They reached their room, a slightly bigger space than they’d had at the previous bunker, but with oddly angled walls and a rather lumpy floor. There was no door, either, just a curtain that could be pulled across the opening for minimal privacy. Together, she and John took off their weapons belts and pouches and outer jackets, keeping on enough clothing to push back the cold night air. Kate finished first and climbed beneath the sleeping mat’s covers, trying to figure out how exactly she was going to broach the subject she and John needed to discuss.
Wasted effort, as it turned out. John knew her as well as she knew him. He climbed onto the mat and pressed himself against her side, one arm draped lovingly and protectively over her, his breath warm against her cheek.
“Let me guess,” he whispered. “You want to go with my infiltration team.”
Here we go, Kate thought.
“It’s not that I want to go,” she whispered back. “It’s that I have to go.”
“Because we need a medic?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk you, Kate.”
“It’s not just that,” Kate said. “It’s that…John, I’ve seen how they look at me. Seen how they treat me. They respect me, yes, but as a surgeon and medic.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Yes, but I’m also supposed to be one of their leaders,” Kate said. “You and the others call me that, and I sit in on your meetings. But I never actually lead.”
“Neither does Williams,” John pointed out. “No one’s thrown her out of a meeting yet.”
“It’s not the same,” Kate said, hearing a hint of desperation creeping into her voice and ruthlessly forcing it back. She needed to convince him, not manipulate him. “I don’t ever share the same risks they do. They respect me, John, but they wouldn’t follow me. Not the way they follow you.”
“And someday they’ll have to?” he asked.
Kate felt her chest tighten. Don’t say things like that! she thought fiercely.
But stifling the words wouldn’t change the reality that had already been foretold by that last Terminator they’d met before the horror of Judgment Day. Just as John would one day rise to lead all of Earth to victory over Skynet, one day he would also die at Skynet’s hand.
“That’s still a long way down the road,” she said instead. “All I’m saying is that I need to do this. I need to do this.”
John reached his hand up and stroked her cheek.
“I hate this,” he said quietly. “You know that, don’t you?”
Kate pulled her right arm from beneath the blankets and took his hand.
“More than I hate watching you go off without me?”
“Touche,” he admitted. “Does anybody say ‘touche’ anymore?”
“You can say it in private,” Kate assured him, feeling some of her tension fade away as she sensed his change from solid refusal to reluctant consent. “And I don’t have to actually lead anyone, not this time. That part can wait until later. I just need them to see me fighting alongside them.”
John didn’t answer. Kate waited silently, her mental fingers crossed, letting him work it through.
“Compromise,” he said at last. “You can come with the infiltration teams and help with the recruitment part of the trip. Actually, you can probably take point on that—you’re much better at talking to people than Barnes or even Tunney.”
“I’m better than Barnes, anyway,” Kate said. “I think Tunney ought to handle the actual recruitment speech, though. I’d rather watch him this first time, and maybe just answer a few questions.”
“Well, you can sort out the duties however you want,”
John said. “But once the actual attack starts, you’ll stay put in whatever temp base we’ve set up in the neighborhood.”
“At least until you need a medic?”
“Until we need work that our junior medics can’t handle,” John corrected firmly. “Is it a deal?”
For a moment Kate considered pointing out that sitting alone in the middle of a fire zone wouldn’t be a lot safer than being out in the middle of the action. But bringing that up would probably get her summarily left here at the bunker instead. “Okay,” she said. “So I can recruit, hide, and maybe bandage.”
“You just can’t shoot,” John said, nodding.
“Well, I can shoot,” Kate said in the prim voice a couple of her mother’s upper-crust friends had always used. “I’m a woman of many talents, you know.”
John squeezed her shoulder, pulling her closer.
“Definitely,” he said. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
CHAPTER
FIVE
Breakfast at Moldering Lost Ashes that morning consisted of a handful of dried seed pods from one of the wild plants that had popped up around the city over the past few years, plus a slice of three-day-old coyote.
Kyle and Star ate quickly, which was usually the best way to get three-day-old coyote down, and then made their way up the untrustworthy stairways to the highest inhabitable part of the rickety building.
Kyle didn’t really like sentry duty. Not so much because it was boring, but because if Skynet ever launched an attack he and Star would be stuck up here, instead of downstairs where they could help.
Chief Grimaldi, the man running the building, didn’t think that would happen as long as the people here minded their own business. But Orozco said it would, and that was good enough for Kyle.
The southeast sentry post had once been the outside corner of a fancy apartment’s living room. It wasn’t so fancy now, though. The firestorm that had swept the city on Judgment Day had blown off one of the living room’s outer walls, along with half of the other wall and most of the ceiling. The result was a roughly three-meter-square section of floor that gave a clear view of that part of the city, but which was largely open to the elements.
Today, those elements consisted of a sporadic southwest wind that grabbed at the collar of Kyle’s thin coat as he and Star stepped off the stairway onto the platform. He pulled the collar back into place as he went to the equipment alcove set into the sentry post’s inner wall. There was supposed to be a spare blanket up here, but a quick check of the alcove showed no sign of it.
Apparently, whoever had been on duty during the night had taken it with him when he left.
That, or else someone had sneaked up between shifts and stolen it. Chief Grimaldi said things like that didn’t happen here, but Kyle knew they sometimes did.
Orozco didn’t much like Grimaldi. He’d never actually said anything, but Kyle could tell.
Grimaldi had run some sort of group before Judgment Day, something called a corporation, which had made him think he could run anything. Some of the other people on the Board that made all the decisions had worked in the same corporation he had, which was probably how Grimaldi had been chosen chief.
Orozco hadn’t been there when the Board was set up. He’d arrived only two years ago, a year after Kyle and Star had stumbled across the building and had been allowed to move in. What Kyle couldn’t figure out was once Orozco had shown up, why he hadn’t been put in charge instead of Grimaldi. Orozco had been a soldier once, and in Kyle’s book that had to count more than anything anyone else had been doing before Judgment Day.
But Kyle was only sixteen, so of course he wasn’t on the Board. He didn’t get a voice in any of their discussions, either, the way some of the adults did. The way it worked was that Grimaldi or one of his men told Kyle where to go scrounging for food or supplies, or Orozco told him which post he’d been assigned for sentry duty, and Kyle would do it.