Victoria stared at the screen a long moment before she said anything at all.
"Twenty-two," she said finally. "Out of what?"
"I don't know. The voice that used to explain things went silent years ago. I only know it started near a hundred, right after the anomaly, and it's fallen every year since — faster, the more I build." Thomas watched her absorb that, the particular stillness she wore when a problem was too large to fit into her usual quick calculation. "I should have told you the day I noticed it dropping. I didn't, because I didn't want it to be real yet."
"How long have you known?"
"Properly? Since the ride to Oakhaven. I'd stopped checking it months before that. The battery held steady, and I let myself believe that meant everything was fine." He made himself say the rest of it, the part he'd rehearsed the whole ride home and still found difficult to voice aloud. "I think every good thing we've built here has cost me something I can't get back, Victoria. The towers, the charter, the medicine — I don't know the mechanism, but I know the number only moves one direction, and it's always the direction of less."
She was quiet for a long time, and when she finally spoke, her voice held none of the sharp, immediate anger he'd half braced for.
"You're afraid this ends with you disappearing."
"I'm afraid it ends with the connection simply — stopping. No warning. No chance to say anything to anyone." He hadn't said it plainly before, not even to himself, and hearing it aloud made it heavier rather than lighter. "I don't know what happens to me when it does. I don't know if I go home, or if I just stop being anywhere at all."
Victoria reached for his hand, and held it a long moment before she spoke again. "Then we find out what's actually happening, instead of guessing at it alone in the dark for another three years. You said the voice went silent. Has it ever spoken since?"
"Not once. Not since the very beginning."
"Then perhaps it's time you asked it something instead of waiting for it to volunteer an answer." She said it with the same steady, practical clarity she brought to everything, though Thomas could see what the calm was costing her. "You've spent three years building this valley as though the ground beneath it would always be there. I don't intend to spend the years we have left pretending the same thing about you."
He didn't have an answer for that, only the quiet, aching gratitude of a man who had expected to carry a fear alone and found, instead, that he wasn't going to have to.