He didn't sleep that night.
He sat on the sand beside the boat with his back against its hull and the chart spread across his knees, and looked at it by starlight until he knew every line of it. Then he folded it away and sat with his arms around his knees and looked at the sea instead.
Once you leave, you will never be able to come back.
He had not heard the voice in twenty years. He had never needed to. He remembered every word, and the flat, empty eyes in the admiral's face, and the spray hanging motionless in the air beside the bow.
He had spent twenty years believing it.
He had built his whole life around it, the way he had once built his life around the stills, and the fish, and the line of sticks. He had grieved Alexander, and let him go, and kept the coat and the unanswered knight, and learned to move through the long grass without a sound. He had grown old on this beach. And every single day of it, somewhere underneath everything, he had known exactly why.
Because the mission ended here. Because the only door he had left led through this island, and through forty years of waiting, and through a quiet death in his sleep, alone, at the very end. And on the other side of that door, maybe, if the voice was telling the truth about anything at all, there was a lecture hall, and a girl with a strand of hair falling across her face, and a house with a crooked gate, and a man who took his glasses off when he laughed.
If he got in the boat, the door would close.
* * *
He made himself think it through, one piece at a time.
He thought about what staying would mean. He would go back up to the cave. He would bury Wren's logbook with Wren. In a week, the Black Tern would reach Scald Rock, and wait, and when the Cormorant didn't come, sail on to Freeport without her. On the twentieth of the month, in a square he would never see, they would hang Alexander Morgan and his wife Glorianna while a crowd cheered, and hang the admiral's coat in the great hall beside the flag.
And Jason would never know. He would be here, on his beach, fishing. He would light the signal fire every evening, out of habit, for a ship that would never come again. And forty years from now, he would lie down beside his fire, old and tired and alone, and close his eyes, and the voice would take him home.
He tried to imagine walking through the crooked gate after that. Hugging his mother. Sitting down across the chessboard from his father on a Sunday afternoon.
He found that he couldn't.
He tried to imagine it a different way. He tried to imagine that he didn't know. That Alexander had simply sailed away twenty years ago and never been heard of again, and was alive somewhere, or not. It would have been easier. He wished, for a long, shameful moment, that he had never heard Wren's story around the fire. That Wren had never come.
But he had heard it.
* * *
Around midnight, he got up and went up to the cave.
He lit a small fire in the stone oven, just enough to see by. He walked past the place where the men had lain without looking at it. He had scrubbed the floor that morning, before he went down to dig. It didn't help.
The chessboard was in its place.
He knelt beside it. The pieces stood exactly as they had stood for twenty years: the long, careful battle they had never finished, and, in the middle of it, the single white knight that Alexander had moved on his last night on the island. The best move he had ever made.
Jason had known his answer to it for twenty years.
He reached out and picked up his black bishop. It was one of the first pieces he had ever carved, on the night by the fire when he had told Alexander about his father and the Sunday afternoons and the bottle cap in place of the missing bishop. It was a little lopsided. He had always meant to carve a better one.
He set it down on its new square, and took his hand away.
It was a good answer. It pinned the knight. Alexander would have hated it.
"Your move," Jason said quietly, to the empty cave.
Then he went to the back of the cave and looked at the coat hanging on its spur of rock, faded and patched, with its little silver lighthouses shining in the glow of the embers. He touched the sleeve once. He didn't take it down.
He went back down to the beach.
* * *
He loaded the boat by starlight.
He packed it the way Alexander had taught him to pack a boat, heaviest things low and in the middle. Water, first, from the cistern, in every gourd and barrel he could find. Dried fish from the racks, and fruit, and a bundle of the peppery leaves from the cliff. The chart, the logbook, and the compass. The rope, and the two new knives, wrapped in cloth. A small leather pouch of fever bark, to hang around his neck. The small gourd from the back of the cave, sealed with fresh wax, with what was left inside it. The admiral's coat, folded over the four small holes, in the dry locker under the stern seat.
And the old knife, in his belt, where it always was.
By the time he was done, the sky in the east had begun to gray.
He pushed the boat down the sand into the shallows, and waded out beside it. The water was cold around his shins, then his knees. The tide was going out. He could feel it pulling gently at the hull, toward the gap in the reef.
He stopped, and put his hand on the gunwale.
It was the same gesture. He knew it was. His hand on the side of a boat, his foot lifting from the sand, the whole sea waiting. He stood there with his heart hammering and waited for the world to stop.
It didn't.
The waves went on lapping against the hull. A gull cried somewhere over the reef. The light in the east went on slowly spreading, pink and gold, and nothing froze, and nobody spoke.
Jason waited a long time.
He found that the silence was worse than the voice. Twenty years ago, the Enigma had warned him. It had turned an old man's head toward him and spoken through his mouth, and told him exactly what the price was. Now it said nothing at all. It didn't need to. It had said it once, and it was not the kind of voice that repeated itself.
He thought about his parents. He thought about Sarah. He held on to them for a moment, as hard as he could, the way he had held on to the raft in the storm.
Then he let go, and climbed into the boat.
* * *
The sail went up easily. Alexander had taught him how, forty times, on the beach and in the lagoon, lecturing him about sheets and halyards until Jason could have done it in his sleep. It filled with the dawn wind, and the boat leaned, and began to move.
He steered for the gap in the reef.
He knew it better than any path on the island. He had swum it in the dark, and in storms, and with Alexander's weight dragging at his arm. He took the boat through it now, in the gray light, with the coral close enough on either side to touch, and felt the moment when the water under the hull changed from the shallow green of the lagoon to the deep, dark blue of the open sea.
And then he was out.
The swell caught the boat and lifted it, long and slow, and set it down again. The wind freshened. The spray came up over the bow and stung his face. Behind him, the Cormorant rode at anchor, empty and rusting, growing smaller.
He took out the compass and the chart, and set his course.
It came back to him the way the knots had, not as knowledge but as something in his hands. He checked the compass against the last of the stars fading in the west: the Anchor, still visible, low and pale, and he found the line beneath it that Alexander had taught him to steer by in the southern seas. He knotted a length of rope at regular intervals, tied a chip of wood to the end of it, and threw it over the stern, and counted as the knots ran out through his fingers, the way the sailors of the Republic measured their speed. Alexander had shown him that too. Jason had worked out why it worked, and Alexander had called him insufferable.
Four knots, maybe five. Eight days to Scald Rock, if the wind held. Maybe less.
He did the sum in his head, and marked his first position on the chart with a stub of Wren's pencil, and wrote the time beside it.
It was what Alexander would have done.
* * *
He didn't look back for a long time.
He kept his eye on the compass, and the sail, and the long blue swells rolling toward him out of the west. He trimmed the sail and ate a strip of dried fish and drank from one of the gourds. The sun climbed. The wind held.
It was almost noon when he finally turned around.
The island was very small.
It sat on the edge of the world behind him, a low green shape with a darker hump at one end where the cliff rose. He could see the white line of the beach, and a faint gray smudge above it that might have been smoke from the fire he had left in the stone oven, or might have been nothing at all. He couldn't see the cave, or the cistern, or the lines of sticks. He couldn't see the graves.
He watched it.
He had lived there for thirty years. He had arrived there half-drowned, clinging to the wreck of a raft, when he was twenty years old. He had starved there, and lost his eye there, and stood at the top of its cliff in the rain. He had pulled his only friend out of the sea there, twice, and taught him to build a cistern, and learned from him how to tie a knot. He had grown old there. He had meant to die there.
It grew smaller. It became a smudge, and then a line, and then a darker blue against the blue.
And then, for the first time in thirty years, there was nothing behind him but the sea.