A bird woke him.
Not the sound of it; the shadow, crossing his face and gone, and then another, and he opened his eyes to a sky that had things in it.
He sat up.
Thirty or forty of them, white, narrow-winged, high up and turning in a loose wheel that drifted the way everything drifted.
While he watched, one folded and dropped, straight down, and hit the water fifty metres off with a sound like a slap and came up with something in its beak.
Then two more did it.
The sea under them was moving in a way he had not seen it move, a shiver of small bright shapes just under the surface, and the birds were taking them out of it.
He had not seen a living thing that was not him in five days, apart from fish on the end of a line and weed.
He opened the Map.
The region name had changed.
Seabird Waters — Tier 0 — Sector 14.
The dot, compass and current arrow were where they had been yesterday.
He must have crossed into another region during the night.
The water looked no different.
[Health 98% | Hunger 50% | Thirst 70% | Stamina 78%]
He drank one of the full bottles, set it beneath the spout and filled the intake.
Five trips, kneeling and standing.
He took yesterday’s fish from the inventory.
One had gone soft and smelled bad.
He threw it over the side, and a bird caught it before it sank.
He gutted the other with the drum plate and ate it on the edge of the raft.
His Hunger improved by eight points; no illness appeared under Conditions.
He lowered the bright hook beneath the diving birds.
The take came in less than a minute.
He had not got the line to the bottom of its coil before it went sideways in his hand, and the fish that came up was the same silver thing as yesterday and there had been no waiting for it.
He got the hook out, put the fish in the panel, dropped the hook, and the line went sideways again while the first fish was still cold on his fingers.
Three in half an hour.
He stopped after the fifth because a slot was a slot and the fish would not keep, and because the birds had moved off along the surface of the shiver and taken it with them, and the water under the raft went back to being blue and empty.
Fish, 6.
He opened the Cook Stand recipe.
It needed three Scrap Metal and two Wood.
He only had two Scrap, so he closed it.
Cooking would have made the fish safer to eat.
He tried drying two fish instead.
Kelp had dried on the purifier’s back wall.
He gutted the fish, opened them along the spine and laid them skin down on the warm wood, clear of the purifier’s sheet.
He had no salt and did not know how long they would take.
At midday he ate another fish raw.
The others were going soft, and he was hungry.
The illness check came up clean.
He could not keep eating raw fish without eventually getting sick, but he still had no way to cook them.
The bucket came in the early afternoon.
It was a dented builder’s bucket, white with a blue rim and no handle.
He reached it with the pole at three metres, but the hook slid across the smooth plastic.
The bucket rolled and began to drift away.
Adam leaned out, caught the hook beneath the damaged part of the rim and pulled.
Water filled the bucket as it tipped.
The weight dragged the pole down, and its wooden shaft struck the raft’s edge.
He braced one boot against a tile and hauled the bucket aboard before the hook slipped again.
The full bucket held ten litres, too heavy for him to raise to the intake.
He tipped half out and poured the rest in.
He had been making the same trip with a bottle again and again; now he could fill the purifier from a single bucket.
The impact had cut a shallow mark in the pole, but the wood had not split.
He set the bucket by the bottles and crossed it off the wanted list on his receipt.
While the purifier worked, he opened Chat and filtered on Tier 1, a label he had seen but did not understand.
[DELL] Tier 1 edge, two sectors over.
Speared something with teeth this morning.
Two metres, grey, came up under the raft and bit the tile.
Spear in behind the head.
It is dead and I am not.
[DELL] Point being: it came UP.
Under the raft.
If your map shows a dotted line, that’s what’s on the other side of it.
[Saltking] Confirmed via three sources: Tier 1 is where the real loot is.
Higher-tier materials, fish, cores.
I will be publishing routes and safe crossings from this handle.
Serious operators only.
[Saltking] If you are still fishing for silverfish in Tier 0 on Day 6, you are already behind.
He read DELL’s warning twice.
Something two metres long had bitten a raft tile; DELL had killed it with his spear.
Saltking was already trying to sell routes.
Adam closed the tab and returned to fishing.
The wood came through the afternoon, in the way it did now.
A plank at three metres.
A broken length of decking, grey and split, that he got on the second reach.
A round fence post that turned on the hook and nearly went under before he had it.
Wood, 5.
The pole had a score where it had struck the raft as he hauled in the bucket.
The kelp was ready.
He had turned it that morning and by mid-afternoon the two lengths were brown right through and stiff as belt leather and crackled when he bent them.
He split them along the spine as he had done with the fresh.
The pale dry fibre came away in two strands from each leaf, four in all.
He sat on the planks with them across his knee and twisted.
The dry fibre stayed twisted.
Fifteen minutes later he had two metres of rope and the panel said Rope, 1.
Durability: 100/100.
He opened the Raft Tile recipe, then closed it.
He had enough Wood and Rope, but this was his first strong rope.
He kept it for the raft’s ties or another purifier.
The birds came back through in the last of the light, low over the water and moving fast, and the shiver came under the raft with them for ten minutes, and he had the hook in and one more fish on the planks before it had gone.
He ate one of the morning’s at dusk, standing up, and left the other with the new one in the slot, two raw fish that would be fine tomorrow and not the day after.
The two on the purifier’s back wall had gone leathery at the edges and were still soft along the spine.
Not dried.
Not what they had been that morning, either.
When he touched one the panel said Silverfish (Part-dried) and did not say anything about a day, and he turned them over and left them for the morning sun.
After the last pass, the loose wheel tightened and streamed low over the water, north-east along the current arrow.
Adam stood.
A pale smudge broke the horizon, flat-topped and white, with a moving haze above it.
A kilometre, he guessed, and had nothing to guess with.
It sat a little to the right of the arrow’s line.
The foam went past him toward it.
He watched until the light went.
Thousands of birds called from the rock after he could no longer see it.