Root of Unity (33 page)

Arthur will be coming. He will.

“You give her a heart attack, you’ll never get your proof.” My tongue was still thick and languid in my mouth, but the words had enough shape to make sense.

“Can I tell you a secret?” He leaned close, his breath hot on my ear. “I doubt you’ll be a very good incentive. But I don’t really care.” He pushed off and walked away.

Yeah. I’d pissed him off. Big time.

And it wasn’t going to work out so well for me.

“Is she all right?” came Martinez’s grandmotherly voice.

“How nice that you care,” said the Lancer. He’d retreated to a spot between us, leaning on his cane, the meditation balls going in his other hand. “Dr. Martinez, you’ve told me you won’t part with certain information on a proof that—” he brayed his hyena laugh—“that I
know
you have. But I think we can change your mind.” He gestured at me. “We’re going to start by torturing your friend here, who so conveniently made herself available. If that doesn’t work, we’ll go out and find another one of your friends, or we’ll find your family, any family you have—children, grandchildren, newborn babies…do you want that?”

Martinez was silent.

“I said, do you want that?”

“I assumed the question was rhetorical,” she said. “Of course I don’t want that. It would be a most inhuman state. And if I did want it, I would have been spurred to do it myself, in all likelihood, so even if you suspected violent psychopathy on my part, there is evidence to the contrary.”

The Lancer stepped forward and spat on her. The globule smacked against her wrinkled cheek and slid down to dribble on her collar. Martinez twitched away from it in a gentle shudder, like she couldn’t believe the rudeness of kids nowadays. “If you don’t
want
it, then you’ll tell us what you know,” the Lancer sneered.

“You’re assuming that wanting one thing—or, in this case, wanting one thing to happen—precludes wanting, or not wanting, another thing more. In my hierarchy there is no contest. This power makes me unto a deity, and it has been struggle enough whether to share it with the world, but to share it with only those who would use it for evil—there is no decision. I will not be the one to create an evil god.”

“Poetic,” the Lancer said. “In that case, is there anything you wish to say to your friend? She’s about to be quite uncomfortable.”

Something
snicked
off to my left, sharply, and an arc of sparks flew at the edge of my peripheral vision.

Oh,
shit.

Martinez looked past me. “I’m sorry for the actions of these men,” she said. “But not for my actions. They are only rational.”

The ironic part of it was, her logic made sense. In a wretched, soon-to-be-extremely-painful-for-me sort of way.

The
snick
sparked again, louder, right by my ear this time. Bits of heat tingled against my exposed skin where the sparks fell.

“Last chance,” said the Lancer.

I didn’t hear what Martinez said back, because the pain hit.

Chapter 35

I’d been
shot before. I’d been beat up before. In my various disreputable past jobs, I’d been blown up by airborne missiles, almost drowned, and fallen off the side of a mountain.

I’d never been tortured with a fifteen-thousand-volt electric charge before.

It wasn’t only the pain, although that was unimaginable, an almost out-of-body nerve-shredding bonfire that refused to localize to where they’d thrust the leads against me. But more—each charge ripped through my flesh like it wanted to flay me, rending me apart and tearing me like paper…the world twisted into sick, impossible shapes, stretching until it snapped, and my brain flash-fried and crumbled until it was dust.

It took me some time to realize they had stopped, the searing burn pulsing through me even after they’d dropped the leads from my skin. My surroundings kept stuttering and hitching, like someone had taken handfuls of frames out of an animation. I was aware of the Lancer talking to Martinez, every third word piling up on the one before like he was a bad collage.

After a few minutes, the Lancer and his men cleared out, leaving us chained to our chairs. They probably wanted me to beg Martinez to tell, or something. They hadn’t readministered the paralytic, but it didn’t make a difference: my muscles popped and spasmed against each other, defying my attempts to marshal them. Even if I’d been able to move under my own power, however, the mathematics of our situation were dismal; the chains wrapped my arms and legs with a depressing level of redundancy. The Lancer had wanted to make sure I didn’t escape again, and he’d done a good job with the overkill.

“I can’t tell him, you know,” Martinez said after a few minutes. “It would be—it would be quite bad. I don’t know what he would be able to do.”

What he was able to do without it was frightening enough. The Lancer was going to go out and find anyone else in Martinez’s life to hurt—friends, family, other mathematicians, Martinez herself once he knew what would be liable to kill her—until she capitulated. And capitulate she would, once our captor reached the variable named Sonya Halliday. Martinez had given up everything for Halliday, and she’d give up the proof as well, I felt sure. Their friendship was her zeroth axiom.

It was a race, then. “Is okay,” I slurred. “I have a plan.”

She raised her eyebrows. Her huge glasses were missing, I noticed, making her bones seem even finer and smaller than before. “I hope your plan does not involve being unchained, because if so, you are unlikely to be able to enact it.”

“Doesn’t,” I said.

“Intriguing.” She stared into space, considering as if this were a riddle:
Two prisoners, A and B, are chained in a room until A gives up information. B tells A not to worry, that she has a plan to escape. What is it?

I was tired. So tired. “Gotta wait,” I said. “That’s the plan. Wait…”

Her brow furrowed, her lips pursing, trying to figure out the meaning in the punchline.

“People are coming to get us.” I wasn’t sure I said the words or only thought them. I was loopy. Why did everything hurt so much? “Hold out, Professor…they’re coming. You have to hold out…” Who was I talking to? “They’ll be here.”

“How do you know?”

“Faith,” I mumbled.
Faith…

I remembered my earlier resolution, that I didn’t need my past to decide who I wanted to be now. I could be the type of person who trusted, couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I decide to be that? The type of person who trusted, and who protected an old woman from being hurt for as long as I needed to…

“I don’t believe in faith,” Martinez said, very primly. “It’s the antithesis of evidence-based science.”

She was right. But maybe I didn’t need to believe in general—I only needed to believe in certain people. I could manage that.

Certain people. Arthur. Checker. Myself.

Myself most of all. I had to believe I had it in me, somewhere, to do the right thing when it came down to the wire. Otherwise, why keep existing at all? I had nothing else of value—
was
nothing else.

“Professor,” I said. “Act like this bothers you. Okay? We need to make them draw it out…”

“I don’t understand what you mean. Of course it bothers me. They’re evil men, to be hurting you like that.”

“They have to keep going,” I tried to explain. “To keep going, on—on me, and not anyone else. Tell them you’ll give them something if they stop, beg them, and then take it back. Convince them they’re getting to you—”

There was a sound at the side of the room. The Lancer and his men, trooping back in. I wondered if they’d had cameras on us. Too late to worry about it now.

“Have you decided to share with the class yet, Dr. Martinez?” The Lancer leaned on his walking stick, pinning Martinez with his intense stare like she was a butterfly on a card. “Or shall we continue?”

Martinez looked at him and then back at me. I would have crossed my fingers, if I’d been able to move them right.

Her eyes had gone large, and they focused on mine. It was the first time she’d made eye contact with me. It jolted me—I didn’t know what she meant by it.

“Please,” she said to the Lancer, very slowly and softly. “Please stop this.”

I let out a quiet breath.
Good girl. Convince them.

“It’s in your hands,” the Lancer said. “Tell me what I want to know, and we’ll stop.”

“I—I can’t—”

The Lancer nodded to his friends behind me.

I might have screamed then. I wasn’t sure.

♦ ♦ ♦

A face
swam in front of me. I called someone’s name, but it wasn’t the right one.

The face resolved into the sallow features of the Lancer. His hand whipped out and smacked against something. Me. He’d smacked my cheek.

I couldn’t feel it.

My whole body was seizing, a thousand million tiny internal catastrophes as the nerves and muscles couldn’t figure out what to do anymore so twisted and screamed and died.

I tried to find Martinez, but my eyes wouldn’t focus that far away from me. I gave up.

Someone tilted a cup of water against my mouth until I choked on it. I tried to swallow, but the muscles barely obeyed. Nothing was working at all the way it was supposed to. My senses had collapsed in on themselves as if they’d inverted, every
x
and
y
switching until I didn’t know which way was up anymore.

Someone smacked me again, the
crack
of it ever so loud. I felt it that time. It stung. It might have split my skin.

I pondered that.

The Lancer was saying something to Martinez. Something about watching me die. Whether she really wanted to be responsible for that.

I thought you didn’t want to kill me,
I tried to say. I still had something he wanted. Didn’t I?

As if he’d heard me, his breath came hot on my ear again. “I’d prefer you didn’t die, if you’d be so kind. But Dr. Martinez appears to be surprisingly sympathetic to your condition, and let’s just say…what you know is expendable, if it gets me what she knows.”

Expendable. I wasn’t the only one who knew Halliday’s proof. Professor Halliday did, for one thing, as well as Dr. Zhang and probably a handful of other people in the NSA at this point. And if the Lancer pried Martinez’s work out of her, he might not even feel the need for Halliday’s proof at all, because he’d have the bigger, better prize.

It was surprising, how fast my brain was able to make those connections.

Some vestige of adrenaline surged, and I tried to use it to evaluate myself, to see how close the Lancer was to…well, to killing me. It was a surreal place to be. My mind wandered too quickly, however, rendering no useful data.

The Lancer and his men were gone again. It had taken me a long time to realize that. Professor Martinez was trying to talk to me, but her words bounced against my eardrums as if they were nonsense syllables.

At least she was all right.

Wait,
I remembered. I had to wait. What was I waiting for?

The Lancer came back in.

No, no, no, I’m not ready.
I had to
wait—

I tugged at my bonds weakly, involuntarily. The paralytic had worn off now, but it hardly mattered.

“Is there anything our resident double-crossing snake would like to share for posterity?” The Lancer was standing above me, jeering, leaning on his cane with both hands. “Any words of wisdom on always making the quick buck?”

A noise filtered through my consciousness, a very specific sort of shuffle-thump noise. A
very
specific sort of noise.

Holy shit.

“Six, twenty-eight, four ninety-six,” I said. It came out in a weird, sing-song mumble. I felt drunk.

“What did you say?” demanded the Lancer.

There was another shuffle-thump, and a quickly quieted clatter. “Thirty,” I murmured. “A hundred and forty. Twenty-four eighty…”

“Six thousand two hundred,” said Professor Martinez, across from me. “And forty thousand six hundred forty.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. They’re here.”

“Who’s here?” The Lancer’s voice climbed, unnerved. “What the fuck are you on about?”

“Natural numbers with a common abundancy.” Martinez’s voice had gone back to her prim abstraction, and it almost made me giggle to hear it. “When the ratio of the sum of the divisors to the number itself is the same for all of them. We call those numbers friends.”

“I’ve got some, too,” I said, and at that moment the DHS agents breached the room.

A truly terrifying few seconds followed—shouting and smoke and gunfire, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t duck, and neither could Martinez—and then the only shapes navigating through the smoke were black layers of body armor and helmets carrying MP5s and M4s at the ready.

Someone was trying to talk to me, an officer-agent-person with a rifle in one hand and his other hand touching my neck, searching out a pulse; he shouted to someone and then moved over to Martinez. There was a lot more movement, a lot of people hurrying and shouting “clear” and running back and forth, and I was glad I didn’t have to join in, but could just sit here and be still and in pain and cough every so often.

And then Arthur appeared next to me as if by magic, wearing a vest himself and gently unwinding the chains around my wrists. “Arthur,” I slurred. “You got my message.”

He leaned forward briefly so his forehead touched mine. “Yeah. We got your message.”

I tried to push myself up as soon as Arthur finished freeing me. He attempted to stop me with some nonsense about waiting for the paramedics, but when it became clear I was determined to ignore him he got an arm under me and helped me wobble upright while berating me gently for being stupid.

I mumbled something incoherent in response. His grip around my shoulders hurt, a lot, but I didn’t care.

One of the DHS agents was helping Martinez up. The little old professor looked around through the smoke-hazed air at all the black-clad men and women surrounding us, her eyes almost feverishly bright.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

I had a moment to wonder what would happen now—if the NSA would insist on taking the proof from Martinez, if I’d screwed her over even worse by delivering us into the custody of the Feds—when she wobbled like a spent gyroscope and crumpled to the ground.