Page 53 of She Who Devours the Stars

I stared at her, then at the slab, then at the planet spinning below. “Is that supposed to be a threat, a bribe, or an insult?”

“Yes,” Dyris said, perfectly flat.

I snorted and let my head loll back. “They really think a myth academy is going to teach me anything I can’t break in a week?”

“They think,” she said, “that it’ll give you somewhere to aim your entropy that isn’t a major population center.”

I rolled the sleeve of the coat, picked at one of the fake medals. “What the fuck is an Athenaeum?”

Dyris’s mouth twitched. “Imagine a finishing school, but for weaponized legend. Add two centuries of unresolved faculty trauma, and a security budget larger than most navies.”

I thought about it. “Sounds like hell.”

“It is,” she said. “But it’s the one place the Accord won’t try to assassinate you. At least not directly.”

That got a real laugh out of me, ugly and echoing. I kicked my legs over the armrest and lounged, daring her to pretend we weren’t on the same side of the cosmic joke for once.

“Let’s say I go along,” I said, “and play nice with the mythics-in-training. What’s your angle?”

She didn’t answer right away. For a second, I thought she might actually lie to me, but then she looked straight at me, not through me, and the weight of all the words she’d ever swallowed radiated off her skin.

“I don’t want you erased,” Dyris said, so soft I almost missed it. “Not by them, not by yourself.”

I blinked. “That’s some ‘I care about you’ talk for someone whose last job was running counter-intel on my sex life.”

Dyris went crimson. It was a good look on her. “You’re more dangerous than anyone realizes. Including yourself. But you’re not the enemy.”

I let the silence fill up again, just to see how much it would hurt.

In the end, I nodded. “Fine. I’ll do your myth academy. But you’re coming with.”

Dyris raised her eyebrows, genuinely startled. “That’s not—”

I cut her off. “If I’m getting schooled, I want a chaperone. You know. Handler. Dorm mom. Whatever the fuck the Accord calls it.”

She took a breath, weighing the angles. “Attaché,” she said finally.

I grinned, slow and hungry. “Still my Sexretary.”

Dyris made a strangled noise and tried to hide it with a cough. I let her. It was the least I could do.

We spent the rest of the hour picking over the details. What to pack, which of Lioren’s coats I could keep, whether or not the mythship would still answer my call from the other side of the rim. It was like planning for a war we’d already lost, and I couldn’t decide if I liked the feeling or if it just made me want to break something expensive.

Later, when the official Accord feeds cycled to “night,” we both ended up in the captain’s bed, because neither of us had the energy or the will to pretend otherwise. The mattress was so soft it nearly swallowed me whole; I curled up on the edge, clutching the sleeve of the dead man’s coat like a lifeline, and listened to Dyris’s breathing until it smoothed out my own.

I’d never slept in a real bed before. Not like this. The luxury would have made me panic if I’d been alone.

But with Dyris there, inches away, her body heat leaking through the sheets and her heartbeat steady as a metronome, I let myself drift. I let the room go dark. I let the future take care of itself, for once.

It was enough.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin

Axis Alignment: Lounge, Aboard Vireleth the Closure

The Vireleth lounge didn’t know how to do breakfast, so it just panicked and did everything at once. The long table was set with three different kinds of protein slab, a bowl of synthfruit that looked like someone had melted rainbow colored lumps over wet gravel, and three full pots of coffee—all already half-empty. Velline, my mother, was working her way through a stack of fried something, pausing only to reapply lipstick between bites. Dax, my dad, had switched to his second mug and was using the downtime to tattoo a circuit diagram onto his forearm with a microprobe. Perc, our personal coffeepot and accidental AI, sat at the head of the table with a crocheted scarf around his base and the kind of smug that only comes from being the single most functional being in the room.

I hovered at the edge, clutching a plate and trying to work up the courage to join them. You’d think after surviving three planetary disasters in a week, I’d be past the “awkward family meal” stage of development. You’d be wrong.