They were laying out the dome on the grasslands by the river, where the tracks left the town in a straight field, as if someone had traced them with a ruler across the grass. Awnings fluttered, strings sang, and heavy beams sank into the ground with a deafening, assured clatter. It smelled of wet canvas, popcorn and generator grease. The sky shimmered with a salmon-coloured glow, and in this glow the red and blue tent of Circus Phoenix looked like a huge heart sewn into a meadow. Lena sat high on the metal truss with her legs slung over the mannequin, a screwdriver sticking out of her back pocket. She was acutely aware of the spotlight in front of her eyes, which stubbornly darkened as she clapped twice-an old trick to see if it responded. She was a technical assistant, which in Phoenix meant everything and nothing: once she was painting slats at dawn, another time she was tightening ropes, and sometimes she was counting the bulbs, half of which refused to work in the rain. She never complained. She had grown up between trailers since she was a child. She knew the paths between the carts better than the streets of the town, which the circus had never tied up with for more than three nights. When no one was looking, she was left alone in the middle of the manse and stood on a thin practice rope a few centimetres above the sand. No grasping hands from the audience, no fanfare. Just her calves, the pole and her breath. Marcel said she had feet born for balance. Marcel, drummer and juggler in one, always smelled of chalk and mint. He also always appeared when least expected, like now, when he emerged from the shadows by the flagpole and raised his drum. - 'The headmistress is looking for you with her eyes,' he called out quietly. - 'There's a new number on the programme, 'Crossing the River'. At nine o'clock. Lena glanced down. The headmistress Aurelia was standing in the middle of the manse, as if she had grown into the sand. She had her hair pinned up in a silver bun and a cane ending in a metal knob that looked like a star in the lamplight. Her voice split the space like a trumpet in an orchestra. - 'Light rehearsal in twenty minutes! - she called out. - 'And don't let anyone touch the crates marked 'Wandering Mirror'. We didn't invest in that glass for you to check your hairstyles on. In response, someone burst out laughing. Just then, a cart with a black box covered with frosted stickers in various languages rolled under the tent. Mr Kaut, an illusionist with eyelids as heavy as theatre curtains, personally supervised the move. An inscription on the lid of the box read: "Wandering Mirror - do not tilt. Do not touch with bare hands". - Really? - whispered Marcel as he walked closer to Lena. - A mirror that doesn't like heat. - Every one has something to say about it - replied Lena. - And it supposedly 'swallows light'. She didn't get any closer, though. Ever since Phoenix bought the number from a theatre in the south, a whisper has grown up around the mirror. That in the glare of the spotlight it reflects things that aren't there. That it attracts stares. That one should not look into it after midnight. Lena was not superstitious. But she was cautious, like anyone who walks a tightrope or dreams of doing so. At eight o'clock, the tent breathed differently: steadily and quietly, like a whale before the plunge. Children with candyfloss, old railwaymen in caps, teenage girls who wanted to be closer to the light, were hanging around among the chairs. Mothers corrected their caps, fathers checked their watches. The first sounds of the orchestra floated up from under the stage, soft and sure. Only one sound was out of place: the slight purr of the generator, as if its stomach had trembled. - 'We're keeping our fingers crossed for electricity,' muttered Lena, walking past the box with the Mirror. A piece away from her, Vera was putting on stockings of shiny material and Ramos, the tensioner, was mending the bolts in the knots of the rope. Above the manse stretched the rope proper - the one for the number. It wasn't high: maybe five metres above the safety net. Enough for the breath to pause for a moment between 'already' and 'yet'. Zoya, the star of the rope transitions, did not turn up for the afternoon rehearsal. Someone muttered that she had twisted her ankle. Someone else that she had gone into town to get new ballerinas and was stuck on a bridge. Aurelia raised her hands as if to disperse the clouds. - 'We'll do the spacing without Zoya,' she decided. - Someone will climb the rope for three steps. For the light, for the audience. With a net and a belay. I need someone who won't eat my nerves with the programme. Lena felt her stomach rise to her throat and then flow downwards. Her fingers found their way up on their own before she could think. Marcel looked at her, and there was no encouragement or defiance in it - just attentiveness. - 'I can,' she said. - 'I've got shoes and a pole. - With net and pin,' Aurelia repeated, looking into her eyes in such a way that Lena felt as if they were peering through thin air at each other. - Three steps, no more. At the sign of the drum. And no improvisation. Lena nodded her head. Ramos fastened a light lunge to her waist, which attached to a guide over the rope. She touched the net with her hand, as if checking to see if it was really here. It was like the ear of a tent - soft, stretchy, ready to swallow fear. Habit. Procedure. Safety. The lights dimmed as the manse was filled with the first numbers: a clown in oversized trainers who chased a paper dog, a girl on an air wheel that spun slower than lanterns on a river, and a pair of acrobats who folded like origami and unfolded like a fan. The audience giggled, whispered, clapped. Marcel pounded out a rhythm: one, two, three, pause. One, two, three, pause. Signals that Lena knew better than her own pulse. Backstage, Mr Kaut untied a box and took out a mirror. He held it with gloved hands, like a doctor's instrument. The surface was not perfectly smooth - something vibrated in it, as if there was another, thin breath between the glass and the air. Lena only glanced up. A trinket flashed in her dimly lit reflection that made her freeze - she was standing straight in the mirror, although she herself was slightly bent over at the moment, with the pole under her arm. She blinked. The image evened out; she could blame it on the unevenness of the glass. Her heart, however, was already two beats faster. - A sign - Aurelia's whisper reached her. - In a minute. After the clown we enter silence. Then the drum. And you. Three steps. No more. Lena approached the ladder leading up to the platform. A practical, wooden world of steps and rungs replaced her childhood dust in the carriage loft. Along the way, she passed Ramos, who squeezed her shoulder, and Vera, who winked. At the top, a pole waited for her, thinner than that for exercise, lighter - like a pencil used to draw across the sky. She looked at the other end of the rope. There, on the turret, stood someone bent over a turnbuckle - a metal serpent with a thread that was used to tighten the rope. His face was hidden by a shadow. His fingers worked with the precision of a mechanic. Marcel, at the bottom, shifted his body weight from his heels to his toes and lifted the drum. When he raised his eyebrows, Lena realised that he didn't like something. - Ramos! - she hissed downwards, but the orchestra just obliterated her voice with a trombone. The clown bowed one last time, accompanying himself with a children's trumpet. The spotlights turned like the heads of curious birds. The tent fell into a celadon twilight, the one just before the drum beat. - Everything ok? - Marcel shouted non-verbally, with a movement of his chin showing the welt. Lena squinted her eyes. She wasn't sure. The rope was twitching slightly, which normally happened, but the ripples seemed different - not from the wind, but as from the breath of someone standing very close. - Three steps, no more - she repeated Aurelia's words in her mind, putting them together like a talisman. She checked the carabiner. Click. It held. The lunge was taut, the net stretched. Everything just like in the drawings Ramos liked to chalk on the blackboard: arrows, knots, force and gravity, arranged like notes in a bar. The drum rang out. Once. The air in the tent held its breath. Two. A feast of tiny noises - a spoon dropped, someone crunched a nut, a child clutched his nose. Three. Light dripped onto the rope, turning it into a bright sketch. Lena raised the pole horizontally. She approached the edge of the platform. Beneath it a grid, behind it a sound, in front of it a piece of road drawn in the air. To the side, by the manse, Mr Kaut's mirror caught the same spotlight and for a split second Lena saw herself in it - already standing over the second turret, clear and calm. She clamped her eyelids shut, as if from the light. She opened them. The spotlight trembled, the generator purred, the tent groaned like a sail. At eye level, on the other side, the shadow over the turnbuckle took one last turn with the key and disappeared behind the mast. The rope twitched as if to speak. - 'Three steps,' recalled Aurelia's whisper, which suddenly sounded like a distant melody. Lena tightened her hands on the pole and took the first step when....