In August, when the city smelled of heated sheet metal and ozone after the storm, the planetarium stood covered in green sheets of renovation. The sheets flapped like the skin of some huge creature that slumbered beneath the dome. Maja got a pass on the nightly cataloguing: boxes of old slides, maps of the sky and the pencil handwritten notes of astronomers who had long since stopped signing letters. There was only her, the quiet whisper of fans and the disproportionate shadow of the dome, the wandering of blackness across the walls. In the middle of the room stood a century-old Zeiss projector - a metal arthropod on three legs, with an armour plate full of round eyes. When Maja lifted the desktop flap and switched on the main power supply, the filaments sighed and stars spilled across the vault like shattered glass. Only this was not a familiar sky. The constellations shifted a few degrees. The Swan held what looked like a slender key in its beak, and the Carriage had one more wheel. Someone had painted someone else's order in the sky. Maja slipped her fingers under the collar of her shirt - fresh sweat chilled her skin - and looked around, searching for the real cause. As she took a step towards the central bowl where the audience usually sat, the air above her trembled. It was as if someone had pulled a transparent film across the centre of the room and she had just scratched it. In the semi-darkness, in the starlight, she saw a thin, almost hairline scratch. Not on the glass, not in the plaster - in the air. The scratch was the length of a hand and the tone very quiet, something between the hiss of an old record and the first string of a violin. - 'I've seen almost everything, but not that,' muttered someone behind him. Maja twitched so that she almost knocked over a metal stool. In the darkness, where the stars drew a sheen on his forehead, stood Marcel, the night watchman. He had a jam cup of tea, an uncomfortable torch tucked into his pocket and a hand that remembered old injuries. He had worked here for years, walking the corridors like a decent ghost. - 'Relax,' he smiled, toothless on the left. - 'There's always something pretending not to be there. On the other hand, leave the electrics alone overnight. Those filaments can be vindictive. - 'I haven't touched anything but the main one,' whispered Maja, although she knew it wasn't true as she touched the air. - Do you... have... well, stories here? Marcel shrugged his shoulders. Like someone who had already counted these questions. - Once, a long time ago, during a screening, one student walked out of the room. During the ovation, he stopped in a row. Since then we have been selling tickets without even numbers in the middle of row F. Not because someone died. It's because I hate it when something doesn't play, and by hiding the number, fewer things don't play,' he said and scratched the back of his neck. - And now I'm going to pretend I can't see you, because you're not allowed to be here after twenty-two. Except for you, because you have a pass and a notebook. - And now you don't see it either? - Maja pointed to the scratch. Marcel took a sip of tea and looked where he needed to. He held his breath for a split second. It's a tiny, fleeting tension, like a clack of the heart between two steps. - I see many things and miss even more. If you see something that's not on the schedule, don't turn it on all at once,' he advised quietly. - If something creaks, put it out. If something whistles, put it out too. If it sings, run away. He made a half turn of his nightly patrols and disappeared into the dark green crevice of the corridor. Maya was left alone with the iron arthropod, the wandering sky and the thin, brazen line cutting through the air above the bowl. The scratch was no longer the length of a hand. It grew longer, as if someone were dragging a ruler. She heard a subtle crack, so quiet that it had to be made up to reach her ears at all. Maja raised her hand and stopped her fingers just above the line. A chill. As cold as a fridge opening at three in the morning. Her skin was instantly covered with goosebumps and there was a shiver under the nail of her thumb that had no right to be a touch. As she moved her finger along the crack, the stars on the dome, all at once, took a millimetre step sideways. In her notebook she drew a few dots, an arrow, a second layout. Then she looked around at the cardboard boxes. There was one, with a label faded to a half whisper: EDUCATIONAL SET 1978 - DO NOT SPEND. She smiled, because that was exactly what the invitation sounded like. She took an old, scratched disc of slides out of the box and slid it into the tray. The projector whined. The sky went out and lit up another way. Above them, school drawings appeared - as if someone was projecting sheets from a checkered notebook onto the sky: arrows, captions, tiny letters that didn't lose ink on the fly. The scratch responded. It lit up from within a pale white. Maja brought her face a little closer still and looked through the cut. On the other side was a view that had all the things she loved and couldn't name: a city made of paper, stapled together with staples, roofs made of envelopes, streets made of pencil lines. Graphite flowed in halftones on the river, and the bridge shot beads like an abacus. Trees rustled the pages, spitting out words in languages she had never heard, but understood their direction as one understands the wind. On a tower of coloured diagrams stood someone. A tiny silhouette with a head like a dot of ink. She raised a flag with letters that formed her name: Maja. Someone on that shore knew the sound she had borne since birth. - 'No, no way,' she whispered, as if trying to convince herself. - It's an optical joke, some kind of projection reflex.... Above the projector handle she saw something else. A metal plate with an embossed map, so worn that it looked like the skin of a hand after winter. She noticed tiny indentations, serrations along one side - they didn't match any mechanism she knew. She removed the tin carefully. It was cold and soft at the same time, as if she remembered someone else's touch. The scratch trembled more clearly as she brought the tin closer. It darkened and then flared with concentrated brightness, like a pupil that has suddenly seen the light. Somewhere overhead a rubbed rope of repair sheets whirred. Maja took half a step back, drew the smell of dust and old paint into her lungs. There was a movement in her mind - something between a step back and an attack. - 'Maja,' said a voice, clear and soft, from that side. The voice sounded like an ordinary word, but it hit straight at that place in her memory she hadn't touched in years: a caressing variant of a name only her grandmother had used when Maja was still lower than the railing on the balcony. No one had spoken to her like that since she was eighteen. Her heart took two steps at once. - Who's there? - she pronounced slowly, feeling her tongue weighing more than usual. - 'Someone who remembers things you've put away,' the voice replied. - And someone who brings you something you lost earlier than you could have it. The projector beeped unnaturally and stopped. The sky went out, leaving only the soft glow of a crack. From outside came the hiss of the street, a braking bus, distant laughter. The dome was now more cave than sky. Maja stood on the edge of the bowl as she didn't notice when her legs took two more steps. - Don't call anyone. Not yet,' a second voice called back, this time from behind her. She turned around slowly. Standing in the entrance to the room was a man in a coat that was too thin for a night, even an August night. He was tall in a way that was not menacing, rather insistent, like a tall lamp that someone had placed behind his back. Something in his eyes reflected the residual light of his features and he suddenly seemed to have stardust in his gaze. - 'How did you get in here? - Maja asked. - This door... - The door is a courtesy, not a necessity - he smiled briefly. - Is this your tin? Maja squeezed the metal rectangle in her hand, so that the edge scratched her finger. Almost imperceptibly. - 'I don't know what it is,' she admitted, and the tip of her tongue was already arranging itself to add something cautious. - An object that likes to be in the light,' he replied. - 'And you are Maya Ewelina, although you pretend not to remember that. She breathed more violently. The second name was like a drawer she had long since closed. No one here could know it. No one except her family, and the family was now a group of people who lived in another town and spoke rarely, from afar. - Who are you? - She asked, not letting go of the tin, but taking half a step sideways, so that she could see both him and the crack at the same time. - Someone who comes when the air clears. Someone who knows the order of these mechanics," he replied calmly. He raised his hand and a key glinted in his fingers. It was not an ordinary one. It had teeth like a small constellation, points and breaks arranged in characters that could only be read from above. - And someone to warn you: if you go over the wrong edge, you'll be back for a very long time. Behind the wall of the dome, somewhere in the corridor, an old clock chimed a broken half. Maja felt a strange phenomenon: the air in the hall was cooler, yet the inside of her hand lit up. In the crack, on that side, lights began to come on: as if someone was flipping miniature switches one by one in the paper city. - 'I'll show you where the tin should lie,' said the man. - But it's up to you to decide what should open. He took a step. His shoes made no sound on the dance floor. He stopped exactly where Maja felt the air was thinnest, as if there was a place in the room with different rules. He picked up the key. Something twitched in the scratch, as if an electric current had passed over the edge of the page. For a fraction of a second, she had the feeling that all the letters of her name had unravelled and started to re-arrange themselves in a different order. - 'Don't do it,' whispered no one knew who: herself or someone on that side. - Not yet. The man looked into her eyes - deeply, unpleasantly calm - and slid the key not into the lock, but into the light. It was not a mechanical movement, rather a gesture that one remembers better than the hand that made it. The light became as thin as cardboard, then as thick as wool. It hummed. The tin in Mai's hand trembled, as if answering a distant bell. The air swelled, like before the first rain. And then something clicked, very quietly, too quietly for such a large place, and the crack bloomed, like a flower that always waits for someone's name before it opens its petals.