Page 210 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Then her final words come through, quieter.

“Fear survives broken faith. Remember that.”

The transmission dies.

Anita stares at the speaker.

Brakk shouts from the cockpit, “If she is about to become a recurring problem, I would like to file my objection now!”

Sira, strapped into a seat across from us, looks pale and shaken. “She helped open the route.”

“She also murdered people,” Brakk says.

“Yes,” Sira says. “Both truths remain.”

The shuttle breaches the surface of Nareth-Kul.

For a moment, the viewport fills with the dead world’s black-purple sky and the harsh silver glare of orbital work lights. Then we punch through the thin processed atmospheric envelope and into space.

Behind us, Nareth-Kul tears itself apart.

The rogue planet does not explode like a bomb. It destabilizes in layers, cracking along buried ruin lines that glow white from within. Vast sections of crust shear away, exposing impossible architecture folded through the planet’s interior like the bones of something never meant to have a body. Archive light pulses once through the cracks, then seals inward. The surface collapses over itself in slow, catastrophic waves, while debris lifts into space in spirals that no gravity model would accept without complaint.

Brakk slams us into a desperate trajectory as chunks of dead world spin past the viewport. One fragment the size of a city tumbles close enough that the shuttle alarms briefly give up on specific warnings and simply wail.

“Not today,” Brakk snarls. “Not after all that.”

The shuttle clears the debris field by meters, then kilometers, then enough distance that the dying world becomes a whole horror rather than an immediate one.

Silence settles badly after the alarms fade.

No one cheers.

Sira covers her face with both hands and weeps without sound. Brakk remains in the cockpit, breathing hard, his little body hunched over the controls as if daring the shuttle to betray him now. Anita sits beside me, still strapped in, still holding the shard case against her chest.

I reach for her hand.

She gives it to me at once.

Together, we watch Nareth-Kul die.

The planet’s final glow pulses through the viewport, white at the cracks, black at the edges, silver where the sealed archive sinks beyond reach. It looks less like destruction than burial. Perhaps that is only my mind making meaning from catastrophe because it cannot do otherwise.

Perhaps that is what minds are for.

Anita leans against my shoulder carefully, mindful of my injuries. “We made it.”

“Yes.”

“That feels statistically rude.”

“Brakk will be pleased to know you credit his piloting.”

“I will tell him after he stops threatening the engines.”

From the cockpit, Brakk yells, “The engines know what they did!”

Anita laughs weakly, then goes quiet.