On a shelf of dramas, between Shakespeare and Tokarczuk, Maja hid letters. Unsigned, written at night, when the heart then had the loudest voice of all. The library smelled of dust, and the November rain ticked the windows all afternoon. It was the only place she could let out her anger, shame and longing without witnesses, except for the rustling of pages. She wrote to no one about everything that had been bothering her between lessons for weeks. She left pages in a volume about the characters whose decisions hurt her the most. The answer came on Wednesday, although Maja didn't tell anyone about the habit. Someone wrote in the margin: "I hear the same thing," in the same italicised handwriting. For a second, she thought it was a mirror, or simply a librarian's joke. And then her heart pounded as if she were running, even though there was no running. The emotion she had been ashamed of suddenly took shape in the shape of someone's hand and pencil. She checked it the next day, leaving a harsh sentence about her father leaving. In the afternoon she waited for an answer: "You don't have to be tough; meet me at dusk on the roof." Maja read it ten times until the letters began to tremble like a bus. She wrote to Olive: "If I get stupid, stop me", but the message did not go out at all. So she left the phone in her pocket, as if heavier from sudden thoughts than usual. The stairs to the roof were narrow, metal, and smelled of wet rust after the rain. The city glowed below, and the pitch was emptying, as if someone had muffled the sound of the world for a moment. Maya counted her breaths until the anxiety clumped into one plastic weight under the bridge. The tiles groaned in the ajar door, and the handle was icy and strangely resistant. The sky was the colour of the puddle in which she had already drowned her inner scream once. On the banister lay a cardboard box folded in half, clipped together with a blue, worn-out rubber band. She stretched the rubber band, feeling her fingers betray her with a barely perceptible tremble in spite of herself. Inside was the sentence 'You have come' and a signature, all too simple: 'Echo'. The wind stirred the card, and a key rang behind her back, though the door was open. Maja turned too quickly, losing her balance as she heard her own whispered plea close to her ear. "Maja, don't run away," repeated the voice, painfully identical to her note from yesterday. A hooded silhouette emerged from the dark corridor with a rubber band around her wrist. A bracelet with the letter M, identical to her own, flashed in the lantern light. "If you want to know who we are, take a step," a voice said, no longer in a whisper. A truss squeaked under Maja's foot, and the wind suddenly quieted, as if waiting too.