Root of Unity

by SL Huang

  She stared at me, her face going very stiff and still. “You’re joking.”

  “No. You have most of it already.” It was a killer result, if I was honest. Creative and brilliant, turning complexity theory inside out before inverting it back again. I was impressed.

  But I wasn’t going to tell Halliday that and ruin my fun. I flicked her papers back down. “It’s just connect-the-dots. Child’s play.”

  It was hard to say whether in that moment Professor Halliday would have preferred to shoot me or hug me.

  Chapter 17

  “First things first,” I said. “We get you out of here. Then we can worry about the proof.” I stayed sitting and pointed at the door. “When do they open that?”

  “Since I’ve been here? Never. Except for my blood sugar episode. And when they brought you in.”

  Dammit. If I’d been on my toes, I could have mowed down the guards the instant I saw Halliday and gotten us both out then. I hadn’t been thinking fast enough. “Fake an attack, then,” I said.

  “You think that would work?”

  I pondered it. Probably not, actually. If they were smart, they’d watch through the slot in the door until I was safely on the other side of the room and come in with weapons trained on us.

  Ordinarily that might still change enough variables for me to find an opening and get us out. In my current condition, and with Halliday to protect…

  “What about food?” I asked. “They have to bring food.”

  She pointed at the slot in the door. Definitely enough room for a tray.

  “We need a reason for them to come in,” I said, thinking out loud. “Something that will surprise them. Throw them off. Panic them.”

  “And then what?” Halliday’s dark skin had a slightly greenish cast in the fluorescent light. “We’ll never get past them. We’ll die.”

  “Aren’t you a party pooper,” I said. “Professor, I can protect you. I promise.”

  “You can barely stand up on your own.” The words could have been mean, but instead her voice was empty and factual.

  Her skepticism made me even more determined. “I told you, it’s not that bad. I’ll deal with it. Besides, what choice do we have? You’d rather stay here?”

  She didn’t answer, just pressed her lips together for a moment. “Where’s Arthur?” she asked finally.

  “With the NSA. I beat them to finding you.” I bared my teeth in something like a smile.

  “What? We should wait for them, then!”

  I knew Halliday’s opinion didn’t matter, but her reaction was still like a spike in my chest. “We don’t know they’ll find us,” I argued. “The guys who’ve got us are good, maybe good enough to evade the NSA, and this situation could go very bad at any moment. What if they decide to kill us and rabbit? What if the Feds do track us down, and these guys blow us all to kingdom come to avoid capture? You really want to sit on our hands and hope the government rides out of the woods on white horses?”

  “If Arthur said he’s coming, he’ll be here,” said Halliday. “He’ll come for us.”

  “I’d rather we came for us.”

  She tilted her head at me. “You don’t trust him.”

  “What? No, I do!” I protested, surprised and disconcerted at the conversational left turn. “But trusting Arthur doesn’t mean—come on, there are a thousand things he can’t control. Just because he would want to help us doesn’t mean he’ll be able to come through.”

  “He trusts you to come through,” she said softly. “I can tell.”

  “But I’m—listen, Arthur’s handy with a gun, but I’m way, way better than he is. He trusts me to come through for him because he knows I can.”

  “Because he knows you will,” she insisted.

  “I really don’t know what point you’re trying to make,” I said, my emotions prickling. “What you’re saying doesn’t make a difference. It doesn’t matter what he wants to do or how much you trust him to want it, because sometimes no matter how hard you try, there are still going to be things you can’t make happen.”

  “I know,” she said, the weight of the universe in those words.

  I was starting to get angry. “So…?”

  “What you’re saying is, is rational, but—I do trust Arthur that much, despite everything. Regardless of how illogical it seems. And I think…I think it’s sad you don’t. That’s all.”

  The only person I trusted to have my back to that level was Rio, and for good reason. “I don’t know what to tell you,” I said to Halliday stiffly. “You’re not talking about trust. You’re talking about faith.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Is faith so bad?”

  “Faith by definition is unsubstantiated belief!” I tried to keep my voice low enough so anyone lurking outside wouldn’t hear me through the metal door, and I managed the decibel level, barely. The wound in my side wrenched. “For Christ’s sake, aren’t you a mathematician?”

  “Mathematics doesn’t preclude faith.”

  “Of course it does!”

  “Then I feel sorry for you,” she said.

  I closed my eyes and took a breath. I didn’t need Halliday’s okay to break us out. All I needed was a reason for our captors to burst in here without thinking about it.

  With a clang of metal, a tray with two small meals appeared through the slot in the door. Halliday hastened up to get it. “Ever since I had that attack, they’ve been bringing food every hour or so,” she explained. “More than I’ve needed, so if you want some of mine…”

  They were lucky she hadn’t tried going on a hunger strike. “Have you been stockpiling it?”

  Her head came around to me in surprise as she put the food on the table. “No. Why would I do that? I put the extra back on the tray.”

  “Well, start,” I said. “Eat what you need to and stick the rest in pockets. My half, too.”

  “What will you eat?”

  “We’re not going to be in here long enough for it to matter,” I said. The thought of food still made nausea nibble around the corners of my stomach anyway. “Meals might get a whole lot less regular once we’re running, and I don’t want you fainting on me. Now, tell me. Do they come by exactly on the hour, every time?” I checked my watch. The tray had come through at thirty-three seconds past two p.m. If that timing was consistent, it might be exact enough to use for the execution of our escape.

  “I don’t know,” Halliday said. “They took my phone.”

  “We’ll time the next one, then. And then the next one is when we’re out of here. Before dark.”

  “I still think we should wait for Arthur,” said Halliday. “This is foolhardy. Reckless.”

  “Reckless is where I live.” I tried to grin and failed. “It’s too dangerous to wait, Professor. I’m not giving you a choice.”

  “What’s your plan, then?” She addressed the question as if she were giving an oral exam, one she expected me to fail.

  I hadn’t quite worked out what our best shot would be myself, but I didn’t say so, instead ignoring the professor and taking a moment to think. The regular meals gave us scheduled opportunities of contact with our captors, which meant I could try something timed. And what would throw them into a panic more than the chance of losing their bosses’ assets?

  Those assets being the half-finished proof, Professor Halliday, and me.

  She was going to kill me.

  “We only need them to open that door,” I said slowly, “and they’d rush in to save us, if we were in danger. From, say, a fire.”

  “A what?”

  “We’ve got plenty of fuel right here,” I said, nodding at the papers on the table.

  The look of horror on her face was almost comical.

  “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 O2 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…