Something invisible had shifted across the settlements.
Alistair noticed it on a walk that morning. A merchant by the eastern road was extending credit again, scratching numbers in chalk against a blackboard with the careful focus of a man who had forgotten how the work felt and was remembering it slowly.
Further along, a family was planting a secondary crop they had abandoned two years ago. The father stood at the edge of the field with his hands on his hips, looking at the soil as if checking whether it would betray him a second time.
Small things, the kind that kept compounding.
'The Sovereign Debt unraveling does this,' Alistair thought. 'It removes a calculation from the back of every decision, and the decisions start changing one at a time.'
He returned to the base before midday.
