Read Chapter 33: The Hostage

The Prussian headquarters was a requisitioned château outside Versailles, its grand ballroom stripped of furniture and filled with the sharp smell of wax and gun oil. Étienne watched through the broken window of a gardener’s shed, Juliette pressed cold beside him, as Delacroix was marched up the gravel path between two guards in field grey.

The general walked with his chin high, a man still wearing his own uniform despite his capture. Even now, Étienne thought, the bastard believes he can win.

“They’re giving him a trial,” Juliette whispered. Her breath fogged. “Why bother? They could shoot him in a ditch and save everyone the theatre.”

“Because they want what he knows.” Étienne shifted, and the pain in his arm shot white up to his shoulder. He bit down. “He’ll trade. He has nothing else left.”

They had watched the château for two hours since landing the balloon in a frozen vineyard a mile south. Hydrogen canisters and a canvas bomb lay in the basket behind them, hidden under sacking. No black powder this time—the artisan’s final diagram had given them something simpler and more terrible. A sealed drum of liquid nitroglycerin, chilled to keep it docile, wired to a friction fuse that would spark on impact.

Étienne touched the canvas. He had never flown a bomb. He had never flown anything intended to kill men in a room.

Juliette caught his wrist. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I’m not alone. You’re here.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Her grip tightened. “We could wait for Marchand. We could fly to the French lines and bring back a regiment. We could—” She stopped. They both knew there was no time. Delacroix was walking through those doors now, and in an hour, he would have given them every name, every garrison, every weakness Paris had left.

“If they sign a treaty with his intelligence, the war ends the wrong way,” Étienne said. “Paris starves and the Prussians take everything. Not a surrender. An execution.”

Juliette let go of his wrist. She looked at the château, her jaw hard. “And if we do this, they’ll sign it anyway. Just over his body instead of with his voice.”

“Then they’ll lose a route to easy victory. Every officer in there who dies is one who won’t be at the peace table. That matters.”

She said nothing for a long moment. The wind picked up, rattling the shed’s warped door. Then she nodded. “Go. Get the balloon ready. I’ll approach from the ground and draw the sentries if I can.”

Étienne pulled himself upright, his legs slow with cold and exhaustion. “Juliette. If this works, you don’t come back for me. You run.”

“I know.”

He unhooked a small lantern and lit it, the flame low and yellow. The hydrogen envelope creaked above them, fat with gas, tugging at its mooring rope like a horse wanting to run. He helped Juliette pull the canvas drum into the basket, then rigged the fuse to the tether line—a tripwire that would pull the pin the moment the basket stopped moving violently.

Impact. Then fire.

“How long do we have before we have to light it?” Juliette asked.

“We don’t light it. The crash does.”

She stared at him. “Then how do you get out?”

He didn’t answer. He climbed into the basket and held out his hand to help her in. She stayed on the ground.

“Étienne.”

“There’s no way to jump and guarantee the fuse pulls. If it doesn’t pull, they survive. Delacroix survives. Everything we did—” His voice cracked. He stopped and tried again. “The balloon is the fuse. I am the balloon.”

Juliette’s eyes went bright and she looked away, wiping at her face with the back of her glove. Then she climbed into the basket beside him. “Then I’m the balloon too.”

“No. You get out at the last moment. I’ll bring us low enough to skim the roofline. When I say go, you jump. There’s a pond on the west side. You saw it from the hill.”

“And you?”

“I’ll hold the course.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but he took her hand and squeezed it. “Someone has to tell Lucien I didn’t die afraid,” he said. “That has to be you.”

She held his gaze. Her hand shook. Then she nodded slowly.

The balloon lifted with a groan of canvas. Étienne cut the mooring rope with a knife he’d sharpened the night before, and they rose into the grey sky, wind carrying them over the vine rows toward the château. Below, he saw two sentries look up, then raise rifles. A crack. A bullet cut through the envelope with a sharp hiss, and the balloon sagged slightly.

“We’re losing gas,” Juliette said.

“We don’t need altitude. We need direction.” He worked the valve, letting heat bleed off the remaining hydrogen to drop them closer to the rooftops. The château loomed ahead, its tall windows glowing warm against the winter dark. Inside those windows, men in fine coats were deciding the fate of France.

Étienne pictured them: Delacroix at the head of a table, his voice smooth as oil; the Prussian officers nodding, writing, already tasting the surrender. He pictured Lucien in that freezing room in Paris, weak but alive, waiting for a brother who had promised to come back.

“Get ready,” he said.

They were fifty yards out. Thirty. The balloon dropped hard, skimming the frost-covered slate with a shriek that tore splinters off the eaves. Below, security men shouted and ran.

“Now, Juliette! Jump!” he shouted.

She didn’t move. Her hand locked on the basket’s rim, knuckles white.

“Juliette!”

She looked at him—really looked at him, through him, like she was memorizing his face—and then she went over the side. A tangle of grey coat and dark hair, falling into the darkness past the roof’s edge. He heard a splash below, distant, swallowed by the wind.

The château wall rushed toward him. He saw the grand ballroom through the tall windows, men turning, Delacroix’s face lifting, mouth open in shock.

The balloon’s basket struck the glass.