Jason woke shivering.
For a moment he didn't know why. Then the cold sank fully into him, and with it came everything else: the ache in his back, the cuts on his hands, the raw throb behind his right eye. He lay still on the stone a second longer, staring up through the branches overhead while his body took inventory.
Nothing felt good.
"Fantastic," he muttered.
He pushed himself up on one elbow and immediately sucked in a sharp breath. Every muscle in him complained. His shoulders felt beaten, his legs worse, and when he tried to stretch the stiffness out of his spine, pain caught hard enough to make him stop halfway.
"So no yoga," he said hoarsely. "Good to know."
Morning air moved cool through the trees. It slipped under his torn clothes and raised gooseflesh along his arms. He rubbed at them for warmth, then turned his head and regretted that too when the world shifted unpleasantly.
His right eye had gotten worse.
He didn't need a mirror to know it. The lid felt heavier, more swollen than yesterday, and the vision on that side had narrowed to blur and shadow. When he blinked with the left, trying to force the right to cooperate, nothing improved. Just the same dark smear at the edge of everything, and the same sick pulse of pain behind it.
Jason went still.
Not panic, exactly. Something colder.
He closed his good eye for a second, breathed once through his nose, then opened it again.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Not ideal."
He reached for the sharpened stick he'd left beside him and used it to lever himself to his feet. The familiar weight helped. Not much, but enough. He stood there until the dizziness passed, one hand braced on the stone, listening to the forest wake around him.
Leaves shifting. Insects buzzing somewhere deeper in the trees. A birdlike call he didn't recognize, low and hollow.
If there was water inland, or anything useful at all, sitting here wasn't going to find it.
"Move first," he muttered. "Freak out later."
He started into the forest.
The ground was uneven, tangled with roots and wet leaves. Every few steps he had to slow and test his footing before trusting it. The stick helped with balance, but only just. His injured leg dragged more than he liked, and the bad eye made depth feel unreliable, distances slightly wrong.
The forest closed around him quickly.
Under the canopy, the light turned green and gold, broken into narrow bands that shifted with the breeze. Broad leaves brushed his shoulders. Vines hung in loose loops between trunks. Strange insects flickered in and out of view among the undergrowth, their shells catching the light in slick, metallic flashes.
Jason gave one particularly large, many-legged thing a wide berth.
"Nope," he said. "You can stay over there."
The air was damp enough to breathe, but not enough to help. His throat still felt dry. His eye still burned. Every now and then he caught himself squinting with both eyes, as though sheer stubbornness might restore the vision he was losing.
It didn't.
He kept going anyway.
The farther he walked, the more the forest felt like it was narrowing around him. Not physically. Just in the way pain and exhaustion could shrink the world until it became a tunnel of immediate problems: where to step, what to avoid, how far to the next place he could stop without admitting he needed to.
"Come on," he muttered under his breath. "There has to be something out here."
Water. A clearing. A stream. Anything.
After a while the trees began to thin.
Jason noticed it first in the light. Then in the air. Less dampness. More space between trunks. He lifted his head and picked up his pace a little despite the protest from his leg.
A few minutes later he stepped out of the tree line and stopped.
Open ground stretched ahead of him in a wide, gently sloping plain, pale green under the morning sun. After the pressure of the forest, the space felt almost shocking. Wind moved freely through the grass. The sky seemed bigger here.
Jason stood there breathing it in.
"Oh, thank God," he said.
For the first time since waking, he could see farther than a few meters in any direction. No obvious water, but open terrain meant options, and right then options were close enough to hope.
Movement caught his eye.
A cluster of large birds was crossing the field some distance away, heads bobbing as they moved through the grass. They were too big to be graceful, bodies round and heavy, wings small and mostly decorative. Not exactly turkeys. Not exactly anything he knew. Their legs, though, were powerful. Built for running.
Jason watched them for a moment.
"Well," he said softly. "You're unfortunate for both of us."
His stomach tightened with hunger.
He looked down at the sharpened stick in his hand, then back at the birds.
It wasn't even really a choice.
"Sorry," he muttered.
He crouched and started forward.
The first problem was getting close. The birds weren't stupid, only preoccupied. Jason used the taller grass where he could, keeping low, moving slowly whenever one of them lifted its head. His leg made that harder than it should have. Twice he nearly lost his balance. Once a burst of pain from his eye made him pause long enough for the whole flock to shift farther out.
"Great," he whispered. "Love stealth missions."
One bird strayed a little from the others, angling off to peck at something in the ground. Jason changed direction toward it and kept moving, heart beating too fast now, not from excitement but the effort of forcing his body into one more task it absolutely did not want.
He got close enough to see the feathering around its neck. Close enough to hear it breathing.
Then the bird looked up.
Its dark eyes locked on him for one frozen second.
Then it bolted.
"Oh, come on."
Jason lurched after it.
The first few strides were ugly. His leg nearly folded. The ground dipped unexpectedly and jarred his whole body. He clung to the spear, trying to keep pace while the bird zigzagged through the grass with infuriating speed.
He was not fast. Not anymore.
But the bird wasn't tireless, and neither was he dumb enough to chase it in a straight line. He started angling instead, forcing it away from the flock and toward a low patch of uneven ground where tufts of grass hid stones and roots.
It became less a chase than a miserable negotiation.
The bird ran. Jason stumbled after it. The bird changed direction. Jason swore, adjusted, kept going. Twice he nearly lost it. Once he actually did lose sight of it and had to stand bent over with his hands on his knees, listening for movement through the ringing in his ears.
Then it burst from the grass again, closer than before.
Jason threw.
The spear flew badly. Not straight, not clean. But luck, desperation, and proximity did what skill could not. The sharpened point struck the bird hard enough to send it tumbling.
Jason limped the last few steps and finished it quickly before he could think too hard about what he was doing.
Then he stood there, chest heaving, looking down at it.
"Well," he said after a long moment. "That was awful."
He pulled the spear free, wiped it off in the grass, and crouched to gather the bird. Up close it was heavier than he'd expected. He hefted it against his shoulder, winced, and adjusted.
By the time he made it back to the edge of the forest, every part of him felt worked past failure. His hands shook. His leg throbbed. His eye had narrowed to a pulse of heat and pressure that made him slightly nauseous.
Still, he had meat.
That mattered.
He carried the bird back toward the stone ledge near the bush, lowered it onto a flat rock, and stared at it for a second with the dull, blank focus of someone whose brain had run out of spare room.
"Now what?"
He knew the answer, of course. He just didn't like how much effort it implied.
Raw meat was a bad idea if he could avoid it. So was wasting what might be the best food he'd had since washing up on the island. Which meant fire.
Jason looked toward the trees.
"Guess we're doing this too."
He found fallen branches first, then rejected most of them. Too damp. Too soft. Too rotten in the middle. He snapped smaller pieces over his knee, peeled back wet outer bark with the knife, and searched for dry wood hidden in the core. It took longer than he wanted. Everything did.
By the time he had a small pile, his fingers were cramping.
He sat cross-legged on the stone and worked at it methodically. Dry shavings first. Thin splinters. A nest of tinder. Then friction, clumsy at first, then steadier as he forced himself into patience.
His shoulders burned.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
Still nothing.
"Great," he muttered. "Love being humbled by sticks."
He adjusted the angle, shifted his grip, and kept going until sweat started down his neck despite the cool air. The third attempt gave him smoke. The fourth gave him an ember so small he nearly thought he'd imagined it.
Jason froze.
Then he bent carefully, shielding it with both hands, and fed it bit by bit until the ember glowed brighter and the tinder caught with a whispering flare.
A tiny flame rose.
For a second he just stared at it.
Then he laughed, tired and disbelieving.
"Okay," he said. "That's actually beautiful."
He built the fire slowly, nursing it into something steady before trusting it with the bird. Once the flames were strong enough, he plucked what he could, cleaned the carcass as best he was able, and skewered it on the sharpened stick.
The smell hit him long before it was done.
Fat dripped into the fire and hissed. Smoke curled up through the leaves overhead. The skin tightened and browned in places, then darkened further as he turned it. Jason sat close enough to feel the heat on his face, hands aching from the effort of holding the spit steady while his stomach twisted itself into knots.
The wait was brutal.
Every instinct in him wanted to tear into it early, half-cooked or not. But he kept turning it, jaw tight, watching the meat change color.
When he finally judged it done, he pulled it off the flame and let it rest just long enough not to burn the skin off his fingers.
The first bite nearly made him close his eyes.
It wasn't seasoned. It wasn't elegant. Parts were overdone, parts probably weren't. But it was hot. Rich. Real. After salt, raw fish, and fruit, the taste of cooked meat hit him with almost embarrassing force.
Jason swallowed and gave a breathless laugh.
"Right," he said. "I take back every bad thing I've ever said about poultry."
He ate slowly after that, more from caution than restraint. Warmth spread through him with each bite, dulling the edge of the cold and the exhaustion and some small part of the fear. By the time he was done, his hands were greasy, the fire had burned down to a lower crackling glow, and for the first time all day he didn't feel on the verge of coming apart.
Which made the next problem easier to face.
Sleep.
He looked at the ground, then at the trees.
"Can't keep sleeping on rock," he murmured.
Not if he wanted to be able to stand up tomorrow.
Using the stick like a crutch, he went back to the forest edge and started gathering broad leaves, choosing the thickest, driest ones he could find. Some were too wet to bother with. Others tore under their own weight. He brought armfuls back anyway and spread them near the fire, close enough to dry but not close enough to ignite.
One leaf curled, blackened, and caught.
Jason snatched it away at once.
"No," he said. "Absolutely not. We are not setting the bed on fire."
On the second attempt he had better luck.
Little by little he built a rough pile, layering the driest leaves over the least damp ones until he had something that looked less like bedding and more like a forest floor trying to impersonate bedding. Still, it was softer than stone. That was enough.
He found a fallen length of wood nearby and dragged it over for a headrest, wincing at the pull in his shoulders.
Then he stepped back and looked at the result.
The leaf pile was uneven. The log was ridiculous. The whole thing would probably shift under him the second he lay down.
Jason nodded anyway.
"Luxury."
He eased himself down beside the fire, stretched out on the makeshift bed, and let his weight settle slowly. It rustled under him, prickly in places, but not unbearable. The log pressed awkwardly into the base of his skull. Also not ideal. Also better than stone.
The fire crackled softly nearby.
His right eye still hurt. That hadn't changed. Under the warmth and the food and the crushing tiredness, the problem remained exactly where he'd left it, swollen and ominous and unsolved.
But not tonight.
Tonight he had a fire. A full stomach. Something like shelter. A place, however temporary, that felt chosen rather than endured.
Jason stared up through the branches at the fading light.
"One thing at a time," he murmured.
That was all he could do.