Read Chapter 7: The Lie Begins

The smoke had thinned by the time Camille reached the second-floor landing, but the acrid smell clung to the walls like a bad memory. She found Julien in the hallway outside unit 2C, his face smeared with soot, the fire axe resting against his shoulder like an old friend.

“Minor electrical fire,” he said before she could ask. “Wiring in the wall. The building’s old bones are rotting from the inside out.”

“The generator was sabotaged,” Camille reminded him. “That’s not rot. That’s intention.”

Julien’s jaw tightened. “I know. But the fire was just a fire. Old Romex cable, frayed insulation. It happens. I’ve seen a hundred of them.”

“In a building where someone’s already cut power and jammed communications?”

“No.” He exhaled, scrubbing a hand through his dark hair. “Not like this one.”

A clatter from the stairwell made them both turn. It was Antoine, the retired postal worker from 3A, his face flushed and sweating beneath a knit cap that looked too warm for the lingering afternoon heat. He’d volunteered for a scouting run an hour earlier—checking the nearest intersection for signs of military movement, water distribution points, anything useful.

He doubled over, hands on his knees. “Soldiers,” he gasped. “At the Porte de Vincennes hospital. They’ve got the whole perimeter blocked off. Barricades, sandbags—like a war zone.”

“Refusing entry?” Julien asked.

“Refusing everyone.” Antoine straightened, his eyes darting between them. “There were people outside—patients, families, a woman holding a child with gauze wrapped around her arm—and the soldiers just stood there. Rifles across their chests. Not saying a word. One old man tried to push through. They shoved him back hard enough to send him sprawling.”

Camille’s stomach twisted. “Refusing entry to a hospital. During a blackout. That’s not gas leak protocol.”

“Gas leak,” Julien repeated, the words tasting bitter. “They want everyone to believe this is just a broken pipe and a few blown transformers. But first they cut power to a whole city, then they jam communications, and now they’re locking down medical facilities?” He shook his head. “This isn’t a response. It’s a siege.”

“What about the smaller clinics?” Camille asked. “The ones on our side of the river?”

Antoine shrugged helplessly. “Didn’t get that far. The checkpoint at Rue de Charenton turned me back. They’re not letting people move freely anymore. Within an hour, the whole district’s going to be sealed.”

Camille felt the weight of the insulated bag tucked beneath her coat. Inside: six vials of insulin, enough to stabilize the most critical patients at Saint-Vincent if she left now. Sylvie’s face flickered in her memory—the steady hand that had pulled her back from the brink of losing her license years ago, the quiet authority that had saved her career.

But Saint-Vincent was across the river. And the river might as well be on another planet now.

“I need to check on Mme Rousseau,” she said, already moving toward the stairs.

Mme Rousseau’s apartment smelled of lavender and something sour underneath—the telltale scent of a body struggling to regulate itself. She lay propped against a mountain of pillows, her skin pale and waxy in the dim light that filtered through the heavy curtains. Her breathing was shallow, each inhale a small victory.

Camille knelt beside the bed, pressing two fingers to the old woman’s wrist. The pulse was thready, irregular. Her hand was cooler than it should have been, despite the blanket Camille had wrapped around her shoulders the night before.

“Camille,” Mme Rousseau whispered, her eyes fluttering open. “You look worried.”

“I’m always worried,” Camille said, forcing a smile. “It’s my professional disposition.”

“Your mother was the same way. God rest her.” The old woman’s hand found Camille’s and squeezed with surprising strength. “She never could hide anything from me either.”

Camille’s throat tightened. Mme Rousseau had been the building’s unofficial chronicler for decades—she’d watched Camille grow up, had attended her father’s funeral, had brought over cassoulet during the dark months after her mother’s stroke. She knew this family’s medical history better than most doctors.

And she knew about the insulin.

“How much do you have left?” Camille asked, keeping her voice steady.

“Two vials. Maybe eight days if I’m careful with my meals.” Mme Rousseau’s eyes searched Camille’s face. “That’s not enough, is it?”

“It might be enough,” Camille said. “We’re working on something.”

“You’re a terrible liar, dear. Just like your father.”

Camille’s fingers instinctively went to her wrist, touching the cool metal of the watch her father had worn every day of his life. A simple Patek Philippe, nothing flashy, but it had kept perfect time through thirty years of house calls and hospital shifts. Through the blackout of ’98, when he’d walked the same streets she was now walking, his own bag full of what medicine he could carry.

He’d died on those streets. A heart attack at sixty-two, found by a neighbor two blocks from their apartment, his bag still full of insulin he hadn’t managed to deliver.

The vials in Camille’s coat weighed heavier now. She’d hidden them in her father’s old medical kit—the one she’d never been able to throw away—under a false bottom he’d installed for emergencies. Four vials belonged to Mme Rousseau. The other six were for Sylvie’s patients across the river.

But if Mme Rousseau’s condition was worsening faster than expected, that math shifted. And if the soldiers were sealing the district, getting across the river might not be possible anyway.

“I need to check something,” Camille said, standing. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

Mme Rousseau’s eyes closed. “Be careful, dear. The world has changed in ways we don’t understand yet.”

Camille found Julien in the courtyard with Antoine and Léa, who had emerged from her apartment with a laptop that glowed faintly in her arms—solar-charged, she’d explained earlier. The young hacker’s face was pinched with concentration.

“I got more of the message,” Léa said, not looking up. “The NATO transmission I caught this morning. I’ve been running fragments through my offline decoder, trying to piece together what wasn’t corrupted.”

“And?” Julien asked.

Léa finally raised her eyes. “The word ‘Aurelius’ appears three times. It’s a codeword for something—I don’t know what yet. But the two words after it are clearer.” She paused. “‘Containment protocol.’”

The three of them stood in silence for a long moment. Around them, the courtyard was coming alive with the slow choreography of survival—a woman boiling water over a makeshift stove, two children playing a quiet game of marbles, a man stringing a clothesline between balconies. Ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances.

“A gas leak doesn’t require containment protocol,” Julien said quietly.

“No,” Camille agreed. “But a population does.”

She thought of the soldiers at the hospital perimeter, their rifles across their chests. She thought of the encrypted signal sent from this very building minutes before the blackout. She thought of her father’s watch ticking steadily on her wrist, counting out the minutes of a world that was narrowing around them.

“I have to try to get across the river,” she said. “Tonight, while we still have daylight.”

Julien’s eyes met hers. There was something unreadable in them—concern, maybe, or something deeper. “The checkpoints are already going up.”

“I know.” Camille reached into her coat and touched the bag of insulin. Then she thought of Mme Rousseau’s waxen skin and understood she had a different calculation to make before she could leave anyone. “But first, there’s something I need to tell you about my father’s old medical kit.”