The board was cold.
Jason had rested his hands on the edge of it without thinking, and the cold came up into his fingers at once, a deep, steady chill like the stone at the bottom of the pond. It was the most real thing he had felt since opening his eyes. The sand, the silent sea, and the violet moon all had something slightly wrong about them, something too smooth, like a painting of a place. But the board felt like wood, and it felt like winter, and his fingers ached from touching it.
He took his hands away and looked at the figure across from him.
It hadn't moved. It sat with its hands on its knees and its white face turned toward him, and the narrow eye slits were so dark that he couldn't tell whether there was anything behind them at all.
"So," Jason said. "What is this?"
The figure didn't answer.
"Is this a dream? Am I hallucinating?" He laughed, and it came out thin. "I wouldn't blame me. I've spent years talking to rocks. Seeing things was bound to happen eventually."
Nothing.
He looked down at the empty board, then back up at the mask, and something that had been lying quiet in him for a very long time began, slowly, to wake up. It wasn't fear. It was older than fear, and hotter.
"You know what, I don't care what this is," he said. "I've been sitting in silence for years, and I'm done. I want to know who I'm talking to." He leaned forward. "Are you the Enigma?"
He didn't expect an answer. The Enigma had never answered him when it mattered, not once in all those years. It spoke when it wanted to, announced what it wanted to announce, and left him alone with the silence the rest of the time.
The figure's head tilted, very slightly.
"No."
The word was barely a whisper. It was dry and soft, like paper sliding over paper, and it seemed to come from somewhere much farther away than the mask.
Jason went completely still.
He had been so sure. The Enigma was the only thing in this whole nightmare that had ever been more than rock and water and hunger. It had taken him out of the lecture hall, dropped him on the raft, sent back the raft when he'd earned it, and handed out its announcements like a referee reading scores. Everything strange that had ever happened to him had come from it. The footprints had been a mystery, but he had always assumed, somewhere underneath, that they were the Enigma's mystery.
"Then who are you?" he asked quietly.
The figure said nothing.
Jason swallowed. The next question was one he didn't want to ask, and he asked it anyway.
"Are you Death?"
For a long moment the figure didn't move at all. Then, slowly and deliberately, it shook its head.
Jason let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. He didn't know whether it was relief. If this wasn't the Enigma and it wasn't Death, then he had nothing left to call it. He had no name for it and no rules, nothing to hold on to. There was only a masked stranger in rags, sitting across from him on a black beach at the end of the world, with an empty board between them.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Then what do you want?"
The figure lifted one pale hand from its knee, and laid it flat on its side of the board.
"Play," it whispered.
Jason looked down at the board.
It was as empty as it had been a minute ago. There were no squares, no lines, no pieces anywhere. He looked at the sand around it, in case something had been set down there while he wasn't looking. There was nothing. He looked at the figure's hands, at its lap, and at the rags hanging from its shoulders. Still nothing.
"Play what?" he said. "There's nothing here. There's no game."
The figure waited.
"I don't know the rules," Jason said. "You haven't told me the rules. I don't even know what the game is."
The figure's hand stayed flat on the board, patient, unmoving.
Jason's mind started to race the way it had on the night before an exam, grabbing at anything it could use. Maybe the game was a trick question, and the answer was to refuse. Maybe it was one of those puzzles where you were meant to invent the rules yourself, and whoever did it most convincingly won. Maybe he could bluff. He could put his finger on the board, move it somewhere with confidence, and see what the figure did. He had bluffed his way through half of first year. How hard could it be?
He lifted his hand.
The numbness came before he could put it down.
It started in his side, just above the hip, in the exact place where the coral had gone in. It was the same cold, spreading nothing he remembered from the rocks, and it came up through his chest and down his arms, gentle and unhurried, like water rising in a flooded room. His fingers went dull. His thoughts started to slow and blur at the edges, one idea sliding into the next before he could finish it.
He tried to hold on to the bluff, and it slipped away. He tried to think of a rule, any rule, something clever to say, and nothing came.
His hand hung in the air above the board, trembling.
"I don't—" he began, and stopped. It was getting hard to speak. He tried again. "I don't know how to play."
The words dropped onto the board between them and lay there.
He couldn't see any expression behind the mask, of course. There was nothing to see but narrow darkness and fine white lines. But the figure didn't seem surprised. It didn't lean forward or pull back or tilt its head. It sat exactly as before, as if this was the answer it had been expecting from the very beginning.
"You lost," it whispered.
Jason opened his mouth to argue, to ask what he had lost, and how you could lose a game that had never started. But the numbness had reached his throat, and the words wouldn't come. The violet moon started to blur. The black sand tilted gently beneath him, and the board, the figure, and the silent, glowing sea all began to slide away into darkness.
The last thing he heard, from very far away, was that dry, papery whisper.
"You can't lose forever."