Fated Blades (Kinsmen)

“You and I are in-laws!” Drewery snarled. “If you release any of this, you’ll get splattered with the same mud. The media will go after you.”

Matias shrugged. “But unlike you, I run a clean business, and I’ve taken steps to guard myself. What was it you said? ‘I will survive this. You won’t be so lucky.’ I’ve sent the first part to my favorite reporter. She is bright and very hungry.”

Drewery grabbed an ornate, heavy statuette of some weird herbivore off his desk and hurled it at Matias. Matias stepped out of the way, and the statuette smashed into the wall.

“Today the chemical spill, tomorrow the orbital station; I’ll let you pick the third. We have so many to choose from. You might survive one, but can you survive all of them, and how many people will sit idly by waiting for you to drag them down with you?”

Drewery cursed.

“First, you’ll be an embarrassment, then a liability. Your former friends will line up to silence you. One day you will simply vanish. I must say, I’m looking forward to it, Senator.” Matias’s eyes turned dark, and she saw the shadow of death on his face. “I’ve waited for this moment for a long time.”

Drewery grabbed Lyla’s hand.

“Pack.”

“What?” Lyla stared at him.

“Pack. Do it now. We’re leaving the system.” He marched toward the doorway, dragging her with him.

“What do you mean leaving? This is our home. Cassida is here! My life is here! I have a charity dinner tonight . . .”

He pulled her out of the room, and Lyla’s voice faded.

Ramona pivoted to Matias. He stood in the middle of the room, a small smile stretching his lips.

“Was it good for you?” she asked.

“The best.” He grinned at her like a lunatic and laughed.

CHAPTER 6

Ramona opened her eyes. In front of her, a window offered a view of Dahlia wilderness. Huge feather trees spread whorls of narrow silver fronds. Technically, they weren’t trees at all, but giant grasses stretching seventy meters into the air with trunks five meters across at the base. Between them, blue-green Rada evaners, deciduous giants, thrust their massive branches to the sky, each bearing hundreds of thousands of turquoise and indigo leaves. Here and there stranglers flared among the foliage, their distinctive orange leaves and bulbous fruit blazing against the blue-green canopy. Stranglers started their lives as parasitic vines that climbed their host tree to the sunlight, draining it of nutrients and water until it withered and only the strangler remained, now a thriving columnar tree.

It took her a second to remember where she was. Her back ached. A slow soft pain washed over her hips. At least her mouth had stopped bleeding and her vision no longer blurred at the edges.

Ramona glanced at Matias in the pilot seat. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Her body made that decision on its own. Using seco exacted its price. The secare ate like pigs and slept like the dead, unless they were in enemy territory.

If she told her family who had watched over her while she’d slept, they would never believe it.

The way they’d battled through the Drewery mansion troubled her. She’d fought beside her brothers before. She and her siblings were trained by the same person, their mother. They started with the same dances as children, and then, as their seco matured, they sliced through the same practice targets, and finally, when their family was put to a test by kinsmen feuds, they killed side by side. But there was never the kind of synergy she experienced with Matias.

She and Matias didn’t fight in the same way. Their technique differed, but it didn’t matter. They moved at the same time, coordinating their defense and attacks without speaking. It was as if they had the exact same instincts.

It was the closest she’d ever come to synchronization.

The original secare fought in pairs. It maximized their survivability and target range. A single secare covered a 180-degree target field in front of them. A pair standing back-to-back covered the entire 360. But synchronization was more than simply doubling the shields and the blades.

Something unexplainable happened when two secare synchronized. Ray Adler, her distant ancestor who’d made Rada his home, called it “a perfect harmony” in his notes. He wrote of a bond, a connection that happened on a seco level that was “stronger than love and family.” Even in his time, in the original unit, the nature of that connection wasn’t understood and not every secare found one, but those who did became more than the sum of their parts.

It was said that a synchronized pair of secare could empty a dreadnought of its marines and crew in mere hours. Two against hundreds, sometimes thousands of combatants. It seemed almost mythical, a legend rather than reality.

Ray Adler had also blamed that connection for the death of his wife. He left no instructions on how it might be achieved. He stopped short of condemning it, but it was clear he thought his descendants would be better off without it.