The silence was the worst of it. He hadn't expected how loud it would be.
He had forgotten. For five years there had always been some sound in the cave that wasn't his: Alexander humming off-key while he gutted fish, Alexander talking in his sleep, Alexander losing something and swearing about it, Alexander breathing on the other side of the fire. Jason had stopped hearing it after the first year, the way you stop hearing the sea.
Now it was gone, and the silence rushed in to fill the space, and it was enormous.
On the first morning, he woke before dawn and lay listening for a long time before he understood what he was listening for.
On the second morning, he caught himself setting out two portions of fruit.
On the third, he went down to the lagoon and found the good rope coiled neatly on the rock where it belonged, exactly where he had always wanted it, and stood there looking at it for so long that the tide came in over his feet.
* * *
He kept everything the way it was.
He didn't decide to. It simply happened, the way the routine had happened on the raft, one small choice at a time. Alexander's side of the cave stayed Alexander's side, the bed of leaves still pressed into the shape of him. His things stayed where he had left them: a half-braided rope, a gourd with a crack in it that he had been meaning to fix, a flat stone with the weather-guessing scores scratched into it, Jason's column and Alexander's side by side. Alexander had been winning by eleven.
The chessboard stayed by the fire.
It was a real board now, not lines drawn in the ash. Alexander had carved it in their third year from a plank of driftwood, sixty-four squares cut into the wood with the tip of the knife and the dark ones scorched with a hot stone. The pieces stood on it exactly as they had on the last evening, with the white knight standing where Alexander had put it.
Jason looked at it every night. He thought about the position, the way he used to lie awake thinking about the black beach and the empty board. He worked out his answer to the knight within the first week. It was a good answer.
He didn't play it.
* * *
He played the other games instead.
He played Tides against himself on the beach, scooping out the ring of pits in the wet sand and moving the pebbles around from one side and then the other. It was a strange, lonely business, trying to flood your own harbor, and he lost to himself almost every time. He rolled the knucklebones by the fire in the evenings, calling out the lucky combinations the way Alexander used to, and heard his own voice in the empty cave, and stopped.
He tried Admirals once. He set out both fleets on the board of hexagons, and then sat there looking at it, and understood that it couldn't be played alone. The whole game was the fog. Each player could see only his own half of the sea, and had to guess the rest. With one player, there was no fog. There was nothing left to guess.
He put the pieces away, and didn't take them out again.
* * *
And every evening, before sunset, he climbed the cliff and lit the signal fire.
He didn't expect anything from it. He knew exactly how far away the fleet was, and how much war there was between here and there. But Alexander had lit that fire every evening for five years, and it seemed wrong for it to go dark.
"A ship's boy lights the lamps," he told the wind, feeding the first flames. "He doesn't ask whether anyone's looking."
He talked more, after that. He talked to the fire, and the fish traps, and the cistern. He talked to the chessboard. Mostly, if he was honest, he talked to Alexander. He told him that the traps were full, or that the weather was turning, or that a new bird had come to nest on the cliff, a big, clumsy, gray thing that Alexander would have named something ridiculous within a day.
He knew what he was doing. He had done it on the raft, with the stills, and in his first years on the island, with the rocks. He knew exactly where it could lead, if he let it: to a voice that answered.
So he was careful. He talked, but he never waited for a reply. And when he caught himself turning his head to listen, he made himself stop, and went and did something with his hands.
* * *
The worst came in the fourth month.
A storm blew in off the sea in the middle of the night, fast and violent, the kind Alexander would have seen coming two days ahead and scored himself a point for. Jason didn't see it coming. He woke to the wind screaming across the cave mouth and the woven wall bowing inward, and he spent the rest of the night bracing it with his back while rain drove in through the gaps and the fire hissed out.
When it was over, the wall was half torn away, and the drying racks had blown down the cliff, and one of the bark gutters above the cistern had split open along its whole length.
He stood in the gray dawn among the wreckage, soaked and shaking, and something in him simply gave way.
He sat down on the wet stone and put his face in his hands. For a long time, he didn't move at all. He thought about the cliff, for the first time in years. Not about going there. Only about the fact that it was there, the way you remember a door in a house you used to live in.
Then, after a while, he thought about the cistern.
It was the thing Alexander had been proudest of on the whole island. I've stood on the deck of a warship with three hundred men, he had said, grinning, soaked to the skin, and I have never been as proud of anything as I am of that hole. If the gutter stayed split, the next rain would run straight past it into the sand, and the one after that. It would be empty in a month.
Jason lifted his head.
He got up, slowly, and went and looked at the gutter. It was a clean split. He would need a new length of bark, and some resin, and a day's work, maybe two.
"Fine," he said out loud. "Fine. I'm doing it."
It took him three days. When the next rain came, a week later, he sat at the mouth of the cave and watched the water run down all the gutters and pour into the basin, and he felt something that wasn't happiness, not yet, but that lived next door to it.
* * *
It was around then that he started the new line of sticks.
He hadn't meant to. But on the morning after the storm, walking down to the beach, he passed the old line, the long gray row of weathered sticks that ended abruptly, years ago, on a morning he could no longer remember. He stood there looking at it for a while. Then he broke a new stick from a branch, and walked a few paces past the end of the old line, and pushed it into the sand.
After that, he planted one every morning.
It wasn't like before. Before, each stick had been a day survived, a day subtracted from the terrible number he had worked out on the beach, on the thirtieth evening. Twenty-one thousand, nine hundred. He had never been counting forward. He had been counting down.
This line was different. He didn't know what it was counting toward. He only knew that every morning he pushed another stick into the sand, and that every stick was one more day since the smoke had faded off the edge of the world.
* * *
The line reached three hundred and sixty-five on a still, clear morning at the end of the dry season.
Jason stood at the top of the beach with the new stick in his hand, and looked back along the line. It ran a long way. A whole year of mornings, each one marked. A year of meals eaten alone, and fires lit for nobody, and games played against himself.
He had survived it. He had not climbed the cliff.
He looked out at the sea. It was empty all the way to the horizon, blue and glittering and calm, the way it had been empty for most of his life on this island. He waited for the old ache, the hollow one under his ribs.
It came. But it was smaller than he had expected. It was smaller than it had been a year ago, and much smaller than it had been ten years ago, on a raft in the middle of an ocean with nothing but two plastic stills and a can of something that might once have been peaches.
He thought about Alexander, somewhere out there beyond the horizon. Standing on the deck of some steel ship, probably, in a coat with brass buttons, telling a crew of three hundred men about the finest pastry in the entire Republic. Alive, and doing what he had always wanted to do.
And he thought about himself, standing here with a stick in his hand, counting the days since his friend had left, as if he were waiting for something to end.
He was so tired of waiting.
He had waited on the raft for land. He had waited on the beach for a ship. He had waited years for the voice to tell him he was done, and then waited years more for nothing at all, and then waited for a boat, and a smoke, and a fleet. He had spent a third of his life waiting, and every single thing he had ever waited for had either never come, or come and gone again.
He had sixty years left on this island. Maybe less. Maybe more.
He could spend them counting. Or he could spend them living.
Jason looked down at the stick in his hand. Then he turned around, walked back up the beach, and snapped it in two, and dropped the pieces in the fire pit to burn with the evening's kindling.
He never planted another one.
That night, he climbed the cliff at sunset and lit the signal fire, the way he did every night. And then, for the first time in a year, he sat down beside it and stayed, and watched the sun go down into the sea, and the stars come out one by one: the Anchor, and the long curve beneath it, and low in the west, dim and red and calm, the Drowned Queen's eye.
"Clear skies," he told it. "No storm."
He was right. He scored himself a point for it on the flat stone by the fire when he came down.
He was still losing by ten.