Page 95 of She Who Devours the Stars

Probably. Maybe. Absolutely.

I grinned, teeth bared, and let the hunger sit there with me. It wasn’t going away. I wasn’t going to let it.

If Fern ever came back for the piece she left behind, I’d be ready.

No panic. No fear.

Just anticipation.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane

Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

The margarita pool was a mythic joke that never got old.

It sprawled across the South Tower rooftop, a slow-rotating disk of lime-mint liquor kept in perpetual motion by a resonance field that pulsed every five seconds. Most days, it shimmered under a patchwork of shimmerpanels, the city lights painting spiral arms across the surface like some drunk god’s attempt at cartography. Tonight, the panels bent light just a little wrong, so every star above and every window below warped into a lazy, green-gold whirlpool centered exactly on me.

I floated dead center, collarbones skimming the surface, eyes half-shut. My glow was uneven, gold where the last of the day’s warmth lingered under my skin, sharp green where the hunger hadn’t burned off. Each breath I took sent a ripple through the pool, shifting the axis of the whirl by a degree, but I didn’t bother fighting it. Sometimes it was easier to let the world orbit you than pretend you had the strength to swim.

I should have felt relaxed. Sated. Instead, every muscle in my body hummed with unfinished business. The air above the water was sharp with the chemical bite of tequila and ozone, every breeze flavored by whatever the city’s HVAC system belched up from the streets below. I liked the taste of it: artificial, slightly toxic, and always layered with the afterscent of something trying too hard to be real.

On the far edge of the pool, Perc sat on a broken lounge chair, propped up on the corpse of a dead control panel.

Perc’s holo display flickered and popped, lighting his bowl in stuttering pulses as he scrolled through headlines and flagged anything that mentioned my name. Every time he picked up a reference to “Nullarch” or “Mythic Disaster,” the entire suite of notifications went nova for a second, then reset. He glanced at me every few cycles, as if expecting to find me evaporated or replaced by something more interesting.

I didn’t oblige.

Instead, I drifted, let the water cradle my spine, and watched the city tremble with its anticipation.

“You know you’re breaking the security perimeter,” Perc said, not looking up. “Six of the campus drones have defaulted to Fail-Over because they can’t parse your containment logic.”

“Seven,” I said, just to see if he’d check.

He did. His mouth twitched at the corner. “Nice. Did you do it on purpose?”

“Not really,” I said, but it wasn’t a lie. The hunger did most of the work now.

He set his holo aside and watched me float. I could tell he wanted to ask about the trial, about the aftermath, about whether I felt better or worse, but Perc had never been the type to tiptoe around the answer he wanted. He just stared, silent, until I started to feel like a specimen.

He said, “You look unsatisfied.”

“Because I am.”

“News said you collapsed the city’s mythic field for a full point-eight seconds. That’s longer than the Accord has on record.”

I shrugged. “It didn’t feel long enough.”

This time, he used a curious-cranky face gif.

“You ever going to talk about it?” he asked.

“Nothing to say.”

“Could have fooled me.”

We sat in that silence for a while. The pool’s rotation slowed, then sped up, matching my mood. I wondered if Alyx was awakeyet, if she could feel it when the world bent just a little bit to the left.

Perc resumed monitoring the holo again. “They flagged her at Tier One,” he said. “Triggered alerts on twelve systems. Eighteen more are watching for resonance drift.”