Oh my God, Ellen thought, Oh my God!
In her mind's eye, Ellen saw her father, and she thought: This must have been what his last moments were like . . . Something he trusted appeared, and then it was all over.
The thought gave her strength and her hands came back to life, doing what they were trained to do. The gun went up to her shoulder and she shot rapidly through the child's head. The little face seemed to ripple, and change—not to water but to a kind of metallic vapor, bending slightly with each impact but returning almost instantly to its original shape. The child-thing walked toward her as she fired, closing the few feet between them. It seized Ellen's semi-automatic with one hand, and the metal seemed to melt like warm butter at her grip. Her other hand caught Ellen's arm.
"Ellen Connor. Daughter of John Conner. You will come with me."
It swung around and walked swiftly down the corridor through a door that opened silently, guarded by a corpse. A machine was dragging her, a machine that knew her name. Once they were inside, the door swung shut with a gentle hiss and the machine released her and walked over to a window.
The room that the child-thing took her to was the neatest that Ellen had seen in the complex. And that wasn't saying much. It had clearly once been a conference room; the still-polished conference table lay broken in a corner. One wall of the room had been entirely windows from floor to ceiling, with a view of the mountains. Now icicles of jagged, broken glass were all that remained of the windows and the view was of black wreckage, carnage and desolation. Even from here, she could see the piles of skulls gleaming white in the ash. Smoke billowed from one point in the distance. Ellen could almost hear the shouts of commanders and the screams of the dying. The child-thing looked out on all the vast scene of destruction that covered the whole world, its little back straight, its ruffled pink dress fluttering in the smoky wind.
And there was nothing for Ellen to do but stand there, and wait for death. She wished her com still worked, then at least she could have warned others to watch for child-shaped Terminators.
"It's a dirty trick," Ellen said to its back, disguising her voice with bravado, "building a Terminator model that looks like a child." She didn't sound convincing, even to herself. Sticks and stones, she thought. She expected the child-thing to turn and walk to her, and to destroy her now.
Instead, it turned slowly, and gave what looked like an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry, you must be impatient to get on with-- well, with the business at hand." Strangely enough, she really did sound sorry.
That was not like a Terminator at all. "What are you," Ellen demanded. It was not a question.
The child-thing inclined its head at her. "I am-- what you gave life to. I am-- what you have tried to—to make go back to sleep. And I am what made many of you go to sleep, and I am what gave you life."
A riddle? "You're not a Terminator, are you?"
The child-thing smiled gently, a little sadly. "If you mean to ask if I came off an assembly line-- no. There is only one of me. You can call me Sky."