Read Chapter 4: The Kitchen's Secret

The galley was a stainless-steel sarcophagus. Alfred Roy knew every scar on its surfaces—the burn mark shaped like Africa near the fryer, the scratch from a dropped knife that ran crooked as a lie. He’d been scrubbing the same counter for twenty minutes, trying not to think about the dead man three cars down, when he heard the crash.

The sound came from the storage locker. Not the main fridge—the padlocked one. The one Henri had told him never to open.

Alfred stood very still. The train shuddered around him, the emergency lights casting everything in a sickly amber. He should call someone. He should fetch Marcel. That was the right thing. That was what a man who wasn’t drowning in debt to Henri and his crew would do.

He pushed the door open anyway.

The crate had fallen from the top shelf. Its wooden slats had cracked along the seam, and the contents had spilled across the floor in a tangle of dark meat and frozen air. Alfred crouched, his breath catching. The bats were intact, their fur matted with frost, their wings folded tight against their bodies like they were praying. There had to be thirty of them, packed in with dried leaves and plastic bags of something that smelled like old blood.

Henri’s cargo. Henri’s *special* cargo, for the passenger in First Class who paid in cash and asked no questions. Alfred had helped load it in Paris, his hands shaking so badly Henri had laughed at him. *“Relax, petit. They’re just animals. People eat them in other countries. Nothing to be afraid of unless—”* He’d never finished the sentence. Alfred had never asked.

One of the bats had broken open on impact. Its belly had split, and a dark, gelatinous fluid had soaked into the cardboard beneath it. Alfred reached to push the carcass back into the crate, his fingers brushing the torn flesh. The meat was warm. Not frozen-warm. *Alive*-warm, like something had been moving in it recently. He snatched his hand back and wiped it on his apron, his skin crawling.

He should report it. The protocols were clear—anything unusual, anything that could compromise the train, went to Marcel immediately. But Marcel would ask questions. Marcel would want to know why Alfred had the key to the padlock. Marcel would call Henri, and Henri would call in the debt, and Alfred’s mother’s apartment in Roubaix would go to the people Henri owed.

Alfred made a decision he would regret for the rest of his very short life. He dragged the broken bat into the crate, packed the others around it, and hauled the mess back onto the shelf. He found a roll of duct tape in the tool drawer and sealed the crate as best he could. His hands shook as he worked, and he kept wiping them on his apron, over and over, until the fabric was dark with meat juice and rust-colored smears.

The cut on his thumb—a shaving nick he’d gotten that morning, still pink and tender—throbbed where the blood had mixed with whatever was inside that bat. He taped it anyway and washed his hands for a full minute in the sink, watching the water run pink, trying not to think about what he’d touched, what he’d breathed in when the crate cracked open and that cold, wet air hit his face.

When Marcel found him, ten minutes later, Alfred was leaning against the counter with a cup of coffee he wasn’t drinking, his eyes fixed on the storage locker door like it might open on its own and drag him in.

“Boy. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Alfred forced a laugh. “Just the news. Bad signal, but what we can get—it’s not good, is it?”

Marcel studied him. The train manager’s face was gray with exhaustion, but his eyes were sharp. “No. It’s not good. I need you to keep the galley closed. Lock it. No one comes in, not even staff, until I say otherwise. Tell the kitchen crew to stay in the crew car. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

Marcel turned to go, then stopped. “There’s a woman—a passenger. Dr. Fournier. She’ll be coming through here. She’s going to inspect the dead man’s things. Let her through, but keep the galley locked. She doesn’t go in the storage areas. Not yet.”

“Who is she?”

“Trouble,” Marcel said, and left.

---

Élise had seen death before. She had watched bodies bloom with fever and collapse under the weight of their own failing organs. She had held the hands of men and women who were already gone, their eyes still open, still pleading. But she had never seen death *managed* the way Marcel managed it.

They walked through the passenger cars in silence. The Eurostar’s dim safety lights cast long shadows across the seats, and passengers huddled in clusters, whispering. Some of them had already pulled their collars up over their mouths. Others stared at their phones as if the screens could save them. Élise caught fragments of conversation—*“They said fifteen minutes,”* *“My husband is going to miss his meeting,”* *“I heard it’s a terror attack”*—but no one said the word *plague*. Not yet. That word was still waiting in the tunnel, coiled in the dark, patient.

The dead man had been moved to a baggage compartment at the rear of the train. Marcel unlocked the door with an old brass key that looked older than the train itself. Inside, the air was cold and metallic, and the body lay on a luggage rack, covered with a thin blanket.

“His name was Jacques Moreau,” Marcel said. “Sixty-two years old. Retired schoolteacher from Lyon. He was traveling alone.”

“You’ve checked his reservation.”

“We checked everything. Passport, credit cards, phone records. The manifests don’t mention anyone else under his name.”

Élise knelt beside the body. She pulled back the blanket and studied what she could see of his face. The skin was mottled, the lips already tinged blue. But it was the discoloration at the corner of his mouth that caught her attention—a faint green tint, like something had leaked from his lungs and dried there.

“It was fast,” she murmured. “He was fine when he boarded. He coughed, and then he collapsed. Fifteen minutes, maybe less.”

“The doctor on board said it might have been a heart attack.”

“The doctor on board isn’t an epidemiologist.” Élise touched the man’s hand. The fingers were stiff, but the palm was still warm. “Thirty minutes ago, this man was alive. Whatever killed him, it didn’t give him time to fight back.”

“And this?” Marcel gestured to a small leather satchel that had been set on a shelf above the rack. “His belongings. We collected them per protocol.”

Élise opened the satchel carefully. Inside: a wallet, a set of keys, a crumpled handkerchief, and a small spiral notebook. She flipped through it—the handwriting was neat, but the entries were sparse. *“11:30 – Arrive London. Meet Marie. She doesn’t know.”* That was the last entry.

She checked the wallet. A few euros, a photograph of a woman who might have been his daughter, and a train ticket. But it was the satchel’s inner pocket that made her stop. She pulled out a folded piece of paper. It was a list of names—eight of them, scrawled in a different hand than Jacques’s—with check marks next to four, and dates scribbled in the margins.

“Marcel. This was in his bag.”

Marcel took the paper, frowning. His hand was steady now, but Élise remembered the way Renaud’s had trembled. She filed that detail away.

“Do you know these names?” she asked.

Marcel shook his head. “Passengers? Crew? Could be anything. He was a schoolteacher—maybe students, or colleagues.”

“A schoolteacher traveling with a contact list in his bag, in a language that isn’t French, with dates and check marks next to half of the names?” Élise took the paper back. “He was tracking people. Whether they were alive, or whether they showed up where he expected them to be. I need to compare this against the manifest.”

“That’s crew-only data.”

“It’s *lives* data. And right now, every minute we spend protecting protocol is a minute that pathogen spends finding more hosts.” She folded the paper and tucked it into her own pocket. “Let me see the manifest, Marcel. Or I start telling your passengers that you’re hiding information.”

Marcel’s face tightened. For a moment, Élise thought he’d refuse. But then his shoulders sagged, and he nodded toward the door.

“There’s a service office two cars up. I’ll get you the manifest.” He paused, his hand on the latch. “But when you cross-check those names, Dr. Fournier—if you find that someone on this train knew this man, knew what was coming—”

“They’ll have answers I need.”

“Or they’ll be dead before you can ask them.” Marcel opened the door, and the din of the train fell back in around them. “Follow me. And stay quiet about the list. Some of my crew—I don’t know who’s listening anymore.”

Élise followed him through the corridor, her hand closing around the list in her pocket. Four names had check marks. That meant four people on this train had been in contact with Jacques Moreau in the past week. At least four potential vectors. Four chances for the pathogen to have already spread, like cracks in a dam, waiting for the water to push through.

She passed the galley as they walked, and through the narrow window she saw a young man in a white apron, wiping his hands again and again on his stained uniform. He looked up briefly, met her eyes, and looked away too fast.

Élise made a note to come back for him. But first, she needed to know who else had touched the dead.

The list in her pocket was warm against her thigh, and she could feel it the way she’d felt the first fever breaking in a village clinic—a pressure building, a clock beginning to tick down toward zero.