February 1807.
Nightfall. Just beyond Saint-Ouen.
The snow had melted into mud, and the mud had turned black — thick with soot, coal dust, and the residue of things that shouldn't be in flour. The air stank of wet grain and something chalky beneath it, a smell that clung to the tongue like guilt.
Étienne moved first, lantern hooded, stepping carefully through the crumbling crypt of a ruined chapel. Above them, the walls bore remnants of saints—stone eyes cracked, wings broken, faces burned clean by time and fire.
Margot followed, Jules close behind, clutching her coat. The boy had grown silent again — not with trauma, but with memory. His eyes flicked to every alcove, every passage. He wasn't lost. He was tracing ghosts.
They came to the rusted grate behind the altar. It opened with a push, groaning like something old waking from sleep. A narrow corridor stretched beyond it, sloping downward. The air changed again. Warmer. Moister.
Jules paused.
> "He's still there," he whispered.
Étienne turned back.
> "Who?"
> "The man with white gloves. He sang when he worked. Not loud. Just… humming."
Margot's hand tightened on the boy's shoulder.
They moved on.
The passage narrowed until they had to crouch. Water trickled along the floor, shallow but dark. And then, suddenly, the corridor widened — and they saw it.
The mill.
It rose from the darkness like a monument to compromise.
A rusted wheel turned above a murky channel, grinding grain too pale to be wheat.
Inside, torchlight flickered through slats in the wall.
A rhythm pulsed from within: scrape, thud, scrape, thud — the sound of gears and bones.
They crept along a ledge to a broken window.
What they saw made Margot stop breathing.
Workers — thin, hunched, some barely teenagers — moved in slow cycles, passing sacks, lifting pale dust into barrels. The dust floated in the air, coating everything: skin, lips, lashes.
One worker coughed and spat — the phlegm was streaked white.
> "They're breathing it," Étienne muttered. "Every second."
> "They think it's flour," Margot whispered. "They don't even know."
Then they saw the barrels.
Labeled Ration Militaire.
Stamped with the seal of the Empire.
And beside them, smaller sacks, branded Faubourg 9.
They were identical — except for one thing.
Margot reached out and scraped a finger across the outer layer.
It came away coated in a fine white powder.
She touched it to her tongue.
Flinched.
> "Limestone. Mixed chalk. Maybe worse."
Étienne opened the sack slightly. Beneath the top layer, the flour was darker — grainy, yellowing.
> "A mask. The top fools the inspectors. The rest rots the lungs."
Then Jules spoke, his voice small:
> "There."
He pointed to a corner, behind stacked crates.
They stepped forward — and saw her.
A girl, maybe ten.
Eyes open.
Mouth slack.
Lips white with powder.
No marks.
No wounds.
Just stillness.
As if she had worked, fallen, and no one had noticed.
Margot knelt. Touched her hand.
Still warm.
No time for tears.
Étienne stood and pulled a sack from the stack — marked for Faubourg.
> "We take it. Proof. That this isn't just theft. It's intentional."
Margot rose slowly, her face pale but hard.
> "They're not just feeding people poison."
> "They're choosing who survives."
And from somewhere deeper in the mill,
a low humming began —
soft, tuneless.
The sound of someone working.
Or watching.
---
They froze.
The humming grew closer — not hurried, not alert, just steady. The sound of a man who believed no one would ever dare stand in his way.
Étienne pulled Jules behind a half-empty crate and motioned Margot to crouch.
They waited, breathless.
A figure emerged from the far side of the mill floor.
Not in a soldier's coat. Not in a laborer's rags.
He wore a butcher's apron, stained with chalky smears and darker splotches. One hand gloved, the other bare, raw, blistered.
His face was half-ruined — a melted ruin of skin from temple to chin, his left eye missing, replaced by a glass orb clouded like stormed glass. His gait was uneven, deliberate.
And he hummed.
A child's lullaby, maybe.
Or a marching tune slowed by memory.
He walked past the dead girl without pausing.
Didn't flinch. Didn't look down.
Just kept humming.
Then — he stopped.
Turned his head, slowly, toward the crate where Étienne and Margot hid.
> "You can come out," he said.
His voice was smooth, aged wine turned to vinegar.
"If you meant to burn the place, you'd have lit the fire already."
Margot stood first.
Not defiantly. Not meekly. Just there.
Étienne stepped beside her, hand on the knife at his belt.
The man smiled — or what passed for it on his twisted face.
> "Étienne Roux," he said.
"And Margot... daughter of the ferryman. You're not myths after all."
> "La Cendre," Étienne said, naming him.
The man nodded once.
> "That's what they call me. Ash. Because I stay after fire."
He looked at Jules.
"And the boy who remembers doors. Charming trio."
Étienne tensed.
> "You know what this is."
> "Of course."
La Cendre gestured to the sack on Étienne's back.
"That's not flour. It's order. Dosed in dust.
Make the poor too sick to riot.
Make the hungry too weak to march."
Margot's voice was sharp.
> "That girl is dead. She was ten."
He didn't blink.
> "She was unfortunate.
But she died serving the only thing that feeds her kind: the Empire."
Étienne stepped forward.
> "You know what this place is.
You know it's criminal."
La Cendre laughed. Dry. Soft.
> "Criminal? No. Calculated."
"We balance the scales.
You think you're justice.
But you're weight. Noise. Sentiment."
He walked to the girl's body and pulled a coarse tarp over her with surprising gentleness.
> "You'll go back to your tunnels.
You'll show your sack of truth.
And nothing will change."
He turned his ruined face back to them.
> "Because the Empire doesn't fear truth.
It fears hope.
And you, my friends, aren't hopeful.
You're angry."
He stepped aside, gesturing to the corridor leading out.
> "Go. I won't stop you.
Let your shadows run wild.
Let your fire burn.
But remember this—"
He tapped his glass eye.
> "I watch ash better than I see flame."
They left in silence.
Not because they feared him.
But because they knew —
La Cendre believed every word.
And monsters who believe
are always more dangerous than those who pretend.
---
They walked in silence for nearly a mile beneath the earth.
Étienne carried the sack over one shoulder. It was heavier than it looked, not just from weight — but from what it meant. Chalk, mold, poison disguised as sustenance. Margot said nothing. She walked just behind him, eyes fixed straight ahead. And Jules followed close, his bare feet barely making a sound on the damp stone.
Only when the air thinned and the ceiling rose into vaulted arches did they stop.
The catacombs opened here — not into a chamber, but into what had once been an old cistern. Lanterns glowed dimly in alcoves. A few bodies stirred beneath blankets: smugglers, couriers, children too small to be useful above. The forgotten.
Captain Adam was already waiting.
He stood beneath a cracked pillar, arms crossed, oil-stained gloves tucked into his belt.
His eyes went straight to the sack.
> "Did he let you take it?"
Étienne nodded.
> "He watched us do it."
> "And?"
> "He smiled."
Margot stepped forward, voice sharp:
> "He covered the girl's body. That was the only thing he did that resembled humanity."
Adam motioned to two of his people, who stepped forward and took the sack with practiced care. They laid it open on the stone and cut a slit in the top with a bone knife.
The flour spilled out — pale, grey-tinged, fine like powdered lime.
Adam dipped two fingers into it, rubbed them together, and then wiped the dust onto the stone.
It left a smear that didn't fade.
> "You were right," he said quietly. "They're not starving the Faubourg.
They're dissolving it.
One breath, one crust, one shift at a time."
Étienne looked up.
> "And they think they're merciful."
> "Worse," Adam replied.
"They think they're logical."
He turned toward a nearby table — not a desk, but a makeshift altar of documents, lists, plans. He picked up a map and spread it across a crate.
> "This goes public tonight.
We send the flour to every safe house in the city.
Every worker's hall.
Every baker that still dares to care."
Margot leaned in.
> "They'll try to silence them."
> "They always do," Adam said. "But it won't be just truth we send. It'll be choice."
> "Let the people decide what kind of hunger they're willing to live with."
Jules stepped forward then — small, dirty, pale.
> "We need to go back."
They all turned to him.
> "There's another door," he said.
"Behind the barrels. It didn't lead to flour.
It went down."
Étienne crouched beside him.
> "Down to what?"
The boy stared into the firelight, eyes too old for his face.
> "To where they keep the things that don't belong in bread."
Silence. Then Adam stood straighter.
> "Then the mill wasn't just a mill."
Margot's voice came low.
> "It was a filter."
Adam folded the map.
> "Rest tonight. We move at dusk tomorrow.
Next time, we don't just bring back a sack.
We bring back what they're hiding."
And as they dispersed, Étienne remained still.
He stared at the residue on his hands — chalk-white, poison-soft — and thought of La Cendre's words.
> "You're not hopeful. You're angry."
He wasn't wrong.
But perhaps — he could be both.
---
That night, Étienne couldn't sleep.
He sat against the stone wall of the cistern, legs pulled close, the residue of flour still faintly clinging to the cuffs of his coat. Nearby, others slept — some curled beneath scavenged cloth, others simply sitting upright, heads bowed, too exhausted to fall unconscious but too worn to keep resisting.
Margot sat opposite him, sharpening a knife on a flat stone. The rhythm was soft but steady, like the beat of a second heart keeping him awake.
> "You're thinking of him," she said without looking up.
> "La Cendre."
A pause.
> "He knew exactly what that place was.
He knew she was dying. And he kept smiling."
Margot exhaled through her nose, slow and sharp.
> "Because he's not afraid of being a villain.
He thinks the world needs villains more than heroes."
Étienne rubbed his hands together.
> "He doesn't want the Empire to survive.
He wants it to calcify.
To become so rigid, so 'efficient', that no one even remembers what freedom meant."
> "Then we remind them."
Margot stood, blade clean and sharp, eyes sharper.
> "We don't have time to cry over monsters.
We need to dig deeper.
If that mill leads somewhere else, if there are more, we find them."
> "And if they find us first?"
Margot smiled grimly.
> "Then they'll wish they hadn't."
---
At dawn, a message arrived by hand — a courier girl, no older than twelve, with shoes wrapped in cloth and soot under her fingernails. She said nothing, just handed Étienne a scrap of parchment folded thrice.
On it, in tight letters:
> "One of our men saw a wagon leave the mill at nightfall. Covered. Guarded. Not heading toward Faubourg. Toward the river."
"The manifest read: Stone Dust. For glasswork."
"But it wasn't going to the glassworks."
"It was going to the fort near the old quarantine wall."
"You know the one."
Étienne read it twice.
Then handed it to Margot.
> "They're not just poisoning bread."
She looked up, her mouth tightening.
> "They're testing something."
A slow, sick understanding crept into both of them.
> "Not just flour," Étienne whispered.
"Control. Distribution. Selective survival."
> "And the fort?" Margot asked.
He stood.
> "We find it. We follow the wagons.
And this time, we don't bring back a sample."
> "We bring back what they're afraid to say aloud."
She nodded once.
> "Then we burn the name into every wall in Paris."
And from the corner, Jules watched them both — silent, unmoving.
He didn't ask where they were going.
He only whispered:
> "I remember the quarantine wall."
"It was built to keep sickness out."
"Now they use it to keep people in."
And no one spoke after that.
Because the boy was right.
And monsters like La Cendre weren't guarding supply lines.
They were building something.
Something beneath the Empire.
And it was time to open the next door.