On the seventh morning after F-Day, Jason woke at dawn on the floor of his bedroom, and for a few seconds he couldn't work out why the ceiling was so flat.
No rock. No smoke stains. No crack running toward the cave mouth where the light came in. Just white paint, and a smoke detector blinking a patient little green light, and somewhere through the wall the muffled sound of gunfire and somebody swearing.
Then he remembered, the way he remembered every morning, and lay there and let it settle.
He had stopped trying to sleep in the bed on the second night. It was too soft. It swallowed him, and he woke every hour with his heart pounding and his hands groping for a knife that wasn't there. The floor was better. He had folded a blanket into a narrow pad beside the window, where he could see the sky and the door at the same time, and he slept there now, on his side, the way he had slept by the fire for seventy years.
The crest was in the pocket of his jeans on the chair. He checked it with his fingertips before he did anything else. Then he looked at the closet, where the mask lay at the bottom of an old sports bag, wrapped in a towel, under a pile of shoes he no longer remembered buying.
It was still there. It was always still there.
He got up.
* * *
His body still surprised him.
It got up too fast. That was the main thing. For the first few days he had kept bracing for the old pain, the knees and the back and the stiff left shoulder, and it never came, and every time it didn't come he felt slightly sick, the way you feel when you miss a step in the dark. His hands were too smooth. His reflection in the bathroom mirror was a stranger, a skinny kid with messy dark hair and two blue eyes that looked out of the glass at him with an expression no twenty-year-old should have had.
Only the left arm was his. From the fingertips to just below the shoulder, the black lines ran across it exactly as they had for seventy years, fine and dark and branching like cracks in ice. Everything else had been given back to him. The lines had come back on their own, the moment he touched the mask.
He didn't look at the mirror much.
He drank a glass of water at the kitchen sink, slowly, in small mouthfuls, holding each one for a moment before he swallowed. The tap ran clean and cold and endless, and he stood watching it for a while after the glass was full. Then he turned it off very carefully and checked that it had stopped dripping.
"Morning," said a voice behind him.
His hand closed on the edge of the sink. He made it open again.
Tim was standing in the doorway of the living room in a hoodie and boxer shorts, with a headset around his neck and the gray, puffy face of someone who had not slept so much as lost consciousness in front of a screen. He had been Jason's roommate for a year and a half. Then Jason had not seen him for seventy years, and now here he was again, exactly the same, as if he had only stepped out to get a drink.
His eyes went, the way they did every morning, to Jason's bare left arm. Then away again.
Tim had seen it on the first night, when Jason had finally peeled off the gray sweatshirt he had worn all the way home from the lecture hall. He had stopped dead in the middle of the living room with a slice of cold pizza halfway to his mouth, and stared. Jason had waited for the questions. Where. When. What happened. What is that.
"Whoa," Tim had said at last, with deep respect. "That's actually really cool." He had leaned in for a closer look. "You think it'd look good on me?"
And that had been all. He had never asked again. Jason still didn't know whether it was tact or simply Tim, and had decided that it didn't matter.
"You're up early again," Tim said. "That's, like, the seventh day in a row. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"You keep saying that."
"I keep being fine."
Tim squinted at him. Then he yawned so widely his jaw cracked, and padded past him to the fridge, and stood in front of it with the door open, staring into it as if it might have changed overnight.
"There's no milk," he announced. "There's never any milk. This lockdown is a crime against humanity. They close the city and the milk trucks can't get in. Nobody thought about the milk."
"There's water."
"Water's not breakfast, man." Tim took out a can of energy drink instead and cracked it open. "Water is what you drink when you've given up."
Jason didn't say anything. He thought about two plastic stills bobbing on their cords beside a raft, and a few warm mouthfuls of fresh water in the palm of his hand, and decided not to explain.
* * *
The city had been closed for a week now. Nothing in, nothing out: the trains stopped, police cars parked across the bridges and the highway ramps. And every night from eleven until six, the curfew, and the sirens, and the empty streets.
Jason remembered the first days the way he remembered a storm: in pieces. The body sliding off a desk and tumbling down the steps of the lecture hall. Sarah's face. The alarm wailing across the whole city. Missing posters on the lamp posts, plywood over the windows of a mall, a black scarf, a bowl of fish soup, a newsreader saying the word terrorist in a perfectly calm voice. Four short messages from Sarah. No more classes. Not until the next one. Two crates and two warm sodas in an alley that smelled of laundry steam.
A week, now. The sleepers were still sleeping. The number on the news still only went up.
Jason had seen the pictures again on Tim's laptop. Rows and rows of cots under fluorescent lights. He had looked at them for a long time, at all those calm, sleeping faces, and thought about a cave on an island, and a fire burning down to embers, and a white mask on a ledge with its narrow eyes turned toward the sleeping man.
Then he had closed the laptop and gone to sit by his window.
He hadn't been home yet. His parents lived three hours away by train, and there were no trains. There was nothing to do but wait. He had learned how to do that a long time ago.
* * *
Tim, it turned out, was much less good at waiting.
By the third day after the university closed, he had finished every game he owned. By the fifth, he had started them all again on a harder difficulty, which Jason found he could not think about without a strange twist in his chest. By the seventh, he had moved on to Jason.
"Okay," he said, dropping onto the couch beside him with two controllers. "We're doing this. Intervention."
Jason was sitting by the window, which was where he sat most of the day. From the living room he could see the street, and the corner, and the roofs of the buildings opposite, and a small rectangle of sky. He had spent a week learning it. He knew which windows lit up first in the morning, and where the pigeons roosted, and which way the wind blew before it rained.
"Intervention?"
"You've been weird," Tim said. "Since the whole... thing. You don't play anymore. You don't talk. You sit by that window like a cat waiting for a bird. You sleep on the floor, man. I heard you. You don't think I know, but I know."
Jason looked at him.
"Everyone's been weird," Tim went on, before he could answer. "I get it. Everybody heard the voice, everybody passed out, the whole world went insane. My cousin won't leave his room. My mom calls me four times a day. It's fine. But you need to get out of your head, and I am going to help you, because I'm a good friend, and because I've been playing solo for a week and the matchmaking in this game is a war crime."
He held out a controller.
Jason took it.
It was lighter than he remembered. He turned it over in his hands, slowly, studying it. The two little sticks, the buttons, the triggers on the back. He knew what it was. He had held one ten thousand times. But the knowledge was far away, at the bottom of a very deep well, under seventy years of rope and knife and net and fishing line, and when he reached for it, he found only the shape of it, and none of the weight.
"You good?" Tim asked.
"Yeah," said Jason. "Just remind me which one's jump."
Tim laughed, thinking it was a joke.
* * *
It was not a joke.
They played for an hour. It was the game they had always played together, a squad shooter with bright colors and loud guns, where four players dropped onto an island and fought until only one team was left. The irony of that was not lost on Jason. He chose not to mention it.
He died in forty seconds.
He died again, in the next match, in a little over a minute. Then in two. He couldn't aim. His thumbs moved too slowly, and the camera swung wherever it wanted, and the whole screen was full of flashing lights and noise and movement coming from every direction at once. Every time something exploded, his whole body flinched toward the window.
"Okay," Tim said, after the sixth match. "Okay. Rough start. That's fine. Everybody's rusty."
On the seventh, Jason stopped trying to shoot.
He didn't decide to. It simply happened. He found himself, on the screen, crouched in a patch of tall grass at the edge of a field, not moving. Waiting. Watching. The other players ran past him, firing at each other, and none of them saw him. He watched the way they moved. He watched where they looked, and where they didn't. He watched a player sprint across the open ground toward a building, and knew, before the player knew it, exactly which window the shot would come from.
It came from that window. The player dropped.
"Dude," said Tim. "Dude, what are you doing? We're in the final circle. Move!"
Jason didn't move.
The circle closed. The other teams found each other, and fought, and died, one by one, in the open, loudly, while Jason lay in the grass and watched them do it. In the end there was only one enemy left, limping, out of ammunition, running across the field straight toward his patch of grass without the faintest idea that he was there.
Jason waited until the player was three steps away. Then he stood up and hit him once with the butt of his rifle.
The screen filled with gold letters. VICTORY.
Tim stared at it. Then he stared at Jason.
"You didn't fire a single shot," he said slowly. "The whole match. You won a match without firing a single shot."
"I didn't need to."
"That's—" Tim opened his mouth and closed it again. "That's the most toxic thing I've ever seen. Do it again."
* * *
He couldn't do it again. The next match dropped them in a city, all streets and corners and noise, with nowhere to lie still, and he died in thirty seconds. And the one after that. And the one after that.
Somewhere around the twelfth death, Jason put the controller down on the couch beside him, very gently, the way he used to put the knife down on its stone by the fire.
"I'm done," he said.
Tim looked at him. For a moment, something crossed his face that was almost worry. Then it was gone, replaced by the expression of a man who had found a reasonable explanation and was very relieved to have one.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, I get it. It's a losing streak. It happens. You go through a bad patch and your head gets in the way and you start overthinking every fight, and then you lose more, and then you think about it more." He nodded wisely. "It's mental. It's all mental. You just need to reset."
"A losing streak," Jason said.
"Happens to the best of us, man. I once lost thirty-two in a row. I didn't sleep for two days. I'm not proud of it." Tim clapped him on the shoulder. "You'll bounce back. You just need to remember why it's fun."
Jason looked at the screen, where the game was waiting with its bright colors and its flashing button that said PLAY AGAIN.
"I lost a game once," he said. "I still don't know what it was."
Tim laughed. Then he stopped laughing, and looked at Jason's face, and then laughed again, a little uncertainly, because surely it was a joke.
"You're so weird lately," he said.
"I know."
* * *
That night, Tim went to bed at two in the morning, which for Tim was early. Jason heard his door close, and the bed creak, and then nothing.
He sat by the window in the dark.
Down in the street, a police car rolled slowly past with its lights turning and no siren, and turned the corner, and was gone. Somewhere across the city, a dog was barking. The sky above the roofs was orange with the city's light, and there were no stars in it at all. Not the Anchor. Not the long curve beneath it. Not the Drowned Queen's red eye.
He had looked for them every night for seven nights, out of habit. He knew they wouldn't be there. He looked anyway.
You need to remember why it's fun, Tim had said.
Jason sat with his arms around his knees and tried. He tried to remember being twenty, the first time. Lectures he didn't understand. Late nights with Tim and a controller and a pizza going cold on the floor. Sarah sliding her notes across the desk. Phone calls home on Sundays. A future made of internships and exams and nothing much else. He could see all of it, the way he could see the island from the clifftop: clearly, in detail, every piece in its place.
He just couldn't find himself anywhere in it.
The next morning, when the news announced that the city would reopen at noon, the trains and the bridges and the roads, he made up his mind.
He knew what he was going to do with his first afternoon of freedom. It was the only thing he had done for seventy years that had never once, not even on the worst days, felt like waiting.
He was going to buy a fishing rod.