In the antique shop "Rysy and Silent", paper breathed quieter than people. Ida, a twenty-year-old bookbinding apprentice, knew its sound like her own pulse. As she bent the corner of the page to the right angle, the shelves retracted for a second. The dust returned to the backs, and the bell by the door played its sound from the end. This was not a trick of the market; it was the unseen mechanism of the city. The tissue of the streets had fibres like paper, and Ida had learned to feel them with her fingers. That afternoon someone had left an old map of Krakow on the counter, cut with a grid of sharp folds. The paper hummed quietly, as if a thin, taut string flowed inside. A touch was enough for the bugle call from the tower to sound backwards in memory, and the tram signal cut through the silence like a crack. A shadow wandered along one of the lines, moving through Kazimierz, the bridge and Planty, straight for the shop. A message flashed on the phone screen about a planned power cut at 8pm, but the shadow didn't want to wait. Ida closed the blind, unfolded the map on the press and took a test, tiny tooth. On the windowsill, the fly froze, then flapped its wings, as if it had taken back the thought of flight. She had her rules: don't bend around living creatures, don't put your hands in the middle of the fold, don't trust the echo. Meanwhile, a tapping sounded in the back cell, where the wall had once been a walled passage. First single, then rhythmic, inverted, as if someone was knocking from the end of a word. She heard her name cut into syllables: "I... da...". The smell of ozone and wet stone came from the corridor, though the rain was just gathering over the rooftops. Mr Rutkowski's clock in the neighbourhood started ticking backwards, and behind the glass the tram stopped in half a turn, with the light skipping like in an old film. The seventh line shone on the map, the deepest one, running through the market like a quick knife cut. She knew that the full bend would split the city into the sails of time, separate yesterday from tomorrow and leave today somewhere in between. The shadow was already touching the edge of the tabletop. - 'It's just a test,' she told herself, though her voice stuck in her throat like a pin. She set up the rulers, marked the street axes on the floor with chalk and slid the map under the frame of the press. Darkness poured through the glass, along with a click that extinguished the entire quarter; only a pale light along the future fold remained. The handle to the rear cell moved, though it was bolted from the inside with two screws. A chill came from the draught and the smell of a storm that no one had ever seen before. Ida gripped the corner of the map as she heard her own whisper behind her, telling her exactly where to make the next bend.