Free Root of Unity by SL Huang

gunfire—five people were firing right now, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more.
    Screw it. I counted down from thirty, popped up as they reloaded, and fired at the first human being my gun crossed—a guy still in the driver’s seat of one of the SUVs. A pistol barked just as I pulled the trigger, and a line of fire lanced through my shoulder as I sat back down, hard. A round had clipped the skin between my shoulder and neck, on the right side. Less than an inch over and it would have hit my jugular.
    Shit. Well, at least I’d nailed one of them. And I’d gotten a glimpse. Eight people at minimum, and maybe more I hadn’t been able to see.
    There was a slight pause. Then a Molotov cocktail hit the ground right next to me.
    My eye registered it in the instant before it landed, and I launched myself up in the breath of a split second, wrenching open the front passenger door of the van and pivoting behind it. An explosion crashed across my impromptu shield and the metal slammed against me like it wanted to flatten me.
    My head ricocheted off the side of the van. My vision was vibrating. I couldn’t hear. I’d lost my gun.
    What the fuck, Molotov cocktails didn’t explode—
    Except this one had.
    My hearing buzzed in and out, muffled and badly tuned. Shouts. Doors slamming. Boots tromping on the ground.
    I stumbled back from the door that had protected me. The other side of it was on fire. So was a good part of the pavement where I’d just been sitting next to the hood, napalm or something like it coating every surface, flaming globs dousing the side of the overpass spectacularly. The heat scorched my skin, and my lungs strained with every breath as if someone were smothering me.
    Somewhere in my head I registered that this must have been their own brand of modified incendiary, a nice little bomb helping splash the napalm around. A thousand times deadlier than a normal Molotov cocktail. Great.
    A smattering of automatic fire tore into the van again, and I ducked, covering my head as more glass rained down. They couldn’t see me—did they know I was still alive?
    A soft click. I wasn’t sure how I heard it; everything was still muffled and ringing; but my brain immediately knew: lighter.
    Another flaming bottle soared over the roof of the van.
    The world slowed only to the parabola of projectile motion. The bottle sailed down, tumbling end over end, the flame on the soaked rag flaring as the wind of its passage whipped at it.
    I swung my arm down and around in a circle and came up right underneath it, like my arm was a freaking golf club, and smacked the heel of my hand against it, cupping it with infinite gentleness and then following it up with increasing speed until I let it fly back the other way, bottle strength estimates ricocheting through my head along with maximum decelerations because the one thing I absolutely did not want was for the bottle to break against my hand—
    I felt the momentum transfer echo through my arm and the flame blistered me, and then the bottle was flying back the way it had come. Exactly the way it had come.
    The world sped up again. My sleeve had caught fire. I smashed it against myself to smother it as I ducked.
    The math of free fall meant I knew exactly when the bottle would hit the ground: height of zero, solve for time. I didn’t hear the bottle shatter, because the explosion was too loud.
    The van rocked against me like a giant had smacked it, the metal bowing and rippling as the concussion ripped through. My hearing rang out into complete silence for an instant before tuning back in. Screams tore through the air, the screams of men coated with flaming chunks of napalm, men being devoured by third-degree burns. The other side of the van was on fire; the napalm had splatted against the metal, and the flames lit up what was left of the driver’s side window and licked up to rise in hungry spirals above the van’s roof.
    I dropped to the ground and pawed around until I