By the bay, where the wind rushes through the narrow streets like a postman who is always late, stood the Orion Planetarium. The grey dome nestled between the maple trees resembled a snazzy little house, and the fallen letters on the facade formed the word O R I - as if the building had taken a breath of its own. Posters from years ago, faded to the colour of smoke, still hung in the display cases: an invitation to a night of shooting stars, a lecture on comets, the smiling face of a woman signed Dr Hanna Kuraś. Iga stopped on the stairs. In her pocket was a round brass token, cold as ice despite her warm hand. On its edge someone had once carved a pinwheel of stars - seven tiny rays converging in the centre. She found it in a machine needle box when she was sorting out her grandmother Hanna's things. There, on the bottom, next to an old photograph of the dome, was also one short sentence: 'If you can hear the silence, Orion will speak'. - 'You'll see, it's just cobwebs and dust,' muttered Tymon, who reluctantly admitted that curiosity had drawn him here as much as Iga. He had a rucksack stuffed with notebooks and a tangle of wires, as he always carried half a workshop with him 'just in case'. - The city announces a renovation, but no one is here today. Just us, the trees and the echo. The hall was colder than the world outside. The boards groaned underfoot, smelled of a tarnish of old paint and felt. The clock above the cash register stood at 19:17, as if time was stuck in an uncomfortable position. To the right, behind a curtain, the corridor to the screening room waited. The door was slightly ajar; somewhere deeper, twilight may have been present. Iga lifted the curtain and looked questioningly at Tymon. He nodded. The room under the dome was larger than she remembered from the photographs. Rows of armchairs, undulating like the back of the sea, looked upwards. In the middle stood a projector - black, irregular, resembling a massive seedbox from which spherical lenses protruded. On the console next to a row of switches, she found a shallow, round recess. The same as the token in her pocket. - 'No,' Tymon said reflexively. - 'We don't even know if there's electricity here. - If I don't try it, I'll think about it for the rest of the world - replied Iga quietly. - And last night I dreamt... - she broke off. The dream was still sticking to her like a fog: a huge sky that didn't fit into any of the stories she had been told. The token slid into the recess as smoothly as if it had been waiting there forever. Something clicked deep inside the machine - a short, steady sound, like a case closing. For a second nothing happened. Then they heard a low purr, passing into a tremor, as if a metallic voice was greeting long-lost visitors. The darkness thickened. First one dot of light blossomed on the dome, then another, a tenth, a hundredth. The stars lit up one by one, unhurriedly, forming a picture of the sky. Iga pulled her shoulders down; these were not familiar patterns. No Carriage, no Swan, no Crown. The lines that drew themselves between the points twisted at different angles than in the atlases. The names that appeared beneath the constellations did not belong to any alphabet that Iga had seen. The letters were soft and sharp at the same time, resembling waves and razor cuts. - Are these some old markings? - Tymon squatted closer, in awe forgetting to be cautious. - Or an attempt? Maybe someone had modified the software. - It's not a computer,' Iga whispered. - This projector is older than our families. On the floor, just in front of the stage, a bright circle appeared, as if someone had placed a lamp there. The periphery of this light pulsed in its own rhythm: once clearer, once softer, like breathing. The murmuring grew into melodies of low tones from which an ocean could be formed. Dust particles drifted down from the ceiling and glistened like plankton. Iga reached out her hand. The top of her hand warmed suddenly under the token left in the console. The rays on its edge, barely visible before, now shone dully, as if outlined in pencil. She twitched. - Can you feel it? - She asked. Tymon answered no more. He stared at the dome as if enchanted. The inscriptions in the sky murmured, although there was no sound of letters. Iga felt that she understood one word. Not because she could read it. Rather because somewhere inside, in her shoulder blades or between her fingers, something hinted at the meaning. The word sounded like a crack of ice and meant: "Entrance". Beneath the bright circle, the floor parted silently, like the skin of a fruit cut by a blade. It was not a shaft or a hidden storage room. A staircase - narrow, of graphite-coloured metal - led down below the stage. No lamps shone, but they could still see where to put their feet, as if their eyes had tuned into a different range of light. There was a chill blowing from below, but not that of a cellar; rather a fresh one, full of salt, needles and something else that resembled the smell of heated stone after a storm. - 'I'm not a fan of stairs to nowhere,' Tymon grunted and tried to smile, but the smile didn't quite come out. - Nevertheless... this is absolutely amazing. - 'We'll walk a bit and come back,' decided Iga, herself surprised at the calmness of her own voice. - We'll just check. Grandma would like to know. - Your grandmother once drew a map of the sky on a bench, remember? - Tymon was trying to establish the tone of the conversation from a moment ago. - 'Maybe she wanted you to draw something too.' - He looked at her hand. - Just don't forget the token. - He probably won't get anywhere - Iga glanced at the console. - Although... The rays on the edge of the token moved, or so she thought, folding like a fan. The dome was alive with its own rhythm. The constellations, which had no names in any of their notebooks, moved slowly, as if waiting for someone to finally name them. From the side of the corridor came a distant, deafening thud, like a drop that falls every so often into the depths of an empty house. Iga put her foot on the first step. The metal under her toes was not cold - it had the temperature of the air on an August night after a long day. There was a thin, barely perceptible scratch under her toe. In the darkness she read it with her fingertips. It wasn't a scratch. It was marks. A line, a dot, an arc. She didn't know the alphabet, yet she knew it meant: "Caution". - You know me,' she said towards the stairs, herself not quite sure to whom she was saying it. - 'I'm always trying to. - She knew it sounded silly, but the words flowed on their own, as if someone had opened a tap right next to her heart. Tymon sighed, clasped his rucksack to his chest and stood next to her. - We stick together,' he decided. - And we count the steps. If we get to fifteen and nothing, we turn back. Okay? - Okay. They went down three steps. Five. Seven. The light from the dome wasn't fading, but it wasn't the usual light that casts shadows. Everything around them had contours that were bright and soft, as if someone were seeing them with eyes that never tire. Ten. Eleven. The twelfth step trembled slightly, as if responding to their presence. The thirteenth appeared slightly wider, and on the fourteenth, when Iga put her foot down, she felt clearly the same as on the edge of the token: seven rays converging into a point. - 'Fourteen,' whispered Tymon. - Another one. Underneath, a space opened up that could not be called a cellar. The ceiling did not exist. Instead, the sky stretched out, but not the one they knew. It was closer, denser, full of slow, twitching streaks, as if someone had suspended rivers of light in the air. A form floated in a gentle arc on the horizon, resembling a second moon or a dome hovering over a dome. There was no hum of ventilation, no buzz of lamps. There was only the low, soothing sound that Orion breathed, and a very distant, rhythmic clatter, reminiscent of footsteps on stone slabs. And then Iga heard it. A word immersed in the hum, in the blowing of an invisible wind, in the flickering of dots. A word that did not pass through her ears, but got inside like free flight. "Iga." She stopped with her foot over the fifteenth step. Tymon turned his head towards her with a question in his eyes. The token in the console above them flashed like a yellow fish underwater. At the far end of the impossible hall, something moved silently, leaving a wave of light behind it, like a fin mark just below the surface. - Did you hear it? - she whispered. Tymon did not answer. He looked down to where a corridor was drawn in the bright air with a map outlined on the walls, its outlines arranged in shapes too regular to be a coincidence. One of these shapes pulsed in exactly the same rhythm as the token. Exactly in the same one. And then, from the side of the pulsating shape, from a place where there should have been no entrance at all, there was the quietest of sounds - the sound of a gaping crack, as if someone on the other side had just walked towards them....