Page 29 of She Who Devours the Stars

I leaned into the corridor, not really expecting an answer. “Dad?”

No response. Dax Meldin was the kind of sleeper who’d survived four years in a mining camp and never lost the habit of keeping one ear open for collapse. If he didn’t answer, he wasn’t ignoring me; he was out cold.

I padded down the hall, avoiding the one squeaky board by pure muscle memory. His door was cracked, letting out a wash of used air and the faint, sour note of old coffee grounds. I peered in.

He was sprawled sideways across the bunk, feet planted like a man expecting the next disaster to be vertical. In the dim light, his beard looked like a hostile lifeform. The blankets were twisted around his waist, one hand curled over a half-finished circuit board, the other wrapped tight around a dead soldering iron. I watched the rise and fall of his chest, counting to make sure.

“Breathe easy,” I said, softer now. The words weren’t for him. They were for me.

I pulled the door shut and wondered where Mom had gotten off to. Work was, obviously, out of the question with all that hung over our heads. Knowing Velline, she’d slipped out to meet up with her arms dealer contact to stock up on more weapons-grade cosmetics for whatever apocalypse she’d penciled in next.

My bedroom had become a kind of abstraction. I avoided it. The mattress remembered too much, and the wall still bore the imprint of the last time I lost my temper and punched straight through to the insulation. The hole was patched with a decal that said, “MONUMENT TO BAD DECISIONS,” a birthday gift from Dax that was only funny on alternate days.

So, the kitchen again.

I slumped against the counter and looked at the window. Our apartment was four stories up, high enough to get a slice of actual skyline if you craned, but tonight the only thing out there was the shadow of the defense grid, the ghost of a city that didn’t know what to do with itself.

I checked the time: 04:13, then 04:14. I felt the minutes sliding past, slick as wet glass.

A pulse went through my left hand, the glow under my skin intensifying to a visible level for just a second. It faded quickly, but the afterimage was strong enough to paint the world in echo. I flexed my fingers, watching the light pool in my palm. It was supposed to be a bug, a glitch, something that would fade with time and ignorance, but it was getting stronger every day. Like the mythship had left something inside me, and now it was growing, hungry for a world that made sense.

I opened the fridge, hoping for a miracle. There was a quarter bottle of Velline’s unauthorized vodka, a slice of orange floating like a corpse. I poured myself a finger, sipped, and let it numb the edges.

The silence felt alive now. Not the cold, waiting kind, but something almost sentient, as if the city itself had decided to exhale all at once and see what happened when nothing filled the gap.

I pressed my forehead to the cabinet door. It was cool, and the vibration through the metal was steady now, a slow build toward some inevitable crescendo.

I tried to remember if I’d ever experienced a morning without dread.

Probably not.

I traced the veins on the back of my hand, blue-white and shimmering in the vodka-glow. It felt like having a second pulse, a hidden life. I wondered if anyone else had ever survived the mythship’s touch and stayed human long enough to care about breakfast after. Lioren didn’t count; he supposedly built the ships.

I turned to Perc, the coffeepot still blinking “Awaiting.” I put my hand over his lid, letting the glow sink in.

“You awake?” I asked, half expecting a snarky comeback.

He whirred, then clicked. “Processing,” he said, voice slow and weirdly childlike. “World… unstable. Awaiting query.”

I bit my lip. “Is it me, or is it too quiet?”

“Too quiet,” Perc confirmed. “Statistically, there should be three brawls, a minimum of four neighbor complaints, and at least one marriage proposal from the block captain by this hour. Instead: nothing.”

I sipped the vodka, which was warm now and tasted like surrendered optimism. “Maybe we’re overdue for a good disaster.”

Perc flashed a sad-face emoji. “Last time you said that, you lost your eyebrows.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, touching the faint scar above my left eye. “You think it’s a prelude, or an aftershock?”

“Unclear,” he said, then went silent again. I could almost hear him thinking, if that was a thing coffee machines did.

I finished the glass, set it down, and looked at my reflection in the microwave door. The girl in the glass looked the same as always: skin a little too pale, eyes ringed with the residue of not-sleep, hair doing its own gravity experiment. But the glow in my veins was brighter, more insistent, and for a second I thought I saw something else behind my eyes—a shape, or a memory, or a warning.

Cold settled over me. I rubbed my arms and stepped back toward the window.

The city was still there, but less real, like a simulation on pause. I wondered if anyone else was awake, or if I was the last variable in a system that had already decided the outcome.

Braced against the hush, I pressed my palms down against the counter.