Read Chapter 6: The List

The contact list was crumpled, coffee-stained, but the names were legible. Élise spread it flat on the bar counter of the dining car, her finger tracing the cramped handwriting. Four names, each followed by a time and a carriage number. Three had been crossed out. One remained unchecked.

“Carriage 7,” she murmured, half to herself. They were in Coach 7 right now—or as close to it as the train’s layout allowed. Adrian Wilde leaned over her shoulder, his brow furrowed.

“The manifest,” he said. “You have it?”

Élise pulled the folded sheet from her jacket pocket. Marcel had given it to her reluctantly, warning her that if anyone found out she had it, he’d deny everything. The cover page listed the crew. The second page, the passengers. Forty-one names total, but she knew already that two were blank spaces—designated only as “V.I.P.” with no details. Renaud’s little secret.

She ran her finger down the manifest, cross-referencing. “Josette Belloir. Coach 3, seat 27. That’s the first victim—matches the list.” She moved down. “Antoine Marchal. Coach 3, seat 32. He’s the second passenger who collapsed.” She paused. “And the third name—” Her finger stopped on the page.

“Don’t stop now,” Adrian said.

“Third name: Colette Saint-Jean. Coach 7, seat 41.” She looked up. “That’s this car. She’s here.”

Adrian scanned the seating chart. “Seat 41 is near the rear of this car. Past the kitchen. A young woman—I remember seeing her board. Early twenties, dark hair, nervous. Kept checking her phone.”

Élise folded the manifest and shoved it back into her jacket. “Take me to her.”

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The dining car had been converted into an isolation ward, and the air was thick with the metallic scent of antiseptic and the low hum of bodies too close together. Quarantined passengers sat on benches or sprawled across tables, eyes hollow with fear. The Barron family—the ones with direct contact with the first victim—huddled in the far corner. The young daughter was cradled in her mother’s arms, her face flushed, and Élise could hear the wet, rattle-like quality of her breathing from across the room. It was too fast. Too wrong.

She tore her gaze away. Focus on the list.

Colette Saint-Jean was sitting alone near the rear of the car, legs tucked beneath her, a thin cardigan wrapped tight around her shoulders. She was scrolling through her phone with trembling thumbs, and when she looked up and saw Élise approaching, her face drained of color.

“Ms. Saint-Jean?” Élise kept her voice low, non-threatening. “I’m Dr. Fournier. I have some questions about a man you may have met. A passenger in Coach 3. His name was Josette Belloir.”

Colette’s eyes flicked to the side. “I don’t know anyone named that.”

“Your name was in his belongings,” Élise said carefully. “Written in his hand. You two had some contact—a brief meeting, perhaps? Maybe you served him a drink, or sat near him?”

Colette shook her head too quickly. “No. I never met him. I barely left my seat.”

Adrian stepped forward. “His list had a time next to your name. Eleven-forty in the morning. Yesterday. That was before the train departed.”

“What are you, a detective?” Colette’s voice rose, and a few passengers nearby glanced over. She lowered it, but her knuckles were white around her phone. “I don’t know him. I told you. I don’t—I just want to get out of here like everyone else.”

Élise studied her. There was something in the way Colette’s shoulders were hunched, the way she kept glancing toward the exit of the car, that didn’t add up to simple fear of infection. This was fear of something else.

“You’re not on the quarantine list,” Élise said. “You’re not showing symptoms. But I’m not here to accuse you of anything. I just want to understand how a connection was made between you and a man who died in Coach 3 before the train even left the station.”

Colette’s jaw tightened. “Maybe I bumped into him on the platform. I don’t know. People write stuff down all the time.” She pulled her cardigan tighter. “He could have seen my name from my ticket or—can you just leave me alone?”

Adrian opened his mouth to push harder, but Élise placed a hand on his forearm. She leaned closer to Colette, dropping her voice to barely a whisper. “He wasn’t a random passenger to you, was he? You knew him before the train. And something about that meeting scares you more than the sickness itself.”

The girl’s composure cracked. For just a second, her eyes went wide and glassy, and Élise saw the curl of a bottom lip before Colette forced it flat. She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

And then she coughed.

It was a small cough at first—almost polite. Élise’s instincts flared. She watched Colette bring a hand to her mouth, watched the way the girl’s chest hitched tentatively, as if she was trying to swallow the sound. But the second cough was not polite. It was deep, wet, and ripped out of her like a snare trap snapping closed.

Colette doubled over, her body convulsing. The phone clattered to the floor. Her cough turned into a hack, a ragged sound that tore through the dining car’s heavy air, and then she was spitting a spray of red-tinged mucous across the table. A thin trail of blood dripped from her nose.

The passengers around them erupted. A woman screamed. Someone shouted, “She’s got it! She’s got the plague!” and the roar of fear swept through the car like a spark through dry grass. People scrambled to their feet, chairs scraping backward, bodies pressing toward the far doors, away from Colette’s crumpled form.

Élise cursed under her breath. She grabbed Colette by the shoulders and eased her onto her side, angling her head to keep the airway clear. Blood and saliva smeared across the girl’s pale chin. Her eyes rolled, half-conscious, breath sawing in and out.

“Adrian—towels, clean water, now!” She ripped off her jacket and pressed it against Colette’s mouth, trying to muffle the spray. “I need someone to hold down the car doors! Don’t let anyone out—this is a contamination event, not a riot control exercise!”

But the mob was forming. A cluster of passengers—mostly men, mostly red-faced with terror—was converging on the Barron family’s corner. “You did this!” a man bellowed, pointing at the mother. “Your kid was with him the whole time! This girl was with him too—it’s all connected!”

Élise’s head snapped up. The mother was shielding her daughter with her body, her eyes wet with frozen terror. The little girl coughed, a liquid rattle that made Élise’s stomach twist.

She wanted to be two places at once. She needed to treat Colette. She needed to stop the mob from tearing the family apart.

Adrian appeared at her elbow, handing her a wad of linen napkins and a bottle of water. “I’ll handle the crowd,” he said, pushing past her before she could protest.

He stepped between the mob and the family, hands raised — a man between wolves and prey. “Back off! The infection spreads by respiratory droplets, not by proximity to a family who had contact with one man. Everyone stay back, or you’ll make it worse!”

But his voice cracked. He knew it was futile. They were already panicking.

Élise turned back to Colette, pressing the linens to her face. The girl’s tremors were subsiding, but she was barely conscious now, skin pale and clammy. Élise’s own pulse hammered in her throat.

The contact list. Four names, three crossed out, one unchecked. She’d assumed the remaining name would tell her something about the chain of infection. But Colette Saint-Jean had just collapsed at her feet—another dot in a pattern she couldn’t yet see. Not a passenger linked to Josette Belloir. Not a co-conspirator to whatever Renaud suspected.

A victim.

Élise felt the danger settling over the car like a thickening fog. The manifest, the list, the hidden passengers—they were strands of a web, and she was standing in the middle of it without a full picture. The mob’s roar was growing. A scuffle broke out near the doors, and someone screamed.

Colette coughed again, weaker this time. Her hand found Élise’s wrist with surprising grip. Her eyes opened—bloodshot, but lucid.

“He told me,” she rasped. “The man in Coach 3. He said... it started with the ones who already knew.” Her grip tightened. “They’re already here. On this train. You’re chasing the ones who got sick, not the ones who made them sick.”

Élise’s blood ran cold. Before she could ask what that meant, Colette’s eyes rolled back, and she fell limp. Adrian turned from the crowd, face tight with strain. Behind him, a single plate of glass in the dining car window cracked under a man’s fist.

The mob was about to break.

And Élise still didn’t know who had made them sick—or why anyone would.