The warning came at the sixth hour of a Tuesday morning.
I was already awake, which had become my default state in the mornings, lying in the grey predawn quiet with the particular alert stillness of a man whose mind began its work before the rest of the world had caught up to the day. I had been thinking about the northern route situation and the sequence of moves that the next two weeks would need to contain, turning the pieces over in my mind with the focused patience of someone who had learned that planning done in the early quiet was planning done without interference.
And then the system's notification appeared at the edge of my vision, and it was unlike anything I had seen from it before.
