The heavy oak door of the bathhouse vibrates under the sudden impact of a fist.
Knock. Knock. Knock.
Inside the humid enclosure, the sound echoes sharply against the wet river-rock walls, cutting through the dense, white clouds of steam rising off the geothermal pool. The water ripples, scattering reflections of the lanterns hanging from the timber rafters.
Comtois tilts his broad chest up out of the water, a grin stretching across his face as he glances at the three boys submerged beside him. He raises his chin toward the entrance, his voice booming over the splash of water. "Come in!"
The heavy wooden door creaks open on iron hinges, allowing a draft of cooler morning air to slice into the thick humidity. A high-collared tunic frames a lean, weathered figure stepping across the threshold. Lourdes Renaud stops mid-stride. Her dark brown eyes, shadowed beneath a sharp brow, scan the fog-laden room. The mist hangs heavy, blurring the far side of the stone tub. Silence settles, save for the rhythmic drip of condensation falling from the roof beams.
Without warning, the water erupts.
Four figures break the surface simultaneously, spraying droplets across the stone edge as their upper bodies surge into view.
"Boo!"
The chorus rings out in a jagged, unharmonized shout. Comtois lets out a barking laugh, while Hano and Onaga splash the surface. Aldo wipes water from his eyes, a brief smirk breaking his usual stoic mask.
Lourdes does not flinch. Her feet remain planted on the wet flagstones. Her dark eyes narrow, shifting slowly from Comtois to Onaga, then settling on Aldo. The faint line of a scar across her jawline tightens as her lips flatten into a hard, unimpressed line.
"You too?" her raspy voice cuts through the echoes, thin and cold as a winter blade.
Aldo clears his throat, brushing a lock of wet dark hair away from his forehead. He rests his elbows on the polished stone ledge of the pool, his fair skin flushed red from the heat. "I'm happy too."
Lourdes lets out a short, quiet exhale through her nose, ignoring the pool entirely as she steps deeper into the enclosure. Her boots leave damp prints on the grey stone. She reaches into her leather vest, pulling out a folded piece of coarse, yellowed paper, its edges frayed and stained with dried pulp.
"We need to go over the revolutionary plan," she speaks directly, her tone stripped of any pleasantry. She unfolds the document with calloused fingers, her thick, dirt-stained nails catching on the rough fibers. "Specifically the manifesto and the strategic rollout up to the year 1301. We can't afford delay."
Onaga tilts his head, resting his chin near the water's surface as he looks up at her. His delicate face softens with genuine curiosity. "What have you and your people been doing since you got here, Renaud?"
Lourdes folds her arms over her chest, holding the paper loosely against her side. Her gaze flickers toward the small, barred window overlooking the northern quadrant of Farmland.
"Helping the men care for the animals," she recites flatly, her throat producing a dry, scratchy sound with every sentence. "Planting young trees. Cutting timber. Processing logs into planks, and keeping records of the yield." She pauses, her eyes shifting back to Aldo, dark and questioning. "You have a pretty detailed record-keeping system here, don't you? It must have been made by Lei."
Aldo pulls himself slightly higher out of the water, his arms folding across the edge of the tub. "I made it when the 204th company was about to arrive at the community!"
Hano splashes a handful of water toward the drain, nodding rapidly. "Yes, yes, Aldo made it. I was with that community at the time."
Lourdes stares down at them, her brow furrowing into deep, skeptical lines. Her cheekbones, sharp and prominent under her pale, hollowed skin, harden. "I don't believe a bunch of kids know how to make such an elaborate ledger." She tilts her head slightly, her gaze locking onto Aldo's unblinking eyes. "But you probably do..."
She takes a half-step closer, the leather of her worn boots creaking under her weight. The casual atmosphere in the bathhouse evaporates, replaced by the weight of her presence. Though thin, her posture retains a taut, wire-string tension—the lingering instinct of a guerrilla commander accustomed to sudden violence.
"Our goal is simple," Lourdes says, her raspy voice rising slightly in volume, carrying a rigid, unyielding edge. "We overthrow the Earthling Slavery regime of the Mikhland Federation. We pull it out by its roots. Completely."
Aldo doesn't move. He stares back at her through the veil of steam, his expression dropping into a flat, motionless wall.
"Only Heilop," Aldo says quietly.
Lourdes stops. Her breath hitches in her throat, a faint, ragged sound. Her fingers tighten around the manifesto, crushing the rough paper. Her eyebrows draw together in sharp disbelief as she leans forward.
"Repeat that," she whispers, her voice dropping an octave, vibrating with an unspoken threat. "Palantine of Heilop?"
"Only Heilop," Aldo repeats, his voice entirely devoid of emotion.
Lourdes's face contorts, her upper lip pulling back slightly over her teeth. Redness flares along her neck, creeping up toward the jagged, pale brand hidden beneath her collar. She thrusts her arm out, pointing a trembling, calloused finger at Aldo's face.
"Our alliance ends here," she snaps, turning her heels sharply against the stone floor. She strides toward the heavy exit door, her hand reaching out to slam against the oak frame.
Onaga surges forward in the water, his hands lifting to splash the surface. "Renaud, wait! Please, don't!" he calls out, his soft face twisted in panic. "We can negotiate! Both sides can make concessions to reach an agreement!"
Lourdes's hand rests flat against the rough wood of the door. She does not turn around, but her shoulders remain rigid, raised high in a defensive, angular posture.
Aldo doesn't rise from the water. He simply speaks to the back of her head, his voice steady, ringing clearly against the stone chamber.
"Mikhland is roughly the size of North America, Renaud. Maybe even larger." Aldo tracks her posture, noting the subtle twitch in her jaw. "It has 40 Member States and 120 Non-member States that directly answer to the Federal Parliament. Palantine of Heilop is just one part of those 40 Member States. Do you honestly think it's easier to abolish slavery in Heilop first, or all of Mikhland at once?"
Lourdes turns her head slowly. Her eyes are wide, filled with a dark, blazing anger that glares straight into Aldo's chest.
"So you're going to stand by and watch our people be exploited in the rest of Mikhland?" she spits, her chest heaving as she grips the door handle. "While we just stand safely in Heilop? You'd leave them in the dark?"
Hano groans loudly, throwing his head back so his wet hair slaps against the stone rim behind him. He stares up at the damp wood beams of the ceiling, throwing his hands into the warm air.
"Come on!" Hano whines, rolling his shoulders in frustration. "Renaud-oneechan, slavery on Earth wasn't abolished en masse either! It's like you hate your termite-infested wooden house, so you burn it down, but then you need a new one. Burning takes a few hours. Cleaning up the ashes takes many hours. And building a brick house takes several more months!"
Comtois rests his chin in his large palm, his brow furrowed as he processes Hano's words, nodding slowly to himself. "You mean... tearing down is easy. Building is hard."
Aldo leans forward, the water cascading off his chest back into the pool with a steady, rhythmic splash. He looks directly into Lourdes's glaring eyes, his tone absolute.
"Hano's point is that the abolition of Earthling slavery en masse creates massive political resistance," Aldo explains, his words calculated and cold. "It disrupts stability completely and could easily lead to warlordism and total anarchy. At the same time, the abolition of Earthling slavery requires a new economic engine. It takes time to form the political and economic institutions needed to support millions of freed people without everything collapsing into famine."
Silence falls over the bathhouse once more.
Outside, a faint breeze rustles through the thick pine canopy of the surrounding Central Mikhland forest. A solitary raven calls out from a high branch, its harsh croak filtering through the small bathhouse window before dying away.
Lourdes remains standing by the door, her hand frozen on the dark iron latch. She does not open it. She does not turn around to face them fully. She stands motionless in the rising fog, staring at the rough grain of the wood, her eyes wide, unblinking, and fixed on nothing.
He's lying. He has to be lying.
The thought strikes her mind like a cold iron spike, sharp and sudden, forcing a silent, sharp intake of air into her lungs. Her fingers twitch against the door handle, her fingernails scraping softly over the rust-pitted metal.
It's a retreat. A coward's compromise. He's a fourteen-year-old boy who has never held a dying comrade in a cold dirt trench while the overseers' dogs barked in the dark. He hasn't felt the weight of iron around his ankles for months on end until the skin turns black and rots away. He doesn't know what it means to look into the eyes of a child born in a work camp and tell them there is no light coming.
Her jaw tightens, the muscles working furiously beneath her pale skin.
We fought for two years in the borderlands. We burned the granaries. We tore down the supply lines of the Federation brick by brick. We were La Meute. The Pack. We swore an oath under the rain in Terre that not a single one of us would remain in chains while another drew breath. If we leave them... if we leave the children in the mines of the deep south, if we leave the field hands in the eastern territories to be worked until their bones crack... then what was it all for? What were the lashes on my back for? What were the interrogations for?
Her hand begins to tremble slightly against the heavy door. The scar on the back of her neck—the pale, jagged mark of the Federation's ownership—burns with a phantom heat, radiating down her spine.
The turncoats... Julien... Marc... they surrendered because they believed the Federation was too big to fight. They believed the same lie this boy is telling now. 'Be reasonable. Take what you can get. Save yourselves.' They took their gold and their citizenship papers, and they gave up our location. They watched us get dragged into the subterranean pits while they walked free in the sun.
She grits her teeth, a faint, grinding sound escaping her mouth. Her breathing grows shallow, ragged, smelling faintly of the old mine dust that still lingers in the deepest passages of her lungs.
If I accept this... if I accept 'just Heilop'... I am no better than them. I am selling out the rest of Earth to buy a quiet farm in the valley. I am becoming Julien. I am becoming Marc.
She raises her left hand, staring down at her palm. The skin is yellowed, scarred, and mapped with thick, dark calluses. Her nails are short, split, permanently stained with the black mineral dust of the Deep-Level Mines. No matter how much soap Ryong had given her over the past three days, the coal dust remained embedded in the deep lines of her skin, a permanent ledger of her degradation.
Look at your hands, Lourdes, a darker, quieter voice whispers from the back of her mind, heavy and exhausted. Look at what is left of you.
Her eyes drop to her arms. Lean, wire-muscle, stripped of all fat by years of starvation rations. She remembers Normandy. She remembers the smell of fresh baguettes cooling on her father's wooden counters, the sound of her mother calling her name across the gravel driveway, the weight of a handball in her grip, the cold coastal rain on her cheeks. That girl was dead. She had died three years ago in a mud-drenched trench outside Terre, replaced by a ghost that lived on scrap metal and stolen bread.
You can't burn down Mikhland, the quiet voice insists, cold and merciless. You tried. You had a hundred fighters, stolen muskets, and the burning rage of righteousness, and they crushed you in a single night with two squads of armored infantry and a handful of coin paid to a traitor. You couldn't even save your own cell. You couldn't save the boys who hid in the cellar with you. You spent three years in the dark extracting ore until your back bent and your hair turned gray before your twenty-fifth year.
She squeezes her eyes shut, her head dropping slightly forward until her forehead almost touches the rough oak of the door. The steam from the pool clings to her face, warm and suffocating.
North America. Aldo said it's the size of North America.
The sheer scale of the words echoes in her head, heavy and vast, crushing her under its weight. She had read maps in her father's study long ago. She remembered the vast expanses of green and brown stretching across globe globes—endless, incomprehensible landmasses containing millions of lives, thousands of garrisons, fortified cities, ancient noble houses, professional standing armies. Mikhland wasn't just an estate or a province. It was an empire built on the back of a world it dragged through magic portals to bleed dry.
How do you fight a continent with broken hands?
A terrifying, hollow ache opens up in her chest. It is a feeling worse than the whip, worse than the cold iron shackles in the capital dungeons. It is the sudden, dizzying realization that her hatred, as vast and burning as it felt in the dark of the mines, was merely a drop of water thrown against a furnace. The grand, romantic revolution—the image of a unified army of freed Earthlings marching on the Federal Parliament with flags flying—was a fantasy. A fever dream born of a high school girl's history textbooks, shattered by the cold reality of logistics, supply chains, and military force.
If we burn it all... if we try to tear down the entire apparatus at once... who feeds the millions of slaves who don't know how to wield a sword? Who protects them when the local lords turn their heavy cavalry loose on the roads? They will starve. They will be slaughtered in the ditches before the month is out. Warlords... anarchy... Hano was right. It would be a slaughterhouse.
She opens her eyes. The dark grain of the wood door comes back into focus, inches from her face.
So what do I do? her mind cries out in a silent, desperate scream. Do I surrender? Do I let the Federation win? Do I tell the ghosts of La Meute that their deaths were just an acceptable loss in a regional political calculation?
Her fingers loosen slightly on the iron latch. Her chest rises and falls in long, shuddering breaths.
No. Not surrender.
She grips the frame again, harder this time, her knuckles turning white.
A foothold. Heilop isn't the end. It's a base. If we secure Heilop, if we build a place where Earthlings cannot be bought or sold, where we have arms, grain, and walls... then we have a sanctuary. We have a fortress from which to reach out. It isn't giving up on the rest. It's building the ground under our feet so we don't drown while trying to save them.
The realization leaves a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth. It feels like a betrayal of her younger self, a surrender of the absolute, unyielding morality she had wrapped around herself like armor for eight long years. But beneath the bitterness, a cold, sharp clarity begins to settle over her mind. The revolutionary had to die so the survivor could build.
Lourdes slowly drops her hand from the door. She turns her body around, inch by inch, until her back is resting flat against the thick oak paneling. Her eyes sweep across the pool, taking in the four teenage boys sitting in the hot water.
Aldo's face remains calm, his dark eyes waiting patiently, offering neither triumph nor sympathy. He looks like a stone sitting in the stream, unaffected by the current raging around him.
Lourdes lets out a low, scratchy breath, her posture stiffening as she adopts a formal, guarded stance.
"Come to our tenet," she says, her voice hard, testing the weight of every word. "I'll go first. I want Abolition and Civil Rights."
She takes a step away from the door, pointing a slender, scarred finger toward the ceiling to enumerate her terms.
"Including Right to vote: Every eligible citizen can cast a ballot in elections," she states firmly, her eyes locked onto Aldo. "Equal protection: The government must treat all people fairly without bias. Freedom from discrimination: Laws ban unfair treatment based on race, gender, religion, age, or disability. Fair legal process: Accused individuals get a fair trial and due process in courts. Access to public services: Everyone can use public education, transport, and spaces."
She lowers her hand, her gaze sweeping over the rest of the boys. "And you guys? What tenet do you have?"
Comtois puff out his chest, water swirling around his massive torso as he sits up straight with a serious expression. "Socialism."
Before the word can fully echo off the stone walls, Hano reaches across from his spot in the pool and slaps Comtois hard on the back of his bare head.
"SILENCE!" Hano growls, rubbing his stinging hand while glaring at Comtois. "LET'S DISCUSS FIRST!"
Onaga, sitting quietly between them, clears his throat softly. He looks up at Lourdes with a gentle, polite expression, though his eyes remain firm.
"Renaud, please go outside so we can get up, get dressed, and discuss," Onaga speaks quietly, pointing toward the door. "We haven't been able to leave the Onsen while you're here."
Lourdes clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth with an audible thwack. She casts one last sharp look over the four submerged teenagers, turns on her heel, and steps out into the hallway, slamming the heavy wooden door shut behind her.
Inside the bathhouse, the four boys quickly scramble out of the water. They dry off with coarse linen towels, the sound of rubbing cloth mixing with their rapid, heavy breathing. They pull on their dry tunics, trousers, and leather boots, moving swiftly up the wooden staircase leading to the administrative living quarters above the bathhouse.
Comtois fastens his belt buckle, looking over his shoulder at Hano as they climb the stairs. "I joked," Comtois grunts, a slight smirk playing on his wide face. "I want Laissez-faire."
Onaga walking behind Aldo, adjusts his ledger bag over his shoulder. He looks at Aldo's quiet, reflective face.
"Let's write down our tenets and present them to you, Renaud," Onaga says softly to the empty air ahead, framing the strategy.
Aldo lets out a long, heavy sigh, his shoulders dropping as he reaches the top of the stairs. He reaches into his pocket, pulling out a small brass key. "Just give her whatever you can find."
Onaga stops, reaching out to catch Aldo by the sleeve of his coat. His voice is unusually stern, though kept to a quiet whisper so it doesn't carry down the stairwell.
"We can't sell her the captain's Pragmatism," Onaga says, his eyes narrowing slightly as he points toward the wooden locker sitting in the corner of Aldo's private study. "Put it in your locker, please."