Mechanical Hearts (Skeleton Key)

by Nicole Blanchard

  I grew desperate along with their cries. The water was to my thighs, and I knew if I waited any longer it would reach my waist, then my chest, then it would swallow me whole.

  I was really getting sick of nearly drowning.

  My vision blurred with a combination of sweat and tears. I shouted at them, telling them I was coming. Help was coming. Just hold on. Eventually, my throat grew so hoarse, I could barely speak let alone shout.

  Soon, my entire lower body was consumed by the rising water.

  I was beyond feeling. Beyond the cold.

  In fact, it felt rather nice. Warm, even.

  Eventually, the roar from the water drowned out the sound of their screams. Then a great lurch wrenched me away from the door and I floated for a while. Voices broke my stupor and I fought to a standing position, fought against the darkness that wanted to consume my vision.

  When I was on my feet, I found Ezra standing in front of me, his mechanical arm straining to pull back the lever. His mouth was open in a soundless feral shout. The veins in his temple and throat stood out in sharp relief. With a great crack, the door burst open and the water, ever opportunistic, flooded the room, sucking Ezra and me along with it.

  My arm caught the doorway as I went through, and I let out a cry, my mouth immediately filled with salt water, choking it off. I tumbled, churned by the water, until I managed to claw my way to the surface.

  It was complete chaos. Grown men were screaming, fighting each other to the door against the constant waves of water from the hall. I tried to move, tried to swim to the exit myself, but my body had given up. I told my brain to tell my arms to move, but they hung limply by my side. The only thing keeping me from going completely under was the table I managed to stand on to keep my head above water.

  Ezra was in front of me corralling the thrashing men with shouts and great heaves. One scrabbled up his back, panicked by the encroaching water, and Ezra gripped him by the scruff and threw him through the doorway. When they were all safely out and their voices started to recede, he came for me.

  “Go,” I said. “I’ll just slow you down.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” he growled.

  “Just go!” My shout was hoarse, and I winced at the pain in my throat.

  Before I could protest, he swung me up in his arms and dove into the water. His powerful legs kicked behind and propelled us through the doorway. We broke the top, both of us gasping for air.

  The water was up to our necks then, and I could feel my body starting to shut down. If we didn’t get out of there, and quickly, I feared the submarine would become my tomb.

  “Hold on to me,” he shouted over the sound of the sea closing in around us.

  He slipped me around his back and positioned my arms around his neck. I was careful not to hold on too tight as he powered his way down the hall. He didn’t go to the control room like I expected, but to a door off the left.

  Inside, there were empty bays that reminded me of a car garage, but smaller.

  “Where are we going?” I knew the question could be pointless, as Ezra had an infuriating habit of leaving most of my questions unanswered, but the filter to my mouth had been washed away along with the submarine.

  “Escape pod,” he said. His neck swiveled back and forth as he strode down the walkway, checking each of the bays.

  There was one pod left in the last bay, but it looked like it had taken a hit from whatever had attacked us. It was a miniature submarine—as in, it could probably fit the both of us, but it would be cramped. It rested drunkenly, almost completely on its side, and was smoking from somewhere in the back.

  That couldn’t be good.

  Ezra sat me down on an overturned crate as he went about righting the pod with one arm. My mouth may have dropped open from awe, but it could have also been from exhaustion.

  He managed to get it somewhat straight and began working on a dashboard that was behind a panel in the wall.

  I must have blanked out for a second because the next thing I knew, he was carrying me to the pod and climbing in with me in his lap. The glass front closed in around us, and then we dropped straight down the floor and into the ocean.

  That was when the ship attacking us came into view.

  “Bleeding hell,” Ezra muttered.

  It was a sub nearly twice the size of the one we’d just vacated. And where ours had been made for travel, that one had huge cannons on every level, all pointed in our direction.

  It was dark, so I couldn’t make out much more than that, but in the distance, I could see a growing light behind the attacking vessel.

  Are we nearer to the surface than I thought?

  As Ezra directed our pod away from the ship, I twisted my head to make out the light and found the lights were coming from luminescent bacteria growing on the armor of a whale the size of a skyscraper. It loomed just beyond the submarine like a menacing shadow.

  I tapped Ezra’s shoulder with a hand. “Ezra. Look!” When he didn’t, I started to shake him. “Look!”

  “I’m trying to steer this thing without—” he started as he turned in the direction I was pointing. “Bleeding hell,” he repeated.

  “Is that what we were looking for?”

  “Looks like it found us,” he said.

  “Who are those people? Did Fletcher send another group after us? Why would he do that?”

  “No,” he said. “Those aren’t his men. Too obvious. This was a quiet affair. They must be someone else’s.”

  “I don’t really want to stick around to find out,” I told him.

  “We wouldn’t survive it if we did.”

  “What about the others?” I asked to distract myself from the pinpricks and heat ravaging my aching feet.

  “They’ll have made it to their own escape pods.”

  We hope.

  “What about the whale? Tink mentioned they were rare. We can’t just let this one go.” I watched as the whale was swallowed by the ocean the farther we went in the other direction.

  “You wanna try taking them on, go ahead, princess,” Ezra said.

  “There has to be some way.”

  “Look, all we can do now is get somewhere safe, find my men, and then we’ll get another ship and start over.”

  When the last of the whale was blackened out by the dark water, I turned back to the front to find nothing but empty sea in front of us.

  No other pods. None of his men.

  There was nothing.

  “Take off your pants,” Ezra said.

  “I don’t think so, buddy.” My brain may have been fuzzy with exhaustion and my body may have been numb with cold, but I hadn’t lost my good sense. Yet.

  “If you don’t want to die,” he explained as he tugged at the button on my pants, “then you need to warm up. Staying in these wet clothes is guaranteed to kill you.”

  There wasn’t much room in the small pod for me to move around let alone undress. “I can barely move,” I admitted. “My fingers feel numb.”

  He muttered a curse underneath his breath. With quick fingers and efficient motions, he undid the clasp at my waist and worked my pants down my legs. He undid the knots on my boots, pulled them off along with my socks, then tugged my pants the rest of the way off. It felt better to not be surrounded by the freezing material, but the hell if I was going to admit it.

  The interior of the pod was cramped. There was barely room for his long-limbed body, let alone the addition of mine, but what it was good for was heat. The small space warmed quickly. The tingling in my extremities grew more painful.

  “It’ll pass. Here,” he said, and then his hands were on my legs, rubbing and massaging the life back into them.

  My response strangled in my throat. “W-What are you doing?”

  “Warming you up,” he said all too simply.

  “Right,” I said. Because what else was I supposed to say? “Don’t you need to drive this thing?”

  “Auto-pilot,” he said.

  “Whe
re exactly are we going?” My voice turned out to be much scratchier than I would have liked it to be, so I cleared my throat. “Back to Arliss?”

  He studied a readout on the dash as he massaged my legs absently. “No, we’d never make it in this heap. There are some test capsules along this way, so I hope we can find one before we run out of juice or run into more assassins.”

  My limbs and eyelids were heavy. “Other ports like the one you mentioned before?”

  “Hmm? No, these were abandoned ages ago, but at least it’ll provide some protection for the night until we can figure out a way to signal a passing ship.”

  I must have fallen asleep because the next parts were hazy. I remembered bursts of light and vibrations. For a while, I thought maybe Port Arliss and Ezra were all a dream and I was still caught in the storm. The thought ignited an intense ache in my chest and pulled me from the darkness.

  The pod spun wildly out of control. Lights flashed and Ezra cursed above the sound of sirens, but there was something different about it: his voice was faint.

  I glanced back at him and gasped. There was a deep gash on his forehead that I didn’t notice before. His eyes were heavily lidded, and he blinked rapidly to keep the blood from dripping past his lashes.

  “You’re gonna have to take the wheel,” he said. He nodded toward his hands, releasing when mine took position. The wheel jerked wildly underneath, and my already sore muscles strained to keep it level. “Auto-pilot gave out.”

  “Now what?” I asked as I looked back at him. I wished I had my medical kit so I could bandage the wound on his head, but there was nothing inside the barren pod.

  “See that shape up ahead? That’s the capsule we’re aiming for. You’re going to line up with the locking plate and go in slowly. Hover beside it until it seals. Hopefully the damn thing still works.”

  Alarm pierced my chest. “And if it doesn’t?”

  “We’ll worry about that later.”

  “Sure,” I said, “that sounds like a great plan.”

  When he didn’t respond, I turned back toward him. His eyes were closed, and if I didn’t feel the rise and fall of his chest against my back, I would have thought he was dead.

  The thought bothered me more than I wanted it to.

  Focus, Caroline, or you’re going to crash right into the damn thing.

  The shape of the capsule in front of us grew more and more clear as the pod hurtled toward it. I pulled out on the wheel, which only served to aim the pod upward, then I jerked it back down, which sent us rocketing toward darker water. It went like that for the next few minutes until I managed to regain control.

  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.

  Stranded

  Even 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 neg
lected, 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.