The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  “You all right, Mrs. M.?” Jonathan asked, never taking his eyes from Greg.

  “Fine. My ankle’s broken, I think.”

  “Whatever you think you saw,” Greg began, “marital disputes are resolved between husband and wife, Johnny. That’s the law.”

  “The law,” Jonathan repeated, and his mouth twisted up into something that might have been a smile.

  “Why don’t you go back to the house, and we’ll forget this ever happened? I won’t even report it.”

  “That right? You won’t?” Jonathan’s words were beginning to broaden, southern twang showing up between each carefully spoken consonant. Dorian had called him South Carolina, Lily remembered, in an early morning that already seemed like years ago. She stared, transfixed, at the gun barrel pressed against the back of Greg’s skull.

  “Come on, Johnny. You know me.”

  Jonathan grinned wide, a rictus that showed all of his white teeth. “Yes, indeed, Mr. Mayhew. We have boys like you where I come from. Three of them took my sister for a ride once.”

  He turned to Lily. “Go inside, Mrs. M.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t need to see this.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Johnny, put the gun away. Remember who you work for.”

  Jonathan began to laugh, but it was hollow laughter, and his dark eyes blazed. “Oh, I do. And I’ll tell you a secret, Mayhew. The man I work for wouldn’t even think twice.”

  He shot Greg in the back of the head.

  Lily couldn’t stop a small shriek as Greg’s body fell forward to land at her feet. Jonathan leaned down, planted the gun at Greg’s temple and fired another shot. The reverberation was very loud, bouncing off the backyard walls. Security would come now, Lily thought, whether they had found the Mercedes yet or not.

  Jonathan wiped the gun barrel on his dark pants and put it away. At Lily’s feet, half of Greg’s head was blown away, leaking steadily into the bright green perfection of the lawn. Lily looked down and found herself covered with gore, but most of the blood was hers, from the cuts on her arms.

  “You need a doctor,” Jonathan told her.

  “I have bigger problems now,” Lily replied, then reached out and grasped his shoulder. “Thank you.” The words were not enough, but she could think of nothing better, and now she heard the first siren, still distant, somewhere downtown. Someone must have called Security when Lily went through the glass doors. “They’re coming. You should go.”

  “No.” Jonathan’s face was resigned. “We take responsibility.”

  “You can’t stay here!”

  “Sure I can.”

  “Jonathan. They’ll never listen. Even if I told them everything, they wouldn’t listen. They’ll kill you.”

  “Probably. But I had to do it.”

  Lily nodded, trying to think. Even now, at the strangest of all times, the better world was in her head, crowding out all else, every other consideration. It was the river that held her, she saw now, the river with its deep blue water. She had failed in Boston, but here was another chance.

  “Give me the gun.”

  “What?”

  “Give me the gun and get out of here.”

  Jonathan shook his head.

  “Listen to me. They’ll be coming for me anyway, sooner or later. I can tell the same story, and I have better evidence. Look at me; I’m a mess.”

  “You won’t do any better, Mrs. M.; Security is Frewell’s organization, right down to its bones. They’ll look at your face and arms, believe every word you say, and find you guilty, all the same.”

  “He won’t let me go, Jonathan. On the ship. I asked and he said no.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “But you have to go.” Lily looked down at Greg’s corpse, wishing she were as brave as the rest of them, but she knew she was not, and she needed Jonathan to leave, now, before she lost her nerve. “We take care of each other, yes? You did this for me. Now I want you to go.”

  “They execute wives who kill their husbands.”

  “I’m dead anyway,” Lily retorted, taking a shot in the dark. “On September first, right?”

  Jonathan swallowed.

  “Isn’t that what’s going to happen?”

  “Mrs. M.—”

  She reached out and grasped the barrel of the gun. Jonathan resisted for a moment, then let it slide bonelessly from his fingers. The sirens were louder now, leaving downtown and entering the quiet maze of streets that had made up Lily’s adult life.

  “Go. Think about him, not me. Help him.”

  Jonathan’s dark face had gone pale. “They’ll check your hands. For powder. Fire a shot into the ground.”

  “I will. Go.”

  He hesitated a moment longer, then headed for the wall and climbed it, in almost the exact spot where Dorian had fallen down. Even in the midst of her terror, this symmetry pleased Lily; she felt that she had now come full circle, completed the journey from the woman she had been pretending to be to the woman she really was. At the top of the wall, Jonathan turned and gave Lily a last reluctant look, but she waved him away with the gun, relieved when he dropped soundlessly into the Williamses’ yard, out of sight.

  Lily planted herself, aiming the gun at the ground several feet away. She knew that guns recoiled, but she was still unprepared for the force of the shot, which sent her sprawling backward. The gunshot echoed around the garden, and as it faded, Lily heard the squeal of tires turning onto her street.

  I killed my husband. He was beating on me and I shot him.

  How did you get the gun?

  I took it from Jonathan the last time he drove me downtown. Tuesday.

  Bullshit. He would’ve noticed it was gone.

  That was true. Lily tried again. What if I tell them it was Greg’s gun?

  The gun’s tagged. They’ll only need to scan it to know it was Jonathan’s.

  She couldn’t think of a response. Jonathan was right; the story was too flimsy, no matter who did the telling. Greg was dead, shot by two bullets from Jonathan’s gun. Last night, Lily had gone outside the wall alone and come back with Jonathan. They would either think that Jonathan had killed him, or that she and Jonathan had done it together. No one would care about Lily’s black eye, the cuts on her face and arms. It was all over now; she was a woman who had killed her husband. She thought of the executions that played regularly on the giant screen in the living room: men and women turning pale as the poison hit their veins, drowning them in their own lung fluid. Their agonized gasping always seemed to go on forever before they finally succumbed, and Greg would laugh at Lily when she tried to cover her ears. They died with bulging, pleading eyes, like fish in the bottom of a boat.

  Lily dropped the gun and closed her eyes. When Security burst into the backyard, she was standing on a high brown hill, miles of grain all around her, staring down at the deep blue river that ribboned the land below. She didn’t hear them speak to her, didn’t understand their questions. She was caught by the world around her, Tear’s world, Tear’s creation, the sights and sounds of the land, even the smell: freshly turned earth and a tang of salt that reminded her of childhood trips to the Maine shore. Lily didn’t feel them pin her arms behind her back and march her toward the front door. She didn’t feel anything at all, not even when they pushed her into the back of the truck.

  For the first time, Kelsea opened her eyes and found herself not in her library, but in the arms room.

  “There you are, Lady.”

  She blinked and found Pen on one side, Elston on the other.

  “What am I doing here?”

  “You wandered in.” Pen released her. “You’ve been all over the Queen’s Wing.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.”

  Less than two hours gone. Lily’s life was moving faster now. Kelsea blinked and saw, as if through a thin veil, the dark tin box of the Security truck, its armored inner walls. It was night again; flashes of str
eet lighting spilled intermittently through the small slats near the ceiling, fleeing over her hands and legs before it disappeared. Lily was right there, not centuries away, not over the borders of unconsciousness, as she had once been, but right there inside Kelsea’s mind. If she wanted to, Kelsea could reach out and touch her, make Lily scratch her forearm or close her eyes. They were bound.

  “Only crossing,” Kelsea whispered, clutching her sapphires. Who had said that? She couldn’t remember anymore. “Only crossing.”

  “Lady?”

  “I’m going back, Pen.”

  “Back where?” Elston asked crossly. “Sooner or later, Lady, you’ll have to sleep.”

  “Back under, I think,” Pen replied, but his voice was already distant. Dimly, Kelsea remembered something she was supposed to do, something about the Red Queen. But Lily took precedence now. Another flash intruded: Lily being pulled from the truck and marched down a long staircase, her eyes blinded by glaring fluorescent light. A wave of nausea broke over Kelsea like a wave, and she remembered that Lily had hit the double doors headfirst. Did she have a concussion? “You stay, Pen. Don’t let me fall.”

  “Go, El.”

  “I’ll get the Captain,” Elston muttered. “Christ, what a mess it all turned out to be.”

  He said the last bit quietly, as though hoping Kelsea wouldn’t hear. But if she could have found her voice, she would have agreed with him. It had all gone wrong, but where was the tipping point? Where had all of her good intentions fallen apart? Lily’s feet tangled on the stairs, and Kelsea lurched forward. She grabbed for the armrail, found there was none, and stumbled.

  “Get the fuck up!”

  “Lady?”

  Get the fuck up!”

  Lily pushed herself off the wall and regained her feet.

  These were not the polite guards of the New Canaan Security station. Four men surrounded Lily; three carried small oblong objects, some sort of electrical prod, while the fourth carried a gun.

  Lily needed a doctor. None of the cuts on her arms had been very deep; they were already beginning to scab. But she had taken an ugly slice on her scalp when she went through the glass doors, and blood was steadily oozing through the hair on the right side of her head. From time to time nausea beset her; the last attack had been so bad that she nearly collapsed. But she fought it, hard, because those taser-type weapons looked well used. As a child, Lily had once stuck her finger into the socket of a desk lamp that was missing its bulb, and she would never forget the brief, burning agony that had taken her hand in that moment. The four men who surrounded her didn’t seem the sort to think twice before giving her a jolt.

  They had kept her at the New Canaan station until early afternoon, in a dingy cell that was still years removed from the terrible conditions Lily would have imagined. There was no one else in the cell with her; it was dirty from disuse, not overuse. New Canaan’s Security probably never hosted prisoners; there was no petty crime there. Lily was in the cell for hours, but she never spotted so much as a single roach. She hadn’t slept in more than thirty hours, and she was exhausted. Hungry too, but the sharpness of that hunger quickly began to fade against her thirst. She didn’t know if they would have given her water at the station, but she had forgotten to ask. Now her throat felt as though someone had gone at it with sandpaper.

  When the sun was just beginning to set, they had taken her from the cell and loaded her onto another truck. Lily didn’t know how long the journey had been, only that night fell long before they came to a halt, and when they pulled her from the truck, she found herself in a wasteland of bright fluorescence and asphalt. The better world had never seemed farther away than it did in that moment, Lily freezing cold from the long journey in only her T-shirt and jeans, blinded by the bright lights and the slow trickle of blood from her scalp. She tried to remember why she was here, but at that moment William Tear and his people seemed infinitely distant. Tracking backward through her memory, Lily realized that it was still only August 30, that September first was still two days away. Two days until the carnival, Parker had said, but Tear would never let a creature like Parker into his better world. So what was the carnival?

  What does it matter now?

  But no matter how many times Lily had asked herself this question during the interminable truck ride, she remained unconvinced. Carnivals were excess and abandon, doing anything you liked. Lily was no extraordinary empathist, but it took only a few minutes for her mind to slip into Parker’s, conjure an image, and spread it out before her like a mural. Parker’s carnival would be the same as any other: excess and abandon, brought now into the limitless range of the monstrous, troubled world they all lived in, a world of walls that separated the privileged from the deprived. And the deprived were angry. Lily’s mind created the pictures faster than she could push them away, and by the time they reached the Security compound, she had seen the end of the world inside her head, a bacchanal of rage and revenge. Parker’s glee was easy to understand now; he might be too debased for the better world, but on the first of September, Tear meant to turn him loose in this one.

  I should tell Security, Lily thought. I should warn someone.

  But that was impossible. Even if anyone would believe her, there was no way to tell them about Parker without also telling them about Tear. They were going to ask her about Tear anyway, no doubt, and despite Tear’s words, Lily suspected that she wouldn’t last long under interrogation.

  I can’t tell them anything. Lily steeled herself against another wave of nausea. I keep quiet until the second of September. That’s my job. It’s all I can do for them now.

  One of the guards opened a plain black metal door and stood back. “Find her an empty room.”

  They marched Lily down a dark, narrow corridor filled with doors. Lily was swamped with sudden déjà vu, so strong that it crashed over her mind like a wave, obscuring everything. She had been here before. She was certain of it.

  They sat her down in a small room whose fluorescent light barely provided enough of a thin, sickly glow to illuminate a steel table and two chairs that were bolted to the ground. The man with the gun cuffed Lily to the chair, and then she was left, staring blankly at the wall, as the door closed behind them.

  Greg was dead. Lily kept this idea firmly in front of her, for despite her current predicament, there was comfort in it. No matter what happened now, it would not be Greg, not ever again. She fell asleep and dreamed that she was back in the backyard, trying to crawl toward the kitchen door. Something terrible was behind her, and Lily knew that if she could only reach the door, there would be solace there. She was searching for the door handle when a hand grabbed her ankle, making her scream. The backyard blew apart and now she was in the long, door-filled corridor again, stumbling along, lost. The light was a dim orange: not fluorescents, but torchlight, and Greg was no longer important, Greg was nothing, because she held a great fate in her hands, the fate of a country, the fate of—

  “The Tearling,” Lily muttered, jerking awake. The dream dissolved, leaving her with the confused afterimage of a torch behind her eyes. Someone had just doused her with water. She was soaking wet.

  “There you are.”

  The back of the chair seemed to have dug claws into her spine, and Lily groaned as she straightened. She felt as though she had slept for hours. It might even be morning, but there was no way to tell inside this tiny, cramped room.

  Across from her sat a thin blade of a man with a pointed face and wide dark eyes punctuated by arching, neatly sculpted black eyebrows. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, his hands folded on his knee. His posture was very prim, but somehow it fit the room around him. Beneath his dark Security uniform, the man looked like an accountant with several secret nasty habits. He had brought up a screen on the table beneath him, and Lily saw her own upside-down face peering at her from the steel surface.

  “Lily Mayhew, née Freeman. You had a busy day.”

  Lily merely stared at him, her
face blank and bewildered, though the sense of futility struck her again. She couldn’t act for shit.

  “Where is this place?”

  “You don’t care,” the accountant answered pleasantly. “All you care about is how you can get out, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh, you do, Mrs. Mayhew. One of the qualities that gained me my present position is a great talent for sniffing out a member of the Blue Horizon. You have the same look as the rest of them, something around the eyes . . . you all look like you’d seen Christ himself and come back to tell the tale. Have you seen Christ, Mrs. Mayhew?”

  Lily shook her head.

  “What did you see?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lily replied patiently. “I thought I was here because of my husband.”

  “You are, certainly. But national security trumps local crime, and I have a lot of latitude in such matters. It could go either way, really. On the one hand we have Lily Mayhew, the brutally battered wife whose life was in danger, who acted to defend herself. And on the other, we have Lily Mayhew, the cheating cunt who screwed her black bodyguard—a separatist black bodyguard, just to add to the fun—and then convinced him to help her murder her husband.”

  He leaned forward, still smiling the pleasant smile. “Latitude, you see, Mrs. Mayhew. It really could go either way.”

  Lily stared at him, unable to reply. Everything inside her seemed to be frozen.

  Screwed Jonathan? Did he really say that?

  “Now, me, I’m not interested in your husband. In fact, I too thought Greg was an asshole. But I am extremely interested, one might almost say obsessively interested, in what you were doing down at the Port of Boston early yesterday morning.”

  “I wasn’t,” Lily replied. A frog was in her throat, and she coughed it out. “I was heading that way, but I got carjacked on Highway Eighty-Four, just over the state line into Massachusetts.”

  The accountant’s smile widened, and he shook his head. “A tragedy! Do go on.”