The battery held steady for the first day, exactly as Thomas expected, the induction loop's charge deep enough to carry him well beyond the valley's bounds before any decline would show. It was the second reading, taken on a cold evening camp two days out, that stopped his hand mid-motion over the screen.
Battery: 94%. Ordinary, expected, nothing to trouble him.
Anchor: 31%.
He stared at the number a long moment, feeling something go cold and still in his chest that had nothing to do with the winter air. He had not checked the anchor reading properly in months — had let the habit lapse, he understood now, precisely because the battery's own steady hundred percent had made the whole worry feel abstract, a danger belonging to some future season rather than this one. He had assumed, without ever quite examining the assumption, that the two numbers moved together, that a healthy battery meant a healthy tether.
He understood now, with a clarity that settled cold and permanent into his chest, exactly how wrong that assumption had been.
Elias, sharing the watch beside him, noticed the stillness before Thomas had said a word. "Something's wrong."
"The phone." Thomas turned the screen so Elias could see it, though he knew the mapmaker had no context for what the numbers meant beyond what Thomas himself had ever chosen to explain. "There's a second reading. Not the battery — something else. A measure of how strong the connection to home actually is. I haven't checked it properly since before the charter, maybe longer. I thought the battery holding steady meant everything was fine."
"And it isn't."
"It's a third of what it should be." Thomas closed his hand around the phone, the familiar weight of it suddenly unfamiliar, threatening, in a way it hadn't felt since the very first frightening weeks after the anomaly. "The last time I saw a number this low was right after Hamo touched it, back before any of you knew me properly. Right after the screen cracked."
Elias was quiet for a moment, processing that with his usual careful, cataloguing attention. "You've built an entire town in the years between then and now. Towers, roads, a currency two counties trust. If that number falls the more you change about this world, then everything we've accomplished together has been —" He stopped himself, visibly reconsidering the sentence before finishing it. "Has been the very thing weakening it."
"I think so. I don't know for certain. I've never had anyone to explain the mechanism to me — the voice that used to answer questions went silent years ago, and I've had no way of asking it anything since." Thomas looked up at the cold, star-scattered sky, thinking of a mother three hundred years and one entire world away, of a letter that had arrived two days late on the single happiest night of his valley's whole existence. "I think every good thing I've built here has been quietly costing me something I can't get back, Elias, and I think I've been too afraid to check the number often enough to notice how much."
They rode in near silence the following morning, the towers and villages of the March passing in slow, unfamiliar procession, and Thomas found himself checking the reading again that evening, and the morning after that, unable now to stop himself from the habit he'd let lapse for so long — Battery 89%, Anchor 27%. Battery 85%, Anchor 24%. The battery's decline, at least, followed a pattern he understood, the induction loop's charge simply bleeding away with distance and time exactly as the physics had always predicted. The anchor's decline followed no pattern he could identify at all, save the grim, obvious correlation with every mile that carried him further from the valley he'd spent three years quietly, unknowingly weakening the tether by building.
He wrote nothing of it in the letter he sent back with the returning courier three days later, unwilling to hand Victoria a fear this large across a distance neither of them could properly discuss it over. He told himself, riding the last stretch toward Oakhaven's distant walls, that there would be a better time to raise it than in the middle of a journey that already demanded every ounce of composure he had left to spend on the court awaiting him.
He did not entirely believe himself. He rode on regardless, the two failing numbers sitting in his tunic like a second, colder weight against his chest, growing heavier with every mile that carried him further from the only anchor — the word felt, suddenly, considerably more literal than he'd ever let himself consider before — that had ever actually kept him tethered to anything at all.