Atlantia

Aldo’s moment of civility has already ended. “I’m going to have to redo all the race brackets for this weekend now that she won’t be swimming.”

“Did she leave anything here for me?” I ask.

“What would she leave?”

“A note,” I say. “Or something else. I’m not sure.”

“No,” Aldo says. “She always took her gear with her. We don’t have room to store much down here. You know that.”

I do. The racing lanes themselves use most of the available space, and the spectator stands take up what’s left. There is a small bank of rent-by-the-hour lockers pushed up near the wall where Aldo posts the brackets; we can keep our things there while we race.

“Could there be anything in the lockers?” I ask.

“No,” Aldo says. “I went through them last night. They were all empty.”

He says it in a disinterested tone, and I believe that he tells the truth. My heart sinks.

So. She didn’t leave anything here, either. Aldo turns and walks away.

The water slaps against the walls of the cement canals. Steely thin bleachers rise up on either side, calling to mind the seats in the temple. The priests knew Bay began racing here after my mother’s death, and they turned a blind eye to it. We needed the money. The temple takes care of all of its students’ room and board, of course, but all our work there is considered consecrated and we receive no coin in return. Almost everyone else had two parents to watch over them, to give them pocket money and pay for books and buy new clothes. But the Minister also takes no money for her work, only room and board and clothing. Our mother looked out for us by selling her personal possessions when we needed something new. However, she’d gone through most of those items by the time she died.

So Bay set out to earn money. It was surprising, how clearly she knew exactly what to do. After I promised to stay, she still grieved deeply, but she was back to her old self in other ways—calm and collected, thinking things through.

“They have races in the deepmarket,” she told me. “Swimming ones. People bet on them.”

I knew about the races, even though up until then Bay and I rarely watched them. The priests discouraged it. “But those people have been swimming for years,” I said.

“We can learn fast,” she said. “It’s in our genes.”

Bay and I both take after my father physically—we are tall and strong, while my mother was small and delicate. When we were twelve, we passed her in height and kept on growing; she laughed that she had to look up to the two of us.

My father was a racer, back when it was an approved sport and they had fancy sleek swimming lanes erected in the plazas on weekends. That’s how my mother met him. She was attending one of the races, and he came out of the water after finishing and looked up and saw her. In a crowd of people stirring and shouting there was one spot of stillness: my mother. She stood up because that’s what everyone else was doing, but she kept on reading the book she’d brought with her. That intrigued him. What was so interesting that she couldn’t even be bothered to watch the race? So he climbed up in the stands and found her and asked her to go to one of the cafés with him. She agreed. That was the beginning.

“But racing is what might have given him water-lung,” I protested.

“They’ve never proven the link,” Bay said.

She sold one of my mother’s few remaining personal possessions—a tiger god statue—and used the coin to buy each of us a training suit and practice time in the lanes.

“I feel naked,” I told Bay the day we first tried on the suits.

“You shouldn’t,” she said. “These things are almost as modest as our temple robes. We’re covered from stem to stern.”

That made me laugh, which I hadn’t done often since my mother died, and Bay smiled. We went out to the lanes together, and the teacher shook his head. “Aldo didn’t tell me you were so old,” he said. “It’s no use for me to teach you.”

“We’re only fifteen,” Bay said.

“Still too old,” the man said. “You have to start younger than this.”

“We paid you to teach us,” Bay said. “It’s no concern to you how fast we are as long as you have your coin.”

Of course, when we both picked up swimming fairly quickly, he acted as though he’d predicted it all along. “It’s in your genes, of course,” he said. “You’ll never be as good as you could have been, if you’d started younger. But I suppose your mother wanted to keep you up at the temple. I can’t say I blame her.”

“It doesn’t matter if I’m not in the faster brackets,” Bay said to me quietly. “I only have to be good enough to enter and win some of the races.”

“Wait,” I said. She’d said I, not we. “What about me?”

“No,” Bay said. “It’s too dangerous.”

Because of my voice. I knew that was the reason. It always was, for everything. But this time, I didn’t see why.

“It’s like everything else,” Bay said. “Anything you do in public runs the risk of exposure. It’s better if you watch. You can tell me if anyone tries to cheat. You can keep an eye on the clock and see if Aldo tries to rig the results.”

I fumed. “If I’m not going to race, why did I bother learning to swim?”

“It’s part of who we are,” she said. “Our father knew how. And doesn’t it seem stupid that most of us don’t know how to swim? When we live underwater?”

“Not really,” I said. “If there’s ever a breach, we’ll all die anyway.”

“Don’t think like that,” Bay said. So we kept training together, day after day, but I never raced.

Aldo comes back out with more papers to post on the wall. The rustling of the pages brings me back to the present.

“I could swim in her bracket,” I say. Racing would be a connection to Bay. A way to burn off some of the restlessness eating me up inside.

Aldo raises his eyebrows. I can tell that he likes this idea, because he is both sharp and lazy and this will save him some work. “When the two of you trained side by side, you always kept up with her.”

“Yes,” I say. “I did.”

“I don’t have a problem with it,” he says. “But the other racers will have to agree with the substitution. And I’ll need to let the bettors know.”