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Dom drives the boat like a madman. It is a miracle we don’t wreck. The waves are enormous.

South Beach is gone now. The sea has swallowed it. No more red kelp or black sand. No more seals or penguins. I hope desperately that they have found somewhere safe. As we speed down toward the mouth of the tunnel, I see a great chunk of earth crumbling into the ocean. The cliffs are changing shape. If the seed vault hasn’t caved in yet, it will not be long.

Dom goes straight for the hatch on top of the hill, running like a rumbling great bear with tools slung over shoulders and around hips. I watch him for less than a second, but the impression of him, of how he looks in the rain as he tries to save his son, will stay with me always.

I take a different path: I go in through the tunnel. I don’t know what I will find, but it is a place of terror now, this watery grave. I shout Orly’s name over the rushing water. I am half wading, half swimming. It feels awkward and too slow. The water is an old enemy and my mind turns dark, it turns bad, it tells me the water will move within and fill me to bursting. It tells me I am going to die down here, with all these lost species of plants. It takes deep, profound stubbornness to keep moving past these thoughts, to forbid them from taking hold.

He’s not in the vault. My heart is galloping. The weight against the door to the shaft is so heavy I can hardly get it open. Which means that if I go down there, I don’t think I am returning this way. I won’t be able to push this door back open.

Orly might not even be here. It’s possible he and Hank got away. But if he is, if he is trapped down there, if there’s even a chance , I can’t leave him. I step through the door and let it close behind me.

“I’m here,” says his little voice in the dark.

I feel my way to his side. He is sitting on Hank’s camper bed, and my arms go around him. We hold each other so tightly, his little cheek to my lips.

“You found me,” Orly says.

“Course I did,” I say.

“I let Hank go.”

“Okay.” It takes me a minute to work that through. “And he just left you here?”

I feel Orly nod and that’s it. I am done with that man, a man I do not know. Maybe I never knew him, if he is capable of this. Maybe I have never known myself.

“I can’t believe you came down here on your own.” I think better of it and add, “Well, I actually can. Same insanity that might urge a boy to completely ignore every seed on that list and choose whichever ones he wanted.”

There is water getting in from somewhere, I can hear it, can feel it around my feet. And I don’t know how much air there will be in here, without power or vents.

“You figured it out then?” he asks me. “The seeds?”

“Yeah. I guess I know you too well.”

“Do you understand?” he asks me. “People find a way to survive no matter what, we’ll figure out the food, we always do, but the plants won’t, they will go, and so will the animals that need those plants, so we have to help them.”

I nod, I can’t speak. Because I should have guessed. That the seeds he would choose to save are the strange and the unlikely. The species we don’t need, the ones we don’t want, cannot eat. That Orly would choose these because no one else would.

“I did grab some rice and wheat though,” he adds, and I laugh, and pull myself together.

“We’ll deal with it later,” I say. “Right now we’re gonna climb the ladder and go out the hatch.”

“The hatch is sealed. I already tried it.”

“Your dad’s up there opening it.”

We feel our way along the walls to the shaft, manage to find the rungs of the ladder. There is hardly any light coming in from the glass in the hatch as the sky above is almost black with the storm. Just as I am thinking about that glass we hear it crack.

“Cover your face,” I tell Orly quickly, and we both shield ourselves from the falling shards. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

We climb, with him above me, rung by rung. It’s a long way, and we are moving slowly in the dark, forced to feel our way, and it’s slippery. I don’t know where the water is coming in, but halfway up, a crack opens in the wall and it’s like a wave is dumping onto us.

Orly screams. I press him hard to the ladder so he doesn’t slip in the downpour. It doesn’t slow, we have to keep climbing through it. Once we are above this crack I look down to see the deluge; the shaft is going to fill more quickly now.

“Dad!” Orly shouts frantically for the last several meters until we reach the hatch.

“I’m here!” Dom bellows. We can see him through the small opening. “You guys okay?”

“We’re okay!” Orly tells him. “Get us out!”

“Working on it, mate. Hang in there.”

So we hang in. Orly keeps his eyes on his dad. I keep mine on the rising water.