NEAL STEPHENSON
49
“I work for RadiKS. We protect our own.”
“Not tonight you don’t. Tonight you took a pizza from the scene of a car wreck. Left the scene of an accident. RadiKS tell you to deliverS that pizza?”
Y.T. does not return fire. The MetaCop is right; RadiKS did not tell her to deliver that pizza. She was doing it on a whim.
“So RadiKS ain’t gonna help you. So shut up.”
He jerks her arm, and the rest of her follows. The three-ringer gives her a quick look, just long enough to make sure she is really a person, not a sack of flour or an engine block or a tree stump. He leads them around to the fetid rump of the Buy ‘n’ Fly, dark realm of wretched refuse in teeming dumpsters. He unlocks the back door, a boring steel number with jimmy marks around the edges like steel-clawed beasts have been trying to get in.
Y.T. is taken downstairs into the basement. First MetaCop follows, carrying her plank, banging it heedlessly against doorways and stained polycarbonate bottle racks.
“Better take her uniform-all that gear,” the second MetaCop suggests, not unlewdly.
The manager looks at Y.T., trying not to let his gaze travel sinfully up and down her body. For thousands of years his people have survived on alertness: waiting for Mongols to come galloping over the horizon, waiting for repeat offenders to swing sawed-off shotguns across their check-out counters. His alertness right now is palpable and painful; he’s like a goblet of hot nitroglycerin. The added question of sexual misconduct makes it even worse. To him it’s no joke.
Y.T. shrugs, trying to think of something unnerving rqd wacky. At this point, she is supposed to squeal and shrink, wriggle and whine, swoon and beg. They are threatening to take her clothes. How awful. But she does not get upset because she knows that they are expecting her to.
A Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can’t handle it when you leave that little box.
Y.T. is not fond of boxes. Y.T. establishes her space on the pavement by zagging mightily from lane to lane, establishing a precedent of scary randomness. Keeps people on their toes,