In the decade before the Crossing, the American Security apparatus took thousands of alleged separatists into custody. The sheer number of detainees convinced the American government, as well as the public, that Security was winning the war on domestic terrorism. But this single-minded focus on demonstrable results also blinded the government to the real issue: an enormous fault beneath the American surface, unseen, that was finally beginning to crack.
—The Dark Night of America, GLEE DELAMERE
Dorian was gone.
Lily stood in the doorway of her nursery, blinking. Dorian was gone, and so were the medical supplies, the extra clothes that Lily had given her. The nursery was still as always, full of tiny dust motes that floated in the late-morning sun. No one would know that Dorian had ever been there.
Of course Lily hadn’t expected her to say good-bye, but she had thought there would be more time. Now William Tear had come in the night and taken Dorian away. Lily turned and walked back down the hall, all of her pleasure in the morning suddenly evaporated. What was she supposed to do now? She was supposed to play bridge later, with Michele and Christine and Jessa, but she saw now that she would have to call that off. There was no way she could sit there at the table with the three of them, gossiping and drinking whatever cocktail Christine favored this week. Something had shifted, and now there was no way for Lily to return to the world of small things.
Two days later, the news sites announced that simultaneous terrorist attacks had taken place in Boston and Dearborn, Virginia. The terrorists in Boston had broken into one of Dow’s warehouse facilities and stolen medical equipment and drugs, nearly fifty million dollars’ worth, a huge coup that was splashed all over the top of every website. But the attack in Virginia, though less spectacular, was more interesting to Lily because it made no sense. Some ten or twelve armed guerrillas had broken into a billionaire’s Dearborn horse farm and stolen most of his breeding stock. The guerrillas came prepared, with their own trailers for the horses, but they took nothing except the animals and some equipment for their care.
Horses! Lily was baffled. No one actually used horses for anything anymore, not even farming; they were a rich man’s vice, only valuable for harness racing and the gambling that went with it. Lily wondered briefly if the tall Englishman was crazy—for she was certain, somehow, that this was Tear’s work—but that wasn’t the impression she had received. Rather, the entire thing seemed like a puzzle, one that was missing several pieces. Horses and medical equipment stolen, jet facilities destroyed. Each day Lily moved these pieces around a board in her mind, trying to understand. She felt sure that if she could only fit them together, assemble the puzzle, then it would somehow clarify everything, show her the Englishman’s real plan, the clear outlines of the better world.
Three days after the Virginia attack, Lily was back in the hospital. It started very simply: a shirt Greg wanted to wear happened to be at the dry cleaner’s, and when Lily couldn’t produce the shirt, Greg slammed her fingers in the bedroom door. It didn’t even hurt at first; there was only the door, held tight against her hand so that no sensation traveled. But when Greg opened the door a few seconds later, the pain came roaring in, and when Lily screamed, Greg did something he had never done before and punched her twice in the face. On the second shot, Lily felt her nose break, a thin, crisp snap, like stepping on a twig in winter.
Greg was already late for his meeting, and so it was Jonathan who took Lily to the emergency room. He said nothing, but she could see his set jaw and narrowed eyes in the rearview mirror. Whom did he disapprove of? Both of them? She hadn’t spoken to Jonathan since that night in the living room; he was clearly determined to pretend that it had never happened, so Lily did the same. Sometimes she wished that she could talk to him about it, but Jonathan’s reserve kept her from opening the discussion. She concentrated on her nose instead, working hard to keep blood from dripping to the seats.
It turned out that Lily had two broken fingers in addition to the broken nose, and she could only stare groggily around the brightly lit room as Jonathan responded to the doctor’s questions. When it was time to repair her nose, they knocked her out. She spent the night in the hospital, in the charge of two nurses, and when she woke up and heard their voices, kind and mothering, Lily wished that she could stay there forever. There was pain in the hospital, and sickness, but it was a safe place. Greg had said it wouldn’t happen again, but he had been lying; several times since that day at the country club, Lily had woken up with Greg’s fingers inside her, shoving painfully, almost scraping. Broken bones were bad, but that was infinitely worse, and the hospital felt so safe compared to home.
Five days later the power went out all over New England. It was a brief outage, only twenty minutes, and there was no real damage done except for a few traffic accidents. But still, the incident caused a flurry of panic in Washington and on the stock exchanges, because such an outage was supposed to be impossible. In a world where everything was run by computers, safeguarded and backed up eight ways to Sunday, the system wasn’t supposed to have room for failure. Greg said that the hardware had been defective, but Lily wondered. She thought of Dorian, of how a woman without a tag had been able to get through Security at a naval base. She thought of the thousands of soldiers, like Jonathan, who had come back from serving in Saudi Arabia to find that there were no jobs, no market for their skills. And now she began to wonder: how many separatists were there, really? The news sites spoke of the Blue Horizon contemptuously, describing the cell as a few disorganized, dissatisfied groups of mentally unstable individuals. But the evidence didn’t bear that out. Lily thought of Arnie Welch, the Security lieutenant who had once admitted, over too many drinks, that the terrorists were both efficient and organized. William Tear had said that there were ways through every barrier, and the questions swirled in Lily’s head, maddening. Just how big was the Blue Horizon? Did they all answer to Tear? What was the better world?
The next weekend Greg had Arnie Welch over to dinner, along with two of Arnie’s underlings. Greg always invited Arnie on the rare occasions when he was in town; they had been fraternity brothers at Yale. Greg said it was useful to be friends with a Security lieutenant, and even Lily saw the sense in that. But this time, when Arnie walked through the door, Lily didn’t see Greg’s parking tickets or a quick travel visa for vacations or even the Security helicopters that Arnie would sometimes loan as a favor when business was slow. Instead, she saw Maddy being hustled out the school doors, the last flash of her blonde pigtails, a picture so clear that Lily swayed momentarily on the threshold, and when Arnie tried to put an arm around her shoulders, she ducked away toward the kitchen.
For once Arnie didn’t drink during dinner, and he glared at his two flunkies when they showed signs of reaching for the whisky. Greg heckled him about it, but Arnie merely shrugged, saying, “I can’t afford a hangover tomorrow.”
Lily was just as happy to have Arnie stay sober. He got pretty handsy when he drank; once he’d actually tried to worm his hand between her legs at the table. Lily could never tell whether Greg noticed these advances; as possessive as he had become, he seemed to have achieved a level of deliberate blindness when someone was in a position to be useful to him. But Lily had seated Arnie on the far side of the table, just in case.
Although her nose was almost back to normal, Lily still had noticeable bruising under her right eye, but she was not surprised when Arnie didn’t ask about it. She found that she could barely eat. Her healing fingers, both of them still encased in temporary splints, made it hard to manipulate the knife and fork, but that wasn’t really the problem. She had spent most of her married life telling lies, but ever since Dorian toppled over the back wall, there had been a shift in the foundation, and it was becoming harder to dissemble, harder to force each individual lie out. She was afraid of her husband, but the fear was less important now. She sensed a wider world out there, a world not run by people like Greg, and sometimes, even though she understood nothing, she knew exactly what Dorian meant: it was so close she could almost touch it.
Pigs, she thought, watching Greg and the military men snort and chuckle and snuffle their food. Pigs, all of you. You have no idea about the better world. Lily didn’t understand the better world either, true, but she thought she was beginning to at least see the outline now. No poverty and no greed, Tear had said. Kindness is everything. People like Greg would be entirely irrelevant. Yesterday he had told her that he’d made contact with an in vitro doctor. They would go on Monday. Lily couldn’t imagine what her life would look like on Tuesday.
She had her doubts that Arnie could really stay sober throughout dinner; even among Greg’s normal set of dinner invitees, Arnie was a consummate boozehound. The whisky bottle sat on the table right in front of him—Greg’s idea of a good joke—during the entire meal, but somehow Arnie ignored the bottle, sticking strictly to water. He was nervous and jumpy, constantly checking his watch. His two underlings weren’t much better, though they still found time to nudge each other and grin at Lily during the meal. She was used to this kind of thing, and ignored their comments, even when she heard herself referred to as a nice piece of snatch.
“What’s got you so twitchy?” Greg finally asked Arnie. “Are you on drugs?”
Arnie shook his head. “Stone sober. I have a long day tomorrow, that’s all.”
“Doing what?”
“It’s classified.”
“I’m cleared.”
Arnie looked uncertainly across the table at Lily. “She’s not cleared.”
“Oh, fuck her, she’s not going to tell anyone.” Greg turned to Lily with narrowed eyes. “Are you?”
She shook her head automatically, keeping her eyes on her plate.
“So come on, man, give,” Greg begged, and Lily suddenly saw something she had never seen before: Greg was jealous of the military men across the table. Greg worked for several defense contractors, yes, but his was a desk job. Arnie was trained to fire weapons, to interrogate, to kill people, and Greg thought that made Arnie a better man. “Tell us what you’ve been up to.”
Still Arnie hesitated, and Lily felt a tiny alarm go off inside. Clearance or not, Arnie was always telling Greg things he shouldn’t, and it usually didn’t take much alcohol to make it happen. She kept her eyes on her plate, trying to make herself as invisible as possible, waiting for him to speak. But after a few moments, Arnie merely shook his head again. “Sorry, man, no. It’s too big, and your wife’s not cleared.”
“Fine, come on upstairs. We’ll talk in my study.”
“You two go down and wait in the car,” Arnie told his two flunkies, then wiped his mouth and threw his napkin on the table. “Thanks, Lily. That was great.”
She nodded and smiled mechanically, wondering if Arnie had noticed the splints on her knuckles. The flunkies left, and Greg and Arnie disappeared upstairs. Lily stared at her plate for a moment, considering, then grabbed the edge of the table with her uninjured hand and levered herself upward. Leaving the dirty dishes scattered all over the table, she hurried through the kitchen and into the small guardhouse that housed their surveillance equipment. Jonathan was supposed to be on duty tonight, but Lily was hardly surprised to find the alcove empty. She wondered how many nights the house had been left unguarded while Jonathan was out running errands for the Blue Horizon.
Tapping at the screen, Lily brought up Greg’s study, a dark, mahogany-filled room that tried too hard to be masculine. The walls were paneled with bookshelves, but they held no books, only Greg’s old football trophies and pictures of Greg and Lily with important people at various events. The walls were covered with plaques; Greg liked to show off his awards.
Arnie was sitting in one of the big armchairs in front of Greg’s desk, and Greg was behind the desk, with his leather executive chair tilted back. Both of them were smoking cigars, and the haze had drifted up toward the camera, making Greg’s features indistinct.
“The building blew and collapsed,” Arnie said, “just like it was supposed to. They clearly had an escape plan, but it got botched somehow. I’ve got to hand it to Langer; much as I hate that bastard, he pulled off a pretty good trick. It looked like all of them died, but Langer managed to grab one alive, some guy named Goodin. They’ve been working on him for the past four days, and he finally broke last night.”
“What broke him?” Greg asked, his voice crawling with eagerness, and Lily closed her eyes. How long would it have taken them to break Maddy? Forever, Lily thought, but deep down, she knew that wasn’t true. She wiped her forehead and her hand came away wet.
Arnie looked uncomfortable too. “I’m off duty now, man. I don’t want to talk about that shit.”
“Yeah, I suppose not,” Greg replied grudgingly. “So what did he say?”
“He wasn’t high up or anything, but he gave us a lot.” Arnie’s face became animated again. “The leader of the Blue Horizon is some guy who calls himself Tear. A Brit, if you can believe it.”
“I do believe it. The UK and their fucking socialist experiment.”
“Well, this Tear is apparently the big money. The separatists think he’s some kind of god. Blue Horizon sprang up out of the old Occupy movements, but you know they didn’t know what they were doing. This Tear, though, he’s a trained guerrilla. That’s why they’ve been such a pain in the ass the last few years.” Arnie lowered his voice, and Lily thumbed the volume control on the screen. “They’re holed up in an abandoned warehouse down on Conley Terminal.”
“Where’s that?”
“Port of Boston. I’ve spent all day looking at maps. That warehouse has been condemned for at least ten years, but Frewell’s boys took all the money Boston was supposed to use for a new container facility and put it into some God crap or another, so all the containers have just been standing there. Goodin said they’re using the warehouse as a headquarters. We’re going in at dawn.”
Lily stared at the screen, frozen.
“They’ve put Langer in charge of the whole thing; it’s his baby now, and he wants prisoners. We have to surround the Terminal on land and water, which is no easy trick . . . lots of boats and lots of men. My division is supposed to provide a secondary perimeter tomorrow morning.” Arnie sighed and stubbed out the remains of his cigar. “So no booze.”
“Want to play some poker? I’ve got a game downtown.”
“Can’t, really. I have to be in Boston in two hours. My copter’s waiting down at the pad.”
Greg nodded, though his lip had pushed out in that little pout that Lily had come to know so well lately. “Fine. I’ll walk you out.”
Lily shut off the screen and hurried back into the dining room, where she set the washer to begin clearing plates. When Greg and Arnie’s voices had disappeared out the front door, she dug her phone from her purse and called Jonathan, but he didn’t pick up; there was only his dry, deep voice, a generic greeting. Lily couldn’t leave him a real message; her calls were monitored. Trying to keep the panic from her voice, she demanded that he call her back immediately. But she couldn’t escape the feeling that wherever Jonathan was, he wouldn’t get back to her in time. She could see it now: the darkened warehouse, Dorian inside with William Tear. Dorian had said that she wasn’t going back into custody, not ever again. The Boston waterfront. The Blue Horizon. Lily closed her eyes and saw the tiny group of wooden houses beside the blue river, bathed in sun.
I have to do something.
And what can you do, Lil? Maddy asked, her voice jeering. You’ve never had the courage to do anything in your entire life.
I did, Lily insisted. When Dorian fell into the backyard, I did.
But deep down, she knew that Maddy was right. Dorian had been a low-risk decision, almost a game, insulated in the relatively safe environment of the nursery. What Lily was contemplating now was something else entirely. She formulated a plan, rejected it, formulated another, rejected that, formulated a third and examined it, turning it over for flaws. It was a stupid plan, no doubt. It would probably get her arrested, maybe even killed. But she had to do something. If the better world was real, it was also unutterably fragile, and without Tear, there would be nothing.
“Arnie’s gone.”
Lily focused on the window again and found Greg reflected behind her, though she could not read his expression in the glass. She said nothing, looking ahead now, toward Boston. There was no place for Greg in that journey. He would only get in her way.
“Are you excited, Lil?”
“About what?”
“About Monday.”
Lily’s hand clenched on the handle of a pot, and for a moment she very nearly turned and flung the pot at his head. But her mind cautioned patience. Her aim might not be good enough. Greg had six inches and nearly a hundred pounds on her. She would have one shot only, and she could not afford to miss. She cast along the counter, and her gaze fixed on a large, heavy picture frame, nearly a foot tall, that stood on the windowsill. Photos of their wedding day flashed endlessly over the screen in sparkling pixels; Lily saw herself, only twenty-two years old, covered in yards of white satin, getting ready to cut an enormous tiered cake. Even though her hair was beginning to come down from its elaborate coiffure and Greg’s wretched father stood beside her, she was laughing.
God, what happened?
Greg took a few steps forward, so close now that Lily could feel his breath on the back of her neck. She reached out to touch the picture frame, grasping its edge in her good hand.
“Lil?”
If he tries to fuck me now, she thought, I will go insane. It will be very easy; I’ll just float off, and then none of this will matter, not William Tear or the Blue Horizon or a warehouse down on the Boston port. None of it.
“Lil? Are you excited?”
His hand settled on her shoulder, and Lily whipped around, bringing the frame with her, swinging it sidearm as she would a tennis racket at the club. The frame crunched into the side of Greg’s head, tiny plastic shards flying everywhere, peppering Lily’s hand and arm, and Greg fell sideways, banging his head on the marble counter on the way down, a deep thunk. Lily raised the frame again, ready, but Greg was down for the count, sprawled on his side on the kitchen floor. After a moment, blood began to trickle down his face from his scalp, tiny red dots dripping onto the white tile.
“Well, that’s done,” Lily whispered, unsure whom she was talking to. She thought about checking Greg’s pulse, but couldn’t bring herself to touch him. Moving slowly, as if in a dream, she went upstairs to their bedroom. She pulled out her oldest jeans, the ones she never wore when Greg was around, and a faded black T-shirt. These clothes were still nicer than anything poor people would wear outside the wall, but they were better than nothing and might offer some camouflage. She covered them with a beaten leather jacket she’d had since she was fifteen, a remnant of better times that Lily refused to give away. The Mercedes was an automatic; after a moment’s thought, Lily removed her splints and left them on the dresser. She tapped at the wallscreen, examining maps of the Port of Boston while she dressed. Conley Terminal was a big container facility down near Castle Island, tucked into one of the thousand inlets that seemed to make up the Massachusetts coastline. Public roads, it would be have to be, Highway 84 to the Mass Turnpike. The private roads would be full of Security checkpoints, particularly at night, and when they scanned her chip and found out that she had left her husband behind, it would raise more questions. Lily would have a better chance on public roads . . . if she even managed to get outside the New Canaan wall at all.
After a bit more searching, she found that condemned property was the province of the Department of the Interior. There were two condemned buildings located on Conley Terminal; only one looked like a warehouse, but Lily mapped each location carefully and sent the maps on to the Mercedes. Belatedly, she realized that these searches were probably going to trip an alarm somewhere at Security, and she had a quick moment of panic before she realized how small a problem that really was, with her husband lying bleeding on the kitchen floor. Even if Greg wasn’t dead, women had been executed for less. Lily went downstairs and grabbed the small codekey with the Mercedes emblem off the hook on the wall. The Mercedes was their third car, the fancy one for emergencies or important visitors. When she held the key up to the light, she found that her hands were shaking. Her driver’s license was still valid, but she hadn’t driven a car since she was eighteen.
“Like riding a bike,” she whispered. “Just like riding a bike, that’s all.”
She spared a final glance at Greg, who still lay sprawled in the same position on the kitchen floor. Blood had begun to pool beneath his right ear now, but he was still breathing, and for a moment Lily wondered at her own coldness, until she isolated its source: it didn’t really matter whether Greg lived or died, or whether she did herself, only that she got to Boston. The better world, the small village beside the river, these were the things which mattered, and they burned inside Lily’s head, searing through the fear, lifting her up.
She turned and headed down the hallway toward the garage.
No one had driven the Mercedes in a while, but it didn’t seem any worse for disuse. Jonathan must have been taking care of it; he liked tinkering with cars, kept the BMW and Lexus in good working order. The Mercedes had a full tank, and its headlights cut easily through the night as Lily turned off Willow Avenue and onto the checkpoint road. Ahead of her the wall loomed: twenty feet of solid steel polymer, topped with laser edging, blocking off the horizon. Something inside Lily seemed to freeze at the sight, and a low, panicked voice began to babble inside her . . . the voice of her marriage, Lily realized now, its tone craven and helpless.
You’ll never make it through, not in a million years, and when they find Greg—
“Shut up,” Lily whispered. Her voice shook in the darkness of the car.
The checkpoint appeared out of the fog: a fifteen-foot break in the wall, lit by bright fluorescent lamps. A small guardhouse, also walled in steel, stood off to the left, and as Lily approached, two guards in Security uniforms emerged. Each of them carried a gun, the small laser pistols that Security seemed to favor these days. Greg had a gun, Lily suddenly remembered, a tiny thing that he kept in his study. She could have grabbed it, and this made her wonder what else she had forgotten. But it was too late.
“Evening, ma’am,” the first guard said as she lowered the window. He squinted at her for a moment, then smiled wide. “It’s Mrs. Mayhew, isn’t it?”
“Yes, John. How are you tonight?”
“Fine, ma’am. Where you heading?”
“Into the city to see friends.”
“All by yourself at this hour? Where’s that black bodyguard of yours?”
“He had to run an errand for my husband.”
“Just a moment.” He walked around the hood and disappeared back into the guardhouse. The other guard remained on the right side of the hood, a dark silhouette against the fluorescent lamps. Lily kept a pleasant smile on her face, but her fingers had clamped on the steering wheel. The guard had gone to call Greg, and now her mind produced a clear picture: the kitchen, Greg lying there motionless, but his phone rang on and on. The muscles in her thighs were shaking. Outside the bright circle of fluorescence that bathed the car, everything was pitch-black.
“Ma’am?”
Lily jumped; the guard had silently reappeared at the other window.
“We’re not getting any reply from your husband, ma’am.”
“He’s ill,” she replied. “That’s why he’s not coming with me.”
The guard consulted a tiny handheld, and Lily knew that he was scrolling through the details of her life. Greg’s position, the fact that they were not under surveillance, would weigh in Lily’s favor. Lily had never been in trouble, and that would help too. Maddy would be in there, certainly, but so would the information that Lily had been instrumental in turning Maddy in.
“Does your husband always let you go into the city at night by yourself?”
“No. This is the first time.”
The guard stood staring down at her, and Lily had the disturbing certainty that his eyes were crawling, even though her breasts were encased in the thick leather jacket. But she kept the smile plastered on, and after a moment the guard raised something black and gleaming. For one panicked moment, Lily thought it was a gun, but then she saw that it was only a scanner. She offered her shoulder and waited for the scan to register with a soft beep. The guard waved Lily forward, and she depressed the gas pedal. Too hard, for the Mercedes leapt forward with a growl. She stomped on the brake, gave an apologetic smile out the open window. “I haven’t driven in a while.”
“Well, be careful, ma’am. Stay off the public roads. And don’t open your door for any strangers.”
“I won’t. Have a good night.”
Lily pressed the gas again, gently this time, and rolled the car forward, out of the bright circle of light.
When Lily was in the car, Jonathan used the private highway. But there had been a few times when the highway was down, blocked by debris dragged onto the roadway or sabotaged by explosives. Even Security couldn’t repair a badly damaged highway in less than a week, and at such times Jonathan always turned onto a small back road a few miles outside the wall, a dirt track that headed north for a few minutes through the woods before it joined with Highway 84. No matter how hard Security worked to keep the public off the private roadways, they always found a way through, cutting new paths through the woods and digging tunnels beneath fences. This idea, which would have alarmed Lily a few weeks ago, now seemed oddly comforting. Jonathan’s back road might have allowed William Tear to get close to New Canaan before slipping over the wall, might have allowed Dorian to evade Security as she fled from the base. It took Lily several U-turns before she spotted the small break in the undergrowth. When she guided the car through, she could hear the scrape of brambles along the paint.
“The better world,” she whispered as she guided the Mercedes forward through the woods, feeling the sharp thump of rocks beneath the tires. Trees surrounded the car, ghostly white pillars in the glare of the headlights. “It’s out there, so close we can almost touch it.”
She kept an eye on the side windows and rearview mirror; there were probably some people living out here somewhere, though they’d need some serious weaponry to break into this car, which had steel-reinforced windows and was built like a tank. But she saw no one, and after twenty minutes of carefully crawling along, she emerged onto the public highway. Highway 84 was much wider than the private roads, its northern span stretching six lanes across, and without the ten-foot walls that bordered most private freeways it felt very wide, almost limitless in its emptiness, remnant of a bygone era when everyone could afford cars and gas. Signs on Lily’s right advertised the speed limit as sixty-five, but Security never bothered to police the public highways anyway, and sixty-five seemed ridiculously slow, almost like standing still. Lily sped up, then sped up further, easing the car over eighty-five and up toward ninety, finding a pure pleasure in going fast, in watching the miles fly by.
Several times she saw the remains of old barricades on the highway shoulder: piles of trash, blown tires and tree branches that had simply been cleared to one side and left for wind and time to disperse. She couldn’t fathom the purpose of such barricades, and this, more than anything else, drove home to Lily how little she knew about life outside the wall. Even as a child, she had always used the private roadways, always had temperate weather, never needed to worry about starving.
Occasionally she saw fires lining the sides of the road, large bonfires surrounded by the silhouettes of many people. The poor, moving out of the cities and into the forests . . . safer, most likely, but also harder to survive. Lily couldn’t slow down to take a closer look; armored or not, a Mercedes rolling at street speed was an open invitation. But she couldn’t help staring at them in the rearview mirror, all of those human shadows standing around the flames. She couldn’t help imagining the lives they led.
“The better world,” she whispered, repeating it every time another mile ticked off the odometer and into the night at her back. Green exit signs flew by, some of them so worn that Lily could barely read the white letters announcing their towns. Vernon, Tolland, Willington. Some of these were undoubtedly ghost towns, while others were alive but given over to lawlessness. Lily dimly remembered hearing Willington mentioned on a news site a few months ago, something about a cult. But she couldn’t remember, and then Willington was behind her. She was halfway to Boston now, only seventy-five miles to go.
Her phone beeped, and Lily gave a small croak of fright, certain that Greg had woken up, that he had gotten hold of a phone. She could barely bring herself to look at the screen, but when she did, she saw the word Jonathan shining against the bright blue background.
“Answer . . . Jonathan?”
“Where are— Mrs. M.?” His voice crackled with static, dropped out. But of course, cell service would be wretched outside the walls. People like Lily weren’t even supposed to be here. With the advent of panic buttons in cars, no one even used a phone for emergencies anymore.
“I’m on my way to Boston.”
“What’s in Boston?” She might have been imagining it, but even under the static, Lily sensed a sudden, guarded quality about Jonathan’s voice.
“The warehouse! The port! They’re in trouble, Jonathan. Mark had Arnie Welch over for dinner—”
“Mrs. M.? Can— hear you. Don’t—” Now the static cut in for a long moment, “Boston!”
“Jonathan?”
The call dropped.
Lily redialed, but she knew already that it was an empty gesture. She didn’t even get Jonathan’s voicemail this time, only a dead and empty silence. Peering down at her phone, she saw that she had no service. Too late, she realized that the brief call had surely been recorded by Security.
“Fuck,” she muttered. Jonathan had told her not to go to Boston, she was sure of it. But Jonathan didn’t know what she did, and inertia had taken over now. She was already in trouble. There was no turning back.
At Sturbridge, she switched over to the Massachusetts Turnpike. For the first fifteen miles of the Pike there were no freeway lights at all, not even the old arc-sodiums; the highway was completely dark except for the faint glow of moonlight, and Lily was forced to slow down to forty-five, which felt like crawling after the pure, open speed of 84. She navigated on intuition rather than sight, squinting for the outline of things ahead, knowing that she should have turned back long ago. She breathed a sigh of relief as she passed Auburn and spotted the thin orange glow of lights in the distance.
“The better world,” she whispered, watching another green digit trip forward on the odometer. “So close we can almost touch it.”
She was only forty miles away.
When Lily was growing up, Boston had still been a good place to visit for a day. Mom and Dad would take her and Maddy; even though Dad had grown up in Queens and was a diehard Yankee fan, he had a secret admiration for Boston. Mom liked to see the sights and shop, but Dad’s bent was historical; he took Lily and Maddy to Boston Common, to the Kennedy Library. Once they had even gone to the docks, to the site of the Boston Tea Party, and Dad explained what had happened there, quite a different story from the one Lily had heard in school. Maddy said that Dad’s version might get him in trouble, so Lily had never repeated it, but it had been a struggle in tenth grade not to raise her hand and tell the teacher he was wrong. Whenever Lily thought of Boston, she always remembered standing on the docks and looking down at the water.
Now Boston was buried under a haze of smog. The last few times Lily had been here with Greg, in the daytime, there had been no sunlight, only a thin, sickly luminescence, and now, in the middle of the night, the sky over the city was bright orange, reflecting the streetlights below. When Lily rolled down the windows, the air tasted foul. When was the last time she had breathed outside air? She couldn’t remember, she was so used to scrubbed air, the purifiers that covered New Canaan.
As soon as she passed the Washington Street exit, Lily’s phone chirped happily to let her know that service had been restored. If Greg had woken up, he would be able to track her by her tag, but that would take some time in the middle of the night. Her phone, though, was in Greg’s name, and he would be able to look up its location himself. After a moment’s thought, Lily chucked the phone out the window.
She took the exit for Massport Haul Road and began to wind her way down Summer Street, heading toward the vast black emptiness that signified water. She had never been down to this part of the port; Dad had taken them up to the Congress Street Bridge and—in those days—the many child-friendly amusements up at Boston Harbor. But here at Conley Terminal, the waterfront was a sea of containers, and Lily was struck by the ghostly outlines of the container cranes, an endless row of storklike apparatuses towering over her head. They would be different colors, probably, but in the yellow light they all took on varying shades of jaundice. The terminal seemed empty; Lily saw no people walking across the seamed pavement, no cars or movement of machines. Security was down there, she knew, probably hidden in the shadows of buildings and containers. What if they stopped her on the way in?
She parked the car on the edge of an enormous parking lot, behind several dumpsters in a lonely clump around a small outbuilding that looked as though it might once have taken tickets. For a moment, Lily simply sat there, feeling the adrenaline of the drive fade away. Her muscles felt as though she’d run a marathon.
According to her map, the first condemned building was about half a mile to the north, a corrugated behemoth that looked like it was ready to collapse. The walls were covered with enormous patches of rust. Lily had brought along a plain black baseball cap, and now she gathered her hair up and tucked it inside the cap before getting out of the car. Someone might find the Mercedes and break into it while she was gone, but there was nothing to be done about that. A last look around revealed no one visible, and Lily darted across the poorly lit pavement, the stench of asphalt and chemicals burning her nose.
The port had appeared deserted on the way in, but with each step Lily became more convinced that she was being watched. Several times she ran across port rats, big as kittens and not frightened of Lily at all. Most of them merely glanced at her as she passed by, but one actually stood its ground, squeaking in outrage, and Lily was forced to go around it, watching it with a wary eye, realizing anew how far out of her depth she really was.
She finally reached the south wall of the warehouse and crouched against it, breathing hard. She had a stitch in her side. There were no doors on this wall; she would have to move around the corner to the east wall, the long side of the warehouse. Huddling close to the corrugated tin, she sidled down the wall until she reached the corner. She was just leaning forward to peek around it when something hard pressed against the side of her head.
“Hands above your shoulders.”
Lily obeyed. She had never even heard him approach.
“She can’t be Security,” another man said.
Lily raised her voice and spoke clearly. “I need to talk to Dorian Rice, William Tear, or Jonathan.” She felt like an idiot; she didn’t even know Jonathan’s last name.
“No names.” The man’s hands were all over her now, but it was an impersonal search, feeling for weapons. Lily was glad she hadn’t brought Greg’s gun. She forced herself to remain still, though the man knocked her cap off so that her hair fell down her shoulders and into her face.
“Pretty lady down here, unarmed . . . you must be out of your fucking mind.”
“William Tear, Dorian Rice, Jonathan. I need to speak to one of them.”
“Do you now? And what about?”
“Just give her to us,” another man’s voice floated out of the darkness behind Lily. “She’s wall bait, it’s all over her.”
A hand groped beneath Lily’s shirt, running across her naked shoulder. “Yup. Still tagged too.”
“Turn around,” the first voice ordered.
Lily turned and found a short, powerfully built black man in green army fatigues. Behind him were several other shadowy figures, their silhouettes barely visible through the fog that had begun to creep across the port. The man pressed a gun against her temple, and Lily willed herself to be calm, breathing slowly and easily, in through her nose and out through her mouth.
“You’re right, she’s from inside the wall. But trying to dress like outside.” The man leaned closer, breathing heavily in Lily’s face. “What are you doing here, wall lady?”
“I need to see one of them,” Lily repeated, hating her own voice. She sounded like a child stamping her feet on the floor. “You’re all in danger here.”
“What danger would that be?”
“Enough!” one of the shadows snarled. Lily couldn’t see his face. “My boss said to kill anyone who approached the building. Just hand her over. We haven’t had wall bait in a long time.”
“This is our territory. My leader decides what happens to an intruder.” The black man shook his head disgustedly before turning back to Lily. “You picked a bad night to wander down here, wall lady.”
“Please!” Lily begged. Time was ticking by, seconds rolling by constantly, impossible to get back. “Please. The better world.”
“What do you know about the better world?”
“I know that it’s close now. So close we can almost touch it.”
He blinked and then studied her for a moment, his dark eyes moving rapidly across her face. Lily felt herself being dissected from the inside out.
“What’s your name, wall lady?”
No names, Lily almost replied. But then her mother’s voice echoed through her head, a constant phrase from Lily’s childhood: Now is not the time to be smart.
“Lily Mayhew.”
The short man tapped at his ear. “Come back.”
He began to chatter rapidly in a language Lily didn’t recognize. It sounded vaguely like Arabic, but she couldn’t be sure. Her own name passed through the conversation, but Lily barely noticed; she was too busy watching the shadows who stood behind the man’s shoulder. Panic was trying to swarm in her head, which created multiple scenarios faster than she could ignore them: gang rape, torture, her own lifeless body floating in the Inner Harbor. The short man was with Tear, Lily felt certain, but at least some of these others were not, and they loomed out of the darkness, seeming ten feet tall in the fog. They made Lily think of Greg, and she suddenly saw him, clear in front of her, sitting up from the kitchen floor and opening his eyes. The image made Lily jump, as though someone had prodded her with something sharp.
“We’re taking her in,” the black man announced.
“In there?” One of the shadows detached itself and resolved into a tall man with messy blond hair, dressed in a flamboyant woman’s jacket of bright blue silk. The rest of his clothing was utterly destroyed, and as he drew nearer, Lily realized that she could smell him, a high stink of something rotten. She didn’t like his eyes either; they had a bulging, manic look that Lily recognized from grade school, where several kids in her class had already been addicted to meth. When the man spoke, she saw that his teeth were a black-stained ruin. “She’s not going anywhere near my boss. She could be wired.”
The black man shook his head wearily. “They’ll scan her for IEDs.”
“Not good enough.”
“You’re in our house.” The black man produced a second gun. “That means my leader’s orders stand. When we come down to Manhattan, you can make the decisions.” He turned back to Lily. “Lace your hands on the back of your head.”
Lily did.
“Walk to your right. Stay close to the building, and keep walking until I tell you to stop. Try anything creative and I won’t think twice before I shoot you in the head.”
Lily nodded jerkily.
“Blue Horizon my ass,” the man in the silk jacket muttered. “Bunch of pussies.”
The black man ignored him, prodding Lily forward. “Move. Now.”
Lily walked forward, concentrating on the ground ahead so that she didn’t stumble or stagger. The man with the two guns wasn’t bluffing; he had the air of the war vet about him, a quality Lily recognized from Jonathan. This man would do whatever needed to be done, even if that meant shooting Lily in the head and throwing her body into the harbor. She wondered what time it was, checked the instinctive motion to look at her watch. She was halfway down the corrugated side of the warehouse when the man said, “Stop.”
Another group had emerged from the fog on her right. The leader was hooded, carrying some kind of assault rifle on a strap over one shoulder. But as they neared, the hood came down, and Lily recognized those blonde Goth-girl knots with no trouble at all.
“Rich lady. You’re kidding me.”
Lily had stopped, but now the gun prodded her forward again. “I couldn’t reach Jonathan. They’re coming here. At dawn.”
Dorian’s face was marked up with black paint, but Lily still saw her brow furrow. “Who?”
“Security. All of them. You have to get out of here.”
“Is she nuts, coming down here?” the black man asked. “I didn’t want to take the chance.”
“Not nuts, no,” Dorian replied slowly.
“I’m not,” Lily blurted out. “I swear I’m not. Please . . . you have to get out of here.”
“We can make her talk,” the man in the blue jacket offered, and the eagerness in his voice made Lily’s stomach turn.
“Not a chance,” Dorian replied, and Lily heard real hatred in her voice. “I know your methods, you prick.”
“You and your precious better world, where everyone’s equal to everyone else. But they aren’t, are they? You and your boss still treat our people like shit.”
“Your people are shit. Shooting up and whoring each other out and killing each other for the clothes off your backs.”
Lily heard a dry click behind her. Dorian looked past her and raised her gun. “Don’t even think about it.”
“I’m thinking about it, cunt.”
The men behind Dorian moved forward and Lily saw that they were all armed with the same weaponry: gleaming black cylinders that looked like some sort of military hardware. Lily had never heard of a separatist attack on a federal armory . . . but of course, she wouldn’t have. Security would never release that information to the public.
“We’re wasting time!” the man in the blue jacket snapped.
Dorian ignored him, turning cold eyes back to Lily. “Consider what you’re doing here, Mrs. Mayhew. Because if I find out that you’re here to fuck us over, I’ll watch you die slow.”
“I’m not,” Lily insisted, trying not to let hurt creep into her voice, for she suddenly realized the staggering level of her own arrogance. In those few days in the nursery, she had convinced herself that she and Dorian had built up some sort of trust. But the divide between them was vast, and any dream of bridging it was a rich girl’s fantasy. “Security’s already surrounded this place, water and land. They’re coming in tomorrow.”
“How would a wall bitch know something like that?” asked one of the men behind her.
“This one might,” Dorian replied thoughtfully. “She married into the DOD.”
Lily blushed. Dorian’s tone made it sound as though Lily had married her cousin and joined a family of inbred lunatics in their shack.
“Scan her and bring her inside.”
Lily held still for the body scanner, though the black man gave her an extra sharp prod in the stomach. The scanner made her wonder, again, where they had gotten all of this hardware. Security equipment was supposed to be tagged upon manufacture. Had the Blue Horizon figured out a way to remove the tracking chips from equipment as well as people? When the scan was done, Dorian chattered the strange language into her own headset for a moment and then prodded Lily with the tip of her rifle.
“Inside.”
Lily went through the warehouse door, her hands still laced behind her head, and blinked as light assaulted her eyes, blinding her for a few moments. When she recovered, she found herself in a large room with corrugated metal walls. A small table was set up in the middle of the room, two men seated there. Lily first spotted Jonathan, standing behind a chair at the far end, and in the chair sat William Tear, staring with narrowed eyes at the man opposite. Dorian prodded Lily in the back with her rifle, and Lily marched forward. Several more guards moved to surround her now, though she was relieved to see that they only had pistols. Two of the guards were women, which surprised Lily; she had somehow assumed that Dorian was unique.
Tear looked up in annoyance as they approached, but as he spotted Lily, his face changed, became unreadable, and he stood up from his chair. The man at the near end of the table turned around, and Lily fought not to recoil. He had lost most of his face to acid, or something worse. Red, angry tissue covered his cheekbones and crawled over his forehead. His teeth were just as bad as those of the man outside.
“Nice, Tear,” the burned man rasped. “Your people let a Security agent through.”
“No,” Tear replied coldly. “Not sure what she is, Parker, but she’s not Security.”
“Look at her clothes. Whatever she is, she’s wall meat, and she’s seen my face.”
Parker came toward Lily. His disfigurement made him look simultaneously ancient and rapacious, and Lily shrank back. He reached out and grabbed her breast, roughly, wrenching it to the left, and Lily clamped her lips shut on a groan.
“Take your hands off her.” Tear’s voice had turned to ice now.
“Why should I?” Parker grabbed at Lily’s other breast, and her hand balled into a fist. But then she felt Dorian’s hand slide over her shoulder and clamp there, a warning. Lily closed her eyes, forced herself to be still.
“Because if you don’t, Parker, I break that hand and throw you out of here with nothing, none of my toys. How would you like that?”
Parker’s face twisted angrily, but he finally let go. Lily backed up, clutching her aching breast, until she bumped into Dorian’s rifle again. These people, Parker and his men, were what Lily had always pictured when she thought about life outside the wall: violent and careless, with none of the fundamental decency she sensed from Tear and his people. So what were they doing here?
Tear left the table and Jonathan followed, keeping close, in the same way that he did with Lily. His eyes constantly landed on Tear and then flitted away, anxious, looking for threats, and at that moment Lily realized that Jonathan had never really been her bodyguard. He was Tear’s man, and Lily had only been an incidental stop on the way.
Tear halted in front of her, and she was struck again by his military posture: straight, with the heels together. Time seemed to be slipping away again; she wished she could check her watch, but she kept her hands up. It would be long past midnight now. How many hours until dawn?
“Mrs. Mayhew. Why are you here?”
Lily took a deep breath and repeated the entire evening’s events, everything since Arnie Welch had shown up for dinner. She omitted nothing except Greg and the picture frame; when the moment came, she found herself unable to tell that story in front of all of these people. Tear’s gaze never wavered from her as she spoke, and Lily found that she had been right, that night in the nursery: his eyes were not grey but silver, a bright and glimmering silver. Lily had to fight not to look down.
“She’s lying,” Parker announced flatly, when Lily had finished.
Jonathan leaned over to whisper into Tear’s ear, and Tear nodded. “We did lose Goodin a week ago. Several bodies were burned beyond recovery in that explosion.”
“That’s an easy piece of bullshit for Security! They could have identified your man by dental records and then sent this whore in to tell a story.”
“Security doesn’t have any medical records on my people.”
“Someone else talked.”
“How did she know where to find us, then, Parker?” Tear’s voice thinned with contempt, but he turned to Dorian. “Dori. Take your boys out and have a look around. Thirty minutes.”
The gun barrel withdrew from Lily’s spine, and she shivered. Dorian’s hand squeezed her shoulder one last time, then left.
“So what to do with the whore?” Parker asked. His men had moved up to surround him, and Lily saw that they carried only knives or pistols, antiquated guns that must have been at least twenty years old, none of the heavy weaponry that Tear’s people were holding. Tear’s people seemed cleaner as well, as though they had access to plumbing. Here and there Lily saw crooked teeth, but none of them seemed to be rotten. The Blue Horizon clearly had their own doctors; did they have a dentist as well? Clothes, teeth, weapons . . . everything about Tear’s people seemed to be newer. Better.
What can he possibly want with these people?
“This is our house, Parker,” Tear replied. “The woman belongs to us. Jonathan, take her in the back and have a good time. Afterward, we might pass her around.” He sat back down at the table and gestured Parker into the other chair. “Let’s finish up.”
Jonathan grabbed Lily’s arm roughly and began dragging her toward a door at the far end of the room.
“Fight me,” he muttered. “Put on a show.”
This was actually a godsend. Lily’s nerves, frayed almost bare, suddenly sprang to life, and she hauled back and punched Jonathan in the face. He took a fistful of her hair and dragged her toward the door. Lily pawed ineffectually at his shoulder, and then they were through the door and Jonathan slammed it shut, then stood her up in front of him.
“Scream. As loud as you can.”
Lily drew a deep breath and screamed. Jonathan let her go on for perhaps two seconds and then clamped a hand over her mouth, muffling the scream into a grunt. He released her, and Lily moved over to perch on the arm of a puffy, misshapen chair that sat against the wall.
“Sorry about that, Mrs. M. It’s all these people understand.”
Jonathan hurried over to a door that stood open on the far side of the room. He shut the door, but not before Lily glimpsed something enormous in the warehouse space beyond: long bars of wood crisscrossed with horizontal beams that extended out of her range of vision. Lily had the impression of a massive skeleton, wooden goliath, half finished.
The skeleton of a ship.
She stared at Jonathan for several long minutes, her thoughts jumbling together around this new puzzle piece. Horses and medical equipment stolen. Transcontinental jets destroyed. Satellites brought down from the sky. A wooden ship being built by hand. The river-covered land that Lily had only glimpsed in her mind, a land where there was no Security, no surveillance, nothing.
And then she understood.
“You’re leaving. All of you are leaving.”
“I can’t talk about it, Mrs. M.”
The door slammed behind them and Tear stalked into the room. “It’s set. September first.”
“Parker gone?”
“No. He thinks he’ll get a crack at Mrs. Mayhew here. Animals, the lot.”
“What’s the word on the DOD feed?”
“Those three destroyers are still sitting a few miles outside the harbor. They’re not moving, just waiting.”
Lily’s mouth dropped open, and she stared at them, staggered. How could Tear have gotten into the Department of Defense?
The same way they can bring the satellites down from the sky and put out the power, her mind whispered. Technology is only as good as the people who supervise it.
“There’s radio silence all around the edge of the terminal,” Jonathan continued.
Tear nodded. “Hard to say when they’ll come, but I’m betting soon.”
Lily groaned, the truth tumbling into her stomach like a pile of rocks. “You already knew.”
“Yes.”
She sat down in the chair, covering her face with her hands. All of this . . . the entire journey, Greg . . . she had done it for nothing. She looked up at Jonathan, her cheeks blooming with furious color.
“I tried to save you the trip, Mrs. M.”
Another whoop came from the room outside, and Tear rolled his eyes. “That’s long enough, I suppose. Go and tell some heroic rape stories. Get them all ready to move as soon as Dori comes back. We’ll send Parker and his bunch out by the surface tunnels.”
Jonathan left, and Tear collapsed into an armchair near the door, perching his arms on his knees. The silver eyes gleamed at Lily, even from across the room. “I’m sorry for all of this. I’d like to shoot them as dogs, but I need them.”
“Why?”
“Because my people are valuable, Mrs. Mayhew. They’re intelligent and well trained. Brute force would be a waste of their talents.”
“What happens on September first?”
“Nothing you want to know about. How did you get here?”
“I drove.”
“Husband let you out in the middle of the night for a romp, did he?”
“I think I killed him.”
Tear looked up sharply.
“I bashed him on the head and left him there.” Lily didn’t want to keep talking, but it was like that night in the nursery; the words tumbled out. “He wanted to me to have a baby. He wanted to take me to an in vitro doctor. It didn’t matter what I wanted.”
Tear nodded. “It’s a problem. Women are selling their eggs for the price of a small bag of meth, but the rewards on the other end are enormous.”
Lily considered for a moment. “I wanted to kill him.”
“Well, you’ll be facing a world of hurt when you get home, one way or another.”
Lily nodded.
“Leave your car here. Security’s ringed the port; there’s no way you got in without their notice. They’ve seen your car and marked it as belonging to my people. Leave it here and Jonathan will take you home. You can claim you were carjacked and called him to come get you.”
“My tag will show I’ve been here.”
“That’s true,” he replied, and Lily saw that he’d only been trying to make her feel better.
Three quick knocks and Jonathan came back in. “Dori’s back, sir. Nothing new out there. I told Parker we’re leaving soon.”
“Is the gear all packed?”
“Five minutes.”
Tear gestured toward the closed door on the far side of the room. “Pity we didn’t have more notice. I hate to leave her here.”
“When?” Lily blurted out. “When are you leaving?”
“What makes you think we’re leaving?”
“You are,” Lily muttered, her throat hoarse with tears. “On a ship.”
“And where do you think we’re going?”
“To the better world.”
Tear leaned forward. Lily was struck again by his silver eyes, which seemed to reflect even the dim glow provided by the fluorescents. “Why did you come here, Mrs. Mayhew? This has nothing to do with you, and you took an enormous risk. Why?”
Lily couldn’t answer. As a child, she used to pick a single item and stare at it for as long as possible, until her eyes had dried out and her gaze had lost all focus. She remembered taking a vast pleasure in having her gaze so captured, in being transfixed, and now she could not take her eyes from William Tear. She followed each of his movements, even the small ones: the rapid flicker of his eyes across her face, the tap of his fingers on one knee, the clench of his jaw. All things seemed to center on Tear, to hinge on him.
I believe it.
In that moment, Lily believed it all. There was a better world out there, somehow, and it was close . . . almost within their reach. The wheat, the bright blue river, the endless trees. If Tear asked her to die for the better world, she would do it. She wouldn’t even need to think. And if he asked Lily to die for him, she would do that too. She had never felt anything so deeply in her life.
Her eyes had watered again; Lily tore her blurry gaze from Tear and wiped her arm across her face. When she looked up, she found Jonathan watching her, a small smile on his face. He reached out a hand and Lily clasped it in both of hers, gripping tightly. She didn’t want to let go; she thought she might drown.
“The better world,” she gasped. “I see it. All the time.”
“We all see it, Mrs. M.”
Tear reached beneath her chin and tipped her face up with one finger. His eyes were so brilliant now that they seemed to glow in the dim light. “What do you see, Lily?”
“Water,” Lily stammered. “Blue water, then cliffs, then land. Yellow land, covered with wheat. And there’s a village on a hill, next to a river. Children.”
“What are they doing?”
“I don’t know,” Lily admitted. “But they’re free. They’re all free.”
Tear smiled and released her chin. “This is the Blue Horizon.”
Lily began to cry.
“Five years ago,” Tear continued, “when we asked to secede, I had planned to create the better world myself, to take a small corner of America and remake it. Despite its blight, this country is an incredible creation, and a piece of it would have served us well. But it’s just as well they turned us down, for it would never have worked. Parker, people like him, they’re built to spoil things. They would never have left us alone. If not them, it would be your government, finding seller’s remorse ten or fifteen years down the line. If we made the better world in a place where others could reach it, they would only try to tear it down.”
Lily wiped away her tears. “There’s no more land. Where can you go?”
“The world is bigger than you think.”
“Why do they get to come along?” she asked. “Those people outside?”
“Parker’s people?” Tear chuckled bitterly. “Parker’s people sell their children and trade women for food. They don’t get anywhere near the better world.”
“Sir,” Jonathan muttered from the door. Listening, Lily heard voices raised in argument outside, then a quick, light hum that she thought might be silenced laser fire. Tear gestured for her to stand, and she pulled herself from the chair. She didn’t know how tired she was until she tried to stand up.
“I apologize, Lily, but there’s no way around this. Hold still and close your eyes.”
Lily shut her eyes. Her head rocked back as a short, sharp blow landed on the corner of her mouth. There was very little pain, but she tasted blood. Tear smeared the blood across her chin, then tore the neck of her shirt in two places. “Just for show; it’ll heal quickly. Don’t forget to limp.”
Jonathan opened the door and Tear dragged Lily outside. Dorian was blocking the doorway, her rifle trained on Parker and his men. They reminded Lily of wolves who had treed an animal.
“This bitch is out of her mind!” Parker shouted. “Tell her to stand down!”
“Security has ringed us. We need to get out of here now.”
“We didn’t see anyone.”
“Wonderful.” Tear’s voice was acid. “You have access to satellite imagery, do you?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fine. Stay and wait for them.”
Parker’s one good eye gleamed with hatred. “How do we get out?”
Tear bent to the floor and swung up a trapdoor, revealing steps that descended into darkness. Parker gave Dorian one last furious look, then squatted to peer down the stairs.
“Flashlights?”
“No flashlights. Our heat signature will be risky enough. It’s a straight shot through the tunnels into downtown Boston.”
“What about the wall bitch?”
“Jonathan likes her. He wants to take her with.”
Parker stared at Lily for a moment. “Ah well. Not long now, anyway.”
He made for the trapdoor, but Tear stopped him with a hand on his chest. “We have an agreement, Parker. September first.”
“September first,” Parker replied, grinning, and Lily saw so much pure evil in that grin that she had to close her eyes for a moment. She called up the real world and realized that it was now the early morning of August 30. “September first, and we have our carnival.”
Tear’s mouth twitched in disgust, but he nodded. “Into the tunnel. Look for a ladder beside a blue emergency light; it’ll bring you out beside Fenway.”
Parker and his men went first. Perhaps thirty of Tear’s people had returned to the warehouse and gathered around the trapdoor; most of them carried guns, like Dorian, but several had nothing, only small receivers tucked into their ears and tiny metallic threads coiled around their index fingers. Computer techs.
“Radio silence until you get outside the city,” Tear ordered. “We’ll meet at home.”
So Arnie had been wrong; this wasn’t their headquarters after all. Lily followed Jonathan down the stairs and then they were into blackness, nothing but scraping footsteps and the jingling of straps that held the guns. Dorian was somewhere behind her, Lily knew, and she took some comfort from that. Occasionally she heard squeaking sounds somewhere near her feet, but even the scurrying proximity of rats wasn’t particularly frightening. These were safe people, and Lily trusted them to keep her safe, no matter where they were going.
But what happens on September first? her mind asked, its tone plaintive. What’s the carnival?
After perhaps half a mile, someone coughed in the darkness ahead and Jonathan grabbed Lily’s arm, bringing her up short. Parker and his men kept on moving, up the corridor, the sounds of their passage growing fainter, diminishing into silence.
Jonathan pulled her to the right, whispering, “Stairs.”
Lily felt her way down another staircase. She had gotten a second wind for a while, but it was wearing off now, and she thought that soon she might simply collapse. But she kept going, determined not to slow them down, not to be—what had they called her?—a wall bitch. It was an eerily apt term; Lily applied it to most of her friends and found that it fit.
“Hold,” Tear announced, an eternity of time later. Lily paused, heard them all come to a halt around her.
“Bang.”
A deep thrumming echoed above their heads. The tunnel shook, concrete dust sifting down to land on Lily’s hair and face, getting into her eyes. A great breath of heat pushed against her back, and for a few moments, the tunnel was filled with a hollow roar of sound. Then it faded, and they stood once more in the quiet dark.
“The better world,” someone murmured.
“The better world,” they repeated, and Lily repeated it with them, liking the sound of her voice with theirs, hoping that no one would mind.
After a moment, as though by collective consent, the entire group began walking again. They were moving through a labyrinth of tunnels now, sometimes going up staircases, sometimes down, sometimes slipping through narrow crevices that made Lily feel claustrophobic, trapped. She kept going, focusing on the present, for the future was not to be considered. She couldn’t imagine what was waiting for her at home.
Perhaps twenty minutes later, she followed Jonathan up a ladder and emerged through an open manhole into a dark alley, where she found herself surrounded by dumpsters that clearly hadn’t been emptied in years.
“Help Dori up when she comes,” Tear told Jonathan. “She won’t want help, but do it anyway. That bullet hasn’t quite finished with her yet.”
Lily tucked her arms around herself. The air was warm in late August, but she was wet through with perspiration, and wind seemed to sneak up beneath her jacket.
What happens on September first?
“Get your fucking hand off me!” a voice hissed from the manhole.
“Shut up, Dori.” Jonathan hauled her up from the hole, rifle and all. “Everyone knows how tough you are.”
“I could put you down, South Carolina.”
“Sure you could.”
“We need to move.” Tear was staring at the mouth of the alley. Lily could see nothing, but she believed him; he reminded her of a dog on point, scenting danger that was invisible to the eye. After ten people had emerged from the manhole, Jonathan replaced the cover, and Lily remembered something Arnie had said once: that the Blue Horizon liked to split its forces to prevent losses. The rest must have moved on in the tunnel.
“Come on, Mrs. M.”
They went one at a time from the mouth of the alley, vanishing in all directions. Dorian touched Lily’s shoulder in passing, but when Lily turned, she was already gone. Tear tugged at her arm and they both followed Jonathan up a street that Lily didn’t recognize. Office buildings, long derelict, reared above both sidewalks. Each window seemed to tell its own story of breakage, and Lily heard the telltale sounds of people inside, shuffling and muttering, but she couldn’t see anyone. The glow of smog above their heads was beginning to dim with approaching dawn.
“Get the car,” Tear said, and Jonathan moved off into the mist. Lily swayed on her feet and Tear grabbed her elbow, steadying her.
“You’re in a lot of trouble, Mrs. Mayhew. Tell as good a story as you can about the car, but Security will eventually think to look up your tag. They’ll want to know what you were doing here.”
“Have you ever been in custody?”
“Yes.”
“What happens?”
“You try to live through it.”
“And what happens on September first?”
Tear’s jaw tightened. “I can’t tell you.”
“In case they torture me?”
“Yes.”
Lily considered this for a moment, feeling her stomach knot up. She closed her eyes, tried to think of the better world. But all she saw was the school doorway, Maddy’s tousled head disappearing forever. A car pulled up in front of them, and it took Lily a moment to recognize her Lexus, Jonathan at the wheel. The car’s sleek, black frame seemed alien, grotesque on this broken street.
“Get in. Jonathan will take you home.”
“Can’t I . . .” Lily took a deep breath. “Can’t I stay here, with all of you?”
Tear looked at her for a long moment. “No, Mrs. Mayhew. I’m sorry. There are already too many. A lot of good people will be left behind.”
Lily nodded, trying to force a smile, but Dorian’s voice rang in her head: The better world’s not for people like you. She got into the car, barely registering the plush leather seats. Tear began to close the door, and she grabbed his wrist, almost in desperation. “I don’t know how I get through this.”
Tear put a hand on her cheek. Warmth seemed to sink into her skin, bringing her back from the cold place in her head. “I promise you, you will get through it.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“Yes, I can. Believe me, you’re tougher than you imagine.”
“How do you know?”
He withdrew his hand, straightening up. The silver eyes glimmered. “I know, Lily. I’ve known you all my life.”
The door slammed in her face and a fist thumped twice on the roof. Jonathan floored it, and Lily was thrown back in her seat. She twisted around, wriggling until she could look out the back windshield and see William Tear staring after them, his tall frame standing military-straight under the lights of Boston.
They were halfway back to New Canaan before Jonathan said a word. Lily had spent the journey looking out the window, trying to think of a more plausible story for Security. She had nothing. With each mile, her stomach tightened, then tightened further, knots seemed to coil in on themselves until she thought she might be sick.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. M.”
Lily jumped. She had forgotten that someone else was in the car. She looked up and found Jonathan’s eyes on her in the rearview mirror.
“I think I killed him, Jonathan.”
“You had cause.”
Lily blushed. This was the closest they’d ever come to talking about that night . . . about any of the nights. “Security won’t care about that.”
“We look out for each other, Mrs. M. We take care of each other. Without that there’s nothing.”
“Won’t you be in trouble too? If they track this car?”
“I fixed the tag on this car a long time ago. It was in the garage most of the night, until you called and I came to pick you up.”
Lily nodded slowly. It boggled her mind, the world of hidden things that had undoubtedly been going on around her for years. Outside the window, another green sign flashed by: Tolland. The horizon was lightening, blush pink eating its way into the dark sky overhead. Lily stared at the pink haze, wishing she could see much farther east, all the way to the Atlantic, where the sun would already be up. She leaned against the window, enjoying its coolness on her cheek, and behind her eyes she saw the half-finished ship. There must be many more ships, she realized, hidden . . . where? All over New England? She thought she knew, now, what would happen on September first: they would leave, Tear and his people, and more than anything, Lily wanted to go with them, to that wide-open place covered in water and trees. In the distance, outside the glass, she heard a voice.
“Kelsea.”
Lily shook herself awake, but it was a losing battle. Half of her body was already fast asleep.
“Kelsea.”
“Mrs. M.?”
“Who’s Kelsea?” Lily murmured. The glass felt so cool, pillowing her cheek. She wanted to stay there forever, wanted—
Kelsea!”
She opened her eyes to a moving world, Pen shaking her shoulders. The hallway jumped wildly around her. For a moment she was back in the car, then she was back with Pen. Her head throbbed wildly. She felt sick.
“Lady, I had to wake you. It’s important.”
“What time is it?”
“Eleven in the morning.”
Kelsea shook her head, trying to clear it, trying to get her bearings. She was standing in the hallway, just outside the balcony room. The early sunrise was still bright in her mind, bruised pink. She could feel cool window glass on her cheek. “Well, what couldn’t wait?”
“The Mort, Lady. They’ve reached the walls.”
Kelsea’s heart sank. “We knew this was coming.”
“Yes, but Lady—”
“What?”
“The Red Queen. She’s come with them.”