The sunshine was barely visible through the overcast sky. A light breeze fluttered Belyana's thin dress, now pale blue colored, and her dirty bandage was replaced by an eye patch with a floral ornament. No birds could be heard, no rustling of leaves. They were not even visible - one and two-story buildings, arranged in a checkerboard pattern, occupied all the streets. Wherever you look, not a single green island was there.

  People, instead of walking, jumped on one leg. One of them caught up with Karina, but instead of jumping past, he stopped. He raised his hands up, clenched his hands into fists three times, let out an inarticulate yell and stared at her. Realizing that he would not get the same from her, with disgust on his face, he spat at her feet and only after that he jumped away. When this happened again, Karina decided to ask the first old woman she came across “what, in fact, was the matter.”

  “Youth are completely brazen,” she muttered under her breath and with a loud sound, collecting all the saliva and mucus from her throat into her mouth, spat in Karina’s face.

  This time Belyana could not stand it anymore and laughed.

  “And what's so funny about it?” Karina asked, grimacing and wiping her cheek with a handkerchief.

  “Nothing,” Belyana replied, narrowing her eyes. “Do you want to ask me why I'm narrow-eyed?”

  “What does this have to do with it?”

  “Well, you pester anyone if something seems strange to you.”

  “They spit on me!” she exclaimed.

  “And the bonobo would have tried to have sex with you,” Belyana answered.

  “Nice try,” Karina said irritably. “Monkeys are monkeys. They are dumb and can't talk.”

  “And who told you that?”

  The deafening ringing of a bell interrupted their conversation. People began to come out, or rather, jump out of the buildings doors, disappearing into the crowd. Karina and Belyana decided to join the flow, heading to the center of a small town.

  A fair number of people had already gathered in the round square. In the center, on a raised platform where one would have expected some kind of monument, sat someone tied to a chair. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was half open - if not for the loud ringing, you could hear him snoring lightly. From the very same platform stretched a lot of ropes, which turned out to be leashes with cats.

  The ringing has stopped. The last to come were the people in gray robes, lined up. Each of them, taking a cat, sat down on the ground. Someone stroked the cats, someone scratched behind the ears. One of these people went up to the pedestal - apparently, there was a ladder behind, which was not visible from this side. There was deathly silence.

  “At this hour and this day,” he spoke loudly enough for his voice to be heard in any part of the square, “We are gathered to mark the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one! Exactly one year ago, God died, and his army was defeated! And a new God has come to replace him!”

  He put his hand on the head of the man sleeping on the chair.

  “And, although, our Lord left us because of our sins, he still guides us! He sees everything and hears everything! Let us cleanse ourselves so that he forgives us and returns to us!”

  “Let's cleansed!” the crowd yelled in unison.

  Hundreds of people in gray robes raised above their heads cats, completely unhappy with such treatment. To the accompaniment of rhythmic cries, they lowered the little animals to chest level, pulled out knives from their belts and cut open the squealing cats, from neck to crotch.

  “What the fu…” the stunned Karina even began to speak out loud, but the clatter and screams completely swallowed her voice.

  People, pushing each other, rushed forward, falling to their knees and licking blood from the ground. Those who were in robes joined the feast, but they preferred to eat the insides of the cats.

  “We won’t get through,” Belyana said unhappily, looking with disgust at the raging crowd. “Try it from here, we're close enough.”

  Pale Karina, with her hand on her mouth, turned her back to the square and began to breathe deeply through her nose, probably trying to suppress nausea. Only this made it even worse - a distinct smell of blood was added to the mournful meow, muffled by the champing of people.

  "It's impossible," she answered, trying to breathe and speak through her palms. “I can't take my mind off.”

  “All right,” Belyana answered with understanding, “Plan ‘B’.”

  She cleared her throat softly before yelling at the top of her voice.

  “People! Your moms are dirty sluts who spread their legs for cookies! How do you even live with congenital syphilis?!”

  Although it seemed unbelievable, the crowd turned away from their meal, and with faces full of hatred, roaring loudly, they galloped on one leg after Belyana, who was running away from the square with insane cackle.

  Only the dying cats remained, wheezing rather than meowing. Karina, trying not to look under her feet, went up upstairs to the pedestal. Estimated the height of the chair by eye, she realized that she would not reach it that way. Helping herself with her teeth, she loosened the strong knots of ropes, after which, puffing, she removed the wizard and laid him on the surface. She herself lay down next to him, because this time there would be no one to catch her - if she started to fall, a broken head would be provided. She closed her eyes and habitually touched the wizard's forehead with her finger.

  A ticking sound broke the silence of the darkness. Karina saw a long glass corridor, in which many gears were spinning behind each wall. It ended with a large round crossroad, diverging into dozens of other paths, to which the puzzled Karina approached in turn. She listened, peered and even sniffed, but did not see any difference between them. So she did what any other adult would have done in her place.

  “A crescent came out of the fog, he took a knife out of his gob,” at each word, pointing her finger at one of the passages, she began to read a rhyme, “I will cut you, I will whale - either way, you must to play.”

  Although the counting rhyme was not even enough to cover even a quarter, Karina did not care about this - nodding to herself, she set off along the road chosen by chance.

  At the exit a village appeared, full of life and greenery. Children jumped on the rake, getting hit on the forehead with the hilt, laughing, repeating it over and over. There were grown-ups outside some houses, endlessly hammering nails into doorframes. Each hammered nail caused the previous one to pop out of the wood, resulting in people having to re-hammer the same nails. At other houses, people, with whole families, hung bizarre decorations. In the process, they uttered various spells, some fragments of which, reaching Karina, made it possible to understand that they were talking about protection from all sorts of disasters. Dogs and livestock walked in circles, looking piteously at their owners, when they came into their line of sight. Those whom the owners endowed with attention ran away to eat contentedly, and the rest, barely seeing this, began to make senseless circles with even greater frenzy.

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  One old man, with deep, deep wrinkles, noticed Karina and went to her. Each step created his sand copy behind him, but only for a second, after which it crumbled, turning into a sandy path. In his hand he held a hammer, the same as that used by the local population. Approached, he explicitly invited her to join the others, holding out the hammer to her.

  “No, tha…” she wanted to politely refuse, but everything around her immediately fell silent, and people and animals glared at her angrily. “Seriously?”

  The old man shrugged his shoulders, and the world around Karina spun like a carousel. Before she even realized what had happened, her whole body began to shake rhythmically, as if she was inside a pan, on which someone was banging with a ladle. From the blows, between which not even a second passed, she seemed to explode from the inside. She tried to see or hear anything, but she couldn't even distract herself from the vibrating thunder.

  The familiar face of the old man flickered across the blurred world, then immediately changed to the shaking of the impact again. Karina, making a bet on this, tried to bend as much as possible in one of the directions, not really understanding where they were in general in this space.

  “Motherfucker!” the yelling old man began to blow hard on his fingers, on which he charged with a hammer.

  Karina, in the form of a nail with eyes, began to wriggle like a caterpillar, methodically twisting herself out of the plank. In the end, she succeeded, but instead of the ground, she fell into the sky.

  The flight did not last long, but she managed to regain her human form before landing on a cloud. Fearing a sudden fall back, she crawled from the bottom of the cloud to its top, only there rising to her full height.

  High-rise roads were thrown between the clouds. The transition from one floor to another was carried out on concrete stairs - people even went up and down them. In the distance, tall buildings were visible, looking like megacities in their aggregation.

  A huge garbage mountain was slowly crawling past Karina. Surprised, she began to examine it, going around it for a long time from one side, then from the other, but did not find anything strange, except for its movement.

  “Cuckoo,” she turned to the last resort, calling out to the mountain itself.

  It stopped. An approaching rustle was heard, followed by the wizard's head sticking out from under the mountain, with veins puffed out at the temples and forehead from the effort.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “Mmm, why are you carrying this?” Karina asked, a little hesitant.

  “What?”

  “Well, this garbage,” she pointed to the mountain with her hand.

  “There is no garbage here!” suddenly yelled head, splashing saliva. “Maybe you're garbage?”

  Directly above Karina, in the air, another huge pile appeared, immediately collapsing on top of her. Under it weight, Karina was flattened on the hard surface of the cloud.

  “But,” she lifted herself up on her hands to get enough air, “What's the point of that?” half of the mountain immediately disappeared, and Karina was able to sit down, albeit with difficulty. “If this isn't garbage, then what is it?”

  “These are necessary things,” the wizard answered in surprise. “They make me who I am.”

  “Isn't it heavy? Is it worth holding on to something that won't even let you stand?” the rest of the mountain evaporated, completely freeing Karina. “See? And nothing has changed in me because everything ‘necessary’ has disappeared.”

  “Or maybe you're just an ill-mannered bitch?” condemningly asked the head. “You are discarding what whole generations of ancestors gave you.”

  “My ancestors only gave me nine years of antipsychotics,” she replied calmly. “Besides, think for yourself, what such an important could give you ancestors, in whose order of things was only to slaughter each other with whole nations?”

  “Wisdom and knowledge!” exclaimed the wizard, rejecting to admit the obvious.

  “This is what science gave us. And the victory over the fear that we experience when faced with the unknown,” Karina was drawn in to such an extent that she was already shamelessly lecturing the wizard. “Of course, the ancestors passed on knowledge. Don't touch this, respect that. Sometimes make a sacrifice to someone, in the hope that this will help to avoid encountering natural disasters. It is useful when you are a tribe of fifty people, and everything that you know about the world can be written down in the palm of your hand, but not more than that”

  "You are an ill-mannered bitch after all!" the head screamed again. “Get out of here! Out!”

  Karina came closer, pulled out a random box and looked into it. Under the wizard's frantic screams for her to put it back in place, she showed the box to him.

  “Well, what's in it?” she asked.

  “Nothing…” the wizard answered in a defeatist tone.

  “And what's the point in those where there is even nothing?” Karina smiled softly. “Get rid of them, you won't lose anything at all.”

  Gritting his teeth, he nevertheless admitted that she was right. Now his mountain has shrunk by half.

  “Its lighter, isn't it? she asked, pulling out another box, under another doomed wail of the wizard. “And what’s here?”

  “Do not pass objects through the door threshold,” as if he said something sane, he replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Umm,” he hesitated.

  “That's what I'm talking about. Why do you need a bunch of incomprehensible stuff that you can’t even explain yourself?”

  The mountain had shrunk noticeably, but was still imposing. Karina reached for the next box.

  “All right, stop,” the mage said. “I understand what you mean, that’s enough.”

  “Unfortunately, you will have to get rid of everything,” Karina replied coldly. “Or you can wake up on your own, although I have no idea how”

  “What do you mean?”

  "Exactly," she replied, pulling out of the box a gentleman's code, ten thousand pages thick, almost entirely consisting of contradictory theses. “Will you read it yourself or with my help again?”

  And so it went on until the last box remained, around which the wizard curled up like a snake, refusing to let her in.

  “Come on, how long have we been here already?” Karina asked with displeasure, trying to find at least some gap in the wizards's perfect defense. “Are you still refusing to accept, that there is nothing worth attention among them at all?”

  “Leave! Shh! Ugh!” he waved his hands, cursed and bit her hands, when Karina tried to capture this fortress in one way or another.

  Quite tired, she just sat down, glaring at the mage.

  “I can force you, you know?” she said with a sigh.

  “Even if I die, I won't give it!”

  “Are you completely idiot?” Karina even raised her eyebrows. “Fine, I promise I won't call the content useless if you show it.”

  Lightning struck nearby, rippling through the cloud. A luminous lake appeared under Karina, ready at any moment to repay her with an eternity of pain, if the promise was broken.

  The wizard hesitated a little, but nevertheless agreed and opened the box.

  “Are you serious?” Karina was furious, but the need to choose her words carefully kept her in line. “You better answer, do you love them?”

  “That's why I'm protecting it!” exclaimed the offended mage.

  “Will your feelings for your parents disappear if you are not obliged to love them?” she asked, glancing apprehensively at the lake, but it didn't move. “You either have feelings or you don't. You can’t command your heart.”

  Wizard thought.

  “That’s probably true,” he finally said.

  Karina had already taken a breath to yell at him, but the box in the mage's hands began to crumble, so she only let out a sigh of relief.

  “Was it worth such perseverance?” she asked rhetorically and emerged from his mind without waiting for an answer.

  Karina and the wizard opened their eyes at the same time. The mage, clearly disoriented, slowly sat up and looked around.

  “Welcome home!” Belyana shouted as she climbed the stairs. Her lips were tightly compressed, and through her nose, every now and then, with gusts of air came out suppressed chuckles.

  The man did not understand where he was, so all Belyana's clowning turned out to be fruitless. Karina caught something familiar, watching how Belyana makes fun of the mage, who looked with empty eyes first around, then at the source of the voice.

  “Am I also that stupid?” she asked doomily.

  “Exactly!” Belyana answered, first surprised, and then laughing.

  The streets of the town they were leaving were now empty. Not a single soul, not a movement. Only a symphony of vomiting, at one moment from single building, at another from several at once, brightened up the silence, reminding that someone lives here.

  “Still, why cats?” Karina asked sadly. “Couldn’t they have chosen something ugly?”

  “No one is ugly,” answered Belyana. “And cats ... Once there were ten times more of them here than people. Just bad luck of them,” she shrugged. “The sad fate of those whom people considered valuable. A sacrifice is a sacrifice, because its loss must mean something to the one who brings it.”

  “They should’ve cut off their hands instead...”

  “Sooner or later they would come to this anyway.”

  Karina just now noticed a few neat little holes in Belyana's dress.

  “By the way, what is it?” she asked, pointing her finger at her find. “It didn’t exist recently.”

  “Unexpectedly, some of humans turned out to have a firearm,” Belyana answered imperturbably. “It’s even a pity in fact, but an extra reminder that I shouldn’t get used to things.”

  “What?”