The ceiling fan clicked like a metronome above Minister Kaipo’s desk. The office smelled faintly of salt and mildew, a scent that no amount of scrubbing could keep out. From her chair, Anna Voigt caught sight of the road outside where the asphalt had dropped away into sand. Last year’s king tide had claimed it.
She held a folder across her knees. Inside were maps, charts, photographs of seafloor plumes. Facts she had rehearsed on the long flight here, facts she had already repeated three times since landing.
“You know what those dredgers are doing,” Anna said, forcing calm into her tone. “Clouds of silt are spreading miles past the sites. You choke the microbes, the corals, you choke the fish. That isn’t mineral recovery, it’s ecological collapse.”
Kaipo’s broad fingers drummed against the desk. His face carried the patience of someone who had heard the same words before. “Collapse,” he said, almost idly. “You say the word like it’s a new thing. But collapse is already here.”
He gestured toward the window with a tired hand. “You saw the road. You’ve seen the houses on stilts. Each year we lose more.”
Anna leaned forward. “That’s why this matters. If the oceans die, it doesn’t stop at your reef. It unravels everywhere.”
“Everywhere,” he echoed, a trace of dryness in his voice. “Yet everywhere is still burning coal. Still drilling for oil. And you come to us, the smallest, the drowning, to ask restraint.”
His words landed heavier than she expected. She shuffled her papers, buying a moment. “The corporations don’t care about your people, Minister. They’ll build a hospital, yes, but they’ll vanish once the nodules are gone. You’ll be left with their scars in your waters and nothing lasting.”
Kaipo chuckled softly, though his eyes stayed hard. “And what has your United Nations left us? A conference speech? A promise of aid that never came?”
Anna opened her mouth, then stopped. The click of the fan filled the silence.
“My cousins are already in Brisbane,” Kaipo went on, quieter now. “My sister in Auckland. They send money home, but each year more leave. What do I tell the ones who stay? That the ocean’s microbes matter more than their children’s bedrooms?”
He rose from his chair, restless, and crossed to the window. The horizon shimmered with heat, a container ship crawling in the distance. “My grandfather’s house went under five years ago. We watched the water climb through his kitchen, into the bedrooms, until the graves in the yard were washed bare. You think I do not know loss, Dr. Voigt?”
The way he said her name—formal, cutting—made her throat tighten. She stood too, clutching her folder. “You can’t trade one destruction for another. Mining won’t stop the sea from rising. It will only take away what’s left.”
He turned, his gaze steady. “The sea is already taking everything. At least this way we might build walls, buy time. You ask me to be the moral voice. But I cannot feed my people on principles.”
Anna’s breath caught, words rising then dissolving. She thought of her apartment in Hamburg, of lectures delivered to polite rooms. Of boarding a plane powered by kerosene to tell a drowning man about restraint.
She felt suddenly foreign in every inch of her skin.
Kaipo returned to his desk and straightened a stack of papers with deliberate calm. “Climate change asks the vulnerable to make impossible choices,” he said. “This is mine. I will trust the capitalists. They are ruthless, but they deliver on their promises.”
For a moment, the only sound was the click of the fan, steady as surf.
Anna tucked her folder under her arm. She wanted to argue again, to find some unspoken crack in his resolve, but there was nothing left to press against. His decision had the heaviness of stone, already weathered into him.
The minister didn’t look up as he waved to the secretary by the door.
Outside, the street smelled of seawater and diesel. Children shouted somewhere down the block. The tide lapped against the sea wall, patient and sure, as if waiting.