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for her whistle.
    Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Susan had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.
    Hopefully before she was sent back out into the forest and the mountains to die.

CHAPTER FOUR
    They’d been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk’s engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.
    Beside her, scowling in the copilot’s seat, was Barnes.
    Blair sighed to herself. She hadn’t wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn’t wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted, and John Connor wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.
    Especially when the only reason Connor’s dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.
    Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.
    Not the man , a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes’s voice. The machine you learned to love .
    Blair shook her head sharply. Stop that! she ordered herself. Yes, Marcus had been mostly machine by the time Blair met him, a hybrid of man and Terminator that was far beyond even Skynet’s usual blasphemies. And yes, he’d been created for the express purpose of luring Connor into Skynet Central to die.
    But buried somewhere beneath all that machinery had been a man. A man with a living heart, a determined mind, and an unquenchable spirit.
    There was no way to know if he’d still had a soul. Blair hoped that he had.
    “There!” Barnes’s voice growled into her headphones.
    Blair blinked away the bittersweet reverie. Ahead on the horizon she could see the still smoldering remains of the massive Skynet dish array and hidden underground lab that the Resistance had hit over two weeks ago.
    And in doing so had walked squarely into a devastating, multilayered trap.
    Blair still winced whenever she thought about how close they’d come that day to losing everything. The self-destruct explosion that had taken out the lab and killed the entire assault team—except Connor—had been the first, most obvious trap. The data download that the techs had managed to transmit before they died had been the far more subtle, far more dangerous one. Buried inside that data had been a radio kill code that had promised a way for the Resistance to simultaneously shut down Skynet’s vast armies of Terminators, T-1 tanks, and H-K Hunter-Killers.
    But the promise had been a lie. The code had worked perfectly in Connor’s small-scale tests, perfectly enough that Command had given the order for a massive, simultaneous transmission to be followed by a scorched-earth attack on Skynet’s huge San Francisco hub.
    But when the multiple signals were sent out, the supposed kill code morphed into a homing signal, allowing Skynet to pinpoint and destroy most of the Resistance cells worldwide.
    Of all the leaders only Connor had smelled a rat in time, and had shut down his team’s transmitter before it could join the party. Only Connor’s group and the ones who had heeded his plea for more time were still alive and functioning.
    And only Connor’s group was back there in the remains of San Francisco, cleaning up the remnants of Skynet’s once massive forces.
    So far, the clean-up had been relatively easy. A duck shoot, even, at least the mopping-up part that Barnes had been engaged in. Nearly all the surviving T-600s and T-700s were hopelessly crippled, and their demolition was giving some good firearms practice to the new recruits who’d joined up from among the civilians Connor’s pilots had