Fated Blades (Kinsmen)

“Pass,” he said.

She agreed. A formal spotlight on their activities was the last thing they needed.

“Two, we can get ourselves rescued. Your family or my family, take your pick.”

“Pass.”

She agreed again. “According to my OTC contact, the Vandals are too far out to pick us up with their sensors. Too much biomass and too much cloud cover. They would have to launch a probe, and with the OTC scrutinizing their every twitch, they won’t chance it. Right now, the Vandals don’t know if we’re dead or alive. They’ve registered the crash, they think we’re dead, and they’re doing their due diligence. But a moving aerial is a lot easier to spot than two humans in the old woods with a smoke-absorbing temple.”

“Which leaves us with the third option,” Matias said. “We play dead for three days, until the OTC chases the Vandals off.”

“It would be best if they thought we wouldn’t crash their party in Adra.”

Matias glanced at her. “Why do I have a feeling that more bad news is coming?”

“Janus got back to me.”

“The immigration guy with the spaniel?”

“Yes. We thought there were twenty-four Vandal ‘asylum seekers’ in Dahlia. We were half-right. Drewery had managed to push the second group through two days ago. It took a while for them to process, but they made planetfall this morning.”

“How many are waiting for us in Adra?”

“Fifty-four.”

His expression went blank.

The moment the Vandals recognized her and Matias, they would attack. They would hesitate to murder a senator’s daughter in public, but if she and Matias showed up, all bets would be off.

If the two of them boarded a vessel crewed by fifty-four people, Ramona wouldn’t even pause. In the crowded confines of a ship, they would go through any number of combatants like they were practice dummies. At the festival, out in the open, in front of thousands of bystanders, they would be overwhelmed and massacred. The Vandals wouldn’t even have to close in. They could just catch them in a crossfire. The seco shields weren’t omnidirectional. They could shield their front, but not their back.

Going to Adra was a death sentence. Even if they tried to hunt down the Vandal patrols to winnow their numbers, killing them without being noticed with thousands of tourists on the streets was impossible. And as soon as a patrol failed to come back in, the Vandals would go on full alert.

They could mobilize both of their families. Well, they could try. They’d have to explain that the research got stolen, how it got stolen, and who stole it, and then they would have to convince the families who had been enemies for centuries to work together. They’d have to beg, cajole, make promises, convince, and threaten, all of which would take too long, and in the end they would fail, because Matias was a Baena. If he convinced his family to work with hers, the Adlers would never accept that alliance.

Even if they succeeded by some cosmic miracle, their net gain would be six secare, only two of whom had recent battle experience. It would be a slaughter. And while the civilian authorities turned a blind eye to kinsmen disputes, the moment civilians got hurt, they would have a lot to answer for.

“We need more intel,” he said.

“I called Karion. If the Vandals are in Adra, he will find them.”

“Will he do it quietly enough?”

She turned her head and looked at him for a second.

“A dumb question,” he said. “Forget I said anything.”

Her brother would do it quietly. Karion was subtle, meticulous, and merciless.

The rain stopped. The last drops rolled off wet leaves, falling to the ground. The sky turned clear, and above them a universe glittered in a spray of stars. The Silver Sister, the smaller of the two moons, slipped out from behind retreating clouds, spilling a gauze of white-gold light onto the forest.

The temple turned transparent, the blue of its walls vanishing into the darkness. Only the silver web remained, glittering seemingly suspended in empty air. Under the trees, hundreds of rukta flowers unfurled, their translucent red petals revealing whorls of glowing white petals within. A delicate, sweet scent spread through the air. The forest turned ethereal, a magical place from one of the fairy-tale shows she used to watch as a child. She breathed in its fragrance, merged with its magic, and felt herself relax, muscle by muscle, as if inhaling the night air had purified her, purging fatigue, stress, and worry.

So, that is the glory of the temple. We give the ancients so little credit.

Matias rose and came to sit across from her, leaning on the other side of the doorway. He moved completely silently, his terrain suit shifting with blue and indigo as it mimicked the forest. His face was calm. Everything she knew about him told her that he was chewing on the problem, trying to dissect it into manageable pieces. But none of that effort was reflected in his expression.