The Invasion of the Tearling

“Go on inside, Mrs. M. I’ll call Security.”


The woman opened her eyes. They shone, bright green and remarkably clear, too old for adolescence, before they slipped closed again. The woman breathed in shallow pants, her hand clamped against the bloody patch on her stomach. She seemed too young to even contemplate crime, and she looked so much like Maddy, Maddy who had disappeared years before.

“You’re injured,” Lily told her. “You need a hospital.”

“No hospital.”

“She’s a trespasser!” Jonathan hissed.

The sirens were louder now, perhaps as close as Willow Street. The woman opened her eyes again, and in them Lily saw resignation, a tired sort of acceptance. Maddy had looked that way when they came for her, as if she were already imagining what came next. Lily didn’t want to think about that day, about Maddy. Jonathan was right; they should call Security. But Maddy was upon Lily now, and she found herself unable to do it, unable to turn the woman in.

“Help me get her inside.”

“What for?” Jonathan asked.

“Just help me.”

“What would Mr. M. say?”

Lily looked up at him, her voice sharpening. “It wouldn’t be the first secret we’ve kept, would it?”

“This is different.”

“Let’s get her up.”

“She’s not a random wall trespasser, Mrs. M. You hear those sirens? You think they aren’t for her?”

“Into the house. We’ll put her in the nursery. He’ll never know.”

“She needs a doctor.”

“Then we’ll get her one.”

“And then what? Doctors have to report gunshot wounds.”

Lily hauled the woman up, slipping an arm under her shoulders and wincing when the woman groaned. It seemed very important to hurry up and get the woman inside before she thought too hard about possible consequences, about Greg. “Come on, inside.”

Grumbling, Jonathan pitched in. Together, they helped the woman across the garden and into the house, an air-cooled oasis of darkness. By the time they reached the living room, the woman had dropped into unconsciousness and become much heavier than her skinny frame would have suggested. Lily groaned as they hauled her through the foyer, but her mind was already clocking off the things she would have to do. First, the surveillance. Lily had no backup footage of the living room and stairway, but she could do a onetime erase and Greg would chalk it up to a glitch … probably, her mind amended. The separatist’s shoes were covered with mud, and she had left several patches of it on the living room carpet. The house sterilized itself, but not that quickly. Lily would need to clean the mud up by hand before Greg came home.

They muscled the injured woman into the nursery and deposited her on the sofa. Lily could feel Jonathan’s glare, even before she looked up.

“What are you doing, Mrs. M.?”

“I don’t know,” Lily admitted. “I just …”

“What?”

A picture of Security popped into Lily’s head: the door through which they hustled people who never came out again. When Lily was a child, there hadn’t been such doors, and even as she became an adult, she had paid very little attention to the world changing around her; she often thought that it was this very inattention to implications, to the future, that had allowed her to marry Greg in the first place. Maddy had been the political one, the one who cared about the wider world. Lily’s immediate concerns were keeping the house running and dealing with Greg, finding ways to tiptoe around his newly volatile anger, to stay one step ahead of it. That was a full plate, certainly, but she couldn’t escape a nagging sense of shared responsibility, of many good people, all of them with their eyes on the ground, who had allowed the faceless door of Security to become the status quo. Maddy would not have allowed it, but Maddy had disappeared.

Jonathan was still waiting for an answer, but Lily couldn’t explain, not to him. Jonathan had been a Marine, had fought in Saudi Arabia in the final, desperate battle for the last of the world’s oil. He was a loyalist. He carried a gun.

“I’m not going to turn her in,” Lily finally replied. “Are you going to tell Greg?”

Jonathan looked down at the woman on the sofa, his gaze contemplative. “No ma’am. But you need to get her a doctor. If you don’t, she’s going to bleed to death right here on your couch.”

Lily ran though the list of local doctors she knew. Greg’s friends, none of them trustworthy. Their family doctor, Dr. Collins, had offices less than five miles away, in the center of town, but he wasn’t an option either. Dr. Collins had never asked Lily whether she wanted to have a baby. On her last visit, he’d told her that she needed to relax more during sex, that relaxing was a good way to conceive.

“My purse. There’s a card in there. My doctor in New York.”

“Davis? This isn’t his area. He’s a fixer.”

“He’s a fertility specialist!”

“Right, Mrs. M.”