Read Chapter 35: The Shortwave Station

The parting came at false dawn, the sky over the Jura a bruised purple. Étienne watched his brother cinch the strap of the worn rucksack over his shoulder, the one that held the SD card and the whole weight of Europe's restoration. Marc's wounded arm hung stiff, but his eyes had that hard, focused look Étienne remembered from their father's funeral—the look that said *I will not break.*

"Seven hundred kilometers," Marc said, not a question. "I'll take the freight lines through Basel, then north. Cargo trains still run on diesel. They're not watching every switchyard."

"You're wounded. You'll bleed out before you cross the Rhine if that dressing slips."

Marc smiled, thin and tired. "Then I'll have to be careful, won't I?" He stepped forward and gripped Étienne's shoulder with his good hand. "You find that radio. You make them hear you. And when this is over, we burn the fishing dam and never speak of it again."

"Deal."

They did not hug. Moreau men didn't, not even after a decade of silence and a night of gunfire. But Étienne held his brother's gaze a second longer than necessary, then turned and swung onto the dirt bike he'd liberated from a farmhouse three valleys back. It had a full tank and a rack welded to the back, enough for the generator parts he'd strapped down: a rotor, a voltage regulator, an exciter coil wrapped in oilcloth.

He twisted the throttle and let the bike's engine swallow the silence.

The route north into the Swiss Alps was brutal. The dirt bike bucked over goat trails and military-access roads that hadn't been maintained since the Cold War. Twice he had to dismount and walk the machine up switchbacks too steep for its gearing, the generator parts grinding against their straps. The sky stayed a pale, washed-out gray—solar debris still scratching at the atmosphere, he guessed. No GPS. No satellites worth trusting anyway. He navigated by contour map and dead reckoning, the same skills his mentor Fercèy had drilled into him on summer exercises twenty years ago.

*The grid is a living thing, Étienne. You can't command it from a screen. You have to walk its bones.*

By noon he crested a ridge and saw the station.

It sat alone on a granite shoulder of the mountain, a cluster of rust-streaked buildings dominated by a lattice tower that rose a hundred meters into the thin air. The tower looked ancient, its cross-braces pitted, its guy wires sagging. But the antenna array at the top—a complex web of dipoles and reflectors—gleamed with recent work, and a thin ribbon of smoke rose from the main building's chimney.

Étienne killed the engine and let the bike coast the last hundred meters. The front door opened before he reached it, and a man stepped out holding a shotgun in a way that suggested he knew exactly how to use it.

He was old, maybe seventy-five, with a white beard cropped short and eyes the color of faded glacier ice. He wore a heavy wool sweater under a leather vest, and his hands were scarred with the burns of a lifetime of tube radios and hot cathodes.

"You're a long way from any road," the old man said. His voice was calm, unhurried. The voice of someone who hadn't needed to hurry in decades.

"My name is Étienne Moreau. I'm a senior engineer with RTE, the French grid operator."

"I know who you are. I know the RTE. Doesn't answer my question."

Étienne dismounted slowly, keeping his hands visible. "I need your transmitter. I need to reach the world."

The old man—his name, Étienne would learn, was Werner—looked at him for a long moment, then at the generator parts strapped to the bike. He lowered the shotgun, but only slightly.

"The consortium's been dark on every frequency I can reach for two weeks. Even the Swiss Army has gone quiet. You think my old lady up there"—he jerked his chin toward the tower—"is going to punch through that?"

"She's a Cold War relic. She's got a hundred kilowatts to a properly matched array, and she runs on diesel, not the grid. If I can rebuild her exciter and get the rotor seated, she'll push a signal across the Atlantic."

Werner grunted. "The exciter's been dead since '09. I've been running at reduced power for a decade. You brought parts?"

"I brought the right parts."

Another long silence. Werner's fingers drummed on the shotgun's stock. He looked past Étienne, down the mountain toward the valley where the lights had gone out and stayed out. He was thinking of something—a daughter, a granddaughter, a story he'd heard on a dying battery radio.

"Generators," Werner said at last. "I've got two, but one's got a cracked block and the other's been cranky since February. We fix them first, or you're broadcasting into the void with a dead mic."

"We fix them all. Then we climb the tower."

Werner spat into the dirt. "You're not afraid of heights, I hope."

"No. But I'm afraid of what happens if we're too slow."

They worked through the afternoon. The generator shed was a cramped space thick with the smell of diesel and old grease, and Étienne fell into the rhythm of it—hands finding bolt sizes, ears tuning to the whine of an engine that was missing just a half-turn of idle. Werner was competent, methodical, unhurried. He didn't ask questions about the consortium, or the blackout, or why a French engineer was standing in his shed with a rifle's barrel of a story behind him. He just worked.

By dusk, the first generator rumbled to life. The second took another two hours, and when it caught, the shed filled with a steady, throaty roar that made the dust dance off the rafters.

Werner killed the lights and gestured to the tower, black against the dying sun. "The array's still connected. We'll have to climb to check the feed lines, but the tower held through the storm. She's old, but she's honest."

"Then we go now."

"Now?" Werner looked at him, and for the first time something like wariness crossed his face. "It's dark in an hour. Climbing that thing at night is suicide."

"It's darker in the valley," Étienne said. "And they're hunting me there. The longer we wait, the more time they have to find us."

Werner studied him, then nodded slowly. "You're not just a grid engineer, are you?"

"I used to do other things."

"Like what?"

"Things that make me comfortable climbing in the dark."

They gathered harnesses and headlamps. Werner insisted on coming up himself—"You don't know the lean of her"—and so they climbed together, two dark figures ascending the lattice against a sky that was turning from violet to black. The wind picked up, cold and sharp, and the tower groaned beneath them like a living thing. Étienne focused on the next grip, the next rung, the steady rhythm of his breathing.

They reached the top forty minutes later. The antenna array spread around them, a metal spiderweb catching starlight. Werner ran his gloved hands along a coaxial feed line, grunted, and used a small wrench to reseat a connector.

"Good enough," he said, his voice thin at this height. "She'll push. Now let's get down before my hands freeze off."

They descended, and Étienne's feet had just touched the ground when he saw it.

A light, far off to the east, winking in the darkness. Not a star. Not a car.

A drone, running dark, its exhaust trail barely visible in the moonlight. It was flying a grid pattern, precise and patient, scanning the ridgeline.

Werner saw it too. He went very still, the shotgun in his hand forgotten.

"They found you," Werner said quietly. "Or they're about to."

Étienne watched the drone's light blink, pause, then resume its sweep. It was moving closer. He did the math in his head: they had maybe twenty minutes before the drone reached the station's perimeter.

Werner turned to him, his voice dropping. "You brought your war to my mountain, boy. Now I need to know something."

"You need to know if what I'm saying is true."

"No." Werner shook his head, and his eyes were hard as the glacier ice they resembled. "I need to know your brother made it. Because if he didn't, there's nothing to broadcast, is there? Just you and a story and a dead continent."

Étienne thought of Marc, limping toward a freight yard in Basel with an SD card taped to his chest.

"He made it," Étienne said. "He'll make it. He's a Moreau."

Werner held his gaze for a long moment, then grunted and walked toward the station house. "Get the fuel cans from the shed. We're going to need to keep the generators running while you talk. And if that drone gets close, I'll put a hole in it that'll make its owner think twice."

"Your shotgun can't—"

"It can," Werner cut him off. "It's loaded with slugs. Trust an old man who's been waiting for a war longer than you've been alive." He paused at the door, looking back at Étienne. "You're going to tell them everything, aren't you? The blackout, the purge, all of it."

"Everything I know."

Werner nodded slowly. "Then maybe my granddaughter will have a grid to come home to. That's all I need to know."

He disappeared inside. Étienne stood in the yard, watching the drone's light drift closer, and felt the weight of the purge protocol drive in his pack—and the weight of every facility he knew was on that list, every power station his mentor had helped build, ready to be permanently crippled.

He had a transmitter. He had proof. And he had a drone coming to take it all away.

Étienne grabbed the fuel cans from the shed and started moving.