I looked up and down the street, hoping my dad would appear if I looked hard enough. Nothing; like many streets in the docks, it was empty, at least during the middle day.

Panic rose within me. I'd only been in his world for a few hours, and I'd already lost him.

I got a grip. The sense that something had gone terribly, irrevocably wrong was making me irrational. The answers were standing next to me, and all I had to do was keep my head long enough to ask for them.

"Where is he?"

"I don't know," Theresa said. She was looking at the ground, maybe scanning for something.

"Well, where did we meet up with him?"

"We didn't meet up with him. We were supposed to meet up with him here, but he left."

I ground my teeth, then brought my temper under control. I knew exactly how crazy time-traveling killer robots from the future sounded—the child psychologists who had talked to me after they'd arrested Dad had been sure to tell me—but they were a fact, and facts had to fit together logically.

Theresa was a program; she ran on logic. All I had to do was explain what I was asking clearly enough she could understand me and fix things. "You're from the future. This is the past. You lived—I mean, Future Me already went through this with Past You. How did we find my dad? Where is he?"

"I never went through this," Theresa said.

"But—"

She interrupted me. "Future Taylor told me you would think this way. She told me to tell you to listen to Future Lisa."

"And what did Future Lisa say?"

"To listen to Future Aisha."

I folded my arms.

"Future Aisha said you would do that. Then she said to tell you that 'The timelines don't work that way, you complacent ass. And yes, I know what complacent means.'"

"Um," I said. Theresa had spoken the message in Aisha's voice. I'd known that terminators could mimic human voices—the one sent to kill my father had killed my grandmother and pretended to be her—but hearing it for myself was unsettling. "Do you have anyone else I could talk to? Lisa, maybe?" Or me?

Theresa went on, completely emotionless, as she spoke, or, rather, played back, Future Aisha's words. "'I knew you'd say that. You should be less predictable, or you're gonna get schwacked.'"

She could figure out complacent, but still think schwack was a word? The mind boggled. "How and why did I recruit her, again?"

Theresa said that it was because Aisha was a good soldier, then switched to Lisa's voice before I could question Future Taylor's judgment any further. "'I can't give you any pro-tips on how to live through this terminator's attack because we never lived it. The terminator's mission is to eliminate the timeline we know by killing you, and it might work. You can't manipulate our knowledge of the future to serve your present. There is no stable loop.'"

Fuck.

"Anything else?" I asked.

"There's nothing else from Future Lisa, but Future Taylor has something to say."

I waited, curious to see how being a commander had changed me.

"That's the bad news," Theresa said. It was my voice, only higher-pitched than it sounded to me. "The good news is that if Scion can change the past, so can you. Survive this and do what Scion tried to do to you—prevent it from ever being born. Dragon has all of our notes in her memory bank. I'd tell you good luck, but you know there's no such thing as luck."

"Who or what is Dragon?"

Theresa responded in her own voice—or the voice her baseline program used. "Me. It's my model's name. There was a human Theresa that I killed and replaced, and they don't like calling me that."

"I still don't understand how time can just be changed," I said. Parallel universes, maybe? Had Scion created a parallel universe when it sent its terminators back? Had I? "Can you explain how the time machine works?"

"That's not what I'm built for," Theresa said. "I'm designed and programmed for infiltration, target acquisition, and termination."

Damn it, I thought, but it made sense. The terminators weren't Scion, they were its tools, and there was no reason to enclose the secrets behind its greater strategy in expendable tools that could fall into human hands.

And I doubted I could modify Theresa—Dragon, as I agreed with my future self and friends that it was ghoulish to call a machine after the human it had murdered—to figure out time travel on my own. The processing power required couldn't possibly fit into a human-sized computer, and if I tried to hook Dragon up to a larger network, there was a chance I could create Scion.

Something to think about later.

"Well," I said, "then acquire my dad."

"I don't know Danny Hebert in the future," she said. "He was killed before I was manufactured. You have more information about him than I do."

Suddenly it was hard to support myself. I leaned against the trunk. "How?" I asked. My voice didn't sound right.

"Scion captured him and was going to use him to find you. He committed suicide."

No.

I'd change that.

Starting now. I'd find him and keep him safe.

He would be looking for me, so all I had to do was figure out how he'd accomplish that. As I considered his probable actions, I was ashamed to realize he knew so little about me that he'd have to resort to the same methods "Mr Wallis" was probably using to track me down.

Like the terminator, he knew about Alan and Zoe and he knew about Winslow, but he wouldn't know where else I'd go. I'd met my friends after he'd been taken away, and I'd never mentioned them or what I did with them in the few letters I'd bothered to send. I'd always gotten the sense he wouldn't be too happy about me joining a—not a gang, exactly—but a group of thieves and fugitives.

On the other hand, they were a group of delinquents who would work with me to save humankind from annihilation. "Hi, so these are my future lieutenants" sounded a lot better than "Hi, so these are the people I've been committing armed robbery with."

Yeah, I would go with that angle, if I found him.

When I found him.

I sighed when it dawned on me that I would have to undo all the work I'd put into evasion and go back to Alan and Zoe's house. That I'd have to walk into a trap.

"Dragon," I said. "I want—"

I broke off as something came to me.

"Yes?" she said.

My dad had one other lead: Dragon. If he saw her as a threat to me, he would stay close to her and wait for an opportunity to attack her.

"Taylor Hebert!"

We looked up. My dad was on the roof of a building three stories high, near a fire escape, and he had a fucking machine gun.

"Get the hell away from that thing!"