In the evening, Dice told us that they’d try to get rid of us because we threatened the fake world. We were a model for a successful alternative. Maybe this man was from the FBI. Dice talked about the Green Scare, the way that environmental activists were becoming the top-priority terrorists for law enforcement agencies. “Amazing,” Dice said, “that the government is more afraid of people conspiring to help trees and animals than people conspiring to kill each other.” The family laughed. We were angry.

The man was, perversely, a sign of our success, Dice said. The better we got, the more the fake world would fight us.

* * *

That night, someone woke me. I heard the scratching sound of a match being struck. In the candlelight, Dice’s face floated before me, ragged and orange. “Come with me,” he whispered. He had sweat on his face. I wondered what he’d been doing in the cool night to get so hot, if he’d been running, lifting heavy objects. The flame, as though trying to please him, grew tall. He brought the candle close to my arm. I stood and my nightgown’s hem brushed my ankles. I felt I was in a dream.

We got in the truck. We drove for hours and hours. I was half-asleep. The night air came in through the windows, broad music. The headlights seemed to X-ray the trees. We tore past the forests and hills, which at times broke to reveal the view of the ridges beyond the ridges beyond the ridges. A red helicopter rumbled low over us, then cut away through the forest. “Putting out a fire somewhere,” Dice said.

We pulled up at a rough-hewn cabin. I knew we were not near the farm because the landscape was crossed by huge steel towers, the likes of which I’d never seen, holding aloft three long-distance power lines each.

The lines on their strutted towers were keening above the yowl of frogs and crickets. “The more humid the air,” Dice said, “the more sound the electricity makes.” It sounded like low-voiced men singing falsetto. “We’re not in North Carolina anymore,” Dice said. “This is a place that man wants to build on.” He reached out and gripped my shoulder. It was too dark to see his face.

The power streamed on through the lines, wailing for the lamps it would light, the radiators it would heat. I followed him down a dark hill. We seemed to be going so quickly, as though we were on a moving walkway through the waist-high grass.

“How long have you been with us, Harmony?”

“Almost two years,” I said. I was sure he knew that. I couldn’t wait for each day to pass, to add it to my total, to measure up my time here against my time in the fake world.