Read Chapter 22: The Night of Fires

Étienne threw his weight against the starboard vang, cursing the dead weight of his left arm as the balloon lurched. Below them, the Prussian supply road unspooled like a dirty bandage through the dark. Marchand crouched beside the burner, hands shaking as he adjusted the valve. The chameleon cloth shimmered and dulled, matching the bruised purple of the sky, but Étienne’s nerves were singing.

“You’re flying too low,” Marchand said, voice thin over the wind.

“I’m flying blind, with one hand, over an army that wants me dead,” Étienne snapped. “If you have better counsel, give it.”

Marchand’s jaw tightened. He’d been like this since they’d left the Paris ramparts—twitchy, muttering to himself about his son’s face, his hands never still. Étienne had argued with Juliette about it before she’d climbed into the gondola. *He’s grief-strung, not a soldier,* she’d said. *He’ll be our way through the wire.*

Étienne had wanted to remind her that Marchand had made her break out of a French prison by stuffing a guard’s mouth with fabric scraps, but then they were airborne, and the argument died with the wind.

“We’re past their forward batteries,” Étienne said, scanning the darkness for occupation lights. Far off, a tongue of orange licked at the horizon—a burning village. “Another hour and we can set down before the—”

The lantern swung.

Étienne saw it happen in slow motion. Marchand had rigged a signal lamp to the rail—a small brass thing meant to flash a code to friendly eyes on the ground—but the bracket was loose. It tipped. The glass shattered against the wicker. A gout of flame, oil-fed, leapt up the rigging.

“No!” Étienne slammed a hand onto the canvas, but the fire had already found the envelope’s sealed edge—the *untreated* patch they’d applied in haste that afternoon. The chameleon cloth held for one blessed second, shimmering near-white like a heat haze—and then it caught.

Marchand screamed. He lunged for the flame with his bare hands, beating at it until his sleeves were scorched and black.

“Get down!” Étienne grabbed him by the collar, hauling him to the floor of the gondola. “Stay low, keep your breath shallow.”

The canvas above them was a writhing sheet of fire. The envelope’s hydrogen ignited in a soft *whump* that knocked the air out of Étienne’s lungs. He felt the gondola drop, then rise, then twist in a sickening spiral.

“We’re going down!” Marchand shrieked.

Étienne braced his good arm against the rail. He had no basket of ballast left—they’d dumped most of it over the French border just to clear the ridges. The fields below rushed up, a dark tide studded with the skeletal fingers of trees.

“Hold on to something!” he roared.

The crash was not like he remembered the no man’s land. That had been mud, soft, forgiving. This was forest. The gondola struck a pine crown with a sound like a cannon shot, and the basket disintegrated around them. Étienne was thrown clear, hitting the ground shoulder-first, the breath driven from his body in a single white flash of pain.

He lay in the dark, leaf litter in his mouth, the crackle of the burning balloon somewhere above him a mockery of a funeral pyre.

“Marchand.” He forced the word out. “Marchand!”

A groan answered him from ten yards off. Then a thrash of undergrowth. Marchand crawled into view, his face striped with soot, his hands blistered. “I’m sorry,” he gasped. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Étienne got a knee under him. “The fire. Is it out?”

They both looked up. The burning canvas had caught a branch and was dripping fire to the forest floor in fat, hissing gobbets. The trees were dry. It would spread.

“We need to move,” Étienne said.

They didn’t have time. A shout rang out from the dark, guttural and sharp—Prussian. Then another voice, then the sound of boots crunching through bracken.

Marchand’s eyes went wide as a hunted animal’s. “They’ll shoot us on sight.”

“Then don’t be seen,” Étienne hissed, but his arm was useless and his legs were screaming and the forest was already filling with lantern light and hoarse commands.

Three soldiers emerged from the gloom, rifles raised, their greatcoats slick with pine sap. A sergeant stepped forward. His face was tired, hard, younger than Étienne expected. He snapped something in German that ended in a sharp inflection.

Étienne didn’t move. He raised his good hand, palm open. “We’re balloonists,” he said slowly, in the little German his brother had taught him on a rooftop years ago, words rusted from lack of use. “Mail. We came down. Lost.”

The sergeant’s eyes flicked to the burning wreckage, then to Marchand, who was shaking like a child. He spoke to his men, then gestured with his rifle at the direction of the smoke.

“March,” the sergeant said, in mangled French.

They marched.

The POW camp materialized out of the dark an hour later, a smear of torchlight and wire against the forest. Étienne felt the ground change under his boots—packed earth, the ruts of a thousand other men—and smelled the place before he truly saw it: woodsmoke, latrine pits, boiled cabbage, and the thin, bitter undercurrent of sickness.

The sergeant handed them off at the gate to an old guard with a gray beard, barking a few words that likely meant *prisoners, no papers, be handled*. Then he was gone and Étienne and Marchand were shoved through the wire.

Men stared. Rows of gaunt faces, hollow eyes. Squalid tents, a few damp lean-tos. The old guard prodded Étienne’s back with his rifle butt, forcing him toward a courtyard at the center of the camp, where a fat cook’s fire burned and a tin boiler hissed.

“We’re alive,” Marchand whispered, his voice raw.

“For now,” Étienne said.

The old guard shoved them down onto a log beside the fire. Étienne clutched the two gold lockets through his coat—Lucien’s and his father’s—feeling the pressed edges dig into his ribs. *He’s here.* The thought burned hotter than the fire. *He’s somewhere in the wire.*

He scanned the faces. They all blurred together—dirty, bearded, starved. He tried to pick out a shape he might recognize from a boyhood lived across a breakfast table and a dozen Paris rooftops.

“The commandant will want to see you,” the old guard said, his French thick but understandable. He pointed to a squat timber building at the camp’s edge, where a single lantern glowed behind a canvas flap.

Étienne forced a nod. “What commandant?”

The old guard chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. “Kohl. Good man. Gets results.” He gestured at a line of prisoners being marched back from the wood—each one carrying a bundle of cut branches. “You’ll be working tomorrow, balloonists. There’s a war to win.”

Marchand made a sound low in his throat, a noise Étienne didn’t like—half sob, half snarl.

Étienne squeezed the lockets. He found his voice. “Everyone in this camp works?”

The old guard shrugged. “Everyone alive does.”

Étienne’s gaze swept the crowd once more. A figure had emerged from one of the tents—thin, wrapped in a filthy coat that hung off his frame, dragging a bucket of water across the frozen mud. The man looked up. His face was pale, hollow-cheeked, with a scar angled across his left eyebrow that Étienne remembered from a childhood bicycle crash.

Lucien looked at him without recognition.

Then the moment passed. Lucien’s head dipped, and he carried his bucket away toward the sick tents, swallowed by the shadows.

Étienne’s breath caught. He turned back to the old guard, forcing calm into his voice. “We need food. Rest. Then bring us to Kohl.”

The old guard blinked at his eagerness. “You’ll see him soon enough. He always comes for new meat.”

Marchand shifted on the log, his burned hands gripping his knees. “He comes?” he whispered, low. “He comes *here*?”

Étienne saw it then—the artisan’s face, lit by the fire, had gone the color of ash. Not fear. Something else. Recognition.

“You’ve met him before,” Étienne said quietly.

Marchand’s knuckles whitened. “I served under him.”

“Served?”

But Marchand said no more. He stared into the flames, and the fire crackled, and somewhere beyond the wire, a man coughed into the dark, long and wet.

Étienne turned the words over. Marchand, who’d lost his son to Kohl. Marchand, who’d built a balloon to fly Étienne to his brother. Marchand, who had burned his own hands beating at a flame he should have never touched.

*Served under him.*

The artisan’s grief wasn’t the plain grief of a father. It was salted with shame—the shame of a man who had once followed the very officer who murdered his son.

Étienne looked at Marchand and said nothing. But he tucked the thought away, cold and careful, beside the lockets.

The night fires burned on. Tomorrow, Lucien would see him. And the morning after that, if fate was kind, they’d be gone.

But Marchand was watching the commandant’s hut now, an expression in his eyes that had nothing to do with escape.