It was hot below ground. We sat in the entry shaft to catch whatever cooling draughts rifled down, and once the wind abated we took turns to go up into the hatchway to watch the endless rain squalls barrel in. After the first day, glints of silver showed against the bluffs and crags of the range as water began to cascade from the heights. Then the wind died and the rain kept on. By the second day, the canyon mouths were gushing like dirty bores, spewing boulders and bones, scraping the dust of the plain up in a welter of mud as pink as melon juice. On day three, several homestead families drowned in their own bunkers, their plant and equipment swept away entirely. We only learnt this later, of course. But that same afternoon, once our storage cisterns had filled, including the two we’d reserved for growing corn, our bund gave way and the channels blew out. In a cataract of mud and stones, we got the hatch locked down and retreated from the streaming shaft.

  In the hab we listened to the hum of the pumps and willed the batteries to hold out long enough to keep our heads above water. To save power, we sat in the dark. We only used our headlamps to check kit or prepare food. Most of the time there was nothing to be done but listen to the ominous rumble of water and the grind and crash of debris overhead.

  Have you checked the bund? asked Sun mordantly during that first night as my mother slept in a far corner.

  What bund would that be? I replied.

  The one that just washed into the sea.

  Oh, I said, that bund.

  Look at you, she said, switching on her lamp.

  What?

  You’re different.

  Different in what way?

  You’re all sparked up. Your eyes are glittering.

  You’re a riot.

  I’m serious.

  You are? I said, alert.

  This is what you’re like before you go away.

  Like what?

  Sparky, she said. Jumpy, excited.

  Oh? Really?

  Something crashed against the hatch and both of us flinched as a shower of mud came down the shaft.

  You come back home all shut down. As if you’re going into hibernation.

  I glanced at the dirty puddle forming in the shaft.

  I’m not whining, she said. Just making an observation.

  I need to check that, I said, getting up.

  You don’t need to hide from me.

  Something’s up, I said, rushing to the shaft.

  The pumps were faltering. Moment to moment, I could hear their pitch change. And then, as I stood there, they fell quiet, one after the other.

  Losing power! I yelled, pushing through to the battery locker where there was silence, but at least no smoke. Sun came after me to help switch over to the auxiliary bank. I got two pumps going again – the third was cooked. So now if the hatch seals blew out, or if it rained for another whole day, there was no guarantee we could keep ourselves from drowning. Without a break in the rain, or a big stretch of wind to stir the turbines, the reserve bank would not be sufficient.

  You’re worried, she said.

  Not really.

  I don’t want to drown in here.

  You won’t.

  I’d rather drown up there.

  That’s a plan, I said, glad to hear her laugh.

  We stood there a moment, suspended, it seemed, as the pumps hummed and the canyon cobbles thudded against the hatches overhead. And then my mother appeared in the shaft, casting about with her lamp as if to find a shortfall for which she could offer a directive.

  Everything’s fine, I said.

  We’re holding?

  Yes, said Sun. Holding.

  The wind returned. The batts and pumps kicked on. And eventually the rain subsided.

  As I said, we were lucky. But that storm left an unholy mess in its wake. We laboured for weeks in the steaming heat to restore the bund and reset our gates and posts. The houses and sheds held strong. One turbine was on its face, undermined, but all the panels of our array had stood the test. We wallowed in mud and debris to square things away, working slowly, in brief bursts, to save getting sick, and once we’d finished, the only enduring sign of the deluge was the buttress of canyon cobbles piled high against the loading ramp on which our vehicles and trailers had ridden out the flood.

  After our labours in the perilous humidity, we lay depleted and somnolent in our bunker until the summer finally broke. And when it came time to emerge and prep the houses for the season up top, we were lethargic and low on stamina. I couldn’t remember beginning a winter in such a diminished state.

  For all that, and the lost corn and the work ahead to rebuild the levee, the homestead was still sound. Out beyond the winter quarters, parallel to the bunker, we had five cisterns. Each with a 50,000-litre capacity. And now every one of them was full. Whatever else happened, we had enough to drink and plenty to trade.

  Not long after we moved upstairs, the plain burst into colour. Everywhere you looked was a puzzle of pink and yellow, blue and white. Tiny brown frogs emerged from the sodden earth. Broad puddles on the plain teemed with weird wrigglers, creatures with domes on their backs and scores of legs. And then mosquitoes descended on us, a storm of their own. Despite every tincture and ointment we made to keep them at bay, all three of us were left pocked with rashes and scabby sores, and my mother developed ulcers on her arms that Sun had to scrape and pack with mustard. Eventually, very slowly – and then quite abruptly – everything dried out, including our weals and wounds. The puddle crawlers desiccated and blew away. The frogs disappeared. And the plain returned to dust and silence.

  For a while, in the wake of the flood, Sun seemed distant. More contained. Newly cautious at work and at large. At first I thought this inwardness was a form of resignation. I wondered if life with me had dimmed her flame, or whether the watchful presence of my mother had finally crushed her spirit. But it was something else.

  Have you ever seen a child born? No? Dear God, comrade, you have no idea.

  My mother must have known about the pregnancy before me. If Sun hadn’t confided in her, I’m sure she would have sensed it. She had to have known. But in the surprise and joy of the revelation and the months of consuming excitement that led to the birth, and of course the momentous event itself, for which nothing on earth could have prepared me, all that seemed irrelevant.

  We had a child. Delivered by my mother. Born under a full moon. On the deck. Sun was magnificent, a champion – staunch beyond all reckoning. The child emerged like a glistening marrow. And after my mother put a finger into her mouth and hooked out a plug of mucus, the little girl gave a cough and mewled for a moment with an expression of indignation. And so began the best years of my life.

  We called her Ester. For the smell of sweet fruit. And for the warrior queen of the sagas. The name was Sun’s idea. A child conceived underground and born under an open sky.

  Before she’d even taken the breast, I held Ester to the heavens. Like a trophy. For reasons I still don’t understand. Was it to show her the stars? Or to let the celestial bodies know she was here among us? This atavistic moment – I still can’t tell if it was an act of homage, vanity or defiance. The women laughed at me, and I laughed with them, feeling sheepish, ridiculous, but incandescent.

  Ester changed the atmosphere of the homestead. With her in our lives, the way we worked – all three of us – was different. I don’t know how to explain it except to say we were all less dutiful. We were lighter in spirit. At times even frivolous. Everything she did, every sound and look she produced, brought delight. She seemed to blossom before our eyes. I loved the smell of her breath, the silkiness of her skin, her cross-eyed sobriety, the boundless novelty of her movements. She was our shared treasure.

  Of course we were discreet about her advent in the hamlet. In the early months we rarely took her in. But we could hardly keep her a secret. Eventually she made appearances in the market, strapped to Sun like a wallaby in its pouch, another family face at the stall.

  I could only assume the Service was observing all this. Because no pigeon came with a message for me all year. And I didn’t miss field action for a moment. Never even thought about it much. I just grew comfortable with the way things were. As if this was my life now.

  Ester was blessed with Sun’s complexion, her smooth skin, dark hair, half-moon eyes and inky irises. As a babe, she was placid, sober, observant. Many times I sat to watch her feed and she’d survey me carefully with one eye while still busy at the nipple. Low on her back, and across her tiny buttocks, she had blue blotches, the Mongolian spot common to those whose heritage goes back to the Hermit Kingdom. Her cries were like the bleating of a hungry goat.

  She grew teeth. Learnt to sit. In the shade of the house or the cool of the sandbox in the bunker, she’d run her fingers through the dirt and sieve up glinting stones and shells like plunder.

  Her first season underground was a challenge. For all of us. But by the following winter, with the summer jaundice behind her, she was crawling. In the coolest mornings we let her play in the shade, and she loved the feel of the yielding dust and the grit between her fingers. Ester was enchanted by the world. I’d watch her from the stairs as she beetled along, scraping up loose mounds of dirt into caches, as if provisioning. And she ate the soil – perhaps all children do this – shovelling fistfuls into her mouth, expecting this paprika-red stuff to taste as sweet as it looked. What a picture she was, with her cap of black hair and those chubby limbs, her face running pink with drool.

  She was a curious and strangely patient child. Once she was walking, she was stoic when she fell, which was often. In the growhouse, she’d follow us down the aisles, smelling and touching everything in its turn. Tasting, too. Anything red seemed irresistible. She loved the look of hot peppers – all those witchy fingers, glossy and wrinkled – and she quickly learnt the difference between a tomato and a chilli.

  I can still see her shaking the moisture from columns of corn, fingering the thistle stumps and smooth ribs of okra. Collecting eggs alongside us, she was clumsy in her great displays of care. But she lingered most often amongst the tomatoes, seemed to luxuriate in the strange, hairy texture of their stems, stroking each plant in turn as if it were some furry creature redeemed from extinction. Later, up in the house, I’d catch her sniffing her fingers in astonishment that she’d somehow brought that green scent with her.

  The growhouse was a work hall for all of us, but also a sanctuary. And I think Ester understood this instinctively, as if she’d been born with that secret apprehension, knowing somehow, in her body, that growing and feeding and blossoming and fruiting were sacred.

  We took Ester to the canyons. We hiked on cool mornings to fossick in creekbeds and gullies in search of feathers, bones, signs of movement. I carried her on my shoulders as the chalky winter breeze raddled our hair and our hats and chilled the sweat in our tunics. We shouted to hear our voices bounce and chime from wall to wall and laughed at the noise that rolled back over us.

  My mother was at pains to leave Ester to Sun and me. But she watched her hungrily. And I felt for her. Such, I thought, was the nature of her sacrifice: to step back and give us this.

  Ester was born into the last steady years. That’s something to celebrate, not to mourn. Anyone who lives is lucky. But some are luckier than others. It’s strange, you know, comrade, but despite all the hard things I’ve done, and those done to me, I don’t feel cursed. I don’t mean to sound like a skiting windbag, but the truth of it is, I feel blessed.

  Would I feel different if Ester hadn’t come along? I honestly couldn’t tell you.

  The summer that followed was milder than the one before. But it was not an easy season underground. By then, Ester was bridling at the confinement, and once she was mobile and beginning to talk, she was much harder to please and manage. It took the wiles and energies of all three adults to keep her occupied and safe. And for all our efforts to keep her cool and away from the killing sun, the lack of sunlight affected her mood as much as ours. What made everything worse was knowing the darkness was a threat to her growth. The hamlet was full of folks with bones like chalk and legs like hoops. The sun ate them in winter and the lack of it sapped them in summer.

  When we came up out of the cellars for the new year and settled into a fresh season, it soon became evident we were working harder for less. Our seedlings were leggy and our birds listless. In the hamlet, fowls sickened. At the same time, an outbreak of scabies took hold amongst the people. Sun managed to help with the itching plague, but when she failed to cure their animals, folks gave up seeking her counsel at the market. Some of them began to politely shun her. She took this hard. Sun was a person of strong will. She wasn’t used to defeat. Or the ways in which country folks react to the defeats of others. Trust is as fickle as weather. She seemed bewildered by the way people withdrew from her.

  At home, we killed and chipped all our ailing birds. Ours and my mother’s. The horrified child watching on at a distance. Without our surplus of water, oil and preserves, we would have fared badly that year.

  It was a lean period. And this was when Sun began to grow distant again. At times she seemed to struggle with Ester’s curiosity and her own impatience. The child had so many questions. And perhaps she could feel our disquiet. The undercurrents of anxiety we must have given off. Sun remained as competent as ever, but sometimes she looked as if she were in mourning. I wasn’t sure of the loss, whether it was the regard of others or just her sense of self, the loss of power over her situation. I asked her about this. Repeatedly. Initially, she deflected, made light of her moods, or insisted there was no problem. Until, in the end, she refused to discuss it, cut me off before I could raise it again.

  By the time the solstice came, I knew it was time to drive south and draw on our caches of salvage. Our water stores would keep us safe, but we needed other materials to trade. Yet I was reluctant to leave the homestead. I broached the idea of a foraging mission with Sun. Suggested she and Ester come along. But she demurred with a look of resignation that bordered on grief. She seemed depressed. I couldn’t understand it.

  And of course it occurred to me it might be best if I stayed. But I worried how things might stand come October. The idea of going back underground short of supplies – it frightened me. Sun refused to discuss it. And I couldn’t bring myself to enlist my mother to help convince her I needed to go. In the end, I left in vexed silence.

  Half a day down the highway, I came upon a roadtrain jackknifed in a scour off the shoulder of the road. My spirits were already low, but the sight of this set-up made my heart sink. I almost didn’t pull over. But a woman jumped down from the cab and stood in the road and waved me in. Then she stepped up onto my running board.

  Pull around behind, she called through the window.

  I can’t tow that rig, I said, smelling her sweat.

  Not expecting you to. Look at the rear trailer.

  I reversed a little way and saw what she meant. The third trailer was a low-loader.

  I’ll winch you on, she said.

  Seriously?

  I’m just the pigeon. I don’t issue the orders.

  Where are we going?

  Elsewhere, she said flatly.

  She got down while I manoeuvred into position. She dropped the ramp and, when I eased onto it, she hooked my bar and cranked me up. By the time I climbed out, she’d chained my truck and trailer to the anchor points. And while I watched from the roadside, she ran the shrouds around.

  Climb up, she said, pointing to her cab.

  An hour after sunset, I was in the air.

  The job was a milk run. A delivery of materiel deep in the desert. I was back within two days, but the site we landed at wasn’t the one I’d been mustered to. A few hours later, we lifted off again and flew south. We set down in the dark in the wilds beyond a port town on the southern coast. There I was transferred to another stat with a full action team that flew east, high over the deserts, all night, and the following day.

  We ended up on an island in the Pacific. A mucksweat job in full suits. It was hellish hot out there. A highland stronghold. Straightforward, at least. No losses.

  The whole time, I sensed I was being watched. And I was torn. Because I knew that if I acquitted myself well, my seasons at home would be fractured again. I’d be away from Sun and Ester much more than I wanted to be. But if I came up short, my days of active service might be done. And I didn’t know how I could accept that.

  On the repat run back from the islands, as we made landfall on the eastern coast, we came over low enough that I could see the field of light behind the walls of Sydney. The air stank of rotting refuse, bad water.

  Jesus, I said to the operator beside me.

  I could feel the turn of her head, hear the indrawn breath. It was as if she was just waiting for me – daring me – to say something disparaging.

  Home?

  She grunted. I felt the sudden rise in altitude in the pit of my belly as we climbed away again, out over the faintly spangled darkness of the interior.

  It’s a big island we come from, says the bowman.

  I nod.

  You were right to hold your tongue about Sydney.

  You’re from there? I ask.

  People can’t help where they’re from. And nowadays, what does it matter, anyway?

  I was thinking something like that, just now, I tell him. That we are where we find ourselves.

  Deep, that.

  I laugh.

  But I’m serious, I tell him. I’m here, you’re here. She’s here. We have skills, training. We know what’s right. If we make it work here, then we’re from here. Don’t you think?

  Jesus, he says, you could trade water to a drowning man.

  Comrade, I am a drowning man.

  Ever see what a drowner does when someone gets close?

  I’ve seen it. I understand.