CHAPTER 12 — FOURTH LAW: WHAT NEVER COMPLETES
The Fourth Law was different from the previous three. It did not deal with the external world, but with the gap between what a person says and what they allow themselves to feel. An internal space that is never resolved.
Aurelian had observed this dissonance in thousands of people: accumulated tension that is never released, a thought that is never finished, an emotion cut off halfway by fear, shame, or simple inability to process it.
It was the quietest noise of all. And for that very reason, the most destructive.
During the three weeks of "silence" after the Mikkelsen case, Aurelian had not been inactive.
He had been observing. Refining. And, for the first time, experimenting with something unplanned.
---
[The Unforeseen Incident — 23:47, two weeks earlier]
Aurelian was following one of his potential candidates—a university professor with a fascinating history of ethical contradictions—to an old residential building.
He intended only to observe, to measure behavior patterns, to verify routines.
But in the silent corridor of the third floor, something occurred outside the plan: a door opened unexpectedly.
The man who stepped out was around fifty. Strong build. Direct, steady gaze. The kind of person who has built himself as "the pillar" of his environment: the problem solver, the one who never shows weakness, the one everyone turns to in a crisis.
He stopped when he saw Aurelian in the hallway at that hour.
"Are you looking for someone?" he asked, his voice firm but not aggressive.
Aurelian didn't answer immediately. Silence was a measuring tool: it allowed people to fill the void with their own projections.
The man frowned slightly.
"It's almost midnight. I don't recognize your face. Do you live in this building?"
At that moment, Aurelian made a decision he had not planned: to turn the witness into an improvised experiment.
He analyzed him in two seconds: confident adult, conviction, an apparently stable internal structure upheld by decades of being "the strong one." The hardest type of person to break psychologically.
And therefore, the most interesting as an accidental proof of concept.
"What exactly do you think you saw?" Aurelian asked in a tone so neutral it was unsettling.
The man answered quickly, with the confidence of someone used to being right:
"A stranger lurking around a neighbor's door in the middle of the night. That's not right. I'm going to call—"
Aurelian interrupted him with glacial softness:
"Your tone does not match what you actually feel."
The man froze, thrown off by the abrupt conversational shift.
"Excuse me?"
"Your words are firm," Aurelian continued, taking an almost imperceptible step forward, "but your breathing is not. Your jaw is tense, but your hands don't know where to rest. Tell me… when was the last time you were truly, genuinely certain about something important?"
The man opened his mouth to answer, but no sound came out.
That was where the Internal Interval began to crack.
Aurelian continued, like reading defective lines of code:
"You define yourself by what you hold together for others. By being 'the strong one' for your family, your circle. And that strength depends entirely on no one noticing how tired you really are. How exhausted. How empty."
The man took half a step back, confused by how a stranger could read something so intimate.
"You don't know me. You don't know anything about—"
"Three years," Aurelian interrupted with surgical precision. "It's been about three years since something broke inside you. Not something big. Something small. A microscopic fracture. But since then you've lived accumulating tension—small, silent, constant. The Internal Interval that never closes."
He pointed at the man's chest without touching him, his finger completely steady.
"Right there. And you don't know how to release it. Because if you do—if you admit it's there—everything you've held together for decades could collapse."
The man blinked several times. Something in his face began to crumble in a way that probably hadn't happened since childhood.
It was not fear of Aurelian specifically.
It was fear of himself. Of the truth that had just been named aloud.
"You didn't find me tonight," Aurelian said calmly. "You found yourself, in the worst possible place: in front of someone who can see the crack."
The man stood completely still. Not with anger. Not with the urge to fight or flee.
Only with a sudden void where certainty had once been.
Three years of accumulated tension had reached its forced release point, and the entire self-deception system had abruptly shut down.
Aurelian waited exactly seven seconds, watching the internal collapse reflect in micro-expressions.
Then he simply turned around and walked toward the stairs at a normal pace, as if nothing had happened.
The man did not follow. Did not shout. Did not call the police.
He remained there in the hallway, staring at the empty space where Aurelian had been—but truly staring into the hollow inside himself that he could no longer ignore.
When Aurelian reached the street, he heard a door gently close in the distance.
The witness would not be a problem. He had been completely neutralized—not by physical threat, but by the collapse of his own internal structure.
Aurelian walked toward his car with the calm of someone who understands that even mistakes can be productively incorporated into the system.
The witness had not been an obstacle to eliminate.
He had been an accidental proof of concept for the Fourth Law.
The Fourth Law could function without physical death. Simply by exposing the Internal Interval so brutally that the person became functionally silenced.
But no. That would break the consistency of the system.
The Twelve Laws required completeness. They required that silence be definitive, not temporary.
The witness lived, but he would live broken. That was enough as an experiment.
The true victim of the Fourth Law had to be someone else.
---
[The Correct Victim]
In the following days, Aurelian reviewed his candidates with renewed focus.
He needed someone who lived in constant internal contradiction: someone who projected intellectual and emotional clarity, yet dragged along perpetually incomplete thoughts. Someone trapped in permanent tension between what they should be and what they were.
He found her: Clara Neumann, 41 years old, clinical psychologist.
Highly respected in her field. Highly contained in public. Excessively organized in every visible aspect of her life.
That level of extreme order almost always hides unresolved spaces.
Aurelian observed her for five consecutive nights through the windows of her office (from a nearby building with high-definition binoculars):
• She rearranged the same books twice in one hour
• She wrote long text messages and deleted them without sending (six times in one session)
• She stared at specific objects for entire minutes, mentally frozen
• She breathed with an irregular pattern indicating suppressed chronic anxiety
Every micro-gesture confirmed that she lived in constant tension between two identities that never fully met: the perfect therapist and the broken person who needed her own therapy.
In his notebook, Aurelian designed the entire scene:
FOURTH LAW: THE INTERNAL INTERVAL
Orientation: Northwest (continuous rotation)
Object angle: 15° (interruption, not direction)
Central element: An object split into two halves
Tape: Incomplete strip that DOES NOT fully cover
Time: 04:11 (intermediate moment between night and dawn)
Lighting: Single lateral source — interrupted shadow
Distinctive detail: Something must be visibly INCONCLUSIVE
Each element responded to a fundamental principle: Nothing must be complete. Nothing must end. Nothing must close.
It was the antithesis of the first three Laws, which had perfect geometry.
The Fourth Law had to FEEL broken.
The ghost object would be perfect: Clara's professional business card, split exactly in half.
Her name. Her professional identity. Her public façade.
Cleanly fragmented. A perfect piece to represent the Internal Interval that never closes.