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“What do you want to do tonight?” Elizabeth asked, flopping onto the couch. Outside the window behind her, the sky was fading from blue to pink to orange, and I mentally ticked off one more day of the thousands I had left. “I actually don’t feel like going to a club.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” I threw my arms up. “Are you sick?” I teased.
“Ha-ha,” she retorted. “I’m just in the mood for something different.”
Miaka looked up from our shared laptop. “Where is it daytime? We could go to a museum.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “I will never understand how you are so into such quiet buildings. As if we aren’t silent enough.”
“Pssh!” I gave her a pointed look. “You, silent?”
Elizabeth stuck out her tongue at me and hopped over to Miaka. “What are you looking at?”
“Skydiving.”
“Oh, wow! Now that’s more like it!”
“Don’t get any big ideas. For now I’m just researching. I’ve been wondering what would happen with our adrenaline levels if we did something like this,” Miaka said, taking notes on a pad beside the computer. “Like, if we’d get an above-average spike.”
I chuckled. “Miaka, is this an adventure or a science experiment?”
“A little bit of both. I’ve read that adrenaline rushes can alter your perception, making things look blurry or causing a moment to look frozen. I think it’d be interesting to do something like this, see what I see, then try to capture it in art.”
I smiled. “I admit, it’s creative. But there has to be a better way to get a rush than jumping out of a plane.”
“Even if things went wrong, we’d survive, right?” Miaka questioned, and they both turned to me as if I was an authority figure on the topic.
“I think so. Either way, you can count me out for that particular adventure.”
“Scared?” Elizabeth made wiggly ghost fingers at me.
“No,” I protested. “Simply not interested.”
“She’s afraid she’ll get in trouble,” Miaka guessed. “That the Ocean wouldn’t like it.”
“As if She would ever get upset with you,” Elizabeth said, a tinge of bitterness in her voice. “She adores you.”
“She cares for all of us.” I tucked my hands in my lap.
“Then She wouldn’t mind if you went skydiving.”
“What if you’re terrified and start screaming?” I proposed. “What would that do?”
Elizabeth, who was preparing to pounce on my worry, backed down. “Fair point.”
“I have twenty years to go,” I said quietly. “If I mess up now, it’d make the last eighty years a waste. You know the stories about sirens who went wrong as well as I do. Miaka, you saw what happened to Ifama.”
Miaka shuddered. The Ocean had saved Ifama as she was drowning off the coast of South Africa in the fifties, and she had agreed to serve in exchange for being able to live. For the short season she was with us, she kept her distance, staying alone in her room, appearing to be in prayer most of the time. Later we wondered if her coldness was part of a plan to remain unattached to us. When she had to sing for the first time, she stood on the water, chin in the air, and refused. The Ocean pulled her under so fast, it was as if she’d never been there at all.
It was a warning to us all. We must sing, and we must keep the secret. It was a short list of commandments.
“And what about Catarina?” I continued. “Or Beth? Or Molly? What about the slew of girls in our position who failed?”
These girls’ stories were the cautionary tales that were passed down from one siren to the next. Beth had used her voice to make three girls who had teased her jump into a well. This was in the late 1600s when the idea of witches wasn’t that far-fetched. She’d put an entire town in an uproar, and the Ocean had silenced her to keep our secret. Catarina was another who had refused to sing and was taken. The strange thing about her was that she’d already been a siren for thirty years at that point. I nearly made myself crazy wondering about what could have made her give up on the promise of freedom that far in.
Molly’s story was different—and more disturbing. Her life as a siren had brought on some kind of mental breakdown. Four years in, she’d murdered a household of people in the night, including an infant, in an outburst she hadn’t realized she’d had until she was standing over an elderly woman who was facedown in a bathtub. From what I had heard, the Ocean tried to soothe her, but when she had a similar episode a few months later, the Ocean took her life. Molly was proof that there was grace when the Ocean knew your intentions, but she also showed that there was only so much room for that mercy.
These were the stories we carried, the guardrails that kept us in line. Forsaking the rules meant forsaking your life.
Exposing our secret would mean being taken away, maybe experimented on. When they couldn’t destroy us, and if we couldn’t escape, that could be a literal eternity of silent imprisonment. And if anyone guessed that the Ocean was purposefully consuming some of the people She also helped sustain, it wouldn’t take the humans very long to figure out how to get their water without ever touching Her. If no one went into the water … how would we all live?
Obedience was imperative.
“I worry about you two,” I confessed, crossing the room to hug them. “Honestly, I’m jealous sometimes of how well you’ve both … assimilated. But I wonder how much longer you can do that without making a mistake.”
“You don’t have to worry,” Miaka assured me. “This is what sirens have done throughout history, and we just happen to be the best at it so far. Even Aisling lives on the outskirts of a town. Human contact helps to keep us sane. You don’t have to seclude yourself to make it through this life.”
I nodded. “I know. But I don’t want to push my limits, or the Ocean’s.”
Elizabeth didn’t need to say anything. I could hear her judgment without words.
“Why don’t we go see Aisling?” Miaka suggested. “We’ve never really asked her about how she copes.”
“Because she’s never here,” Elizabeth replied, irritation in her voice.
We hadn’t seen our fourth sister since the last time we sang, and it had been well over two years since she’d lived with us.
“That might be a good idea. Just a short trip,” I added, mainly for Elizabeth, who had never really warmed to Aisling. She was too reclusive for Elizabeth’s taste.
Elizabeth nodded. “Sure. Nothing else going on anyway.”
We headed out the back door where a small wooden staircase led down to a floating dock. A handful of the other houses had Jet Skis or personal paddleboats secured to theirs, but ours was empty. The sun was low enough that no one would see as we slipped into the water.
Her currents stirred in greeting, and an almost tickling feeling wrapped around my body as we sank in. I relaxed in the warmth of Her embrace, already calmer.
Can you tell Aisling we’re coming? I asked.
Of course.
Wheee! Elizabeth sang as we dived deep into the water and set off. The speed stripped away her flimsy clothes, and she spread out her arms, hair dancing behind her, as she waited for her siren’s dress.
When we moved like this, every earthly thing we wore fell away. The Ocean opened Her veins, releasing thousands