Free Adrift by Lyn Lowe Page A

collapsing in around you? Again.
    “What do you see?”
    “Death,” he muttered. Then, as he pulled himself back into the ship and saw the confused look on her face, “they’re back.”

Problem
     
    Kivi didn’t need to ask who ‘they’ were. She hadn’t had enough time to learn Tron’s inflections or facial expressions yet, but she didn’t need to decipher this. There was only one force in the world they shared that could make an intercom sound as frightened as he did. The people who attacked.
    She staggered backward like he’d hit her. “They’re coming for us.”
    “No.” Kivi couldn’t tell if he sounded sure, or if he was just guessing. She bet he was just guessing. She hadn’t told him what she heard, because he hadn’t asked, but Kivi knew she wasn’t like most people. Most people liked to talk. Not to her, of course. But she’d watched and listened as they talked to each other. If the silence stretched on too long, they’d tell everything in their heads just to make it stop. That didn’t make sense, but she had catalogued enough exchanges between others on the ship to know it was true. And they’d had hardly anything but silence. Maybe Tron was different. Not like her, obviously, but there might be other differences. She didn’t think so, though. She thought it was far more likely that he knew even less than she did about the invaders that had destroyed everything.
    “No, they’re not coming for us.” He definitely couldn’t know that. But Kivi didn’t say so. She wanted to hear his logic before she corrected it. “They don’t know about us. Not specifically, I mean. If they knew there were two kids still alive, they would’ve come and gotten us when they were here last time. So it’s not us they’re after. It’s the people who disconnected the ships.”
    “That’s us,” Kivi said. She worried. He wasn’t making sense, and she couldn’t have him losing his mind. She didn’t know how they were going to fix the hole in the hull, and he obviously had an idea. If he went crazy, he might not help.
    “Yeah, but they don’t know that, do they? Look, they know there’s someone here, but they don’t have any way of knowing who, or how many. How could they?”
    “Why does that matter?”
    “Because it’s something we know that they don’t!” He said loudly. Kivi flinched. When he spoke again, it was in his normal volume. “Look, there’s no way we can fight off another invasion. The whole ship couldn’t stop whatever happened before. But they’re coming into a ship they’ve only been on once, prepared to fight an unknown force. We can use that.”
    “How?”
    “I haven’t figured that out yet,” he admitted. “It’s something, okay? The element of surprise is big in the war stories I read. So is guerrilla fighting. It’s better than nothing, right?”
    She didn’t know he’d read war stories. Those weren’t supposed to be available to children, except during class. All the teachers said so. Kivi had never asked why, but Heath did once. Mrs. Terrance said it was important for people to know what people had done, because you can only stop history from repeating itself if you learn of it, but that they didn’t want any of those crimes touching their new world. So they would learn about them in a place where it could be monitored and controlled. She had never heard about the element of surprise in the stuff they’d showed her in class. Tron was older than her, but only a little. Had he found some way around their blocks?
    “Do we hide?”
    “No!” He snapped. “They’re going to be hunting for the people who disconnected Lucy. If we hide, they’ll come looking. Where can we go to hide from someone who really wants to find us?”
    She pursed her lips. There were places she could hide. She was small and was used to making herself invisible. But Tron was big. He was even bigger than some of the grown-ups. She couldn’t get him into the tight places. “So what