“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.