Page 16 of She Who Devours the Stars

I tried to remember the girl’s face again, digging for something, hair color, the shape of her lips, anything, but every time I reached for it, the memory bent away, slippery and sharp. I could remember her voice, a low, vibrating hush that made my ribs ache. I could remember the smell of her skin, even through the ozone, blood, and burning circuitry. But the rest? Gone. Like the mythship had taken it as payment.

Which, honestly, seemed fair.

I braced my elbows on my knees and let my hair hang forward, dripping onto the floor. It was only then I realized how hard I was shaking. My muscles felt hollow, bones loose in their sockets. I tried to clench, to force stability, but it only made the shaking worse.

“Not stable,” I muttered, and the words bounced around the bathroom like a curse.

I forced myself to stand, ignoring the warning twinge from my left hip. The towel threatened to betray me, but I cinchedit tighter and shuffled to the sink, bracing myself against the cheap metal edge. My hands left glowing smears on the steel. I ran the water to have something else to listen to, but even the faucet sounded different now. Less like a leak, more like a voice, whispering in a language I’d almost learned.

I scrubbed at my face, trying to erase the girl in the mirror. When I looked again, the reflection was back in sync, almost. My eyes glowed, just a touch. It would fade, I told myself. Everything fades.

I looked down at my hand. The star freckles burned. I traced them with my fingertip, mapping the new constellations, the way they looped and bent and clustered together. On the inside of my wrist, the veins made a pattern I almost recognized.

It looked like a sigil. Or a warning.

I tried to laugh. The sound was wet and ugly.

After a while, I shut off the water, wiped my hands, and made myself breathe. In, out, count to four, don’t pass out on the bathroom floor. When the shaking finally slowed, I took inventory: two legs, both operational. Two arms, one glitching, but still attached, the other pretended everything was fine. One head, not okay, but intact.

I stood there, naked except for the towel, and watched the mold shrink away from my toes.

I tried, one last time, to remember the girl from before the mythship.

Nothing.

I felt the loss like a bruise. But maybe that was how it worked. Maybe you weren’t supposed to hold on to things from the other side of the singularity. Maybe the only way forward was to let thepast burn off, molecule by molecule, until all you had left was the afterglow.

I dropped the towel, stepped back into my underwear and my cleanest dirty shirt, a blue tank with a yellow star on it. The static was still in my mouth, but it tasted less like fear and more like potential. The resonance in my bones hummed, hungry and bright.

The mirror didn’t blink this time. Neither did I.

I left the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.

Time to see what else had changed.

Thread Modulation: Dax Meldin

Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment.

I could always tell when the Accord lost their minds by how many notifications they sent in a row. After the Nullarch thing tripped half the planet’s alarms, they went from “routine update” to “existential priority” to “please stand by for further instructions” in under an hour. Now, the stack of printouts on the kitchen table was thick enough to serve as a makeshift riot shield. I shuffled through them, hoping for something actionable, but most read like the results of a bureaucratic breakdown crossed with a desperate meme account.

“WELCOME BACK, PLEASE COMPLY WITH YOUR EXILE TERMINATION INTERVIEW,” the top one said, as if I’d left the moon for a hotdog and a smoke instead of getting forcibly relocated to the ass-end of Xenthis’s maintenance loop. Beneath that: “CITIZEN MELDIN, YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR RANDOMIZED LOYALTY ASSESSMENT.” A third: “EMERGENCY VOTE: SHOULD RATIONS CONTAIN MORE OR LESS YEAST? RESPOND WITHIN 30 SECONDS TO AVOID PENALTY.”

I snorted, flicked the top three onto the floor, and kept going.

Velline made more noise in the kitchen than all the Accord’s warning sirens put together. She chopped, whisked, and fried with the grim determination of a person who believed you could solve any problem with enough block yolk. She never looked up from the stove, but I could see her tracking me in the reflection of the microwave door, eyes narrowed and sharp. Every time I glanced over, she doubled down: louder chopping, more aggressive seasoning, once even launching a fistful of chives at the wall for emphasis.

Chives didn’t make Protein Emulsion Solids any better. Nothing did.

“Don’t,” I said, before she could open her mouth.

“I’m not doing anything,” she snapped, slicing a protein slab into strands, like it had personally wronged her. “You’re the one obsessing over those. They’re probably tracking your stress hormones through the paper.”

“Maybe,” I admitted, “but at least I’m not flooding the house with oil vapor and emotional instability.”

She banged the pan down. “You’re one to talk, Dax. I caught you singing to the old coffee machine again last night.”

“That’s called maintenance. If you want appliances to work, you show them some respect.”