Ariock tore aside part of a wall so he could bust into an industrial room, following Thomas.

The former Commander of All Living Things was the source of the intense life spark. Even in space armor, she looked like a skeletal agent of death. She raised her scimitar and sprinted toward a frail silhouette floating amid holographs.

Ariock had never met the Death Architect in person, but he had seen an accurate holographic representation of her. She looked innocent. And calm. Even with a wicked blade bearing toward her, the little girl did not move.

She did not even blink. Was she paralyzed?

A gaunt battlebeast uncoiled from shadows and moved in front of the Death Architect, ready to protect her. Saliva drooled from its enormous jaw.

Ariock extended his own protection. He shielded the Death Architect with compressed air. At the same time, he was aware of another occupant of this room.

Vy!

Unharmed!

Vy looked mightily relieved to see Ariock and Thomas in full armor. Her hair was in disarray, her clothes rumpled, and she crouched behind a tabletop, ready to take cover. But she smiled as if Ariock was the best sight she’d ever seen.

Ariock smiled back, happy that his visor was retracted. She could see his face.

“Ariock—” Thomas began to speak, to issue commands, but the Death Architect smiled and made a hand gesture. The battlebeast saw a mirrored reflection of her gesture, and it unexpectedly lunged at Thomas with its maw open. Ariock could see all the way down its cotton-white throat.

Blasts tore the animal apart in midair. It twisted and exploded in a rainfall of fleshy gore.

Thomas had shot without hesitation.

Slimy parts of the monster fell as Thomas rushed onward toward the Death Architect, blaster readied. That was one enemy down.

The Death Architect casually pressed a button on her control sleeve.

“Hold the station together!” Thomas screamed.

Ariock sent his awareness into every solid material within sight. He was icy iron. He became the tungsten hull. He encompassed as much as he could.

That was what saved them.

An explosion tore rock apart. The blast—a nuclear blast, it felt like—should have wrenched the whole asteroid apart. It should have caused the station to collapse or leak.

Instead, Ariock forced it to merely shrug instead of shatter. Fault lines formed. Ariock sloughed pressure into the void of space. He was ionic tungsten. He was the outer hull of the station, and he held fast, as immovable as a mountain. He was the strength of prophecy.

Inside his awareness, items slid loosely. Grates knocked against each other. Pipes broke and vented steam. Stress fractures formed in walls and ceilings. But mostly, everything remained functional.

Ariock dared to release his awareness from the fractured asteroid, bit by bit, returning some awareness to his human body. He could not exist as an asteroid forever. Vy needed him. Thomas needed him.

Some unknown liquid leaked and fizzed in a corner. The walls no longer quite met at even angles, and parts of the room had buckled, but at least this was still a viable habitat with life support.

The disgraced Commander was rising to her feet. Vy looked shaken, but she was also rising. The Death Architect was statue-still, but Ariock couldn’t spare focus for her strange behavior. The violence had thrown Thomas off his feet.

Ariock compressed air, forming a shield to protect the fallen boy from any further damage. He poured healing energy into Thomas. That should mend all wounds.

“Shield yourself!” Thomas wheezed even as Ariock healed him.

Just in time, Ariock compressed air. A cruelly curved blade whistled downward and almost sliced through his pressurized air.

The blade nicked his gorget but stopped short.

The disgraced Commander revealed no hint of disappointment. She raised her scimitar again, this time ready to hack at Thomas.

“I’m not the one who wants to end the universe!” Thomas twisted away like a martial artist. Ariock blinked. The boy must have been taking lessons from Alashani warriors.

The Death Architect had been thrown from her hoverchair. She lay on her stomach, too weak to push herself up. Her vehicle was dead, its delicate hover disk broken.

One of her baleful eyes stared into a distance that only she could see, partially obscured by one ribbon-tied pigtail. Was she dead?

Thomas knelt and leaned close to his nemesis like a sky croc about to gorge on a carcass. He inhaled.

Stolen story; please report.

Ariock knew that type of inhale. Thomas sounded like that when he was feasting on the life histories of penitents. He inhaled just before he twisted the minds of zombification victims. That was the inescapable sound of Thomas winning.

Thomas’s eyes widened with surprise.

That wasn’t such a good sign.

“Ariock, only you can stop the death of the galaxy.” Thomas straightened to face him fully. “She played dead long enough to trigger doomsday. The chain reaction is in progress.”

Ariock wanted to item-teleport Vy to safety. He had to make sure she was unhurt.

“Vy is safe. I’ll protect her.” Thomas spoke rapid-fire, underscoring the urgency. “There’s no time for anything else. I’m sorry to do this to you, but you can’t bring me or anyone with you.”

Pain seared Ariock’s eyes. He whimpered.

When he reflexively closed his eyes, a burning image of the galactic disk glowed against his inner eyelids. Veins threaded the spiral disk. Circles blazed at the ends of various threads, with features titled in neat lettering. ENKLADAD. STATION FURTHER. SHOOF. REJECT-238. OTHKO BELT.

YOU ARE HERE.

There were many others. He couldn’t make the image go away.

“I burned a cosmic map onto your retinas,” Thomas explained. “It will fade as your eyes heal, and you have ultrafast healing, so you’ll need to be quick. Go to each of the thirteen temporal gateways on that map. They’re the names I circled. Each one has an ultradense payload heading toward it at speed. You need to deflect those payloads. Make sure they swerve. If they enter the temporal stream network, then the universe is in danger of ending.”

Ariock blinked. The galactic map hung in the air even with his eyes open, seared into his vision.

“You’ll need all your strength,” Thomas warned. “And if you aren’t fast enough, then you’ll need to immediately travel to the Centauri system near Earth, to protect Earth from obliteration. That’s where the first supermassive black hole will emerge.”

Ariock began to ask if Vy was truly safe. What if the disgraced Commander tried to murder her?

“Vy is fine!” Thomas cried. “Go!”

A clap of thunder sounded. All of a sudden, Garrett was in the room, fully geared for battle. His beard and hair spilled out, bright white against black armor. Metallic wings shone from behind him with golden light. Ariock squinted, his vision overwhelmed with brilliance as well as the galactic star map. Evenjos must be with Garrett, having hitched a ride as his disembodied passenger.

“Evenjos!” Thomas yelled. “Deflect the payload that’s headed to the nearest temporal stream! Ariock, skip that one and deflect the other twelve!”

Garrett and Evenjos decoupled, Evenjos materializing as a radiant goddess. She and Garrett clasped hands and began to speak to each other, but Thomas shoved Ariock.

“Go, go, go!” He was weeping.

That, more than anything, conveyed the urgency. Thomas did not cry unless he had very good reason to do so.

“Protect Vy,” Ariock told his friends.

Vy was saying something nonsensical, insisting that she could make Ariock stronger. Whatever she wanted to convey, it would have to wait. Ariock sealed his visor and began to breathe the air from tanks embedded in his armor. Garrett and Thomas would protect Vy from the disgraced Commander. Evenjos might lend a hand once she deflected the nearest payload.

The Death Architect remained unmoving on the floor. She was no longer any sort of threat.

Ariock ghosted across the galaxy to one of the circled targets seared into his vision, the one labeled RAWU, and scanned the area for…

Well, he supposed that swarm of super fast missiles might be the payload?

Ariock teleported into the void of space. While he hung there, as useless as a space rock, he discarded all of his internal brakes and checks in order to expand as far as possible.

Soon his core body was insignificant. He became an immensity larger than a planet, albeit without much mass or density. The cosmic map seared onto his retinas became so irrelevant that he no longer even saw it. He existed as cosmic radiation and space plasma.

If he were relying purely on visual data, the missile swarm would stymy him. Each missile appeared to be identical and they all traveled at roughly the same velocity, heading in roughly the same direction. There was no visual way to identify the real threat.

But Ariock encompassed the swarm. It became as much a part of him as his own skin. He immediately sensed which of those many missiles was different from the rest. That one missile was ultra, ridiculously, dangerously unstable and…

Heavy.

Heavier than a planet.

Heavier than anything Ariock had ever dealt with. Every fiber of his being, including his human body, slid toward the gravitational pull of that ultradense missile.

The swarm snapped into the heavy missile. Its containment must have failed, or ended, and now their mass was added to its already critically packed density. The payload glowed with unknown energy reactions.

A section of space beyond Ariock danced and warped and glowed in anticipation. Ariock knew without needing to be told that he was perceiving the receptive gateway of a temporal stream.

He had to deflect the payload.

Ariock poured all his focus into the ultradense, ultraheavy, malevolently glowing missile. It no longer even resembled a missile. It looked more like a deformed meteor.

He gained its velocity. Its power. And its mass. He hurled all of his newfound weight—the weight of a thousand Jupiters—downward.

The meteor dipped.

Its mass was such that the temporal stream sucked towards it, energy arms reaching for an energy goal. Ariock-the-deadly-meteor forced himself further off-course. As he hurtled away from the temporal stream, the gateway fizzled with particles on their way to join his ever-increasing mass.

Ariock-the-meteor dared not withdraw. Whatever was happening inside his dense mass, it was a runaway chain reaction. He felt its volatile potential. The payload might transform into something like a star. Or a black hole.

Such a devastating cosmic phenomenon would annihilate the nearest solar system, which he assumed was Rawu. It would also annihilate his mortal body and end his life. He couldn’t allow that.

But Ariock-the-meteor had no idea what to do. Thomas was too far away to offer advice.

Ariock was matter. He was heat. He was radiation.

So he channeled energy out of the density and into the void of space. He bled mass. He bled velocity. He didn’t know how to unpack it all without causing a dangerous explosion, so he left density alone.

Bit by bit, the mass became relatively stable.

It was still an ultradense abomination of a wrecking ball. But it no longer felt like it would twist into something beyond his control. The meteor flew past the temporal gateway, slower and colder than it had been.

He let it go.

Bereft of density, mass, energy, radiation, and heat, he struggled to exist at all. He was hardly aware of who he was.

Bit by bit, he remembered.

He slammed back to his human size, and the shock of downsizing from a cosmic demigod to a mere mortal caused him to curl up, muscles knotted with tension. His own heavy breathing was the only sound in the universe.

Had that exercise taken seconds?

Or had it consumed precious minutes? Was the universe going to end?

Ariock was exhausted, but the cosmic map still glowed on his vision. He wearily exited his body and ghosted across solar systems and nebulas, seeking the next location.

He had eleven more payloads to deflect.