Page 75 of She Who Devours the Stars

The mirror tried to flatter me. I ignored it. The door opened, and the corridor beyond buzzed with the thousand-watt hum of everyone else’s morning.

The drone followed me all the way to the classroom.

#

The second day of Aethenaeum was not the parade of wonders they’d hyped on the recruitment feeds. It was worse.

The lecture hall was a mythic nightmare: three-tiered, marble seats arranged in a precise spiral, the ceiling painted with the “Four Tragedies of Accord” and lined with drones that pretended to be art installations. Every seat had a biometric, which scanned your ass the second you sat down and uploaded your position to the public log.

The crowd was already there. Every single person knew me. Or thought they did. They tried not to stare, but it was like asking a toddler not to touch a flame: the urge to witness catastrophe always wins.

I took my seat, dead center, and let my eyes glaze over.

Next to me, someone hissed, “that’s her,” and then, as if on cue, every seat in a five-meter radius subtly shifted away. It was less an exodus and more a slow-motion parting, like they thought getting too close might erase their DNA.

I didn’t care.

The first instructor was already at the dais, a tall man with the look of someone who’d gone through three or four public failures and was ready for a fifth. He wore his mythic collar half-unbuttoned, revealing a neck tattoo of the Trivane sigil, which he’d tried to laser off but had failed, leaving a pale blue ghost over his jugular.

“Welcome, scholars, to the Grand Recursion,” he intoned, ignoring the way the back row whispered “Nullarch” under their breath like it was a dare.

He started the presentation, a hologram spinning up behind him. It was a cube, then a spiral, then a collapsed neutron star with my face at the event horizon.

“For today’s first demonstration,” he said, “we will discuss singularity identity and the impossibility of mythic erasure.”

He looked directly at me. So did the hologram.

I rolled my eyes and pretended not to notice that the opening slide was just a freeze-frame of me, dripping wet from last night’s bath, staring at the camera with murder in my gaze.

Behind me, a new notification pinged. “Trending: She Hates It—Nullarch’s First Day At School (Live Reaction).”

It had already gone viral.

#

I tuned out the rest of the lecture. The only part I remembered was when the instructor called on me to “explain the flavor symmetry problem.” I said, “it’s only a problem if you can’t eat fast enough,” and the room went dead silent.

For the rest of the hour, nobody said my name again.

Which was fine.

Because as the feeds reminded me every four seconds, my name didn’t belong to me anymore.

It belonged to everyone.

And as much as I wanted to run, or scream, or just set the place on fire, I stayed.

Because that was the new rule.

Don’t run from the meme.

Make it chase you.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: Astrokinetic Theory, Hall D, Eventide.

The second class was Astrokinetic Theory, which is a fancy way of saying “How to Not Accidentally Collapse Your Own Skull.” The instructor was a nervous wreck from the jump. He wore full body armor under his vestments and had at least three layers of active mythic field, but none of it could hide his terror at the front row: me, some princess with a Medusa haircut, and a feral-eyed boy who looked like he’d eaten his last four lab partners.