Chapter 28: The Voice in the Stone

The sound of his own name, spoken by a ghost, hung in the damp air of the depot’s deepest room. The blue light from the screen painted Françoise’s face in silver and shadow, her eyes wide, her grip on his arm like a vise.

“Jean-Luc,” she whispered. “Who is that child?”

Marchand could not answer. His tongue had turned to lead. The screen flickered—a rectangle of light no larger than a prayer book—and on it, a man’s face, tired, unshaven, older than the face he saw in his shaving mirror. The man was speaking to someone off-screen, someone small.

“—can’t save them all. Choose. Choose, Jean-Luc. You have to choose.”

The recording looped again, and this time Marchand saw it: the man on the screen was wearing a French Army uniform, but the cut was wrong, the fabric synthetic, the insignia unfamiliar. And the man’s eyes—his own eyes, but older, ringed with sorrow—were looking directly at him.

“Papa?” The child’s voice again, off-screen, small and frightened.

Marchand sank to his knees on the stone floor. The key lay beside him, still warm from his hand. He had buried this. He had dug the hole with his own hands, wrapped the device in oilcloth, and sworn never to return. And yet here it was, awake, speaking, demanding.

“I buried it,” he said, his voice cracked. “I buried it because I couldn’t—I couldn’t watch it again.”

Françoise knelt beside him, her skirts pooling on the dusty floor. She did not touch him, but her presence was a wall against the dark. “What is it?”

“A recorder. From my time. It was in the depot when I arrived. I found it in the first week, in a crate marked ‘personal effects.’” He laughed, a hollow sound. “They were my effects. My future effects.”

The screen flickered again, and the older Marchand raised a hand—a gesture of farewell, or perhaps of warning. “You cannot save them all,” the recording said, his voice cracking with exhaustion. “But you can save some. Choose the ones you can. And for God’s sake, Jean-Luc, don’t bury this. Don’t bury the truth.”

The screen went dark. The blue light died, leaving only the guttering torch Marchand had brought.

Françoise was silent for a long moment. Then she said, quietly, “You have a son.”

Marchand nodded. “Had. Have. I don’t know. The recording was made three hundred years from now, but it’s my voice. My face. My… my son’s voice.” He pressed his palms against his eyes. “I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know if he was ever born. The storm took me before I could—” He stopped. The words would not come.

Françoise reached out and took his hand. Her fingers were cold, but her grip was sure. “Then we find out,” she said. “Whatever this device is, it is a window. And windows can be opened.”

Marchand looked at her. In the torchlight, her face was fierce, unyielding. She had the look of a woman who had survived too much to be frightened by a ghost.

“The King’s fête is in three days,” he said. “Colbert is watching me. The man in the shadows knows something. And now this—this thing, waking up, speaking to me in my own voice—” He shook his head. “I am unraveling, Françoise. I am a man holding a torch, and the flame is eating my hand.”

“Then let me hold it with you.” She squeezed his fingers. “You are not alone. You have never been alone, not since the day you gave me that cross.”

Marchand touched his chest, where the cross from the dead woman hung beneath his shirt. It was warm against his skin.

“The recording said not to bury the truth,” he said slowly. “But what is the truth I am supposed to tell? That I am a man from the future, armed with wonders I do not understand? That the King of France is about to march to war with the help of rations and steel from three hundred years hence?” He laughed again, bitter. “They will burn me as a sorcerer.”

“Then do not tell them all of it,” Françoise said. “Tell them only what they need to know. The King wants glory. Colbert wants power. Turenne wants victory. Give them those things, one small piece at a time, and they will not ask where the pieces come from.”

Marchand stared at her. “You sound like a minister.”

“I sound like a woman who has learned to survive in a palace of knives.” She rose, brushing dust from her skirts. “Now. You have a key that was taken from you and returned by a clerk with old eyes. You have a voice from your own future telling you to choose. And you have a war coming that will swallow thousands of lives. What do you choose, Jean-Luc?”

He looked at the dark screen of the recorder, then at the cross on his chest, then at Françoise’s face—in the torchlight, she looked almost fierce enough to be a queen.

“I choose to save the ones I can,” he said. “And I choose to find out who sent that clerk. Because if the King has a key to this place, then I no longer have a secret. I have a leash.”

Françoise nodded. “Then we go to Versailles. We smile at the King. We feed Colbert a morsel to keep him quiet. And we find the man who stole your key before he finds us.”

Marchand rose, pocketing the recorder and the key. The weight of them was heavy, but not unbearable.

“One more thing,” he said. “The recording. It said, ‘Don’t bury the truth.’ But there is something else I buried here, deeper than the recorder. Something I have not told anyone.”

Françoise’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

Marchand hesitated. The shadows in the room seemed to lean closer, listening.

“A second crate,” he said. “Marked ‘Quarantine.’ I opened it once, and I have never opened it since. Whatever is inside, it is not from my time. It is from somewhere else.”

Françoise’s face went pale. “Where?”

Marchand shook his head. “I don’t know. But I think it is the reason I was sent here. Not to save France. Not to serve the King. But to keep that thing from falling into the wrong hands.”

The torch sputtered. In the darkness beyond the circle of light, something shifted—a sound like breathing, slow and patient.

And from the depths of the depot, a third voice spoke. Not his own. Not a child’s.

A voice like iron scraping stone.

“You should not have come back, Jean-Luc Marchand.”

Françoise drew a sharp breath. Marchand’s hand went to his belt, where the steel knife from his own time hung—a blade three hundred years sharper than anything in Versailles.

The voice came again, closer.

“But since you are here… let us discuss the price of your secrets.”