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.
He didn’t know how, and it was driving him up the wall.
Ramona stopped. “Thirty.”
He raised his eyebrows at her.
“If we are caught by the Vandals out in the open, we have about thirty seconds before they flank us and lay down intersecting fields of fire. Even if we charge them, they will fall back, fan out, and take us out.”
She picked up her bottle and drank from it.
His own estimate wasn’t much better.
Ramona tilted her head and studied him. “Can you dance?”
“Of course.”
Dancing was a mandatory part of their training. Four dances in total, each with its own tempo, passed down from generation to generation. It was martial arts set to music, designed to improve balance, flexibility, and timing and to teach flawless transition between battle forms. Enemies who witnessed secare dancing usually didn’t live to tell the tale.
“Dance with me,” she said.
They were stranded in the middle of the forest with two days’ worth of rations, waiting for the battle cruiser above their heads to leave so they could get on with their suicide run, and she wanted to dance. Not spar, dance.
He shrugged. “Why not?”
She turned slightly, left leg forward, right shoulder back, left arm raised. He recognized the stance. The spinner. He’d never danced it in pairs. This would require some adjustment.