The letters Ben had stenciled onto the stone marker a week ago were already fading. He rested his wrist against it and began to trace the letters, broader this time, and with darker paint. The stone was warm in the hot island sun. Weren't these sorts of things always supposed to be cold?
He glanced over his shoulder towards the barracks. Everyone was moving around there just as usual, just as though nothing had happened, just as though they weren't accomplices to every crime that had ever taken place on this all-but-forsaken island.
For all their talk of transcendence and enlightenment, the Dharma Initiative was surprisingly reticent to speak of death. No last rites, no final words, no burials—just a clandestine fire and a mutual agreement that the only ones who had ever existed were the ones who were still there, walking back and forth watering rosebushes and carting supplies and living lies with every second granted to them.
For all their research into the extraordinary life, they were painfully oblivious to ordinary things. Love. Grief. Justice.
Ben was tired of it, all of it. How many years had he been silent on the outside, his soul nearly deafened by the volume of his internal screaming? Too many.
He had slipped into the jungle again yesterday as he had so often before, ever since his first meeting with Richard. This time, however, he hadn't waited for the older man, now strangely like a peer. This time, Ben wandered aimlessly through the underbrush, stopping to lean his forehead against a tree from time to time, breathing in the scent of the island and tingling from head to toe with the raw power he knew was there.
It was as he drew his head up from the last of these trees that he saw the cabin.
And it was what he experienced in the cabin that made him able to find Richard, who was crouched by a stream getting a drink. He seemed startled not to be the one appearing without warning.
"It's time."
"I'll be the judge of that, Ben."
"Jacob will be the judge of that," Ben replied coldly, and Richard's face tightened in apprehension. "It's time. The island is ready, and so am I."
Richard stood slowly, brushing his wet hand against his shirt before extending it to the younger man. "So are we all."
They didn't have to make plans. The plan had been in place for years. Ben knew even as he and Richard stood staring at each other, hands clasped in a gesture that was equal parts solidarity and challenge, that the only reason either of them had held off was that they had been waiting for these latest deaths, this latest fire.
The island had demanded a sacrifice. And Ben—unknowingly, unwillingly—had provided the sacrifice.
Now he sat back on his heels and surveyed his work, the freshly painted stone marking deaths that everyone else ignored.
"Anne & Alexander Linus—Beloved Wife and Unborn Son"
He wished he had something to leave there. Wedding rings, maybe. But there were no rings in the Dharma Initiative, nothing to set anyone apart from anyone else.
Except….
He reached into his bag and drew out a crudely carved pillar of wood, painted in simple colors.
Yes. That would do.
Using both hands, he dug out a space underneath the stone and laid the sculpture inside.
"This way," he whispered, "we'll never have to be apart."
He looked at his watch. He had just enough time to pack the dirt down, replace the stone, and scrub the dirt from beneath his fingernails.
And then he would make one last delivery run.