Thanks for the kind reviews.

I cannot reveal just yet how the journey will unravel. I'm interested in two things, though, Cameron and John's relationship and Cameron and Derek's friendship/cooperation. We had a glimpse of the latter in 220: To the Lighthouse.

Cameron is blond and wields a Japanese sword… Kill Bill, all right. Will she perform the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart technique? Maybe...

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 TWO
IN WHICH DEREK WANTS TO RETRIEVE HIS CAN-OPENER
AND JOHN ALSO MEETS A BLOND GIRL

Derek woke with a sore head and the cold awareness that he was utterly miserable.

"It's like an elephant took a dump in my mouth," he croaked. He tilted the rear-view mirror to see a battered face, a black-and-violet bruise spreading like a port wine stain under his right eye. "Did it stomp on my face too?"

Cameron kept her eyes locked on the road. "No," she deadpanned.

The sky was slowly turning gray into a pale shade of red, casting a smooth glow beyond the cliff and on the moving crests of waves. The ocean was calm and flat on the horizon. The storm had passed.

"Got any water?" He was parched.

"Check the glove box."

He did and a heap of random shit fell on his feet – among which a tiny juice box with a rainbow-colored toucan on it. "Good call." He speared the box with the plastic straw and gulped down the undefined liquid. "Thought your kind was tidier."

"Not my car," said Cameron.

Derek slouched back against the dusty window and drifted into a shallow slumber. Bits of the night came back to him at random, untangled with figments of dream.

Gunshots and fire. She was standing there with a bloody sword. No, not she. It. Cameron. The metal. What the hell was she doing here? He was fine and cozy in his leatherette booth and some serious shit had hit the fan. Two tall guys came for him… and the third one, just a boy, impaled by the Japanese sword. The boy was stuffed with the other two in the back of a black van. She came to retrieve the head – a fucking head – and threw it as so much garbage into the trunk of the van. Then she stepped backward and shot the gas tank: the van ignored gravity for a split-second, fell back on its tires and burst into flames. The world merged into a blur. She made him drink something with a pill, maybe two, then he was lying on something hard with his chest bare and he was cold and she was rummaging through him.

Derek woke again and winced at the stabbing pain in his flank; he had a gauze dressing around his stomach, somewhat wet and reddish where he felt the sharp ache.

"You'll be okay," said Cameron. "One of the rounds went through me and lodged itself in your abdomen. I removed it."

They had left the shoreline. The road was now taking sharp turns into the steep terrain behind the cliff. Small pines stood idly on the side of the road, their brown roots peppered with bottle-green bushes cracking the asphalt open. Derek resisted the urge to fall back into oblivion and tried to gather his thoughts.

"April 21, 2011," he whispered.

"What?"

"April 21, 2011," he said again, "my Judgment Day."

"I know," she answered, "it's mine too."

"So what?" he snapped. "It's been three years now. It's not happening?"

"I don't know," she confessed. "It will eventually. Judgment Day is inevitable."

He made a gruff sound in response. "I was good, you know," he finally said, "I kept my head low."

"It was just a matter of time before they'd find you."

Derek felt like his past years had be thrown down a bottomless pit: he was going to take the blame for whatever happened back at the club. The Ellison case had been dropped and he was out of prison and for once in his life, he had been a free man and he had been at peace with something. His face was going to pop up on the FBI database and the news channels. He could see it clear as day:

DEAD OR ALIVE

with a grainy picture of him beneath, unshaven in his crumpled shirt from Magnum PI.

"Who were they anyway? That group – what was it – Kaliba?"

"I think they were something else," she said.

"What did they want from me?" he pressed.

"Interrogation. Then termination."

He sighed and massaged his temples. "I don't get it. I'm nobody. I know nothing."

Despite the rampant misery of incarceration, Derek had breathed relief behind the rusty metal bars of his cell. It was somewhere in the middle of the second year that he had realized he was no pawn in John Connor's big chess game. Nobody had come down tearing the jail apart to break him out – or to separate his skull from his spine, for that matter. Nobody wanted him inside and nobody was waiting for him outside and he was fine with that. Still, he had resented spending his last days laundering sperm-stained blankets and stamping license plates for the state of California.

"You are the resistance," said Cameron softly.

"Don't say that. Just don't." He shifted in his seat, trying to get into some kind of fetal position. "I need some rest."

Soon enough he was clutched by the void and back to sleep.


John shoved bits of a dismantled rifle aside and laid out the paper map on the kitchen table. He smoothed the creased corners on the plastic tablecloth adorned with pictures of ferns and rainforest trees. The map was a country-wide representation of America. John had pinned six red dots at various locations: three of them were lined up the west coast and three were spread five hundred miles inland.

Sarah Connor glanced up from the mug of coffee she was nursing, volutes of steam rolling up her cheeks lazily. "What is that?" she asked. "A map of lightning strikes?"

"No. Radiation sites. I triangulated some of them from the readings of a government-sponsored lab… you remember when we jumped from the bank's vault, back in 2007?"

She nodded grimly.

"Well, what happened yesterday was an order of magnitude higher. The time slippage was huge, bigger than anything I expected."

Sarah knew his son's theory about time travels and how they could stop time for a split-second – no, a tiny split of a split-second. She was also positive that John was a self-taught genius in most aspects of physics and she could barely follow his train of thoughts most of the time.

She sighed wearily. "Meaning?"

"What happened in that back alley…" he said, "was not an isolated event."

Sarah exhaled slowly. She had been working the night shift during the storm: you would not consider mopping the floor of gas stations a fascinating activity but their savings had worn thin over the last year; they only had a few diamonds left in the black pouch hidden under the sink. You could see the bottom of it.

John had made the call and she'd dropped the mop and drove straight to the back alley, a nondescript path between two major lanes a few miles shy from their safe house. Both entrances had been yellow-taped and cops had literally crowded the place, a team of forensics fussing over the crater. She had floored the gas pedal, hurtled the truck back to the safe house and spent the rest of the night in the Kevlar-stuffed chair facing the front door, a twelve-gauge shotgun armed with tungsten rounds on her lap.

"So," asked Sarah sharply, "each dot on the map marks a crater with a naked guy in it?"

"Can't tell," said John. "Some of the radiation sites might be only artifacts from the storm. It's still early but the local precincts and the FBI are keeping it close to the chest."

The morning sky was bright and blue, showing no sign of the antediluvian storm that had wreaked havoc during the night. They had muted the small television screen propped on the counter: all the channels were parroting each other in a shallow attempt to report factually the origins of the

STORM OF THE CENTURY

"They won't be able to stifle the situation for long," said Sarah.

John made his way to the tiled counter. "Maybe they will," he said, pouring himself a cup of coffee, or rather, the coffee-brewed-by-his-mother, which was something else entirely: a brownish and overboiled, straight-down-to-the-bowels beverage. "I intercepted a short communication. It was mostly scrambled but I think it came from higher up. Big Brother might be boggarting us."

He took a sip and winced at the sour taste. He needed it though. He hadn't closed a single eyelid since… well, he couldn't tell anymore. "Where's Charley at?" he asked.

"Early shift," she said. "The storm left a trail of broken wrists and ankles. And a dead cop," she added. "Got a lead on the whereabouts of our new friend?"

John shook his head. "Couldn't track him down after he snapped that poor fellow's neck. He's foe, though, not friend. From the bulk I'd say trip-eight or a higher model."

Sarah's knuckles went white on the mug's handle. "Got a good look at its face?"

"The video was to grainy and the camera didn't get the right angle. It was a he though."

"You sure?"

"Saw his male parts."

Sarah gulped down the last third of the boiled mixture then with a few swift, economical movements, reassembled the rifle scattered across the kitchen table. She had made up her mind.

"Pack your things," she said.

John remained slouched against the counter. "You know where I stand on this," he said. "Keep our ground. Fight." He spoke halfheartedly, arguing with his mother was like trying to stand ground to a hurricane.

Sarah poked the map and each red dot on it with increasing violence. "That's good reckon you did there," she said coldly. "But you're still a sloppy strategist. It's not a game of chess, John. There is no pawn hopping one square at a time, waiting for a countermove. Until we know better, each one of these dots is foe and they're moving toward us."

They remained silent for a while. Then she said, more softly, "How's Savannah?" She had locked her up in the basement, a large concrete room they had padded with thick, plastered sheets of lead. It was not the first time they'd done this and Sarah knew that it was about time the girl would become mad and try to break down the steel door with her teeth and bare fists.

"Calmer than you'd think," said John. "She knows what's at stake." He fiddled with a loose thread on his shirt. "She's been making friends at school."

"I know she has," said Sarah. "But you also have a bullseye on your forehead, one of those things could be ringing our doorbell any minute, now. This is no desertion, John… we just don't have the upper hand, is all."

He sighed heavily. "I know, I know."

"What was that thing you told me? Back at that chess tournament with Andy. Something about the queen doing zigzags."

John sniffled. "Zugzwang. The Japanese had lost their master piece, the queen. It's called zugzwang."

"Well, we lost our queen a long time ago – we don't have her to fight and take bullets in our stead."

He brought down the cup harshly on the counter, spilling the hot liquid on his hand. Shit.

His anger died in his throat and they both froze when they heard the noise. The bickering between mother and son melted away and morphed into something else, something old and carved into their bones. Sarah popped two armor-piercing shells in the rifle's chamber and John crouched by the sink to retrieve the Remington and the six tungsten bullets resting in its magazine.

Someone had just rung the doorbell.


Derek dreamed of garbage and big chunks of concrete walls with bits of rusty metal protruding at right angles from them. He dreamed of the everlasting night and the tunnels. He dreamed of standing at attention on a white marble square, surrounded by humongous statues of metal: some looked like horses, some looked like towers and kings. John Connor sat on a throne made of skulls and made a vague gesture toward him: Derek moved forward, a mere pawn sent to slaughter. He was shitting himself, right now. He dreamed of rubber the color of sulfur in the shape of a human face and he dreamed of a red diode burrowed in it.

Then, he dreamed of her. She was standing in front of him in a white leather jacket, her long brown hair placated against her face, dripping water on the concrete floor and looking like a drowned rat. She cut the gray tape that had him restrained to the chair and she said, you're welcome.

Derek snapped awake when the car hit a bump. They had left the shimmering tarmac and were now on a dirt road, edging away from the pine forest. At the end of the trail, a wooden motel stood a bit off its axis, like a brothel-looking version of the Pisa tower. The neon sign was missing a letter. Cameron parked the truck in the inner courtyard.

"What are we doing here?" mumbled Derek, straightening up in his seat.

Cameron keyed off the ignition and exited the car swiftly. There was a huge mark on her seat: a dried-out blood stain in the shape of her lower back and shoulder blades. She strode to a door labeled with a silvery "7" turned upside down (the thing was loose on its screw.) From here, she looked like she had been put through a meat grinder.

"Got stuff I need to retrieve," she called out, inserting a key with a little tag on it. "I won't be long."

Derek sighed and delved into the mess the glove box had puked all over the carpeted floor. He found a hand-crank flashlight, a pine-shaped freshener, empty wrappings of mint gums and a near-empty cigarette pack with brown butts lying around. He lit one of the cigarettes with the lighter socket and exhaled the smoke slowly. He thought of hiding the rest of the pack in his jeans' back pockets: cigarettes were a steady currency on the prison market. The parking lot was bereft of any other car. A lone vending machine stood beneath the porch and a big lizard lay in front of it, basking in the morning sun. Most of the doors were covered in dust or missing their identification number… welcome back, Derek. That's your kind of place, all right.

Cameron emerged from the room with a black armored suitcase and her leather jacket in one hand and a military bag bigger than her slung over her thin shoulder. She had changed her blood-stained garments with a set of fresh ones. She put her stuff on the backseats then came around to stand in front of him. She was cradling something in her hands.

"Here," she said, handing him her black leather jacket. The back of the thing was ripped and stained with gore. "I'm sorry," she added, "it's in bad shape now."

Derek threw the butt of the cigarette through the open window. "What is it?" he asked. "It won't fit me anyway."

"No," she said, "I meant to get it back to you. It's Jesse's jacket."

He stared at her.

"You left it in your truck six years ago. You said I shouldn't touch it."

It came to him in some sort of a silent, black-and-white flash. He was in his old locker room, the one he'd burned down after retrieving the diamonds. He had snatched the jacket from her hands, because it was Jesse's jacket, and she should not be touching that, no one should be touching that. Then she had said something about his unborn baby and the world had turned red. He had pinned her against the wall. God, he just wanted to put a bullet through her chin up to her silicon chip. He had wanted to do bad things to her in that moment and some of them involved carnal punishment, something he would never admit to himself. He saw how John could be so easily fooled by her, the petite, ninety-pound brunette with the innocent doe eyes and that fucking pout.

He wanted to scream and shout and shove the bloody token of his past into her face. He wanted to be angry but the truth was… he didn't really care. She was staring at him and he felt no anger.

"Well, the thing is ruined," he said. "Did you wear it at least?"

"I did. It's a tight jacket."

He leaned over the window and throw the remnants of the jacket across the yard toward the vending machine. The lizard skedaddled, startled by the sudden intrusion of its privacy.

"Well I guess it's served its purpose," he said. "What's in the suitcase?"

Cameron circled back to her seat and turned on the ignition. "Laptop," she said. "We need to investigate what happened."

"The bad guys."

She turned toward him. "No. Time has stopped. Time shouldn't have stopped."

"You said that before, back in the club. What does it mean?"

"I don't know yet."

She put the truck in gear.

"Wait," said Derek, "where are we going?"

"South."

He shook his head. "No, we need to go to my place."

"No, we don't need to do that."

"We do and we will. You owe me."

She cocked a dubious eyebrow. "You owe me," she said. "I saved you. Twice."

"And you show up with your fake blond hair and your pert butt and I'm a fugitive again. We need to go to my cabin."

"They knew where you worked," she said, "they surely know where you live."

"My dog," was all he said.

"What?"

"My dog. We need to get my dog."

Minutes elapsed slowly. He thought he heard her make the faintest sigh.

"Come on… he's all I got left."

"What's his name?"

"Cano." He pronounced it Canno. "It's short for Can-opener."

"I'm not a dog person."

She made a U-turn in the courtyard then floored the throttle and they left the motel in a trail of dust.


John and Sarah knew all the floorboards that would make so much as a soft creak. They avoided them and got to each side of the reinforced door frame. A shadow was standing behind the hammered-glass panel. The bell rang again.

"Come on guys," came the voice outside, "it's been a rough night."

Sarah leaned a bit harder against the door frame and lifted the safety pin off her rifle. John did the same. "Who are you?" she asked.

"It's Riley. Riley Dawson. You know me, right?"

They stared at each other open-mouthed. Then Sarah mouthed quietly to John, "Is that her?"

"How could it be?" he hissed through gritted teeth.

"You died a long time ago, girl," said Sarah to the door.

"Huh… no, walking and talking. I'd knew if I were dead."

"Okay, take a few steps back," ordered Sarah.

"What?"

"Just do as I say or I swear I'll blow your fake yellow head into smithereens."

The girl took a few steps back on the wooden porch to appear in the visual field of the security camera. "Oh. Hi!" She waved at the blinking device.

"Is that her?" asked Sarah again, tilting the surveillance screen toward John. "She doesn't look metal, that's for sure."

"Fuck… I don't know, she looks a bit older."

"She's the Riley from our time, right? Still a child somewhere."

"No," said John, "it's doesn't work like that. She's already jumped and died in our timeline. Or it means the future is an endless reservoir of our own selves. It doesn't make any sense."

"Let's ask nicely." Sarah pressed the intercom button. "Where did you come from?"

The disembodied voice crackled in the intercom. "Around here."

Sarah punched the door frame. "What year?"

"Oh, sorry. 2031… could you just let me in? I could really use some form of food and a proper bathroom right now."

Sarah sniffled in disdain then she opened the door and stepped forward, the barrel of her rifle a few inches from Riley's face. The few patches of bare skin she had exposed were covered in grime and the rest of her body was draped in oversized, threadbare garments – the kind picked at random in the middle of the night. John appeared in the entrance and tucked his gun in his waistband.

Sarah turned back toward her son. "Well?" she asked, a murderous glint in her eyes. The girl was ogling the ominous barrel shoved up her face.

"Yes," said John, "it's her." Then he muttered to himself, shaking his head, "It doesn't make any sense."

"Okay, then." Sarah dropped the rifle loose to her side, grabbed the girl by the collar of her dirty "Let's go Beavers!" sweatshirt and rammed her forehead into her nose. Riley dropped to the ground in a "fuck!" and a hail of waving limbs, blood gushing from her nostrils. "Look at that!" exclaimed Sarah. "I called it: she's not metal."

John squeezed his temples hard between his thumb and middle finger. "Mom…" he sighed, "your skull would be cracked open like a ripe coconut if she were."

Sarah raised her hand apologetically. "Live and learn, I guess. You…" She grabbed a weeping Riley by the neck and threw her across the porch and into the house. "Welcome home."

John helped the girl to her feet. "I'm gonna pack my tech and free Savannah from her cell," he said. "If Riley knows our address, others might too," he added grimly.

Sarah walked back inside and slammed the door shut. She propped the rifle against the door frame and made a curt nod. "Glad we agree. I've already packed most of the weapons and ammo this morning. I'll call Charley. We're out in fifteen minutes," she said.

"Make it twenty. I have to stop the bleeding. Just look at this mess…"

"Cotton wool's under the sink. I'll make pancakes."


Author's note: Derek's dreams: Cameron freeing him from Kaliba (220: To the Lighthouse.) Jesse's jacket: I suppose Cameron kept all their stuff.

Riley Dawson, shouldn't she be dead?

A stranded bit from Chapter Two coming up next.