Page 61 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)

Thread Modulation: Fern Trivane Axis Alignment: South Tower, Eventide

They called it a “margarita pool” but that was an insult to both physics and tequila.

The surface was a quarter-meter thick, bright enough to bleach your retinas, and curved in toward the center like an inverted planet’s gravity well.

Someone had rimmed the entire thing in a three-meter-wide ring of crushed salt and engineered the resonance jets to send perfect beads of moisture skimming over the edge every forty seconds.

Occasionally, the “water” splashed upward and hovered in midair, vibrating like it was testing the viscosity of the local atmosphere before shattering into confetti and rejoining the main event.

In theory, you could swim in it. In practice, you just let yourself float and waited for the universe to invent new forms of pleasure.

I was already on my second glass.

My legs dangled off the lounger, left arm stretched and pink from the last mythic event, and I’d lost my shirt somewhere between the first bottle and the last time Dyris tried to teach me how to “properly” lick salt from a collarbone.

She lay next to me, topless, one leg thrown over mine like a lazy manacle.

Her lips were a mess—salt, citrus, a little blood from an argument I’d already forgotten.

The suit she wore was the color of blackout, tailored to reveal nothing except the exact outline of everything.

It was the best thing I’d ever stolen, which was saying something.

The lights overhead were shattered, but we didn’t need them.

Every so often, the pool would pulse, sending mythic feedback into the surrounding air and making the surface of our skin glow as if we’d been shotgunned with bioluminescence.

If I squinted, I could see Dyris’s pulse lighting up the veins in her neck: not quite human, not quite legend, but more alive than anyone else I’d ever met.

“Still with me?” she asked, barely moving her head.

“Define ‘with,’” I replied. I ran my tongue along her jaw, collecting a rim of salt she’d missed. “Is this a check-in, or are you trying to see if I’ll say something emotional before noon?”

She huffed, a sound that tried to be disdainful but got lost in the humidity. “You’re sweating myth. You know that, right?”

“Don’t kinkshame.”

She licked her thumb and wiped a stripe from my cheek, then sucked it clean. Her pupils dilated. “You taste like battery acid and regret.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That tracks.”

Somewhere in the city, another mythic alarm went off, deep and low, the kind of sound that made you want to hide under the nearest load-bearing surface. Dyris ignored it. I ignored it harder. The Tower had survived worse, and so had we.

We clinked glasses, which made a noise like two planets colliding.

“Last time you said we’d lay low for a day,” Dyris reminded me.

“Technically, this is a form of laying,” I said.

She sipped, eyes hooded. “I hate you.”

“Tell me again in five minutes,” I murmured, licking the salt off the rim of my glass. “I’ll see if it takes.”

She leaned over and kissed me, a slow drag of tongue and teeth, her hand in my hair, gentle at first, then pulling tight. The sweat on her chest tasted like the ocean, and something underneath—metallic, not blood, but not not blood. I dug my nails into her thigh, left a row of red, then let go.

She grinned, sharp. “You’re bored.”

“Not possible.”

“You’re plotting.”

I shrugged, which made her glass spill a little onto my skin. She licked it off without breaking eye contact.

I wanted to say something clever, but at that exact moment, the main doors to the pool deck slammed open with the kind of force that meant either security breach or incoming disaster.

Or both. I turned my head, but the lights were too bright—everything afterimage and noise.

For a second, I thought it might be a hallucination, a ghost of someone I’d let down.

It wasn’t.

Alyx stood in the doorway, arms up, hair wild and glittering with the mythic residue that said she’d been awake for at least seventy hours.

Her tank top was twisted, stained with something that looked like blue ink but probably wasn’t, and the shorts she wore had clearly lost a fight with a broken elevator panel.

She was barefoot, one ankle bandaged, eyes wide and so full of life it made my own heart skip.

She looked straight at us and screamed, “I’m healed!”

Dyris and I raised our glasses in unison.

“Congrats, babe,” I said, deadpan. “Margarita?”

Alyx didn’t answer. She ran straight toward the pool, ripped the tank over her head, and cannonballed into the center with a splash that sent salt and mythic foam everywhere.

Dyris flinched, but only a little. I laughed, full-throated, and set my glass on the floor. “She’s gonna get it in her eyes,” I said.

“She likes it rough,” Dyris replied, then paused. “You realize this is probably going to break the pool.”

“It’s a feature,” I said.

Alyx surfaced, gasping, hair plastered to her face and shoulders. She blinked twice, spat a mouthful of margarita, and shouted, “It tastes like your kiss!”

She grinned, wiped the foam from her lips, and did a slow, show-offy backstroke to the edge where we lounged.

I noticed, for the first time, that the pool itself had started to refract light differently, every ripple echoing in bands of blue and green, with a hint of something white-hot at the very core.

It looked like the surface tension was thickening, turning syrupy, as if the pool had just leveled up to a higher state of consciousness and wanted everyone to know.

Dyris watched with interest. “Is it supposed to do that?”

“Define ‘supposed,’” I said, but my skin prickled. Not fear—just awareness. Alyx had always been a wildcard, but her resonance signature was off the charts today. I wondered if she’d even noticed, or if this was just the new baseline.

She paddled over, propped her elbows on the edge, and looked up at us. The runnels of liquid traced down her bare chest, highlighting the edge of each rib, the perfect dark line of the tattoo above her heart. She smiled, lazy and real.

“Are you drinking alone?” she asked, accusing.

I picked up her glass—pre-poured, because I’d anticipated this exact situation—and handed it to her. She took it, sucked the rim, then drained half in a single pull.

“Damn,” she said. “That’s got a kick.”

“It’s fortified,” Dyris said, voice gone soft and dangerous.

Alyx eyed her. “Are you gonna come in, or do I have to drag you?”

Dyris considered, then shook her head. “I don’t swim in beverages.”

“I do,” I said, and slid off the lounger, landing with both feet in the shallows. The surface flexed under my weight, hugging my calves, then letting go. The salt burned at a scrape on my ankle, and I grinned through the pain.

I reached for Alyx, caught her wrist, and pulled her up until we were face to face. She was taller than I remembered, or maybe just more herself. Either way, it worked.

“You look good,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “You look like you slept in a washing machine.”

“Didn’t sleep,” I said.

She snorted. “Same.”

I cupped her face, thumb tracing her cheekbone, then kissed her. The taste was different this time: sweeter, with a sharp edge, like lime and possibility. She kissed back, harder, biting my lower lip until I gasped. Then she laughed, a sound so alive it made the air in the room bend.

Dyris watched, her glass half-raised, mouth twisted into a not-quite-smile.

Alyx broke the kiss, licked the blood from my lip, and said, “We’re matching now.”

“Not for long,” I replied. I spun her around and dunked her head first, then jumped in after, the pool closing over us like a dream made entirely of flavor and light.

Under the surface, the noise of the world vanished. It was just the two of us, floating, skin to skin, the pulse of the mythic grid humming in our bones. I hooked my foot behind Alyx’s knee, pulled her close, and we tumbled together, her arms around my waist, fingers tracing the line of my spine.

We surfaced, gasping. The air above the pool was warm and wet, thick with the scent of salt and fruit and something I couldn’t name.

Dyris had set her glass aside and stood at the edge, arms crossed, watching us with the patience of a star waiting for its planets to align.

Alyx reached for her, but Dyris shook her head. “You’re both wasted,” she said.

“That’s the point,” I told her.

She didn’t argue, just knelt and ran her hand through my hair, squeezing the margarita out in slow pulses.

Her touch was cold, clinical, but when her fingers slid down to the nape of my neck, I felt the old current flare up.

It wasn’t lust, not exactly. More like need, or nostalgia for a version of ourselves that had never existed.

Alyx watched, then smirked. “You gonna join us, or just supervise?”

Dyris’s eyes narrowed. “If I get in, you’ll never get me out.”

“That’s a risk we’re willing to take,” I said.

She considered, then reached for my face, wiping a streak of salt from my chin. She licked it, slow, then kissed me.

It was different this time. Less hunger, more gravity. Her tongue traced the cut Alyx had left, then found the place behind my ear that always made me shiver. I let her take her time, let the moment draw out until the rest of the world faded to black.

Alyx pressed against my back, wrapping her arms around my chest and resting her chin on my shoulder. “This is nice,” she said.

“It is,” I agreed.

We stayed like that for a while, just breathing, three bodies orbiting a point of collapse, none of us willing to break the loop.

Eventually, the mythic alarm in the distance changed tone, going from disaster to celebration. Someone, somewhere, had declared us safe. Or maybe just bored.

Alyx laughed, then kissed my shoulder. “I think the administrative AI likes us,” she said.

“It has taste,” Dyris replied.

I grinned. “It has no idea what’s coming.”