The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,21

body sharply upward and began her ascent to shallower waters. She was so tired that she put little effort into avoiding predators who could make easy work of her in her weakened, brain-addled state. All that mattered was escape.

She curled her body to make it move faster and faster, and with each swim stroke she became more and more lightheaded. She wasn’t sure she was breathing properly, or at all. Water glided over her gills, but it was different water than what she was used to. Had she risen higher in the ocean waters at a more reasonable rate, her body would’ve naturally adjusted, but she was swimming at top speeds.

The headache threatening at her temples was sharp and prickly. She didn’t know what to do with the decreases in pressure. Her body felt wrong, like it was flying apart. There was nothing in these depths to hold her together, to squeeze her into place. As the light colored the water into a strange shade of dark, greenish blue, she closed her eyes, unused to the burn of sunshine.

This was familiar. She’d been here years and years ago. Words came to mind… hunting… hunting with Amaba. Or perhaps this place was from the History. She had a sense of the rememberings still, though already the details had faded. Whenever she tried to concentrate on anything specific, it slipped through her mind like sand through her webbed fingers. She could feel it still, but she didn’t know it.

She couldn’t say for sure where she’d seen the sunshine before, or this particular shade of blue. Random, meaningless images were all her mind dredged up. Where she’d once carried multitudes, there was sparsity.

Yetu was not so shallow yet that she felt out of danger. Light was only just beginning to penetrate. Some wajinru lived at these depths and would search for her here. She needed to go closer to the surface yet if she wanted to escape her people entirely.

Yetu pumped her body upward in a spiral, unthinkingly, too out of her mind to determine how far she was going. She guessed it had already been miles.

Light burned her eyes as she rose. Her pupils shrank to dots, but it was still too much. She couldn’t focus on navigation with the headache that had spread from her temples to the top of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Her sense of north, south, east, and west were gone. The currents were a maze. Unfamiliar animals moved in ways she didn’t recognize.

Schools of fish flitted past her, turning her around. Which way was up again?

She followed the light, went toward its blinding whiteness. It was so warm. She’d never been this lost before, never been so unable to orient herself.

But Yetu didn’t need to orient. She just needed to go. That was what mattered most. The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

She went up, up, and up until there was no up left, her head cracking through the sea’s surface, oxygen from the air—the air!—blitzing her lungs. It made her remember fire and bombs, images of thrashing water tumbling through her mind, but then she couldn’t remember where the fire and bombs came from. A few seconds later, Yetu couldn’t remember what fire and bombs were.

Yetu was still. She let herself float. She’d left the wajinru. That, she could not forget. She’d done the one thing the first historian wanted no wajinru to do. By leaving, Yetu was forcing them to endure the full weight of their History. She’d left them alone. Had abandoned them. They were not one people anymore. Yetu was apart. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and reminded herself that they’d be okay. Amaba was the strongest wajinru Yetu had ever known. Her will did not bend. Not even the rememberings could ruin her.

Yetu trembled in the water, the physical ache of her desertion catching up to her. After everything, she still might die. She wasn’t sure her body, debilitated from a year of neglect, could take what she’d done to it.

The light overhead was dimmer now. It still hurt to look at it with squinting eyes, but it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. The air was cold against Yetu’s face. Sounds up here were different. She couldn’t feel them properly. She turned around. Pink-orange haze crowned the sky.

Waves carried her up and down and toward the