They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 05
Chapter 5 – The Oath
Nobody applauded.
Twenty-seven people sat very still while a five-foot-five eighteen-year-old walked to the front of the room to take
command of them.
“They’ll hate you by lunch,” Emmett said, pressing a tablet into my hands. “Files on all of them. Scores. Family. Psych. Build your teams by morning.”
“They can hate me,” I said. “They just have to survive me.”
He almost smiled.
Our quarters are the east wing of a stone building we share with a unit that’s been operational for nine years – Capo Dante Ricci’s unit, which everyone here discusses the way people discuss weather and war.
I read the files until three in the morning. I didn’t need them.
Here’s what a year of invisibility teaches you: how to watch. I’d spent fourteen days learning who flinched, who lied, who covered for somebody else’s mistake, who ate alone and pretended not to mind.
At 0800 I stood in front of them in the common room..
“Ines. You’ve already picked your team. Say it out loud and I’ll break you back down to junior.”
Ines shut her mouth.
“You’re not choosing friends. You’re building the thing that keeps you breathing.” I looked around the room. “Every one
of you has a flaw. I built your teams around the person who covers it. Argue after I’m finished.”
Nobody argued. Not once they heard the reasoning. There is nothing on this earth that shuts a person up faster than being seen accurately for the first time in their life.
Ines got the ground floor – five light sleepers between our wing and whatever walks in at night. She looked stunned
when I explained it.
“You put us on the door because you trust us?”
“I put you on the door because you’re the only ones who’d wake up.”
She stood straighter after that. Then she said, quietly, “We won’t embarrass you, Commander.”
I keep that sentence in my pocket for bad days.
We swore the oath at noon in the chapel – because of course it’s a chapel; these people never met a ritual they didn’t sharpen with eight instructors circling to catch anyone mouthing the words without saying them.
Do you swear your loyalty to the Table above your own blood?
“I swear.”
Do you swear to serve the truth even when it costs your own family?
“I swear.”
–
Twenty-eight voices, perfectly in time until the last line.
“Do you swear to take no lover within the Requiem, in your unit or any other – excepting only a lawful marriage?”
Four voices didn’t answer.
“We didn’t know that was in there,” one of them mumbled.
“It’s in there,” Emmett said, “because ninety years of history says that when armed people break up badly, somebody
ends up in a river.”
They swore it the second time. I made sure they understood exactly what happens if they break it.
Six months went by like a thrown knife.
We trained. We studied ninety years of sit-downs until we could recite them. We ate on our own floor, because our
kitchen was better and because I wanted my people bonded to each other, not scattered. We finished the program
three weeks early – the whole unit, together – which had never once happened.
I told my people what I am. All of them. I had to; secrets rot a unit from the inside.
I recited, word for word, a conversation each of them had had in front of me during the fortnight. Tomas went the
color of paper. Dara laughed and then stopped laughing.
They swore they’d never tell a soul – and Renata, who reads old family genealogies for fun, went very quiet and said,
“Siena. There are two bloodlines on record that ever produced that. Do you know what they used to do with the women
who had it?”
“Don’t,” I said.
“You need to know.”
“Not yet.”
I wasn’t ready. I’d spent a year deciding my family didn’t love me. I wasn’t ready to consider that they’d been terrified of
something.
We got four days of leave before we went operational. We spent them cooking, fighting about movies, and listening to Renata plan her wedding to Tomas out loud, because Tomas had turned nineteen and formally asked for her the first
hour he was legally allowed to.
On the last afternoon, I heard her on the stairs.
Renata doesn’t stomp. Renata doesn’t raise her voice. Renata is the calmest human being in my unit.
She came through the door shaking so hard she dropped the takeout bag.
Tomas was up in half a second, arms around her, growling something into her hair. Between her breathing and her
swearing I got the story in pieces.
Capo Marco Greco. Third son of the Greco family. Nine years in service. Uncle of the boy I got expelled.
He’d blocked her in a corridor with two of his men behind him. He’d told her exactly what he wanted, which room, and
what hour.
And when she said no, he smiled and said: “Then I’ll file a fitness report Monday, and your little girl commander won’t be able to save you.”
The room went very, very quiet.
I put down my coffee and stood up.
“Monday,” I said. “Monday is my first meeting at the Table.”
