Chapter 7

Henri, always a man of measured words, did not mention it immediately.

We were in the sitting room, the late afternoon light settling into the familiar geometry of the space, when he finally set aside the newspaper he had been reading and looked at me with a consideration that felt deliberate.

“There is something you should know,” he said.

Claire glanced up from her embroidery, her expression shifting subtly at his tone.

I felt it before he said anything else.

“What is it?” I asked.

Henri folded the paper neatly, aligning its edges with a precision that bought him a moment.

“The device you asked about,” he said. “The one taken from you when you arrived.”

My attention sharpened.

“What about it?”

“It has drawn interest,” he replied.

That was not unexpected.

“From whom?”

A brief pause.

“From Monsieur Moreau.”

The name settled heavily.

I kept my voice even. “Interest in what sense?”

“He requested access,” Henri said. “Under the pretext of technical curiosity. The Exposition committee approved it without much resistance.”

Of course they had. Moreau didn’t force things. He arranged them.

“When?” I asked.

“This morning.”

The same answer I had heard before. Everything important seemed to be happening just out of reach.

“Where is it now?” I said.

Henri hesitated—not because he didn’t know, but because he understood the question behind the question.

“In a secondary storage room,” he said carefully. “Not the main annex. A smaller space used for items under examination. Access is ... more controlled.”

Claire set her needle down.

“Henri,” she said quietly.

He met her gaze, then returned his attention to me.

“I am telling you this,” he continued, “because I suspect it matters more to you than you have chosen to explain.”

It did. More than I could afford to admit.

“I appreciate that,” I said.

Another pause.

“William,” Claire said, her voice softer now, “what are you intending to do?”

I didn’t answer immediately. Because the truth was already decided.

The second storage room proved more difficult to access than the main annex.

Henri had not exaggerated. It was smaller, more contained, and governed by a different kind of attention—not overtly guarded, but observed in a way that made intrusion feel deliberate rather than incidental. This was not a place one wandered into by mistake.

I waited until the Exposition grounds had quieted into their nighttime rhythm.

The energy of the day did not disappear entirely, but it softened. Movement became less predictable, more intermittent. Workers passed through in smaller numbers. Conversations dropped to low exchanges. Light pooled instead of flooding, leaving long stretches of shadow between illuminated spaces.

I moved when those shadows allowed it.

The door itself was secured, but not with any sophistication that would deter someone determined to enter. It required patience more than skill—a careful hand, a willingness to work quietly, and the discipline not to rush the moment. When it finally gave, it did so without sound.

Inside, the difference was immediate. The air felt closer, more controlled. The ceiling was lower than the warehouse, the space arranged not for storage but for study. Tables stood at measured intervals, each one holding objects in various stages of examination—mechanical components partially disassembled, unfamiliar devices tagged and cataloged, fragments whose purpose was not immediately clear.

A single oil lamp burned near the center of the room, its light steady and contained, casting a narrow circle that left the edges of the space in partial shadow.

And there, within that circle, was the camera.

It was not hidden away in a crate this time, nor wrapped in cloth. It had been placed deliberately on the table, as if it were something to be understood rather than merely stored. The positioning suggested attention—curiosity that had not yet found its answer.

I approached slowly, aware of the quiet in the room and how easily it could be broken.

Up close, the device looked unchanged. Smooth, intact, its surface unmarked by whatever attempts had been made to examine it. It remained as foreign here as it had been the moment it was taken from me.

Yet there was something else now, something less visible than felt—a tension in the air around it, subtle but unmistakable.

I reached out, stopping just short of touching it.

For a moment, I considered leaving it where it was. Walking away before the choice became action. I already understood what it was capable of showing me, and there was a part of me that recognized the danger in knowing more than I could control.

But that hesitation did not hold. It never did.

My hand closed around the camera, and at once I felt it again—that faint, unnatural hum, not quite a vibration and not quite a sound, but something that existed just beneath both. It was the same sensation I had experienced before, the same quiet indication that the device did not fully belong to the moment it occupied.

I did not allow myself time to reconsider. I pressed the power button.

The screen came to life unevenly, cycling through darkness, then a dull gray, before breaking into a pattern of static that crawled across the surface. It struggled to stabilize, as though it were attempting to reconcile conflicting states, and for a moment I thought it might fail entirely.

Then, slowly, something resolved.

The battery indicator flickered unpredictably, shifting between full and empty as if it could not settle on a single truth. Beneath it, files began to appear—but not the ones I had taken. Not the coastline, not the eclipse.

These were different. Fragmented. Corrupted in a way that suggested not damage, but interference.

I scrolled carefully, my movements deliberate, unwilling to disrupt whatever fragile coherence the device had managed to achieve.

One file stood apart from the others. Its icon was distorted, its name incomplete, but its format was unmistakable.

It was not an image, but something else.

I selected it.

The screen hesitated before responding, the display flickering as if the device were struggling to retrieve something not meant to be accessed. Then, gradually, an image began to assemble—not all at once, but in sections, like pieces of a memory returning out of sequence.

A pale background emerged first. Text followed, faint and broken, resolving just enough to suggest form before slipping again. The edges of the image appeared uneven, torn rather than cut, the texture of paper visible beneath the distortion.

It was a newspaper clipping. The realization settled in even before the words became clear.

I leaned slightly closer, my attention narrowing as the device strained to hold the image together. Fragments of text surfaced, incomplete but legible.

“ ... Dubois...”

The name appeared first, isolated within the broken field of print. My chest tightened as I watched the rest struggle to resolve. More text flickered into place, unstable, as though it might vanish at any moment.

“ ... electrical explosion...”

The words held just long enough to be understood. I did not need more than that.

Whatever context the clipping once contained—headline, date, explanation—remained beyond reach, dissolving into distortion each time it tried to form. The image refused to complete itself, as if there were a limit to what could be revealed.

But the essential truth was already there.

Elise Dubois. Electrical explosion.

The fragments aligned with what I had already seen, not contradicting it, but reinforcing it in a different form.

The screen flickered once more, the image breaking apart into static before collapsing entirely into black. The device went still in my hand.

I did not attempt to power it on again. There was no need.

The confirmation had settled into something colder than shock, something steadier. Whatever uncertainty had remained was gone, replaced by a clarity that left little room for interpretation.

I set the camera back on the table with care, returning it to the exact position in which I had found it. My movements felt more controlled now, more deliberate, as though precision could restore some balance to what had just occurred.

When I stepped away, the room seemed smaller than before. Not physically, but in the way it held its silence. The air felt more contained, as if something had closed in around the space without changing its dimensions.

I left as carefully as I had entered, slipping back into the night without drawing attention.