"Teach me a game," Jason said.
Alexander looked up from the fish he was gutting. It was a few weeks after the fever, and Jason's side had finally healed into a thick white scar that pulled when he stretched. They had fallen into a rhythm by then, and one of its first rules was that Alexander did the gutting, because Jason had done it alone for four years and had informed him, with a perfectly straight face, that he was officially retired.
It was the longest joke Alexander had heard from him yet. He had been quietly delighted about it for days.
"A game?"
"A board game. Any board game. As many as you know."
Alexander wiped his knife on the grass. "That's a strange request."
"I know."
He looked at Jason more carefully. Jason was sitting on the rocks with his arms around his knees, looking out at the sea, and there was a tightness in his jaw that Alexander had learned to recognize.
"Is this about the beach?" he asked. "The black one?"
Jason hesitated, then nodded.
Alexander wasn't surprised. Jason had told him about it only once, on a night early on when the fire was low, and had never mentioned it again. But Alexander had seen him sometimes, late at night, sitting up and staring at nothing with his hands flat on his knees, as if there were a board in front of him that only he could see.
"If I ever end up there again," Jason said, "I want to know something. Anything. Maybe it's one of your games, or maybe the rules are the same in all of them somewhere underneath. I don't know." He shrugged. "Right now I know nothing, and that's worse."
Alexander studied him for a moment, and made a decision.
He had seen men like Jason before. Not quite like him, because nobody was quite like him, but close enough. Sailors who came back from long voyages on the far patrols, months without seeing land, and who sat in the harbor taverns afterward with their drinks untouched, looking at the walls. The ship's surgeon had told him once that the ones who recovered were the ones who talked. It didn't matter what about. What mattered was that they said it out loud, to someone, and heard it come back.
Jason almost never talked about himself. In all these weeks, Alexander had learned more about him from his fever than from anything he had said awake.
"All right," Alexander said. "I'll teach you every game I know. On one condition."
Jason's eye narrowed. "Which is?"
"You tell me about your world." Alexander went back to his fish, keeping his voice light, as if it were nothing. "Earth. Where you come from. What it's like, and who you left there. Everything."
Jason didn't answer right away. When Alexander glanced up, he saw that his hands had tightened around his knees.
"That's not a fair trade," Jason said. "You've got games. I've got—"
"A whole world," Alexander said. "I'd say I'm the one getting cheated."
* * *
The games were easy.
Alexander knew a great many of them. There was Tides, played with pebbles moved around a ring of pits scooped in the sand, in which the pieces flowed from pit to pit like water and the goal was to flood your opponent's harbor. There was a dice game sailors played on long crossings, using carved knucklebones and a great many rules about which combinations were lucky and which would get you thrown overboard. And there was Admirals, which every child in the Republic learned before they could read: two fleets of carved pieces on a board of hexagons, maneuvering through a fog that hid half the board from each player.
Jason lost at all of them, over and over, for weeks.
He didn't seem to mind. He studied every loss the way Alexander had once seen a navigator study a failed course, retracing each move and asking endless, precise questions. Why that pit? What if I'd moved here instead? Is there any position where the first player always wins? He was the most stubborn student Alexander had ever met, and very slowly, he began to lose less badly.
The trade was harder.
Alexander asked his questions gently, and usually while they were busy with something else, so that it wouldn't feel like an interrogation. What did people eat, where you come from? What did the houses look like? Did your family live near the sea?
And every time, he watched Jason's face close like a door.
It wasn't that Jason refused. He would start to answer. He would say my parents' house had a kitchen with a window over the sink, or there was a radio my mother always kept on, and then he would stop, and something would happen behind his eye, a flicker of such raw, sudden pain that Alexander felt it in his own chest. Then Jason would say it's fine, very quietly, and change the subject, and deal out the knucklebones with steady hands.
Alexander never pushed. He would nod and roll the dice and let it go. But each time, he lay awake afterward, wondering whether he had asked for too much.
You're torturing him, said the cold voice. For your own curiosity. You call that kindness?
He didn't know. He honestly didn't know.
* * *
The night it finally came out, it came out because of a stone.
Jason had been carving pieces for a new game, one Alexander half remembered from his childhood, and he had ended up turning a small white pebble over and over in his fingers, scraping at it with the knife. Alexander, across the fire, was only half watching. Then he noticed that Jason had gone completely still.
He was staring at the pebble in his palm. He had shaped it without seeming to think about it: a round head, a notched collar, a wide flat base. Alexander had never seen anything like it. But Jason was looking at it the way Alexander had once seen a man look at a letter from home, months late, in the middle of the ocean.
"What is it?" Alexander asked quietly.
"Nothing," Jason said automatically.
Then he stopped, and Alexander watched him decide.
"No," Jason said. "It's not nothing."
He turned the pebble over in his fingers.
"There's a game where I come from. It's called chess. It's very old. Two armies on a square board, sixty-four squares, black and white. Every piece moves differently. This one's the weakest." He held it up in the firelight. "It's called a pawn. It can only go forward, one square at a time. But if it makes it all the way to the other side of the board, it can become anything it wants."
Alexander said nothing. He waited, the way he had waited on the night of the cliff.
"My dad taught me," Jason said.
And then it came out.
Not all at once, and not easily. It came in pieces, with long pauses between them, and Alexander sat very still and let every one of them land. A small house with a crooked gate. A chessboard that had belonged to Jason's grandfather, with one black bishop missing and replaced with a bottle cap, whatever a bottle cap was. Sunday afternoons in a room with a window. A father who wore reading glasses he pretended not to need, who said a man should know how to make his own fishing pole and never trade your queen for a pawn in the same serious voice, and who had never once let his son win.
The day Jason had finally beaten him, at fifteen, and how his father had stared at the board for a long time and then laughed so hard he had to take his glasses off.
His mother, who couldn't stand chess and read in the next room with the door open, calling out is anyone winning yet? every half hour. The kitchen, and the radio, and a dish called lasagna that Jason had once called fine to her face and would now have crossed an ocean for. A girl called Sarah who sat next to him in a lecture hall and pretended not to help him. The sound her head had made against the desk.
His voice went, more than once. Each time, he stopped and breathed and went on, and each time, Alexander thought he might stop for good, and he didn't.
At some point, Alexander realized he had moved. He was sitting beside Jason now instead of across from him, his shoulder pressed against Jason's, and he couldn't remember deciding to do it. Jason didn't pull away.
By the time it was over, the fire had burned low, and Jason's face was wet, and he didn't seem to care.
"Thank you," Alexander said quietly.
Jason wiped his face with the heel of his hand and let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh. "That was a terrible trade for me. You owe me about forty games."
"I'll pay you back," Alexander said. "Every one." He nodded at the pebble still clenched in Jason's fist. "Show me. The game. How it works."
* * *
So Jason cleared a space in the sand beside the fire and smoothed it flat with his palm.
He drew the board with a stick, eight squares by eight, and filled every other square with ash so that it came out dark and light. Then he took the knife and a pile of driftwood and pebbles, and by firelight he began to make the pieces, explaining each one as he went. The rook, which moved in straight lines like a wall. The knight, which jumped in the shape of an L, and which Jason said was everybody's least favorite piece to play against. The bishop, sliding along the diagonals. The queen, the strongest of them all. And the king, who could barely move, but whom you had to protect at all costs, because if you lost the king, you lost everything.
Alexander listened with his chin in his hands.
He had expected to be interested. He hadn't expected to be enchanted. But there was something about the game that caught him immediately: the strange, rigid rules, the lines of force running across the board, the weak little pawns that could become queens. And there was something about Jason, too, as he talked. His voice had changed. It was steadier than Alexander had ever heard it, and quicker, and every so often, when he explained a particular move, his hands moved with it, sketching lines in the air above the board.
He looked, Alexander thought, like someone who had remembered who he used to be.
"Your people fight wars with this?" Alexander asked, when Jason explained checkmate.
"We used to pretend to. Mostly we just played it on Sunday afternoons."
When the last piece was finished, it was very late. The signal fire on the cliff had long since burned out. Jason set up the board the way his father had shown him, pawns in front and the back row behind, white pieces carved from pale driftwood and black ones from wood he had charred in the fire. One of the black knights looked more like a dog than a horse. Neither of them mentioned it.
Jason looked at the board for a long moment.
Then he turned it so that the pale pieces faced Alexander.
"White goes first," he said. "You're white."
Alexander picked up a pawn, frowned at it, and moved it forward two squares, the way Jason had shown him.
Across the board, in the last of the firelight, Jason smiled.
It was small, and a little crooked, and it disappeared almost as quickly as it came. But it was real, and it reached all the way to his eye, and Alexander, who had spent weeks waiting for it without quite knowing he was waiting, looked down at the board so that Jason wouldn't see how much it meant to him.
Jason moved his pawn.