'What? What are you talking about?'
'Her life's too unbalanced as it is. I don't want to curse her with knowing that much.'
'Don't underestimate her,' his father ordered, but Milo wasn't listening anymore. He'd had a whole week of the old man's words in Albuquerque, his scheming and deal-making. What was he left with now?
The Suzuki was part of the parade of cars carrying children home, and he noticed a gift-wrapped box in the back, for his daughter's birthday.
' Milo? You there?'
But Milo only heard the Bigger Voice, the one that spoke in his mother's strange intonation. Endlessly in that cell on the nineteenth floor, it had told him that everything he was doing was wrong, but he hadn't listened. Now: There goes the last of your hope.
He heard Einner: I’ll bet the Book has something to say about hope.
And he: It tells you to not get hooked on it.
Then it was six years ago to the day, and he was bleeding all over the sun-baked Venetian cobblestones. A pregnant woman screamed, while inside her the child beat and scratched to come out. He'd thought it was the end, but he'd been wrong. All of it-all the things that mattered, they were just beginning.
A strand of Tourist philosophy came to him, and for once he talked back to that disappointed voice that lived inside him: We don't need hope, Mother, because there is no end.
'What was that?' asked Yevgeny.
The Suzuki turned the corner. They were gone.
Olen Steinhauer
