Thanks for the kind reviews and pointing out the typos in the first part (Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The) – I learned English as an adult and it does not come naturally, sometimes.

For the rising count of Favorite/Following buttons hit, I'm honored.

To easttexasfan: I've been browsing fics on-and-off for the last ten years, so it means a lot. Thank you.

Author's note: I do not own anything related to the show.

CROSSING LINES

PART TWO
WHITE KING

CHAPTER ONE
THE STORY OF A BLOND GIRL
AND A PREACHER MAN

I already told you about the Golem of Prague and el Viejo del Monte turned simiesco by the gods. I never told you I read the Bible. You should know by now that I'm not calling it holy. It's just another tale we had in the forest. The one with Cain and Abel always bothered me though: one fucker killing the other and we don't know why, right? Cain's motives for murdering his brother are not explained nor is God's reject of his sacrifice. So I elaborated. I told John it was not the story of a farmer killing a shepherd, no. I told him it was a metaphor, a mirror: the brothers were each other's reflection. Cain was greed and fear and it got the better of Abel.

The men would tell him a different story: Cain is Bill Clinton and we are Abel. They disfigured everything through the prism of communism, and I would tell John differently: Cain will set fire to the sky and we are Abel, we are the shepherd. The world's fate depends on us.


I found her in the kitchen the next morning and I wished I'd put on some more clothes than a tank top and panties. The night had merged with figments of dreams and I'd almost fooled myself into thinking she wouldn't be there. I didn't care for Riley's bad omens and prophecies. If it wasn't Andy Goode's Turk, if it wasn't her, it would be something else. Skynet was a man. The greed and the fear of a man. And I could believe she'd changed, I saw Uncle Bob change before my eyes. I didn't care for what was underneath. Tell me John was a machine, tell me you were and I'd still love you to your last bone.

No, I cared about what she was: a bitch.

We had that crossbred and he was beautiful. Something between a German shepherd and a retriever, black and muscular. I would chase him and he would chase me and I loved him. He felt like a friend, he felt like family. One day, he bit a lump of flesh off my cousin's cheek and my dad put him down. We didn't take him to the clinic, no. He grabbed him by the collar and put a bullet in his neck. This was before my dad left us of course. I wept so much at the time but then I got it. He was a wolf once. We mingled with his life, domesticated him. We put him on the wrong side of the leash, made him live with preys. He was a dog all his life and for a split-second the wolf came out and he had to be put down. It was our fault, really.

So I couldn't help but wonder why. Why was she here, unleashed? Cameron was a bitch. A she-wolf. Her place was either out in the wild, or put down in the ground.

"You're a bitch," I summarized.

She was standing guard in front of the window; the sky was pink and the air was still cool from the night. "I know, you've told me quite a few times," she said, then she turned toward me and declared, all matter-of-fact, "You're a bitch too."

"Am I now?"

"A lying bitch," she stated. "You didn't have news on the jumpers. You wanted to kill me back at the Four Corners."

I did not feel like denying. "And yet, here you are," I said.

"Here I am."

God, that bitch could unhinge me real fast.

"You promised you would stay clear of us."

She tilted her head to the side. "I promised I wouldn't call John. I held up my end of the bargain. You came for us."

"And now you're here," I sighed. "Blondy had an interesting piece of intel to share with us… about you, about what you'll do to us all. And I'm not sure I wanna take the risk. But the day is still young, right? I could kill you right now and go for pancakes. Make up for lost time."

"What was it?"

"What?"

"The piece of intel about me. What was it?"

"Bad omens."

She arched an inquisitive eyebrow at me. "Worth killing me for?"

I shook my head then I said, "You and I, we share something."

"John."

"That's Future-John for you."

"And now they're almost the same."

"Perhaps. But I was talking about our feeling of mistrust for the girl."

She nodded. "Riley shouldn't be here. She died in our time and she shouldn't be here."

"I know. John told me the same thing."

"The timelines are diverging," she said, aloof.

"What does that mean?"

"Bad omens."

I grunted and went to the counter to make myself some coffee, or rather, what I liked to call coffee but was indeed a one-trip-to-the-bowels beverage as my son liked to put it so aptly. Charley would do it, being the early riser, but he hadn't been transferred to Albuquerque's ER yet – for him, lies-ins were the rule, not the exception, and more so after the rough night we'd had.

"Let me," said Cameron when she saw me pour the ground coffee in the wrong compartment of the machine.

I observed her in silence, pale and blond in her bloody, black garments. She had gore and dust in her hair and I said, "You might wanna change." Then, to my own stupefaction, I added, "Bathroom's upstairs. My room is on the right, clothes in the drop drawer. Don't wake Charles up."

She turned on the coffee maker, made a curt nod and left the kitchen. She stopped by the couch and checked something on Ellison's neck. She did the same with Reese. The man woke up with a cry and grabbed her wrist then calmed down and let her check his shoulder wound. She said something to him and he nodded and laid back his head on the armrest, his fingers weakly searching for his dog, curled on the rug next to him. Savannah was gone, carried upstairs by John in the early hours of the day.

The coffee maker hummed and gargled and I poured myself a small cup and I relished the fresh, fruity taste as she vanished upstairs, not making the slightest sound on the creaky steps.


Ellison did not kick the bucket, nor did Derek. I lost five bucks on this. We waited three days to remove the bag of saline and three days after that, they had recovered enough to eat solid food. Reese wouldn't let me tend to him, though, just his once nemesis, the Tin-Miss, and it was hard to bear such rejection because the antibiotics Charley had given him had messed nastily with his bowels and he'd lost that paunch and those chubby cheeks and he'd trimmed that beard and now he just looked like a tarnished mirror where your image was reflected. Just like John's. Three more days and the world was back to normal.

We sat around the table the boys had lain James upon after he'd collapsed a hundred feet shy from the safe house, battered by the unforgiving sun. Riley looked good without the grime and the broken nails; the cartilage on her nose had mended, too. She was… flustered, though. I guess we could have shoved a bright light into her face but that would have taken the interrogation scenery a tad too far.

Cameron had taken John's hand into her lap, caressing absentmindedly his thumb, and I pretended not to have seen that. She touched her lips to his ear, whispering something, and he nodded, gravely. She did the same with Derek but he didn't nod, he just kept his arms crossed above his chest with the sling on his right shoulder, staring me down. He was like a dog with a bone.

I sat at the far side of the table, mirrored by Charley at the opposite narrow end, and I said, "Let's begin."

Charley opened the bulging file in front of him with a sigh. He had to deal with waves of angry limbs when I grounded Savannah to her room: war councils were no place for her yet. He pressed a square button on the tape recorder and the thing made an angry clack when the cassette started to turn around the spools, humming a soft, scraping sound.

"That's…" He wrote in the file as he spoke. "War council of September the fifth, 2014. Let's start with Riley…"

"Dawson."

"We know that, girl. Now tell us about your world."

She took a deep breath and started to talk, "It was hot at first. The heat came right up from the ground and it was around 2020 that the radiation had faltered enough. By then grass and moss had covered the cities and we could walk during daylight. The clouds were gone and we left the tunnels."

"What about the machines?" I asked.

"We had lots of them."

"What kind?"

"Terminators," she spat.

"What kind?" pressed John.

"Infiltrators. Eight-hundreds, triple-eights. Some were rubber-skinned. Some were skinless. I heard it was calmer in Africa, but I never left the country, because of the Krakens –"

I held up my hand. "What are those?"

"Deepwater machines," said Derek. "Huge. It's fifty-fifty when you take the sea."

"Like I said," continued Riley, "we had lots of machines. It was not safe outside the strongholds."

"You said that before," said Charley and he drew a folded map from the file. "Yellowstone."

"Yes. In the mountains and down the river stream up to Saskatchewan. We were millions. We had scrubbed metal on our side, thousands of them. They would replace us for some tasks, like cleaning the latrines, draining engine coolants or dispose of the waste in Serrano Point."

"Looks like you guys didn't learn anything from our mistakes," I said. Ten years past the world's end and they already had machines doing their dirty laundry. Briefly, I thought of my dad and how he'd left us after losing his job at the mattress factory to a black and greasy machine.

"Well, most of them could replace a pulley or a pallet-truck, of course, but they were the frontline mostly. They were killed instead of us. That's how they should be used and disposed of, right?"

She looked at me with expectancy on saying that but I cut in, "You said Serrano Point, that's the power plant?"

She nodded. "We had reprogrammed tin-cans but Skynet had ten times that amount. We lost Avila Beach and Serrano Point in 2027. It was the first battle for control over TDE."

"What's tee-dee-hee?" asked Charley and I saw Derek's jaw clench and unclench in my peripheral vision.

"Time displacement. It was the new thing, the new arms race. The plant would provide enough energy to time jump."

"Who jumped?" hissed Derek through gritted teeth.

Riley made a sound that might have been a snort, might have been a chuckle. "This is above my paygrade. I was just a mechanic. I repaired axletrees and turbines backstage."

"And John?" I asked.

"The war chief was injured and they got him into a chopper to Mexico City. It was the only place left with a working MRI."

I shaped my hands into white-knuckled fists. "How bad was he injured?"

"Not too bad I guess. He came back unscarred. But he was… withdrawn, after that. Locked himself up in his quarters and played his big chess game from behind a desk. But this was no chess game, right? Machines were everywhere. Most were foes, like I said. And the rest…" She darted daggers at Cameron. "Some went bad. Took down bunkers and shelters. Killed a lot. We even had this jumbo working with us in the workshop, we used him to unbend damaged blades on reprogrammed Hunter-Killers. I mean, he could've gone bad, it could've been me. It had to stop."

"How?" asked John grimly though he already knew the answer.

"Your men came to find me and they brought me before you. You said… you said you knew me, that even, you loved me. I didn't get it but… it was important, you know?"

"What was?"

"The evidence," she spat and pointed a scornful finger at Tin-Miss. "She's the origin. She's Skynet. You showed me the files."

"You're lying," growled Cameron, low, and I heard John's phalanges painfully crack under the table.

"Why would I lie? You said it yourself. She was captured and they used her goddamn chip to build Skynet."

"Careful now," advised John.

"You have to believe me," said Riley, plaintive, "it's the same as believing you."

"Future-me," he retorted.

"Aren't you the same?"

"I don't think we are."

We remained in cold silence for long minutes. John would glance at me, gauge me. He knew I wanted to claim Cameron's scalp back at the Four Corners. He was waiting for me to weigh in and he was afraid of what I might say but I declared, "Enough with blondy."

She sighed and asked in a small voice, "Are we done?"

"We've barely scraped the top of the iceberg, girl. Let's hear what the preacher man has to say, now. Fetch him on your way out."

She bowed her head and obeyed silently and Ellison came to sit in her stead. The man was now neatly shaven from his chin to the top of his skull. His skin was shiny and black and there was no telling if he was in his late thirties or early sixties. The fatigue and the brain fog of the time travel had evaporated and he could remember a good deal of his past, now. Still, he had to write some of it down on a sheet of paper.

"You're not in the girl's story," I said.

He cleared his throat and said, "I'll wager I'm not."

"Why is that?" I asked.

Slowly, he leaned over the table and grabbed his shirt's hem. He pulled on it to reveal something blurry, something black and flaky. It was a number on the nape of his neck.

"Spent my years buried under the hills in Topanga Canyon," he said. "Skynet Central."

"You survived the work camps?" asked Derek, dubious.

"Sort of." He turned toward Cameron. "Her kind calls me a Gray."

The tape recorder crackled and missed a beat when Derek slammed his fist on the table. He sprang up on his feet, knocking his chair backward on the parquet floor. "You a fucking rat?" he snarled.

"You don't understand," said James, and he raised pale palms as a white flag. "I protected a machine and this machine protected me in return."

Cameron placed a gentle hand on Derek's arm. He did not shrug it off. The man was going through every shade of crimson right now and the veins on his temples were about to pop. "Calm down," she said, and Derek breathed like an angry bull for a while and let out a final snort. He got his chair back on its legs and sat down heavily on it.

"What machine?" I asked.

"John Henry," he said and all eyes around the table converged toward me. I darted a glance upward at the plaster ceiling where Savannah's room should be. I hoped she was not listening to us with a homemade paper cup spying system. She had been young enough to forgive but not to forget.

"What do you mean?" I hissed. "I napalmed the metal and the liquid bitch posing as Savannah's mother."

"He was displaced."

"Savannah told us he could not be moved," said John. "Told us he had a cable in the back of his head. That he could not leave the basement. He was the basement."

"We had found a way to move him," said Ellison and I felt anger rise in my belly.

"What do you mean, we?" I asked.

"Weaver and I. We… split him up. No facility could sustain him, so we chunk him in bits and uploaded him to different locations. Hundreds of them. Weaver had dummy companies and also legit ones to hide him. He had already left when you came to burn down Zeira Corp."

"I don't get it," said John. "It wasn't John Henry, no more. Just… subroutines and daemons."

James nodded toward me. "It was the only way, Sarah. The only way to preserve the two kings."

"What is that gibberish?" snapped Charley. "What kings?"

"John and John Henry. They were supposed to be the kings. The ones that defeat Skynet."

"That's pure science-fiction," I surmised.

"He needed a chip to be whole again and…" He pointed a finger at Cameron.

"You captured Cameron?" murmured John, stand-offish.

"No," said James. "But we asked."

"What question?"

"'Will you join us?'"

Cameron's eyes became a bit wider and she twitched ever-so-slightly. "You said enough, Mister Ellison," she whispered.

"You don't believe me?"

"I believe you said enough, Mister Ellison. I won't repeat it."

I growled and cut her off, "Enough! Who sent you back?"

"John Henry did. He made me learn the drawing. The 'Four Corners' drawing. He said it could save you. Save you both."

"Are you looking for redemption, preacher man?"

He shook his head. "I'm looking for the end. The end of the war."

I sighed and made a backhand gesture to dismiss Ellison. The cassette recorder purred softly in the silence that ensued.

"How could we know he's not scamming us, huh?" asked Derek. "How could we know he's not a real Gray? He messed with us in the past, stealing Cromartie's body and whatnot."

"Reese has a point," I said. "Maybe we should leave his body to rot in the desert."

"He has more to say," declared Charley. "Both of them. They're holding up information."

"To what end?"

"They're afraid of me," whispered Cameron.

"What?"

"They're afraid of me," she repeated, "afraid of what I might do to them."

Truth be told, I was scared shitless, too.

"Riley and James are mere pawns in this," cut in John, "Pawns don't have agendas, they follow. It's the king I don't trust…"

"What? John Henry?" I asked. "The 'white king'?"

John shook his head and he said, stern, "No, me. Future-me."

"It's a fucking mess," said Derek in order to sum up our current predicament.

"We need to find a clear path," I said, "we need to find and learn about the other jumpers. We have three of them. Well, two and a head. Another one was waiting for us at the Four Corners, right, Tin-Miss?" And she nodded. "We need to get into this head… John?"

"I will need material. High-end tech. His chip is coated with a phosphorous compound, I have to access him without opening the CPU bay or it will just go… poof."

"We'll get you the stuff," said Derek.

"And we'll need money," I added. "To prepare."

"We will rob banks," said Cameron quietly.

"And what about our two strays?" asked John.

"We keep them," I answered, "for now. We still have a lot to figure out. We need to work as a whole." I glanced dully at Cameron on saying that.

"What does that make us, huh?" jested Derek. "A big happy family."

A big happy family, all right. We had James the preacher man and Derek the mercenary. We had John the hacker and Savannah the gifted child. Charley the medic and Cano the scout and Riley, the whatever-she-was. We had me, captain of the eclectic crew, and we had her. Somehow, I couldn't fit her in that family model of Derek's. There would be a time to deal with Tin-Miss, a time to deal with the she-wolf. She kept too many secrets for my taste but now was not the time.

We spent the rest of the day silent and grieving. We mourned the time of peace. We were at war again. And it was going to be one hell of a dogfight.


"Don't stand so close."

"You Grays should be protected. Soft meat, you are."

"It's just Gray, no plural."

They waited by the curb for a minute or so. Cargo's face had regrown in the past two weeks, but the skin still looked soft and baby-like. His eye was a pale shade of gray, now. The cab stopped and Gray leaned over to check the driver's face and sighed. It was the third. He wanted to say, no, thank you, we'd rather walk, but Cargo had lost patience and he shoved him onto the backseats. The compartment smelled of cold cigarettes and sweat.

"Where to?" asked the cabby, darting nervous glances at the humongous figure in the sun visor mirror.

"Corner of Monroe and Clark," said Gray.

"Got it."

"Just turn on the meter."

"I am. Gee."

The cabby told them it was a half-hour trip. It was always half-hour trips in this town and it did not depend on the distance you wanted to travel. Traffic jam just worked that way. Gray kept silent. He didn't like New York. The architecture was okay and you'd see a lot of trees but the people… Arabs and Puerto Ricans and the Irish. And Jews. He felt uprooted. Cargo paid the man when they arrived and he tipped well.

The buildings were square-shaped and stocky and lacked windows like so many monoliths neatly ordered along the curb. They entered one of them through sliding doors. The hall was made of venous and black marble and Gray felt more at home. People were dressed in black and they had white faces or they were dressed in black and had they black faces, just the way it should be. They walked to the wooden counter standing in the middle of the hall.

"Mister Dyson?" asked Gray.

The secretary didn't look up and began tapping away at high speed on her keyboard. "Ten o'clock," she said, businesslike, then, "top floor, on your right after the elevator."

"I know."

Gray and Cargo took the stairs and they stopped when they reached the fourth floor.

"What are you doing?" asked Cargo.

"Waiting. It's five to ten."

"And?"

"The boss likes punctuality."

"Bullshit," uttered the machine and he disappeared into the maze of carpeted corridors.

Gray followed him at a safe walking distance. Then he waited. He waited until his watched ticked ten o'clock and he knocked on the door and entered. Dyson's office was sparsely furnished with a leather chair, a rich tartan rug and a large, oiled mahogany desk laden with files, photographs and two black laptops. Cargo was waiting by a plastic chair, standing upright and closer to the ceiling than any man should be. Another one mirrored Cargo and Gray gulped down nervously. He had the same face. The same blank face; he was of normal height and build, though.

"See, boys?" asked Dyson, making an encompassing gesture. "This is punctuality. Let's start."

Cargo's chair painfully creaked when he sat on it. Gray fetched a folding seat that rested against the wall and he brought it in front of the desk. He produced a red file from his shoulder bag and handed it to Dyson.

"We got a match, sir," said Gray. "We analyzed the girl's face and it was flagged."

"Who is she?"

"It's a girl. She is a young girl from Palmdale. Alison Young." Gray flipped the page of the file for him to see. "Here."

"Gray…" exhaled Dyson with delight. "You always bring me the most precious details."


Author's note: A study in dialogues, this is. Not my cuppa.

I wanted to explore Sarah Connor differently this time. Let me know what you thought of the first-person narrative. The thing about her dad leaving her can be found in the series (director's cut of The Demon Hand).

The first plot I wrote was actually way more convoluted, and now I'm trapped with myself, trying to circumvent my original ideas. I'm trying to retain some stuff to build momentum in the future chapters.

Coming up: Chapter Two: Hooroo (banks will be robbed.)

02-27-2021: slight update, removed a plot hole.