Page 13 of She Who Devours the Stars

Kall’s hands shook. “That’s not possible. House Trivane is dormant.”

“A myth,” Olaric said, but he was already moving, punching up the command chain. “Quarantine protocol, now. Dump the core, isolate the array, and lock this block down tight.”

The lights flickered. Not the ordinary flicker, the kind you got when the generators switched to backup. This was a deliberate, old-school warning. Every panel in the block went black, then flashed a single symbol in dead white:

NULLARCH [ACTIVE?]

For a moment, no one said anything. Kall’s whole life boiled down to that moment of silence, the hum in his teeth, the way even the floor seemed to shudder in anticipation.

The alarm went off, so loud it knocked him back in the chair. Shutters snapped down over every viewport. The doors slammed with a hiss and the cold, antiseptic taste of security foam flooded the vents.

Olaric’s comm buzzed, high-priority. He barked a command, too fast for Kall to catch. Gintz had gone a color usually reserved for the terminally ill.

“Is this real?” Kall whispered. “Did we just—”

“We didn’t do shit,” Olaric snarled, sweat beading on his bald scalp. “The Accord did this. The Accord’s been waiting for this. And now we’re in the middle.”

The Nullarch signal, whatever it was, was no longer rising. It was holding steady, burning so hot it saturated the local spectrum. Kall could see the afterimages burned into his retinas, could feel the heat of it behind his ribs.

“What’s the protocol?” Gintz asked, voice barely audible over the sirens.

Olaric grimaced. “You know the stories, right? What happens to people who work the Trivane events?”

Kall nodded, throat dry. “You either get promoted so fast your brain fries… or you disappear. Sometimes both.”

“Good,” Olaric said, with the cold smile of someone who had already written them all off as casualties. “Let’s find out which one we are.”

The lockdown was total. Emergency bands were jammed, but Kall’s screen still blinked with status updates: cross-reference toTrivane mythdata, acceleration of perimeter protocols, the word “oblivion” appearing in more than one official warning.

Somewhere deep in the building, a door exploded open. Security goons in full Accord blue stormed the corridor, pulling terrified techs from their stations and herding them toward the evac lifts.

Kall stood up, wobbling. “Do we go?”

Olaric looked at him, then at the screen, then at the marching security. He shook his head. “We ride it out. Someone’s got to log the end of the world.”

Kall sat back down, staring at the pulse of the Nullarch signal as it began to resolve into a pattern. A voice, maybe, or a name. He thought, for a moment, it sounded almost like a girl he’d known once, back before he realized the galaxy didn’t care about feelings.

The lights cut out. All that remained was the hum, and the flash of that impossible signature, burning through every system, demanding to be noticed.

He noticed. He always had.

He typed the words into the log, just in case anyone survived to read it:

Nullarch reactivated. Accord unprepared.

And then, for the first time in his life, Technician Kall was afraid.

Thread Modulation: General Cadris,

Axis Alignment: Accord High Command, Tenevar System(formerly OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb).

The conference suite at Accord High Command’s Blacksite Data Relay wasn’t technically on any blueprint, which explained both the lack of windows and the faint smell of sacrificial bleach. The centerpiece was a table the size of a cargo lifter, surrounded byholodisplays, emergency shunt panels, and a cluster of live feeds that looked like the world’s worst security cam montage.

Twelve people were present, not counting the pair of resonance monks levitating in the corner, their tattoos pulsing in time with the panic in the room.

The woman at the head of the table was called General Cadris, but everyone addressed her as Ma’am, even when she was absent. Her face was half beauty, half fatigue, eyes the color of a midnight news crawl. She’d outlived three reform cycles and a dozen coup attempts, and the rumor was that she’d once personally overseen the suppression of a Sovereign-class threat using nothing but a stapler and her bare hands.

She spoke first, voice clipped and dry. “Status on the anomaly?”