The whirring of rotors filled Noctilucent's ears. Though the ivory stallion wore large headphones that caught on his inky black mane, the eternal hum filled his eardrums and refused to allow him a minute's rest on the flight from Lupine Falls back to Gracia.

Not that he could have gotten any sleep anyway. The back seat of the IS spinner was nothing more than a hard, cushioned bench up against the rear metal wall. Noctilucent's back ached from the hours of flight, made worse by being packed between two agents in black suits.

Across from him sat the grey-and-black spotted Agent Fresco. He had glared at Noctilucent the entire ride, one hoof always near his weapon. Even as they began to descend, once they had reached the outlying suburbs of Gracia, the agent kept his eyes locked on their newest member.

The spinner threw up dust and stray blades of grass as it came down in a park in the middle of a neighborhood about twenty petramin outside of downtown Gracia. It was a quiet and well-kept neighborhood, so naturally the residents flocked to watch the landing of not just a spinner, but an all-white IS spinner.

Ponies gathered in a ring around the spinner kept their hooves on their ears until the blades had finally stopped spinning and the vehicle had come to a complete rest. Not a second later, the anonymous agents were out of the passenger area and working to create a perimeter for them.

Agent Fresco stood and half-helped, half-pulled Noctilucent from his seat, wrangled the headphones off, and escorted him off the spinner and onto the soft soil of the park below them. The pilot waved to them and leaned back in his seat, his job done.

The elder stallion followed Fresco and the other two agents away from the spinner and across the verdant green field to the entrance of the middling suburb. It had all the tenets of its kind: blocks of four models of houses placed close together and done in earthy tones that were bright, but not too bright. The lawns, as usual, were immaculate and the cars in the driveways higher-end.

Farther down the blacktop road, right on the corner, was a house surrounded by police vans and IS cars. Their lights were still flashing and bright green police tape ringed around the perimeter while ponies went in and out of the front door.

"So you brought me back to Gracia to look at Staten's house?" Noctilucent asked. "What's the point? We already know where he's going."

Agent Fresco nodded. "Yes, that is true, but we do not know why. Serenity Valley is home to over ten million citizens; the task of finding them will be impossible without knowing where exactly they'll be heading first."

"Right, sure."

Noctilucent followed the agents down the street and up to the house. He stepped underneath the police tape and up the steps to the small bungalow. The door was off its hinges and hanging to one side while a single agent milled outside. He started when he saw Agent Fresco walk up and did his best to get out of the way. He only gave a cursory glance when the ordinary citizen followed Fresco in.

The interior of the house was a mess, as to be expected, but Noctilucent had a sneaking suspicion that the police weren't the only reason. He remembered that Staten had always been a bit of a slob, so it was unsurprising that his house was as well. The building itself wasn't very big. A small living room with a model kitchen and master bedroom with a bath. There was a study upstairs, he knew, but they had searched every petrabit of that place already.

Fresco turned to him. "Well?" he asked.

"Well what?" Noctilucent replied.

"You're the suspect's friend," the agent said. "We've searched every petrabit of this place: we've gone over his computer records, his phone bills, and his mail. Not a single shred of evidence. That's why you're here, to find what we can't."

"And if I can't find it either?"

Fresco cracked a frightening smile. "Try not to think about it."

Noctilucent looked further around the house. He grinned a little, seeing the serious police agents box up all the little knickknacks and food boxes that Staten had left laying everywhere. He'd never liked to throw anything away, saying it was an archaeologist's duty to find the value in everyday things. How the old coot thought a takeout box would be valuable someday was a mystery, however.

"Well?" Fresco asked after the fourth time Noctilucent had circled the sparse living room, pawing around his video collections and gaming consoles.

"There's nothing here," the older stallion said. "I'm telling you, Staten isn't the kind of stallion to just leave important stuff out where anypony can find it. Even somepony like me."

Fresco's expression didn't change. "Search the study."

Noctilucent sighed, but dutifully walked across the small room, past the kitchen swarming with police officers and agents, and up the stairs toward the study. Staten had invited him for drinks a few times and they had always made their way to the musty old room at some point to swap stories and reminisce about old times.

The warped door to the study hung open like all the others and contained a couple agents who peeked at the sturdy bookshelf against one corner and poked around the desk in the other. Both were ordered out by Fresco, who shut the door behind him.

Noctilucent turned to him. "I really don't think—"

"Keep looking."

The aging finance broker and former archaeologist sighed and moved over to the bookshelf. If Staten had kept anything of use to the IS in the house, it would be there.

He picked out a few books and stared at the titles: The Twilight Code, A Case for Celestia, and The Unicorn Delusion. He rolled his eyes, but Fresco seemed to find interest in the doorstop-sized novels.

"Your friend was certainly . . . interested in the Old World Myths," he said.

Noctilucent shrugged. "Every archaeologist gets a little interested in this kind of stuff at some point, I suppose. In the end, though, you dig enough and you figure out for yourself that there's no such thing as a 'Canterlot' or a flying pony outside of little kids' stories."

"And Mr. Staten believed differently?"

"I wouldn't say he believed in them," Noctilucent said, "but not as skeptical, I guess. He used to have this theory, you see, Celestia and Luna, the big ones, were like gods to the ponies and that, maybe, they angered them and the two took away their wings, horns, and magic, then wiped the world clean."

He chuckled a little. "He was a Solarist when he was younger, but kind of gave that up, so I guess he wanted to believe something. Used to give me crap for being an Adanist, I'll tell you what."

Fresco seemed to have retreated back into his shell and gave Noctilucent a blank stare once more, as if he knew more than he wanted to say. "Keep looking," he ordered.

Noctilucent scanned the bookshelf once more, over the covers of passé sci-fi novels and big fantasy series that Staten had kept since his youth. Then, he spotted one book out of place among the rest. Its black spine stuck out from the orderly shelf, as if it had been put back in a hurry.

He took it out and his eyes widened when he saw the cover. Teton Atlas. When he flipped it open, it turned to a page not quite in the middle of the thick book. What was more important than the page it turned to, however, was the ones that had been torn out of the book near the front.

Fresco appeared next to him. "What do you have?" he asked.

"It looks like he tore out some maps," Noctilucent said, then whistled. "If I'm reading this right, they were the maps for the area in and around Amperdam."

"Amperdam? What's there?" Fresco snapped.

"Nothing, nothing." Noctilucent shook his head. "We only went there a few times. We never did anything except—"

"Except what?"

He paused. "Have you had any agents sent over to my house since you got me and my wife?"

"We had a few patrolling near there for your daughter and Mr. Staten, but they left once the pair had run from the police with Mr. Reddington. Why?"

Noctilucent shut the book with a thump. "Get me over there right now."

---

The ride over to his house in the back of the police car had Noctilucent on edge the entire time. He kept looking out the window at the lunchtime traffic and willed it to move so they could reach his house before Staten got any farther with his daughter.

That thought set him on edge.

Every time he shut his eyes, it seemed, his mind was assaulted with the images of Staten dragging Starlight further and further away from him, and toward whatever danger his old partner had gotten himself into this time.

Dammit, Staten, why didn't you pick me for this fool adventure? Why Starlight?

After what seemed like an eternity inside the stuffy police car, they arrived in front of his house. Noctilucent noticed more damage than he had when he'd been shoved into a van in the middle of the night and winced a little. He wasn't here to look over the damage, however, and leapt from the car once they let him out.

He bounded up the front steps, through the front door, and across his living room to his study. He paused for a moment at the destruction that had been brought down on it, but then looked around for what he knew in his heart was already gone.

Sure enough, after a moment of searching, he found the family portrait he had paid for many years ago. And, like he had most feared, the front was cut out and the disc inside was missing.

Noctilucent threw the picture aside and sat in the rubble of his study, trying to keep the thoughts of Staten taking his daughter to her away.

Fresco popped his head into the room and stared at the older stallion. "Do you know where Mr. Staten has gone?" he asked.

"Get a spinner out here," Noctilucent ordered. "We need to get to Amperdam."

---

Agent Nightcall sat on the hard, uncomfortable interrogator's chair in the Sundown IS office's interview room and wondered if the furniture was as bad on the other side of the big, metal table. The copper-colored stallion with the soft, wavy golden mane that he been worn and fringed from stress stared down at the papers that had been faxed from Lupine Falls to him.

Across the table sat Sunny Skies, her hooves crossed in front of her teal chest and her icy blue eyes staring daggers at her would-be interrogator. For the twenty minutes the two had spent in the room together, she had not said one word.

Night sighed and took out a prisoner interrogation form from the bottom of the folder and put it at the top of the stack of papers. He clicked open a pen and asked, "Name: last, then first with middle initial."

Sunny snorted. "You already know my name."

"It's for the official form; just tell me, okay? I don't like this anymore than you do."

"Skies, Sunny D," she growled.

"Great." Night wrote it down at the top of the form. "Height, weight, date of birth."

"Ten petras tall, a thousand pounds, and the beginning of time."

He put the pen down and rubbed his forehead. "Look, I know you're mad, but there isn't anything I can do about it. You want to get mad at somepony, take it up with our head office. Right now, I just have to do this for the records."

"Well, I may be happier to answer your questions if I knew what I was even being stuck in here for," she said. "Last time I checked, holding me without a reason was against the law, but you IS colts have never been good at obeying that, have you?"

"Look, the information of what's even going on is just now getting down to us over here," Night snapped. "We don't know much either! We're stuck in the dark and while you get to sit here and stew I have to be out there trying to figure out a way to keep this whole situation from falling apart!"

He took a deep breath and tapped his pen against the form once again. "Look, you help me with this and I'll tell you what I know, okay? It may come as a surprise to you, but I like obeying the law. Now: height, weight, and date of birth."

Sunny continued to leer at him, but answered, "Two petra and three petrabits, sixty-one pounds, and June 7, 2017."

"Place of employment and job title."

"The University of Sundown and Professor of Hippology — Doctor."

"Alright, good," Night said as he wrote it down. "Now, the important thing: relation to Dr. Staten Lane, curator of the Gracia Museum of History and Science?"

Sunny's eyes narrowed. "So this is about him, is it?"

"It's what Lupine Falls wants." He shook his head. "Not my question."

"Well you can tell them that, oh yeah, he's my dad! Yeah, we haven't talked in a while, but he's my father and if they think I'll tell them anything about him, they can shove it up their overly-puckered flankholes."

Night smiled a little. "I'll write 'No Comment.'"

Sunny leaned back in her chair. "Okay, so I gave you the whole story on me, now why don't you hold up your end and tell me just why I'm still in here?"

Night shuffled the document back into the folder with the rest. He'd have one of his desk jockeys send it off to Lupine Falls and hope they didn't respond very fast. He leaned forward on the table and cleared his throat.

"From what we know, your reasons for being held is a little more . . . complicated . . . than the deal with that couple in the other room. Most of it stems from the crystal heart we were forced to remove from the dig site."

"It didn't used to be so active," Sundown said.

"As we are well aware. Its transformation is what has us worried the most. According to readings from around the edge of Sundown, that thing was pouring out more radiation than a megabomb, and it still is. If we scanned you right now, you'd probably be white-hot."

Sunny raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't the only pony there, you know. There were dozens of ponies: financiers, board members, faculty, and the rest."

"And we're doing all we can for them too; they've been escorted to the hospital." He sighed. "The only problem with you is your ties to the heart being there in the first place and the relationship your father has with the object and his current position with the Intelligence Service and Teton Government."

"You want to arrest him."

"I've been informed that he fled the city of Gracia with his former partner's daughter and a smuggler. We're being told that they're on their way here. Of course we want to arrest them."

"For what?" Sunny cried. "What have I or my father done that could possibly justify this kind of treatment?"

"We are only holding you and wish to hold your father until we can figure out all that is going on," Night said. "Or do you want to be out there on the streets, walking around like some rad bomb?"

Sunny sat back in her seat and didn't say a word. She looked away, towards the one-way mirror, and refused to respond to any more questions the agent posed to her. The interview was over.

Agent Nightcall sighed, collected the document folder and walked out. In the hall, he instructed a junior agent to escort Miss Skies back with the other prisoners in their room.

On his way back to his desk, Night was joined by Agent Flower, who stepped out of the other interview room and gave a big yawn. The light violet mare had dark circles ringing her golden eyes, and her maroon mane was almost as frayed as Night's was. She had discarded the heavier trappings of her Agent uniform, leaving only a white undershirt and black trousers.

"I take it your interview with the proud parents didn't go so well?" Night asked once they had reached his desk. He just about threw himself into his chair, which squeaked and groaned in protest. He took a cup of coffee off his desk, sipped it, decided it wasn't too old, and drained it.

The oppressive desert heat had started to set in for the day once again, and the fans around the office were going at full blast, though they did little to bring relief to the poorly-ventilated office.

"Shockingly, new parents don't want to be told they can't go home with their child," Flower said, taking a seat in a plastic chair somepony had brought for her. "Explaining the finer points of security protocol was more an exercise in patience than anything else."

Night smirked. "An exercise they won, huh?"

"You could say that."

"And I am." The supervising agent laughed and scratched at his mane. "Can you even believe all this crap? We're getting news from Lupine about radiation and mutations and all this other bull. They're talking like it's the 90s or something with all the dirty bomb scares and mutant ponies."

"I don't . . . I don't even know what to believe," Flower said, leaning forward in her chair and putting her head in her hooves. The once resilient and stone-faced agent now just shook her head and frowned. "Bringing them in was hard enough, but now it's like every hour that passes, things get worse. There's talks of quarantining the entire city, and who is supposed to do that? The Army's out in Sethton, the police force here is only big enough to keep a tight watch on downtown and, well, we're overwhelmed by three stubborn prisoners."

"Close the city? Really?" Night asked.

"It might just be a rumor, but who knows at this point? Phones are tied up at Lupine and what we get from them is conjecture at best."

The both of them were silent for a moment. The office around them was quiet as agents who had worked through the night fought to keep themselves awake. Night leaned back in his chair and tried to get comfortable.

"What are we going to do, Rose?" Night asked, using the name he'd found in glimpsed on Flower's paperwork.

Rose raised an eyebrow and rested her hooves against his desk. "Are we on first name terms now?"

"I try to get familiar with my agents as best I can," Night said quickly. He turned to an agent at a desk not far from him. "Isn't that right, Blackstone?"

"My name's Topaz," the agent said. "Jerk."

"Right you are, Tom," Night said, then turned back to Flower. "See? Familiarity."

The agent rolled her eyes and put her forehooves behind her head. "Well, to answer your question, Night, I'm not really sure what we are supposed to do at the moment. Headquarters hasn't given us much in the way of direct orders that we haven't done already and we're all taxed out today. If I may, I might go find somewhere to take a nap."

Night tapped a hoof against his chin. "Well, you could do that, but when's the last time you've eaten?"

"Yesterday, why?"

"Well, there's a good diner just around the corner." Night scratched the back of his head. "Want to go grab something? Strictly business, of course."

Flower smiled a little. "Strictly business? You promise?"

"I'm a stallion of my honor," Night said.

"Alright, then let's go. I'm starving here."

---

A steady downpour of rain beat against the front windshield of the Odyssey. The RV idled in the middle of a dozen other still cars on the Red Road, all stalled while they waited to pass through the final mountain pass and into Serenity Valley.

It was late in the day and the heavy clouds overhead glowed orange from the setting sun. They had spent the entire day on the road and would make it to the valley just as night fell.

Red sat in the front seat, his head resting on his hoof as he idly watched the cars in front of him. In the seat next to him, sprawled out in the leather chair, was Staten Lane. His eyes were closed and jaw hung open.

At the back of the recreational vehicle, curled up in the small bed with the blanket wrapped around her, was Starlight. She had pushed her way against the pillow and slept quietly through the trip.

The steady beat of raindrops against the back window kept her in a dreamless sleep as she waited for the Odyssey to make it past the mountains and into the valley. For the moment, she was content to sleep.

Then, the traffic started to move again.

It was so sudden that Red jerked in his chair before putting the Odyssey in gear and following the cars in front of him. As if a lever had been pulled, the stalled traffic melted into a throbbing vein of cars moving steadily forward.

Staten awoke to the sound of the cars and looked around. "We're moving again?" he asked.

Red nodded and smile. "You're going to want to get that daughter of yours for this. We're almost out of the mountains."

Staten nodded and slid out of his chair. He stumbled across the interior of the RV as it moved, then wrenched open the door at the back.

The beam of light that invaded the small bedroom hit Starlight in the face and she awoke with a sigh. "What is it?" she mumbled.

"We're almost to Serenity Valley," the professor said. "I thought you might enjoy your first view of it."

"Can't it wait?"

"Not if you don't want to miss it."

Starlight debated for a few seconds about whether to stay in bed, then sighed and swung herself out of the bed. Her hooves touched the cold floor—she winced—and then followed Mr. Staten out of the bedroom and toward the front of the RV once again.

The road ahead of them rose up until it came to a crest where it sloped down the other side. The Odyssey neared the top just as Starlight and the professor joined their smuggler by his side.

"You ever seen this before, kid?" he asked.

She shook her head. "Never."

The RV finally made its way to the top of the hill and, for a moment, rested on the top.

"Well then," Red said, "welcome to Serenity Valley."