I was thoroughly disoriented by the time we alighted on top of a very familiar roof. I might not say I was dizzy or nauseous, but I was definitely at least a little bit stirred up. This was probably similar to how that bald cultist guy felt when I carried him away from the top of the main engineering building. The major difference was that I was being carried by a clothed, human-shaped person and not riding bareback on a big metal creature. I really didn't envy a ride like that. To be fair, though, he was the one who asked in the first place.

  Once we were at our destination, Saber just fucking dropped me. Even I had been a bit more considerate with my passenger than that, and I wasn't some housecat who was prepared to just twist the right way around and land on some dainty little paws. I was in a princess carry, which meant she dropped me straight onto my back—onto gravel.

  Ugh. This fucking bitch. Rolling over and getting up, I took a moment to stretch and dust myself off. Some particularly small and sharp rocks were loosely stuck to me, so I had to brush them off. God. What kind of person does something like that? It was beyond psychotic in almost any situation. Unless I was deliberately trying to injure someone in a fight, even I wouldn't have done something like that, which was admittedly already a super low bar. The fact that I had awakened as a Tier 3 Anathema didn't really make it that much better.

  I pretty quickly realized there was one other person on the roof, and they were also a Tier 8 Star Guardian. Dad. It didn't take long for me to realize that he looked way more annoyed than normal. Even when he didn't want to bother with something or decided to just brush past social norms, he was still a generally easy-going kind of guy. Right now, though, he looked mildly pissed off, which was a pretty strong word to use for him.

  Dad marched over to us with a scowl painted across his face. Glaring at Saber, he worked his jaw for a few seconds before shaking his head and sort of throwing his hands up. Turning to me, he ran a hand through his hair and visibly calmed himself down. "Right. Sorry about that, Alex. I wanted to discuss some things with you, but I was going to wait for you to return home on your own." He shot an irritated look at Saber again, but the other Star Guardian didn't seem bothered. "I had no intention of forcibly dragging you back here before you were ready."

  Saber didn't say anything or so much as acknowledge any of what he just said, even though I was certain she was paying full attention. I was starting to suspect that was typical. Are all the super duper strong Star Guardians off their rocker in some way or another? I sure hoped not.

  Returning my attention to my dad, I shrugged. "It's fine. Katherine is probably going to be pretty worried, but I'm fine."

  For a moment, the irritation crawling under my dad's skin started to fade, only to come rushing back not a moment later. Shooting another look at Saber, he scowled. "Did you seriously just snatch her away without any warning?"

  Saber tilted her head—the most expressive action I'd seen from the masked woman yet—but she didn't look like she was going to say anything, so I took it upon myself to answer the question. "Yeah, that's pretty much what she did."

  "Figures," Dad scoffed. Shaking his head again, he started guiding me towards the stair access. "Regardless, it's well past the time I ought to have shared some things with you." Gee, you don't say? I wanted to snark at him. I held my tongue, though. A nervous thrill was starting to work its way up my spine, and my thoughts soon turned cautiously optimistic. Is he really going to actually explain things to me, now? It was simultaneously as hard to imagine him actually telling me anything as it was to keep my hopes from rising too much.

  We climbed the two flights down to the penthouse proper in silence. Dad started heading straight for my bedroom, but that probably wasn't the best place to have our little meeting in its current state. The shattered window was technically sealed over with a temporary covering, but the whole room was a construction area right now, and I had moved over to the guest room in the meantime. So, that was where I led him.

  Most of my stuff was still in the other room, but the most important essentials were here, like my desktop, laptop, and new keyboard. The last was a new addition, something I'd bought online several days ago. I got it to help with my voice practice.

  While in theory I should be able to replicate any arbitrary mixture of sounds with my voice alone, I wasn't quite there yet—that was the entire reason for practicing in the first place. I wanted to be able to play chords and other accompaniments for myself without having to actually voice them at the same time. Technically, I could just play some backing on my computer or phone, but that didn't give me much control. The keyboard was a convenient middle ground, where I could control the overall output while not having to worry about literally synthesising the actual sound myself.

  It also helped me learn music theory properly instead of 'cheating' by easily mimicking any particular melody or chord voicing purely by ear and voice. That was something I was starting to develop an interest in purely for its own sake.

  My dad swept his gaze over the whole room, seemingly taking note of everything. His eye lingered on the keyboard, actually, which made me think that he thought that—he interrupted my theorizing with a question. "That's new, right?"

  I nodded. "Yeah. I only got it a few days ago."

  He also nodded. "Does that have anything to do with chamelium mimicry?"

  Ah. Straight to the point. I didn't mind, though. He already knew, I already knew that he knew, and he clearly had no intention of harming me. I actually appreciated his bluntness in this instance. "Yeah, it is. I couldn't just mimic anything immediately—I've been having to teach myself how to do it. I actually had a bit of trouble sounding like a normal human again at first." I shrugged. "It hasn't been hard to figure out, so far, but it wasn't like it was completely effortless, you know?"

  "Huh." He actually rubbed his chin as he pondered the information. "That's interesting."

  I got the feeling that he was legitimately interested in it. Which makes sense, of course—I couldn't forget that I was almost undoubtedly some kind of experiment, and my dad was naturally a very intellectual, systems-over-people sort, and he was in the process of almost finishing a master's degree in information theory and thermodynamics when the first incursions struck and he was chosen as one of the first wave of Star Guardians.

  He even went and finished the degree after things settled down, because he was the kind of guy who genuinely cared a lot about learning and wasn't just there for the diploma. I actually read his old thesis a few years ago—pretty dry stuff, obviously, but something about the experience itself was honestly pretty cool.

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  He'd also double majored during his undergrad years, obtaining bachelor's degrees in both math and 'evolutionary microbiology,' of all things. Honestly, that second one was a weirdly specific thing for undergrad, right?

  My train of thought snagged against a sudden connection and completely derailed. Wait, wait—holy shit, that's actually—I felt like I was about to fall over, and I took a steadying breath. I had no idea if my dad was saying something, because I felt like I'd finally bothered to look at several different pieces again that were now trying to snap together. Information theory and thermodynamics—those two were extremely closely linked, actually, and his thesis had been about analyzing the convergence of early statistical learning models from a thermodynamic point of view. That wasn't really the important thing here, though.

  I remembered a lot of it had been about projections between nonlinear, high dimensional vector spaces. That obviously made him well-equipped to study things like breaches—something I probably should have already pieced together, now that I thought about it—and it also fits super well with his actual abilities, right? The more that I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed.

  But that wasn't all. Evolutionary microbiology—I wasn't sure what to do with that specifically, but the 'biology' part alone was telling. Combine that first part with an interest in biology, and...

  I felt like I'd finally worked out some obvious insight into how he ended up raising a literal Anathema as a daughter. 'Raising' might be a strong word for it, but regardless, it was more than a bit strange. Contextualizing it with his prior research interests, though—okay, it's not like it makes my situation completely inevitable, but there's pretty much no way it's not related, right? I was definitely going to ask him about it, assuming he let me get the chance to. That also reminded me that he was still in the room with me right now—and we were supposed to be having an important discussion.

  Snapping back to the present, I realized he was just waiting patiently and silently. I coughed into my fist. "Sorry. I just got caught up thinking about something."

  "You looked like you were deep in thought," he acknowledged, "so I didn't want to bother you."

  How considerate, I smirked in my head. He definitely had a tendency to be strangely patient and impatient at the same time—in a sense, it was like someone took a naturally very patient fellow and then gave him zero tolerance for a bunch of random, normal person stuff. Weird, but I feel like I get it, to be honest.

  "Anyway," he said, doing that stupid hand clapping thing he always did, "as I said, we have some very important things to discuss, and frankly, it's well past the time I would have liked to have done it."

  I frowned as he started walking over to the window. What do you mean by that? I didn't see why he couldn't have just—you know, maybe actually be involved in my life? He was obviously busy, and also very important, but I was literally his daughter, or, at the very least, an absolutely insane kind of experiment. I also wondered what he was doing by going over to the window and shutting all the blinds. Obviously, he didn't want anyone to be able to see into our room, as unlikely as that was in the first place. Is he really that paranoid? You can't even eavesdrop through windows better than you can through—oh.

  He did the thing where he ripped a strange, glassy blade straight out of reality. I already knew what to expect when he brought it down in a quick, practiced, vertical slash. Just seconds later, he'd created a portal in the very middle of my temporary bedroom. I wonder where he's taking me? I was admittedly super curious. I wasn't very nervous, because I figured that if he meant me any harm, there was virtually nothing I could do about it anyway.

  He beckoned me over, and we stepped through the portal together.

  I stepped out onto sandy, rust-tinged sands. A thin, anemic wind whipped past us at tremendous speed, yet I somehow barely felt it. It was as if the very air itself had lost all substance.

  Looking around, the landscape as a whole was quite stark and barren—the most deserted place I'd ever been by far, and there was absolutely no sign of even the scrappiest vegetation. It was also shockingly and incongruently cold—and it didn't take me much longer to realize I couldn't breathe.

  Momentarily stunned, I just took in the ground, the impossibly dark sky—filled with more stars than I ever thought possible—and the chilly, rampaging yet insubstantial wind. Holy shit. There's no way. I tried to say something, but in such a thin atmosphere, it was exceedingly challenging, and I soon gave up.

  In a way, I was almost as flabbergasted that I could even survive walking around in this place as I was at the fact that I was there at all. It made a lot more sense when I considered my nature as an Anathema though, as well as the fact that it still wasn't anywhere near comfortable. For a few more moments, I held my breath, and we just continued to stare. Then, we started walking.

  Prior to hatching as a chamelium, I would have an incredibly hard time going so long without proper air, even without accounting for all the other harsh conditions I was currently facing. Now, however, it was bearable. I almost wondered if my regeneration would let me survive without air indefinitely—or, at the very least, as long as I had enough to eat. Either way, it was still pretty uncomfortable.

  We soon made it to a literal house situated in a depression at the top of a small hill. The best way to describe it truly was 'house,' not 'dome,' or 'habitat,' or 'station.' It was certainly equal parts futuristic and utilitarian in some ways, but it also looked way too much like an old, New England home or maybe an uncommonly tasteful Mc-Mansion. There was even an attached greenhouse garden. I soon realized the front porch doubled as an airlock, and one which cycled remarkably quickly.

  Finally, now that we were back under normal Earth atmospheric conditions, I could breathe again—and we could talk.

  I didn't know what I should say, though—this was well and truly beyond the scope of anything I was prepared for—so I just followed him in through the real front door, silent and numb, and not just because of the freezing temperature outside. I already knew where we were, of course, despite how insane it was—but for some reason, I still needed to hear him say it. And he did. Shutting the door and gesturing proudly at his own, actual living area, Dad announced it—and he even did a decent job at it.

  "Welcome to the Red Planet," he all but beamed, "stronghold of the Red Faction—and, unfortunately, the only place you'll ever be truly safe from the Blues."

  Okay, hold up. He was already starting to drop some super important lore on me—I hadn't missed that weird "Red Faction Blue Faction" shit—but I needed a moment to keep taking it all in. I hated to admit it, but part of me was way more interested in seeing where my dad actually lived than in whatever crazy, worldview shattering shit he was about to load on me. Walking further inside, I gravitated to a small end table with a row of family photos on it.

  Dad himself trailed behind me. "Unfortunately—and I really wish this wasn't necessary, but—what I probably need to get out of the way first is that you won't be able to stay here for very long."

  I was barely listening, though. I vaguely nodded along with what he was saying—it was disappointing, but on some level, I already expected it—but what drew most of my attention was the dominant figure in all of the photos. It wasn't me, and it wasn't my dad. For a moment, I just stared. That looks like—wouldn't that mean she's...? My dad fell silent beside me, and we looked at the photos.

  It was Saber.

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