* * *
BY THE TIME the streetcar deposited her in front of her hotel, Antaea was exhausted. She had been in Sere a few days now--long enough to have gotten over any residual nostalgia from her college days. The city was the same as always, after all: locked in permanent darkness, its mile-wide copper wheels lit only by gaslight. Rings of windows turned above her head, and the streets soared up to either side to join in an arch overhead; nothing unusual there. Each window, though, spoke of some isolated room, some tightly constrained human life. There were thousands of them.
It was raining, as it often did here. Rain was something that happened only in town wheels, and she'd used to think it was a wonderful novelty. The wheel cut into a cloud, and droplets of water that had been hanging in the weightless air suddenly became little missiles pelting in almost horizontally. They were cold, though. The novelty wore off fast; so she hunched her shoulders and trotted across the verdigris-mottled street to the hotel, where the permanent fans of light and shadow had faded the paint in the entryway, and thousands of footsteps had worn a gray smear in the once-red carpet.
The boy behind the desk sent her a covert, hostile glance as she walked past. It was the thousandth such glance today and she ignored it. They might hate her kind, but as long as she wore this uniform, no one would dare lay a hand on her.
In the elevator she pulled back her black hair and wiped the rain from her face. The dimly lit car thumped at each floor, monotonously counting its way up to her room. No one else got on or off. When it stopped, she fumbled for her key as she counted the doors to hers, and, in a state of nonthinking exhaustion, slid the key into the lock.
Antaea just had time to realize that the lights in the room were on before iron fingers clamped onto her wrist and yanked her arm behind her. She automatically went with the motion but before she could finish her recovery somebody'd kicked her leading foot out from under her, and then she hit the floor and the wind went out of her.
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
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
'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
'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.
