Chapter 46 — The Ship That Never Looks Back

People Who Don't Dare to Look Straight

Ho Dac Liem sat in the small interrogation room, his hands on his knees, trying to keep them from shaking in front of the Guard officer sitting opposite, flipping through the pages of a thick file without saying anything for nearly a minute, a purposeful silence that made the tension in the room grow thicker with each second.

"Do you know why you were called here?" The officer asked, finally looking up at him.

"No, sir." Ho Dac Liem replied, his voice trying to stay steady. "I was only informed to participate in a routine personnel review related to Directive Twelve."

"That's right." The officer said, nodding, but his eyes never softened. "We are reviewing all curfew violation records over the past three weeks, comparing them with the checkpoint schedules. Your name appeared on the list of people on duty near the Old Garden area last week, right when the system recorded an unusual movement signal that did not match any officially assigned maintenance staff."

Ho Dac Liem felt cold sweat pouring down the back of his neck. He immediately remembered the evening when he accidentally passed by that area, later than the usual shift because he had to complete a valve inspection report, and caught a glimpse of two figures standing close together in the darkness near the entrance to the Old Garden - a girl wearing a Roots Week uniform, and a person wearing a navigator's uniform, a combination so strange that he still remembered it clearly a week later, although at that time he simply thought it was someone's private love affair, none of his business.

"I... I'm not sure I understand what you're asking, sir." He spoke, trying to buy time, his heart torn between his instinct to protect himself and a vague feeling that anything he said now could harm someone.

"I will explain more clearly." The officer said, his voice sharp. "We know you were in that area that night. Security cameras recorded you passing by exactly eleven minutes before the unusual signal appeared. My question is simple: did you see anything unusual?"

Ho Dac Liem thought of his family - his elderly mother waiting for her weekly water ration, her younger sister who had just passed Ky Dinh Floor last year, trying to maintain her position in the Maintenance Team so as not to be evaluated poorly in the upcoming review. He thought of himself, a clean record of six years of work, now hanging over a question he was not prepared to face. Fear, silent but intense, crept into his every thought, whispering that an honest answer, no matter how small, could be the fastest way to end this interrogation, allowing him to return to his normal life.

"I did see..." He began, his voice shaking, then stopped, fighting back the urge to finish. He remembered Khe Lam's face at the distribution station the day before, the way she gave her piece of dry cake to a strange child, the way she looked at him with unfeigned kindness even though they had only just met. He didn't know what she was doing, didn't know why she was meeting a navigator student in the dark, but part of him didn't want to be the one to get her into trouble.

But the officer still looked at him, waiting, patient in the way of someone who is used to waiting for moments of weakness like these.

"I saw two people standing near the entrance to the Old Garden." Ho Dac Liem spoke last, each word seemed to be pulled out of him reluctantly. "One person was wearing a To Tuan Re uniform, the other was wearing a navigator student uniform. I couldn't see their faces clearly, it was dark, so I didn't stop to observe for long because I thought it was someone else's private matter."

"Do you recognize the team insignia of the person wearing the Root Layer uniform?" The officer asked immediately, not showing any emotion at the information he had just received, but his hand began to take notes faster.

"I... I think it's the Roots Patriarch, based on the way the badge is sewn on the shoulder of the shirt." He replied, his voice now almost a whisper, a feeling of guilt rising in his heart as soon as the words left his mouth, unable to take them back anymore.

The officer nodded and closed the file, a gesture that showed he had what he needed. "Thank you for your cooperation. The interrogation ends here. You can return to your normal shift."

Ho Dac Liem left the interrogation room, walking in the hallway with a heavy feeling clinging to every step, not the relief he expected after the interrogation ended, but a new, sharp and persistent torment. He didn't know what consequences he had just caused, he only knew that he had said something, no matter how little, no specific name, that could have become an important piece to a much larger picture than he could have imagined.

That night, he couldn't sleep, lying on the bed in the small apartment, listening to his mother's steady breathing in the next room, wondering if Khe Lam — he had guessed, though not completely certain, that she was the person he saw that night, based on several recent encounters at the distribution station — was in danger because of what he had just said. He thought of the kind way she had treated the young mother of a sick child, of the small smile she had given him when they had briefly chatted by the checkpoint, and a deep feeling of shame rose in him, mixed with a fear he could not yet fully name.

He thought about finding a way to tell her, to warn her that something had happened, but then hesitated, afraid that any action he took next might make things worse, making himself a more obvious suspect instead of an unwitting witness. He lay there in the darkness, torn between the cowardice he had just shown and a desire to correct it, not knowing that hesitation, although coming from a heart without malice, had become part of the machine that was slowly tightening around the two people he had never really known.

Not far away, in his private office, Than Bao Nghiem reread the report he had just received, placing it next to the three files he had kept private for many weeks — Do Khe Lam's file, the file about the night of the incident at the Founding Archives, the file about Do Viet Khiem's death. Now, a new piece of the puzzle had appeared, a piece that confirmed what he had long suspected but never had concrete evidence for: that Root Layer engineer was still continuing to meet someone from the navigator class, secretly, outside curfew hours, in a remote area rarely visited.

He sat quietly for a long time, looking at the four files in front of him, feeling more clearly than ever that the moment he had to decide — whether to report to Chuong Khac Dinh according to the correct procedure, or continue to keep quiet to find out more for himself — was coming much closer than he had ever been mentally prepared to face.

He opened a map of the Old Garden area on his desk screen, marked the entrance location where Ho Dac Liem described, and then compared it with the Tuan Re Group's shift assignment schedule for the last three weeks. He was in no hurry to send men to surround the area at once—twenty years of experience had taught him that a hasty raid would often only make the prey more wary and disappear deeper into the darkness, while a patient observation, placing a few extra unfixed eyes at the most likely hours, would yield far more certain results. He ordered an increased irregular patrol, not on a fixed schedule, passing through the Old Garden area at random hours over the next week—enough not to alert them, but thick enough not to miss them if they returned.

On the other side of the ship, in her small apartment, Khe Lam couldn't sleep, even though she had no specific reason to explain the restlessness curling up in her heart. It was a vague premonition, the kind she had learned to trust through years of careful living—a slight change in the familiar rhythm of the Root that she couldn't pinpoint, only felt it like a cold breeze blowing under a closed door. She remembered Ho Dac Liem's face at the distribution station, the uneasiness in his eyes when talking about his newly assigned watch job, and wondered, not for the first time, whether she was missing a certain danger that was silently closing in around her.