The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,24

had cursed them. After all, when she held the rememberings, only one wajinru suffered. In the aftermath of her leaving, all of them did. All but Yetu. That wasn’t right, but neither was the alternative. She didn’t deserve to die, did she?

The wajinru weren’t faring well, Yetu had no doubt of that, but eventually, hunger and fatigue would draw them out of the trance. They’d carry the rememberings, but they’d be able to resume hunting and live the rest of their lives.

Yetu watched the ocean. Waves collided with the surface at regular intervals, water spraying. Overhead, clouds gathered. The seas were not particularly rough nor the sky particularly gray, but a heavy rain was on the horizon.

It meant nothing. Storms came and went for any number of reasons. It wasn’t a sign anything was amiss, that the wajinru were worrying the water. Still, Yetu kept guard over the water, eyes steady on the sea as she succumbed to sleep. Everything would be all right now that she was free.

* * *

Yetu next awoke to the smell of dead fish. A pile of fifteen of them lay next to her on the beach, their tails tied together with a piece of browned, twined seaweed.

She recognized it for the gift it was and devoured it. She slept again.

The next day, there was more. Still hungry from having eaten so poorly over the last year, she devoured it too. There were blacktails among the bounty, one of her amaba’s favorites. She was about to call out to invite her to join the meal before she remembered that Amaba was not here. Yetu chewed the fish slowly, hesitant to take another bite. While she feasted on gifts from a stranger, Amaba and the other wajinru were trapped in rememberings. They would recover in time, Yetu had to believe that, but without her guidance, they were surely stumbling and scared.

Reminded of the heavy rain in the distance, a rain that would not touch the corner of the earth where she was settled, Yetu looked out to the ocean. When would the wajinru wake up from the trance of the Remembrance? They didn’t have that much time before they’d work themselves into the same kind of state Ayel had when the Remembrance had first started and she’d forgotten who she was. Without direction, they’d break open the walls of the mud womb, leaving themselves exposed, and the world in danger. Taken by rage and grief from the rememberings, and without the cognizance to hold themselves back, the wajinru all together could stir the ocean waters to a degree that would disrupt the natural weather cycles. The winds, the skies—they’d both be electrified into a whipping frenzy. The wajinru could make a storm as big as the one that prickled like a half memory in the back of Yetu’s mind, the one that drowned the land.

It wouldn’t come to that. Yetu worried because that was what she always did, prone to fits of anxiousness and over-reactivity. She shook her head and took another bite of fish. She forced herself to swallow it after realizing she’d been chewing the same morsel for several minutes.

The vastness of the ocean looked so different from above, so much less comprehensible. Its murky blue waters were a dark veil separating her from her people. Cut off from them, she had trouble making sense of who or what she was. Without them, she seemed nothing more than a strange fish, alone. Absent the rememberings, who was she but a woman cast away?

Yetu squeezed her eyes shut against the light of sunrise. She had not been granted stillness like this since she was a child. Never had she had so much time to think. She wasn’t even sure she could do it.

Another day passed, and the next morning, when she awoke to fish, she saw the person who’d left her the food just as they were walking away. Yetu whimpered to grab their attention, and the two-legs turned around, startling back a few feet as they took in the sight of her.

“Hi, there, fishy fish,” they said. “Shh, now. Quiet. I’m Suka, and I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.” They were one of the original four who’d seen her the day she had first become beached.

“It’s all right,” they said, holding out their hands to placate her. She recognized the same gesture as one her amaba did sometimes. Was such a thing passed down in DNA? Was it a part of