Page 102 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

ANITA

The transmitter wakes again after Sira is gone, and the sound of it is worse than gunfire.

It lies on the floor between us like an insect pretending to be dead, a flat black disc no wider than my palm, half-melted along one edge from the heat of Brakk’s failed attempt to smash it before it activated. Silver static crawls over its surface in thin nervous lines. The corridor around us still smells of plasma burns, fractured stone, and the bitter chemical residue of the Choir’s breach charge. Smoke hangs low against the floor because gravity has apparently decided it has opinions about grief, and every breath I take scrapes the back of my throat.

Sira is gone.

The thought has edges.

It keeps cutting me from the inside, clean and quiet and relentless. One second she was beside us, pale and calm despite the madness, her hand touching the wall while she tried to understand a system that could swallow governments whole. Then black armor came through the stone, and a restraint collar flashed around her throat, and the wall sealed behind her like it had never been a doorway at all.

I stare at the place where the wall closed.

There is no seam now. No scratch. No scorch mark. The corridor has erased the wound with obscene neatness.

Brakk stands near it with his fusion cutter hanging from one hand. Blood runs down the side of his face from a cut above his ear, matting his fur in a dark stripe, but he does not seem to feel it. His broad chest rises and falls too quickly. Every few seconds, he lifts the cutter as if he can threaten the wall into admitting what it took.

Ghar is checking his weapon beside me, but his attention is not on the charge meter. It is on me.

I can feel it without looking.

That irritates me because being noticed right now feels too close to being held together, and I am not interested in discovering how little pressure it will take to make me fall apart.

“We should move,” Ghar says quietly.

“Not yet.”

“Anita.”

“Do not use that voice on me.”

He glances toward the sealed wall. “The Choir knows our position.”

“They know it because they just stole Sira through a magic murder door,” Brakk snaps, turning on us with raw fury in his eyes. “So unless your plan involves politely jogging after them through solid rock, maybe give the woman ten damn seconds.”

Ghar’s expression shifts, not into anger, but recognition. Brakk is grieving too. We all are. The problem with surviving disaster in a group is that nobody gets to have a private breakdown; every piece of pain has to negotiate for space with everyone else’s.

The transmitter clicks again.

The sound is soft.

It freezes all three of us.

A column of faint light rises from the disc, thin and gray at first, then sharpening into the outline of a figure. The image is unstable, distorted by ruin interference, but the presence behind it fills the corridor with immediate pressure. An Odex woman appears in layered robes reinforced with hidden armor plating, her blue fur braided with rings of dark metal. Ritual scars mark her arms and throat in pale raised lines. She stands nearly motionless inside the projection, massive even reduced to flickering light, and her eyes hold the awful serenity of someone who has already forgiven herself for everything she is about to do.

“Anita Prentiss,” she says.

Her voice is soft.

That is what makes it terrible.

I would prefer a fanatic’s shriek, a sermon, a howl, anything with enough ugliness to dismiss quickly. This woman speaks like a scholar in a quiet room, like a physician explaining a diagnosis, like a judge who never needed to raise her voice because the sentence was written before anyone entered the chamber.

Ghar lifts his weapon toward the projection. “Identify yourself.”

The Odex woman turns her luminous gaze toward him. “Ghar Vek’Talan, former Alliance shock trooper, later attached to private archaeological security operations in League space. Decorated three times. Disciplined twice. Discharged voluntarily after refusing a reassignment order near the end of the Centuries War.”

Ghar goes very still.