The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,45

causing this storm would calm, saving two-legs lives, including Suka, their people, and Oori. It would save the wajinru from their grief. Yetu hoped that they hadn’t already starved themselves.

The sea rose as rainwater bashed its surface. Waves crashed over the boulders surrounding the tidal pool. Yetu sunk down into it. She couldn’t jump the rocks with so little room to give herself proper leverage, but she could still gather up her strength. She let the salt water cleanse her with its mix of constancy and fluidity. A beautiful reminder of balance.

Yetu tuned in to that essence as she let herself be buried by ocean in the small pool. The burn of salt and the cool flow of water. The warmth she’d felt for Oori and the sadness that had flooded her when she’d chosen to leave. Wanting to see her amaba alive again. Wanting the world to exist, to be more than just a place with a history no one would ever know.

These didn’t have to be contradictions. She let the multiple truths exist inside her as a way of meditating. It was something that she’d learned to do when dealing with the rememberings, to try to find a modicum of quiet and accept the multitudes inside herself. She never reached calm, nor even a steadiness, but she did it anyway. It made her remember that she existed.

She luxuriated in the sloshing water. Tiny fish fluttered past her again, reminding her that she was alive. A crab clicked against the stones above, far from shelter. Water, outside her in the pool, inside her body in the form of life-sustaining blood and wet tissue, both connected. She saw it all move in a circle as real as a remembering. Inside her, outside her, one.

As she felt herself carried away in the rush of feeling, her body seemed to ignite, electric. She’d never felt so synchronized with the ocean before. Her emotions were as dark and tumultuous as the deep. Spurred by her need to leave and leave now, she zeroed in on the water with as much focus as she could, hoping this would work.

“Rise!” Yetu said. If she could generate enough charge in her body, the water would be attracted to her, and she could bend it.

“Rise!” she said again, not to the water, but to herself, demanding her body to focus. “Rise.”

The water moved, but not to her will. Storm and wind jostled it, but she could feel that more was possible, as emotions and sensations kindled her body into sharp awareness. If the wajinru could bring this tempest, she could make the water in the tidal pool carry her to freedom.

Yetu closed her eyes and stopped breathing with her mouth. She visualized the water in the tidal pool going upward to great heights, carrying her over the boulder back to the sea.

There was a stir in the pool, distinct from its normal movement. Yetu reached out to it using the same technique she did when she reached out to the wajinru during the Remembrance. She had to slit herself open and spill herself out. Yetu gave her whole being to the ocean the way the ocean had given all of itself to her, giving the wajinru the spark of life, showing them that if only they knew how, water could be breathed.

With that, the water rose, and Yetu cleared the rocks. As soon as she splashed back into the open sea, she swam toward the center of the coming hurricane, ignoring the pain that still touched every part of her.

* * *

The deep embraced her, and oh, how glorious the dark was. Her eyes had been burning for weeks, and she hadn’t realized until the open ocean soothed the ache. Racing as fast as she could, she made it to the wajinru in only three hours. The wajinru were still in the sacred waters, though their flailing had destroyed the thick walls of the womb. Despite the wajinru being cradled in the ocean’s depths, their turmoil had affected the whole sea, extending up to the surface where the storm raged.

Yetu watched them with her ears and skin. Their bodies seized in a thousand different directions. Though individuals quaked to the rhythms of their own bodies, as a whole they moved as one. Together they formed a giant teardrop, but there was no pattern to any single wajinru’s movement.

The wajinru were thin and malnourished. While Yetu had been onshore feasting on Oori’s offerings, they’d lost the ability to