I waited until Michael departed with Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Hurley the next morning. Inwardly, I knew it was likely that I would just wander in the jungle until I died from exposure, or get spooked and come home, but if Henry and Ethan had suggested anything to me, it was that the Others were more than capable of quietly stalking the trees and meadows, completely unknown to us. I was sure there would be more of them out in the jungle to find me.
Maybe it was stupid logic, but I elected to begin my journey at the point where my first adventure had come to an abrupt (and painful) end. If I could get even the slightest bearing on the direction Henry had traveled from, maybe I could find his people on my own, though I knew it was far more likely that I would pick up my own trail and follow it straight back to the Hatch.
Tristan picked her way carefully around Sun's vegetables, through the swaying verge to the spot at which she, 24 hours earlier, had sat bolt upright in the morning haze, left temple still throbbing. As she had suspected, it wasn't terribly difficult to discern the path by which Henry had led her from the Hatch. The path was marred by blades of grass that she realized suddenly that she alone must have bent and broken. Henry had left no trail at all. With a sigh, she gazed up toward the warm Island sun, toward the path to the Hatch, and allowed herself one fleeting glance back toward the beach and camp. She would have to make her own way. At last, she turned, at relative random, a quarter turn from the path to the Hatch. If she knew anything about the geography of this island (she didn't.), a bearing in this direction would carry her toward the interior, which is where she supposed the Others must live.
At least she was clever enough to remember that both Henry and Ethan had been, at one time, quite pale, and she supposed that Henry's sunburn in the Hatch must have had far more to do with being strung up in the sun all day by Rousseau than from living on the beach like the castaways.
Fingers of reluctance had at last begun to grasp at her mind. She was standing on the cusp of what she was beginning to understand was a life-changing decision. She hated making decisions with finality. But she found she could no longer be silently complicit with Jack's decisions, so, allowing that to propel her, she headed off into the jungle.
She might have been traveling in circles, for all she knew, every rock and every jungle clearing seemed the same after a while. The trees rustled gently, the birds cried overhead, and she found she was no longer quite certain what might happen to her. A tiny part of her mind realized that she might not have tried to understand the full story, so angry was she about Michael's betrayal. After all, had Sun, Jin, and Sayid not also set off that morning in the stranger's boat? Were they also looking for Henry, or had she mistaken their intent entirely? She had assumed that it wouldn't take long for the Others to sense her clumsy trudging in the underbrush but it had been hours, and she hadn't heard a single footstep. She began to quietly wish anyone would find her, even if it meant ending up at the business end of Rousseau's rifle.
But she was left alone, wandering the jungle, 'til nightfall.
Brilliant me, I had thought of just about everything except for the reality that I might have to spend a night alone in the wild jungle. What had we always said? Don't wander the jungle at night. What was I doing? Wandering the jungle, at night. I hadn't even brought a torch, so dusk found me scurrying for the shelter of the overgrown roots of some tree or other. I hunched in the failing light, allowing my fears to torture me long into the night, before exhaustion finally claimed me.
The next morning, I was singularly impressed to find myself still alive, and decidedly disappointed to find myself still alone. I wondered distantly if this was what Rousseau felt like every morning. I didn't want to find out. Shouldering my pack, I tried to discern what direction I had been traveling the night before. Failing that, I once again turned in an arbitrary direction, and set off once more into the jungle.
The morning sun was growing stronger, and Tristan was trying very hard to ignore the first hints of hunger when something caught her eye in the distance. An unmistakable glint in a thicket of bushes harnessed her curiosity, and she approached. It couldn't possibly be… But it was.
Her other shoe. Nestled upside down in the brush sat her other dance shoe, rhinestones speckled with mud, but still sparkling. She wrestled it from the branches, fingering its delicate straps bemusedly before she realized, too late, than the rustling of the brush had been masking the sound of approaching footsteps.
For a fraction of a second, she wavered between wild hope that the footsteps belonged to Henry and a resolute belief that she was, in fact, screwed. But as her eyes flitted upward, she was caught completely off guard by the man standing before her.
He was much darker than both Henry and Ethan, tall and tan, dark eyes taking her in more as a curiosity than a hostile thing. And he stood there, anachronistic in his pressed grey dress slacks and gleaming shoes.
"What are you doing out here?" He asked at last, in a tone that hinted he might have a good idea indeed of what she was doing alone in the jungle.
"Are you one of Them?" she asked, boldness taking even herself by surprise.
"One of them?" He repeated
"Are you an Other?" She spat this out with an aggression she must have picked up from the rest of her people, and attempted to arrange her face into something resembling reticence.
"I suppose you could say that, yes." He responded, expression growing wary.
"I want to go with you. Back to your people." Tristan said, straightening. "My name is Tristan Josephine Gardner, I am a survivor of Oceanic flight 815, and I wish to defect."
"Defect?" He asked, amused.
"That's right. I wish to join your people. I promise, I pose no threat."
The man ran a hand through his dark hair, chuckling.
"Is… is that yours?" He asked at last, indicating the shoe.
"Yeah. …You don't think I'm stupid enough to hit you with a shoe?" She asked, stuffing it hastily into her bag.
"No. If that's yours… I have something else that belongs to you."
"Oh god. You didn't find my panties, did you?"
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing." She turned away, flushing crimson.
The man allowed silence to permeate the air for a moment, listening to the rustling of the trees.
"Alright, Tristan Josephine Gardner. I'll take you with me." He said, at last.
"You… You're not going to send me back to my own camp?" She asked, incredulously.
"Could you even find your own camp at this point?"
"…Probably not."
"It isn't safe for you to wander the jungle alone." He said. "You can come back with me, but you'll need to talk to Ben if you really want to stay."
"Fantastic. Let's find this Ben and have a chat."
"Not so fast. It's going to be a while. You'll have to wait until he gets back."
"So… You're just going to let me walk among your people, privy to all your secrets, and you don't even know if I'll be allowed to stay? Won't you get in trouble for that?"
"I don't answer to Ben." The man said. "And you will be watched. But you came of your own free will, there's no reason to start off on the wrong foot. Besides, you don't want Ben coming to collect you, trust me."
He began to lead her deeper into the jungle, following a twisting path only he seemed capable of seeing. Just as when she was travelling with Henry, questions kept bubbling up inside her until she couldn't stand her own ignorance any longer.
"You're Ben, aren't you?" She blurted at last.
The man's expression split in a wide smile.
"No. I'm not Ben. My name is Richard. Richard Alpert."
"Richard." She mused. "Pleasure."
They continued in further silence.
"Can you tell me, did Henry make it back to your camp?"
"Henry?" Richard asked.
"Henry Gale?"
"I don't know a Henry, Tristan. I'm sorry. Where did you meet him?"
"My, uh, people found him in the jungle. They thought he was one of yours… Guess not?"
"I don't know everyone on this Island." Richard mumbled dismissively. "Maybe you should ask Ben about him."
Tristan was too busy wrestling with this new puzzle piece to notice Richard's amused smirk.
"So… What's this Ben like, anyway?" She was digging for conversation at this point.
"Tristan, it really isn't safe to be announcing your presence to the entire jungle every few minutes." Richard replied, with an air of finality. She fell silent, consenting to allow him to conduct her still further down the invisible path. She began to concentrate instead on the rustling of the trees high above and Richard Alpert's dark silhouette, bobbing ahead of her. As they clambered over fallen branches and leaf litter, it eventually occurred to her that the only footfalls belonged to her, Richard's gleaming dress shoes treading silently over broken twigs.
Gradually, the terrain began to even out, rolling jungle and fallen rocks giving way to thinning, sparse trees and fields of sawgrass. The sun was crawling slowly toward the horizon and Richard paused momentarily to observe this, before waving her onward.
Across the prairie, Tristan could barely make out a series of strange, evenly-spaced structures, jutting out of the landscape.
"What is that?" She asked. "Is that some kind of border?"
"It's getting late. I'd like to get you settled by nightfall." Richard replied, not looking back.
"Are you afraid of the jungle at night too?"
"Of course not."
But he wasn't slowing down.
Finally, they approached the structures, rising out of the fields like absurdist trees.
"Ok, this is really starting to feel like The Martian Chronicles here. Are you going to tell me what the hell is going on and what these things are, or do I have to guess?"
As she made to move closer, however, Richard seized her by the arm, pulling her to a halt. He approached alone, pulling open a small panel on the base of one of the towers and punching in a series of numbers. Tristan felt the very air around her shiver with a kind of electricity, and then fall conspicuously silent.
It was only when Richard had conducted her through the towers and again punched in a long code that he finally stood and regarded her.
"Protection against undesirables." He explained, hardly an explanation at all in Tristan's estimation.
"Oh, I get it. Now it's safe to chat. Now that you can be sure no one can follow me." Tristan muttered dryly.
"You weren't being followed." Richard responded dismissively. "And even if you were, we wouldn't need a sonar fence to keep you out."
"A… sonar fence."
"That's right. Shall we keep going? It will be dark within the hour." Once again, he had already turned away from her and began walking, hardly even beckoning her on.
You would think that Richard Alpert and his unusual fashion choices would have solidified Michael's lies about the Others in my mind, but really, I hardly noticed at all. If I'd had any doubts, however, they were blasted away by the existence of the sonar fence. Suddenly, Michael's juvenile insistence that they wore loincloths and lived in tents seemed like a laughably indulgent fantasy at best. Had he been here? I wondered how much he had really known, how surely he had been leading Dr. Jack and Co. to slaughter.
I thought again about Henry Gale, so obviously one of Them in my mind. Richard had never even heard of him. Did he live in a place like this? And, if he did, how awful and savage must we have seemed by comparison? I was horrified at the thought that my own people were convinced our actions were the civilized ones.
They hadn't traveled 50 yards past the fences when Tristan's ears began to ring. Richard, several paces ahead of her, began to slow as the ringing grew more aggressive.
"Do you hear that?" He asked.
"What is it?" She caught up to him, and they both turned to gaze back toward the jungle.
The trees themselves seemed to begin to tremble, and Tristan clapped her hands over her ears as the ringing in the air became an unbearable whine.
"Get down." She heard Richard murmur, and the pair knelt together in the rustling grass.
The sun had been obliterated in a blinding wave of purple light, and Tristan found herself squeezing her eyes shut. What was happening?
I was reasonably certain that I was going to die there in that field, having never accomplished my mission, found Henry, or figured out who the hell this mysterious Ben character was. The sun had exploded and I was going to fry, with aloof Richard Alpert watching the whole thing like it was some sort of blasé intellectual curiosity. But as quickly as the sunny day had become a hellscape, the light faded, the ringing in my ears ceased, and I was left in a wash of peculiar silence as even the birds had stopped singing to ponder their mortality. No sooner had I opened my eyes in surprise when Richard seized me by the arm, heaving me back to my feet.
"We need to move. Quickly." He said, already releasing his grip and advancing across the rolling hills.
I was conducted in further infuriating silence through the ever-falling dusk across what was quickly becoming bafflingly manicured lawns. At this point, I was so far beyond knowing what questions to ask, it was pointless to try and wrestle answers from my guide. Clusters of tiny houses, like a dystopian summer camp, cropped up around me, electric lights twinkling merrily from windows and porch lamps. The largest house, still tiny and quaint to my eyes, stood at the center of the largest cluster.
"Ben?" I asked, nodding toward this house, conspicuously dark.
Richard simply nodded in silent reply. He guided me to a separate cluster, though within direct visual line of the large house, and stopped in front of one of the doors.
"I think you'll find everything you need, but if I can get you anything, you can find me just down the hill." He said at last, pointing away toward the direction we came.
"That's… that's it? We walk through the end of the universe, and you drop me off at the front door of Camp Kumbaya without so much as an explanation?"
"Good night, Tristan." He was already walking away.