“Help me get her inside.”
“What for?” Jonathan asked.
“Just help me.”
“What would Mr. M. say?”
Lily looked up at him, her voice sharpening. “It wouldn’t be the first secret we’ve kept, would it?”
“This is different.”
“Let’s get her up.”
“She’s not a random wall trespasser, Mrs. M. You hear those sirens? You think they aren’t for her?”
“Into the house. We’ll put her in the nursery. He’ll never know.”
“She needs a doctor.”
“Then we’ll get her one.”
“And then what? Doctors have to report gunshot wounds.”
Lily hauled the woman up, slipping an arm under her shoulders and wincing when the woman groaned. It seemed very important to hurry up and get the woman inside before she thought too hard about possible consequences, about Greg. “Come on, inside.”
Grumbling, Jonathan pitched in. Together, they helped the woman across the garden and into the house, an air-cooled oasis of darkness. By the time they reached the living room, the woman had dropped into unconsciousness and become much heavier than her skinny frame would have suggested. Lily groaned as they hauled her through the foyer, but her mind was already clocking off the things she would have to do. First, the surveillance. Lily had no backup footage of the living room and stairway, but she could do a onetime erase and Greg would chalk it up to a glitch … probably, her mind amended. The separatist’s shoes were covered with mud, and she had left several patches of it on the living room carpet. The house sterilized itself, but not that quickly. Lily would need to clean the mud up by hand before Greg came home.
They muscled the injured woman into the nursery and deposited her on the sofa. Lily could feel Jonathan’s glare, even before she looked up.
“What are you doing, Mrs. M.?”
“I don’t know,” Lily admitted. “I just …”
“What?”
A picture of Security popped into Lily’s head: the door through which they hustled people who never came out again. When Lily was a child, there hadn’t been such doors, and even as she became an adult, she had paid very little attention to the world changing around her; she often thought that it was this very inattention to implications, to the future, that had allowed her to marry Greg in the first place. Maddy had been the political one, the one who cared about the wider world. Lily’s immediate concerns were keeping the house running and dealing with Greg, finding ways to tiptoe around his newly volatile anger, to stay one step ahead of it. That was a full plate, certainly, but she couldn’t escape a nagging sense of shared responsibility, of many good people, all of them with their eyes on the ground, who had allowed the faceless door of Security to become the status quo. Maddy would not have allowed it, but Maddy had disappeared.
Jonathan was still waiting for an answer, but Lily couldn’t explain, not to him. Jonathan had been a Marine, had fought in Saudi Arabia in the final, desperate battle for the last of the world’s oil. He was a loyalist. He carried a gun.
“I’m not going to turn her in,” Lily finally replied. “Are you going to tell Greg?”
Jonathan looked down at the woman on the sofa, his gaze contemplative. “No ma’am. But you need to get her a doctor. If you don’t, she’s going to bleed to death right here on your couch.”
Lily ran though the list of local doctors she knew. Greg’s friends, none of them trustworthy. Their family doctor, Dr. Collins, had offices less than five miles away, in the center of town, but he wasn’t an option either. Dr. Collins had never asked Lily whether she wanted to have a baby. On her last visit, he’d told her that she needed to relax more during sex, that relaxing was a good way to conceive.
“My purse. There’s a card in there. My doctor in New York.”
“Davis? This isn’t his area. He’s a fixer.”
“He’s a fertility specialist!”
“Right, Mrs. M.”
She stared at him for a moment. “Are you going to tell Greg?”
Jonathan sighed, pulling the Lexus keys from his pocket. “Stay here. Keep pressure on the wound. I’ll be back with a doctor.”
“What doctor?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Not one of Greg’s friends?”
“Don’t worry about it, Mrs. M. You were right; we both know how to keep a secret.”
JONATHAN WAS GONE for more than an hour, giving Lily plenty of time to imagine the worst: Jonathan arrested for transporting an unlicensed physician; Jonathan unable to find a doctor at all; but mostly, Jonathan gone straight to Greg’s office, straight to Security, to tell them everything. Jonathan had been her bodyguard for nearly three years, Lily told herself, and he knew about Dr. Davis. If he’d wanted to get her in trouble, he could have done so a long time ago.
But still she was afraid.
The woman on the sofa was visibly dehydrating before Lily’s eyes. Her lips were chapped nearly white, and when she tried to speak, it was a hoarse croak. Lily went downstairs and filled a bowl with chipped ice. She didn’t know anything about taking care of sick people, but she’d had pneumonia when she was little, and for that entire week, all she could stand to eat was ice chips. She wet a cloth with freezing water and dumped it into the bowl as well.
When she returned, the woman on the sofa asked where she was. Lily tried to tell her, but the woman passed out again before she’d finished. Another three hours and Greg would be home. Where was Jonathan? And what was Lily doing anyway? The pills were one thing, one secret to keep, but hiding a person was something else.
“What’s your name?” Lily asked the woman when she woke up again.
“No names,” she whispered back. Lily felt as though she had heard those words before, perhaps on one of the government’s countless pamphlets and flyers. What had the woman been doing here? From time to time, Lily heard sirens cruising the neighborhood, sometimes far away and sometimes very close. She checked the news sites on the wall panel, but there was nothing, no local news about a trespasser or any nearby crime. She went out to the surveillance room and deleted that afternoon’s footage. There was always a chance that Greg had seen it in real time, but that was very unlikely today; at the end of his conference, Greg would be busily glad-handing before he got on the plane. On her way back to the nursery, she cleaned up the mud.
The woman was still unconscious. She was too young to be Maddy, yes, and a bit too tall as well, but still, it was almost like having a ghost on the sofa. As the afternoon advanced, the line of sun from the window moved across the woman’s shoulder and Lily spotted a scar there, just above the collarbone. Lily had a scar in the same place, a neat surgical line from having her tag implanted when she was young. But this scar was much more noticeable. It was not the thin, pristine line that a laser would leave. It looked as though it had been done with a scalpel.
Lily stared at the scar for a very long time, a wild idea taking hold in her mind: the woman had somehow removed her tag. That should have been impossible; each tag was armed with a toxin, a deadly chemical that would release on impact if anyone tried to tamper with the device. But the longer Lily considered the scar, the more certain she became: this woman had managed to get rid of her tag. She could move freely wherever she wanted, without Security tracking her every movement. Lily couldn’t even imagine what that would be like.
Jonathan finally came back at four, with a small, neat grey-haired man in tow. The little man looked just the way a doctor should look, to Lily’s mind; he wore a professional-looking grey suit and old-fashioned wire-frame glasses, and he carried a small black leather bag that clinked as he set it down. He ignored Lily entirely, going straight to the woman on the sofa. After a moment’s assessment he turned, speaking as he would to a nurse. “Boiling-hot water and some towels. Cotton towels.”