Getting back onto the raft turned out to be the easy part.
Jason lay on the boards for a while, coughing up seawater, his torn arm cradled against his chest. When he could breathe again, he sat up and looked at his forearm properly for the first time. The teeth had raked across it rather than closing on it, leaving three long, ragged cuts that were still oozing blood. It looked bad, but his fingers still moved when he told them to, which was more than he had expected.
He tore a strip from the bottom of his shirt and rinsed the wound in seawater, which hurt so much that he saw white for a second. Then he wrapped it as tightly as he could and pulled the knot closed with his teeth.
"Good as new," he said, and his voice shook. "Practically."
Then he looked at the shark.
It was floating a few meters away, rolling on the swell in its cloud of red, and it was the most food he had seen in over two weeks. It was also going to start attracting every other hungry thing in this part of the ocean, if it hadn't already.
"Right," he said. "No pressure."
He untied the cord that had held the plastic box in place, knotted one end to the raft and the other around his waist, and slid back into the water, which was something he had hoped never to do again. He swam out to the shark, looped the cord around its tail as fast as his shaking hands allowed, and pulled himself back along the line to the raft with his heart pounding the whole way.
Then he started hauling.
It took him most of the afternoon. The shark was longer than the raft, and he quickly understood that there was no getting all of it aboard without flipping the whole thing over. So he settled for dragging it alongside and heaving its front half up across the edge of the boards, a few centimeters at a time, bracing his feet and pulling until his injured arm screamed. The raft tilted under the weight until water washed over the low side, and he tied the shark down where it lay before it could slide back.
By the time he was done, the sun was touching the horizon and his vision had started to swim.
"There," he mumbled. "Done. Great job, everybody."
He lay down next to the carcass, meaning to rest for just a minute, and the world went dark.
* * *
He woke to the sun in his eyes and the smell of fish so strong it felt solid.
For a moment he didn't remember anything. Then he turned his head and found himself nose to nose with the shark, and it all came back at once. He sat up too fast, winced, and looked down along the carcass to its tail.
A chunk was missing from it, a clean, curved bite that hadn't been there the night before.
Jason stared at it for a long time.
"Okay," he said quietly. "Noted."
He did not look at the water for a while after that.
Instead he looked at his catch. In daylight the shark was stranger than he had realized. Its skin had a faint sheen to it, almost pearly, that shifted color when the light moved across it. A row of odd ridges ran along each flank, too regular to be scars, and its tail was longer than seemed right, drawn out into a thin, whip-like tip. He had watched enough shark documentaries at two in the morning to know the basic shape of one, and this was close, but it wasn't quite right.
"What even are you?" he asked it. "Then again, it's not like I ever took marine biology."
It didn't really matter. It was food, and it wasn't going to stay food for very long in this heat. He picked up the knife.
"Alright," he said, patting its rough side. "Let's see what you're made of. Literally."
The first cut went badly. The skin was like sandpaper and far tougher than it looked, and the dull blade skidded off it instead of going in. It slipped and nicked his finger, and he sucked on the cut, tasting salt and copper.
"Okay. Take two. You dissected a frog in high school. This is just a really big frog." He looked at the teeth. "With a few extra features."
The second cut went in, barely. He had to saw at it, leaning his whole weight on the knife, and when he finally broke through, the smell that came out made his eyes water. He turned his head, breathed through his mouth, and kept going.
For the first hour, it was a massacre. He hacked where he should have sliced and tore where he should have cut, and a lot of what he managed to free came away ragged and mixed with skin. The ridges along the flanks kept catching the blade. His bandage turned pink, then red. Twice he had to stop and put his head down between his knees until the nausea passed.
Then, slowly, he started to understand what he was doing.
He learned that the skin came away more easily if he cut along the belly first and worked outward from the inside, peeling it back rather than trying to cut through it. He learned that the meat had a grain, like wood, and that the knife went where he wanted if he followed it instead of fighting it. He learned where to put his weight and where not to, and how to hold the blade so it didn't slip toward his fingers. None of it was elegant, but each cut was a little cleaner than the one before, and somewhere in the middle of the day he realized he had stopped thinking about each movement and was simply doing it.
"Look at that," he murmured, holding up a long, clean strip of pale meat. "I might have a future as a sushi chef after all."
He didn't eat all of it, much as he wanted to. Even half-starved, he knew there was far more here than he could eat before it spoiled. So he cut most of it into thin strips and laid them out on the sheet of torn plastic he'd salvaged, in neat rows under the full blaze of the sun, turning them every so often so they would dry on both sides. If it worked, it would be jerky. If it didn't, he would find out soon enough.
The sun climbed, peaked, and began to fall. He worked through all of it. His skin, which had burned and peeled and burned again over the last two weeks, had started to take on a darker, tougher look, and he barely noticed the heat anymore. By late afternoon there were rows of drying strips covering half the raft, and more stacked beside them, and he was sitting in a mess of blood and scales with a feeling that he eventually recognized as pride.
"Not bad," he said, "for a guy whose cooking skills used to end at microwave ramen."
When he had taken everything he could use, he cut the cord and pushed what was left of the carcass back into the sea. It rolled once, slowly, and sank. A moment later, far below, he saw shadows gather around it, two of them, maybe three, circling in the blue.
Jason pulled his feet a little further in from the edge and didn't say anything for a while.
He ate at sunset, sitting cross-legged with a strip of fresh meat in his hand. It was tough and chewy, and it had a strange, sharp aftertaste that reminded him of cleaning products. He decided not to think about that. For the first time in over a week, he ate until he was actually full, and then he lay back on the boards with his hands on his stomach, feeling it for once as something other than an empty ache.
The sky went orange, then red, then violet. His arm throbbed dully under its bandage, and the smell of fish hung over everything like a fog, and he felt better than he had since the lecture hall.
"Okay," he said to the darkening sky. "Calamity setting. I get it now. You push, and I push back." He smiled a little, tired and crooked. "Bring it on. This average guy's just getting started."
Trial concluded for difficulty: Normal.
The smile slid off his face.
Survival rate: forty-six percent.
He sat very still, the half-eaten strip of meat forgotten in his hand, while the words settled.
Normal. The setting he had asked for. Somewhere out there, the people who had chosen it and survived were done, and the thing that had ended it for them was the shark, the same shark whose meat was drying in rows on his raft. If the Enigma had given him what he'd asked for, he would have been finished tonight.
He looked at the strips of meat, and at the bandage on his arm, and at the dark water all around him, which went on in every direction exactly as it had that morning.
Before he slept, he cut the notch he had forgotten that morning into the plank beside the others. There were seventeen of them now, a neat little row along the edge of the wood.
He didn't know it yet, but the plank was going to run out of room long before the ocean ran out of days.