In truth, he had been sleeping somewhat raggedly the last hour or so. He had left his phone on the ground next to him with its screen facing up. As notifications filtered in, the device would turn its screen on, creating a series of false, bluish dawns. He’d been wondering whether it was worth the effort to reach out and flip the phone over facedown, but some deep nerd part of his brain was worried about scratching the screen on a rock. For like all of the other legionaries in the tent, he was sleeping directly on the ground, wrapped in his woolen cloak. He had not actually looked at any of the notifications.

He had configured the phone in such a way that it would only ring under certain rare circumstances, such as a personal call from the CEO. His legion was on maneuvers in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana, which it was using as a proxy for the Alps. Use of cell phones and other portable electronics was discouraged during the daytime, and while in character, but was tolerated in private tents, in the hours of darkness, as long as you weren’t too loud.

But waking people up with an early-morning call was bad manners everywhere, and so when it rang, he lashed out and silenced it as quickly as he could.

“Salve,” he croaked into the phone, over the grumbles of his tentmates.

“I need you down here,” said his boss. “All hands on deck.” Then he hung up without explanation, leaving Corvallis with the vague feeling that he was missing something.

“What the fuck, Corvus,” complained a legionary in the next tent. “Mutate.” Moo-TAH-tay. This was bastard Latin, using the imperative conjugation to tell him to mute his phone. “Corvus” was the Latinized version of his name. He turned off the phone’s sound so that it wouldn’t continue to make cute little noises as he went on messing with it.

The trail of notifications on his phone told the story. They had originated from various people on various social networks, but they had all been triggered by the same event: the surprising obliteration of the town of Moab, Utah, by what was apparently a tactical nuclear weapon.

It had occurred before daybreak, at about 5:20 A.M. local time. The earliest postings were from insomniacal passengers and crew on coast-to-coast red-eye flights, reporting a sudden flash so bright it dazzled them from hundreds of miles away. This had faded too rapidly for people to snap pictures of it, but descriptions had been tweeted and Facebooked via the planes’ onboard Wi-Fi systems, and retweeted and reposted a millionfold by the time Corvallis saw them.