The Boreal Circus tent loomed up on the quayside like a dark blue mushroom after a storm. The fabric shimmered with silver threads, and when the wind from the river blew, the whole sheathing rustled quietly, as if breathing. On the other side of the fence, the bonfires of the installation crews were burning, smelling of tar, damp wood and sugar burnt on a stick. Lena poked her head up. Her airwheel hung high under the ridge, black against black, yet clear, like the outline of the moon just before full. She warmed her hands with magnesia, watching the white dust settle on her skin with the dots of the constellation. She felt that pre-show thrill - a mixture of trepidation and hunger for flight. Right next to her was busying himself with Benjamin, the technician for everything: he had perpetually dusty sleeves and an unbelievable ability to find lost screws in sawdust. "If sawdust could talk, it would tell us half the world," he muttered, pulling a crate on rubber wheels. The crate was iron, studded and so heavy that the floor groaned under its weight. On the lid, next to the old logo of a faded comet, someone had stamped 13. Not the thirteen in poster font, but a handwritten one, uneven, with a slight scratch between 1 and 3, as if the digit wanted to fuse into a single character. - 'Mind your ears,' chuckled Maurice, director and bowler-hatted announcer, who loved his words as passionately as the audience loved his voice, from the threshold. - This marvel is entering incognito. No rumours, no questions. This is our new opening number. Number thirteen, gentlemen and ladies, but we pretend it's pure arithmetic. He smiled, but his fingers squeezed the cane too tightly. Lena noticed how his knuckles stiffened for a second. Benjamin saw it too - he nodded to Lena lightly, wordlessly. In three moves they slid the box under the stage, where the smells of cat sand and perfume collide, where sawdust obliterates footsteps and where a man can hear his own pulse. Someone placed a red cord on the lid, as if it were a gift not to them, but to the night. In the evening, Lena climbed the rope stretched between the pillars. From above, the world was simple: three circles of light, two rows of chairs, one empty arena. She slid her hand over the metal of the circle and supported her wrist. A thin tone came to her from below, like the distant sound of glass damp with rain. She looked towards the chest. Along the age gap, as if under the skin, a narrow strip of light dimmed. It twitched, went out, reappeared. Lena pressed her lips together. - Can you hear? - She whispered as Benjamin joined her by the ladder, not taking his eyes off the shadows beneath the stage. - I can hear. And I'd rather not,' he replied half-jokingly, then added seriously: 'Maurice got a letter today. The paper old, the ink almost faded. Someone had written to him not to enter it. He folded it up, tucked it away, had it played. As always. Lena nodded, making no comment. The circus was governed by a rhythm that sounded like a snare drum: prepare, announce, show, put out. Sometimes, however, a gap opened up between these beats, into which light and shadow slipped out of sequence. On this evening, the gap looked like the route of a red string on the lid of a box. The next day, the exercises accelerated: Gabriel, an illusionist with hands too calm for a man who was constantly making something disappear, was arranging his mirrors into a fan. To avoid distracting the team, Maurice replaced the placard at the entrance. A handwritten note in ink at the very bottom proclaimed: "Premiere number under the sign of the comet". An elderly ticket saleswoman spotted him and spat over his shoulder, which in her case was considered a blessing. - Under the sign of the comet," repeated Lena, strolling down the line. - Who wrote it? - You know the answer,' Gabriel replied, and turned one of the mirrors. - 'Every number has a sign. The question is whether the sign chose us or we chose it. That night, when the tent was already asleep and only the clocks in the carriages were talking to each other in whispers, someone - maybe the wind, maybe a hand - moved the red rope from the chest without revealing the age. Lena, who couldn't stay in bed for long when the air was as thick as cloud soup, slipped her feet into her trainers and ran down the metal steps. As she crouched by the crate, a piece of glass slipped out of the sawdust. She picked it up. Her face was reflected in the small shard as usual, only blinking a quarter of a second later than her eyelid. - 'An illusion is a contract,' Gabriel told her the next day, looking at the shard against the light. - You make it with things you don't understand. They usually keep their word. Usually. The light on the day of the premiere was as heavy as dust. Guests whispered at the entrance, tracing numbers on their chairs. Someone lost a glove, someone else laughed too loudly. Maurice stood in the aisle, his coat lined with satin and that sparkly dust in his eyes that showed it was already there. Benjamin fastened the last buckle at the winch and handed Lena the harness. The metal was warm from his hands. - 'Number thirteen goes at the end of the first part,' he said quietly. - 'If anything... if you need to jump off, jump onto the mats on the left. There's a crate on the right. - I'm not going to jump, I'm going to fly,' she replied and smiled the way a person smiles when they can already see their trajectory in their head. The snare drum whirred. Gabriel extinguished the mirrors in one motion. The light thickened over the arena. Maurice stepped into the sheaf and his voice spread through the tent like a wave: - Ladies and Gentlemen, Dear Audience, under our blue skies we welcome you with a number that has not been there yet, although it has been waiting for us for a long time. I ask for silence. I ask you to take a breath. I ask you to have the courage to look where you do not usually look. The applause muffled itself, as if ashamed of the volume. Benjamin looked at Lena, Lena at Benjamin. The end of the red cord dangled from the box like a tongue of silence. And then, without a touch, without a signal, the lid vibrated. Someone's throat became dry, someone else pushed back a bag of sweets with a shoe. The metal clattered. A narrow, black gap appeared between the lid and the box. Lena, already suspended above the arena, with her hand on the wheel, saw something smooth shine through this gap - like the eye of a mirror - and for a split second she was sure that this something was looking straight at her.