Page 110 of She Who Devours the Stars

Zevelune blinked. Stared at the wall, then at the glass, then at her hand, as if she could catch the ship in a lie.

Then she threw her head back and roared. Full-body laughter. Wine sloshed over her wrist, spilled onto the floor, and evaporated before it hit the plasteel.

“Oh my stars. Two weeks.” She howled again, barely able to breathe. “She did it in two weeks. We’re so fucked.”

Vireleth didn’t respond, but the lights in the ship’s forward corridor dropped a shade, as if even the vessel needed a moment to process it.

Zevelune rolled off the dais, barefoot, robe trailing behind her like a flag of surrender. She paced the length of the bridge, stretching muscles she hadn’t bothered to flex in a century.When she reached the viewport, she stared out at the empty mythspace, the nothing-between-the-stars, and grinned.

“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen,” she said. “She’ll keep escalating. The Accord will try to contain it, but she’s already hacked the rules. The mythics will panic, the Accord will threaten, and the only one who might enjoy the next century is you, Vireleth—because you’re the only one who sees the pattern coming.”

The shimmer in the corner didn’t move. “You think she’s an upgrade?”

Zevelune wagged a finger, enjoying the wordplay. “I think she’s a recursion. And if she survives, the Accord won’t know what hit it.”

She finished her drink, shattered the glass on the deck, and let the fragments sing for a moment before the cleaning drones swept in.

She licked the last drop from her wrist, then keyed the ship for maximum burn.

“Wake me when we’re above Eventide,” she said. “And if you see Fern before I do—tell her I’m bringing her a present.”

Vireleth’s voice was so soft Zevelune almost missed it. “What kind of present?”

Zevelune grinned at her own reflection. “The kind that breaks the world, but leaves her hungry for more.”

She turned from the window, let the hum of the engines shake her bones, and felt the mythic anticipation build as the ship cut through the impossible.

Out there, somewhere, was the kid who’d already rewritten the book on mythics. Zevelune was coming for her. She had no ideawhat she’d do when she got there. But, as always, it would be legendary.

It never occurred to Zevelune to ask Vireleth the same question Vireleth asked her; was Fern an upgrade? In hindsight Zevelune realized Vireleth hadn’t been mourning their mutual lost love, Lioren, for the first time in centuries…

She smiled, wicked and wild, as the stars blurred past.

“Two weeks,” she repeated, savoring it.

And the whole galaxy shivered.

Chapter 15: The Drift Between

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

Gravity didn’t come back for a while.

Not the real kind, not the “keeps you on the floor and your skin attached to your skeleton” kind. The version that returned first was local, messy, and totally obsessed with the girl curled against my shoulder. It was hard to blame it.

Most mornings-after, my body went straight into disaster recovery. Patch the holes, sweep up the myth, check for survivors. Today, all I could manage was to float. I mean that literally: the bedding field had disengaged from the floor, and we were gently orbiting a meter off the mattress, tangled together like the room had decided to start its own personal satellite system and we were payloads one and two.

I could have panicked. I could have tried to break the drift, fight the new vector. Instead, I just let my hands run lazy circles down Dyris’s back, tracing the sweat and the static, counting the vertebrae that didn’t belong to me and never would, and thinking, for the first time in weeks, that maybe the world wasn’t going to end today.

Dyris stirred, blinking up at me with eyes that had forgotten how to be cold. The old ice was gone, replaced by a wild silver that matched the light show outside the windows. Her hair fanned around her face, a curtain of platinum that caught the sun and made her look like she’d been designed to outshine the gods.

She said, “You’re not moving.”

I tried to shrug, but we were both topless, and the friction just made our skin stickier. “There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “Up and down are both off-limits until the room stops rotating.”

She looked past my head. I could feel her brain cataloguing every surface, every angle of escape, before she gave up and pressed her forehead to my jaw.