Chapter 69: New York's First Supernatural Recruitment Fair
The map the turtles had drawn was on a Domino's napkin in blue ballpoint pen, and it was either a masterpiece of navigational clarity or completely useless depending on which way you held it.
They'd been in the sewer for fifty-five minutes.
"Ted," Rango said, with the patience of someone who has already deployed all his patience and is now operating on the infrastructure beneath it, "that is the third time we have passed that specific boot."
"I'm aware of the boot," Ted said, from Rango's shoulder, where he'd relocated approximately twenty minutes ago when the floor situation had become untenable.
"Then explain to me how we keep finding it."
"The map," Ted said, with dignity, "is ambiguous in the northeast quadrant."
"The map has four directions and twelve landmarks. It's a napkin, not a topographic survey, but it should be sufficient to navigate a sewer that one group of people lives in full time—"
"I may have been holding it rotated," Ted said.
Rango stopped walking.
"For how long."
"Unclear. Potentially the entire time."
Rango looked at the boot. At the sewer ceiling. At the particular darkness of a place that was trying very hard not to be anywhere.
"Give me the map," he said.
Ted gave him the map.
Rango turned it one hundred and eighty degrees. Looked at it. Looked at the tunnel ahead.
"Seven minutes," he said. "If we're quiet."
"I wasn't the one talking," Ted said.
They went seven minutes in silence, following the reoriented map, and came to the sealed secondary pipe that the napkin had labeled, in Michelangelo's handwriting, squeeze thru here (sorry).
Rango looked at the pipe.
"The things I do," he said, to no one in particular, and went in.
The other end opened into light and the smell of pizza.
Rango pulled himself out of the pipe, stood up, and found four large turtles pointing weapons at him from various positions around a living space that was, against all reasonable expectation, comfortable. Couch. Enormous TV. Pizza boxes in a configuration that suggested a long-term relationship with a specific delivery operation. Skateboard ramps. A punching bag. Framed photos on the wall that had been hung with actual care.
Leonardo lowered his katana first.
"You found it," he said.
"Eventually," Rango said.
"Most people use the direct manhole." He gestured upward. "It's marked."
From across the room, April O'Neill, seated on the couch with a coffee and a notebook, looked up and said nothing, but her expression said quite a lot about the pipe route versus the direct manhole.
Rango looked at the pipe. Looked at April. Looked at Ted, who had emerged from the pipe with the contained dignity of someone who had decided retrospective grievance was more useful than current complaint.
"Next time," Rango said, "the direct manhole."
"Next time," Ted agreed.
Splinter came from the back of the lair in the way that people who have trained for decades move — not dramatically, just with a complete absence of wasted motion, each step landing where it was meant to land and nowhere else. The yellow robe. The weathered face. The eyes of something that had been paying attention for a long time and had found the habit useful.
He looked at Rango.
Rango looked at him.
"Anya spoke well of you," Splinter said.
"She handled a difficult situation well. I just drove her home."
"You did more than that." Splinter gestured toward the couch. "Sit. Tell me what brings you here."
Rango sat. Leonardo sat across from him. The others arranged themselves with the ease of people who did most things together and had worked out the logistics.
"The Yellow-Eyed Demon," Rango said. "Azazel. He's moving toward New York with a timeline I don't have exactly but that Amos estimates is weeks rather than months." He looked at Splinter, then at the four turtles. "When he arrives, he won't come alone. The people he's seeded over the years — the ones with abilities, the ones he's been cultivating — they'll come with him or ahead of him. My cousins and I can handle the supernatural end. The seeded humans are a different operational challenge."
"You want our help," Raphael said.
"I'm asking if you're willing. You don't owe me anything."
"We owe you the component," Leonardo said. "You handed it over without negotiating. That matters."
"It was your problem more than mine. I just happened to be holding it."
Leonardo and Raphael exchanged a look.
"We're in," Raphael said. Not from the debt — Rango could hear the difference. From the fact that a major demonic operation in New York was a New York problem, and these four had decided New York was their responsibility a long time ago.
Splinter nodded once, the small decisive nod of someone ratifying a decision already made.
Then he looked at Rango with the specific attention of someone who has been reading a person since they walked in and has arrived at a conclusion.
"You move well," he said. "But you move like someone who has power and hasn't learned what to do with the edges of it."
"I've been told something like that before."
"By who?"
"A man named Splinter," Rango said. "Approximately ten seconds ago."
The corner of Splinter's mouth moved. "Your grandfather trained you."
"Some. My father more. And a man named Amos who trained with my grandfather for thirty years and has opinions about everything."
"And yet." Splinter stood. "There are things none of them could teach you. Because none of them had your specific gifts." He picked up his staff from beside the chair — not threatening, just present. "Speed and strength beyond human parameters. You use them the way a person uses a crowbar who learned construction with a hammer. Effective. Inefficient."
Rango watched him.
"I'm going to offer you something," Splinter said. "And you can say no."
"Okay."
"Three sessions. Not a curriculum. Just three conversations, with demonstration." He looked at the staff. "What Bruce Lee understood — and what most people who study Lee miss — is that the technique exists to remove obstacles between intention and outcome. You have the outcome. You're fighting the obstacles with more power instead of removing them." He set the staff down. "Three sessions."
Rango thought about the fight in Anna's apartment. About the entity in the tree house, and how close the margins had been. About the rhinoceros one's hide and the inefficiency of impact without precision.
"Three sessions," he said. "When?"
"Now," Splinter said. "Starting with this."
His hand moved.
Not fast — or rather, fast in the way that things that are completely efficient appear fast, no wasted vector, the staff not swinging but arriving, aimed at Rango's left shoulder.
Rango's reflexes fired. He caught the staff.
Splinter's wrist rotated.
The staff became irrelevant. The fist behind it, traveling six inches, hit Rango's sternum with something that had no business existing in six inches of travel, a force that bypassed the architecture of how he thought about force entirely, and he went back four feet into the wall.
He stood in the plaster dent and looked at Splinter.
Splinter looked back with the mild expression of someone who has demonstrated a point and is waiting for the student to articulate it.
"Inch punch," Rango said.
"The delivery mechanism," Splinter said. "Not the point. The point is that speed and power are not the same as placement. You caught the obvious thing. You didn't account for what was behind it." He tilted his head. "Shall we continue?"
Rango pushed off the wall.
"Yeah," he said. "Let's continue."
Four hours later, Rango climbed out of the direct manhole — which was in fact clearly marked and directly accessible and would have saved approximately fifty-five minutes if anyone had looked for it initially — into a Manhattan night that had decided, while he was underground, to start raining.
He was soaked to the skin within thirty seconds.
He was also thinking about placement in a way he hadn't before, which meant the four hours had been worth the wall dent and the two subsequent impacts that had left impressions in the lair's support pillars.
Splinter's training was not the cinematic kind. There were no dramatic montages, no crane poses, nothing that would have looked good in a movie. There was a man who had spent sixty years understanding something deeply asking Rango to demonstrate what he did, and then showing him, very precisely, where the gaps were.
It was the most useful four hours Rango had spent since Amos had first explained what the consulting work actually involved.
Ted, who had watched from the couch with April and eaten two slices of pizza and had opinions about both, appeared on Rango's shoulder as he walked.
"How do you feel?" Ted asked.
"Like someone hit me three times in a confined space."
"Someone did."
"I know. That's the point." He turned up his collar against the rain. "How was the pizza?"
"Good. April has strong opinions about anchovies."
"Where does she fall?"
"Pro. Firmly." A pause. "She also has strong opinions about the story she's not filing."
Rango glanced at him. "What story?"
"The one about the museum security consultant who handed over an alien weapon component to four mutant turtles without negotiating, who trains with the turtles' sensei, and who apparently has a car that makes its own decisions about social interaction." Ted paused. "She's not filing it. She said — and I'm quoting directly — that some beats land better when you've got the whole arc."
"She's waiting for the bigger story," Rango said.
"She's waiting for the bigger story," Ted confirmed.
Rango thought about this. About a reporter who understood that some things were worth holding.
"I don't hate that," he said.
Meanwhile, back at the apartment, Dean and Sam had set up Rango's laptop on the kitchen table and were looking at the response to the post Rango had put up the previous night.
The post had been sparse: Looking to connect with individuals operating in the New York area who have non-standard capabilities and are interested in a coordinated response to an incoming demonic situation. Serious inquiries only. Museum, nights.
Forty-seven responses.
"Okay," Dean said, scrolling. "This one says he can talk to fish."
"Could be useful near water," Sam said.
"He specifies freshwater fish. He's not sure about saltwater."
"Less useful."
"This one can make plants grow faster. Like, agricultural speeds."
"Pass."
"This one—" Dean stopped. "Huh."
"What?"
"This one can see exactly twelve seconds into the future. Not more. Not less. Twelve seconds."
Sam thought about this. "That's actually—"
"Specific and weird, but yeah." Dean kept scrolling. "Okay, this is more interesting. Former Army Ranger, says she developed pyrokinesis after a near-death experience in Kandahar. Attached a video."
Sam watched the video over Dean's shoulder.
"That's real," Sam said.
"That's very real," Dean agreed.
"Flag her."
Dean flagged her. Kept going.
"Telekinesis, telekinesis, claims to be a vampire but the email is sent at two PM so probably not, telekinesis—" he paused — "this one just says 'I know where Azazel's going to be in three weeks' with no other information."
Sam went very still.
"Flag that one," Sam said.
"Already flagged."
They looked at each other across the laptop.
"Rango's going to want to see all of this," Sam said.
"Rango's going to want to see that last one immediately," Dean said. "Wherever he is."
McQueen was already moving before Dean finished the text.
Rango was three blocks from the lair when the phone buzzed. He read the text. Sent back: On my way.
He picked up his pace through the rain — and nearly ran directly into Clary Fairchild, who was coming the other direction with a cello case on her back and the expression of someone who has been trying to get a cab in a New York rainstorm for twenty minutes and has arrived at a new understanding of futility.
She blinked.
"Rango Winchester," she said. "Of all the—"
"Clary." He looked at the cello case. At the rain. At the total absence of available cabs on the block. "Where are you going?"
"Home. Brooklyn. The F train if I can find a station that isn't flooded." She looked at him — soaked, slightly battered, moving with the purposefulness of someone who has somewhere to be. "What happened to you?"
"Training."
"In the rain?"
"The training was underground. The rain is new."
She looked at the cello case on her back. He could see her doing the math — rain, instrument, crowded subway, transfer at Jay Street.
"McQueen's a block away," he said. "I can get you to Brooklyn before the F would get you to the first stop."
Clary looked at him with the expression of someone who has been told, in every context since childhood, not to get in cars with people she doesn't know well.
"I know your mother's name," he said. "Your father's a werewolf. You carry seraph blades under that coat. I think we're past the standard calculus."
She looked at him for another second.
"The cello doesn't fit in a sports car," she said.
"McQueen has opinions about how much he can fit," Rango said. "He's usually right."
As if on cue, McQueen appeared at the curb, and the passenger side window slid down to reveal an interior that had reconfigured itself with the specific accommodation of something that understood the geometry of instrument cases and human comfort and had worked out a solution.
Clary looked at this.
Looked at Rango.
"Does it always do that?"
"He," Rango said. "And yes."
She got in.
The cello fit perfectly, which surprised her and didn't surprise Rango at all.
"I have somewhere to be first," he said, as McQueen pulled into traffic. "Someone sent a message that they know where Azazel is going to be in three weeks. I need to go find out if that's real or a waste of time."
Clary went quiet for a moment.
Then: "What if I told you the Shadow Hunters have been tracking the same thing?"
Rango glanced at her.
"Your mother send you?" he asked.
"My mother doesn't know I'm in this car," Clary said. "Which is why this conversation stays in this car."
The rain hammered the windshield. McQueen threaded through the gridlock with the fluid authority of something that understood the city's geometry from the inside.
"Tell me what you know," Rango said.
Clary looked out the window at the rain.
"Azazel's not coming to New York," she said. "He's already here. He arrived two days ago. The Shadow Hunters lost track of him somewhere in the Meatpacking District." She paused. "My mother has been trying to figure out how to tell you without starting a panic."
"She could have called."
"She doesn't have your number."
"She could have called Jocelyn," Ted said, from the dash.
Clary looked at Ted. "He's right," she said. "She probably should have."
Rango drove through the rain and thought about Azazel two days ahead of where he'd thought, and about Emma in Boston with Fiona's calculations running behind her warmth, and about forty-seven people who had responded to an online post about a coordinated demonic response, one of whom apparently knew the timeline better than anyone.
"Ted," he said.
"Calling Amos," Ted said, already on it.
"And Dean."
"Also already."
The rain didn't let up.
McQueen drove faster.
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