Free Mechanical Hearts (Skeleton Key) by Nicole Blanchard, Skeleton Key Page A

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