Page 24 of She Who Devours the Stars

I considered it, then shook my head. “You already know.”

She grinned, slow and vicious, then got up, letting her chair scrape across the floor with all the ceremony of a declaration of war. She walked to the window, mug still in hand, and stared out at the Glimmer Zone.

“See the kid out there?” she said.

I checked the HUD. Yes, I saw him, a barefoot child chasing a glitching holo-steak, running through rain so toxic it would peel paint off a drone.

“He’s going to eat that steak,” she said, “even if it kills him.”

She didn’t turn. “I’m not the virus. I’m the antibody. You want to fix the city, start with the reason people are starving for steak that’s not even there.”

Her words hit with more force than I expected. I was trained to weather emotional outbursts, to absorb rage, grief, defiance and then neutralize them. But this wasn’t any of those. It wasn’t a plea or a threat. It was a diagnosis, delivered with the calm of someone who’s already survived the cure. I respected the clarity, even as I resented the effect it had.

I catalogued her again. For control. As if it would help.

Auburn hair, wild but curated, chaos worn like armor. Cheekbones sharpened by spite and circumstance. Pale skin, freckled in patterns that felt more like star maps than ornamental pigments, as if someone could navigate by them if they didn’t mind being lost. Small bust, perky. Irrelevant. I noticed anyway. My focus should’ve been the glow of her hand, the resonance bleeding out in pulses. Instead, I recalculated curve-to-waist ratios and wondered which bastard in Tactical let this girl into my kill radius.

Her hands saved me. Scarred, callused, glowing faintly at the tips. Those were fingers made for ignition, not hand modeling. She stood like a detonation waiting for an excuse, all kinetic potential with no promise of restraint. Too slight for standard threat assessment. Too volatile for dismissal. And entirely too much for my implanted systems to quantify.

Fern’s eyes weren’t blue. Not white either. It was a color I didn’t have clearance for, a spectrum the universe invented as a warning label.

I was staring. I looked away. Not because I had to. Because it was already too late.

She turned, caught me in the act, and smirked. “See something you like?”

I kept my voice steady. “I see someone who doesn’t understand what’s at stake.”

She shrugged. “You mean ‘who refuses to play by your rules.’”

“Those rules are what keep us from—”

She laughed, cut me off. “From what? Unraveling?”

The word hung, heavier than it should have.

She drained the mug, set it on the counter, and took a step toward me. The static doubled, then tripled. My boots buzzed again, out of rhythm with the room. I realized, dimly, that I was sweating. That my heart rate had climbed past baseline and was holding steady, despite every attempt at self-regulation.

Fern stopped half a meter away, close enough for me to smell the aftertaste of ozone and fake berry in her hair.

Her proximity scrambled something. Too close, too fast, too much data. I caught myself focusing on the slope of her nose for no good reason, like my brain had decided that was the safest thing to stare at while the rest of me recalculated risk versus want versus imminent tactical failure.

“You can’t scare me,” she said, softer now. “But you can listen.”

I should have ordered her back. I should have called in the extraction, forced compliance, and escalated as protocol dictated. Instead, I stood there, cataloguing the rise and fall of her chest, the bright pulse of her wrist, the tilt of her head as she waited for my answer.

I said nothing.

After a moment, she stepped past, heading toward the back of the apartment. The temperature in the room dropped with her absence. My boots stopped humming. My HUD resumed normal function, but I didn’t trust it.

I took a deep breath. Tried to remember why I was here.

Containment. Calibration. Suppression.

But as I watched her disappear into the hallway, I realized I was less interested in stopping her than in seeing what she would do next.

I made another note, this one for myself:

She’s not the anomaly.