The Invasion of the Tearling

She stared at him for a moment. “Are you going to tell Greg?”


Jonathan sighed, pulling the Lexus keys from his pocket. “Stay here. Keep pressure on the wound. I’ll be back with a doctor.”

“What doctor?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Not one of Greg’s friends?”

“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. M. You were right; we both know how to keep a secret.”

JONATHAN WAS GONE for more than an hour, giving Lily plenty of time to imagine the worst: Jonathan arrested for transporting an unlicensed physician; Jonathan unable to find a doctor at all; but mostly, Jonathan gone straight to Greg’s office, straight to Security, to tell them everything. Jonathan had been her bodyguard for nearly three years, Lily told herself, and he knew about Dr. Davis. If he’d wanted to get her in trouble, he could have done so a long time ago.

But still she was afraid.

The woman on the sofa was visibly dehydrating before Lily’s eyes. Her lips were chapped nearly white, and when she tried to speak, it was a hoarse croak. Lily went downstairs and filled a bowl with chipped ice. She didn’t know anything about taking care of sick people, but she’d had pneumonia when she was little, and for that entire week, all she could stand to eat was ice chips. She wet a cloth with freezing water and dumped it into the bowl as well.

When she returned, the woman on the sofa asked where she was. Lily tried to tell her, but the woman passed out again before she’d finished. Another three hours and Greg would be home. Where was Jonathan? And what was Lily doing anyway? The pills were one thing, one secret to keep, but hiding a person was something else.

“What’s your name?” Lily asked the woman when she woke up again.

“No names,” she whispered back. Lily felt as though she had heard those words before, perhaps on one of the government’s countless pamphlets and flyers. What had the woman been doing here? From time to time, Lily heard sirens cruising the neighborhood, sometimes far away and sometimes very close. She checked the news sites on the wall panel, but there was nothing, no local news about a trespasser or any nearby crime. She went out to the surveillance room and deleted that afternoon’s footage. There was always a chance that Greg had seen it in real time, but that was very unlikely today; at the end of his conference, Greg would be busily glad-handing before he got on the plane. On her way back to the nursery, she cleaned up the mud.

The woman was still unconscious. She was too young to be Maddy, yes, and a bit too tall as well, but still, it was almost like having a ghost on the sofa. As the afternoon advanced, the line of sun from the window moved across the woman’s shoulder and Lily spotted a scar there, just above the collarbone. Lily had a scar in the same place, a neat surgical line from having her tag implanted when she was young. But this scar was much more noticeable. It was not the thin, pristine line that a laser would leave. It looked as though it had been done with a scalpel.

Lily stared at the scar for a very long time, a wild idea taking hold in her mind: the woman had somehow removed her tag. That should have been impossible; each tag was armed with a toxin, a deadly chemical that would release on impact if anyone tried to tamper with the device. But the longer Lily considered the scar, the more certain she became: this woman had managed to get rid of her tag. She could move freely wherever she wanted, without Security tracking her every movement. Lily couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.

Jonathan finally came back at four, with a small, neat grey-haired man in tow. The little man looked just the way a doctor should look, to Lily’s mind; he wore a professional-looking grey suit and old-fashioned wire-frame glasses, and he carried a small black leather bag that clinked as he set it down. He ignored Lily entirely, going straight to the woman on the sofa. After a moment’s assessment he turned, speaking as he would to a nurse. “Boiling-hot water and some towels. Cotton towels.”

For a moment, Lily was too surprised to move. She wasn’t used to being ordered around in her own house.

Except by Greg, her mind whispered, and that got her moving, out of the nursery and down to the kitchen. After she had fetched the water, she went to the linen closet and tried to decide which towels Greg would miss the least. He had a strange, sporadic eye for details around the house; Lily would throw out a set of threadbare sheets and then, a year later, Greg would ask where the sheets had gone. None of their towels were dark enough to hide blood; whichever set she chose would have to be tossed.