“Why do they act like that, you suppose?” I asked Jaime once.
“You serious?” The small amount of light that seeped through the vent wasn’t enough to allow me a good look at Jaime’s expression, and I hadn’t figured out how to read his tone of voice yet back then. Still, I knew him well enough to be on the defensive.
“What do they get out of it, I mean?”
Jaime snorted. “They get nothing. Even an idiot smart guy like you should be able to figure that one out.”
I tried not saying anything for a few seconds, but I couldn’t let him have the last word like that. “That’s what I mean. If they get nothing, why do they act like that?”
“Because that’s how they’re told to act,” said Jaime, as if speaking to the dumbest kid he’d ever met.
I watched a man talking to a woman on the other side of the street. He said something, and the woman raked her nails across his face, then kneed him in the balls. He went down hard, and a couple of people walking by kicked at him as he lay on the ground. The woman walked about ten feet away and started talking to another man. “Nobody tells them to act that way,” I said.
“When everybody’s telling you something, nobody has to tell you anything,” Jaime said, as if that made any sense at all.
With the Idea Rat in his durafab bag, Jaime leads us past crumbling tenements, boarded-over store fronts, graffitied brick and concrete walls. We pass wide-eyed derelicts who would kill us simply for the meat we carry, never knowing or caring it was worth a lot more than a meal. Jaime has a knack for finding the least-crowded streets, the safest alleys. I follow him, so confident in his ability that I don’t even pay attention to our route.
Soon, the people we pass look less desperate. The streets we walk along start to fill with traffic—plastic electric cars, bright and sleek compared to the rusting hulks that litter the curbs in our part of the city. A tunnel leads us beneath a maglev track, its trains rushing silently overhead. The buildings are taller, cleaner. They contain entire walls of unbroken glass.
We stop in front of the NattCo Building, squinting into the sun glinting off its mirrored windows. A huge revolving door gobbles in and spits out people who all look self-consciously busy, people with someplace to be. I don’t want to move any closer, can’t imagine myself as one of these purposeful people. I take a step or two back, ready to turn and run, feeling more like a little kid than I’ve ever felt in my life.
Jaime s hand on my elbow stops me. I follow weakly as he leads us toward the building, toward those huge spinning doors that will deposit us inside.
“What will it be like, do you think? If we catch one?” I asked Jaime a few months after we left school. I was gnawing the last bit of meat from the thigh of what we were eating. I was trying to make it last, delaying with great anticipation the moment when I would snap the bone and suck delicious marrow for dessert.
“We’ll be rich,” said Jaime.
“How rich?”
He paused a long time, and I thought he was probably thinking up imaginary scenarios on how we’d spend all the money some company would give us for the Idea Rat we were still sure we’d grab any day. Instead, when he answered, it was short. “Too rich to even think about this place anymore.”
I laughed. “Like we could forget all this.”
“Be surprised what you can forget when you’ve got enough money.”
“You’d know.”
He threw his bone at me and some sharp edge scraped my cheek. He got up and walked to the other side of the room.
“It was a joke,” I said, brushing my fingers over my face. I licked off the smear of blood they came away with.
“Yeah,” he said. “Funny.”
I finished eating in a shadow of silence. The marrow didn’t taste as good as I thought it would.
“I’d go back to school,” I said finally, deciding the silence was worse than whatever ridicule Jaime might throw at me.
“Crazy,” he said, his heart not really in it.
“I mean a good school,” I added quickly. “Or I’d give a bunch of money to make ICSS good, then go back there.”
He shook his head. “Waste it on a bunch of junior pinchheads. Let some scarface boss you around.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’d do, then?”
“I told you,” he said. “I’d do whatever I wanted to.”
Inside the NattCo building, Jaime pulls me toward a large, curved counter with a dozen receptionists, each sitting behind a computer monitor. Most of them are talking to people, but Jaime walks up to one who isn’t busy and puts the bag with the Idea Rat on the counter.
“We’ve got business with I.R. Retrieval,” he says.
The receptionist frowns. She asks our names and punches them on the keyboard in front of her. She looks at her screen, then back at us. Smiling now, she indicates a yellow line of tiles set into the floor. We follow them down several hallways to a small lobby with a single desk. A man behind the desk talks into a microphone on a rod curving from his ear to his mouth.
Jaime holds the bag conspicuously. “We’ve got business.”
“Check in, please.” The man pushes a button, and a small square in the wall next to us opens. The lighted indent of a handprint is inside the square. Jaime looks at the man, then puts his hand over the print. The light fades, and Jaime quicldy pulls away. He frowns, looking at his fingertips. He opens and closes his hand a couple of times, then shrugs at me.
I put my hand in the print. As the light goes down, I feel a sensation like cool, sharp steel scraping just below my fingernails. I pull my hand out and take a look. A thin, pink line near the first knuckle of each finger is already starting to fade. The fingers tingle, slightly numb until I wiggle them.
“Have a seat.” The man motions toward a small reception area. Jaime and I sit in huge, cushioned chairs that barely sink under our weight. I listen to the buzz of activity moving through the building until the receptionist looks over at us. “That hallway,” he says, pointing to an opening behind his desk. “First door on the right.”
The door is open, and we enter a room with a large, red table. At the far end of the table, a man with skin even darker than mine is smiling at us.
“Come in, men. Sit down.” His voice is as smooth and featureless as a wet street. “My name is Calvin Natt.”
“They don’t exist,” I said to Jaime one night about six months after we left school. We were lying in the dark again, this time in a basement room Jaime had found for us when the attic got too cold. The place always felt too closed-in for me, too dark. I went to sleep there feeling like I was in a coffin, wondering if I would wake up in the morning. Most nights I baited Jaime into conversation to buy an extra few minutes of wakefulness.
“Stop talking crap,” he said.
“It’s a pinchhead’s daydream,” I told him. “Who’s ever caught one?”
In the small room, Jaime’s voice was like a whisper in my ear. “I was six when my mother left me,” he said. Then he was quiet. I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what to say. He had never mentioned his mother to me.
“When she put me to bed at night,” he continued after a while, “she used to sing that song about buying a mockingbird. You know the one I mean?”
“Yeah.” Most of the sound got stuck in my throat.
“She used to carry for dealers, even though she hated pinchheads, despised them for not having control over something as basic as their own lives. She did anything to keep us fed, but she was always home with me at night. She used to call me her special night-time man.
“Usually, she came home with something canned. Sometimes she’d sucker someone too far gone out of a cut of fresh meat. I don’t remember ever being hungry while she was still around. One day, she dumped her bag, and a rat fell out on the floor. She had gotten it as payment from the pinchhead she delivered to. She was supposed to take it back to the dealer, but she brought it home for me instead.