“Only crossing,” Kelsea whispered, clutching her sapphires. Who had said that? She couldn’t remember anymore. “Only crossing.”
“Lady?”
“I’m going back, Pen.”
“Back where?” Elston asked crossly. “Sooner or later, Lady, you’ll have to sleep.”
“Back under, I think,” Pen replied, but his voice was already distant. Dimly, Kelsea remembered something she was supposed to do, something about the Red Queen. But Lily took precedence now. Another flash intruded: Lily being pulled from the truck and marched down a long staircase, her eyes blinded by glaring fluorescent light. A wave of nausea broke over Kelsea like a wave, and she remembered that Lily had hit the double doors headfirst. Did she have a concussion? “You stay, Pen. Don’t let me fall.”
“Go, El.”
“I’ll get the Captain,” Elston muttered. “Christ, what a mess it all turned out to be.”
He said the last bit quietly, as though hoping Kelsea wouldn’t hear. But if she could have found her voice, she would have agreed with him. It had all gone wrong, but where was the tipping point? Where had all of her good intentions fallen apart? Lily’s feet tangled on the stairs, and Kelsea lurched forward. She grabbed for the armrail, found there was none, and stumbled.
“Get the fuck up!”
“Lady?”
GET THE FUCK up!”
Lily pushed herself off the wall and regained her feet.
These were not the polite guards of the New Canaan Security station. Four men surrounded Lily; three carried small oblong objects, some sort of electrical prod, while the fourth carried a gun.
Lily needed a doctor. None of the cuts on her arms had been very deep; they were already beginning to scab. But she had taken an ugly slice on her scalp when she went through the glass doors, and blood was steadily oozing through the hair on the right side of her head. From time to time nausea beset her; the last attack had been so bad that she nearly collapsed. But she fought it, hard, because those taser-type weapons looked well used. As a child, Lily had once stuck her finger into the socket of a desk lamp that was missing its bulb, and she would never forget the brief, burning agony that had taken her hand in that moment. The four men who surrounded her didn’t seem the sort to think twice before giving her a jolt.
They had kept her at the New Canaan station until early afternoon, in a dingy cell that was still years removed from the terrible conditions Lily would have imagined. There was no one else in the cell with her; it was dirty from disuse, not overuse. New Canaan’s Security probably never hosted prisoners; there was no petty crime there. Lily was in the cell for hours, but she never spotted so much as a single roach. She hadn’t slept in more than thirty hours, and she was exhausted. Hungry too, but the sharpness of that hunger quickly began to fade against her thirst. She didn’t know if they would have given her water at the station, but she had forgotten to ask. Now her throat felt as though someone had gone at it with sandpaper.
When the sun was just beginning to set, they had taken her from the cell and loaded her onto another truck. Lily didn’t know how long the journey had been, only that night fell long before they came to a halt, and when they pulled her from the truck, she found herself in a wasteland of bright fluorescence and asphalt. The better world had never seemed farther away than it did in that moment, Lily freezing cold from the long journey in only her T-shirt and jeans, blinded by the bright lights and the slow trickle of blood from her scalp. She tried to remember why she was here, but at that moment William Tear and his people seemed infinitely distant. Tracking backward through her memory, Lily realized that it was still only August 30, that September first was still two days away. Two days until the carnival, Parker had said, but Tear would never let a creature like Parker into his better world. So what was the carnival?
What does it matter now?
But no matter how many times Lily had asked herself this question during the interminable truck ride, she remained unconvinced. Carnivals were excess and abandon, doing anything you liked. Lily was no extraordinary empathist, but it took only a few minutes for her mind to slip into Parker’s, conjure an image, and spread it out before her like a mural. Parker’s carnival would be the same as any other: excess and abandon, brought now into the limitless range of the monstrous, troubled world they all lived in, a world of walls that separated the privileged from the deprived. And the deprived were angry. Lily’s mind created the pictures faster than she could push them away, and by the time they reached the Security compound, she had seen the end of the world inside her head, a bacchanal of rage and revenge. Parker’s glee was easy to understand now; he might be too debased for the better world, but on the first of September, Tear meant to turn him loose in this one.
I should tell Security, Lily thought. I should warn someone.
But that was impossible. Even if anyone would believe her, there was no way to tell them about Parker without also telling them about Tear. They were going to ask her about Tear anyway, no doubt, and despite Tear’s words, Lily suspected that she wouldn’t last long under interrogation.
I can’t tell them anything. Lily steeled herself against another wave of nausea. I keep quiet until the second of September. That’s my job. It’s all I can do for them now.
One of the guards opened a plain black metal door and stood back. “Find her an empty room.”
They marched Lily down a dark, narrow corridor filled with doors. Lily was swamped with sudden déjà vu, so strong that it crashed over her mind like a wave, obscuring everything. She had been here before. She was certain of it.
They sat her down in a small room whose fluorescent light barely provided enough of a thin, sickly glow to illuminate a steel table and two chairs that were bolted to the ground. The man with the gun cuffed Lily to the chair, and then she was left, staring blankly at the wall, as the door closed behind them.
Greg was dead. Lily kept this idea firmly in front of her, for despite her current predicament, there was comfort in it. No matter what happened now, it would not be Greg, not ever again. She fell asleep and dreamed that she was back in the backyard, trying to crawl toward the kitchen door. Something terrible was behind her, and Lily knew that if she could only reach the door, there would be solace there. She was searching for the door handle when a hand grabbed her ankle, making her scream. The backyard blew apart and now she was in the long, door-filled corridor again, stumbling along, lost. The light was a dim orange: not fluorescents, but torchlight, and Greg was no longer important, Greg was nothing, because she held a great fate in her hands, the fate of a country, the fate of—
“The Tearling,” Lily muttered, jerking awake. The dream dissolved, leaving her with the confused afterimage of a torch behind her eyes. Someone had just doused her with water. She was soaking wet.
“There you are.”
The back of the chair seemed to have dug claws into her spine, and Lily groaned as she straightened. She felt as though she had slept for hours. It might even be morning, but there was no way to tell inside this tiny, cramped room.
Across from her sat a thin blade of a man with a pointed face and wide dark eyes punctuated by arching, neatly sculpted black eyebrows. His legs were crossed, one on top of the other, his hands folded on his knee. His posture was very prim, but somehow it fit the room around him. Beneath his dark Security uniform, the man looked like an accountant with several secret nasty habits. He had brought up a screen on the table beneath him, and Lily saw her own upside-down face peering at her from the steel surface.