The Invasion of the Tearling

She had taken a shower, straightened her hair, and put on her best dress, knowing that Greg would come home angry. The news sites had begun to carry the story almost immediately: three East Coast Security bases, one only six miles from New Canaan, had suffered some sort of cataclysmic chemical explosions in their jet proving grounds. The casualties had been low; the terrorists had clearly been aiming for equipment, not men, and they had succeeded. More than one hundred jets had been destroyed. Two civilian contractors from Lockheed had died as well, but they hadn’t been workers, only management.

Only management. That sounded like something Lily’s father would have said. Dad had been a chemical engineer, and by the end of his life he’d been management himself, making upward of five million a year. But his sympathies had always been with the workers. When Lily was very young, Dad even tried to organize a union at Dow, but that attempt had died with Frewell’s Labor Facilitation Act. When quality control went to complete automation a few years later, there weren’t even any workers to unionize anymore. Dad was well off, yes, but Lily knew he was unhappy. He had died two years ago, and even in those last hours, sitting beside his bed in the hospital, Lily could sense him longing, still dreaming of his more equitable world. She couldn’t escape the feeling that she was the wrong daughter to be there, that it was Maddy he really wanted.

Greg dumped his coat on the sofa and went straight for the bar. Another bad sign. Lily noted the hunch of Greg’s thick shoulders beneath his suit, the way his dark brows had knitted together over his fraternity-handsome face, the clench of his jaw as he dumped gin into a glass. Liquid sloshed over the rim onto the bar, but Greg didn’t wipe it away. That would be her job, Lily thought, and was surprised to feel a dim throb of anger trying to break through her anxiety. The anger struggled briefly, then drowned.

Security sirens had been sounding in and out of their neighborhood all afternoon. They hadn’t come to Lily’s door, but they had gone to see Andrea Torres down the block. On the rare occasions when something happened in New Canaan, Andrea was always the first one questioned, because her husband was half Mexican and had once been arrested on suspicion of helping illegal immigrants cross state lines. But Andrea was a tiny, shy woman who could barely gather the courage to go down and get her own mail at the foot of her lawn. Lily always invited her to parties as a matter of form, since they lived in the same neighborhood, but Andrea never came.

Security was looking for an eighteen-year-old woman, five foot six, with blonde hair and green eyes. She had been hired as a civilian cleaner at Pryor Security Base three months ago, and today, somehow, she had made her way onto the jet fields and planted a bomb. She had taken gunfire as she fled from the scene, and they believed she was wounded. Her name was Angela West.

No names, Lily had thought, almost reflexively. The woman in the nursery was not an Angela. Lily decided that she must have been mistaken about the scar on the woman’s shoulder; no one would have been able to get Security clearance on a military base without a tag. The news sites said that the woman had known affiliations with the Blue Horizon, but no one seemed able to explain what domestic terrorists wanted with jets designed for transcontinental flight. The sites postulated that the separatists were mad dogs, simply going after the nearest military installation; everyone knew they were headquartered in New England somewhere, although neither Security nor private bounty hunters had been able to find a trace. The news said that naval bases were a convenient target.

Even to Lily, this explanation didn’t ring quite true. Every few months Greg would invite a Security lieutenant named Arnie Welch over to dinner, and the last time, after a few drinks, Arnie had admitted mournfully that the Blue Horizon were efficient, well-organized terrorists; they targeted carefully selected goals and usually succeeded. Lily watched the online news because there was nothing else, but she knew the news sites were heavily censored. Security was determined to keep the size of the problem under wraps, but Arnie could always be persuaded to talk on his third glass, and according to Arnie, the Blue Horizon was a much bigger problem than most civilians knew.

“You haven’t asked me about my day.”

Lily looked up and found Greg staring at her, a hint of petulance in his protruding lower lip. She got up from the armchair, taking a deep breath, and went and kissed him. He tasted like salami and olives. He’d already been drinking martinis on the plane.

“I’m sorry.”

“I had a bad day,” he told her, pouring himself a scotch.

Lily nodded with what she hoped looked like sympathy. Every day was a bad day for Greg. “Did the trip go all right?”

“It did, right until terrorists blew up every jet on the East Coast.”

“I saw it on the news.”

Greg looked down at her, irritated, and Lily realized that he had wanted to tell her about it himself. “I didn’t know it was terrorists. I thought they were just accidents. Explosions.”

“They weren’t. Three saboteurs got Security clearances. One of them was even a woman! I don’t know what the hell has happened to this country.” Greg took a swig of whisky. “I have to go down to Washington in a couple of hours. The Pentagon will need more jets in a hurry, and they’re going to want me to take care of it.”