Page 3 of Alien Assassin's Heir

The past is dead.

The past is dust on the viewport and echoes in an empty hallway.

And I won’t let it take anything else from me. Especially nother.

The crèche smellslike warm plastiform floors and overripe fruit. The kind of sticky, cloying scent that clings to your skin even after you’ve scrubbed yourself raw.

I linger by the entrance longer than I should, Solie’s small hand still curled around mine. She’s not quite ready to let go, and neither am I.

“Do I have to go today?” she asks, tipping her head back to squint up at me. Her bangs flop in her eyes. I brush them aside and nod.

“Yes, baby. Mama’s got a lot of orders to process today.”

She scrunches her nose. “Boring orders?”

“The boringest,” I say with a tired smile. “Go on. Maybe draw me another robot who sings.”

She snorts and skips forward, twirling as she moves through the auto-scan and into the crèche. The attendant gives me a polite nod, barely glancing at the bio-readout. Good. I’ve done everything I can to make sure Solie scans human—modified medfiles, skin overlays, neural dampeners. It won’t hold forever. But it only needs to hold long enough.

I watch her join the others. She runs into a pack of kids playing with modular blocks, their laughter bouncing off the plastiform walls. Solie laughs, too. Loud and sweet and unburdened.

So normal.

So safe.

But I know it’s a lie.

She isn’t normal. She’s a miracle stitched together from half-truths and bloodlines no one should ever mix. Her skin has started flaking again—scales rising beneath like gold-etched armor when she’s scared or angry. Last week, I found her curled in bed with her fingernails hardened into claws. She didn’t cry. She just looked at me and asked, “Mama, am I sick?”

I lied. Like I always do.

I told her it was growing pains. A normal part of becoming a “big girl.” She nodded like she believed me. But I saw the doubt in her eyes.

The guilt hits me again, sharp and nauseating. I wrap my arms around myself, watching her laugh, watching her glow. I want to bottle this moment. I want to freeze time. But even standing here, just outside the crèche’s walls, I can feel the cracks forming in the lie I’ve built.

Solie deserves the truth. But what truth can I give her that won’t destroy us both?

The door chimes again. Another parent enters, brushing dust from her sleeves, her face drawn and tired in the way all frontier parents are. I nod, stepping aside, already turning back toward the heat-rippled street.

Outside, the wind kicks up, scattering grit across my boots and whipping the hem of my jacket around my knees. The twin suns hang high in the copper-blue sky, casting long, harsh shadows across the outpost’s rust-colored buildings. My datapad buzzes with a new alert—shipment from Coretra due intoday. Fabrication deck wants override codes. Droids flagged the chassis welds again.

I sigh and start the walk back, boots crunching on gravel and broken shellstone.

It’s just another day in exile.

That night,the world softens.

The winds die down. The outpost goes quiet. Even the droids hum lower, their maintenance cycles kicking in.

I’m sitting cross-legged on the couch in our cramped little housing unit, Solie wrapped in a faded blanket next to me, one arm slung over her stuffed starwhale. We just finished our usual round of storytime—today’s pick was “Luna Lancer and the Sky Fortress,” which she made me do voices for. I can’t say no to that face, even when she asks me to do the cranky old AI with the squelchy voice that shreds my throat.

She yawns and leans against me, all soft limbs and sleep-warm skin.

And then she says it.

“Mama… why don’t I have a daddy?”

It’s so casual. So innocent. So fatal.