5 February 2029  ·  Paradise  ·  6:15 a.m. – 9:00 a.m.

She wakes at six-fifteen because her body has not been told about Paradise, and her body's default setting is the hospital rhythm — the pre-dawn alertness of a junior doctor whose every night of sleep has been timed against the possibility of being needed, of something going wrong in the dark and requiring her specifically. She lies in the Kashmiri walnut suite with the thick duvet pulled to her chin and the heated floor radiating warmth upward and the mountains visible through the gap in the curtains — grey-blue and enormous and very clear in the pre-dawn light, with a quality of permanence that she finds, for reasons she cannot entirely articulate, deeply comforting — and she thinks about the previous evening for approximately thirty seconds before she gets up, because she is the kind of person who operates better when moving than when lying still with her thoughts.