Mechanical Hearts (Skeleton Key) (7 page)

I wished he’d given me better instructions before he passed out. Like, how to actually drive the stupid thing.

I didn’t dare risk any of the buttons on the dash. Knowing my luck, I’d completely screw things up. With the distance between us and the capsule lessening, I had only minutes to figure out how to slow us down enough that we didn’t crash into the side. I mean, it’s not like it came with brakes …

Of course!
I laughed out loud, probably more from desperation than a moment of genius. All I would need to do is angle the pod in a wide arc to slow our trajectory just enough that we didn’t crash land into the thing.

Piece of cake
, I told myself. It didn’t look so hard when Ezra was doing it.

My hands were slick on the controls and my joints throbbed from clutching onto the wheel so tightly, but I didn’t dare let go. The sirens screeched and my heartbeat thundered in my ears. Sweat dotted my upper lip and hairline.

Once I parked, my first priority was going to be a nice, hot shower. Then I would sleep for a hundred years, find a way home, and I’d stick to being boring for the remainder of my life.

Adventure isn’t as fun as it’s cracked up to be
, I concluded.

“When you wake up, I’m going to kill you,” I muttered to Ezra’s unconscious body. “Some pirate you are, letting a woman steer your ship.”

Ship was an overstatement.

The capsule looked nothing like Port Arliss. For one thing, it was pitifully small, and for another, it was the definition of abandoned. Even from a distance, I could see the overgrowth choking the exits. It was like a glass jungle, and I feared just what we would find inside.

I managed to maneuver the pod as close as I dared without running straight into the side. There was a godawful screech as the pod dragged along the side of the glass. For one, long, tension-filled moment, I was certain I’d punctured a whole in the side and we’d drown in the flood. Then we lined up with the airlock and the pod came to a stop.

My breath released with a whoosh. At least I hadn’t killed us.

With the airlock secure, I turned to face Ezra and saw with shock the wound at his head was furiously seeping thick, dark blood.

E
ven though I
’d dealt with injuries of every possible nature from skinned knees to gunshot wounds, the sight of him broken and bleeding and vulnerable shook my sense of calm. My normally steady fingers trembled as I scrubbed back his matted hair to investigate the bleeding.

Head wounds bled a lot, but even though I knew the facts, the treatment, my heart still skipped a beat when my hands came away soaked and slippery with crimson.

It wasn’t terribly deep, but he’d need stitches whenever we got back to Arliss.

If
we got back to Arliss.

I made do with the sleeve of my shirt to wipe away most of the blood. It still trickled in a steady stream, but no longer gushed. As I brushed his hair the way I did with Phoebe when she’d had a bad dream, I tried to rouse him. I was worried if I didn’t, then he wouldn’t wake up at all.

“Ezra,” I said softly. I tried shaking him a little, but not so much that it jostled him. “Ezra, wake up.”

He moaned, and his eyes fluttered beneath translucent lids, but he didn’t wake.

“Ezra,” I said, more loudly that time. “We’re here.”

He cracked an eye open. I’d never been so happy to see someone so annoyed. “Bloody hell, you don’t need to shout.”

Relief was swift and sweet. “I thought you were dead for a second there,” I said as I slowly helped him into a sitting position.

“I must be, because this is hell,” he groaned. His fingers probed the wound, and he winced. When he spoke, his voice was almost amused. “Did you hit me?”

“You may have a concussion,” I said. “I think you hit your head when we were trying to save those guys.”

“Great,” he fairly wheezed.

“The good news is we made it to the capsule without crashing.”

“Are you sure?” he asked. “It sure feels like we crashed.”

“I’m sure your hard head will survive, but we better get you out of here so I can take a better look at you.”

I eased backward to help him get to his feet, but my back came in contact with the close wall of the pod. There wasn’t much room to move around, but I managed to steady him as he swayed in front of me.

He brushed my hands away. “I think I’m old enough to walk on my own.”

He took two steps around me and promptly swayed into the wall.

“Sure, you can.” I wrapped an arm around his middle and we inched toward the airlock. “You didn’t seem to mind me doctoring you before.”

“You didn’t seem to enjoy my pain as much before.”

I couldn’t help my smile as I watched him carefully get to his feet. “Watch the step there,” I said.

He turned back to glare at me as he squeezed through the small opening to the air lock. Our bodies brushed, and my breath caught in my throat. In the small space it was hard for me to ignore his already imposing presence. I swallowed back the sudden lump in my throat and carried his weight through the darkened passage.

The door had long since stopped operating automatically, so Ezra had to heave it open with a flick of his wrist.

Verdant green exploded in front of us, a jungle of overgrown fruit trees, fields of neglected, but flourishing, vegetables of every kind imaginable—and a few I’d never seen before. Rich soil squished between my toes as we stepped out of the airlock. The air itself inside the capsule was thick, my chest fairly ached with each inhale. It reminded me of the most humid summer mornings in Florida and longing speared through me as sure and devastating as a blade to the gut.

Ezra must have sensed a change in my mood because he plants his feet in the middle of a row of citrus trees, the scent heavy in the air around us. “What’s the matter?” his eyes, still cloudy with pain, sharpened.

Eye contact is dangerous, especially with a man like Ezra, whose gaze made me feel like he could see into my very soul.

“Nothing, I’m fine.” I tried to pull him along, to get away from the sudden morose weight that started to pull me down, but he wouldn’t budge.

He released me, but only to run his hands over my hair, down my back, up and over my arms, and then to my hands. More than ever, I was hyper-aware of the fact that I was in nothing more than a thin pair of tan shorts and matching shirt they’d provided that served as underclothes. My pants were still too wet to put on. At first, I stared at him with a frown.
What the hell is he doing?
Then I realized he was checking me for injuries.

I stilled his hands when they reached my cheeks. “I’m not hurt. I’m fine.”

He seemed to realize how close we were, that his hands were clutching my jaw like a lover, and he released me, only to stumble.

“Don’t. I can walk on my own,” he said. He brushed my hands away and managed to keep on his own two feet.

“You’re going to fall and knock yourself out,” I warned as we continued into the thick overgrowth. He was a few steps in front of me, grabbing onto trees, snapping thin saplings with the strength of his hand.

“I’ve managed for twenty-six years without your help, princess. I think I can handle walking a few feet.”

We reached a clearing bordered by one of the vegetable gardens. Ezra leaned heavily on a pear tree, his face bleached of color.

“You need to sit down,” I told him.

He ignored me. “I’m going to look for food. Use this to start a fire.” He handed me a little piece of metal as though I knew what to do with it.

I looked up to ask him how to use it, but he was already disappearing into the trees.

I left my clothes to dry in the artificial sun while Ezra went off to look for something to eat. The lamps weren’t as strong as the ones in Arliss, so I was reduced to shivering in the half light in just a thin undershirt and shorts as I attempted to start a fire in the damp wood I collected from husks of orchard trees. Anything to get my mind off the sharp ache in my stomach and the resulting light-headedness.

Underneath the bark there was a soft, nearly paper-like fluff that I gathered to use for tinder. I made a bed of it on top of the wood to make a home for the flames to grow. With the lighter Ezra had given me before he left, I figured out how to make it work and lit the fluff. It burst into orange and red flames almost immediately. The heat was intense, much more so than anything from my world. It tore through the fluff and soon even the damp wood was crackling pleasantly. The warmth washed over me in waves. I had to bring some home to show Phoebe; she’d love it.

Remembering her, remembering that we’d lost our chance at the whale and my ticket home, the cloud of melancholy settled over me again.

Since we were technically no longer in danger, that is, no one was shooting at us anymore, I struggled to make sense of what had happened, if only to distract me from the tears that clogged my chest and threatened to spill.

The heart was valuable, even I knew that. Someone must have known what we were after. But that didn’t make sense. Why would they attack us if we were … And then the drowsiness gave way to shock and I sat straight up.

They were after the whale, too, and they’d attempted to kill us in order to beat us to it.

And took away the one chance I had to go home.

I forced that thought away and focused on feeding the fire. I simply couldn’t comprehend the possibility that I wouldn’t get back to Phoebe, so I pushed it from my mind. If it took years, I’d find a way.

A branch snapped, and I jerked up to find Ezra emerging from the dense overgrown trees. He cradled a bunch of unrecognizable plants in his arms. At that point, I didn’t care what I ate so long as it would fill my belly.

He set the food down between us, and I recognized some sort of potato and maybe a carrot of some kind.

Without asking him, I filled a pot I’d gotten from the dilapidated farmhouse with water from one of the canisters we’d taken from the pod. He started peeling the potatoes, and I took an extra knife and diced the carrots. They looked like regular carrots except they were shorter and fatter, squat little things. I mentally shrugged. Who cared what they looked like as long as they were edible? When I was done, I tossed them in the pot of water along with the cleaned potatoes and set it in the glowing coals to cook.

Once that was taken care of, I looked over to find Ezra canting to the side, his eyes drooping. “Oh, no you don’t,” I said as I jumped to my feet and raced to his side. “We’ve got to get some food in you.”

Ezra scowled, and for some reason, it made me smile down at him. “I’m
fine
,” he said.

I adjusted his uncharacteristically pliant body and ignored his thunderous expression until his head was resting in my lap. “You should rest. You don’t want to aggravate that head wound.”

“I won’t be babied,” he said.

“Good,” I retorted. “I’m not your mother, but you did appoint me as the healer on your ship and you’ll listen or I’ll—”

“Or you’ll what?” he interrupted. Even from his reclined position, he emanated raw masculinity with confident ease. Something that, around other men, would have made me nervous, but from him, only served to make me want to challenge him. Ruffle his feathers. “Well?”

“Hush,” I said, and he shocked us both by complying. As the potato and carrot mixture simmered in the pot beside us, I used a slight amount of water from the canisters to clean the bloody gash on his head. “You’re lucky this didn’t do more than knock you out.”

“My mother will be lucky to hear my hard head was good for something aside from causing her endless irritation.”

“Hold still for a second,” I said. Really, he needed stitches, but with no medical kit, the best I could do was clean it with water and wrap it in a relatively clean strip of cloth I tore from my damp shirt. “That’ll do for now, but you’re going to need to take it easy. Though, I’m guessing you’re going to fight me on that.”

“Since it currently feels like the cogs in my head have gone rusty, I’m going to take your advice. For now.” He peered at me with one bloodshot eye. “But don’t get used to it.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said as I tried and failed to hide my smile.

I stirred the pot and tried not to whimper at the smell wafting from it. “How did you manage to become a pirate?” I asked to distract myself from gobbling it all down raw.

His scowl deepened. “I’m not a pirate. I’m a captain.”

“Fine, then. How did you become a captain? Your father?” I guessed.

“Hell, no,” he said. “My father owned a shop that sold automata.”

“Automata?”

“Trinkets, like Tink, but not quite as large. He was an inventor of sorts. His creations were mostly for household purposes. Like the coffee-maker on the ship or gadgets for the office. He used to have a shop in the city square, but my mother grew too ill to take care of herself and I was always gone, so he had to close his shop to stay home with her.”

“I’m sorry to hear about your mom,” I said.

Ezra waved it away. “Anyway, I had to find work after that.”

“How old were you?” I didn’t particularly enjoy the fact that I could relate to him. I didn’t want or need anything to bind me to his world. Especially not when I had so much depending on me in my own.

“Sixteen.”

“That’s very young,” I said.

He shrugged then winced when it jolted his head. “I took a job on one of the export ships. Each capsule manufactures different goods. There are agriculture capsules, fishing, poultry, coal, and so on. Our job was to transport goods from one capsule to another.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

His eyes shutter closed again, and he seemed to relax into me. My hands shifted idly through his hair as I listened to his response. “It wasn’t; it was good work. A few years later, I had my daughter, you met her, to consider. Her mother died a few years before, and it was up to me to provide for her.”

“I can understand that,” I said, before I even thought about the words. There was something about him that pulled me. I found myself wanting to give him parts of me without fully understanding why.

I wondered how much I’d have to surrender to him before I realized it was too late.

I shook my head to clear those thoughts and refocused on what he was saying.

“About five years ago, the ship I was first mate on was attacked by a rogue ship. They weren’t common back then, but the few out there were vicious and bloodthirsty. They stole supplies to take to abandoned capsules like this one where they’d horde them for themselves.”

The rustling of the leaves was no longer pleasant. The trees offered too many places for people to hide. “They aren’t— They don’t come here, do they?”

My eyes still on the trees, I didn’t notice for a few minutes that he hadn’t responded. When I looked down, I found his eyes closed again. I gently shook him until he blinked up at me.

“Probably best if you don’t fall asleep for a couple hours. Just to be sure.”

“You mean to torture me today, don’t you?” He lifted a hand and twined a finger around a lock of hair that had fallen from my bun.

“If that means keeping you alive. You still haven’t told me how you became a captain,” I prompted.

“Well, when the rogue ship captured ours, they killed everyone who fought back except those who surrendered and agreed to serve. I couldn’t leave my daughter behind, even if it meant doing something I disagreed with, and I had my parents to worry about.”

I didn’t know what to say in response, so I checked on the stew again and found it ready. It probably wouldn’t taste very good, but at least it was food.

There were two cracked earthenware coffee cups along with the tin pot and I used them to serve up the steaming stew. Ezra managed to clamber up into a sitting position, and as he sipped the food, the color came back to his face.

Once he devoured the first serving, he went back for seconds. “I should have hired you as a cook,” he said.

I tasted a bite and found it to be bland, but he was already going back for another serving. “I think I’ll just stick to healing, if that’s okay with you.”

We sat in silence as we finished off the pot of stew. All too soon, we were scraping the bottom of the dented tin pot.

Ezra had enough energy to get to his feet and stretch upward into one of the pear trees and pick off a couple of the fruit for dessert.