The Invasion of the Tearling

Maybe this is what I wished for, she thought, staring at the mirror. Maybe this is what I wanted more than any other thing. A phrase from one of Carlin’s books recurred: blood will tell. Kelsea thought of the portrait two floors beneath her, the smiling blonde woman with no care in the world beyond her own pleasure, and felt like screaming. But the face in the mirror remained serene, mysterious, just on the point of deepening into beauty.

“True Queen,” Kelsea muttered bitterly, and heard her voice crack. Her reflection blurred for a moment, became indistinct. She blinked, confused, and then found herself fading, that curious sense of incipient otherness, of becoming someone else, which she had experienced before. She should call Pen, warn him that she was starting on one of her fugues, but humiliation overwhelmed her, and for a moment she could not find her voice. The power of this particular memory did not seem to fade with the passage of time; at any moment it could rise like the tide, swamping Kelsea and drowning her in an ocean of shame. Why should she tell Pen what was coming? It would serve him right if she blundered into a wall or a piece of furniture, if she injured herself on his watch.

You are being utterly childish. These aren’t real problems. Lily has real problems. The Tearling has real problems. Your little dramas aren’t even on the map.

Kelsea tried to shut the voice out, but it was too right to ignore, and for a moment she loathed the sensible side of herself, that pragmatic core that no longer allowed her even the luxury of throwing a tantrum. The room faded around her, rippling, and Kelsea felt a moment of wonder at how close the two worlds seemed to be. Lily’s life and her own … sometimes it seemed as though they lay right beside each other, perfectly aligned … as though Kelsea could step over some line and simply be in a different time, in the America that was gone.

“Pen!”

He appeared in moments, his face stiff.

“I’m going,” Kelsea murmured. The room was fading away now, and as Pen approached, she found that he was fading as well, until she could look right through him, into a sunlit room.

“It’s all right, Lady,” Pen murmured. “I won’t let you fall.” His grip on her arm was good, strong and comforting, but Kelsea sensed that, in time, even that would fade.





CHAPTER 8


ROW FINN


The Frewell administration liked to propound the age-old fiction that women were frail and indecisive creatures, badly in need of homes and husbands to give them structure and guidance. But even the most cursory glance at the late pre-Crossing suggests otherwise. American women were extremely resourceful in this period; they had to be, in order to survive in a world that valued them for only one thing. Indeed, many women were forced to create secret lives, lives about which we know very little, and about which their husbands certainly knew nothing.

—The Dark Night of America, GLEE DELAMERE

AFTER TWO DAYS, Lily had run out of books. Dorian was a voracious reader, and she went through Lily’s hidden stash like lightning. Lily offered her a pocket reader, but Dorian dismissed it with a contemptuous sniff. “All the e-books are edited and purged. I worked a stretch in a SmartBook factory, and the government people were all over the place, editing content. Stick with hard copies; they’re harder to alter after publication. In the better world, there won’t be any electronics at all.”

The better world. Lily had thought it was only a slogan, something that the Blue Horizon used to make its deeds seem more innocuous. But now she wondered. The tall Englishman, Tear, had seemed so certain that it was real. “There is no better world.”

“There will be,” Dorian replied calmly. “It’s close now … so close that we can almost touch it.”