Adrift (4 page)

There were plenty of materials for bandaging up the cuts already bleeding through the soft soles of his shoes, and he was pretty sure he could make a halfway decent splint. But there were no painkillers that he could see. Granted, he didn’t have anything resembling a working knowledge of drugs and medicines, but he remembered a couple of the ones Dr. Geddes had given him for the various bones he’d broken over the years, and all he could find of those were a couple empty bottles. There might be some in the mess on the floor, but Tron knew better than to try guessing about that. The last thing they needed was to be popping mystery drugs. He didn’t particularly fancy the idea of combing through the glass for them, anyway. So, with nothing but the most basic of supplies, he headed back to Kivi
, all the time being careful never to look at the dead man in the corner.

This time she was where he’d left her. He was relieved. Tron wasn’t sure how much more walking he was good for, with his throbbing feet. The minute she saw him, she held out a hand like she expected him to drop some magical medicine into it. He grimaced.

“I didn’t find any pills.”

“There are lots of pills,” she said.

Tron barely managed to swallow his growl. “Yeah, well, you’re welcome to go in there and guess about what they might be, but I prefer to know what I’m swallowing. I checked every cabinet, and every bottle with a name I recognized was empty.”

“You don’t know much about medicine.”

“Yeah?” He snapped. “And I suppose you’re an expert?”

“No.”

He wanted to be pissed at her, but it was clear she wasn’t saying any of this to be a pain. She was just making observations. Normally that was plenty to be angry about. There was a reason he’d avoided her just as much as everyone else did. But Tron just couldn’t convince himself it was worth the risk of alienating her. He needed her to stick around, at least until they found Jay. He didn’t think she’d do that if he got bent out of shape when she was just doing what she always did.

“I don’t want pills,” she said after a while. “I want the bandages.”

Tron blinked and looked down at what he was holding. “I’ll wrap your leg.”

She shook her head. “Not for me. For you.” Kivi point
ed at his feet. He flinched as he saw the bloody footprints leading up to where he stood. He was surprised she noticed. He’d never seen her pay any attention to people unless they were asking something from her. He certainly didn’t expect her to offer to tape up his feet. “I got it.”

She made a face at him. It might be the first time he’d ever seen her do that. She opened her hand again and wiggled her fingers insistently. “Don’t be dumb. I can help you too.”

Half out of shock, Tron dropped the bandages into her hand. Then, again mostly because she surprised him, he plopped down when she shoved him backward. Kivi got to work yanking off his shoes without another word. He couldn’t believe how carefully she examined his injuries. He didn’t think she was quite so delicate about yanking out the bits of glass still stuck in his skin, but once she was wrapping up his feet he started to feel bad again.

“Sorry I pushed you.” He said it mostly because of the silence. The quiet of the Lucy now was unbearable. Even down in storage, the sounds of distant conversations and the hum of the engine filled every second. Now there wasn’t even the occasional thunk of machines working. But the fact that it was just to ease a tension he suspected only he was feeling didn’t make it untrue.

She nodded, as though he’d told her something she already knew. Then she tied off the bandage and shifted around until her own foot was near enough for him to work on. Tron sighed and followed the unspoken command, wondering who exactly it was in charge of this little team.

“Thank you.”

He glanced up at her big blue eyes, once again startled. “Huh?”

“For saying sorry.” Kivi paused, then gave him a smile that only looked a little strange on her. “And helping me.”

Tron shrugged, more uncomfortable now than he had been with the silence. “Eh. Whatever.” He finished assembling the mediocre splint and pushed himself up to his feet, offering her a hand up. “Let’s get moving.”

“Where?”

“We have to find Jay. He’ll know how to get things working again, and what to do next.”

Kivi hesitated. Tron knew what she was thinking. He would be thinking the same thing, if he let himself. But he wasn’t going to. They needed help, and the captain was the best kind of help he could think of. The man had to be alive. Tron tried to think of a way to explain this to her, but before he could she slipped her hand into his. “Ok.”

Just like that, he was in charge again. He still didn’t want the job, but he was so grateful that she wasn’t going to shatter his faith with one of her pointed observations that he nearly hugged her. She trusted him. Tron wasn’t sure what to do with that, but he was determined to prove that she wasn’t wrong for it. The only way he could think of was to find the captain and all the others still alive as fast as possible.

The captain had to be in
navigation. It was the only place that made sense. He had to be there to turn off the alarm, and Jay wasn’t going to leave such an important position when there might be invaders on Lucy. Navigation had the extra advantage of having the thickest door on the ship, and one that locked from the inside. It was standard on every ship. Jay probably had a whole bunch of people with him. They just had to get there.

He couldn’t carry her constantly.
She wasn’t much weight, but the pain in his feet was no small thing. He could barely drag himself most of the time, and even that little bit extra was too much. She never said a word of complaint when he had to put her down, just like she didn’t when he scooped her back up. She did what she could to help him with every door they came across, though that was not much. Tron knew, on some level, she thought the trip to the nav was pointless, but she never let it show.

The minute he saw the door to
navigation stuck half-open, Tron knew. Kivi stopped walking, dropping his hand for the first time since med bay, but he hardly noticed. Everything in him was squeezed so tight he could hardly breathe, and even though he knew he’d been wrong, he couldn’t stop moving forward and trying to convince himself that someone would be waiting just on the other side of that door.

There were more of the blue light strips in
navigation than any other area they’d been. The result was surreal, making the whole place look like more like a picture than the world. Nothing was knocked over here, there was no shattered glass or piles of bodies. Everything looked like it was just waiting for people to show up and start living in it again. There were two consoles that each looped in a sort of half ‘u’ and there was a chair in front of each one. The chairs had wheels, and they were surely knocked about during all the rocking Lucy had done earlier, but the result was that they both looked like someone had only just gotten up. Between the consoles was a large space with grated flooring. Tron stared at it for a while, wondering if he would see something underneath the grate when the lights were on. Now, all there was to see was darkness. The main thing about the room was not the consoles or the grate, though. It was the massive window out to the black.

Tron had never seen space before. They lived closer to it than most, having nothing but the walls of their ship separating them from the black. He’d seen plenty of pictures of it during his studies. But windows were structural weaknesses, and no ship had many.
Lucy wasn’t a well-funded project, like some of the others he’d read about. She only had the one. He always thought, when he finally saw what it was everyone was always talking about, he’d feel something wonderful. He didn’t feel anything at all. It was just more nothing.

He scanned the room again, looking for some sign of life to cling to. If there was anything that indicated the captain or crew w
ere still on the ship somewhere, then Tron would have somewhere to go next. It wouldn’t be just him and Kivi, and he wouldn’t be the one who had to figure out how to fix things. What he found was not what he needed.

There were no bodies here. At first he thought that was a good sign.
Nav was never empty, not like the engine room. If there wasn’t anyone dead inside, surely that meant that they’d escaped just like him and Kivi, and they opened the door to get back inside the ship proper after the danger was past. Then he saw the bloody handprint on one of the consoles. It smeared all the way down. Like someone had been ripped out of their seat and pulled away.

He dropped down in the space between the consoles, the tears he’d tried to leave in the mess spilling down his cheeks. He buried his face in his hands and let out another sob that cracked in his aching throat and came out sounding broken.

A small hand dropped on his shoulder. Tron jumped at the touch, then looked up, shame heating his face. He was furious at Kivi for interrupting his grief, at her finding him during his weakness, but that drained away the instant he saw her face.

Even in the blue glow, she was obviously pale. And her eyes weren’t on him. They were above and behind him, to the vastness outside the window. He quickly wiped away his tears and climbed back to his feet clumsily, staring back at the black and trying to figure what it was that had her attention.

“What the hell are you staring at?” he asked harshly. Enough of the anger was still in his voice that he expected her to flinch, the way she had when he snapped at her down in his storage. But she didn’t even seem to notice.

“We’re moving.”

Tron shrugged. “So?”

“The engine is dead. We shouldn’t me moving.”

“Makes sense to me. Isn’t there that rule about objects in motion staying in motion?”

“
Unless acted upon by an external force,” she agreed readily. “Newton’s first law. But the engine slowed down before it stopped. We’re moving too fast.”

He didn’t know how she could tell. Sure, the pinpricks of light scattered across the blackness outside were moving past them in streaks. Or they were moving past. Regardless, he didn’t see how she could have any idea what
speed they were going. Heck, they could just be spinning in circles. It’s not like they’d have any idea aboard Lucy. “I’m sticking with my original question. So what?”

She pushed past him and plastered herself against the window. Tron gaped at her, wondering if she’d lost her mind. He wouldn’t blame her. Well, yeah, he would. Because then he’d be all by himself. But he could understand it. He felt like he was walking the razor edge of sanity himself.

“No. No, no no.”

It was the same horrible sound she’d made when he was getting ready to enter the mess. If he’d listened, maybe he wouldn’t see his mother’s lifeless face every time he blinked. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again. He followed her over to the window.

It didn’t take long to figure out what Kivi was seeing. There was no missing the great, hulking ship off their portside.

Connected

Kivi felt something awful bubbling up inside her as she took in the size of the ship out the window. She was three when she saw the Lucy from the outside, and that was before she could remember anything. So maybe it was possible that it looked bigger from the outside than it was inside. She’d heard of that happening to people all the time. Perception was a tricky thing. But she knew exactly how big the Lucy was inside. She’d memorized the schematics a long time ago. And she was pretty confident that the small bit of hull she was able to see from the windshield was
part of a ship at least twice as large as theirs.

They were attached. They had to be. Her view never shifted. If it weren’t for the stars, she’d think they were both completely still. Since she knew they were moving, the only thing that made any sense was that somehow the two ships were connected. They weren’t that way at lunchtime,
she didn’t think, so it seemed a pretty safe assumption that it was done by the attackers. Probably when the engine stopped, as it would be easier to match speeds when they could be certain that their own engine was the only factor affecting the equations. Her head spun with all the possibilities. She didn’t really know how it would work. Was it magnetic? She knew magnetic fields weren’t affected by the absence of atmosphere, when a lot of other things were. That wasn’t the way she would do it, but she didn’t know anything about these people or their technology.

Tron started walking away. She watched him for a second, wondering if this was the time when he decided she was too much trouble and left her behind. “Are you coming?” he snapped.

She jumped, sending a shot of pain through her ankle. Kivi hurried after him as fast as she could. “Where are we going?”

“To see how they’ve got us hooked to their ship.”

“That’s not a where,” she observed.

He made an irritated noise as he waited for her at the door. He held out his hand. “Will you just come on?”

Kivi took his hand without thinking about it. Tron was weird. She’d always disliked him for how he picked on Heath. Heath was her little brother, and it was supposed to be her job to look out for him. When he found her at the bottom of the stairs, she’d wished that she could go back to being all alone. Without any adults, there would be nothing to stop him from being even meaner to her than he was to Heath or Gerome, who he hurt bad enough to send to medical. But Tron wasn’t mean to her. He wasn’t nice, not like her parents and all the other adults, but he wasn’t mean.

And he listened to her. No one ever listened to her. They all just gave her a look and went somewhere else. That was ok with Kivi, as she had a hard enough time never being alone without people always trying to talk to her. But it wasn’t like that now. Tron got that look. Everyone got that look. But he didn’t leave her behind when she talked. Not
after that first time. Even when he pushed her down and went into medical by himself, Kivi knew it was to help her. She wasn’t sure what it meant.

She didn’t know what being hooked up to another ship meant, either. That one seemed more important, though, so she stopped thinking about why Tron was acting the way he was acting and started worrying about that.

He didn’t take her far. Probably, he picked the place because his feet hurt. Her ankle hurt, and she only just twisted it. He walked on glass. She’d picked pieces out of the pads of his feet, so she knew it hurt him bad. Or maybe he thought of something she didn’t. Whichever it was, he led her straight to the airlock at the forward hatch.

There were two ways on and off the Lucy. There was one in the stern, near the Engine Room, where things like supplies were loaded and unloaded. Then there was the forward hatch, which was for loading people. She’d never understood why there needed to be two. The hatch was a structural weakness, and was redundant with the indisputably necessary loading bay. When he asked her papa, he said that there needed to be a way for people to go outside without venting the atmosphere. But that didn’t make sense either. All of the doors in the Lucy were airtight. Even if the loading bay lost pressure, there would still be plenty in the rest of the ship. Besides, no one should go out until they landed at their new home. That’s what Captain Jay and her teachers always said.

Once they got there, Tron started pushing open the door. Kivi caught him just in time, and instead of flinging it to the right, the way he had all the others, they worked together to open it just a crack. Air surged past them in an ear-popping rush. Kivi tried to scream at Tron to push it closed again, but she couldn’t suck in a breath. It wasn’t necessary. He figured it out on his own, and a second later they were both heaving in as much air as they could, with their backs pressed against the closed door.

“Now we know how they’ve caught us,” he said. Kivi glanced up at him in confusion. He noticed and gave her a grim smile.  “Didn’t you see? They have some kind of mechanical device hooked on to the outer door.”

“I didn’t see.”

“Well, I did. A bunch of metal and wires. Not a pretty sight.”

Kivi wished she had seen it. Whatever Tron thought, that sounded like really interesting to her. She’d never heard of a machine that could hold to space ships together. She wanted to get a look at it. Then she might be able to disconnect them. That was her good reason. Her bad reason was that she wanted to see. It was a new machine, and just like with the engine, Kivi couldn’t resist a new machine.

“There are pressure suits in my storage.”

Kivi blinked and looked back at Tron. She didn’t know what a pressure suit was or how one could help now. He flashed her a quick smile. “I’ll get them and bring them back. We need to be fast, right.”

Her stomach clenched. He was leaving her after all. “You’ll come back?”

The sound that came out of his mouth didn’t really sound like a laugh. “What do you think I’m going to do, go read a book in my bunk and hope they’re taking us somewhere nice?”

She tried to
smile at him, but it came out wrong. She believed him, believed he’d come back. This time. She knew he’d leave her eventually, but not yet. She could tell he understood that it was probably the attackers who had the Lucy, and that he wanted to get unattached as much as she did. He was going, and she would be alone again, but it was only going to be for a while. Then he’d be back with those suits and she would see why they would help. But she was anxious anyway.

He dropped a hand on her shoulder, just like she had done to him when he was crying in
Navigation. She’d done it to get his attention, but he already had her attention, so he must have been trying to be nice. His hand was huge, and barely fit on her shoulder, but she decided she was glad he’d done it anyway. Normally she didn’t like being touched, but Tron wasn’t so bad.

He didn’t say anything
. After a minute he left. For a time, she was alone in the near-dark. She tried not to think about anything bad, tried not to let her mind go back to those minutes in the Mess Hall, where everything had gone so bad. But she wasn’t very good at not thinking about things. Once something was in her head, she had to work it like one of her momma’s worry stones. She had to get it to make sense. No matter how many times she went over what she’d seen, it wouldn’t make sense. It was always just bad for no reason at all.

She felt like running again. She didn’t, because Tron was coming back to her here. But she wanted to so bad she couldn’t sit still. Kivi pulled herself up and started pacing. When that hurt too much, she leaned against the wall until she could start again. When she leaned against the door to the hatch, she heard a faint hiss.

“Oh no!”

Kivi knew what that hissing sound was. It was the atmosphere leaking. That didn’t make sense, since all the doors were airtight, but it was happening anyway. She ran her fingers along the seams, as far up as she could reach, trying to feel where it might be slipping out. Without the engine on, they didn’t have much air at all. Only whatever was in the Lucy when it shut off. If everyone was still trying to breath it, that wouldn’t last more than a couple hours. With just her and Tron, it was better. They could go a
little while before they froze or suffocated. But not if air was leaking out.

Before she could find the problem, T
ron returned. He was loaded up with two huge burdens. She couldn’t make sense of what they were. They looked like two limp white people, except they had bubbles for heads. They didn’t seem like they were made out of cloth, but she couldn’t tell what else it might be. He dropped them both at her feet and they made a heavy clang as they hit the floor.

“Pressure suits,” he explained matter-of-factly. “I looked, but there weren’t any small enough for you. We’re going to have to figure it out.
And check out what else I found!” He lifted his newly free hand and shook a small red box. Heavy, metallic clunks followed the motion and Kivi felt a spark of excitement. It was a tool box.

She picked one up. It was really heavy. He was right, of course.
Everything was too big for her. Kivi poked at the suit, examining how it fit together. There were lots of buckles. Tron knelt down beside her and pointed to a couple of places where they could detach a section and make it smaller. They went to work quickly. When they were done, it still didn’t fit. But at least she could see out of the bubble head, and the arms weren’t entirely impossible to work with. That meant she wasn’t useless.

Tron positioned himself
to the left of the door, his own suit securely on and fitting exactly the way it was supposed to. Kivi stood right in front of it, ready to run inside when he opened it. The weight of the suit was incredible. She was pretty sure she’d only be able to manage a slow shuffling walk, but Kivi was determined to get into the airlock as fast as she could. It wasn’t going to be a slow leak of air this time, it would be a great blast. The faster they made it through, the better.

“It should just be me,” she announced, surprising herself as much as him.

“What?” His voice sounded funny. It was coming through an intercom like the ones in the ship, only better.

Tron asked that a lot. It was better than ignoring her. “I am good with machines,” she told him. That wasn’t really true. She was great with machines, and she knew it. But her momma told her it wasn’t good to brag. Kivi wasn’t exactly sure what constituted bragging, but she didn’t want to upset Tron and make
him stop listening to her, so she was trying to be careful. “Are you?”

“No,” he admitted. “You can do this alone?”

That surprised Kivi. She was used to people questioning her. She didn’t talk much, and most people seemed to think that was because she didn’t know anything. When she realized that, she tried to talk more but she didn’t like it. So she stopped. Even when she did talk, everyone was so busy ignoring her or being uncomfortable that they never took the time to believe her. That’s why no one would give her a schematic of the engine. If they had, she never would’ve gone in there and maybe everything would still be okay. But Tron didn’t seem to be doubting her. It seemed like he was asking for her honest opinion.

She thought about his question for a while. Could she do it alone? She hadn’t seen the machine like he did, so she had no way of knowing. But she had never seen the inside of the intercom, the first time she pulled
one apart. And she put that back together again without anyone ever knowing. The intercom might not be as important as this, but it had been amazingly complex. She’d daydreamed about all the circuits for almost a week before she taken it apart again. The hook might be more difficult to sort out than that, but Kivi didn’t think so. The intercom had to do two things: receive and transmit sounds, while filtering out as much background noise as possible. This attachment would only be doing one: staying attached. She thought.

Really though, even if she was wrong about how hard it was, Kivi knew she wasn’t wrong about the right way to do it. If he came in, that would be even more time that the door was open. Even if everything went right, until they figured out how to get the engine moving again that wasn’t something they should be risking. She needed less space to get
through the door, even with the bulky suit on. Plus, he wasn’t good with machines. There wasn’t anything he could add to the work.

“Maybe.”

He made a face at her through the bubble head. “That’s not very convincing.”

“
Having you there won’t make it more likely.”

Tron sighed. He did that a lot. Most people did. “Alright pipsqueak. Get it done.”

“You’ll be here?” She asked. “In case I need you?”

He considered her for a while. Then the bubble moved up and down in a strange sort of nod. “I’ll be in shouting distance. Promise.”

Kivi nodded too, though her bubble didn’t move. Her head wasn’t big enough to move the helmet. That was good. She might need to get out of there fast. She didn’t want to get sucked out into the black. Besides, she liked having Tron near. She didn’t worry about the bad things so much with him around. He was distracting.

She tensed herself, ready to run as hard as she could once the door opened. For a second nothing happened. Then, just like the last time he pulled the door, they were hit with a blast of air rushing past them into the vacuum of space. Kivi was surprised at how much this helped her move. She wasn’t running, not really, but she was going through at a pretty fast clip. Less than a minute later, she was through and he was pulling the door closed again.