It took Jason another week to get back on his feet, and Alexander didn't leave his side once.
They didn't talk about the argument. There didn't seem to be any need. Whatever had to be said had been said in the dark, during the fever, and although Alexander wasn't sure how much of it Jason had heard, something had changed between them. Jason still spoke very little. But he no longer watched Alexander the way he had in the first weeks, as if he were waiting for him to vanish. Sometimes he even fell asleep first.
Alexander, meanwhile, couldn't stop thinking.
He thought about the sticks. He thought about where they stopped, and about how long the sand ran on smooth and empty after the last one. He thought about the first night, and Jason lying on the rocks at the foot of the cliff in the rain, gray-faced, saying then I die without a trace of fear in his voice. He had heard a lot of men talk about dying on the decks of his father's fleet. He had never heard one sound like that.
And he thought about the signal fire.
Every night for weeks, he had climbed the cliff to light it. Jason had never once come up with him. When Alexander had asked, Jason had said something about his side, and later something about being tired, and later still nothing at all. At first Alexander had thought nothing of it. Then he had started to notice that Jason didn't just avoid the climb. He avoided the whole top of the cliff. When they walked back from the fruit trees along the ridge, he always took the inland path, the long way around, and he never once looked toward the edge.
Alexander turned all of it over in his mind, the way he used to work at a navigation problem, and slowly the pieces began to fit together into a shape he didn't like at all.
* * *
He brought it up on the eighth evening.
They were sitting by the fire after eating. On top of the cliff, the signal fire was burning. Alexander had started lighting it again the day the fever broke, though he no longer sat beside it until it died. Outside, the sea was calm, and the sky was clear and full of stars.
"Can I ask you something?"
Jason glanced at him. "You're going to anyway."
It was almost a joke. Alexander noted it, the way he had noted every one of them, and filed it away.
"On the night I washed up," he said. "You were in the water with me, weren't you? That's how you got hurt. That's how you pulled me out."
"Yes."
"How did you get there?"
Jason looked into the fire. "I saw you from the cliff."
"From the top of the cliff," Alexander said slowly. "In the middle of the night. In the worst storm I've ever seen, and I grew up on warships." He paused. "What were you doing up there?"
Jason didn't answer.
"The sticks stop," Alexander said. He kept his voice very quiet. "Months before I came. I walked the whole line, Jason. A man who went back to replace every stick the tide took, for years, just stops one day. And then, a few months later, he's standing on top of a cliff in a storm, at night, alone. When I found him bleeding to death, he told me he'd die if I didn't fetch a mask, and he said it the way you'd say it looks like rain." He looked at Jason across the fire. "And now he won't go near the edge. He walks the long way around just so he doesn't have to see it."
"I was watching the storm," Jason said.
"No, you weren't."
"I was. I used to go up there to—"
"You weren't looking at the sea that night," Alexander said. "You were going to jump."
The fire crackled. Somewhere far below, a wave broke and drew back with a long hiss over the pebbles.
Jason opened his mouth, and Alexander braced himself for the denial.
It didn't come. Instead, something happened to Jason's face that Alexander had never seen before. The flat, careful look he had worn like armor for weeks simply came apart. Underneath it, for the first time, Alexander saw how tired he was: not the tiredness of one bad night, but something deep and old, something that had been building for years.
"Yes," Jason said.
It came out barely louder than the fire.
Alexander didn't say anything. He had learned that much, at least, on the ships: that sometimes the kindest thing you could do for a man was to be quiet and wait. So he waited, and after a while, the rest of it came out on its own.
"It wasn't sudden," Jason said. "People think it's sudden. It wasn't. It was years. The fruit got worse, and the birds got harder to catch, and I stopped counting the days because counting them only told me how many more there were. I stopped talking. I stopped doing anything except the things that kept me breathing, and after a while I couldn't remember why I was doing those." His thumb moved slowly along the black lines on his left wrist without seeming to notice them. "That night I just decided I was finished. I climbed up, and I stood at the edge, and I was going to step off."
"And then you saw me."
"I saw something in the water. I thought it was driftwood. Then the lightning came, and it was a person, and I just..." Jason shook his head slowly. "I didn't decide anything. I jumped. Just not the way I'd meant to. I went in after you."
Alexander stared at him.
He had imagined a hundred versions of that night since he had woken on the rocks. In every one of them, Jason had been the rescuer, strong and certain, a castaway who had seen a drowning man and done what anyone would do. He had never once imagined this: a man at the edge of a cliff in a storm, about to let go of everything, who had jumped into the sea after a stranger instead.
"Gods," he said softly. "And I told you that you should have let me drown."
"You didn't know."
"I told you that you dragged me out of the sea for nothing." His voice cracked. "And the whole time, the only reason you were still alive to drag anyone anywhere was that I was floating there."
Jason looked up at him. Alexander watched the idea reach him, slowly, and saw his face change as he turned it over.
"I suppose that's true," Jason said.
"So we're even."
"I don't think it works like that."
"It works exactly like that." Alexander wiped his face roughly on his sleeve and laughed, a wet, shaky sound. "You saved me, and I saved you, and neither of us meant to do it. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"Welcome to the island," Jason said.
And then he laughed.
It wasn't much of a laugh. It was rusty and cracked, the sound of something that hadn't been used in a very long time, and it seemed to take Jason himself completely by surprise. He stopped, looking startled, and then it came again, and this time he didn't stop. Alexander heard himself laughing too, helplessly, with tears still drying on his face, and for a while the two of them sat on either side of the fire and laughed like idiots at nothing at all.
It was the first time Alexander had ever heard him laugh. He decided, sitting there with his ribs aching, that he would do whatever it took to hear it again.
* * *
After that, it was his turn.
He didn't need to be asked. It seemed to be understood between them that a confession like that deserved one in return, and Alexander sat looking into the fire for a while, gathering it up.
"I tried to tell you some of this before," he said finally, with a crooked smile. "A few weeks ago, by the fire. About my father. You fell asleep."
Jason winced. "Sorry."
"Don't be. It was the first time I'd seen you sleep without jumping awake." Alexander looked down at his hands. "I'll try again."
So he told it again, and this time Jason stayed awake for all of it: the father who came home twice a year, the swimming lesson off the harbor steps, the escort ship at fourteen, the watch where he had frozen and the whole crew had known it within the hour.
Then he told him the rest.
He told him about the Republic, a nation of islands and floating cities scattered across an ocean so vast that its fleets took months to cross it, and about the war that had been tearing it apart for longer than Alexander had been alive. The rebels called themselves free captains. They struck from the empty reaches of the sea, where there were a thousand places to hide and no land to hold, and then vanished again. His father had spent his whole life hunting them.
Last of all, haltingly, he told him about the voice.
"It's always been there," he said. "As long as I can remember. It isn't like yours. It doesn't come from outside. It's just me, the worst of me, telling me what everyone else is too polite to say." He poked at the embers with a stick. "It told me I was a coward. On the ship, and at home, and here, when I couldn't cut off your arm. It said my father knew it too. That he'd always known."
Jason was quiet for a moment. "Did he?"
"I don't know." Alexander looked into the fire. "I never asked him."
He tipped his head back and looked up through the mouth of the cave at the stars, because it was easier than looking at anything else.
"That one's the Anchor," he said, pointing. "The three bright ones in a row, and the curve beneath them. Sailors steer by it in the southern seas. And there, the red one low down, that's the Drowned Queen's eye. My mother used to say that if you could see it clearly, a storm was coming."
He waited for Jason to look up. When he didn't, Alexander glanced over and found that Jason wasn't looking at the stars at all.
He was looking at Alexander's mouth.
"Say that again," Jason said.
Alexander frowned. "The Drowned Queen?"
Jason's eye didn't move from his lips. There was something new in his face now, sharp and intent, the look of a man working through a problem at great speed.
"Say something else," he said. "Anything. Slowly."
"Why? What's wrong?"
Jason sat back against the wall as if something had pushed him.
"What's engineering," he said, half to himself. "The Maritime Republic. Stars I've never seen. An ocean with no land in it." He let out a strange, breathless laugh. "More than four years, and I never once asked which sea I was on. Water was water."
"Jason, what are you talking about?"
"When you talk," Jason said slowly, "I hear my language. English. Every word. But your mouth doesn't move the way the words sound. It never has. I just never looked." He pressed the heel of his hand against his eye. "The voice is translating. For me. Everything you say."
"What's English?"
That made Jason laugh again, a short, cracked sound. "Exactly." He dropped his hand and looked up at the sky, at the Anchor and the Drowned Queen's red eye, and Alexander saw something go through him, a slow shiver that ran from his shoulders all the way down to his hands. "I'm not on Earth. I haven't been, since the lecture hall. None of this is Earth."
Alexander didn't know what to say. He didn't know where Earth was, or what it looked like, or how a man could fall out of one sky and into another. All he knew was that Jason looked, for a moment, more lost than he had even on that first night, bleeding on the rocks.
"I don't know where Earth is," he said at last.
"No," said Jason. "I don't think you would."
* * *
They sat together for a long time after that, looking up at the stars of a world that only belonged to one of them. Eventually, Alexander lay down on his side of the fire and pulled his coat over his shoulders. His eyes were heavy. The day had been very long.
"My father will come," he murmured, already half asleep. "Wherever this is. He'll come."
Across the fire, Jason was still sitting up against the wall, his face turned toward the sky. Just as Alexander was slipping under, he heard him say something, very softly, to no one.
It was a single word. Alexander was too far gone to catch it, and too tired to ask. He only noticed, drifting down into sleep, that it had sounded strangely like a goodbye.