Read Chapter 34: The Countdown of Thirteen

The candle guttered, drowning the map table in shifting shadow. Alex pressed both palms against the oak edge, willing the room to stop spinning. His shoulder screamed where the bandage had soaked through, and the leg—God, the leg—felt like someone had driven a hot poker through the muscle and left it there.

Louise stood by the shuttered window, one finger hooked through the latch, listening. Camille paced behind him, ink-stained fingers drumming against his thigh. They had maybe four hours until dawn. Four hours to warn a general he'd never met about a plot he'd only just learned existed.

"The rider," Alex said, forcing his voice steady. "The hunter sent him north. How long before the committee gets those papers?"

Camille stopped pacing. "If he takes the post road, he reaches the Palais-Royal by midday. The committee will have you hanged by supper."

"Then we don't let him be the only message moving." Alex looked at Louise. "Where is Lafayette tonight?"

"At the Hôtel de Noailles." She turned from the window. "He's been there since evening—there's a reception for the Marquis de Condorcet. It's why the assassins chose tonight. The chapel of Saint-Angel is connected to the main hall by a cloister walk. A man with a rifle could fire through the stained glass and be gone before the smoke clears."

Alex's mind raced. The chapel. The Hunter. The papers. Every thread pulling toward the same knot.

"Pierre," he said. "Where is Pierre?"

"Below," Camille said. "Guarding the cellar door. He's been restless since the Bastille—doesn't like being underground."

"Send him to the Hôtel. Now."

Louise frowned. "You can't send a boy into a nest of royalists with a message for Lafayette. They'll cut him down before he gets within ten paces."

"He won't go to the front door." Alex pushed off the table, swayed, caught himself. "The chapel has a rear entrance off the Rue Saint-Honoré—servants' entrance. Coaches pull in there, deliveries. Pierre can slip through the kitchens. He's just a courier boy. No one looks twice at a courier boy in a livery that doesn't quite fit."

"And what does he tell them?" Camille's voice had the edge of a man who'd watched too many brave plans collapse. "Lafayette's guards are royalists themselves. Half of them dine with the very men who want him dead. You hand him a note that names the conspirators, and that note becomes the noose around your own neck."

"Then he doesn't hand them a note." Alex reached into his coat, pulled out the stub of charcoal he'd been using to mark the tunnel maps. He tore a strip from the hem of his shirt—the cleanest fabric he had—and wrote in a cramped, hurried hand:

*The dove flies to the angel's wings at first light. Trust the words of the boy who bears this. He speaks for the man who stood in the fire.*

He folded it small, pressed it into a wax seal from the candle, and handed the packet to Camille.

"The dove flies to the angel's wings," Camille read aloud. "That's the code the royalists used in the meeting."

"Exactly. If Lafayette's people intercept it, it reads like a warning from a double agent inside the plot. If the assassins intercept it, it reads like confirmation the plan is moving."

"And if it reaches Saint-Angel directly?"

"Then the priest who runs the chapel—the one who's been hiding the assassin's rifle—thinks the local co-conspirator is sending word that the dove is in flight. He'll check the weapon. That gives Pierre a chance to see where it's hidden."

Louise crossed the room, took Alex's chin in her hand, tilted his face toward the candlelight. Her fingers were cool. Her eyes searched his.

"You invented this gambit in the last sixty seconds," she said. "With a fever burning through you and blood in your boot. And it's good." She released him. "That's what frightens me about you, monsieur. In another life, you'd have made a terrifying spymaster."

"Send for the boy."

Camille was already moving toward the door. He paused. "And if Pierre fails?"

Alex let out a breath that cost him more than he'd admit. "Then I walk into the chapel myself and I stand between Lafayette and the stained glass. One rifle, one shot, one body in the way. I've done worse math."

Louise caught his arm as Camille disappeared down the stairwell. Her grip was strong, insistent.

"That math kills you."

"I've been dead since I touched that key in Versailles, Louise." He said it flatly, without self-pity. "I've just been moving since then. The question is how the equation ends—whether I die as a nameless traitor hanged by a committee in Paris, or as a man who did one thing that mattered before he went."

She held his gaze a long moment. Then she let go and moved to the window, lifting the latch an inch. Cold air leaked through, carrying the wet stone smell of the city.

"You gave Pierre a cryptic note," she said, "but you didn't tell him what he'd actually find. He doesn't know the plot's details beyond what he overheard in the tavern. He's just a boy with a paper and a prayer."

"He's more than that." Alex lowered himself onto a stool, the leg nearly going out from under him. He gritted his teeth. "He carried armory papers out of the Bastille for a reason. He knows how to recognize a weapon cache when he sees one. And he knows his way through the Hôtel's kitchens better than you think."

Louise stared.

"He said his cousin worked as a scullery maid there," Alex continued. "Three years ago. He visited her on feast days. He knows the corridors to the chapel better than any of the hunter's men."

"You've been running that network of tavern rumors and half-heard conversations like a chessboard," Louise murmured. "How long have you known?"

"Since the Bastille tunnels. Pierre let slip a detail about the chapel's crypt doors that wouldn't have made sense unless he'd actually stood inside them."

"You didn't tell me."

"You had enough to carry." Alex looked up at her, and for a moment the mask slipped—the weary, aching exhaustion of a man running on empty since the first day he'd smelled gunpowder and sewage and revolution on the Paris air. "I'm sorry. I've been making decisions alone because I didn't want to bring anyone else into the blast radius. But I need you now. We're past the point of protecting anyone."

Louise's expression softened a fraction. Then she crossed to a low cabinet, pulled out a battered musket and a powder horn, and began loading with the calm efficiency of someone who'd done it a hundred times.

"Whatever you need me to do," she said, "I'll do it. But tell me the real mission, Alex. Not the one for Lafayette. The one for you."

The stairwell creaked. Pierre's voice rose from below—young, urgent.

The moment shattered.

Alex rose, bracing against the table. "When Pierre reaches the chapel, the hunter will know his message has been intercepted. He'll accelerate the plan. The assassination moves to dawn, no matter what the original schedule."

Louise looked up, musket half-loaded. "Then we're not running to stop it in time."

"We're not trying to stop it from happening." Alex took a shaking step toward the door. "We're making sure we're already there when it does."

Pierre burst into the room, breathless, eyes bright in the candlelight. "They say you've got a job for me. Something dangerous."

Alex pressed the sealed note into the boy's hand.

"This is the most dangerous thing you'll ever do," he said. "And the most important."

Pierre looked down at the paper. Then his chin lifted. "Do I get a weapon?"

"You get your wits and your feet, same as me," said Alex. And then, because there was nothing left to offer and everything riding on a boy with a paper, "Now run. Bring me something that proves you made it."

He didn't tell Pierre about the hunter who was already waiting in Versailles. Some truths, a boy didn't need to carry.

But as Pierre disappeared down the stairs, Alex made a new calculation. The hunter had known his destination before he'd ever left Paris. Which meant the man had anticipated every road north, every tunnel, every false identity Alex might assemble.

Every road but one.

"He expects me to run," Alex said quietly. "So I'm not going to run. I'm going to walk straight into the chapel. The hunter will be watching the Versailles road for a fugitive. It won't occur to him that the man he's hunting is already standing in the church across from the altar, waiting for the same assassin to pull the trigger."

Louise finished loading the musket. "And if the assassin recognizes you before he fires?"

"Then the hunter's plot doesn't just kill Lafayette," Alex said. "It kills two birds with one shot. Which means I need to be worth more to him alive than dead, for just long enough."

He did not add the rest. That the key in his pocket had burned a pattern into his palm that he'd never let Louise see. That every time he touched it, he felt the timeline pulling, correcting, trying to file him out of existence. That tonight, he would need to use that key for something it was never meant to do.

Tonight, he would have to kill a man with the very thing that had brought him here. And if the paradox was truly as dangerous as the professor who'd warned him about time travel insisted, it might unmake him in the process.

The price of saving Lafayette was becoming clearer by the minute.