Alexander spent the first night sitting with his back against a tree at the edge of the forest, too angry to sleep.
He argued with Jason for hours in his head. He said all the things he should have said in the cave, better and more cleverly, and in every version Jason had no answer to any of them. By the time the sky began to gray, he had won every argument several times over, and he felt no better at all.
You could have left him on the rocks, said the cold voice. The very first night. You could have saved yourself all of this.
"Be quiet," Alexander muttered, and went to find breakfast.
The second day was easier, or at least simpler. He knew the island well enough by now to feed himself. He climbed a fruit tree, and fell out of it only once, and ate sitting on a branch with his legs dangling, looking out over the forest canopy toward the sea. He told himself that he was thinking. Mostly he was trying not to.
He didn't go back.
He didn't know what he would say if he did. I'm sorry wasn't right, because he still didn't know whether he was. You were right was worse. And every time he pictured the cave, he pictured Jason sitting against the wall with that flat, empty look, not arguing, not defending himself, just letting the words hit him, as if he had long ago stopped expecting anything better. Alexander found that he couldn't face that look again. Not yet.
On the second night, the forest was very quiet.
He had never noticed how quiet it was. For the first few weeks he had been too busy, and after that there had always been Jason: breathing across the fire, or shifting on the leaves, or muttering in his sleep. Now there was only wind in the leaves and the distant sea and the rustle of small things in the undergrowth, and Alexander lay awake listening to all of it and felt the silence settle on his chest like a weight.
He had been alone for two days, and he was already talking to himself.
* * *
On the third day, he went down to the far beach, because it was the only place on the island he could think of where Jason would never be.
He walked along the waterline with his hands in his coat pockets, kicking at the foam and trying to think about nothing. The sand was white and clean, and the waves came in low and gentle, and he almost walked straight past the sticks.
They were set along the top of the beach, just above the line of dried seaweed where the highest tides reached, and at first he took them for driftwood. Then he saw how straight they stood, and how evenly they were spaced, and he stopped.
He followed them.
There were hundreds of them. They ran along the top of the sand in a long, patient line, each one pushed firmly into the ground. Some were pale and fairly new. Others had been bleached gray by years of sun. In places, the wind or the tide had knocked a few of them down, and someone had come back and set new ones in their place, one for one, as carefully as if every single stick mattered.
Alexander walked the whole length of it. After the first few hundred, he began, without meaning to, to count.
He stopped somewhere past a thousand, because his throat had closed.
Every one of them was a morning. Every one was a day that Jason had woken up alone on this island, walked down to this beach, and pushed another piece of wood into the sand to prove to himself that time was still passing. Alexander had spent two nights alone in the forest and could barely stand it. He tried to imagine a thousand of them, and more, with nobody coming and no voice to hear but the one inside his own head, and he found that he couldn't. His mind simply refused.
I used to put a stick in the sand for every morning, Jason had said. So flatly, as if it were nothing.
Then, near the far end of the beach, the line stopped.
It didn't thin out or trail away. It simply ended. After the last stick, the sand ran on smooth and untouched for a long way, and even Alexander could see that no one had come back to add to it in a long time. The last few sticks had weathered almost as gray as the first.
He stood there looking at the empty sand for a long time.
He didn't understand it. A man who had set a stick in the ground every morning for years, who had come back to replace the ones the tide took, did not simply forget. Something had made him stop, some time before Alexander had washed up on those rocks. He didn't know what it was.
But he thought of Jason's face on the first night, gray and empty in the rain, saying then I die as if he were talking about the weather. He thought about you should have let me drown, said to a man who had lived like this for four years, and something cold settled into his stomach.
He turned and started back toward the cave. He walked fast, then faster, and by the time he reached the plain, he was running.
* * *
The fire was out.
That was the first thing he noticed when he ducked through the cave mouth, breathing hard: the fire pit cold and gray, and no smoke, and the air as chill and damp as a cellar. The second thing was the smell, faint and sour and wrong. The third was Jason.
He was lying on the leaves on his side, curled up tight, with one arm pressed against his ribs. His face was flushed a dark, unhealthy red, and his hair was soaked with sweat. He was shivering so hard that the leaves rustled beneath him.
"Jason." Alexander dropped to his knees beside him. "Jason, can you hear me?"
Jason's eye opened halfway and looked straight through him. His lips moved. He was saying something, over and over, too faint to hear.
Alexander put a hand on his forehead and snatched it back. Jason was burning up.
He pulled the ragged shirt aside and saw the wound, and swore.
The scar in Jason's side had been healing cleanly the last time Alexander had looked at it. Now the skin around it was swollen and shiny and hot, flushed an angry red in a wide ring, and at its center the old wound had split open again, weeping something yellow that explained the smell.
"Gods," Alexander said. "Oh, gods. How long have you been like this?"
Jason didn't answer. His lips kept moving.
For a moment, Alexander simply knelt there with his hands shaking, and every lecture the fleet surgeon had ever given flew straight out of his head.
You left him, said the cold voice. You left a sick man alone for three days because your feelings were hurt. If he dies, that's yours.
"Then he's not going to die," Alexander said out loud.
He made himself breathe. Then he made himself remember.
Clean it out. That was the first thing the surgeon had always said, drumming it into a room full of bored boys. Hot water, clean cloth, and get the rot out, however much it hurts. Most men who die of their wounds die of the dirt in them.
He rebuilt the fire first, with shaking hands, until it roared. He filled a hollow in the rock beside the fire with seawater, dropped fire-heated stones into it one by one until the water steamed, and tore the cleanest strip he could find from the lining of his coat. Then he knelt beside Jason and began.
It was the worst thing he had ever done. Jason fought him, weakly and blindly, crying out when the hot cloth touched the wound, and Alexander held him down with one arm and kept going, talking the whole time without knowing what he was saying. Hold still. Hold still, I'm sorry, I know, the surgeon always said you have to get it all out, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. When it was done, the water in the hollow was cloudy and pink, and Jason had gone limp, and Alexander's own face was wet.
He packed the wound with clean cloth and bound it. Then he sat back on his heels and shook.
* * *
He didn't leave the cave for four days.
He kept the fire high and the water hot. He cleaned the wound twice a day, and each time it was a little less red, and the smell a little fainter. He held Jason up to drink, a few mouthfuls at a time, coaxing the water between his cracked lips the way he had once coaxed fruit juice beneath the edge of the mask. He slept in snatches, sitting up against the wall, and woke at every sound.
Jason talked, in the fever. Most of it was too faint to follow. But sometimes a word came through clearly, and Alexander learned names he had never heard before. Sarah, over and over, sometimes as a question and sometimes as a warning. Dad. A word that sounded like Hawkins, said with a strange mixture of guilt and dread. Once, very clearly, not today, in the same stubborn voice Alexander had heard a hundred times on the decks of warships, from men who had decided not to die.
On the third night, when the fever was at its worst, Alexander sat beside him in the firelight and found himself talking too.
"I'm sorry," he said. He didn't know whether Jason could hear him. He wasn't sure it mattered. "I was angry at the wrong thing. None of it was yours. You pulled me out of the sea, and I shouted at you for it, and then I left you here alone. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
Jason didn't answer. But after a while, his breathing eased a little, and he stopped shivering, and Alexander stayed where he was and watched him sleep.
* * *
On the fifth morning, Alexander woke up with a stiff neck, and knew before he even opened his eyes that something had changed.
Pale gray dawn was coming through the cave mouth. Jason was awake.
He was lying on his back on the leaves, looking up at the ceiling, and his face had lost that terrible flush. His skin was pale and damp, and he looked as weak as a newborn, but the eye that turned toward Alexander was clear. It knew where it was. It knew who he was.
For a long moment, neither of them said anything.
Alexander had rehearsed this. For four days, whenever Jason was quiet, he had rehearsed exactly what he would say when he woke up. The apology, properly this time, in full. The explanation. The promise that he wouldn't leave again.
None of it came out.
"I saw your sticks," he said.