Read Chapter 37: The Last Battle

The substation's outer gate buckled under the third ram—a deafening screech of tortured metal that echoed down the access ramp. Lamplight from the team's headlamps cut through swirling dust as Julien shoved through first, rifle up, scanning the cavernous transformer hall.

"Clear left!" he shouted.

"Right side clear!" Marc answered from the doorway, covering their flank.

But clear was a lie. They both knew it. The militia was two blocks out, and the faction remnants had gone dark on the radios—which meant they were already inside, waiting in the dark.

Camille pressed against the wall, the brass key cold in her palm, her father's journal heavy in her pack. The substation smelled of ozone and rust and old oil. Three stories of transformers and switching gear loomed around them like dormant giants.

"Sub-level five access is through the maintenance corridor," Camille whispered, reading from the journal's last page by the beam of her penlight. "Behind the primary cooling array."

Julien nodded, never lowering his rifle. "Marc, hold the main entrance. Lambert's covering the east approach from the café with line of sight to the ramp."

"Lambert can barely stand," Marc said.

"He can still shoot." Julien's voice left no room for argument. He motioned to Camille. "We go now."

They moved through the transformer hall in a low crouch, the beams of their headlamps carving narrow paths through the dark. Gunfire erupted behind them—Marc's position—and Julien spun, teeth gritted.

"Keep moving."

The maintenance corridor was narrower than the journal described, clogged with debris from decades of neglect. Camille's heart hammered as they reached the cooling array, a wall of rusted pipes and heat exchangers that blocked their path like a metallic ribcage.

"There's no door," Camille said, voice cracking.

Julien scanned the wall, then dropped to his knees. A maintenance access hatch, barely visible behind a collapsed pipe section, iron corroded almost to ruin. He grabbed the edge and pulled. Metal screamed, then gave way with a shower of rust flakes.

Beyond it, a stairwell plunged into darkness.

"The master switch room should be at the bottom," Camille said.

Julien went first, his boots echoing on steel steps. Camille followed, the journal clutched to her chest, counting the stairs the way her father had taught her. The number five was written in his cramped handwriting on the last page, circled three times. She didn't understand it yet. She prayed she would when it mattered.

At the bottom, a single reinforced door. The brass key fit its lock like it had been made for it—because it had been. Camille turned it, and the mechanism released with a dry click.

The controls filled the room. Rows of switches and gauges, a central console caked with dust, and at its heart, a master switch housing with a keyhole that matched the second key in her other pocket.

"We did it," Camille breathed.

Boots pounded down the stairwell behind them.

Julien slammed the door shut and threw the locking bar across it. "Get to the console! Now!"

Camille ran, slamming her father's personal key into the switch housing. It clicked into place. The panel above it flickered to life with a weak green glow, asking for input in blocky cold-war era monospace:

**VOICEPRINT VERIFICATION REQUIRED. PLEASE STATE AUTHORIZATION PHRASE.**

She looked at Julien. He was braced against the door, rifle aimed at the reinforced steel. Through it, she heard shouting, the scrape of tools against the frame.

"Say it," Julien said. "Say the phrase, Camille. Now."

"Printemps," she said into the console's microphone.

The console hummed, processing. Then the screen flashed red:

**INSUFFICIENT CLEARANCE. VOICEPRINT NOT RECOGNIZED.**

"No," Camille whispered. She checked the journal again. The failsafe code. The fleur de lis. The number five. What was she missing?

The door shuddered under a heavy impact.

Julien looked back at her, torch beam cutting through the gloom. "Camille. Whatever you're going to figure out, figure it out now."

She flipped pages. The journal's final entry showed her father's diagram of this very room. And there, at the bottom of the diagram, barely legible in pencil—five attempts. The system allowed five attempts before locking permanently.

"Voiceprint clearance can be overridden," she read aloud. "Failsafe requires five-second continuous tone matching the original voiceprint frequency band." She closed the journal, looked at the console. "He built a manual audio override port."

She found it behind a service panel—a quarter-inch jack, exactly where the diagram placed it. But she had no cable, no tone generator.

The door buckled. Metal screamed as the locking bar bent.

Julien reached into his vest and pulled out a coil of wire. "Field radio cable. Might carry the signal."

"Might isn't—"

"It's all we have." The door cracked open an inch. A weapon barrel poked through, and Julien fired, driving it back. He turned to her, eyes bright with something that looked almost like peace. "Go. Make it count."

He threw the wire. She caught it.

And then the door gave way. Julien turned to face the breach, and he was not afraid. He fired, and fired, and the dark swallowed him in a roar of muzzle flash and shouting.

Camille jammed the wire into the console, stripping it with her teeth as her hands shook. She touched the exposed copper ends to the port's terminals, twisted, and closed the circuit. Then she pushed her mouth to the microphone where she'd spoken "Printemps," and she screamed her father's name into it—a broken, desperate sound, five seconds of raw grief and love.

The screen flashed.

**VOICEPRINT MATCH: 78% OVERRIDE THRESHOLD... ACCEPTED.**

The master switch housing unlocked. Camille's hands closed on her father's key.

Behind her, Julien's gun fell silent. The room was suddenly, terrifyingly still.