Ohre (Heaven's Edge) (6 page)

In the Nukvar Valley, there lived night terrors that didn’t exist in dreams, but attacked while sleeping. I needed to always be on my guard when living with the other survivors in our cave. After slaying that first four-legged stripe-back in our cave, I realized we were living on the edge of predator territory. I decided the Royal younglings didn’t need to know about that, though it might have helped me to have another pair of hands to hunt. The longer the days were spent in hopeless search for the missing shuttle crew, the more I began to crave those nightly hunts.

Only after she chose him and the tree village did I realize what I had become. I was no better than the monsters of my night terrors. Seeing her Tamn, a Royal that seemed to breathe the qualities I could never claim, made me see how less of a
hunan
I could be. Tamn was Royal superiority without the cruelty some of them showed us. He didn’t lord over us the fact that he was considered better than miners. The whole time she was dead to the world between life and death, he rarely left her side. I watched them from the shadows and guarded the door to her tree hut and couldn’t help but listen. That’s how I knew she was better off with him than with me, much as I wanted to claim her for my own with every part of my gray gills. I was the night terror.

I wasn’t excited to return to the hidden valley the Nuki’s called Nukvar. We had crashed much further up the beach not so long ago. Adi had liked the caves when I showed them to her on our way back to the crash site. She said it was the perfect defensive position in case the ones who fired
Datura 3
from the heavens came back. But every space of that cave carried memories for me. I didn’t want to remember the Royals I had left behind.

The cave bled out into the sea and it was through the sea we swam up into the mountainside. We climbed out to the caves Qeya and I had claimed from the beasts. I wondered, as we drew closer to the ledge opening overlooking the valley, if I was coming to live or to die.

Adi’s mission was just short of a death stroke. I knew she wanted to leave Qeya once we were close enough to the Nuki village. Then she wanted us to find our missing crew member. If we couldn’t—and if we made it out of this pit with our heads attached—we’d have to find another way to fix the
Pioneer
. But there was more to Adi’s reasoning to find Remin; maybe something having to do with her clan’s original plan. Would they have really dumped the Royals on Heaven’s Edge?

At least we all had fresh weapons. Even Qeya was armed with one of our mini-blasters, though I knew she was good enough with her scythe to slice through drops of rain. This gave us better odds than the first time we came to Nukvar Valley.

When we arrived at the cave, much had remained untouched. I was surprised none of the beasts, whose territory we had invaded, had come to reclaim this place. But the piles of decimated bones and the used fire pit might have been enough to ward any lesser predator away. It also helped that I had smeared the entrances with the creature’s blood that first night. The Royals complained of the scent, but even they knew it was better to use the beasts’ hide than offer up ours.

We camped that first night of our return to the cave in our old spot, just shy of the ledge overlooking the forest below. Adi made herself busy checking over our supplies and starting a new spark for the fire pit. Qeya stared at Jymee’s rock etchings for some time, while I rummaged through the piles of forgotten items. Looked like the Royals hadn’t come back to retrieve their things. Not so strange, considering the trouble we went through to get to the
Nukis village. How Qeya had managed the journey out to us on her own made me wonder if the others knew she had come after all. Surely Tamn and Arvex would have never allowed her to come alone. When she first showed, I half expected the others to come blasting into camp with her.

Adi sat hunched over a handful of data pads and explosives. I had a few ideas of what she had planned once we sent Qeya back to her kind. None of them sounded good to me. It wouldn’t be the first time I disagreed with my own people.

“Ohre?” Qeya’s voice pulled my gaze from Adi and back to her startling eyes. “Did you hear what I said?” I nodded and checked over my personal arsenal one more time. She sat beside me, curious as she had the first time she asked me about my weapons.

“You were telling me something about the younglings and the Nuki?”

Her smile brightened the darkness of the cave and the mission ahead. “They finally finished mending their abandoned section of the village. It’s been difficult keeping everyone disciplined to their studies when there is so much to do. Gem wants to learn to hunt from the trees. Bruv and Kahne spend all day setting up traps in case anything tries to attack us again. Jymee has grown close with some of the Nuki children. They’re such strange creatures and can barely speak as we do, but they have other ways of talking. They speak with their hands, like this, see?” She motioned with her hands and arms as though weaving patterns in the air, like a dance.

Adi scoffed nearby but I ignored her and asked, “Have they told you anything more of their enemy, the Var?” I wanted to know what kind of trap Adi was insisting we walk into. If all went to plan, Qeya would be long gone by then.

Qeya shuddered, her inner lids closing over her golden eyes. “No one speaks of them. Arvex has been trying to learn the language so he can speak to the chief, but there is little contact between the two species, except in death.”

“I’m going to get some fresh air,” Adi announced, twisting her blaster and shoving it into the holster tied to her thigh. She marched out the cave entrance and merged with the darkness outside.
I was glad to be rid of her for the moment. I knew she must be thinking of Remin and the other adults.

I glanced at Qeya while keeping my eyes on the cave we had called home for too short a time. Now we were alone, I wanted to ask her more questions, about this valley, and especially why the Nuki stayed in the interior. I squashed the harder questions that insisted on rising to the
surface, like why she chose to stay in her village instead of coming with us. Not that I didn’t agree with her choice. But maybe I was regretting leaving without asking her first.

Being the miner I was, I blurted out the first blubbering thing that came to my head. “We could have stayed here, you know.”

Qeya’s breath hitched, startled, “Wh-what?”

I waited to answer, to better sort my thoughts before something equally blithering came flooding out of my trap. I picked up my little collection of left behind artifacts, Jymee’s drawing rocks and Menai’s collection of dagger teeth, Kahne’s leaf and twig samples and the jaw of the beast that Gem kept and had often used. Qeya reached out to touch Bruv’s ruined dagger, a left over from home world.

“We could have stayed here, all of us, instead of dividing.” I didn’t bother to add that I would have been fine to see the little ones safe in those trees. Part of her belonged with them, I knew. But another part of her, the part that had kept them alive with my help, belonged to the wild things, to the savage power hidden inside of her.

To me.

She pursed her lips together, glared at the pile of crude mementos of a time her family seemed to want to forget. Was this why she had come? Not just to learn the truth of what happened the day we crashed, but to bid that day farewell forever? Something feral and wild raged inside of me at the thought.

“They don’t know you came, do they?”

“No,” she whispered.

I growled low and clenched my fists to keep from doing anything stupid. “Why?” I asked hoarsely.

Why did you come?

Qeya looked up and swallowed thickly before affirming my fears.
“To say goodbye.”

After Qeya was fast asleep, I ordered Adi to guard the Royal, caring little that each barely tolerated the other. Qeya could hold her own against Adi in a fight, long as she kept her retractable scythe on hand, which she always did. It was time that I went to work. I pressed my middle finger into the gauntlet to activate it and as the metal bits shifted and opened to reveal the inner settings, I switched it from something suitable to blasting through rocks, to something better suited to killing. I climbed higher than the cave entrance to a narrow outcropping that hung just above the ledge overlooking the valley below.

For a moment I let the night air carry scents from the forest beneath us, and the stale smell of old kills that lingered around our cave. I could see the tiny spotting glow of fires now, as I occasionally had before when we searched half blindly for the
Pioneer
. Somewhere out there, the Royals were living their new lives. Elsewhere, the Var waited. Unlike Adi, I had little hope that the adults, Remin particular, were still alive. Unlike Adi, I now had nothing to live for. Nothing but the hunt, but the sea and the freedom it promised.

As soon as I finished helping her rebuild
Pioneer
into a ship better suited for deeper travel, I vowed to dive into that sea and never return. This time there would be no Brien to pull me out of the ruins, no more spending half my life wishing he hadn’t.

Several pebbles tumbled down the face of the cliff behind me and I crouched lower as I caught a fresh putrid scent drifting from overhead. I preferred to wait until the last possible moment to twist out of the way of the beast’s first strike. It leapt onto my crevice with a grunt
and I twisted, wrapping my arms around its heavy, scaly torso, so I could avoid the spikes lining its back. Claws dug into my thigh, nearly tore through the biosuit.

Rather than use my gauntlet, I kept one arm secure around its middle and used the other to slam it against the rock wall. The beast grunted again, this time in pain and I winced as my arm was partially crushed in the process. I avoided its claws and the spiked tail as best I could before grabbing it by its head and whipping it upside down, so its body again smashed into the wall. It fell, stunned, and its glowing-green slit eyes blinked up stupidly at me before it jumped to its feet with a snarl. I waited as it leapt up and this time, I let it come for me, jaws open wide, the span the length of my head. My hands caught its upper and lower jaw, needle sharp teeth pricking my skin as I tugged and waited for the familiar pop and snap.

A guttural gasp escaped its body as I threw it over the cliff edge and watched it tumble down the rest of the way until it lay motionless at the bottom.

I had not killed to protect this time, though I knew they would be out there, waiting for us as the beasts always had. This was about my uncontrollable rage, the feelings I had never been able to tame as well as the others. It made me feel less like a miner and more like what I was born to be, a predator.

V

Divide

I decided the following day that we needed to get Qeya on a path that would take her closer to the Nuki village before nightfall. Besides the fact that she was more vulnerable to predators, being around her only dredged up things I had no business muddling in. She seemed to understand my need for distance, though I caught her anxious looks more than once as we descended the cliffs and entered the wet forest.

Adi chose to speak with her, while I kept to the trail behind. Thrice I was forced to gun down predators twice our size. Two were the furred long-fangs and the other, the dwarf ridge-backs as I called them. After this, I kept closer to the two females than before, deciding my embittered feelings didn’t mean I had to sacrifice their lives along with mine.

I kept my eyes on the tangle of roots and vines and ferns around us, while Adi dove deeper into her questions about the people we were about to visit.

“Tell me, why don’t they try to make peace with the Var?”

Qeya rolled her eyes and huffed as she often did when forced to repeat herself. I smirked at the familiar sight in spite of myself as she answered, “The Nukis live in the trees and they know the span of the valley, but they never go near the northwest. That’s Var territory. And they don’t speak like we do, miner. The Var, too, have their own language, from what I understand. But I don’t know much more than…” she trailed off and then hissed.

I froze when she suddenly backed into me, gripping me by the belt and dragged me to the nearest tree trunk. “Come on! Climb up!” I was too shocked to argue.

Adi twisted her head and grimaced, opening her mouth to protest until she saw my warning glare. With surprising grace, she climbed another tree with ease. I followed Qeya until we were peering at the earth below. No sooner had I settled in behind her on a thick branch, my arms keeping her locked in, than a familiar cry echoed the forest. Soon a sea of spiked ridge-backs passed our way, sniffing our scent and hooting to one another as they sought our whereabouts. These were smaller than their cliff-dwelling cousins, better suited to the underbelly of the forest. But the sight of them reminded me of my killing the night before and how close I had been to losing it because of a blooming Royal.

Qeya held her breath and glanced over her shoulder so our eyes linked. I could see echoes of her sorrow, of that day we fought these same creatures and Menai lost his life. I had seen them during my nightly hunts in the cliffs from afar, but the ridge-backs never came so close to the border. Here they roamed free, reminding me that the Var were the least of our troubles.