Page 59 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

NOT THE ORIGINATORS.

For a moment, the corridor loses all sound.

The words do not strike me like a plasma round. They do not burn, cut, or crush. They enter more quietly than that, slipping beneath armor, beneath training, beneath every scar and oath and battle-song that made me Vakutan.

The Precursors were the inheritors.

Not the originators.

My people revere the Precursors without begging from them. We do not fall to our knees at every sign and whimper for intervention. We are not Alzhon, filling temples with polished doctrine and priests who claim direct communion with ancient wisdom. Vakutans respect strength, action, protection, and the Grand Design as a road we help pave through our own blood. We teach our children that the Precursors seeded the galaxy with life, shaped souls to recognize one another across species, and set history toward eventual harmony no matter how much war scarred the path.

If the Precursors inherited the design, then whose road have we walked?

If they were not originators, then what are jalshagar?

If the bond pulling at my chest was made by hands that were themselves only copying older hands, then how many layers of intention stand between my will and Anita’s face?

The corridor sways slightly, though the floor does not move.

Anita looks at me. “Ghar?”

I force my expression still. “Continue.”

Her eyes search my face. “That hit you.”

“I said continue.”

Brakk, for once, does not make a joke.

Sira studies me with too much compassion. “Religious structures often survive reinterpretation.”

I look at her sharply. “This is not reinterpretation.”

“No,” Sira says. “It may be displacement.”

Anita closes the scanner case halfway, dimming the projection. “We don’t know what it means yet.”

“It says what it means,” I reply.

“No, it says one sentence in a dead language embedded in a murder hallway under a planet that apparently cheats at geometry. We are not letting the haunted wall write the final theology textbook.”

The line should irritate me.

Instead, it steadies me by reminding me who she is. Anita Prentiss distrusts every sacred claim until it survives interrogation. She does not reject meaning because she hates meaning. She rejects shortcuts to meaning because she has seen them sold too cheaply.

I look back at the words.

They continue glowing through the dim projection.

THE PRECURSORS WERE THE INHERITORS.

NOT THE ORIGINATORS.

“My first instructor told me the Grand Design was like a battlefield formation,” I say before I mean to speak. “No soldier sees the entire shape while he fights. He sees his orders, the warriors beside him, the enemy before him, and the ground beneath his feet. Faith means trusting that the formation has purpose beyond the individual life.”

Anita watches me carefully. “And what did you think when he said that?”

“I was young. I thought it sounded noble.”