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“You really did, buddy.”

His smile deepens by a fraction, and the sight feels almost obscene in a room full of catastrophe. The old Anita would have made a joke and run three emotional miles away. This Anita, apparently, has been through enough cosmic horror to discover that vulnerability does not actually kill you on contact.

I breathe him in, smoke and metal and warm scales and something steady beneath all the ruin. “If we live through this, what do we do?”

His gaze searches mine. “You mean after we prevent the oldest archive in existence from becoming either a weapon or rubble?”

“Yeah. After that small administrative task.”

He looks past me for a second, toward the lower corridor where Brakk’s amber escape route flickers. “We find sunlight.”

My chest tightens.

“Real sunlight,” he says. “Not excavation lamps. Not archive glow.”

“That sounds nice.”

“We find a room where you can cover every surface with notes and deny that the piles have become dangerous.”

“They will be organized piles.”

“They will be geological events.”

“Rude but plausible.”

His hand slides to mine, fingers folding around mine with careful strength. “We build a place where truth is handled with care, not fear. Where questions are not worshiped, but not buried under bodies either.”

My throat aches. “That’s a big dream for two people who currently have one angry mechanic, one traumatized Pi’Rell, and an escape route held together by profanity.”

“Good foundations are often humble.”

“Did you just call Brakk humble?”

Brakk’s voice bounces across the chamber. “I heard my name, and if anyone is volunteering me for anything philosophical, I refuse!”

Ghar looks toward him. “He strengthens my argument.”

I laugh, and this time the sound comes easier.

Then the archive screams.

The silver threads around the interface whip outward. Sira cries out as Rolaev ’s destruction key punches through the outer stabilizing layer. The projection tiers buckle, collapsing toward the central hollow. Full origin records flare dangerously bright, too much information pressing against the chamber’s containment like a flood against cracked glass.

Sira staggers. “Anita!”

Reality returns with teeth.

I pull away from Ghar, but his hand stays in mine until the last possible second.

“Go,” he says.

I look at him, and for once leaving his side does not feel like emotional retreat. It feels like partnership. He will hold the line. I will hold the archive. We are not dividing ourselves; we are extending the same choice in different directions.

“Come back,” I say.

“I am fighting toward that.”

“Good answer.”