The second hand moved, and the world came back.
It didn't come back all at once. It came back the way feeling comes back into a numb hand: a prickle first, then a throb, then everything. The hum of the projector fan. The air conditioning breathing cold on the back of his neck. Somewhere far away outside, a car horn. And all around him, in the long curved rows of seats, the soft, scattered sounds of eighty people beginning to breathe again.
Jason sat very still, with the mask on his knees.
Then he understood what he was holding, and where he was holding it, and his hands moved faster than he did. He bent down, unzipped the backpack at his feet, the backpack he had not seen in seventy years and still knew exactly how to open, and pushed the mask inside, between a textbook and an empty water bottle. The crest was already in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He pressed his palm flat against it through the cloth, once, and let go.
That was when he saw his hand.
His left hand, lying on his knee. It was young. The skin was smooth and pale, the nails clean, the knuckles unscarred. And across the back of it, from the tips of the fingers to the wrist, ran the fine black lines. Branching. Forking. Like cracks in ice. They climbed his forearm and disappeared under the short sleeve of his T-shirt, and he didn't need to look to know where they stopped. Just below the shoulder. Where they had always stopped.
The voice had given him back his eye. His teeth. His knees, his back, seventy years of skin. For a minute, it had given him back his arm too. Then he had picked up the mask.
He pulled the left sleeve of his sweatshirt down from the elbow, where he had always worn it pushed up, over his wrist and over his hand, until only his fingertips showed, and curled them into his palm.
Nobody had seen. Nobody was looking at anything yet.
Around him, people were waking up.
* * *
It started in the front rows and spread backward, like a wave going up a beach. A girl in the second row lifted her head off her desk and blinked at the whiteboard. A boy near the aisle groaned and rolled over, and sat up, holding his jaw where it had hit the floor. Two rows down, the girl who had been yawning straightened slowly in her seat, and looked around her with an expression of total bewilderment, and then, very quietly, began to cry.
Some of them woke up the way you wake from a nap: groggy, confused, rubbing their faces. Jason watched them, and knew, without knowing how he knew, that they had never left this room. They had heard a voice, and fallen down, and closed their eyes, and opened them again. For them, a few seconds had passed. Maybe a minute.
Others woke up differently.
A young man three rows in front of him jerked upright with a gasp, as if he had been pulled out of deep water. His hands flew to his chest, his arms, his face, patting himself all over, checking that everything was there. A girl by the far wall woke with her fists already clenched and her eyes already open, and didn't move at all, didn't make a sound, just sat there with her back pressed against her seat, staring at the room the way an animal stares from a hole in a hedge.
Jason knew that stare. He had worn it for seventy years.
And some of them didn't wake up at all.
* * *
It happened near the top of the hall, in the back row by the left-hand aisle.
A young man had been slumped across his desk with his arms folded under his head, the way you might sleep in a library. Jason had seen him earlier, in the frozen silence, without paying him any attention. Now, as the people around him began to stir, the boy beside him shifted in his seat and bumped him with an elbow.
The sleeper slid.
It happened slowly at first. His arm slipped off the edge of the desk. His shoulder followed. Then his whole body tipped sideways out of the narrow seat, loose and heavy, and fell into the aisle, and the aisle in this hall was a long flight of shallow steps running all the way down to the front.
He went down them.
It was a terrible sound. A soft, heavy, tumbling thud, again and again, a body that didn't put out its hands, didn't try to stop itself, didn't make a single noise of its own. He rolled down twelve steps and came to rest at the bottom, on his back, at the foot of the lecturer's desk, a few meters from where Professor Hawkins still lay on the tiles.
His eyes were closed. His face was calm.
For one long second, the whole hall was completely silent.
Then somebody screamed.
* * *
It was chaos after that. Jason watched it the way he used to watch a storm come in across the reef: from a long way off, very calmly, without moving.
People were on their feet, shouting. Someone was trying to get out, shoving along a row of seats toward the door. Someone else was yelling that nobody should touch him, and three people were already touching him, kneeling around the young man at the bottom of the steps, shaking his shoulders, saying his name, which Jason had never known. A boy with a phone was trying to call an ambulance and getting no signal, and shouting at the phone about it, over and over.
He felt someone looking at him.
He turned his head.
Sarah was sitting in the seat beside him, exactly where she had been. She had lifted her head off her notebook. There was a red crease on her cheek where it had lain against the binding, and her hair was a mess, and the pen was still clenched in her fist.
And she was staring at him.
Her face went through about five different expressions in the space of a second, each one bigger than the last, and settled on one that would have been funny on any other day: eyes enormous, mouth slightly open, eyebrows halfway to her hairline, like someone in a cartoon who has just watched a piano fall past a window.
She wasn't looking at the hall. She wasn't looking at the body at the bottom of the stairs, or the screaming, or the boy with the phone.
She was looking at his eyes.
"Oh," she said, very quietly. "Oh, no. Jason."
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He looked back at her, and saw in her eyes the same thing she was seeing in his: the faint, unmistakable mark of somewhere else. Not seventy years. Not even close. But something. Long weeks of something. Salt and sun and fear and endless water.
She had been gone too.
* * *
Slowly, the hall began to calm down.
It didn't happen because anyone took charge. It happened because there was nothing to do. The young man at the bottom of the stairs went on breathing, slow and steady, and went on not waking up, no matter how hard anyone shook him. The boy with the phone gave up on it. Somebody found Professor Hawkins's pulse and announced, shakily, that he was breathing too, and then that he wasn't waking up either, and then said nothing else.
People sat down again, mostly because their legs wouldn't hold them.
Jason noticed who went quiet first.
It wasn't the ones who had been crying, or shouting, or trying to get out. Those kept talking, in high, frightened voices, asking each other what had happened, whether they had heard the voice too, what it had said to them. It asked me to pick.I said easy, I said easy, why did I say easy?I didn't pick anything, I just passed out.
The quiet ones were the others. The young man who had patted himself all over. The girl by the far wall with her fists still clenched. A heavy, red-haired boy in the front row who had woken, looked around, and very deliberately put his hands flat on his desk and kept them there. They didn't join in. They didn't answer when someone asked them a question. They sat very still, and watched the room, and every so often their eyes went to each other, quickly, and away again.
Measuring. Wondering.
Were you one of them? Did you go somewhere? Did you come back with something?
Jason kept his own eyes on his desk.
Then, from somewhere outside the building, an alarm began to wail.
It wasn't a fire alarm. It was deeper and slower than that, a long, rising and falling howl that seemed to come from the whole city at once, from every rooftop and every street corner. A second later, every phone in the room went off together, a harsh, buzzing shriek, all of them at the same moment, so loud that the girl by the far wall flinched and nearly fell out of her seat.
Jason looked down at his own phone. He had forgotten he owned it. The screen was lit up red.
EMERGENCY ALERT. REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TRAVEL. STAY CALM. FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS WILL FOLLOW.
All around the hall, people were reading the same thing, and going very quiet.
* * *
"Seventy years," Sarah said.
She said it very softly, under the noise of the alarm, without looking at him. They were sitting low in their seats with their heads close together, like two students whispering at the back of a boring lecture, which is what they had been, an hour ago, a lifetime ago.
"About that," said Jason.
He had told her most of it. Not all. He had told her about the raft, and the island, and the years alone. He had told her about Alexander, and the boat, and the fleet that came, and the voice that stopped him getting into the launch. He had told her about the chess games, and the cistern, and the two old men fishing on the rocks while battleships patrolled the horizon. He had told her that he had died in his sleep, old, by a fire, the way he was supposed to.
He had not told her about the cave on the night of the soup. He had not told her about the twelve sticks at the edge of the forest, or the commodore on the beach, or the captain in her cabin. He had not told her about a black shore under a violet moon, and a figure in rags with a white face, and an empty board.
He didn't know how. And he didn't think she wanted him to.
Sarah was quiet for a long time.
"Hard," she said at last. "I picked hard."
Jason turned his head.
"I know," she said. "I know. I don't even know why. No, that's a lie. I know exactly why." She was turning her pen over and over in her fingers. "The greater the difficulty, the greater the reward, right? And I thought about my mom. Working two jobs since I was eight. My dad's back. The apartment. I thought, if there's a reward, if there's anything at the end of this, I want it to be big enough to change that. All of it. So I said hard." She laughed, a small, shaky, humorless sound. "Fourteen percent."
"You made it."
"I made it." She didn't look at him. "Eleven months on a raft. Then a storm. Then a reef. I don't really remember the last part. I remember the water, and the coral, and thinking this is it, this is how it ends, and then sand. And the voice." Her mouth twisted. "Trial concluded for difficulty: Hard. Like a bus announcement."
Jason said nothing. He remembered the bus announcement very well.
"And then it gave me something," Sarah said, even more quietly. "A rune, it called it. It's—" She stopped, and glanced around the hall, at the quiet ones by the walls, at the boy with the phone. "I can't show you. Not here. Not with all these people. It's not exactly something you can pull out of a backpack."
"What is it?"
She hesitated. Then, very low: "It's a shark."
Jason looked at her.
"A real shark," Sarah said, a little defensively. "A live one. It's... I don't know where it is, exactly. Somewhere. But I can feel it. Like a dog that's waiting by the door. And it likes me. It's friendly, Jason. It's really friendly. Except that inside it there's this... it's like a gun. A big one. A machine gun, I think? Built into it. Camouflaged." She rubbed her face with both hands. "I haven't tried it. I haven't done anything with it. We've been back for, what, forty minutes? I don't even know how you'd start."
There was a pause.
"I rode one, once," Jason said. "A shark."
Sarah lowered her hands and stared at him. "You rode one?"
"Not on purpose."
For a moment, something flickered across her face that was almost a smile, almost the old Sarah, the one who had slid her notes across the desk and pretended she wasn't helping. Then it was gone, and she was looking at his eyes again, with that same expression she'd had when she first woke up: as if he were something that had washed up on a beach, and she couldn't tell whether it was alive.
* * *
"Jason," she said. "I don't..."
She stopped. Started again.
"I'm not good at this. You know I'm not. I'm not the person who knows what to say. I was gone eleven months and I already feel like my head's on wrong. And you—" She looked at him, and away, and back. "Seventy years. I can't even—I don't know what that is. I don't know what you need. I don't think I can help you with it. I'm sorry."
"I didn't ask you to."
"I know you didn't." She took a breath. "I just... look. Just try to get used to it again. Okay? Real life. Normal stuff. Talk to people. Go home. Eat something that isn't fish. Buy groceries, I don't know." She made a helpless little gesture with the pen. "A little at a time. That's all I've got. That's all I've got for me, honestly."
Jason looked at her for a while.
She was frightened. Not of the alarm, or the sleepers, or the voice. Of him. A little. She was doing her best to hide it, and she was doing it badly, and she was still sitting here beside him, which counted for more than she knew.
"Okay," he said. "A little at a time."
Sarah let out a breath. She nodded, too many times. Then she looked down at the notebook open on her desk, at the last line of notes she had been writing when the world stopped, half finished, trailing off into a blot of ink where her pen had rested for eleven months.
She closed it.
Outside, the alarm went on wailing over the city. On the stairs, the young man who would never wake up lay breathing, slow and calm, at the foot of the lecturer's desk. And in a backpack at Jason's feet, between a textbook and an empty water bottle, a white mask lay in the dark with its narrow eyes open, looking at nothing at all.