Salt from the bay clung to Nina's hands as she carried three glass vials. In each waved a different colour: the blue of anxiety, the amber of relief and the cautious green of hope. Seventeen-year-old Nina saw emotions as others see clouds, and from a young age she learned to pick them up. She learned their weight so that her own would not topple her life. No one in Bird Bay knew she kept them in her backpack alongside the scripts for the play. Tonight, the school auditorium was getting ready for Night of Lights, an annual performance about what moves us. Paper jellyfish hung above the stage, and beneath them rehearsals were rattling with cables and pinned microphones. She was to play a girl who is learning to name what she feels. "Do you have the lyrics?" - asked Iwo, a stage technician and friend of Nina's for years. "I have the colours," she replied, jokingly, but she felt a knot tighten in her stomach. Just backstage, the air thickened like steam over a kettle, heavy and motionless. Nina stopped at a narrow door she didn't recognise from the stage set. The lock let go under her fingers, and inside stood a box with a brass panel: Registry of Feelings, model 1997. On the lid lay a piece of paper in uncertain handwriting: "For Nina when she's ready." Her heart was making a mess in her cage, and the vials in her backpack trembled like a sled on ice. Her grandmother used to say that other people's emotions are borrowed shoes to fall over in. She was leaning over the knob when Iwo slipped inside with a torch. "Have you heard the rumours?" - he whispered. "This box supposedly reproduces feelings so strongly that you can drown in them." Nina nodded, but her fingers refused to move away from the button. From outside came the countdown of the stage manager: three minutes until the curtain rose, two minutes of silence. Somewhere in the auditorium, the audience rustled their jackets and a wave from the bay hit the windows like a palm. Suddenly the colours slipped out of the vials and flowed in thin trickles into the box, as if waiting for home. The door slammed, the lights dimmed and the panel flashed with four characters: FEAR, MEMORY, SHAME, COURAGE. "Nino, we don't have to," Iwo said, but she could already feel someone from inside watching. She pressed her fingertip against the cold metal, and there was a quiet, familiar heartbeat and a whisper saying her name in the darkness.