The boat smelled of rain and brick dust. The night was sticky on the walls of the old spinning mills and the neon lights reflected in the puddles like cut ribbons. Lena drove slowly, so that she could hear the city - not just with her tyres on the cobbles, but with her whole self. Cable poles sang in a low, grounded tone. Traffic lights squealed thinly, nervously, as if they were drilling people's temples. As she drove past the transformer, its bass flew through her ribs and did what it always did: put her thoughts in order. No one knew what he could do. Nicolas was the closest, but even to him she never showed everything. She only said she had absolute hearing, that she could tell a tram two from a tram three by the tone of the brakes, that she could whistle the frequency at which an old lighthouse once trembled over the sea. The truth was greater. Lena could hear the tensions. She could feel the polarity. She could slip into the current like a melody and shift her accent to make the light flicker, to make the kettle boil faster, to make a stranger's phone screen go off by itself at the worst moment of the conversation. - Are you sure this is a good idea? - Nikolai rode up beside him on his bike, rearranging his rucksack so it wouldn't bang against the saddle. - Messages from unknown numbers at this hour are usually bad stories. - I know what a bad story sounds like,' she replied. - This one sounds like... an opportunity. She pulled out her phone and glanced at the text message once more. "If you can hear it: Księży Młyn, Hall C, 23:30 - turn on the metronome." Underneath, the coordinates. No signature. No "please" or "sorry about the time". Lena turned on the metronome and saw that the pulse there was set to 60 - even with her heart rate. She shuddered, but not from the cold. The Księży Młyn slept like a mighty sleeping dog, lurking beneath its own history. Red bricks, windows like eyes, cobblestones that remembered thousands of steps. They drove through the gate, past murals that had been saved from the rain by a fresh coat of varnish. A factory chimney loomed on the left, on the right the extinguished café where she overheard espresso conversations in the summer - short, rapid, like sparks. - Hall C? - Nicolas hopped off his bike, escorted to the shade. - Where the big ones used to stand, which was.... - Looms - finished Lena. - Yes, there. They stopped at a tall glass door. On the glass someone had formerly scratched out the violin keys, now partially drenched in drops. There was deep darkness inside, but when Lena put her hand on the metal handle, she felt a slight pinch. A wire on the other side. The current was asleep, but it was there. - Ask me again if this is a good idea - she asked quietly. - This is a bad idea. - Nikolai smiled crookedly. - That's why I'm standing next to him. They agreed that she would go in alone. Nikolai was to stay at the gate, with his phone in his hand, at the ready to call, to shout, to do anything. Lena took a deep breath, let the smell of wet dust into her lungs and leaned into the lock. All it took was a flick of the tone, a barely audible mutter under her breath. The latch vibrated, then again, as if dragging, and let go. The door creaked, not too loudly, respectful of the night. The interior was larger than she remembered. The hall stretched far away, disappearing into the gloom, rows of steel pillars lost in shadow like tree trunks. Once upon a time the life of machines and hands had throbbed here; now there was silence broken only by the drip of the roof. Yet there was something else that did not belong to the silence. Somewhere in the centre a rhythm was falling. An invisible drum, a pulse. The metronome from her phone was quietly ticking in her pocket, but Lena felt something larger synchronising with her step. She stepped deeper. With each line of cobblestone beneath her feet, the light of the night softened, as if someone was gradually raising the lighting slider. She saw that an installation had been built inside. A familiar lump: the outline of a Jacquard loom, only instead of threads - bundles of fibre optics, instead of shafts of yarn - vertical cassettes of transparent plastic in which tiny diodes floated. Above all this hung perforated cards, white and stiff, marked with rectangular holes like notes on a stave. On the floor - a metal plate of thin mesh. A plaque: "Look, but don't touch". This inscription was like a challenge. Lena came closer, rolled up the sleeve of her jacket so that the scar on her wrist, thin as a thread, shimmered in the light of the lantern behind the glass. She put her fingers on the edge of the plate. She listened. She heard. A pulse flew through the circuits, echoed back from the ceiling. The system waited. It registered a presence. It was ready. - Lena? - Nikolai's voice sounded from the gate, slightly muffled. - 'There's nothing going on? - I'm fine,' she replied, not lying at all. She switched on the key in her head, the one she had learned when she was ten years old, and for the first time decided to see what would happen if she tried to 'sing' into the tension of the network. The vibration was gentle, like falling asleep. She moved it up a half tone and touched the metal grid with her whole fingertip. The diodes in the cassettes vibrated. Once, a second time. Then they flared one by one, as if welcoming the conductor who lifted the baton. The hole cards began to move, slowly, steadily, as if an invisible hand had set them in motion. Large, twitching shadows of the holes appeared on the walls, arranging themselves in a geometric pattern that changed with the tempo of the metronome in her pocket. Lena felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Not because it was cold. It was because the installation was responding to her pulse. This wasn't standard, passive light - this was feedback. She drew in air. When she let it out, she changed the frequency slightly. The shadows on the walls folded into a spiral, a high-pitched tone whispering somewhere above the tapes shifted into a soft chord. For a second, everything came together perfectly - it was a moment she had known since childhood, when the world told her: yes, yes, this is the right place. A flake of paint fell from the ceiling. Lena jumped back reflexively, and then a lock clicked somewhere on the side. The hall door, the one on the other side, closed of its own accord, its metal sash flickering as if someone had wired it with a pulse. Nikolai shouted her name, no longer sounding calm. - I'll be right out! - She threw over her shoulder, although she didn't know at all if she could. A light flashed on the balustrade of the upstairs office. The glazed cage, which must once have been where the foreman drank tea and looked at people, now glowed with a white, cool radiance. No one could be seen from behind the glass, but Lena felt that she was not alone. It was something other than electricity. Like the presence of an attentive ear on the other side of the wall. The speakers, which she hadn't noticed before, crackled and hissed. Then a voice rang out - stifled, metallic but clear: - Candidate seventeen. Calibration compliant. First module: resonance. Please remain on the platform. Lena laughed briefly, nervously. The candidate? Did someone test her? She hated tests. She didn't like the word 'module'. But this was no time for prejudice. She glanced upstairs. Her silhouette was reflected in the glass of the office, petite, with a cheek darker on the left from the sun that wasn't there. In the reflection behind her, the tapes shimmered, creating a pulsating horizon. - 'Oi,' Nikolai shouted again. - 'That door on my side just now... Lena, something's holding it. She felt her stomach grow hollow. If someone could control the door without touching it, then... Well, she wasn't the only one affected by the current. - 'It's ok,' she said into the speaker, unsure if they could hear her. - I am. Say what you want. Sound, not words, answered her. A motif flowed from the tapes, simple and pure, like the first practice of a scale. In note up, In note down, change of tempo. The system dictated, she was to repeat. She raised her left hand, although she didn't have to 'do' anything with her hands - it was still happening in her head and in her muscles, her chest vibrating like a membrane. She responded precisely. The light twitched in response, kind, accepting. The second motif was more difficult, weaving in and out of the low buzzing of the risers and ceiling fluorescent lights, which she could not see but felt were there. With each phrase, the installation grew more alive to her, like an instrument that finally understood who it was carrying. It was like running barefoot through the grass. Like falling into a puddle without feeling like someone was going to shout for it. Like being yourself, something you don't have to fight against. As the third motive tore like hail, Lena also felt something alien: a gentle, calculated delay, an intrusion that didn't stem from her actions. Someone had tried to 'dim' the background. A false tone - someone else's - rang out. At the same moment, the signal of the metronome in her pocket trembled and sped up a few beats. She didn't change it. - 'Don't bury my tempo,' she whispered through her teeth, and then, more emphatically, she sent a short, short pulse into the wires. Like a clap. Like a boundary. The speaker hummed. For a second she heard someone besides a modulated voice. A sigh. Maybe a muffled laugh. Then again: a neutral tone, a command, the announcement of another step. - The second module: interference. Counter interference. She was good at this one. Ever since she was a child, she had been able to identify an annoying sound in the classroom - even if it was below the threshold of audibility for the rest of us - and reverse it, dissecting its ripples, spreading them out so that it disappeared. She pulled her sleeve higher, exposing her entire forearm, as if the skin would help her cope with whatever was coming. Before she had time to react, the installation changed character. The fibre optics in the strands flared with a delay relative to each other, creating a cascade of flashes that from a distance would look like a rain of shooting stars, but up close was chaos. Individual dots began to spark in the tapes, as if someone was shooting pins of light in random places. The floor beneath her feet trembled slightly, the way a platform trembles when a train approaches. - Lena! - Santa's voice was closer this time. - 'I'll try to come in from behind! - The ominous metallic groan of the door was the answer to his intention. Followed by - silence. She couldn't run to him for the moment. Not only did she have an ill-mannered light against her, but also someone who really wanted to see if she could handle what she dealt with on a daily basis. She adjusted the filter internally. First the lowest tones, then the midrange. She cut off the part that was most disturbing. She picked out the other tone, the one that was not part of the installation, but came from somewhere outside. It led like a thread. Unchaotic, deliberate, soft, with a peculiar manner of ending phrases, as if it were not so much played as breathed. She lifted her head. The lights of the upstairs office changed to a warmer hue. A shadow moved behind the glass, a line of shoulders, a profile. Lena's heart twisted in its cage. She tried not to think about the fact that this outline was strangely familiar to her. That it was preserved in her memory from someone else's even shorter moment from an album at the bottom of a cupboard. A shot from someone's youth. The tilted head. The same axis of the face as hers. The voice in the speakers did not manage to give the 'third module'. Instead she heard her own name, unprocessed, with a slight whisper that she remembered from her childhood, although she shouldn't have remembered anything before the age of six. - Lena... The fibre optics vibrated like strings. A grate trembled underfoot. The door to the balcony opened from the office and a figure she would recognise even if all the streetlights in the world went out stepped forward. A man she had no right to meet here, now. The man from her old family photographs, which always lacked a signature. He stopped at the railing. He squinted into the light. And Lena, with her hand raised in a half gesture, herself unsure whether she wanted to cut the power or amplify it, drew in a breath and, for the first time in years, forgot all the rules she had imposed on herself. In that one beat of silence, just before everything was about to be decided, the speakers wailed a short signal and red markers flashed over the tapes. Someone else had gone online. Someone who was not on her side.