Part 10: And a Little Child Shall Lead

He loses track of time. The air conditioner kicks out some hours after Savannah falls asleep in his arms, and he notices, as he tucks her into bed, that Sarah is clammy and flushed. He's not sure if that's from the heat, the stress, or something else entirely. He thinks she is over the fever, but he wonders if her sprained wrist is hurting her. He'll have to wrap it for her again in the morning---or has it been morning already, and then night again? It doesn't cool down here at night like it does in the city, and there are no skyscraper lights to come on at night and help him mark the passage. And there has been sickness, too. He can't even pace out the days by what they're eating.

This won't do. He is a soldier now, he tells himself. In this, at last, 100%. He has accepted Sarah, accepted her role as the trainer, the leader, the commandant of this little operation. Even the sickness has not diminished her strength, her bravery in his eyes. He wishes she could see the potential for magnificence he has recognized in her. Her people skills need work, true. But she knows better than he does what is to come and how they might survive it, and experience is a different but all the more necessary people skill when all is said and done. He has accepted Savannah, the joint role they will play in her life, the need to balance his desire to protect her with his recognition that she is both more resilient than he thinks she is, and that she'll have to push her boundaries in that regard if she is to learn what she must. And finally, he has accepted God. It was John's gift to him, that message, and he'll do it justice, because he knows now that hell is on the way, and it will take his faith in God to fight it.

But this won't do. They'll need routine. They'll need a way to mark days and measure progress, to train, to strengthen, to grow. They'll need focus, and much as it pains him to admit it, they won't have it while Sarah is off-kilter. She is mourning for her son, who for all they know is alive and well in the future and sending messages back to them, but still, is gone. And his absence has left her alone to cope with a decade and a half of post-traumatic stress that, in the absence of her son to focus on, is suddenly hitting home for her. He is not sure what he's supposed to do about this. If she won't talk to him, who will she talk to? And if she doesn't talk, what other outlet will she have for the stress she is under?

He isn't aware that he's fallen asleep, or that he's woken up again hours later to morning sunshine, until he feels, as he has so often during these awkward days, a tiny hand on his cheek.

"Morning, Uncle James."

"Good morning, Savannah."

"It's warm in here."

"Yes," he says. "I think the air conditioner isn't working."

"Oh, it'll come back on," Savannah says.

"Is that so?"

"Aunt Sarah pried a panel open. There were a lot of wires."

That image makes him twitch, though he can't quite articulate why.

"Then she went outside for awhile. She said she would put the wires back together when she came back in. She made me some pancakes. I was eating them before I came to get you."

"Oh."

"I looked over at you and you were all sweaty and you'd kicked the sheets away. I was...I was worried. I was worried that you would be angry it's so hot and that you would make us leave again."

He puts a hand to her forehead, worried for a moment that she's still feeling ill. "You're not ready to move, Savannah?"

"Are you?"

He surveys the hot, cramped trailer, then shrugs. "Hadn't thought about it much. I had assumed we would want more space at some point."

"No," Savannah says. "I don't think space would be good right now. We have to stay together, Uncle James."

He's startled by her decisiveness. "Is that so?"

She slides off the bed, slips on her shoes. "Yes. Yes it is. It's better that you can see her right now. Better that she can see you. We have to stay together!"

"Okay," he hastily assures her. "Okay, Savannah. Okay. We will. We'll stay together."

She puts a hand on the doorknob, then turns back to him for one more reassurance, "So, we're staying here?"

"Yes," he says. "We'll stay."

--

He wanders outside after his own breakfast, and his heart nearly stops for a second when he doesn't spot them right away. But he senses activity as he nears the rugged dirt patch where he's parked the jeep, and he can see from his off-side vantage point that both of them are there. The bandage on Sarah's hand has come loose and is covered with grease stains, the trunk of the jeep is open, and she's wedged off a piece of damaged circuitry from Cameron's eye. She's moving gingerly with her injured hand, guiding Savannah's tiny fingers under a piece of robot skin and helping her peel it away to see the gears beneath it.

"There," says Sarah. "You feel that, Savannah? That little lever?"

"Yes," Savannah says.

"Flick it. There you go. You see the little LED light up?"

He wants to rush forward, pull the robot bits out of Savannah's hand, ask Sarah what the hell she's doing. But something tells him to hold back...

"Neat," Savannah says.

"Now pull your finger back...gently...there. The light is off now. It's a switch, Savannah. See?"

"Yes."

"Great. Mark it on the diagram, then we'll put this part away and try another one."

Savannah picks up a pencil, makes some sort of notation in an open book that's resting on the dirt in front of them. But she holds the part in her hands for a long moment, turning it over, her little brow furrowed in thought.

"Aunt Sarah?"

"What, Savannah?"

"What was she like?"

"What was who like?"

"Her. The...the girl. The metal girl. The one we're looking at right now."

"She wasn't a girl, Savannah. She was a machine."

"And that means that she was bad?"

"Yes," says Sarah. "That is exactly what it means."

"But not all of them are bad," Savannah says. "John Henry..."

"He was bad when I knew him," Sarah says. "Before he was John Henry, he was something else."

"But he changed," Savannah says. "And then he wasn't bad anymore. Would you...would you be less sad, Aunt Sarah? If you knew him like I did, would you be less sad?"

Sarah sighs, pulls Savannah onto her lap. Winces a little as the motion jostles her injured hand. "It's not that simple. I've wished a thousand times that it could be, but Savannah, it never is. It's like that switch she had that I let you touch with your finger. You flick it one way, and there is light. You flick it another way, and the light goes out. You see how easy it is to change it? And then to change it back again?"

"So you're saying John Henry had a switch," Savannah says.

"They all do. They're built that way. And one way, they are dangerous. Another way, they might not be. But if you can't see the light, Savannah, if they have skin and arms and limbs covering it up and you can't see the little blinking light, how do you know which way the switch is turned?"

"Aunt Sarah, do we have switches too?"

Sarah doesn't answer. But Savannah nestles closer, letting herself relax in Sarah's arms. "I'd like to talk about John Henry sometimes," Savannah says.

"Yeah. You and Uncle James both."

Savannah nods, seems to accept this as an answer to the question she hadn't quite asked. Then she reaches behind her, grabs her stuffed monkey and wedges it in the crook of Sarah's other arm.

"You can talk too," Savannah says. "To Mr. Fur, I mean. If you want to. He listens very well. Aunt Sarah, can we have lunch? We've been out here for a very long time."

"Okay. Yes. I'll be in in a second."

Savannah skips happily away and Sarah sits there, still a little stunned by the conversation. Mr. Fur is propped on her knee, watching her with expectant, amused patience; ready---as he was built to be---to listen.

--

He beats them back to the trailer and already has lunch preparations underway when Sarah joins him. She makes no effort to intrude on the tiny kitchen area. Either she is reluctant to infringe on his personal space in the way the confines would force her to, or she is reluctant to allow him to intrude on hers. She sits down though and carefully props her injured hand on the table.

"There's Tylenol in the bag that Edward left," he says. "If that's bothering you."

She neither refutes nor denies that it is.

"It could use a rinse," she finally admits. "And another bandage."

"And would you like some help with that?"

"What do you think?"

It's like pulling teeth. Or worse, maybe---he's seen that done, and this is harder. He is suspecting he should be alarmed at these regressions. For every wall that comes down, she puts up ten other ones...

"I think that if you really needed me to help you, you wouldn't have waited for me to offer. You can sit and stew with it until I have Savannah fed. Then we'll see."

To his delight, this brusqueness has a galvanizing effect, and she rallies, helping him set out Savannah's plate, picking at a handful of chips herself. It's worse to pity her, he realizes. Worse to pander to her misery and let her wallow or sulk. She is more a soldier than he gave her credit for, and what she needs right now is a commanding officer to swoop in and refresh her with some marching orders...

He is less gentle than he could be while he mends her hand, but she stoically endures his ministrations, accepts a packet of Tylenol, then polishes off the rest of the chips and half a sandwich. He takes advantage of this new-found fortitude to clear the air a little.

"So, you were at the jeep," he says.

"Oh. You saw that."

"I see a lot of things."

Her descent back into glum, defiant misery is swift and discouraging. Her eye twitches, and she looks away from him. "Let's not go there."

"Fine. We'll talk about the jeep. What were you doing out there?"

"What did it look like I was doing?"

He forces himself to be patient. "I thought we weren't going there."

She doesn't answer right away, but he resists the urge to jump in and poke her again. He's going to teach her the skill of interpersonal give-and-take if it kills him, and if it doesn't start now, they'll be marooned in this trailer for the rest of their lives, however short that may wind up being...

"We have to know how they work," she finally says. "John, he was always tech guy, and I let him, and now he's gone and I don't know how to do it all. I have to learn. We all do. Or we won't survive."

"At last, we agree on something. And?"

"And what?"

"And do you have any sort of timeline on how much learning we need to do before we can move on from this place?"

"Wow. You still don't get it, do you?"

"Stop saying that!"

"Look, I could take you. Even with one good hand, I could take you. And the ones they're going to send after us once they figure out where they are? They could take all of us."

"You know, I'm not as dumb as you might think me to be, Sarah. I've seen a lot already."

And like that, she closes off again. "Yeah," she grumbles. "So you were saying."