It was all blue, all breath, all indifferent motion, as if the world had been reduced to one endless lung inhaling and exhaling. The sun sat overhead like a coin pressed into the sky, and beneath it a rubber life raft rose and fell on the swells, small as a thought no one bothered to keep.
Lieutenant Ethan Lawson had stopped trying to count the days after the fifth sunrise. Counting made you hungry in a new way. Counting reminded you that time was still moving even when your body felt like a stranded machine, rusting in salt.
He lay on his back, eyelids half-lowered, lips cracked and swollen. His uniform was long gone, shredded into rags by the sea and his own frantic hands. He’d kept the dog tags, though. They rested against his sternum, tapping softly with each rise and fall of the raft, like a tiny, stubborn metronome insisting he was still alive.
He tasted rain.
Not much, only a few warm drops at first, but he turned his head and opened his mouth like a man begging a god he didn’t believe in. He had learned to catch rainwater with anything: his palms, a piece of canvas, the hollow of a bent elbow. Seven days at sea taught you shame was a luxury. Pride didn’t hydrate you.
His mind kept trying to return to the moment everything ended.
The attack had been sudden. A flash under the water, the submarine jolting like it had been punched by the ocean itself. Alarms screamed. Men shouted. Someone prayed. Someone else laughed, not because it was funny, but because terror sometimes wore a grin.
Then the steel world broke apart.
