Chapter 16
Scar Language
Elara
I stare at the page until the words blur into the paper’s grain. My notebook lies open across my knees, the pencil hovering above it like a hesitant blade. The questions I’ve answered sprawl in crooked lines, crossed-out phrases layered over each other until they look like veins under skin.
I used to know how to do this. An article always began with distance; with someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s heartbeat stopped. I could take a death, fold it into language, and file it neatly between commas. But this one breathes beside me. This one hears me think.
He told me to write him. Not invent him, not accuse him, but record him; the truth, his truth.
I don’t know if that means myth or confession. I don’t know if he wants to be human or proof that humanity can rot and still walk.
So I start with what I know.
His voice is low, deliberate, I’d guess he’d be some years older than me.
His posture is precise. Even when he sits, he’s coiled, a structure of discipline.
The kind of stillness that belongs to hunters and surgeons.
He’s taller than any of my memories dared to imagine.
Shoulders made for carrying both weight and guilt.
He carried me like a sack of potatoes. His character is complex, dark and lethal.
Intelligence without empathy. Desire without warmth.
When he speaks, logic sounds like scripture.
When he touches, even through gloves, the air itself recoils.
He’s not cruel, cruelty requires emotion.
He’s something colder, but is he truly entirely a monster?
I draw lines between the words, a crude mind map that spreads across the page like frost. Arrows link The web forms itself while I watch.
The heater hums through the wall. That sound has become my clock. It cycles, pauses, breathes. When it stops, I panic; when it starts again, I suppress the panic that rose. That’s how time lives here; between hums.
He hasn’t come back, or spoken to me. The last time I heard him was a click of metal and the soft slide of a tray through the hatch.
The bowl stayed steaming for a minute before cooling to the same temperature as the air.
I never know if a day passes between meals or an hour.
The body loses track first; the mind follows. He knows that, he uses that.
Sometimes, in the moments just before sleep, I imagine the world above me; the newsroom lights, Sigrun’s mug with its chipped rim, the hum of the printer spitting out truth no one reads twice.
I wonder what they say about me now. Missing journalist, presumed dead.
A sentence in passive voice, because no one wants to name the subject.
I have become an unfinished article, and if I don’t get out of here I’ll be a finished one soon.
The hatch clicks again. My pulse stutters.
A tray slides through; bread, water, a bowl of stew that smells faintly of dill.
No footsteps, no voice. He could be standing on the other side listening.
He could be miles away. The not-knowing is the cruelty.
He’s cruel. I sometimes think I might forget what language is.
I eat slowly, forcing myself to chew, to exist. My fingers shake less now when I hold the spoon. That feels like progress, or surrender. Hard to tell the difference.
When I finish, I return to the notebook. The pages smell faintly of iron and ink. I write what I didn’t know before I met him: He smells of smoke and clean metal, like a laboratory that learned prayer.
His hands are language. They speak before his mouth does. Sometimes I think he envies the living, other times I think he pities them. I can’t tell which is worse. He’s smart, highly intelligent even I suppose.
The air in the cell tastes of metal and heat.
My body has started mapping it like territory; the way the warmth pools near the floor, the way the pipes tick again.
I know where every sound belongs: the pipe that ticks at irregular intervals, the hum above my head that means the filtration system still believes I’m worth the oxygen.
Sometimes I press my ear against the wall and listen. There are other rooms beyond this one, there have to be, but they stay mute. I’m in isolation, completely cut-off from anything and anyone. The world above feels imagined, like something I wrote once and forgot how to end.
I tell myself I’m still a journalist. That this is research, documentation, survival through observation. But the pen shakes differently now. The act of writing feels like prayer; and if it is, then congratulations to me, I’ve finally landed the interview from hell.
I wonder what he does when he’s not here.
I picture him above me in another chamber, working, the mask resting beside him like a second face.
I imagine him reading my old articles on a flickering screen, tracing my sentences with the same precision he uses on his experiments.
Another question rises; what is the goal of his experiments?
Another question next to so many others.
Night doesn’t exist here, but exhaustion eventually wins. I curl on the mattress, notebook under my arm like a talisman. The heater hums, the light stays constant. I try to dream of the sea, but every wave sounds like his breath through a filter.
The hum stops. It’s so sudden the silence feels physical, pressing in from every side. My eyes open before I mean them to. The light hasn’t changed, but the air has. Warmer. He’s near.
The lock turns once, slow. Then again.
I sit up, heart stumbling. The door opens only halfway; he fills the gap like a shadow deciding whether to cross the line between worlds.
Mask in place as always, the faint trace of smoke, the glint of metal at his wrist. In his hand: a tray.
Steam rises from the bowl, real food again, but in his other hand rests something folded. Cloth. A blanket.
He doesn’t speak until he’s set both on the ground in front of me. “Eat before it cools.”
His voice sounds rougher than usual, as if he’s spoken to no one for days. It makes me wonder—has he always lived like this, surrounded by silence so thick it became company? Does it ache in him the way it does in me, or has he long since made peace with the quiet?
I manage, “You… cooked this?”
“Yes.”
The answer shouldn’t surprise me, yet it does. The scent of roasted root vegetables and thyme fills the space; absurdly normal. My throat tightens. “Why?”
He glances up, unreadable. “Because starving you defeats the purpose.”
I reach for the bowl, and the spoon. The first spoonful trembles halfway to my lips. I can feel his gaze following the motion, patient, dissecting. The stew is hot, rich, too human. My stomach remembers what hunger is and shakes with gratitude and shame.
When I look up again, he’s already turning toward the door.
“Wait.” The word slips out before I can stop it. “Don’t go.”
He stills. His back is a wall of black fabric and quiet power. “Why?”
“I—” My voice falters. Because silence is worse. Because the hum of machines can’t look back. “Just… stay.”
For a moment, nothing. Then he exhales, slow, deliberate, and returns with a chair positioning it opposite the mattress.
The same careful distance as before. His presence fills the room without moving.
I eat again, slower now, aware of every sound between us; the scrape of the spoon, the faint pulse in my ears.
I lower my gaze to the bowl, to my hands, my feet wrapped in clean bandages. The fabric of my shirt shifts against my shoulder. Too large. Not mine.
The thought slams through me. I look up sharply. “These clothes—”
He doesn’t flinch. “Yes?”
“Who changed me?”
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. He leans back in the chair, folds his hands. “Who do you think?”
The air leaves my lungs. My face floods with heat that has nothing to do with the room’s warmth. My mouth opens, closes. He watches the realization bloom, patient as a scientist waiting for a reaction.
“I—” The word disintegrates. My fingers tighten around the blanket. “You touched me.”
He tilts his head, the mask moving with it; the gesture half amusement, half warning. “Relax, little scribe. I was very gentle.” A beat. “And I took my time.”
The heat in my cheeks ignites into something electric; rage, humiliation, a pulse of confused awareness that betrays me by trembling down my spine. I turn my face away, but he catches the motion and chuckles. A sound that vibrates through the room, a rare sound I haven’t heard before.
“You’re blushing,” he observes, as if noting an experiment’s result.
“Go to hell.”
He doesn’t, of course. He sits there and lets the words land against him like snow against stone. The chuckle lingers in the air, low and rare, and then fades until I can hear only the heater and my own pulse.
I take the last bite of the food, buy myself three seconds, then set it aside.
“You want me to write. Fine. Then we do this the right way.” My voice surprises me; thin at first, then steadier.
“I’m going to ask questions. We start simple.
You answer honestly for the sake of the paper. If you don’t, I’ll write what I want.”
He doesn’t move. Then, slowly, he leans forward, gloved hands folding with ritual precision. The pause is approval wearing silence. “Ask.”
I open the notebook across my knees. The pencil feels heavier than it should, like I’m holding the lever that tilts a city. I write the date though I don’t know it, underline the place though it has no name, and start where I would start with any case.
“People you kill, how do you choose them?”
“They choose themselves,” he answers like a liturgy. “By behaving like the way they do.”
I hear the old argument flare in my mother’s voice: that justice is just cruelty wearing the right badge. “So you’re a moralist.”
The smallest shake of his head. “I’m a cataloger. Men rot in patterns. I cut the pattern out.”