He woke with a dry mouth and an ache behind his eyes.
The rope tied beside his face blurred when he tried to count its turns.
[Thirst 42%]
He closed the readout.
Thirst was falling quickly, and he still had no drinking water.
The sun came up on the right.
He picked up the pole.
More debris passed the raft that morning, though most of it was too far away.
He lost his balance trying to hook a plank four metres out.
The next came within three metres, and he caught it by lowering the hook before it passed.
He caught another an hour later.
By the time the sun was overhead the slot said Wood, 7.
Four new planks, one of them a decent length of two-by-four with a bracket still screwed to one end, a right-angle of galvanised steel that had gone brown at the edges.
He prised it off with his fingers and the bracket came away with the screws still in it and he held it in his palm and looked at the panel.
Scrap Metal, 1.
He still needed one more piece for the purifier.
A blue corner of tarpaulin, torn on two sides with one eyelet, became three Cloth Scrap: one rope.
A dented green bottle with its cap on became his second container.
He twisted the rope at midday, sitting in the shade of nothing with the blue cloth torn into three strips across his knees.
His fingers cramped before he had gone a metre.
Not tired; cramped, the tendons in the back of his hand locking so that he had to stop and open the hand against his thigh and wait.
He did not know if that was the sun or the thirst.
He thought it was the thirst.
The rope knitted under his thumbs the same as yesterday, the strips finding each other, and it took longer than fifteen minutes because of the hands, and when it was done the panel said Rope, 1.
He opened Chat and filtered on scrap.
[DELL] Scrap: drum rims, barrel hoops, brackets off pallets, tins, wire.
Rust-brown and floating high = an empty drum.
Get a pole.
Stop asking me for the spear.
[Saltking] Scrap is the bottleneck in every recipe I have seen posted.
Whoever holds scrap when trade opens sets the price.
Position accordingly.
[Marnie_K] thirst 9.
sector 14.
is anyone near.
anything at all
[Marnie_K] sorry.
i know nobody can
He read the last two lines twice.
Sector 14 was tens of kilometres across.
He did not know where she was in it and could not have moved a hundred metres toward her if he had.
He closed the tab, and the two lines stayed in his head anyway, because they were also a number.
Nine.
He was at forty-two, and he had the sun on his neck for another six hours.
The drum came in the late afternoon.
He saw it from a long way off because it was the only thing on the water that stood up.
A steel drum, the kind chemicals came in, lying on its side and riding high, a third of it out of the water and turning slowly as it came.
Brown all over.
Dented in at one end.
Empty, then, and sealed, or it would not have floated like that.
It was on a line that would bring it past his left edge at a distance he could not judge, and he stood there with the pole and did not breathe properly until it was close enough to see that the line was two metres, maybe less.
He hooked the drum’s rim at the first try.
The hook slid, caught in a dent and held.
He pulled until the drum bumped against the raft.
It started to roll away, so he dropped the pole and held the drum with both arms while it floated against the edge.
The panel had a line for it.
[Rusted Drum: 4 Scrap Metal.
45 min.
Requires: hands or tool.]
The drum held enough metal to build the purifier.
He had perhaps two hours of light.
The rusted rim would cut his hands, but he could not leave the drum against the raft overnight and wait for his thirst to fall further.
He got the drum half up on to the raft, the dented end on the planks and the rest in the water, and wedged it there with his knees, and confirmed, and started.
He pried at the rusted rim.
It cut the base of his thumb before it came free.
The metal softened in his hands and vanished.
The panel said Scrap Metal, 2.
He did not stop.
The drum’s thin body had cracked around a dent.
He bent the damaged section with his hands and boot until it tore free and cut the back of his hand.
He dipped the hand in the sea, then kept working.
Scrap Metal, 3.
The second end was stronger.
He pulled the drum onto the raft and stamped at the seam until it broke.
Scrap Metal, 4.
He tore another strip from the body.
The remaining piece fell into the water.
Scrap Metal, 5.
He sat with his palms up.
Four cuts, two still bleeding.
His fingers would not straighten properly.
The panel showed Health 96% and Stamina 15% in red.
He chose the wettest tile and laid out five of his seven planks, two scrap and the rope.
The purifier line in Crafting was lit.
He confirmed it.
It took the planks first.
They drew together edge to edge and the gaps between them closed as the wood found itself, and then they rose, four of them standing up into walls while the fifth lay flat and became a floor, and the walls met at the corners and the rope went round the top edge in a run of tight turns and held them.
The steel went in.
It softened and spread inside the box like something poured, and lined the floor and the lower walls in a dull grey skin that was not rust any more, and dished, in the centre, into a basin.
Then a thing he had not put down happened.
Over the top of the box a sheet formed, clear, sloping from the back edge to the front, the way a lean-to roof sloped, and it was plastic or something like it, and it had come from nowhere he could see.
Along the front, where the low edge of the sheet ended, a lip appeared in the wood, a narrow trough running the width of the box with a spout at one end.
At the back, a second trough, wider and open, with no cover.
It stopped.
It stood on his raft in the dusk, a squat wooden thing knee high and a metre square, with a clear sloped lid and a grey basin under it and two troughs, and the panel said:
[Basic Water Purifier.
200/200.
Intake: seawater, ~5 L per unit.
Output: 1 unit clean water per ~2 hours of sunlight.
Collects in the output basin; decant to avoid overflow.]
He read it three times, because of the headache and because he wanted to.
Sunlight.
There was none.
The sun was a red line on his left, going, and the clear sheet over the box had the last of it in a smear and then did not.
He put his hand flat on the sheet.
It was cool.
Nothing was happening under it and nothing would, until morning.
Five litres per unit.
He had two bottles, one of them full of the sea already.
He poured it into the open trough at the back, and it went where he could not see, under the basin, and the trough was empty again.
He filled the bottle over the side, poured it in.
Again.
The green bottle, twice.
Five trips, five litres, his hands leaving smears of blood and rust on both bottles and on the lip of the trough, and at the end of it the intake gave a small sound, a settling, and the panel put a word next to the purifier’s name.
Ready.
He lay down beside it on the planks, in the shell of the jacket, and put his cut hand on the wooden side of the box, and felt the raft go up and down under both of them.
[Thirst 31%]
The purifier needed sunlight.
He would not have drinking water until morning.