Matias smiled. “She didn’t have to drag me very hard. I liked the flowers too.”
“I miss it. Back then, I thought that when I grew up, it would be always summer. I would do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted . . .”
He chuckled. It sounded bitter. “How long?”
“Since I spent a summer in the province? Four years.”
He held out his hand, showing her five fingers.
“Why do we do this to ourselves?” she wondered.
“Family. And the glamour of being kinsmen.” His words dripped sarcasm.
“So much glamour. Sometimes I am so glamorous I forget to take a shower for three days and sleep in my office.”
“Sleep? What is this luxury? Sleep is all about relaxation. Soft bed, warm covers. I haven’t slept since last month.”
She looked at him, not sure if he was joking. Today was the seventh. Technically, with the right boosters, it was possible.
“I don’t sleep. I pass out, and before that I lie awake making mental checklists, until my brain shuts down and the alarm goes off four hours later.”
“Thank the universe you got some sleep, because for a second there, I had second thoughts about you flying . . .”
He took his hands off the controls. The aerial dipped forward.
“Matias!”
He grinned and pulled the vehicle back up.
“If you’re too tired, I can take over,” she offered.
“I could fly this thing in my sleep.”
Sure, you could. “Bad choice of words.”
“It was on purpose.”
Ramona shook her head and accessed the dashboard display in front of her, pulling in the feed from the satellite. They were about ten minutes out from the senator’s villa. She called it up on the screen. A sprawling three-story mansion in the extravagant style of Third Wave, the final mass arrival of the settlers, it was built with pink marble and accented with Cellordion quartz trim that shone with bright crimson when it caught the sunlight.
What an enormous house.
The bottom floor was a massive cube with rounded edges, twenty meters tall and one hundred meters wide, with walls featuring towering arched windows. A smaller rounded cube—the top two floors—sat on top of that huge base, in the center. The space around those two floors was taken up by a beautifully landscaped park. Several curved paths meandered through the greenery and wound their way to the south corner of the structure, where a double staircase sliced through the first floor, leading down to a semicircular pool as big as a small lake. It looked like someone had taken a knife to an oversize three-tier cake and hacked off one of the bottom corners, and the liquid filling had leaked out of it in a round puddle.
Not a single sharp angle to be seen. Everything was cambers and arches, and the dark-red roof was a sinuous curve crowned by a cupola. Everything glittered with red quartz.
“Shiny,” she summarized.
“It’s meant to reassure voters of his traditional values.”
“It looks like rose wine cake. How big is it?”
“Almost twelve thousand square meters.”
The average home in New Delphi ran about two hundred square meters. “I didn’t realize politicians were paid that well.”
“Honest ones aren’t,” Matias said. “This is a monument to all of the bribes he took.”
Wow.
It wasn’t just the cost of the house. It was also the upkeep. Even if Drewery automated just about everything, the energy cost of cleaning and maintaining all that had to be staggering.
“Cassida is an only child,” she said. “It’s just him and his wife in that monstrosity. What does he even do with all of that space?”
“Some pretty amazing things. He has a library filled with antique books. Real paper, vacuum sealed. He has an indoor sports court. And there is a massive atrium in the middle of the house with its own tropical garden, saltwater pool, and an actual sand beach. The atrium alone is six thousand square meters.”
She stared at him.
“I’m not joking,” he said. “His wife is a fan of the tropics.”
The mansion filled the screen. The aerial’s camera couldn’t see it yet, but they were getting steadily closer.
“Do you have a plan?” she asked.
He glanced at her.
“He is a federal senator, after all.”
Rada was divided into provinces, each with its own provincial senate. In addition to that, every province sent federal senators to the planetary council, one representative per each million citizens. Dahlia had eleven federal senators, which made Drewery one of the eleven most powerful people in the province. Only the provincial governor held more authority.
“We can’t simply assault him,” she continued. “For one, there will be senatorial guards.”
“There won’t be. He declined the protection of the guard to ‘save the taxpayer money.’ The guard is loyal to the institution of the Federal Senate. He found the presence of so many eyes and ears he didn’t own inconvenient.”
“Private security, then,” she guessed.
“Most likely.”
That certainly made things easier. Still, their approach and everything they did inside the house would be recorded. There was no doubt that if they left Drewery alive—and they would have to leave him alive—he would use the record of their actions as a detonator to explode their families. The future of both the Adlers and the Baenas hinged on what they did next.