He heard it before he opened his eyes: a knock, wood on wood, somewhere off the north edge, and then another, and under both a sound like a very slow tide going through gravel.
The map said it before he had sat up.
Debris Field — Tier 0 — Sector 14.
The arrow pointed north-east.
The dot was where it always was.
Owen’s two bottles came back empty at first light with a note saying the old man had finally slept.
Adam set them with the five full bottles already on the raft and went to the north edge with the pole.
Junk drifted across the water: mats of plastic and bottles, a tangle of rope, a broken piece of white boat hull.
Farther north, the current had piled debris into the wall Reeve had warned him about.
A fridge floated on its back fifty metres away and closing.
South of him the crust thinned to patches.
That was the edge he had paddled for, and he was on it.
He hooked a bracket off a broken shelf at eight in the morning and it went into the slot as Scrap Metal, 3, and he stood on his two metres of bare decking and looked at the number for as long as he had looked at the first one, on the fourth day, and then went back to the edge.
By mid-morning he had worked out a rule: hook what came within three metres and let the rest pass.
A second bracket and two rusted food tins raised Scrap Metal to six.
Five short planks followed, then a crate lid and two pieces the panel called Plastic.
A blue jerrycan floated high on the next swell.
It had a lid.
He hooked it.
[Jerrycan (10 L).
Empty.]
Each 1 L bottle held one unit of Water.
The jerrycan could hold ten litres.
He poured the second and third units into it without having to empty the trough again.
The foam taught him something at noon.
A mat of it, white, the size of a door, came along the working edge at a metre, and he put the pole out to push it off rather than hook it, because foam was nothing, and a swell lifted the mat as the pole touched, and something came up through the foam from underneath.
A sheet of steel, corrugated, brown, one long edge of it as clean as a blade, and it rose through the white like a fin and slid back down as the swell passed, and left a slit in the foam where it had been.
He drew the pole back.
The junk had two layers, and the submerged one carried the weight and sharp edges.
From then on, he lifted each mat with the hook before touching it.
The wood was in a cluster twenty metres north, a raft of planks and part of a pallet held together by rope and weed, and it was not coming to him, and he wanted it.
Twenty metres was ten minutes with the paddle.
He got the paddle.
The blade went in on the third stroke and did not come out.
He felt it catch: not the water’s drag, which he knew now, but a stop, as if he had put the paddle into a hand.
He pulled.
The paddle came up a foot and stopped again, and something rose with it, green and dripping, a mesh he could see now that it was near the surface, fine and square and heavy with weed, and it went down out of sight in every direction.
Net.
Reeve had said nets and Adam had heard the word and not the thing.
The thing was a curtain hung under the whole of this water, and he had put his paddle through it, and the paddle was his only way of moving the raft, and the net was going nowhere.
He pulled harder.
The raft turned around the paddle.
Its edge reached the foam mat with the steel in it, and he stopped pulling.
He lay flat on the decking with his chest over the edge and both hands on the paddle shaft and worked it back the way it had come.
The blade was in the net’s mesh, through it, hooked by its own width.
He could feel the shape of the problem through the wood.
He could not push it back through; the weed had closed on it.
He could not pull it; he had tried that.
He needed to cut, and he had no knife, and he thought about that for perhaps five seconds, and then took the first bracket out of the slot and held it by the screws with its rusted edge outward and sawed.
It took ten minutes.
He counted them, because his arms were going and counting was what he had.
The mesh was nylon, old and slimy, and the bracket’s edge was rust and not a blade, and he had to hold the paddle with one hand against the drag of the net and saw with the other with his face a foot off the water, and the swell put the water over his hands every seven seconds and once over his face.
One strand.
Two.
He worked round the blade in a circle and felt each strand let go as a small drop in the weight.
When the paddle came free it came all at once and he nearly put it in the sea and did not, and lay on the decking with it under him, and the raft swung slowly back the way it had been.
[Stamina 18%]
[Wooden Paddle 90/100.]
Red.
He had not seen red since the drum.
He put the bracket back in the slot with the weed still on it and lay there, and the wood he had wanted went past on his left at twenty metres and he watched it go.
He would work the edge.
The net had held his paddle for ten minutes; next time it might keep it.
Anything beyond the pole’s reach could pass.
He filled the intake at dusk with his arms not his and the jerrycan a third full, and lay down on the old side, and the knocking went on all night, wood on wood, plastic on wood, somewhere off the north edge in the dark.
The second day was slow, and he made it slow.
He hooked from the working edge and nothing else.
A cupboard door passed in the morning with its hinge still attached and wire wrapped around it.
He pulled both loose.
The Scrap Metal count reached eight.
He could now afford a second purifier and a Cook Stand.
A tarpaulin, blue, most of one, came along the edge half sunk and heavier than the pallet had been, and he got it over the tile in ten minutes of hauling and stood dripping over it.
[Tarpaulin (torn): 6 Cloth Scrap.
15 min.
Requires: hands or tool.]
He had no tool.
He tore it with his hands along its own tears and it went, strip by strip, six of them, and left a ragged remainder the size of a bath towel that the panel did not count and he kept anyway, because it was the first thing he had had since the second day that would go over a box in the rain.
Four planks.
Then the fridge.
The fridge reached the working edge in the early afternoon, grey with age and black weed around its seal.
Adam hooked the handle, pulled it against the tile and levered the door open.
The shelves were empty.
A rusted kitchen knife lay in the bottom door pocket.
As he reached, a swell dropped the raft while the fridge stayed high.
The steel edge came down across his palm.
Not deep.
A line, from the base of the fingers to the heel of the hand, that was white and then red and then running.
He held it shut with his other hand and looked at the panel because that was the order things happened in now.
[Health 92%.
Condition: Laceration (left hand).]
He took the knife out of the door with the hand that was not cut.
[Knife.
Tool.
60/100.
Rusted.]
Sixty.
He turned it over.
The edge was brown but there was an edge, and he would have given the whole of yesterday’s haul to have had it yesterday, and he did not let himself dwell on that.
He put it in the slot.
He looked at the fridge’s back, where the compressor was, black and heavy and worth scrap by anyone’s arithmetic, and it was a foot under the water and there was net wound round it, green, the same mesh, and he pushed the fridge off the edge with the pole and let it go.
Then he did what he had agreed to do.
[Kessler] Tessa_M.
Cut palm on a fridge door.
Clean-edged, not deep, bleeding.
Not red yet.
Two water for one antiseptic, as agreed.
[Tessa_M] Bottles.
I’ve two empties, I’ll send them with it.
Rinse it in clean water first, then the antiseptic, then keep it out of the sea for a day.
Don’t fish with it.
The window opened.
His side: two full 1 L bottles of Water.
Hers: Antiseptic ×1, Empty Bottle (1 L) ×2.
Adam left Return Container unchecked; his two bottles went to Tessa with the Water, and her two empties came to him.
He confirmed with his good hand.
A small brown glass bottle with a dropper cap sat on the tile in front of him, and Tessa’s two empty bottles beside it.
A second window opened before he had picked it up, hers, with a rolled bandage on her side and nothing on his.
[Tessa_M] That one’s free.
Don’t tell anyone.
Wrap it, not tight.
[Barter: 2/5 today.]
He rinsed the cut with a third of a unit, added four drops of antiseptic and wrapped it loosely.
[Laceration (palm): clean.]
Regional was talking about the north bank when he opened it.
Three handles in an hour had said the same thing in different words: six rafts tied in a line along the wall, working it with a net on a pole, and anyone who drifted into their stretch was told what it would cost to drift out.
A tarp.
A paddle.
A day’s fish.
One woman had paid.
One man had paddled and was not sure he had got clear yet.
[Reeve] Stay south, lad.
They’ll not row for one raft with nothing on it but a box.
[Kessler] South edge is quiet.
Nets under everything.
If you’re coming, don’t paddle in it.
The bandage kept his cut palm covered while he watched the debris bank.
The rafts charging a toll stayed out of sight.