“Yes,” Surit said. “Because they were artifacts made by nonhuman life-forms. Life-forms that died out.” That was the standard answer they taught in schools; anyone who wanted to study more got a Resolution scholarship and moved out-system.

“Yes. Okay. But—Surit, they altered your genes, and we have them in our head. Do they feel like artifacts to you?” Tennal met his eyes. He said, without moving his lips, Does this feel like an artifact to you?

Surit suspected he wasn’t going to like this. “Say it out loud.”

“We altered ourselves beyond human, and it carried down in our genes,” Tennal said, more quietly. “Not much. I think our parents would have died if they’d altered themselves much further. But the remnants are something’s body. Can’t you feel it? They’re the remains of something dead. Something that didn’t see the universe like humans do. And we took a shadow of a shadow of what they could do, and we split it in half, and we gave it to ourselves. We hacked our powers together out of the bones of dead aliens.”

“Wish he wouldn’t keep putting it like that,” Basavi said. She and Istara were, for some reason, ransacking the desk drawers. Istara nodded with the air of someone who had just been in an enclosed space with Tennal for several days after he’d come up with this.

Tennal made a rude gesture vaguely in Basavi and Istara’s direction. “Listen. When an architect and a reader sync, it feels like we’re coming back together. But we’re just the echo of a whole life-form. We’re the corpse of a dead alien.”

Submersed back in the ocean of Tennal’s thoughts, the constant churn of waves in his ears, Surit could feel the layer of panic under Tennal’s voice. “All right.”

“All right?” Tennal said incredulously. “How is that all right?”

“It doesn’t matter what we are,” Surit said. It would have bothered him a few days ago, but he’d given himself a mission, and right now there was no room for anything except the mission. “It matters what we do.”

Tennal’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah?” Surit felt him look at Surit’s thoughts and take a wary mental step back.

“I want to go and find Oma,” Surit said.

Tennal said, in his head, I know. And he did know. Their thoughts were tightly bound. Tennal might have saved Surit’s life, for now, but that didn’t mean their sync was any more stable than before; if anything, it was worse. Surit strongly felt they were rushing toward a waterfall together, and if so, Surit was going to bring Oma down with them.