Read Chapter 30: The Forgotten List Again

The firelight from the Prussian camp painted the undersides of the clouds a sickly orange, a false dawn bleeding across the horizon. Étienne stood at the edge of the ruined farmhouse, his breath misting in the cold air. The ground still trembled from the last of the secondary explosions, a continuous rumble like a hungry stomach.

“We need to move,” Marchand said, appearing at his elbow. “That fire will draw every patrol for miles, and they won’t discriminate between saboteurs and survivors.”

From inside, Lucien coughed, a wet, tearing sound that made Étienne wince. The boy had insisted on coming this far, had refused to be left behind at the borrowed apartment, but each step had cost him. Now he leaned against the crumbling wall, his face the color of old paper.

“The cart’s still hitched,” the artisan said. He was the man who had helped them dig the pit beneath Rothschild’s grain depot, a quiet cooper who had lost his wife to a stray shell the week before. He was already walking toward the road, his shoulders hunched against the cold.

Étienne nodded. “We go west, hug the treeline until we hit the Marne. There’s a ferryman near Joinville who owes me favors.”

They moved fast, the artisan taking point, his lantern shuttered to a thin slit of light. The fire behind them painted their shadows long and jagged, dancers in a burning world. Marchand carried the canvas sack with the untested bomb, his grip proprietary. Lucien stumbled twice, and the third time he went down hard, his knees buckling on the frozen mud.

Étienne was at his side in an instant. “Up. Now.”

Lucien’s eyes were glassy. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Just go on. Leave me.”

The word *leave* hit Étienne like a punch. He had left his brother once, had watched him vanish into the smoke of Sedan and never seen him again. “No.”

“He can’t keep pace,” Marchand said, his voice flat. “And we don’t have time for sentiment.”

Étienne turned on him, teeth bared. “He comes.”

The artisan had stopped ahead of them, waiting. He took a step back toward the group. “I’ll carry him. I’m stronger than I look.”

He lifted Lucien effortlessly, draping the boy over his shoulders like a sack of grain. They pushed on. The treeline was close now, a dark spine against the gray fields. The fire was a distant roar, punctuated by the crackle of small arms as the Prussians tried to quell the chaos.

They had just reached the first trees when the shot came.

It was not a crack. It was a wet thump, like a stone hitting a melon. The artisan staggered, a red rose blooming across his chest. He turned, almost surprised, and his mouth opened. Lucien slid from his shoulders, crumpling to the ground.

Another shot. This one split the bark of a tree beside Étienne’s head, showering him with splinters.

“Sniper,” Marchand hissed, already dragging Lucien into the deeper shadow of the trees. Étienne dove after them, landing hard beside the fallen artisan.

The man was still alive, his breath a ragged whistle. Blood frothed at his lips. A Prussian bullet had punched through both lungs.

“Don’t,” Étienne said, pressing his hand against the wound. It was useless, and he knew it. The blood was arterial, too thick and too fast.

The artisan grabbed Étienne’s wrist with surprising strength. His eyes were wild, not with fear but with a furious determination. “The list,” he said, the words bubbling. “You lost the list.”

“I found it. It was in my pocket all along.”

“No.” The artisan shook his head, a violent jerk. “Rothschild had a copy made. Missing names. He kept one back, the one that would condemn himself if it surfaced. I found it. I hid it.”

He reached into his own coat, but his fingers were already losing their function. Étienne did it for him, finding the inner pocket, feeling the stiff paper. He pulled it free. A single sheet, yellowed, creased. The handwriting was the same as the original list.

His eyes scanned it, and the world tilted.

There was only one name on it. Etched in the same black ink, the same deliberate hand.

*General Philippe Delacroix.*

Étienne’s mind raced, discarding everything he thought he knew. Delacroix. The hero of the left bank. The man who had rallied the National Guard at Buzenval, who had stood on the ramparts and sworn to die before surrendering. Delacroix, who had access to every defensive plan, every supply manifest, every secret of the city’s fragile will to resist.

And who had been quietly selling that access to the highest bidder.

The artisan’s grip on his wrist tightened. “He’s not a soldier. He’s a merchant. He’s been starving Paris for profit. He’s—he’s planning to open the gates. He has a date. A signal. I don’t know it. But he’ll do it soon. Before the new year. He wants the city whole when the Prussians walk in, so he can take his place in the new government.”

Étienne looked at the man’s face, already losing color. “How did you get this?”

“Bordeaux. He has a mistress. She keeps his documents. Her brother owed me money.” A thin, bloody smile. “The brother doesn’t owe me anymore.”

Another volley of shots whined overhead. Marchand fired back into the dark, and a distant cry told them he had found his mark.

“I have to stop him,” Étienne said. It was not a statement of intent. It was a realization, a weight settling onto his shoulders.

“You have to *fly*,” the artisan amended. The grip on his wrist slackened. His eyes went milky. The breath left his body in a long, final sigh.

Étienne held still for a moment, his hand still pressed to the wound that no longer bled. Then he folded the paper into his own pocket, next to the original. Two pieces. One whole betrayal.

Marchand appeared above him. “We have to move. There could be more of them.”

Lucien had crawled to the artisan’s side. He looked at the dead man, then at Étienne. “He carried me,” he said, as if that were the whole story.

“And he served Paris,” Étienne said. “Better than the men who led it.”

He stood. His arm ached, the fresh wound from Kohl’s surgeon pulsing with a dull heat that was rapidly becoming a fever. But there was no time for that.

“We need to get back to the city,” he said. “Tonight.”

“That’s suicide,” Marchand said. “The gates are sealed until dawn, and the patrols are doubled after what we just did.”

“Then we go over.”

Marchand stared at him. “Over the walls? In the dark? With the wind as it is?”

“No. Over the walls with what’s left of the gas in my balloon. It’s moored at the edge of Saint-Cloud, hidden in the mill. We can reach it before they even know we’re gone.”

“And the boy?”

Étienne looked at Lucien. The fever was claiming him now, his eyes already half-lidded with exhaustion. He couldn’t make the climb. He couldn’t make the walk.

“He stays,” Marchand said.

“No,” Étienne said. But he heard the indecision in his own voice.

Lucien spoke, his voice barely a whisper. “The infirmary. They know me there. They’ll take me in without questions. You get to the balloon. You stop Delacroix.”

“It’s the only way,” Marchand said. “I’ll stay with him. You fly alone.”

Étienne’s hand closed around the paper in his pocket. Delacroix. A general of France. A man who was already planning to surrender Paris on a silver platter.

He thought of his brother, lost at Sedan. He thought of the artisan, dead in the mud for a scrap of paper.

He thought of the trap that had been laid for him, all the way back at the start, and realized the trap had never been about catching him. It had been about keeping him from finding the truth.

The truth was in his pocket.

And the truth was about to be exposed.