There was no sunrise.
In the grey light, he tied a rope around his waist and to the raft beside the planter.
Then he held the rope securing the purifiers and looked west.
The cloud came all the way down.
There was no line between it and the water, only a place where the grey got darker and had a texture, like rain seen from a bus.
It was a few kilometres off.
The swell was coming from it in long backs that lifted the raft slowly and set it down, and the tops of them had begun to break, not much, a line of white that formed and went.
The sheets had made almost nothing.
He tipped the old box and got a unit from the two troughs together, and put it in one of the ten bottles, because the jerrycan was full.
He tied it back into the bundle at the shade post: one full bottle and nine empty ones.
Then he filled the intakes anyway, because a full intake was weight, and went and sat with his back against the planter and his hand on its rope and waited for the thing to arrive.
[Reeve] Here it is.
Sit down.
[ChloeB] sitting.
tin’s on my wrist.
Reeve’s got the oars tied to him and the raft tied to his raft and I’ve counted the knots four times
[Reeve] Off.
The wind came first, ahead of the rain by a minute, and it was not like the wind he knew.
It came across the water flat and the water went dark under it in a line that ran at him, and when the line reached the raft the shade filled like a sail and the whole deck leaned.
He had his hand through the planter rope.
He heard the bottles go against the post.
Then the rain hit, and it was not drops; it was the sea thrown at him sideways, and it was fresh, and it was cold, and he could not see the far end of his own raft.
Two hours, it turned out to be.
He did not know that while it was happening.
While it was happening there was no time in it, only the raft going up the front of a wave, hanging, and coming down the back of it with the deck at an angle he had not thought the deck could make, and the sea coming over the low corner every third or fourth wave in a sheet that ran the length of the planks and out the other side.
The waves were not tall.
He could see over them when the raft was on top of one.
A metre and a half, perhaps, from the trough to the white.
It was enough.
A metre and a half was the height of a man lying on his side, and the raft went over every one of them like a door in a gale.
The cover went in the first ten minutes.
He watched it go.
The eyelet held; the two corners he had tied with strips off the frayed end of the seventy did not, and the tarp stood up off the old purifier’s sheet like a flag and beat itself against the box, and then the eyelet strip parted too and the whole thing went over the side and was gone into the grey as if it had never been cloth at all.
He stayed on the deck.
The shade sagged in the middle under the rain until it was a shallow bowl, with a stream running from its low edge.
The bucket was under the post.
Adam got to it on his knees, dragged it beneath the stream and wedged it with the paddle.
Waves kept washing across the deck and sloshing water out of it.
By the time the rain eased, the bucket held a little over three litres.
He stayed beside it with an arm through the purifier rope.
His jerrycan was full, and the ten-bottle bundle knocked against the post.
The planks went at about the same time and he saw only the end of it.
The raft came down off a wave with its low corner first and the whole deck ran like a tipped tray, and the two planks he had left to dry, wedged under the planter’s foot, came out from under it as the planter lifted on its rope, and went across the deck flat and fast in the wash.
One went straight over the side.
The other hit the old purifier’s box end-on, rode up the side of it on the wave that was following, and went through the sheet.
He heard it.
A sound like a bag tearing, through the noise of everything else.
The plank hung there a moment with its end inside the box and then the next wave took it out and away, and the sheet was two flaps, and the rain was going into the basin.
[Basic Water Purifier 140/200.
Sheet torn.
Output halved until repaired.
Repair: 1 Plastic.]
He had three Plastic, enough for the repair.
He could do it after the storm.
A steep wave struck the raft.
Something cracked to his left.
The storage crate slid across the tilted deck, its rope broken at the frayed end.
The crate hit the planter.
The planter’s rope held; the planter tipped, its weight going over on to one edge against the crate, and the kelp in it shifted with a wet noise and he saw the rotted mass lean toward the edge of the box, and the four seeds in it that he could not see.
He had one arm and about a second.
He caught the planter and pushed it upright.
Behind him, the crate scraped over the edge.
By the time he turned, it was gone.
The crate had carried five eggs, four dried fish and the handful of feathers.
The tile the crate had stood on was doing something.
He could feel it through his knees: it went up when the rest went up, and then it went up a little more, a finger’s width, and came down a finger’s width late, and he did not know what that meant except that it had not done it yesterday and the crate had gone over that edge with a lot of weight behind it.
He held on through the next wave with his arms around the planter.
[ChloeB] the rope between our rafts snapped we’re separated
He read it at some point in the second hour.
He did not know when she had sent it.
He read it three times and looked west, where there was nothing, grey, rain, the top of a wave, and looked at the line again.
[Kessler] Reeve.
Where are you.
[Kessler] Chloe.
Neither answered.
Other people reported lost bottles and torn shade.
He watched the water to the west.
Chloe and Reeve had been three kilometres away that morning.
He could not reach them in this weather.
Forty minutes, as near as he could count it, with the panel opened and closed and opened.
Then the rain thinned.
The rain did not stop at once.
It thinned from a wall to a curtain, and the cloud lifted enough to show the horizon.
The wind eased, but the swell remained.
He waited until the deck stopped tipping before he got up.
[Reeve] Rowing.
Can’t see her.
She went downwind of me.
Anyone east of me with eyes, look for a four-tile raft, girl in a green top.
[Reeve] Kessler, shut up, I’ll tell you when.
He untied the lifeline and poured one litre from the bucket into each of two empty bottles.
A little over a litre remained, which he drank while he checked the raft.
The bucket was empty.
The tether had snapped at the post, and the bundle broke apart when the next wave washed over the deck.
One full bottle had slipped out of its loop, and three empty ones were gone over the side; six bottles remained, two now full from the rain bucket and four empty.
The new purifier and planter were still tied down, but the old purifier’s sheet was torn.
The storage crate and the food inside it were gone.
He put a hand on the corner tile.
The next swell lifted it slightly out of line with its neighbours before it settled again.
He was too exhausted to repair it now.
[Health 90% | Hunger 55% | Thirst 78% | Stamina 12% | Conditions: none]
Bruises rose along his ribs and both knees.
He sat against the new purifier with the rope in his lap.
The sky remained cloudy, and the corner tile shifted under each swell.
[Reeve] Got her.
Two k east of where I started.
Raft’s whole, she’s whole, she’s talking.
Tin’s still on her wrist.
[Reeve] Tied the rafts together again.
Properly this time.
Kessler, you there.
[Kessler] Here.
Lost the crate.
Old purifier’s torn.
Everything else held.
[Reeve] Then you did alright, lad.
Tomorrow.
Adam closed Chat.
The corner tile shifted under the next swell.
He held the rope across his lap and stayed beside the planter.