Adrift, page 17
And he was the one who told her to wake up Tron and get him in his suit. When she’d needed to ask him about the coil he’d answered right away. It wasn’t a good answer, not a helpful one, but he tried. What little he knew just didn’t apply to their engine. Kivi had known that the second he said he remembered something about exhaust ports. There weren’t any exhaust ports near the coil. All of that seemed like stuff a good guy would do.
Kivi wished people would just make up their minds, whether they were good or bad. All the switching back and forth was confusing.
She didn’t want to turn the channel to 5, where she could talk to Whitman. She wanted to keep her mic on 2, so that she could hear Tron breathing. It was a good sound. It meant he was still alive. She could concentrate on things better so long as she knew that. But Whitman might have something important to say, so she did it.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Nothing important then. She reached up to change the channel back.
“You’re going to get yourself dead!” He shouted before she could hit it.
Kivi frowned. She didn’t like it when people yelled. It made her feel like she was doing something wrong, even when she knew she wasn’t. “No. I just need my fingers. There’s a rubber seal around my wrist that will keep the air in.”
Air was a problem. They were running low. Not low like Tron. There wasn’t much of any left out there. But they were low. Low enough to make her lightheaded, which wouldn’t help anyone. She’d noticed it when they were putting on her suit.
“You need your fingers?” He wasn’t yelling anymore. He sounded confused. “What for?”
She pointed to the pad. “I need to see it. To figure out how it fits.”
Whitman let out a slow breath. “Alright. I’ve got some better for the delicate work, but they’re never going to fit like they are. Let’s see what else we can do about that, huh?”
“Do?”
“To keep your fingers from freezing off. Unless you have a deep desire to go around with a couple fewer digits than you currently enjoy. If that’s the case, let me know now. Otherwise I’m going to ruin a very nice pair of small-work gloves for nothing.”
Kivi didn’t need to weigh those options. She could see in the readout how cold it was outside the suit. She hadn’t considered what that would do to her fingers, only that she needed them. She’d only even thought about the air when Whitman started questioning her actions. Consequences had never been factored in. “Ok.”
It wasn’t exactly simple, the solution Whitman came up with for the gloves he dug out of the pack he’d brought with him from the Free Ride. At first he was going to tie a knot in each one, but Kivi rejected that idea right away. She needed her hands to be able to move, and a big knot would only be a little better than the suit. He tried to shift it around to the back of her hand, but that wasn’t much better. So, as Kivi tucked her hand back into the suit’s heated glove, Whitman went to work on his really nice lined leather ones.
He dug in his pack and came up with a pair of scissors. The sheers were so small and sharp that Kivi suspected they were meant for snipping wires instead of cloth, but Whitman didn’t hesitate to cut into them. It took him only a few minutes, then he fished around the pack again and pulled out a thick white tube. “Glue,” he explained. “Sort of. It’s designed to plug holes in seals for little bits of time. Dries pretty much instant, with or without atmo. Not really meant for seamstress stuff, but it should work for a while. We make do out here in the black.”
A few minutes later, Kivi was taking off her suit’s gloves for good.
The leather ones weren’t nearly as warm. They couldn’t be, of course. They didn’t link up with the suit’s temperature controls that so efficiently distributed the heat to her entire body. But Kivi hadn’t expected it to be so much of a difference. The leather was nice, nicer than anything she’d ever even seen, let alone had on her hands. And the lining was easily the softest thing she’d ever touched. But there weren’t any tips at all, and the cold seeped in so fast that she couldn’t imagine her hands would be any colder if she didn’t have gloves at all.
There wasn’t time to deal with it. Once Whitman checked the fit, tightening the holes around her fingers as best he could by tying strips of fabric around them, Kivi forced her mind away from the bite of the cold and back to the pad she’d left on the floor by the door. She switched the channel on the mic back to 5, then settled into place with her back against the metal that kept her locked in. Somehow she got her fingers to start work on building the model on flat surface of the thin pad.
The trembling in her hands became a serious problem for a while, then Kivi figured out how to factor the movement into her gestures and it became just another part of the process. Soon she had the first 3D rendering floating above the pad. The holo was fairly translucent, which didn’t help her pretend it was the real thing. If there was power, she could hook the pad up to one of the power junctions. Then the holo would look utterly real, right down to shadowing and imperfections in the metals and glass. But if there was power, she wouldn’t need it. Kivi made do.
After a few seconds of analysis, she waved her hand through the image, which returned to rendering to the flat surface. Kivi pursed her lips as she considered the problem.
“Not going well?”
She jumped at the voice. Kivi had forgotten Tron was on the other end of the mic. His breathing had become another part of her process, a white noise that helped her focus. Like her papa’s whistling or her momma’s laughter. “Um…”
“You hum,” he told her.
“No.”
“You sure do. You did it when you were working on the hook and you were doing it up until about a minute ago.”
She wasn’t humming. She would’ve noticed. But he wouldn’t lie to her. Not about that. It served no purpose. “I didn’t mean to.”
“I believe that,” he said with a chuckle. “I like it. It sounds happy.”
That startled her. Happy? Well. She wasn’t unhappy. Not when she was working. Every other time, but not then. She shouldn’t be. Kivi knew that. They were all about to die, and Tron was going to be first. It was colder where he was. Now that she was paying attention, the way she’d promised herself she’d always do, she could hear his teeth chattering. Kivi was cold, so cold her hands hurt worse than anything. Even worse than her head when she fell down the stairs. But her teeth weren’t chattering. Tron had all of himself inside a suit. That meant it was worse for him. Colder. She could imagine ice forming on the outside of his helmet and that made her stomach so tight she thought she might get sick. But he was right. When she’d been designing her model, she’d been happy. It only went away when she’d turned off the holo.
“I’m sorry.” She chewed her lip. “I didn’t mean to.”
“Didn’t mean to what?”
“Be happy. I’m sorry.”
“Oh Kivi,” Tron sounded sad. Sad that she didn’t care that he was going to die, probably. “Don’t apologize for that. Don’t ever.”
“But…”
“I told you I liked it, right?”
She sniffled. Was she about to cry? She thought she was. That wasn’t ok. She wasn’t going to cry anymore. She’d decided that already. “Yes.”
“I wasn’t lying Kivi. I like listening to you hum. I mean it. So. What’s going on with this solution you’re getting for me?”
“I don’t have it.” She took a deep breath. Kivi knew what he would say. She could hear his voice in her head almost as clearly as she could the one in her ear.
“Not yet.”
Kivi smiled at the echo. “Not yet,” she agreed. “Tell me when I hum?”
“Absolutely not. Then you’ll stop and ruin my fun.”
Her smile stayed in place as she flexed her aching fingers and started again. She worked backward from what she’d done before, trying to see where things had fallen apart. She’d been at it a full ten minutes when another solution hit her like a jolt. Kivi rubbed her hands together until she could feel her fingers again, then hit the delete icon on her pad. All the labor of the past forty minutes disappeared in an instant. Good riddance.
The screen cleared, she started all over again. Half an hour passed, she knew it did the way she always knew what time it was, but it didn’t actually feel like half an hour. It felt a lot faster than that. When she tapped the icon to do another rendering, she traced her fingers over the translucent lines, but Kivi already knew she’d found the right answer. It was so elegant she laughed out loud.
“Good news?”
The mic didn’t startle her this time, just like the happiness didn’t vanish. “It’s perfect! You’ll see.”
She started walking him through her process. It had gone so quickly for her, but all she had to do was tap the screen, and she knew what she was doing. Tron had to cut wires and undo bolts and all the other steps to realize her vision. Kivi had known it wouldn’t be as easy for him, and had known it would take him longer. She just never realized how much longer.
The chattering got worse as he worked. Kivi’s joy at her solution faded as she began to worry it had taken too long. How long ago had the chattering started? She should know. She always remembered, and she’d been so determined to pay attention to him. But there had been a machine to fix, and focusing on two things was hard. If he’d stopped breathing, she would’ve noticed. The same as she did when he started talking. But the teeth? That was different. It had taken her a while to even realize it wasn’t just some kind of odd feedback. She didn’t have any idea.
His breathing started slowing. Kivi knew what that meant. Whitman had warned her, when he told her to get Tron in his suit. When people got too cold, they just fell asleep and never woke up. A lot of times they thought they were just resting for a minute, and that it was their decision, but it was really their bodies shutting down.
“Hey!” She’d never shouted into the mic before. It echoed in both their helmets, and the feedback hurt her ear. Kivi didn’t mind, though. She heard him draw in a sharp breath. “You can’t go to sleep!”
“Huh?” He didn’t sound right. Almost like he did when he first woke up, only worse. Like maybe he wasn’t all the way awake.
“Stop going to sleep!”
“I’m tired.”
She knew he was tired. That was a dumb thing to say. She’d just told him not to go to sleep. People didn’t go to sleep if they weren’t tired. Tron wasn’t dumb, so he clearly wasn’t thinking right yet. She had to fix that. Kivi thought really hard, and decided she would try to act like papa when he was getting Heath to do his class work. She remembered exactly what he said, of course, but getting the tone of her voice right was harder. “Well that’s just too bad! You’re whining like a baby! How am I supposed to take you seriously when you act like a baby when it’s time to be a man? Is this what you do when people are counting on you?”
He drew in another sharp breath. “No.” He sounded mad. Growling, like he’d done at Whitman when they first argued.
She wanted to tell him she was sorry, that she didn’t want to be mean. It was just to get him moving. She wanted to beg him not to be mad at her. He said he couldn’t be, but Kivi knew he was mad now and it was just the two of them. It wasn’t like he could be mad at himself. He hadn’t done anything wrong. It was cold. But if he was angry, he wouldn’t fall asleep. Momma always said that no one could go to bed angry. She and papa argued a lot, so she would know. But she didn’t know what else to say to keep him angry.
“Talk to me.”
Six minutes had passed, but he was still growling. Kivi didn’t understand what he wanted. Was he expecting her to apologize? She wanted to. She just couldn’t yet. He needed to stay awake. Seven more minutes passed in silence. “Dammit Kivi, if you don’t help me stay awake I’m not going to be able to get this thing done!”
He was still growling. But his words didn’t make sense if he was angry. “I’m helping.”
“No, you’re being quiet. That’s not helpful.”
“But you’re angry. If I say sorry, you won’t be angry anymore and it won’t help you stay awake.”
“I’m not angry at you. I don’t want an apology. Just talk.”
It sounded like he was angry. She still felt like she was supposed to apologize. But that wasn’t what he said he wanted, and he wouldn’t lie to her. So Kivi thought as hard as she could for something to talk about.
She’d never been good at the idle conversation stuff. That wasn’t something Tron did either. She’d learned a few things about filling time with talk the day before, when they were waiting. Not idle stuff. Real stuff. Kivi didn’t want to distract him. He had to finish filing down a nail from the toolkit he’d found. He had to complete the connection, but it was a small space. If the nail was too big it wouldn’t stay in place. He was close, so close. But it would take time. But if he said he needed her to fill the time again, she would do that for him.
“What were you going to be? When we got to the colony?”
“What are…? Why?”
“I want to know.”
Tron sighed. That was better than growling. Maybe. “I dunno. Probably the village drunk.”
Kivi blinked in surprise. “The adults let you drink alcohol?”
He chuckled. “God no. They’re not stupid. But I’m eighteen now. They could’ve only told me no so much longer.”
“And that’s what you wanted?”
“Wanted? No. But I figure it’s better than being the colony’s first criminal. Then they’d have to build a jail just for me. At least as a drunk I’d be able to go where I wanted while I made good people wish I didn’t exist.”
She frowned. She hadn’t expected something like that. He couldn’t really think those were his choices. That was stupid. Kivi knew he felt alone all the time, because he’d told her so. He told her that he was pretty sure his parents never wanted him and he was absolutely sure they were embarrassed by him, because they’d told him that. But he couldn’t have thought that would go on forever. Why would he think that everything would always be like it was with his parents? He’d told her about his friend the mechanic and the way Captain Jay talked to him.
“I think you would’ve been mayor.”
He snorted. “Mayor of the barstool, maybe.”
“I mean it,” Kivi insisted. And she did. “You are so good at thinking fast. Better than anyone. I couldn’t think of stuff to save us half as quick as you did. That’s important. Everyone else would’ve seen that too. I’d want the person in charge of me to be the best one at coming up with fast solutions, and that’s you. Plus you never let me give up, and I really wanted to. You’re good at listening. You would’ve been a really good mayor.”
“Well I guess I’d have one vote.” She knew he was joking. Kivi could tell. But he didn’t sound like he was laughing at her. She wasn’t sure how he sounded. A little bit sad, but not all the way sad. She wished people would just tell her what they were feeling. That would make things easier. She thought about asking Tron what he felt, but he spoke before she could.
“What did you want for your life?”
That wasn’t the same thing she’d asked him. She’d been ready for answering the same question. She wasn’t sure how to answer this. “I was going to take care of plants or animals until my momma and papa picked a husband for me. Probably Asher. Then I’d have babies.”
“You wanted to marry that brat?”
“No. He’s just the one most likely. Momma liked him, and he didn’t hate me so he’d probably agree to it. He’d really like being Heath’s brother.”
He was quiet for a while, and Kivi started to worry he was falling asleep again. His breathing was ragged, though, and his teeth were still clicking together. “You really thought you were going to be stuck marrying some boy who only agreed because he was friends with your brother? That the best you could hope for was not being hated?”
She rubbed her fingers together. She should’ve put the suit’s gloves back on, but she wanted to be able to make fast changes to her design, if Tron ran into trouble. He’d needed that once so far, but now he was almost done and she really should’ve put them back on. Kivi didn’t understand why he sounded so sad. It wasn’t sad. It just was. And now it wasn’t. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was just tired. “Yes. My papa really wanted me to get married and have babies. Asher was the most likely.”
“That’s what your papa wanted.” He definitely sounded sad. “What did you want?”
That question again. Kivi still didn’t know how to answer it. She’d never considered wanting something different an option. Not really. She’d had fantasies about doing things, like building an engine that could take people to Earth and back so fast that people could visit. Silly things like that. But they weren’t possible, so they were only fantasies, not real wants. They didn’t count. Now he was asking her to sift through those half-thoughts and find one with more weight than the others, something real and possible? It wasn’t something she knew how to do.
Except, there was one daydream. One she thought about almost every day when she was sitting through lessons. Everybody probably thought it. It didn’t really count as something she wanted when everyone thought about it. But it was the best answer Kivi could come up with.
“I wanted to go to one of those schools the teachers were always talking about. The ones on Earth called universities. I wanted to see all the knowledge in the whole universe.”
He chuckled. “You are so weird.”
Before, Kivi would’ve thought he was being mean. She knew better now, though. “What did you want?”
He didn’t answer. Well, he did answer. But it was with a curse, so Kivi didn’t think that was for her. “I dropped the nail.”
Her heart felt like it had flown up into her throat.
“I can’t reach it!”
