The broadcast goes out to schools and churches throughout Atlantia, but I’ve always listened at the temple. So I ride the crowded gondola up there, hoping I can find a seat somewhere now that I no longer have a reserved spot at the front with the other acolytes.
The temple is jam-packed, as is always the case for these sermons, and there is a strange buzz in the air, an excitement that feels heightened. I see a spot at the back, high up in the gallery, and as I make my way toward it I hear Nevio begin talking at the pulpit, his voice magnified by speakers set up throughout the building.
“I speak for both the Ministry and the temple,” Nevio says, “for we are in perfect agreement about how to address this situation.” His voice sounds fulsome and rich, with something underneath it, some steel sound that I’ve never liked. I reach the top of the steps, and someone slides over on the highest wooden bench to make room for me. I barely fit. This place is full.
“The situation,” Nevio says, “is the sirens.”
My heart jumps in my chest. What is he planning to say? Does this have something to do with Maire breaking into the floodgate chamber?
Does Nevio know that I was with her?
“As some of you are aware,” Nevio says, “the sirens’ time is ending. The last known siren was born twenty years ago.”
Can this be true? If it is, then I am the youngest siren. The last one. My mother never told me that.
“The sirens are a miracle,” Nevio says, “but they are our miracle, to be contained and controlled for our good. They belong to Atlantia. Just as the bats cannot be allowed to fly about unchecked and need a place of their own and people to feed them, the sirens also need keepers and a safe haven for their protection and ours.”
He speaks to Atlantia, but I have the strangest feeling that he also speaks to me specifically. That he’s telling any sirens out there—Could there be others like me?—that they need to come to him to be safe. That we are capable of terrible things. We might hurt the ones we love. We might turn evil and wrong.
Maybe I should listen to him.
But then I look back at the pulpit and picture my mother there instead of Nevio and I know that was the very thing she tried to protect me from—a life under the control of people who didn’t love or understand me.
“And as the time of the sirens ends,” Nevio says, “we may look for a new miracle. For the third miracle.”
The people rustle hopefully, murmur to one another. They’re all too ready to give up the strangeness of the sirens for something else, for something new.
“This is what I want to speak about with you today,” Nevio says. “We must prepare for the third miracle. We must be ready.” He speaks of sacrifice, and love, and duty, and of the relationship between the Above and the Below and the importance of following the rules set forth by the Council. I stop listening, because I have heard the same thing said before, and much better, by my mother.
What if I am the last siren?
What does that mean?
As people exit the temple after the sermon, they push past me on my bench, speculating with animation and excitement about the when and where and how of the third miracle. I don’t move. This is my mother’s place. She should be here. Everything has been wrong since she died.
Why is she gone?
How did she die?
Who made it happen?
Nevio could have done it.
Or was it Maire?
It’s not a thought I want to have, but it won’t leave me.
Could Maire tell me if I really am the last siren?
I don’t know who to trust.
I hear footsteps on the stairs, and then someone appears in the gallery. Justus. He comes and sits down next to me. He looks weary and sad. I wonder if he’s thinking of my mother, too.
“When you were a candidate for Minister,” I ask him, “what was it like in the floodgate chamber? When they brought in all the sirens to test you?”
“I could resist all of them except for one,” Justus says.
“Maire,” I say.
Justus closes his eyes. “The words she spoke,” he whispers. “The way she said them.” He opens his eyes. “She made her voice sound like your mother. And the things she said . . .”
“Terrible things?”
“Wonderful things,” Justus says, and a flicker of remembered happiness crosses his face. “But none of it was true, and when I realized that, I wept. When the Council saw the effect Maire’s words had on me, that was the end of my chance at being Minister.”
My heart goes out to Justus. He always loved my mother. Bay and I knew it, and so did my mother, but she didn’t love him back, not that way. I wonder what Maire said to him. It was a cruel thing to do.
“Maire kept me from being the Minister,” Justus says. “In the end she brought down Oceana, too. Right before she died, your mother tried to reconcile with Maire, and look how she was rewarded.”
When Justus looks at me, I know he wants me to realize what he means, but he doesn’t actually want to say it. Everyone holds things back when they speak, not just me. Everyone expects and needs other people to give part of the meaning, to make inferences, to put the rest into the little they manage to convey.
Justus thinks that Maire killed my mother.
I want to ask him more, but I suddenly realize we are not alone. I glance up and there stands Nevio, wearing the emblem that used to hang around my mother’s neck.
“Justus,” he says. “It is time for you to go to work in the tower. The dimming time has begun.”
Justus inclines his head. As he leaves he puts his hand on my shoulder. It is the first time he has done that since he found out what I am, and I’m grateful for the gesture and for what he’s told me. He is a weak man, too weak for my mother, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t kind. And he’s kept my secret. He hasn’t told anyone about my being a siren, or I would have been hauled away to work for the Council by now.
I stand up, too, but Nevio motions for me to sit back down. I don’t. Nevio is taller than I am by several inches but I don’t look up at him. I look past him.
“I know you have been through a great deal,” Nevio says. “I know your mother’s death and your sister’s choice to go Above have made you not quite yourself.”
He’s right about that.
“And now you’re the last one, left to deal with the aftermath of their actions,” Nevio says, and a sharp, sudden bitterness floods through me. He’s right again. Bay and my mother are away from everything now. I’m the one they left to gather up the fragments, and I’m not even sure of what I’m trying to piece together.
“I suppose Justus has been telling you about our suspicions regarding your mother’s death,” Nevio says. “He should know better than to make the same mistake twice. He also told Bay that he thought Maire was responsible.”
He did?
“It wasn’t a surprise,” Nevio says, “when Bay decided to run away from it all by choosing the Above.”
But Nevio was surprised. I saw him, that day in the temple when Bay said Above instead of Below.
I saw him.
He’s made a mistake, and I’ve caught him.
And then I realize.
Nevio the Minister is a siren. A different kind than I’ve ever encountered before, but still a siren. A strange, subtle one. I can’t put my finger on it.
The Minister is not supposed to be a siren. It’s against all the rules.
But he is one nonetheless. I know. I know the truth from his lie.
He was convincing me, making me bitter and believing—not about everything, but about my mother and Bay leaving me alone to pick up the pieces—and then he made that mistake. He said that he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t know I’d seen him, in that short moment in the temple when Bay made her decision.
And an unexpec
ted thought flickers into my mind, bright and right as a fish among the coral in the sea gardens.
When Maire manipulates you, she always lets you know that it’s happening. She looks right into your eyes. Even if you can’t resist, you know what she’s doing and you hate her for it. Nevio is not like that. He doesn’t want you to know that you’re being manipulated.
Could it be that Maire is an honest kind of siren? Could it be that I can trust her?
“I’ve had to lock your aunt away for a time,” Nevio says. “She was breaking into parts of Atlantia that are forbidden to sirens. One of the guards who encountered Maire was fairly certain that he saw someone with her, but she was captured alone. Do you know who that other person might be?”
“No,” I say. “But it wasn’t me. I’m afraid of my aunt.”
Nevio studies me for a moment. Does he believe me? Did I give enough truth in addition to my lie? Does he know that I’ve figured out his secret? Does he know mine?
“I am glad to hear that,” Nevio says, and then he walks past me, along the gallery toward the door to the tower where Justus works. I wait until Nevio closes the door behind him before I breathe again.
Why would someone kill my mother? Was it because of something she knew? Something she did?
Who she was?
Back in my room, I hold the dark shell that Maire gave me. It feels hard and knobby. It was once inhabited by something alive. Is there life inside it again? Will I hear my aunt’s voice?
This seems like magic. It seems dangerous.
But I have so many questions.
On that page of notes, the part Nevio didn’t mean for me to see, my mother wrote the word sirens. And she wrote to Ask Maire.
So I do.
“Can you tell me the history of Atlantia and the sirens?” I say into the shell. “From the very beginning?” It is cool against my lips. I hold it up to my ear and wait.
Yes. Maire’s voice comes to me as if it has traveled a great distance, which of course it has, all the way from her prison cell in the Council block to my room in the temple. Her voice sounds small and clear, and I do not know how she has managed to hear me from so far and to send her answer such a long way.
And then Maire repeats the history of the sirens to me, and I am surprised to find myself trying not to laugh, because the voice she uses to tell me the history is a quiet but perfect parody and put-on of Nevio’s voice when he sermonizes, his speaking mannerisms exaggerated just enough to make it ridiculous. I didn’t know Maire could be funny.
In the beginning there was the Divide.
The world began to fall apart, and so the gods helped the engineers and the Minister create Atlantia. But not everyone could go down. To ensure that the system would work, they made sure that every person who had to stay Above had a loved one Below. Many agreed to remain Above because they wanted their loved ones to be safe. They selected numerous adults for life in Atlantia, of course, because they could keep Atlantia running and fix any problems that occurred. But there were also plenty of children chosen. Children were particularly effective selections for the Below, because you could convince multiple adults—parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, teachers—to stay for a single child. This is how it was in the beginning.
“I know all of this,” I say. “Can you tell me more?” I stop and try to think of what I really want to know, what I want her to make clear. “Is there another history?”
Yes, Maire says again. To tell it to you means that I must tell you a secret. One that could ruin me if you share it with anyone else.
I hold my breath. Maire has another secret? I already know that she is extremely powerful, that she can save voices in the shells.
She says nothing, and I realize that I have to ask.
“What is your secret?”
I can hear voices from people who are gone, Maire says. Who died hundreds of years ago.
I hear voices in the walls of Atlantia, especially siren voices. They’ve been saved up, embedded in the walls. The dead are always speaking, but not everyone hears them. I can, and I think that gift must be connected in some way to my ability to save the voices in the shells.
I’m silent for a moment. Then I say, “I don’t know if I believe you.”
Maire laughs.
“Can you tell me what they said?” I ask. “Those voices in the walls? What did they tell you about the history of the Below? About the sirens?”
Yes, Maire says. And her voice changes, becomes the voice of someone else.
In the end there was the Divide.
It’s very different from when she mimics, the way she did with Nevio moments ago. It seems that a real and other person is speaking. The voice belongs to a woman who sounds very old, and it is not the voice of a siren.
Those of us chosen to live Below knew we were lucky, but our hearts were also broken. We wept for those left Above. We wandered the streets of our beautiful city and we felt so cold. Though we knew it meant death, we began to want to get back to the Above. We didn’t believe that we belonged so far underwater. We felt that if our world was dying, we might as well die with it. Our leaders told us to remember how fortunate we were. To live so that we made the sacrifice of the others worthwhile. Tears streamed down their cheeks as they said these things, so we knew they understood how we felt.
We all tried. But nothing tasted the same. Nothing looked right or sounded the way it had in the Above. There were so many walls, so many echoes. And even with all of the lights, you could feel the dark outside. Some people attempted to get Above. They stowed away in the food transports and suffocated within minutes. They went out through the mining bays and drowned.
Even some of the children tried.
There were so many children sent down without parents. We all did our best to take care of them. They had it the hardest of everyone who came Below. They tried to be happy, because that’s what we all said their parents wanted. They cried to themselves, silent tears all day long, as they learned and worked and grew. They became strong, because children are resilient, but I could swear that even after they stopped weeping outwardly, their hearts wept inside. But—and I will always believe this was what made the first miracle possible, that in fact it may have been the first miracle—the children became strong without becoming hard. They steadied their hearts but didn’t let them turn to stone.
And then, as they grew up and began having children of their own, a miracle happened.
The sirens.
They were born as I was getting very old, but I lived long enough to hear their voices. I am glad for that.
They sang peace to us. They reminded us what laughter sounded like.
They were beautiful and joyful. Their parents loved them. We all loved them. We loved them so much that we could at last bear the pain of missing those we’d left Above.
When they told us to live, somehow we could. They looked into our eyes and asked us to be happy, and we found we wanted to obey.
The bats came soon after the sirens. Looking back, I think that the bats must have been here all along but didn’t show themselves until the siren children sang in the temples and skipped through the courtyards. The bats loved the siren children. They flew about and landed on the children’s shoulders and stretched out their wings, as if they wanted to protect the beauty of the sirens’ songs.
The sirens were so beautiful and so terrible. Beautiful because of their voices. Terrible because little children should not have such a great responsibility.
But there is no doubt that the sirens saved us.
The voice stops.
What if the children who didn’t harden their hearts were the first miracle?
Then we have already had all three, and the people are waiting for something that will never come.
“How do you know this?” I ask Maire. “Where did you find that voice?”
>
I heard it in the walls one day, Maire says. I think a siren saved it there long ago, asked the walls to hold someone’s voice when they were speaking so we could know the truth later. I think that in the past there were many sirens with that ability. But I don’t know anyone else who can do it now.
“How did you hear it?”
I was listening.
“Why?”
Because that is another important part of a siren’s power, Maire says. Most of the sirens now do not understand that part at all. But you do.
“Am I the last siren?”
You are the last one that I know of, Maire says. But I do not know everything.
“Do you think there are more?”
I hope so.
It’s frustrating that I have to ask for every piece of information, that she can’t volunteer more than I request. Maire did this so that I would trust her and it’s helping, but I also wonder what she would say if she hadn’t made these rules.
And there’s something else. Maire set the rules and spoke them. So does this mean she can control herself? If I make a promise, in my real voice, will I be unable to break it, no matter what?
Stop thinking too far ahead, I tell myself. You can do this. You can earn money for the air tank and get Above.
“Where can I get pressurized air?” I ask.
Silence. I can imagine what she wants to say:
You can’t get out on your own, Rio. The mines will kill you. Don’t try to go through those doors in the ocean room.
But that’s not how I plan to leave.
I ask again. “Where can I get a tank full of pressurized air?”
And it must be that she can’t break the rules she set, because the words sound almost torn from her. Ennio in the deepmarket, she says.
“Is he a crook?” I ask.
When he sells air, it is good. It’s not his fault everyone dies.
Ennio. I knew it.
“How could someone convince him to sell her a tank of air,” I ask, “without having to use her real voice?”