On July 16, 1945, the human race reached the single most important man-made moment in its history. In the Jornada de Muerto—“Journey of Death”—desert, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, mankind discovered the power to end all life on earth. Until that moment, it had only been an idea, a mathematical calculation in the minds of geniuses who could theorize a step beyond the average individual. But on that fateful day, the smartest minds in the world, funded by the wealthiest nation in the world, toward the end of the most devastating war the world had ever known, turned theory into reality.

The first atom bomb, modestly called “The Gadget,” was detonated, in the single greatest moment of earthly invention and destruction, for the power to create always goes hand in hand with the power to destroy. The twenty-kiloton blast firmly put the blade of self-annihilation into the hands of mankind, and from that moment on, nothing on earth would ever be the same.

The bomb was not beloved, but even so, the universe could not ignore such a world-altering event, and so at the very instant The Gadget was dropped from its tower and detonated, the entire blast zone crossed into Everlost, becoming the world’s largest deadspot, perfectly round, and perfectly preserved. And at ground zero, the very center of the deadspot, sat the bomb itself. While its atoms had been shredded in the living world, in Everlost, The Gadget sat a millimeter above the Journey of Death desert, poised at the last microsecond before detonation, waiting at that final moment of infinite possibility.

Waiting, perhaps, for Mary Hightower.

CHAPTER 46
The Sum of All Tears

Mary Hightower and her huge cumulus of Afterlights crossed the Nevada desert, pulled by Mary’s conviction that something spectacular lay ahead of them. They carried with them more than twenty Interlights whose bodies lay comatose back in the town of Artesia. If all went according to plan, every single one of them would awake as a skinjacker.

On a bright chilly January morning, Mary stepped from the living-world desert, and onto the Trinity deadspot. Mary was not a girl easily impressed. She had seen many things in her deathtime, but nothing could prepare her for this moment. All around them, on a deadspot that stretched for more than a mile, was a treasure trove of crossed objects. The ground was a giant repository of random items. Chairs and cars and toys and clothes and books and boxes and basically every type of manmade object imaginable stretched for as far as the eye could see. Flashes of static, like tiny forked lightning, sparked around them every few seconds; phantom branches of light, shooting between metal objects.