**Location:** Elara's Office, Two Hours After Waking
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The first stack had gone down by roughly a quarter.
Ken stood by the wall, arms folded, watching Elara work with the same focused attention he gave potential threats. Not because he expected danger—just because watching her was genuinely difficult to stop doing once you started.
She'd been at it for two hours straight.
No breaks. No pauses. No staring out the window while processing—she processed *while* working, reading one document, signing it, reaching for the next, annotating in the margins with that precise economical handwriting, cross-referencing against earlier files she'd already memorized and hadn't needed to look at again.
