Page 148 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“It is truth.”

“No, it is a conclusion you are sprinting toward because despair feels cleaner than ambiguity.”

A bitter laugh tears from my throat. “You argue like a scholar even at the end of the sacred.”

“And you catastrophize like a soldier who thinks if he burns the bridge first, nobody can trap him on it.”

The accuracy hits too close. I turn toward her fully, and the movement makes the chamber’s dim silver lines crawl over my armor. “Everything we built was false.”

Her face hardens with fear and compassion locked in the same expression. “No.”

“Yes. Honor, destiny, sacred purpose, the Grand Design, the holy recognition of jalshagar. They were stories placed over an accident. The Precursors knew the truth and manufactured meaning to keep younger species from collapsing. My people took their curated mythology and made it the foundation of our lives.”

“Foundations can be built later.”

“Do not make poetry from this.”

“I am not making poetry. I am trying to keep you from mistaking origin for total value.”

I step closer, anger finally finding somewhere to stand. “If existence is accidental, then everything built upon it is false.”

“No,” she says sharply. “That does not follow.”

“It follows perfectly.”

“It follows emotionally. It does not follow logically.”

“Do not dissect my faith like one of your artifacts.”

Pain flashes across her face, and regret follows it through me at once. I hate that even now I can hurt her. I hate that part of me wants the hurt because it proves something between us can still be real enough to wound.

Anita inhales slowly through her nose. When she speaks again, her voice is lower. “Fair. That was unfair of me.”

The apology disarms me more effectively than argument.

She steps close enough that I can smell dust in her hair, cold sweat at her throat, and the faint chemical tang of the archive residue clinging to her gloves. She is alive and exhausted and terrified, and my body still recognizes her as essential. That terrifies me more than losing faith, because I no longer know whether recognition is devotion or programming.

“I am not trying to dissect you,” she says. “I am trying to reach you.”

“I do not know if there is anything left to reach.”

“That is also grief talking.”

“It may be the only honest thing left.”

Her eyes shine in the dim chamber. “Then let’s be honest. I am devastated too.”

I stare at her.

She gives me a humorless little smile. “What, you thought because I grew up professionally allergic to sacred nonsense, I would take this well?”

“You questioned everything.”

“I questioned fraud. I questioned institutions. I questioned smug old men with tenure and bad breath who treated doubt like a personality flaw.” Her voice shakes, and she does not hide it. “I did not actually prepare my nervous system for proof that the universe began as some incomprehensible being’s casual experiment that accidentally stuck.”

My anger falters.

Anita looks past me toward the pillar. “I thought skepticism would make me immune. It didn’t. It turns out intellectual curiosity is not armor. It’s a door. Sometimes you open it and get wonder. Sometimes you open it and get a room full of knives.”