Page 147 of She Who Devours the Stars
Not just because the feeds made it look like Fern had decided to crash the universe for fun, but because, for the first time ever, I believed she could. The Lioren ghostprint was back, this time not as a rumor, but as a physical overlay, mapped in three dimensions over her body. You could see it pulse, see it want. When she looked at the camera, I flinched.
The second wave was rage.
Not at Fern. Not really. She’d always been the disaster, the one who made the rules by ignoring them. But I hated how, no matter what happened, I was never in the room where it mattered. Even now—her biggest event yet, and I was watching it on replay, from a gym nobody used, in a shirt that didn’t even fit right. That’s the thing about mythic events: they only ever need the chosen ones. The rest of us are just side-channels, the static in the air.
The third wave was shame.
This one stuck. It always did. Years of Accord files, the ones they “never used for real assessment,” said I’d never resonate. Never even crack a Tier 3, let alone matter to a mythic. The best they ever said was “showed strong adaptive logic and recursive subroutine awareness, but lacks core narrative inertia.” The translation was: not a hero, not a villain, not even a proper disaster. Just someone who watched.
I stared at the feeds, feeling my pulse drop, then spike, then settle into a flatline of not caring. In the background, someone was doing maintenance on the training drones. One rolled past, slow, trailing a loose arm and the sad whine of a dying battery.
I grabbed it.
The movement was automatic. I yanked the drone from the mat, felt the soft, plasticky skin peel off, and threw it as hard as I could at the wall. The sound was perfect. A crunch, a hollow pop, and the unmistakable shatter of something expensive and unnecessary dying on impact.
Wires dangled. The head rolled, paused, and looked back at me with its one good eye.
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. The laugh was ugly, sharp, nothing like the bright cackle Fern always managed. But it was mine.
“Fuck it,” I said, voice brittle and mean. “Just fuck it.”
I walked to the wall, picked up the broken drone, and smashed it again, this time until the casing split and the whole thing went dark.
It felt good. It wasn’t enough.
“If I stay like this,” I said to nobody, “I’ll be another footnote. Another loser watching someone else take the story.”
The words didn’t echo, but in this room, every noise was louder than it should be.
I looked at my hands. Still shaking, but better.
“Not this time,” I said. “Not here.”
I walked back to the center of the mat, sat down, and opened my neuralterminal for the first time in days. The UI flickered, slow to boot, and I almost bailed out. Instead, I waited. Fingers trembling, I typed in the old override code. The one I’d written, then deleted, then resurrected a hundred times in my head.
It worked.
The first response was an error, a denial from the Accord’s mythlogic. But that was the trick, failure wasn’t an end state, just a new vector. I rewrote the request, piggybacked it on a dozen dormant update packets, and sent it again.
This time, the system paused.
A single line scrolled across the AR feed:
[HELLO, ALYX. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NEXT?]
I smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, but it was real.
I said, “I want to matter. I want to be in the fucking story.”
The system, well, something I’m pretty sure wasn’t the Accord AI, responded.
[ACKNOWLEDGED.]
I sat back, shaking, not with fear, not with rage, but with the raw, quivering possibility that maybe, just maybe, this was my turn. Whatever it was, it wasn’t the Accord AI. It was too… attentive. Like something old and orbiting had turned to face me.
“No more bitchy loser,” I said, soft, almost cracked. “Not here.”
I closed the broken feeds. Pulled up Eventide’s mythic net topology. Started searching for the holes nobody else bothered to see.
