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anything. He was sure she was going as fast as she could. He could leave her behind, but Tron wasn’t ready for that. She might want to figure things out all by herself, but he didn’t. And maybe they were at risk of being found, but each minute that passed without an attack made him surer that his first assumption about the invaders was right; they were gone.
    “This isn’t going to work. I’m sorry.”
    It was the first thing either of them had said in a while, and it was Tron’s turn to be startled. “What?” He was afraid she was going to say the two of them working together. He didn’t want to be alone any more than he wanted to be in charge.
    “I’m going too slowly. We’re wasting life support. You need to carry me.”
    He tried not to be offended in the matter-of-fact to ne she took. Tron was sure that something in there was meant to be a polite request. And he was hardly one to complain. He’d spent all of his life making demands from one person or another. And she was still following his plan, and saying the same thing that he’d been thinking. Still, it was kind of annoying for this sprite of a girl to be telling him what to do. He got even with her, a little bit, by being less gentle than he might have been when he scooped her up. She whimpered, but she didn’t complain. They made much better time in that arrangement. They were in the med bay in a quarter of the time it took them to get halfway the other way.
    The place was a mess. Lucy had rocked pretty hard during whatever had happened . That might explain some of the debris scattered around a room that Doctor Geddes always kept so tidy, but not all of it. Most of the supplies were kept in cabinets designed for space-flight. Tron had tried to break into them once, though he couldn’t remember why. He’d had some plan about holding the medicine for ransom or something. It was stupid, just like all his plans, but this one didn’t even get as far as most of the others. He’d tugged on every cabinet in the place, and hadn’t figured out how to open a single one. Only the drawers were accessible, and all those held were bandages and such; nothing worth the effort of getting into med bay without being noticed.
    Now, it seemed like every container in the place was smashed up on the floor. There was glass everywhere. He could just make out pills lying among the ruin, but the re were only a handful, not nearly enough to fill even one of the bottles scattered around the doorway. Every drawer was opened, some of them half off the tracks, and the cabinets were all flung open with more than a few lying on the ground in a splintered mess. Even the doctor’s table, which had always been in the center of the room, was tipped on its side and shoved over into a corner. And, tucked in so tightly beneath it that Tron almost didn’t notice him, was the doctor. Dead. Just like all the others.
    Kivi made a small moaning noise in the back of her throat, and Tron nearly made one of his own. He managed to hold it back, barely, and considered the situation. Obviously, the inv aders went after the medicine Dr. Geddes. They’d taken what they wanted and killed Geddes in the process. But none of that mattered. Or, it did, but not just at that moment. Right now the only important thing was to get Kivi taken care of so that they could hunt down the captain.
    He set her down carefully, hoping that there was no glass below her feet that he couldn’t see in the horrible lighting. She didn’t cry out, and he took that as a good sign.
    “Stay here. I’m going to go get some stuff. I’ll need my arms. That glass will cut right through our shoes, and there’s no point in us both going.”
    “It makes more sense to send me in . I’m already hurt.”
    He rolled his eyes at her dramatically, wondering if she could even see them from her angle. Tron just hoped she grasped his frustrated demeanor. “No,” he insisted in his firmest voice. When it didn’t seem to convince