Her family always had a shotgun, but now they had a pistol, too, and eventually a gun for each of them. Mara’s father made her run laps around the dome, calling for her to go faster, faster, until her lungs stung and her heartbeat crashed in her chest. Then he’d thrust the nine mil into her hands and tell her to shoot. If she didn’t hit an old propane tank at twelve yards on the first try, she had to do it again. And again. A person couldn’t shoot until they could shoot tired.

“It’s an important skill,” he told her. And then his voice went gentle. “Even more important for you, Marabelle. Girls need to be able to defend themselves.”

They had always preserved food, being so far from town. But now her parents ordered shipments in bulk, and talked about digging a bunker to store it all. They told Mara not to mention their precautions to her friends. She didn’t have friends; she just had parents. By then Stormy wore all black and was into Finnish death metal. They didn’t hang out anymore.

One weekend her father built a mud pizza oven, and it felt like when they’d first moved to the country. Sitting outside on the dirt porch, eating slices and watching the birds. But then her mother had to ruin it. “This will be good for cooking if we can’t get fuel for the generator,” she said, and Mara lost her appetite. Talk like that scared her. Scared her that her parents might be right, and scared her even more that they might be wrong.

They had always told her: just because this is our lifestyle doesn’t mean it has to be yours. But as Mara got older, she didn’t know what else to do. When she was sixteen she got a job at a drive-through burger joint, an hour’s bike ride away. She hated it. Everything loud and fast and layered in grease, the people and the shouting. It made her eyes hurt, her mind hurt, by the end of each shift.

One of their neighbors was a mink rancher, and Mara started going there instead, cleaning cages for ten bucks an hour cash. The smell was awful, and it stuck to her clothes. The mink were mean. “Anyone who wants to save the mink,” the rancher liked to say, “you know they’ve never met one. These asshole sons’abitches,” rolling his sleeves to show the scars. He was a sad man, and Mara liked him. His wife had died of breast cancer three years before. He baked bread often, and sent her home with warm loaves of sourdough, or called her to the kitchen for a slice, toasted and soaked with butter. Once, sizing her up, he brought her to his wife’s closet and told her to pick anything she wanted, that his wife would have liked to see her clothes used. Mara picked a thick sweater, hand-knit with a pattern that looked like eagles. She wore the sweater the next time she came by, thinking it might please him. But it seemed to make him sadder. After that, the rancher didn’t invite her in as much. She still cleaned the cages, but now he left money under a rock outside.