After the season, Amber Harbour would fall asleep early and the wind would pile the nets in long, rustling streaks. Lena was on duty in the lighthouse museum, keeping an eye on a catalogue of wrecks on a borrowed laptop and creaking display cases. In the oldest box, fished from the wreck of the Ariadne after the storm, she found a brass instrument. It resembled neither a compass nor a clock; it had rings with dates, latitudes and a tiny amber eye. When she moved the rings, something inside clicked, as if a finicky maw was measuring invisible distances. On the underside was engraved: "Kronometer of the Haven, do not open during the silence of the apogee". - the warning was scuffed but legible. She was left alone at that hour, only the light bulb above her desk buzzing like a wasp's solitude. Rumour had it that in 1904 the lighthouse keeper disappeared, leaving a diary full of signs and interruptions. "Time gives three signals before it loops," he wrote, and the ink faded like salt on a railing. Lena laughed at the superstition, but her hands trembled as the chronometer arranged itself in her pocket like a heart. That evening was the silence of the apogee, the rare moment when the sea retreats its whisper and the tide clocks fall silent. She brought the instrument upstairs to the very top of the Fresnel lens room, where the light spliced the darkness into transparent ribbons. On the windowsill lay an envelope-shaped leaf, unstamped, with the initials M.K. and a single sentence. "Set the ring for silence and you will see the day that did not come," the paper whispered, dry and rough. Lena turned the date to November 1904, the width to the lantern, and stopped the centre at the amber mark. The mechanism clicked three times, and silence carried each sound like a plate carrying a drop. First the clock on the wall was late, the hand yawned and stood still, though Lena's heart beat faster. Drops of mist rose from beneath her feet and hovered, as if searching for her old feet to tread on. From downstairs came the prolonged clanging of a bell, stretched like a rubber band, serious and very much out of time. Someone scratched at the door above her, though the ceiling ended just above her head, and beyond that there was only sky. Lena turned the lens, and saw a reflection in the glass that was a fraction of a breath ahead of her. She wore the same jacket, but with a scar above her eyebrow and eyes that remembered something that wasn't there yet. The reflection raised its hand, showing an identical instrument, only with the ring missing, as if time had gnawed something out of it. The mouth moved soundlessly; Lena read the words don't come down before the sound had time to reach her ears. Behind her back, shadows shimmered, thin as amber veins, and formed the shape of a staircase that was not there. The air hardened and the chronometer frantically turned the rings, stopping at a date she had not set. The lens whirred like a giant beehive, and a wall of fog grew outside the glass, thick but pulsing with light. A silhouette in a stormjacket slid out of the mist, stood on the balcony of the lighthouse and looked straight at Lena. The door lock dropped of its own accord, clicking silently, and two pairs of knuckles flourished on the glass, inside and out. The reflection uttered a single word, which Lena didn't manage to hear because someone had just knocked twice.