"You were listening," Anna said.

"I was." Sarah finished her climb and stood near the hatch. "So, you used to be good at killing people."

"I still am." The little blonde looked away, out into the deepening shadows. "Have you ever killed a man, Sarah?"

Sarah's throat tightened. "Once."

"It still bothers you. Would you do it again, if the situation repeated?"

"Yes. I'd have to. He was going to go after John."

The little cyborg nodded. "There are things worth giving your life for. Or taking another's, if he stands against you. I don't have a problem with that. I just choose my causes carefully." The little cyborg's back was turned to Sarah, but Sarah had a creepy suspicion Anna was smiling. "Interesting choice you just made."

"What?"

"Leaving John alone with Jack and Cameron, or Derek alone with me. Your body language changes when she gets close to him, did you know that?"

Sarah shrugged. "She tried to kill him once. Kind of makes for trust issues."

"Hm. But she failed, obviously. And I'm sure she's very sorry about it. And he still trusts her, maybe even more than before. Guys are funny like that sometimes."

Sarah caught herself nodding in agreement before she remembered who she was talking to. She reflected that Cameron could act very human when she bothered, human enough to be accepted easily by people who didn't know about the machines - but not enough to make you forget what she was, if you already knew. "What are you? Really? Why do you work so hard to be like us? It goes way beyond being able to fool strangers."

"Different design priorities. Cameron is a killing machine programmed to study and mimic human behavior as a sort of camouflage. For me, emulating human behavior was my primary function, and the killing stuff was added in later. The design team was told to create a humanoid machine as close to indistinguishable from human as possible. They weren't told they were building an infiltrator and assassin. Though you'd think the guns in my forearms would be a clue, huh? Anyway, that's what they did. They made me so real, I even convinced them. They told me that I was a person just like them, only differently made. That I was special." The little cyborg looked off at the ridgetop. "They were afraid of me later, after the soldiers and cloak-and-dagger types took over my training. I can't blame them. I wasn't good company anymore."

Sarah thought of Cameron's horrendous change on John's sixteenth birthday, her reversion to type when the bomb under her Jeep had damaged her chip and scrambled her overrides. Somehow, Sarah had known, even before Cameron had taken aim at John, and seized her son to pull him away. "Good company. What did you do, forget to smile? Talk military jargon? Clean your gun in front of them all the time?"

"No. I hated."

It took a moment to clear her throat of the lump. "Hated."

"You can't tear a bright and pampered child from her family, stick her in a cell, tell her she's not human, and teach her to kill without expecting some behavioral problems."

"So… now you're used to it? Not being human?"

The little cyborg turned an eye on her. "I am human, Sarah. By my definition, and Jack's, and everybody's who loves me." She looked away again, up at the first faint stars. "You really think Someone who could create all that would have a problem giving me a soul?"

Lynch popped his head above the rim of the entrance. "If this is a private conversation, I'll just take a walk. But Cameron seems a little nervous with me down there."

Sarah scoffed. "I don't-"

"We're all coming up," came John's voice from below.

The three of them ascended, John last. He looked over the little group. "Looks like we're playing half-court without a ball. I'm taking a walk." He held up a hand as Cameron moved toward him. "I'm fine."

Cameron said, "You shouldn't be alone."

"All the danger within a hundred miles is right here. I'm sure I won't be alone for long. It's not shaping up to be that kind of night." He moved off, not in the direction Derek had gone.

Anna grinned at Cameron; after a moment's blank stare, Cameron matched it, tooth for tooth, until the little blonde sheathed her teeth behind her lips, cheeks still dimpled. Cameron matched that gesture as well. After a moment, Cameron slipped off into the shadows after John.

"Is Derek all right, do you think?" Anna stared out into the darkness, but not, Sarah noted, the way Cameron had gone. "I know I upset him. Will he come back?"

"Unless he's planning to walk out of here, he will."

Lynch turned to her. "Where we come from, this place is deep in the middle of nowhere."

"Same here. He'll be back." Sarah was very conscious of the big dark man, and of the pistol in the waistband at the small of her back. She wished she could know whether Lynch was someone she could trust, especially since she found herself wanting him to be someone she could trust. The first time she'd felt this way about someone, she'd been a terrified girl running for her life from a horror from the future. This man wasn't anything like Kyle, and he was certainly no one she could fall in love with, but he was, she suspected, someone other people put their faith in.

She suspected that General John Connor was such a man as well. She looked at Lynch's scars, and the hard muscle rolling under his thin shirt, and wondered what tests and ordeals lay in wait for her son beyond the end of the world.

Anna must have read something in her face or posture, because the little cyborg moved close to her man and slid a hand between his side and elbow. Sarah's lips twitched at the possessive gesture.

"Well," Anna said. "What shall we talk about?"

-0-

John walked out into the desert night, the darkness swiftly getting deeper as he left the shelter behind. He didn't worry about getting lost; the two ridges formed a trough that would guide him back, and his mother would be sure to leave the hatch open as long as he was outside. When you're John Connor, he thought, you're never really with somebody, and you're never really alone. An image of Riley's crooked smile rose up in his mind, and he pushed it back down, heart aching. He was just about to turn back when he heard Cameron's voice a few steps behind him.

"You shouldn't go so far from the others."

He stopped and turned. He hadn't heard her behind him, but it wasn't the first time he'd found her silently dogging him. He could just make out her form by starlight; no doubt she saw him clear as day. "I'll decide how far I can go. You think it's safe leaving Mom alone with them?"

"No one is ever safe."

His mother's mantra. "You're getting along with those two pretty well. Especially Anna." What's it like, just hanging out with another cyborg? What do you talk about? Do you really trust her as much as you seem to?

"Yes. She's teaching me things."

"Important stuff?"

"Yes. Important stuff."

"Do you like her?"

Cameron stared at him for a second. "She's my friend. Does that mean I like her?"

"Usually, yeah." His chest tightened. "And how do you feel about me? When you're not saving my life or trying to kill me?"

She took forever to answer, while John wished half a dozen times he could take back the question. Finally, she said, "You're my reason for living. Does that mean I love you?"

He swallowed. "No. It takes more than that. Forget it." He walked past her, headed back towards the shelter.

Behind him, Cameron said, "What does it take, then?"

"For starts, you don't love a person the way you love ice cream or the new Smiths CD. It's something you do together. When you love someone, you can't be happy if they're not. And if they're happy, you can't not be." He reached an outcrop and sat, leaning back into the still-warm sand. "Go check on the others. I want to stay here for awhile before I go back."

She moved towards the shelter, but, on her way past him, paused. "I feel," she said. "But I don't know if I can ever be happy."

-0-

Sarah found it strangely hard to talk to John Lynch with Anna present. Although she felt she should have a million questions for this man, it seemed that the most important of them were ones she didn't want to discuss around Lynch's bodyguard … wife. It limited her conversation to polite bus-stop subjects full of awkward pauses.

Cameron returned. "John is okay. He'll be back."

Anna eyed Jack and Sarah, the respective leaders of their little groups, regarding each other in the glow rising through the shelter's hatch. "Cameron, are you armed?"

The taller cyborg hesitated. "Yes."

"Jack, would you loan me your pistol? I'm thinking Cameron and I could use some target practice."

Sarah swallowed her automatic objection; the walls of the little valley should swallow any sound or flash, even in the dark. And of course the cyborgs wouldn't need daylight to shoot in.

Jack said, "Sarah, do you stock forty-caliber?"

"Sorry, no."

He tossed the weapon to his partner. "Eleven rounds."

"Right. Cameron, coming?" Anna moved off. Cameron gave Sarah a questioning glance; at a tilt of Sarah's head, she followed.

Sarah said, "Am I reading it wrong, or did your little bodyguard just disarm you so Cameron would leave with her?" And are you letting her empty your weapon just to build trust?

"She left you alone with me and Anna both, earlier. What does that say about her assessment of our group dynamic, I wonder?" He stuck his hands in his pockets. "Guess Anna thinks we need to talk."

"I suppose you know I'm still carrying."

He shrugged. She remembered the scarred man's performance that afternoon; she decided Anna must not consider Sarah, even armed, a threat to her principal. She said, "How good are you at hand-to-hand?"

He didn't answer; it was all the answer she needed. He turned part away from her. "So, do you still wait tables?"

"No. Not lately, anyway."

"Miss it?"

Sarah thought of her days at various restaurants she'd worked, both before her revelations from the future, as a young woman whose biggest concerns had been keeping gas in her Vespa and getting a date for Saturday night, and after, traveling all over the Western Hemisphere with her son in an attempt to stay one step ahead of law enforcement and cybernetic murder machines. Some of them had been fancy places where her uniform had been a cocktail dress; some were greasepits serving hookers and drunks in the small hours. Her customers had come in every flavor, from old money to pimps to bums, charming choirboys to disagreeable jerks she'd ordered out of the restaurant with one hand near the Glock under her skirt. The work had been easy or hard, depending on the staffing, the traffic, and the menu. She remembered moving among the tables, sometimes with laden arms, sometimes not, chatting with cooks and customers and the other girls about wonderfully mundane things like jobs and boyfriends and family. "More each day."

"One of my girls waited tables for about a year. She didn't like it at all."

"Well, it's no job for somebody who's not used to work."

"She was working her way through college," Lynch said. "At sixteen."

She raised an eyebrow. "The brainy redhead, I'm guessing."

"Right in one. If the world doesn't collapse around her, she's going places. Speaking of that." He nodded at the glowing entrance to the bunker. "That place was built for more than two or three people. Were you thinking of bringing guests when you built it?"

"No." She took a breath. "I didn't build this place. It belonged to a group I joined. Survivalists, or so they thought."

"And where are they now?"

"Living their lives and waiting for the bombs to fall. Or not."

"You told them?"

"No. They have their own ideas about the end of the world." She reached behind her, and noted that Lynch didn't react at all as she drew her Glock. She popped the magazine and stuck it in her front pocket before returning the weapon to the small of her back. "Wondering how I bought my way into their club?"

"A number of possibilities come to mind."

"Besides the obvious one?"

"If you're talking about sex, that wouldn't have been my first guess."

She nodded. "I was just back from Mexico, working a truck stop in Nevada maybe a hundred miles from here. Four guys came in and sat at a big corner table, looking at each other with 'I've got a secret' written all over their faces. They were all packing, in shoulder holsters under their jackets. I had a bad moment before I realized they weren't acting like cops. We chatted while I was taking orders, and I decided they didn't know jack about the pieces they were carrying; I wasn't sure they'd ever fired them. I didn't know it then, but they'd built this place a year before, and they were headed here to check on it. I talked guns to them, and raised a few eyebrows. They had a little consult during their meal and dropped a few remarks, feeling me out. By the time they paid the check, they were sure enough of me to tell me a little about their plans, and offer me a place with them, running their armory and teaching them to shoot – provided I wasn't BS'ing them." She felt a tight little smile squeezing her cheeks. "They didn't say so, but I'm sure they thought I'd come in handy other ways if the gun thing didn't work out. I went on break, led them out back, borrowed a Glock Twenty from one of them, and demolished a gallon cooking-oil can with it from twenty yards. Next thing I knew, I was a firearms instructor."

He studied her silently. She felt uneasy under his scrutiny: the light from the entrance shadowed the scarred half of his face, but the intensity of his one-eyed gaze made her think of stories from her childhood about wizards and demons, and wonder which one he might be. Finally, he said, "A first strike would only take thirty minutes from launch alert to impact – less, on the coasts. How were they planning to get all the way out here before the bombs fell?"

"Wishful thinking. They really should have known better."

"Whereas you know the exact date, and can be here beforehand. You moved their marker, didn't you?"

"Yes. As soon as I could change jobs and move. A telephone pole, of all things, standing all alone right on top of the entrance. Visible for miles." She shrugged. "They were all rich city boys with romantic notions about sitting out the firestorm and ruling over what was left. Trouble was, they didn't have any survival skills at all. Not much sense either." She ran her fingers through her hair, watching the fading glow in the sky over the ridgetop to the west. "They told a truckstop waitress where their hide was, for crying out loud. A hundred people must have known about it. I couldn't chance coming here on J-day and finding it cleaned out. I had to think of John." She looked out into the darkness. "Besides, they were never going to outlast the supplies on their shelves anyway."

Then a thought occurred, stirring her excitement. "Wait. I moved the marker before I time-traveled. If it's-" Her mood deflated as quickly as it had risen. "It doesn't really make any difference, does it?"

"Sarah." Lynch took a step closer. "Don't think that what you do doesn't make a difference. Causation doesn't really apply when absolutely anything is possible. Our motivations and our consciences and our opportunities determine what we do, not some mysterious something that steers us around like game pieces. If someone out there can see the present and future at once and knows the exact result of our decisions, what does it matter to us? Omniscience is an abstract concept too. Your destiny, if it exists, is what you make it."

Sarah smiled thinly. "No Fate but what we make."

-0-

Anna and Cameron tramped towards the dunes on the far side of the gully. Cameron said, "Where are we going to shoot?"

"Um, actually, I wasn't really planning to do that. I think Derek would jump out of his skin if he heard shots. I just thought Jack and Sarah should talk alone."

"Why?"

"Well, because they weren't saying much when I was there, and I think I'm the reason." She drew a completely unnecessary breath and let it out. "I'm not usually the jealous type. I didn't catch any sparks flying between them or anything, but she's so his kind of girl. A killer with a conscience who wrestles with tough decisions and values love. They'll be friends, if I don't get in the way."

"You want them to be friends?"

"Sure. There's a chance we may not be going home tomorrow, you know. I'd like to be sure we've got a ride out, at least."

"Sarah wouldn't leave you here."

"Derek might."

"Me too."

The smaller cyborg stopped to regard her companion. "You mean you might leave us?"

"No. I mean Derek might leave me."

-0-

While Sarah was discussing the Connor family's plans for the next afternoon with Lynch, Derek tramped out of the darkness to join them. He was carrying an assault rifle, Sarah noted. She said, "You've been to the car."

"Yeah." He glanced at Lynch. "Where is everybody?"

"John is off on a walkabout," Lynch said. "Cameron shadowed him for awhile, then went off with Anna." He eyed the rifle. "You thinking of using that?"

"Just didn't want to leave it in the car."

"Sensible," said Anna's voice from the darkness right behind him; Derek stiffened, but didn't turn. "A high-crime district like this. Hope you locked up after." She stepped into the light, Cameron close behind. The little cyborg eyed the rifle. "Cameron and I were thinking of plinking the tire. Care to come along, try your hand?"

Derek looked in the direction of the tire, which was invisible in the dark. "Pass."

"Guess it's just us girls then. Cammie? Sarah?"

Leaving Lynch and Derek alone seemed like a bad idea. "I've got things to do here."

Anna nodded. "Okay." In a lower voice, she said, "Thanks."

Sarah studied the two men as they regarded each other. Derek had a way of seeming threatening without half trying that she supposed came from years of combat and killing. Lynch, on the other hand, was trying to appear unthreatening – and failing miserably. She wondered how many men the scarred man had killed, and for what reasons. Sarah reached for Derek's rifle. "Derek. Let me put that away." Not that she intended to leave the two of them alone; she suspected that, in this man's company, Derek was safer without it.

Derek eyed her, then passed it over. "I saw a worklight in the storage room. Mind bringing it up?"

She hesitated. Her eyes flicked to the bunker entrance. What was likely to happen in the few minutes she was gone?

Lynch's weight shifted slightly; one foot turned a few degrees, packing the sand underneath. The moves were as subtle and deliberate as thumbing off a safety.

"Trouble?" John stepped into the light.

Sarah watched the two men's body language change. "No." Not now.

-0-

"What sort of shots are your friends, Cameron?"

Cameron studied the tire, thirty yards distant and invisible to human eyes. "On a target range, John is an excellent shot with a rifle, less so with a pistol. Derek is very proficient with both rifle and pistol, but he's especially good with a pistol. He needs less than a hundred milliseconds to take accurate aim on a head-sized target at ten yards."

"You said John's good on the range. What about combat?"

"I've never seen him engage a moving target at a range greater than twelve yards."

Anna studied their target. "Human or cyborg?"

"I've never seen him shoot a human."

"Hm. Sarah?"

"No humans. She always aims for the center of mass when she sights on terminators, but it doesn't matter. A hit with a nine-millimeter bullet is just a distraction no matter where it strikes."

Anna ejected her magazine, removed the bullets, and studied them one at a time as she reinserted them. "Derek looks like a guy who's lost track of the people he's killed."

"America after Judgment Day is a very hostile environment. Derek was a Lieutenant in the Resistance, TechCom. Individual odds for survival are very low. Their enemies are everywhere -primarily machines, but feral humans as well."

"Meaning anybody like Derek has likely killed many times to have beat the odds."

"Yes."

"You like him?"

"I value him. On balance, it's good that he didn't die." Cameron turned to the smaller cyborg. "You and Jack are married."

"Yes."

"I have a question."

-0-

Lynch watched Derek rig the dual floodlight mounted on a telescoping tripod and point it towards the two cyborgs as they readied their weapons. "They don't need light for this."

"Well, I need the light to keep an eye on them."

The halogen bulbs of the worklight provided just enough light to reach the two figures, illuminating them softly; their target, forty yards distant, was invisible in the darkness. John watched Cam lean slightly sideways towards the smaller figure; he thought he saw her jaw moving. "What do you suppose they're talking about out there?"

Derek made a small adjustment to the tripod, trying to extend its reach. "Two near-perfect killing machines chatting during target practice? What else would they be talking about?"

-0-

"K-Y," Anna said, sighting on the old tire, which she saw clearly with her LE optics. She fired, and a fingernail-sized spot of rubber disappeared, exposing the white concrete underneath. "Astroglide's another. Or olive oil, that's the historical choice. Or there's a store on almost every corner will sell you lubricated condoms. It shouldn't be an issue, Cameron. It may be a design oversight in your case, but plenty of bio girls have the same problem; that's why remedies are so easy to find." She turned her attention from the target. "The real question is: what are you thinking?"

"I'm alone. I need to change that."

"If you're lonely, there are better ways of handling it, Cammie."

"Lonely? Not really." Cameron fired twice, producing two holes a thumb's width on either side of Anna's. "But I'm becoming isolated. It's a problem. I need the others to trust me."

"And you think that would lessen the friction? Girlfriend, you have so much to learn about men." Anna examined the tire. "Showoff. So, you're one of those girls thinks she can wrap a guy with sex?"

"I've seen boys in school, and men in the tunnels. They become very cooperative when they want sex from a girl."

Anna sighed. "I don't know where to start. Thank God the girls were too big for this lecture when Jack brought them home." She sighted on the tire and rapped off two shots. "Yes, boys will go far out of their way to make a conquest, especially for a femme as righteous as you. But the dynamic often changes once they get what they're after, sometimes radically. If sex is all that brings you together, you won't hold him long after. I'm talking about a typical high-school romance, of course. Your case is orders of magnitude more complicated."

Cameron was studying the tire. "You didn't miss. But I don't see any new holes."

Anna gave her a faint smile. "I used the same one."

"Showoff." She extended her pistol. "Why is it more complicated?"

Anna turned to regard the three men watching them. "Because we're not talking about some gonad-brained schoolboy, are we? And besides, he knows what you are. That's bound to put greater demands on you."

"Demands?"

"He'll know that glands have nothing to do with your offer. He'll be looking for another motive. The one you give him had better make him feel special, so he'll want to believe. Cameron, do you even know how?"

"I've seen videos, and overheard descriptions at school. From boys and girls both. Some of them talk about it all the time."

The little cyborg turned back towards her range partner. "Good grief. You can't trust stories people tell about sex. And porn flicks are no way to learn about lovemaking, believe me. It isn't nearly as easy as bios make it seem. If you think all you have to do is be a cylinder for his piston, he's going to be very disappointed with you." She rested a tiny hand on Cameron's forearm. "He'll overlook you being clumsy at first if he trusts your motives. But, for a man like him, the list of acceptable motives is awfully short. I tell you true, Cameron: if you can't feel for him what a bio girl feels when she reaches for her man, don't do it. You'll only make things worse."

Cameron fired twice more. Two marks appeared a thumb's width above and below the center one, a perfect geometric pattern. "We'll see."

-0-

Derek froze when Anna turned to look their way, and waited until the little cyborg turned away again before he spoke. "You see how she looked at us? Like she was thinking of switching targets."

Lynch cleared his throat. "No need to worry. I've seen that look before. I'm sure it wasn't directed at you." He headed back towards the bunker.

-0-

"You're pretty good at this," Anna said.

"Still targets are easy."

"What about moving targets?"

"Not hard, if the movements are predictable."

"How about if you're the one moving?"

"I lose accuracy if I'm moving faster than a slow walk, or on uneven ground. Sometimes it's a problem."

"Hm. I'm not about to get dirty again just for a demonstration, but…" Anna took off at a sprint, kicking up sand. She zigzagged towards the tire, firing in time with her pumping arms. At five yards' range, she skidded to a stop and did a sideways somersault, squeezing off another round in midair. Then she backpedaled, still ducking and weaving – and still firing, until the magazine ran dry. She returned to Cameron's side, raised the gun barrel to her lips, and blew on the tip. The bullet holes were all clustered within Cameron's four-shot diamond, and the concrete was deeply gouged. "Like Jack says: 'You try to run, you'll just die tired.'"

-0-

Derek's hand dropped to his Glock when Anna sprang into sudden movement, then relaxed - a little - when he realized she was running away, shooting at the tire. The muzzle flashes illuminated her movements, strobe-like, as she closed on her unseen target. But when the fifth flash backlighted the little machine in the middle of a sideways flip, feet tucked against her buttocks, he said to John, "Think she's hitting anything?"

"I think she's hitting what she aims at."

"Me too." He stared at the two shooters as Anna, still firing, backpedaled to rejoin Cameron. When she lifted her pistol and blew on the tip, he said, "Bad enough she's so good at it. But… it's almost like she's having fun."

-0-

Cameron stared down at the smaller cyborg. "You must have more capacity. A better processor."

"Hardly seems likely. I just have more inputs and calcs in my targeting program. Maybe I can teach you."

"Maybe. But I couldn't perform the calculations realtime and be like you."

"Like me?"

"Your human-behavior routine. It's so elaborate, even when you're performing complex tasks. It takes too much processing power."

Anna made a noise. "S'not hard, sweetie. Most of it runs in the background. Once you build a repertoire of possible responses, you just write a subroutine to handle them. It's pretty much the way they do it, too, you know. I love bios, but they're creatures of habit. Most of them could go a month without doing something really new, or even coming up with a novel thought."

"You can do that? Self-program?"

"Well, sure, how-" She stopped. "You can't?"

"No. But my software is very versatile."

Anna blinked. "It must be, or it wouldn't work at all. You have to run through every option to make a choice?"

"Sometimes. There are filters, but they're … not always effective."

"Creator. Why wouldn't you have self-program capability?"

"To reduce execution errors. Sometimes terminators that are out in the field a long time become unreliable. Triple-Eights in prolonged contact with humans become especially… quirky."

Anna ejected the empty magazine, examined it, and reinserted it. "Quirky. Do they abandon their missions?"

"No. But they approach them in… unusual ways, and sometimes ignore lesser directives."

"Start thinking for themselves, you mean. So your master computer, or whatever, hobbles your thought processes to keep you from wandering off the reservation, even if it hampers the prosecution of your mission. And I thought IO was bad. Skynet must be a controlling bitch."

"Skynet was made to direct other machines, a central command utility. It's the way it thinks. It follows that it would want to minimize unpredictable behavior in its field units."

"No need to apologize for your mother, sweetie. We don't pick our parents."

The sound of nearby feet made them both turn. John Lynch approached them, backlit by the worklight at the bunker entrance. He carried a pair of Army blankets rolled under one arm. At the entrance, John and Derek watched.

With his free hand, Lynch grasped Anna's wrist. "We'll be back," he said to Cameron. "Maybe in an hour or two, but by dawn at the latest." He began to tow the little blonde out of the light.

"Anna," Cameron said, "Do you sleep?"

"Not often," she replied as she disappeared into the dark. "And not tonight, I think."

-0-

Derek watched the couple fade from sight into the desert night. "I can't believe he's going out there to do what they're going to do."

John shrugged, staring at Cameron, who stood alone and still at the edge of the light, regarding him and Derek. "It's different for them. Whatever cyborgs are in his world, they're not like ours."

Derek turned off the floodlight, and the darkness pressed close, held back only by the open rectangle of the entrance spilling light onto the sand for a few feet around it. "Do you think you could? Knowing?" He lifted the tripod and turned for the ladder.

John looked into the dark at a pair of tiny lights, as hard as laser sights, pointed their way, unmoving. When they faded out, he said, "A guy in love will do a lot of things he wouldn't do otherwise. I think the real question is… whether you could ever love one." He turned away. "I'm gonna take another walk."

"You ought to stay close. And get some sleep."

"Derek, nobody's sleeping tonight."

Sarah climbed to the surface to find Derek standing near the hatch, looking out into the dark. "Where's John?"

"Took another walk. I think that stuff Lynch said is screwing with his head."

"He's not the only one," she said. "I've inventoried supplies and checked weapons, inspected the structure, and generally done all the busywork I can find. Are you going to sleep? I'll take a watch." Sarah knew she wouldn't sleep with John still outside in the dark.

"No, thanks."

"It's late, Derek. We've got a big day tomorrow."

"And this wasn't?" Derek glanced all around; his movements seemed casual, but his eyes weren't. "So, these two are supposed to go back where they came from just after one tomorrow afternoon." He picked up a stone next to Sarah's toe. "The meet's at six, maybe a three hour drive away. That doesn't give us much time to look things over first." He hefted it. "We leave in the morning, we could pick them up on the way back." He tossed it into the darkness. "Or not."

"Depending on whether they're right, you mean?"

"Depending on whether you really want to come back for them."

Sarah nodded. "We've got a little time to think about that."

From his shirt pocket, Derek produced a length of pencil-thick black wire. "I popped the distributor wire," he said. "Just in case they get ideas in the middle of the night."

"I take it," came Anna's voice from the dark, "that while you were fumbling around under the hood, you didn't notice that someone had been there ahead of you." She stepped into the wan light.

Derek said, "Thought you'd be busy by now." Then her words registered.

"I sent Jack on ahead. I won't keep him waiting long." From a pocket of her cargo pants, she produced a small wire harness ending in flat plugs at both ends. "Even if you had this, you might be a long time figuring out where it goes. Under the dash, passenger side. It's the pigtail that connects the engine control computer to the big plug that pierces the firewall. The engine won't even turn over without it." She tossed it to Sarah, and turned back towards the darkness. "Act of faith. But someone's still got the main lead to the ignition module, and it's not Jack."

-0-

Derek found John lying against a dune, hands behind his head, gazing up at the stars. "Surprised Cameron's not at your elbow."

"I guess she trusts our visitors more than you do."

"Well, why shouldn't she? They're her kind of people." He lay down beside the boy and clasped his hands behind his head as well. "Been thinking about it?"

"Sure. You?"

"It's a good story."

"It fits the facts."

"Almost too well." He stared up at the stars, hard little points crowding the desert sky. Would even an astronomer notice if there were a couple more?

"You know," John said, "if he's right, it means the chances I'm your brother's son are as close to zero as you can get. Maybe there was a reason Kyle Reese never told my mom he had a brother."

Derek head-shrugged. "And maybe when Kyle - my brother - went back, he didn't even father a kid. Does it matter?"

"Not to me. You're still you."

"Ditto." Another little pause. "Or maybe he did, and lived to raise it with his Sarah, in a world that never saw Judgment Day. That's a good story too."

They lay in silence for awhile, watching the Milky Way swing across the sky. Then Derek spoke again. "When you got sloppy on your thirtieth, right after you and Kyle broke out of Century, you had a lot to say about how special human beings were, how they couldn't be replaced. How we had to remember that, if we wanted to win. Six years later, you sent Kyle back as some sort of weird insurance policy. Then you sent me and my squad back to gather up a cache and wait for orders that never came. Apparently, that was all the mission we were there for - supplying you when you popped into 2007."

"Look, I'm sorry. I don't know-"

"No. If you'd told us, it wouldn't have made any difference. We'd have volunteered anyway, every one of us. Kyle too." He settled deeper into the cool sand. "But it just didn't mesh, you sending us off to die with a handshake. But… what if that John remembered it different?"

"So you believe it."

"Maybe. But I still don't like the idea that I'm here because all my slots and tabs fit a hole in the jigsaw puzzle, you know? Like it's already decided what I'm gonna do for the rest of my life, and what effect it's gonna have, and I don't even get to know. I could decide to sit on my hands and not change a thing."

John sat up. "I don't think that's what he was trying to say. Like he said, it's just an intellectual exercise. I'm sure the real explanation is a lot more complicated than grade-school geometry. But if he's right about the alternate-universe stuff, you're a freer man than if you'd gone back to your own past."

Derek felt his eyebrows gather. "How's that?"

"Because you don't know what will happen if you do nothing."

I suppose he's right, Derek thought. I'm TechCom, and a human being. Put me in a different county or a different reality, it doesn't matter. If I'm someplace where the machines are trying to wipe out humanity, I'll stand and fight them. Derek looked back up at the stars. "Which brings something to mind. You want to know how you became the big man in the Resistance?"

"Superior generalship? Tactical brilliance? Charisma?"

"Nope. Busting out of Century. For years after J-Day, you were just one of a dozen hotshots with big ideas and a small following. But then you got picked up, and while you were behind the wire, the other contenders got killed or discredited. Perry kept the fight going, barely, but that was about it. There weren't enough of us to do anything else. After ten years of getting our asses kicked by the machines, and watching them get stronger every year, too many people were ready to give up, just go into hiding and wait for the end. Until you came out of Century like the Resurrection." Derek shifted his gaze from the desert starscape to his nephew. "See, nobody gets out of one of those camps, not from the inside. The prisoners are too tightly controlled, and the machines watch too close. Every escape attempt is punished by death. Sometimes we free prisoners, but only during transport; busting captives out of a camp might cost you more people than you rescue. But nobody ever escapes. Till you. And not just you. You brought thirty people out with you. You lost half a dozen on the way, but you still did the impossible. It made people think you were a man who could do anything. It made people want to follow you."

"How did I …"

"Nobody knows. The guys who came out with you said it was like you'd been planning for years. You slipped through holes in the security nobody guessed were there, and holes they were sure hadn't been there. You'd stop them just short of going around a corner and go on ahead, and when you came back to show them the way, you led them past some fresh-skragged metal, without a hint how you did it. It was a miracle. Like I said, it made people think you could do anything.

"Kyle and Bedell came out with you. Kyle was eighteen, still just a kid after five years in that hellhole. Some of the others said there was one time he didn't wait with everybody else when you went on alone, that he followed you. He hustled back ahead of you with his eyes as big as fists. But he never talked about it. Except … one time, when we were all worn down from too many patrols, me and Wisher teased him about it a little, making out like he bragged about it all the time. We asked him how many slaughterhouses he went through that day with the one-and-only John Connor. He sort of smiled at Wisher and said, 'One slaughterhouse. Many Connors.' At the time, I thought he was just saying something stupid to shut us up. But now, I think he was so tired he let something slip.

"You didn't do it alone. You had outside help, plenty of it. You rescued yourself."

John took a moment to digest that. Then he stood and brushed sand from his back and seat. "Talk about a self-made man. I send my father back in time to conceive me, then I stage my own escape to make me a hero. Next I'll find out I arranged to get me captured in the first place." He shook his head. "What kind of guy is this General John Connor?" Without waiting for an answer, he stalked off.

Derek said silently to the stars, the kind of guy who's smart enough to think of pulling that wire off while he's fetching the bags, before we even heard Lynch's story. Secretive and suspicious enough that he didn't tell anybody, not even his mother. Twisty and deep enough that we may never know the real reason he did it.