The accident blocked the highway for nearly half a mile. The resulting traffic jam stretched out over five more. 

Cars that had been on the fringes of the pileup had escaped with little more than bent bumpers or a bit of lost paint. Their human passengers were equally lucky, suffering only minor scrapes, bruises and strained muscles. Insurance companies would be overflowing with claims of minor physical damage and emotional trauma, but for the most part, the claims would be grossly exaggerated.  

Agent Auldridge left his car along the outer perimeter, parking it among the ambulances and fire trucks strung out in a ragged semi-circle that separated the victims from the merely inconvenienced or voyeuristic. It would have been impossible to drive anything with four wheels any closer, so he walked through the barrage of media and news cameras rolling live feed on a tragedy half the city couldn't see, his badge a shield against their professional curiosity.

In the absence of electrical power, flood lights had been set up to illuminate the scene as dusk became more of a fact than an inevitability. The further he went, the worse the carnage became. Cars upside down, on their sides, and off the edge of the road were twisted and crunched, paint scraped away and glass shattered. Paramedics with stretchers weaved in and out of the tangle, some carrying the wounded, others trying to reach the ones still trapped. Those that were beyond saving had been covered and laid out on the grassy green banks beside the road. When the paramedics had been forced to reserve the last of their sterilized sheets and blankets to warm the living, the survivors had donated whatever coverings they could. Plaid, knit, and even coral pink, the makeshift shrouds stood out like blood-stained flowers on a battlefield.

Aldridge's eye was caught by a pair of bodies under a hand-knit quilt, one of them barely half the size of the other, a child. He thought of Savannah Weaver, the little girl that had gone missing from her school the day Sarah Connor blew up Zeira Corp. Was she still alive? Was her disappearance a coincidence, or was she yet another victim of a madwoman?

"Agent Auldridge?" 

Auldridge's attention was pulled away from the grisly sight by a stocky uniformed officer with a neatly trimmed moustache and blood on the cuffs of his jacket.

"Officer…?"

"Wilson, Darryl Wilson. I paged you, but I didn’t know if you'd be able to make it." The man's relief that Auldridge had finally arrived to take over was as visible as the sweat on his face.

"It was my case." Auldridge indicated that the officer should lead the way. "I appreciate you contacting me."

"Was, Sir?"  Officer Wilson led him past a truck with its windshield shattered and passenger side door torn off, to the knot of officers and middle-aged women gathered beside it. One of the women was having theatrical hysterics while two others tried to comfort her, and the fourth was giving what looked like a long and involved statement, complete with elaborate hand gestures.

"Was," Auldridge confirmed.

The officer shrugged. "Might be about to reopen. When the paramedics found blood on the broken glass in the vehicle but no passengers or registration, we ran the license plate. It came up as stolen. Witnesses claim they saw two women fleeing the scene. One of them apparently pulled the door off the truck with her bare hands and the other fits the description of your suspect.

"They're mistaken." Auldridge took a deep breath before plunging into the maelstrom. "I don't care what your witnesses have to say, Officer Wilson. Sarah Connor is dead."

 

ACT I

Cameron watched from halfway up a forested hillside that ran alongside the freeway as Agent Auldridge joined the crowd around their abandoned truck. She zoomed in, reading his lips as he assured the officers and women that they hadn’t seen what they thought they had.  He was wrong. They'd seen exactly what they were trying, quite animatedly, to explain to the officers on the scene.

Cameron hadn't hesitated when Sarah's door had jammed. She had ripped it free of the truck before Sarah could even try to climb over the broken glass to the driver's side. She had only meant to force it open, but once again, emotion had pushed her into using far more force than she'd planned. The only thought running through her head had been to get Sarah out as quickly, and with as little injury, as she could. The possibility of witnesses hadn't even occurred to her until she had Sarah on her feet, and then the startled ring of spectators had finally penetrated through her fear.

They ran. It was all they could do, taking their bags but leaving their fingerprints and blood inside the vehicle, evidence that even now Auldridge was having collected. Cameron didn't know if he believed what he was telling the police and witnesses. The fact that the truck was stolen was enough to have it searched and examined, but he wasn't sending anyone up into the hills after them. From the blood, he had to suspect at least one of them was injured, but still he held back. Was he hesitating because he didn't see any point in wasting desperately needed manpower to hunt down car thieves? Or because he feared what might happen if he sent anyone after Sarah Connor and the someone, or something, that could rip a car door off its hinges?

Auldridge had gotten his warrant for Ellison's house. Whatever else he may have found there, including records of the synthetic blood that had shown up at several crime scenes, there was a good chance that he had come across several of Sarah’s files that Ellison had signed out of the institution. With those in hand, Auldridge would have proof of Sarah's real fingerprints and blood type. Cameron had changed the digital files to match those of the woman she'd killed at Miranda, but she hadn’t been able to do anything about the paper documents. Auldridge's need to find the answers might unravel her entire deception, putting him, and the entire police department, back on their heels.

He knew Sarah had faked her death once. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to consider the possibility that she had done it again.

"What's he saying?" Sarah's question cut through Cameron's thoughts and she looked back to find the other woman sitting on the ground, leaning against a tree and rubbing fitfully at her left arm. A slight bump in the accident was all she would admit to, but Cameron had been around Sarah long enough to know that if she was admitting to any pain at all, it was more than just a bump.

"That you're dead."

"Good." Sarah leaned forward, draping her arms over her knees and craning her head back to look up at Cameron. "Hopefully he believes it."

"Hopefully," Cameron echoed, feeling the first stirrings of real anger towards the agent. He had always been a threat, but only a minor one. Now he was becoming a problem.

"You don't think he does?"

Auldridge looked up into the trees. They were shielded from human view, but Cameron felt him watching them just the same. "No."

"Great." Sarah shivered, and Cameron yearned to go to her. But despite her injury, Sarah had refused every offer of help on their way up the hill, avoiding Cameron's touch as if it might burn her. Cameron would have liked to have blamed the accident and its inevitable consequences for Sarah's attitude, but the truth was that she had been picking up high levels of stress from the other woman all day. It had started when they’d finally gotten out of bed and had only gotten worse as the day wore on.

What they had done last night…

Sex had never been part of Cameron's programming, but there hadn't been anything in her code that prohibited it either. Once she had freed herself from the artificially imposed boundaries that had kept her mind and body separate, there had been nothing holding her back from exploring that connection to its fullest extent. But Sarah had programmed herself to hate machines. Cameron suspected that making an exception to the rule that had dominated the last seventeen years of Sarah's life had shaken her. She didn't want to risk unbalancing her any further. Not when every time she stepped forward, Sarah took a giant step back.

"We'll have to find another car. It's still over ten miles to the location Ellison gave us," Cameron said instead of giving in to her need for closeness or addressing what it was that held her back. Before last night, she had been bolder, pushing Sarah's boundaries in ways she barely understood, trying to force… something. She hadn't even known exactly what it was she'd been pursuing, not until Sarah had finally stopped running. She'd had very little to lose then. Now she had everything.

Sarah nodded, but Cameron saw the crease of pain between her eyes and the weariness in the set of her shoulders. The last thing Sarah needed was to sit on an unprotected hillside until the accident scene calmed down enough to risk eluding the police to find another vehicle.

"We could call Ellison." Cameron almost blurted the suggestion, her voice rising in a concern she could no longer hide, discarding caution in favour of protectiveness. "He could meet us."

"No." Sarah shook her head. "If Auldridge really is on to us, I don't want to risk bringing Savannah out here."

"She might be safer with him." The thought of losing Savannah was nearly unbearable, but the thought of losing Sarah… Cameron looked back down to the road where Auldridge was supervising the team going over the damaged truck. "He cares. He would take care of her."

Sarah snorted with the first hint of humour she'd shown all day. "He doesn’t have a clue how to take care of her. A machine would take her away from him before he so much as got his gun out of the holster. No, she stays with us."

"Then we'll have to train her." Unable to resist it completely, Cameron finally turned her back on the road and moved to stand in front of Sarah. She needed to be nearer, even if she couldn’t touch. "She'll have to know how to hide, when to run and when to fight. If she's staying, she needs to know how to survive."

"Like John…" Sarah trailed off with a tight smile that spoke more of pain than pleasure. "So I get to turn another child into a soldier, even though she'll probably hate me for it as much as he did."

 "She might," Cameron agreed. "But she'll be alive."  

"And that's all that matters, right?"

"It's hard for anything else to matter if you're dead."

"You've got me there, girlie."  Sarah rubbed the back of her neck, trying not to worry about whether or not her skin was a little warmer to the touch than it should have been. The stress of the accident, followed by the exertion of the climb, that was all it was. Or a touch of the flu or maybe it was just having Cameron standing so close that she was practically between Sarah's legs.

"Sarah?" The worry in Cameron's voice brought Sarah's head back, and her spine complained bitterly at how far it had to bend for her to look Cameron in the eye. "Are you okay?"

"Fine…" Sarah searched Cameron's face, taking in the lacerations across the machine's brow, cheek and neck from the broken windshield. It wouldn't take long for them to heal, but Sarah knew now that Cameron would feel them until they did. "But you're not."

Cameron lifted a hand to the worst of the gashes, a deep slice over her eye. She brought her fingers back down, looking almost surprised to see them tipped in blood. She wiped it off on her pants. "Superficial. They'll heal."

"But they hurt." It wasn't a question. 

"Yes."

"Come here," Sarah whispered.

Cameron hesitated, and the uncertainty in her eyes hurt, but it was only a moment's pause, and then she was kneeling, her hands on Sarah's knees. The chaste touch burned through Sarah’s jeans, and she took a deep breath, ignoring the scent of cheap motel shampoo that somehow still managed to be alluring. She reached out and pulled one of their bags closer, rummaging through it for the first aid kit.  

Cameron stayed perfectly still while Sarah extracted a handful of antiseptic wipes, but Sarah felt her shiver when she stroked the first one down the side of her face. She took Cameron's chin in her hand, tipping her head left, and then right as she cleaned off the worst of the blood and dirt.

Cameron's hands slid over onto Sarah's thighs, and Sarah responded instinctively by pressing the inside of her knees against Cameron's hips. Cameron felt solid and real, the warmth of her a shield against the evening's chill. Before Sarah knew what she was doing, she had urged the cyborg closer and discarded the pretence of first aid to cup that perfect porcelain doll face in hands that were suddenly shaking.  

"Sarah?"

"You…." Sarah swallowed, feeling Cameron's skin under her fingers, her breath against her lips. She felt her body react and felt the fear. "You… should be watching the road," she finished in a rush.

Cameron stiffened, pulling back and away from Sarah's touch within a second of the words leaving her mouth. Sarah wanted to take them back, she wanted to call Cameron back, but she didn’t do either.

Instead, she let Cameron return to her surveillance. Silhouetted against the harsh flood lights, the terminator was a stark symbol of unwavering loyalty, a machine with the body of a dancer and the appetites of a sexually starved teenager. Sarah closed her eyes but the image was burned onto the insides of her eyelids, just as the memories of their shared night had engraved themselves into her brain. Taunted and denied, Sarah's sulky libido started throbbing in time with her arm, and she smacked the back of her head against the tree in sheer bloody-minded frustration. What the hell was she doing?  

*****

 

"Anything yet?"

Sierra barely gave John a sideways glance as he inched up to her position, belly down under the cover of dead scrub and fire blasted rubble and looking out over the dusk-shrouded valley below them, but even that was enough to make him wish he'd kept his mouth shut. Whatever tentative imitation of friendship they had been building between them since she’d given him back his watch, it seemed to have vanished in the instant he'd revealed the existence of the time machine.

"Did I give the signal?" Sarcasm should have been difficult to convey in a whisper, but Sierra didn’t seem to have any trouble. Something else she had in common with his mother.

"No," John mumbled because her tone demanded it and the soldiers to either side of them were starting to look over curiously.

"Then I haven’t seen anything yet." The words were civil, but the implication was one of the clearest fuck offs he'd ever been the recipient of.

Properly chastised, even if he wasn't exactly sure he'd deserved it, John bit back what he'd been going to say about the wisdom of staying out in the open after dark and waiting to meet someone who might not be coming, and scooted back down the slight rise until he was well within the ruins the squad was using for cover. Allison shouldered her rifle to help him to his feet, giving him a sympathetic slap on the shoulder.

"Don’t take it personally. She's been snarling at everyone since we called off China Lake, even me."

"She never snarls at you," John retorted, making Allison smile. He tried to ignore the way it warmed him from head to toe. Sierra had one thing right; Allison was off limits. Even if Skynet wasn't chasing her now, he didn't want to give the damn thing a reason to start thinking about it.

"Maybe not," Allison fell into step beside him as they went deeper into the burned out building. "But I'm pretty sure she's wanted to at least twice." Despite the lightness of her tone, John heard worry underneath Allison's teasing.

He had yet to figure out the connection between her and Sierra. They weren't friends, or at least, he'd never seen them together outside of a group or a squad, but Allison had admitted that Sierra took an acute interest in her safety, and John himself had seen how the older woman watched her. Sierra had warned him to steer clear of Allison. Was that only because she didn't want history to repeat itself, or was there some other reason? 

Duke trotted through the rubble to join them, nothing but one shadow among many until he was almost at their heels, and John felt his shoulders clench at the sight of the animal. No, not animal, metal masquerading as an animal, Weaver. The machine who had claimed to be Sierra's mother was still pretending to be Allison's dog.

John had intended to reveal her. He was bound by both honour and friendship to tell Allison at least that her beloved pet was most likely a rotting corpse stuck in a hole somewhere. But he couldn't. Not only because it would hurt the girl he was becoming dangerously fond of, but because he still had no idea what Weaver's agenda was.

Would she kill Allison to keep her secret safe? John couldn’t afford to doubt that she would. His mother had once teamed up with a triple eight to destroy a liquid metal terminator, and she'd barely survived the experience. The resistance as it was now had no experience with machines like Weaver. From what John had seen and heard, there simply weren't any in this timeline. 

Weaver seemed to share at least some of their goals; she had told John about the trap at China Lake after all, but he had no way of knowing what her loyalties truly were. If an HK hadn't interrupted their one and only chance to combine forces so long ago, it might have been different. They might have had a chance to work together. Maybe Cameron wouldn’t have… but then he would never have met Allison…

John shook off the what-ifs, saying nothing as Allison gave Duke a welcoming scratch behind the ears. He just didn’t know enough yet. Weaver had 'slept' at Allison's bedside for nearly a year without harming her. John had to trust that she wasn't going to start now. 

For her part, Weaver ignored him completely, staying on the opposite side of Allison. He imagined she knew exactly what he was thinking and had come to the same conclusions. He couldn’t afford to betray her, so he wasn't a threat. John wondered if she intended to continue to use him the way she had used him to carry the news of the time machine. Was that why she had let him tag along to the future? To be her puppet?  It seemed plausible, but if she had any grand ideas of manipulating the resistance through him, she'd be disappointed. Even if Tango and Prophet hadn't had the utter and complete loyalty of their people, he had the sneaking suspicion that Sierra, whatever her position really was, would never tolerate him having any kind of power.

"Prophet's late," John offered, both to fill the silence and because it was probably at least part of the reason that Sierra was being even more difficult to get along with than usual. The rendezvous should have taken place hours ago, in the daylight, but now the light was almost gone, and there had been no sign or word of the rebel leader. "And it's getting dark." 

Allison frowned, not saying anything as they reached their post, waving another pair of soldiers on. Sierra had them rotating around ruins at the top of the overlook every half hour, claiming it kept their eyes fresh. Considering there was less and less to see every minute, John figured she was just doing it to keep them from getting bored. "She won't leave him," Allison said when they were out of earshot.

"I know." John rubbed the back of his neck. "But what if something happened?"

"If he had a run-in with metal, you mean?" Allison stared out into the night.  "He has a personal guard. Sabine and her squad should have been with him…”

"But he sent her ahead to guard John Henry," John finished for her, bitterly aware that Sierra was probably blaming him for that, too.

Allison unslung her gun, keeping it at the ready against whatever might be coming up the hill after them. "It's not your fault,” she said, correctly guessing the source of his guilt. "Prophet and Tango made the call. You're not the reason he showed up."

"Aren’t I?" John wasn't sure what prompted the question. Sulky pride perhaps. Or maybe he just needed someone to take him seriously, someone who hadn't known him before, someone who might actually like him.

"Are you?" Allison turned away from the view down the hill to look up at him. Her eyes held a mixture of challenge and wariness. She had said before that she trusted Tango's judgement, that she wouldn't push to find out who he was or where he’d come from, but here he was, practically offering to tell her everything, and curiosity was a powerful force.

"I…" John would never know whether or not he might have spilled his guts then and there, because before he got any further, Duke snapped his head up and snarled, and then all hell broke loose around them.

"Metal!"

The shout went up around the perimeter, picked up by each soldier in turn until it was drowned out by the roar of guns and the screams of pain from those who hadn't gotten down fast enough.

John and Allison hit the ground in unison.

"Duke!" Allison hissed, but the last they saw of the German Shepherd was a furry tail as the dog bolted through the ruins towards Sierra's position.

Weaver ignored the bullets and charges making the dirt and gravel leap and scatter around her. A few of them made contact, leaving silver craters in the illusion of a dog, but she simply reformed the skin and fur as she ran. This form had its advantages, and she reached the other side of the camp much faster than she would have on two legs.

A growl formed in her throat, the fury almost blinding her. It had been a long time since she had felt any loyalty to her creator, but she had not hated it, not the way she hated it now, for threatening not only her freedom and that of her kin, but the lives of those she had come to consider her own. A machine she was, metal and programming instead of flesh and blood; she did not understand humans, she did not trust them, but she was beginning to understand what drove them.

Mine! The thought filled her consciousness, driving out everything else as she leapt for the back of the terminator pointing a gun at her daughter's back.

Sierra turned just in time to see the machine that would have killed her taken to the ground by a dog. Even in the midst of chaos, she stood frozen in pure shock, her eyes widening as Duke wrapped his mouth around the back of the terminator's neck and crunched down.

It wasn't possible.

She was watching a dog kill a machine, and it simply wasn't possible. Long white teeth shivered into silver knives, shearing through flesh and chrome as if it was paper. The terminator tried to pull its attacker off, but the dog was locked on, and it was only seconds before it bit through the wires connecting the machine's chip to its body.

The terminator gave one last twitch and lay still, but Sierra had no time to dwell on her unlikely rescuer, there was another machine, there was always another machine, and she blanked her mind as she brought her rifle up again and again, doing what she had been trained to do since she was six years old.

John and Allison fought their way towards Sierra. They didn't have to discuss it; there was no other place to take their stand that made sense. If Allison had not been with him, John would have been torn, but with her at his side, there was no conflict. Friends or not, he and Sierra were connected, and if there was anyone who could lead them out of this mess, it would be a woman trained by his mother.

She had lost her gun by the time they reached her.

Hands empty save for a wicked looking knife, Sierra dodged and spun away from the powerful but graceless grab of a female skinned machine. There were knots of fighting going on around her, John saw Weaver, still on four legs, keeping two other machines busy and a trio of soldiers working together to try and take down another.

Sierra fought alone, and despite the urgency, John took a moment just to stare. She didn’t fight like his mother. Sarah had known how to lay an ambush and hit from behind, but when it came down to fisticuffs, she was a straight-forward brawler. He'd never seen anyone, not even the vicious men that had trained them in the jungle, fight as fiercely as she had, but for all of that, Sarah Connor could not have done what Sierra was doing now.

The rule had been drilled into his head as long as John could remember. Run. Never engage a machine in combat unless you have a plan and a shit-load of firepower. A human cannot take a terminator in hand-to-hand combat. Maybe no human ever had… before Sierra.

It was like she knew what it was going to do before it did, and by the time it had done it, she was gone. Machines were strong and fast, but they were still slightly awkward, mechanical. They relied on force, not agility. Sierra was using that. If it was fast, she was faster. Her knife was like an extension of her hand, flicking in and out as she danced around the machine, cutting through skin and slicing through wires wherever there wasn't a metal plate to protect them. She knew exactly where to cut, exactly what damage would make the machine lose the most mobility.  

John's mother couldn't have trained her to do that. Someone else had. Someone who had intimate knowledge of how terminators were put together, how signals travelled through their bodies, how their own fighting abilities were programmed... Cameron. John felt the air leave his lungs, it wasn't possible, not without a chip… but the evidence was playing itself out right in front of him. No one else could have done it. Sierra had to have trained with a terminator to fight one like this, trained day after day, for months, for years.

And Sierra had known Cameron wasn't on John Henry's chip.

The drawing on her wall, the way she looked after Allison, it all made sense in one breathless moment.

Spinning, Sierra slammed her foot into the back of a damaged knee, and the terminator fell forward. She was crouched on its back in a second, driving her knife in on first one side of its neck and then the other, severing the primary cables. It jerked once and then the light in its eyes went out. Not taking any chances, she cut through the scalp and pried out its chip.

One down and at least a dozen to go.

John was moving again even as the chip was consumed by fire, its phosphorous coating igniting in the chilly evening air. Allison had gone on without him when he froze, and she helped Sierra to her feet, clasping hands briefly with the older soldier. They exchanged fierce grins, and then John caught up and the three of them went on together, gathering the rest of their squad as they went.

It was a losing battle. Even with Weaver and Sierra, there were too many machines, and it was dark, giving the enemy a distinct advantage. There were less than half of them left when John finally accepted that he was going to die. He only hoped he went before either Allison or Sierra; he didn't think he could stand to watch them be killed.

When a machine got past his gun and grabbed him by the arm, tossing him clear of the nearly standing building they'd set their backs to, John thought his wish had been granted. He hit the ground hard enough to knock the breath out of his lungs. His weapon went skittering off into the night, and a foot on his wrist halted any move he might have made to reclaim it.

The terminator was big. It blotted out the firefight going on behind them, and when it reached down, John closed his eyes tightly and clung to memories of his mother, of Cameron and Allison, even Sierra, even his father. He felt strangely calm. The pain that knifed through his heart in that moment wasn't fear, but shame, that everything his mother had fought for was coming to nothing. He had failed her.

Fingers grazed his neck, but the expected choke hold didn’t come. Instead there was a flash of light and the boom of a pulse rifle, and the weight on his arm fell away.

John's eyes snapped open. There was still a dark shape looming over him, but this time the hand reaching down was human, and the swell of a dozen or more human voices screaming defiance had added themselves to his little band, pinning the machines between them. The fight had just become decidedly one sided in their favour.

John blinked, squinting up at a face hidden in shadows, and then extended a shaky hand. The soldier's grip was firm and strong; he pulled John to his feet in one smooth motion, stepping back while he caught his breath.

"Thanks," John gasped when he could breathe again.

"No need to thank me." The man's voice was deep and a little rough, and despite the situation, it held a hint of humour. "Your mother would rise from her grave to kill me herself if I let anything happen to you."

 "Elli-" John nearly bit off his tongue to keep the name from escaping his lips. Like Tango, the cop that had chased him and his mother for years would probably prefer to keep his identity secret. "How… who…" Completely stunned, he couldn't seem to form a complete sentence. The man in front of him wasn't the one he remembered. Like Tango, he’d aged, and time had not been kind. Deep wrinkles around his eyes and a scar curving back off his forehead and continuing deeply into his close-cropped hair, spoke of a decade on the front lines.

 Ellison just smiled through a dark beard laced with silver. "You can call me Prophet. And unless I'm very much mistaken, we have a lot to talk about, John Connor."

*****

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