“What does it mean? I don’t understand you! Can’t you talk? You have a dumb attack, that’s why you are called “dumb” in Lower? Not only blindness, but also dumbness happen to you? Fuck!” She remembered how the doctor said something about his cropped vocal cords, she then missed it by her ears. Apparently a stone bag, and the non-regular intake of “restoratives” perceptibly violated something in his body.

“I understand that you have not yet returned to normal, you cannot see and speak. I have understood. Now I'll inject you something, just… Wait!” Karina feverishly began to delve into her purse:

“Here! Hold on!” She put a small little book for notes and a pencil in Nikto’s hand:

“Write me as you can. I will understand what to inject!”

Nikto took a pencil and slowly scratched something on the sheet, his fingers didn’t obey him. Karina literally grabbed the notebook from his hands, but instead of the name of the drug and the proportions, it was written on the sheet:

“What is today’s date?”

Karina sat and stupidly looked at these curve uncertain words. Then she looked up and said:

“Three and a half days, if I'm not mistaken, you spent in a stone bag. My father told me so.”

Nikto shook his head, and held out his hand, she immediately returned the notebook to him. He wrote only one word: “Date.”

And stunned, Karina, called him that day’s date and year.

“By the way,” she said, “to believe my father, today is your birthday,” she tried to smile, forgetting that Nikto couldn’t see her smile anyway, and barely said, “congratulations,” and the words got stuck in her throat.

Nikto leaned back against the wall and bowed his head. He didn’t move. She, too, was silent, not knowing now what to say, waiting for Nikto to come to his senses and give her a sign. But he seemed to become numb. So minute passed by minute, and nothing happened. They sat together in a dark and moldy prison casemate, and a stone flower, unlike a candle, could dispel the darkness all around forever. Nikto was cringed, cowering in the corner, and Karina sat next to him, just opposite, on a low bench.

“Nik?” She finally called, unable to waste any more time in vain, her father had probably already been informed of her act in court, and he would soon begin to look for her. Of course, looking for her here would never come into his head, or it would come last, but still…

“Nik?”

He raised his head. And to her disappointment, Karina saw that nothing had changed. His gaze was still frighteningly empty. Only… or it seemed to her in the obscure flickering light of a flower, his eyes shone strangely somehow, and his cheeks were wet.

And Karina couldn’t stand it, she rushed to him, hugging him:

“Dear, darling, don’t do that… Gods, I can’t bear it! Why is my father so cruel to you?! Why does he think you’re a demon?! He should have seen you now! It is unbearable! It is inhumane to make you suffer because of idle gossip and speculation!”

Nikto didn’t pull away from her embrace, and she put the pencil in his hands again:

“Write me something. Write that everything will be fine!”

Nikto obediently took a pencil in his hand, Karina only now realized that his right hand was fastened to the wall, and he wrote all the time with his left! But it seemed that this didn’t bother him and he succeeded.

He handed her a piece of paper.

“I want to die” was written on it.

“I… I will show this sheet to Arel, and he will arrange such a thrashing for you! You mustn’t give up!”

Nikto held out his hand, and again receiving a pencil, wrote as if specifying: