Page 159 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“Because destroying it makes your fear the final authority,” I say.

Rolaev ’s eyes narrow.

I step closer despite Ghar’s low warning sound. “You are right about the danger. I hate that, but you are. Uncontrolled release would be catastrophic. Maybe not everywhere, maybe not forever, but enough. Too much. I am not going to pretend otherwise because pretending would make me feel brave.”

“Then help me end it.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because suppression is not stewardship when it leaves no future possible except ignorance enforced by violence.” My voice shakes, but I let it. “Because the Precursors preserved this for a reason, and even if their solution was compromised, they understood something you refuse to admit. Civilizations change. People mature. Frameworks can be built. Context can be created. Maybe not now. Maybe not for centuries. But if we destroy everything, then your trauma gets to decide that no one, ever, can be trusted with what happened.”

For a moment, Rolaev looks struck.

Then grief closes over it.

“I trusted them,” she says.

“I know.”

“No,” she whispers. “You do not.”

The archive responds again.

A final image rises between us without warning. Rolaev , younger, standing in a colony square beneath a red-gold sky while fires burn behind her. A child clutches her robes. People scream. A man in scholar’s white raises a weapon at a crowd gathered beneath a banner translating roughly to Liberation Through Nullity. Rolaev ’s younger face twists, not with fanaticism, but with horror so complete it hollows her out.

The image vanishes.

The woman before me remains.

I cannot breathe for a second.

She looks away first. “I learned what mercy required.”

“No,” I say, and my own eyes sting. “You learned what fear could justify.”

Her head turns back toward me slowly.

The chamber hums. Ghar’s hand brushes mine. Sira and Brakk stand behind us, silent witnesses to an argument too intimate for politics and too consequential for mercy.

Rolaev ’s voice becomes very soft. “If you preserve this archive, you will become what I became.”

“I might.”

Ghar turns sharply toward me. “Anita.”

I do not look away from Rolaev . “I might. That is the part nobody wants to say. I might make the wrong call. I might hide too much or reveal too much. I might get scared and dress cowardice up as caution, or get proud and dress recklessness up as courage.”

Rolaev studies me as if the admission matters more than any defiance.

“But I won’t start by murdering everyone who disagrees with me,” I say. “And I won’t end the future because the past broke you.”

Her expression hardens, but her eyes remain wounded. “Then you leave me no choice.”

Brakk groans. “That sentence never leads anywhere pleasant.”

Ghar moves fully in front of me now, done negotiating with geometry and my need to see. “Rolaev , do not.”