Jason lay on the beach with one arm buried in the sand.
For a while he didn't move. The cold had worked its way so far into him it no longer felt like a surface thing. It sat deeper than skin, deeper than muscle, somewhere in the joints and marrow. When he finally tried to push himself up, his arms shook so badly they gave out under him, and he dropped back into the wet grit with a breathless, broken sound.
The bird lay a few feet away.
He stared at it through wind-stung lashes, not really seeing it at first. Just a dark shape on pale sand. Then hunger, or thirst, or whatever stripped-down thing was still driving him, fixed on it and refused to let go.
Jason dragged himself toward it.
His clothes hung off him in ruined layers, stiff with salt and old dirt. His knees left tracks in the sand. By the time he reached the carcass, his breathing had gone thin and ragged. He gripped it with both hands, knuckles standing out white against skin gone too sharp over bone.
The bird was still warm.
That should have helped.
It didn't.
Jason lowered his head and brought it to his mouth anyway.
The first taste hit and his body recoiled before his mind caught up. Hot iron. Salt. Thickness. He gagged hard, jerked away, and vomited into the sand until there was nothing left in him to bring up. The carcass slipped from his hands and landed beside him with a soft, ugly thud.
He spat again and again, trying to clear the taste.
It stayed.
For a long moment he knelt there on all fours, shaking, hair hanging into his face, the sea wind cutting through him as though he were already hollow.
Then he lifted his head.
The ocean stretched ahead in a flat sheet of gray steel, all the color leeched out of it. The horizon was barely there, just a smear between water and sky. Nothing moved except the tide. Nothing came. Nothing changed.
A wave rolled in farther than the last and left something pale behind when it withdrew.
Jason squinted.
The object lay half in the wash, half on the wet sand, white against the darkened shore.
The mask.
He stared at it.
Even from here he knew it. The same carved lines. The same impossible, untouched surface. It should have been gone. Dragged down, buried, lost somewhere beyond sight. Instead the tide had given it back like a joke too cruel to bother dressing up.
Jason reached one hand toward it without meaning to.
Then stopped.
His fingers hovered in the air for a second before dropping uselessly to his side.
"No," he said.
The word barely carried.
He pushed himself upright in stages, one hand braced against the sand, then against his own thigh, until he was finally standing. The world tilted once, then steadied. He left the mask where it lay.
And started walking.
The beach seemed endless in both directions. He passed the long gray line of sticks at the top of the sand without looking at it. He had stopped adding to it months ago, on a morning he could no longer remember. Wet sand gave way to drier ground, then to scrub and the first twisted line of trees. Jason kept moving with the slow, mechanical determination of someone who had run out of reasons but not yet out of momentum. His bare feet sank and dragged. Branches caught at his sleeves when he entered the forest. Twigs snapped under him. He did not look back.
The trees thinned.
The forest opened onto the plain.
By then the sky had darkened enough that the land looked half-drained of color, the grass brittle and pale, the distant cliff a black shape rising against a ceiling of bruised cloud. Jason crossed the open ground without slowing. He knew where he was going long before he reached it. The decision had been forming in him for days, maybe longer. Not dramatic. Not sudden. Just worn smooth by repetition until it stopped feeling like a choice and became the last unfinished task.
The cliff rose ahead of him.
He put a hand against the rock and began to climb.
He had made this climb before. Not for this. For fruit once. For escape once. For survival. Now he climbed with the same body, or what was left of it, toward a different answer.
The wind was stronger near the top.
By the time he hauled himself onto the final ledge, it was pulling at his clothes hard enough to make them snap against his body. Below, the ocean threw itself against the rocks in white bursts that vanished almost as soon as they formed.
Jason stepped to the edge and stopped there.
The drop was sheer.
Far beneath him, water hammered the cliff base in an endless cycle of impact and retreat. Black rocks jutted up between the waves, and here and there coral broke the surface like jagged teeth. The sound of it all came up heavy and constant, less like surf than breathing.
He stood very still.
"Is that what you wanted?" he asked the sky.
His voice was thin in the wind. It barely sounded like his anymore.
"To see me get this far?"
No answer came.
Above him, the clouds had drawn together into one low, dark mass. The light went mean and metallic. A distant roll of thunder moved across the horizon, too long to be accidental, too deep to ignore.
Jason laughed once under his breath.
"Of course."
The first gust hit hard enough to make him brace.
Then another.
The trees below bent in unison, a ripple of movement racing through the forest canopy. The air changed all at once. Cooler. Sharper. Wet with the smell of rain before any had fallen.
Lightning flashed somewhere over the sea.
For a second the whole island came white and stark into view: cliff, trees, rocks, broken surf, Jason himself standing at the edge like a mark cut into the stone.
Then darkness rushed back in behind it.
Rain began without warning.
Not a drizzle. Not a buildup. One second wind, the next a hard wall of water slamming sideways across the cliff. Jason flinched against it, blinking through the sting. Thunder cracked overhead so violently the rock under his feet seemed to answer.
He lifted his face into the storm.
"IS THAT WHAT YOU WANTED?"
The words tore out of him raw enough to hurt.
Rain ran into his mouth, down his neck, across the scarred side of his face. His hair whipped across his eye. The wind shoved at him from behind, then sideways, then nowhere he could predict.
Jason looked down.
One step.
That was all.
One shift of weight. One surrender. Gravity would do the rest. The rocks, the water, the current. The island could finish what it had been working on for years.
He moved his foot forward.
The stone edge vanished beneath his toes.
His body tipped.
Then something below caught his eye.
A shape in the water.
Jason froze.
For one impossible second he thought it was driftwood, or foam, or some trick of rain and failing light. Then lightning flashed again, bleaching the world white, and he saw it clearly.
A body.
Pale against the black water. Rising and falling in the churn below the cliff.
His breath caught.
No.
The thought came cold and immediate, slicing through everything else.
No.
His weight rocked backward. He stumbled, half-fell onto the wet stone, hands scraping against rock as he dragged himself away from the edge.
Because the thing below was wrong.
Not just because it was there. Because of how it moved. How it stayed at the surface. How it turned in the water as though it had meaning, direction, intent.
Jason stared down through the rain, heart slamming against his ribs.
"Dead bodies don't float," he whispered.
Another flash of lightning.
Another glimpse of the pale shape in the surf below.
It was a human body.