Page 270 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

She laughs, then glances around the bay. The new team boards the Wayward Thesis with crates, compads, protective cases, and the kind of hope that looks fragile until tested. Halvek stands near the command entrance speaking with the oversight escort. Sira reviews the access-language roster beside the ramp. Brakk argues with the ship’s loading AI and appears to be losing because the AI is ignoring him.

Anita’s hand finds mine.

“We’re really doing this,” she says.

“Yes.”

“Our first official expedition.”

“Yes.”

“Under charter, oversight, and a truly obscene amount of liability language.”

“Brakk insisted the liability language include the phrase ‘not my fault if you ignore me.’”

“That was one of his better additions.”

I look at the ship. “Our destination is safer than Nareth-Kul.”

“You say that like the bar is not buried under a dead planet.”

“It is a lower-risk survey site.”

“Allegedly.”

“Allegedly,” I agree.

She smiles. “Look at you, learning academic caution.”

“I have an excellent teacher.”

“She sounds exhausting.”

“She is.”

Anita laughs again, but it fades as she looks at the ship’s emblem. The open doorway. The spiral of stars. The future rendered as a symbol on fresh hull paint, vulnerable to scratches, politics, dust, and time.

“We can keep doing expeditions forever,” she says. “There will always be another ruin, another question, another dangerous door.”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t want to only be in motion.”

The words are quiet enough that the bay almost swallows them.

I turn toward her fully. “Nor do I.”

She looks up at me, and beneath the professional poise, beneath the new authority, I see the woman from the archive chamber, the kitchen, the shrine, the containment room at night. Anita is brilliant enough to chase the oldest truth in existence and human enough to want somewhere to come home afterward.

“I keep thinking about the place with sunlight,” she says.

“So do I.”

“Not instead of this.”

“No.”

“Alongside it.”