The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “I certainly did.”

  “Refused!” Kelsea snapped. “What kind of fool takes offense at an illusion?”

  “Majesty, please!” Father Tyler had moved up to stand beside the Holy Father, his thin face blanched nearly white now. “This is hardly constructive.”

  “Shut up, Tyler!” the Holy Father hissed. “All magicians are charlatans! They promise quick solutions and undermine faith in the straight and righteous path.”

  Kelsea narrowed her eyes. “Don’t even think about playing the devout card with me, Your Holiness. I’ve heard all about you. What of those two women you keep in the Arvath? Do they kneel down before the Holy Spirit every night?”

  At this, the Holy Father’s face turned an apoplectic purple, and Kelsea suddenly wished that he would simply have a heart attack and keel over right in front of her throne, consequences be damned.

  “Have a care, Majesty. You have no idea how delicate your position is.”

  “Threaten me again, you greedy fraud, and I will end you.”

  “I’m sure he meant nothing of the kind, Majesty!” Father Tyler exclaimed in a high, panicky voice. “It was no threat, only—”

  “Tyler, stay out of this!” the Holy Father roared. He turned and lashed out with one arm, catching Father Tyler in the chest. Tyler momentarily pinwheeled for balance, then fell backward, down the stairs of the dais. Kelsea heard the dry, crisp snap of a breaking bone, and all thought ceased, the voice of reason in her head falling mercifully silent. She jumped to her feet, pushed past Pen, and slapped the Holy Father across the face.

  Mace and Pen moved very quickly, and the rest of the Guard was right behind them. Within a few seconds, more than ten men stood between Kelsea and the Holy Father. The guards obscured her view, but not before she had seen and memorized the white mark of her handprint against the Holy Father’s red cheek, wrapped it in her mind like a gift.

  “Sacrilege!” the taller acolyte hissed from the bottom of the stairs. “No one can lay hands on the Holy Father!”

  “If you value that hypocrite, get him out of my Keep right now.”

  The acolyte scrambled up the steps to assist the Holy Father. Kelsea turned back to her armchair, determined to ignore them, but then she heard gasping breaths below her, behind the wall of guards.

  “Father, are you all right?”

  “Fine, Majesty.”

  But Father Tyler’s voice was hoarse with pain.

  “Stay there. We’ll get you a doctor.”

  “Tyler will come with us!” the Holy Father snarled. But Mace had already pushed his way down the steps and positioned himself between Father Tyler and the priests.

  “The Queen says he stays.”

  “My own doctors will attend him.”

  “I think not, Your Holiness. I’ve seen the work of your doctors.”

  The Holy Father’s eyes widened, full of surprise and something else . . . guilt? Before Kelsea could decipher his reaction, Mace sprang across the room and laid hold of the taller acolyte, grabbing him by the neck. “We’ll be keeping this one as well. Brother Matthew, is it?”

  “On what charge?” the Holy Father demanded, enraged.

  “Treason,” Mace announced flatly. “The Thorne conspiracy.”

  The Holy Father’s mouth worked for a moment. “We came here under promise of safe conduct!”

  “I promised safe conduct to you, Your Holiness,” Kelsea snapped, though inwardly she cursed Mace; he never told her anything. Now she placed Brother Matthew easily: one of the men from the Argive, crouched around Thorne’s campfire in the middle of the night. “You’re free to go. But your toadies came at their own risk.”

  “I suggest you leave now,” Mace told the Holy Father, tightening his grip on the struggling priest’s neck. “Before I have a chance to ask your weasel any questions.”

  The Holy Father’s eyes narrowed, and he kicked the shorter acolyte, who was still unconscious on the floor. “You! Wake up! We’re leaving!”

  Somehow or other, they got the young man to unsteady feet. Mace handed Brother Matthew off to Elston and followed the two Arvath men to the doors. The second acolyte, his face white as milk, cast several appalled glances over his shoulder, but the Holy Father, walking stiffly at his side, never looked back.

  Kelsea hurried down the stairs to crouch beside Father Tyler, whose left leg was twisted at a dreadful angle. He was breathing in shallow pants, enormous beads of sweat rolling down his pale cheeks. Kelsea gathered the hem of her dress to wipe his forehead, but when Coryn tried to examine the leg, Father Tyler groaned and begged him to stop.

  “Broken in multiple places, Lady. We’re going to have to put him out to reset the bone.”

  “We’ll wait for the doctor,” Kelsea ordered, casting a murderous glance toward the Holy Father’s retreating back. “God’s good work, I suppose.”

  Father Tyler giggled, a wild, disconnected sound. “I got off light, Majesty. Seth will tell you so.”

  “Who’s Seth?”

  But Father Tyler gritted his teeth, and although Kelsea asked her question several more times before the doctor arrived, he refused to answer.

  Chapter 5

  Dorian

  The success of a great human migration depends on many individual pieces falling into place. There must be discontent with an unpleasant, perhaps even intolerable status quo. There must be idealism to drive the movement, a powerful vision of a better life beyond the horizon. There must be great courage in the face of terrible odds. But most of all, every migration needs its leader, the indispensable charismatic figure whom even terrified men and women will follow headlong into the abyss.

  The British-American Crossing met this final requirement in spades.

  —The Blue Horizon of the Tear, GLEE DELAMERE

  Lily was sitting in the backyard, struggling to record a message to her mother. The day was too hot; something must have gone wrong with the climate control. That happened more and more often lately. Greg said it was the separatists and their hackers, sabotaging the satellites; the military men he dealt with at the Pentagon had been complaining about it for weeks. Over the past few days, the temperature in New Canaan had climbed into the high nineties, and now heavy wet air blanketed the backyard.

  Weather aside, this had been a good week. Greg had gone on a business trip to Boston, some sort of convention with other players in the military. Lily always pictured these meetings as a larger version of the parties they held at their house: drunken men, their voices growing louder and hoarser as more and more liquor poured forth.

  Still, she was grateful. When Greg was gone, she could almost pretend that this was her house, that she needed account to no one for her day. There was no need to hide in the nursery; Lily could move freely around the house. But tonight Greg would be coming home, and Lily was trying to snatch the last few hours to record her letter. It was hard to make her lies sound natural, particularly for Mom, who didn’t want to hear about anything unpleasant. Lily had just hit record again when a woman toppled over the back wall into the garden.

  Lily looked up, startled. The woman rolled down the wall, a hissing sound following her descent as she scraped against the ivy that clung there. She ended up buried in the patch of hydrangea bushes, disappearing from sight with a low, wounded grunt.

  Jonathan materialized from the kitchen doorway, his gun drawn. “Stay back, Mrs. M.”

  Lily ignored him, got up from her Adirondack, and tiptoed over to the stone wall. The intruder had flattened the hydrangea bush. Lily felt Jonathan’s restraining hand on her arm, but she peered over the jagged edges of the bush until she found the woman who lay there.

  She looks like Maddy!

  The woman did look remarkably like Lily’s younger sister. Her hair, now tangled in the bush, hadn’t been washed in some time, but it was the same dirty blonde, even the same springy texture. She had Maddy’s snub nose, her freckles. She was a few years too young; Lily bit her lip, trying to remember how old her sister
would have been now. Two years younger than Lily, so twenty-three. This girl couldn’t be more than eighteen.

  Now Lily heard sirens, their wails muted by the thick stone wall. Security hardly ever used sirens in New Canaan; on the rare occasion when they came into Lily’s neighborhood, it was a quiet, efficient business. But this woman clearly didn’t belong in New Canaan. Her face was streaked with some kind of grease, and she wore jeans and a torn sweater that looked about three sizes too large. The edges of the sweater were bloody. Lily peered more closely, then drew back with a hiss. “She’s been shot!”

  “Go on inside, Mrs. M. I’ll call Security.”

  The woman opened her eyes. They shone, bright green and remarkably clear, too old for adolescence, before they slipped closed again. The woman breathed in shallow pants, her hand clamped against the bloody patch on her stomach. She seemed too young to even contemplate crime, and she looked so much like Maddy, Maddy who had disappeared years before.

  “You’re injured,” Lily told her. “You need a hospital.”

  “No hospital.”

  “She’s a trespasser!” Jonathan hissed.

  The sirens were louder now, perhaps as close as Willow Street. The woman opened her eyes again, and in them Lily saw resignation, a tired sort of acceptance. Maddy had looked that way when they came for her, as if she were already imagining what came next. Lily didn’t want to think about that day, about Maddy. Jonathan was right; they should call Security. But Maddy was upon Lily now, and she found herself unable to do it, unable to turn the woman in.

  “Help me get her inside.”

  “What for?” Jonathan asked.

  “Just help me.”

  “What would Mr. M. say?”

  Lily looked up at him, her voice sharpening. “It wouldn’t be the first secret we’ve kept, would it?”

  “This is different.”

  “Let’s get her up.”

  “She’s not a random wall trespasser, Mrs. M. You hear those sirens? You think they aren’t for her?”

  “Into the house. We’ll put her in the nursery. He’ll never know.”

  “She needs a doctor.”

  “Then we’ll get her one.”

  “And then what? Doctors have to report gunshot wounds.”

  Lily hauled the woman up, slipping an arm under her shoulders and wincing when the woman groaned. It seemed very important to hurry up and get the woman inside before she thought too hard about possible consequences, about Greg. “Come on, inside.”

  Grumbling, Jonathan pitched in. Together, they helped the woman across the garden and into the house, an air-cooled oasis of darkness. By the time they reached the living room, the woman had dropped into unconsciousness and become much heavier than her skinny frame would have suggested. Lily groaned as they hauled her through the foyer, but her mind was already clocking off the things she would have to do. First, the surveillance. Lily had no backup footage of the living room and stairway, but she could do a onetime erase and Greg would chalk it up to a glitch . . . probably, her mind amended. The separatist’s shoes were covered with mud, and she had left several patches of it on the living room carpet. The house sterilized itself, but not that quickly. Lily would need to clean the mud up by hand before Greg came home.

  They muscled the injured woman into the nursery and deposited her on the sofa. Lily could feel Jonathan’s glare, even before she looked up.

  “What are you doing, Mrs. M.?”

  “I don’t know,” Lily admitted. “I just . . .”

  “What?”

  A picture of Security popped into Lily’s head: the door through which they hustled people who never came out again. When Lily was a child, there hadn’t been such doors, and even as she became an adult, she had paid very little attention to the world changing around her; she often thought that it was this very inattention to implications, to the future, that had allowed her to marry Greg in the first place. Maddy had been the political one, the one who cared about the wider world. Lily’s immediate concerns were keeping the house running and dealing with Greg, finding ways to tiptoe around his newly volatile anger, to stay one step ahead of it. That was a full plate, certainly, but she couldn’t escape a nagging sense of shared responsibility, of many good people, all of them with their eyes on the ground, who had allowed the faceless door of Security to become the status quo. Maddy would not have allowed it, but Maddy had disappeared.

  Jonathan was still waiting for an answer, but Lily couldn’t explain, not to him. Jonathan had been a Marine, had fought in Saudi Arabia in the final, desperate battle for the last of the world’s oil. He was a loyalist. He carried a gun.

  “I’m not going to turn her in,” Lily finally replied. “Are you going to tell Greg?”

  Jonathan looked down at the woman on the sofa, his gaze contemplative. “No ma’am. But you need to get her a doctor. If you don’t, she’s going to bleed to death right here on your couch.”

  Lily ran though the list of local doctors she knew. Greg’s friends, none of them trustworthy. Their family doctor, Dr. Collins, had offices less than five miles away, in the center of town, but he wasn’t an option either. Dr. Collins had never asked Lily whether she wanted to have a baby. On her last visit, he’d told her that she needed to relax more during sex, that relaxing was a good way to conceive.

  “My purse. There’s a card in there. My doctor in New York.”

  “Davis? This isn’t his area. He’s a fixer.”

  “He’s a fertility specialist!”

  “Right, Mrs. M.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “Are you going to tell Greg?”

  Jonathan sighed, pulling the Lexus keys from his pocket. “Stay here. Keep pressure on the wound. I’ll be back with a doctor.”

  “What doctor?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Not one of Greg’s friends?”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mrs. M. You were right; we both know how to keep a secret.”

  Jonathan was gone for more than an hour, giving Lily plenty of time to imagine the worst: Jonathan arrested for transporting an unlicensed physician; Jonathan unable to find a doctor at all; but mostly, Jonathan gone straight to Greg’s office, straight to Security, to tell them everything. Jonathan had been her bodyguard for nearly three years, Lily told herself, and he knew about Dr. Davis. If he’d wanted to get her in trouble, he could have done so a long time ago.

  But still she was afraid.

  The woman on the sofa was visibly dehydrating before Lily’s eyes. Her lips were chapped nearly white, and when she tried to speak, it was a hoarse croak. Lily went downstairs and filled a bowl with chipped ice. She didn’t know anything about taking care of sick people, but she’d had pneumonia when she was little, and for that entire week, all she could stand to eat was ice chips. She wet a cloth with freezing water and dumped it into the bowl as well.

  When she returned, the woman on the sofa asked where she was. Lily tried to tell her, but the woman passed out again before she’d finished. Another three hours and Greg would be home. Where was Jonathan? And what was Lily doing anyway? The pills were one thing, one secret to keep, but hiding a person was something else.

  “What’s your name?” Lily asked the woman when she woke up again.

  “No names,” she whispered back. Lily felt as though she had heard those words before, perhaps on one of the government’s countless pamphlets and flyers. What had the woman been doing here? From time to time, Lily heard sirens cruising the neighborhood, sometimes far away and sometimes very close. She checked the news sites on the wall panel, but there was nothing, no local news about a trespasser or any nearby crime. She went out to the surveillance room and deleted that afternoon’s footage. There was always a chance that Greg had seen it in real time, but that was very unlikely today; at the end of his conference, Greg would be busily glad-handing before he got on the plane. On her way back to the nursery, she cleaned up the mud.

  The woman was still unconscious. She w
as too young to be Maddy, yes, and a bit too tall as well, but still, it was almost like having a ghost on the sofa. As the afternoon advanced, the line of sun from the window moved across the woman’s shoulder and Lily spotted a scar there, just above the collarbone. Lily had a scar in the same place, a neat surgical line from having her tag implanted when she was young. But this scar was much more noticeable. It was not the thin, pristine line that a laser would leave. It looked as though it had been done with a scalpel.

  Lily stared at the scar for a very long time, a wild idea taking hold in her mind: the woman had somehow removed her tag. That should have been impossible; each tag was armed with a toxin, a deadly chemical that would release on impact if anyone tried to tamper with the device. But the longer Lily considered the scar, the more certain she became: this woman had managed to get rid of her tag. She could move freely wherever she wanted, without Security tracking her every movement. Lily couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.

  Jonathan finally came back at four, with a small, neat grey-haired man in tow. The little man looked just the way a doctor should look, to Lily’s mind; he wore a professional-looking grey suit and old-fashioned wire-frame glasses, and he carried a small black leather bag that clinked as he set it down. He ignored Lily entirely, going straight to the woman on the sofa. After a moment’s assessment he turned, speaking as he would to a nurse. “Boiling-hot water and some towels. Cotton towels.”

  For a moment, Lily was too surprised to move. She wasn’t used to being ordered around in her own house.

  Except by Greg, her mind whispered, and that got her moving, out of the nursery and down to the kitchen. After she had fetched the water, she went to the linen closet and tried to decide which towels Greg would miss the least. He had a strange, sporadic eye for details around the house; Lily would throw out a set of threadbare sheets and then, a year later, Greg would ask where the sheets had gone. None of their towels were dark enough to hide blood; whichever set she chose would have to be tossed.