The wet had gone through the seat of his jeans and the back of his T-shirt.
The collar of his jacket was damp against his neck.
Adam Kessler lay on moving wood.
He opened his eyes.
There were stars above him.
He could not see any lights from home or the street.
He sat up too fast and grabbed a rope wrapped round the edge of a plank.
He held on until the raft steadied.
Then he counted the planks.
Planks.
Four across, with rope at each end.
Another row of four behind him.
The raft was roughly two metres square, its edges level with the water.
He put a hand over the side.
The sea was warm, and the raft rose and fell with it.
No lights.
He turned all the way round on his knees.
No lights anywhere, not on the horizon, not a plane, nothing.
The horizon was a line he could only find because the stars stopped at it.
The stars were wrong.
He was not good with stars.
He knew the Plough and could sometimes find Orion from the back garden, and neither was there.
There were too many of them, in the wrong places, and low in the east hung a moon that was bigger than it should have been and the colour of a dinner plate.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he looked away, because looking at it changed nothing.
He checked what he still had.
He had come in from the late shift at twenty to twelve, eaten a bowl of cereal standing up, sat down on the sofa to get his boots off and not got them off.
He was still in his boots.
Jeans, T-shirt, the navy work jacket with the thin quilted lining.
He patted himself down.
Phone in the inside pocket, screen cracked in the corner where it had always been cracked.
He pressed the button.
Nothing.
Held it.
Nothing.
Keys, front and back door.
A folded receipt from Saturday’s big shop.
The biro he had been chewing in the planning meeting.
That was the lot.
No water.
“What is this,” he said, out loud, to nobody, and looked up and to the left, at the wrong moon, as if it might have an answer.
Something opened in front of his eyes.
A rectangle of faint light hung about an arm’s length away, the size of a laptop lid, with the stars still visible through it.
Text sat on it as if printed there.
[Display name required.
Enter a name to be shown to other survivors.]
Under that, a blank box and a cursor.
His hand passed through it.
A blank box with a cursor was familiar enough.
He thought his surname at it, and the letters appeared.
Kessler.
It was what went on the rota.
[Welcome, Kessler.]
The panel changed.
A row of tabs along the top: Status, Inventory, Crafting, Map, Chat, Raft.
The first was lit.
[Health 100% | Hunger 84% | Thirst 91% | Stamina 70% | Temperature: Normal ↓]
[Conditions: none]
His hands were shaking.
He put them under his armpits, inside the jacket, and looked at the numbers until they stopped.
Something else happened while he was looking.
There was a box on the raft.
It sat on the join between the four squares of planking, dead centre, and it had not been there when he crawled across that join a minute before.
Shoebox-sized, pale, no lid, no seams that he could see.
He crawled to it and touched it, because everything else here had answered to touch.
It opened.
It did not unfold or unlatch; the top of it was simply not there any more.
Inside lay a flat rectangle of something like card, and the panel had a new line.
[Gift Box: Basic Water Purifier Blueprint.
Consumable.
Use to learn the recipe.]
He took the card out.
It had weight and it was dry, the first dry thing he had touched.
Water purifier.
He turned it over.
Nothing on the back.
He thought Use at it, and it went soft in his hand and then went, the way the box top had gone, and in the panel the Crafting tab flashed once.
He opened it.
A list, short.
Rope.
Wooden Paddle.
Hook Pole.
Raft Tile.
Simple Fishing Line.
Storage Crate.
Cook Stand.
Cloth Shade.
And at the bottom, set apart:
[Basic Water Purifier: 5 Wood, 2 Scrap Metal, 1 Rope.
Produces clean water from seawater in sunlight.
Footprint: 1 tile.]
He opened Inventory.
Twelve empty slots drawn as squares, and a line at the bottom: 0 / 30 kg.
He looked down at the planks he was kneeling on and back at the panel.
The raft was not in the inventory.
The rope holding it together was not in the inventory.
He tried, briefly, to think a plank into a slot, and the panel did nothing, and he felt stupid, and stopped.
He had the purifier recipe but none of its materials.
He went through the other tabs because they were there.
Raft: Starting Raft.
Tiles: 4 (2 × 2).
Buoyancy: 300 kg.
Stability: Low.
Structures: none.
And a grey line underneath, answering a question he had not asked yet: Tiles cannot be removed below minimum raft size (4).
Map: a black field with a single dot in the middle, a compass rose, a faint arrow pointing a little east of north, and a label.
Calm Drift — Tier 0 — Sector 14.
No coast.
No other dots.
He thought about zooming out and the dot got smaller and nothing else appeared.
Chat was the last tab, and it opened itself before he had properly looked at it.
Text.
A column of it, pouring upward faster than he could read a single line, each line starting with a name in square brackets.
He caught fragments.
Where is everyone.
Is this real.
Three lines in a language he did not know.
MUM ARE YOU THERE.
A line in capitals that was only a name, over and over.
The column did not slow.
He tried to fix on one line and it was gone before he reached the second word.
Thousands of people, by the rate of it.
Nobody could read that.
Nobody could answer it.
He closed the tab.
The panel went with it when he thought it away, and the dark came back, and the sound of water against wood.
He sat with his knees up, because there was nothing to lean against.
He slept badly.
Once he woke with his hand gripping the rope at the edge.
Mostly he watched the moon and counted swells.
He thought of Beth asleep with the landing light on.
The light came from the direction the arrow had pointed, or near it.
First the stars thinned, then the horizon went from guessed to certain, then grey, then a colour.
He watched with the panel closed.
When there was enough light he stood, feet apart, and the raft tilted under him and settled, and he turned round once.
Water.
In every direction, to the horizon, a long low swell that lifted the raft and let it down about every seven seconds.
No land.
No other rafts, though he looked for them and kept looking.
The sky was clean.
The sea was a dark blue that went green where the sun caught the top of a swell.
He could see the current.
He would not have been able to say how, at first.
Then he saw a line of foam ten metres off, a thin scum of bubbles the width of a hand, and it was sliding past him.
Not fast.
Less than walking pace.
Everything on the surface, foam, a leaf of something, the raft itself, was going the same way, a little east of north, and the water underneath was going with it.
The map had told him so with an arrow.
At about half past six by the height of the sun, which was a guess, a plank went by.
He saw it come up on a swell thirty metres off to his left, a grey length of timber lying flat in the water.
A swell hid it.
Then it was twenty metres.
He was on his knees at the edge of the raft before he had decided to be, both arms in the water to the elbow, pulling.
The raft turned a few degrees but did not move sideways.
He pulled harder and got the raft to swing until he faced the plank, and then he had nothing to pull with that would move four square metres of wood through water at any speed a plank could not beat by drifting.
Eight metres.
He could have thrown a rope that far, if he had a rope.
He could have reached it with a pole, a long one.
He could have swum it.
He looked at the water between him and the plank, dark and going down, and did not know how deep it was, or what was in it, or whether the raft would still be within reach when he turned round with a plank under one arm.
He stayed on the raft.
The plank passed at eight metres, parallel, unhurried, on the same current, and he watched it go ahead of him and become a line and then nothing.
He sat back on his heels.
His mouth was dry.
It had been dry since he woke.
He opened the panel, because at least the panel did not move.
[Health 100% | Hunger 82% | Thirst 88% | Stamina 74% | Temperature: Normal]
His Thirst had dropped three points while he sat still in the cool.
The sun was warming his face now.
He needed drinking water, and there was none on the raft.
He leaned over the edge and scooped a handful of the sea, because he had to know, and drank it.
Salt.
Not the salt of a mouthful at the beach when a wave caught you; salt all the way through, thick, with a bitterness behind it.
He spat it over the side and spat again and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
His tongue felt worse than before.
He looked at the panel.
Thirst 88%.