“We never pretended to care about your rules, Royal.” When I didn’t respond and the silence was long enough to his satisfaction, “So now I’ve upset you well enough. What say we give the proper greet?” And just as suddenly, just as my fingers managed to clasp around the edge of my scythe blade, he twisted me around and let me go. His hands steadied my shoulders when I stumbled.
My eyes narrowed, peering up into his. “What are you expecting?”
He ignored my question. “What reason have you to come here? I saw you before on third deck, once.” The shadows were so dense I could barely see his smirk. He gave no better explanation, only added, “I’m called Ohre.”
“Qeya.”
“You come here because you heard what was said up on top deck.” He didn’t question, rather stated, like he already had all the answers.
And before I could filter them my thoughts poured out. “I don’t understand why they wouldn’t listen to you when it’s obvious you have more experience with the beyond than we do. I guess…I wanted to know what it is exactly you heard.” The distant cacophony of his world filled the silence growing between us. I wondered if he had understood me at first.
“It be more a feeling. Something swirls out in the beyond, something unnatural. It’s the reason so few venture to these worlds. The black spaces are a part of it, pieces unraveling pulling apart. We’ve come too far, waited too long to turn back now. Only death awaits us here.”
I shivered with foreboding and bit my lip to restrain my fears. I must never lead out of fear.
He laughed then. “Not the answers you came for?”
I shook my head. “How did you know I was coming?” My eyes were arrested, linked to his in a breath so instantly brief and long I gasped to catch up when his fingertip connected with mine. A hot fire, shiver of feeling and emotion sparked at our touch. The miners were like us in yet another way.
“You told me with your eyes while you watched the elders refuse to listen.”
“You knew they weren’t going to listen, but still you came above. Why?”
His smile somehow broke through the gloomy haze. “The same reason you are here, Qeya.” There was something disturbingly natural about the way his skin felt warm against mine. In his eyes I saw his weariness, a life spent serving others just to live another day. In his eyes I saw the kind of strength that is beat into a person rather than born into them. In his eyes I saw the appreciation and wonder he had for me. Like he was to me, I was different from anything else in his world and it drew us together like a host to a parasite. I had a feeling once he got under my skin he was there to stay.
There are moments in time when the axis of the universe shifts, when life as you knew it is irrevocably altered. When the hiss and grind of the gears fell silent, some deeply rooted instinctive part of me knew this was one of those moments. The constant dull clanging and press of our engine faded into an oppressive silence, where I could hear the beat of our hearts and shaky breaths.
I wondered if I was losing my water because I knew the idea of Datura 3 shutting down was impossible. Even though we were still orbiting above the hostile world while Pioneer explored, our ship had not ceased in motion since we stepped on it seven years before. I counted the quiet by the beats of my heart. What took an instant to process in my mind was not much longer than the wait.
The ship echoed a pained groan and then the floor beneath our feet began to shift. Ohre’s hand was on my arm instantly, steadying me before I could tip into the pipework lain against the wall.
The intercom blasted over our heads, pounding its way through the decks in one last warning. My father’s voice bled pure terror. “All hands to deck! Lock in and prepare for attack! Enemy ships closing in from—” The speaker fell silent. The floor trembled with the first blast, knocked me off my feet and into Ohre’s arms.
“Qeya!” he called when I twisted and ran for the lift. “Qeya there’s no time!” His boots clunked heavily behind mine on the hard metallic surface. The second tremor began to tilt the ship and knocked me inside the lift at a harsh angle. Ohre braced himself on either side of the open door, his eyes fear-stricken.
“Qeya, you can’t! If this is an attack they’ve already hit Navigation and the—”
“I don’t bleeding care about Navigation! I’m going to second deck!” In my panic, the rush of sudden essence burning in my veins, an eerie present calm coated my emotions. It barely veiled the images of my parents’ faces and what Ohre’s warning truly meant. Instead, I ignored the third tremor, the blast of energy tearing holes through the plasma hull of our ship and allowing the beyond inside. Datura 3 tilted off its stable axis, making me unable to reach the lift controls.
The fourth blast hit below our deck, and behind Ohre a tumbling roar became the screams of the dying miners, the impact of metal crushing metal and gasses exploding in subsequent bursts.
I froze with the memory of our escape from home world, the fire and screams from the palace and sudden rapid images of deeper memory, of war and terror and bloodshed…
Ohre crawled inside after me, somehow finding a sure grip with his boots while clutching me by the waist and smashing his hand into the locking key. The moment his fingers pressed against my skin I broke free from the abyss of the past.
“SECOND DECK!” he yelled and lights showered over us in a consuming wave, even as the lift shook on its path above. Second deck was good as the quickest death by now, I feared, no better than stepping into the heavens naked. Surely the blast had already pierced the hull, letting the cold space outside in, but I held onto the hope of our last defenses. Should anything happen to the rest of the ship, father had ensured a way for the children to survive.
Burying my face into the chest of this miner I barely knew, I clung to his solidity, barely heard his warning.
“Channel your water.”
My surprise over his words was stolen by the sight of my home in chaos. Ohre tore at the door with his powerful fists when it stalled open and I whipped out my blade to hook and cleave the wiring in two. We had only seconds if the quickest death was upon us. If Arvex did not survive, I was the only key.
“Come on!” I shouted, dragging the tattooed miner down the slight decline and straight for deck controls. Screams and shouts greeted us. The youngest were crying while the older ones sought to comfort in spite of their own shock. Those who saw us looked on with glazed eyes. Our calm and placid existence, our regimented and peaceful enclosed world, everything was being ripped away from us.
I found no sight of my brother, but Gem and Menai and a few others were already hiding beneath the control panel, pressed in a huddle together. Menai shouted my name and Gem echoed.
“Qeya! What’s happening?”
“Qeya! What do we do?”
“What’s that leaking miner doing here?” This last came from one of the huddle, the golden-haired Kahne.
“Just shut up and let me think!” I shouted, and was nearly slammed into the controls with the final and lasting tremor. Ohre braced me by the waist to him. Our eyes connected in one last passing of thoughts and feelings neither of us could ever name aloud. Yet somehow he managed to support us both while turning me so I could find the right keys on the keypad. I pressed them and felt the breaking begin.
“Strap yourselves in, you grease heads!” Ohre roared over the ear-splitting rip of metal.
Second deck broke away from the rest of the ship, one last measure for survival. Projector slides continued to flicker to the iridescent memories of the home world we would soon see again in death. As the others found their best means to strap into the cords and pipes hiding behind our flimsy decorations, my eyes met those of my strange protector.
“Strapping in?” My brow quirked in question and a flash of morbid humor effaced.
His answering grin was pained but too real. “I’m stronger than I look.”
Before this day we had never met. He had only seen me from afar. Yet he was the one holding me to the metal core
of the control center, bracing us so we could gaze together out the window to the stars.
I flinched as a barrage of my mother’s memories flooded my mind. This was when I knew they were about to die, when my mother tried to transfer their memories to me over a great distance. The other children screamed as they too were assaulted by their parents’ memories ahead of schedule. It was too much too fast, images from our mothers and fathers and their ancestors of royal blood. This was one of our unique gifts and in this moment, our curse.
In that moment I received everything she had been given until we were linked to the present. Breathing in time together, I watched through her eyes as she looked into my father’s eyes one last time. I felt her breath in my chest and the deep regret she felt for not telling us all how deeply she loved us.
Our eyes never saw the enemy ship, the doom Ohre and old Brien felt coming, but we saw the desecration briefly from the nearby window. Datura 3 burned as it broke apart, bursting into showers of white-hot balefire before freezing again in the silent heavenly death.
A chorus of screams accompanied our descent into the hostile world’s outer invisible sphere, and then we were plummeting faster until the plasma film protecting us broke. I bit through a piece of my tongue, dug my nails so deep into Ohre’s side I must surely have marked his clothed skin.
The children who were my responsibility, my family in ways far beyond the ones who gave birth to us, fell silent on impact.
Lights out, I would have been thrown up into the air if Ohre had been any less strong than he claimed.
And then for a long painful moment afterward, nothing…
III: REMEMBERED
We didn’t know the people who attacked our ship or why they picked us. Maybe they were guarding some ancient secret, something to do with this new world. Maybe they were taking preventative measure for things they believed we would do. I knew in my heart it was against the current to harbor hatred for a people I did not know. My training aspired to higher thinking. Eventually, I must be able to split myself in two, separate reasoning from feeling.
Did our parents use reason when they met death? Did they give into our deepest natural inclinations and reach out for one another? How can anyone separate feeling from the mind?
I stared unblinking at the flicker of slides painting Datura on the wall at a jilted angle. The energy powered projector shouldn’t be working at all. Defective, it flickered to two out-of-sequence photos.
My arm was bent at an awkward angle, trapped between metal and something hard. And when the floor moved beneath me, I remembered the reason I was alive now. Twisting my head, I met Ohre’s luminous eyes catching and reflecting the dim lights. He grimaced when I shifted against him.
“Oh… Sorry.” I extracted myself carefully, instead of pushing him deeper against the control panel. Lights flickered on and off around us and somehow I found footing amid the chaos. Ohre released my arm from his side and hardly winced as he stood on the slanting deck. As we stepped away from the debris he caught me more than once mid-fall. Having lived so long on a constantly moving object, the full weight of gravity, new atmosphere and traces of foreign air were foreign. Everything was so still.
I could not look too closely at the broken limbs and faces lying motionless amid the detritus of the broken deck or I would have screamed. I was the Orona—I had cared and even bled for them—but I knew at a glance that I could never heal them from death.
My eyes swept the control board, trying to grasp meaning out of a mess of wiring and fading power. The break from the main ship had been successful, but there would be no one to communicate with in the heavens now. We were alone.
“Come on. We need to pack up whatever we can carry and get out of here.” Ohre had already broken into an emergency kit, was strapping on the pack and shoving random objects inside.
“Qeya?” A faint voice groaned at my feet. Jumping off a shifting leg, I held back Ohre’s sudden rush with an arm.
“Arvex?” I fell to the floor and gathered my brother up in my arms, ignoring the fact he was so much bigger than me. Both sets of eyelids blinked in rapid succession and joy filled my heart. For the moment, all my training and self control was welcome to wash away with the tears leaking from my eyes. “Arvex!” I shook him slightly when he managed the rest of the way up on his own. “Where were you? It drove me crazy when I came in and thought you were already gone.”
“Ouch!” He winced at my punch. “Easy there, Qeya. I was with Hanea.” His smile faded slightly, eyes filling with worry that quickly took to a search over the room.
Throwing my hands up I made to follow him. “Well, obviously you didn’t listen to Ohre and strap yourselves in before landing.”
“No, we were kind of strapped into each other—”
“Stop! Please, I don’t want to hear any more.” I shuddered in feigned annoyance, but truthfully I was too high with the joy of having my family alive. Arvex had always been my family in more ways than our parents. At times he liked to joke we had raised each other. In a way we had. While our parents were busy fighting off a potential invasion and running the world, we took care of ourselves. As long as I could remember he had tried to balance my severity with his joviality. Now for the first time, I saw his brow furrowed for reasons other than not being the center of attention.
“I went sailing when we landed. Back is killing me like I just wrestled a leviathan.”
I snorted. The only physical action my brother had ever engaged in was with a blade or joining with Hanea. Glancing back, I found my shadow was still following, picking up things he found useful along our path. Our eyes met briefly and I remembered the dangers of our situation. Ohre was right. We needed to gather ourselves together, scavenge what supplies we could and get off deck. Much as it terrified me stepping foot onto an alien world, we couldn’t survive on a piece of a ship. And what if the ones who killed our parents decided to come down and finish us off?
“Arvex, we need to get on the surface. Look for anyone who isn’t broken and make them carry as many supplies as they can.”
Ohre followed me in the opposite direction, helped me find the wounded amid the dead. It was a task I had never imagined in my worst of dreams. Most of these children I had watched grow from conception, nurtured and helped guide as best as I could. They were more than my peers or cousins. They were all pieces of my extended family. And a piece of me had died that day with them, though I did not know it yet.
All were dead save a few. The twins, Gem and Menai had the least trouble helping us once Ohre had woken them. Kahne and her little brother Jymee were not so well off. Black-crimson blood was seeping through their small tunics. Ohre patched them up as well as I could have, but he had seen injuries far worse on lower decks, he assured me, and told me to save my energy when I tried to step in to help.
Arvex found Hanea where he had left her, her wide eyes unable to register what they were seeing. Her body was fine, but her mouth was silent for the first time since I had witnessed. Her two elder siblings, Tamn and Min had been on the Pioneer though. It was very doubtful they had survived. It was almost certain that the alien ship would have made sure to be rid of them first.
Besides Kahne, who was born only a year before our exile, and Jymee, the youngest of us at four years, only one other child survived the crash. Bruv and Kahne had gotten into a fight earlier over their practice scythes and Jymee had tried to protect his big sister. Strange that now Bruv, two years older than Kahne, was clinging so near the siblings he had hated.
Arvex led Hanea to the control panel, seeking the best way out. The children shadowed Ohre as he shadowed me. Very few of my personal possessions had made it unscathed, but I found my pack and stashed it with what keypads I could. One day it would be important to remember our training, maybe pass it on to the next generation. I had no real hope we would ever make it back to second deck. Memories would be all we soon had of our life sailing the heavens, of Datura. The ones following me could not remember home w
orld. And with our way back forever gone we had no other hope.
“All the exits are blocked. We’re sitting wreen, Qeya.” Arvex hopped over the panel and held out his arms for Hanea to jump into them.
“Unless…” I whispered with images of the Pioneer flashing through my mind.
Ohre stepped round until he was blocking my path, his unique features garish in the deathly fading lights. “What do you see?” he asked in that deep, faintly accented voice.
“The shuttle.” At his nod I knew I needed say no more, and found more reason to hope than anything else could have given me. My eyes scanned the ceiling that was now partially a wall. And before I could even think of what we could use to bust out, the miner was twirling one of the tools unhooked from his belt between fingers.
Arvex half-carried, half-led Hanea to meet us. “What in the blue core is that miner doing? Qeya, you still haven’t explained why he’s here.”
Ignoring my brother I followed Ohre and listened to the sniffles and smaller steps behind me. “What are you doing?”
Wiping the blood off his face he checked his tools and held it level to his eye, facing the roof. “Weakest point…” I jumped when a thin blue beam shot out of the tool and began to pierce through the ceiling wall. “Right there.” He nodded to a fracture in the hull of our deck. “If we had landed on it we’d have been smashed flat.”
“Well, thank the Creator for leaking miners!” Arvex laughed and I shook my head. Only the golden prince would joke at a time like this.
“What are you doing, miner?” Gem piped up.
“Yeah,” Menai echoed his brother. “What are you doing? Can I borrow that thing?”
A faint smirk drew at the corners of Ohre’s mouth and then he pulled up the sleeve of his suit and exposed the gauntlet attached to it. Crude in model, it proved genius when he attached his tool to rest against the top of his hand and soon the beam became a blast.
Qeya (Heaven's Edge Novellas Book 1) Page 3
