by Ally Condie
“Bien,” Elinor says, a warning note in her voice.
“I don’t see why not,” Bien says. “If Rio doesn’t mind . . .” She waits for me.
I say nothing. I have been bullied before, especially in the years before I moved to the temple school. The students at my first school laughed openly at my dull voice and unusual height. I’ve learned that sometimes answering the questions satiates the person bullying. Sometimes it doesn’t.
“I just want to know what it was like living with someone so famous,” Bien says, and now I hear a definite tone of malice in her voice.
“Bien, stop,” Elinor says. “This is not kind.”
“We didn’t live with her after she became the Minister,” I say, though Bien already knows all of this. Everyone does. “The Minister has to have his or her own quarters in the temple.”
“Did that make you feel bad?” Bien asks. “That your mother chose her work over you?”
I’m not sure why Bien doesn’t like me, unless it’s the usual reason, the one that made those children tease me: I’m different.
“We never saw it like that,” I say.
“Of course you didn’t,” Elinor says, finally getting a word in edgewise. She seems furious with Bien.
“I don’t know why I’m asking questions about your mother’s life,” Bien says, “when the most interesting thing about her is how she died. Do you know who killed her?”
Though I hate Bien for doing this, and my hands are tight in fists that could hurt her, push her down, pin her there and tell her to take it back—I know I could, I am that strong and stronger—there is a strange relief in hearing it said out loud. In knowing that it’s not only Bay and I who have thought of the possibility of murder.
Still, I have to wait a moment before I have the control to speak. Next to me, Elinor sputters in outrage, tells Bien that she is cruel, sacrilegious.
“I don’t know,” I say at last. “I don’t know who killed her or how she died. Her heart just stopped.”
“Do you want to know who I think did it?” Bien asks.
I will not give her the pleasure of nodding. But, actually, I do want to know. I want to know what people are saying. And of course Bien wants to tell me.
“Maire,” Bien says. She has an expression of perverse pleasure on her face. She enjoys making me miserable. Does she do this to other people? I haven’t seen it, but I haven’t known her long. I can’t tell if it is me in particular she wants to torment, or if she is a narrow-minded person who rejoices in broad, cutting strokes of cruelty that encompass as many people as possible. “Most of us think that Oceana was killed by her own sister.”
“Not everyone thinks that,” Elinor says.
Someone calls to Bien, and Bien, her work done, gives us a wave and sets off to join another group. I hear a burst of laughter as she joins them.
“I’m so sorry,” Elinor says. “Bien is a troublemaker. She shouldn’t have said such a thing about your aunt. I’ve heard people say that Bien’s own brother was a siren and made her do terrible things before the Council took him away to raise, so she is especially poisonous where sirens are concerned. She thinks they should all be eliminated.”
“Do you believe that, too?”
“No,” Elinor says. “Of course not.”
But do you think we should be locked up and contained? I want to ask her this, but of course I don’t.
“That explains why Bien hates my aunt,” I say, “but why does she hate me? And my mother?”
“I don’t know,” Elinor says.
“Who do you think killed my mother?”
Elinor shakes her head. “I don’t think anyone did kill her. Her grand, generous heart simply stopped. Perhaps she was taken up by the gods. If so, it would be the third miracle.”
But though I love my mother and am glad to hear that others do, too, I can’t believe her a miracle. Just a human, one gone too soon.
“At least that money gets sent to the people Above,” Elinor says, her voice almost fierce. “Still, I hate to think that you wasted a wish on Bien.”
But I didn’t. When I threw the gold coin into the pool, I made the same selfish, wonderful wish I’ve made ever since I was a child. I wish that I could see the Above.
Perhaps I should have wished for something else. Perhaps I should have wished to know the truth.
Could Maire have killed my mother?
I don’t believe a sister could do such a thing.
But I also never would have believed that Bay could leave me, and she did. I saw her go.
It is agony to cry when you can’t make a sound, when you have to stuff your pillow into your mouth, almost choking yourself so that no one will hear the timbre of your real voice. No one knows how much that hurts, not even the loved ones who want to keep you safe.
I miss Bay so much, and I am so angry with her. If she were here, I would cry out at her. I wouldn’t care who heard. How could you leave me? My throat aches as if I’ve already screamed myself hoarse.
When was the last time Bay and I fought? I wonder. Before our mother’s death, we used to fight all the time, because we were sisters in a shared, small world—room, temple, city—and because we were different and the same.
But I could never really fight because of my voice. I couldn’t ever tell her how angry I was at her.
And so now I wonder if she also never knew how much I love her. Because I do.
There are two things that I’ve always known for certain: that I have to see the Above and that I love my sister.
Do I honestly believe I’m going to be able to do this? That I can swim through the mines? And buy an air tank to get Above? It’s a ridiculous plan. I know it. There are countless things that could go wrong.
The impossibility of everything overcomes me.
In desperation I look around for something, anything to help. And I see the shell again. I seize it and hold it up against my ear. My own breathing is the only sound.
Then I hear something else.
My sister, singing a lullaby from our childhood, one that our mother used to sing to us when we were small.
Under star-dark seas and skies of gold
Live those Above, and those Below
They sing and weep, both high and deep
While over and under the ocean rolls
She sings it again, and again. The song is calming, lulling, sad and gentle, true. I close my eyes and listen.
CHAPTER 7
I sit down under Efram’s tree, the one I repaired not long ago. I miss working here, with the shivering leaves and the sullen gods. I wonder why Maire picked this as a meeting place and how long it will take before she comes. I wonder why I’m here. Is it because my mother wrote Maire’s name in her notes? Ask Maire. Or because it seems that Bay did trust Maire to give me the money and the shell?
Or am I here because I want to talk to another siren? The conversations I’ve had with Maire have been the only times I’ve spoken with someone who has the same power that I do.
She’s all the family I have left.
Silver leaves scatter over the ground. I lean down to pick one up and tsk to myself when I see the heavy-handedness of the soldering work. Despite what Nevio said, they haven’t found someone to take my place repairing the trees. Not someone as skilled as I am, anyway.
And then I see a splay of blue wing and brown fur on the ground.
One of the temple bats.
The bat’s tiny body looks fine, nothing broken, but it’s certainly dead. Its eye stares back up at me with nothing there. Against the ground, its wings are dark as the deep instead of blue as glass and sea. I hear people gathering near me.
“It’s like seeing Efram himself fallen and broken,” a man says, but he is quickly quieted. What he’s said sounds too much like sacrilege. We are not supposed to believe that Efram, or an
y of the gods, could fall or break.
At least the gods are easy to fix. This animal is beyond any help we can give. “Find Justus at the temple,” I say, and someone goes running.
It takes Justus only moments to arrive, but there’s nothing he can do. He tells the others to move along. I stay behind.
“What do you think killed it?” I ask.
Justus shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “I suppose it could be a natural death. There are a few tests I can conduct back at the temple to try and find out more.” He lifts the bat carefully in his hands. There’s a clean linen cloth in the bottom of the container and he places the bat gently inside, as if it weren’t past all feeling.
“What was it doing out in the day?” I ask.
“It might have died in the night,” Justus says. “It’s not the first. They’re not immortal.”
Of course not. I know that. But it’s very odd to see one of the bats dead.
Justus straightens up, careful not to step on the hem of his robe, and holds the box in his hands. “They’re dying more quickly, though,” he says, “since we lost your mother.”
He leaves me there alone, and as soon as he has gone back inside the temple, I hear her.
Maire.
She walks softly. She doesn’t step on any of the leaves or say a single word, but I still know she’s here, just as I did that day in the temple.
“The trees sing,” Maire says. “They told me you were here. And I’ve been listening and hoping that you would come.”
It’s unsettling to hear her say that about the trees. They’re mine, not hers.
I say, flatly, not giving her even a hint of my real voice: “What do you want?”
“It’s not about what I want,” Maire says. “You know that. It’s about what you want. To go Above and find your sister.”
“And you think you can help me.”
“Yes,” she says. “I can. I helped your sister and your mother, and I can help you.”
As if we’ve agreed to do so beforehand, the two of us start walking together. Across the courtyard, people wave to one another and call out to friends passing by in gondolas. A peacekeeper blows his whistle to warn a group of youth gathered too near the canal and they move away. I feel a sudden fierce love for my city.
“I can help you,” Maire says, after we’ve walked in silence for a time, “if you let me. I won’t make you do anything.”
“You don’t know that you could make me do anything,” I say.
“That’s true,” she agrees, in a flat tone that sounds exactly like mine. I hate her for mimicking me.
She stops, and I realize that we’ve come to the back entrance of the temple compound, the part that leads to the floodgates and the morgue.
I haven’t been here since my mother died. Bay and I had to go down through this entrance to prepare our mother’s body. When we finished, we had to leave her there and climb the stairs to the floodgates’ viewing area, where we sat in our reserved seats to witness her body going up. We were daughters of the Minister that day, one last time.
Maire strides right up to the guards at the floodgate entrance. “We’d like to go inside,” she says.
“That’s not allowed,” one says. “You don’t have Council and temple permission.”
“I understand,” Maire says, and the resignation in her voice convinces even me for a second. I’m turning away when she speaks again.
“Now,” she says, just a single word.
It’s cold and hot, a slice, a knife through one’s brain and body. I step forward involuntarily.
The guards have already started to open the doors, as if they began to obey her before she finished speaking. Is that possible? Is her power so strong?
“Stay,” Maire tells them.
And then, to me, she says, “Come.”
I follow. I’m not sure whether I’m following her voice or my own strong, strange desire to go inside.
“I think,” Maire says, “that we should go down.”
Down. Into the floodgate chamber itself, not up to the viewing area. This is strictly forbidden unless you’re a priest or have come with one to prepare a body, but Maire acts as if she has every right to be here.
We go through narrow, dank hallways, the ones that eventually lead to the morgue farther down. The guards don’t follow us. They’re likely calling for reinforcements, who will arrive in a matter of moments. But will it matter? How many people can Maire command?
“Not an army,” she says, as if she’s heard my question, “so our time is limited. They’ll send guards who are immune to the sound of my voice, and they’ll take me away. The Council will find it necessary to reprimand me and lock me up for a few days, so you and I should accomplish as much as we can at this meeting.”
I can’t get over the sound of that Now. My heart pounds. And I realize how silly my thoughts were earlier, about being a match for Maire in some way. Her voice has been honed and cultivated for years. It is a weapon, a beautiful one.
“Ah,” Maire says. “Here we are.”
She puts her hand on the door in front of us. It is metal and heavy, pressurized for when the water comes in. Somehow Maire opens it easily.
“Come along,” Maire says, stepping across the threshold. There’s no command in her voice, but I’m not sure I trust the invitation. I pause for a moment before I follow her inside.
The floodgate chamber is tall, many stories high. Along the carved buttresses supporting the ceiling sit ancient stone figures representing the gods. Like the ones in the temple, they were taken from churches Above long ago. I look up at the screaming tiger and dragon and lion mouths and at the glaring eyes. The floor is damp in places.
It took the engineers years to perfect the technology of the floodgates, to make walls strong enough that they could let the water in to this chamber alone without the pressure breaking the city wide open. It’s a little terrifying to watch a body go up—it feels as though, at any moment, the water will break through into the viewing area. But of course that has never happened.
The water of the sea pushes against the top of the gates, presses down all around us. I think I hear the metal sigh and the stone moan.
Bay and I were together here at the floodgates, and we were together before that when the priests and representatives of the Council asked us their many questions after they found our mother’s body: Had she been unwell? Did she tell you of any chronic illnesses in your family, ones we don’t have here in our medical records? Bay and I sat side by side, saying no over and over again.
“What do you think happens when the dead reach the surface?” Maire asks. “Do you believe that their bodies become foam and their souls fly free?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“I don’t know about the souls part of it,” Maire says. “But if a body makes it through the mines in the water and washes to the shore, the people Above take what they want from it. Clothing. Jewelry.”
With that word it all comes back, the whole memory of that day, the one I’ve tried to keep locked away, pushed down in my mind.
“I forgot to bring her ring,” Bay said. “She always wanted to wear her ring when she went to the surface. How could I forget?”
“It’s all right,” I told Bay, but I didn’t look at her, because they were bringing our mother’s body into the floodgate chamber. We sat high up in the viewing area. Our mother looked small in their arms.
They set our mother down on the floor and chanted the prayers. I willed myself not to cry. I didn’t look at Bay. And then, when the priests were finished with the prayers, they left the room, sealed it shut, and left our mother alone. Hundreds of us were watching—some of us in the viewing area, some on screens set up in the plazas throughout Atlantia—but she was alone.
I heard a creaking sound in the walls. It was the
sound of water coming in.
The open mouths of the gods began to stream. The water cascaded to the floor, and soon our mother was wet, her clothes clinging to her legs, her hair swirling around her.
Far, far above was the exit of the floodgates, an enormous opening modeled after the rose window in the temple.
The water filled the chamber, and the body lifted up. The speed of the water increased, filling the chamber faster and faster.
The water rose above the level of the viewing area, and I gasped in air. It seemed as if we were going to drown as the water went past our windows. But of course, we were safe.
Our mother’s body went up, up, up, toward the exit of the floodgates, and I thought I could see the sun for a moment, that it was shining all the way down on Atlantia.
When the chamber was nearly full, and I could barely see my mother anymore, the window began to spin. It looked like a flower opening.
And then she was gone.
When we came home that night, I found the ring and pressed it into Bay’s hand. “I think she would have changed her mind anyway,” I said. “I think she would have wanted you to keep this.”
“Once they’ve taken what they need Above,” Maire says to me now, “they dump the body in a pit. They don’t want it any more than we do Below.”
Maire is saying a body, but I think of her body. My mother’s. I can picture it all exactly: her clothes in a tangle, her limp form slumped against the shore, pushed again and again by the waves. Someone from the Above coming down to find her. Taking what they can.
“The dead are not the only ones who leave Atlantia,” Maire says, her voice a whisper, even though there is no one here but me. “Of course there are those who choose to go Above, like Bay.” Maire pauses. “But there are others. The Council, when occasion requires it.”
I already know this. Sometimes the Council takes their transports up through the locks—the series of compression and decompression chambers that lead to the surface. It’s part of their work. The Council must negotiate with the people who live Above, to make sure everything runs smoothly. But the Minister never goes. The Minister’s safety is too precious to put at risk, and his or her place is in the Below.