Veniss Underground Read Free Page B

against the feel of their paws, their hands—clammy and soft, cruel and hot—as they held me down. As the needles entered my arms, my legs, and filled me with the little death of sleep, I remember seeing the orangutans weeping on their bonsai branches and wondering why they wept for me.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    LET ME tell you about the city, sir. Like an adder's kiss, sharp and deadly. It's important. Very important. Let me tell you about Quin and his meerkats. I work for Quin now, and that's bad business. I've done terrible. I've done terrible things—the deadest and deadliest of the Dead Arts, the cold pricklies of the soul. I've killed the Living Art. I've killed the living. And I know. I know it. Only. Only the flesh comes off me and the flesh goes on like a new suit. Only the needle goes in and the needle comes out and I don't care, though I try with all my strength to think of Shadrach and Nicola.
    But the needle goes in and . . .
    Let me tell you about the city
. . .

II
    NICOLA
    â€œThey say this here place is haunted. Yeah, but only by a ghost.”
    â€”Giant Sand

CHAPTER 1
    You. Were. Always. Two. As one: Nicola and Nicholas, merging into the collective memory together, so that in the beginning of a sentence spoken by your brother you knew the shadow of its end and mouthed the words before he said them. In each moment you spent with him, you lived again that mist-shrouded beginning when the doctor rescued you from the artificial mother's womb—to bawl and cough and look incredulous on the sheer imperfection of the outer world. The world of plastic, the world of sky, the world of detritus and decay.
    A subtle yet pulsing music played in the birthing room. The walls, in your memory, at least, had been stained red, within which you and your brother were splendid, symmetrical parallels of flesh.
    â€œAnd you,” your foster mother always said, as long as you allowed yourself to live with her. “
And you
,” your foster mother always said, as if to claim the miracle of the moment for herself, “the first sight of the world, for you, for Nick, besides the air itself, the ceiling, the bed, the chair, was the
other
, the
twin
, the sweet, sweet mirror of the flesh.”
    You'd been taken from a vat womb like all the other vatlings, but Nick was your brother, grown from the same egg, and in his eyes you saw yourself staring back.
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    THE NIGHT you noticed the change came one week after Nick failed to show up for an infrequent lunch date in the Canal District. You were tired, exhausted by a ten-hour day of programming, and you stood at the window of your apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of the Barstow, staring down at the city spread out below you: multicolored, flowing lanes of hover traffic defining the shape and height of buildings as the light fled the sky in streaks of orange and green. Here, the great, greedy glitter of the industrial sectors, there the glamorous but petit languor of the Canal District. Beyond the lights, the dark swath of the city walls, almost two hundred feet high and a mile deep, followed by the patchy bleed of the wastelands, and farther still, if you squinted hard, if you really wanted to, you thought you could discern the faded, distant twinkle of Balthakazar, sister city.
    Once, we were close and close-knit, but now we are unmoored islands, each alone, each a separate planet, drifting farther and farther away, content to turn ever inward
. . . This is no idle solipsism; it has taken on the fragile brightness of truth. Cities turned from cities, self-devouring. Governments fragmenting into fragments of fragments. Entertainment become a solitary diversion. Solo adventures.
    As you watched the night invade the city, snuffing out the glint and glitter of sun off steel and glass, you sensed Nick in the shadows between spaces, knew that he was somewhere
down there
, in the chaos that from the seventy-fifth