Page 15 of She Who Devours the Stars

Smoke—thick and sweet, laced with the illegal kind of hallucinogens—curled in from the street. The walls, patchwork slabs of refab and vandalized adboard, were covered in sigils drawn in everything from old lipstick to what looked suspiciously like arterial spray.

At the center, the seer knelt, knees raw against the pitted concrete, hands trembling as she sifted the relics. They were nothing, really: a sliver of memory drive, a broken ring, a strip of faded cloth. But here, in the heart of the Glimmer Zone’s devotional sector, they were as sacred as blood.

She dragged in a breath, the air electric with pre-dawn tension. Her name, once, had been Cerise, but the cult had burned that away. Now, she was just the Seer. The only one who could read the starwinds and survive.

She started the chant, low and careful, so as not to spook the newcomers. The words were ancient, stolen from the bones of dead religions and soldered together with desperation.

The relics began to hum, the memory drive glowing at the edge of visible light. The crowd pressed closer.

Cerise lifted the drive, held it high, and let the resonance move through her. It started slow, like a headache in a forbidden color. Then it hit.

A wall of sound—no, not sound, but the aftertaste of a scream—blew through her skull, flattening thought, flattening self. The vision arrived in pieces: a girl, naked and incandescent, burning with the signature of a collapsed sun. The Seer’s own hands clamped to her ears, and her eyes rolled back so far she saw only the stars inside her head.

The name came then, echoing and impossible.

Fern.

Cerise howled, fell flat, and clawed at the ground until her fingernails tore loose. “She is here!” she shrieked. “Nullarch! The Devourer comes!”

The cultists lost their minds. One bit off the tip of his own finger and painted the nearest wall with a sloppy, ecstatic spiral. Two more started fighting over the strip of cloth, each certain it bore the new messiah’s scent. The air filled with shouting, prayer, and a metallic rain of teeth on cement.

Cerise wept, the resonance still drilling through her. It hurt, but it was beautiful, the most beautiful thing she’d ever touched. Shefelt herself dissolve, atom by atom, into a faith that tasted like static and warm, coppery blood.

She lifted her head just long enough to watch the others fall to their knees, faces upturned, hungry for the next sign.

It would come, she knew. They all knew.

The city would break itself open to greet the Nullarch.

All Cerise had to do was survive until dawn.

Chapter 3: Keep Her Quiet

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9.

I sat on the toilet with the towel wrapped around me like a burial shroud, watching my left hand glow. It was just the fingers, at first, pale blue-white under the nails, pulsing at the knuckles, but every time I flexed, the light ran up my arm like a threat. Even after the hottest shower of my life, I was still shivering. It wasn’t cold. The whole Meldin apartment was a damp oven, one of those post-rain cycles where the walls sweat and the air tastes like boiled dust. But the cold was inside. Deeper than bone. Deeper than whatever the hell the mythship had done to me.

When I closed my eyes, I could still see her. The other girl. The one who’d pinned me down with hands made of silk and a tongue made of fire, who’d slipped her tongue into my mouth until I choked on it. I couldn’t remember her face. Couldn’t even remember a name, if she’d given it. But I could remember the way she laughed when I lost the ability to stand, and the way she’d bit my shoulder hard enough to leave a scar in my memory. Her sweat, her taste, her everything: gone, rinsed down the apartment’s ancient pipes along with what was left of my self-respect.

I tried to remember her, and instead, all I got was static. Under the static were the flashes of bodies I hadn’t meant to kill.

The shower had steamed the mirror, but the glass was cold enough to fog over with every breath I took. I watched my reflection through the haze: hair wet and sticking to my face in coppery tangles, freckles blurred, eyes burning faintly. I lifted my hand, and the mirror did too, except it lagged, just a millisecond, a tiny time-slip, but enough that I felt the difference in my teeth. I blinked. So did the reflection. However, it glitched, as if the renderer didn’t have enough cycles to keep up. For a second, the girl in the mirror wasn’t me at all.

I dropped my gaze to my lap, where the towel was failing at its job. Skin paler than I remembered, dusted with black specks that shimmered when I moved. Star freckles. I’d had three, maybe four, on my left collarbone since I was a kid, but now there were dozens, all up and down my torso and thighs. Some clustered at my hip, some spiraling around my wrist like a tiny, hostile galaxy. Every inch of me felt like an invitation to get dissected by a very enthusiastic research student.

The pipes in the wall hummed with a wet, living sound. I pressed my heel into the tile and listened. The resonance was different now. Used to be, the plumbing sang in one note, desperate and sad, like the building was warning me to run before I became part of it. Now, it was layered. There were words in the water, if you listened hard enough. Sometimes I heard my name echoing down from the roof vent, then back up again through the clogged drains.

I flexed my left hand again, trying to will the glow away. It only got brighter. My veins lit up with it, the blue-white pulse leaking out from between the bones. I squeezed, felt the pulse surge, then fade.

When I opened my fist, the light stayed, faint and insistent.

At my feet, a patch of the infamous Meldin mold flinched back. I watched it, curious. Once, you could scrub the stuff with a wire brush, and it’d just laugh at you, growing back overnight with twice the coverage. Now, it shriveled whenever I looked at it, retracting like it knew something I didn’t. I wondered if, somewhere deep in the fungal hive mind, a single spore was screaming.

“Stop it,” I whispered, not sure who I meant. The mold? Myself? The universe?

No answer. Only the soft, wet chorus of pipes and the weird, digital afterimage of my own face, still lagging a frame behind reality in the mirror.