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.