The floor tasted of wax and old dust.
I couldn't breathe. It felt like someone was sitting on my chest, pouring concrete into my lungs.
"Alex! Breathe!"
A hand slapped my face. Hard.
My eyes fluttered open. The ceiling of the Tuileries Palace spun in a sickening vortex of gold and plaster.
Fouché hovered over me. His face, usually a mask of reptilian calm, was twisted in terror.
"The physician!" Fouché hissed to the guard at the door. "Get the physician! And if you tell a soul, I will flay you alive!"
I tried to speak. All that came out was a wet, rattling wheeze.
I coughed. It was a violent, hacking spasm that tore at my ribs.
Something warm and metallic filled my mouth.
I turned my head and spat onto the Persian rug.
Bright red. Frothy. Oxygenated blood.
"Pulmonary edema," I thought. My accountant brain was still categorizing the data even as my body failed. Fluid back-up in the lungs. Left ventricle failure. The pump is broken.
"Don't move," Fouché whispered, loosening my cravat. "Stay with me."
I grabbed his wrist. My grip was weak, trembling like an old leaf.
"No... physician," I gasped. The words bubbled through the blood in my throat.
"You are dying!" Fouché snapped. "Look at the floor!"
"If... the market knows..." I sucked in a ragged breath. "The stocks... crash."
"Damn the stocks!"
"Silence," I ordered. It was barely a whisper, but it held the weight of the state. "Help me... to the chair."
Fouché hesitated. Then, he cursed under his breath. He grabbed me under the arms and hauled me up.
My legs were useless. Dead weight.
He dragged me to the leather armchair behind my desk. My head lolled back. The room was dimming at the edges, a black vignette creeping in.
I closed my eyes.
A number flashed in the darkness behind my eyelids. Glowing green digits, like an LED display from a life I left behind.
Time Remaining: 641 Days.
The number flickered. It dropped.
640 Days.
639 Days.
It wasn't counting down by days anymore. It was counting down by hours. The timeline was rejecting me. The universe had identified the virus, and it was scrubbing the drive.
"Here," Fouché said.
He pressed a glass to my lips. Brandy mixed with the digitalis drops.
I drank. The alcohol burned the blood taste away. The medicine tasted like bitter earth.
We waited. The silence in the office was heavy, broken only by the wet rattle of my breathing.
Slowly, the concrete on my chest lightened. The vignette receded.
"Status," I croaked.
Fouché wiped sweat from his forehead. He looked shaken.
"You have blood on your chin, Administrator."
"Wipe it."
He took a handkerchief and scrubbed my face. He looked at the red stain on the white cloth with disgust.
"This isn't sustainable," Fouché said. "You can't run a country while coughing up your lungs."
"I don't need to run it forever," I said, my voice gaining a fraction of strength. "Just until the audit is complete."
The door handle turned.
Fouché's hand went to the pistol inside his coat.
The door opened. Maximilien Robespierre stepped in.
He stopped.
His eyes darted to the blood on the rug. Then to the blood on the handkerchief. Then to my pale, sweating face.
He didn't gasp. He didn't call for help. He was the Auditor General. He just assessed the liability.
"Close the door," Robespierre said.
He walked to the desk. He placed a stack of files on the wood, careful not to touch the bloodstains.
"Is he dying?" Robespierre asked Fouché. He spoke as if I wasn't there.
"He had an episode," Fouché said.
"He is dying," Robespierre corrected. He looked at me. His eyes behind the wire-rimmed glasses were cold, magnified, and terrifyingly intelligent.
"If you die tonight, Alex, we are dead tomorrow."
"I know," I whispered.
"Napoleon is in Italy," Robespierre said. "He has the loyalty of the army. If the Administrator falls, the General returns. He will turn the Republic into a barracks."
He leaned over the desk.
"And he will hang me. Because I know too much. And he will hang Fouché. Because Fouché knows everything."
"I'm not... dead yet," I managed to say.
"You are a liability," Robespierre said. "We need a succession plan. A legal decree. A Regency Council."
He pulled a blank sheet of parchment from his folder. He dipped a quill in the inkwell and held it out to me.
"Sign a blank order," he commanded. "I will fill in the names. Me, Fouché, Talleyrand. We keep the machine running."
I looked at the quill.
The machine. That's all I had built. A perfectly efficient, soulless machine.
I reached for the pen.
My hand shook. The tremors were violent, uncontrollable. It looked like a palsy.
"Steady," Robespierre hissed.
I tried to grip the wood. My fingers wouldn't obey. The nerves were misfiring.
The quill slipped. It fell onto the parchment.
Splat.
Black ink sprayed across the white paper. It looked like a gunshot wound.
I stared at the ink blot.
It moved.
The black liquid swirled. It formed eyes. A mouth. High cheekbones.
Marie Antoinette.
She wasn't the regal queen I had saved from the guillotine only to lose later. She was the woman who had died screaming, trying to kill the man I sent to save her.
Her face was melting. Ink dripped from her eye sockets like black tears.
"You fixed the books, Alex," the ink-face whispered. "But you broke the people."
I blinked. The hallucination vanished. It was just an ink stain.
"I can't sign," I whispered. "My hands."
I looked up at the wall. The portrait of the Royal Family hung there. Louis XVI, Marie, and the children.
I was Louis XVI now. But I was also Alex Miller. And I had killed them both.
The Queen was dead. The King was a dying puppet. And the boy...
My chest seized again. A sharp, stabbing pain.
"The boy," I gasped.
"The boy is in England," Fouché said softly. "Forget him. He is gone."
"He is a monster," I said. Tears pricked my eyes. Not from sadness, but from pure physical exhaustion. "I made him a monster to survive. And then I threw him away."
"You liquidated a toxic asset," Robespierre said coldly. "Do not get sentimental now. It is inefficient."
Sudden noise shattered the grim quiet.
Click-clack-clack-click.
The door to the telegraph room burst open.
My chief operator, a young man named Henri, stumbled in. He looked like he had seen a ghost.
"Administrator!" Henri shouted. "The machine! It's... it's possessed!"
"Lower your voice," Fouché snapped.
"I can't stop it!" Henri cried. "Come and see!"
I forced myself to stand. "Help me," I told Fouché.
He supported my weight. We shuffled into the adjoining room.
The Chappe Telegraph receiver was a mess of brass gears and paper tape. Usually, it clicked rhythmically.
Now, it was having a seizure.
The mechanical arms on the roof were visible through the skylight. They were thrashing. Up, down, left, right. No pattern. Just chaos.
CLACK-CLACK-SMASH-CLICK.
"It's everywhere," Henri said, pointing to the incoming strip. "Paris, Lyon, Calais. All stations reporting total signal loss. It's just noise."
"Jamming," I whispered.
"Jamming?" Robespierre asked. "What is jamming?"
"Cagliostro," I said. "He's using light. Strobe lights. Mirrors. He's blinding the towers with flashes so they can't see the signals. He's flooding the network with garbage data."
I looked at the chaotic movements of the arms. It was mocking us. The greatest communication network in history, reduced to a twitching corpse.
"Shut it down," I ordered. "If we can't trust the data, we cut the feed."
"Wait," Henri said. "Look."
He pointed to the paper tape spilling out of the decoder.
Among the gibberish—random letters, numbers, symbols—there was a pattern repeating.
Every thirty seconds, amidst the noise, a clear sequence printed out.
"It's not a code," Henri said. "It's... arithmetic?"
I leaned closer, squinting through the pain in my eyes.
It wasn't arithmetic. It was calculus.
y = x tan(θ) - (g x²) / (2 v² cos²(θ))
I stared at the paper. The world stopped spinning.
"The trajectory formula," I whispered. "Projectile motion. Parabolic arc calculation."
"Who is sending this?" Robespierre asked. "Is it Cagliostro?"
"No," I said. "Cagliostro speaks in poetry and riddles. He doesn't do math. He finds it boring."
I ran my finger over the numbers.
v². Velocity squared.
There were only two people in the 18th century who knew this specific notation. I hadn't published it yet. I kept it in my private journals.
I had used it to teach one person.
I flashed back to a memory. Five years ago. The Tuileries garden.
A small boy with blond hair, holding a toy cannon.
"If you want to hit the target, Louis, you don't guess," I had told him. "You calculate. Gravity is a constant. Wind is a variable. Math is the only truth."
The boy had looked up at me with cold, blue eyes. "Then I can hit anything, Papa? Even if it's far away?"
"Even if it's a world away," I had promised.
I looked at the telegraph strip.
The signal was routed through Calais. Origin point: Across the Channel.
"England," I breathed.
Fouché stepped closer. "Who is it, Alex?"
A strange sensation washed over me. The pain in my chest didn't vanish, but it was suddenly irrelevant.
My hand stopped shaking.
I picked up the strip of paper.
"It's not a ghost," I said. "It's a proof of life."
I looked at Robespierre.
"You asked for a successor."
I tapped the formula.
"He's alive. And he's doing the math."
"The boy?" Fouché's eyes widened. "He is twelve years old. He is a broken child in a boarding school."
"He sent this through the jamming," I said. "He found the frequency Cagliostro wasn't using. He calculated the signal-to-noise ratio."
I crumpled the paper in my fist. A drop of blood from my lip fell onto it, sealing the promise.
"He isn't broken," I said, a grim smile touching my lips. "He's recalibrating."
I turned to Henri.
"Clear the room," I ordered. "I need to send a reply."
"But the jamming—"
"I said clear the room!"
They scrambled out.
I sat at the key. My heart hammered a dangerous, erratic rhythm. Thump-thump-pause.
I didn't care.
I put my finger on the key.
I tapped out a single line of algebra. The solution to the equation.
x = Range.
I sent it into the dark.
"Come on, son," I whispered to the machine. "Show me what you've learned."