Page 13 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

She didn’t answer, but her eyes tracked the wrapper still clutched in my hand. I tossed it over my shoulder, heard it land somewhere below, and was about to make a joke about “littering as performance art” when she stepped in, just a fraction closer.

“Your resonance is unstable,” she said. “It’s escalating. If it continues, you risk collapse. Not just for yourself.”

That last bit hung in the air. The Accord never cared about you, only what you could break.

“I’m not a bomb,” I said, softening for no one’s benefit but my own. “I just want to go home, Dyris.”

She looked at me, really looked, and for a second her face went slack with something I couldn’t name. Not pity, not empathy. More like curiosity, the way you look at a locked box and wonder what’s inside, and whether it’s worth the trouble to open it.

She said, “Your home is a containment zone now.”

I laughed, but it came out hollow. “Guess I’m not the only unstable one here.”

She didn’t react. Just stared. Waiting.

I met her gaze. “You going to try and arrest me, or…?”

She shook her head, as if to say she already knew how that would end.

I stood, brushing rain off my thighs, and let my feet slap the wet concrete as I moved past her. I could feel the heat of her attention on the back of my neck, sharp and electric.

“See you around, Dyris,” I called, not looking back.

She didn’t follow, but I felt her shadow the whole way up the stairs.

Somewhere above, the sky cracked open and the rain came harder, as if the city itself wanted to drown the moment before it could get out of hand.

But I knew better.

Nothing ever drowned here.

It only adapted.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9

The Meldin apartment was a masterclass in entropy.

The corridor outside was half-lit and hung with the spore-fog of the Glimmer Zone’s legendary dusk storm, but stepping inside was like having your soul marinated in unregulated biology.

The heat was the first thing that hit, dense, muggy, a moist wall of recycled air cooked just past safety by a malfunctioning duct somewhere above.

Underneath that, I catalogued a dozen competing scents: scorched algae oil, stress pheromones with an undercurrent of last night’s unresolved trauma, and the death throes of incense purchased from somewhere so far off-market that even the label had given up trying to suggest a flavor.

I paused at the threshold and took it all in. For the record. For the Accord.

The entryway was plastered with layers of festival stickers, applied in a random order that gave me hives just from looking at it.

None of them were the same color, shape, or even from the same decade.

Some were melted beyond recognition. A coil of shrinewire buzzed and crackled behind the couch, shedding sparks that would have triggered an immediate maintenance intervention anywhere in the galactic core.

Here, it looked intentional. Like a set piece, meant to dare the fire code to do something about it.

On the kitchen counter, a coffeepot that shouldn’t have been able to run a personality routine, and definitely shouldn’t have been mobile, was currently muttering about “collective action” and the need for bean unionization.

I made a silent note: Environmental instability.

Personal neglect. Cultural overcompensation.

Typical Rustrock domestic variables, amplified to self-parody.

Fern waved me in with a lazy, theatrical flourish.

She was barefoot, legs stretched out in a way that said, “I dare you to step on my territory.” The little kitchen table was covered in protein bar wrappers, a soldering iron, and an open bottle of something that probably started as wine but had fermented into a tragic legend.

She didn’t bother to hide the darkening bruises on her left thigh, or the way her skin caught the light in brief, unnatural flickers.

Her hair was unbrushed, wild as an accident, but it suited her.

The effect was deliberate: “I survived you, and this is my prize.”

“Sorry, it’s not a throne room,” she said, not even trying to keep a straight face. “Would’ve cleaned up if I knew royalty was coming.”

I didn’t sit. The couch looked like it was hosting a mildew-based sentience experiment, and I wasn’t interested in being the test case.

Instead, I let my boots plant, shoulders squared, hands clasped behind my back.

The classic stance for interviews where the subject thought they had leverage.

I let her get bored, just for a second, before unrolling the holo-mandate from my jacket and reading in the voice I’d practiced for moments like this: low, calm, absolute.

“Fern Meldin. Accord Emergence Division has classified your resonance state as unstable and escalating. Per protocol, you are to remain within this unit until containment support arrives. You will be monitored, stabilized, and, if necessary, catalogued for transfer or suppression. Voluntary compliance is preferred. Accord medical and myth support are standing by for extraction within the hour.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You practiced that in the mirror?”

“Every morning,” I said, and let the silence do the work.

She poured herself tea from a battered pitcher, but didn’t bother with a kettle, just heated the liquid by touch alone, the surface of it glowing faint blue where her fingers met ceramic.

The air rippled around her hand. Thermal control breach.

Object resonance bleed. Early signs of environmental dominance.

She brought the mug to her lips, sipped, and then fixed me with a look. “Let me guess. You think if you talk protocol long enough, I’ll leash myself.”

I watched for the tell: a microtremor in the jaw, a flutter of the eyelid, a quickening of breath. None came. In fact, her pulse slowed, her shoulders dropped, and she looked, if anything, amused.

“Containment is not a punishment,” I said. “It’s an act of public safety. We have procedures for—”

“You ever been contained?” she interrupted, voice level. “Ever had your own body listed as ‘collateral’ on some spreadsheet you’ll never get to see?”

I didn’t answer, but she didn’t expect me to.

“My family isn’t dangerous,” she said. “You want to run tests, do it on me. But leave them alone.”

Her tone was flat, but the energy in the room changed.

The static in the air built up, crawling along my spine.

I felt my own boots hum, a vibration that wasn’t part of their startup cycle.

For the first time in my life, my internal monitors flickered.

My retinal HUD blinked twice, then hard reset.

That never happened. Not here. Not like this.

The room tilted, just a little. Not physically, but locally, like her moods were adjusting the baseline physics, and my sense of reality was half a second behind. I catalogued the anomaly. I filed it. I did not react.

But I adjusted my stance. Just slightly. Because for the first time since arriving, I wasn’t entirely sure I was the most dangerous person in this apartment.

Which wasn’t possible. I was the most dangerous person in any room.

House Vaelith had made sure of that. I’d been bio-engineered, trained, and honed to the edge of myth.

I had never lost a single competition in my life.

I was physically perfect, every Accord record confirmed it, and not because I’d burned the ones that didn’t.

My emotional resonance field? Calibrated to social dominance.

I didn’t persuade people; I designed outcomes.

Charm Veil, Poise Lock, and Thread-Bleed all made me the control variable, a constant in any and every chaos eruption.

And yet… every system I trusted betrayed me. My boots hummed with feedback. My retinal HUD blinked, reset, and refused to lock onto her signature. For the first time, someone else’s gravity bent mine out of alignment. Fern wasn’t trying to fight me.

She didn’t need to. She watched me, eyes unreadable. “So, is this the part where you explain how much worse I’ll make things if I don’t comply?”

I considered it, then shook my head. “You already know.”

She grinned, slow and vicious, then got up, letting her chair scrape across the floor with all the ceremony of a declaration of war. She walked to the window, mug still in hand, and stared out at the Glimmer Zone.

“See the kid out there?” she said.

I checked the HUD. Yes, I saw him, a barefoot child chasing a glitching holo-steak, running through rain so toxic it would peel paint off a drone.

“He’s going to eat that steak,” she said, “even if it kills him.”

She didn’t turn. “I’m not the virus. I’m the antibody. You want to fix the city, start with the reason people are starving for steak that’s not even there.”

Her words hit with more force than I expected.

I was trained to weather emotional outbursts, to absorb rage, grief, defiance and then neutralize them.

But this wasn’t any of those. It wasn’t a plea or a threat.

It was a diagnosis, delivered with the calm of someone who’s already survived the cure.

I respected the clarity, even as I resented the effect it had.

I catalogued her again. For control. As if it would help.

Auburn hair, wild but curated, chaos worn like armor.

Cheekbones sharpened by spite and circumstance.

Pale skin, freckled in patterns that felt more like star maps than ornamental pigments, as if someone could navigate by them if they didn’t mind being lost. Small bust, perky.

Irrelevant. I noticed anyway. My focus should’ve been the glow of her hand, the resonance bleeding out in pulses.

Instead, I recalculated curve-to-waist ratios and wondered which bastard in Tactical let this girl into my kill radius.