Chapter 14
The Art of
Keeping Someone Alive
Vapor
The world above hums with panic. I can hear it through the news feeds that slip down the signal line before it cuts off.
Crime journalist missing in ísafjoreur. Her name repeats like a prayer, like guilt wearing a headline.
Twelve hours after I took her, the story broke.
A day later, the search parties began. They combed the docks, the fjord, the roads carved into the mountains. They will find nothing.
There are no footprints where I walk.
I sit at my desk in the second chamber and watch the screens flicker with their frantic updates; police interviews, coworkers trying to sound hopeful, old photos stolen from her paper’s website.
Every angle of her face projected across the town, and soon the country.
She is everywhere except where she really is: below, in the fourth room, under the frozen earth, beneath the world of the living.
They think I erased her. She probably does too, but I didn’t. I only accepted what someone else ordered. That’s the distinction that keeps me steady. I didn’t wish her gone; I only made her disappear.
I wonder who paid for her death. Whoever they are, they wanted the little scribe buried. They never imagined she’d be buried alive. Yet the thought of it doesn’t sit right with me, why her? And why now?
I rub the ink from my fingers. The smell of solvent lingers. Around me, the bunker hums. Machines breathe, heaters pulse, the air-filters sigh. It sounds almost domestic if I stop listening to what it means.
The cleanup was simple. Two intruders. Wrong men, wrong time.
I shot them before they knew which ghost they had trespassed on.
The noise was tidy, two soft exhalations of lead and air.
Afterward I turned her house back into silence.
Blood wiped. Shells gone. I carried the bodies to the fjord and worked by moonlight, knife, shovel, frost. Cut them into manageable parts, hands and faces last. The ground swallowed them in pieces. The sea will never tell.
Her home looks untouched now. A kettle left on the stove, a notebook on the desk, one shoe under the table. The police will read it as struggle, as exit. They will stand there and call it mystery; I call it order.
Before leaving, I filled a duffel with her things: her sketchbook, two pencils, the cardigan that still smelled of smoke and paper, her glasses, and some more. Now the bag sits on the floor beside my chair, unopened. Every few hours the scent of her hair drifts up from the fabric, faint and human.
It turns the air inside me strange.
I check on her every few hours, when she just got here I checked on her almost every ten minutes.
The fourth room was never meant for breathing things.
Cold as the grave, it used to be where I stored what was almost beyond use; failed compounds, corroded equipment, relics from another life.
When I carried her down, the air bit through my gloves.
The concrete sweated frost. I spent the other half of the night making it liveable: heater wired to the main line, cot stripped of rot, walls cleaned of chemical dust. The space resists warmth, but it listens.
She lies on the mattress now, bound, blindfolded.
The ropes have loosened; she fights less.
Her breathing is steadier. I wrapped her feet myself, the wounds shallow but angry.
She bled over the sheets, red blooming through white.
I cleaned it. I told myself it was because infection wastes time, but it was something else too.
Something like the respect you give to a rare specimen.
I injected her with saline and electrolytes when her pulse dipped, the vein rising blue under skin too pale.
I’ve never done that for anyone. Keeping things alive has never been my work.
Now it is.
She sleeps most of the time. Sometimes she wakes and calls out.
At first, words; please, let me go, I’m sorry for what I said or wrote.
Then just sounds. I stay behind the door when that happens.
It’s easier for both of us. The sound of her voice reminds me that she’s real, and that reality is the most dangerous thing I’ve ever handled.
I don’t know what to do with her.
Killing is a closed system: a beginning, a process, a result. This, this is open, continuous. A life echoing against mine like sound in a sealed room. She breathes, so I hear it. She trembles, so I feel it. The logic of experiment breaks apart when the subject keeps living.
Sometimes I stand in the corridor outside her door and listen.
The heater hums, the faint rustle of fabric, her heartbeat if I’m close enough.
I imagine what she sees behind the blindfold; shadows, maybe, or the shape of my voice.
She probably thinks I’m waiting to kill her.
I haven’t decided what ending suits us, only that I feel conflicted.
For the first hour she was in that room I sat on the floor, back against the steel. The wall separates us, but it’s thin enough to hear her breathing even when she sleeps. It steadies me in a way I can’t explain. I used to think solitude was control. Now it feels like absence.
News filters in from the surface: journalists quoting journalists, investigators recycling each other’s theories.
They build narratives out of smoke. Her colleagues call her “brilliant, fearless, too curious.” They use the same adjectives they’ll use in her eulogy if the story dries out.
Some say she ran, some say she was taken by the same killer she wrote about.
They aren’t wrong, but they’re not right either.
Truth is smaller than they think; it fits in the palm of my hand, bound and breathing.
I let the screens run until the noise becomes static. Then I turn them off.
The scent reaches me before I reach her door. I took her off the injections a few hours ago, she’s stable again. I find her awake, sitting as far back as the rope allows, her face turned toward the sound of the lock. That awareness moves through the room like a charge.
I turn away before I do something stupid, like touch her face.
I’ve never kept anyone breathing this long. The living are unpredictable; they sweat, bleed, speak. They remind you of what you’ve lost. Every time I walk past her door, I feel the old scars on my arms itch; the burns my father left when he taught me what control means.
The night stretches long. I go to the surface to breathe air that hasn’t touched her.
The snow glows blue under the aurora, the fjord black as ink.
Somewhere beneath it, two men sleep in pieces.
Somewhere beneath me, one woman dreams of a world she is no longer part of.
And in the middle, I exist, part shadow, part man, part something that wants too much.
I light a cigarette, let the smoke curl around the scars on my hands. The tremor is back, small, persistent. I flex my fingers until it steadies. When the cold starts to bite my skin, I turn back toward the hatch. The bunker waits below, patient, humming, alive. So does she.