kept his eyes on him and kept the gun perfectly level.
“Ah, Mr Grieves,” he said into the phone. “I take it everything is in order? Yes? Good. What? Ah, the Secretary of Defense wishes to speak to the President? I’m afraid he will have to speak to me.”
Nimrod smiled at Eisenhower as he waited on the phone. There was a movement in his ear, muffled, as the phone was passed over.
Nimrod raised the gun, stretching his arm out straight, pointing the barrel directly at the center of Eisenhower’s expansive forehead.
“Ah, Mr Secretary? How charming to speak to you again.”
Nimrod pulled his thumb back, cocking the revolver.
“Now, listen very carefully. These are my terms.”
EPILOGUE
THE CLOUD CLUB
She took a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and sipped it, enjoying the tickle of bubbles against her nose. Glass half-drained, she kept it high, and peered over the rim at the man on the other side of the room. The man raised an eyebrow, his mouth twitching into a smirk. Then he turned away.
The band struck up again, and soon people were back on the dance floor.
“You’ve been looking at him all night.”
She lowered the glass and turned her back on the room and her attention to the vast window that formed nearly the whole of the wall. She took a step forward and pressed one gloved hand to the glass. Manhattan stretched out before her, the lights of the city kissing the invisible horizon in every direction. If she squinted, just a little, the lights fuzzed and spun, turning into the whirly stars of the Milky Way, bathing her in their magical blue light, the light of…
“Seriously,” said her friend, sipping from her own champagne. “You can’t keep this up all night.”
She smiled. “I can keep this up forever.”
“If you don’t do something soon, I’ll do it for you.”
She blinked, and the city returned. She turned away from the window and watched the patrons of the Cloud Club drink and talk and dance.
“He looks nice.”
“Yes, he does,” she said. Then she frowned.
“What’s wrong?”
She shrugged. “I’ve seen him somewhere before, that’s all.” She searched the room. “Where is he?”
Her friend smiled and slid sideways, back towards the window.
“Excuse me.”
She turned. He was there, smiling at her, his eyes big and brown. His hair was dark, slicked back, one escaped lick flicking across his forehead. She decided she liked that.
The man bowed and glanced at her friend, who smiled before burying her face in her glass. “May I have this dance?”
She laughed, glancing at her friend, who nodded furiously. She turned back to the man and held out her arm.
“I’m charmed, Mr…”
“Fortuna. Kane Fortuna.”
“Evelyn McHale.” She took his arm.
“Ms McHale,” he said, “the night is ours.”
The pair weaved their way to the middle of the room, joining the mass of dancing couples.
Outside, New York sparkled, the lights of the city like jewels on velvet, like the stars in the sky, their light the light of the gap between the universes, the light of the end of the world.
And in the Cloud Club, the music played on and the couples danced, and danced, and danced.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost, I have to thank my literary agent, Stacia J. N. Decker, for work above and beyond the call of duty on this manuscript. The Age Atomic wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for her, and for that I am forever grateful and forever in her debt.
For support, advice (both moral and editorial), and late nights on Twitter, my thanks to Lauren Beukes, Joelle Charbonneau, Kim Curran, Will Hill, Laura Lam, Lou Morgan, Emma Newman, James Smythe, Steve Weddle, Chuck Wendig and Jennifer Williams.
Special thanks to Mur Lafferty, whose ear I was able to bend, and bend frequently, during the course of writing and editing this book. The gin is (still) on me.
Thanks once more to the Angry Robot team, in particular my editor Lee Harris, as well as Marc Gascoigne and Darren Turpin. And thanks to Will Staehle for yet another glorious cover.
As a writer, inspiration sometimes comes from the strangest – and saddest – of places. Evelyn McHale jumped from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building on May 1st, 1947, and landed on the roof of a United Nations limousine. A few minutes later, Robert Wise took a photograph of her body, which ran as a full page in Life magazine a couple of weeks later. This photo, which became known as “The Most Beautiful Suicide”, was later used by Andy Warhol for a