Chapter 53
Submerged
Lucan
The water tanks breath.
There’s two of them, but just one’s occupied.
That is the first thing I register, not Einar’s shape inside it, not the restraints, not the way his pulse keeps betraying him in small, frantic movements against the glass, but the sound.
A low, cyclical slosh as the filtration pump circulates water through metal veins that were never meant to carry life.
The rhythm is imperfect. Old machinery. The kind that doesn’t care if it keeps you alive or not, only that it keeps moving.
Einar is suspended upright, wrists cinched to steel rings bolted into the tank’s spine, ankles weighted just enough that he can’t float himself free.
The water line kisses the base of his throat when he’s still.
When he panics, it creeps higher. He hasn’t learned yet that stillness is the only thing that buys him time. He’s out, drugged, but soon he’ll wake.
The place smells like iron and wet concrete and something older—rot that has learned patience.
Kollbein did well. I told him I wanted isolation, depth, and a structure the earth itself had already started reclaiming.
He found me this: an abandoned pumping station buried into the slope of a mountain like a forgotten organ.
Moss climbs the outer walls in thick, green veins.
Inside, the air is cold enough to sharpen thought.
I told Henrik not to bring Elara here.
Not because I am hiding anything from her.
Because this is not for her.
This is not a story that needs a witness, or an author.
I roll my sleeves once, slow, deliberate, the fabric rasping softly in the silence. The scars along my forearms catch the light from the single overhead lamp, pale and uneven, like geography that never settled. My hands gloved, tremor present as always. Once I begin it’ll hopefully disappear.
I found him easily.
áron did most of the work, he owed me after last time.
He understands invisibility the way chemists understand reaction thresholds: not as absence, but as control.
He lives inside networks the way parasites live inside hosts, feeding without killing, moving without detection.
Black market IT, they call it. As if the market ever mattered. What matters is access.
I gave him Halldórsson’s work phone.
Halldórsson was sloppy in keeping his secrets secret.
His phone still carried cached credentials, biometric access tokens tied to internal police systems, partial keys that only needed patience and the right angle to open doors that were never meant to stay closed.
áron cracked it quietly, methodically, like peeling skin from fruit without breaking the flesh.
Through Halldórsson, we gained eyes.
Traffic cameras. Harbor feeds. License plate recognition. Facial recognition archives flagged as “inactive” because no one thought to audit them anymore. Internal memos, redacted reports, sealed case files that still breathed under the surface.
Einar appeared there more often than he should have. He’s a serial fraud; that’s where we are different. I kill with intent. He survives by dilution; splitting himself into aliases and accounts and favors owed, until no single version of him is solid enough to face consequence.
He tried to disappear into the same black-market labyrinth that taught him how to steal in the first place.
He believed speed would save him. He believed movement equaled escape.
He believed we’d all be dead by now. He believed I would take care of his problems, like some murder machine he could control.
He was wrong.
The chase lasted hours, not even days like I expected.
That is what shames him most, even if he doesn’t understand it yet.
Weeks, maybe even months, of planning his evil Houdini act, undone in a single afternoon because he underestimated how quickly a system collapses once you know where to apply pressure.
áron watched him fracture in real time. The first stop was digital: darknet forums that pretend to be marketplaces but are really just confessionals for men who think encryption is absolution.
Einar resurfaced under an old handle, one I recognized instantly, because vanity is another habit he never cured.
He tried to sell pieces of the formulas, not whole of course, not even the real pieces.
Just another Houdini trick. Just enough to keep people invested without giving them leverage.
He reached out to brokers in Eastern Europe within three hours of stealing them, then pivoted when no one bit fast enough. Desperation accelerates stupidity.
From there, he went physical.
He moved toward the ports, of course. Men who traffic in chemicals always trust water.
He slipped through Reykjavík first, using a rented car registered to a dead man, paid for with currency laundered so many times it barely remembered what it had been.
Harbor feeds caught him twice, hood up, head down, moving like someone who already knew he was being watched but didn’t understand how thoroughly.
License plate recognition flagged him leaving the city less than forty minutes after the first attempted sale failed.
I followed him while áron guided me with his digital eyes.
He drove north, then cut east, avoiding main roads too late to matter.
Traffic cameras tracked him until he thought to abandon the car near an old shipping depot, one of those half-dead places that exists in a bureaucratic blind spot, owned by a shell company that owns nothing but debt.
He tried to vanish there, further away perhaps another country, switching to a secondary vehicle arranged through a black-market courier service that advertises discretion like it’s a virtue.
It isn’t.
Discretion is just delay.
I intercepted him on a service road that hasn’t been maintained in years, the kind that only appears on maps if you know which layers to turn on.
áron had already ghosted the courier’s communications, rerouted his location pings, fed him false confirmations until he delivered Einar exactly where I wanted him.
By the time the courier realized something was wrong, he was already irrelevant.
Einar saw me too late.
They always do.
The road was narrow, bordered by rock on one side and a steep drop on the other.
No cameras. No witnesses. Wind howled through the cut in the mountain, carrying the smell of salt and wet stone.
He tried to reverse when he saw my vehicle blocking the way ahead.
I disabled his engine before he could complete the thought.
The sound it made, metal failing under precise force, was loud in the quiet.
Usually I take my motorcycle, but this time around my Mustang was a better fit.
I stepped out slowly. I wanted him to see me. To see the monster he thought he could shape into something useful.
He screamed when I pulled him from the car.
High, thin, undignified. The kind of sound made by men who have spent their lives externalizing risk and suddenly find it internalized.
He tried to bargain immediately. Offered money.
Offered names. Offered access. Offered partnership. I laughed at that one.
I didn’t answer him.
The formulas were on him, exactly where I knew they would be: encrypted storage device tucked into the lining of his jacket, close to his body, as if proximity could confer legitimacy. The core. The variables which ruined my family. The parts that cannot be guessed or reconstructed once lost.
I took them back, while pressing a knife a little too far into his throat.
Transporting him after that was simple. He didn’t fight.
He couldn’t. I drugged him. I wasn’t in the mood for theater.
Kollbein arranged the route, the vehicle, the gaps in surveillance so cleanly they barely registered as actions.
We moved him the way you move waste: efficiently, without ceremony.
Once arrived on location they left me to it.
Now he is strapped into a tank designed to regulate pressure and flow, repurposed into something honest.
The water laps gently at his collarbones.
I step closer and rest my palm against the glass, observing him. Maybe after all I do have specific traits of my father.
I think of Elara, briefly.
Not as an absence, but as a boundary.
I told Henrik to keep her away because this is not a lesson she needs to learn.
She already understands monsters. What she doesn’t need is the math behind them.
There are things you protect not by hiding them, but by deciding they are not part of the exchange.
I don’t want to exchange this part of myself with her.
I don’t know who I am tonight, Lucan or Vapor. It feels as if I’m neither, something darker, worse.
The tank hums. The building answers with a low, subterranean echo, as if the mountain itself is listening. I feel steady. Anchored. The formulas are back, and they might do some good after all. After that they’ll disappear.
Einar was the easiest hunt of my life.
That should tell him everything he needs to know.
Above us, the world keeps moving.
Down here, gravity does what it always does.
And I’ll decide how fast.