Lane looked at the Miata in disgust. It obviously showed. The idiots, her students, watched her and their faces fell. The old idiots who had seen Mr. Josephs fall had mostly been replaced by new idiots Carol had brought along one day. Carol was the only one of the lot brave enough to talk.

"What did we do wrong?"

"Everything."

"Hey, I put the oil in where it said to put the oil!" Idiot number four whined. Sandy, her name was Sandy. Lane had to write up evaluations on all of them, and if she wrote 'idiot' on any of them, she'd be out of the shop for sure. Her Willys was counting on her. She had to keep it together.

"No. You put it in the first opening you found. Fortunately, you didn't destroy the car."

"I didn't?"

"No. But don't use the windshield washer."

"Oh."

"Michelle, you got the oil drained."

"I did it right?"

"Yeah, no. Now you have to clean it up from the bottom of the pit."

"Oh."

"Yeah. Put a something under the oil pan next time."

"How do I clean it up?"

"See the big barrel of sand?"

"Yeah?"

"Shovel it onto the spill. When you can't see oil any more, shovel it into the bucket."

"Ok."

"The red bucket."

"Oh. Right."

Lane plucked the blue water bucket from Michelle's hand and handed her the red chem bucket. She looked at Sandy, thought about her trying to remove a part from the car. Any car, any part. Sandy's face fell as she anticipated Lane's likely response. Before Lane could speak, Sandy trudged over to help Michelle with the sand.

Cathy looked up from where she knelt next to the tire. Lane reached over to the fender of the car and pushed. The car had been well maintained in the past; the shocks had just the right amount of give. The tire, on the other hand, was loose enough to let the whole car wobble, then settle just slightly off kilter. Lane shook her head, appalled. Cathy and Carol began working the jack into position under the car. Carol and Michelle had done the oil pan work over the pit, but learning to change a tire on a shop lift was useless.

Padma looked down at her clipboard. Her dark skin didn't show much when she blushed. Lane still saw it. Padma was the crew chief. It was her job to make sure everything was done, and done right. She was the one to pull Lane away from where she contemplated the wreck of her Willys. Now Lane saw her furiously scratching out each of the lines where she'd marked things 'done'.

"Clean up the oil mess. Get the lug nuts tightened. I'll take care of the oil and the washer fluid."

"But we..."

"Don't. Just... don't. We'll be looking over the manuals for the rest of the week. You can try again next week."

A week ago, none of them would have listened to her. Now they jumped as if scalded. It still amazed her. It spooked her a little, too. To get over it, she moved away and returned to contemplating the Willys.

The frame was a wreck. Before the disaster last week, it had been in bad shape. She'd been welding a reinforcing section in place but was only half done when everything went to hell. When she'd pitched the thing over, it had snapped clean off. Her choices now were to scrap the whole thing or machine a new crosspiece, cut the old one out, and replace it entirely.

For a second she considered giving up entirely. Only for a second, though. Her shoulders twinged, and her resolution firmed. Keeping half an eye on the girls working on Cathy's Miata, Lane walked over to the motor pool office. Mr. Josephs had given each of the girls a small locker to keep her personal stuff in. The others held a combination of textbooks, electronics, and cosmetics. Lane's locker had two big bottles of dietary supplements and a small container of aspirin balanced on top of her gym bag.

She reached for the bottle of calcium, shook a short handful into her palm. Two multi-vitamins went on top of that, and she topped the whole thing off with two aspirin. She clenched her fist and felt the pills fragment. With her other hand she reached for the water bottle resting atop the locker. She continued grinding the pills as she walked out into the garage and watched the girls correct their mistakes.

By the time they finished, the pills were a fine powder. She sent the girls on their way with a nod toward the exit, then turned her back on them and poured the powder from her hand directly into her mouth. The bitter taste of pills made her scowl until the water washed it away. The mixture sent a shudder through her as some of the powder stuck to the back of her throat and blew up into her sinuses. With that ritual over, she reached for her gym bag. A workout sounded like just the thing to take the edge off before she decided what to do with the Willys.

"That can't be good for you."

After the events of the previous week, Lane was on edge. At Carol's voice she spun about, her gym bag lashing out. She pulled up short, grunting as the leg and arm weights in the bag slammed into her thigh. Carol pulled back, sudden fear clear on her face. Lane closed her eyes and took a breath, consciously composing herself.

"Sorry. I'm on edge. I'm not some kind of juicer. I have a condition."

"Uh..."

"I'm serious. It's called a myostatin deficiency. It's freak-rare in men. I'm the only girl they'd ever seen with it. Ever hear of osteoporosis?"

"Yeah, but..."

"I'm already getting those effects. Just a little. My bones aren't as heavy as a guy's would be. The lifting helps. The calcium helps. The vitamins help. Keeping myself at such a low body fat that I don't bleed every month helps. But before I'm thirty, I'm going to start breaking bones. Y'know how?"

"Um, no, wait..."

"Isometrically. Y'know, just flexing. Snap, crackle pop. It will start with the little ones. Like my fingers. Then the bigger ones, like ribs and arms. Finally, I'll have to be careful or I'll snap my own hips. So yeah, I take the calcium, and the vitamins, and I take painkillers."

"Lane?"

"What."

"One, that's like, the longest speech I've ever heard you make. Two, that explains a lot of that blow up you had with Mary over the Co-Captaincy. Three, I wasn't talking about the pills, exactly."

"Then what, exactly, were you talking about?"

"Your hands are, like, full of grease."

Lane looked down at her hands. Carol was right. Under the thin dusting of powder from the pills, grease from where she had been working on the Willys' engine coated them. Sighing, she dropped the bag.

"Thanks. I was gonna work out, but I'd probably hurt myself."

"I'll spot you."

"Nah, I have to get the Willys sorted out. Cleaned up, at least."

"Standing offer then. Just let me know."

"Why are you being so nice to me all of a sudden?"

Carol stood there wearing a look of profound confusion. She stared for a few moments, then shook her head and blinked. Lane snorted; the image reminded her of something out of a cartoon.

"You saved our lives. You beat the hell out of things that took down a SEAL."

"Uh, I'm guessing you're not talking about fuzzy water animals that balance balls and honk horns?"

"No. I'm talking about Navy Special Forces. You know, like the movies?"

"I kinda know what you mean by Special Forces. Is that what Mr. Josephs did in the Navy?"

"Yeah. They're like, super action heroes. Those two dog things were gonna get us, and he jumped in the way, and they just took him down, and were eating him, and then you showed up and whack! Whack! You knocked them down like some kind of... I dunno. Warrior mechanic. I mean, seriously."

Lane shrugged, uncomfortable. She really wanted to get back to working on the Willys. She had to get the garage in order before she left. If she didn't get that done soon, she wouldn't have time to study. If she didn't keep her GPA above 3.0, the whole 'Automotive Restoration and Engineering' project would be put on hold. To do any of that, she had to get the silly idiot to stop gushing.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"It wasn't that big a thing, ok?"

"Lane, it was. You saved my life. Not, like, you helped me with a grade, or fixed my dress before a date with a hot guy, or... I would be dead now. Maybe crippled, and that might be worse than dead."

"So it's worse to be crippled than dead? Want to go explain that to Gwen?"

"That's not what I meant!"

"Just... Just go, ok? I really need to get to work."

"Ok. Remember what I said. If you need a spotter, or a hand with anything, let us know."

"Yeah. Thanks. I'll let you know."

Lane lost herself in contemplation of the Willys. She needed to get it onto the lift and get some loose reinforcement attached. A manual winch ratchet should do. She might be able to straighten the frame that way too. Carol's exit went unnoticed as Lane mentally ran through the steps she would need to get the old warhorse's skeleton back in order.

First thing she had to do was get it on the lift. She stepped over beside it and ran a calloused hand over the rusted surface of the metal. It wasn't too ragged, but Mr. Josephs had drilled the need for equipment into her. She went back to the gym bag, got her leather work gloves on, and came back to the frame. She took careful hold at two spots, one on either side of the broken weld, and pushed. The frame twisted, sagged, then moved. She pushed slowly at first, careful not to tip it too far. Once she was certain it wouldn't fall apart if she put pressure on, she threw her full strength behind tipping the frame of the old jeep right side up.

Inertia fought her, but Lane spent hours every day keeping her body in top condition. She heaved, and the entire frame went up and over the point of no return. At that point, she took a firm grip and pulled to slow the entire process. For a moment, she thought the weight of the frame would pull her along. Then she heard the one thing she'd feared most; tearing metal. The fatigued metal holding the frame together gave way; the portions she held coming off in her hands.

Desperately she fought for some compromise between tearing metal and falling frame. There was no chance; the fatigued, rusted metal ripped itself free, leaving her with one short section clutched in each glove. Lane cringed, awaiting the sound of the entire frame hitting the ground the way it had the other day. This time, no emergency had been at fault, only her own impatience to come to grips with something she knew.

There was no clang. There was no crumple. There was instead a sound like metal shifting gently against ceramic. Lane forced her eyes open, and through her squint she saw the jeep, leaning at an angle, on... nothing.

She reached slowly behind her and took a firm grip on her gooseneck pry bar. Since the 'terrorist attack', she hadn't let one get out of reach, although she had to take the small two foot one to class, secreted in her book bag. She clutched the big six-foot monster now. Gripping it with both hands, she edged around the jeep.

"I'd rather you didn't clout me with that thing. I'm not going to bite."

The voice reminded Lane of a guest speaker the school had in her sophomore year. He'd been from India, and his voice had been the oddest combination of precise British enunciation and an incredibly high pitch for a man. This voice was lower, deeper, as if the speaker was a large, hulking man instead of a small, neat one. The bear-dogs hadn't talked, they'd just snapped and bit. Lane still wasn't taking any chances. She kept the bar in a two-handed grip like a baseball bat.

When she rounded the corner and saw what was holding the jeep up, her grip loosened. It kept getting looser the longer she stared. When it tapped the ground with the ringing of metal on concrete, she shook herself and made herself look at what she was seeing.

There was a turtle under the jeep. She was sure on that; her bio teacher had spent days lecturing on the difference between a turtle and a tortoise. The shell was low domed, designed for swimming through water. The jeep rested against that dome, and where it touched there was the faintest dusting of rust where it had flaked off the frame. Beneath the rust was clean, shiny steel, looking factory new, reflecting the carapace of the turtle beneath it.

Lane tightened her grip on the pry bar. Long, graceful flippers extended out from the shell. Flippers designed for crawling along a sandy beach, for pushing the turtle off that beach into the surf, to propel it through the ocean, and hold it steady in strong coastal currents. Not unlike what they were doing with the currents of air flowing from the air conditioning vent.

"I'm not going to drop your jeep, mind you, but if you could see your way clear to lifting it just a bit, I'd like to get out. I can hold it all day, but I can't set it down gently. No opposable thumbs, you see."

The absurdity of the situation caught up with Lane. The administration was right. There had been an attack using trained animals. Bears, dogs, maybe crocodiles, but masked by hallucinogens. Now she was having flashbacks. She was really glad Carol had left before they started.

"By the way you're staring, you don't believe me."

"Why wouldn't I believe you?"

"Perhaps I should say, you don't believe in me. I have a proposition for you."

“Ohhh kay…”

"If I am real, I have just saved your project car when I had no need to. This, I think, entitles me to at least a modicum of polite conversation. It also would behoove you to release me from my current predicament before I release myself. If I am not real, you are hallucinating, and your jeep is either lying broken or you haven't touched it yet."

"If you're not real, I'm going to take some stress out on you with my bar."

"If I'm not real, you can feel free to do so."

With exaggerated care, Lane slid her pry bar under the leaning Willys' frame. When she was sure she had it seated firmly, she pushed upward gently. When the frame held, she increased the pressure slowly, until the whole thing lifted off of the turtle, which continued its inexplicable midair flotation.

"Couldja move? I can't hold this forever."

"Oh, certainly. My apologies."

With a quick flip of his fins, the turtle scooted away. Lane had more important things to worry about than a gravity-defying turtle. Her Willys was not a light automobile. Her muscles ached as she lowered it gently to the ground. Once it settled with a light groan and sifting of rust, she looked up at the turtle, which was taking a lazy spin around the hanging light fixtures.

Lane stared for a bit, her mind racing around in little circles. To give her hands something to do, she wandered over to the Miata and stripped out the windshield washer reservoir. Once she had it out, she checked the feed lines. There wasn't any oil in them as far as she could tell. Grateful, she wandered over to the waste oil barrel to dump the ruined oil. The waste annoyed her, but not as much as the lack of thought that produced it.

She wandered to the shop sink and washed out the container. She wasn't sure if she could get it clean enough to use, but she knew she wasn't going to buy Cathy a new one. Maybe she could...

Sudden inspiration gripped her. She grabbed an old stone paperweight off the shop sink shelf and set it into the reservoir to hold it in the water. Once it was soaking, she jogged into Mr. Josephs' office. There, on a sticky note tacked to his monitor, she found what she was looking for. One hand holding the sticky, she dialed the number without looking. After a half dozen rings, a harried male voice answered.

"Hello. My name is Lane Lake. I'm a teaching assistant over at Martin Van Buren High."

"Yes, I know Mr. Josephs, I'm his assistant."

"No, I'm not planning on taking his job! I'm just filling in 'till he gets back, really."

"I'm not lying! I can't take his job, I'm one of his students!"

"Yeah, I'm that Lane."

"No, I didn't know anything about anyone being brought in to replace Mr. Josephs, I really hope they don't. I was calling to ask if you have a windshield washer reservoir for a '08 Miata."

"Wait, can you leave it in? I want to bring the class out and have them pull it."

"Yeah, I'll fix anything they break."

Lane hung up; satisfied she was finally doing a decent job for Mr. Josephs. She wandered back into the garage proper, wondering why the junkyard owner said he was looking forward to meeting her in person. Absentmindedly, she pulled the washer fluid tank out of the shop sink, scrubbed it out, and dried it off on a shop towel. Looking around, she considered where best to hide it.

"I say, I could put it up in the rafters here. With the glare from the lights, they'd never see it."

Of course, if she was stark raving mad, it was always possible the girls were still here, and she was spreading oil and sand on her face and calling herself chief Ikki Ikki Ikki Kuun.

"Let’s go at this another way. Do you have any friends with experience with altered states of consciousness?"

"Yeah, kinda. Gwen had a bottle of some serious painkillers on her. I'm guessing they're legal, but only just maybe."

"Then I will make you a deal. If she comes here and tells you I am real, will you accept that I am?"

"How do I know she's not part of the hallucination?"

"How do you know you're not a butterfly dreaming it is the Buddha?"

"'Cause I'da got squished when the Willys fell on me the other day."

"At some point you will need to trust the evidence of your senses. I expect that you will be dealing with many such times relatively soon."

Sighing, Lane admitted to herself that the turtle was probably right. Trudging back into Mr. Josephs' office, she dialed Gwen's cell number. After a few rings, Gwen answered, sort of.

"Yeah, mushy mushy to you too. Can you come down to the garage? I really need a hand with something.”

"No, I'm not trying to..."

"Why the..."

"What?! Look, I'm probably just hallucinating this. Carol was right, I shouldn't mix grease and pills. Thanks anyway, I mean it."

"Uh, ok. I'll see you when you get here. Just bang on the garage door."

Lane looked up at the turtle, which glided down to just above head height. Now that she was getting a better look at it, it was pretty. The shell looked like someone had given it a coat of high gloss, and the flippers were almost the texture of the green leather she'd been looking at for the Willys restoration. It wasn't original, but she wasn't an authenticity Nazi. The green would fit the jeep, and the leather would work well for the steering wheel grip.

"Don't even think about skinning me for leather, young miss. I would be most put out."

"Hey, I wasn't. I’m just thinking you're kinda pretty."

"Well. That's the first time anyone's said that to me, I'm sure. Will you accept that if your friend can see me, I'm real?"

"Oh, no. You've got to talk to her too."

"So, a talking sea turtle is odder than a flying one?"

"Yeah. No. Why wouldn't you be able to talk to her?"

"There are a number of reasons, but the most pertinent is that I might not want to. Still, we shall see when she arrives. Is she a pleasant sort like you?"

"Oh, no. She's way depressing most of the time. It's why we stopped hanging out. Well, that, and I started to think she's a little... you know."

"I'm certain I do not."

"I think she likes girls."

"She is supposed to be antagonistic to her own gender?"

"No, I mean she likes them likes them."

"I'm not following."

"I mean she's a lesbian."

"She's Greek then?"

"Huh?"

"From the isle of Lesbos, which is Greek. Unless it has changed hands recently, although she would still be ethnically Greek."

"No, no, no. I mean she... Oh, this is just too weird."

"What is, that your friend is from a Greek island, but isn't Greek herself?"

"No, that I'm explaining unnatural sex acts to a flying turtle."

"Unnatural sex acts? Oh, wait! You mean she prefers gratification of and by members of her own gender?"

"Yeah, that's about the size of it."

"That is strange. Still, you hominids seem to have the oddest reproductive practices. So, you dislike her due to her attraction to females?"

"Oh, no. No way."

"Then why did you stop, as you say, 'hanging out'?"

"She was acting like she was going to put the moves on me. Try to do sex stuff with me."

"Ah, so you felt threatened?"

"No... Well, not really. I mean, she never said anything. I just... I dunno. If she'd asked me, I'da felt obligated, and I don't swing that way. I mean, not even a little. But she's... She's Gwen. I guess it's like a pity thing, and that would make it worse, 'cause she's really pretty. Pretty enough to get a date if she wanted, so she doesn't need pity sex, but... Ah, I dunno."

Lane was startled a moment later by the concept that a turtle could sigh with such expressiveness.

"Forgive my misplaced curiosity. I simply needed to know this; is she likely to be a threat to you?"

"Who, Gwen? Hardly."

"You're certain?"

"Yeah. She'll be here soon. You'll see."