Nika was nineteen and working quietly in the night reading room when the fog hung over the harbour. The library in Międzybrzeg rustled with maps even without people, as if the pages themselves were breathing. That evening, Nika discovered something on bookcase M that was not listed in the inventory. The slender atlas in green cloth throbbed with coldness, like a stone held too long under water. On the front pastedown was the title, seemingly a printer's joke: A Guide to the Outdoors, Revised and Unstable Edition. In the margins, someone had jotted down things in pencil that one remembers by skin, not by memory. The handwriting was strangely familiar, because it was exactly how her grandmother wrote when she left her recipes. One map showed the same shore as outside the window, but moved one street to the side. By the lamppost a door with three hinges was drawn in a fine line, as if someone had drawn in the possibility. At the same moment, the glass in the reading room shuddered and the overhead light went out and immediately came back on. She felt a whiff of salt and rosemary, although no one had cooked anything warm here for years. Grandma used to say at the cooker that doors come to those who remember coming back. M's bookcase creaked and moved a few centimetres away, revealing a wall with a doorframe drawn in. Behind the frame wove a door without a handle, with a lock in the shape of an eight-pointed star, cool as the shadow of a well. Constellations were carved around it, shifting imperceptibly when she blinked or looked away. She turned a page of the atlas and something slid out softly: a thin brown key, warm as a pebble from the beach. A breeze whirred on the stairs, but she saw no one, only the clock chimed with one stray beat. She wasn't brave, rather curious, and curiosity in her house had always escaped being a close cousin of memory. She put the key in the star and heard the mechanism making what sounded like distant rain on the tin roof. The light dimmed and streaks of ink rose from the atlas, laying letters and roads in the air. The constellations lit up pale blue, the air swelled with the smell of the tide, and the floor trembled like the deck of a boat. Someone on the other side whispered her name in her grandmother's voice and asked quietly: Are you ready, child of light? Nika turned the key a millimetre as a heart, not her own, answered and the doorframe let out a cold mist. The lock vibrated once more, and a light like an inverted aurora spilled through the crack. The street seen through it was the same street, but the lantern stood where the well should have been. A tide crawled silently across the ceiling, not falling, just lifting dust like a school of silver fish. The clock stood forever at 00:00, and in the atlas the stars rewrote themselves into one unknown name. When the first hinge beeped, as if it had been silent for a long time, Nika took a breath and pressed on.