Free Adrift by Lyn Lowe

it and felt trapped by it, but he’d never really thought of it as a container. Not until that moment, staring at the place where metal should be.
    The hole was huge, nearly the size of the room itself. The edges were jagged and raw, like a tin can that someone opened with a knife. Most of them were twisted inward, like something had burst through. He couldn’t see any sign of what that might’ve been, but guessed that whatever it was had been the cause of the first jolt that had rocked Lucy before the attack.
    There wasn’t much left in the room. A few things were caught, wedged against the shelves which were bolted into the floor, but most was gone. No doubt, it was sucked out into the black when the hole was punched. Or it simply drifted out as they moved. If it weren’t for the magnetics in the boots of their suits, he and Kivi would probably be drifting away too.
    Tron couldn’t curse now. He could barely think. All that kept running through his head was how stupid he was. He’d always thought Lucy was keeping him inside, but that wasn’t true at all. She was keeping the outside away from them. And now it had found a way through, and was going to suck up all their air. They were going to die with blue lips and burning lungs.
    “We’ll freeze first.”
    Tron jumped at the sound of Kivi’s voice, only then realizing she was still standing beside him. “What?”
    “We won’t have burning lungs. So long as we’re still, there’s no more heat. The black is sucking up our heat faster than it’s taking our air. We’ll freeze before we suffocate.”
    He blinked. Had she read his mind? Had he said it out loud? Tron honestly couldn’t say, and didn’t know which would be more disturbing. “We have to fix this.”
    “How?”
    “Is there a torch in your tool kit?”
    She bent down over it, rummaging through with clumsy fingers. When she came back up with a small stick, he almost sagged with relief. It wasn’t life, not by a long shot, but it was a start. He was about to say so when the floor beneath his feet began to vibrate. It was an odd sensation, feeling it through the hard boot. After a life of soft shoes that did nothing to hinder his sensitivity, he felt almost numb in them. Aside from the cuts, of course.
    “Why are we shaking?”
    Tron shook his head, having no answer to give her. He shuffled closer to the hole, taking care not to touch any of the bits curling inward. There was no telling how sharp they were, and one cut on his suit would be the end of him. There was no chance he’d get back into the corridor before all the air was gone, but it would be the loss of pressure that would kill him. He remembered those lessons. They’d given him nightmares.
    Seeing outside wasn’t like looking at the pictures on his reader. It was, he imagined, more like leaning out over the edge of a waterfall and hoping that gravity let you teeter. Tron was extremely aware of the fact that it was only the magnetics that held him to the world, and that these suits were just as old as the seals on the door that was leaking. That would be a death that took a long time to come, and it would be without Kivi.
    It took a while to orient himself to the space outside the hull. He looked to the left and right first, as though those were the only directions this new danger could be coming from. He looked up at what he thought of as sky. Except it was all sky. He’d almost decided it must be something inside when it finally occurred to him that there could just as easily be something beneath as there could above. He should’ve let Kivi do this. She would’ve realized that even before she leaned out. Of course, she wouldn’t reach far enough to see past Lucy’s rolling curves.
    As he stretched as far as he could, Tron finally found the source of the vibrations. “No.”
    It was the same word Kivi had said right before he walked into hell. It was the only word for it. What else was there to say when you were seeing the world