Tennal had been right. Her bodyguards were paying attention, and nothing was private here. That was fine. Basavi was listening anyway. Tennal had no secrets.

“Dodging the question?” Tennal said.

His aunt made a casually rude gesture and opened a screen. Tennal didn’t realize what she was doing until an image flickered up. For one confused second, he thought it was the group shot he and Surit had found. The same faces stared back at him. His aunt, small and fierce. Oma wearing a sunny smile. Marit Yeni, looking neutral and so painfully like Surit that Tennal nearly bit his tongue. But this was new—this was a picture from his aunt’s private archives. They were all in a rec room. They were all in this room.

“We were volunteers,” the legislator said softly. “The most ambitious and reckless junior soldiers of our generation. Who else would take an experimental neuro procedure? They took the remnants, and they made us into something alien.”

Tennal inhaled sharply. Thoughts he didn’t want to remember came back to him. Surit had cut the sync because what they were turning into scared them both. And Tennal had almost ended the bond himself by throwing his mind into space—something that should not have been possible. Space was a physical plane, not somewhere you could extend your awareness. But if that was true, how did reader piloting work?

Space was a physical plane. Or rather: space was a physical plane for humans.

“You mean they turned you into architects,” he said. “Or readers, some of you.”

But the legislator had seen his face while he thought. “You’ve found out something, haven’t you?” she said. “No. They used the remnants to neuromodify us. In the early days, that meant all of us could read and write. They weren’t separate powers. But the experiment was unstable. A third of our group died. Some of the others…” The lines deepened at the corners of her mouth. “Thought they could run the world. Can’t blame them; lots of people have thought that even without neuro powers. The divisions were saber-rattling in any case, and each of us early volunteers was a weapon. So we started the war.”

“Wait,” Tennal said. “So it wasn’t a reader rebellion?”

“No. At that point, we could all do both. They stabilized us later by splitting our powers, because it turned out that human brains weren’t strong enough to handle it. I saw some of the volunteers who died … anyway. We don’t understand the remnants. I was stabilized into what we call an architect now, and here I am, twenty years later, so it hasn’t killed me yet. But the war wasn’t a reader rebellion. It was a fucking mess. The cease-fire needed a scapegoat.”

“And you picked readers,” Tennal said, feeling sick.