“It felt like we weren’t going to exist as separate halves much longer,” Tennal admitted. It didn’t sound any better when he verbalized it. “It felt like we were turning into something else.”

“You never said that part,” Basavi said.

“Surit thought it would be bad for morale.”

“You could have said,” Basavi said, in a slightly off-balance voice that proved Surit’s morale point.

Tennal took a deep breath. “I don’t know anything about remnants, except that they were made by weird aliens who don’t seem to be around anymore, and the Resolution prefers to keep them in a freezer. But is it possible the remnants they used for the experiments are … the body of something?”

“That’s one of the Resolution’s theories,” the legislator said.

“That’s absurd, though,” Tennal felt obliged to point out. “That’s not a bone or a fossil or anything organic. That’s a weird rock.”

“What’s a body?” the legislator said. “We don’t have a good concept of what they considered physically a part of them. All I know is that we transferred something from the remnants when we used them, and then the same thing showed up in our kids. Maybe there’s a good reason the Resolution wants to sit on these, but just because early humans didn’t understand fire, it doesn’t mean they didn’t use it.”

Tennal looked away from the remnant. A curl of horror sat in his stomach. “So what me and Surit felt was an echo of something dead,” he said, trying not to listen to his own voice. “Our parents used a remnant to alter their brains, and a generation later, we can still hear it.”

“I don’t know why you’re so squeamish,” the legislator said. “We used a corpse for its materials. We eat food from the earth our ancestors rotted in. Everything goes in cycles.”

Not like that, Tennal wanted to say, but he couldn’t put words to what he felt. His reader powers must be the same thing: a sliver of a dead alien. And they were a part of him as much as his arms or his legs.

“You were a reader, sir,” Basavi said suddenly, as if she’d been thinking about it.

The legislator gave her another of those slightly surprised looks. “Somewhat complicated, Private.”

“Lights, give her a straight answer,” Tennal said. Basavi deserved it if anyone did; she’d hidden her powers for years.

The legislator paused, as if editing the swear words out of her sentence. “I had reader abilities. And I came out as an architect in the split. Yes. The separation was something we invented.”

“You were a reader,” Basavi said, “and you still let everyone believe readers can’t be trusted?”