Aboard the school's Orlik station, orbiting Pluto, it was the quiet of the night shift. Nela, a fourteen-year-old navigation apprentice, was keeping a log of interstellar noises that night. Usually she took notes of crackles and pulsars, but today she heard something resembling a lullaby. The melody repeated at even intervals, as if someone was winking at her with a star. Igor, her colleague in the sensor section, pulled up a chair and put on headphones. They rewound the recording, picked out the rhythm and turned it into a map of the sky. The source point moved slowly beyond Charon's orbit, heading towards darkness. Nela turned pale as she recognised the notes her grandmother hummed to her to sleep. Where in the void did the melody come from in the little flat in Old Debniki? According to the regulations, they should report an anomaly, but the regulations did not know of such cases. So they went to the observation dome, from where the swollen glow of Pluto could be seen. Nela launched the Zuk-3 service probe and put the signal translation on autopilot. The artificial intelligence Kora reported a minor magnetic deviation in the storage sector. The lullaby rhythm increased and the indication suddenly jumped from space to the deck. The source was at the old research module, closed since the fateful collision. The door still had a faded owl sign, the same as on Nela's pendant. Igor lowered his voice and hissed that this was maintenance territory under penalty of working off hours. Nela touched the panel and the panel groaned, as if remembering other children's fingers. The bark sent out a warning of unauthorised activation, but the emergency opening countdown was already running. A cold breeze blew through the crack and a whisper formed into a melody. Nela picked up the pendant as something blinked in the semi-darkness that shouldn't blink. The lights dimmed and the speakers hissed, as if someone was changing the chat channel. The sound signature unfolded into three notes, followed by a name. "Nelo" - emerged from the crackle more clearly than the turndown of the cooling pumps. Igor grabbed her sleeve, but Nela pressed further unlock. In the gloom, drawings on the glass shimmered, as if someone was drawing stars with a fingernail. A single tap answered from deep within the module, and then a second, closer tap. The lock vibrated and moved back a centimetre, revealing an icy breath of darkness.