Julka lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building overlooking the old town. In the evenings, she would sit in the window and stare as people turned into shadows under the streetlights and stone lions came to life in the yellow light. She used to be a child and believe in magic, but now she was 22, studying philosophy and increasingly catching herself that she hadn't grown out of that belief at all. It was an ordinary evening. Julka had returned from class soaked to the skin - the June rain had poured down suddenly, completely surprising even the street players. In the kitchen, Misha, her roommate and avid astronomer, was waiting for her. They were brewing tea and talking about what is real. "What if reality had a second layer?", Misha suddenly asked, pouring boiling water into mugs. Julka laughed then, but that night, as she lay with a book over her head, something disturbed her. A shadow had appeared on the windowsill, seemingly from a tree, but the branches were moving in a rhythm she had never seen before. From an old cupboard came the smell of wet earth and something sweet, as if someone had just brought a freshly dug strawberry into the flat. The next day she was walking to university through St Mary's Square. The sun was playing in the windows of the townhouses, the street glistened after the rain. Then she noticed an elderly man sitting by the fountain, whom she had never seen here before. At his feet squatted a huge black cat with a human look. As Julka passed them, the man looked straight at her and whispered quietly: "Beneath the crust of reality lies what you never dreamed, Julka." And then he slipped something under her arm that looked like a tram ticket, but there was only one word engraved on it: "THROUGH". Julka didn't know if it was a dream or a reality. She was standing in the middle of the square, clutching the strange ticket in her hand, and a black cat was looking straight into her eyes. Behind her back there was the sound of an approaching number 0 tram, which apparently hadn't run for years....