The Invasion of the Tearling

by Erika Johansen

  There was no time to ponder it. Another Mort soldier came at him, this one left-handed, and Hall forgot about the hawks as he fought the man off. His helmet fell backward again, off his head, and Hall cursed as he threw it to the ground. Fighting without a helmet was a good way to die, but even death seemed like an acceptable outcome at this point. At least there would be sleep waiting there. Hall jabbed at the Mort, felt his sword clang harmlessly off the man’s iron breastplate. The damned Mort armor! A scream came from behind him, but Hall could not turn around, not even when warmth soaked the back of his neck.

  Someone launched into the Mort from the side, knocking him to the ground. Blaser, grappling with the soldier for a moment before clubbing him across the face. When the man lay still, Blaser got up and grabbed Hall’s arm, pulling him back toward the Tear line.

  “What is it? A retreat?”

  “Come, sir! The general!”

  They pushed their way back through, knocking aside several Mort along the way. Hall moved along in a dream. Everything seemed muted somehow: the sunlight, the sounds of battle, the stench, even the screams of the dying. But the waters of the Caddell were clear and sharp, a bright and sparkling red.

  Atop the knoll ahead, a group of soldiers were clustered, their faces grave. Something about this tableau shook Hall awake for the first time in days, and he began to run, Blaser at his side, heedless of the battle at the bottom of the hill.

  Bermond lay facedown in a heap. No one had dared touch him, so Hall squatted down and rolled him over. A collective groan went up from the assembled men; Bermond’s throat had been torn out, leaving only shreds of flesh that dangled on either side of his neck. His chest had been protected by his armor, but all four of his limbs had been shredded to pieces. His left arm was barely attached at the shoulder. His eyes gazed blankly at the sky from a face wet with blood.

  A few feet away, in the grass, Hall spotted Bermond’s helmet with its ridiculous blue plume. A silly affectation, that helmet, but Bermond had loved it, loved riding the Tearling with the plume waving jauntily in the breeze. A general for peace, not wartime, and Hall felt his throat tighten as he closed Bermond’s eyes.

  “Sir! We’re losing ground!”

  Hall straightened and saw that the Tear line was indeed weakening. At several points, the Mort had pushed the Tear neatly inward, like a pin in a cushion. Hall stared at the men around him—Blaser and Caffrey, Colonel Griffin, a young major whose name he didn’t know, several infantry—feeling at a loss. Promotion of a general required a formal procedure, approval by the Queen, a ceremony. Hall had stood right beside Bermond, years ago, when Queen Elyssa had invested him with command. At this moment the Queen was miles away, but when Hall looked around, he saw that all of them, even Griffin, were looking to him, waiting for orders. Queen or no, he was the general now.

  “Caffrey. Fall back to the next knoll.”

  Major Caffrey took off in a dead sprint down the hill.

  “You, Griffin. Pull the remainder of your battalion back and head for New London. Take the leftover material from the deserted areas of the refugee camp and barricade the bridge.”

  “A barricade of old furniture and tents won’t hold up for long.”

  “But it has to. Ask the Queen for extra lumber if you need to, but get it done. We’ll meet you there as soon as the evacuation’s complete.”

  Griffin turned and strode away. Hall returned his attention to the battlefield and saw that the Tear had already begun to retreat, inching up the gentle slope at the bottom of the knoll. He looked down at Bermond’s corpse and felt sorrow and exhaustion heave up inside him, but there was no time for either. The Mort were slowly creeping up the slope, accelerating the retreat. A deep voice bellowed orders behind the Mort line, and Hall knew, somehow, that it was General Ducarte, close to the battle now. Ducarte wasn’t one to hang back and keep his hands clean. He had come to see blood.

  “You.” Hall pointed to the two infantrymen. “Go with Griffin. Take the general’s body back to New London.”

  They lifted Bermond’s body and carried it down the other side of the knoll, toward the horses. Hall followed their passage for a moment, then lifted his eyes to the refugee camp. Defenseless people, an entire city.

  One more day, he thought, watching the Mort mass at the weakest point of the Tear line and charge, swords and freshly polished armor gleaming in the sunlight. They went through the Tear easily, breaking the line even as Hall’s soldiers scrambled to get back up the hill. Tear soldiers swarmed in, bolstering the gap, but the damage was done; there was a hole in Hall’s formations now, and they would have no time to regroup. The Mort pressed their advantage, massing at the weak point, forcing the Tear to fall backward and accommodate them. Bermond was dead, but Hall could still feel him somewhere, on the next hill perhaps, watching and evaluating, waiting to see what Hall would do next. The sun broke through the clouds and Hall drew his sword, relieved to find new life in the muscles of his arm, to find himself more awake than he had been in a long time. The Mort tore through the Tear line, a black mass that could not be defeated, and General Hall charged down the hill to meet them.

  Chapter 11

  Blue Horizon

  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.

  T
hree 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.