DOCTOR WHO/SCC FIC: Lifelines [Martha Jones, Derek Reese | 5/8 | PG]
Title: Lifelines
Author: jinxed_wood
Rating: PG, for language and Armageddon
Characters:Martha Jones, Derek Reese
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the Beeb, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belongs to Fox (I think) all I have is my Microsoft Word…
Summary: Martha needs to spread the message... but in order to do that she needs to stay alive - something Derek Reese is very good at.(Set during the year-that-wasn't)
Previous parts: PART ONE| PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR
~~~LIFELINES: PART FIVE~~~
They’d been on the road for nearly a month when they reached Chicago. It was on fire, a technicolored nightmare that could be seen from over a hundred miles away.
“It can’t get any worse than this,” Martha said, awe and dread flavouring her voice as they watched the inferno on the horizon
“It can,” Reese said softly. “It will.” He fired the bike’s engine up. “Come on, we need to be out of Illinois by morning.”
“There are smaller towns,” Martha reminded him. “Ones that aren’t on fire.”
“Do you actually think they’re going to listen to you now?”
“There is a town south of here, called Beecher, in Will County. It’s on our route,” she said, ignoring him. She had discovered, over the last few weeks, that this was her best course of action when he got into one of his moods.
“It’ll be our final destination, if we’re not careful,” he drawled, arms dangling over the handlebars as he leaned forwards and glared at her.
Martha sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Reese; you’re always the optimist.”
“All the optimists are dead or in prison, Jones; or haven’t you noticed?”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the exception that proves the rule.”
Martha eyed him. “Has anybody ever told you your sense of humour sucks?”
“Can’t say the subject has ever come up.”
“Well, it has now,” she drawled.
“Oh, I’m crushed…now get on the damned bike.”
Martha smirked as she put on her helmet, and jumped on behind him. They’d be stopping at Beecher. He was always grumpy when he gave in.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
Martha balled her hands into fists, her knuckles whitening as she watched the town’s population being herded onto the train carriages. “There’s got to be a way we can stop this,” she said.
“The question isn’t whether we can, it’s whether we should,” Reese said quietly, his face shutting down as his eyes took in the mercenaries as well as the two Toclafane hovering above.
“Reese, they’re rounding them up,” she said softly. “Do you know what that means?”
“I can hazard a guess,” he said flatly. ”Work or concentration camps, most likely.”
How can you be cold about this?” Martha asked, frustrated, as they watched from their hiding spot in the ditch. “Some of them look young enough to be in school.”
“That’s because they probably are,” he said. “I doubt the Master’s men are carding them, not that it changes a damned thing. We’re only two people, Jones, and there’s too many of them.”
“There’s about the same amount of soldiers as there was in Sparta, by my count,” Martha challenged.
“I didn’t attack Sparta, I attacked the convoy, and I did that for a reason.” Reese nodded at the two Toclafane in the sky above. “It’s a case of risks and returns. With you dead, the Master could claim a real victory, but these guys…well, they don’t really matter, not in the long run.”
“Sometimes I don’t get you, Reese,” Martha said flatly. These are real people…what if one of them were you?”
A humourless mile graced his lips. “Trust me, it wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
Martha looked at him as she tried to figure out what was going on behind that purposefully bland expression of his. “We’re going to break them out,” she said eventually
“We’re going to do no such thing.”
“Okay, then, I’m going to break them out,” Martha said grimly, as she crawled back from the train tracks. She heard Reese curse under his breath behind her.
“Don’t think I won’t tie you up and throw you onto the back of that bike if I need to, Jones, coz you know I will.”
Martha’s mind went back to the small town in Ohio, where Reese had tied her to a tree on the outskirts of the town because he didn’t like the look of the locals. “Don’t think I wouldn’t make you pay for it,” she returned sweetly. “Because you know I will.”
“Just as long as you’d be alive to do it,” he snapped back. He did like to have the last word and, this time, she let him.
Because she fully intended to have the last laugh.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
He watched her, arms folded tightly, as Martha attached the charge to the C4. “I thought the plan was to save them, not blow them up,” he eventually said.
“It’s a distraction,” Martha said defensively.
“No, it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen,” he countered. “You’re doing it wrong.”
“What?”
He sighed and crouched down beside her. “You attach the charge like this,” he said, as his fingers did the work. “That way, there’s enough of the receiver showing to pick up the signal to detonate.”
“Signal?”
“Shit, Jones, don’t you ever pay attention to what I say?”
“When it’s relevant.”
“And this ain’t relevant? How many times do I have to tell you, you need to know how to defend yourself.”
Martha bit back a few choice observations, about the usefulness of plastic explosives in self-defence, and tried to keep her voice even. “I’m learning how to use a gun, aren’t I?”
“You keep missing the target.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Yes you can. You’re doing it on purpose.”
Martha frowned. “You knew?” she asked, before she could stop herself
Reese’s eyes flashed up from the bomb in his hands. “Nobody is that bad a shot, Jones,” he drawled. “Not even you.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t need to. It takes a lot of hand eye coordination to miss a target as thoroughly as you do. I figured you’d be able to hit it if you ever truly needed to.”
“That is…extremely sneaky,” Martha said, looking at him suspiciously.
Reese shrugged. “I ended up taking care of my baby brother a lot when I was younger,” he said noncommittally. “You learn to pick your battles.”
Martha decided to ignore the connotations of that statement, in favour of finding out some more about the Reese family. “That would be John’s father?” she asked, her voice deceptively calm.
“Yeah.” A beat. “Kyle.”
“I’ve got a brother,” Martha said. “And a niece too, actually, although she’s just a tiny little thing. They’re still out there, I think. I contacted Leo before the Master found him.”
“The Master is looking for your family?” Reese asked.
Martha gave him a small smile. “Yeah,” she said. “He found them, too…well, my parents and my sister. They’re still on the Valiant, last I heard.”
“Shit, Jones…”
“I don’t like to dwell on it,” Martha said softly. “If I think about it too much, I mightn’t be able to…you know…”
Reese nodded. “It’s hard,” he said. “When Kyle…” He took a deep breath. “I was once in a similar situation, once.”
“Yeah?”
“You just have to keep your mind focused on the job at hand,” he said.
“Is this a pep talk?” Martha asked, and then winced. “That came out wrong.”
Reese shrugged, but she could almost see the shutters go down behind his eyes. “They’re primed,” he said. “Now the question is, what are you going to with them?”
“I was hoping you might have a few suggestions.”
“Oh, I see, now you want my input,” he drawled, sarcasm lacing his words. “Well, let me see, my suggestion is that we hop on the bike and get the hell out of dodge…but something tells me that ain’t gonna be on the agenda for today.”
“You going to help or what?”
Reese sighed. “I am so gonna regret doing this,” he muttered under his breath as he got to his feet. “We need to get the Toclafane out of the picture.”
Martha nodded. “I figured as much,” she said. “That’s why I was going to blow up the receiver dishes for the local phone network on the other side of town. It should buy us a few minutes. The Toclafane will check them out - the Master still relies on that signal to keep a good chunk of the world population under his thumb.”
“Not as many as you’d like to think,” Reese muttered. “Most of them are keeping quiet because of good old fashioned fear…which reminds me; you do realise that even if this plan works, a lot of those people are going to die anyway?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it’s not enough to know what you’re running from, you’ve also got to know where you’re running to,” Reese said quietly. “Let’s just say we succeed in killing, or incapacitating, the guards and getting the Toclafane out of the way - what then? Oh sure, they’re free, for about five minutes, ten tops - and then the Toclafane will be back on the scene and hunting them down. Technically, I suppose, they’ll die free…but as for the rest.” He shrugged. “I’d give it a thirty five percent success rate.”
“Oh, you’re a real bag of laughs, you are,” Martha said, scowling at him.
“I’m a realist, Jones,” he countered. “And you need to know this; you need to know that, while you’ll probably save a few lives, you’re not going to save them all.”
“I didn’t think we would,” Martha said shortly. “But I'm going to try my best to save as many as I can.”
He gave her a long look. “You think you can attach the C4 to the dishes without actually blowing yourself up?” he asked.
“Oh, I think I might be able to manage it,” she said, with a snort.
“Good, off you go, then. I’ll set something up for the mercs.”
Martha looked at him suspiciously. “What are you up to?”
“Saving the day, apparently,” he muttered, as he pulled some more C4 from his bag. “You’d better get a move on, that train isn’t going to just sit there all day.”
Martha bit her lip, unsure, but got to her feet. “You’ll be here when I get back, yeah?”
He looked up at her, his face expressionless. “See you in fifteen, Jones.”
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
He wasn’t there when she got back
“Damn you, Derek Reese,” she said under her breath, as she slid down the ditch they’d used earlier. She moved as quietly as she could through the undergrowth, wondering as she did so, how good a Toclafane’s hearing actually was. Was it like a human’s or could they hear a grasshopper chirrup a thousand miles away? She’d love to get one of them on an examination table, just to see what was going on beneath that shell of theirs.
A movement caught the corner of her eye, and Martha felt her mouth go dry as she spotted Reese crawl beneath the train’s engine. They probably wouldn’t be able to spot him from the station platform, but still…
“Crazy, lying bastard,” she muttered. “What are you up to?”
The Toclafane hovered above, prodding the last of the town’s people onto the trains, and Martha realised that they could be pulling out at any moment. Was that why Reese had made his move now, rather than waiting for her? No, something told her that this was his plan all along.
Thick skinned, annoying little…
Martha watched as he pulled himself between two carriages and slid an automatic out of his jacket. What the hell was he thinking? If one of the Toclafane saw him….
Oh, right, the Toclafane.
Martha pulled out the detonator from under her coat and looked at it, wondering what she should do. In many ways, Reese reminded her of the Doctor, so full of the little details that the big ones tended to get away from him; like what to do if he suddenly falls in love with a nurse in 1913 while you’re scrubbing the toilets, for instance.
“Oh, bugger this,” Martha muttered, and hit the trigger.
A loud resounding boom echoed through the train station, and the windows suddenly blew out, covering the entire platform with shattered glass. Oops, guess she went a little too heavy on the C4.
The Toclafane rose into the air, a whine emanating from their shells that sounded almost like a distress call, and Martha briefly wondered if humankind weren't the only ones who received messages through the archangel network
Gunfire rattled the quiet, and Martha’s eyes widened as she realised Reese was firing into the air. She watched as the prisoners hit the deck, and the mercenaries swung their weapons around, trying to figure out where the weapons fire was coming from…and then Reese released another burst of automatic fire, mowing down the mercenaries,
It was all over in a moment or two. A few of the mercenaries had survived, and pulled back, releasing cover fire, but Reese ignored them, letting them go as the prisoners slowly got to their feet, and brushed the glass off their clothing. Martha watched as Reese swung onto the platform and she scrambled up the ditch and across the tracks as he began to open the carriages.
“How long have we got, you reckon?” she called out, over the sea of heads.
“I’ve already told you that,” he called back. “Five minutes, ten tops.”
Martha looked at the crowd, milling around on the platform as if they weren’t sure what to do next, and Reese’s words came back to haunt her. It’s not enough to know what you’re running from, you’ve also got to know where you’re running to…
She jumped onto a bench and waved her hands over her head. “Oy, over here,” she called out, and then nearly lost the ability to speak as a thousand heads turned to look at her. “Uh, hi,” she said. “Listen, you need to make it to the town limits before the Toclafane get back.” A low murmur began to run through the crowd, and Martha raised her voice. “You need to keep your heads down and stay out of sight; you don’t want to be easy pickings.”
“Who the hell are you?” a voice called out.
“I’m Martha,” she said, with a quick grin. “Martha Jones - now run!”
And, amazingly enough, they did. Martha smiled goofily, as they stormed off the platform and across the tracks. Something told her that Toclafane wouldn’t find this group as easy to track down as Reese had said.
A hand gripped her arm. “What are you doing, you idiot?” Reese growled at her.
“Saving lives,” Martha retorted.
“Committing suicide is more like it,” he muttered as he dragged her off the bench. “Come on, we need to go. Every damned Toclafane from here to Colorado is going to be looking for us now.”
But not even Reese could ruin Martha’s mood at that moment. They’d done it; they’d actually done it! For once, since this terrible year had begun, she’d been responsible for saving lives, rather than ending them.
That had to be worth it.
~~~PART SIX~~~
Author: jinxed_wood
Rating: PG, for language and Armageddon
Characters:Martha Jones, Derek Reese
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the Beeb, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles belongs to Fox (I think) all I have is my Microsoft Word…
Summary: Martha needs to spread the message... but in order to do that she needs to stay alive - something Derek Reese is very good at.(Set during the year-that-wasn't)
Previous parts: PART ONE| PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR
~~~LIFELINES: PART FIVE~~~
They’d been on the road for nearly a month when they reached Chicago. It was on fire, a technicolored nightmare that could be seen from over a hundred miles away.
“It can’t get any worse than this,” Martha said, awe and dread flavouring her voice as they watched the inferno on the horizon
“It can,” Reese said softly. “It will.” He fired the bike’s engine up. “Come on, we need to be out of Illinois by morning.”
“There are smaller towns,” Martha reminded him. “Ones that aren’t on fire.”
“Do you actually think they’re going to listen to you now?”
“There is a town south of here, called Beecher, in Will County. It’s on our route,” she said, ignoring him. She had discovered, over the last few weeks, that this was her best course of action when he got into one of his moods.
“It’ll be our final destination, if we’re not careful,” he drawled, arms dangling over the handlebars as he leaned forwards and glared at her.
Martha sighed. “That’s what I like about you, Reese; you’re always the optimist.”
“All the optimists are dead or in prison, Jones; or haven’t you noticed?”
“I’m not.”
“Yeah, well, you’re the exception that proves the rule.”
Martha eyed him. “Has anybody ever told you your sense of humour sucks?”
“Can’t say the subject has ever come up.”
“Well, it has now,” she drawled.
“Oh, I’m crushed…now get on the damned bike.”
Martha smirked as she put on her helmet, and jumped on behind him. They’d be stopping at Beecher. He was always grumpy when he gave in.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
Martha balled her hands into fists, her knuckles whitening as she watched the town’s population being herded onto the train carriages. “There’s got to be a way we can stop this,” she said.
“The question isn’t whether we can, it’s whether we should,” Reese said quietly, his face shutting down as his eyes took in the mercenaries as well as the two Toclafane hovering above.
“Reese, they’re rounding them up,” she said softly. “Do you know what that means?”
“I can hazard a guess,” he said flatly. ”Work or concentration camps, most likely.”
How can you be cold about this?” Martha asked, frustrated, as they watched from their hiding spot in the ditch. “Some of them look young enough to be in school.”
“That’s because they probably are,” he said. “I doubt the Master’s men are carding them, not that it changes a damned thing. We’re only two people, Jones, and there’s too many of them.”
“There’s about the same amount of soldiers as there was in Sparta, by my count,” Martha challenged.
“I didn’t attack Sparta, I attacked the convoy, and I did that for a reason.” Reese nodded at the two Toclafane in the sky above. “It’s a case of risks and returns. With you dead, the Master could claim a real victory, but these guys…well, they don’t really matter, not in the long run.”
“Sometimes I don’t get you, Reese,” Martha said flatly. These are real people…what if one of them were you?”
A humourless mile graced his lips. “Trust me, it wouldn’t change a thing,” he said.
Martha looked at him as she tried to figure out what was going on behind that purposefully bland expression of his. “We’re going to break them out,” she said eventually
“We’re going to do no such thing.”
“Okay, then, I’m going to break them out,” Martha said grimly, as she crawled back from the train tracks. She heard Reese curse under his breath behind her.
“Don’t think I won’t tie you up and throw you onto the back of that bike if I need to, Jones, coz you know I will.”
Martha’s mind went back to the small town in Ohio, where Reese had tied her to a tree on the outskirts of the town because he didn’t like the look of the locals. “Don’t think I wouldn’t make you pay for it,” she returned sweetly. “Because you know I will.”
“Just as long as you’d be alive to do it,” he snapped back. He did like to have the last word and, this time, she let him.
Because she fully intended to have the last laugh.
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
He watched her, arms folded tightly, as Martha attached the charge to the C4. “I thought the plan was to save them, not blow them up,” he eventually said.
“It’s a distraction,” Martha said defensively.
“No, it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen,” he countered. “You’re doing it wrong.”
“What?”
He sighed and crouched down beside her. “You attach the charge like this,” he said, as his fingers did the work. “That way, there’s enough of the receiver showing to pick up the signal to detonate.”
“Signal?”
“Shit, Jones, don’t you ever pay attention to what I say?”
“When it’s relevant.”
“And this ain’t relevant? How many times do I have to tell you, you need to know how to defend yourself.”
Martha bit back a few choice observations, about the usefulness of plastic explosives in self-defence, and tried to keep her voice even. “I’m learning how to use a gun, aren’t I?”
“You keep missing the target.”
“I can’t help that.”
“Yes you can. You’re doing it on purpose.”
Martha frowned. “You knew?” she asked, before she could stop herself
Reese’s eyes flashed up from the bomb in his hands. “Nobody is that bad a shot, Jones,” he drawled. “Not even you.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t need to. It takes a lot of hand eye coordination to miss a target as thoroughly as you do. I figured you’d be able to hit it if you ever truly needed to.”
“That is…extremely sneaky,” Martha said, looking at him suspiciously.
Reese shrugged. “I ended up taking care of my baby brother a lot when I was younger,” he said noncommittally. “You learn to pick your battles.”
Martha decided to ignore the connotations of that statement, in favour of finding out some more about the Reese family. “That would be John’s father?” she asked, her voice deceptively calm.
“Yeah.” A beat. “Kyle.”
“I’ve got a brother,” Martha said. “And a niece too, actually, although she’s just a tiny little thing. They’re still out there, I think. I contacted Leo before the Master found him.”
“The Master is looking for your family?” Reese asked.
Martha gave him a small smile. “Yeah,” she said. “He found them, too…well, my parents and my sister. They’re still on the Valiant, last I heard.”
“Shit, Jones…”
“I don’t like to dwell on it,” Martha said softly. “If I think about it too much, I mightn’t be able to…you know…”
Reese nodded. “It’s hard,” he said. “When Kyle…” He took a deep breath. “I was once in a similar situation, once.”
“Yeah?”
“You just have to keep your mind focused on the job at hand,” he said.
“Is this a pep talk?” Martha asked, and then winced. “That came out wrong.”
Reese shrugged, but she could almost see the shutters go down behind his eyes. “They’re primed,” he said. “Now the question is, what are you going to with them?”
“I was hoping you might have a few suggestions.”
“Oh, I see, now you want my input,” he drawled, sarcasm lacing his words. “Well, let me see, my suggestion is that we hop on the bike and get the hell out of dodge…but something tells me that ain’t gonna be on the agenda for today.”
“You going to help or what?”
Reese sighed. “I am so gonna regret doing this,” he muttered under his breath as he got to his feet. “We need to get the Toclafane out of the picture.”
Martha nodded. “I figured as much,” she said. “That’s why I was going to blow up the receiver dishes for the local phone network on the other side of town. It should buy us a few minutes. The Toclafane will check them out - the Master still relies on that signal to keep a good chunk of the world population under his thumb.”
“Not as many as you’d like to think,” Reese muttered. “Most of them are keeping quiet because of good old fashioned fear…which reminds me; you do realise that even if this plan works, a lot of those people are going to die anyway?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that it’s not enough to know what you’re running from, you’ve also got to know where you’re running to,” Reese said quietly. “Let’s just say we succeed in killing, or incapacitating, the guards and getting the Toclafane out of the way - what then? Oh sure, they’re free, for about five minutes, ten tops - and then the Toclafane will be back on the scene and hunting them down. Technically, I suppose, they’ll die free…but as for the rest.” He shrugged. “I’d give it a thirty five percent success rate.”
“Oh, you’re a real bag of laughs, you are,” Martha said, scowling at him.
“I’m a realist, Jones,” he countered. “And you need to know this; you need to know that, while you’ll probably save a few lives, you’re not going to save them all.”
“I didn’t think we would,” Martha said shortly. “But I'm going to try my best to save as many as I can.”
He gave her a long look. “You think you can attach the C4 to the dishes without actually blowing yourself up?” he asked.
“Oh, I think I might be able to manage it,” she said, with a snort.
“Good, off you go, then. I’ll set something up for the mercs.”
Martha looked at him suspiciously. “What are you up to?”
“Saving the day, apparently,” he muttered, as he pulled some more C4 from his bag. “You’d better get a move on, that train isn’t going to just sit there all day.”
Martha bit her lip, unsure, but got to her feet. “You’ll be here when I get back, yeah?”
He looked up at her, his face expressionless. “See you in fifteen, Jones.”
~~~*~~*~~*~~~
He wasn’t there when she got back
“Damn you, Derek Reese,” she said under her breath, as she slid down the ditch they’d used earlier. She moved as quietly as she could through the undergrowth, wondering as she did so, how good a Toclafane’s hearing actually was. Was it like a human’s or could they hear a grasshopper chirrup a thousand miles away? She’d love to get one of them on an examination table, just to see what was going on beneath that shell of theirs.
A movement caught the corner of her eye, and Martha felt her mouth go dry as she spotted Reese crawl beneath the train’s engine. They probably wouldn’t be able to spot him from the station platform, but still…
“Crazy, lying bastard,” she muttered. “What are you up to?”
The Toclafane hovered above, prodding the last of the town’s people onto the trains, and Martha realised that they could be pulling out at any moment. Was that why Reese had made his move now, rather than waiting for her? No, something told her that this was his plan all along.
Thick skinned, annoying little…
Martha watched as he pulled himself between two carriages and slid an automatic out of his jacket. What the hell was he thinking? If one of the Toclafane saw him….
Oh, right, the Toclafane.
Martha pulled out the detonator from under her coat and looked at it, wondering what she should do. In many ways, Reese reminded her of the Doctor, so full of the little details that the big ones tended to get away from him; like what to do if he suddenly falls in love with a nurse in 1913 while you’re scrubbing the toilets, for instance.
“Oh, bugger this,” Martha muttered, and hit the trigger.
A loud resounding boom echoed through the train station, and the windows suddenly blew out, covering the entire platform with shattered glass. Oops, guess she went a little too heavy on the C4.
The Toclafane rose into the air, a whine emanating from their shells that sounded almost like a distress call, and Martha briefly wondered if humankind weren't the only ones who received messages through the archangel network
Gunfire rattled the quiet, and Martha’s eyes widened as she realised Reese was firing into the air. She watched as the prisoners hit the deck, and the mercenaries swung their weapons around, trying to figure out where the weapons fire was coming from…and then Reese released another burst of automatic fire, mowing down the mercenaries,
It was all over in a moment or two. A few of the mercenaries had survived, and pulled back, releasing cover fire, but Reese ignored them, letting them go as the prisoners slowly got to their feet, and brushed the glass off their clothing. Martha watched as Reese swung onto the platform and she scrambled up the ditch and across the tracks as he began to open the carriages.
“How long have we got, you reckon?” she called out, over the sea of heads.
“I’ve already told you that,” he called back. “Five minutes, ten tops.”
Martha looked at the crowd, milling around on the platform as if they weren’t sure what to do next, and Reese’s words came back to haunt her. It’s not enough to know what you’re running from, you’ve also got to know where you’re running to…
She jumped onto a bench and waved her hands over her head. “Oy, over here,” she called out, and then nearly lost the ability to speak as a thousand heads turned to look at her. “Uh, hi,” she said. “Listen, you need to make it to the town limits before the Toclafane get back.” A low murmur began to run through the crowd, and Martha raised her voice. “You need to keep your heads down and stay out of sight; you don’t want to be easy pickings.”
“Who the hell are you?” a voice called out.
“I’m Martha,” she said, with a quick grin. “Martha Jones - now run!”
And, amazingly enough, they did. Martha smiled goofily, as they stormed off the platform and across the tracks. Something told her that Toclafane wouldn’t find this group as easy to track down as Reese had said.
A hand gripped her arm. “What are you doing, you idiot?” Reese growled at her.
“Saving lives,” Martha retorted.
“Committing suicide is more like it,” he muttered as he dragged her off the bench. “Come on, we need to go. Every damned Toclafane from here to Colorado is going to be looking for us now.”
But not even Reese could ruin Martha’s mood at that moment. They’d done it; they’d actually done it! For once, since this terrible year had begun, she’d been responsible for saving lives, rather than ending them.
That had to be worth it.
~~~PART SIX~~~