Page 7 of She Who Devours the Stars

She wiped a streak of nutrient gel off her sleeve, barely missing her cheek in the process, then fixed me with the maternal death-glare she reserved for things like skipped meals and police reports. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Fine,” I said for the sixth time, then redirected with a desperate pivot toward safer ground. I pointed at our half-dead houseplant like it was a flare signal. “How’s Old Greeny doing?”

They took the bait. Of course they did. Parents are experts at pretending their kid isn’t five seconds from a breakdown, or worse. Both of them grabbed onto the subject like it was a life raft, launching right back into their eternal war about root cluster hydration, moisture retention metrics, and who’d nearly killed it with last week’s fungal bloom.

It didn’t last. The HoloNet’s timing was almost designed to counteract my parents' wink-wink-nudge-nudge overlook of my nudeness, wearing a strange blanket, or my now glowing skin. I bet it was that annoying AI I muted before, fucking with me.

Every info-feed window on the shared wall started flashing between riot footage outside City Hall and progressively worse Sgr A* proximity warnings, each captioned with varying degrees of cosmic alarm. The central headline ran in bright, capitalized panic text: CRITICAL INCIDENT—PELAGO-9.

Below it, three rotating phrases: DANGEROUS. ANOMALOUS. SECURE FOR DEBRIEF.

My face dominated half the feeds. I laughed, dry and stupid, because what else could I do?

“Nice to see I made the news,” I said to no one in particular.

Mom grabbed the nearest throw pillow and hurled it at the screen like violence could fix public relations.

“You said you’d stay out of trouble this cycle!”

Dad’s face went pale. “What happened?”

I opened my mouth to explain. I really, totally tried. I told them about the mythship, the voice, the reentry, the way the world bent sideways when I got scared. I left out the girl, the promise, and the part where I almost atomized half the city.

But I didn’t leave out the names. Couldn’t. Not when they kept tearing their way out of my throat like they had a schedule to keep.

Vireleth.

Mythship.

Lioren.

The moment the last one slipped out, the room's temperature changed.

Mom froze like I’d hit her with a blunt instrument. Then she laughed. Not the good kind. The hollow, edge-of-sobbing, please-let-this-be-a-joke kind. “Of course it’d be Lioren motherfucking Trivane,” she spat, with the bitter anguish of all wives married to men with hobbies, obsessions, or, apparently, long-standing personal vendettas against entire eras of mythic disaster.

Dad just… stopped moving. His whole brain stalled mid-process like a maintenance drone bricking itself halfway through a firmware update. It took him a full ten seconds to reboot.

When he finally spoke, it was in that same dazed, why-are-we-even-still-having-this-century tone I’d only ever heard twice before. Once during the filament fire. Once during the techborn riots.

“He fucked a moon,” Dad said, voice thin and shocked like the words had snuck out before he could veto them. “Literally. Impregnated it, too. He founded the Accord.”

Mom’s hands went to her temples like she could physically hold her skull together through sheer willpower. “We are cursed,” she muttered. “We’re so fucking cursed.”

“Lioren Trivane,” Dad said again, like just saying the name was a full-body betrayal. “Of course it would be him.”

Mom threw her arms in the air, pacing like she was looking for something to throw that wouldn’t bounce off a bulkhead and hit me by accident. “I told you. I told you the whole Trivane line was a disaster zone wrapped in a singularity. I told you when you wouldn’t stop doomscrolling through those mythship incident reports. But no, you had to get into comment wars with sim-clones like it was your civic duty.”

“In my defense,” Dad said, one hand already halfway to his coffee for moral support, “the man did seduce and impregnate a sentient moon. I feel like that sort of thing deserves at least one heated forum post.”

Mom gave him a look sharp enough to scratch paint. “We’re talking about our kid. Not a hypothetical collapse field on some conspiracy thread.”

I stood there, still bleeding, still shaking, still wrapped in the worst blanket in recorded history, and for once, I didn’t think they were exaggerating.

Mom paced one more frantic lap of the room, then planted both hands on the table like she could anchor herself to the furniture. “We’ve survived worse. The filament fire. The time with the illegal pets. Remember that?”

Dad didn’t even blink. “Those were gerbils, Velline.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And we survived.”