At noon, at exactly 12:03, the Silversmith stopped breathing. The winds quieted as suddenly as if someone had muffled them in one movement, and the sound of the trams slipped into the narrow gaps between the tenements and did not return. The curtains in the windows stopped, puddles reflected the still sky, and pigeons hovered in half-wings over the square as if cut out of paper. The clock on the town hall tower locked at 12:03 and took everyone else with it - at bus stops, in schools, in kitchens. The city, which had hitherto lived on hurried inhalations, suddenly sat staring at a single stationary comma of time. Lena was then standing in the Sky Repair Workshop, among the frames scattered across the tables, stretched between them like cobwebs of faint silver. Above the table floated delicate slivers of darkness with tiny candles pinned into it - mapmakers called them constellation calushas, not yet sewn to their proper places in the sky. It smelled of heated copper, moon dust and old rosin. Master Remigius, in a ridiculously crooked waistcoat, was bent over the scattered Pleiades when the workshop became so quiet that she could hear her own pulse in her fingers. - 'Don't touch,' said Remigius without raising his eyes, though she didn't touch anything. He had this habit: pronouncing words that came seconds before events. - Now there would be a drop. The sky above Silverstone was not in the habit of dropping anything. And yet the air vibrated, as if someone had snapped their fingers, and a song crept into the workshop, through the ajar window. It was not the singing of a bird or a human; it sounded like a thin metal line drawn through fingers, like a squinting light, like water remembering its shape. Lena felt it between her shoulder blades and knew it wasn't her trembling, but the reality around her. - 'The station,' whispered Remigius, finally raising his head. His eyes, usually ridiculously gentle, were now sharp as needles. - Old Glass. Before the others know it. Before the others - that is, the Convergence Department, the clerks in graphite coats who showed up whenever something deviated from a straight track. People of measure and order. - Take this," Remigius slipped a thin steel wire into Lena's hand. At its end shone a tiny ball of light trapped in a knot. - In case something needed to be sewn on the run. - And you? - I'll join in. I need to close the map before it falls apart. He didn't join in. When Lena returned her gaze to the table, the rem on his square was already empty, the chair still swaying slightly, as if he had just got up. Two words were left on the tabletop, written on the back of an invoice for a month ago: "Don't let silence catch your breath". She ran out of the Studio, almost bumping into Antek, who was waiting at the gate. He had hair the colour of wet coal and a coat all stained with bird's wing paint. On his calf, under his rolled-up leg, a tattoo was visible: a wandering band of black swifts. - Did you hear that? - She asked without greeting. Antek nodded and pointed with his chin towards the sky. There was a thin, almost invisible crack above the city, as if the sky had been pulled too tight and had cracked where it held the worst. And then they heard the same thing - the same metallic chanting, clearer now, leading them through the streets that had become the setting for a halting performance. The Glass Station in Silverstone had always looked like it was more of a memory than a building. Its hall, with a roof of frosted panels, held the old chill and photographs of people who had waited here, left, returned. It had long since closed; yet at night someone would draw birds on its walls that were not afraid - Lena knew whose birds they were. Now the birds seemed to look up at them from their paints, stretching their necks towards the scratch in the sky. Inside, someone had broken the clock. Or perhaps the clock itself had broken from trying to move on reluctant time. The tiles on the floor were cracked, as if something had tried to pass through the stone at high speed. A splinter lay in the middle of the former hall, where the departures board used to hang. It was as clear as a drop of glass, yet opaque - a thin mist of light enveloped it, like skin. It did not steam when Lena picked it up carefully; under her fingers she felt a coolness and movement, a pulsing, as if this piece of sky was breathing. On its surface she experienced the scratching of marks: a delicate grid of engraving, reminiscent of a map of rivers. - Can you hear it? - She asked. The voice seemed too loud in this still hall. - 'Just crackling,' Antek replied, turning towards the board. - And... look. The blackboard, which for years had shown only rearranged letters and under-burned spaces, trembled. The greyness slipped away, the numerals flicked. An inscription appeared: "Complaint 03: Lower Sky - Track 9". The hour of departure pulsed with a rhythm that paralleled Lena's heartbeat. The girl looked at Antek. He looked at her. Neither of them was joking. - 'Track 9 doesn't exist,' Antek stated, but they were already walking towards the end of the hall, where a dirty wall once covered the entrance to the walled-off part of the platforms. The paint of the birds cracked under their hands as they peeled away the thin, brittle scales of plaster. Behind them, a door appeared - metal, silent, with a handle shaped like a closed eye. The shard in Lena's hand stirred and clasped in a thin tone that found just the right string in the air. The door answered with a sigh. The lock had a shape she hadn't seen in any workshop: more like a knot of tangled ribbons than a mechanism. Before she could do anything, the shard slipped out of her fingers, hovered for a moment and tapped lightly against the metal. The shapes on its surface glowed, as if the blood continued to run. The lock moved a millimetre. Lena stopped the shard with her hand and slipped it into her pocket. - 'If there's a track, let's see the track,' she said, feeling a dryness rise in her throat, the kind of dryness that comes in moments when the decision is already made and the body catches up with reason. The door gave way without a groan. Behind them it was cool, like the cellars where words lie. The stairs led downwards. Each step sounded different under their steps; one like glass, another like wood, a third like breath. The lower they went down, the more the air smelled of water. Antek shone the torch from his phone, but the light bounced off the walls like taffy, returning to them with a delay, like an echo of light. The corridor ended in a platform. Not like the ones at the top. Here, instead of blackboards and benches, there were floating skylights enclosed in glass bubbles. Threads dangled from the ceiling - thin, as if someone had spun a spider's web of yarn from the night itself. Water flowed parallel to the track, creating a silent channel of black surface. A quiet murmur could be heard - not machine-like, more like the purr of a big cat dreaming. Track nine was a track only conventionally. Instead of steel rails, two strips of dark sheen ran, as if someone had laid out kilometres of ironed obsidian. Above it approached something that did not drive, flow or fly - a train-like phenomenon, with carriages of smoked glass in which shadows moved as gently as the words on the tip of your tongue move before they are spoken. - Lena... - Antek drew in air so that it almost sounded like laughter, but he wasn't laughing at all. - You know this is a bad idea, don't you? - Of course - she replied and smiled crookedly. - 'But a bad idea that's already happening is better than no idea at all. The train stopped without a sound. The doors had no gaps or handles. Through the glass you could see the interior: seats like bent leaves, shelves full of empty instrument cases, mirrors in which they were not reflected, only letters never sent. On one of the seats rested a music box case - identical to the one Lena's mother had once kept by her bedside. The girl felt something in her stomach slide down, heavy and stubborn. Her mum had disappeared five years ago, the night the third part of Perseus was detached from the sky. No one could answer any of the questions. For five years Lena trained her hands not to tremble as she patched up the constellations. For five years she had not asked out loud. Now the casket lay there, like a promise not to be touched. The skylights on the platform began to flutter, as if there was a draught in the corridor, although the air had not moved a millimetre. Something that might have been the conductor slid out of the first carriage. It took the form of a silhouette that did not fill the air with flesh, but with shadow, wearing a long coat stitched together from broken reflections. Instead of a face, it had a surface polished like the surface of a lake before a storm. As it leaned towards them, Lena didn't see herself or Antek - she saw someone who had once kissed her on the forehead for the last time before the bedside lamp went out. She reached out, but Antek grabbed her wrist. - 'Don't touch,' he repeated Remigius's words quietly, though he didn't know how he knew them. The whole hall beneath the platform trembled imperceptibly, like an inhalation trying to come in at last. The board above the tracks flashed once more; the time from 12:03 moved back a second and came back, leaving a light trail, a sort of smudge from a falling star. The shard in Lena's pocket moved so violently that she felt heat through the fabric. Before she could stop it, it had escaped, flashed between their hands and slammed into the smooth surface of the door, like a droplet that had found a crack. The silence was no longer silence - it was filled with a low, growing sound in which someone's name rang out. - 'Lena,' said the hall in a voice of many people at once. The train door, hitherto invisible, slid noiselessly open. A chill of unparalleled air gushed from inside, smelling of ozone and autumn moss. The lights in the carriages dimmed, as if preparing the place for someone to enter. At the same time, somewhere behind them, on the stairs, the echo of footsteps could be heard - even, counted down, as if someone was measuring with them the distance between "yet" and "already". - 'We have one entrance,' the conductor called back without a mouth, although no one could see the material moving. - The ticket was printed. Time... for a moment, he fancied us. Antek squeezed her hand tighter. Lena felt a pulse under the skin where she had had a thin, milky scar on her wrist in the shape of an arch since childhood - a reminder of the too-hot Orion map. The scar baked like a new light. The train waited; the sound grew and grew, like swelling rain. Someone on the stairs sped up, even steps turned into a run. Lena took half a step forward. Just then, a music box sounded from inside the carriage. The melody she knew better than her name flowed towards the platform, and from the conductor's mirror, for a second shorter than a blink, someone's hand emerged - the one she was never to touch again - and fluttered through the air, as if reaching them through the water. - 'If you come in, you won't be able to pretend you don't know anymore,' Antek whispered, but when Lena turned her head, she saw in his eyes the same thing that was rumbling in her cage now: the desire to finally stop standing still 12:03. A whisper of official voices, cold and practical, came from the corridor. The shadows on the wall stuck together. The train moved a millimetre, patiently, like someone who does not forgive lateness. The skylights went out at once and lit up again, this time in deep blue. The music box melody took on a higher tone, sharper, calling. The door in which the shard had been stuck began to close slowly, like the eyelids of someone very tired. - Lena! - called out from above, a voice she knew from insomnia and from Monday mornings, a voice belonging to the world on the surface. - Stop, immediately! The clock in her head vibrated. Time, which had hitherto been impervious to air, made a small window. The train waited, the footsteps came, and the shrapnel in the doorway sent a doubtless, bright burst of light in her direction.