Page 155 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Ghar growls.

I lift a hand without taking my eyes off her. “No. Let her talk.”

“Anita.”

“I know.” My mouth is dry. “But she came here for more than a fight.”

Rolaev inclines her head. “You always were quicker than your defenders wished.”

“That sounds almost like a compliment.”

“It is an observation.”

“Everybody on this planet needs new social skills.”

Rolaev ’s mouth does not smile, but something nearly human moves around her eyes. “Perhaps.”

The archive reacts to her presence by lowering the active records until the chamber becomes a cathedral of suspended evidence. Precursor suppression directives hang in the air between us. First One experimental cycles rotate beyond them. Civilizational collapse projections glow along the outer rings like indictment carved from light.

Rolaev walks forward slowly. Ghar tracks every step. I can feel him beside me, a contained storm with hands and scars.

“You have seen enough,” Rolaev says.

I hate that my first answer is not instant defiance.

Have I?

The question twists in my stomach before I crush it under irritation. “I have seen enough to know you were not lying about the danger.”

“And yet you still intend to preserve it.”

“I intend to prevent you from deciding that slaughter is responsible stewardship.”

Her eyes sharpen. “Do not make the comfortable mistake of assuming I began with slaughter.”

Rolaev stops at the central hollow. Pale light rises over her robes and turns the metal rings in her braided fur into tiny moons. She looks old right now. Not physically. Odex do not age like humans, and she still radiates terrifying strength. But something in her voice carries the fatigue of a person who has spent years holding up a door while everyone else on both sides calls her monster.

“I was not born the Voice of Silence,” she says. “I was Rolaev Thane, intelligence analyst to the Coalition stabilization bureau. I believed knowledge could free people from priestcraft, propaganda, and inherited obedience. I believed secrecy was the favorite tool of tyrants.”

My throat tightens.

Damn her.

Damn her for starting where I started.

Sira whispers, “What happened?”

Rolaev ’s eyes remain on me. “I found a fragment beneath the ruins of Kelratha Minor. A damaged Precursor archive, heavily sealed, half-corrupted by radiation and war. It contained only partial origin data. Nothing as complete as this. A few classifications. A few First One traces. Enough to prove that the foundational myths of several major species were curated responses to an unbearable truth.”

Brakk lowers his cutter slightly. “You told people?”

“I did.” Her voice stays soft, but the chamber darkens around it. “I believed exactly what Anita Prentiss believed. That truth wounded only those invested in lies. That open knowledge would force maturity. That civilization, once stripped of comforting falsehood, would build something cleaner.”

I cannot speak.

The archive records behind her shift, and I realize with a sick lurch that the chamber is responding to her memory. It begins displaying colony names, dates, population structures, psychometric projections. Not abstract models now. Histories.

Rolaev looks up at the records. “My first disclosure was limited. Two hundred eighty-four participants across six disciplines. Philosophers, physicists, theologians, military ethicists, medical trauma specialists, governance theorists. I thought intellectual preparation would provide resilience.”