Gora looked at the paper, then at Tikhomirov, then shook his head slightly affirmatively:

– Yeah. You're right. The word "open" doesn't belong here.

Inquisitor

This cell was even smaller than the one he'd been sitting in a few days ago. This one contained only a bunk and a garbage bucket. It seemed to him that the warders had something special to do with buckets – you couldn't just take them out, or cover them with something, or even fill them with water at first. They are inviolable except when you defecate in them. I guess that's what it looked like in their heads.

It was a punitive isolation cell, where prisoners who violated something flagrantly or repeatedly were sent. The priest had violated several times – he was wearing clothes that were not according to the regulations. He had one button undone on his collar and one on each sleeve, plus his sleeves were rolled up. He was reprimanded the first time, and sent to the detention center the second time.

Of course, he tried to convince them that there was no malice in it. That the button on his collar was undone because otherwise the collar squeezed his throat and it was hard to breathe. And the sleeves don't button up properly at all. And that the whole prison uniform was too small for him. In response, he heard that it was not a problem for him to button up, that he sometimes did so during inspections, that it was the same with the sleeves, and that all these were gross violations of discipline.

And again he tried to say that, indeed, technically he could zip it up, but not for more than a couple of minutes while the inspection was going on. And that he was only doing it so that his actions would not be seen as malicious, which they were not.

He was once again told that there was a malicious intent to return everything back to the wrong position after the inspection had left, and that if he did not understand it in a good way, he would have to understand it in a bad way and sit in the isolation center.

With a garbage can, and two square meters of free space. That's all you can count on, Your Eminence Samoh.....

Not a few hours later, the same mentally ill person, who could shout day and night without tiring, was moved to the cell opposite him. And once again, in addition to the acrid stench of his own feces and urine, the sound accompaniment from the room opposite was added.

On the first such day Samokh did not fall asleep, and spent the whole next day in endless efforts to stay awake, pecking his nose at every minute. From time to time the warden looked into the cell and tapped the bars with his baton, on the one hand insinuating that he could see everything, and if you covered your eyes a little longer than the blinking time, he would immediately report a violation – a prisoner in the SHIZO was sleeping at the wrong time. On the other hand, such attention gave Samokh some confidence – he continued to realize that the whole damn structure of the prison administration was probably designed around him to get something out of him. That realization kept him from extinguishing his sense of self-importance to those around him-so necessary when there were no rights to anything.

This one, too, he fell asleep. There was no strength for anything, and even the shouts from the cell opposite eventually merged into such a background that it ceased to disturb him. He dreamt this time of his drill of unspoken resource and of Rambanhr, who is at the head of it. They had beaten Guzokh to a pulp to begin with, then they had taken out some chums from the BSS and shot them, then they had brought in Ananhr herself and started mocking her, calling her an upstart and a whore working her sweet spot. It was impossible to see her reaction or even her face properly in the dream. At those screams the dream ended, Samoh woke up and heard that they were screams from the cell across the hall. And it was so easy to feel the presence of the Church's combat unit near him…