It almost looks like -

For a moment - just one - a memory scratches at Raphael's mind; jutting vertical shafts across a great expanse of space, rippling with dense, green foliage. Then the itch is gone, crushed to dust beneath decades of sepia wasteland glare.

It isn't a forest. Not really . . . at least, as much as he can recall one to compare. It cuts up from the horizon in striking jagged shapes, a mosaic of deep greens, lurid teals and garish purples, and it catches the piercing desert sun in a thousand glittering, razor-edged places. The sky above it carries an unnatural violet haze broken only by disparate crackles of effervescent lightning.

It is as beautiful as a mirror shattering in your face and, by all local accounts, about as friendly.

"Raph, time to pull over." A magenta glow intrudes on the edge of his vision, accompanied by the soft whirring of servos and hum of electronics. Donatello leans in past the driver's seat, his unreadable gaze fixed on the prismatic horizon. What they are driving along can hardly be called a road, but Raph tears his eyes from it anyway to glare at his brother.

"Wha? Why? There's still a few miles to go 'til we get to -" Even as he says it, he can feel his voice beginning to rasp against his throat, each breath a little heavier than it should be and driving through his lungs with a faintly acidic sting. He hasn't realised until now the pressure building against his temples, or the sluggish effort now required to blink. "Damn. Already?"

"Well, can't say I didn't warn ya," Donatello chirps, infuriatingly cheerful. He pats Raph's shoulder with a clink clink.

Raphael runs a hand over his face, groaning his frustration, but he eases his foot off the gas and switches over to the brake as if he might suddenly lose the coherence to do it safely. "Are you kiddin' me? I thought we'd at least get closer than this, just in case -"

"In case you need to charge in and rescue me. Really?" The subtle head swivel, the asymmetrical drift of his antennae and the lilting pitch of Donnie's modulated voice blaze robotic sarcasm. "After that ambush outside Drywelt, and based on a sample size of 486 relevant scenarios, the ratio of brotherly rescues currently stands at 55:26. In whose favour, d'ya think?"

Raph's glare deepens, burnished heavily with an unspoken 'That's not what I meant'. Donnie quickly relents in the face of it and throws a sheepish shrug. "Ehh . . . sorry, Raph. I mean, who's even counting, right? But we talked about this. Much as I'd like otherwise, you wouldn't last five minutes in there. It's safer this way."

A brooding frown has engraved itself on Raphael's already surly face.

They pull over.

"Hey, once I'm out, I think you should head back a little," Donnie warns as he wrenches open the Shellraiser door. "Maybe a couple hundred yards. Your rebreather's kinda out of its league here and I'm getting atmospheric toxicity readings at this position that are a smidgen higher than the level I'd call 'probably won't kill ya'. Not immediately but it won't exactly do you any good -"

"This is a terrible idea, Don," Raph cuts him off with a grunt. He hasn't left his seat but he twists around in it as far as his hulking frame will allow, eyeing his brother's silhouette in the eerie light from outside. It gives the robot pause; his antennae sweep low and his mechanical frame seems suddenly awkward. Raphael knows that hesitation - the clash between a machine that has run the numbers, and a mind that is still just illogical enough to defy them anyway.

"If you remembered her," Donnie says quietly, "you wouldn't think so." His robot brother squares his shoulders and hops out into the torrid dust.

Raphael growls. In the cabin, something tinkles softly in Donnie's wake. He automatically raises a hand to the shattered pieces of a metal tessen, stilling their musical dance. His touch is deceptively gentle.

"Keep your comm line open!" he roars after Donatello, but he is not correctly armed to make further argument.

"My old Ma told me it's been around almost as long as the M-Bomb crater."

"So's the blister I got on my big toe," Raphael muttered. "That don't impress me much."

Donatello's library of pop culture filled in the missing Oh Oh Oh-ohhh. He almost sang the notes (well, played an actual recording of Shania's lovely rural twang), but his current audience was a mutated gecko born too late to experience human country pop music and Raphael at his wasteland-business-surliest, who probably wouldn't even remember the reference.

Clearly his talent was wasted here.

"So these 'Sharding Wastes' didn't exist immediately after M-Day," Donnie instead said, a little pointedly, "but rose up some time afterward. That could make 'em pretty unconventional . . . with potentially unconventional salvage."

The gecko looked at him, and casually licked her eyeball.

"Hey, now. That thing's pretty smart. It for sale?"

Raph's fist slammed down beside the lumpy leather bag of questionable odour currently sitting in the middle of the diner table. A few nearby denizens of the dim, grubby waterhole turned to cast an eye over the gathering, and promptly turned around again when they saw the unfriendly set of the turtle's jaw.

"That 'thing' is my brother - no, don't even ask - and you're wasting our time. This is grade A mutascorpion meat right here and so far you ain't earned it. Is there anything valuable there or not?"

Good ol' Raph, straight to the practical matters. The gecko hooted, leaning over to punch him in the shoulder as though he'd made a winning joke, and utterly oblivious to the fact that the old turtle was not, in fact, laughing with her. She had to massage her knuckles when she pulled her hand back.

"Sure, sure! I mean, I don't know, but a place ain't 'forbidden'" she spat, "unless it's got the good stuff in it."

Raph settled back with a huff, the threadbare alcove seating groaning under his weight. "Then it'll have been raided a hundred times already."

"Yeah. Yeah, y'ain't wrong. Plenty of mutants have tried their luck." The gecko took a terribly conspicuous sip of the mulch that passed for drinking water here, and grinned. "Not that anyone ever came back."

Donatello finds the first corpses about half a mile from where he and Raph part ways. The landscape of death tells a particular story to his analytic modules; a rusted salvage van stands tall, silent, the open driver-side door creaking disdainfully in a hot, sluggish breeze. The mummified bones of the driver lie some ten feet away, following a meandering route from the truck cabin that suggests a desperate crawl.

Donnie can't narrow down the species to anything more than 'canine', given the diversity of wasteland's mutant population, but the delicate finger bones collapsed about the neck make the cause of death pretty obvious. His sensors have been detecting fatal levels of breathable oxygen for some time now - and the permeation of chemicals and elements that are not in any way native to Earth.

Not native, no. But familiar to him, nonetheless.

He looks up, briefly, at what is left of Earth's sky. Even in the distance, far from the so-called Sharding Wastes, its ravaged atmosphere bleeds magenta and is laced with deceptively beautiful cyan chemtrails. The Mutagen Bomb had taken a sledgehammer to the fabric of their world and it had shattered, sure enough - but like toughened glass, the pieces still cling together around a lattice of spidery cracks. You can see the vagaries of Dimension X through them; sometimes, it even seeps through, and the places that it does quickly become the Places We Don't Go To Anymore. Donnie has theories upon theories on the long-term stability of the situation, but he keeps them mostly to himself.

They don't make for pleasant conversation.

And they're not important, not right now. What's important is that the only other place his scanners have picked up Dimension X contamination of this level has been the M-Bomb crater itself - hundreds of miles away. How a little pocket of Dimension X landscape design could have sprung up so far from Ground Zero is an unresolved query, and this mystery could still unravel any number of ways.

But there is one possibility in particular that stands out from the others, glowing like a beacon amidst the array of potential predicted outcomes. With every step, Donatello ticks another box.

He opens the back of the van and finds three more unfortunates there, curled up in various states of agony. This is classified as tragic, a subroutine acknowledges somewhere, and Donnie's head drops, emitting a sad sigh.

"You guys had no idea what you were getting into here, did you?"

He scans the vehicle for potential salvage.

Fuel, weapons, some outdated but useful engine parts that put the salvage crew at maybe fifteen years dead. Parts of the van itself could be stripped down for decent scrap metal. It occurs to him that he and Raph could pick up some useful resources just by scouting the bodies and abandoned vehicles that doubtless ring the Wastes. He runs some projections on how lucrative that would be, the potential distances the salvage seekers might have penetrated, and the most likely locations on the circumference to find the good stuff based on distance and vectors from known populations - but they're loose estimates. Who knows how many mutants have tried and failed to reach that lurid array of alien colour on the horizon?

The engine of the salvage van needs a little encouragement, but he soon has it purring like a particularly angry and sputtering kitten.

"Sorry, fellas," Donnie announces to his trio of long-dead passengers (his brief skeletal analysis has at least identified the corpses as likely males), "but I kinda need it more than you do."

The notion to contact Raph and let him know the morbidly good scavenging news comes, and goes. Instead he files away the task for later, several rungs down his priority queue.

Donatello's mission stopped being about scavenging as soon as the gecko mentioned the witch.

Raphael actually laughed. It sounded like a broken tuba.

"The 'Witch of the Wastes'? What, the wasteland doesn't have enough actual threats in it that you had to go and invent some fairy tale?"

Their intrepid advisor snaked her fingerpads over the bribe bag, sensing a victory; Raph issued a warning grunt, but let her take it.

"Look, nobody can get close to the place, right?" she insisted. "But plenty tried. Some got far enough in and were smart enough to realise they were gonna choke to death on their own tongues, that they turned back. Brought stories with them. Maybe half-dying drove 'em mad but they said they saw things. Strange creatures. What they thought were . . . trees, I think they were called? Except they were all made of some kinda glass. And . . . her."

Raphael raised an eyebrow.

"The Witch of the Sharding Wastes," she nodded eagerly. "Legends go back pretty damn far. The Wastes are her domain and all of its danger is her doing. One guy even said he saw her twist his friend into a horrible monster, right in front of his eyes."

Donnie sat up a little straighter in the booth, and his brother glanced sideways at the sudden twitch of his antennae. "You call the Witch a 'she'," he remarked, trying earnestly not to hum with curiosity. "If that's more than guesswork, someone must have got a pretty good look at her."

"The survivors said she was pink, mostly hairless, no scales or nothin'." The gecko leaned in closer and lowered her voice, her huge eyes shifting left and right. "Y'know . . . like one of those humans?"

For half a mile, Donatello follows a road toward the dense teal walls of the Wastes proper that is littered with death and destruction. In the reclaimed truck he weaves between wasting vehicle carcasses and the occasional pale, bleached glints of bone that creep out from the desert grit. A quiet little subroutine somewhere is keeping a morbid tally.

And then - nothing. A stretch of unmarked desert between him and the walls. Only the tiniest traces of Earth's atmospheric elements remain detectable on his sensors and the horizon offers up one last relic of a hopeless attempt to penetrate the Wastes; it is a lonely truck, its sides and top torn open like a paper bag, wheels strewn across the sands and innards exposed to the alien skies. Donnie dwells on the image of it, while the gecko's descriptions of feverish survivor stories replay verbatim in his head.

His memories are too perfect now. The limitations, the filters imposed by organic matter are gone, replaced by note-perfect recall. They looted some valuable screens from the skeleton of an old mall, once, and used them to outfit the Shellraiser. Donnie had considered hooking himself up to one and playing those memories back for Raphael. If anything could shift his brother's amnesia, maybe their lives before the M-Bomb played out like a movie in front of his very eyes would do the trick?

But he had dropped the idea, aggressively so. Their lives, even at the best of times, have not been like a movie. For every shining moment in their past there is something dark and cutting lurking just a little ways along the timeline, just waiting to come and sweep it all away. And sometimes that dark and cutting thing is simply the awful truth about the people they loved, about themselves, unobscured by the haze of desperate nostalgia, every terrible decision and grimy flaw available for viewing in full high definition.

There are good times in that sequence, yes. But there are also very, very bad times.

So Donatello remains selective. When Raphael is feeling so orphaned from their past that he gets that . . . that look in his eyes, he breaks out the cheery stories, the victories and the laughs.

The worst tales he keeps for his private recollection.

He slows down when he sees the trees. He's almost there now, welcomed by this gleaming, jagged forest to the walls of the Wastes.

Trees made out of glass, the gecko said.

But they're not trees, and it's not glass. Not really.

"You know, you really ain't very good at selling this place." Raph's smile was broad and unpleasant.

"Hey, you wanted information! Well, I know what you actually want is loot." Suddenly smug, the gecko girl rummaged around in the pocket of her tattered, baggy combats. "Take a look at this."

What she set on the table was the tiniest sliver of a Kraang power cell crystal.

Donatello leaves the salvage van a five minute walk from the walls of the Wastes, because the 'trees' become too dangerously dense, and the ground between them a minefield of shiny, unpredictable crystal growth. At best, they'd rip the vehicle's tyres to shreds.

At worst, they'd shatter beneath the thick rubber treads, and he'd be coasting back to Raph on the mushroom cloud of an alien explosion.

It's 59 minutes and 35 seconds since he left the Shellraiser and, like clockwork, he picks up the incoming signal from Raph's T-phone. Donnie hasn't needed to use one for a long, long time; instead, he twitches his antennae into a more efficient position and says aloud: "Hey, Raph. Still alive! Well, in a manner of speaking."

Raph's return grunt sounds over his speakers. "How's it lookin'? Seen her yet?"

"Nope, nothing moving out here so far."

"What about stuff that ain't moving, but should be?"

Donatello considers sugar-coating his reply, but Raphael heard the gecko's spiel. "Plenty of dead on the way here, I admit. Most killed by the atmosphere, though. Plenty of salvage!"

"Most? Ngghh. I don't like it."

"Be quicker for you to give me the list of things you do like, Raph," Donnie says, managing to somehow make vocal the eyeroll he's no longer capable of performing. "Look, it's Kraang terraforming for sure. I'm gonna take a quick look around, and I'll call you if I find anything. I'm at the walls now."

They're not walls. Not really. Donatello stares up - and up, and up - at those sheer iridescent vertices. From a distance, they look like a solid barrier surrounding the core of the Sharding Wastes. Only this close can his sensors work around the weird refractions of light and see the intermittent breaks in it, the slight teetering curvature of the towering luminous cliffs. They've formed as if a massive fist smashed into a lake of liquid crystal at the centre of the Wastes, and the waves rippled outward but froze before they could crash back down to earth.

It makes the way in . . . complicated. Before him lie labyrinthine, glistening passages through the segmented walls. He steps inside the first, and is instantly confronted with a dozen distorted reflections of himself crawling along the purplish-turquoise surfaces.

It's disorienting, but it's also a surprising novelty; clear pools of water or vanity items like full body mirrors aren't exactly commonplace in the desert wasteland. He rests his hand on a crystalline wall and stares into the magenta glow of his own visor.

And recoils.

It isn't that he doesn't know what he looks like now. He designed his own form. But he is supposed to be Donatello, and even after all this time, when he looks at his reflection . . .

Some rogue piece of code expects to see something else.

He turns away, marching off through the maze of crystal with his head down, antennae scything a low arc. It's a bug. Just a stupid software bug, a failed logic check somewhere. He'll root it out later, fix it so that it never crosses his mind again. And yet, if he can't recognise himself . . .

How will she?

Despite his best efforts to divert them, the conundrum plagues his cybercortex processors as he ventures deeper into the Sharding Wastes. If his brain were still organic, he would have been lost fifteen minutes in, faced at every turn by mirror walls of crystal that look exactly the same as the last set he'd avoided looking at. He keeps track of every step taken, however - number, distance, angle from point of entry - and knows he could get out exactly the way he came in. There is no fear, no uncertainty.

Convenient.

Inhuman.

But then, that has always been the problem, hasn't it? Even before. One of the greatest highlights in Donatello's lifetime reel is the moment he realised she was a mutant, too - not that it was enough. It was never enough, and now he's never been less -

The ground pitches beneath his feet - and keeps trembling, a low alarming rumble that vibrates through every sturdy mechanical joint. Donatello comes to a dead halt, all sensors on high alert. An inbound communication from Raph pings his digital ear, but when he opens the channel he can barely make out the words through the hiss of disruptive static.

"Don - kssssssttttt - something out - kssshhhhhttttttttt - see that?"

But of course, he can't, because he's in a canyon of crystal so narrow he can touch both walls at the same time, and can see nothing that isn't ahead, behind or directly above him. His other sensors are picking up something, though; an increase in electromagnetic interference, breaking up his communication signal, and a sudden drop in barometric pressure. The physical reverberations at his feet can hardly be ignored, either.

"Raph, you're breaking up," Donnie yells, charging ahead to the end of his narrow passageway. It opens up into a intersection of sorts, broadening for a spell before four more paths through the labyrinth head off in different directions.

A scratchy, clinking howl screeches down the eastern and northern paths. The sky above them roils dark and violent, and Donatello can see movement in the distance, a strange cloud churning its way toward him like a translucent steamroller.

"You'd - ksssshhhtttttttttt - near - ksssttttttttttttt - orstorm!"

"You said nobody made it back," Donnie accused the gecko. "Where did you get that?"

"If we get a bad blowout in these parts and it crosses the Sharding Wastes before it gets to us, it carries this stuff with it. Pretty bad news. Always casualties." Suddenly solemn, she picked up the shard between thumb and forefinger pad and frowned at it.

"We call it a razorstorm."

It is barrelling in his direction, a frenzy of wind and storm pressure forming a whirling dervish of loose crystal shards. Casualties, the gecko had said; no surprise, given the force behind that engine of destruction can probably flay anything organic to ribbons in seconds.

And his metal shell won't fare much better.

"Donni - kssshhhht - to a - kssssstttttttsss - fe place! Do - ksssshhhhttttttssss - ead me?!"

Raph's sputtering attempts to reach him crackle in and out as Donnie retreats the way he came.

"I'm trying, Raph! Give me a second here."

He can't outrun it. There's no easy cover in the sheer walls of crystal. Donnie runs anyway, calculations spinning away in his system to figure out how the labyrinthine passages can be used to evade the coming storm. He is painfully aware of a subsidiary threat, vibrating all around him as the crystal shakes with the force of the unnatural disaster.

"- kssshhhhttttt - comin' after you!"

A flood of warning alerts almost makes him screech to a halt. Donnie yells reflexively down the comm line: "DON'T YOU DARE! You'll kill yourself! Raph, stay put, d'ya hear me?! I'll be fine as long as - "

CRACK.

He catches it before it shatters - a jagged black line splitting the wall to his left from top to bottom. The whine of rapidly building unstable energy.

A fuschia explosion fills every sensor with light and heat and sound.