“When I found those slaves on Pahusk…I learned something. The island teaches you things. The longer that you are on it, you just see nothing but prophecy. No outcome is too mundane. Carved into the bark of trees, things like ‘the wind from the north brings cold rain in three moons’. ‘Muddy boots will stain the furs of the eldest woman’s house when the third rain falls.’ It’s so ripe with prophecy that the tribals on the island are fucking bored by it. But on the third night on the island, the night after I scouted out the village, we camped alongside a large cliff to hide our smoke from them. On the cliff was something written in large, red letters in a language I didn’t know. Anyway, long story short, I got really drunk that night, and before I went to sleep, I thought I read what the cliffside said, bathed in the orange light of the campfire.”

“What?” I asked.

“It said, ‘The Gods have Cancer.’”

“Cancer?”

“Cancer. I don’t know what it is either. But I thought nothing of it, I was so drunk, I fell back asleep. I remembered it as I read the case that said Highwayman in front of the Lake Boss.”

“So you still didn’t answer, why kill him?”

“Because,” Torbil said.

Torbil faced me. His face conveyed no emotion. I started to smell the rabbit cooking behind him. He squatted real low. He got an inch from my face. I smelled his sweat.

“I can read the language of the Gods, and he can’t. I can take it, so I did. I made a choice. It’s why you are here right now. I am not the same as the rest of you. And if I can read the language of the Gods, that means I have some purpose. If I have a purpose, that means, I think I have a choice. And I’ve found more signs.”

Torbil reached into a sack, and I heard light, melodic clunking as he dumped a series of bottles out onto the ground.

“Read it,” he sneered at me.

I grabbed a bottle. Seemed foreign. Wrapped in a red and white scroll, color faded from time. Something alien written on it.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Budweiser,” he said.

“What?”

“I don’t know either,” Torbil said.

Torbil spit, gathered the bottles back into the leather sack, and poked at the rabbit. He fumbled to roll a cigarette and dropped the contents of his tobacco onto the ground.