Root of Unity by SL Huang

windows. Utterly unassuming, and more than large enough to house fleets of vehicles and whatever else this gang might need. Now I just had to get over there.
    Sixteen and a half feet between the buildings, and if possible I wanted to clear the jagged edges of destroyed wall and the lion’s share of the rubble. Fortunately, I was one story higher. I’d have more than enough time to fly the x -distance while I was falling, and the vertical distance was barely over thirteen feet. I’d fallen farther plenty of times.
    Of course, the height difference meant I’d have to find a different way out once I made the leap, but I could figure that out once I sussed the demolition rig up close.
    I walked along the edge of the roof, looking for the smoothest landing spot amid the rubble on the opposite building, and zeroed in on a likely patch of floor. I tossed some bits of roof over just in case anything was still live, but my landing area showed no evidence of being likely to disintegrate me. Good.
    I backtracked to the middle of my roof to give myself a running start, did the final calculations, and then ran straight at the edge. I couldn’t see my landing spot as I pounded toward the brink—only purple-blue sky, clear and empty, as if I were about to take off and fly past the end of the world.
    I hit the lip of the roof and jumped.
    My muscles rocketed me into the air, and I soared in a perfect parabola. An instant of weightlessness at the top—my own personal optimum, hanging above the earth—and then I accelerated downward, faster and faster, the rubble-strewn third floor of the other building multiplying in my vision until it became the entire universe.
    I hit exactly where I’d aimed, and rolled out.
    Ow.
    I sat for a minute. Why had that hurt? Oh. Yeah. Napalm and street-sized bonfires and being shot and getting into an intentional car crash.
    I coughed. Dammit.
    I staggered up and surveyed my surroundings. Now that I was on the building, it appeared even more vast, a broad forest of rubble and nubs of walls. I began picking my way across. Every so often I caught sight of something that might have been part of the gang’s base—a few loose papers crushed under concrete blocks, a broken computer monitor, a dismembered office chair—but mostly it was unidentifiable debris.
    I stayed wary of any explosives that hadn’t gone in the original blast, but the third floor had died a valiant death and thoroughly destroyed itself. I finally found a staircase—well, more like a ladder into a skylight now.
    Very carefully, I stepped down.
    My skin tingled as I transferred my weight from stair to stair. What if they’d rigged everything about the second floor, instead of only the perimeter like I expected? What if I jostled the wrong bit of wall or stepped on the wrong patch of floor?
    I reached the bottom without blowing anything up. I took a steadying breath, immediately regretted it as my ribs twinged, and peered around, keeping my steps slow and my senses alert.
    The second floor had been set up like a barracks. Bunks took up quite a few of the rooms, stacked on top of each other with no privacy. A rusted-out kitchen was replete with boxed MREs; I didn’t think it likely the plumbing was working. A larger percentage of the rooms turned out to be empty—this building was, apparently, too big even for their purposes. I wandered between them, the light filtering through the painted-over windows creating an eerie interplay of shadows.
    Whether or not the rooms had been in use, they were all set up to explode, though fortunately the setup was a lot clearer than I’d feared. The wiring crawled over the whole outside perimeter, cupping the second floor in a deadly closed circuit. What looked like military-grade plastic explosives were packed against all the support pillars. Foil wire spiderwebbed over the windows—that must have been what I’d tripped on the third story—and floor mats lined the walking space next to the walls.