Read Chapter 10: The First Crack

The crash came from the dining car’s far door—a shoulder slamming against wood, then another. Élise spun from the bar where she’d been pressing a damp cloth to Colette’s forehead. Through the grimy window of the isolation barrier she’d jury-rigged from overturned tables and luggage straps, she saw shapes pressing against the frosted glass. Six, maybe seven of them. Their voices were muffled but the intent was not.

“Open it!” a man shouted. “You can’t keep them in there with us!”

Élise recognized the voice. The man with the red cap who’d been shouting about government cover-ups since Calais. She’d seen him in the corridor earlier, his face flushed, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth as he harangued a woman holding a sleeping infant.

“Stay back,” she called through the gap. “This barrier is the only thing keeping the pathogen contained. If you breach it, you expose everyone.”

“They’re already exposed!” Red Cap slammed his palm against the glass. It rattled in its frame. “That girl is dying in there. We all breathed the same air before you locked them up. We’re all dead anyway—so why should they get special treatment?”

Behind her, Colette coughed—a wet, rattling sound that ended in a wheeze. The sound carried. It carried like a confession.

The door shook again. This time two bodies hit it together.

Élise grabbed the fire extinguisher from its wall mount and jammed it under the door handle. It wouldn’t hold long. The dining car’s other exit—the one leading toward Coach 4—was blocked by a freight trolley she’d dragged across it earlier. She’d thought she was being paranoid. Now she cursed herself for not finding a way to weld the damn thing shut.

“Listen to me!” She raised her voice, straining to be heard over the rising din. “I’m a doctor. An epidemiologist. I know what I’m doing. The people in here are not your enemy. The pathogen is. And if you break that door, you’re not saving anyone—you’re opening the box.”

Red Cap’s face appeared in the small window, nose flattened against the glass, one eye wild. “You’re the one who was fired. We all saw the news. You think we don’t know who you are, Dr. Fournier? You think we don’t know you have a theory about everything?”

The words hit her like cold water. So they did know. Of course they did. The internet had a long memory, and her disgrace had been very public.

“My theories don’t matter right now,” she said, forcing calm into her voice. “What matters is that we keep the infected separated from the healthy. That’s basic containment. That’s how we survive until rescue arrives.”

“There’s no rescue!” Red Cap screamed. “The line’s dead. The manager’s gone quiet. We’re trapped under the sea with a plague and you’re hoarding the sick like they’re your pets.”

The door shuddered again. Someone had found something heavy. A chair leg? A fire axe from the emergency cabinet? Élise’s stomach dropped.

“Renaud,” she hissed over her shoulder. “I need you to help me brace this.”

The assistant conductor stood frozen by the far counter, his face pale and sheened with sweat. His hands trembled at his sides. For a moment, Élise thought he was about to collapse—another victim. But then he blinked and shook his head.

“I can’t,” he said. “I have to—I have to check on the other cars. The power keeps flickering. If the lights go out in the side tunnels, people will panic.”

He was already moving toward the corridor door, sliding past the bar with his eyes averted.

“Renaud!” Élise called after him. “If they breach this door, everyone in this car is dead. Do you understand? I need you here.”

He paused at the threshold, one hand on the frame. For an instant, something flickered across his face—shame, or fear, or both. Then his expression hardened.

“You’re the expert,” he said. “You handle it.”

And he was gone, the door sliding shut behind him.

Élise stood alone with the sick.

Colette had stopped coughing, which was somehow worse. Her face had taken on a gray pallor that Élise recognized from every epidemic she’d ever studied. The little girl—the first victim’s daughter—had curled into a ball in the corner, her small hands pressed over her ears as the banging grew louder.

The red cap hit the glass again. This time, a crack spidered across the pane.

“Last warning!” Red Cap shouted. “We’re coming in whether you like it or not. We’re taking the sick ones to the cargo car. They can ride the rest of the way in quarantine on their own.”

“That’s not quarantine,” Élise said, moving to stand in front of the children. “That’s a death sentence. The cargo car has no ventilation. No heat. If they’re as sick as you think, they won’t survive an hour.”

“Then they die faster,” someone in the crowd said. “Nature takes its course.”

The glass shattered.

Élise threw her arm up to protect her face as shards sprayed across the dining car floor. The crowd surged through the gap—Red Cap first, his face twisted with righteous fury, followed by three men and a woman with a steel pipe gripped in her white-knuckled fists.

“Get behind me,” Élise ordered the child. She grabbed the fire extinguisher, ripped the pin, and leveled it at the intruders.

“I don’t want to use this,” she said, her voice steady despite the hammering of her heart. “But I will. The CO₂ will disperse the pathogen before you reach them. You’ll be breathing it into your lungs with every desperate inhale. Is that what you want?”

Red Cap hesitated. The woman with the pipe didn’t.

“She’s bluffing,” the woman said, and swung.

Élise ducked, and the pipe whistled past her ear, clanging against the steel counter where she’d stood a second before. She squeezed the extinguisher’s trigger. A jet of white spray hit the woman square in the face, sending her stumbling back with a shriek.

But in the chaos, someone else had already slipped around her flank.

A lit cigarette—tossed carelessly in the struggle, or dropped by a shaking hand—flickered end over end through the air. It bounced off a table, rolled across the floor, and disappeared beneath a floor panel where the fuel line ran from the galley stove.

For one terrible second, the world went silent.

Then the explosion lifted Élise off her feet.

The blast threw her across the dining car. She hit the far wall with her shoulder, felt something pop, and slid down to the floor in a heap of pain and ringing ears. Smoke filled the car, thick and acrid, burning her eyes and throat. The floor beneath her was hot. Flames licked up from the ruptured fuel line, catching on the vinyl tablecloths, spreading toward the curtains.

“Fire!” someone screamed. “Fire! Get back! Get back!”

The mob scattered, clawing over each other to reach the exits. Red Cap was gone, last seen dragging the woman with the pipe through the shattered barrier. In the confusion, the infected were left alone—Colette still unconscious on her stretcher, the girl crying in the corner, three other patients huddled together, hacking into their hands as smoke poured over them.

Élise forced herself to her knees. Her shoulder screamed. The fire extinguisher lay on its side, still hissing its last plume of white spray.

She crawled toward the flames and emptied it.

The fire died with a sizzle of steam and scorched vinyl. A blackened scar now ran across the floor of the dining car, bisecting the space between the healthy and the sick. The stench of burned fuel and plastic hung heavy in the air.

Élise dropped the empty extinguisher and leaned against the wall, gasping.

The first crack had come. Not in the hull, but in the fragile order that had kept two hundred people from tearing each other apart. And now the smoke was spreading through the ventilation ducts, curling toward the other cars, carrying the message that something had gone terribly wrong.

Somewhere above her, in the ductwork, she thought she heard a scuffling sound. A movement that wasn’t the settling of metal.

She looked up, heart hammering.

Dr. Antoine’s message flickered through her mind: *Move before the lockdown.*

He had known. He had climbed into these ducts to hide. And now, as the smoke cleared, she saw that one of the vents above her—the one that had been sealed with a maintenance sticker—now hung ajar.

Something had moved it recently.

Someone was still in the walls.