Page 4 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
The door shuddered open with a sad hydraulic whine.
I stepped through and immediately tripped over a pile of scavenged coolant pipes that hadn’t been there this morning.
My left shin made contact with something sharp enough to draw blood, which meant they’d been out junking again. At least some things hadn’t changed.
I barely had time to register the new obstacle course as a threat before the domestic artillery started.
“I watered it last shift!” Mom’s voice detonated from the kitchen nook like she was staging a coup.
Velline Meldin: five feet of muscle, attitude, and perfectly sculpted eyeliner, currently dual-wielding a canister of nutrient gel and a cereal spoon like she was ready to go full berserker on the next living thing that grew a fungus spore.
Her words ricocheted off every metal surface in the unit: fridge, microwave tower, Dad’s sacred coffee urn.
From behind the partition came Dad’s usual counterfire, slow and geological as always. “You watered the wrong side,” he said. “The root cluster on the right is dying.”
Mom responded with an audible eye-roll. “How does a root cluster even have sides? It’s a sphere! You made that up.”
“If you listened when I explained—”
“No one has ever explained root directions to me,” Mom fired back, jabbing at Dad with the nutrient gel for punctuation. “Not once in nineteen years.”
Dad didn’t answer right away. He was probably running internal diagnostics on how best to phrase his next point without triggering escalation.
He’d once been an actual peace negotiator for orbital dockworker unions, a fact he only mentioned when cornered, but right now he was deploying that same high-stakes crisis management on houseplant care.
Their voices bounced around the prefab walls like ion cannon fire on a mining hull. It should have been annoying, but it was weirdly comforting, like nothing outside had changed and we weren’t all one missed meal away from anarchy or atomization.
Then Dad rounded the corner, saw me, and froze like someone had just kicked the gravity up to eleven. His face locked in place, all his usual crisis-response subroutines short-circuiting at once. I watched him try to reboot behind the eyes.
Mom turned next. Her gaze swept over me with the speed and accuracy of a targeting array. The spoon hit the floor with a metallic clatter. For a whole second, neither of them moved.
Maybe they were taking inventory: number of limbs still attached, quantity of visible blood, degree of burn trauma, any signs of mythic contamination or active collapse fields. Or maybe they were just waiting for someone else to speak first so they wouldn’t have to admit how terrified they were.
“Hi,” I said, forcing the word through a throat raw from screaming my way through atmospheric entry. Well, that and being naked in a mythship. I tried not to look at the gash on my shin because if I did, Mom would too, and that would be the end of the room’s structural integrity.
They both moved at once, coming at me from opposite sides of the room like some long-practiced containment maneuver.
It wasn’t so much an embrace as a full-scale hazardous material clean-up.
Dad materialized a med-spray from thin air and went for my leg while Mom cupped my face in both hands like she was checking for fractures or psychic possession.
“Fern, baby, what the absolute fuck,” Mom said, voice cracking at the edges like she couldn’t decide if she was about to strangle me or cry or both. The longer she looked at me, the more it leaned toward crying. I might’ve preferred the strangling, I was dressed for it at least.
“Are you okay?” she asked before I could answer, and then immediately followed it with, “What happened?” and “Did you eat today?” all in one breathless barrage.
“Yeah,” I said, the lie automatic and poorly stitched together. “Just had a rough landing coming back from work.” Which wasn’t technically wrong if you stretched every definition past the point of legal durability.
Mom tilted my chin, searching my pupils for concussion signs or worse.
When she didn’t find an immediate cause for a hospital run, she switched gears mid-sentence like she always did.
“You know what would help you heal faster? Real food.” Then she stabbed Dad with a glare sharp enough to pierce hull plating.
“Which we’d have more of if someone hadn’t spent half our stipend on hydroponic upgrades nobody asked for. ”
Dad, unphased, sprayed my leg with antiseptic foam cold enough to make me twitch, then gave me his signature philosophical nod like he was delivering a sermon.
“Growth is sometimes painful,” he said, as if quoting scripture instead of slathering menthol-smelling frostbite onto an open wound. “But adaptation makes us stronger.”
Mom rolled her eyes so hard I heard it. She caught herself smiling anyway, because as much as she claimed to hate this entire circus, she loved it more than she loved oxygen or root cluster arguments.
Dad took a beat before making the next tactical approach. “Didn’t expect you back until tomorrow,” he said, voice low. Which was code for: What disaster dragged you home this time?
“I got off early,” I lied, again. If either of them noticed how badly my hands trembled, they didn’t say anything about it.
Mom snorted, sharp and unimpressed. “Probably because your boss finally figured out nobody survives his overtime scheduling.”
She wiped a streak of nutrient gel off her sleeve, barely missing her cheek in the process, then fixed me with the maternal death-glare she reserved for things like skipped meals and police reports. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Fine,” I said for the sixth time, then redirected with a desperate pivot toward safer ground. I pointed at our half-dead houseplant like it was a flare signal. “How’s Old Greeny doing?”
They took the bait. Of course they did. Parents are experts at pretending their kid isn’t five seconds from a breakdown, or worse.
Both of them grabbed onto the subject like it was a life raft, launching right back into their eternal war about root cluster hydration, moisture retention metrics, and who’d nearly killed it with last week’s fungal bloom.
It didn’t last. The HoloNet’s timing was almost designed to counteract my parents' wink-wink-nudge-nudge overlook of my nudeness, wearing a strange blanket, or my now glowing skin. I bet it was that annoying AI I muted before, fucking with me.
Every info-feed window on the shared wall started flashing between riot footage outside City Hall and progressively worse Sgr A* proximity warnings, each captioned with varying degrees of cosmic alarm. The central headline ran in bright, capitalized panic text: CRITICAL INCIDENT—PELAGO-9.
Below it, three rotating phrases: DANGEROUS. ANOMALOUS. SECURE FOR DEbrIEF.
My face dominated half the feeds. I laughed, dry and stupid, because what else could I do?
“Nice to see I made the news,” I said to no one in particular.
Mom grabbed the nearest throw pillow and hurled it at the screen like violence could fix public relations.
“You said you’d stay out of trouble this cycle!”
Dad’s face went pale. “What happened?”
I opened my mouth to explain. I really, totally tried. I told them about the mythship, the voice, the reentry, the way the world bent sideways when I got scared. I left out the girl, the promise, and the part where I almost atomized half the city.
But I didn’t leave out the names. Couldn’t. Not when they kept tearing their way out of my throat like they had a schedule to keep.
Vireleth. Mythship. Lioren.
The moment the last one slipped out, the room's temperature changed.
Mom froze like I’d hit her with a blunt instrument.
Then she laughed. Not the good kind. The hollow, edge-of-sobbing, please-let-this-be-a-joke kind.
“Of course it’d be Lioren motherfucking Trivane,” she spat, with the bitter anguish of all wives married to men with hobbies, obsessions, or, apparently, long-standing personal vendettas against entire eras of mythic disaster.
Dad just… stopped moving. His whole brain stalled mid-process like a maintenance drone bricking itself halfway through a firmware update. It took him a full ten seconds to reboot.
When he finally spoke, it was in that same dazed, why-are-we-even-still-having-this-century tone I’d only ever heard twice before. Once during the filament fire. Once during the techborn riots.
“He fucked a moon,” Dad said, voice thin and shocked like the words had snuck out before he could veto them. “Literally. Impregnated it, too. He founded the Accord.”
Mom’s hands went to her temples like she could physically hold her skull together through sheer willpower. “We are cursed,” she muttered. “We’re so fucking cursed.”
“Lioren Trivane,” Dad said again, like just saying the name was a full-body betrayal. “Of course it would be him.”
Mom threw her arms in the air, pacing like she was looking for something to throw that wouldn’t bounce off a bulkhead and hit me by accident.
“I told you. I told you the whole Trivane line was a disaster zone wrapped in a singularity. I told you when you wouldn’t stop doomscrolling through those mythship incident reports.
But no, you had to get into comment wars with sim-clones like it was your civic duty. ”
“In my defense,” Dad said, one hand already halfway to his coffee for moral support, “the man did seduce and impregnate a sentient moon. I feel like that sort of thing deserves at least one heated forum post.”
Mom gave him a look sharp enough to scratch paint. “We’re talking about our kid. Not a hypothetical collapse field on some conspiracy thread.”
I stood there, still bleeding, still shaking, still wrapped in the worst blanket in recorded history, and for once, I didn’t think they were exaggerating.