The battery became, over the following year, the strangest object in Thomas's life.
It had been, for eleven years, a fixed thing — ninety-something percent, always, a number he had stopped reading because it never changed. The anchor had been the number that mattered. The battery had been furniture.
Now the anchor sat unmoving at one and the battery fell.
Seventy-eight. Seventy-four. Seventy-one.
"It's the wrong way round," he told Victoria, in the autumn. "For nine years I had a dying tether and an immortal battery, and it was agony, because it meant every day I was connected to something I was losing. Now I've got an intact connection to nothing and a battery that's actually running out, and I find I mind considerably less."
"Why?"
"Because a battery running down is just a battery running down. It's the most ordinary thing in the world. Every lamp in this valley does it." He turned the device over. "It's the first entirely comprehensible thing this object has ever done."
He used it, that year, more than he had in the previous five.
Not for letters — there were none — but for the archive. The phone held, buried in storage from a world fourteen years gone, an enormous quantity of downloaded material he had pulled in the first frantic months after the anomaly, back when he had assumed the connection might sever at any moment and had grabbed everything he could think of.
He had barely touched most of it in a decade. There had been no need; the Codex had grown to hold what the valley actually used, and the rest had sat there, an unread library in his pocket.
At seventy-one percent, with a year of charge left and no charge coming, he began transcribing.
He worked with Maud and Cecily and two of the second cohort, four hours a day, every day, in a room in the schoolhouse with the shutters open for light. He read aloud and they wrote — metallurgy he'd never had cause to use, agricultural rotation methods, anatomical drawings he described as precisely as he could manage while Cecily rendered them, the mathematics of structures, forty pages on the germ theory that Aldith had been operating on faith for a decade without ever having seen the underlying argument written out.
"You had this the entire time," Aldith said, reading the transcribed pages with an expression Thomas could not entirely read.
"I had it and I didn't know I had it. There's four hundred documents in there. I pulled them in a panic in the first month and never catalogued them." He rubbed his eyes; they ached constantly now from the reading. "I've spent fourteen years thinking my value here was what I remembered. It turns out a considerable amount of it was in a folder I forgot about."
"How much is left?"
"At this rate? I'll get through perhaps two-thirds before the battery goes."
Aldith set the pages down. "Then we go faster, and we take shifts, and we do it properly rather than well." She was already standing. "I'll take the medical documents myself. Cecily takes structures. You read for six hours a day rather than four, and you stop attending council meetings entirely, because Alaric can chair them and you are wasting hours in rooms discussing drainage that could be spent putting a hundred years of medicine into a book."
"Aldith—"
"I have been polite about the number in your pocket for eight years, Thomas, out of respect, because you asked us all to treat it as ordinary." Her voice was entirely level. "I am declining to be polite about this specifically. There is a finite quantity of irreplaceable material in that device and a finite quantity of time, and I have spent my entire life watching people die with things in their heads that nobody wrote down. Not this time. Not while I'm standing here."
They went faster.
At the end, at four percent, with the transcription team working in relays and Victoria feeding him because he had stopped stopping for meals, Thomas got through rather more than two-thirds.
He did not get through all of it, and the specific documents that were lost — a section on chemistry, most of an agricultural volume, something about optics he remembered only vaguely — were catalogued by title in the Codex, with a note in Cecily's hand: Known to have existed. Contents unrecovered. Do not assume these problems are unsolved; assume only that we did not reach them in time.