The Invasion of the Tearling

“Get her out of here!” the Red Queen shrieked. “Get her out!”


One of them, clearly the captain, pinned Kelsea’s wrists behind her back, and she felt irons cuffing them into place. The irons were too tight; they pinched her skin as he snapped the clasps. But Kelsea still couldn’t stop laughing.

“You lost,” she told the Red Queen, and knew that she would never forget the woman’s face in that moment: the face of an enraged child denied dessert. Kelsea barely felt the guards’ hands tighten on her arms, yanking her out of the tent. The Tearling was safe, her people were safe. The sapphires belonged to her, no one else, and Kelsea roared with laughter, even as they hauled her away.





AND AT THE END


The Crossing


LILY CLUTCHED A line of rope on the railing, trying not to fall to the deck. The ship rocked wildly; the water was roiling, stirred by wind and the thunder of explosions on land. Above them, storm clouds were highlighted against the night sky, a swirling purple bruise. Lily had been on ships before, but those had been powerboats, yachts that cut so smoothly through the waves that they barely felt as though they were moving at all. This was different, a terrible funhouse feeling, the ship’s deck literally rocking beneath her feet as she clutched the rope, trying desperately to support Jonathan with her other arm. Jonathan was barely conscious; Tear had removed the bullet and stitched him up in the car, but by the time he was done, the backseat was covered in blood, and Tear’s grim expression had said it all.

Far behind them was the skyline of New York, a smoldering orange wreck of dark buildings whose windows gouted flame into the black night. But Lily and the other people on the ship were not looking at the skyline. Their gazes were fixed on the sea behind them, on the two huge ships that had materialized from nowhere. From the shouted reports on deck, Lily also knew that there were several submarines out there, rapidly closing beneath the surface. They had been all right as they sailed down the Hudson and entered the lower bay, but then a siren had gone off, and now, as they moved out into the Atlantic, Security was closing.

“Five minutes!” William Tear shouted from the prow of the ship. “All we need!”

He is insane, Lily realized. Oddly, it didn’t seem to matter much. They weren’t going to make it, and Lily was sorry for that, sorry that she would never get to see the deep, clean river beneath the bright sun. But these ships were free, and Lily was going to die a free woman, and she would not have been anywhere else at this moment for the wide world, submarines or not.

“Ready!” Tear shouted, and the computer tech near Lily began to chatter into his earpiece in their strange language.

A hollow boom echoed on Lily’s left, followed by distant screams. When she craned her neck to see over the beams that covered the deck, she found that one of Tear’s ships was on fire, its back end flaming, gouts of black smoke billowing up into the night.

“Torpedo!” someone cried. A second explosion echoed, and then the ship wasn’t even half a ship anymore, only a smoldering ruin on the heaving ocean. Everyone on the deck of Lily’s ship had run to the railing, but Lily could not leave Jonathan, so only she saw William Tear turn away, clutching something in his outstretched right hand, all of his attention focused on the eastern horizon.

“We’re not even armed!” a woman cried.

The destroyers were closing now, less than half a mile away. Lily wondered why they hadn’t fired as well, but after a moment’s consideration, she knew: they meant to take the rest of Tear’s ships, to board them. Security loved its prisoners, after all. Lily’s burn wound throbbed, even though her palm had scabbed over with a dark crust, and she knew that whatever happened, she wasn’t going back.

Bright light suddenly engulfed the ship, blinding. Lily threw her hands over her eyes, a low squeal escaping her throat, thinking of the halo device that Tear’s people had used in the Security compound. Terror suddenly overwhelmed her, the terror that it had all been a dream, that she would wake up and find herself back in that room, facing the accountant, the box. But when she peeked through her fingers, she saw that this light wasn’t electric. It was plain old daylight, a soft glow on her arms.

Lily turned toward the light and screamed.

There was a hole in the eastern horizon. Lily had no other way to describe what she saw. The black shawl of night still covered the sky above her head, but as it dipped east, the shawl tore open, its jagged edges surrounding the hole like a broken portrait frame. Inside the frame was day, a pink and orange horizon above the azure water, as though the sun were about to rise. The light bathed everything, and Lily could see all of the other ships around her now, clearly, their flying sails stained orange in the dawn.