Page 22 of She Who Devours the Stars

I tapped the railing with my heel, feeling the buzz of local gravity trying to wrestle with the Accord’s anti-personnel field. “What if I don’t?”

She didn’t answer, but her hand flexed once at her side, thumb brushing the flat of her palm like she needed to feel where the weapon wasn’t.

“If you want to interview me, you could have just sent a message,” I said. “Or one of those cute little memes you Accord types love so much.”

She glanced up at the drones, which instantly stopped recording, then back to me. “You have already exceeded the parameters for peaceful containment. Further escalation will—”

“—be hilarious,” I finished for her. “You ever been in a riot before? They’re more fun than they look.”

She closed the distance, until our faces were almost level. Her eyes were pale, nearly silver, but the pupils were dark and round, and when she looked at me, it wasn’t the gaze of someone who thought you were a threat. It was the gaze of someone who wanted to see what you’d do next, just for the hell of it.

She said, “If you don’t comply, I’ll be forced to use protocols you’ll find… invasive.”

I felt my pulse trip. Not fear. Not exactly arousal, either. But something in the middle, a weirdly hungry ache that settled in my throat and radiated down to my hands. My skin prickled with a fresh wave of static, and I knew without looking that the veins on my wrist were glowing brighter now, tracing patterns that probably looked like a countdown to anyone with enough myth training to interpret them.

I shrugged. “That’s the Accord for you. Always overpromising on penetration.”

This time, she definitely smiled.

We stood there, neither of us moving, as rain, power, and potential hummed in the air. The city outside didn’t care. The drones didn’t care. But for a moment, it felt like the whole world was waiting to see which one of us would make the next bad decision.

I licked my lips, tasted iron and rain and the possibility of disaster. “You got a name, or just a badge number?”

She held my gaze. “Dyris. Dyris Vaelith. Accord Emergence Division, Director.”

I didn’t hear anything after Vaelith.

Her name hit like a gravity well, pulled everything else out of orbit. I repeated it in my head, slow and deliberate, the way you test a word before it rewrites your story. I wanted to say it aloud just to feel the shape of it, to let the first syllables of Dyris cut through the rain like a dare.

“Dyris,” I said, savoring it. “You ever eat a protein bar on a stairwell before, or is this your first time slumming it?”

She didn’t answer, but her eyes tracked the wrapper still clutched in my hand. I tossed it over my shoulder, heard it landsomewhere below, and was about to make a joke about “littering as performance art” when she stepped in, just a fraction closer.

“Your resonance is unstable,” she said. “It’s escalating. If it continues, you risk collapse. Not just for yourself.”

That last bit hung in the air. The Accord never cared about you, only what you could break.

“I’m not a bomb,” I said, softening for no one’s benefit but my own. “I just want to go home, Dyris.”

She looked at me, really looked, and for a second her face went slack with something I couldn’t name. Not pity, not empathy. More like curiosity, the way you look at a locked box and wonder what’s inside, and whether it’s worth the trouble to open it.

She said, “Your home is a containment zone now.”

I laughed, but it came out hollow. “Guess I’m not the only unstable one here.”

She didn’t react. Just stared. Waiting.

I met her gaze. “You going to try and arrest me, or…?”

She shook her head, as if to say she already knew how that would end.

I stood, brushing rain off my thighs, and let my feet slap the wet concrete as I moved past her. I could feel the heat of her attention on the back of my neck, sharp and electric.

“See you around, Dyris,” I called, not looking back.

She didn’t follow, but I felt her shadow the whole way up the stairs.

Somewhere above, the sky cracked open and the rain came harder, as if the city itself wanted to drown the moment before it could get out of hand.