Page 211 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I feel her tremble against me. Not from cold. Not only from exhaustion. The shard case rests between us, carrying fragments of truth selected by fear, love, judgment, and necessity. Behind us, the full archive sinks into the remains of Nareth-Kul, sealed beneath a dead world that is dying again in a more final way.

“Ghar,” she says softly.

“I am here.”

“I chose you back there.”

“I know.”

“I mean before the shard. Before the knowledge. Before everything.”

I turn my head enough to look down at her. Her face is lit by the dying world, all silver and shadow and tear tracks through dust. She looks transformed, but not remade into someone else. More herself, perhaps, stripped of the last illusion that intellect can spare the heart.

“I chose you too,” I say.

“I know.” Her mouth trembles. “I just like hearing it.”

“Then I will say it often.”

“That sounds dangerous. I might get used to tenderness.”

“You should.”

Her eyes fill again, but she smiles. “Bossy.”

“Alive.”

“Also a strong point.”

I look back at Nareth-Kul as its white fissures dim. I feel grief for a faith that will never return in its old form. I feel anger for the dead. I feel fear for the shard, for Rolaev loose in the galaxy, for civilizations too fragile and too violent and too beautiful to receive the full truth. I also feel Anita’s hand in mine, and that is no small thing.

No god commands the meaning of this moment.

No destiny certifies it.

Still, I honor it.

The last visible light from Nareth-Kul collapses inward and vanishes.

Anita rests her head against my arm.

We watch the darkness where the dead world was, and I understand that we have not escaped unchanged. We carry wounds, truth, doubt, and a shard of history too dangerous to love carelessly. We carry the memory of Echo saying beauty was unexpected. We carry the dead. We carry each other.

And you know what’s interesting? I do not ask the universe what it intends.

I hold Anita’s hand and begin deciding what I intend.

CHAPTER 31

ANITA

The League recovery vessel smells too clean.

That is the first thing I notice when they pull us out of Brakk’s battered shuttle and into the med-deck receiving bay. The air has been scrubbed until it tastes sterile, all antiseptic vapor, recycled oxygen, and the faint lavender sting of calming aerosols someone in procurement probably believes are psychologically supportive. The walls shine a soft institutional white. The floor panels do not tremble. The lights do not flicker. Nothing folds sideways, whispers in dead languages, or attempts to redefine gravity under my boots. After Nareth-Kul, all that clean order feels obscene, like walking into a hotel lobby after crawling out of a mass grave.

Ghar nearly falls before the medics reach him.

He hides it well enough that the League attendants hesitate, because seven and a half feet of wounded Vakutan still looks like a lawsuit waiting to happen. I catch his forearm even though physics and common sense both know I cannot hold him up if he goes down. His skin is hot under my palm. Blood has dried in dark seams across his scales, and the burn across his chest gives off a sharp, cooked-metal smell that makes my stomach turn.