Read Chapter 14: The Committee's Eye

The summons came at the tenth hour, when the Tribunal’s corridors were thick with the smell of stale coffee and nervous sweat. Élodie had just set down her pen, her fingers aching from the morning’s copying, when a clerk she did not recognize touched her elbow.

“You are Moreau? The Committee of General Security requires your presence. Now.”

The words landed like a stone in her stomach. She followed the clerk through a warren of passages she had never walked, past doors marked with wax seals and guards who did not meet her eyes. The room they entered was smaller than the Tribunal’s great halls, but it felt larger. Three men sat behind a long oak table. The one in the center wore a tricolor sash and spectacles that caught the light, hiding his eyes.

“Citizeness Élodie Moreau,” he said, not as a question. He gestured to a chair placed before the table. It was deliberately far from the door.

She sat.

“I am Deputy Inspector Fabre. This is my colleague.” He did not name the other men. “You are a copyist attached to the Revolutionary Tribunal’s records office.”

“I am.”

“You copied the execution list of the 17th.”

It was not a question. Élodie kept her hands folded in her lap, her nails pressing into her palms. “I copy many lists.”

“This one specifically.” Fabre slid a sheet of paper across the table. It was a page of her own work, her small, precise hand dark against the pale sheet. The names were clean. The columns were straight. At the bottom, her initials. “Can you confirm this is yours?”

Élodie looked at it. She did not need to read it. She had copied it three days ago, sitting at her desk, while Jacques Bouchard watched her from across the room with a smile like a blade.

“It is mine,” she said.

“And you copied these names exactly as they were given to you?”

“I copy exactly what I am given. Always.”

Fabre leaned forward. The spectacles slipped down his nose, and she saw his eyes for the first time. They were tired. That was worse than cruel. Tired men were patient. “And if the source documents themselves were altered? If someone changed the names before you received them, or planted a list that did not match the original warrants?”

Élodie’s mouth went dry. She had anticipated this question. She had rehearsed its answer in the dark of her cot, with Amélie’s breathing soft in the next room. “I do not see the warrants, Inspector. I see the lists I am given. If they carry the seal of the clerk’s office, I copy them. That is my duty.”

“Your duty. Yes.” Fabre exchanged a glance with the man to his left. “You are aware that the Committee has noticed a discrepancy in the records of the condemned. Seventeen names from the 17th's list have no corresponding arrest files in the archives.”

Seventeen. Élodie kept her face still. Seventeen of Roussel’s twenty-three. Of course the Committee had noticed. She had known it was only a matter of time. But she had hoped—

“Seventeen is a large number,” Fabre continued. “This is not a clerical oversight. This is an operation. Someone in the records office is erasing prisoners from the record. We intend to find that person before the Committee's purview is questioned.”

Élodie’s throat was sand. She forced her voice steady. “I can only tell you what I did, Inspector. I copied what was placed before me. I do not keep copies. I do not ask questions. That is how I have survived three years in this office.”

There was a pause. Fabre studied her, and she felt the weight of it like a hand around her windpipe.

“You are a careful woman, Citizeness Moreau. But care can be a kind of lie. Who gave you the list?”

“The head clerk. Citizen Marchand.”

“And you never looked at the source warrants yourself?”

“I am not permitted. I receive the lists, and I copy them. If you question the source, you must question the clerk’s office, not me.”

The door opened. Élodie did not dare turn, but she heard the familiar heavy step, the shuffle of boots that never quite lifted from the floor.

“Inspector Fabre.” Roussel’s voice was plain, unthreatening, the voice of a man who carried keys and did not pretend to more. “I was told you had summoned one of my copyists. Am I permitted to ask why?”

Fabre’s eyes flicked to the guard. “This does not concern you, Roussel.”

“Everything concerning the prisoners of the Tribunal concerns me.” Roussel stepped forward, stopping just behind Élodie’s shoulder. He did not look at her. He looked only at Fabre. “The Citizeness is one of my staff. If there is a question of her conduct, it is my place to answer it.”

“And you would vouch for her?”

“I have overseen her work for eight months. She has never been late. She has never missed a deadline. She is the most meticulous copyist in the office.” Roussel’s voice hardened a degree. “If her pages show clean columns, it is because she writes clean columns. If there are discrepancies in the source documents, that is not a flaw in her ink.”

Fabre’s lips pressed into a thin line. He looked at Roussel for a long moment, then back at Élodie. “You may return to your desk, Citizeness. But you will not leave the city. And you will not discuss this conversation with anyone but myself. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Inspector.”

She stood. Her legs were water. She walked to the door, and Roussel followed, closing it behind them.

In the corridor, he caught her arm. His grip was iron, but his voice was low. “Walk with me. Do not stop.”

They moved through the passage, past the guard, around a corner into a stairwell that smelled of damp stone. Roussel stopped and turned to face her.

“You did well in there,” he said. “But it will not be enough.”

“They know,” Élodie breathed. “They know about the missing files.”

“They know there are missing files. They do not yet know how. And Fabre is thorough. He will cross-check. He will find the pattern if he is given time.” Roussel’s jaw tightened. “We must accelerate.”

“The twenty-three names. I’ve done eleven.”

“Then you have twelve to go.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded slip of paper. “The next deliverable. I have arranged for Amélie to be moved to a different dormitory tonight. In two days, there will be an exchange at the north gate. But only if the copies are ready.”

“Two days.” Élodie’s heart slammed. “I cannot copy twelve names in two days without being noticed. I have duties, and Fabre will be watching me now.”

Roussel was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You will copy at night. In the offices, after the dinner hour. I will make sure the night guards are rotated.”

“And if they catch me?”

“They will not.” He said it flatly. “Because you will be with me.”

Élodie stared at him. He was offering his own neck to the blade. It was the first time she understood that his hidden network was not a ladder he climbed but a rope he hung from.

“Why?” she asked. “Why would you risk yourself for my sister? You have never even spoken to her.”

Roussel’s eyes were dull, but not unkind. “Because I have already buried one sister, Citizeness. I will not bury another if I can help it.”

He pressed the paper into her hand. “Twelve names. Small hand. Consistent. No flourishes. Finish by the night after next, and Amélie will be on a cart to the coast before the sun rises.”

He turned and walked up the stairs, leaving Élodie alone in the dark stairwell with the slip of paper warm in her palm.

She unfolded it. The cipher again. Twelve names, columns, dates scratched at the margin, connected by thin lines that curved like a net drawn around the dead. She could not decode it, and she did not need to. The truth was simpler and uglier: she was writing her sister’s life in ink, one name at a time.

But as she turned to climb the stairs, a sound made her stop. Footsteps, soft and measured, from the corridor above.

She looked up. At the top of the stairwell, a shadow separated from the wall. A man, thin, with a clerk’s cap pulled low. He was watching her.

He did not move. He did not speak. He only watched, and then he turned and disappeared into the gloom.

Élodie’s blood went cold.

The forger had found her.