One Bottle Between Us

The ferry went over in the time it takes to spill a cup, and the sea kept almost everyone. Mara came up under the wrong sky — black where it should have been grey, the lights of the *Halvarsen* already gone beneath her, fuel slick on her lips. She did not remember choosing to swim. She remembered only the cold, which was not a temperature but a hand, and then the orange shape riding the swell twenty meters off, half-inflated, turning slow circles like something stunned. She reached it the way drowning people reach things, with the last of a strength she hadn't known she was spending. She got an arm over the gunwale, then a leg, then she was inside it, retching seawater, and that was when she understood she was not alone. A man lay across the far side of the raft, one hand locked white-knuckled on the lifeline, the other curled around a single clear bottle of water. He was big through the shoulders and grey in the face, and he watched her come aboard with the flat, careful stare of an animal deciding whether the new thing is a threat. "Anyone else?" she managed. "No." His voice was wrecked. "Just us. I've been watching for an hour. Nobody else came up." He said it without softness, a fact laid down between them like a stone. She lay back against the cold rubber and let the swell rock her and tried to make the world hold still. Grey light was beginning in the east. The raft