Free Adrift by Lyn Lowe Page B

do we do?”
    He held out a gloved hand. “Give me the torch.”
    She did it immediately and followed him out the door. Kivi struggled against the blast of air, but Tron wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her through. Once the door was closed again, he lit up the torch. The flame burned blue, and she couldn’t help but flinch at the thought of all the additional air it was using. Then she realized what he was about to do.
    “ Wait! You can’t seal the room! There’s food in there! We have to get it out.”
    “We have to let it go. Can’t risk them opening the door and letting the rest of the air out. We can live off the hydroponics and cold storage.”
    Kivi understood what he wasn’t saying; that they were probably going to be dead when this was over, and they wouldn’t need to worry about food at all. She knew that. But she couldn’t help worrying anyway. Food Storage was one of the most important parts of the ship. She could hear Captain Jay’s voice in her head telling her and the other children about it, back when they were six and seven and he gave them their first official tours of the Lucy.
    After a second, Tron started the torch up a gain. Soon he was pressing the blue flame to the door, near the handle. Kivi expected him to go all the way around, but he only did a little bit, tugged the handle twice, and then turned off the flame.
    “Just enough to make sure they can’t get in,” he explained as he turned back to her. “Now let’s get out of these suits and figure out what we can do to get rid of them.”
    It only took him a minute to get his helmet and gloves off. Once those were tucked under one arm, he started helping her. That was good. Kivi was afraid he’d expect her to get herself free and, though she could get the helmet and gloves off alright, their modifications had made it impossible for her to get loose of anything else.
    Almost immediately, they both realized something was wrong. She didn’t tuck her helmet under an arm, the way Tron did. Her arms weren’t long enough to do it comfortably. She tried to set it on the floor, but the instant she did it started drifting upwards again. They both st ared at it. She realized what it meant, of course. The gravity was gone. That made sense. Like everything else, the ship’s gravity was powered by the engine. What baffled her was why it hadn’t been gone as soon as the engine kicked off. How had she fallen down the stairs?
    “What ha ppened to the gravity?”
    It clicked together in her mind, and suddenly Kivi understood something that she should’ve realized right from the start. “That’s what the power in the hook was for.
    “How the hell did it do that?”
    Kivi shrugged. “I only saw part.”
    “Are you sure?”
    Kivi shrugged again. “It’s the only thing that’s changed.”
    He frowned, and she could tell it bothered him. She didn’t understand why. Now that she knew the answer, she didn’t need to understand why. She still wanted to look at another one of those hooks, though. If she thought there was any chance that they would let her take it apart, she might give herself up to the bad guys outside. Then she’d get to see the hook’s insides, which she only barely got a glimpse at while she was in the airlock, and it would be much better than running out of air. But Kivi didn’t think they were likely to agree to that. She didn’t know how she’d ask.
    “No time for it, I guess,” Tron said. “Hurry up. We’ve got to get to nav.”
    “Why?”
    “So that we can keep them out. It’d be better if we had a few traps set up, but since we can’t do that, we’ll have to settle for making it impossible for them to get to the control panels.”
    Kivi considered what he’d said for a while. She didn’t bother pointing out that the navigation room didn’t keep the people inside it safe last time. She knew he’d seen the blood too, and it didn’t seem like the kind of thing that would be good to talk about.