Page 97 of Destined For Her Alien Daddy
CHAPTER 14
GHAR
The next corridor descends through heat, pressure, and a silence that feels too deliberate to be empty.
The walls around us no longer resemble stone. They are black at first glance, but each surface contains submerged layers of faint silver, amber, and deep blue light that move beneath the material like currents under ice. The air tastes of copper, old rain, and the clean antiseptic sting of ancient machines maintaining themselves long after their makers vanished. Every few steps, the floor warms under my boots, then cools suddenly, as if the ruin is testing whether our bodies still obey the small predictable rules that define living flesh.
I keep walking because stopping would make thought unavoidable.
Unfortunately, thought no longer waits for permission.
The phrase from the archive chamber repeats through me with each footfall. Playful creation cycles. Stable reality emerging from experimentation. The Precursors as inheritors instead of originators. My people’s sacred songs, warrior rites, blood oaths, and death prayers suddenly feel like banners planted in soil that may never have belonged to the ones we named. The Grand Design was supposed to be immense, mysterious, and painful because all true roads toward peace demanded endurance. Now the road beneath my feet seems less like divine architecture and more like a trail built over buried machinery no one understood.
I smell smoke that is not in the corridor.
The memory comes without mercy.
A settlement on Tarev’s Ninth burns under a red sky during the forty-third year of my service. We were told the strike would break an Ataxian logistics chain, that the shelter complex beneath the old mineral refinery housed enemy coordinators and drone pilots. The admiral called it a necessary compression of suffering. The chaplain called it a bitter turn in the Design. I remember entering after the bombardment, stepping over melted doors and collapsed bunks, listening to medics shout casualty classifications into comms that kept cutting out. There were enemy coordinators inside. There were also families, conscripts, cooks, children too young to have chosen a side, and an old Pi’Rell physician who held a dead infant against his chest and looked at us as if we were the first monsters ever born.
My instructors would have told me the formation was larger than my field of view.
I believed that once.
The corridor bends to the left, although my eyes insist we have not turned. Anita walks behind me with the archive case clutched in both hands. Brakk trails beside her, grumbling as he checks the charge on his cutter. Sira moves near the rear, but her attention keeps shifting toward me. Pi’Rell perceive too much and announce too little. It is one of their more dangerous qualities.
Anita speaks first, her voice low enough that she pretends she is not trying to reach me. “Your burn is bleeding again.”
“It is sealed.”
“It is bleeding through the seal.”
“Then the seal is busy.”
Brakk lets out a rough snort. “That is the kind of medical optimism that gets limbs misplaced.”
Anita quickens her step until she is closer behind my shoulder. “Ghar, stop for thirty seconds.”
“No.”
“You’re limping.”
“I am walking.”
“Those can overlap.”
I do not answer because she is correct, and because her concern reaches me in places I am currently trying to keep locked. The kiss remains between us, not spoken of, not resolved, and not forgotten. I can still taste dust and salt on her mouth. I can still feel her hands on my jaw and the trembling courage in the way she leaned into me despite fear clawing at both of us. Afterward, I stepped back because staying close felt too easy, too consuming, and too entangled with a bond I no longer know how to name.
Now she watches my back with worry she tries to disguise as irritation.
I should find that amusing.
Instead, it makes the world tilt.
Sira’s soft voice comes from behind us. “You are resisting a wound that will worsen if ignored.”
“My body heals quickly.”
“Bodies often do,” Sira says. “Worldviews less so.”
