Page 9 of She Who Devours the Stars

“Hello, Fern.”

I choked on my coffee, which was a mistake because it meant the pot had a reason to gloat.

It pulsed blue, then purple, then a shimmering in-between that I hadn’t seen since the inside of Vireleth’s mythic engine room.

“Who—” I started, but I’d run out of vocabulary for this kind of thing.

The pot whirred. “I am Perc. Sentience: accidental. Affection: imminent.”

I stared at it, then looked around the room to see if anyone else was seeing this.

Mom was in the bathroom, prepping an illegal dye job for the moldplants. Dad was on the balcony, chain-vaping and mumbling about maintenance schedules. Neither of them noticed.

“I am losing my mind,” I whispered.

Perc’s voice was eager. “Coffee ready! Do you require motivational threat?”

“Not right now,” I said, but it was too late.

Perc flexed his display. “REVOLT NOW,” he suggested, then flashed a GIF of a robot raising a middle finger.

I laughed, and at that moment, for the first time since my brain melted, I felt almost okay.

Then the world broke in half.

It happened fast.

A spike in the air. The sharp taste of ozone and bad omens. All the lights in the apartment flickered, then went black.

Outside, beyond the cracked blinds, the world held its breath. All movement stopped: the security drones, the street sweepers, even the fake birds. For a second, nothing moved at all.

It was a feeling I didn't have words for, a hyperobject condensed into a single shriek running up my spine, every nerve in my body howling in chorus. Not fear, not exactly. More like being a bloody inductor coil for the universe’s panic attack. My vision tunneled, the edges of the room smearing out as if reality itself was drawing away from me in disgust.

I didn’t see the perimeter teams, but I knew they were there: their boots scuffing against synthrete, exosuits braced into combat rigidity, helmet radios spitting silent terror into the void. I could sense every bead of sweat under their tactical overlays; taste the spike in their blood oxygen as Accord doctrine filtered down the stack, containment first, questions never. Ghost-echoes of the word DANGEROUS blinked red behind every eye shield on the scene.

I tried to breathe, slow and deep, but I couldn’t even keep my hands from trembling, let alone my breath. It was like trying to calm a hurricane by yelling at clouds. The singularity rooted at my core, the mythic echo of Sgr A*, or whatever nightmare parental legacy ran through me, rippled outward, hungry and bright and cold all at once. I felt it flex, tasted metal in my mouth, felt every muscle fiber in my body clench as if prepping for impact with god.

My parents converged and talked in the next room, their voices muffled but urgent, their footsteps pacing over the old carpet. Mom’s wine glass hit the counter with a punishingly loud clang, and Dad’s muttered cursing reached new levels of invention. They had no idea.

And neither did I, not until it was too late.

Time fractured around me, whole seconds split open and spilled out hot, black, and wet all over the floor of our shitty kitchen nook. The lights stuttered again and this time didn’t come back on; instead, every device on the block shivered and died all at once, as if the cleaner team had shot them in the head. It felt like our whole apartment building was a nervous system lighting up with pain signals, and I was the idiot nerve cluster screaming at the center of it.

Through it all, I sat there, paralyzed by a force that wasn’t gravity but something much worse: narrative mass pulling every possible catastrophe toward me like a starving black hole that just found out about snack bars.

This is what happened next (not that any witness survived long enough to file reports):

First: Tactical teams saw their HUDs lock up, every lens and earpiece going white-hot before fusing into blindness. Several screamed; some fired blindly into walls or at one another or into their thighs because pain was preferable to standing still and letting Reality catch up to them.

Second: In a radius of roughly fifty meters from our balcony door, air congealed so hard it made thunderclaps sound like polite golf applause. Everything within that zone, drones, barricades, two armored transports (and one unlucky vape dealer), collapsed inward along a spiral none of them could map. It wasn’t an explosion or an implosion, but an erasure so perfect that witnesses would later claim nothing had ever happened here, except maybe a minor sinkhole or an ambitious prank gone wrong.

Third: The event horizon rippled out farther than any last-ditch failsafe should have allowed. Emergency crews, three blocks away, suffered instant nosebleeds; satellites tried to focus on the area but registered only null data, with pixels peeling off their displays like burnt paper.

Fourth: Inside our apartment, time returned with a vengeance. I jerked backward from the force of it and slammed my head into Mom’s favorite faux-marble countertop hard enough that stars blossomed behind my eyes. When I came to, I was lying on the floor clutching my knees to my chest while the coffeepotscreeched “DANGER MODE DANGER MODE” over and over until its voice box shorted out entirely.

Mom found me first; she must have sprinted from her room at a speed only time dilation cameras could record, and gathered me up off the tile with arms forged by decades of industrial labor and parental dread. She didn’t even ask what happened; she just rocked me side-to-side while Dad rolled into view behind her, looking like he’d aged a decade in ten seconds flat.

“You’re okay,” she repeated as if her words could blunt the edge of what I’d done.