CHAPTER 20
Nevio stares at me.
“But that’s not possible,” he says. “You’re related to Maire by blood.”
“Nevertheless,” Maire says. “She is a siren. You heard her.”
Nevio keeps looking at me. Then he smiles. “Bring her to my office,” he says, and he walks out of the room, leaving my aunt and me alone.
“Why now?” I ask Maire as soon as Nevio leaves. I use my false voice. It’s hard to do after speaking in my real one.
She takes me by the arm, and I try to twist away, but her grip is strong.
“Good,” she says. “Keep using your old voice. Save the true one. You will need it Above.” And then the peacekeepers catch up to us, and Maire lets go.
I expect them to take us to Nevio’s office in the temple, but instead we walk down a long corridor and to another door. So he also has an office in the Council buildings. They offered one to my mother, but she never used it. She liked to do all her work in the temple.
A peacekeeper opens the door for us, and I stand there and gape. I can’t help it.
Nevio’s office here is like nothing I’ve ever seen. The walls are paneled entirely in wood. I feel like I’m standing inside a tree, where its heart should be, and I don’t like it.
“We need to take her with us to the surface,” Nevio says.
“Yes,” Maire says.
“I should have known.” Nevio paces around me. “That dull voice. It stood to reason that you were hiding something.” He laughs, a truly ugly sound because it’s full of anger and condescension, no mirth at all. He turns on Maire. “How long have you known?”
“Not long,” Maire says. “I heard her that day in the temple when her sister went Above.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I didn’t,” Maire agrees.
“Did anyone else hear you?” Nevio asks me.
“Justus did,” Maire says.
“Justus,” Nevio says dismissively, as if Justus is nothing at all. “Anyone else?”
The Minister pacing, Maire betraying, neither one of them treating me as if I’m a person at all. I told them what I was, but nothing has changed—
“That boy she’s been running around with,” Maire says, and my head snaps up. “His name is—”
“Stop,” I say, and I don’t hold anything back.
For one long, long second, they do stop. Nevio quits pacing. Maire doesn’t speak.
Then Maire says, “True Beck.”
No. Not True. How did she know?
“Impressive,” Nevio says, his eyes running over me like I’m a fascinating piece of sculpture to admire; a line of scripture to decipher; a thing, not a person. “She told us to stop, and we did. How long did it last?” he asks Maire.
“Just for a moment,” Maire says. “And you?”
“The same,” he says.
For a few seconds, I made them do what I wanted.
Nevio watches me, calculating. Is he changing his mind about what should be done with me? Why does he get to decide?
He doesn’t.
“I am going Above,” I say, in my true voice.
I’ve known it all along. I’ve known it since I could first think or feel. Hearing myself say it now takes away all uncertainty. Maire shakes her head at me. She told me that she wants me to save my voice. For what? Why does it matter now?
I’m going Above.
“You are,” Nevio says. “Take care of everything,” he tells Maire. “We leave as soon as they send down the transports.”
“I know you hate me,” Maire says as we hurry down the hall together. The peacekeepers have vanished, and Maire and I follow the winding pathways of the Council buildings, a place I know only from the artfully constructed exteriors, the sand- and candy-colored stuccos of the buildings.
I don’t deny it. “You said that you’d let me choose.”
“You were the one who made the final choice, who said the words just now,” Maire says. “Which is good. Because this won’t work if it isn’t what you want. And we are running out of time. If you don’t come up with us now, you’ll be stuck Below forever.”
“What won’t work?” I ask. “What am I supposed to do Above? And why did you tell him about True?”
Maire doesn’t answer. She pulls me to a window in the long hallway. “It’s all falling apart,” she says. “Look.”
The plaza is flooded. Not by much, but the entire surface is sheeted in several inches’ worth of water. It’s so beautiful that I can’t keep from staring—a pool, shining like a lake in pictures of the world before the Divide. The bare silver trees reflect on the water, making two of each of them—one in the water, one above.
“Another problem,” Maire says. “It began last night. A small, slow leak, but we haven’t been able to stop it or drain it yet.”
“How can you work with Nevio?” I ask. “He’s part of the Council that killed my mother.”
“You know what he is,” Maire says.
So she does know that he’s a siren. Of course she would.
“I know what he is,” I agree. “And I know what you are.” I can’t hide the hatred in my voice. “You gave Nevio a shell. I saw it in the safe in his office. You’re his collaborator.”
“I have never spoken with Nevio that way,” Maire says. “There’s only one other person I’ve spoken back and forth with through a shell the way I have with you. And that was your mother.”
Out in the plaza, peacekeepers direct people away from the water. Maire touches the wall next to the window, and I wonder if there are voices in here, too.
“The shell you found in his office,” she says. “Was it white?”
“Yes.”
“That was the shell Oceana and I used to communicate, near the end, when they were watching her,” Maire says. “She had it with her when the Council poisoned her. I’ll never forget that, hearing her whisper what they’d done, and then the silence after.” Maire’s eyes stay dry, but her voice sounds rough and sad. “Nevio took it from her just after that, before she ran away to find me. He knew the shell was important, but he didn’t understand why or what it did. He must not have seen her speaking into it. I’m not surprised he’s kept the shell. He doesn’t like mysteries.”
“She tried to keep you safe,” I say, “but you didn’t do the same thing for her. What kind of sister are you?”
Maire turns away from the water, and I take a step back. For the first time, I think that she looks like Oceana. I see the same weariness in her eyes that I used to notice in my mother’s, but in Maire’s it is even more profound.
“I need you to do what you do best for a moment,” Maire says. “Listen.”
“To you?”
“To the city,” she says.
And I do. I can’t help myself. Atlantia no longer screams, but breathes the way a child does after he has cried all he can and is tired and broken and empty. I listen to Atlantia’s sounds and I look out at all her sights: the colorful houses, the iron rivets, the metal trees, the sky, the people who are so sure they are blessed.
“When I first heard you, that day in the temple,” Maire says, “I knew we needed you. I knew how powerful you might be. You’ve had to keep your voice hidden, which means that when you do speak with your full voice, you have a raw power that the rest of us no longer possess.”
“Did my mother know that?” I ask. Was she trying not to hide me, but to make me strong?
Maire smiles. “Yes,” she says. “Of course, making a siren hide her voice can also have the opposite effect. It can destroy a child who isn’t strong enough.”
This is what I hate about Maire. Right as she tells me something I desperately want to know, she gives me terrible answers to questions I never thought to ask.
“I have been waiting for you,” Maire says. “But I can’t wait any longer. We might succeed, if you join us. We’ve found you just in time.” She shakes her head and smiles, a sad smile. “How could Oceana hide you so long from me? Especially when we were friends again, near the end, and she told me everything else?”
I hear tenderness when she speaks of my mother, and I can’t bear it. “Don’t talk about her,” I say.
“So you won’t allow me to speak of my own sister,” Maire says. Her eyes flash and she looks dangerous, but she keeps her voice on an even keel. “Then let’s continue to speak about you and your extremely useful voice. Pure and untrained. The most powerful voice I’ve ever heard.”
That can’t be right. “The Minister—” I begin.
Maire shakes her head. “Nevio isn’t as powerful as you. But his talent is unusual, and I don’t know that any siren in history has been able to mask their voice as well as he has masked his. The sirens have changed. The Minister can hide and use his voice. You and I are in the same family, and we can control things in addition to people. It seems that even miracles evolve.”
Even miracles evolve. The bats did. They made their wings blue like glass and water. They changed to suit their environment.
And now they are dying.
“The Minister is speaking to the other sirens right now,” Maire says. “He is telling them that we are the Below’s last chance for survival. He will let them know that we are going to the Above to remind the people there of their place in the world, and of ours. He will say that the people of the Above are tired of providing for us Below, and they do not plan to continue to do so. The Minister will say that this mission is essential to the survival of Atlantia. He is right.”
“Atlantia will die without us?”
“Yes,” Maire says. “It will. Two weeks ago the Above stopped sending food, and our stores are almost depleted. The city is breaking, and we are running out of materials to repair it.”
She doesn’t use her voice to convince me. She doesn’t have to. This all makes sense to me, so much so that I wonder why it’s taken the people Above this long. Why wouldn’t they hate us? Why wouldn’t they want our better lives? But I also have the distinct feeling that there is something Maire isn’t telling me.
“Do they want us dead so that they can take over Atlantia?” I ask. Is that it? Then they could have our city and our longer, easier lives.
“They want us dead,” Maire says to me very quietly, her voice sounding the way it did in the shell. “They’re the ones who put the mines in the water to keep us from coming up. And they don’t care about Atlantia.”
So Josiah was wrong, or he lied to me. The people Above are the ones who put the mines in the water to prevent us from trying to escape.
They don’t care about us, and they don’t care about our city.
I have always wanted to leave Atlantia, but I never wanted it to die.
The temple, with its aquamarine-painted wooden door and rusty hinges. The plaza, shimmering now with water. The gods in the trees and the leaves we take such care to put back on, the apartments painted pink and blue and white and orange. The mining bays, the beautiful broken drones, the dark ocean room and the metal scraps glinting in the sky room. The prows and bellies of the gondolas, their sleek way of moving through the canals. The priests, who wear robes and minister to others, and the workers who throw gold coins into the wishing pools and the children who sing as they run across the plazas, their feet fast and their arms open wide.
And True. Most of all, True.
“We may lose everything,” Maire says. “We need you to join us. Will you?”
When she says it like that, there is only one answer I can give.