Read Chapter 16: The Battle of the Basement

The coal chute was barely wide enough for Émile’s shoulders. Each scrape of brick against his wounded arm sent a lance of white fire through his chest, but he kept moving, one hand wrapped around Lucien’s broken arm, hauling his brother behind him as they tumbled out into the narrow service alley behind Printemps.

The cold air hit them like a slap. It was almost dawn, that grey hour when Paris looked less like a city and more like a corpse.

“Can you run?” Émile asked, already knowing the answer.

Lucien looked at him with that familiar half-smile, the one Émile had seen a thousand times in childhood, before the war had carved the charm out of his face. “I can limp with purpose.”

Shots rang out behind them. The basement door they’d just escaped through shuddered as bullets chewed its frame.

Émile grabbed Lucien’s good arm and pulled him toward the mouth of the alley. “Then limp faster.”

They broke into the open street. The Thirteenth Arrondissement was a warren of collapsed barricades and abandoned buildings, the bones of the Commune still steaming with the heat of its own dying. But the men hunting them now wore Communard armbands, and that made them the more immediate threat.

Another volley. A bullet whined past Émile’s ear and cracked into a lamp post three feet ahead.

“They’re gaining,” Lucien said, staggering.

Émile’s shoulder was bleeding through the bandages Doctor Vautrin had wrapped, each pulse of his heart pushing a fresh bloom of red through the linen. He couldn’t carry his brother far. He couldn’t even carry himself far.

The sewer grate was twenty yards ahead, set flush into the cobblestones at the intersection of Rue Nationale and the Boulevard de l’Hôpital. Émile had photographed that grate once, years ago, a study in shadow and iron. He’d never imagined he’d be diving into it to save his brother’s life.

“Luc, the grate. Can you lift it?”

Lucien’s face was grey, his breath ragged. “Left arm’s useless. Right one’s two seconds behind. Together.”

They reached it. Émile dropped to his knees, jammed his fingers into the grate’s iron slots, ignoring the fresh scream from his shoulder wound. Lucien crouched beside him, his good hand joining Émile’s.

The combined effort nearly broke both of them. The grate came up with a wet, sucking sound, revealing a dark drop into running water below.

The Communard soldiers rounded the corner.

There were six of them, maybe seven. Hard to count with adrenaline blurring the edges of his vision. They raised their rifles.

“Go,” Émile said.

Lucien dropped. He hit the water with a splash and a curse. Émile followed a half-second later, pulling the grate down over his head as the first bullets rang off the metal above them.

The sewer was dark, thigh-deep, and cold enough to steal the breath from a man’s lungs. Lucien leaned against the curved brick wall, chest heaving.

“That was—” he started.

Another volley against the grate. Then the sound of boots scraping cobblestone.

“They’ll find another entrance,” Émile said. “We have two minutes, three if their captain’s an idiot.”

Lucien pushed off the wall and took a step. His leg crumpled beneath him and he went down, nearly face-first into the water. Émile caught him before he could fall completely.

“I’m fine,” Lucien said through clenched teeth.

Émile looked down. Lucien’s left thigh was soaked in dark blood, a neat hole smoking gently through the fabric.

A bullet. At some point during the sprint. He hadn’t even cried out.

“The hell you are,” Émile said.

He pulled Lucien’s arm over his shoulder, taking his brother’s weight onto his good side. The water sloshed around them as they half-stumbled, half-swam through the tunnel, guided by instinct and memory. Émile had mapped these sewers once, a lifetime ago, for a commission that never paid.

“The Hôtel de Ville tunnel,” Lucien said, teeth chattering. “It’s—it’s not far. Northwest. The old branch, runs under the main drain.”

“I know the one.”

“The records. The hollow brick. Marked with a cross.”

“I know.”

Lucien’s grip tightened on Émile’s collar. “Promise me. If I don’t make it—you go to the tunnel. You take the records, and you burn them. Every name. Burn them all.”

“You’ll make it.”

“Promise me, Émile.”

Émile didn’t answer. He just kept walking, each step a grinding complaint from his joints and his wound. Behind them, he heard the grate clang open, and then shouts echoing through the tunnel.

Delacroix’s men. They knew the sewers too.

They stumbled on for another hundred yards. Then two hundred. The tunnel branched, and Émile took the narrower channel, water up to his chest now, Lucien losing consciousness against his shoulder.

“Stay with me, Luc.”

“I’m here.” The words came out slurred.

Another branch. A ladder of iron rungs leading up to a small grate at street level. Émile recognized the pattern of the slats overhead. Rue de Rivoli. Too close to the Hôtel de Ville. Too close to everything.

But footsteps were closing behind them, and Lucien’s weight was becoming impossible to carry much longer.

“Up,” Émile said. “We go up.”

“They’ll spot us in the open.”

“The alternative is drowning with a bullet in your leg.”

Lucien grabbed the ladder with his good hand. Émile pushed from below, his shoulder screaming, blood running down his arm in rivulets. They emerged onto the quiet street in a tangle of wet wool and exhaustion, just as the first pale band of light announced the coming dawn.

The cobblestones were empty. Shops shuttered. Not a soul.

Émile helped Lucien to his feet. “Which way—?”

A rifle cocked behind him.

“Don’t move, either of you.”

Émile froze. The voice was crisp, aristocratic, utterly without mercy. He knew it.

He turned, slowly.

The Versaillais soldier stood twenty feet away, immaculate in his dark uniform despite the hour. And behind him, a dozen more, rifles raised, forming a semicircle that cut off every possible escape.

At their head stood Commandant de Valois, a man Émile had photographed at Versailles only months ago, back when the studio work had still paid better than dying in the streets.

De Valois smiled. It was a thin, bloodless expression.

“Monsieur Chardin,” he said. “What a pleasant coincidence to find you here, surfacing from the city’s bowels at dawn, with a brother who is on our list of delightful traitors.” His eyes flicked to Lucien’s state, then back to Émile. “You’ve made this very convenient.”

Émile said nothing. He could feel Lucien sagging against him, seconds from collapse.

De Valois stepped forward, boots clicking on the cobblestones.

“You have something I want, Monsieur Chardin,” he said, close enough now that Émile could smell the cologne on him. “The photograph. The one from the fort. I’m tired of chasing ghosts through this revolting city.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Émile said.

De Valois raised a hand almost lazily. Two soldiers broke from the line and seized Lucien, tearing him from Émile’s grasp. Lucien cried out as his broken arm was wrenched, but he didn’t beg. He never begged.

“Then we will discuss it at leisure,” de Valois said. “In Saint-Denis. Where I have excellent facilities for conversation.”

Émile’s hands were twisted behind his back and bound with coarse rope before he could respond. He watched his brother be dragged toward a waiting wagon, the blood tracing a dark trail across the cobblestones.

“I’ll find a way,” Émile called out.

Lucien turned his head, managed a bloody smile. “You always do.”

Then he was gone, shoved into the back of the wagon, and the doors slammed shut.

De Valois motioned to his men. “Get him in the cart. Another cart. I don’t want them plotting while they bleed together.”

A rifle butt connected with the back of Émile’s skull, and the world turned to grey static.

When his vision returned, he was in a cell, and the only thing between him and his brother was a wall of iron bars.