Read Online Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer - Free Book Online

your brother's absence. You ignore Salvador for the rest of the night. In the morning, you refuse his offer of breakfast. You work frantically to meet deadlines, push Nicholas to the back of your mind. You call Shadrach twice during the day, but his personal holoscreen remains off. You keep seeing his face as the meerkat fell into step beside him.
    At lunch, you use the time to try to find out more about Quin, but nothing exists on Quin. Quin's presence surrounds the city, engulfs it, and yet there is nothing inside the city about him. It is almost as if his creations define him so utterly that no one has bothered to set down, for the record, who he is, preferring to rely on rumor, on innuendo, on falsehoods. He's as insidious as the chemical-loaded air come off the sea—invisible and yet everywhere. How do you fight someone like that? How do you get inside his guard?
    You wonder and worry until the evening, when you return home to another delicious dinner. Salvador, with his annoying subservience. You are a fairy-tale princess in a fairy-tale tower served by a beast that is, under the fur, a man.
    That night, you cannot sleep. You fall into a half doze, only to be brought out of it by the echo of your brother's voice, trying to tell you something. At three, you give up on sleep and sit at the edge of the bed, sweat beading your forehead despite temperature control. You hate Salvador in that moment. You hate Shadrach, too, for his unwillingness to tell you the truth. Shadrach said, “
I've made a mistake
. . .” Is it a mistake to let Salvador into the apartment?
    The click of the front door opening brings you fully awake. Your first thought is that you really did hear your brother's voice and he has snuck in past the security systems. But more than likely a genuine intruder has entered the apartment.
    Stealthily, you rise, wrap your nightgown around you, and take the laser gun from your purse. You tiptoe to the bedroom door and open it a crack. A half-moon shines into the apartment and gives you enough light to see a dark shape walking across the living room carpet.
    You step out from the bedroom, hit the light switch, say, “Don't move or you're dead,” and aim your weapon at . . . Salvador.
    You keep the gun aimed at the meerkat, whose eyes blink against the sudden light.
    â€œPlease don't be frightened, Nicola,” Salvador says. He extends a hand. “See? I waited early for fresh fiddlers. You liked them so much.”
    The fiddlers' claws close impotently on the meerkat's slick fur.
    â€œThree in the morning?” you say. “Three in the morning, and you're out getting fiddlers for next night's dinner?”
    Salvador stares at the ground and when he looks up again his fangs show and his eyes flash with some inscrutable emotion.
    â€œNicola,” he says softly, “if you think there has been a malfunction in me, then you must tell Quin. If you think I am lying, then you must do that. I may well have broken down in some way. I am not capable of monitoring my own state of mind.”
    You sigh and let the gun drop to your side. “Go to sleep, Salvador. Just . . . go to sleep.”
    â€œThank you,” Salvador says, and slips past you to the kitchen.

CHAPTER 6
    You were always two as one: Nicola and Nicholas merging into the collective memory together
. You have been living someone else's life. You have been living someone else's life. There is a shadow existence here, a separate world—you see it in mirrors where your image does not match your living form, your movements not quite synchronized with this
other,
this
creature
, who is not you.
The shadow of the waxwing slain
. The moon crosses your heart. Out in the Tolstoi District the animals gather amidst the wrack and ruin, no longer shy.
    You see it in the glass, where your half reflection slides off to reveal, at the corner of your eye, another life, another even more ghostly Nicola living out another life. That is