Why didn’t you tell Elvi that you’d assigned yourself a suicide mission? Surit thought, staring up at her face. Marit had given her life to the army, but she’d lived with Elvi for years and frozen her genes for Surit to be born. Why didn’t you leave any explanation for me? Didn’t we matter?

He looked up as Tennal emerged from the shower, doing up the tabs on the shoulders of his uniform.

“Tennal,” Surit said.

He didn’t give Tennal a chance to open his mouth. He threw the text onto the wall screen in front of him.

Three of Marit’s readers died in that lab.

It played through Surit’s head on loop. Three of Marit’s people had died—read: had been killed—in the neuromodification experiments in that lab. They hadn’t stopped at making the first neuromods. They’d moved on to new experiments, and they’d taken readers to do it, and those readers had died. Marit might not have been trying to seize power. She might have been trying to close the experiments down.

Tennal’s expression went through several journeys before he apparently remembered he was trying not to care.

“Look,” he said, “that’s shitty. I’m sorry. The army is the worst. But it was twenty years ago, Surit, I don’t know what you want me to—”

“What were they doing?” Surit said.

Tennal stopped talking.

“Marit went into that laboratory,” Surit said. “They invented the architects and the readers. The readers rebelled. Marit joined them—she joined the readers, so she must have thought they had a cause. And now this. Three of her fleet’s readers died. What were they doing, that the whole project was shut down after the war? Oma was there from the start. What does she know?”

A moment of silence. Tennal started to pace up and down the room, watching Surit warily. “All right. Let’s think about Oma. Here’s what we know about the Archer Link Station clusterfuck.” He held up a hand to tick off his fingers. “One: Oma deposed Governor Birimi on shaky grounds. Two: Oma impounded the Fractal Note and its whole fleet, maybe just because Archer likes fucking with Cavalry, but she coincidentally got her hands on a massive trove of remnants.”

“We brought her those,” Surit said automatically.

“Quiet, Lieutenant. Three: Oma came to power weirdly fast and has a bunch of architects under her who Birimi says are creepy. You say Oma was involved in the original neuromodification project—so was my aunt. I’m not surprised. Marit tried to shut that project down. Maybe she died to do it.”

Surit breathed out, remembering the weird moments of blankness he’d seen at the officers’ party. He turned the wristband over in his hands again.