Free Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

of a customer as casually as a pound of rice . . . puppies hanging from telephone poles . . . gerbils burned alive in skillets . . . mice poured into burning wax for a Living Art exhibit . . . scenes from the wastes outside the city walls, where the animals gasp and cough and live out their lives against a backdrop of chemicals and toxic gases . . . meerkats pierced through the skull with a control bar and guided by their human tormentors to tear each other apart . . .
    You cannot watch for long. You must not. It is too terrible . . . When you can bear to look again, you see that now it is not animals but human beings—tortured, mutilated, burned, cut up, gassed . . . and, strangely, the seated meerkats and Ganeshas react most visibly to these displays, such physical revulsion that some look away as you look away, in shock and disgust. They hide their children's eyes as any responsible parent would . . .
    A chill runs through you. What could they think of a species that had brought the world to such an impasse? As you watch them, as you watch their interactions, their conversations, you are overcome by a panic that has nothing to do with fear of discovery. You manage to control it—even though it bubbles up beneath the skin, steals your breath, slicks your palms. You creep backward through the underbrush, until the light is once again just a glimmer through dark green and the white pebble path once more ribbons out behind you.
    Then fear seizes you for real, cups your throat, lets your legs hang free—and you run, biting your tongue not to scream, sometimes on the path, sometimes off it, unaware when you almost turn an ankle or when a branch strikes your face. You have forgotten Salvador, Shadrach, Nicholas, and Quin. Soon you see the platform glinting and you run faster, jump up onto it, and plunge back through the hologram into the dead-end alley. Back amongst the stench, the stink, the pollution of the city. Your lungs burn. Your legs ache.
    You pause to catch your breath. Now you realize that even in your panic, a part of your brain has been talking to you. It has been saying, in a shock as profound as that of the flayed dog,
You are not superior. You are not superior
. Because what Quin's Shanghai Circus means is this: your extinction.
    The people that you pass on your way home, these governed and governing—do they realize yet that their place has been usurped?
Driven out
. How long before they guess?

CHAPTER 7
    Later, in your apartment
. You love the lights at night, the silence of street corners, the pixilation of dewdrops on the window glass. You love the feel of warm sheets against your skin in the cold. You love the way your fingers seem to know the next step faster than your brain when you are immersed in programming. You love the sensation of sex, even with a holograph. You love, you love, you love . . . and yet such a ghost are you, haunting your apartment, waiting for the return of Salvador. You have a gun in your hand. You sit on the living room couch. A coffee mug rests on the table nearby.
    The coffee mug, the couch—these are very normal, ordinary things, and yet you are waiting in a dream that is not your apartment. You are dreaming in a world that is not your world, and you feel as if you have seen it all before—this strangeness, this sense of oblivion.
    The utter clarity of your surroundings despite the revelations of the night convinces you that you are in a shadowland. The absence of light.
He came out of the darkness, a revelation
. . . You have turned the lights off. What choice do you have? You prefer the reality of the vast forest, the delicate bridge, the white pebble path. You prefer the moonlight. You prefer all that will be denied you.
The animals are waiting in the Tolstoi District, under leaves and branches and bricks . . .
    A sliding of an ID card in the door lock. A familiar scent.
Two as one—Nicholas's presence a shadow, an absence—defined by the space