Peeking past the animal skin Ohre had made our first night in the cave, I watched my crew share in their latest kill. We quickly learned that we couldn’t expect the beasts of this world to avoid us forever, just because we smelled strange. The second day after, a giant cat with long, razor-sharp fangs attacked us and nearly sliced Kahne’s leg in two. Ohre’s power fusion gauntlet saved the day again, blasting it to shreds. Kahne walked with a slight limp after that. Even with my healing powers I almost hadn’t been able to fuse the bone back together again. She never told us whether it gave her pain or not.
I had used my gifts to stitch her up as best I could from the inside out, and we collected our second trophy. While Jymee covered the walls with his scribbles, the boys had lined the opposite wall with bones and treasures from the forest floor. Gem and Menai had taken to painting themselves up with mud every day, called it their “war paint”. It was half off by the end of the sultry days, but it amused them and gave Bruv something to poke fun at them about on our sweeps of the valley.
Arvex kept Hanea close to his chest, surprisingly affectionate to the girl he had formerly barely tolerated in favor of other conquests. Though she had not spoken since the crash, her eyes betrayed warmth whenever Arvex spoke to her.
The children waited after their meal to hear him speak. He always told stories of home world before bed. “Let me tell you something really clever now, mates,” he said. “Something not even the miner knows…”
Ohre was scouting the area he had claimed for our territory and I pretended I wasn’t also standing outside to watch for his return. Otherwise Arvex would never dare talk about what the miner did and didn’t know.
“Hear that, Gem? The King’s going to tell us a story!” Menai’s teeth seemed exceptionally white on his mud-caked face.
Gem was too busy poking Kahne to pick up on his brother’s comment and Bruv was sending him death glares. Kahne refused anymore of the twins’ kisses until they started taking real baths again. “Get off of me, you filthy wreen!”
Gem might have been put out had his brother not jabbed him hard in his bare chest. “Ow! I’m listening!” He rubbed his chest as though it had been a scythe wound. Another annoying habit the twins had taken to was wearing their shirts around their heads or their waists depending on the time of day. They also liked to string the teeth and claws of our victims from the twine about their necks.
Now convinced he was the center of attention once again, Arvex began, “Once, back on Datura, we all lived underwater.”
“All of us?” Jymee piped up and paused his burning the end of a stick in the fire pit.
“Aye, that was the way of things,” Arvex replied with a wink. “Now everyone knows the miners lived deep in places none of our kind could ever go. For an age, the peace was kept because of this. But then… Can anyone tell me what happened next?”
Kahne smiled as she added, “Then the miners came to our palaces and wanted to steal our ways. They told stories about how our palaces were once theirs, which everyone knows is mindless. How could miners build something so beautiful?”
Bruv continued the tale, stared broodingly at his scythe and the markings on it that belonged to his house. “Miners only knew one thing: how to dig deep and fast and hold up long. They could defeat us because we couldn’t chase them to their caves, so we came to land first, to escape.”
Arvex nodded, finishing the story we all knew best. “This is how things began for us, all those ages ago. When the miners finally came to see why we had left our palaces, they couldn’t fight us above ground. Too long they had spent in the deep dark places. They hated the light so much, they found caves above ground too, and here made their discoveries.”
I could have added the honest truth none of our people would confess to. The miners might have wanted our palaces once upon a distant age, but we wanted their resources even more. We wanted what they had so badly we fought an age until we had enslaved them.
“Watching from the outside again, Navigator?” Ohre’s voice startled me so that I nearly took his neck off. His eyes shone through the darkness; firelight from within glinted off my retractable scythe blade unbound and held to his neck. My people had always been faster than his. From the way he was grinning now, I don’t think he minded.
“Care to step away, miner? You’ve been beaten.”
Yet his lips parted to reveal his two rows of white pointed teeth. “Are you so certain?”
I felt something sharp press my belly and gasped, narrowing my gaze. My inner eyelids closed protectively and I blushed after glancing down to find a black blade held at my belly. Made from some polished, shiny rock, I had seen Ohre use it to skin our kills many times before. Pushing away from him I hooked my blade to my tool belt and faced the drop leading to the forest, welcoming the chill of night.
I fought the urge to swim, something only my brother had been able to inspire me to do as a child. Not everyone felt the same way about the sea. Some of us chose not to remember out past in the ocean but the memories were never far from me. For me breathing underwater was a natural as on land. Arvex loved the empty underwater palaces and often dragged me into his schemes to sneak out of our home to visit them. I rebelled against my own nature often. A leader can’t always do what they wish, even if the waters seem too welcome to resist. Now every time I was around Ohre my gills parted, desperate to breathe the waters in. To me, this made him dangerous.
He stood silently beside me, dropping yet another scaly creature at our door. “Any luck calling on the stars?”
I sighed, regretting I had opened up to him the night before and admitted to the reason behind my nightly vigils. “No, but I’d rather stay out here than face them.”
Ohre nodded, understanding and so subtly I might have missed the move, reached for and took my hand in his. “Power’s almost shot in that scanner. Won’t be long before it don’t work and you have to face the hard truth, orona.”
I wanted to pull away and shout at him as I had done before with Arvex. Instead I nodded and felt my inner lids close hard as my emotions choked me. “We’re going to find them tomorrow, Ohre. I’m not giving up.”
I hadn’t told him about Tamn, but somehow I supposed that he already knew. He knew so much about me just through touch. Twisting to face him I remembered again how much taller than me he was. The intensity of his gaze was only something I ever saw directed at me and I hadn’t forgotten his words or what he hadn’t said. His gills flared the longer I stared up at him, waiting, wondering if I should give into the new emotions I felt every time his fingers brushed my bare skin.
“Qeya…” he breathed as he traced the sharp line of my jaw and dipped into my unbound hair.
Frowning, I felt my mind take control the instant he said my name and tried pulling away. “Don’t you dare—” I was interrupted by his lips on mine, by the quick tug and draw of my body into his arms. I was lifted up, clamped into his hard rigid lines and his mouth was moving over mine, coaxing a response. My scream died the moment I felt his tongue and then I felt lost to a kind of gut-jolting fire that boils the rest of its way through your blood. For a brief, yet endless moment of joy I raked my nails over his bare tattooed scalp and ignored the random wish we were underwater.
My eyes bolted open, and I used all of my strength to push away from him. He was stronger than me, than my kind, but he let me go the instant I resisted. Yet his eyes were still burning with that fire I felt melting my bones and still tingling my flesh till every hair stood on end. I gaped at him, breathless and trying to give him a piece of my mind. He waited, poised against the rock like the predators he hunted every night, watching for my move. When I gave none he gradually relaxed and a slow smile spread across his face.
That was what set me off, and the words tumbled out of my mouth. “How dare you touch me you—you miner!” Rushing up, I kicked him in the shin and darted inside, trying to ignore the echo of his laughter behind me.
VII: FOUND
Of course the m
iner had to go and ruin things by kissing me, I later reasoned as we began to comb the valley floor one last time. I shook the scanner, realizing the technology wasn’t going to suddenly function swimmingly in response to my physical maiming. Ohre once told me that you had to treat metal like a child, at times gently and others firmly for its own good. But he warned I wasn’t helping anything by beating it against the rocks.
I was brought out of my inner groaning by my brother’s voice.
“And furthermore, how would you feel if you woke up washed clean and wearing your real clothes again, mate? Not very happy, I assure you!”
Arvex was warning Menai over the twins’ latest prank. My brother had not appreciated waking up with his face covered in mud and twigs sticking out of his hair. But he liked the dragon-tooth necklace, our name for the beasts we had killed to inhabit their cave. As punishment, after learning whose idea it had been, Gem was ordered to remain with Hanea and an almost-healed Jymee.
“You gotta admit you look better dressed like us,” Menai said while rubbing a hand over his shaved head. He had taken to shearing off the single spiked strip soon after our first day, now that he had no gel to keep it upright. I think he just liked the fact that with his bald head he looked more like a miner than the Royal heir he was.
As if he could hear my thoughts, Ohre appeared at my side, letting Kahne and Bruv take the front. I was paranoid, my skin itching to touch his, wondering how it would feel to kiss him again. Love had never been a factor in most Royal alliances. Our people were above such primal passions. Or so I had been led to believe. The way Arvex was with Hanea was making me think otherwise, for ever since we had crashed on the beach their affection had grown deeper and sprouted roots.
Much as my soul ached for my intended, the things I felt when I was around Ohre, his ability to make me feel strong or vulnerable as I needed to be, I wasn’t willing to turn away.
Nodding to my scanner he said, “How it be cranking there, Navigator?”
I sighed and held the screen up for his inspection. “It keeps blinking out on me. I knew we were pushing it. We should have found them by now, but the signal keeps moving. Every day it’s somewhere new. Now that it’s closer than ever before I’m afraid it’s going to phase out on me.”
Grinning roguishly at me he said, “Never fear, Royal. We miners have more than a few tricks up our gills.”
Rolling my eyes at his cleverness, I watched him from the corner of my eye as he bent slightly to inspect his people’s creation. Like almost all our heaven travelling technology, it was miner designed and made. The more time I actually spent around one of them, the more I was convinced there was nothing he couldn’t do.
The air cracked and tensed and then his eyes took to glowing a luminous blue. I had watched this oddity before, one of the tricks he alluded to. There was so much we hadn’t bothered to learn about his people. The metal we brought from the ship should have died days ago without being recharged by the ship’s power fuels, yet Ohre had somehow learned the secret to keeping the technology and us alive.
The twins’ banter fell silent the instant we entered the deep woods. Nearest the rocky caves, the mountain range was bare of most life until the grassy strip that bordered the edge of the forest. We had discovered the majority of predators lived here and learned to avoid most of their territory. The twins had taken to mapping out areas from bark they stripped from the trees and marked with Jymee’s little stones. This was exactly how we knew we were entering dangerous territory.
Massive plant-eating creatures and their small counterparts grazed in the sparse tree line, but deeper within the forest was darker and dangerously quiet. Here the prey knew to be silent and farther in, a place not even the alien monsters dared to roam, we knew something was off.
The day before, Gem had nearly been lost in a sinkhole before Bruv rushed fast enough to catch him by the arm. Ohre had dragged them both out with his greater strength and from then on we knew exactly what to watch for. The ground was also moist and tended to suck at the heels of your boots if you weren’t careful. And no matter where we trod, I couldn’t shake the feeling of silent eyes watching us from the dark shadows.
“Qeya, it’s too hot to keep going like this!” Arvex finally spoke up again, finished with his sulking. I dearly loved my brother, but sometimes he could be such a pain in the gears.
Grinning back at him, I called out in a simpering voice, “Poor little prince misses his mechanically controlled air system?”
Narrowing his eyes at me, he was unable to hide his grin and replied, “You just wish you had my stamina, little sister, but then again, I did inherit all the perfect genes.” Pointing to the sky discreetly, I followed his direction and found the star directly overhead.
Biting my lip, I tried to quell the panic rising inside my gut. That was our cut-off point every day. We knew better than to wander the forest at night and it would take us another half of the day just to march back up those rocks. We were running out of time. And the longer we waited, the less likely the chance we would find the shuttle crew again.
“Let’s turn back,” I said, giving in. “Arvex, you lead this time. Ohre and I’ll take up the stern.”
“Aye, best plan you’ve had all day.” The golden prince saluted me and grinned at our crew. “Come along, mates! Freshly chopped up alien meat awaits us!”
I shook my head, but smiled faintly. Against my will I was already starting to relax, just thinking about lying down on my pallet in our cave. I would never call this hostile world my home, but for now at least, it was something. And I would rather have a part of my crew and shelter than nothing.
Just as we were all ready to begin the march back to the caves, Arvex shouted over to me, “Qeya! Your scanner!” It was flashing wildly, though no sign of the Pioneer was in sight.
“I don’t understand,” I said. I hadn’t been paying attention to the device in my hands, and was surprised my brother noticed the faint beeping before I did. His hearing had always been better than mine above water.
Ohre’s gruff voice was close to my ear. “They must have the beacon with them.”
We stopped, clustered together in the mud of the inner forest and I held the scanner closer to my eyes to determine the distance between us and the Pioneer. My gills were flaring as my nerves woke afresh. We were so close. Would I see Qori, the twins’ sister, and her mate Min, Hanea’s older brother? I was afraid to believe Tamn could still be alive now; afraid if I did, his face would be the one to fade with my memories forever.
“Look out!” A strange voice cried out over our heads.
The children screamed when a pack of belly-crawling creatures rushed from the trees, swarming to where we had gathered, drawing us deeper into the forest. Ohre cursed, rushed to attach his weapon to his gauntlet and our blades were already out. We made a circle, back to back, our best defense for this kind of close-up fight.
I heard Menai shout out, “Qori! We’re over here!”
And then the voice I had not heard in what felt like ages, the voice I had heard almost every day of my life, calling to me, “Hang on, Qeya!” My eyes wildly flung about the trees to the source of our warning, and I cried out in relief and shock at the faces rushing in front of us.
I couldn’t distinguish Tamn from the blur their figures made in the trees around us.
A flurry of alien screams and beastly snarls was accompanied by the blast and slice of Daturan weaponry. We used our blades when the feral beasts attempted to blaze through us, suddenly desperate for an escape. Their wings fluttered then twitched as they died, jaws still working even after life escaped them.
Somewhere in the near distance I heard a child’s voice erupt in a blood-curdling cry.
I gasped for breath, watched while the tall silhouettes of our missing shuttle crew darted between trunks in an ever-tightening circle. Quickly realizing they were trying to trap them between our two crews, I felt true relief for the first time since the crash. We had found them, or perha
ps they found us—I was never certain, really.
The shuttle crew’s frames were gradually leaving the shadows, approaching the pockets of light that had escaped through the tree tops and reached the forest floor. As they darted through the aliens and propelled their way around us in an expert weaving formation, I saw the spiraling and jagged tattoos of two miners, pumping energy beams out of their handheld weaponry. Occasionally they used brute strength to smack the leaping creatures back into the air, ending on one of our blades and Ohre’s expert shot. Two of the Pioneer adults moved faster and taller, with an age of experience over the best of us, so their scythes literally looked like ribbons in the water. Yet it was the flash of silvery hair that made my gills constrict and my voice catch in the back of my throat. It could have been Min, I reasoned, but I could have sworn I heard Tamn’s voice before the attack.
It was over almost as quickly as it had begun. Within seconds the lost shuttle crew had dispatched the vicious creatures with scythes and miner weaponry. A brief silence followed the swarm’s demise, while we stared back at one another as if disbelieving the hunans standing in front of us.
The shuttle crew had always carried eight members: two miners, three adults and three ascended youth. I already counted one adult missing from what remained of the Pioneer, but was more than relieved to see two adults and an older miner among the crew. Their faces were swept with grief and terror as they surrounded Arvex, demanding answers. It was not the news they wanted. Their children were among the ones we’d left behind.
Qeya (Heaven's Edge Novellas Book 1) Page 7