Ohre (Heaven's Edge) Read Online Free

on. Truth be told, I was trembling in my boots, showing her the amount of scars and lack of markings I still wore. I was decorated just as much as the average miner. But my tattoos were not in honor of the discoveries I had made. Instead they told the story of unnecessary fights and demerits for putting my gills where they didn’t belong. Where they connected at the top of my spine, the tattoos told of my origins, of the clan that no longer existed.
    I was a wildling, once. It is known that my clan abandoned their servitude in favor of the open seas. And I was the only thing that was left of them: a scavenger, feeding off whatever prey I could find. As a youngling, I had lurked in the abandoned Royal palaces. That was where their scanners picked up my signature. Old Brien claimed me; only  he and his generation remembered my clan. He told the others I had left the pod and come below where I shouldn’t have been lurking.
    He adopted me, never giving me the chance to try and find my clan. I guess he thought he was saving my hide. But I never got used to life in the caves and the memory of the above-ground palaces still makes me cringe. I was fastest in the waters I’d been born to, and I returned often enough to never climb high in the ranks. I think Brien put me on Datura 3 hoping to cure my wild ways by sailing the heavens.
    Qeya was still the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, above or below the waves. The bare skin of her arms and neck gleamed like the translucent wings of the sea angels. I had only ever seen them once as a boy, but never forgot the rarest fish in the deep. Qeya’s skin was not marked by tattoos, and only littered by a faint scattering of scars and gills. And because I knew her well, I recognized that her lack of injuries was a sign of her skill with the scythe blade she insisted on bringing along. If my people were the fastest creatures of the deep, then hers were quick as steam breezing past your fingertips. They could move so quickly in the shallows that my people had aptly named them ghosts, ages before.
    She stood almost naked in nothing but the wrappings around her breasts and hips. I fought my reaction to her with all the mettle in my bones. She needed to trust me, where we were going, not find more reason to fear. Her hands twitched restlessly in an effort to busy themselves. She seemed uncertain as to whether she should hold onto the tool belt now tied to her waist, or dig her fingers nervously in her red hair. I wondered if she had ever exposed herself so thoroughly to another of her own kind.
    This kept me confident as I strode up to her and took her hand again. “Come on, Navigator. Ready to face some new monsters?”
    Qeya rolled her eyes and grinned up at me, then unhooked her retractable blade to press the end into my hard stomach. “Are you sure you can keep up with me in the shallows?” she asked, knowing full well I could see much better in the dark. She screamed when I swept her off her feet and ran until I was waist deep in the waters and threw her into the waves.
     
     
    All seas are essentially the same, made up of water or something just as fluid. We were lucky the sea on this world was not made up of toxins. But I was surprised by how familiar this one felt. Besides a stronger presence of an alien mineral I didn’t know the name of, it even smelled the same. Each kick of my legs made me feel stronger, every pass of water through my gills made me faster. Qeya’s form curved and bent in angles mine could not, slightly ahead of me. She held the scanner in her hand, using it to light her way, while I trusted my gut and the infrablue vision my ancestors had passed down to me.
    We cut through the waters in a way that would have slowed us down on Datura. Yet here, we soared.
    For the length of a league we saw nothing but dim shadows marking the ocean floor. Nothing stirred in the deep to give away the position of approaching gill breathers or beasts, making me even more