Read Chapter 26: Marc's Fate

Léa’s fingers worked the radio dial with the precision of a surgeon, her face lit ghostly green by the cracked screen of the portable scanner. Camille stood behind her in the basement utility room of the *mairie* annex, watching static bloom and die in rhythmic pulses.

“There,” Léa whispered. “Again. Listen.”

The burst was faint, buried under layers of white noise, but it was there—a repeating pattern, five seconds on, three off. Not random. Not atmospheric. Someone was transmitting from inside this building.

“Marc’s last log was routed through the civic repeater,” Léa said, adjusting the gain. “But the handshake response is local. It’s bouncing off something in the sub-levels.”

Victor leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. “This place was cleared three weeks ago. I swept it myself.”

“You swept the ground floor,” Léa said without looking up. “The sub-basement has a maintenance shaft that runs under the old boiler room. The city used it for emergency civil defense storage back in the Cold War.”

Camille’s chest tightened. “Marc’s last known position was the 11th. He wasn’t supposed to be here.”

“He wasn’t,” Léa said. She killed the radio and stood, wincing as she favored her bandaged leg. “Which means someone brought him here. Or he came on his own, looking for something.”

The basement stairs groaned under their weight. The maintenance shaft was exactly where Léa said it would be—a steel hatch half-hidden behind rusted shelving units, the lock snapped clean, not jimmied. Someone had used a key.

The air changed as they descended. Colder. Stale, with a copper undertone that Camille knew from the hospital morgue. Julien took point, his flashlight cutting a narrow cone through the dark. Victor brought up the rear, hand resting on the knife at his belt.

The room at the bottom was small, concrete, with a single drain in the center of the floor. A folding table had been set up against one wall, covered with maps and a dead laptop. And in the corner, slumped against the wall, was Marc.

He’d been dead for days. The wounds were methodical—clean incisions, precise burns, the work of someone who knew exactly how long to keep a man alive. His hands had been bound behind him with zip ties, the plastic cutting deep into the skin. His eyes were still open.

Léa made a sound—small, wounded—and turned away. Julien moved to block her view, but Camille forced herself forward. This was her job. She’d done this before, cataloguing the dead in the aftermath of chaos. She knelt beside him, checking for anything she’d missed.

“They tortured him,” Victor said quietly. “Professional. Military or intelligence.”

“Not insurgent work,” Julien agreed. “Too clean.”

Camille’s gaze caught on Marc’s left hand. His fingers were curled oddly, almost deliberately, around a small object clutched against his chest. She pried them open gently. It was a piece of packing tape, folded over itself into a crude strip, with something written on it in ballpoint pen. The force of his death grip had smeared the ink, but the first letters were legible.

“Montparnasse,” she read aloud. Then a line of numbers, faded and incomplete. “And coordinates. He traced a partial grid reference on the underside.”

“He wrote it on himself,” Léa said, voice cracking. “He wrote it on his own skin, under the tape, so they wouldn’t find it when they searched him.”

Camille turned Marc’s hand over. There, on the pale skin of his palm, were more markings—faint, scratched in what looked like dried blood. A second set of coordinates. A backup location.

“He didn’t die for nothing,” Camille said.

Julien was already at the folding table, rifling through the maps. He pulled one out, flattening it over the dead laptop. “Montparnasse Tower. The commercial floors were gutted by fire during the first week. But the sub-levels are reinforced—bomb shelter, cold war construction. If there’s a backup command center for the power grid, it could be there, intact.”

“We can’t get there,” Victor said. “The quarantine lines are moving in from the north. We have twelve hours, and that’s generous.”

Léa looked up, her face pale and hard. “We don’t have twelve hours. I’m out of antibiotics. By dawn, the infection will be past the point where anything Victor has will stop it.”

The silence stretched. Camille looked from Marc’s corpse to the map in Julien’s hands, the blood-drawn coordinates burning in her memory. The building above them held forty-seven people who trusted her to keep them alive. The convoy was closing in from the north. The city was sealing in forty-eight hours.

And somewhere beneath the Montparnasse Tower, in a bunker that officially did not exist, there was a switch that could turn the lights back on.

“Then we go tonight,” Camille said. “All of us, now, before the quarantine sets.”

Julien nodded slowly. “But not alone.”