“Farthing,” I croaked, and my own voice woke me.

I sat up, wobbly and weak, and my eyes peeled open to see the green lizard in front of me. Staring at me with eyes of new copper. The sun pounding was awful bright.

“Farthing,” I said again.

I uncurled my cramped arms and legs and found the pain in my head had faded. I’d stopped trembling, but my tongue was gummed to the roof of my mouth and I suffered a terrible thirst. There was something pink in the lizard’s mouth, and then it was dropped at my feet.

A ripe prickly pear—the spikes removed. It had split, and the juicy contents leaked out. I crawled to the food, my body weak and shaky, scooped out the pink pear flesh with my fingers, and shoveled it into my mouth, seeds and all. The lizard—Farthing—watched.

My stomach grumbled, woken by this morsel. My brain woke up too. This was the real world, and I had escaped death. Again. At least for now, because the juice of the fruit reminded me how parched I was.

What a clever little beast this lizard was! To kill the centipede, stay through my illness, and now find me food. Only the most intelligent, highly trained dog would do that. Or maybe a counting horse, like the ones at the circus sideshow.

“Do you belong to someone? Are you … a pet?” I said.

The lizard tilted its head to one side at the sound of my voice.

People living here? Impossible. But wild animals simply didn’t behave like this. Except … I recalled how a pod of porpoises had swum alongside the Beagle and Mr. Darwin had commented that they seemed to deliberately seek out the company of men.

Was I still half-mad with the poison and this whole scene part of my delirium? Well, if I was, this was a darn sight better than the nightmares.

“Thank you … Farthing.”

The lizard tilted its head to the side, and snorted. Then it walked toward the sea, in the direction of the plain of prickly pear cactuses. I checked for the sky beast, then limped after it.

The old sailors were wrong. My life had passed before my eyes, but I was not ready to make peace with my maker—not yet.

After all, I had never been a very peaceful sort of a boy.

The sun rose high beneath a white haze, and the air above the earth rippled with midday heat. With no sign of the sky beast, I almost convinced myself that I had imagined it, but I still felt its claws wrapped around me, the wind in my face, that drop through the air, and the smash into the sea. Farthing stopped at one of the chimney-like fumaroles, as dead as all the others. A fruitless prickly pear sprouted from it and a small black bird pecked at a yellow flower. I noticed this bird’s beak was longer and more pointed than those on similar finches we’d observed pecking at mites on the iguanas and tortoises. I was so taken with peering at it I forgot where I was and almost turned to Mr. Darwin to point it out. I’d been with the master so long, it was mighty strange to be alone. Well … not completely alone.