Page 76 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy

Halfway to the bridge, a Choir soldier drops through the smoke on a cable and lands ahead of us with frightening precision.

He raises his rifle toward Anita.

I hit him before he fires.

The impact drives him into the inner wall. His armor absorbs the first strike, so I use the second to break his weapon arm and the third to crush his helmet against the stone. He drops at my feet, twitching once before he goes still.

Anita sees it.

Her face tightens, but she does not flinch away from me this time. That registers somewhere I do not have time to examine.

Another attacker lands behind Brakk. Sira moves first, sweeping a loose cable around the soldier’s ankle with surprising speed. Brakk turns and fires point-blank into the attacker’s chest armor until it fails.

“Pi’Rell are terrifying when motivated,” Brakk says, panting.

Sira releases the cable. “I dislike being pursued.”

“Valid.”

We reach the bridge as the upper smoke begins thinning. The structure spans the central shaft in a graceful black arc without visible supports. Silver lines glow along its edges. Far below, or perhaps far ahead depending on the next gravity shift, a vast circular system pulses with layered light at the heart of the planet’s buried architecture.

The deep archive column.

Even I know it when I see it.

Anita stops beside me, her breath catching. “That’s it.”

The bridge vibrates under our boots.

The Choir reaches the ramp behind us.

I look at Anita, at the blood on her sleeve, at the terror she has not let stop her, at the case she refuses to abandon even after it nearly pulled her into the void. I look at Brakk and Sira, both exhausted and injured. I look upward at trained killers descending through smoke with tools made for hunting people through ruins like these.

There is no route back to the surface.

There may never have been.

“Across,” I say.

We run onto the bridge as the first Choir volley strikes behind us.

The bridge answers the archive case with a brilliant pulse of silver light, and the far end opens into a descending aperture shaped like an iris. Cold air rushes upward, carrying whispers of ancient machinery and buried memory. The aperture leads down into the planet’s deepest systems, where the answers Anita wants and the truth I fear are waiting in the same darkness.

Anita reaches the opening beside me and looks back once toward the route we used, toward the smoke, gunfire, and every dead person above us.

Her voice is hoarse. “No safe way back.”

I meet the eyes of the first Choir soldier emerging through the thinning smoke and fire one shot that forces him behind cover.

“No,” I say. “Only forward.”

Together, we descend.

CHAPTER 11

ANITA

The aperture carries us down in silence so complete it feels engineered.