Page 90 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I tell myself it is fine. We are being hunted by the Choir of Revelation, carrying corrupted archive fragments through a buried megastructure older than any known civilization, and possibly standing on evidence that the Precursors covered up the origins of reality. A scarred Vakutan being emotionally awkward after kissing me in a panic chamber should rank somewhere below oxygen, ammunition, and not getting murdered by religious commandos with climbing rigs.

My chest disagrees.

Ghar stops at the end of the passage and raises one fist. “Hold.”

We obey because none of us is stupid enough to argue with his battlefield voice right now.

The corridor opens into a circular chamber that hangs inside a vertical shaft lined with archive lattices. It takes my eyes several seconds to understand the room because its shape refuses to settle into ordinary architecture. The floor is a transparent black plane suspended over a column of rotating mechanisms descending into darkness. Above us, concentric rings move in opposite directions while threads of light pass between them like data traveling through a nervous system. The walls are covered in suspended script, not written on stone but floating in stacked layers through the air. Each layer turns slowly, thousands of luminous symbols passing through one another without collision.

The chamber hums with such precision that my bones begin to ache.

I forget Ghar’s silence.

I forget my own exhaustion.

“Oh, you absolute lunatic marvel,” I whisper.

Brakk groans. “I preferred when you were emotionally distracted.”

Sira steps beside me, her eyes reflecting the floating script. “This chamber is active but isolated. The nexus may have routed us here intentionally.”

Ghar scans the upper rings. “Can the Choir access this shaft?”

Sira studies the moving symbols before answering. “Not directly, unless they hold a compatible resonance source or force a breach through the outer lattice.”

Brakk angles his cutter toward the far wall. “They have been forcing breaches all damn day.”

“Then we should assume they will try,” Ghar says.

I am already moving toward the center of the room.

“Anita,” Ghar says.

I stop, but only because his voice sounds strained instead of commanding.

He looks at me across the black floor. Dust and blood mark his torn shirt. The med patches along his chest and side are already darkening around the edges because he has been pretending injury is a decorative inconvenience. His golden eyes hold mine before sliding away toward the chamber’s upper access points.

“Check the floor before you cross,” he says.

That is all.

No lecture. No hand at my arm. No closeness.

I should appreciate the trust.

Instead, the distance scrapes.

I crouch and run a scan across the transparent floor. “Stable enough. The local gravity field is weird, but apparently less homicidal than upstairs.”

Brakk taps one boot against the surface and recoils when pale light ripples under his sole. “Less homicidal is not a classification I enjoy.”

“It’s the best one we have.”

Sira sets the archive case down. “The scanner core is responding.”

I kneel beside it and open the case with care that feels almost reverent, which annoys me because reverence is precisely the emotional infection this place keeps trying to provoke. The cracked core rises a finger’s width above its cradle, held by a silver field. The floating script layers accelerate around us, symbols aligning into vertical columns before scattering again.

Ghar takes position near the chamber entrance. “How long?”