The first thing Jason learned about the ocean was that it never stopped moving.
He sat in the middle of the raft with his knees pulled up and his arms wrapped around them, and every few seconds the whole world rose beneath him, hung there for a moment, and slid back down. His stomach followed a little behind each time. The sun was already high and hot on the back of his neck, and the light coming off the water was so bright that he had to squint to look at anything at all.
He kept looking anyway, turning slowly on the spot until he had checked every direction twice. The horizon was the same everywhere, a clean blue line with nothing on it.
"Okay," he said. His voice sounded strange out here, too small for the space around it. "Okay. Think."
Sarah's head hitting the desk. Hawkins folding to the floor. He pushed the images away before they could settle, because if he let himself think about the lecture hall right now he was going to fall apart, and falling apart on a raft in the middle of the ocean did not seem like a winning strategy.
He went back over what the voice had said instead. Pass away peacefully in your sleep, alone, on a deserted island. It was a terrible sentence, but the more he turned it over, the less it sounded like a curse and the more it sounded like instructions. You couldn't die peacefully on an island without reaching one first, and you couldn't die of old age without surviving long enough to get old.
"So there's an island," he said. "Somewhere. Great. That narrows it down to the entire planet."
It wasn't much, but it was a goal, and a goal was something he could work with.
The raft was small enough that exploring it took about thirty seconds. It was a square of gray, sun-bleached boards lashed with rope over two long floats that had once been painted orange and were now mostly faded and scuffed. There was no mast, no oar, and no shade. At the center, strapped down under a tangle of cord, sat a plastic box with a cracked lid.
Jason worked the knots loose with fingers that weren't quite steady and opened it.
The first thing he found was a knife. It was small and plain, with a scratched wooden handle and a blade that had gone dull and spotted along one edge. He tested it against his thumb, expecting nothing, and hissed when it bit.
"Okay," he said, sucking the cut. "Fair. Point taken."
Under the knife was a tin can with no label, heavy and faintly sloshing. He shook it next to his ear. "Could be peaches," he told it. "Could be dog food. I'm not ruling anything out." He set it aside for later, when he was hungry enough not to care which.
Next came a small mirror with a wooden handle, the kind of thing people used for signaling in survival documentaries. He caught the sun in it by accident and blinded himself for a second, then spent a long, hopeful minute flashing it at the empty horizon before admitting that there was no one out there to see it.
At the bottom of the box lay two bundles of folded plastic, clear film and tubing and flat pouches all packed together. It took him a moment to recognize them, and when he did, his heart gave a hard, painful jump.
He had seen something like it once in a lab catalog: a solar still. You floated it on the water, the sun heated the seawater inside, and the vapor condensed on the clear plastic and ran down into a pouch as fresh water. Salt water went in, drinkable water came out, and all it asked for in return was sunlight, which was the one thing he had far too much of.
"Water," he said out loud, and his throat, which had only been dry until that moment, suddenly ached with it.
He unfolded the first still across his knees. A creased sheet of instructions had been tucked into the fold, the printing faded and water-stained and the little diagrams half blurred. Jason smoothed it flat on the boards and bent over it.
"Engineering student," he reminded himself. "You build things. This is literally the job."
It took him the better part of an hour. The diagrams were faded exactly where they mattered most, the plastic kept catching the wind and trying to fold itself back up, and every time the raft tipped, one of the small fittings rolled toward the edge and he had to lunge after it. By the time he had the first still inflated and all its pieces connected, his shirt was soaked through with sweat and the back of his neck had started to burn.
He held it up and turned it around.
"That looks right," he said. "I'm pretty sure that looks right."
He lowered it carefully into the water, tied its cord to one of the lashings, and watched it bob beside the raft like a small, clear balloon. Then he sat back and waited.
Waiting turned out to be harder than building. With nothing left for his hands to do, his mind kept drifting back to the lecture hall, to the sound of bodies dropping and to the question the Enigma had refused to answer. Every time it did, he dragged it back and made himself count the swells instead. He got to four hundred and something before he lost track.
When he finally pulled the still out of the water and tipped a few drops from the pouch onto his tongue, they tasted exactly like the sea.
Jason spat over the side and stared at the thing in his hands. It took him a full minute of turning it over to see what he had done. He had connected the intake to the collection pouch, which meant the pouch had spent the last few hours faithfully filling itself with salt water.
"You have got to be kidding me," he said.
He had assembled it backwards. An engineering student, handed one simple machine and one simple job, had built it backwards.
He laughed despite himself, a short, cracked sound that got out before he could stop it. "Great job," he told himself. "Truly inspiring. Hawkins would be so proud."
Then he emptied the pouch, pulled the tubing apart, and started over.
The second attempt went faster, because he had already made every possible mistake once. He built both stills side by side, checking each connection against the diagram twice before he trusted it, and lowered them into the water one after the other. By then the sun had moved well past its highest point, and he had no idea how much daylight the stills needed or how much was left.
So he waited again, and this time he kept his eyes on the plastic.
The afternoon crawled. The heat pressed down on him until even thinking felt heavy, and his lips began to crack at the corners. More than once he caught himself staring at all the water around the raft and thinking, dully, about how much of it there was. He knew better than to drink it, the way everyone knew better, but knowing better felt a little less convincing with every hour, so he made himself look away.
Late in the afternoon, when the light had begun to turn gold, he saw it: a thin film of droplets clinging to the inside of the first still, and below it, in the corner of the pouch, a small, trembling puddle.
Jason pulled the still in so carefully that he barely breathed. He tipped the pouch into his cupped palm, and a mouthful of water ran into it, warm and faintly cloudy.
He tasted it with the tip of his tongue first, bracing for salt.
It was fresh.
He drank it slowly, letting it sit in his mouth before he swallowed. It was warm and it tasted of plastic, and it was, without any competition, the best thing he had ever drunk. When it was gone he closed his eyes and stayed very still for a moment, feeling it go down.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Okay. That works."
The second still had made a little less. He drank half of it and left the rest in the pouch for the morning, because he had a feeling tomorrow was going to be long too.
By the time he had checked the knots on both cords, the sun was touching the horizon. The sky went orange, then pink, then a deep, bruised blue, and the heat drained out of the day faster than he expected. Jason pulled his knees up again and watched the first stars come out over a sea that looked no less empty in the dark.
Somewhere out there was an island. He had water, a knife, a can of something that might be peaches, and a mirror with nobody to signal. It wasn't much, but it was more than he'd had that morning.
"One day," he said to the dark. "One down."
He lay back on the boards with his hand resting on the cord of the nearest still, so that he would feel it if it pulled, and let the slow rise and fall of the ocean rock him toward sleep.
He didn't feel it when, some time after midnight, something long and dark passed beneath the raft, turned, and slowly moved on.