I scanned the side for a name, but found nothing.
A soft hand wrapped around my arm. “Come on. Don’t swim so close.”
“I want to poke around a bit.”
“No,” said Lysi firmly.
“Aren’t you curious?”
“Mee, there’s iron everywhere.”
“I’ll be careful.”
She pulled hard, forcing me to look at her. “All it takes is an accidental brush across your skin and you’re burned forever.”
I shut my mouth, ashamed for being so tactless. Of course Lysi knew what it felt like to be burned by iron. The enormous scar across her waist was there because of me. I looked away.
“Let’s keep moving north,” she said.
I followed, keeping close to her tail. Lysi was right. Poking around here would be needlessly reckless.
“Should we follow the curve of the islands?” I said. “Won’t there be more shipwrecks closer to land?”
“Yes, but I’m sure Kori Maru is further north.”
We left the Aleutian Islands behind. The Bering Sea was cold and wild, the waves overhead more violent than anything I’d experienced. I was glad for the safety of travelling far below the surface.
Having not slept the night before, we grew sluggish. My concentration waned and every part of me felt heavy. The sky darkened to a deep navy blue. It must have been at least midnight.
“There’s a wreck over there,” said Lysi, “but it’s wooden. Feel the texture on the current?”
“Sure,” I said, too tired to bother. “Where’d you learn about all these wrecks, anyway?”
“It was part of our geography and navigation lessons. You have to learn these things if you want to find your way around. But it isn’t proving very helpful, apparently.”
“It’s okay. I learned a lot of things in elementary school that I can’t remember. Long division. Outer space. The British Empire.”
“Why do humans need to learn about outer space if they don’t need to keep track of tides?”
“Huh?”
“The cycles of the moon.”
“Oh,” I said. “No, we learned more about planets and stuff.”
“What do planets affect?”
“Um. Nothing.”
Lysi cast me a sidelong glance.
I laughed. “We don’t learn about that stuff because it affects everyday life. It’s more for the sake of, just, knowledge. Understanding the universe.”
“Did learning about the planets help you understand the universe?”
I considered, thinking about our place on this blue dot hurtling through space among all those other planets and stars. I thought about how small we were in the middle of a war, and how small the war was in the context of space.
Then I looked at Lysi swimming beside me, and I decided that as long as she was there, I didn’t care how miniscule we all were.
