Author's note: I do not own the characters, the space-time continuum, etc.
Summary: The story begins six years after the events of 219: Today Is the Day. Sarah ditched Derek and Cameron and kept John hidden in the lighthouse with Charley Dixon. She felt that Jesse's treason was Derek's and that Riley's murder was an omen. A storm gathers and in the eye of the storm stands a girl from the future, Cameron. Space and time have been stretched between John and her. She will travel with unexpected companions on an unexpected journey to find her way back.
CROSSING LINES
PART ONE
THE FOUR CORNERS
CHAPTER ONE
IN WHICH A STORM GATHERS
AND DEREK MEETS A BLOND GIRL
The night had grown hot and sultry in the northern state of Washington. Black clouds had gathered from the shoreline, their insides cracked open by towering arcs of lightning. Each bolt of blinding light would leave a vaporous, two-dimensional imprint of the world on his retinas: the tenements looked carved out of limestone and the cars lined up the curb were so many paintings of ancient predators.
Derek had spent the last three years earning a decent wage bouncing for late night establishments near Seattle. The three years before that, he was in prison. Sarah had just hightailed with John, leaving him marooned down a dirt road with a truckload of rifles and a set of sham coordinates to the safe house. He had yearned for a strong drink that night and gotten more than one. He'd been caught sobering up on the sticky floorboards of a backcountry joint where he'd broken some kneecaps… just an honest brawl between honest folks, really! Somehow the prosecutor had been at odds with this statement and he'd thought – in his right mind – that throwing a customer onto a red-hot frying table was far from the realm of honest behaviors. But it had smelled like burned pork, and Derek loved the smell of burned pork, it would always bring him back to family barbecues on Sundays. Derek said so and they said he should not be joking on such grave matters and the honest brawl turned into an aggravated assault and battery – which you could call a terminological divergence in Derek's opinion.
He made a turn right on the wet, neon-spattered street. The asphalt had been battered by the heavy summer rain and rivulets were gushing down the gutters. He steered his old truck into the half-empty parking lot, the wet tarmac lit by a lone sodium-vapor lamp. He keyed off the ignition and shouldered the door open, slamming it shut behind him. The air was heavy with salt and the tang of ozone and thunder was rumbling low on the horizon. Derek strolled to the back entrance of the King Jack's nightclub where Omar, the lean, six-eight bouncer, had his usual don't-fuck-with-me look, his black shirt and black skin still damp from the rain; he hauled himself up from the garden chair and smiled a wide array of tobacco-stained teeth.
"Didn't reckon I'd see you 'fore Monday," he said. Omar bent himself and they patted each other on the back.
Derek wiped the moisture on his brow. "Just figured I'd spend the night down here, cooling off."
"I here ya." Omar produced a set of keys from his pocket, unlocked and pushed open the metal gate that advertised in flaky letters:
STAFF ONLY
"Don't go too hard on yourself, old man!" he called out when Derek vanished into the gloomy staircase; he chuckled and raised his middle finger above his shoulder.
Thunder roared one last time before the door was closed and Derek felt like a big cat. Knowing the man – and his history with violence – you might picture this kind of big cat: the huge, yellow-eyed shadow pouncing from the depths of the canopy in a rustle of leaves and a hail of fangs. But in that regard you couldn't be further from the truth. Derek felt like an overweight Persian dragging its furry paunch over the parquet and under the bed, scared to the bones by the looming storm. It would always drag him back to that place where daylight had become an obsolete concept, the everlasting darkness split apart by serpentine bolts of lightning and acid rains and the heat rising from the vitrified, tainted soil. Storms still gave him the heebie-jeebies and no mistake. If you were to mention it, though, violence would certainly ensue.
Derek took the flight of skidproof steps that led to a thirty-foot long maintenance hallway where aluminum-coated pipes sprouted at random from the polystyrene ceiling. The rumble of thunder overhead faded slowly, washed away by the bone-shaking thrum emanating from the nightclub's backroom. Derek let the tension in his spine wear off. He didn't care much for the music or the scantily-clad chicks that usually crowded the place but he was keen on spending most of the night underground, nursing a shameful amount of sixty-percent-off White Russians – the perks of being a bouncer. He came to an halt at the end of the deserted hallway and softly pushed the plywood door open and the world became noise and flickering lights.
He found his regular reddish, vinyl-layered booth in the most secluded part of the smoky basement, somewhat recluse from the faceless crowd moving in sync to a dull, mechanical beat. Darkness was only split by transient speckles of blue, pink and green light, staining the varnished surface of his table to the Brownian rhythm of swiveling spotlights. He made a vague two-finger gesture toward the counter and Louis, the heavily-tattooed barkeep, nodded his acknowledgment before deftly taking various flasks and bottles from the neon-embedded bar. The faded-blue ink the man wore from wrist to shoulder displayed linear bits of servos, hinges and pistons. The sight of it could unsettle Derek: it was an oblivious, mock-painting of what laid underneath the skin of them. His paranoid self would still creep up at the faintest cue: a glimpse of metal or a vacant stare, all too reminiscent of the rubber-skinned monsters… one night, he shot his VCR recorder into Bakelite smithereens. It was the red diode, he had told himself, panting in the pistol smoke. It was the freaking red diode, all right.
"You buying?"
Derek had not noticed the pretty blond that had taken a seat opposite to him, her legs swung together in a strange poise, as if she was side-saddling a still, wooden horse. He was met with straight, shoulder-length ash blond hair and the outline of a delicate neck and the delicate tendons within. She seemed engrossed in the hot, boiling human soup stirring back and forth on the dancing floor. New patrons were still gushing from the main entrance. A couple of them, tall blokes with craggy faces, made a beeline to the bar. Then the blond girl lost whatever had caught her eye in the inebriated crowd and turned back to Derek. Smudges of light flew across her face, cracking open the surrounding darkness for a split-second. She was a bit younger than he was but he could not decide if she was beautiful. She was a dissonant sight, though, clad in different shades of black head to toe, from the worn leather jacket and the black tank top underneath to the tight, battered jeans. She wore big, golden hoop earrings.
"I'm having White Russians," said Derek over the loud music. He frowned: the sentence seemed to lack a relevant amount of syllables. Heck, his tongue was thick. "It's coffee liquor, milk and vodka," he explained. "You having some?"
She blinked and nodded in what surely meant agreement and Derek raised two fingers toward the counter.
"You come here often?" she asked. It sounded more like a statement.
"I bounce here."
She made a quiet sound that resembled a question mark – if you admitted that question marks could make a sound of their own.
Derek went on, "I handle security at the entrance, spook off the tipsy, flip-flop wearing folks. We don't want no flip-flops, here, broken glass can be deadly to toes. They said they wanted to switch the tumblers with plastic cups, but it's not the same cachet, you know. Anyway, it's my night off." He did not mention that elbows had been bent at unnatural angles on more than one occasion. Most of the work was smooth-talk, anyway.
"Oh," she said. "Thank you for explaining."
He didn't quite catch that.
The waitress, a cute brunette in her mid-twenties, came in carrying a black tray balanced on her palm. She leaned over the table, shrouded in the ambient blackness, and set down two large copper tumblers filled to the brim with a creamy liquid, a few coffee beans floating on the foamy surface. She parted quietly and sashayed to the next secluded booth.
The blond girl took a small, pink-tongued sip out of the tumbler then gazed at it as if it might lick her back in retribution. She said something that sounded like "cheers!" and Derek returned the courtesy absentmindedly – he didn't raise his tumbler, though. He was staring past her left shoulder, watching intently as the waitress stopped in front of the nearest booth, twenty feet shy from theirs. The two rough-looking guys that had entered the club a few minutes ago sat there, facing each other. One had porcine eyes burrowed in a pale face, his jaws clenched, and the other was broad-shouldered with short-cropped hair, his skin the color of oiled mahogany. They both wore close-fitted field jackets made of gray, heavy-duty fabric. They seemed blank and did not share a single word when the waitress handed them two highball glasses of tonic water. Derek looked away when the white guy caught his eye.
The scene – decided Derek in his inner, not-paranoid mind – was deeply unnerving. He felt a hollowness spread in his guts, the one he'd trusted his whole life to keep him safe and get him the hell out of Dodge. He pressed harder against the backrest and shifted in his seat to feel the reassuring weight of the Glock strapped under his parrot-ornamented shirt. The blond girl said something but it sounded like a distant hum, now. The sweaty crowd was swaying with frenzy, taking human shapes under the fleeting waves of light only to vanish a second later. The bass beat was speeding up frantically, merging into a lifeless shriek.
Then it all came down in a heartbeat.
The booming speakers went dead and the basement was plunged into utter darkness. The world became noise again to the deafening crack of thunder and disembodied cries of fear.
John Connor pinched the bridge of his nose and knocked back the cold remnants of coffee that laid at the bottom of his "Best Dad Ever!" ceramic mug. He pressed the "Y" key when the terminal queried him with an umpteenth request. Monitoring the local precincts' database had been a bust. Then he'd gone from reading forecast bulletins to rummaging through thousands of obscure webpages, searching for weird, "bubble-looking" electromagnetic events. The amount of "bubble-looking" stuff the search engine could muster was maddening. Truly maddening.
"Care for help?" came the sweet voice from the doorway. John didn't bother to greet the newcomer. He took his forehead and temples in his hands and let out a gruff "m'fine!"
Savannah made her way to the desk littered with a solid ton of laptops, hard-drives and monitors, each one of them displaying fluctuating graphics or black-and-white security recordings. She laid a thin, freckled hand on John's shoulder. The girl had hit puberty the year before and she'd nursed a crush on and off for the young man since. She knew from the slight shake in his hands that he had not slept a single minute in the past twenty-four hours.
"I know it's out there," said John. His voice trailed off a bit. "It's coming, I can feel it."
Savannah picked up a printed copy of a scientific article precariously perched up a towering pile of paper. John had tried to wrap his head around this for more than a week, now. Something about "time slippage." She could not understand one word out of two but she knew it had something to do with the upcoming storm. Clocks were not ticking the way they should be.
"A second is an arbitrary measure," had said John to her over breakfast, the bottom-half of his face hidden behind the Honey Pops box. "It's based on the state transition of cesium."
"What's cesium?"
"It's an atom. Anyway, the nuclear clocks are getting out of tune. Time is slipping. It's like a real Doomsday Clock."
Savannah doubted such a clock existed. Most of the concepts were way out of her grasp but one thing was for certain: she trusted John. Clocks were getting funky and it had something to do with time travels.
"It's like the leaves on a tree," he had said. "They move because of the wind, but you cannot see the wind itself, right? Well, traveling in time is like the wind, the tree is the watch on your wrist and the ticking hands are the leaves. When they miss a tick, it means that someone, or something, has jumped back in time."
She had nodded in sham understanding before gulping down a mouthful of cereal.
"I think it's about matter," he had mused over his third cup of coffee. "The amount of energy displaced by a body is high enough that the universe needs to balance it, y'know, blow off the steam. Somehow, losing time is one way of doing it… come on, sweetie, finish your Honey Pops. You gonna be late for school."
Savannah put back the paper neatly on the edge of the wooden desk. Dusk had finally settled on their quiet suburb. It was a hot night, though, and the amount of computers radiating heat was gradually turning the room into a furnace.
"Maybe I'm going to call it a night," said John, slouching back into the padded chair to stare blankly at the monitors.
"I wish I could help."
He sighed and swiveled on the chair. "Don't sweat it, lil'one. You should get some sleep, too."
John's desk was actually a downscale version of the entire room. Heaps of garments and dismantled weapons were battling for supremacy over the parquet floor. The bed had been already claimed by thirty meters of copper wire, a small army of pliers with handles spanning the whole color spectrum and a dozen solid-state circuits ablated from gutted computers.
Something caught Savannah's eye on the edge of the desk. Something she hadn't seen in a long time. She bit the inside of her mouth. "Would she be able to help?" she finally asked.
John rubbed his eyes harshly. "Huh?"
She was pointing at something resting on the far end of the desk. A tiny set of navy-blue papers. She knew that sometimes John would look into it with solemn deference, engrossed in the tiny picture within. Sometimes, though, he would hide it for months in the top drawer of his bedside table, trying to forget it existed in the first place. Savannah couldn't help but feel a pang of envy. She walked past John, took the passport and stared at the portrait inside.
"Would she be able to help?" she said again.
John tensed up, he'd never talk about her willingly and would get skittish if someone did. Savannah had never met the woman on the photograph – the only one they'd kept – and would eagerly snatch every piece of information, every bit of memory she'd left behind her.
"I don't know," sighed John wearily. "She knew a lot. At the same time, she knew very little."
Savannah fiddled with one corner of the passport. "She still alive?" she asked.
John gently took it back from her hands and closed it without looking at the picture inside. "It doesn't matter. Now, let's get some rest –"
John's voice disappeared in the deafening sound that engulfed the house and Savannah yelped in fear. Thunder rolled up ahead, the unreal crack of a mountain being split open by the sheer force of nature. They stood still in the white dust slowly drifting down the plaster ceiling. Savannah had a firm grip on John's arm. Her eyes and ears were slowly regaining function, adjusting to the darkness and the sharp silence. The lights in the house had gone out, save for John's hardware, plugged to an emergency generator. Outside, some streetlamps had shattered from the surge.
John was unflinching, smiling even in the blue glow cast by the monitors.
"What was that?" cried out Savannah.
"Gotcha!" exulted John, ignoring her. He pointed to one of the screens where charts were furiously blanking amber. Once again, the universal timescale had shifted. No human could have perceived such a feeble mishap in in the space-time continuum, but a machine could.
"The power surge is huge, too" he said, spinning another monitor around. "Look! It's spread a hundred miles inland."
John was ecstatic, tapping away at high speed on the plastic keyboard. One at a time, lights were back in the street, materializing out of the ozone-tinted mist. "Someone jumped," he said. "One hell of a jump, too, it fried half the west coast. I gotta track back the position –"
She interrupted his ramble, "John, look!"
A grayscale footage was playing on one of the screens, the one that was paired to the LAPD private broadcast. Shaky pictures interwove with statics. The body-worn camera shuddered to the fast pace of the policeman as he ran and turned sharply into a back alley. The scene came into focus when the cop stopped abruptly in his tracks. The street was literally on fire, metal dripping from the melted staircase attached to the brick walls. Impenetrable smoke was rising from the center of the alley, evaporating slowly, first revealing the black-burned, vitrified tarmac, then the naked body kneeling at the center of the crater.
John's mouth was agape. "Fuck."
A large human shape emerged from the fuming embers, the surrounding fire casting deep shadows on his muscular body. He did not seem to mind the white-hot asphalt as he marched forward. The cop's voice came crackling on John's desk, "You alright, bud? Just step out of this mess."
The other responded, "What day is it?"
"Huh. Saturday."
"What year?"
"You got hit by lightning or something, bud? 2014. Come ahead, now."
"Thank you for the information."
John and Savannah watched the cop being lifted up from the ground. He drew his pistol and shot. The naked man did not even flinch when the bullet ripped and tore his skin apart, revealing the metal under his jaw. They heard a heart-sickening snap and the cop went limp. The last thing they saw was the ground on fire and a bare foot stepping on the camera, and then, the back alley turned into white noise.
Derek sprang upward and touched the grip of his Glock, adrenaline searing his thigh muscles. Bodiless cries of fear drifted through absolute blackness. His body quivered and tensed when something came laying upon the center of his chest. He snapped and grabbed what felt like a hand. He tried to yank it away, but the arm attached to it was like unmovable, solid steel.
The distant drone of a generator revved softly and the emergency sodium-lamps came alive, casting a weak, yellow glow down the smoky basement of the King Jack's nightclub. A man climbed up the counter and shouted at the top of his lungs over the noisy crowd, "Sorry guys! We experienced some kind of – huh – power surge. The second generator has just kicked in. We gonna wait for the main power to turn back on."
Derek stood still, deaf to his surroundings; the world had coalesced into a blur… all but the tiny, smooth hand that held is Hawaiian shirt into a death-grip and the lean, leather-clad arm above. The blond girl was standing upright, her petite frame inches away from his bulky one. Her face showed nothing, not even the slightest strain as she held his two hundred pounds like a vise. She nodded curtly toward his right hip.
"Do not draw that."
What the hell, muttered Derek to himself, feeling blood departing his face. He'd been so engrossed in watching the two odd-looking blokes that he'd missed it entirely. Sloppy, Reese, you're getting soft. But he could see it now under the shallow light: doe eyes that burned right through his skull. It had been, what, six years, maybe more; it certainly felt like several lifetimes ago. An ancient reminder of what lay behind the curtains.
"Do not draw that, Derek," she said.
The hair on the back of his neck erected, the skin-crawling sound of his name weaving down his spine. Three years ago, when the warden had wished him good riddance for being a model inmate, Derek had gone straight to his old locker room, snatched the plughole out of the tiled floor and removed the small package glued under it: fifty thousand dollars worth of diamonds. He'd ridden the Greyhound upstate and beyond, gotten himself a cabin in the woods and a brand-new identity. He had not heard his real name since and it crept him out, but at the same time, it felt good.
"They are here for you," she said. Derek kept his eyes locked onto hers, not daring to glance at the two vacant-looking, gray-clad men. They were up on their feet, too, and looked like bowstrings ready to snap.
She tilted her head to the side as if trying to isolate the sound of their heartbeats from the background noise. "Humans," she deadpanned, "machines wouldn't mind the civilians. Time to go," she added with urgency.
"I can take care of myself!" snarled Derek.
"They are trained killers."
He tried to jerk her arm and drag her aside. "And what are you, huh?" he retorted furiously.
She resisted effortlessly and made a low, feline growl.
Derek's knuckles had gone white where he had clenched her arm. He could not fathom how a quiet night at the club had turned so hastily into a nightmare from his old life: a man hunt. A second rumble shook the very foundations of the basement. The cleaving sound of thunder filled the room and the lamps flashed and burst into gleaming shards, leaving blurry shapes on his retinas, floating in utter darkness.
The blond girl pushed Derek backward. "Time to go," she shouted over the growing mayhem. He obeyed and they bumped into erratic patrons, half-running to random places on the verge of panic. The place reeked of perspiration. "Back entrance," she instructed. They tumbled through the plywood door and entered the deserted hallway, hastening their pace. The staircase was only a few feet away. She stopped for a second when they clumsily reached the flight of steps. Derek heard a rustle behind them and caught sight of a moving shadow.
"What is it?" he pressed.
"Time has stopped," she said, then without so much as a how-do-you-do, she pushed Derek roughly across the last steps and through the locked metal gate, squeezing both of them through the gap she'd created. The lone streetlamp had survived the storm and still cast a pale halo on the parking lot. Derek felt bile fill up his throat when he saw a pair of long legs protruding on his right. Omar was slumped in his garden chair, a hole the size of a dime between his eyes. Footsteps intensified behind them down the pitch black corridor.
"You were lucky to be off-duty, tonight," she said. Then, "To my truck," she ordered. "Go!"
They sprinted ahead on the wet tarmac and got side by side to the bed of a black Dodge Ram, panting. The roar of thunder was edging away… and they froze on the spot when they heard a click, the sound of a safety pin being lifted off. A tall man with a Seattle Mariners baseball cap emerged from behind the truck, a Beretta trained on Derek's head. He was also clad in gray, military-grade garments, but was much younger than the other two. His lips were folded into a thin, trembling pink line. The metal door of the nightclub burst open and Derek heard the fast stride of steel-capped boots on asphalt. He raised his palms slowly behind his head when he felt a cold barrel ram his upper spine.
"Easy, easy," he gasped.
The raspy voice came from behind, "Good job, Lars." The gun was pressed harder into the soft flesh at the base of Derek's skull. In the unreal, silent aftermath of the storm, he could hear his watch ticking.
A third man grunted in the back, "Let's take him, now. The boss is not so partial on waiting."
"But what about the girl?" said the capped boy, tightening his grip on his pistol.
"Don't sweat it," said Raspy, followed by a hoarse chuckle. "Come on girl. I wanna see your hands now. Nice and easy. Turn around."
Derek glanced at her. She had kept her head low, hidden behind her blond hair, and her hands were in the bed of the truck; the muscles in her forearm were tight, showing stretched sinews underneath. Without the slightest inflection in her voice, she said, "I'm gonna show you my hands."
"We're losing time!" barked the third man and he thumbed the safety off his gun. "Just shoot the bitch and we take him."
Derek could still hear his watch ticking but it seemed to slow down more and more… then he saw what the girl was holding in her hands and between two ticks of the second hand, time stood still.
Tick… the shrieking sound of metal splitting the air. She span at inhuman speed and the blade connected with the first neck, ripping the black skin open, the carotids and the spine underneath. Gravity had yet to claim the severed head when her sword reached the second guy, separating the top of his skull from the rest of his body, splattering brain matter all over the tarmac like a goddamn Jackson Pollock. The scalp made a harmonious, parabolic course across the droplet-filled air to land in a puddle near a car tire… tick.
Before Derek could react, she'd grabbed his collar and flung him to the ground, crouching over him and pressing her lithe frame hard against his body. Six rounds slammed into her back at point-blank range, each recoil slamming her collar bone into Derek's face, nearly knocking him out. Then she bolted upright and without so much as a glance threw the sword over the truck's bed. The boy looked down on his torso where the blade had impaled him. He dropped his gun and staggered backward. She was on him before he could fall, holding him tight by the sides of his head.
"Who gave the order?" she demanded.
His eyes became unfocused and red foam formed at the corners of his mouth.
"Who gave the order?"
She sensed one last floppy heartbeat and the boy was gone. She pulled the blade off his chest and let the body fall limply on the wet tarmac. Slowly, she came to Derek, her sword resting at her side. She extended a tiny, blood-stained hand. The girl from the future. The girl from his past.
"Derek Reese," said Cameron. "Come with me if you wanna live."
Author's note: I compare "time slippage" to Hawking's radiations (pairs of particles that should annihilate themselves but one is lost in a black hole.) Too much energy comes into one timeline when someone jumps (a unique person becomes people) – time is lost to compensate the overload.