Jason woke stiff and cold.
For a moment he lay still on the bed of dried leaves, staring up through a lattice of branches while his body reminded him of everything it disliked. His back ached from the uneven ground. His shoulders felt bruised clear through. His right eye still throbbed with that hot, dull pressure that had become its own kind of clock.
He rolled onto one elbow and winced.
"Excellent," he muttered. "Still alive."
The air had a morning chill to it, thin and damp and sharp enough to raise gooseflesh along his arms. He rubbed at them and sat up slowly, brushing leaf fragments off his shirt.
How many days had it been now?
Four? Five?
He looked out through the trees toward the pale wash of dawn and tried to count backward through storms, hunger, fruit, fire, and pain. Somewhere along the way the days had stopped sitting neatly in order.
"I need a system," he said aloud. "Before I start celebrating the same Tuesday twice."
His voice sounded rough from disuse. Or maybe from overuse, considering he mostly talked to himself now.
Jason pushed to his feet, grabbed the sharpened stick he'd been using as both spear and walking aid, and stood there until the worst of the stiffness eased. The camp was still exactly what it had been the night before: a fire ring, a crude bed, a few salvaged things arranged with the kind of care that came from having too little to lose.
Still pathetic.
Still better than nothing.
"Alright, Keller," he said, because hearing another name in the air, even his own, helped. "Let's go see if your genius traps have done anything besides insult the local wildlife."
He headed into the forest.
The route was familiar now, or as close to familiar as anything on the island had become. He knew where the roots knotted worst beneath the leaf litter, which patches of ground stayed slick in the morning, which trees marked the rough path toward the traps he'd cobbled together the day before. They weren't elegant. A few bent branches, some loops of vine, a trigger mechanism he would have laughed at in any other context.
But they had looked plausible when he built them.
In daylight, they looked offended.
The first trap was empty.
Jason stopped in front of it for a beat, hands on hips.
"Good start."
The second had sprung without catching anything. The bait was gone.
The third was still set and equally useless.
He stared at that one the longest, then tipped his head back toward the canopy and sighed.
"Just one bird," he said to the universe at large. "I'm not asking for a feast here. One bird. Preferably stupid."
The universe declined to comment.
Jason reached down, picked up a fallen branch thick enough to swing, and tested the weight of it in his hand.
"Right," he said. "Plan B."
He moved off more quietly this time, or tried to. Quiet was harder when one leg still hurt and one eye still didn't see properly. He pushed through ferns and ducked under a low branch, listening for movement overhead.
A rustle.
He froze.
Something shifted in the leaves above and to his left. Jason tightened his grip on the stick and craned his head slowly. There, half-hidden on a branch, was a bird. Smallish. Round-bodied. Distracted.
Perfect.
He stepped closer.
The bird stayed put.
Jason drew in a breath, lunged, and swung.
There was a burst of feathers, an outraged squawk, then a thud.
For a second he just stood there, stunned.
Then he looked down at the fallen bird and blinked.
"I did not think that was going to work."
The laugh that escaped him was short and tired but real.
He stooped, picked up the bird, and held it at arm's length like proof of concept.
"Okay," he said. "That's one point for blind luck."
By the time he got back to camp, he was grinning despite himself.
It faded when he had to pluck and clean the thing, but not completely. Fire came easier now than it had the day before. Still work, still annoying, but no longer impossible. He knelt by the old coals, fed them dry tinder and kindling, and coaxed the flames back to life.
As the bird roasted over the fire, the smell did terrible things to his patience.
He sat close, turning the spit carefully, watching fat drip into the flames with a soft hiss. His stomach tightened and growled loud enough to be rude.
"Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "Working on it."
The meat browned slowly. Smoke curled into the morning air. By the time he judged it done, he was close to shaking from hunger.
He tore off the first piece too hot and immediately regretted it, burning his fingers and tongue in the same motion.
Jason swore, fanned his mouth once, then kept eating.
It was worth it.
The bird was lean, a little tough, and not nearly as much food as he wanted it to be, but it was hot and filling and different from fish. That alone made it feel almost luxurious.
He licked grease off his thumb and sat back a little.
"Character building," he said dryly. "Would still trade it for fries."
When the last bite was gone, his stomach was no longer empty enough to hurt, which made the day feel briefly manageable.
That feeling lasted until he stood.
He decided to go looking for fruit again.
The forest had already started warming, the cool edge of dawn burning off under a rising sun. Jason moved more slowly now, part from fullness, part from fatigue, part because his eye made every patch of broken ground feel like a dare.
The slip happened fast.
One second he was stepping over a mossy stone, the next his boot skidded and the whole world snapped sideways. He went down hard, shoulder first, then hip, then the rest of him in an undignified crunch of leaves and twigs.
He lay there for a second with his eyes shut.
"Perfect," he said to the dirt.
Then he opened his good eye and noticed the fruit.
A small cluster lay half-hidden in the leaves beside him, green-gold and split from whatever stem had dropped them. He stared at them, then at the branch overhead, then back at the fruit.
"Well," he said. "That's one way to forage."
He pushed himself up with a groan, gathered all four fruits, and held them against his chest like a prize he definitely deserved.
Back at camp, he ate two immediately.
The first bite flooded his mouth with cool, sweet juice. Jason closed his eye and just stood there chewing for a second, letting the taste sink into him.
"Still absurdly good," he mumbled around the second bite.
When he finished, he tucked the remaining two under the leaves near his bed, shaded and out of direct sun.
"Stay there," he told them. "You are future morale."
Then he turned back to the traps.
They annoyed him on sight now.
Jason crouched beside the least embarrassing one and began adjusting the trigger mechanism, muttering under his breath as he worked. The problem, as far as he could tell, was everything. The tension was off. The loop sat wrong. The whole design assumed a level of cooperation from local birds that local birds clearly had no intention of providing.
"Come on," he said, pulling one of the vines tighter. "You don't have to be elegant. You just have to be functional."
The trap collapsed inward.
Jason stared at it.
Then he let out a long breath through his nose and started rebuilding it from scratch.
An hour later he had three traps again and exactly zero confidence in any of them.
He sat back on his heels and squinted at the nearest one as if resentment might improve the engineering.
"Maybe I build a fence," he said.
He pictured the amount of wood that would take, glanced at his dull knife, and snorted.
"Or maybe I don't spend the next year reinventing agriculture."
That should have been the end of it. Instead he spotted a cluster of broad leaves nearby, stared at them for a moment, and decided that if he was going to fail repeatedly in the wilderness, he could at least do it with a little flair.
He gathered a handful, stripped a few stems, and wove them together as best he could.
Ten minutes later he set the result on his head.
The hat sagged slightly over one eyebrow.
Jason crossed his eyes trying to look at it.
"This," he informed the empty camp, "is craftsmanship."
It was terrible.
He kept it on.
The forest felt less oppressive with a ridiculous hat on. Not better, exactly, but slightly more absurd, which in his experience was sometimes the next best thing. Jason wandered farther than usual that afternoon, following a loose slope through thinning trees until the air changed.
Salt.
A minute later the forest opened and he stepped out onto a beach.
Jason stopped dead.
Sand stretched in a pale curve ahead of him, clean and almost untouched except where the tide feathered across it. The waves here were gentler than the ones below the cliff, the whole shoreline oddly calm after everything else the island had thrown at him.
"Well," he said softly. "Look at you."
He stepped onto the sand and winced at once. It got into the cuts on his feet and pressed against every sore place, but he kept walking anyway, the leaf hat wobbling slightly as he went.
"Vacation vibes," he muttered. "Minus literally all vacation features."
The beach didn't offer much. No driftwood worth carrying. No coconuts. No miraculous crate of useful supplies washed ashore with a helpful note attached. Still, he found himself slowing down just to look.
It was beautiful in a quiet, indifferent way. Sea on one side, tree line on the other, sky huge overhead.
Jason followed the shore until he reached the far end of the curve, then sat down where the water could wash over his feet.
The coolness helped.
For a little while he said nothing. He just watched the horizon and listened to the waves fold themselves apart.
Then, because silence always filled eventually, he spoke.
"This would be nice," he said, "if I had literally one other person here."
The loneliness had a way of arriving sideways. Not all at once. Just in odd moments, when something almost resembled normal life and his mind instinctively reached for someone to share it with.
He huffed out a laugh.
"Honestly, I'd take a volleyball at this point."
The joke thinned quickly.
Jason dragged a hand down his face, then pushed himself upright again before the mood could settle too deep.
"Nope," he said. "Not doing that."
He turned back the way he'd come, following the line of his own footprints along the sand. After a few steps he began placing his feet inside them, half for balance, half because it gave his brain something stupid to do.
"Behold," he said to the empty shoreline, arms slightly out for balance, "the world's least impressive tightrope act."
He took another step.
Then stopped.
A second set of footprints cut across the sand a few meters ahead.
Jason went completely still.
For one strange second his mind refused to understand what he was seeing. The prints were shallow but clear enough. Human-shaped. Not his. Not old enough to have blurred away.
The leaf hat slid crooked over one eye. He didn't notice.
Slowly, carefully, Jason stepped closer and crouched beside the nearest print.
His pulse had gone wild.
He held his hand near it without touching, measuring the size, the depth, the direction.
Not his.
Definitely not his.
The sound of the waves seemed to fall away.
"Okay," he whispered.
He looked up at the empty stretch of beach, then back toward the tree line.
"Okay."
The word came out thinner this time.
Either he was losing his mind, or he wasn't alone on the island after all.
And he wasn't sure which possibility scared him more.