Fated Blades (Kinsmen #3)(34)

“I envied you when you left. I was fifteen, and I so wanted to trade places with you. I’m kind of glad I didn’t.”

He looked up at the night sky. “We are sheltered here on Rada. We live in our cozy homes, grow dahlias to impress our neighbors, and have our small feuds. This planet has never known a full-scale invasion by a superior military fleet. Most of us have never known war. I have seen firsthand what an orbital kinetic bombardment does to a city. The moment that salvager showed up in my office with the seco research data banks, everything else in my life no longer mattered. I knew then that I had to develop that tech and I had to control it, because if someone like SFR gets their hands on seco generators, they will become invincible. They will massacre system after system until they drench the sector in blood. As long as I breathe, neither the Vandals nor their parent asshole republic will ever touch it.”

She stared at him in silence, her eyes wide.

“Your turn,” he prompted. “Tell me why I have no room to talk about betrayal.”

Her face shut down. “It’s ancient history. It’s not important.”

“I want to know.”

“Matias . . .”

“We had a deal. Pay up.”

“Don’t make me tell you.” She almost begged.

“Ramona, you promised.”

She shut her eyes for a second, then opened them. “Have you ever wondered why two secare families ended up on the same planet in the same province?”

“Coincidence? Rada is beautiful.” To battle-hardened secare, it must’ve seemed like heaven.

She took a deep breath. “When the secare unit was made, the Sabetera Geniocracy offered them the Pact. Once the war was over, each secare would get one million credits and one hundred acres on the Sabetera world of their choice. After the end of the Second Outer Rim War, the Sabetera Geniocracy decided that secare were too dangerous to be freed. They went back on their word. They tried to kill the secare, but the unit had advance warning and they scattered.”

Suddenly he had a bad feeling.

“The Sabetera was determined to exterminate them. They made a deal with the five strongest secare in the unit to hunt down the others in exchange for money and power. Every secare knows these names, and they make sure their children learn them as well, so the treachery will never be forgotten. The five traitors are Whitney May, Hee Granados, Katia Parnell, Leland Dunlap-Whitaker, and Angelo Baena. Their hands are stained with the blood of their battle brothers and sisters.”

He felt a rush of cold.

“The Baena family settled on Rada because Angelo Baena chased my great-great-great-grandfather, Ray Adler, to this province. He was going to kill him and collect the bounty. He fell in love with a woman from Dahlia and chose to settle here instead, but not before he killed my great-great-great-grandmother. That’s why when Ray’s children grew up, they tried to wipe out your family twice. That’s why there can never be peace between our families, Matias.”

She rose and walked away into the forest.



Ramona was troubled.

Last night, he’d waited until she came back. She wasn’t gone long. She came in, settled under her blanket, and closed her eyes. He sat for a while, thinking things over, connecting the scattered bits and pieces of what he knew about his family into a picture and failing to make sense of it. He’d studied the family records with due diligence when he was an adolescent. It was part of his mandatory education, taught to him primarily so he could map out the complex interactions between the Baenas and the rest of the powerful families in the provinces. There was no mention of betrayal. No mention of becoming highly paid hitmen or hunting down fellow secare.

There were large gaps, however.

Finally, he went to sleep.

He woke up because she moved. Morning light bathed the woods. He saw her go into the forest again, and when she returned, he heard rustling behind the south wall and went to look.

Ramona had found the terrace.

All First Wave temples had one, a semicircle of stone floor where the outdoor part of the services had been performed centuries ago. The forest had attempted to claim it, but the terrace was raised, and it mostly succeeded in just wrapping it in vines. Ramona must’ve decided to clear it, because he found her cutting the vines away. He helped. They worked for the better part of the hour in silence until a crescent of white stone emerged, thirty meters wide and thirty meters long. Now she dashed around it, striking at the imaginary enemies.

Matias watched her out of the corner of his eye as she cycled through fight stances. She moved like water, smooth, seamlessly flowing from attack to defense and back to attack again, her seco snapping into blades one moment and morphing into shields the next. He recognized the stances. She was testing crowd-control forms.

He’d done the math this morning while dragging the vines off into the woods. The numbers were not on their side. Fifty-four Vandals. Hundreds of potential civilian casualties. Right now, he saw no way around it.

They needed more information. Until they knew more, there was nothing to be done. He’d pushed it out of his mind, but it clearly ate at Ramona. There was distance in her eyes. She wasn’t defeated. He had a feeling Ramona refused to acknowledge that concept. But she was grim and focused, like a cornered animal baring its teeth.

That look in her eyes bothered him. He wanted to make it go away. To fix everything.