Page 16 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

I was barefoot on the laminate, toes numb from the fridge’s leaking coolant, picking at a slice of bread so anemic the word “bread” had to be in quotes.

I’d found it sealed at the bottom of a ration crate dated three cycles ago, and the yeast content was an urban legend.

But the other option was the same as always: caffeine, despair, and maybe a protein square if Perc didn’t overheat the wrapper again.

I dropped the bread into the toaster, a relic from the last maintenance boom, and waited for the familiar rattle of gears and ozone. It didn’t come. The machine just sat there, inert, daring me to believe in a future where things worked as intended.

I pressed the lever again, then harder, and then with a punch that left my knuckles aching. Still nothing. No click, no judder, no cheap mechanical music. Just silence so deep it retroactively erased the memory of every breakfast I’d ever had.

“Perc?” I said, not turning. The coffeepot glowed faintly in the corner, but he’d gone dark except for a blinking blue dot.

His LCD was supposed to default to sunrise emojis at this hour, or at least a grim motivational quote about the necessity of carbohydrates, but right now it just pulsed a single word: “Awaiting.”

I stared at it, unsettled.

“Don’t make me debug you before dawn,” I warned, but the joke fell flat even in my own ears.

The city outside made up for the apartment’s lack of personality.

The Glimmer Zone was never truly quiet: even in lockdown, the hum of street vents, the pulse of day-old news feeds, and the slap of early-shift boots on wet pavement all filtered through the cracked seals of our windows.

Tonight, or this morning, it was nothing except the distant, low-pressure hush of a world that had lost its taste for noise.

I pulled the bread from the toaster. The top was still cold, but the bottom had gone brittle in the ghost of a heat cycle.

I chewed, jaw working slow, and let my gaze wander over the chaos of our kitchen.

The counters were an archaeological dig of family conflict: Dax’s solder spools and micro-welders, Velline’s beauty bombs and color-coded infusions, and my collection of scavenged signal chips, blackmarket adhesives, and the one forbidden knife I’d never managed to re-hide after the last Accord sweep.

The knife’s handle was slick with a kind of heatless static, and every time I touched it, my veins pulsed a little brighter for the rest of the day.

I finished the toast and ran my thumb over the jagged edge of the counter.

The vibration was off, a half-cycle slower than usual.

It took a second to realize what was missing: the argument.

There was always an argument, usually about power consumption or whose turn it was to patch the mold-rot behind the utility panel.

The silence in its place was loud enough to rearrange molecules.

I leaned into the corridor, not really expecting an answer. “Dad?”

No response. Dax Meldin was the kind of sleeper who’d survived four years in a mining camp and never lost the habit of keeping one ear open for collapse. If he didn’t answer, he wasn’t ignoring me; he was out cold.

I padded down the hall, avoiding the one squeaky board by pure muscle memory. His door was cracked, letting out a wash of used air and the faint, sour note of old coffee grounds. I peered in.

He was sprawled sideways across the bunk, feet planted like a man expecting the next disaster to be vertical.

In the dim light, his beard looked like a hostile lifeform.

The blankets were twisted around his waist, one hand curled over a half-finished circuit board, the other wrapped tight around a dead soldering iron.

I watched the rise and fall of his chest, counting to make sure.

“Breathe easy,” I said, softer now. The words weren’t for him. They were for me.

I pulled the door shut and wondered where Mom had gotten off to.

Work was, obviously, out of the question with all that hung over our heads.

Knowing Velline, she’d slipped out to meet up with her arms dealer contact to stock up on more weapons-grade cosmetics for whatever apocalypse she’d penciled in next.

My bedroom had become a kind of abstraction.

I avoided it. The mattress remembered too much, and the wall still bore the imprint of the last time I lost my temper and punched straight through to the insulation.

The hole was patched with a decal that said, “MONUMENT TO BAD DECISIONS,” a birthday gift from Dax that was only funny on alternate days.

So, the kitchen again.

I slumped against the counter and looked at the window. Our apartment was four stories up, high enough to get a slice of actual skyline if you craned, but tonight the only thing out there was the shadow of the defense grid, the ghost of a city that didn’t know what to do with itself.

I checked the time: 04:13, then 04:14. I felt the minutes sliding past, slick as wet glass.

A pulse went through my left hand, the glow under my skin intensifying to a visible level for just a second.

It faded quickly, but the afterimage was strong enough to paint the world in echo.

I flexed my fingers, watching the light pool in my palm.

It was supposed to be a bug, a glitch, something that would fade with time and ignorance, but it was getting stronger every day.

Like the mythship had left something inside me, and now it was growing, hungry for a world that made sense.

I opened the fridge, hoping for a miracle. There was a quarter bottle of Velline’s unauthorized vodka, a slice of orange floating like a corpse. I poured myself a finger, sipped, and let it numb the edges.

The silence felt alive now. Not the cold, waiting kind, but something almost sentient, as if the city itself had decided to exhale all at once and see what happened when nothing filled the gap.

I pressed my forehead to the cabinet door. It was cool, and the vibration through the metal was steady now, a slow build toward some inevitable crescendo.

I tried to remember if I’d ever experienced a morning without dread.

Probably not.

I traced the veins on the back of my hand, blue-white and shimmering in the vodka-glow.

It felt like having a second pulse, a hidden life.

I wondered if anyone else had ever survived the mythship’s touch and stayed human long enough to care about breakfast after.

Lioren didn’t count; he supposedly built the ships.

I turned to Perc, the coffeepot still blinking “Awaiting.” I put my hand over his lid, letting the glow sink in.

“You awake?” I asked, half expecting a snarky comeback.

He whirred, then clicked. “Processing,” he said, voice slow and weirdly childlike. “World… unstable. Awaiting query.”

I bit my lip. “Is it me, or is it too quiet?”

“Too quiet,” Perc confirmed. “Statistically, there should be three brawls, a minimum of four neighbor complaints, and at least one marriage proposal from the block captain by this hour. Instead: nothing.”

I sipped the vodka, which was warm now and tasted like surrendered optimism. “Maybe we’re overdue for a good disaster.”

Perc flashed a sad-face emoji. “Last time you said that, you lost your eyebrows.”

“Don’t remind me,” I said, touching the faint scar above my left eye. “You think it’s a prelude, or an aftershock?”

“Unclear,” he said, then went silent again. I could almost hear him thinking, if that was a thing coffee machines did.

I finished the glass, set it down, and looked at my reflection in the microwave door.

The girl in the glass looked the same as always: skin a little too pale, eyes ringed with the residue of not-sleep, hair doing its own gravity experiment.

But the glow in my veins was brighter, more insistent, and for a second I thought I saw something else behind my eyes—a shape, or a memory, or a warning.

Cold settled over me. I rubbed my arms and stepped back toward the window.

The city was still there, but less real, like a simulation on pause. I wondered if anyone else was awake, or if I was the last variable in a system that had already decided the outcome.

Braced against the hush, I pressed my palms down against the counter.

“It’s too quiet,” I said, louder now, like maybe the world would listen if I just spoke up.

Nothing answered.

But the silence was getting heavier.

And I knew, without knowing, that the next sound I heard would change everything.

I never heard the first round. Not the way you’re supposed to hear disaster, with the whine of ionizing air and the split-second preamble of a missile shrieking toward your face.

The city was still silent, the kitchen still cold, and my mind still orbiting the simple fact that I didn’t want to be awake.

So, I wasn’t ready, not even a little, when the world went from pre-dawn to post-mortem in the space between two heartbeats.

The only warning was a vibration, deeper, older than the city itself.

Not even sound at first, just the kind of pressure you get when your insides know something that your brain refuses to log.

Then, through the floor, the shockwave hit.

It didn’t even bother to knock; it simply arrived, tore up the protocols, and made itself at home in the kitchen, the hallway, and the marrow of my bones.

I dropped the mug. It never hit the floor.

The apartment flexed around me, walls bowing, the fake marble counter shattering upward in a spray of flying white teeth.

The toaster launched from the wall and clipped me in the shoulder, but I was already moving, slamming into the far cabinets by a force that felt like an argument with gravity.

My hands hit the metal hard. My head followed, harder.