Danzig was falling asleep, but the Maritime Archive had a rhythm of its own. Tall windows like dark tanks, panes of glass inside, desk lamps covered with green shades, and that distinctive smell in the air: dust, old threads, the leather of frames and the distant, salty breath of the harbour. Kalina liked to stay after hours. As the city slowed down, she was just churning - brushing the edges of pages, untangling the fibres of linen, exploring the writings of unknown hands. That evening, parchment lay on her table, thin as the wing of a vase, barely holding on to the world. A gift box from some retired captain had hidden it at the bottom, under crumpled maps of the fairways and a card from under Bornholm. The corner of the parchment had a trace of fire, but the burning had stopped abruptly, as if someone had blown out the flame in mid-breath. Under the magnifying glass, one could see an intricate grid of old threads and something else - a crystalline deposit in the recesses, flashing with a faint blue light. - 'Salt,' muttered Kalina, touching the grain with the end of her brush. She moistened the cotton swab with distilled water, as she always did. But when a drop accidentally dripped from her finger onto the parchment, right next to the sediment, the fibres trembled. They didn't twitch like paper under the wind, but like something that has its own insides and can react. Kalina held her breath. A drop spilled over the subtle relief and suddenly lines sprouted from it that had not been there before. Not intrusive - as if they were emerging from the half-light. Thin streets, canals, the shape of a harbour basin, a few pictograms: a boat on black water, a lighthouse, a toothed wall. The title of the map appeared reversed, written in ferro-galan so faded as to be almost transparent: Double Port. - Double? - whispered Kalina, moving the magnifying glass. In the margin, right next to one of the incisions made with a bookbinder's knife, was a small notation in cursive script: 'Thirteenth sound'. Nothing else. Two words that sounded like a clue or a joke. And the lantern in the drawing - five-walled, with a crowned lens molded so intricately as to be too precise - cast no shadow. No matter where she led the lamp from, the ink suggested no streak. It was as if the light had nothing to hook onto. Kalina lifted the parchment to the window. The cranes of the shipyard were reflected in the glass, black dashes in the threads of the sky, and a red point in the distance - the beam of a lighthouse that cut through the fog over the estuary time and again. As the lantern turned, its pale blade ran over the edge of the table. At the same instant, something rustled in the parchment. Not by sound, rather by touch - as if a light net of cobwebs had shifted under the fingers. "The thirteenth sound," she repeated in her mind. The clock in the archive never struck thirteen. But the harbour, for centuries, had its own cycles, not always in line with those that hung on the town hall. That night Kalina did not fall asleep. At dawn, as the first trams dragged light on Jezuicka Street like grey ribbons, she packed the parchment into a soft briefcase, wrapped it still in the blue silk she had once bought by chance at the St Dominic's Fair, and drove north. Where the Vistula breathes wider. Where a fortress and a lighthouse have towered for centuries, whose rotation has been stopped neither by wars nor by the quarrels of officials. The harbour in the morning is like a theatre before a dress rehearsal. The inhuman skeletons of the cranes, the quiet clatter of chains, and in places the cry of a seagull, which pretends to be a dramatic actress. Kalina stood by a low wall where an old brass mooring ring was hidden under a layer of moss. Her fingers found the coolness of the metal. The wind carried salt and something else, the metallic aftertaste of a coin applied to the tongue. She took out the parchment. She shouldn't have. That's what the regulations said. But recipes rarely dealt with things that breathe. She unrolled the silk, her breath spreading mist from the warm layers of her coat. She laid the map on the stone. Drops from her sleeve - surely salty - sprinkled the parchment like a fine rain. The Double Harbour came into focus. The lines thickened, the criss-crossing streets let dawn pass through them. A new sign appeared in one corner: an arc with dashes on the inside, like a cross-section of a shell. Beneath it, in equally fine writing: "West to the left, east underfoot". Kalina stepped back and looked at the horizon. The lighthouse rotated quietly, like the gaze of someone guarding a boundary but not saying what. Its glow did not leave a streak on the waves. The light slipped through, capturing nothing, as if it were of a different material to the rest of the day. And yet each turn changed something on the shore: the outline of the warehouse, which a moment ago had been a rectangle, lengthened slightly; the thin posts of the fence began to form an even grid. - 'If this is a joke, it's a consistent one,' she muttered, feeling the skin on the back of her neck tighten like parchment. The first sound of the bell came softly from the sea, carrying the dampness within it. The second was closer, the third strangely deep. Kalina closed her eyes. Archive records were full of stories of fog bells that could summon and warn at the same time, of signals that sounded only on certain nights and drove fishermen ashore. She counted. Tenth. The eleventh. The twelfth, which usually closed the series. And then, just as she was about to put the parchment away, came the thirteenth strike. Not louder. Just different. It hit the stone beneath her palms like a soft wave that, instead of wetting it, arranged it into a new shape. A chill pierced the map. The lines, hitherto flat, took on depth. The street in the drawing ran downhill and intersected with the real slabs of the quay at the point where an old inscription in German, long worn out, was visible. Kalina picked up the parchment and lifted it to eye level. The world behind it did not blur, as if through glass. On the contrary - it sharpened into other cities, gently shifted in relation to each other. One Danzig and another, shifted by the thickness of the paper, where that paper was also a door. The outlines of figures emerged from the mist near the water itself. Someone stood motionless, wearing a coat tailored like a sail, with a hood that gave no shade to his face. As the lantern cut through him with a blade of light, his silhouette grew no darker. There was nothing to throw. Kalina felt laughter stifle in her throat. It wasn't laughter from fear. It was more from relief that what had seemed inconsistent had suddenly found a rule. A rule that they didn't write about in the textbooks. The figure raised his hand. There was no gesture of greeting in it. More of an indication: to the brass ring, which had hitherto been stuck motionless. Now it moved slightly, as if beneath it, deep in the stone, something had awoken. She heard the crackle of lichen shells - it was the lichen cracking at the cracks. With the breath of the third thirteenth beat, the ring began to turn. And with it - a whole slab of quay, as if set on an old mechanism, a diagram of which was visible in the left-hand margin of the map, where the fire had left a sudden break. - 'Kalina,' said something, and it took her a moment to realise that it was not the air, not the bell, not the lantern. It was the parchment that whispered her name, the fibres twitching, laying letter by letter on the skin of her palm. - Don't lose the scale. She wasn't sure if it was a warning or a request. "Scale." - A word that suddenly felt heavy, as if it had dimension, weight and temperature. She remembered lessons in the studio: the scale tells you how much of the truth fits on a piece of paper. To get it wrong is like going to a meeting and missing a decade. The ring stopped, clicking. The stone spread about a foot wide. There was no water underneath. There was a staircase, laid with flat slabs overgrown with faded moss, descending at an angle that defied any geometry known to Kalina. The bottom of the stairs merged with the drawing of the harbour basin on the map as perfectly as if someone had rearranged two carbon copies and made them be one picture. The figure by the water did not move, but Kalina knew she was watching. She knew it just as she knew that silence was safest in the archive and that not every parchment wanted to be touched. The lantern made another turn, but instead of gliding onwards, it stood still. Its glare stopped on Kalina, as if picking her out of a crowd that wasn't here. There was something disconcerting about this real estate - the light that had stopped travelling began to weigh. - 'If you enter,' the figure said, and the voice was strangely clear, without echo, as if it flowed straight from a line on a map, 'you will agree to remember everything you have put off. She withdrew her hand out of habit to hide the parchment. But the parchment held her as tightly as she held him. On the back, hitherto smooth, letters began to appear, pushed out from underneath: the outline of a sentence she knew from her childhood, taught to her by her grandmother when she was still drawing waves with chalk on the pavement as the first rain washed away. The clanging of the bell blended with the beating of her heart. The sea, the lighthouse and the map counted down something she couldn't name. The furrows between the slabs of the quay lit up as if someone had filled them with light. The horizon line trembled, shifted by a thickness of paper, then another. The stairs underfoot began to smell of aniseed and old cordage. The brass ring warmed to white. The air clung to the skin, thick, as in a compartment where the door had just closed. - 'Name,' said the figure, quieter this time. - 'It's a buckle, without it everything will come undone. Kalina opened her mouth. She thought not of what the office called her, but of what she had been called at home before she had learned to straighten the syllables. At the same moment, on the other side of the parchment, someone - or maybe something - knocked softly, as if checking that the lights were on.