SNOW CRASH

amount of fear. One of them has had his trousers torn from the waistband all the way down to the ankle, and a strip of fabric is trailing out across the lot, as though he had his pocket picked by something that was in too much of a hurry to let go of the actual pocket before it left. Maybe this guy had a knife in his pocket.

There is no blood anywhere. The Rat Thing is precise. Still they hold their hands and holler. Maybe it’s true 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,” YT. 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.