Kors glanced at Nik. Strongly tightening his forearm with a black cord, he somehow miraculously found a living vein on his arm and managed to inject himself, injecting the drug just below the elbow bend.

      “Nik, maybe you can lie down with Arel, cover yourself with a blanket?” Kors suggested. “It’s cold on the floor, I feel it with my feet.”

      “I don’t feel cold. I’m not cold,” Nik said. Kors called him Nik, but he didn’t correct him.

      “Just because you don’t feel cold it doesn’t mean you have to lie in a draft.”

      “I don't feel cold,” Nik repeated, leaning toward his box again.

      So he took care of his slaves in their still human bodies, put them gently on the bed and covered them to keep them warm, but he didn’t care about his own body, just lay down on the floor, on the skins.

      “Why don’t you feel the cold? You’re human, but you can lie down in the snow, can’t you?” Kors didn’t understand that.

      “Yes, I can. A lot of people are used to the cold. It’s a habit,” Nick said faintly, but he did.

      Kors watched him sit on the hide, with his head bandaged and his hair tangled, sticking out from under the bandages. Kors watched as he put something back into the syringe. One of his thick white braids, which Kors had so lovingly braided, was now disheveled and sticking out from under the top layer of shorter hair. It was disheveled, and the tip lay on the dirty floorboards. Playing with Nik and decorating him to his liking, Kors had begun to braid the bottom layer of his hair back in Ore Town. He remembered that this was how Nik’s hair had been braided the first time he was brought in for questioning. The bottom layer of his hair had been braided into four braids, one of which was very short, cut by Arel. Kors had ordered Nik to unbraid his hair then, to show him off at the Spring Ball in all his glory, but later he began to braid him himself, fixing his hair beautifully with bobby pins and, in addition, to keep it tousled longer, he bound it tightly with long thin cords adorned with faceted black and turquoise beads. It was probably wrong, too – beads were usually used by girls to decorate their braids – but Nik looked so much like a girl, so delicate and sweet, and Kors liked it when he was neatly combed and tidy. Later he would braid Nik’s hair in the Fort as well, thus trying to pass the time and do something to occupy himself without taking a restorative or drinking too much. Nik never even looked at what he was braiding into his hair, how he was decorating it. He always sat there obediently, not moving, like a doll, and he never minded Kors, letting him braid his hair, put as many different colored beads in it as he wanted, pin it with different pins. Even now he hadn’t taken them off; his hair had just come undone, unraveled, and was now touching the floor. And Nik didn’t pay any attention to it, didn’t take care of himself, didn’t take care of his beautiful hair.