The first thing Jason felt was pain, and he had never been so glad to feel anything.
It sat in his side, just above the hip, a deep, hot ache that pulsed with every heartbeat. His left arm throbbed. His throat was so dry it felt cracked. The air smelled of smoke and salt and damp stone, and somewhere nearby a fire was crackling.
He opened his eye. Only one. The right side of the world was dark again, the way it had been for years, and the cave ceiling above him was the same cave ceiling he had stared at through a thousand bad nights.
He was home. Or the closest thing to it.
"You're awake."
The voice was young, and it cracked in the middle. Jason turned his head, slowly, because everything hurt, and saw a young man kneeling beside him in the firelight.
He was maybe a year or two older than Jason had been in the lecture hall, which meant younger than Jason was now. He had a sharp, sunburned face, dark hair plastered to his forehead, and green eyes that were wide and red-rimmed with exhaustion. He wore the ruins of what had once been a very fine coat, dark blue, with a row of tarnished brass buttons down the front and one sleeve torn away at the elbow. His hands were raw and scabbed across the palms.
Jason knew him. He had seen that face before, pale and slack in the water at the foot of the cliff.
"Gods," the young man said. He sounded as if he might cry. "You're actually awake. I thought— I didn't think—"
Jason tried to speak and produced only a dry click. The young man grabbed something from beside the fire, a split fruit, and held it to his lips, and Jason drank the juice in small, careful swallows until his throat remembered how to work.
"How long?" he rasped.
"Six days." The young man sat back on his heels. "Six days, and you haven't moved once. I thought you were going to die. I thought you'd been dying the whole time and just hadn't gotten around to it."
Something moved at the edge of Jason's vision. He turned his head a little further.
The mask lay on the stone beside his pillow of leaves, face up, looking at the ceiling. It must have slipped off when he woke. It was perfectly white and perfectly clean, exactly as it had been on the day he had first lifted it off the pedestal, and in the firelight its narrow eyes seemed to hold a little of the dark.
Jason looked at it for a long time.
"I put it on you," the young man said quietly, following his gaze. "The first night. You told me to bring it, so I did, and then I didn't know what else to do with it. Nothing happened. But you didn't die, either." He hesitated. "You don't remember any of that, do you?"
Jason closed his eye. He remembered black sand, a violet moon, an empty board, and a whisper like paper. He did not remember a young man in a blue coat climbing a cliff in a storm to fetch a mask he'd thrown into the sea.
"No," he said.
* * *
The next few days passed slowly.
Jason couldn't stand at first, and could barely sit. The hole in his side had finally started to close, the edges knitting together red and tender, and every time he moved too quickly it reminded him. His left arm was stranger. Black lines covered it from the fingertips to just below the shoulder, branching and forking across the skin like cracks in glass, fine and dark and intricate. They didn't hurt, and they had stopped spreading. The young man told him that they had stopped on the night his breathing changed, and had not moved since.
Jason stared at them for a long time on the first day. Then he stopped looking. There were a lot of things he had learned to stop looking at.
The young man's name was Alexander Morgan. He told Jason on the second day, a little formally, as if he were introducing himself at a dinner rather than kneeling in a cave, and seemed faintly surprised when Jason just said, "Jason Keller," and didn't add anything else.
He was the son of an admiral, he said, of the Maritime Republic. He said it as if Jason should know what that meant, and when Jason didn't, a slow, puzzled frown crossed his face. He had been aboard one of his father's ships when a storm came up out of nowhere, a storm the navigators hadn't seen coming, and the last thing he remembered was the deck tilting and a wall of water. Then he had woken up on the rocks with Jason bleeding beside him.
"What happened to the ship?" Jason asked.
Alexander looked into the fire for a long time. "I don't know," he said at last.
Jason didn't ask again.
He told his own story in pieces, over those days, a little at a time, because it came out that way and because talking was still hard. He told Alexander about the lecture hall, about the voice and the four settings, and about the one that wasn't a setting at all. He told him about the raft and the shark, and about the storm that had thrown him onto the reef, and about the years that had followed.
He didn't tell him about the cliff, or what he had been about to do when he saw a body in the water. He wasn't ready for that.
Alexander listened to all of it with an expression that shifted constantly between wonder and deep doubt.
"A voice," he said, when Jason had finished telling him about the Enigma. "In your head."
"Yes."
"Telling you the odds that you'd survive."
"Yes."
"And you believed it?"
Jason thought about eighty-one percent, forty-six percent, and fourteen percent. "It's never been wrong," he said.
Alexander was quiet for a moment. "And what was it you did, before? You said you were a student. Of what?"
"Engineering."
Alexander's frown came back. "What's engineering?"
Jason opened his mouth and found, to his own surprise, that he was smiling. It felt strange on his face, like using a muscle that had been asleep for years.
"Building things," he said. "Bridges. Machines. Figuring out why things break, and how to stop them from breaking."
Alexander considered this. "And you ended up here."
"Yeah," Jason said. "The universe has a sense of humor."
On the fourth night, when the fire had burned low, Jason told him about the black beach.
He told it slowly and carefully, the violet moon and the silent sea and the figure in rags walking out of the grotto with the board under its arm. He told him about the questions and the answers, about play, and about you lost. And he told him the last thing the figure had said, the whisper that had followed him down into the dark.
When he finished, Alexander had gone very still.
"What?" Jason said.
"Nothing." Alexander poked at the embers with a stick. "It's nothing. Just a story."
"What story?"
Alexander hesitated for so long that Jason thought he wasn't going to answer. Then he said, without looking up, "There's a tale sailors tell in the Republic. About a shore where the sand is black and the sea doesn't make a sound, and someone who waits there for the drowned." He shrugged, too casually. "It's an old story. Deckhands tell it to frighten the new boys on their first voyage. That's all."
"What does the someone want?"
Alexander tossed the stick into the fire and watched it catch. "In the story," he said quietly, "it wants to play a game."
Neither of them said anything else that night.
* * *
On the seventh day, Jason stood up.
It took him three tries and most of Alexander's shoulder, but he did it, and he stayed up, swaying, one hand braced against the cave wall. His legs shook and his side burned, and he felt more like himself than he had in a very long time.
When he was sure he wouldn't fall, he bent down, slowly, and picked up the mask.
It was as cold as he remembered, and as light, and as perfectly smooth. He turned it over in his hands and held it close to the fire, running his thumb along the fine lines that spiraled in toward the eyes. He had held it once before, in the chamber under the pond, and had been too angry to really look at it. Now he looked.
He turned it over and looked at the inside.
There was nothing there. It was as smooth and white as the outside, without a single line or mark, and it curved exactly to the shape of a face. He ran his thumb over it and felt only cold, perfect smoothness, as if no one had ever made it and it had simply always existed.
He had half expected something, a sign or an explanation, anything that would tell him why it had come back to him, or why he was still alive. There was nothing to find. It was just a mask, and it had kept him breathing for six days for reasons it wasn't going to share.
"What are you going to do with it?" Alexander asked. He had come up beside him and was eyeing the mask warily from a careful distance.
Jason thought about it. "Keep it, I guess."
"You don't sound very happy about that."
"I tried throwing it away once." Jason turned it slowly in the firelight. "Into the sea, as far as I could."
"What happened?"
"It came back."
Alexander looked at the mask for a long moment. Then, without a word, he took a small step backward.
Jason set it down on a ledge of stone at the back of the cave, face up, where the firelight couldn't quite reach it. The narrow eyes stared at the ceiling, blank and patient.
The sea had given it back to him once. Something told him it would keep doing that for as long as he lived.