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?”