Read Chapter 36: Generators and Greed

The diesel generator coughed once, twice, then caught with a rumble that shook the floorboards. Étienne watched the needle on the voltage meter climb, past the yellow band, into the green. The lights in the shack flickered—first hesitant, then steady.

"The tower's not the problem," Werner said from the doorway. The old man had a rifle slung over one shoulder, a rusted relic he'd pulled from a cabinet when the drone first appeared. "It never was. That generator's been sitting for six years. The fuel's stale. The bearings are dry. It'll give us an hour, maybe two, before it seizes."

Étienne wiped his hands on his trousers. "Then we give it what we need in two hours."

"Or we fix it properly."

He looked up. Werner's face was granite in the low light, but his eyes flickered with something Étienne hadn't seen before—a kind of stubborn hope, warring with the pragmatism of a man who'd spent his life alone on a mountain.

"I don't have time for properly."

"No. But properly will buy you the time you don't have." Werner set the rifle against the doorframe and crossed to the workbench, where he began pulling tools from a worn canvas roll. "That generator isn't broken. It's neglected. Same thing, different name." He paused, looking back at Étienne. "What you're asking me to do—broadcast proof that powerful men have turned off the lights for their own greed—that's not something I can undo if it goes wrong."

"I know."

"Do you? Because power likes to punish the people who expose it. Publicly. I've seen it happen in places you've never read about, boy. I was there when they shot the radio stations in Managua. I was there when they strung the cables in Sarajevo."

Étienne moved closer. "Then why are you even considering this?"

Werner's jaw tightened. "My granddaughter. She's eight years old. Lives in Lyon with her mother. The last time I reached her was four days ago, when the phones still worked half-decently. She was asking why the lights went out. She was scared." He met Étienne's eyes. "I told her, 'Don't worry, Grandpa knows people who fix things.' I was lying. I don't know anyone. You're the first person who's shown up here in three years with a story I actually believe."

Étienne understood the weight of that. He had no money. No resources. Nothing to offer this man except risk.

"I can't pay you in anything that's worth anything," he said. "Europe's currency is frozen in dead bank servers. What I have is the truth, and the chance to restore something bigger than either of us."

Werner snorted. "That's a politician's speech. I asked you to think of my granddaughter, not to sell me the moon."

"I'm thinking of her." Étienne pulled out the purge protocol drive, holding it up. "This file contains plans to permanently destroy any power plant that wasn't built for the consortium's ghost network. If they succeed, there won't be a grid to restore. Your granddaughter will grow up in a world where electricity is a luxury for the connected, not a right for everyone. She'll live in permanent dark, while the people who caused this sit in their glass towers using solar and batteries they hoarded years ago."

The silence stretched. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the aluminum sheeting on the shack's roof.

Finally, Werner nodded. Slowly, like a drawbridge lowering.

"Fine. But we do it right." He turned to the workbench and pulled out a coil of thick copper wire. "The generator needs a full service—oil, filters, and the fuel needs to be swapped. There's a cache of diesel buried two hundred meters south, left over from when I ran this station for the civil defense. Should still be good, if the seals held."

"How long?"

"Three hours, maybe four. If we don't break anything."

Étienne looked at the sky. The drone was still out there—a dark speck against the fading stars, holding position on the eastern ridge. Watching. Waiting.

"Then we better not break anything."

---

They worked by headlamp and moonlight. Étienne had done emergency repairs on substation equipment under worse conditions, but never with a bored machine gun drone hovering a kilometer away.

The tower itself stood forty meters tall, a lattice of rust-streaked steel that had once relayed emergency broadcasts across three national borders. The antenna feed line was corroded at the base. Werner rigged a harness while Étienne climbed, ninety minutes of hanging in the wind with a soldering iron and a prayer, reconnecting the line to the transmitter's final stage.

"Was it always this exposed?" Étienne called down, the wind whipping his words.

The drone hadn't moved. But there was something different about it now. It seemed lower. Closer.

"Always," Werner shouted back. "Cold War, they needed the line of sight to reach the Alps. We were the backbone of the western defense network. They used to say if this tower went dark, Switzerland fell."

"Nice to know we're continuing the tradition."

He descended, hands raw, and they moved to the generator. Werner drained the stale diesel and replaced the filters while Étienne checked the ignition system. The part that was cracked—a ceramic insulator in the fuel injector—took Werner forty-five minutes to jury-rig with high-temperature epoxy and a piece of scavenged porcelain from a coffee mug.

"Founding fathers' coffee," Werner said, gesturing at the missing handle. "I've been drinking from this mug since the Berlin Wall fell. Gave it to the cause, but only because you're fixing the grid."

Étienne smiled. It was the first time in days he'd felt like anything other than a hunted animal.

Then the drone moved.

It came off the ridge in a smooth, deliberate arc, dropping altitude. Not scans now. A targeting run.

Werner followed Étienne's gaze and grabbed his rifle. "Son of a bitch." He lifted the ancient weapon and worked the bolt. "That's a reconnaissance model. Armed drones have a different silhouette. We still have time, but if it's calling for backup—"

"How much time?"

"Depends on how quickly they believe what they see." Werner chambered a round. "Twenty minutes. Maybe less."

The generator was 80 percent repaired. The lights were ready. The transmitter was warmed up.

Twenty minutes.

Étienne calculated quickly. "We need ten."

"Then we make seven." Werner moved to the scrub line and dropped to a knee, rifle tracking the drone's approach. He fired. The crack split the night, echoing down the valley. The drone jinked, but didn't fall. "They'll have heard that."

"Good," Étienne said, turning back to the generator. "Let them know we're not hiding."

He didn't know if they could do it. He didn't know if the transmitter would hold, whether the signal would reach further than the next valley over, whether Marguerite was safe, whether Marc had made it to Brussels, whether any of it mattered at all.

But he knew what the alternative was.

He bent to the engine and pushed. The old man kept shooting.