That first horrible week in the farmhouse, Leonardo needs his bath water changed three times a day. It's a disgusting and excruciatingly painful process, judging by the muffled sounds leaking through the bathroom door. The turtles refuse to let either Casey or April help, despite April's arguments that it's technically her tub getting stained with blood and god knows what else.

"I'm sorry, April," Mikey says, his face grey and gaunt behind the stark green of his freckles. He's carrying a dripping armload of bloody bandages, cradling the bundle close to his plastron like a precious doll. Behind him, Donatello's shushes aren't enough to drown out Leo's broken gurgles. "Brother stuff, you know?"

April is an only child. She shakes her head.

"I just want to help," she says. "I just want..."

Her father is gone. New York is gone. Casey's father, his sister. Master Splinter. Irma...

...was never really there to begin with, was she?

And whose fault was that she'd... That they'd...

April's cold hands curl into hard fists.

"I'm going to see what else I can find around the house that we can use as supplies," she says. "Donnie still needs more cut-up sheets, right?"

"Yeah," Mikey laughs, smile wide but brittle at the corners. He clutches the soiled bandages a little closer. "Leo's about bled through all of the first batch."

Her boots thump heavily across the floorboards, leaving small clouds of dust in her wake. Each room of the old farmhouse feels somehow colder and emptier than the last. April huddles further into her coat, nose wrinkling at the stale odor of sweat. She hasn't taken it off for more than a few minutes at a time since she first put it on what seems like a lifetime ago, standing in the front hallway of her apartment and rolling her eyes good naturedly as her dad lectured her on the dangers of stiff breezes and chill night air, both of them doing their best to pretend that chapped lips and a head cold were the worst things waiting for her out in the dark city streets.

Sometime during the drive up from New York, she'd put her hand in her pocket only to find that her trusted tube of Carmex was missing. She's quit trying to return Michelangelo's hollow grins with a reassuring smile. It makes her mouth bleed.

April aches for a hot shower, for the thick lather of shampoo against her scalp, but that will have to wait until Casey manages to fix the hot water heater. All of the water they can manage to boil on the stovetop's few working gas burners has to be saved for sterilizing needles and cotton and stabilizing the temperature of Leo's bath.

Raphael—who's spent most of the last few days huddled over the stove, eyes darting and alarmingly neon in the half-gloom—only lets them use the least-efficient of the burners to heat their own meager canned meals. Water for tea and stale instant coffee they boil in a kettle over the living room fire. With the lights flickering and popping threateningly each time they flip more than two switches, none of them have dared to see if the old 1980s microwave still works, let alone the furnace or any of the other appliances. At least it's cold enough for Mikey's mutated cat to wander around outside without the worry of melting.

"I'll take a look at the wiring," Donnie promises each time they manage to drag him out of the first floor bathroom. He refuses to sleep on the nest of mattresses they've made in front of the fireplace, but he takes the coffee and dry toast they force into his hands with minimal protest. "And the furnace. Just as soon as Leo's stable."

Alone in what used to be her grandmother's closet, surrounded by moth-eaten cardigans and polyester blouses gone stiff with age, April shudders, tries not to think about the flat, distant look to Donnie's eyes whenever he talks about Leo, the way they lock onto cobwebbed corners and empty points in space rather than meet her own.

When April was small, summers at the farmhouse meant sunburnt afternoons learning to swim in the river, or riding into town with Gran in her peeling champagne Oldsmobile, the trunk and most of the back seat overflowing with squash and zucchini for the farmer's market. Her parents would take her to the music festival where they met, Mom trading in her subdued, carefully ironed office wear for loose blouses and bright, flowing skirts that swirled like water around her tanned legs as she and Kirby swung April giggling between them, all of them with flowers in their hair.

April stayed in her mother's childhood bedroom, under the watchful if faded gazes of a large Joni Mitchell poster and half a dozen cross-stitched songbirds. At night, if April couldn't sleep, she would creep through long, creaking hallways, the shadows making looming gargoyles out of the taxidermy ducks frozen in flight along the walls of the stairway, until she reached the living room. Dad could never figure out how she got so good at the Atari, but Gran had caught her more than once. Some nights she would shoo her straight back to bed, but most nights she would wrap her in the musty afghan that lived on the back of the couch and lead her further into the night, the two of them rocking lazily on the yard swing as Gran pointed out constellations and twinkling satellites she kept insisting were spaceships until April finally fell asleep.

Pop Pop had been more reserved—aloof and quietly doddering in what April realizes now must have been the end of a long, slow slip into senility—but he'd go walking with her through the fields, nodding solemnly whenever she burst out of the grass to show him a frog or interestingly shaped rock. They spent long, hazy hours out in the barn, Pop Pop under the hood of his black pickup, April up in the barn loft carving mazes out of the musty lumps of hay. He'd died halfway through April's first year of school, and the week that they'd spent there for the funeral was the only time April had ever seen the farmhouse in winter before she helped carry a half-dead Leo through the front door.

She remembers this house as a place of exploring, of quiet adventures and closets full of mothballed mysteries and wonder hidden in old shoe boxes and ancient cookie tins. Now she evaluates each piece of the rustic decor of her grandfather's den with a battle-hardened eye. She should feel something, she thinks, when she looks at the dusty wooden snowshoes mounted on the wall above his rusted silver rifle and finds herself measuring out how many inches worth of stitches Donnie could make with the string, but after days of listening to Leo moan and slosh restlessly the thought only plucks tunelessly in her chest.

Too thick, she ultimately decides. But if they use up all of the thread from Gran's sewing kit, then maybe it could be unwound into individual strands. She takes an armload of old phone books and farmer's almanacs down with her to the living room for kindling.

They've pretty well decimated what usable sheets there are to be found. The lace-trimmed tablecloths folded up in the dining room credenza crumble yellow and useless beneath her touch, but the faded floral dust ruffles that trim the twin beds upstairs prove hardier.

She finds an overlooked first aid kit at the back of one of the kitchen cabinets, most of the creams and pill bottles decades out of date. The half-full bottle of rubbing alcohol still seems okay, though, so she sets it aside for Donnie. The rest of the cabinets hold nothing but mismatched drinking glasses, the pots Raph had deemed too small or dented for effective boiling, and the sorry assortment of non-perishable goods mixed with gas station junk food that make up the bulk of their meager food stock.

April had had forty seven dollars, a metro card, and an "emergencies only" prepaid debit card with a $100 limit in her wallet when they left the city. Casey had had even less—twelve dollars plus or minus some change—and after some quick, huddled whispering the turtles had scrounged another hundred and twenty in filthy, carefully smoothed out bills between them. The debit card is already half gone, spent on the fuel they needed to get the six of them to North Hampton in the first place, and the paper money feels too-light in her hand, a futile stopgap against the heart-pounding math of six bodies in need of food and medicine and toilet paper (Jesus, how do they manage to go through so much toilet paper?) for the next however many months it takes for Leo's body to knit itself back together.

"Fake IDs," Donatello mutters over a cold, hurried breakfast, hands shaking around his third cup of coffee and eyes bloodshot to the point where its hard to pick out the edge of his irises. "Probably a couple, just to be safe, with credit cards leading to blind P.O. boxes. I'll get something worked out, just as soon as Leo's—"

There's a big glass jar full of coins in her grandfather's den, but they aren't desperate enough to roll it all out just yet. During her third unsuccessful search of the van for her chapstick, she finds a battered silver Altoids tin jammed purposefully into the struts underneath the passenger seat. Inside is a tightly folded wad of twenties and fifties, thick as her thumb, and this sudden, unexpected reminder of her gentle, fearful, justifiably paranoid father burns hot inside of April's chest.

"Come shopping with me," she says, hooking Casey by the arm. "I need—" To get out of the house. To not be alone. "—another pair of hands."

They stop by the combination feed and hardware store first. It takes them fifteen minutes to decipher Donnie's handwriting on the hastily-scrawled shopping list, then another thirty to track the last of the items down: wrapping tape; half a dozen tubes of various ointments, salts, and what appears to be water-soluble antibiotics; a collection of barbaric-looking tools April is pretty sure were originally meant to shoe horses; a giant jar of quick-dry, ultra hard spackling that she's chillingly certain will be used more or less as its manufacturers intended.

"You kids got a lame horse?" asks the cashier with some confusion, holding the farrier kit in one hand and a length of aquarium tubing in the other. "I can give you a recommendation for a good vet. Something like a split hoof really needs to be left to the professionals."

"We're fine, thanks," April beams forcefully. "Just a sick turtle."

To her disappointment, he doesn't offer up a recommendation for a local reptile specialist.

At the bottom of the list, in Raphael's more legible if no less scrawling script, is a list of herbs and teas that makes April's heart sink. They'd be lucky to find two or three off of the list in high summer, when the farmer's market is crowded with aging, free-spirit yuppies like her father. What are the chances that any of them will be stocked at the dingy local Price Chopper?

"Oh come on," she groans, rattling the supermarket's locked front door. There's a little handmade sign taped to the inside of the glass—CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE—and all of the aisles beyond are empty and shadowed. "Like anything else could go wrong."

Casey kicks at a rock, sending it flying. The rusted newspaper rack still has a stack of papers from last week, screaming alien invasion in three inch typeface. "Guess we're not the only ones running, huh?"

She doesn't know how to process this place she'd thought of as being safe and away being another person's far, far too close.

At least the food mart at the gas station is still open, though the selection and prices are enough to make even a jaded New Yorker like Casey cringe. They actually have a dusty box of one of Raphael's obscure ninja healing teas half-hidden behind the energy drinks, however. April clings to that bright spot fiercely, letting it warm her numb hands as they carry the bags (far fewer than she had planned) of groceries across the empty, wind-bitten parking lot.

Casey's thoughts are apparently a mirror of her own. "Think we ought to stop back by that farm store?" he asks as they pull back out onto the highway. In the back, the bags of groceries thunk restlessly against each other. "Maybe pick up one of those big bags of corn?"

Despite herself, April smiles at the mental image of Casey wearing a feed bag while Mikey walks along bent double, clucking and pecking happily as she tosses scattered grain across the floorboards. "I don't think that corn is the kind a regular person can eat, Casey."

"Not us, no, but the guys maybe. They eat all sorts of weird shit."

"Casey..." April looks over her shoulder instinctively, but of course the turtles aren't there.

"Worms and trash and whatever that green stuff Donnie's got simmering in his lab is. That place sold bait, right? Let's get them some bait. Nothing like good old fashioned home cooking."

"Euuugh, Casey! Stop being gross!" She laughs as she says it, though, and Casey grins back, eyes glittering with victory.

The old van bumps hard when they pull off the highway and onto the winding, half-mile dirt drive that leads back to the farmhouse. The sun quickly disappears behind the tangle of winter-bare forest, its golden glare all the more blinding whenever it does manage to break through. April settles back in her seat, adjusting the one working passenger heat vent to blow directly into her face. She's determined to enjoy the warmth while it lasts, and Casey, with a knowing look, slows the van to a crawl. She closes her eyes, basking in the successes of their trip, pushing down the disappointments and lingering guilt until they're swallowed by the rumble of the diesel engine as it bumps along the heavily-rutted road.

When they finally pull up to the farmhouse, she's actually managing to feel something like hope. The old house even looks friendlier, its dark windows less eyelike and the yawning porch less like the gaping jaws of a predator.

Maybe, just maybe, they'll get out of this okay.

Ice Cream Kitty is curled up in her bowl in a shady corner of the back porch. She stretches to wakefulness as April climbs the steps with the first load of groceries, marching over and tangling herself between April's legs with a loud, sticky-sweet meow.

"We're all decided then?"

There's frozen condensation covering most of the kitchen window, but April can just make out the green curve of a shell seated at the cramped Formica table. Donnie, she thinks.

"Yeah." That's Raph. "I hate it, but there's no other choice."

"Mikey?"

The door sticks when she tries to open it, the doorknob like ice even through her thick gloves. She shifts the groceries to one hip, adjusts her grip, and leans her weight against the door.

"Mikey, I need to know you're okay with this."

"I'm sorry, it's just—"

The door gives way on the third shove, and she half-stumbles into the dim, steamy kitchen. There's water boiling on the stove as always, but Raphael has strayed far enough from his post to join his brothers at the table, his head resting heavily in his hand. Michelangelo, in the far seat, is the only turtle whose face she can see. He blinks up at her, mouth still half-open on an unspoken syllable, but before she can make heads or tails of his strange, stiff expression his face stretches into a grin, forced mirth rattling down over his features like a brightly graffitied storefront gate.

"Heya Apes! What's shakin'?"

"Hey," she answers reflexively, even as every cell in her brain stem screams out at her that something is wrong, wrong, wrong. "What's going on?"

Donatello's head swivels slowly on his long neck. His mask does nothing to hide the dark, sunken pockets beneath his eyes, the shadowed lines of his cheekbones where weeks before there had been the faintest hint still of baby fat. He doesn't blink. He doesn't smile.

"Hi, April," he says dully. "We're going to put Leo down."