Anselm found him in the guildhall that evening, before Thomas had even finished packing.
"You didn't tell them," he said, without preamble, settling into the room's single chair uninvited. "I watched your face when Corliss asked. You had an answer ready, and you swallowed it."
"Would you have wanted me to give it?"
"No." Anselm said it plainly, without hesitation. "I have spent a long career watching the Church do exactly what you feared it would do to a stranger truth. I am glad, for your sake and your household's, that you understood the danger before I had to explain it to you." He studied Thomas a moment longer, something almost fond in his tired scholar's eyes. "You are a wiser man than the one who showed me an inferior steam engine three years ago and thought he'd gotten away with something. I mean that as a compliment, in case it didn't sound like one."
They rode out the following morning, Elias and Alaric flanking him as before, and Thomas checked the reading once they'd cleared the city gates, dreading the number before he'd even looked.
Anchor: 22%.
He said nothing to the others. There was nothing useful to say yet, only the long ride home to survive first.
The battery began climbing again on the second day, the induction loop's pull growing steadily stronger as the valley drew nearer, and Thomas watched the anchor reading with a different kind of attention now — not hoping it would recover alongside the battery, but simply needing to know, with each evening's check, exactly how much further it had fallen.
It was still falling on the morning they crested the last ridge and saw the towers' small, familiar lights waiting below.
Victoria was at the gate before he'd even dismounted, and the sight of her — steady, unhurried, exactly as he'd left her — undid something in his chest he hadn't realized he'd been holding taut for the entire ride.
"Well?" she asked, once the embrace had loosened enough to let either of them speak.
"They believed enough of what I told them to leave us alone. I didn't tell them everything." He held her gaze. "There's something else I need to tell you, though. Something I should have told you months ago, and didn't, because I was afraid of what saying it out loud would make real."
Her expression sharpened, the old familiar readiness for bad news settling over her features. "Tell me now."
He drew the phone from his tunic, and showed her, for the first time in three years, the second number that had been quietly falling the entire time she'd watched him build a town around the first.