Elara half-carried, half-dragged the injured Professor Laurent away from the restricted vault. The main halls were still dark and deserted, but the silence felt brittle, ready to shatter. She bypassed the standard staff areas and took them deep into the museum's upper floors, to a space known only to a few long-serving archivists: an abandoned attic storage room, dusty and forgotten, reserved for condemned records.
She gently settled Laurent onto a moth-eaten canvas sheet. He was weak but coherent.
"We need to call the police, Professor," Elara whispered, tearing a strip from her ruined coat to bandage his bleeding head.
Laurent gripped her arm with surprising strength. "No! Dubois has the commissioner in his pocket. The police will simply escort us back to him. You forget: we are the thieves, the ones who broke into the cellar. They will simply assume I went mad and fabricated this conspiracy."
He coughed, the soot from the chimney still heavy in his lungs. "We need to understand Dubois's full plan, Elara. Not just why he needed the key, but where he intends to use the power."
"When they had me… in the Cellule," Laurent began, his voice raspy, "Dubois didn't just demand the key. He demanded to know the original intended location of the Regulator. He was desperate for confirmation."
Laurent closed his eyes, recalling the torture. "Dubois showed me detailed maps of the Parisian foundation. He said Vance's final choice—the cellar beneath the museum—was always meant to be a secure holding cell, a place of isolation. Not the power nexus."
Elara looked at the two keys—the Hourglass and the Broken Circle—resting on a stack of discarded ledgers. "So where was the Regulator originally meant to be placed? The true nexus?"
"The Panthéon," Laurent whispered, the name heavy with historical significance.
"Vance believed that if the Ley Lines could be stabilized, the energy should flow into the symbol of the city's highest intellectual and philosophical ideal. The Panthéon, built on the summit of the Sainte-Geneviève hill, acts as a perfect focal point for the city's power."
Laurent explained that Vance had abandoned the plan because the Panthéon was too open, too public, and too vulnerable to people like Elias Argent.
The chilling realization dawned on Elara. "Dubois knew the Cellule was not the nexus. That's why he wanted to remove the Regulator from the cabinet. He wasn't going to turn it on down there; he was going to steal the entire device and move it to the Panthéon."
Laurent nodded, grimacing in pain. "Exactly. He won't be able to open the cabinet in the Cellule because he lacks the philosophical understanding of the Loss Key. But at the Panthéon, sitting on the active Ley Line nexus, he believes the sheer power of the location will bypass Vance's ethical lock. He can force the Regulator to release its energy without the required sacrifice."
"If he moves that cabinet and forces the Regulator at the Panthéon's nexus point," Elara said, her eyes wide with horror, "he won't just destabilize Paris. He could potentially harness or unleash that energy, creating the very cataclysm Vance feared."
They had to assume Dubois and Henri, once recovered, would return with a team and heavy equipment to extract the massive iron cabinet from the Cellule. They had a brief window of opportunity.
Elara helped the Professor stand. "We must go. If Dubois believes the Panthéon is the key, then the Argentum Society is already mobilizing there. We need to get there before they can move the Regulator, or before they realize we have the keys that can stop them."
Laurent leaned heavily on her. "I can't fight, Elara, but I can guide. The Panthéon's foundation is older than the building itself, riddled with tunnels and Roman catacombs. Vance's original plans should still be intact down there."
"Then that's where we go," Elara said, taking one last look at the quiet, scholarly museum that had become a battlefield. "To the Panthéon. We are going to stop the Argentum Society from turning a philosophical monument into a power source."