“Here it is, drink, you need a drink. What should I inject you? Gods! If you need “black water,” she stopped short, because with these words Nikto flinched and recoiled from her, clinging to the wall. Karina didn’t understand him, she continued:

“If you can't do without it… I will try to get it somehow, steal it from my father’s safe in which he stores material evidence. I think it should be there… Or… I don’t know… I will go to the castle, to Arel, and there I will turn everything upside down and find it. I have nothing to lose! You just tell me where to look?”

Nikto seemed to hear her, he somehow strange, frantically ran his hands over his face, over his eyes, over his scar, lips with rings. And his face twisted in such despair, in such anguish that Karina instantly forgot all her problems and questions.

“Gods! What's the matter? Answer me something?! Don’t act as if you are out of your mind!”

Nikto touched his hair, ran his palm along the entire length of his face, it felt as if he were feeling himself, while his eyes looked into the wall behind Karina’s back, past her, and she realized that he couldn’t see anything.

“Are you okay?! Oh please! Stop it! Gods! He moved off his mind! What to do now?”

Nikto turned his head slightly, as if guided by the sound of her voice, and shook his head in a negative gesture, this made her unspeakably happy, since it meant he still heard and understood her.

The chain clanged, Nikto ran his hand along the rough wall, then with his free hand down, he felt the floor slabs and straw as if he didn’t understand where he was and what was surrounding him.

“Nik! Can you hear me? Tell me something! You scare me very much!”

Nikto froze, and slightly bending his head, slowly ran his fingers over his dry cracked lips, as if crossing them crosswise.

“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.