He paid Owen before he had drunk anything himself, because the old man had been up before him and had said so.
Two bottles on his side of the window, full from last night.
Nothing on Owen’s; the seeds were paid for and the bottles from yesterday had come back empty at dusk.
Owen confirmed, Adam confirmed, and he was holding nothing, and a line came up under his name in global that ran to two lines and thanked him and told him a shoe made a poor cup but a fair one if you held it right.
[Barter: 1/5 today.]
That left him one full bottle and four empty clean bottles on the raft; the other two full bottles were with Owen.
The box would make six by dark, and the receipt was still there.
He read the receipt in the first light with the intake filling.
Bucket, crossed through.
Bottles, crossed through, though not with much conviction.
Scrap.
Rope.
Food.
Planter, underlined, from yesterday.
Then the line, and under the line, water, and yesterday’s tally beside it: sold 5, kept 3.
The top of the list was two pieces of brown drum steel that had sat in a slot for a week while everything else on the raft changed.
Five wood, two scrap, one rope.
He had seventeen wood and three rope.
He had two scrap and needed four.
He had known that every night for a week and had not been able to do anything about it, and this morning he had a column of people who wanted to sell him things, so he filtered on scrap and went looking.
There were sixty lines.
He read every one.
Nobody in Sector 14 was selling scrap at any price.
Every Sector 14 line was somebody asking, the way he was asking, and most of them said what for: a hook, a cook stand, a hinge for something they did not describe.
Two sectors over, a man had six pieces and wanted three units a piece and said so in a tone that suggested he had said it before.
Another, further off, wanted four.
A third offered a swap, scrap for rope, one for one, and had forty replies under him and no scrap left by the time Adam reached the bottom of them.
He wrote to the three-unit man because three was the lowest number on the page.
[Kessler] 2 scrap.
2 water each.
I’ve bottles.
Today.
[Saltking] Kessler, the price of scrap is not a negotiation.
Scrap is the input under every recipe that matters.
Whoever holds it holds the market.
I said so on Day 3.
He had not written to Saltking.
Saltking had simply been there, under the word, the way he was under every word that had a price in it.
The three-unit man wrote back a minute later: 3, mate, I’m not moving, everyone needs it for hooks and stands and hinges, you know that or you wouldn’t be asking.
He did know that.
Three units a piece was six for the pair, and six was a day’s output, and he had a day’s output every day.
He could pay it tomorrow, and the day after have the second box and twelve units a day instead of six, and the six he had spent would be back in his bottles by the end of the week.
He did not buy.
Six units was eighteen wood at the price he sold at, or six rope.
It was the whole of what he could sell in a day, in a window that let him make five trades and no more, and the man wanted it in one go.
Adam had five clean bottles on the raft and two full ones with Owen in Leeds.
He could not ship six units today if he wanted to.
And scrap did not rot.
Scrap floated past, brown and high in the water, and last week he had torn four pieces out of a drum with his hands.
He needed a drum, not a broker.
The map had something to say about that.
He had not opened it in days because it never said anything, and he opened it now to see where north-east had gone, and the arrow had moved.
Not much.
It had pointed a little east of north for eleven days, and this morning it pointed more east than north, and the dot that was him sat where it always sat, and the label said Seabird Waters — Tier 0 — Sector 14, and nothing else.
Regional had more.
[Kessler] Anyone in 14 bought scrap this week?
Anyone seen any floating?
[Reeve] Nobody’s selling it, lad.
Everyone’s one short of something.
[Reeve] Current’s turning.
There’s a junk field north-east, two days off, maybe less.
Been through one on Day 5.
Junk for miles.
Nets under it.
Mind your paddle.
[Reeve] Frey’s lot are heading for it and all.
Six rafts lashed, a big net, a foreman’s voice.
Don’t drift into their patch.
[Kessler] Who’s Frey?
[Reeve] Scaffolder.
Birmingham.
Talks like he’s already in charge of you.
That’s all I know and it’s enough.
[ChloeB] we’re about 3k west of you now Reeve says, going the same way but slower because of my raft sorry.
the field sounds horrible.
is that where you get scrap?
He told her yes, that was where you got scrap, and closed the tab, and looked north-east, where there was nothing yet but water.
A junk field.
He did not know what one looked like and Reeve had told him the two things that mattered: nets under it, and other people on it.
The nets were a problem for the paddle.
The people were a problem he did not have a tool for.
He could not steer clear of it.
The current had him for two more days, and forty minutes with the paddle moved him a hundred and fifty metres against a line and cost him half his Stamina.
A field that was miles across did not care about a hundred and fifty metres.
A field had edges.
He could choose which one reached him.
First, the raft needed room to work.
Two tiles needed eight wood and two rope.
He laid out the first four planks along the north edge, added the rope, and confirmed.
He had built a purifier and a crate and a pole, and he had not seen a tile made, and it was different.
The four planks did not draw together into a box.
They lay flat and drew outward, edge to edge, into a square of decking, and the rope ran itself along the join between the new square and the old in a run of tight turns, and then went under, and he felt the raft take the weight.
Not a jolt.
A settling, the way a lorry settled on its springs when the last pallet went on.
The new square sat a finger lower than the old for a moment and then they were level, and the gap he had been able to get a finger into on the first night was not there.
[Raft Tile attached.
Starting Raft.
Tiles: 5.
Buoyancy: 375 kg.]
The second went beside it.
Six tiles, three by two, with the purifier and crate on the old side and two metres of bare planking on the new.
Four hundred and fifty kilograms.
The deck barely tilted under his weight.
[Starting Raft.
Tiles: 6 (3 × 2).
Buoyancy: 450 kg.
Stability: Low.
Structures: Basic Water Purifier, Storage Crate.]
Low.
Still low.
He moved the crate.
It was the only thing on the raft that would move, and he put it beside the purifier on the old side, the side away from the new decking, so that the two metres of bare tile between the junk and the box would be a working edge and nothing else.
Whatever came over that edge with a net on it or a point on it would have two metres to cross before it reached anything he could not replace.
He could not lash it down; he had no rope to spare, and he wrote that on the receipt: rope, again, underlined.
Nine wood.
One rope.
One cloth, which was a third of a rope and no use.
In the afternoon, he traded two Water, each in its own full 1 L bottle, for a rope and three planks.
He checked Return Container.
The same two bottles came back empty with the goods, and the man wrote that was all his wood.
Adam believed him.
Two trades.
Twelve wood.
Two rope.
He had thought about selling a third Water and did not; tomorrow he wanted to arrive at the field with all five bottles on his raft full and his Stamina in the bank.
The kelp came at four, a mat the size of a car roof going past the new edge at three metres, and he took six lengths of it over the tile with the pole because rope was the shortage and dried kelp was rope.
He spread it along the new decking to catch tomorrow’s sun, and the panel said Kelp, 6, and the Hook Pole said 88.
Two days, if the sun held.
He did not think about it more than that.
Then he did the thing he had put down earlier.
He filtered regional on field and read for ten minutes.
There were a dozen people in it or near it, and they did not agree about much, but they agreed about the shape: thick to the north, where the current piled everything into a long bank, and thinner to the south, where it spread out into mats and gaps.
The people who said toll and net and six rafts were all on the north side.
The people who said quiet and slow and not much here were on the south.
He could not stay out of it.
He could pick which edge.
He got the paddle.
The sun was two hours off the water and the current was taking him a little east of north, and he wanted to be south of the line he was on when the junk arrived, so he knelt on the south-east corner and put the blade in and paddled four strokes on one side and three on the other because the nose still swung, and the raft, which had been four tiles when he learned that and was six now, was heavier than it had been and moved less for each stroke and kept moving longer after he stopped.
Forty minutes.
He did not count strokes.
He counted swells and the angle of the sun off the paddle blade, and when he stopped, the foam line that had been on his left was still on his left and further off, and the box behind him had made its last unit, and the panel said what it always said after forty minutes.
[Stamina 34%]
[Wooden Paddle 94/100.]
He stopped paddling when his arms began to shake.
The foam line was farther north than it had been.
He had moved away from the rafts guarding the debris bank.