I woke up to silence.
That was the first warning sign.
War isn't silent. Even after the shooting stops, there is the screaming of the wounded, the sawing of bones in the surgery tent, the groans of dying men.
But this silence was heavy. It pressed against my eardrums like deep water.
I sat up on the cot. My body felt like lead. My joints popped and ground together.
I reached for my chest. The heavy brass tank was gone.
Panic spiked. I gasped, expecting to suffocate.
Air filled my lungs. Thin, smoky air, but air. The oxygen therapy had bought me some time, or maybe the adrenaline was just lingering.
I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I was wearing a simple linen shirt, stained with sweat.
"Fouché?" I croaked.
No answer.
I forced myself to stand. The world tilted, then righted itself. I grabbed a cane leaning against the tent pole.
I limped outside.
The camp was bustling, but it was wrong. Soldiers moved sluggishly. There was no victory celebration. No wine being passed around.
I walked toward the main hospital tent. It was a massive canvas cathedral erected in the ruins of the British camp.
A young French doctor stood at the entrance. He looked pale, wiping his hands on a bloody apron.
"Administrator," he said, bowing nervously. "You shouldn't be up."
"Why is it so quiet?" I asked. "We captured twenty thousand men. Where are the screams?"
"They... they aren't screaming, Sir. They are just... fading."
I pushed past him.
The smell hit me first.
It wasn't the copper tang of blood. It wasn't the rot of gangrene.
It was a metallic taste. Like sucking on a battery. And underneath that, a sweet, sickly scent of cooked meat.
I walked down the rows of cots.
British Redcoats lay in rows. Thousands of them.
They were conscious. Their eyes were open. But they didn't move.
I stopped at the bedside of a Captain. He was young, maybe twenty-five.
"Water," he whispered.
I picked up a tin cup from the table. I held it to his lips.
He drank greedily.
Then he coughed.
Blood sprayed onto the white sheet.
It wasn't bright arterial blood. It was dark. Black.
He wiped his mouth.
Three of his teeth came out in his hand.
He stared at the teeth in his palm. He didn't scream. He just looked confused.
"My teeth," he whispered. "Why are my teeth loose?"
I looked at his hairline. Clumps of hair were on the pillow.
I looked at his hands. The skin was red, like a severe sunburn, but blistering from the inside out.
My stomach dropped.
I knew this sickness. I had read the reports from Chernobyl. From Hiroshima.
Acute Radiation Syndrome.
"Don't drink the water," I whispered, knocking the cup from his hand.
The cup clattered to the floor.
"The wizard," the Captain wheezed. "The wizard touched the supplies. He said it was a blessing."
I backed away.
I looked around the tent. The bleeding gums. The hair loss. The ghostly pallor.
These men weren't wounded. They were dead. They were walking corpses, their DNA shredded by high-energy particles.
"Get out!" I shouted to the French orderlies. "Everyone out! Now!"
They stared at me.
"Move!" I roared.
I scrambled out of the tent, gasping for fresh air. I felt dirty. I wanted to scrub my skin with steel wool.
I saw them by the command fire.
Napoleon sat on a log, holding a bottle of wine. Charles stood next to him, meticulously cleaning the soot off his flintlock pistol.
They looked like conquerors.
"Administrator!" Napoleon beamed, raising the bottle. "A toast! To the annihilation of the English!"
He brought the bottle to his lips.
I moved faster than a dying man should.
I swung my cane.
SMASH.
The bottle shattered in Napoleon's hand. Red wine exploded over his white breeches.
Napoleon jumped up, hand on his sword hilt. "Have you lost your mind?"
"Don't drink it," I gasped, leaning on the cane. "Don't eat the food. Don't touch their water."
"It's vintage claret," Napoleon snapped, shaking wine off his hand. "Captured from the General's tent."
"It's poison," I said.
Charles looked up. He holstered his pistol. He saw the terror in my eyes.
"Cyanide?" Charles asked. "Arsenic?"
"Worse," I said. "Radium."
They looked blank. The word meant nothing to them. Madame Curie wouldn't be born for another seventy years.
"Invisible bullets," I said. "Cagliostro didn't just leave. He spiked the supply train."
"Magic?" Napoleon scoffed. "You believe in curses now?"
"Science," I snapped. "Physics."
I looked around. I needed to prove it. I couldn't explain ionization to an 18th-century artillery officer.
"Fouché!" I yelled.
My spymaster materialized from the shadows near the carriage.
"The surveillance kit," I ordered. "Bring me the silver nitrate plates. The ones for the camera obscura."
Fouché hesitated, then ran to fetch them.
"What are you doing?" Napoleon demanded.
"Showing you the invisible," I said.
Fouché returned with a light-proof box. I took out a glass plate coated in silver nitrate—primitive photographic film. It was wrapped in black paper.
I walked over to a stack of captured British canteens.
"This water," I said. "If Cagliostro poisoned it, it's emitting energy. Light you can't see."
I placed the wrapped plate on top of the canteen.
"We wait," I said.
Five minutes passed. The silence stretched. Napoleon tapped his foot impatiently. Charles watched the plate like a hawk.
"Time," I said.
I grabbed a bowl of developing solution from the kit. I stripped the paper off the plate and slid it into the chemical bath.
We watched.
Slowly, the white glass began to turn gray. Then dark gray.
Then, pitch black.
Charles gasped.
"It exposed itself," Charles whispered. "But there was no light. The paper was sealed."
"The light came from the water," I said. "It went through the paper. It goes through wood. It goes through flesh."
I looked at Napoleon.
"If you drank that wine, you would be dead in a week. Your insides would liquefy."
Napoleon looked at the wine stain on his breeches. He turned pale. He frantically wiped at the fabric.
"What kind of weapon is this?" Napoleon whispered. "It has no sound. No smoke."
"It's the fire of the sun," I said. "Bottled."
I looked at the hospital tent. Twenty thousand men.
"They are already dead," I said. "They just haven't stopped moving yet."
"We must help them," Napoleon said, his soldier's honor kicking in. "We have doctors."
"No," I said. My voice was cold. It was the Administrator speaking. "You can't fix this. You can only contain it."
I turned to Fouché.
"Quarantine the camp. Set a perimeter at one mile. Anyone who crosses it gets shot."
"Shoot our own men?" Fouché asked.
"If they've touched the British, they are contaminated," I said. "The dust on their clothes. The sweat on their skin. It spreads."
I looked at the pile of captured supplies. Gold, weapons, food. Millions of francs worth of assets.
"Burn it," I ordered.
"The gold?" Charles asked. "We need the gold, Father. The deficit."
"Wash the gold in acid," I said. "Then bury it in lead boxes for a month. Test it again. But the food? The uniforms? Burn it all. And bury the ash in concrete."
"This is madness," Napoleon said. "These are prisoners of war. There are rules!"
I stepped close to him. I grabbed his lapel.
"There are no rules for this," I hissed. "He broke the timeline, Napoleon. He introduced a plague that won't be understood for a century."
I pointed at the hospital tent.
"If you go in there to play the hero, you won't die like a soldier. You won't die on a battlefield."
I tapped his chest.
"You will rot. Your hair will fall out. Your bones will turn to sponge. You will bleed from your eyes and scream for days before your heart stops."
Napoleon stared at me. The conqueror of Italy, the man who laughed at cannon fire, took a step back. He looked terrified.
"He poisoned the world," Napoleon whispered.
"He escalated the market," I said.
I looked at Charles.
The boy was staring at the black photographic plate. He was calculating.
"Invisible variables," Charles murmured. "How do you fight an enemy you can't see?"
"You don't fight him," I said. "You liquidate him."
I turned away from the camp.
"Get the carriage," I ordered. "We're going back to Paris. We need to secure the government before the panic sets in."
"And the prisoners?" the French doctor asked, stepping out of the tent. "What do I tell them?"
I looked at the young doctor. He wasn't wearing gloves. He had been touching them all morning.
I felt a pang of pity. He was a sunk cost too.
"Tell them help is coming," I lied. "Give them morphine. Give them all the morphine we have."
"And then?"
"And then wait for the silence," I said.
I limped toward the carriage.
Cagliostro hadn't just defeated an army. He had broken the Geneva Convention before it was even written. He had turned warfare into an extinction event.
My hand shook as I gripped the cane.
I wasn't fighting a wizard anymore. I was fighting the apocalypse.