Chapter 126: The Brother Who Erased a Doorway
The security office at Landspítali was a windowless box buried in the administrative bowels of the hospital. The air hummed with the low-grade heat of servers and the sterile scent of dust on electronics. Wall-mounted monitors showed a grid of silent, grey-washed corridors: the staff entrance, the pharmacy delivery bay, the restricted service hallway leading to the old boiler room. Berg Kristensson leaned back in his swivel chair, the plastic creaking under his weight, his boots propped on a lower drawer. He’d been reviewing access logs, the blue light of the screen etching tired lines around his eyes.
When Aelyth entered, he didn’t startle. He’d seen her approach on monitor three. He gave a curt nod, not unfriendly, just acknowledging a presence he’d been briefed to accommodate. “Everything quiet,” he said, gesturing loosely at the screens. “The usual. Delivery guys, lost visitors, staff smuggling out extra yogurt.”
Aelyth stood beside him, her gaze not on the live feeds but on the printed log sheets scattered on the desk. Names, times, clearance codes. A ledger of mundane comings and goings. “Your sister works here,” she stated.
Berg’s posture shifted almost imperceptibly. Some of the guarded tension in his shoulders eased. Talking about Iva was familiar ground, a subject that felt safe. “Yeah. Iva. You met her. Sunshine in scrubs.” A small, genuine smile touched his lips. “Too sweet for this place, honestly. Thinks a smile fixes everything. Too naive.”
“She believes in the inherent goodness of systems,” Aelyth observed.
“She believes in the goodness of people. Which is worse.” Berg shook his head, a fond exasperation in his tone. “She trusts anyone who’s nice to her. Thinks rules are there to help, not to control. Thinks kindness is a shield.” He glanced at a monitor showing the quiet break room, now empty. “It’s not. It’s a target.”
“Has your dynamic always been this way? You, the protector. She, the one needing protection.”
The question was neutral, but it made Berg’s easy slouch stiffen. He took his boots off the drawer, the feet hitting the floor with a soft thud. “Yeah. Pretty much. I’m older. It’s my job.”
“Is it?”
He looked up at her, his brow furrowing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You do not protect her like a brother worried for a sister.” Aelyth turned from the logs to face him fully. The cool light from the monitors played over her translucent skin, making the emerald bioluminescence beneath pulse like a slow, alien heartbeat. “You guard her like a man guarding evidence. Like guilt.”
The word struck the hum of the room and silenced it. Berg’s face closed down, the fondness evaporating into something shut and hard. His jaw worked. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know patterns. Your aggression is performative, but its root is fear. Not fear for her. Fear of a past action. What did you do, Berg?”
He stood up abruptly, the chair rolling back to bump against the server rack. “I look out for her. That’s it. End of story.”
“You used her,” Aelyth pressed, her voice unnervingly steady. “You used her access, her trust. You made her complicit in covering something up. She believes she helped you fix a technical error. What was the error?”
Berg’s breath came harder. He stared at the screen showing the staff exit, a concrete alcove lit by a flickering fluorescent bar. His eyes were locked on it as if seeing a ghost rehearsal play out on the grainy feed.
“He shoved her,” Berg said, the words ripping out of him low and raw. “Some arrogant med student, thought he was a god because he had a white coat. Iva was carrying a tray of samples, he was late, he plowed right into her. Sent the tray flying. Blood vials everywhere. Glass.” He was clenching and unclenching his fists, reliving it. “He didn’t help her up. He stood there and called her a clumsy, useless scatterbrain. Said she was too stupid to be in a real hospital.”
The air in the small room felt charged, thick with the memory of shattered glass and rage.
“I heard the commotion. Came around the corner. Saw her on the floor, trying to pick up the broken glass, crying. And him, just walking away like he’d cleared a minor obstacle.” Berg’s voice dropped to a venomous whisper. “I followed him out to the staff exit. No cameras on the door’s exterior then. Just that alcove.”
He fell silent, his chest rising and falling.
“You beat him,” Aelyth supplied.
“I taught him,” Berg corrected, a flash of ugly pride in his eyes. “I broke his nose. Two ribs. He was on the ground, crying. Begging. I told him if he ever looked at my sister again, I’d put him in the ground for real.” He finally looked away from the screen, his gaze challenging Aelyth. “He deserved it. He deserved worse.”
“And the footage?”
Berg’s defiance faltered, seeping into a denser, shamed frustration. “The internal alcove camera caught the tail end. Me dragging him out. I couldn’t delete it from my terminal. Security clearance’s different.” He swallowed. “Iva has higher access for patient-log overlays. I told her… I told her the camera feed was glitching, corrupting files. That I needed her login to run a diagnostic and repair cycle. She believed me. She’s always believed me.” He looked sick. “She typed in her codes right in front of me, smiled, said she was happy to help fix things. I erased ninety seconds of footage. She thinks she helped the hospital.”
He slumped back against the edge of the desk, the fight gone out of him, replaced by the heavy, familiar weight. “He deserved it,” he repeated, but now it sounded like a plea.
Aelyth considered him, the furious younger brother caught in his own trap. The monitors continued their silent vigil, showing empty, peaceful corridors.
“Deserving punishment does not grant you the right to become the judge,” she said, her words clean and sharp as surgical steel. “It certainly does not grant you the right to make your sister the unwitting executioner. You did not protect her. You implicated her. You turned her inherent trust into a tool for your vengeance, and now you guard her not from outsiders, but from the discovery of your own crime. Your guilt is not a shield for her. It is a weapon you have already accidentally pointed in her direction.”
Berg had no retort. The truth of it, laid out in that calm, unassailable tone, was a vacuum that sucked all his righteous anger away. He just stared at the floor, seeing the shattered glass, his sister’s confused smile as she handed him her credentials, the bloody knuckles he’d hidden from her.
“The man never reported it,” Berg mumbled. “Too ashamed, probably.”
“It does not matter. The fracture is in your code, not his.” Aelyth moved toward the door. She paused, her hand on the frame. “You are a security officer. Your function is to maintain system integrity. You have compromised it at its core—the trust of a key component. You are now the vulnerability.”
She left him there, surrounded by the proof of his failure—the endless, scrolling logs, the omnipresent eyes of the cameras. Berg didn’t move. He just stared at the live feed of the staff alcove, now hauntingly empty, a clean, well-lit place where a secret was buried under a lie his sweet, naive sister still carried for him, smiling all the while. The system, he realized with a cold dread, was not something out there. It was in here, in this room, in him. And it was already corrupted.
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Landspítali hospital area, Reykjavík, Iceland — patient activity room decorated with colored paper, crafts, tea cups and half-finished puzzles.
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Landspítali hospital area, Reykjavík, Iceland — patient activity room decorated with colored paper, crafts, tea cups and half-finished puzzles.
The patient activity room was a silent riot of desperate cheer. Paper snowflakes, clumsy and asymmetrical, hung from acoustic ceiling tiles. A low table was a museum of distraction: half-completed puzzles showing fjords, mugs stained with tea rings, and scattered markers smelling sharply of synthetic fruit. Lisabet Muggadotir was there, alone, meticulously arranging a series of neon sticky notes into a color gradient on a window.
She turned, sensing Aelyth in the doorway. Her smile was instantaneous, a reflex of practiced warmth. “Oh! Hello. Berg said you were still in the building. Can I help you with something?” The brightness in her voice was a tangible thing, like another decoration she’d just hung in the air.
Aelyth entered, her gaze passing over the crafted contrivances of comfort. “I have just come from speaking with Berg.”
“Ah.” Lisabet’s hands stilled on a citrine-colored square. Her smile didn’t falter, but it acquired a waiting quality. “He’s a good guy. A bit of a storm cloud sometimes, but his heart’s in the right place.” She said it like reciting a gentle, approved review.
“How close are you, really?”
The question landed in the quiet room, sharper than a puzzle piece. Lisabet’s smile lingered a beat too long, a pleasant echo after the sound had ceased. She looked down at her gradient, adjusting a note that was already perfectly aligned. “Berg is… sweet. In his way. Intense. Funny by accident, not on purpose.” She glanced up, her eyes flickering with something more fluid than her tone. “I like being seen by him. But we’re not together. It’s not like that.”
“You enjoy the focus of his attention.”
“Everyone likes to be looked at like they matter.” Lisabet’s laugh was a soft, breathy sound. She finally abandoned the notes and leaned against the table, crossing her arms. The playful administrator was still there, but receding, like a tide pulling back from a familiar shore.
Aelyth moved closer, her steps silent on the linoleum. “The distinction is important. Do you like Berg, or do you like the way he looks at you?”
The brightness in Lisabet’s face finally fractured. It didn’t shatter; it simply drained away, leaving behind a softer, more weary topography. She studied Aelyth, and her gaze was no longer harmless. It was assessing, and held a quiet intelligence that her crafts and stickers usually disguised. “I don’t know,” she admitted, the words simple and stark. “With Berg, I feel… chosen. It’s not comfortable, exactly. It’s heavy. But it’s specific. He’s written me into a story in his head, and I’m the main character.” She picked up a marker, uncapped it, and drew a slow, aimless coil on a scrap of paper. “The problem is, he never asked me if I liked the plot.”
“If he did something wrong for you,” Aelyth pressed, watching the coil tighten into a dark vortex. “Something violent. To defend you, or avenge a slight. Would you stop him? Or would you enjoy being defended?”
Lisabet’s hand stilled. The only sound was the distant, muffled chime of a hospital elevator. She didn’t look surprised by the question. She looked, instead, deeply familiar with its contours.
“Sometimes,” she said, her voice lower now, stripped of its melodic lilt, “the sweetest people are the most selfish. They just frame it in softer light.” She looked directly at Aelyth, and her eyes were clear, unguarded, and chillingly perceptive. “He wants to be my knight. That’s his need. My enjoyment of it… that’s just a side effect. If I told him to stand down, he wouldn’t. He’d think I was being noble, or fragile, and he’d do it anyway because his story requires the grand gesture.”
Aelyth understood then. The colorful puzzles, the cheerful chaos, the harmless demeanor—it wasn’t just a facade. It was a filter. It made people confide in her, made them feel safe and seen. And in return, they gave her pieces of themselves. Otto with his jokes, Iva with her trust, Skellir with his hidden glances, Berg with his entire, volatile narrative.
Lisabet did not only collect secrets. She collected devotion. She curated the emotional dependencies of others because it mapped the room, it showed her where the soft spots and the fault lines were. She was, in her own sticky-note and glitter way, the most powerful intelligence asset in the entire wing.
“He has already been violent,” Aelyth stated, no longer asking. “For his sister. He compromised her to hide it.”
Lisabet absorbed this. She didn’t flinch. She nodded slowly, as if a suspicion had been confirmed. “Iva.” She sighed, a sound of genuine sorrow. “Of course. She’s the purest thing in his life. Of course he’d corrupt something to protect the idea of her.” She capped the marker with a definitive click. “He told me a version, once. Drunk on panic and pride. Said he’d ‘handled’ someone. I never asked for details. I just… listened. And he loved me for it.”
She pushed away from the table, the cheerful curator gone completely now, replaced by a young woman who understood the precise weight of the secrets she held. “He’s a liability now, isn’t he? Because you know.”
“He is a contained variable,” Aelyth corrected. “His pattern is now legible. As is yours.”
For the first time, a flicker of unease crossed Lisabet’s face. Not fear, but the sudden, uncomfortable awareness of being read as clearly as she read others. The collector had been cataloged.
“What happens now?” Lisabet asked, her voice barely a whisper.
“Now,” Aelyth said, turning toward the door, the paper snowflakes trembling in her wake, “you continue to listen. And you report to me not just what people say, but what devotion they are trying to pay you with. The currency of their need is the data point. Berg’s violence, Skellir’s attention, Iva’s trust. It is all transactional. You have been accepting payment without filing a receipt. That ends.”
She left Lisabet standing amid the colorful, childish debris, the vibrant archive of other people’s fragility. Lisabet did not move. She looked at her perfect gradient of sticky notes, a beautiful, meaningless system of her own design, and felt the walls of her harmless kingdom become very, very clear. She was not just an observer anymore. She had been enlisted. Her collection had just been audited, and all its contents were now someone else’s property.
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Reykjavík City Library area / Landspítali hospital corridor.
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Reykjavík City Library area / Landspítali hospital corridor.
Edith was in the history section, her fingers tracing the worn spines of regional archives, when the shadow fell across her shelf. She turned, a polite, distracted smile already forming, then froze. The woman standing there wasn't human. The bioluminescent channels beneath translucent skin pulsed with a slow, alien rhythm Edith felt in her own quickening pulse.
"Aelyth." Edith's voice was thin paper. "Is something—"
"Skellir needs to see you." Aelyth's words were clean cuts, no wasted breath. "Immediately. He sent me to bring you in."
The world narrowed to those two sentences. Edith's breath hitched, a sharp little gasp. Her mind, always racing toward worst-case scenarios, offered a buffet of horrors: test results missed, a shadow on a scan, something terminal and urgent. But beneath that familiar fear, another current surged—hot, bright, and shamefully hopeful. He'd sent for her. He'd thought of her, needed her there now.
"Right. Okay. Yes." The words tumbled out as she scrambled, knocking her notebook to the floor. Pens scattered. She didn't care. She shoved the archive book back, its placement wrong, her movements jerky with a frantic energy that had nothing to do with organizing research. "Is he… did he say what it was about?"
"No." Aelyth watched her, mercury eyes recording every fluttering gesture. "Only that it was urgent."
That was enough. It was everything. Edith slung her bag over her shoulder, not bothering to zip it, already moving toward the exit. She didn't question why Skellir would send this strange, celestial emissary. She didn't pause to consider the lack of a call, a text, any direct contact. The magic of his name, the promise of his focused attention, bypassed all logical circuits. Her anxiety and her longing had become the same creature, and it was pulling her toward the hospital on a taut, invisible string.
Aelyth followed at a distance of twenty paces, a silent observer to the experiment. Edith didn't look back. She walked quickly, almost running, her coat flapping open in the crisp air, a woman drawn by a need she would only call worry.
The hospital corridor smelled of lemon disinfectant and underlying dread. Iva was restocking linen carts, her hands moving on autopilot, when she saw Edith burst through the main hallway doors. Not walk, burst. Her face was flushed, her eyes wide and scanning like searchlights.
"Iva! Is he—is Skellir in his office?" Edith’s words came in a rushed jumble. "He called me. It's urgent."
Iva’s hands stilled on a stack of pillowcases. She blinked. There was no appointment blinking on the screen in her mind. No scribbled note from Skellir tucked under her keyboard, no missed call flagged as priority. The doctor’s schedule today had been routine, bland even. He’d left ten minutes earlier for a coffee, saying nothing about an urgent consult.
"He… called you?" Iva asked, her voice slow with dawning realization.
"Yes, he sent Aelyth to the library to get me." Edith was already shifting her weight, poised to sprint down the hall. "Can you just tell him I'm here? Please?"
This time, Iva did not smooth it over. She didn’t offer a cheerful, "I’m sure it’s fine, let me check!" She didn’t try to fix the confusing disaster with a smile. The memory of Aelyth’s request in the break room—you will tell me—rose up, cold and clear. This was the unusual pattern. This was the break.
Her fingers, slightly trembling, found her phone in her scrub pocket. She turned slightly away from Edith’s anxious, pleading face.
"Let me… just see where he is," Iva mumbled, her thumbs typing rapidly.
The text flew to Aelyth, a tiny digital flare in the sterile quiet: Edith just came in. She says Skellir called her urgently. I don’t know anything about this.
Edith watched, confused by the delay, by the texting. "Iva?"
"Just a second," Iva whispered, her eyes on her screen, waiting, her heart thumping hard against her ribs. The old Iva would have apologized, made up an excuse, protected everyone's feelings. This Iva stood still, holding the line, feeling the uncomfortable weight of a truth she wasn't softening.
Aelyth, standing at the far end of the adjacent corridor, watched the scene unfold through the reflection in a darkened office window. She felt her phone vibrate. She read Iva’s message. A small, cold satisfaction settled in her chest, precise and analytical.
Both tests yielded conclusive data. Edith had come without hesitation, proving her dependency was emotional, not clinical. The specific pull was Skellir himself, a beacon she’d run toward even through a stranger. And Iva had reported the anomaly. Her kindness had finally grown a spine of caution; she had chosen integrity over instinctive appeasement.
The variables were becoming constants. Aelyth slid the phone back into her pocket. The machinery of their lives was now revealed, its gears and levers exposed. She knew exactly how to make them turn.