The Siren by Kiera Cass Read Free Book Online

uneasy— as did anything unpredictable while we were such strangers to this world— but I had to be grateful. The War kept us unemployed, as it were, for a while, which none of us complained about. Well, perhaps Aisling was wherever she was hiding. With so much time on our hands, it really did take the reuniting with our sisters to distinguish between years and decades. Those moments of destruction were so striking; they were the only real things we had to mark time. Sometimes we tried to keep up with the seasons to celebrate holidays, but that was for the sole purpose of being entertained. It was like life happened all around me, but not to me.
    I could watch mothers, but not be one. I could see women as sales clerks or students, but not become one. We had to lay low, so we perfected people-watching. Sometimes this was fun for me. Watching children in particular lifted my heart. They always had so much energy. Children who already existed brought me unimaginable joy. But sometimes, when I saw a woman who was glowing with the fulfillment of pregnancy, I had to turn my face from Miaka and cry. I wanted to be strong for her.
    If I saw too many couples, their actions would dissolve into my daydreams of faceless partners who held me and kissed me. Sometimes, in my dreams, I was still like this— a creature of destruction. Somehow, I found someone who loved me beyond my condition. Other times, I was the girl of my last life, and I picked up where my own story had left off. It made me yearn, and since I couldn’t speed up time, I had to quietly endure it. Besides my own emotions pulling me, nothing was remarkable. So the 30s and 40s were quiet for us, with only being called upon to serve a handful of times.
    Living with Miaka was quite a shift from being with Marilyn. Where Marilyn was as talkative as I was, Miaka rarely spoke up. I kept reminding her that it was alright to talk to me, that it couldn’t hurt me . She just said she wasn’t used to speaking first. So I started asking her questions all the time. First, I learned everything I could about her past; her memories were slipping faster than mine. And then I made an effort to get her opinion on everything, or even get her to have an opinion at all. We bonded slowly. Miaka and I had vaguely similar backgrounds. Like me, she was the oldest of three and the only girl. But where I had been loved, Miaka was only accepted. Her parents needed boys. She couldn’t do the work they did, so she just wasn’t as valuable.
    Those were the exact words she used: not as valuable.
    They got her to do small tasks on their fishing boat with her brothers since her mother could handle the housework. They didn’t care that their daughter feared the Ocean. Tiny Miaka cried every time they put her on the boat for years. And then, seeing that it made no difference for her and only angered everyone else, she learned to control that. She couldn’t swim and was very soft-spoken. She fell off her boat on a particularly choppy day, and no one even noticed. Now she was lost to her family because they refused to listen to her. I had to imagine that, even if she wasn’t the most favored child, this would still bring grief to any mother. And how strange that now the Ocean she had feared for so long was like a parent of sorts, protecting her from everything else.
    I tried to show her things and teach her about the rest of the world. Miaka had no idea it was all so big. She had such a hard time saying how she felt that I would ask her thoughts on things that had no value at all. What did she think of that woman’s dress? Aren’t those stones in the wall pretty? Did she see any shapes in the clouds that day? Anything to get her to open up. I think asking all these tiny, detail-oriented questions eventually struck a chord in her. She knew I was going to ask them, so she started paying attention to everything. She started noticing things that my eyes missed.
    “Look at that shade of yellow,” she