Page 9 of She Who Devours the Stars (The Astral Mess #1)
I sat on the toilet with the towel wrapped around me like a burial shroud, watching my left hand glow.
It was just the fingers, at first, pale blue-white under the nails, pulsing at the knuckles, but every time I flexed, the light ran up my arm like a threat.
Even after the hottest shower of my life, I was still shivering.
It wasn’t cold. The whole Meldin apartment was a damp oven, one of those post-rain cycles where the walls sweat and the air tastes like boiled dust. But the cold was inside.
Deeper than bone. Deeper than whatever the hell the mythship had done to me.
When I closed my eyes, I could still see her.
The other girl. The one who’d pinned me down with hands made of silk and a tongue made of fire, who’d slipped her tongue into my mouth until I choked on it.
I couldn’t remember her face. Couldn’t even remember a name, if she’d given it.
But I could remember the way she laughed when I lost the ability to stand, and the way she’d bit my shoulder hard enough to leave a scar in my memory.
Her sweat, her taste, her everything: gone, rinsed down the apartment’s ancient pipes along with what was left of my self-respect.
I tried to remember her, and instead, all I got was static. Under the static were the flashes of bodies I hadn’t meant to kill.
The shower had steamed the mirror, but the glass was cold enough to fog over with every breath I took.
I watched my reflection through the haze: hair wet and sticking to my face in coppery tangles, freckles blurred, eyes burning faintly.
I lifted my hand, and the mirror did too, except it lagged, just a millisecond, a tiny time-slip, but enough that I felt the difference in my teeth.
I blinked. So did the reflection. However, it glitched, as if the renderer didn’t have enough cycles to keep up.
For a second, the girl in the mirror wasn’t me at all.
I dropped my gaze to my lap, where the towel was failing at its job.
Skin paler than I remembered, dusted with black specks that shimmered when I moved.
Star freckles. I’d had three, maybe four, on my left collarbone since I was a kid, but now there were dozens, all up and down my torso and thighs.
Some clustered at my hip, some spiraling around my wrist like a tiny, hostile galaxy.
Every inch of me felt like an invitation to get dissected by a very enthusiastic research student.
The pipes in the wall hummed with a wet, living sound.
I pressed my heel into the tile and listened.
The resonance was different now. Used to be, the plumbing sang in one note, desperate and sad, like the building was warning me to run before I became part of it.
Now, it was layered. There were words in the water, if you listened hard enough.
Sometimes I heard my name echoing down from the roof vent, then back up again through the clogged drains.
I flexed my left hand again, trying to will the glow away. It only got brighter. My veins lit up with it, the blue-white pulse leaking out from between the bones. I squeezed, felt the pulse surge, then fade.
When I opened my fist, the light stayed, faint and insistent.
At my feet, a patch of the infamous Meldin mold flinched back.
I watched it, curious. Once, you could scrub the stuff with a wire brush, and it’d just laugh at you, growing back overnight with twice the coverage.
Now, it shriveled whenever I looked at it, retracting like it knew something I didn’t.
I wondered if, somewhere deep in the fungal hive mind, a single spore was screaming.
“Stop it,” I whispered, not sure who I meant. The mold? Myself? The universe?
No answer. Only the soft, wet chorus of pipes and the weird, digital afterimage of my own face, still lagging a frame behind reality in the mirror.
I tried to remember the girl’s face again, digging for something, hair color, the shape of her lips, anything, but every time I reached for it, the memory bent away, slippery and sharp.
I could remember her voice, a low, vibrating hush that made my ribs ache.
I could remember the smell of her skin, even through the ozone, blood, and burning circuitry.
But the rest? Gone. Like the mythship had taken it as payment.
Which, honestly, seemed fair.
I braced my elbows on my knees and let my hair hang forward, dripping onto the floor. It was only then I realized how hard I was shaking. My muscles felt hollow, bones loose in their sockets. I tried to clench, to force stability, but it only made the shaking worse.
“Not stable,” I muttered, and the words bounced around the bathroom like a curse.
I forced myself to stand, ignoring the warning twinge from my left hip.
The towel threatened to betray me, but I cinched it tighter and shuffled to the sink, bracing myself against the cheap metal edge.
My hands left glowing smears on the steel.
I ran the water to have something else to listen to, but even the faucet sounded different now.
Less like a leak, more like a voice, whispering in a language I’d almost learned.
I scrubbed at my face, trying to erase the girl in the mirror. When I looked again, the reflection was back in sync, almost. My eyes glowed, just a touch. It would fade, I told myself. Everything fades.
I looked down at my hand. The star freckles burned. I traced them with my fingertip, mapping the new constellations, the way they looped and bent and clustered together. On the inside of my wrist, the veins made a pattern I almost recognized.
It looked like a sigil. Or a warning.
I tried to laugh. The sound was wet and ugly.
After a while, I shut off the water, wiped my hands, and made myself breathe.
In, out, count to four, don’t pass out on the bathroom floor.
When the shaking finally slowed, I took inventory: two legs, both operational.
Two arms, one glitching, but still attached, the other pretended everything was fine. One head, not okay, but intact.
I stood there, naked except for the towel, and watched the mold shrink away from my toes.
I tried, one last time, to remember the girl from before the mythship.
Nothing.
I felt the loss like a bruise. But maybe that was how it worked. Maybe you weren’t supposed to hold on to things from the other side of the singularity. Maybe the only way forward was to let the past burn off, molecule by molecule, until all you had left was the afterglow.
I dropped the towel, stepped back into my underwear and my cleanest dirty shirt, a blue tank with a yellow star on it. The static was still in my mouth, but it tasted less like fear and more like potential. The resonance in my bones hummed, hungry and bright.
The mirror didn’t blink this time. Neither did I.
I left the bathroom, shutting the door behind me.
Time to see what else had changed.
Thread Modulation: Dax Meldin Axis Alignment: Meldin Apartment.
I could always tell when the Accord lost their minds by how many notifications they sent in a row.
After the Nullarch thing tripped half the planet’s alarms, they went from “routine update” to “existential priority” to “please stand by for further instructions” in under an hour.
Now, the stack of printouts on the kitchen table was thick enough to serve as a makeshift riot shield.
I shuffled through them, hoping for something actionable, but most read like the results of a bureaucratic breakdown crossed with a desperate meme account.
“WELCOME BACK, PLEASE COMPLY WITH YOUR EXILE TERMINATION INTERVIEW,” the top one said, as if I’d left the moon for a hotdog and a smoke instead of getting forcibly relocated to the ass-end of Xenthis’s maintenance loop.
Beneath that: “CITIZEN MELDIN, YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR RANDOMIZED LOYALTY ASSESSMENT.” A third: “EMERGENCY VOTE: SHOULD RATIONS CONTAIN MORE OR LESS YEAST? RESPOND WITHIN 30 SECONDS TO AVOID PENALTY.”
I snorted, flicked the top three onto the floor, and kept going.
Velline made more noise in the kitchen than all the Accord’s warning sirens put together.
She chopped, whisked, and fried with the grim determination of a person who believed you could solve any problem with enough block yolk.
She never looked up from the stove, but I could see her tracking me in the reflection of the microwave door, eyes narrowed and sharp.
Every time I glanced over, she doubled down: louder chopping, more aggressive seasoning, once even launching a fistful of chives at the wall for emphasis.
Chives didn’t make Protein Emulsion Solids any better. Nothing did.
“Don’t,” I said, before she could open her mouth.
“I’m not doing anything,” she snapped, slicing a protein slab into strands, like it had personally wronged her. “You’re the one obsessing over those. They’re probably tracking your stress hormones through the paper.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, “but at least I’m not flooding the house with oil vapor and emotional instability.”
She banged the pan down. “You’re one to talk, Dax. I caught you singing to the old coffee machine again last night.”
“That’s called maintenance. If you want appliances to work, you show them some respect.”
“Fern doesn’t need you to fix her, you know,” she said, voice dropping just a notch. “She needs—”
“She needs us to be ready,” I cut in. “If those Accord goons come back, we can’t just—”
“—what? Bake them into submission?” Velline laughed, but it was a tired, sharp sound. “You really think we matter to any of them?”
I stood, walked to the fridge, and stared into its glow. Not because I needed anything, but because it was the only light in the apartment that didn’t flicker. “We matter to Fern.”
The chopping slowed, then stopped. “Yeah. We do.”