The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,44

humbled.

It is not long before our sprawling city is gone. All traces of dwellings, ash. Omju says we need to go outward, to expand to other sections of the deep and build there. We tell him what’s really necessary is to go upward.

“We must go to them. Fight them. The ocean made us. Therefore it will take care of us,” we say. “We must simply call on it.”

Omju tries to interrupt us, and we hurl our body toward his, signaling a fight. “If you want to be king of the wajinru so badly, then be willing to fight for it. Be willing to fight me for it,” we say.

Not one to further sacrifice his reputation to the onlookers already disappointed in him, Omju shows his teeth. Like us, he is small and agile, but we have the benefit of generations of wajinru fighters and warriors. We know everything they know. We’ve learned all they’ve learned.

We go for his throat, and he is done, his breathing apparatus inside our own.

“There has been a change in regime,” we say. There will be no more foolish leaders. No more councils. We are the historian. We carry the sacred rememberings. Who but us knows enough to lead?

The wajinru are no longer frightened of us. They are emboldened by what we represent: war with the creatures who cut our population in half. “The two-legs will not stop until we are extinct,” we say. “Like salmon, like the mighty hammerhead, monk seals, various sea turtles, fin whales, and so many others. Are you ready to take back what belongs to us?”

* * *

Amassed in a single unit, a chorus, we swim upward. The warmth from the sun-touched waters weakens us, and we rest for days before ascending higher.

We pass on rememberings to them. They must have the depravity of the two-legs fresh in their minds. Ephras swims next to us. He is never out of our line of sight.

Many cannot survive the rush of light and heat. Is the sun any different than the bombs? With all the pain so fresh, many choose simply to sink and die. The others we stir to action with more memories. Psychically linked, we are stronger. Our connection makes us a beast mightier than the blue whale.

We swim upward and upward, bodies in formation. We are arranged in rings, a circle of forty over a circle of forty over a circle of forty and so on. We move in a spiral as we ascend, creating a twister in the water.

Not all of us survive. For some, the shock of the near pressureless water compared to the deep is too much, and they die. Two-legs wage war against us, even as we’ve left the place they want so badly to claim as their own. They know we’re coming for them.

The power of our upward motion agitates the water into a protective cyclone only wajinru can enter. Our shared fury makes us stronger. We continue to rise.

As we near the surface, we lose sight of what we are doing. We are not Basha anymore. It is like we are in every remembering at once. We are every wajinru. As one, we make the ocean waters rise and create a tidal wave that lifts us high above land.

This is the first time the other wajinru are seeing the two-legs outside of the Remembrance. They are shocked by their faces, similar in many ways to our own. They know what we have known since taking on the History. The two-legs are our kin.

This does not make us more gentle. It has the opposite effect. We send endless waves of salt water onto the land, flooding the whole earth. This is only our first assault.

* * *

We remember.

9

RAIN FELL WITH SUCH FORCE that Yetu half convinced herself that the sky was another ocean. Since Suka’s departure, the precipitation had increased from a steady pulsing to a smothering. Were the surface dwellers to look up, they’d drown.

Yetu worried for Oori and the other surface dwellers, who were likely unprepared for this wrath from the heavens. She worried for her fellow wajinru, too, suffering woefully because of her neglect of duty.

No easy solution presented itself to her, no scenario where Yetu maintained her peace and freedom, and the world survived.

Maybe the sacrifice of a single person was the only path forward. It would result in the fewest amount of deaths. Yetu knew how to contain the rememberings. If she took them back, the uproar in the water