[ THE ISLAND. THE SWAN STATION. NOVEMBER 2004 ]

The "Henry Gale" charade had fallen apart, exposing his true nature as one of the Others. And this unpleasant development—this small flaw in his carefully constructed plan—had inevitably stripped him of the last remnants of comfort.

The light in the empty armory that now served as his prison was almost always off; his wrists and ankles were tightly bound with coarse rope that dug into his skin, leaving raw, burning marks; the number of visitors had dropped sharply—save for Jack, who still came to tend to his shoulder wound, and Ana Lucia, who brought him food. But the cruelest blow was the loss of the books John had given him—his only solace, the one thing that had made this imprisonment even slightly more bearable.

In response, he had almost completely stopped speaking and eating. There was little practical value in this quiet act of defiance, but God knew he was quietly amused by the Oceanic survivors’ attempts to pry even the smallest scrap of information from him. For now, that was enough.