Location: Bonaparte family property, Normandy countryside
Date: August 1977
Point of view: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life) / Omniscient (focus on Victor)
The month of August in Normandy crushed the countryside under a humid and motionless heat. The air, saturated with the smell of dry grass and terracotta from the sun, vibrated above the fields that surrounded the old family building made of cut stone.
For eleven-year-old Lazare, this summer holiday was a test of endurance of a very special nature. Far from Paris, far from the parcels of clandestine books sent by Henri Dufresne, he was deprived of his digital oxygen. Here, there were no equations to solve in the dark, nor RISC architecture diagrams to perfect. There was only the fresh air, the endless family meals under the lime tree, and the absolute, terrifying obligation to behave like a child on vacation.
And the centerpiece of this summer comedy was called Victor.
At the age of seven, Victor Bonaparte was not a child: he was a projectile. A ball of pure, noisy, chaotic and inexhaustible kinetic energy. Victor did not walk, he ran. He did not speak, he cried out with joy or anger. His knees were perpetually scratched, his hands covered with pine sap, and an imagination that transformed the smallest grove into an epic battlefield.
Lazarus was walking a few paces behind him on the little path that led to the edge of the wood. He held in his right hand a long barked hazel stick. Officially, it was a rifle. They were playing at war.
War. Lazarus looked at his piece of wood with a dizzyingly cynical pout. In his former life, war had the coppery smell of blood on the Chadian sand, the deafening crash of 7.62 caliber bursts, and the deathly silence that followed the extraction of a target. Here, the war was about doing "Pew! Pew!" hiding behind a hundred-year-old oak tree.
"Cover me, Lazarus!" shouted Victor, throwing himself awkwardly into a thicket of ferns, his face flushed with effort and excitement. "The Russians are coming from the left flank!"
Lazarus stopped. He sank his breath, obeying the protocol of the imposture. He crouched down slowly, raised his stick, and emitted a flat mouth sound, devoid of the slightest conviction.
"It's okay, Victor. I got them. The sector is clear. »
Victor emerged from the ferns, his face beaming with blissful adoration.
"You're the best marksman in the world, Lazarus! You didn't even aim and you shriveled them all! »
The seven-year-old approached and punched his older brother affectionately in the shoulder. For Victor, Lazarus was not simply an elder. He was a living myth. An infallible entity. Victor did not understand Lazarus' silence, his stiffness or his tired adult look, but he interpreted them through the prism of heroism. If Lazarus did not speak, it was because he was thinking of brilliant plans. If he didn't smile, it was because he was standing guard. In the eyes of his younger brother, Lazarus was a knight of quiet strength. Zero suspicion. Absolute faith.
And this faith, for Lazarus, was a cruel torture.
He smiled faintly at his brother. A smile made with three facial muscles.
If you only knew, Victor, he thought, a chasm of sadness opening up in his chest. If you only knew that the brother you admire doesn't exist. That I am an old man locked in the body of a boy. That I calculate the force of gravity of your jumps instead of laughing about them. That I love you with all my heart, but that I will never, ever be able to show you who I really am.
"Come on, come!" cried Victor, who had already run away. "We're going to explore the ruined barn! It's their secret base! »
The owl barn, as Madeleine called it, stood on the edge of the property. It was an old farm building from the last century, the roof of which had collapsed a long time ago. All that remained were four ivy-eaten stone walls and an old, half-rotten oak wood mezzanine that overhung the dirt floor at a height of nearly three meters. The place was formally forbidden by Augustus.
But Victor was a Bonaparte; The ban was for him a formal invitation.
Lazarus followed him into the ruin. The air was fresher, smelling of saltpeter and humus. Sunlight filtered through the holes in the vanished roof, drawing columns of golden dust in suspension.
"Victor, we're not going up," Lazare's calm but firm voice ordered, the engineer having instantly scanned the structural integrity of the beams.
Dry rot. Wood-eating fungi. Critical humidity level. Maximum load estimated at less than twenty kilos before breakage.
But Victor had already set foot on the first crossbar of the rickety ladder nailed to the wall.
"I'm just going to see if there's any treasure upstairs! Don't worry, I'm light! »
He climbed with the frenetic, unconscious agility of childhood. Lazarus stepped forward, feeling the adrenaline, the real one this time, start to prick the tips of his fingers. His black eyes narrowed. His brain switched from "bored big brother" mode to "imminent threat assessment" mode.
Victor reached the mezzanine. The old oak floor groaned mournfully under its weight. He advanced towards the center of the structure, where the main beams were no longer supported by any lower pillars.
"Come and see, Lazarus! You can see the whole garden from here! It's huge! »
He began to hop on the spot to prove his balance.
The sound was dry, clear, definitive. Not a squeak, but the muffled detonation of dead wood that gives way under duress. A tension fracture.
The ground gave way under Victor's feet.
There was no cry. Just the face of the seven-year-old who abruptly changed from excitement to sheer terror, his eyes widening as he tipped back into the void. Three meters of free fall, back forward, head first, towards a ground strewn with angular stones and old rusty ploughshares. A fatal fall, or at least synonymous with lifelong paralysis.
Physics dictates that a body falls three meters in less than a second.
But in the brain of Lazare Bonaparte, time ceased to exist.
The illusion of the eleven-year-old boy was instantly shattered. The old agent of the Action Service took over the reins with absolute brilliance. Survival admitted neither fear nor panic, only vector calculus and biomechanics.
Target mass: 25 kilos. Acceleration: 9.81 meters per second squared. Estimated point of impact: granite block 40 centimeters from my current position. Interception time: 0.7 seconds.
Lazarus did not shout his brother's name. Howling consumes oxygen and shifts the center of gravity of the jaw.
His childlike muscles, unprepared for such nervous violence, exploded under the electrical impulse. He propelled his body forward, literally throwing himself into the path of the fall. His feet left the dirt floor. He stretched in the air, defying the joint limits of his young shoulders.
He intercepted Victor a meter from the ground.
The collision was brutal. Lazarus gripped the collar of his brother's shirt with his left hand and put his right arm under the back of his neck to protect the child's cervical vertebrae. But absorbing twenty-five kilos in free fall when you weigh only thirty-five yourself required deflecting kinetic energy, not stopping it in its tracks.
Lazarus twisted his own pelvis in mid-flight. He turned his back towards the sharp stones, using his own body as a cushioning shield.
They hit the ground.
Lazarus hit the clay with a perfect military roll-and-ball technique, dissipating the shockwave along his shoulder blade and latissimus dorsi. A rock hidden under the dust ploughed his left side—the same place where the AK-47 bullet had taken his life in Bali. The pain radiated like a flash of white fire throughout his trunk, taking his breath away, but his arms remained locked around Victor's head.
The cloud of dust and rotten wood debris fell heavily on them.
The silence in the ruined barn was absolute. All that could be heard was the indifferent song of the cicadas outside.
Lazarus exhaled violently, driving the air out of his aching lungs. He loosened his grip. Victor was lying on his chest, his eyes bulging, his breath blocked by the shock of fear. The seven-year-old felt his own head, then looked at the ground around them, the sharp stones that had been waiting for him seconds earlier, and finally the gaping hole in the mezzanine above.
He looked down at Lazarus.
Lazarus' face, covered with dust, was not that of a frightened older brother. For a split second, as he struggled to catch his breath, the mask cracked. Her dark eyes stared at Victor with a terrifying, cold, evaluative intensity. The look of a soldier checking on his teammate's condition after an IED explodes. Not an ounce of childlike sweetness.
But Victor didn't have the software to read this look.
The child burst into a nervous, hysterical laugh, with tears in his eyes, not of pain, but of emotional discharge.
"How did you do it?" stammered Victor, sitting astride Lazarus' belly, forgetting that he had just come close to death. "You stole, Lazarus! I saw you! You jumped like a ninja! You caught me in the air! »
The adoration in the little boy's eyes was total, blind, sunny. It was an absolute devotion. Lazare had just performed an impossible physical miracle, a feat of anticipation and motor technique that would have left an Olympic gymnast speechless, and Victor thought it was normal. Because it was Lazarus. And that Lazarus could do anything.
The pain in the reincarnated engineer's shoulder pulsed excruciatingly. He probably had a cracked rib and a nice muscle tear. But this physical pain was nothing compared to the groundswell that overwhelmed him at that moment.
Lazarus looked at his brother's beaming face, the freckles on his nose, his little hands clinging to his shirt.
He loves me," Lazarus realized with icy lucidity. He loves me to death.
But it was a love based on a dizzying deception. If Victor knew the truth—if Victor understood that the accuracy of this rescue came from years of slitting the throats of sentries and covering fire in bloody deserts, if Victor knew that his brother was not a child but a ghost escaped from death—that love would turn to terror. Victor would back down. He would see the monster.
In order to be loved by his own brother, Lazarus was condemned to remain a comic strip. A mute superhero. An illusion of protective perfection.
Lazarus closed his eyes for a second, swallowing the metaphysical despair that threatened to suffocate him. He locked the doors of his mind again. The soldier returned to the darkness. The eleven-year-old child, serious and a little rough, resumed his place.
He gently pushed Victor away and stood up, grimacing, dusting his pants with his good hand.
"You're heavy, you idiot," Lazare said, forcing his voice into a sulky, annoyed intonation. "You could have killed us both. I told you not to go upstairs. »
"But did you see how you rode?" insisted Victor, hopping on his feet, the adrenaline erasing the reprimand. "We have to tell dad! He's going to hallucinate! »
"No."
The word snapped like a gunshot. Lazarus grabbed Victor's arm tightly. The grip was a little too strong, painful, authoritative.
"We don't say anything to Dad. We don't say anything to mom. If you speak, they will forbid you to come and play here. And I won't protect you anymore. That's our secret. Do you understand? »
Lies, again and again. Managing the crisis. To protect the anomaly of Auguste's eyes, who would have immediately understood that the mechanics of this cushioned fall defied the laws of infantile chance.
Victor nodded, solemn, proud to share a military secret with his personal god.
"I promise, Lazarus. Motus. »
They walked out of the ruin in silence, returning to the great sun-drenched house. Victor walked in front, kicking the stones, victorious and invincible because he knew that his shadow was watching over him.
Behind him, Lazarus walked gritted his teeth, his breathing wheezing slightly with each step. He watched his brother's small, bouncy figure stand out against the summer sky. The gap had just widened. Lazare Bonaparte knew this with mathematical certainty: he would spend his whole life saving his family, protecting them from falls, from the world and from ruin, and in return, he would die of the most absolute of solitudes.
Location: Bonaparte family property, Normandy countryside Date: August 1977 Viewpoint: Lazare Bonaparte (2nd life)
The large stone house was plunged into the torpor of the afternoon. The shutters on the ground floor had been drawn to keep the room cool, plunging the living room and corridors into a half-light striped with golden dust.
Lazarus had taken refuge in his room, on the first floor, under the eaves. He closed the door behind him and turned the key in the lock with a small metallic click that felt like a pressure relief valve.
He was alone. Finally.
He slowly pulled his shirt off, wincing as the cloth rubbed against his left side. He approached the old stitched mirror that topped the cherry wood chest of drawers and observed its reflection. On his pale eleven-year-old skin a large purplish bruise began to bloom, a memory of his fall into the ruined barn. Lazarus brushed the bruise with his fingertips.
The location was diabolically precise. It was exactly there, under the last rib, that the 7.62mm bullet had hit him in the Kuta mall, fifty years later — or in another life. A phantom pain, sharp and burning, passed through his nerve endings. The dead soldier reminded him that he was still there, lurking under the child's skin.
He looked away from the mirror, unable to bear the sight of this body that was not his any longer.
He sat down at his little schoolboy's desk, opened the bottom drawer, and took out one of the black notebooks supplied by Henri. He grabbed a pen and opened it to a page covered with dense equations. The simple touch of the paper and the smell of the ink acted like a balm. He delved into the abstraction of the RISC architecture, resuming his calculations on branch prediction, a processor optimization technique that he knew was essential for future VELA chips.
For an hour Lazarus forgot about Normandy. He forgot the heat. He forgot Victor. He was now a pure spirit, an architect of the future tracing the plans of an invisible empire.
The tension built up during the rescue suddenly subsided. Fatigue, an ancient, metaphysical fatigue, fell on his shoulders with the force of a leaden cloak. Lazarus ceased to write. His back is rounded. His features relaxed completely. The sixty-year-old engineer dropped his mask. His childish face froze into an expression of unfathomable weariness, his eyes blank, his jaws clenched with the bitterness of a life of lies. He looked like an old man awaiting death in the body of a pre-adolescent.
He exhaled for a long time, rubbing his tired eyes with the palms of his hands.
It was then that he felt a slight draught glide over the back of his neck.
Lazarus froze. He hadn't heard the key turn. He hadn't heard the handle give way. He slowly turned back in his chair.
The door to the room was not locked, as he had thought. The antiquated mechanism must have been improperly engaged. It was a few centimeters ajar. And in this thin slit of darkness, at the height of an adult's knee, two large, clear eyes stared at him.
Claire.
Her little sister was not yet three years old. She stood in the hallway, motionless, clutching a faded fabric cuddly toy. She did not yet speak very well, forming hesitant sentences, but her gaze spoke the language of absolute observation.
Unlike Victor who swept the world with his energy without ever lingering on it, Claire absorbed everything. She was a silent little sponge.
Lazarus felt a cold sweat bead on his temples. How long had she been there? What had she seen? Had she seen the monster? Had she seen the old man?
He tried to straighten his shoulders, stretch his lips to form the benevolent smile of the big brother, but his facial muscles refused to obey. The mask was too heavy to put back up in a hurry. For three long seconds, the sixty-year-old man and the three-year-old girl looked at each other in silence, separated by the doorframe.
Claire doesn't smile back. She didn't back down either. She tilted her head slightly to the side, like a bird studying a strange insect. Her clear eyes ran over Lazarus' hard, tired, ravaged face. She didn't have the vocabulary to name what she saw — dissociation, reincarnation, trauma — but her childlike instinct, free of any preconceptions, registered the fundamental anomaly. This boy is not who he claims to be. She stored this image in the vault of her young memory. It was the first piece of the puzzle. The first line of a file that she would spend years building without even realizing it, becoming the unwitting detective of the Bonaparte family.
The spell was broken by the creaking of the old floor of the corridor. Madeleine's light step drew nearer.
Claire blinked, spun on her little heels, and silently walked away into the hallway before her mother even noticed her. Lazarus took a deep breath, locked his mind brutally, and closed his black notebook which he slipped under a pile of comic books. He grabbed a clean shirt from his bed and hurriedly put it on to hide his bruised side.
The door opened wide.
Madeleine entered, bringing with her that soft light which seemed always to accompany her. The smell of rice powder and lavender wafted through the room. She held in her arms the latest addition to the Bonaparte tribe: Camille, barely a few months old, snuggled against her mother's chest.
"Have you locked yourself up, big boy?" asked Madeleine gently, approaching the desk.
She noticed Lazarus's drawn features, the slight pallor of his cheeks. Her mother's heart, programmed to worry, immediately translated these signs into the only language she knew.
"You've been playing too much in the sun with your brother," she said, placing her free hand on Lazarus' forehead to check his temperature. "You came back from the barn covered in dust. You're the big brother, Lazare, you have to know how to say stop when Victor is exhausted. »
Madeleine's touch was fresh and comforting. Lazarus closed his eyes for a second under the caress. It was always the same thing. She laid her hand on the forehead of the genius, the impostor, the man in the shadows, and she saw in it only a little boy who had run too much under the Normandy sun.
"I'll open the window to make a draught," said Madeleine, turning to the skylight. "Hold it for a second, will you?" My arm goes numb. »
Before Lazarus could refuse, Madeleine placed little Camille in her arms.
Lazarus froze. He sat awkwardly on the edge of his bed, propping the infant into the crook of his good arm, terrified that his aching muscles would give out. He was not comfortable with babies. They represented the epitome of innocence, an all-too-pure mirror in which he hated to look at himself.
Madeleine was busy by the window, struggling with the rusty latch.
Lazarus looked down at the little bundle of warm swaddling clothes he was holding. Camille was not sleeping. His deep blue eyes, huge and liquid, were fixed on the face of his older brother. She didn't move. She wasn't crying.
The contrast between them was stunning. In the room, there were two ends of human life. On the one hand, a baby whose brain was just beginning to trace its first synaptic connections, an absolute blank canvas. On the other, a man who had lived sixty years, gone through decades of engineering, seen friends die, killed with his own hands, and felt the cold of the grave. And yet, physically, this chasm was contained in the embrace of an eleven-year-old child holding his little sister.
Camille blinked slowly.
Lazarus felt a strange sensation overwhelm him. Unlike Victor, who projected his own dreams of greatness onto him, and unlike Claire, whose silent acuity sounded like a threat, Camille asked for nothing. She didn't judge anything. The genetic codex of this child seemed to be carved out of pure, raw empathy, devoid of any reading grid.
In the silence of the room, Lazarus' soul resonated with that of the infant.
He dropped the mask. Not the physical mask, but the mental shield that he maintained 24 hours a day so as not to go crazy. He let the sadness rise. The overwhelming melancholy of not belonging to that era. The heartbreak of knowing that he would have to face the empires of technology alone, with no one to entrust with the burden of his prescience. The perpetual mourning of the man he had been at Cambridge, and the agent who had bled in Kuta.
Sadness radiated from Lazarus like an invisible wave of heat.
Camille did not look away. Her little eyebrows, barely drawn, furrowed very slightly. She didn't cry at the wave of black despair, but she slowly raised her chubby little hand. His tiny fingers, uncertain in their motor skills, sought the origin of this pain.
Camille's warm little hand came to rest delicately on Lazare's cheek.
It was an instinctive, clumsy gesture. But for Lazarus, it was love at first sight. He had the overwhelming impression that, for a brief moment, in the utter absurdity of this world, a living being understood the extent of his grief. Camille didn't know who he was crying for or what he had lost, but she knew he was broken. She caressed the ruins of her soul.
A lonely tear, hot and heavy, escaped from Lazarus' right eye and slid down his cheek to die against his sister's little fingers. He did not wipe it away. He remained motionless, breathing softly, accepting this alms of tenderness with the desperate gratitude of a man condemned to death.
"There, it will make a little air," said Madeleine, turning round.
Lazarus closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, swallowed his sorrow with the violence of a soldier, and opened his eyes dry and perfectly neutral. The moment of grace was over.
Madeleine approached, her eyes bathed in tenderness. She saw Camille's little hand on Lazarus' cheek.
"Look how she loves you already," whispered the mother, her eyes shining. "You have a gift with them, Lazarus. You will be a wonderful big brother. You will protect them all. »
"Yes, mamma," replied Lazarus in a dull, almost mechanical voice. "I will protect them."
Madeleine took the baby in her arms. Lazarus arose, his side on fire, his heart in ashes.
He would protect them, yes. That was the mission. He would build Volta to protect France, and he would build himself as a fortress to protect his family. It would absorb shocks, it would anticipate falls into ruins, it would deflect bullets and hostile takeovers. He would be the titan on which the Bonaparte family and the whole country would rest.
But as he watched Madeleine leave the room humming a lullaby, Lazarus definitively accepted his sentence.
The ditch was not only dug; it was filled with concrete. The Bonaparte family was built on love, on light, on blind trust. He was built on silence, on calculation, and on the greatest lie in the history of humanity. He would dine at their table, he would smile at their weddings, he would finance their lives, but he would do it from the other side of an armored window that he had put up himself.
The sixty-year-old man returned to his desk. He opened his black notebook, wiped away the invisible tear that had flowed, and resumed his calculations of software architecture. Love would not save his world. Only silicon would do that.