At Klifowa, the storm always began with silence. First the wind went silent, as if someone had twisted a knob off a radio, then the seagulls quietened and circled above the cliff higher than usual, and the waves took on the colour of lead. Lena stood at the edge of the path leading up to the abandoned weather station. Her jacket was sticky from the mist and her hair was sticking to her cheeks. In her hand she turned a small brass key with an engraved wind rose. She had found the key three days ago, in a needle box at the bottom of her grandmother Halina's chest of drawers. The box smelled of lavender and dust, and underneath the velvet lining someone had drawn barely visible lines in pencil: "DW-3". - DW as in 'former tower'? - prompted Maks, Lena's cousin, as soon as she told him about it. - Or 'lower lift'. Or... - he broke off, because he just liked to shoot. He was fourteen, with a head full of plans and pockets full of screws. Now he was climbing behind Lena, carrying a rucksack so stuffed it buzzed with every step. The Wind Station - that's how the concrete building with antennae sticking up like withered trees was referred to in Klifowa - stood quietly, as if it had been holding its breath for years. A rusty sign by the door stated that the facility had been decommissioned in 1998, due to a "systems upgrade". This 'modernisation' never got here; instead, the wind had taken up the paint and salt had gnawed through the metal railings. - 'It all adds up,' whispered Maks, leaning over to the padlock. - See. It's the third warehouse, 'DW-3'. Strange choice of location for a warehouse. Lena slid the key in. The lock vibrated, reluctantly, as if waking from a nap. She turned it twice. The padlock squeaked and dropped in her hand. Inside it smelled of old paper and damp. On the wall opposite the entrance hung a map of the coast, flecked with pins and threads that must once have formed some sort of order but now looked like a spider's web. Beneath the map was a table with a shabby top, and on it - a console with knobs, indicators and a speaker the size of a cake. Next to it lay a thick brown folder with the inscription: "Wind Record - October/November". - 'If I have to guess, my grandmother kept something more than diaries in here,' muttered Maks, 'see.' - He pointed to a note attached with a pin to the cork board: 'When the siren in the harbour is silent, listen to the sky'. Someone had written it in Grandma Halina's hand, in her characteristic slanted handwriting. Lena touched the edge of the folder. She felt tiny grains of sand slip through her fingers. She opened the first page. There were dates, times, brief notes on wind direction and strength, but also strange notations in a column in the margin: "- - - - - - - - - - -", "- - - - - - - - -", and so on. Long and short dashes. Too much for coincidence. - 'Morse,' Maks said quietly, 'Someone's been playing with the alphabet here.' - He pulled a pencil and a scrap of paper out of his trousers. - Write it down. Lena bit her lip. Grandma Halina used to say over dinner: "The wind can be a postman too, if you know how to listen to it". At the time, she had considered it one of Grandma's poetic remarks. Now the phrase was back, disturbingly specific. Maks leaned over the console. - 'Let's see if this thing still works. I've got a powerbank, an inverter, the old wisdom: 'if something has wires, you can make it work'. - 'That's not wisdom,' Lena snorted, but smiled when she saw how deftly he was connecting the wires. Outside the station walls, the sea gathered to jump. A siren wailed in the harbour, at first prolonged, then quieter and quieter, until it finally went silent, as the note promised. At the same moment, the indicators on the console vibrated. Lenie brushed her hair out of her eyes, held her breath. At first, the speaker merely crackled, like a page torn from a notebook. Then a rhythm broke through the crackling. Short, long, long, short. Pause. Short, short, long... Maks whispered under his breath the letters that corresponded to this clatter, as if he were solving an equation. He would write down the characters in one go, then go back a centimetre and correct it as the signal slowed down. - This is not a random broadcast,' he said. - Someone is broadcasting specifically here. Or... - he hesitated. - Or it's a thing that only your grandmother understood. Lena pressed her hand against the cool metal of the speaker. She felt a tremor. The rhythm was settling into something familiar. Not a melody, not words. Something from her childhood, from evenings when her grandmother would make raspberry tea and tell stories about the wind that once saved a cutter from running aground. Warmth and salt. A voice that was not a voice. - Save the breaks," she said. - Density. Maybe it's not the letters, but the... - she suspended her voice. - The gusts, the units. And the breaks are... Then something clattered quietly under their feet. Like metal against metal, far away in the underfloor darkness. They both froze. The second sound was clearer, a touch closer. - The basement? - whispered Maks - I saw a trapdoor at the entrance, but it was rusty. - He took a step back to look around, and stumbled over a wooden box. A roll of paper slid out from inside. On the roll someone had drawn a diagram of the station. The lines went down like twigs. At one of the branches were the letters "DW-3", and next to it an arrow and a note: "Storm sewer". Under the note, in smaller writing: "Only when the siren is silent". - 'Storm sewer...', Lena repeated, trying not to sound as if she felt a shudder and curiosity at the same time. - That is, something that only works in weather like today. The same rhythm was coming from the loudspeaker, but now there were other sounds mixed in - short, like the echo of a drop hitting a tin cup. Or like footsteps on a metal staircase. - 'It could be a reflection from the water,' Maks tried to reassure, although his voice had shifted to a whisper. - Interference. Lena nodded, although she wasn't at all sure. She picked up her phone and switched on the recorder. The red dot blinked, but next to it the range marker went down to zero, as if Klifowa had momentarily ceased to exist for the rest of the world. - 'We'll take pictures and come back,' she decided. - 'We need to translate this into letters or whatever before the wind changes the settings. As she raised her hand to take a picture of the map, there was a glint of something on the glass of the screen that shouldn't have been there: behind their backs, at the end of the corridor, a pale light was flickering, as if someone was holding a torch under the table. She turned abruptly. The corridor was empty. Just twilight and dust in the air. - Did you see? - She asked, feeling the question hanging between them like a string that it was better not to pull. - 'Nothing,' replied Maks in a maximally neutral tone, 'nothing except that the speaker is about to.... The speaker wailed, a hair's breadth away from pain, then the sound stabilised to a whisper, so soft that you had to move closer. Lena leaned against the metal grille. Her breath reverberated warmly against the cool surface. From this distance, the rhythm formed a very simple pattern. Short, pause, long. Short, long, pause, long.... - It looks as if... - Maks began, but did not finish. The floor trembled as if someone had switched on a generator underneath them. The noise of the sea mixed with something else - a low, continuous sound of flow. Lena pushed the dust off the plaque on the side of the console and read the words once scrawled in small print: "Acoustic channel - manual activation". Under the knob, someone had carved a uniform wind rose mark with a knife - identical to the one on the key. Lena's heart leapt. She turned the knob a quarter turn. First they heard something like breathing. Then a short: crackle, crackle, pause - and a voice. It was not a radio voice, from a distant station. It sounded as if it was speaking from close by, from somewhere out of sight, from somewhere beneath them, between the concrete and the rock. - 'Hello,' he whispered. - Can you hear me? Lena gripped the edge of the table so hard that her knuckles turned white. Maks looked at her, eyes widened in astonishment. His voice trembled, as if he needed to gather his courage. - Lena...?