Page 93 of She Who Devours the Stars

I grinned into the pillow, the memory of Fern’s mouth on my skin like the aftershock of a good decision.

Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was a promise.

Either way, I wasn’t scared.

I was ready for more.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith

Axis Alignment: Observation Chamber, Above Medbay

The observation chamber was built for judgment.

Every angle of it calculated for maximum detachment: glass that curved a full hundred and eighty degrees so that you could monitor every patient and visitor at once; floors that repelled dust and emotion alike; a climate system tuned to keep the room always two degrees colder than you wanted. If you stood at the correct mark, you could watch the whole mythic ward without ever seeing your reflection. The design was efficient, honest, and merciless. I appreciated that.

I stood at the centerline, arms folded, gaze on the bank of displays streaming Alyx’s vitals in real time. The data was elegant, her resonance spike mapped as a symmetrical, looping waveform, then overlaid with a second, messier pattern: half echo, half interference. The medical AI flagged it as “aberrant but stable.” The mythic panel tagged it “UNCLASSIFIED (pending recursion).” I could have lost myself in the math, but I didn’t care about the numbers. I cared about her.

From up here, she looked small. Human. Her chest rose and fell with the slow, deliberate pace of someone fighting every breath for control. Even in sleep, she was in the process of becoming something more. I remembered how she’d looked in the bath, a creature of warmth and motion and contradiction, skin reflecting the pool’s gold and blue like she’d been designed for that exact spectrum.

My hands twitched, the nerves in my left pinkie still recalibrating from the cold. I pulled Fern’s coat tighter around my shoulders, not because I needed the warmth, but because it gave my body something to do while my mind ran in circles. The coat shouldn’t have fit me as well as it did. Fern was shorter, lighter, but the garment felt weighted, loaded with memory. It smelled like her: ozone, the faint hint of engine grease, and under that, the sweet-sour trace of synthetic cherry. I told myself I’d worn it up here because it was the nearest thing at hand, but my fingers kept finding the places where the seam had come loose, the patches she’d repaired with bite marks and sticker glue. A little piece of entropy, stitched together with bad intentions.

If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine it smelled like Alyx, too.

A technician entered, arms full of printouts and a tablet blinking with notification after notification. She set them down without a word, checked the calibration on the neural dampeners, and hurried out. I could see the pulse in her throat, frantic, scared. The staff all had that look now, ever since Fern’s trial. It amused me.

Alyx’s chart spiked, there, right there, in the transition from REM to waking. Her body stiffened, then slackened, and a visible shiver ran from her toes up to her collarbones. Themythic feed flashed red, then immediately corrected itself: a system built for disaster learning, for real-time forgiveness.

I leaned in, watching her hands clench, relax, then grip the bedding with a desperation so raw it almost felt like violence. She didn’t cry out. She just existed, furious and alive.

Alyx’s eyelids fluttered, then opened. For a moment, she just stared up, blank and unfiltered, as if the world needed to prove itself before she’d give it the benefit of the doubt. I recognized the look. I’d worn it myself when I was 14, post-awakening.

I tapped the side of the glass, once. The interface chirped, and her camera panel flickered on. I watched her watch herself on the monitor, then reach up and stroke the spot on her thigh where Fern had touched her. The gesture was precise. Reverent, almost. The way someone might test the edge of a wound they weren’t sure had healed.

The waveforms on her chart spiked again, sharp, intimate, familiar.

The first time I saw Alyx, I dismissed her as a baseline overachiever. She wore her competence like a joke, all sarcasm and slouched posture, the kind of mask that only worked if you’d never been forced to wear one for real. I assumed she’d break the first time she experienced resonant or mythic awakening. Instead, she’d made it through both simultaneously and still managed to throw a punch at the world on her way out of the ring.

She wasn’t afraid, not of Fern, not of the mythic, not even of the silence that followed.

I catalogued that. I respected it. And, if I let myself, I wanted it.

She reminded me of Fern, in the ways Fern wouldn’t admit even to herself.

The scan lights shifted, a slow cascade of blue and green, translating Alyx’s internal storm into a language even the AI couldn’t quite render. “Emotional structures: altered,” it said, the voice neutral, blank. “Command-level resonance: detected.”

I tilted my head, watching the translation crawl the perimeter of the display.

“She survived bonding with Eirona-Null,” I said, the words barely a whisper. The A.I. heard me, logged it, and added the notation to her file.

Fern had barely flinched. Alyx had gone under and come back out, not as a mythic, but as herself, doubled and rewired, as if the only way she could accommodate that much power was to let it eat her old self and start from scratch.

It wasn’t jealousy I felt. Jealousy was pointless, a reaction for people who expected to lose. This was curiosity. Interest. The low, coiled thrum of a scientist confronted with a better result than the theory allowed.

I slid my hand down the sleeve of Fern’s coat, feeling the seam, the fray, the memory. I wondered what it would feel like to pull Alyx into a space this cold, this controlled, and see whether she’d break or whether she’d burn it down.

Maybe both.

Alyx shifted on the bed, staring at the ceiling, then at her hands, as if expecting to see something unfamiliar. She didn’t. She just sighed, then let her body fall slack, as if the fight was over for now.