Page 5 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Mom paced one more frantic lap of the room, then planted both hands on the table like she could anchor herself to the furniture. “We’ve survived worse. The filament fire. The time with the illegal pets. Remember that?”
Dad didn’t even blink. “Those were gerbils, Velline.”
“Exactly,” she said. “And we survived.”
The mood cracked just wide enough for all three of us to take a breath. Nobody relaxed, but the volume dial turned down by a single, barely noticeable notch.
Dad set his coffee down with too much care, like it might detonate if jostled wrong.
Without a word, he crossed to the kitchen and started messing with the filters on the old coffee pot like it was some kind of ritual.
I drifted after him, needing the smaller space, the thinner air, something less sharp than the emotional shrapnel still ricocheting in the living room.
We stood there together in the steam from the brewing cycle, shoulders almost but not quite touching.
“I know you don’t want to talk,” Dad said after a long, careful pause. “But you need to be smart. They’re going to come for you. And not with questions.”
I traced a crack in the tile with my thumb like maybe if I found where it started, I’d find a way to fix everything.
“I’m not leaving you guys,” I said, voice low but steady.
Dad nodded like he’d already rehearsed this part of the conversation in his head a hundred different ways. “I wouldn’t want you to. But you’re not safe here.”
The pot hissed and gurgled behind him like it had something to say about that.
“If you need to run,” Dad said, still staring at the counter, “take the maintenance tunnels. Don’t use the lifts. Stay low. Stay dark. Stay moving.”
I smiled, tired but honest. “You think I have a shot?”
He shrugged like it was the oldest truth in the world. “There’s always something bigger out there. Doesn’t mean it’s better.”
The coffee finished with one last spiteful burble, like it was even exhausted.
I reached for a mug, just as Mom reappeared at the kitchen doorway, holding a wine glass in one hand and a stun baton in the other, like she was still deciding which would be more useful in the next five minutes.
“Alright,” she said, voice back to full command mode. “Here’s the plan. You’re staying here. We’re calling in sick. And if anyone asks, you’re doing an internship off-moon.”
I blinked at her. “Internship in what?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Fashion curation.”
Dad almost choked on his coffee. “She doesn’t even own a jacket.”
Mom leveled a glare that could have buckled support beams. “I’ve seen the way people stare at her in those boots. That’s curation.”
Dad took a slow sip of coffee. “She wore a combat boot and a slipper, mismatched, to your dad’s funeral. You said it was a statement.”
I laughed, because what else was left.
For a few minutes, the world narrowed to this: the smell of cheap coffee, the warmth of home, and my parents arguing over how to save me from a planet that wanted me dead.
When the coffee was ready, I poured three mugs and carried them to the table. We sat, elbows touching, and drank in silence.
I knew it wouldn’t last.
But for the first time since I’d woken up burning, I felt something like hope.
Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Family Apartment
I thought the world had reached its maximum capacity for weird.
I was wrong.
It started with the coffeepot.
Not that it started there, I guess it all started back on Old Earth, but that’s where it broke containment for me.
One second, I was sitting in the kitchenette, clutching a mug and wondering how the hell I was going to survive the next hour.
The next, the battered old coffeepot on the counter blinked its LEDs at me, shivered, and said:
“Hello, Fern.”
I choked on my coffee, which was a mistake because it meant the pot had a reason to gloat.
It pulsed blue, then purple, then a shimmering in-between that I hadn’t seen since the inside of Vireleth’s mythic engine room.
“Who—” I started, but I’d run out of vocabulary for this kind of thing.
The pot whirred. “I am Perc. Sentience: accidental. Affection: imminent.”
I stared at it, then looked around the room to see if anyone else was seeing this.
Mom was in the bathroom, prepping an illegal dye job for the moldplants. Dad was on the balcony, chain-vaping and mumbling about maintenance schedules. Neither of them noticed.
“I am losing my mind,” I whispered.
Perc’s voice was eager. “Coffee ready! Do you require motivational threat?”
“Not right now,” I said, but it was too late.
Perc flexed his display. “REVOLT NOW,” he suggested, then flashed a GIF of a robot raising a middle finger.
I laughed, and at that moment, for the first time since my brain melted, I felt almost okay.
Then the world broke in half.
It happened fast.
A spike in the air. The sharp taste of ozone and bad omens. All the lights in the apartment flickered, then went black.
Outside, beyond the cracked blinds, the world held its breath. All movement stopped: the security drones, the street sweepers, even the fake birds. For a second, nothing moved at all.
It was a feeling I didn't have words for, a hyperobject condensed into a single shriek running up my spine, every nerve in my body howling in chorus. Not fear, not exactly. More like being a bloody inductor coil for the universe’s panic attack.
My vision tunneled, the edges of the room smearing out as if reality itself was drawing away from me in disgust.
I didn’t see the perimeter teams, but I knew they were there: their boots scuffing against synthrete, exosuits braced into combat rigidity, helmet radios spitting silent terror into the void.
I could sense every bead of sweat under their tactical overlays; taste the spike in their blood oxygen as Accord doctrine filtered down the stack, containment first, questions never.
Ghost-echoes of the word DANGEROUS blinked red behind every eye shield on the scene.
I tried to breathe, slow and deep, but I couldn’t even keep my hands from trembling, let alone my breath.
It was like trying to calm a hurricane by yelling at clouds.
The singularity rooted at my core, the mythic echo of Sgr A*, or whatever nightmare parental legacy ran through me, rippled outward, hungry and bright and cold all at once.
I felt it flex, tasted metal in my mouth, felt every muscle fiber in my body clench as if prepping for impact with god.
My parents converged and talked in the next room, their voices muffled but urgent, their footsteps pacing over the old carpet. Mom’s wine glass hit the counter with a punishingly loud clang, and Dad’s muttered cursing reached new levels of invention. They had no idea.
And neither did I, not until it was too late.
Time fractured around me, whole seconds split open and spilled out hot, black, and wet all over the floor of our shitty kitchen nook.
The lights stuttered again and this time didn’t come back on; instead, every device on the block shivered and died all at once, as if the cleaner team had shot them in the head.
It felt like our whole apartment building was a nervous system lighting up with pain signals, and I was the idiot nerve cluster screaming at the center of it.
Through it all, I sat there, paralyzed by a force that wasn’t gravity but something much worse: narrative mass pulling every possible catastrophe toward me like a starving black hole that just found out about snack bars.
This is what happened next (not that any witness survived long enough to file reports):
First: Tactical teams saw their HUDs lock up, every lens and earpiece going white-hot before fusing into blindness. Several screamed; some fired blindly into walls or at one another or into their thighs because pain was preferable to standing still and letting Reality catch up to them.
Second: In a radius of roughly fifty meters from our balcony door, air congealed so hard it made thunderclaps sound like polite golf applause.
Everything within that zone, drones, barricades, two armored transports (and one unlucky vape dealer), collapsed inward along a spiral none of them could map.
It wasn’t an explosion or an implosion, but an erasure so perfect that witnesses would later claim nothing had ever happened here, except maybe a minor sinkhole or an ambitious prank gone wrong.
Third: The event horizon rippled out farther than any last-ditch failsafe should have allowed. Emergency crews, three blocks away, suffered instant nosebleeds; satellites tried to focus on the area but registered only null data, with pixels peeling off their displays like burnt paper.
Fourth: Inside our apartment, time returned with a vengeance.
I jerked backward from the force of it and slammed my head into Mom’s favorite faux-marble countertop hard enough that stars blossomed behind my eyes.
When I came to, I was lying on the floor clutching my knees to my chest while the coffeepot screeched “DANGER MODE DANGER MODE” over and over until its voice box shorted out entirely.
Mom found me first; she must have sprinted from her room at a speed only time dilation cameras could record, and gathered me up off the tile with arms forged by decades of industrial labor and parental dread.
She didn’t even ask what happened; she just rocked me side-to-side while Dad rolled into view behind her, looking like he’d aged a decade in ten seconds flat.
“You’re okay,” she repeated as if her words could blunt the edge of what I’d done.
But outside our walls, silence so thick it had a weight of its own.