When she came back to her senses, the underground complex was silent. She was still alone, and no one had handcuffed her in her sleep.
Rolling to her feet, she padded to the door as quietly as possible and felt for the knob in the pitch blackness. It was unlocked.
She leaned against the wall, trying to remember the layout of the rooms. She only had one chance to find the exit. If she failed, the escape attempt surely wouldn't make the creatures feel any more kindly towards her. Of course, they were already planning to kill her, so she didn't have much to lose.
Drawing a breath, she opened the door and crept out into the hallway. To the right, as far as she knew, everything was sealed off. To the left, she could access the room with the hole in the wall. With luck - at least, for certain definitions of luck - she could get out into the sewer from there, find a ladder, and get home.
She had barely gotten two steps before she tripped over something big.
This time, at least, she protected her head on the way down. But a moment later a hand descended on her ankle.
She struggled; surely if she could get free, she could outrun something that called itself a Turtle. But getting free was easier said than done.
A match flared; the wavering flame travelled to light a candle. Through the flickering glow, she squinted at her captor.
Leonardo. The silent one.
As calm as ever, he snuffed the match, then met her gaze and pointed back towards the room she had come out of. In response, she flailed her leg.
"I changed my mind," she bit out. "I'm sorry for what happened, but I'm not going to help you if you're going to kill me anyway. Let me go."
He didn't speak; she realized she didn't know if he could. Maybe he didn't even understand her.
He stood up and dragged her across the floor, carefully skirting the flame. She fought, but she was nowhere near a match for his strength. She thought about grabbing the candle, but there was nothing flammable here except for the clothes she was wearing, and attempting to burn the Turtle seemed unlikely to do anything but enrage him.
Before she could think of any other plans, she was unceremoniously thrown back into the room, and the door slammed behind her. She pounded on it, but it wouldn't budge. She screamed but got no answer. When her throat was too sore to go on, she crawled miserably into the pile of dirty blankets, and cried herself to sleep.
The next day, the Turtles didn't seem in the mood to take any chances. Leonardo kicked her out of bed, cuffed her before she knew what was happening, and dragged her out into the main room. Despite her profanity-laden protests he chained her to the wall again, and then left her alone with Donatello and Michelangelo. For a long time, the three of them sat in sullen silence.
"Why don't you just go destroy all the Mousers?" she asked finally. "You seem to be good at that."
"Too many," Michelangelo replied. "And Raph hurt now, can't fight." Donatello added a comment, and his brother translated for him. "Want to make the Mouser fight for us. Send it back, carrying something, destroy everything."
April didn't have the energy to be astonished that Donatello had come up with such a plan. "Do you happen to have some very powerful explosives and a remote detonator?"
The answer, once Donatello understood the question, was no.
"Then you would have to program the Mouser to self-destruct. It wouldn't be powerful enough to destroy the whole factory, but if you detonated it in the right position, it could set off a chain reaction that would wipe out everything. Or nearly everything."
Another round of translation, and Donatello indicated that he liked the idea.
"But to hack into the Mouser, you would need a computer. Do you have one of those?"
No, he didn't. But he seemed to have something else in mind. "Have computer at Mouser place?"
"Yes, of course."
"Will steal one," Donatello said, and abruptly the interview was over.
"The Mousers haven't come back," April said to Michelangelo, before he walked away. "Why not?"
"Don't know," he replied. "Not taking chances."
A short time later, she saw Leonardo and Donatello head down the hallway that she now suspected led to whatever they used for a front door. In the hours that followed, Raphael occasionally prowled across the room, snarling but keeping his distance. April, for her part, sat against the wall and didn't talk to anyone.
When Leonardo and Donatello returned, they came directly to her. Kneeling on the floor, Donatello set down a laptop and exactly the right cables for a productive hacking session.
"Teach me."
She tried to look unimpressed, despite the Turtle's success in retrieving the right supplies. "Have you ever used a computer before?"
He shook his head.
"Do you know how to write any code?"
Another shake.
"I spent four years of college learning how to do this. I'm not going to teach you in an afternoon."
A flash of anger came into Donatello's face, but a sharp word from Leonardo chased it away. "You do." He studied her warily. "No tricks."
It occurred to her that she could program the Mouser to do anything, and the Turtles wouldn't know the difference until it was too late. They were giving her the keys to the kingdom with this stolen laptop. Then again, they'd left her in an unlocked room and she had completely failed to turn the situation to her advantage.
"No tricks," she agreed, even though she knew they wouldn't believe her.
Donatello watched her every move as she connected the computer to the Mouser - he pulled the power cord across the floor to plug it in for her - booted up the machine, and began to work.
Pretty soon he was sitting next to her, and then practically leaning on her, like an overgrown child. It occurred to her that she did not know his age.
At first she worked diligently, jumping into code modules and opening a side window to sketch out pseudocode. After a while, she calmly typed GIANT TURTLES ARE BUTTCLOWNS into her notes file.
Donatello didn't react.
He couldn't read.
After that she grew bolder. She wrote some irrelevant code, then searched for an internet connection while waiting for the routine to compile. If she could email someone… well, she didn't know exactly what she would tell them, but the general idea seemed like a good one.
No connections were found. She supposed underground complexes had lousy wireless reception.
She clicked back over to the code window, and suddenly she knew what she wanted to do. The code came slowly at first, and then faster, her fingers flying over the keyboard. She had almost forgotten that a giant turtle was watching over her shoulder when her elbow cracked painfully against his armor plating.
"Ow," she whined, rubbing the injured joint, but Donatello only looked at her balefully. "What, like that was my fault? Give me a little space."
He backed off marginally, and it flashed into her mind that she should ask for more. "Would you bring me a glass of water? Coding makes me thirsty."
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, but rolled to his feet and padded off towards the kitchen. None of the others were around, and April seized the opportunity to enact the most important step of her plan.
When Donatello came back he made her stand up so he could search her for more stolen makeshift weapons. He found none, and only then did he let her have the water.
She drank, he seemed satisfied, and then it was back to work. A few hours later she had a clean compile and was ready to test it out.
"Okay," she said. "Let's see if we can get this little guy on his feet."
She carefully selected a different routine from the one she had just completed, and commanded it to execute.
The Mouser's pilot light came on, blinking and then steady. Its visual processors whirred to life; it surveyed its surroundings, then activated its stabilizers to get upright. Despite the huge dent in its head, it was able to operate its jaw servos as it went through its start-up routine.
Donatello pulled back warily, eying the robot and then April. The Mouser took a few steps, and when it showed no inclination to attack anyone, the Turtle leaned forward again, obviously fascinated.
"Pretty neat, right?" April said.
"You… are smart," Donatello said, and this time his speech was slow not because the words were hard, but because they represented a new idea.
"Uh, yeah," April said. "I only graduated top of the class from NYU." She knew this would mean nothing to him, but anyway he wasn't listening. He was following the Mouser around as it experimentally scaled the piles of junk. Only after half a circuit of the room did he seem to remember that this was only the first stage of his plan.
"Leo?" he called through a doorway, and in a moment the other Turtle appeared. They conversed for a while, seeming to discuss what to do with the now-functional robot. April paid close attention, and noticed that Leonardo was nearly silent in this other language as well. He didn't seem less fluent than his brothers - not that she had any reasonable grounds on which to base this conclusion - he simply used his words sparingly.
"Send now," Donatello said, without preamble, when he and his brother had reached an agreement. He crossed his arms and looked down at her, still sitting on the floor with the computer in her lap. "Destroy Mouser place. If trick… goodbye Apriloneil."
She swallowed hard, and launched the untested routine.