Page 14 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Her hands saved me. Scarred, callused, glowing faintly at the tips.

Those were fingers made for ignition, not hand modeling.

She stood like a detonation waiting for an excuse, all kinetic potential with no promise of restraint.

Too slight for standard threat assessment.

Too volatile for dismissal. And entirely too much for my implanted systems to quantify.

Fern’s eyes weren’t blue. Not white either. It was a color I didn’t have clearance for, a spectrum the universe invented as a warning label.

I was staring. I looked away. Not because I had to. Because it was already too late.

She turned, caught me in the act, and smirked. “See something you like?”

I kept my voice steady. “I see someone who doesn’t understand what’s at stake.”

She shrugged. “You mean ‘who refuses to play by your rules.’”

“Those rules are what keep us from—”

She laughed, cut me off. “From what? Unraveling?”

The word hung, heavier than it should have.

She drained the mug, set it on the counter, and took a step toward me.

The static doubled, then tripled. My boots buzzed again, out of rhythm with the room.

I realized, dimly, that I was sweating. That my heart rate had climbed past baseline and was holding steady, despite every attempt at self-regulation.

Fern stopped half a meter away, close enough for me to smell the aftertaste of ozone and fake berry in her hair.

Her proximity scrambled something. Too close, too fast, too much data. I caught myself focusing on the slope of her nose for no good reason, like my brain had decided that was the safest thing to stare at while the rest of me recalculated risk versus want versus imminent tactical failure.

“You can’t scare me,” she said, softer now. “But you can listen.”

I should have ordered her back. I should have called in the extraction, forced compliance, and escalated as protocol dictated. Instead, I stood there, cataloguing the rise and fall of her chest, the bright pulse of her wrist, the tilt of her head as she waited for my answer.

I said nothing.

After a moment, she stepped past, heading toward the back of the apartment. The temperature in the room dropped with her absence. My boots stopped humming. My HUD resumed normal function, but I didn’t trust it.

I took a deep breath. Tried to remember why I was here.

Containment. Calibration. Suppression.

But as I watched her disappear into the hallway, I realized I was less interested in stopping her than in seeing what she would do next.

I made another note, this one for myself:

She’s not the anomaly.

She’s the catalyst.

I stood alone with the smell of burnt algae and the faint echo of her laughter, and waited for the city to catch up.

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9

The apartment walls groaned in sympathy with my mood, or maybe just from the weight of impending disaster.

Even the lights, which were usually resilient to storm surges and domestic violence, flickered overhead, casting the kitchen in alternating strips of orange and migraine blue.

Dyris stood by the door, her outline so sharp it made everything else in the room look unfinished.

The heat of her presence pressed against my skin, even as she pretended to be composed.

She raised her wrist, tapped a sigil into the Accord holo, and read her final decree. Her voice had a new edge. She’d been holding this one back, saving it for when she thought I was at my weakest.

“Under Emergency Accord regulation, resonance subjects may be remanded to permanent stasis until their anomaly is resolved, or their agency is proven non-hostile. If you refuse immediate compliance, you waive all rights to civil appeal.”

I let her say it. I let the words hang, like a threat that didn’t know how to land.

I turned my back on her. Walked to the window, ignoring the way the glass vibrated under my hands.

The city outside was the same mess it always was: a kid running barefoot through rain, chasing a ration-steak hologram that would vanish the second he got close enough to taste it.

Farther down, I watched a cluster of cultists ignite votive screens, each one glowing with a different color, all of them facing the sky, like they were expecting a reply from something that actually cared.

Dyris waited. She didn’t move, but I could feel her watching. Cataloguing every tremor in my spine, every shift in my breathing, every subtle way my body threatened the structural integrity of the room.

I let the silence stretch until I felt her composure fracture.

“You think I’m unstable,” I said softly, but the words split the air like a hairline fracture. “But I’m the only thing here that’s adapting. The Accord’s still pretending hunger can be filed under ethics.”

She didn’t answer, so I kept going.

“You want to keep the world safe? Start by making it less worth destroying.” I looked over my shoulder, caught her in the act of staring at my mouth.

I turned. Stepped toward her, slow and deliberate. I could feel the power bleeding from me, pulse after pulse, like breath held too long and finally exhaled. The table beside me vibrated. The mug next to her arm cracked, then fused back together, the light around it bending in new directions.

“You came to make me safe,” I said. “But you didn’t bring enough safety.”

Her jaw worked, like she was about to say something, but she couldn’t get the words past her teeth.

“Not scared of me yet,” I teased, letting the charge build, making it personal. “That’s your second biggest mistake.”

I stopped an inch away, close enough for her to smell the ozone and adrenaline leaking from my skin. Her eyes locked on mine, wide, hungry, afraid.

“Your first,” I whispered, “was wondering what I’d sound like moaning your name.”

She broke then, not out loud, but in every muscle. I could see the way her boots tried to anchor her, how her fingers curled tight behind her back to keep from reaching for me.

For a second, we were both suspended, waiting for the world to decide if this was a fight or a fuck, or something else entirely.

The apartment groaned again, but I barely heard it over the sound of my heartbeat.

“Now,” I said, not needing to raise my voice. “Do your job, Dyris. Or get out of my kitchen.”

She blinked. Once. Twice. Then she stepped aside, opening the path to the door, and let me pass.

But I didn’t leave. Not yet. I just stood in front of her, waiting.

She swallowed, audibly. “You’re not supposed to be like this,” she said, voice almost hoarse.

I grinned. “Neither are you.”

I let her stand there, every system in her body screaming to retreat or to escalate. But she didn’t move.

I left her with the taste of my smile—the kind that lingers on the tongue like a secret, sweet and sharp, impossible to swallow. A cursed flavor that haunted my exes like teens flocking to new memes.

And the promise of more.

Thread Modulation: Dyris Vaelith Axis Modulation: Glimmer Zone, Pelago-9

The corridor outside the Meldin apartment was darker than when I’d entered.

I shut the door behind me and let the city’s quiet violence settle back into my bones.

The whole Glimmer Zone felt like it was holding its breath, as if every molecule of rust and plastic and rot had pivoted to align with the new center of gravity that was Fern Meldin.

Even the drones seemed to sense it—two floated above the landing, but when they turned their lenses on me, the lights dimmed and they powered down, as if excusing themselves from an assignment they wanted no part of.

I descended the stairs, slow, careful. My boots made no sound. I catalogued every step, every angle of attack, every ambush vector, but nothing moved. No one followed. The absence of threat was, itself, a kind of threat.

Outside, the rain was heavier. The city’s skin glistened under the onslaught, every puddle a lens refracting the sodium glare into strange, mythic shapes. I cut left, then right, until I reached the old lot where my drop-pod was supposed to be waiting. It wasn’t.

Instead, the pod’s perimeter had been breached, the security lights dead, the bio-lock scanner unresponsive.

I tried the override code, then the manual.

Both failed. The warpod sat like a coffin, stubborn and inert.

I looked at the status panel, but the screen only showed a single phrase, over and over: “I see you.”

I fought the urge to shiver.

I keyed in the deep reset, burned my palm on the quick-heat surface, and forced the door.

Inside, the temperature was subzero; the air tasted of old blood and cooling agent.

I ran the diagnostic on the flight panel, but the resonance map was corrupted.

Instead of a grid or a path, the display resolved to a single point, a sharp blue-white pinprick surrounded by a field of chaos.

I deleted the scan log. Flushed the backup. Wiped my own biometric from the entry system.

Then I composed my report. “Subject stable. Recommend monitoring only. Awaiting further orders.”

I knew what would happen to it. The message would get filtered, then rewritten, then buried in a data-silo where even the Accord’s best wouldn’t bother to retrieve it. They would send someone else. Maybe a team. Maybe a weapon.

But not me.

The reply came faster than I expected. Two lines, no signature.

“RETURN TO CRUISER FOR REASSIGNMENT. LOCAL OPERATIONS SUSPENDED PENDING REVIEW.”

I stared at the screen. Not a reprimand. Not a request for clarification. Only distance, enough for me to be clear of whatever came next.

I powered down the comms and sat in the cold, letting the chill soak into my bones. I ran through the interview in my head, cataloguing every mistake, every moment I’d lost control. There were more than I wanted to admit.

I tried to close my eyes. I tried not to remember the way Fern had looked at me. Like she knew something about the world that I didn’t. Like she was already mourning the future.