The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,29

The rememberings were gone, replaced with a ghost. Still, the echoes the History had left told her that the two-legs were capable of savagery.

“Oh really? What do you know, Yetu the wise?” asked Oori.

“I know what it feels like to be drowned,” she said, refusing to explain more, because she couldn’t remember more. Her only recollection of it was the sensation in her lungs. “I won’t be able to show you how to make the proper sound if you don’t come closer. Don’t you want to lure all the fish to you?”

Yetu dipped her head in and hoped Oori would do the same. She did, but it took her a whole minute. “Go like this,” said Yetu in wajinru, before realizing that wouldn’t make sense to Oori. She switched to her language and said the same, then demonstrated the sound. Oori pushed back up through the water to take a breath, then came down again and tried to emulate the sound.

Yetu shook her head, then gestured for Oori to join her back above the water. “Don’t use your mouth so much. The sounds are through your throat. Try screaming. Or screeching. That will get you closer.” Yetu hoped she wasn’t being too demanding. It felt good to share something freely with another. She could think of all kinds of things she wanted to show Oori. “Come now. Again.”

This time, the sound Oori made under the water was half decent, and though it didn’t sound like any word Yetu knew, at least it sounded like it could be a word in wajinru.

Oori emerged from the water looking very pleased with herself. She wasn’t smiling, but Yetu detected the satisfied smugness there. “Now it’s your turn,” said Yetu.

“My turn?”

“To show me something. Isn’t that how it works?” Conversations, shared moments—they were exchanges, were they not? This was what Yetu remembered of them from the time when her life had been a little more social than it was now.

“I have nothing to show you,” said Oori. “The only thing I know is the water, and I doubt I know anything about it that you don’t know better and more deeply.”

Yetu didn’t doubt it either. “Well, you could tell me about something else. You could tell me something about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Oori, looking more comfortable in the water now. She watched the sea, and birds flying overhead, and crabs in the sand. Her eyes never once met Yetu’s.

“Where are you from?” Yetu asked, hoping she’d get a chance to ask another question too. If she didn’t, and she’d wasted her question on something as mundane as place of origin, she’d regret it dearly. She wanted to know what Oori wanted more than anything else in the world, and what she was most afraid of, and had she ever been brought to shivers from sadness or anger. Did she like Yetu? Would she have treated any creature who washed up into this pool so gently, or was Yetu special?

“I am from a dead place,” Oori said.

“What do you mean?”

“The land is dead. The people are dead.”

“Your parents?” asked Yetu.

“Dead.”

“Siblings?”

“Dead,” said Oori.

“Kin?”

“All dead. I am the last of the Oshuben,” said Oori.

Yetu looked for traces of sadness on Oori’s face but found none. She was blank.

“What an unspeakable loss,” said Yetu, not wishing to assume that Oori’s stern countenance revealed anything about how she felt on the matter. According to Amaba, Yetu simply looked “away” and “removed” at times when she was experiencing some of the most violent rememberings.

“I can’t imagine a hole as wide as that,” said Yetu, looking out at the sea. When she made her skin receptive to it, she swore she could feel the wajinru’s anguished weeping through the water. It was like fish crawling all over her skin.

It wasn’t real, though. Just her imagination. Through the rocks, it was difficult to feel the wider ocean.

The ocean looked calm, but in the distance, she felt the sort of heavy rain and winds that signaled a coming storm. It was too far away to see how big it was, or which direction it was moving. If they had broken from the mud womb and decided to rise, the wajinru could cause a storm like that, couldn’t they? They all possessed the electrical capability to move the waters.

Yetu shook her head. She had no evidence that was going on. Wild speculation wouldn’t serve her. It was just another way to tie her to the past, and the past had