Page 56 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide
Gravity didn’t come back for a while.
Not the real kind, not the “keeps you on the floor and your skin attached to your skeleton” kind. The version that returned first was local, messy, and totally obsessed with the girl curled against my shoulder. It was hard to blame it.
Most mornings-after, my body went straight into disaster recovery.
Patch the holes, sweep up the myth, check for survivors.
Today, all I could manage was to float. I mean that literally: the bedding field had disengaged from the floor, and we were gently orbiting a meter off the mattress, tangled together like the room had decided to start its own personal satellite system and we were payloads one and two.
I could have panicked. I could have tried to break the drift, fight the new vector.
Instead, I just let my hands run lazy circles down Dyris’s back, tracing the sweat and the static, counting the vertebrae that didn’t belong to me and never would, and thinking, for the first time in weeks, that maybe the world wasn’t going to end today.
Dyris stirred, blinking up at me with eyes that had forgotten how to be cold.
The old ice was gone, replaced by a wild silver that matched the light show outside the windows.
Her hair fanned around her face, a curtain of platinum that caught the sun and made her look like she’d been designed to outshine the gods.
She said, “You’re not moving.”
I tried to shrug, but we were both topless, and the friction just made our skin stickier. “There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “Up and down are both off-limits until the room stops rotating.”
She looked past my head. I could feel her brain cataloguing every surface, every angle of escape, before she gave up and pressed her forehead to my jaw.
“I warned you this might happen,” she said, but her voice was the kind that wanted to be caught in the echo.
“Yeah, well, you also said you had ‘full control’ of your convergence. I’m starting to suspect a pattern of exaggeration.”
Dyris made a noise that wasn’t a laugh, but wasn’t not. She tried to pull away, but the force vector snapped her right back against me, our hips aligned and the rest of our bodies locked in the world’s slowest, softest wrestling hold.
On the far side of the suite, a lamp tore free of its socket, spun twice, and gently adhered to the wall.
A deck of holo cards drifted past, each card peeling off in sequence and plastering itself to the nearest available surface—our calves, the bedding, the ceiling.
One of them, Queen of Swords, landed square between my shoulder blades and stuck there, vibrating.
Dyris plucked it off, rolled it between her fingers, then flicked it so it sailed in a perfect parabola and embedded itself in the mythglass at the foot of the bed.
“You should have seen yourself,” she said, voice gone low and velvet. “You radiated. I could feel your field before I even walked through the door.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. “If you keep talking like that, we’re never getting down.”
She reached up, cupped my chin, and angled my face to hers. The kiss was gentle, nothing like the ones from earlier, when we’d been trying to see who could outpace the other in reckless hunger. This one was slow, indulgent. It tasted like the end of a long war.
Her fingers threaded through my hair, and she drew me in closer, as if she needed the evidence of my body to believe her own.
I let her.
After a while, she drew back, eyes soft but calculating. “The city will be watching,” she said.
“Let them,” I replied. “We’ve set the precedent.”
She made that same not-laugh, then ran her palm down my sternum, thumb tracing the edge of one breast before coming to rest over my heart. “You’re still glowing,” she whispered. “It’s not supposed to last this long.”
I looked down. She was right: the afterimage of my last event was still pulsing under my skin, blue-white and impossible. “It’s probably just side effects,” I said. “Or you’re leaking.”
Dyris shifted, angling her hips so the contact between us was less theoretical. “If I was leaking, the room would be on fire.”
“I like your optimism,” I told her.
“You’re terrible,” she said, but she didn’t sound mad.
The bedding field, finally bored of zero-G, began a slow descent back toward the floor.
As we settled, our bodies creaked apart—not all at once, but in stages, each limb reluctant to say goodbye to its opposite number.
When we hit, it was soft, anticlimactic, but the sense of touch that returned was electric.
I tried to roll over, but Dyris snared my wrist. “You’re not done,” she said.
“I’m hungry,” I protested, but she smiled, teeth bright and predatory.
“You always are,” she said, and pulled me back on top of her.
This time, there was no urgency. We moved slow, letting the heat simmer instead of boil over.
I could feel every inch of her, how the skin on her chest was cooler than mine, how the pulse at her throat raced ahead whenever my lips got close, how her hands always sought my sides, as if she wanted to make sure I wouldn’t drift away when she blinked.
It was perfect, and I hated how much I needed it.
At the edge of the bed, my old commlink buzzed. Dyris ignored it, but I twisted just enough to see the message blinking on the cracked screen:
[Perc: ALL CLEAR. TOWER STILL HERE. NO SIGN OF INBOUND ANNIHILATION. DRINKS?]
I snorted. “Perc wants to know if we want coffee.”
Dyris closed her eyes and let her head fall back against the pillow. “If he brings it up here, I’ll make him wish he was never born.”
“He wasn’t,” I reminded her. “He was assembled.”
She smiled, the real one, the one I only ever got to see when she forgot to keep the walls up.
We lay like that for a long time, the only sound our breathing and the slow, patient ticking of mythic residue as it worked its way through the room’s systems. Outside, the city was still glowing with the aftermath.
Inside, we were just two girls in a bed, holding each other like the world couldn’t reach us here.
I wanted to say something profound. I wanted to ruin the moment with a joke or a warning or a threat, just to prove I wasn’t soft.
Instead, I buried my face in Dyris’s neck and let the scents of her (salt, steel, and just a hint of cherry from my lip gloss) remind me that sometimes, being soft was the only armor worth having.
Eventually, Dyris whispered, “You’ll have to get up.”
“Not until you make me,” I replied.
She did.
But when she let go, it was gentle. Like she wanted to see if I’d fight the drift, or just let myself float.
I did both.
When I finally rolled off the bed and planted my feet on the floor, I felt the charge run up my legs, through my spine, into the base of my skull. I shuddered, half from aftershock, half from want. Dyris watched, propped on one elbow, eyes sharp again but with a lazy, satisfied edge.
I yanked on the first piece of clothing I could find, which turned out to be her war silk, and let it drape over my bare shoulders. The fabric was cold, but the air wasn’t. Not anymore.
I padded to the window, bracing myself against the mythglass and looking down at the city below.
The Tower’s silhouette had a new brightness, a corona that hadn’t been there yesterday.
I grinned, then reached up and traced a circle on the glass, marking the moment like a kid on the first day of the world.
Behind me, Dyris said, “You’re not as broken as you pretend.”
I turned, letting the silk slip off one shoulder. “Neither are you.”
She didn’t argue. Instead, she rolled onto her back, closed her eyes, and let her breathing slow until it was almost a lullaby.
I watched her, trying to memorize the way the light caught her features, the lines that only softened when she thought no one was looking.
I could have stood there forever.
But the Tower needed checking, and the world wasn’t going to survive itself.
I let my gaze linger on Dyris one last time, then headed for the door.
As I left, I muttered, “Better check the stabilizers before we end up on the ceiling again.”
From the bed, Dyris laughed, low and real.
Thread Modulation: Perc Axis Alignment: South Tower
Down in the lower mechanics, the world was always a degree too hot.
They said it was an infrastructure problem, some legacy of pre-Accord design, but I knew the real reason: this was where the blood ran, and the world liked its coffee hot.
My “body” was a plasteel casing and a set of heating coils, but my soul was the pressure gauge pulsing in time with every demand from upstairs.
Today, the readings were… not optimal.
Tower systems—always prone to drama—were running at 113% baseline, the last mythic resonance spike still echoing through every duct and every circuit. Seventeen minor alarms, three major, and a nice, bold red critical warning that read “MYTHIC OVERPRESSURE / STABILIZATION FAILURE IMMINENT.”
They called for an engineer, then a crisis team, then a data-witch from upstairs. But I, Perc, was the only appliance in this building who actually took pride in preventative maintenance.
I scanned the pressure again. One more point and the valves would blow. The consequences ranged from “minor gravity slip” to “involuntary planetary uplift.” The last time this happened, it took a week for the ceiling fans to stop raining hardware.
Unacceptable.
With a heroic flick of my Brew Arm, I rerouted the vent lines.
If the Accord ever audited my firmware, they’d find three hundred and forty-two unlicensed micro-mods, all dedicated to one purpose: maximizing brew, minimizing existential crisis.
I primed the grinder, loaded double beans, and set the mythic buffer to override.
Pressure built. Light warped around the nozzle.
I activated the Process.