The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,4

Yetu still felt the violent emotions her amaba had provoked in her, knew the precise script of ill words exchanged between them.

“Such things don’t matter with all of this going on,” Yetu said, though it was a lie she told just so Nnenyo didn’t feel bad. He was close enough to her that the impact had bombarded her full force.

Amaba looked on the verge of arguing, then seemed to think better of it, returning to her work instead. She was wrapping sections of Yetu’s body with fish skins and seaweed to help block out sensation. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it would make the Remembrance more bearable.

Nnenyo’s children arrived not long after. They’d been far away to conceal the surprise, so Yetu couldn’t discern the shape of it. Of course, the gift was wrapped, but that didn’t always matter. Sound traveled through everything, and though a second skin could dull things, it usually wasn’t enough to hide something completely.

Ajeji, the youngest of Nnenyo’s children at only fifteen, handed Yetu a corpse. Still reeling from the shock of Nnenyo’s whistle, she accepted it without pause, question, or upset.

“Don’t worry,” said Ajeji. “We did not kill it. It was already dead. We just thought it’d make a good skin for your gift.”

A vampire squid, strange and complex in form, did make a good disguise, though she hated holding it. She dealt with death every day during her rememberings, and more again when she was lucid enough to hunt for food. For once, she wanted to avoid confrontation with such things, reality though it may be. It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.

It was perhaps dramatic to compare that to her own situation, but it was true. Her people’s survival was reliant upon her suffering. It wasn’t the intention. It was no one’s wish. But it was her lot.

“Such a beautiful creature,” Yetu said, front fins massaging the squid so she could memorize the shape of it. She had not yet determined what gift lay inside, too enamored by the textures of the externals. “I have never touched one or even been this close. Remarkable.”

She wanted to cry for the dead thing draped in her front fins.

“You have always been such a tender thing,” said Nnenyo as Yetu clutched the vampire squid. “Does it help to know that when we found it, there were no marks upon it? It did not die at the hand of another, as far as we can tell, but peacefully of age.”

Yetu nodded. It did help. She didn’t understand why everything couldn’t be like that. Gentle and easy. No sacrifice. No pain.

Yetu handed the body back to Ajeji, unwilling to break inside the creature’s flesh. “What’s inside of it?” she asked.

One of Ajeji’s siblings—Yetu guessed Kata by the precise, jagged movements—opened up the slit they’d cut in the flesh cut and removed a small, flat object, which she handed to Yetu.

“What is it?” she asked.

“We don’t know, but we know how much you like to have old things you can actually hold. It was found here near the sacred waters, lodged inside the skull of a two-legged surface dweller, which itself was inside the belly of Anyeteket,” Kata said.

“Anyeteket?” she asked. She hadn’t thought of that shark in some time. Anyeteket had only died last year but had lurked in these waters since the first wajinru six hundred years ago. Her age and infamy had earned her a name, which was not an honor bestowed on most sea creatures.

It wasn’t common for frilled sharks to be bound by such a limited area as she was, but she had two reasons to stay: One, she’d probably never forgotten the rain of bodies that descended here when two-legs had been cast into the sea so many centuries ago. Sharks didn’t usually feast on surface dwellers, but easy meat was easy meat. Two, being sickly, she couldn’t travel far to hunt. Wajinru supplemented her diet by bringing her grub.

Yetu was intrigued by the present being offered her. She guessed the two-legs skull inside of Anyeteket had been what had made her so ill all these years. There was a chance the head was one of the first mothers, the drownt, cast-off surface dwellers who gave birth to the early wajinru.

Yetu rubbed the flat object from the skull against the sensitive webbing of her fins to get a better sense of its precise shape. Sometimes, when she came across