The sun didn't take long to punish.
Just a few hours after dawn, the heat on the tarp was unbearable. Samuel took off his coat—still damp—and folded it as a pillow. The shirt beneath his open shirt clung to his chest like a second salty skin.
He looked around.
The sea was the same in every direction. Dark blue. Eternal. Not a single wave breaking the surface. The silence was so absolute he could hear his own breathing, and beyond that, the dry tapping of water against the sides of the raft.
He took a sip from the bottle. Just one.
Less than half was left.
His stomach growled insistently, but there was nothing to offer it. The first day, he managed to ignore it. The second, no longer.
With the wet notebook in his hands, he tried to write something down, some calculation: the sun's direction, possible latitude. But his fingers shook, and the ink ran on the paper as if it wanted to escape too. He closed the notebook and put it away again. He looked at the knife. Useless now. He looked at the sky. Motionless.
"Someone must be looking for us. The Oceanus had communications, a route… How is it possible there are no signals? Where are they?"
He began talking to himself. Murmuring. Not out loud, not shouting. Like someone conversing with an absent person, with broken phrases, with ideas born and dying without direction.
"Maybe… all the boats sank. Or drifted off course. Maybe no one raised the alarm. Maybe… I'm on the other side of the ocean and no one knows where to look."
On the third day, the water ran out. It happened foolishly, inevitably. A careless move, a sharp tilt, and the last sip spilled onto the bottom of the tarp.
Samuel stared at it as if he could put it back in the bottle. He didn't curse. Didn't hit anything. He just let himself fall against the raft's wall and stayed there, looking at the sky as if waiting for an answer.
At nightfall, thirst began to ache. His mouth burned. His tongue felt like a dry rag. His lips were cracked, and the taste of salt covered everything. He dreamed of glasses of crystal-clear water, the clinking of ice. He dreamed of hands touching him, voices calling his name.
He woke without knowing how much time had passed. His skin was burning. His eyelids were heavy. The briefcase no longer mattered. Neither did the knife. He was too tired to be afraid.
Then came the fourth night. The worst.
He didn't dream.
He didn't sleep.
He only fell into a kind of lucid fever, where the mind wears out faster than the body.
He laughed softly.
He covered his head with the coat.
He talked to his father.
He talked to Elena.
He talked to himself.
"This can't be how it ends," he murmured, his lips cracked. "No one dies like this. No one dies… like this."
And when the sky began to lighten, his body didn't rise. He had no strength left.
He lay there, eyes half-closed, watching the sun rise. He felt his skin was stone, his throat made of paper, his soul no longer fitting inside his body.
That's when he saw it.
A silhouette.
Very, very far away.
Low. Irregular. Almost imperceptible.
Not a mountain.
Not a cloud.
A dark line on the horizon.
Still.
Real.
Or at least… different.
His eyes didn't react immediately. He didn't know if he was crying or if the sun was burning his pupils. But his body, by pure instinct, lifted itself up. Not fully. Not with strength. Just a gesture. A twist of his torso. An attempt to sit up.
He blinked once.
Twice.
Thrice.
The silhouette was still there.
A firm stripe, breaking the liquid perfection of the world.
Land.
Or so he thought.
He smiled. Not with joy. Not with triumph.
He smiled like someone who has lost so much there's nothing left but that: one last smile, dry, crooked, not knowing if it's salvation or madness.
And in that stillness, under the sun of the fifth day, the man who no longer believed in survival found something to hold on to again.
Even if he didn't know what it was.
Or how much was left.
Or if it was really there.