Page 133 of She Who Devours the Stars

The first rule of mythic diagnostics was: don’t get attached to the readings. They lie, they mutate, and if you let them, they’ll drag your narrative into the mud right along with the subject’s. That was why I preferred to scan Fern when she was unconscious, or better, comatose, but today I’d have to settle for “vaguely vertical” and “smiling like a convicted arsonist at her parole hearing.”

The second rule was: never, ever trust the baseline.

I was halfway through my third pass with the portable resonance grid when Alyx, arms full of towels, burst onto the balcony with the force of a minor coup. She wore the same clothes as yesterday, possibly because she hadn’t changed, perhaps because she now believed in one-day fashion cycles as a hedge against existential fatigue. She dropped the towels, then bellowed, “Fern, you promised to help if the pool got weird again!”

“It’s not weird, it’s historic,” Fern said, not looking up from the rail where she sat, legs dangling over more than a dozen stories of insured disaster. She hadn’t bothered to dry her hair, so the damp tendrils glowed where the sun hit them, every strand lit up like a war banner. “Let the record show: margarita pool still floats, still spins, still attracts only the best mythic talent.”

Alyx glared at her. “You told me it wouldn’t—”

“—spontaneously generate a mythic signature on low sleep,” Fern finished, “and I was correct. Technically, it was generated on no sleep. Science marches on.”

I tried to ignore them, but it was like tuning out a fire alarm because you’re busy microwaving batteries. I’d been at this for an hour, and the results got less plausible by the minute. Thegrid was no help. Its little diagnostic eyes whirred, its needles danced in half-circles, and every so often it beeped a warning that could only be described as “existentially distressed.”

Aenna Caith was the source of the problem. She floated in the margarita pool’s central gyre, arms out, face blank, one toe just brushing the surface. If she had ever been conscious, she was now in a state best described as “cosmically adjourned.” She glowed faint blue, the kind of blue you only get from a nova in its teens or a drunk who’s managed to rupture her reality three days in a row… or if you absorbed far too much of Fern’s mythfire.

I paced a tight circle around the balcony, reading and re-reading the diagnostics. On the sixth revolution, I finally cracked.

“Resonance is off the charts,” I said, voice clipped. “You didn’t just bind her. You bound… something. Multiple somethings. New.”

Fern stretched, made a show of examining her nails. “Aren’t you proud?”

I scowled. “I’m concerned about the systemic consequences.”

She grinned, wicked and beautiful. “That’s your way of saying you’re proud.”

Alyx, now balancing on the lip of the pool with a towel over her shoulder, looked from Fern to Aenna, then to me. “I tried to talk to her. She’s not—” Alyx made a looping gesture with her finger. “She’s not in there.”

“She is,” Fern said. “She’s just busy.”

Alyx scowled. “With what?”

Fern shrugged. “Being legendary. It’s a full-time job.”

I made the mistake of trying to use logic. “She should have crashed hours ago. Her echo signature is cycling at seventy percent above tier, and her vitals—”

Alyx cut in, “She’s alive, right?”

“As alive as any of us,” I admitted.

Fern’s eyes glittered. “See? She’s fine.”

There was a brief, beautiful silence, the kind that only exists in the seconds before a catastrophe realizes it’s late for an appointment.

Then Fern said, “I got crabs!”

Alyx dropped her towel. I dropped the scanner. The universe, for a moment, stopped.

Fern watched our faces, let the line land, then rolled her eyes. “Not literal crabs. M1. The Crab Nebula. We’re both resonating it.”

I snatched up the scanner, recalibrated, and stared. Fern was right: the waveform was spiking on the M1 channel. Aenna’s body was a live wire, signature clear as day.

I pressed a thumb to my temple. “You pulled her into a full celestial override. That’s—”

“A first?” Fern said, voice so smug I wanted to punch it. “Go ahead. Say it. History. You’re not the only one who gets to write it anymore.”

I didn’t trust my hands not to shake, so I set the scanner down. “What did you gain?”

Fern’s eyes locked on mine. She didn’t break eye contact, not for a second. Instead, she slid one hand down her front, tracing the line of her torso, the movement slow enough to make it clear she knew we were both watching. When her palm reached herabdomen, the skin there flared blue-white. The wounds from the last “event”, bruises, shallow cuts, the kind of mythic debris field you pick up just from being near Fern, all healed over, skin knitting shut, blood flow resuming in a neat, mythlogic spiral.