Root of Unity by SL Huang

gauze over my hand; I put the cell on speakerphone and tore the tape with my teeth while I waited for him to pick up.
    “Hello?”
    “It’s Cas.”
    “I’m guessing from the new phone number that something didn’t go as planned. What happened?”
    “Ambush,” I said.
    “Good God. Are you all right?”
    “Of course,” I said. My voice was scratching. “Though I left the street on fire. Have the cops found it yet?”
    “You left the street— what—”
    “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. “They brought napalm. Or something napalm-like. Has someone called it in yet?”
    “Checking,” he said. “Aw, Arthur would be proud, you bringing in the authorities. This time of year LA’s a tinderbox; it’s not a bad idea.”
    That hadn’t been what I meant, but I didn’t correct him. “It’s just north of the 263, off the Puesta del Sol exit.”
    “Found it. Yeah, we’ve got fire department. And police, and…” He trailed off, a frown in the last words.
    “What?”
    “From what I can tell, the cops are being superseded by someone else. I can’t see who.”
    “NSA?”
    “I don’t know. Who attacked you? Who were these guys?”
    “The same ones who ran Arthur and me off the road, I’m assuming,” I said. I finished my rudimentary first-aid, leaned back, and flexed my hand against the bandaging. Painful, but I had my whole range of motion.
    “Did you get their pictures for me? License plate numbers?”
    Fuck. I hadn’t even thought of that stuff. Like I always told Arthur, I was a shit detective.
    “It’s okay,” Checker said, when I hadn’t answered. “I’ll be able to pull things from police records, though it’ll be a few hours before their CSU stuff hits the system. Can you believe it, you’d think in this modern era we’d have everything connected instantly, but no.” When I didn’t say anything, he prompted, “Cas? You there?”
    I’d been thinking about the bad guys’ MO. AKs and Molotov cocktails were common as a bad haircut. But Molotov cocktails rigged to explode as these had, those were something more unusual…and they’d geared us up with a pretty nifty car bomb earlier…plus the souped-up grenade…
    “Cas? You all right?”
    I squeezed my eyes shut. My head felt like steel wool, sharp and stinging and a dirty tangle, and the nausea still nagged at me. Being in the midst of a street-sized bonfire for too long could apparently make you sick. Who knew. “I’m here.”
    “Why don’t you come back to the Hole? We’ve got more data to track now. Maybe we can—”
    “No.” My brain buzzed, trying its best. I hadn’t taken the van for that long of a ride before stopping and searching it…
    I tried to think back. It was hard to focus. No more than fifteen minutes of driving, no more than seven spent searching the van before the SUVs had arrived.
    Twenty-two minutes. They wouldn’t have wanted to go above the speed limit, not with the hardware they were carrying. Plus figure a couple of minutes for noticing the van was on the move and gearing up…
    There wasn’t all that much out this way. And it was unlikely they would’ve expected someone to find the van in the first place, so no reason for them to have had men babysitting it. I was betting I could find their hideout.
    “Cas, talk to me. What are you thinking?”
    “I’m going to find their base,” I said.
    “How?”
    “I need a map,” I said.
    “What?”
    “A physical paper map. Where can you buy one of those these days?”
    “Um, I don’t know. I’d stop at somewhere with Internet and print one, if I were you.”
    “You’re the guy sitting at a computer,” I said, irritation bleeding into my voice. “Find out where I can buy a fucking map. On paper.”
    “Other than Amazon?”
    “Stop being a smartass.”
    “Okay, okay.” He hesitated. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re, uh, a little more snappish than usual.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “All right already. Um, it looks like your best bets