Jason woke on the second day with the sun already on his face and the skin of his arms tight and hot where it had burned the afternoon before.
For a moment he didn't know where he was. Then the raft dipped beneath him and everything came back at once, and he lay there staring up at the pale sky while his heart slowly settled.
"Still here," he said. "Great."
He started with the water. The pouch he had saved from the night before held a few warm mouthfuls, and he drank them slowly while the stills bobbed on their cords beside the raft, their plastic already fogging in the morning heat. At least they were going to keep working without him.
Food was a different problem. He hadn't eaten since breakfast in a dorm kitchen that now felt about a thousand years away, and his stomach had started to make its opinion known. He looked at the can. Then he looked at the ocean, which was full of fish in theory and completely empty of them in practice, at least as far as he could see.
"Okay," he said. "Fishing. Everyone can fish. People do it for fun."
He had no rod, no line, and no hook, which seemed like a strong start.
He spent the morning taking stock of what the raft could give him and came up disappointingly short. The boards were lashed too tightly to pull loose, and he wasn't about to start taking apart the only thing keeping him out of the water. The rope that held them together was the only cord he had, and it already had a job. By noon he had tried and abandoned half a dozen ideas and had nothing to show for it but a burned neck.
Then, early in the afternoon, the sea brought him something.
He saw it first as a glint off to his left, riding the swells a little way from the raft. He shaded his eyes and squinted, not daring to hope, and as the current pushed it closer it turned into a small cluster of debris: a couple of splintered planks, a twisted sheet of plastic, and a jagged fragment of what might once have been part of a boat.
Jason knelt at the edge of the raft with his arm stretched out and waited while it drifted toward him with agonizing slowness. When the first plank came within reach he grabbed it and hauled it aboard, then went back for the rest one piece at a time, nearly tipping himself into the water twice.
When he was done, he sat back and looked at his haul. There were two planks, one with a pair of rusty nails still sticking out of it, a sheet of plastic that was torn but big enough to be useful, and, wedged in a crack of the broken hull, a shard of thick green glass the length of his finger, sharp along one edge.
"Okay," he said, turning the glass carefully in his hand. "Now we're getting somewhere."
He didn't know yet what he was going to do with any of it, but it was more than he'd had an hour ago, and he would take it.
Nothing else came that day. He drank what the stills had made and watched the sun go down on an empty stomach, and when he finally fell asleep he dreamed about cafeteria sandwiches.
The next morning, the sea brought him something better.
A length of driftwood was floating a little way off, with something pale wrapped around it. Jason stared at it for a long moment before he understood what he was looking at, and then he was lying flat on the boards with both arms in the water, straining toward it.
It was fishing line, a whole snarl of it wound around the wood like a nest.
"Come here," he said through his teeth, his fingertips brushing the wood. "Come on, come to me."
It bumped against the raft, and he hauled it in with a whoop that sounded ridiculous in all that silence.
His delight lasted exactly as long as it took to look at the line properly. It was one enormous knot, looped and doubled over itself so many times that he couldn't find either end.
"Of course," he said. "Of course it is."
He sat cross-legged in the middle of the raft and started untangling.
It took him most of the day. The sun climbed and beat down on him, sweat ran into his eyes, and the line bit into his fingertips until they were raw. He worked one knot at a time, and every time he freed a length of it, he wound it carefully around the end of a plank so it couldn't tangle again. Somewhere in the long middle of the afternoon he caught himself humming, and realized with some surprise that the work had calmed him down. It was a problem with a solution, and problems with solutions were the one thing that still made sense.
By late afternoon he had a clean coil of line and a pair of hands that looked as if he'd been wrestling cats.
He wasn't done yet. He took the plank without nails and used the knife to split a long, narrow strip from its edge, then shaved it down until it would bend without snapping. It wasn't much of a rod, but his father had once spent an entire camping weekend insisting that a man should be able to make his own fishing pole out of whatever was lying around, and for the first time in his life Jason was grateful he'd been listening.
"You'd be unbearable about this," he told his absent father, tying the line to the tip. "I know you would."
For the hook, he worked one of the rusty nails loose from the other plank and bent it against the edge of the plastic box, a little at a time, until it made a crooked curve. Then he rubbed the tip against the glass shard until it came to something close to a point. It was an ugly little thing, and he was absurdly proud of it.
That left bait.
Jason looked at the can.
He had been saving it, telling himself it would be there when things got really bad, but when he looked at it properly now he saw that its top had swollen into a gentle dome. He pried the lid up with the knife, and it gave with a soft hiss. The smell that came out made him jerk his head away so fast he nearly lost his balance.
"Oh, that's—" He gagged. "Okay. That's not dinner."
Whatever was inside had been gray and vaguely meat-like once. Now it was mostly smell.
"You're bait," he told it, breathing through his mouth. "Congratulations on the promotion."
He pressed a lump of it onto the hook, wiped his fingers on the boards, tied a scrap of plastic to the line as a float, and cast it out over the side.
Then he waited.
The sun sank lower. The float bobbed gently with the swells and did absolutely nothing else. His stomach growled loudly enough that he almost apologized to it, and he tried not to think about the fact that he had built the whole thing on guesswork and half-remembered camping trips, and that there might not be a single fish within a mile of the raft.
"Come on," he said softly. "Just one. I'm not asking for much."
The float vanished.
Jason nearly dropped the rod. Then he grabbed it with both hands, and something on the other end pulled back, a quick, frantic pulse that ran up the line and into his arms. The strip of plank bent into a curve he did not trust at all.
"Don't you dare break," he told it. "Don't you dare—"
He pulled, eased off, and pulled again, the way his father had shown him years ago and he had never bothered to remember until this exact second. The line cut into his palms. Then a flash of silver broke the surface beside the raft, thrashing and twisting, and he swung it up over the boards before it could shake itself loose.
It landed at his feet: a fish barely the length of his hand, flipping furiously.
Jason stared at it.
"I did it," he said. Then, louder, to the whole empty ocean: "I did it!"
He pinned it down before it could flip itself back into the water, and after a moment's hesitation he killed it the quickest way he could think of. His hands were shaking afterward, and not only from excitement. Catching a fish was one thing. Holding it still while it stopped moving was another.
He cleaned it with the glass shard, clumsily, making more of a mess than he needed to, and the smell of fish and blood joined the smell of the can. Then he sat with it in his hands and watched the sun go down in bands of orange and pink across the water.
There was no fire, and no way to make one. He had known that all along and had managed not to think about it until now.
"Right," he said. "Sushi. People pay good money for this."
He took a small bite.
It was cold and slippery and tasted strongly of the sea, and the first bone he found made him yelp. He picked it out, found another, picked that one out too, and kept going. By the third bite his stomach had stopped caring about the texture, and by the end he was eating with his eyes closed, spitting bones over the side and swearing quietly at each one.
When nothing was left but a tiny skeleton, he licked his fingers and lay back on the boards with a sigh that came from somewhere deep in his chest.
"Look at that, Dad," he said to the first stars. "Your boy's not completely hopeless after all."