01 Come hell or high water
Dark clouds came rolling in from the Lusatian Mountains. The evening air was thick with forest scents, but there was a hint of a bad storm on the way. Pavel was well aware. His knees always sensed in advance what was about to go down. Like a fortune-teller's sphere, it told him that he had to hit the road. That's how it had always been. Pavel slipped out of his pyjamas, dressed in his work clothes and hopped on the bike. His carbon fiber semi-racing special sliced through the thick air below the quarry. Roots and rocks he ran over with the efficiency of the kiosk worker assembling a hot dog. A sharp bend in the dam of the stabilizing reservoir above Lesák, a short but precise leap over its spillway and he's already spinning the valve, which obediently reverses the direction of water inside a steel duct. The swimming pool has an ingenious bypass system to protect it from the storm floods. The pool has two two inlets, and these must be diverted before each rainstorm. The water then flows underneath the pool via an underground duct all the way below the dam. A few more twists and turns and everything is closed, the water murmurs underneath the dam, Pavel can go to bed. Late evening has long since parted with the sun, the water surface has settled and in the distance above Ještěd ridge, lightning flashes like a strobe at the local Devil's Disco. The suspense in the air gives a hunch that something bigger is coming in tonight.