'How much worse?' Sam said.

'Ziggy's predicting a hurricane. Winds over fifty miles an hour, more rain and seas rising. I'd tell you to get to the high point on the island,' Al swallowed hard, 'but there isn't one.'

Sam clenched his jaws, his throat and mouth suddenly dry. He grabbed up one of the broken sides of the crate, a slab of wood nearly the size of a shovel's blade. 'I can dig,' he said. 'Into the side of this sand bank. It'll give me a bit of protection.'

'Sure,' Al said. 'You do that.'

Sam needed action. What else was he going to do, sit there and wait to be washed away or blown away by the rising wind? He dug between the roots of the trees, sand slipped away and avalanched beneath his attempts. He wasn't going to get far, or very deep, but he needed some way to keep the wind off him, somewhere to huddle and keep warm. He was hungry again, he wished he'd had time to get something to eat, more bananas and mangoes. Another coconut. He should have stopped and dug up a few of those crabs, but the thought of eating them raw didn't appeal. He supposed it would, when he got hungry enough. He wondered how long that would take. If the weather had been better he could have gone onto the reef and brought back some clams or maybe even caught a fish.

Al watched him for a while, his discomfort evident. The terrible helplessness each had when needing to give any physical support to the other. 'I just have to go do something,' he said. 'I'll be right back.'

'Sure.' There was nothing Al could do. Nothing in the world. Sam kept digging. His life depended on it. He forced his way between the tree roots and he dug until until his hands bled, until they went beyond pain and became numb with cold and the wood dropped from between his fingers. Rain washed through his hair and into his eyes, poured down his arms and back, stuck the ragged underpants to his body. The scrape he'd made was barely enough to cram himself into, but he dragged the silk underwear and draped it around his shoulders because even that was better than nothing and he grabbed up the hatbox and stuck it on his head. The box was solid cardboard and would keep the rain off. He knew he stood a better chance if he could keep his head warm. He huddled there, shaking with cold and pain and with fear. The wind roared and tore at the trees so that he could feel their roots moving, straining to hold onto the earth. Waves pounded the beach and the island shuddered. In a dazzling flash of what Sam thought at first was lightning, Al appeared.

Had he gone away just to get changed? He was wearing a thick, warm raincoat and waterproof hat. In one hand he had a large shopping bag, in the other, a halogen lamp with a power cord that faded to nothing. 'Well this looks cosy.' He put the bag onto the ground so that it disappeared and knelt down to look at Sam. 'I think I liked the hat with the bird better. How you doing, kid?'

Sam just didn't have the energy to lie. Al would have figured it out anyway, the way his teeth were chattering. 'I'm so cold.'

'That's what I thought. Got just the thing here.' Al hefted the lamp.

'What are you going to do with that?'

'Sam, c'mon. What's the one thing a hologram can provide?'

'Uh, light, I guess.'

'Exactly. So get out your diamond brooch and let's make fire.'

Sam rushed to find anything dry; tinder, fallen palm fronds, a couple of those books, the wood from his crate, driftwood he'd found on the beach, branches from nearby in the forest. The movement warmed him a little. He used the lid of the hatbox for added shelter and shredded coconut fibre and some of the pages from a book in a small pile. 'Okay.' He held the brooch in readiness.

'You ready, kid?'

'Yeah, go ahead, Al.'

Al snapped the halogen into life and for a moment Sam was dazzled by it. He steadied himself and held the brooch, angling it awkwardly, needing to keep it out of the wet. An intense dot of white glowed in the nest of paper and fibre.

'This is getting hot,' Al complained.

'So's this.'

Al shut the halogen off. Sam's little fire gave out a small, friendly light. He leaned down over the paper, a tiny flame danced there. He fed it with threads of coconut fibre and more pages of the book, added shredded palm frond and a stick. Raindrops made it sputter and threaten to die, but Sam added more paper, more fibre, building it until it could handle the weight of several sticks and a small chunk of the crate. He could feel the heat in his aching hands. 'That feels so good.' Sam held his fingers inches from the flame, felt its warmth on his nose and cheeks, up under his hatbox-hat. 'Thanks Al.'

'Any time.' Al put the halogen down and it vanished. He reached for empty air and the shopping bag reappeared in his hand. He pulled a butane bottle and camp stove out of the bag.

'What are you doing?'

'Making sure you stay warm.' Al connected the stove and bottle, lit the burner and settled it onto the ground, its flame flickering blue and yellow.

'I appreciate the sentiment but holograms don't generate any actual heat.'

'You gotta stay awake and you gotta think warm. That's the important thing.' Al kept his hand on the gas bottle of the stove, he didn't even have a cigar with him. He shuffled closer to Sam so that their shoulders were almost touching, except that they were decades apart and each only an image to the other. 'Check out the coat,' he said. 'Same as yours only blue.'

'What?' Sam looked at his bare chest. It would have been nice if he'd had a coat. Had Al just gone crazy?

'No. I said look at my coat. Go along with me here. You've gotta think warm, Sam. Think it.'

'Sure.' No matter how hard he thought, it wasn't going to make him warm. The fire was small, he couldn't build it up too much in the confined space. He warmed his hands one at a time and pressed them against his chest but he was still shivering, still so very tired. It was hard keeping his eyes open against the rain and the muscle spasms. It was all just work. Even listening to the wind was work. He let his eyes close.

'Hey. What are you doing?'

'Sorry. Nothing. Just a little tired.'

'Well tired's no good. Beeks told me you have to stay awake.' Al turned Ziggy's link around so that Sam could see a new little screen had been wired onto it. 'Here we go.' Al punched the buttons and a rectangular grid appeared. A pink block composed of four cubes stacked so that they made an "L" shape appeared at the top of the grid and began to float down.

'Tetris? You're kidding me.' Sam was colder than he'd ever been in his life. He could hardly hear Al over the noise of the storm, and the rain was relentless, but his friend wanted to play this lame little game of block stacking.

Al kept his foot pressed against the gas bottle of the camp stove. As long as he was touching it with part of his body, it would remain visible. 'Come on. You have to tell me which way to move the blocks.'

'Al…'

'The best way to stay awake is to keep talking. Now while we do this I want you to tell me about the hottest you've ever been.'

'Think warm. I know. Shift that across to the left.' He pointed to the Tetris game, his hand shaking with cold, rainwater dripping from the end of his finger and falling through the screen. 'It was the summer of sixty nine. No, nineteen seventy. I'd just graduated high school.'

'You were about to start college.' Al's eyes glazed over for a moment. 'All those co-eds.'

'Too bad none of them were interested in a little kid, which is h-how they th-thought of me.'

'Think warm. It's summer.'

Sam set his jaws to stop his teeth chattering. 'Rotate that through ninety degrees and shift it two spaces to the right.' He stared at the steady blue and yellow flame of the camp stove and tried to imagine that the rain falling through it was the hologram and the heat coming off it was real. That in a moment Al would pour him a hot coffee. He added more sticks to his fire, but it hissed and the flame went low, the wood was damp. 'Come on,' he whispered to it.

'So how hot was that summer?'

His eyes met Al's intent, compassionate gaze. Al, without even the cigar in his hand. He couldn't remember the last time he'd seen that.

'Hot. Let me tell you. It was hot. The chickens were laying hard boiled eggs.' It was the worst summer of his life and he felt as if time had stopped. Tom was gone and in the unrelenting heat of that summer it seemed as if the world could not forgive itself for that loss. He remembered the smell of dust rising off the straw in the barn, flies, thick and sticky in the holding yard outside of the milking shed. Everything made him think of death. He couldn't even be bothered pushing Katie off the sofa so that he could lie there and watch TV. His dad had come in from settling the cows down, dust caked into mud on his forehead where his hat had been. How much worse had things been for Al that summer? The first year of his internment as a prisoner of the Viet Cong. 'I lived that whole summer down by the waterhole, watching the river get lower and lower. That was the year Bess died.'

'Your Aunt?'

'Dad's old hunting dog. Followed me down to the river every time I went there. I was always taking shortcuts through the cornfield. It was twice as long if you went on the road.'

'Snakebite?'

Sam nodded. 'Poor Bessie. She didn't have many summers left in her, and I think her heart broke when Tom died. Don't know how she knew, but she knew. Then I nearly broke my back digging her grave. That ground was hard.' Sam looked at his hands. No calluses there any more, but they were ragged and bloody from the work he'd done that day, opening coconuts. Digging in the sand. Despite his little fire and Al's attempt to distract him, he still shook with cold.

'So tell me,' said Al. 'What was your best ever Thanksgiving?'

They talked. All night they talked through the roaring and shaking of the storm. Al must have been so cramped. He was sitting in the middle of the floor of the Imaging Chamber and from time to time Sam guessed that Gooshie and Dr Beeks came in and said something because Al's attention would wander and he'd say things that made no sense, or maybe it was just Sam who wasn't making sense. He knew he was getting bad. The hatbox had been a good headcover for a while, but the pounding rain had seeped into the cardboard and soaked the joins so that it fell off his head. He fed the box, bit by bit, to the fire, worried each time that he would drown it. Cherry coals glowed at its heart but the cold was eating its way into him. He tried to picture Gooshie and Beeks, even though he couldn't remember exactly what they looked like. Tall, round, warm people in thick polar coats and woollen hats pulled down to their ears. Maybe they were trying to be helpful but in the end Sam knew he was alone. The treatment and cure for hypothermia is heat and the shared heat of another human body is a fundamental resource. He couldn't get that from Al. Not even the feel of an arm around his shoulders. Just Al himself. Just the warmth of his personality. If he could make that work, the man was a magician.

'Hey come on or you're gonna crash it.'

'Huh?' Water streamed down the embankment above Sam and a thick mixture of sand and water poured over him. He ached. All over he ached, the muscles in his back, arms, legs, stomach shuddering so that it was hard to breathe now.

'The blue block.' Al waved Ziggy's link under his nose so that it was hard to focus.

'Two left. No. The other left.' His jaws locked. He was so tired. He didn't want to shiver any more. He didn't feel warm, the way you were supposed to when hypothermia finally got you, he wasn't losing it, he knew where he was, he just wanted to sleep. He'd had enough.

'C'mon Sam, stay with me. Stay with me, huh?'

But he couldn't.

'Tell me about your favourite Fourth of July.'

He thought of fireworks and the sizzle of hamburgers, his dad joking around with him and Tom and Katie The sound of his mother's voice and the taste of her Strawberry-Rhubarb pie, but ultimately there was just Al. No more real than a picture on a TV screen, flickering dimly late at night and he just couldn't stay awake. He'd been doing this for too long, it felt like forever and it had to stop. No more shaking, no more shivering, no more noise. The storm could go somewhere else, he just needed to sleep.

'Don't do this. Sam don't do this. I need you to stay awake.' Al raised his voice and put a hard, military edge to it. 'I mean it. Come on. Sam!' One last time, Sam opened his eyes. He could see the look of desperation on Al's face. Al put his hand in the fire, reached towards Sam, his hand going through Sam's. His hand came up to Sam's face and like a dream, vanished when it got there. It was less than the draught caused by a fly's wings.

Sam's eyes closed again. The night had suddenly gone calm. He thought he was dreaming it, this wish that the storm would end, but the wind had dropped from a roar to a howl to a whisper and now nothing.

'It's over.' He could hardly get the words out. He was so tired.

'No it's not Sam. It isn't. This is just the eye of the storm. We're in the middle and it's calm but all around it's still the hurricane and it's coming back. It's right on top of us and you have to stay awake. You hear me, Sam? Stay awake for me.'

'Anything for you, Al.' He added one more bit of broken crate to the fire and that took the last of his energy. It was a funny thing, just as Sam's eyes slid closed for the final time, he was sure he could see water on Al's face. How did that get there? It wasn't raining where Al was. How come his face was wet?