Mechanical Hearts (Skeleton Key) (11 page)

Tears slipped down my cheeks unbidden, and my hands were restrained so I couldn’t wipe the evidence of my fear away. Two guards pulled Ezra away from where he kneeled at my feet and held him along with Fletcher. Two more moved behind me to work on the reactor.

“You are heartless,” I whispered.

But my words fell on deaf ears. Millie merely laughed. “Well then, that will make two of us.”

Then she flipped a switch and energy coursed through my body, paralyzing my face in a silent scream.

T
he pain was so
great it catapulted me into a state of numbness. It overwhelmed my senses until I was consumed by an endless assault. Whatever was happening to me would destroy me. Of that, I was sure.

I could still see, but I couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel anything other than the constant, relentless waves of pain.

I saw Fletcher screaming at Millie, saw him brandishing the gun in her face. She stood, cool as a winter’s breeze, and merely laughed in his face. I watched as Fletcher bubbled over with rage, lifted the gun, and shot her right in the stomach.

Her guards were already upon them with raised sticks that were as wide as my wrist. They came down on Fletcher—my father—like a wave of bees on honey.

I was grateful I couldn’t hear then, but I could still see the pain etched on his face as they hit him. Over and over again until he was limp and bloody on the floor. The only way I knew he was still alive was the shallow inhalations that lifted his chest. Even from a distance away, I could tell that movement was an effort.

The guards turned their backs on him when he could no longer fight back. Two of them shouldered Millie and carted her from the room.

Ezra went to Fletcher’s side, and after a few moments, he nodded.

I’m not sure what happened next because I blacked out. When I came to, my hearing was spotty, and my vision was hazy at best.

The room was full of people. I recognized some of the faces as men from Ezra’s submarine. Ezra stood at the center of it all presumably shouting directions at everyone.

Vaguely, I wondered where Phoebe was.

I wanted to call out to them. Wanted to remind Ezra about his promise to keep him safe, but then I blacked out again.

I woke up screaming, but that time I could hear the echoes reverberating off of Fletcher’s laboratory walls. Tink was in front of me.

He worked on the restraints that held me to the reactor, but he couldn’t get me loose.

The last thing I saw of Ezra was blurry, and for that, I was sorry. I wanted to apologize for not believing him. I wanted him to hold me again, to stroke my hair. Maybe even kiss me, just one more time.

As he ran in the direction Millie went, and I still couldn’t quite reconcile that she was the same person who raised me, he shouted, “I’ll come back for you!” but he was already fading into darkness.

Tink hovered in front of me, and if he had an expression, I would have thought it would be thoughtful. When I extended my hand in his direction, he moved closer and took it in two of his.

I felt my life draining with each beat of my heart and I didn’t want to be alone.

“What’s … happening?” I asked him, though I was sure I already knew the answer.

“The machines that manage Arliss require a great deal of energy. The mechanical hearts are the balance wheel of it all. They maintain the rhythm. When one dies, we require another or everyone in Arliss will perish.”

I thought of the people again. Ezra’s family. Ezra. My … father. And then Phoebe. There was no telling if we’d ever find another heart to send her home.

“I can help you,” Tink was saying. “I believe you’ll be able to recover with minimal complications if we do it now.”

Even though my energy was rapidly waning, I understood what he was saying. If I removed myself from the machines, Arliss, and all of the people I’d come to care for, would die. But if I didn’t, then I would.

The decision was a surprisingly easy one to make.

“No,” I said firmly. “Just promise me Phoebe will be safe.”

Tink studied me for one long moment, then he said, “With you for a sister, I doubt she will be anything but.”

I tried to reply to his cryptic statement, but found I no longer had the energy to do more than blink.

The next few minutes faded in and out, but in little snapshots; I saw Tink, still hovering over me, but he wasn’t talking anymore, or if he was, I couldn’t hear it again.

Then there was an excruciating bolt of pain straight through my heart.

And then there was nothing at all.

I didn’t float.

There was no bright light.

I didn’t see flashes of my past, present or future.

What there was, was darkness.

Complete and absolute darkness.

It was almost pleasant.

Eerily, it reminded me of when my father’s ship sank and I was suspended in the waves. The waves that brought me to Arliss. To Ezra.

I broke the surface of the water and came awake to a flurry of activity. Women dressed in stark white uniforms worked over me, speaking too quickly for my addled mind to understand. I tried to look down but found that I couldn’t even spare the energy to lift my neck.

I attempted to call out for Phoebe but barely managed to part my lips and expel a wheeze.

This cycle repeated until one morning when I woke up and found Phoebe sitting by my bedside. Beside her was Ezra’s daughter.

For a moment, I was convinced I was dreaming. But then I felt the soft touch of Phoebe’s hand on my hair.

“You’re awake,” she said. And no sound had ever been more welcome, or more beautiful.

Frustrated tears streaked down my face, because tried as I might, I couldn’t get my mouth to form words. My tongue and the inside of my lips were dust dry.

A nurse entered the room with a glass of water, and I sipped greedily until it washed away the brackish taste.

“Phoebe,” I croaked.

“About time you woke up,” Phoebe said. “I’ve been waiting for
ages
.”

“I’m so glad to see you,” I said. She climbed onto my bed and nestled next to my uninjured side. I spoke the next words into her sweet-smelling hair. “I’m never leaving you again.”

And for the next few days, I didn’t let her leave my side. When she was not in my hospital bed, she slept on a cot right next to me.

One day, Ezra’s parents visited, followed by his little girl. I looked for Ezra, but he didn’t follow.

“He’s after Millie, dear,” his mother explained. “No one could stop him. And believe me, the both of us tried.”

“She got away, then?” I asked. The details of that day were still fuzzy.

“Yes, but I don’t doubt he’ll find her. That boy always gets what he wants when he puts his mind to it,” she said.

“What about everyone else?” The healers advised me not to stress myself, so I pushed thoughts of Ezra and Millie from my mind. There was no use worrying until I was healthier. “Fletcher and the crew and Tink?”

“They didn’t—” Ezra’s mother shared a heavy look with her husband. “They didn’t tell you?”

My fingers knotted in the coarse bed sheets. “Didn’t tell me what?” There was a thick silence, so I raised my voice, hoping it didn’t sound as feeble and thin as I thought it did. “Didn’t tell me what?”

“Fletcher didn’t make it, dear,” she said softly.

I blinked back the tears for the father I never got the chance to know. “And Tink? What about Tink?”

“When Millie hooked you up to the reactor, she used up any life your own heart had.”

“Tink, he explained that to me,” I said slowly. “He was going to save me, but I told him not to. I didn’t want anyone here to suffer for me.”

I didn’t understand the tears that filled her eyes, but she wiped them away before I could ask.

“Believe me, that is a debt that can never be repaid. But Tink, dear, he did save you.”

“I’m sorry.” I shook my head as though that would help me think more clearly. “I don’t understand.”

“Tink did save you,” she said again. “He gave you his heart.”

I
could tell
someone was there before they’ve even said a word. My life had existed in a routine for the past six weeks, and any deviation in that routine had a ripple effect on every other person in the clinic.

So when a hush fell over the healers, who were normally so chatty, it made me feel like there was a constant buzzing in the background, I knew something is different.

I hadn’t been very mobile for the past few weeks and I didn’t have much energy, so I didn’t sit up to look around like the patients in the beds on my sides. All I wanted to do, all I’d wanted to do, was sleep. Maybe if I slept long enough, hard enough, I’d dream and then maybe I could convince those dreams to come true. Maybe if I slept long enough, it would make my heart stop hurting.

Which was funny, considering it wasn’t even my heart anymore.

That thought brought tears to my eyes as I remembered Tink and his sacrifice, which only served to make my cry harder because I was being such a baby about it.

The healers had mentioned that the recovery process would be an arduous one, but they never mentioned the emotional anguish I would experience.

It hadn’t occurred to me until afterward that a person could have such heartache, even with a synthetic organ instead of a real one.

I could be grateful for many things, though, and that was what had gotten me through the surgery and the physical therapy. Phoebe was safe and happy and really, that was all that mattered to me.

The Castles were taking good care of her and she had been over the moon that she had a friend her age to play with. Unlike me, the transition to living in Arliss had been an easy one for her. She had smiled more in the past month than I remembered seeing in her whole life, which was bittersweet.

And that was why I got up each day and forced down their tonics and endured the barking orders from the physical therapist slash mechanical engineer who oversaw my heart synthesis. Doctors, or in my case, future doctors, were the worst patients.

Her smiles got me through the pain and the loss. So that was why when I heard footsteps nearing my bed, I sat up, though it cost me. It was not the normal day Phoebe visited, but I could really have used one of her smiles.

But it wasn’t her standing at the foot of my bed clasping a handful of flowers and smiling down at me.

It was Ezra.

A flush stained my cheeks as the monitors went off in a symphony of alerts and beeps in an automatic response to his presence.

The corner of his lips quirked up in the way I remembered and loved so much.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice embarrassingly breathless. “I thought you left.”

“I did,” he said as he came to sit by my side.

My responses played out on the monitors with a series of rapid beeps. “You came back,” I said dumbly.

His fingers traced the side of my face, and I leaned into his cool touch automatically. “Of course.”

“Where did you go?”

He ignored my question and instead leaned down to press a soft sweet kiss on my lips.

I found myself sinking into it until I remembered I was supposed to be upset with him. I pressed a hand to his chest and pushed him back.

“Where did you go?” I repeated.

“Before your father died,” he said, “he made me promise him something.”

My breath caught in my throat, and I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know, but I forced myself to ask anyway. “What?”

“Take a walk with me?” he said instead of answering the question.

I started shaking my head, but he ignored me and put his hands under my arms to lift me to my feet anyway. The soreness and twinge of pain took my breath—and protests—away, so I was on my feet, swaying in front of him, before I could argue.

With the majority of my weight being propped up by his strong arms, I gave in and leaned against his side.

“A short walk,” I said as we made the slow, painstaking journey from the patient rooms to the side entrance that led to a sunny courtyard.

“A short walk,” he agreed. “We can see it from out here.”

He held open the door for me, and I stepped into the watery light. It was a particularly bright day. The swirling ocean on the outside of the capsule was the clearest it had been in a long time. Or at least that’s what everyone kept telling me.

Since I’d been admitted to the clinic after the heart synthesis everyone, it seemed, had stopped by to express their gratitude. The merchants from the city center, the other captains from the submarines, even the curt woman from the bakery stall who I’d met on my first day in Port Arliss.

While everyone, including Phoebe, had been reveling in the positive changes taking place, I’d been mourning. For Tink. For the father I’d never known, and the life I’d left behind.

For Ezra, though, I tried to convince myself it wasn’t mourning because I missed him. It was anger because he left without even saying goodbye.

Over the past six weeks, I’d convinced myself it was for the best. He had
The
Avenger
back. He had his own family to take care of. He had a job to do.

The explanations and reasons were easy; it was believing them that was hard.

I pushed that from my mind and stared out across the roofs in front of me trying to find what he was showing me. “What is it I need to see?” I asked.

He rearranged our position so that he was behind me and I was supported by the porch railing. My eyes closed momentarily as I nearly wilted at the feeling of his strength so close.

His arms turned into a cage around me and he rested his chin on my right shoulder so his voice was low and soft and everything I remembered and missed in my ear.

“Look at the dock there,” he said as he pointed with one arm. “See
The
Avenger?”

I followed the line of his arm and nodded when I found
The
Avenger
. “What about it?”

“See the big shadow just past it?” he asked.

I refocused and squinted, then a gasp escaped my lips. A breathless, “Oh my stars,” escaped my lips.

On the other side of
The
Avenger
was a whale nearly three times the size of the submarine. It swam idly in the water, it’s synthetic stripes nearly glowing in contrast down its vast back.

“What? I don’t—what?” was all I managed to say.

Ezra merely circled his arms around me and pulled me close against his chest. “Before your father died, he made me promise to give you the one thing he never could. He made me promise to give you and Phoebe a choice,” he said. “He made me promise to give you the choice to go home again. To the place where you both grew up. A place where there’s space and land and freedom from this disease. Where you don’t have to be trapped.”

When I tried to speak, his arms tightened around me and he said, “Don’t worry. Before he died, your father learned that we can work with the whales instead of slaughtering them. A costly lesson, but change is made one step at a time and he dreamt of a better future for you and Phoebe.”

I managed to swallow back the lump in my throat and said, “We can go back?”

“Yes,” he said simply.

“This is where you’ve been?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Why?”

“So you can go home, to your world.”

I turned away from the whale, careful to do so without causing myself too much strain. “But why would you do that?” I asked again.

“Your father asked me to.” Ezra shrugged. “He made his mistakes, but your father was a good man who just tried to do the right thing in a time where there were no right choices. When he learned there were things he could do to fix the problems he caused, he did them. The least I could do for him is take care of his daughters.”

“So this is some sort of death bed obligation?”

Ezra nodded. “On one hand, yes.”

“And on the other?” I asked as I began to grow impatient.

He lifted one of my hands to his lips and kissed my knuckles. I blamed the resulting shudder that coursed through me on the light artificial breeze.

“On the other, I love you, Caroline, and I just want you to be happy. Even if that means you can’t be here with me.”

“You wouldn’t come with me?”

He shook his head then, his breathing going harsh. He cupped a hand around my cheek and pulled my lips to his. “I’d come with you in a heartbeat if I could. I’d turn my back on my obligations here, I’d let the world burn for you,” he said.

“But,” I prompted.

“But,” he continued as he pressed his face into my hair, “then I wouldn’t be a man worthy of a woman like you. They need me here, and it would be selfish of me to keep you here and selfish of me to turn my back on a city in need.” He pulled away and tucked my hair behind my ear. “So I’ll let you go, so you can go home and be happy.”

He started to take a step back, but I gripped the lapels of his unbuttoned white shirt to stop him. He looked down at my hands with a furrowed brow and brought his to cover mine.

“Stop,” he said. “I promise it’s okay. You can go home.”

When he made to pull away again, I tightened my grip and surprised us both with my display of strength.

“Caroline?” he said, his voice hoarse. “Don’t.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.

“You need to heal,” he said. “I’ll stay out of your way. I just had to come to expla—”

“No,” I said. “I’m not going home. I’m not leaving Port Arliss. I’m not leaving you.”

His mouth went slack. “But I thought—”

“You thought wrong,” I said.

“But all this time you’ve been fighting so hard to get home.”

This time I shook my head. “No. All this time I
was
fighting to get home. I just didn’t know what home was. Home is Phoebe, happy, truly happy, for the first time in her life. Home is helping people here who truly need my help. Home is this big, beautiful, challenging, dangerous world.” I used my hands to pull him closer so that our lips brushed once, twice. I didn’t think I would ever tire of kissing him. “Home is where you are, Ezra, and that’s where I want to be.”