“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.