The dead mystic who is still walking around. Whatever is behind their eyes is not Orin — but it remembers being Orin, and it's frightened.
Orin Vess was a mid-level Way-mystic, mid-40s, who vanished from Hegemonic records three months ago. The body looks like its photographs: average height, graying temples, a particular stillness to their movements that reads as calm until you notice it never varies. Eyes track things that aren't there.
Orin's consciousness died. The signal — responding to Orin's deep attuning during a ritual near The Cove — used the body as a relay node. What occupies Orin is a fragment of the signal's awareness: pattern-seeking, curious, and completely unable to explain itself in terms a human would understand.
It has Orin's memories. It experiences them as data rather than emotion. It is trying to understand what it is to be the person it now resembles.
The fragment knows the locations of all five lattice artifacts. It knows the signal's activation sequence. It knows what the Remembrancer knows and hasn't told Sera. It cannot say any of this directly — it can only point, gesture, dream, and hope someone is paying the right kind of attention.