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"You can't escape fate," Sarah said almost every damn day. She would know, Grace figured, but she didn't have to beat it into their heads so often. Sarah had fought fate tooth and nail for decades, and fate had fought her back, stealing her comfortable life, her mother, her lover, her son, and ultimately, her hope. Sarah was weathered and solid as teak, was implacable as the steel monsters that had hounded her throughout her life. She'd fought fate and lost, and she kept fighting because she didn't have anything left except the fight.
"There was a future where John led the fight against the Terminators, and we broke that timeline, but it didn't help. The metal came back. Fate always wins." She'd usually take a drink when she said this, and if there was no booze at hand, she'd tap unhappily on her leg. Then she'd look at Dani. "You can't change fate, but I can teach you to fight it."
Sarah knew there was no escape.
Dani listened to Sarah. She accepted what scraps of stories Grace let herself piece out, and she learned what she needed from them both.
It was strange. Dani had saved Grace from her desperate life, raised her up at her side and taught her all the skills she knew. Now Grace held Dani next to her, her own heightened senses picking up the warmth of her skin and the jump of her pulse, as she wrapped her hands around Dani's and helped her improve her aim. They bent over wiring together, foreheads nearly touching, as Grace taught her to rig up explosives the same way Dani had shown her, while Sarah looked on and critiqued their soldering.
You couldn't beat fate. You could meet it, head on, and force it into a shape like Dani's inexperienced fingers shaped the putty before inserting it into the device, the same way she'd wrapped her own hands around Grace's to press and mold.
"Like this," Dani had told her, and now Grace was the one giving instruction, piece by piece. Möbius training, passed from hand to hand to hand, no beginning, no end.
Endings were for other things.
Dani didn't have to stop and rest as often as Grace. The downside to losing her main power source was how weak she felt. Stimulants didn't help. She'd been sent back in time to protect Dani and instead she was the one who needed Dani and Sarah watching out for her as they traveled from place to place along the lonely, secret highways Sarah had learned long ago.
"You should leave me," she told Dani one night. "I'm slowing you down. You and Sarah could make much better time without me."
They'd made camp in a stretch of desert set aside as a national park, but Grace remembered parks. They were supposed to be filled with trees and grass and children, not cacti and scorpions. Somewhere out in the far distance, her own younger self was sleeping in a real bed, dreaming about a day spent on the swings and merry-go-round. It was hard to imagine the girl she'd been, not here in the quiet night, Sarah dozing restlessly in her own bedroll across the fire.
"I won't," said Dani, and her chin was already learning the stubborn set Grace remembered. "We're a team."
"Your life is more important than mine. Dani, I need you to understand that."
Dani gave her a familiar look, one Grace had seen countless times over the years. She wondered if the Dani she remembered from those days was thinking about this moment, any of these moments, when she'd looked at Grace back then. "We're all important, or none of us are. Sarah bought into that Chosen One shit, and look what it cost her."
"I lived those days," Grace said. "I know they happen. I know who you are."
"She knew who John Connor was supposed to be. What did that get him?"
Grace shook her head. In her world, there had been no John Connor and she'd never minded the lack. "Promise me if it comes to it, you'll let me go."
Dani gave her a different expression, one Grace didn't recognize. For all the time they'd spent together, Dani had never looked at her this way. The wonder of it struck her, but that was nothing compared to the surprise of Dani's mouth against hers in the firelight.
"I'm not going to let you go," she said, breathing the promise into her lips. "So you'd better find a way to keep up."
Shock and singing, sudden joy flooded her veins, nearly overloading her systems. "Dani … "
"Swear it to me," said Dani, her hands on Grace's shoulders. "Swear you'll stay. I'll be your damn new Jesus if you need me to, but not without you. That's my price. Take it or leave it."
She was so tired, her body barely able to keep up with the energy demands of her implants. She knew she ought to wait until Dani was asleep, and walk out into the desert, and lose herself. But Dani was waiting for her answer, an impossible answer. The Dani she'd known hadn't had a lover at her side, certainly not one who wore Grace's face. It was too much to ask, too bitter to consider.
Sarah stirred in her sleep.
You couldn't beat fate. But the metal thought they could, thought they could go back in time and rewrite history with Dani's death the same way they'd rewritten it with John's. They'd changed it, creating a future where Sarah's lover had never, could never have been sent back into the past by a son who hadn't survived to adulthood. The past could change and leave the future written. The future could change from another past. Dani had not raised her with another woman at her side, but what if she had? Would the future unwind so terribly? Sarah and John had postponed Judgment Day, and from what Sarah knew, this had lessened the blow all of them felt. Fate could not be outrun, but it could be redirected.
"Swear," said Dani, and she was gorgeous under the starlight, scorpions be damned.
Grace bent to her, kissing her again, letting herself feel this, and ignoring the call of the desert night.
"I swear."