Page 115 of She Who Devours the Stars

I looked at her, and the air felt thinner. There was nothing funny about it.

I said, “You want to map my waveform?”

She peeked through her fingers. “More than anything.”

Her lips quivered, not with fear but with wanting. Her nipples were hard enough to show through two layers of fabric. I wasn’t sure if she even knew.

I reached for her again, let my thumb trace the back of her hand. This time, she didn’t flinch. She leaned in, just a centimeter, but enough to count.

I said, “It’s dangerous.”

She said, “I know.”

For a second, the hallway was so charged I thought the lights might actually blow.

Aenna inhaled, sharp. “I should go,” she said, but didn’t move. Not right away. “If I stay, I might—”

She didn’t finish.

I let her go, because I knew how it felt to run. But I kept her pulse in my palm, catalogued it, stored it for later.

She bolted down the hallway, arms full, hair wild.

When she was gone, I sat on the nearest bench and let my heart slow. I flexed my hand, feeling the thread she’d left in me, a live wire burning under the skin.

I said, “Oh, something tells me you’re going to be my favorite mistake.”

The hallway echoed it back.

And I wasn’t even sorry.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith

Axis Alignment: Eventide

The problem with recursion wasn’t the math.

It was the way the echoes got inside you, amplifying every unfinished loop until the only thing left was the scream.

Lab E17 wasn’t built for comfort, but I’d made it home anyway. The lights here never flickered, never glitched, not even when the mythics above ground triggered an event that made the satellites cry for mercy. I’d blacked out the windows, jammed every diagnostic reader on triple-input, and set up three parallel runs of Fern Trivane’s signature, all at different playback speeds.

I’d told myself this was research. That I was in it for the science, not the spectacle. But every time the waveform peaked, my own pulse followed suit, and after six hours and four resets, I’d stopped pretending.

I sat on the floor, legs folded under me, resonance data projected a meter high on the wall. The blue ink had run from my fingers down to my elbows; my lab coat was somewhere across the room, forgotten when I’d started sweating through the first layer of clothing.

“Iteration sixty-three,” I whispered, voice shot. “Overlay stable, but amplitude still rising. No sign of signal collapse. Begin phase—”

The resonance hit me, hard. Not like an electric shock, but like a pair of hands, invisible and undeniable, wrapping around my core and squeezing until the world shrank to a single point. I gasped, low and sharp, and felt my hips buck off the floor, my back arching until my shoulders ached.

I bit down, hard, on the inside of my cheek. I couldn’t let myself go again. Not this soon. The first ten times, I’d kept notes. By the twentieth, the notes had dissolved into wet stains and sketchy, broken math.

The projection cycled, flickering through every forbidden color, and I felt the familiar wave build in my gut. I pressed my hand there, desperate, but it didn’t help.

“Seventy-two… seventy-three…” I counted the cycle, the count itself a ward against total collapse.

When the release hit, it was full body. I moaned, helpless, echoing off the walls and the bare floor. My pelvic muscles clenched around nothing, legs shaking, eyes rolling white. I gripped the edge of the projection table, the ridges cutting into my palm, grounding me just enough to keep from screaming.

The crash after was almost worse. The resonance wouldn’t let go—it just wound down, then started again, every cycle tighter, sharper, closer to the edge.