It should have been satisfying. Instead Tennal was surprised to look inside himself and find only a sober heaviness. It wasn’t even a choice anymore. Zin was on this side of the link and probably always would be. Surit was somewhere in the sector and needed Tennal. And his aunt, whom he’d always thought he’d run to the end of the universe to escape, was glaring at him from six feet away, after admitting she would have murdered a stranger for him without regret—and that was something Tennal set aside to think about later, maybe after the heat death of the universe. “No,” he said. “No, I’m staying. But I have to find Surit, and I don’t trust you with him.”

The legislator narrowed her eyes. “You can’t go off on a half-assed rescue mission now,” she said. “It’ll take you months of treatment to finish bringing out your architect powers. You’ll need the medic I gave you. It won’t be comfortable, but—”

“I’m not turning into an architect,” Tennal said. “I need to sync with Surit.”

“You got this far,” the legislator said incredulously. “You’d throw it all away to go back into a sync? You said yourself the sync was killing you.”

Tennal didn’t exactly want to either, but—“He’ll die otherwise,” he said. The prospect of Surit dying wasn’t even concerning. It was just a terrifying blank. “If you want to keep me alive, give me a way to deal with Oma. Unless…” He looked her over, in some doubt for the first time. “Are you planning to deal with Oma? Or are you hiding out until you’re healed? They got you pretty badly.”

His aunt said brutishly, “If you sympathize with me, Tennalhin, I will have you court-martialed.” She opened the case by her side and slipped the remnant back in it. “Of course we’re here to deal with the brainwashing. I’ve had my people strip out what files remained in the storage systems here. There weren’t many. But it’s clear the brainwashing actively pulls on the energy of the remnants in a way normal powers don’t. So we’re back to containment.”

She took a piece of equipment that looked like a half sphere of plain metal from the case, like a handheld scanner that everyone from doctors to mechanics used a version of. This one was unusual, though: the face on one side was laddered with glowing white filaments.

“Don’t touch the active elements,” his aunt warned. She placed the remnant on the tray. “I remember the medics using these in the lab—Lights, that was decades ago. I’ve seen the Resolution’s people use them too.”

“What do they do?” Tennal said.