At night, the city was sometimes thinner. The streets slowed down, the air became as paper-like as parchment, and the lamps on the corner of Ogrodowa and Krochmalna blinked, as if someone was rewriting them and couldn't keep up with the dots over the 'i'. In Nina's studio, on the third floor of the Three Keys tenement, there was the smell of starch, rabbit-skin glue, the dust of old frames and the first rain of late summer. The expanse of the table was flooded by a warm circle of lamps; the rest of the room was hidden in half-shadows. Nina liked this moment, when the neighbours had long since switched off the lights and the quiet growl of the fridges came from the bakery on the ground floor. Usually by now she would have pulled herself away from her work, but on this night she had something she couldn't put down. The package - no stamps, no return address, wrapped in grey paper and tied with a ribbon recovered from someone's old dress - had been waiting since the afternoon. She left it under the window and pretended to have forgotten. She hadn't forgotten. She cut the paper open with a bookbinding knife. Inside she found an atlas. Not an elegant cabinet volume, none of those thick books with smooth spines and gilded titles. This one was modest, covered in rough cloth, with corners scuffed like the elbows of someone who had leaned on the world for too long. When opened, it smelled of distant rain and the smoke of burnt juniper. Graphite, Nina's cat, crawled onto the table and laid his tail in the margin of the title page. He had a habit of pretending to be a statue when a decision had to be made. Nina grimaced but did not chase him away. There was no author's name. Just a brief entry in ink faded like a memory: "To whom it dares." She smiled in spite of herself. There was a breath of perversity in it from someone who understood maps differently, closer to skin than geometry. The first map was strange. It didn't depict anything Nina knew, and she knew a lot. Cities could wear masks, but the shape of the river, the layout of the hills, the way the roads escaped the wind - this couldn't be easily glossed over. Here the lines were as soft as hair, the shadows of the mountains drifted away like waves, and the light from the lamp seemed to fall into ink and disappear without an echo. She moved her finger across one of the rivers, very gently so as not to disturb the pigment. The water vibrated. It was not the illusory sheen of varnish. The ink, which seemed to have been dry for a long time, moved like a living organism, as if in response to a touch, and for a fraction of a second formed a microscopic spill before it returned to its place. - Are you looking? - She whispered to Grafit. The cat squinted, which in his language meant patiently: "Of course I'm looking." Nina pushed back her chair and stood up. She opened the window. From the courtyard came the smell of wet earth and basil from the neighbour's pots across the street. A dog barked in the distance, then went quiet, as if someone had convinced it that this was no time for conviction. The clock in the parish common room struck midnight. A vertical crack of sound cut through the night. At the same moment, the lights went out throughout the building. The lamp above the table dampened the air with a last flash and died. The darkness came quickly, almost tripping over itself, that's how fast it was. Yet the studio did not become completely dark. The atlas was glowing. Barely, from within, not like a lamp, more like a constant reminder that something was breathing, though standing still. - There you go,' Nina said, more to herself than to the cat. She sat back down and leaned over the map. Now she could see more. The lines of roads looked like threads spun out of cobwebs, tying together places whose names gave no answers: Leaning Market Square, Halfway House Marina, Sixth Arch Street; she knew such names from old plans and from poems. There were promises and sleepless nights in them. In the margins she noticed a small pen drawing: a key. Not extraordinary, a simple iron key, without ornamentation. Next to it were dots arranged in a row. There was no signature as to what they meant. She turned the sheet over. The next sheet showed the city from above, but not in that tidy, geometrised manner to which surveyors were accustomed. This city seemed to have the gaze of a bird that doesn't so much measure as remember. At intersections, instead of house numbers, small symbols were applied: fingerprints, crescents, field flowers. In the middle, where the market square or the cathedral usually is, a tenement house was drawn so similar to the one Nina lived in that her heart slowed down for two beats. She pressed her hand to the table as if it might float away. The windows, the arcades of the gate, even the crooked gutters on the back wall - the entire Three Keys tenement was captured here with a precision that had no right to exist in a book none of her neighbours could know about. Next to the drawing, someone has noted in a thin handwriting: "Nina's studio - temporary entrance". Dots. Key. Entrance. - Who the hell... - She whispered, and Graphite raised his left ear, which meant: "Hush, listen first". She listened. All that came from the stairwell was the usual nocturnal creaking of planks and the distant rattling of pipes. Yet something else, barely perceptible, like the soft beat of a moth's wings against the glass, was coming from the wall behind the cardboard box rack. Where she had put away the seldom-used canvas press and where the light did not willingly peek through. She moved her chair and carefully removed the boxes one by one from the bookcase, placing them next to the atlas. Each had a label with the date and a brief description: "Patching marine atlas (north coasts)", "Lunar calendar - new binding", "Unknown park plans (butterflies)". Behind the boxes, she saw an ordinary white wall, slightly wavy, as in old tenements. She put her hand to it. It was cool. A gentle draught, which should not have been there, swept over her knuckles. She turned back to the atlas. She moved her eyes over the details as if they were the face of a long-lost friend. On the third map, the dots in the margin no longer formed a row, but an arc. The caption: "Every seven - breath". Nina pushed her hair back from her forehead, put down her brush and started touching the dots with her index finger, counting in her mind: one, two, three, four, five, six.... On "seven" she took a deep breath, as deep as if she was going to blow a candle very far away. The ink on the map, where the tenement was stuck, trembled and ran down like a drop of water on a windowpane. The vibration went through the table, through her forearms, through the floor. The wall behind the bookcase responded with a quiet sigh. - 'No kidding,' she said to the wall already. The graphite jumped down to the floor and sat down by the bookcase, very straight, with his tail curled around his paws, like a sentry under the door to something no one had yet named. Nina slid her fingers under the edge of the bookcase and moved it a few centimetres. It wasn't heavy, as if something was helping her from behind. Under the paint, where the boxes had stood before, she discovered a thin, vertical crack. Looking under the light from the monitor, which was still pulsing dormant, she saw the sheen of metal. She put her ear to it. The murmur from that side resembled distant street sounds: the clatter of footsteps on gravel, the hiss of a soda being opened, the creak of a frostbitten piano. Nothing was distinct enough for me to put my finger on it and say, 'that's it'. All together it sounded like an invitation. In the margin of the atlas, next to a drawing of a townhouse, ink spilled into a shape that hadn't been there before: a small, round hole. Next to it, a microscopic arrow: "Here." Nina leaned in so low that she felt the warmth of the lamp, although, after all, the lamp was not lit. She reached into her apron pocket. There she usually carried a pencil, an eraser, a bone bender and - because she liked things with character - an old key, found a year ago at a flea market. She took it then without conviction, the way one takes an elegant phrase from a book, because it might come in handy for a letter one day. The iron had a texture that could not be mistaken for anything else. The teeth were uneven, as if someone had sawed them with a bread knife. She took out the key. She attached it to the drawing in the margin and for a split second she had the impression that the shadows in the room were receding to make more room for her. If someone was watching her, she no longer had to wonder what they would do. She just knew. She picked up a box from the corner of the wall and moved it further away. The crack turned out to be more than just a crack. Beneath the layer of paint was a thin plate, enamelled white. Tiny, bolted on. In the middle - a keyhole. So small as to be frivolous. Perfectly fitting for the key that had been weighing down her pocket aimlessly for a year. The blood in her temples slowed down, as if her heart had decided to listen very carefully. A single clatter came from the kitchen, meaningless, but in that moment every echo had the weight of a stone. Outside the window, in the darkness, an invisible tram passed by - Nina didn't know of any line that ran through their street at that hour, but the bell sounded like it had before the war, clear, unhurried. - If it's a joke, it's a very good one,' she muttered. She glanced at the atlas. The maps were no longer flickering with an undirected glow; they glowed more quietly, as if waiting for her to make a move. Where street names stuck, the tiny letters seemed to quietly change their typeface, as if someone was correcting them on the fly. There was a new addition next to a drawing of an apartment building: "Best at midnight". She smiled at the cheeky tone, exactly the kind of tone she would have used to herself at a too-bold idea. She put the key to the hole. It fit. The metal touched metal with a sound that was no mere tap; it sounded like the first note of a song you've known since you were a child, though you've never heard it. - Graphite? - She threw over her shoulder. The cat sat still, and his pupils were so wide that they almost absorbed the colour. He poked at her with a look that said: "If you're going, go as someone who knows he can come back." There was no fear in it. There was attention. Nina tightened her fingers on the cool shaft of the key. On the other side of the wall something rustled, as if someone was sifting sugar into a tall jar. The air thickened with smells that could not be imagined at this time of year: needles from a winter forest, the warm skin of a horse's neck, salt from a quiet bay. A quiet ticking, not belonging to her clock at all, formed a sequence: three short, one longer, three shorter. She turned the key a millimetre. The mechanism responded surprisingly softly, as if it had been greased by her exhalations for years. From deep within came a click. The metal under her hand began to warm. Loose plaster trembled from the ceiling, and a narrow beam of light - not electric, not candlelight, just the kind that reminded her of morning light in a place she had never been. Her fingers were already in a position where all she had to do was twist another centimetre for the mechanism to do what mechanisms do best: open. And just at that moment, exactly between one heartbeat and the next, on the other side of the wall, someone - or something - pushed back something that sounded alarmingly like a deadbolt, and a whisper came from inside, too clear to ignore, too quiet to be sure if she really heard it: "Nina, quickly, before the moving streets change course."