Read Chapter 16: The Return

The night had turned against them by the time they reached the block. The sky above the rooftops was smeared with the low orange glow of fires burning somewhere to the east, and the air tasted of ash and diesel. Camille’s legs were lead weights as she pushed through the barricade’s rear entrance, Julien close behind her, his breathing ragged through the dust mask he’d pulled up over his mouth.

The courtyard was not quiet.

Shouting echoed off the walls, and the yellow flicker of lantern light spilled from the ground-floor windows of the community room. Camille’s stomach tightened. She’d hoped for stillness, for a building asleep and trusting her to do the hard thing. Instead, she heard Léa’s voice—sharp, frayed, raised against someone else’s.

Julien exchanged a glance with her. They moved.

Inside, Léa stood with her back to the medicine cabinet, the rifle cradled across her chest like a shield. Facing her were four men Camille recognized by sight more than by name—residents from the third floor, the ones who’d been at the front of the negotiation with Julien. The one in the lead, a heavy-shouldered man with a salt-and-pepper beard who went by Roland, had his arms crossed, his chin thrust out.

“—told you, we’re not waiting for her to decide who lives and who dies,” Roland was saying. His voice was loud enough to carry, and Camille saw the shadows of other residents hovering in the doorways of the corridor, watching. “That stash in your cabinet is community property. You’ve been holding us hostage to her schedule.”

“You’ll have your share,” Léa said, but her voice cracked. “She said she’d bring more tonight.”

“She said,” Roland repeated, slow and mocking. He took a half-step forward, and Léa’s knuckles went white on the rifle’s stock. “You hear yourself? She. She. We’ve been guarding this building while she runs around playing hero. What happens if she doesn’t come back?”

“She came back,” Camille said.

She stepped into the light, her boots loud on the tile. Roland turned, and for a moment his arrogance flickered. Her jacket was smeared with grime, one sleeve torn at the shoulder, and she knew she looked nothing like the calm pharmacist who had distributed pills and patience in the early days. She looked like what she was now: someone who’d crawled through pharmacy rubble and dodged gunfire to bring back a canvas bag of antibiotics, syringes, and saline.

She set the bag on the table between them. The clink of glass was the only sound.

“Twelve vials of amoxicillin,” she said. “Four of parenteral saline. A box of methylprednisolone. Two hundred and forty needles. That’s what I brought back.” She looked at Roland, and she did not blink. “You want to take over? Fine. Lead tomorrow’s run. Walk the corridors of the dead zone with the fires east of you. Feel what it’s like to carry the weight of every fever and every broken bone in this building on your back while people call you a hero.”

Roland’s jaw worked. He didn’t look at her. He looked at the bag, at the contents she had just named, and she saw the calculation in his eyes shift.

“We just want to be sure our families are covered,” he said, quieter now.

“They are,” Camille said. “If you help us hold the line. Not if you tear it apart from the inside.”

The men filed out slowly, Roland lingering just long enough to shoot Léa a look that was less threat than warning. When the door closed, Léa’s whole body sagged. She set the rifle down on the table and pressed her palms to her eyes.

“They’ve been at it for hours,” Léa said, voice muffled. “Ever since the last flare went up. They saw it too. Figured if you were going to the hospital, you weren’t coming back with anything for them.”

“I didn’t come back with enough,” Camille admitted.

She unpacked the bag in silence, laying out the supplies on the table. Léa looked at the collection—meager, relative to what they’d hoped for—and her face tightened.

“No insulin?” she asked.

Camille shook her head. The word stuck in her throat, so she didn’t say it aloud. She’d explained before they left that the partial dose she’d given Sylvie was a promise, not a gift. The hospital’s five insulin-dependent patients were hours away from crisis, and she had nothing left to give them.

Julien leaned against the doorframe, pulling the mask down around his neck. His face was streaked with sweat and soot, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion. He looked at Camille, then at Léa, and he didn’t say the thing they all knew: that the stash in the cabinet behind Léa was the only insulin within a kilometer, and it barely covered the needs of the block’s two diabetics for another week.

Camille moved past them, into the corridor, trying to breathe. The walls seemed closer than they had been.

She found the small window at the end of the hall, the one that looked out over the courtyard. She pressed her forehead to the cold glass. The dark was absolute out there, punctured only by the distant, winking embers of fires. The smoke columns had grown again. Four of them, maybe five now, spreading westward like black fingers reaching toward the block.

She heard Julien’s footsteps behind her, soft on the tile. He didn’t speak at first. He just stood beside her, looking out at the same darkness, the same fires.

“You did good tonight,” he said.

“Did I?” Camille’s voice was flat. “I promised Sylvie I’d repay her. I promised my father he’d make it to dialysis. I promised Roland’s family they’d get their share. I keep making promises I can’t keep, Julien. That’s not leadership. That’s a debt I’m digging myself into.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “There’s a fire I was on, two years back. Industrial building, east side. The roof came down while a crew was still inside. I made the call to pull everyone out before the search was complete. Command said it was the right move. But the guy we left behind—we found him the next morning. He’d crawled halfway to the exit before the smoke got him.” His voice dropped. “I still think about it. Whether he’d have made it if I’d pushed ten more minutes.”

Camille turned to look at him. His reflection in the glass was pale, his jaw set.

“How do you live with it?” she asked.

“You learn to carry it,” he said. “You don’t stop making calls, because the moment you do, someone else makes the call for you. And they usually make it worse.”

A thin smile touched her lips, barely there. “Is that the official firefighter wisdom?”

“No,” he said. And then, quieter: “The official wisdom is that you don’t sleep. You keep your hands busy. You find something worth holding onto and you don’t let go of it, even when you’re not sure you’ll get through the night.”

He didn’t move closer. He didn’t reach for her. But she felt the weight of his words settle into her chest, a warmth that had nothing to do with the distant fires.

“I don’t know if I can hold this together,” she admitted. The words were harder to say than she’d expected. “The building. The stash. My father. I feel like I’m fraying.”

“Good,” Julien said.

She blinked. “Excuse me?”

“If you didn’t feel frayed, I’d worry you weren’t paying attention.” He looked at her at last, his eyes shadowed but steady. “Frayed people still hold. They just hold closer. You’re the reason that cabinet isn’t empty. You’re the reason those men walked out with their anger cooled instead of their hands armed. You did that tonight, Camille. You did more than you know.”

She opened her mouth to argue—to list every failure, every barely-evaded bullet, every promise she couldn’t keep—but the sound of a rapid knock cut through the stillness.

Léa’s voice, urgent from the courtyard: “Camille. You need to see this.”

They moved. In the courtyard, Léa stood pointing at the rooftop across the street, eastward, toward the line of smoke. A light blinked at the top of an apartment building—once, twice, three times, a pause, then three times again.

“Is that a signal?” Léa asked.

Camille watched the pattern repeat, her heart dropping cold. It wasn’t a flare—it was a code. One she’d seen only once before, in her father’s old medical field manual, from the protocols of the last blackout the city had ever faced.

*A doctor in distress. Three-rapid, three-slow—means the medical facility is compromised and help must reach the source.* She counted the intervals again.

Whatever the hospital was, whatever Sylvie was facing, it wasn’t just running out of supplies. It was under threat.

“Get the bag,” Camille said. “The rest of the meds. Every antibiotic we have left.”

Julien’s hand caught her arm. “Camille. You just got back.”

“I know,” she said. Her gaze was fixed on the blinking light, on the code that kept repeating, patient and desperate. “But that’s not a supply signal. That’s a call for extraction. And I think I know who’s sending it.”