Page 83 of She Who Devours the Stars
Alyx watched her go, then looked at me, and in her face I saw a million possible futures, all of them dangerous.
“Good night, Fern,” she said, and this time, she was the one who left first.
I waited until she was gone, then leaned against the wall, let the chill of it seep into my back, and counted the beats until my heart stopped racing.
I could still feel the pressure of her voice, lodged somewhere behind my sternum.
For a second, I let myself feel it.
Then I flicked a tiny illusion into the air: a little Alyx, making finger-hearts and smirking like she owned the place. I watched it dissolve, the afterimage lingering longer than it should.
“Better luck next time,” I said, but not loud enough for anyone but the wall to hear.
I walked on, the corridor empty, the world outside still a mess.
But for once, I didn’t mind.
Not even a little.
Chapter 11: The City Between Us
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron
Axis Alignment: Eventide
It was supposed to be a quiz day.
I had been prepping for three cycles, grinding through block diagrams and memetic overlays and the part of the curriculum known unofficially as “ways not to die when your resonance goes sentient.” My table was a shrine to preemptive anxiety: two compads, one spiral notebook (with actual paper, just to show off), and a caffeine dosage so criminal it gave the auto-dispenser second thoughts. My hair was in defiance mode, half-braided, half in my face, and my hoodie had absorbed enough stress sweat to qualify as a crime scene. But I was ready.
The rest of the cohort filed in on autopilot, most of them still operating on less than three hours’ sleep and the breakfast equivalent of a hot glue gun to the veins. Even the Vellari twins looked rough, their synchronized smirks dialed down to “mildly sarcastic.” Across the aisle, Fern Trivane slouched in her seat with a plastic carton of what was probably illegal noodles, eyes glazed, chin propped on her palm. She looked like she’d been up all night punching holes in the moon and then decided to haunt the class for fun.
She caught me looking. Didn’t smile, just winked, then upended half the noodles into her mouth with an efficiency that made me want to throw my notes out the window and retire to a cave.
Professor Ipsum called for attention and got it in the way only someone who could weaponize silence could: he simply stopped moving. The man was an entropy sponge, and even the most battle-hardened students wilted in the psychic gravity of his glare.
“Today,” he intoned, “we begin the Alignment Trial.”
If there was an easier way to kill the vibe in a room, I hadn’t seen it.
Every eye twitched to the main board, where the computer had already queued the rules. I felt the old dread spike in my chest. The Alignment Trial was infamous. Most years, it was ceremonial: practice runs, token containment exercises, maybe a mild hallucination if someone miscalibrated their link. But this cycle? This cycle, we had a Nullarch, two Vellari prodigies, and a rumor that the entire test was being piped out to the HoloNet as a “demonstration of the Accord’s commitment to mythic stability.”
It wasn’t a class. It was a blood sport with homework.
I blinked, and the A.I.’s prompts locked me out of my compad. The words crawled over my notes in blue fire:
[TRIAL INITIATION: PAIRWISE ALIGNMENT. OPT OUT NOT PERMITTED.]
My jaw tightened. Even the professor looked like he’d rather eat glass than proctor this.
“Trial pairs will be determined by resonance vector,” he said, in a clinical voice. “We do not choose. The computer does.”
Which meant, in practical terms, that you got paired with your most incompatible nightmare and then had not to collapse reality together.
I shot a glance at Fern, who was already grinning at the chaos, mouth still full of noodles. She raised her eyebrows, like she was betting the algorithm would explode before we got to her name.
It was a good bet.
The computer spun through a hundred permutations per second, every screen in the room a strobe of names and partial data. A few pairs locked in early: Vessa and some poor baseline kid from AgriDome; a Vaelith junior with a transfer student who looked like he’d never even kissed a mythic field, let alone survived one. Each time a pair was locked, the student’s desk blinked gold, then a little bar in the upper right went from “SAFE” to “GOOD LUCK.”
