The chest had the horizontal mark inside the lid.
He had looked before opening. One centimetre, enough to see the mark, then the decision. The horizontal mark had been safe twice now. He opened it fully.
He reached inside with his right hand.
The needle was in the floor of the chest, angled upward, recessed into a slot in the wood so it was invisible from above. His fingers found the contents first, something wrapped in cloth, something cylindrical, and then his palm came down on the needle as he gripped and it went in through the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger and he pulled back and the needle stayed in the chest and the damage was done.
He looked at his hand. A small puncture, barely visible. A dot of blood welling up, very red against the skin.
The mark had said safe.
He closed the chest and sat down on the planks and pressed the puncture against his thigh and thought about what the mark actually told him. It told him the lid mechanism was clear. It did not tell him anything about what was inside. Those were two different things, and he had assumed they were the same thing, and that assumption had just put a needle in his hand.
He noted this without moving and waited to see what the needle had left in him.
The first sign was numbness at the puncture site, arriving within two minutes. Not the numb of cold or impact. Something more deliberate, spreading outward from the dot of entry in a radius that grew steadily, half a centimetre per minute, moving toward his wrist.
He watched it happen. There was nothing else to do. He pressed the watch face but could not feel the indentations properly under his numbing fingers and had to look at his hand to confirm he was pressing the right spots. The face lit. The list appeared.
He searched for medicine. Found the cluster of rows he had categorised as treatment. Scrolled through them. He did not know the specific symbol for antidote and had no way to ask. He looked for something that appeared to be a single-use consumable, a small container, associated with the treatment category. Found two candidates.
The numbness reached his wrist.
He highlighted the first candidate and tried to assess the cost. The number beside it was large. He looked at his inventory. Two food portions. Water. He had nothing else. He had parted with the better cloth in the last trade, the blood-soaked sleeve before that. His pockets held food and water and the watch on his wrist and the arrow in his shoulder.
He put both food portions on the platform and waited.
The platform did not respond.
He sat with that. The food sat on the platform. Nothing compressed. Nothing arrived. Either the value was insufficient, or the candidate row was not what he thought it was, or something else about the trade was wrong. He retrieved the food before the numbness in his hand made fine motor control impossible and tried the second candidate row.
The numbness was past his wrist now. Moving up his forearm.
He put the food back on the platform. Both portions again, everything he had. The cold was in his arm now, a deep internal cold, not the cold of the bridge air but something moving through the tissue itself from inside. His right hand was clumsy. He watched himself place the food portions and was not certain he had placed them squarely.
The sweating started.
Not gradual. A sudden shift in temperature across his whole body, hot and then cold, and then sweat on his face and neck and the watch face was slick under his fingers and he had to wipe it on his knee to see the display. The food was on the platform. The row was highlighted. He could not find the confirm input. There had been a confirm input, he thought, something he had used in the first trade, a deliberate gesture, but his hand was not responding precisely and the face kept going dark when he lost contact and he had to relight it and find his place in the list again.
His vision went at the edges. A narrowing.
'Focus.'
The watch. The row. The food on the platform.
He dragged his thumb across the face, the same uncontrolled drag that had first summoned the platform. Uncontrolled worked when control was failing. The platform shimmered. The food compressed inward, both portions, one after the other, and was gone.
He waited.
The cold was at his elbow.
He waited and watched the platform and the cold moved and the sweat ran down his jaw and dripped off his chin onto the planks and made small dark circles in the grey wood, and he watched those too because watching something concrete was better than watching the edges of his vision close.
The vial appeared on the platform.
Small, dark glass, sealed with a cap that was crimped rather than threaded. He picked it up with his right hand and his fingers did not close reliably on it and he switched to his left, which had the burn below the elbow but the hand itself was functional, and he got the cap between his teeth and bit down and it gave with a small resistance and a faint smell came out, sharp and chemical, nothing like food.
He got it down.
Not cleanly. Some of it went wrong and he coughed and the coughing pulled at the arrow and he stopped coughing through will alone. What stayed in him he had to trust was enough. He put the empty vial on the plank beside him and put his back against the railing post and waited to see what the antidote would do.
It did not work quickly.
The cold kept moving for another ten minutes after he drank, climbing past the elbow, reaching the upper arm. His thinking went slow and strange in a way that was distinct from exhaustion. He was aware of the planks under him and the post at his back and the void on the other side of the railing. Present but not organised. The edges of things had softened.
The cold stopped before it reached his shoulder.
He noticed this before he noticed anything else improving. The cold was still there, still deep and unpleasant in the arm, but it had stopped its forward movement. He sat with that. After a while the cold began to retreat, slowly, the way a tide goes out, not all at once but in degrees. Elbow, then forearm, then wrist. The numbness in his hand was the last thing to release, and even when it did the puncture site still ached and the hand still felt thick and unreliable.
His vision came back fully. The edges returned.
He sat against the post for a long time. He did not track how long. Long enough that the sweat dried on his face and the planks under him felt cold through the tracksuit, which meant he had been there long enough to lose body heat to the wood. He did not move until he was confident the poison was fully done with him.
When he finally stood, he took inventory without looking for comfort in it.
No food. He had traded everything. Water, roughly half a container now, he had drunk during the worst of it without noticing. Right hand functional but sore at the base of the thumb, the puncture site an ache that moved when he flexed. Arrow still in the left shoulder. Burn still on the left forearm. Watch on the right wrist, face dark. Bridge ahead, no end in sight.
He reopened the chest.
The contents he had not retrieved were still there, the cloth-wrapped object and the cylinder he had felt before the needle found him. He took them out with his left hand this time, keeping the right clear of the chest interior. The cloth-wrapped object was another food block. The cylinder was a short tube of something viscous, sealed at both ends, that he did not recognise and pocketed for later.
He looked at the needle in the chest floor. Visible now that he knew it was there, the tip still faintly dark. He noted its design: spring-loaded, set shallow so that the first contact of a palm going down would drive it in. It had fired on contact, not on opening. The mark had not lied. The mark had only ever told him about the lid.
He closed the chest and considered that for a while.
The mark told him one thing. He had been reading it as two things. He had been lucky, in a sense, that the second thing the mark failed to tell him had been a needle rather than something faster. He filed the correction precisely: the mark covered the mechanism. The interior was a separate question he did not yet have a system for.
He put the food block in his pocket, took a careful sip of water, and walked.