The Invasion of the Tearling

When Lily exited the elevator, she found several members of Security clustered around a well-dressed man at the scanner. The man looked respectable enough to Lily’s eye, with just a touch of grey in his hair and a very smart navy suit. But the guards hustled him behind the desk, through a blank white door with “Security” painted on it in black letters. All sound ceased when they closed the door behind them.

Under the watchful eyes of the two remaining guards, Lily moved toward the waiting Lexus. Terrible memory had awoken: Maddy’s blonde pigtails, disappearing through the doors. Sometimes there were whole months when Lily managed not to think of Maddy, and then she would see something: a woman being escorted from her car, Security knocking on someone’s door, even the faintest glimpse in the distance of one of the sprawling detention centers that lay along I-80. Maddy was gone, but even the tiniest thing could bring her back. Lily jerked the car door open angrily, forcing the image away. This little expedition was hard enough; she didn’t need Maddy along for the ride.

“Back home, Mrs. M.?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes, please,” Lily replied, feeling the same odd, amalgamated emotions the word always evoked in her: half comfort and half revulsion. “Home.”

AFTER JONATHAN DROPPED her off, Lily went right to the nursery. Greg wasn’t home yet and the house was empty, silent but for the humming of circuits inside its walls. Jonathan was supposed to stay with Lily at all times, even when she was at home, but she heard the engine gun outside and knew that he had left again. He often ran his own errands on the clock, sometimes at odd hours, but Lily had never mentioned this to Greg. She never felt unsafe by herself, not here in New Canaan. The walls around the city were twenty feet high and topped with electrified fencing. There was never any crime … or at least, Lily amended to herself, any violent crime. The city was full of law-abiding thieves.

The nursery was a spacious, airy room on the ground floor. Lily had chosen this room because it was beside the kitchen, but even more so because the nursery opened onto a small brick patio that overlooked the backyard. Lily had liked the idea of being able to bring a baby outside to feed it in the shade of the elms. Three years ago, but it seemed like a hundred, and now Greg’s baby was something to avoid having at all costs.

When no children came, the room had become Lily’s by default. Greg wasn’t the sort of man who would ever enter the nursery anyway; his father, whom Lily had loathed, had raised Greg with very definite ideas of what was masculine and what wasn’t, and a room full of stuffed animals didn’t make the cut. The fact that Lily remained childless only made the nursery less inviting to him, and despite the toys strewn all over the place, the room had more or less taken on the air of a Victorian lady’s parlor: a quiet, sedate space where men never entered. Sometimes when Lily had friends over, they would have coffee in here, but it was always the women, never the men.