Battle of Earth by Chloe Garner

Author:Chloe Garner [Garner, Chloe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Horse Called Alpha
Published: 2019-02-01T07:00:00+00:00

Olivia hadn’t ever really liked the beach. All sand and sun and sharks, there was nothing about it that called to her. She looked cute in a bikini, if you overlooked how fair she was, but that was all it had going for it.

But she could feel the rhythm that Cassie was talking about. She let herself relax, just treading water as the wave gathered, then she turned her face down into the water, swimming three or four strokes with it as it tried to toss her. She brought her head up again after it was gone.

She could see huge rock cliffs at the edge of a narrow beach. That was where she was going.

The water was too murky with swirling sand to see if there was anything sharp below her, but she tried to keep her feet up, anyway.

“Hard swim,” Cassie called as the next wave came in, and Olivia pushed herself. She’d been on the swim team in high school. She didn’t hate water. She just didn’t like the ocean.

Her body remembered, and old muscle overtook the sense of panic, and spurt by spurt she made it in toward the beach, until Cassie stood up. With the waves all the way out, she was only waist-deep in the water, though the next wave would be over her head.

Olivia stood cautiously and waited for a wave to push her in further, trying harder now to keep her feet off the ground until the waves washed out and made her do it.

“Are there corals here?” she asked. “Rocks?”

“Don’t know,” Cassie said. Olivia gave her a dour look that the Palta woman probably missed through the wet tangles of hair all over Olivia’s face.

They finally got to shallow enough water that they could just walk in.

The ground was sandy, here. Sharp, at intervals, but small sharps, not the kind that were going to slice her feet open. Olivia got all the way to the beach, where the water just washed up across her feet each wave, and she stood with her hands on her knees, feeling washed out and dehydrated and exhausted.

Cassie stood with her, patiently enough, not paying Olivia all that much attention.

The foreign terrestrials, on the other hand, stared.

Olivia was trying not to acknowledge them. Going to Gana had been different. No one had noticed them, and she’d been able to watch the world going by the way she did back home. Even that, though, had taught her that she was not cut out for this life. The adventures and the risk. Troy and Cassie lived for it, but Olivia simply didn’t understand. She’d been excited to do it, because no one got to, but when it came to the actual moment-to-moment being somewhere new, she just… She didn’t get anything out of it, and it cost her an awful lot.

“You ready?” Cassie asked when Olivia finally straightened and tried to pull the hair out of her face. It was a tangled mess. There was a reason Cassie always wore her hair up.

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