The relay spoke again on a night Thomas hadn't expected it to speak at all — not in answer to any question he'd asked, not accompanied by any deliberate searching on his part, but simply appearing, unbidden, on the screen while he sat alone in the garden after a long day spent helping Wat finish the fever house's second room.
He hadn't touched the phone in nearly a week. He'd been trying, in his own halting way, to practice what Hamo had counseled — to let the days matter for themselves rather than filtering every one of them through the lens of the falling number — and it was precisely because he wasn't looking for it that the sudden light against his ribs startled him badly enough to nearly drop the device into the tilled earth.
Deviation cascade approaching threshold.
No greeting. No explanation. The same flat, mechanical brevity he remembered from three years and one entire lifetime ago, back when the voice had still occasionally deigned to answer his frightened, desperate questions with something more than silence.
He sat very still, staring at the words until they faded, his heart hammering in a way that had nothing to do with the evening's cooling air. He typed, with hands that weren't quite steady, the only question that mattered.
What does that mean.
Nothing. The screen held its ordinary glow, battery at eighty-eight percent, anchor — he made himself check it, though he already knew — at fifteen.
He tried three more times, each question more desperate than the last, and received nothing further, the relay's single fragment of warning hanging unexplained in the cooling dark, exactly as unhelpfully cryptic as every other communication it had ever offered him.
Victoria found him there an hour later, still sitting among the tomato rows with the phone held loosely in one hand, and read the trouble in his face before he'd said a single word.
"It spoke," she said. Not a question.
"Deviation cascade approaching threshold. That's all it gave me. No explanation, no context, nothing I asked afterward got any further answer." He handed her the phone, though he knew she couldn't read the words the way he could, couldn't feel the particular cold weight of a machine that had once explained the whole shape of his impossible situation now reduced to fragments too brief to properly understand. "I think it's telling me something's about to change. I don't know if that means the anchor, or the connection, or something else entirely that I don't have a name for yet."
Victoria sat beside him in the dark garden, and was quiet a long moment before she spoke again. "Threshold implies a line. A point past which something different begins." She said it slowly, working through the words with the same careful precision she brought to a difficult ledger entry. "You've been falling toward something, Thomas, this whole time — the number dropping, the connection weakening. Perhaps this is simply confirmation that whatever's coming is close now, rather than distant."
"That's not comforting."
"No. It isn't meant to be. I think it's meant to be honest, which is a different kindness than comfort, and possibly the only kindness a machine like that one is even capable of offering." She took his hand, her grip firm despite the tremor he could feel in her own fingers. "What do you want to do with the warning, now that you have it?"
He thought about that for a long while, the cold night settling around them both, the small lights of the towers burning steady on the ridge exactly as they always did, indifferent to the quiet crisis unfolding among the garden rows below them.
"I want to keep building the days," he said finally. "Same as before. I don't think there's anything else useful to do with a warning this vague, except let it remind me why the days matter as much as they do." He looked at her, and found, even now, that some stubborn, hopeful part of him refused to fully surrender to the dread. "But I want you to know everything from here forward, Victoria. Every reading, every fragment the relay gives me, however small. I spent too long carrying this alone already. I don't intend to make that mistake again."
She held his hand tighter, and they sat together a long while beneath the cold, star-scattered sky, two people bracing together for a threshold neither of them yet understood, but had at least, finally, stopped trying to face alone.