The village of Borki hugged the edge of the forest, as if the houses themselves preferred the old pines behind them to the sand of the road. August nights here were black and deep as a well. Usually at this time, when the wind had ceased to rustle and the dogs had fallen silent, there would be the sound of a drawn-out, chilling voice from somewhere beneath the dunes. The wolves answered each other from the valley and from across the wetlands, and the echo tied their voices together like a thin silver thread. That evening, the thread broke. Lena opened the window wide and leaned against the sill. The resin smelled sweet, mingling with the coolness of the approaching dew. She listened, as she always did - first the crickets, then a distant splash on the ponds, the flight of a bat. She waited for the howl. It didn't come. Instead, she heard the cawing, low and snarling, that she knew from hundreds of mornings. Ebony. The raven sat on the gutter and inclined its head, staring intently at the girl. He had a few slightly frayed feathers around his neck - a souvenir of last year's encounter with a fox - and an unforced confidence in his step, like all royal yard robbers. He had a predilection for glitter; he would carry spoons out of the kitchen, hide jar caps and always, completely without shame, return for more. "Not now, Ebony," whispered Lena. "I'm listening to the wolves." Ebony plunged his beak against the windowsill, as if he wanted to make a scratch, and clucked differently than usual - a short, clipped "krr, krr", something between a warning and a rush. Then it straightened up, put a leg forward and dropped something grey-green onto the windowsill. A belt. A leather belt with a metal buckle and a plastic box, like an instrument from a nature film. Lena leaned over and touched it carefully; there were still teeth on the plastic - as if something had bitten it off. Her heart grew light and anxious at the same time. Ebony didn't bring rubbish. He brought things that someone cared about. He stretched out his wings so violently that he sprayed her with dew. He leapt onto the railing of the balcony, circled once more and flew away, staggering in a dark arc over the alley. He hovered for a moment over the birch tree by the fence and looked down, as if checking to see if Lena was following. "Great," she burbled. "Still you." She reached for a torch and an old checked notebook in which she had drawn clues and sketched maps with her father before he left to work in another forestry district. She slipped her phone into her pocket. "Okay. But I'm not going alone." Message to Staszek: "Ebony found something. Are you coming?" The answer came after a minute: "In five." Staszek lived two streets away, in a house whose yard always smelled of curdled milk and dust because his grandfather kept pigeons. The boy had a torch better than any school torch, a compass given by his sailor uncle and a stubbornness that could break through a wall. Lena liked this stubbornness in the forest - between the trees it helped more than in maths. They met under a chestnut tree and set off along the path towards the embankment. The moon hung low, pressed into the twigs like a stilted glass. The quiet was different from usual; without the lively chatter of the forest, without the sopping of nocturnal creatures. A silence hung over everything, thick and sticky. "Do you hear?" asked Staszek in a whisper, although there was no one to wake him. "That there is nothing?" "Exactly." The sandy bend showed fresh deer tracks, the broad reflection of a badger's paw and.... Lena knelt down, touched the hollow with her finger. "A wolf," she said immediately. "A big one. Look at the shape: triangular front, fingers wide apart." "How many?" "Two individuals, maybe three. They walked this way before dark." She furrowed her brow. "But why no howling?" Ebony flew at times above them, so low that they could feel the air rustle over their hair. It disappeared into the blackness, reappeared again, guiding them to the next branching paths. After twenty minutes they reached the dry bed of the stream, which was still called the Silver Ditch on the maps. All that remained of it in summer was a cool crack of sand between the ferns and an old bridge that remembered the days of the carts. There was something lying in the middle of the sandy crack. Lena knelt down once more and touched it with her hand. It was not a twig or an old string. It looked like a transmitter collar - a rectangular module, clearly bitten through, as if someone had tried to get inside. A sticker was visible on the plastic, half rubbed off, but it could be read: "Project WOLF WAY - do not touch". "Someone didn't comply," muttered Staszek. He looked around reflexively, though there was only lighter and darker nothing in the torch circle. "Or rather, something." Around the collar, the ground was pored with footprints. They did not form a line of wandering. Instead, the paws were reflected in a circular pattern, as if the animals were walking around, circling, approaching, leaving and returning. The tracks overlapped, yet the sizes were distinguishable: young, adult female, adult male. Lena felt a thought run through her mind, quick and sharp. "They were circling the collar. As if... As if they were guarding her?" "From whom?" Ebony sat suddenly on the railing of the old bridge, so quietly that the plank only groaned in response. He bowed his head and made a sound that Lena had never heard before - low, muffled, as if someone were speaking through closed lips. "I don't like it," Staszek said. "You know how wolves sometimes take off their collars? They bite the strap. But why bring it to us?" "It wasn't the wolves who brought it to us." Lena raised her eyes. "It's Ebony." The raven jumped down from the railing, grabbed the collar by the buckle and tugged, as if he wanted them to follow him. After a moment, he had to let go - it was too heavy - so he just spread his wings and, cawing, led them up the trough, towards an old sand pit that had been overgrown with self-sown pine for years. A wide basin emerged from the darkness like a bowl; its edges were overgrown with grass and the bottom was filled with a shallow pond that smelled of algae in summer and moss in autumn. It was quiet there now. Too quiet. Insects did not buzz over the water, and frogs - if there were any - pretended to be stones. "I don't like this place after dark," Staszek admitted half-heartedly. He glared at the edge of the pond. The light brushed something silver - a soda can - and something dark that looked like a bundle of fur. "I think they were here." Lena crouched by the edge and ran her fingers over the gravel. There she found hair - thick, grey - and tiny paw indentations. Right next to it, her own face was reflected in the mud, smudged, as if someone had rearranged it by half a centimetre so that it had two pairs of eyes. Her head spun. "See?" "Fog over the water. It gives a double image," Staszek assessed, but his voice was cautious. He felt it too. "Look over there." On the opposite bank, in the scrub, lurked two patches of colour that could not be mistaken for anything else - amber points, suspended low to the ground. Pairs of eyes? One? Two? Three? As the patch of light moved through the bushes, the yellow spots lit up and went out, always at a height between the man's knee and hip. Ebony let out a single, short 'kraa' and leapt onto Lena's shoulder. His claws gripped through her sweatshirt, his weight settled securely. The girl felt his warmth and unexpected confidence. The raven did not sit like that to just anyone. "Easy," she whispered, not quite sure whether more to the bird or to herself. Something rustled to her left, in the reeds, at the edge of the pond. There was no path on this side - just wet hollows and clumps of grass. Staszek's torch twitched. The beam of light cut a bright streak through the mist and stopped on something round, metal, rusted and partly buried: an old, overturned plaque. The letters were worn away, but it could be read: "ENTRY PROHIBITED - pit open for one year...". The rest had drifted away in rust. "No one has looked here for years," muttered Staszek. "Someone looks in," replied Lena. There was a sound on the other side of the basin - not a howl, not a hoot, not a crackle of branches. Something like breathing. A strong, conscious breathing, but non-human. It repeated itself, again and again, like the quiet release of air through teeth. Wolves. They did not speak in voice. They breathed together. "They are there," whispered Staszek. "Can you see?" Silhouettes flashed in the darkness - low, muscular shadows with long snouts. One of the wolves took a step out, so that the light only brushed its side: it was a female, they recognised by her slenderness and her stride, sure but careful. M had a scar above her left eye, thin as a blade. She lifted her muzzle and looked not at the Torch, not at them, but above them, somewhere behind their backs. Lena felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She turned around slowly, as one does when one knows that a quick movement might provoke something bad. Behind them, an old truck slip road stretched downhill, long since overgrown with grass and dwarf pines. At its tip, just over the edge, the mist thickened into a roll that seemed to breathe. From this whiteness came a quiet, metallic clatter. As if something had kicked against a stone. Or as if an iron had snagged on the gravel. Ebony tensed and clung to her arm so tightly that a shiver ran through the girl. Staszek grabbed her by the cuff. The wolf-female took another step, a tiny one, barely a claw. All the amber eyes lit up at once, formed a half circle. And then - so lightly that she might have thought it was the wind - the ground beneath their feet trembled, as if, somewhere in the depths of the excavation, something huge had moved for the first time in a very, very long time.