Adrift (15 page)

He tugged, but the door wouldn’t move. Either it was heavier than it should be, or it was stuck. Tron positioned his legs and shifted his arms until he had a better grip. There was a strange cracking sound, then the door flew open, sending him backward. He landed hard on the floor of the cooler. The door reached the end of its arch and began swinging inward again. Kivi darted forward and caught it, the weight of the thing clearly more than she could handle for more than a minute.

Clouds of white steam billowed out from the opening, making it impossible to see what was beyond. As soon as Tron was back on his feet, he took the door from her and Kivi skittered inside. He didn’t like the idea of her venturing in without him, but he wasn’t about to let the thing close on them. Unfortunately, he forgot all about that when he heard her scream.

Tron ran through the mist, his feet moving faster than they were supposed to. The floor was ice. He’d never seen so much ice before. It was supposed to come in small cubes, not coat the floor of an entire room. The door slammed shut behind him with a bang. As soon as it was closed, the clouds began to clear.

He was looking at winter. He’d seen it on plenty of vids and always thought it looked beautiful. That wasn’t what he thought now. Terrifying would be a better word for it. Everything was coated in an ice so thick it was hard to make out what it was hanging from the ceiling or sitting on the shelves all around him. The only thing he could see clearly was Kivi, who was kneeling in front of a pile of dark, large frozen things.

“I can’t pretend,” she was muttering. “Can’t pretend, can’t pretend.”

He dropped down beside her, the chill biting into his legs. He knew, even as he reached forward to brush aside some of the ice, what it was he was looking at. He’d seen Kivi like this before, just once, when he was about to carry her into the mess hall. It was another piles of bodies.

Tron swallowed the sob that welled up in his throat. Kivi’s brother, Heath, was staring at them with frozen, sightless eyes.
He wasn’t the only one. There were three others. Two more kids, Heath’s best friends. Hector and Asher. With them was Sonja, one of the teachers. He could see it in his mind’s eye: the screaming as the invaders started killing, Sonja realizing the danger and grabbing the first children she saw, dragging them deep into Lucy’s heart, looking for somewhere to hide. Of course Sonja would take children with her. She was always thinking about them, more even than her husband. Tron always wondered why she’d never had any kids of her own, and now he would never get his answer. Because Sonja had found the hiding place, and it had killed them.

Well, it had killed the boys. She was injured. As he looked close he could see a dark stain over her stomach that could only have been blood. She must have used all of her strength to get them here, where they would be safe. But the door had slammed closed, just like it did for him and Kivi. The three boys weren’t much bigger than Kivi, and even together Tron doubted they’d have the strength to get it open. They must have curled up against her, when they realized they were trapped, and slowly frozen to death.

He wondered if he should feel better about their deaths than the ones in the mess hall. Those had been violent, brutal. If the vids were right, they all just fell asleep. But it didn’t seem better to Tron. It seemed worse. They had to live with their terror for a long time. Maybe days. While he and Kivi had been climbing in and out of their pressure suits, fixing holes and chasing off vultures, her brother and his best friends had been dying in cold storage. He didn’t know how he was supposed to live with that. He didn’t know what to say to convince Kivi that she should.

“There’s food.”

As usual, her voice startled him. Tron came out of the trance of despair slowly, half expecting life to throw some new horror at them here, to chip at their will. It seemed like that was the game, and he was tired of being blindsided by it. “Huh?”

Kivi climbed to her feet and brushed shards of ice from her hands and knees. Her breath came out as a smaller version of the clouds of mist that had first assaulted them when he opened the door. She breathed on her hands, and immediately he realized his own were freezing and mimicked the gesture. After a second of blowing hot air against her fingers, she pointed up.

“Food. Lots of it. Frozen. You were right. We won’t starve.”

Tron blinked and stood up, his eyes taking in what was all around them. Just like with the bodies, his mind hadn’t processed what he was seeing until she pointed it out. It was food. Great slabs of meat hanging from the ceiling, boxes labeled ‘bread’ and ‘vegetables’ and even one that said ‘chocolate’. The small room was packed with all kinds of food. More than enough for three people. For a while, anyway. He opened his mouth, not sure if a laugh or a sob was going to come out. Before he found out, Kivi startled him again by throwing her arms around his waist in a tight hug of her own.

“You don’t get to die.”

Tron smiled, his eyes shifting back to the bodies against his will. “You either.”

Lessons

Kivi stood on her toes, trying to see over Tron’s shoulder. Not for the first time, he waved his hand in an attempt to brush her off. She knew she was annoying him. She knew, because he said so. Often and loudly. But that didn’t bother her. She used to annoy lots of people, who told her so just as often as Tron did. Now there was just him, and she knew that he wasn’t really angry at her.

Well, she didn’t know. She’d been worried about it a lot at first. She’d gone off to sit by herself in a corner as far away from him and Whitman as she could while staying in
navigation, the first time he yelled at her. She would’ve gone to another room, but that would be leaving the two of them and being alone. Kivi knew she could do it, if she had to and if she had a helmet on so that she could hear Tron’s breathing in her ear to let her know he was still alive. But she didn’t have a helmet, and she didn’t have to go do something that only she could do. So she stayed and worried that she’d made him hate her and that he was going to make her move her bed somewhere else when they were done learning and went to rest before whatever was going to happen. After a while, he had come over. He asked what she was doing and she told him. Then he laughed at her and told her she was dumb. Usually, when people called her dumb it bothered her. But she realized that he was teasing her, and that he didn’t really mean it. He told her that he wasn’t going to be mad at her, no matter how annoying she was.

So now she didn’t worry about
him being angry. Because Tron only lied to joke or make her brave. She’d figured that out about him. It wasn’t on her list, she should’ve started a list but she kept not doing it. But she figured it out anyway. Tron was weird, just like her, so maybe she was allowed to figure things out about him without a list. At least for now.

It was important, what Whitman was trying to teach them. He wanted them to learn how to use sensors on the outside of the ship. Kivi didn’t know there were sensors on the outside, but it made sense. There was probably a lot of stuff floating around in the black, and they would need some way to know it was coming so that they didn’t hit it.
He said that they needed to know how to work them so that they could help him when the bad guys came closer.

Kivi had been the one who decided it should be
Tron who learned first. Other people might come up with a lie to convince him, and she had thought about it. She had never tried to lie before, though, so she decided that it wasn’t a good time to try. So she didn’t tell him why at all. And he hadn’t tried to get her to explain. He said it was a good idea too. She didn’t think it was for the same reasons, but it didn’t need to be. She was just glad it was him. Sort of. He was hard to see around.

She knew that learning how to work the sensors wasn’t going to make Tron quit thinking they had t
o get rid of Whitman. Kivi wasn’t sure how to fix that. Her momma was really good at fixing people, and she wanted so bad to understand how to make that happen, but she was good with things instead. So she had to guess. She remembered her momma always made her and Heath spend time together when he called her a freak or she yelled at him. So Kivi decided to make Whitman and Tron spend time together. They were going to do that anyway, but it wouldn’t have been the two of them talking about stuff, it would’ve been the three of them. This way maybe Tron would stop being all worried about stuff and realize that Whitman wasn’t a bad guy.

It wasn’t going as good as she’d hoped. They weren’t saying much. She knew that when normal people were making up, they talked a lot. She saw her momma and papa do it, as well as lots of other people on the Lucy. Tron wasn’t like her, so she figured he needed talking too, but so far all he did was answer Whitman’s instructions with grunts. And all Whitman did was go over the exact thing to do. He didn’t even explain the why, which Kivi knew was the most important part. If you didn’t know the why, you couldn’t figure out a new how if something went wrong. That’s why she always took stuff apart first, to figure out the way all the pieces worked together so that she’d know which ones did important stuff and which ones could be worked around. If all Tron had was instructions, he wasn’t going to be much help
when something bad happened.

“Did you go to school to learn all this?” The teachers were always talking about schools back on Earth like they were special places with all the knowledge in the universe held inside. Kivi used to dream about going into one of those schools and catching a piece of that knowledge for herself. Now she just dreamed about bad things.

Tron gave her a look, and Kivi realized he knew what she was trying to do. She shouldn’t have said anything. She never cared about stuff like that about other people. She didn’t care about it now. She just cared about Tron and them both getting somewhere safe where all the bad stuff would go away. Whitman was an important component to that, and she didn’t think he was the type you could pull out and replace. Even if he taught them how to fly the Lucy, they didn’t know how to find anything. They didn’t know how to contact other people on other ships. He could teach them all that too, but Kivi thought there might always be something more they didn’t know yet. The Lucy was their world, but his was the black. And he wasn’t a bad guy. He had a gun, just like the guy who wouldn’t let him on his ship, and he hadn’t used it on them to get food. He could’ve, too. He didn’t have to bargain with them. He had, and that meant that he wasn’t bad. Maybe not good. He was stealing, and that was a bad thing. But he didn’t act like a bad guy in any other way. And Kivi was willing to give him a chance. Because they needed him.

Whitman laughed and shook his head. “Nah. They filled up my schooling with stuff like writing and mathematics. This stuff I learned same way you are. After I signed on with the Free Ride, I had someone teach me.”

“The Free Ride?” Tron snorted. “What kind of name is that?”

Whitman’s eyebrow went up almost into his thin black hair. “Oh? Should I have had them change it to Lucy? Or hey, how about Tron?”

“He’s named after an old Earth vid,” Kivi interjected.

“What?”
Tron shot her a look so confused Kivi could recognize it even without a list of his expressions. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The movie,” she said. She didn’t know why he wasn’t understanding. Didn’t his parents tell him how they picked his name? Her parents told her. Her name meant stone. In Finnish, which was a language they spoke in the place her momma was born. “My papa said it was ahead of its time.”

He made a weird face. She didn’t know what that meant. Maybe she needed a list after all. “No. My name’s Trondheim, after the city my parents met. It’s Tron because, if someone tried to call me Heim, I’d break their nose.”

It was Whitman’s turn to chuckle. “Yeah, that’s better than the Free Ride.”

She couldn’t say it was. Kivi liked Tron, because she knew how much her papa liked ancient Earth vids. She wasn’t sure how she felt about Trondheim. She didn’t know anything about that city. She didn’t even know it was a city. She would have to do research to decide if she liked his new name. Or his real name. But she thought Whitman might be right, and the Free Ride might be better.

They weren’t talking about her name. She knew she had a weird one. Maybe it was a good sign. Maybe they were bonding. Momma was always talking ab
out how people needed to bond. She held that hope for a little while, while they kept poking fun at names. It wasn’t friendly, not exactly, but it was talking. Then they ruined it all by going back to talking about the sensors.

Now Whitman was quizzing Tron on what they’d gone over for the last two hours. He was doing pretty good, but not perfect. Kivi didn’t know if she’d be better, if she could see the buttons, but she probably would. She never forgot anything. She wanted to help him. Kivi could tell him exactly what Whitman had said, and even if she couldn’t point out what to press, that would probably help him a lot. But she didn’t. She wasn’t even sure why.

The quizzing went on for another hour. Which made three. Whitman had them working at one console, while he did most of his work on the one that used to have the handprint. At first Tron had thought that was suspicious, and had said so a bunch, but Whitman had convinced them that it was a good idea. He had set up the first console to only operate the side sensors, while he kept control over the bow and stern ones, so that he could keep an eye on the bad guy’s ship and the debris field. Tron thought he should be learning to understand both of those things, and Kivi didn’t think he was wrong, but Whitman had promised they would get to it once Tron mastered the basics. In the meantime, he kept sliding back and forth between his console and theirs. He’d check Tron’s work, ask a few questions, and then go back to what he was doing on the other one and lecture. But he never did get around to the whys. Just when Kivi decided she couldn’t listen to any more without demanding to know why it was better to keep the rendering of sensor data in black and white or something else along those lines, Whitman announced that he was done with ‘teacher duty’.

“This isn’t going to be an instant kind of thing,” Whitman explained when Tron protested that he could do better. “
I’m about all tapped out on the patience front. You need time to process or let it soak into your head or whatever it is that makes the learning happen.”

“We’re still half a day away, by your calculations. What are we supposed to do while we wait?” Tron demanded.

“I don’t care. Dance around naked, play a game of cards, paint the whole ship red. Whatever makes you happy. Just do it somewhere else. I’ve got work to do if we’re going to pull off anything resembling a daring escape. So get.”

Tron grumbled and headed for the door. Kivi hesitated for just a moment. “The code is 00,” she said.

Whitman gave her a sharp look. “What code?”

“The one to use every intercom in the ship. I’ve only ever heard you use the one in Tron’s room. I thought you should know.”

He looked her up and down in silence for a while, then nodded. “Thanks.”

Kivi flashed a quick smile, then scurried after Tron. She didn’t want to lose sight of him. Not until they were safe.

“Well, what do you want to do?” He asked the moment they were far enough away that Whitman wouldn’t be able to hear. She wondered if he’d been waiting for that, gauging the distance, or if it was just a coincidence. Probably the former.

Kivi shrugged. Since the attack, there’d always been something to do. Fixing things, taking care of Tron, finding food. There wasn’t a single moment without a task that needed her attention. Before that, there was always a schedule to keep. Shower, get dressed,
eat breakfast, school time, lunch, clean-up, rec time, school time again, dinner, free time, bed. That was every day, except for the one where they could do church time with Father Andrei instead, if they wanted. He did that once a week. Kivi had gone once, but she didn’t have access to the net during church time, and that was the best part about school time. She could look up schematics and research whatever she was interested in while the teachers talked about boring stuff. When she got bored during church time, she just had to sit there and wait. But there was always a plan. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do to fill up hours without one.

“Recreation?”

Tron nodded with a tight smile. “I need it,” he admitted. “I’m not as strong as I was before.”

Kivi stopped for a moment, surprised by a thought. “You use rec time to get strong.”

He gave her that odd look again, the one he’d made when she was wrong about his name. “Yeah. What do you use it for?”

“To
minimize the impact of low gravity on the deterioration of bones and muscles.”

Tron laughed. “How clinical of you. It’s the same thing, though.”

She shook her head. “It’s not. I was fixing damage. You were making improvements.” Kivi looked at him, really looked at him. She’d seen him naked, had seen all the lines and him. Now she considered what that meant. He had more muscles than a lot of people on the Lucy. Tron was definitely more fit than anyone she’d interacted with on a regular basis. There wasn’t anyone out of shape on the ship; that would make them useless when they finally got to the planet and regular gravity. But there weren’t many who took the time to build like him. “Will you teach me?”

He gave her a
smile so big it split his face. Tron dropped his hand on her shoulder. “You,” he said with a wink, “are going to regret that so much.”