The party was always happening. That was the rule. If the music stopped, if the champagne ran dry, if the last guest stumbled out into the Manhattan night and the doorman locked the door, then someone -- Wallader St. Clair, usually, but not always -- would start the music again and uncork another bottle and tell the doorman to leave the door cracked, just a crack, so the sound could leak out into the street and the street would leak into the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood would leak into the whole goddamn city, which was what Wallader wanted. He wanted the city to know that the party was happening. He wanted everyone to know that for tonight, at least, the world had not ended.

He was not sure when it would end. Nobody was. There were rumours -- whispers in the smokiest corners of the club, conversations conducted in codes over glasses of bourbon that tasted like they had been distilled from regret -- of a fleet coming from another star. Another star. The words didn't make sense. They belonged in a textbook, not in a conversation over dinner. But they were real. Wallader knew they were real because he had built the wall that was keeping them out.

The wall was a number. A financial figure. A piece of information sitting in a locked drawer in Wallader's apartment above the club, written on a page that was no thicker than a playing card but heavier than the gold reserves of Fort Knox. If that number became public, the entire financial system of the United States would collapse. Stocks would become paper. Bonds would become fiction. The Federal Reserve would become a joke told in boardrooms and then told nowhere at all.

And the people who had sent the fleet -- the people who had been watching, listening, waiting for humanity to make a sound loud enough to pinpoint -- those people had told Wallader, through channels he did not fully understand and did not entirely trust, that if the American financial system collapsed, they would stop coming.

So the number sat in the drawer. And Wallader sat below it, in his club, playing piano, pouring drinks, watching Catherine Ashford sing songs that sounded like stars dying, and trying not to think about the drawer.

***

Cathy sang on a stage that was smaller than a confession booth. She wore a dress the colour of liquid gold and a necklace that caught the light every time she moved, which was often, because movement came naturally to her the way breathing comes to people who have never considered the alternative.

Her voice was the kind of voice that makes men buy drinks they cannot afford and women cry for reasons they cannot explain. It was a warm voice, a voice that sounded like it had been trained in a church, though Cathy had never been to church. It was a voice that sounded like it knew about loss and had decided, generously, not to talk about it.

Wallader listened from the bar. He had been listening for eleven months and nineteen days. He had fallen in love somewhere around the fourth month, in a way that was both the most natural and the most foolish thing he had ever done.

After the set, she came to the bar. She smelled like jasmine and gin.

"You're staring," she said.

"I'm listening."

"That's worse."

She sat down. She ordered a beer. She drank it like it was wine. Wallader watched her from across the bar and thought, not for the first time, that she was the most beautiful thing in a city full of beautiful things, and that beauty was the most useless thing in the world when the sky was full of enemies.

"Did you hear me?" she said.

"I always hear you."

"Then hear this. I'm tired of this place. Of the music. Of the drinking. Of pretending that tomorrow is going to be another night like tonight."

"Maybe it will be."

She laughed. It was a beautiful laugh. It sounded like a glass breaking. "Wallader, look at me. Look at this city. Look at all these people, dancing and drinking and laughing, and not one of them knows. Not one of them knows what's coming. Do you know?"

He did. He knew. The number in the drawer told him.

"No," he said. "I don't know."

It was a lie. It was the kindest lie he had ever told.

***

The Great Depression began on a Tuesday.

Nobody knew it was the end of the world. They knew it as a Monday when the stocks fell. Then a Wednesday when the banks closed. Then a Friday when the streets were full of men in hats standing in lines that stretched around blocks, and the men in hats were not crying or screaming or throwing things. They were just standing. Quietly. With their hats in their hands.

Wallader stood on the balcony of his mansion and watched Manhattan change. The lights went out, one by one, like a city falling asleep. The clubs closed. The restaurants emptied. The jazz stopped.

Cathy came to the balcony. She was wearing a dress that had cost forty dollars and was now worth nothing, because value, like everything else, had become a conversation people stopped having.

"It's flat," she said.

"What is?"

"Everything. It's all flat. One day you have money and a dress and a life, and the next day you have nothing, and the nothing is flat. It has no depth. It's like --" She searched for the word. "Like a picture of a life. Not the life itself."

He took her hand. Her hand was cold. It had always been warm. Now it was cold.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"About what?"

"About everything."

She looked at him. For a moment, the music was still playing somewhere -- a piano in a closed club, a voice singing a song about a star falling -- and in that moment, the city was beautiful. Not the beauty of wealth or power or youth. The beauty of a thing that knows it is ending and sings anyway.

"Don't be sorry," she said. "Just keep playing."

***

The drought came in the spring. It was the strangest drought anybody had ever seen. It didn't crack the earth or kill the crops. It flattened it. The fields of Ohio became plains. The hills of Vermont became drawings of hills. The mountains of Colorado became watercolours of mountains.

Jack Miller, who was working at a gas station in Cleveland, noticed it first. He was under a car, oil on his hands, when Boss Thompson came running in from the porch, looking at the sky.

"What is it?" Jack said, sliding out from under the car.

"Look."

Jack looked. The sky was wrong. Not dark or light. Wrong. Like a photograph that had been developed in the wrong chemicals.

"The land," Boss said. "Look at the land."

Jack looked. The fields were flat. Flat as a table. Not level -- flat. Like someone had taken an iron to the earth and pressed it until all the hills and valleys and ridges and hollows were gone.

"That's not right," Jack said.

"No," Boss said. "It's not."

***

Wallader sat at the piano in the empty club. The chairs were stacked. The bar was locked. The bottles were gone. Only the piano remained, and Cathy, sitting on one of the stacked chairs, watching him play.

He played a song he had written. It was a simple song. Three chords. A melody that went up and then came down, like a star falling and then stopping halfway, hanging in the sky, not quite dead, not quite alive.

Cathy listened. She didn't sing. She just listened. And when he finished, she said: "That was beautiful."

"It was about you."

"It's about all of us."

They sat in silence for a while. The city outside was quiet. The parties had stopped. The music had stopped. The champagne had run dry.

"Wallader," she said.

"Yeah?"

"Was it worth it? The number in the drawer? Keeping them out?"

He thought about it. He thought about the years of lying and hiding and carrying the weight of a number that held the world together. He thought about the men who had died so the number could exist. He thought about the fleet that had stopped, held at bay by a figure on a page.

"I don't know," he said. And that was the truth. He didn't know. He would never know.

The music had stopped. The guests had gone. The stars were still there, indifferent and distant, watching a city that had been beautiful and was now just a city, flat and grey and real.

He played another chord. Then another. Then nothing.

Cathy stood up. She walked to the door. She opened it and stepped out into the night.

Wallader played one more chord. It hung in the air, vibrating, not quite fading, not quite lasting.

And then it was gone.