Beside the Guillotine
In the heaving crowd of spectators, Camille edged her way to the front, where blood slicked the wooden scaffold and dripped onto the sawdust and straw below. A line of women were knitting and singing ‘Ça Ira’, and next to them a short woman was studiously carving a wooden death mask. From a row of baskets came the sightless stare of severed heads.
Al was hauled onto the platform.
A boo echoed round the Place de la Révolution, with pieces of rotten fruit following to land with wet plops around his feet. He was stripped of his usual sneer, eyes searching the crowd with anxiety plain on his face. He’d seen Ada, then. Good. Camille would expect him to play along, no matter how much he might have had to drink.
Silently, she drew the vizard mask out of her pocket. It was hot and smelled of ashes, but it would do what she needed. A little showmanship, a little misdirection.
She unhooked the pistol from her belt, flexing her fingers around its grip.
Everything could go wrong. Or it could go right. It was the risk they took. The choice they made. All of them. And she trusted all of them, her battalion.
James was wrong, she didn’t trust the wrong people.
On the scaffold Al had been forced to his knees, the executioner’s hand on his shoulder pushing his head between the jaws of the headlock.
It was now or never. She was Camille Laroche of the Battalion of the Dead. And she was so far from finished.
With a cry, she launched herself onto the platform, gun aimed at the executioner.
‘Release him now!’
She pulled back the cock.
‘Cam – behind you,’ yelled Al.
Camille spun on her heel in time to see Comtois leap onto the scaffold, a pistol in his hand. She whipped hers up, jumping back a few paces, as he raised his. They circled, held at the point of each other’s gun. When Comtois finally stilled, he was standing by Al. He raised his hand and the executioner snapped closed the lock, securing Al in place.
‘It’s over, Citoyenne Laroche!’ called Comtois. ‘You cannot manipulate and trick your way out of this. Your associate was rightfully arrested and convicted.’
‘Is that so? I saw that sham trial.’
‘You really expect me to believe you care about that?’
‘Not my problem what you think about me,’ she said.
‘Oh, but it is. You’ve pulled stunt after stunt, endangering this Republic at every turn. It stops here.’ He cocked his pistol and took a determined step forwards. Camille’s eyes flickered between Comtois and Al. ‘You were never going to help us get the girl, were you? It was a scam.’ His voice dropped as he came closer.
‘You’re right, we weren’t going to give you the girl.’
But that doesn’t mean I’m helping the Royalists. Cam caught herself before the words came out. She’d been railing against the government – against the whole Revolution – since her parents’ deaths, but it was pointless. It didn’t change what happened, and now she’d lost the memory of the people she thought they’d been. Her anger hadn’t changed anything. The past had only eaten her up inside, pushing her further away from the people she still had. The people who mattered. Her family.
‘And I’m not going to let you take my friend either.’
Camille took a breath, steadying the aim of her gun.
‘Too late,’ sneered Comtois.
His gun fired just as Camille squeezed the trigger on hers.
Three things happened almost at once.
A hot line of pain painted itself across her shoulder. She staggered back, clutching at the wound where the bullet had grazed her.
Comtois sank to his knees, hands pressed against his chest. Around the crossbow bolt protruding between his ribs.
The lock on the guillotine burst into a rain of splinters and hot metal as Camille’s bullet found its target.
