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.