She spared it one last glance as she swept out of the dirty room as she hoped that she would still be alive to come back to it by the end of the day.

Using the rest of the money that Cutter had given her at the beginning of the week to get a cab, Jess sat in the back of the car and prayed that she wasn't too late. Her plan was to stop Cutter from entering the ARC to find Helen in the first place. If all went well then the ARC would still burn down but at least this way no one she cared about would die. She realised how cold hearted she sounded as she mentally condemned Helen Cutter to death, as there would be nobody there to save her, but she found that she honestly couldn't bring herself to feel more for the woman.

As she drew closer to the ARC she could see the acrid and thick black smoke rising away from the buildings in plumes. She hoped with every fibre of her being that she wasn't too late to stop Cutter from going into the building. Dread filled her body as she continued to watch the smoke spiral upwards to the sky.

The cab stopped at the curb and Jess flung the rest of her money at the driver before sprinting towards the burning building. As she got closer she could make out the figures of the team all looking up at the blaze in awe and hopelessness. She only stopped when she was in their midst as she fought to get air into her lungs. She ignored their looks as shock and incredulity as they took in her sudden appearance and instead just scanned to try and find Cutter. She couldn't see him.

"You knew this was going to happen, didn't you?" Jess looked around to see who had spoken and was surprised to see it was Connor who stood there with his hands curled into fists in an uncharacteristic show of anger. "We wondered where you were but Cutter told us not worry! All this time you knew what was going to happen and you ran!" Jess backed away slightly from the anger in Connor's voice. She had never seen him this truly angry and she would be lying if she said that he didn't scare her slightly.

"He's right isn't he?" This time it was Abby who spoke. Her words held cold anger that was displayed in the clipped tone of her words and the hardness in her eyes.

Jess just stood there looking at the team who had know gathered around her all with condemning looks in their eyes. Slowly she nodded.

"Wh-where's Cutter?" Asked Jess as she struggled to keep the tremor in her voice under control.

Jenny gave a humourless laugh as she looked at the former ARC with what looked like tears in her eyes, "He's gone back inside. To save her!" Jenny looked away from Jess as the younger woman swore under her breath. Jess spared Jenny a glance as she remembered that although she hadn't said it yet Jenny was in love with Cutter. She doubted even Jenny knew it yet but it was clear for Jess to see. She found that she was quite the expert in unrequited love.

"Hang on," Jess looked around to see this time it was Sarah Page who spoke, " Why would you run even if you know that this was going to happen? I mean you must have known you would escape because we all did, so why would you…" Sarah tailed off as she brought up a hand to her face, "He dies doesn't he? Nick's going to die."

Not for the first time Jess found she had the attention of the entire team. In this situation Jess took a second to reconsider her options. She could stay here and try and explain herself or she could take the right course of action and try and change the course of history. She knew that she was meant to try and have as little effect on the past as she could but it went against everything she knew to not try and save this man who had done nothing wrong and who would be so sorely missed.

Calmly, Jess ran through the situation in her head. Cutter was in the collapsing building, most likely with Helen and if she didn't get to him soon he would die. She wondered how she was going to stop Helen from shooting the man even if she got to them in time. She supposed she could tell Helen she was from the future and hope that that was enough to distract the mad woman for enough time to formulate an escape or…

Jess's eyes were caught by Becker. He stood at the back of the group grimfaced. He wasn't looking at her, instead the building that until recently had been the ARC. When he did look at her his were the only eyes that didn't hold hate or anger.

Just confusion and sadness.

She wished that she had enough time to explain herself to him, she couldn't stand the thought of him being angry with her but unfortunately every second she wasted could mean the difference between life and death. All of this registered in her head but the one thing that really drew on her attention was the regulation firearms that was holstered at his belt. This was way before the EMD's had come into play and as a soldier he was permitted to be armed at all times around the ARC.

She came to her decision and without a second thought put it into action. Becker was standing at the back of the group, so to get him she roughly pushed past the other members of the team. They weren't expecting such a move and parted easily. She reached Becker and barely had time to register the shock on his face before she had ripped the sidearm away from his belt and once again she was sprinting.

She heard the shouts of pursuit behind her but desperation made her legs work faster and soon she was running into the flaming ARC with the gun clenched firmly in her hand. She took her last breath of clean air before she waded into the wreck before her.

~o~o~o~

Jess tried to move as quickly as she could though the ruined ARC but debris, fire and smoke often cropped up and forced her to slow down. She soon realised she had no idea where Cutter and Helen would actually be so she decided her best chance of finding them both was to get to the centre of the ARC and work from there.

When she eventually reached her destination the place was virtually unrecognisable. The once high windows lay shattered on the floor, crushed to glittering sand as the larger pieces reflected the orange glow of the fire around her. Her eyes stung from the smoke and her lungs burned but in a distant part of her mind she realised she was lucky that unlike the new ARC the old one had an extremely high ceiling and open floor plan. It made the smoke less dense and the air easier to breathe.

She clenched the gun tighter in her hand as she whirled around and tried to figure out which way to go. There were several hallways and corridors leading away from the main area and she knew that Cutter was down one of them; she just didn't know which.

"-now are you coming or aren't you?" Jess span at the faint end of a sentence she had heard. It was definitely Cutter who had said them though his voice was distant and faint. The words scared her as they meant that although Cutter was still alive he was with Helen; the woman that was going to kill him any minute now. She ran towards the corridor that she was sure held both of the Cutter's but soon had to stop when she saw the state the hallway was in.

Support beams had fallen from the ceiling along with plaster and feebly sparking wires. Swallowing her fear, Jess began to pick her way through the mess around her silently so as not to alert either party to her presence. She slowly worked her way forward keeping a sharp ear out for more of their conversation.

"I'm sorry Nick but I can't let you go." The words were enough to chill Jess but the next sound all but turned her blood to ice. A click. The unmistakeable sound of a handgun being cocked. Jess almost shouted out to them then but Cutter spoke and Jess continued to creep forward.

"What the hell are you talking about?- Oh for god's sake." Jess knew from the tone of his voice that he'd just seen the gun aimed directly at him. If the situation had been less serious Jess felt sure that she would have laughed at the disbelief and exasperation mingled together in the man's voice.

"You see nothing's changed Nick…" Said Helen, her voice becoming slightly more sinister as she carried on talking, "the future's still more important than either of us."

"You really know how to pick your moments, don't you?" Once again Jess couldn't understand how Cutter was being so flippant in a situation so serious but by now she had moved forward enough see them both. Helen stood with her back to Jess but she could see that the older woman had her arm out in front of her with the gun aimed. Jess felt her own grip tighten around the gun in her hand. If she looked beyond Helen she could see the smokey outline of Cutter some ten feet ahead. Jess stayed hidden in the smoke and shadows, unsure of what her next move would be.

In front of her Helen's voice saddened, "If you'd see what I'd seen, you'd understand." For a fleeting second Jess actually felt a fleeting stab of pity for the deranged woman. In her own muddled head Helen seemed to genuinely believe that she was in the right. Jess's sympathy vanished once more when she saw the gun pointed at Cutter's chest. "I'm sorry Nick. I wish there was another way." Helen raised her gun to point at the dead centre at her husband for the last time as the man took a breath to say his final words.

With a half smile and a devastatingly calm demeanour, he did, "You know Helen," he said looking her in the eye, "You're not as smart as I thought you were."

"STOP!"

Jess didn't recall moving but suddenly she standing in full view with her gun pointing straight at Helen Cutter.

The woman in question had whirled around on the spot when she heard Jess's scream but she had kept the gun trained on Cutter.

"Jess, get out of here. Go. Now." Said Cutter from the other end of the hall. His words were still calm but his tone betrayed his worry.

"No." She said, "I'm not leaving. I thought I could let this happen, but I can't." She looked a Helen, "Don't shoot him. I know you think you're saving the future, but you're not, you're ruining it!"

Helen looked at her calculatedly, "You wouldn't be able to understand, I've seen the future-"

"So have I!" Cried Jess desperately trying to make the other woman understand, "I've seen it and I know what you do to it!" It was technically a lie seeing as she had never crossed into the future but the future predators that had stalked her and Lester had been enough of a taster for her.

"Have you now?" Asked Helen with a malicious glint in her eye, "And how could you have seen that when I know no one from the ARC has walked through an anomaly to the future?"

Jess swallowed thickly before forcing the words out ignoring Cutter shaking his head in the background, "I'm from the future, I'm not from this time so I know what happens. Please believe me!" Jess was aware of her voice rising in pitch and her words running together as she became more desperate. She was slightly ashamed when she realised she had sunk as far as begging Helen to see sense but if it saved a man's life she was willing to do it.

"Is she telling the truth?" Demanded Helen of Nick as her head whipped around to look at him. Slowly and wearily he nodded.

"Well isn't this excellent?" She drawled, "The only thing that's changed though, is the fact that now I have to kill both of you." Quicker than she could follow Helen's gun was now pointing at her own chest and she struggled to keep her breathing under control. For a wild second she wondered why Helen didn't shoot her before the dull ache in her arm remaindered her that she too was holding a gun.

Helen eyed the gun in Jess's hand before turning the gun back to Cutter,

"Don't. You shoot him and I will kill you." Said Jess. She honestly didn't know if she could follow through with her threat but the combination of the gun in her hand and the wariness in Helen's eyes made her feel something akin to power. Her voice had come out even and her hand was steady thanks to Becker, who had, in the future, dragged her aside one day to show her the basics of how to use a gun. She hadn't asked at the time, she was glad just to spend the extra time with him, but now she was glad she had paid attention. "Helen, you can just walk away. No one has to die here today." She willed the woman to see the sense her words, Jess didn't want to shoot anyone, even Helen who was turning out to be the nut job that Connor had always made her out to be.

"You're wrong," Said Helen softly, and although the gun stayed trained on Cutter the woman's eyes darted between her two would be victims, "I am saving the future. And someone is going to die here."

~o~o~o~

Outside the burning ARC Becker was as close to panic as he had been in a long time. As soon as Jess had run into the aflame building he had tried to follow but had been held back by many grim faced co-workers. He wasn't sure why but her flight from the ARC seemed to have hit harder than his team mates even if he managed to hide it well from them. They had all missed her in some way or another but he found that his day seemed genuinely darker without her there to brighten it up.

It wasn't like he even spoke to her a lot, especially recently, but she always seemed to be able to make him laugh or simply listen to what he had to say. A lot of that had tailed off recently and he knew that was his fault. Seeing her laying motionless at the bottom of some stairs while Abby clutched at her terrified had shocked him into thinking. For the first time it hit him that this woman really was from the future. A future that he was in. It took waking up holding her hand for him to realise that maybe his feelings towards her weren't quite, well… platonic. This in turn made him realise that nothing could ever happen between them.

It took a while for him to appreciate how impossible her situation was. For all he knew, he might be with someone in the future which meant that even hinting towards his feeling abut Jess would be a very bad idea.

It might just be a simple case of she doesn't want you, thought Becker as he thought about the fact that in her time they might just be people who work together, nothing more, nothing less. He didn't want to make her feel awkward or out of place and he didn't want to ask her out when he constantly felt like he was getting half of the story.

Of course, this was before she had disappeared. It was all rather irrelevant now but even so he refused to drawn into the group discussion from the team about why she had returned. He wanted to believe that it was so she could help but the sinking voice in the back of his head questioned how she could do that. She was a small woman in a collapsing building with an armed psychopath on the loose who had only a handgun for protection. Her chances weren't looking so good.

He looked across at his colleagues, all of whom were worrying after Cutter. Sarah's idea seemed to have rooted and they were all fairly certain that he was going to die. Jenny was sending pleading looks at the ARC while Connor and Abby were talking quietly between themselves.

He saw Abby say something to Connor as he gave a serious nod. The next second he was running. Connor dodged past the fire fighters who had been keeping everybody out and almost made it to the smokey entrance before a sound rent the air that stopped all movement from everybody, ARC employees and fire fighters alike.

Becker tried to swallow the feeling of fear that rose up inside of him at the two sounds that could have come straight out of his days at Sandhurst, touring the front line.

Two faint but definite gunshots.

…..

A/N- Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed it! If you did (or didn't) please leave a review!

To be fair though I can see why you may not want to speak to me ever again… I mean, I'm pretty sure that's the cruellest cliff hanger I've ever written, I would say I'm sorry for it… but I'm not!

I want to apologise for the wait since the last chapter but I'm in Cornwall at the moment or as it shall now be known…The Land Without Internet. Seriously, I have no idea how people survive down here. Still I've given you three chapters which I hope makes up for it!

Thanks to the people who messaged me about the story- it really helps me write it when I know there are people out there who want to read it!

Please review and thanks again,

VE