SNOW CRASH

__________ At half an hour on the dot, she hears the back door being unlocked The lights come on. Her Knight Visions save her from wracking eyeball pains. The manager thunks down a couple of steps, glares at her, glares at her for rather a long time. The manager, clearly, is tempted. That momentary glimpse of flesh has been ricocheting around in his brain for half an hour. He is wracking his mind with vast cosmological dilemmas. Y.T, hopes that he does not try anything, because the dentata’s effects can be unpredictable.

“Make up your fucking mind,” she says.

It works. This fresh burst of culture shock rattles the jeek out of his ethical conundrum. He gives Y.T. a disapproving glower-she, after all, forced him to be attracted to her, forced him to get horny, made his head swim-she didn’t have to get arrested, did she?-and so on top of everything else he’s angry with her. As if he has a right to be.

This is the gender that invented the polio vaccine?

He turns, goes back up the steps, kills the light, locks the door.

She notes the time, sets her alarm watch for five minutes from now-the only North American who actually knows how to set the alarm on her digital wristwatch-pulls her shiv kit from one of the narrow pockets on her sleeve. She also hauls out a lightstick and snaps it so she can see ‘sup. She finds one piece of narrow, flat spring steel, slides it up into the manacle’s innards, depresses the spring-loaded pawl. The cuff, formerly a one-way ratchet that could only get tighter, springs loose from the cold-water pipe.

She could take it off her wrist, but she has decided she likes the look of it. She cuffs the loose manacle onto her wrist, right next to the other one, forming a double bracelet. The kind of thing her mom used to do, back when she was a punk.

The steel door is locked, but Buy ‘n’ Fly safety regs mandate an emergency exit from the basement in case of fire. Here, it’s a basement window with mondo bars and a big red multilingual lire alarm bolted onto it. The red looks black in the green glow of the ligbtstick. She reads the instructions that are in English, runs through it once or twice in her mind, then waits for the alarm to go off. She whiles away the time by reading the instructions in all