The Invasion of the Tearling

“Tell me a little something, Lily, and I’ll give you a break for a while. Just tell me why you went to Conley Terminal the other night.”


Lily felt her consciousness beginning to waver. Her vision had blurred again. There could be no harm in answering the accountant’s question … after all, he already knew, didn’t he?

Focus!

Lily’s mind sharpened for a moment. Those words were not Dorian’s, not Maddy’s. And now she realized that she was actually hearing the other woman, her thoughts inside Lily’s mind, so tightly wrapped that Lily might have mistaken them for her own.

The other night.

It definitely wasn’t August 30 anymore. Had William Tear and his people gotten away? Lily would have given her life for the correct date, but she couldn’t ask.

The assistant left the room, the door booming closed, and for no reason at all, Lily suddenly thought of her father, who had died years ago. Dad had hated President Frewell, hated the proliferation of Security offices in each city and town. But there was no organized resistance then. Dad had been a fighter with nothing to fight for, no one to fight with.

Dad would have liked William Tear, Lily realized now, her eyes stinging with tears. Dad would have fought for him.

“Last chance, my girl.” There would be no respite; the accountant had moved over to the man to console himself. Lily clenched her toes in preparation, grabbing the arms of the chair. The accountant sat down and smiled pleasantly at her, a predator’s smile in a bureaucrat’s face, then clucked in mock concern.

“Tell me, Lily … whatever turned a nice woman like you into a cunt like this?”

He reached for the console, and the lights went out.

For a long moment, Lily could only hear her harsh, frightened breathing in the darkness. Then she heard shouts and cries in the hallway outside, muffled by the metal door. Beneath her feet, the ground trembled, and Lily was seized with joy, a fierce joy that bordered on ecstasy in the dark.

September first! her mind exulted. She knew, suddenly, that it had come, the end of the old, diseased world. September first!

Somewhere, far away, an alarm began to squawk. More muffled screams echoed from the hallway. The accountant’s chair scraped back, and Lily drew up into a ball, expecting him to find her at any moment. She could hear the grating crunch of his feet on the concrete floor, but whether he was near or across the room, Lily couldn’t tell. She began to feel her way around the arms of her chair, looking for a sharp edge, a nail, anything, tugging as hard as she could against the short reach of the handcuffs. This was her only chance, and if she didn’t take it, if they managed to get the lights back on, the pain might go on forever.

The door thrummed, a deep metal gonging sound, and Lily jumped, banging her head against the back of the chair. Several sharp beeps punctuated the darkness: a gun being loaded. Lily could find no sharp edges on the arms of the chair—of course not, she thought, of course there wouldn’t be—and so she began to work on one of the handcuffs that bound her to the chair’s arms. She was fine-boned, with thin wrists, but no matter what she did, the cuff wouldn’t slip off the protrusion below her thumb. She continued to pull at it, not stopping even when she felt the first trickle of blood. Sometime in the last forty-eight hours, Lily had discovered the great secret of pain: it thrived on the unknown, on the knowledge that there was a greater pain out there, something more excruciating that might yet be reached. The body was constantly waiting. When you took away the uncertainty, when you controlled the pain yourself, it was infinitely easier to bear, and Lily yanked at the handcuff, gritting her teeth, hissing the pain away through pursed lips.

The door boomed again, a much deeper sound, metal hitting metal, and a moment later the hinges burst apart, emitting a silver rectangle of light from some sort of halo device. When Lily was little, they used to take such lights camping, but this one was infinitely brighter, turning the door into a rectangular sun in the darkness. Lily threw up a hand to cover her eyes, but it was too late; she was already blind, her eyes burning, leaking salt. The room was full of gunfire, quick sharp clicks and the metallic ping of bullets bouncing from metal walls. A thin slice of pain tore across Lily’s bicep. The backs of her eyelids seemed to be on fire.

“Mrs. M.!”

A hand clasped her shoulder, shook her hard, but even when Lily opened her eyes, all she could see was white fire.

“Jonathan?”

“Hold still for a minute.”

Lily held still. There was one sharp crack of metal, then another, impacts that reverberated all the way up her arms.

“There, you’re out. Come on.”

“I can’t see.”