Page 17
She lifts her scanner again. “On a good day, both.”
The answer should irritate me. It does irritate me. It also lodges somewhere uncomfortable because she means it. Anita Prentiss is afraid, but fear does not slow her. It sharpens her. She studies danger the way soldiers study terrain, searching not for comfort but for usable truth.
That unsettles me more than panic would have.
A low tremor passes through the chamber. Dust whispers down from the braces.
I catch her arm before she steps forward.
She goes still.
So do I.
The contact is through her coat this time, not skin against armor, but the bond still answers with a savage pulse. Not the full rupture from before. A lesser echo. Enough to bring the memory of her first touch back with cruel precision. Heat. Shock. Her face seen through my eyes. Her mind recoiling from mine. The impossible recognition neither of us asked for.
She looks at my hand on her arm.
I release her at once.
“Do not step there,” I say, my voice rougher than I intend. “The floor is undermined.”
Her throat moves as she swallows. “Right. Structural concern. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
For once, she does not mock me.
Then her scanner chirps, and her attention snaps back to the wall with such force I can nearly feel the bond dragged after it.
“There,” she says.
I follow her gaze. The inscriptions brighten under her beam, layering into visible lines. I cannot read the language. I have battlefield fluency in six modern tongues, enough ritual Vakutan to understand old war songs, and enough Alliance formal to know when admirals are lying. Ancient symbolic linguistics is not my field.
But one phrase emerges through the translator lattice on Anita’s scanner, assembling itself in fragments.
CHILDREN SHAPED AFTER THE FIRST ARCHITECTS.
The chamber grows colder.
Anita inhales. “That translation cannot be right.”
“What does it mean?”
“It means either the grammar engine is hallucinating, or this inscription is claiming the Precursors were descendants, creations, or inheritors of something called the First Architects.”
“There are no First Architects in Precursor doctrine.”
“No kidding.”
“The Precursors are the originators.”
“According to most major religions, yes.”
“According to history.”
She looks up at me carefully. The sarcasm fades from her face, leaving intelligence without armor. “Ghar, history is just what survives long enough to intimidate people.”
The words anger me because they are too close to things I have feared in silence. I look back at the inscription. Children shaped after the First Architects. The phrasing presses against old teachings, old songs, old certainties spoken in training yards while young warriors learned to bleed without complaint. We were told the Precursors seeded the galaxy. We were told all species carried their design. We were told jalshagar existed because souls were patterned to recognize their other half across the stars.
