Greg tugged harder now, pulling Lily’s hair, hurting her scalp, and she opened her mouth, not knowing if she meant to say it or not. Even if Dorian couldn’t eat solid food, she would need something; maybe Lily could bring her some soup. Chicken broth; that should be safe enough. That was what invalids always ate in books. Lily should give Dorian some books, too, from her hidden stash, so that she wouldn’t be bored.
“You do love me, don’t you Lil?”
What if she can’t read?
“Lil? Say you love me.”
“No.”
The word was out before she could pull it back, and Greg flung her across the living room, into the teak cabinet that housed the screen. Lily’s forehead hit first, splitting open and leaving a smear of blood on the dark wood. The cut didn’t hurt so much, but then her midsection also ran into the corner of the cabinet, knocking the wind out of her. It felt like someone had kicked her intestines in. Lily opened her mouth but couldn’t speak; her breath was stuck somewhere in her throat, trying to get down into her lungs, allowing only a series of hoarse gasps. Blood trickled into her left eye, and when she looked up, she saw Greg approaching through a haze of scarlet. The rug was scattered with drops of blood.
“What did you say to me?”
Good question. Lily had put a lock on her throat a long time ago, so that everything would need to pass through a filter before coming out. There was a very real lock there now, a physical one; she struggled to draw breath. But the other lock, the one that mattered . . . it had broken wide open. She wiped blood from her eye and braced herself as Greg bent down toward her. His face was red with anger, and the corners of his eyes had squeezed down into deep pockets, but the eyes themselves . . . they were empty.
“Want to apologize?”
Part of her did. If she apologized, and did it well, he would fuck her and then leave her alone for the rest of the night. If she wasn’t such a good actress, he might give her a few more sporting injuries and then fuck her anyway.
Going to be a bad night.
He was about to hit her again. His fist hadn’t even clenched, but over the past year Lily had developed good radar for such things. She sensed the oncoming blow, perhaps even before the impulse had left Greg’s own brain. She grabbed the leg of his grey suit pants with one bloody hand and pulled herself up into a crouch before he could jump backward. Her stomach was still hitching, but as she straightened and stood, everything relaxed inside her and she drew a pure, clean breath of air that seemed to fill her up.
“You got blood on my suit.” Greg’s tone was astonished, as though Lily had defied gravity. “Now I’ll have to change.”
“How terrible for you.”
He grabbed her by the hair and threw her out of the corner. Lily tripped over the coffee table, barking her shin and landing in a pile of government flyers that flew everywhere, scattering across the living room floor. She tried to shove herself up, but Greg was behind her, pushing her back down as if she weighed nothing, pinning her against the coffee table. He pulled up her dress, and Lily fought harder, suddenly understanding what was going to happen next. She thought of the woman in the nursery, the bullet hole in her stomach, how brave she’d been . . . she held the idea tightly as Greg ripped her panties off and shoved inside her. He’d planted his arm in the small of her back to keep her still, but Lily hitched involuntarily as she felt something tear deep inside her on the left side. A groan was climbing up the back of her throat, but she bit down on the skin of her hand. Greg would like it if she made a hurt sound. There was no logic to this, it was simply something she knew.
Movement from over her shoulder caught her eye. She looked backward, past Greg’s arm pinning her neck, and saw an upside-down Jonathan standing in the front hall behind her, frozen, his eyes wide. His car keys were still in his hand.
Shame crashed down on Lily. She did her best to hide the bruises, knowing very well that she wasn’t fooling anyone. Jonathan knew the score; he had taken her to the emergency room when Greg broke her arm. But this was much worse, and everything in Lily screamed that it had to be hidden. She couldn’t watch it reflected in anyone’s eyes but her own.
Jonathan took a step forward, reaching beneath his jacket and pulling out his gun.
Lily shook her head frantically. Jonathan could probably stop Greg, even without the gun; Greg was bigger, but Jonathan was combat-trained. But then what would happen? Greg would fire Jonathan without a thought, hire Lily a new bodyguard. Jonathan might even go to prison. And then what would happen to the woman in the nursery?
Or to me?
Jonathan took another silent step forward, raising the gun, his eyes fixed on Greg.
Lily drew a hitching breath and gasped, “No!”
This only served to egg Greg on; he began to thrust faster. But it had also stopped Jonathan. He paused, gun in hand, on the bottom step into the living room.
Lily gave him a small smile through gritted teeth, a smile meant to tell him that she would get through it, that she was looking beyond the next few minutes. She rolled her eyes to the left, toward the nursery. The separatist.
Jonathan hesitated for a long moment, eyes gleaming and hand clutching the banister. Then he tucked the gun back inside his jacket and disappeared into the shadows of the hallway, as silently as he’d come.
Two hours later, Lily hobbled slowly toward the nursery. She’d meant to check on the woman much sooner, but in the end she broke down and took a hot bath. Even after an hour soaking in the tub, she could barely walk. She would have taken some aspirin and gone to bed, but she didn’t like the idea of the injured woman sitting in the dark nursery alone. Lily didn’t know whether Jonathan had gone to check on her; he appeared to have disappeared from the property again.
Greg had gone to Washington for his crisis meeting at the Pentagon. Above the stone wall around the garden, Lily could still see the orange bloom of flames, the thick smoke that obscured the moon. They hadn’t been able to get the fire under control yet, and Pryor was still burning. Had Dorian Rice built the bomb herself? Where had she learned that kind of thing, young as she was? The Blue Horizon recruited many veterans, both men and women, who had returned from the oil wars to find themselves unemployed. But Dorian looked too young to have done a single tour of duty.
When Lily reached the nursery, she slid the dimmer switch on the wall panel up slowly, not wanting to scare the woman if she was asleep. But Dorian was awake, lying on the couch and staring at the ceiling, looking lucid for the first time. Lily set a bowl of broth and a glass of water on the table in front of her, and Dorian nodded thanks. She had sharp eyes; they tracked Lily’s every movement and grimace as she limped across the room.
“Looks like we’ve both been through it today,” Dorian remarked. “Where are we?”
“My nursery.” Lily reached the loose tile, but now she faced a logistical problem: squatting was simply not going to happen, not tonight. She was reduced to pawing at the tile with her toes. After an interminable period, during which she could feel the young woman’s eyes pinned to her back, she managed to work a toenail beneath the edge of the tile and flip it up and over. She bent one knee and stuck her other foot out, gracefully, like a ballet dancer, flipped two books out of the hole, and pushed them over to Dorian, who picked them up off the floor and flipped through them appreciatively.
“Where’s a woman like you get real books?”
Lily bit her lip, not sure how much to tell. What if this woman were taken for interrogation?
Dorian grinned, showing a missing incisor. “You’re already in plenty of trouble, honey.”
“There are a few other wives in the neighborhood who like to read. One of them has family in California with some kind of collection. They bring her books whenever they come to visit, and we pass them around.” Michele could also procure pharmaceutical-grade painkillers for anyone who needed them. Lily wished she had some now.
“Does anyone know I’m here?”
“Jonathan does
. He went to let some other people know.”
“I won’t be here long, then.”
“You can stay as long as you like.”
“Dangerous for you. I bet Security’s all over this town.”
“Yes.”
“When they don’t find me, they’ll start searching houses.”
Something new to worry about. But Dorian didn’t look particularly worried, so Lily shrugged and tried to look nonchalant as she sat down carefully in her favorite armchair. She tightened up everything in preparation for the landing, gritting her teeth, but when her ass met the cushion, it still started all over again. She should have taken the aspirin.
Dorian yawned. “I’m getting sleepy. If you decide to call Security, do me a favor and shoot me in the head first.”
“I won’t call anyone.”
“Good. Because I’m not going back into custody.”
Lily swallowed. She thought again of the blank door, that day in Manhattan, the group of uniformed men hustling the man in the suit inside. She had never found a single article or news report about what went on behind that door. “What’s it like?”
“What?”
“Custody.”
“Oh, it’s wonderful. They serve you steak and whisky, and when you go to bed, there’s a little mint waiting on your pillow.”
“I’m only curious.”
“Why do you care?”
“My sister—” But Lily found she couldn’t finish that thought. Did she really want to know what had happened to Maddy behind that door? “Nobody talks about it.”
Dorian shrugged. “It’s bad. For women especially.”
“Women have a bad time everywhere.”
“Oh, get off it, rich lady. Sure, you walked in here limping and shuffling, but we’ve all done that walk. You should be thankful he was the only one.”
Lily swallowed again. The throb between her legs, the raw-rubbed skin, suddenly felt much worse.
“I need to sleep. You can go.”
“I’ll stay until you’re asleep.”
“There’s no need for that.”
Lily leaned back in the armchair, crossing her arms.
“Fine. Christ.” Dorian closed her eyes. “Wake me up if he comes.”
Who? Lily almost asked, then answered herself: No names. She lit the small scented candle that sat on the table beside the armchair, then whispered to the house to turn off the overhead light. Shadows flickered on the walls, highlighting Lily as a matronly figure, an old woman in her rocking chair.
We’ve all done that walk.
She watched Dorian fall asleep. Her mind kept on trying to turn to Greg, to go over the evening, but Lily wouldn’t allow it. She would think about these things tomorrow, in the light of day . . . not now. But the images, the sensations, kept on coming, until she thought she might bolt from the chair and scream.
What would Maddy do?
But that was easy. Maddy wouldn’t have shied away from remembering. Maddy would have gone all the way through it. Maddy had always been tough, and Lily, who had been delighted at the idea of a younger sister, quickly became disenchanted when she realized that Maddy was never going to want to play any of the same games as herself: no dress-up, no beauty parlor, no cooking in the fake kitchen that sat in the corner of the living room. Maddy liked baseball, insisted on wearing pants. By the time she was twelve she was the best pitcher in the neighborhood, so good that the neighborhood boys not only allowed her to play in their impromptu baseball league but always picked her first.
But being a tomboy was only part of it. Maddy was much smaller than Lily, tiny and pixie-like, but she had no tolerance for bullshit. She was unable to keep silent, even when silence would save her trouble or pain. Their elementary school had had two bullies, and by the time Maddy started sixth grade, she had dealt with both of them. In eighth grade, she took several suspensions for arguing with the canned government information being peddled by her history teacher. Maddy was born to be a defender of the weak, of the helpless. Maddy was the first to tell Lily that millions of people were living outside the fences that surrounded Media, people who didn’t have enough food, people who owed so much money that they would never be free of their debts. Until then, Lily had had no idea that not everyone lived the way their family did. Dad told her the truth as well, but many years later, when Lily was fifteen. Even though Maddy was the youngest, Dad had clearly told her the truth of things long before.
The woman, Dorian, moaned in her sleep, jerking Lily back to the present. Drops of sweat gleamed on Dorian’s forehead in the candlelight. Lily cast around and found the bowl of melted ice she had brought up earlier. She hauled herself from the chair, wincing, dipped a towel in the cold water and wrung it out, and then placed it gently on Dorian’s forehead. The towel turned warm almost immediately, and Lily dipped it again, replaced it. She should get Dorian some aspirin. But no, the doctor had left some pills for fever. Lily seemed unable to feel sure of anything. She’d been at her father’s sickbed, but she didn’t know how to take care of sick people. The nurses and machines had done all of the work. Toward the end, when Dad was pumped full of drugs, he had asked for Maddy, and Lily couldn’t bring herself to explain where Maddy was, to make him go through it again. She had told him that Maddy was down the hall, talking to the doctor, but Dad kept on asking, right until the end. They had a special bond, Dad and Maddy, and because that bond seemed to have always been there, Lily had no time to develop resentment. Dad took Maddy to Phillies games in the summer, and he would sit with her in his study at night, the two of them reading endless books together. Even though Maddy was two years younger than Lily, she was the first to learn to read on her own. This was the crucial difference between the two of them, and the crucial similarity between Maddy and Dad: Maddy cared deeply about things.
“If we could be better people,” she would say, “if we could care about each other as much as we do about ourselves, think about it, Lily! Think what the world would be!”
Lily would nod, for this sounded good in theory, but Lily had no such deep drives; anything she cared about was discarded as uninteresting two months later. Maddy’s passions were exhausting. They demanded not only interest but commitment and effort. Sometimes Lily had wished that Maddy would just think about boys and clothes and music, as all of Lily’s friends did, as Lily did herself.
The candle flame flickered sharply, and Lily looked up at the walls, where the shadows of her familiar nursery furniture had turned grotesque in the thin candlelight. The house was supposed to be airtight, to protect against a chemical attack, but she felt a draft from somewhere, chilling her toes. The cold had not woken Dorian, though; she slept on peacefully, her head lolling sideways on the pillow. For a moment she looked so much like Maddy that Lily could almost believe this woman was her sister . . . but then the shadows shifted again, and the illusion was broken.
That Maddy would be politically active was almost a foregone conclusion. Their childhood was not a good time for anyone to be political, but Lily had only realized this years later, when she learned about the Frewell administration. One of Lily’s English teachers, Mr. Hawthorne, had disappeared when she was halfway through eighth grade, and Lily had not questioned the school’s announcement that Mr. Hawthorne had moved to California. Only in college did she remember that Mr. Hawthorne had been prone to sweeping pronouncements about the impact of religion on society, that he often assigned books with this theme. Back then, federal editing of individual works of literature was still new, and Mr. Hawthorne had always managed to secure the original versions for their readers. But one day he was simply gone, replaced with a substitute who used the approved editions. Mr. Hawthorne vanished perhaps two months before Maddy did, and Lily, who had barely cared at the time, often wondered now—again, in those moments before sleep, when everything took on an exaggerated importance and even fever dreams seemed reasonable—how he had gotten caught. A student, probably . . . a student as thoughtless as Lily, talking because
she loved to talk, meaning no harm.
She was being watched.
Lily knew it suddenly, in every nerve ending. Someone was standing just inside the door to the patio, looking down at her. Greg, back early, here to check on her, to see what his doll was up to. Greg didn’t come into the nursery, but that wouldn’t be the only line crossed tonight, would it? Lily would look up and see his grinning face, his bully’s cheerfulness, and she would have nothing left.
She made herself look up, and relief nearly choked her; it wasn’t Greg. The man had entered the room without making a sound, and now he leaned against the closed door, watching her. He was perhaps forty, a tall man with a military bearing that showed clearly despite his relaxed posture. He wore all black. His blond hair was cropped almost brutally short, but it suited the face beneath: a severe, clean-shaven face, all angles and hard curves.
“How is she?”
Lily blinked at his accent, which wasn’t American. “She’s fine. She’s got a fever, but the doctor said that might happen. I’ll stay with her until it breaks.”
The man inspected her closely, studying her face. “You’re Mrs. Mayhew.”
Lily nodded slowly, identifying the accent: English. She hadn’t heard an English voice in a long time. It had been more than ten years since Security had closed the border to the UK and expelled all of the Brits; what was he still doing here?
“Have you ever seen me before?” he asked.
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.” She was sure. She would have remembered this man; he exerted pull, a magnetism that Lily could feel all the way across the room. He lifted a black canvas bag, smaller than the doctor’s but still clearly medical; Lily heard the light ring of metal instruments inside when he set it on the table.
“I don’t know why you helped her, but thank you. Unexpected help is the best kind.”
“Why is it unexpected? Because I’m rich?”
“That, and your husband.”
For a moment, Lily could only think of the scene in the living room. Then she realized that he must be talking about Greg’s job. Greg didn’t work for the government, not exactly, but by now, Security practically was the government; in the eyes of the Blue Horizon, Greg was just as bad as any politician. The man’s eyes were beginning to hypnotize her; with an effort, Lily turned back to Dorian. “Why did she blow up the naval base? It seems so pointless.”