Page 21 of She Who Devours the Stars
Chapter 4: Dyris Arrives
Thread Modulation: Fern Meldin
Axis Alignment: Above Meldin Apartment, Pelago-9.
Rain was the only honest thing on Pelago-9.
It sluiced down in chemical ribbons, picking up neon on the way through the Glimmer Zone, fusing itself to every exposed wire and cracked concrete seam until the whole block smelled like drowning in someone else’s last hope. At dusk, the towers looked like the bones of monsters that died waiting for rescue, and tonight was no exception. My family’s unit hung somewhere near the top, balanced between the locked-in gloom of Coldgrave and the sun-bleached hell of Burnside. I don’t need to explain the reasons for their names, do I? The stairwell was my cathedral. Third flight up from our landing. Best view of the city’s spine.
I’ve always loved a woman’s spine, flexible yet unforgiving, the kind that makes you want to bend adamantium just to prove you can. The Glimmer Zone’s spine? Almost did the same thing to me. Almost.
I was barefoot, partly because I didn’t want to track real mud into the house, and partly because I wanted to feel something raw and unfiltered. Every step in the stairwell told you a story: moss, heat, the faint tickle of someone else’s blood that no onebothered to mop up. I huddled on the chipped edge of a landing, legs pulled to my chest, chewing a bar that tasted like regret and the nutritional ghost of meat. The wrapper said “PROTEIN, NOW WITH MORE LIFE” but the only thing it gave me was a mouthful of cardboard and something that sizzled on my tongue like static.
The hallway lights winked out the second the drop-pod hit.
Not a crash, not even a proper impact. Just a controlled decel and the briefest tremor, as if whoever was flying wanted to remind the city it wasn’t worth real violence. I spit out the last bit of the bar and watched the whole block shudder from the pressure pulse. Across the street, above a liquor kiosk that never closed, four security drones locked into formation. They’d been floating there for forty-eight hours, scanning every movement, every heat signature, every angry or aroused thought that registered above baseline. Accord standard procedure was to neutralize the anomaly and report up the chain, but the drones hadn’t moved an inch since I’d gotten home. It was as if they were afraid the building would eat them if they got too close, and they were right. Here I fucking was, a black hole girl who’d already killed a whole containment team.
No one said it aloud, but everyone knew: if you were wrong about a tier 0 resonance, you got demoted to biological ballast. If you were right… It was worse. The Accord didn’t want my myth to be real because then they’d have to do something about it, and “do something” implied risk, liability, and a level of consequence that didn’t look good on a quarterly review. That’s why no one rushed in. That’s why even the block’s Accord liaison, who lived two doors down and had once given me a tin of contraband peanut butter, pretended my residence tag was glitched.
They didn’t come because they couldn’t agree what I was. Too dangerous to detain. Too sacred to kill. Too inconvenient to explain.
The Accord hated undefined variables. And I was glowing, horny math.
The landing door hissed open at the far end of the stairwell, and in strode the most Accord-issue officer I’d ever seen: black-on-white uniform, badge lit up in a color so blue it hurt to look at, boots that seemed immune to the city’s grime. For a second, I almost laughed. They looked like they’d never even heard of dirt, let alone had to climb multiple stories through it.
Then she looked up, and I realized this wasn’t just any foot soldier.
She was tall, easily half a head taller than me, and built like someone took every combat readiness metric, every fitness algorithm, and someone said, “Okay, but make it cruel.” Her hair was a severe white-gold, pulled back in a way that made you think about knives. Her eyes scanned the stairwell in microsecond bursts, calibrating, recording, logging every shadow. Her jawline had the kind of definition that came from at least three generations of engineered breeding and one complete cycle at the top of whatever finishing school bred Accord officers.
Her jaw could’ve cut wire. Her shoulders were a thesis on structural integrity. Even her goddamn clavicle made me horny.
She took one step onto the landing, and the entire stairwell seemed to contract, like the building itself was trying to get out of her way. She didn’t flinch at the smell, or the damp, or even the lingering threat of violence that always lived here. She just stood, rain dripping from the corner of her jacket, and stared me down.
I stared back. Not out of defiance, well, not only out of defiance, but because for the first time, someone else’s story pressed against mine, and the friction felt… warming. I wanted, needed, to see whose gravity would win.
And if I was being honest, which I tried not to be, but sometimes it sneaked up on me, I’d never seen anyone so physically perfect, at least not outside of a heavily filtered HoloNet drama. People like this didn’t come to the Glimmer Zone. They didn’t even orbit Pelago-9 unless it was on a bet or a dare. Even then, they’d land in the admin district, file a complaint, and be off-world before their skin finished outgassing the smell of local air.
The officer took another step. I caught myself eye-fucking her a little, because, well, why the hell not? If you’re about to get conscripted, erased, or otherwise mythified, you might as well enjoy the last few minutes of plausible deniability, and I was currently wondering what she tasted like.
She stopped an arm’s length away. Looked down, then up, then through me. When she spoke, her voice was low and clear, with just enough disdain to cut glass.
“Finally sent someone with a chin sharp enough to cut denial,” I said, because I had no impulse control and zero fear of authority.
She didn’t blink. When she spoke, low, clear, and with just enough disdain to carve me open, it hit me right between the ribs. “The Accord does not respond to rumors. Only verified anomalies.”
I snorted. “Sweetheart, you parked a war pod on my vape dealer. Maybe try ‘verified’ in a sentence with fewer drones.”
The ghost of a smile, there and gone so quickly I might’ve imagined it, flickered at the edge of her mouth. She ignored the rain sliding off her jacket and brushed a wet lock of hair off her forehead, a gesture so precise it might have been trained in a lab.
“The vape dealer you killed last night, along with 30 Accord myth containment specialists?”
She didn’t.
“Subject: Adam Kale. Local distributor. Multiple low-grade offenses. Confirmed deceased. Cause: eaten by a black hole.”
She said it as if she were reading it off a clipboard she’d already set on fire. And, yeah, somewhere in the wreckage of my survival instincts, my bad decision engine, and my lizard-brain attraction to people who could absolutely ruin me… I had no idea whether I felt guilty, turned on, or love-struck.
“Fern Meldin,” she said. “You are to remain here until stabilization.”
