Adrift by Lyn Lowe Page B

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