On the bridge of the "Odyssey," everyone was frozen in horror. They were watching their friends, their entire fleet, being turned into a floating art gallery of crystal statues. Ilsa Varkov's magnificent flagship, the "Unbroken," was the latest victim.

The wave of perfect, silent light was washing over it, turning the mighty warship into a giant, lifeless jewel.

The shield wall was gone. There was nothing left between them and the universe-ending beam.

"It's over," Seraphina whispered, her hands covering her mouth. Emma could only stare, her mind, which always had a plan, was finally, terrifyingly blank.

But they weren't the only ones watching.

In the small, cramped cockpit of the Void Cutter, a fast little ship that looked more like a souped-up space hot rod than a military vessel, Jaxon Ryder and Carmella watched the same terrible sight on their screen.

The Void Cutter was docked inside the "Odyssey." It was not a warship. It was a smuggler's ship, built for running away, not for fighting.

Jaxon stared at the beam, his mind racing. He wasn't a soldier. He was a thinker, a problem-solver. And when a problem was too big to fight, you didn't fight it. You cheated.

"Hey, Lia," he said, his voice quiet. "I have a stupid idea."

Carmella didn't take her eyes off the screen. "You have a lot of those," she said. "Which one is it this time? The one where you try to teach a robot to dance?"

"Worse," Jaxon said. He pointed a shaky finger at the beam on the screen. "That beam works because it's perfect. It's a perfect idea, a perfect law, hitting our ships. But what if we hit it with something… imperfect? Something completely messy and chaotic?"

Carmella finally looked at him. "What are you talking about?"

"The Reality Destabilizer," he said, his eyes gleaming with a wild, desperate light. "Valerius's crazy invention. We don't use it to make a shield. We fly right up to the beam and turn it on. We don't try to stop the beam.

We try to make it… confused. If the beam is a perfect sentence, we need to throw a bunch of nonsense words right in the middle of it."

Carmella stared at him for a long second, processing the insane plan. He wanted her to fly their little ship, their home, into a ray of light that turned warships into lawn ornaments.

A slow, dangerous grin spread across her face.

"So," she said, her fingers already dancing over the launch controls. "You want me to fly into the universe-ending death ray and cause a little trouble?" She flicked a switch, and the Void Cutter's engines hummed to life. "Sounds fun."

Before anyone on the "Odyssey's" bridge could even ask what was happening, the small hangar bay doors slid open. The Void Cutter shot out like a bullet, its engines burning a brilliant blue.

"Jaxon? Carmella ? What are you doing?!" Emma's panicked voice came over the comms.

"Just going for a little spin, boss," Carmella 's cheerful voice replied. "Don't wait up."

The comms cut out.

The little ship was impossibly fast. Carmella was a master pilot, and the Void Cutter was her instrument. She weaved the ship through the new graveyard of crystal vessels, her ship a tiny, living thing in a forest of the beautiful dead.

She flew past the "Unbroken," and for a moment, she could see the frozen, crystal form of Ilsa on the bridge, still standing defiant.

"Showoffs," Carmella muttered, pushing the engines harder.

The beam grew larger and larger until it filled their entire viewscreen. The small cockpit began to shake. Alarms started to beep, then scream. The ship's systems were protesting, complaining that reality was getting very, very weird.

"Almost there!" Carmella shouted over the noise.

Jaxon was holding onto his seat, his face pale. His job was to time the device perfectly. Too early, and it would do nothing. Too late, and they would be a very small, very fast crystal statue.

"This is definitely one of my stupider ideas!" Jaxon yelled.

"It's in my top three favorite stupid ideas of yours!" Carmella yelled back, her knuckles white on the controls.

The light from the beam was so bright now it was pouring through the cockpit windows, making everything inside glow. The ship was groaning, the metal creaking under the impossible pressure.

Jaxon looked at Carmella . Her face was lit by the blinding light, her expression a mix of fierce concentration and wild joy. She was beautiful. He thought of all the things they had planned to do, all the adventures they were supposed to have.

"Looks like you might not get that moon after all!" Jaxon shouted over the screaming alarms.

Carmella laughed, a bright, clear sound in the middle of all the chaos. Her hands never wavered from the controls.

"Just make sure the view is good from wherever we end up!" she yelled back. It was all she needed to say.

They met each other's eyes for one last, perfect second.

"Okay!" Jaxon yelled, turning back to his console. "Get ready to push the big, scary button! On my mark! Three… two…"

He slammed his hand down on the activator for the Reality Destabilizer.

"One!"

A wave of pure wrongness erupted from the Void Cutter. It was a bubble of chaos, a pocket of space where the rules of the universe just stopped working for a moment.

The bubble hit the beam.

For a single, breathtaking instant, the perfectly straight, perfectly pure beam of law wavered. It flickered like a candle in the wind. A crack appeared in its flawless surface. Jaxon's nonsense words had made the perfect sentence stutter.

But the power was too much. The feedback from hitting the beam with so much chaos flowed back into the Reality Destabilizer. The device overloaded in a shower of sparks. The energy surge was so massive it ripped through the entire ship.

The feedback shattered the Void Cutter.

On the bridge of the "Odyssey," they saw the tiny ship reach the beam. They saw the beam flicker. And then, they saw the Void Cutter explode in a silent, brilliant flash of light, vanishing without a trace.

Emma cried out, a sharp sound of pain. Seraphina's hand flew to her chest, her heart breaking for her lost friends.

But their sacrifice had not been for nothing.

The beam, which had been so perfect, was now weaker. The flicker had disrupted its power. It was still coming, still a weapon of terrible force, but the brief moment of chaos Jaxon and Carmella had created had wounded it.

It was no longer perfect.

"They did it," Emma whispered, tears streaming down her face. She looked at the weakened beam, now just seconds away from hitting the "Odyssey." "They bought us a second."

But a second was all they would get. The wounded beam, an unstoppable wave of rewritten reality, continued its path, heading straight for them.

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