Some heavy body was sitting on the small of her back, holding her wrists against the floor. She snarled, furious and humiliated.
"Just like I thought," said a familiar male voice. "She's wearing it."
"Crase?" She craned her neck and saw a small forest of black-clad shins and boots. After struggling to breathe for a few seconds, she managed, "What are you doing here?"
"Today, I'm chasing down an imposter." Lieutenant Anander Crase of the Virga Home Guard knelt to look into her face. "You've no right to wear that uniform. Not since the trial."
She hissed. "All I wanted to do was come home. Without the uniform, I'd have been arrested by now, or strung up by some vigilante gang. You know how they feel about winter wraiths here."
He'd been looking her in the eye, but now that she'd highlighted the racism they both knew was common here, his gaze slid away. "Why did you come back, then?" he asked sullenly. "If there's no welcome here for you?"
"It's not up to me to justify returning. It's up to them to justify keeping me out. Let me up," she added to whoever it was that sat on her back.
Crase looked up, shrugged. The pressure on Antaea's back eased, and she rolled into a crouch.
There were six of them, all men, only their standard-issue boots betraying that they were Home Guard. They'd tossed her room efficiently and ruthlessly. She almost smiled at the thought of how disappointed Crase must be at finding nothing.
He went to sit in the small suite's one chair. "You almost make sense," he said, "but not quite. You lived here for a while, but Abyss isn't your home. You grew up on the winter wraith fleet."
"--Which I did not want to return to. They're the most isolationist people in Virga, even if it's for good reason because normal people are always trying to kill them ... Crase, where did you expect me to go? I have no home anywhere. The Guard was my home. Without that..."
"You have friends here?" He was skirting very close to the truth, but she had no option now. She nodded.
He leaned forward in the chair. "Then where are they? And why did you use your disguise," he nodded to her frayed old uniform, "to wrangle your way onto a government-sponsored expedition today?"
"I'll tell you that if you tell me why the Guard is lying about the Crier in the Dark."
He exchanged a glance with another of the men. Then he stood up and walked up to loom over her. "I want you out of here on the next ship," he said. "None of this concerns you. You're not Home Guard anymore."
She could probably have put him and his friends on the floor, if she'd been training the way she used to. As it was, she had to stand there and take his intimidation. She hung her head, and consciously kept her hands from balling into fists.
Crase shoved past her, and he and his goons clotted the doorway. "You know what happens to people who pretend to be Guardsmen," he said before closing the door. "You got off lucky this time."
The click of the door locking itself surprised her into motion. Antaea went to her bags and began assessing what they'd done. Crase really had let her off easily; imposters usually disappeared. And though they'd gone through her luggage with trained efficiency, they hadn't taken anything. When she was sure of this, she sat down on the edge of the bed and let out a heavy sigh. Her chest hurt, and her arm. There would be finger-shaped bruises there later.
Crase might have stayed to interrogate her further, but they had a bit of a history. He knew her well enough to suspect that she was tougher than he was. She half-smiled at the thought, then reached into her jacket for the item that, if they'd frisked her, would have told them why she'd come here.
She hadn't lied about this being the only place where she had ties--it was just that those ties were almost impossibly thin, and left to herself, she would never have come back because of any of them.
The letter in her hands was so worn from travel and folding and refolding that it was practically falling apart. Still, she smoothed it carefully onto the bedspread. She didn't have to read it; she just needed the reassurance of knowing it existed at all.
Dear Antaea, it read.
My name is Leal Hieronyma Maspeth. I don't know if you remember me, I studied with your sister at the academy. We had supper together, the three of us, one time. Your sister once told me she wanted to join the Home Guard and I told her it was a myth. I guess I was wrong.
She did remember Leal Maspeth; she'd been her sister's timid, academically minded roommate when Telen went to college here in the city of Sere. Maspeth was one of the few people in the world who'd known of Telen and Antaea's plan to track down the supposedly mythical Virga Home Guard and join up.
I'm writing you, Maspeth continued, because we have a problem, and the government refuses to admit to it, and they refuse to let the Home Guard in to investigate. I don't know who else to turn to, so I've asked the Guard to bring this letter to Slipstream and maybe they can get it to you.
There is something in the dark.
Antaea stood and walked to the window. It looked out over Rowan Wheel's main street, providing an unchanging vista of lit windows and deep shadow. No sun ever rose here. No one born and raised in Abyss should be afraid of the dark.
Nobody will talk about it. Officially, things are fine. But people have been disappearing--whole town wheels! They're outlier communities, fringe places whose people only show up to market once or twice a year. Now they're not showing up at all. Far as we are from any sun, the darkness has always seemed normal. You know, you grew up here. Lately, though, it broods. I believe something has awakened in one of the cold abandoned places of the world. It is picking off the weak and those who get separated from the group and it is growing bolder.
If you make inquiries no one will admit to anything, so don't even try! I know I'm asking a lot, but you must trust me. We need someone who has experience with this world's mysteries, Antaea. We need a hunter.
Nobody cares about Abyss. We're all like you and Telen, as far as the sunlit countries are concerned: just winter wraiths of no account. Maybe you no longer care about your old home, either, in which case I shall never hear from you.
But if you do care--if you believe me even a little--please come home. I don't know who else to turn to.
--Leal Maspeth
Once, the darkness hadn't bothered Antaea, either. There had been a time when she wondered what waited there--oh, not in the unlit cloud banks and fungal mists beyond the lights of Sere, but beyond: past the iceberg-choked walls of Virga itself, in the vast universe that bounded and, lately, threatened this little world. Telen had wondered and had found out, and been more than killed for that knowledge. Antaea had chased her, too late to catch her, and didn't know what it was that she'd found other than that it was horrible.
Leal Maspeth was missing, too. The government wouldn't talk about it; the officials Antaea had spoken to acted like she should already know, and she'd been afraid to push lest they begin to question her authenticity. So far, though, Antaea had learned that somehow, impossibly, timid little Leal had gotten to know the famous sun lighter and adventurer Hayden Griffin, and then ... The rumors spoke of murder and of the Crier in the Dark, and then she was gone.
Antaea unbuttoned her jacket, aware with each twist of her fingers that she would never be putting it on again. She'd kept it out of sentimentality uncommon for her; it was time to let it go. She dropped it on the bed and forced herself to turn away.