Page 96 of She Who Devours the Stars

“Is she okay?”

“She’s not dead.”

“Better than average,” I said, smiling.

He smiled back, but it was thin. “You know, all this chaos, and you still look like you want to eat the moon.”

“I didn’t get to finish,” I said. The pool darkened at the core, water contracting as the resonance pulled tight. I felt the echo of the touch I’d left behind, the part of myself still spinning somewhere in the medbay, waiting to be claimed.

Perc didn’t push. He’d seen enough mythics spiral to know when not to poke the beast.

A shadow crossed the pool, elongated by the rooftop lights. Dax appeared, barefoot, towel draped over his shoulders, carrying three drinks balanced between his hands and chin. He didn’t even blink at the warping space. He just walked it, like it was another broken hallway in a city he’d already learned to survive.

He set the drinks on the edge of the pool, then dropped the towel and sat next to Perc. His gaze was sharper than Perc’s, but softer around the edges, as if he was already in the process of forgiving me for whatever I’d done.

He handed me a glass. It was my favorite: fake lime, extra salt, zero dignity.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“I feel worse,” I said, but I took the drink anyway.

He watched me for a long time. I could see the math in his eyes, the way he added up every gesture, every skipped heartbeat, every microexpression. Dax had never been the type to mourn. He was the type to measure the loss, then build something out of the ruins.

“Is this the fallout you wanted?” he asked.

I let the question hang in the air, then shook my head. “No. But I didn’t stop it.”

He nodded, as if that made sense.

Perc sipped his drink, then nudged Dax with an elbow. “She wasn’t just fallout, though.”

“No,” Dax said, not looking away from me. “She wasn’t.”

“You’re still bound to her,” Perc said, looking me dead in the eyes with his stupid pixelated display. “It’s not going to fade.”

I didn’t bother to deny it.

We sat like that, the three of us, for a while. The only sound was the slow churn of the pool, the distant whine of the city, and the faint, persistent buzz of the HoloNet’s never-ending meltdown.

Then, without warning, the shimmerpanels blinked and threw a newsfeed directly across the pool. The Trivane household AI had overridden the privacy settings, which meant something truly disastrous had gone down.

Mavros Antellan appeared, live, the man’s face twisted in high-res anger as he ranted about “resonance dilution” and “baseline contamination of astral lineage.” The AR tagged the feed as originating from the North Spire Gala, somewhere I’d never heard of, but it sounded smug and expensive.

“Bloodline audits should’ve caught this trash before she was allowed to bond,” he spat. “Astral resonance isn’t a charity—”

Off-camera, Dr. Thurnis’s sleeve blurred past the mic.

“You mean it’s not for girls who didn’t crawl out of your ivory fuckcradle,” she snapped. “Keep your vanity fetuses and gene-purity cosplay to yourself.”

A pause. A crash. The feed caught the moment a wine glass shattered against Mavros’s head, then switched to shakycam chaos as the brawl spilled into a VIP corridor.

“Already viral,” Perc said, not impressed.

“That’s a firing,” Dax said, shaking his head.

I sipped my drink, watched the city flicker, and said, “No. That’s a promotion. Somewhere worse.”

Dax, still watching me, asked, “You’re going to pull this tighter, aren’t you?”