The missed evenings grew more frequent through the following month, and Thomas found himself keeping a second count alongside the anchor's own steady decline — not days since the last letter, but days without one, a grim new arithmetic that told its own story more plainly than any single fragment from the relay ever had.
Three missed evenings became five. Five became eight, spread unevenly across a month that had once, for four unbroken years, never once failed to deliver its small, ordinary comfort on schedule.
"I don't think it's random anymore," he told Victoria, laying the pattern out across a page in the Codex, dates marked carefully against each gap. "Look — it clusters. A week of missed evenings, then a week of perfect reliability, then another cluster worse than the last. I don't know what that means, but it doesn't look like simple decay to me. It looks like something fighting to hold on, and losing more ground each time it has to fight."
Victoria studied the pattern with her usual sharp attention, though Thomas could see the fear beneath her careful composure growing harder to fully contain. "You think the connection is trying to correct itself. The way the relay's fragment suggested — some mechanism attempting containment, and failing more each time."
"I think that's exactly what I think, though I have no way to prove it beyond this pattern and my own frightened guessing." Thomas closed the quire gently, unable to look at the accumulating dates any longer without the particular vertigo that had become, over the difficult months, uncomfortably familiar. "I keep waiting for it to simply stop, Victoria. A clean ending, one way or another. This is worse, somehow. Watching it fail slowly, unevenly, without any way to know which missed evening might finally prove to be the last one."
"Then we keep doing what we've always done," Victoria said, though her voice carried more effort than usual in finding the familiar reassurance. "We record it. We build the days. We refuse to let the not-knowing steal whatever certainty we do still have — which is each other, and this valley, and whatever time the falling numbers ultimately allow us."
Thomas nodded, though the fear sat heavier in him that evening than it had in some time, and it was Hamo, consulted the following day with the pattern laid out plainly before him, who offered the observation that finally shifted something in Thomas's own private accounting of the dread.
"You describe this as a failure," Hamo said, studying the careful record of dates. "I wonder if you might instead describe it as a fight. Something on the other end of this strange connection, whatever it actually is, clearly isn't surrendering easily to whatever force is pulling it apart. It keeps returning, Thomas, however unevenly, however much ground it loses in each new cluster of silence. That is not the pattern of a thing giving up. That is the pattern of a thing still, stubbornly, trying."
"You think there's something actively fighting to keep the connection alive."
"I do not know what mechanism governs any of this, any more than you or Victoria do. But I have watched this valley itself fight exactly this same uneven, imperfect battle against every danger it's faced — the Baron's fire, the plague's slow spread, your own falling number. Progress rarely arrives clean and steady, Thomas. It arrives exactly like this. Ground won, ground lost, and a stubborn, uneven persistence that somehow, against every reasonable expectation, keeps the whole enterprise standing regardless." Hamo's steady gaze held his. "I would not call this pattern purely a grief. I would call it evidence that whatever's happening, something on both ends of it is still fighting to hold on, however imperfectly. I find that, on balance, a considerably more hopeful reading than the one you've been carrying alone."
Thomas turned that over for a long while after Hamo had gone, the fear not fully lifting but shifting, subtly, into something he could carry with slightly less weight than before — not a countdown toward a certain, clean ending, but an uneven, ongoing struggle that neither he nor whatever strange mechanism connected him to his mother's ordinary, distant life seemed prepared to simply surrender without a fight.
He wrote as much into the Codex that evening, beside the careful record of missed dates, a single line added in his own steady hand: Still fighting. Still here. Whatever comes next, I intend to meet it exactly the same way this whole valley always has — imperfectly, stubbornly, and together.