Page 91 of She Who Devours the Stars

The myththreads in the room quivered, as if the words alone could shake the ship apart.

It should have been a threat or a promise. It was neither. It was just a fact, spoken as gently as the first shudder before collapse.

I let the silence hold long enough to allow the truth of it to soak the walls.

“And what about what you need?” I said, this time quieter. There’s no dignity in watching your love starve herself, but I was never built for dignity. I was built for thresholds, for locking the doors at the last possible second. I was the Closure.

Fern finally looked at me. Not at the cameras, not at the hovering projections, but right at the core, where my memory and her future shared the same singularity.

Her mouth twitched, a near-smile that was only teeth. “This was supposed to be enough.”

I processed a dozen responses, none of which would change the outcome. “You can’t save everyone. Not even her.”

She ran a hand through her hair, the motion ragged and graceless. “Then why did you ever let me try?”

I could have said, because Lioren loved lost causes. Because I loved Lioren. Because I see the pattern and can’t break it, even now.

Instead, I said nothing. Sometimes, the best thing a cathedral can do is be silent.

I watched as Fern let her head rest against Alyx’s shoulder, the line of her spine arched like a question never meant to be answered. The mythic flux between them danced, receded, then spiked again, the whole story of their future already written in the negative space between their breaths.

I catalogued the moment for my records. If I’d had a tongue, I would have bitten it.

Fern slept there, or tried to. Alyx shifted in her dreams, her mythic signature flickering between fear and want. I ran a diagnostic. My containment of Alyx held.

I envied them both, just a little.

In the dark, I let the hunger gnaw at me, too.

And I waited, as always, for the world to break first.

Lioren used to say, “The best endings are the ones you see coming. Slow, inexorable, with just enough time to crave the fall.”

He was right.

Chapter 12: Afterlight

Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron

Axis Location: Medbay, Eventide Athenaeum

The first thing I noticed was the light.

Not the clinical glow of the medbay, or the nervous shimmer off the containment glass, but the way it invaded my body. Every photon that hit my skin left an afterimage on the inside of my eyelids, crisp as a digitized burn. I blinked, but the world didn’t snap into place. Instead, it stretched, time and sense fanned out into a thin white noise that hummed all the way down my spine.

They’d stripped me down to the disposable gown—standard procedure, I guess, when you might be contagious with myth. The fabric stuck to my chest, staticky and scratchy, and the IV in my arm pulsed along to a rhythm that had nothing to do with my heartbeat and everything to do with the subtle, electrical purr of the bed’s diagnostic grid. I could feel it: the grid’s algorithm running microcurrents through my back, mapping me like a coastline. Each pulse drew out a version of myself that was both more and less than human.

I lay there for a long time, pretending I didn’t know why the diagnostics kept stalling at 99%. Pretending I didn’t see the error flags looping in the periphery of my vision, projected just high enough in the HUD to make me dizzy if I looked directly at them.

The medbay was a box of obsidian glass and soft-walled silence. Only the necessary equipment: isolation pod, three-point monitor, a single row of chemical suppressants lining the side tray like tiny glass grenades. I counted them—nine, all full—and the act of counting steadied my hands enough to let me flex my fingers. They felt swollen, too hot, like the air was thickened just for them.

I tested my voice. “System. Water.”

Nothing, at first. Then a slow, deliberate click as the room’s neural net debated whether I was fit for liquids. The dispenser unlatched, the sound a little too loud, a little too deliberate, and filled a plastic cup with exactly 225 milliliters of water. Not a drop more.

I drank, even though it tasted like memory. My own, or someone else’s.

For a long time, nothing happened. The world went on, indifferent to my existence. I watched the condensation bead on the cup, each droplet shining with the promise of entropy. I thought about letting one run down my arm, see if it would sizzle or dissolve or just stick like a badge of failure.