by Hugh Howey
Stained blinks. Montana rubs her belly.
“Can you read his mind? It’s gonna be a boy?”
Tears blur her vision like the rainy Tralfamadorian nights streak the dome.
“If you can talk to him, tell him I love him. Tell him everything’s gonna be okay.”
Stained has gone back to cleaning. Montana wants to scream, but the thing she is angry at is in the past. The past can’t hear her. This is the thing, her great discovery. She smiles at the future. Happiness is a choice. She knits another row and loves every man who ever wronged her. More important, she loves those who will wrong her yet.
“Because,” Stained says, curling a finger, and peering in at her.
“Yes,” Montana agrees. “Because.” She laughs, and almost feels free.
9
* * *
A plane disappears into an office building, and bombs erupt everywhere at once. In London and Baghdad, in Spain and Afghanistan, every bomb that ever was and ever will be detonates in unison. All the same bomb.
The Tralfamadorians see time stretched out in all directions. They see a people who can do nothing but make joyous fists. Something is wrong with those who don’t. Something is terribly wrong with those who don’t. And where are the more like them?
It is July 6, 2001, and I am on the deck of the motor yacht Symphony. There is a stranger beside me, a beautiful girl; I do not know her name. She is a dancer, one of the high-kicking Rockettes, and we have exchanged smiles more than once over the course of the night. I join her on the bow. It is a warm evening on the Hudson. I have yet to meet my wife, Amber, in whom I will find peace. Symphony turns away from the Statue of Liberty and aims for Manhattan, steams through those lapping waters toward a skyline alight, toward those tall pillars of gleaming glass that blot out the blackest sky.
At that moment, a stranger leans in and kisses a boy, and the universe has never been so right. If time could be lived in a single dimension, there is where I would be. A boy and a city whole. But it is a man who writes this, every word of it true. And in that bright blue and empty sky where shade used to shelter my toil, I take solace in the wisdom of Montana Wildhack—who knows that nothing in the past can keep her from being free.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
HUGH HOWEY spent eight years as a yacht captain before giving up the seafaring life and taking up writing. His New York Times bestselling Silo Saga has been translated into more than thirty languages and optioned for a feature film by Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian. He lives in Jupiter, Florida with his wife, Amber, and their dog, Bella. When he isn’t writing, he’s taking pictures or talking to strangers.
www.hughhowey.com