Adrift by Lyn Lowe Read Free Book Online Page B

her as she took in the size of the ship out the window. She was three when she saw the Lucy from the outside, and that was before she could remember anything. So maybe it was possible that it looked bigger from the outside than it was inside. She’d heard of that happening to people all the time. Perception was a tricky thing. But she knew exactly how big the Lucy was inside. She’d memorized the schematics a long time ago. And she was pretty confident that the small bit of hull she was able to see from the windshield was part of a ship at least twice as large as theirs.
    They were attached. They had to be. Her view never shifted. If it weren’t for the stars, she’d think they were both completely still. Since she knew they were moving, the only thing that made any sense was that somehow the two ships were connected. They weren’t that way at lunchtime, she didn’t think, so it seemed a pretty safe assumption that it was done by the attackers. Probably when the engine stopped, as it would be easier to match speeds when they could be certain that their own engine was the only factor affecting the equations. Her head spun with all the possibilities. She didn’t really know how it would work. Was it magnetic? She knew magnetic fields weren’t affected by the absence of atmosphere, when a lot of other things were. That wasn’t the way she would do it, but she didn’t know anything about these people or their technology.
    Tron started walking away. She watched him for a second, wondering if this was the time when he decided she was too much trouble and left her behind. “Are you coming?” he snapped.
    She jumped, sending a shot of pain through her ankle. Kivi hurried after him as fast as she could. “Where are we going?”
    “To see how they’ve got us hooked to their ship.”
    “That’s not a where,” she observed.
    He made an irritated noise as he waited for her at the door. He held out his hand. “Will you just come on?”
    Kivi took his hand without thinking about it. Tron was weird. She’d always disliked him for how he picked on Heath. Heath was her little brother, and it was supposed to be her job to look out for him. When he found her at the bottom of the stairs, she’d wished that she could go back to being all alone. Without any adults, there would be nothing to stop him from being even meaner to her than he was to Heath or Gerome, who he hurt bad enough to send to medical. But Tron wasn’t mean to her. He wasn’t nice, not like her parents and all the other adults, but he wasn’t mean.
    And he listened to her. No one ever listened to her. They all just gave her a look and went somewhere else. That was ok with Kivi, as she had a hard enough time never being alone without people always trying to talk to her. But it wasn’t like that now. Tron got that look. Everyone got that look. But he didn’t leave her behind when she talked. Not after that first time. Even when he pushed her down and went into medical by himself, Kivi knew it was to help her. She wasn’t sure what it meant.
    She didn’t know what being hooked up to another ship meant, either. That one seemed more important, though, so she stopped thinking about why Tron was acting the way he was acting and started worrying about that.
    He didn’t take her far. Probably, he picked the place because his feet hurt. Her ankle hurt, and she only just twisted it. He walked on glass. She’d picked pieces out of the pads of his feet, so she knew it hurt him bad. Or maybe he thought of something she didn’t. Whichever it was, he led her straight to the airlock at the forward hatch.
    There were two ways on and off the Lucy. There was one in the stern, near the Engine Room, where things like supplies were loaded and unloaded. Then there was the forward hatch, which was for loading people. She’d never understood why there needed to be two. The hatch was a structural weakness, and was redundant with the indisputably necessary loading bay. When he