Page 124 of She Who Devours the Stars

Dax shrugged, the universal gesture of “not your fault, kid.” “You broke what was already cracked. The rest is just… follow-through.”

I looked at them, at the mess of us, at the way their fingers intertwined on the cushion next to mine. “What if I can’t fix it? What if I just keep making it worse?”

Velline ruffled my hair. “Then you make it interesting.”

Dax grinned. “And you let your parents say, ‘That’s our girl.’”

I laughed, which felt strange and good.

We sat like that for another forever, the world outside the fake window flickering with the aurora of a mythic storm, the tacos cooling on the tray, the couch slowly eating us alive.

Finally, Velline got up, stretched, and announced, “We’re not done here. Next time, we do it for real. With better drinks.” She looked at Dax, who nodded in solemn agreement.

I hugged them both, let their warmth soak into my bones. When I pulled back, Velline kissed my forehead, and Dax ruffled my hair, and I almost started crying, but didn’t.

“You can’t break what was never meant to stay whole,” Dax said, and it was the wisest, dumbest thing I’d ever heard.

“Is that your yoga wisdom?” I asked.

He shrugged again. “Or just an old punk’s.”

Velline rolled her eyes. “It’s a Meldin thing. You’ll get it eventually.”

I doubted it, but maybe that was the point.

They let me go, and I stood at the threshold, looking back at the family I’d been so sure I’d lost, and realized the simulation didn’t matter. This was real.

Outside, the world was ending, or beginning, or both.

Inside, I was home.

Even if it was just for one more night.

I smiled, reached for another taco, and braced myself for the next disaster.

But this time, I knew who would be waiting when I came back.

My family, weird and unbreakable and alive.

Me, too.

Chapter 17: The Margarita Pool Incident

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

They called it a “margarita pool” but that was an insult to both physics and tequila. The surface was a quarter-meter thick, bright enough to bleach your retinas, and curved in toward the center like an inverted planet’s gravity well. Someone had rimmed the entire thing in a three-meter-wide ring of crushed salt and engineered the resonance jets to send perfect beads of moisture skimming over the edge every forty seconds. Occasionally, the “water” splashed upward and hovered in midair, vibrating like it was testing the viscosity of the local atmosphere before shattering into confetti and rejoining the main event. In theory, you could swim in it. In practice, you just let yourself float and waited for the universe to invent new forms of pleasure.

I was already on my second glass.

My legs dangled off the lounger, left arm stretched and pink from the last mythic event, and I’d lost my shirt somewhere between the first bottle and the last time Dyris tried to teach me how to “properly” lick salt from a collarbone. She lay nextto me, topless, one leg thrown over mine like a lazy manacle. Her lips were a mess—salt, citrus, a little blood from an argument I’d already forgotten. The suit she wore was the color of blackout, tailored to reveal nothing except the exact outline of everything. It was the best thing I’d ever stolen, which was saying something.

The lights overhead were shattered, but we didn’t need them. Every so often, the pool would pulse, sending mythic feedback into the surrounding air and making the surface of our skin glow as if we’d been shotgunned with bioluminescence. If I squinted, I could see Dyris’s pulse lighting up the veins in her neck: not quite human, not quite legend, but more alive than anyone else I’d ever met.

“Still with me?” she asked, barely moving her head.

“Define ‘with,’” I replied. I ran my tongue along her jaw, collecting a rim of salt she’d missed. “Is this a check-in, or are you trying to see if I’ll say something emotional before noon?”