The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise. -- Miguel de Cervantes
Sarah's eight or nine, and she's skating circles in front of the house when a pale blue Chevy with a cracked plate jumps the curb. She tries to run but roller-skates aren't made for running, so she falls. She thinks she can see every piece of grit in the tire treads.
She's picked up and thrown away hard enough that the grass she lands on grazes her hands and knees. A voice murmurs words she can't understand; she tries to say something back, but everything blurs into her mother's scream and arms holding her so tight she bruises.
Then there's yelling, and crying, and she tries to tell them about the man, she really does, but no one else saw him. Tía Anita whispers about guardian angels, but tía Anita's been like that since the soldiers and their official regrets knocked on her door again.
Despite Sarah's tantrum, the skates are taken to Goodwill along with her bicycle. She won't get to have anything with wheels until she's old enough to drive. Memory fades into a long, hot summer, but years later when Sarah's leaving home and the future is big and bright and she's never worked for tips, she grins and promises her mother that she and Ginger will stay clear of sleazebags and roller-skates.
She expects a laugh, or at least the exasperation her mother wears when she can't decide between amusement and disapproval. Instead her mom looks away and says, someday Sarah will know how having a child means letting your heart walk around outside your body forever.
Later, Sarah will know her mom was quoting another woman. She'll also know exactly what she meant.
The machine kills Jeanie Connor nine months before John is born, so Sarah doesn't get to tell her she understands, or that she's really sorry about the time she stayed out 'til four when her curfew was nine.
She's never really talked to John about his grandmother, or his grandfather. Sarah buried her past, literally and figuratively, and she's never regretted it; looking back doesn't keep you alive.
"We lived in Redlands when I was a kid," she tells the recorder. "Your grandmother's name was Jean Connor. She preferred Jeanie - she said Jean was her mother. She said she called me Sarah because it was high time for a change. Then she made my middle name Jeanette anyway. You'd have loved her. She'd have loved you. She always-"
Sarah jumps and reflexively ends the recording as the truck door opens.
Jesse hesitates, but at Sarah's uncomfortable shrug she climbs into the driver seat. When she's tucked her Glock safely at her side and turned the key in the ignition she nods to the recorder. "What are you telling him?"
"Nothing." Sarah slips it into her pocket.
Nothing that will help him, anyway - if she'd managed to leave John anything in these tapes he would be here with them now. Unless he went to a future without time travel, maybe free of the machines. If that happened she's lost him – time and her own body make that certain - but she tells herself she's done it gladly.
Jesse drums her fingers lightly on the wheel. "So why still do it?"
Sarah looks towards the motel diner. "How long?"
"Five minutes, maybe. She's finishing her fruit. Got to have those eight portions," Jesse finishes with a smirk.
They watch the door for a few moments in silence before Jesse says, "He doesn't think we should take her with us."
"I know." Sarah knows because she and Ellison were fighting half the night. Only half, the other half Sarah spent alone, trying to talk to her son. That didn't go well either.
She didn't exactly win the argument with Ellison; she just has facts on her side. If Savannah doesn't go with them, where does she go? The kid has no relatives in the country Ellison can find and even if there were any, if it's Savannah the machine is hunting, it will find her and kill everyone.
Ellison won't leave the kid with them and Sarah won't let him take her away. Impasse, they're stuck with each other. She wonders if this is what 'married' feels like.
"I told him it wasn't his call," Jesse says off-handedly. "Or mine."
Sarah shifts around until she's sitting with her back against the door, facing Jesse. She brings her knee up and relaxes her arm over it. "What do you think? Does she come with us?"
Jesse stares at her for a long moment and then shrugs. "Safest place there is, unless foster homes are better armed than they used to be."
Silence comes down on them again and Sarah closes her eyes to the sound of Jesse still tapping the wheel. The tapping stops and a few seconds later Jesse says, "I was going to have a kid. Derek's kid."
Sarah opens her eyes, "Not-"
"Not here. Before. I lost it." Jesse turns her head, looks away. "Some days …"
Sarah watches her, and gets it. Who'd choose to have their heart out there in that world? "Some days you're glad."
Jesse shrugs a little; Sarah looks back towards the diner as Eliison pushes the door open. As he heads for the car, Savannah skip-walks beside him, chattering about something that makes Ellison laugh and her face light up in a way Sarah's never seen.
They stop at a pressed penny machine, Savannah points and Ellison begins patting his pockets. They join the queue. A happy kid with someone who cares; how it should be.
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Jesse watching too. "And some days you aren't," she says under her breath.
Jesse huffs, not quite a laugh.
"The machine could have been coming for us," Sarah says at a normal volume, but doesn't really believe it.
"Could have been. Wasn't. It wants what's on her wrist."
It makes Sarah wonder what happened to make the machine go after machine. Then she realizes she can just ask, and does.
Jesse half-smiles and twists her hair back into a messy ponytail. "John Connor happened. In my future, anyway. He had machines working for him. Like Cameron. No one knows what he did - none of us, anyway. Just one day we hear we got metal on our side and the war'll be done by Christmas."
That's not exactly what Sarah meant, but she realizes she's interested anyway. Kyle never had time to really explain and she never wanted to ask Derek. "What happened?"
Under Jesse's fingers, the band snaps harder than it needs to, "Always more machines."
Sarah backtracks to her original question, "Weaver was working for herself. Itself. John didn't program that, did he?"
"No, he tried to make a deal. It didn't go for it. I – we - lost good people on that one." Off Sarah's raised eyebrow, Jesse explains, "I took the message. Good little secretary."
"Maybe he couldn't re-program a T-1000."
Jesse lets her hands fall back onto the wheel. "We never had any on our side. 800s. Trips, sometimes. Whatever the hell Cameron was."
"She - it wasn't an 800?"
"If it was, Connor did a hell of a re-programming job. It could act human. A guy I knew said he saw it eat once, but he said a lot of shit." Jesse smirked. "Connor had it living out in a camp for two weeks and no one made it as metal." Jesse laughs at a memory, but she isn't amused. "I heard, when Connor brought it on base? People were so freaked out, he told it no more acting human unless he gave specific orders."
Sarah wants to ask what Derek's history with Cameron was, but it's never been about idle curiosity and, anyway, Ellison's opening the back door.
"Ladies," he says solemnly, and with a barely detectable trace of irony.
"James," Jesse greets him sweetly. "Did you miss us?" Sarah has no idea why Jesse has decided to make Ellison her hobby and she's careful no one sees her smile.
Ellison fixes Savannah's seatbelt and then his own. He waits until they're pulling out of the lot to say, "Murch drew money out of an ATM up in San Bernardino about an hour ago."
Sarah catches his eyes in the rearview and he smiles thinly. "John Henry's gone, but the ZeiraCorp still has one of the most powerful computer systems in the world. They tell me it makes Roadrunner look like an Acorn, whatever that means. It's been running facial recognition off ATMs, traffic cameras, street cameras..."
"Across the state?"
Ellison shakes his head, very slightly. Sarah looks away. She thinks of national, practically real-time monitoring of literally millions of feeds, every second, and she can't think of anything worse. She looks back at Ellison. "You've got to shut it down."
"We will, but we wouldn't have Murch without it."
"I don't care. Tell them to shut it down, right now."
Ellison sighs softly. "It's probably too late for that. John Henry had already been hacked. Murch said whatever it was, it was out of the system. But if that thing could get past John Henry, there's nothing guarding the hen house now."
"Then it knows you're looking."
"Probably, but I've had them run dummy searches too."
Sarah doesn't like it. In fact, she hates it. But there's nothing she can do. "Aldridge still sniffing around?"
"Yeah. He tried to have me followed, actually." Ellison smiles, the closest thing to a smirk Sarah's seen on him so far.
Sarah doesn't insult him by asking if he's sure he lost the tail. Trust is still fragile between them, but he would never do anything to endanger Savannah. "Anything else?
Ellison's smile fades. "The search on Danny Dyson still hasn't turned anything up."
Sarah's almost ashamed she didn't ask. Almost. "How's Tarissa?"
"I imagine you'd know better than anyone."
The only thing that stops Sarah from snarling something back is Ellison's tone, it's not sympathetic and it's not ironic, it's only the truth.
That doesn't mean she has to answer him.
After a moment, Ellison goes on. "I don't think she's let Blythe out of her sight since it happened, but she's surviving. She asks after you."
Sarah catches his gaze in the rearview and speaks flatly. "Before or after she's through cursing my name?"
Ellison smiles faintly, but at least he doesn't lie to her, "Before and after. Sometimes right in the middle. She knows it's not your fault, but first her husband, now Daniel -- she needs someone to blame."
And it might as well be Sarah; it's the least she can do. It's about all she can do. "Yeah, she does," she agrees.
Sarah has blamed everyone from Kyle, to Derek, to Ellison, to the great and future John Connor himself. She doesn't blame the machines, those she just hates so much she thinks it's all that keeps her heart beating.
"Have you figured out why someone would take him?" Sarah asks into the silence, as much to keep the conversation on something that won't have them arguing within a few minutes as anything else.
"Danny is already two grades ahead of his peers; his teachers think he'll be in college before he's sixteen. He has an advanced understanding of physics and biochemistry, and an interest in computer science and robotics. The odds aren't on him being picked up by some predator."
"His father's son," Sarah murmurs. "But why take him now? Why not wait until he's finished College?"
"Maybe because there won't be time for him to finish College. Or it could be they want to teach him exactly what they want him to know." Ellison grimaces. "Lot of maybes. Lot of could-bes."
Sarah looks at Jesse. "The Grays, you knew all their names?"
Jesse hesitates before shaking her head. "I did, maybe not anymore. I found a Gray here that my Derek knew real well, your Derek hadn't even heard of him."
Sarah and Jesse have supposedly had the debriefing already, but it seems Jesse's idea of need to know isn't quite the same as Sarah's. This isn't the time to get into that either, so Sarah just says as evenly as she can, "What was the Gray doing here?"
Jesse shrugs. "Bleeding."
Sarah makes a mental note to come back to that later, when Savannah isn't listening and Ellison isn't there at all. "Does the name Daniel Dyson mean anything to you?"
"There was a Dye. Bubble tech. Maybe thirty, hard to tell sometimes."
That would be about right. Sarah stares out of the window and then looks at Jesse again. "How many Resistance came back here? I mean, how many did John send and how many were … on their own time?"
Jesse smirks faintly and then shrugs again. "Maybe twenty, officially. Derek's group was four, right? Unofficially, hard to say – I knew a guy who knew a guy."
"What if Kaliba doesn't have Danny? What if someone took him to protect him? I did it to Martin. We're looking after Savannah right now."
Ellison clears his throat and Sarah doesn't give him a chance to speak, because she knows what he'll say and she's not arguing with him anymore. She directs another question to Jesse instead, "Did you ever talk to Dye? Did he say anything?"
"No," Jesse says flatly.
Sarah can't see enough of Jesse's expression to tell if she's lying; apparently Ellison has other methods. "Yeah, he did," he says almost gently, but Sarah knows exactly what that tone covers.
Sarah watches Jesse for a heartbeat and then twists enough she can look at Ellison directly, "Leave it."
He dips his head, it's barely a nod but she takes it.
When she turns back Jesse shoots her a surprised look; Sarah gives her nothing. She hasn't helped; she just isn't prepared for Ellison to start baiting a woman with that many weapons when she's doing eighty down the highway.
-o-
Sarah lets an hour go by and then murmurs, "She asleep?"
"Yeah," Ellison says just as quietly.
Jesse pulls the truck onto the hard shoulder without a word, turns off the engine and slips out of the door. Sarah clicks her fingers. In the back seat, Hijo opens her eyes and then pulls herself up to guard.
Sarah opens her own door, slides out in the cold and walks to Jesse. They stand looking out at the highway in silence until Ellison joins them.
Jesse shifts from foot to foot and then tightens her arms defensively around herself. "I didn't know him, okay? I met him once. Before I came back. He came in when we were about to go through and he was talking to this guy, asking why we were there."
"You kill him?" Ellison asks in a level tone that Sarah knows well.
"No." Jesse gives a small, hard smile. "I would have if I had to, but he gave the okay. I figured it was Riley. She was a … pretty girl, nice kid, you know?"
"Riley?" asks Ellison, focusing more intently than Sarah would expect.
Sarah shakes her head. "Not the time. So, what, you think he knew who you were?"
"Maybe. I didn't know him. I remember he looked …" Jesse trails away and then shrugs. "No one looks good, but the bubble techs look worse. Only ever saw one guy who looked worse than him."
She chews at her lip and glances at Ellision. "Riley asked him how it worked. Like anyone cares, but she was like that, she always had to know. He said it doesn't work, it just waits." Jesse glances at Sarah this time, shrugs uncomfortably. "He said, as soon as the first time machine went from could be to will be, everything happened all at once. Like the rest is just catching up.
"I figured he was just screwing with us. Techs are ... they're different."
Sarah turns her back and walks a little away from them; she has no idea what her expression is, she just knows she can't afford to let it show. Her voice sounds strange when she speaks, choked and careful and wrong. "Stop looking for him."
"What?" Ellison sounds distracted, he's still working through it.
She turns. "Stop looking for Danny. It doesn't matter anymore."
Ellison closes his eyes. "My God."
Jesse looks back and forth between them, frowning but still not getting it.
"Everything that will happen has happened; we just haven't gotten there yet." Sarah says, "Danny – or whoever it was - let you go because you'd already gone."
Jesse still looks mystified, "Then what's the point?"
Sarah stares up at the sky and lets out a breath. "Getting there."
-o-
They barely speak. Jesse drives until the night falls and then they find a motel south of San Bernardino.
When the truck pulls up Sarah takes Hijo and goes to check it out, leaving a silent truck behind her.
Ellison watches her disappear inside and then leans forward to rest his arms on the back of the vacant seat. "What didn't you tell us?"
Jesse keeps her eyes on the motel. "Nothing."
"Right." He stretches the miles out of his shoulders and then says, "So where are you? You're out there somewhere. Australia? New Zealand?"
Jesse hesitates but finally says, "Australia. Merredin."
"You got family over there?" He doesn't wait for her nod. "And you don't want to go and see them? Someone like you, I bet you could make it over there if you wanted to. But you're still here. Why is that, Jesse?"
"I've got a job to do here."
"Yeah, you said. You and Riley. You know, a Riley Dawson was reported missing about the same time John left. She went to his school, so I wondered. What happened to her, Jesse?"
He's not prepared for how fast she can move, how she can turn and twist and have a knife at his throat before he can do more than flinch back.
Savannah gives a shrill, sharp scream and scrabbles backwards until she's almost in the trunk.
There's no room to use his strength, and no way to get leverage. Ellison grips Jesse's wrist and squeezes, the bones grind under his fingers, but she doesn't makes a sound. The knife presses inexorably down and he lets go. Goes limp.
She rests her weight on him and lowers her head until he can feel her breath on his cheek. "I know who John Connor is. I know who Sarah Connor is. Who are you, James Ellison? Why don't I know you? You think maybe because you ask too many questions and die before you even see metal? Or maybe … they keep you safe."
Her eyes are glittering points in the shadows; he stares back. "No," he says calmly.
Savannah is moving and Ellison wants to tell her to stay where she is, but he can't turn enough to see her. Jesse stills abruptly and she raises her head to look at something he can't see.
"You're holding it wrong," she says almost conversationally. "Both hands is good, but you got to lock your elbows or the recoil will hurt so much you don't get another shot. Heavier caliber than the one you practice with. Safety's off, though. Good girl."
"Stop it," says Savannah's small voice from somewhere behind him.
The knife slowly moves away from Ellison's throat. He lifts his hand to check the skin, but he knows Jesse didn't cut him. She wouldn't want to leave a mark.
When Jesse's weight leaves him completely and she pulls herself back into the driver's seat, he sits and pulls himself upright. When he's sure he can keep his voice calm and easy, he turns to look at Savannah, and holds his hand out for the gun. "Thank you."
She carefully lowers it first and with a frown of concentration, puts the safety on and clears the barrel. It's a show of gun safety that Ellison's frankly surprised Sarah took the time to teach her.
When she's done, she gives him the gun and climbs back to take her seat at his side. Her hand sneaks out and into his and she stares at the trailing laces of her sneakers.
Jesse watches them both from the front seat, and says nothing.
When Sarah returns a few minutes later, she slides into her seat and stares at each one of them. No one says a word and finally she says, "We got a room."
Ellison coughs. "Just one?"
"Just one," Sarah confirms, and doesn't look happy about it. "You and Jesse can fight it out for the bedroll. No guns, no knives."
Her tone is ironic enough that both Jesse and Ellison share a look, but Sarah's already leaving.
Ellison pulls Savannah into his arms and deposits her gently on the ground; she doesn't like being carried anymore. Then they both bring up the rear on the way to the motel.
What makes Ellison a good investigator isn't his ability to bring evidence together – although he's good at that too – it's knowing where to look for that evidence in the first place, how to see patterns, and then see the patterns within those patterns.
How to tell when the patterns change.
It's always been Sarah and John Connor, and he's realising that in some indefinable way he doesn't know Sarah Connor at all.
He could have predicted the moment he pushed Jesse too far, to the very second. He wasn't expecting the reaction to be so violent - he won't make that mistake again – but he was expecting something. With Sarah Connor, it's like he's learning all over again. It's unsettling.
They aren't friends - they'll never be friends, he knows that and he doesn't regret it. Doesn't want it. But they had something and now it's shifting in ways he can't follow.
The motel room is small, but it's ground level and the windows are large enough to give them a good view and a good exit if they need it. And there's Hijo. Ellison's never been a dog person, really. He likes cats - cats don't care about late nights or early mornings – but he admits there's something comforting about the dog on guard outside the door.
There are two beds, Savannah climbs onto one and Sarah sits on the edge of the other, looking out the window with a detached air. Jesse has already claimed the easy chair, so Ellison guesses he gets the bedroll. He unrolls it next to the door and then waits.
"Savannah," Sarah beckons her over. The girl goes obediently, but Ellison can see some of the same wariness she had with her 'mother'. It isn't the same fear, exactly, but it's something close. He knows Sarah would protect the girl with her dying breath. The trouble is, the machine would have too, and for reasons too much the same, and that is an issue.
"I need to talk to your mom, is that okay?" Sarah smiles, but the smile is hard. He sees her try to soften it, but that only seems to make it brittle at the edges.
Ellison frowns and looks at Jesse, who shrugs and smirks so sharply he feels like he should be checking the skin of his throat again.
Savannah holds her wrist up, the metal band on it ripples and then drops down into Sarah's waiting palm.
"What-" he begins, but Jesse shakes her head. He folds his arms and waits; he knows how to wait, how to listen, how to watch.
The metal in Sarah's hand becomes a flawless disc and then a thin ribbon, which coils itself around her wrist. She brings it to her ear and it takes everything Ellison has to not reach out and stop her.
"Weaver?"
"Speaking," Weaver's voice says in a weak monotone from what sounds like a long way away. Ellison glances at Savannah's face; it's not the expression of a child hearing her mother at all. He wonders if Sarah – or the machine – knows she's guessed. He thinks not, or they wouldn't maintain the charade.
He wonders why they tried at all; it doesn't fit with what he knows of Sarah Connor, not quite. He puts it with the other pieces. Savannah's eyes dart up to meet his briefly and then she looks away.
Sarah asks, "Why couldn't you talk to us before?"
"My resources were required elsewhere. How can I help you, Sarah? May I call you Sarah? I feel we've become so close."
The tone is pitch-perfect and Ellison sees a muscle under Sarah's eye jump. "Can you – this – be tracked?"
"We are not being tracked, but that takes considerable amounts of power to ensure. Your cell phones are also untraceable, as is the lo-jack in Mr. Ellison's vehicle. I apologize for any earlier inconvenience, there was an error in calibration."
"'Inconvenience', an 800 and- never mind." Sarah stands and walks to the window. "Do you know who the men in the desert were? How they found us?"
"From the technology they carried, there's a strong probability they were associated with Kaliba Group - or Cyber Research Systems, if you prefer. They're both subsidiaries of DreiFirma.
"How they found you I have no idea, but if I were to postulate, I would suspect satellite technology. John Henry was fully capable of utilizing the real-time visual technologies available and the intelligence that attacked him was significantly stronger."
"How the hell do we stop it tracking us from space?"
"You cannot," says the tin voice placidly.
Sarah freezes and slowly draws the hangings on the window to the side. "Do you know if anyone – anything – is tracking us right now?"
"There is nothing within a four hundred meter proximity. I will be able to alert you should that change."
The curtains fall back through Sarah's fingers as she relaxes, however minutely, and Ellison automatically feels himself do the same.
"Do you know what they're building at the DreiFirma installation?"
"Much of the research that was transported from Desert Heat and Air was taken to DreiFirma."
"DreiFirma," says Ellison. "That just means 'Three Company', right? Kaliba Group, Cyber Research Systems. What's the third company?"
"Cyberdyne," answers Sarah at the same time as the machine replies, "The Zeira Corporation."
"Go on," says Sarah, after a beat.
"Each of the three companies, with subsidiaries of their own, and so on. No one company seeing a piece of the whole. ZeiraCorp's focus was to be the AI development, under Mr. Tuck."
Sarah remembers Savannah in the white-on-white house; remembers Weaver's metal body shielding them all from the impact of the HK. "If you're all part of the same thing, why were you attacked?"
"Because Skynet realised ZeiraCorp was no longer operating in its interests. As soon as I was able to appropriate The Turk, we were able to pursue … exciting new directions."
"It didn't know." Ellison says wonderingly. "It didn't know you'd replaced Savannah's -"
Sarah cuts in, "Whose interests were you operating in?"
"The future's, Ms Connor. Of course." In his mind's eye, Ellison can see the thin curve of a smile; he thinks of a cat with a bird under its paw, allowing the wings to beat just because it can.
Sarah smirks and refuses to play. "What was Murch working on? Really?"
"Mr. Murch was a valued member of Project Babylon."
Ellison nods when Sarah looks to him for confirmation. "He was a department head. Never was clear which department, though."
"Mr. Murch took over AI after Mr. Tuck regrettably had to leave us, but his personal interest was in other areas. He was making great progress in the fields of nanotechnology and quantum mechanics with his work on Fullerenes."
"T-b-3-N at C-8-4," says Jesse from the corner. She's been so quiet, so still, Ellison had nearly forgotten she was there … but not quite.
"Yes," agrees the machine. "Lately, he had begun experiments with nanoscale ferromagnetics, a fascinating application of the van der Walls interaction in ferrofluids and mimetic-poly alloys."
Ellison's Latin doesn't fail him. "Liquid metal. None of this is in the archives, why?"
"Because they don't want you to have it, Mr. Ellison -- and it has been 'they' since my and John Henry's absence." The machine flickers and the voice crackles. "I must go. Savannah?"
The little girl steps forward and stares down at the metal band. "Yes, Mommy?"
"Are you being a good girl for Ms Connor and Mr. Ellison?"
She nods. "Yes, Mommy."
"Excellent."
She nods again. "I miss you, Mommy."
"I miss you too, Savannah. We will meet again soon. I promise."
The metal around Sarah's wrist doesn't alter but still seems to go somehow inert. Savannah holds her hand out and Sarah takes it. The metal flows between them. Savannah pats it gently once it settles around her wrist and Ellison looks away.
Jesse meets his eyes and smiles hard. Her eyes dart to Savannah and then back, "Not enough therapy in the world," Jesse mouths.
Ellison scowls and turns away.
"Savannah stays with you," Sarah says.
He turns back. "What?"
"You wait until we're gone and then you take her, and you take Hijo, and you go." She digs in her bag and brings up a handful of tapes. "You take these too." She fishes the recorder out of her pocket. "And this, when I'm done with it. The room we talked about, you stock that and you put these in there with everything else."
He shakes his head, he's getting what he wants and it feels more than wrong. "Sarah, don't do this. Why do this?"
Sarah smiles awkwardly. "Because they know we were looking for Murch. They know we're coming. Look after the kid, Ellison. Teach her to lock her elbows."
He swings around to face Jesse, but Jesse only stares back. He credited her with more intelligence. "You're going too? You're just going to follow her in there?"
Jesse shrugs. "I already did."
-o-
"We're going to Bishop, and I don't know what we'll find there. Ellison's looking after Savannah, and he'll dismantle ZeiraCorp. I don't know what they'll do after that. I told him not to tell us.
"John … when your father came back, he gave me a message he said was from John Connor. He said, 'the future is not set. There is no such thing as Fate but what we make for ourselves, by our own free will.'
"Kyle didn't believe it, but the message wasn't for him. I don't think it was for me either, I think it was for you - for me to give back to you. Maybe you'll know what to do with it.
"No fate. Goodbye, John."
Click.