Read Chapter 13: The Flight from the Guillotine

The balloon lurched. Étienne threw his weight against the wicker rim, felt the envelope shudder above them like something wounded. Juliette clung to the mortar mount, her face pale in the gray half-light of dawn.

“How long?” she asked.

“Long enough to clear the walls.” He didn't tell her it was a lie. The shrapnel had punched three holes the size of fists through the lower canopy, and the hydrogen was whistling out in a steady, corrosive breath. They were losing altitude, drifting south and east, toward the Prussian lines that ringed the city like a noose.

The smoke of Paris fell behind them. Below, the countryside unrolled in strips of frozen brown and white, dotted with the black scars of burned farms. Étienne had flown this route a dozen times, carrying mail pouches and desperate letters, and each time the ground had been a patchwork of living fields. Now it was a graveyard.

The wind shifted. The balloon groaned.

“Étienne.” Juliette pointed.

A column of Prussian infantry was moving along a road below, maybe two hundred men, their bayonets catching the first thin light. Étienne banked the envelope, tried to find a pocket of warmer air, but the balloon was too heavy, too damaged. The ground rushed up.

They hit hard. The basket splintered on impact and Étienne was thrown clear, rolling through mud and frost, his shoulder slamming against a fence post. He lay there, gasping, watching the great silk envelope collapse like a dying animal over the wreckage.

Juliette was already scrambling out of the torn basket, blood streaking her temple. She reached for his arm.

“Run.”

Boots. Shouts. The sound of Prussian German snapping across the field. Étienne tried to rise, but his legs wouldn't hold. Juliette pulled him up, and they made it one stumbling hundred yards before the first rifle shot cracked past them.

They stopped. Hands went up.

The Prussian captain who questioned him was young, younger than Étienne had expected, with a scar across his jaw that pulled his mouth into a permanent sneer. He wore spectacles, and he studied Étienne with the careful detachment of a man reading a ledger.

“Étienne Vautrin,” the captain said in accented French. “The balloonist. Yes, we have been expecting you.”

Étienne sat on a wooden stool in a command post that smelled of damp wool and coffee. His wrists were bound with wire. Juliette was somewhere else, in a separate room, he could hear her shouting once, then silence.

“Expecting me,” Étienne repeated.

The captain slid a file across the table. It was thin, dog-eared, stamped with the Prussian eagle. He opened it.

“Your brother, Lucien,” the captain said. “He flew for the Republican forces at Sedan. Shot down. We recovered him alive.”

Étienne’s chest tightened. “He’s dead. His body was sent home.”

The captain turned a photograph around. A young man with Étienne’s jaw, his mother’s eyes. Standing against a wooden barrack, thinner than Étienne remembered, hollow-cheeked, but unmistakably alive.

“No,” the captain said. “That is a picture from last month. He is in a camp near Cassel. Not a comfortable camp, I assure you. But he breathes.”

Étienne stared at the photograph. His hands trembled, and he hated that they did.

“You’re lying.”

“I have no reason to lie to a dead man.” The captain closed the file. “You are a spy. After today's attack on your own wounded soldiers, the French will hang you if they catch you. And if they don't, we will shoot you. The only question is what happens to your brother.”

The captain let the silence stretch.

“You have some standing among the aeronauts, yes? You know the dispatch routes. The movements of the army of Paris.” He leaned forward. “Tell me what I want to know, and I will send word to Cassel. Your brother will be transferred to a hospital camp. He will eat. He will see a doctor. He will live.”

Étienne looked at the photograph. At Lucien’s hollow cheeks. At the defiance still burning in his eyes, even there, even beaten.

“I don't have any information,” Étienne said.

The captain laughed, a short, humorless sound.

“You don't have to decide now. I will leave you with the file. Think about it. In the morning, we will talk again.”

He stood, gathered his papers, and left. The door locked behind him.

Étienne sat in the silence. The lamplight flickered. He looked at the photograph again, then at the file. There was more inside, handwritten notes about his family—his father’s tobacco shop, addresses in Paris, his aunt’s house in Lyon. Everything. The Prussians knew his whole life, laid out in neat, triangular script.

That wasn't guesswork. That was intelligence. Fed to them by someone inside Paris.

He turned the page. A final entry, dated three weeks earlier, signed with a code he didn't recognize.

*Subject’s brother is expendable. Recommend execution to ensure compliance.*

Étienne’s stomach dropped. Execution. The captain had shown him the file to make him grateful—but the file said Lucien was meant to die. The captain was offering a reprieve that his own superiors had already denied.

Or it was a trick. Another layer.

He was still staring at the page when the door opened. A Prussian soldier entered, carrying a tray of bread and water. He set it down, and as he straightened, he glanced at the file on the table.

“The prisoner at Cassel,” the soldier said in rough French. “The pilot.”

Étienne looked up.

“You know him?”

The soldier shrugged. “He was here. Before the transfer.” He paused, then added, oddly formal: “He fought well at Sedan. They say he tried to burn his own balloon rather than surrender.” The soldier crossed to the door. “They shipped him north on the same train as the wounded. Brave man. Pity about his hands.”

The door shut. Étienne sat alone.

Hands. What about Lucien’s hands?

He didn't sleep. He read the file until the lines blurred, and when the captain returned in the graying hours before dawn, Étienne was still sitting in the same position, the photograph in his lap.

The captain set a new paper on the table. A transfer order. Cassel. His name left blank.

“Your choice, Vautrin.”

Étienne looked at him.

Then he looked past him, at the window, where the fires of Paris—his city, his brother's city—still glowed red on the horizon.