On the fifth day, Alexander came down the cliff with four fruits wrapped in the tail of his coat and his hands bleeding again.
He had learned the climb by now, or at least he had learned where it hurt. He knew which ledges crumbled, which cracks would take his whole hand, and which stretch of rock near the bottom stayed slick with spray no matter how long the sun had been out. He still hadn't learned to do it without tearing the skin off his palms. Every morning the scabs from the day before opened again, and every evening he came down with fresh blood on the rock.
The voice came down with him, as it always did.
Five days, it said. Five days of this, for a man who is already dead. He just hasn't noticed yet.
"Quiet," Alexander muttered, and dropped the last meter onto the rocks.
The island had not been kind to him, but it had not been cruel either. On the first morning he had followed a worn trail from the top of the cliff, a path trodden so deep into the grass that it could only have been made by one man walking it over and over for years, and it had led him to a stand of enormous trees with round green fruit hanging high in their branches. He had fallen out of the first tree three times before he reached anything. He had tried twice to catch the strange, fat, flightless birds on the plain and had come back with nothing but grass stains and a torn sleeve. The fruit was sweet and full of juice, and it was keeping him alive. That would have to be enough.
He ducked into the cave.
The man lay exactly where Alexander had left him that morning, exactly where he had lain for five days, on the heap of leaves by the cold fire pit with the white mask over his face.
He was still alive.
Alexander stood in the cave mouth for a moment and simply watched his chest rise and fall. He did this every time he came back. Every time, some part of him expected to find the chest still, and every time it wasn't, and he still didn't know whether what he felt was relief or dread.
He knelt beside him and began the evening's work.
He cut open the first fruit with the man's knife, a small, worn blade with a scratched wooden handle that he had found on the man's belt, tied to his wrist with fishing line. Then he lifted the lower edge of the mask, very carefully, just far enough to uncover a pair of cracked lips inside a matted beard, and let the juice trickle between them a few drops at a time.
Some of it ran out again and down into the beard. Some of it spilled over the mask, and slid off the white surface without leaving a trace, the way everything did. But after a moment the man's throat moved, and he swallowed.
"Good," Alexander murmured. "That's good. Keep doing that."
He had started talking to him on the second day. He wasn't sure when it had stopped feeling strange.
When the fruit was gone, he sat back on his heels and looked at the man the way he looked at him every evening, as if the answer to what was happening might be written somewhere on his body if he only looked closely enough.
It was not an easy body to look at.
The man was tall, taller than Alexander, but there was almost nothing left of him. Every rib showed under skin burned dark and tough as old leather. His collarbones stood out like the frame of a hull stripped of its planks, and his arms and legs were little more than bone wrapped in cord. His hair fell past his shoulders in salt-stiff ropes, and his beard, where it showed beneath the mask, was so long and tangled that it looked like something that had grown on him rather than from him.
And he was scarred everywhere. Three long, ragged lines ran across his left forearm, old and white, the kind of marks that only teeth could make. Another thick scar ran up his shin. His hands were a map of small cuts and burns and calluses, the nails broken short and black-rimmed, and the soles of his bare feet had hardened into something closer to hide than skin. The patch of leaves and cloth still covered his right eye beneath the mask, and Alexander had not had the courage to look under it.
He tried to imagine how long it took for a man to end up like this. He couldn't. Years, surely. Years alone on this rock, with the birds and the fruit trees and the sea on every side.
He looked at the heap of leaves the man slept on, and at the spear against the wall, and at the fire pit and the neat little pile of dry wood beside it, and he felt something cold settle in his stomach that had nothing to do with the voice.
This was what the island did to people who stayed.
His eyes went back to the mask, as they always did eventually.
He had studied it more than he wanted to admit. By daylight it was even stranger than it had seemed on the beach. The white was not the white of bone or porcelain or paint; it was deeper than that somehow, as if the color went all the way through. The fine lines carved across its surface ran in patterns that almost made sense, spiraling in toward the eyes and branching outward toward the edges, and if he followed them too long they began to seem as though they were moving. The eye slits were narrow and long, and some nights, in the firelight, he could have sworn that they were watching him.
It never marked. It never stained. Sand wouldn't stick to it, and neither would blood, rain, or fruit juice. In five days it had not gathered so much as a speck of dust.
He had thought about taking it off. He had even reached for it, once, on the second night. But the man had not gotten any worse since the moment it had touched his face, and Alexander had pulled his hand back and not tried again.
That was the other thing he didn't understand.
The wound should have killed him. On the second day, when the bleeding had stopped completely, Alexander had worked up the nerve to pull the coral out, braced for a gush of blood that never came. What was left behind was a deep, ugly hole in the man's side, raw and red, and in five days it had not changed at all. It had not closed or scabbed or started to fester. It looked exactly as it had on the first night, as if time had simply stopped around it.
Everything about the man had stopped, except for one thing.
Alexander made himself look at the left arm.
It had started on the third morning as a thin black line at the tip of the man's middle finger, and he had thought at first that it was dirt. By that evening it had branched. Now it covered the whole hand and climbed past the wrist, a spreading pattern of fine black lines that forked and forked again like the roots of a tree or the cracks in a sheet of ice. The skin around it had gone hot and angry red.
He had seen something like it once before. A sailor on his father's flagship had been struck by lightning on the mainmast during a storm off the southern capes, and he had lived, and afterward the same kind of branching pattern had covered half his back, dark red and feathered like a fern. The ship's surgeon had called it a lightning flower. It had faded within a few days.
This wasn't fading. Every morning it had grown.
You know what has to happen, the voice said.
Alexander closed his eyes.
Take the arm off. Tonight, before it reaches the shoulder. Before it reaches the heart. Or sit there and watch it creep up him inch by inch, knowing you could have stopped it.
"I'm not a surgeon," he whispered.
No. You're a coward. Everyone always knew that. Your father knew it.
He opened his eyes and picked up the knife.
He spent an hour working its edge against a flat stone until it was as sharp as he could make it. He tore a long strip from the hem of his shirt and tied it around the man's upper arm, above the elbow, and pulled it tight with a stick the way the fleet surgeon had shown him, until the flesh bulged around it. He knelt at the man's side with the knife in his hand and set the blade against the skin just below the knot.
His hand was shaking so badly that the tip trembled against the skin.
He looked at the man's face, or at the white mask that covered it, calm and blank and utterly indifferent. He thought about what it would be like to do this to someone who couldn't wake up to scream, and to do it badly, and to have him bleed to death on the leaves anyway because a boy who had slept through the surgeon's lectures had cut in the wrong place.
He thought about doing nothing, and watching the black lines climb.
He stayed there, frozen, until his knees ached and the fire had burned low.
Then he set the knife down on the stone, very gently, and untied the tourniquet.
Coward, the voice said.
"Yes," Alexander said quietly. "I know."
He sat back against the wall of the cave with his arms around his knees and stared at the man until the fire went out. He didn't sleep. He listened to him breathe, slow and shallow and steady, the only sound in the cave apart from the sea.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, sometime near dawn. "I'm so sorry."
When the light came, he looked at the arm.
The black lines had crossed the elbow.