The smell of combusted cloth and ozone permeated the air.

“Bad! Bad – very bad!” I screamed as a violet bolt of magical energy screamed over my shoulder. The temperature outside and in was supposed to be below zero.

And yet everything around me was melting into molten slag.

The security-bots were getting closer.

Energy cannons shrieked behind me, their blinding muzzle flashes illuminating the factory like an epileptic light show. Energy bolts punched smoking, melting holes into the walls and floor as I made a mad dash for cover.

I heaved myself over a blackened, unopened crate - and landed in someone’s crumbling skeleton. The blackened bones shattered beneath my weight. I would’ve screamed if I wasn’t already panicking from the lasers bolts showering over me.

One beam flashed across the top of my head, splitting the ends of my red mane.

“AHH – hot, hot, hot! FUCK!” I patted out the small fire that was beginning to burn my scalp. With my hair smoking and the floor on either side of the crate a molten slag, I started to think that there wasn’t going be a way out of that mess.

“Damnit!” I hissed, as their lasers burned through the air, “Don’t those things ever overheat!?”

“DIE, ZEBRA SCUM,” a robot droned as its energy casters whirred and screeched a barrage of violet bolts of crackling magic.

In an instant, the world around me flashed. The crate atomized behind me and I fell flat on my back, hooves in the air into a pile of glowing, incinerated matter.

The laserfire stopped.

I rose to shaky hooves, looked up, and saw half a dozen tracked robots with smoking energy cannons rolling towards me. Upon the robots' heads were … what I hoped weren’t pony brains, spinal cord and all, contained within cylindrical glass cases.

I clenched my mouth bit and eyed my horrifyingly low ammo count. I’d found out earlier that those damned tin cans were unfazed by body shots. SATS was my only ticket out of that soup sandwich.

I couldn’t shoot them where it hurt without my training wheels.

Thankfully, whoever designed those robobastards didn’t put too much thought into protecting their only weak point: their brains – or installing a functional IFF.

‘How clichéd,’ I thought.

A flanged, metallic voice droned from the smoke and darkness.

"Confirm: E.K.I.A?"

I stepped out into the open. “H-hey there, you guys,” I called out to them, my mane still smoking. I lifted a shaky hoof, beaming them with my PipBuck’s glow as the boiling heat beneath me began to dissipate. “I-I’m actually a pony, not a zebra, so if you could please just –”

"Negative. Tango is still active. BURN STRIPED SCUM." A curse slipped out of my lips as their weapons screamed to life.

The touch of white hot death seared past my left flank as I dove for cover behind a forklift. It sparked and melted away, bearing the brunt of the magical onslaught. At the rate it was withering away I knew that it wasn’t going to hold for long. Now with my ass smoking too, I double-timed it for the closest door I could find. The tin cans raced after me. They were gaining on me – fast. I could hear the roar of their engines scream closer and closer.

The world lit up with streaks of teal as I slipped into SATS mid-gallop.

“You will not escape, zebra intruder –”

"I'M NOT A FUCKING ZEBRA, GODDESSES DAMNIT!"

My pistol kicked in my mouth, and its brain case exploded in a shower of gray matter. It stuttered and went limp – only to be plowed out of the way by the rest as they revved after me, lasers flashing.

But no matter how many I put down, another came screaming to take its place. That factory was crawling with them, and as laser bolts flashed across the factory floor, the number of shadows that lurched across the walls reminded me of how wrong I was before I’d arrived.

It was bad. Real bad.

One violet beam flashed on high, and the shadow of a tracked tin can painted itself briefly against the floor in my path. I nearly stopped in my tracks – only to find that it wasn’t in front of me.

It was above me.

The shrieking uproar of metal being sheared in half pierced my ears. I jerked my head upwards and saw the shuddering catwalk that hung precariously over me.

A raving robobrain raced across it.

“Z-Z-ZEBRA – ZEBRAZEEEEEBBRAAAAA –”

“Fuck.”

The robot fell first.

It careened into the floor in front of me, still screaming. In a dull explosion of shattered limbs and liquefied brains, it perished. Slimy gray matter splattered onto my face and metal fragmentation nicked my bare flesh.

Then the air suddenly felt a few thousand tons heavier.

I heaved myself out of the way just as the catwalk careened into the floor behind me, quaking the earth beneath my hooves. A massive plume of debris erupted into the ceiling, blinding my eyes and every howling death robot around me.

A painful groan rasped out of my lips. I lay there spread-eagled and coughing beneath the smoke, blood streaming down my face. Pulling back my splayed limbs, I tried to sit up - but something yanked me back down to the floor. I jerked my head back, ready to deplete my SATS charges into whatever robo shit for brains had clamped down on my tail.

It wasn’t.

It wasn’t a robot.

My tail ... my tail …

It was trapped beneath the catwalk.

“Fuh … fuh … f-f-f ...”

“VISUAL REESTABLISHED. ENGAGING.”

The catwalk blocked their path. So they just started melting through it.

I pulled. And pulled. And pulled. Sweat poured down my face and chilled instantly in the freezing air. I could see the flashing violet glows getting closer and closer through the dust and darkness.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, OH FUCK – THIS!”

I cried out, tucked in my legs, and bucked as hard as I could against the catwalk behind me.

I didn’t even realize I was screaming as I ripped – tore – and shredded myself free.

I didn’t have to look to know that my tail was gone.

My ass was on fire.

I tossed a few hundred bits into my swear jar as just about every swear word in the books howled through my teeth.

I screamed my throat raw and galloped to the first door I could find. A sign above labeled it ‘Maintenance’. It didn’t matter where I went. I slammed into the door and wrenched it open, tumbling inside as my hind legs slammed it closed.

I glanced up with stars in my eyes, and found that I wasn’t alone.

“– no, come on – come on!” I heard someone hiss.

I saw the streaks in her curly mane first. They were red and white … like a candy cane.

“Candy Cane?” I breathed, eyes widening.

She was in the process of jamming a hairpin into a door’s lock and feeling for its innards with a screwdriver when she swung her head around to see me.

“Oh no.”

With a violent twist, she forced the lock and bucked it open.

“STOP!” I scrambled to my hooves and nearly slipped upon an empty potion bottle as I bounded after her and out the door.

“Get away from me!” the mare screamed, her horn flashing silver. A shelf packed with maintenance supplies crashed to the floor at my hooves. I leaped over it – and a lightbulb exploded against my skull. I blinked away flecks of blood, clenching my jaw and galloping after her as she yanked down light fixtures in my path.

Glass shattered beneath my hooves as I shrugged off bulb after bulb. The hall was getting shorter.

She turned a corner and stopped, her back against a wall. I could see the defiance etched upon her face.

“You won’t get away with this!” I screamed, and lunged after her, hooves outstretched.

But she threw herself out of the way at the very last moment and my face greeted the concrete wall with an audible thump. Stars exploded in my eyes and I barely noticed the blur that was her tail as she pounded her hooves farther and farther away.

Candy Cane found the door at the other end of the hall, her magic glowing around a screwdriver as she picked at the lock with a bobby pin. I struggled to get to my hooves, but collapsed once more in my daze.

That was all the time she needed. Candy Cane shoved the door open, glancing over her shoulder before disappearing outside. I shook the stars from my eyes and hobbled after her.

“Fucking …” I murmured, rounding the corner only to see her halfway down a flight of stairs leading to the factory floor.

Too bad I needed her alive.

My eyes followed her across the factory floor. I let out an irritated groan. Stretching out into the factory’s depths was a network – no, a mess of assembly lines and conveyor belts. And she was going to disappear inside of it.

I bounded down the steps after her, skipping four at a time – nearly smashing my skull in as I slipped and rolled down the last five. By the time I was up again, the mare was already twenty yards away from me, galloping as fast as she could across the factory floor.

“INTRUDERS DETECTED,” dozens of synthesized voices shrieked in unison. “ENGAGING DEFENSIVE PROTOCOLS – WEAPONS FREE.” Red lights flashed, and from the metal alcoves in the walls rolled out more robobrains.

They revved after us, their twin-linked energy casters glowing like demon eyes in the darkness.

I groaned, “You’ve gotta be SHITTING me!”

A robobrain veered into my path, blocking any view I had of Candy Cane. My muscles tensed and my eyes clenched shut.

I slammed my body into its metal frame, its arms flailing, energy weapons flashing. I felt the skin on my face prickle and burn as its energy casters hissed and erupted with violet spellfire on either side of my cheeks.

With a defiant scream, I jammed my pistol into its brain case and yanked the trigger back.

CRACK!

Gray matter and reeking fluids dribbled down my face. I heaved the robot away from me, and found that Candy Cane was even further away. I was losing her fast.

To my surprise, she leaped onto the conveyor belt, unassembled parts and debris scattering to the floor in her wake. I pounded after her, tossing aside everything in my path. With the automated machines blocking the robots’ line of fire, their computers couldn’t plot any firing solutions.

Good for the both of us. Until the lights on the machines flickered to life and the conveyor belt began to move.

My eyes widened as I saw the gray shimmer around her horn fade away.

“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY!?”

She shouted back, “You’re crazy for following me here!”

The darkness gave way as the factory sprang to life, my eyes blinded for a moment as the lights overhead drowned us out with a flickering white glare.

Then I saw it. I wished that she had just kept the lights off.

A massive, chomping maw of steel devoured the unassembled parts before us and pancaking them into different shapes.

I was about to get butchered by an oversized cookie-cutter.

I watched as Candy Cane dove into its groaning maw. Then it slammed closed.

“Luna’s fucking grace!”

It opened once more and all that came out were more metal parts.

I stood there frozen on my hooves – but the conveyor belt just kept rolling.

‘Oh no.’

“FUCK. EVERYTHING.”

I closed my eyes, threw my hooves in front of me, and dove forward. Utter darkness fell over me. Metal pounded against metal, and a shrill ringing screeched into my ears.

Then the machine opened once more and I was outside – the stub that was my tail just barely an inch away from being caught between its teeth.

Candy Cane glanced over her shoulder, her eyes widening. I suppose she thought that that should’ve killed me.

I glared at her as she galloped away.

A rivulet of sweat trickled over my brow.

“Are you fucking serious …” I murmured.

And she leaped off the conveyor belt.

Nearly half a story below, she landed, scrambling onto another. I made another jump, and barely stuck my landing beside a cylindrical case about the size of a stallion’s torso.

Coming in fast was a machine that bolted onto the cases the metal parts that had been shaped from earlier. I saw Candy Cane duck into one of the tin cans as six different machines impaled the shell to oblivion.

My stomach ached as I imagined one of those bolts driving into my chest. I swore under my breath. My metal coffin awaited me. I crawled inside and cringed. The machines roared as they screwed and tunneled and bled out my eardrums with their bolt drivers. Now completely and utterly deaf, I heard nothing but the ringing in my ears as I hurled the tin can off of me and sent my hooves pounding across the conveyor belt in the shrill silence.

With the mare leading the way, she cleared the path for me as she tossed aside metal shells in her path. But a machine that was supposed to tip the cylinders upright scooped her up from behind and dumped her onto her face.

“Fuck -”

Cold metal slammed into my face. The machine scooped me up off my thrashing hooves and dumped me back down onto the conveyor belt. I panicked - and slipped off the edge.

Screaming, I hung from the conveyor belt twenty feet above the factory floor for my dear life with a single hoof as it dragged me along the line at a full on gallop. I threw my left hoof high and found purchase, wrenching myself up and over.

I stood there – eyes widening, seconds away from another automated death trap. The machine roared closer. It shoved parts off the assembly line as its other half sparked and shuddered.

I closed my eyes and covered my face with my hooves.

The machine slammed into me, hurling me off the assembly line to fall to my death. But a swinging mechanical claw broke my fall. Then another conveyer belt. And another machine. I tumbled through the air in free fall and slammed onto the floor on my back, my body beaten, bruised, and aching. I cursed under my trembling gasps, wondering if I’d broken anything.

I lay there questioning how I was still alive.

A painful moan gathered my attention elsewhere as I rose to my hooves. Candy Cane had landed a stone’s throw away from me.

“Give up!” I panted, ejecting my pistol’s mostly spent magazine and tucking it into my pocket.

Candy Cane scrambled to her hooves, and half limped, half ran away.

“JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!” she cried.

I loaded my last magazine and entered SATS.

I tagged her legs ... but my firing solution was taking too long to calculate. She was fast. Too fast. If I missed and struck her chest, she’d die. Then I’d never find the Orphanage. I threw off my training wheels and snarled after her.

We neared a wide, shattered window pane that lined the entirety of the wall on that side of the factory. She’d do anything to escape. I wasn’t surprised when she hurled herself into the window pane and sent it crashing into the snow outside.

Without so much of a pause, I leaped after her, rolling down a heaping mound of snow that had nearly buried the concrete wall behind me.

The mare punched a deep outline into the drifts, the powder breaking most of her fall. My flailing limbs threw up showers of snow as I struggled to rise to my aching four legs. But she beat me to it. Growling in frustration, I lunged after her, trying to chomp down on her tail, but she lashed out with her hind legs and blinded me with a hail of ashen snow.

I sputtered, spitting the powder out of my mouth and shaking it off my muzzle.

She was already on her hooves, and limping away from me.

I snarled, “It's over Candy Cane!”

I slogged after her in the knee-deep snow, my PipBuck’s light flashing across the drifts. Her heavy, panicked gasps and my irritated murmuring were the only sounds among those abandoned lines of storage containers.

She knew the end was near.

Candy Cane finally collapsed, wheezing for air to fill her lungs – but that didn’t stop her. She crawled. She crawled away from me, her tail disappearing around a corner.

I made the turn and watched as she dragged herself across the snow ... in vain. A stack of crates, piled high above our heads made the alleyway between the storage containers on either side of me a dead end.

Candy Cane threw herself against the wall behind her. She peered up at me as I approached, my pistol drawn.

“Please … let me go,” she begged, tears welling up in her eyes. Her eyes. I locked my burning gaze with hers and stared into her watery grays. Her steel gray eyes.

All my anger dissipated like an evanescent dream.

I froze, with another mare’s name upon my lips. Shivers ran down my spine as she spoke.

“Don’t make me go back … please … don’t make me go back … just tell Grifter and his Palominos I’m dead,” Candy Cane sobbed pathetically, tears streaming down her rosy cheeks. A lock of her curly red and white mane fell over one of her eyes as she hung her head, weeping silently. “I’m dead … tell them I’m dead …”

“Wha … what are you talking about?” I uttered, trembling on my hooves.

She looked up at me in desperation with defeated, teary eyes. The mare parted her mane with a shaking hoof.

Around her neck was a collar. It blinked red with every second that dragged by.

‘Dear Celestia.’

“You … you’re a slave,” I whispered, the hairs on my coat standing on end.

“If you want the money … please … just take it … take it and let me go!” she begged through trembling lips, reaching into her jacket.

A sack of jingling caps landed in front of me.

I could only stare, frozen upon my hooves as Candy Cane’s shoulders rocked with miserable sobs. She wept into her hooves, shaking her head and wiping them away only for more to stream hopelessly down her cheeks.

Doubt ran circles around my head. My right eye twitched as I struggled to stay aloft on my own four hooves.

Candy Cane's trembling voice broke my heart like glass.

“Don’t make me go back … I-I don’t want to go back!” she begged between her quaking sobs. “I don’t want to go back anymore … No more - PLEASE! Don’t make me go back there! They’ll hurt me … again and again!”

I lowered a trembling hoof to the snow and picked up the sack of caps. Candy Cane went silent. I looked up and saw her staring at me with her teary, anguished eyes. Her steel gray eyes.

A second passed as I lost myself in her hauntingly familiar gaze, entranced.

Distraught. Disturbed. I clenched my eyes shut as my stomach churned and my head spun.

Then a shrill cry shattered my rapturous state.

“I WON’T LET YOU TAKE ME BACK, YOU FUCKING CAFONE PIECE OF SHIT!”

Candy Cane hurled herself at me, a knife enveloped in her magical grip.

I slipped into SATS.

My hindhooves bucked into her chest.

Candy Cane slammed into the wall of crates behind her before crashing into the snow in a writhing heap.

“NO!” she wailed as I threw myself on top of her, pinning her flailing limbs into the snow.

“NO – NO – NO!”

The mare shrieked with everything she had left.

“NOOOOO!”

Candy Cane thrashed beneath me, screaming like a frenzied, cornered animal until she screamed her throat raw and her muscles burned out. Nearly a minute passed, her heavy gasps for air barely audible over the howling wind.

She let her head roll across her shoulders, laying her cheek in the snow. The buttons on her winter coat was torn loose, revealing beneath me the ribs of her heaving, naked chest.

“Just … just do it …” she rasped in between breaths. “Just do it …” Candy Cane clenched her eyes shut and whimpered softly … shivering ... unable to shed anymore tears in her weary, pathetic state. She just lied there, pinned to the snow beneath my hooves. She didn’t resist. She didn’t utter a single word ...

… not a single word as she parted her hindlegs beneath me.

A horrified gasp escaped my lips.

I lifted my hooves off of her slender, trembling legs. She was broken. And I was afraid that I’d broken her too. I touched one of her forelegs, her leg too thin to fill her entire sleeve, one too many sizes big for her. One was bloodied and bandaged tightly where Dawdleshoes had shot her. Even now unhindered by my weight, she could do nothing but lie there.

Defeated.

I stared down at the sobbing mare with wide eyes. The bomb collar continued to blink. Every flashing pulse was a quaking flashback to my meeting with Sugar Rum’s crew.

Slavers. Slavers. Slavers.

She was a slave.

“What are you?” I still asked, unable to believe the thoughts that screamed at me inside my head. I closed my eyes, covering my face with a hoof.

There was only silence. I opened them, and Candy Cane was still sobbing quietly, snow clinging to her disheveled red and white mane.

“I … I’m a pony … I’m a pony … not a fucking … slut. Not a … whore. Not a slave. I’m a pony. I’m a fucking pony …” she wept, her voice trembling.

I blinked away the tears in my eyes as her cries echoed through my ears. All that time I was chasing … a victim. A victim. It tore me apart knowing that I would have murdered her if I wasn’t trying to take her alive.

I was after the wrong pony. I was helping the wrong pony.

Grifter was a slaver. A Palomino. A liar … a manipulative scumbag sack of pony garbage!

And to think I was going to exchange information for another pony’s life! Candy Cane’s life ...

I touched her face with a hoof, gently rolling her head to face me. Candy Cane’s eyelids fluttered open.

“I’m … I’m not one of them,” I told her. “I won’t hurt you.”

She closed them once more. “You’re lying … you don’t know how many times I’ve heard that … how many times they’ve hurt me anyways. You don’t know … you’re lying …”

“NO!” I shouted, suddenly. She shuddered beneath me, her bloodshot eyes widening. “I’m not a fucking Palomino … they lied to me. Grifter. Lied to me. He said you mugged – mugged his customer! Daintybelle said you stabbed her – tried to kill her! I ... I thought you were one of them!” I cried, my chin quivering as my blood began to boil.

“He fucking lied to me, told me that if I brought you back, he’d help me … I … I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not like them. I’m not a monster.” I looked into her eyes, pleadingly. “Please believe me … I won’t hurt you.”

She sniffled, wiping away the frost that had formed upon her cheeks. I collapsed to my haunches, my head hung as I stared blankly at the ashen snow.

All of it … everything Grifter told me was bullshit … it was all fucking pony feathers. As I sat there in turmoil, Candy Cane’s voice pulled me back into the light.

“I … I believe you …”

The mare sat down in front of me, staring at the snow under her hooves with desolate eyes.

“What’s your name … I mean you already know mine,” she asked.

“Red Dawn … my name’s Red Dawn. I’m sorry, Candy Cane … I-I didn’t know. Goddesses damnit … I didn’t know.”

She nodded, quietly, running a hoof through the snow.

“Daintybelle … you spoke with Daintybelle, didn’t you?”

I looked up at her and nodded.

“She was a regular customer at the Sultry Scullion … she really liked me,” Candy Cane began, distantly. “Daintybelle always chose me … she has a husband you know? Says that I … I can make her feel better than her husband can. She … she really liked me. She’d always pay extra to … to … ” she looked away, shaking her head as she teetered on the edge of breaking down into tears once more.

I cradled my head in my hooves. “That … two-faced whore … she lied to me.”

“I got tired of it …” Candy Cane sighed softly, her voice hoarse. “I got tired of all of it … so I decided I’d leave. I stabbed her … took her caps … and ran …”

She looked up at me with uncertain, watery gray eyes. “So … now what? What … what are you going to do to me?”

I said nothing as my blood boiled in my veins. My head spun so fast that I wanted to puke. I stared at her bomb collar, watching it blink with every burning second that ticked by. A shallow breath escaped my lips, and I hung my head, trembling with rage.

I’d already made up my mind before the thought even came to my head.

“I’m going to bust you out of there.” I looked her in the eyes. “For good.”

Candy Cane snorted, shaking her head hopelessly. “What makes you think you can? I’ve escaped so many times but they've always been able to find me ...”

“It doesn’t matter if you’ve escaped at all, because you still have your collar on,” I growled, quietly. Candy Cane looked at her hooves. “I know what those things can do …”

“They’d never pop me," she whispered, "They’d never just throw me away like that … not while I can still ...” She shook her head, vigorously. “That’s why they’ve always brought me back.”

I fell silent, hatred seething within me.

“I’m going to get that collar off of you,” I said, softly, barely containing my rage.

“How?”

“There’s a detonator. Grifter has to have one. If there’s a detonator, he can make it pop. If there’s a detonator, I can make it go dark.” I slammed a hoof in the snow. “I just have to take it from him …”

Candy Cane shook her head. “You’d never get that close … his guards, they’ll put you down before you can even get close to him.”

I held up my right foreleg. “I have a PipBuck. I can drop all of them at once with its targeting system.” I clenched my eyes shut, shaking my head. “… I’ll make this right …

“I’ll make them pay.”

I brooded in silence as she sat there, wiping her weary eyes for what seemed like hours.

“You … you’d do this for me?” Candy Cane shook her head, wistfully. “You don’t even know me … I-I don’t even know you.”

“Has anyone ever tried to help you escape?” I asked.

No answer.

“Anyone?”

Still nothing.

“Then believe me … I’ll help you … because no one else will.”

Candy Cane stared at me in silence. All I could hear were her sobs as she began to weep.

“You’d do this for me? Y-you really would?” she cried, distantly.

I hung my head in solemn quietude. Those zebra villagers … I let them die. I watched as those mercs slaughtered them all. Those ponies that Sugar Rum’s crew enslaved … I let them die. I watched as those blood letters slaughtered them all.

I wasn’t going to let Candy Cane be another person that I could’ve – should’ve saved.

“Yes. But you have to trust me … we would need to go back.”

Her eyes widened.

“No …” she whispered, clenching her eyes shut.

I held her shoulder with a hoof. “I’ll need to get close to him.”

“No … no please …”

“Candy Cane …” I touched the collar around her neck, its red light flashing in my eyes. “It’s the only way to get that collar off of you. Even if you run, even if you leave the city … you’ll never be able to get away. As long as you have the thing around your neck, you’ll never escape.”

She shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Okay … okay … I want to be a pony, Red Dawn … I want to be a pony.”

Candy Cane sat there as I rubbed her shuddering shoulders. I closed her winter coat, and she hugged the fabrics close to her chest.

“You already are. You just have a bomb collar around your neck.”

I led Candy Cane through the market, the Sultry Scullion not too far away, its colorful, flickering neon signs only adding fuel to my fire.

There he was. The liar. The Palomino. The grifter.

“I have her,” I said, approaching the stallion and his three henchponies.

“Ah, there’s the big-balled palooka! Look at him – how’d a small pony like that wrangle that wild mustang when a big boy like you couldn’t?” He chuckled, grinning at dumbass Dawdleshoes. “Heh, maybe I might just hire this colt and put you on mop-duty?”

Twiggy and Dahlia laughed, and the idiot stallion grumbled something incomprehensible. It didn’t matter. All I was doing was planning ways to put bullets through their heads.

Grifter cocked his head at me. “Why the long face, kid?”

“I … I went through a lot of shit to get her back,” I muttered through my teeth as I twitched the stub that was my tail. My eyes narrowed at him. “Don’t forget about our agreement.”

He laughed, and so did his henchponies.

“Forget about it! I told you – I’m no welcher … I help ponies who help me, ya dig?” He reached into his chest-pocket, and held out a slip of paper to me. “Saw that PipBuck of yours, so I figured you could make use of coordinates better than directions.”

I took the piece of paper and stared at it. Now I had what I was looking for. I glanced over my shoulder at Candy Cane who was staring at her hooves in quietude.

“Well? Hoof her to me. And the caps, too.”

I looked at Candy Cane and she looked at me. I nodded, and she began to walk toward them. So far so good.

I reached for my chest pocket, tucking away the note in my left, and grazing the pocket on the right. Just above my pistol’s holster. I gulped.

Six dark shapes trotted down the aisle of vendors. Their black hats hid their eyes.

My heart sank.

Grifter turned and the same mare who’d wailed on him when I first met him had returned.

“So what’s it gonna be, Grifter? You got the caps or no?”

My heart started to beat faster than I could breathe.

Candy Cane saw the fear in my eyes.

“Yeah, yeah. I got ‘em, Dolce. Hold your fuckin’ horses.”

Grifter donned his fedora and held out a hoof.

“I need those caps, Red Dawn.”

SATS illuminated the world around me. I glanced at my charges … then I glanced at their heads. Ten of them. There were ten of them, one of me, and six rounds in my magazine.

I was going to take a risk. For Candy Cane. I thought of Gail. I thought of how I galloped headfirst into that hail of bullets just to save her. But it wasn’t my own efforts that had saved Gail’s life. It wasn’t luck that had kept me from dying.

I didn’t have ponies like Night Sky, Bone Charm, or Sprinkles to cover my sorry ass.

There, my strength was laughable. There, luck wasn’t on my side. Neither were any ponies.

But I promised Candy Cane that I would … I … I promised Dew Drops that I would save our Stable. I couldn’t do that dead. I bit my lower lip so hard that I drew blood. Even if I did put Grifter and his guards down, I wouldn’t have had enough bullets to drop the rest. It would end in a bloodbath, with my blood mingling with the rest.

I was screwed … no … Candy Cane was screwed. And I was going to screw her over. 'No … no … no … Goddesses ...' I shook uncontrollably, screaming inside my head, 'There were only supposed to be four of them, damnit!' I glanced at the firing solutions in my queue.

A rivulet of sweat trickled down my face.

Grifter and his dogs were instant kills. A shot through the head for each … but the rest ... I eyed the automatic weapons slung around their necks.

I gulped. It would be suicide.

Candy Cane was gazing at me expectantly. Expecting I’d pop into SATS and slaughter them all. Expecting I’d free her like I said I would.

In the past, I had taken risks ... to save Gail, a griffon I hardly knew. There I was again was as the past repeated itself – this time to save a mare I hardly knew.

But saving Candy Cane wasn’t a risk … it was a death sentence. Not like that. Not with so many of them.

I left the quietude of my thoughts. As my hoof dipped into my right pocket and yanked out a sack of caps, I met Candy Cane’s stare.

"I'm sorry ..." I whispered.

The bag plummeted into Grifter’s outstretched hoof. I watched as Candy Cane’s steel gray eyes widened. Her jaw dropped as all her hope shattered and fell away from her hooves. Something within me broke too when I heard her voice.

“Red … Red Dawn?” she whimpered.

Grifter looked overjoyed. “Thanks, kid, heh. You just about saved my hide,” he grinned.

I stared at my hooves.

“Red Dawn … what … what are you doing?”

My jaw clenched as I looked away, unable to say a word. Unable to look her in the eye.

“… you … you said you’d …”

I clenched my eyes shut. “I’m sorry.”

“No … no! You promised! YOU PROMISED YOU WOULD!” she wailed, “YOU FUCKING LIAR! YOU’RE ALL THE SAME! YOU’RE ALL THE SAME, YOU SON OF A –”

“Oh shut your cocktrap, ya fuckin’ broad,” Grifter growled, hoofing her collar’s detonator.

He punched one of its buttons. Candy Cane fell to the snow, screaming in agony as violent electricity arced across her body.

Her flashing silhouette reflected dimly in my eyes as I stood there, uselessly.

“YOU – LIED – TO ME!” Candy Cane wailed.

Grifter turned, hoofed the black-hatted mare behind him the caps, and flipped the off switch. Candy Cane lay limp in the snow, her clothes smoking.

“Alright! Haul her fine ass back to the Scullion. She’s going back to work as soon as tomorrow comes.”

“No …” I murmured as the Palominos started away from me. “Damnit …” My hoof trembled as I curled it around my pistol’s holster. “Goddesses damnit …”

I stared grimly at the snow as my hoof slid back into the ashen drifts. The darkest corners of my mind told me that it was going to be okay.

I had what I wanted anyways.

I shook my head vigorously, damning the voices that reassured me in my thoughts.

I promised Dew Drops that I’d save our stable. But I wondered: how the hell could I save the 294 ponies in my stable if I couldn’t even save just one pony?

I kept telling myself that that wasn’t how it was supposed to end.

'I’ll find a way to make this right,' I promised her.

But Candy Cane would have to wait. And so would Grifter.

I turned, and I walked the other way.

Footnote: Level 5
XP: 1270/2500