Thanks for the kind reviews and the support. It keeps the story going.

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 FOUR
IN WHICH THE WHITE QUEEN CALLS

What Derek presumed would be simple mechanics – by that he would consider a discarded motorbike on the side of the road to be fairly simple, you could find plenty of them in the future – was actually a conundrum of tiny metal plates, optical wires the width of a hair and solid-state circuits that would make the insides of an iPhone look like an early, gross concept of the Babbage Machine.

Cameron sat on the chair, bent over the table. Her back was still a bloody mess from the night at the club. If one of the rounds had penetrated right through her hip to end up in his stomach, the five other bullets had lodged themselves into her back: two in her lower spine, which he had extracted easily, two where her lungs should be, which was also a simple access, and one in her right shoulder blade. This last bullet was… what, a pain in the ass? No, that would the understatement of the century. The frigging thing had embedded itself into a complex network of wires that sat behind her skeleton. She had given him the knife so he could peel the skin off her upper back, which was a bit sanguine and smelled like blood and iron and a "frog course" – the one with the dissection in it. He had to go into the bathroom and wash his hands several times because her fake blood was so sticky. The shoulder blade had many insertion points into her spine and what served as a collar bone but most of them acted like hinges and he had been able to remove it without much strain. The thing was light as a feather but he did not mention it.

Under the shoulder blade – which he put gently on the table – rested what Derek considered to be a chaotic representation of electronics imagined by a mad contemporary artist; he could almost hear the little bugger: oh yes, my dear, it's a modern critic of our technological society, you know, I placed some bits of wires and shit here and there… why ma'am, to make it look like a goddamn puzzle, all right. I do love me some puzzle, you know, not the soothing kind with lake pictures, mountain peaks and a thousand pieces, oh no, I prefer my puzzles made of a million, pitch black pieces that drive you freaking nuts.

Derek was sweating like an exhausted bull and he could feel droplets fill the creases on his forehead. The first time he tried to remove the bullet Cameron went limp on the table and she drooled something like plugbackcable plugbackcable. So he did plug back the cable, and the second time he tried to remove the bullet with the needle-nose pliers he had taken from the toolbox, her arms jerked and the shoulder blade he had neatly put next to her went flying across the room to bury itself into the bathroom wall… he already had trouble playing Operation with Kyle as a child, this was another dimension of nightmare.

"Could you please be gentle?" asked Cameron against the table. Her voice had a strange, inhuman quality to it, not unlike that tedious Siri living in his phone.

"I am being gentle but your body is a fucking mess. It's like an ordeal to leave the seventh circle of Hell or something… third time's the charm, right?"

"I don't like this kind of logic," she protested against the table.

"You don't like anything. You're a..." He pressed the handles of the pliers together like a vise. "Tough." He put both his hands on the handles. "Metal." He pulled with all his strength, tendons and veins bulging in his neck. "Bitch!" He staggered backward and hit the far wall behind him. The crushed bullet was sitting pretty between the jaws of the pliers. "Yes!" he shouted victory to the ceiling… and Cameron was now flaccid as a proverbial catfish on the beach.

"You all right?"

He poked the soft skin then tried to shake her awake. Her cheek was resting sluggishly on the table and her eyes stared into nothingness, unfocused.

"Fuckfuckfuck!"

Then she glanced up at him and said, "I fooled you."

He came to sit on a chair on the opposite side of the table, shoved aside some precision screwdrivers laying around and took his face in his hands, breathing out heavily through his fingers.

"Can you scratch my back?" she quipped.

"Don't push it," he grunted. "Connor used to repair you himself, right? A fucking nightmare is what it is."

"We are more complicated than you think."

"More intricate, you mean. I guess they don't teach that in Caltech."

"Not yet," she managed to mumble against the table. Then, "Thank you."

"Well, thanks for taking the bullets in your back in the first place."

She wriggled and drummed her fingers on the table. "Looks fine. You did a good work."

"Yeah? Looks like a wreck under the…" He pointed his thumb toward the shoulder blade embedded in the wall. "How does that work, exactly?"

"Neural networks circumvent the damaged area and enable me to operate at suboptimal levels until full repairs are complete."

"And again you mistake me for Connor… I only understood damage and repairs, here."

"Damage means I'm not one hundred percent."

"And who can perform the full repairs?"

"Connor," she said with a dull voice.

Derek laughed grudgingly. "What about daddy? Can't Skynet put his toys back together?"

"Skynet would just discard me and make a fresh one. Only humans repair machines."

"Silly of us, huh? One day we fix the beloved toaster, the next day it goes door to door looking for Sarah Connor."

Cameron made a muffled noise that resembled a silent outrage and then, "Would you…"

"Yeah, yeah."

He drank some fresh water from the faucet in the bathroom, yanked the shoulder blade off the wall with much swearing, shooed Cano away when he found him licking the sham blood on Cameron's back, and was back to work: reassembling the beloved machine in one piece.


Sarah parked the truck curbside. When they stepped out of the air-conditioned compartment the hot night engulfed them like a leaden shroud. They had taken rounds behind the wheel to get some sleep: with two cars, three drivers, and the fact that Savannah wouldn't ride with Riley, you could say it had been some kind of a twelve-hour long river crossing puzzle until they reached Albuquerque. They mustered the remnants of morale they had left to bring the solid ton of boxes and army bags into the living room. The place looked old: it was like the eighties had puked half-digested furnishings on the parquet floor and the wallpaper displayed green and pink flower patterns.

Charley was driving the weaker Subaru and got to the safe house half an hour later, carrying a sleeping Savannah in his arms. He lay her down on the couch while they started to sort the gargantuan mess out. Riley had vanished upstairs and into the bathroom. They were fine with that. They had tried to grill the blond girl – all of them being the bad cop, obviously – but most of the journey had been spent in cold silence and they didn't want to deal with the bird of ill omen just yet.

Sarah went down the flight of steps that led to the basement with the weight of a dead man on the back. The walls of the concrete room were lined with shelves made of metal and plywood. She laid down the bag on the floor and started to unpack a fraction of their arsenal: a wide array of guns, rifles, shotguns and armor-piercing ammunition that could supply a guerrilla warfare. Sarah had to make lots of trips to bring the artillery downstairs and the living room was gradually sorting itself out. At some point Savannah woke up and made the pretense of carrying things around – mostly the cushions that were already there in the first place. Another trip and the girl was watching reruns of My life as a teenage robot. Another trip and John and Charley were hugging like long-lost bears. John was holding some kind of tarnished locket attached to a silvery chain. He had grown big in the last years and was now taller than Charley by a few inches. Still, he always looked like a kid when he was with the older man. Sarah made the last trip with a bag full of Semtex and started to store the weapons in the shelves. The boys left her alone and they were right to do so. The basement was now a shrine to her and they knew better than to disturb the holy labor. Two hours later her white tank top had turned gray with perspiration. She made her way up and found the living room free of boxes and bags, almost neat and organized. The place sill looked like a boudoir, though, with the dusty carpets and these creepy ivy patterns climbing up the walls to the wooden ceiling. John and Savannah had slept on the couch top to tail for a while then he had carried her to one of the bedrooms. Sarah felt rough hands sliding on her flanks to come and rest on her stomach.

"It's never gonna stop," she whispered. "Is it?"

Charley sighed in the nape of her neck. "We're safe, for now. Come on," he added before she could speak her mind on the matter of safety, which they all knew well. "I brewed some coffee."

He led her to the kitchen and they kissed briefly. They were both weary and might drop unconscious for forty-eight hours straight if they sat down so they remained slouched against the counter in a half-standing position, nursing two crazed ceramic mugs.

"What does John think?" she finally asked. "I saw you two talk earlier."

"He's confused. He's angry."

"Do you trust that girl?"

"John told me she was pretty much the same even though the original was born in the tunnels."

"Doesn't make much sense, does it?"

"It does not to me. I think it does to him."

Sarah chuckled. "You think you can read that boy's mind?"

"I do," he answered gravely. "I know if he's up to something at least."

"Anyway, if that blond minx is the same then we cannot trust her entirely. You remember what she tried to pull on us."

"The Jesse case, right?"

Sarah spat the name back, "Jesse. Derek's bitch."

"It was that woman's doing. Not the girl."

She exhaled slowly and blew some air on the steaming liquid. "Maybe," she mused. "Did you talk about her, then?" Charley remained silent. "You're not gonna tell me, are you?" It was a statement, actually.

"Boys' talk," he answered. "Privacy clause."

Sarah faked a laugh. "Well, I hope you talked strategy. If Riley is right… we need to destroy her chip."

"That bit you can trust, huh?"

"And you don't?"

Charley put down his mug on the tiled counter and scratched his stubble, gathering his thoughts. "Cyberdyne, the Turk, Zeira Corp, the Hunter-Killers and those Kaliba grunts at the lighthouse… you blew them all sky high and yet, Riley is here. The future's still out there. Don't you think that Cameron might just be… Cameron?"

"I'm not sure I wanna take the risk, Charles."

"Figure it out. For John's sake. And don't call me Charles. You know I hate it."

She smiled wearily and laid her hand on his cheek. She came closer and they kissed. "What you gonna do about it, Charles?" she smirked against his stubble. She shoved the mugs aside and sat on the counter and they made love in silence. They clutched onto each other for a while, panting. They exhaled the storm and they exhaled the bad omens and they exhaled the height hundred miles of asphalt stretched between Los Angeles and Albuquerque.

Soon enough, Charley left the kitchen and made his way upstairs. Sarah pressed her temples hard between her fingers and she thought about her, the bloody token of the future… Cameron. Sarah was not good with compromises. She strolled to the living room in her panties and tank top and threaded lightly on the floorboards. Dawn was slipping in softly and Sarah found what she was looking for in the orange dimness. She stepped back into the kitchen and over her discarded jeans and she went down the flight of steps that led to the basement. There, she flipped open the prepaid phone and dialed the number. Sarah had made up her mind. Her son would understand. Her son would forgive, she told herself. The phone rang three times.

"White queen takes pawn," she said and waited for the code in response. "We need to meet."


Derek's wound had been gnawing and pulling in his stomach and he had managed to wash himself, crouching in the tub to avoid the gauze dressing. When he came out with a towel wrapped around his midsection, Cameron had her bare back to him. He had stapled the flaps of skin together and deemed it to be a fine handiwork. Then he fell on the bed and into oblivion and the night was cut with noises and visions.

He dreamed of the prison and the rusty bars and he dreamed of stamping the date of Judgment Day on a million license plates and he dreamed of stapling people onto walls and it made taptaptaptaptap.

At some point, Derek half-emerged from sleep. The room was dark and her small naked form was ethereal, bathed in the laptop's blue glow… taptaptaptaptap. She was drumming and tapping away at inhuman speed on two separate keyboards, filling the screen with endless columns of code and she was probing and scratching Cano's ears with her toes. The dog was curled asleep under the table and he squinted his eyes blissfully to the touch and Derek thought that it was senseless. Then he dreamed of electric birds and the chirping woke him up. Dawn was already snaking its way through the thick curtains.

"Black queen takes knight," said Cameron in the mouth-piece of the flip phone. "Where are you?"

Derek's brain was still foggy and he couldn't make much sense out of the conversation. Then his clothes were shoved into his face and he growled something like fuck and bitch with a furred mouth.

"We need to go," said Cameron.

"Who was that on the phone?" he mumbled in a heap of guttural sounds.

"Sarah Connor."


Author's note: A small chapter to introduce the next installments... the queens' meeting (one of them traveling with two dogs.)