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 cheeks. 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.
That’s what’s happening to the Rat Thing right now. It has to keep moving, keep forcing air over its radiators, or else it overheats and melts down.
“Cool,” she says. “I wonder if it’s going to blow up or what.”
The body converges to a sharp nose. In the front it bends down sharply, and there is a black glass canopy, raked sharply like the windshield of a fighter plane. If the Rat Thing has eyes, this is where it looks out.
Under that, where the jaw should be are the remains of some kind of mechanical stuff that has been mostly blown off by the explosion of the grenade.
The black glass windshield—or facemask, or whatever you call it—has a hole blown through it. Big enough that Y.T. could put her hand through. On the other side of that hole, it’s dark and she can’t see much, especially so close to the bright orange glare coming from the radiators. But she can see that red stuff is coming out from inside. And it ain’t no Dexron II. The Rat Thing is hurt and it’s bleeding.
“This thing is real,” she says. “It’s got blood in its veins.” She’s thinking: This is intel. This is intel. I can make money off this with my pardner—my pod—Hiro.
Then she thinks: The poor thing is burning itself alive.
“Don’t do it. Don’t touch it, Y.T.,” Hiro says.
She steps right up to it, flips her goggles down to protect her face from the heat. The Rat Thing’s legs stop their spasmodic movements, as though waiting for her.
She bends down and grabs its front legs. They react, tightening their pushrod muscles against the pull of her hands. It’s exactly like grabbing a dog by the front legs and asking it to dance. This thing is alive. It reacts to her. She knows.
She looks up at Hiro, just to make sure he’s taking this all in. He is.
“Jerk!” she says. “I stick my neck out and say I want to be your partner, and you say you want to think about it? What’s your problem, I’m not good enough to work with you?”
She leans back and begins dragging the Rat Thing backward across the lawngrid. It’s incredibly light. No wonder it can run so fast. She could pick it up, if she felt like burning herself alive.
As she drags it backward toward the doggie door, it brands a blackened, smoking trail into the lawngrid. She can see steam rising up out of her coverall, old sweat and stuff boiling out of the fabric. She’s small enough to fit through the doggie door—another thing she can do and Hiro can’t. Usually these things are locked, she’s tried to mess with them. But this one is opened.
Inside, the franchise is bright, white, robot-polished floors. A few feet from the doggie door is what looks like a black washing machine. This is the Rat Thing’s hutch, where it lurks in darkness and privacy, waiting for a job to do. It is wired into the franchise by a thick cable coming out of the wall. Right now, the hutch’s door is hanging open, which is another thing she’s never seen before. And steam is rolling out from inside of it.
Not steam. Cold stuff. Like when you open your freezer door on a humid day.
She pushes the Rat Thing into its hutch. Some kind of cold liquid sprays out of all the walls and bursts into steam before it even reaches the Rat Thing’s body, and the steam comes blasting out the front of the hutch so powerfully that it knocks her on her ass.
The long tail is strung out the front of the hutch, across the floor, and out through the doggie door. She picks up part of it, the sharp machine-tooled edges of its vertebrae pinching her gloves.
Suddenly it tenses, comes alive, vibrates for a second. She jerks her hands back. The tail shoots back inside the hutch like a rubber band snapping. She can’t even see it move. Then the hutch door slams shut. A janitor robot, a Hoover with a brain, hums out of another doorway to clean the long streaks of blood off the floor.
Above her, hanging on the foyer wall facing the main entrance, is a framed poster with a garland of well-browned jasmine blossoms hung around it. It consists of a photo of the wildly grinning Mr. Lee, with the usual statement underneath: