Page 44 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

The words emerge weak and unsteady.

“You are shaking,” he snaps.

“I’m fine.”

“That is a lie.”

The chamber folds sideways physically this time. Gravity twists hard enough to drag shattered debris across the floor toward the screaming archive. Teren crashes into Sira while the tunnel entrance warps briefly out of alignment before snapping back into place.

Ghar locks one arm around me and forces us toward the exit through falling stone and failing supports.

I clutch his shirt instinctively.

The vision still burns behind my eyes.

Experimentation.

Iteration.

Try again.

Emotion surges upward so violently I nearly choke on it.

Not because the revelation destroyed meaning.

Because it didn’t.

That realization terrifies me more than the entities themselves.

Ghar glances down at me while carrying me through collapsing darkness. Dust streaks his face while fresh blood runs from somewhere near his hairline. Fear burns openly in his golden eyes now, stripped completely free of discipline.

Not fear for himself.

Fear for me.

The realization hits almost as hard as the archive did.

The tunnel behind us collapses with a roar that shakes the entire lower structure.

Ghar throws himself forward just as the shockwave slams through the corridor and darkness swallows everything behind us.

CHAPTER 6

GHAR

The Choir Arrives.

The first thing I taste after the lower tunnel collapses is blood, dust, and the bitter metallic residue of old power waking beneath stone.

I come up on one knee with Anita still locked against my chest, my shoulder burning from the impact and my ears full of the dying roar of the cave-in behind us. The corridor around us has changed shape in the violence of the collapse. The black ruin walls flex with faint silver afterlight, and dust moves through the beam of my shoulder lamp in slow, unnatural spirals instead of settling. The air is thick enough to chew. Each breath drags grit over my tongue and down into my lungs, but I breathe evenly because panic burns oxygen faster than fire.

Anita’s fingers are clenched in my shirt. Her face is pressed against my collarbone, and she is shaking hard enough that I feel the tremors through my ribs. She is conscious, but only barely present. Her eyes stare beyond me at something no longer inside this corridor, and the terror in them is not the ordinary fear of collapse, injury, or death. I have seen soldiers after artillery barrages, after boarding actions, after void exposure. I have seen minds return from the edge of horror carrying scars no medical scanner can map. Anita looks like she has seen a battlefield too large for mortal memory.

“Anita,” I say, keeping my voice low despite the alarm clawing through my chest. “Look at me.”

She blinks once, slowly. Dust clings to her lashes. “They were laughing.”

The words slide into the corridor with a softness that makes the hair along my neck rise.