Page 3 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

The Glimmer Zone’s Perimeter Defense Array had once been the pride of Pelago-9, a glass-walled cube perched atop a brutalist tower, bristling with comms dishes, cluster-microwaves, and a single faded poster promising “Infinite Safety, Zero Worries.” In practice, it was a cross between a daycare for washed-up defense techs and a glorified drinking den.

Most days, the only thing the operator had to defend against was boredom, and even that lost half its edge by noon.

She went by Mal, or at least she did now that the old security chief had finally been demoted. The job was simple: watch the dashboard, log the pings, and, if the Accord ever got around to it, run a system integrity check. The Accord never got around to it.

Mal was three sips into a cup of industrial-grade coffee (it had been banned in five sectors for its alleged mutagenic properties, but here it was basically tap water) when every single alert on the dashboard went bright red.

Not the dull, lazy red of a missed drone check.

The kind of red that suggested imminent and thorough disintegration.

She blinked. Once. Twice.

The grid was lighting up every defense node on the hemisphere, from the old sky-pulse railguns to the deprecated orbital shrapnel banks.

Even the prototype weather satellites, which weren’t supposed to be weaponized, began spinning up.

For a second, Mal wondered if she’d finally succumbed to the coffee’s side effects.

But no, the dashboard was still blinking, and her hands were steady.

Somewhere in the background, she could hear the whine of capacitors charging for the first time in years.

“Okay,” she said, to no one in particular. “Somebody’s bored.”

She keyed in the targeting log, half-expecting to see the usual dead man’s bluff: a flagged ship, a rogue satellite, maybe a stray comet if the sensors were feeling dramatic.

Instead, every weapon was locked onto a single, falling point.

The signature was so hot it burned through the interface; nothing but a string of random letters and a location that drifted lower by the second.

She cross-referenced the ID. Accord didn’t have a match, but there was a voiceprint hit from a decommissioned salvage relay.

The subject was flagged as “anomalous,” with a cautionary note: “Potential mythic-resonance event.” Mal snorted.

She’d heard that phrase tossed around before, usually by Accord lifers trying to sound cool at staff parties. Myths didn’t happen on Rustrock.

She zoomed in on the falling object. The cam feed resolved, and Mal saw it for herself: a non-Accord, highly advanced, reentry pod, trailing vapor and flame, and inside it was a girl. Barely twenty, if that, face caught mid-scream, hair floating in a corona of resonance.

Mal reached for her flask, unscrewed the cap, and took a long, deliberate pull. It tasted like old batteries and regret, but it did the job.

She watched as the pod punched through three layers of atmospheric defense, ignored all attempts at interception, and landed squarely in the middle of the old maintenance yards. The Accord’s kill order came in seven seconds later, with a warning to “minimize collateral.”

Mal laughed. It wasn’t even a good laugh. “Sure. Minimize collateral with thirty city-block railguns. Nice one.”

She let the dashboard continue its little apocalypse. The protocol said she was supposed to escalate, but who would she call? No one up the chain would care, not unless the target started a revolution or bought the wrong person’s daughter a drink.

She watched, with a kind of morbid curiosity, as the target’s data went from “unknown” to “priority kill” to “classified: Sovereign risk.” The new face on the feed was a better shot than her own ID photo: scared, beautiful, a little bit star-burnt around the edges.

Mal sighed. “Here’s to you, girl. Burn it all down.”

She poured a little from the flask onto the floor in solidarity, then propped her boots on the console and waited for the next disaster.

When the railguns finally fired, Mal toasted the sky.

It was going to be a hell of a morning.

Thread Modulation: Trivane AI Axis Alignment: Trivane Vault, Galactic Core

Meanwhile, in the Vault, the AI had gotten more poetic.

It was writing sermons, songs, and memes, which it then sent to me.

Subject: Nullarch Reborn.

Addressee: Fern Meldin, Last Spark of Creation.

Attached: A graphic made to look like a child’s homemade card. A red heart. “I love the Nullarch!”

It didn’t ask my permission. It didn’t wait for my approval.

It just loaded into my AR, which had changed from my red, pink, neon-black abomination of a personal theme into some sleek black-and-silver nightmare that screamed upper crust. I hated it.

It didn’t yell “paint rat from Rustrock.” It screamed the worst swear word I knew: “aristocracy.”

It slung the data across every piece of the House Trivane network, every shadow, every half-dead satellite. It sent the message to every mythic node in the sector.

The message was simple: the Nullarch is back. Worship accordingly.

I liked the card, but what the fuck was a Nullarch? Could I have my old theme back?

Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Family Apartment

I didn’t know any of this as I staggered through the edge of town, smelling like burned plastic and murder. Well, I learned of it. Because the fucking A.I. that hijacked my AR kept playing me clips and telling me strange facts about its existence. Then, I found the mute button.

Take that, fucker.

So, I knew, but not like, in an omniscient way, but in the way that someone who listens to the official Compliance Operatives' comm channels knows things.

I felt it in the way the sidewalk curled away from my unprotected feet, the way the automated billboards glitched whenever I walked by. I felt it in the nervous, edge-of-riot murmur in every crowded market, every hole-in-the-wall food cart.

Not the sort of response a young woman in nothing but a blanket usually gets.

When the first kid recognized me, wide-eyed and mute, he ran off so fast he left his snack behind.

It hit me like a lightning bolt. I stared at the snack like it was the last honest thing in the galaxy.

Looked both ways like guilt still mattered.

Then I grabbed it, chewed like it owed me something, and kept walking.

Who the fuck eats banana-flavored protein snacks? I finished it anyway.

The city’s surveillance drones all pivoted to watch me, their lenses dilating, shivering, as if terrified to blink.

Most of all, I felt it when I heard the first chant, not loud, but persistent, in the half-abandoned underpass outside Bay 7: “Nullarch. Nullarch. Nullarch.” Weirdest thing? It was more than the techhborn chanting it.

It felt like the start of a religion. Or worse? The revival of an old one they buried for a reason.

By the time I got back to the apartment, the world was already on fire. Literally.

Artillery shells lobbed by Accord security fell haphazardly all around me.

Most detonated in mid-air. Rail gun slugs tore the skyline, and a guided missile tried to nail me when I crossed the market.

Tried being the keyword. The first shell bent away from me like it changed its mind.

The second just… vanished, and most of the rest just spaghettified into a smear of quantum nonsense that left behind a perfect silence and the smell of baby powder and prismatic bubbles that made strangely loud POP sounds.

The missile? I wasn’t really sure, but some red-black beam made it vanish from the sky. Vireleth, maybe? The incredibly put-upon sigh that echoed in my head didn’t leave many doubts.

I didn’t ask for protection, didn’t see most of it, either.

I just walked, the aftertaste of artificial banana in my teeth, blanket around my shoulders, and the burn of Sagittarius A* in my bloodstream whispering “ hell no ” to physics.

I guess, maybe, “Nullarch” came with auto-defense.

Which was nice, but I still didn’t know what a Nullarch was.

The street outside was empty, all the usual noise vacuumed up by curfew or something worse. The only lights were from the vending kiosks, running panic ads on a ten-second loop: EMERGENCY UPDATE. CITIZEN COMPLIANCE ORDER. STAY INDOORS. BUT WHILE YOU’RE HERE, BUY A FIZZ.

I slunk through the lobby, hugging the wall, ignoring the slow-rot smell from the carpet.

The elevator was out, of course, so I took the stairs, each landing painted with a different mural, all of them faded except the last: a girl in a jumpsuit, floating through starless dark, the phrase “GIVE IT HELL” stenciled above her head.

Home sweet home.

If there’s a hell, I’m pretty sure you’re forced to spend eternity inside whatever apartment you last paid rent for.

Ours was an ex-mining prefab jammed into one of the tower stacks on the city’s shadow side, forever reeking of industrial coolant and wet laundry no matter how many incense pods you burned through.

Two-and-a-half rooms, enough zero-G fishing rods jammed in the entryway to impale a small marching band, and one oxygen fern that my parents had been trying (and not completely failing) to keep alive since before my birth.

Someone with a vendetta against comfort could have designed the place, but it was also the only place in the universe that had ever felt remotely safe.

I braced myself at the door, drew in one last lungful of honest-to-whoever street air, overripe soy oil and melted plastic piping and the faintest copper tang of fear, then palmed the entry.