And I can speak. I will never stop speaking.
I think Maire knew that this would happen. I think she understood, and she didn’t tell me because she thought I might not be willing to give up my voice. I believe that in the end she did love me, but she loved the sirens more. She loved the city more. She wanted it all saved. And she was right.
It was worth it, what I lost, if it gained the lives of those who live in Atlantia.
The door of the transport slides open. A mass of people waits for us, and the city breathes.
I wonder if they can smell the sun on our skin or see the stars in our eyes?
This time it is not hard to find her. She’s right at the front of the crowd, looking for me.
“Bay,” I say. “I came back.”
EPILOGUE
The sirens’ island is quiet.
The salty winter air feels cool, and in this season the sky’s colors are softer, pink and blue. When I take off my shoes and walk on the sand with my bare feet, it feels grainy and separate, instead of a smooth warm whole.
Bay waits on the island. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me close. The waves hit the shore over and over. I feel my sister’s heart pounding against mine and I close my eyes and listen.
When we pull apart, I sit down on the sand and Bay sits next to me.
Most of the transports now surface at the shore of the main island. But when I come Above, Bay and I like to meet here, even though it is where Maire died.
That may seem strange to some but not to us. The island is beautiful. More than any other place, even more than the temple, it feels like a bridge between the Above and the Below. The bats that stayed Above never went back to the temple. Instead they make their homes in the caves near the sea. Sometimes, at dusk, they come out and roost in the silver-mossed trees, and I see their blue wings.
And the island feels like sacred ground.
Every shell in hand could hold her voice. Every stone under foot could be where she stood. Every whisper of wind or hush of water might be a message, or nothing at all. Nothing more or less than wind and waves and shells and stones.
I love it here. If I could, I’d build a house out of driftwood for Fen and Bay and True and me. I would set the trident god from Elinor over the lintel of the house. The bats might come to rest on him.
I wish I could stay Above.
And Bay wishes she could be Below. But neither of us can live where we’d like, and we can’t be together. Bay needs to be with Fen, and Above is best for him now that their doctors will treat him. And for now the Below is better for me. I still can’t last up here as long as I want—a matter of days, not weeks or years, thought it gets easier each time I surface.
And of course True lives Below. Together, we work on a crew rebuilding the deepmarket. We piece Atlantia back together with fire and metal. Yesterday, we raced side by side in one of the lanes, and when our bodies touched, I remembered when we came Above. When we climbed out of the water, True kissed me in front of everyone and ignored their cheers and catcalls. “Why me?” he asked.
“I’ve been listening a long time,” I said. “No one sounds as right as you.”
When I was growing up, I often felt trapped by the constraints of my voice, the concerns of my family, the confines of my city.
Sitting with my sister’s arm around me, breathing the air of the Above while the sky of the Below laps at our feet, I know I am no longer trapped.
I am protected, shaped and built by what is outside, what they made of me, but also by what is inside, what I made of myself.
“Bay,” I say, speaking to her for the first time, and I see her face change, grow still but not surprised. The wind touches her hair, blows sand along our skin.
“Rio,” she says. “Your voice.”
I smile. She hears it, too.
My siren voice is coming back.
I thought it was gone, and for weeks that was true. But then I felt it again, on the day some of the hidden siren children gathered in the temple to sing, and it seemed right that my voice would return, the way it felt right when it left. I spent it all and so was given it to share again. It made me think of my mother. Oceana gave what she had to save others, to protect and teach them. And somehow, that never diminished her. Somehow, that made her strong.
I thought I was the last siren in Atlantia, but now I am the first. Someone has to teach the younger sirens, those who have at last revealed themselves. Someone has to tell them the stories once hidden in Atlantia’s walls.
“We ended up like Oceana and Maire, after all,” I say to Bay. “Two sisters who have to live apart.”
“I’m proud to be like them,” Bay says.
So am I. They kept faith with each other. Neither of them tried to destroy the other, though they could have, the way the sisters in that siren story did.
It is easy to see my mother and her sister in every small thing, to feel them in the open places in my soul. I think they watch us. I think they love us still.
Bay wraps both arms around me and I feel her tears on my skin. We are not lost mermaids with seaweed hair and coins for eyes, but human girls, alive and found.
We are sisters, and we did not drown.