No one else supported him.
“Okay, and look again, what is with his throat, he wheezes, you hear? Do you have a cold? Or an infection? Isn’t it all enough?”
“Yes, I hear that he wheezes. Open the mouth, young man, I’ll shine in your mouth, okay?”
“It’s nothing to do with a cold,” he said after a while, moving away, “the vocal cords were cut,”
“What?!”
“I confess that for the first time I see a person with such vocal chords generally talking. By all laws, he should not speak. He can't talk!”
Nikto looked up and for the first time in all this time looked at Kors, and he realized that he had finally seen him!
Their eyes met.
And Nikto looked down. His shoulders slouched again, he froze, cringing in his chair.
“Who are you?”
Nikto flinched at this simple question, as if Kors had hit him. He squeezed his in leather gloves fingers into the lock.
“Get out,” Kors ordered quietly, but in such a voice that the convoy and the doctor literally flew out the door.
They two stayed in a room together.
* * *
“You're not a human!”
“So be it,” Nikto agreed, somehow doomed, “so it’s easier. And you don’t have to blame yourself for the mistakes.”
“Bravo!” Kors clapped his hands several times. “And you almost threw dust in my eyes!”
“What does it mean?”
“That I really believed…” Kors suddenly grabbed a portrait lying face down from the table:
“Who is it?! See?! Or should I put your head in a bag and let you look from there?”
“I see now.”
“Well? So who is it, do you know?”
“I know.”
“Who?!”
“Your wife, Iness, Karina’s mother,” answered Nikto.
“Correctly! My wife and mother of Karina. Mother of only Karina!”
Nikto stupidly looked at his hands in expensive gloves lying on his knees, one arm remained unfastened and not closed. Bracelets were lying in a heap on the desk of Kors.
“After everything you did to him… to appear in the corpse of my…” Kors hesitated. “In a so cynically mutilated corpse.”
Nikto was silent and still looked at his hands.
“What do you really look like? What are you? This?” Kors pointed a finger at the spoiled drawing on Nikto’s hand, forcing him to recoil.
“Will you answer me something?!”
Nikto raised his face, looked at Kors, and it seemed to him that his eyes were laughing:
“I can’t,” said Nikto. “After all, my vocal chords are cut.”
And Kors hit him. With all his power, with a fist to the temple. Nikto fell from a chair, crouched on the floor.