The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,25

the History she’d never noticed before? She went to flick through the rememberings in her head to find previous instances of it, but—she had no rememberings anymore, not like she used to. When she reached for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip.

“I promise, all right? I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” Suka said. “Not that I could if I tried. I know you can’t possibly understand me but— Everything’s all right. I promise.”

She believed them, that they weren’t going to hurt her. After all, they’d given her all this food. But Suka didn’t seem like an authority to trust on whether everything was going to be all right or not. They didn’t know anything about her. They didn’t know what she’d swum from.

“I understand you,” Yetu said, the words spitting up from her throat unexpectedly and in an odd configuration. She sounded croaky and rough; her voice so deep she wasn’t sure the two-legs would understand. She had never spoken this language before, and the words felt strange sliding against her esophagus and tongue. The words tickled faintly against her skin, but not in the same way they would were she in the water.

Everything about life on land strained her senses. It was disorienting to use her eyes rather than her skin. She was like a newborn, cast away from its amaba and grasping outward for anything solid on which to hold.

“My god, my god, my god,” Suka said. “You are— What are you?”

Yetu breathed deeply in, but it just rattled her more, the oddness of getting oxygen through the air rather than the water.

“Thank you for the fish,” she said. “I’m recovering from a difficult journey and unable to hunt for myself.”

Suka looked at her in silence, their eyes wide and mouth agape, showing the tips of what looked like very useless, blunt teeth.

“I am Yetu,” she said, hoping that might calm them.

“You speak. You’re alive,” said Suka, trembling.

“If you didn’t think I was alive before, why did you bring food to sustain me?” Yetu asked.

“I meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said.

It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.

Yetu squeezed her eyes shut, regretting the thought. She wasn’t ready to be swept into the fold of a stranger. She was wajinru, no matter how far away they were from her. Being historian, being different, didn’t change that. “I didn’t mean to startle you so. I only wanted to thank you for the fish,” she said.

Suka calmed, limbs visibly loosening. “It actually wasn’t me. It’s Oori who’s been catching them for you. I just, I happened to be here.”

“Oori. Is that one of your siblings?” asked Yetu. “One of the… people… from the other day?” The words were much more fluid in her mind than they were coming from her mouth. It sounded like she was belching them out.

“No. Oori fishes around here, but she’s not family,” Suka said. “She’s from an island off the northwestern coast. We’re inland mainland folk, and much farther south. I’d say she trades with us, but to be honest, mostly she just gives. I tried to give her a blanket once and she laughed at me and asked if I’d mistaken her for an infant, so. That’s Oori.”

“Can you tell Oori thank you for me? Then tell her I’d like more?”

“More?”

“More fish. Or preferably a seal. Something fatty.”

“Oori is—she doesn’t take kindly to requests or demands on her time,” said Suka, like it wasn’t something to be wary of about her. Yetu found the quality fascinating. She wanted to be a person who didn’t take kindly to requests, who knew her own mind. Maybe if she’d had a stronger will, she’d have been able to resist the pull of the ancestors, able to carry the History without so much grief.

“That’s admirable,” said Yetu. “It was only a question. Not a demand. She should do what she wants.”

“Oh, she does.”

Despite what Suka warned, Oori did bring bigger loads of fish over the next few days. And fresh seal. Small sharks. King mackerel.

Yetu swam in tiny circles in the pool in an attempt to keep