Tave Part 3 by Erin Tate

Author:Erin Tate
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2015-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

A full week later and Rina still had yet to get the whole swimming from place to place thing. Like, conceptually, swimming underwater at the bottom of the Gulf was just like swimming underwater near the shore.

And yet it wasn’t.

Now she was battered by deep currents, twisting turns, which seemed easy to navigate with a tail, but were hell for those without one. Sure, she’d grown some webbing between her fingers and toes when she’d entered the ocean, but it wasn’t a tail.

Of course, the upside to not being fully Ujal in an underwater world meant that everywhere she and Tave went, he had to carry her. Er, swim with her clinging to his back like a sea anemone. And sticking to him while he worried about navigation meant she could take in her surroundings, and gasp when she’d first spied the towering structures the Ujal managed to build in their world. Or rather, the coral-like creatures that rapidly rose high and expanded, taking gentle direction from the Ujal engineers. The creatures not only provided Ujal with a home, but also filtered the saltwater, cleaning and recycling the fluid. They were the biggest reason that wildlife now flourished across the globe.

Not something she—or the general public—knew about.

They’d always assumed it was technology when, in fact, it’d been something biological and originating on the Ujal home world.

Rina, covered with a bikini and waiting for Tave to finish his preparations for the day, reclined on a soft mound of sea moss that had been cultivated and grown to form a chair of sorts. It didn’t have arms, that would have made it too constricting for tail wearing Ujal, but there was a gentle depression to cradle their bodies. An undersea beanbag. Her mate had not appreciated the comparison. She apologized, but still secretly called it a damned beanbag.

She wiggled and sank deeper into the squishy surface, letting her eyes drift closed as she waited for him to appear. The man took longer than she did to get ready. Her bathing suit shifted and she tugged the top back into place. The stupid thing was always moving around and she realized that was mainly because she was expecting it to cover a lot more skin than before. Not because her new Ujal genes altered her size, but because she seemed to be inhaling every morsel of food placed before her.

She had her suspicions why but kept silent. At least until she could find a doctor at UST to chat with.

A discrete ruffling of the curtain, which covered their home’s entry, told her others were waiting. That’d been another thing to get used to—no doors.

Which, again, they were probably hard to deal with when sporting tails. Since she was more comfortable on two legs than swimming, they’d drained their quarters, though the rest of the rooms in the castle remained flooded. She’d been learning their language—her language—and now understood most of what she was told and could even carry on stilted conversations. When they’d arrived, Tave promised he’d work with her.

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