The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “New London is not your concern, General. Lazarus and Arliss are in charge of preparing for siege. You worry about the rest of the kingdom.”

  “I do worry, Majesty. You’ve opened Pandora’s box.”

  Kelsea did not allow her expression to change, but the satisfaction on Bermond’s face told her that he knew he had struck his mark. Kelsea had opened the door to chaos, and while she told herself there had been no alternative, her nights were tormented by the certainty that there had been another option, some path that could have stopped the shipment while avoiding the bloodshed to follow, and if Kelsea had only been a bit more clever, she could have found it. She drew a slow breath. “Regardless of blame, General, done is done. Your job is to help me minimize the damage.”

  “Like trying to dam up God’s Ocean, eh, Majesty?”

  “Just like that, General.” She grinned at him, a grin so ferocious that Bermond recoiled against his chair. “The first wave of refugees will reach the Almont proper tomorrow. Give them some guards, and then begin moving the rest. I want those villages cleared out.”

  “And what happens if my army is as weak as you seem to think, Majesty? The Mort will make straight for New London, just as they did in your mother’s time. Mort soldiers get a salary, but it’s a pittance; they build their wealth on plunder, and the good plunder is right here. If I can’t keep them from crossing the border, do you really think you can keep them from sacking the city?”

  Something was wrong with Kelsea’s eyes. A thick cloud seemed to obscure her vision, light at the corners and heavy in the center. Was it her sapphires? No, they had been quiet for weeks, and now they hung dark and still against her chest. Kelsea blinked rapidly, trying to clear her head; it wouldn’t do to show weakness in front of Bermond now.

  “I’m hoping for help,” she told him. “I have opened negotiations with the Cadarese.”

  “And what good will that do?”

  “Perhaps the King will lend us some of his troops.”

  “Fool’s hope, Lady. The Cadarese are isolationists, always have been.”

  “Yes, but I’m exploring all options.”

  “Lady?” Pen asked quietly. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Kelsea muttered, but now spots were dancing across her field of vision. She was going to be ill, she realized, and she could not do that in front of Bermond. She stood up, grabbing at the table for balance.

  “Lady?”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated, shaking her head, trying to clear it.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Bermond asked, but his voice was already growing faint. The world suddenly smelled like rain. Kelsea clenched the table and felt the slickness of polished wood slipping beneath her fingers.

  “Grab her, man!” Mace barked. “She’ll fall!”

  She felt Pen’s arm around her waist, but his touch was unwelcome, and she shook him off. Her vision blurred entirely and she glimpsed unfamiliar surroundings: a small compartment and a grey, threatening sky. Panicked, she closed her eyes tightly and then opened them again, looking for her audience chamber, her guards, anything that was known. But she saw none of them. Mace, Pen, Bermond . . . they were all gone.

  Chapter 2

  Lily

  “It is merely crossing,” said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, “merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.”

  —David Copperfield, CHARLES DICKENS (pre-Crossing Angl.)

  Her eyes opened on a deep grey world, storm clouds promising certain rain. In the distance, through the windshield, she could see a bleak sky dominated by a line of dark grey silhouettes.

  Manhattan.

  The car hit a bump crossing the bridge, and Lily looked out the window, annoyed. Greg was in charge of their household finances, but Lily had overheard him telling Jim Henderson that he paid a good chunk of money to the utilities every month to use the bridge. In return, they were supposed to maintain the paving. But they never did as good a job as they should have, and lately Lily had noticed bumps and potholes that took longer and longer to repair. Still, the trip beat taking the public bridge; their Lexus was begging to be carjacked on a public roadway. Security regularly patrolled this bridge and its connecting roads, and officers would appear in moments if Jonathan pressed the panic button. A few potholes were a small price to pay for safety.

  The bridge ended, and Lily looked eagerly out the window as the high walls tapered down to a low barrier. She came into the city less and less often, and it seemed like things were worse every time, but she still liked to visit. Her own house in New Canaan was beautiful, a stately colonial with white columns, just like those of all of her friends. But even an entire town could get old when everything was the same. Lily dressed more carefully for her rare trips outside the wall than she did for her own dinner parties; dangerous or not, this excursion always seemed like an event.

  Looking over the edge of the roadside barrier, she glimpsed the slums, hung with garbage bags to create shelter from the coming rain. Shapeless, shiftless people huddled against walls and beneath overhangs. The first time Greg had brought Lily to New York, just after they married, most of the buildings had already been empty, the windows covered with For Lease signs. By now squatters had torn down even the signs, and so many buildings had been abandoned that Security hardly bothered with the downtown at all. The blank windows made these buildings look empty, but they weren’t; Lily shrank from imagining what went on inside. Drugs, crime, prostitution . . . and she’d even read online that people caught sleeping unawares were often killed for their organs. There were no rules outside the wall. Nothing was safe.

  Greg said that the people outside the barriers were lazy, but Lily had never thought of them that way. They were simply unlucky; their parents hadn’t been wealthy, like hers and Greg’s. Greg hadn’t been so rigid when he was at Princeton; sometimes, on weekends, he would even work with the homeless. That was how they’d met, both of them volunteering in Trenton at the last homeless shelter left in New Jersey, though more and more, these days, Lily wondered whether Greg had done it for his résumé; he had gone on to a government internship the next summer. Lily went to Swarthmore, studying English because it was the only thing she liked. The books were all purged by then, free of sex and profanity and anything else the Frewell administration had found un-American, but Lily could still enjoy them, could still dig deep beneath the sterilized surface to find a good story. She loved being in school, and the thought of the future made her feel panicky and out of control. Greg was the ambitious one, the one who’d worked summers in Washington, who traveled to New York on countless weekends to network with his parents’ friends. Lily had liked that, liked that Greg seemed to have such a handle on where his life was going. When he landed a good job, assisting the liaison for a defense contractor, and asked Lily to marry him after graduation, it had seemed like nothing short of a godsend. She wouldn’t have to work; her entire job would be keeping the house and making nice with other people like herself. And of course, taking care of the children, when the children came. None of it seemed like real work. Lily would have plenty of time to shop, to read, to think. The car hit another bump, jarring her against the seat, and Lily felt something almost like a smile stretch across her lips. She had hit the jackpot, all right.

  Rain pelted down on the car all at once, hitting the window in spatters that obscured Lily’s view. The sky had been darkening all day, and many of the people outside the barrier were wearing some sort of synthetic bags over their clothing in preparation. Lily wondered if they had to find new bags for each rainstorm, or whether they reused the same bags over and over again.

  “Detour up ahead, Mrs. M.,” Jonathan said over his shoulder.

  “Why?”

  “Explosion.” He pointed out the windshield, and Lily saw an oily sheen of flame through the rain, perhaps a mile ahead. She’d read about this as well; sometimes criminals would climb up and plant explosives on the private highways, trying to block them off, t
o force people to take public routes. Just one of many constant dangers in traveling outside the wall, but so long as Jonathan wasn’t concerned, Lily wasn’t either. Greg had hired Jonathan for Lily three years ago, in the week before their wedding. Jonathan was a good bodyguard, but an even better driver; during his service in the Oil Wars, he’d been in charge of security for supply caravans, and he seemed to know the entire eastern seaboard’s roadways like the back of his hand. He guided the car through the high streets, which now ran so flush against the buildings that Lily could only glimpse a thin line of darkness over the edge. She pictured the people beneath her, imagining them as rats that scuttled through the gloom. Embeth, a high school friend of Lily’s, had come to New York after graduation to be a nanny, but a few years ago Lily could have sworn she had seen Embeth on a corner in lower Manhattan, dressed in rags, skin grimy and hair looking as though she hadn’t washed it in years. Just a brief glimpse through a car window and then gone.

  As they passed over the crumbling remains of Rockefeller Center, Lily saw that someone had lasered blue words onto the pavement where the old fountain used to be, the graffiti so large that it was visible from the roadway above.

  THE BETTER WORLD

  That was the slogan of the Blue Horizon, the separatist group, but no one seemed to know exactly what it meant. Most of the Blue Horizon’s activities seemed to involve blowing things up or hacking into various government systems to cause trouble. Last year, when the separatists had presented Congress with a request to secede, Lily had been all for it, but Greg told her no; there was too much money at stake, too many customers and debtors to lose. Lily, who thought only of the reduction in violent crime, considered it a good trade, but she left it alone. That had been a stressful time for Greg at work; he was constantly on edge, drinking too much. He had never really relaxed until the petition failed.

  Jonathan took a smooth left into the basement of the Plymouth Center and stopped at the Security barrier. Two men with guns in their hands approached the car, and Jonathan presented his pass.

  “Mrs. Mayhew, appointment to see Dr. Davis on the fiftieth floor.”

  The guard peered into the back of the car. “Open her window.”

  Jonathan rolled down Lily’s window and she leaned forward, presenting her left shoulder. The guard had a cheap portable scanner; he had to wave it over Lily’s shoulder several times before her tag registered with a small, cricketlike beep.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Mayhew,” the guard said, and gave her a smile with no warmth. He went up to scan Jonathan, and Lily settled back into the leather seat as the car proceeded smoothly into the garage.

  The body scanner beside the elevator buzzed loudly as Lily went through; she’d forgotten to take off her watch. It was a big, chunky thing, nearly solid silver with a diamond face, and her friends always eyed it covetously when she wore it to the club. To Lily, a watch was a watch, but like so many things Greg had bought her, she wore it because she was expected to. As soon as she made it through the gate, she stuffed the watch into her purse.

  The elevator beeped as it read the implant in her shoulder. The tag would show her location, if Greg should check, but what of that? To the outward eye, Dr. Davis was a perfectly respectable doctor, and many wealthy women consulted him for their fertility troubles. Still, Lily felt a guilty blush spreading over her cheeks. She always got caught when she lied, and she had never been able to keep a secret. Only this one, the biggest secret of all, and the longer she kept it, the more frightened she became. If Greg found out . . .

  But she didn’t let her thoughts go too far down that road. If she did, she would turn around and run out of the building, and she couldn’t afford to do that. She took a deep breath, then a few more, until her pulse slowed and her nerve came back. When the elevator doors opened, she turned left and went down a long hallway carpeted with deep, rich green. She passed many doors advertising various specialty doctors: dermatologists, orthodontists, cosmetic surgeons. Dr. Davis’s was the last door on the right, a thick walnut slab that looked exactly as it should, with a brass nameplate that advertised “Anthony Davis, M.D., Fertility Specialist.” Lily place her thumb against the pad and waited a few seconds, looking up at the pinhole camera fixed to the side of the door, until the tiny red light turned green and the lock clicked.

  The waiting room was crammed with women. Nearly all of them were like Lily, white and well dressed, holding high-quality handbags. But a few were clearly from the streets, betrayed by their hair and clothing, and Lily wondered how they had gotten past Security. One of them, a Hispanic woman, perhaps five or six months pregnant, had squashed herself into a chair just beside the door. She was gasping for breath, clutching the arms of the chair, her face pale and frightened. When Lily looked down, she saw that the lap of the woman’s jeans was soaked with blood.

  Two nurses came hurrying out of the back office with a wheelchair and helped the woman slide into it. She clasped her swollen belly with both hands, as though trying to hold something in. Lily saw tears trickling from the corners of her eyes, and then the nurses pushed her through the door, to the examining rooms beyond.

  “Can I help you?”

  Lily turned to the receptionist, a young brunette with an impersonal smile.

  “Lily Mayhew. I have an appointment.”

  “Wait, please, until we call you.”

  There were no seats left but the newly vacated chair, its light green cushion soaked with blood. Lily couldn’t bring herself to sit there, so she leaned against the wall, stealing covert glances at the people around her. A woman and a teenage girl, clearly mother and daughter, sat in two nearby chairs. The girl was anxious, her mother was not, and Lily read their dynamic easily. She had felt the same way the first time Mom had brought her to this office, understanding that it was a rite of passage, but also that it had to be kept secret, that what went on here was a crime. Lily hated this appointment, hated this office, the necessity of it, but at the same time she was utterly grateful for this place, that there were people who didn’t fear Greg, all the Gregs of this world.

  But it was a mistake to think of Greg now; Lily felt as though he were looking over her shoulder, and the idea made her forehead break out in sweat. Each year she came here made it more likely that she would get caught, if not by Security then by Greg himself. Greg wanted children in the same way he had wanted a new BMW, the same way he wanted Lily to wear her diamond-studded watch. Greg wanted children so he could show them off to the world. All of their friends had at least two children already, some even three or four, and the wives gave Lily pitying looks at the club, at parties. These looks didn’t hurt at all, but Lily had to pretend that they did. A few times she had even drummed up some tears, small tantrums for Greg’s benefit, solid evidence of sorrow over her failure as a wife. Once upon a time Lily had wanted children, but that seemed very distant now, an entire lifetime that had happened to someone else. Greg was the one who had suggested that Lily go to a fertility clinic, not knowing she’d been coming to Dr. Davis for years, not knowing that he had just made things that much easier for her to hide in plain sight.

  After an eternity, Dr. Anna leaned out the glass door and called Lily’s name. She led Lily into an office and drew the curtain, leaving her with the inevitable paper gown. Dr. Anna was Dr. Davis’s wife, a woman well into her fifties. She was one of the few women doctors Lily had ever met. Lily had mostly been too young to understand the Frewell Laws; President Frewell’s term in office had begun when Lily was eight and ended when she was sixteen. But his laws had left their legacy, and medical schools rarely admitted women anymore. Lily, who could no more have let a strange man look between her legs than she could have gone outside naked, was grateful that there was a Dr. Anna at all, but Dr. Anna had the constantly irritated face of the old-time schoolmarm, and she always seemed annoyed at Lily for being there, for taking her away from something more important. She asked Lily the routine questions, making notes on her clipboard, while Lily worked at tu
cking the paper gown more tightly around her, trying to cover as much skin as possible.

  “Do you need more pills?”

  “Please.”

  “A whole year’s worth?”

  “Yes.”

  “How will you pay?”

  Lily dug inside her purse and produced two thousand dollars in cash. Greg had given it to her for shopping last weekend, and Lily had poked the money through a hole in the lining of her purse, then lied and said she’d bought herself a pair of shoes. The hole in her purse had come in handy several times in the past year, when Greg had taken to making unscheduled inspections of her things. She had no idea what he was looking for; when he found nothing, he would give Lily an odd, cheated look, the look of the store clerk who had failed to catch someone shoplifting. The inspections were unsettling, but that look worried Lily even more.

  Dr. Anna took the cash and slipped it into her pocket, and then they went on to the messy, unpleasant business of the exam itself, which Lily endured by gritting her teeth, staring at the cheap plaster tiles on the ceiling, and thinking of the nursery. She and Greg had no children, but Lily had furnished the nursery just after their marriage, back when things were different. The nursery was the only place in their house that belonged entirely to Lily, where she could really be alone. Greg needed people around him, needed someone to respond to him. Nowhere in the house was safe; he might come barging into any room at any time without knocking, seeking attention. But he never came into the nursery.