Late summer in New Waterfront smelled of warmed salt and wet peak. The rain did not fall evenly; it glided across the windows of the flat blocks like an escape map, branching into thin strands and merging into darker rivers. Lena sat by the window and marked those thickest veins of water on the glass with a stylus, as she had done since she was a child. She was always sure that the rain did not run off by accident. - 'At least pretend you're reading your Polish Baccalaureate,' muttered Tymon, leaning his bike against the wall and shaking the drops off his hood. - 'And close that window, it's like an aquarium in here. - I'm reading - replied Lena, moving her finger along the water line. - Except that this is text that writes itself. See, when I stick the film and put it on tracing paper, I get the street. The second time, it worked out identically. Tymon approached, still with a wet mark on his jersey from the bike strap. He wasn't the type to be easily drawn into other people's obsessions. But he knew Lena and her persistence, and he also knew the strange stillness that enveloped the flat as the rain dictated the rhythm of the drops tapping against the windowsill. On the table lay a fold-out plan of the city, thick with purple lines, additions and underlinings. Lena pressed the film freshly removed from the glass to it; a translucent grid of scrawls lay over the map like an extra layer of streets. One line - thicker, offset from everything they knew - ran straight through the area marked on the plan as Tram Depot Area 3. - 'That doesn't exist,' Tymon stated, although his tone was more questioning than firm. - On a dry day it doesn't exist - Lena corrected him. - On a rainy one it has an address. Next Street. See how it fits into the grid. It connects four storm sewers that you can't see on public maps, but you can hear them when you're there. This is no coincidence. - And how do you know what time it is? - Tymon tilted his head, noticing a small note in the corner of the film: 19:13. - 'From the sound,' Lena said quietly. - 'When it rains, all the drops fly like a metronome, but at thirteen past, for a minute, the rhythm scatters, as if someone is suspending and then speeding up the time. I recorded it three times, in different parts of the city. Only at the depot does it break into two voices. Tymon laughed, but there was no mockery in it. There was a restlessness in his laugh that he knew from his morning training, just before the start. He had a knack for running along lines that someone else had drawn for him: the route, the track, the rules. Lena liked to draw her own. - You want to go there today,' he said. - I want to hear where those two voices are coming from - she admitted. - And see if it's just rain or something besides rain. They left as the sky faded from the sodium lamps and the street was alive with stains from the umbrellas. Tramway Depot 3 lay on the edge of the harbour, a place where history rusted and new developments were born from conference folders. Two buildings with arched windows, rough brick and a gate once guarded by a guard with a moustache like wings. Now it was guarded by cameras and silence. Lena was going first, her bag weighed down by a sound recorder, headphones, two candles just in case and a notebook of transparencies. Tymon had a head torch, a multitool and an escape plan that included a scramble towards the breakwater if necessary. The rain hadn't let up, but it had turned fine, like railway gases; the air smelled of moss and old oil. - 'Do you remember coming here to take pictures when they closed the depot? - Asked Tymon as they stopped at the level of the side gate, hung by a padlock with a worn-out sign. - 'I remember the gatehouse full of mugs with the MZK logo on them,' smiled Lena. - And the feeling that everything should still be running, even though it no longer does. The sky darkened by half a tone. At 7:12 p.m. the streetlights began to flash. Somewhere far away there was a rumbling, as if they were rearranging containers at the port, although the port was asleep at this hour. Lena pressed her headphones into her ears and plugged in her microphone. The clock on the phone was ticking with numbers. 19:12.33. 19:12.48. 19:13.00. The rhythm of the rain had indeed faltered. From a uniform, predictable 'shhh' emerged two gears, two separate tempos overlapping. One was even, like the steps of someone who doesn't need to prove anything. The other sped up and slowed down, like a heart after a run. Tymon looked at Lena and she nodded, pointing with her chin at the wicket. The padlock didn't look like it was going to give way. It didn't need to. The hinge at the post let go without a sound, as if the metal, soaked by years, just now, at this time, wanted to breathe. The wicket swung open an arm's width. They were struck by a cold that was different from that of the street: it smelled of needles and something resembling chalk. - A forest? - Tymon whispered. - Here? - Maybe another kind of embankment,' whispered Lena. - Or chortles in the basement of the world. They went in. The drops had stopped rumbling; the depot had an acoustics that swallowed sounds and returned them like echoes to the back. The rusty rails disappeared under puddles so black they reflected the sky like glass. Lena looked under her feet and reflexively drew her foot back: in the mirror of the water she saw stars. Not the kind that should be over the New Waterfront; these were too dense, too jumbled, as if someone had rewound the sky and missed the snap. - 'The sky from the bottom,' said Tymon, now out of jokes. - 'Or the bottom that glows. To the left, against a wall of falling plaster, stood a service door, steel, handleless, with a black plaque on which water was arranged in letters. The letters emerged from the wet surface; they were not the alphabet Lena knew, and yet she understood the meaning as one understands rhythm - with the eyes of the skin, not the head. For a moment she had the impression that the placard said: Don't open when the water is standing. Open when the water is running. - The water is running," she said. The gutter by the door was growling a thin stream. - See. Above the door a security light was on; yellow, tired, it blinked in a rhythm that matched the two differing beats of the rain. It was like a signal that someone had been sending for years and finally lived to see the recipient. Lena pressed her palm against the cold metal. A current of massage ran through her fingers up to her elbow. The door vibrated. - 'If this is a bad idea, say so now,' whispered Tymon. His tone was slightly ironic, but standing just behind her, he held the torch so that it didn't dazzle, but flooded the light like water. - 'When I was eight, I wanted to go under the fountain in the park to see where the sound was coming from,' Lena replied. - And you stood in your slippers on the grass and shouted that it wasn't allowed. I listened then. Now... now I feel like it's landing right in my head, like a string. If I walk away, I'll stop hearing. Tymon raised an eyebrow, but nodded. - 'All right. We go slowly. If something's wrong, we turn back. It's wet here, and wet places like to lie. The door gave way without a rasp. Behind them was no ordinary technical corridor. There was a mist in the air, as cool as a morning in the mountains. The walls, of light-coloured, porous rock, had broken tiles blending into each other, of which a mosaic strip was composed. Lena leaned over and froze. It was a plan of the city - but not the kind you buy in a kiosk. The streets curved into little arches, an orchestra of streams ran where the walls actually stood, and the main squares were shaped like drops. In the middle, in the usual place of the main station, there was a word she couldn't read, yet she knew what it meant: Thresholds. - It's... - Tymon began, searching for a word that didn't appear in textbooks. - Cartography of water. - 'Rain cartography,' Lena corrected, and it sounded suddenly so obvious, as if it had always had that name. The corridor continued on, turning at an angle that didn't exist in the flat or the tunnels they had explored as children. Geometry didn't exactly obey here. When they took three steps, Lena felt as if they had taken half a step back in a slight wave. As they stopped, an echo seemed to overtake them and return in front, carrying their own breaths. Far away flashed something like a bicycle lantern or a window from a physics lesson when a ray passes through a prism. - Can you hear it? - She asked suddenly. Tymon slowed down. There was a sound coming from the front, like the tapping of a schoolboy's pencil against a tabletop. No, not a clatter. It was drops, hitting metal, but with a rhythm that arranged itself into syllables. Lena put her hand on the cold rock to feel the trembling. The drops spoke. They said her name. - I hear," whispered Tymon, paler than usual. - They said "Tymon." And something else. They heard it simultaneously. "Don't be late," folded Rain, voice by voice, as if he were playing dictation. "The door closes when the water stands." They looked behind them. The trail of daylight that spilled through the doorframe shrank slightly, like the phase of the moon in acceleration. The air at the entrance thickened, as if someone had poured milk in there. - 'It's now or never,' Lena said, her heart so loud she would have preferred to record the beat. They took a few more steps. The sound of the drops sped up, shifted accents, turned into something that resembled a fragment of a melody played backwards. The fog in front of them opened up like a curtain. Silhouettes stood in it. Not people. Not shadows. The outline of balconies suspended from nothing, staircases without walls, a courtyard surrounded by high facades that looked over their shoulder without being behind them at all. Everything was clear and pale at the same time, like a reflection in a puddle when someone stirs the water with a shoe. - This is... our city? - Tymon pronounced it with the kind of reverence he never left for geography in class. - But from below. Or from before some inhalation. Lena took half a step back as something started to walk in front, from the very centre of this suspended courtyard. Someone? Something? It didn't have blades. It had names. Hers and his, repeated with different intonations, as if someone was trying to choose the most convenient version of their sound. At the same moment, a thin, vertical shadow appeared on the wall to the right. Like a crevice. Like a gap into which a card slides before the mechanism pulls it in. The light by the front door blinked twice and then began to go out, counting down their seconds. The number was unspoken. It was felt in the chest, in the wrists, in the hair on the nape of the neck. - 'Lena,' Tymon said, 'if we go in, I don't know if we'll come back the same way. - If we don't go in, I'll tell myself that things are written in the rain that we'd rather be silent about,' she replied, clutching the strap of her bag so that her knuckles turned white. - 'And I don't know how to be silent when something rattles like water. From the front, the silhouette just stopped saying their names. It uttered a sentence whose meaning touched them the way a sudden blast of cold on a hot day touches them. The words cobbled together into a promise or a warning. And before they had time to respond, the ground beneath their feet tilted slightly, like the deck of a boat, and the doorframe behind them began to close faster, like an eyelid that cannot be held open without pain. Then Lena took a step forward and raised her hand, as the thing held out its own, and their hands were about to meet at the exact moment when the light outside went out fully, and the drops deposited another word she didn't know from the dictionary, but recognised it like an echo coming back from the future.