Page 94 of She Who Devours the Stars
I admired that, too.
Alyx’s bare throat was impossible to pull my eyes from, the way her pulse shivered just under her skin. I remembered the shimmer of sweat along her collarbone, the way she had glancedat me from under the water’s surface, as if daring me to look twice. I smiled, soft and silent.
I watched her for a long time, patient and relentless, until the lights in the medbay began to fade toward evening and my AR’s calendar reminded me I had other business to attend to.
On my way out the door, I let myself imagine what the world would look like when she finally woke up and realized she was, for the first time in her life, truly mythic.
Thread Modulation: Alyx Vieron
Axis Alignment: Medbay
By the time the room stopped spinning, the world outside had gone full dusk. Soft blue and muted, like the universe was embarrassed by how many people could see in. I sat up in the medbay bed, let my feet dangle off the edge, and took inventory. Head: pounding. Stomach: hollow. Skin: tingling with that faint, unfinished resonance, like the aftertaste of a near-electrocution.
I flexed my hands and watched the white-hot light in my veins stutter and recede. It was supposed to fade. The medtechs said it would. But it didn’t. My whole body glowed in places I’d never known had enough nerve endings to catch a charge.
It wasn’t unpleasant, not precisely. It was just… too much. Like the volume on everything had been turned up, and the mute button was broken.
I glanced around. No one in the hall, no one at the glass. I was alone, except for the new piece of myself I couldn’t stop touching.
My left hand gripped the mattress so hard that the knuckles went bloodless. I didn’t realize I was doing it until a line of red beads formed under my fingernail, bright and precise. I loosened my hold, letting the sensations, pain, relief, and shamewash over me. With my right hand, I hovered just above my sternum, as if waiting for a sign that Fern’s touch was still there, marking me as hers. It was.
I breathed, slow and deliberate. My pulse refused to match the cadence, hammering out its erratic tempo: fast, then slow, then a double-flutter I couldn’t name.
I tried to remember how I’d gotten here. The details came in flashes. Fern’s hands, her mouth, the raw certainty in her eyes as she’d torn the world apart and rebuilt it around the axis of my want. She hadn’t hesitated, not once. The only question left was whether I’d ever be able to hesitate again.
I could still hear her voice, low and sure, in the echo of my bones.
She’s the reason the stars haven’t gone out yet.
The thought came out of nowhere, but it felt true in a way nothing else did. I said it out loud, just to see if it changed anything.
“She’s the reason the stars haven’t gone out yet.”
The room didn’t react. Neither did the AI that was monitoring me. But something in me settled, then shifted, as if the truth was a rock dropped into the slowest-moving ocean in existence.
But what happens, I thought, when she realizes she could let them?
I laughed, just once. Not a real laugh. The kind you do in a bathroom stall with your head in your hands, because no one is coming to save you.
The interface panel on the far wall blinked, then flickered to life. I hadn’t called it. Didn’t need to. It had learned to expect me.
My AR projected a new message, the first line already completed:
TO: TRIVANE, FERN
I stared at the blank field, my fingers hovering in the air restlessly, while I panicked about what to think-type.
Did you know you left part of yourself in me?
I typed it slowly. I read it three times.
I didn’t send it. Instead, I hit “save” and let the words hang in the air, echoing in the half-lit box of my existence.
For a while, I sat like that, half-dressed, hands raw, feeling every vibration in the building, every rumor of her mythic field, every faint, hungry echo of what Fern had left behind. The ache never faded. I didn’t expect it to. It wasn’t a wound; it was a scar forming in real time, a new organ learning how to pulse, how to want.
I wondered if she felt it, too.
I leaned back against the wall, let the calm settle into my bones, and tried to imagine what would happen if she walked through the door right now. Would I run? Would I beg? Would I let her finish what she’d started?
