False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(20)

I swallowed, feeling Taema stiff and hurt beside me. That seemed … wrong. Wicked. Like Mana-ma always said about the outside world.

And what would they think of us, out there? What would they do?

Taema and I didn’t speak to each other. We read as fast as our eyes could speed across the text, looking up words we didn’t recognize, nudging each other gently when we could scroll down.

We spent hours in that tree. Taema said she’d had enough and closed her eyes, going to sleep. But I kept reading and learning, and appreciated that even if she was afraid of it all, she wouldn’t rat on me.

So much of it I didn’t understand. At first, I didn’t want to believe it. I mean, this was all I’d ever known. I wanted to believe that maybe the outside world was lying, making it all up for some reason. For money, probably. Mana-ma said that was all people out there ever wanted. Money and all the evil they could buy with it.

But deep down, I started thinking about all the ways she treated us and the others. All the things she made us do. Outside wasn’t perfect. I’d never expected it to be. I couldn’t help but wonder if maybe, just maybe, life didn’t have to be like it was in the Hearth.

*

I stuck the tablet in the bottom of our bag and slung it across my shoulder. The movement woke my sister. I knew it was dangerous to take it back to camp, but I also didn’t want to leave it out here. I didn’t know much about technology, obviously. If it rained in here, would the water break it? I knew that could happen with things like the record player.

Taema was quiet as we slunk back to the town center with our rocking gait. My arms were around her waist, and hers were around my shoulders. She felt guilty. Both because she’d let herself be close to something Impure and because she knew that we wouldn’t be giving it over to Mana-ma. We wouldn’t mention it in Confession. I’d get in trouble, and so would she by default. I’d put her in a shitty situation, and I should have felt worse about it than I did.

After reading those articles, I felt like I was seeing everything with fresh eyes. I’d seen a couple of photos of cities as we searched on that tablet deep within the forest, and they seemed so unfamiliar compared to our trees and single-story houses. But to hear Mana-ma talk about it, San Francisco and the rest of the outside world was a vast cohort (yes, she actually used the word “cohort” in everyday conversation) of corruption, abomination and filth.

Now I knew what so many people out there thought of our church, our town hall, our little houses all in a row. Our tidy allotments, or the fish smoking over an open flame. Nathaniel, a boy our age who was missing a leg, waving a hand to us as he turned the meat.

I tugged my skirt straight. Simple homespun. Taema and I made the dress ourselves—everyone did, but sometimes they swapped or inherited hand-me-downs. Not us, of course.

I shouldn’t care what they thought. They seemed more like aliens than other humans.

Yes, I knew what aliens were. My parents had two pulp science fiction paperbacks, smuggled in when they joined the Hearth as teenagers. My parents loved the Hearth and believed in it, but my dad couldn’t bear to leave them behind. He found a logic loophole for himself—they were both editions from the Golden Era of sci-fi and therefore pre-1969, and the far-fetched futuristic tech in them was just fantasy. I’d found them a few years ago: The Stars My Destination and The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Again, Taema had been annoyed at both me and Dad, convinced we should turn them into Mana-ma. Again, my sister had stayed quiet as I read long into the night, turning the crumbling yellow pages delicately. I’d loved escaping to those other worlds and dreaming about life on other planets.

Our planet was this small: 1,000 acres of redwood forest. I couldn’t stop thinking about its past, laid out as it was on the tablet. How it used to be somewhere called Muir Woods. How the swamp was created to keep people out.

Or maybe to keep us in.

After we left, Taema and I hardly ever told people in San Francisco that we grew up in Mana’s Hearth. When we did, they usually looked at us the same way the supply ship people did. As if we were unnatural. Aberrant.

I hated that look. It made me feel trapped. Made me want to lash out.

I’ve written this all down to show what the Hearth was like from the inside. I know you’re all as curious as the rest of them. I’ll keep telling you about life in the compound, and I won’t tell you lies—whether you believe that or not. I can only tell you what it was like ten years ago, since we haven’t been back. We’re not allowed, even if we wanted to go to that godforsaken place.

On that walk back, tablet well hidden, a few people were milling around the church, waiting for midweek prayer, dressed in shades of cream and brown. A lot of us had brown skin, brown hair, brown eyes. When we first came to San Francisco, we couldn’t believe all the color.

I remember I looked up at the church. The five-pointed symbol was carved over the door, painted gold and silver. A light was on in Mana-ma’s study. As far as I know, she’s still the leader out there, as I haven’t heard anything about her dying. She’ll probably outlive the apocalypse; she’s just that stubborn. The supposed wife of God, according to the Good Book. I used to believe that, I really did. But I’d started losing my faith long before I found that tablet, I think. I can’t pinpoint what caused that; just a lot of little things adding up. Guess I was proven right.

Mana-ma would probably be pretty interested in a Confessional from me now, a lot more than she was when I told her I’d stolen some cherries from Leila’s allotment. Confession was meant to be one-on-one with Mana-ma, but Taema and I were a two-for-one special. A few times, she asked one of us to cover our ears while the other confessed, but she gave up after a while. We already knew each other’s sins, anyway. Obviously.