The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,40

In such a battle, the two-legs would surely lose, for what being on this earth could compete with the might of the ocean? Suka and their family might die, and it would be Yetu’s fault. She’d have to live with that for the rest of her days. Her bid to save herself, to save her life, would have the unintended consequence of killing others.

Oori would die too. Eventually, so would the wajinru; for if they had not found their way out of the trance of remembering by now, it didn’t seem likely to happen. They were so lost in it, they were taking their grief out on the whole world.

Then there would just be Yetu, all alone. There would be quiet. The waters would settle. The winds would slow. The rememberings would perish with the wajinru. The wajinru would have the same fate as Oori’s people. Much of the world would.

Storm waters filled the tidal pool, dark and murky, blotting out Yetu’s view of the teeming life inside. The future, too, was dark, if there was a future at all. The hurt that coursed through Yetu as she imagined a futureless world rivaled the pain of the rememberings. Could it really be that there was a version of the world where everything would be eradicated? Gone? She imagined how it felt when the History left her, the freedom of it, but if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point?

Nothingness was a fate worse than pain. How long would it take for Yetu to become ravenous for something to fill the hole the way other wajinru did? She doubted she could last even a year. She was already aching to see Oori, but also her amaba.

At least with pain there was life, a chance at change and redemption. The rememberings might still kill her, but the wajinru would go on, and so, too, would the rest of the world. The turbulent waves were a chaos of her own making, and it was time to face them.

8

HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN “tonight”? Lost in the endless madness of the Remembrance, we all starve, unable to nurture our bodies. Our bodies wane but our minds swell with pains too large to contain. Such imbalances cannot last.

Foolish Zoti, to think there is ever a way to guard against harm, to protect prosperity. Everything ends. How she would cry to know what became of her legacy.

We wajinru live Zoti’s ignorant lie for centuries, convinced our castles in the deep can shield us. The ocean is more than our home or birthplace. It is our heaven, too. For we were knit together by the powers of its life force. When we die, it is where we remain. Therefore we nurture it as it has nurtured us. We bring life to it as it brought life to us.

This is our covenant, maintained for years, until we are Basha.

In the old days, when we discovered a ship that threw our ancestors into the sea like refuse, we sunk it. Now we will sink the world.

* * *

There is chatter about dead children.

“Is there anything about this in the History?” Omju asks. “Something that can tell us how to proceed?”

Someone else asks, “Basha?”

“Historian Basha! Honored one!”

We hear them call us, our name ringing out through the water, but we are too entranced in a remembering to respond, one made by the third historian. The History troubled her so deeply that she did not believe it. She thought it was a trick of the ancestors, a test she had to pass. The third historian wondered if a woman called Zoti really had seen bodies cast overboard into the sea, left to drown.

When she went upward to see if it was true, she was snagged by a hook and lifted onto a boat deck. She tried to heave in oxygen through her mouth and nose, but she didn’t know how. Suffocating, she half passed out. The two-legs (they were real!) tried to grab and handle her, but she was more awake than they thought, and she bit every one of their throats until they died. She flopped and crawled to the boat edge, using her front fins to pull herself forward. With one powerful but painful thwack of her tail fin, she was back into the sea, having cleared the short wall.

She did not see the supposed surface dwellers who abandoned bodies of their own kind like an emptied-out clamshell, but she had no trouble believing the two-legs were