Ohre (Heaven's Edge) (2 page)

“She came below, Adi, to fourth deck. What was I supposed to do, let her burn up too?” The very thought of her red hair burning in those flames was enough to make my gills stretch and my inner eyelids rapidly blink.

“Aye!” Adie growled, twisting to face me. She might have stood a head lower but she was no less formidable when angered. It took every ounce of control I claimed when she grabbed me by the helmet hook on the collar of my biosuit and pulled me to her eyelevel. “A true miner would have rather burned than help
them
! But you, you
filsh-
loving loon…” She released me with enough force, I might have tumbled into the fire were I weaker. “I saw the way you look at
her
, Ohre. You may have fooled yourself into thinking you cared, but you and I know she hasn’t the bully to handle you. We don’t mix with them because they’re not like us.

“
And soon as we find the
Pioneer
, we’ll find another ship to mine. But we won’t sail the heavens blind no more. No, we’ll gather the other refugees, unite the old clans and take back what be ours…” She broke at the end, choked by the water leaking from her eyes. Only females of our kind could shed water, for reasons we had forgotten.

I breathed the smoke in deeply and tried to picture that life, the revolution we had all been itching for, ever since
they were betrayed by one of their own kind and the alliance invaded home world. All I could see when I opened my eyes was a mane of bright red hair and mismatched golden eyes that glowed in the darkness. I blinked and frowned. “Qeya,” I breathed.

“What?” Adi lifted her head and trained her ferocity on me. “You’re still talking about her? Why can’t you get her out of your water
-logged head?”

I couldn’t look away, however, from the figure standing on the opposite side of our death pit.
I shook my head and pointed. “No, she be here with us.”

Adi’s form ripp
led as she gathered her control into a mask to hide her hatred behind. She would simmer down later, I knew. All of her clan had whispered she spent too much time on the
Pioneer
with the Royals. Her talk came from guilt as much as ingrained prejudice, I think. Because she had taken every chance she could to keep off
Datura 3
and less with the ones that raised her.

Qeya was dressed in the same orange biosuit
that Adi’s clan had designed. There were subtle changes about her, though. Fresh lines had given her large mismatched eyes and full lips more depth. She had grown into the role she was born to play. With the memories of her ancestors tumbling about in her head, she was instantly older and more naïve than I would ever be.

“Come to mourn your dead, have you, Orona?” Adi spat with false frigidity.

Qeya froze and tucked her bottom lip between her teeth. That action alone was enough to make me squeeze my fists and fight the instinct to claim her in some way. I wanted her even more, even after she had chosen
him
. Anyone with a brain could see the strength her fragility was hiding inside. To the others, Qeya had become more than their leader, because instead of grieving, she used it to hone her strength. Trouble was, she was like a boiler filled with too much gas. One of these days she was bound to build up too much pressure and blow.

Her eyes flicked to mine and she lifted her chin, as if remembering herself. Her voice rang clearly, cultured and proper like all Royals. “
I needed to say goodbye,” she said, answering Adi’s wrath.

I flinched when she shifted and seemed to be standing at the center of the flames. I moved to stand beside her, unable to shake the awful images from my head.

What would have happened if she hadn’t come looking for me?

Adi huffed and pulled her emitter from her belt. “I’m going to have a look at those power cells.” My eyes followed her as she went inside
the shipwreck. I knew she was going to watch the slides of home world again, too. Below decks, we had never been allowed to see the frames taken from home. When Adi and I came to burn and salvage, those glitched slides were the first thing to greet us.

Qeya stepped into my line of vision, blocking my view of the ship. Her skin glowed in the firelight as she crossed her arms over her chest. “I did not mean to send her away.”

I smirked and closed the remaining distance between us, so our arms brushed together and I could pretend Adi wasn’t right about us. Pretend that it didn’t affect me to touch her because I was stronger than she believed, than any of them knew. “She blames herself for what happened on the ship; thinks if she had been there she would have sensed it sooner.”

Qeya frowned and my smile grew with her confusion. “How could any of you have sensed what those aliens would do?”

“Old Brien had the same gift. Adi was the daughter of his firstborn. Some is just born with the knack for seeing trouble afore it happens. Brien told me the gift was more common when they still lived in the sea. Mining on land changed that, he believed.”

She nodded and though she didn’t realize, leaned sli
ghtly closer to me when she answered, “It’s like that for us, too. We didn’t want the miners to know our gifts had weakened so greatly in the last three generations. We only had enough in the Royal family to stop the last miner uprising…” She paused and pressed her fingers to her gills as her voice wavered. “Sorry, these memories are hard to control for me sometimes. Usually we have more time to prepare for our ascension.” She breathed in and out deeply, so even her gills fluttered. And then she said, “No one really remembers where the gifts came from, but our legends say we were strong enough to stop the bottom dwellers’ strength and even make the core seep into the sea to destroy their homes.”

I sucked in a sharp breath and grimaced before pushing an unwanted memory away. “So is that why you
pale gills work so hard to learn the scythe.”

“Outside of the ten greatest families, the gifts had faded to nothing better than moving small objects with their minds. My brother and I, the other children that were on
Datura 3
, we were the last to show any promise. Our parents never told us this. We learned after their deaths when their memories fell to us.”

We both turned our heads
at the sound of metal crashing into metal inside the ruined deck. Adi’s voice echoed the cacophony. “Steam wirms!” Neither of us tried to hide our grins. But I could see the burden behind her gaze and I wanted to lighten the heavy mood. Best she didn’t think too much on something she couldn’t help now.

“So,” I said, testing her waters, “how goes life in the village?” When she gave no answer, I turned to face her. “Do they know you be here?”

Her translucent inner lids shut and opened rapidly as she closed her lips together. “No,” she whispered.

Only one person would have
enough reason to stop her from coming here tonight and I couldn’t think about Tamn without switching my gauntlet to its highest setting and burning the white gills off his pale skin. I looked back at the fire and tried to focus some of my rage into it. We had learned how to not act like the barbarians the Royals treated us as. But that didn’t mean the instinct to lash out wasn’t still brewing inside us.

She surprised me when she spoke again, stronger this time. “Arvex and Ta—the others, are still looking for the adults. After saving us from the Var, they still have not returned.
Ta—Min and Corrie have been worried.”

I nodded.
“After watching them spear old Battleaxe, I would think you would be               brainless not to fear.” It still burned me to think of the loss of Old Brien’s son. He had been the expert at turning Adi’s
chole
dust into an alternative fuel source. We quickly learned that a relatively small amount could power a ship for at least ten leagues, while the old
filsh
only lasted not even a pinch of that. And I couldn’t deny the fact that, once again, one of my people had sacrificed themselves for a Royal. It seemed our lot in life.

Qeya had
grown quiet again, drawing into herself and I shifted closer to her, wishing I could carry her with my strength. Had I not known that other Royal was better for her than me, I would have asked her to come back to the caves with Adi and me, and ignored the leaking consequences.

Never talking about
old pale-gills Tamn again would have been just fine with me. But he had not died in the last attack, against the wishes of my darker side. And I stupidly hoped if I spoke of him, she might feel safer with me, might hover longer. So I said, “How be your Tamn?” I watched carefully as her lips parted slightly and her inner lids blinked.

“
He’s swimming along well enough. I healed the last of his injuries. But,” she hesitated and then said, “He has been affected by this, in more ways than the children. The things the
Pioneer
crew saw and endured were different. We had hope that they might be out there still. He didn’t.”

“And, how was the
bonding ceremony?” I tried to calm my waters when I said this, but it wasn’t easy. I couldn’t have cared less what Tamn and the other Royals went through. Not with the memory of those nights I spent looking after her and the children she had mentioned. Never in all my life would I have expected to grow close to any Royals. But I too mourned the death of Menai, who had wanted so badly to look like me. Of all the memories I carried from that time, the crash and finding the caves, Menai’s death and running from those leaking sentient forest devils, watching Qeya run into Tamn’s arms, had wounded me most.

“There was no ceremony
. Hasn’t been one yet at least,” she said softly and infused me with a hope I hadn’t known since our ship came crashing down and my only wish came true.

My hand grasped hers, turning her towards me and bringing her body so it caved into mine. My chest burst with feelings. I could hear her pulse pick up and then everything about her seemed heightened to my senses, the feel of her smooth skin and the way her eyes blinked up at me with uncertainty and something more. My eyes fell to her lips and I remembered the last time I had tasted them. I wondered what she would do if I tried to claim her again. She might have every right to push me away.

But she came here for more than a primal need to say farewell to her past. I trusted this instinct as I leaned over her and lightly pressed my mouth to the gills fluttering against the side of her neck. She gasped and her fingers tightened against my arms. I didn’t know if she was pulling me to her or pushing me away and I didn’t get the chance to find out.

Adi’s voice carried through the ship’s metal casing long before she came rushing out of the opening.
“Dugong cows! I can’t believe my eyes!”

Qeya jerked out of my embrace and I stubbornly kept her hand enclosed in mine. I wasn’t
planning on letting go of her again until I knew for sure she could say no to me forever.

Adi’s arms were coated in slick white goop from the ship’s wiring and some had been wiped on her biosuit. In her hands, she held a scanner, the surface of which was casting her face
in red and black lights. It was the happiest I had seen her since the day she discovered
chole
dust on our first expedition on the gas giants beyond the core worlds. “Ohre!” She was practically laughing when she came bounding up to stand between us, her eyes aglow with a blue sheen. Spending too much time in dark places tended to do that to my kind. And we had engineered our technology so only our special vision could comprehend all its parts. “Here!” she said, thrusting the scanner into my free hand. For once, she didn’t glare at my red-haired Royal.

“Look! Can you see it? Right there! I found this old thing fully charged and resting in a panel underneath the main controls.” Narrowing her eyes with self-satisfaction
at Qeya, she added, “Shame you Royals never thought to look for this. It was set with coordinates to the
Pioneer
. Tamn must have planted this on your deck before we left. None of the rest of them would have thought of a backup plan, in case something ever went to the bleeding pits.”

Qeya’s fingers tightened on mine and her other arm shifted so she could clutch the retractable scythe blade on her tool belt. After sharing a secret grin with the flustered
orona
, I lifted the scanner for my own inspection. Using our infrablue vision, I saw past the crude outlines of the shallow sea we were camped beside. The tunnels beneath our feet brought the sea through caves that eventually bled into the mountain range, eventually spilling into freshwater rivers.

“Here it
be, at last!” I said with a growl. “You were marked for sure about it being so close by.” Adi flashed me another grin, but not before I caught her disturbed glance at Qeya’s hand trapped in mine.

Snatching the scanner from my hand, she walked around the death pit and closer to where the water washed over the wet sands. “It shouldn’t be far. Just a quick swim in the deep and we can snatch what we need.”

I only felt a brief pull on my hand before Qeya followed me past the fire and to the shoreline. The wind made the sea choppy and unpredictable. We didn’t know these currents, but already I had tasted the mineral-rich waters. This world was filled with dangers we had only begun to grasp. My gut told me the worst be underneath those waves. But Tamn had shared the unexplained things they had seen during their escape from the sinking
Pioneer
.