Read Chapter 32: Brother's Call

The operative’s voice still rang in Étienne’s ears as he moved deeper into the data center’s bowels, past the humming racks of servers that held Europe’s darkest secret. The man had known his name. Known his movements since the river. The funnel theory wasn’t paranoia—it was architecture.

But the mention of Marc had cracked something open in Étienne’s chest, a door he’d kept welded shut for years. His brother, the ghost who’d disappeared into corporate finance and never looked back. The brother who, according to Marguerite, now owned the very facility Étienne was breaching.

The corridor ended at a reinforced door marked with a symbol Étienne recognized from his own schematics—a legacy tape archive, pre-digital, magnetically shielded. The kind of room where old conversations went to die. The kind of room a man like Marc would use to hide something.

The lock was mechanical, not electronic. Old-fashioned. The kind that required a key, not a code. Étienne pulled the brass key from his pocket—the one Marguerite had kept, the one she’d pressed into his palm with a warning gaze. It fit. Of course it fit.

The door swung open on oiled hinges. Inside, the air was cold and dry. Rows of magnetic tape reels lined the walls, each labeled with dates going back decades. But on a small steel table in the center of the room sat a single device—a portable digital recorder, military-grade, its casing scuffed and worn.

Étienne’s hand hovered over it. The operative had offered Marc’s last known movement files in exchange for a conversation. But this was something else. This was a message. Left here, in a room only someone with the brass key could access.

He pressed play.

Marc’s voice filled the small room, tinny through the speaker but unmistakable. The same cadence, the same slight nasal quality that had driven Étienne mad as a child. His brother had always talked too fast, as if afraid someone would interrupt before he finished.

“Étienne. If you’re hearing this, you found the key. I knew you would. You always were the one who found things.”

A pause. A breath. The sound of Marc steadying himself.

“I know what you’re thinking. That I’m one of them. That I helped build this thing. And you’re right—I did. I was there when they designed the ghost network, when they mapped the overlay onto the legacy grid. I thought it was a backup system. A redundancy protocol for when the storm hit. That’s what they told me. That’s what I believed.”

The recording crackled. Marc’s voice dropped.

“Then I saw the purge protocol. The kill code. They’re not going to restore anything. They’re going to burn the old infrastructure to the ground and rebuild it exactly how they want. No regulators. No oversight. Just them, holding the switch.”

Another pause, longer this time. When Marc spoke again, his voice was raw.

“I tried to stop them. I copied what I could—the restoration algorithm, the real one, the one that would bring the grid back without their overlay. But they found out. They’re coming for me, Étienne. I’ve been running for three days. I don’t know how much longer I can last.”

A ragged breath.

“There’s only one place I can think of where they won’t find me. Where we used to go as kids. The dam. You remember. Where Dad used to take us fishing on Sundays, before everything went to shit.”

Étienne’s throat tightened. The hydroelectric dam at the foot of the Jura, forty kilometers from where he’d grown up. The one spot on the map where the old man had been happy, where they’d all been a family. The one place no one else would think to look.

“I’m going to wait there as long as I can. Three days, maybe four. If you get this, come find me. I have what they want, and I’m not letting it go. Not after what I’ve seen.”

A final crackle, then the recording ended.

Étienne stared at the dead device, his pulse hammering. Marc was alive. Or he had been, two weeks ago. The recording was timestamped—fourteen days old. The operative had said Marc disappeared two weeks ago. That meant the recording had been made around the same time as his disappearance.

Which meant either Marc had made it to the dam and was still hiding there, or the consortium had found him and silenced him, and this recording was nothing but a lure.

Étienne’s jaw tightened. He couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice. The purge protocol code was on his shielded drive, downloaded and verified. That was the proof he needed to expose the consortium. If he ran for the dam and found nothing, he might lose the window to get the code out. If he ran for the border now, he might never know what happened to his brother.

But he already knew the answer. He’d been running on instinct for days, responding to threats, reacting to the consortium’s moves. This was the first time he had a choice that mattered—a choice that could mean saving his brother or losing him forever.

His father’s voice echoed in his memory: *You look after your own. Everything else can wait.*

Étienne tucked the recorder into his jacket, then moved to the server racks. The kill-switch code was already on his drive, but he wanted something more—a redundancy, a backup. He cracked open the nearest terminal, bypassed the physical lock, and began pulling the raw purge protocol files. The download was agonizingly slow, the connection monitored, but he had minutes, maybe less.

The fire would cover his exit. A timer, a chemical accelerant from the maintenance closet, a delay long enough to let him get clear of the blast radius. He’d done it before, in another life, when the work had been less moral and the payouts far better. The skills never quite left you.

He finished the download, ejected the drive, and set the timer with shaking hands. Five minutes. Enough time to reach the drain he’d come through, enough time to be well clear before the flames hit the server banks and the whole place went dark.

As he moved toward the exit, he paused at the door. Marc’s voice still hung in the air, pleading. The dam. The place where they’d been brothers before they’d been strangers.

Étienne didn’t say goodbye to the data center. He didn’t look back. His steps echoed down the corridor, past the operative’s still body where it lay slumped near the entrance, past the rows of servers that held Europe’s future hostage.

He had forty kilometers to cover before dawn, and a dam to find.

If Marc was alive, he would be there. If he wasn’t, Étienne would make sure the men who had silenced him paid for every single light they’d stolen from Europe.

The fire would catch soon. He had to move.