By mid-morning the sun had heated the back of his neck and he put the jacket back on the wrong way round, arms through the sleeves, hood up over his face, the quilted lining outward.
It was hotter inside it and better.
The light off the water came from every direction, and with the hood pulled forward he could look at the panel without squinting through it.
He had been on the raft ten hours.
He had eaten nothing, drunk nothing that counted, and moved the raft perhaps two degrees.
The foam line was still sliding past on his left at the same unhurried pace.He opened Chat again.
Someone there might know how to find water.Messages moved too quickly to read.
Adam watched for repeated words and found the same instruction under several names: type /filter, then a word, to show only messages containing it.
He thought /filter water at the panel.
The column did not slow.
Every second line had water in it.
He thought /filter purifier, and the flood stopped as if a door had shut, and what was left came at a pace he could read.Forty-one messages about purifiers arrived in the first minute.
Most asked how to get one.
Two people had a blueprint but no Wood to build it.
A third claimed his neighbour had already built one.
Adam could not tell whether that was true.
Nobody was selling anything.
Nobody could.
[DELL] Everyone begging for a purifier: there is NO trade tab.
I’ve looked.
Physical handover only.
Stop typing and start looking at what’s floating past you.
[DELL] Gift box was a steel spear, Tier 1 on the label.
If anything in this water has teeth it’s getting introduced.
[Saltking] Wood is the only thing out here that floats, stacks, and everyone needs.
Accumulate now.
The day a market opens, wood prices will
[Saltking] go one way.
Remember who told you.
Prices of what?
There was nothing to buy with.
Saltking sounded like the market emails Adam used to get at work: sure of the trend, vague about when it would arrive.
DELL had at least checked for a Trade tab before telling everyone there wasn’t one.
He tried /filter Sector 14 and got a hundred people saying where they were, which told him nothing about where that was.
He cleared the filter and closed the tab.The purifier was the only recipe on his list that made drinking water.
It needed five Wood, two Scrap Metal and one Rope.
Before he could gather any of that from beyond arm’s reach, he needed a hook pole.
He looked at his sleeves for cloth he could turn into Rope.
The slick came in the early afternoon.
He saw it first as a change in the texture of the water, off to his right and ahead, a long patch where the swell went flat and oily and the light lay on it differently.
Things sat in it.
He could not see what things.
It was fifty metres off, he guessed, and the current was carrying it and him in the same direction, and the gap was closing, but slowly, the way two lorries in adjacent lanes closed on each other at four miles an hour.
It would pass at fifteen or twenty metres.
Like the plank.
Everything was going to pass at fifteen or twenty metres.
He took the jacket off, lay flat on his stomach at the front right corner of the raft with his chest over the edge, put both arms in the water to the shoulder, and pulled.
Paddling with his hands barely moved the raft sideways.
He kept his eyes on a white shape in the slick and pulled through the water until it came closer.
After five minutes his shoulders burned.
After ten he had to stop and lie on the wet planks to catch his breath.
The white shape was still closer when he lifted his head.
He paddled again.
He stopped counting minutes after the first ten.
He knew what it cost, because when he finally hauled himself up on his knees at the edge of the slick, he opened the panel and looked.
[Stamina 25%]
The number was in a colour it had not been before, an orange that did not quite belong on the panel, and he could feel what it meant: his arms were not entirely his, and when he sat up the raft’s small movement was enough to make him put a hand down.
The slick was full of rubbish and none of it was his.
A tangle of something green, netting or weed, ten metres in and going away.
A container lid.
A bottle, a second bottle beyond it, a coil that might have been cable.
The white thing he had steered by was a length of foam sheet he had no use for.
Most of it was passing.
He picked the three things nearest and got them, one at a time, by lying flat again and reaching, and by lying flat with his arm in to the shoulder and waiting for the swell to bring the thing up to his hand.
A plank.
Grey, a metre and a half, with a rusted nail hole at one end, heavier than it looked.
A clear plastic bottle, a litre, label gone, cap still on, empty except for a finger of water in the bottom that he did not trust.
And a rag, a strip of blue towelling the length of his forearm, that had wrapped itself round the bottle and came up with it.
He sat with the three of them in his lap and looked at the rest of the slick going past, the second bottle, the coil, and the cost of them, and let them go.
The plank first.
He held it across his knees and thought it into the panel the way he had thought his name in, and the plank was not across his knees.
Slot one held a small drawing of a plank and a number: Wood, 1.
The weight line at the bottom had moved off zero.
He thought it back out.
It returned to his hands, wet, with the nail hole.
He put it back in.
The bottle he kept out.
Empty Bottle (1 L), the panel said when he asked, and then, when he unscrewed the cap, tipped out the finger of old water, and filled it over the side: Bottle: Seawater (1 L).
The label identified its contents.
He looked at the label for a while.
Then he screwed the cap on and set the bottle upright in the sun in the corner of the raft, because the recipe had said sunlight and seawater and he wanted to see, before he spent five wood and two scrap on the question, whether sunlight and seawater in a bottle did anything on their own.
The rag he wrung out and laid flat on the planks beside the bottle to dry.He lay down with the jacket over his face until his arms stopped shaking.
By late afternoon the slick was a smear behind him and the water had gone back to its long clean swell.
He sat up and checked.
Stamina 38%.
The bottle in the corner was warm to the touch and the panel still said Seawater.
He tipped it, looked at the surface of the water inside it, and saw nothing on the inside of the plastic that looked like anything.
He had not really expected it to.
He put it back in the sun anyway.
It was not costing him anything to be wrong for another two hours.
Thirst 71%.
His Thirst had fallen from eighty-eight at dawn to seventy-one.
If it kept falling this quickly, he had less than a week to make clean water.
Drinking seawater had not improved the reading.Hunger was seventy-four.
He needed drinking water first.
He needed reach.
Two wood for the pole and three cloth for its rope.
He had one plank, a rag drying on the raft, a lining stitched into his jacket and a T-shirt on his back.
The sun went down on the left of the direction he was going, red, taking a long time, and the water went from blue to a grey that had no colour in it, and then the cold came.
He had not thought about the cold.
The water had been warm all day and the air had been a punishment, and it took him until the light was almost gone to understand that the planks under him were wet and the wind across the swell had a bite in it now and his T-shirt was damp with the sea from the afternoon.
He got the jacket on properly, zipped it to the chin, pulled the hood up and the cuffs down over his hands, and sat with his back curved and his knees inside the jacket as far as they would go.
The lining was a thin quilted thing, cheap, the kind of jacket a distribution centre gave you at the start of a contract.
It was the only warm object within, as far as he knew, the whole of the world.
The panel, when he checked, had put an arrow next to Temperature and the word had changed.
Cold.
He was not going to argue with it.
He slept in pieces.
Each time the raft tilted, he woke gripping the rope.
A swell soaked his boots through.
The moon lit the sea flat silver.
He thought about the plank in his inventory and the hours it had cost him.
If the slick came back, he would paddle again.
Sometime after the moon had passed overhead he checked his condition.
[Health 100% | Hunger 74% | Thirst 66% | Stamina 41% | Temperature: Cold ↓]
He closed the panel and put his hands back inside the jacket.
The raft lifted and dropped.
The bottle of seawater remained in the corner.