Atlantia (7 page)

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.