Veniss Underground Read Online Free PDF Page A

you—and it seems important, to maintain, to renovate, to hold back the encroachment of barbarism for one more day, one more week, one more month, one more year.
    Back to work, your boss on your shoulder, supervising your department by remote, sending his miniature holoself to peer at hard screen and soft like some tiny devil with a pitchfork. You never know when he might pop up—or even if there would be a penalty for being found slacking off—but still, halfway through the day, you decide to hunt for Nick through the computer systems, through the code.
    You check his identification number and find he has paid no rent for two months. He is behind on all of his bills. He has several loans out from disreputable pawnshops and so-called financial services. You check his credit. He's all maxed out, the last purchases made at least five months ago. Then you try one last, time-consuming idea—you access his bank (illegally) and check for bank cards. You find one, issued not three weeks ago . . . and finally find a current purchase which makes your heart leap . . . until you read more closely and see that the purchase—of a prawns-and-avocado pita from an independent vendor—was made on the tenth level below ground. You hardly knew there was a tenth level below ground, and you worry in earnest. Nick could have been robbed and killed, his credit now used by his attackers. Or perhaps he is hiding—made one too many shady deals, or gave the district police trouble. You decided not to give him money the last time he asked you for it. He was already into you for so much . . . but the deepest fear is of the underground, not for Nick. Just thinking of so much lawlessness makes you weak . . . and where would Nick have gone after coming to you?
    The answer comes to you immediately: Shadrach. You remember when Shadrach told you he was going to work for Quin. Shadrach had been in the city for a year, and you had lived with him for six months in your apartment. He'd been supporting himself by running supplies via autotrain to Balthakazar and other cities. This meant plowing through miles and miles of chemical wastes and rogue bioneer entrapments, and sometimes he didn't come back uninjured. Through the burnished glass, listening to Mozart, he would watch the automatic bombs go off, would watch the funny people and mutties as they tore at the train—this sudden confluence of color and violence and music—and he would wonder if he was not in fact trapped in a dream. Those were the days, he would tell you, when he realized beauty and horror could be synonymous, when he wept upon his return, the thought that he might not have survived to see you too much for him. You would take him in your arms and he would tell you his fears—that he might not ever be truly assimilated into the city, that the very language might fragment into shards of nothing.
    He understood and he didn't understand anything above ground. He wanted to be something other than he was. He wanted to be free. On the face of it, you should have been glad he was changing employment, but he couldn't even tell you what he would be doing for Quin.
    You sat with him in a tiny cafe called the Toussaint that looked in on the vast aquarium of blue-green water where you could catch your own meal: redgills, sailbellies, trenchfish. On the other side was the restaurant that owned the aquarium, and through the glass you could see, as if drowned amongst the kelp, the pale, wavery faces of its clientele.
    Shadrach didn't care much for the aquarium—he always set his chair facing outward, to the familiar open expanse of the meltdown canals.
    He talked to you about Quin—or, rather, talked
around
Quin—his dark eyebrows lively, his hand gestures many and quick, his body contorted so he could turn his head to glance at you, then look back at the canals. He was so beautiful, his face caught by the sun, his eyes so alive with excitement. He was going to