The shark was still there on the tenth day.
Jason had stopped pretending otherwise somewhere around the eighth. At first it had come only at night, a shadow sliding past in the dark, and he had been able to tell himself it was just passing through. Then it started showing up at dawn. By the ninth day it was simply around: a fin that surfaced now and then at the edge of his vision, a dark shape that drifted beneath the raft whenever he looked down for too long.
It never came close enough to threaten him. It didn't need to. The fish had noticed it too, and there were fewer of them now in the shade under the raft, and they were warier, darting away at the slightest movement. On the ninth day he caught one. On the tenth, by midmorning, he hadn't caught any.
"You're bad for business," he told the fin when it broke the surface. "You know that, right?"
He was sitting at the edge of the raft with the rod across his knees and his eyes on the float, trying not to think about how empty his stomach was, when the float finally dipped.
It dipped twice, and Jason pulled.
Something small and frantic fought on the other end, and the familiar pulse ran up the line into his hands. He reeled it in carefully, keeping the tension steady the way he had learned, and a flash of silver twisted just below the surface, close enough that he could see its eye.
"Come on," he said. "Come on, you're mine—"
The water beside the raft exploded.
A gray shape burst out of the sea in a surge of white spray, jaws wide open, and closed on the fish, the hook, and half the line in a single bite. The rod was ripped out of Jason's hands. He grabbed for it on instinct and caught it for half a second before it snapped with a crack like a breaking bone, and he fell backward onto the boards holding one short, splintered end.
The shark was already gone, sliding back down into the blue as if nothing had happened, with a few feet of his fishing line trailing from the corner of its mouth.
Jason lay there with the broken rod in his fist and seawater running off his face.
"No," he said. Then, louder: "No! That was mine! That was my—"
His voice cracked, and he stopped, because there was nobody to shout at. The fin didn't reappear. The sea smoothed itself over the place where the shark had been, and within a few seconds there was no sign that anything had happened at all, except for the stub of wood in his hand and the hole in his stomach where lunch should have been.
He sat up slowly and looked at what was left. Most of his line was gone, but not all of it, because he had kept a spare length coiled around the plank. The hook had gone down with the fish, but the other nail was still in the second plank. The rod itself was finished.
"Okay," he said, and took a long, shaky breath. "Okay. Think."
What would MacGyver do? MacGyver would probably have built a submarine out of the can and the stills by now. Jason was an engineering student with a dull knife and a grudge, and that would have to be enough.
The piece of driftwood the fishing line had arrived on was still wedged under the lashings where he had stored it. It was thicker and tougher than the plank had been, with a natural bend that he thought might actually help. He spent the afternoon stripping its bark and shaping it, and by the time the sun started to drop he had a rod that was uglier than the first one and, he hoped, much harder to break. He worked the second nail loose, bent it into a new hook, more carefully this time, and tied it on with fresh line.
That fixed the fishing. It didn't fix the shark.
He looked at the remaining plank for a long time. Then he picked up the knife.
"This is a stupid idea," he said, and started carving.
The spear took him two days. He shaved one end of the plank down to a long, narrow point, then smoothed and sharpened it against the glass shard until the tip was as fine and hard as he could make it and his arms burned from the effort. It was about as long as he was tall, and when he balanced it in his hand it felt, if he squinted, almost like a real weapon.
He tied the end of his spare line around its base. That way, if he threw it, he could pull it back, which would save him from having to jump into shark-infested water to fetch it. As engineering went, it was the best idea he'd had all week.
Then he practiced.
He stood at the edge of the raft and threw the spear at a patch of foam, reeled it back, and threw it again. His first throw went so wide it was almost impressive. His second hit the water flat and bounced. By the twentieth he could get the point to land more or less where he was looking, as long as he was looking at something that wasn't moving and wasn't very far away.
"Great," he said, reeling it in again. "If the shark ever holds still and lets me walk up to it, it's in real trouble."
He waited for it the next morning, standing at the edge of the raft with the spear raised and the line coiled at his feet, and he kept waiting long after his arm had started to ache.
The shark came in the late morning, as it often did, a dark shape rising slowly out of the blue. Jason's breath caught. He tracked it as it circled, adjusted his grip, waited until the fin was close and the shadow was right beneath the surface, and threw with everything he had.
The spear hit the water a hand's width behind the fin. The shark didn't even flinch. It simply turned, unhurried, and slid back into the deep while Jason stood there with the line going slack between his fingers.
"Oh, come on."
He reeled the spear in and waited again.
He waited the next day too, and the day after that. Every morning he woke up, notched the plank, checked the stills, and then stood at the edge of the raft with the spear, and every day the shark came, circled, and let him miss. Sometimes he missed by a meter and sometimes by a few centimeters, but he always missed, and the shark never seemed particularly bothered either way.
"What are we at now?" he asked it on the fifth morning, reeling the spear in yet again. "Seventeen throws? Eighteen?" He wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "I think you're enjoying this."
The fin sank out of sight.
The fishing wasn't going any better. With the shark always nearby, the fish had become skittish and scarce, and he caught one every two days if he was lucky. Twice more the shark took his catch straight off the line, though at least the new rod survived it. His stomach, which had gotten used to being disappointed, started to hurt in a new and deeper way, a hollow ache that didn't fade between meals because there weren't really meals anymore.
He noticed other things too. His arms were getting thinner, and his ribs had started to show under his shirt. He got dizzy if he stood up too quickly, and some mornings it took him several tries to cut the day's notch because his hands wouldn't hold steady.
On the fifteenth evening, he counted the notches, and then he counted what he had eaten in the last three days, which didn't take long.
"Okay," he said quietly. "This isn't working."
The shark was out there somewhere, circling in the dark. It had eaten more of his food than he had. It was stronger and faster than him and far better at living out here than he would ever be, and the only thing standing between Jason and slow starvation was a sharpened plank he couldn't hit anything with.
He looked at the spear lying beside him, and then at the black water.
It was the worst idea he had ever had, and he knew it. The problem was that it was starting to look like the only one he had left.
"Absolutely not," he said out loud, to make it official.
He didn't sleep much that night.