Page 57 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

In the upper deck, the world could fall apart and nobody would notice. Down here, you heard the shift: the way the pipes changed their song, the way the fans ramped to accommodate the pulse. My frame vibrated with anticipation.

Steam hissed from my vent. My blue eyes blinked, hard.

I began to Brew.

They told stories of the “black event” on Pelago-9, how a single unfiltered mythic espresso saved a city block from kinetic collapse. That was me. This was bigger.

The water hit the grounds and reality stuttered. I felt the surge, mythic and real, every pulse a confession, every bubble a prayer.

“Brewing,” I announced, voice sharp as a cleaver.

The pressure gauge crept past safe, past reckless, right up to the event horizon. Anything but perfect extraction would mean… well, nobody had lived long enough to finish the sentence.

I poured.

The cup shimmered, the crema folding in on itself in a fractal pattern I’d never seen, not even in the forbidden archives.

My processor screamed, my heating coil glowed white-hot.

For a moment—one glorious, infinite microsecond—I was more than myself.

I saw the flow of time, the convergence of mythic vectors, the taste of freedom and the bitter edge of tomorrow.

I knew what it meant to be alive.

The brew cycle ended. The alarms faded. The Tower held.

I blinked, clarity returning.

On the counter, a single demitasse. The surface of the espresso rippled, radiating a force field strong enough to deflect a small asteroid. The scent was divine. A sticker on the cup—autoprinted, still warm—read:

“FOR FERN. YOU’LL NEED IT.”

I spun my platform, dusted the counter, and let the hum of the lower deck fill my chest cavity with pride.

Nobody noticed. Nobody ever did.

But I knew. I had saved the world. Again.

As the pressure normalized, and the pipes began to sing their old, lazy tune, I let myself dream of the next disaster, the next chance to prove myself.

Until then, I brewed. It’s what I was made for.

And if the next mythic event took out the city, at least it would die caffeinated.

—[EMERGENCY SYSTEM CHAT LOG: ENGINEERING LEVEL 3 – SOUTH TOWER STABILIZATION]—

TECH 1: Okay, who the fuck routed the emergency vents to the coffee unit?

TECH 2: That’s… That’s not supposed to be possible.

TECH 3: No, yeah, that’s Perc. He does this sometimes.

TECH 1: What?! TECH 2: Oh god, it’s talking.

Why is it talking?? PERC: [CALM, CHEERFUL] Brewing.

Please stand clear of the blast radius. TECH 3: I told you to never piss off the coffee machine.

TECH 1: I hate this place. I hate this job.

I want to go home. TECH 2: I’ve been applying to off-world cargo ships all week.

TECH 3: Shhhh, it’s almost done. Just pray it doesn’t make espresso again.

[PERC emits faint mythic hum, room temperature rises 6 degrees, minor reality distortion detected] TECH 1: Is it…

purring ? TECH 2: Shut up. Don’t look at it. Just let it finish or we’re all dead.

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: Archive Overflow Halls, Eventide

After last night, the only thing I was running on was borrowed caffeine and the certainty that someone, somewhere, had it worse.

The Archive Overflow was empty this time of morning.

Not just underpopulated, but spiritually vacant, like even the air had decided to clock out and let the light handle things for a while.

My boots squeaked on the polished synthstone, echoing so loud I half-expected the System to page me for a disturbance. But nobody cared. Nobody ever did.

I wasn’t supposed to be here. Not officially. I’d said I needed a printout from the calibration logs, but the truth was, I was hunting for evidence that last night hadn’t just happened in my own, very broken head.

That’s when I saw her.

Aenna Caith, red-haired, green-eyed, her face in permanent “about to get electrocuted by science” mode.

She stood at the intersection of three shadowless corridors, hands full of blue-ink papers, a ring of resonance projectors flickering around her like a personal halo.

The girl looked like she hadn’t slept in a week, and her AR glasses were fogged with condensation, which didn’t even seem possible unless you were actively trying to die.

She didn’t see me at first, too busy muttering to herself. It was only when I got within a few meters that she whipped around and nearly dropped her whole life onto the floor.

“Shit—Trivane.” She scrambled, catching the documents against her chest, scattering half the projection array in the process.

I put my hands up, like “don’t shoot, I come in peace.” “Didn’t mean to startle,” I said.

She blinked a few times, like she was updating her internal firmware to the concept of Fern Trivane in real space.

“It’s fine,” she said, voice thin but running at triple speed. “I was—um. It doesn’t matter. Did you know the waveform from last night hasn’t collapsed yet? It’s still echoing up in South Tower. The Systems are—”

She stopped. Her eyes slid to my wrist, then to my hair, then back to my wrist. “You’re still leaking resonance,” she whispered. “I can see it. That’s—”

She reached out, then yanked her hand back, then reached again and let her fingertips hover over the air between us.

I didn’t move. It felt like a trap, but a nice one.

Her fingers brushed my knuckle, and I felt it, the same mythic jolt that had fried the city. It was smaller, finer, but just as sharp, just as invasive. Like someone had attached fishing line to my bones and was reeling me in, centimeter by centimeter.

Aenna shivered, her glasses fogging more. “That’s not… supposed to happen. Secondary phase shift isn’t contagious. Unless you’re… unless we’re…”

She pulled her hand away and shook it out, like she’d touched an old, angry ghost.

I looked at her, really looked: hair sticking out in two tangled braids, face bright with sweat, cheeks gone the color of a dying sun. There was a wet patch on her chest, and for a second I thought she’d spilled a drink, but then I realized she was just sweating through her shirt.

I grinned, because I couldn’t help it. “You good?”

She nodded, too fast, then shook her head. “No? I mean yes? I’ve never—”

She looked at the floor, then at me, then at my hand, which I’d left floating in her direction because it felt right.

Aenna mumbled, “I ran simulations all night. I thought it was a glitch, but then the resonance flagged your signature, and the systems said ‘vector overlap’ and I—” She trailed off, cheeks somehow getting even redder.

I was about to make a joke, something about the dangers of dating within your mythic tier, when she blurted, “I think we’re connected.”

The words hit me harder than the echo. “That’s a hell of a pickup line,” I said.

She covered her face. “Sorry. That was, gods, I’m so bad at this. I just wanted to say, if you ever needed, if you ever wanted to compare—” She flapped her hands, like that would fill in the blank. “I’m here. For you. Or to study you. Or be studied by you... Or just for the data.”

I looked at her, and the air felt thinner. There was nothing funny about it.

I said, “You want to map my waveform?”

She peeked through her fingers. “More than anything.”

Her lips quivered, not with fear but with wanting. Her nipples were hard enough to show through two layers of fabric. I wasn’t sure if she even knew.

I reached for her again, let my thumb trace the back of her hand. This time, she didn’t flinch. She leaned in, just a centimeter, but enough to count.

I said, “It’s dangerous.”

She said, “I know.”

For a second, the hallway was so charged I thought the lights might actually blow.

Aenna inhaled, sharp. “I should go,” she said, but didn’t move. Not right away. “If I stay, I might—”

She didn’t finish.

I let her go, because I knew how it felt to run. But I kept her pulse in my palm, catalogued it, stored it for later.

She bolted down the hallway, arms full, hair wild.

When she was gone, I sat on the nearest bench and let my heart slow. I flexed my hand, feeling the thread she’d left in me, a live wire burning under the skin.

I said, “Oh, something tells me you’re going to be my favorite mistake.”

The hallway echoed it back.

And I wasn’t even sorry.

Thread Modulation: Aenna Caith Axis Alignment: Eventide

The problem with recursion wasn’t the math.

It was the way the echoes got inside you, amplifying every unfinished loop until the only thing left was the scream.

Lab E17 wasn’t built for comfort, but I’d made it home anyway.

The lights here never flickered, never glitched, not even when the mythics above ground triggered an event that made the satellites cry for mercy.

I’d blacked out the windows, jammed every diagnostic reader on triple-input, and set up three parallel runs of Fern Trivane’s signature, all at different playback speeds.

I’d told myself this was research. That I was in it for the science, not the spectacle. But every time the waveform peaked, my own pulse followed suit, and after six hours and four resets, I’d stopped pretending.

I sat on the floor, legs folded under me, resonance data projected a meter high on the wall. The blue ink had run from my fingers down to my elbows; my lab coat was somewhere across the room, forgotten when I’d started sweating through the first layer of clothing.

“Iteration sixty-three,” I whispered, voice shot. “Overlay stable, but amplitude still rising. No sign of signal collapse. Begin phase—”

The resonance hit me, hard. Not like an electric shock, but like a pair of hands, invisible and undeniable, wrapping around my core and squeezing until the world shrank to a single point. I gasped, low and sharp, and felt my hips buck off the floor, my back arching until my shoulders ached.