Chapter 45 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

The Gap Between Shifts

The small maintenance door leading into an abandoned engineering alcove between the Root Level and the Season Level creaked open as Khe Lam turned the wrench she had modified from a common work tool, enough to fool the old mechanical lock without leaving any trace on the electronic access recording system. This was the new meeting place she and Bach Van were forced to find, after the old supply compartment became too risky under the eyes of the new checkpoints springing up throughout the Root Layer.

"Is this place safer?" Bach Van asked, following her through the narrow space, looking around the cramped cavity filled with old pipes and control panels that had stopped working decades ago.

"Safer, but not as comfortable." Khe Lam replied, sitting down on a makeshift board next to a large water pipe, the gentle warmth emanating from it was the only source of heating in this small space. "This is a dead spot in the surveillance system — the nearest security camera is thirty meters away from here, and its angle cannot cover the entire hallway leading here. I discovered it many years ago, when I was an apprentice, when I was avoiding an exam I didn't want to take."

Bach Van laughed lightly, a rare laugh amid consecutive stressful days. "You always have a list of places to hide, right?"

"People learn to find spaces when they grow up in a world that doesn't leave much room for privacy." She replied, not really a complaint, just a fact she had long accepted.

She listened as Bach Van recounted in more detail the meeting between his father and the Commissioner, about the two words Lam Chu being spoken publicly for the first time in Kieu Trong Nghiem's work history, about the painful confession that even a Head of the Department of Instruction was only handed down a fearful command with no clear origin.

"That changed the way I looked at this whole system." Khe Lam said, after he finished telling. "I used to think the Council was a unified whole, knowing everything, deciding everything. But if even your father, a man in such a high position, was just following a passed-down fear without understanding the root, then how many others in that system are also just following inertia, not really knowing what they are protecting?"

"Perhaps only a very few people really know the whole truth." Bach Van said, nodding in agreement with her thoughts. "Chuong Khac Dinh was certainly one of them. Perhaps a few of the highest-ranking Commissioners. But most of the rest of the apparatus—my father, the instructors, maybe even many of the Guard officers—were just operating within the orders and boundaries they were taught to adhere to, without knowing the real reasons behind them."

"That both makes me feel more relieved and makes me more scared." Khe Lam said, squeezing his hand tightly. "Relieved because it means it's not a giant system that is deliberately working against us, just a small group at the top. But more scary, because that small group holds all the power to control that entire giant system to do what they want, without needing to explain, without any of them really understanding why."

They sat quietly for a moment, listening to the sound of water flowing in the pipe next to them, a sound familiar to Khe Lam from many years of work but now with a different meaning - that water, endlessly recycled for the past two hundred and forty-seven years, has gone through countless generations, bathing the hands of Doan Vinh Khai and Vu Thua Nguyen, of Dinh Khac Bat and Chuong Khac Dinh, all drinking from the same closed water source that never stops circulating, like secrets. The secret of this ship also circulates through each generation, never truly disappearing, only changing the shape of its bearer.

"We need to access code 228-R." Khe Lam said, breaking the silence. "The student library and the official copy application are both closed to us. Is there any other way?"

Bach Van thought for a moment, then slowly shook her head. "I can't think of a way that isn't risky. Every legal path leads to leaving traces, and every illegal path risks a repeat of what happened in the Founding Archives last time."

"So maybe we need a completely different approach." Khe Lam said, a new idea began to form in her mind. "Not through official records, but through people who remember. Mr. Sinh told me most of what he saw with his own eyes that night. But he mentioned, once, that he was not the only person who survived that night and still kept his memories. There were others, ordinary workers who were held overnight and then released, who may still be alive, still remember small details that he did not know."

"Do you think you can find them?" Bach Van asked.

"I'm not sure, but it's worth a try." She replied. "Nineteen years is not too long for all of them to be gone. If I can find even one or two of the thirty held back that night, perhaps they know something about what happened to the group that was escorted separately—my mother, Dinh Khac Bat, and the others."

Bach Van nodded, although his eyes were still full of worry. "Just be careful. If Than Bao Nghiem is monitoring every move related to your family, your sudden search for old witnesses of the Night of Broken Roots may be the clearest sign you can give."

"I know." She replied. "But I also think a lot about what Bui Dac Sinh once said — that people who live a long time at the edge of this system learn how to move without leaving a trace, because they have to learn it to survive. He didn't go ask anyone directly by name, he just sat in places where old people gathered, repeated a few old stories as a way to suggest, and then waited to see who would react. That's how a person with no power finds the truth in a world where every direct question is recorded. again."

"A slow method." Bach Van commented.

"Slow, but much safer than rummaging through official records again." she said. "And I think, after all that Directive Twelve is doing out there, we have no choice but to accept that slowness, even though each passing day carries its own weight."

She looked down at her hands, old calluses from years of holding wrenches and welding tools, then at Bach Van's hands, much softer, more used to simulated panels and screens than rough metal. Those two different pairs of hands, she thought, were now holding a part of the same secret, an image she never dared to imagine the day she first copied the Lam Chu data in the Primordial Core, trembling with fear, not knowing that it would lead her here, to a man at the Dome Layer who was willing to risk his entire family just to accompany her on this path.

"I won't ask directly." she said. "I'll let Mr. Sinh help, he knows how to approach old people without attracting attention, the way people who have lived on the edge of this system long enough know how to move without leaving a trace."

Their conversation was interrupted by a small noise from the hallway outside—footsteps, slow, unhurried, but close enough that they both froze in a tense moment. Khe Lam signaled Bach Van to be quiet, put his ear to the metal door, and listen.

The footsteps stopped, then continued moving, fading away, just another maintenance worker passing by on a normal shift, nothing unusual. But that tense moment reminded them both, more clearly than any words, of how fragile everything they were building in the dark was — every encounter now brought with it a new layer of anxiety, an ever-looming possibility of discovery, no matter how careful they were.

"We can't continue like this forever." Bach Van said, his voice whispering, when his footsteps were far away. "Hide, find gaps, hope no one sees. Sooner or later there will come a time when we're not lucky enough."

"I know." Khe Lam replied, her voice also soft. "But I don't see any other path right now, other than continuing to be as cautious as possible, until we have enough to bring it to light, in a way we can control, rather than letting it be discovered in a way we can't control."

They left the engineering niche in different directions as usual, but this time, as Khe Lam walked in the darkness of the nearly empty hallway under the new curfew, she felt more clearly than ever the feeling of being in a race against time — not just with Than Bao Nghiem, not just with the Council, but with the very fragility of the gaps they were relying on to survive, gaps that could close at any moment without warning.