By morning, the worst idea he had ever had still looked like the only one.
Jason sat at the edge of the raft with the spear across his knees and watched the sun come up over the water. His hands were shaking, and he could no longer tell how much of it was fear and how much was hunger. He had eaten half a fish in two days. His head felt light and slightly too far away from his body, and whenever he tried to think the plan through properly, the thoughts slid away before he could finish them.
That was probably for the best, because the plan did not survive being thought through properly.
"For the record," he said, "this is insane."
Nobody was keeping a record, but it felt important to say.
He had gone over it all night. From the raft, the shark could always turn away. It saw the spear coming from above, it saw his shadow, and it had all the time and all the room in the world. In the water, it would come to him. That was the whole problem, and if he was crazy enough, it was also the whole solution.
"You're an engineering student," he told himself. "You go to lectures. You drink too much coffee. You do not go swimming with sharks."
Then he thought about the fifty-five percent, and about the way his ribs showed now, and about how many more days he could last on one fish every other day. He didn't like the math. He had never liked math that ended in zero.
He untied the line from the spear, because down there it would only tangle. He checked the cords on the stills one more time, and then there was nothing left to do but go.
He sat on the edge with his legs in the water. It was cold, much colder than he had expected after days of sun, and he felt goosebumps rise all the way up his thighs.
"Okay," he whispered. "Okay. Three. Two—"
He slid in before he got to one, because he knew he would never get there otherwise.
The cold closed over his head and knocked the breath out of him. For a moment he floundered, arms flailing and the spear knocking against his shoulder, completely unused to having nothing solid beneath him after so many days on the boards. Then he got his head above water, gasped, steadied himself, and gripped the spear in both hands.
He took a deep breath and ducked under.
The world went silent and blue. Sunlight fell through the water in long, wavering columns that faded into darkness far below, and the raft above him was a small dark square against the bright surface. There was nothing else around him, no fish and no shadow, only depth, going down and down until the blue turned black.
He came up for air, breathed, and went back under.
On the third dive, the shadow was there.
It rose out of the deep blue slowly, the way it always did, a long gray shape taking form out of the gloom. Up close and underwater, it was so much bigger than it had seemed from the raft. It moved with an ease that made his own clumsy kicking feel ridiculous, and when it turned, he saw its eye, flat and black and completely uninterested in anything except him.
Every instinct he had was screaming at him to get back on the raft.
He stayed where he was.
The shark circled once, close enough that the pressure of its passing pushed against him. Then it swung wide, turned, and came straight at him.
Jason had maybe a second. He twisted sideways, and the jaws went past close enough that he saw the rows of teeth, and its rough skin scraped along his leg like sandpaper. He jabbed with the spear and hit nothing but water. The shark was already turning.
It came again, faster this time. He threw up his left arm without thinking, and pain exploded through it as teeth raked across his forearm. Blood bloomed into the water in a dark red cloud.
Jason screamed, and the scream came out as a burst of bubbles.
Some part of his mind stepped back from the pain and noticed, very calmly, that the shark was right there. It had turned to come back through the blood, its body level and exposed, and for the first time in days it wasn't moving away from him.
He drove the spear forward with everything he had left.
The point went in just behind the gills. He felt it sink in, catch, and hold, and the shark convulsed. The whole ocean seemed to thrash around him. The spear was nearly torn out of his hands, and the tail slammed into his ribs hard enough that white sparks burst behind his eyes.
He needed air. The raft was a dark square somewhere above him. The shark was bleeding and twisting, already starting to pull away toward the dark, and it was taking his only spear with it.
It was also taking his lunch with it, some small, insane part of his brain pointed out. And his dinner, and possibly breakfast.
Jason grabbed the dorsal fin with his good hand and held on.
The shark bolted.
The water tore at him. He clamped his knees against its sides and pressed himself flat along its back, and they shot forward through the blue so fast that the raft vanished behind them. The shark's panic drove it upward, and for a moment they broke the surface together in an explosion of spray. Jason gulped a breath that was half air and half seawater before they plunged down again.
He found the spear still lodged in the shark's side and pushed.
The shark twisted beneath him. He pushed again, and again, every time they came close to the surface, snatching breaths in between while his arms burned and his vision went gray at the edges. He had no idea how long it lasted. Time had broken into pieces: water, air, the spear, the fin cutting into his palm, water again.
Then, slowly, the thrashing began to fade.
The shark's movements grew weaker and more ragged. It stopped trying to dive and wandered in a slow, sagging curve, its tail sweeping less and less, until at last it hung limp in the water, rolling gently with the swell.
Jason let go of the fin and kicked for the surface. He broke through coughing and choking, and grabbed the shark's side to keep himself afloat.
"I did it," he wheezed. "Oh my God. I actually did it."
He laughed, a raw, disbelieving sound, and for a moment it was the best he had felt since the lecture hall.
Then he looked around, and the laugh died in his throat.
There was no raft.
He turned in a slow circle, holding on to the shark. Swells rose and fell in every direction, blocking the horizon, and each time he rose on one there was nothing to see but water. The shark had dragged him away from the raft, and he had no idea how far, or in which direction.
"No," he said. "No, no, no. Come on."
He tried to swim toward where he thought it might be, dragging the shark along with him, and managed maybe twenty meters before his arms refused to go on. His left forearm had gone from pain to a deep, pulsing numbness. The blood was still coming, and he was cold all the way down to his bones.
He stopped swimming.
For a while he simply floated there, one arm hooked over the dead shark, rising and falling with the sea. The adrenaline drained out of him and took everything else with it, and what it left behind was a heavy, bottomless exhaustion.
"Is this what you wanted?" he asked the sky, and his voice was so hoarse he barely recognized it. "Is this the test? You let me win, and then you take the raft away?"
He hadn't really expected an answer.
He rolled onto his back and let the water hold him up. The sky was huge and bright above him, and in a distant way it was almost peaceful. The cold had stopped hurting, and so had his arm. Even the hunger was quiet for once.
He closed his eyes.
Something bumped against his right arm.
Jason's eyes snapped open. He twisted around, splashing, and his hand closed on rough wood.
It was the raft.
It was right there, rocking gently on the swell, its faded floats bumping against his shoulder as if it had come looking for him. The stills bobbed on their cords, and the plastic box was still strapped down in the middle.
He stared at it for a long moment, too stunned to move. Then he grabbed the edge with both hands, and a sound came out of him that was half laugh and half sob.
It shouldn't have been possible. The current, the wind, the distance: none of it added up, and he knew it, and he found that he didn't care. Something had brought the raft back to him. Something had decided that he had earned it.
The greater the difficulty, the Enigma had said, the greater the reward.
"You reward the risk," he whispered. "That's it, isn't it? You're not cruel. You're fair."
He didn't know if that was true. But it was the first thing about any of this that made sense, and he held on to it the way he was holding on to the raft.
He looked back at the shark, floating a few meters away in a spreading stain of red, and then down at his torn and bleeding arm.
"Okay," he said, still breathing hard. "I'm ready for whatever you throw at me next." He paused. "Just let me get on the raft first."