"A pyramid," he repeated. "I was reinforcing my prana.

"Reinforcing your what?"

"Reinforcing my prana." Andy picked up the top of the tent and it collapsed into a limp cylinder of linen and rods. "It's got the same ratio of structure as the pyramid at Giza."

Kate was very, very tired, or she never would have asked. "What's prana?"

He set the pyramid in a corner and looked at her, very solemn, very earnest. "Prana is the universal life force. All energy derives from it. It brings together East and West, the spiritual and physical. The pyramid concentrates that energy, and I meditate beneath it, thus enhancing my own personal prana." He stretched and yawned. "Long shift. Think I'll turn in." He climbed into the top bunk and burrowed beneath the covers. "Get the light, would you?"

TWO

THE smell of bacon frying brought Kate wide awake the next morning. For a moment she lay listening to the throb of the engines and the rush of the Avilda's hull through the water. It wasn't necessary to hang on to anything to stay in her bunk. Of course. Now that they were no longer picking pots and hanging their asses out over the water, the high seas had abated. Naturally.

Raising up on one elbow, she peered out the porthole.

All there was to see was fog and gray seas slipping rapidly past beneath it. It figured. This was the Aleutians.

If it wasn't foggy, it was windy. If it wasn't windy, it was foggy. After the last week, Kate would take a nice, peaceful, impenetrable fog any day.

The tantalizing smell of bacon eventually proved impossible to resist. Abandoning the contemplation of things meteorological for things hygienic and things culinary, she showered and dressed, tied her still-wet hair back into a single braid and beat feet down to the galley. There she was greeted by the dizzying sight of eggs over easy, bacon fried crisp and a huge mound of buttered toast. It was the first hot meal she'd seen in four days. She piled her plate high and sat down next to Andy.

"Oh, no," he said, looking at her plate, "not you, too."

She reached for a slice of bacon. "I beg your pardon?"

He waited until the bacon was well and truly in her mouth. "Oink, Oink, oink, oink."

"Excuse me?"

"Meat eater," he said, in the portentous tone of one crying "Taccuse!"

She looked down at her plate, and was aware, not necessarily of things coming to a halt around her, but of attention being shifted to the two of them in an almost palpable way. "And proud of it," she agreed cheerfully, and forked up some egg.

"How can you be? Animals have souls," Andy told her, as earnest and as solemn as he had been the night before holding forth on prana, "the same as humans. Did you know that after death an animal may be reincarnated as a human, and vice versa?"