Page 150 of She Who Devours the Stars

She blew a kiss.

I swatted at the projection. The kiss stuck anyway, a perfect lip-print burned in cherry-gloss on my right cheek.

I wanted to punch a hole through the bulkhead.

Instead, I kept walking. “Vireleth. Override her access. Bring Fern back.”

The ship’s reply was almost gentle. “You’re not in condition for that, Dyris. Asterra’s repairs are temporary. Your systems will degrade in ninety-three minutes if you don’t let them set.”

“I don’t care,” I hissed. “She’s out there, with—”

“With someone who might help her,” the ship finished, and for a second, I heard a note of genuine sympathy in the circuit-cold monotone.

I pressed my hands to the wall, trying to steady my breathing.

Asterra was a monster, but she didn’t do anything for free. If she’d patched me up, it was because Fern had bought me another chance at relevance, at the cost of her own story.

“Recharge,” the ship said, low and almost maternal. “She’ll need you when she comes back.”

There was a pause, then the voice went even softer.

“If she comes back.”

I stared at the wall. My hands shook, but I couldn’t stop them. The mythprint flickered, and for a second, I thought I’d collapse. Instead, I pressed my forehead to the stone, trying not to cry, not to think, not to give in to the certainty that Fern was already gone.

The door behind me snapped open. I turned, ready to fight, but instead of a threat, I was greeted by the full, unfiltered presence of Velline Meldin.

She didn’t walk in. She stormed, bringing with her the scent of hair dye, fake leather, and enough motherly contempt to cow a regiment. She wore what looked like a tactical bathrobe, studded with metallic spikes, and her hair was a weaponized mess offuchsia and orange, so bright it made the mythprint scars on my face go dark in self-defense.

“Gods, you look like trauma,” she said, voice both diagnosis and insult. “Let’s fix that.”

I tried to protest. “Velline, this is not the—”

She was on me before I could finish. She gripped my chin, turned my face side to side, then dug her thumb into the lip print on my cheek and wiped it clean in one brutal swipe. The sting hurt more than anything Asterra had done.

“I’m serious,” she said, and there was no room for argument. “You want to win, you need to look like it. First lesson they teach you in cargo culture: confidence is the only thing they can’t repossess.”

She dragged me, literally, arm in an iron grip, down the corridor.

Thread Modulation: Dax Meldin

Axis Alignment: Vireleth the Closure

The first sign of a bad day was the butter-coffee. The second was the state of my workshop: two inches of oil on every surface, half-disassembled drone corpses scattered like failed suicide attempts, and a perfectly good bottle of orbital whiskey sitting untouched next to the holo projector. The third, and by far the worst, was Perc, eating his own weight in cold pizza and watching me like a particularly stubborn fungus.

I hadn’t changed shirts since Fern left, which was fine because I wasn’t wearing one.

The butter-coffee tasted like guilt. I drank it anyway.

“Let’s just get this straight,” I said, voice half a growl, half a wet cough. “I still believed in him. Even after the moon impregnation holo. Even after the ‘Singularity Slut’ meme. Even after the riots, when half my friends couldn’t tell if he was deador just busy ghosting the sector. I watched the transmission at least ten times. I still thought he was the answer.”

Perc made a noise that was somewhere between a burp and a short-circuit. “To be fair, the production values on that holo were top tier. The sound design—mwah. You could hear the moon crack.”

I glared. “I’m talking about the failure of the whole mythic system, Perc. The utter collapse of generational trust. The betrayal of hope, and you’re stuck on the bass mix.”

“Look,” Perc said, pizza slice waving like a white flag, “I’m an appliance, not a therapist. But if I was, I’d recommend you eat something with a vegetable in it and stop watching the Lioren collapse loop on repeat. It’s starting to mess with my analytics.”

I grunted. “If you ever cared about Fern, you’d know why I can’t.”