Page 77 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

There is no lift platform beneath our boots, no visible machinery around us, and no cable suspending the circular descent shaft from above. The black iris opens around us, the bridge disappears overhead, and the ruin lowers us through a vertical column of darkness on a field I cannot see and barely understand. My stomach insists we are falling. My boots insist we are standing. My eyes insist the walls are moving upward, but the silver markings beneath the stone pulse downward in long, slow streams, guiding us deeper toward whatever the planet has spent uncounted ages keeping hidden.

Cold presses through my coat and settles against my skin, damp and intimate as breath. The air tastes mineral-rich and electric, but another scent rides beneath it now, faint as memory and almost organic, like old paper sealed inside a wet tomb. My ears pop twice, then fill with a low harmonic vibration that seems to come from inside my teeth. Brakk’s fusion cutter hums beside me. Sira’s breathing remains steady behind my shoulder. Ghar stands close enough that I can feel heat radiating from him through the chill, his sidearm angled toward the darkness below as if he can threaten physics into behaving.

The archive case pulses against my hip, like a key that has started remembering the lock.

Brakk peers down over the edge of the invisible field beneath us and immediately pulls his head back. “I have made a decision.”

Sira looks at him. “What decision?”

Brakk tightens both hands around his cutter. “I have decided I hate elevators more when they are imaginary.”

I try to laugh, but it comes out too thin. “Technically, this is probably a localized inertial descent field.”

Brakk gives me a wounded look. “Why would you say something worse when imaginary elevator was right there?”

Ghar’s gaze stays on the shaft below us. “How far does it descend?”

I check the scanner, but its display flickers between distance readings that have no agreement with each other. “The scanner thinks we have traveled forty meters, nine kilometers, and negative six centimeters.”

Brakk points at the device. “I like negative six centimeters. That sounds closest to not dying.”

Sira lifts one pale hand toward the wall without touching it. Silver light brightens under her palm and spreads through the hidden lines like frost across glass. “The structure is not transporting us through ordinary distance.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Brakk mutters. “Ordinary distance would be too working-class for this place.”

The descent slows.

Below us, darkness opens into a chamber so vast my mind refuses its scale at first. The aperture releases us onto a curving platform that extends from the wall like a balcony inside an artificial cavern. Our lamps reach only a fraction of the space, but the ruin provides its own light in threads and pulses, silver and blue and pale gold moving through the architecture like thoughts crossing a sleeping brain.

The lower chamber stretches farther than any excavation hangar, farther than most cities I have seen from the air. Pillars the width of towers descend from the ceiling and vanish into a misty abyss below. Suspended rings rotate slowly in the open space, some no larger than shuttle bays, others wide enough to hold neighborhoods. Bridges grow from one ring to another at angles that should not support weight. Mechanisms hum within the walls, old and patient and still powered after billions of years.

The sound of them enters my bones.

I take one step forward and forget, for one brilliant second, to be afraid.

“Oh,” I whisper.

Ghar shifts beside me immediately. “Do not move too far.”

I barely hear him.

The chamber is impossible in the purest sense, not merely large, not merely old, but organized around principles that make known engineering look like children stacking stones in mud. Every ring, bridge, pillar, and suspended node follows mathematical relationships I can feel before I can name them. The whole structure is a lattice of memory and pressure, an archive built not only to store information but to preserve relationships between events, causes, failed histories, and maybe even realities that never properly stabilized.

The Precursors did not build this.

I know it with sickening certainty.

They found it.

They feared it.

They buried it.

Sira steps up beside me, her eyes wider than I have ever seen them. “This chamber has been preserved almost perfectly.”

Brakk lets out a low whistle. “Preserved is one word. I would have gone with smug.”

Ghar scans the platforms above and below us. “Can the Choir follow?”