Chapter 15 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

A Name That Should Not Be Called

Two days after the meeting in classroom seven, Khe Lam received a small piece of paper folded into four, cleverly tucked into the slot of her toolbox at the maintenance station — no one on the team realized who had put it there, and when she opened it, she saw only a neat handwritten note: "Request sent back, waiting for a response from the archivist in charge. Nothing unusual happened. — B.V." She read the words over and over again before tearing up the piece of paper, stuffing it into her pocket to later drop it into the recycling grinder—the way of exchanging information they had agreed upon the night before was rudimentary but harder to trace than any form of electronic communication that could be monitored.

That evening, Khe Lam returned to Day Deck, carrying not only the extra copper wire as usual but also the determination that had accumulated over the past two days. She could no longer endure the roundabout questioning—every hour that passed without more information was an hour when she felt like she was standing in an unknown void, not knowing what to believe.

"Lam Chu." Khe Lam said the name directly, no longer beating around the bush like last time, placing the leftover copper wire on Bui Dac Sinh's workbench like a familiar ritual that had been repeated for many years.

The old man froze, his hand holding the welding torch trembled a beat before he could regain control. He put down the tool slowly, as if trying to buy time to think about how to react, then looked up at her, his eyes were no longer the vague wariness of the previous times, but a naked, undisguised fear.

"Where did you find that name?" He asked, his voice hoarse.

"I read it in the original file, at the Primeval Core." Khe Lam replied, deciding not to hide it anymore — if Bui Dac Sinh really knew something, she needed him to trust her enough to say it, and that required her to show him she knew enough to be worth hearing the rest. "I know that was the ship's original destination, before being changed to Tinh Vong in the forty-first year of its voyage. I know there's a restricted-classified file 041-H related to that decision. I just don't know who made the decision, and why no one has ever mentioned it again two hundred years later."

Bui Dac Sinh sat quietly for a long time, his old hands clasped together on the table, his eyes looking down at the unfinished components as if looking for courage somewhere among that pile of scrap metal.

"Do you know why he lives here, on Day Deck, instead of the official residential area?" He asked, not directly answering her question.

"I never asked you." Khe Lam replied.

"Because nineteen years ago, there was an incident." He spoke slowly, each word seemed to be pulled out of a deep place that he had tried to bury for nearly two decades. "People call it many different names, depending on who you ask. Officially, it has no name, just a brief note in an internal security file about a system sabotage that was prevented in time. But survivors from that time, people like you, still call it the Night of the Broken Roots."

Khe Lam felt a chill run down her spine when she heard that name, even though she had never heard it before, wasn't in any textbooks, wasn't in any stories her grandmother had ever told.

"What happened?" She asked, her voice quiet.

"A group of Root Plane engineers, working near the Protoplasmic Core, discovered exactly what I just discovered." Bui Dac Sinh said, his eyes still not leaving the pile of components on the table. "They tried to announce it to the entire ship, over the intercom, believing that everyone had a right to know the truth about where they were being taken. The Council responded faster and stronger than anyone could have imagined. In one night, it was all over. The leaders were captured, some officially recorded as having died during the crackdown. Others — no one is sure of their true fate."

"Do you know who they are? Their names?" Khe Lam asked, a strange urge made her unable to help but ask, even though she didn't completely understand why this question was so important to her.

Bui Dac Sinh looked at her for a long moment, and in his eyes, Khe Lam glimpsed something she couldn't name — not exactly hesitation, but like the pain of a person standing in front of a door that he knew he wasn't ready to open, even though the person standing in front of him was begging.

"You know a few names." He spoke finally, his voice heavy. "But little girl, today is not the right time. Not because I don't believe you. It's because there are truths that, once spoken, cannot be taken back, and I need to make sure you're ready for them, because it won't just change what you know about this ship. It will change what you know about yourself."

That sentence made Khe Lam's blood run cold, even though she didn't understand why. "What do you mean?"

"I'm sorry." Bui Dac Sinh shook his head and stood up, a decisive gesture showing that the conversation had ended according to his wishes, even though it had not ended according to her wishes. "Let me think about it some more. And in the meantime, be extra careful. If you've tracked down the name Lam Chu and the case code 041-H, you're going faster than I thought — faster than is safe."

"You just said the Night of the Broken Roots happened because the Council discovered they were trying to reveal the truth." Khe Lam said, standing up to follow, refusing to let the story stop so easily. "How did the Council know to stop it in time? Who told them?"

Bui Dac Sinh stopped at the compartment door, his back turned to her, his shoulders slumped as if carrying an invisible weight that had been pressing on him for nineteen years. "That," he said, without turning back, "is the question to which I myself have never found a reassuring answer."

He left into the darkness behind, leaving Khe Lam standing alone in the middle of the chaotic mechanic's compartment, his heart still beating fast from all that had just been revealed. Night of Broken Roots. Nineteen years ago — she did a quick calculation in her head, that year she was only one year old, the same year her mother disappeared in "an accident on the Root Level, it was very chaotic back then" according to the only vague account her grandmother had ever told her.

A coincidence of timing, she told herself, trying to brush aside a premonition that was beginning to form in her heart, a premonition she did not yet have the courage to face directly. But on the way home, under the weak yellow light of the old corridors leading off the Day Deck, Bui Dac Sinh's words kept echoing in her head — it won't just change what you know about this ship, it will change what you know about yourself — and for the first time, Khe Lam wondered if the secret she was looking for was just the secret of the ship, or also the secret of her own family, hidden right under the three bowls on the dining table. every night.

She didn't go home right away. Instead, she took a shortcut leading to a public communication station near a residential area, where there was an old physical mailbox that few people used in an era where everything had gone digital — precisely because of its obsolescence, Bach Van proposed it as a secondary communication channel, more secure than any electronic message. She scribbled a piece of paper, wrapping what Bui Dac Sinh had just revealed into the most concise paragraph possible: "There is a name for that event — Night of Broken Roots, nineteen years ago. A group of Root Layer engineers tried to announce the truth, but were suppressed. The informant is unknown. Need to meet again soon."

She folded the piece of paper, stuffed it into drawer number thirteen of the old mailbox — a number they had chosen at random the night before, with no special meaning other than being easy for both of them to remember — and then left without looking back, following the rules they had set for themselves to minimize the risk of others noticing that the two of them frequented the same places.

That night, lying in bed, Khe Lam kept thinking about the last question she asked Bui Dac Sinh — how did the Council know to stop it in time — and his vague answer. If there had been an informer nineteen years ago, causing a whole group of people to pay with their lives or freedom, then who can be sure that, right now, there is not another pair of eyes silently following her and Bach Van's footsteps, waiting for the right time to report to above.

She woke up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, so she quietly went to the living room to pour herself a glass of water. The faint night light shines on the dining table, where three bowls are still neatly stored in the cupboard waiting for breakfast the next morning. She stood there for a long moment, looking at that old cupboard as if she were seeing it for the first time in her life, wondering how much of her family story, what she had always considered an unquestioned truth, was actually just a carefully crafted version to protect her from something much greater than the ordinary pain of loss.