The Invasion of the Tearling

TWO DAYS LATER, the news sites announced that simultaneous terrorist attacks had taken place in Boston and Dearborn, Virginia. The terrorists in Boston had broken into one of Dow’s warehouse facilities and stolen medical equipment and drugs, nearly fifty million dollars’ worth, a huge coup that was splashed all over the top of every website. But the attack in Virginia, though less spectacular, was more interesting to Lily because it made no sense. Some ten or twelve armed guerrillas had broken into a billionaire’s Dearborn horse farm and stolen most of his breeding stock. The guerrillas came prepared, with their own trailers for the horses, but they took nothing except the animals and some equipment for their care.

Horses! Lily was baffled. No one actually used horses for anything anymore, not even farming; they were a rich man’s vice, only valuable for harness racing and the gambling that went with it. Lily wondered briefly if the tall Englishman was crazy—for she was certain, somehow, that this was Tear’s work—but that wasn’t the impression she had received. Rather, the entire thing seemed like a puzzle, one that was missing several pieces. Horses and medical equipment stolen, jet facilities destroyed. Each day Lily moved these pieces around a board in her mind, trying to understand. She felt sure that if she could only fit them together, assemble the puzzle, then it would somehow clarify everything, show her the Englishman’s real plan, the clear outlines of the better world.

Three days after the Virginia attack, Lily was back in the hospital. It started very simply: a shirt Greg wanted to wear happened to be at the dry cleaner’s, and when Lily couldn’t produce the shirt, Greg slammed her fingers in the bedroom door. It didn’t even hurt at first; there was only the door, held tight against her hand so that no sensation traveled. But when Greg opened the door a few seconds later, the pain came roaring in, and when Lily screamed, Greg did something he had never done before and punched her twice in the face. On the second shot, Lily felt her nose break, a thin, crisp snap, like stepping on a twig in winter.

Greg was already late for his meeting, and so it was Jonathan who took Lily to the emergency room. He said nothing, but she could see his set jaw and narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror. Whom did he disapprove of? Both of them? She hadn’t spoken to Jonathan since that night in the living room; he was clearly determined to pretend that it had never happened, so Lily did the same. Sometimes she wished that she could talk to him about it, but Jonathan’s reserve kept her from opening the discussion. She concentrated on her nose instead, working hard to keep blood from dripping to the seats.

It turned out that Lily had two broken fingers in addition to the broken nose, and she could only stare groggily around the brightly lit room as Jonathan responded to the doctor’s questions. When it was time to repair her nose, they knocked her out. She spent the night in the hospital, in the charge of two nurses, and when she woke up and heard their voices, kind and mothering, Lily wished that she could stay there forever. There was pain in the hospital, and sickness, but it was a safe place. Greg had said it wouldn’t happen again, but he had been lying; several times since that day at the country club, Lily had woken up with Greg’s fingers inside her, shoving painfully, almost scraping. Broken bones were bad, but that was infinitely worse, and the hospital felt so safe compared to home.

Five days later the power went out all over New England. It was a brief outage, only twenty minutes, and there was no real damage done except for a few traffic accidents. But still, the incident caused a flurry of panic in Washington and on the stock exchanges, because such an outage was supposed to be impossible. In a world where everything was run by computers, safeguarded and backed up eight ways to Sunday, the system wasn’t supposed to have room for failure. Greg said that the hardware had been defective, but Lily wondered. She thought of Dorian, of how a woman without a tag had been able to get through Security at a naval base. She thought of the thousands of soldiers, like Jonathan, who had come back from serving in Saudi Arabia to find that there were no jobs, no market for their skills. And now she began to wonder: how many separatists were there, really? The news sites spoke of the Blue Horizon contemptuously, describing the cell as a few disorganized, dissatisfied groups of mentally unstable individuals. But the evidence didn’t bear that out. Lily thought of Arnie Welch, the Security lieutenant who had once admitted, over too many drinks, that the terrorists were both efficient and organized. William Tear had said that there were ways through every barrier, and the questions swirled in Lily’s head, maddening. Just how big was the Blue Horizon? Did they all answer to Tear? What was the better world?