The Invasion of the Tearling

That was the same thing Tear had said. The words had the ring of religious rhetoric, but Dorian seemed too practical for that. For that matter, so did Tear. In the past couple of days Lily had done several online searches, but the information was very sparse. There was a birth record for a William Tear from Southport, England, in 2046, and eleven years ago, a William Tear had been awarded the Military Cross for heroism with the Special Air Service. Lily had assumed that the Special Air Service was the British version of the old American Air Force, but after some more research, she found that the American analogue to the SAS was actually the SEALs. Now she was certain she had the right man. She had met plenty of paramilitary types through Greg, and the men always projected an air of invincibility. Tear had given the same impression, but it was combined with something else, something close to omniscience. For a few insane moments there in the nursery, Lily had been sure that he knew everything about her.

There was no other information on Tear, which seemed impossible. Lily could look up her friends’ drug prescriptions—the legal ones, anyway—their genealogies, their medical records, tax statements, even their DNA sequences, if she felt like it. But William Tear had been born, had served in the British special forces, and that was all. The rest of his life had disappeared. When Lily searched for Dorian Rice, she found the same thing. The results yielded countless news stories, but they had all been published in the last few days and dealt with the explosion at the airbase. Greg had said that Dorian had escaped from the Bronx Women’s Detention Center, but there was no arrest record online. There was no mention of Dorian’s family, no birth certificate. It was as though someone had literally wiped Dorian and Tear from history. But only Security had the power to remove things from the net; the days when citizens could edit their own information had vanished with the enactment of the Emergency Powers Act.

Lily longed to ask Dorian about herself, but she didn’t want Dorian to know that she’d gone snooping. Dorian had stopped jumping at every little thing, but she still displayed an odd paranoia that came and went. She didn’t want to discuss William Tear; whenever Lily mentioned him, Dorian would snap, “No names!” making Lily feel as though she had blasphemed somehow. Dorian was able to sit up now, to make her way across the nursery, but she still froze whenever the phone rang, and she didn’t like to be touched. She insisted on doing her own injections.

Tear wasn’t the only topic that was off-limits. When it came to the better world, Dorian remained maddeningly evasive, speaking in vague phrases and giving no real answers. Lily couldn’t tell whether she was holding something back; maybe Tear’s followers didn’t understand the better world either, maybe they were just as much in the dark. And yet Lily was desperate to know. The vision she had seen that night with Tear had taken hold in her mind: a vast, open land, covered with wheat and the blue ribbon of river. No guards or walls or checkpoints, only small wooden houses, people moving along freely, children running through wheat.

“When does it arrive, this better world?” Lily asked.

“I don’t know,” Dorian replied. “But I don’t think it’s very far offnow.”

On Sunday Lily had to leave Dorian alone to go to church, and she fretted through the service. She barely heard the priest’s lecture on the sins of a childless woman, although, as always, the priest looked right at Lily and the other delinquents in his congregation. Greg put a hand on Lily’s back, trying to convey sympathy, she supposed, but the deep gleam in his eyes made her uneasy. Greg was planning something, certainly, and it could be nothing good. For a brief moment she wondered if he was scheming to divorce her; even after the Frewell Laws, the government would still ease the way for rich executives who wanted to shed barren wives. But Lily was beginning to see something now that she had never seen before: to Greg, she was property, and Greg wasn’t a man to give property away, not even if it was damaged. Lily wondered if things would change someday, when she became irreparably childless.

Cheerful thoughts, candyass, Maddy whispered, and Lily blinked. Ever since Dorian had rolled over the back wall into the garden, it seemed as though Maddy was everywhere, always ready to offer her opinion. But it was rarely anything that Lily wanted to hear.

After church, Greg directed his driver, Phil, to take them to the club. Lunch at the club was a Sunday routine, but Lily wished she could beg off. The thought of their friends was almost unbearable today. Lily wanted to be back in the nursery with Dorian, trying to unravel the mystery of the better world.

As they pulled out of the church parking lot, Greg pushed the button that raised the partition, blocking Phil out. Lily was alarmed to see his eyes bright with excitement.

“I found a doctor.”

“A doctor,” Lily repeated cautiously.

“He’s not cheap, but he’s licensed, and he’s willing to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Plant you.”

For a moment Lily had no idea what he was talking about. The word plant made her think of implants, and her mind went automatically to the tag in her shoulder. But no, Greg meant something else. A truly awful idea popped into Lily’s mind, and she shrank from it … but she also knew that it was exactly what Greg meant.

“In vitro?”

“Of course!” Greg took her hand, leaning forward. “Listen to this. The doctor says he can use my sperm, just stick it in another woman’s eggs. You have the baby and no one ever has to know.”

Lily’s mind went blank. For a moment, she considered simply throwing open the car door, rolling out while it was still in motion and fleeing to … where?