The storm had no name yet, but the city was already feeling it. Danzig trembled from the wind, and floating gardens knelt at anchor, creaking like old crates full of wet leaves. The lights of the water trams drew jittery paths along the canals, and the air smelled of salt and ozone, as if someone had cut the sky open again and sewn it crooked. Mila Czarnowska sat on the roof of a steel greenhouse, holding the silver cylinder of a hydrophone in her hands and struggling against her own breath, which sounded like the sea in her headphones. Below, a maze of dark passages and alleys stretched across the broken expanses of the former shipyard, roofs and piers. Above them, to leeward, shone a mural: a huge jellyfish with a thousand glowing arms that someone had painted to wave in the wind. - 'One more time,' she muttered, pressing the plug against the socket. - Another clean pull. Where she sat, the wind suddenly quieted. It was as if the city itself had made space for her to listen in. A squiggly line appeared on the screen of the handheld analyser, distorted by background noise and the sound of the storm. Mila moved the receiver away from one ear, turned down the external microphones, then switched on a filter she had written herself long ago, when she still believed that sounds could change the world. The line calmed down and broke into three bands. Two were familiar: the low rumble of waves that bounced off the concrete pockets of the sewers, and the metallic murmur of the generators. The third, however, had a rhythm. Too regular, too determined to be a coincidence. - One, two, three, four... - she began counting, her cheeks growing colder as she realised she had counted an even number. - It's not the wind. The signal was deep. It entered the body like a distant, disconcertingly human movement of an alien step. And yet it was not a step. It was a beat: once, pause, two short, longer pause, once. The pattern repeated itself with slight shifts, as if someone was trying to speak through a layer of water and steel. Mila pressed the keys. Applied Pattern Match, folder: somatics. She was curious out of habit, but didn't expect anything else to surprise her. However, when the programme sucked in the sample and, after a moment, flashed a green compatibility bar, Mila's hand trembled so that the hydrophone hissed into the microphone. Compatibility: 98.7%. With what? With her own pulse, recorded three years ago during an examination when her middle ear microchip was replaced. Not with the 'average pulse', not with the model. With hers. With her arrhythmia on the verge of sleep, which she knew only from charts and the doctor's quiet reminders. - 'That's impossible,' she whispered, and immediately felt a childish laugh, one she had long kept in the furthest drawer. - Don't speak, not now. She switched off one filter, switched on another, checked the sensitivity. She changed the directionality of the antenna, turning it slowly, as if running her finger along the shoulder of an invisible creature. The signal faded, disappeared, returned. A pointer, like a shadow, like the touch of a cold fish in her hand: from the west. From the vicinity of the old breakwater, where tucked away was something that was spoken of in whispers and half-words in the city, because it hadn't worked for years and was said to be dangerous. The Wrzos tidal engine. - 'Heather,' she said into the empty air, and the wind answered her with a short whine of a cable. She picked up the phone. Kasper answered after the third beep, with some electronic rhythm coming from his background and the clatter of chairs being moved. - 'Do you know what time it is? - he yawned. - 'I'm on call today, and you're probably awake again and measuring the sea with a metronome. - I got the signal. - Mila wasted no time in making an introduction. - From Heath. - After all, the Heath closed down a long time ago and its core was drenched in foam. It lives in you, this belief that something is still moving there. Like in the old fairy tales. - That's my pulse," she said, expecting a laugh. She didn't hear it. Only silence, and then the tapping of moving forks. - 'How long am I due in? - He asked. They met at the marina, where lanterns blinked to the rhythm of the waves. Kasper Niewiadomski arrived on a scooter from which drops were still dripping. He was wearing a rescue jacket, but instead of a first aid kit he was carrying a backpack with tools and a 3D printed display board. - We once got caught in a storm on Ołowianka," he recalled as he strapped on his scooter. - 'Then I promised myself that I would never again follow you to places that city maps prefer not to remember. - And yet there you are - she chuckled. - 'Because when you say something breathes at a particular frequency, the matter has weight.' - He smiled briefly. - 'And besides, I want to see you discussing again with a completely unsuitable machine for conversation. They cruised along the canal, passing illuminated algae nurseries and dark warehouses that remembered a time when the sea was just a backdrop, not a character. Bar and wine bar signs blazed, someone played the saxophone on a balcony over the water. Around the bend stretched a space so black it rang in your ears: the breakwater. Contrary to rumour, it was not completely abandoned. Tiny Hydria controllers rode along its edge, glinting blue like fish guarding a flock. - 'Camera number seven has had a blind spot for a fortnight,' Kasper said, calling up clouds of data in the air. - Repair 'in progress'. That means the corpo is waiting for the storm to blow it over itself. We have a gap. They also had a key to the airlock, printed from one of the old photos Mila had acquired in the archives. On the way they passed a warning sign: STRESS ZONE. AUTHORISATION ONLY. The sign was new, the paint still smelled faintly chemical, yet the door had a rusty tarnish, as if time had sped up here. Inside, there was that thick silence that empty spaces are not supposed to give. The corridor arched downwards, and rivulets of water ran down the walls, every now and then meeting in droplets larger than necessary. Heather had once breathed water; now she breathed memory after memory of water. - 'What do you think,' asked Kasper in a half-hearted voice, 'why would that be your pulse? After all, you don't have any devices around here, no relays, none.... - 'My implant could have logged into the technical network when I was born,' she said with apparent nonchalance. - 'My parents worked in the shipyard, you know. Mum on Hydria projects. They connected people to objects, trained hearing, signed a hundred papers a day. A few traces might have been left before I learned to erase the data in my wake. - You know, even if that's true, it still doesn't explain anything. - I know. They turned into a side vestibule where the sensors hissed softly, even though no one had asked them. Above the door hung a sign: RESONATOR OF THE CORE. AUTHORISED ONLY. The door didn't look like the ones from the movies, with no armour or steering wheels. Simply matte, with a palm scanner embedded in the surface. Kasper pulled out his contact plates. - 'I'll try to confuse his eyes first,' he muttered. - If there's still electricity here at all. - 'There is,' Mila said. She had felt it before: a gentle tingling in her fingers that told her that there was energy flowing close by. Close and in an amount that should not be part of an object "that has been switched off for years". - 'Milka,' Kasper turned away, as if he had suddenly stopped joking. - 'If something here reacts to you, you might not want to open it. - That's why I have to. She moved her hand over the scanner without pressing it against the surface. The light hidden in the matt plastic trembled slightly, like the breathing of someone on the verge of sleep. One, a second time. Then the whole panel lit up with a soft, greenish glow and made a sound that was neither a beep nor a hiss - it had something of the creak of old wood being dipped in water. - 'It's not possible,' Kasper repeated, this time without irony. - You have no powers. - 'Maybe I'm not the one with them,' replied Mila, not knowing herself where the words came from. The lock clicked. The door dropped a millimetre, letting out the cool, salty air that must have been locked in here for years. It was dark inside, but not quite: some very soft glow hugged the edges of the consoles and railings, like plankton in the night glued to the sides of a boat. - 'Do you remember Mum telling you about the Treasurer? - chuckled Mila in the semi-darkness. - That was the name of the control system for tidal reactors. It was supposed to listen to the sea, pick up small differences and predict them so we wouldn't get torn apart by the wind. It was supposed to learn from people who could hear deeper. - It was never officially implemented,' Kasper replied. - 'Because something went wrong at the testing stage. Because someone closed that door and said it was safer. - Officially," she repeated. She slid into the gap, feeling the hair on the back of her neck go up. The resonator resembled an amphitheatre built for sound. Steps descended softly towards a circular basin that housed something like a hybrid instrument: steel strings, as thick as a finger, stretched over water whose surface was as smooth as glass. Above it hung a circle of sensors, like the ring of a crouching crown. Mila took her steps very quietly. Every sound came back to her after a while, circling as if the space was made of thin ice. It was no longer just the sound of the wind in her ears. Something trembled in the air, slow and sure, like heartbeats. Her heart. - Can you feel it? - Kasper whispered. - Yes. She walked to the edge of the basin. The water was so calm that she could see not so much her reflection in it as the echo of her silhouette, which was created with a delay, as if time had strange properties here. Crouching down, she stretched her hand above the surface. As her skin met the coolness of the moisture, tiny dots flashed above the ring of sensors. Not obediently even, not routinely, but as if they were waking from a long sleep, trying to name the movement that awakens. - 'Hello,' she said quietly, not knowing to whom. - If you are, you can hear me better than I can hear you. I know you can hear. The dots on the ring began to form a slow circle. The strings trembled, hesitantly at first and then more fully, subtly, like a draught passing between harps. The sound had no melody yet. But there was already something in its undulation that made Kasper take a step back, and Mila felt the area around her sternum grow heavier, drawn inwards. - Mila... - Kasper put a hand on her shoulder. - If this is the Treasurer, then.... - It's learning all over again - she finished. - On my beat. Suddenly there was a pause in the vibrations. A short, sharp bite of silence. Then one low tone, very pure, so pure that after it every drop in the air seemed to have a skin of its own. The ring lit up halfway through, like a crescent moon. The water in the basin made an imperceptible but distinct movement, as if someone underneath had made an inhalation. Somewhere in the depths of the mechanisms, behind a wall that they would have taken for a mere fragment of structure, something startled. The movement did not feel like a malfunction - it was deliberate, slow, unhurried. As if someone was counting not in seconds but in tides. As if something had woken up and was checking that all the threads of reality were in place. Mila lifted her gaze. The ring dimmed and flared again, this time in a rhythm she already knew from the greenhouse roof, but more complex, richer with internal divisions. It wasn't just a pulse; it was a response, an invitation to enter a simple code, something that mimicked language. The air trembled. For a moment all the lights in the corridor behind them went out, then came back on, as if in shame. The tones came together and rose, forming into the outline of a syllable that sounded more like an image than a sound in her head. Something else slipped into that image: the feeling that it wasn't just the two of them and the machine now. Kasper leaned in closer, sticking his eyes into the twitching line in his plate. - Can you see it? - he whispered. - That frequency signature? He... it looks like it's pointing to a specific sector of the reactor, one whose plans are not in any open archives. - That place below us? - Mila asked, although she could already feel the answer in the back of her neck. The strings trembled a third time, deeper. The water vibrated. The chill from inside the room became sharp, palpable. And then, from the very bottom, from the place the corridors skirted, came a sound in which there was no longer just sea or machinery. There was something disturbingly close to a voice. The lock in the floor, which they had not noticed before, moved a hair's breadth, like the blink of an eye. The air stopped, as if even the storm had stopped breathing for a moment. Mila tightened her fingers on the cold railing, and her own pulse busied itself trying to jump to the new pattern that filled the room.