Adrift (7 page)

“What’s this?”

“A failure,” she answered. It wasn’t though. Not really. She’d known that even when she saw that it wouldn’t do what she’d designed it for. “I was trying to make an automatic riveter, like Maintenance uses when seams come loose. But it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t make the rivets shoot out fast enough.”

“Wait… shoot?”

Her mouth stretched into such a big grin that her face started to hurt. “Yes. My brother tried to catch the beanbag I used to test it and it went so fast it broke his hand. Not fast enough for riveting though.”

Tron laughed a little. “You’re a little scary. Got anything else?”

“Yes. Here.” She placed another project in his hand. “Papa asked me to invent the perfect mouse trap. That was silly. Someone else already invented that. But they didn’t make it for giant mice, and sometimes terraforming makes animals grow different. I heard about that. So I made the perfect mouse trap work for bigger mice.”

This time he laughed a lot. “Forget what I said. You’re not scary. You’re outright terrifying.
This is fantastic!”

She had others. Not many. But none of them were good for this. She took them anyway. Maybe they would be useful later. Or, more likely, maybe she would find a reason to dismantle them and use their pieces somewhere else. She didn’t want to do that. She liked all her projects. But parts were precious and Kivi wasn’t going to lose any.

They headed back up, again moving faster than she ever realized people could go. Weightlessness was really was useful. Even after how long it took them to get out of their suits and learn how to steer themselves, they were still able to get down and then all the way back to Navigation before there was any noise at the airlock.

Tron set up her inventions, only needing a little instruction from her to figure them out, near the hatch.
He didn’t try to hide them. There was nothing to hide them with. But he did try to make them look like they were just garbage that got knocked in the way. That wasn’t hard to do. They were mostly made out of garbage. Kivi stashed the other three underneath one of the consoles, so that the bad guys wouldn’t find them right away when they broke in. If they broke in. Tron didn’t think they would. Kivi wasn’t so sure.

He finished just in time. The both heard clanking in the airlock just as he drifted and bumped his way back into
Navigation. He snapped his feet into the boots of his pressure suit as fast as he could, then shoved the doors closed. Kivi took a little longer getting her boots back on. Last time she’d snapped them closed, he’d helped her. They were too big for her feet and she had to get her pants to roll a certain way or else she just slid right out. It was hard to do by herself. She thought Tron might help, if she asked, but she didn’t want to ask. Any second, the bad guys were going to come back into the Lucy. This might be the very last pair of shoes she ever put on, and if it was Kivi wanted to do it herself. She didn’t want to be a baby everyone took care of.

Unconventional Solution

Despite her resolution to be a grown up, the first place Kivi went when she got her boots secured and lessened the magnetics enough to walk was Tron’s side. That was when she noticed he hadn’t shut the door all the way. She supposed he couldn’t. Not if he wanted to see when his ‘element of surprise’ would be most effective. But she hated it. The whole point of being in Navigation, she thought, was to lock the doors so that the bad guys couldn’t get in. But that wouldn’t work if he had it cracked enough to see through. She wanted to tell him so, but nothing came out when she opened her mouth. She was too afraid that the men making noises in the airlock would hear.

She reached up and tugged his arm, trying to get his attention so that he would lean close enough for whispers. Tron must have misunderstood, because he pulled her close into a sort of half hug. Kivi forgot that she hated hugs, and wrapped her arms around his waist without even thinking about what she was doing. She buried her face into his hip and closed her eyes as tight as she could.

She felt gravity. Kivi didn’t know where it came from, but she knew it was back. She could feel the drag of it so suddenly that she wondered how she didn’t notice it leaving in the first place. All at once she felt heavy in her own skin. She wondered, vaguely, if the bad men were using another hook, or if there was some other device that she hadn’t seen yet. She didn’t care enough to look or even to ask. She just kept her eyes closed and tried to make her breathing slow down so that the bad men wouldn’t hear it.

A snap went off, one so loud that it echoed. Someone shouted, just noises at first but bad words a second later. That was her mouse trap. Kivi had been so proud of it before, so glad that she could help with Tron’s plan. Now she realized how stupid it was. It didn’t stop the man who stepped on it, only made him mad. 
In a minute he would figure out that the people who set it up must be in Navigation, then he would come and punish them for hurting him. The Rivet went off a second later. That time it wasn’t followed by a shout, but a scream. Tron squeezed her shoulder like she’d done something good. It didn’t sound good. There were still a lot of people talking and saying bad words.

Time took longer than it was supposed to. Kivi always knew what time it was. Her papa liked to call her his little alarm clock, because she always warned him before the intercom came on. He jumped even worse than her, except when she was there to warn him. She also told him and momma and Heath when their time on the treadmill was up. She always knew. But in here, waiting for the bad guys to come and get them, she didn’t have any idea what time it was. Seconds kept lasting too long. It made her head hurt as bad as when she fell down the stairs.

“Gotta let me go now.”

She heard him whispering in her ear, and for a second Kivi forgot that it was Tron
. For that second, she thought he was her papa telling her secrets the way he used to when she was younger. She opened her eyes, just a little, and saw that they weren’t facing the bad things in the room, but the door. He’d left it open a crack and was watching outside with his helmet off and his eye pressed against the opening. He’d lifted the helmet back up to his mouth so that she could hear him through the microphone.

Kivi didn’t want to let him go. He told her what his plan was. He wanted to capture the leader. It sounded okay, when he was saying it, but she knew it wasn’t smart. It was stupid. Smart would be hiding, smart would be playing dead. That’s what small animals
did when bigger ones were coming to kill them. She and Tron were field mice, and the invaders were hawks who wanted to rip out their insides and eat them up. The mice never attacked the hawks. Tron was going to get hurt, and probably dead. Then she’d be all alone again.

She let him go.

He slid the door open so easily that it didn’t make a sound. That seemed impossible. There’d always been grunting and straining before. It wasn’t right that now, when she wanted him to realize how stupid it was and how much better hiding would be, he could get it open with hardly even trying. He left his boots behind. Kivi only noticed when she almost tripped over one as she shifted so that she could see out the space he’d made. She hadn’t even noticed Tron taking them off. When had he gotten so fast? There was gravity now. He was supposed to be slow again. But he was moving like he was flying again. It didn’t make any sense at all.

With only the thin shoes on, he moved through the corridor silently. That’s what the shoes were designed for, after all. The bad men were clustered nearby. Kivi could see them so clearly she couldn’t understand why they weren’t shouting and pointing at her and Tron yet. Then she realized the answer; they couldn’t see. It had taken a while for her eyes to adjust to the blue.
They hadn’t noticed the black spot against the light, because all they saw was black. Kivi could see everything though. She watched as Tron slid up right behind the one furthest from the hatch and launched himself forward.

The two men grappled on the floor. She couldn’t see nearly as much down there, with the other three blocking her view. The shouting echoed so loud it hurt her ears and those three others were moving like they were going to help their friend on the floor. Or two of them did, while one rolled around on the other side of the hatch. She figured that must be the one who got shot, which was good after all, because it was one less person that was going to hit on Tron. Three was bad enough. Too bad.

She didn’t know what it felt like to get punched. No one ever hit her. She’d burnt and cut herself, and even broke a finger when one of her inventions snapped shut on her, but Kivi hadn’t ever been really hurt, except her ankle maybe. So she didn’t know what Tron was going to feel. People were always saying she ‘lacked empathy’ but that wasn’t true. Kivi just didn’t know how to empathize with things she’d never felt before. That was nonsense. But she knew it would be very bad, worse than her ankle, and that he was doing it to protect her.

Well, maybe not protect. If he’d wanted to do that then he should’ve shut the door to
navigation and hidden with her. But he didn’t want her to get hurt. He’d hugged her, and that meant he wanted her to feel better. That’s what hugs were for. That was on her list. People who wanted you to feel better were careful about not letting you get hurt, just like how Tron hadn’t let her walk through the glass to get bandages, even though it made more sense to have only one person hurt while the other was whole. So Kivi knew this rolling around and getting hit by three people was at least a little bit for her, somehow, even if it didn’t make any sense.

It wasn’t right, just standing in the doorway and watching him get hurt, knowing that. Kivi didn’t know what to do about it. She’d given him all her useful projects, and she didn’t have any more shots. They were moving down the corridor as they beat on the huddled form Kivi thought was probably Tron. The man he’d tackled was up now, and helping the others kick him. Either that, or Tron had joined the bad guys and they all
decided to kick the first man together, but that didn’t make much sense, since she hadn’t heard anyone talking. Just swearing. So it was probably the first one. If Kivi was going to help him, she needed to do it soon. People weren’t designed to be kicked like that. Soon they would have to stop, and when they did they’d make sure Tron was another body like the others, instead of a living and breathing boy who helped her and gave her a hug.

Kivi couldn’t think of anything. Not at all. She wasn’t used to that, and didn’t really know how to deal with it. She tried to think of what her papa and momma would say to do, but she wasn’t very good at guessing what people were going to say, even if she made her list about their expressions. So, with nothing else to do except stand around and wait for them to get so far away that she couldn’t see anymore, Kivi dropped her head and ran.

A weird sound was coming out of her lips as she charged for them. She’d never heard herself make it before, and wasn’t really sure why she was doing it now. She thought it might be a bellow. She’d always wondered what a bellow sounded like, and that word did seem like whatever it was that was spilling out of her throat. Whatever it was, it got the bad guys’ attention. They all made surprised noises and turned around. One even got out a whole word before Kivi felt her head collide with the backs of his knees.

The man toppled. Kivi wasn’t strong, and she wasn’t big, but neither one of those was important with enough of a running force, and the proper use of leverage. It wasn’t something she’d really thought about. These men were the reason she needed to go, and they were in her way at that. Everything else just kind of happened. But now that she was falling to the ground with the man, tangled up in his legs like they were ropes instead of bones and muscle and skin, she could think about what a smart idea it was. Now there were only two men to hurt Tron, and they were both pretty distracted. Maybe he could run away and hide.

Except that wasn’t what he did. Kivi didn’t understand why – or maybe she did, since she hadn’t been able to hide either – but Tron pulled himself forward and reached out a hand for the man she was caught up with. He caught hold of the man’s head and then it got strange. It looked like Tron ripped the man’s face off. But that couldn’t be what she’d seen. For starters, faces didn’t come off so easy. If they did, people would be losing them all the time. Secondly, the man didn’t scream. He just swore a lot.

The other men seemed to be done kicking. They all leaned in close to each other and started talking. Their words were muffled, sounding like the intercom only less cl
ear. She couldn’t make out most of what was said, but she definitely heard the words ‘kids’ and ‘mistake’ before they started backing up. The men all lifted their hands. Kivi knew that was meant to show that they weren’t going to fight anymore. It was on her list too. The big list, the one about universal things, which was where she had hugs. She didn’t wonder why they were leaving. That they were was more than good enough, it was more than anything she’d dared to hope for. Even the man she’d rushed got up and started backing up like the others. Kivi was happy to let them go.

Tron wasn’t.
He climbed to his feet and started going after them.

“Hey now, son!” One of the bad guys shouted to them. “This was just an honest mistake, yeah? We thought the ship was driftwood, didn’t know it was occupied. We had a
tussle, but there’s no harm done, yeah? We don’t want no trouble. We’re Scavs, not murderers.”

Kivi didn’t know what a
Scav was, even though the man said it like they should’ve. She did know what murderers were, though, and it changed a lot of things if they weren’t those. She couldn’t believe everything people told her. Momma was always warning her that people told lies, especially boys who thought she was pretty. Kivi didn’t know if these men thought she was pretty, but she didn’t think they were lying. They just looked like they wanted to leave. Since she and Tron were both still alive, it seemed like they were probably being honest.

“Not murderers,” Tron said. He sounded like he was making fun of them, but also angry. Kivi didn’t think that was good. “But you thought we were drifting. So you came to rob the dead. That’s loads better.”

“We take what they don’t need and we do. No hurt in that, yeah? But we ain’t done any of that here. We take nothing. Everyone goes separate ways, yeah?”

Tron started after them. Kivi tried to stop him by tugging on his leg, but he didn’t react to her at all. She knew she should let him go. Before wasn’t smart, rushing out like he did, but this was just stupid. He wasn’t getting anything from this, and there was no one left to protect. They were leaving. This time they
wouldn’t just kick him and walk away. He was going to make trouble and maybe die, and Kivi decided back when she started running that she wasn’t going to be the only one in this ship. She would rather learn what it felt like to die.

“Come on kid,” another of the men pleaded. “We made a mistake, we said we’re sorry, now we’re leaving. It happens. Don’t make this bad. We’ll defend ourselves if we have to, and that don’t mean our boots.”

“You killed our families, and you think you get to just leave?” He demanded. Kivi blinked. She thought they were the same bad guys at first too, but now she was almost positive they weren’t. Those bad guys made a whole bunch of people into bodies so fast that the alarm was only on for three minutes. Kivi knew that time much better than the stuff that passed in the navigation room. She thought she was as scared as she could be then, but that was before she knew about bodies. Now there were only her and Tron, but these bad guys hadn’t made any bodies. And they were leaving.

They could just be going to do something bad like putting on the hook again, but she didn’t think so. The bad guys before took a whole bunch of things before putting the hook on. Why would the same people come and try to take more things
? Maybe if they were here to make her dead because she’d broken the hook in the first place, but she could see they had guns strapped to their hips. She’d felt it while she was trying to get away from the man she’d run into. But none of them had drawn them. Kivi believed them when they said they weren’t killers.

“Whoa now son,” the first one said again. “We
ain’t set foot on this ship of yours but ten minutes ago. I expect you can account for every second of that. If there’s someone that did your people wrong, it was someone else, yeah?”

“He’s right,” Kivi whispered. She wouldn’t expect to have to tell Tron this, but he didn’t seem to want to believe them. Maybe she was wrong. But she didn’t think she was. Even if she wasn’t, it wouldn’t do them any good to act like it now. They could just pull out those guns and shoot them both whenever they felt like it. The soft metal of the bullets wouldn’t even dent the Lucy. All Tron was going to do, looking for a fight like this, was get them both dead. Kivi didn’t want to be dead, so she was going to help the bad guys get off the ship as soon as possible.