I nod.
“Come again tomorrow and I’ll tell you what they say,” Aldo says. He heads back in the direction of the stall where he takes the bets.
I stand there for a moment more, watching the smooth turquoise water wash against the sides of the racing lane. Aldo colors the water artificially so that it looks more enticing. For the first time since Bay left I feel a tiny bit better. If I make my body tired, maybe my mind can rest, even if only for the moments when I swim and stare down at the line on the bottom of the lane and think about nothing but pushing through my own fatigue.
“Rio,” a voice says behind me.
And in one heartbeat my thoughts go from blue to black.
I know that voice, though I haven’t heard it in a long time, not since my mother’s funeral.
She’s here.
Maire.
My mother’s sister.
The siren woman some people call a witch.
The one I think might have killed my mother.
How else to explain her crumpled figure on Maire’s doorstep? Or why Maire never said anything, never offered a single word of explanation as to why my mother might have come to her?
“Maire wouldn’t have killed her,” Bay said, when I told her about my suspicions. “A sister couldn’t do that.”
I turn around and look back at the throngs in the deepmarket, but I can’t find Maire among the moving cloaks and banners and faces. Still, I feel her watching me, even if I can’t see exactly where she is. Does she expect me to answer her?
Maire doesn’t know about my voice. My mother took great care to keep that part of me hidden from everyone, even her own sister.
“But if Maire has a voice like mine, won’t people expect me to have one, too?” I asked once, when I was small.
“No,” my mother said. “There have never been two sirens in the same family line. We’ve always believed that the siren voices are a gift from the gods, not simple genetics.”
“Then why don’t you treat it like a gift?”
Her eyes softened. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish we could. But it is a gift, just not one you can use right now.”
“When?” I asked.
She had no answer for me, but I had one for myself. After I went Above. My mother was always so pleased with my self-control. She didn’t know that the reason I could manage it was because I never planned to do it forever. I thought I would go Above and speak at last.
“Maire is your greatest protection,” my mother said. “Because she has a siren voice, people aren’t looking for any of us to have one as well.”
Rio. I hear my name again now, a single, clear word meant for me.
I start walking, fast, away from the rows of sellers and stalls and back up toward the lower reaches of Atlantia’s neighborhoods.
I think I feel Maire following me, and I think I hear her, too. It’s almost as though she’s whispering to me, sentences I can’t quite make out, hiding an undercurrent of words in the sound of the air channeling through the walls of the city. And I can’t help myself. I wonder, Could I do that, too?
If I use my voice, I’ll be like Maire. I’ll be marked as a siren and people will fear me.
Every time I see Justus, the priest, he won’t meet my gaze. Even though he heard me speak only a single word in my real voice, it was enough to make him keep his distance. That’s the safest response for me, and I should be glad. But I’m sad about it. He was my mother’s best friend, the gentlest priest, the one Bay and I hoped the others would choose as Minister after she died.
But they didn’t. They chose Nevio.
A group of teenagers push past, laughing and talking together. They glance over at me and then look away. For a minute I’m tempted to call to them in my real voice. I could play upon the boys; I could make the girls feel jealous, wish they’d never ignored me.
“Hello,” a voice says, persuasive, delicious, and for a moment I think I’ve done it, I’ve spoken. But I haven’t.
Maire stands in front of me in her black robes, with her disheveled hair. Her face is at once too sharp to be anything like my mother’s and yet too intelligent to be dissimilar. I have never seen her so close before.
“I need to speak to you,” Maire says. “About your mother. And your sister.”
You do not, I almost say, in my true voice, but I have been so long silent that it seems a pity to speak now. To ruin anything for an aunt who cares nothing for me.
I walk past her. She follows. I hear her boots on the street behind me. I feel the dark of my losses in those words mother and sister, in the way she said them so they would echo in my mind, cold as a cathedral with no candles.
I have always known that if I stayed Below I would be made small, and I feel it happening.
“Rio?” Maire says. “I was there at the temple the day Bay left. And I heard you speak.”
I stop.
It wasn’t only Justus who heard me.
“I always wondered if you were a siren, too,” Maire says, a ring of happiness in her voice, and I flinch in spite of myself.
“If,” Maire says, “there is ever anything you want, or need, I can help you. I helped your mother, you know. Even Oceana the Minister needed me.”
That’s a lie. And my mother would be proud of how my voice comes out even and flat, although I want to scream. “My mother didn’t need you,” I say. “She had us. Her daughters.”
“There are some things you only tell a sister,” Maire says. “And some things you only ask of a sister.” Now her voice sounds soft and sad, faraway, even though she stands close to me. It’s unnerving. “You think that I am the evil sister, and that your mother was good,” she says. “But Oceana did need me. And Bay needed me, too.”
Bay didn’t need Maire. Bay had me.
“She left something for you,” Maire says. “Come along and I’ll give it to you.”
I’m caught between two things I know to be true.
Bay wouldn’t have gone Above without leaving me some kind of message or explanation.
She also would never have left that message or explanation with Maire.
Would she?
Maire’s voice is tangling things, confusing me.
A gondola comes behind us, slipping along in its cement canal. I want to get away from Maire and back to the temple. I break into a run.
“We need to talk, you and I.” Maire’s voice follows me. “I can help you get what you want, your deepest desire.”