Read Chapter 11: The Turncoat's Need

The floorboards of Ferrand's borrowed darkroom were still warm from the failed prints when the first knock came. Émile's hand went to the knife in his boot—the only weapon he had left. But the knock was too soft, too hesitant. A soldier's knock was sharp. A traitor's knock was sharp. This was something else entirely.

Then a woman's voice, thin and wet with pain: "Émile. Please."

He knew that voice. He had heard it whisper promises on the Pont Neuf. He had heard it give the order that sent men lunging for him in the dark.

Céleste.

"Go away," he said through the door. "Whatever Delacroix promised you, I have less. And I have nothing to give."

"Émile, I'm bleeding." A thud against the wood, like she'd slumped against it. "They know I came to you. What do you think they'll do to me now?"

He pressed his eye to the gap between the door and the frame. She was there, alone, one hand pressed to her ribs. The blood between her fingers was fresh and dark, spreading in lazy fingers across the grey wool of her dress. Her face was pale beneath the gaslight, and her eyes had that glassy quality of someone who had lost more blood than she could spare.

"You sold me to them," he said. "On the bridge. You watched them try to kill me."

"I watched them try," she said. "And I watched you get away." A weak laugh that turned into a cough. "Do you know what that cost me? Delacroix has no use for failures. I have nowhere else to go."

"Find another fool."

"Émile." Her voice cracked. "I know where your brother is. Not the fort. The fort is where they'll kill him. But I know where they're holding him now, before the transfer. And I know who carries the order."

He stood very still. The name of the executioner was already in his pocket, written in Ferrand's cramped hand. But the location of Lucien's current cell—that was new. That was leverage. That was possibly hope.

Or possibly another trap.

"You chose Delacroix once," he said. "Why should I believe you've changed?"

"Because I'm dying in your doorway, you idiot." Her voice was sharp despite the pain. "If this were a trap, don't you think they'd have waited for me somewhere more comfortable?"

He opened the door. She stumbled forward and he caught her by the arm, not gently. She was lighter than he expected, and when his fingers found her wrist, her pulse was a frightened sparrow beating against the bone.

"Where are they holding him?"

"In a house near the Butte-aux-Cailles. Private residence, one of Delacroix's safe houses. He's being kept comfortable." She laughed again, wetter this time. "They want him presentable for the execution. A show piece."

Émile steered her toward a chair by the stove that Ferrand used for making tea. She collapsed into it, and he saw the wound more clearly now: a knife slash across her ribs, not deep but long, the kind of wound that bled steadily and endlessly. Someone had meant for her to bleed out, just slowly.

"This needs stitching," he said.

"You'll have to forgive me if I don't trust you with a needle near my chest."

He fetched the sewing kit from the shelf anyway. His hands were steady as he worked; the war had taught him that much. She gritted her teeth but didn't cry out.

"Tell me about my brother."

"I was supposed to watch you," she said. "Delacroix assigned me to you from the beginning. He thought if I stayed close, you'd lead him to the plate naturally."

"You did more than watch."

"I did what I had to." Her eyes met his, and there was something raw in them that he hadn't expected. "You think I wanted to be his creature? You think any of us chose this?"

"You chose to betray me on that bridge."

"I chose to stay alive." She winced as he pulled the thread tight. "The Commune is falling. Every day Delacroix grows stronger, Versailles grows nearer, and the people between them get ground to dust. I don't want to be dust, Émile. I want to survive."

"You want to survive," he repeated. "That's why I should trust you?"

"That's why you should understand me." She reached out and touched his hand—the one holding the needle—and her fingers were cold. "I know where they're holding Lucien. And I know how to get to him. But I can't do it bleeding to death on your floor. Help me, and I'll help you."

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I die here, and you spend the next three days wandering the city looking for a needle in a haystack. By the time you find him, it'll be too late." She leaned back, eyes half-closed. "That's your choice."

Émile looked at her. Everything in him said she was still Delacroix's creature, that this was another layer of the trap. But everything in him had been wrong about Céleste before, and about Delacroix, and about the entire city that had burned around them. The only thing his instincts had gotten right was the plate itself, and the plate was hidden in a mansion he couldn't return to.

He fetched a blanket from the cot and laid it over her.

"I'm going to make tea," he said. "And then you're going to tell me everything you know about that house near the Butte-aux-Cailles."

"Everything," she said. "I'll tell you everything."

The tea was still steeping when the building shook.

Émile had been in enough bombardments to know the sound—that peculiar combination of thunder and digestion, as if the earth were swallowing something too large for its throat. But this was no distant shell. This was close. This was the front wall.

"Céleste, get down!"

She was already moving, rolling off the chair and toward the floor. Émile dove after her, covering her body with his own as the world came apart.

The explosion wasn't a shell from Versailles. It was too precise, too close. It had been placed, he would realize later, in the doorway. In the exact spot where Céleste had been standing when she knocked.

The blast folded the building's entrance inward. Bricks screamed past his ears. Dust filled his lungs. The stove toppled, spilling coals across the floor, and he heard something fall—the shelves, the trays, the bottles of fixer and developer shattering against the stones.

Then silence, thick and buzzing, punctuated by the crackle of growing flame.

Émile pushed himself up. His ears rang. His hands found blood but not his own—Céleste's wound had reopened, and she was beneath him, still breathing, still alive.

The doorway was gone. Replaced by a mound of rubble that reached nearly to the ceiling of the small room. The back window—the one Ferrand used as an escape route—was blocked by fallen beams.

They were trapped.

"Émile." Céleste's voice was barely a whisper. She was looking not at the rubble but at something in her hand. A scrap of paper, still clutched in her fist. He hadn't noticed her holding it when she arrived. "They knew. They always knew."

"What is that?"

"A note. From Delacroix." Her hand trembled as she held it out. "He said if I betrayed him, he'd make sure I was buried alive with the photographer."

Émile took the note. His hands, which had been so steady with the needle, were shaking now.

*The building at Rue de la Lune, 14. I have already tired of your games. I send my regards to the rubble.*

He read it twice. Then he looked at the mound of bricks that separated them from the street, and the growing fire that was eating toward the darkroom's stores of chemical spirits.

"We need to dig," he said.

"We can't." Her voice was flat. "There's too much."

"Then we burn." He was already on his feet, pulling at the nearest brick. "Move, Céleste. We're not dying in this hole."

She stared at him, and in the firelight he saw something change in her eyes—something he couldn't name.

"You're really going to save me," she said. "After everything."

"Don't mistake me for a good man," he said, pulling at another brick. "I just refuse to give Delacroix the satisfaction."