“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.
“Did you know that this time they’re planning to take the sirens, too?” Maire asks. “Rumor has it that we’ll leave very soon. If you let me, I could take you with us. Above.”
Remember, I tell myself, you can’t believe what she says. But I can’t help it. I could go up with them and perhaps, once I was Above, I could find a way to escape.
“Sirens are miracles,” Maire says. “Remember that.”
“Then why are you all at the mercy of the Council?” I ask.
“Because we are human miracles,” Maire says. “And so there are people we love, and the Council can hold that over us. Remember the time of the Divide? How they were able to get people to agree to stay Above by sending one of their loved ones to live safely Below? That manipulation is very like what the Council does with the sirens. It’s how they control us. We do what they ask, and our loved ones have better lives. If we don’t do what they want, they can make things difficult for those we love.”
“Who do you love?” I ask Maire, because I cannot picture her loving anyone. Especially now that my mother is gone.
Maire laughs. “I love myself,” she says. “I do what they ask because I want to live.”
I understand her.
She and I are alike.
I love Bay, and my mother, but I also want to survive. Perhaps that is what I want more than anything else. If I’m honest with myself, how much of my desire has to do with seeing my sister again and how much of it has to do with my increasing certainty that, if I don’t get Above, something in me will die?
Maire and I are two sides of the same dark coin.
“And of course I loved your mother,” Maire says. She walks out into the middle of the floodgate chamber. “She was in this chamber years before her death, you know. All potential Ministers come here. The Council and the priests close off the public viewing area. One by one, each candidate for Minister lies down in the middle of the floor, in the same spot where their bodies will be placed when they die. Did you know this?”
No. My mother never told me.
“I know this,” Maire says, her voice growing, pushing, pulling on me, “because I was there.”
“You couldn’t have been there,” I say. “They would never consider you for Minister, and you’re not part of the Council.”
“That’s true,” Maire says. “But as you know, a Minister has to prove that he or she is either immune to the sirens or powerful enough to resist them. So the candidates for Minister come here, during the night, while the rest of Atlantia sleeps. The priests and Council watch as witnesses. And then the sirens come in. We take turns talking. The other priests and the Council don’t hear what we say. They watch our lips, of course, they see the words, but they stay safe from our voices.”
“What do you say?” I ask.
“Oh,” Maire says, “it’s different for each person. Of course. The point is to see who screams and breaks, and who can resist.”
“They’d never let you talk to my mother,” I say. “The two of you are sisters. They’d think you’d go easy on her.”
“On the contrary,” Maire says, “they thought I might know exactly what to say. And they knew those things might be even more difficult to hear, coming from a sister.”
I don’t ask her what she said to my mother, but Maire tells me anyway.
“I told her that her husband never loved her, that her children were going to die young,” Maire says, closing her eyes. She seems like she tastes each word as she says it. “I told her that she wanted to be Minister for all the wrong reasons—for power, for gain. I told her about terrible things, evil things that people do to one another. I told her that I did not love her.” Maire opens her eyes and there is a darkness in them that I have never seen before, one so deep it shocks me, even coming from Maire.
“I held nothing back,” Maire says. “And it worked. Oceana’s ability to resist impressed the other priests and the Council. She was the only one able to withstand every single siren, including her own sister. And she wasn’t born immune, the way some people are. So she has me to thank for her excellent control. Those few years we grew up together taught her resistance.” Then she smiles at me. “Though perhaps I should credit you with some of that, too. It’s rather impressive she trained herself to hold out against her own child.”
That hurts, as Maire knew it would. But I refuse to let her manipulate me. I remember how my mother did not resist me when the need was real, how she always told me who I really was even as she tried to shelter me.
“Without me, your mother never would have been the Minister,” Maire says. “I helped make her into what she’d always dreamed of becoming.”
I don’t believe Maire. My mother was the Minister because of what she did.
“Of course, it hurt her,” Maire says. “She knew it would, but she didn’t understand how hard it would be to hear me say those things. She thought less of me after that day. She was afraid. But there was no way around it. If I hadn’t done what I did, she would never have been the Minister, and she had to be the Minister.”
“You make her sound selfish,” I say. “As if that’s all she cared about.”
“No,” Maire says. “She loved the city, but she had to be the Minister because Atlantia needed her to be the Minister.”
“Do you love Atlantia?”
“I love it and I hate it,” Maire says.
When she says that, I feel it, too.
“I won’t force you to do anything, Rio.” Maire makes my name sound beautiful. She makes me sound beautiful. “But you can choose to come to the Above with us.”