When the remnants ceremony came around, it should have been a relief to give up on the crash logs. Instead, Jainan stared into the mirror as he changed his outfit and felt like a ghost hovering outside his own body. He must look respectable. He and Kiem were to act like a happy couple. The Thean embassy had tried to invite them to a reception afterward; Jainan knew Bel would turn it down as not commensurate with Kiem’s status. Imperial Princes were expected to put the palace first.

Kiem was late—Kiem was often late; he seemed incapable of looking at the time—and he turned up in a flurry of apologies. Jainan smiled mechanically, the ghostlike feeling floating around him like a layer of film, and accompanied him to the event.

The remnants ceremony took place in the palace’s largest stateroom, the Chamber of the Hill Enduring. The Hill Enduring was Iskat’s crest, a sparse, instantly recognizable curve, but Jainan had never been told the history. The day before, he had absently asked Kiem about the original hill. “I don’t … know,”

Kiem had said, as if just realizing this himself. “It must be on one of the planets the first terraformers came from, but we’ve been here for four hundred years.

Probably eroded by now, wherever it is.”

The shape of the Iskaners’ long-abandoned horizon was emblazoned on two walls of the stateroom. Several hundred beads of light hung from the roof like the dense hearts of galaxies, shedding a soft light on the endless gold braid that adorned the military officers and royals in attendance. The stateroom was set up around a wide ceremonial dais at one end, which currently held an assembly of stands, glass cases, and incongruously heavy lockboxes. Remnants.

The remnants came in sizes from an obsidian-like stone that could fit on a coin up to an opaque lump of metal the size of a small dog, with compressed strata that seemed to bleed further into each other as you watched. Jainan had seen remnants before, of course. His university had a minor shard on loan in the xenotechnology department, but he had been deep in his own research and uninterested in something with no practical use and so many Resolution interdictions around working on it.

He was unprepared for the feeling of dozens of remnants clustered together, which was like walking into a garden thick with swarming bees.

The Auditor stood to the side of the dais, quietly conferring with the Emperor’s aides. His staff moved among the remnants, which Jainan realized were grouped by planet: the cases with the Thean remnants had clan insignia showing who was involved in the digs that found them.