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The slab is down and I am hosing it carefully to make sure it doesn’t crack while it sets. The sun is scorching on my face but there is a crispness to the autumn air that means you can be cold while your skin burns. I am peering around at this land, my land, so recently acquired, and pondering how overwhelmed I feel by it. I don’t know what to do here. This is all I have ever wanted: land of my own, a place to build a home. But now that I stand here, I feel dwarfed by the enormity of the space around this cement slab. I know I want wildness, I want to grow things, but I don’t know how, or where to start, and I feel young and foolish and very alone.

It’s only by chance that I turn and look out over the valley. At the reason I chose this place, those snow gums. Their ghostly white trunks streaked through with blood red and ocher yellow, their gnarled and twisted forms contorted into eerie sculptures. They are unlike any other tree I have seen. There is a man among them.

I turn off the hose and jump down onto the grass. My stride is as quick as my pulse. He is trespassing.

“Hi,” I call.

He turns and sees me approaching. The sun is at my back; he lifts a hand to shield his eyes, squints to make me out. He is neither big nor small in stature. Neat brown hair, handsome but forgettable face. Not particularly remarkable. He wears a backpack and carries a notepad and pen. I think about these things because I may need to describe him to the police.

“Hi there,” he says, his accent American.

“Do you need help?” I ask.

“Not unless you can tell me why the Phoracantha are increasing their damage on the pauciflora .”

I study him, already knowing him. “Let me rephrase. Why are you on my land without permission?”

“Trying to figure out why the Phoracantha are increasing their damage on the pauciflora .”

I must look unimpressed because he laughs and that’s when I see it: there is something remarkable after all. It’s his smile and that laugh, the warmth of it.

“Can I explain over a coffee?”

“I don’t have coffee. I don’t have a kitchen.”

He peers up the hill at the worksite. “Incredible spot you’ve got here. What do you plan on doing with it?”

“Just… you know—house, garden.”

“Can I take a look at the aspect from up there?”

I don’t answer, wondering how I will get rid of this guy.

“Purely for appreciation,” he says. “I love it here. I’m from New York, I’m studying the decline in your snow gums. You’re wondering why, of course: I like to travel, I try to take on projects all over the world. It’s taken me fifteen years to get here to the Eucalyptus pauciflora and they don’t disappoint.” He is gazing around at the rainbow snow gums, happy, it seems, to chat away without much response from me. I guess he remembers his manners because he offers a hand and says, “Hank Jones, professor of biology at NYU, I’m leading a research project into adapting plants to climate change, specifically swapping genetic modules between cells to create more drought tolerance. But as I’m starting to see, drought is not the only problem here, there’s a wood-boring beetle using the drought’s dryness to dig more deeply into the gums. The trees are dealing with a double-pronged attack.”

The hand is still outstretched, waiting for me. Reluctantly I shake it. I really just want to get back to watering my slab.

I turn and head up the hill, letting him follow me. “It’s triple,” I tell him over my shoulder.

“What’s the third?”

“Fire.”

“Ah. Of course.”

At the top he steps up onto the cement and takes in the view. In every direction are sloping hills and valleys, some covered in thick bush, some rocky outcrops glistening in the sunlight, and on the higher mountains in the distance is snow. I can feel how moved he is by it in the quality of his silence. Some of my impatience eases. I feel proud, suddenly, of this place I’m to make my home.

Unlike the rest of our surroundings, the stretch of hill we stand on is bare of vegetation, but for three enormous eucalypts.

“You could do a wildflower meadow,” he says suddenly. He’s jumped down onto the grass and is walking across the hill. “It’s perfect here.” I don’t even know if he’s talking to me but he is rapt by this idea. “ Craspedias and Stylidiums , Gentianellas , Leucochrysum , Ranunculus , Brachyscome , Euphrasia —these mountains were underwater,” he says abruptly, glancing at me with astonishment as though I have told him this fact instead of him me. “Hundreds of millions of years ago. And during the Ice Age there were glaciers all over it, which means that geologically speaking it’s very interesting, the rocks are incredibly old and there’s evidence that the unusual variety of botanical families found here date all the way back to Gondwana, which is why you can find species here that resemble flora of the northern hemispheres. Do you know how lucky you are that this is yours? You could do Prostanthera cuneata , and Grevillea , and Myrtus , they would all thrive in each other’s company and the light is perfect…” He has barely remembered to breathe, he is so excited, and as he smiles at me with the delight of this, with the plants he has imagined and brought to life around him, I start to see what he sees. Not the plants specifically—I have no idea what any of those names mean—but I see the hill we stand on covered in color. He has painted it for me.

I walk over to the caravan and flick on the kettle for a cuppa.

I try to keep this memory in the forefront of my mind. I try to recall in as much detail as I can those first days and weeks and months of discov ering that we were both in love with the same place, the same mountains, the same small patch of land—and by extension each other. He could see how to turn the land I’d bought into a home. I would build the house and, improbably, this man from across the world would plant the garden, and together we would create a life.

To find him now, to figure out why he left Shearwater without telling me, to ask him what on earth is going on—and to make sure he’s okay—I need a girl who can swim out to retrieve a radio. If Hank isn’t here, then I have come for nothing, and I need to get off this drowning island.

Fen lives on the beach, they’ve told me. So I am making the trip down the hill for the second time when I hear a noise and turn to see a flash of pale hair among the tussocks.

“Could that be a rare golden shag I see hiding in the grass?”

Orly stands up with an eye roll. “No such thing as a golden shag.”

“No shit. What are you doing?”

“Following you.”

“Why?”

“Dad said I have to leave you alone.”

“This isn’t doing a very good job of that.” I turn and keep walking, but every now and then I hear him behind me, and eventually I call, “Either walk with me or go home, this is annoying.”

He hurries to my side, a little skip in his step. “You’re a bit grumpy, huh?”

“Am I?”

“A bit. How come?”

I think about it. There are several current reasons that seem obvious enough, but I try to think back to before all of this and ponder whether I’ve always been grumpy. “I think I’ve been pissed off for a while,” I admit, though pissed off is not the right way to describe the state of me over the last year.

“How come?”

All I can think to say is, “I built a house.”

“What kind of house?”

“Just a house. My sisters helped a bit, but mostly I did it myself. It took a long time, a lot of years. It had a garden.” I stop, because I don’t know how to talk about this garden, or really this house either. My life.

“Where was it?” he asks, his eyes alight at the mention of a garden.

“In the Snowy Mountains.”

“Were there snow gums?” he demands.

I smile. “Yeah, there were snow gums. There were a lot of things. It was more of a wildlife corridor than a garden, I guess. We did a lot of work, but there were parts where you just stood back and let nature do its thing. The plants and trees were so varied that it meant the patch of land was full of animals. There were emus and dingoes, those were the ones everyone used to get excited about, but I really loved the platypus in the stream, and the family of wombats that had dug their burrows just outside my bedroom window. They have square poos, did you know that?”

He laughs. “No way.”

I nod but I am finding it hard to keep my voice steady and it occurs to me that maybe this isn’t the best thing to tell a nine-year-old about.

“What happened?” he asks.

“A bushfire came through.”

We are both quiet for a while, thinking through all that that means.

“Was there… much left?” he asks. “The house?”

“No.”

If I look up into the sky now I will see the way the ash fell like snow in the night, swirling and delicate.

The crazy thing is that I’d engineered the house to be as fire resistant as possible, I’d thought I was being silly, and then a fire comes along that reminds you that you know absolutely nothing about what nature is capable of, the power of it is ludicrous, beyond your capacity to prepare for, and everything— everything —burns if it’s hot enough.

“The animals?” Orly asks. “The snow gums?”

I don’t reply because he already knows the answer, I can hear it in his voice. “It was hard to be cheerful after that,” I tell him.

“Will you rebuild?”

“No. There’s no point in rebuilding. It’ll go again, another fire will come.”

“Because of climate change,” he says, working it through.

“That’s right.”

“Will we die of climate change?” Orly asks, sounding more curious than scared.

“I dunno.”

“But if you had to guess.”

He’s pushing me. I’m not sure what answer he’s hoping for. What are you meant to do with kids? Protect them or be honest? I shrug, tell him what I think is true. “One day soon enough, everything is either going to burn, drown, or starve, including us.”

He stares at me.

I spread my hands. “You asked.”

We walk in silence for a bit and I start to feel guilty. “I’m only joking,” I say feebly, but I don’t think he’s listening.

Orly asks, “So what will you do? If you won’t rebuild.”

I think about having nothing and what that can do to you. How it can paralyze a person. I was paralyzed for a while. Deep in my cells I was inert, I was lost. Until I got on that boat to come here. And now it feels like if I stop moving, even for a second, I will perish.

“Did you get to know any of the scientists who lived here?” I ask Orly a little later.

He nods. “Raff’s friend Alex. He came up to the lighthouse for dinner a lot.”

“Oh yeah? What was his job?”

“He was studying the fur seals. Do you know sealers nearly wiped them out? Thousands and thousands of them. Back in the 1800s. But people like Alex have been bringing them back.”

I think on this. Leaning against my walking stick. A whole population of animals, clubbed to death. I can see the beach now, stretching below us. I can picture the ship, anchored a little way out. Can see their dinghy rowed in, men climbing out onto the black sand. Surrounded by such astonishing creatures, and, what’s more, by the miracle of their trust. Animals who had never learned to fear humans. I feel sick, actually, and the vividness of the vision feels beyond me, it feels outside my body, like something I am being shown. I have a sense, now, of why this place feels so… creepy. It hangs upon the air, the memory of this violence.

“Who else did you know?” I ask him. “The base leader?”

“No,” Orly says. “Not really.”

But he answers too quickly.

“You didn’t have anything to do with him? Didn’t ever cross paths?”

“I mean, a little.”

“What was he like?”

“Hank?” Orly thinks. “He was nice. Everyone liked him.”

“Mates with your dad?”

“Oh no, not Dad.”

I look sideways at him. “Really? Why not?”

“I dunno.”

“Did they not like each other?” I press.

“Dad said once that he could see through Hank.” Orly looks at me. “What does that mean?”

“Just…” I try to work it out too. “I guess it means he thought Hank wasn’t who he seemed to be.”

“Oh. Why do you care, anyway?”

“I don’t,” I say robotically, but Orly has already darted forward, not interested in my response.

My too-small boots hit the black sand of the beach. We have been picking our way around the big fat seals on the pathways. Some of them look up at us as we pass, some snort and give a lazy gurgle, while others don’t bother lifting their heads.

“Meet the wieners!” Orly says. “Elephant seal babies. The adults have gone out to sea already.”

I can’t even imagine the size of the adults if these giants are the infants.

There is a human shape in the distance. Out among the fur seal colony. We make our way past the clumps of bright seaweed, over the bones. Birds fill the sky. I don’t know what kinds they are.

“Mind the gentoos,” Orly says, skirting around little waddling penguins with bright-yellow feet and beaks.

“They are much cuter than they have any business being,” I comment. It is hard to take in that they are just… here. Right beside me. Completely unbothered by the presence of people on their beach.

“I know. My favorites are the royals. They have those long orange eyebrows, you know? They let you get close, too, you can hang out with the royals and the kings, they’re down on South Beach, but these gentoos are more shy so we have to be careful not to disturb them.”

“Got it.”

We give them a few meters’ berth. I can see about a dozen of them awkwardly wandering over the rocks, sort of idly making their way toward the roaring sea. When they reach the water I see that awkwardness morph into a smooth, sleek dive through the waves.

As we draw nearer to the fur seals, the sound of them crests. Could there be hundreds of them? The honks and snorts from the adults are coupled with what sounds like the bleat of lambs. In my confusion I look for the source of this and realize there are little squidgy shapes in among the adults, sand-covered babies with little ears poking out of their heads, dozens and dozens of them making these tiny lamb cries.

“Oh my god,” I say.

“I didn’t know they’d given birth!” Orly exclaims. “Let’s not get too close.”

As he says this a huge male starts flopping over to us with an aggressive bark. I am alarmed but Orly raises his hands above his head and says, “Shoo! Go away!” And the seal kind of considers him, gives a huffy sniff, and then flaps back to the colony. I can’t help laughing.

“That was King Brown,” Orly tells me, as though this explains the interaction.

“You guys name them?”

“Alex and Fen did.”

A sleek, light-gray mother seal starts shouting, panicked, and as we watch, the girl, the human shape among this astonishing mound of furry bodies, picks her way over to the crying mother and without any hesitation she shoves an enormous male in the side, making him start with surprise and shuffle his way off the tiny baby he’d been squashing. The little seal pup shakes its head and bleats for its mother, who nuzzles it in relief, while the male gives a roar of indignation and then flops back down to sleep.

“He nearly killed the baby,” I say, horrified.

“Yeah. It happens, sadly. They don’t mean to, they’re just so big. Fen stays in there a lot to try to stop it.”

“Doesn’t it bother them to have a human among them?”

Orly frowns, looking at his sister. “I guess not,” he says, as though it’s a stupid question, and given what we’re looking at I suppose it is. “The researchers used to have rules about keeping a few meters away, letting them come to you, you know, just basically not bothering them. But they didn’t even try to make Fen stick to those rules. She’s just… one of the seals.”

Which seems a truly bizarre thing to try to contemplate, and I find myself wondering how this could be true, how such a thing could come to be. Why is she down here among these animals instead of living in a house with her family? And why does her dad allow it?

Fen has seen us now and is making her way over to us. We have met before but that feels like part of the fever dream. I take her in properly, watch the way her body moves, completely at ease on the sand and among the animals, strong and graceful in the full wet suit that looks not unlike the sleek dark fur of the seals. Her hair is long and sun-bleached blond, tangled and salty almost to the point of dreadlocks. Her skin is very tanned and freckled and she seems like a wild animal who has stepped free of a life under water.

Maybe Dom doesn’t have much choice in the matter of who and what his daughter is; I can’t imagine it would be easy trying to keep this creature from the sea.

“Hi—” I start to say before I am cut off by an embrace. I am so shocked and it hurts so much that I don’t think to hug her back, and when she lets her arms drop I immediately regret this, wanting to reach for her even through the pain.

“Oh!” she gasps. “Your wounds!”

I grimace. “It’s okay.”

“Sorry. It’s just…” Her eyes are filling. “I didn’t know if you’d wake up.”

I gaze at this girl, realizing all three of these children have shown me the same open warmth, a kindness given freely and without agenda, and I wonder if that generosity is a product of their isolation, of their loneliness, or if it is simply a truth of their characters. Their father is different, he looks at me with wariness, but if that is to protect his children then I can understand it.

I don’t want to ask this girl what I’ve come here to ask her. Not now that I know she will say yes.

“They’re beautiful,” I say of the seals, and she beams, a smile of crooked white teeth, and she is beautiful.

“They are,” Fen agrees. “I find it so hard to leave them. How are you?”

“I’m okay.”

“You were just a shape,” she admits. “Tangled in driftwood and kelp. I didn’t think you’d be alive.”

I don’t know how to thank her, how to convey the enormity of my gratitude.

“Come on,” she says before I can try. She leads Orly and me to a wooden hut on stilts in the water. It’s a boatshed, with a single rumpled mattress in one corner, a kitchenette with a sink, kettle, and fridge, and a bookshelf bursting with paperbacks. Fen has a row of shells and knickknacks on the windowsill above her bed, the only sign a teenage girl lives here. This all sits alongside three inflatable motorboats, bobbing gently against the timber floorboards. It is cold in this shack, and it feels exposed, and looking at the space makes me feel a little depressed for her.

“Could I use one of these to get back to the mainland?” I ask, gesturing to the boats.

The kids look at each other and burst out laughing.

My hope curls into embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah, what then, what are you showing me?”

“I have an idea,” Fen says. “If you’re, if you want, I mean.”

“Okay.”

“Dad told you where your boat is?” she asks.

I nod.

“I might be able to use the Zodiac to reach it. Then radio an SOS.”

Turns out I didn’t need to ask at all.

The problem is the current. I’ve heard it from each of them separately: the Drift is perilous. There’s no swimming against it, there’s barely swimming with it. It dumps you ferociously onto sharp-toothed rocks. If Fen can manage to steer the Zodiac into a calm pocket of water protected by the hull of the wrecked boat, she might be able to climb onto the deck, find the bridge and check the radio, all without getting wet. But if the current steers her too far to the left or right, even by millimeters, she will shoot past the wreck and into the rocks.

The big thing, she says, is not to tell Dom.

“No,” I say. “No way.”

But she says, “I know this ocean, trust me,” with such confidence, and because the selfish, ugly part of me wants to, I do.

She looks at Orly next, the weakest link. We can both see him itching to race for home, worried about his sister but also happy to be part of this. “Can we count on you?” she asks him.

Orly extends his hand and they shake. “You can.”

We climb into the Zodiac. I don’t want to be in this flimsy boat, or any boat, but despite their clear independence I don’t think I should let them attempt any of this without adult supervision. Orly and I will go with Fen to the southern bay and watch from land.

Fen starts the motor and steers us out of the shed. The sea opens up before us.

I train my eyes skyward. If I think about how close the water is, if I imagine how easy it would be to tip over, I stop being able to breathe. I focus on my bum on the rubber, my feet in the boat, my hands tight about the rope rail.

We zoom along the island’s coast, cresting waves with big leaps and landing so hard we are thrown up off our seats and slammed back down on our tailbones. I scream with each one. It hurts . Sea spray drenches us and I realize too late it’s drier to sit at the back. Orly can’t stop laughing at my screams.

In a calmer moment I look up at the island, taking it in. It is dramatic, mist shrouded.

“That’s a blue-eyed shag,” Orly says, pointing out a flash of black passing over our heads. “They’re endemic to Shearwater.”

Along the shoreline are huge stretches of white, and Fen steers closer so I can see that they are in fact enormous penguin colonies, thousands and thousands of birds in swarming masses. “Royals,” Orly says, or, “kings.” “There are rockhoppers around here too but not as many.”

I think of the life these kids are living, surrounded by such beauty, by so much wildness. This place is a dream. Do they think it’s normal? Even my home among the trees was still nothing like this. The animals I shared a stretch of forest with were shy and elusive; if I ever saw them, it was as they ran from me. I’m not even sure I knew places like this island still existed. That a place so alive could survive our colonizing.

On the tail of this thought I spot large metal shapes in among the penguins, rising up above them, red with rust. There is a bad feeling in me as I look at them.

“What are those?”

Both the kids go silent.

Then Fen says, “The sealers who came here. When they’d clubbed all the seals they could find, they’d stuff the penguins into those barrels—”

“Alive,” Orly adds.

“—to boil all their oils out.”

Oh god.

“And they’re still just sitting there?”

“I don’t think anyone knows whose job it would be to remove them, so they say they’re historical artifacts.”

I look at the barrels and at the thousands upon thousands of penguins surrounding them. As before, the image is like an intrusion into my mind, I see the men again, climbing out of their wooden boats and wading through those masses, lifting the little creatures into the barrels and ignoring their screams. I am glad when we’ve passed this particular stretch of coast.

“We see them too,” Orly says to me, and I look at him and realize he sees not only the penguins and the men but me, he sees far too much of me.

The bay is deceptively calm. Yen’s boat appears as we round some rocks and enter the mouth. It is confronting, to see it so broken, and I find it hard not to go back again to that storm and that swell. He tried to make a Mayday call but the only station close enough to hear us was here, on Shearwater, and nobody answered. I know now it’s because the radio had been destroyed and most of the island’s occupants had already gone. But we didn’t know, he wasted so much time trying to get through and the waves were so big.

“It’s okay,” Fen tells me softly.

“Sorry.” I swallow. “I didn’t realize it would be so hard to see.”

She steers us closer, then idles the engine and lets us bob in the waves. I can see a change in the color of the water, which must be the Drift. I can see the rocks. I can’t see a way to avoid either. I realize we are not getting that radio.

“I’ll drop you to shore and circle back,” Fen says.

“No,” I say, and she looks at me. “We’re going home now.”

“What? No, I can make it.”

I hold her eyes. “We’re going home now. It’s alright.”

Her mouth opens but whatever she was going to say dissolves and her shoulders slump. “But we need the radio.”

“It’s not worth drowning for.”

Fen starts the Zodiac once more and makes a wide turn. It opens up a different view of the rocks the craft is wedged within.

“What’s that?” Orly asks. “Stop, Fen, what is that?”

She slows and I make sense of it seconds before they do. I grab Orly and pull his face to my chest so he can’t see. “Don’t look,” I say to Fen. “Don’t look.” But she is looking, and a sob leaves her. Because the body barely looks human anymore. Birds have feasted on him. And the rocks. He is not in the shape he should be, his limbs are out of place. Parts of his skin gone.

“Go, Fen,” I order her, making my voice hard enough to reach through to her, and she blinks, wipes her eyes, and navigates us out of the bay. Her hands on the throttle are shaking. I am still holding Orly against me, not letting him move, and he submits to it, returns the embrace, I don’t know how much he saw.

I face the wreck and the rocks and Yen’s body, I watch it grow smaller, I’m so sorry, I’m so fucking sorry, I hate myself.

They are waiting for us on the beach. I can see it’s going to be bad. Raff’s pacing back and forth like a tiger behind glass, and Dom is still as a gum tree, arms folded over his chest.

“Why would you take him down there?” Raff demands the second the Zodiac hits the sand. I realize he’s talking to his sister, furious with her even as he helps her out of the boat. Orly is still within the circle of my arms. Dom wades into the sea and reaches for his son; Orly clings to his father as he’s lifted easily out. I raise a leg over the side just as a wave hits us and I’m sent into the ankle-deep water. The pain of the impact brings hot tears to my eyes.

“Did you get the radio?” Raff is asking as I drag myself upright.

“We didn’t even go for it, nothing happened,” Fen says.

“We saw a body!” Orly shouts. He is halfway between terrified and excited. Then he says, a little more subdued, “He was all eaten.”

“Oh my god,” Raff snaps. Dom places a calming hand on his eldest son’s shoulder, while his gaze swivels to me.

“I’m sorry,” I say quickly.

“Why would you take my children to a boat wreck?” he asks me, eerily calm. “Where you know there will be a dead person?”

“I—”

“ We took her , Dad,” Fen says.

“A nine-year-old and a teenage girl who’s been through more than enough already,” Dom says, ignoring his daughter.

“What has she been through?” I ask him. “Why does she live alone in that shack, for god’s sake?”

“Don’t, Dad,” Fen says and then walks a few paces away.

“They seemed like they knew what to do,” I say helplessly. “That it was simple, and I… I just was thinking about that radio, it didn’t even occur to me that we would see him…” I press palms into my closed eyes. “I mean they run wild around here, how am I meant to know what they can and can’t do?”

The question falls into silence, sounding pathetic. The wind leaves me. I am shivering with cold, drenched through. Instead of making excuses I say again, “I’m sorry.” And “I really messed up.”

Dom’s eyes move to his children. “Are you okay?” he asks them.

They nod, but they look pale, and I don’t think their father is convinced.

“Everyone up to the house,” Dom says. Then to Fen, “Including you.”

Orly says he wants to walk with his brother and sister. Dom tells Raff to carry him if need be, and then he and I trudge over to the quad bike.

I grip the seat and peer over my shoulder at the three figures behind us. It’s late; the sun is starting to set and I can feel something unraveling inside me. No radio to call for help. No boat on which to leave. No husband here, as he said he was, when he pleaded for me to come. No home to return to, only ash. And I have killed a man and left his body in the sun to be picked at. I have shown him to children, and altered the way they see the world.

I am a tunnel, wind screaming through me.

And into this empty space comes a mad thought, unbidden.

They have killed him. My husband .