The descent into the cellar beneath the brewery was an exercise in damp constriction. The stone steps, worn into shallow hollows by generations of monks who had carried barrels of small beer long before Thomas ever claimed the hill, were slick with a fine film of grey mold. The air down here was thick, heavy with the yeast-sweet rot of fermented grain and the sulfurous, biting tang of the deep coal that fed the engine's boiler in the adjacent chamber.
Thomas sat on an overturned firkin, his back pressed against the cold limestone of the foundation wall. He had his knees drawn up to form a makeshift desk, the phone resting on the rough fabric of his trousers. The screen was the only true light in the small room, casting a sharp, blue-white glare that made his pale face and the dark circles under his eyes look skeletal.
Battery: 78%
System Download: 44%... 45%...
The progress bar was moving with an agonizing, granular friction. In his dorm room at Regis, this data packet—scarcely two gigabytes of compressed engineering schematics and historical industrial manuals—would have completed between two sips of lukewarm coffee. Here, reaching across eight centuries of unwritten history, the connection was like a thread of spun silk being drawn through a keyhole.
"The masons have left the lane," Victoria said from the top of the stairs. She didn't come down into the damp; her silhouette was a dark shape against the orange firelight of the upper kitchens, her voice echoing down the stone shaft with a hollow, metallic ring. "Elias gave them twenty pieces of scrip from the iron tray to keep them from pulling the horses out. They've dumped the limestone blocks by the stable wall, but they swear they won't lift a chisel until you come out and mark the corner post."
"Tell them the line is straight," Thomas said, his thumb hovering over the screen as he monitored the incoming data clusters. He was pulling down everything he could find on nitric acid production and the vulcanization of tree resin—the raw chemistry needed to insulate copper wire before they could even think about an electric current. "If they follow the old ditch line, they'll hit the limestone shelf within three feet. They know how to lay a footing without me holding the string."
"They don't want the string, Thomas. They want to know that the man who pays them with paper isn't losing his mind in a cellar," Victoria said, her boots finally clicking down the first three steps. She stopped where the light from the door failed, her hand resting on the damp masonry. "The whole village is talking about the Sunday deadline. They think you are waiting for a sign from the saints. Or a curse from the King."
"It's just an upgrade, Victoria," Thomas said, his voice flat. He didn't look up from the red bar. 48%... 49%... "The people who built the machine that allows me to see this world are changing the wires back home. If I'm not connected when they pull the plugs, the machine won't know how to find this valley again."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small copper rod Wat had drawn through a series of successively smaller steel dies that morning. It was thin—scarcely the width of a thick horsehair—but it was uneven, its surface pitted with tiny imperfections where the zinc in the local ore had made the metal brittle. He rolled the wire between his thumb and forefinger, feeling the rough friction. Without the automated extrusion tables he was trying to download right now, they would never be able to make a mile of wire that wouldn't short out the moment they dropped it in the river.
Suddenly, the phone let out a long, heavy vibration that rattled against his knee. It wasn't a notification from the portal. It was a direct call—the screen shifting from the red progress bar to an incoming video interface that he hadn't seen since his second week in the mud.
The contact name read simply: Home.
Thomas's hand shook so violently he almost dropped the glass slab onto the stone floor. He swiped his thumb across the screen, his breathing stopping completely as the interface connected.
The screen didn't show his mother's porch or Sarah's car. It was a live feed from the interior of his own apartment in Denver. The camera was stationary, likely his old desktop webcam that he'd left running on his study desk. The room was empty. The morning sun was coming through the blinds, casting long, geometric bars of yellow light across his unmade bed and the stacks of software manuals he'd left on the floor.
On the desk, right in front of the lens, sat a half-empty mug of coffee, a thin ring of white mold forming on the surface of the dark liquid.
"Tom?"
It wasn't a voice from the speaker. It was a text caption that appeared at the bottom of the video feed, a real-time transcription from a voice recognition software running on his home PC. The audio channel was nothing but a low, roaring white noise—the sound of eight hundred years of static—but the words were being processed through the digital tether.
"Tom, if you can see this, the remote desktop script finally executed. We've been trying to ping your phone's local IP for three weeks. The police think you went into the mountains near Mount Evans. They found your truck by the trailhead, but there's no trace of you. Mom is... she's not doing well, Tom. She spends all day in your room."
The text scrolled up, replaced by a new line of white letters that looked incredibly sharp against the image of his empty bed.
"The university is shutting down the server array in the engineering building on Sunday morning to clear the old student accounts. If you're using the proxy network we set up for your thesis, it's going to get wiped. You need to come back, man. Whatever project you're working on out there, it's not worth this. Just come home."
The video feed flickered, the image of his apartment distorting into a grid of green and pink pixels before stabilizing again. The moldy coffee cup remained exactly where it was, a tiny, domestic monument to the life he had left behind.
Thomas stared at the screen, his throat so tight he couldn't form a syllable. He reached out with his thumb, his nail tapping the keyboard interface to send a reply, but the input field was locked. The download was consuming ninety-nine percent of the connection's bandwidth; he could receive the image of his home, but he couldn't send a single word back through the keyhole.
"Thomas?" Victoria's voice came from the darkness of the stairs, closer now. She had crept down until she could see the blue light reflecting off his wet face. "What is that place? Is that your manor?"
"That's my room," Thomas whispered, his eyes fixed on the text transcription as it began to fade from the screen. "That's where I used to sit when I was writing the code. Before the hill took me."
Victoria looked at the image of the white steel bed frame and the plastic coffee mug. To her, it looked like a room made of polished bone and ice, completely devoid of the tapestries, the straw, and the fire that made a home recognizable. "It looks cold," she said softly. "It looks like a tomb for a king who died before he was born."
"It's not a tomb," Thomas said, a single tear cutting a clean line through the coal dust on his cheek. "It's just... Sunday."
The progress bar at the bottom of the screen flickered, shifting from forty-nine percent to fifty percent.
The video feed of his apartment suddenly snapped to black, replaced by a standard system error message that read: Connection Timeout. Retrying sync in 300 seconds.
Thomas locked the device and tucked it back into his tunic, the metal of the wire rod still clutched in his palm until the ends bit into his skin. He stood up from the firkin, his cloak falling back around his shoulders with a heavy, wet thud. The exhaustion was still there, but beneath it, the cold, clinical focus of his training had returned.
"Come on," Thomas said, passing Victoria on the stairs without looking at her. "Let's go mark the corner for the masons. If we're going to lose the drawings on Sunday, I want to make sure the walls are already too high for them to pull down."