When Mara had saved enough, she bought an old station wagon. She put blankets in the back and went for longer and longer drives. Days at a time. Then a week, two. She hoped she’d know where she was going when she got there, but she never did.

In Mukilteo, on a bulletin board outside a food co-op, she saw an ad for a survival school seeking instructors. It seemed as good a job as any, and easier than most. Mara called from a pay phone and was invited to come by in three days for an interview.

Eighteen people showed up to the interview. It was a group test. The applicants had four hours to start a fire, build a shelter, and acquire some kind of food. The weather was drizzling, and half the applicants dropped out in the first hour. They said it was too hard to start a fire in the rain. One of them called it impossible. The statement fascinated Mara; she had never seen someone be so confidently wrong.

By afternoon, Mara had a good flame in the opening of a debris hut, and all her clothes were dry. When Bjørn stopped by, she offered him grilled fish on a skewer. She started work two days later.

From that first week, Mara was partnered with Ethan, who had worked at Primal Instinct for a year. She slept in her car and showered at truck stops. She liked the work, which was better than other work she’d done, and she liked that she was good at it. She liked Ethan enough, too. He was a lapsed Catholic and he played guitar. After a month of dating, he asked her to move in with him, and she did.

For a while Mara drove home twice a month. But it seemed that each time she saw her parents, there was something new they were worried about, something she felt a burden to fix, though she could not. They recounted terrible things with the awe of discovery. That her mother’s miscarriages were caused by chemicals in commercial corn, a conspiracy to keep the population in check. “It all makes sense,” Mara’s mother told her. “You know how hard we tried.” There were plots by elites to manipulate science, to brainwash, to poison and sedate. It was dangerous, her mother said, to know these things. It made them a target.

“Aren’t you worried?” Mara asked her dad. While her mother ranted, she watched him, wishing he would wink to her, signal it was all a joke. But instead he stopped answering the phone when Mara called, noting that it might be tapped, and eventually he got rid of his phone completely.

Someone was always watching, Mara’s parents warned her. Always trying to overhear. Mara stopped coming home as much, and spent her days with Ethan, who was earnest and rarely afraid. He taught her French, which he had studied at Reed, and she taught him to fish. Life wasn’t good, but it was better. It was better to be away.