Read Chapter 20: Aftermath of the Raid

The stairwell smelled of sweat and blood and something acrid—smoke, maybe, drifting up from the lower floors. Camille leaned against the wall outside apartment 4B, letting her knees lock so she wouldn't slide down to the floor. Her hands were still shaking. She pressed them flat against the cool plaster until the tremor stopped.

Julien came up the stairs two at a time, his firefighter's coat slung over one arm. His shirt was dark with sweat and grime, a fresh scrape across his jaw where someone's rifle butt had clipped him during the extraction. He looked at her and didn't say anything. Just stood close enough that his heat bled into her space.

"Everyone's back," he said finally. "Léa's doing a head count. We got twelve people total, including the two kids."

"Sylvie's brother got his insulin?"

Julien nodded. "He's already gone. Took the back alleys. Said he'd make it before nightfall."

Camille let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. The debt was paid. The debt was *paid*. She'd repeated that to herself during the worst of it, when the rival group's leader had put a flashlight in her face and demanded to know what she was doing in "his" territory, when she'd seen Julien's silhouette through the shattered pharmacy window, when the gunshot had gone off somewhere behind her and she'd thought—for one long, terrible second—that it was him.

But here they were. Bruised, no insulin, but alive.

The courtyard door below them banged open. Heavy footsteps. Camille tensed, but it was just Léa, her dark hair twisted into a tight knot at the nape of her neck, her jaw set hard. She saw them on the landing and stopped, hands on her hips.

"The insurgents are moving," Léa said. "They've got the ground-floor apartments now. The ones facing the street."

"What do you mean, *they've got* them?" Camille pushed off the wall. "We agreed. That was the deal. We wouldn't let them—"

"They don't care about the deal." Léa's voice was flat. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "There's a woman with a newborn in 2C. Marco from the third floor tried to stop them from putting sandbags in her kitchen. They told him to get lost or get shot."

Julien's knuckles went white around his coat. "Where were you? You're supposed to be on security."

Léa looked away. "The kid. The near-shooting earlier—I was checking on the kid."

"And the woman?"

"The insurgents don't want her room. They want the windows. They'll let her stay if she moves into the hallway."

Camille stared at her. "That's not negotiation. That's entryism."

"Then what do you want me to do?" Léa's voice cracked. "Start a war in the stairwell? We have maybe three working weapons and a dozen people who know how to use them. They've got discipline and numbers and—" She stopped, swallowed. "And ambition. They didn't just wander in. They've been planning this."

Down the hall, a door opened. An old man Camille recognized from the fifth floor poked his head out, saw them arguing, and retreated back into his apartment without a word. The door clicked shut behind him.

The building had gone quiet. Not the relaxed quiet of people sleeping, but the held-breath quiet of people waiting for the next gunshot.

Camille thought about the radio, still tucked in her father's medical bag upstairs. The voice that had come crackling through the static, repeating its careful message about a "controlled shutdown." The words had been meant to reassure. She'd played them back half a dozen times, trying to find a crack in the delivery, something that would tell her the person speaking had been as afraid as the rest of them.

No such luck. The voice had been calm. Bored, almost. Like someone reading a weather report.

"Where's the body?" she asked.

Léa blinked. "What body?"

"There was a firefighter found near the substation. That's what you said. Before the raid. A corpse."

Léa's face shifted. "We haven't moved it. It's still there. Down by the junction box on Rue Charonne."

Julien's expression darkened. "Our substation? The one at the end of the block?"

"Broken open," Léa said. "Someone got to it before the blackout even spread. The guy—the firefighter—he was there when it happened. But it's not that simple."

Camille waited.

"Julien, you'd know better than I would." Léa's eyes flicked to him. "I saw his hands. They were cuffed. Plastic zip ties, the heavy duty kind. And there was a second set of footprints. Someone stood over him. Watched."

The stairwell was suddenly colder.

Julien's breathing had gone shallow. "Cuffed firefighters aren't accident victims," he said quietly. "That's an execution. And no one cuffs someone without a reason."

"They found the substation before the grid went down," Camille said slowly. "They disabled it. They disabled him. And then—" She stopped. "They made it look like part of the blackout."

"Or they didn't care how it looked," Julien said. "Because they knew no one would be coming. No police. No investigators. The whole city's blind."

Footsteps echoed up the stairwell. The three of them turned as Marie, a retired teacher from the ground floor, appeared with a rolled-up curtain in her arms. She looked at them, then at the tension in their faces, and said nothing. Just climbed past them and knocked on the door of 4B.

"Rita needs curtains for her window," Marie said over her shoulder. "The insurgents have flashlights. They walk up and down the street at night."

Camille waited until Marie was gone. Then she turned to Julien and Léa.

"I'm going to Saint-Vincent."

Léa's head snapped up. "We just got back. You want to leave again in the dark?"

"Not tonight. Tomorrow, at first light. I have to give Sylvie the radio broadcast. She needs to know it's not random—that it was planned. And now this." She gestured vaguely east, toward the substation. "A cuffed firefighter. A staged grid failure. There's a pattern."

"And what does a pattern solve?" Léa demanded. "There're armed strangers in our building, two working guns left to guard a hundred people, and you want to go on a sightseeing trip to recite conspiracy theories at a head nurse?"

Camille didn't answer right away. She looked past Léa, down the hallway, through the grimy window at the end that showed the street below. The far sidewalk was dark. But in the distance, just at the edge of view, there was a glow. Headlights. The convoy she'd spotted earlier, still crawling west to east, inching toward them like a slow-moving flood.

"They're not coming to help," she said quietly. "All those lights. They're moving against the direction of the blackout. Same as the people who took out our substation."

"Or they're just trying to get out of the dark," Léa said.

"For four hours straight? No convoy that size stays together that long unless they've got a way to communicate. Coordinated movement takes planning. Same as the attack."

Julien stepped forward. "I saw the body. I'll take you to see it tonight, before we do anything else."

Léa looked between them. Her jaw worked. "You two are going to get yourselves killed chasing shadows."

"Maybe." Camille met her eyes. "But the people in this building are watching us. They saw us go out and come back. We brought nothing but blood. If we want them to keep trusting us—if we want them to choose us over the insurgents—we need to give them something worth following."

"Platitudes," Léa spat. "We need walls. Ammo. A plan that keeps our people alive."

"Then come with us."

The words hung in the air.

Léa stared at Camille. "Where?"

"To the suburbs," Camille said. "Your contact. Richard Brauer. Marc trusted him. Marc warned you about the attack before it happened. If Brauer knows half of what Marc did, he might know why the grid failed, why the firefighter was killed near our substation, and who sent that convoy." She paused. "He might know how to end this."

"And the hospital?"

Camille touched the strap of her father's bag, still slung across her shoulder. Inside, the radio sat silent and heavy. "We stop on the way. I'll give Sylvie the recording. She can do what she wants with it. Then we keep going."

Léa shook her head slowly. She looked like she wanted to argue. Instead, she looked at the peeling paint on the walls, at the dark windows, at the stairwell where her authority had crumbled hour by hour since the insurgents walked in.

"Tomorrow," she said finally. "Before the convoy reaches Rue de la Roquette. We go at dawn. That building stays locked and quiet while we're gone." She pointed at Camille. "We're back by noon, or I'm not coming back at all."

Camille nodded. "Then we should see the body before we plan the route."

Julien moved toward the stairs. "I'll grab a light."

Léa lingered a moment longer, her expression unreadable. Then she turned and headed back down toward the courtyard, her footsteps swallowed by the dark.

Camille stood alone on the landing. Through the grimy window, the convoy's lights had inched closer. She counted them. Twelve. Fourteen. Maybe more at the back, still hidden beyond the horizon.

She slipped her hand into the bag and touched the smooth casing of the radio. Somewhere in Paris, a voice had read a script about a controlled shutdown over the emergency frequency. Somewhere to the east, a man named Richard Brauer had been a trusted friend of a missing neighbor. Somewhere below, a dead firefighter lay in the rubble with zip tie marks around his wrists.

They didn't fit together yet.

But they would.

Camille pulled her hand from the bag and followed Julien down into the dark.