That was when Leox Gyasi’s voice came over the ship’s comms: “Everybody who wants to stay alive, strap yourselves in now!”

Reath ran for the jump seats, reaching them just as all the other Jedi scrambled in. As they hurriedly fastened their safety harness straps, Orla called out, “What’s happening?”

Leox answered, “Near as I can figure, hyperspace is broken.”

“What?” Dez looked as bewildered as Reath felt. “How is that possible?”

“Tons of debris, the kind of thing you usually never find in hyperspace? It’s all over hyperspace.” The spice stick gripped between Leox’s teeth was getting a grinding. “As in, littering every route out there.”

Reath could barely put the thought into words. “But that would mean a disaster on—on a galactic scale.”

“That’s pretty much the size of it,” Leox said. “Now everybody hang on.”

Chapter Three

Affie had seen a lot more than most seventeen-year-olds. Had boarded and served as crew on ships traveling the length of the sector, now across the galaxy, all the way from Kennerla to Coruscant. Had helped steer a ship through a hyperspace vortex once.

But she’d never seen Leox Gyasi so close to losing his nerve.

His hands remained fixed on the controls as he attempted to hold steady. “So,” she said, “what do we do now?”

“We try to check whether our path is clear.” Leox would’ve looked almost relaxed to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Affie did. Only she and Geode could detect the tension coiled inside. “If we get hit by so much as a splinter of metal, we’re looking at explosive ejection from hyperspace, followed by your favorite and mine, a hull breach.”

Hull breach. Every space traveler’s worst nightmare. A breach meant being blown out into the frigid void of space—which would kill you within two or three minutes. Within only seconds if you had any breath in your lungs, which would immediately expand and burst.

Even worse: the electric blue of hyperspace was changing color. Shifting more violet, all the way to red. Affie had no idea why that was happening, but it couldn’t be good.

The navicomputer began blinking fast, sending staccato crimson light across the bridge. “We’re picking up debris,” she managed to report. “Something huge.”

Leox said what she was really thinking: “That thing’s got a bull’s-eye on us.”

“Can we evade?”

“We’re gonna find out.”

Steering in hyperspace was no mean feat. Generally, there was no need to do so, since the navicomputer calculated and modified the jump at inhuman speeds. Today was an exception. Experienced pilots formed a kind of intuition about hyperspace—an instinct—that worked better than any droid or machinery. Leox had better instincts than any other pilot Affie had ever encountered. He could save them if anyone could.

She just wished she didn’t know how big an if that was.