i do not own ninja turtles
"Tear these into strips of bandages," he commanded Tzu, who hovered beside him, always mindful of his friend, tossing him some old shirts. "And find something to use as a split."
"I can do better than that," Tzu said.
"What are you talking about?" Casey asked.
As answer, Tzu opened the bag he had food and medicine in and produced cotton bandages and a slight shaft of wood. He was glad now he had thought to grab most of the packages in the medicine cupboard before escaping as well as food for several days. Casey took them without a word and delicately splintered and bound the wing tightly.
*
"She should be OK now," he said as I stirred sleepily. "I don't know how long the wing will take to heal fully, but at least the process can start now."
"Thanks, Casey," Tzu said as I raised herself and got off the bed.
"Where are we?" I asked, looking out of the window. I could only just make out the shadow of the city, but it was probably miles away.
"We're on my family's old farm," Casey said. "No one comes here since we moved to the city, but as my mother refuses to sell to other farmers, we still own the surrounding land. It's quite a good retreat."
I remained stationery at the window. I had never felt safer, and here we were miles away from the dangers that I had already come to associate with the city. Now I could recover from my wing injury, a process of several weeks, without having to worry about Purple Dragons or whoever Saki was.
That was a thought. I pulled the laptop out of her bag and turned it on.
"What are you doing?" Tzu asked as I sat cross-legged with the laptop in my lap.
"Searching for any mention of the name Saki," I told him. "Before we escaped, Adkins told me the man who had funded his research and brought for us was called Saki. If we can find anything about him, it may help us avoid him."
"Did you just say Saki? You are running from him?" Casey asked, and I noticed an urgent tone in his voice that I had never expected to hear. Tzu was looking at him as though afraid he had suddenly become unsafe.
"Does the name mean anything to you?" I asked our new ally. I trusted him already. Tzu was happy to be around him, and between the two of them they had protected me and now I was on a one-way ticket to recovery.
"We're talking about one of the most powerful men in the city of New York, someone I and my friends know as the Shredder. He is the leader of a group of deadly ninja assassins known as the Foot Clan, situated right in New York; he is the main source of funds for the Purple Dragons. He is the most ruthless man alive. One of my friends...well, perhaps that story would be best told by him."
This thing ran deeper than I had thought.
"So how do we topple him before he topples us?" Tzu asked.
"If I knew the answer to that, Liam, my friends would have been able to defeat him a dozen times over by now. But he has got a nasty habit of not staying down. Plus he's one of the strongest ninjas alive today."
"You've had dealings with him before?" Tzu asked.
"Not me personally, but my friends have; and they barely escaped alive last time," Casey said. "You two are in deep if you have never heard of the assassin who has control over every other mobster in New York and the Purple Dragons."
"I thought the Foot Clan were only a Japanese gang," I said, having found an archive in the news archives from about fifty years back.
"They came over with their master," Casey said. "And they are causing the same level of damage here as they did in Japan."
I turned back to the laptop screen and soon found an article on Saki. I recognised his face at once. It wasn't a large article, but it did contain essential facts –he was considered an important citizen, who had invested a large chuck of his vast fortune to improving the city's infrastructure. If Casey hadn't told us what I guessed was a hidden truth and if I hadn't seen him with my own eyes in the underground laboratory, I would have never guessed this was the same man.
"You know what I'm hearing, Adkins?" asked the man who had been promised the two hybrids only to find them gone and Adkins locked in one of the cages instead when he had gone to collect them. He had been so furious that he had had harm inflicted on the professor. The wretched man now stood before him, scarred and wretched. "All these fancy words in your report all lead up to one word. The one word I despise –failure! You are no nearer to catching your runaway projects than you were a week ago."
"They are merely more resourceful than I thought, more capable of hiding in the open undetected than I would have guessed," Adkins said. He was getting tired of the way his partner considered his creations merely predictable machines. They were complex human-animal hybrids who were teenagers, but showed no signs of their passing. He was glad he had released them, but he was suffering in leading the hunt for them. Because he didn't want them to be caught, he would have to lead the men searching under his command the wrong way if they got close, but so far there had been very little trace of them.
"I'm fed up of hearing your excuses," Saki said, standing from his chair. "Bring them to me by the end of next week or pay the ultimate price!"
With the warning ringing in his ears, Adkins left the building for the streets. His feet led him away from the stronghold of the Foot Clan and towards Manhattan. He was walking randomly and soon had no idea where he was. All he knew was that this was the area where a group of Purple Dragons had heard a noise while moving their equipment before being jumped by a vigilante who seemed to be quite a thorn in their side.
Now he wondered; that report had come in the night after Takara and Tzu had escaped to the surface. Was there any possible connection? He wandered down the alley and found an answer hidden behind a bin: a large feather, mainly a pale grey in colour, with a band of black on its tip. At a guess, he would say it belonged to a crane hawk. As they were native in Mexico to Argentina, there was only one way such a feather could have got here. And this was much larger than any normal crane hawk's feather.
"Takara," he said quietly. And if they were still sticking together, then Tzu would have been here as well. But something worried him –if there was a sign of her down here and nowhere else, did that mean she was hurt?
He tucked the feather into his pocket, out of sight. If Takara was hurt and Tzu was with her, then there was another mystery: how had they avoided the constant hunt? Every abandoned block, each section of the Central Park and every dark corner had been turned over. But there was no sign of them. Where they with an unknown ally, someone who could have hidden them where no human would normally venture? Or was it possible they could have returned to the laboratory?
He had to know so he could help. He cared for his creation so much he was willing to hide from Saki, to work with his enemies to ensure their safety.
He undid the nearest manhole cover and slipped down it, securing it behind him. Taking a torch out of his pocket, he began to trudge down the stinking sewer. He had forgotten just how badly it smelt.
For several hours he trudged on and met nothing. And yet he knew the creatures the Shredder hated lurked down here. It was only a matter of time before he tripped something. As he was just beginning to give up hope, he heard a vibration that shook the tunnel. He stood still, trying to locate what direction the sound came from.
The huge bulk of the machine came hurtling around a corner at a terrific speed. It stopped short of him, the headlights blinding him until the driver cut the engine.
"Who are you?" one voice asked, assertive and confident.
"I am Professor Robert Adkins," the scientist replied. "If you are who I think you are, I need your help."
"And how could we help you?" asked another voice, tougher and less patient than the other.
"I need help to locate two mutated kids before the Shredder can find them. I fear one is hurt. Takara and Tzu need help."
"How do you know about them?" asked the first voice again.
"I should know everything about them, seeing as I was the one who created them."
"So you're the one they were running from?" asked the second voice again.
"It's not me they flee," Adkins said. "I made them on the orders of the Shredder, but I released them. I can help you find them."
"And at the same time betray them to the Shredder? I think not," snarled the second voice.
"I released them to make sure they wouldn't fall into his hands, and I would never let that happen. He does not respect them as I do."
There was a pause and then the engine started up again.
"Get in, but I'm going to have to blindfold you," the first voice said. Adkins did as he was told, allowing himself to be blindfolded. "OK, let's go. But take it easy, Raphael."
After several minutes, the craft stopped and one of the two let the Professor down from their craft.
"Who is this?" asked a voice. It was one Adkins had never heard before –deep and gravelly, but full of energy.
"Master, this is the man who created the two we're searching for. He says he can help, that he's changed allegiance against the Shredder to ensure their safety," the first voice said.
"Do you trust him, Leonardo?"
"I wouldn't have brought him if I didn't think he was trustworthy, Master," said the voice again.
"Then undo his blindfold and let him see where he is."
The rough cloth covering his eyes was untied and the Professor saw he was in a huge circular section, about two storeys high. Before him stood five creatures he had never seen before, but heard a lot about from the Purple Dragons and various ninjas in the Foot Clan.
One was a rat, but standing on two legs and supported on a cane. Its black eyes were trained on Adkins' face. The other four were turtles, but each at least as large as the rat, and each armed with a different sort of ninja weapon.
"You have entered our territory," the rat said. "Unless we can be sure of your friendship, we cannot allow you to leave."
"I won't betray you, or your allies," the Professor said. He had heard so much about these skilled martial artists that he was filled with nothing but awe.
"I believe you," the rat said. "I am known as Master Splinter, and these are my sons: Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo."
"I have heard a lot about you, but I am honoured to be in your presence," the Professor said. "I am Professor Robert Adkins, although I suppose Professor is no longer a valid title for me."
"Why is that?" asked the blue-masked Leonardo.
"I created creatures out of innocent children, and now I am desperate to find them to protect them. It's been weeks, and there's no sign of them anywhere. Apart from this," he said, holding out the feather. The purple-masked Donatello reached out and took it from him.
"Doesn't this colour pattern belong to a crane hawk?" he asked after studying it.
"Hang on, I think the girl had wings of this colour theme," said Leonardo. "I never caught the whole colour scheme, but I'm sure she had wings like this."
"Takara did have the wings and one-fifth of her DNA make-up is of a crane hawk," Adkins said. "Are you saying you saw her?"
"About six weeks ago, someone tripped a proximity alarm in the tunnels. When we went to investigate, I got a reading of something with a third of cobra DNA with human genes making the rest. When we tracked them down, they were escaping up a ladder to the surface and sealed it shut."
"And six weeks ago I let them go. You must have picked up Tzu, but you saw Takara. That must have been when they escaped to the surface. And the night after, the Dragons reported that there was a noise down the alley next to where they were hiding contraband. I found that feather down there only a few hours ago."
"We can't even trace them that far. But one of our allies did fight some Dragons down that end of town. He hasn't been in contact since that night."
"It's not like Casey to vanish like that. He told us that he had family business to deal with," said a voice from the door leading from the tunnels. Adkins turned to see a young red-haired woman standing there.
"April, this is Robert Adkins. He created the two we're looking for," explained the red-masked Raphael.
"If he was near the alley where the two were, he might have drawn the Purple Dragons' attention away from Tzu and Takara. Is it possible he could have found them?"
"If he had found them he would have phoned us," the orange-masked Michelangelo said. "That was the arrangement."
"I told them not to trust anyone," Adkins said. "Even if they did decide to trust your friend for some reason, I doubt they would have allowed him to phone anyone who could have been a potential enemy. And the length of time he's been missing would indicate he's got one potential injury to cope with."
"So you think one was hurt, and that Casey took them away to hide them while whichever one it was to recover?" Leonardo asked. Adkins nodded.
"Right, I vote we take the Battle Shell and cruise to the most likely place he would go," Raphael said. "Just because we weren't invited doesn't mean we can't just turn up."