Atlantia (11 page)

I
've just changed out of my racing suit when I hear the bells chiming, the ones that signify closing time for the deepmarket. “It's too early,” I say out loud, and someone in the dressing stall next to me says, “Not for the third Wednesday.”

Of course. I'd forgotten, lost track of the days. The Minister always gives a broadcast on the third Wednesday of each month. I wonder what the Council wants us to hear tonight.

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 unexpected 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.