Read Chapter 2: The First Night

The first scream came from the third floor, a woman’s voice sharp enough to cut through the courtyard’s low murmur of panic. Camille’s head snapped up from the cardboard box of bandages she’d just set on the stone bench. Julien was already moving, his flashlight beam cutting a white path across the cobblestones toward the stairwell.

“Stay here,” he said over his shoulder. “Keep them calm.”

Camille opened her mouth to argue, but he was gone, boots scuffling up the concrete steps. The woman screamed again, and the sound unraveled something in the crowd. A man started shouting about the metro. A child began to cry.

She looked down at her hands. They were trembling. She pressed them flat against her thighs and counted to five, the way she did before a code blue in the hospital. Then she turned to the ring of faces—her neighbors, most of them strangers until twenty minutes ago—and raised her voice.

“I need everyone to listen.” She pitched it low and steady, the tone she used with anxious families in the ER. “My name is Camille Laurent. I’m a pharmacist. I worked at Saint-Antoine, and I’m here, in this courtyard, and I’m not leaving. If you have a medical problem, you come to me. If you have a fear, you tell me. We get through this one hour at a time.”

A man in a sweat-stained polo stepped forward, cradling his arm. “I think I broke my wrist when the bus stopped short. It hit the pole.”

Camille nodded, gestured him to the bench. She knelt, fingers finding the swelling along his radius with practiced gentleness. “I need a rigid splint. And clean cloth.”

Someone produced a wooden ruler, someone else a tea towel. She worked quickly, wrapping and securing, her mind half on the third floor. When she finished, the man shook her hand with his good one, his eyes wet with something like gratitude.

Another woman pushed forward, holding up a trembling toddler. “He fell on the stairs. His lip is bleeding. Is it bad?”

Camille examined the small face in the flashlight glow. A fat, ugly split, but clean. She pressed a gauze pad to it and told the mother to hold it firm. More people came. A cut. A burn from a candle. A man with crushing chest pain who she recognized, with a lurch, as a cardiac history from the building’s emergency directory she’d once helped assemble. She had no aspirin. She told him to sit, to breathe slow, and sent a boy to fetch Julien if he came down.

The courtyard began to settle. Sounds of distress softened into low conversations. Someone had found a battery-powered radio and was turning the dial through static. A teenage girl was handing out bottles of water from a crate she’d lugged from her apartment.

Camille was splinting a second wrist when Julien came back down, his face grim in the swinging light of his helmet lamp. He moved toward her, stepping around the small knots of residents, and crouched beside her.

“Third floor. Apartment 16. A kid, maybe six years old.” His voice was low. “The mom says he’s asthmatic. He’s having an attack. She’s out of refills on his inhaler.”

Camille’s stomach dropped. She didn’t need to ask why the mother hadn't refilled. Prescriptions lapsed. Money ran short. The system had teeth. She stood, adrenaline cutting through her exhaustion.

“I have albuterol in the pharmacy. In the basement.” Her eyes moved to the dark mouth of the courtyard’s service entrance. The stairwell down was utter black. The pharmacy door was solid steel, keypad-locked. The grid was dead, which meant the keypad was dead. Which meant the lock was dead. The only override was a mechanical key that lived in the store manager’s office safe. Because of course it did.

“You’re locked out.” Julien read her face.

“The safe has a backup key. I know the combination. But I need to open the pharmacy door first, and that needs the manager’s key from the safe. It’s circular. I don’t have tools to break in.”

Julien stood, rolling his shoulders. “I have an axe on the engine.”

A woman nearby gasped. Julien ignored her, his eyes steady on Camille’s. “It’s your call. Your pharmacy. Your license. But that kid is wheezing, and I’ve seen asthma spiral fast in low light, high fear. He needs medicine, not bureaucracy.”

Camille pictured her license, framed on the wall behind the counter, her name in clean navy type. She’d worked six years to earn those letters. Breaking a steel door with a fire axe wasn’t burglary, she reasoned. It was triage. Her father’s voice, the old pharmacist, echoed in her head: the medicine belongs to the sick. You’re just the hands that hold it.

“Do it,” she said.

They moved together toward the service stairwell, Julien’s beam making monsters of the railings’ shadows. Behind them, the courtyard fell quiet, watching. The boy’s mother appeared on the third-floor balcony, her face pale as paper, holding a limp form against her chest.

Camille didn’t let herself look. She counted steps. Seventeen to the door. Julien’s axe swung in a heavy arc, the impact ringing through the concrete like a bell. Twice more, and the frame gave, the door hanging crooked on a single bent hinge.

They squeezed through the gap. Camille kept her hand on the wall, guiding them past the shelves she could have navigated blindfolded in daylight. Behind the counter, the safe sat low, its digital panel dark. She spun the manual dial left, right, left, feeling for the clicks her manager had shown her once during inventory. The lock gave with a soft thunk.

Inside: cash trays, a ledger, and the plastic keycard in its plastic sleeve. She grabbed it, jammed it into the door’s manual override slot, and twisted. The bolt slid open. She pushed through and went straight to the controlled substances fridge—inhalers weren’t narcotics, but they were tracked, and shelved under lock as a matter of policy. Her fingers found the cold, smooth canisters in the dark.

“Salbutamol.” She pressed one into the cold of her hand. Then another, for good measure. “Let’s go.”

They ran up the stairs, past the shattered door, past the whispers. The mother met them at her apartment door, and Camille fell to her knees beside the small boy on the couch. His lips had a blue tinge she didn’t like. She shook the canister, fitted it to his mouth—no spacer, she’d have to do this crude—and depressed the valve on his inhale.

“One more,” she said. “Breathe in deep, sweetheart. You’re okay. You’re okay.”

The seconds stretched. The mother’s hand found hers, gripping hard enough to hurt. Then the boy’s chest rose smoothly, and the wheeze softened. The blue in his lips receded like a tide going out.

The mother sobbed once, a raw, ragged sound, and pulled the boy into her arms. Julien’s hand landed on Camille’s shoulder, big and warm, and squeezed. She looked up at him, sweat cooling on her forehead, and saw something shift in his eyes. Not pity. Not professional distance. Something like recognition.

“You’re good at this,” he said.

“So are you.”

He almost smiled. Then his radio crackled, and a voice broke through: *Julien, we got a problem. The station lost comms, and the water pressure on the fourth floor is dropping. Something’s wrong with the mains.*

The almost-smile vanished. He looked from the sleeping boy to Camille, and she saw him make the same calculation she was making. The city wasn’t just dark. Things were breaking. And they were only two people, and there were hundreds in this building alone.

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

He didn’t argue.