Page 2 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

His eyes narrow. “Why did that sound like a lie?”

“Probably because you have excellent survival instincts.”

The ramp lowers into a storm of dust and floodlight. The first breath of Nareth-Kul’s processed air tastes metallic, stale, and faintly bitter, as if the atmosphere scrubbers have learned resentment. My boots hit the landing platform, and vibration travels up through my bones from machinery buried deep under the site. Generators thrum. Distant drills scream against stone. Comms crackle in several languages at once. Somewhere beyond the perimeter, the planet answers with a low groan that rolls across the excavation field and makes every worker pause before pretending they did not see.

I step forward anyway.

The cold bites my cheeks through the thermal membrane of my hood. Dust taps against my visor in dry, whispering grains. The floodlights bleach the world into brutal contrasts, silver edges and black trenches, amber hazard markers and the red blink of drones mapping unstable ground. I smell machine lubricant, cold minerals, sweat sealed too long under pressure gear, and the faint ozone tang that usually means old power systems are awake where they have no business being awake.

Merrow hurries after me. “Prentiss.”

“Doctoral candidate Prentiss,” I call back.

“You are walking away from the reception area.”

“I am observing the reception area from a dynamic perspective.”

“You are leaving the marked path.”

“I am adjacent to the marked path.”

“You are three meters beyond it.”

“Then the path is clingy.”

A few workers glance over. One laughs before turning it into a cough. Good. If the whole site is terrified, I can at least be useful by giving them a bureaucrat to enjoy watching suffer.

A temporary command structure squats near the landing zone, its modular walls patched with emergency insulation and League hazard placards. Beyond it, the outer dig begins in a series of descending terraces cut into the basalt crust. Survey beacons cast lattice patterns over exposed stone. The main ruin complex rises from the central pit like a bad decision made by giants.

I stop at the first overlook because my body understands something before my brain does.

The architecture is wrong.

Not wrong in the romantic, sloppy way people use when they find a weird temple and declare it “beyond imagination” because they cannot be bothered to do the math. This is wrong in the numbers. Wrong in the load distribution. Wrong in the angles between planes. A black arch spans almost sixty meters over an empty shaft without visible reinforcement, but its curve is not parabolic, catenary, or any other structure that should distribute weight. The support columns below it do not align with the stress points. They do not even align with each other. Each one stands a fraction of a degree off expected orientation, tiny deviations that should compromise the whole system and somehow make it stronger.

I move closer to the rail.

A Precursor ruin has a recognizable elegance. Even when damaged, even when misinterpreted by six hundred generations of mystics and souvenir vendors, Precursor design tends toward recursive symmetry and biological metaphor. Spirals. Branching lattices. Repeating triads. Structures that look grown as much as built.

This place has none of that.

This place is all severe planes, nested contradictions, and angles that feel like they are waiting for my eyes to blink first.

“Oh, you gorgeous impossible bastard,” I whisper.

“Please don’t flirt with the murder architecture,” someone says behind me. “It encourages the place.”

I turn and find a tall, skinny human man approaching with two equipment cases in his arms and three more dangling from a harness that looks one bad buckle away from surrender. Sandy hair sticks up around wireframe ocular implants, and his face has the grayish pallor of someone who has been living on stimulant paste and professional anxiety for too long.

“You must be Teren Ikkev ,” I say.

He blinks. “That depends. Are you angry, armed, or from payroll?”

“Anita Prentiss.”

His expression brightens with exhausted relief. “Oh, thank the profoundly indifferent cosmos. You’re the linguistics maniac.”

“That is not my official title.”