Chapter 20 #2
I watch him as carefully as I listen. His words are correct.
His timing is correct. His face, however, is like a mask that’s been worn so often it’s become second skin.
The grooves of the expression are too practiced.
A muscle in his jaw ticks once when someone in the back asks if there’s been any sign, any trace, any evidence she’s still alive.
He says, “We are exploring every avenue,” and hands out hope like rationed bread.
He doesn’t radiate urgency. He radiates management.
It’s subtle. The lack of tension in his shoulders.
The absence of that strained, exhausted tightness I’ve seen in officers who become personally invested.
The way his gaze glides over the room, but never lingers too long on the rawest grief.
He looks at people’s foreheads when they speak to him, not their eyes.
Relaxed, my mind notes. Artificially neutral. Like someone who knows more than they can say, and has already assessed that panic is unnecessary.
Interesting.
“Is it true she might have just… run off?” a man in the back asks, voice cracking. “You hear stories about young people, you know, stressed, needing to get away—”
Her mother makes a sound then, small but sharp, like something tearing. Heads turn. Halldórsson is quick to respond, just as the room’s focus shifts to her.
“There is no indication that Elara left of her own accord,” he says smoothly. “We take every missing person case seriously, regardless of age. We are not treating this as a voluntary disappearance.”
The man sits down, chastened. Sigrún stares at the floor, lashes wet, breathing through her mouth like she’s trying not to be sick.
I catalogue it all. The human pain. The official reassurances. The tremor in the raw voices and the steadiness in the practiced one. It’s a tapestry, and I know how to read woven things. What’s said, what’s not, where the gaps are.
Halldórsson does not mention leads. He does not mention lack of leads.
He does not admit to being baffled, as most local law enforcement would be in the face of a professional extraction.
He does not posture about how they’ll “find whoever did this, no matter what.” He keeps the focus on the process, not the perpetrator.
If I were advising a man who wanted to appear competent but not culpable, I would tell him to do exactly what Halldórsson is doing.
The thought slides in easily: He knows something. Not necessarily about me. But about someone, something, some angle that isn’t being discussed in this fluorescent-lit room.
I shift my weight, crossing my arms instead of leaving them loose at my sides.
It changes nothing about how visible I am, but it gives my muscles somewhere to go.
I am careful with my posture, with the angle of my chin, with the intensity of my gaze.
Predators staring too hard at the herd attract notice.
The trick is to look like an apex predator to yourself and an uninteresting bystander to everyone else.
Sigrún asks a question next, voice small but clear enough to carry. “Are you… are you bringing in any outside help? Like… specialists?” Her eyes flick, for the briefest moment, toward Halldórsson, then away, as if she regrets the implication of her own doubt.
Specialists. The word lands oddly. It makes the corners of my mouth want to move. I keep them still.
Halldórsson’s expression doesn’t change. “We’re in consultation with several agencies,” he replies. “But at this stage, our best asset is the community’s eyes and ears. You know Elara. You know this town. Anything you remember, anything at all, could be important.”
Half true, half lie, stitched seamlessly together. He sidesteps the question of specialists by reframing it as local responsibility. He diffuses doubt by giving them something to do. It’s deft. It’s practiced. It’s almost too smooth.
I watch his hands again. The way his fingers press briefly into the back of the chair when someone mentions the CCTV footage from the night she vanished.
The way he glances toward one of his officers, a tiny, sharp look that says more than any sentence could.
There’s something there. A gap in the story that he’s holding closed with professional pressure.
They have footage. Of course they do. Cameras are everywhere now.
They’ll have caught Elara at the last point she was visible.
And after that… what? My extraction was clean.
I scrubbed as I went. There should be nothing.
No van not accounted for, no vehicle that tarries too long, no stranger’s gait to pull apart frame by frame.
The point was to make it look like she stepped off the edge of the world and never hit the ground.
So what is pulling Halldórsson’s mouth into that almost-smile when he reassures them? What is keeping his pulse so steady?
I file it away. A question mark to return to later. A thread to tug when I’m not standing thirty feet from the stage pretending to be another concerned citizen.
The meeting drags on. They discuss search rotas, dividing the town into a patchwork of zones that will be combed over by desperate hands and tired eyes.
Volunteers sign up. People argue gently about who should cover which areas.
Someone suggests a candlelight vigil. Someone else talks about social media campaigns.
Low-tech and high-tech grief, braided together.
All the while, I stand in my shadow, breathing in the shared panic like secondhand smoke.
I think of Elara, underground. Of the way her voice vibrates when she talks too long without water.
Of the way she looked at me when I said the number ninety-three, like I had ripped something out of her worldview and left a smoking cavity where her assumption of human limits used to be.
I think of the way she rebuilds stories in her head, compulsively, even in captivity, trying to pin me to a narrative that behaves.
She doesn’t know, yet, that they’re all here. That her mother is sitting upright on a folding chair because lying down would mean surrender. That Sigrún is twisting a tissue into a rope in her lap. That an entire town is rearranging itself, however briefly, around the absence of her.
I don’t know what she would do with that information. Break, maybe. Or harden. Or both. She is not simple.
My attention returns to the front as Halldórsson wraps up the official portion of the meeting. “We will remain available after this to take any specific concerns or information,” he says. “Thank you for being here. This kind of unity is exactly what we need in times like these.”
Unity. The word is like a coat thrown over a broken chair. It doesn’t fix anything, but it hides the splinters.
Chairs scrape. People stand. There’s a shuffling, a reordering, as small knots of conversation form and dissolve.
Some head straight for the sign-up sheets.
Others for the exit, needing air. A few make their way toward the front, toward the officials, carrying questions and fragments of memory like offerings.
I stay where I am a moment longer, watching the reconfiguration.
Her mother doesn’t move. For several long seconds, she sits as if she has been forgotten there, the crowd flowing around her.
Then she stands abruptly, like someone has cut a string, and turns toward the aisle.
Her gaze collides briefly with Sigrún’s.
They exchange a look too quick and complicated to unpack—a shared devastation, a jagged kind of solidarity.
Sigrún reaches out as if to touch her arm, then thinks better of it. Some losses are too fresh for comfort.
Halldórsson steps down from the front and begins to circulate, shaking hands, clapping shoulders, bending his head to listen. He’s very good at looking like the steady center. If I didn’t know better, if I were just another pair of frightened eyes, I might even feel soothed.
But I do know better.
Something in my chest shifts, a faint echo of what might have once been interest, or curiosity, or professional recognition. It feels like pressure against scar tissue. Not pleasant, but familiar.
I’ve been conditioned to see patterns. To identify anomalies.
To sense where the story doesn’t line up with the facts.
Halldórsson is an anomaly in this room, not because he cares less, but because his caring, if it exists, is not manifested the way everyone else’s is.
He is not desperate. He is not frantic. He is not angry at the limits of his reach.
He is… composed.
There are explanations that would satisfy an average mind. He’s seen too much; he’s compartmentalized; he’s trained to maintain level-headed control. Maybe that’s all it is.
But I did not survive this long by accepting the most convenient interpretation.
I uncross my arms and let my hands fall to my sides, rolling my shoulders once to dispel the stiffness.
Time to leave. Stay too long and someone might try to talk to me; I don’t want my voice attached to my face in their memories.
Right now, I’m just an outline in a black jacket at the back. That’s enough.
I slip through the bodies without touching anyone, a shadow threading through thicker shadows, and step back into the cold outside.
The air bites at my cheeks, cleansing after the humidity of shared grief.
My motorcycle waits where I left it, a black shape against the dull sheen of parked cars.
I swing a leg over, settle onto the seat, and pull on my helmet.
For a moment, before I start the engine, I sit in the quiet and look back at the building. Through the windows I can see them moving, dim shapes rearranging, the human swarm trying to build meaning out of absence.
They are looking for a trail that has been deliberately erased. They are looking for a girl who is a week underground. They are looking for a predator who just attended their meeting, listened to their plans, and left without leaving so much as a smudge of his presence behind.
A monster in their midst, unseen. The thought should please me. Once, it would have. Now it just feels… accurate. Descriptive, not celebratory.
My mind flicks back to Halldórsson. To the calm. To the practiced ease. To the faint glimmer of something like private knowledge behind his eyes.
If he is part of the architecture around this situation, I need to know how deep his foundations run.
I start the engine. The bike roars to life, a brief, satisfying violence of sound that startles a few birds from a nearby tree. As I pull away from the curb, I don’t look back again.
They have their meeting. Their plans. Their hope.
I have Elara.
The road opens up ahead of me, dark and wet and empty. I lean into the curve, the town lights falling away in the mirrors, and head back toward the place where their missing girl is remaking me in her mind, one terrified, furious, necessary thought at a time.