Hugh Howey: Dust

A stick cracked behind her, a rustle of leaves, and Juliette expected to find Elise returning to complain that she couldn’t sleep. Or perhaps it was Charlotte, who had joined her by the fire earlier that night, had remained largely quiet while seeming to have much she wanted to say. But Juliette turned and found Courtnee there, white smoke steaming from something in her hand.

“Mind if I sit?” Courtnee asked.

Juliette made room, and her old friend joined her on the bedroll. She handed Juliette a hot mug of something that smelled vaguely of tea… but more pungent.

“Can’t sleep?” Courtnee asked.

Juliette shook her head. “Just sitting here thinking about Luke.”

Courtnee draped an arm across Juliette’s back. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay. Whenever I see the stars up there, it helps put things into perspective.”

“Yeah? Help me, then.”

Juliette thought how best to do that and realized she hardly had the language. She only had a sense of this vastness — of an infinite possible worlds — that somehow filled her with hope and not despair. Turning that into words wasn’t easy.

“All the land we’ve seen these past days,” she said, trying to grasp what she was feeling. “All that space. We don’t have a fraction of the time and people to fill it all.”

“That’s a good thing, right?” Courtnee asked.

“I think so, yeah. And I’m starting to think that those we sent out to clean, they were the good ones. I think there were a lot of good people like them who just kept quiet, who were scared to act. And I doubt there was ever a mayor who didn’t want to make more room for her people, didn’t want to figure out what was wrong with the outside world, didn’t want to suspend the damn lottery. But what could they do, even those mayors? They weren’t in charge. Not really. The ones in charge kept a lid on our ambitions. Except for Luke. He didn’t stand in the way of me. He supported what I was doing, even when he knew it was dangerous. And so here we are.”

Courtnee squeezed her shoulder and took a noisy sip of tea, and Juliette lifted her mug to do the same. As soon as the warm water hit her lips, there was an explosion of flavor, a richness like the smell of the flower stalls in the bazaar and also the upturned loam of a productive grow plot. It was a first kiss. It was lemon and rose. There were sparks in her vision from the heady rush. Juliette’s mind shuddered.

“What is this?” she asked, gasping for air. “This is from the supplies we pulled?”

Courtnee laughed and leaned against Juliette. “It’s good, right?”

“It’s great. It’s… amazing.”

“Maybe we should go back for another load,” Courtnee said.

“If we do that, I might not carry anything else.”

The two women laughed quietly. They sat together, gazing up at the clouds and the occasional star for a while. The fire nearest them crackled and spat sparks, and a handful of quiet conversations drifted deep into the trees where bugs sang a chorus and some unseen beast howled.

“Do you think we’ll make it?” Courtnee asked after a long pause.

Juliette took another sip of the miraculous drink. She imagined the world they might build with time and resources, with no rules but what’s best and no one to pin down their dreams.

“I think we’ll make it,” she finally said. “I think we can make any damn thing we like.”

Hugh Howey spent eight years living on boats and working as a yacht captain for the rich and famous. It wasn’t until the love of his life carried him away from these vagabond ways that he began to pursue literary adventures, rather than literal ones. Hugh wrote and self-published his first adult novel, Wool , which won rave reviews and praise from readers. Dust is the final part of the trilogy. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife Amber and their dog Bella.