“They’re roaring and thundering,” she said. “You have to watch out for the half-dead wolf, you know. We see them around the land sometimes. Dressed like scientists. Looking in our rivers. Digging in the woods. There’s no coal here, but the roads have gotten better, and they want to develop. It’s already too bright to see the Milky Way.” Her tone made my skin prickle. “Once the biodiversity is gone, it’s gone. After a catastrophe it takes millions of years to come back.”

“Do you really think you’ll be able to stop them?”

“Let me tell you something Dice told me,” she said. “We animals are more like fungus than like plants. We are descendants of big groupings of cooperating fungus cells. We are not single selves, just tendencies, groups. And so we do think we can stop the catastrophe, because we are not working alone. The fake world is not a match for us.” When she turned away from me I saw her buzz cut was grown out in the back like a rat tail. In that moment she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.

I wondered how they would stop the mining, the developing. I imagined a march through the center of town, like my ex-boyfriend and I had done against the bathroom bill and the ag-gag. “I’d like to come to your protest,” I said.

“We don’t really do protests,” she said. “We do direct action.” She stooped to stroke a hen’s broad red back, and it hunched, stilled by her touch. The hens ate soft mangoes and passion fruits. They jabbed their beaks into grapes. Sara showed me how to collect the eggs, feeling around in nesting boxes, under the warm feathers and sturdy legs. She watched me and said, “Bay was right to bring back someone who loves animals. I bet your family didn’t see that, did they?”

“My mother wanted me to focus on school,” I said.

Sara touched my face. Her hands smelled like horses. “I am glad you found us,” she said.

We tracked through the barn, a maze of low-ceilinged wooden rooms of irregular sizes. One room was stacked floor to ceiling with pieces of PVC pipe. As we walked past, the pipe ends looked like rolling eyes.

We fed the four massive pigs, dropping down crates of lettuce and kale and bagels and strawberry Yoplait. “From the free store,” Sara said. “The Dumpster.”

“Do you travel to town often?” I was remembering Bay: three days or the rest of your life.

“That’s a silly question,” she said. “We’re traveling at six hundred miles a second toward the Great Attractor.” She laughed when she saw my face. “Get relativity,” she said. “It’s one of our lessons.”