Page 114 of She Who Devours the Stars

TECH 3: Shhhh, it’s almost done. Just pray it doesn’t make espresso again.

[PERC emits faint mythic hum, room temperature rises 6 degrees, minor reality distortion detected]

TECH 1: Is it…purring?

TECH 2: Shut up. Don’t look at it. Just let it finish or we’re all dead.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Archive Overflow Halls, Eventide

After last night, the only thing I was running on was borrowed caffeine and the certainty that someone, somewhere, had it worse.

The Archive Overflow was empty this time of morning. Not just underpopulated, but spiritually vacant, like even the air haddecided to clock out and let the light handle things for a while. My boots squeaked on the polished synthstone, echoing so loud I half-expected the System to page me for a disturbance. But nobody cared. Nobody ever did.

I wasn’t supposed to be here. Not officially. I’d said I needed a printout from the calibration logs, but the truth was, I was hunting for evidence that last night hadn’t just happened in my own, very broken head.

That’s when I saw her.

Aenna Caith, red-haired, green-eyed, her face in permanent “about to get electrocuted by science” mode. She stood at the intersection of three shadowless corridors, hands full of blue-ink papers, a ring of resonance projectors flickering around her like a personal halo. The girl looked like she hadn’t slept in a week, and her AR glasses were fogged with condensation, which didn’t even seem possible unless you were actively trying to die.

She didn’t see me at first, too busy muttering to herself. It was only when I got within a few meters that she whipped around and nearly dropped her whole life onto the floor.

“Shit—Trivane.” She scrambled, catching the documents against her chest, scattering half the projection array in the process.

I put my hands up, like “don’t shoot, I come in peace.” “Didn’t mean to startle,” I said.

She blinked a few times, like she was updating her internal firmware to the concept of Fern Trivane in real space.

“It’s fine,” she said, voice thin but running at triple speed. “I was—um. It doesn’t matter. Did you know the waveform from last night hasn’t collapsed yet? It’s still echoing up in South Tower. The Systems are—”

She stopped. Her eyes slid to my wrist, then to my hair, then back to my wrist. “You’re still leaking resonance,” she whispered. “I can see it. That’s—”

She reached out, then yanked her hand back, then reached again and let her fingertips hover over the air between us.

I didn’t move. It felt like a trap, but a nice one.

Her fingers brushed my knuckle, and I felt it, the same mythic jolt that had fried the city. It was smaller, finer, but just as sharp, just as invasive. Like someone had attached fishing line to my bones and was reeling me in, centimeter by centimeter.

Aenna shivered, her glasses fogging more. “That’s not… supposed to happen. Secondary phase shift isn’t contagious. Unless you’re… unless we’re…”

She pulled her hand away and shook it out, like she’d touched an old, angry ghost.

I looked at her, really looked: hair sticking out in two tangled braids, face bright with sweat, cheeks gone the color of a dying sun. There was a wet patch on her chest, and for a second I thought she’d spilled a drink, but then I realized she was just sweating through her shirt.

I grinned, because I couldn’t help it. “You good?”

She nodded, too fast, then shook her head. “No? I mean yes? I’ve never—”

She looked at the floor, then at me, then at my hand, which I’d left floating in her direction because it felt right.

Aenna mumbled, “I ran simulations all night. I thought it was a glitch, but then the resonance flagged your signature, and the systems said ‘vector overlap’ and I—” She trailed off, cheeks somehow getting even redder.

I was about to make a joke, something about the dangers of dating within your mythic tier, when she blurted, “I think we’re connected.”

The words hit me harder than the echo. “That’s a hell of a pickup line,” I said.

She covered her face. “Sorry. That was, gods, I’m so bad at this. I just wanted to say, if you ever needed, if you ever wanted to compare—” She flapped her hands, like that would fill in the blank. “I’m here. For you. Or to study you. Or be studied by you... Or just for the data.”