The second purifier’s trough filled first.
It faced the morning sun square while the old one took the light at a slant.
By nine he had two units in the jerrycan and both intakes refilled.
The line yielded two silverfish.
He gutted them and set them beside four dried fish from the Debris Field.
The advisory came while he was kneeling there with fish on his hands.
It did not come through the chat.
It came the way the display-name box had come on the first night, on its own, a line across the top of the panel.
[Weather Advisory — Seabird Waters, Sector 14: Squall expected within 24 hours.
Secure loose items.]
He read it twice.
He looked at the sky, which was blue, with a line of thin cloud in the west that had been there since dawn.
The sea had a swell on it a little longer than yesterday’s, nothing more.
The line stayed at the top of the panel when he changed tabs.
Then the chat went, because the chat always went.
[DELL] Everyone got the weather line?
Everyone.
Sector 3 to sector 20 by the look of it.
Secure loose items.
That’s the System telling you to tie your stuff down.
That is help.
[Saltking] It is not help.
It is information, and information has a source.
If the System can forecast weather it has a weather map.
Note who gets the map first.
[DELL] Saltking, it told ten thousand people to tie their rafts down.
Take the win.
[Saltking] It told ten thousand people the same thing at the same time.
Nobody wins from that.
Somebody will, later.
Watch this handle.
He filtered on squall and got two hundred lines a minute of people asking what a squall was, and cleared it.
He filled the bucket and read the warning again.
Twenty-four hours.
Tomorrow, then, some time before now.
The purifiers and crates were loose.
So were the bottles, bucket, paddle and pole.
The shade was fixed to the raft.
He had two fresh fish and four dried ones that would spoil if they got wet.
The fish first.
He was surprised to find that was the answer, and then he was not.
Everything else on the raft would still be what it was after a wet day, or could be tied so that it was.
The food was the only thing with a clock on it, and the clock ran faster in the wet.
Cook Stand.
Three scrap, two wood.
He had six scrap.
He had held them since the Debris Field, and three of them had been the cook stand’s since the day he had put a drum-plate edge into a raw fish and eaten it anyway.
He laid it out on the tile beside the old purifier.
Two planks, side by side.
Three pieces of scrap on top: the hinge, a bracket, a curl of tin.
Confirm.
The planks stood up, from lying flat to standing on end a hand apart, with nothing holding them, and then the scrap moved.
The hinge and the bracket ran together and drew out into two bars across the top of the uprights, and the tin spread under the bars into a shallow tray, a dish of grey metal a foot off the deck with the bars over it like a grill.
Six or seven minutes.
When it stopped there was a thing on his raft that looked like a barbecue somebody had made in a shed, and the panel said Cook Stand, 100/100, and under that, Fuel: Wood (dry) or Kelp (dried).
Cooked fish: illness risk 2%.
Dry wood.
He had thirteen planks in the slot and every one of them had come out of the sea, and when he held one against the tray the panel said what he thought it would: Salt-soaked.
Dries in 2 days.
He took two planks out, the two that had been out of the water longest, and laid them flat on the deck under the edge of the shade where the sun would get them and the spray would not, and wedged them under the planter’s foot.
Two days.
Thursday’s fuel, if the days had names.
Today’s was in the corner of the storage crate, where he had been putting the peel from every kelp leaf he had stripped since the fishing line, dried to brown paper, because he had not been able to make himself throw away a thing that might burn.
It burned, with a smell like a beach fire and no heat to speak of, and he fed it in handfuls, and the two silverfish went on the bars and spat, and turned white, and were the first hot food he had put in his mouth in seventeen days.
He ate one standing.
The second he ate an hour later, because it would not keep, and the panel said Hunger 71 and nothing beside Conditions.
Scrap, 3.
Wood, 11, two of them drying.
That was the cook stand paid for.
Now the rest.
Rope.
He counted the things that needed tying and got four, two purifiers and two crates, and counted the rope in the slot and got one.
Three cloth to a rope.
He had seven cloth, and the seven were all the tarp there was, and the shade had taken four already.
He cut it with the knife, six strips, and twisted them in the shade of the purifier with his back against the box, two ropes, half an hour, the strips grabbing each other under his thumbs the way cloth did.
Rope, 3.
Cloth, 1.
The one that was left was a piece of tarp the size of a tea towel with an eyelet in one corner, and he held it up against the old purifier’s sheet and it covered most of it, and he put it aside for that.
Three rope for four things, and himself.
Rope was a unit of water, when anyone was selling.
He opened the filter on his own handle to see who was buying water today and found a third of yesterday’s lines, and the ones that were there were people asking what a squall was rather than what he wanted for a unit.
Rain.
Ten thousand people with buckets could wait a day.
Saltking had predicted prices would fall with the first rain.
They fell when it was announced.
He put that on the receipt, in the second column.
Day 17.
Advisory.
Offers down.
[Reeve] Kessler.
Tie each corner twice.
Tie yourself on.
Don’t be clever.
[ChloeB] is anyone else’s raft doing the thing where it goes up at one end more than the other, ours is doing that, Reeve says it’s the swell and it’s fine but it wasn’t doing it yesterday and I’ve tied the tin to my wrist
[Reeve] It’s the swell.
It’s fine.
She’s tied the tin to her wrist.
[Reeve] Rope.
Man two k south of me has some and wants water.
Tell him I sent you.
He’ll want the bottles back.
[ChloeB] sorry.
sorry.
tying things.
He looked for Frey’s people in the regional, the north-edge lot who had been charging tolls, and there was nothing from any of them.
Rope enough, or gone somewhere else, or six rafts tied together did not need to ask anyone anything.
He noted it as a thing he did not know.
The man two kilometres south of Reeve answered in three words.
Adam offered two bottles of water with the containers returned.
Two ropes appeared on the other side of the trade window.
[Barter: Kessler offers Bottle: Water (1 L) ×2 (return containers: yes).
Offers Rope 100/100, Rope 70/100.
Confirm both parties.]
The second rope was frayed at one end.
Adam asked if the man had a better one.
He didn’t.
He confirmed.
The bottles went and the ropes came.
A minute later, both empty bottles came back under Return Container.
One trade.
Rope, 5.
He secured the purifiers first.
One good rope went over both boxes and through the ropes holding the raft together on either side.
He pulled it tight and tied each end twice.
He tied the planter to the raft with one of the new cloth ropes.
That left the storage crate, and the seventy.
The storage crate held five eggs and four dried fish.
Adam kept the two good ropes for himself and a spare.
He tied the crate down with the frayed one.
It felt tight when he pulled it.
The tea-towel of tarp went over the old purifier’s sheet, tied at the eyelet and at two corners with strips of the frayed end he had cut off the seventy to tidy it.
It was not much.
It was the one cover he had, on the one sheet with a number under two hundred.
Bottles.
He poured every one of the ten bottles into the jerrycan, then tied the ten empties together by their necks with a strip off the tarp’s edge and tied the strip to the shade post.
He tied the bucket to the same post, and laid the paddle and pole flat along the deck under the purifiers’ rope.
The line and the knife went in the slot.
The jacket shell he tied round his waist by the sleeves.
The afternoon made what it could, which was less than the morning; the cloud in the west had come over the sun by three and turned the light flat, and the sheets fogged and thinned and fogged.
Three and a half units, perhaps, where the morning had made four.
He drank one, his third of the day, and put the rest in the jerrycan, which took it to Water (10 L) and then took no more, and he stood at dusk with a bottle in his hand that had half a unit in it and nowhere to go.
He drank it.
[Health 96% | Hunger 69% | Thirst 84% | Stamina 48%]
Dark cloud covered the western sky.
Adam checked the ropes holding the purifiers, planter and crate.
Two planks were still drying under the shade edge.
He wedged them between the boards and left them untied.
They would float if water reached them.
He lay down with his back against the planter and the rope for his waist beside him.
After dark, the wind shifted west and turned cold.