Adrift by Lyn Lowe Page A

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.
    “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