Maja always returned from the river along the same path, with a rucksack heavy with notebooks and paints. On a bench under a poplar tree, she would open her Atlas of Feelings, a sketchbook full of colourful maps. She painted fear in green, shame in dull purple, anger in quiet, vibrant red. For a month someone had been leaving her cards, always one word, hit like a needle. "Wavering, relieved, jealous". - these words lay like pebbles, and she pretended her hands weren't trembling. On Monday, the art teacher announced a competition to create a mural in the passage under the bridge. Maja felt her stomach grow light and her throat tight, as if from smoke. "You should try it," - said Christopher, putting down his pencil - "you have things that no one has". She smiled crookedly, thinking of yesterday's card: "Dare", draped under the eraser of the sketchbook. How did they know that, the dark strangers of the cards, something she hadn't even told herself? In the evening she went to the skatepark under the viaduct, where the concrete smelled of wet rusty night. The neon sign of the shop reflected in the puddles, and trams lost their bright sparks overhead. She opened the Atlas of Feelings, counted her breaths and began to sketch a narrow strip of breath of fear. When she reached for the red, she found a new piece of paper stuck to the strap of her backpack. On the note was the phrase: "I see you looking at red", dry, alien and yet somehow warm. Anger spilled over with reason: you can't read me without my permission, she thought. She wrote in chalk on a pillar: "19:17, bench by the ramp. Let's talk. No tricks." Her heart pounded to the rhythm of the tram's wheels; her hands were freezing, although her hood kept her neck warm. She sent a message to Christopher: "Stupid action in the park, keep an eye on me", then deleted everything. She didn't want anyone to rescue her from her own questions, though she craved someone's attention. She heard laughter in places, the skittering of a skateboard, the distant whistle of a train, drops counting time. She looked at her watch when the hand touched seventeen; she counted the cracks on the ramp. She sat on the bench and learned to sit in suspense, without escape or theatricality. Someone stood behind the ramp, the shadow growing, shrinking, as if afraid of someone else's light. "If you know my colours, show your face," - she said; her voice sounded lower than she had planned. The hooded figure raised his hand and sent a paper plane towards her. It stopped at Mai's shoe; she unfurled the wing, already knowing the texture of the paper all too well. It was a torn page from her Atlas, with a coffee-coloured stain in the shape of a moon. Before she could look up, a tram passed over them, cutting the darkness with lines of light, and the bracelet on the stranger's wrist flashed a familiar blue.