Dad turned off the water carefully. “What, Tila?” Even though he’d been facing the other way, he knew it was me. He and Mom came through and sat on the couch across from us. My mom pushed her curly hair back over her shoulder. My dad worried his lower lip with his teeth the way he did when he was nervous. Their faces were tight, trying to keep any emotion from sneaking out.

“We don’t want to die,” I repeated. “And we don’t have to, if we can leave the Hearth and get to the city. Can you help us do that?” I kept the emotion out of my own voice.

Mom’s face crumpled, and Dad put his arm around her. “My girls,” he said, his voice breaking. “I wish we could. But no one leaves the Hearth.”

“Mia did. We remember.”

It’d been hushed up, but even as children we heard the rumors. I’d forgotten about them until we started thinking of leaving. She’d left. On purpose. No one ever found out how she’d escaped.

Our parents looked away.

“Please. You have to help us … we’re dead if we stay.”

“If you escape…” our mother whispered, “you’d be apostate. You’d be damned. Surrounded by all that technology … all the Impure…”

Next to me, Taema flinched. “That’s true,” I said. It wasn’t worth telling them we—I, at least—didn’t believe in the tenets of the faith anymore. Damn, they’d been so brainwashed in the last sixteen years, with Mana-ma battering away at their brains like the rest of us. Could I even break through? I pushed on ahead.

“We’d rather be alive and damned than dead and saved. Please. We don’t want to die.”

Though for me, it was more that I didn’t want Taema to die. I knew more than her. I knew if we did get out and found a doctor to fix our heart, there was a chance we wouldn’t both survive. Of course there was. Medicine out there was really advanced, but it wasn’t infallible. I just had to hope that if death took one of us, it took me and not her.

Dad pressed his lips together as he thought.

Shit, I miss them so much. They were good parents. They did their best by us. Even then, when they knew that if they helped us they’d never see us again, they still risked their jobs and their faith to help us.

“What about smuggling them out in the supply ships?” Dad asked Mom. “We could hide them…”

She shook her head. “Mana-ma would find out that way, as so little goes back out.”

“Even if we bribe them?”

“With what? Hand-stitched quilts? Those few credits we have from thirty years ago are worthless now.”

“What goes out to the city? Just blankets and apples and stuff, right?”