Adrift (6 page)

Problem

Kivi didn’t need to ask who ‘they’ were. She hadn’t had enough time to learn Tron’s inflections or facial expressions yet, but she didn’t need to decipher this. There was only one force in the world they shared that could make an intercom sound as frightened as he did. The people who attacked.

She staggered backward like he’d hit her. “They’re coming for us.”

“No.” Kivi couldn’t tell if he sounded sure, or if he was just guessing. She bet he was just guessing. She hadn’t told him what she heard, because he hadn’t asked, but Kivi knew she wasn’t like most people. Most people liked to talk. Not to her, of course. But she’d watched and listened as they talked to each other. If the silence stretched on too long, they’d tell everything in their heads just to make it stop. That didn’t make sense, but she had catalogued enough exchanges between others on the ship to know it was true. And they’d had hardly anything but silence. Maybe Tron was different. Not like her, obviously, but there might be other differences. She didn’t think so, though. She thought it was far more likely that he knew even less than she did about the invaders that had destroyed everything.

“No, they’re not coming for us.” He definitely couldn’t know that. But Kivi didn’t say so. She wanted to hear his logic before she corrected it. “They don’t know about us. Not specifically, I mean. If they knew there were two kids still alive, they would’ve come and gotten us when they were here last time. So it’s not us they’re after. It’s the people who disconnected the ships.”

“That’s us,” Kivi said. She worried. He wasn’t making sense, and she couldn’t have him losing his mind. She didn’t know how they were going to fix the hole in the hull, and he obviously had an idea. If he went crazy, he might not
help.

“Yeah, but they don’t know that, do they? Look, they know there’s someone here, but they don’t have any way of knowing who, or how many. How could they?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because it’s something we know that they don’t!” He said loudly. Kivi flinched. When he spoke again, it was in his normal volume. “Look, there’s no way we can fight off another invasion. The whole ship couldn’t stop whatever happened before. But they’re coming into a ship they’ve only been on once, prepared to fight an unknown force. We can use that.”

“How?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet,” he admitted. “It’s something, okay? The element of surprise is big in the war stories I read. So is guerrilla
fighting. It’s better than nothing, right?”

She didn’t know he’d read war stories. Those weren’t supposed to be available to children, except during class. All the teachers said so. Kivi had never asked why, but Heath did once. Mrs. Terrance said it was important for people to know what people had done, because you can only stop history from repeating itself if you learn of it, but that they didn’t want any of those crimes touching their new world. So they would learn about them in a place where it could be monitored and controlled.
She had never heard about the element of surprise in the stuff they’d showed her in class. Tron was older than her, but only a little. Had he found some way around their blocks?

“Do we hide?”

“No!” He snapped. “They’re going to be hunting for the people who disconnected Lucy. If we hide, they’ll come looking. Where can we go to hide from someone who really wants to find us?”

She pursed her lips. There were places she could hide. She was small and was used to making herself invisible. But Tron was big. He was even bigger than some of the grown-ups. She couldn’t get him into the tight places.
“So what do we do?”

He held out a gloved hand. “Give me the torch.”

She did it immediately and followed him out the door. Kivi struggled against the blast of air, but Tron wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her through. Once the door was closed again, he lit up the torch. The flame burned blue, and she couldn’t help but flinch at the thought of all the additional air it was using. Then she realized what he was about to do.

“
Wait! You can’t seal the room! There’s food in there! We have to get it out.”

“We have to let it go. Can’t risk them opening the door and letting the rest of the air out. We can live off the hydroponics and cold storage.”

Kivi understood what he wasn’t saying; that they were probably going to be dead when this was over, and they wouldn’t need to worry about food at all. She knew that. But she couldn’t help worrying anyway. Food Storage was one of the most important parts of the ship. She could hear Captain Jay’s voice in her head telling her and the other children about it, back when they were six and seven and he gave them their first official tours of the Lucy.

After a second, Tron started the torch up a
gain. Soon he was pressing the blue flame to the door, near the handle. Kivi expected him to go all the way around, but he only did a little bit, tugged the handle twice, and then turned off the flame.

“Just enough to make sure they can’t get in,” he explained as he turned back to her. “Now let’s get out of these suits and figure out what we can do to get rid of them.”

It only took him a minute to get his helmet and gloves off. Once those were tucked under one arm, he started helping her. That was good. Kivi was afraid he’d expect her to get herself free and, though she could get the helmet and gloves off alright, their modifications had made it impossible for her to get loose of anything else.

Almost immediately, they both realized something was wrong. She didn’t tuck her helmet under an arm, the way Tron did. Her arms weren’t long enough to do it comfortably. She tried to set it on the floor, but the instant she did it started drifting upwards again. They both st
ared at it. She realized what it meant, of course. The gravity was gone. That made sense. Like everything else, the ship’s gravity was powered by the engine. What baffled her was why it hadn’t been gone as soon as the engine kicked off. How had she fallen down the stairs?

“What ha
ppened to the gravity?”

It clicked together in her mind, and suddenly Kivi understood something that she should’ve realized right from the start. “That’s what the power in the hook was for.

“How the hell did it do that?”

Kivi shrugged. “I only saw part.”

“Are you sure?”

Kivi shrugged again. “It’s the only thing that’s changed.”

He frowned, and she could tell it bothered him. She didn’t understand why. Now that she knew the answer, she didn’t need to understand why. She still wanted to look at another one of those hooks, though. If she thought there was any chance that they would let her take it apart, she might give herself up to the bad guys outside. Then she’d get to see the hook’s insides, which she only barely got a glimpse at while she was in the airlock, and it would be much better than running out of air. But Kivi didn’t think they were likely to agree to that. She didn’t know how she’d ask.

“No time for it, I guess,” Tron said. “Hurry up. We’ve got to get to
nav.”

“Why?”

“So that we can keep them out. It’d be better if we had a few traps set up, but since we can’t do that, we’ll have to settle for making it impossible for them to get to the control panels.”

Kivi considered what he’d said for a while. She didn’t bother pointing out that the
navigation room didn’t keep the people inside it safe last time. She knew he’d seen the blood too, and it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be good to talk about. Tron really seemed to think they could fight. She still hadn’t thought of any place they could hide him, so she wasn’t going to argue. “I might have some things that could work.”

Tron gave her a sideways look. “Things that can work for what?”

“Traps,” she explained. “I think I can make some.

His eyes got wide. That usually meant someone was surprised, but sometimes it meant they were scared. Kivi didn’t know which one he was. She needed to start her list of his expressions soon. If they didn’t die. It didn’t make any sense to
start her list when it was so likely they were going to die.

“Show me.”

They helped each other out of their suits, both of them drifting up toward the ceiling the instant they were out of their boots. It took her a minute to figure out how to move right in zero g, but it wasn’t so bad. Tron looked like he was going to get sick at first, but once he figured it out he started smiling a little. They shot through the corridor without the need to run, and that was really nice since her ankle still hurt. She knew his feet did too, even though he never said anything about them, and that meant that he probably liked not running too. And without her short legs holding her back, Kivi discovered that she wasn’t just able to keep up with the bigger boy, she could go faster if she wanted to. That was neat. She’d never been faster before.

They made it through the ship so fast that they both almost shot past the stairs. They were the same ones she’d fallen down earlier. She wasn’t going to fall this time, with no gravity to pull her down, but Kivi
was anxious anyway. She kept thinking about what it felt like when she was running right before she fell. Kivi didn’t like that, and didn’t want to feel like that again, but the tight feeling was coming and even though she couldn’t run anywhere, she felt like maybe she needed to anyway.

“Hey kid.” Tron’s voice cut through the bad thoughts like a knife. “We’re going to your place, right?”

She nodded, wishing her heart would slow down. She was more afraid of what was down the stairs than she was about the bad guys who were coming back to kill her. That didn’t make any sense. She grabbed the metal of the hand-hold, but she couldn’t seem to make her arm work to pull herself down. That didn’t make sense either.

She felt his hand on her shoulder.
She hated being touched. Only momma and papa could ever do it the right way. Even Heath was bad at it. But Tron wasn’t. It didn’t bother her, and she didn’t think he was about to make her hug him. Most people did. Most people also said ‘oh you poor dear’ right before they hugged her, but Kivi didn’t think he was going to say that either.

“Look, no matter what, they’re not going to be in there. That’s ok. It doesn’t mean they’re dead. They wouldn’t stay there, would they? We didn’t stay where we were. So even if it’s empty, that doesn’t mean they’re dead.”

Deep breath. She was getting good at those. Then she pushed herself down.

There weren’t nearly as many blue strips on the
habitat floor. Her eyes had gotten used to the darkness above, until it wasn’t darkness at all. But this was different. The soft glow was only enough to see a little bit of the wall. That was okay. Kivi didn’t need light to find her bed. She’d snuck out after lights out plenty of times. She knew the way. She closed her eyes. It was easier that way. It would be better if she was walking. She knew exactly how many steps it was from the stairs to her door. But she knew how many other doors were between there and here too. She counted quietly, feeling Tron’s fingers wrap around her good ankle. It was easy to pull him along without gravity making his weight impossible. Kivi almost smiled. It was her turn to carry him.

Her door was wide open. That wasn’t because someone had come and gone. Their door was always that way. Heath had broken it years ago, when he was too little to know that he couldn’t stick his toys in the small space the door receded into. Maintenance was going to fix it, but he managed to break something important with his little army men. The piece they needed to make it work again wasn’t one they had anymore. Parts were limited, just like everything else on the Lucy. They offered to come up with another solution, but momma just waved it away with a laugh and hung up a big curtain. Everyone was careful to make lots of noise when they were coming to visit, and to pretend they couldn’t hear when her family was the one making lots of noise, and so
the curtain worked well enough. Kivi pushed past the thin cloth, noticing how much it smelled like her family. Had it always? She’d never noticed before, even though she walked through it at least twice every day.

Finding her bed wasn’t easy. Even though she’d gone through the room in darkness just as complete as this plenty of times before, that was always with her feet on the ground. She didn’t know how to
navigate from the walls so well. Luckily, the space was small. Everyone’s space was small. So after only one failed attempt, she was pulling herself down as close to the floor as she could manage, so that she could reach her arms under her bed.

Her fingers ran over the familiar lines and comforting chill of her projects. Kivi felt more of the tightness from above go away as she felt all her old friends. People were hard. They had all those face movements to memorize and they always expected her to think and act in ways that didn’t make sense. But machines weren’t like that. She understood machines. And, hard as parts were to find on the Lucy, Kivi’s papa always managed to bring back one or two a week for her to play with. Usually it was stuff that was so broken it didn’t work anymore, and sometimes it was so bent up that she couldn’t even tell what it used to be. But every now and then, he brought her something truly amazing. Over the years, she’d found all sorts of fun ways to put them together. Ways that wouldn’t be any use on a colony, but could be very helpful with making traps.

The first one she pulled out was actually the first thing she’d ever made for herself. It was just a little while after she’d first taken apart the intercom. That was her test. If she messed that up, someone would fix it. If she messed up on her parts, she might never get those specific ones ever again. So Kivi was so careful. She almost didn’t try the idea that had been brewing in her head, because she was afraid that she would regret the loss of the tiny little motor once she’d used it up. She handed it back to Tron.