what they say, that the Rat Thing gives you an electrical shock when it wants you to let go of something.
'Look out,' she hears herself saying, 'they got guns.'
Hiro turns and grins at her. His teeth are very white and straight; he has a sharp grin, a carnivore's grin. 'No, they don't. Guns are illegal in Hong Kong, remember?'
'They had guns just a second ago,' Y.T. says, bulging her eyes and shaking her head.
'The Rat Thing has them now,' Hiro says.
The jeeks all decide they better leave. They run out and get into their taxis and take off, tires asqueal.
Y.T. backs the taxi on its rims out over the STD and into the street, where she grindingly parallel parks it. She goes back into the Hong Kong franchise, a nebula of aromatic freshness trailing behind her like the tail of a comet. She is thinking, oddly enough, about what it would be like to climb into the back of the car with Hiro Protagonist for a while. Pretty nice, probably. But she'd have to take out the dentata, and this isn't the place. Besides, anyone decent enough to come help her escape from The Clink probably has some kind of scruples about boffing fifteen-year-old girls.
'That was nice of you,' he says, nodding at the parked taxi. 'Are you going to pay for his tires, too?'
'No. Are you?'
'I'm having some cash flow problems.'
She stands there in the middle of the Hong Kong lawngrid. They look each other up and down, carefully.
'I called my boyfriend. But he flaked out on me,' she says.
'Another thrasher?'
'The same.'
'You made the same mistake I made once,' he says.
'What's that?'
'Mixing business with pleasure. Going out with a colleague. It gets very confusing.'
'Yeah. I see what you mean.' She's not exactly sure what a colleague is.
'I was thinking that we should be partners,' she says.
She's expecting him to laugh at her. But instead he grins and nods his head slightly. 'The same thing occurred to me. But I'd have to think about how it would work.'
She is astounded that he would actually be thinking this. Then she gets the sap factor under control and realizes: He's waffling. Which means he's probably lying. This is probably going to end with him trying to get her into bed.
'I gotta go,' she says. 'Gotta get home.'
Now we'll see how fast he loses interest in the partnership concept. She turns her back on him.
Suddenly, they are impaled on Hong Kong robot spotlights one more time.
Y.T. feels a sharp bruising pain in her ribs, as though someone punched her. But it wasn't Hiro. He is an unpredictable freak who carries swords, but she can smell chick-punchers a mile off.
'Ow!' she says, twisting away from the impact. She looks down to see a small heavy object bouncing on the ground at their feet. Out in the street, an ancient taxi squeals its tires, getting the hell out of there. A jeek is hanging out the rear window, shaking his fist at them. He must have thrown a rock at her.
Except it's not a rock. The heavy thing at her feet, the thing that just bounced off of Y.T.'s ribcage, is a hand grenade. She stares for a second, recognizing it, a well-known cartoon icon made real.
Then her feet get knocked out from under her, too fast really to hurt. And just when she's getting reoriented to that, there is a painfully loud bang from another part of the parking lot.
And then everything finally stops long enough to be seen and understood.
The Rat Thing has stopped. Which they never do. It's part of their mystery that you never get to see them, they move so fast. No one knows what they look like.
No one except for Y.T. and Hiro, now.
It's bigger than she imagined. The body is Rottweiler-sized, segmented into overlapping hard plates like those of a rhinoceros. The legs are long, curled way up to deliver power, like a cheetah's. It must be the tail that makes people refer to it as a Rat Thing, because that's the only ratlike part-incredibly long and flexible. But it looks like a rat's tail with the flesh eaten away by acid, because it just consists of segments, hundreds of them neatly plugged together, like vertebrae.
'Jesus H. Christ!' Hiro says. And she knows, from that, that he's never seen one either.
Right now, the tail is coiled and piled around on top of the Rat Thing's body like a rope that has fallen out of a tree. Parts of it are trying to move, other parts of it look dead and inert. The legs are moving one by one, spasmodically, not acting in concert. The whole thing just looks terribly wrong, like footage of an airplane that has had its tail blown off, trying to maneuver for a landing. Even someone who is not an engineer can see that it has gone all perverse and twisted.
The tail writhes and lashes like a snake, uncoils itself, rises up off the Rat Thing's body, gets out of the way of its legs. But still the legs have problems; it can't get itself up
'Y.T.,' Hiro is saying, 'don't.'
She does. One footstep at a time, she approaches the Rat Thing.
'It's dangerous, in case you hadn't noticed,' Hiro says, following her a few paces behind. 'They say it has biological components.'
'Biological components?'
'Animal parts. So it might be unpredictable.'
She likes animals. She keeps walking.
She's seeing it better now. It's not all armor and muscle. A lot of it actually looks kind of flimsy. It has short stubby winglike things projecting from its body: A big one from each shoulder and a row of smaller ones down the length of its spine, like on a stegosaurus. Her Knight Visions tell her that these things are hot enough to bake pizzas on. As she approaches, they seem to unfold and grow.
They are blooming like flowers in an educational film, spreading and unfolding to reveal a fine complicated internal structure that has been all collapsed together inside. Each stubby wing splits off into little miniature copies of itself, and each of those in turn splits off into more smaller copies and so on forever. The smallest ones are just tiny bits of foil, so small that, from a distance, the edges look fuzzy.
It is continuing to get hotter. The little wings are almost red hot now. Y.T. slides her goggles up onto her forehead and cups her hands around her face to block out the surrounding lights, and sure enough she can see them beginning to make a dull brownish glow, like an electric stove element that has just been turned on. The grass underneath the Rat Thing is beginning to smoke.
'Careful. Supposedly they have really nasty isotopes inside,' Hiro says behind her. He has come up a little closer now, but he's still hanging way back.
'What's an isotope?'
'A radioactive substance that makes heat. That's its energy source.'
'How do you turn it off?'
'You don't. It keeps making heat until it melts.'
Y.T. is only a few feet away from the Rat Thing now, and she can feel the heat on her checks. The wings have unfolded as far as they can go. At their roots they are a bright yellow-orange, fading out through red and brown to their delicate edges, which are still dark. The acrid smoke of the burning grass obscures some of the details.
She thinks: The edges of the wings look like something I've seen before. They look like the thin metal vanes that run up the outside of a window air conditioner, the ones that you can write your name in by mashing them down with your finger.
Or like the radiator on a car. The fan blows air over the radiator to cool off the engine.
'It's got radiators,' she says. 'The Rat Thing has got radiators to cool off.' She's gathering intel right at this very moment.
But it's not cooling off. It's just getting hotter.
Y.T. surfs through traffic jams for a living. That's her economic niche: beating the traffic. And she knows that a car doesn't boil over when it is speeding down an open freeway. It boils over when it is stopped in traffic. Because when it sits still, not enough air is being blown over the radiator.
