Page 49

This family is falling apart.

I sit with Dom on the sand for a long time, until the fire has burned itself out. There’s no way to douse it—it’s quite the blaze. So we watch. He’s still holding the partially burned book. I can see enough of the cover to know that it’s Jane Eyre . I take it from him gently and brush the burned edges away, open the pages to see they’re mostly intact. Claire’s writing fills the margins. “I think this was the best one,” I murmur. “She put herself into this one. It’ll be enough.”

“There was so much that she loved in there,” he says, of the bonfire.

“I know about things burning,” I tell him, and he looks at me for the first time. “I know about sifting through ash to try and find anything that survived. They’re just things, and you don’t need them, but it’s okay to grieve for them.”

I hand him the book and he gazes at it.

“I’ll go check on your kids, and then we’ll walk up home, get some sleep. In the morning we’ll start work on the vault.” I know him well enough to know he’s going to need something to work on, something important.

There is no rust converter, so we will have to manually scrape the rust from the steel. We set up two ladders with a scaffolding tray between them so Dom and I can both climb up and halve the time of the job. First he uses a rotary drill with a chisel attachment to chip away all the flaking concrete—it turns out to be a huge area, much larger than it first looked, and we don’t say aloud that we don’t think we can patch up this problem; instead we silently go about trying. Once the steel rods are exposed, we start scraping off the rust. It takes a few days of neck-craning, arm-straining work. It’s not difficult, just tiring, especially dressed in the bulky cold suits. We don’t talk much while we work, but the silence feels prickly and full of noise. The monotony makes way for thought and my thoughts are out of control. Once a minute I think of his question, his offering, and I think of my response and how blunt it was, blunt like a sledgehammer. I think of his kids and how much I want to be around them. I think of the way he broke when his wife’s belongings were gone from him. I don’t know how he feels about that fire now, or about me. I don’t know if he is freed, as Fen intended, or more tightly bound than ever. But I know there is something different in the space between our bodies, there is heat now, and knowledge . An intimacy so blazing it is very difficult to ignore, to undo. That is what we’re attempting: to pretend it never existed. Even as I imagine his hands on me and then his mouth, the weight of his body on mine.

We take breaks from the vault often, though they slow us down. There is no other option—we can’t let ourselves get too cold, must always be climbing out of this freezer and warming thoroughly under blankets by a fire before we head back down.

Once the rods are clean, we refill the open area with mortar and leave it to dry. While up on the ladders we’ve spotted more patches of concrete cancer, so we work on these next. There is simply too much moisture in these walls, trickling down from above. The permafrost is melting fast, and permafrost is not meant to melt. This place was never prepared for it, for a thing that couldn’t be conceived of. The storms grow more violent. The pump works hard to siphon out the water, but I feel like every time my feet touch the ground they are a little more submerged. We carry buckets of water each time we go. And the kids are on round-the-clock seed-sorting duty. They do this with gusto, for there are just so damn many—thousands and thousands of containers that need finding and moving. It is an incredible feat, the list Hank has made. No wonder he became consumed by it.

“I think we need to get them out of here,” I say after a week has passed. “All the seeds that need saving.”

The kids have finished sorting the containers, but Dom’s and my efforts to repair the vault have amounted to very little. The wall should hold out for a while longer—if we are lucky, until the ship comes in three weeks—but new cracks appear by the day and water trickles in from every angle and the temperature has reached minus eight and continues to rise.

“They all do,” Orly says, and there is an uncomfortable pause.

I look at Dom. “Is there anywhere dry we could put them?”

“Gotta be dry and very cold,” he says.

“Has the freezer on the base started flooding yet?” Raff asks.

Fen nods. I haven’t heard her speak aloud since the bonfire. She has gone painfully silent. Dom is the same toward her; he doesn’t look at her, doesn’t address her. The tension between them is unbearable. And I don’t think it’s anger, exactly. Neither of them seems to have any kind of temper. It’s just… distance. I can see how this divide could grow until it swallows even the memories of their closeness. I can see how distressed it’s making Raff, who looks between them constantly, too silent himself to come out and say anything that could bridge the gap.

“Could we move it?” I ask.

“Move what?”

“The freezer? To higher ground.”

Dom scratches his chin, looking skeptical. “Dunno how we’d manage that. It’s a room, not a box.”

“What about the freezer back up in the lighthouse?”

“It’s too small,” Orly points out. “We’d only fit a fraction of what’s here.”

There is silence.

I look the kid in the face. “We might need to make some tough choices.”

“No,” he says. “Hank already halved them. It can’t be less.”

“I don’t know what to tell you. This place is going under fast.”

“Then fix it!” he demands.

“Hey,” Dom says softly, and Orly bites off whatever he was about to yell at me. He turns on his heel and disappears into an aisle of seeds. The rest of us look at each other helplessly.

We keep going, keep patching, keep pumping. It is, as Dom put it, pushing shit up a hill. And as we work we are all probably thinking the same thing: Orly is the only one who knows enough about the seeds to know which to save, and this is a terrible thing to have to ask him.

I tell myself he’ll be alright. That he has to be. Because he’s a kid, and kids are resilient.

But as night falls and we all slide wearily into bed, I hear the patter of small feet and there is a boy climbing in with me, and he tells me the story of the dinosaur trees. And I can understand why he might not, in fact, be alright. Why maybe none of us will be, because we have, all of us humans, decided what to save, and that is ourselves.