Chapter 57
The Woman-Shaped Void
Lucan
Elara.
I don’t say her name out loud anymore. I don’t write it on my skin. I don’t let myself speak it into the steam of my shower or the smoke of my cigarettes. I don’t give it the dignity of sound.
But it exists anyway. A pressure point. A bruise. A hunger that doesn’t translate into anything useful.
Level Three gives me more work and less noise. It gives me silence so thick it becomes a second skin. It gives me power that is not satisfying, because power is only intoxicating when you’re still trying to prove you deserve it. I stopped trying to prove things a long time ago.
Now I am only trying to keep one body alive.
I visit my sister on the days when Henrik isn’t there.
Not because I fear Henrik. Because I refuse to watch him touch her.
I refuse to see his hands near her skin, his eyes scanning her like she’s a chart.
I have killed men for less disrespect than that.
If I sit in that room and watch him work, I will decide that my sister’s hope is not worth his breath.
So I go when he’s gone. When they’re both gone; Henrik, and her husband ágúst. Who thinks Henrik must be a brilliant neurochemical doctor. Ironic how much we don’t know.
The house is not ours. It isn’t even near the places we grew up.
It sits on the edge of a fjord woods where the wind is constant and the ocean is always muttering.
A safe place arranged through her husband.
It looks normal; white walls, narrow windows, a porch that creaks, light spilling warm into snow.
Inside, the air is too clean. Henrik has installed machines.
I take off my boots at the door out of habit, even though no one told me to. It’s the kind of softness I don’t understand in myself. I leave my coat hanging. I keep my gloves.
She is in the living room on a recliner that looks like a throne designed for someone who never wanted to be queen of anything. A blanket tucked around her legs. A humidifier humming quietly near her chair. A plastic cup with a straw on the side table. Medications lined up like soldiers.
My sister turns her head when she hears me.
Her hair is thinner than I remember. Her cheeks are too pale, her bones too visible beneath the skin, as if her body is slowly forgetting how to hold itself together.
The disease has eaten at her nervous system the way rust eats metal; quietly, steadily, without drama, until one day the structure collapses.
But her eyes—
Her eyes are still the same. Bright, sharp, stubborn. Alive in a way her body isn’t.
“Lucan,” she says.
No one says my name like that. No one says it without fear or calculation or ownership. She says it like it belongs to me.
I cross the room. Each step feels louder than it should. The floorboards complain under my weight. My lungs tighten. I don’t know why I am nervous. I have walked into rooms full of armed men and felt nothing.
I stop in front of her chair.
She smiles, small but real. “You’re late.”
“I’m not on your schedule,” I say.
“You should be,” she answers immediately, and the bluntness of it hits me harder than any insult.
I stare at her. For a second I see her as she was, small hands gripping my sleeve while our father shouted. The way she used to press her face into my shoulder so she wouldn’t hear the experiments. The way I used to step between her and the worst of it like my body could be a wall.
“I didn’t know if you’d come,” she admits, softer now.
I swallow. My throat feels scraped raw. “I said I would.”
She snorts, a weak little sound. “You say a lot of things.”
It’s true. I say things I don’t mean. I make promises I treat like tools. I speak in rules and threats and conditions. But this one, I meant this one.
“I’m here,” I say. We haven’t gotten to talk much, mostly I’d just watch her. I watch her sleep, check on her vitals, and cook her something she can stomach. My presence mingling with hers. I feel like today might be different.
Her gaze drifts over me like she’s taking inventory. “You’re bigger.”
“Time does that,” I answer.
“It also does other things,” she says, and her eyes sharpen. “Like make people disappear for years.”
The accusation is gentle. That’s what makes it worse.
I stand there with my hands at my sides, gloved fists clenched. “I had to.”
“You didn’t,” she says. “You chose to.”
I flinch, almost imperceptibly.
She watches it and smiles again, not cruel, not satisfied, just… knowing. “There you are,” she murmurs. “Still human. Buried under all that.”
I don’t respond. My jaw tightens until it aches.
She shifts slightly, wincing. The movement costs her. Everything costs her now. And it breaks something in me, not loudly, not dramatically. Just a subtle fracture, a hairline crack in the part of me that likes to pretend I am made of stone.
“How is it?” I ask.
She knows what I mean. She glances toward the hallway where Henrik’s makeshift lab sits behind a closed door. “It’s… strange,” she says. “He’s careful. Too careful. Like he’s afraid he’ll break me if he touches me.”
“He should be,” I say.
She laughs, then coughs, the sound thin and wet. It makes me go still. My whole body locks as if I’m preparing to kill the cough itself. She’s always cough behind that damn door at the end of the hallway in our old house.
She waves a hand. “I’m fine.”
You’re not, my mind says. You’re dying in slow motion.
“What did he do?” I ask, controlled. “What has changed.”
She looks down at her fingers, turning them slowly as if she’s testing whether the signal reaches them today.
“At first, nothing. Just the same weakness. The same shaking. The same… fog, everything. And then”—she hesitates, like she doesn’t want to give me hope because hope is dangerous—“two days ago, I stood up without my knees giving out.”
My chest tightens.
“Not for long,” she adds quickly. “I sat down again. But I stood. And I didn’t feel like the room was tilting. But he’s still adjusting everything, and the balances. He says I’m a tough case, but he says he’ll do anything to succeed.”
A point of light. A pathetic little ember in the dark.
I nod once. I don’t let her see the relief, because relief makes you careless, and careless gets people killed.
She studies my face anyway, because she has always been good at reading what I don’t say. “He’s trying,” she repeats. “I think he hates himself.”
“He should,” I say again.
She hums. “You’re very committed to that.”
My fingers flex. “His regret doesn’t resurrect anyone.”
“No,” she agrees. “But it might keep him from doing it again.”
I stare at her. She’s always been the one who could see past the rage. The one who could imagine a world where things didn’t have to be paid back in blood. It used to annoy me. Now it makes me ache.
She leans back, breathing shallow. “Sit,” she says, pointing to the edge of the couch.
I do. The couch creaks under my weight. I keep space between us like distance is safety. Like I’m afraid my presence will contaminate her.
She watches the gap and rolls her eyes. “I’m not made of glass, Lu.”
I glance at her. “You kind of are.”
She smiles faintly. “Then stop treating me like I’ll shatter if you look at me wrong.”
I don’t know how to answer that. I’ve built my whole life around control. Around reducing variables. Around keeping things at a distance so they can’t break me. But she is a variable I cannot control, and she is breaking anyway.
Her gaze drifts toward my hands. “Do you still shake?”
My left hand twitches slightly, as if it heard the question and decided to prove her point. The tremor is still constant. It mostly comes when I’m still. When I’m forced to exist in my own skin without action to drown it out.
I curl my fingers into a fist. “Not when it matters.”
“Does anything matter to you now?” she asks.
The question lands softly, but it detonates inside me.
I stare at the wall across from us. There’s a framed photograph there, it’s her and him, they look like a happy couple.
“Yes,” I say, and the word tastes like something I don’t understand.
She tilts her head. “Like what?”
I should lie. I should deflect. I should turn it into something cold and manageable; my sister, my work, my survival. Those answers are safer.
But she doesn’t want safe. She never has.
So I tell the truth in the only way I know how; carefully, like handling poison.
“You,” I say first.
Her expression softens, but she doesn’t interrupt. She waits.
“And…” My throat tightens. The void inside me stirs, hungry. “Someone else.”
Her eyes sharpen again. “A woman.”
I don’t answer. Silence is confirmation.
She smiles, slow. “Oh.”
I feel exposed. It’s absurd. I have stood over screaming men and felt nothing, but this, this makes my skin itch.
She studies me like she’s fitting puzzle pieces together. “Is she alive?”
“Yes,” I say immediately, too fast.
“Is she safe?”
My jaw clenches so hard it hurts. “I think so.”
My sister leans forward slightly, as if the conversation itself gives her energy. “Tell me.”
“No.”
“Lucan.”
I glance at her. “It’s not your business.”
She raises an eyebrow. Even sick, even fragile, she still has that look, the one that used to make grown men back down. “Everything you are is my business. We survived the same man. We bled in the same house. Don’t you dare pretend you’re an island.”
The words hit me like a slap. I swallow. My fingers flex against my knee.
“She’s… complicated,” I say finally, because it’s the closest thing to a description that doesn’t cut me open.
My sister smiles wider. “That means you like her.”
I feel something twist in my chest. Annoyance. Panic. Something else beneath it that I refuse to name.
“She’s dangerous,” I say.
Her smile doesn’t falter. “So are you.”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing,” I add. “She doesn’t understand the shape of the world I live in.”
“Or maybe she understands it better than you think,” she counters. “Maybe she sees you clearer than you see yourself.”