The city of Saint-Malo at night is a labyrinth of echoes. The granite walls of the Intra-Muros absorb the sound of the waves and bounce back the footsteps of ghosts. Elias and Sarah moved through the narrow Rue de la Pie, staying in the deep shadows beneath the overhanging eaves. To any late-night reveler stumbling home from a calvados-soaked evening, they were just two more shadows in a city full of them.
Elias stopped at the mouth of the alleyway leading to the back entrance of Thorne's Hardware. He held up a hand, signaling Sarah to wait.
The air was still. The scent of salt was being replaced by the smell of woodsmoke and old stone. He scanned the rooflines. Vogel was dead, but the "Vauquelin" machine was vast. They would have local contractors—former police, private security, or the kind of men who worked the docks and didn't ask questions.
"The front shutter is still down," Elias whispered, his breath hitching slightly from the ache in his ribs.
"But the side door has been tampered with. See the angle of the handle?"
Sarah squinted into the dark. "No. It looks normal to me."
"It's a three-degree tilt. My father installed a tension spring. If you don't use the specific flick of the wrist, the internal mechanism shifts. Someone tried to pick it. They failed, but they tried."
He didn't use the side door. Instead, he led her to a small, unassuming coal chute at ground level. He kicked away a loose stone, reached inside, and pulled a lever. The chute didn't open; instead, a section of the wooden fence three feet away swung inward just enough for a person to squeeze through.
"Jacques loved his secrets," Sarah murmured as they slipped into the dark belly of the shop.
"He survived because of them," Elias corrected.
Inside, the hardware store was a cathedral of silence. The moonlight filtered through the high, barred windows, casting long, skeletal shadows across the rows of hammers, saws, and jars of brass fittings. It was exactly as he had left it, yet the atmosphere had shifted. It no longer felt like a place of business; it felt like a fortification.
Elias didn't turn on the lights. He moved to the center of the shop, his boots silent on the sawdust-covered floor. He needed to find the "most honest place in the shop."
"You said my father mentioned that phrase?" Elias asked, looking at the towering shelves of inventory.
"In his last letter to the contact," Sarah said. "He wrote: 'The truth isn't in the ledger. It's in the honest measure. A kilo is a kilo, and a Thorne always gives full weight.'"
Elias stood still, his mind cataloging every inch of the store. Honest measure. Full weight.
He walked toward the back of the shop, where a massive, antique cast-iron scale sat on a wooden pedestal. It was a Berkel, a beautiful piece of engineering from the 1920s, used for weighing out nails and loose grain. Jacques had refused to replace it with a digital version, claiming that a spring could be faked, but gravity was the only thing in the world that didn't lie.
Elias ran his fingers over the brass weights lined up in a wooden tray next to the scale. 50g, 100g, 200g, 500g, 1kg.
He picked up the one-kilogram weight. It felt right. He moved to the 500-gram weight. It, too, felt correct. But when he reached for the 200-gram weight at the end of the row, his thumb caught on a microscopic seam near the base.
"Sarah, give me the penlight."
He shone the narrow beam on the weight. The brass was slightly more polished than the others, as if it had been handled more frequently. He gripped the top and bottom of the weight and twisted. It didn't budge. He tried pushing the center. Nothing.
Then he remembered: A Thorne always gives full weight.
He placed the 200-gram weight on the scale. The needle swung around and stopped exactly at 200.
"It's accurate," Sarah said, disappointed. "It's just a weight."
"No," Elias said, a realization dawning on him. "It's too accurate."
He grabbed a handful of steel bolts from a nearby bin and dropped them into the weighing pan until the needle hit the 1-kilogram mark. Then, he took the 200-gram weight and placed it on top of the bolts.
The needle didn't move to 1.2kg. It stayed at 1kg.
"The scale is rigged," Elias whispered. "But only for this specific weight."
He reached under the base of the Berkel. His fingers found a small, recessed magnet that had been deactivated by the presence of the 200-gram weight. With a soft clack, a hidden drawer in the wooden pedestal popped open.
Inside was a single, hand-written map on a piece of yellowed parchment and a small, silver-plated skeleton key.
Elias spread the map out on the counter. It wasn't a map of Saint-Malo. It was a floor plan of the Gare de Saint-Malo—the train station.
But it didn't show the lobby or the platforms. It showed the subterranean maintenance tunnels and a specific locker bank labeled 400-450.
"Locker 402," Sarah said, her voice barely a whisper. "The key we found at Les Noires. It fits something in the station."
"Not a locker," Elias said, pointing to the map. "Look at the scale. The locker bank is a facade. Locker 402 is situated directly in front of the old steam-pipe access. The key doesn't open the locker door. It opens the panel behind the locker."
Suddenly, the front window of the shop shattered.
The sound was like a gunshot in the silence. Elias tackled Sarah to the floor just as a canister of tear gas skittered across the boards, hissing violently.
"Masks!" Elias yelled, though he knew they had none. He pulled his collar over his nose and mouth. "Through the basement! Go!"
A second canister thudded into the shelves of paint cans. The room was rapidly filling with a thick, acrid white cloud that burned the eyes and lungs. Through the haze, Elias saw the silhouette of a man stepping through the broken front window. He wasn't wearing a charcoal coat. He was wearing a gas mask and a tactical vest with no insignia.
Elias didn't reach for his gun. He reached for a heavy gallon-can of linseed oil on the shelf above him. He tipped it over. The oil poured onto the floor just as the intruder lunged forward.
The man's boots hit the slick surface, and his feet went out from under him. He hit the floor hard, his suppressed rifle clattering away.
Elias didn't stay to finish him. He grabbed Sarah by the arm and hauled her toward the office.
"The basement hatch! Move!"
They tumbled down the stairs into the dark just as a burst of automatic fire chewed through the office door above them. Elias slammed the heavy oak door and bolted it.
"They're in the shop," Sarah coughed, her eyes streaming tears. "How did they find us so fast?"
"They didn't find us," Elias said, his voice rasping from the gas. "They never left. They were waiting for us to lead them to the rest of the puzzle. They let us find the map."
He looked at the silver key in his hand. If the "Vauquelin" group was this close, the train station would be a slaughterhouse. He couldn't go there—not the way they expected.
"We need a car," Sarah gasped. "We need to get out of the city."
"No," Elias said. "We need to go to the station. If we leave now, we lose the Index forever. And if they get that key, they win."
He moved to a corner of the basement where a heavy workbench stood. He pushed it aside to reveal a small, rusted iron ring in the floor—the entrance to the tunnels they had used earlier.
But instead of going toward the harbor, he pointed toward the opposite end of the tunnel.
"This leads toward the station," Elias said. "It's a three-mile crawl through sewage and seawater. It's narrow, it's cold, and there's no light."
"Better than the gas," Sarah said, wiping her face.
As they descended into the crawlspace, Elias heard the heavy thud of boots on the basement door above them. They were coming.
He closed the hatch and wedged a steel bar through the handles. It wouldn't hold them forever, but it would give them a head start.
"Elias," Sarah said as they began to crawl through the damp dark. "Why did your father do all this? He could have just handed the Index over years ago and lived in peace. Why keep the war alive?"
Elias didn't answer for a long time. The only sound was the scraping of their knees on the stone and the distant, rhythmic thumping of the pursuers above.
"My father believed that a man's weight in the world is measured by what he keeps," Elias finally said. "He didn't keep the Index to start a war. He kept it to make sure the people who started the last one never forgot the price of it."
They emerged into a larger pipe, the air smelling of rust and ancient rain. Somewhere above them, the city of Saint-Malo was sleeping, unaware that beneath its streets, the son of a hardware store owner was carrying the weight of a continent's sins.
"The station is a mile ahead," Elias said, checking the glow-in-the-dark compass on his wrist. "Keep your head down. If we see light, we stop."
He didn't tell her that Locker 402 wasn't just a hiding place. If his father had followed the standard "Librarian" protocols, the locker was rigged with a mercury switch. If the wrong person turned the key, the entire station wing would go up in a ball of fire.
Elias Thorne had spent his life fixing things that were broken. Tonight, he was going to find out if some things were better left destroyed.