Chapter Six

When Emily gets up to the staff kitchen, Noah is already enjoying his mid-morning soda.

"Came early today?" she asks, putting her bagged lunch away in the fridge.

"Like I was going to wait any longer for Raphael's test results," he replies.

"And?"

"Not an alien," Noah says, with great disappointment. "But definitely a new species, and a pretty weird one." He drains his soda and tosses the can in the recycling. "Come on, I'll show you."

Emily follows him down to his office. Noah plops into his chair and wheels it close up to the desk, while Emily takes the opposite seat. There's a thick stack of papers, multiple copies of DNA charts, probably twenty pages each. He turns the top one around so Emily can read it.

"There's a lot of turtle DNA," Noah says, indicating sequences in the narrow columns. "But not enough to easily say what kind of turtle he's most closely related to. And then," he rubs his nose and turns the page, "there's all this, which isn't like anything."

"That's kind of the definition of new species," Emily says dryly.

"No, I mean it's not even close to anything," Noah says. He scans the upside-down text. "There are random matches with all kinds of known organisms, but that's just an artifact of the simplicity of DNA. Taken in larger chunks, there's just no relation between Raphael and any other genome we've sequenced. I mean, look at this." He points to a neat alternating pattern of A-T and T-A pairs. "And this." An extraordinary number of G-C pairs, one right after the other. "And this." A loop of the four base pairs, chasing each other endlessly down the page. "I've never seen anything like it." Noah turns the paper back around and considers it. "DNA is supposed to look random. But this... it looks like it was arranged by an artist who would really be better off working in a library."

"So what is he?" Emily asks.

"Well, he's a vertebrate, at least," Noah replies. "If I had to pick a class, I'd say reptile." He flips the pages back, so the sheaf lies flat again. "Emily... even aside from his intelligence, Raphael is going to be the most interesting thing in biology since that telegram about the platypus." His professional calm shatters, and he breaks out in a wide grin. "I am so excited about this! Do you have any idea how many papers we're going to get published? I mean, it's not as good as finding an actual alien, but... it's getting pretty close...."

"Don't worry," Emily says. "One of these days you'll meet an actual alien." She indicates the printouts. "Can I take one?"

"Take two," Noah says, pushing them at her. "Take three. One for the reporter, one for... I don't know, for posterity."

"Thanks." Emily knocks the papers against the desk, to align the edges, and stands up. "By the way – male or female?"

"No sex chromosomes," Noah tells her. "You'll have to do it the old-fashioned way."

More or less impossible. Turtles are hard enough when they belong to a known species, and with only one specimen she can't even guess from comparison. Reptiles.

"Well," she says, "let me know if you notice anything else."

"Absolutely." Noah puts his hand possessively on the remaining charts. "I'm not done with these. Not by a long shot."


On the kitchen wipeboard, Raphael doesn't yet have a checkmark for breakfast, so Anne flips open his care book and prepares some food according to what Dr. Thacker has noted about his needs and preferences.

There's a scribbled line on the most recent page, indicating that Raphael should be sent out into the exercise yard.

Anne layers some extra fruit on top of the vegetables and fish; she would much prefer to entice Raphael outside, rather than fight with him again.

She hasn't seen him since she showed him to Noyes, and hasn't heard much either. The research department must have found him interesting, or they would have transferred him to one of the other buildings.

Or maybe he wouldn't go.

She shakes her head. Raphael is an animal; he can be controlled. If he were really as intelligent as Anne had originally thought, Dr. Thacker surely would have noticed. She is the expert, after all.

Anne takes the bowl of food, and heads to the old gorilla enclosure.

When she gets there, Raphael is sitting in the hammock, holding a stuffed animal in his lap, and - she would swear - radiating a profound sadness.

"Hey," she says, keeping the bowl tilted towards him while she circles around to the open door. "You want some breakfast? Why don't you come outside and eat?"

Raphael watches her with narrowed eyes. As she passes behind him, moving out of his line of sight, his neck snaps around at blinding speed, and he continues watching over his other shoulder.

"Come on," Anne encourages, shaking the bowl a little and backing out through the door. "Come and get it."

He doesn't move.

She sets the bowl down under a tree and goes back inside. "Hey," she says, approaching the hammock while making big gestures at the door. "Go on outside. It's a beautiful day."

He clutches the stuffed animal a little tighter.

"You can take that with you," Anne says. She reaches out and taps his shell with her fingertips. "Come -"

On the second tap, he whips around and clobbers her forearm with the stuffed animal.

It doesn't hurt, but it certainly conveys a message.

"Okay," she says, switching to Plan B. "Have it your way." With a speed gained from many encounters with striking animals, she snakes her arm around his middle, pinning his arms. With her other hand, she scruffs him - he has an awful lot of extra skin around his neck. She squeezes, just so, until the relaxation response is triggered, and then she leans him forward, shifting his weight onto her arm so she can lift him.

The stuffed animal falls from his limp fingers as she carries him outside. She lays him down gently, in the sunshine by the pond, sliding her arm out from underneath and releasing him from the hold. She backs away, into the cool of the enclosure, and closes the door.


Not fair! How did she know about that reflex? He didn't even know! Nobody has ever grabbed him like that before, and he's definitely not going to let anybody do it again.

Heck, he's not even going to tell his brothers about it. It's just not fair.

There's still a tingling weakness in his limbs, but he slithers down into the pond, and settles in the sand at the bottom.


On her way back to the kitchen to see what else needs to be done, Anne runs into Dr. Thacker.

"Raphael's been put out," Anne says.

"Good," says Dr. Thacker, distractedly, more interested in the sheaf of papers in her hand. "Thank you."

"He didn't want to go," Anne tells her. "He hit me again."

Dr. Thacker refocuses. "What? Where?"

"Only on the arm," Anne says. "With his stuffed animal. I thought you should know."

Dr. Thacker sighs. "That's why I wanted him outside. There's a reporter coming to see him, and I thought it would be better all around if we used the viewing platform."

"I think you're right." Anne flicks her gaze to the papers. "More rat results?"

"No," Dr. Thacker says, reshuffling the stack so Anne has a better angle for reading them. "Raphael's DNA. Dr. DeVry just gave it to me."

"Oh?" Anne can't make heads or tails of the data, but she looks at it anyway. "So what is he?"

"We're still sort of working that out," Dr. Thacker says, skimming over the lines of text herself. "But this is really Noah's department, and my rats are calling." She pulls the papers to her chest. "Thanks again, Anne. I'm sorry Raphael has taken such a dislike to you."

"Dr. Thacker," Anne says, as the scientist turns to go. "What do you think of Raphael?"

Dr. Thacker regards her consideringly. "I think he's very interesting. And I think someone is regretting that he escaped."

Anne remains in the hallway for a few moments after Dr. Thacker has gone, reflecting on what the cognition expert told her. Nothing Dr. Thacker said suggests that she thinks Raphael is anything more than a clever animal.

Well. Anne must have been mistaken in her judgment. She defers to the higher education and greater experience of the white-coats, and gets on with the business of cleaning cages and administering medicine to uncooperative patients.


Raphael remains submerged until his air runs out - twelve minutes, by his time sense, which is better than Donnie's record of ten and a half - then tilts up and pushes just the top of his snout above the water line. His nostrils pull open, his lungs refill, and he stays that way until the slow, heavy feeling leaves his body.

When he feels strong again, he digs his toes into the sand and rises smoothly into the air. Water rains off him, pattering back into itself, staining the dirt dark as he climbs out of the artificial basin and crosses the sunny yard.

He considers his situation. The door to the inside part of the cage is closed, and a quick check proves it's locked. He's now trapped outdoors, which is a novel and nerve-wracking situation. As much as he needs the sun, darkness and a solid roof over his head have always meant safety. If he can creep into a narrow place and hide, then everything will be okay.

The bushes just don't look like very good cover.

He decides to climb a tree. It will put him out of reach, like his perch inside, and if somebody tries to trap him he can jump onto the netting and get away.

At the base of his chosen tree is a bowl of food. He's not really hungry, but he thinks it would be a good idea to take it with him, so he won't have to come down later. Examination shows that the bowl has a funny hollow underneath, and he can balance it on his head while he climbs.

Raphael settles on a sturdy upper branch. He can see almost the whole yard, and a person on the ground will have trouble spotting him.

He congratulates himself on his awesome ninja skills, makes himself comfortable, and waits to see what will happen.

Some time later, he hears Thacker's voice from outside the wall. "Right over here," she's saying. "Watch your step."

There's some creaking, and then Thacker and a human Raphael doesn't recognize appear over the wall.

Half of them, anyway.

This is very surprising. Thacker is not that tall, and if any human is, then Raphael has been sorely mistaken about their size range.

From their easy posture, Raph can tell that they're not climbing, not balancing on narrow holds. They must be standing on something that he can't see.

"Where is he?" the strange human is asking.

"I don't - Ah. There." Raphael holds his ground - or, at least, his branch - as Thacker points at him.

"A giant turtle that climbs trees?" the new human says. "Are you sure this isn't a hoax?"

"A little research into the history of zoology will acquaint you with many stories of real animals that were initially thought to be hoaxes," Thacker says.

Too many words Raph doesn't know, and it only gets worse from there. Species. Opposable. Phylogeny. It's all way over his head, and mostly he's just interested in watching the humans to be sure they don't throw or shoot anything at him.

After a while they go away, and a while after that some half-glimpsed person, that Raphael can't remember seeing before, comes and opens the door.

He stays in the tree, picking at the food. Part of him is hungry, but another part is all twisted up and doesn't want to eat anything. He feels sick in his stomach - not the sick of a fever, or the sick of bad food, but a different kind of sick, like a ball of sadness got inside him and is taking up the place where something else should be.

He can't look at the food anymore.

He wedges the bowl into a crook of the branches, gathers himself, and jumps up into the netting. He climbs near the wall the humans were standing over, then away from it, trying every angle, but he can't see what they were standing on.

Anyway, he still can't get out. He hangs down from the net and drops to the ground, landing in an elastic crouch, the way his father taught him.

He stays crouched there, tracing his finger in the loose dirt. Right now, he wants nothing more than to be underground, to be in a place where the walls and the darkness hold him close, where nobody knows he exists and nobody can hurt him. He wants to be left alone. He doesn't want to see anyone, unless it's his family coming to rescue him.

Actually, he wants to see his family, even if they're not rescuing him. This place would be a little less awful, if only he wasn't so alone in it.

He goes inside with dragging feet. The red tube in the corner catches his eye, makes him think of a narrow runoff near his home, where he once wrote his name on the wall and declared himself King of the Sewer.

He crawls into the tunnel, making it rock under his shuffling hands and knees. He scooches around, so that he's facing out into the room, and lies down, imagining himself back in the only world he's ever owned.


Emily selects a cage from the shelving unit, pulls it out, holds it up, peers inside. The occupant, Alice, is a singularly dim-witted rat. She can't seem to learn even the simplest of tasks. She's completely useless for cognition studies, and if Emily can't find some other way for Alice to earn her keep, the little rodent will have to be sent to the Reptile House as snake food. (Emily sees the elegant economy of the practice, but she still hates it.)

"Last chance, Al," Emily says to the uncomprehending animal. "I hope you like giant turtles."

She gently lowers the cage to arm's-length, and carries it out of her office, heading down the hall to the gorilla enclosure. She lets herself in, sliding through the narrowest possible opening and then closing the door.

"Raphael?" she calls, because the turtle is nowhere in sight. "Are you still outside?"

Emily sets the cage down, with only the tiniest bump, and goes out into the yard. No sign of Raphael in the pond or the bushes or the trees. (Though she does notice a blue plastic bowl caught in the branches - she'll have to send someone with a ladder to get it down.) She goes back inside. Her eyes adjust to the dimmer lighting, and she stops short.

The door of the cage is open, and Alice is gone.

She is dealing with one scarily intelligent reptile.

She had intended to follow good practice, introduce the two animals gradually, let them see each other while maintaining a safe separation. It hadn't occurred to her that Raphael would figure out the little spring-loaded catch quite that quickly.

Well. If Alice has been eaten, she's at least no worse off than if Emily hadn't tried this experiment.

"Raphael?" she calls again. Not perched on the climbing structure. Not in the tire swing. Not in the hammock. She bends down to peer into the crawling tube.

Two pairs of eyes shine back at her. Two pairs of eyes blink.

Emily settles into a crouch, tilting up the end of the flexible tube so she can see better. "You," she says, "are one very clever turtle."

Raphael is holding Alice close to him, but gently, stroking her like he did the stuffed cat. Alice, for her part, looks calm and comfortable, though it's possible she's just too stupid to be afraid.

"Can I have that back for a minute?" Emily asks, reaching in.

Raphael moves Alice away from her, possessively.

"Raphael," Emily says firmly. "Give me the rat. Give it!"

Raphael growls.

"No!" Emily reprimands him. "Drop it, Raphael!"

He shifts backwards, putting himself in the middle of the crawl-tube, where she can't easily get at him from either end.

On the one hand, the tube is sized for a gorilla, and Emily can very well go in after her rat. On the other hand, it's rarely a good idea to enter an enclosed space with an angry animal. Emily hasn't yet seen Raphael attack anyone, but apparently he does when he feels threatened.

Emily sits back on her heels. If Raphael and Alice were going to fight, they probably would have done it already. First contact seems to have gone well. At this point, leaving them together doesn't seem any more dangerous than letting one's pets encounter each other as they move around the house.

"Fine," Emily says. "She's yours." She stands up and moves the cage into a corner, leaving the door open so Alice has a rat-sized place of refuge in the big room.

She flicks through her mental list of animal needs. There's food and water in the cage. The walls of the exercise yard are smooth and solid, so Alice won't be able to go over or under or through them. Alice doesn't have any diseases, and if Raphael did, Noah would have mentioned that when the blood tests came back. Her lovably dull rat should be perfectly safe here.

It's funny, how animals from completely different species will accept each other into their packs, and become inseparable. Who would've thought a turtle would adopt a rat?

"Okay," Emily says. "You two have fun."

She heads back to her office. In nineteen other cages, bright rats are waiting to dazzle her with their maze-running skills.


"It's okay," Raph whispers to the rat, when Thacker's footsteps have faded away. "I won't let her hurt you." He puts his new friend down, and the sleek grey rodent scampers around the crawl tube, climbing up the curve of one side until it gets too steep and she slides back to the bottom, then trying the same thing on the other side.

Raph lies down on his stomach, watching the rat. "I'm Raphael," he says. "What's your name, Nezumi-san?" He waits for an answer, but if the rat replies he can't understand. "Okay. Can I call you Nezumi-san?" He listens attentively for a moment. "Did they catch you too? They caught me, and I've been trying to get out but I can't. You know, you're little. You could fit through the holes in the outside ceiling. But the wall is pretty high, and you look like you're not so good at climbing..." A plan begins to formulate in his mind. "I'm good at climbing. I can help you get to the ceiling holes. You could run away. What do you think?" The rat sits up on her hind legs, twitching her whiskers in his direction. "Yeah. We could be partners. You could get out, and then... and then..." And then I'd be alone again. "Hey. Listen." He scoops the rat into his hands. "I'll help you get out, but you gotta do something for me. You gotta go find my dad. He's a rat, only a really big one. You gotta find him, and tell him where I am. Okay?" He lifts the rat a little closer to his face, willing her to understand him, the way rats understand his father. "You gotta promise!"

The rat nibbles his thumb.

"Okay," Raph says. "You promised. No backsies." He thinks, while the rat curls into a circle and grooms herself. "We'll do it later. When it's dark." He shifts the rat into one palm and strokes her with his other hand. "You should rest now. So you'll be ready."

He gently deposits the rat on the curving floor of the tube, and she immediately tucks her nose under her tail and goes to sleep.

Raph smiles at her. This plan will work for sure. He'll be out of here in no time.


He waits.

He waits while a brown-clothes human comes in with a strange moving ladder, gets the food bowl down from the tree, and goes away again, grumbling the whole time.

He waits while a different brown-clothes human brings yet another bowl of vegetables and dried fish, this time along with a tiny bowl of brown pellets. The rat is only too happy to eat them, even though Raph tries to warn her they might not be good.

He waits as the sun goes down, as the darkness gathers and the building quiets around him.

He waits while the rat takes a post-dinner nap, while she squeaks indignantly at the stuffed cat until she loses interest, while she goes into her cage to drink from the funny bottle there, while she sits in the sawdust licking her butt.

He waits until the moment seems right.

When his finely-tuned ninja senses tell him it's time, he pads over to the little wire cage, crouches down, and holds out his hand. "Come on," he says, and the rat scampers out, shakes herself, scurries into his palm and up onto his shoulder.

He goes outside, into the cool evening, and climbs with strong hands and steady feet. From the top of the tree, it's an easy jump to the netting. He swings himself up, curling his toes into the lattice, so that he's suspended face-up between the earth and the sky.

"Go," he encourages his partner, pulling himself as close to the netting as he can, lifting his shoulder to make her way easier. "Jump up! There's something on the other side you can use to get down."

The rat patters in circles over his chest and stomach, her claws ticking against the bony plating. Then she launches herself upwards, catching the net with her front paws and swinging wildly before she manages to pull herself up. In seconds she's away, funambulating fearlessly over the wall.

"Remember!" he calls after the disappearing rat. "Find my dad! His name is Splinter! He's really big, you can't miss him!" He listens, but he can no longer hear the scratching of the rat's tiny claws. "Good luck," he whispers.

It's dark.

He's alone.

It hurts.


Translation Notes

Nezumi-san – "Mr./Ms. Rat".