Balzac's War: A Tale of Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer Page B

keys, and if I can turn enough of the keys, the city resurrects itself. Take that thing there.” He pointed to a rectangular patch of sand dotted with eroded stone basins and bounded by the nubs of walls. “That’s not just a box of sand. That used to be a garden or a park. And take that strip.” He pointed to a slab of concrete running down the middle of the highway. “That wasn’t just a divider for traffic lanes – that was a plot of plants and grass.”
    “You mean that you see the city as if it were organic.”
    “Yes! Exactly! And if I can rebuild the city, you could bring back the plants and the trees, flesh out the skeleton. There’s a water source here – there must be – how else could the land support a city? In the old books, if you look, you’ll see they used plants for decoration.”
    “Plants for decoration,” she said slowly. Then she lay back down against the rock.
    His heart pounded against his rib cage. He had made her see it, if only for a moment.
    A silence settled over them, the sun making Balzac lazy, the leechee fruit a coolness in his stomach.
    After a time, Jamie said, “No rain for at least a month.”
    “How do you know?”
    “The water dower’s last lesson – don’t you remember, stupid?” She punched his shoulder. “Look at the clouds. They’re all thin and stretched out, and no two are grouped together.”
    Balzac shielded his eyes against the sun and examined the clouds. At the edge of his vision, he thought he saw a series of black slashes.
    “What are those?”
    Jamie sat up. “I see them. They look like zynagill.”
    The scavenger birds circled an area east of the highway. Balzac shivered and stood quickly.
    “Maybe we should go back now. Maybe if we find Jeffer before he finds us he won’t be as angry.”
    But a sudden intensity and narrowness had crept over Jamie’s features – a stubborn look Balzac had seen many times before. It was the look she wore in class when she disagreed with her teacher. It was the look she wore with her friends when they wanted to do something she didn’t want to do.
    “No,” she said. “No. We should go see what they’ve found.” She shimmied down the side of the rock, folded her arms, and stared up at him. “Well?”
    Balzac stood atop the rock for several seconds, his pulse rapid, the weal of sky and sun burning above while all around lay the highway, littered with bones. Only when he looked into Jamie’s eyes and realized she doubted him did he move; even then he hesitated, until she said, “If you don’t go, I’m going alone.”
    She held out her hand. Her palm was calloused from hard work. He grasped it awkwardly, leaning against her compact weight as he jumped down off the rock. As they came together, her lips brushed his cheek; where she had kissed him the skin tingled and flushed bright red. He could smell her hair, was caught between its coolness and the heat of her lips.
    But she was already moving away from him and before he could react, she shouted, “Catch me if you can!” and sprinted down the highway, smiling as she looked back over her shoulder.
    He stood there for a moment, drunk with the smell and feel of her. When he did begin to run, she had a lead of more than a city block. Even worse, she didn’t so much thread her way through the fields of broken stone as charge through them, leaping curved girders as blithely as if playing coddleskatch back at the crèche. To see her run for the joy of it, careless of danger, made him reckless too, and as much as his nature would allow he copied her movements, forgetting the zynagill and their destination; watching only her.
    Balzac had gained so much ground that he bumped into her when she finally stopped running.
    A mountain of sand rose above them. Vaguely pyramid-shaped, it buttressed the sides of a massive amphitheater. Balzac could just see, at the top of the sand pile, winged phalanges curling out from the circular lip. Above, the zynagill wheeled, eyeing