Two hours past the corridor, his stomach had started telling him things he already knew.
He had no food. He had three quarters of a water container and a body that had been walking for the better part of a day with an arrow in its shoulder and a burn on its forearm and nothing to eat since a compressed grain block he had forced down while sitting against a railing post in moderate shock. The hunger was not yet severe but it was present and getting louder, and he was aware that the longer it went on the worse his thinking would get.
He needed a chest.
The bridge had not provided one since the corridor. He had passed several sections of wall with the normal sparse hole distribution, one section with no holes at all, and nothing else. The bridge was under no obligation to supply him on any schedule. He knew that. He kept walking anyway, checking the floor and the walls and the space ahead, and eventually the chest appeared the same way they all appeared: it was not there, and then it was.
He stopped and ran the checks.
Left arm could not manage the splinter toss cleanly. He did it with the right, awkward, the throw going slightly wide. The splinter hit the chest's side and fell. Nothing happened. He circled to look at the underside from a distance, then approached and crouched and pressed two fingers to the latch. Cold metal, no spring tension, no resistance beyond the latch mechanism itself.
He looked inside the lid before he opened it fully, cracking it one centimetre, enough to see. The mark scratched inside was a single horizontal line.
He opened it.
Food, yes. Two blocks, same dense compressed grain as the first chest. He ate one immediately, standing over the open chest, chewing without tasting it. His body accepted the food with a thoroughness that surprised him. He ate the second block more slowly and drank a careful measure of water and stood there for a moment feeling the edge come off the hunger.
There was also cloth. Two folded squares of something dense and clean, better than tracksuit material, the kind of fabric that had been made for a purpose. He used one to repack the shoulder dressing, which had soaked through during the walk. The new fabric was thicker. It held better. He retied the binding and rotated his right shoulder experimentally and the dressing stayed.
And at the bottom of the chest, set in a shallow recess in the wood as if placed there deliberately rather than packed: the watch.
He picked it up.
It was small, lighter than it looked, with a dark casing and a face that showed nothing when he turned it over. No obvious clasp, no button, no glass covering the face. He pressed the side of it and nothing happened. He turned it over again. The underside had a flat section and two small indentations, one on each side, that might have been finger placements or might have been nothing. He pressed both simultaneously.
The face lit up.
Not brightly. A dim geometric pattern, more grey than white, like something printed in light on the surface of the face. He held it closer to his eyes. The pattern resolved into a grid of some kind, rows of information, each row containing symbols he did not immediately recognise and numbers he did.
He found the numbers first because numbers were easier. Each row had two of them. The first was a small integer, never above thirty in the rows he could see. The second was larger, inconsistent. Some rows had second numbers in the hundreds, some in the thousands. He looked for a pattern between the first and second number and did not find one that held.
The symbols between the numbers were not letters he recognised. Not any script he could identify. Pictographic, possibly. Each symbol was distinct from the others, and he started trying to categorise them by shape. Some were angular, some curved, some looked like outlines of objects he could not name.
He stood looking at the grid for a while. Hungry as he was before the food, his mind ran slowly. He turned the watch over again, then back. The grid had not changed. He tried pressing the side of the casing and one of the indentations at the same time. The grid shifted. New rows appeared from below, old rows scrolled up and off the top of the face.
He was looking at a list. He did not yet know a list of what.
He pressed the indentation again and the list scrolled back. He found what he thought was the top of it, a row with a symbol that looked different from the others, more complex, and a number beside it that was not a small integer but something larger. He pressed the indentation once more and one of the rows in the list became highlighted somehow, brighter than the others.
He was trying to work out what that meant when his thumb moved across the face of the watch and something he had not intentionally pressed registered as input.
The platform appeared two feet in front of him.
It did not arrive instantly. It built, layer by layer, from a point in the air outward, geometry assembling itself in sequence, and the whole process took perhaps three seconds. What was left was a flat surface roughly the size of a large book, suspended at waist height, with no visible means of support. It had a faint luminescence the same grey-white as the watch face, and it was solid, when he backed away and his elbow caught it accidentally, it did not move.
He was four metres back before he had decided to move.
He stood there and looked at it. The platform floated. Nothing else happened. It was simply there, waiting, emitting its faint light and doing nothing else.
His shoulder was telling him things. His arm was telling him things. He breathed through both and kept his eyes on the platform and waited to see if the situation developed. It did not. The platform held its position and its silence and its light, and the bridge held its hum, and nothing moved.
After two minutes he stepped closer.
He looked at the watch face again without touching the controls this time. The highlighted row was still there, still brighter than the others. He looked from the watch to the platform and back. The highlighted row was the only element that had changed when the platform appeared. He pressed the indentation carefully, once, and the highlight moved to the next row down. The platform stayed where it was.
He pressed again. Highlight moved again. Platform unchanged.
He tried pressing the indentation on the other side. The highlight moved back up. Still the platform.
He thought about it. The platform was not a response to the highlight position. It had appeared when he dragged his thumb across the face, an uncontrolled input he could not reproduce deliberately. It was still here. It had not disappeared when he moved the highlight. Which meant either it was waiting for something or it was a persistent state until he did something specific to clear it.
He looked at the platform surface more carefully. There was a faint depression in the centre, a shallow concavity he had not noticed before, the size of a hand. He did not touch it yet. He looked at the highlighted row on the watch instead and tried again to understand what it was describing.
The symbol in the row looked, he thought, like a container. Rounded at the bottom, open at the top. Beside it, a small integer. Beside that, a larger number. He looked at the open chest beside him, then back at the row. The symbol did not match the chest exactly, but the shape class was similar. Rounded container. The small integer was one. The larger number was in the hundreds.
He had one water container. Roughly three quarters full.
He looked at the platform. He looked at the watch. He looked at the water container sitting in the chest.
'It is a market.'
He did not act on that yet. He stood with it instead, turning it over, looking for the part that did not fit. The platform was the exchange surface. The list was the inventory, or an inventory, not necessarily his. The numbers were quantities and values, though which was which he could not yet say. The highlighted row was a selected item.
He pressed the indentation until the row that he thought corresponded to something like a water container was highlighted. He looked at the platform. He looked at the chest. He did not place anything on the platform.
He was not ready for that yet.
But he understood, roughly, the shape of the thing. Someone had put a market inside a watch and left it in a chest on a bridge over a bottomless void, and the market was apparently accessible to other people, and those people were apparently somewhere, and the watch was how you reached them.
He closed the chest, pocketed the food block he had not yet eaten, and fastened the watch around his right wrist. It was slightly loose but it held. The face had gone dark when he stopped touching it. He pressed both indentations again and it lit back up.
He let it go dark again and kept walking.
He would come back to it when his shoulder hurt less and his thinking was clearer. For now he knew what it was, and knowing what it was was enough.