Page 125 of She Who Devours the Stars

She huffed, a sound that tried to be disdainful but got lost in the humidity. “You’re sweating myth. You know that, right?”

“Don’t kinkshame.”

She licked her thumb and wiped a stripe from my cheek, then sucked it clean. Her pupils dilated. “You taste like battery acid and regret.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That tracks.”

Somewhere in the city, another mythic alarm went off, deep and low, the kind of sound that made you want to hide under the nearest load-bearing surface. Dyris ignored it. I ignored it harder. The Tower had survived worse, and so had we.

We clinked glasses, which made a noise like two planets colliding.

“Last time you said we’d lay low for a day,” Dyris reminded me.

“Technically, this is a form of laying,” I said.

She sipped, eyes hooded. “I hate you.”

“Tell me again in five minutes,” I murmured, licking the salt off the rim of my glass. “I’ll see if it takes.”

She leaned over and kissed me, a slow drag of tongue and teeth, her hand in my hair, gentle at first, then pulling tight. The sweat on her chest tasted like the ocean, and something underneath—metallic, not blood, but not not blood. I dug my nails into her thigh, left a row of red, then let go.

She grinned, sharp. “You’re bored.”

“Not possible.”

“You’re plotting.”

I shrugged, which made her glass spill a little onto my skin. She licked it off without breaking eye contact.

I wanted to say something clever, but at that exact moment, the main doors to the pool deck slammed open with the kind of force that meant either security breach or incoming disaster. Or both. I turned my head, but the lights were too bright—everything afterimage and noise. For a second, I thought it might be a hallucination, a ghost of someone I’d let down.

It wasn’t.

Alyx stood in the doorway, arms up, hair wild and glittering with the mythic residue that said she’d been awake for at least seventy hours. Her tank top was twisted, stained with something that looked like blue ink but probably wasn’t, and the shorts she wore had clearly lost a fight with a broken elevator panel. She was barefoot, one ankle bandaged, eyes wide and so full of life it made my own heart skip.

She looked straight at us and screamed, “I’m healed!”

Dyris and I raised our glasses in unison.

“Congrats, babe,” I said, deadpan. “Margarita?”

Alyx didn’t answer. She ran straight toward the pool, ripped the tank over her head, and cannonballed into the center with a splash that sent salt and mythic foam everywhere.

Dyris flinched, but only a little. I laughed, full-throated, and set my glass on the floor. “She’s gonna get it in her eyes,” I said.

“She likes it rough,” Dyris replied, then paused. “You realize this is probably going to break the pool.”

“It’s a feature,” I said.

Alyx surfaced, gasping, hair plastered to her face and shoulders. She blinked twice, spat a mouthful of margarita, and shouted, “It tastes like your kiss!”

She grinned, wiped the foam from her lips, and did a slow, show-offy backstroke to the edge where we lounged. I noticed, for the first time, that the pool itself had started to refract light differently, every ripple echoing in bands of blue and green, with a hint of something white-hot at the very core. It looked like the surface tension was thickening, turning syrupy, as if the pool had just leveled up to a higher state of consciousness and wanted everyone to know.

Dyris watched with interest. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Define ‘supposed,’” I said, but my skin prickled. Not fear—just awareness. Alyx had always been a wildcard, but her resonance signature was off the charts today. I wondered if she’d even noticed, or if this was just the new baseline.

She paddled over, propped her elbows on the edge, and looked up at us. The runnels of liquid traced down her bare chest,highlighting the edge of each rib, the perfect dark line of the tattoo above her heart. She smiled, lazy and real.