“He is uninvited to this wilderness. Not a natural friend, if you see what I mean. But he will breathe it out as it is only fudge. The machines are there because Zakrzówek was a, what do you call it. Where you dig up rock and pile it for shopping.”

“A quarry?” We passed a lounging teen with a braided rattail, sneering at me. I pulled my mask up, disguising the bottom of my face, which was too delicate to pass for male. The top of my face was all right: I had sturdy cheekbones and small eyes, and my new, haphazard haircut—executed with nail scissors on my last night in New Jersey. That was part of why I wore the medical mask. The other reason was that Krakowians lose five years of life to the coal smog that settles in this valley.

“Once upon a time machines pierced this watershed. And the basin filled. All the machines were underneath. They wait still underneath.”

At the end of the platform, stone steps led down to the water. UWAGA, a sign beside the steps read, with a cartoon of a screaming, frazzled man, limbs akimbo, tongue out. “Oh no,” I said. “We can’t swim.” Relief sluiced through me, though I’d love Rosie to have heard I’d been killed in a lake of construction equipment. Unlike me, she treasured adventure. If she were here, she would’ve already clambered into the driver’s seat of an underwater bulldozer.

Marek flapped a dismissive hand at the sign and pushed across the platform between bodies, seeking a spot to claim. Though he was forty-five, round and squat, and I was thirty, I lagged behind. My naked arms burned with shame as he observed me fitting my ass between clots of people. “So the boy landed on machinery?”

“Ha, ha, no!” Marek’s lips were dark and wormy, his head too round. “Though many have! This boy was only sixteen. At that age, a boy’s heart is not developed. Or it is weak in some fundamental capacity, in terms of very structure. From the hot air to the frigid water, his heart stopped.”

Today was hot, so hot that the air was white and textured. The quarry unfolded as we crossed the platform: the water shockingly clear, granite cliffs rising on every side, tufted by maples. The cliffs were mirrored in exact, upside-down detail on the surface. Teens shattered the reflections, kicking their legs in freefall, plummeting into the crowd of swimmers as though no one had ever died here. I hadn’t imagined Poland contained natural beauty, only slabs of buildings with narrow, deep-set windows. A muscle inside me loosened.

Marek danced between prone bodies, offering cześćs to everyone conscious, until he settled on a slender ribbon of gravel backed up against rockface. “You may remove your mask,” he said. “We have achieved leisure.”