CHAPTER 7
I sit down under Efram’s tree, the one I repaired not long ago. I miss working here, with the shivering leaves and the sullen gods. I wonder why Maire picked this as a meeting place and how long it will take before she comes. I wonder why I’m here. Is it because my mother wrote Maire’s name in her notes? Ask Maire. Or because it seems that Bay did trust Maire to give me the money and the shell?
Or am I here because I want to talk to another siren? The conversations I’ve had with Maire have been the only times I’ve spoken with someone who has the same power that I do.
She’s all the family I have left.
Silver leaves scatter over the ground. I lean down to pick one up and tsk to myself when I see the heavy-handedness of the soldering work. Despite what Nevio said, they haven’t found someone to take my place repairing the trees. Not someone as skilled as I am, anyway.
And then I see a splay of blue wing and brown fur on the ground.
One of the temple bats.
The bat’s tiny body looks fine, nothing broken, but it’s certainly dead. Its eye stares back up at me with nothing there. Against the ground, its wings are dark as the deep instead of blue as glass and sea. I hear people gathering near me.
“It’s like seeing Efram himself fallen and broken,” a man says, but he is quickly quieted. What he’s said sounds too much like sacrilege. We are not supposed to believe that Efram, or any of the gods, could fall or break.
At least the gods are easy to fix. This animal is beyond any help we can give. “Find Justus at the temple,” I say, and someone goes running.
It takes Justus only moments to arrive, but there’s nothing he can do. He tells the others to move along. I stay behind.
“What do you think killed it?” I ask.
Justus shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose it could be a natural death. There are a few tests I can conduct back at the temple to try and find out more.” He lifts the bat carefully in his hands. There’s a clean linen cloth in the bottom of the container and he places the bat gently inside, as if it weren’t past all feeling.
“What was it doing out in the day?” I ask.
“It might have died in the night,” Justus says. “It’s not the first. They’re not immortal.”
Of course not. I know that. But it’s very odd to see one of the bats dead.
Justus straightens up, careful not to step on the hem of his robe, and holds the box in his hands. “They’re dying more quickly, though,” he says, “since we lost your mother.”
He leaves me there alone, and as soon as he has gone back inside the temple, I hear her.
Maire.
She walks softly. She doesn’t step on any of the leaves or say a single word, but I still know she’s here, just as I did that day in the temple.
“The trees sing,” Maire says. “They told me you were here. And I’ve been listening and hoping that you would come.”
It’s unsettling to hear her say that about the trees. They’re mine, not hers.
I say, flatly, not giving her even a hint of my real voice: “What do you want?”
“It’s not about what I want,” Maire says. “You know that. It’s about what you want. To go Above and find your sister.”
“And you think you can help me.”
“Yes,” she says. “I can. I helped your sister and your mother, and I can help you.”
As if we’ve agreed to do so beforehand, the two of us start walking together. Across the courtyard, people wave to one another and call out to friends passing by in gondolas. A peacekeeper blows his whistle to warn a group of youth gathered too near the canal and they move away. I feel a sudden fierce love for my city.
“I can help you,” Maire says, after we’ve walked in silence for a time, “if you let me. I won’t make you do anything.”
“You don’t know that you could make me do anything,” I say.
“That’s true,” she agrees, in a flat tone that sounds exactly like mine. I hate her for mimicking me.
She stops, and I realize that we’ve come to the back entrance of the temple compound, the part that leads to the floodgates and the morgue.
I haven’t been here since my mother died. Bay and I had to go down through this entrance to prepare our mother’s body. When we finished, we had to leave her there and climb the stairs to the floodgates’ viewing area, where we sat in our reserved seats to witness her body going up. We were daughters of the Minister that day, one last time.
Maire strides right up to the guards at the floodgate entrance. “We’d like to go inside,” she says.
“That’s not allowed,” one says. “You don’t have Council and temple permission.”
“I understand,” Maire says, and the resignation in her voice convinces even me for a second. I’m turning away when she speaks again.
“Now,” she says, just a single word.
It’s cold and hot, a slice, a knife through one’s brain and body. I step forward involuntarily.
The guards have already started to open the doors, as if they began to obey her before she finished speaking. Is that possible? Is her power so strong?
“Stay,” Maire tells them.
And then, to me, she says, “Come.”
I follow. I’m not sure whether I’m following her voice or my own strong, strange desire to go inside.
“I think,” Maire says, “that we should go down.”
Down. Into the floodgate chamber itself, not up to the viewing area. This is strictly forbidden unless you’re a priest or have come with one to prepare a body, but Maire acts as if she has every right to be here.
We go through narrow, dank hallways, the ones that eventually lead to the morgue farther down. The guards don’t follow us. They’re likely calling for reinforcements, who will arrive in a matter of moments. But will it matter? How many people can Maire command?
“Not an army,” she says, as if she’s heard my question, “so our time is limited. They’ll send guards who are immune to the sound of my voice, and they’ll take me away. The Council will find it necessary to reprimand me and lock me up for a few days, so you and I should accomplish as much as we can at this meeting.”
I can’t get over the sound of that Now. My heart pounds. And I realize how silly my thoughts were earlier, about being a match for Maire in some way. Her voice has been honed and cultivated for years. It is a weapon, a beautiful one.
“Ah,” Maire says. “Here we are.”
She puts her hand on the door in front of us. It is metal and heavy, pressurized for when the water comes in. Somehow Maire opens it easily.
“Come along,” Maire says, stepping across the threshold. There’s no command in her voice, but I’m not sure I trust the invitation. I pause for a moment before I follow her inside.
The floodgate chamber is tall, many stories high. Along the carved buttresses supporting the ceiling sit ancient stone figures representing the gods. Like the ones in the temple, they were taken from churches Above long ago. I look up at the screaming tiger and dragon and lion mouths and at the glaring eyes. The floor is damp in places.
It took the engineers years to perfect the technology of the floodgates, to make walls strong enough that they could let the water in to this chamber alone without the pressure breaking the city wide open. It’s a little terrifying to watch a body go up—it feels as though, at any moment, the water will break through into the viewing area. But of course that has never happened.
The water of the sea pushes against the top of the gates, presses down all around us. I think I hear the metal sigh and the stone moan.
Bay and I were together here at the floodgates, and we were together before that when the priests and representatives of the Council asked us their many questions after they found our mother’s body: Had she been unwell? Did she tell you of any chronic illnesses in your family, ones we don’t have here in our medical records? Bay and I sat side by side, saying no over and over again.
“What do you think happens when the dead reach the surface?” Maire asks. “Do you believe that their bodies become foam and their souls fly free?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I don’t know about the souls part of it,” Maire says. “But if a body makes it through the mines in the water and washes to the shore, the people Above take what they want from it. Clothing. Jewelry.”
With that word it all comes back, the whole memory of that day, the one I’ve tried to keep locked away, pushed down in my mind.
“I forgot to bring her ring,” Bay said. “She always wanted to wear her ring when she went to the surface. How could I forget?”
“It’s all right,” I told Bay, but I didn’t look at her, because they were bringing our mother’s body into the floodgate chamber. We sat high up in the viewing area. Our mother looked small in their arms.
They set our mother down on the floor and chanted the prayers. I willed myself not to cry. I didn’t look at Bay. And then, when the priests were finished with the prayers, they left the room, sealed it shut, and left our mother alone. Hundreds of us were watching—some of us in the viewing area, some on screens set up in the plazas throughout Atlantia—but she was alone.
I heard a creaking sound in the walls. It was the sound of water coming in.
The open mouths of the gods began to stream. The water cascaded to the floor, and soon our mother was wet, her clothes clinging to her legs, her hair swirling around her.
Far, far above was the exit of the floodgates, an enormous opening modeled after the rose window in the temple.
The water filled the chamber, and the body lifted up. The speed of the water increased, filling the chamber faster and faster.
The water rose above the level of the viewing area, and I gasped in air. It seemed as if we were going to drown as the water went past our windows. But of course, we were safe.
Our mother’s body went up, up, up, toward the exit of the floodgates, and I thought I could see the sun for a moment, that it was shining all the way down on Atlantia.
When the chamber was nearly full, and I could barely see my mother anymore, the window began to spin. It looked like a flower opening.
And then she was gone.
When we came home that night, I found the ring and pressed it into Bay’s hand. “I think she would have changed her mind anyway,” I said. “I think she would have wanted you to keep this.”
“Once they’ve taken what they need Above,” Maire says to me now, “they dump the body in a pit. They don’t want it any more than we do Below.”
Maire is saying a body, but I think of her body. My mother’s. I can picture it all exactly: her clothes in a tangle, her limp form slumped against the shore, pushed again and again by the waves. Someone from the Above coming down to find her. Taking what they can.
“The dead are not the only ones who leave Atlantia,” Maire says, her voice a whisper, even though there is no one here but me. “Of course there are those who choose to go Above, like Bay.” Maire pauses. “But there are others. The Council, when occasion requires it.”
I already know this. Sometimes the Council takes their transports up through the locks—the series of compression and decompression chambers that lead to the surface. It’s part of their work. The Council must negotiate with the people who live Above, to make sure everything runs smoothly. But the Minister never goes. The Minister’s safety is too precious to put at risk, and his or her place is in the Below.
“Did you know that this time they’re planning to take the sirens, too?” Maire asks. “Rumor has it that we’ll leave very soon. If you let me, I could take you with us. Above.”
Remember, I tell myself, you can’t believe what she says. But I can’t help it. I could go up with them and perhaps, once I was Above, I could find a way to escape.
“Sirens are miracles,” Maire says. “Remember that.”
“Then why are you all at the mercy of the Council?” I ask.
“Because we are human miracles,” Maire says. “And so there are people we love, and the Council can hold that over us. Remember the time of the Divide? How they were able to get people to agree to stay Above by sending one of their loved ones to live safely Below? That manipulation is very like what the Council does with the sirens. It’s how they control us. We do what they ask, and our loved ones have better lives. If we don’t do what they want, they can make things difficult for those we love.”
“Who do you love?” I ask Maire, because I cannot picture her loving anyone. Especially now that my mother is gone.
Maire laughs. “I love myself,” she says. “I do what they ask because I want to live.”
I understand her.
She and I are alike.
I love Bay, and my mother, but I also want to survive. Perhaps that is what I want more than anything else. If I’m honest with myself, how much of my desire has to do with seeing my sister again and how much of it has to do with my increasing certainty that, if I don’t get Above, something in me will die?
Maire and I are two sides of the same dark coin.
“And of course I loved your mother,” Maire says. She walks out into the middle of the floodgate chamber. “She was in this chamber years before her death, you know. All potential Ministers come here. The Council and the priests close off the public viewing area. One by one, each candidate for Minister lies down in the middle of the floor, in the same spot where their bodies will be placed when they die. Did you know this?”
No. My mother never told me.
“I know this,” Maire says, her voice growing, pushing, pulling on me, “because I was there.”
“You couldn’t have been there,” I say. “They would never consider you for Minister, and you’re not part of the Council.”
“That’s true,” Maire says. “But as you know, a Minister has to prove that he or she is either immune to the sirens or powerful enough to resist them. So the candidates for Minister come here, during the night, while the rest of Atlantia sleeps. The priests and Council watch as witnesses. And then the sirens come in. We take turns talking. The other priests and the Council don’t hear what we say. They watch our lips, of course, they see the words, but they stay safe from our voices.”
“What do you say?” I ask.
“Oh,” Maire says, “it’s different for each person. Of course. The point is to see who screams and breaks, and who can resist.”
“They’d never let you talk to my mother,” I say. “The two of you are sisters. They’d think you’d go easy on her.”
“On the contrary,” Maire says, “they thought I might know exactly what to say. And they knew those things might be even more difficult to hear, coming from a sister.”
I don’t ask her what she said to my mother, but Maire tells me anyway.
“I told her that her husband never loved her, that her children were going to die young,” Maire says, closing her eyes. She seems like she tastes each word as she says it. “I told her that she wanted to be Minister for all the wrong reasons—for power, for gain. I told her about terrible things, evil things that people do to one another. I told her that I did not love her.” Maire opens her eyes and there is a darkness in them that I have never seen before, one so deep it shocks me, even coming from Maire.
“I held nothing back,” Maire says. “And it worked. Oceana’s ability to resist impressed the other priests and the Council. She was the only one able to withstand every single siren, including her own sister. And she wasn’t born immune, the way some people are. So she has me to thank for her excellent control. Those few years we grew up together taught her resistance.” Then she smiles at me. “Though perhaps I should credit you with some of that, too. It’s rather impressive she trained herself to hold out against her own child.”
That hurts, as Maire knew it would. But I refuse to let her manipulate me. I remember how my mother did not resist me when the need was real, how she always told me who I really was even as she tried to shelter me.
“Without me, your mother never would have been the Minister,” Maire says. “I helped make her into what she’d always dreamed of becoming.”
I don’t believe Maire. My mother was the Minister because of what she did.
“Of course, it hurt her,” Maire says. “She knew it would, but she didn’t understand how hard it would be to hear me say those things. She thought less of me after that day. She was afraid. But there was no way around it. If I hadn’t done what I did, she would never have been the Minister, and she had to be the Minister.”
“You make her sound selfish,” I say. “As if that’s all she cared about.”
“No,” Maire says. “She loved the city, but she had to be the Minister because Atlantia needed her to be the Minister.”
“Do you love Atlantia?”
“I love it and I hate it,” Maire says.
When she says that, I feel it, too.
“I won’t force you to do anything, Rio.” Maire makes my name sound beautiful. She makes me sound beautiful. “But you can choose to come to the Above with us.”
I close my eyes with the pleasure of that thought. If I say yes to Maire, maybe I could taste real air. I could walk across a sandy beach to a town with real trees and talk to my sister. Even if we were tasked with burying garbage while breathing in pollution for the rest of our lives, we would be together and Above, a circumstance I never thought possible.
“You can’t get Above on your own,” Maire says. “The transports they use to move goods between the Above and the Below aren’t pressurized for human survival. The transports they use for taking people to the surface are guarded too closely by the Council. Even if you used your voice to get past those who guard them, the Council would know the minute you tried to ascend. They’d cut off your air and bring the transport back. You’d be dead in minutes. I’ve seen it happen.”
I open my eyes.
“Even if you somehow scrape together the money to buy an air tank and attempt an escape through the mining bay,” Maire says, “you’ll be blown to bits by the mines before you exhale the last of the air you breathed in Atlantia. This is the best way. I’m your safest chance for the Above.”
I hear something outside. The guards are at the door. It won’t hold for long.
“You think you don’t know me,” Maire says, “but you do. I sang you some of your first lullabies.”
And I don’t know if it’s her voice or the truth or both, but I think I do remember her singing a song long ago.
Under star-dark seas and skies of gold
Live those Above, and those Below
They sing and weep, both high and deep
While over and under the ocean rolls
“You see,” Maire says, her voice sad. “You remember.”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
“Your mother cut me off from you when you were very small,” Maire says. “And I always thought I knew why. When I heard you speak in the temple the day Bay left, I knew for certain.”
“She wanted to protect me from you.”
“She was right,” Maire says. “She knew I’d want to talk to you, to teach you about your gift. I wouldn’t have been able to resist. But I would never have hurt you intentionally.” She looks up at the floodgates. “I wonder if that was what she was coming to tell me, the day she died. I wonder if she meant to tell me about you. Or if it was something else entirely.”
My mother’s last act was to go to her sister’s house. What was she trying to do? Was she trying to tell Maire something? Give her a warning? Ask her a question? And did she die before her message was given, as Maire asserts? Or was she able to deliver it and then struck down? By whose hand? My aunt’s?
My mother and my sister trusted Maire, but I’m not certain she repaid their trust.
The clamor outside is growing. They’re about to break open the doors.
“I won’t be able to control them for long once they get inside,” Maire says. “There will be too many. You should go. Slip out the door as they come in, and I will make sure they don’t see you. But take this.” She presses another shell into my hand. It is ridged in black and white, mostly black, and rough to the touch. “This one holds my voice. This is how I will teach you about what you can do, since it will be difficult for us to be together in person very often. All you have to do is ask a question into that shell and then listen for the answer to come back to you.”
“How can that work?” I ask. “How will you hear me?” If this is real, and not some kind of trick, then Maire’s is a terrific, terrible power, and she can do things I’ve never heard of or imagined. I always thought my mother was the most powerful woman in Atlantia, but now I am not so sure.
“It’s part of my magic,” Maire says. “Your mother and I discovered it by accident. We used to do that child’s trick of holding a shell to your ear to listen for the wind in the trees, and one day I whispered something into the shell for Oceana, and when she held it to her ear, she could hear my voice saying the words again. When Bay decided to leave, I saved some of her voice in the other shell so that you could have it later.”
Does this mean that if I whispered questions into the other shell, Bay would answer them?
“No,” Maire says. Once again she knows what I’m thinking without my saying it. “With other voices, I can just capture their sound. Mine is the only one that can communicate and change. The rest are echoes of what was already said.”
My heart sinks with disappointment. “Can any other sirens do this?” I ask.
“None that I know of,” Maire says. “And this isn’t perfect. I can answer a few questions at a time before I’ve expended all my strength carrying my voice so far. And it will only work when you ask. I can’t say anything unless it is an answer to your spoken question. I ordered it this way to help you feel that you can trust me, so that you will have a measure of control over our conversations.”
Then her voice becomes brisk, and she sounds almost like one of my teachers back at school, except there is an edge of danger and urgency to Maire’s voice. “Being a siren is more than simply using your voice,” she says. “It’s practicing how to control it, how and when to save it, when to let your voice soar. And all of that is scarcely the half of it.”
She sounds sad again. Are the emotions real or is she manipulating me? It’s not the sorrow in her voice that pulls on me—it’s the sorrow in my own heart, that I can never fully speak. I’ve always wondered if I could, Above.
I’m wavering. And weak. Maire knows it.
What other hope do I have? Maire could help me get Above.
“The things you told my mother were not true,” I say to Maire. “My father did love her. She wanted to be Minister for reasons that were pure.” My mother loved helping people.
“I know,” Maire said. “But I could make them sound true. It was a gift to her. I wanted to help her become the Minister.” And I can’t tell if it is reflected light or tears that I see in Maire’s eyes. “I hoped she would love me for it. I think she did. And of course she hated me for it, too. Even she couldn’t help that.”
I swallow. “How do I know you’re not lying to me now about helping me get to the Above? How do I know that you won’t lie to me in the shell?”
“You don’t,” Maire says.
I’m out of time. The guards burst through the door. “Go,” Maire says to me, and she starts calling to them, her voice so strange, a laugh and a cry and a song.
The guards all stare at her. Though some of them are supposed to be immune, none of them look my way.
As I slip away, I can’t stop listening to Maire. She’s singing that lullaby again, but this time Maire has turned it angry, into an attack. “They sing and weep,” she says, and I suddenly realize that line could be about the sirens.
And then Maire goes silent. Caught. What did they do to make her stop? Or did she know I was gone?
I hurry through the back hallways. Why did Maire tell me all of this at the floodgates? She knew she’d be imprisoned this way—did she want it like that? Certainly there were hundreds of places where we could have met where we’d be much less likely to get caught.
Why teach me this way, instead of in person? Why get herself locked away so that we have to trust the shell, so that she can only answer the questions I ask?
Does she not entirely trust herself, her own eagerness to have her sister’s daughter as a pupil?
Or is there another reason, one so dark and deep I can’t even begin to fathom it?
My mother and my sister trusted Maire. But they are both gone. Neither of them can tell me if that trust turned out to be justified.
It is entirely possible that they were both betrayed.
As I come back out into the plaza, I lift my eyes to the sky and to the stone-and-glass version of the floodgate exit—the temple’s rose window, high and colorful against the daylight.
Maire took me to the floodgates to talk about my mother. But she also took me there to remind me of what death looks like. Bodies laid out on the stone, cold water coming in, someone you love going up. She wanted me to recognize that trying to go through the mining bay or in the transports isn’t safe. She wanted me to see her as my way to the Above.
Instead, she has reminded me of another way that I can leave.
I can’t leave Atlantia the way my sister did.
But I can try to leave the way my mother did.
Of course, there will be one significant difference.
When I go through the floodgates, I’ll be alive.