The Invasion of the Tearling

“I apologize, Lily, but there’s no way around this. Hold still and close your eyes.”


Lily shut her eyes. Her head rocked back as a short, sharp blow landed on the corner of her mouth. There was very little pain, but she tasted blood. Tear smeared the blood across her chin, then tore the neck of her shirt in two places. “Just for show; it’ll heal quickly. Don’t forget to limp.”

Jonathan opened the door and Tear dragged Lily outside. Dorian was blocking the doorway, her rifle trained on Parker and his men. They reminded Lily of wolves who had treed an animal.

“This bitch is out of her mind!” Parker shouted. “Tell her to stand down!”

“Security has ringed us. We need to get out of here now.”

“We didn’t see anyone.”

“Wonderful.” Tear’s voice was acid. “You have access to satellite imagery, do you?”

“Fuck you.”

“Fine. Stay and wait for them.”

Parker’s one good eye gleamed with hatred. “How do we get out?”

Tear bent to the floor and swung up a trapdoor, revealing steps that descended into darkness. Parker gave Dorian one last furious look, then squatted to peer down the stairs.

“Flashlights?”

“No flashlights. Our heat signature will be risky enough. It’s a straight shot through the tunnels into downtown Boston.”

“What about the wall bitch?”

“Jonathan likes her. He wants to take her with.”

Parker stared at Lily for a moment. “Ah well. Not long now, anyway.”

He made for the trapdoor, but Tear stopped him with a hand on his chest. “We have an agreement, Parker. September first.”

“September first,” Parker replied, grinning, and Lily saw so much pure evil in that grin that she had to close her eyes for a moment. She called up the real world and realized that it was now the early morning of August 30. “September first, and we have our carnival.”

Tear’s mouth twitched in disgust, but he nodded. “Into the tunnel. Look for a ladder beside a blue emergency light; it’ll bring you out beside Fenway.”

Parker and his men went first. Perhaps thirty of Tear’s people had returned to the warehouse and gathered around the trapdoor; most of them carried guns, like Dorian, but several had nothing, only small receivers tucked into their ears and tiny metallic threads coiled around their index fingers. Computer techs.

“Radio silence until you get outside the city,” Tear ordered. “We’ll meet at home.”

So Arnie had been wrong; this wasn’t their headquarters after all. Lily followed Jonathan down the stairs and then they were into blackness, nothing but scraping footsteps and the jingling of straps that held the guns. Dorian was somewhere behind her, Lily knew, and she took some comfort from that. Occasionally she heard squeaking sounds somewhere near her feet, but even the scurrying proximity of rats wasn’t particularly frightening. These were safe people, and Lily trusted them to keep her safe, no matter where they were going.

But what happens on September first? her mind asked, its tone plaintive. What’s the carnival?

After perhaps half a mile, someone coughed in the darkness ahead and Jonathan grabbed Lily’s arm, bringing her up short. Parker and his men kept on moving, up the corridor, the sounds of their passage growing fainter, diminishing into silence.

Jonathan pulled her to the right, whispering, “Stairs.”

Lily felt her way down another staircase. She had gotten a second wind for a while, but it was wearing off now, and she thought that soon she might simply collapse. But she kept going, determined not to slow them down, not to be—what had they called her?—a wall bitch. It was an eerily apt term; Lily applied it to most of her friends and found that it fit.

“Hold,” Tear announced, an eternity of time later. Lily paused, heard them all come to a halt around her.

“Bang.”

A deep thrumming echoed above their heads. The tunnel shook, concrete dust sifting down to land on Lily’s hair and face, getting into her eyes. A great breath of heat pushed against her back, and for a few moments, the tunnel was filled with a hollow roar of sound. Then it faded, and they stood once more in the quiet dark.

“The better world,” someone murmured.

“The better world,” they repeated, and Lily repeated it with them, liking the sound of her voice with theirs, hoping that no one would mind.

After a moment, as though by collective consent, the entire group began walking again. They were moving through a labyrinth of tunnels now, sometimes going up staircases, sometimes down, sometimes slipping through narrow crevices that made Lily feel claustrophobic, trapped. She kept going, focusing on the present, for the future was not to be considered. She couldn’t imagine what was waiting for her at home.