Chapter 139: The Note

Astrid Vale

I searched through the bag of belongings one more time, though I already knew what I’d find. Nothing. The same scattered items I’d already pulled apart twice, none of them the small folded piece of paper I needed most.

"It’s not here," I said, more to myself than to Ivy.

"Maybe it fell out somewhere in the room," she offered, already checking beneath the bed on my behalf.

"I remember holding it," I said. "I remember pressing it against my chest when we were running. I don’t remember losing it, but it’s gone."

Ivy sat back on her heels, watching me with something gentle and sad in her expression. "I know how much it meant to you."

"I wanted to keep it forever," I admitted, my voice cracking slightly. "It was the last thing she ever gave me. And now I’ve lost even that."

The door opened, and Reed stepped inside, his eyes moving over the scattered belongings across my bed and the frustration clearly written across my face. "What happened?" he asked.

"I lost Liora’s note," I said. "It must have fallen somewhere during the escape. I’ve looked through everything twice."

Reed didn’t immediately try to smooth over what I was feeling, didn’t rush to tell me it would be okay or that it didn’t matter. He simply listened, letting the weight of it sit in the room for a moment before he spoke.

"You didn’t lose it," he said.

I looked up at him. "What?"

He reached into his jacket, into an inner pocket I hadn’t noticed before, and pulled out a small, carefully folded piece of paper, worn at the edges but intact. "I found it during the fight," he said. "I knew it mattered to you, so I kept it safe."

I stared at the paper in his hand, hardly daring to believe it was real. "You had it this whole time?"

"I didn’t want to give it to you until you were ready," he said. "You’ve had enough thrown at you the last few days."

I took it from him carefully, almost afraid it might disintegrate the second I touched it, my fingers trembling slightly as I unfolded the creased paper. Liora’s handwriting filled the small space, slightly uneven, clearly written in a hurry, but unmistakably hers.

I miss things I’ve never even seen. I wonder if the stars look the way the old drawings show them, or if they’re something else entirely, something better. I hope someday someone from the surface knows we existed down here. Not as a curse, or a warning, or a mistake. Just as people. I hope you get to see everything you’ve never told me about yet. And I hope, someday, someone remembers that Elaris was real.

I read it twice, my chest tightening with each pass through her words, simple and unguarded, exactly like she’d sounded the first time she’d asked me about the sky.

"She wasn’t asking me to save anyone," I said quietly. "She just wanted to be remembered."

Reed sat beside me on the bed, his presence steady and warm. "Then let’s make sure she is."

Something clicked into place in my mind, sudden and clear. "The bloodlines project," I said. "Our research already led us to the old Moonshade ruins. The sealed passage, the ancient inscriptions, the connection beneath the academy. We already had half of Elaris’s history without even realizing what we’d found."

Reed’s expression shifted, understanding settling in alongside mine. "We could tell their story," he said. "Not the dangerous details, not anything that puts anyone at risk. But the history. The truth of what’s actually down there, an entire civilization that vanished from the surface’s memory generations ago."

The door opened again before I could respond, Xander walking in with a tray balanced awkwardly in one hand, already complaining before he’d fully entered the room.

"You’ve been in here monopolizing her for twenty minutes," he said to Reed. "Some of us also want to—" He stopped, noticing the paper still held carefully in my hands. "What’s that?"

"Liora’s note," I said. "Reed had it the whole time."

Xander set the tray down and moved closer, reading over my shoulder without asking permission, his usual teasing expression softening the further he got through her words.

"She just wanted people to know she existed," I said. "That her people existed."

Xander’s jaw tightened slightly, something sincere replacing his earlier lightness. "Then we’ll make sure everyone knows," he said.

The three of us sat together for a while, ideas starting to form between us faster than I could fully track. We had maps from the old ruins. We had the ancient inscriptions Eliza had painstakingly reconstructed. We had the ancient records referencing the war, the sealed passage, the generations of history buried beneath Moonshade’s own grounds. We had, somehow, uncovered an entire lost civilization through nothing more than a school assignment none of us had taken seriously at the start of the semester.

"We could include the curse," Reed said, already thinking through the structure of it. "How it started, why it forced them underground, how it’s been affecting them for generations."

"And how they’ve survived," I added. "The farms, the markets, the entire society they built out of nothing. People need to understand these aren’t monsters. They’re people who inherited something they never chose."

"And Liora," Xander said quietly.

I nodded. "A section just for her. Not as some tragic victim we found down there. As a girl who wanted to become a doctor, who wanted to help her people, who spent her whole life dreaming about a sky she’d only ever seen in old drawings."

Something settled into place inside me as we kept talking, ideas building on top of each other, the weight I’d been carrying since waking up in that colorful, unfamiliar room finally shifting into something I could actually do something with. I couldn’t bring Liora back. I couldn’t undo what had happened to her, or take back the moment Roshan’s shot had torn through her instead of me.

But I could make sure her existence mattered to more people than the handful of us who’d stood beside her grave that afternoon.

Once Reed and Xander finally left to let me rest, I folded the note carefully along its original creases, running my thumb once over her handwriting before tucking it beneath my pillow, close enough that I could reach for it whenever I needed to.

Liora had wanted her people’s story told.

I intended to tell it.