Halfway up the mast, he paused. He had seen it again, a momentary gleam reflected on the belly of a cloud somewhere over the eastern horizon, somewhere on his port bow, infinitely distant, impossible to pinpoint, but there. He returned to the wheel, heart pounding.

Just one more flash, he begged, just once more...

He came left until he thought he was on course for it.

In five minutes the eastern sky had gone gray with morning twilight.

He stayed on course for where he thought he’d seen the flash: He did not see it again. Perhaps he’d only imagined it.

She kept drifting in the dark between trance and consciousness, and each time she returned from the void she would find herself half under the horseshoe buoy, slipping into the deep. Her jacket was pulling her down. If she managed to get it off, which seemed a tremendous effort, then she would be lighter.

She wanted to shed it, but there must be reasons why she should not. Soggy or not, it was conserving body heat, and she was very, very cold. Also, it was orange, and if she made it until daylight, it could help him spot her. Also ... There was something else-what?

The whistle. She’d thought through that before. It was tied to the zipper, and she’d lose it.

Her whole world had compressed to the flash of the strobe on the neighboring waters. Her boundaries were herself, the yellow horseshoe, and the scruffy line that led to the man-overboard pole nodding and bobbing twenty feet away.

Her horizon was the crest of whatever watery depression she happened to be in when the strobe decided to fire. She had lost the stars and the sense of infinity she had known before she found the buoy; the instant she had touched the horseshoe she had traded vision for security.

She no longer looked for the dawn. She had no sense, even, of which way was east. From the bottom of the swells, she could see the man-overboard flag silhouetted against a creamy sky, but she hardly even noticed.

The strobe seemed weaker.

But it was not. It was competing with the morning light. Soon the sun burst over the eastern horizon, upstaging the strobe so mightily that, though it was flashing two feet from her head, she forgot it was there.

She was not sure, but she thought she had been in the water for over twenty-four hours.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

Gusts from Mount Pahia raced after them across the Bora Bora lagoon. She ignored the wind. She stood in the cockpit clutching the mizzenmast, hypnotized by the surf in the pass. She still wore a dress, from the flight, but did not dare go below to change. If he entered the pass they would be hurled back, like a toy boat in a bathtub, perhaps overturned. She did not want to be trapped below.