CHAPTER 12
I’ve been promoted. Josiah meets me at the door at work the next morning and tells me that it’s time. “We’re moving you to the ocean room today,” he says.
“Congratulations,” Elinor says as I stop near our table to say good-bye. She works quick and capable, and I wonder why they didn’t move her to the ocean room long ago.
“I like it here,” she says. My face must reveal what I’m thinking, or else it’s a question others have asked before. “I’ve requested to stay. The ocean room is—too much.”
I think I can see what she means. Through the window that separates us, I’ve watched the people in the other room and I’ve noticed a tension there that isn’t in the sky room, a striving among the workers. You can see it in the way they work and interact. I wonder if it’s the proximity to the sea, and the fact that real water can be glimpsed through the window in the portal door. I think the ocean can make people anxious. It’s like seeing a real sky. It’s seeing the world as it is, not as we made it to be.
When I sit down at my new workstation, I hear Atlantia breathe deep and even around me.
Somewhere, far away, I think I hear a voice screaming. But when I try to listen more closely, to narrow my hearing down to that sound alone, it disappears.
It’s your imagination, I tell myself. You’re remembering what Maire thinks she can hear.
Bien watches me from her table, her gaze clear and unkind, and I drop my eyes. I still can’t control people, not without revealing myself. I need to be careful.
The morning passes quickly. Josiah shows me the screens that demonstrate and diagnose the more complicated drone injuries that we fix in the ocean room, and it’s easy to see how to repair them from the graphics. My hands are capable and I feel confident as I clamp my visor down and get back to work.
Everyone except Bien is friendly enough, which is to say they ignore me and concentrate on their own work. The damage on the drones is fascinating—ashy scars of injury, torn wires jutting out of their metal bellies—and it turns my stomach when I think of what the mines could do to a person.
That won’t happen to me, I tell myself. I won’t let it.
I wish I could show True the drones. He’d love them.
After work everyone walks to the nearest wishing pool and throws in their coins for me. Elinor comes; Bien, too. People are polite, but they don’t know me well and I never have much to say, and after Elinor leaves, I sit alone at the well looking down at all the glittering coin. It’s a great deal of money, and I find myself touched that they’d do this on my behalf. Of course they might have used the wish for themselves, the way I did with Bien, but I don’t mind that.
I count fifty-three coin, and the amount makes me wonder. Is there a way to gather all of this up? It’s illegal, of course. The money is supposed to go to the people Above. I glance around. The plaza is almost empty, except for an occasional worker or peacekeeper walking across.
And someone else.
Maire sits down next to me on the rim of the pool. She reaches into her pocket and takes something out. I can’t see what it is.
“I thought you were in prison,” I say.
“The Council had something they needed me to do,” Maire says, her voice dry. “They let me out.” She’s unescorted—no peacekeepers, no Council members in sight. So they trust her enough—or need her badly enough—to let her free, even after the incident at the floodgates.
“What was it they wanted from you?” I ask.
She smiles. “Don’t you want to save these questions for the shell?”
“No,” I say.
“That’s good,” she says. “Some things are better discussed face-to-face.” She opens her hand and there’s a coin sitting in the middle of her palm. “Take it,” she says. “Make a wish for yourself.”
“No,” I say. “Thank you.”
Maire shrugs and tosses the coin into the water. Fifty-four. She gives no outward sign that she wishes for anything.
“I want to know more about the sirens,” I say. “Is it safe to ask you about them here?”
Maire doesn’t even look around to see how many people are near us. But she tilts her head, and I realize she is listening. “Yes,” she says. “For now.”
I keep my voice low. “How did the sirens go from being loved to hated?”
“There was a step in between,” Maire says. “They were worshipped.”
“What do you mean? Like the gods?”
Maire smiles. “No,” she says. “I mean they were the gods.”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “The gods have existed since long before the Divide.”
“People worshipped gods for thousands of years,” Maire says. “So yes, gods have existed long before the Divide. But our gods—the ones you see in the temple—were only sculptures in the beginning, brought down from the Above. They were salvaged from the ancient cathedrals on the surface and used as decorations. Embellishments. People didn’t believe in gods at the time of the Divide. It had been years since anyone believed in anything.” Maire puts her hand in the water, trails her fingers through it. “Then the sirens came and changed all of that.
“There was no scientific or logical explanation for them. So the people began to turn elsewhere for an answer. And when they looked up, they saw those statues in the temple looking down, and they began to wonder. They wondered if there were gods after all, and if they had sent the sirens. Some people even believed that the sirens were gods. That’s when the miracles and our religion all came about. Did you know that the first Minister was a siren?”
“No,” I say. “They don’t teach us any of this.”
“The Council changed the history long ago,” Maire says. “Even most of our own Council now doesn’t know what happened. They believe as you did, as most people do, the version that you’ve been taught.”
Could this be true? I think back to that voice Maire saved, that long-ago woman who came Below and who witnessed the siren children. The only even remotely religious word she used was miracle. That might have been the beginning of their belief.
Who else knows this? Did my mother know? Did Bay? I can’t bring myself to ask. I don’t want to know how many more things they kept from me.
“Did that first siren Minister invent our religion?” I ask. “And then force everyone to believe it?” That could be a reason for people to come to hate the sirens—if they felt manipulated in their belief.
Maire shakes her head. “The religion was agreed upon by the sirens and the people together. They studied old histories. They learned about the gods. And then they shaped it all to fit the way their lives were. The Council took our religion to the Above, and the Above began to believe as well.”
“Did the Above hate the sirens and the people Below for that?” I ask. “Because we told them what to believe?”
“No,” Maire says. “At first both the Above and the Below believed the religion was right, that it made the most sense. In fact, they came to believe that they had not created their faith and belief system. Rather, they felt that they had been led to the truth by the miracle of the sirens. But the religion became warped and twisted as both the Councils Above and Below used it for their purposes. As I said, a very few people in Atlantia know the truth. Now you are one of them.”
“What evidence do you have of all this?”
“The siren voices,” Maire says. “This is what they told me. And I believe them.”
“Do you have any of them that I can hear?” I ask. “Like the voice of that other woman in the shell?” If I could hear the sirens say all of this, I would know that it’s true.
“No,” Maire says. “The siren voices were too strong to save. I heard them once, and then they were gone. They had been waiting a long time.”
So I can’t hear them myself. That’s convenient, I think. Do I believe Maire?
“The siren voices are gone,” Maire says, “but you can still hear some of the others. Like the one I caught in the shell. I was listening, and when I found one that I knew would be good for you to hear, I saved as much of it as I could before it was gone. They can all only speak once, you know. But they have things worth saying, too. Haven’t you heard any of the voices before?”
“Not speaking,” I say. “I’ve heard breathing. Screaming. I thought it was Atlantia.”
“It is,” Maire says.
I’m not sure I understand what she means, but there is something else I want desperately to know.
“How do you do it?” I ask her. “With the shells?”
“I tell them what I want,” Maire says. “I tell them to hold the voices, and they do.”
She makes it sound so simple.
“Could I do it?” I ask. “Control things that aren’t living?” I wait for Maire to laugh at me. I wait for her to tell me that I can’t. That I’m not powerful enough. Or that I shouldn’t try. Or that it’s not safe. That’s what my mother would say. She cared so much about keeping me safe.
But Maire doesn’t say any of those things.
“You can’t be afraid,” she says. “I failed in my first attempts at saving the voices because I was afraid.”
“You were afraid of the shells?”
“I was afraid of what I was asking them to do,” she says.
“Are there any other rules?”
“The sirens of the past told me that we can only control physical things that have been made,” Maire says. “We cannot control things that are more elemental. Air, wind, water—you cannot control the things that have almost always been.”
“And we can control people,” I say.
“Their bodies,” Maire says. “But we cannot control their souls.”
“Is there anything else?”
“You have to be near the object when you command it,” Maire says, her tone practical, instructive. “At least that is how it is for me. And eventually your command will wear off. You and I won’t be able to communicate through the shell forever.”
She stands up. “I need to get back.”
“Wait,” I say. I’ve realized that this information isn’t just interesting in abstract—it’s useful for me now. I could use this in the tanks. “You’re saying you can command other things,” I say. “Not just people. Not just shells.”
“That’s right,” Maire says.
“And the trick is to not be afraid,” I say.
“It’s not a trick,” Maire says. “It’s the way it is. And you have to listen.” She pulls her black robes tightly around herself. “It’s time for me to go.”
She doesn’t look back. I don’t follow after her.
When I glance down at the pool, I see that all the coins have come up to the surface. They’re floating there. All I have to do is pluck them from the water and put them in my bag, if I want them. But coins sink. They don’t float. Unless—
My aunt must have told them to do it.
Maire has done something very dangerous, I realize, by teaching me so many things when she knows sirens are to be taught only under Council supervision. But what Maire’s done isn’t public. I’m the only one who knows. She’s put herself in my hands. I could go to the priests, I could tell Nevio the Minister, I could warn the Council about what she can do and what she’s said to me.
I have the power to make things very difficult for my aunt, and she is the one who gave that power to me.
Does that mean Maire trusts me?
I don’t know. But I do know that she’s told me something that could help me make it Above, alive.
As I walk to the gondola stop, I think about my new idea and try not to jangle the coin I’ve taken from the pool. It’s heavy in my pocket. When I pick up my pace to pass a group of people, I think I hear a voice, a person crying out, and I turn too fast. I slip unexpectedly and fall hard to the ground, hitting my knees and hands and sending an aching, sharp song through my bones.
A woman near me exclaims and reaches down to take my arm and help me up.
“Thank you,” I say, after a brief pause, to make sure the pain won’t come out in my voice. I’m still stunned by the suddenness of the fall. I should have been more careful.
“Are you all right?” someone else asks.
“Yes,” I say. “I don’t know why I slipped—”
And then we see it.
A small puddle of water, right there on the ground. In unison we all look up to try to find a source.
“Is it a leak?” someone asks.
A drop of water sails down from somewhere up high.
“Where did it come from?” I ask.
“I think it’s coming from one of the rivets near that fifth seam,” someone else says. “Can you see?”
I try to focus on the ribs of metal sky arching above.
A peacekeeper pushes through the crowd. “What’s the problem?” he asks.
“It looks like a leak,” says the woman who caught me. “This poor girl slipped in the water from it.”
“Don’t worry,” the peacekeeper says. “We’ll get it fixed straightaway.”
I’ve heard of tiny leaks before, but I’ve never seen one. I’m fascinated by the growing pool of water on the ground, and I have this strange desire to kneel down and touch it, maybe even taste it. Real seawater, sneaking in from the outside.
When I change into my racing suit, all I feel is focus. I have to see if this will work. If what Maire says is true. And if I am strong enough, powerful enough.
Once I’m in the water for my practice swim, I open my mouth, and I speak. Unafraid.
I use my real voice, but it sounds different under here. And of course my mouth fills with water even though I try to let in as little as possible. There is only so much you can say like this, but all I need is a word or two.
“Come,” I say.
And the fish and the eels come to me, without hesitation.
“Go,” I say, and they swim away.
I am exhilarated.
I might survive this after all.
The fish and eels are small. But if I can control them, is there also a chance that I could control the mines out there in the water? And could I tell the doors of the morgue to unlock and let me in when it’s time for me to shroud myself and go up through the floodgates?
For once in my life, something is easy. I used my voice, and it worked exactly the way I wanted. Does the water magnify my voice? Make me more powerful? There’s so much I don’t know, and it feels wonderful for the first time, instead of miserable.
I swim up and down and up and down the lane, wearing myself out, practicing telling the fish what to do.
Maire and I are not like the other sirens.
Even things that aren’t alive have to obey us.
For once I’m glad to be like my aunt.
When I get home, I look at my pile of coin and my pile of fish and I feel a deep satisfaction. I’m not there yet. But it’s coming together.
Except for one thing.
When I lift up Bay’s shell, it has gone silent.
No singing, no breathing. Not even the sound of the ocean. Nothing at all.
Is it because I am getting closer to the Above? Because I am going to hear Bay’s real voice again soon, in person? Or has the magic worn out? Maire said it wouldn’t last forever.
My sister is gone again.