Oma didn’t answer him. She opened the lid of the box she’d taken from the cabinet.

As she opened it, Tennal immediately felt a buzzing in the back of his head. The first layer was a black cloth tray with a dozen pearly fragments embedded in it.

Then she lifted the tray, and what Tennal saw was a mass of opalescent fragments heaped on each other, filling the box in a glowing pile, dozens upon dozens. Hundreds.

Tennal’s mouth was open. He knew Surit had seen this when he found them, but Tennal himself had never come across more than one remnant in the same place. As Tennal watched, they seemed to move, like every fragment was a droplet in a wave. Then he blinked, and they were still.

“We used to call it the Constellation,” Oma said softly. “Rather beautiful, aren’t they? They were all found together. The biggest remnant discovery in our history.” Her hand hovered over them. “It’s inadvisable to touch them. But you do always feel a … compulsion.”

Pressure gripped Tennal’s chest. He tried to understand it. What he felt wasn’t a compulsion to touch them; what he felt was a deep and debilitating grief.

That was impossible to explain. Tennal didn’t bother to try: he knew remnants messed with your head. He was lucky he wasn’t smelling sounds and hearing colors. “Does the Resolution know we have these?”

“The Resolution doesn’t know. And it won’t as long as we keep the power usage low. The trick is to use one at a time.”

“One at a time?” Tennal said. “Is that how it works? The brainwashing?”

Oma said sorrowfully, “Brainwashing is a very loaded word.” She shut the box with careful hands. “Imagine this.”

Her mind cracked open like a fissure in the side of a volcano, and an image flooded Tennal’s brain.

Tennal saw a single point of light, with countless lines out to other points, like a hub and spokes. Each bright, glowing line felt alien. It felt, Tennal realized, like the remnants. Oma was the hub. Each other point was someone else’s mind.

“Calling it brainwashing really undersells the delicacy of it,” Oma said. She withdrew her mind; Tennal didn’t even understand what she’d done. It was like writing, only she’d made his eyes visualize something instead. That level of control was ridiculous. “It’s only an expansion of the neuroscience we already had. It’s a modification of the sync bond.”

“The sync,” Tennal repeated, trying to sound brightly clueless, which wasn’t hard.