beautiful, intricate tattoos. Some of the symbols were identical to etchings on the comb I received shortly before the last Remembrance. One of the offerings made to me. I’d assumed they were bite marks, but of course, they are not. They were intentional carvings. I misinterpreted.”
“It is easy to do that with the past, even with the blessing of the full visions of the History,” said Amaba.
Yetu showed Amaba the comb. “My Oori comes from the place where this object is from. Does it spark anything for you? A location?”
Amaba held the comb in her front fin and rubbed it with closed eyes. “It’s from a song.”
“What?” asked Yetu.
“A song our amaba used to sing when she was pregnant.” Yetu understood that when Amaba said our amaba, she was speaking in the voice of the Remembrance, when everybody became one.
“You remember such things?” asked Yetu.
Amaba began to sing. “Zoti aleyu, zoti aleyu, watsa tibi m’besha tusa keyu?”
Strange fish, strange fish, why do you jump around in my belly like a fish out of water?
Yetu had heard the song before. She’d just dismissed it as an old conversation with her amaba, something from her own childhood.
She’d taken on the History so young that memories from the past blended with memories of her life. Amaba was old enough that her memories were more distinct.
“I know where she is,” Yetu said, and left her amaba at once to try to find Oori.
Waj, the first surface dweller a wajinru had befriended, had lived on an island called Tosha. It was the wajinru word for belonging. It was also the Tosha word for belonging.
Waj had told Zoti, the first historian, where she was from, where she was heading. Zoti had misinterpreted. Perhaps Waj had deliberately played with her.
It was a small island in the backward C-shaped cradle of the African continent, and it took Yetu a day to swim there. She didn’t know if Oori would even still be there. It had been a while now since the storm had passed.
Yetu swam close to the shore, careful not to beach herself. “Oori!” she screamed, her voice ugly, strange, and coarse. “Oori!”
She called her nonstop for hours, her voice as loud as she could manage. Finally, she gave up, accepting reality. If Oori was here, she was not coming.
Yetu waited days, eyes on the tree line, waiting for Oori to emerge. She did not. Yetu neither ate nor slept. She certainly didn’t leave. A world where a storm she had made killed the two-legs she held so dear was not bearable. Yetu remembered Zoti and Waj, but it was not the same. Oori had asked Yetu to come with her, and Yetu had willingly denied her. She’d never forgive herself.
On the seventh day, Yetu turned back to the open sea, where she saw a sail on the horizon. She squinted, the sun a blight against her eyes. Dazed from lack of food and rest, she wasn’t sure that she wasn’t sleeping. “Oori,” she said quietly, her voice ravaged from the days she’d spent shouting for her. “Please, please, please,” she begged, her heartbeat quickening.
The boat was coming in fast, the winds strong.
When Oori saw Yetu, she did not wave happily, but she did lower her sail so as not to run Yetu over. It was perhaps the closest she’d ever get to a gesture of love.
Then Oori jumped into the water next to Yetu. Her small boat was not anchored and drifted away quickly on the waves.
“Your boat,” said Yetu.
“Hopefully the tide will carry it in. Or it won’t.”
“I have longed for you since you left,” said Yetu. “Were you able to get here in time?”
“No,” said Oori. Neither of them said anything for several moments until Oori added quietly but steadily, “I longed for you, too.” Then she began to cry like she’d been holding it in her whole life. Yetu thought she probably had. Oori had been waiting for someone to bear witness. “I thought I’d never see you again. I thought— I thought what happened to my family, to my nation. I thought that had happened to you.”
“I’m here,” said Yetu. “I will stay with you no matter what.”
“It’s all gone. All of it,” she said.
Yetu nodded. “All but for you,” she said, shivering at the feel of Oori’s legs treading water. “And this.” Yetu showed Oori the comb.
Oori studied it with sharp, serious eyes, her brow pinched tightly together as she bit her lower lip. “Where did you get this?”
“It is from