The Invasion of the Tearling

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, to 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.”