Qeya (Heaven's Edge Novellas Book 1)

by Jennifer Silverwood

  I grimaced when Arvex shifted me in his arms so I was trapped against the wood railing and Hanea on the other side. The children’s voices could be heard long before their pounding footsteps signaled their coming.

  “Qeya!” I could hear Jymee’s small voice screeching over the din of foreign voices. I had avoided looking at the Nuki people so far. Too much had happened too quickly and I was having trouble taking it all in. Not that I would admit that to anyone but myself.

  Kahne called after Jymee, “Wait! Jymee!”

  Bruv grunted, “If he gets caught in those vines again, Kahne!”

  “Oh shut your trap, Bruv!” Kahne called back and I couldn’t help but laugh at their faces when they came barreling into me, even the stoic Bruv. My best scythe students held me in a way that would have never been acceptable on Datura 3. Physical affection was avoided among the young. Better to keep focused on the task, on the next lesson, the adults had always told us.

  And as I squeezed the children back, I realized the miners had been right about this much. Feelings weren’t something to tuck away and burry deep inside. Once, my people had known this. Somewhere down our line, we Royals forgot. And though I had always suspected that the miners were not lesser than we were—despite having been taught otherwise—now I wasn’t afraid to admit it.

  I saw no sign of Gem and his sister Qori, or Hanea’s other brother, Min. When I asked, Hanea laughed and said, “Oh they have made friends with the Nuki. They’re always up in the village, talking with the council. Min says their language is fascinating, but I find it sounds utterly disgusting.” She scrunched her nose in a way that looked so like the Hanea I used to know, before the crash.

  In a way I was glad I didn’t have to face Gem just yet. I didn’t know if I could stand to face the look in his eyes, after losing Menai.

  They spoke over one another, until I was having trouble focusing and even breathing became a challenge. I met Ohre’s eyes over the children’s heads and we shared a knowing smirk. He had known I was not ready for this. But like everything else, I had found we are hardly ever truly ready for the challenges the heavens throw our way.

  “Come, Navigator. You should conserve your waters.” Ohre led me back into the hut where I could sit and still listen to my brother and the others as they filed in behind us.

  “We went back to find the others after the Nuki found us,” Arvex was saying. “He almost didn’t make it. Hid in the underbrush in mud so they couldn’t find him.”

  What is he saying? I wondered. My heart began to pound with his words as hope and fear welled up in me. “Who hid?” I asked and Arvex glanced to Hanea. They looked worriedly back and forth at one another.

  “He didn’t tell you?” Arvex’s eyes hardened and he turned back to glare at the miner once more.

  “I was ab—” began Ohre.

  “Shush, no need, miner. Arvex, love, be calm.” Hanea put up a hand, which managed to quiet both men simultaneously.

  I smiled absently to see Hanea’s once vibrant personality returned. Maybe she wouldn’t be a simple figurehead beside my brother after all. Instead of acting as both Queen and Orona, maybe I could focus on teaching and healing, as I was meant to all along. I had a renewed flicker of hope that the three of us might prevail at leading our people after all.

  Lifting my gaze past him to the open door of the hut and the walkway beyond, I froze and all sound faded to a dull blur. It was as though everything had been submerged and I was hearing and seeing from under the waters. Words, at least the kind that were spoken on land, had no meaning there. Only sight, shared thoughts and feeling.

  A figure was approaching us, from the same direction as the children had come running. His steps were labored and the light blazing through the canopy washed his form in a golden light. His features were so light it made him seem to glow from within. I wondered if I were still dreaming after all, about to wake up in that strange vine and leaf-made bed.

  The tall hunan limping quickly from the opposite end of the platform had to use a wooden stick to support his wrapped legs.

  My lips formed his name long before I began to rise again and move toward him.

  “Qeya?” I heard his voice, weaker than I had ever heard it before. It was that weakness that made the waters flush out from my ears so I could hear again.

  “Tamn!” I choked out his name and my legs carried me past my family, past Ohre and the small, furred, alien beings watching on. All thoughts of the miner and the other life he represented were washed away with those waters. Tamn was my first love, my truest friend. So of course, the moment he confessed his love for me I knew I loved him just as fiercely back. Without a second thought I ran as quickly as my tired legs could carry me and crushed myself into his solid frame.

  “Qeya!” he cried against my neck and in spite of his injuries lifted me until my feet were off the ground and around his waist.

  I laughed and held his face between my palms. There was something about being alive when we had been so close to death, to seeing another face I had thought only to see again in my memories and dreams. “How did you make it out of that death trap?”

  “By the edge of my gills,” he whispered, hoarsely, reminding me he was not completely healed just yet. But there was strength in his silver eyes that I needed. I sank into him when he kissed me and added, “I had a much better reason to live than the others.”

  Feeling Tamn’s arms around me, resurrected things I had hoped for ever since our first days in this valley. Most of our time had been spent struggling to survive the day to devote to our studies. But now that we had a promise, even a sliver of peace, I could hear their voices in my head again, the ones who came before me. I could hear them telling me to carry on our lessons. Only this time, we weren’t prepping to rule a planet. We were preserving a culture and maybe we could take the lessons we had been taught and share them with the Nuki. Maybe we could, if not have a palace, create something lasting that would carry on with our children one day.

  The others interrupted us soon after, though Tamn never let me leave his side. When I remembered to look for Ohre, a sick and twisted guilt hooked my gut. The look on his face when I awoke, the sorrow in his eyes even as he laughed with me in the treetop hut were all I had left of the miner I also loved. Because when I looked past my family and friends, he was gone.

  The forest floor was a dark and dangerous place, the Nuki people later told us. They learned long ago to keep away from the war-loving Var. And because they too watched us fall from the heavens, they offered us a place to keep away from our shared enemy. It seemed to them as if we had been sent for a purpose not even they admitted to us. In turn we would help to protect them.

  Ohre and the other young miner Adi chose not to stay with us, but returned soon after to the cave we found. Neither one felt at ease so high off the ground, and the caves reminded them a bit of home world. I didn’t know it then, but Ohre knew the best choice for me. Because he loved me as only a miner can love, he let me go. I only hoped I could do the same thing for him in return one day.

  Arvex and I both became leaders before our time, accomplishing things beyond anything our parents had dreamed for us. Scars are impossible to rub away and only fade with time. We all carried scars of home world, of Datura 3 and what happened after, with us every day. But between the things we had carried with us and the memories in our hearts, we learned how to keep the past alive while turning the tide to a new and different future.

  What happened after, as we struggled to graft into this new home world, the choices I faced, and whether or not I would choose the forbidden cast of green over silver, are another story to tell. Only know that for now we all found our happiness. We felt and laughed and lived how we wanted to live. And in the end, each of us found a way to live a different kind of dreaming.

  To be continued in, Ohre: A Heaven’s Edge Novella

  I: REBUILDING

  The first time I saw her was the moment my life began. Living in the eternal dar
kness of the lower decks I had heard rumors about the royal family. We all knew it was their fault we were stuck on Datura 3 forever sailing the stars without a port of call. Sure, there was plenty to mine and every pirate ship we came across paid us thousands for our goods. For some below it was the dream life, far better than scrapping it in the deep cave wastes on home world. But I hadn’t spent all my days on a miner ship. I still remembered the smell of salty sea air and the glow of the undersea palaces at night.

  As a boy I slipped out of the slums, past the guard and into that sea to catch a glimpse of it. Something the royals didn’t know or had chosen to forget was we came from the sea too. The underwater caverns opened up inside the abandoned palaces. I spent a hundred nights or less exploring these forbidden places. Countless times I nearly lost my life, but the sea meant true freedom for me.

  Somewhere down the ages we forgot that, we abandoned our first homes. Few lived below the waves now, save the wild ones we didn’t speak of—old clans that it was said had never surfaced. When I was a boy I wanted to join them, but Old Brien said that was just crazy water-logging talk. Ever since the wars in which my kind lost, we stuck to what we did best: mining the core. “And that’s all you’ll ever be good for, boy,” Brien would say. “Just remember that next time you go risking your neck below.”

  When I had more fool than sense I used to argue back, “But we were great once, weren’t we, Brien? We could be great again!” I meant it too. When the palaces grew wearisome I slipped a bit deeper than even licensed divers were allowed. The Royals could never go as deep as us, had forgotten how to breathe when the water pressed you so hard your mind saw new colors. That was when I learned the hidden truth not even Old Brien wanted to remember. My people had come first.

  “Are you just going to stare at the blowing sea all day or pick up a blasting shovel and help me?” Adi’s harsh voice cut me from my reverie, and brought me back to the present.

  Like all miners, Adi was hairless save a thick fringe of eyelashes only the females had. Though she was smaller than me she was swarthier than a Royal and by our standards beautiful. Her tattoos were similar to mine, of the same jagged lines beginning over her scalp and covering her face and neck, but they were lined with blue chole dust. Chole was very rare and in our journey we had only gathered a single vial of the precious mineral. Adi had chosen to mark herself with it because she was the miner who discovered it.

  Adi wasn’t like me. She had been born and raised in the heavens above, on this very ship we were salvaging, in fact. Even though she was chosen to join the Pioneer crew as their chief tactician in dealing with hostile worlds, her heart remained on Datura 3. A part of her had died the day it was blown to bits. As terrifying an experience as it had been for those of us on board, Adi had watched from the surface of Nukvar. Half of her blood family had been on that ship.

  So while I had agreed it better to return to the caves where we could at least be close to the sea, Adi was the one pushing me to rebuild. “We is just as smart as Old Brien or any of them ever was, Ohre!” she had claimed to me the other day. While I doubted we could manage to haul the abandoned shuttle from its watery grave, she was brimbling with confidence. Some on board Datura 3 had considered her a nuisance, a child playing at adult games. Her beliefs bordered on arrogance easily. But I cared little.

  Gritting my teeth, I fought the urge to hurl up the fish we had caught and cooked for breakfast. The stench from the pile of mangled bodies waiting behind me was overwhelming to our overdeveloped sense of smell.

  For the better part of the day Adi and I split our work in half. She dug the trench needed to bury our dead from the Datura 3, and I brought the bodies out of the deck onto the white sand. This is how we learned no living creatures lived in the sand bar lining the mountains and sea. Nothing had entered the wreckage through the hole I blasted free after the crash, leaving the bodies stinking but intact.

  Some miners would have gladly taken my job, spat on the grave and said good riddance to the Royal scabs. Others would have set the whole ruined deck on fire and never flinched from what they considered duty. My opinion lay somewhere between that thin line of hate and honor toward those who had shaped my life.

  But most of the bodies were nearly a third of my size. Here they didn’t decay as quickly as we had expected. Expressions of terror and pain were frozen on their faces, gills on the sides of their necks blackened with death, open in desperation to breathe the water in. Even in the end, our bodies tried to return to our first home, the sea. For a moment I wondered if we should throw them into the alien ocean. An old legend said when we were returned to the sea we became the water and began a new and better life. If I knew the bodies would keep I would. If I could guarantee the cold gilled devils that hunted us wouldn’t come back looking I might have done it anyway.

  But if we had any hope of salvaging the technology from second deck, we had no other choice. At least we could handle the work without the burden of burying our families. Qeya would have pretended to stomach it, while secretly dying on the inside. That was her way, burying her woes until I had to come and pick her spirits back up again.

  With blood-streaked hands I picked up another child and dumped them into Adi’s deep trench. All of my kind had hated the Royals, save those pampered few who worked for them in the palaces. Now that we were so far removed from home world things had changed. Even Adi’s sharply featured, lovely face contorted in sorrow as she continued to dig. I watched as she wiped the sweat off her gray skin.

  Soon as we finished here and scrapped the parts we needed from deck two we would search for the Pioneer. I was curious to see what this new sea held to offer. Qeya had been reluctant to leave the valley, even though she promised to come and help us. “They all count on me, Ohre,” she had said. True as this might be, I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t helping Adi to keep my mind off of things, off her, the Royal I had stupidly fallen in love with.

  OTHER BOOKS

  Heaven’s Edge

  Qeya

  Ohre

  Wylder Tales

  Craving Beauty

  Wolfsbane’s Daughter

  Silver Hollow

  Stay

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novella wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of my editor, Jessica Augustsson who is a true literary genius. My cover designer, Naj, thank you for your quick fixes that made the cover look professional. Also, thanks to Krystin and my parents for helping to give me the backbone to fine-tune this. And last but not least, thank you Grandpa for sharing your love of writing and the written word in the first place.

  I started writing from an early age, pounding on the antique typewriter my grandpa gave me. From there I started writing a series of short stories about a group of kids who crash land on an alien planet. As you might have guessed, the Heaven’s Edge series stemmed from those childhood ideas.

  Please feel free to contact me through the links listed below to find information on upcoming books. I love hearing from readers and other authors. Being new to the game myself, I’m always happy to help others follow their dreams.

  Website: www.jennifersilverwood.com

  Blog: www.silverwoodsketches.blogspot.com/

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