Page 260 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

I see Teren laughing at the dig site and then not laughing ever again.

I close my eyes.

“Am I being careful,” I whisper, “or am I being scared?”

A soft chime sounds from the shard.

My eyes snap open.

The fragment field has changed.

The rotating text collapses inward, becoming a pale thread suspended above the cradle. It wavers like a reflection on water, then spreads into a shape too faint to be a projection and too deliberate to be a glitch. My pulse rockets up my throat.

“No,” I say. “Nope. We are not doing surprise ancient contact at two in the morning.”

The shape brightens by a fraction.

It does not become Echo exactly. Not the pale, embarrassed, almost-person who looked through reality as Nareth-Kul died. This is less than that. A residue of residue. A fingerprint left in preserved data. It gathers itself into a small, unstable presence that makes the room feel larger without moving the walls.

A voice arrives through the filtered speakers and also somewhere behind my thoughts.

“Searching continues.”

I grip the edge of the console. “Oh, good. Great. The archive has commentary.”

“Human pattern: question toward absence.”

My mouth goes dry. “Are you Echo?”

“Echo of echo. Stored contact resonance. Not independent fully. Not danger intentionally.”

“Love the qualifier.”

The presence flickers. “You are alone.”

“That is a rude observation.”

“You chose alone.”

I look toward the locked door as if Ghar might materialize through sheer protective instinct. He is asleep in our quarters, or at least he was when I left. His injuries still ache at night no matter what he admits. He looked peaceful when I slipped out, one arm curved over my side of the bed as if even asleep he expected me to return to the shape of him.

Guilt digs its claws into me.

“Yes,” I say. “I chose alone.”

“Why?”

The question is gentle, which makes it much worse.

I could lie to an official. I could lie to Merrow for sport. I could lie to myself for several impressive hours with the right coffee and enough footnotes. But the faint ancient thing in the shard is harder to lie to because it is not judging me like a person. It is observing the fracture between what I say and what I fear.

“Because I wanted to know whether we sealed too much,” I say. “Because people are already fighting over the little we released. Because every day I wake up and think maybe Rolaev was right, and then I hate myself, and then I think maybe she was wrong, and then I hate myself in the other direction for being arrogant enough to decide.”

The pale thread brightens.

“Decision carries wound.”

“Yeah. That’s one way to put it.”