Read Chapter 26: Aftermath of Conflict

The barn smelled of diesel and dry hay. Étienne did not remember entering it. One moment he was running through the gorse line, lungs burning, the turboprop’s engine whine still pressed into his skull; the next, he was on his knees on packed dirt, hands on his thighs, head down, watching the dark spread of sweat bloom across his shirt.

His right hand was shaking. He watched it tremble against his thigh and understood, distantly, that this was the body’s own reckoning—the adrenaline bill coming due.

He forced himself upright. The barn’s corrugated roof had a rusted hole the size of a dinner plate, and through it he could see the last smudge of twilight bleeding out of the sky. Somewhere beyond the tree line, the Frankfurt airfield was burning, or being burned, or simply screaming with alarms he could no longer hear. He did not know. He had run nine kilometers on foot, maybe more, navigating by stars and the distant hum of unharmed highways, until his legs had simply stopped cooperating and this barn had appeared like an answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

Claire was gone.

No—not gone. *Elsewhere.* She had peeled away at the airfield’s northern fence, pressing the forged diplomatic passport into his hand with two rounds left in her magazine, telling him she would draw the patrols east, that she would meet him in Geneva, that *this is the only way, Étienne, you have to go alone now.*

He had argued. He had grabbed her wrist and argued, and she had looked at him with that particular stillness she wore when she had already made up her mind, and then she had kissed him once—hard, brief, like a document stamped *final*—and vanished into the long grass.

That had been eleven hours ago. Or maybe three. Time had stopped behaving.

Étienne found a rusted workbench against the barn’s rear wall and sat on its edge. His hands, finally still, moved to his jacket pocket. The satellite radio Jacques had given him was a slab of composite and steel, military-issue, heavy as a brick. He turned it over in his fingers, then thumbed the transmission switch.

Claire’s frequency was burned. They both knew it. The consortium had cloned her DGSE badge in Lyon; every channel she had ever touched was suspect. But there was one number—a dead-drop relay in Marseille, a postbox she had described to him once as *the one thing I never digitized*—and he had memorized it anyway, at the time thinking it was the kind of romantic gesture engineered engineers made, and now it was the only line he had.

He keyed the mic.

“Crane. This is Moreau. If you receive this, the Marseille postbox is live, repeat, live. Send everything to the wire services. Associated Press, Reuters, AFP—all of them. The Frankfurt converter station. The welded interconnectors. The Langhammer AG contracts. Jacques’s testimony, transcribed in full. I’m attaching coordinates for three compromised substations between Lyon and Paris that the consortium has tampered with. Do not try to reach me. Do not respond on this frequency. If I don’t surface in seventy-two hours, release the full archive. No embargo.”

He paused, thumb hovering over the transmission lock.

“Claire. If you’re hearing this on a relay, don’t. Run. I’ll find you in Geneva, at the lake, the way we discussed. If I don’t arrive by the third day, you are authorized to treat me as lost and execute the archive schedule. I’m sorry. I should have said more at the fence.”

He released the switch. The radio’s display showed a single blinking bar—signal strength, weak but active, chewing through the static of a dead continent to find its satellite.

He set the radio down on the workbench and stared at it.

Jacques’s face swam up unbidden. The old man’s steady hands, the way he had placed the watch in Étienne’s palm like a communion wafer. *You were never the traitor. I was the one sabotaging them from inside.* The words had been calm, measured, the calculated disclosures of a man who had spent years lying and had finally found a truth worth telling.

But Jacques had also known about the watch—the watch Étienne’s brother had given him, the same watch the foreign agents had mentioned. That was not a coincidence. That was a thread Étienne could not pull without the whole tapestry unraveling.

He picked up the radio again, cycled to Jacques’s personal frequency.

His thumb hovered.

The last time he had trusted Jacques, he had been nineteen, a junior engineer in Lyon, and Jacques had assigned him to a network penetration exercise that had gone sideways, nearly getting him fired and permanently flagged. Jacques had smoothed it over, but the lesson had lodged in Étienne like a splinter: *the old man deploys people, and sometimes the deployment is the lesson.*

But Jacques was the only one who knew the full architecture of the consortium’s movement. The only one who had mapped the interconnectors. The only one who had given him a head start and then watched him run.

Étienne transmitted: one pulse, two, three. The pattern Jacques had drilled into him a decade ago, a ghost of a code from a system that no longer existed.

The response came back in under four seconds, a single pulse. *Confirmed.*

Étienne released a breath he had not realized he had been holding. “I’m alive. I’m moving overland to Geneva. I need you to verify the data center’s physical security—entrances, exits, anything your people left behind. And I need to know if Claire’s badge trace originated from Lyon or from somewhere closer to the border.”

The radio hissed. Three pulses again. *Confirmed, and then silence.*

Jack said nothing more. Perhaps he was watching. Perhaps he was compromised. But Étienne had made his choice, and the choice was the only road forward.

He lay down on a bale of hay flattened by years of weight, the radio clutched to his chest like a child’s toy. The barn’s roof creaked. Wind moved through the gaps in the planks, carrying the smell of rain and cold metal.

He closed his eyes.

Marc’s smile came to him in the dark—that crooked, unfinished grin, the one that had never quite decided whether it was a smirk or a plea. Marc, two years older, the one who had taught him to solder circuit boards at the kitchen table, who had walked him through his first routing algorithms with the patience of a man who genuinely loved the mathematics of connection. Marc, who had disappeared from a data center in Geneva six years ago, leaving behind no body, no note, only a single unanswered call log and a desk still warm.

Étienne had filed the report. He had made the calls. He had flown to Geneva himself, walked the corridors of the facility where Marc had been a senior network architect, and been told by polite, unhelpful security staff that his brother had resigned effective immediately, no forwarding address, all accounts closed.

He had believed them. For years, he had believed them, because the alternative was too large to hold.

But the consortium’s data center was in Geneva. The same building, according to the fragment Jacques had given him, the same goddamn glass-and-steel tower on the lakefront where Marc had last been seen alive.

The connection snapped into place with the weight of a breaker closing.

Étienne’s eyes snapped open. He stared at the barn’s dark rafters, heart hammering.

Marc had not disappeared randomly. Marc had been *there*, in the same building, years before the consortium took shape. Marc had been a network architect with access to Europe’s routing core. Marc had taught Étienne everything he knew.

And Marc had vanished the month before the first unexplained grid anomaly.

Étienne sat up slowly. His mind, exhausted, refused to stop turning. A chain of questions, each heavier than the last, dragged through his skull:

*What did Marc find? What did Marc know? And did Marc leave because he was silenced, or because he was already part of the structure that was only now revealing itself?*

He could not answer. Not here, in a barn, with the radio dead and the wind rising.

But he knew where to go.

Geneva.

Not to the data center the foreign agents had pointed to. Not to the tower Jacques had named. But to the building where his brother’s ghost still sat at a desk, in a room full of servers, humming with a current that Étienne was only beginning to understand.

He lay back down, closed his eyes, and let the image of Marc’s smile carry him under. The dream, when it came, was not a nightmare. It was a memory—the two of them, teenagers, crouched over a disassembled radio on a Saturday afternoon, Marc laughing as a capacitor arced and hissed, Étienne flinching, and Marc saying, *no, no, watch—watch how the current finds its way.*

The current always found its way.

Étienne woke in the dark, the barn cold around him, and knew exactly which way he had to run.