She takes a breath.

"Corona just killed himself. I called to see if you could get to him in time, but - you couldn't have. It was maybe half a minute from when he cut me out."

"Shit," says Anneia.

In the morning, Chelsa winds up curled up to Tima, since Corona isn't there.

She isn't worried right away. He may have gone to get a snack. It would be sort of thoughtless of him to go on a trip while she's so frazzled, but she never said he couldn't, she supposes.

And she continue supposing that until she sees Anneia, a little while later.

She's been up half the night trying to think of some way to say it - she's sure Kers has told Aelise by now, but Aelise isn't going to make a special trip to Chelsa's friends' quarters just to break the news, she doesn't think - and in the end she just blurts out, "Corona killed himself last night."

"I don't know - why, or where, or anything - Kers called me when he shut her out, but she says it wasn't more than a minute from then until Demauri couldn't find him."

She sniffles. She liked Corona. Well - of course she did.

Chelsa is inconsolable.

She is not in a position to deliver announcements for the next time zone cluster's morning.

In three hundred years, this is not the first time that Chelsa has missed a set of morning announcements. Aelise fills in just like always, greeting the appropriate section of the world with a smile and some inconsequential news, and explaining that Chelsa was called away because one of her close friends died unexpectedly that morning.

Then she finds the time to notify Tab, because in no way is Chelsa ready for another flicker, and she probably won't be for a while.

Tab agrees to wait.

Maybe Chelsa will just fall apart all by herself.

That sure looks like it's a possibility.

Chelsa can't stop crying. She'll let Amdon feed her, when he begs her to eat something, but mostly she just cries.

This is... not ideal.

But it's not the worst way it could've happened, she supposes.

Aelise visits Chelsa, amidst her friends. She expresses her condolences and gives Chelsa a hug.

Chelsa doesn't really get better.

She's bidden friends goodbye before, to trade them in for warmer models, but they don't die, not anytime soon, and they don't kill themselves, and none of them were her warm sun.

She does a few announcements, on her better days, but she has to have someone sitting with her, out of sight of the camera, and her smile is a little forced.

She stops crying perpetually, but she's listless, and she sleeps a lot.

Aelise observes all this.

She suggests gently that maybe Chelsa would like to retire, to a comfortable little island, with all her special friends.

Chelsa doesn't want to upset anyone. She'll do the set, but it will have to wait for a good morning, which delays her departure.

Finally, she has an unusually calm-dreamed night and wakes up and tells the world she's going into retirement, and will miss them.

The world will miss her too. They love her very much.

Aelise sees everyone to the island personally.

And she won't die anytime soon. And her friends will be with her - Aelise makes sure they're all on about the same level, immortality-wise, and they have Kers to repel accidents and Anneia to keep everyone healthy in their old age.

All in all, a comfortable retirement.

Aelise doesn't visit often, after that first time; she has a considerable amount of work to do. A lot of little changes will have to be made to compensate for Chelsa's absence. That was already underway, but it's accelerating now; there are a rocky few years ahead of them.

She also consults with Mehitabel over the best time for her to come back down to the ground.

"I don't think it's time yet," she says frankly. "I don't think it'll be genuinely safe until Chelsa is dead. As long as there is no conceivable way she could know you exist, we still have the inverse shield to fall back on, but once the cat's out of the bag the only thing I could possibly do to avoid an enormous shitstorm would be assassinate her on the spot."