Page 6 of She Who Devours the Stars
The missile? I wasn’t really sure, but some red-black beam made it vanish from the sky. Vireleth, maybe? The incredibly put-upon sigh that echoed in my head didn’t leave many doubts.
I didn’t ask for protection, didn’t see most of it, either. I just walked, the aftertaste of artificial banana in my teeth, blanket around my shoulders, and the burn of Sagittarius A* in my bloodstream whispering “hell no” to physics. I guess, maybe, “Nullarch” came with auto-defense. Which was nice, but I still didn’t know what a Nullarch was.
The street outside was empty, all the usual noise vacuumed up by curfew or something worse. The only lights were from the vending kiosks, running panic ads on a ten-second loop: EMERGENCY UPDATE. CITIZEN COMPLIANCE ORDER. STAY INDOORS. BUT WHILE YOU’RE HERE, BUY A FIZZ.
I slunk through the lobby, hugging the wall, ignoring the slow-rot smell from the carpet. The elevator was out, of course, so I took the stairs, each landing painted with a different mural, all of them faded except the last: a girl in a jumpsuit, floating through starless dark, the phrase “GIVE IT HELL” stenciled above her head.
Home sweet home.
If there’s a hell, I’m pretty sure you’re forced to spend eternity inside whatever apartment you last paid rent for. Ours was an ex-mining prefab jammed into one of the tower stacks on the city’s shadow side, forever reeking of industrial coolant and wet laundry no matter how many incense pods you burned through. Two-and-a-half rooms, enough zero-G fishing rods jammed in the entryway to impale a small marching band, and one oxygen fern that my parents had been trying (and not completely failing) to keep alive since before my birth. Someone with a vendetta against comfort could have designed the place, but itwas also the only place in the universe that had ever felt remotely safe.
I braced myself at the door, drew in one last lungful of honest-to-whoever street air, overripe soy oil and melted plastic piping and the faintest copper tang of fear, then palmed the entry.
The door shuddered open with a sad hydraulic whine. I stepped through and immediately tripped over a pile of scavenged coolant pipes that hadn’t been there this morning. My left shin made contact with something sharp enough to draw blood, which meant they’d been out junking again. At least some things hadn’t changed.
I barely had time to register the new obstacle course as a threat before the domestic artillery started.
“I watered it last shift!” Mom’s voice detonated from the kitchen nook like she was staging a coup. Velline Meldin: five feet of muscle, attitude, and perfectly sculpted eyeliner, currently dual-wielding a canister of nutrient gel and a cereal spoon like she was ready to go full berserker on the next living thing that grew a fungus spore. Her words ricocheted off every metal surface in the unit: fridge, microwave tower, Dad’s sacred coffee urn.
From behind the partition came Dad’s usual counterfire, slow and geological as always. “You watered the wrong side,” he said. “The root cluster on the right is dying.”
Mom responded with an audible eye-roll. “How does a root cluster even have sides? It’s a sphere! You made that up.”
“If you listened when I explained—”
“No one has ever explained root directions to me,” Mom fired back, jabbing at Dad with the nutrient gel for punctuation. “Not once in nineteen years.”
Dad didn’t answer right away. He was probably running internal diagnostics on how best to phrase his next point without triggering escalation. He’d once been an actual peace negotiator for orbital dockworker unions, a fact he only mentioned when cornered, but right now he was deploying that same high-stakes crisis management on houseplant care.
Their voices bounced around the prefab walls like ion cannon fire on a mining hull. It should have been annoying, but it was weirdly comforting, like nothing outside had changed and we weren’t all one missed meal away from anarchy or atomization.
Then Dad rounded the corner, saw me, and froze like someone had just kicked the gravity up to eleven. His face locked in place, all his usual crisis-response subroutines short-circuiting at once. I watched him try to reboot behind the eyes.
Mom turned next. Her gaze swept over me with the speed and accuracy of a targeting array. The spoon hit the floor with a metallic clatter. For a whole second, neither of them moved.
Maybe they were taking inventory: number of limbs still attached, quantity of visible blood, degree of burn trauma, any signs of mythic contamination or active collapse fields. Or maybe they were just waiting for someone else to speak first so they wouldn’t have to admit how terrified they were.
“Hi,” I said, forcing the word through a throat raw from screaming my way through atmospheric entry. Well, that and being naked in a mythship. I tried not to look at the gash on my shin because if I did, Mom would too, and that would be the end of the room’s structural integrity.
They both moved at once, coming at me from opposite sides of the room like some long-practiced containment maneuver. It wasn’t so much an embrace as a full-scale hazardous material clean-up. Dad materialized a med-spray from thin air and wentfor my leg while Mom cupped my face in both hands like she was checking for fractures or psychic possession.
“Fern, baby, what the absolute fuck,” Mom said, voice cracking at the edges like she couldn’t decide if she was about to strangle me or cry or both. The longer she looked at me, the more it leaned toward crying. I might’ve preferred the strangling, I was dressed for it at least.
“Are you okay?” she asked before I could answer, and then immediately followed it with, “What happened?” and “Did you eat today?” all in one breathless barrage.
“Yeah,” I said, the lie automatic and poorly stitched together. “Just had a rough landing coming back from work.” Which wasn’t technically wrong if you stretched every definition past the point of legal durability.
Mom tilted my chin, searching my pupils for concussion signs or worse. When she didn’t find an immediate cause for a hospital run, she switched gears mid-sentence like she always did. “You know what would help you heal faster? Real food.” Then she stabbed Dad with a glare sharp enough to pierce hull plating. “Which we’d have more of if someone hadn’t spent half our stipend on hydroponic upgrades nobody asked for.”
Dad, unphased, sprayed my leg with antiseptic foam cold enough to make me twitch, then gave me his signature philosophical nod like he was delivering a sermon. “Growth is sometimes painful,” he said, as if quoting scripture instead of slathering menthol-smelling frostbite onto an open wound. “But adaptation makes us stronger.”
Mom rolled her eyes so hard I heard it. She caught herself smiling anyway, because as much as she claimed to hate this entire circus, she loved it more than she loved oxygen or root cluster arguments.
Dad took a beat before making the next tactical approach. “Didn’t expect you back until tomorrow,” he said, voice low. Which was code for: What disaster dragged you home this time?
“I got off early,” I lied, again. If either of them noticed how badly my hands trembled, they didn’t say anything about it.
Mom snorted, sharp and unimpressed. “Probably because your boss finally figured out nobody survives his overtime scheduling.”
