At three am in the morning, Daniel Miles Dyson sat on the edge of his bed and stared down at his cell phone. Black, smug and expensive, the phone kept its own counsel. It didn’t care that Danny was lost, awake and alone in the middle of the night. Like everything else in the apartment, it wasn't really his.
Ten buttons, that was all it would take. Danny thought about pressing those buttons, wondered what would happen, what his mother would say if he called her after nearly four months of silence, just to hear the sound of her voice. He'd hear it all right… loud and clear. Terissa Dyson was many things, but forgiving wasn't one of them. Danny winced and restlessly flipped the cover of the phone down, up, then back down again. He couldn't dial, but he couldn't quite put the phone away either.
Standing, he slipped the phone into the pocket of his sweat pants and headed for the kitchen. The counters were sterile expanses of mock granite, the cupboards wood veneer and the floor laminate. The effect was sleek, stark, classy and… fake.
Danny poured a glass of water and lifted it to his lips, but the sudden buzzing against his hip almost made him drop it. Fumbling to regain his grip, he set the glass safely on the counter and pulled the phone out of his pocket, flipping it open to find a familiar text message.
3:15
There was no need for a signature. Danny knew who it was from. No one else had his number. Officially, his number didn’t exist, and neither did he. Not anymore.
It took him less than ten minutes to dress and take the elevator down to the ground floor. The usual car, a nondescript black with darkened windows, pulled up just as he walked out the front of the apartment building. Danny didn’t hesitate, sliding into the backseat and pulling the door shut behind him.
He'd never seen the driver. Opaque black glass, the same material as the windows, always separated the back of the car from the front. There was no way for Danny to know if it was the same driver every time, or even the same car. He wasn't the only one of his team that was driven to work this way, either. Danny imagined an entire parking lot full of dark cars and faceless drivers and suppressed a shiver.
He counted the turns to distract himself, working on his mental map of their route. It was a habit that passed the time, nothing more. As far as Danny could tell, he'd never been taken the same way twice, but the ride generally took about an hour. Not this time. Danny was startled when the car came to a stop and the door locks released after no more than thirty minutes. His stomach turned over uneasily. He wasn't sure how he felt about living this close to the company's underground facility. It wasn't that Danny didn't trust them; aside from rumours that the secretive research and development agency had possible military ties, he had no reason to suspect them of being anything more than another company trying to win the technology race.
Still… the sensation of being watched was already starting to make Danny a little twitchy, and the idea of having their eyes in his backyard only made it worse.
Danny swallowed his trepidation and opened the door, finding the familiar empty parking garage on the other side. The elevator was waiting for him, descending smoothly when Danny punched his code into the keypad. There were no numbers, either on the wall or above the door, but Danny was fairly sure that it was more than a couple of floors down to the one he worked on. It was the only floor he'd ever seen. Danny had no idea how many projects the company was working on as they didn't exactly encourage curiosity.
Hale was waiting for him in the hall when the elevator doors opened. Red-haired and square-faced, the head of floor security looked no more than a few years older than Danny himself. In fact, it had been Hale, in the guise of a grad student, who had first approached him at college with a proposition he promised Danny wouldn’t be able to resist. Something to do with computers he'd said. That was six months ago, and since then, Danny had learned the project was a great deal more than that, but Hale had been right, he hadn't been able to resist.
"Hey, Danny." Hale reached out and clapped Danny on the shoulder. "Sorry to drag you out of bed, but the higher-ups insisted."
Danny shrugged. "I wasn't asleep. What's up?"
Hale shook his head. "Not sure. There's been an incident at one of our facilities across town. The police think it's a domestic terrorist case. They're saying some anti-technology nut-job with a whole lot of explosives and a grudge against A.I.s blew the place sky-high."
“Are they right?" Danny asked, stiffening.
"That's what the bosses are trying to figure out." Hale was oblivious to Danny's sudden tension. "Come on, I'll take you in."
"Sure." Danny followed the shorter man down the hall, dodging rushing technicians and harried assistants juggling coffee. For such an early hour, the place was busy. A hint of not-quite panic saturated the air, making Danny even more nervous and jumpy.
Hale didn’t stop at the control center or the labs. Instead, he led Danny down a second hallway, then a third, eventually stopping at one of the conference rooms. He swiped them in without a word, holding a finger to his lips to indicate that Danny should keep his mouth shut as well.
The meeting was already in progress.
Hale took his place to the left of the door, and Danny quietly found a seat. As he slid into the chair, the small, angled screen set into the table directly in front of him lit up.
Hello,
Danny. You received my message?
Danny nodded, knowing the A.I. would be able to see his silent reply via the cameras hanging from the corners.
No one else at the table acknowledged his arrival. Their attention was fixed on the larger screen at the front of the room and Frederick Vaughn, the man in charge of the C.A.I.N. project and Danny's boss.
In a severely tailored black suit, his steel grey hair cut so close that it was almost army regulation, Vaughn looked more like a general than an executive, and he wielded his laser pointer like a weapon. "Miranda Technology Systems," Vaughn identified the building on the screen. "No more than an hour ago, this facility came under attack by the same terrorist group believed to be responsible for the destruction of Zeira Corp."
The picture changed, switching to the charred remains of an office building. "Our intelligence indicates that it is a small anti-technology cult that recruits new members with the threat of a future ruled by machines and the promise of a saviour who will lead humanity to victory. The first confirmed strike was fifteen years ago when their leader attempted to bomb a computer factory and was subsequently remanded to Pescadero State Hospital for the criminally insane. She escaped three years later…"
Vaughn kept talking while Sarah Connor, the woman who had murdered Danny's father and destroyed his world, stared down at them from the flat screen monitor, but Danny barely heard his boss through the roaring in his ears. He caught a few of the others sneaking glances at him over the table, but he ignored them. His father's death was no secret, not here, but he’d never brought it up, and nobody had asked.
The only time Danny's boss had mentioned Miles Dyson to him had been the day they met. He had examined Danny over his desk, openly measuring the gawky twenty-one-year-old while they exchanged empty pleasantries. Danny must have passed because afterwards, Vaughn had taken him to a small lab and introduced him to a primitive looking chess platform cobbled together out of gaming hardware. The computer had been damaged, and Danny remembered thinking it almost looked as if it had been burned, but it wasn't dead.
"This is all that's left of your father's work, Danny," Vaughn had said. "Would you like to help us finish it?"
"Dyson," a gruff voice demanded Danny's attention in the present.
"Sir?" Danny asked, dragging his eyes away from Sarah Connor and his head away from the past, and refocused both of them on Vaughn.
"You know her." Vaughn gestured at the monitor.
"She killed my father," Danny acknowledged with a slight edge to his voice. As you very well know.
"You know her," Vaughn repeated as a quiet murmur hummed through the room.
"I've met her." Danny suspected his boss already knew that, too. "Twice. Once, when I was just a kid, and then again, ten years ago. She's insane."
Vaughn nodded. The murmurs increased, and then cut off abruptly as he shifted his attention back to the rest of the table.
"You mean she was insane," One of the suits on the far side of the table said impatiently. "According to police reports, she just blew herself up."
Sarah Connor, dead? Danny doubted it. His scepticism must have shown on his face, because Vaughn took one look at him and snorted.
"You don't believe it, Dyson? Well, neither do I, but someone, or something, went through a great deal of trouble to make it look like she died in that explosion tonight."
"Something?" a woman a few seats to Danny's left asked, her hand raised as if she was in a classroom.
Vaughn didn't answer her. Instead, he turned back to the screen. "C.A.I.N.," Vaughn addressed the A.I. "Show us the security footage from Miranda, the piece you salvaged before it was altered."
Certainly,
Mr. Vaughn.
Danny blinked, but held back his questions as the Cybernetic Artificial Intelligence Network, the A.I. born of his father's work, the program the company had christened C.A.I.N., brought up a video recording. He watched with rising anger as Sarah Connor climbed out of a hatch in the roof and ran off into the darkness as the building exploded behind her in a halo of fire.
"She faked her death." Danny gripped the edge of the table, ignoring the pain as the rough edge bit into his skin. Sarah Connor always had an out; she let other people do the dying for her.
"Are you going to send this to the police?" The first suit asked.
"No." Vaughn shook his head. "Better if they go on thinking she's dead. What we're interested in is the intelligence that managed to set this up, hacking into a top of the line security system and altering everything from employee to dental records."
"You think it's like…" The suit gestured to the glowing screen, now back to its serene blue. "Is it the other A.I.? The one Zeira Corp was developing?"
No,
my brother is gone.
A collective shiver went through the room, and Danny felt it lick up his own spine. Only Vaughn seemed unaffected by the A.I.'s claim of relation. It wasn't the first time C.A.I.N. had used that term in reference to Zeira Corp's A.I., but it never failed to make Danny uneasy. He knew every line of C.A.I.N.'s code, and the ability to feel a connection with another computer wasn't something they'd programmed into it. C.A.I.N had figured that out himself. It made Danny wonder what else the A.I. could do that they didn’t know about.
"No," Vaughn agreed with C.A.I.N. "There hasn't been a trace of the Zeira Corp A.I. since Connor took out their building. Either they've got it locked up so tightly that it doesn't even have net access, or it was destroyed. This is something else."
There were nods around the table. "So what does all of this have to do with the boy?" Another man asked, indicating Danny. "He's just a tech."
He
is the link.
Vaughn nodded. "Whatever this thing is, it's working for, or with, Sarah Connor and her associates, but it's covered its tracks so well that even C.A.I.N. can't find it. Connor's just as slippery. We need inside information and the Connors have a history with the Dysons."
Danny swallowed as the room erupted into noisy protest. Part of him wanted to slink off back to his lab and his computers. They were right, he was only a tech. These were the people with their asses on the line if Connor decided to target them next. They had contracts to fill, and their clients were the kind that didn’t like a lot of press.
The other part of him, the part that had said yes when Vaughn had asked if he wanted to continue his father's work, that had chosen to leave his mother behind when his work became so sensitive that the company had insisted he be relocated… that part wanted to do this. Wanted revenge for his father’s death. Even knowing his mother would disapprove, that she believed the nonsense Connor had told her, Danny couldn’t give up this chance for a little payback.
When the room subsided, Vaughn raised a questioning brow. Danny squared his shoulders and looked directly at his boss.
“What do you want me to do?”
****
ACT I
Savannah was used to getting up early for school. At home, she had had her own alarm clock, a little yellow duck with a clock set into its tummy that quacked until she woke up and turned it off. Mommy had said it was important that Savannah take responsibility for getting up on her own, because Mommy was very busy with work and with John Henry.
Here, there was no school, no duck, no Mommy, and no John Henry, but Savannah still got up early.
She picked out her own clothes, a blue checked jumper over a white shirt and thick cotton tights. Dressed, Savannah folded her pyjamas neatly and put them under her pillow before making up the bed. That part was harder. The pink comforter was heavy, and the sheets didn't like to pull straight, but she managed.
Next, Savannah padded into her very own bathroom, washed her face and brushed her hair. She couldn't tie it back by herself yet, so she left it loose. Mr. Ellison would do it for her later, if she asked. She might have asked Aunt Sarah, but Savannah was a little bit afraid of her. Mr. Ellison said she was imagining things, but Savannah didn’t think Aunt Sarah liked her very much. She didn’t seem to like Mr. Ellison all the time, either.
The kitchen was dark when Savannah came down the steps, but the lights switched on before she reached it. "Thank you, Cameron," Savannah said automatically, not expecting an answer. Mostly Cameron, the Pirate Queen, only talked to Aunt Sarah, but Savannah kept trying. Mr. Ellison said that Cameron wasn’t used to dealing with children and that she and Sarah were too alike for their own good, but then he asked Savannah not to repeat that last part.
The cupboards were too high for Savannah to reach, so she pulled over a chair and climbed up on top of it to get a cup and a bowl. The fridge was easier, and the cereal was kept on the bottom shelf of the pantry. Savannah put the chair back on the other side of the island before putting her breakfast together.
She paused on her way to the kitchen table, balancing her bowl carefully in one hand and her juice in the other. It seemed rude to sit so far away from Cameron. Aunt Sarah had broken her table, and she looked lonely sitting in a chair all by herself.
Savannah put her bowl and cup back on the counter and dragged and pushed the kitchen table across the floor. The legs rasped and squeaked on the tile, and Savannah was sweating by the time she got it into place in front of Cameron, but once it was there, Cameron looked more like a real person.
Satisfied, Savannah got her breakfast and brought it over to Cameron's new table. After a moment’s thought, she went back to the kitchen and got a second glass of juice, placing that one in front of Cameron's still body before clamouring up into her chair.
"Good morning," she chirped, almost dropping her spoon when the screen in front of her flickered to life.
Good
morning, Savannah. Did you sleep well?
"Yes, thank you," Savannah squeaked, surprised and pleased to have someone actually talking to her. Mr. Ellison tried, but he wasn't really very good at it, and he forgot a lot, too. "How about you?"
I
don’t sleep.
"Oh…" Savannah thought about that. "Don't you ever get tired?"
There was a long pause and Savannah had turned her attention back to her cereal before Cameron responded.
Yes,
I can get tired.
"Is
that why your body is turned off?" Savannah asked. "Is it tired? Mr.
Ellison said you were sleeping so that you could get better. Are you going to
get better soon?"
No.
"Why not?"
It's
broken.
"Mr. Murch can fix you. He helped fix John Henry," Savannah reassured Cameron as she finished her cereal and juice. She cleared the dishes, rinsing them and putting them in the sink. Unsure, she hesitated at the edge of the kitchen. No one else was up yet, and even when they did get up, there still wouldn’t be anything for Savannah to do except go back to her room and play with her dolls or read her books.
She walked back over to Cameron. "Can I stay with you?"
Why?
"I don’t want to be by myself," Savannah admitted timidly.
What
would you like to do?
"We could colour," Savannah suggested. "I have a princess colouring book and new crayons. I don't like the princesses very much, but there are some nice horses and other animals, too."
What
else would you like to colour?
"Hmm… Pirates? With swords and a ship and treasure… and a parrot that talks!"
Okay.
The printer hummed, and Savannah watched as it spit out several sheets. She picked them up to find exactly what she'd asked for: pirates with swords, ships and parrots. There was even one that looked a little like her and another with long hair and an eye patch. "Thank you."
You're
welcome.
Savannah left the papers on the table and ran back to her room to get her crayons. It wasn't long before she was settled at the table again, happily colouring in the little pirate girl's boots. She had set one of the other drawings in front of Cameron and put a crayon in the machine's hand, bending her fingers until it stayed.
Cameron's body remained slack and lifeless, but Savannah didn’t mind; she kept up a steady stream of chatter, glancing up periodically to read Cameron's replies. It wasn't much different than when she’d chatted with John Henry on her computer at school, even if Cameron was a little stiffer, and the familiarity eased some of Savannah's confusion and loneliness.
Mr. Ellison said that Mommy and John Henry had gone on a trip. He didn't know when they would be back, but he'd assured her that they were coming back, and that he, Mr. Murch and Aunt Sarah would take care of her until then. Savannah didn’t exactly think he was lying, but she knew that sometimes people didn’t come back. Her daddy hadn't come back, and neither had Dr. Sherman. People left all the time, sometimes forever.
Savannah was almost finished with her picture and had just asked Cameron's opinion on what colour she should use for the parrot when she heard the coffeemaker switch on in the kitchen. She looked up to see the cursor blinking vacantly, the screen itself blank. She waited for a minute, but Cameron didn’t say anything.
"Cameron?" she prompted, wondering what the machine was thinking about so hard.
Sarah's
awake.
"Is she coming down?" Savannah asked a little nervously.
Soon.
*****
John woke up in the infirmary.
He hadn't gone to sleep there, and it took him a few minutes to piece together just how he'd gotten into one of the narrow bunks. He'd been in Terissa's quarters…
He'd cried himself nearly sick in her arms, and she'd just held him until he'd finished, trailing off into sniffles and shaky hiccups. Then, she'd sat him down in a pile of cushions and made him a cup of tea over a little gas burner.
"The privileges of rank," she said with a warm smile when she handed him the tin cup.
The tea was thin, and there wasn't any milk or sugar, but John savoured the gesture and the heat against his hands. Even the smallest taste of civilization after the last few weeks was welcome. He'd thought he'd grown up rough, training with his mom in the worst and most remote terrain she could find, but nothing had prepared him for this. The sheer destruction and destitution was overwhelming. Clean clothes, decent food, even toothpaste… what he'd considered the basic necessities of life, they were all luxuries here.
“Better?" Terissa asked after a few minutes, sitting down beside him.
"Yeah, thanks." John cradled the cup between his hands, tilting it slightly so that the light fell through to illuminate the leaves swirling around in the bottom. He wondered if there was anyone left who read them and what his would say, if there was. Maybe he didn't have a future anymore, maybe he only got one, and if he threw it away… well, that was it.
"How did she…?" John couldn't finish his thought, couldn't say the words. His mother, dead? It didn’t compute. Sarah Connor was more than his mother, she was the hero of his childhood, his guardian, his whole damned world. And that had been the problem. They'd been too close. She was too intense, too fierce, too demanding. John had needed room, but Sarah had made him fight for it, forced him to push her away just so he could breathe. Now that she'd finally let go, he wanted her back.
Guilt made his guts clench around the tea sloshing around in his stomach. If it was his fault…
"It doesn't matter right now," Terissa said gently, granting him a temporary reprieve. "We'll talk about it another night."
John nodded, oddly relieved. He wasn't sure he really wanted to know anyway. Cancer, a police bullet or a terminator, he didn’t need any of those images confirmed. Better not to know. "She wasn't alone when it happened, was she?" he asked tentatively, needing that much at least to assuage his guilt, even if he didn't deserve it. "I mean, did she have anyone?”
Terissa hesitated a moment, glancing away, then back, as if deciding how much to tell him. John couldn't blame her. Her uncertainty about him stung, but she had every right to hate him and, instead, had held him, given him tea, so he swallowed the hurt and waited quietly.
"She had someone," Terissa said finally.
John felt some of the pain ease, leaving room for curiosity to start nibbling at him. He wondered who it had been. There hadn't been anyone left; no one his mother had trusted. Another question loomed. "Kyle," he blurted. "My… how much does he know?"
Terissa gave him a look and climbed to her feet. "That's between you and your father," she said, making it clear how much she'd been trusted with, even while deflecting the question. "You'll have to ask him." She paused. "But in private, please. For now, as far as this camp knows, you're still just a refugee."
"For now?" John followed her, standing and setting his empty cup down on a stool.
"For now," Terissa repeated. "We'll speak again. I'll send for someone to show you back to your room." She reached for the door but the handle jumped out from under her fingers, wrenching down and back as someone on the other side yanked it open so hard that it slammed against the wall. A red-haired tornado stormed into the room in a swirl of crackling fury, slamming the door behind her.
"Where is he?"
Terissa took the intrusion calmly, holding her ground without twitching a hair, but John shrank back into the shadows uneasily certain that he was the he in question.
"Sierra…" Terissa started patiently, but the woman wasn't listening. She zeroed in on John within seconds, her ice-blue eyes narrowing.
"Do I know you?" John whispered. He was absolutely certain he'd never seen the tall red-headed woman in front of him before; he'd definitely have remembered, but there was something familiar about her… Clearly a soldier, she was wearing the same plain clothes as everyone else. Dark pants tucked into knee-high boots and a worn, sleeveless shirt that bared lean muscled arms with a skull and crossbones tattoo on her right shoulder. Her bright red hair was hacked to a jagged jaw length shag, and she must have just come from some kind of shower because it hung in wet spikes around her angular face.
The last thing John remembered before opening his eyes to the infirmary ceiling was a familiar watch hanging around the woman's neck and a fist heading for his face.
"You're awake."
John scooted back on the cot, an arm half-raised in defence before he even registered the words. The woman Terissa had called Sierra smirked. She was perched on a stool beside the bed, and her hair was completely dry, so John figured he must have been out for an hour or two. His jaw ached, and he prodded it gently, wincing when the pain went from bearable to threatening to send him back into blackness.
"No thanks to you," he managed roughly. "What was that for?"
The smirk vanished. "You've had that coming for a couple of decades. Be glad a bruise is all you got." She hopped down off the stool, moving with the raw, rangy grace of someone who was no stranger to using her body as a weapon. John had seen it before. His mother had moved exactly the same way.
"Come on, I promised Tango I'd get you back to your room in one piece."
John glanced around. They were in a quiet corner of the infirmary, with the only patients in beds close enough to hear them either asleep or unconscious. "You know me," he accused her sullenly.
"Yep," Sierra agreed readily. "And you know me… or you did."
John frowned, trying to think through the pounding in his head. "That's a mean right hook," he allowed grudgingly, sliding off the bed, and leaving alone for now the questions of who had what coming, and just who this woman was and what exactly he’d done that she'd taken such personal offence to.
"I learned from the best." Sierra led John back into the labyrinthine halls of grey cement and metal pipes, pausing every few seconds to exchange a few words or just a nod with the soldiers they passed. Allison and Kyle had been well known by the soldiers at the base, but everyone knew Sierra. John saw respect and even awe in the faces of younger recruits.
He didn't say anything when they got back to a part of the tunnels he recognized well enough to navigate on his own. Sierra had said she was going to see him back to his quarters, and he was pretty sure she’d meant whether he liked it or not.
She hesitated at his door, betraying the first sign of uncertainty he'd seen from her. There were still a few people in the hall, so John opened the door and indicated she could come in. Sierra followed him without a word and closed it behind her.
"You can’t say anything," she told him firmly when they were alone. "Tango told you that, right?"
John nodded, dropping onto the narrow bed. "She said to lay low."
"We'll be putting squads together to look for John Henry." Sierra's voice gentled on the A.I.’s name, something almost soft entering her blue eyes, but it was gone almost before John knew what he had seen. "Until we find him, nothing changes."
"What about Weaver?" John asked, beginning to suspect just who he was talking to.
Sierra snorted, but a noticeable rise in tension confirmed his guess. "We'll be looking, but something tells me she'll find us first."
"Something is probably right," John muttered, wincing at the thought of the pain he knew he had coming tomorrow when Derek and Jesse got a hold of him again. "What do I say about meeting Tango? And this?" His gesture took in his aching jaw, which John was pretty sure was sporting an impressive purple and black bruise by now.
"We thought of that." Sierra pushed a piece of hair behind her ear and leaned back against the door. "That blue light you told Kyle about? We’ve received intelligence from the Spider's people that suggests it's a new neurological weapon Skynet's been experimenting with. We don’t know exactly what it does yet, besides scrambling people's memories, but you're the only person with a firsthand account, so that's why the higher-ups are interested in you." She pointed to his jaw. "As to that, while we were questioning you, you had a flashback, fell and smacked your chin."
John found the unmistakable satisfaction in Sierra's eyes unsettling. This lean and deadly woman seemed as far removed from the quiet little girl John had taught how to tie her shoes as a tiger was from a kitten. But there was no denying the resemblance to Weaver; it was there in her eyes, her hair, and the lines of her face. He still had no idea why she was so angry at him, but it was definitely her.
Motivations and identity aside, however, John had to admit her story made sense. Thorough and simple, it explained his ignorance and anything strange he might say. All he had to do was keep being vague about his background, and people would just assume he was still recovering. He wondered briefly who this Spider was, but shrugged it off as something else that was going to have to wait. "Fine," he agreed. "But can I ask you one more question?"
Sierra’s, no Savannah's, hand was already on the door handle, but she waited, one red brow raised. "What?"
"Your watch…" John gestured to the pocket watch hanging around her neck, the one he knew so well that he could see it with his eyes closed. "Where did you get it?"
Sierra wrapped one hand protectively around the watch, her eyes growing cold. "It was given to me," she said flatly, wrenching open the door, "You left a lot of things behind, John, and some of them are gone forever."
*****
Sarah washed the sweat of restless sleep and nightmares off of her face, scrubbing roughly at her skin, as if soap and water, applied with enough force, could scour the images from her brain. Death, war, destruction, the theme was always the same, but lately, the dreams were getting more vivid, more focused.
Sarah expected to see John. She'd seen him die a hundred thousand different ways, and every time, she was too late to stop it. Those were the nightmares she was familiar with. They had plagued her from the moment he'd been conceived, before she even knew what he would look like, or how much she would love him.
What she hadn’t expected were dreams of a John that was lost and alone, crying in the dark for a mother that never came. She'd started awake over and over again in the last few days, his sobs echoing away into the silence of her room. Out of her bed in an instant, Sarah would be halfway to the door before she remembered that John was far beyond her reach. Wherever, whenever, he was, she could no longer steal into his room in the middle of the night to make sure he was still breathing or soothe him out of his own nightmares.
Cold water couldn’t make Sarah forget, but the simple routine grounded her.
She paused on her way through her room to the catwalk for her gun, shoving it into the back of her jeans where it rested reassuringly against her spine. She probably didn’t need it. There were already weapons stashed all over the warehouse, and Cameron would let them know if anyone came anywhere near the building, but having a loaded gun close to hand made Sarah feel better. It was her own deadly little security blanket, the only one she had. Everything else was gone.
Except one thing.
Sarah hesitated, and then picked up John's watch from the desk. She turned it over in her hands, trying to sort out what it meant to her and how she felt about it. The detonator inside was a painful reminder of the secrets John and Cameron had kept from her, but it also represented the trust the machine had put in John, her determination to end her own existence before she endangered him. In a weird way, it felt like a gift, a sacrifice. Sarah got that. And John had worn it…
"Fuck it," Sarah muttered and hung the watch around her neck, tucking it inside her shirt. The metal warmed almost immediately against her skin, like it belonged there. Feeling a little better, Sarah switched off the light and headed downstairs.
The lights were on, but she didn't really think about it beyond hoping that someone else had put the coffee on. The hope was confirmed by her nose before she reached the kitchen. Murch was probably up, and for his coffee making skills alone, Sarah might have kept the scientist around. Toss in his computer know-how, and he was indispensable.
Sarah had a mug out of the cupboard and filled to the brim before she took in anything beyond the kitchenette. The empty space where the table had been startled her for a moment, until she cast her gaze wider and saw its new location.
Her guts twitched, both at the shift and the reason why Cameron's table had needed replacing. She had come so close to losing it that night. She hadn’t felt so helpless, so hopeless, since Pescadaro.
In losing John, Sarah had lost the anchor that kept her from flying away in the storm of her own madness. If Cameron hadn’t spoken up…
Sarah shook her head. It didn’t matter what might have been. The ‘what ifs’ would drive her crazy faster than all the white walls and dots in the world. She had to focus on what was, and right now, that was stopping Skynet, so that whatever future her son had gone to would be better than the one she saw in her dreams. For that, she needed to stay sane, and she needed to talk to Cameron.
And speaking of the pirate queen… Sarah made her way across the room, coffee cup in hand. A single glance took in a spread of line drawings and crayons across the table and an obviously nervous Savannah. The child was perched on her knees in one of the straight-backed chairs, a purple crayon clenched in her fist, her blue eyes wide and hesitant.
"Good morning, Aunt Sarah," she said gamely.
Sarah winced at the familiarity that Ellison had bestowed on her. It implied a level of responsibility she wasn't quite ready to accept. The girl was a liability, albeit one that was less of a danger to them than they were to her, which only made it worse. Sarah didn’t want a child's blood on her hands. There was enough blood on them already.
"Morning," Sarah managed. "What’s all this?" she gestured at the table, raising her eyes to Cameron's central screen, a single eyebrow crooked in question. There was a certain resemblance about the half-coloured drawing of the long-haired pirate in the eye patch that made her wonder if Cameron was embracing this whole pirate queen idea.
"We're colouring," Savannah said, while the cursor continued to blink, a bit sheepishly Sarah fancied.
"Well," Savannah continued. "I'm colouring. Cameron can't really colour because she's broken. Are you going to fix her?"
Sarah looked down into that earnest face, seeing more there than a child's need to believe that the adults in her world could make everything okay. She saw acceptance of the possibility that Cameron could not be fixed, and at the same time, a desperate hope and an all too familiar loneliness.
"We're going to try," she offered, and Savannah nodded. "Why don’t you go and see if Mr. Ellison is up?"
"Okay." Savannah picked up the picture she'd been working on and carried it off, presumably to show Ellison. Sarah sighed for another childhood cut short and slid into the abandoned chair. Setting her coffee down, she picked up the other picture, turning it around to face the screen.
"Colouring?"
She
was sad.
“And your solution is arts and crafts?"
She
asked.
"Why so accommodating all of a sudden?"
She
brought me juice... and I know what it's like to be alone.
"Hmph…" Sarah snorted, covering her unease at the second time Cameron had referred to being alone, and set the picture back down on the table. Since sharing their own demons after the bombing of Miranda, she and Cameron had been groping their way towards some kind of understanding. John had always been their link. They had argued about him, protected him, and fought for his attention. Now John was gone, and they had lost the force that simultaneously brought them together and forced them apart.
What was left seemed to be a strange version of camaraderie between soldiers, tempered by the inevitable familiarity brought about by spending the better part of two years living together and trying to figure each other out.
You
can't.
For a moment, Sarah thought Cameron had read her thoughts. "I can’t what?" she asked suspiciously.
You
can’t fix me.
Sarah blew out a breath in relief. Cameron in cyberspace she could handle, Cameron in her head was something else entirely. "How do you know?"
It's
broken.
"Your body?" Sarah glanced over at the terminator's still form, the rakish eye patch covering a wound that was healing far more slowly than she'd expected. In fact, it had been days since she'd seen any improvement at all.
Not mine. Not anymore. No chip, just metal and meat.
The eerie echo of Cameron's first evaluation of human death sent a shiver down Sarah's spine. "We can get a new chip…"
No.
"No?"
No,
it is not a mission priority. The body is broken; it should be burned. It's
better for me to be in here.
Somehow, Sarah hadn’t realized that when Cameron had said it was better for her to have given John Henry her chip and gone into the system, the machine had meant permanently. She had assumed that Cameron's body would heal, the way it always had, and that they would somehow find another chip for her to download onto, and then everything would go back to the way it had been before. Miranda was supposed to have been an anomaly. She had missed having the terminator at her back, missed that solid reassurance of having someone on her side that was nearly indestructible.
"I need you mobile," Sarah insisted harshly. "If we’re going to stop Skynet, then I need a body at my back with a gun, not a glorified search engine."
You
have Ellison. He is a trained FBI agent.
"He's a cop," Sarah argued. "It's not the same." And it wasn't, even if Sarah didn’t know exactly why.
It's
close enough.
There was finality to the words on the screen, and Sarah could almost hear Cameron's voice, her usual monotone gone steely with conviction and near-human stubbornness. "Cameron…" she started, only to trail off when the screens suddenly went dark, leaving nothing but a familiar spinning colour wheel and betraying something suspiciously like a sense of humour. Cameron, it appeared, was currently not responding.
****
