O-baasan hauled her find out from the layers of rubbish and held it up for inspection. Once it had been something valuable - something that somebody had thought worth paying for. Now it was just junk, a mass of broken plastic and corroded metal. In other words: "Gomi!" O-baasan snarled the word. She pulled her breathing mask aside so she could spit, then tossed the useless object away. It tumbled down the slope into a gully, shedding pieces as it rolled. But O-baasan didn't notice. The old woman was already rummaging through the debris again.

Little Ji hauled herself up the mound, careful not to start an avalanche of trash. She had grown up here in the Gomibako, had never known any life except picking through the morass of rubbish that stretched from horizon to horizon. Her upbringing had not killed her childish curiosity, though. She stopped by the gully and looked down at the discarded find. "What was it?"

O-baasan shrugged as she continued to sift through the layers of dead electronics and decaying plastics. "Maybe a television. Or a monitor. Who cares?"

Little Ji ignored the irritation in the old woman's voice. "Did you have one?"

"Several," O-baasan replied. She stopped her rummaging then held up a rectangle of black glass and rusted metal, its surfaces stained and pitted from its entombment. "Now this is something!:

Little Ji hurried to see what O-baasan had found, her oversized boots flapping around her bandaged legs as she ran. "Oh?" She looked at the object and tried to divine what it might have been. "It's a strange mirror, that one."

"Mirror?" The old woman held her find at arm's length and waved it around, as if following some strange ritual. "This is a phone," she said delightedly.

Little Ji stared at the rectangle. She had heard the old folk tell tales about the phones - how people took them everywhere, loved them more than their families, would fight to have the smartest one. "Does it work?"

"Course not!" O-baasan looked at the child with contempt. "Its batteries will be long dead. And there's no signal neither. Hasn't been since the world got broken." The old woman fumbled the phone into a pocket concealed somewhere in the layers of fabric wrapped around her. "Mark this place. We'll want to come back."

Little Ji looked around, fixing the few landmarks in her memory, then hurried after her companion. "What are we going to do with it?" she whispered, wary in case there were others listening.

"What we always do. Denkisan will give us food and water for it. Maybe some medicine too. Now, no dawdling. It'll soon be dark and the night air's no good for my lungs." As if to emphasise this, O-baasan coughed violently, momentarily forcing the mask away from her face. "Hand," she panted.

Obedient as always, Little Ji held out an arm for the old woman to lean on.