Page 11 of She Who Devours the Stars

Perc chirped. “You are not alone.”

I nodded. “I know.”

From somewhere below, the chant rose again, louder this time, carrying on the wind:

“Nullarch. Nullarch. Nullarch.”

I closed my eyes.

Maybe I was a weapon, or a joke.

Either way, I was the Black Hole Girl.

Thread Modulation: Velline Meldin

Axis Alignment: Meldin Family Apartment.

I have survived three apartment fires, two civil lockdowns, and the entire third season of "Petty Crimes of the Goldslick" without ever letting my eyeliner smudge. That was my reputation: Velline Meldin, disaster mom with a vision board, laugh lines, and zero regrets. I wasn't caught off guard. Not ever.

Until that night, 23rdof the Quanta of Ruin, when the building shivered like it knew something I didn't.

We lived three blocks from the bay district, stacked high in a prefab that moaned every time the wind so much as threatened to get personal. Dax was on the floor, drinking straight from a bottle of what the label insisted was synth-whiskey, while I patched into the local drone feed and tried to keep the bastards from rerouting my surveillance bot to some smuggler’s joyride. A typical midweek.

The tremor hit so deep it bypassed the glassware and went straight for the marrow. My hands stopped on the keyboard. The console lights blurred, and I felt the air do something I had no words for, like a pressure drop, but in the part of the soul reserved for gut instincts and parental dread. Dax looked up at me, eyes wide and shining with dread. We both froze.

The moment stretched. I counted my pulse. It came back slow, but wrong. We’d both worked orbital maintenance before; we both knew the difference between structural and existential threat. This was the latter.

Then, as if someone had scheduled the apocalypse for primetime, the Accord Public Address System blipped into life with a melody that always sounded like it was one octave away from a mass grave.

"Attention, residents of Sector B," the voice said, a smile digitally painted on every syllable. "Routine calibration in progress. Please remain indoors until further notice. Minimize all movement, communication, and narrative entanglement."

Dax snorted, but it came out strangled. He got up too fast, spilling whiskey on the floor, and yanked the blackout drapes. The old muscle memory of duck-and-cover. It was useless against most things, but we did it anyway.

I turned back to my console, which was now pulsing with alerts in colors I’d never seen. Red was for fire, orange for containment breach, yellow for "someone forgot to feed the reactor rats." These were purple, the color the Accord only used when they couldn't think of a metaphor strong enough to warn you.

Three notifications stacked in the center of my vision. First: "MYTHIC-LEVEL CONTAINMENT BREACH — NULLARCH EVENT, STATUS UNCONFIRMED." Second: "CIVILIAN ZONE LOCKDOWN — AUTHORITY OVERRIDE." Third: "OFFICIAL-UNOFFICIAL CHANNEL — If you are receiving this, stay in your apartment. Do not investigate. Do not interfere. Do not look directly at her if you value your continuity."

My palms left wet spots on the console. Dax struggled with standing still, so he paced behind me instead, and asked, voice raw, "That wasn’t her… right?"

I opened my mouth to lie, and nothing came out. Not even a joke. Not even a curse. I turned in my chair and looked at him, really looked, and the whole universe got small enough to fit in his haunted, bloodshot eyes.

He sat down hard on the edge of the kitchen counter. "Cool. So we’re already at narrative entanglement. Great. Next step is what? Full-blown mythic recursion?"

"Uh, casual inversion?" I fumbled, but I couldn’t focus. Fern, my Fern, had always been a disaster, but never the sort that killed people.

Dax stared at the ceiling. "You ever just… statistically not exist for a second? 'Cause I feel like I just did."

He drank, no glass this time.

I whispered it anyway: "Oh, good. Existential crisis o’clock."

Dax didn’t say anything. He just poured more whiskey, hands steady for the first time all night.

We sat like that for what felt like an entire Quanta, the silence between us thick enough to suffocate. He leaned back, staring at nothing, and finally muttered, "Big mood."

Chapter 2: Disappearance = Terror

Thread Modulation: Kall Drennic, Accord Analyst