Chapter 84 Endless threats

Chapter 84 Endless threats
I was halfway down the corridor toward Tasha's room when every screen in the mansion changed at once.

I stopped walking.

Daniel's face filled the display mounted on the wall ahead of me, the Cube's command deck visible behind him, officers moving in the background.

"To the residents of Hulon," Daniel said. "You have forty eight hours to evacuate your districts. This is not a suggestion. This is not a negotiation. Anyone remaining in these three districts after the deadline will face the consequences of continued insurrection against legitimate authority."

He paused, looking directly into the camera.
"The oxygen reduction will be targeted, controlled, and complete. Unlike previous incidents, this one carries my full authorization and this time, the whole nation will go down. 

Unlike previous incidents… He was using the Breathless Dome as a reference point. Not as a mistake or an atrocity. 

The broadcast cut to a LunarCast anchor who looked like she'd aged five years in the last thirty seconds, trying to find professional language for something that didn't have any.

I pulled up Kellan's frequency before she finished her first sentence. He wasn't answering quickly, so I sent an emergency signal to his transmission.

“Did you—”
"I saw it right before answering," he said.
"How fast can you move your fleet?"
"My flagship is running on thrusters only. Two escort ships are down." A pause. "Da Vinci, we just took serious damage. My crew needs—"
"We only have forty eight hours, Kellan."

Silence on the line.

"I know what forty eight hours means you fucker," he said.
"Hulon has two hundred thousand. Garron's people are in all three districts. The people who followed his movement, who sang that song at the Breathless Dome, who came out into the streets after my broadcast this morning." I kept my voice level. "Those are the people Daniel just gave forty eight hours to run."

Another silence. Longer this time.

"I'll get the fleet moving," Kellan said. "But Da Vinci, if we go back to that station with what I have left, we better have a plan that's better than the last one. Cause we just got our asses kicked by the Cube."
"Work on it from your end. I'll work on it from mine."

The call ended.

I stood in the corridor with the broadcast still running on the wall screen behind me, the anchor now cutting between aerial footage of all three districts, crowds were already gathering around the public display.

The door at the end of the corridor opened. Tasha leaned out, something in her hand, her expression shifting when she saw my face.

"You saw it?" she said.
"Everyone saw it."

She came into the corridor and we stood there together watching the footage, the three districts laid out from above. Then I heard the front entrance of the mansion open two floors below us.

Grandisfield's security team didn't shout, which meant whoever had come through the door was expected. I heard footsteps on the stairs, and then the figure appeared at the top of the stairwell. Garron.

He looked at me first. Then at the screen still playing Daniel's broadcast on the wall.

Something moved across his face.
"Garron..." I said.
"Da Vinci," he said. His voice was lower than usual. "Nice seeing you again. I watched your transmission this morning."
"What did you think?"
"I think you said what needed to be said." His eyes moved back to the screen. "And I think Daniel just told us what he thinks of it."

Grandisfield appeared at the far end of the corridor, having come up from the floor below, and the two of them looked at each other across the length of the hallway.

"Theron," Garron said.
"General Garron," Grandisfield said.
Nobody said anything for a moment.
"Come downstairs."

Garron looked at me once more before following.

I watched them both disappear down the stairwell, their voices starting low and careful beneath us, the first real conversation between the two men who had been running parallel revolutions across the same colony without ever being in the same room.

Tasha pulled me back toward her door before I could follow them down.

"It'll keep for ten minutes," she said. "This won't."

Her room was similar to mine, a single lamp on the desk casting warm light across the wall, a chair pulled close to the window overlooking the dome's inner city. She'd been sitting here before the broadcast interrupted everything, 

She picked up a photograph from the desk and held it out to me.

I took it.

Old format, printed on physical stock the way people used to before everything went digital, the colors slightly faded at the edges from age and handling.

Three people standing outside a building I didn't recognize, somewhere on Earth judging by the sky behind them, real clouds, real unfiltered sunlight that no dome ever quite replicated correctly.

My parents…

Younger than I'd ever seen them in any photograph I'd grown up with, my mother's hair darker, my father standing straighter than the man I remembered, both of them smiling.

Between them stood a third person.

Tall. Well dressed. A younger face that I'd only ever seen older, but unmistakable once I found the shape of it beneath the years.

Sir Vaelthor.

I stood there holding the photograph while the voices from downstairs drifted up through the floor, Grandisfield and Garron beginning to build something together out of urgency and forty eight hours and two hundred thousand people who needed somewhere to go.

"Where did you find this?" I said.
"In the files Grandisfield gave me access to after you agreed to do the broadcast," Tasha said. "He's known who you are, but not who you truly are..."

I kept looking at the photograph.

My parents. Young and alive and standing next to the man that I had his watch everyone wanted so badly.

"Tasha," I said.
“Yes?”
I looked at her.
"Then everything," I said. "Men of Moon finding me,the watch, the missions. All of it."
“I was the one setting you up for it. I wanted you to be on our side after seeing the cruelty of Men of Moon for yourself.”
“What if I didn’t—”
“You saw it from the start. You were just afraid of the past. And I saw that in you.”

I looked back down at the photograph, my parents' faces young.

I put the photograph in my jacket pocket and glanced at her. 

“Tasha, after we rescue everyone in Hulon, I want you to tell me who I really am.”