I ignored her, still trying to reach down, but Taema stayed stubbornly straight. I pulled harder, until she grunted in pain, but she didn’t budge.

“Come on,” I wheedled. “We have to turn it in to Mana-ma, don’t we? We can’t leave it here.” Really, I just wanted to hold it, at least for a moment.

With a reluctant sigh, she leaned forward. I wrapped my hand around the metal and glass.

“You’ll get in trouble for touching it with your bare skin,” she warned.

“So will you.”

“Exactly. I’ll have to be Purified along with you, and you know burning sage always makes me cough.”

I looked around nervously. How long before people came?

“Let’s go to the tree, first,” I said.

“So you can look at it?”

I didn’t answer.

“It’s Impure,” she whispered, her brow furrowed.

I started toward the trees and she followed, her legs stiff and straight.

“We shouldn’t do this,” she kept whispering. “Mana-ma wouldn’t like it.”

“Mana-ma doesn’t need to know.”

“She knows everything.”

I felt a little bit of guilt, but I squashed it right down.

The tree was our favorite spot in the forest. We went to it whenever we really wanted to hide from everyone else in the Hearth. In the compound it was hard to ever be truly alone, but out in the woods there were only the redwoods and the birds. Our tree was an old, hollowed-out redwood, struck by lightning a long time ago. We shuffled inside, smelling the old smoke and damp greenness of the forest. I loved it there. When we were younger, we’d had tea parties or played cards, whispered secrets, stashed things we didn’t want to share. It was our safe space.

I held the tablet in front of me, turning it this way and that. It felt so smooth, hard and cold. It seemed alien.

I found a little button on the side and pressed it, and the screen came to life in vibrant greens, blues and yellows. We both gasped.

How had the people from the city worked it?

I pressed it with my finger.

Words appeared on the screen: No implants detected. Use manually? Y/N.

“I’m going to press yes,” I said.

“You know you shouldn’t. Mana-ma says it’s evil.”

Sometimes she drove me nuts. “For God’s sake. You can’t tell me you’re not even a little curious.”

Taema set her mouth in that stubborn line we both make when we’re not budging.

“If God didn’t want us to look at it, it wouldn’t have been left there,” I tried.

“It’s a test. That’s what Mana-ma would say.” She bit her lip. I knew she was curious, almost as curious as me.