“I think I might be familiar to them,” I say. “I used to clean the temple trees, where they loved to roost. But the temple trees have no leaves anymore. They’ve all fallen.”
“They have?” Fen asks. “What else has changed?” I hear homesickness in his voice, and longing.
“Atlantia is breaking,” I say. And then I realize we didn’t even have time to tell Fen and Bay about the deepmarket. “The deepmarket drowned,” I say. “There was a breach.”
“No,” Fen says, sounding horrified. “How many died?”
“Hundreds of people,” I say. “And the bats were starting to die, too.” I take a deep breath. I think the bats are calming me.
“So what are you going to do tonight?” Fen asks. “How are you going to get around Nevio? What are you going to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to think of something,” Fen says, growing agitated. “This is Bay’s life you’re asking for. And True’s.”
“Did Bay tell you? What I am?”
“She said that you had a secret,” Fen says, “and that it was yours to tell. But I think I’ve figured it out.”
He’s smart. I can see why he caught her eye, why he has a hold on her heart.
“You’re a siren,” he says very quietly.
“Yes,” I say.
And then Fen leans forward, coughing again, this time sounding even worse than before. Someone is going to hear us. He has to stop. I take my hand away from where I’ve been resting it on the bats’ cage and put it on Fen’s back. Soon he’s quiet and his breathing settles.
“I’ll wear the mask from now on,” he says. “I promise. It’s just—I hate it. I feel like I’m drowning when I have it on.”
“I understand perfectly,” I say.
He looks at me. “I guess you do.”
He pulls the mask over his face and we settle back inside the closet to wait, closing the door.
“I heard there was another civilization that lasted as long as we have,” Fen says after a while, softly. “They separated their people, too, around the same time we had the Divide. Some stayed on land, and the others went into the sky. Maybe those people are up there, watching us now. Maybe they’re waiting for this to all play out, and then they’ll come down and take what’s left.”
“People up in the sky? That sounds like the gods.”
“I don’t believe in the gods.”
“Bay does.”
“I know,” he says. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
Then we hear someone open the door to the storage room.
“Do you have the key to the closet?” a voice asks, and Fen and I both stiffen in recognition.
It’s Nevio again.
“Yes,” someone says. He’s not the same person who came with Nevio before, but I can tell from this man’s accent that he is also from the Above. “I think it’s this one. It was in his pocket.”
“Excellent,” Nevio says.
I hear them jimmying with the lock on the closet door. Fen and I pull the robes in front of us and make ourselves as small as we can in the back, but I worry it’s not enough. Are we about to be caught?
“This isn’t a permanent solution,” the other voice warns, and Nevio laughs. He seems a little farther away. I can hear one of the bats shrieking and the cage opening. What is he doing?
“I know,” he says. “You only have to give me long enough to speak. Then we’ll have someone come back and get rid of him.”
“Where will you take him?” the other man asks.
“We can dump him in the ocean,” Nevio says. “That seems appropriate. He seemed to have a fascination with its abominations.”
The other person laughs. “Everything has gone very smoothly.”
“Yes,” Nevio agrees. “But I wish we knew what he was doing down near the water.”
“Don’t worry about it,” the other man says. “It’s as you said. He was fascinated by the ocean. He walked down by the shore all the time, gathering up shells and watching the waves.”
The key engages in the lock, and the closet door opens.
I hold my breath. Fen is quiet as can be and I send up a silent prayer to my mother and the gods that he won’t cough right now.
And then I stop praying and have to try not to scream, because someone is being pushed into the closet, someone slack and heavy and dead, and he lands in front of us, on us, and then the door swings shut, they lock it again, and the body is still on me, and I know exactly who it is. I saw his face in that moment of light.
Ciro.
“Might as well dump this in there as well, for now,” Nevio says.
And then the door opens again, and they throw something else in—another body, this one tiny, but just as lifeless as Ciro’s.
It’s one of the temple bats.
It’s so dark, and I scrabble for the closet door as soon as I hear Nevio and the other man leave the storage room. I find the inside lock and twist it, pushing the door open, and the bats all stare at me with wide eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I say to them, to Ciro. “I’m so sorry.”
I should have told Ciro what Nevio was. I should have trusted Ciro. But I didn’t, and now he’s dead. After everything he did to help us.
He’s dead because of me.
“Rio,” Fen says. “It’s all right.”
I shake my head. “How can it be all right?” I look at Ciro, his wild hair and his poor, dead face. I put my hand on his chest, but I feel no rise and fall, no heartbeat. I can’t see a wound, but the lack of life in him, the emptiness of his eyes, is grotesque. Is this how it was for my mother? Did Nevio himself administer the poison this time, or did he once again get someone to do the dirty work?
“It’s all right,” Fen says again, pulling off his mask so he can speak to me face-to-face, “because True and Bay got Below. Did you hear Nevio? He doesn’t know what Ciro was doing at the water. Ciro must have already helped Bay and True leave on the transport. Remember? Nevio didn’t see Bay and True. He saw Ciro, alone. We still have a chance. You still have to speak.”
Ciro is dead.
The sirens are dead.
Maire is dead; my mother is dead.