Chapter Text
Bruce
The first thing was sand.
It ground into his lips, the creases of his palms, under his nails — coarse and salt-crusted and relentless.
His lungs burned. He coughed once, twice, and a thin ribbon of seawater came up with it, leaving the back of his throat raw and tasting of brine.
He lay face-down. Didn't move for a moment. His body ached.
Where am I?
Just the sound of waves pulling back from shore and the low moan of wind, and the distant, formless sense that he was supposed to be somewhere else.
No answer.
Why am I here?
Nothing.
He pushed himself onto his hands and knees, and that's when he felt it. Resistance around his waist.
A rough nautical cord, thick and weathered, looped and knotted against his ribs. He followed it with his hands. An orange life saver, half-buried in wet sand. And looped through the ring, slack and still...
A girl's arm.
He moved before he thought about it. Crawled to her through the sand, his fingers pressing immediately to her wrist, her throat — pulse, please— and found it, thin but present.
He lowered his cheek near her mouth. Breath, shallow and slow.
He sat back on his heels and looked at his own hands.
They were still moving. Still checking her collarbone, jaw, the base of the skull, and working through an assessment he hadn't consciously decided to perform. He watched them like they belonged to someone else. Like they remembered something he didn't.
He undid the knot around himself and realized a pressing issue. Why was he on some beach tied to some girl he didn't know?
Something inside him twisted. Something felt wrong. Those were the wrong questions. He needed the answers to something even more basic than that.
Who… who am I?
All he could remember was his name.
Bruce was his name.
Maybe he'd been in an accident. Maybe this girl knew who he was.
The blankness where his life should have been didn't feel like forgetting. Forgetting left evidence of memories, like ragged edges, fragments, the shape of a thing even when the thing itself was gone. This was clean. Like something had reached in and taken it leaving no trace. Whoever he'd been before this beach wasn't lost somewhere in the fog of his mind.
He was just gone.
"Hey." He patted her cheek once, then harder. "Hey. Wake up. Hey, you need to get up."
She didn't stir.
Bruce didn't know her. He was certain of that — or as certain as he could be of anything, which was almost nothing. But something in him reacted to her stillness with a specific, irrational dread, like misplacing something irreplaceable. She was young. Probably a high school senior or college freshman. Her blond hair was in horrible disarray.
He shook her shoulders.
"Hey, wake up. You got to get up."
She gasped.
It was violent and sudden, her whole torso jerking upright, one arm shooting out for balance as she coughed, deep racking coughs that bent her double. Wet hair fell across her face and she shoved it back with a shaking hand, blinking hard against the pale morning light.
For a moment she just breathed. Then her eyes found him.
"Who are you? What— what do you want?"
"I—" Bruce opened his mouth and stopped.
What could he say? He turned the question over, looking for purchase, and found almost none. Just a single fragment, floating alone in the blankness.
"I'm Bruce." The words felt strange, like reading his own name off a stranger's lips. "I was hoping you could tell me — I, I don't have any memories from before waking up here."
Her expression shifted. Her eyebrows cinched together, her eyes narrowing.
"What do you mean?" She shook her head slowly. "You got amnesia or something? Just now?"
"I just woke up before you. I don't know where we are, I don't know how I got here, I don't know who you are." He said it plainly despite how freaked out he was. "I know my name. That's everything."
She stared at him. Then her hand moved sharply to her own temple as she winced in pain.
"Where are we?"
The girl looked around wildly, taking in their surroundings.
Bruce also looked, they were on a beach — wide and pale and curving away in both directions, the kind of shore with no end visible from either side. Behind them, maybe thirty yards back, a dense treeline where the sand gave out and underbrush took over, dark even in the growing morning light. Ahead, the ocean stretched vast and colorless in the early grey, and the wreckage riding the surf in.
"I, why don't I— why can't I remember where we are?"
She clutched at her chest, panic setting in her eyes.
That was not a good sign.
"Hey, it's okay, just breathe. Look at me, you're going to be okay. What's your name?" Bruce put his hands on her shoulders.
It wasn't helping. The girl's eyes were searching for something unseen by Bruce.
"I— my name is Stephanie." The words came out slowly, like she was testing weight on ice. "Or, or Steph. Just Steph."
"Okay Steph. Are you able to remember anything else?"
She started shaking her head, unshed tears in her eyes.
"I— I know my name. But everything else is just—" She pressed her fingers harder against her skull and exhaled sharply. "It's like trying to remember a dream. The more I reach for it, the more it… dissolves."
The implication settled between them like something cold. Stephanie's gaze moved to the surf and froze. Bruce followed her gaze and saw others.
Bruce stood.
The sun was breaking over the water — low and orange, cutting long shadows across the beach. In its light, the full scope of the shore came into focus, and he turned slowly, taking it in.
Wreckage was everywhere.
Deflated rubber life rafts half-buried in wet sand, their orange canopies torn and collapsed. Shattered fiberglass canisters split open where the rafts had deployed. Splintered planks and debris from the vessel itself riding the surf in and out. And scattered among all of it was clothing. Evening gowns and suit jackets, sodden and tangled around driftwood and rock, formal wear with nowhere to belong.
And the people.
Dozens of them. Strewn across the beach like the tide had deposited them there without ceremony. Some still unconscious. Some sitting upright with that glazed, animal stillness of recent shock. Some already on their feet wandering the beach, touching strangers' shoulders. A hundred feet down the beach, past the spit of sand, the main cluster of survivors had formed without them.
"Other survivors?" Bruce vocalized his thoughts.
"Wait, why'd you call them survivors? Is that what we are now? Did something terrible happen?"
"I—" Bruce didn't know why he called them survivors. But it felt right. "I don't know."
"Okay, right, got it. You don't know anything, I don't know anything. Can't ask you why we're all the way over here and the rest washed up over there. Got it, everything's fine. It's fine."
Steph said all of this almost like she was trying to convince herself it was true.
"Let's get to the others then, maybe someone has answers."
Bruce stood, and offered a hand to Steph.
She looked as surprised as he felt. The gesture seemed natural to him.
She took it and stood carefully. They began walking toward the group a hundred feet away on the beach, footsteps sinking into wet sand with every step, the surf coming in cold around their ankles.
Dick
Dick woke up with his cheek against solid decking, staring along the length of a boat that was pointed the wrong way.
He blinked. Didn't move. Just looked.
Forward — downhill. The vessel pitched away from him at a steep angle, the deck dropping toward the bow buried somewhere in the cliff face ahead. The stern rose against the grey sky, still clearing the water, the railings intact.
He was somewhere in the middle of the upper deck, sprawled against the base of a deck lounge that had jammed against the side rail and stopped sliding.
Not rocking. Fixed. Wedged. Like something had driven the bow hard into stone and left the rest of the boat hanging.
An emergency light was still running somewhere below decks, its dim red-orange pulse leaking up through the companionway hatch a few feet away. The sky above him was pale and overcast.
Early. Very early.
He sat up carefully and ran his hands along his ribs. Bruised, definitely. Nothing grinding, nothing displaced. He pulled a slow breath in and let it out.
What happened?
The question arrived from nowhere and hit hard. He held very still, cataloguing his current status. His hands, the tuxedo jacket hanging from one shoulder, the cold of the teak beneath him. His name.
Dick.
He had his name.
That was all there was, just that single anchor in a lot of open water.
And that was all he could remember.
He stood carefully, testing his balance on the pitched deck, and looked forward.
The boat, whatever was left of it, was some sort of luxury ship. Or had been.
One hundred and fifty feet at least, steel-hulled, the kind of vessel that required a professional crew and cost more than most people earned in a lifetime. Several decks stacked above the waterline when upright. The upper deck where he was standing now, open to the sky, with the wheelhouse at the forward end. The sun deck on top.
The bow had driven into a rock shelf jutting from the cliff face dead ahead. It must have been traveling at full speed to punch through solid rock like that.
The impact had collapsed the wheelhouse and the forward section of the upper deck entirely. Dick could see the crumpled mass of it from here, white fiberglass and bent steel rail and broken glass, the bow buried in the rock like a nail hammered in wrong. The hull had cracked along the forward third. Whatever had been in the lower decks at the bow end was gone. Open to the water, flooding, finished.
The back third of the vessel was still clear of the rock, still largely intact, hanging elevated above the bay floor on the angle of the pitch. Dick was on it. That must be why he was alive.
He stood at the rail and looked down.
The bay floor was black, flat and wet, maybe twenty feet straight down from where he stood at the stern rail — no slope, no gradual drop, just the sheer edge of the rock dropping away like the rest of the cliff face around it.
Dick looked around, still orienting himself to his new reality.
The bay itself was a rough gouge in the cliff, open to the sky, walls rising sheer on three sides. No beach. No sand. Just dark wet rock at the bottom and then, at the bay mouth, a hard edge where the rock ended and the ocean began. A straight drop into deep water, the surface still rough from the storm. Debris from the shattered bow was already out there, riding the chop. Planking, fiberglass panels, cushions from the main deck saloon. The boat's insides scattered across the water like it had been turned out.
Whatever was left of this vessel was not going anywhere. If it came off the shelf, it would sink.
He turned and looked at what he had to work with.
Several crew members in white uniforms were scattered across the tilted upper deck between him and the wreckage of the bow. Two had half-open gazes, unseeing eyes of dead men, having slid forward on impact and fetched up against the forward rail wrong.
The rest were alive but scattered. Some were gripping deck cleats or rails to keep from sliding further forward, some were just sitting frozen against whatever had caught them.
The companionway hatch that led below was wrenched open a few feet from Dick's position, and he could see down into the main deck interior. The emergency light pulsing its orange rhythm from somewhere deeper in, and below that, audible even from here, the low rhythmic surge of water finding its level through the cracked hull.
He looked at it for only a moment before looking away and felt something land in his chest that he had no context for. Grief, almost. Unexplained and immediate, and not quite proportionate to strangers.
He moved to the nearest living crewman without deciding to.
Moving on the deck was its own problem. The pitch was steep enough that every step forward, down the slope toward the bow, had to be controlled, weight back, the non-slip teak decking the only thing between him and a slide into the forward wreckage.
He kept close to the side rail, one hand skimming it for purchase, and crouched when he reached the first crew member rather than risk standing at that angle.
His hands were already working by the time the conscious part of him caught up. Tearing fabric into strips, applying pressure at exactly the right angle, fingers checking the pulse point at the throat with an ease that felt inherited rather than learned. He spoke before he chose to speak.
"Hey. Look at me. Can you tell me your name?"
The crewman blinked up at him. Mid-forties, one hand locked around a deck cleat to keep from sliding forward, a long gash above the temple already crusting dark. "Marco," he said, and then his face did something complicated. "I think. I— that's the only thing I—"
Dick quickly realized that he wasn’t the only one having issues with memory.
"That's okay. I'm Dick. I've got you." He pressed folded cloth against the wound and guided Marco's own hand up to hold it. "Keep pressure there. Don't let go of that cleat. I'm coming back."
He didn't wait for an answer. He moved to the next person, another younger crewman, who was conscious and tracking but holding his left arm at an angle that was immediately wrong. Radius or ulna, maybe both, the forearm swollen already and bent a few degrees off true.
Dick splinted it with two pieces of broken deck rail slat and strips of his tuxedo jacket, talking the man through it in a low steady voice that he didn't have to think about producing.
"What's your name?"
"Brandon." He hissed through his teeth as Dick tightened the binding. "Is it bad?"
"Clean break, probably. You're not losing the arm." He tied off the last strip. "Can you stand if you hold the rail?"
"Yeah."
"Then hold the rail."
He kept moving. The navigator, a young woman who said her name was Petra, had wedged herself into the gap between a storage locker and the side rail near the stern, the highest and most stable point on the deck. Both hands gripping the rail, feet braced flat, using the angle rather than fighting it. She looked up when Dick crouched in front of her with the watchfulness of someone who'd already decided not to fully trust him.
"Anything broken?"
"I don't think so. I just— can't seem to remember…" She watched his hands as he checked her pupils. "I know what all of this is supposed to do." She gestured forward, down the pitch of the deck toward the ruined bow crumpled into the cliff. "Navigation. I know it was my job. I just can't tell you how I came to be on it."
"That’s okay, we’ll figure it out later."
Further forward the going got harder, the pitch steeper the closer he got to the damaged section. Dick found Hannah sitting with both legs braced against a bolted equipment case. Her right ankle was the problem, sprained, and already swelling. She couldn't put weight on it.
And then there was a man near the forward section, almost at the boundary where the deck started to crumple into the wreckage, who hadn't made a sound and whose leg was wrong in a way that was not a sprain.
The femur, Dick thought, looking at the angle, the unnatural shortening of the thigh.
The man, Frank he said when Dick asked, was conscious but very pale, his breathing shallow, the leg immobilized by nothing more useful than the fact that he'd managed to wedge himself between a collapsed deck chair and the rail and hadn't been able to move since impact.
"Okay," Dick said, and kept his voice exactly level. "I need you to not move until I tell you to. Can you do that?"
Frank nodded. His eyes were glassy and too-focused, the look of someone running on adrenaline and a very thin margin.
Dick moved to the next person before the situation could demand something he didn't yet have the equipment for.
Something in him was very good at switching parts of himself off when they weren't useful.
He wasn't sure how he felt about that. He didn't know who he was, didn't know how he'd ended up on a wrecked ship on an unknown shore in a tuxedo, but his hands knew how to stop bleeding, and his voice knew how to keep a frightened person focused, and apparently that was enough. Whoever he'd been, he'd brought the parts that mattered.
Then a new voice cut through the low agitated voices of the crew. Measured. Focused.
"The antenna's gone but the radio still has power."
Dick turned.
A teenager, maybe seventeen, had come up through the companionway hatch and was crouched on the tilted deck just aft of the opening, sleeves pushed up, working on the emergency radio that had apparently come with him from below.
Its housing was cracked open down one side, wiring spilling out, the emergency light from below still pulsing its orange rhythm up through the open hatch behind him. Not panicking. Not frozen. Just working, hands moving across the unit with the particular fluency of someone who wasn't thinking about what they were doing because they didn't need to.
Why didn't Dick notice the kid before now?
"What the— where are your parents?" Dick asked.
The kid looked up with flat, unimpressed eyes. "How should I know where my parents are if I can only remember my name?"
Right, he already established this group amnesia thing. What a Dick move... Crap, was he someone who also made bad puns???
Dick moved closer, bracing against the pitch of the deck. "Sorry... I'm Dick. What's your name?"
"Tim." He didn't look up again. "The transmitter's fried— impact damage, probably. But the receiver's intact. If I can rig a replacement antenna, I might get a signal out."
"You've done this before?"
Tim paused. Seemed to genuinely consider the question. "Probably," he said, like it was a weather forecast.
He pulled a corroded contact free, examined it, set it aside. "The emergency beacon's gone, by the way. Bracket's empty down there. Either it launched on impact when the bow went in, or someone pulled it. Either way it's not here."
Dick absorbed that. No beacon, no radio yet. If nobody knew where they were, that was the whole problem right there.
Dick watched him work. He felt a skeptical, like a bone-deep thing in him resisted trusting a process he couldn't personally verify, but he also had no better offer. He braced his back against the side rail and looked at the full length of the deck while Tim worked.
"What do you think happened?" Tim asked. "To the ship."
"I don't know yet."
"Radar would have given warning for a storm. Crew would have been at stations." He turned a piece of housing over in his hands, studying it. "Mechanical failure would be localized damage. This is everywhere. Like full speed into the rocks — no course correction."
Dick watched him work through it. Watched him arrive somewhere and then stop. Go very still for a moment.
Tim set the piece of housing down and didn't say anything else.
Dick looked at the side of his face. "What?"
"Nothing." Tim picked up the next component. "I need to focus."
He didn't say what he'd concluded. But Dick had seen the shape of the thinking, and he could finish it himself.
Which means someone drove it into the rocks.
Or no one was driving it.
He didn't say that out loud either.
Alright, who the hell was this kid? Did he take his antidepressants? What kind of pessimist was he stranded with?
Dick looked at him for a moment, a teenager with no memory but strangely calm about it, crouched on a wrecked and boat on an unknown shore, taking apart a radio and reconstructing the mechanics of how a hundred-and-fifty-foot vessel ends up driven bow-first into a cliff at full speed.
Dick couldn't decide if it was reassuring or deeply unsettling.
He decided it was both.
The hull groaned, a deep sound, structural, working up through the soles of his shoes. Not the sound of metal scraping rock. The sound of the hull separating. Slowly. A crack spreading under load, the vessel working against itself.
Dick made a decision.
He stood straight and said it at a volume the whole deck could hear, not shouting, just carrying — the voice that came out of him without his permission again, already knowing how to do this.
"Listen up. We're getting off this boat right now. On your feet, grab something useful on your way— food, medical kit, anything in a case or a bag, and get to the stern rail. We're going over the side and down to the bay floor. If you can't carry it, leave it. If you can't climb down yourself, tell me. Move."
There was a beat of silence. Then Brandon pushed off the rail and started moving, one-armed, toward the nearest supply case. That was enough. The others followed, the people who'd been frozen for twenty minutes suddenly having something to do with their hands.
Dick didn't watch them get started. He was already moving back toward Frank.
Getting a man with a broken femur down a pitched deck and over a rail twenty feet above solid rock was not a clean operation. It took Petra on one side and Dick on the other, both of them braced against the slope, taking Frank's weight between them and moving him in increments toward the stern. Frank made almost no sound — either toughness or shock, probably both. The leg couldn't be trusted to take any weight at all. They basically carried him.
Hannah went next, her ankle splinted with the same improvised rail-slat technique as Brandon's arm, hopping on one foot and gripping the side rail the whole length of the deck. She was white-faced and set-jawed and didn't ask for help until she needed it.
Getting people over the stern rail and down the outside of the hull was the other problem.
The hull plating on the stern section was buckled and torn from where the vessel had grated across submerged rocks on its way in. Rough enough to give handholds and footholds, not smooth enough to be easy. For the mobile survivors it was manageable, awkward but survivable. For Frank it required Dick hanging off the rail by one arm and taking weight while two others guided from below, shouting instructions up, until they got him down without moving the leg more than they had to.
Dick was last off. He did a final sweep of the ship, companionway hatch checked, the flooding louder now and the orange light dimmer. He looked at the two crew members still forward on the wreckage of the bow deck, unreachable from the moment of impact, too far into the crumpled section. He looked at them long enough to know it and not long enough to let it cost him anything useful. Then he swung himself over the rail, found the hull plating with his feet, and climbed down.
The bay floor was cold and hard underfoot. Black basalt, slick with seawater and storm foam, littered with debris from the shattered bow, broken planking, fiberglass panels, shattered glass, a seat cushion still somehow intact.
The cliff walls rose sheer on three sides, dark and streaked with runoff. At the bay mouth, the rock ended in a straight drop into deep water, the ocean beyond still grey and rough, the debris field spreading out toward the horizon.
Dick moved the group upland and away from the bay mouth, back toward the cliff wall where the rock was higher and dry above the storm-surge line. Not above the true high tide mark, which was impossible to know, but far enough from the water's edge to be out of immediate danger, and far enough from the hull that if the wreck shifted, they wouldn't be under it.
He set Frank down there first on the flattest section he could find. The others arranged themselves around the supply pile as it came off the hull, each crate handed down and stacked by whoever had a free hand.
The wreck groaned above them long and low, and then the bow section shifted.
Not catastrophically. Just a few inches, the hull grinding against the rock shelf, a sound like a very large thing deciding something. And then it stopped. Settled. The groan faded to a low continuous vibration that everyone on the bay floor could feel in their feet but stopped getting louder.
Dick stood still and watched the hull for a full thirty seconds. Nothing else moved.
He let out a slow breath. The boat wasn't going anywhere. Not right now, not today probably. The shelf had it, the pitch had it, the forward section was buried deep enough in the rock face that the wreck had found its equilibrium. Unhappy, stressed, actively flooding, but settled.
Which meant there was still equipment on that boat. Supplies still in the stern section, above the waterline, accessible if you were willing to climb back up.
He turned to figure out what they had first.
The supplies were meager. Two emergency ration canisters that had been bolted near the stern rail, a first aid kit that someone had grabbed from inside the companionway before it flooded, two coils of line, a folding knife, a waterproof flashlight. That was it. That was everything they'd gotten off.
Dick looked at it laid out on the rock and felt the frustration arrive. It was hot, immediate, and not entirely rational, because it wasn't anyone's fault, people had been moving injured crewmates in the dark on a forty-degree pitched deck and they'd done well to get off at all. He knew that. He knew it and the frustration was still there.
He turned to Tim, who had set the radio unit on the flattest section of rock and was bent over it, working. "Where are we on the radio?"
"The replacement antenna's built." Tim didn't look up. "But the signal board's cracked through. I didn't know that until I tested it just now. It won't transmit."
"You said the receiver was intact."
"It is. We can hear. We can't be heard." A pause. "I'm sorry."
Dick looked at the back of his head. We can hear but we can't be heard.
He turned that over for a second and felt the shape of it. The specific, horrible geometry of that problem, how close and how far it was simultaneously.
"What do you need?" he said. His voice came out sharper than he meant it to.
Tim didn't flinch. Just said, flatly and precisely, "A replacement signal board, or the components to build one. Copper wire, a capacitor, a transistor, a power relay. The engineer would know if there's a maintenance closet on board with electrical spares. Ships this size usually carry them for exactly this kind of repair."
Dick looked back up at the hull hanging above them. The orange light still pulsing, faintly, through the porthole glass.
Right.
He turned to the group. Eight people on the rock — three with significant injuries, two in shock and holding each other and not yet useful for anything physical, and three who were upright and functional and waiting to be told what to do.
"Brandon. You're with Tim— whatever he needs, you're getting it for him." Brandon straightened, the splinted arm held carefully to his chest. "Petra. Do you know this boat well enough to know where the maintenance closet would be?"
"Dick."
Petra's voice. Not urgent, just flat and deliberate. The tone of someone saying something they'd already decided to say.
He stopped. Turned.
She was looking at him steadily from where she sat near the cliff wall. Not just her, Brandon too, one-armed slinged and watchful. Tim hadn't looked up from the radio, but he'd gone very still in the particular way of someone listening.
"Sit down," Petra said.
He opened his mouth.
"You've set two fractures, organized an evacuation off a sinking boat, and carried Frank down twenty feet of hull plating." She said it without inflection. "The crew needs to rest. So do you. The boat will still be there in the morning."
He stood there with the argument ready and found he didn't quite have the fuel for it.
"We need rest, we just survived— whatever this was," she said. "And I watched three people nearly lose their footing coming down that hull plating in broad daylight with nothing wrong with them. We need to do this when we have a plan."
Dick looked up at the wreck. The hull plating. The twenty feet of drop to hard rock if someone's grip slipped. Then he looked at the group. At two still locked together near the cliff wall, at Frank pale and breathing shallow on the rock, at Hannah watching him with the careful attention of someone who'd been holding herself together for hours and was not going to last forever.
Nobody said anything.
He stood there with the decision in his hands and turned it over.
The maintenance closet wasn't going anywhere. The stern section was above the waterline and holding. The wreck had settled, and it had told him that itself, that long groan and then the stillness. It would probably hold through the night. Probably.
And if he went up alone in the dark and something went wrong, he'd traded himself for a capacitor and some copper wire.
"Morning," he said.
It came out quieter than he'd intended. Not a concession, just a fact.
"If a rescue comes before then, we won't need to go back up at all." He looked at Tim. "Can you do anything more with what you have tonight?"
Tim considered. "I can keep working on the receiver. If there's traffic on any of the standard frequencies I'll hear it."
"Then do that." Dick turned back to the group. "Everyone else— we make camp here. Away from the tide line, backs to the cliff. We rest in shifts. First light, Petra and I go back up for what we need."
Nobody argued. That was either trust or exhaustion, probably both.
Dick sat down on the rock and pulled off his tux, putting his back against the cliff wall.
He looked up at the wreck above them. The orange light still pulsed through the porthole glass, very faint now. The bow buried in the cliff. The stern hanging elevated.
At all 150 feet of steel that had found its resting place and stopped.
He thought about Tim going quiet with his conclusions, and what those conclusions were.
There were 8 people on black rock with nothing but their names and whatever their hands still remembered how to do.
Frank breathing steady and shallow. Brandon with his splinted arm. The two in shock finally quiet, the older woman asleep against the younger man's shoulder. Tim with his head bent over the radio, the only one still working.
Rescue might come in the morning. Someone would have noticed the ship missing. They'd be searching.
He hoped they were searching.
Jason
He was already running when awareness arrived.
Not waking up, not coming to, just present suddenly, mid-stride, crashing through underbrush, one arm locked around a small body pressed against his ribs.
The forest was thick and dark, branches snapping at his face, and he was moving with the specific urgent momentum of someone running toward something or away from it.
He stopped.
Looked down at his arm. At the kid tucked against his side. Unconscious, small, maybe ten years old. Looked at his own hands. Looked at the trees around him, at the dark between them.
Nothing.
"Jason," a faint voice called.
Jason's memory faded after that. All he could recall was a woman calling his name. His name was Jason.
That was it. Everything before this moment was a door standing open to an empty room.
What felt more surprising than the lack of memories was how comfortable it felt. Like wearing an old pair of boots.
Jason checked his surroundings before he set the kid down carefully against a tree root. The forest was dense enough that the canopy blocked most of the morning light, leaving everything in a dim grey-green. The trees were old, trunks wide as cars, underbrush thick at ground level, and there was no path in any direction he could see.
He'd been running on something like instinct, or memory, and whatever direction that had been, it had brought him here, to a shallow depression in the ground where the root system of a massive tree created a natural windbreak on three sides. Not a bad spot to stop, actually. Like he'd been making his way to it.
He started checking over the kid's condition. He saw nothing obvious — no bone at a wrong angle, no blood soaking through the clothes.
He pressed along the ribs, checked the skull with his fingertips, two fingers at the pulse point in the throat. Steady. Strong, actually. He moved his thumbs gently over the jaw, the temples. No swelling he could feel, no heat that suggested bleeding underneath.
Nothing external.
Which was either good news or the kind of bad news that didn't show up until later. Jason sat back on his heels and looked at the kid's slack face and decided there wasn't much he could do about internal injuries in a dark forest with no supplies, so he filed it under problems for later and stood up.
Then he looked down at himself.
Slacks. Dress shoes. White shirt. And a leather jacket. He dressed like some sort of mobster.
Was that who he was?
He was wearing dress shoes in a forest, which explained why his ankles felt like he'd been running through a cheese grater. He looked at his hands — no rings, no watch, no...
Wait.
He was wearing a watch.
He unclipped it slowly. Turned it over. Ran his thumb along the underside of the strap and felt the thin line of the wire before he saw it, coiled flat and nearly invisible against the leather.
A garrote.
He stared at it for a second.
Okay. The mobster identity was starting to be the leading probability.
He set it down and checked the jacket. Inside breast pocket was a slim card wallet, but no cards in it, nothing with a name or a face or any information that would have been useful. He dropped it. Outer pocket he found what felt like a pen until he held it up and it was very clearly not a pen.
A knife.
A throwing knife, actually, and he knew that with a certainty he couldn't explain — just the way it balanced across his fingers, a weight that felt familiar in a way nothing else about his life currently did. He set it down and kept going.
Two more in the lining of the jacket. A compact firearm at the small of his back that he'd somehow not noticed until he reached for it, which said something about his baseline. Two more in ankle holsters. And then, in the deep interior pocket, tucked flat and cool against the fabric...
He held them up and turned them slowly in the dim light filtering through the canopy.
Were these throwing stars?
He set them down in the growing row and stared at the complete picture laid out across the moss and tree roots in front of him. Garrote, three knives, three guns, six shuriken, and — he checked the last pocket, the one he'd somehow saved for last, maybe because some part of him knew — a block of plastic explosive wrapped in cloth, and a lighter sitting next to it.
What the fuck?
Why couldn't he be a normal person with amnesia? Why did he have to be the carrying-around-weapons type of amnesiac? Was he running away from someone trying to kill him? What if he couldn't remember who was trying to kill him and he got killed?
He crouched there in his ruined dress shoes in the middle of a forest he didn't recognize, looking at what was apparently just a normal Tuesday in his pockets, and had what felt like a completely reasonable moment of just — not moving.
He thought about the unconscious kid against the tree root. The way he'd set him down carefully. The way waking up mid-run with a child tucked under his arm had felt like a responsibility he'd already agreed to, not one he was just now discovering.
He thought about the plastic explosive.
Those two things lived in the same person, apparently.
He didn't know which one was the real answer to the question of who he was. Maybe both. Maybe whoever he'd been before this forest was someone he wouldn't recognize, or wouldn't like, or wouldn't choose to be again given the option.
But he'd set the kid down carefully. He hadn't needed a memory to tell him to do that.
He figured that counted for something.
He started putting things back before he felt a blow to the back of his head.
No twig snap. No rustling leaves. Nothing that polite.
What he got instead was the sound of something small and fast — and then half a second of nothing when a foot connected perfectly with the back of his knee and buckled it, and a heel drove into the base of his skull with a precision that sent white light across his vision and put him face-first in the moss before he'd even registered the first hit.
Trained strikes.
The white cleared from his eyes.
Jason pushed up onto his hands and saw the tree root empty, a small shape already fifteen feet away and accelerating into the dark between the trees, bare feet making almost no sound on the forest floor, moving like water between the trunks.
Jason sat there for one second with his ears ringing.
Son of a—
He shoved to his feet and grabbed the gun off the ground — not drawing it, just not leaving a loaded firearm in the middle of a forest — and ran.
"Hey!"
The branches caught him across the jaw immediately. He ducked too late and took one across the cheek and kept moving. "Hey, kid, stop— wait up!"
He could hear him ahead. Barely, he almost no sound, the kid was good at this, moving through the underbrush with a lightness that didn't belong to a ten-year-old who'd just been unconscious, but occasionally a branch, a root, the faint impact of small feet.
Jason chased after him. When he caught him he was going to… what was he going to do?
Well, he genuinely had not gotten that far.
Wow, that's impulsive. Let's just chase the kid who decided to kick a guy twice his size in the middle of nowhere. What is wrong with me?
He just knew a child had put him on the ground with trained strikes and was now running barefoot through an unknown forest, and that both of those things were his problem.
The second part of that was a bigger problem than the first. But he was pissed about the first part.
"Kid! Shit— I'm not going to hurt you—"
The kid vanished.
Not around a tree. Not into denser brush. One stride he was there, the next he wasn't, and Jason's brain said wrong about a quarter second before his feet said edge and he threw his weight back and skidded to a stop with gravel cascading off the cliff face ahead of him and dropping into silence.
He looked down.
Sheer. A drop 120 feet, maybe more, straight down to wet black rock and the white noise of water grinding against it far below. The cliff edge was ragged here, undercut in places, with a thin fringe of scrub brush that had absolutely nothing beneath it. No ledge, no catch, nothing forgiving.
And on the lip of it were fingers white-knuckled around an exposed root, feet scrabbling at the cliff face and finding nothing, body swinging — the kid.
He was looking up at Jason.
Not screaming. Not crying. Completely silent, jaw set, eyes running the math. Jason could see it happening, the calculation, quick and cold, stranger above me, drop below me, which is the worst outcome. For one genuinely horrible second he thought the kid might decide the drop was preferable.
He dropped to his stomach. Reaching out.
"Grab my hand."
The kid looked at his hand. Looked at his face.
The root shifted. A small cascade of dirt.
"Now, damnit." Jason ordered.
The kid grabbed his wrist.
Jason pulled him up and got his other hand around a fistful of jacket and hauled backward, heels digging into gravel, and the kid came over the edge in a scramble of knees and elbows, and they both ended up several feet back from the drop and breathing hard.
Neither of them moved.
Jason lay on his back looking at the canopy. His skull throbbed. His palms were shredded. The plastic explosive had dug into his hip during the whole ordeal but he was not going to think about that right now.
After a few minutes of just breathing the kid sat up.
Jason distanced himself. He was not going to fall for another sneak attack.
The kid looked at his own palms bleeding lightly where the root had cut into them, and touched the cuts with the clinical detachment of someone noting a minor inconvenience. He didn't make a sound about it. He just looked.
Then he looked out.
Because the cliff opened above the treeline. The canopy dropped away on both sides and the ocean spread out ahead — vast, grey, enormous, and completely, utterly empty.
No other land on the horizon in any direction. No lights. No structures. The beach below curved away in both directions as far as either of them could see, and there was nothing on it. Just sand and surf and ocean for miles.
A fucking island?
That must have been the same conclusion the kid came to, because something in his whole body shifted. Running wouldn't help him.
"Are we done?" Jason asked, tired of this already.
The kid looked at him. A pause that lasted exactly as long as it needed to.
"Yes..."
Jason sighed and put away the gun he'd dropped when he'd almost gone splat.
He looked at the kid with dirt smear across his jaw, the bleeding palms held perfectly still, the expression of someone who had just nearly died off a cliff and was now sitting quietly like it was a minor scheduling inconvenience.
"You got a name, kid? Wait, no, more importantly— do you remember anything?" Jason asked.
"Damian." He flexed one hand experimentally, testing the cuts. "...happened…"
"What was that? Stop mumbling and speak clearly."
"Tt. It appears that I don't remember how I got here or what happened."
"Shit, you too?"
Damian looked at Jason with something new now. "Are you also having memory issues?"
"Yeah, I was trying to figure it out before you decided to cheap-shot my head. Thanks for that by the way."
"I woke up in the middle of nowhere while a perfect stranger went through his arsenal of weapons. I wasn't about to stay still and do nothing."
"Fine, I respect that." and he would probably have done the same to be honest.
Damian looked back at Jason. His eyes were moving, assessing him. "You're either not a threat or not a competent one. Given the arsenal, I'm inclined toward the former."
"Great. A ringing endorsement."
"It's an assessment." Damian looked back at the water. "You don't know what you are either."
Jason was quiet.
"No," he said. "I don't."
They sat with that for a moment. The wind came off the cold and steady and pulled at Jason's jacket, the sun reflected off the ocean.
"What now?" Damian said, not quite to Jason. More to himself, or to the space between them.
"I don't know. We need a better lay of the land. Maybe there are inhabitants somewhere, and we just ended up on the wrong side… Then again, both of us are here without our memories. I find that very suspicious."
"You too are not above suspicion."
"Look, kid— I don't think I wanted to hurt you before. I think I was trying to protect you. I was running from something before. I woke up running. Something was either chasing me or chasing you and I was a fucking idiot who decided to protect you from it while you were unconscious."
Damian turned to look at the treeline. Dark. Dense. Quiet in the way that forests went quiet when something in them was paying attention.
Neither of them said what they were both thinking. Maybe it still is.
"Fine," Damian said suddenly. "I could use a useful ally in this unknown place. What is your name?"
Why did this kid piss him off?
"Jason."
He brushed dirt from his clothes with two precise swipes, and turned to face the trees.
"Alright, Jason," Damian said his name like it somehow felt wrong to say, or like he meant it as an insult. "Let's get to higher ground. See if we can find a source of water."
Damian started leading the way back into the forest like he was the de facto leader.
Jason never thought he'd be a person who wanted to hit a kid so badly. But he was learning — or relearning — new things about himself every minute now.
He turned and followed Damian into the dark.
Bruce
No one on the beach knew anything.
He confirmed it by listening after they made it to the main group.
Survivors drifted in and out of each other's orbits, trading the same meager inventory — a name, a blankness, a ruined piece of evening wear — and arriving at the same wall every time.
"I'm Helen. I don't— I have that, and that's it."
"My name's Ray. You don't know me?"
"I've never seen you before."
"How does that even happen? How do you forget an entire—"
"I don't know, Ray, I don't know, I don't—"
Bruce moved through the outer edge of it, listening without engaging, filing pieces. Stephanie walked beside him, half a step behind. Not by his direction, just the way it had settled.
"That's the seventh pair I've seen do that," she said quietly.
"Do what?"
"Meet, compare notes, hit the wall, get scared." She watched a man in a torn dinner jacket sit down heavily in the sand, face in his hands. "Nobody's got anything different. It's all the same blank."
"32 survivors visible. All in formal wear. All with the same memory profile, first name only." He paused. He didn't finish the thought out loud.
Stephanie looked at him sharply. "You think whatever this is… it was done to us."
"You don't?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I think it's more terrifying if it was."
He didn't disagree. But he also noticed that she was the only other person on this beach asking that question. Everyone else was looking out at the water. Waiting for a boat on the horizon, telling each other that someone would come. The fear here was being stranded. Being forgotten. Being lost.
Bruce kept looking at the treeline.
Steph talked while they walked, filling the silence in the nervous, running way of someone keeping the dark at bay.
He caught fragments of theories about the boat, about the clothes, about whether this was a party of acquaintances or strangers, about whether some people here were important people to dress like that, and whether search parties would come.
He registered maybe half of it. She was processing out loud, and the processing was useful even if most of it didn't land anywhere.
"—because it doesn't make sense, right, like what kind of event were we all at? All dressed like this? I don't think I could even afford a dress like this. There could have been hundreds of us, which means someone organized it, which means someone knows we're missing, which means—"
"Enough, quiet," he said.
Bruce pressed a palm back to his aching temples. The pain of lack of memories. Of no knowledge of these people. Of his hyperactive, and paranoid, brain coming up with contingencies for all things had given him more than enough to think about.
The quiet lasted longer than Bruce thought Steph could go without talking. He turned to look at her.
She had stopped.
Completely stopped. Mid-word, mid-breath. Her mouth closed. Her expression went strange, a flicker of confusion, then something sharper. Her hand came up slowly toward her throat.
"...what are you doing?" Bruce asked. Because this was somehow just as surprising as the rest of the day had been.
"How did you do that?" She said carefully.
"Do what?"
"I couldn't— it wasn't that I stopped. I couldn't make words. And then I could again."
"I didn't do anything. I just wanted some silence to think for a bit."
"People don't ask for quiet like that. And then like, I reacted to it before I could think about it."
"I'm sorry?" Bruce didn't mean to scare her, but he wasn't sure that was what she meant.
Steph shook her head. "Were you like a hypnotist or something?"
"No." Bruce responded immediately. It felt very wrong.
She stared at him. Her expression moved through several things before settling. "Then how the hell did that happen? Why would I just react like that?"
Bruce considered the question. What kind of bond would they have that he could ask her to be quiet and she'd shut up?
"Maybe I was your boss? Or something similar?"
Maybe that would explain why Bruce felt like he had to protect her. Like he had gotten her into this situation and felt responsible. Enough to tie them together with a life ring in open water.
Steph made a face like Bruce had insulted her.
"Sure thing, boss man," she said, dry as chalk.
Bruce sighed. He looked out to the sea, not for the first time in the last hour, looking for any sign of someone who'd come looking for stranded survivors. The ocean offered nothing back. Just grey water and the debris field spreading across the surface, and beyond that, the flat line of the horizon with no ship on it.
He could also feel the subtle panic among the other survivors looking out for rescue and realizing that they might have to spend the night on the beach.
Bruce had already begun making contingencies for scenarios of mass panic.
It wasn't long before several among the survivors started to appoint themselves as their leaders.
A large man in a wrinkled dinner jacket had installed himself at the center of the group, using volume and physical mass the way some men used credentials. He'd found the emergency ration boxes from a cracked life raft canister washed up at the tide line and was organizing distribution like someone who needed to be needed.
"Everyone needs to stay calm— I'll handle the allocation—"
"Who put you in charge?"
"Someone has to be. Unless you'd like to sort it out yourselves." He gestured at the crowd. "Because I'm looking at 30 people who can't remember their own names and I don't see any other volunteers."
That quieted the pushback, which was exactly what he'd counted on.
Bruce stood at the periphery with Steph, who had stuck beside him the entire time, and watched the portions being divided.
They weren't equal. He had tracked them.
The man gave more to those who were larger, who looked like they might push back, and less to those already quiet or sitting apart. Practical, maybe. Still a choice made before anyone agreed to it.
Stephanie appeared beside him with her meager share two foil-wrapped bars and a small water bottle, and looked at it with an expression of resigned assessment.
"Okay, I know we all just lost our memories," she said, "but this feels like a normal amount to not be thrilled about."
Bruce looked at his own portion. Then held out half to her.
She looked at him. "You don't have to—"
"Take it."
She took it.
Hours after looking towards the sea the sun began to descend faster than it had any right to. The temperature began to drop, and the wind off the water came in cold and damp.
The voices around them had gotten lower and tighter. The adrenaline holding people upright was wearing thin. Some survivors had begun to pull the larger pieces of wreckage up the beach and away from the waterline. Less from a plan, more from the animal instinct to do something useful before night arrived.
Bruce stood apart from it, watching the treeline.
The beach was maybe sixty yards wide here, from the surf to where the sand ended and the undergrowth began. The trees were dense enough that the interior was already dark even in the late afternoon. A wall of shadow that gave nothing back. He'd been watching it since they'd arrived at the group. He couldn't have said what he was watching for.
He heard it before he saw it. A sound — rhythmic, low, just under the pull of the wind. Rustling that didn't move like leaves.
"Bruce!"
Steph ran up to him. "Do you think you can help—"
Bruce held a hand up, and she quieted.
The shadows between the trees were deep and layered and very still.
He didn't look away.
Nothing moved. No more sounds.
He looked back to Steph, who was giving him an annoyed look. "Did it happen again?"
"Yep." Steph folded her arms. "And I just went along with it. I hate that trick. C'mon, help me set up a shelter. I don't really trust anyone else here yet. Do you want to take turns being on lookout?"
"That's a good plan." Bruce followed Steph back to the beach, away from the treeline, and from whatever was inside the forest.
Maybe it was only his imagination.
He looked out at the group as he walked back toward them. 32 people who didn't know their own names, who couldn't tell you where they were born or who they loved or what they'd done with their lives. Strangers to themselves and to each other.
Whoever we were before this beach, none of that was here anymore.