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 "J'accuse!"

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?"

"Yes," Kate said calmly, taking the wind out of his sails and causing the other two men in the galley to look askance at each other and warily at her. Aleuts believed all things, animate and inanimate, had souls. She had learned that at her grandmother's knee, almost before she learned to walk, but she saw no reason to explain this to Andy.