by Ally Condie
And then Maire’s voice is in my ear, and she’s pulling me back up to my feet and away from the leaves. When I turn around, I am stunned to see that the transport has already disappeared Below.
I didn’t even hear it go.
Maire speaks to me quickly as we cross the sand to join the other sirens, who ascend a low, wooden platform. It appears as if it were made from trees like the ones growing on the island. “I have a plan,” Maire says, “for you and True to escape.”
I listen.
“Behind those rocks on your left,” Maire says, “there is a little inlet. Climb in and swim and follow the curve of the inlet. You’ll find a cave, farther back along this shore. Hide there. Wait until it’s nearly dark, if you can. And then swim from this island to the main isle and go to the temple. You’ll see it as soon as you come over that rise.” She points across the water to the shore of the main island.
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“One of the voices told me,” Maire says. She sounds sad. “This way is best. You would never have survived the floodgates. Your lungs would have burst in the ascent. That’s why I told Nevio what you were doing. We were just in time.”
So she was the one who betrayed me. But how did she know?
“It was another way up,” Maire says, “and you hadn’t chosen mine. At least you have a chance this way.”
“She’s telling the truth,” True says to me softly. “But I think you know that.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t.”
We’ve reached the other sirens. They stand in a line on the platform, their robes of blue undulating in the wind.
People sit in boats near the shore, waiting. People from the Above. “What are they carrying?” I ask, loud enough that the other sirens can hear. “Are those weapons?”
“It doesn’t matter if they are,” one of the sirens says, her tone so confident that I almost believe her.
The sirens have no weapons except for their voices. This is a fool’s errand, one of Nevio’s devising, one that will end in destruction and silence. Why is he doing this? Does he want to be the last siren in the Below? Does he even want to save Atlantia at all?
Nevio himself is nowhere in sight. The other sirens look around for him, too. “It’s all right,” one of them says. “He must be here somewhere.”
The people in the boats wait. The boats are gray, like the trees.
The deepmarket siren raises her arms. The rest look up at her, eager to respond.
“What are the gifts given to we who live Below?” she asks, exactly as my mother used to do on the anniversary of the Divide, as Nevio did this year on the day Bay left and again on the transport.
Where is Nevio now?
And why did he cause the breach in the deepmarket? So that the sirens would come up to try to save the city, thinking that the breach had been an attack from the Above? Will he tell the people Below that the sirens offered themselves as sacrifices to save Atlantia, or will he tell the citizens that the Council purged the Below of our dangerous, evil presence?
Either way, he thinks we are all going to die.
Are we?
“Save your voice,” Maire whispers to me. “But move your lips. So that you don’t draw attention from the others. Don’t try to escape until I tell you.”
After a beat of silence, the sirens all begin calling in response, their voices as textured as this land Above. And it is true that their voices are even more powerful here. I feel the air shivering with sound.
“Long life, health, strength, and happiness.”
“What is the curse of those who live Above?” the deepmarket siren asks.
“Short life, illness, weakness, and misery.”
“Is this fair?”
“It is fair. It is as the gods decreed at the time of the Divide. Some have to stay Above so that humanity might survive Below.”
“Then give thanks.”
I don’t join my voices with the sirens.
I do not speak for the gods. All I ever wanted was to speak for me.
The siren begins asking the questions again. And this time Maire joins her voice with the others.
It is the most sorrowful, singing sound I have ever heard. Through the frightening, layered unison of the other voices, there is Maire’s, apart though she speaks at the same time and with the same words. Her voice is the sound of blue and brown, of trees with no leaves and flooded marketplaces and candles lit in memory of people now gone and gods who never were, a begging, pleading, asking the people of the Above to let us live in our place Below. She is not telling like the others, she is asking.
But even Maire’s voice is not working. I don’t know how I know; I just do. I can’t see the faces of the people on the boats. The boats move up and down on the waves, each moment closer to us. The people watch the sirens. They wait for something. Their faces are terribly blank. I have an impression of unmoving lips, staring eyes. I realize that they wear masks. To protect them from the air? To hide their faces?
The sirens’ voices swell, like a wave of the sea. They rise and fall, the commanding, the cajoling, the sweetness of some voices, the poison of others.
The deepmarket siren has been calling over the water and now she turns back to us to continue the litany.
She opens her mouth and lifts her hands. But she doesn’t speak. She falls.
I don’t understand at first. Neither do the others. One voice less, they keep speaking.
“And have mercy on us.
“And on those who live Above.”
The fallen siren does not move.
The people of Atlantia always thought we had the upper hand over the people of the Above, that we had the power.
But we were wrong.
Somehow, the sirens’ miraculous voices have lost their effect on the people of the Above.
The sirens begin calling for the people of the Above to go back, go back. Leave. Leave.
“Why aren’t our voices working?” one siren asks another in panic.
Another siren starts to run. Before she’s taken more than a few steps, the people in the boats shoot her down, too. True cries out and goes to kneel beside her, to see if there is something he can do, but of course there is nothing. She doesn’t even breathe, only bleeds.
I stare in horror at her crumpled body, her robe pooled blue around her. I think, Like the bat.
The miracles are dying. The sirens no longer have power to dictate what happens Above.
I open my mouth to beg for True. Perhaps I could tell the people in the boats that True’s not a siren, convince them to spare his life.
But then Maire is beside me, speaking into my ear low and urgent. “Save your voice,” she says. “You will need it later.” She smiles at me. “I have enough power to distract them now while you run. I can make them forget there were two more people on the island today.”
“But what about you?” I ask.
Another siren falls, but we three are safe.
Maire takes my hand and presses something hard and fragile into it. I don’t even have to look to know that she has given me another shell. “She will tell you everything,” she says. “You will believe it, if you hear it from her. But I had to save it for a long time. She will speak just once. Be sure you listen.”
“Who?” I ask, hardly daring to hope.
“Your mother,” Maire says. She closes her eyes. “My sister.” Her voice is so full of pride and love that it brings tears to my eyes. It is how I want to speak of Bay. It is how I hope Bay speaks of me.
“You loved her,” I say.
“Always,” Maire says. “I love her still.”
With her eyes closed and her voice soft like this, she looks the smallest bit like my mother, her sister.
“She loved you,” I say.
“Of course s
he did,” Maire says. “And I care enough about myself to want redemption for the things I’ve done.” Before I can ask what she means, what she’s done, whether she believes in the gods after all, she opens her eyes and looks right at me.
“You didn’t care about me until you heard my voice,” I say.
“Your voice is part of you,” Maire says. “So when I say that I love your voice, which I do, I am also saying that I love you.”
“But you didn’t love me without it.”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t. Not as much. But that is the kind of person I am.” She pauses. “Would you love me without my voice?”
I have a strange thought. Perhaps I could love her more without her voice.
She sees what I am thinking.
“Yes,” she says. “That is how it has always been for me.”
My cheeks are wet.
“Maire,” I say, “how do you know you can do this? How do you know I can do this?”
“My dear,” Maire says, “the only chance of success is to trust in your own power.”
And then she gestures for us to run, and she moves away from me, calling out to the people in the boats.
“Listen,” she says. In a voice full of power but also hope, and kindness, no curses, no fear. It’s golden, beautiful, pure. When I hear it, I believe in her as absolutely as I used to believe in my mother. I know Maire has the power to save us.
But we have to go now.
I reach out and try to touch the sleeve of her robe in farewell, but she doesn’t turn. True grabs my hand, and we run across the sand, our feet sinking in, our breath coming hard. I glance back once but I can’t see Maire.
What has happened to her? Has she disappeared? Is she dead?
True and I pull off our robes and leave them on the shore. I slip into the water, the shell Maire gave me clutched tight in my hand, her perfect voice ringing in my ears. And then, for the first time in my life, I swim in the sea Above.
CHAPTER 24
True and I huddle together inside the cave, wet and waiting. There’s not much to hear besides the water as it pushes against the walls of the cave. The constant sound of it reminds me of Atlantia breathing.
We made it.
And the sirens are dying.
My exhilaration over the success of our swim vanishes.
What have I done?
I left Maire behind because I wanted to get True away from the people in the boats, but now he’s safe in the cave.
“I need to go back,” I say.
“They’ll kill you, too,” True says. “We have to trust Maire and do what she said.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You have to,” True says. “It’s what she wanted. If you go back, you betray her. You need to let Maire save you.” He moves a little, readjusting his position, and then he says, his voice almost angry, “Why did you try to go up through the floodgates if Maire told you she could take you up a different way? You could have died.”
“Some of us don’t have the luxury of knowing when Maire is telling the truth.”
“But you could have trusted me,” True says. “You could have told me what you planned to do.”
“You would have tried to talk me out of it,” I say. “You might have even turned me in to the Council to try to save my life.”
True’s silent.
“I need to go back,” I say again. It is all I can do to keep my real voice from breaking through. I have to save it. Maire told me so.
Did she use her voice on me to convince me to leave her with the other sirens? Could it be that she’s done all of this just to get me to the surface?
She gave me a shell, one that holds my mother’s voice.
What if it tells me something that I desperately need to know?
I want to hear my mother speak. It has been more than a year without her, and I am afraid and Above.
I hold up the shell. I clutched it tight in my hand the whole time we swam, and suddenly I worry that time will have taken away her voice, that there will be nothing left but the sound of water and wind.
“I have to listen to this,” I tell True. “I can only hear it once.”
He looks at me like he did back at the lanes in the deepmarket, as if he doesn’t understand but is with me anyway, and nods.
I put the shell to one ear.
And then I hear her voice and my hands start to shake. True puts his hand over mine to help me hold the shell steady, but he turns his face away to let me listen in privacy.
So, she says. This is everything I have learned about the sirens and the Divide and our gods.
It’s her. It’s really her. She must have told this to Maire, and Maire saved it. How did Maire know she would need it?
The Divide did not happen exactly the way we were taught, my mother says. Her voice is not the one she used over the pulpit. It is low, urgent, intimate, the voice she used with someone she loved. Someone she trusted. Some of it happened the way we’ve been told: People were chosen for the Above and the Below. Everyone Above had someone Below who they cared about so they would keep the Below alive.
But the rest of it, the religion, came later.
The temple, the gods, all of it, was a facade, a conceit. It was a way to make things beautiful Below while evoking the old cultures of the Above. No one believed in the gods as gods. They thought they were gargoyles. Decorations.
But then the miracles began to happen.
First the sirens, and then the bats.
And then the people came to believe. They built their religion around the miracles.
You know all this.
Thank you for unlocking the door to the Council’s secret library for me. Thank you for making it so that I could read the papers. So that I could hold the evidence in my hands.
I’m sorry that I couldn’t believe in your voices in the walls.
You were right.
I should have listened to you.
Because now it may be too late.
I read other things in those papers.
Did you also know that the air Above became clean enough to live in years ago? Though still polluted, it is much more safe to live there now. But by the time this happened, the Above wanted nothing to do with us. They hated us for our sirens but loved us for the ore we could deliver. So they reached a conclusion—they would keep us alive as long as the mines kept producing.
But the mines are running out of ore.
The Council of the Below decided that the Minister always had to be a true believer, which is part of the reason they selected me. How else could I convince the people if I didn’t believe myself? And the people Below had to be convinced, had to believe their lives were wonderful and safe, so they could keep mining and keep Atlantia running so that we wouldn’t be cut off. The people of the Above have no desire to live or work in Atlantia. They think it’s dirty, broken. They think we as a people are dirty and broken, too.
We are not the only Above, and not the only Below. We are an outpost, one among many, strewn across the great islands of the sea. The cities Below were where the fortunate once lived and worked, but now the roles have been reversed.
Sirens have appeared in all the Belows. Our mines have lasted longer than anyone else. And the other Aboves have—and I cannot bear to say this—
The other Aboves have killed all their sirens. They found that it was very easy to do, because even if some of the sirens escaped the drowning of their cities, even if no one catches or kills them, they can’t survive for more than a few days Above. They belong to the Below.
What? I am so shocked that I pull the shell away from my ear, forgetting that I will lose her voice. I pull it back fast, to listen again. My heart pounds hard inside my chest.
I can’t live without the Below. I can’t live here Above. And e
veryone like me has been or will be killed.
I push my hand, hard, into my mouth so that I won’t scream.
We have the last sirens, my mother says, and it is a matter of time before the Above tells our Council to get rid of our sirens, too. And our Council will listen, because if they don’t, they will die. Everything they’ve done to deceive us has been to save themselves when the time comes.
So we have to save the sirens. We have to appeal to the people of the Above and the Below, so that they will see that this is wrong.
We have to save Atlantia, too. They let us send up our child-ren once a year on the anniversary of the Divide, but I don’t know how many more people the Above will allow to come up. I don’t think they care about saving all of Atlantia. Though survival is possible in the Above, the people there see us as drains on their resources, as parasites. Which we were, for many years. But as things are right now, the sirens cannot live for long outside Atlantia. They can’t last without the water above them.
Will you help me? I have to save you, and I have to save—
My mother stops. She doesn’t say my name, but I wonder if that is when Maire realized that I could be a siren. If, when I spoke in the temple, it was the confirmation of something she’d already guessed.
Maybe if you spoke to the people Above—
It has to be a pure siren? What does that mean?
A pause. And then it sounds like she’s saying something back that has just been said to her.
Someone who has saved her voice for years. Who has never used her voice for the Council. Who loves the Below as much as she loves herself. Do I know anyone like that?
I hear her breathing. She was thinking of me.
I do not.
She lied. She lied to my aunt, for me.
Or maybe she didn’t think I loved the Below enough.
Perhaps you could go up and speak. Let them see what a siren really is. You could use your power for a greater good, instead of for all the Council’s little evils.