Montana
The West keeps its secrets under larger sky.
New Beginning || Signal || Vast
The drive from the Billings airport took two and a half hours on roads that grew progressively less sure of themselves, from four-lane highway to two-lane state route to county road to, finally, a dirt track that her rental car navigated with the reluctant dignity of a creature doing something beneath its station. The sky was enormous in the way that Montana skies are enormous: not merely large but aggressive about it, pressing down from all directions, making the land look like an afterthought. She had grown up in cities. She was not accustomed to so much visible horizon.
Dr. Osei met her at a crossroads. She was fifty, compact, with the efficient movements of someone who had spent considerable time working in difficult terrain and had stopped being interested in unnecessary motion. Her handshake was a statement. She had the portable receiver already running. As Elena climbed into the passenger seat, the signal reached her — same pulse, different rhythm. Not eleven seconds. Seven. Same frequency of frequency, if that made sense: the mathematical signature of something designed deliberately, by someone who knew how to build a transmission to last.
“How long?” Elena asked. “At minimum four years. Possibly longer — the log the engineer kept only goes back four years. The signal itself may predate his records.” Elena looked at the horizon. The wide, enormous sky. The sense of something hidden in its vastness. She was tired in the way that is actually hunger — for the next thing, for the movement, for the finding. She knew this quality in herself. Her father had it. “Who owns the land the signal’s coming from?” she asked. Dr. Osei smiled slightly. “That,” she said, “is where it gets interesting.” She handed Elena the research folder. Elena opened it. She read the first page. She looked up at the sky. “All right,” she said. “Let’s start from the beginning.”