Page 46 of She Who Devours the Stars

Her voice dropped half an octave as she leaned closer, so close her holo-rendered face pixelated slightly across its own resolution boundary.

“You’re not just another variable,” Kaela murmured. “You are the variable everyone is betting against.”

She let that hang between us like a challenge written in antimatter ink.

“Not you?” My voice came out steadier than expected. I blamed adrenaline or maybe just years of winning arguments by refusing to lose them.

She rewarded me with another micro-smirk: this one edged with actual danger instead of performance art.

“I never bet against inevitability,” Kaela said softly. “I simply pre-register outcomes and invoice accordingly.” She toyed with her glass again, perfectly still otherwise, and let her tongue flick against one canine as if savoring future profits from my statistical demise. “Vireleth answers your call directly these days? That’s new.” A faint note of admiration crept into her monotone; only someone as old as Kaela Vaelith could recognize mythic escalation for what it truly was: inevitability wearing new clothes.

I nodded once: yes, Vireleth showed up uninvited now; yes, I heard Lioren’s echo when nobody else did; yes, I’d made Dyris scream so loud last night that even ghosts outside this spacetime probably filed complaints with Management.

Of course, Kaela Vaelith didn’t fear me. She feared what would come after me. My ship. My echo. The singularity that followed in my wake. But most of all, the fact that a new myth always replaced an old myth. Sometimes, they ate it alive.

“You want an alliance,” I guessed aloud because guessing wrong with House Vaelith wasn’t an option unless you really liked being disassembled into constituent atoms for research purposes.

Kaela didn’t blink.

“If you destabilize,” she said matter-of-factly, “the whole Core could fall.” She might as well have been discussing galactic hydrology or fiscal policy. “I have no desire to be trapped on the wrong side of a singularity event.” A pause. Then: “Literal or otherwise.”

The sincerity in her boredom was its own threat: this was nothing personal; this was self-preservation scaled up until entire polities became footnotes in someone else’s survival plan.

I looked at her carefully now, the way someone might study an ancient mosaic before deciding which piece to pry loose first. Kaela wore actual pearls at her throat, a minor flex given how few real oysters survived atmospheric collapse, but it wasn’t vanity; it was symbolism. Pearls formed by infection. By irritation. By centuries of turning discomfort into beauty and meaning, until nobody remembered how sharp pain felt anymore.

Her eyeliner shimmered subtly even through holo artifacting, a synthetic blend formulated for zero-g environments so tears couldn’t ruin your look during diplomatic breakdowns or attempted coups. Everything about Kaela screamed preparedness but never contentment; predators older than civilization didn’t know satisfaction, they only knew endurance.

This woman had fucked, killed, and out-negotiated every living myth in two empires and still woke up every morning hungry for whatever hadn’t already been conquered or consumed by House Vaelith itself.

And here I was, wrapped like fresh meat in nothing but static and last night’s sweat, pretending dignity while dripping mythic radiation across enemy lines just by breathing too loud on conference call audio.

What did I actually want?

It felt like a trick question, the kind you get on diagnostic intake forms or at the end of a hellish first interview, when you’re supposed to answer with something aspirational but still pathetic enough to prove you haven’t outgrown your leash. Except Kaela Vaelith wasn’t HR. She was HR’s evolutionary endpoint: the apex predator of sentimentality, trained since conception to weaponize everything you loved against everything you feared.

But I was so tired of being clever, I could’ve screamed.

So, I let the question eat me alive, just for a second. I let myself be honest. No caveats, no irony shields, nothing left to lawyer after the fact. And then I said it aloud:

“I only want one thing,” I said softly.

Kaela cocked an eyebrow, so sharply, so precisely, it must have been blueprinted in her genome and then hand-sculpted by five generations of etiquette tutors. The micro-expression that followed was not predatory in the usual animal sense; more like an archaeologist’s delight as they discover a fossilized heart where there should have only been blood and teeth.

“Dyris?” she guessed.

My pulse hammered hard enough to crack the cylinders in my throat. Maybe Kaela saw it, the way my skin betrayed me, or maybe she just recognized her target’s favorite wound from centuries of vivisection. Either way, she didn’t blink. Didn’t even smile. Just let the hypothesis hang there, like a planet too close to its sun.

“She’s part of it,” I conceded, but each word had to be dragged up from the part of my soul that had never seen sunlight or good intentions. “But that’s not all.”

Kaela tilted her head, waiting for the rest with a patience that vibrated at quantum zero; perfectly still, but on the verge of something catastrophic if even one atom shifted.

I tried to find a way around the truth, but all the escape routes were marked with hazard tape and tripwires left by girls smarter than I was. So instead, I told her exactly what she’d use against me later:

“I already have her.” It was stupid, arrogant, and true.

There, now, Kaela had leverage she didn’t even have to steal. She let herself lean forward by another micron (three centimeters would’ve been vulgar) and sipped from her glass again as if every molecule was logging data for later consumption.

A silence unfolded between us that lasted longer than most wars. On my end, it stretched out slow and thin, like old honey or burnt sugar, from bedrail to ceiling and back again, looping through my brainstem until I could practically hear Dyris’s voice calling me an idiot for giving away key strategic assets this early in negotiations.