The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,30

been responsible for nearly killing her.

* * *

She’d learned how to deal with the rememberings. The other wajinru would too, in time.

“I am sorry for what happened to you, for all that was taken from you,” said Yetu. Even though she’d left her family, Yetu didn’t like to think of her amaba not existing. Such a thought was intolerable.

“It’s the way things go,” said Oori.

It was, and Yetu knew no words to console her. “Is there anyone to enact vengeance upon?”

“Everyone and no one,” Oori said, inching forward through the water closer to Yetu.

“Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to lose everything. Sometimes it’s good,” said Yetu, thinking that for the first time in twenty years, she could feel the ocean now without it overwhelming her senses.

She had room to think. To know what she wanted and believed. And all it had cost her was everything.

“Good?” asked Oori. Her steely facade cracked, but only infinitesimally. Yetu wondered if she’d even seen it at all. She felt the brokenness of Oori’s voice against her skin, but that was the only sign.

“If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?” said Yetu. “I was a historian.” It made her feel so good to say that. Was. No longer. She blinked her eyes shut and tried to cast out thoughts of the wajinru locked in the Remembrance. “It was a very holy thing for my kind. It meant I held on to all the memories so no one else had to, generations and generations of them. Six hundred years of pain.”

“Were you like a storyteller then?” asked Oori.

Yetu shook her head. “All the memories of those who’ve come before, they lived inside me. Real as flesh. I remembered them like they were my own. I walked inside them.”

Oori nodded, curious and intrigued. “Touched by spirits,” she said sagely.

“By electricity,” Yetu countered. “And it hurts. I gave up the memories so I could be free.”

So she could live.

Oori looked out at the sea, unblinking. “I would take any amount of pain in the world if it meant I could know all the memories of the Oshuben. I barely know any stories from my parents’ generation. I can’t remember our language. How could you leave behind something like that? Doesn’t it hurt not to know who you are?”

“I know who I am now. All I knew before was who they were, who they wanted me to be,” said Yetu. “And it was killing me. It did kill me. I wasn’t Yetu. I was just a shell for their whims.”

Oori shook her head and stood up from the water. “But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.”

“No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist. I didn’t exist. If you prefer a world where I don’t exist, then stop bringing me fish.”

“Fine,” said Oori, turning to leave. The water splashed, brushing Yetu’s skin. She hated that despite being as angry as she was at Oori, she was thrilled by even that small amount of connection with her. These feelings were unfamiliar. More than anything, she wanted Oori near, but Yetu yelled at her to go.

“You are nothing but a silly fish,” said Oori. “Of course you wouldn’t understand the importance of having a history.”

Oori did not come back for three days.

6

HISTORY WAS EVERYTHING. YETU KNEW that. But it wasn’t kind. Abandoned now by Oori, Yetu dwelled in the darkest parts of it. Not the History. That was all but gone. Her own history, the once upon a time when she’d been fourteen, small, and totally unequipped to handle the darkness she had been a host to.

* * *

She remembered Amaba shouting at her, as she’d started doing a lot in that time, because Yetu was supposed to go practice-hunting with some young girls in the nearby den but had been away in a remembering and had forgotten.

When she awoke, she refused to go.

“I can’t see them anymore,” Yetu cried. The same way that Amaba was always shouting, Yetu was always weeping.

“It’s been weeks since you’ve seen anyone. You cannot prefer this loneliness,” Amaba insisted. She was right, in her own way. It wasn’t a preference but a necessity to keep out the pain. “Go, right now! Go to them, or else.”

But