They called the lake Silent Eye, although it was rarely quiet. Autumn nights vibrated with a quiet hum, as if someone was tuning invisible strings beneath the surface. Nina was returning from sketching the shores, carrying a wet notebook and a short torch in her rucksack. She liked maps because they turned chaos into something you could walk your finger over. That evening she drew something that didn't fit any map. Under the light of the kitchen she took out her grandmother's locket, greenish from time. It was smooth on one side and had a strange pattern on the other, resembling a shell. Her grandmother used to say it was "the key to conversations we don't yet know". When Nina pressed the medallion to the notebook, the paper trembled as if someone had blown from underneath. The dots, which she had previously thought were ink mistakes, formed into streets. The phone vibrated midnight, without reason or notice. The vibration had a rhythm she didn't know, soft and persistent. She opened the recorder and the graph of the vibration arranged itself into an arc, then a gate. After a moment, the gate turned into something that resembled a reflection of the market, only turned upside down. There were three quiet thumps at the end of the file. The lake answered from the darkness. At dawn the next day, Nina stood on the longest pier. Olek, a neighbour from the third, pretended to have come to practise jumping, but he followed her every move. "If it's a joke, it's moderately funny," he muttered. Nina hung the medallion on her finger and touched the water with it. The taffy did not wet her skin. It tightened, like the thin skin of a drum, and circles ran down it, forming a grid of streets and squares. In the middle flashed a spire that was not on any map of the city. A low sound rose from the depths, resembling the breathing of a huge animal. The water bulged into a dome, and lights ran inside like windows in motion. Olek took a step back. "Nina, it's about to blow apart." "It won't fly apart," she whispered, although she wasn't sure herself. Three bells sounded in the distance, the exact same rhythm she had recorded during the night. New lines flowed across the lake, like a blueprint of an invisible neighbourhood. Then something touched the medallion from the other side, as gently as a finger through the glass. From the dome came a muffled, clear word that none of the maps could write down: "Enter". A figure shifted beneath the membrane and a twin medallion flashed on its chest. Olek squeezed Nina's sleeve. "You don't have to," he said quietly. The taffrail glowed with a calm radiance and the water opened up a step wide. Nina tightened her hand on the key and took one very small step.