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You’re six years old the first time the Church “borrows” your voice.
Guidance clasps the circle of leather around your neck, petting your hair in passing as she withdraws her hands. At the front, in the hollow of your throat, the two straps converge on a single square of metal inscribed with a rune. The metal warms against your skin, leeching the magic from your own body to power its spell. You feel the theft of your voice as a single throat-closing spasm, as if your vocal cords briefly attempted to lock the doors against an intruder. Then everything relaxes. When you open your mouth, nothing comes out except the soft, indistinct whistling of air. Your throat feels unnaturally open, as if it has been scooped clean of its internal structures, and your tongue is suddenly thick and clumsy in your mouth.
Guidance touches your cheek, and you don’t quite flinch, but you don’t quite like it either, this touch that suddenly makes your stomach churn with a nauseous mix of feelings you have no name for. You don’t know why; you have always run to Guidance for safety before. She’s explained about borrowing your voice, clearly, patiently, answering as many questions as you had, and it all sounded reasonable and right and you know you’ll be helping people, and Guidance will be proud of you, and all of that sounded good, sounded like what you want to do.
That the reality of it feels so wrong, wrong in ways you don’t even have words for, sets your head spinning. Your breath comes too fast, harsh in your too-open throat. You feel a sickening urge to run, to hit, to claw at the thing on your neck, to fall to the ground and scream, and yet you cannot move an inch as Guidance cups your cheek and tells you what a good child of Benevolence you are. Her voice hums with magic—with your magic, your voice—and a calm that does not belong to you washes through you, loosening your limbs, making your cheek sink gently into her hand. You feel strange, hazy, almost dizzy. The twisting nauseous wrongness is smothered beneath the wash of contentment that pours itself into your veins.
You’ve been a good child of Benevolence. You’ve made Guidance proud. That’s all that should matter.
*
Guidance calls the thing that steals your voice a necklace.
Pets are few and far between in Founder’s Wake, and nonexistent in the church. So it takes you a long time to learn the far more appropriate word. The first time you see it, accompanying an illustration of a young woman in the surface world controlling a dog by the attached lead, your entire stomach flips over in recognition.
You may not have had a word for it, but you’ve always known that what you wear is a collar.
*
They remove the collar once a month for your catechism. Your voice comes back to you sore, spent, overworked. You cough and wheeze your way through your study sessions, keeping your answers short and rote and your questions shorter. You dream of soothing teas, of the soft numbness of ice cream. You grow to hate the hours when you have your voice more than the ones when you don’t.
“Your voice is a blessing to Benevolence,” Guidance tells you, smoothing back your hair as you rasp for breath, flinching from her hands. Your throat burns with overuse, although you yourself have not spoken a word since last month. “I know it’s difficult, Devotion, but think of how many souls your voice can save when it’s shared.”
She strokes your back and you shudder, that uncertain twisting nausea returning. You want her comfort and you don’t; you need her touch and you abhor it. You want to hand back your voice, to get the raw feeling out of your throat, to abdicate your responsibility for it, and you want to tear the collar apart with your bare hands. Tears trickle out of your eyes and Guidance wipes them away with a soft handkerchief.
“We’ll do your catechism after dinner,” she decides. “Rest until then.” She presses a finger against your lips and adds, cheerfully, “Don’t speak until then. You need to rest your voice.”
She leaves you alone in your room to dream about ripping your vocal cords out with your fingernails.
*
Siren, is the term Orlean uses for you. You overhear him talking to Guidance about it. You also hear her shush him, which is why, when you’re a little bit older and a little bit bolder, you start your search with that word.
It isn’t particularly illuminating. What you can find about sirens are only myths, pure fiction, nonsense stories about ladies with bird bodies. You understand the reference Orlean was making—an enchanting, irresistible voice, that could even lead someone to their own death—but these stories aren’t real. They cannot tell you where you came from or why you are like this.
Much later, you’ll work up the nerve to ask Brother Seldom, scribbling down your question and passing it to him at dinner, not looking at him. He will hem and haw and recount more myths to you, albeit more recent ones.
As the sea changed, the world—and some people—changed with it. The little town on the shore had been a transient place, where strangers arrived and left throughout that whole last chaotic year. If some of the strangers had been, well, stranger than the others, it would have been difficult to notice. Still, the rumors swirled: strangers who walked up out of the surf and insisted that they had been on the beach just moments ago, stranger with voice too beautiful, too melodic, too enticing to be real, strangers with fish scales on their toes and webbing between their fingers, strangers with seaweed for hair, strangers who promised everything you ever wanted and made you believe they could get it for you.
Amber, when you meet her, knows ghost stories: everyone in Founder’s Wake has a friend of a cousin with a story about meeting someone—a beautiful someone—someone with a voice they could listen to for hours—that they have never seen before, perhaps taking them home, perhaps agreeing to follow them to theirs, because every suggestion they made sounded like the best thing in the world, only to wake up seconds from drowning, halfway out of an airlock with water pooling at their ankles, escaping just in time to live to tell the tale.
Later still, Tolliver will look at you with hooded, sarcastic eyes, and ask if you really think an entire ocean infused with magic brings nothing but death.
*
You find the first feathers when you’re twelve. You don’t know what they are; you’ve never seen a bird except in drawings. You don’t know about down, about the impossibly soft and tiny curls of it, about the way it tickles and makes you sneeze when you bring your arm so close to your face for inspection that your nose presses into it. You think it’s hair, and say nothing, although it makes your arms itch terribly as it grows.
Guidance discovers the feathers almost a month later, when they start to poke out beneath your shirtsleeves. She seizes your arm without warning, making you flinch at the suddenness of it, and yanks up the sleeve. She pinches one of the feathers, tugs at it, and you recoil. She relinquishes it.
She questions you—about the feathers, how long they’ve been growing, why you didn’t tell her about them, how fast they’ve multiplied. You sign back your answers nervously, struggling to keep up as she keeps grabbing your wrist to look at the feathers, to lift them up and rub them between her fingers and tug on them until blood wells out of your skin. Eventually, she takes a pair of tweezers and rips three of them clean out.
*
They grow back slowly, painfully, irritating the wounded skin and making you mad with itching. Guidance has to bandage the tips of your fingers to stop you from scratching.
“If any of them fall out, save them for me,” she instructs absently as she tapes over your nails.
She doesn’t tell you why. You don’t know how to ask.
*
“Seems like you’re yearnin’ for the sky even without ever seeing it,” is Amber’s observation the first time she sees them. She wraps the words in her usual mocking humor, but there’s something complicated in the uneven edge of her voice, the tightness around her eyes.
*
When you flee, you have to do it with the collar. It isn’t just about how rarely you get to remove it. You’re sure by now it isn’t an accident that someone always seems to be following you during the one day each month you get to remove it. You’ll never escape while it’s off. Escaping with it on isn’t perhaps as complete an escape as you would like, but you’ll take it.
You do, at least, take the bag of feathers you’d been obediently saving for Guidance, and set it on fire in your bathroom sink before you leave.
Brother Seldom is kind, and patient, waiting while you write down your half of a conversation, working with you to expand your painfully rudimentary sign language. He can’t get it off you—only Guidance or someone with much more powerful curse-breaking magic can do that—but he watches sympathetically as you rant, your fingers still clumsy with newly-learned invective, about the shit the Church did to you, took from you. He’s sorry you had to endure it for so long. He’s so glad you’ve come to him now. He never trusted Guidance either.
*
The feathers on your arms are shimmering, iridescent, elegantly long pinions. They’re dark blue, struck through with turquoise greens and silvery whites, and they coat your arms with an almost unholy beauty. Zoox can’t get enough of them, gazing at them with wide and wondering eyes on the rare occasion you shed your jacket.
You hold an arm out to him one day, offering something you haven’t let anyone but Guidance do, and inviting him to touch. He accepts the invitation with his childlike eagerness, scrambling across the room and raising a single trembling finger to stroke the edge of a feather with more solemn reverence than you ever had in Benevolence’s chapel. You steel yourself against a flinch, against the nauseating anxiety that Zoox might rip them from your arms, but it doesn’t come. There’s nothing malicious in Zoox’s touch—no greed, no possessiveness, no jealousy. There’s only wonder.
“Don’t you hate it,” you sign to him, “not knowing what you are?”
Zoox tilts his head, considering.
“I think I’ve decided that I’m me,” he says, “and that I don’t need to be anything else.”
You draw your arms back to your chest, stroking the edges of the feathers back into place. It’s a lovely thought, like most of Zoox’s thoughts, when they aren’t startlingly violent. You turn the sentiment around in your mind, considering it, and feel with terrible acuity the hollowness in your throat where part of you has been scooped out.
*
The collar simply falls off.
It happens suddenly, unceremoniously, without any kind of warning or sign. You jolt awake to the sensation of your throat suddenly painfully sore, sit straight up in bed, and the collar slithers off your throat, falling inert onto the covers. You pick it up with trembling, disbelieving hands, and stare at it.
Only Guidance can remove the collar. But Guidance isn’t here. Which means there’s only one other reason the spell would suddenly have broken. You tuck your knees up to your chest, tuck your face against them, and begin all at once to cry.
For the first time in years, you listen to the sound of your own sobs, and you don’t even know what it is you’re mourning.