Mechanical Hearts (Skeleton Key)

by Nicole Blanchard

“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 c
aptured 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.

  “What about you?” he said. “What about your world?”

  I shrugged as I bit into a piece of the juicy fruit. “I’m in school to become a doctor—healer. I live with my aunt Millie and Phoebe; she’s five, so about your daughter’s age.”

  “Your parents?” he asked.

  I just shook my head in response. He didn’t have anything to say after that and we both polished off our pears.

  “I was thinking,” I said, once I licked my fingers clean, “that we could use the sextant Fletcher gave you to track the whale again. If those guys who attacked us still have it, then we can find them, overtake them, and still get the whale.”

  “We’re lucky I still have it,” he said, pulling it out of his backpack.

  I took another pear from the pile next to the fire. “The only thing wrong with that plan is getting to them. Even if we figure out where they took the whale, we have no way to get there.”

  “That’s not the only thing wrong with it,” Ezra said.

  Ambrosia

  Ezra held the sextant up and peered through the eye sight. He squinted, cursed, and tried it all over again. Whatever he saw inside did not make him happy.

  The fierce scowl on his face made him look all the more like the pirate he claimed not to be. “Is it broken?” I asked hesitantly.

  “It sure as hell isn’t working,” he said, then threw it into the dirt beside his feet. “I can’t get a decent read off of it. Before the attack, we were obviously headed in the right direction, but now, it just reads like we’ve already reached our destination.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” I said. “If we can survive a sinking ship, we can survive this.”

  He didn’t say anything and I didn’t want to agitate him any more than he already was, so I retrieved a bit of plastic they used for diverting water and laid down on the ground next to the fire. I made a bed of my clothes so I didn’t have to sleep in the dirt and used the plastic to conserve what little body heat I had.

  “The best thing we can do is get some rest and reevaluate in the morning. There’s nothing we can do right now. You should be able to sleep now, and I’ll make sure to wake you up every couple hours.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll stay up and keep watch.”

  “Are you sure that’s necessary?”

  “I don’t want to take any chances.”

  By then, my eyelids were drooping, and I could barely speak for all the yawning. “Fine,” I said. “Just wake me in a couple of hours and we’ll trade off. If your head starts hurting, don’t try to be a hero.”

  “Trust me,” he said as I drifted into sleep, “I’m not the hero in this scenario.”

  The next morning it was the cold that woke me. I was shivering so much my teeth clattered together with an audible racket. A chill clung to the morning air and the fire had long since burned itself out.

  I pawed at my eyes and sat up. Ezra was leaning against the pear tree. “Why didn’t you wake me for my watch?”

  He shrugged. “I had a bit of a nap yesterday and you needed to sleep.”

  My joints ached from sleeping on the rough floor and I rubbed my hands over my arms after a good stretch. Neither did much to wash away the chill, so I put on my still-damp clothes, reasoning that they would dry throughout the day.

  “So you watched me sleep?” I said. “That’s not creepy at all.”

  His lips twisted into a half-smile. “Considering that you think of me as a pirate, you’re lucky I didn’t do more than just watch you sleep.”

  Heat washed away any lingering sleepiness like one warm wave on a hot summer day, leaving a coat awareness draped over me in its wake. I didn’t say anything back, but I felt his eyes on me as I gathered a couple apple and pears for breakfast.

  Something changed throughout the night. Something I didn’t quite understand. I resolved to ignore it. Complications—and anything other than a platonic understanding between Ezra and myself would have been a complication—weren’t on my agenda. Even if there was a tender feeling writhing in my stomach when I looked at him. Instead of seeing him as a means to an end, now when I caught his gaze, I remembered his head on my lap and his smooth voice telling me stories of his past.

  I took my time cutting up the apples and pears and mixing them together in the cleaned tin pot. It wasn’t much, but we needed fuel for the day ahead.

  I was halving a pear when I felt Ezra’s presence behind me. Unlike before, my body stilled, but not with the tinge of fear it had before, but with complete feminine awareness.

  It made me scowl at the pear in my hands. “Did you need something?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, he took the hand with the pear and brought it to his lips. I twisted around so he could see the downward turn of my lips.

  “You could have waited. I was almost done.”

  I was so displeased by the turn of events, I didn’t realize the fruit was still in my hands as he nibbled. The knife clattered into the tin bowl as my hand went limp. He bit into the pear and his full lips wrapped around its flesh. I had a sudden, startling urge to taste the pear from his lips.

  “You can let go of my hand now.” I was pleased to find my voice was steady—certainly steadier than my thundering heartbeat. I only hoped he couldn’t feel it racing underneath his palm.

  He didn’t. Instead, he took another bite, that time his lips grazed my fingers. I wrenched my hand from his and went back to peeling the fruit.

  When I was finished, I filled a bowl and shoved it in his direction. “Here, if you’re so hungry.”

  He took the bowl and sat next to me. He didn’t mention the deal with the pears, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to bring it up.

  “I think our best chance at getting out of here is to see if anything was left behind before they abandoned this place. Maybe they have some sort of communication or boat they left behind that we can use.”

  I barely heard what he was saying because I was so fascinated by his glistening fingers bringing bits of apple and pears to his lips.

  When I noticed he was looking at me expectantly, I frowned. “What?”

  “Do you want some of mine?” he asked. “You’re staring at it like you’re going to take a bite. Did you not get enough?”

  I glanced back up at his face and noticed his self-satisfied smirk so I scowled in return as I finished my own food. Then, I wiped my hands on my still-damp pants and got to my feet.

  “We better get started, then,” I said.

  I left the cups and tin pot in the farmhouse and we gathered anything of use from the pod. There was a medical kit I wished I’d seen the night before when I was cleaning Ezra’s head wound, an automata that told the time—not that we would have much use for it—and a brass card with a picture of Ezra’s family printed on it.

  His eyes softened at the image, and he pocketed it with a gruff, “Best b
e going,” before he dove back in the jungle of orchard trees.

  I followed after him with a frown that was quickly becoming an automatic response to being in his presence.

  The lamps that heated the capsule were turned up to full blast, no doubt to stimulate the growth of the various plants, but it was a heck of a thing to tromp through since the chill had burned off.

  Ezra cut a powerful figure though the reaching arms of the trees and brush. Fingers of it clutched at my clothes as I fought my way through. We picked our way through the fields, taking handfuls of sugar snap peas and green beans to feast on when we hadn’t made our way across to the other side by lunch time.

  “How much farther?” I asked when we stopped to take a bit of water from the pack he carried on his back.

  Sweat beaded on his forehead and he’d shed the thick black overcoat he wore like a second skin. “Not too much farther, I hope. These ag-farms were small when they built them at first. Now that we have so many people, they had to build larger ones to support the population.”

  “How many people survived here after the war?” I asked. “How many ports are there like Arliss?”

  Ezra wiped a hand over his brow and took the canteen from me to chug. His throat bobbed as he swallowed and a bead of sweat slid down into the dark tangle of hair at the hollow of his neck.

  “There were tens of thousands that survived the war, but I doubt half that made it down to the capsules. Many died from exposure to the toxins, as did many of their children. It’s only now that our people have finally begun to thrive. It’s the water, you see. It’s poisoned. Anyone who’s not been exposed with it either die or be changed.”

  “Changed?”

  He flexed his arm between us.

  “Tink mentioned that. So, if you go into the water?”

  “I’d be right as rain.”

  There were so many questions I wanted to ask, but as I opened my mouth, we broke through the edge of the trees and came to the other side. It never ceased to amaze me how beautiful their world was.

  Living on the coast of Florida had always taught me an appreciation for the sea, but being there, surrounded by it, was another thing all together.