In the second year after the smoke, Jason made a map.
He had walked every part of the island a hundred times, but he had never tried to hold all of it in his head at once. So one rainy season, when the storms kept him in the cave for weeks at a time, he took a stick of charcoal to the smooth wall beside the drawings of things that wanted to kill him, and began to draw.
He drew the coastline first, a long lopsided shape like a fist with one finger pointing north. Then the cliff, and the grotto, and the lagoon with the gap in the reef. Then the forest, and the plain, and the stream that ran down from the high rocks. He filled it in a little more every day, and every time he went out, he checked something against it and came back and corrected it.
It took him four years to finish. By the end, the map covered half the wall, and there was not a gully or a spring or a stand of trees on the whole island that wasn't on it. There were places marked on it that Alexander had never seen: a sea cave on the north shore that could only be reached at the lowest tide of the year, a hollow tree on the edge of the plain big enough to sleep in, a crack in the cliff face above the grotto where the air came out warm on cold mornings, the same air he had breathed in the dark beneath the island.
He knew now how the island breathed. He knew where the wind went when it came off the sea, and which paths it carried sound along, and which ones swallowed it.
* * *
He learned to move without noise.
It started with the birds. The traps caught fewer of them every year, as if the birds of the plain were learning, and Jason decided that if they could learn, so could he. He started going out at dusk, when they came down to roost in the long grass, and creeping toward them, and failing. For a year, he failed every single time. He stepped on a dry stem, or brushed a branch, or simply breathed too loudly, and the whole flock went up in a clatter of wings.
Then, slowly, he stopped failing.
He learned to put his heel down first and roll his weight forward. He learned which grass whispered and which didn't, and to move only when the wind moved, so that the sound of his body was lost in the sound of the plain. He learned to breathe through his mouth, slowly, and to stand so still for so long that his legs went numb and the birds forgot he was there.
The first time he closed his hand on a sleeping bird without waking the others, he stood there in the dusk with it warm and struggling in his fist, and felt like a thief.
After that, he never went hungry for meat again.
* * *
He learned the sea the same way. Alexander had taught him the words for it, the names of the clouds and the winds and the swells. But it was only in those years, alone, that he learned to read it.
He learned that the water off the north shore turned a certain flat, milky green two days before a storm, and that the fish left the lagoon a day before that. He learned the currents around the reef so well that he could have swum the gap in the dark. He learned that the big gray birds on the cliff went quiet before a gale, and that the wind shifted to the west before a clear spell, and that the Drowned Queen's eye was, as far as he could tell, completely useless, and he went on looking for it every night anyway.
He scored himself a point on the weather stone every time he got it right. In the ninth year, he finally caught up with Alexander's total. In the tenth, he passed it, and felt oddly guilty, and stopped keeping score.
* * *
The wall of things that want to kill us grew.
He added every plant on the island to it, one careful drawing at a time, with a small skull for the dangerous ones and a small cross for the ones that healed. He found a bark that brought a fever down if you chewed it, and a leaf that kept a wound from going bad if you bound it on, and a root that made you sleep, and a pale berry that stopped your heart if you ate more than three. He tested everything with the patience of a man with nothing but time, one tiny taste and then a long wait, and wrote down what happened in his square, careful letters. Twice he made himself sick. Once, for a day and a night, he was fairly sure he was going to die.
The mushrooms were at the top of the wall, where he had drawn them first. Every year, when the rains came, he went back to the hollow under the rocks on the north shore where Alexander had found them. They were always there, pale gold and perfect in the shade. And every year, he picked a few and dried them on the rack, and put them away in a gourd sealed with wax at the back of the cave.
He never asked himself why. So I'll always know them, he would have said, if there had been anyone to ask.
There wasn't.
* * *
He got older.
It happened so slowly that he didn't notice it at first, and then all at once. He was thirty-eight when his knees began to ache after diving, a deep, dull ache that lasted into the next day. He was forty when he looked down into the still water of the cistern one morning and saw gray in his beard, a whole streak of it, running down from the corner of his mouth.
At forty-two, he lost a tooth. It was a back tooth, one that had been hurting for a year, and in the end he pulled it himself with a length of fishing line and a doorframe of rock, and lay on the floor of the cave afterward shaking and laughing and spitting blood.
At forty-five, he found that his eye, the one he had left, took longer to adjust to the dark. He began to go to bed a little earlier, and wake a little earlier, and to feel the cold of the rainy season in his hands in a way he never had before.
He still dove the pond. Not often, and never without breathing a long time first. But every so often, on a still day, he went down through the tunnel and came up in the chamber beneath the island, and sat there for a while in the gray light that fell through the cracks, not thinking about anything in particular. The mausoleum didn't frighten him anymore. It was the quietest place on the island, quieter even than the cave, and some days that was what he needed.
He never went into the room with the niches.
* * *
The hardest thing was Alexander's face.
He hadn't expected that. He had expected to miss him, and he did, every day, in a hundred small ways. He hadn't expected to lose him a second time, slowly, a piece at a time, without any storm or any ship.
It happened in the fourteenth year. He was sitting by the fire one evening, looking at the chessboard with its single white knight, and he tried to picture Alexander's face the way it had been when he made that move. He could see the hair, dark and always in his eyes. He could see the pink scar on his forehead. He could hear his voice, perfectly, every word of it, and his laugh.
But the face itself slid away from him. He could not remember the exact shape of the smile.
He sat there for a long time, trying, and the harder he tried, the further it went.
The next day, he took a stick of charcoal to the wall and tried to draw it. He was good at drawing now. He had drawn every plant on the island, and every rock. He drew for an hour, and scrubbed it out with his palm, and drew again, and scrubbed it out again, and in the end he sat down in front of the smudged gray patch on the stone and understood that it was gone.
He still had the voice. He still had the laugh. He decided that would have to be enough.
The coat still hung on its spur of rock at the back of the cave. It had faded over the years, the dark blue going gray along the shoulders where the light from the cave mouth touched it. The gold braid on the cuffs had gone brown. Once a season, Jason took it down and brushed it, and checked the seams, and mended them where they needed it with fishing line, and hung it back up.
The little silver lighthouses on the collar never tarnished. He polished them anyway.
* * *
It was on one of those long, still nights in the rainy season, lying awake listening to the rain, that he thought about the announcements.
He didn't know what made him think of them. It had been nearly thirty years. But he found himself going through them one by one, the way he used to go through the knots, in order.
Trial concluded for difficulty: Easy. Survival rate: eighty-one percent.
That had been on the raft, on the seventh morning, with the shark circling underneath.
Trial concluded for difficulty: Normal. Survival rate: forty-six percent.
On the raft again, after the shark. With the taste of shark meat still in his mouth.
Trial concluded for difficulty: Hard. Survival rate: fourteen percent.
In the grotto, on the night he washed ashore, lying on the stone with his head bleeding.
And that was all.
Jason lay very still in the dark.
There had been four settings. Easy, Normal, Hard, and Unreal. He had heard the first three end, one after another, one after another. And then nothing, for nearly thirty years. He had never heard Unreal end.
Two percent, the Enigma had said. Two out of every hundred.
He didn't know what that meant. Maybe Unreal had ended, and he simply hadn't been told. Maybe the announcements had only ever been for him, and they had stopped when the Enigma was done with him. Or maybe, somewhere out there, in some other world, a handful of people were still fighting their way through a trial that had been going on for as long as his had. Maybe longer. Maybe it would never end.
Maybe there was someone else out there who had been waiting as long as he had.
He lay there for a long time, listening to the rain, and didn't know what to think.
In the end, he didn't think anything. He got up and fed the fire and went back to bed. But he never quite stopped wondering about it after that.
* * *
He was fifty years old on the morning he saw the smoke.
He knew it was his fiftieth year only roughly. He had given up counting a long time ago. But he could count the rainy seasons since the fleet, and there had been twenty of them, and he had been thirty then. And his body told him the rest: the ache in his knees, the gray in his beard, the stiffness in his left shoulder when he woke on cold mornings.
He was on the clifftop, checking the old signal fire, when he looked up and saw it.
It was a thin gray thread on the edge of the world. It was moving.
He stood very still, the way he had stood in the shallows twenty years before, and watched it.
He did not run this time. He did not shout. He knew the sea much better than he had then, and he watched the smoke with the patience of a man who had learned to wait for birds in the long grass. He watched it for an hour while it grew, and turned, slowly, toward the island. He watched the dark shape beneath it lengthen into a hull, and grow a funnel, and then two masts. He watched it come closer, slowly, much more slowly than the Kestrel had come, trailing smoke that was thin and ragged and very black.
And when it was close enough, he looked for the flag.
He had been waiting for it for twenty years. Deep blue, with a white circle at the center. The flag of the Republic. Alexander's flag.
The flag at the stern of this ship was not blue.
It was black, and there was nothing on it at all.