Adrift by Lyn Lowe Read Free Book Online

occasional thunk of machines working. But the fact that it was just to ease a tension he suspected only he was feeling didn’t make it untrue.
    She nodded, as though he’d told her something she already knew. Then she tied off the bandage and shifted around until her own foot was near enough for him to work on. Tron sighed and followed the unspoken command, wondering who exactly it was in charge of this little team.
    “Thank you.”
    He glanced up at her big blue eyes, once again startled. “Huh?”
    “For saying sorry.” Kivi paused, then gave him a smile that only looked a little strange on her. “And helping me.”
    Tron shrugged, more uncomfortable now than he had been with the silence. “Eh. Whatever.” He finished assembling the mediocre splint and pushed himself up to his feet, offering her a hand up. “Let’s get moving.”
    “Where?”
    “We have to find Jay. He’ll know how to get things working again, and what to do next.”
    Kivi hesitated. Tron knew what she was thinking. He would be thinking the same thing, if he let himself. But he wasn’t going to. They needed help, and the captain was the best kind of help he could think of. The man had to be alive. Tron tried to think of a way to explain this to her, but before he could she slipped her hand into his. “Ok.”
    Just like that, he was in charge again. He still didn’t want the job, but he was so grateful that she wasn’t going to shatter his faith with one of her pointed observations that he nearly hugged her. She trusted him. Tron wasn’t sure what to do with that, but he was determined to prove that she wasn’t wrong for it. The only way he could think of was to find the captain and all the others still alive as fast as possible.
    The captain had to be in navigation. It was the only place that made sense. He had to be there to turn off the alarm, and Jay wasn’t going to leave such an important position when there might be invaders on Lucy. Navigation had the extra advantage of having the thickest door on the ship, and one that locked from the inside. It was standard on every ship. Jay probably had a whole bunch of people with him. They just had to get there.
    He couldn’t carry her constantly. She wasn’t much weight, but the pain in his feet was no small thing. He could barely drag himself most of the time, and even that little bit extra was too much. She never said a word of complaint when he had to put her down, just like she didn’t when he scooped her back up. She did what she could to help him with every door they came across, though that was not much. Tron knew, on some level, she thought the trip to the nav was pointless, but she never let it show.
    The minute he saw the door to navigation stuck half-open, Tron knew. Kivi stopped walking, dropping his hand for the first time since med bay, but he hardly noticed. Everything in him was squeezed so tight he could hardly breathe, and even though he knew he’d been wrong, he couldn’t stop moving forward and trying to convince himself that someone would be waiting just on the other side of that door.
    There were more of the blue light strips in navigation than any other area they’d been. The result was surreal, making the whole place look like more like a picture than the world. Nothing was knocked over here, there was no shattered glass or piles of bodies. Everything looked like it was just waiting for people to show up and start living in it again. There were two consoles that each looped in a sort of half ‘u’ and there was a chair in front of each one. The chairs had wheels, and they were surely knocked about during all the rocking Lucy had done earlier, but the result was that they both looked like someone had only just gotten up. Between the consoles was a large space with grated flooring. Tron stared at it for a while, wondering if he would see something underneath the grate when the lights were on. Now, all there was to see was darkness. The main thing about the room