Fade

Chapter 17

By Dierdre

Many thanks go out to the talented MB, who was kind enough to beta this chapter for me. You rock!

I will try my hardest to update more frequently from now on, although I won’t carve that promise in stone. What I can pledge, however, is that I will never abandon this story. It may take a while, but I will see ‘Fade’ through to completion. Scout’s honor, gentle readers.

Without further ado… on with the fic! I hope you enjoy. :)

Her simple reply was like a slap to the face, and before I even knew what I was doing, my left hand shot out with all stunning swiftness of a lightning strike.

My shoulder rammed against the confining bars and rattled them sharply in their foundations, making my fingertips tingle with phantom feeling as my hand stopped mere inches from her throat. I felt her startled breath wash over my knuckles in a sudden rush of warmth, and the nail on my index finger actually grazed the tip of her chin before my straining muscles reached their limit. Her wide eyes quickly narrowed and locked with my own, and for a timeless instant, we stood frozen in place, like a pair of contorted statues in Medusa’s garden.

“Come one step closer, kisama,” I finally rasped, breaking the spell, “and I’ll have my revenge.”

“Your anger is understandable,” she said tightly, “but it was your own stubbornness that brought you to this pass.”

“You think I’m just pissed off about this fucking cage?” I slowly drew back my hand and curled my fingers around one of the metal bars, anger faltering for an instant in the face of honest astonishment. “Lady, you haven’t even scratched the surface yet.”

She tilted her head to one side, a single perfect eyebrow arching in a Lilliputian gesture of incomprehension. The last three months flashed unbidden across my mind with that small movement, streaming through in a tangled jumble of pained memories and bile-black emotions, and for a moment I nearly choked on the bitter desire to tell her everything. About the weeks spent trapped underground, entombed in a silence so vast and echoing that my mind would sometimes play tricks, tormenting me with the phantom click of my father’s cane or a fragment of nonexistent laughter. About the scrap of Don’s shell that I could hide in the palm of my hand, a little piece of my brother that I carried with me so I would feel less alone. How there were moments when reality would slip away, and when I turned my head to say something to Mikey, and he wasn’t there, it stole my breath.

A needle of pain stabbed through my heart, constricting my chest and sending faint tremors across the skin of my hands, like the prelude to an earthquake. In an attempt to stave off a meltdown of Chernobyl proportions, I took a steadying breath and reached down reflexively, searching for my belt pouch and the bit of shell I knew resided within...

It should have come as no surprise when my hand encountered nothing, but a chill still shot through me like an injection of liquid nitrogen. On more than a subconscious level, I finally understood. She had taken it. Without hesitation or remorse, she had taken it, just as easily as she had snatched away the lives of nearly everyone stupid enough to love me. This stone-faced woman had stolen them from me, and with them had gone Leo’s sanity, April’s joy, my life-

Red mist swelled up to block my vision, and I went a little crazy after that.

I reared back, twisted sharply on my heel, and then flung myself at Karai with every ounce of strength I possessed. My carapace hit the bars with a clatter and the high-pitched shriek of distressed metal, jarring my bones and dousing my injured arm in little pinpricks of fire. Ignoring my body’s distress with the ease of long practice, I hammered at my cage again, and again, bashing myself against it until the tortured sound of warping metal seemed poised to swallow the world. I was barely aware of the guttural cry that was ripping itself from my throat like an alien parasite; that wild, continuous howl of an animal driven mad by captivity, colliding with the bars of its prison until it beat itself to dea-

-him last, no more than twenty feet from the spot where I had found Mikey entombed in rubble. A heavy beam that had once supported the roof, quickly followed by a shower of jagged concrete and gravel dust, had crushed his upper body. The combined weight of the debris was almost too much to shift, but since I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave him behind, I located a solid length of metal piping and used it to lever away the worst of the concrete slabs. I then jabbed the pipe into a neighboring pile of debris and began to dig in earnest, tossing chunks of molded rock over my shoulder and shoveling away gravel with my hands.

Once the rust-mottled support beam was unearthed, I closed my eyes against the sight that lay beneath it and blindly gripped the warm metal with my blood-slick hands. Flecks of white light darted behind my closed lids as I heaved with every ounce of strength my body possessed, and my arms felt as weak as cooked spaghetti when I finally lifted it a few inches above Master Splinter’s body. I then swung the heavy metal ponderously to the side, where I let it fall with a loud thud that cracked a fallen slab in two.

The muscles in my legs turned watery, and I fell to my knees with a small gasp, my arms hanging limply at my sides. I knelt there for a while, drawing in huge lungfuls of filthy air as I fought not to pass out from sheer exhaustion. A part of me wanted to remain like this forever, until the city fell into ruins and the earth patiently reclaimed what had been stolen from it, the wilderness returning to swallow me whole. That would be infinitely better than having to open my eyes, knowing that the first thing I would see was my father’s broken body.

Ah, god, anything would be better…

In the end, it was the threat of capture that finally breathed purpose back into my beleaguered psyche. I was too far gone to care much about what would happen to me, but I knew that I had to get Leo and April away from this hell before the cops came. And I would be damned before I would let Splinter or Mikey be torn apart by a gaggle of eager scientists, their remains desecrated in the name of knowledge.

With a sigh that was half a sob, I slowly opened my eyes and rocked back on my heels, unfolding into a standing position with legs that trembled and shook. Feeling unreal, like a person trapped in a waking dream, I bent at the waist and carefully lifted Splinter into my arms. Dirt and gravel cascaded from his body like hard rain as I held him to my plastron and slowly turned, picking my way through the wreckage. I was breaking into a cold sweat and my heart seemed to have stopped beating, but I experienced very little emotion when I felt his crushed rib cage flex with an audible grating sound, like a broken accordion.

The only coherent thought running through my mind at that moment was a distant gratitude that Splinter had been spared the indignity of immolation. Casey hadn’t been so lucky, and although his body didn’t need to be hidden away like the rest of my family, I had still laid him out across the backseat of the Battle Shell. My friend had shielded April from the worst of the blast, and I refused to have his sacrifice belittled by letting the police connect him with the bombing. And so, even as I walked towards the rear door of our vehicle, my head was spinning with vague plans to return him to his empty apartment and open the valve that heated his stove. It should take only a few hours for the gas to fill the apartment and reach the pilot light…

This notion to make Casey’s death look like an accident in an effort spare his mother further pain was nothing more than a stopgap measure, a pathetic attempt to distract myself from the grisly turn my life had taken. I clung to it with all the tenacity of a limpet, however, for I knew it was the only thing that kept me upright and walking, the only thing keeping me sane as I cradled my dead father in my arms like a child.

I pushed the back door open wider with my shoulder, awkwardly crawled into the cab, and placed Master Splinter gently on the floor, positioning him between an unconscious Leo and the twisted heap of flesh that used to be Mikey. Still finding refuge in that strange sense of detachment, I wasted a moment brushing away the grime that matted his fur. I then straightened out his tattered robe with a reverence I had rarely showed him in life, and tugged at his collar in an effort to make it lie smoothly against his neck, like he preferred.

I must have pulled too hard, however, for his head canted slightly forward, and I found myself staring straight into his lifeless eyes. Those brown orbs, usually so full of wisdom and quiet humor, were now as blank and pitiless as the dark side of the moon, their brightness dulled by a fine patina of gravel dust. All the air left my lungs in an explosive exhale as I watched blood dribble from between his teeth, exposed by a long muzzle trapped forever in a rictus grimace.

I whirled around and flung myself out of the cab, falling to my hands and knees just as my stomach gave a violent heave. I vomited into the dirt as my body fought to expel everything I had ever eaten, as if by so doing it could purge the swelling grief from my body like a poison. It didn’t work, and my face was dripping with sweat, vomit, and tears when I finally gave up, nothing left in me but misery and bile.

I collapsed bonelessly on my side, my muscles twitching spasmodically as my lungs shuddered in my chest, struggling to keep up as I tried to breathe and cry and scream all at once. I was faintly aware of the wail of sirens, distant but approaching rapidly, yet I couldn’t bring myself to care. It only seemed to lend my voice new strength, the sounds of my anguish meshing in with their continuous keening to create an eerie funeral dirge. A lament for the dying, and the dead-

The flashback ended as abruptly as it had begun, and when I came back to myself, I found that I had slumped against the side of my cage, kept upright only by one shoulder wedged between the bars. My mouth was lined with a thick coat of bitter saliva, forcing me to swallow hard to keep from vomiting as I shakily straightened my legs. I yanked my shoulder out from between the constricting bars, leaving a thin layer of skin behind as I glared balefully at Karai through a lingering haze of memory-fog.

At my sudden movement, she paused in the midst of dialing a number on her cell phone and gave me a speculative glance. When it became apparent that I had successfully anchored myself back in the here and now, she closed the device and quickly pocketed it. “Are you quite all right?”

“Just peachy,” I growled in response, forcibly quelling the urge to turn my face away from those probing, inquisitive eyes. My spell of blind rage had passed, effectively snuffed out by the memory, leaving in its wake a vague feeling of nausea and a sense of humiliation that burned to the core. I’d let my anger get the best of me, and in doing so had exposed my Achilles' heel to the queen bitch of the Foot clan. I was batting a thousand tonight.

Suppressing a hiss as my wound gave a sudden, sharp twinge; I looked down listlessly at the bright spots of blood marring the dressing on my injured arm. The only things I’d gained from my little hissy fit were an aching shoulder and a couple of popped stitches. If we all managed to live though this, April was going to kill me.

The thought of her name somehow snapped my mind back into focus. I lifted my head and glared defiantly at Karai, my eyes filled with hate, and a told her exactly what I thought of her proposal. “After what you’ve done, you have the gall to suggest an alliance with me? Screw you, Karai. I’ll see you in hell first.”

For an instant, she had the audacity to look confused, as if she could not understand why I would reject her oh-so generous offer. But then, she suddenly stiffened, and I could almost see the light bulb flash to life above her head. “Now I understand. You believe I am the one who tampered with the bomb.”

“Give the bitch a prize.”

“And why, pray tell, would I commit such a heinous act?” she asked quietly. Her hands were slowly curling into fists at her sides, her gaze hooded with the promise of violence, but I was too far gone to pay attention to such obvious warning signs. All I knew was that I was finally getting a proper rise out of her, and so I plowed onward with an eager mockery that was rapidly approaching viciousness.

“Don’t pretend like you don’t know. Out of all of Saki’s lapdogs, you were the one who had the most to gain from his death.” I leaned forward to grip the bars, which were slightly bent from my earlier outburst, and continued in a low tone, “You’ve always chafed under dear ol’ dad’s rule, so when it became obvious that me and my brothers weren’t going to kill him fast enough for your tastes, you decided to take matters into your own hands.

“It must have felt so good to see Saki leave on that last mission, knowing he’d never come back. If you hadn’t had to keep cool so the others wouldn’t suspect anything, you probably would’ve danced a fucking jig. The Foot clan would benefit from your leadership, after all, and it wasn’t like he didn’t deserve it.” I paused for dramatic effect, savoring my small moment of revenge as I prepared to give the coup de grace. “Besides, he wasn’t really your father.”

I had known Karai for nearly a decade, had fought against her and occasionally beside her in more battles than I could count, but never in all those years had I seen her move so fast. Her face turned ugly even as she darted forward so quickly she practically blurred, reaching through the cage with all the speed of an enraged cobra. I didn’t even have time to flinch as her callused hand hooked the back of my neck in a granite grip and pulled sharply, ramming my head against the bars. I lashed out instinctively and grabbed her hand as a burst of incandescent light erupted behind my eyes, but I was too dazed to shift my grip into a proper hold. She managed to tear herself away with a boneless twist of her wrist, but I was gratified to hear a distinctive, muffled pop as her fingers slid through my numb grasp.

We separated violently and staggered backwards with twin gasps of pain. My vision swam as the floor tilted treacherously beneath my feet, and I would have fallen over if my shell hadn’t hit the opposite side of the cage. My knees locked automatically, propping me upright as I blinked bemusedly at the two blurry figures in front of me, faces fixed in identical expressions of wrath. Something was wrong with this picture.

I shook my head rapidly and glared until the fuzziness faded away, sighing in relief when one woman merged with the other. One Karai was more than enough, in my opinion.

The whole altercation had lasted only a few seconds, but we were both feeling the consequences of our lack of control. We seemed to be equally determined not to show any further weakness, however, for in moments I was standing under my own power again, and I watched with indifference as Karai gripped her dislocated index finger and gave it a practiced tug. Her face whitened to an almost translucent shade of eggshell as the knuckle joint slid back into its socket, yet she didn’t flinch or utter the slightest sound. If I had been inclined to ply my enemies with compliments, then I would have applauded her on her fortitude.

Flexing her hand experimentally, she lifted her head to meet my gaze. Her contorted expression had smoothed out as swiftly as the ripples on a pond, but her eyes were still muddied and dark with barely retrained rage.

“He was blood to me,” she finally rasped, her voice thick with a kind of torment that I found all too familiar. “In every way that matters, he was my only kith and kin. I could have no more harmed him by treachery than you could have stabbed Splinter in his sleep.”

My brows drew together at the mention of his name, and things might have degenerated further if a thin trickle of blood hadn’t chosen that moment to trace a red line between my eyes. Momentarily distracted by this, I reached up and ran a finger across the shallow gash left by the rough metal bar that Karai had attempted to pull my head through. Although it had been fleeting, I slowly realized, for a moment Karai had well and truly lost her cool. That kind of knee-jerk reaction was almost impossible to fake, and for the first time doubt opened its wings and began to flutter experimentally through my mind.

“If it wasn’t you,” I grudgingly asked, “then who was it?”

“I am surprised you haven’t figured it out yourself, kame, considering his unreasoning hatred for both your family and my father.” That sentence had apparently come out harsher than she had intended, for she paused and stared at the ceiling, attempting to calm herself. After a moment, she lowered her gaze again and said coolly, “It was Stockman.”

Snorting derisively, I wiped away the line of blood with my good arm. “I was this close to buying your bullshit, Karai. Mr. Brain-in-a-jar was evil, but Shredder’d had him on a short leash for nearly a decade. At the slightest hint of a double-cross, he would’ve known about it.”

“That is true, but to the misfortune of us all, Stockman had help.” Seemingly preparing herself for a long explanation, Karai sat back down on Jacob’s chair and demurely crossed her legs. She then folded her hands over her bent knee, outwardly oblivious to way her injured digit had begun to stiffen and swell. “Do you remember Chaplin?”

“Yeah… that skinny redhead with the bad skin. Had a serious hard-on for the doctor.”

“That is the one. Chaplin was a great admirer of Stockman’s, despite the latter’s lack of reciprocating sentiment, and he never approved of the systematic torture my father dolled out to ensure Stockman’s obedience. Since his idol’s previous flamboyant and often narcissistic treacheries had proven ineffective, it seems that Chaplin somehow convinced him to try something a little more subtle.” As Karai spoke, the last vestige of anger had faded from her eyes. She once again seemed completely at ease, as if the musty dimness of the warehouse was nothing more than an illusion, and we were actually having a pleasant chat on a sun-dappled bench in Central Park. “Until that time Chaplin had proven himself to be impeccably loyal, which meant that he was not monitored as closely as some under my father’s rule. He used this resulting freedom to build a new body for Stockman, one better suited to house the pitiful remnants of his flesh. After that, they played a waiting game, biding their time until an opportunity presented itself.

“As you well know, that opportunity came three months ago, inside a high-tech communications building that was undergoing repairs.”

“The bomb.”

Tiny crow’s feet appeared at the corners of her eyes as Karai nodded, her manner turning grim. “By that time my father was well used to your family’s uncanny ability to meddle in his affairs, and so he came up with a contingency plan to keep the brightest of you busy while his own techs hacked into the communications network. Chaplin built the bomb that appeared to meet my father’s expectations, but was in actuality nothing more than a shell, containing a far more powerful incendiary device with no kill switch. Once Donatello discovered the treachery, it was far too late to stop what happened next.”

I was usually the kind of skeptic that would ask God to see his I.D. card, so I was surprised to find the sharp edges of my animosity beginning to dull. Her words had a ring of truth to them, but I knew it was dangerous to let my guard down. Karai had been Saki’s right hand for many years, both in affairs with the clan and with his legitimate dealings, so she was by necessity a master of duplicity. She’d play me like a fiddle if I let her.

With this thought at the forefront of my mind, I narrowed my eyes and attempted to trip her up. “That’s all well and good, but just the where hell were you? I have a hard time believing that you were just an innocent bystander in all this.”

“No. Hun and I were in my father’s stronghold, mobilizing a unit of Foot soldiers to act as backup in case you and your family interfered. We would have been there within minutes if my father had made the call, but regrettably, Chaplin rendered that impossible. He jammed all incoming and outgoing signals in the building, and then used the resulting confusion to transfer Stockman to his new, incredibly powerful robotic body… which the ‘good’ doctor wasted no time in testing out.” She paused in remembrance, her mouth tightening into a hard, white line. “I had helped to mold the Foot into some of the finest warriors in history, but our combined efforts barely made a dent in Stockman’s metallic hide. We were decimated; mown down by hails of bullets and missiles, crushed beneath his feet and torn apart by his hands. He laughed as he was killing us. He laughed.”

The chair made a gritty squeal against the concrete as Karai surged to her feet and stepped closer to my cage, careful to remain out of my reach. In her eyes was a look of almost electric intensity, as if she could compel my belief by the power of her gaze alone.

“Now do you see why it could not have been me? Even as my father and your family succumbed to fire, my clan was being slaughtered.”

“So you say. If the Foot was butchered, then how did you survive?”

Some of the intensity diminished, but she showed no other outward dissatisfaction with my continued questioning. “It was Hun who saved me, ironically enough. We were working in tandem during the attack, in an effort to disable Stockman’s shoulder-mounted missile launcher. Hun had managed to rip off a panel on the back of the weapon and was tearing out clumps of wiring as I kept Stockman’s attention focused on me. I was only able to hold his interest for so long, however, before he grew impatient and dispatched me with a single swipe of his hand. The blow knocked the wind out of me and sent me flying into a shattered support beam, where I sustained the injury that marks my skin to this day.”

With a calculated motion, she gripped the collar of her dogi and pulled it slightly to the side, partially exposing the bright scar I had caught a fleeting glimpse of earlier. It looked even worse under the full light of the halogen lamp; the raw, jagged remnants of a wound that had torn across her torso like a lightning bolt, branding her skin forever with the memory of its passage.

I could feel the flesh beneath my collarbone tighten in unwilling sympathy. Ouch…

Once she was certain that I had gotten the full effect, she smoothed the cloth back into place and continued with her narrative. “As I lay bleeding beside my fallen soldiers, barely conscious and unable to move, I heard an enraged bellow and then the sound of tearing flesh. A moment later a crushing weight landed on top of me, rendering me immediately unconscious and hiding me from Stockman’s merciless gaze. That was how my father’s few remaining soldiers found me, hours later, nearly smothered under the weight of Hun’s decapitated body.”

With this charming mental image cycling through my brain like a movie reel, I lifted my head and spent a moment staring through the bars that topped my cage. Looking upward into a gloom that even the powerful halogen lamp could not penetrate, I let my lids fall in a long blink, feeling them scrape over my eyes like fine sandpaper. God, I was tired.

“Okay, let’s assume for one moment that all this is true. Why wait until now to tell me? And why the cage?”

“The injuries I sustained in battle were severe, so I was under the care of my private physician for over a month before I could take up my duties as the new jonin of the clan. It took nearly twice that long to return the clan to some semblance of order. As for your second question…” Her mouth curled into the barest of smiles, and there was irony in her eyes when she said, “I did attempt to contact you by more peaceable means, as you may recall. But the time for action is drawing near, and when it became clear that you were disinclined to conversation, I was forced to take more drastic measures.”

Launching arrows at my back and making me swan dive off a building didn’t exactly fit with my definition of ‘peaceable,’ but I let it go in favor of satisfying a rising suspicion. “So let me guess: you’ve found Stockman.”

“Correct. The doctor is an incredibly intelligent man, and therefore difficult to locate, but with a great deal of perseverance my operatives finally found him. He has built for himself a new, state-of-the-art facility at an abandoned dock on the New Jersey waterfront, complete with a staff of morally deficient scientists and a small army of mercenaries as his personal bodyguards.”

“Sounds pretty hopeless.”

“Until recently, it was. It took weeks of in-depth background checks and surveillance before we found one of Stockman’s scientists who would be susceptible to bribery. Once we had our mole, however, everything else fell into place in an almost serendipitous fashion.” That creepy light had returned to her eyes, and it became obvious that the massacre of our kindred had marked her in more ways than one. Karai had the look of a fanatic about her now, and her craving for retribution was so strong it seemed to rise from her body like steam. “We can beat him, Raphael, and put our families’ souls to rest.”

My eyes narrowed as I absorbed the subtext in her words, which contained a hint of disquiet that she couldn’t entirely hide. “There’s still a problem, though, isn’t there?”

“Very astute.” Karai crossed her arms over her chest, and I saw her nostrils flare in a quiet sigh. “The problem is a basic one. Most of my clan’s veteran soldiers were killed during Stockman’s attack, and while I have been recruiting more at a furious pace, most are like Jacob. Talented, but inexperienced. Unblooded.”

“And that’s where I come in.”

“Yes. I had hoped for Leonardo’s assistance, as well, but since he is currently… indisposed, you will have to do.”

“Flattery will get you flattened, Karai,” I deadpanned, scowling when she had the nerve to look amused at my response. Bitch. “And how will my help make a difference in this mysterious revenge plot of yours?”

“Your worth has been proven in countless battles against my father,” she said impatiently, “so do not pretend at modesty. Even after all that has happened, your skills are on par with mine. When the time comes, your presence could very well tip the scales between victory and defeat.”

Well, didn’t that just make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside?

Rolling my eyes in an eloquent gesture, I asked, “So are you going to let me in on the plan?”

“No, not yet. First, I must know where you stand on this. Will you help? Are you with me?”

Her gaze was so intent that it seemed she expected to find the verdict etched into my forehead like a tattoo. I was usually pretty quick on the draw when it came to this kind of thing, but this was one of the few times in my life when I didn’t have a damn clue about the right path to take. In the last two days I had been stabbed, bled out, stitched up, drugged, kidnapped, imprisoned, and force-fed a truckload of information from a person of questionable veracity. Despite my forced siesta, I was so tired my eyes were crossing, and my skull seemed to be stuffed with cotton wool. I needed a long nap and some time to think before I could trust myself to make even a halfway intelligent choice.

I met her unblinking stare with one of my own and sighed, absently running a hand over my blood-splotched bandage. In my next life, I was going to be an accountant. Accountants didn’t have to make these kinds of decisions.

“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully.

Karai’s shoulders slumped a little, but she didn’t appear to be surprised by my response. “Then an explanation will have to wait.”

Dropping to one knee in a motion that epitomized grace, the Foot clan leader reached into a side pocket on April’s bag and pulled out a length of red cloth, stained and fraying at the ends from years of hard use. She then straightened and took two deliberate steps forward, walking into my strike range and holding out my bandanna. This show of trust threw me; enough so that I couldn’t think of anything snide to say as I reached out and mutely pulled it from her grasp.

“Go home,” she said, her voice almost gentle, “and mull over all that I have told you. Find Stockman’s stronghold if you wish, although if you want to live I would not recommend a solo infiltration. Search your heart for the answer, and then come to the Marble Cemetery at dusk two nights hence. I will await your decision there.”

I contemplatively ran my thumb over the tiny lock picks sewn into the cloth as she withdrew to a safe distance. Seeming to dismiss me from her mind, she turned away without another word and stepped out of the ring of light. My head shot up and I snapped, “What about my family?”

Karai stopped and turned, her form swallowed in darkness but for the red slash of her headband and the pale, half-moon curve of a high cheekbone. “No matter how tempting the prospect, I will not hold them hostage as an insurant to your obedience. You will find them in your lair, safe and unharmed.”

She made another move to leave, and I delivered a ringing slap to one of the bars to get her attention. “Wait a damn minute… that’s it? After all this, you’re just going to let us go?”

A thin laugh trickled out of the gloom, rusty from disuse and filled with an emotion so complex I could not even begin to decipher it. “There is one thing about me that you always seem to forget, Raphael. I am my father’s daughter, but I am not him.”

My hand tightened around the cloth as she fell silent, and I twitched when the unseen door slammed shut with a corroded squeal that nearly made my ears pop. I let loose a strangled sigh that was a potent mixture of confusion and annoyance, before hooking a nail under the head of one of the lock picks and carefully pulling it free from the minute stitching. I crouched at the door to my cage and threaded my arms through the bars, gripping the oversized padlock with my right fist. My hands were shaking from fatigue and lingering blood loss, but the lock was an old-fashioned model and relatively easy to jimmy open. I was free inside five minutes, straightening painfully as the door swung wide on well-oiled hinges.

I paused at the threshold and inhaled deeply, taking in the scent of stagnant rainwater and neglected concrete as I cautiously scanned my surroundings. Aside from the distant, eternal honk of car horns, I was enveloped in silence, and after a few moments, I let myself relax a little. Either my ninjitsu training had abandoned me entirely, or I was finally alone.

Tying my bandanna around my head in a motion so practiced and familiar it required no thought, I snagged the abandoned backpack and dropped it on Jacob’s chair. Unzipping it and parting the stiff fabric, I was unable to keep my mouth from dropping open at the sight of my clothing, belt and weaponry, tucked neatly atop the shattered bits of April’s laptop. Not quite believing it, I grabbed my belt and fastened it around my waist, and then pulled out the fragment of Don’s shell. I ran my thumb over the rough edges and stared at it for a long moment, feeling the tension seep out of me like an unplugged drain, before gently replacing it in its accustomed pouch.

My hands didn’t tremble at all when I reached into the pack a moment later and belted my sais. I wrapped my clothing around April’s kunai and the loose computer parts, effectively silencing the rattle as I swung the pack over my good shoulder. Gingerly looping my injured arm through the remaining strap, I walked out of the halo of illumination and into the surrounding black, my lips thinned with resolve and a strange calm.

I still didn’t know what to think about Karai’s story or her bizarre proposal, but the fact remained that the Foot clan knew where we lived now. It killed a little something inside of me to do it, but until I could puzzle all this out, I knew there was no other choice. It wasn’t safe for us anymore.

We had to abandon the lair.