No one was there when the long night started—nobody to be afraid and cry out when the volcano rumbled again and grew. It didn’t grow by much, barely enough to jostle boulders and worry the snowpack clinging to its slopes. But it definitely grew.

It made music, too, like wind chimes, with great shards of ice quivering on the ridge crests. Already, the northwest chamber was full: beneath the snow on top and below multiple layers of cold, black rock, two columns of lava were nearing the end of their ascent and would claim the southeast chamber instead. This was the mountain’s lifeblood, exploding into a frozen cavern, transforming ten thousand tons of slush into a thick and superheated steam. The steam was about to sparkle. It would be laced with precious minerals and, like good champagne in a roughly shaken bottle, would soon exert an irresistible pressure against the cavern’s ceiling, pushing it, buckling and bloating it, and probing every new fracture before soaring out beyond the chamber and up into the air above.

For a couple of hours, across the mountain’s slopes, hot spouts hissed and popped beneath a sky filled with stars. The spouts gave only hints of the violence stirring below. The steam puffed a thousand feet high from each of those tiny fissures before it condensed, crystallized, and fell back to the slopes as the finest layer of fresh, white snow. Had it remained undisturbed, this was a snow that might have glittered, just a little, when the dawn arrived next spring.

Morgan Edlin stood alone on the stage and stared at his audience. He was waiting for the chatter to subside. He’d dressed in tasseled loafers, a double-breasted wool suit, and a wide, red tie. Morgan was a big man, middle-aged. For fifteen years, he’d given presentations like this to the company’s board, the staff scientists, the legal counsel, and the accountants—basically to anyone in a suit. All of them were here today. A projector screen loomed behind him, and now he turned sideways, mopped his face with a handkerchief, then flashed a laser pointer at the first of his carefully prepared slides.

But the chatter continued, undiminished.

“Okay,” he yelled, “let’s get started!”

Quickly, everyone shut their mouths and looked at the screen. On a huge map, they saw Morgan’s laser dot, trembling above an irregular oval. “This is the island,” he began. “It’s forty miles by thirty, and it shows as a bump, here, at the seaward edge of the Ronne ice shelf. The latitude is minus seventy-seven degrees, and the highest elevation is twelve thousand feet.” He approached the screen, squinting. “It’s, let’s see—yes, the island is a hundred and fifty miles east of the Antarctic Peninsula. Folks, it has three volcanoes, two of them dormant, one of them most definitely active. Next slide, please.”

In the shadows beside the stage, an intern tapped at a keyboard. Now they all saw a photograph of a woman. She seemed to be in her late forties. Tall and sharp-eyed, she had long, blonde hair and freckled cheeks. She was pale, almost albino, with skin like cracked porcelain.

“This is our lady of Taos. She’ll be our way in.” Morgan paused, wiping his face a second time. He wanted to be sure that what he had just said registered with the crowd. “Okay? This is Dr. Anna Eldberg, of the Taos Research Institute, New Mexico. A geologist. Her parents were geologists too. Hardworking types. Dr. Eldberg here was actually born at Palmer Station, on the peninsula, seven hundred miles south of Argentina.” With a nod he added, “Go back to the first slide, please.”

He traced the laser in an arc on the left side of the map and held the red light on a square marking the old U.S. research base. “That’s it, there. Palmer Station. Anna Eldberg is one of only a small number of Americans ever to have been born in Antarctica. I don’t suppose Mom and Dad thought about it at the time, but as far as the State Department was concerned, these patriots helped to plant the flag.”

Morgan’s audience was predominantly male, dumb, and brashly unreconstructed. A few of them chuckled. Stengel Jones did not. He sipped hot tea and stared through the window, down at Lexington Avenue. Stengel never sat during presentations. Always, he leaned on a window frame, well back from the stage, sometimes glancing at the projector screen but mostly watching the traffic below. Today his colleague, Philomena, stood beside him. She didn’t laugh either. Both were young and still new to this. They were two years out of graduate school. They’d met Anna Eldberg a few times and had seen her at conferences and workshops. They didn’t know her, exactly, but she seemed decent enough.

“Third slide, please.” Morgan studied his shoes and sighed loudly. He then lifted his sweating head. A black and white picture of an old derrick came onto the screen. “Standard Oil worked on the island for eighteen months, in the early 1940s. It was totally illegal, but who’d have stopped them? If you can believe it, they sank a well and tested for crude—beneath a volcano.”

Some of the men in the room smirked.

“Eventually they cut their losses and got out. No one’s tried anything like that since then. Of course, International Commodities will not be searching for oil, but we’ll see what else the island might offer. We’ve invested half a million already, with a million in reserve. Two more years. If nothing shows up, we bail. Next slide, please.”

Stengel and Philomena glanced at each other and shifted on their feet. A dozen slides later, they heard their names called out. It was over.

“Come here!” said Morgan. “Let these people have a good, long look. Folks, allow me to introduce our resident rockheads.”

The pair hurried onto the stage and stood beside the big man as he guided the audience through their résumés. Finally, he hesitated, letting his gaze wander, as if checking on every person in the room. “Okay? In early November, Philomena and Stengel will rendezvous with Anna in Tierra del Fuego.”

Both cringed as he wedged himself between them. He ruffled their hair, gripped them by the shoulders, and laughed. “I know what you’re all thinking,” he bellowed, still laughing, “I know, I know! These two are just a tad young.”

He shook them. Philomena turned and saw the sweating face.

“Be assured,” he continued, “our company is in very safe hands.”

Anna Eldberg walked slowly down the long hallway. Some of the doors were open. She smiled at a few of the nursing home’s residents, the early risers, and at last reached her mother’s tiny room. This door was only partly open. She stopped, then peered in before entering and moving quietly to her usual chair, the one beside the nightstand.

Anna’s father, Johan, visited each day. He was there now, in an armchair in the corner. He’d fallen asleep with a book on his lap, breathing softly. Anna’s mother, Freya, was likewise asleep. She lay in bed, on her back, an oxygen tube pressed into her nostrils. A cable stretched across her neck and over the covers to a small tank humming on the floor.

Anna sat down. She wore a parka but didn’t dare take it off for fear of waking her parents. She was annoyed with herself for keeping the damned thing on. The winter had been protracted and cold, but today was the year’s first warm day in Taos.

She couldn’t resist leaning in, coat scrunching, to hold her mother’s hand while smiling at the sight of her sleepy father. Then she saw Freya’s old red bathrobe hanging from a hook on the back of the door. Her mother had worn that robe forever, and it seemed to Anna a homey touch in this dreary space. It was not the only one. A china cup and saucer waited on the nightstand, newly washed and glistening. Collected nearby were Freya’s two pairs of glasses, a lighter, and a silver case of Marlboros, unfiltered. The cigarettes sat beside a bottle of pills. All around the walls were paintings. They were paintings of people and animals, of tranquil landscapes, of vegetables and fruits and vases of pretty wildflowers. Most were oil and tempera on canvas, the rest were watercolors. The largest was a snowscape, almost as big as the door. It was the first thing Freya gazed at, each time she woke: two painted figures in the foreground, silhouettes against the ice, one of them holding a baby.

“And how is everyone in here? Mr. and Mrs. Eldberg? Anna?” A nurse was shouting from the hall.

Anna cursed. Her mother woke up, and her father got to his feet, too fast. His book fell to the floor as the nurse bustled into the room. She took Freya’s left wrist, counted pulses against her watch, dropped the arm on the covers, and scrutinized a monitor near to the bed. Next she pulled a thermometer from her pocket and motioned at the nightstand, fingers snapping. “Anna, pass those pills.”

Anna did as commanded, then fled into the hall. She waited until the nurse had started shouting again, this time one room along: “So, how’s everyone in here?”

Anna sighed, gathering herself, and looked back into her mother’s room.

Johan had claimed the chair she’d been using and was holding Freya’s hand. If he followed his usual habit, he would soon make tea for her. Both were laughing. As Anna watched, Freya pulled the tube from her nose and pushed herself into a sitting position. They both knew she had come, and she supposed they were happy for that, but she could also see how much they still enjoyed each other’s company, even here, and it was all she could do to stop from crying. They’d had enough of her tears. This room was all they could afford, and if they were contented with it, then she could be contented too.

Freya and Johan Eldberg had been in their mid-thirties when they brought a very young Anna to Taos. She’d been just five years old, coming north of Tierra del Fuego for the first time. Her parents’ research on the peninsula was finished. They were exhausted, grateful to settle down as young faculty at the Taos Research Institute. Shortly afterward, however, they resigned their posts. The petty politics, the occasional unpleasantness, the pace, the tone—all of it had begun to corrode something that for them was too beautiful to be spoiled.

But they’d remained in Taos, having grown to love the city. Johan became a high-school science teacher. Freya opted to stay at home. She grew fruits and vegetables in their small backyard. Every fall, there’d be two cases of apricot preserves. She rolled her own tobacco. She designed and sewed her family’s clothes, and she built a small wood shop in the garage, where she made a chicken coop, a writing desk and, finally, an easel. And then she painted. More than anything for Anna, during her childhood and later on, these paintings had been treasured: she’d always loved them. They showed where she was born and where her parents had been. They revealed precisely how her father and mother felt about each other, and how they’d felt about their little girl. Of course, Freya and Johan often told her stories about their lives and travels, and the work they’d done before she came into this world. But the paintings: they always said it better.

Anna left the nursing home mid-morning. A short drive, and she was at her house among the blue oaks and tall sycamores near to the Institute’s campus. Her home was a tiny Spanish cottage—stucco walls, pink bougainvillea, a red tile roof. She’d bought it fifteen years earlier, not long after being granted tenure. By now, Anna Eldberg was the Shackleton Professor of Geology at the School of Geophysical Sciences. The Taos Research Institute formed a striking collection of old pueblo-style buildings, set among groves of junipers, the whole campus centered on a meadow of wild grasses and clover. The place was heavenly, especially in the spring, and it was more than tolerable for Anna. Unlike her mother and father, she had learned to handle the departmental strife, partly by refusing to take sides, mostly by tuning it out. At this point, it wasn’t just her cottage but the whole Institute that felt like home. Early one morning, long ago, she’d walked ten blocks from her parents’ house to the campus, ready to begin her bachelor’s degree, and she’d pretty much been there ever since.

But today she had a sabbatical to prepare for. Her living room was filled with supplies and packing crates. Hawaii’s Big Island was her first destination. She’d already spent a lot of time on the lower slopes of the island’s volcanoes, west of the town of Hilo, and her stay this year would be extended through to the fall, allowing her time to train a couple of students and test new equipment.

Only three of the crates would go to Hilo. These were stuffed, their lids nailed shut— ready. The rest, ten in all, were still open; when she was finished with these, they would be shipped to Tierra del Fuego to join her on an icebreaker headed to Point Terror. After many vicious winters, she’d learned the hard way never to count on anything being usable at Cinder Island’s research station––sometimes even on the entire base itself. She walked to the center of the room, inspected everything, then knelt down on the floor. “Okay,” she muttered, “let’s get started.” Three pairs of steel-capped mountain boots went into the first crate, to be overlaid with bulky red parkas and a stack of medical kits. The next crate was for gloves and sunglasses, five pairs of each, then balaclavas, a gallon of sunscreen, and a half dozen wide-brimmed hats. For a good hour she lost herself in canvas backpacks and emergency rations, in maps and flare guns, in flashlights and laptops, in battery packs—all she could think to bring.

Evening came, and the crates were filled, sealed, and ready to ship. She sat at a desk now in her study, a glass of wine beside her, staring at a laptop. The study was almost dark. French doors nearby were open onto a dimly lit patio. Somewhere, a blackbird sang. A large moon was rising, peeking between the sycamores and bathing the backyard in a soft, gray light.

Anna could hear the bird out there, but its song lay at the edge of her senses as she sipped her wine and talked. She was video-conferencing with Stengel and Philomena in New York. They were visible from the waist up. Stengel had a cup of tea on the desk in front of him, and Philomena drank from a glass of water. Both were dressed in business suits.

“Don’t you ever stop?” asked Anna. “It’s nine o’clock there, right?”

Philomena was puzzled, but Stengel grinned. He lifted their laptop and pointed its camera out the window to show a blur of vehicles and colored streaks—green and red and yellow.

Anna enjoyed it for a while, then said, “Okay, enough! What’s this I’m looking at?”

“Twenty-Seventh and Lexington,” said Stengel. “You can see we’re not the only ones who are still busy.”

For the next few minutes, Anna briefed these fledglings while they dutifully took notes. At one point she paused, to drink and let them catch up. Then she continued, “I’ll bring three multi-function sensor networks. They’re wireless. Each is eight-by-eight, for a total of one hundred and ninety-two nodes. I’ll disperse them around the slopes. It’ll be a lot of work, and I’ll have only two students with me. Deployment will take weeks. We’ll be drilling into hundred-year-old ice, and it’ll be very difficult. We sure could use your help.”

She expected them to be happy to hear this. They’d be out in the field again. They’d get their hands dirty on rocks and ice. They’d be using tools. They’d be away from their desks, away from the corporate world. What, she wondered, could be better than that?

Instead, they simply looked at each other. Philomena then turned toward the screen. “Yes, I believe we could help,” she said. She leaned in, arms folded. “Dr. Eldberg, I take it that each node will measure seismic activity, but may I ask what else the networks will do?”

“Additional capabilities are,” Anna began—again, they took notes––“one, temperature measurements; two, orientation, absolute and relative; three, emissions. Before you ask, the identification of emissions is highly experimental. We’re doing science, after all. But each node has its own compact mass spectrometer. This is a first, and we’re extremely proud of it.”

Philomena stopped writing and stared into the camera.

“The spectrometers are really quite good,” said Anna. “We should catch all the usual volcanic gases. And if we work hard and if we’re smart enough, then we’ll detect most of the trace elements as well. We’ll sense copper and zinc and, for you people, the gold.”

At the word “gold,” Stengel looked away. Someone else was there. Anna pretended she hadn’t noticed. “Both of you know,” she continued, “or should know, that there won’t be much gold. It will be vanishingly little, but there will be gold.”

Again, she saw their glances—at each other and at Mr. Invisible, behind the laptop. Anna had guessed immediately that it was Morgan Edlin. Evidently, the big man didn’t want to be heard or seen. Anna was irked by this, but she didn’t let it show. Instead, she focused on retrieving Stengel from his distraction. Something told her that this young man might be someone after her own heart. There he sat, dressed in his business suit, but the suit seemed at odds with the stubble on his chin, the energy in his eyes, and his mop of long, disheveled hair. In that round and child-like face, she sensed awareness—innocence certainly, but also the alert interest of someone with cares beyond himself.

“Stengel,” she said, “I’m looking forward to having you and Philomena with me on the island. We’re scientists, but it’s more than that, right?”

Stengel brightened. He was about to reply when Philomena tapped his hand and answered for both of them. “Yes, we’re eager to get there.” She hesitated. Stengel broke in, but she tapped his hand a second time. “And we’ll be keen to tell you about our mission,” she went on. “That is, about our mission for International Commodities. If these field tests prove conclusive, we’ll also discuss our plans for the island, going forward.”

Anna studied Philomena’s face. It was hard and unsmiling, a face that should have been pretty but wasn’t. The eyes were dark, cold, almost dead. They invited nothing and no one. Anna decided that, scientist or no, this was someone wholly devoid of doubt.

Half a minute passed before she responded. Then she said, “The pair of you can call me whenever you like, you hear? I’ll be in Hawaii, calibrating a batch of those nodes. We have plenty of time to get ready.” She waited, choosing her words. “Philomena, do give some thought about what you’ll be telling me, once we’re down there together, okay? I’ll be all ears.”

Smiling, she finished the call by raising her glass, tilting it in their direction. “Speak to you soon,” she said.

Outside, the air was cool. The blackbird had gone, and the moon was higher. Anna was tired and a touch drunk. She crossed the lawn to a wicker table and a love seat. On the table were the day’s mail and an unlit scented candle. She put her wine glass beside them and lay down on the seat’s blue cushions. She’d planned to relax for a while, to watch the moon through trees. The stars were out. She pulled a Hopi blanket across her legs and clasped her hands behind her head. Crickets began to chirp. It felt good to be alone. She wriggled, settling in.

She woke, startled, and saw the unlit candle and the glass and the pile of mail. The moon had climbed above the trees. An owl was calling, and there’d been a fuss of wings. Had he woken her? She’d heard this owl before, from where she lay right now. She’d also heard him from her bed in the middle of the night. But never once had she seen the little fellow.

Yawning, she threw the blanket off her legs, rubbed her face, and leaned in to light the candle. She looked up and squinted, but her owl had gone. Perhaps he’d return? In the meantime, she’d go to the kitchen and make a pot of tea.

Before long, she was fully awake and out on the lawn again. The table rattled as she set her cup down. The stack of mail included two identical packages. She’d been relieved when they’d arrived at the house that day. She tore open the seals, slid out a wad of bubble wrap, and grabbed a bunch of keys from her pocket to slice some nylon cord. The packages contained tablet computers, one for Freya and one for Johan. With these, they’d be able to keep in touch with her when she was down on Cinder Island.

She was about to power them on when she caught herself and let out a laugh—a sigh, really. Then, with a long, deep breath, she put the machines onto the rumpled blanket and reached for her tea.

Her owl hooted once more. He was further away this time, and she figured it would be a good idea to listen carefully now as he shared his owlish thoughts.

CINDER ISLAND asks the question: to what extremes might we go when protecting a place we love? Anna Eldberg is a gifted scientist. She resides in the United States and is proud to be one of only a few people born in Antarctica. But the division of Anna’s loyalties between two continents has left her with little time for anything else. Middle-aged, and solitary by choice, she will now make a final voyage to her wild and bewitching homeland. Whether or not Cinder Island needs her help, she intends to save it from plunder. Ultimately, she will embrace a life she has never known before.

The narrative of CINDER ISLAND grew from two sources. The first was my fascination with the continent of Antarctica—its remoteness, the absence of people, its brutal climate, and its sheer scale. One theme explored in the novel is the fact that Antarctica is so enormous, terrifying, and alien that humans will never be more than a transitory presence on it, their influence so marginal as to be virtually irrelevant. In this sense, the place seems to have its own plan, and invites nobody’s concern.

Anna Eldberg, CINDER ISLAND’s protagonist, is entirely fictional, but the remarkable women I’ve known during my time as a research scientist comprise a second source of inspiration for my novel. A professional career in the sciences can be difficult enough. That so many women have now made a place for themselves in what was formerly a man’s world—indeed, a very private club—is nothing short of spectacular, an accomplishment to be celebrated and admired. It has been my privilege to spend time with Anna Eldberg when writing this novel.