The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,34

needed. A single lonely girl, her own needs never won.

It was days before Oori and Yetu returned to something approaching their previous level of companionship. Nothing so personal as their earlier discussions, just practical matters. Hunting techniques, currents, winds. Yetu could answer many of Oori’s questions about the sea, and Yetu was happy to be her font of knowledge.

“What is the biggest creature in the sea?” asked Oori next, her face stern. Her drive for knowledge wasn’t gently curious, as one might expect, but ferocious and consuming. A part of Yetu could understand why she would lust after something like the History so much.

“Leviathan. Like you, she’s the last of her kind. Larger than a blue whale by several degrees. She holds air long enough to be underwater for days at a time, and comes up only at night to breathe.”

Oori seemed to perk—as much as she ever perked—as she listened.

“She must be lonely,” Oori said.

“She’s nearly as old as the ocean. It is her companion, as are its many creatures,” said Yetu.

“Still. Who could truly know her when there are no others of her kind?” said Oori.

Some days, Oori discussed the place she came from, how there’d been only a few families left for several decades. Disease took all but her in the end. “When there are so few of you, anything can ravage you in moments. What chance did we ever have at survival?” she asked.

Yetu thought she remembered something about another young woman whose family was wiped out in an instant by disease, but she couldn’t put it together, couldn’t think of who it would be. Another half memory from the rememberings.

“And your husband? Or your wife? Or is it wives? What happened to them?”

Oori snorted. She stood in the water on the other side of the rocks from Yetu, in the shallow part of the open ocean. She had a spear, but she wasn’t fishing.

“I have never had any of those things,” said Oori.

“Friends?”

“No,” Oori said, her voice sad.

“Me neither.”

Though that wasn’t true, of course. It was a long time ago, so distant now that it seemed to have happened to someone else, but it wasn’t someone else. It was Yetu, as a girl, with a small group of peers who tolerated her anxiousnesses. How different might her life have turned out without the History stealing them from her? Would she still love them? Would they have become her lovers or mates? Would they share a den now?

Yetu’s gut twisted as she remembered that those girls she once knew were now locked in an eternal state of memory. With no one there to relieve them of its burden, would all of them die? Would they want to kill themselves? Would all the wajinru writhing together turn the ocean into a frothing pit? Would Yetu sink into the hole they created?

The approaching rough weather had all the markings of a wajinru tempest. The slow, slow brew of it, the uncertain and moving center, the feeling of electricity in the air. Yetu had brought this. Her simple but extraordinary rebellion might drown the world if she didn’t stop it, if she could stop it. Yetu wasn’t sure she’d still be able to gather the rememberings from them, the strength of the wajinru en masse too great for her to overcome. She had always struggled to face the darkness, and the thought of returning to the wajinru choked her with dread. The impossible weight of her responsibility to the world would obliterate her before she had the chance to fix what she’d done.

* * *

The sky was pale gray with cloud cover. Yetu smelled the coming rain in the air. She’d never experienced such a thing on the surface before, and she was curious what it might be like. She imagined it like gutting an animal. The sky was the belly. Something sharp would come along and slit it open till all its contents spilled out and filled the sea, nourished it.

“You’re smiling,” said Suka, shaking their head. They didn’t come around often, but they occasionally stopped to chat and see how Yetu was doing. “I didn’t know that you could do that. What’s got you?”

“I’m thinking. I mean, I had a thought. My own thought. My own story.” It still pleased her that she could do that, that it was possible to have her mind to herself. Without the History devouring the whole of her mind, she had an inkling of who she was. She didn’t have answers