Read Chapter 23: Léa's Fever

Camille’s knees gave out the moment the door to the stairwell shut behind them. The dark swallowed the sound of her boots scraping concrete, and she pressed her back against the wall, dragging air into her lungs like it was the first breath she’d taken in hours. Julien was already moving past her, Léa draped across his shoulders like a broken sail, her feet leaving a thin trail of blood on the steps.

“Third floor,” he said, voice tight. “We need light. We need—Camille, snap out of it.”

She snapped.

The apartment they’d claimed on the third floor was small, a bachelor’s flat with a fold-out couch and windows sealed with blackout paper. Camille cleared the table with one sweep of her arm—a dead plant, a stack of old magazines, a rusted corkscrew clattering into the corner—and Julien laid Léa down on it. Her face was the color of old parchment, sweat beading at her temples even in the cold.

“Get the lamp,” Camille said. “And my bag. The green duffel, in the stairwell, I left it at the bottom.”

Julien hesitated, his hand brushing Léa’s forehead. “She’s burning up.”

“Then move faster.”

He moved.

Camille cut the sleeve of Léa’s jacket with a pair of scissors from the kitchen drawer, peeling the fabric away from a wound that had gone wrong. The gash on her forearm—a shallow thing, she’d called it a scratch when she stumbled into the stairwell—had bloomed into a festering line of red and yellow, the skin around it hot to the touch and swollen to twice its size. Infection. Sepsis, if they didn’t act.

She had three antibiotic vials left. One for the old man with pneumonia on the fifth floor. One for the child with the infected ear. One for emergencies.

This was the emergency.

She uncapped the vial and drew the needle with steady hands, because if she let them shake, she’d stop entirely. “This is going to hurt,” she said. Léa didn’t respond. Her eyes were half-open, glassy, fixed on the ceiling like she was counting the cracks.

The needle went in.

Julien returned with the lamp and the duffel, setting them down at Camille’s feet. “What else do you need?”

“Boiled water. As hot as you can get it. And I need someone to hold the lamp steady.”

A voice came from the doorway—low, calm, with an accent that rolled the r’s in a way that made Camille’s spine stiffen. “I can do both.”

Victor. The engineer. He stood in the frame, his gray coat streaked with road dust, his face unreadable in the low light. He carried a field kit Camille hadn’t noticed before, a battered olive canvas roll that he set on the counter with the quiet authority of a man who knew where everything belonged.

“You have field training,” Camille said. Not a question.

“Military. Fifteen years.” He unrolled the kit: scalpels, suture thread, forceps, a small vial of antiseptic that gleamed amber in the lamplight. “I saw the wound when we carried her up. You need to debride it. Now. The antibiotic alone won’t stop what’s already taken hold.”

Camille stared at the scalpel. Then at Léa. Then at Julien, who was watching her with the expression of a man who had already made his decision and was waiting for her to catch up.

“You’ll let him touch her?” she asked.

“He’s the only one with a sterile blade and steady hands,” Julien said. “You just used your last good needle. Unless you want to do surgery with a kitchen knife.”

She didn’t want that. She’d done it before, in the first week, on a man crushed by a falling balcony. He’d died anyway.

“Fine.” She stepped aside. “But I watch everything.”

Victor worked like a man who had done this a hundred times in places that didn’t show up on maps. He cleaned the wound with brisk, efficient strokes, cut away the dead tissue with the scalpel, and sutured the edges with a thread so fine it seemed to disappear into Léa’s skin. Léa screamed once, a hollow sound that echoed through the stairwell, and then went silent again as Camille forced her jaw open to pour in the last of the antibiotic.

When it was done, Victor wiped his hands on a rag and sat back on his heels. “She’ll live. But she’ll need rest. And more antibiotics in twelve hours, or the fever will come back worse.”

Camille looked at her empty vial. “There are no more.”

Victor’s gaze was steady. “Then we find more. Or we hope the fever breaks on its own.”

Julien knelt beside the table, pressing the back of his hand to Léa’s forehead. “She’s already cooler. The medicine’s working.”

“For now,” Victor said. He stood, rolling his kit with mechanical precision. “You have the chip.”

It wasn’t a question. Camille pulled it from her inner pocket—a small black rectangle, no larger than a thumbnail, sealed in a plastic sleeve. She held it up to the lamp. “You’re going to tell us what’s on it.”

“I’m going to show you.” Victor took it from her hands with surprising gentleness. “But it’s not my field. I built bridges, not networks. I know what the chip does, but I don’t have the tools to read it.”

“Then what do we do with it?”

Victor glanced at Léa, whose eyes had fluttered open. Her lips moved, cracked and dry, forming a single word.

“Radio.”

Camille leaned closer. “What?”

“The radio at Saint-Vincent.” Léa’s voice was barely there, a thread of sound. “Sylvie has the ham set. The shortwave. It can read encrypted files if we patch the chip through the auxiliary port.”

Camille exchanged a look with Julien. Saint-Vincent. They’d planned to deliver the recording before leaving for Meaux. Now it wasn’t just a delivery—it was the next step. The chip in their hands might hold the answer to the blackout, but only if they could reach the hospital without getting shot, ambushed, or buried under the convoy that was still crawling its way across the horizon.

“We go at first light,” Julien said. “No detours. No stops. We get to Saint-Vincent, we read the chip, we find out what the hell the engineer here was carrying.”

Victor smiled. It was a thin, tired expression that didn’t reach his eyes. “And if what you find is bigger than a hospital can solve?”

Camille looked down at Léa, at the fresh sutures glistening in the lamplight, at the coal-dark rectangle of the chip now sealed in Victor’s coat pocket.

“Then we solve it anyway.”

She didn’t sleep that night. She sat by the window, watching the horizon, waiting for the convoy’s lights to appear. But the convoy never came. Instead, in the darkest hour before dawn, a new set of lights flared in the east—not the slow crawl of approaching headlights, but a single, brilliant burst, rising straight up into the sky like a flare from a ship at sea.

It hung there. Pulsing. In a pattern.

Three long. Three short. Three long.

SOS.

Then it went dark, and the horizon was empty again. But Camille couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t a distress call. It was a beacon. A signal meant for someone.

And whoever had sent it was coming from the east.