Xander drove south along Highway 115 from Colorado Springs. Faith sat beside him with a map and a compass. The compass wasn't pointing north: it was pointing south-west. Willow had charmed it so that it pointed to the new Slayer that they were tracking down. Faith checked the direction shown on the compass against her map. "I've got a bad feeling about this, Xan."
"What's the problem?"
"It's looking to me like this thing is pointing at an Air Force base."
Xander could see the mountain off to the right, that seemed to have a forest of radio antennae growing from the top of it. "Cheyenne Mountain?" he asked.
"That's the one," said Faith. "Why does that sound familiar?"
"Ever see the movie War Games?"
"Do I look like Andrew to you?"
"The fact that you know to ask that question, is itself incriminating," said Xander.
"Okay…yeah I've seen it. That's the one where the computer tries to start a nuclear war, right?"
"Yeah," said Xander. "And that computer was inside Cheyenne Mountain. It's home to NORAD." He nodded at the highway sign that they were passing, warning that the exit for NORAD Road was one mile ahead. "Are you sure that's where she is?"
"No," said Faith. "It looks like there's a residential area, just this side of there that she could be in, but how much do you wanna bet?"
"How do we get there?" asked Xander.
"The residential area? We should have gotten off at the last exit."
After an hour of driving around, checking the direction that their compass was pointing them from various locations, they had confirmed that their Slayer was indeed inside the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, but they couldn't get close enough to determine if she was actually inside the mountain, or in one of the many surface buildings surrounding the tunnel entrance. Xander found a place to park their car, just off NORAD Road, well outside the perimeter of the Air Force base. He was still a little nervous about it. Someone was bound to take notice of anyone who parked there for too long.
"Let me see that map," he said to Faith. She handed it over to him. He looked at it for a moment. "Okay, Willow had her located up here." He pointed to an area circled in the north-western section of the city. "Near this Garden of the Gods place, plus or minus a mile or two, not down here, over ten miles away. I don't think she could have missed by that much."
"So, she wasn't here when Willow did the spell," said Faith.
"Which means that maybe she's just visiting," said Xander.
"You don't think another operation like that Initiative thing found her, do you?"
"I hope not. I mean, why would the Air Force be running an operation like that? And if they were, why put it in the middle of NORAD?"
"You think she might actually be in the Air Force?"
"It's possible." Xander refolded the map, and gave it back to her. "Some of the new Slayers could be in their twenties. That's old enough that she might have enlisted out of high school, be done with her basic training, and been assigned to something like this…or she could be in the Air Force Academy. It's not far from Willow's target area."
"So, we just wait here and see if she comes out?" asked Faith.
"For a little while at least." Xander checked his watch, it was nearly 5PM. "We'll give her an hour, anyway. Any longer and we're bound to have someone asking us why we're parked here."
"And if someone does ask, what do we tell 'em?" asked Faith.
Xander gave her a lop-sided grin. "Why, we just pulled into a nice place to enjoy the view, and make out a bit."
Faith slid across the seat to him. "If anyone does come by, we want to make it look good for them."
Xander shifted uncomfortably. "Faith, you know I was kidding about the making out."
"Relax, Xander. I'm not going to molest you, not that I'd object if you decided to start anything."
"Faith—"
She poked his ribs. "I said, 'Relax, Xander.' This is just for show, remember?"
"Right." Xander stretched out his arm along the back of the seat, behind her head.
"You missed the yawn," said Faith.
"What?"
"You know, the classic move in the movie theatre: the guy yawns, and stretches his arms, and just happens to put one down along the back of his girl's seat."
"But we both know that we're just pretending here," said Xander.
"Well, one of us is, anyway."
"Faith—"
"You are so easy!"
"Hey! I resemble that remark!"
"I'm just kidding," said Faith. "You're the only guy who's ever wanted to just be my friend, without any strings attached. I screwed that up, last time. I'm not planning to do it again."
"So now you're giving me the 'I just wanna be friends' speech?" asked Xander. "Do you have any idea what that does to a guy's ego?"
"I already told you: I won't object if you want to start anything." Faith wiggled a bit against him.
Xander kept his arm up on the back of the seat. "I think we'd better stick with the 'just friends.'"
"That's fine by me."
"So…never had any guy friends?" asked Xander. "What about Robin?"
"I'd known him for about 24 hours, and had two conversations with him, before we jumped into bed together," said Faith. "That relationship was all about getting laid…for pretty much both of us. I had spent the previous three years in jail, after all. Robin was a gentleman about it—which was pretty new for me—but once we got past the sex—which was great—we really have nothing in common. So, how'd you make out in the pool?"
"Pool?" asked Xander.
"Slayer hearing, remember?" asked Faith. "I knew about the pool. So tell me: Who won the 'How long until Faith and Robin break up' pool?"
"Uh…Dawn actually. She's the only one who thought you'd last longer than a week."
"Well, she's still young, and a bit of a romantic," said Faith. "How much did she win?"
"Fifty bucks."
"So, what do we do if it turns out that she's in the Air Force?"
"I don't know," said Xander. "That could be almost as bad as them knowing about her. She might like it there, and we can't just pull her out. That's the sort of crap that the old Council used to pull on the Potentials. We've thought about what we'll do when Riley's people find out about all the Slayers now, and decide they want to try to recruit a few. Having a Slayer already in the military isn't something that we'd even considered."
"If she wants out?" asked Faith.
"If they don't want to let her out…I suppose we could have Willow do for her, what she did for you. Change all their records so that they have different pictures, fingerprints, and stuff for her. Then set her up with a new identity."
"If she's got friends and family, she might not want to go for something like that," said Faith. "It was easy for me. No one from my past I ever want to see again. She might like her life."
Xander made a non-committal "Hmm" noise, and settled back to wait. They'd jump off that bridge when they came to it. He thought about what had brought him and Faith to the side of this road in Colorado.
The initial euphoria that most of them had felt after surviving the battle in Sunnydale hadn't lasted long. Too many people had died giving them that victory. Anya, Amanda, and nearly a dozen of the other new Slayers hadn't made it. They had all lost people that they were close to.
The bus had gotten them only a couple of miles down the road before they'd run into rescue vehicles coming the other way. Robin Wood, Rona, and some of the other more badly injured girls had been transferred to ambulances and rushed to the hospital in Oxnard. They tried telling the rescue people that there was nothing left of Sunnydale, but they weren't believed, and the rescuers wouldn't just let the rest of them continue on their way, unmolested. They were taken to a shelter that had been hastily set up for Sunnydale survivors in an Oxnard school gymnasium. It had seemed very empty, with only the Slayers and their few friends in it. It turned out to be a pretty good thing that they had the gymnasium, though. There wasn't a hotel or motel room available for a hundred miles in any direction: they had all been filled by the people who had left Sunnydale over the previous weeks.
They played a bit of a shell game with the relief workers to keep the authorities from getting Faith's name: Willow still hadn't made her disappear from the system. The spells she used for that were a scaled back version of what the Monks had done to create Dawn. They didn't affect people's memories, only what was actually recorded about Faith. Photos of her were subtlety modified, moving her eyes farther apart, changing the shape of her nose and mouth a bit, adjusting her hairline. Not so much to make her unrecognizable to anyone who knew her, but enough so that if they were compared to the real Faith, by someone who didn't know her, they'd think that she just looked a lot like the girl in the picture, but a closer look would convince them that it was only a resemblance. The fingerprints and dental records that they had on file for her now matched one of the Slayers who had died in Sunnydale, and Faith's description had been changed, making her two inches taller, and moving her tattoo from her right arm to her left. As a final bonus, there was a genuine police report saying that Faith had been seen in Sunnydale just days before it was destroyed. She was currently listed among the missing and presumed dead from Sunnydale.
Once all of Faith Lahane's old records were modified, an entirely new set had been created for Faith Russell: birth certificate, Social Security Number, Driver's license, medical and school records. A complete paper trail, good enough to fool just about any sort of investigation into her past.
While Willow worked her magic on Faith's files, Giles had gone to work re-establishing contacts with the survivors from the Watchers' Council, to try to get help for the new Slayers. A lot of the Council survivors were members of the old guard—the really old guard—men and women from the generation before Quentin Travers who had retired from active service. One of the youngest of them was Roger Wyndam-Pryce—and everything that Giles had to say about him had Xander feeling some sympathy for Wesley for the first time in his life.
The bad news was that it was that old guard who held the purse strings, at first. It turned out that the Council did have contingency plans in place which took things like a large portion of its board being wiped out into account. In a situation like that, control of its assets was temporarily passed to a group of retired members until a new chairman and board could be elected.
The good news was that at some time during the previous century, in a move of unprecedented egalitarianism, the Slayer had been given a vote in the selection of the Council chairman. Since there was only one Slayer, no one had figured that she would really make much difference, anyway. And then, five years earlier, Travers had pushed through another amendment which gave all living Slayers a vote in choosing the board and its Chairman. At the time, he'd figured that the vote of a properly trained Slayer like Kendra would counterbalance whatever that unpredictable Summers girl might do.
The old guard had been shocked when Giles had shown up at the emergency board session, carrying the proxy votes of twenty Slayers, electing him, Xander Harris, Willow Rosenberg, Robin Wood, and Dawn Summers to the board, and further electing him as board Chairman. They had really howled at putting Dawn onto the board, but Giles pointed out that the Council by-laws placed no minimum age on board members, and there were precedents for members just as young: Prince Rupert of the Rhine had been Dawn's age when he was first elected to the Council board. They had stopped howling about Dawn, when they saw the first amendment that the new board made to the Council by-laws: every Slayer was now a full member of the Council, and there were three board seats reserved for Slayers, to which Buffy, Faith and Caridad had been elected.
Things had gone more smoothly after that. Many of the Slayers who had family were sent back home, for now. The rest had gone to Cleveland, to check out the state of its Hellmouth. It had never been as active as the one in Sunnydale, but some feared that that would be changing, as a new equilibrium was established.
Giles was in England, working to get the Watchers reorganized. Many of the lower ranking members of the organization were still alive, scattered around the world. Robin Wood was left in charge of the core group of Slayers in Cleveland, while others spread out around the world to track down the new Slayers. Buffy and Dawn had gone to Europe, Willow and Kennedy were currently in South America, and he and Faith were here in Colorado Springs.
Xander was brought out of his reverie by Faith saying, "Hey, she's moving."
He looked at the compass, and saw that the needle was twitching. He reached for the key to start the car. Faith slid back across to the passenger side. They didn't have to wait long. A few minutes later the compass needle swung around, following a green sedan that passed by them.
"Alright, here we go." Xander pulled out behind the car, and followed it back onto Highway 115. They headed north, into Colorado Springs.
"Let's try out Willow's database," said Xander. "See what it can tell us about who owns the car with that license plate."
Faith pulled out the notebook computer that had been stashed under her seat, and opened it up. She typed in her password, and then started the database program that Willow had set up for them. She entered the license plate number. "Here it is," she said. "The car belongs to a Dr. Janet Fraiser, Major, U.S. Air Force. Current address: 47 Mountain View Lane, Colorado Springs." She checked her map. "That's right in the middle of Willow's circle."
"I doubt if she's our Slayer."
"No, but she has a sixteen year old daughter, named Cassandra," said Faith. "She's probably the girl who's with her in the car."
"Bingo!"
"So, why would her daughter be with her at the NORAD base?"
"Bring your daughter to work day?" asked Xander.
"I don't think that the Air Force does things like that."