Chapter 91 Let the colony know

Chapter 91 Let the colony know
The hostel in Aquilas ran eight rooms off a corridor that smelled like recycled air and old insulation. The room cost forty Lun a night, which Tasha wanted to refuse badly. However,  we took the room at the end.

One window. Two beds. A screen on the wall that hadn't worked in years judging by the dust on the frame. 

I sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the wall for a while. Tasha came out of the bathroom and stopped when she saw my face.

"What are you thinking?" she said.
"I want to make another recording."

She was quiet for a long moment.

"Da Vinci—"
"Not through Grandisfield. Not through LunarCast. Just me. My eye-ring. Whatever this wall looks like behind me."

She sat down on the other bed and looked at me with concern.

"The first broadcast put warrants on both of us," she said. "A second one, this time with the bloodline, doesn't just make us insurgents. It makes us the most hunted people in this system. Adrian. Daniel. Victoria. Every single person currently fighting each other looks up from whatever they're doing and points at us simultaneously."
"I know."
"Men of Moon has teams in every district. Rusk knows our general movements. We have limited ammunition, no safe house, and two beds in a room that costs forty Lun a night!"
"I know all of that."
"Then explain to me why we do this now?"

I looked at my hands.

"There was a moment," I said. "Ten years ago on the surface. When the machines came up out of the dust and I ran instead of staying..." I kept my eyes on my hands. "Everything I've done since traces back to that moment. Every mission I took with Men of Moon. Every order I followed without acting the right way. Every time I told Matt a version of the truth that wasn't the truth." I looked up at her. "All of it is just the same run dressed up differently. I did all that to protect my secret. This time, I don’t want to hide secrets if it means saving the Moon."

She said nothing.

"I know who I am now," I said. "And sitting in this room hiding it is just another version of running. The Moon has been waiting for a Vaelthor heir for decades and the heir has been carrying out Men of Moon arrests and pretending not to notice what the organization was doing to the people it was supposed to serve."
"If we send this recording—"
"They're already hunting us," I said. "The only difference between hiding and not hiding is whether we get caught standing up or on our knees."

The room held still around us.

Tasha looked at me for a long time, her hands resting on her knees, her expression moving through something I couldn't fully read until it settled into comfort.

"Make it good," she said.

I propped the eye-ring against the window frame and sat on the edge of the bed facing it, the plain wall behind me. Tasha sat off to the side where the camera wouldn't pick her up. I looked into the lens.

"My name is Liam Vaelthor," I said.

I didn't stop. Didn't rehearse. Just said it the way it plainly.

"My parents were killed by Daniel Halverson before I was old enough to walk. My grandfather placed me with a family who raised me without knowing who I really was. I grew up as Liam Calloway. I joined Men of Moon as Da Vinci. I carried out their operations for months because I wanted to hide the truth from my only friend."

I picked up the watch and held it toward the camera.

"This is the Vaelthor Watch. It carries a biological verification sequence tied to my bloodline that any colonial legal authority can confirm. I am not asking anyone to take my word for who I am. The watch exists precisely so that nobody has to."

I set it back down.

"The Moon was built by three families. The Grandisfields. The Caelrics. The Vaelthors. Two of those families were systematically murdered by the organization that has been running this colony's shadow government for decades. Men of Moon killed them because a verified founding bloodline represents a legal authority they cannot override, and cannot manufacture for themselves."

I looked directly into the lens.

"I am not a revolutionary. I am not a politician. I am not asking anyone to follow me or fight for me or believe in me. I am telling you the truth about who I am and who killed my parents and why the watch that everyone has been hunting for years has been sitting on the wrist of a Men of Moon operative the entire time."

A pause.

"The Moon belongs to the people living on it. That hasn't changed. But the people living on it deserve to know that the last Vaelthor heir is still alive. And that he is done running. Perhaps there is a chance to save our Moon.” I paused. “So depend on whom? We depend on the truth. And that’s why we won’t end in a Lunar tomb."

I reached over and stopped the recording.

Tasha took the file and pushed it through every open channel she could reach from her eye-ring without touching Men of Moon's monitoring infrastructure. Garron's broadcast network. Kellan's comm channels. Underground relay systems that had been built specifically for moving signal across the Moon without going through official lines. Grandisfield's frequency last.

We sat in the quiet room after that and waited. Eight minutes passed. Then Tasha's eye-ring started lighting up.

Not Men of Moon alerts. Not Rusk's frequency. Messages. Dozens of them, then more than dozens, coming in through every channel she'd used to push the broadcast out, bouncing back from people she'd never met in districts she hadn't visited in years.

She transferred the messages to my eye-ring so I could read them.

A woman in Med-Nochtia who had been at Garron's first rally months ago. A transit worker in Gladivea who had helped move people during the Hulon evacuation. A student in Aquilas who had watched the Breathless Dome footage and not slept properly since. An old man in the outer rings who said he remembered the Vaelthor name from before Men of Moon had it removed from public records.

Different words. Same meaning.

We're with you.

Tasha kept scrolling.

Then she stopped.

One message sat separate from the rest, no name attached, no identifying information, just a string of coordinates somewhere in Aquilas's lower district and three words beneath them.

Come find me.

I looked at it through her shared screen.

"Trace the signal," I said.

She was already doing it, her fingers moving, pulling apart the transmission layers one by one.

But then she stopped.

"What?" I said.

She opened the screen of her eye-ring toward mine so I could see the encryption signature wrapped around the base of the transmission, old coding architecture that sat underneath the message like a foundation nobody had thought to look beneath.

I recognized the pattern from the watch's own mechanism. The same sequence structure. The same family coding that Tasha had described as pre-Men of Moon. 

We looked at each other across the small room.

"Nobody else should have that encryption," I said.
"No," she said. "They shouldn't."

I looked at the coordinates on the screen. Somewhere in Aquilas's lower district. Twenty minutes from where we were sitting.

I picked up the watch from the bed and put it on.

"Let's go," I said.