Page 196 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

My mouth goes dry. “It wants final preservation parameters.”

Brakk stares at me. “Pretend I’m stupid.”

“I would never.”

“Pretend harder.”

“It wants me to decide what survives in the shard before the rest seals or collapses.”

Ghar turns sharply. “Now?”

“Yes, because ancient systems apparently believe in maximizing inconvenience.”

Rolaev laughs once from near the wall.

The sound is low, ragged, and almost empty.

I look at her. “Something funny?”

“No,” she says. “Only familiar.”

Her gaze lifts to the projections. Pale light cuts across her scarred throat and the metal rings braided through her blue fur. She looks less like a monster now, which is inconvenient because I am still furious with her. She looks like a woman whose life’s organizing principle has been broken in half and left in her hands with blood on both ends.

“You stood in a chamber like this before,” I say.

“Not like this.” Her eyes move to the shard. “Smaller. Corrupted. Enough to damn me.”

Sira steps closer, though Brakk hovers protectively near her with the anchor tucked under one arm. “Can the relay be stabilized?”

Rolaev ’s gaze flicks to the far wall, where silver lines are stuttering around a cracked control spine. “Briefly. The right side is collapsing into dead recursion. If it reaches the central register, the shard may absorb unstable origin layers regardless of Anita’s choice.”

Brakk squints. “Was that helpful information or ominous poetry?”

“Both,” Sira says.

“Fantastic. Love when those overlap.”

The chamber shakes hard enough that Ghar’s hand clamps around my upper arm. He keeps me standing while several suspended projections scatter into sparks and reform. Beyond the walls, a low planetary boom rolls upward from unimaginable depth. It is not an explosion. It is larger than that. It feels like a continent-sized thing shifting where no continent should move.

Brakk looks down at the floor. “That was new.”

Sira closes her eyes, listening through the stabilizer field. “The rogue planet’s crustal lattice is losing cohesion around the ruin systems.”

“Again, pretend I’m stupid but in less terrifying words.”

“Nareth-Kul is destabilizing,” she says. “The ruins are not only collapsing. They are pulling the planet apart around the active archive structures.”

“See? That was much worse.”

“How long?”

Sira’s expression answers before her voice does. “Not long.”

The shard pulses harder.

The preservation options sharpen around me.

Full disclosure layer. Rejected.