Read Chapter 3: The List

The first gray light came through the courtyard like a bad photograph, all shadows and no color. Camille’s knees cracked as she stood from the bench where she’d spent what was left of the night. Her neck ached. Her mouth tasted of copper and old coffee.

She found Julien by the fire engine’s rear door, tracing a pencil across a clipboard. He looked up when she approached, and she saw the same exhaustion she felt, painted darker under his eyes.

“You didn’t sleep,” she said.

“Didn’t have the schedule for it.” He handed her the clipboard. “Survivors. Sixty-three in the building, plus the two cooks from the bistro across the street who showed up looking for wine to sterilize. I told them to stay. They brought bread.”

“Bread.” The word felt foreign.

“Still warm when they came. Not now.” He shrugged. “I need to check the water pumps on the roof. Mechanical, not electric, but if the header tank drains, we lose gravity pressure. Whole building becomes a dry well.”

“Then go do that.” Camille ran a finger down the list he’d made. Units, names, rough ages. “I’ll do the same for their bodies.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“Health census,” she said. “I need to know what I’m dealing with. Blood pressure meds, inhalers, insulin, anticoagulants, anything that needs refrigeration or daily dosing. What we have in the pharmacy, what we need to find.”

“You’re going door to door.”

“The building won’t come to me, Julien.”

He almost smiled. “You need a hammer.”

“I have a flashlight.”

“Then you’re better equipped than most.” He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt—the one they’d taken from the pharmacy’s night safe—and pressed it into her hand. “Channel two. I’ll answer, if I can. If I don’t, send someone.”

Camille clipped it to her coat and started on the third floor, working her way up.

---

Mme Rousseau lived in 4B. Camille knew her only as the woman who complained about the courtyard fountain’s motor noise, though the fountain hadn’t worked in two years. The door opened six inches on a chain. A pair of brown eyes blinked at her from the dark.

“Camille Laurent. Pharmacist. I’m doing a check on the building. Are you well, madame?”

The door closed. Camille waited. It opened fully.

Mme Rousseau was smaller than Camille remembered, collapsed into herself like a paper lantern someone had stepped on. Her silk robe hung loose. She gripped the doorframe as if standing were a decision.

“I take one medication,” she said, before Camille could ask. “You might as well come in, since I know who you are. Lafarge’s granddaughter, yes? The girl who scored high on the bac and left for that hospital by the Seine.”

“I came back.”

“Everyone comes back eventually.” Mme Rousseau shuffled to a chair and sat heavily. “There’s a box in the kitchen. You’ll want to see it.”

Camille found the box, the top slit open. Inside, yellowed plastic boxes—the kind pharmacists used when she was a child—stacked in neat rows. She read the labels and felt her stomach drop.

*Insuline glargine. 300 units/mL.*

She pulled out one of the pens. Under it, a small insulin vial.

“You’re diabetic.”

“Type two. Or type one, depending on which doctor you believe. They’ve changed their minds four times.” Mme Rousseau’s voice was flat. “The last one said my kidneys are starting to notice. I need the insulin daily. I have eight pens in there, maybe two weeks left. I don’t know how long this will last—the electricity, I mean. And I don’t know who else in this building takes the same or something like it.”

Camille crouched, inventorying. Eight pens. A bag of glucose tablets. Test strips.

“I need to check your blood sugar now,” she said.

“I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning. I was saving the food.”

“How did you know I’d come?”

Mme Rousseau’s eyes met hers. “Because you’re a pharmacist, and you look like your mother. She was always checking on old people. Made them her project.”

Camille found the glucometer in a drawer. The battery was still good. She watched the number climb and settle. 312. High, but not catastrophic. Not yet.

“I’ll bring you breakfast,” she said. “And I’ll check on you later. I don’t want to waste your supply, but we need to know your baseline.”

“You’re rationing already.”

“I’m planning.” Camille touched her coat pocket. The watch was there—her father’s old mechanical piece, the one that didn’t need batteries, the one she’d grabbed from her apartment dresser that morning without thinking. It still ticked. She pressed it once, for luck. “Someone has to.”

---

Unit 7. Apartment 7B. She steeled herself before knocking. Unit 7 was the corner apartment, the one with the balcony that oversaw the intersection, the one whose owner—Marc—had done the odd electrical job in the building when the managing company took too long.

There was no answer.

Camille knocked again, louder. No sound inside. She tried the handle. Locked.

She knelt and looked through the mail slot. The floor was littered with electrical wire coils, a toolbox open, a soldering iron lying on the floor like it had just been put down.

Marc had been working when the grid failed.

The thought sat in her chest like a stone. She keyed the walkie-talkie.

“Julien, you there?”

Static. Then his voice, crackling but alive: “Reading you.”

“Unit 7. Marc, the electrician. He’s missing. Door’s locked, tools are out.”

A pause. “You want me to kick it in?”

“Not yet.” But she thought about the wiring diagrams she’d once seen taped to his door. Marc was the kind of person who prepared, who kept cable connectors for a grid that had been stable for decades. If anyone had a backup plan, he would have.

“But make a note,” she said. “Priority check.”

“Done. Water pressure’s holding on two and three. Roof tank’s at thirty percent and dropping slower than I thought. I’ve got more time than I feared, less than I wanted.”

“How much more?”

“Maybe three days if we stop flushing every time someone has a glass of water.”

“I’ll add that to the education program.” She clicked off and stood in the hall. The morning light was getting stronger. Through the stairwell window, she could see a haze over the rooftops—dawn breaking over a city that had no idea it was no longer the City of Light.

---

Back on the ground floor, she found the two cooks from the bistro, René and a woman whose name Camille hadn’t caught, setting up crates of bread and a canister of something that smelled like chicory coffee. She pointed them toward the building’s dead flower bed that had become a de facto common space.

“Set up there,” she said. “Under the awning. People need to see food and see that it’s shared. It’s about morale as much as eating.”

The woman nodded. “We have a propane burner in the van. We can heat soup, if we get a pot.”

Camille thought of the pharmacy’s small lab, the gas fixtures they used for sterile compounding. “I can get you a pot from the pharmacy. Maybe a shelf of supplies if you need them. Just... log what you take. I need to know where everything goes from now.”

The pharmacy door was still cracked from the night before, the lock plate bent outward from Julien’s shove. Anyone could walk in. She had the only passcode to the back office, but the front shelving—the controlled drugs cabinet locks were still intact, she’d checked—held everything else: salves, syrups, clonazepam, the carefully counted boxes of oxycodone locked in the Zurich vault. That one, she thought, was secure.

But the insulin—the pharmacy’s entire two-month routine stock of insulin—was in the refrigerator in the back office. The one that was already warm.

She stepped inside. The lights were dead, but enough daylight came through the barred front windows to work by. She moved through packs of gauze and bags of saline until she reached the back office.

On the desk, she pulled out a stack of prescription ledgers and started to count.

Her own handwriting from the last inventory—eleven boxes of Levemir, fourteen of Lantus, six vials of Novorapid in the fridge with chain-of-custody slips. She flashed the penlight across the refrigerator shelf. One box of vials looked smaller than it should. She pulled it out and counted. Five, not six.

She stared at the shelf. Then she swept the floor. The missing vial wasn’t there.

Camille sat back in the office chair and put her hand over the watch in her coat pocket, once, twice. Somebody took it. The door was broken—they might have slipped in during the chaos last night, when everyone was shouting about the trapped resident on the third floor.

She made a tight mental list of who she had seen at the pharmacy door yesterday.

Julien. The boy’s mother. The boy himself. And a handful of others who had clustered around to watch the fire crew work, faces Camille hadn’t memorized.

Her stash. Her responsibility. And it was already leaving the building.

She looked down at the numbers on the ledger. Mme Rousseau’s eight pens. The pharmacy’s remaining boxes if kept cool, but they weren’t—warm insulin loses potency day by day. A building with unknown, unregistered diabetics who might come to her in a week with blood sugar climbing and no solution.

She needed a cold source. She needed to find who had the vial. And she needed the world to start cooperating.

On the desk, a pharmacy-branded pen lay next to the ledger. She uncapped it, then saw faint pencil marks, someone else’s, on the corner of the page she’d looked at. A series of numbers: apartment numbers, one through twelve. The number seven was circled.

Camille Laurent touched her father’s watch through her coat and felt it tick steadily against her palm.

*Seven last night. Seven now. Someone else is keeping a list too.*