Page 161 of She Who Devours the Stars

His eyes flared blue. “I know a guy who needs a new pizza delivery ship.”

I shook my head, then looked down at the wrecked drone, the ruined plate, the stains on my own hands. It wasn’t much. But it was something.

“If we survive this,” I said, “I’m building something even Fern can’t break.”

Perc grinned, or did the carafe equivalent of a grin. “That’s a plan.”

We watched the world end, together, and neither of us blinked.

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Alignment: Eventide

There’s a moment, between the breach and the alarm, where you decide if you’re a criminal or just desperate. For me, it was less a decision and more a default setting.

The hallways of Eventide were on triple lockdown, the mythic suppression net humming so loud it made my teeth itch, but I knew the backdoors. I’d written most of them, or copied from someone who had. What I hadn’t accounted for was how the building itself seemed to want me gone—every corner tighter, every door more passworded, every camera tracking me like it was personal.

I moved fast, hoodie up, eyes darting between the AR overlays and the static-filled world in front of me. Each feed was a nightmare: Fern, lighting up the Fey Ruins like a cataclysm, her mythprint so wild the sensors kept inventing new colors to keep up. Dyris, incommunicado, last pinged in the depths of Vireleth, then vanished. Everyone else? Either gone or too scared to move.

I was tired of being left behind.

The destination was Aenna’s room, though I told myself a dozen times that it wasn’t. The AR said I was tracking Dyris, her emotional signature, at least, since she’d locked her own trace. But every turn brought me back to the same corridor, the same shitty patch of linoleum, the same half-collapsed door with the sad sticker of a dabbing cat on it.

I stared at the overlay. It glitched, then reset, then flashed a message so bright it burned across my retinas.

[ARE YOU LOST, ALYX?]

I flinched, looked over my shoulder. No one. I reached for the handle, found it locked, and did the trick with the old ID badge and the wedge of plastic I kept in my sleeve. The door popped with a sigh, swinging inward on a breath of air that tasted like printer ink and mythic residue.

I stepped inside.

The room was dark, but not unlit. The windows were blacked out with tape and paper, but the walls glowed faintly, the hum of dead electronics giving everything a blue halo. The bed was unmade, the covers tangled, the surface dusted with a scatter of glass tablets and half-empty bottles of calorie gel.

And in the center, curled around herself like a seed waiting for rain, was Aenna.

She didn’t move as I entered. Her hair was longer than I remembered, red and wild, fanned out across the pillow in a corona. Her face was pale, freckled, mouth slack with sleep, eyes twitching behind closed lids. The mythprint on her wrist glimmered, a tiny nebula that pulsed in time with her breath.

I took two steps forward, then stopped.

The AR overlay went red, then white, then blank.

I was alone in the room, but not alone in my head.

A voice, soft and female and everywhere at once: “You are in the right place.”

I swallowed. “Solance?” I asked, but it wasn’t a question.

“Yes,” said the voice. “You are.”

Then, overlaying it, colder, sharper, with the edge of a knife: “You’re late,” said Kairon. “But not too late. Yet.”

I wanted to freeze, to run, to do anything but stand there, but my body didn’t get the message. I watched as my hands started to shake, then steadied, then curled into fists.

Aenna’s eyelids fluttered.

I couldn’t move.

The voices twined around each other, like two competing frequencies, fighting for space in my skull.