And then, without speaking, we stop at the same time.
Maire said I would know the temple, and I do, even though it’s different from the one Below.
It’s made of metal instead of stone, and it appears to be formed from chunks of other buildings welded together. I want to run my fingers along the rivets and see how well it all meets. And the whole building is covered in an oxidation of green, like it grew up out of the ground. I’ve heard of this before—pollution so bad that it can corrupt even metal, but in the moment it’s beautiful.
True and I stand together, Above, in front of the temple, our clothes damp and our feet dirty. The door is not open, perhaps to keep out the air, but when I turn the handle, it moves easily. It’s unlocked. It must be accessible at all hours, open to the people who need to pray, the way our temple is in the Below.
But I am afraid to enter.
Someone mutters and pushes past me. There are others who want to go inside, and I should move.
“Rio?” True asks.
“Bay,” I say, remembering why I’m here, and I take a step inside.
The temple is fairly crowded, and no one seems to notice us come in.
I take a few more steps. It is so different and so much the same. The pews, the quietness, the softened voices and prayers. True and I walk past a woman crying and a priest comforting.
The gargoyle gods watch us. They don’t adorn only the walls but also sit welded into place, like permanent worshippers, on some of the pews. Why, I wonder, and then in a moment I know, when I see their eaten faces, their pockmarked bodies, the way the air turned them green like they have been long underwater. The air. I had to weld our gods back into the trees for upkeep; the priests here brought their gods inside for shelter when the air was at its worst and have not yet taken them back out.
I stop in my tracks, utterly fascinated. High up, a seahorse curls its tail on a plinth, its head seemingly bowed in prayer while it supports the weight above. A whale with a bulbous head and startled eyes pushes out from the wall, and on the pew nearest me, a spiky-tailed shark shows its teeth. They are supposedly the same gods we have Below, with different forms, and they seem at once foreign and familiar. They would have had to make these after the advent of the sirens.
What would it be like, to make a religion? To fashion your own gods?
The pulpit is inlaid with shells from the Below, with a design similar to our waves that become trees. On their pulpit the trees turn and roll into clouds. It’s beautiful. And I can’t help but wonder if there are any voices trapped inside those shells. I close my hand around the one in my pocket.
As we approach the altar, I notice a large jar of water in the place where the jar of dirt sits in the temple in Atlantia.
And for a moment, I allow myself to imagine that this is another version of home, one where I find my twin and perhaps my mother, too, that she will come in to stand behind the pulpit to speak saving words to all of us, and she’ll notice me and rush to take me in her arms and say, All along we were here, Rio. We were waiting for you to come to the right place.
I’m crying now without a sound. For the loss of my mother, and for Maire. I know she’s gone, too. Somehow I can tell that her voice will never again be heard under the water or over the wind.
She is nowhere Above and nowhere Below.
And neither is my mother.
But my sister might be.
“Bay?” a man’s voice says, close behind me, and my heart pounds with familiarity and fear. This used to happen all the time Below—someone has mistaken me for Bay. What can I say that won’t give me away?
“Bay?” the man asks again, sounding puzzled.
I turn around. But he isn’t talking to me. He’s speaking to the real Bay, who has stopped in the middle of the aisle leading to the altar, staring at me as if she can’t believe what she sees.
And I don’t believe my eyes, either, though this is where I hoped I’d find her, though this is what I wanted more than anything else for so long, though almost everything I’ve done has been because I knew I had to see my sister again.
I see my sister again.
CHAPTER 26
I want to say something and I can’t.
I’m afraid she’ll leave the way she did the last time I saw her. Turn her back on me and walk away, again.
That she’ll be angry with me for coming, because it isn’t safe for me here.
But Bay throws her arms around me, and she’s crying. I hold on so tight. She whispers into my ear, “You’re here. How?”
It’s such a long story. I don’t even know where to begin. Priests stare at us and the gods sit among the people in the pews and my mother and Maire are dead. And the Above is not what I’ve been told it was all my life and I don’t care, I love it anyway, and I can’t live here. I’m a siren and no one wants me to live anywhere.
“Rio,” Bay says, and I feel her smoothing down my hair, holding me close. I’m a mermaid girl, tears in my hair, salt on my skin, barely able to breathe under the heavy weight of what’s happened and light with the relief of seeing my sister at last.
Bay leads True and me to a storage room at the back of the temple, a place full of boxes and books and odds and ends. She goes to a closet at the back of the room and pulls out some old robes for us to wear over our still-damp clothes from the Below. All the time I can’t stop staring at my sister. It hasn’t been long, but I can’t believe how imperfectly I remembered her. I thought I remembered everything, but I didn’t. I forgot how she moves when she wants to be quiet, how that looks. I forgot her profile when she’s turned three-quarters away from me, how her ear from that angle is small and fine, like a shell. I realize that I didn’t hold on to the exact color of her eyes.
She’s cut her hair shorter, and her skin is tanned from the sun. Her arms look strong—I can see the muscles in them, even more defined than when she practiced in the lanes every day. There are dark shadows under her eyes, the kind that speak of weeks without enough sleep, rather than one single harrowed night.
Her voice still sounds gentle but also huskier—perhaps a result of breathing the air Above—and she’s taken on their accent. Even so, I remembered the tone of it perfectly. It is the one thing I have remembered exactly right, I realize. Maire told the truth. I do know how to listen.
And then I finally say something.
“Maire,” I say. I have to tell Bay what happened to Maire.