Read Chapter 10: The Engineer's Plan

The dawn came gray and bitter through the broken shutters, and Alex woke to the smell of wet straw and his own fear. Pierre was already sitting against the far wall, watching him with those too-old eyes, a strip of linen half-wrapped around his forearm where the cavalryman's sword had grazed him.

"You talk in your sleep," Pierre said. "You said *quatorze juillet* three times. Also *non*—many times."

Alex sat up slowly, his back protesting the stone floor. His stomach made a sound that embarrassed them both. "I need to see a man. An engineer at the Bastille. His brother runs a print shop near the Arsenal."

Pierre's eyebrows rose. "You want to walk into the Arsenal quarter? With the police looking for you?"

"Not looking for me yet. Looking for a sketched resemblance of me. There's a difference." Alex got to his feet, swaying for a moment as the blood left his head. "I need paper. Quill. And I need you to find me something to write with that doesn't make me look like a man forging documents."

Pierre studied him for a long moment, the way a card player studies a marked deck. "The message. The one I lost. You never asked what it said."

"Would it help me?"

"Maybe not. But it costs you nothing to ask."

Alex felt the weight of the unpaid debt shift between them. Six livres by Sunday. The lost commission. The boy had saved his life in that salon, and Alex had repaid him with a blade to the arm and a night in a hovel.

"What did it say?"

"A time. A place. A name." Pierre counted them off on his fingers. "Two in the morning. The Quai de la Mégisserie. Bertrand."

Alex's mind spun. Bertrand was common enough. But the quai—the riverfront below the Louvre—had been the site of increasing agitation, pamphlets passed hand to hand in the dark. Whatever the boy had been carrying, it wasn't bread money.

"If I help you with your engineer," Pierre said slowly, "that debt is settled. The six livres, the commission. All of it."

"You'd be helping me, not the other way around. You want to be inside this thing when it happens."

Pierre's smile was thin and sharp. "Four days. The Bastille falls in four days, you said. I want to be close enough to see it." He pushed himself up from the wall, flexing his wounded arm. "And close enough to survive it."

They moved through the city as the morning bells rang, Alex keeping his head low beneath a borrowed hat that smelled of fish and onion, Pierre walking a half-step ahead like a scout. The streets were alive with rumor—the dismissal of Necker had spread through the working quarters like fire through dry timber, and the faces Alex passed were harder than they'd been a week ago, hungrier, angrier.

The Arsenal quarter was quieter. The print shop sat in the shadow of the great magazine, its windows dark, its door closed. Alex knocked. Nothing. He knocked again.

A shutter above creaked open. "The shop is closed. Try the Palais-Royal."

"I'm not looking for pamphlets." Alex kept his voice low, pitched upward with the nervousness of a man unused to conspiracy. "I'm looking for the brother of an engineer. A man who works inside the Bastille."

The shutter fell closed. Alex waited. Beside him, Pierre shifted his weight, hand moving toward the knife at his belt.

The door opened a finger's width. A man's face appeared in the gap, middle-aged, tired, with the ink-stained fingers of a typesetter and the crossed forearms of a man who had been a soldier once.

"Who sent you?"

"Nobody sent me. That's the point." Alex chose his next words carefully, drawing on everything he knew of the months before the fall. "Your brother drew plans for the new fortress gates in '77. He knows the drawbridge mechanism better than any man alive. And he's been complaining about the governor's refusal to reinforce the guard posts along the outer wall."

The man's eyes narrowed. "You know a great deal about my brother, for a man nobody sent."

"I know the Bastille is a powder keg and your brother might be the only man in Paris who understands which wall will blow first."

The door opened wider. The man—Jean-Baptiste, Alex remembered from his research, a sometime pamphleteer who had connections in the Cordeliers district—stepped out into the light. He was smaller than Alex had expected, but his gaze was a measuring instrument.

"You speak like a man who reads secret things," Jean-Baptiste said. "What do you want with my brother's knowledge?"

"I want to know the weaknesses. The places where the old stones give. The gates that won't hold. The garrison that won't fight." Alex paused. "I want to know if there's a way in."

Jean-Baptiste's laugh was short and humorless. "In? There is no way in. The Bastille doesn't admit visitors by appointment. It admits prisoners, and they don't leave."

"I'm not looking to enter as a prisoner."

The implication hung in the air between them. Pierre had gone very still beside Alex, his eyes moving between the two men, reading the negotiation.

Jean-Baptiste took a step closer. "You're either a spy, a madman, or a revolutionary. I've seen all three hang in this city, and the rope doesn't discriminate."

"I'm a man who knows what happens in four days."

"Four days? What happens in four days?"

Alex weighed the risk. Every word he spoke to anyone in this city was a thread pulled on the tapestry, a change rippling outward from his presence. But he had already told Pierre. And the boy was alive because of him, which meant the tapestry was already fraying.

"The people will take the Bastille," Alex said quietly. "And what concerns me isn't whether they will—it's whether anyone worth saving will survive it."

Jean-Baptiste's face betrayed nothing, but his fingers twitched against his forearm—the gesture of a man fighting the urge to cross himself.

"Come inside," he said finally. "Quickly."

The print shop was a single room, presses along one wall, trays of type scattered like dark confetti across every surface. Jean-Baptiste locked the door behind them and gestured to stools near a cold stove.

"My brother Pierre-François is second engineer at the fortress," he said, speaking low and fast as if the walls had ears. "He's been there fourteen years. He knows every stone, every seam. He's been writing to me for months about the governor's preparations."

Alex leaned forward. "De Launay is reinforcing."

"Reinforcing and provisioning. He's brought in grain stores for a siege, increased the garrison from eighty to a hundred and fourteen." Jean-Baptiste's mouth twisted. "The man believes he's preparing for a war that won't come. My brother believes the war is coming to him."

"Your brother is right." Alex paused. "What does he say about the weaknesses?"

Jean-Baptiste reached into his coat and withdrew a folded paper, worn from handling. He didn't open it, just held it between two fingers like a relic.

"My brother was present when they reinforced the drawbridge mechanism in '85. He wrote me everything—the placement of the counterweights, the iron braces, the points where the chain could be cut with enough force and the right angle." He looked up at Alex. "He's been waiting for someone to ask."

"Who's supposed to ask?"

"The hand that reaches for the Bastille." Jean-Baptiste's eyes were bright, hungry. "He believes it will come. And he wants to be ready when it does."

Alex felt the shape of the opportunity forming—not the way he had first imagined, not a way in, not an escape route. Something else. Something closer to what the revolution would actually need. And that's when his mind caught on a detail.

"Your brother," Alex said slowly, "is second engineer. He's one of the few men who'll command the garrison when the fighting begins."

Jean-Baptiste nodded.

"If the crowd comes, and your brother holds the defense of the outer courtyards—" Alex's pulse quickened. "He could open the gates from within."

The silence in the shop was absolute. Outside, a cart rumbled past, the driver cursing at his horse.

"My brother is not a traitor," Jean-Baptiste said carefully. "He's a servant of the crown. If he's seen opening gates..."

"He'll be hanging from a lamppost by nightfall," Pierre said flatly from the corner. "With or without the gates open."

Jean-Baptiste's mouth tightened, and Alex watched the man's resolve deepen with the stakes he hadn't yet considered. What he had proposed wasn't simply a clever plan. It was a death sentence delivered in either direction.

"Give me the paper," Alex said. "And give me a name I can use to reach your brother directly, if the moment comes."

Jean-Baptiste stared at him for a long moment, then extended the folded sheet. Alex took it, feeling the weight of other men's futures in his hands.

"There's a wine merchant on the rue de la Cerisaie," Jean-Baptiste said. "Name of Hulin. He supplies the fortress kitchen. If you need to reach Pierre-François, go through him."

Alex nodded, folding the paper into his coat. "I need one more thing. A place where I can watch the road to Chaillot."

"The road to Chaillot?" Jean-Baptiste frowned. "What's there?"

Alex couldn't tell him the truth—that the royal family was planning flight, that the road westward was the escape route of kings. That he needed to understand the shape of the days ahead before he could know what to do with the engineer's knowledge.

"Insurance," Alex said. "Just insurance."

Jean-Baptiste walked them to the door, unlocking it with a hand that never stopped gripping the latch. "My brother has a wife and two children," he said. "Whatever you're planning, remember that."

Alex met his eyes. "I intend nothing that would put him in more danger than he's already in. But I can't promise the revolution will cooperate."

As they stepped into the street, Pierre pulled close to Alex's ear.

"That man's going to tell someone we came," the boy said. "Whatever he decides, word will spread. You've started something now."

Alex felt the paper against his chest, the first concrete thread he'd managed to grasp since falling into this city. But even as he walked away from the shop, he couldn't shake the knowledge Jean-Baptiste had given him—Hulin, wine merchant of the rue de la Cerisaie. The name was wrong somehow. Unsettling in a way Alex didn't understand yet, as if the history he knew had shifted, and this was a piece that didn't quite fit.