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I am greeted, at breakfast, with “You got a screw loose?”

“Huh?” I fumble with the coffee percolator because I have a sense I’m going to need it for whatever this is.

“Telling my nine-year-old that if he doesn’t burn or drown he’ll starve.”

Oh.

I get the coffee onto the stove and light the gas. Then turn to face the simmering man seated at the kitchen table. “That’s not exactly what I said. And I told you not to use this table yet.”

He lifts his hands to show he hasn’t been touching the table. “Why’d you say anything remotely in the realm?”

“He asked. He’s curious.”

Dominic stares at me, astonished, and then he rubs his eyes. “Jesus,” he mutters. “Okay, you don’t have kids.”

“No.”

“Let me explain. You don’t just say to them whatever dark bloody thoughts pop into your head.”

“He’s smart, Dom.”

“Yeah and he’s a child. You think he’s able to cope with the image in his head of animals burning?”

“None of us can cope with that.”

“Too right. He woke up screaming.”

My insides plummet. “Shit. I’m sorry.” I sit down opposite him, holding the coffee mug in my lap. I try to make sense of what possessed me. “It felt wrong. Not to tell him the truth. He hasn’t seen the way the world is but he will. He needs to be prepared.”

Dominic contemplates this, his eyes fixed on the sky above the sink.

“How do you know what to say and not say?” I ask.

He looks back at me. “Bit of common sense’d do the trick.”

I look down at my hands, chastised.

“And just so we’re clear. They’re mine to prepare—or not—in whatever way I reckon.”

“I know that, of course.”

There is a long silence.

“I thought it would be the body,” I admit.

After a moment he says, “So did I.”

You think there will be time, but there isn’t. You get the sprinkler systems going to drench the ground between the forest and the house, the firebreak or so it’s called. You get the hoses ready to fight the flames by hand if you have to. You check that the gutters are clean, you soak them yet again. You pack bags. You pack everything that means anything to you. You think there will be time to pack more but it’s already arrived, tearing through the hills. You think you will fight it but you can’t, you can see that now. There is no stopping this blaze.

I’d set up the property well. My firebreak was wide enough that it should have saved the house. The materials I’d chosen to build with were about as fire resistant as you can get. I had several huge rainwater tanks hooked up to the sprinklers.

But there were eucalypts, three of them. My favorite trees on the land. They were a fraction too close to the house, but I couldn’t cut them down for that. I loved them too much.

In the end everything burned for those eucalypts. Because the flames, they leaped. They flew farther than I’d ever imagined they could.

I am going south with Dom and Orly to the seed bank. It requires a look-in every few days—we have to check the temperature now the power’s out, on top of which they have this sorting and packing task Hank left them. I’ve told them I’m coming, regardless of whether they want me to, regardless of how much it slows them down. We are going to sleep the night in a field hut, which is where Hank mostly lived. I want to see for myself where my husband spent his time. I want to sniff around a bit. Can’t shake the feeling Dom’s not telling me everything.

If Hank has indeed gone home (there is no home, there is nothing left, where will he go?), then I’d like to know what he went through in his final months here, and why he was so disturbed he sent me those last three emails. They tell a different story.

I think my body is starting to get used to the walking. I suppose it has to. The stitches have helped: there is no fresh blood. This improvement bolsters me.

We make our way south. Dom quizzes Orly on his maths. The kid makes swift work of it, then turns the conversation to the land we walk through. Much of the trek is difficult, and there are stretches so steep we need ropes to help us walk up the inclines. But there are also long tablelands of grasses, with mountains rearing up on either side. Sloping green hills and valleys. Mossy mounds. Rocky sea cliffs. And crystal-blue lakes nestled within it all. It is like walking through an ancient, untouched paradise, and I begin to see the island differently, now that I have trespassed within it. From outside, from the ocean, it is dark and dramatic and uninviting, but its center is quiet, it is peaceful. I can see why they love it here so much.

We reach a lake and above it circles a giant, snowy albatross. “Is it Ari?” I ask. “Or Nikau?”

Dom and Orly peer upward, studying the graceful, gliding arc. “It’s Nikau,” Dom says. “Males have less gray on their wings.”

We watch the bird for a long while. His flight is mesmerizing. I breathe in the cold, crisp air and it reminds me of home.

“Dad calls them the teenagers,” Orly says, “’cause they only wake up and start flying around at midday.” He seems to think this is hilarious.

“You can swim here,” Dom tells me. “If you dare.”

“Feel it,” Orly urges me. “Take off your glove and put your hand in.”

“No way, I’m not that stupid.”

“Come on, please? Please, please, please.”

I take off my glove, mostly to shut him up. Walk down over the rocks to the clear water. The albatross glides through the crystal reflection on the surface. The cold, when I feel it, hits me in the guts. For Orly, I let out a mighty yowl. He cracks up, goes to his knees laughing, and his dad and I are chuckling too, if at nothing else than his pure delight.

We walk on, skirting a valley so green it’s almost neon.

“That’s bog,” Orly tells me. “Don’t go down there, whatever you do. This is a type of fern.” He points to a vibrant green plant with many tiny fronds. “I can’t ever remember its proper name…” He gives his head a hard knock with his fist, looking desperately disappointed in himself.

“I forgive you,” I say. “What’s that one?”

“These are megaherbs, they don’t grow anywhere else in the world except on these subantarctic islands. This one’s the Stilbocarpa polaris , and it’s got loads of vitamin C. The sealers who came here used to eat it so they wouldn’t get scurvy.” The plant in question looks like a big green cabbage with fanlike leaves, and there is another one beside it with a long stem to hold a bright-yellow flowerhead. “And see this mossy-looking stuff?” Orly says next, indicating a large round patch of what does indeed look like moss. “It’s called Azorella , and it’s a perennial herb, but it’s interesting because it gets really windy here—the wind can get so savage, you haven’t even felt it yet, —and this plant has evolved to get pulled underground by its deep roots, so it can survive the harshness of the conditions. Oh, and look! This one here, this pretty one”—he is touching what looks like a purple spiky dandelion—“this is the one I was telling you about, the buzzy burr. Its real name is Acaena magellanica . See these tiny little hooks on the seed? This is how they catch onto bird feathers and get carried around the world. A lot of the plants here are like that, they’ve had to find ways to survive an unsurvivable place.”

I peer around at the vegetation. “They’re pretty special then, huh?”

He nods proudly, and though I had thought this island’s botanicals were sparse and bleak, I realize I just didn’t know how to recognize their abundance.

It gets colder as we travel farther south. I see frost covering the ground, and one of the southernmost mountains is completely covered in snow. Cresting a rise brings us out onto a kind of grassy plateau, and Dom tells me I have to move quickly along the worn footpath, because there are baby giant petrels nesting. I do as I’m told, following his pace and letting Orly bring up the rear, and as we walk I catch glimpses of them, fluffy gray dodo-type birds, completely adorable in their little nests among the tussocks.

The freezing wind is whipping against my face, icing my eyelashes and making my teeth chatter. This wind is a high shriek through the snowy grasses and the megaherbs; it is almost wordlike. I hear Orly say, “We aren’t going that way, I promise.”

I look back at him, thinking he must be talking to me, but I see him gazing into the sky and something about it chills me.

“Keep moving,” Dom orders me, voice low, and there is an urgency I’m not expecting. I find my pace again, a little more quickly now, and my heart is racing, I can’t help hearing Orly’s voice in my mind and the wind is lifting—

We climb down over the edge of the plateau onto a set of wooden steps, and the second we are protected by the cliff face the wind is gone and my panic with it.

What I am met with, instead, is an entirely different world.

A cacophony of sound. A universe of it.

My god. If I thought there were animals before, it’s as nothing to this place they’ve brought me to. Thousands of penguins, both royal and king, squawking and screeching and chattering. Huge elephant seals flopping about, either lying on the sand, using their clawed flippers to scratch their fat bellies or throw sand over their fur, or rearing up in the water, practicing their fighting with great bellowing honks and gurgles. The racket is mind-blowing; I have never heard anything like it. Not eerie and haunted like the wind was but wild and boisterous and full of life. I can’t help laughing in astonishment, in wonder. Even the color here feels richer, the black sand blacker, the mountains a deeper green, the kelp bloodier, and the bursts of color worn by the penguins so intense it’s like they’re waving flags at us, joyfully calling here I am!

“Welcome to South Beach!” Orly announces, flinging his arms wide.

I shake my head, lost for words.

We walk along the water’s edge, and unlike up at the pinch, where the westerlies ravage and batter the beach and base, here we are protected, and the water of the bay is quite calm. I can see penguins diving, their sleek little bodies launching in and out. Here and there in the shallows are more fighting seal pups. Chunks of ice bob in the dark water and sit on the sand, and there are spatterings of snow upon the ground. Dark cliff faces rise up on either side of us, shrouded in mist, and again, at these coastal points I feel a sense of the dramatic, but this time I don’t feel so uneasy. I feel moved by the beauty.

“Wait here, please,” Orly tells me in an imitation of a traffic cop. He uses hand signals to gesture to the penguins and I realize there is a steady stream of royals waddling up and down this particular path between the water and the steep craggy cliff face. They start leaping up the rocks and disappearing behind a curtain of the big green cabbage. “The royal highway,” Orly tells me. “They head up through there to their nesting ground, way up in the hills. This is the only place in the whole world where they breed! We can go and look at the colony later, there’s still some chicks up there, they’re so cute. But you have to keep the road clear for them, so when we get a break in the traffic… we go! Go!”

I realize he is waving me through and I trot forward over the highway, past the waddling creatures with their stylish yellow eyebrows. The kings are quite different, much larger and more elegant, with a graceful curve to their long thin beaks and a rich velvety collar of yellow at their throats. One of them waddles right to my feet and looks up into my face, inquiring as to my presence here, maybe saying hello. I gaze down at it, trying to communicate silently, trying to tell it how lovely I find it, but it grows bored and wanders away.

A massive bird angles down over my head and I duck, startled. As it nears the bay it flings its huge flippered feet out and runs along the surface of the water, flapping for balance and then plonking down. It’s quite the landing.

“That’s a stinker,” Orly says, following my gaze. “Rats of the skies.”

“That’s nice.”

“They deserve it,” he tells me with a wrinkle of his nose. “They’ll feed on anything, the giant petrels. They’ll peck out the eyes of baby seals!”

I can’t help laughing. “You sound excited by that, you little freak.”

“Don’t get too close to them, okay, they have a special defense mechanism you don’t even want to know about.”

“Roger that.”

“They spew fish vomit on you!” he cries gleefully.

My nose crinkles. “I thought I didn’t want to know.”

I’ve been building to something but I’m not sure how to frame it, Dom’s instruction about using common sense forefront in my mind. “Hey, I’m sorry I scared you with the talk of the fire…”

“You didn’t,” he says brightly, then skips ahead.

Righto.

I hurry to catch Orly and we follow Dom, who now waits by the entrance of a cave. It seems to sit at the base of the snowy mountain I could see on approach, and it has, I see as I draw closer, a man-made floor. It’s not a cave, it’s a tunnel.

The long dark tongue of a tube snakes out. From its end trickles a steady stream of water, making its way down to the sea. He’s got a pump in there somewhere.

“Why’s there water, Dad?” Orly asks, sounding panicked.

“It’s alright, mate,” Dom says, not looking at either of us but turning to lead the way down into the dark. “Just the storm.”

“But that was nearly two weeks ago,” Orly says, and is met with silence.

We follow the piping. It gets a lot colder as we descend the tunnel. The heavy snow parka that was too hot for hiking across the island is now necessary against the icy air. Up ahead, Dom switches on a string of lights; I imagine this would be a terrifying walk for those who suffer claustrophobia. I have never been bothered by small dark spaces, but there is something unnerving about walking down into the depths of this island, with its whispering winds and its ghosts. Easy to imagine there is something very old waiting down here for us. And with the orbs of light to guide the way, the shadows seem ever deeper.

“How long is the tunnel?” I ask softly, not liking the sound of my voice but needing to get a sense of our depth.

“Hundred and fifty meters,” Dom says.

I was expecting the water to have dried up, but in fact by the time we get down to the chamber door our feet are submerged. The pump is working away, siphoning out as much as it can, but it already seems overloaded.

“Don’t let it get inside!” Orly exclaims.

“I won’t, it’s okay,” Dom says. But there’s not much choice, really. He pulls the heavy door open and the water runs in. We’re in a kind of antechamber, its walls covered in ice. There are special subzero suits hanging in this chamber and we each pull one over our other layers. They have built-in gloves and hoods that cover most of our faces, but as we open a second door into the seed vault I feel the cold striking straight to my extremities. My fingers and toes, my ears and nose all start stinging.

As an afterthought, Dom asks, “You don’t have any heart conditions, do you?”

I stare at him.

“The cold,” he explains.

Jesus. I shake my head.

We are in a cavernous space, with tall rows of shelving. The walls here too have thick layers of ice, as in a giant freezer. And that’s really all it is. For all of Hank’s descriptions, for his passion about this room and what it holds, I never thought it would be so… plain . It is just a very large, very cold storage unit. I try to hide my sense of anticlimax from Orly, who is gazing at the place as though it’s a royal Egyptian tomb filled with riches.

Our breath makes clouds in the frigid air.

“It wasn’t purpose-built?” I ask Dom.

“No, this cave has been here a lot longer than the seed vault. It was used by the nineteenth-century sealers. A storage room for their catches.”

Meaning once upon a time it was filled with the dead. I can see them laid out before me, all those creatures we passed outside, hundreds of them now lifeless, and it isn’t the first time I have resented the vividness of my imagination. I don’t like this room. I don’t like being down here. Hank told me he was all but living here at the end, and the thought is a crawling thing.

“There’s an air shaft at the back,” Dom tells me. “I’ve always thought it was pretty amazing that they were able to drill through the mountain with whatever tools they must have had available to them in the eighteen hundreds.”

“Can I’ve a look at it?”

“Nah, we try not to open the door so we don’t lose air temp.”

“What is it now?” Orly asks worriedly.

Dom peers at the gauge. “Minus sixteen. It’s holding pretty well so far.”

This doesn’t seem to ease Orly’s concern. “That’s two degrees warmer than it should be,” he points out.

“It’ll be fine, mate. There’s some tolerance.”

Orly and I make our way down a few rows. To distract him, I ask him questions, and as he talks me through what we’re looking at, I peer at the containers, all sealed so I can’t see what’s inside. With a jolt of familiarity I see that some of the labels are in Hank’s handwriting. There is not one without another . His mantra, and how he taught me to garden. The trick is in working out which plants go together and which compete. A patchwork, a collage. Try this here, try that there. In the vault I take in the vast volume of seeds waiting to be plants and wonder how they would go together, know that nature’s experiments are far more sophisticated than ours, and far further reaching. These seeds, given a chance, would all be able to work out how to coexist across the globe, how to feed and help and sustain each other, and there is something truly wonderful about that.

“Dad told me you’re married to Hank?” Orly says.

I glance sideways at him. “Yep.”

“He was nice, he talked to me about the seeds. We did lessons with him sometimes.”

“He told me about you,” I admit. “In our calls. He said he’d met a very smart boy with a passion for botany.”

Orly beams. It’s easy to see how much this means to him. “He told me about you, too.”

“What did he say?”

“Just that you guys had a garden.”

I smile. “I suppose it was kind of the main thing to say about us.”

“What was in it?” Orly asks. “In the nature corridor?”

I don’t know where to start, so I begin with the trees that were already there, the snow gums of course, but also the mighty ashes, some of the tallest in the world, and the old-growth alpine ashes, the manna gums, the eucalypts. I talk about the long silvery grasses and heathlands that cover one hill, and I tell him about the wildflowers Hank and I planted from seed to cover the entire stretch of meadow. Yellow billy buttons and white or lilac snow daisies, purple native violets and alpine Podolepis with their yellow petals and blood-red centers. Vibrant bottlebrush for the bees and the birds. The alpine mint bush we planted has the most incredible hairy flowers, with geometric designs of yellow and purple on their white petals. I tell Orly about the mosses and the tree ferns that bordered one side of the house, making a kind of rainforest that led down to the stream, where the platypus lived. A delicate silver-dollar eucalypt, my favorite of all, right outside my window where the rainbow lorikeets came in pairs to feast. And on and on. So many plants over the years. So many experiments. “The climate there’s a challenge,” I say. “Not as bad as here but still tricky when you’re thinking about what to plant.”

“Did things die?”

“Of course.”

“Wasn’t that upsetting?”

I think about it. “I mean, yeah, a bit. You get disappointed, for sure. But that’s the life of a gardener. And it’s the life of all plants, right? Of living things? Nothing lives forever.”

He frowns and walks on, contemplating that.

I stand beside my husband’s handwriting for a little longer. Rhododendron campanulatum , he has scrawled on one of the boxes, Himalayan region of Nepal. Nearby is Calluna vulgaris (heather), from Scotland , and I wonder at how they are organized, as it doesn’t seem to be by region. I then wonder at the fate of these two plants. Have they been chosen for life or for death?

It comes over me like the mountain we stand beneath. Now that I am here among them, contemplating the scale of these seeds—there are so many of them—I can feel the weight Hank must have been under, I can feel the burden Dom spoke of. How to let go of plants and trees and flowers and shrubs, how to let go of the most exquisite, the most unusual, how to let biodiversity die in favor of what humans can eat. Not only do I feel this weight, I see the future laid out before me. A vast stretch of crops and nothing else, nothing wild or natural, and even these neatly planted rows threatened on all sides by flame and flood. All of earth, a wasteland.

I turn and follow Orly because I don’t want that image in my mind any longer.

Father and son explain to me what we are doing with the seeds, how we are referring to the list Hank has left us (so long it is collated in a thick binder), collecting the species on this list and moving them into a new area, then packing them carefully into travel cases. They explain how to find my way around, that the seeds are categorized by taxonomic classification—by their scientific family rather than their location. The aisles have letters and the rows within the aisles have numbers, like in a library. As I understand it, the seeds are cleaned, dried, and frozen before being transported, and nobody here can open the sealed containers once deposited. They also explain that we need to work quickly, because the cold is not cooperative; we have a limited amount of time down here before we have to get ourselves somewhere warm.

We work in silence. A malaise has come over all three of us. At one point, feeling exhausted by the scale of this task, I ask Orly through chattering teeth, “How many seeds are in this vault?”

“Oh, I’m not sure how many seeds there are, but there’s at least three million varieties.”

I feel sorry that they have to live in darkness, in this place of death, instead of bursting to life up above as they were meant to. I feel sorry for all the boxes we are leaving on the shelves.

Our time runs out and we head for the exit. On our way my eyes go to the nearest wall. There is a large patch where the ice has melted away, leaving the concrete exposed. That alone is cause for concern, but I can also see that the concrete is flaky. “You’re getting concrete cancer,” I tell Dom.

He follows my gaze. “Meaning?”

“Meaning moisture. Sooner or later that wall will come down.”

“We only have to worry about the next five weeks,” he says, dismissing it, but I don’t know if that wall’s got a month left in it.

There is wet snow falling when we emerge from the tunnel. We lift our hoods against the freezing needlepoints but even this weather is a relief from the cold of the vault.

“You said you’re not in construction anymore?” Dom asks me as we walk. Orly is at the waterline with a huddle of king penguins—he is crouched among them, almost the same height as they are—so for the moment we are alone. “What do you do now?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean?”

I shrug. “I took jobs here and there, but mostly I just… worked on my house.”

“The house that burned down.”

I swallow and look at him.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asks, and I am surprised to hear betrayal in his voice.

My immediate reaction is to reply that I don’t have to tell him anything, but I know how much genuine pleasure he took from hearing about my house, and to be honest I took a lot from describing it to him. So I try to find better words. “I wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. For an afternoon.”

He scratches his stubbly beard. There is a long silence as he thinks about that. “So now what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Build another house?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“What’s the point?”

Dom frowns. “So you have somewhere to live?”

I don’t reply. He hasn’t understood.

But then he says, “Look, you just have to keep going. That’s all. There’s nothing else.”

“I spent decades working for that house,” I say. “Now I just want to rest.”

“And what’s that then, lying around?”

“I dunno, maybe. Why can’t I just lie around? I don’t owe anyone suffering or working. So much fucking working .”

“I have no idea what you’re on about,” he says flatly, a man who has clearly never not worked a day in his life.

I spread my hands. “Look, I get it. I was the same. I dropped out of school when I was fifteen so I could get a job to support my sisters. My dad had bailed and my mum was… She couldn’t work. So I did. It’s all I did. Backbreaking labor for years and years. I had this insane drive to build a house that would keep my sisters safe. But it was stupid, and I’m sick of trying to make things that will survive this world because nothing can, anymore.”

At first I think he’s done with the conversation, that he will let that be the end. But then he says, “Most of what I do with my days is repair things that are gonna break again soon. I just fix them and then when they break I fix them again. It’s like pushing shit up a hill.”

“So why do you do it?”

“Because someone has to, or everything just stays broken.”

He walks a couple of steps ahead and I take the moment to watch him, watch a droplet of water run off the tip of his nose, watch another slide down into his beard. I imagine the taste of it, of his skin on my tongue. It startles me, and my foot glances off the edge of a rock and I stumble.

“You okay?”

I nod but I’m not. I know the curl of desire when I feel it.

There are two field huts: the closest has a blue door, the farther a red. Hank spent a lot of time living in the blue so that’s where we go; his room is small and empty. There are no pictures, no personal items. He has cleared it out completely, so that when I sit on this bed where he slept, I feel no part of him, and when I climb between his sheets there is no smell to bring him back, nothing at all, I am alone. I think of how I have felt this way in our bed too, the bed we shared before it was ash.

In the kitchen there is a small gas camp stove. Dom and Orly are already boiling frozen vegetables in pots and searing fillets of fish in a pan when I return from the bedroom. I closed my eyes for seconds and slept without meaning to. In my dream a child was running from me, hiding in the gaps between floorboards where I couldn’t reach him. I have had this dream before, but not for many years. It disturbs me that it should return now.

It stinks of bleach in this cabin. The smell seems incongruent to the feel of the place, and I try to work out why. Is it odd that it’s been cleaned so recently, given nobody has lived here in weeks? Maybe Dom and his kids stay here regularly when they visit the bank, and like to keep it spotless.

The snow has turned to rain and it batters the windows. I look out at the ocean. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing to the water. There is a kind of shadow beneath the surface. A shape. The waves crash over and around it.

They come to either side of me.

“There was a third field hut,” Dom tells me. “Green.”

“The sea used to be farther out,” Orly says. “But it came in.”

“It happened in the night,” Dom says. “A storm took out the support posts. Ate the outcrops. The hut sank into the waves.”

The hairs on my arms stand on end. “Was anyone hurt?”

“No,” Dom says, but I catch the glance between father and son.

Later, in the candlelight. In the little living room, on the couches. We have finished our dinner—too delicious to be called a camp meal—of bream on a bed of garlic greens.

“The time is upon us,” Orly says dramatically, grabbing a torch and flicking it on and off beneath his face. “Tonight you will learn about the Shearwater Carver.”

“Don’t waste the battery,” his dad says, so Orly switches off the torch with a huff. But his excitement can’t be dampened.

“Get ready to be scared, .”

“I’m ready, Orly.”

“Many years ago, on this very island, madness reigned.”

My eyebrows arch and I glance at his dad. Dom holds his hands up, like don’t blame me for this .

“It was not long after the animal massacres had ended and the island had been named a wildlife sanctuary, so the feel of all that spilled blood lingered on. The scientists who came to work here were haunted by it, and by all the animal souls that remained.”

I don’t know who taught him this story, but he’s obviously learned the intonation and the pacing as well as he’s learned the words, and I suddenly find myself a bit creeped out.

“That haunting worked its way inside a young man called Carver. It whispered to him every night. The souls told him they needed to be avenged, and that any human life would do, but the more blood spilled the better. One night, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he took a carving knife from the kitchen and he went to each of the sleeping quarters, to each of the researchers asleep in their beds, and”—and here he shouts the last words—“ stabbed them all dead! ”

I stare at him in horror. “Oh my god, you little ghoul.”

Orly giggles. “I didn’t make it up.”

“He heard his brother and sister telling it a few years ago.” Dom sighs. “Had nightmares about it for a month and then became obsessed with it.”

“Well you’ve done a good job, kid, I feel very uncomfortable.” I look at Dom. “Is that true?”

He shrugs.

“Nah,” Orly pipes in. “Can’t be. The voices are gentle. They don’t want anyone to die.”

Later, when Orly has fallen asleep in his father’s lap, I can’t help asking Dom about it.

“Who does he talk to?”

“He says the animals live in the wind. The ones that were killed.” Dom shakes his head slowly. “It scares me sometimes but it’s not just Orly. We all feel it here. The blood spilled. Don’t you think there should be a price to pay?”

I have felt it too. A stain on the island. But I shake my head, for this is not unusual. “We have a debt to pay to this whole world,” I say. “We’ve slaughtered creatures everywhere.”

“Only here it sends some of us mad.”

“Including you, Dom?”

“Oh, sure.” He looks away from me to the corner of the room. It is empty, but he stares at it. “Me most of all, I’d say.”

“Do you hear the voices?”

“I only hear one.”

I don’t need to ask, but I make myself, because I think hearing it from him will help me to banish the thoughts that have started creeping in.

“Whose?”

Dom looks at me. “My wife’s.”

“It must be nice,” I say softly, “being able to keep her close.”

“It’s nice and it’s terrible.”

I think I understand. To miss her less and more at once. To grieve for her less and more. She is balm to his loneliness and a symptom of it. His love for her endures, gives her form. Could mine do the same for Hank?

I know the answer to this, too: I would not let it. I have made my love for him weak, designed it to be so, that it should be easier to cut myself free of.

Wind batters the cabin. I listen to it, trying to pick out sounds within it. I think of Orly’s promise to this wind. We aren’t going that way.

What else is out here?

I return to bed and try to shake off the images in my mind, of carving knives in bellies but also of winds that carry ghosts upon them. I want to feel something else, I want to reach for a shadow of the love Dom has inside him, wish to know if I am capable of it. So I imagine Hank’s hands on my body, in his bed I try to feel close to him, but it has been so long since my husband touched me that I can hardly remember the feel of him, and anyway a part of me knows he will not conjure the feeling I want. Instead there is another set of hands, a set I spent yesterday watching as they held tools and worked metal, it’s these large, strong hands that I can feel on my skin and it’s as if where they touch they smooth away pain, they set alight a different sensation. It is easy in the dark to imagine he is not lying in his own bed, thinking of his wife. It is so easy to imagine he is thinking of me, and vividly enough to drive him from that bed and into this one. And when it’s over, when I have drifted down the other side, I am myself again, enough to lie here in shame and know how stupid it is to imagine not an ending, but a beginning.

The trip to the field hut and the seed vault has offered no clues as to why Hank left without telling me. Although that’s not exactly true, I suppose. I may not have found anything physical, but I felt it, didn’t I? The weight of his grief. The terrible haunting of this island and the burden of his decisions. Maybe it was all too much, the choices he was having to make, and so he boarded that last ship with the rest of the researchers and he sailed home to the mainland, but instead of coming to find me, he left me instead. Maybe he has left me.

Hank and I don’t often fight, and when we do it’s only ever about one thing. Tonight we are already in bed, which means I won’t sleep for the rest of the night, whereas he will be snoring within minutes.

“The single greatest choice we can make to reduce our carbon footprint is to not have a child,” I say calmly; it is very well-trodden ground for us. We have been over the science so many times it feels embarrassing to wield it at him again, but I don’t know what else to say. “How many times have we decided together that it means something to us, to live well. Why would the choice to have a baby be based on a different set of values?”

“Because it’s different,” Hank snaps. He is the first to sit up and put his back to me, which is how I know this is about to go downhill fast.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “I thought you were as concerned about this as I am. You’ve always claimed to be.”

“Us not having a child is not going to save the planet,” Hank tells me. “What’s going to save the planet is nobody using any more fossil fuels.”

“That’s one part of it—”

“No, that’s the whole of it.”

“So you don’t think we have any personal responsibility?” I shake my head. “Bringing children into this apocalypse is selfish and unethical.”

“Fuck ethics,” he snarls. He turns on the mattress and now I have to sit up too because otherwise he is looming over me and I need the space, I need my own ropes to retreat to.

“I want a child,” he says bluntly. “There’s nothing wrong with that and I can’t stand that you try to make me feel guilty for it.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to do,” I say, even though maybe subconsciously I have been. I suppose I want him to share my guilt; it is a heavy thing to carry alone.

“Your arguments don’t hold up,” he declares, and in all honesty he’s right, they don’t. I can feel them falling away, can see that he won’t accept the same lines anymore. It is true, what I’ve said about the cost of children to the world, but it is not the whole truth, not my whole truth. That has more to do with the harm the world will do to my children. That is where the deepest currents of fear live, though I can’t say this aloud lest he dismiss it as carelessly as he does my other fears.

“I don’t want a child,” I say. “I have been clear about that from the day we met.”

“Bullshit, you’ve been umming and aahing about it for years, doling out little morsels of bait to keep me on the line. I don’t deserve to be treated like this, Row. It would not kill you to do something for me.”

I stare at him. In the years we have been together it has become very clear to me that he does not see me at all. I am actually not so bothered by this; what an ordeal it would be, to be known. But the “umming and aahing”? If this is how he has perceived one conversation we had years ago, then I don’t know how to make sense of a single communication we’ve ever had. It was a time during which I questioned myself and came to realize that the problem was not that I didn’t want kids, or maybe more specifically didn’t want to nurture, to love, to care for, and raise something. The problem, the true heartbreak, was wanting those things and also feeling like I couldn’t in good conscience have them. I thought he understood me. I thought he accepted the vulnerability I battled to show him, I thought we were closer for it, but instead of comprehending the complexity of how I felt—and the difficulty of contradictory feelings—he judged me, misunderstood me, and is now using it against me.

A chasm opens up beneath me and I have never felt so lost in this marriage. Never deeply passionate, never a meeting of hearts and souls—I don’t think I believe in any of that—it has nonetheless been sturdy ground to place my feet on, it has been strong, it has been joyful to share a vision, to work toward this home we are building, to love this place together. We have made a life here, have grown and raised it.

Having kids has come up before, of course it has, but in this moment I can see what it will do to us. I can see that for him they already exist and that by saying no I am killing them. One day soon he will hate me for them, for the children.

The trek home from the field hut is much harder than the hike there. The weather turns bad, the wind chill dropping the temperature to minus five, freezing rain burning our cheeks and noses. It is more a mental game than anything to keep walking, and I am in awe of Orly, who carries on without complaint. There is no other option really—we must get home to shelter and warmth before our muscles seize and we start getting hypothermia.

During the last leg of our journey, the wind dies off and we breathe sighs of deepest relief. Instead a thick fog descends over the island. We choose our steps carefully, staying close so as not to lose each other within it. I reach out and my hand almost disappears. It is eerily quiet without the wind, and even the cries of the birds have fallen away. I listen instead to the sounds of our breathing, to our boots on the grass. Dom leads, Orly between us, me last. Which is why it concerns me to hear footsteps behind me.

I stop and turn but there is no one there. Just a wall of white, so thick I can imagine choking on it.

Something touches my hand and I yelp, spinning around, but it’s only Dom, looming over me in the fog.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he says.

“Fuck,” I say, trying to slow my heart.

Orly doesn’t laugh, he watches me with concern, his pale blue eyes very bright in this light.

“Stay close,” Dom says, and I do, shaken.

Is this how it will feel when the world starts to crumble? Like you can’t see where you’re going, and at any moment you could lose your people and be left to wander alone?

We hear the sound before the lighthouse appears. The long, slightly mournful notes of a violin drifting through the fog to us. Not a light, but a song to guide us home.

“He’s playing!” Orly exclaims and runs inside.

Dom pauses to listen, and I stop close behind, still scared of getting lost even within sight of home. We stand in the white and let his son’s music wash over us; it is beautiful and strange and familiar. It takes me a little while to identify the sound it calls to mind: it’s whale song.

I am about to say something when I catch sight of Dom’s face and see that he has tears in his eyes, and I am so frozen, so mortified to have trespassed into this private moment that I am unable to speak or move for fear that he will remember I’m here.

But he looks at me. Shakes his head, and offers by way of explanation, “I wasn’t sure he’d play again.”

The eerie sounds continue and we stay to listen. It is a searching call and within the notes I can see the whale, swimming a deep and endless ocean, seeking another of its kind. I think Dominic Salt will stand here for as many minutes, hours, days as his son plays. That bond I can see in the man’s eyes, that love, the universe of it: I have chosen not to know that.

I thought I had made peace with that fact—I thought I wanted it that way—and then I came here.