The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,39

translating it to home-sea in her head but unable to make any sense of that.

Oori’s face fell, and Yetu searched for all the reasons that might be. Was it a word she was supposed to remember but had forgotten? Had Yetu’s question been insensitive in some way? Yetu retraced the conversational steps, the moment Oori’s face changed from gently hopeful to a mixture of anger and sadness. She had been expecting Yetu to ask something else. What?

“A homeland is just a place,” said Oori, her voice quiet and unsteady. She’d never sounded so defeated. “It’s a place that means something because of its history. I know you have a complicated relationship with the past. I do too. But if I don’t protect what is left of it there, I will have no homeland. It will just be another place,” Oori explained.

Yetu tried to bob her head up and down to nod, but the movement was rigid and forced. “You are leaving me, then?” said Yetu, teeth out, though she hadn’t meant them to be. Yetu could only understand a few words Oori had said, too lost in shocked grief to make sense of much more. “Just like that, you are going?” That was the pertinent information. Yetu would be alone again, like she’d been in the deep.

There was Suka. There were other two-legs and surface dwellers. But they did not compare. With Oori, she always wanted more, desperate for time together, for conversation, for closeness. The depth of want seemed endless.

Yetu batted her front fins against the water and made a hard splash, almost soaking Oori’s cloth coverings. “Stay. You must stay. Please,” she begged, hating herself for it. She’d left the wajinru, seeking out freedom, yet here she was, tethered to another, bending herself toward her. She could not make herself feel nothing for this two-legs, and that was not freedom.

“Come with me,” said Oori.

Yetu sunk herself deeper into the sand. She wanted to bury herself alive in it. “I can’t. I’m stuck here.”

“You and I both know that’s not true,” Oori said. “Your health is not perfect, but you’ll survive, I’ll make sure of it. We can protect each other. What is keeping you from the sea? What kind of deep-sea creature prefers a shallow death pit to the infinite ocean?”

What kind of creature, indeed? One who had abandoned the History and the people to whom it belonged. One afraid. One who could neither bear the weight of the rememberings nor the weight of feeling her people suffer through the churning water.

Yetu shook her head. “You’re the one who’s leaving.”

“No, Yetu. You’re the one who’s not coming with.”

* * *

Oori had been gone for a day, and the rain had not ceased. Yetu kept her ears open for any sign of where Oori’s homeland was, but no one knew. All anyone said about the matter was that the place Oori was from wasn’t really a homeland anymore because a homeland needed a people. Without a people, it was just a patch of earth.

That was part of why Oori was going back. This place had meant so much to her, she could not let it become nothing, all traces of it wiped out by storm, a storm Yetu had caused by leaving the wajinru to brood in the rememberings.

Why had she been so stubborn with Oori? Now Oori was on the ocean as the waters grew more and more unsteady. Yetu imagined the brine rising up and filling Oori’s throat, imagined the waves upending her craft. She’d let her fear of going back into the ocean stop her from doing what she’d needed to do to keep Oori safe. But Oori wasn’t the only one who would suffer. The winds were heavy enough that the trees on the beach shook violently. Branches flew from some of the taller ones onto the sand. The ferocity and the tumult of the sea had increased more than tenfold since Oori had left. Yetu should’ve known this was coming, how bad it was going to get.

Suka had come to visit her to see how she was doing. Yetu had yelled at them to go inland and to take as many people as they could with them. They weren’t new to storms, but they’d likely not seen anything like what was coming. An echo of a remembering reverberated through Yetu. The same images she’d seen when she first came here washed over her afresh. Drowning two-legs. War between the wajinru and the surface dwellers.