Chapter 395 --395
She glanced away, doing the count in her head without much enthusiasm. Eight years. Maybe nine. She was not entirely certain — the number had blurred somewhere along the way, the same way a lot of things had blurred. From the moment she had begun preparing Samuel in earnest, transferring responsibility piece by piece, teaching him how to read a room and read a document and read a person, the system had simply gone quiet. Vanished, more or less completely. The few times it had surfaced since were so brief and so unremarkable that she could not have described the circumstances if asked.
Eight years of silence, and it had chosen now to reappear.
She looked at it again.
"You have terrible timing," she said.
Elara walked back to her chair and sat down, pulling the stack of documents toward her without ceremony. The system’s presence materialized beside her — that familiar cloud-like shape, hovering just at the edge of her peripheral vision the way it always had, as though it had never been gone at all.
She did not acknowledge it immediately. She was already reading.
"No matter how many years pass," the system said, looking at the documents spread across the table, "you never change, do you. Still working."
He looked at the stack more closely.
"I feel tired just looking at that."
"Then don’t look," Elara said, without glancing up. "Who called you here?"
The system made a sound that might have been a sigh. "Nobody called me. You know how it is. I just — I could not leave you completely alone. So I came."
Elara picked up her pen. "What, did your other host die?"