Root of Unity by SL Huang Page B

are.” Not to mention that the last thing I wanted was the NSA knowing anything about me. And I didn’t want to take the time to wait for Arthur—at least, that’s what I told myself. “I’ll find her.”
    “Cas—”
    “What?” The word might have been harsher than it needed to be.
    “You’re not in this alone. There are people who will back you up. You know that, right?”
    “You sound like Arthur,” I said, without thinking.
    “Well, that should tell you something!”
    I stopped at the passion in his voice.
    It was true that Arthur had been trying, for upwards of a year, to bash it through my head that I had backup now. That I could ask people for help, if I needed or wanted it.
    When he said it, it always seemed to make sense. In the moment, I either didn’t think of it or found a good reason to go it alone. After all, I always had sound logical reasons for what I did, didn’t I?
    Didn’t I?
    Like now. Arthur was busy following his other lead, and we’d find his friend faster if we kept working in parallel. Besides, it would take him ages to get out here—I wasn’t just being petty. I wasn’t.
    And even if I weren’t hours east of the city, who else was I going to call? I knew a Mob sniper who still claimed he owed me eighty percent of a favor, but I didn’t trust him further than a nickel’s worth, not the least of which because his boss had been trying to freeze me out of the underground for a year now. I knew a forger who hadn’t sold me out when he’d had the chance, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a forger, not someone I could call into a firefight even if I’d wanted to. To be perfectly honest, the only person I truly trusted to be skilled enough to have my back was halfway around the world bashing corrupted warlords’ heads in, and that was even farther than Pasadena.
    “I could call Rio,” I said, just to get a rise out of Checker.
    “If you think you should,” said Checker after a moment, very stiffly. I almost laughed. He was going to strain something trying to avoid saying what he thought about that idea. I suspected it was a rant about selling your soul to the devil to kill a spider—albeit a poisonous one.
    “Maybe I should call him,” I continued. “After all, we’re talking potential global economic collapse; it might be good to bring in every gun.” Except that even planes could only fly so fast, and I wasn’t about to let this go on another twenty-four hours. I wasn’t inclined to call Rio away from whatever head-bashing he was engaged in only for him to arrive to find there was nothing left to do.
    Having my pride wasn’t pettiness. And I was perfectly capable of doing this job for Arthur, without Rio or the NSA or anyone else.
    “Look, these guys aren’t anything special,” I said to Checker. “They’re not psychics or robots or even creepy international black-ops people. They’re just your general run-of-the-mill criminal kidnappers with cheap automatic weapons.” And some nifty explosives, but I didn’t mention that. “I can handle them, okay?”
    “Okay,” said Checker, the word fragile and drawn out.
    “I’ll call you once I’ve got Halliday.”
    “Okay. You’d better.”
    I didn’t know why I found his concern so irritating.

Chapter 9
    I zipped the little old Honda out to the first industrial park Checker and I had identified. It was a sprawling complex of warehouses, with a network of driveways in between wide connecting parking lots. Through the gate at the entrance I could see rows of white tractor trailers, and beer-heavy men in jeans shouted to each other as they lowered loading gates and hauled crates in and out. The place was a beehive of activity. Several prominently placed signs indicated it might be an ice packing plant—or maybe shrimp. The picture on the sign made it hard to tell.
    Checker had said he’d be looking into the people whose names were on the real estate I was checking out, but he’d warned me it