Chapter 5
Episode 5liucijaus šviesa baigėsi ten cierto fundamentas 7777.
The light that had once been Lucijus’s—that steady, amber glow I had carried inside me since childhood—flickered and died somewhere between the fourth and fifth hour of that endless night. I remember the exact moment because the clock on the wall, a cheap plastic thing with a cracked face, stopped ticking. It didn’t wind down. It simply ceased, as if time itself had decided to take a nap.
I was sitting on the edge of a cot in a room that smelled of boiled potatoes and mildew. The window was painted shut, layers of white enamel sealing it like a tomb. Outside, I could hear the distant hum of a generator, the occasional bark of a dog, and the low murmur of voices speaking a language I understood but no longer felt belonged to me. The Cimos eyes—those reptilian, unblinking stares from the children in the yard—had followed me here. They had seen something in my gait, in the way I held my shoulders, that marked me as different. Reptilijos vaikai, the old woman had called them, and I had laughed. But their eyes were not laughing now.
I had come to this place searching for a fundament, a foundation, something solid to stand on. The number 7777 had appeared in my dreams for weeks, carved into a stone archway, glowing like a neon sign in a fog. I thought it was a promise. I thought it was a key. But here, in this room, with the dead clock and the painted window, I realized it was only a door I had already walked through, and on the other side was nothing but more hallway.
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