The Invasion of the Tearling

Lily nodded slowly. “I’ll tell Greg you went to pick up my new dress in the city.”


This wasn’t precisely a lie. Lily had ordered a new dress from Chanel several weeks ago: fifteen thousand dollars, amethyst silk with hand-sewn sequins. Now, looking down at the unconscious woman on the sofa, she felt sick.

“We need to go. Her husband will be home soon.”

The doctor gathered up his instruments, wiped them down with the bloody towel, and stuck them inside his bag. “These towels need to be burned. You can’t just throw them away.”

“I know that,” Lily snapped, glaring at him. Then she looked down in bewilderment. The floor tiles had begun to tremble beneath her feet.

A giant thunderclap echoed outside, an explosion of noise that made Lily cover her ears. Dimly, from the other end of the house, she heard glass shatter. The doctor had covered his ears as well, but Jonathan merely stood staring out the window, a faint smile on his face. For a few seconds the walls and doors continued to rattle, and then they were still. The Security alarm went off downtown, its distinctive bray loud enough to penetrate even the unconscious brain of the woman on the couch; she rolled and murmured in her sleep.

The doctor reached out to clasp Jonathan’s hand. “The better world.”

“The better world,” Jonathan repeated.

Lily stared at him with wide eyes, a hundred tiny things coming together in her mind. Jonathan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the public roadways. His inexplicable decision to keep Lily’s secrets. His mysterious nighttime errands. Now Lily understood why the injured woman had rolled over the wall into this particular garden: because Jonathan was here. Jonathan, a separatist.

“I’ll be back later, Mrs. M.”

She nodded, watching him go. Deep down, she secretly hoped that the doctor would shake her hand as well, but he didn’t, only gave her another distrustful look as he went. Lily was left staring at the woman on the couch, her mind already categorizing the various types of trouble she was in. If she were caught harboring a fugitive, she would be arrested, taken into custody. But even the dangers of arrest paled against what would happen if Greg found out. Greg called the separatists filth. He crowed whenever one of them was caught and watched with a grim but smug pleasure as they were executed on the government site.

I need to be smart now, Lily thought, staring at the woman on the couch. She wondered how it was possible to be terrified and, at the same time, deeply excited. She had gone to a party one weekend in high school, years before she had met Greg … she had been drunk, yes, but not so drunk that she didn’t know what she was doing, and at the end of the night she had followed a boy into a darkened room and given up her virginity, just like that. Lily had never learned the boy’s name, not even in the morning, but he had been shy and kind, and she had never regretted the incident, a moment of wild abandon that had seemed, in that time and place, to define her.

I’m here, she thought now, terrified but buoyant, as though she were floating in midair at a great height. Really and truly here.

It had been a long time.

WHEN GREG WALKED through the door, Lily could already tell that it was going to be a bad night. His head was lowered like a bull’s, and there were sweat stains under his arms. Although he’d never said so, Lily was fairly sure he was scared of flying. She could smell him all the way across the living room, a mixture of bitter fear-sweat and the sandalwood cologne he wore every day. The cologne smelled like a dead animal.

If he’d only been wearing it when I met him, Lily thought, biting her cheek against a sudden peal of awful laughter, maybe I would have told him to get lost.