“Snakeskins are bad luck,” said Stormy.

“They’re not,” said Mara. She had learned about snakes in school. How they grew, but their skin didn’t, so they shed it like old clothes. Like her family’s old life in Salem. She started to explain, but Stormy cut her off.

“I know about snakes,” said Stormy. “Duh. It’s the skins that are bad luck. My brother touched one last year, and then he got hit by a car.”

Mara had met Stormy’s brother, and he seemed fine. But she couldn’t dismiss the possibility. She went to the bag to dig the snakeskin out, but the bag was gone. She found her father at the dome, pressing barbed wire into the stacked bags to keep them from sliding around.

All the bags looked exactly the same.

“We need to take the wall apart,” Mara told him.

“Why’s that?”

She explained about the snakeskin, and the bag, and about Stormy’s brother.

“Don’t worry, Marabelle,” her father said. “You trust me, right? I’ll tell you what, I think Stormy remembered wrong. The way I heard it, snakeskins are actually good luck.”

He was just making that up.

“But her brother was hit by a car,” said Mara.

“Is he dead?”

“No.”

“See? What did I tell you. Maybe the snakeskin protected him.”

Still Mara worried. She begged her father to take the bags apart, but it made no difference. The wall was built. The snakeskin was part of it forever, humming like a curse.

When fall came, Mara didn’t go to school. The dome was mostly finished—it had a roof, and a stucco coating to smooth the walls—but most of Mara’s lessons were outdoors. She had a waterproof notebook, and her parents told her to write down everything she saw. Birds circling, hawks or vultures. She named the tracks of the animals that snooped the compost pile at night. When she found a flower—clover, say, or a tansy aster—she made notes of its qualities, in detail that increased with practice. In September: how many petals? In November: did the leaves have spine-tipped teeth?

Life in the country wasn’t bad. It felt normal, even exciting. Mara slept on a plywood bunk above her parents, and ate meals cross-legged on the ground outside, on a patch of bare dirt they called the porch. They washed clothes in an old bathtub, hauling water from the pump. They burned trash in a barrel. They were always together, the family. The three of them. Mara’s parents had wanted more kids, a houseful of children to raise in joy, as they called it. She knew they were still trying, but each season a sibling seemed less likely. They called Mara their little miracle. They called her their perfect gift.

A year passed, and then two. The next summer they built a sweat lodge, and neighbors gathered to sweat out toxins, or play banjo outside and drink. The spring after that, they built a new dock.

Mara couldn’t remember when she first felt the change. It had probably been happening so slowly she barely noticed, or maybe it happened after she went to bed, neighbors talking late into the night. It was the way her parents talked about the property. Like it wasn’t an adventure anymore, but a life raft. Now they were calculating how far they were from cities. Talking supply chains and solar flares. Mara thought they would live on the land forever—thought that was the whole point—but twice she overheard her mother asking if they should move somewhere else, somewhere even more remote.