Read Chapter 5: Old Debts

The bicycle’s chain ground against a gritty sprocket, each rotation a small confession of how far Étienne was from the smooth, humming machinery he had spent his life mastering. Dawn had not yet broken over the Île-de-France, but a faint, sickly orange bled along the eastern horizon—not the clean gold of sunrise, but the bruised glow of a grid still sputtering in its death throes. He pedaled south on back roads, avoiding the main arteries where military convoys and desperate civilians would soon be crawling. Paper maps, old habits from a pre-digital age, were fanned across his handlebar bag. The laptop was strapped to his back beneath a stolen raincoat, its edges digging into his ribs with every bump.

He had not slept. Not really. Every passing car, every distant hum of an engine, sent a spike of adrenaline through his legs. The jamming signal had been precise, surgical—the kind of countermeasure he himself had designed once, in another life, for another employer. That thought coiled in his gut like a cold wire. Whoever was silencing Laurent knew their tradecraft. And Laurent, with his big mouth and older loyalties, was likely already in a hole somewhere, or worse.

By midday, the landscape softened into the rolling patchwork of the Loire Valley. Vineyards and sunflower fields, now brown and brittle, stretched between stone farmhouses. The air smelled of dust and dry leaves. Étienne stopped at a roadside shrine, a small stone Madonna bleached by sun, and drank from a plastic bottle he had refilled at a trough. His thighs screamed. His hands, blistered from the rubber grips, ached with a dull throb. He checked the watch on his wrist—a mechanical one, thank god, immune to the electromagnetic chaos—and calculated the remaining distance. Eighteen kilometers to Claire’s place. Assuming she still lived at the old farmhouse she had inherited from her grandmother. Assuming she was even alive.

Claire Delacroix. The name brought with it a flood of bittersweet memory. Five years ago, they had worked side by side at RTE’s national control center, two of the youngest senior engineers ever admitted to the inner sanctum. Claire was brilliant—a genius at SCADA systems, fluent in the dark poetry of industrial control protocols. But she was also careless, prone to cutting corners when deadlines loomed. It was that carelessness that had nearly cost her everything. A misconfigured relay, a missed patch, and a regional blackout in the southwest had cascaded into a near-grid collapse. The investigation had been brutal. Heads rolled. Claire faced dismissal and criminal charges.

Étienne had stepped in. Quietly, methodically, he had altered the audit logs—a small manipulation, a nudge in the timecode that shifted the blame to a subcontractor who had already left the country. It was a debt, he had told himself at the time. She had once covered for him, years earlier, when a late-night experiment had nearly blown a transformer. Now he needed to call that debt in.

The farmhouse appeared as the sun dipped below the horizon. A low stone structure, whitewashed, with a rusted weather vane creaking on the roof. No lights in the windows—but then again, no lights anywhere. Étienne leaned the bicycle against a broken fence post and approached on foot, his footsteps soft on the gravel. He circled the building once, checking for vehicles, for shadows, for the telltale glint of a rifle barrel. Nothing. The place looked abandoned, but something felt off. The front door was ajar, a finger’s width.

He pushed it open. The interior smelled of cold ash and lavender. “Claire?” His voice was a whisper. No answer. He moved through the dark, guided by memory. The kitchen. The pantry. A staircase leading to the upper floor. In the living room, a figure sat in an armchair by the cold fireplace, wrapped in a heavy blanket.

“You look like shit, Étienne.”

Her voice was exhausted, but sharp as ever. He exhaled, a long breath he had not realized he was holding. “You look like you’ve been through a war.”

Claire laughed, a hollow sound. “I have. The private sector is rough.” She gestured to a chair across from her. He sat, and in the dim light, he saw her face—pale, drawn, with a bruise blooming along one cheekbone. “The security firm? They dropped me the moment the grid went down. No contract, no paycheck, no loyalty. I’ve been holed up here for three days with a generator that died this morning.”

“I need a satellite phone.”

She stared at him, unblinking. “The jammed frequencies. You tried to contact someone, and they burned it down.”

“Laurent. Lyon. He mentioned a depot near Mâcon. But he was cut off mid-sentence.” Étienne leaned forward. “I have evidence, Claire. Proof that this wasn’t an accident. The storm was nothing—a minor coronal mass ejection. But someone manipulated the protection systems. They tripped the grid in a deliberate sequence, segment by segment, like a surgeon cutting arteries.”

Claire was silent for a long moment. Then she reached into a pocket of her blanket and pulled out a small black device—a satellite phone, compact and military-grade. “I had this hidden for emergencies. But I don’t have the codes to access the network anymore. My clearance was revoked the day I left RTE.”

“Your clearance, maybe. But I remember your old access patterns. The biometrics are still in my head.” He took the phone, turning it over in his hands. “There’s one more thing I need. You worked for the security firm that has contracts with the grid authority. I need to know who their real clients are. Who’s pulling the strings.”

Claire’s eyes flickered. “Étienne, that’s… that’s proprietary. Even if I could access it, I’d be signing my own death warrant.”

“You owe me.” His voice was flat, unforgiving. “Remember the relay. The one you misconfigured. I covered for you. I buried the evidence. You walk free, you build a new life in the private sector, you make real money. I ask for nothing in return for five years. Now I’m asking.”

She was quiet, the weight of his words pressing down on her. Finally, she nodded and rose, shuffling to a bookshelf and pressing a hidden latch. A false panel swung open, revealing a small safe. She spun the dial with practiced ease, pulled out a slim data chip, and held it up.

“This is the client list. But I’m warning you, Étienne—don’t trust RTE’s CEO. The man’s been courting my firm for months. He wants to use this crisis to push through a privatization deal. ‘Natural disaster,’ he called it. The perfect excuse to dismantle public ownership and hand the whole grid to his friends in the consortium.”

Étienne took the chip. It was cold, inert, and yet he felt its weight like lead. “The CEO of RTE. Gilles Vasseur.” He shook his head. “I knew he was ambitious, but this… this is beyond office politics. This is treason.”

“Worse,” Claire said. “It’s business.” She turned to walk him out, but before she reached the door, the satellite phone in his hand buzzed. Both of them froze. The screen flickered to life—a boot sequence, an incoming call on a frequency Étienne did not recognize. Someone was trying to reach him. Someone knew he had the phone.

He pressed the answer button. A burst of static, then a voice, distorted and mechanical: “Étienne Moreau. You have something we want. Bring the chip and the laptop to the Pont de Sully, south of Paris. You have twenty-four hours. If you don’t, the woman in the chair with you will be the last casualty of your arrogance.”

The line went dead. The room was silent. In the distance, an engine growled—a heavy vehicle, approaching fast on the gravel road.

Claire’s face was white. “You led them here. You brought this to my door.”

The laptop on his back suddenly felt like a bomb. The data chip burned his palm. And the headlights of the approaching vehicle swept across the windows.