The evening in Praga had the taste of wet plaster and the promise of a storm. The street was almost empty now, the trams creaked around corners like old boxes, and unfinished songs and half-hearted arguments came from behind the windows. Lena approached the rusty gate with the number that always reminded her of her grandfather's birthday: 6/12. The key creaked in the lock, the courtyard welcomed her with a chill and the smell of machine oil. On the ground floor, behind a milky glass window, the workshop of "CLOCKMAKER - T. ZADOR" was waiting. A lamp with a green shade lit up the space respectfully, as if entering a church. In wooden drawers sat mechanisms - small as buttons and heavy as memories. On the wall hung majestically a regulator that could put many a museum to shame: a narrow oak box, a vertical ribbon of a pendulum, a dial with numbers that looked like handwritten poems. Grandfather Tadeusz had been dead for three weeks, and Lena could still see him at the lathe - bent over, listening to time as if it were speaking to him in a whisper. Lena, a researcher in the history of technology by profession, was given, along with the keys, a cardboard box full of notes, crumpled bills, letters written in ink that was the colour of coffee after a long night. The studio was a legacy, but also a question for which she still had no words. Between the catalogues and boxes of balancing hairs was a box she didn't remember from her childhood. It was small, oak-black, with a brass lock as if taken out of an old casket. On the lid a burnt-in inscription: "ANANKE". For a moment she hesitated, because she didn't like opening things that didn't call to her. But the box was calling, only it was calling in a whisper. The lock gave way with that peculiar click that watchmakers call satisfaction. Inside, on a soft, faded cushion, rested a marine chronometer with a heavy brass envelope, with a hinged lid and glass under which the dial was slightly cream-coloured, like the paper of an old letter. Above the seconds hand, in small letters, someone had engraved: "Ignis 2". Under the cushion lay a roll of paper. Lena unrolled it carefully. She recognised her grandfather's handwriting - slanted, patient, a little old-fashioned. "Lena, if you're reading this, it means you came after your time. Don't set the clock to local time. Listen to the way it breathes. Remember the thirteenth beat. Don't look at the calendar. This is where draughts bring it." She smiled at this "draughts". Grandpa talked like that about everything that couldn't be related to a textbook: the smell of the underground in August, the parallel dawdling after a migraine, the cracks in the glass that line up like maps. The regulator on the wall was ticking a hair too fast. Lena went to the window to unseal the frame. Simon, the night watchman from the neighbouring tenement, appeared in the courtyard. A man endowed with a face that took everything in stride, and a hand in an unspoken gesture: "it is what it is". He waved at her. "Have you come to order time?" - he asked half-jokingly as she opened the door to let in the fresh air. "For a test," she replied. - "And do you still hear our courtyard beating to a different rhythm?" Simon hesitated, as if cooking the words in his head on the right fire. "Last night the clocks beat twelve and . one more time. I thought it came together with the church, the tram and the radio. But the gate trembled as if someone heavy had passed it. Only no one came out." "Thirteen strikes!" - repeated Lena quietly, rather to herself. "Maybe it's the lady rioting after her grandfather. This is where he remembers everything," Simon added and walked away into the courtyard with the torch, which in his hand was more of a polar star than an object. Lena returned to the box. The chronometer had a sunken heart and demanded a spring as if it were singing. She pulled the crank carefully, listening for the metal to respond. The mechanism slowly gained a pulse: at first unsteady, then rhythmic, and finally strangely double - as if someone inside was counting in parallel in her language. When she leaned over the glass, she saw that the seconds hand did not move in a perfectly circular fashion; it trembled differently in one quarter, as if it was thinking about something. On the desk she spread out letters and notes. There were her grandfather's sketches: curved arrows, astronomical angle markings, diagrams, against which he had signed: "bursts of daily tides". There was a clipping from a pre-war newspaper about a show at the Museum of Industry: "Fedorovich's peryhelion chronograph demonstrated a momentary suspension of the minutes". And a piece of paper without a date, on which her own name was written in the same character as always, only the slant of the letters was as on the left hand: "Don't wait for it to even out. Go in when it's past thirteen. Otherwise you won't catch the path." She shuddered. How could this note have ended up here? Was it her grandfather's joke on her last journey, or an echo of something she had no right to know yet? In her gut she felt that familiar tension of a researcher standing over a document from which a new chapter of a book or a new tangle of questions might begin. Outside, the storm was circling Warsaw with unhurried culture. Cloud jars moved across the sky like pinwheels, and the air thickened as if someone in the studio had changed the oil to thicker oil. Lena extinguished the lamp and turned on a second, more spotty one, one whose light could stop dust in flight. She placed the chronometer a little higher, on a felt pad, under the wall clock itself, as if she wanted to overhear them talking. The courage she had lived by in the archives - patient, not prone to theatrical gestures - here took a different form. She took a small notebook out of her pocket, the same one in which she wrote down her dreams. She noted down: "23:41 - Ananke. 23:43 - Ignis 2. Sound: double. 23:50 - regulator late or me speeding up." When 23:58 came, she closed the window. The yard was silent, only a train passed somewhere far away, behind the tracks. The regulator sighed and evened out his stride. The chronometer began counting down the seconds like drops of water on a stone. Lena placed her hand on the brass, which was cool and yet trembled with life. "Grandpa, what were you playing at?" - she whispered to the empty workshop, not expecting an answer. The twelve beats dissolved into the night unhurriedly. As the twelfth resounded, Lena prepared herself for silence. But the silence did not come. Before the thirteenth tone rang out, something clicked quietly in the chronometer mechanism - a click, barely perceptible, like a tooth that had decided to finally fall into place. The air thickened in her throat and the hair on her forearms stood up. The thirteenth thump was no louder, yet it carried differently - not through the room, but as if through a thread stretched between points that had hitherto been unaware of its existence. At the same moment, a narrow, luminous crack outlined itself in the wall behind the bookcase, where there had always been a blind spot of plaster. It wasn't a light that tore through from the corridor, or a reflection from a car in the street. The light had the colour of an old photograph and a smell that evoked a memory not of Lena: the dampness of books, the starch of shirts, the paraffin in the lamp, the coal in the cellar. She heard footsteps - not just the sound, but the time between them, which hinted at the length of her skirt, the fibre of her sole, the kind of rush. Clocks across the courtyard echoed. Lena pushed back the bookcase, though it was heavy, as if rooted. The plaster cracked slowly, like dough rising, and just as inexorably. The crack widened to the width of a hand. Inside, there was no darkness, just a corridor, too narrow for modernity, with a floor in a fine chequered pattern. On the wall hung a frame without a picture, and in the frame was a nickel-coloured air. The chronometer went silent. The regulator held its breath. Lena felt a metallic taste on her tongue, like an old spoon. A pencil fell out of her pocket and clattered on the floor like a command. "You have three minutes." - said a female voice from the depths of the corridor. A voice quiet but without hesitation. Her voice. Too familiar to miss, too even to be a chance coincidence. Lena didn't know if it was an echo from another floor or if time had just leaked through an ill-fitting pen. Her heart beat illogically, as if lost in another's rhythm. She stretched her hand towards the crack. A chill blew in from the other side and brought a strip of printed paper: a tram ticket. Thick, fibrous, stubborn against her fingers. Imprint: line 7, direction Muranów. Date ... illegible, rubbed off, but the font was of a different order. "Don't look at the calendar," recalled her grandfather's whisper from the sheet of paper she had touched a moment before. Someone on that side had moved the doorknob - a doorknob that here was just plaster. The metal let the metal know that the time had just come. Something small crackled in the workshop; apparently one of the shelves had quietly given up that test of gravity she had been putting off for years. Tin and screws sprinkled on the floor like a rain of late stars. "Leno." That one word. Tone without appeal, timbre without hesitation. That's what she said to herself in her mind when she had to make a difficult move. It was how she spoke when she was breaking away from something that was bothering her. Now the voice was coming from inside a wall that was no longer just a wall. Lena's hand hovered over the phenomenon - there was no other name for it. For a second she saw in the light of the corridor particles of dust that floated like planets in their orbits. A spring from an old bracelet vibrated on her wrist, as if she could wait no longer. From behind the wall came the sound of footsteps, closer this time. Then someone she shouldn't see now took another step. The air drew in its breath with her, and the thirteenth beat came back once more - shorter, darker, like a signal, after which nothing would be in the same place again.