Read Chapter 11: The Search Party

The night pressed down on them, thick and swallowing. Julien led, a crowbar in one hand, his flashlight beam a pale spear cutting through the ruined streets. Camille followed close behind, her medical bag thumping against her hip, and Léa brought up the rear, her eyes scanning the rooftops as if she expected the dawn to come early.

They moved through the familiar gut of the 12th, past shuttered bakeries and abandoned cars. The air was wrong, acrid with smoke and the metallic tang of spilled fuel. Twice they flattened against doorways as figures shifted in the shadows, looters picking through the debris of a world unmoored. Julien’s hand tightened on the crowbar, but the figures moved on, their curses muffled by the dark.

The city listened. A city without sound is a corpse, and this one was still breathing its last ragged breaths.

“Marc’s workshop is two streets over,” Léa whispered, her voice a dry rasp. “He kept a toolbox there for odd jobs.”

They cut down a narrow alley, where the trash bins had been overturned and gnawed at by something desperate. It was there that Julien’s beam caught on a metal gleam. A red toolbox, scuffed and dented, lay on its side in a slick of dark oil that spread like a stain across the cobblestones. Marc’s name was stenciled on the side in white paint.

Julien crouched beside it. He didn’t touch it, just stared. “It’s his. He never left this behind.” His jaw tightened. “Not voluntarily.”

Camille knelt, her hand hovering over the oil. It was fresh, still tacky. “He was here. Recently.”

Léa was already scanning the alley, her flashlight dancing over graffiti and grime. “No blood. No drag marks. Maybe he was running.”

“Or maybe he dropped it,” Julien said, but the hope in his voice was thin, worn through.

A sound cut through the silence, low and insistent. A hum, deep and electric, like a mechanical heartbeat. It vibrated through the soles of their shoes, a frequency that didn’t belong in a dead city.

Julien stood slowly, his head turning toward the north. “That’s not a car. That’s… industrial.”

Léa pulled out her compass, squinting at it in the dark. “That’s the direction of Q-4.”

The substation. The one on Marc’s blueprint, the one on the fire station map. The one someone had restored to a low, hungry power. The three of them stood in the alley, the toolbox forgotten, listening to the ghost of a machine breathing back to life.

“He was heading there,” Camille said, her voice quiet but certain. “He was trying to fix the grid.”

“Or finish breaking it,” Julien countered, but he stepped past her, moving toward the sound.

They left the alley, keeping to the shadows of the buildings. The hum grew louder, a tangible pressure in the air. The street opened onto a broad square, and there it was: a squat, windowless concrete building surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. A single floodlight on the corner bathed the yard in harsh white light—the first living light they’d seen since the blackout began. The gate was ajar.

Léa grabbed Julien’s arm. “Wait. Look.”

Through the fence, they could see a military truck parked inside the yard, its engine idling. A lone soldier stood by the door of the substation, smoking a cigarette, the glow of its tip a tiny orange star.

“They’re guarding it,” Julien breathed. “They have it running.”

“Then Marc didn’t fix it,” Camille said. “They did. For themselves.”

A voice cracked out of the dark, sharp and metallic. A burst of gunfire, not aimed at them, but close. Rounds chewed into a lamppost down the block, shattering glass and sparking against the iron. The soldier at the gate dropped his cigarette and raised his rifle, barking into a radio.

Julien yanked them back into the alley’s mouth. “We need to move. Now.”

They retreated, running low and fast, the echo of the shots chasing them through the empty streets. The blocky silhouette of their building finally rose ahead, a sanctuary of boarded windows and frightened hearts. But the hum of the substation stayed with them, a reminder that the grid was coming back, and not for them.