The bad season passed, the way bad seasons did. The fruit came back plump and sweet, the birds returned to the plain, and the drying racks filled up again. By the end of their third year together, Jason had almost stopped waking at night with the hollow ache under his ribs.
Time moved differently with two people. On his own, the days had been long and all the same, and the years had crawled past like something wounded. Now the days were short and full, and the seasons slid by almost without his noticing. There were storms, and they rode them out together at the back of the cave with the wind howling across the mouth. There were long, still summers when they did nothing but fish and dive and argue over the chessboard. Alexander was getting good. He had won his first game in the second year, and he had not stopped talking about it since.
"Do you remember my historic victory?" he asked one evening, setting up the pieces.
"That was months ago," Jason said.
"It was a historic victory. It deserves to be remembered."
"You've reminded me every day."
"And I'll keep reminding you," Alexander said serenely, "until I win the next one."
* * *
It was on one of those still summer nights that they talked about what they wanted.
They were lying on the flat rocks above the beach, where the stone kept the warmth of the day long after sunset, looking up at the stars. The sea was calm and silver. Neither of them was sleepy yet.
"If you could have anything," Alexander said. "Anything at all. What would it be?"
Jason thought about it for a long time.
"I'd want to go home," he said finally. "Not forever, necessarily. I don't even know what home would be like now. But I'd want to walk through the door of my parents' house and see my mom's face. See my dad take his glasses off." He was quiet for a moment. "And I'd want to know what happened to Sarah. Whether she woke up. Whether anyone did."
Alexander didn't say anything. He had heard about Sarah, in pieces, over the years, and he seemed to understand that there was nothing to say.
"What about you?" Jason asked.
"My own ship," Alexander said at once. "Not an escort, not a scout. A real ship, a ship of the line, with my own crew. I'd want to end this war. I'd want to hunt the free captains down one by one until there was nothing left of them, so that nobody else's son has to go to sea at fourteen." He hesitated. "And I'd want to see Glorianna again."
Jason turned his head. "Who's Glorianna?"
Alexander was silent for so long that Jason thought he wasn't going to answer. Even in the starlight, he could see that Alexander's face had gone red.
"A girl," Alexander said at last. "In the capital. Her father's a shipbuilder. She used to come down to the dockyards to argue with the foremen about hull designs, and they were all terrified of her." He smiled up at the sky. "She told me once that I had the posture of a wet heron. I asked her to walk with me along the canals the next evening. She said yes."
"And?"
"And we walked along the canals most evenings, for a year. And the night before my ship left, I asked her to wait for me." Alexander's smile faded. "She said she would. She said she'd wait as long as it took."
Jason didn't know what to say to that. So he didn't say anything, and they lay there side by side on the warm rock and looked at the stars, each of them thinking about someone very far away.
"Three years," Alexander said quietly, after a while. "She'll think I'm dead."
"Maybe."
"She's probably right to."
Jason looked at him. Alexander was still looking up, but his jaw was tight, and something in his face had set, the way it did on the chessboard just before he did something reckless.
"I'm going to build a boat," Alexander said.
* * *
He meant it.
Jason had half expected it to pass, like one of Alexander's sudden enthusiasms for a new bird or a new cave. It didn't. By the next morning, Alexander was already walking the beach, measuring driftwood with his arms and muttering to himself about keels.
"If my father can't find me," he said, "I'll go to him. There have to be shipping lanes somewhere out there. If I can get far enough out, someone will see me."
"In what, exactly?"
"In a boat."
"Made of what?"
Alexander waved an arm vaguely at the whole island. "Trees. Rope. Whatever we've got."
Jason looked at the forest, and at the single worn knife on its stone by the fire, and felt the familiar itch at the back of his mind, the one the cistern had given him, only much bigger. It was the feeling of a problem that could be solved, if you were clever enough, and careful enough, and had enough time.
They had nothing but time.
"Not a raft," he said slowly. "A raft's too slow, and it can't be steered. You need a hull. Something narrow that cuts the water." He picked up a stick and started drawing in the sand. "Two hulls, maybe. A main one and a smaller one on an arm, off to the side, to keep it from rolling over. People on Earth have crossed whole oceans in boats like that."
Alexander crouched down beside him and stared at the drawing. Then he grabbed the stick out of Jason's hand and added a mast, and a sail, and a long curved line underneath.
"Keel," he said. "Here. Otherwise the wind will just push you sideways."
Jason took the stick back and started working out the angles.
* * *
It took them a year and a half.
They chose a tree on the edge of the forest, tall and straight, and spent a month bringing it down with fire and the knife and stubbornness. They hollowed out the trunk the same way, slowly, charring the wood and scraping it away, a finger's width at a time. They built the outrigger from a second, smaller trunk and lashed it to the hull with arms of hard, springy wood, using knots that Alexander tied and Jason checked twice, and Alexander checked again after him. They wove the sail from split palm leaves and strips of bark, and made a mast from the straightest sapling on the island.
Jason loved it. He hadn't expected to. But every evening, when they sat back and looked at what they had done that day, he felt something he hadn't felt since his first year at university, bent over a drawing table at two in the morning: the deep, quiet satisfaction of making something that worked.
There was only one thing they argued about.
"You're coming," Alexander said.
It was not the first time. Every few weeks, while they were working, he would say it again, lightly, as if it were already decided.
"No," said Jason, the way he always did.
"There's room for two. We built it for two."
"You built it for two. I built it for one, and let you make it bigger."
Alexander set down the rope he was braiding. "Jason. Listen to me. You don't know that your voice would stop you. You don't know anything for certain. Maybe the mission only says you have to be on the island when you die. Maybe you could come with me, and see my world, and live a whole life, and come back here when you're old."
Jason didn't answer right away.
He had thought about it. Of course he had. He had lain awake more nights than he wanted to count, turning the words of the mission over and over, looking for a gap. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, alone, on a deserted island. It didn't say he had to stay. Not in so many words.
But he remembered the raft coming back to him on the swell after the shark. He remembered a branch flying out of the storm to find his head in the dark. He remembered washing up at the foot of the cliff with the coral waiting for him, and every single thing on this island arriving exactly when it needed to. The voice didn't have to say it in so many words. The island had been saying it for years.
"Nothing leaves," he said quietly. "I'm sorry. I can't."
Alexander looked at him for a long moment. Then he picked the rope back up, and went on braiding, and didn't say anything else that day.
But he asked again, a few weeks later. And a few weeks after that.
* * *
They finished the boat at the end of Alexander's fifth year on the island.
It sat on the beach above the tideline, long and narrow and dark, its outrigger stretched out beside it like a wing and its woven sail rolled against the mast. It was the most beautiful thing Jason had ever built. He walked around it a dozen times that evening, running his hands along the hull, checking every lashing.
"It'll hold," he said.
"I know it will," said Alexander. "You built it."
They loaded it the next day with dried fish and fruit and gourds of water from the cistern, enough for weeks at sea. Alexander checked the weather the way he had taught Jason to: the clouds high and thin and scattered, the wind steady from the east, the sea calm. It was perfect.
That night, Jason couldn't sleep. He lay by the fire listening to Alexander breathe, and at some point he got up and walked down to the beach, and stood beside the boat in the dark.
The sky was clear. Low in the west, just above the horizon, a single red star was burning brighter than he had ever seen it.
He looked at it for a long time. The Drowned Queen's eye, Alexander had called it. If you can see it clearly, a storm is coming.
It was an old story. A sailors' superstition, something Alexander's mother had told him when he was small. Jason went back up to the cave and lay down, and didn't mention it.
* * *
They pushed the boat into the water at dawn.
Alexander stood in the shallows beside it, knee-deep, with the waves lapping against the hull. He looked back up the beach at Jason, and for a moment neither of them said anything.
"Last chance," Alexander said.
Jason shook his head.
Alexander nodded slowly, as if he had expected nothing else. Then he waded back up the beach and hugged him, hard, the way Jason's father used to hug him at airports.
"I'll come back," Alexander said into his shoulder. "With my father's whole fleet. I'll bring you real food, and books, and a proper chessboard. And a knife that isn't falling apart."
"Bring the pastry," Jason said, and his voice didn't work quite right. "The disgusting one."
Alexander laughed, and let go, and climbed into the boat.
The wind filled the sail. The boat slid out across the lagoon, gathering speed, and threaded the gap in the reef that they had spent weeks mapping, and then it was out in the open sea, small and dark against the dawn, with Alexander a tiny figure at the stern, one arm raised.
Jason stood on the beach and watched it go.
It was halfway to the horizon when the sky changed.
It happened so fast that Jason didn't understand it at first. The wind dropped, all at once, as if someone had closed a door. Then it came back from the west, the wrong direction entirely, cold and hard, and behind it the horizon was going dark. A wall of cloud was rising out of a clear sky, black and bruised and boiling, climbing so fast he could see it move.
"No," Jason said. "No, no, no—"
The storm hit the boat before it could turn.
He saw the sail snap and tear away. He saw the hull swing broadside to the waves and lift, and hang, and come down. Then the rain came across the water in a gray wall and he couldn't see anything at all.
He was already running.
He didn't remember deciding to go in. He was simply in the water, fighting through the breakers toward the gap in the reef. Then he was through it, the coral tearing at his legs and arms, and out into the open sea, where the swells rose up like hills and dropped away like cliffs. He swam the way Alexander had taught him, long and steady, with his breath under control even as his heart hammered, and he looked for the boat every time a wave lifted him.
He found the outrigger first, torn loose and drifting. Then pieces of the hull. Then, clinging to a broken spar in the trough of a wave, a pale shape with dark hair plastered across its face.
"Alexander!"
He reached him on the third wave. Alexander's eyes were open, but they weren't seeing anything. There was blood on his forehead, washed away by the rain as fast as it came. Jason got an arm around his chest from behind, the way the lifeguards had taught him at the public pool when he was twelve, and turned them both toward the island, and swam.
He never remembered the swim back. He remembered the reef, and dragging Alexander through the gap with the coral biting into his own back. He remembered the shallows, and his feet finding sand, and staggering up the beach with Alexander's weight dragging at him, and falling. Then he was on his knees in the wet sand, pressing on Alexander's chest the way he had seen in films and never once done in real life, counting under his breath, pressing again.
Alexander coughed up half the sea, rolled onto his side, and went on coughing.
Jason sat back in the sand. He was shaking so hard that his teeth rattled. The rain was still hammering down on both of them, and out on the water, the storm was already moving on, the black wall rolling away eastward toward the horizon. Behind it the sky was clearing, as if nothing had happened.
For a long time, neither of them could speak.
Then Alexander rolled onto his back and lay there in the rain, staring up at the sky. He was very pale, and the cut on his forehead was still bleeding, and when he finally spoke, there was no anger in his voice at all. He sounded only tired, and a little wondering.
"Your island," he said, "doesn't want to let me go either."