"What it told you," Alexander repeated.
"The voice." Jason pulled his knees a little closer. "The Enigma. I told you about it."
He had, in his first days awake, in the same flat voice he used for everything. A voice in a room full of frozen people. Four settings, and a fifth that wasn't a setting at all. Numbers read out like the results of a race. Alexander had listened, and nodded, and privately filed the whole thing away alongside the black shore and the singing shells and all the other things sailors saw when they had been too long at sea.
"You told me it spoke to you," he said carefully. "You told me it gave you odds. You didn't say anything about ships."
"It didn't. Not exactly."
Jason was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was very even, the way a man's voice goes when he is carrying something heavy and trying not to spill it.
"When it put me on the raft, it gave me a mission. Everyone got one. The people who picked the other settings had to survive for a certain time, or get past a certain danger. A week on a raft. A shark. Reaching land. When they did, it was over. Every time someone else's trial ended, the voice told me. It told me three times."
"And yours?"
Jason looked into the fire.
"Pass away peacefully in your sleep," he said, "alone, on a deserted island."
The words didn't sound like anything Jason would say. They were too smooth and too finished, and he recited them the way Alexander had once recited the articles of war as a boy, without a single stumble, as if he had said them to himself so many times that they had worn a groove in him.
"I thought it meant I had to find an island," Jason went on. "So I found one. Then I thought something would happen, that the voice would tell me I was done, like the others. It never did. It took me a while to understand why." Something moved at the corner of his mouth that wasn't a smile. "My trial doesn't end when I reach the island. It ends when I die on it. Of old age. It wants me to live here for the rest of my life."
Alexander stared at him.
"I did the math once," Jason said. "If I live to eighty, that's about twenty-two thousand days. I used to put a stick in the sand for every morning, and one day I realized the beach wasn't long enough." He lifted one shoulder. "Nobody is coming. Not because your father won't look. He probably will. But the island is the whole point. Nothing leaves it."
For a moment, Alexander couldn't say anything at all.
Then he heard himself laugh, one short, disbelieving breath.
"That's your trial," he said. "Not mine. I didn't choose anything. No voice ever spoke to me. I was on my ship, and there was a storm, and I washed up here. That's all. Whatever this thing wants from you, it has nothing to do with me."
"Doesn't it?"
"No!"
Jason didn't raise his voice. He didn't seem to have the strength. "Nothing lands on this island by accident," he said. "Not the raft. Not the branch that nearly split my head open. Not the shark, or the fruit trees, or the storm that brought me here. Everything here happens for a reason, and I've never once been told what it is." He looked up. "You're here because it wanted you here."
"You can't know that."
"No," Jason admitted. "But I've been here four years. I haven't been wrong about it yet."
Alexander was on his feet. He didn't remember standing up. His hands were clenched at his sides, and his heart was going far too fast, and somewhere in the back of his mind the cold voice had begun to speak, very softly, the way it always did when things were about to go wrong.
Alone, it said. Did you hear it? He said alone.
"Alone," Alexander said out loud. "The mission. Die alone on a deserted island."
Jason hesitated.
It was only for a moment. But Alexander had grown up on the decks of warships, watching officers decide what to tell their men, and he knew exactly what that kind of hesitation meant.
"So what am I?" he asked quietly. "If you're supposed to die alone, what does that make me?"
Jason didn't answer. He didn't have to. It was written plainly across his face, in the way his eye slid away toward the fire and didn't come back. However long it took, the island was not going to keep two people until the end. Sooner or later, one way or another, Alexander was not going to be here.
"Gods," Alexander breathed.
He turned away and pressed both hands over his face. The cave felt suddenly too small, the walls too close, the air too thick with smoke.
"Do you know what I was thinking, when I woke up on those rocks?" His voice was shaking, and he couldn't stop it. "I was thinking that I'd been lucky. That the sea had taken my ship and every man on it, and somehow it had spat me out alive onto the one piece of land in a thousand leagues. I thought someone was watching over me." He laughed again, and this time it cracked in the middle. "And now you're telling me I'll spend the rest of my life on this rock, chasing birds and picking fruit, until your voice decides it's time for me to go away."
"I'm not telling you that. I don't know what's going to happen to you."
"You pulled me out of the water."
Jason blinked. "What?"
"On the rocks. I was drowning, and you pulled me out. Didn't you?" Alexander could feel his eyes burning. "You should have let me drown."
The words hung in the air between them. As soon as they were out, some small, distant part of him knew they were wrong, and unfair, and that he would regret them. The rest of him didn't care.
"Drowning is quick," he said. "I've seen men drown. It's terrible, but it's quick. You dragged me out of the sea so I could starve here slowly, right next to you, for no reason at all, and you didn't even—" His voice broke. "You didn't even ask me."
"You were unconscious."
"That's not the point!"
It rang off the stone. Jason flinched, very slightly, and for a second Alexander saw something move behind his face, something raw and old and much too tired. Then it was gone, and there was only the flat, careful look again, and Jason said nothing at all.
He didn't argue. He didn't defend himself. He simply sat there against the wall of the cave and took it, the way he seemed to take everything, and somehow that made it worse.
All the fight drained out of Alexander at once.
"I need to think," he said. "I can't— I need to think."
He grabbed the knife from beside the fire, stepped over Jason's legs, and walked out of the cave into the dark.
He went fast, over the rocks and up the path toward the plain, the wind cold on his wet face. He was halfway across the grass before he realized he was listening for something.
He was listening for Jason to call after him. For footsteps, or his name, or anything at all.
He stopped and turned around. Behind him, the cliff was a black shape against the stars, and at its foot, very small, the cave mouth glowed orange with the last of the fire. Nothing moved there. The only sound was the wind in the grass and, far below, the long, slow breathing of the sea.
Jason hadn't called after him.
Alexander told himself that was exactly what he wanted.
Then he turned his back on the glow and walked on into the dark, and the cold voice at the back of his mind said nothing at all, which was somehow the loneliest thing it had ever done.