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?