Elara arrived at the perimeter of the Bibliothèque Nationale half an hour before sunrise. The museum was a fortress, but one she knew intimately. She avoided the main entrance, where Dubois would have surveillance, and instead slipped in through the service gate used by the early maintenance crews and book delivery trucks.
Her Curator's ID, though flagged, still granted preliminary access. She swiped it at the security checkpoint, meeting the weary eyes of the night guard, Jean-Pierre.
"Mademoiselle Dubois? You're early," Jean-Pierre mumbled, yawning.
"A backlog of acquisition notes, Jean-Pierre. I need the silence of the vault," Elara lied, offering a brittle smile. The guard, used to the eccentric hours of academics, simply waved her through.
She moved through the cavernous, quiet halls, feeling like a ghost haunting her own past life. Every shadow seemed to hold Henri or one of his agents. Her destination was the restricted manuscript vault—the same vault where Dubois had cornered her, and where Professor Laurent was last seen.
The main door of the vault was secured by a new, cutting-edge electronic lock Dubois had installed last year. But Elara knew its flaw. The electronic system was layered over the original, massive 19th-century mechanical lock. The new system required 30 seconds to fully cycle its sensors once the power had been momentarily cut.
She reached a hidden junction box in the ceiling panel above the vault door, a place only maintenance staff and former curators knew about. Using a small, stiff piece of wire she'd taken from Jules's office, she executed a flawless, timed short circuit.
The lights flickered and died. The new electronic lock sputtered. Elara slammed her body against the main door and slid through the crack just as the power automatically restored and the electronic sensors re-engaged. She was inside.
She stood in the center of the vault, the silence amplifying her pounding heart. This was where the Baron's library was stored, and where Dubois had waited. She quickly moved past the climate-controlled shelves to the oldest section of the vault's rear wall.
The wall here was reinforced with cement, marked with a faint patina of dampness. But Elara knew the truth from the archival maps: the cement was a 1930s patch job, covering the original doorway to the deep sub-level.
She found the seam of the doorway—a tiny, vertical line where the cement met the original stone. She hadn't brought a demolition kit, but she didn't need one. She remembered a small, antique iron chisel—heavy and sharp—used for trimming parchment bindings, stored in an unmarked cleaning cabinet near the entrance.
Retrieving the chisel, she drove the point into the weakest part of the cement seam near the top. The old material, weakened by humidity over the decades, crumbled more easily than she expected. She worked quickly and silently, chipping away at the cement until a gap large enough to slide through appeared.
She shone her torch into the opening. The light fell upon a structure that had been sealed for centuries: a rusted, iron spiral staircase descending into an abyss of shadow and stale air.
The descent was treacherous. The iron railing was pitted and cold, and every footstep on the rusted treads sent a loud, metallic shriek echoing into the depths. She was descending past the library's foundation, moving from the world of documented history into the undocumented world of the alchemist.
Finally, her feet hit a solid floor, damp and rough. She was in a small, circular room cut deep into the Parisian earth—the Cellule de Vance. The air was intensely charged, smelling faintly of ozone and something metallic, like a storm gathering indoors.
In the center of the room stood a single, towering object: the same dark, iron cabinet from the Saint-Jacques forge, now secured by the two locks. The Hourglass Lock was open, but the Broken Circle Lock was firmly sealed.
And leaning against the iron cabinet, his face bruised and pale, was Professor Laurent. He was conscious, but chained to the cabinet, a bloodied scarf tied around his head.
"Elara... no," Laurent whispered, his voice thin and desperate. "You shouldn't have come. It was a trap."