Root of Unity (18 page)

“Oh, stop looking so appalled,” I said. “You can rewrite it.”

“Just to recreate this much has been—”

“So the second time will be easier,” I said. “Christ, I’ll help you.”

“This is my life’s work!”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Not really; your life’s work is somewhere else we’d better find. But we don’t want to leave these guys with a copy anyway, and this means we won’t have to carry it with us. Win-win.”

“This is madness!” Halliday lifted her hands in what looked like an appeal to the heavens. “How would we ignite anything? And what’s to stop the fire from killing us before someone gets here?”

“Oh, ignition’s easy. It’s just math.” I might have been deliberately needling her. “As for us dying, do you really think this room is going to burn?” I gestured at the concrete surrounding us. “Smoke inhalation will be the only problem.” I thought through the science of combustion, then diffusion, the particle disbursement in the air. If we burned everything that would combust well, the papers and the table and chair, we’d both suffocate if they didn’t get to us fast enough. On the other hand, if we didn’t burn everything and they
did
open the door, we’d risk them being able to put the fire out before all of the papers were consumed. Burning it all would make the fire big enough to keep the mathematics neatly out of their hands.

“Madness,” reiterated Halliday.

It was possible she was right, but I wasn’t about to back out now.

Chapter 18

The next
food tray came at only a handful of seconds after three. Perfect. I wanted the fire going well enough that they wouldn’t be able to recover the proof even if they charged in with an extinguisher, and after that we had about a two minute window before it would get dangerous for us. I didn’t tell Halliday that part.

The first thing I did, just in case the guards
were
lurking and listening, was pick up the chair and smash it against a concrete wall. The joints snapped apart, the legs of the chair clattering to the floor. We both glanced toward the door, but nobody came running.

I brought the proof papers and the mathematical journals over to the side of the room farthest from the door and started crumpling and folding them into a nice bonfire tower. Halliday watched with an expression of twisted tragedy before turning away.

Next I levered under one end of the table—my torn muscles protested,
ow
—and hauled, building enough momentum to slam that against the wall, too. I didn’t have any way to break apart the tabletop, but the legs were nice logs, and I gathered them together with the smashed-up chair.

On second thought, I hefted one of the table legs back out of the pile. Decent balance, with a center of mass at a perfect point for a good swing. It would pass as a weapon. The rest of the wood went into building my little pyre.

Halliday had begun watching me again, with the gruesome fascination of someone observing a train wreck in slow motion. “You’re injured,” she tried again as I stacked the wood around the papers. “If we wait just a few days, maybe there’s a better way—”

“Too late now,” I said, glibly enough for it to sound like fact. I checked my watch. We still had some time, and if I started the fire early, I might kill us. “They’re not within shouting distance or they would have heard all that. The minute they bring the food, your job is to start screaming about fire. Be ready to get down by the food slot.”

I half-expected her to refuse. But then she went and stood by the door, her every movement dragging with skepticism even as she obeyed.

I’m not getting her killed. I’m getting her
out.

We waited, Halliday by the door and I by my fire pile. I spent the time fraying bits of thread off my clothes to build a fluffy little kindling bundle and pretending not to see the disapproving glances Halliday cast my way. I kept expecting her to declare that she wouldn’t be a part of any such foofaraw, that the proper way to escape was to wait for government authorities, but she didn’t offer any more argument.

The minutes counted down until we were almost at the hour. Finally. I fluffed up my thread pile inside a cradle of crumpled paper and picked up a narrow, tapered rod and flat piece that had originally been part of the chair back. “Get ready, Professor.”

I’d never tried this before, but I knew the general idea, and the method was just friction—and friction was just physics, and physics was only math. I knew how it had to go. A delicate operation, but with the right pressure and the right timing, it would all work out.

I trusted the numbers.

I stamped a boot down on the flat piece, poised the rod against it, pressed my palms flat against the sides, and started spinning it between my hands, pressing it down into the wood at the same time. The forces balanced perfectly, a pleasing vector diagram of pressures and normal forces that settled me enough to ignore the pain in my still-bandaged left hand and my broken right thumb as I rubbed faster and faster. Mathematics made everything okay. I could sink into this, accomplish what I needed to do.

The rod began to bore into the wood below it, sawdust gathering where it spun—sawdust that began to blacken as I kept up the friction, the rod spinning relentlessly. The sharp tang of smoke in the air was a benediction. It was working.

The blackening sawdust turned to a tiny coal of an ember, and I stopped spinning, my palms prickling with numbness. I picked up the piece of wood and very carefully tipped my tiny ember into my thread pile. Then I leaned down and blew very, very gently.

The stoichiometry of combustion filtered through me as I added O
₂
into the equation, nursing my delicate little ember against the threads. Smoke began curling up in a thin tendril, tickling my nose. I kept blowing.

Some of the threads began to blacken against the ember, crinkling into ash…and between one moment and the next a little flame burst up.

The flame swallowed the ball of thread and licked at the paper cupping it, and I quickly held other folds of crumpled pages around it until their edges flared, too. Then I poked the pieces of burning paper into each corner of the kindling pile. I didn’t need to check my watch again. I’d been tracking the time closely, and we were just over a minute before the hour—right on time.

I moved over to the side of the door, my table-leg club at the ready. Halliday had crouched down by the food slot, her jaw clenched. Across the room, the flames darted upward from the engulfed papers, limning the wood.

The hour struck. The wood began to catch, the stench of burning varnish making the smoke bitter. The tower of crumpled paper was quickly dwindling and collapsing beneath.

Smoke had started to roll against the ceiling and then haze down through our precious breathing space. Halliday coughed. My eyes were watering; I blinked stubbornly, wrapping my arm across my mouth and breathing through my sleeve.

One minute after the hour. They were late.

The smoke in the room was building up to cloud the air, making it hard to see. I was starting to feel woozy. I repositioned myself into a crouch, ready to rocket up into the first guard to enter, but even the lower position didn’t seem to help much. Beside me, Halliday had pushed open the slot in the door and was breathing against it. She beat on the metal next to it and shouted.

No one came.

Shit.

Halliday’s shouts devolved into coughing; she gave up her efforts and slumped against the slot. She had pulled out a handkerchief and had it pressed against her nose and mouth, her eyes streaming. Who carried handkerchiefs these days, I thought groggily.

Two minutes after the hour.

My lungs spasmed into a cough at every other breath now. I tried to stop, to sip the air more shallowly, to be ready, but it was too much. The wound in my side throbbed.

Two and a half minutes. Two minutes forty seconds. Forty-one seconds.

Someone outside the slot shouted, loud and profane and the sweetest sound I had ever heard. The tromp of boots, and something clanged—

“Help,” croaked Halliday.

I didn’t know if they heard her, but at this point they didn’t have to. Smoke was billowing through the room and would be pouring out of the door slot. The commotion continued on the other side, more yells and bangs and then the scrape of keys in the lock…

The door flew open, and I shot to my feet and brained the first man through with my club.

My aim and balance were off, and the blow was only glancing, taking the man down but not killing him. I let it pass as good enough and rocketed my elbow into the man behind him.

Vague silhouettes coughed and bellowed commands through the smoke, a fracas of confusion. As the man whose face I’d just smashed in went down I grabbed for the weapon I knew he must be carrying, the outline of an AK apparent as soon as my hands closed on the wood and metal. I squeezed my eyes shut and flipped it around, letting the mathematics be my eyes, and fired.

The gun was set on full auto—of course—but I controlled the barrel and managed to aim. I wasted two rounds, but five bodies thumped down before me. I squinted my eyes open. The air was starting to clear into the hallway, but smoke still rolled around me in waves, suffocating my senses and diffusing my vision into gray haze.

I groped behind me and found Halliday’s sharp elbow to haul her up. She started to fall to the side and I ducked under her arm, yanking her taller frame against me and forcing her to lean into me as we staggered out. We hustled, gulping cleaner air into scratching lungs. Halliday was wracked with coughing.

More shouts echoed through the corridor. More armed goons, coming this way.

My left leg almost buckled underneath me as the wound in my side stabbed.
Shit.
I forced myself upright and dragged Halliday with me to the stairs, and we stumbled down, half-missing some of the steps and almost going into a headlong tumble. More men, bristling with armaments, burst around the corner as we hit the bottom. I’d flicked the selector lever to semiauto and fired before they could aim. An AK wasn’t as accurate as an M16, but at this range I didn’t need it to be. Nobody got a shot off.

Here in the hallway, the gunfire thundered through and echoed off the walls until it was twice as deafening. Halliday flinched against my shoulder.
Well, excuse me, Professor.

We got to the main entryway before they cornered us. In the same place I’d followed the Lancer and D.J. in from the sunlight, a square block of brightness tempted us with freedom, but it was far—too far. Goons poured in from all directions, loading weapons as they came. Three smoke grenades sailed over from our left and landed hissing in front of us. Not more smoke…

My leg muscles spasmed again.

Nobody had fired—they must be trying to take us back alive—but my body was giving out on me faster than I had expected, and I’d breathed a lot more smoke than I’d meant to. The mathematics wavered in melting lines around me, and the AK wavered in my hand. I wasn’t sure I could fight them all and win.

Through the smoke, through my streaming eyes, I caught sight of something snaking up the wall.

Hey, I’m working on the foundation,
the insane D.J. had said.
You gotta see what I’ve put together. It’s balls-out cool…

He’d been setting this base to implode, for the walls to crack and crumble and bury themselves, just like the other one.

A bullet wouldn’t set off plastic explosives. But the detonation mechanism—if someone happened to be a
very good shot—

I mustered all my strength, brought the AK up, and fired.

The explosion tore through concrete and stone, and I jerked Halliday with me, running, running, every minute expecting a 7.62 round to punch through my back. But men were screaming all around us, dashing to save themselves—even the ones who’d been closer to the exit than we were needed precious seconds to lurch around and figure out what was happening, to turn and race for the outside, and we sprinted past them toward light and freedom. Concrete blocks smashed down as the ceiling began to cave in. We were so close to the door—we would make it, we could make it, we had to make it—

We burst out into the sunlight, the overgrown weeds slapping at our shins. I yanked Halliday along with me, away, away, the building collapse a thunder on our tails. I flipped the selector switch on the AK back to full and sprayed it behind us without looking, dissuading pursuit.

No one fired back. Most of the goons had been way too far from the door.

We ran.

Thoughts skittered through my brain in a jumble. We had to get to a vehicle; not everyone would have been killed and the rest could keep coming after us, shooting at us as we ran. But I didn’t see any sign of their vans or SUVs. Where would they be keeping them?

We kept running, the sky vast and blue and too bright above us, and we almost ran right off the bluff into the Pacific.

Halliday yanked me back, stumbling herself. I’d glimpsed the surf crashing against the rocks far, far below.

Tires screeched behind us, and I pulled Halliday down. We hit our bellies in the dry grass and peered back the way we had come. But the SUV wasn’t gunning for us; it was haring away, skidding in its hurry.

Another followed, and another, swerving and careening as if they fled from the devil.

“They’re running,” said Halliday, her voice hoarse and scratching. She coughed into her shoulder.

That they were. And it hit me—if we were anywhere near a single other sign of civilization, this explosion would attract the authorities, no question. This area might be fairly deserted, but nowhere in Southern California was the middle of the Yukon, and unlike some people I’d tangled with, these guys didn’t have law enforcement in their pockets, couldn’t afford to bring attention to themselves when a federal investigation was already barking against their heels. They didn’t have time to stay and hunt us down and murder us, not when it might mean their own skins, not when they didn’t know if law enforcement had caught wind of this.

Their overzealous explosives expert had screwed them.

I prodded Halliday, and we belly-crawled until we were behind a rolling knoll of the bluff, right on the edge of the cliff with our feet practically dangling over the edge. We sat there and breathed, the sun in our eyes, while the bad guys ran. I kept the AK ready just in case, but to a man, our captors put their own preservation first.