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I brought my children to Shearwater Island eight years ago. I was not expecting the island to feel so haunted, but for hundreds of years the lighthouse we live in was a beacon to men who built their lives upon the blood of the world’s creatures. The refuse of those sealers and whalers remains to this day, discarded along the lonely stretches of black coast and in the silver shimmering hills. The first time Orly admitted he could hear the voices, all the whispers of the animals killed on this ground—including, for good measure, an entire species of seal bashed on the head and wiped out entirely—I thought seriously about taking my children away from here. But it was my ghost who told me they might be a gift, these voices. A way to remember, that surely someone ought to remember. I don’t know if that burden should fall to a child, but here we are, we have stayed, and I think that actually my wife was right, I think the beasts bring my boy comfort.

Mostly it is quiet here. A life of simple tasks, of day-to-day routines, of grass and hills and sea and sky. A life of wind and rain and fog and of smiles huddled around a heater and of books read each evening. Of hands clasping a hot cup of chocolate or the bend of a head against the weather, of wet clothes flung off at the door and trying to pick out the difference between a giant petrel and an albatross at distance. Of frozen food and sometimes downloaded movies and schoolwork and training and music. Of the gurgling roar of an elephant seal or the banana pose of a fur, of the flamboyant orange eyebrows of the last royal penguin colony in the world. Of seeds. Of parenting. Of grappling constantly with what to tell them about the world we left behind.

Ships come every so often to bring supplies and scientists. Despite its wonders, Shearwater is not a tourist island: it’s too remote, too difficult to reach. Mostly no one comes here but a handful of researchers studying the wildlife, the weather, the tides. Certainly people don’t wash in from the sea. I am having trouble making sense of how she’s alive—the ocean around us is perilous and so cold, and there is no land for many thousands of kilometers. She must have come off a boat, but it doesn’t make sense that there should be a boat close enough to our shores. The supply ship isn’t due for weeks and the only ships that pass by are way out at sea, following the passage south to Antarctica, and to come off one of those would mean certain death. Unless of course this boat of hers was coming here, to Shearwater.

In the morning Raff and I assess the damage. Gutters are down and water has come under the doors, but our lighthouse has held strong even in the face of such a battering. The power sources can’t say the same. My son and I walk up the hill to see that both wind turbines have come clean off their shafts. One of them is face down hundreds of meters away—it has flown—while the other is protruding up out of the ground in a salute to its own demise. The solar cells are scratched, and the roof of the shed has been lifted up and off, leaving the batteries within to take an absolute beating. I’ll need to replace that roof but for now we set up a tarp to try to protect the remaining batteries—too complex to move and rewire all the cabling. Half of them are dead, anyway. The other half have some power stored in them, and this will have to stretch a long way.

Surviving in remote places is all about setting up contingencies. If one thing goes, there’s another option to take its place. It’s never occurred to me that all the solar cells, half the batteries, and both the wind turbines could go at the same time.

“We’ve still got the diesel,” Raff says as we walk home. I can’t hear any fear in him, just a focused kind of concern.

One thing we can’t do without is heating. I don’t know if we’d survive the kind of cold it will be without heating. Normally we’d be straight on the radio to the mainland, calling for help. Repairmen, new parts, more gas, more diesel. Alas.

Raff and I walk home along the headland. There is no real reason to do this, but I am letting him guide the way and his feet often lead him here. Shearwater is long and skinny and divided into two parts, its northern side mountainous and mostly unexplored, its southern side smaller, more inviting. This is where the various buildings have been placed, including our lighthouse, the field huts, the communications station, and the seed vault. There is a finger of land that joins the two sides, an isthmus, narrow in shape and low in altitude. We call it the pinch, and it’s where the research base sits. The base is several long white shipping containers made of aluminum so as not to rust in the salty air, as well as several wooden cabins. A hodgepodge of seventeen little buildings built over many decades. A dining hall and kitchen. The labs. A hospital. The storage unit. Sleeping quarters. Until recently a buzzing community of people, the pinch now holds a collection of empty buildings. And just as well because there is water lapping at walls and doors. The research base looks like it’s floating on a pond.

“Bloody hell,” Raff says.

High tide has never been this high before.

I am shaken but I’m not about to let him know that.

We still have some gas for cooking and manually heating water, and diesel for the generator to keep the freezer running so our remaining food stores don’t spoil, but everything else is getting turned off. No more lights, no computers or phone chargers or stereo, no washing machine or vacuum cleaner, no power tools. The kids don’t complain when I tell them; keeping this place running is a never-ending exercise in problem solving, and they understand that. What I am concerned about is the power to the seed vault down at South Beach, and whether it’s gone too. I get Raff started on repairing the damaged gutters and pack myself an overnight bag. It’s a ten-kilometer hike south to the vault so I’ll stay the night in one of the field research huts down there.

First I look in on the woman. Orly is perched on the end of her bed, reading to her from a book on botanicals that his astounding mind has no doubt memorized. He has barely left her side since she arrived.

“How’s she doing?” I sink into the chair by the window.

He shrugs. “Seems okay? She’s breathing.”

“You don’t have to stay in here.”

“I know.” He fiddles with a corner of a page, dog-earing it and then smoothing it out. “Just seems like someone should be here when she wakes up.”

I consider how much to tell him about my fears for the vault. In the end I just say, “I’m headed south for the night.”

“Can I come?”

“Not on this one, mate.”

The woman mutters something under her breath and even though she is not dead, there is something unnatural about it. A corpse reanimated. Her hand, the long fingers of it, clench once into a fist, then relax.

“Don’t get too tied up in it,” I tell Orly.

“In what?”

“In her surviving. She might not. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.” He studies her face, I study his. “It’s just… why isn’t she waking up?”

“I don’t know, mate. She swam a long way. She might still be swimming.”

The Shearwater Global Seed Vault was built to withstand anything the world could throw at it; it was meant to outlast humanity, to live on into the future in the event that people should one day need to regrow from scratch the food supply that sustains us. Specks, most of them. Tiny little black dots. That’s all they are. These treasures we keep buried in boxes below ground, down here in the arse-end of the world. The last hope of their kinds, but also of our kind.

The idea is a big one: to save humankind. But in all honesty that’s not why we came here. I needed a job, and I needed it to be far away. The purpose of it came later; in truth it came when my youngest recognized its magnitude.

While the seed vault is owned by the United Nations, the management of it has been allocated to the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service, which also manages the nature reserve on the island as well as the research station—Shearwater Island belonging to Australia by virtue of its location. I was hired as caretaker of every building on this island, including the enormous frozen vault at its far south, and so in the beginning, when we first arrived, I was making the trip across island often. Because he was so little, I had no option but to take Orly with me, and I resented these regular hikes, when I could have been attending to the maintenance of the research base or the lighthouse. But as Orly got older, he would explore as we walked, touching and smelling and picking, and as he learned to talk he spoke the names of the plants we saw, and then the seeds we were there to visit, and I began to see, through his eyes, that in fact this job was important . I started imagining the use of these seeds, I imagined the world that would require them. I felt better about being here, on the island that was protecting this last floundering hope, rather than back on a mainland that would need rescuing. And with every danger that came upon Shearwater, every struggle, I would think, at least we’re not back there, dealing with fires and floods and food scarcity and all the rest of it.

At least we are here, in a place that seems hostile until you look more closely. Until you begin to see its beauty and its tenderness. Until you see the hidden abundance of it.

I never loved a place before we came here.

And now it’s over. The seed vault is closing. It was meant to last forever, and now we are sorting and packing the seeds for transport, and in just under two months we, too, will be leaving, with all the lucky little specks important enough to be chosen for relocation.

The tunnel is dry, always. It must be: it’s part of the design. Except that today, when I step into the mouth of the long descent, my boots splash. I stop and peer into the darkness. The wrongness of it stands the hairs on my arms. The impossibility of it.

I splash down into the earth, to the underground chamber, to its vacuum-sealed door. Like the door of a fridge. If the water has gone beneath it, we will be in real trouble, but it hasn’t, and I remember to breathe. Just the tunnel then, that’s alright. It will be alright. Within the vault it’s still dry. But as I check the temperature gauge my fears are confirmed. The lights are working but the cooling system has shorted out. It’s already a degree warmer than it should be in here.

It has been made very clear to us that keeping the seeds safe is more important than keeping ourselves safe. Quietly, down in the corners of me, I consider whether I could let thousands of species go extinct in order to save the lives of my three children. If I were to reroute the energy we use for heating the lighthouse I might buy the seeds a little extra time. But the answer is easy, and I don’t think they should have sent a man out here who has kids. That man would never make the choice they want him to.

I set up a pump in the tunnel, uncoiling the long dark tube until it snakes out the opening into daylight. If the water level reaches a certain height, the pump will turn on automatically. Next I walk each of the thirty aisles of the vault. They are dry, so I don’t hang around. Despite it all, despite the importance of this place and these specks, I don’t enjoy being down here. I’m not sure why, really, it’s a mystery even to myself. Something, maybe, about the pre-life-ness of it, which in a way is death, though Orly would tell me I’m mad, that this place is the opposite of death. Maybe it’s the stasis of it then, the way that life is being kept dormant. Maybe it has nothing to do with the seeds at all, and is simply the underground of it, or the deep, deep cold. Whatever the reason, the place unnerves me, so I let my boots splash their way back up to the surface.

I climb to the crest of the hill, where the shrubs give way to the long tussock grass, and I turn and look out at the horizon. It is like gazing off the edge of the world. Way down there sits Antarctica but mostly what lies before me is a boundless ocean and this edge is sharp. If I take one step in the wrong direction I will fall, and I am never, for a single moment, able to forget it.

The field huts sit among mossy hills on the shoreline, accessible only via a crooked set of metal steps built into the rocks. It takes me the rest of the day to reach them. I will sleep here tonight; we don’t travel after dark and usually we don’t travel at all unless in pairs. I am breaking a rule, but I can’t bring my children to see what’s waiting. The huts are pods, delivered here fully furnished on the back of a freight ship many years ago. The blue hut (so named because of its blue door) is closest, while the red hut is a little farther along and closer to the water. Once there were four scientists living within them. Now the huts sit empty. Once there was a third, its door green.

The blue hut is the last place I want to set foot inside. The unconscious woman isn’t going anywhere fast, but if she wakes she could eventually find her way down here, which means I can’t put this off any longer. I push inside. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dark. The smell is a shuddering kind of bad.

There are two single bedrooms, and I move past them to the kitchen.

It’s not as grim as I remember it, but it is pretty grim.

In the backpack I’ve brought a scrubbing brush, cloths and towels, and bleach. I get to my hands and knees and start cleaning up the blood.