The Deep

5

YETU HURTLED THROUGH THE WATER, away from the shadow of her people. Her tail fin jutted left and right to propel her to startlingly fast speeds. Her heart beat so fast, she couldn’t tell one pulse from another. The steady thrum resounded like the hum of a whale.

She’d spent large swaths of time over the last year immobile, floating, lost in rememberings, and her body wasn’t used to this level of performance. Muscle, fat, and cartilage had withered away, leaving behind a faint impression of what a wajinru should look like.

Yetu’s will thrived where her body faltered. The only thought on her mind was go, go, go. Forward, never backward. Flee. The place she’d gone from was a world of pain, and there was no distance she could swim where that past wouldn’t haunt her. Right now the wajinru were lost in the Remembrance, but they wouldn’t always be, would they? Surely one among them would realize it was time to transfer the rememberings back, and that realization would spread. Without Yetu to signal when this was supposed to happen, it might take longer than usual, but not too long.

In such sparsely populated waters, Yetu stood out, her body creating unique patterns of waves that a wajinru tracker would be able to spot. The wajinru would come for her to return the rememberings once they recovered—and they would recover. Most assuredly they would. If Yetu could survive the rememberings intact, weak as she was, they could too.

She didn’t let herself consider the possibility that they would be as lost in the face of it as she’d always been. To think such a thought for even half a moment would be to admit accursing them to immeasurable suffering. What if, like her, they all waned to shadows? Yetu shook her head. That wasn’t going to happen. They would awaken and search for her so they could return the rememberings to their proper place. If she wanted to survive, she couldn’t let that happen. They’d have to learn to adapt to them.

Yetu needed to go where they couldn’t sense her, where they wouldn’t search. She turned her body sharply upward and began her ascent to shallower waters. She was so tired that she put little effort into avoiding predators who could make easy work of her in her weakened, brain-addled state. All that mattered was escape.

She curled her body to make it move faster and faster, and with each swim stroke she became more and more lightheaded. She wasn’t sure she was breathing properly, or at all. Water glided over her gills, but it was different water than what she was used to. Had she risen higher in the ocean waters at a more reasonable rate, her body would’ve naturally adjusted, but she was swimming at top speeds.

The headache threatening at her temples was sharp and prickly. She didn’t know what to do with the decreases in pressure. Her body felt wrong, like it was flying apart. There was nothing in these depths to hold her together, to squeeze her into place. As the light colored the water into a strange shade of dark, greenish blue, she closed her eyes, unused to the burn of sunshine.

This was familiar. She’d been here years and years ago. Words came to mind… hunting… hunting with Amaba. Or perhaps this place was from the History. She had a sense of the rememberings still, though already the details had faded. Whenever she tried to concentrate on anything specific, it slipped through her mind like sand through her webbed fingers. She could feel it still, but she didn’t know it.

She couldn’t say for sure where she’d seen the sunshine before, or this particular shade of blue. Random, meaningless images were all her mind dredged up. Where she’d once carried multitudes, there was sparsity.

Yetu was not so shallow yet that she felt out of danger. Light was only just beginning to penetrate. Some wajinru lived at these depths and would search for her here. She needed to go closer to the surface yet if she wanted to escape her people entirely.

Yetu pumped her body upward in a spiral, unthinkingly, too out of her mind to determine how far she was going. She guessed it had already been miles.

Light burned her eyes as she rose. Her pupils shrank to dots, but it was still too much. She couldn’t focus on navigation with the headache that had spread from her temples to the top of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Her sense of north, south, east, and west were gone. The currents were a maze. Unfamiliar animals moved in ways she didn’t recognize.

Schools of fish flitted past her, turning her around. Which way was up again?

She followed the light, went toward its blinding whiteness. It was so warm. She’d never been this lost before, never been so unable to orient herself.

But Yetu didn’t need to orient. She just needed to go. That was what mattered most. The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

She went up, up, and up until there was no up left, her head cracking through the sea’s surface, oxygen from the air—the air!—blitzing her lungs. It made her remember fire and bombs, images of thrashing water tumbling through her mind, but then she couldn’t remember where the fire and bombs came from. A few seconds later, Yetu couldn’t remember what fire and bombs were.

Yetu was still. She let herself float. She’d left the wajinru. That, she could not forget. She’d done the one thing the first historian wanted no wajinru to do. By leaving, Yetu was forcing them to endure the full weight of their History. She’d left them alone. Had abandoned them. They were not one people anymore. Yetu was apart. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and reminded herself that they’d be okay. Amaba was the strongest wajinru Yetu had ever known. Her will did not bend. Not even the rememberings could ruin her.

Yetu trembled in the water, the physical ache of her desertion catching up to her. After everything, she still might die. She wasn’t sure her body, debilitated from a year of neglect, could take what she’d done to it.

The light overhead was dimmer now. It still hurt to look at it with squinting eyes, but it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. The air was cold against Yetu’s face. Sounds up here were different. She couldn’t feel them properly. She turned around. Pink-orange haze crowned the sky.

Waves carried her up and down and toward the waning light. She bobbed, and she liked the rhythm of the subtle movement. She was, for the first time in many years, weightless.

Breaking through to the surface was not as new a feeling as she had expected it to be. Yetu had lived it all before through the rememberings, and though her mind struggled to focus on any particular image or memory, it was familiar. This was how her people must have felt after the Remembrance. The raw pain of the memories was gone, but the truth of it still remained in the wajinru, helping them to carry on.

That was how it had been before, at least. Now, her people were still remembering. It would take them some time to untangle themselves from it.

Yetu focused on making sense of her surroundings. There was nothing solid that she could see. No land. No boats. No birds. Just water and sky.

Soaking up the strange nothingness of life without the History, she drifted off to sleep. She awoke at random intervals, stoked to consciousness by the searing pain all over. When she tried to convince herself that she should go hunting for meat, she passed out again from fatigue and pain. This carried on for three days, her mind and body both at the brink.

Any attempts at wakefulness were quickly met with protest by her sore limbs. There was an ache, a throbbing, a pull, a tension in every part of her. She let herself be moved about the sea. Storms shook her, tossed her body like a piece of driftwood here and there. They lifted her, then thrust her back down.

Though pain racked over every inch of her, this was a deep, restful sleep. There were no nightmares. Rememberings didn’t haunt her. She was just Yetu. She wasn’t quite sure who that was, but she didn’t mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.

When she finally awoke properly, it was onshore. And she wasn’t alone.

The two-legs spoke a short distance away using a language Yetu couldn’t name, but that she knew. She may have forgotten the specifics of her own life and of the rememberings she’d once carried, but in the same way she still knew how to speak wajinru, she knew many other languages too.

The surface dwellers were talking about her, asking what she was, wondering among themselves if they’d ever seen such a thing. One said that it didn’t matter and argued that Yetu looked more or less like food, and that they should eat her.

Yetu groaned as she squinted her eyes open cautiously. The light was so unbearable, and pathetically, she felt homesick already, coveting the deep sea, its blanket of cold and dark.

One of the two-legs in the distance noted that Yetu was moving, breathing. She’d washed into a small pool bordered by massive rocks, the top half of her body in air, the bottom in a mix of gushy sand that her torso seemed to sink into. The water was extremely shallow, but the tide brushed over her, back and forth, allowing her to breathe through her gills.

Strangely, she was breathing with her mouth and nose, too, sucking in air from her surroundings with the two narrow slits in her face and her wide mouth. She didn’t know she could do that. It was a new, uncomfortable feeling, and her lungs felt unsatisfied.

Her body had never hurt this much before. The waves must have battered her against the rocks before tossing her into this hole. All her cartilage was damaged.

One of the two-legs started to approach, and Yetu tried to move back into the water, but she was so stiff, so spent, and she certainly couldn’t clear the large boulders separating her from the larger sea. She settled for a scream, opening her mouth wide, showing rows of sharp, long teeth, narrow and overlapping.

Her eyes and nose disappeared as her mouth expanded, her face replaced with a black, endless pit guarded by fangs. The two-legs jumped back, then stepped away farther and farther with cautious steps, hands held out in front of them.

She didn’t quiet herself until they were a safe distance away, her teeth at the ready. She roared, the ensuing sound so different on land than it was in the water. She was pleased to find it sounded even more terrifying. She didn’t want them to think they could hurt her just because she was in a vulnerable state. She would not let them forget she could tear them apart if she wanted to.

She swallowed air through her nose and chest, working out the mechanisms to suck it in so her chest didn’t constantly feel empty. This made the surface dwellers stand back even farther. She must’ve looked hungry, like she was biting the air. As her breathing became more fluid, her body stilled and she could take in the sight of her audience more thoroughly.

There were four in total, and they looked similar enough that she guessed they were of the same people, perhaps even the same family. They were a range of sizes, and likely, ages, one small, coming only up to the hips of the others, one lanky and wobbly and uncertain on scrawny feet. They had dark brown skin and long, dark brown hair that was wild, scraggly, and long, matted into pieces that looked like long chunks of coral.

Yetu’s memory stirred as she regarded them. At first, only a fuzzy gray outline emerged, then flashes of images from the History flicked through her mind without context. She saw the bodies of two-legs drowning, but not just in the water, on land, too. Water erupted from the sea and flowed onto the surface. A war. The ocean war? The wave war? Yetu concentrated deeply, straining to remember. Fractured details returned, but only briefly. The memories were caught in a quick current, hurriedly swishing away from her.

The drownings had been a part of the Tidal Wars—that was the name—a conflict between wajinru and two-legs. Yetu rummaged her mind for more images, more precise explanations, but it was all too disconnected to put together. She pressed and pressed, anxious to know what had happened, but all that was left of the rememberings were traces and impressions, and even those seemed to be fading from her. Though the curious quiet and lightness of her mind pleased her, she did not relish forgetting. She felt unmoored.

“What if it needs our help?” said the youngest one among them.

Yetu studied what remained of her scant memory to identify the language they spoke, but even though she understood it with ease, she didn’t know where it came from, what region of surface dwellers it belonged to. This, very much like the breathing through her mouth and nose, surprised her. How much of two-leggedness was in her? She didn’t know what came from instinct and what came from the History and echoes of rememberings.

Though Yetu knew that at least distantly the two-legs were kin, the similarities were not as prominent as their differences. Yetu was black and scaled. She lived in the water and she looked it. They looked so… fleshy. Yetu only had skin like theirs over her belly, and a smaller portion on her face, over her eyes, nose, and mouth.

“Leave it. Let’s go,” said another one of the two-legs.

They left, and she was alone again. Yetu still couldn’t move. Sunlight faded, thank goodness. She welcomed the dark and the rising tide, which soon left her gloriously submerged.

Strangely, despite the physical pain her body was in, she felt better than she had in ages. The ache of her muscles, bones, and cartilage was nothing compared to the pain she was used to carrying, of the History and what they’d been through. There was no doubt that despite the disorientation of life without the rememberings, Yetu felt tranquility, too.

Not far off from sleep, she wondered if she’d still be here in the morning, or if she’d wash up on a different, nearby shore. How miraculous it was to go where she pleased. No past, and no future, either. Before leaving the History, she’d had little chance to discover who plain old Yetu was. The wajinru inside her from the past had pulled her backward, and the wajinru around her had pulled her outward toward their various ends. The combating forces had stretched her so far this way and that way that she had lost her shape. If she had a will of her own, she was too deflated to actually exercise it. Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.

Prior to this Remembrance, the other wajinru must’ve felt this way all the time. Unburdened, they could do as they pleased and follow their whims wherever they took them. Now, trapped in the mud womb, they had to endure the limitations Yetu had had since she was fourteen.

As Yetu drifted in the tidal pool toward sleep, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had cursed them. After all, when she held the rememberings, only one wajinru suffered. In the aftermath of her leaving, all of them did. All but Yetu. That wasn’t right, but neither was the alternative. She didn’t deserve to die, did she?

The wajinru weren’t faring well, Yetu had no doubt of that, but eventually, hunger and fatigue would draw them out of the trance. They’d carry the rememberings, but they’d be able to resume hunting and live the rest of their lives.

Yetu watched the ocean. Waves collided with the surface at regular intervals, water spraying. Overhead, clouds gathered. The seas were not particularly rough nor the sky particularly gray, but a heavy rain was on the horizon.

It meant nothing. Storms came and went for any number of reasons. It wasn’t a sign anything was amiss, that the wajinru were worrying the water. Still, Yetu kept guard over the water, eyes steady on the sea as she succumbed to sleep. Everything would be all right now that she was free.

Yetu next awoke to the smell of dead fish. A pile of fifteen of them lay next to her on the beach, their tails tied together with a piece of browned, twined seaweed.

She recognized it for the gift it was and devoured it. She slept again.

The next day, there was more. Still hungry from having eaten so poorly over the last year, she devoured it too. There were blacktails among the bounty, one of her amaba’s favorites. She was about to call out to invite her to join the meal before she remembered that Amaba was not here. Yetu chewed the fish slowly, hesitant to take another bite. While she feasted on gifts from a stranger, Amaba and the other wajinru were trapped in rememberings. They would recover in time, Yetu had to believe that, but without her guidance, they were surely stumbling and scared.

Reminded of the heavy rain in the distance, a rain that would not touch the corner of the earth where she was settled, Yetu looked out to the ocean. When would the wajinru wake up from the trance of the Remembrance? They didn’t have that much time before they’d work themselves into the same kind of state Ayel had when the Remembrance had first started and she’d forgotten who she was. Without direction, they’d break open the walls of the mud womb, leaving themselves exposed, and the world in danger. Taken by rage and grief from the rememberings, and without the cognizance to hold themselves back, the wajinru all together could stir the ocean waters to a degree that would disrupt the natural weather cycles. The winds, the skies—they’d both be electrified into a whipping frenzy. The wajinru could make a storm as big as the one that prickled like a half memory in the back of Yetu’s mind, the one that drowned the land.

It wouldn’t come to that. Yetu worried because that was what she always did, prone to fits of anxiousness and over-reactivity. She shook her head and took another bite of fish. She forced herself to swallow it after realizing she’d been chewing the same morsel for several minutes.

The vastness of the ocean looked so different from above, so much less comprehensible. Its murky blue waters were a dark veil separating her from her people. Cut off from them, she had trouble making sense of who or what she was. Without them, she seemed nothing more than a strange fish, alone. Absent the rememberings, who was she but a woman cast away?

Yetu squeezed her eyes shut against the light of sunrise. She had not been granted stillness like this since she was a child. Never had she had so much time to think. She wasn’t even sure she could do it.

Another day passed, and the next morning, when she awoke to fish, she saw the person who’d left her the food just as they were walking away. Yetu whimpered to grab their attention, and the two-legs turned around, startling back a few feet as they took in the sight of her.

“Hi, there, fishy fish,” they said. “Shh, now. Quiet. I’m Suka, and I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.” They were one of the original four who’d seen her the day she had first become beached.

“It’s all right,” they said, holding out their hands to placate her. She recognized the same gesture as one her amaba did sometimes. Was such a thing passed down in DNA? Was it a part of the History she’d never noticed before? She went to flick through the rememberings in her head to find previous instances of it, but—she had no rememberings anymore, not like she used to. When she reached for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and wide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip.

“I promise, all right? I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” Suka said. “Not that I could if I tried. I know you can’t possibly understand me but— Everything’s all right. I promise.”

She believed them, that they weren’t going to hurt her. After all, they’d given her all this food. But Suka didn’t seem like an authority to trust on whether everything was going to be all right or not. They didn’t know anything about her. They didn’t know what she’d swum from.

“I understand you,” Yetu said, the words spitting up from her throat unexpectedly and in an odd configuration. She sounded croaky and rough; her voice so deep she wasn’t sure the two-legs would understand. She had never spoken this language before, and the words felt strange sliding against her esophagus and tongue. The words tickled faintly against her skin, but not in the same way they would were she in the water.

Everything about life on land strained her senses. It was disorienting to use her eyes rather than her skin. She was like a newborn, cast away from its amaba and grasping outward for anything solid on which to hold.

“My god, my god, my god,” Suka said. “You are— What are you?”

Yetu breathed deeply in, but it just rattled her more, the oddness of getting oxygen through the air rather than the water.

“Thank you for the fish,” she said. “I’m recovering from a difficult journey and unable to hunt for myself.”

Suka looked at her in silence, their eyes wide and mouth agape, showing the tips of what looked like very useless, blunt teeth.

“I am Yetu,” she said, hoping that might calm them.

“You speak. You’re alive,” said Suka, trembling.

“If you didn’t think I was alive before, why did you bring food to sustain me?” Yetu asked.

“I meant you’re… you’re like us,” Suka said.

It was flattering to be thought of in those terms. As similar. As sharing something in common with not just one other, but a whole us. Since she was fourteen, she’d always been marked as different by her role as historian.

Yetu squeezed her eyes shut, regretting the thought. She wasn’t ready to be swept into the fold of a stranger. She was wajinru, no matter how far away they were from her. Being historian, being different, didn’t change that. “I didn’t mean to startle you so. I only wanted to thank you for the fish,” she said.

Suka calmed, limbs visibly loosening. “It actually wasn’t me. It’s Oori who’s been catching them for you. I just, I happened to be here.”

“Oori. Is that one of your siblings?” asked Yetu. “One of the… people… from the other day?” The words were much more fluid in her mind than they were coming from her mouth. It sounded like she was belching them out.

“No. Oori fishes around here, but she’s not family,” Suka said. “She’s from an island off the northwestern coast. We’re inland mainland folk, and much farther south. I’d say she trades with us, but to be honest, mostly she just gives. I tried to give her a blanket once and she laughed at me and asked if I’d mistaken her for an infant, so. That’s Oori.”

“Can you tell Oori thank you for me? Then tell her I’d like more?”

“More?”

“More fish. Or preferably a seal. Something fatty.”

“Oori is—she doesn’t take kindly to requests or demands on her time,” said Suka, like it wasn’t something to be wary of about her. Yetu found the quality fascinating. She wanted to be a person who didn’t take kindly to requests, who knew her own mind. Maybe if she’d had a stronger will, she’d have been able to resist the pull of the ancestors, able to carry the History without so much grief.

“That’s admirable,” said Yetu. “It was only a question. Not a demand. She should do what she wants.”

“Oh, she does.”

Despite what Suka warned, Oori did bring bigger loads of fish over the next few days. And fresh seal. Small sharks. King mackerel.

Yetu swam in tiny circles in the pool in an attempt to keep herself awake for longer hours. She wanted to catch a glimpse of this Oori. The tightness of her temporary resting quarters was stifling, but the border of boulders formed an appealing bubble around her, shutting out the sensations of the ocean. She’d tire of the curious blankness against her skin compared to the open sea eventually; for now, she lapped up the calm, the finiteness of it. As long as she didn’t make a point to tune her skin to the waters beyond the wall, her world ended but a few feet from wherever she was. It was a cage, but also a protective cocoon.

On the third day of trying to spot Oori, Yetu finally did. She awoke when the sky was only just turning light, a pleasing dark blue shade that reminded Yetu of being underwater where sunlight barely reached.

“I see you,” Yetu said, using a wajinru greeting.

Yetu heard a startled splash.

“So?” Oori said, her voice quiet, deep, and raspy.

“I was just letting you know,” said Yetu, alert now. It was too dark to properly see her, and sound didn’t travel as well through air. She could neither feel nor hear the shape of this strange woman beyond a vague outline.

“I suppose now I know,” said Oori.

“Thank you for the food,” Yetu said, swimming closer to where Oori stood in the pool, slowed down by the shallowness of the water.

“It’s nothing,” Oori said, the gruffness in her voice showing no signs of retreating.

“It’s food. It’s helping me get better.”

“What should I have done instead? Not provide what is necessary? Don’t take it to heart. I fed my mother till the day she died, and I despised her. Good-bye.”

Their conversations over the next several days continued to be short. Oori had no interest in Yetu, nor in anyone, it seemed. She spent her days out on the water in a wooden sailboat Yetu had spotted, which, given the calm winds of late, had become more of a paddleboat. She spent nights on the water as well, sleeping in her boat, the rope tied to a large boulder. According to the others, she didn’t always tie herself to shore, letting the water carry her wherever it would, living off fish and stores of ocean.

“I wish there was a way to properly thank her,” Yetu said to Suka one day.

“Who? Oori?”

“Yes. Who else?” asked Yetu.

“She doesn’t like to be thanked. That’s too close to kinship for her, which she doesn’t do.”

“Well, kinship isn’t inherently a good thing,” said Yetu, beginning to understand Oori more and more. Perhaps for Oori, kinship meant taking care of a mother who’d hurt her. For Yetu, it had meant isolation from her people as she tried to cope with the rememberings. And now? She wasn’t sure what it meant. She would always see herself as wajinru. That was one thing she’d figured out since being in the tidal pool. The sea beckoned her, and it pained her not to join it, to be one with it, to feel it all over her. Even though it often hurt, her skin relished the pressure and the feedback. Above the surface, everything seemed so insubstantial and light. She missed being a part of not just the sea, but the whole world. Without the History, she felt out of place and out of time. She missed being connected to all.

But connection came with responsibility. Duty choked independence and freedom. If Oori didn’t want kinship, Yetu could understand. Why be beholden to anyone else’s agenda? Oori was obligated to herself and herself alone.

“I just mean that she’s different, you know? Not like us. She’s not so good with, hm, how do you say, human interaction and any trappings of decorum or rules. I suppose that’s why she prefers animals to people. Most animals don’t exchange hellos and ask how the other is. They just exist next to one another.”

Yetu’s ears and skin perked at the sound of that. Oori preferred animals, did she?

“Perfect, then. I’m not human,” said Yetu. Though her foremothers were two-legs, she felt she had very little in common with these strange land walkers, whose teeth were weak and flat. “I am animal.”

Suka played with their breath in the back of their throat then pushed it through their mouth—a strange habit of the two-legs. It was too thoughtful to be a sigh. Too calm and content to be a groan. Just a sound, meaningless, as they considered what to say.

“Yes, but only animal-ish?” they said, hedging.

Yetu didn’t understand what that could mean. She groaned, unable to keep track of it all. Without the vivid images of the rememberings, she was left only with outlines of memories, and even those were waning. Two-legs had specific ways of classifying the world that Yetu didn’t like. She remembered that, at least. They organized the world as two sides of a war, the two-legs in conflict with everything else. The way Suka talked about farming, it was as if they ruled the land and what it produced, as opposed to—they’d just said it themselves—existing alongside it.

Suka didn’t understand Oori. Yetu did. And what she didn’t understand, she wanted to. Suka had written Oori off. But Yetu was happy to simply exist alongside her whenever Oori made herself available for such things.

The first time Oori stayed longer than a few moments, Yetu got to see her in the sunlight. She had dark skin, darker even than Suka’s, and there were scars and markings cut into her face in elaborate patterns. They were beautiful and strangely familiar. Yetu squinted to get a stronger impression, but she couldn’t place them. Something from the History? That didn’t feel right. The memory felt more present than that, more recent.

Yetu wanted nothing more than to keep looking at Oori’s face, which was startlingly captivating. Her eyes were dark as the deep. Yetu drew her into a conversation about fish bait so she might keep looking upon her. Oori remained for nearly an hour debating the merits of this and that technique. Yetu felt bereft when she left, and she spent the rest of the day coming up with topics that might bid Oori to stay even longer.

The next day, Yetu taught Oori how to better read the winds as they related to the currents. For that lesson, Oori remained the whole morning and part of the afternoon. The next day, Yetu opened up about her thoughts on fishing nets, how sometimes, when she was a pup, she’d sneak off and tear all of them to shreds with her teeth. Oori listened, eyes toward the sea but ears toward Yetu, then asked if all nets were the same or were some worse than others. Yetu could talk about this topic at length, and she did, Oori never once standing up to leave. She nodded at random intervals and asked clarifying questions, but was otherwise content to hear what Yetu had to say.

A week passed, and Yetu ran out of topics, but Oori remained anyway. She told Yetu that despite her comfort on the ocean, she got seasick still. She loved riding waves on her little boat. She loved to swim. She could hold her breath for three minutes, which Yetu understood was supposed to be a significant amount of time for a two-legs.

When the both of them ran out of things to say and Oori looked like she might be getting up to leave, Yetu convinced her to stay by saying that there was a special sound she could make to attract certain types of fish to her. It was a hiccupping whistle, a gentler, more musical version of a seabird’s call. It had a hypnotizing effect, for one, but also stimulated pleasure centers in many creatures’ brains when combined with an electrical signal that wajinru could project.

“Like this?” Oori asked, making the sound in the air.

“Close,” said Yetu, but it wasn’t really, not at all. Her vocal apparatus was too different from a wajinru’s. “Make the sound in the water. See if that works.”

Oori hesitated, unsure for several moments. She was currently in a full squat on one of the boulders that surrounded the tidal pool, heels to ground, bottom nearly touching the rock.

“Come,” said Yetu. “Come here now.”

Yetu relished all the time she got to see Oori in the bright light of day. In addition to the patterned divots and scars, there were black markings inked permanently into her face and neck in similarly elaborate designs. If only Yetu could feel them, she might know what they were. Her eyes did not see as well as her scales did.

Oori’s voice and manner reminded Yetu of her amaba, stern and insistent. Yetu glanced toward the wide sea. Amaba’s suffering must’ve been so great right now, left for days in the seizing chokehold of the History. Yetu’s breath caught at the thought of it. Even if Amaba and the others had risen from the trance, it would take them some time to carry on life as usual.

Yetu tried to tune her skin to the water, to feel past the boulders out into the larger ocean. Thousands of sensations brushed up against her, but they were all whisper soft, and she couldn’t distinguish the wajinru from any other living creatures in the deep. Was it wishful thinking to hope that meant they were out of the Remembrance and had moved on now, living quiet, unremarkable lives?

Yetu returned her eyes to Oori, and Oori sat down on her bottom. She let her legs fall into the tidal pool, swaying her feet back and forth.

“See, it’s nice, isn’t it? Come in,” Yetu said.

“It’s cold,” said Oori, but it was just an excuse. Oori was not the sort to be put off by a slight chill. She braved the open sea daily, her boat crashing over waves that sprayed her with buckets of icy water.

“I don’t believe you have ever felt cold in your life,” said Yetu, gently chiding. “Come now. Get in.”

Yetu didn’t know what had come over her. She hadn’t had a conversation like this since before she’d taken on the History. She hadn’t teased or been teased since she was thirteen.

A lonely child, more easily hurt than other wajinru, she’d always tended to keep to herself. But before becoming historian, she could be with people at least, talk to them and confide in them. Once she had taken on the rememberings, she’d lost that ability, too gripped by the past to do more than the bare minimum to interact in the present.

She’d come to prize solitude over all else, desperate for quiet and a stop to the voices of the past and present alike. Friends she’d held dear disappeared, put off by her emotional distance, her unpredictability.

“Please?” said Yetu, keeping her voice light, playful. She hoped she was doing it right. She hoped that she didn’t sound too childish, trying to replicate her manner as a child because that was the last time she’d attempted to make conversation with someone she liked so much.

Oori groaned softly and shortly, but gave no indication that she was truly upset by Yetu’s encouragement. “I was cold once,” she said, “and I didn’t like it. I aim never to feel it again.”

Yetu tingled all over. She’d never been so content to talk to someone before. In fact, over the last twenty years, she’d avoided talking at all except those times when it was absolutely necessary… and even then. During her earliest Remembrances, she’d stayed silent the entire ceremony, providing no filter for the painful images she had sent her people.

“It feels wonderful. Come. Please,” Yetu pleaded again. She hoped she wasn’t pushing Oori too far. Yetu knew what it was like to be torn between one’s own wants and the wants of others.

“Fine,” said Oori, rolling her eyes. She slid into the water but kept her distance from Yetu, who was on the other side of the pool. It hadn’t occurred to Yetu before that Oori might’ve been afraid of her.

“Do I frighten you?” asked Yetu. She was glad that her voice sounded so strange, croaky, and broken, because it disguised any hurt or bitterness in it. “Scared that even though you’ve been feeding me, talking to me, that I’ll gobble you up? You think so little of me?” She’d meant it to sound like a joke, but she knew it didn’t come out that way.

Oori didn’t break under Yetu’s questions. Her face was still and calm, like the deep itself. “You are something from the wild. It isn’t a matter of thinking little of you. It’s a matter of common sense and respect. If I were to nurse a shark back to health, I would keep my distance when releasing it. I don’t know anything about you. What if you have an insatiable need to bite anything that is within two meters of you? What if you have the prey drive of a lion?”

Yetu didn’t know what a lion was. “I don’t. And besides, you look disgusting to eat.”

Oori caressed the top of the water with her right palm, sending tiny shocks of waves over Yetu’s skin a short distance away in the water. “Still. It remains that I know nothing about you. Would you trust a strange creature so readily? Don’t you harbor some recognition that I might do you harm? If you don’t, you are naive.”

“I am not naive,” said Yetu. “I know more about the world’s cruelty than you ever will. I know all of it.”

Except she didn’t anymore. The rememberings were gone, replaced with a ghost. Still, the echoes the History had left told her that the two-legs were capable of savagery.

“Oh really? What do you know, Yetu the wise?” asked Oori.

“I know what it feels like to be drowned,” she said, refusing to explain more, because she couldn’t remember more. Her only recollection of it was the sensation in her lungs. “I won’t be able to show you how to make the proper sound if you don’t come closer. Don’t you want to lure all the fish to you?”

Yetu dipped her head in and hoped Oori would do the same. She did, but it took her a whole minute. “Go like this,” said Yetu in wajinru, before realizing that wouldn’t make sense to Oori. She switched to her language and said the same, then demonstrated the sound. Oori pushed back up through the water to take a breath, then came down again and tried to emulate the sound.

Yetu shook her head, then gestured for Oori to join her back above the water. “Don’t use your mouth so much. The sounds are through your throat. Try screaming. Or screeching. That will get you closer.” Yetu hoped she wasn’t being too demanding. It felt good to share something freely with another. She could think of all kinds of things she wanted to show Oori. “Come now. Again.”

This time, the sound Oori made under the water was half decent, and though it didn’t sound like any word Yetu knew, at least it sounded like it could be a word in wajinru.

Oori emerged from the water looking very pleased with herself. She wasn’t smiling, but Yetu detected the satisfied smugness there. “Now it’s your turn,” said Yetu.

“My turn?”

“To show me something. Isn’t that how it works?” Conversations, shared moments—they were exchanges, were they not? This was what Yetu remembered of them from the time when her life had been a little more social than it was now.

“I have nothing to show you,” said Oori. “The only thing I know is the water, and I doubt I know anything about it that you don’t know better and more deeply.”

Yetu didn’t doubt it either. “Well, you could tell me about something else. You could tell me something about yourself.”

“What do you want to know?” asked Oori, looking more comfortable in the water now. She watched the sea, and birds flying overhead, and crabs in the sand. Her eyes never once met Yetu’s.

“Where are you from?” Yetu asked, hoping she’d get a chance to ask another question too. If she didn’t, and she’d wasted her question on something as mundane as place of origin, she’d regret it dearly. She wanted to know what Oori wanted more than anything else in the world, and what she was most afraid of, and had she ever been brought to shivers from sadness or anger. Did she like Yetu? Would she have treated any creature who washed up into this pool so gently, or was Yetu special?

“I am from a dead place,” Oori said.

“What do you mean?”

“The land is dead. The people are dead.”

“Your parents?” asked Yetu.

“Dead.”

“Siblings?”

“Dead,” said Oori.

“Kin?”

“All dead. I am the last of the Oshuben,” said Oori.

Yetu looked for traces of sadness on Oori’s face but found none. She was blank.

“What an unspeakable loss,” said Yetu, not wishing to assume that Oori’s stern countenance revealed anything about how she felt on the matter. According to Amaba, Yetu simply looked “away” and “removed” at times when she was experiencing some of the most violent rememberings.

“I can’t imagine a hole as wide as that,” said Yetu, looking out at the sea. When she made her skin receptive to it, she swore she could feel the wajinru’s anguished weeping through the water. It was like fish crawling all over her skin.

It wasn’t real, though. Just her imagination. Through the rocks, it was difficult to feel the wider ocean.

The ocean looked calm, but in the distance, she felt the sort of heavy rain and winds that signaled a coming storm. It was too far away to see how big it was, or which direction it was moving. If they had broken from the mud womb and decided to rise, the wajinru could cause a storm like that, couldn’t they? They all possessed the electrical capability to move the waters.

Yetu shook her head. She had no evidence that was going on. Wild speculation wouldn’t serve her. It was just another way to tie her to the past, and the past had been responsible for nearly killing her.

She’d learned how to deal with the rememberings. The other wajinru would too, in time.

“I am sorry for what happened to you, for all that was taken from you,” said Yetu. Even though she’d left her family, Yetu didn’t like to think of her amaba not existing. Such a thought was intolerable.

“It’s the way things go,” said Oori.

It was, and Yetu knew no words to console her. “Is there anyone to enact vengeance upon?”

“Everyone and no one,” Oori said, inching forward through the water closer to Yetu.

“Sometimes it’s not the worst thing to lose everything. Sometimes it’s good,” said Yetu, thinking that for the first time in twenty years, she could feel the ocean now without it overwhelming her senses.

She had room to think. To know what she wanted and believed. And all it had cost her was everything.

“Good?” asked Oori. Her steely facade cracked, but only infinitesimally. Yetu wondered if she’d even seen it at all. She felt the brokenness of Oori’s voice against her skin, but that was the only sign.

“If the past is full of bad things, if a people is defined by the terror done to them, it’s good for it to go, don’t you think?” said Yetu. “I was a historian.” It made her feel so good to say that. Was. No longer. She blinked her eyes shut and tried to cast out thoughts of the wajinru locked in the Remembrance. “It was a very holy thing for my kind. It meant I held on to all the memories so no one else had to, generations and generations of them. Six hundred years of pain.”

“Were you like a storyteller then?” asked Oori.

Yetu shook her head. “All the memories of those who’ve come before, they lived inside me. Real as flesh. I remembered them like they were my own. I walked inside them.”

Oori nodded, curious and intrigued. “Touched by spirits,” she said sagely.

“By electricity,” Yetu countered. “And it hurts. I gave up the memories so I could be free.”

So she could live.

Oori looked out at the sea, unblinking. “I would take any amount of pain in the world if it meant I could know all the memories of the Oshuben. I barely know any stories from my parents’ generation. I can’t remember our language. How could you leave behind something like that? Doesn’t it hurt not to know who you are?”

“I know who I am now. All I knew before was who they were, who they wanted me to be,” said Yetu. “And it was killing me. It did kill me. I wasn’t Yetu. I was just a shell for their whims.”

Oori shook her head and stood up from the water. “But your whole history. Your ancestry. That’s who you are.”

“No. I am who I am now. Before, I was no one. When you’re everyone in the past, and when you’re for everyone in the present, you’re no one. Nobody. You don’t exist. I didn’t exist. If you prefer a world where I don’t exist, then stop bringing me fish.”

“Fine,” said Oori, turning to leave. The water splashed, brushing Yetu’s skin. She hated that despite being as angry as she was at Oori, she was thrilled by even that small amount of connection with her. These feelings were unfamiliar. More than anything, she wanted Oori near, but Yetu yelled at her to go.

“You are nothing but a silly fish,” said Oori. “Of course you wouldn’t understand the importance of having a history.”

Oori did not come back for three days.