The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,19

think about its origins. We cannot think of what sickness plagues surface-life affairs that they throw living creatures to the sea to die alone. We must not think of the surface dwellers and two-legs at all. Only zoti aleyu.

“I will call you Aj,” we say. It means small. This little thing in front of us is the tiniest of our kind in this moment. One day it will be full-grown. One day it will take over where we’ve left off.

Overtaken with happiness, forcing any trace of sadness that might ruin it away, we take the new pup to the bottom of the sea, along with its two-legs parent. We must bury the surface dweller. Our kin.

We are headed to the city at high speed. We are not slowed down by the weight of the pup or the two-legs. With determination, we plow through the water, diving through the icy depths. Blackness and cold welcome us. The city we’ve built together with the other zoti aleyu thrums. Our body shakes from it, and it is the most welcome vibration. It has been one year since we left in search of where we came from.

When we are near enough that many will begin to hear and feel our approach, we slow down. What of this body? What would they think of it?

“I cannot bring this sadness to them,” we say, and turn toward the outskirts, swimming deeper, to where there is ocean floor.

When a zoti aleyu dies, we bring it to shallow waters, where plant life grows, and wrap it in layers and layers of whatever we can find. Coral, seaweed, kelp. When it’s done, the body is ovoid and thick, looking like a plumped, filled bag of waters. Or an entire womb. We then take it to some bit of seafloor and weigh it down with rocks.

We are prepared to do none of this with the two-legs, so we go to a small hut we’ve built outside the city and take off pieces of the wall to wrap the surface dweller in, till her form is concealed, so she may rot in some kind of peace if the ocean doesn’t erode away the wrappings too quickly.

We set her off into a strong, cool current, saying farewell to our kin.

* * *

Over the years, we raise so many pups. We find more zoti aleyu. The strength of our people is our togetherness. Many of us lurk in the deep, yet we are one, and as the years pass and we grow old and decrepit, we remember that we are young, too, thriving, because we live on in this legacy of strange fish we’ve made.

In these last moments of our life, we try not to linger upon the horrors, of which there were many. We do not think about the secret of our origin and how easy it became to find zoti aleyu once we’d learned it.

We discovered which ships to follow. We memorized their routes. We learned their accents, their languages, and heard them through the water like an alarm. We followed ships where none went overboard, but this brought its own grief, for we knew the lives of those on the ship would not be good ones.

At times, we did more. We could not hide the truth of what happens on the ocean surface from all the zoti aleyu, many following us to discover our secret truth. The first such time, a group of them followed us and watched as a ship cast all of its cargo into the deep, the enslaved having been taken by some sickness. We and the other zoti aleyu now present gathered together to trouble the waters, to sink the ship. This did not come about by plan, but by anguish. As all of us wept and raged, we noticed the way our fury made the water pulse and rise. Swept up in the power of our newly discovered abilities, and engulfed by the grief over the immense loss of life, we let our ache fill the water. The effort of it left us and the other zoti aleyu spent for days, but when we recovered, we buried the bodies from the ship on the ocean floor.

We never wanted our people, our kindred, to suffer the loneliness we have known. Over the years, when others came to us desperate to talk about it, we encouraged them to forget. “Focus on what we have together. Here. Now.” Not all could manage it, and they required extra help