The storm didn't build. It simply arrived.
One moment the rain was coming in gusts, and the next it was a solid wall, hammering the raft so hard that Jason could barely see his own hands. The wind came with it, howling across the water, and the sea rose up to meet it. The long, easy swells he had lived on for a year were gone, and in their place came steep, broken waves that slammed into the raft from every direction at once.
Jason clung to the lashings in the middle of the boards, soaked through and shaking, and tried to keep track of everything he owned.
It wasn't much. The knife was tied to his belt loop with a length of fishing line, and he had wrapped the line twice around his wrist for good measure. The stills were lashed down beside him under the plastic sheet, as tightly as he could manage. The empty can was already gone; the first big wave had plucked it off the raft like a hand picking up a cup, and the mirror had gone the same way a moment later. He had watched them both spin away into the dark without being able to do a thing about it.
"Stay put," he shouted at the stills, and the wind tore the words out of his mouth. "Stay put, stay put—"
A wave broke over the raft.
For a second there was nothing but water, pouring over him and around him, dragging at his clothes and his legs and his grip. Then it drained away over the edges, and he was still there, coughing, his fingers locked around the rope.
One of the stills wasn't. Its cord had snapped, and it was sliding across the tilted boards toward the edge, tumbling end over end.
Jason didn't think. He let go of the lashings with one hand and lunged for it.
His fingers closed on the plastic. The raft pitched and he slid with it, belly-down across the wet boards, until his shoulder hit the edge and stopped him. He had the still pressed against his chest in his fist, and he was laughing, or crying, or both, with water streaming down his face.
"Got you," he gasped. "I've got you."
He crawled back to the middle and tied it down again with fingers so cold he could barely feel the knots. Every wave that hit made the raft buck beneath him like something alive and furious.
For a while after that, it seemed as if the worst had come and gone. He huddled in the center of the raft with both arms threaded through the lashings and his head down, and counted waves just to have something to count. His teeth chattered so hard his jaw ached. He thought of Sarah, and of James from his lab group, who had once talked him through a panic attack before a midterm by making him name five things he could see. He couldn't see five things. He could barely see one.
"Rain," he said through his teeth. "Wave. Raft. My hand. My other hand."
It helped, a little.
Then, somewhere in the dark ahead, he thought he saw the rain begin to thin. There was a paler patch low in the sky near the horizon, a smear of something that wasn't quite black, and hope flared in his chest so hard it hurt.
"Come on," he whispered. "Come on, just a little longer—"
He never saw the branch.
He heard it, a strange hollow whistle under the roar of the wind, and then it struck him across the side of the head and the world burst into white. He was dimly aware of falling sideways, of the boards hitting his cheek, of something heavy and leafy crashing across the raft and tumbling off the other side. Then there was only a high ringing sound and a darkness that pulsed in time with his heart.
When he came back from it, he didn't know how long he had been gone. A few seconds, maybe.
His head was pounding, and warm blood was running down his temple and into his ear. He lifted his head in time to see, in a flash of lightning, the branch sliding away over the waves. It was a real branch, as long as he was tall and still thick with green leaves.
Even through the pain, some small, stunned part of his mind put it together. Branches didn't grow in the middle of the ocean. That had come from a tree, and trees grew on land.
"Land," he croaked. "There's—"
He heard the roar before he saw it.
The wave rose behind the raft like a cliff, black and glossy and so tall that it blotted out the pale patch of sky. For one long, suspended moment it hung there over him. Then it came down.
The raft flipped.
Jason was torn loose and thrown into the sea, and the water closed over his head, and the world became cold and black and roaring. He tumbled until he lost all sense of up and down, and felt the fishing line around his wrist snap taut and then, somehow, hold. He still had the knife.
He kicked toward what he hoped was the surface, and broke through choking.
The raft was gone, and so were the stills and everything else he owned. There were only the waves and the rain and the wind, and somewhere in all of it, he knew, there had to be land.
Lightning flashed again, and he saw it.
It was a dark shape, low against the sky, off to his left. It might have been a cloud, or a trick of the storm and the blood in his eye. But it was the only thing in any direction that wasn't water.
"Okay," he gasped. "It's not like I've got a better plan."
He swam.
It was the longest swim of his life. Each wave lifted him up and dragged him back, and every stroke felt as if his arms were made of lead. His old wound burned with every pull, and his head throbbed so hard that his vision kept going gray. But every time the lightning came, the shape was a little bigger and a little darker and a little more real. Soon he could hear it too, over the storm: the deep, booming crash of waves breaking against something solid.
"Just a little further," he told himself, spitting out seawater. "You're an engineering student, not an Olympic swimmer, but you can manage a little further."
The shape became a cliff, a black wall of rock rising out of the churning white, and at its base, just beneath the surface, the water turned treacherous.
His knee struck something hard and sharp, and pain shot through his leg. It was coral. The reef lay beneath him like a field of broken glass, and the waves were driving him straight across it.
He tried to swim around it and couldn't. He tried to keep his body high in the water and couldn't manage that either. A wave lifted him, and when it dropped him again, his face slammed into a jagged branch of coral.
Pain exploded through his right eye.
He screamed and swallowed water and tumbled, clawing at nothing, and for a moment he was sure it was over. Then another wave caught him and threw him forward, and he felt the coral slide away beneath him and something smoother take its place.
It was rock, flat and slippery.
He crawled without knowing where he was going. Half-blind, with his right eye burning as if it were full of fire, he dragged himself over stone and through shallow water, away from the roar behind him, until the rain stopped hitting his back and the sound of the storm turned hollow and echoing. He was inside something, a cave or a grotto carved into the foot of the cliff.
The ground under his cheek was cold and hard and completely, blessedly still.
"Made it," he whispered. His voice was barely there. "I actually—"
Trial concluded for difficulty: Hard.
The voice seemed to come from very far away.
Survival rate: fourteen percent.
Jason's lips moved, but nothing came out. Hard was over, then. He had reached land, the same as them, and so this had to be the end of it for him too. Any second now, the voice would say his name.
He waited, his cheek against the stone, for the rest of it.
The voice said nothing more, and darkness took him before he could wonder why.