Page 41 of She Who Devours the Stars

Above the city, Vireleth shifted again, shadows twisting into new, impossible shapes. I watched her, and she watched me back, both of us waiting for the next move.

It was good to be alive.

Even if I was the wrong girl for the job.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Alignment: Pelago-9 Administrative Center

Maybe I should have called for a detachment, brought a kill-team, or at least a pair of goons to stand at the door and glare at her until she stopped smiling. That would have been protocol. Instead, I staged the entire thing myself, down to the utensils and the clandestine sweep of the room, twice, before she arrived. On my way in, Vireleth reflected in every window I passed, a cold, celestial reminder that nothing the Accord possessed could threaten the Nullarch. Not anymore.

I wasn’t afraid she’d kill me; I was worried she’d find out I was scared. There’s a difference. A matter of pride. Vaelith heritage.

I set the table as if it mattered. The steak, real, not vat-grown, black-market provenance, acquired through the dangerous quid pro quo. The wine was vintage enough to get me court-martialed. And the jammer, battery already running hot, its red diode blinking like a heartbeat on the edge of panic.

The spread was a confession, an apology, a bribe, and I didn’t know which one Fern would taste first.

She arrived late, of course. She wore the same Accord civilian uniform from yesterday, but looser, as if she’d unbuttoned the structure out of it. Hair in a tangle, face freshly scrubbed, the skin around her left eye still shadowed from an ancient bruise. She looked, if possible, more dangerous out of context than in. Like she’d taken off her armor just to see what it felt like to breathe.

She didn’t look at the food, or the wine, or me. She circled the room, slow, every movement a dare, as if waiting to see if I’d break before she did. She stopped by the window, stared out at the city, then at Vireleth’s silhouette blotting out the horizon.

Fern didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. She leaned into the view, bracing both hands on the glass, and stared at Vireleth with such intense focus that, for a moment, it seemed they might collapse the intervening kilometers through sheer narrative gravity. Her mythic resonance bled into the air, burning off emotional ozone and warping the containment shimmer to a hazy aurora, bands of color that crawled across her skin in geometric fractals. The room picked up on her mood and vibrated with an almost-audible hum, as if physics itself had clocked in to bear witness.

She drew a breath that should have been impossible for any single pair of lungs, shuddering, hungry, cosmic, and exhaled a filament thread of raw mythfire that left a phosphorescent afterimage over my retinas. The trail lingered in the air, shimmering like bioluminescent ink, then faded into nothing except the memory of brightness. For one heartbeat, time stretched; Vireleth’s silhouette responded in kind, rearranging her orbit to throw a corona of false daylight through the window. It was a courtship or a challenge, or both.

Fern’s gaze never wavered from her mythic twin above the city, but when she finally pivoted away from the window and locked eyes with me, I felt it in my teeth. It was like staring into a searchlight: disorienting, hot, and impossible to look away from for any length of time. She walked to the table, eyed the steak, the wine, then the jammer. She grinned, not bothering to hide the teeth.

“Did you make this, or just pay off the cook?” she said.

“I made it,” I replied, and hated the way it sounded.

She sat, hands in her lap, then reached for the steak. No knife. Just the edge of her fork, carving through it like butter that had been waiting its whole life to be wanted. She tore off a bite, chewed slow, and—

Fern moaned.

Not loud, but the kind of sound that echoed anyway. Low, throat-slick, unfiltered. The lights overhead flickered. The jammer skipped a beat. Somewhere, outside, a security drone lost altitude and crashed into someone’s illegally rigged power line.

Her eyes never left mine, not even through the aftershock.

“This isn’t protocol,” she said after a swallow, her voice ruined and velvet and entirely too pleased. “If I had to guess, you’re supposed to be interrogating me right now. Or collecting a blood sample.”

I shook my head. “This is unofficial.”

“Bold,” she murmured, licking a trace of juice from her thumb. “Dangerous, even.”

She reached for the wine, poured a glass with the casual grace of someone who’d definitely never done it before, and took a sip.

Her throat worked, slow and deliberate, and I couldn’t help but watch the motion. Not watching wasn’t an option; her myth demanded witness.

She froze, eyes widening a fraction. Then she swallowed and let out a sound that barely qualified as a sigh, but it still made the air between us shift. Her fingers tapped once against the glass, knuckles whitening for a heartbeat like she was grounding herself.

“Holy shit,” she murmured. “That’s not bootleg. That’s sex in a bottle.”

Fern set the glass down with a clink, her eyes still locked onto mine. “So, Dyris, is this an interview, a seduction, or a firing squad?”

I felt my cheeks heat. Not fear, definitely not shame, but the slow, horrifying realization I’d completely lost control of the scene I’d set—every Director’s nightmare. “That depends on how you answer.”

She leaned forward, elbows on the table, that lazy grin returning, but her voice dropped half a register. Low. Sweet. Criminal. “Ask, then.”