Tennal was right up against him. At some point he had put his hand on Surit’s sternum, resting over his uniform jacket. His eyes met Surit’s, and it looked like he was trying to say something his thoughts hadn’t yet formed.

There was a loud splintering crack from across the room. They both looked away.

“Well, they’re not in here,” Istara announced.

Basavi was standing over the remains of what had been the desk with a crowbar. The desk drawers, or parts of them, were on the floor. Istara crouched over them with a handheld scanner that glowed a bright white.

Tennal frowned. “Lights take it. I was hoping—oh, sorry,” he added, at sensing Surit’s confusion. He turned and dumped a bewildering package of information in Surit’s mind.

Surit flinched. It was like getting thrown a ball made of sharp metal scraps. He got flashes of memory: the legislator, alive. A conversation in an abandoned space station that, in Tennal’s memory, was razor-edged. A plan to tear Oma away from her remnants.

“You want to deactivate her remnants? You have no idea if that will work,” Surit said out loud. “What if she only needed the remnants to create the brainwashing link? You have no proof that deactivating them will make any difference.”

Basavi looked entirely too comfortable with the crowbar in her hand. She looked up from it, frowned, and said, “Didn’t seem to be a better option, sir. And the legislator ordered it.”

Surit was used to last-minute briefings scraped together with insufficient information, but this one was particularly bad. “Why do you think this is going to work? And why did you think she’d keep her remnants in here?”

Tennal patted him on the shoulder, his face neutral but a flash of dark amusement leaping from his thoughts to Surit’s. “I’ll try anything once,” he said. “Breaking some remnants? Syncing? Helping out with a coup? No, sorry, all right. We’re in here because this is my aunt’s office.” He waved a hand around the small, disused room. “Her constituency office, that is; she hasn’t used it since she became legislator. Oma seems obsessed with taking over from her, so I thought this would be a neat place to hide her remnants. Oh well, they can’t all be winners. Next stop—” He hesitated.

“The Legislator’s Residence,” Basavi said implacably. “You did say you had access. That’s the other likely place.”

“Yes,” Tennal said, more reluctantly than Surit was used to; breaking into the Legislator’s Residence was an absurd idea, and usually Tennal was on those like hungry trainees fell on dinner. “It’s not like it’s far.” And it’s a better idea than your half-baked plan of throwing yourself at Oma like a grenade, he thought at Surit.