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.