I finally chased down what Jaime was looking for—about a dozen subdirectories deep in a forgotten news group of the Internet, an old network that was one of the original attempts to link all the world’s databases. I found financial reports which showed NattCo spent over ten million dollars a year on something listed as “I.R. Retrieval.” I found a memo estimating that one in fifty Idea Rats never made its destination. I found maps showing the local offices of NattCo most likely to be the recipients of information passed through Idea Rats.
“Wait till Rodriguez sees this,” I told Jaime.
I saw the sharp flicker in Jaime’s eyes that was his way of laughing. “You’re a genius,” he told me.
I shook my head and looked away from him.
“I mean it,” he said. “I figured you for just some suck-ass the teachers liked because you did whatever they said.”
My ears and cheeks were hot. Jaime reached over and put a hand on my arm. I shrugged it away.
“I’m saying this wrong,” Jaime told me. “This is a compliment. I never would have found this stuff by myself.”
“So what?”
“So we don’t have to write a paper.”
The statement sounded so strange that I looked at him again. I couldn’t read his expression.
“We can just catch an Idea Rat.”
I felt like an idiot for not understanding sooner. “I did this research for our paper,” I told Jaime.
Jaime spoke quietly. “You think school’s going to get you out of here? When’s the last time you heard of anyone from here going to college? We’re not supposed to get out. That’s why we aren’t included in the national databases. It’s why the government cut off welfare and job-training programs. It’s why they abolished the city cops, so we can do any illegal thing we want. They’re pumping us full of Pinch, waiting for us to die.”
He paused, watching my face, his nostrils wide. “Idea Rats are the only way we have left.” It came out as a plea.
I thought of the broken-down school, of classes that got a few students smaller each year. I thought of the reports and the maps and all the little bits of information we had found about Idea Rats.
The decision was already made.
“Uhhhh-ahhhh,” says the pinch-head, maybe asking what I am doing, maybe trying to describe what he is planning to do to me. I grab onto his hand with both of mine, barely lessening the pain of hair being pulled from my scalp.
Jaime rrashes the door into my back. The force knocks me into the pinchhead and sends him sprawling, still clutching my hair. I land on top of him, and his grip finally loosens as the air is forced from his lungs.
“Under the bed!” I yell at Jaime. I sit up. The pinchhead’s breath bubbles raggedly out through his mouth. He’s not moving.
On his hands and knees, Jaime flicks his bag under the bed to force the Idea Rat out. It backs away. Then, realizing it can’t hide, it climbs the woman’s leg. She shows no reaction as it runs up her torso, one claw leaving a long scratch down her chest to a stretched-out, brown nipple. It crawls over her face to the top of her head. She stares vacantly toward the doorway as the Idea Rat hisses at us.
I lunge for it, but Jaime gets there first. He doesn’t try to scoop the Idea Rat off the woman’s head, as I was planning. Instead, he brings the open end of his bag straight down, capturing the Idea Rat along with most of the woman’s upper body. He pulls the drawstring tight.
The Idea Rat does not go gently. The thrashing lump it makes seems to be all over the bag, and its hissing blends with a high-pitched squeal as loud as the brakes on the single, rundown El that still goes through our neighborhood.
“Hit it! Hit it with something!” Jaime yells. He holds the string with both hands. Even the woman is struggling now. Frustrated, Jaime headbutts the bag twice. The woman’s body falls back onto the bed.
Jaime lets go and grabs a large black bible from a table next to the bed. The lump of the Idea Rat is moving toward the opening of the bag. Jaime swings at it, and there is a loud, sharp squeak as he connects. The bag is suddenly still, but Jaime hits it two or three more times anyway. He waits, bible cocked back over his shoulder in case he sees more movement. The bubbling breath of the man is the only sound in the room.
Jaime hands me the bible and carefully slips the bag off the woman. At a point near her shoulder he comes to a lump that must be the Idea Rat. He takes his time to make sure it stays inside the bag. There is a smear of blood on the woman’s neck, but the worst of it comes when Jaime gets the bag past her face. Her nose seems pasted on sideways. Bloody lips are curled back over a jagged-tooth smile. A long scratch opens so much flesh that her eyeball seems ready to slide out. I stare for a long time, but she doesn’t take a breath.
“She was just a pinchhead.” Jaime drops the bag to the floor between us. I see the lump of the Idea Rat inside, unmoving. Jaime waits for me to open the bag, but I’m afraid I’ll find this has been just another chase that has led to nothing. I kick it toward him.
He holds the bottom of the bag, letting the Idea Rat slide out onto the floor. Its head flops loosely. Its front paws stretch out in a final prayer. Its black eyes don’t look much different than when it was alive.
Jaime picks it up by the tail and holds it out to me. I uncurl its left hind foot, feeling the unnaturally rough skin of its sixth toe.
The birthmark is right where our research said it should be.
The logo is NattCo’s.
I didn’t miss home. Jaime always found better places to live than the room I had shared with brothers and half-brothers and cousins at my grandparent’s apartment. What I missed about my old life was school. I wondered how Mr. Rodriguez had taken our leaving. Sometimes I wondered if he would let me come back.
One of the first places we lived was an attic storage cubicle of a five-story apartment building. Nobody living in that place was dumb enough to store things outside of their own apartment, so we were never bothered by the tenants. Jaime had cracked the combination of an old padlock he found, and we used that to feel safe behind a thin, plywood door.
It was late fall by then, but enough heat seeped up from below that we never really got cold at night. A light was too dangerous, so after dark we’d sit looking at the streets below through the slits of a small vent in the side of the building. The street world at night was a lot different than during the day. When the Sun was up, kids like us ruled. Jaime and I could walk around without being bothered because other kids didn’t know how strong a gang we might belong to. The only adults out during the day had legitimate jobs to go to, so they left us alone.
At night the kids were inside, and adults ruled. As the Sun went down each night, desperate-looking men and women slithered into our line of vision from doorways, sewer drains, or thin air, carrying lanterns and flashlights and bottles and baggies. A constantly shifting party moved like something almost alive below us. People would come together in groups, passing bottles or pills, then drift apart slowly. Fights erupted without warning, generally attracting large crowds, though there were always a few who fled the possibility of stray anger splashing over onto them.
Only occasionally would voices drift up to us—a raucous laugh, a scream: nothing identifiable as human language. Often we heard a shatter of glass; gunshots coughed a couple of times a night. We were far enough above these sounds that they never seemed quite real.
What struck me most each evening was the tremendous energy of all those people. That energy had no sense of direction. I tried to imagine what they wanted, what they got out of the nightly dance they performed while Jaime and I watched. They seemed little more than sub atomic particles bouncing off of each other in completely random, totally unpredictable ways.