Alex reaches forward and picks up the key before his brain has formally authorised his hand to do so. It weighs approximately as much as a small ambition. Vesna watches him the way a mountain watches a tourist. "You will want the third step from the top," she says, as he and Mira squeeze past her toward the narrow door set into the chapel's north wall. "It is not there." The staircase inside is a tight stone spiral, smelling of old rain and something else — lamp oil, possibly, or time — and Alex counts each step with mounting anxiety. Twenty-two steps in, the third from the top does indeed prove to be entirely absent. He manages to avoid falling mainly by grabbing the wall and making a sound that will never be mentioned again. At the top, breathless, they push open a shutter onto something neither the guidebook nor Vesna has mentioned.