Read Chapter 34: Aftermath of the Shots

The crack of the rifle shot still rang in Étienne’s ears as he half-carried, half-dragged Marc away from the dam’s concrete apron. Marc’s breath came in sharp, wet gasps, and his left arm hung limp against his side, blood soaking through the sleeve of his jacket where a ricochet had torn through the muscle.

“It’s superficial,” Marc managed between gritted teeth. “Just keep moving.”

Étienne didn’t answer. He’d seen enough wounds to know that “superficial” was a word men used when they wanted to keep walking. The bullet had passed clean through, which was something. The bleeding was steady but not arterial. He could work with that.

Behind them, the dam loomed dark and silent. They’d silenced the two guards in the control room, but a third had appeared from the maintenance stairwell as they made their way out. The man had fired twice, wildly, and Marc had shoved Étienne into the lockers just as the second shot clipped his arm. Then Étienne had returned fire and the man had gone down.

They’d taken the utility tunnel used by the dam’s original construction crews—a narrow concrete passage that smelled of wet earth and rust, half-flooded in places, that Étienne remembered from the summers his father had brought him to inspect the turbines. Marc had stumbled through the shallow water, leaving a trail of diluted blood behind him.

Now they were in the treeline, the Jura forest pressing close on all sides. Étienne found a fallen pine and lowered Marc onto its trunk, then shrugged off his pack and pulled out the field kit he’d carried from Geneva.

“Let me see it.”

Marc peeled off his jacket with a wince. Underneath, his shirt sleeve was soaked through, a dark stain spreading down to his wrist. Étienne cut the fabric away with his knife and examined the wound. The entry point was clean, the exit a ragged hole a little larger.

“You’ll live,” he said, trying to sound certain. “But we need to clean this before it goes septic.”

Marc nodded, his face pale in the moonlight. “I know a place. Not far.”

The shelter was a hunter’s cabin, abandoned years ago but still standing. Marc had stumbled upon it as a boy, during one of their summers at the dam, and had kept its existence a secret. The roof was mostly intact, the stove had scattered holes, and there was a stack of dry wood against the back wall.

Étienne got the fire going while Marc sat on a dusty cot, hissing through his teeth as Étienne poured the last of his antiseptic into the wound and packed it with clean cloth from his pack. He tied a field dressing over it, tighter than he wanted but tight enough to stop the bleeding.

“You’ll need stitches,” Étienne said. “Not tonight. Tomorrow, maybe. If we can find a vet or a medical supplier.”

Marc managed a thin smile. “You’ve gotten good at this.”

“I’ve had practice.” Étienne didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. They both knew what the last few weeks had been made of.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. The fire crackled, sending shadows dancing against the rough timber walls. Outside, the wind moved through the pines like a low, continuous breath.

Marc broke the silence first. “You thought I was one of them.”

Étienne’s jaw tightened. “You disappeared. After the blackout. You took their work, and you disappeared.”

“I took *your* work,” Marc said quietly. “The restoration algorithm you built. They had it. When I found out what they were planning—the purge, the permanent shutdown—I knew they’d never let it out. So I took it.”

“You could have told me.”

“Tell you what? That I’d spent three years working for a company that turned out to be a front for a coup? That I’d noticed the signs too late and by the time I did, they were watching me?” Marc shook his head. “I didn’t know who was safe. I didn’t know if you were still the brother I grew up with or another piece of the machine.”

The words landed like a blow. Étienne felt his own shame rise—the suspicion that had festered in his gut since Geneva, since Marguerite had shown him the holding company papers with Marc’s name on them. He’d been so ready to believe it. So ready to think his brother had become the enemy.

“I wanted to call you,” Marc continued. “Every day, I wanted to call you. But I knew they’d find out. Every call, every message—they had eyes on that, too. The ghost network isn’t just on the grid. It’s everywhere. They own the fiber, the microwave relays, the satellite links. I had to go dark. Completely dark.”

Étienne stared at the fire. “Fercèy.”

Marc’s eyes flickered. “I heard. I’m sorry, Étienne. Truly sorry.”

“They ordered it. Because he knew the purge was coming and was going to speak out.” Étienne’s voice was flat, level. “He trusted them. Trusted the institutions. Thought he could fight them from the inside.”

“He was a good man.”

“He was.” Étienne’s hands curled into fists. “And I wasn’t there to stop it. I wasn’t even there to hear his name until they were already hunting me.”

Marc shifted on the cot, wincing as the pressure changed in his arm. “That’s the thing, though. If you’d gone to him first, if you’d told him what you knew, you’d have walked into the same trap. They knew about you, did you know that? They were tracking you from the river crossing in Germany. Watching you. Waiting for you to lead them to Fercèy, so they could deal with both of you at once.”

Étienne looked up sharply. “The operative. At the data center. He knew my movements.”

“They’ve satellite coverage of the entire corridor you came through. Thermal imaging, ground sensors, everything. You were a moving target they could see in real time,” Marc said. “But you moved too fast. You hid too well. You found Fercèy before they could coordinate the kill order. And when you didn’t stay dead, they panicked.”

The data center. The timed fire he’d set before driving south. He’d bought himself hours, maybe a day. But the cleanup would be thorough. They’d rebuild the servers, reroute the backups, and by the time anyone realized the purge protocol was missing, the trail would be gone.

Unless they used the one thing they couldn’t erase: the broadcast.

“You said you have the algorithm,” Étienne said. “The restoration code.”

Marc nodded and tapped a pocket on the inside of his jacket. “SD card. Second one. The first I left in your apartment wall as a decoy. Led their sweep team on a two-day wild goose chase.”

“Why a decoy?”

“Because they knew I’d taken something,” Marc said simply. “I had to give them something to find, or they’d keep looking until they found the real one. Took me two days to think of it. Wrote a forged version that would take their brightest engineers a week to realize was gibberish.”

Trust Marc to think of that. Even now, with blood seeping through a field dressing, his brother’s mind was working three steps ahead.

Étienne moved to sit on the floor across the fire from the cot. The flames flickered between them, turning their faces to masks of light and shadow. He reached for the pack and pulled out the shielded drive.

“This is the purge protocol. Their kill code. It lists every facility they intended to permanently disable—every power station, every backup turbine, every line that could be brought back online by hand.” He turned it in his fingers. “He wanted to turn Europe’s lights on forever. We can turn them on—or prove they never intended us to.”

Marc’s eyes were dark in the firelight. “Together, we have the full picture. The plot. The proof. The solution.”

“The world will need to see it,” Étienne said. “All of it. At once, before they can spin it.”

“An open broadcast,” Marc said slowly. “We need a transmitter that isn’t on their network. Out of their reach. Out of their awareness.”

Étienne had already thought it through. “There’s a shortwave station in the high mountains. Old one, built in the 1970s for Cold War frequencies—redundant, even antediluvian. It’s off the grid, solar power, and it can reach most of Europe if the conditions are right. I know its maintenance crew. They’re French army reservists, old men now, but they kept it operational out of pride.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Once. Years ago, for a training exercise on resilience protocols.” Étienne smiled grimly. “I remember the supply route. There’s an old generator that runs on diesel. I can rig it to last a few hours. That’s all we need.”

Marc drew a slow breath. “Then we go at dawn. I’ll take the SD card to Brussels. I know a journalist—a Belgian who worked the energy beat for years. She’s the one who first suspected something was wrong, when the communications grid went down in ways that didn’t match the storm damage. She’ll know what to do with a real restoration algorithm.”

Étienne shook his head. “You’re in no condition to travel.”

“I’ll manage.” Marc looked at his arm. “A clean through-and-through doesn’t stop a man from riding a bicycle. And Brussels is only… seven hundred kilometers. I’ll find a freight train. There are always freight trains running, even in the dark.”

“You’re talking about going through hostile territory without anyone to cover you.”

“I’m talking about going where I’m least expected,” Marc said. “You think they’ll be watching for a wounded man on a bicycle heading north to expose them? Or for the man who broke into their data center and burned their ghost network to the ground?”

Étienne laughed—short and without humor. “They’ll be watching for both.”

“Then we make sure they look the wrong way,” Marc said. He leaned forward, his face serious in the firelight. “This isn’t about us, Étienne. It never was. They tried to make it personal—the hunt, Fercèy, the dam. But the board they’re playing on is the whole continent. Every city, every factory, every hospital. All waiting in the dark for someone to decide whether they’re allowed to see the light again.”

Étienne looked at the flame. At the blood-streaked bandage on his brother’s arm. The weight of the drive in his pocket felt heavier now. More purpose, not more burden.

“All right,” he said eventually. “Brussels. The SD card. You go to the journalist.”

“And you go to the mountains.”

“And I go to the mountains.” He looked across the fire at his brother. “I’m sorry, Marc. For doubting you.”

Marc’s mouth twitched. “And I’m sorry I shot you in the leg with a paintball when we were fourteen. I think we’re even.”

“That was an accident.”

“No,” Marc said, grinning for the first time. “It really wasn’t.”

The silence that fell between them now was easier than the one that had come before. The fire snapped. Outside, the wind continued its patient breathing. Beyond the window, the forest stretched away toward the first gray hint of a coming dawn.

Étienne felt something shift in his chest—a loosening of a knot he hadn’t realized he’d been carrying for years. The purpose was still there. The rage. The grief for Fercèy, unresolved and unavenged. But there was room now for something else.

He stood, crossed to the cot, and clapped his brother on the shoulder. Marc winced, but he didn’t flinch away.

“Come on,” Étienne said. “We’ve got three hours before dawn. We should eat something, and then you’re going to lie down and sleep while I figure out how we find you a train.”

Marc nodded, leaning back against the wall, his eyes already drooping. “You know where we went wrong as brothers?”

“Where?”

“We spent so much time arguing about what we disagreed on that we forgot we were standing on the same ground the whole time,” Marc said. His voice was thick with exhaustion. “Same ground, Étienne. We always were.”

Étienne watched his brother’s eyes close, his breathing slow into the rhythm of sleep. The darkness was thinning at the edges of the window, and somewhere beyond the trees, a bird began its tentative morning song.

He pulled the shield drive from his pocket and held it in his palm, warming it with his grip. Then he placed it carefully on the floor beside his pack, beside the map Marguerite had given him, beside the water and the bread he’d carried from a farmhouse kitchen.

The lights were still out across half of Europe. The consortium still had its forces, its assets, its plans. There would be more firefights, more narrow escapes, more losses. He knew that. But for the first time in weeks, he wasn’t running alone.

He looked out at the first pale light in the east, and let himself feel the quiet stirring of something that resembled hope, before the morning tasks swallowed it whole.