Page 78 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Eventually,” Sira says. “The bridge aperture may not open for them unless they carry a compatible resonance source.”

Brakk looks at the archive case. “So the good news is they may need our magic nightmare suitcase. The bad news is they very much want our magic nightmare suitcase.”

“They can get in with equipment if they’re patient enough.”

Ghar turns his head toward me. “Will they be patient?”

“They murdered an excavation site to stop a discovery. I’m guessing patience is one of their less annoying virtues.”

He looks toward the chamber again, his expression hardening. “Then we move before they solve the door.”

I nod, but my attention has already moved to the nearest wall. Script runs along its inner surface in bands so dense they resemble woven metal. Some symbols match the fragments from the upper corridors. Others make my scanner stutter before it even tries translation. The archive core inside the case glows brighter with each step I take toward them.

Sira catches my sleeve gently. “Anita.”

I look back, irritated despite the softness of her touch. “What?”

Her gaze holds mine. “You are leaning toward it as if pulled.”

“I’m walking toward the single most intact archive chamber ever discovered.”

“You are walking toward a system that may have destroyed the emotional stability of entire cultures before ours existed.”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

Sira’s face remains calm, but her voice gains a quiet severity I have not heard from her before. “Knowledge does not become harmless because one person is clever enough to name it.”

That lands uncomfortably close to the part of me currently vibrating with excitement.

I pull my sleeve free, though not roughly. “I know this is dangerous.”

“No,” Sira says. “You know it can kill you. That is not the same as understanding what it can do after you survive it.”

Brakk glances between us. “I vote we print that on the expedition brochure.”

Ghar steps closer, his eyes on me rather than the chamber. “Listen to her.”

I laugh once, sharp and defensive. “Wonderful. We’ve reached the everyone tell Anita to stop learning portion of the apocalypse.”

“No one is telling you to stop learning.”

“You want me to move faster, touch less, translate less, and avoid the giant archive nexus that is actively responding to the only evidence we saved. That sounds very stop-learning adjacent.”

“It sounds like not dying.”

“It always sounds like that when people want the truth slowed down.”

Ghar’s nostrils flare. The argument is familiar enough to be dangerous, but the chamber around us transforms it. Up there, in the upper ruins, we were running from attackers through collapsed tunnels and half-understood systems. Down here, the truth is no longer an abstraction. It surrounds us in humming rings and glowing walls. It has scale, temperature, sound, and weight.

Sira moves toward the wall while we argue, examining a column of script with precise focus. “This section references a containment philosophy.”

I turn immediately despite Ghar’s warning look. “What kind?”

Sira reads slowly, her fingers hovering above the symbols as the archive case projects a trembling translation lattice across the wall. “The custodians believed unprepared minds could confuse origin with worth. They observed that civilizations exposed to certain causal records often experienced doctrine collapse, authority fracture, reproductive anxiety around bonded pairings, and ritual violence.”

“Reproductive anxiety?” Brakk asks, horrified. “That phrase just walked into my ears without paying rent.”

I move closer to Sira, scanning the text. “It’s talking about jalshagar.”