The number reached one on an entirely unremarkable morning in the eighth year, and Thomas sat with it alone in the garden for about ten minutes before going inside and telling Victoria, because he had promised, and because he had learned that the four days he had once spent not telling her were among the few things in his life he genuinely regretted.
"One," she said.
"One."
They looked at each other across the kitchen.
"I find I don't know what to do with my face," Victoria said, which was so unexpectedly and precisely honest that Thomas laughed, which was the last thing either of them had anticipated, and then she laughed too, and then she cried, and then they sat down together at the table and were quiet for a while.
"I want to be careful about something," Thomas said eventually. "I don't know that one means anything. I've assumed for six years there's a scale I don't understand — that these are percentages, or fractions of something, and that one is nearly nothing. I've also never had a single piece of evidence for that. For all I actually know it counts down to one and stops there for thirty years."
"Do you believe that?"
"No. But I've been wrong about this in every direction it's possible to be wrong, and I'd rather hold it loosely than make a solemn occasion out of a day that might turn out to be a Tuesday."
Victoria nodded slowly. "All right. Then here's what I'd like, and you may tell me if it's wrong." She folded her hands. "I don't want a farewell. I don't want us to spend whatever this is doing meaningful things at each other. If it's thirty years I'd feel absurd, and if it's a fortnight I'd rather it be a fortnight of our actual life than a fortnight of ceremony."
"That's exactly what I want."
"Good." She stood, and went to the shelf, and brought back the roofing accounts. "Then the eastern spur drainage is still wrong, and Cecily's asked for a decision about the second cohort's numbers by Thursday, and Maud has apparently requested a quantity of tin that Wat describes as 'not a request, a raid.'"
They worked through the morning.
Thomas told the council that afternoon, briefly and without drama, because they had all agreed years ago that they would be told. The reactions were, he thought afterward, exactly characteristic — Aldith asked two clinical questions and then said she had nothing useful to offer and would not pretend otherwise; Wat left the room; Alaric asked whether the succession document needed any final amendment and, on being told it did not, said that he would review it independently anyway and Thomas could object if he liked; Cecily said nothing at all in the meeting and came to find him alone that evening.
"I want to ask you something and I want you to give me the real answer," she said. "Not the encouraging one."
"All right."
"Is there anything about how you built things that I still don't have? Anything you've been carrying and not written down, because you assumed there'd be time, or because it seemed too obvious to record, or because you didn't have words for it."
Thomas thought about that for a long time. It was, he realized, the single most useful question anyone had asked him in two years.
"Yes," he said. "One thing. And you're right that I never wrote it down because it seemed too obvious."
"Tell me."
"Everything I built that lasted, I built too slowly and with too many people involved, and I resented it at the time." He met her eyes. "Every single one. The scrip took four years of Victoria arguing with me. The charter took Hamo and Alaric and eight months of drafting I found tedious. The fever protocols took Aldith telling me I was wrong repeatedly. The things I built fast and alone — the early works, the wire — are the parts most likely to fail when nobody remembers why they're shaped that way."
"That's it?"
"That's it. It's not clever. I spent about six years learning it and I've never once seen it written anywhere, because everybody who learns it thinks it's too simple to bother saying." Thomas shrugged. "You'll want to build fast. You're twenty-three and you're right about almost everything and the temptation will be enormous. Don't. Be slower than you want to be and make people argue with you, and you'll be annoyed for fifteen years and then you'll have something that outlives you."
Cecily wrote it down, right there, standing up, in the small book she carried everywhere.
"Thank you," she said. "That's the answer I wanted and not the one I expected."
"They're usually different," Thomas said. "That's another one you can have free."