The city came back out at noon like something waking from a long sleep.
Before he went out to meet it, Jason stood in the hallway of the apartment and wrapped his arm.
He had practiced it so often since the day he bought the scarf, sitting on the floor of his room, that his hands no longer needed him. Starting high under the shoulder and working down, turn over turn, firm and flat, over the elbow, down the forearm, across the back of the hand to the knuckles. He tucked the end in. Then he pulled on his jacket, and flexed his fingers inside the wool, and looked.
It looked like an injury. A sprain, maybe, or a burn. People would look at it once and stop wondering.
That was the point.
Jason walked through the city slowly. The streets were full again, but not the way they used to be. People moved in small, careful knots, talking low. They stood a little farther apart in line outside the pharmacy than they needed to. And everywhere he looked, he caught the same thing in their faces when they glanced at one another: a quick, sideways measuring, there and gone, like someone checking a stranger's hands for a weapon.
He knew what they were wondering. He had been watching people do it for a week from his window.
Were you one of them? Did you go somewhere? Did you come back with something?
Nobody asked out loud. Nobody had to.
He kept his left hand in his pocket, and his eyes down, and walked.
* * *
The superstore on Halsey Street was enormous, a long gray box with a parking lot the size of a small lake, and inside it was louder and brighter than anywhere he had been in seventy years. Music came from the ceiling. Screens flickered over the checkouts with the news on mute. A child was crying somewhere. Carts rattled. The light was white and flat and came from everywhere at once, so that nothing had a shadow.
Jason stood just inside the doors for a long moment, letting it wash over him, the way he used to stand at the mouth of the cave and let a storm wash over the island. Then he found the sign that said Outdoor & Sports, and followed it.
The fishing aisle was at the very back, past the camping chairs and the bicycles. He turned the corner into it, and stopped.
It was almost empty.
Not just quiet. Empty. The long rack where the rods should have stood was bare from end to end, nothing but rows of plastic clips and price tags with nothing above them. The hooks were gone. The line was gone. The little plastic boxes of lures and weights and floats were gone. There were two lonely spools of heavy-duty line left on the bottom shelf, and a child's rod in a garish pink box with a cartoon fish on it, and that was all.
Jason stood looking at it.
A young employee in a green vest was restocking the shelf at the end of the aisle, a skinny kid with a name tag that said DEVIN and a lanyard full of keys. He noticed Jason staring and came over, a little cautiously, the way everybody approached everybody now.
"Sorry, man," he said. "We're out. Totally cleaned out."
"Of fishing rods."
"Of everything fishing." Devin waved at the bare rack. "It's crazy. The minute they opened the city back up, people were lined up at the doors. Everybody wants to get out to the lakes, I guess. Half of them came straight back here. Rods, line, hooks, nets. I sold a guy a crab trap this morning. We're in the middle of the city. I don't even know where you'd put a crab trap." He shook his head. "It's like the whole town suddenly decided it loves fishing."
Jason didn't say anything.
He was looking at the empty rack, and he was thinking about a raft.
About two plastic stills and a dull knife and a can of something that might once have been peaches. About a strip of plank shaved down until it would bend, and a rusty nail bent into a hook against the edge of a box. About a float that wouldn't dip, and a hunger so deep it felt like a second heartbeat. About everyone who had chosen Easy, and Normal, and Hard, and woken up on a raft in the middle of an ocean with no land in sight.
Eighty-one percent of them had survived Easy. Forty-six percent had survived Normal. Fourteen percent had survived Hard.
And every single one of those survivors had learned to fish.
He felt it go through him, cold and sudden, like stepping into the pond. He wasn't the only one. Of course he wasn't the only one. There were people all over this city who woke up at dawn now, and drank their water in small, careful mouthfuls, and slept on the floor. And on the very first afternoon they were free, they had all walked to the same place, and bought the same thing, for the same reason.
And anyone who was paying attention to this aisle would know exactly what that reason was.
"Huh," Jason said. "Weird."
"Right?" said Devin. "We've got a delivery coming in this afternoon. Only three rods, though. If you want one, you'd better wait around. They'll be gone in an hour."
"No," Jason said. "That's all right. Thanks."
He turned to go.
* * *
He would have gone. He was already walking, back the way he had come, past the camping chairs, toward the bright white noise of the store, thinking about nothing but the exit.
Then he passed the hunting section, and saw the young man at the knives.
He was maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, thin and pale, in a gray hoodie with the hood pushed back. He was standing in front of the glass display case where the hunting knives were locked away, very close to it, so close that his breath had fogged a patch on the glass. His hands were in the pocket of his hoodie, and Jason could see them moving inside it, clenching and unclenching. His whole body was trembling, very slightly, all the time, like a wire in the wind.
He wasn't looking at the knives the way a buyer looked at them. He was just staring.
Jason slowed.
Just try to get used to it again, Sarah had said, on that first afternoon in the ruined lecture hall, with her voice pitched low. She had been looking at him the way people look at a dog that has been hit by a car: not unkindly, but as if she had no idea what to do with him, and a little afraid to touch him. Real life. Normal stuff. Talk to people. Buy groceries. I don't know, Jason. A little at a time.
He had nodded. He had not had the faintest idea how.
He looked at the trembling young man in front of the knives, and he thought, Normal stuff. Talk to people. This was what people did, wasn't it? In stores. They helped each other find things. The kid looked lost. He looked like someone who had walked into a place he didn't understand and didn't know how to ask for help. Jason knew knives. It was one of the very few things in this bright, loud, flat-lit world that he actually knew.
He stopped beside him at the glass.
"Not that one," he said.
The young man flinched as if he'd been slapped. He turned his head, and Jason saw his eyes, red-rimmed and wide.
"The one you're looking at," Jason said, nodding at the case. "The big one with the serrated spine. It looks good, but the steel's too soft, and the tang only goes halfway into the handle. You'll snap it the first time you put it through a joint. And the serrations are useless. They just catch." He pointed lower in the case, at a plain, ugly knife with a short, thick blade and a wooden grip. "That one. It's boring, but the blade runs all the way through the handle. You could gut a hundred fish with it and it would still hold an edge. What are you going to use it for?"
The young man stared at him.
Then he laughed. It was a high, thin, cracked sound, nothing like a laugh at all.
"Use it for," he said. "What am I going to use it for."
"Fish? Game? Camping?"
"You don't know." The young man's voice was shaking. He took his hands out of his hoodie pocket, and they were shaking too. "You don't know. Do you. You heard it, didn't you? The voice. Everybody heard it. Everybody fell down. And then everybody woke up, and some of them—" He stopped, and swallowed, and his face twisted. "Some of them came back different. You can see it. I can see it. On the street. In the bus. They look at you like you're not there. They walk around like they own the whole world. They got something. They went somewhere and they got something, and I asked it, I begged it, I said take me, pick me, I'll do anything, and it didn't even answer."
Jason said nothing.
"Nothing," the young man said. "It gave me nothing. I just fell down on my kitchen floor and woke up with a bruise on my face and nothing. And my brother didn't wake up at all. He's lying in a gym on Fifth with a number on his foot." He was breathing very fast now. "And you want to tell me about steel?"
"I'm sorry about your brother," Jason said quietly.
It was the wrong thing to say. He saw it the moment the words left his mouth. Something broke in the young man's face, all at once, the way a wave breaks.
He moved faster than Jason expected. His hand shot out to the side, to the open shelf beside the case where a display knife sat on a little plastic stand, a big, ugly thing with a black blade, chained to the shelf by a thin steel cable. He tore it free, cable and stand and all, and the stand clattered to the floor, and then he was coming at Jason with the knife held low and his face white and wild and blind.
* * *
There was no time to think. There was never any time to think. That was the first thing the island had taught him.
Jason's body was twenty years old and soft and slow, and it had never in its life done what he asked it to do now. But the knowledge was older than the body. It was in his hands, and his feet, and somewhere deep in the back of his skull, seventy years deep, put there by a commodore on a beach, and twelve men in a cave, and a coral reef, and a shark.
He stepped inside the blade instead of away from it.
His left hand found the young man's wrist, and turned it, not hard, just exactly far enough. His right hand came up under the elbow. The knife went one way and the young man went the other, and then the young man was on his knees on the white floor of the superstore with his arm twisted up behind his back, and the knife was skittering away under the shelves, and Jason was standing behind him, holding his wrist in a grip that didn't look like much at all.
The young man screamed and tried to twist free. Jason moved his thumb a quarter of an inch, and the scream stopped.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Jason looked down at the back of the young man's head. At the gray hoodie, and the thin neck, and the shoulders shaking under the cloth. He could hear the music from the ceiling, very far away. He could hear the young man breathing, short and fast and terrified.
And something came up in him from very deep down. Something that had been lying quiet in the dark for a week, under the soft bed he couldn't sleep in and the tap water he couldn't stop staring at. Something cold and patient and very, very tired.
He bent down, close to the young man's ear, and spoke softly. Almost kindly.
"You want to be chosen," he said.
The young man went very still.
"You want to go where it sends you. You want what they came back with." Jason's voice was low and even, the voice he had used to talk to the stills, to the fire, to the empty sea. "Let me tell you what it gives you. It gives you an ocean with nothing in it. It gives you a knife, and it lets you learn what it's for. It takes your eye. It takes your friends, one by one, and then it gives them back old, and then it takes them again. It lets you dig twelve graves in a row, and then it lets you count them, every morning, for the rest of your life."
The young man was trembling so hard that Jason could feel it through his wrist.
"And when it's finished with you," Jason whispered, "it sends you home. And you stand in a supermarket, and you look at the people walking past, and you can't remember what any of it was for." He tightened his thumb, very slightly. "You begged it to pick you. Be grateful it didn't. It doesn't give anything. It only takes. And it's still taking."
The young man made a small, broken sound. Then his eyes rolled up, and his whole body went loose, all at once, and he slid sideways out of Jason's grip and lay on the white floor, breathing shallowly, with his face pressed against the tiles.
Jason looked down at him.
He knew, somewhere far away, that he should do something. Check his breathing. Turn him on his side. Call someone. He had pulled a man out of the sea twice. He had splinted the leg of a sailor who had come to kill him. He knew how.
But the cold thing was still in him, up to his throat, and the music was very loud, and the light was very white, and none of it seemed to have anything to do with him at all.
He turned, and walked away.
* * *
He walked back through the camping chairs and the bicycles, and past the toys, and past the long rows of cereal and bread. He walked the way he used to walk through the forest at dusk, when he was hunting birds on the plain: quietly, steadily, without hurry, his weight rolling smoothly from heel to toe.
People got out of his way.
He didn't notice them doing it. He didn't look at anyone. But a woman pushing a cart with a toddler in the seat pulled it sharply to the side as he passed, and then stood very still, holding the handle, watching him go. A man in a suit stepped back into an aisle and pretended to study a shelf of pasta until he was gone. A security guard by the electronics counter, a big man with a shaved head, opened his mouth as if to say something, met Jason's eye for half a second, and shut it again, and looked at the floor.
The toddler in the cart had stopped crying. She stared at him with enormous eyes all the way down the aisle, and didn't make a sound.
Devin was at the end of the outdoor section, pricing a pallet of camping lanterns. He looked up as Jason passed, and smiled automatically, the way he had been trained to.
"Hey, man," he said. "Did you find what you were looking for?"
Jason didn't answer. He didn't slow down. He didn't look at him.
Devin's smile faltered.
"Okay," he said, to Jason's back. "Well. Have a nice day."
Jason walked through the doors, out of the white light and into the gray afternoon, and was gone.
* * *
Devin stood there for a while with the pricing gun in his hand.
He didn't know why he felt so cold. It was just a guy. Skinny, young, about his own age, in a plain jacket, with one arm all wrapped up in something black like he'd hurt it. He had looked tired, that was all. A lot of people looked tired lately.
But when the guy had walked past, Devin had felt the hair stand up on his arms. He had felt it the way you feel it when you're standing at the edge of a roof, or when you hear a noise downstairs at night. It was the feeling of something very old and very large passing very close to you in the dark, and not caring at all whether you were there.
He shook it off. He had lanterns to price.
It was almost twenty minutes later when the delivery came through from the back: a long cardboard box on a trolley, with FISHING ROD x3 scrawled on the side in marker. Devin wheeled it down the outdoor section, through the camping chairs, and around the corner into the fishing aisle, already thinking about how fast they would go.
He stopped.
There was a man lying on the floor in front of the hunting knives.
He was lying on his side with his face against the tiles, in a gray hoodie, perfectly still. A plastic display stand lay overturned beside him, trailing a thin steel cable. And under the shelf, half hidden, Devin saw the black blade of a knife.
For a long moment, he couldn't move.
Then he dropped the trolley handle and ran forward and knelt, and saw, with a rush of relief that made his head swim, that the man was breathing. His eyes were closed. His face was gray and wet. His lips were moving, very slightly, over and over, as if he were trying to say something in his sleep.
Devin fumbled his phone out of his vest with shaking hands, and called emergency services, and gave the address, twice, because the first time it came out wrong. Police, he said. Ambulance. Please hurry. Then he sat back on his heels on the white floor beside the man in the gray hoodie, and waited, and listened to the music from the ceiling, and tried not to think about the guy in the plain jacket who hadn't answered him.
It was less than five minutes before he heard footsteps coming fast down the outdoor aisle.
Devin looked up, expecting a uniform.
It wasn't a uniform.
It was a young woman, out of breath, with dark hair pulled back in a hasty knot and a long gray coat flapping open over a sweater. She came around the corner at a half run and stopped dead at the sight of them: the man on the floor, the knife under the shelf, Devin on his knees beside him.
She took it all in with one quick look. Then her eyes went to the empty rack where the fishing rods should have been, and stayed there for a moment longer than they needed to.
"Hi," she said. Her voice was gentle and calm, much calmer than her breathing. "I'm going to need you to tell me exactly what happened here. Can you do that for me?"