ACT II

The next time Sarah woke up enough to remember the experience, it was early rather than late, but still dark outside. Catching sight of a figure in the chair beside her, she tried to sit up and the world spun around her. What little there was in her stomach decided to make an abrupt reappearance, but before she could disgrace herself all over the blankets, a plastic bowl was placed in her hands and gentle fingers held her hair back.

"Easy, don’t fight it." The voice was vaguely familiar, and Sarah felt too damned rotten to look for her gun, so she let the woman support her until she had finished puking up everything short of her toenails. When she was done, a moist towel was pressed into her shaking hands and she was able to wipe her own face. The cold water felt good, but she longed for a toothbrush and the strength to get to a sink.

"Who…?"

"You don't remember me?" There was a rustling and a click, and then the room was bathed in the light of the bedside lamp. Apparently the power had been restored.

Sarah blinked in the harsh light, everything swimming before her eyes as they adjusted. She blinked again and the blonde woman sitting on the edge of the bed beside her slowly came into focus. "You're the doctor… you took a bullet out of me."

"Felicia Burnett," the doctor supplied. "I don't think we were ever properly introduced."

Sarah looked down at the offered hand in disbelief, but Felicia gave her a tired smile, so she took it gingerly, amused, if that was possible, at the oddity of shaking hands on her sickbed with someone she'd once abducted at gunpoint. "Sarah Connor."

"I know." Felicia released her and took the bowl away, setting it on the floor and covering it with a towel. She gave Sarah a cup of ice chips and resettled on the bed. "I saw you on the news. Now eat those slowly, you're dehydrated, but your stomach won’t be able to handle a lot of liquid all at once right now."

"Why are you…?" Sarah tried to wrap her reluctant brain around Felicia's presence and couldn't quite fathom how the woman had appeared at her bedside. For a moment, she feared she might be hallucinating.

"Your friend is very persuasive." Felicia tapped the side of the cup pointedly when Sarah showed no sign of touching the ice. "Drink."

"My friend?" Sarah shook her head, unable to imagine Ellison risking Savannah's safety by bringing her a doctor, which only left... “Cameron brought you here?” she asked, wincing at Felicia's use of the word persuasive. If Sarah knew Cameron at all, there hadn't been a great deal of talking involved.

"That's one way of putting it," Felicia allowed before changing the subject. "I should check your vitals again once you've finished. I did a preliminary examination when I got here, but it's been a few hours." 

Sarah nodded her assent and shook a few of the ice chips in her mouth, letting them melt on her tongue while she waited for her mind to clear enough to consider the situation, instead of simply reacting to it. There was a lot to consider. Cameron had broken her own rules, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the promise Sarah had demanded from her by bringing Felicia here. She had put them all at risk. Felicia had kept Sarah's secrets once, but that was then, and the stakes had changed. Sarah could guess at Cameron’s motives; the terminator had reacted badly to Sarah’s collapse and the promise Sarah had demanded of her, but the violation of her own security protocols was an act of desperation, of fear.

"She shouldn't have done that," Sarah admitted, a chill that went deeper than the ice in her mouth creeping into her bones. "You shouldn't be here."

"There seems to be a lot of that in my life." Taking the half-empty cup, Felicia put it on the bedside table and strapped a vinyl cuff around Sarah's uninjured arm. "I'm going to check your blood pressure now," she said unnecessarily, her voice taking on the low soothing tones Sarah remembered from their last encounter.

Sarah wondered briefly what the doctor's bedside manner was like when she wasn't in fear of her life, but the building pressure around her arm made it difficult for her to focus. "You seem very calm about all of this."  

"I'm terrified." Felicia read the dial before stripping the cuff off. “But I’ve spent almost the last three years of my life being terrified. You of all people should understand that. Considering your record, I would think you'd be an expert in the horrors the human mind can accustom itself to." 

The sudden release and scrape of vinyl and Velcro against Sarah's skin was near agony. She tried to jerk away from the cold press of a thermometer into her ear, but she was too weak to do more than lean, and Felicia just leaned right along with her. "It's not true," she protested, suddenly unable to bear the idea of being thought insane and a murderer by this woman. "What they say about me, it isn’t true…" 

"Don't," Felicia cut her off before Sarah even knew what lies or truths she was going to use this time, betraying the first hint of anything other than professional concern. "Don't lie to me, and don't try to pretend I'm not here right now because my other option was a bullet. I've had enough of both to last me a lifetime. Just let me do my job."  

Unable to find anything to say to that, Sarah allowed an awkward silence to envelope them while Felicia checked her other ear. The shrill beep of the thermometer brought Sarah's wandering attention away from Felicia's state of mind and back to her own condition. "I'm not getting better, am I?" she asked, as much to break the tension as to confirm what she had already suspected.

"No," Felicia admitted bluntly, hooking a stethoscope into her ears and sliding the end under Sarah's shirt. "Now take a deep breath."

Sarah obliged, or she tried to. There didn’t seem to be enough room in her lungs for anything other than a gasp. Felicia frowned and moved the stethoscope a few times before putting it away and closing her fingers around Sarah's wrist to check her pulse.

“Is it…” Sarah swallowed hard before she could voice her biggest fear.  “Cancer?”

Felicia finished counting before answering Sarah's question. "It's not cancer. Can you still use your left arm?"

Sarah braced herself and extended her arm from its default position, tucked up against her ribs where it had some support. It felt heavy and wooden and even the pain didn’t seem to belong to her anymore. The irregular splotches and fiery red lines spreading in an angry tangle from the old scar under her bicep had migrated to her chest. She tried to flex her fingers and the pain became personal rather quickly. Gasping, Sarah blinked back tears and Felicia helped her to settle her arm back against her body.

"If it's not cancer…" Sarah breathed slowly against the pain. "What are my other options?"

"You have an infection in the long bone of your upper arm." Felicia's voice was gentle, but final. "Judging by your scar, the initial crack or break happened at least six months ago."

"It healed…" Sarah started to protest, but Felicia shook her head.

"It healed over," she explained.  "But when the bone fused, it trapped bacteria inside, isolating it from the rest of your body and concentrating the infection. Have you experienced any significant weight loss, persistent exhaustion, headaches, paranoia or difficulty concentrating?"

"All of the above," Sarah admitted, reeling from the idea that the symptoms that she had been ignoring for the last few months hadn’t been harbingers of the cancer after all. "Shouldn’t it have hurt more?"  

"Pain can be controlled," Felicia pointed out, eerily echoing the words of the hallucinatory Kyle that had guided Sarah through their previous meeting. "Your immune system has been burning up all of your resources trying to fight back, but the infection has eaten away at the bone from the inside. Even a minor blow could have cracked it again and set the infection loose in your bloodstream."

"We were in a car accident…" Sarah mused aloud, finally putting all of the pieces together. The finished picture nearly stopped her heart. “Sepsis,” she whispered.  "I saw it in the jungle when I was training John. With bullet wounds…"  

"Sepsis," Felicia agreed. "You need to be in a hospital."

"They could fix it?" Sarah asked, knowing even as she did so that the answer was irrelevant. Hospitals were off limits.

Felicia hesitated. "If they removed the damaged bone and tissue, you might have a chance. At this point, they would probably recommend amputating the entire arm, and then you’d need a transfusion, antibiotics-"

"And if I don't go?" Sarah cut her off, visions of backwoods amputations turning her stomach and making her light headed.

"Then you'll die." Felicia made no attempt to soften the truth. "Not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but sooner rather then later. I can slow it down with antibiotics, IV's, even surgery, but I can’t stop it, not here." She glanced around the room, taking in the bland furnishings and drab walls. “You’ll die here.”

*****

 

Morning found John alone again. Kyle had left at dawn for a shift on the walls, leaving John to catch an hour of sleep before his own day started. He should have been exhausted, but aside from straining his voice, spending the greater part of the night swapping stories with his father had left him feeling surprisingly well.

The prospect of speaking with Sierra only dimmed the glow a little. John didn't really think she would stop him from trying to go home, a part of him knew that no child raised by his mother could grow up to be so cruel, but that didn’t mean she had to make it easy for him. He suspected her personality would demand the very opposite.

Protocol required, and propriety suggested, that John wait for Sierra to send for him. Even in her public persona, she outranked him enough that she had every right to refuse to see him until she was good and ready, and their particular situation made any breach of that etiquette akin to baiting a shark. John went looking for her anyway.

He should have remembered who he was dealing with.

The tunnels were busy, and John had no trouble finding people who had seen Sierra that morning. The problem was they had all seen her in different places. John covered close to ten miles before noon, criss-crossing back and forth through the base before he accepted that he was being led around by the nose by a woman who had no desire to be found.

Footsore and filthy from getting lost for nearly an hour in an abandoned and very narrow part of the tunnels, John finally gave up. Tango found him on his way back to his room and took pity on him.

"She really ran you ragged, didn’t she?" Tango asked when they were settled in her quarters. She gave John a damp towel and a cup of tea and he was grateful for both. Scrubbing his face clean, he just grunted in response to the question, and Tango chuckled.

"I'm sorry." She sobered and settled down on the cushions beside him. "It's not really funny. I love Sierra like a daughter, and I respect her as much as it is possible to respect another human being, but if she has one major flaw, it’s that she's incapable of letting anything go once she's fixed herself on it. Sometimes that's been in her favour, most of the time it just gets her hurt. Once in a while, it hurts someone else."  

"Good to know she's fixed herself on hating me then…" John muttered into his cup, not mollified in the least by the discovery that he wasn't the only one who thought Sierra would benefit from having her intensity dialled back a little… or a lot.

"Not hating you," Tango corrected him. "Competing with you… she can’t get past the idea that you’re a threat to her, so she has to put you down at every opportunity. It's not personal, it's just who she is."

"A sadist?" John suggested, examining a particularly tender bruise on his elbow that he'd gotten from tripping over a chunk of concrete in a lightless tunnel.

"Scared," Tango countered. "Sometimes I think she's been scared her whole damned life. Ever since that machine killed her parents. It's made her hold too tight and push too hard."

John shrugged. "She's not the only one who's been scared."

"No, she isn’t." Setting her empty cup down on the floor, Tango covered one of John's hands with her own. "It's one of the many things you have in common. That and losing people."

John sighed, feeling most of his anger drain away. "You're telling me I should let her make the first move?"

"Unless you enjoy chasing your own tail, yes, that might be your best option."

"Fine." John took the last swallow of his tea and cradled the cup between his hands. "So what do I do while I'm waiting?"

"First," Tango climbed stiffly to her feet and offered John a hand up. "We eat lunch, and then we talk about a few things you need to know before you go back."

*****

 

"Then you'll die."

The kitchen was directly underneath Sarah's bedroom, and Cameron could hear every word that passed between her and the doctor, even over the running water in the sink. Sarah's voice was low and breathless, as if speech was a battle she was on the losing side of. Felicia's was firmer, but there was fear there as well; they were well matched, the two of them, women living years in the shadow of their own fears, yet fighting to survive another day.

Sarah’s days had just run out; Cameron could hear it in her voice, her acceptance of the diagnosis, her death sentence.

It took Cameron a moment to place the injury—her memory was absolute, but a year ago her focus had been wrapped up in John. Sarah had existed primarily as she related to him and to the mission. Cameron had first noted the wound in Sarah's upper arm as part of a routine scan the night they had spent in the church, when Sarah had found her sitting under an effigy of Jesus on the cross. The day Cameron had gone bad, and John had brought her back again. The voices over her head and the rush of water over her hands were suddenly blocked out as an odd roar overwhelmed her auditory inputs as it sunk in that this was her fault. She had done this to Sarah. It was her fault.

Her eyes blinked open and she stared curiously at the pink water overflowing the sink and dripping down to soak her socks, the white cotton slowly absorbing the color drop by drop. She blinked again and raised her hand from the beneath the water’s surface, her head tilting to the side as she gazed at the long shard of glass protruding from her palm. A delayed sting of pain twitched her fingers as another drop of synthetic blood plinked into the water and all she could do was watch as the drops fell, from her hand to the sink, from the sink to her socks.

Sarah was dying.

Between one synthetic breath and the next, Cameron saw her whole world fracture, tiny cracks in her field of vision expanding until all color muted, the vivid red on her palm the last to seep away. She reached for the broken glass in her palm, missing it by inches as sensory inputs scrambled her hand-eye coordination. Her head jerked to the side as she tried to focus her vision, and she managed to grasp the slippery glass and yank it out, the pain she hadn’t felt when she had impaled herself crackling through her sensors like a lightening storm.

Sarah was going to leave. Forever. No more conversations. No more touches. No more smiles or intense green eyes.

The reality infiltrated every system. Like a virus that raced ahead of Cameron’s efforts to contain it, the truth corrupted every part of her. There was no switch to flip to stop the anguish. No program she could deploy to deflect the sudden grief that swallowed her whole.

“No,” Cameron whispered into the stillness of the kitchen.

“NO!” she screamed the second time. The remains of the glass went flying. A sudden burst of violence sent it crashing into the floor. Its destruction felt good. Necessary.

A chair came next. Swept off the floor with both hands, Cameron slammed it into the wall, shattering it into kindling. Anger was the only thing that made sense. It burned through the pain, giving her purpose, giving her a temporary reprieve from the grief that threatened her very sanity.

From the doorway, a wide-eyed Savannah watched. She clutched her giraffe, watching Cameron as she raged. She heard footsteps, the sound of Mr. Ellison arriving with the doctor in tow. His hands came down on Savannah’s shoulders and he pulled her back against him just as Cameron swept everything off of the counter. The microwave hit the floor and exploded with a bang and a flash, filling the air with the acrid scent of burning metal.

Cameron grabbed the remaining chair and hurled it through the window, wishing she could make someone hurt as much as she did. Wishing her strength could stop something microscopically small from taking the one thing she’d ever wanted for herself. Sarah was going to leave. She couldn’t leave. She couldn’t.

“Cameron!” Ellison shouted when Cameron put her right arm through the kitchen island. His shout was thunder on a clear day, commanding, and utterly without room for negotiation.

Cameron’s head jerked up, her eyes glowing an unholy red. The doctor gasped and stumbled backward, fear etched in every line of her face. Cameron’s gaze shifted to her, to the woman who’d pronounced Sarah’s death sentence. She took a determined step forward.

Ellison continued to call Cameron’s name, but it was a much smaller voice that finally sliced through Cameron’s rage and anguish.

"Aunt Cameron…?" Still in her nightgown, Savannah was half-hidden behind Ellison in the doorway. Her voice trembled, and her eyes, fixed first on Cameron, and then the destruction around the terminator, were filled with fear.

That blue stare cut Cameron right down to what passed for her soul. Horrified and vulnerable, the red in her eyes faded and she froze, trembling as the need to destroy now weighed with the desire to comfort. She couldn't bear to have Savannah looking at her like that. As if she was a monster, or worse… as if Cameron had betrayed her.

"I…" Cameron couldn't find the words to explain herself, not to Ellison and not to Savannah. Language itself seemed to have turned on her. 

Ellison swore under his breath and pushed Savannah back to the edge of the doorway.  "Go up to your room and close the door," he ordered her before stepping into the kitchen.

Cameron stepped back because she didn’t know what else to do without making the situation worse, but her eyes sought and found Savannah's. The little girl had ignored Ellison's instructions, and she was hovering just outside the kitchen. 

"Don't be afraid," Cameron whispered, finding her voice again in the face of losing the only person who had never seen her as a machine first and a person second. "Please…"

Savannah hesitated, clutching the doorway so hard that her tiny hands were white. Cameron took a step forward, hearing Ellison curse, and causing Savannah to shrink back even farther. She stopped. The ties of affection and trust that had been forming between them since the morning Savannah had brought Cameron's broken body a glass of orange juice wavered and nearly snapped. If Savannah ran, they would shatter completely, and there would be nothing left to hold her together.

"Please," Cameron whispered again, dropping awkwardly down to her knees as every component of her system seized. She ignored the sharp pain of glass and wood biting through her jeans. Physical pain was virtually swept away by the whirling maelstrom of emotion. Her skin would heal, the part of her that needed to be seen as something more than a machine might not.

Savannah jumped a little when Cameron collapsed, but she held her ground even though her knees were shaking. She didn’t know what to do. The red-eyed machine that had been rampaging around the kitchen looked like her Cameron, and sounded like her too, but if Savannah had learned anything in her short life, it was that appearances could be deceiving and she already knew that some machines were bad.

"Go upstairs, Savannah," Ellison said again from across the room. He sounded scared, but Savannah already knew that he was afraid of Cameron. He pretended that he wasn't, but he was. He didn't trust her, but Aunt Sarah did.

Savannah lowered her eyes back to Cameron. She was kneeling on the floor, blood leaking onto the linoleum from her knees and hands and mingling with the water and debris, and she looked scared, too. Scared the way Savannah was, of being alone. Savannah didn’t want to leave either. She wanted to stay with her Aunts. Letting go of the wall, she took a step forward.

"Savannah…"

"It's okay, Mr. Ellison," Savannah reassured him. "Cameron won’t hurt me."

"I know, sweetheart." He made his voice very soft and soothing and Savannah found herself resenting it.

Ellison’s gaze went to the shell-shocked doctor and he swore inwardly, not sure who he should wrangle first. "But she's not herself right now,” he continued. “We need to go away for a little while, and when we come back..."

"No!"  Savannah took another step. "I'm not going! Cameron is my friend!"

"She's a machine," Ellison corrected her firmly, taking hold of Savannah's shoulder and trying to draw her out of the room with them.

"I don’t care!" Almost crying now, Savannah wrenched herself free and threw herself into Cameron's arms, tucking her head under the machine's chin and bursting into tears as Cameron pulled her close.

Neither of them noticed Ellison reach out to pull her away, catching himself before he finished the motion. Cameron might not hurt Savannah, but he had no assurance that she wouldn't hurt him, and Savannah didn’t need to see anyone's life threatened today. 

Cameron lifted her head enough to meet his eyes as he drew back, but Ellison didn’t see the threat there that he had expected. He wasn't sure what he saw instead, but whatever it was, it eased his mind. If this was what these two needed, then he wasn't going to be the one to take it away from them. He just hoped Savannah would be enough to keep Cameron sane. He thought about Sarah's diagnosis and shook his head, grief mixing with a desperate worry. She was going to have to be enough, or heaven help them when Sarah took her last breath.

"Cameron," he said softly as he eased the trembling doctor out of the room.

“I won’t hurt her,” Cameron promised before she dismissed him from her mind, all of her attention turning on the little girl cradled in her arms.

Ellison nodded, not sure he was convinced but sensing he had no say in the matter. Stepping back, he took the doctor’s arm. “I owe you an explanation,” he murmured.

Felicia stared at Cameron, her breath coming in harsh pants as the former FBI agent led her away.

"Is Aunt Sarah dying?" Savannah asked when they were alone.

"No," Cameron said fiercely.

"But that woman said-"

Cameron closed her arms a little tighter. "I won’t let her die."

"Promise?

"I swear."

Savannah nodded against Cameron's chest. They both knew it was an empty promise. Savannah already knew that people died all the time, but it helped to know that Cameron was clinging to the same desperate hope.  

"You're holding me too tight," she said after a few minutes, wriggling a little to try and get more comfortable.

"I'm sorry." Cameron loosened her grip, but not quite enough.

"It's okay." Savannah accepted the discomfort, knowing in the way that children do, without really understanding how they know it, that Cameron needed to hold her as much as she needed to be held. "You can hold me as tight as you need to."

*****

 

It wasn't Sierra who came for John as evening lengthened into night, but Weaver. The German Shepherd found him in the generator-lit parking garage where he had first begun his training with Derek and Jesse. John hadn’t been down there in months, but the crudely painted targets bore the pulse burns of recent practice. The rifles in the rack were gleaming with oil, and there were freshly chalked lines on the floor with the ten, twenty, and fifty yard measurements penned carefully above them. A few soldiers and recruits, no one John knew, were still there, performing the final checks for the night, making sure everything was stowed and cleaned correctly.

John had come to do a little shooting, to try and lose himself in something mindless while he waited, but once he was there, he found himself overcome with a strange melancholy. He'd half-expected to find the place abandoned, or at least neglected, and yet here it was, ready for another day of training. The men and women of the resistance would be there tomorrow, and the next day, honing their skills for a battle they had every expectation of fighting, until the last human fell. This wasn't some elaborate stage set up for John's benefit, this was their life.

Weaver's claws clicked eerily against the cement floor as she trotted into the garage. She made a better dog than she had a woman, but now that he knew, John could see where she carried herself just a little bit wrong. She moved with almost military precision, her head held up rather than in line with her back, and a sense of deliberate purpose that animals simply didn't have.

John had settled on a bench in a corner of the room after giving up on the idea of practice. He had a clear view of the entrance, but Weaver still should have had to search for him. It sent a chill down John's spine when she turned and paced right to his feet without looking, as if she'd known exactly where he was before she'd even come into the room. For all he knew, she had. She could have followed him anywhere she wanted to, heard anything she wanted, and there was no way he could have prevented it. Not without telling someone what she was, and maybe not even then.

"What do you want?" John asked when she settled to her haunches in front of him, ears up and amber eyes expectant.

Weaver just blinked at him.

"Right, dogs don’t talk." John glanced up to make sure the soldiers packing up the last of the ammunition were out of earshot before leaning forward, resting his forearms across his thighs. "But you're not a dog."

Weaver's ears flicked back and then forward again in a canine shrug. She stretched out a foreleg and pawed gently at his pants. John jerked away, shuddering, and Weaver… well, sighed. Or at least, that was the only word that John could think of to describe the way she blew a breath out her nose and rolled her eyes up to pin him with a clear, could you stop being an idiot for one minute?

"I don’t work for you," John hissed.

The army tags on Weaver's collar jangled when she shook her head. Rising, she put her paws up on the bench and flipped her nose under the watch around John's neck before he could pull away. Then she dropped to the floor and padded away, pausing at the entrance of the garage to look back over her shoulder.

The message was as clear as a familiarity with syndicated television clichés could make it.

"Since when do terminators watch Lassie?" John muttered under his breath, but he shoved the bench back against the wall and followed Weaver out of the garage and up the long sloping tunnel. "Just so you know, if Sierra's down a well somewhere, I'm all for leaving her there."

Weaver didn't dignify that with an answer, verbal or otherwise. She led John through the base, past Tango's quarters, and down a corridor he'd never explored. Stopping abruptly before a turn, she growled softly to ensure that John stopped with her. A shimmer of metal replaced the dog, and then Weaver stood as Tango before him, a single finger to her lips. She waited until John nodded before continuing around the corner.

A pair of guards blocked the tunnel ahead. John didn’t know either of them personally, but he'd seen them around. They gave absolutely no outward sign of knowing either John or Weaver as Tango, requesting the pass codes with a professional detachment that suggested they wouldn't have hesitated to use the vicious looking guns in their hands on their own leader if they thought for a minute she might be a machine.

They thawed when Weaver got through the sequence without apparent error.

"The boss is in a mood, Tango," one of them warned Weaver gruffly and gestured to John. "You night want to leave the kid behind this time."

"I need him, unfortunately," Weaver said with a small, but chillingly authentic smile. "We'll keep it brief."

"We'd appreciate that," the other guard added feelingly. "If you could convince her to get some rest it would be even better."

"I'll see what I can do," Weaver promised, and the guards waved them through.

Feeling like a traitor, John left them behind without a word. He tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that Weaver could have gotten past them just as easily without him, and revealing her would only have gotten the guards killed, but it was an empty solace. He was betraying the entire resistance every minute that he didn’t tell someone about the liquid metal in their midst.

They passed several doors, but the tunnel was empty. Weaver took John all the way to the last door in front of a pile of rubble that filled the hall from floor to ceiling. The cave-in looked old, moss was already growing in the cracks, and the edges of the broken concrete were worn smooth. John wondered if it was one of the places the resistance had blocked off deliberately, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it.

Weaver lifted a hand to the lock. John shuddered when her fingers stopped being fingers, but he couldn’t look away. A tendril of silver metal flowed into the keyhole, leaving most of Weaver on his side of the door. There was a click, and then Weaver's hand went back to being a hand, the change flowing all the way up her arm until Catherine Weaver stood before him once more, complete with the leather-inspired steampunk outfit she'd created for herself the day they'd come here.

"After you," she offered with the full affect of her old Scottish lilt. "And please, I know my daughter can be… difficult, but you need each other, so try not to piss her off. It slows everything down."

"She's not your…" John snapped, turning away from the door only to trail off as he realized he was talking to Duke's rapidly retreating tail. "Daughter," he finished lamely.

*****

 

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