Atlantia (23 page)

I
want to say something and I can't.

I'm afraid she'll leave the way she did the last time I saw her. Turn her back on me and walk away, again.

That she'll be angry with me for coming, because it isn't safe for me here.

But Bay throws her arms around me, and she's crying. I hold on so tight. She whispers into my ear,
“You're here. How?”

It's such a long story. I don't even know where to begin. Priests stare at us and the gods sit among the people in the pews and my mother and Maire are dead. And the Above is not what I've been told it was all my life and I don't care, I love it anyway, and I can't live here. I'm a siren and no one wants me to live anywhere.

“Rio,”
Bay says, and I feel her smoothing down my hair, holding me close. I'm a mermaid girl, tears in my hair, salt on my skin, barely able to breathe under the heavy weight of what's happened and light with the relief of seeing my sister at last.

Bay leads True and me to a storage room at the back of the temple, a place full of boxes and books and odds and ends. She goes to a closet at the back of the room and pulls out some old robes for us to wear over our still-damp clothes from the Below. All the time I can't stop staring at my sister. It hasn't been long, but I can't believe how imperfectly I remembered her. I thought I remembered everything, but I didn't. I forgot how she moves when she wants to be quiet, how that looks. I forgot her profile when she's turned three-quarters away from me, how her ear from that angle is small and fine, like a shell. I realize that I didn't hold on to the exact color of her eyes.

She's cut her hair shorter, and her skin is tanned from the sun. Her arms look strong—I can see the muscles in them, even more defined than when she practiced in the lanes every day. There are dark shadows under her eyes, the kind that speak of weeks without enough sleep, rather than one single harrowed night.

Her voice still sounds gentle but also huskier—perhaps a result of breathing the air Above—and she's taken on their accent. Even so, I remembered the tone of it perfectly. It is the one thing I have remembered exactly right, I realize. Maire told the truth. I do know how to listen.

And then I finally say something.

“Maire,” I say. I have to tell Bay what happened to Maire.

Bay flinches slightly at the sound of my flat voice. Did she forget already how ugly it sounds?

“It's not that,”
she whispers to me, as if she can read my mind.
“It's just that when I imagine you speaking, you're always using your real voice.”

“The sirens all came up,” I say to Bay, “and the people Above killed them.”

“No,”
Bay says, gripping my arm so hard that it hurts. “
No.
Are you sure?”

“I saw it happen,” I say. “So did True.” At that moment I realize that I haven't introduced True and Bay to each other, but before I can say anything else, someone opens the door.

It's a priest, wearing one of the sober brown robes, the same man who said Bay's name earlier out by the altar. He's a round little middle-aged man, unremarkable except for his kind expression and shock of unruly gray hair. And he's followed by Fen, the boy from the Below. Fen looks terrible—his eyes wild and tired, his hair a mess. He can't stop coughing. I take a step back in alarm.

“Don't be afraid,” Fen says. “It's not contagious.” He claps a mask over his face and breathes deeply. And then his eyes widen. “True,” he says.

True grins, and the two of them embrace. Before True can draw back, Fen starts coughing again.

Bay glances over at Fen but then looks back at me. “
Who
was killing the sirens?”

Should I talk about this in front of Fen and the priest? Can they be trusted? Bay seems to think that they can.

“The people in the boats killed the sirens.” It sounds stupid, and I shake my head in frustration. So much needs to be said, and quickly. “We all came up together on the transport. And when we arrived, people were waiting for us in boats. They never came ashore, but they started killing the sirens. True and I were the only ones who escaped, as far as I know. Maire helped us.”

“Where is she?” Bay asked.

I can't answer.

“They killed
Maire
?” Bay asks, stunned, as if such a thing could never be true. I understand her. It seems impossible that Maire could have survived, but it also seems impossible that she could die.

“I think so,” I tell Bay. “I didn't see.”

“So you
left
them,” Fen says.

It is exactly the wrong thing to say.

“
You
left us,” I say to him. To Bay.

You left us.

“I'm sorry, Rio,” Bay says. “We did. I did. I left.” Her voice breaks.

Bay knows the question I'm going to ask. I can't help it. Even though I know the reason from the letter, I want to hear Bay tell me in person. Bay, who has dirt under her fingernails and short-cut hair and a patch of skin peeling on her nose, who has been living the life I intended for myself Above while I've been living out her time Below.

“Why did you leave?”

“I thought it was the best way to keep you safe,” Bay says. There are tears in her eyes. “I made a mess of everything. I didn't know that the Above was going to kill the sirens and cut off Atlantia. Our mother didn't tell me.”

“She didn't tell me, either,” I say.

“We must go back to the island and see if there is anyone left to save,” says the priest. He moves, and an emblem around his neck glints in the light. It's oxidized to a green color, not shiny like the one my mother wore, but the insignia is similar. It mirrors the image on the pulpit here in the temple Above—trees turning into clouds.

This is no priest. This is their Minister.

“It's all right, Rio,” Bay says. “This is Ciro, the Minister.” She leans closer and whispers to me.
“Don't worry. He's nothing like Nevio.”

How can she be sure? We knew Nevio for most of our lives and would never have believed him capable of murder. Bay has known this Minister for a few weeks. How can she be sure that we can trust him?

As far as I'm concerned, there is one Minister I trust and she is dead.

“Let me see what I can find out,” Ciro says to Bay. “Stay here. Keep them hidden.” He reaches up and touches the insignia around his neck. “May the gods be with us all,” he says, and he moves quickly through the door.

“What does he mean, keep us hidden?” I ask Bay.

“The temple is the only place you might be safe,” she says. “And even here, not for long. It's dangerous Above.”

I know that. It's dangerous for me everywhere.

“You trust Ciro,” I say. “Why?”

“Because he is the leader of the movement to save the Below,” Bay says. “He believes that the Above should not let Atlantia die.”

“Why would he care about any of us?” I ask.

“Because of the shells,” Bay says.

Because of the shells.
What does she mean?

“I didn't know anything about them until I came Above,” Bay says. “But Ciro told me. And others, too. There have been shells coming up with the bodies for years—in the pockets of the dead, or tied around their necks like amulets. At first the cullers—the ones who take any valuables they can find from the corpses that make it through the mines—threw away the shells on the beach. You can find them everywhere up here—they're not worth much. But then, one day, someone picked one up. And heard a voice. A voice from the Below. Not a siren voice, commanding. Just a human voice, talking.

“The voice disappeared after it had been heard once,” Bay says. “People thought that the first person was making things up. But then others started walking along the shore and picking up shells and listening, and sometimes they heard people speaking, too. The cullers began to realize that the shells with the voices in them must be the shells they found on the bodies from the Below. They started bringing those shells to Ciro instead of discarding them. The sounds of the voices broke his heart.

“For years there have been people up here listening. Not everyone Above wants us to die. People here believe the shells and the voices must be from the gods. No one knows how else such a miracle could have happened.”

But I do.

Maire was the miracle.

She saved the voices.

I discovered long ago that some of the best voices can be heard in the prison walls
. She told me that earlier. I wonder if those are some of the stories she sent up. People trapped, wanting to be free.

When Maire saved Bay's voice for me in that first shell, it must have been without Bay knowing. That explains why Bay was singing, not giving me a message. The secret of saved voices in shells was between Maire and Oceana, and then between Maire and me. She shared it first with her sister, and then with a siren.

Maire couldn't have known that Ciro would find the shells. She just hoped that someone would.

“The people here have heard our stories,” Bay says. “They feel like they know us.”

“But they still don't believe the sirens are human,” True says. “They killed them.”

“Some still hate the sirens,” Bay says. “But there are many, like Ciro, who believe the sirens are human, too, and that getting rid of them is wrong.”

“That's better than some of the people Below,” I say. “Not many of them think that sirens are human.”

“Rio,” Bay says, and then she stops. What can she say? I've had to spend my life hiding my voice, and she's had to spend her life protecting me, and that's not what either of us would have chosen. We've both suffered because of what I am.

No. Not because of what I am. Because of the way people fear those who are different, when really we are so much the same.

“There's something I still don't understand,” I say. “If siren voices are so powerful up here, how did the people Above resist the sirens on the island?”

“I don't know,” Bay says.

I wish Bay and I didn't have to talk about all of this. I wish we didn't have to think of sirens and saving. I could tell her that True kissed me and that I was fast, so fast in the lanes. She could tell me how she feels about Fen and what she dreams of becoming without a siren sister to protect. But there's no time for that.

Will there ever be time for it again?

I sit down on the floor, suddenly weary. I put my head in my hands. It's getting harder to breathe, and I can't stop thinking of Maire.

I feel my sister's hand on my back.

“There
are
people who will help us,” Bay says. “I've met many of them. They come to minister to those of us from Below who work in the labor camps.”

“What do you mean about working in the labor camps?” I ask. Fen coughs in the background, and he sounds horrible. “Fen doesn't sound like he should be in a labor camp,” I say. “He sounds sick.”

That makes Fen laugh. “They don't care about that,” he says. “They're not concerned about our health.”

“They only let us keep coming up from the Below because we're free labor,” Bay says.

“They think we're stupid,” Fen says. “And they're right. We don't know the first thing about the way the world really is.”

“They work us to death,” Bay says. “We're allowed a free hour or two at night, and that's when we're supposed to come into town and take care of whatever needs we might have. We make a single coin a day. It's enough to buy only the smallest amount of food at the worst shops.”

“You know your sister,” Fen says, grinning at me. “Instead of getting anything to eat that first day, she headed straight for the temple.”

“It was good we did,” Bay says, “because we met Ciro. Now we come here every night.”

No wonder she looks exhausted, if she works all day and then comes to the temple in the evening.

“I'm sure that the gods would forgive you if you missed a few prayers,” I say.

Fen laughs again. “We don't just come for the gods,” he says. “We come to show the people of the Above that we're like anyone else.”

Fen starts coughing again, harder this time. It sounds terrible, dry and achy and bone-breaking. The air up here is still not clean, but he seems to be affected more than anyone else.

I glance over at Bay, at her tired eyes and her short hair, and I wonder if she cut it off because she couldn't braid it without me, or if she cut it off so she wouldn't have to remember me, or for a reason that had absolutely nothing to do with me.

“Please,” she says to Fen. “Put it on.”

I realize that she means the mask, which he holds at his side.

“I feel like I can't breathe at all when I'm wearing that thing.”

“But it does help,” she says. “Even if you can't tell. It buys you time.”