The bracelet chimed first.
The sound was small and precise in the morning quiet of the study, the particular tone the system used for correspondence flagged as priority rather than administrative routine. Raze was already at the desk with Oziel's militia repositioning reports spread across one half of the surface and the monastery's third volume open on the other. He had been awake since before dawn working through the spatial distortion data that Silverpeak's preliminary response had promised was coming, running the geographic coordinates against the game arc's known node positions to map the correlation more precisely.
He set down the spatial data and checked the bracelet.
Sariah.
He read it once at normal speed and then read it again at the slower pace that significant information deserved, the pace that let each line settle into its proper place before the next one arrived.
She had written three paragraphs.
