Root of Unity by SL Huang Page B

thirty-six minutes. And I didn’t have a way out yet.
    Fuck.
    I wouldn’t be able to stop it from happening. I might be able to see the math of the circuitry, predict the physics of the explosion, but I wasn’t a bomb expert. I had half an hour to clear myself an exit, or the implosion would bury what was left of me.

Chapter 10
    Clear an exit. Easier said than done—this was not something I’d expected to be doing under a time limit.
    I concentrated on the perimeter and filtered the charges into patterns, my brain following the wiring. Closed circuit, right. Elegant, but not complicated. A quick and dirty way to make sure nothing broke in—quick and dirty like Molotov cocktails and AKs, but fused onto the intelligence and competence necessary to rig a building this way…
    I was starting to get a feel for these guys. Smart but lazy. Overly thorough in some ways but taking shortcuts in others. Willing to put the work into something they thought was cool, but bored with work in general.
    Hungry for power but reveling in their arrogance from the shadows.
    I shook myself. Closed circuit. Which meant as long as I didn’t interrupt it, I’d be fine.
    Probably.
    I held my senses on the wiring pattern, on its logical progression, the overlay of explosives leading me back out to the garage and to the broad roll-up doors that led out of the building. Here was the weak point. They’d needed to get their vehicles out. The circuit didn’t cross the doors like it did the windows, but instead flowed against the frame—I focused my regular vision instead of my mathematical awareness and found simple magnetic sensors. Magnet in the wiring, magnet in the door; if the door rolled up, the switch would trip and the circuit would break.
    Okay. I could do this. All I needed was a magnet.
    Well, that was easy. The power had to be working if the computers were, so I had electricity, and there was plenty of junk scattered about the base. Not to mention that they probably had tools and supplies in their storerooms that would have what I needed.
    I sprinted back to the armory and the storerooms beside it and started digging through cardboard boxes and tool kits. I was in luck: not only did I find nails, wire, and duct tape almost immediately, but I also found a box of batteries, which would save me the trouble of jury-rigging a safe voltage from a wall socket. Twenty-eight minutes. I started to breathe more easily.
    I hauled everything back to the garage and tossed it in a pile next to one of the roll-up doors. I sat on the cement floor while I wound the wire, going as fast as possible. Fatigue tugged at my muscles, and my chest and head still ached, though I tried very hard to ignore them.
    My left hand twinged more every time I pulled another coil of wire tight around a nail. The bandage over the burn was caked in dust and starting to come off. I ignored that, too.
    I connected up my batteries to the wire-wrapped nail and stood up. I might need speed, but I needed care more. I cupped the battery and wire-wrapped nail in one hand and brought my first little electromagnet near one of the sensors, testing the field strength very, very slowly.
    Not good enough. I pulled the wire back off the batteries and wrapped another few coils around the nail before holding it up again and judging the slight tug against my fingers. If my magnet was too weak, it wouldn’t do shit.
    But the equal-and-opposite vector diagram lined up this time, telling me I was good to go. I duct-taped my magnet onto the frame in the skinny space between the explosive wiring and the door itself, wedging the nail up right next to the sensor. Then I repeated the process three more times for the other sensors on the door and stood back.
    Time to spare: I had more than nineteen minutes left. My little wire-wrapped nails poked up cheerfully next to the door magnets. I should be able to open it up now.
    As long as I hadn’t missed a sensor or a failsafe.
    I scanned the door one