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A time portal opened. The quick burst of acid-green light flooding the room and the hissing crackle of temporal energy were the only warnings the turtles had before Renet strode forward into the living area of the turtles’ home in the Old Reservoir Station.
The vivid blast of the portal-glare caught the turtles in a flash, freezing them for a microsecond like an oversized diorama or some kind of wax figures on display. Mikey huddled on the couch, one of Raph’s old, hand-knitted blankets thrown over both shoulders against the cold. His head was tilted into the dirty back of a cushion. Leonardo and Raphael faced each other. Leo stood rigid. His arms were crossed tightly over his plastron, and a scowl creased his face. Raph’s body angled aggressively toward him, an accusing finger jutting forward, teeth bared. It was an echo of his fury that the crackle of the portal drowned out. They’d been caught in one of their growingly numerous fights. And this was particularly brutal.
But it lasted just that one overbright instant before all of it—Leo’s set scowl, Raph’s derisive sneer, Mikey’s numb blankness—shifted into a split-second of shock, registering the sound, the light, the distinctive silhouette of their Timestress friend against the blinding background.
And in the next instant, it all shifted again. Mikey could practically hear the sharp click of everything resetting. A plan they had never before discussed was, nevertheless, in motion. For the first time in over three years, the brothers fell into complete, unspoken synchrony.
This was their chance. They could not leave it up to fate; they had to take action.
The scowl dropped from Leo’s face as if it had never been there, replaced by a welcoming smile. His stance relaxed.
Raph’s accusing finger became a hand amiably slapped on the top of Leo’s shell as if that was all it had ever been doing, and his body turned toward their guest.
An ember lit within Mikey’s dull eyes. He shifted one shoulder so that the blanket fell more fully over the stump of his missing arm—gone now, for over a month. He summoned up a goofy grin from the past, one so wide he thought his cheeks might crack.
The heat was broken, and it was fucking cold, and Splinter was dead, and Donnie was just gone , and the world outside was going to shit. And they couldn’t let Renet see any of it. They couldn’t seem desperate. They’d have one shot at this, and they had to play it perfectly.
Mikey forced his grin even wider and felt his heart hammer against his plastron. He’d given up hope that this would really happen, that Renet would trip back into their lives. Mikey remembered spending a whole night a year ago on a rooftop—back when they could spend entire nights on rooftops—(this was after the Justice Force fell, but before Splinter died)—screaming at the sky for Renet. Pleading, begging, cajoling, bargaining. He ended up with nothing to show for it but a crushed-glass voice for a week and the certain knowledge that nothing in the universe was going to intervene. No magical hero. The remainder of their family bereft, with only the consuming ache of their memories and the inexorable, closing walls of a totalitarian state.
But here was Renet, and, now that their eyes had adjusted, she looked so shiny and new compared to everything else in the world. Like she’s probably had a shower and a decent meal recently. She was round-cheeked and bright-eyed. The pristine silver lining on her ridiculous leotard uniform glimmered, reflecting the portal’s light into grimy corners of the room.
Leo and Raph, practically at each other’s throats moments before, now shared a glance and shifted a little. It was subtle. But they wordlessly parted, ready to flank her. Years of intensive ninja training kicked in with a jolt, and all of a sudden, they became a finely honed machine once more.
Mikey, still on the couch, remained careful. He consciously relaxed his tense muscles, hyper-aware of his nunchaku on the table in front of him. There was a time when they might not have had their weapons so easily at hand in the lair. Not anymore. Now there was nowhere that their weapons weren’t in easy reach.
He lightened his voice and tried to project his younger self. “Renet! Long time no see, girl!” He willed his smile to reach his eyes as if nothing was wrong in the world.
They knew they wouldn't have much time, ninja subtlety or not. Renet was no stranger, after all. They spent three unending months together in the Cretaceous. It was just a matter of time before she caught on. But they couldn’t let her leave. Not without fixing this. They had to be sure of it.
Leo and Raph stepped forward, summoning casual surprise to their voices: “Renet! Been a while, good to see you. What’s going on?”
Mikey thought Raph laid it on too thick, but Renet returned their greetings warmly and didn’t seem to notice. Leo even reached out to her shoulder, and the other two watched intently for more movement, but it wasn’t quite time. Too early. The glow of the portal buzzed behind her; any sudden moves could scare her back into it. So, Leo limited himself to a friendly shoulder-squeeze. He and Raph hung back on either side as she turned to Mikey, and the portal finally, finally closed. The relief of its closing, the curtain of shadow descending after its painful radiance, came in a rush that almost made Mikey lightheaded.
But they weren’t done yet.
They’d seen how fast she could work that thing. A flick of her wrist was all it would take for her to use the scepter to open a portal back up. For them to lose this one chance. This one chance at fixing it.
Raph was on her left, the side with the scepter. His shoulder angled down. Mikey saw his fingers twitch.
She babbled: “Boy, am I glad to see you guys! You will not believe what Lord Simultaneous is putting me through.”
Yada, yada , Mikey thought. The sound of his pounding heart drowned out her voice, which shifted in and out of his awareness like a weak radio signal. He struggled to maintain his smile, to make it look natural and attentive.
“I need your help for one tiny thing,” Renet was saying. “I could do it myself, but it would be just totally easier if you’re there, and I thought you might like a trip to—” blah blah blah …
Raph and Leo eased a little closer to her side. “Man, it’s cold in here! I’ll have you back in a jiffy. Really need all four of you. Where’s Donnie?”
Fuck that question.
The shotgun blast of it punched a hole in the carefully knitted fabric of pretend normalcy. Where is Donnie?
Yeah.
Right?!
Where the fuck is Donnie? Bile rose in Mikey’s throat, burning and bitter. Renet asked so casually, just like it was that first time. That very first time someone asked it. Where is Donnie? In fact, it had been Mikey, then. It was just a normal question. Dinner was ready—getting cold, to be honest. But their genius brother wasn’t in his lab. Or the garage, or buried in the innards of the Turtlecopter. Or out fixing the wiring to some fritzing security cam in the tunnels nearby. Raph checked. He’d checked everywhere. And Leo and Mikey had checked after him.
And then, all over again, expanding the search, growingly panicked, to junk yards across the city as Splinter had called each and every friend they had, his claws painfully clumsy over the buttons of the Shell Cell, his soft voice asking, “Have you seen Donatello? Is my son with you?”
And in the minutes, then hours, then days, months, years… that followed that question had gone from a query to a howl. Something that tore at them. It tore at them still. Where’s Donnie? Where’s Donnie? Where’s Donnie?
Something in the stalled breaths, in the cold silence of the moment, must’ve caught at Renet’s attention, pulling at it like a stray wire pulls at the loose, looping yarn of a sweater—the tiny beginning to a rapid unraveling. Renet’s brow furrowed questioningly.
“Where should Donnie be, Renet?” Raph probably thought his tone was calm, but it came off as menacing. The fluorescent lamp Casey had brought in for them and hooked up to the generator flickered for a moment, giving the scene a strange strobe-effect.
“Oh, you know Don,” Mikey tried covering for Raph with a tossed-off shrug, as if saying his brother’s name wasn’t at all like biting down on aluminum. He kept smiling past its galvanic shock. A little rigid, maybe, but better than he’d managed in a long time now. “He’s probably in his lab, you know? Some new project, right, guys?”
“Yes,” Leo replied, a little robotically. He’d always been spectacular in a fight, but of all of them, he struggled most with the ninja art of subterfuge. “We’ll call him for you. Renet, why don’t you sit down and rest a minute?” Leo gestured to the moth-eaten armchair that had been Don’s favorite.
Somewhat hesitantly, she sank into it as Leo continued, “That energy you spend on portaling can’t be easy on you. We’ll get Donnie, but you just take a minute. You can put the scepter right here on the table.” Leo leaned forward to roughly push detritus out of the way—maps, blueprints, mugs lined with ancient tea rings—all to clear a space for the scepter.
They just needed her to put it down. That’s all they needed. If she would just let it out of her grasp for a moment, it would be over.
It was the edge of strain in Leo’s voice that gave it away. Renet wasn’t stupid. Flighty, sure. But not stupid. And she knew them. She knew them. They were her friends. She’d fought with them. She’d hunted fucking leptoceratops with them.
And now it occurred to her, somewhere deep in her marrow, that she was the hunted one.
The turtles’ eyes went stony as they saw her put it together. Their hands dropped automatically to their weapons as Renet’s gaze flickered around the vacuous room.
The cold. The bare fluorescent bulb. The unaccountable mess. The stilted, awkward attempt at greeting.
The one brother who wasn’t there.
“Oh, geeze!” It came out as a tiny gasp.
Both hands moved to grip the scepter and, blue eyes wide with panic, she looked into the orb at its top. Magenta smoke swirled enigmatically in its depths.
Whatever she saw there, she did not like. “Oh, geeze,” she repeated, even smaller and more desperate. “Look, guys. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry; I am! But I sorta got my timelines mixed up a little, I guess. You know, just, like, a smidgen. And I didn’t mean to bother you at all. It’s just a mistake.”
A waver warped her words. She clutched the scepter tightly to her chest. Her eyes sought out Mikey, and she spoke directly to him in a whisper, sincere and pleading, though they all could hear her. “I’m sorry. I really am.” She swallowed and fought desperately to steady her voice. “I have to go now.”
A hiss of steel against scabbard. “Put the scepter down, Renet,” Leo instructed. “Slowly.” It was a relief that the deceitful part of the thing was over.
But they could not let her go. Any movement with the scepter was a danger. They had to do this perfectly.
Mikey realized his hand gripped his nunchaku. When had he picked it up? In addition to its comforting weight, an array of shuriken was tucked next to it into his palm tightly enough that their edges bit into his skin. His phantom limb was doing the same, clutching the nonexistent matching nunchucks with ferocity.
He wasn’t alone. Raph’s sai rested, deceptively loose, in his hands. And the cold blue of Leo’s katana tapered to a point barely a foot in front of the hollow at Renet’s throat.
“We’re not going to hurt you, Renet,” Leo stated, clear and firm. “We just want your help.”
“Well, this is a bogus kind of a way to ask for it, don’t you think?” Renet’s voice gained a little fire, but her blue eyes locked on the tip of the sword. She gulped. “How about you, uh, put down the shiny metal objects and we talk this over? Like friends?”
“And you’ll put down the scepter, too, right, Renet?” Raph asked. “In fact, why donch’ya go first?” He stepped forward and reached for the scepter. “Just put it in my hand.”
“I think you totally know I can’t do that, Raphael.” Renet clutched the scepter so tightly her fingers went white. “It’s, like, against regulations to put the scepter in the care of someone who isn’t a Lord of Time or studying to be one.”
“That didn’t seem ta bother ya last time.”
“Last time we were getting it away from that vile goat-butt, Savanti Romero. Extenuating circumstances, you know?”
“These circumstances are pretty extenuating, too, dudette,” Mikey spoke with a small, weary smile. Shifting forward, he let the blanket fall from his shoulder, revealing the stump of his arm.
Renet didn’t look surprised, just deeply weary. She took a long, sad breath, then looked from Mikey’s missing arm back to his eyes. “I’m so, so sorry, Mikey. But I can’t help you.”
If any of the turtles had been expecting what came next, it might’ve turned out differently.
They’d relaxed a little bit in response to Renet’s softened expression. So, when she kicked the coffee table as hard as she could so its edge bit into Leo’s shins, the shock of it bought her a bare split second—one that she used to vault her weight fully against the back of her chair, sending it tipping precariously backward. Simultaneously, her deft twirl of the scepter opened a portal with a bright hiss behind her, and she and chair both might’ve fallen straight into it, as intended, if Mikey hadn’t caught her wrist with the chain of his nunchaku, wrenching her toward him.
Raph grabbed at the chair itself with a cry of anger, pushing it forward. It might be that the threadbare disuse of their once-perfect ninja harmony showed through, then. In prior years, when attuned to one another’s movements, Leonardo would have expected the push-and-pull of his brothers’ actions, would have seen it all play out ahead of time, and reacted accordingly.
But on this night, it was with absolute shock that, when springing forward to steady Renet and capture the swinging scepter, he found that his brothers’ movements had thrust the Timestress against him, impaling her left side on the blade of his katana.
Renet gasped, a soft, surprised inhale, and dropped the scepter, which clattered to the floor. The portal closed with a pop, leaving them again in the fluorescent glow of the floor lamp and an utter, terrified silence.
Appalled, Leo withdrew his blade in a sharp jerking motion. Renet gave a small cry and clutched at the spurt of blood, black in the unforgiving light. It seemed to be that the sword through her abdomen had been the only thing holding her upright because she fell suddenly forward and would’ve bashed her head on the edge of the coffee table if Mikey hadn’t swooped down to catch her, one-armed, and lay her out gently on the floor. He stuffed a throw pillow under her back to stem the flow from the small exit wound there, then closed his fingers over the swell of warm blood below her ribs.
Renet emitted a slight whimper.
Raphael found his voice first, rounding on Leo. “What the shell is wrong with you!? We wanted ta detain ‘er, not fuckin’ kill her!”
Leo gazed at the blood on his blade, dizzy with shock. “I didn’t mean… I didn’t…” He blinked, then looked at Raph, comprehension slowly dawning in his eyes. “Oh, god, Renet.”
“Yeah. Renet,” Raph spat. “And if you keep just standin’ there, yer gonna haveta add her name to yer list of deaths on your conscience right alongside Master Splinter! And how do ya think she’s gonna help us fix all this bullshit with a sword through her side, huh?” Raph had swaggered near to his brother, who bristled.
“You… you pushed her. You pushed onto my katana,” Leo defended, a flame of righteous anger igniting.
Mikey, from the floor where he knelt beside Renet, sighed heavily as voices rose over them. “Here we go again,” he apologetically murmured to the gasping Timestress. “I-I’m sorry about them. Give me a minute, okay? We’re gonna fix this; we’re gonna take care of you. I promise.”
He raised his voice over the sound of his brothers' argument. “Guys? Guys!” The fighting paused. “Maybe you could, oh, I don’t know, get help?”
A beat of quiet.
“He’s right,” Raph admitted.
Leo gave a sharp nod. “An airstrike took out the radio tower last night. We gotta go by foot.”
“April’s base?”
Leo shook his head. “Too many patrols in between there and here. Risky.”
“Yeah, well, she’s got the good medic. The real doctor. Not that chiropractor yahoo.”
“It’s too risky, Raph! The Harlem Camp has—”
“That’s too far, and you know it. She’s dyin’, Leo!”
The word was like a slap. Leo clenched his teeth and took a slow breath through his nose. When he spoke next, it was to Mikey. “We’ll both go. Better chance of getting through and getting the doctor here in one piece with both of us. Keep applying pressure; we’ll be back as soon as we can.”
“Don’t let her die, Mike.” Raph’s voice was a plea. And his eyes lay, meaningfully, on the time scepter that had rolled halfway under the couch. “We’ll get her fixed up. And then she’ll help us. She’s gotta help us fix the whole stinkin’ world.”
And then they were gone.
Michelangelo knelt on the floor in the harsh light of a single fluorescent bulb, willing life into the girl he’d once called a friend—into the time traveler he’d just helped capture.
“So, this is a little awk—” Renet grimaced, blinking against the pain. “—ward.” Her voice was barely a whisper, but in the heavy silence that surrounded them, Mikey could hear it plenty clearly.
“Oh?” Mikey tried a faltering half-smile and adjusted the angle of his hand against her wound. “You act like you’ve never been almost-murdered by your friends while they were trying to kidnap you before.”
“They say there’s, like, a first time for everything.” Renet’s mouth twitched. She heaved in quick, shallow breaths. “Mikey, I was telling the truth before. I am… I am sorry.”
“You’re sorry, huh? Damn right.” Her blood was still oozing through his fingers. Could he grab a cloth or something? Some kind of bandage he could half-ass until his brothers got back? But he couldn’t move from her side. He had to keep the pressure steady; Donnie had taught them that much before… Before.
He looked desperately around for something within reach—a towel or sheet—that could act as a bandage. The knit blanket he’d been using must’ve slipped behind the couch. “Should be sorry—” he continued. The strain in his voice belied his attempt to keep the tone light. “—getting blood all over the floor like this.”
But Renet shook her head. Somewhere in the violent tussle, her funny-looking clock helm had tumbled away. Blond strands of hair turned ashen with sweat and stuck to her forehead. “N-no. Sorry that I can’t help. I c-can’t help you.” Glazed eyes swam in and out of focus, trying to fix on Mikey’s face.
“Sure you can,” he reassured her. “Doc’ll be here before you know it. The good one, too. She’ll get you patched up. And when you’re feeling up to it, you’ll use your wand-thing there, and we’ll all go back to three years and two months and eleven days ago and…”
Now Mikey’s breaths were matching Renet’s, fast and anxious. “And we’ll just chain Donnie to the fridge or something for a while so he can’t fucking go anywhere, and we’ll watch ‘im. We won’t let him out of our sight until whatever happened doesn’t happen, and wherever he went, he can’t go. And then everything will be different and none of this crap will ever even exist!”
Tears had begun rolling down Mikey’s cheeks, but he couldn’t wipe them away because his hand was busy holding Renet’s internal organs in. So, he let the tears drop into his lap and sniffed loudly.
“Mmph,” Renet grunted her disagreement. A wave of pain swelled and receded, leaving her gasping for a moment. “This is an ancillary timeline,” she explained when she could talk again. “Not primary. We don’t work in ancillary timelines. We… We can’t.”
“Oh yeah?” Something cold came into Mikey’s eyes, something Renet didn’t think she’d ever seen there before. “Feels pretty fucking primary to me.”
“I… I can see your point.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “But you’ll have to take my word for it. We curate the primary timeline. Like, exclusively. Only so much capacity, so much energy. Keep the primary on track, but the branches, the ancillaries… We have to let them go.”
“Let them go,” Mikey repeated dully.
“S-sorry,” Renet offered weakly. For a minute, neither of them spoke. The lamp sputtered again with a staccato buzz. It cast the world into grey and black, shadows sharp and defined.
“You ever see a witches’ broom?” Renet asked. Her lips were pale.
“Like at Halloween?”
Renet shook her head. “No, no like, on a tree. It’s something that can happen in temperate Earth forests sometimes. This mondo-weird cluster of twigs and branches. Some… some kind of fungus or virus or something? It works like a cancer. Branch grows from branch from branch until it makes this giant mass of sticks that don’t do anything. Just suck energy from the tree, suck away its life-force. That’s…” Renet opened her eyes again to try to fix Mikey with an earnest stare, but her head was swimming, and she gave up quickly, closing her eyes and turning her head away. “That’s what happens when you mess with ancillary timelines. Turns… turns into a witches’ broom. Little screwed-up timestreams that double back on themselves and sap temporal energy from the primary.”
Mikey had seen that. Or something like it. Back in that other lifetime at the Jones farm when he and Donnie had gone mushroom hunting for their homemade pizza one summer evening. At first, Mikey had thought the thing in the tree ahead of them was some kind of strange bird’s nest, but as they got closer, they saw the chaotic jumble, the tree unable to control its growth. Crazy fractals of twigs stuck out at all angles in a mass the size of a large beach ball. Even Donnie had been creeped out, a little, fascinating though the thing was. It gave Mikey shivers now, thinking about it.
“Mikey?” He hadn’t realized he’d been silent for so long until Renet said his name.
“Yeah? I’m here. I’m here. I’d hold yer hand, dudette, but I’ve just got the one, you know? But I’m right here with you.”
“Mikey,” she whispered, a single tear leaking down one temple into her now-matted hair. “I’m gonna die here.”
“No, you are not.”
“I’m gonna die here and Lord Simultaneous is gonna be so totally pissed.” She shifted her head toward him and tried opening her eyes again. “Dying in an ancillary timeline is a real bummer. Bad form, you know?”
“Tell me about it.” He smiled weakly. “But we’re not gonna let that happen. Leo and Raph are going to be back real soon. In the meantime, you just gotta keep talking to me, okay?”
“Okay,” she nodded, still scared. A couple more tears squeezed out of her eyes. “Wha—what do you wanna talk about?”
There was only one thing Mikey wanted to talk about. Desperately. But the terror of what she might answer almost choked him. “H—hey, uh, Renet?” He paused, summoning courage. It felt cottony and dry. “Renet, do you know where Donnie is? Not… not the primary timeline Donnie, I guess. My Donnie. Do you know where my Donatello is, Renet?”
He sounded like a little kid again. Pleading. Pitiful. And his nose was full of snot. But he couldn’t help it. He had to know. He had to. “Is he… Is he even alive?”
But Renet shook her head, almost imperceptibly. Somehow, the Timestress found the energy to lift one hand and press it, limp and pale, atop Mikey’s remaining one, which lay over her wound, tacky with her blood. “I’m sorry,” she breathed. “We don’t know. We know, in general, about this timeline, but we never investigated. We were focused…”
“On the primary timeline. Yeah.” Michelangelo hunched in on himself, his shell to the world. Somehow, this was the worst possible answer. He could just add Renet to the long, long list of everyone in the universe who didn’t know jackshit. He bit back his tears, his bitterness.
He kept talking. “They were who you were trying to get to, right? The turtles on the primary timeline? They were the ones you wanted to ask for help.”
“Mmm.” Renet’s hand was so, so cold.
“And Donnie is with them. He’s there? He didn’t dis…” Mikey swallowed. “Disappear or whatever.”
“He’s there. He’s good. Splinter, too. They’re all good, Mikey.”
Mikey didn’t know how to feel about that. Emotions buzzed in his chest, pushing against his ribs and clawing up his throat. He wanted to scream. He wanted to leap up and tear the room apart. He wanted to rage. That other Michelangelo, Primary Timeline Michelangelo, had everything he wanted. Everything he deserved. He had all of his brothers and his father and probably his fucking left arm, too. He had a world that hadn’t collapsed into bleak, hopeless fear.
Primary Timeline Michelangelo could probably wake up with Klunk nestled below his neck. He could make pancakes and tease Raph and pester Leo and bury his face in his father’s fur. He could probably share a blanket with Donnie on the couch and read comic books with him until it was time to patrol. They’d vault across the rooftops together, all four of them, and the city would lie at their feet, alight and alive and brilliant.
No work camps. No patrols. No Karai Bots, and no toxic, festering fights. It was right there. He could feel it so close, he could practically touch that world, overlaid as it was against his own, as if a thin film of gossamer was all that separated them. If he closed his eyes, he could practically smell his father’s chrysanthemum tea.
But he couldn’t get up, and he couldn’t scream or throw things. He couldn’t rip that interdimensional film into shreds. The blood under his fingers had slowed, but the pulse had stuttered, and Renet was now floating in and out of consciousness.
Michelangelo knew what he had to do.
Reaching out with one foot, he caught the scepter’s staff between his toes and pulled it towards him.
He winced with guilt as he left Renet’s side, taking his hand from her wound, but he was around the back of the couch to fetch his old, unused longboard from underneath the blanket, and he’d vaulted back as fast as a ninja could be capable of.
Renet groaned. He eased her torso onto the board, cushioning her head as best he could, and then pushed the scepter into her limp hands.
“Renet? You gotta wake up for a minute, girl. You gotta make yourself a portal. I can’t do that for you.”
Renet twitched. In the light of the bulb, she looked sheet-white, as if she were already a ghost.
“Renet?” Mikey’s voice was more desperate now. “Renet, come on, please! They’ll be able to help you in the 79th Dimension of Null Time, right? All sorts of fancy-pants doctors, I bet. You gotta go home now. You gotta go home.”
Renet’s eyes fluttered momentarily, then opened, dully noting Mikey’s anguished face over her own, the staff of the scepter in her hand.
“That’s it. That’s it, Renet. Time for a portal. Time to go home. You gotta heal up. You gotta keep an eye on that primary timeline, right? You gotta keep an eye on them for me. Please. Please, Renet.”
It was unclear how much of Mikey’s words the Timestress heard. But she heaved a pained breath, then summoned her remaining energy and twisted the scepter. Green smoke blossomed within the orb set at its top, and the two friends were rewarded with the crackle and pop of a time portal spiraling out, slanted and a little off-kilter, at Renet’s feet.
Mikey shoved the coffee table roughly to the side, then gently rolled Renet forward, maneuvering the skateboard platform toward the portal. He hoped to god that her people would be there waiting for her.
Mikey imagined, for a moment, what it would be like to go with her. To leave the sharp-edged fragments of his life, this “ancillary” world, behind him and allow himself to be swallowed by that green light.
He then envisioned what Leonardo’s face would look like if he returned to find him gone. And Raphael’s. He imagined what they would do.
“Goodbye, Renet. I’m sorry. We all are, I swear.” But her head lolled once more, and she was unconscious when he finally let her go entirely into the swirling portal. He felt the fizz of it popping against his fingertips. As she disappeared into it, the portal closed around her.
Raph and Leo appeared seventeen minutes later with a fretful doctor from April’s base in tow, laden with medical supplies. They found Michelangelo utterly alone in the room, the dark pressing in around him, scrubbing the blood-stained flagstones.