Read Chapter 3: A Cipher in the Soot

The crack of the rifle was still ringing in my ears when Valeux staggered against me, one hand clamped to his shoulder. His face had gone the color of tallow. Blood, dark and arterial, seeped between his fingers.

“You're hit,” I said, stupidly. The fact of it refused to settle.

“Grazed,” he corrected through gritted teeth. “The ball took a piece of the shoulder. Not deep.” He looked past me, scanning the rooftops above the Rue de Rivoli. “But he'll correct his aim quickly. We need to move.”

Another shot cracked against the cobblestones at our feet, chipping stone. I grabbed Valeux by the belt and hauled him into the alley mouth we'd just passed. He stumbled but kept his feet. I didn't ask where we were going. I just ran, dragging him with me through the filth of the city's guts.

We burst out into a courtyard where a dead horse lay swollen and untended, its ribs like a shipwreck's timbers. I knew this quarter. The workshops behind the École Militaire, where I'd once gone to have a burner valve re-brazed. The building's ground floor had been abandoned since September—the metalworker gone to the front, his family evacuated.

I kicked in the rear door. The hinges screamed.

Inside, the air was thick with coal dust and the ghosts of a hundred extinguished forges. I pushed Valeux against a workbench and swung the door shut behind us, throwing the bolt.

Silence. Then the distant pop of another rifle shot, muffled by walls.

“He doesn't know where we went,” I said. My own voice sounded foreign.

Valeux exhaled—a long, shuddering breath that suggested the wound was worse than he'd claimed. He slid down the bench leg to the floor, back against the stone, leaving a dark smear across the plaster. I knelt beside him, tore the sleeve of his coat open. The wound was a furrow along the deltoid, ugly but superficial. The ball had missed the artery by a finger's width.

“You've done this before,” I said, binding it with a strip torn from my own shirt.

“Done what?”

“Examine gunshot wounds.”

He didn't answer.

I sat back on my haunches and watched him. The cloaked diplomat, the peace emissary. He'd been so composed on our walk, talking of Moltke's cavalry screens and the need to reach Versailles unannounced. Then a sniper who knew our route, and this man who assessed his own wound like a surgeon at a field hospital.

Something was wrong. Had been wrong since the envelope found me.

I started patting his coat for other injuries. He didn't resist—too weak, or too clever. My hand passed over his breast pocket and felt the stiffness of paper. A fold, thick as a pamphlet. I pulled it out.

“Your terms,” I said. “The peace terms you're carrying to the Prussian command.”

Valeux's eyes moved to the paper, then away. “You shouldn't read that.”

I unfolded it anyway.

It wasn't a treaty.

The paper was a map, hand-drawn in ink so fine it might have been etched with a needle. I recognized the contours of the Bois de Vincennes, the horseshoe bend of the Marne, the arc of the eastern defenses. And overlaid on that geography, small circles and crosses in red ink. Dozens of them, clustered on the heights of Châtillon, at Mont-Valérien, along the Avron plateau.

I'd flown over those positions. I knew what artillery placements looked like from a thousand feet up at dawn.

These were Prussian batteries. Their calibers, marked in brackets. Their fields of fire, drawn as arcs. Their ammunition reserves, notated in shorthand I recognized from captured dispatches I'd helped deliver to the Ministry of War.

“This isn't a peace offer,” I said slowly. “This is an order of battle.”

Valeux watched me. He didn't try to explain.

“You're not carrying terms to Moltke,” I pressed on. “You're carrying target data. You're a spy.”

“I'm a courier,” he said.

“For whom?”

The silence stretched between us, interrupted only by the distant crump of a shell landing somewhere in the eleventh arrondissement. The siege had become such a constant music that I'd learned to read its intervals like a drummer's rhythm. This one was far. Harmless. For now.

I looked at the map again. There was something familiar in the handwriting—the particular way the cross-strokes on the seven slanted. My brother wrote sevens like that. But Jean-Baptiste was dead, frozen in a ditch at Sedan, and I'd watched the list of casualties myself.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“A man who wants the war to end.”

“This map doesn't end wars. It starts artillery barrages.”

Valeux tried to shift position and winced, his shoulder sending a fresh pulse of blood through the bandage. “The man who made that map is inside Paris. He's a French officer. He believes the war is lost—that prolonging it is butchering his own countrymen. So he's giving the Prussians the means to end it quickly. A decisive barrage, the government's nerve broken, capitulation within the week. Fewer dead than a winter siege.”

“He's betraying Paris.”

“He's saving what's left of France.”

I folded the map carefully, along its original creases. My hands were steady. My heart wasn't.

“This mission—the flight, the peace delegation—it's a fiction. You fly me out, I deliver the map, the Prussians shell your city into submission.” He looked up at me, pale and unblinking. “You could kill me now. Bury the map. Tell the government what you found.”

The temptation was a physical weight in my hands. I could have my brother's death repaid in Prussian blood. Let the batteries stay hidden. Let the siege grind on until their ammunition ran dry and the army of relief finally came.

But I thought of Jean-Baptiste's last letter—the one that had reached me three days after the telegram announcing his death. He'd written about the boredom of picket duty, the quality of the bread, a stray dog adopted by his company. He hadn't written about glory or country or the justice of the cause. He'd written that he was tired and wanted to come home.

“Who shot at us?” I asked.

“Someone who knows I'm not carrying peace terms. Someone on my own side.” Valeux grimaced, pressing the bandage tighter. “There are men in Paris who would rather the war continue than see it end without their approval. The same men who refused peace in August because they believed victory was inevitable. They won't make that error twice.”

“If they know about you, they'll be watching the launch sites.”

“Then we need a launch site they're not watching.”

I looked around the metalworker's studio. The forge was cold, but the rafters still held chains and pulleys. The roof had a skylight that could be unbolted. And I knew—had known since the siege began—that the balloon shed at the Gare du Nord was the only official departure point. But the mail service had other assets. Cached envelopes, hidden gondolas, aerostats tucked away in odd corners of a starving city.

“There's a hangar near the southern ramparts,” I said. “An old exhibition balloon the Government requisitioned but never used. It needs light repairs.”

“Can you fly it?”

“I can fly anything with gas in it.” I stood, pocketing the map. Valeux's eyes followed it.

“You're still going to take me,” he said. Not a question.

“There's something you're not telling me.” I looked down at him, at the wounded diplomat-spy-courier with his soldier's hands and his coded map and his impossible mission. “And I want to find out what it is.”

I helped him to his feet. He swayed, caught himself against the bench. Out on the street, another shell landed—closer this time, sending a tremor through the walls and raining soot from the chimney.

“When we get there,” I said, “you're going to tell me the truth about who you really are.”

He smiled. A thin, bloodless expression. “And if I don't?”

“Then I leave you at Versailles and fly east, straight into your own artillery's line of sight.” I unfolded the map and pointed at the nearest red circle. “I know exactly where to drop you.”

The smile stayed on his face, but I saw something shift behind his eyes. Something that looked like calculation, not fear. He was weighing me, revising his plan. And I realized I'd just shown him more than he intended to show me.

“Fair enough,” he said softly. “Fly me. And I'll show you the truth.”