At the turn of autumn and winter, Lake Lyskie did not resemble a mirror, but a breath. Lena, a budding cartographer, drew the shoreline with a hard cartographic pencil, counting down the steps between clumps of rushes. In her pocket she felt the weight of her mother's brass compass, tapping with nervous regularity. She was accompanied by her younger brother, Thomas, always too quick on his feet and words. They left their grandmother's cottage to check out the strange lights seen over the water. The locals referred to them as a threshold, as if the lake had its own door. They found a stone arch on the headland, half buried in the frozen sand. It was not of the ruins she knew from maps, but smooth and unworn, as if freshly set. Marks on the inner edge stung the eye, resembling level lines, but wavy. Her grandmother's old map had a pencil circle at this point and a letter P, which she disregarded. The compass twitched and the pointer turned, as if seeking north in another direction. - 'It's a frame, not a gate,' Thomas said, crouching by the archway with a collector's magnifying glass. - 'The frame hangs the painting, and we need the painting to come here on its own.' Lena put a horn protractor to the stone and counted the angles, though it made no sense. The air inside the archway was thickening, as if it wanted to become water, but with the smell of resin and warm dust. They slipped a stinger through the void; it came back dry, sprinkled with red dust as if from another summer. The first sound rang like a bell underwater, and the lines on the map lit up with a milky sheen. On the other side, they saw no reflection, but a road of black glass running among the junipers, under a sky with three paler moons. Far away loomed the city, suspended by ropes like an instrument someone had put down in a hurry. On the wall flicked a banner with the symbol of three feathers and a cross in a wreath, identical to the one from grandma's chest. - 'That's impossible,' Lena whispered, feeling the compass parch her skin through the fabric of her jacket. The wind from somewhere else hit her face, and the bow flashed with bands of light like the breaths of a large animal. Thomas, clipping the rope to his belt, chuckled: - I'll just look over the edge. Before she could reply, he was pulled softly but unstoppably, as if someone was politely inviting him from within. The rope stretched like a string, it crinkled against the stone, and white welts appeared in Lena's hands. Thomas's notebook fell out of his pocket and unfolded into a sketch of the same banner, dated three days earlier. - 'You knew,' she hissed, feeling the threshold counting beats like a metronome before a jump. From the void came their voice, distorted and close, though it came from far inside. - Lena, no... - It broke off, and then came back clearer: - Or come in now. Red dust fell onto the snow and dissolved into steam, drawing for a moment the shape of a hand touching the water. The compass stopped ticking, the pointer hovering halfway, pointed exactly at its centre. Lena took half a step, feeling a tremor underfoot, when on the other side something began to descend from the black road straight towards the archway.