Page 192 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

“I know, and that is deeply attractive in a very inconvenient way, but I need my hands free.”

A section of wall folds open ahead, revealing a black drop filled with drifting lights. Brakk swerves right, following an amber line over a bridge that forms as he steps on it. He screams the entire way across.

“Is the screaming part of the engineering?” Anita calls.

“It helps me focus!”

Choir survivors appear from a side passage, three of them, bloodied and wild-eyed. They raise weapons at us, but their masks are cracked and their formation broken. Rolaev steps past me before I can fire.

The soldiers freeze at the sight of her.

“Priestess,” one says. “Command us.”

Rolaev looks at them, and the collapse light moves over her face like judgment.

For a moment, I think she will order them to continue the assault. I prepare to kill them all before they can endanger Anita.

Rolaev says, “Run.”

The soldier stares. “What?”

“Run, or die for nothing.”

The words cost her. I see it in the stiff line of her shoulders, in the way her mouth tightens around nothing. Her certainty is not healed. It is bleeding. But she does not turn the wound outward this time.

The soldiers hesitate.

Brakk yells, “She gave you the good option, you porcelain-faced lunatics!”

The corridor cracks beneath their feet. That convinces them more effectively than theology. They scatter into a secondary passage as the wall folds shut between us.

Anita looks at Rolaev . “That was almost constructive.”

Rolaev ’s stare is cold. “Do not become sentimental.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

I keep moving, but I watch Rolaev more carefully now. A crisis of certainty can make a person merciful, or it can make them desperate. She may yet become either.

Another tremor hurls us against the wall. I shield Anita with my body as shards of black stone spray from the ceiling. Pain flares through my ribs, bright enough to blur my vision. Anita grips my waist until the tremor passes.

“You are bleeding more,” she says.

“Yes.”

“That is not a medical plan.”

“I will bleed less later.”

“That is also not a plan.”

“I choose to survive your criticism.”

Her eyes flick to mine, and the fear there sharpens. “Do.”

The escape route opens into a wider junction where three corridors cross through one another in impossible overlap. Brakk slams the anchor control into the floor. Amber light spreads outward, pinning one corridor long enough for passage.

“Through there!” he shouts. “That should drop us two levels above the shuttle access spine.”