The thirtieth stick went into the sand a little crooked.
Jason straightened it with his foot and stepped back to look at the row. There were thirty sticks now, one for each morning since the storm, give or take the first few days, which he had reconstructed afterward as best he could from memory and the state of his wounds. He had started the calendar the morning after he found the footprints, because losing track of time had frightened him more than he liked to admit. The sticks ran along the top of the beach in a neat, slightly wobbly line, just above where the highest tides reached.
"One month," he said. "Rent's due."
The joke came out rough. He used his voice less than he used to.
The month had changed him in ways he could measure and in ways he couldn't. He had learned the island's routine the way he had once learned the raft's: birds in the early morning out on the plain, while they were still slow and stupid from the night; fruit in the afternoon, from the big trees whose trunks he could now climb without falling off more than once; fire at dusk, which still took longer than it should but no longer took him an hour. He had a better spear than the first one, and he kept the knife's edge up on a flat stone he had found on the beach.
His right eye had stopped hurting so much, which he suspected was not good news. The swelling had gone down, but nothing had come back with it. On that side he could tell light from dark and nothing else. He had made a patch out of a folded leaf and a strip of his shirt, mostly so that he wouldn't have to look at it in the water.
And every day, at some point, his feet took him to the grotto.
He had promised himself he would come back, and he had, every single day. What he had never done was go in.
The footprints on the beach were long gone, erased by the first high tide. A few still remained inside, near the entrance, where the sand was dry and sheltered, and they were fading slowly as the grains shifted. He stepped around them the way he always did and walked to the edge of the pond.
It looked exactly the same as it had a month ago: round, black, and perfectly still.
"Okay," he said. "Today."
He had prepared for this, because preparing was the only part of it he was good at. Over the last week he had braided a rope out of vines, twisting and doubling them until he had something about ten meters long that held when he hung his whole weight from it. He had practiced holding his breath on the beach, lying on his back and counting, and he could manage about a minute if he stayed calm.
A minute was a long time. It was also exactly how long it took to drown.
He tied one end of the rope around a spur of rock at the pond's edge and the other around his left wrist, checked both knots twice, and took off his shirt. Then he sat on the edge with his legs in the water. It was cold, much colder than the sea, a deep mineral cold that seemed to come from inside the island itself.
He breathed in and out a few times, slow and deep, the way he'd practiced.
Then he let himself slide in.
The cold closed over his head and squeezed. For a second he floated there, eyes open, seeing nothing but a dim green glow above him and darkness below. Then he found the rock wall with his hands and began to pull himself down along it.
One meter. Two. The light faded quickly, from green to gray to almost nothing. The rock under his fingers was slick with something soft that he tried not to think about. At three meters, maybe four, the pressure started to build in his ears, and then in his ruined eye, a slow, deep ache behind the patch that grew with every pull.
He kept going.
His hand found the edge of the wall, and then nothing.
He felt around it carefully. It was an opening in the rock, a tunnel mouth maybe a meter wide, leading sideways and down into complete darkness. Cold water was flowing out of it, a faint, steady current against his face and chest, as if something on the other side were breathing out.
So there was a way through. The footprints hadn't lied.
Jason gripped the edge of the tunnel and pulled himself inside.
The darkness became total. The rock closed in around him, brushing his shoulders on both sides, and the current pushed gently against him as he dragged himself forward, one handhold at a time. His lungs had begun to tighten. He counted in his head. Twenty. Twenty-five. The tunnel bent downward, and he followed it.
The rope went taut against his wrist.
He had reached the end of it. The tunnel kept going, on and on into the dark, and he had no idea how much further, and his lungs were starting to burn.
Something in him broke loose.
He twisted around in the narrow space, and his shoulder slammed against rock. For one horrible second he couldn't tell which way was back. The rope had looped around his arm in the turn, and when he pulled, it didn't give. Panic flooded through him, hot and blinding. He thrashed, clawed at the rope, felt it slip free at last, and hauled himself hand over hand back along it, out of the tunnel, up the wall, toward the gray glow that was the surface and seemed impossibly far away.
He broke through gasping and choking, grabbed the edge of the pond, and dragged himself out onto the stone.
For a long time he lay there on his side, coughing up water and shaking so hard that his teeth clattered, while his heart tried to beat its way out of his chest.
"Okay," he whispered finally. "Okay. Not today."
He rested. When his breathing had steadied and his hands had stopped shaking, he sat up, checked the knots again, and went back to the edge of the pond.
He stood there with his toes at the lip of the stone and looked down into the black water, and told himself to go.
He didn't go.
His legs simply wouldn't do it. He stood there until the cold had seeped out of the stone into his bare feet, trying to make his body move, and it wouldn't. Some part of him that he didn't have access to had made its decision, and it was not going back into that tunnel.
It didn't make any sense. On the raft, starving and half-mad, he had gone into the sea after a shark with nothing but a sharpened plank. He hadn't been this afraid then.
He understood why, slowly, as he untied the rope from his wrist.
On the raft, he'd had nothing to lose. Here, he had a camp. He had fire, and food that didn't come from the sea, and a bed of leaves that was almost comfortable, and a routine that kept the days in order. It wasn't much, but it was his, and for the first time since the lecture hall, dying felt like it would cost him something.
He coiled the rope and left it by the pond for another day.
* * *
He ate his dinner on the beach that evening, sitting beside the line of sticks while the sun went down over the water.
The fear from the tunnel hadn't gone away. It had settled into him, quiet and heavy, and it kept circling back to the same question, the one he had been carefully not asking for a month: how long was he going to be here?
He had assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that this would end. The raft had ended. The storm had ended. Every part of this had ended eventually.
He thought of the voice in the grotto on the night he'd washed ashore. Trial concluded for difficulty: Hard. He had lain on the stone and waited for his own name, and it had never come. It had never come after the week on the raft either, or after the shark. Easy had ended with a week. Normal had ended with the shark. Hard had ended with land. Every one of them had a finish line, and every time one was crossed, he had waited, and the Enigma had said nothing to him at all.
He had told himself it was coming. He had told himself his trial was simply longer.
Pass away peacefully in your sleep, alone, on a deserted island.
On the first day, on the raft, he had turned that sentence over and decided it was a set of instructions, and that there was hope hidden in it. There was an island, so there was somewhere to go. He had been right about that part. It had been instructions all along.
He had just misread where the finish line was.
There was no rescue in that sentence. There was no next step, no voice waiting to tell him he was done. His trial would end when he died, peacefully, in his sleep, alone, on this island. Not from sharks or storms or starvation, because none of those were peaceful. It would end when he was old and his body finally wore out, with no one beside him.
He was supposed to live here. For the rest of his life.
Jason sat very still.
The engineer in him did the math before he could stop it. He was twenty. If he was lucky, if he didn't break a leg or catch a fever or fall out of a tree, he might have sixty more years. Sixty times three hundred and sixty-five was twenty-one thousand, nine hundred.
Twenty-one thousand, nine hundred sticks.
He looked at the line of thirty beside him, and then at the rest of the beach, running on pale and empty toward the rocks.
There wasn't enough room. There wasn't anywhere near enough room.
He started to laugh, and it took him a very long time to stop.