Chapter 88 History lesson

Chapter 88 History lesson
Tasha didn't start immediately.

She sat on the couch with her hands clasped together, looking at the floor for a moment.

"I need you to listen to the whole thing," she said. "Without stopping me in the middle."
"Okay."
"I mean it, Da Vinci. Let me finish before you say anything."
"Okay?"

She looked up at me.

"I started researching your parents two years before we met," she said. "Not because anyone asked me to. Because the watch kept appearing in records connected to people who had no reason to have it, and every trail I followed eventually led back to the same family name and the same address on Earth."

She paused for a moment as I stared deep in her eyes.

"Your parents didn't steal the watch," she said. "They didn't buy it. They didn't find it. It was given to them by someone who needed it to disappear into the most ordinary life possible, carried by people who would never draw attention, never move in circles where anyone would think to look for it."
"Given by who?" I said.
"I'm getting there." She held my gaze. "They were given the watch along with something else. A child. A boy too young to understand what was happening or why."

The apartment was very quiet.

"Da Vinci," she said. "The people you grew up calling your parents are not your biological parents. They adopted you. They raised you because someone they trusted asked them to, gave them the watch to pass on to you when you were grown, and never told them what either of you actually were."

I opened my mouth.
"You said you'd let me finish," she said.
I closed it.

She took a breath.

"Three founding families built this colony," she said. "You know the names. Grandisfields. Caelrics. And Vaelthors. What the history records don't tell you, because the history records were rewritten by the people who benefited from the rewriting, is what happened to two of those families after Men of Moon consolidated power."

She stood up and moved to the window, looking out over the district, the dome lights reflecting off the surface of her eyes.

"The Grandisfields were already established on the Moon. They had roots here, property, connections, people loyal to them across multiple districts. Too visible to remove quietly. So Men of Moon left them alone and worked around them, which is why Theron Grandisfield was able to fake his death and survive."

She turned back toward me.

"The Caelrics and the Vaelthors were different. Both families were primarily based on Earth at the time Men of Moon began its expansion. Both families had legal claims to colonial authority that superseded everything Adrian had built. Both families represented the single greatest threat to everything Men of Moon wanted to become." She paused. "So Adrian had them killed. Daniel Halverson led most of the operations personally. Over the course of about three years, both families were systematically eliminated. Safe houses raided. Relatives tracked down. Every person carrying either bloodline removed."

I was looking at my hands.

"How do you know all of this?" I said.

"Because I had access to Men of Moon's internal files before I found you," she said. "The same files they use to track bloodlines, property claims, and colonial legal authority. They keep meticulous records, Da Vinci. They always have. It's how they know which threats to eliminate and which ones to monitor." She sat back down. "Your name appeared in those files. Not the name you grew up with. A different name. Flagged as unresolved. A loose end they believed had been dealt with but had never fully confirmed."
"An unresolved loose end…" I said.
"A child who was supposed to have been with his parents the night Daniel's people came for them," she said. "A child who wasn't there because three days earlier his grandfather had moved him to a couple and asked them to raise him as their own and never speak of it again."

I stood up.

I walked to the kitchen and stood there with both hands flat on the counter, looking at the wall.

"Da Vinci—"
"Give me a second."
She gave me a second.
I turned around.
"You're telling me Daniel Halverson killed my real parents?" I said.
"Yes."
"The same Daniel who has been running the Cube. The same Daniel who cut the oxygen at the Breathless Dome. The same Daniel I've been—" I stopped. "The same Daniel I've been technically working alongside this entire time..."
"Yes."

I looked at her.

"Why didn't you just tell me," I said. "When we first met. Why the whole operation, the setup, the Men of Moon mission—"

"Because you wouldn't have believed me," she said, and her voice carried something that sounded like an old exhaustion with it. "If I had walked up to you on the street and told you that you were the secret heir to a founding family and that your entire life had been arranged to protect you from an assassination that happened before you could walk, what would you have done?"
I didn't answer.

“And I also didn’t trust you fully to know if I could tell you then. And you would have thought I was insane," she said. "I needed you to see Men of Moon for what it was yourself. I needed you to feel it. So that when I finally told you this, you'd already know in your bones that the world I was describing was real."
"So you used me."
"I guided you," she said. "There's a difference. Everything you experienced was real. Every choice you made was yours."

I picked up the watch from the table where I'd set it when we came in, turned it over in my hand.

"My parents on Earth," I said. "The people I grew up with."
"Are alive for now," she said immediately.

Something in my chest that had been very tight loosened slightly.

"But they knew," I said. "They knew the whole time who I was."
"They knew you weren't theirs by blood," she said. "They didn't know the full story. Your grandfather only told them what they needed to know to keep you safe."
"My grandfather..."

She nodded toward the watch in my hand.

"Sir Aldric Vaelthor," she said. "The man in the photograph with your parents. He was the last surviving member of the original Vaelthor line after Daniel's operations. He had maybe three days between understanding what was coming and the moment it arrived. He used those three days to hide the one thing that mattered most."

"Me," I said.
"You."
I looked at the watch.

The same watch I'd worn for years without understanding it. The same watch everyone on the Moon and Earth had been hunting, dying for, killing for. 

"Why does the watch matter," I said. "You told me it was proof of lineage."
"It is," she said. "It carries an encoded verification sequence in its mechanism. A biological lock tied to Vaelthor bloodline DNA. It can only be fully activated by someone carrying the right genetic markers." She paused. "It was built specifically to identify the heir. To prove beyond any legal challenge who has the right to claim colonial authority."
"And you think that's me?"
"I don't think it," she said. "I know it. The files confirmed it for me. The photograph confirmed it. The fact that your grandfather put it in your parents' hands the same night he moved you out of the family estate confirmed it."

I set the watch down on the table.
Picked it up again.
Set it down.

"My name," I said. "You said my name wasn't—"

"Your adopted parents named you Liam," she said. "After your grandfather asked them to use a name that wouldn't appear in any Vaelthor record."

"So Liam isn't—"

"The first name is yours," she said. "It was always yours. Your grandfather chose it before he gave you away." She looked at me steadily. "But the last name they gave you isn't the one you were born with."

I waited.

Tasha looked at me across the small apartment, the dome lights coming through the window behind her, the watch sitting on the table between us.

"Your name," she said, "is not Liam Calloway."

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, ready to hear the final truth.

"Your real name is Liam Vaelthor. Heir to Aquilas and Hulon on this Moon.”