After lessons, Lena walked into the school's radio studio, room 214, smelling of dust. Foam panels muffled the sounds and the red light on the mixer blinked stubbornly. She was supposed to record a Polish assignment: talk about an emotion you don't understand. Seemingly simple, as long as she sat alone, with her own breath in heavy headphones. From her backpack she took out the Emotion Cards from Ms Daria, the school psychologist, for today. She rearranged them like sentences that refuse to speak: longing, anger, fear. She chose shame because it was left over from the Talent Festival when she forgot the words to a song. She pressed REC and said: "It's about the body screaming before the thought." She heard a tremor in her headphones that she hadn't planned for, and she didn't turn the microphone off. Downstairs, someone hit a piano key, one at a time, like a breath test. Lena raised her head, but the corridor beyond the glass lay empty and blank. She reached for the phone, but the dashes of range had disappeared, as if the building were breathing on its own. She looked at the computer screen: a new file had appeared next to her path. It bore the name "You are not alone.wav", though she pressed nothing but her own concerns. She clicked play and slid the headphones down her neck to breathe more quietly for a moment. First silence, then her breathing as it echoed through the muffled walls of the studio. The voice sounded similar to hers, only more confident: "Lena, what do you feel when you are silent at home. What I feel when I'm silent, she repeated in her mind, seeing Olek's backpack disappearing last year. She tried to laugh to beat the pressure, but the chair squeaked louder than the joke. The light on the mixer stopped blinking and shone a steady, strangely warm spot. She grabbed the mouse to delete the file, but the cursor shuddered as if in the cold. A single note dropped from the speaker again, lower, like the sigh of someone very close to her. "Who's here?" - she asked in a half-hearted voice, and then the cabin handle moved a millimetre. An envelope with her name on it slid under the door, in familiar though unsigned handwriting. She opened it with trembling fingers, and inside lay a key with a blue tag and the time: 20:17. On the tag was an engraved letter B and a thin arrow pointing upwards. A voice came back from the loudspeaker, this time closer: "If you want to hear the rest, trust." She glanced at the clock in the corner of the screen; 20:06, so she had eleven long minutes. Fear throbbed against her ribs, curiosity rose like a wave and shame took half a step back. Footsteps sounded on the cage, getting higher and faster as the second hand jumped to 20:17.