"Looks like an... –er fl... –out, Don."
Donatello frowns down at the cracked screen of his phone and keys in an adjustment to the modified transceiver he'd jerry-rigged to it to boost its underground signal capacity. "Repeat that, Leo? You're spotting out."
"The whole place is... " Leonardo's voice fades back into static. He thumps the side of the transceiver irritably and adds 'replace Leo's phone' to the increasingly long mental tally of things to do after the move. "—ater up to our necks."
With a huff of frustration, Donnie yanks the cap off of his red marker with his teeth and draws a large "X" across the old pumping annex under West 36th with more force than is strictly necessary. Leaning back to take in the map as a whole, an undeniable pattern is starting to emerge. "There must be a main busted somewhere. That's everything southeast of the Port Authority flooded."
"It's th... –ort Authority, bros." Michelangelo's voice has the tinny, faintly echoed edge of someone shouting to be heard over speakerphone. "What'd you expect? Place... –ithole above ground."
"We're going to try... –ing up 9th Avenue. What've you got between there and Central Park?"
Donnie squints at his list, forcing the doubled letters back into focus. "Two potentials and one unlikely-but-we-still-outta-look-at-it. Texting you the coordinates now."
After three full days of searching Donatello is starting to go cross-eyed from pouring over the labyrinthine details of the New York City municipal water and sewage system. The official plans on file with the city are convoluted enough on their own, but they're not looking for anything that could be turned up by the average construction company filing for digging permits. They've got their own maps of course, revised and expanded with each training run and scavenging mission and forbidden adventure while Master Splinter sleeps, but none of the secret spaces they played in as children are sufficient for their current needs.
That's where the antique blueprints come in—the first a happy accident buried in the bottom of a box of moldy books, the rest originals stolen from the dusty bowels of the public works archives –the ink of the hand-drawn routes so fine and faded that they can't be seen on any of the remaining digitized scans.
The part of him that can spend hours speed-reading the edit histories of Wikipedia articles feels more than a little guilty about the theft.
The much larger part of him that knows how hard it is to feed four growling teenage stomachs on food pantry rejects and the least-rotten contents of restaurant dumpsters and how much easier things get when illicitly-siphoned cryptocurrency is involved is grateful for the moral flexibilities built into ninjitsu.
Donnie's the eyes in the proverbial sky for this operation, sifting and combining multiple data streams into something that makes sense in the physical world. Many sites he's able to rule out through deductive analysis alone—an old sewer reroute under the East Village that got eight feet of water during Superstorm Sandy, an abandoned subway station still accessible and popular enough with taggers that it has its own Instagram tag—but the one's with the most promise are so lost within the bureaucratic cobwebs that they have no way of knowing what they'll find until they go and take a look for themselves.
Mikey, with his badly hidden HGTV addiction, has proven himself an invaluable scout, even if the composition of his real estate photography sometimes straddles the line between conceptualism and deconstructed internet meme . His "exclusive virtual tours" are nauseating to watch, but he's got an organic instinct for spaces that balances nicely with Leo's own more checklist approach. Between the two of them, they're able to assess potential "properties" for both livability and defensibility almost as fast as Donnie can identify them.
"How do five freaking ninjas end up with so much shit?"
Raph, for better or worse, packs.
As instructed, the brunt of their food, medical supplies, and weaponry are already packed up and ready for a quick exit, but if everything goes according to plan they should be able to carry a few more loads of supplies to their new home before being forced to scuttle the lair. Despite his grumbling and obvious dis-ease at letting any of his brothers out of his sight for long, Raph turns to his task with his usual brand of brutal efficiency , sorting their possessions by utility, sentimentality, and disposability with the same quick, decisive movements he uses when lashing out with his sais.
He quickly fills the rest of the battered duffels and big Ikea bags they use when scavenging with the rest of their kitchen, the spare components Donnie has set aside to use as the basis for their new security system, and the parts of their library Master Splinter has deemed too important to leave behind. When Leo and Mikey come back for a quick meal and to drop off the first five gigs of surveillance footage and sensor readings, he disappears into the tunnels for a quick trip topside, returning with an armful of emptied-out trash bags ("It was just shredded paper and office crap, Leo, I ain't fucking stupid") for their linens and several grease-stained cardboard boxes for anything else that will fit.
"Hey!" Mikey yelps when Raph dumps his milk crates full of records out onto the floor. "Watch the vinyl, will ya? Shit's vintage."
"You want a mint copy of Think About It or you want to be able to see your fuckin' feet when you go take a piss?" Raph snaps, carefully filling the crate up again with Donnie's lightbulb collection.
"I think you're severely undervaluing Lyn Collins' classic soul stylings and hip-hop legacy," Mikey sniffs, but offers no further protests as Raph sweeps the contents of several color-coded metal baskets into the growing pile of "Wouldn't It Be Nice If We Could."
Donnie wonders if maybe the brunt of the packing shouldn't have fallen to him. Raph certainly doesn't enjoy it, judging by the hard line of his jaw as he digs through their cache of toiletries and the occasional bangs and bursts of swearing from the dojo as he takes apart their training equipment. Most of the things they own Donnie either found himself or helped piece back together. Given nothing but a pencil and a big enough sheet of paper, he could probably diagram out the entire lair wire by wire with a complete annotated catalog of every stray pizza box, faded sticker, and hastily-stashed dirty magazine.
Then again, maybe that's why his palms go slick every time he passes the stacks of packed belongings lined up beside the main hatch. Why he can't look at the wall of stereos without feeling sick.
Why no matter where in the lair he goes, it feels like there are eyes watching him.
"Dibs on the shower," calls Mikey by way of greeting several hours later.
"There is no shower," Donnie reminds him, not bothering to look up from his typing. The pipe carrying pressurized fresh water to the rough concrete alcove Donnie had studded with sprinkler heads was severed by one of the explosions, and they're back to sponge-bathing out of a bucket like they had as kids.
Michelangelo whines piteously but makes a trudging bee-line to the bathroom anyway, peeling out of his soaked gear as he goes. Leonardo isn't far behind, a familiar looming shadow reflected multiple times over across the scattering of dark, fatally wounded monitors. From the smell and the wet squeak of his shoes he doesn't appear to have fared their latest foray into the sewers any better.
"I take it that decommissioned septic facility was a typo?"
"I don't think it was ever formally commissioned," Leo says flatly. "I think it bubbled up like a geyser from the depths of hell."
Donnie wrinkles his nose sympathetically. "Scrub down before you give Master Splinter your report. We don't want him getting an infection."
"No argument there," Leo answers, clipped and professional. His battlefield voice. Donnie expects that to be the end of the conversation, but Leo's silhouette lingers in his peripheral vision. "You should really get some sleep, now that we're back."
They've been resting in shifts since that first exhausted night, making sure there's always someone awake to check in on Master Splinter or raise the alarm if needed. Donnie is way overdue for his turn.
He shakes his head and keeps his eyes fixed on the sluggish scroll of white on black text across the monitors. Between his hasty repair jobs and the heightened demands he's placed on the remaining security systems all of his other programs have been lagging heavily. "Later. I need to finish modifying the city records before the system auto-archives at midnight."
This piques Leo's interest enough that he forgoes his usual lecture on Donnie's poor sleeping habits. "I thought none of the places we were looking at were in the official records."
"Most of them aren't," Donnie explains, "which is part of the problem. If we wipe ourselves completely off the grid then sooner or later we're going to have jackhammers coming through our ceilings and walls to make room for a skyscraper sub-basement or a new branch of the blue line."
"The joys of New York real estate," Leo grumbles. "So what are you turning the final contestants into?"
"Something crucial but low maintenance, too small to stand up in, and very, very, very expensive to dig up, with lots of false leads sprinkled on top." The more subtle alterations he makes to the records the less obvious it is which trail of breadcrumbs leads to their new home. It's known by their enemies that they live underground; Donatello can't change that, but at least he can make them a hell of a lot more complicated to find.
"Good thinking," Leo says, a general once more. "Just... Rest after this. All right?"
Donnie nods jerkily, neck muscles tense in anticipation of a too-soft pat to his shoulder or brotherly flick to the back of his skull, but Leo keeps his distance, watching him work for a few minutes longer before drifting off to the bathroom.
Leo's authority to give orders is still new enough that Donnie doesn't feel guilty for not obeying its full intent. It's hard to lie still for any length of time without the weight of sleep or his tech pack to counterbalance the too-light feeling quivering in his chest, but there's a piece of an idea in his head that won't keep quiet. He turns it over slowly, prodding at its undersides, the jagged edges and empty spaces where other pieces might fit, careful to keep his features soft and breathing even so as not to give himself away to the figures that linger occasionally in the archway.
When it's Donnie's turn to keep watch again he finds himself pacing the perimeter of the lair, dragging his hands along the pipes, the draped arcs of electrical wire, the seams of mortar between concrete blocks.
After his twenty-eighth pass through the ghost of the kitchen he finds his father awake and watching.
"Such a long, troubled journey, my son. Might I walk it with you, for a while?"
He helps Master Splinter to the bathroom and back again, brings him fresh water and dried apple pieces to chew on while he checks his bandages for further bleeding. His sensei is healing nicely.
Donatello's watch ends. He sleeps and dreams of lightning and hushed voices, of small white hands banging frantically against glass.
There are lots of things he could be doing. Should be doing. Like hacking into the Riker Island surveillance feeds to watch Eric Sack's prison transfer, or trying to find everything he can on the mysterious and still-hospitalized man known only as the Shredder, or scanning April O'Neil's computer for article drafts and every single typed mention of "turtles" and/or "mutant vigilantes." Things that aren't sitting in the octagonal divot in the dojo floor with a growing mountain of scribbled over scrap paper and a mouthful of swollen gums from hours of gritting his teeth in frustration.
He should be able to let this go. He should be able to make this work. He should...
He'd tried to explain it to Mikey, once, back when he'd first programmed his tech pack to take automatic readings of each of his brothers' surface temperatures and heart rates.
"It's like I get stuck," he'd said, flipping through each of his goggle's view modes and watching the orange-pink hues of Michelangelo's latest graffiti design shift and bleed from night vision green to heat-sig black to muted tactical browns. "Like there's a circuit looped somewhere and the current's not powering anything but itself. Know what I'm sayin'?"
"Not really," Mikey had admitted. "Whenever I wanna do something I just—" He'd twirled the cans of spray paint through a rapid sequence of jabs and modified nunchaku strikes. "Whap whap bam shi-kah! Do it."
Donnie had switched back to thermal view, fascinated by the contrast between the near-black of his brother's plastron and the cool reptilian blue-green of his exposed skin. "Probably why you get in so much trouble."
"Oh definitely," Mikey had laughed, cheeks warming to brilliant gold.
Normally Donatello would use his jumble of monitors to its full display potential to help map himself out of a roadblock, but the main server bank is already starting to buzz and crackle angrily as it struggles to keep up with its heavy workload. He wishes he could take the whole system offline and give it the proper maintenance it so desperately needs, but with the uncertain threat of another Foot invasion running through the entire lair like a slowly building static charge it's a risk he's not willing to take.
Not that it matters all that much, long term. If the system doesn't burn itself out before they leave he'll just have to wipe and junk it anyway.
He yanks at his necklace, the straps of his tech pack, rubs the heels of his hands back and forth along his thighs. His head feels like the inside of a movie projector with the film knocked loose and playing back at the wrong speed, everything crooked and punched through with holes and going too fast to make sense of any of the pictures. He shuffles his papers together, scatters them again, flicks back and forth along the long scroll of the open tabs on his touchscreen. Wishes fretfully for something to take apart, something small enough to cradle in his lap but tangled like a Gordian knot, metal components filmed with grease and studded all over with bolts that resist for a moment before giving under the relentless twisting of his fingers.
Finally, in a fit of desperation, Donatello tries to meditate.
"You're gonna give yourself a serious crick in the neck, sleepin' like that."
Raphael's sudden appearance jerks him out of the light doze he'd drifted into after half an hour of trying valiantly to hold the upright half-lotus Sensei had taught them before curling over into the more natural-feeling child's pose.
"Wasn' sleepin'," he mumbles defensively into the floor. The concrete feels good against his forehead, cool and reassuringly solid.
"Yeah, well, you probably should be, way you've been goin'. Don't want you shortin' out on us."
Donatello is really starting to get sick of all the things he should be doing.
Raphael isn't one to stand around and start conversations for the hell of it, which means that he wants something. With a dejected groan he pushes himself up into a sitting position and scrubs roughly at his face until the tingling sensation of draining blood dissipates.
Raph is close enough that Donnie can just make out the brass button detailing of his spats, but his face is a barely defined blob of color, red bleeding into green and dark holes where his eyes and shades should be. "What's all this?" he asks, gesturing at the fanned blur of papers scattered on the floor around him.
"Rough draft for a new offensive layer to our security perimeter. Interior-activated directed debilitating electrical pulse." Donnie gives his glasses a quick polish with the tails of his mask before slipping them on, but Raph's furrowed expression isn't any easier to read in focus.
"So that's... What? Like a force field?"
"Kind of." He points to a diagram of a fractal network of circuits branching out from a central ring. "Think of it like a big circle. Inside, you flip a switch and it's a safe zone that nobody can push past. Originally I was thinking of tying the switch to an automated sensor, but that would leave it vulnerable to any successful override of the security network as a whole, let alone the higher potential for accidental triggering." Donnie does his best to make everything he builds absolutely Mikey-proof, but sometimes his best just isn't good enough. "So now I'm leaning towards a manual trigger. Easier to build in a fail-safe mode plus it gives us more options to deploy it for pointed tactical maneuvers."
"Makes sense," says Raph, which is the thing he says when something doesn't make sense at all. "What happens outside the circle?"
Donatello has seventeen pages of calculations, twelve journal articles, and four digital simulations at his fingertips he could use to answer that question in exact technical detail, but experience tells him that Raphael is looking for something simpler than that. Something blunter.
"Well," he says, "you die."
Raphael's eyes widen, nostrils flaring as he sucks in a deep, shuddering breath. The rest of him goes very, very still.
"That's the theory, anyway," Donnie huffs, fingers fidgeting idly with the sharp edges of his kusazuri. "I'm still trying to balance out the charge levels in case one of us does accidentally get caught in it. But hey—" He smiles crookedly up at Raph. "—at least thanks to Sacks we know we know we can take kind of a lot, right?"
Raph doesn't smile back. He stares at the jumble of papers for a long minute before turning away, rubbing the back of one hand against his mouth. In the kitchen, Mikey is singing "How Deep Is Your Love" soft and off-key, the chorus intercut with a lot of vocal percussion.
"Look, Donnie, about what I said the other day. I just..."
The sudden change in topic confuses Donatello, as does the rough, tightly coiled quality of his brother's voice. Like a rusted spring stretched slowly apart, the metal crumbling even as it tries to pull back in on itself. He waits for an explanation, brows furrowed and head tilted back, but the rest of Raphael's thought seems to have evaporated into the air.
Raphael swallows, an up-and-down bobbing of his throat, and looks back down at the jumble of papers.
"C'mon," he says, jerking his head towards the main hatch. "I wanna show you something."
"Show me what?" Donnie asks, frown deepening.
"Just..." His hands curl into fists. Open again. "Something. Okay?"
Donnie hesitates, still lost within the conversation. His fingers itch to pull his goggles down, but none of the pattern-seek programs he's written so far have proven effective at deciphering this particular kind of puzzle, so he defaults to his training.
He examines every part of his opponent—the awkward hovering of his hands, the hunch of his shoulders, his bared lower incisors, the way the light pools in the white corners of his eyes—and tries to piece together his intent. His next move. It's easier in the dojo, where each motion and strike is repeated a thousand times until even his brothers' movements feel like a part of his own body, hard-wired into his muscles and waiting for him to unscrew the protective plating for a closer look, but sometimes it works for this.
Michelangelo's face—younger, eight maybe—his hands clenched in front of him and shaking, down on his knees before their sensei, round eyes locked on the long metal swords that they have not yet been allowed to touch.
"Please," he says. Implores. "Please please pleeease..."
With a sigh, Donatello gets to his feet, knees and ankles popping alarmingly as he straightens his legs.
Raphael leads him through the sewers to the access pipe that runs down to the oversized storm drains meant to keep the subway lines from flooding after prolonged periods of heavy rains. Between the frequently unpredictable water levels and too-close surface proximity they usually avoid the storm culverts altogether, but the wide, mostly-flat tunnel is dry and empty for now.
Empty, that is, except for...
Donnie flips on one of his headlamps to make sure his brain isn't just making pictures out of shadows and water stains.
"It's a van," he says, stunned.
"It's a van," Raph deadpans. "Ten points to Gryffindor."
While this particular tunnel branches off from a culvert with easy surface access and completely ineffective security fencing, none of the skateboarders who like to drink and carve lazy arcs down the smooth concrete have ever pushed much further than the first bend, the smell and the dark enough to make them turn back towards the surface. Even the occasional groups of homeless people who use the culvert as shelter typically stick close to the mouth of the tunnel until a rainstorm forces them out again.
Which doesn't mean that a human couldn't have had a good reason to try to hide a vehicle by driving it so deep underground, it's just that the far more likely alternative is standing two feet behind him .
"You stole a van." Donatello does a double-take at the all-too familiar logo. "From Sacks Industries."
Raphael's reflected smile seems to fill the driver's side window. "Figured they owed us one," he laughs.
The van is white. Boxy—a cab over model, either a Dodge or a Mitsubishi—with round, bug-like headlights and hard lines running parallel down the length of its body.
It's beautiful.
It's also very badly parked, both side view mirrors missing and the right rear tire stuck high enough up the steep curve of the tunnel's edge that the rest of the vehicle tilts at an ominous angle. Donnie approaches the van cautiously, still too dumbfounded by the incongruity of it all to even pull down his goggles for a better look.
"What happened here?" he asks, touching the long scrape down the driver's side, yellow paint streaked across the exposed aluminum. The left front tire, on closer inspection, is completely blown.
Raph shifts his weight from one foot to the other, grin fading. "I ain't ever driven before, a'ight?"
The van is unlocked. Donnie opens the door and peers inside. "What happened to the driver's seat?"
Raphael scowls but remains silent. Glancing over his shoulder, Donatello takes in the hard lines of his massive arms crossed tightly over his plastron, the way the top curve of his shell looms larger than ever when he hunches over, and works through a quick bit of applied spatial geometry.
He gets the picture. That part of it, at least.
"I don't understand." He runs his thumb along the edge of the door, eyes darting from the dashboard to Raph and back again. Fully automatic, decent mileage. Shitty factory model stereo system. "Why would you—?"
"S'just..." Raph says haltingly. "Mikey told me how much of a pain it was getting the fridge, and I heard Sensei talkin' with Leo about... But I sure as hell ain't carrying your computer shit no six fuckin' miles, so I thought—"
The metal doorframe creaks under Donnie's fingers. Dimly, he's aware of his fingernails slicing long curves into the rubber door seal. "This is to help us move?"
The skin just under Raphael's mask flushes dark green. "Basically."
Donnie closes the door. Opens it again. Breathes in the sickly mix of pine air freshener and musty upholstery while his head spins with the possibilities.
"Did you check it for trackers?"
Raphael throws up his hands.
"It's a catering van, Donnie!" He sounds like he's not sure if he wants to hug him or hit him. After fifteen years living together, Donnie knows the tone well. "They used it to bring in subs and fancy cakes and shit."
Donnie spends almost an hour pulling out panels and scanning every inch of the undercarriage with his goggles before he's satisfied that the van isn't bugged. Raph grumbles through the entire process but complies immediately when Donnie asks him to lift the van high enough for him to slide underneath and check the last few shadowy pockets of machinery by hand.
"What's the verdict?" he asks once Donnie slips free.
He tugs his goggles back up to resting position and straightens his glasses. "Well the good news is that Sacks isn't as paranoid as I am. The bad news is that the suspension is shot and there's no spare."
"Oh you gotta be fuckin'—" He drops the van. "Shit. Shit shit shit. I didn't mean to snag you a lemon."
Donatello wipes his hands on his leather underskirt.
"I can fix the suspension," he muses. "Shouldn't take too long. Probably needs reinforcing anyway, between the weight of at least one of us and whatever we're gonna haul. And we've got those tires under the side table by the couch."
Raphael shakes his head. "Not anymore. They got shredded in the blast." He pauses, thinking. "What about those big tractor ones from the weight set? Think those could work?"
Something in his expression reminds Donatello of the way they all used to look up at Master Splinter when they were first learning their katas, the queasy anticipation as they braced for correction or approval.
He runs one hand along the curve of the engine's air intake, fingers tingling as he traces the rim of one headlight. Licks his lips.
"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, that might work."
