By the sixth day, Jason had a routine.
He hadn't meant to build one. It had simply happened, the way a path appears across a lawn once enough people take the same shortcut. He woke when the sun hit his face, drank whatever the stills had saved from the day before, and cut a notch into the edge of the long plank with the knife, one for each morning, so that the days couldn't blur together. Then he checked the stills.
They were the most important things he owned, and he treated them that way. He pulled each one in, ran his fingers along every seam and fitting, looked for tears in the plastic and cracks in the tubing, and only then set it back on the water. They ran on sunlight and nothing else, which meant he had developed strong opinions about clouds. So far the sky had been kind, but he didn't trust it to stay that way.
"No clouds today, please," he told it, squinting upward. "I'm begging you."
Then he fished.
He had gotten better at it, which was not the same as getting good. He had learned that the fish came closer in the early morning and again late in the afternoon when the light slanted, and that they liked the shade under the raft far more than the open water around it. He had learned to wait for the float to dip twice before he pulled. He had also learned that the rotten contents of the can made excellent bait, and that the smell would never, ever come off his fingers.
On a good day he caught two small fish. On a bad day he caught one and spent the evening telling himself it was plenty.
He ate them raw, because there was no other way to eat them. The first time had felt like an adventure; by the sixth day it was simply dinner, and a monotonous one. He had started thinking about food the way some people thought about their exes: often, fondly, and with a great deal of regret. Pizza, fries, cafeteria sandwiches, and his mother's lasagna, which he had once described as "fine" to her face and would now have crossed an ocean for, if crossing an ocean had been an option.
The hardest part wasn't the hunger, though. It was the quiet.
Back home there had always been noise: traffic outside his window, a roommate's music through the wall, the constant low murmur of other people living their lives nearby. Out here there was only the water slapping against the floats, the creak of the lashings, and his own voice, which he had started using more and more just to hear something that sounded human.
"Morning," he said to the stills. "Nice work yesterday. Keep it up."
"Afternoon," he said to the fish that didn't bite.
He knew it was a little strange. He also knew it was better than the alternative, which was lying still and listening to the silence until it started to feel as if it were listening back.
Nights were the worst. Once the sun went down there was nothing left to do, and his mind, with nothing to hold on to, went straight back to the lecture hall. He saw Sarah's head hit the desk and Hawkins fold to the floor, and he wondered whether any of them had woken up afterward. Maybe they had opened their eyes somewhere like this, alone on some other patch of ocean. Maybe they hadn't opened them at all.
He wondered whether his parents had heard the voice too, and what they had chosen.
He tried very hard not to think about the fifty-five percent.
On the sixth night, lying on his back and counting stars to keep from counting anything else, he heard something new.
It was a soft sound, almost nothing, the hiss of water parting somewhere close to the raft and then silence. Jason lifted his head and looked over the edge.
The sea was black and flat, silvered wherever the moon touched it. For a long moment there was nothing. Then, a few meters out, the silver broke and something slid through it, a dark, pointed shape that cut a thin line across the surface before sinking out of sight again.
Jason went very still.
He watched the spot where it had vanished, then the water around it, and then, very slowly, the water directly beneath the raft, where the moonlight didn't reach.
A shadow passed under him. It was long, much longer than he was, and it moved without any hurry at all, a slow, smooth glide that carried it out from under one side of the raft and around in a wide, patient curve.
"Oh," Jason said faintly. "Oh, that's a shark."
It came around again. This time the fin broke the surface properly, close enough that he could hear the water ripple along it, and the raft rocked gently in its wake.
His first instinct was to pull his hands and feet in, even though they were already in. His second was to remember every shark documentary he had ever half watched at two in the morning, which turned out to be surprisingly unhelpful.
"Okay," he whispered. "They don't actually like eating people. That's a thing. I'm pretty sure I've heard that's a thing."
The shark circled again.
"You don't want me," he told it. "I'm mostly bones at this point, and I smell like a can of something that died. Terrible dinner. One star."
It didn't seem to be in any hurry to leave, or in any hurry to do anything else. It simply circled, slow and steady, as if it had all the time in the world and knew exactly where the raft would be tomorrow, and the day after that.
Jason sat up with his back against the plastic box and the knife in his hand, knowing precisely how useless it would be, and watched.
He watched for hours. The moon crossed the sky, the stars wheeled slowly overhead, and every so often the shadow slid beneath him again, or the fin cut the water just at the edge of sight. It never came any closer than it had to, and it never went away.
Somewhere around the middle of the night, the fear dulled into something else. He was still afraid, but the fear had company now: a strange, reluctant fascination with the way the thing moved, so smooth and so certain, perfectly at home in a place that was doing its best to kill him.
"You're kind of beautiful," he admitted quietly. "I hate that."
The shark kept circling, and Jason kept watching, and it occurred to him, somewhere near dawn, that for the first time in six days the ocean didn't feel entirely empty.
The sun came up a little while later, pale gold over the water, and the fin slipped away into the deep. Jason was reaching for the knife to cut the morning's notch, the seventh, when the voice spoke.
Trial concluded for difficulty: Easy.
He froze with the knife in his hand.
It was the first thing the Enigma had said to him in a week, and it came exactly as before, calm and clear and from nowhere at all.
Survival rate: eighty-one percent.
Then nothing.
Jason waited, his heart hammering, for the rest of it: his name, an instruction, anything at all that was meant for him. It never came.
"Eighty-one," he said slowly.
So it hadn't lied about the odds. Somewhere, right now, most of the people who had chosen Easy were finished. They had lasted a week on a raft, and for them, a week had been enough.
He looked down at the plank and cut the seventh notch with a hand that wasn't quite steady.
"Hey," he said to the empty sky. "What about me?"
Nobody answered, and far below the raft, the shadow began its first slow circle of the day.