They didn't send word ahead.
That was the first thing Nessa had said would happen — they won't announce themselves, they never do, the element of surprise is the first instrument they use — and she had been right about that the way she had been right about the check-in window and the scout protocol and the cold-stone frequency of the Ashborne-bound. She knew how they moved because she had moved that way herself for eleven years, and the knowing sat in her body like a language she had not chosen to learn but could not unlearn.
I felt them at the northern border at three in the morning.
Not scouts this time. Not the patient, observing cold of surveillance. This was different — deeper, older, the kind of frequency that had been running so long in proximity to something hollow that it had t
