The Invasion of the Tearling

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.”

“I called my bodyguard to come and get me, and he brought me home.”

“That is very neat.” His fingers played over the steel surface of the table, and a moment later Lily heard her own voice, echoing from speakers on her left.

“Jonathan?”

“Where are you, Mrs. M.?” The static that had covered the call was entirely gone now, Jonathan’s voice crystal clear.

“Mrs. M.?”

“I’m on my way to Boston.”

“What’s in Boston?”

“The warehouse! They’re in trouble, Jonathan, all of them. Greg had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”

“Mrs. M.? I can’t hear you! Don’t come to Boston!”

“Jonathan?”