Alone

I was on the sea for two days, and then the sea gave me back to the island, and the giving back was the worst thing the sea ever did to me.

The wind failed on the second night. It did not die; it simply stopped being interested, and the launch sat on a glassy swell with the sail hanging and the sun coming up over a horizon that was empty in every direction, and I drank the last of the water and ate the last of the bread and understood that I had traded the island for the sea, and that the sea was the larger fence.

On the third morning the current put me back on the island. I recognized the cliffs from the inner side, the far cliffs, the ones I had made camp on when I was hiding from the Warden, and I understood, with a coldness that had nothing to do with the water, that the island had not been done with me, and that it had arranged the whole shape of it: the storm, the boat, the launch, the wind, the current, the return.

I beached the launch on a gravel cove at the foot of the cliffs, and I climbed, and I stood at the top with the island below me, and the island was quiet, and the quiet was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

The village was gone. Not empty: gone. The huts were still there, and the yard was still there, but the yard had no feathers in it, and the huts had no doors, and the path had no footprints, and I stood at the edge of it and understood that the Kindred had not simply gone over the fence. They had gone into the island, the way water goes into sand, and the wind moved through the empty yard, and the wind did not remember them.

I walked the fence line. The inner gate stood open, and the outer gate stood open, and the mesh lay in the scrub where Kato had cut it, and the whole line of the boundary was a line of dropped sails, and I followed it to the shed, and the shed was open, and the shed was clean. The table was bare. The tray was gone. The floor had been hosed. The Warden's world had been cleaned up the way you clean up after a party, and the only sign that anything had happened there was a dark stain on the concrete by the door, and I did not go close to it, and I have not gone close to it in any of the thousand times I have walked that floor in my sleep.

I did not go to the administration block. I went to the mess hall, because it had windows and light, and I took the rifle from the dock where it lay, and I sat with my back to the wall and the rifle across my knees, and I waited for the island to come and tell me what it was now.

It came at night. Not the Ravener. Something smaller, something I had not seen since the crossing: the Whistle, the dog-shaped thing, the one who had stood at the inner gate and watched me go. He came through the mess hall door with his head down, and he looked at me, and he made the sound that was half a whine and half a question, and I understood that he was the only one of them who had not gone into the island, and that he had been waiting for me, and that the waiting was the last kept thing on the island.

I fed him from the mess hall stores, which the island had not touched, and he lay at the door all night, and in the morning I went out to look for the Kindred, because the island was not going to tell me and the Whistle could not, and I walked the scrub with the rifle up, and I found them.

They were in the deep interior, the place past the inner fence, the place I had crossed when I was hiding from the Warden. They were there the way the inner side had been there: folded, heavy, gone back. The woman with the muzzle was sitting against a fallen eucalyptus, and her eyes were open, and they were the cougar's eyes, and they did not see me. The small one was beside her, and the small one was on all fours, and the small one's head was down, and I stood in the scrub and watched the two of them, and I understood that the Code had not been broken. It had been finished, the way a kept thing is finished, and the keeping had ended, and what was left was the old sentence, and the old sentence did not remember the Code, and the small one's mother had kept it for her until there was no keeping left to do.

That night I walked to the inner gate. Kato was standing there, upright, tireless, the ruin of his face turned toward the scrub, and when he heard me he turned his head, and he looked at me, and I have not been looked at that way since: it was the look of a thing that has finished its work. Corbett had said he was over. He was. Then he walked into the deep scrub, and I never saw him again.

I went back to the mess hall, and I sat with the rifle and the Whistle, and I did not go to the scrub again, and I stayed on the island for nine days, fishing the cove and drinking the seep and watching the horizon, and on the ninth day the Meridian came around the headland, low and white, and it came to the jetty, and a man stood on the deckhouse roof with a pair of binoculars, and he looked at the quiet island, and he looked at the open gates, and he looked at me standing on the dock with a rifle and a dog-shaped thing at my heels, and he did not come ashore. He sent the launch, and the launch took me, and I left the rifle on the dock where Corbett had set it down, and I left the island the way you leave a sentence you have been living in, and the Whistle came with me, because the Whistle was the only kept thing left, and I have kept him since.