“Zeek!” James’s voice sounded from the clearing. “Zeek, where are you?”

  I was surprised by the ragged panic in his tone. He sounded groggy, yet frantic as he called out into the jungle.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to imagine what might have him so worked up.

  James let out a flinching squeal as my voice sounded in his head.

  “Gah, I forgot you could do that,” he said, starting to get a hold of himself. “Where are you at?”

  “I’m on my way back now,” I said. “I left hours ago to work on a personal project. Is something wrong?”

  James sighed. “No, nothing is wrong,” he said. “I just lost track of everything for a moment there.”

  He paused for a moment to catch his breath. “How far away are you?” he asked. “Should I be speaking louder?”

  “No, you’re fine,” I said. “I’ve got good hearing. I’m about thirty feet south of you.”

  Under his breath, James muttered, “How far is that in football fields,” clearly not intending to be heard.

  “Why would anyone measure things in football fields?” I asked as the image came to mind. “That seems impractical. How many feet are in a football field?”

  There was a brief pause. “I think ‘good hearing’ might be an understatement,” James said. “Also, how do you even know what feet are?”

  I caught sight of him through the foliage a moment before he saw me. He was on his feet, still looking a bit haggard, but definitely better than before.

  “Adventurers measure things in feet all the time,” I said as I pushed through the leaves. “I assume it’s a handy way of doing things on account of the fact that most everyone has them. As for the hearing…”

  I thought about summoning some physical silk to try and demonstrate, but settled for a verbal explanation after taking stock of my low reserves. “It’s a spider thing,” I said. “I kind of instinctually leave these mana threads around everywhere I go, and the whole island is saturated with them by now. I should probably take some time to think about how it actually works.”

  James shrugged as he watched me scuttle back up to my stump. “Makes as much sense as anything, I guess,” he said. “I think real—er, non magic—spiders pull off something similar with just their silk. Does it have something to do with your mind altering thing?”

  “Probably,” I said. “We left off with energy levels or something last night, right?”

  James hesitated. “About that,” he said, “I’d love to keep trying to regurgitate random science stuff, but shouldn’t we start trying to figure out a way off of this island first?”

  We.

  It was strange how bitter that was to hear. “I can’t leave this island James,” I said. “I already told you. The fish would tear me apart.”

  “But you do want to leave, right?” James asked. “What are you gonna do if I leave you behind?”

  “What does it matter what I want?” I asked. “What’s the point of wanting something you can’t have?”

  James gave me a concerned look. “Isn’t that obvious?” he asked.

  It was not, in fact, obvious. As far as I was concerned, it was downright nonsensical to waste time pining after the impossible.

  James thought for a moment. Then, he walked over to a mahogany tree and knocked on it. “Say Zeek,” he said, “Would you say it’s impossible for me to knock down this tree?”

  I considered it for a moment. “No,” I said. “If you hit it with something sharp enough times, it might fall over.”

  “Alright,” James said, “And what if I wanted to move it after that?”

  “You could cut it into smaller pieces,” I said almost immediately. “Or you could just ask someone with mana for help.”

  “Let’s pretend neither of those are an option,” James said. “I need the tree in one piece, and there’s nobody around to help me move it. Would it be impossible for me?”

  I gave him a suspicious look. “Normally I’d assume it would be, but you’re making it sound like you’ll find some way to make me feel stupid if I do.”

  James coughed. “I suppose that’s one way to describe a trick question,” he muttered. “What I’m trying to get at is that there would be any number of ways to move the log. I could piece together a rope and pulley system. I could build a wagon. If I was really desperate, I could even try to lasso a giant shark and manipulate it into pulling the log in the direction I need—”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “That sounds absurd,” I interjected.

  He gave me an exasperated look. I went quiet.

  “But,” he continued, “more likely than not, I’d find an entirely unimagined solution after learning what I could from a series of failed experiments. Everything I told you about atoms and molecules? All of it was learned over a generational process of iteration. People tried things, and some of them worked. Do you see what I’m getting at here?”

  “It sounds most likely that you’ll fail every time, leaving some lucky ancestor to use what you’ve learned to finish what you never could,” I said, rather cynically. I was surprised to see James flash me a proud smile in response.

  “Exactly,” he said, beaming.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “That sounds nice enough under normal circumstances, but neither of us is going to pass our failures onto anyone if we don’t get off this island.”

  “That was only a bonus,” James said dismissively. “We won't know it’s impossible to get off this island until we try, and frankly, I don’t expect it to be all that difficult. We just need to assess what we have, and determine how much of it might be useful.”

  He crouched down towards the sand, brushed away his molecular diagrams from yesterday, and started to write out a checklist.

  “You can summon silk,” he said. “That means we have rope and canvas at our disposal, which is more than half the battle for any island escape. You can also blow things up, meaning we have everything we need to build a boat already. What else do we have?”

  “A sea of terrible monsters dedicated to destroying any boat with me on it,” I said.

  “Fish monsters go in the problem category,” James said, seemingly unperturbed. “I could throw spears at stuff, but I don’t expect that to help us much. What else can you do with magic?”

  “I can get a general sense of what’s going on inside the minds of other creatures,” I said, playing along. “I can subtly alter your mental state, making you hear words I’m not saying, and causing you to sense things that aren’t really there.”

  “I will try to pretend that isn’t terrifying,” James said jovially as he wrote it down.

  I tried my best not to be offended by that, which was harder than I might have liked.

  “You can make things sense stuff that isn’t there,” he said, wholly focussed on his table. “Can you stop things from sensing stuff that is?”

  “Yes,” I muttered. “I don’t have enough mana to push a boat a hundred miles while constantly warding off monsters though.”

  James looked up at me. “Why would you need to push the boat?” he asked. “That’s what sails are for.

  I’d never seen a boat with sails, but it was easy to pick out the limitations of the concept from James’s understanding. I snatched up a stick of my own and started sketching a map.

  “The nearest major landmass is a large peninsula somewhere to the northeast of here,” I said. “There are also a few small islands straight east of us, and some larger ones further to the south, but the wind pretty much always blows west. There’s nothing to the west but water for further than we can sail.”

  I looked up at James, wondering if he’d have another quick response. He was staring silently at my map.

  “Do you know what’s past the water to the west?” he asked hesitantly.

  “I’ve heard that the land curls around eventually, but I’ve never seen a map with more than this much. I think there’s another continent to the south. No matter what, it’s all too far to sail to with west blowing winds. What does it matter what’s over there?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” James said quickly. “It just… looks familiar.”

  He shook his head. “Anyway, it also doesn’t matter if the wind blows west,” he said. “We can sail almost 45 degrees into the wind. That’ll get us to the coast. Can you survive for long enough if we do that?”

  “I—How can you sail into the wind?” I asked as I tried to do the math. My journey to this island had been mana powered, and had only taken about 5 hours originating from somewhere on a particularly big island to the south. How much slower would it be to use the wind? How much mana would it take to constantly ward off predators? It was too much, wasn’t it?

  “I don’t know the physics exactly,” James said. “Sailors from my world use triangular sails, which I know helps somehow. We can do some prototyping to estimate the proper proportions.”

  He sketched a little boat with a triangular sail, then looked up at me. “What do you think?” he asked. “Can we make it?”

  I tried not to think too hard about what the real question here was. If James could make a boat that could sail into the wind, he was home free. Well, coast free anyway. The only real question was whether or not I could make it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. If I don’t use any mana at all, I can go for about a day and a half without food, or a mana well like this stump. It doesn’t take much to influence minds, but I don’t know how many monsters I’d need to affect.”

  “We’ll test it,” James said reassuringly. “We’ll test everything. Maybe this won’t work, but it’s worth a shot.”

  Part of me thought he might be right. That part had no trouble flooding the surface, driving me to participate as James outlined how we might build our boat. There was a deeper part though. A part that refused to let myself call it anything other than his boat.

  At the end of the day, it felt impossible to justify the risk of bringing me along. At some level, I couldn’t help but string together plans to make sure he left without me. I’d be putting him in danger if I got on that boat.

  Even still, there were deeper weaves than that. A part of me knew how afraid I was of that water. A part of me knew how desperate I was not to be alone again. I wasn’t sure what that might drive me to do.

  If we found a solution that let us both sail away with a decent shot at survival, would I go?

  If James decided to leave me behind, would I let him?

  It was frightening to wonder how much of me might be an act. Things had been so simple when I was alone. Now I had to put on a show. How much of it was real? How much of it was me? How much more of me was there, underneath it all?

  James planned, and I played along. I seemed to be good at that. What I was trying was working for now. If it ever stopped, I supposed there was always iteration.