In Glassblowers' Haven, a town where salt settled on the windows like a fine coating of sugar, autumn was always one degree colder than elsewhere. The wind came in long strands from the sea and entered the narrow streets where the former glass-blowers' workshops had been transformed into cafés, bookshops and one particularly crooked library. It was there that Maja, a fourteen-year-old newcomer from the city, was helping to rearrange books from cardboard boxes onto shelves. She could still feel the floor beneath her feet gently tumbling, as if the floor had become accustomed to waves. When she lifted the lid of the third box, the smell of old paper mixed with a salty note wafted up - as if someone was drying sea memories on the grass pages. At the bottom lay a thin cloth-bound book. Its spine was softened, and inside, instead of a library stamp, was a clumsy drawing of a lighthouse and a single sentence written in ink that had seeped deeper in some places, as if moisture had taken a liking to it: 'Atlas of Hidden Lights'. A yellowed strip of film was stuck between the pages, with a compressed, brittle seaweed beside it. - 'I've never seen this before,' spoke up behind him, Igor, a year older volunteer who had hair arranged in impossibly twisted springs and a jacket sprinkled with patches. - It looks like it was made from someone's wish list. Maja didn't reply as she spotted tiny italicised letters in the margin of the first page: "Green hour - don't look straight ahead, don't breathe too loudly". Underneath, someone had scrawled numbers that arranged themselves into coordinates. On a world map they could have led anywhere, but Maja felt that strange sting of recognition known only to those who suddenly see a found word arranged into a street they know. Those numbers pointed to the pier, the one that ended in a red light like a nail hammering the horizon. - Green hour? - Igor leaned closer. - The old Zurek of the fishermen used to say that sometimes, at the very moment the sun touches the water, there is a green flash. He said it was the last breath of the day. And that not everyone sees it. Maja tightened her fingers on the cover. Everything seemed to breathe differently in the Glassmakers' Harbour: the forest drew in the air as the sea let it out, the lighthouse blinked in a certain rhythm, and the clocks in the library were late by exactly the same moment every now and then. Grandma Sophie, who used to work in glass, laughed that here the light has its whims like a human being. - 'Grandma gave me this,' said Maja, and took a small prism out of her pocket, so smooth it was almost warm. It felt like it shifted the world within itself when you tilted it. An etched mark resembling a wave and a crescent moon circulated on one side. - And yet... - She pulled at the chain around her neck. A brass key with a polished head, on which someone had once carved six dots in the shape of an arch, fell out from under her jumper. Igor whistled quietly. - 'You sound like the heroine of a book you haven't read yet. Are we going to the pier today? "Don't look straight ahead, don't breathe too loudly." These words did not let up. Maja nodded. - Today. To the west. When they came, the sky was like rain-washed glass: clear, with thin strands of clouds that dared not cross the sun. The lighthouse cast long pale stripes beside it, and the pier creaked with its usual plaintive voice. Somewhere in the distance there was the chirp of dry sand shifting under someone else's shoe. The few seagulls circled sluggishly, as if they too were waiting. They sat down at the end of the pier, right by the railing with the paint falling off. Igor unfolded his rucksack, from which he pulled out a torch, a notebook and a bar. Maja put the "Atlas" on the board and slid the prism between the pages. The wind trembled, but this time it seemed to come from below, from the side of the beams lurking under the pier. - Do you have an hour? - She asked. Igor glanced at his watch. - Seven-fifty-nine. The pages of the 'Atlas' rustled. They had not been turned over by the wind. The black ink shrank, as if it had found new lines for itself, and in the bottom right-hand corner appeared: 19:07. A tiny drawing pressed next to it: a circle crossed by two dashes and something that resembled the outline of a rock. - The sea had frozen over? - whispered Igor after a moment, and indeed, when they looked at the water, it no longer vibrated with its daily tip. It had stopped for a fraction of a second too long. - 'Don't look straight ahead,' Maja reminded herself, and instead of looking at the sun, she looked at its reflection in the prism. The glass piece was indifferent at first, then suddenly filled with a green so intense that Maja felt as if she had opened her eyes underwater. The flash was not the sharpening of her eyelids, but a quiet throbbing inside her chest. The prism, as if it knew what to do, focused this green into a narrow ray that lay on a particular board just inside the last clearing. The board looked ordinary, with a dark knot like an eye. But when the green light touched the knot, the 'eye' trembled and a thin cleft split in its centre. Maja moved her fingertip. She felt the coolness of the metal under the thin coating of wood. - 'The key,' said Igor, already in a whisper. Maja slid the brass into the crack. The turning was not difficult, as if the lock was waiting. Something beneath them sighed. The plank lifted minimally and then let itself be lifted, revealing an opening from which an air older than that of the pier blew, an air that remembered the smells of cords, tar and something else - like winter light. - Steps? - Igor leaned over and turned on his torch. The beam of light hit in a downward spiral. The steps were not wooden or metal. They looked like glass, but frosted and slightly glowing from the inside. Water dripped from the edges and evaporated before it could fall onto the next step. Maja felt her hand tighten on the prism itself. There was a quiet sound in her pocket, too high-pitched to be an ordinary buzz; more like a dragged string of light. - 'Not that I'm panicking, but the tide is coming in,' Igor remarked, pointing to the raised waterline. - 'If we go in now, time ... well, maybe it won't be on our side. - And when will it be? - Maja lowered her legs onto the first step. She was surprised by its springy coolness, its 'elastic hardness', as they say about ice. The prism spread a soft glow across her fingers. They were descending. From above came the rhythmic creaking of the planks, like the breathing of an old wide boat beast. A silence was building beneath them, broken only by drops leaping down several steps at a time and the muffled echo of their own footsteps. The walls of the shaft glistened like the inside of a bottle held under a lantern. After a dozen laps they descended into a circular chamber. The floor was of smooth white tiles, bonded with something that felt like meconium, yet was cool to the touch. Opposite them stood something that for all the world did not match anything else in the area: a door. Not wooden, not steel. Made of black, so pure that it absorbed the glare of the torch. In the middle was a prickly mark made of two crescents overlapping each other and a thin line drawn through the middle. The ring of the door was grooved with letters as if from an alphabet Maja didn't know. "Atlas" fluttered in her hand. It opened to a blank page and began to drink the ink that flowed out of nowhere. The words wrote themselves down: "It opens to him who knows the light of his name." - The light of a name? - repeated Igor. - What do you mean we have...? Then they heard something they had initially taken for a rustling sound begin to form syllables. The air rustled with their names. Maja heard hers more clearly, as if someone was saying them very close to her ear, dragging the first letter, lengthening the dot over the 'j' until it rippled through the air. - 'This is not normal,' muttered Igor, but he did not withdraw the hand he had reached out to touch the black material. In the glow of the prism they saw their own reflections on the walls: but not the ordinary kind. Maja saw herself dressed in a jacket sprinkled with salt, her hair bleached by the wind, as if she had spent years standing on a lamppost. Igor flashed into another part of the taffrail as someone wearing a long coat and on his shoulder a burden that this version of him did not yet know. - 'Okay,' said Maja surprisingly confidently, though her heart was beating faster than ever. She put her hand on the sign. Beneath her fingers trembled a warmth that came from deep within the doorway. The prism glowed a greener green than that of the west. A dull thud came from above, as if someone had stepped on a board above the opening. And then another. Igor looked up, the torch twitching in his hand. - 'Maybe it's just a ripple,' he said, and his voice cracked into two parts - the bolder and the more cautious. "It opens for him who knows the light of his name." Maja suddenly remembered how her grandmother Sophie had brushed her hair away from her forehead in the early summer, before the move, and said very quietly: "Every name has a version that you carry inside. No one uses it, but the light hears it." She didn't know how she remembered that just now. Maybe some memories are waiting for the green hour too. She pressed her lips close to the cool door, feeling the brass key on her chest grow heavier. She said her name as it sounded exclusively to her - not loudly, but clearly, like saying something to the sea. The sign flared, and a thin crack of light cut through the blackness, running from the top all the way down. A chill blew from the chamber, but it wasn't a mere ripple of air. It was a snort, as if the darkness beyond the door had taken a breath. The walls trembled, the water on the edges of the steps rattled in bowls of silence. Overhead something banged again, louder this time, as if someone or something had pressed its ear to the lid. Igor clenched his fingers on the torch strap so tightly that his knuckles whitened. Maja withdrew her hand for a split second, but the light did not go out. The line on the door widened a millimetre, then another. On the other side, something moved in such a way that the air seemed to have a texture, like water under ice when someone puts their hand on it. - Can you hear it? - whispered Igor. - As if... As if this thing was also trying to say our names. And then the black surface trembled for the third time, the resulting fissure flashed a deep green, and the light from the prism exploded in a fan of colours, cutting through the chamber from wall to wall, as if pointing them in a direction that didn't exist a second ago.