warning: not intended for munchkins. Adult situations, violence and nasty language follow.

Chapter Six: Cracks

How can you bear living, I wonder, knowing death could be so close?
--Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters

Meih Peih Chi, six years, ten months after impact

The raid’s scheduled for tomorrow night. The slavers will be traveling by caravan, as they always do... gas is too precious to waste on any but the most valuable slaves. Most of them will be forced to march the miles to the auction. Just like the marches in the old days... what’s the expression? I can’t remember...
“This is the ravine,” Ann tells me, pointing out the narrow pathway on the map.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. That’s it. “You’re sure they have to pass this?”
“Unless they want to hike a hundred miles out of their way.”
I frown at the map. “Put some mines there. Make sure they’ll want to go our way.”
“They’ll be expecting an ambush then.”
“They should be, unless they’re fools. And slavers are rarely fools.” The map is still worrying me; something about it grates on my nerves, something wrong... “Are we sure this is still accurate?”
“No. The locals tell me there’ve been earthquakes.”
”Strong ones?”
“Strong enough. River’s shifted at least once.”
I curse under my breath. If only we could tap into the satellites... they’re still out there, still taking their pictures, but there’s no one left to watch. We’ve tried, more than once, with no success.
“We’ll need a scouting team, then.”
Ann nods. “I’ll see if I can get volunteers. Oh, and you’ve got company, too.”
“What kind of company?”
“They say they were out hiking and they lost a woman-- they think it’s slavers. Don’t look like hikers to me, but the rest of the story holds up.”
“How many are there?”
“Four. One’s definitely human, and one’s definitely a mutant. Haven’t seen enough of the other two to say.”
I nod. “I’ll talk to them. Don’t let them beyond the gate.”
“We weren’t planning on it.”

They have set up a camp just outside the gate. Hooded, as so many of us are these days, but that means nothing. We are all so secretive now... all of us hiding what we really are, what our real purpose is. None of our camps last longer than a week, and even then we have had many a midnight attack caused by traitors we were fool enough to trust. They’ve sent a representative to talk to me, a canine mutant with light-colored fur and luminous deep brown eyes. No doubt he was hand-picked to win my sympathies.
“We have... many skills between us. Two of us are good with electronics, we have a doctor...”
A doctor... I keep my face unchanged. “How do I know you’re what you say you are?”
“You’ll have to trust us.”
”I’ve stayed alive by not trusting people.”
He smiles, gentle, wry. “That’s interesting. I’ve stayed alive by doing just the opposite...”
“Then you’ve been lucky.”
He shrugs his shoulders. “Or blessed. Maybe both... there must be something you need, some way we can help you.”
He looks honest. They always do.
But there is no reward without risk... at least none worth gaining.
They’d be the right size for the scouting team we need... if I knew I could trust them.
Perhaps a test...
“All right,” I say, getting up from the table. “There’s a wreck of a hospital half a mile to the east from here. I’ll meet that doctor of yours there. Alone.”

“So what is this?” he says sourly. “I figure out what’s wrong with you, and you’ll choose to believe I’m a doctor?”
“Something like that.”
He pushes the dark hood back, revealing dark green skin... a face like mine. “I don’t like it. Medicine shouldn’t be about tests... at least not that kind of test.” His features are harsh, set like stone.
He takes the rest of the cloak off, revealing a shell and a pair of jeans. Another turtle. I’ve never seen one before... “You’re the woman Octavian met?”
I nod. He crosses over to the sink and tries the tap. The water flows; he smiles, takes the soap I’ve put out. “How long have you been pregnant?”
“What?”
“How long have you been pregnant?” He turns around, appearing to enjoy my surprise. “Tave told me. Guess he could smell it. He doesn’t have the nose he used to, but he still picks some things up... I’m assuming you want me to check on the baby, but...”
“Yes.” I pull the robe I’ve been wearing off; it’s not as though I’m really naked without it.
“I’d better warn you now,” he says, turning back to the sink. “You’re probably not going to be pleased with what I have to tell you. Most of the mutant pregnancies I’ve seen have been little short of disasters... it’s very difficult to have a baby, much less a healthy one.” He turns back to me, eyes the equipment. “Do we know if this works?”
“It should.”
He grabs the medical coat we’ve prepared for him off the hook. “Has everything been sterilized?”
I nod.
“And there’s electricity, I-- Mieh?” He’s frowning, staring at my abdomen.
“What?”
“The shell plates...” he reaches out. “They weren’t always like that, were they?”
I follow his gaze to just above my stomach, where the thin space between the plates of my plastron has been cracking and reddening.
“That’s bad,” he says bluntly. “How far along--”
”Three months or so.”
He exhales, sharply, almost a hiss, and switches on the examining light over the table.
“It could just be from the weight gain,” I say tentatively.
“You’ve gained and lost weight before?”
“Yes.” I can see the direction he’s headed in.
“And it wasn’t like this.” A statement, not a question.
His eyes are piercing, hard to avoid. “No.”
“Let me do the ultrasound. But as I said--” His finger brushes the raw skin and I flinch. “Painful, too? That’s a very bad sign... very bad.”
“Just do the examination.”

“Most of the system is still intact,” Ann says. “If we had the antenna equipment...”
“I can come up with something,” Don says softly, examining the circuit board.
“Don...” Octavian looks at him. “Are you--”
“Tave. If we can help Sal...” Don has sworn him to secrecy about the slow deterioration of the cyborg skeleton. It’s gotten to the point where using the armor for anything more than normal activity causes him physical pain... Tave’s not sure he can stand it much longer. Some nights Don is so raw and exhausted they cannot even touch.
But Sal... he thinks of her, of her smile, of the way Leo’s face always lights up when he sees her...
“All right.” He leans over Don’s shoulder. “What can I do?”

Somewhere in the haze I can hear his voice... “there’s only one thing to do.”
I shake my head. “No, I can’t...”
“It’s going to kill you, Meih.”
“I cannot make a decision to--”
“If you can’t make it for your own sake, what about the child’s father?”
“My husband? What about him?”
“If you love him as you claim to--”
“I do love him.”
“--then shouldn’t he have some choice in the matter? Must he lose a wife and a child?”
I don’t answer him. He sighs, walks across the room, leans his hands on the counter. “I wish my wife was here. She was always so much better at this part...” His voice cracks for a second, the cold jade softening, but he recovers quickly. An act? I can’t tell.
My hands drop automatically to my stomach, to the flesh that is growing more and more tender. To the child that could-- no, that could never be. “It’s going to take me a while to get used to this.”
“It’s never easy,” he says gently. “I wish there was something more I could do...”
“I will help you find your wife.” I look up at him. “It is the least I can do.”
“After I’ve pronounced a death sentence on your child?”
“You could be wrong.”
“If I knew where to find a second opinion,” he says wryly, “I’d recommend you get one.”
”There’s always my husband. He is known as a healer...”
“Not a doctor, though?”
“No. And he hasn’t seen me in almost two months...”
“He doesn’t know you’re pregnant?”
I shake my head.

“Moved about ten feet by the looks of things,” says a male voice, crisp, competent; his voice has echoes of the doctor’s. The fingers touching the keyboard are the same; a brother?
“They did it.” Ann looks up at me; I can sense her excitement. “Fixed the whole control board, the GPS... look, we’re looking at the ravine right now.”
Any other day I would be exhilarated. “What’s moved?”
“This boulder,” Ann says, “it’s blocked the path, but it’s still passable...”
“If they take the path here--” A metallic hand points, and I fight the urge to jump back-- “you can use the changes to your advantage. Meih?”
“Yes,” I say, and the face turns to me. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m looking into the face of a cyborg.
A cyborg mutant turtle.
Good heavens...
“I’m Don, Doc’s brother,” he says, extending his... non-metallic... hand. His eyes are wide, bright with fatigue, or pain... perhaps both. I shake his hand, feel the leathery texture of skin so much like mine...
Where did they come from? Are they the turtles my Master spoke of?
He said there were four...
But I don’t have time to think about that now. Now we have an attack to plan...
“If we set up here,” Don is saying, “we can offer support from above...”
Ann looks up at me, her soft eyes posing a question. I nod. “All right,” she says slowly. “We’ll work together.”

We camp two miles away from the ambush site and hope they won’t see our fire. Doc takes first watch, but I can’t sleep; after a while I get out of the tent I share with Ann, walk to the fire. He nods at me; I smile. We sit there in silence for a while.
A log cracks into ashes.
“How did you meet her?” I ask.
He looks up, over at me. “My wife?”
I nod.
“When the blast first hit, we got a lot of people volunteering at the hospital. People... it’ll surprise you, the good things they’ll do sometimes. Well, anyway, we had a lot of people in and out, patients, volunteers, volunteers who’d become patients and the other way around, people with nowhere else to go... and the mutants started coming in. I’d been mutated before the blast... but there were a lot of people who’d been born animals, were adults before the changes started. And there was no way of testing them, no way of gauging what they could or couldn’t do, so we’d just put ‘em to work and take it from there. She was scrubbing floors at first, but she was smarter than that, so they started having her do some assistant stuff... but she couldn’t speak. Didn’t speak anyway. So Doctor Michelson figures out she’s got vocal chords, and makes sure we start taking extra time with her, trying to get her to talk... trying to convince her that she can even do it.”
A noise in the woods; we both freeze. He stands up; I can see him move, and I still don’t hear it. I will admit I’m impressed; my own Sui Pian would have trouble doing the same as quietly.
After a moment, he untenses, sits back down. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m thankful.”
He shrugs, as if it’s absurd to be thanking him for such things. “Where was I?”
“Your wife.”
“Oh yeah, we were trying to get her to talk... anyway, I started having lunches with her, next thing I knew I was telling her my life story... and finally one day we got her to talk.” He smiles at the memory. “For a long time, it was hardly more than a whisper... and then, finally, we got more out of her. But it was all pretty new to her... we had to keep explaining words to her, helping her learn new ones... well, one day she was talking to one of the other women, almost the whole day, I didn’t even have the chance to have lunch with her... and I got off my shift-- and she comes over and asks me if I want to have dinner with her.”
The jade sculpture I met is gone; there’s a real, breathing man in front of me. “And I said yes-- I was floored, totally floored-- she’d been asking Georgia all day about stuff, date stuff, what you say, what you do... I was half in love with her already, and that...” He glances at me, and I see the young man there, the one made too old by the bombs, the death, the loss of his wife...
“... that was it. And at the end of the night, she tells me the last word she made Georgia teach her... ‘kiss.’” He shakes his head, grinning. “I mean, what else could I do but kiss her?” He laughs, though I can see the tears starting in his eyes. “What about yours?”
“My husband?”
“Yes. How did you meet?”
My turn to smile. “I rescued him.”
“Slavers?”
“Exactly. He was a skilled fighter, but he was outnumbered.” I remember watching him fight; the amazing, sleek way he moved. “And outgunned, though that part didn’t seem to bother him... at any rate, our people moved in, and that was the end of it.” The look he gave us was half gratitude, half suspicion. “But it was a long time after that before...”
A noise cuts us off; a voice. “--shouldn’t--”
“I’ll be fine.” Don’s voice, I realize. “I just need to get up and walk around...”
“I’ll come out with you.”
“It was a long time after that that we finally realized we were in love,” I finish softly.
Both of our eyes have turned to the tent.
“You okay?” Doc asks.
“I’m fine,” his brother answers, though he’s walking like an old man. “Just locked up a little...”
“That never used to happen.”
Don shrugs. “Gettin’ old, I guess.”
Octavian looks up at us; I can see the plea for help in his eyes, but the look on Don’s face warns me I’d better not say anything.
“As Sui Pian says, our age creeps up on us when we least expect it...”
Don frowns. “Sui Pian... that’s Chinese, isn’t it?”
I nod.
“Means ‘Splinter,’ doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not by any chance a giant rat?”
I freeze. Four sons...
Four turtles in a fishbowl, so many years ago...
“You have brothers,” I stammer. “Two.”
He nods.
Something in my face must give it away... Doc takes my arm, looks into my eyes. “He’s the father, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”

Contents are the property of phishtar, with the exception of the Joyce Johnson quote-- you can find more about her here, and about Minor Characters here; and of course many of the characters are the intellectual property of these guys. If you try to profit from any of this, good luck...you're gonna need it. If you'd like to link to this story, please link to the main fiction page. If you'd like to reproduce this for any reason, email me and we'll talk. Your comments are welcome as well.