Page 64 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Her voice comes out low and shaken. “They were waiting for me to open it.”

I check my weapon and face the descending passage. “Then we stop doing what they expect.”

Nobody argues.

Deep below us, the ruin lights pulse once, as if something older than fear is listening.

CHAPTER 9

ANITA

The deeper ruin chamber becomes my entire universe because the larger one is currently too awful to look at directly.

I sit with my back against a warm black wall while the archive case lies open across my knees, spilling fractured silver light over my hands, my coat, and the stone floor beneath me. The glow turns Teren’s dried blood on the case corner into something almost black. I keep meaning to clean it off. I keep not doing it, because removing the stain feels too much like admitting he is now part of the evidence instead of a person who talked too fast, cracked jokes when terrified, and died reaching for proof that never should have needed blood to become valuable.

The air down here has changed again. It tastes wetter now, heavy with mineral damp and the bitter electric tang of active ruin systems. Every inhale drags cold into my lungs and leaves a faint sweetness on my tongue that makes me think of old preservation fluids. Somewhere below us, hidden machinery or something worse hums in intervals that make my molars ache. The chamber’s faint floor warmth has become uneven, pulsing up through my legs as if the ruin is breathing through stone.

The damaged scanner core flickers between corrupted translation grids and partial archive captures. I have stitched together three fragments from the lower structure, two inscription overlays from the corridor where Sira found the inheritance phrase, and one unstable data echo that keeps trying to self-delete every time I isolate it. The work should be impossible under these conditions. That does not matter because impossible things have been lining up for my attention since I arrived on Nareth-Kul, and I am tired of acting surprised when they demand a chair.

Brakk crouches near the chamber entrance with his fusion cutter across his knees, picking at the planted relay tap with a microtool and muttering threats at it. Sira sits opposite me, her posture composed but her eyes dimmer than before. Ghar stands near the darker passage leading downward, motionless enough to be mistaken for part of the architecture until the light catches his golden eyes.

He has been watching me for the last twenty minutes.

I am pretending not to notice.

This is a mature strategy and therefore doomed.

Sira leans closer to the projected symbols hovering over the scanner core. “The deletion pattern repeats across every recovered fragment.”

“Not deletion,” I say, adjusting the translation field with two fingers. “Suppression. The base data remains embedded beneath compensatory distortion layers.”

Brakk looks up from the relay tap. “For those of us who didn’t attend Fancy Word Prison, does that mean somebody scribbled over the old stuff?”

“Basically.”

“See, now I’m educated and angry.”

Sira studies the shifting projection. “The overwrite does not resemble natural corruption.”

“No,” I whisper. “It resembles an intentional archival purge.”

Ghar’s gaze sharpens. “By whom?”

I do not answer immediately because I already know what the emerging data suggests, and speaking the thought aloud will make it more real. Instead, I widen the projection and pull up the repeating mark buried beneath the distortion layers. The symbol appears as three interlocking arcs around a central line, altered through age and compression but unmistakably related to early Precursor vault-seal grammar.

Sira inhales softly.

Brakk notices her reaction. “That noise sounded expensive.”

Sira looks toward me. “Anita, that seal structure is Precursor.”

“I know.”

Ghar steps closer, his boots nearly silent on the warm floor. “Explain.”

I enlarge the symbol until it floats between us, silver and black and damning. “This is not First Architect notation. It appears in later vault-seal systems attributed to the Precursors, mostly in restricted knowledge sites, quarantine archives, and dead-world repositories.”

“You are saying the Precursors found these records.”