Read Chapter 17: Brussels Junction

The train died outside Liège.

Étienne felt the braking shudder through the floor, the emergency lights flickering once before surrendering to black. Around him, the few passengers who had dared travel east stirred from uneasy sleep, their murmurs rising into panic. He pressed his forehead against the cold window. Outside, nothing. Not a single light on the horizon.

"End of the line," Claire said, already on her feet, her pack slung over one shoulder.

They moved before the conductors could organize anything. Through the emergency doors, down the gravel embankment, into the tree line. The night air bit hard, carrying the smell of diesel and wet earth. Behind them, the train's outline faded into the dark like a sinking ship.

"Sixty kilometers to Brussels," Étienne said, checking the compass on his watch. "On foot, through military checkpoints, with no food beyond what we've got."

Claire was already walking. "Then we'd better move."

They walked through the backcountry, avoiding roads entirely. The fields were dead - not frost-killed, but starved, irrigation pumps silent, greenhouse plastic flapping loose over skeletons of steel. Every farmhouse they passed was dark. Some had been stripped, doors hanging open. Others showed signs of desperate fortification, furniture piled against windows.

Just after midnight, they heard engines.

Étienne pulled Claire into a ditch as a convoy rumbled past on the adjacent road. Armored vehicles, their headlights cutting sharp cones through the fog. He counted six. Seven. The last one towed a trailer stacked with shipping containers.

"Where are they going?" Claire whispered.

"West," Étienne said. "Away from Brussels. That's what matters."

He didn't say what he was thinking: that the military moving matériel away from the capital meant either the city was already secured, or it was being abandoned to something worse.

---

They reached the outskirts of Brussels at dawn.

The city was a corpse. Cars sat abandoned in the middle of intersections, their doors open like mouths gasping for air. Trash had begun to pile in the gutters, and the smell of rot drifted from somewhere deep in the residential blocks. Graffiti covered the walls - not political slogans, but desperate things. *Water here. Food. Radio works on channel 4.*

They moved through the streets in the half-light, staying to the shadows. Twice they heard patrols before they saw them, boots echoing on wet cobblestone. Each time they pressed into doorways, holding their breath until the sound faded.

The telecom hotel was a brutalist slab of concrete in the northern industrial district, all blank walls and small, dark windows. It had once been a switching center for international data traffic, a place where undersea cables met the continent's backbone. Now it stood like a tombstone.

The main door had been welded shut.

"Lena said temporary server," Étienne muttered, circling the building. "She said Marc accessed it remotely. That means he had a way in that didn't use the front door."

The east side of the building offered nothing - windows too high, walls too sheer. The west side was worse. But the loading dock at the rear had a service entrance, and that door had a newer lock. Decent quality, industrial grade. Not military.

Étienne knelt, pulling out the small tool roll Claire had insisted they pack. He worked by feel, the lock yielding after long, cold minutes.

Inside, the dark was absolute.

They used penlights, keeping the beams low. The building was a maze of empty server racks, their cables hanging like dead vines. Dust covered everything, thick and undisturbed. They found the service elevator - dead, of course - and took the stairs to the fourth floor.

The room was smaller than Étienne had expected. A single rack, a small desk, a hand-crank radio bolted to the floor. And there, carefully labeled in marker on a battered metal case: *SERVER - DO NOT REMOVE.*

"It's still here," Claire said.

Étienne unlatched the case. Inside, a ruggedized laptop nestled in foam, its hand-crank generator attached to the side. He checked the connections, then began cranking. The resistance was stiff, the mechanism cold, but after a few minutes the screen flickered to life.

The laptop's drive was a mirror of everything Marc had gathered. Most of it they'd already seen. But in the final folder, dated just before Marc's disappearance, was a single audio file.

*voice_memo_14.ogg*

Étienne looked at Claire. She nodded.

He pressed play.

The recording quality was poor - it sounded like a phone placed on a table, muffled voices in a room with bad acoustics. But the conversation was clear enough.

"...the northern sector is dark as requested," said a voice Étienne didn't recognize. "The economic damage is beyond projections, but the public narrative is holding. The storm is getting the blame."

"Good." The second voice was deeper, older, with the unmistakable cadence of someone used to being obeyed. "The final phase requires a shift. We need the interior ministry to issue emergency powers. That requires the energy minister to resign - or be perceived as having failed."

"That can be arranged."

There was a pause, the sound of a glass being set down.

"What of the resistance cells?" the older voice asked.

"Minimal. The protests we seeded have been contained. The arrests are proceeding without incident."

"And the sector blackouts?"

"Continuing on schedule. The utilities are playing their part. Some need more convincing than others, but the incentive structure is adequate."

The recording ended with a click.

Étienne sat back, his breath pluming in the cold. His hands, despite his gloves, were trembling.

"The final phase," Claire said quietly. "They have a schedule."

"Yes."

"And they can make an energy minister resign on command."

Étienne stared at the laptop screen. The voice of the older man tugged at something. He knew it. There was a quality, a nasal edge, that he'd heard in briefing rooms and conference calls for years.

He replayed the recording, isolating the final exchange. The older man's laugh, brief and dry, before the click.

"Christ," he said softly.

"What?"

He looked at Claire, the weight of recognition settling into his chest like a stone. "The energy minister. The current one. I've heard him speak at every major grid meeting for the last four years."

"The voice is his?"

"That's not what I mean." Étienne stood abruptly, pacing the small room. "The recording. Where was it made? Not just a room somewhere - listen to the background. That low hum underneath the voices."

Claire leaned in, frowning. "I don't hear anything."

"Because you don't work with grid equipment," Étienne said. "But I do. That's a transformer hum. Specific harmonic signature. I'd recognize it anywhere."

He turned to face her, the implications crashing together.

"That recording was made inside RTE headquarters. In my office."

Claire went still.

"The older man," Étienne continued, his voice tight. "The one giving orders. I thought I recognized him. Because I heard him every day for a decade. He was my mentor. The man who trained me, who vouched for me after the network security incident that should have ended my career."

He looked at the laptop, at Marc's evidence, at the fragile thread of truth they'd woven together through a dark continent.

"He's been inside the conspiracy from the beginning. And he had access to my office. Which means he knew everything I knew. Every move I planned to make."

The silence stretched between them.

"He knew we were coming," Claire said finally.

Étienne shook his head slowly. "He knew we were coming before we did."