But Tennal had his own way of doing things. “What the fuck is going on, sir?” he said. “You know Oma is brainwashing people? Using the remnants that came from here! How come we didn’t know that was possible?”

“Mm, I thought so,” the legislator said. “She always made such a song and dance of not caring about the research and wanting it to stay dead. I should have guessed she had her sources in the project.”

“The project?”

“Oh, there’s no conspiracy,” the legislator said, then seemed to reconsider. “Well, only as much as all the research was under confidentiality seals. It was years ago.” She sighed. “What do you know about the first neuromodifications?”

“The first architects and readers were made twenty years ago in a military lab,” Tennal said. You couldn’t go through the Orshan school system without picking that up. He glanced around. “This lab, right?” The legislator nodded, her eyes hooded. “Great. We’re all on a little living history tour. How fun for us. They invented readers and architects to help defend Orshan. You were one of them; you were in the first wave. Our textbooks never said what they were meant to defend us from, since no other sector can invade us without breaking their Resolution treaty, but after my brief and exciting military career, I can only assume it was to give one faction an edge in the next civil war.”

“Not far off,” the legislator said. “Go on.”

“It turned out readers were harder to control,” Tennal said. “The first readers went rogue and started a coup. Marit Yeni joined them. There weren’t enough architects to stop them. The divisions panicked, scaled up the production facilities, and started making architects out of all the soldiers they could fly in. Hundreds of thousands of people got turned into architects, including”—he hesitated—“my gen-parent. Your sister. And, ta-da, with all those architects, they crushed the rebellion without much problem. That’s when they came up with the solution of syncing rogue readers. Oh yes, and then the Resolution noticed what we were doing, took away most of our remnants, and nearly kicked us out of the treaty on top of it.”

“We were lucky with our allies in the Resolution,” the legislator said shortly, “or we’d be having a different conversation right now under another sector’s rule. But the official story of the reader rebellion isn’t what happened.”

“You shock me,” Tennal said. “I’m floored. Stunned. Baffled.” His eyes hadn’t left her face. “What happened, Auntie? We found a picture of you and Oma in Marit Yeni’s storage. You were all … here.”

The legislator winced, then hesitated, then made a control gesture over her wristband. “Bring me one of the salvage cases,” she said. A voice snapped an acknowledgment.