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even once against the half-demolished structures, she curved neatly through the narrow gap.
    Putting the first of the two buildings directly between her and the HK.
    Three weeks ago, with all four of Skynet’s radar towers providing intermeshed coverage of the L.A. basin, this trick would never have worked. But three of those towers were down now, with only the one at Capistrano way to the south still in operation.
    Which meant that unless there was a stray T-l or T-600 somewhere nearby on the ground, being out of the HK’s sight also meant Blair was out of Skynet’s sight.
    She had maybe five seconds before the HK maneuvered its own way through the gap. But she’d spent a lot of time mentally working this through, and she knew exactly what to do. With the A-10
    still curving to the right, she fired up her supposedly dead starboard engine and simultaneously hauled back on the stick.
    And with that, her tight right-hand circle turned into a tight right-hand upward spiral. She rode skyward, gripping the stick with two hands as she fought against the g-forces that were trying to pull the blood away from her brain. The spiral took her over the top of the first building, and she shoved the stick forward again, dropping her nose toward the ground, curving over the broken steel girders and into a power dive headed toward the narrow strip of ground between the two structures.
    Which, exactly as she’d anticipated, put her directly above and behind the pursuing HK.
    Skynet must have known instantly that it had lost this round. But it still wasn’t willing to concede defeat without a fight. The HK tried to roll itself over far enough to bring its Gatlings to bear, just as Blair’s last 143 armor-piercing rounds blew it to hell.
    She puffed a little sigh as she pulled out of her dive and eased back on her engines. The sky around her finally showed clear, and it was time to head back to the new hangar Connor had set up near Fallback One. Blowing a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose, she sent the A-10 in a leisurely circle that would take her back eastward toward the team’s territory. She glanced at the ground, scanning for the distinctive shapes and glowing red sensors of Skynet’s Terminators.
    And abruptly felt her heart seize up.
    21
    Six blocks to the south, squatting motionlessly on the ground like silent gray moths, were four more HKs.
    And Blair was out of ammo.
    Automatically, she kept the A-10 turning on the curve she’d set for it, her pulse pounding in her neck as she gazed at the enemy aircraft. They were sitting at the four corners of a narrow parking lot around a half-crushed warehouse surrounded by a lot of rubble, their lights dark, their turbofans either completely off or else turning slowly enough that they weren’t throwing up any dust. Their noses were pointed outward from the warehouse, the kind of arrangement soldiers used when they had to bunk down for the night in enemy territory.
    But HKs didn’t sleep. Skynet didn’t sleep.
    Could Skynet somehow have missed the fact that Blair was still alive? Ridiculous, not with the Capistrano tower still functioning. Could it have decided it had spent enough of its precious resources for one night? That was at least possible. The honchos at Command were pretty sure that Skynet was still in the ramping-up stage, still building its fleet of HKs and its armies of tanks and Terminators.
    But whatever the reason, all that mattered to Blair right now was that she seemed to be off the hook for the rest of the night.
    The A-10 finished its turn, and Blair straightened the plane out again. Keeping one eye on the city in front of her and another on the view in her mirrors, she headed home.
    22

CHAPTER
    THREE
    Orozco was at his usual night-guard post, sleeping with his back to a broken pillar beside the archway that led into the half-crumpled building known to its residents as Moldering Lost Ashes, when he was startled awake by the sound of an approaching aircraft.
    He