Root of Unity by SL Huang Page A

are bookstores, travel centers, gas stations, or drugstores. I can call around to see who has some. Yes, yes, the antediluvian method of phone inquiries—I could hack their inventories, but that would actually be more work, believe it or not—”
    “I’m at a drugstore,” I said. “I’ll check here first.”
    Silence.
    “Hello?”
    “Why are you at a drugstore?”
    I tried to dredge up a flip answer and couldn’t. My thoughts scraped uncomfortably against each other.
    “Cas, are you injured?”
    Bailing on the conversation was easier than answering. “No,” I said, and hung up.
    The drugstore did, in fact, have a rack of local street maps. I bought one and went back out to my stolen car to unfold it.
    I didn’t know when the bad guys had started out, but… Estimate. Probabilities.
    I closed my eyes. Why did everything still insist on being so fuzzy?
    Inner and outer search radii. Concentric circles of decreasing probability. Adjusted for the metric of road access and speed rather than straight-line distance. A jagged ring rose up in my head, clumsily centered on the location I’d been attacked.
    I examined the map more closely. The direction they’d come from—they weren’t trying to hide anything; they’d meant to kill me. If they’d been going east on the freeway, they would’ve come from the other side of the overpass.
    Half the circle faded out.
    They’d had a fleet of at least four SUVs and the windowless van. Figure about fifteen hundred square feet just for those vehicles—that was the size of a small house. And they probably had more.
    These guys had a ton of gear, but it wasn’t high-end or exotic, it was cheap and effective. This wasn’t going to be one of the more unusual enemies I’d gone up against—they weren’t Dawna Polk with her shiny military precision and ornate secret base or Vikash Agarwal with his absurd ray gun and ridiculous mountain lair. These people were more like me. All about business.
    Which meant I was looking for a building that had already existed, not an unmapped metal dome in the middle of the desert or a special underground staging area. The unpopulated bits of my search ring faded out, too.
    And I knew what I was looking for. A large building, probably an industrial warehouse of some kind.
    There weren’t all that many places left to look. Doing a drive through all the most likely ones would only take me about five hours, depending on how bad rush hour traffic got out here.
    Of course, there was a faster way.
    I made a face, feeling like a child throwing a temper tantrum, and called Checker back.
    He picked up right away. “Cas, hey.”
    I ignored the weight of all the worried questions he wasn’t asking me. “I need you to check a few places for me,” I said. “I’m looking for somewhere with a lot of space—more than a few thousand square feet—and away from prying eyes. My guess is a warehouse or industrial park in a place that’s not all that well-trafficked. I’m going to read off some intersections to you—can you scan the satellite pictures or whatever for the surrounding areas?”
    “These days a monkey could do that,” he said with cheerful sarcasm. “It doesn’t even take skill. Shoot.”
    “Off exit 55, up Hollins Road. Five and a quarter miles from the freeway. See anything?”
    He paused for a minute. “Looks like mostly ranches.”
    Ranches. Lots of land, little indoor space. No room for fleets of vehicles someone wanted to hide from curious passersby—or from satellite pictures, come to that. “All right. Move up to exit 56.”
    We worked our way through my entire search ring. In less than twenty minutes we’d narrowed it to three likely possibilities.
    “Do you want me to connect back up with Arthur or Pilar?” asked Checker. “If they sent a dozen guys after you with napalm—”
    “No,” I said. “If the NSA tries to go in at the same time, we’re just going to get each other killed. And I’m better than they