Autumn rain ran down the cracked windows of Heat Plant 17, collecting in narrow trickles that dripped from the frames like metronomes. The orange glow of the city shyly glimmered through a clearance in the clouds, but here, on the sidelines, everything seemed a silence that pretended to be asleep, although it was really just listening. Lena adjusted her hood and rested her hands on the rusty mesh. Under her fingers she felt the coldness of the metal and a slight vibration, as if somewhere deep in the bricks there were still residual heat circulating. She took a small, heavy box of lozenges out of her pocket. The tin lid opened with a short, familiar click. Inside lay a key - an old, three-toothed one, with a mark of stripped paint and a microscopic engraved mark: three dots arranged in a triangle. "It remembers a couple," my grandmother once said, lifting it into the light like a relic. "Not all metal can." Lena laughed then, convinced it was just a family saying. Now that the heating plant was extinguished for good and the chimney had stopped smoking, the words came back and stuck to her tongue, heavy as drops of water on concrete. - Ready? - Antek slid in next to him, rubbing his jacket against the damp leaves of the wild vine. He had a camera slung over his shoulder and a torch that always turned on at his place a fraction of a second too late, as if he needed a moment to gather his courage. - Just a moment more,' she replied. - You know I don't like jumping fences. - This is not a fence. It's a manifesto of architecture that doesn't wish to be visited. She smiled despite the dampness under her chin. She knew the place from the plans she had looked at passionately at university, and from the stories of the workmen who were dismantling hall after hall. In the plans there was a thin grey line scrawled between two technical walls, as if someone had once corrected a mistake. Grandma claimed that this is how you mark passageways that you don't talk about. Lena then rolled her eyes. And then she found the key. They walked through the breach in the grid, careful of wires and puddles. It was sloshing underfoot, and the smell of wet dust mingled with the aroma of long-extinguished oil. The main hall opened up before them like a temple to forgotten machinery. Huge exchangers crept upwards like steel tree trunks, pipelines wrapped around the space like rough vines. Somewhere in a corner, water flowing into a grille clattered, and dry leaves that must have flown in through a broken skylight crackled on the steel platform. - 'If this were a game, there'd be a tutorial here,' Antek whispered, raising his torch. - "Press E to enter." - In real life no one gives instructions,' she replied. - Just signs in odd places. She led them by memory down corridors whose whitewashed walls now yellowed and peeling in stripes. They passed a social room with a mangled table. Someone had left a cup with a dried brown rim, as if he had only gone out for a cigarette and not returned. Further on there was a narrow clearance between the risers, a small technical chamber and, finally, a space that didn't match the plans. From the outside, it looked like an ordinary section of wall, mouldy, with plaster falling off. From the inside, however, a smooth steel slab, slid into the torch frame abruptly, too clean, too tight. No hinge. No handle. Just a narrow gap low down, where rust would usually be in a door. Lena knelt down. She ran her fingers over the edge and moved her hand away as she touched the chill on the edge of the ice. From the tin tin she removed a key. It fitted into the slot so perfectly that for a moment it made her feel sick, like when things unnaturally pop into place. - It's... - Antek suspended his voice because he couldn't choose an adjective that didn't sound like an exaggeration. - Just watch," Lena replied. Before she pressed the key, however, she stopped. Her gaze was caught by the chalk marks at the threshold: thin lines, circles and curves as if drawn with a trembling hand and yet arranged in order. It was as if someone had torn up the floor to make a silence of a certain temperature. She took something else out of her pocket: a small, worn-out stopwatch. When she pressed the button, it did not start counting down. Instead, the pointer vibrated gently and stood at '12', like a watch waiting for a signal. This, too, belonged to her grandmother. Handwritten on the metal case was engraved: "Turn when air fills". - A great souvenir," Antek mused. - I once had a souvenir from my grandfather. A piece of string. - Did he tie something too? - Knots on cups. So no one would pick him up. Lena smiled briefly and pressed the key. The metal did not object. For a moment nothing happened. Only Antony's torch changed colour with a slight twitch - the yellow became cooler, as if someone had managed to take a bit of summer out of the air. Then came what Grandma always spoke of in half-hearted tones: the tension of the air. Not a sound, but something on the borderline of touch and murmur. The hairs on her forearms trembled; her tongue recognised that there was salt in her saliva. The smell of damp pine trees hit unexpectedly, even though the nearest forest was several kilometres away. And with it - something else. A distant, insistent breath reminiscent of a wave that bounces off the shore and returns with another story. - Can you feel it? - whispered Antek, as if someone behind the wall could overhear them. - I can feel it,' replied Lena. - 'The air... it's taking shape. The steel plate at first merely darkened, as if someone had put a faint smoky glass to it. Then it brightened from the inside, not with light, but with something that laid on the sight like skin on water. The gaping line swung a hair's breadth, and the stopwatch in her hand twitched as if someone had lightly nudged a spring. - 'It looks like heated air over asphalt,' Antek said, carefully bringing his hand closer. - Only it's cold. She wouldn't let him touch it. Something in her remembered the cautions that no one had ever spoken aloud. Instead, she pressed her ear to the cool metal and heard... a voice? No, more like a medley of sounds: the hissing of tiny insects, the flutter of wings, the distant sound of a bell or a sea buoy and something like a short, broken utterance of her name. Maybe it was just the movement of blood in her ears. Or maybe it wasn't. - Lena - Antek leaned over and pointed to the chalk line. - Can you see? These circles are spinning. I would have sworn. And indeed: the chalk drawing wasn't moving, yet its geometry was beginning to form a spiral that wasn't so much spinning as changing meaning. The shadows in the corners of the chamber shifted a millimetre out of sync. Suddenly the torchlight reflected off something on the other side of the steel and came back differently, like light from the bottom of the water. - Can you see the horizon? - Lena was almost out of breath. Just beyond the gap was space. A small strip of something like grass, but darker, shimmering with blue threads. Further on, tiny bright dots - not lanterns, as they trembled in a rhythm that this city did not know. Above all this, a sky in which there was no familiar constellation, just two pale pink streaks, as if someone had left wisps of morning mist on the garnet. A gentle, even pulsation began to beat from the metal plate. Not a sound, but rather a soft pressure on the sternum, accompanying breathing. The puddles beside their shoes wrinkled, as if an invisible wind had cut across them with a finger. Lena felt the key warming in her hand, and only then did she notice that its thin shadow on the floor did not line up as it should. The shadow twisted towards the gap, like a plant to the sun. - Shall we take a picture? - Antek moved the camera, but immediately lowered it, as if it wasn't appropriate after all. - First I'll see if it's really here - said Lena quietly. - And not just... She broke off as the steel vibrated like goosebumps. The plate, which had no hinges, swung soundlessly open by two or three fingers. At the same time, the stopwatch in her hand started - but the pointer sailed backwards, smoothly, without a stammer, from "12" to "11", to "10". She heard the clicks of the mechanism, fine and steady as drops. The smell of pine mingled with the breeze that had no right to get here. The sound of footsteps on the damp grass could be heard, although there was nowhere to set foot. - 'Someone's coming,' Antek said and moved half a step away, but no further. A dusting of light rustled in the crevice and a shape blurred. First the torchlight reflected off something like glass - not smooth, but with an interior full of tiny green lights, as if someone had enclosed a cloud of skylights in the lantern. Then a blacker line, an arm, the outline of a coat that seemed woven from rain. The face remained in shadow, but the silhouette stopped just at the border, so close that Lena could see the gentle movement of the chest - inhale, exhale, inhale - and hear the quiet, very human: "ah". - Do you hear? - Lena asked, without looking away. - I can hear it - replied Antek. - 'And I can see that it's something... someone... knows we're here. The shape lifted the lantern. Inside it, the lights twitched like tiny fish. A smudge moved across Lena's face, which went all the way back a millimetre: the warmth was real, soft, not like from a light bulb, but like from the sun that had forgotten it was October. In this warmth, her grandmother's words again sounded like a command: "When the metal starts to breathe, don't withdraw your hand". She held out her hand. Her fingertips hovered shyly over the trembling air, a boundary so thin that all she had in her mind were images: paths in the grass, double streaks in the sky, a glow on the water that wasn't here yet. The steel plate moved a little wider away and Lena felt something on that side respond to her movement like an echo that anticipates a voice. From the other side, slowly, unhurriedly, someone's hand stepped towards her, fingers slender, cool from the invisible mist. For a split second it seemed as if the air itself would take a step forward.