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It is who explains it all. The naval officers of the icebreaker RSV Nuyina are here to collect eight people and many tons of storage containers. Instead they find four people, far less cargo than they’d been told to expect, a boat wrecked among rocks, two missing people, and four dead bodies.

The last months, now that can reflect on them, have been carnage.

He takes them south on their cargo barges. Shows them, from the sea, the caved-in seed vault. The crumbled cliff face. The absent beaches. Then he takes them to the graves on the hill, and while his arm means he can’t help exhume them, he can witness it. Somebody needs to have seen it all, from start to finish, because there are going to be a lot of questions. will try to spare his family as much of this as he can.

Back at the base, the materials and supplies are being dismantled and loaded. The island is being pillaged and it is happening quickly. Dozens of people have come off this icebreaker, and as watches them work he is devastated that they did not come sooner. To help with the shattering burden of trying to save the world’s seeds from a flooding underground cave. To help deal with a man who’d lost his mind, to refloat two humpback whales. The difference these sets of hands could have made to the last weeks of their lives…

The difference they might have made to a woman, who need not have drowned to save a boy.

But that kind of thinking will ruin you. And the reality is that they’re immensely privileged to have anyone here at all, when there are islands all over the world sinking into the sea, and the people who live on those islands do not have naval ships arriving to rescue them.

He thinks about their future. Of where they will go. Orly is determined to take them to Rowan’s land, and maybe there are crazier things to hope for, maybe the planets will align for them somehow and they will be able to stay there. It is possible he will never play the violin again, but if there is any choice in the matter, he won’t rest until he does. He is a boy—a man now—who knows well what it means to lose the things he loves. There is such peril in loving things at all, and he feels sort of proud, in fact, that he just keeps on doing it. He’s not going to take the punching bag with him when they leave.

His dad will struggle to survive a second time. It isn’t fair. It is so terribly unfair. But will carry him on his back for as many days or years as it takes. He will carry his whole family, if they need him to. It is a good thing his father has taught him to be strong.