He had been operating without it for ten months and he had not fully understood what that meant until he sat down to rebuild it and felt, in the first moment of the reconstruction, the specific quality of a system preparing to restore something it had been missing.
He started immediately. Not the next morning, not after a meal, not after the settlement had processed the return and the ring and the Seal and everything that had happened in the palace compound. Immediately — because the Ghost was the operational foundation under everything else and rebuilding it was the first task and the first task did not wait.
Sera watched him settle into the construction posture in the settlement's inner room without comment. This was one of the things he had come to appreciate about Sera. She understood the difference between a moment that needed to be witnessed and a moment that needed to be left alone, and she had exceptional judgment about which was which.
