Chapter 256 --256
System was quiet, listening.
"So the monitoring function," it said carefully. "The light I found. That’s not extraction."
"No," Elara said. "It’s the opposite."
She paused.
Organized the explanation the way she organized everything — by what mattered most, stated first.
"The collars already existed," she said. "I didn’t build them. What I built was a secondary layer within the existing framework. A recording function, not an extraction one. It registers emotional states — specifically distress patterns, fear responses, the physiological markers of sustained trauma." She paused. "It doesn’t transmit. It doesn’t report to me. It stores locally, within the collar itself, and accumulates a longitudinal record of each individual knight’s baseline over time."
System looked at her. "Why."
"Because I needed to know if what I was doing was working," Elara said flatly. "Not from performance. Not from what they showed me, which is controlled, trained, exactly what they’ve been conditioned to show. The actual internal state." She paused. "I needed to know if the fox-eared guard’s baseline fear response was decreasing. Whether Mahir’s stress markers were different at the end of my regency than at the beginning. Whether what I was doing in this palace was genuinely changing something or just changing the surface while the same damage continued underneath."
System was very still.
"That is—" it started.
"Surveillance," Elara said. "Yes. I know what it is."
"I was going to say complicated," System said.