Jason drove the stick into the sand and left it there.
For a moment he kept his hand wrapped around the top, staring at the line of older marks beside it. Some had faded. Some had been swallowed by wind or tide and cut again later. But enough remained that he no longer had to count each one individually.
Seven hundred and thirty-two.
Two years.
Jason let go of the stick and stepped back.
The beach looked almost beautiful in the early light. Pale sand. Quiet water. A sky just beginning to brighten over the horizon. The kind of scene that, in another life, might have made someone say something embarrassing about peace.
He hated it on principle.
"Two years," he said aloud.
His voice came out rough, rusted from too much silence and too many days spent talking only when he had to. He looked toward the horizon anyway, out of habit more than hope.
Nothing.
No ship. No plane. No wake cutting the water. Just the same endless stretch of sea, flat and indifferent and brightening by the minute.
Jason dragged a hand over his face.
"Happy anniversary."
The joke died where it landed.
He turned away from the shoreline and headed back toward the trees.
The jungle took him in with the same damp heat it always did. Humidity settled over his skin almost at once, thick enough to cling. The ground underfoot was soft with rot and leaf litter, the smell of wet earth and green decay rising with every step. Branches caught at his sleeves. Vines brushed his shoulders. Somewhere overhead, something shrieked once and went quiet.
Two years, and the forest still managed to feel like it was closing around him.
"Another day in paradise," he muttered.
He moved through it with practiced ease now, ducking where the branches dipped low, stepping over the roots he knew would catch him if he got careless. There had been a time when all this had felt hostile because it was unfamiliar. Now it felt hostile because it was familiar and still trying to kill him anyway.
The trees thinned. The ground opened out into the plain.
Jason slowed automatically.
This was where the birds crossed, awkward and stupid-looking until they ran. He had learned their habits the hard way, over weeks and months and humiliating chases across open ground. By now he knew where to set the snares, how to conceal the loops in the grass, how to wait without shifting enough to give himself away.
He crouched at the first trap and checked the tension.
Still set.
The second had been triggered. Empty.
He reset it without comment.
By the third, the sun had climbed high enough to throw heat across the field in a wavering shimmer. Jason wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth and squinted toward the brush.
"Come on," he said quietly. "Just one."
The words were almost gentle. No edge left in them. No performance. Just hunger.
He settled into the shadow of a low shrub and waited.
This part no longer felt dramatic. That was maybe the worst of it. Hunger, patience, killing, skinning, cooking. It had all become ordinary in the most unforgivable way. Once, the thought of crouching motionless in grass for an hour so he could ambush a bird would have struck him as absurd. Now it was Tuesday. Or whatever passed for Tuesday on an island that did not care about calendars.
A shape moved in the brush.
Jason stilled.
One of the birds emerged from the taller grass, round-bodied and ugly, pecking at the ground as though the world had never given it reason to be suspicious. Another followed, then veered away.
He waited until the first one moved closer to the trap line.
Closer.
Closer.
The loop snapped.
The bird gave a startled, strangled cry and went down thrashing.
Jason was on it before the sound had finished echoing.
He killed it quickly. Cleaner than he used to. Cleaner than he liked knowing he could.
Then he knelt there for a second with both hands still on the body, breathing hard though he had hardly moved.
"Great," he said finally.
No triumph. No relief worth naming. Just one more task completed.
He lifted the bird by the legs and stood.
Once upon a time, he thought, he had been an engineering student. Sleep-deprived, overcaffeinated, quietly convinced that passing exams counted as hardship. He had worried about grades, about internships, about saying something stupid in group meetings. He had been ordinary in all the most comforting ways.
Now he was measuring the morning by the weight of a dead bird in his hand.
"What happened to you?" he asked under his breath.
The question might have been for himself. It might have been for Enigma. It might have been for the version of his life that had vanished so completely it sometimes felt borrowed from someone else.
No answer came.
It never did.
By the time he returned to camp, sweat had dried on his shirt in pale salt lines. The clearing looked the same as always: bed, fire pit, a few tools, a few stores, all of it worn thin by repetition. The whole place had the exhausted feel of something held together out of stubbornness rather than design.
Jason knelt by the fire pit and got to work.
Feathers. Skin. Meat. His hands moved automatically now, efficient in ways that still bothered him if he thought about them too long.
"Dinner for one," he said.
The phrase came out flat.
He skewered the bird and set it over the fire, then sat back on his heels and stared at the flames for a moment. They crackled softly, consuming the dry wood he'd gathered the day before. Smoke drifted up through the leaves overhead in a thin wavering stream.
"Is this what you wanted?" he asked the air.
Not loudly. Not like before, when anger had still had energy in it. This was quieter. More tired than furious.
"Was that the point?"
The fire popped. A spark rose and vanished.
Jason looked away first.
While the meat cooked, he went to forage.
The fruit trees were still there, but the trees had changed. Or he had. It was hard to tell which was worse. The branches no longer sagged with abundance the way they had once. The fruit that remained seemed smaller, duller, their skins less bright than he remembered. Maybe it was the season. Maybe the island was wearing thin right along with him. Maybe starvation had simply taught him to see disappointment faster.
He reached up, twisted one fruit free, and turned it in his hand.
It looked fine.
He bit into it anyway.
The flesh was soft, but the burst of sweetness he expected never came. The taste was faint and watery, as if someone had described fruit to the tree and the tree had done its best with limited information.
Jason chewed once, twice, then spat into the brush.
"Unbelievable."
He looked down at what remained in his hand.
"Even you?"
He tossed it aside.
Back at camp, the bird was done. Jason ate sitting on a flat stone with the same grim concentration he brought to everything now. Bite, chew, swallow. The meat was stringy and hot, and he could feel his body taking it in before his mind had decided whether to care.
When he finished, he wiped his hands on his pants and sat for a while watching the clearing darken.
He could have stayed there. He should have stayed there.
Instead, when the light began to soften toward evening, he got up and headed for the beach.
The grotto waited where it always had, tucked beneath the rock and draped in hanging green. By now the walk there was as familiar as the path back to camp. He no longer had to think about where to place his feet on the sand. He just went.
Inside, the air was cooler.
The pond lay at the center of the chamber, still and dark under the fading light. The footprints were long gone. The last of them had faded from the sand near the entrance within a few months of that first day, but he still knew exactly where each one had been, and he still stepped around the places every time, as if the question they had left behind deserved that much respect.
Jason crouched by the water, at the spot where the last print had been, and ran his fingertips over the smooth stone. He had tried the pond once, on the thirtieth morning, with a vine rope around his wrist. He had never tried again.
Two years.
Two years on the island, and this was still one of the few things capable of making the back of his neck prickle.
"Who are you?" he asked softly.
The words spread out over the water and broke against the walls.
He looked into the pond.
His reflection stared back, warped slightly by the low ripples. Gaunt face. Hollow cheeks. Hair too long again, matted in places where he no longer bothered to untangle it properly. Beard grown uneven. Clothes hanging off him. And over his right eye, the patch he'd made out of layered leaves and cloth, changed and replaced so many times it had stopped feeling strange.
He barely recognized himself.
Jason leaned back onto his heels.
"I was just a student," he said.
Not accusing. Not even self-pitying, exactly. Just bewildered, after all this time, by how much life could strip away and still leave a person standing.
"Engineering student. I had exams. Deadlines. Plans." He laughed once, low and humorless. "I used to complain when the cafeteria ran out of decent sandwiches."
His reflection laughed too, soundless and ugly on the water.
The silence in the grotto pressed closer.
"What have I become?"
He knew the answer, or part of it. A survivor, maybe. A trap-setter. A scavenger. A man who could tell by the smell of the wind whether rain would hold off until nightfall. A man who could skin birds without looking down. A man who talked to caves because otherwise he might forget how language worked.
The problem was that none of those things felt like a person.
Jason's hands curled slowly into fists.
"I can't do this forever," he said.
The words came out rougher now.
"Is that what you're waiting for? For me to stop sounding like myself? For there to be nothing left worth rescuing?"
He stood too quickly and had to steady himself against the rock wall. Anger moved through him in a sudden, jagged wave, bright enough to cut through the numbness.
"I never asked for this!" he shouted.
The grotto gave it back in pieces.
"I never asked to be chosen, or tested, or whatever sick word you want to use for it. I was nothing special. I was supposed to stay nothing special."
His voice cracked on the last word.
That, more than anything, stopped him.
Jason stood there breathing hard, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressed over his mouth until the pulse of panic and fury and humiliation ebbed enough for him to think again.
The pond watched, blank as ever.
When he spoke next, it was quieter.
"Maybe that's the joke," he said. "Not the island. Not the storms. Just watching yourself disappear slowly enough to notice."
He stared at the reflection a moment longer, then turned away.
Outside, dusk had fallen properly by the time he reached camp again. He fed the fire what dry wood he had left and coaxed it into life. The flames rose weakly at first, then steadied, throwing orange light across the clearing.
Jason sat on the log by the fire and held his hands toward the warmth.
It barely reached him.
The cold he felt had been building for months now, somewhere under the skin, somewhere beyond anything heat could fix.
"What would you say if you saw me now, Dad?" he asked.
The question slipped out before he could stop it.
He stared into the fire and pictured home with painful clarity all of a sudden. Kitchen lights. Cheap chairs. The hum of appliances. His father looking over reading glasses with that expression halfway between tired and amused. Normal things. Stupid things. Precious beyond measure.
He laughed under his breath.
"I'd take a lecture," he said. "A boring one. A bad one. I'd take standing in line in a crowded cafeteria. I'd take failing an exam. I'd take hearing somebody in the dorm room next door play terrible music at two in the morning."
The flames shifted. Sparks rose into the dark.
"Is anyone still looking?"
He did not know why that question had survived when so many others had worn out. Maybe because it hurt in a way the others didn't. The possibility that everyone back home had already done the necessary grieving, closed the necessary doors, folded him into the category of tragedy and moved on.
Maybe they had to.
Maybe that was what living people did.
Jason lowered his head and pressed both hands over his face.
The fire crackled softly. Insects hummed at the edge of the clearing. Somewhere far off, waves broke against the shore in a steady, patient rhythm.
"Don't forget me," he whispered.
He wasn't sure who he meant it for. His family. His friends. Himself.
The exhaustion that hit after that felt heavier than sleep usually did. It pulled at him from somewhere deep, a slow undertow. He let it.
Jason stretched out on the leaf bed beside the fire, one arm over his stomach, the patch over his ruined eye itchy and warm against his skin. The night air pressed down around him. Above, the branches framed a narrow slice of starless dark.
His thoughts drifted loose at the edges.
Faces surfaced and faded. Voices he could no longer hear clearly. Fragments of rooms, laughter, fluorescent light on classroom tables, the smell of rain on city pavement. Home, reduced to scraps.
"Please," he murmured, already half asleep. "Don't let me disappear."
Then the words were gone too, and the island took him back into silence.