None of them feeling like they had gotten a proper night’s sleep, the Elements got to work. For Twilight, there was overseeing the warehouse test run, and one hundred volunteers she had to make sure did not get themselves hurt inside the evacuation zone. For Pinkie, there was meeting Versus at the park to keep setting up the Contraction party; and for Rainbow, there was gathering more kitty litter, the job Pinkie had abandoned for the party. For Vinyl, Colgate, Octavia, and Big Mac, there was the disposal of Peaceful Meadows’ car, which they had left at the hotel. For the others, it was the mundane but important labor of keeping the team afloat: buying food and supplies, moving hotel rooms to accommodate a prior reservation, consulting maps and books.

“Am Ah on my own again today?” Applejack asked as the room was emptying.

“Sorry, Applejack,” Vinyl said. “I’ll come back later today, I promise.”

“If you got places to be, don’t let me keep ya. Ah get it.” She sobered. “Yer dealin’ with that car now, huh?”

“Trying to.”

Nodding, Applejack said, “Ah’m sorry that had to happen last night, but you did the right thing, not killin’ her. Please be careful today.”

“We will be looking at our backs all day long, I am sure,” Octavia said.

After a few pleasantries, they went out to the lobby, and Colgate again veered toward the bar, again stopped when Vinyl tugged at her jacket. They went out into the brilliant not-dawn, blustery and gray with sleet. The attendant asked them if they needed anything, and they said they did not. Deciding to talk in private, they walked under a weak magical shield out to Peaceful Meadows’ car.

“Don’t just sit here, it’s suspicious,” Colgate said. “Let’s have us a drive.”

“Sure thing, boss, where to?” Vinyl asked, starting them.

“Little Snowdrift?” Big Mac asked. “We can tell Partial Thoughts what happened. Maybe she can help us.”

“We don’t need help,” Colgate said, picking at a stitch in the seat.

“What a novel thought,” Octavia said. “Let us go to Little Snowdrift.”

The ice on the roads made driving even slower, but there were fewer pedestrians out, for the time. It was Friday, and they knew that the streets would be tortuous with ponies once six or seven o’ clock rolled around. They slowly made their way to the road that would take them to the tiny, forested village.

“Peaceful Meadows will be awake by now, I’m sure,” Colgate said. “What does that mean for us?”

“She’s terrified,” Vinyl said, not unkindly. “Imagine it. You wake up in the freezing cold, in a forest, with your mouth bloodied and your stuff gone, missing the last week of memory.”

“We did not have a choice,” Octavia said.

“That’s not what I mean; we did what we had to do. I’m just saying…” She sighed. “Peaceful Meadows is gonna be freaked out. Now, since this is a… I think Partial Thoughts called her a ‘hatchet pony.’ She’s not gonna want to go to the police, or a hospital, anywhere that’s gonna ask questions. She probably assumes she was up to no good last night, and it backfired.”

“How do you know?” Colgate asked.

“I’m just putting myself in her place.”

“Huh.”

“I’d crawl home, honestly. Just get home, make sure I’m safe in the immediate, and try to figure out what’s going on.”

“So we probably do not have to worry about her coming after us again,” Octavia said. “Would you say so?”

“She might have a diary,” Big Mac said.

“Criminals don’t keep diaries,” Colgate said.

“Smart criminals don’t keep diaries,” Vinyl said. She had to raise her voice to match the sleet pounding on their car. They were just leaving Snowdrift, and in the open hills before the pine forest claimed their path, it fell with savage insistence, coming off the asphalt in misty waves that turned a pair of oncoming headlights into diffuse halos.

“Maybe we should just involve the police,” Big Mac said. “If she won’t like that, then we would like it.”

“When they test her for drugs and find she was knocked out, it’s over,” Colgate said.

“But if she does not remember, she will not know who gave her the soda,” Octavia said.

“They do memory therapy for that. Hey, Mac, look in the glove box, see if there’s anything good in there.”

Big Mac shuffled through the papers, the car’s manual, and Peaceful Meadows’ sundries. “Rental car,” he said.

“Great, we can return this one too,” Vinyl said. “More driving. Yippee.”

They drove quietly for several minutes into the trees, passing a pair of hikers on the side of the road, backs bent to the wind. Octavia shook her head at them.

“No returning the car,” Colgate said suddenly, smacking Big Mac’s head rest. “Meadows will have the rental paperwork at her house. She’ll see it, see she doesn’t have the car, and go looking for it. If she finds that it’s been returned, she can find out by who—us. Why would we have her car, unless we weren’t involved with her memory thing?”

“Fine, we’ll drop it off anonymously,” Vinyl said.

Before she did anything else, Twilight counted waivers. Aloe and Lotus had been called out of town for an unspecified reason late at night, which was all their note to her had said. Mood fouled again, Twilight scrutinized a signature, thinking for a minute that it did not match the printed name, then decided that it did not matter. A few stragglers were still coming in, filling out a crowd of onlookers and admirers that talked and speculated ceaselessly just by her.

When she was done, she did a quick head count, found three missing, and stood on a fruit crate to address them. Instructing her friends for so long had spoiled her, she soon found; they paid attention, thought about their situations, knew how to ask questions. The volunteers just stared at her, some more concerned with the cold, and some still starstruck that Twilight Sparkle, the Element of Magic, complete with the bejeweled tiara, was giving them direction. She had to repeat herself, and point out that the warning tape marked the line where it was no longer safe to stand around, and emphasize that the hazard posed a real and physical threat. This last point in particular seemed difficult for them, and Twilight grew more frustrated as she reiterated the danger it posed, and cited that it had almost gotten her and her friends in an earlier incident.

Then, she took questions, many of which she had already answered in her first speech. While the volunteers processed and talked among one another, Twilight turned to keep their leaning airship in view against the warehouse, where she could see a gleaming shape of white ooze under a tangle of pipes. She did not know whether the hazard slept, but it was not moving. It would not be long, she imagined, before it made their airship its permanent nest.

“Last questions? We’re about to start,” she said. Aloe had forgotten to get her a megaphone, so she had to use magic to amplify herself. A chorus of “let’s do it” and “ready as I’ll ever be” came off the crowd, and Twilight pointed to the warehouse. “That’s it right there, under those pipes. See it? The white thing. Everypony line up along the warning tape, but don’t take even a single step past it ‘til I say so.”

Even this took longer than she had wanted. The crowd needed to be directed which way to go along the line, and arguments needed to be sorted out for which pony had claim to which particular piece of ground that they found favorable. One mare complained that she was cold and that she couldn’t stand for so long on an incline, and they had to move to the other side of the parking lot where it was flatter. Some simply complained that it was taking too long. Some pegasi took to the air to try to direct the crowd, but wound up spreading ponies too thin, and Twilight had to re-gather them. Many others, who had found spots for themselves without issue, had stopped paying attention to their surroundings, and Twilight had to not-so-gently remind everyone that the hazard could hurt them, and that she could not protect everyone if something happened. Wondering what exactly Aloe had said to bring them in, Twilight finally walked up and down the line an hour later, making sure no one was in a bad position.

“Okay,” she said, back on her fruit box, “ponies on the west side, you’re going to go first.” She unrolled a long stream of magenta magic over the ponies to her right. “Think of it like a traffic light. When the magic is green,” she turned her magic green, “I want you to walk into the danger zone, slowly. I’ll make it yellow,” she turned it yellow, “for a few seconds, then red means stop.” She turned her magic bright, unmistakable red. “Blue means ‘go back’. If you see blue, go back towards the warning tape, just as slow. East side ponies, same thing. If there’s no magic over your side, don’t do anything. I’ll be here in the middle, watching the hazard move. No one goes too far into the zone. Is that clear?”

Hoping that her instructions were actually understood, and that the ponies weren’t simply hurrying to get back home, she directed the western crowd to advance. Ten feet into the danger zone, she stopped them and watched the hazard, with her naked eyes and also with binoculars. It stirred and undulated like a caterpillar, pressing against its pipes, but not—interestingly to Twilight—flowing between them. It spread out onto a wet loading ramp, some of it still back under the pipes, giving away its sheer size. Lotus had calculated its size and volume earlier, based on the danger zone’s circumference, and found the hazard to be about the volume of a commercial swimming pool, something Twilight had accepted without really envisioning it.

Clinging to the warehouse for support, the hazard could cover around a third of its zone if it spread evenly, and reach the very edge if it extended just one thin process. The amount of material in such a creature, or device, seemed ridiculous to her, more so as she watched it ooze out of the warehouse like a science experiment. It just kept coming, thick and dumb, vaguely beautiful but also distinctly out of place. Pinkie’s comparison to egg white was apt, Twilight kept thinking, and she had her ponies back away as the hazard reached the first dead light pole. She directed the other side to walk seven feet into the danger zone, and the hazard turned, so to speak, in their direction. Tentative, bulky feelers groped the icy ground, and the hazard gradually spread their way, behind it still the shimmering snail trail of itself, presumably coupled with a piece of foundation or equally stable fixture in the warehouse.

She sent her volunteers in, brought them out, led the hazard back and forth and increasingly close to the danger zone’s edge, timing how long it took to register when something new entered its territory, how long it took to change directions, how long it took before receding back to the warehouse. To appearances, it was slow and profoundly unintelligent, which kept with what the twins had told them earlier, and Twilight distantly wondered how they could have almost been caught off guard, given how slowly the hazard moved.

It was close to two o’ clock when she thanked the volunteers and sent them home, sending several autographs with them. The irony did not escape her as she signed “keep friendship in your hearts! Your friend, Twilight Sparkle” on scraps of paper, sometimes pictures of herself or of the six of them. She wondered whether she could invent or find a spell to stamp her signature on a stack of papers, and save herself the trouble of manually signing each one.

Vinyl met with Soulful Song, the memory therapist, for lunch. She had just finished with the rental cars, first dropping off theirs, then walking back to the hotel to drive Peaceful Meadows’, which they simply left in the corner of the lot for an attendant to stumble upon—all this after the back and forth to Little Snowdrift. She had vowed to Octavia that she would teach her how to drive after they got home.

She was distracted as Soulful Song set up their lunch of curried vegetables and rice on the veranda. Partial Thoughts had told them she would let her employer know that Peaceful Meadows was vulnerable, and had asked whether she had any accomplices, something they had not thought about the night before. Colgate said that she and Octavia would handle the griffon, and Vinyl was nervous. She did not think of Colgate and Octavia as particularly level-headed, but that was not the sort of thing she could tell them.

“Would you care to remind me where we left off yesterday, Vinyl?” Soulful Song asked through the open porch door. The sleet had turned to strong rain, and his little dog frolicked in the grass, chasing leaves when they tumbled into the yard.

She waited until they were seated outside before speaking. “We were talking about the difference between blocking a memory and wiping it, I think. You asked me to think about which one I wanted to do.”

He nodded understandingly. “And? What conclusion have you reached?”

“Wipe. You said that’s easier.”

“It is, it is.” He spooned curry around his rice, ears up, glasses almost to the end of his muzzle. With his cardigan and gentle manner of speaking, he looked every bit like the therapists she had encountered during her younger, more troubled, years. She knew it was a calculated look, but tried not to let it bother her.

“The actual technique of wiping a memory is quite easy. Simple, I should say. It’s hitting the right memories that’s tricky. How well do you know this pony?”

“Pretty good. We’re not best friends, but we’re… regular friends.” She looked up at the sound of nearby thunder, and was reminded of Octavia’s explosions in the forest. Apparently, she took too long looking into the distance.

“Is something the matter?”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“Mm?” He inclined his head and put down his silverware. “You sure?”

She had agreed to go out bar hopping with Colgate that night, just the two of them. For her, the idea was relaxing, a comfortable thing to do with a friend to release the day’s tension; she did not know how Colgate viewed it. She guessed that they would be speaking about the incident with Peaceful Meadows.

“I’d rather stay on topic, honestly. We all have our issues, mine are nothing special.”

“My ears are always open, if you change your mind. I’d only charge half price, since you’re here anyway.”

She chuckled. “Thanks, but I’m fine. My friend, though… So, what do I have to do to wipe her memory? What spell do I cast? And how do I practice something like that?”

“Slow down, Vinyl. You asked a mouthful. The spell itself, as I said, is easy. Well, relatively easy. Think of a pony’s mind like a roadmap of memories. Each memory is a destination or a road, most are both. Some memories lead to others, you see. You don’t just think of one thing and that’s it, right?”

“Sure.”

“Think about yesterday. You don’t just have this big, single memory called ‘yesterday’ in your head, it’s broken into all these little pieces, and they lead to each other. If you think about what you were doing last night, it’ll take you to what you were doing before that, and that will take you back further, and so on and so forth. So wiping a memory…” He took a bite, his food finally cool enough, and appeared to savor it for several seconds. “Is seldom about removing a single point from the pony’s mind. You have to remove it, and all the associated memories too.”

“Like when you know you’ve forgotten something, but you can’t place it, and it drives you crazy,” Vinyl said.

“It’s that feeling that we wish to avoid above all else. How significant is the memory?”

Vinyl thought. She knew she could not tell him the nature of the memory without incriminating Pinkie, but was not sure how best to go about it. She had expected an uncomfortable session of dodging and generalizing, and she was getting one.

Surrounded by teams of joking, singing workers as they set up the next Contraction party, Versus was obviously out of sorts. Pinkie tried to compensate the only way she knew how, and Versus tried to respond in kind, but the laughter was not there, and after ninety minutes of forced interactions and flat-landing jokes, she finally gave up and went home, apologizing profusely and promising to be there the next day, back to her bright and sunny self.

Work moved more slowly after she was gone, but it wasn’t of much concern to Pinkie. She had wisely realized that putting the Contraction on a single day was too risky, given how frequently the Elements’ plans did not go smoothly, and instead had asserted a range of a few days on which the Contraction could occur. She had been surprised and a little worried when a few precogs—real precogs—had approached her about it as though it were known already. Weird that no one could nail down when the contraction was scheduled to happen, they said, and she agreed and asked if that sort of vagueness bothered them often. “Every now and again,” the precog had said.

Without Big Mac or Vinyl to stop them, Colgate and Octavia let themselves into the griffon’s house that afternoon, after much sneaking and looking about for potential witnesses. They were able to find a spare key, and save the mess of a broken window, for which Octavia was grateful.

Inside, the house showed signs of a very hasty exit. Clothes were thrown on the bed, drawers and cupboards were left open, lights were left on. Where Partial Thoughts had left with some amount of premeditation, it appeared that the griffon had run only hours after directing them to Umbrella Park.

“Perhaps there was a signal he was supposed to receive that we were taken care of,” Octavia said, looking through the griffon’s junk drawer. “And he did not receive it. He may have guessed that we would come for him.”

“Well, we came,” Colgate said from the pantry. “Lots of different glasses in here.”

“If he is gone, perhaps he will stay gone. I wish we could know that for certain, though.”

“The car’s gone and the luggage isn’t,” Colgate said. “So he didn’t take a train out of here. Maybe we need to go to Little Snowdrift again.”

“For what? We are not going to do anything to him. We are not going to tie him up and bring him to Twilight too.”

“I mean, we could.”

“We are not.”

“Well, seems to me if he goes looking for Peaceful Meadows, then we’re screwed. He doesn’t know what we did, but he knows she was last seen with us. Easy conclusion, one two three.”

“Yes, that is the problem.”

“Here we go,” Colgate said, a few ornate glasses floating around her as she walked to the main room. Before Octavia could stop her or ask what she was doing, she smashed them against the wall. After a second, she looked to her friend. “Watch your hooves.”

“What was that for, exactly?”

“He likes glasses, so I say, let’s break some and leave a note.”

“A note?”

“Take a letter, Octavia,” Colgate said, going back for more glasses. “Something simple, like ‘don’t talk to Peaceful Meadows’, or something. No signature.”

“This is to intimidate him into silence?”

By way of response, Colgate broke more glasses, their shards tinkling on a growing pile. “I’ll sweep all this up and put it on the table with the note. Oooh, hang on.” She trotted to the bathroom and emerged a second later with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, which she placed on the table with a book of matches. “There, in case the glasses don’t get him, this should send a pretty clear message.”

“‘See how easily we could have burned your house down’? I do not like that message. What if he comes for us?”

“Hey, if he skedaddled last night, he sure isn’t gonna come hunting for us after this.”

“You are right. He might ask Peaceful Meadows to do it instead, or the police. Then we are back to square one.”

“Uhhh…” She deposited the broken glass on the table. “I doubt it. He’s too scared. Probably just waits for us to leave on our own.”

“I do not know about this.”

Colgate swept up more bits of glass and arranged them in a neat heap beside the alcohol and note. “We could also just burn the house now and get it over with.”

“Absolutely not!” She flicked a piece of glass off the table’s edge. “The entire purpose of this is to ensure silence, not escalate matters further.”

“It’s just a message.”

“It is destroying someone’s life.”

Colgate looked at her, then looked back and forth, wall to wall. “He’s got neighbors. He can get help so easily in a town like this, I guarantee you, Octavia, he’d be on his hooves in a month at the worst.”

“That is not for us to assume, and it would not absolve us of burning his house even if he did bounce back so easily. Come, we left our note, let us just leave.”

“Fine, fine, fine,” Colgate said, trotting to the back door. “It’s an option, though.”

“Everything is an option. I am saying that it is not a good option.” The door slammed with a gust, and they had to wait for the sidewalk to clear before leaving through the side fence. Voice lowered, she said, “if the police come to us after this, it goes without my saying that we do not know anything. We have not met this griffon before.”

“It’s fine,” Colgate said.

She had second-guessed herself for the entire taxi ride up the mountain, but when April Showers finally reached the end of the secluded, wooded path, she was glad that she had left her weapon at home. Armed guards stood at both sides of the shaded gate, a tall chain-link mechanism erected between two hollow trees. Warning signs of various sorts adorned the gate, and a single security camera that openly followed her movement toward the guards, who did not raise their pulse crystals, but made no attempt to conceal them either.

They looked at her imperiously when she stopped, and, finding her voice after a minute, she identified herself and told them she had been invited. She showed the brochure the Pegasus Advocates had given her at the fair two days ago, wrinkled and sticky with dust. Their countenances only changed when she named Summer Breeze and Tomato Trellis; then, she was able to submit to a pat-down and an unwelcome-sounding “come on in.”

The PA camp was a lightly forested hollow in the mountainside, concealed by trees on all sides, by the mingled shadows of office buildings and jutting boulders from above, and by sheer distance from the suburbs from below. A waterfall rattled nearby, muffling the rising babble of city life. Those who met her inside the camp gave her nods of greeting or simple remarks. In sight of the entrance and the path, there was not much to see, but just inside the inner border of trees, it was like a tiny village. Myriads of picnic tables and bathroom facilities, grills, fire pits, covered recreation and meeting centers, and log cabins were scattered across the grass and shrubbery. Above, but hidden still under the treetops, were patches of white and gray clouds, from which she could hear more voices emanating, and sometimes see curious faces peeping. Many, but not all, of the ponies were dressed in the same ludicrous style she had seen at the fair. Latex was predominant, but several had chosen to wear flashy sweaters over their tighter clothes, obscuring the look.

Unsure, but with a composed face, she pretended that she knew what she was doing, and sat down to consult her brochure. She had checked it obsessively in the day leading up to her meeting, but she checked it again, verifying the time, and that she had shown a healthy twenty minutes early.

“Morning, sisters,” a passing pony called out. Like April, she had not the elaborate mane and clothing combination, but she did have a brochure.

“Hey! You! Are you new here too?” April asked, rising. One aspect of her character, which she did not need to practice, was her outgoing nature. Among her own, she was free to be as friendly as Flitter had been.

“Oh, Luna, finally,” the pony said, trotting up and shaking hooves. “Everyone’s been looking at me hairy-eyed,” she said under her breath. “I thought I was alone.”

“I just came in,” April said. “What’s your name?”

“Chocolate Indulgence.” She patted April on the back. “You know where they’re gathering?”

Together, the new cohorts found and followed a forming crowd to one of the long log cabins, homey on the outside but generically dispassionate within, plastic chairs and a wheeled podium and water coolers on either side of the room. April was glad to have Chocolate Indulgence by her side; the latter trotted without hesitation to a seat in the middle, sparing April the decision, which she knew she was liable to overthink.

Towering, intrusive manes filled the spaces around them, and the cabin was filled with light chatter about ordinary things like day jobs and gripes about traffic. April could hear the occasional slur, spoken without the veneer of hatred that she had heard on the fairgrounds. She looked around, searching for other visibly new pegasi, and someone rapped on the podium, drawing eyes and silencing tongues.

He was a beefy pegasus in alternating shingles of acid green and white latex that ran all the way from his chin to his fetlocks, adorned with miniature buckles in lines along the stitching. He jingled gently as he shifted his weight and waited for the crowd to come to full attention, nodding greetings to ponies he recognized, his starburst mane rigid and strange; it reminded April of a bit of pollen she had once seen under a microscope.

“I’d like to open our meeting, as always, with a welcome to all my sisters and brothers, and particularly any newcomers. If this is your first time meeting with the Pegasus Advocates, stand up, please.”

Warily, April stood up next to Chocolate Indulgence, who shot to her hooves. A few others stood in different parts of the room, but they were few.

“Welcome, sisters,” the crowd said as one, some politely applauding.

“And again, welcome,” the stallion said. “Please be seated. My name is Majestic Clouds, and I’ve been a Pegasus Advocate for four and a half years. By far, my favorite thing about this community is the ability it grants us to teach each other, to learn from each other, free of judgment.”

April forced herself to not roll her eyes.

“Dandelion Winds teaches us that the three races are bound to their domains, and it is there they should remain. The unicorn, she has the unseen, the magical; the earth pony, she has the ground, the land, the labor that weds her to it; and the pegasus has the endless sky.” He paused for the crowd to mumble words of assent. “Consider the noble birds of the sky. Birds are not reviled, they are not spat on, they are not mistrusted or infringed upon. They are marveled, loved, they are symbols of freedom and potential. Even when they are caged by the cruel and idiotic, it is but to steal the beauty they bring to our world. They mean the bird no harm.” He flexed his wings and barked, “Then why are we any different?”

“Yeah!” someone shouted.

“Yet society seeks to imprison the pegasus, to tie her to the ground with the rest of the walkers, through prejudicial laws and ideas society would have found ridiculous and backward even a decade ago. The practice of racial mixing, while long accepted during Luna’s absence, has led us down a dark path, inch by inch. Height limits in public spaces, an invisible border to contain the drift of our floating city, insane regulations on cloud homes… and the subtler toxin of racial supremacy by way of attribute exclusion. Eighty-one percent of base labor jobs are taken by earth ponies, and they excel in these positions for their superior physical strength and an upbringing that discourages the aspirations that are, in unicorn families, drilled into ponies’ heads at a young age.

“This is no mistake! Earth ponies are culled for labor from birth, leaving room for unicorns to take on management and thus secure their supremacy, justifying their lust for power with circular logic and vague truisms. The stereotype that magical power is related to intelligence, this too is no mistake. But what happens to the pegasus? She is left to compete with both races, one with access to magic, the other to gross physical strength. Only in the niche professions offered in Cloudsdale is the pegasus worker welcome, not as a competitor against the earth ponies or as a means to signal an employer’s accepting nature, but as herself. Everywhere else, she is pitted against the strong or the magical, denied the use of her inherent qualities, disadvantaged from the start.

“The unicorn is sneaky. She lives in deception and trickery, glorifies in intimidation, and abhors the truth. She seeks to bring low all around her so that she alone can stand tall on a pillar of her own creation. Rather than using magic to elevate her brothers and sisters, the unicorn seeks to enlarge her own power so she may rule over them.”

Many ponies around the room were nodding in sour agreement, some whispering their own insights to neighbors.

“The earth pony has little chance to resist save for direct conflict; what advantage does she have over the unicorn? Strength is meaningless against magic, a fact both races know well. Well, let the earth pony subordinate to the unicorn, but the pegasus—the pegasus—cannot be chained in such a way. How can you cage a falcon?”

“Yes!” someone cried.

He took a drink of water. “Autumn Whirlwind has written extensively on the topic of racial purity. Of the pegasus, she says, ‘The ability to fly confers on the pegasus a unique set of traits that cannot be discounted or dismissed as mere phenotypical attributes, like an earth pony’s more developed shoulders or a unicorn’s access to the magical spaces of the brain.’ She is writing about our souls: made for flight, made for everything the unicorn and earth pony cannot do, and they seek at every turn to equalize this, seen as an injustice.

“The princesses’ fetishisation of social equality is at greatest fault here, and, as I said, it all starts with racial mixing. What need is there for equality of such a drastic sort among our own company? One pegasus may fly higher, fly faster, arrange his clouds more expertly in the construction of his property, but these differences are all born of the same inviolable right, the right to fly and to live in accordance with our bodies, our birthrights. Only in mixed society must we stoop to accommodate the walkers, where they work ceaselessly to take more from us every day! Where are the pegasi in government, in science, let alone magical studies? Our government representation is left to the buffoons in Cloudsdale, parodies whose suffering city is used as an excuse for increasing regulation from the throne. The Wonderbolts, pure entertainment.”

At the Wonderbolts’ mention, dark murmurs spread in the audience, and April made a mental note of it: a reaction she had not expected.

The speech went on another twenty minutes, elucidating the dangers of complacency, of working for unicorns, and of trusting the news that came out of Canterlot. A couple other speakers got up after he was done and gave personal anecdotes to waves of applause and almost tangible sympathy—and for these, April too felt. One mare had been excluded and marginalized in a primarily unicorn neighborhood, to the point where she had been beaten and robbed one night outside her house. The rhetoric was as ludicrous to her as she had expected, but the personal stories held her rapt attention. She was seeing how the disenfranchised could be drawn to a community like the Pegasus Advocates.

“Last, I’d like to ask our newcomers to tell us a little bit about themselves, what attracted them to the PAs.”

April looked around, blood cold, scrambling in her mind to remember the finer points of her story. Chocolate Indulgence stood up first and told her story, too candid and full of racial slurs for her to be truly comfortable talking to a room full of strangers, and everyone clapped and welcomed her. April went last, kept a cool head, remembered her story, embellished a few things and thanked them all for their support.

Then, lunchtime. Many pegasi took off for other parts of the camp or mountainside, some stayed back in the cabin to set up the next function, a few of the more imposing specimens disappeared into other buildings. April and Chocolate sat at a picnic table and realized a second too late that they should have brought their lunches, that they would not be served. Neither had expected to be there that long, but leaving directly after such a comprehensive discussion seemed uncouth. They both shared a nervous laugh about it.

“I think that was Weeping Willow,” she said, as if the name were supposed to mean something to April. She smiled. “You’ve heard of him. He’s really outspoken, especially below.”

“Ooh, right.” She looked around, wondering just how to start, who to try to make friends with.

“Sprouts,” a pair of pegasi said, taking a seat at their sides. April’s pegasus put a wing over her back, her feathers jangling with small piercings. Her mane was a short, tight mop of ice-white curls, her fur dyed canary yellow, her lipstick and eye shadow beet purple, and April could see the beginning of an elaborate pendant nestled in her plunging neckline.

“Greetings, sisters,” Chocolate Indulgence said.

“‘Greetings’? That’s very fancy of you, miss,” the other pegasus said. “I say, greetings to you too, and a very good morrow indeed!” She cackled, and April’s pegasus simply scooted closer.

“Is there something you need?” April asked.

“Last I checked, there was no crime to being friendly,” her pegasus said. “What my sister here means is that we wanna say hi, get to know you.”

“Well, it’s great to meet you,” Chocolate said, inching away from hers as April tried to do the same. “That was some speech, huh? Really opened my eyes.”

“Who doesn’t love a good speech?” Chocolate’s pegasus asked. “Forget your lunches, sisters? First day?”

“Oh, we weren’t hungry,” April said.

“You can have some of ours,” her pegasus said. “Us, we like to eat indoors. You see that building back there? No, you gotta sit up—there you go, between those trees.”

“Me, I’m hungry now,” the other pegasus said, stretching her wings dramatically, and the two got up, prompting April and Chocolate to follow.

“We’re good, really,” April said.

“No, don’t give me that shit, look at you,” her pegasus, still with a wing around her, said. “That food’s gonna get cold, we better get.” With Chocolate’s pegasus behind them, they started toward the far side of the camp. April’s mind was flying with panicked ideas. She felt stupid for allowing herself to be so easily disarmed, but the alternative seemed worse. “Maybe I should just punch her and run.”

The Pegasus Advocates that they passed paid them no mind save to greet the senior Advocates or smile benignly at April and Chocolate. At the trees, Chocolate Indulgence made another attempt to get away from them, but her pegasus grabbed her wing and pulled: not hard, but enough to show her intentions. A few more PAs sat at tables or on low clouds over the deeper encampment, and they, too, did not show any interest in the new mares.

Save one. On the edge of a cloud, a strangely shaped head peeked over for a second before a long body slithered off and landed a distance in front of them. The pegasus around April tensed for just a second as the new mare slunk forward.

“Hey, we’re actually gonna leave you here,” one said, releasing Chocolate.

“It was really great to meet you both,” the other said, taking her wing off April and taking flight in the same motion. The two looked at each other, shaken.

The new mare looked at them inscrutably for a second before breaking into a warm smile. “They were gonna beat the stuffing out of you.” She was a head and a half taller than April, and her wings were abnormally long even for the larger body, curling up like feathered scythes to stick out on opposite sides. Her mane was a broad lily pad of primary colors, from which dangled crimson loops of ribbon. She was dressed tamely compared to many of her companions, sporting a neon pink cardigan with silver spikes on the cuffs and wing holes, and a pair of light gray slacks with no embellishment that April could see. She looked like a businesspony who had hastily tried to change into a PA costume, but ran out of time, and April felt a touch more at ease.

“Uhh, we got that impression,” April said. “Are… you?”

“No,” she said. “We don’t hurt our sisters here. Do you wanna sit down?” She went toward a table, which had vacated by the time they reached it. “But you didn’t want to make any waves on your first visit, so you didn’t do anything to defend yourselves.” She watched them through a particularly deep ring of ribbon in front of her face. “Right?”

“Right,” Chocolate said quickly. April had wanted to find a less direct way to admit it.

“That’s what they rely on. You’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. Every group has its bad apples.”

“Even the PAs,” April muttered. “Talk about a warm reception. Thanks for chasing them off.”

“It’s the least I could do for a potential sister.” She shook their hooves. “My name’s Long Luxury, I’ve been with us for fifteen years this January.”

“Oh, wow, that’s a long time,” Chocolate said.

“Your stories today were amazing. Wait… Chocolate Indulgence and April Showers?” She pointed at them, and they nodded. “Okay. Yours especially, it really spoke to me, April Showers.”

“Yeah?” April asked. She needed to be in awe of the mare’s seniority, but all she could think was a slightly queasy “fifteen years?”

“It reminded me a lot of myself. I lost both my sisters to stomper gangs, two different ones actually.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” “That’s the past.” She flapped her wings once to readjust them. “Are you sure you’re not hungry?”

“Uh…”

Long Luxury laughed. “I mean we can go get something. There’s a diner just up the road that doesn’t mind us eating there.” She smiled at them. “Let’s go, it’s a quick flight away.”

They found a clearer space in the camp and took to the air, one flying lope over a shoulder of trees and a stretch along the river, and touched down outside a roadside diner. Long Luxury kept her wings out as they walked to the entrance, and April could not help admiring them; she could see that Chocolate was doing the same. The second she had heard “fifteen years,” she had known she had found her starting place. The mare was clearly feared or respected in the camp, and the red ribbon—bestowed only to those who had killed in the name of the Pegasus Advocates—bespoke a level of legitimacy that April imagined she could take advantage of. It depended on how tight the group leader kept her operations.

In a booth in the back, the three looked over their menus and made small talk. Long Luxury took up half her booth, and her wide, flat mane cast an oblong shadow on their table, like a sombrero she had chosen not to take off indoors. Occasionally, it hit the overhead light, and Luxury would jerk her head to one side.

“It’s hard to find a place like this in the inner city,” April said.

“I gave up on it,” Luxury said. “There’s only a couple places I go nowadays. I usually just eat in.”

“Here’s to that.” She thought of what she might best say to keep the topic light, but relevant. Thoughts of a unicorn neighbor sprang to mind.

“If they were gonna beat us up, how come you let them stay in the camp?” Chocolate asked.

“I don’t let them stay, that would imply I have the ability but not the will to make them leave. It’s group politics,” Luxury said. “It’s all tangled up, it’s complicated. Those two are in the smallest minority, though. Pretty much everyone here is happy to meet new recruits.” She nodded to the waitress who brought their orange juice, another pegasus who had barely spoken to them, and who looked at them like they were escaped convicts. “If it was up to me, I’d have them on the streets in no time, but… Like I said, we don’t hurt our sisters.”

“But they…” She looked at April, who shook her head. “Don’t argue with the mare who just saved you.”

“It’s complicated. Since you haven’t been inducted yet, though, you could hurt someone. You could fight each other, if you wanted, and I couldn’t do anything to stop you.”

“Right,” April said, frowning down at her menu, avoiding Luxury’s look.

“Hey, that’s actually a good idea.”

“Wait,” Chocolate said. “You don’t—”

“Go ahead,” Luxury said.

“Huh?”

“Do it.” Her tone was still light, but there was finality there, and April looked up. Long Luxury smiled at her and jiggled her mane. “Right here.”

Part of April wanted to tell Luxury to go to Tartarus and let that end the conversation, but when Chocolate flinched toward her drink, April flinched too. Luxury just watched as the two sized each other up. Chocolate Indulgence looked weaker, a little doughy, and she had lagged behind on the flight over; but April was new to her body, and had never had a heart for combat. Even sparring with the Datura in Ponyville, she would just as soon apologize for something she didn’t do than get in a physical fight.

“I don’t wanna fight her,” Chocolate said.

Towering over her in the booth, Long Luxury played with the straw in her drink. “I want you to.”

“Is this a joke? Some initiation thing?” Without time to think, April, wings tensed, slid out and stood by the table, and Chocolate leaned to the side as if to kick out at her. For a second, nobody moved, then Long Luxury laughed loudly.

“I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding! You can sit back down, April.” She shook with laughter, her wing coming out a little to brush Chocolate, who scooted away, and April sat, angry inside but only annoyed to appearances.

“I wasn’t gonna make the first move,” Chocolate said.

“You almost did it!” Luxury said. “You almost did it.”

“I would’ve,” April lied. “Careful next time you say that, ‘cause I would’ve done it.”

“Hooh, I see that. Okay, I’m better now.”

“What is wrong with you?”

“Don’t put that mean little face on for me, sprout; it was a joke.”

Chocolate looked across the table at April, eyes wide and hurt, as if to ask if April really had been serious.

“Just saying, I would have done it,” April said.

“Yeah yeah, got it. You’re a little firebrand, aren’t you? The young ones usually are.”

“Psh.”

“Finally,” Chocolate whispered when their food came, and for some time, no one spoke. Long Luxury ate with her hooves, completely ignoring the non-unicorn-friendly silverware that had been laid out for them.

“What happened to Summer Breeze and his friend?” April eventually asked. “I met them at the fair, they told me about you girls. I was hoping to see them here.”

“They’re young too,” Luxury said. “Young and fiery, maybe a little too much. Got arrested.”

“No!” Feigning shock was easier than awe, or aggression.

“It’s all part of our wonderful city. You’ve probably already seen, April. You go down into the city and you get crap from all sides just for being yourself.”

“They were just passing out brochures.”

“That’s all it takes sometimes. A pegasus in a unicorn’s world, you tell me how long she’s gonna last. Now, granted, I’ve known those two for a while, and they are a little quick on the draw, but they’re good ponies.”

“Was there a fight?” Chocolate asked.

“Someone tried to stop them from expressing themselves at the fair. It’s disgusting, and you see it all the time too. Someone says something about the pegasus, she stands up for herself, and the police take her away. You know sixty-five percent of police are unicorns, April?”

“Figures,” April said. She had been warned that PAs would outright lie about statistics to support their own views, secure that very few members would actually follow up and verify the research themselves.

“I don’t know when they’re getting out. They put their bail at something ridiculous, of course. Our leader’s looking into it, but I don’t know.”

“Who is your leader? Was she at the meeting today?” Chocolate asked. “I’d love to see her sometime.”

Luxury chuckled. “Sprouts like you don’t get to meet the leader, no offense. She’s usually by in the nights, but you’re not allowed in then.”

“We have to be inducted first?” April asked.

“Three months with the PAs, then you can spend the nights with us.”

“Can you at least tell us her name?” Chocolate asked.

“You might have seen her in the papers, actually,” Luxury said. “Her name’s White Wine, she owns a couple bars around town.”

“She’s the one who’s involved with the Astras,” April said. “I’ve read about it.”

“That’s her.”

“I thought the Astras were keeping their distance?” Chocolate asked.

“They say they want to, but they keep running into PAs,” April said. “They say it’s ‘accidental’, that they don’t want anything to do with us. I say, ‘yeah right’.” To her knowledge, the reverse was actually true; that was how the news had spun it, at least.

“Yeah, I’ve got a bridge to sell you if the Astras are keeping out of our shit.” She sipped her orange juice, a curiously delicate motion for such an imposing mare. One loop of ribbon came dangerously close to dipping in her salad dressing, but she had tilted her head just so to keep it dry.

“I heard they were behind some…” She lowered her voice, not quite sure if she was making a mistake to mention it so soon. “Magic in the PAs. Like magical jewelry and stuff.”

Long Luxury grunted, and April took it as a sign to shut up. She changed the topic to sports.

They flew back to the camp and landed on a bank of clouds just at the treetops overlooking a pair of buildings. If April scraped a hole in the cloud, she could touch the tips of the pines with an outstretched hoof. Long Luxury reclined with her lily-pad mane hanging off the edge, and April and Chocolate just sat there, waiting for something to happen, not sure how much longer to stay in order to be polite.

“Young ponies don’t have enough peace in their hearts nowadays,” Long Luxury said at last. “When I was young, you only got pushed around in the really crappy parts of town. Everywhere else, ponies stopped to help each other on the street, they looked out for each other.”

Recognizing the conversation’s direction immediately, April thought back to her times working for the magazine, her numerous pessimistic musings, and tapped into that frustrated, unkind part of her mind. “It was like that for a few months in Manehattan,” she said. “You’d see some stallion drop his wallet or whatever, someone lets him know. Not today.”

“Nope, that’s gone now. It’s ridiculous.”

“What do you think’s wrong with the world today?” She was sure she could guess, but she also guessed—correctly—that Long Luxury had a speech for the topic. April nodded and sympathized in all the right places as Long Luxury explained how the earth ponies had gotten too prideful, had started competing with the unicorns for power, and the push and pull between them was offset onto the pegasus, who could not compete against either in their own arenas. Many of her own points had been elucidated in the morning’s speeches as well, the idea of the pegasus as a marginalized race, something April found ludicrous. Pegasi were the only ponies who had an entire city to themselves, in Cloudsdale. She didn’t say that.

“The last thing I want is for you to go home today thinking of us as violent ponies,” Long Luxury said. “Because we’re not. Plain and simple, violence isn’t a part of our creed. We just want equality.”

“Pegasus Advocates,” Chocolate said. She had been quiet for a long time, and April looked at her, wishing she would go away now that she had no more use for her.

“Exactly. But those aren’t the times, are they?”

“You want peace, but at what cost?” April asked. An open-ended question that she knew would let Long Luxury explain more of why the world was so bad.

“That’s just it, April. If the earth ponies and unicorns wanted peace for everyone, I’d be the first one there to put aside the past. But they don’t, not without their price. They keep taking, taking, taking, trying to push us into a corner, tie us down. I’m not about to stand for that.”

“There’s lots of pegasi who do,” April said sadly.

“And a lot of PAs don’t take kindly to them. The pegasi who make their beds with the unicorns are just as bad as the unicorns themselves. I get that, but I think it’s just sad. You know, lots of ponies don’t get the opportunity you and I had. They never get to meet pegasus groups, or they grow up in unicorn communities from the start and never know any better. That’s not their fault.”

“They just need to have their eyes opened, is all.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself. Some of us don’t see it that way, and they’re not wrong. A lot of twinkler lovers think we’re evil, and want to see us get taken down. That’s the unicorn media for you.”

“I always take what I read with a grain of salt,” Chocolate said. “Or a mountain. There’s no way the PAs are that bad, just no way.”

“They like to take things out of context a lot,” April said. She almost went on to explain more, but stopped herself. Flitter would have brought up the very real, but much subtler racism of lowered expectations that she sometimes saw in the papers. Stories praising an earth pony for something commonplace, or featuring a pegasus for overcoming odds that were really not that confounding. April, however, was not well-read, and did not think about things very much. “I don’t know why they do it,” she said, feeling dirty and stupid.

“The princesses have a hoof in it,” Chocolate said.

“Not everything is the princesses’ fault!” April wanted to shout. “The government’s more complicated than that!” She said, “they are part-unicorn, so that makes sense.”

Another pegasus flew up to their cloud and stomped at the edge until Long Luxury looked up at him. He glanced at April and Chocolate, then she did. “You two run along now. I have to do something.”

“Can I come back tomorrow?” April asked. “I’d like to learn more.” Under Long Luxury’s penetrating gaze, she fluffed her wings and took on a stronger expression. “Maybe help out around the grounds, get to know some more ponies.”

Luxury softened slightly. “If you’re serious, you can come back any morning you want.”

“I was hoping we could talk more, you and me.”

Luxury gestured for the stallion to move along. “You can find me if you get here early.” She dove off their cloud, and April gave Chocolate a smile. “New friend, I guess,” she said nervously.

“She’s huge,” Chocolate said. “I can’t believe she wanted us to fight.”

“Just a joke,” April said, going to the cloud’s edge.

“You weren’t really gonna hit me, were you? April? I wouldn’t have hit you.”

“Not first.” She gave what she meant for an insincere smile and made for the camp exit, fully fed up with Pegasus Advocacy and buzzing with excited fear. She flew down the mountain until the camp was well behind her, not wanting any stray PAs to see her using her hooves—she didn’t know how they generally felt about pegasi walking unnecessarily, but assumed it was looked down on, at least faintly. Her wings were beginning to feel more natural to her, as with the character, and she was able to glide down most of the mountain to the suburbs, catching the smooth wind more easily than Flitter ever had; her widened wings made it almost effortless, and she thought again of Long Luxury, and her own freakish wings. The mare was built like she was made of wire cleaners, April thought, her body and limbs too long and too thin. When she walked, her head would dip low and her back would arch, like a cat on the prowl, but April got the sense that Luxury did not move that way for effect. She landed on a rooftop and sat in the shade of an air conditioning unit to order her thoughts.

Pegasus Advocates saw themselves as persecuted by the other groups, primarily the unicorns; they saw earth ponies as a lesser evil, puppets for the unicorn elites or fodder for the media machine. April would have to get used to thinking of herself as a victim if she wanted to fit in. While the speeches and conversation with Luxury had explained a lot, and given her access to the rhetoric, she still felt none of the essential, base hatred, nor any feeling like it that she could blow out of proportion. She thought back once more for any real experiences of racial discrimination she could use to bolster herself, but came up wanting. Chilly Clouds had told her over and over again that zeal was key, but neither Flitter nor April had been able to conjure any.

“Maybe I should think of Ink Pearl every time,” she thought, taking flight again toward her apartment. “She’s the worst unicorn I’ve ever met.” She thought in circles about how Ink had treated her, and had built up a bad mood by the time she was flying over the apartment complex. Instead of landing, she turned around and headed for the shelter where her one and only Datura contact would be found. Remembering Ink had reminded her that she needed to establish her presence there.

Inside, she presented herself as a prospective volunteer, and before she could invent plans for the evening and promise to come back tomorrow, they had her in an apron and mane net, ladling out mashed potatoes to the dinner crowd. Fine, she told herself, the mindless work would help her unwind, and it did to a point. The sketchy-looking ponies who came to her were moving at first, but it had been a long day, and she had less good cheer left than she would have thought. Before even twenty minutes were up, she felt worn down. Only once, and from a distance, she saw Sunburst, the pony who had driven her from the Datura clinic. He showed no recognition.

She worked absentmindedly, thinking alternately of Ink Pearl and Long Luxury, wondering who was worse. She wondered whether the Datura had a plan in place if the unthinkable happened, and April went native with the PAs. Maybe Sunburst would step in and deal with her then.

“Long day?” the stallion next to her asked pleasantly. He was a unicorn.

“Long day,” April repeated with a sigh. “You?”

“Better now.” He dropped a bread roll on the passing tray. “Thank you so much for volunteering. Dinner’s a bear here. Ponies like to go home around this time—which is fine, we all have our own lives. Still…”

“I get it,” April said. “April Showers. Good to meet you.”

“I’m Drift Dive.” He paused to chat with a regular in line for a second. “Do you go to school, April?”

“Yeah, but I took the year off. Tuition is getting to me, so I thought I’d get a job for a bit and put a dent in it before going back.”

“That’s a good plan. What do you do?”

“Oh, nothing yet, I’m still looking.” After the Pegasus Advocates, where everything was someone’s fault, and everything was the component of some master plan, she was happy to talk about nothing with the unicorn in the soup kitchen. “What about you? What do you do?”

“I’m actually between jobs. I was a counselor, but… I’m not sure I can go back to that.”

“What happened? Uh, if you don’t mind.” The last pony in line was a thin, gray mare with a light pink mane, and she gave April a dazzling smile.

“Lacey, this is April,” Drift Dive said. “This is Lacey, she’s the boss-mare here.”

“Only when the rev isn’t,” Lacey said. “April, great to meet you.”

Feeling like she had heard the name somewhere before, but not remembering where, April just smiled and shook her hoof across the counter.

She had not intended to stay past dinner service, but Lacey talked her into helping clean up, and after that, she, Drift Dive, and April wound up alone in the dining room with trays of what was left over. It was dark out, as it should have been, and the lights around the complex were shutting off to leave them cocooned in night just outside the open double doors. Emptied of patrons, the dining room was too vast and lifeless, as though they had each taken a piece of it with them on leaving. Between the rolls of plaid tablecloth on the beaten cart to the sagging, colorful banner from a local high school, there was only gray floor, plastic tables and chairs, and the colorless glare of electric light off the same.

April told them she was going to school for law, seeing no reason to lie about it, and they were all suitably impressed. Drift Dive confided that he had lost his job due to a patient case gone wrong, and Lacey told them that she was another Manehattan emigrant, that the city had only gotten worse with Celestia’s prolonged absence. They turned to the topic of the city, much of which April had read for herself. Small-time crooks had carved off neighborhoods for themselves, gang violence was ever increasing, and the economy had been drastically destabilized as a result. Strawberry, the white-collar criminal who had kicked it all off, had disappeared from the public eye, and in the resultant power vacuum, Manehattan’s middle class was divvying itself up between the wealthy and the disenfranchised.

Somewhere in Lacey’s explanations, April made the connection. It was Lacey Kisses, the actress her cousin had worked with. Wings and Jet had only ever had bad things to say about her, but April had never met her. For a few minutes, she looked at Lacey and tried to notice signs of the horrible details of her personality, but nothing showed. Lacey was attentive, articulate, and a little withdrawn, sympathy in her voice and eyes when speaking of their work. At one point, she accidentally bumped Drift Dive, and though he gave no reaction, she apologized; April could not imagine such a pony doing anything to earn the reputation she carried with Wings and Jet. Still, a little more warily, she carried on with the two of them into the deep evening.

April Showers still had to stop by the grocery store for a few things, and it was ten o’ clock when she finally got home. The pulse crystal was on the floor next to her stack of movies, and she looked at it disdainfully. She had left her blinds open all day, not expecting to be gone so long, and went around the apartment closing them before sitting on the couch and letting the TV distract her. She wanted to put in a movie, but knew she should get to bed early so she could get to the PA camp in the morning. Long Luxury did not strike her as the type to look kindly upon lateness.

She compromised. She popped some popcorn, threw in an old favorite, and lay on the couch, figuring she would fall asleep when she fell asleep, and that would be that. Ingratiating herself to Luxury had been easy once they were acquainted, but still, April did not know what to make of the incident in the diner. Had Luxury really wanted them to fight, or had it been a joke from the start? Perhaps it was a test, to see if they would respect a senior Pegasus Advocate’s wishes, and perhaps it was a test of the reverse, to see if they would blindly follow orders for the sake of making it in the group. In her head, the scene played out over and over, sometimes fizzling as it had, and sometimes erupting in a fight. She fell asleep during the movie’s credits, dreamed of PAs in the shelter, and woke up the next morning to a hot VCR.

Whooves, meanwhile, woke up in Whippoorwill’s bed at the hotel. He snuck to the shower, made himself decent, and decided to surprise the unicorn with breakfast and a paper from the café across the street. Whippoorwill was a late riser, and was only just waking up when Whooves got back.

“It’s a beautiful morning for all,” Whooves sang, depositing his gift on the end table. “Did you rest well, sunshine?”

“Mm.” Whippoorwill stretched. “Ah needed that, an’ Ah ain’t lyin’.”

“You…” He climbed onto the bed and whispered into Whippoorwill’s ear, “are a rocket.” He went to the curtained window, stopped himself, and turned on the lights instead. “A night such as last shall surely be embossed on my memory for all my life.”

“Yer a wild one all right,” Whippoorwill said, opening the drawer to look over one of his many checklists. The pulse crystal rolled gently inside, but Whooves had learned to ignore its presence there.

“So what’s on the docket today? More calls to those of esteem in the great city?”

“Somethin’ like that.” Whippoorwill had finally begun with White Wine’s plan, that which he could do from the safety of his hotel room. All day, he had been making calls to pry for information, to barter secrets to others, and to blackmail. For a few days, it was sufficient, but he knew he would soon need to go out and physically face many of the ponies he called. He went over his list slowly, ignoring a running monologue from Whooves, trying to figure how he could spend another day without going outside.

“—which is, of course, unthinkable considering last night’s ghastly weather. Wind that could pluck a chicken. But perhaps today nature will smile upon us, and I can go out in my prize scarf. What say you, handsome?”

Whippoorwill looked at him, prancing and turning in the full-length mirror.

“Ah, he was not paying me a lick of attention! Tsk, such is the nature of work, I suppose. I was merely proposing that I go about and pick us up a few things this morning. Essentials, one might say.”

“If you got the money, sure.”

“The money! My dear, money is like air for me! My friends are lavish.”

“Ah know it.”

“Only I am tied up this afternoon and evening. Social calls, nothing of especial import.”

“You do get around.” He looked up from his paper. “What’re you tellin’ folks nowadays?”

“Ah, by that tone, I take you to mean ‘you’re not talking about me, are you?’ Is it not so? Let me allay that fear, then: not a whit, not a whisper, nor suggestion nor hint nor trivial implication have made their way into the world via these lips. Count on it, dear sir.”

Whippoorwill shook his head. “Ah trust ya.” He thumped the drawer. “You ain’t dumb.”

“Many things have I been, but dumb, never,” Whooves said. “As it is, I’ve been rather wrapped up with tales of the great, neon infection in our country’s heart, Applewood. Word gets out I was there for the dam incident, and suddenly I can’t beat them off with a stick.”

“You must like that.”

“It has its perks.” He lay on the bed. “But, for this perfect morning, I am all yours. Your wish is my command. Shall I pick up some groceries? More clothing? Perhaps an amusement? There’s a cute little bodega I’ve been meaning to acquaint myself with.”

Whippoorwill shook his head in thought.

“Or perhaps something a bit more heroic is in order. Have you anything greater to request of me? Tasks, activities, trouble in its many forms? Think of me as oil to your hinge.”

“Mmm, you can’t get involved in that stuff.”

“Am I too delicate?”

Whippoorwill laughed. “You could say that.”

“Pish posh, delicacy is just a disguise for me. I can rough-and-tumble with the meanest of brutes if I’ve a mind to.”

“All right, you can make some threats for me if you want. Grab one of my crystals and some spray paint and head downtown.”

“Ah, yes. Well, as it stands—”

“That’s what Ah thought.”

Whooves looked at him, cheeks rosy. “So, shopping, then?”

“Gimme a sec, Ah need to look at my boots. Ah think one of ‘em needs some work on the heel.”

To save the cab fare, April decided to fly back to the Pegasus Advocate camp. She got up at six, showered, barely ate, and then set off first on hoof and then on wing when she reached the mountain’s steeper slopes. She flew up through the trees and over the snaking highway, and practiced her hatred in solitude. In her mind, she lashed out at the vehicles below, particularly any pegasi who might be driving. Why drive when you can fly? She set the question aside for a conversation starter.

In artificial morning, the mountainside reminded her of the Everfree Forest’s outer edge. The trees were different, but the spaces were not; both were impenetrable with shadow and foliage, save the occasional cut of path or river; and both rose up in defiance of the civilization at their borders. From her apartment, the mountainside looked dark and faceless, like a forest in a painting, as had the Everfree from her house in Ponyville, but to fly over it, she could see more personality. The mountain’s slopes were not rocky or paved on all sides, as they appeared from certain directions, but fertile, gentle in many places, and scarred with small waterfalls or pitted with caves. Where just above was the glamour of Greater Canterlot and below was the gentrification of Lower Canterlot, between lay a protected shard of wilderness that April had never seen before. She landed at the Pegasus Advocate camp in a better mood than she had intended.

The guards let her in, laughing when she said she was supposed to meet Long Luxury, and she walked with more purpose than she felt to the back, where they had met the first time. Luxury had not specified where to find her, and April was nervous to ask too much.

She didn’t have to. Long Luxury swooped down at her from a cloud and nearly knocked her off her hooves in the gust. A pair of pegasi followed, sticking to her sides like bodyguards, one in plain clothes and the other dressed in a conservative red and black corset with knee-length gloves and crimson dreadlocks. Next to her, Long Luxury was a firework of clashing colors and textures. Her mane and ribbon were the same from yesterday, but she wore a slender tartan dress of black and arctic blue, tucked into heavy boots that went halfway up her legs—April counted seven blocky buckles—and cinched closed at the back like a corset to let out her tied tail in a controlled, thin whip. Black pearls hung in three places from her ears and and also off a choker around her neck, artificially darkened by a fishnet body stocking that extended up from under the dress, and her eye shadow and lips were sulfur yellow, difficult to see at first on her pastel cranberry fur. She jingled and creaked when she moved, and the three looked at April for a long second before Long Luxury spoke.

“I didn’t think you’d show.”

“Uhh…” She tore her eyes off the large mare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Long Luxury nudged her, not gently. “I don’t see your friend today.”

“Right, Chocolate.” She looked around as if to evince the point. “Yeah, I guess she didn’t make it.”

“We can’t socialize much today.” She moved to a table, and the four of them sat around a large scroll one pegasus unrolled. “Something big’s happening.”

“Big?” Inside, she withered; it was not a very incisive question.

“As in four-thousand bits big,” one pegasus said.

“I’m listening,” April said.

“No you aren’t,” Long Luxury said. “Put that away.”

“Hey, hold it. If I—if it’s a question of loyalty—”

“No sprouts allowed, end of discussion.”

April fluffed her wings. “I know how to handle myself.”

One pegasus snorted, and Luxury smacked him with a wing.

“And I know how to be discrete.”

“Yeah, you know what you know?” Luxury asked, spreading her forehooves, indicating zero. “I like your ambition, but don’t talk to me like you know shit.”

“She’s got gumption,” the first pegasus said to Luxury.

“We don’t need more of that.”

“What do you need?” April asked.

Luxury sighed and straightened in her seat, and fixed April with an unamused expression. “How about this, little buddy? If you want to prove your loyalty, you can start in there.” She pointed to the bathrooms. “Or,” she angled her hoof to where the gate was, “you can leave us be.”

April rose haughtily, aware she was on a delicate line. She didn’t want to ruin her chances, but also couldn’t just comply right away; it would be out of character. “I don’t remember cleaning the shitters being a rule.”

“As I said, the gate’s back where you came from.”

She paused long enough to make them look up and see her glare. “All right, fine, fine, I get it. If you’re still here when I’m done—”

“I’ll think about it,” Luxury said unconvincingly.

At the bathroom entrance, April turned back to see them with their heads together in conversation. Suspecting she was the topic made it all the harder to begin, and she spent the next fifteen minutes searching for the cleaning supplies. Everyone she asked looked at her like she was the butt of some joke, but she pretended not to mind.

She wryly thought it appropriate that, even in her new life, she should still do her more intense reflection in the bathroom. On her knees with a sponge on one hoof and a rag on the other, grinding away at mildewed grout, she had the time to realize the small differences between her two days. She had not encountered any open hostility, and she had, in turn, not been as intimidated by the wild-looking PAs in their camp. From her experience in the Ponyville spa, she knew that the PAs like Long Luxury would have to get up hours early in order to get their appearances right, yet the outrageous colors and mane shapes were already losing their novelty. More encouraging to her, a couple faces besides Long Luxury’s were familiar. It didn’t feel like progress, but she told herself that it was.

“How long do I have to stay here until they’ll talk to me?” she wondered. There was no way she was going to clean the entire bathroom herself, it would take half the day, so she decided, somewhat arbitrarily, to seek out Long Luxury again once the floor was cleaner. The grout was hopeless, but she could at least get a shine on the tile, and she assiduously worked at it until she was numb to the pain in her knees and to the concoction of smells that had turned her away on first entrance.

“All righty, good enough,” she said to herself forty minutes later, throwing the blackened rag into its pail. She dumped the water in the woods outside and, deciding that the rag would never be returned to its original state, flung it into the trees as well, where it landed under a bush and was gone from her mind.

She met Long Luxury in the common area closer to the gate, where she was still with her companions and the map. Acting most unlike her former self, April sat down without a word and looked at them. Long Luxury gave her a slow appraisal, which did not outwardly faze her.

“There’s other bathrooms, you know,” the male pegasus said.

“Shut up. You are a persistent sprout, April.”

“A weed.”

“Shut up. I think I changed my mind. I like you, kind of.”

“Well okay then,” April said, working to control her tone. “What’s the plan?”

Luxury laughed. “The plan is, you can ride along with us.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t sure why she was disappointed; they weren’t going to just serve up the information she wanted on day two.

“Since I’m such a nice lady, you can watch us do our work, and you can keep quiet, and do exactly as you’re told, and stay out of our way. Does that sound right to you two?”

The female pegasus just sighed.

“Well, I like her, so we’re gonna do that. April? Hey.” She smacked the table in front of April’s face, snapping a momentary thought. “Can you do that? Keep quiet, do what you’re told, and stay out of our way? You haven’t been doing it very well this morning.”

“I’ll be fine,” April said, not sure how to sound confident but deferential as well. She had what she wanted; there was no need to assert herself further.

“Hear that?” the male pegasus asked. “She said she’ll be fine.”

“I did hear that,” Luxury said. “It’s wonderful.”

“So what happens now?” April asked after a second of respectful quiet.

“Lunch, then we go.” She looked at April. “Forgot your lunch again, I see. You know where the diner is.”

“It’s okay.” She wasn’t about to let them out of her sight.

After a quiet lunch, full of mistrustful looks and cryptic exchanges among the three PAs, they flew across and down the road to a small parking lot and got into a well-kept black car, roomy enough for six and ice cold when Long Luxury turned the air on. She could hear things rattling in the trunk, and tried to put it out of her mind as they started up the mountain.

“I know you want me to be quiet, but can you at least tell me where we’re going?” April asked. Luxury’s mane made it impossible for her to see clearly out the windshield, so she watched the side window, searching for any sign of what they were doing.

“Greater Canterlot,” Long Luxury said. “We’re looking for someone.”

“In a car, for some reason,” the male pegasus said.

“When you’re looking for walkers, you move like walkers,” she recited.

“Twinkler or stomper?” April asked as naturally as she could.

“Both, hopefully,” the mare said.

“The stomper’s a friend of our real target,” Luxury said.

“Who are they?” April asked.

Luxury shook her head, and no one spoke. April settled back in her seat and waited for the drive to be over. It was a long way up the mountain, and no one was talkative; though she felt bad about it afterwards, she wound up falling asleep with her head against the window. When she woke, they were cruising in the outer neighborhoods of Greater Canterlot, the palace a reduced shape in the distance. Luxury and her companions were speaking about something quietly, but did not stop when they saw April had awoken.

“I told you, it’s one street down,” the stallion said.

“I thought this one went through,” Luxury said. “Look at that.” She honked her horn, and the unicorn pedestrian jumped out of the crosswalk. They drove a lengthy circle around a gated community before finding the main road again, and Luxury took them along a circuitous route to the grocery store. There, they parked, and the pegasus mare got out without a word.

“Our source was a little vague about this guy’s haunts,” Luxury said. “But once we find him, we’re going to tail him until night.”

“And he’ll lead you to the other target,” April said, nodding. “Smart.”

“Yep.” She adjusted the rear-view mirror. “Having fun so far? I saw you napping.”

Ignoring the comment, April said, “It’s okay, but I thought there was gonna be some action. That’s how it sounded.”

“That’s what you thought,” the stallion said. “This isn’t a movie.”

“Yeah, thanks, couldn’t tell.”

“PAs who run in somewhere, crystals blazing,” Luxury said. “That’s pathetic. The kind of shit you do when you think you’ve got something to prove.”

“But it gets results,” April said with a smile. She was supposed to be dumb and impulsive, and was trying to keep with that.

“Heh, yeah, it makes the group look bad and puts the dumb PA who did it in prison. Some results.”

“Summer Breeze,” the stallion mumbled.

“I thought he had potential, but then he started running around with that Trellis mare.”

“What happened?” April asked, genuinely curious.

“What’d I just say? He thought he had something to prove. He tried to show off and instead he got put in the clink.”

“He didn’t have a chance to make bail or anything?” “Careful, April. You don’t know shit about the law.”

“The chance, sure, but who’s gonna scrape together that much to let him out?”

“But he’s your brother. Right?”

“He dirtied the entire PA face that night, him and Trellis. They get what they get, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Let ‘em rot,” the stallion said. “That was quick.”

The mare got back in. “Haven’t seen him today. She said to check the mall.”

“That’s not far,” Luxury said, starting them up. “April, you can go with Winter Leaves.”

April had only seen the Lower Canterlot malls: great, dirty, tall buildings with tinted windows and wide parking lots, where the masses gathered for bargains and for weekend outings, and nothing was made attractive because nothing needed to be. The Greater Canterlot mall looked like something entirely different, a place someone might visit for the sheer pleasure of it, might travel to see. White arches and pillars formed a tall pergola around a low pancake of a building, encompassing the outdoor food court, a small garden, and the shaded walkway to a neighboring movie theater. The ponies themselves were clearly of a status above as well, many of them dressed conservatively or with some high fashion that April could recognize but not identify. There were tourists too, but few of these, and a fair amount of weary parents. They got out, and April was conscious of how they would stick out. She pretended to adjust something in her outfit, back to the PAs, as she composed herself.

“Half an hour?” Luxury asked.

“Sounds fine,” the stallion said, fiddling with the laces on one of his long gloves. He fished out a photograph as the two mares went ahead. “Here, April, this is who we’re looking for.” She took the picture and studied it, though there was not much to see. After spending the afternoon looking at Pegasus Advocates, the grinning stallion in the photograph struck her as laughably plain. Brown coat with a short, darker brown mane, he posed in a simple vest and slacks for the invisible photographer, with no distinguishing features save an easy and practiced-looking smile that April immediately decided was insincere.

“He’s got a generic hourglass for a cutie mark, so no help there either,” the stallion said. “All we’ve got is he loves talking, and he goes around calling himself the doctor.”

Under the arches they passed, and April paused as something clicked into place. “Doctor? Doctor Whooves?”

The stallion eyed her.

“I’ve read that name in the papers a few times.” Lowering her voice, pretending to have read significantly less than she did, she said, “he’s like a big name in town.”

He shrugged and held the door for her, and she thanked him. Everyone around them had stopped what they were doing, some staring openly and others being more polite, but he did not seem to mind. She tried to follow suit.

“I don’t know anything about him, care less,” he said.

“Huh.” They entered the mall’s vestibule, where skylights showed off its various booths: a jewelry repair booth, a stall dedicated to oxygen therapy, a used record booth, and on and on they went into the body of the structure, where around a roaring fountain shoppers walked on clicking hooves. She looked around, not expecting to see anything, and secretly hoping they would miss him entirely. She didn’t know what they were doing, but he was an earth pony; she didn’t imagine it would be good if they found him.

“You said your name is Winter Leaves?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

She nodded. “Oh, and my name’s April Showers. I know we haven’t been formally introduced, so please, let me. Great to make your acquaintance. I’m sure we’ll be best of fricking friends.”

“He could have been any other color,” Winter Leaves groused. “There are browns everywhere, I have to squint at every pony I see.” April made a larger circle in her search, to show that she was engaged in the same way; on the other side, she saw a pair of unicorns speaking and pointing at them, expressions dark.

They turned into the scented candle shop, and while Winter Leaves quizzed the visibly nervous cashier, April browsed, happy for a moment to be away from his stigmatizing presence. Her ears stood up when she heard him wish the cashier a nice day, and she had to get a second look just to make sure.

“You were nice to him even though he was a stomper,” she said when they were walking again.

“Sure, why not?”

“Uh, well, I can think of a couple reasons.”

He sighed. “Let me let you in on a secret, April, and you can take it or throw it in the trash. That inspirational speech you heard the other day isn’t supposed to be just blowing smoke.”

“I never said it was.”

“We live in a society, and you gotta separate the dream from reality if you wanna be successful. Sure, we’d all love to live in a world where we’re equal to the unicorn and the earth pony, that would be great, but it ain’t gonna happen. Least, not in my lifetime. So you make do.”

“Make do?” She knew what he was going to say, the same pearl of wisdom every freshly disillusioned pony heard sooner or later.

“You can’t change the world out here, ‘cause out here, there’s a hundred of them for every one of us, so you just make do. You get along and you don’t start anything stupid with ponies. Look at what happened to Summer Breeze if you wonder why not. We can change the world from where we are, as a team, but alone out here, there’s no chance.”

“So why dress up like a PA then, if you’re not gonna do anything?”

“‘Cause I’m not afraid of who I am. Let’s check in here.” They entered a novelty shop and went to the back, with the lewd shot glasses and overpriced party light sets. A middle-aged mare glared at them and moved away.

“I guess it’s nice that you’re peaceful,” April said. “Sometimes.”

“If you’re smart, you figure it out pretty quick,” he said. “There’s no point in starting anything, least of all in a place like this. I wouldn’t let him near my kids, but he’s not hurting anyone by talking to me. A lot of the younger sisters will tell you that’s bull, but it’s just smart.”

“You can’t be on a crusade every minute of every day,” April said.

“Exactly.” He spotted the employee he was looking for and quizzed her similarly, and April looked at a shelf of spoof comics. “Daring Don’t’s Erotic Adventures, Volume 6!!” She couldn’t believe they had produced that many comics on such a stupid idea—then again, she thought, yes she could.

“Great, well, thanks anyway,” Winter Leaves said. “Let’s get.”

“No luck?”

He grunted.

They met back up at the car, Long Luxury with a cinnamon bun and a large coffee, which hung like a cowbell off her neck, its plastic straw waggling back and forth as she walked. April stared at her bun enviously, but did not say anything. “Home and garden center next,” the pegasus mare said, and they drove off.

It was four o’ clock when they finally spotted him coming out of a trendy tea shop, saddlebags weighed down with the day’s purchases, mostly clothes. He wore a pair of rose-colored glasses and a pinstriped vest, and as they watched, he paused to admire himself in a shop window.

“Look at him,” Winter Leaves said, disgust unmistakable.

“What do we do?” April asked.

“This is the fun part,” Long Luxury said. “We tail this stupid stomper until he leads us to our twinkler. If anyone needs to go to the bathroom, too bad.”

They let him prance to the intersection before rolling behind, waited for him to get into a taxi carriage, and let it lead them to an art museum. “Well, this’ll be easy, at least,” the mare said. They parked in view of the doors, rolled down the windows a crack, and waited.

Their target was a unicorn named Whippoorwill, Long Luxury explained to April. The unicorn had been harassing their group, and more specifically, White Wine, who had tried to brush him off herself but eventually got tired and put a bounty on his head. The PAs had been searching for a while, but only recently had Long Luxury found anything.

“This Whooves character is his friend, you said?” April asked. “How do you know?”

“He likes to talk about us,” Luxury said. “He has to be a friend of the Astras too, because he talks for them just as much.”

“Twinklers hiding behind their mouthpiece,” Winter Leaves said.

“Typical,” April put in.

“If you read the papers, you’ll see his name. He’s always talking about this shit between us and the Astras. Except—this is the interesting thing, April, what caught my eye—only recently, he dropped a hint about a unicorn on the run from the PAs. How did he put it?”

The mare rooted around in the glove compartment and pulled out a newspaper. She read off, “‘Local artist and confidante of the noble Astra family’—noble, can you believe that? ‘Dr. Whooves had this to say: ‘Their glory knows no bounds. Only the other day did they offer asylum to a poor unicorn, hunted by the savage Pegasus Advocates.’ He went on to say…’ Blah blah blah. This article was only a couple days after White Wine put the price on his head.”

“Wow,” April said, not sure what else to say. “What if it’s not Whippoorwill, though?”

“We’ll keep looking,” Long Luxury said. “If he is hiding out with the Astras, it would explain why he’s been such a pain in the neck to find. They probably put him up somewhere out of the way.”

“I see.” April knew a fair amount about the Astras, and their southern counterparts, the Mansels. Both names had come up a lot in college; they were the only private entities, outside the princesses, with enough political clout to significantly shape the country’s laws and infrastructure. She had written a fourteen-page report on the effects if the Astras were to gain supremacy in Canterlot legislation: in brief, privatization and monetization of specialized magic; the integration of magic and industry; marginalization of unskilled magicians; a complete restructuring of the education system based on evaluations of skill level; and many other things which, in her view and the views of her professors, would be awful for most ponies but really good for some.

Instead of saying any of this, she said, “I heard the Astras wanted to take over Equestria.” She had to bite her tongue to keep a straight face.

“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Long Luxury said, “but you’re basically right.”

“That’s why we’re at war with them?”

“It’s not a war,” the mare said, eyeing April angrily.

“Shouldn’t it be?”

Long Luxury sighed. “One of the reasons I love White Wine. She’s not blinded by idealism.”

“Oh, this again.”

“I talked to her about separating the dream from reality,” Winter Leaves said.

“Ah. You get that, right, April? The PAs are strong, and we’re strongest here in Canterlot.”

“Something the media will never admit,” the mare said.

“But the Astras are strong too. Running up directly against them would be suicide.”

“Wait, so why are we doing it, then?” April asked.

“We’re not,” Winter Leaves said.

“It’s a media ploy to destabilize us,” Luxury said. “Every few years, they do something like this. They take a couple isolated incidents and blow them waaay out of proportion.”

“Then everyone gets freaked out,” the mare said, “and then they report on that instead. That’s how they keep everyone down, they divide and distract us with fake wars like this. Not just pegasi, but everyone.”

“The unicorns in the palace who own the papers and the news companies,” Long Luxury said. “You should look it up, nine out of ten ponies up there are unicorns. It’s ridiculous, and the princesses don’t do a damn thing about it.”

“So we’re not fighting the Astras,” April said.

“There’s been a few scuffles,” Winter Leaves said. “Now that the media’s got everyone believing it. Some of our sisters have gone after the Astras on their own—found out why we don’t fuck with them too.”

“Are we doing anything about that? I can’t believe that we’d just let a family like them have so much power.”

“It’s difficult,” Luxury said. “A lot of it’s above you, too, so let’s just say that we have our ways.”

“Magical ways, perhaps?” Sensing that she was close to the actual point of her mission, she thought for a second how best to press the issue. “I’d think if we could subvert them somehow and get ponies to lose faith in them, that would be a good start.”

“That’s what the Mansels are for. Heard of them?”

“Oh yeah.”

“The longer those two stay at each other’s throats, the better for us,” the mare said.

“So you want to encourage the fighting between those two,” April said, smiling and nodding, as if impressed by how clever they all were.

“That’s right.”

“How many of you are in Roan?”

“Conducting a census?” Long Luxury asked. April laughed, but Luxury just looked at her, eyes level and unimpressed under her huge mane. “You sure ask a lot of big questions for a sprout.”

“I’m curious, sue me.”

“You wanna be careful with that,” Winter Leaves said.

“Shut up, Leaves. Listen to me.” Luxury turned around with some effort and leaned toward April, and April lost the residue of her smile. Long Luxury was intimidating at the best of times, with her weird body and massive disc of hair looped with red; in the car’s close quarters, bearing down on April with all frank scorn and impatience, she looked like a monster in a pony’s skin. She got close enough to breathe on April’s muzzle. “Keep your nose out of our business.” Her small eyes penetrated April’s, and they sat there, one pinning the other, until April couldn’t stand it anymore and flinched away.

“I’m just curious,” she mumbled.

No one responded, and they watched the museum steps for their earth pony.

After the museum, they followed Whooves to a neighborhood near the palace, where he spent an hour at one house, an hour and a half on the private golf course at another, and then forty minutes taking tea and biscuits on the front porch of one more with a pair of young mares who fawned on him the entire time, laughing at everything he said and kissing him on the cheek when he rose to go. Then, he got in another taxi and headed for the city’s edge.

“This has to be it,” Luxury said when Whooves got out at a Crystal Star, a popular chain of affordable hotels. Still with his overloaded saddlebags, but with a visible spring in his step, he disappeared into the lobby. It was eleven o’ clock, and a few of the windows were still lit, but no one was outside to see them do a circuit around the building. Luxury pulled into the parking lot near the back, putting them behind a spotted dogwood tree, and pulled out a pair of binoculars. The mare got out and strolled to the hotel, and April realized then why she had not dressed like the rest of them. She was their scout.

“This is the part where you shut up and do as you’re told, April,” Luxury said. “And slide over. You might have company in the back.”

April slid as told, scared to ask what was going to happen. In the light of day, the Pegasus Advocates could look a little silly, but with binoculars and heavy things in the trunk, and their proud red ribbons strung through both manes, there was nothing remotely funny anymore.

The mare came back and spoke through the opened window. “We need the northeast side of the building. They’re in three-oh-nine.”

“Together?” Luxury asked.

“Sounds like they’ll be in there a while.”

“Okay. Get a room near them and wait for my signal.” They quietly moved to the hotel’s corner, parked close to an exit to the main road, and waited, idling.

A window flicked on, and the blinds shifted up and then down. Luxury flashed her brights, and the blinds shifted again.

“Stay right where you are, April.” No friendliness or anger in her voice, just business. She got out and Winter Leaves got behind the wheel, keeping the car on. The trunk opened and things shifted inside, and Luxury approached the hotel wearing a pair of innocuous saddlebags.

“What’s she gonna do?” April asked.

“Quiet,” Winter Leaves said.

It was a still, calm night, but April Showers felt like she had drank an entire pot of coffee. She kept her eyes dead set on the signal window, watching for any movement, any shadow, heart beating and hooves tingling with a soft skin of sweat. She had been included in their scheme on a lark, that was clear, so the intent could not possibly be too serious, she told herself. They were not collecting the bounty on Whippoorwill, they were just setting up to do it later. Long Luxury was there to talk to him, convince him that the PAs had nothing against him, lure him out so they could catch him on a different day. They would not drag April along for more than that.

Winter Leaves turned the car off, and they sat in darkness, eyes adjusting, waiting for something to happen. There was a lot of traffic out still, more evidence that they had nothing serious planned for the night.

Two rooms down from the signal window, glass exploded outwards and rained softly onto the asphalt, and April jumped. Lights popped inside, silhouettes tumbled, and unicorn magic made the curtains billow out into the cold night. The fracas, the pulse crystals, the screaming and babbling that was cut short in a few flashes of blue magic, all sounded fake with distance, a violent play being rehearsed. April gasped as a final blast of magic tore one curtain off and almost rattled the window frame out of the wall, a sandy yellow light that looked for an instant like a petal of golden flame. More flashes, then the shapes inside stopped jumping around, and all was still. Winter Leaves turned the car back on and popped the trunk.

“That would’ve been called in,” he said to himself.

Ten minutes of interminable quiet passed, waiting for something to happen. Police sirens appeared in the distance, and two minutes later, the fire alarm cut the night rudely. Winter Leaves stopped fidgeting and looked back, searching for the red and blue lights. Two burdened shapes were running their way, and April froze in her seat, her vision tunneling, her heart skipping. “No way, no way, no way, no way.”

One, they slung into the trunk, wrapped in a stained blanket, and the other they threw in the back against April, who shrunk into the corner with a whimper. The mare was screaming at Winter Leaves to drive before they had even gotten in the car, and Luxury shoved her out of the way to let herself in first. Tires squealed, the door slammed, and Luxury looked back in her seat with naked fear on her face. Horns blared when they pulled into the street, and Winter Leaves gunned it away from the city lights, and in the seat next to April, the pony with the pillow case on his head thrashed violently against his bindings.

“Lower your speed, idiot,” Luxury barked, even while the other mare was calling for him to drive faster, run the red light, get them to the river. April recoiled when the pony brushed her with his head, and after a pause, he screamed something around his gag, struggling to get closer, to hit her with his horn. Lights washed over the car as it yawed across two lanes, and April lurched and kicked with desperation, mind emptied of pity or thought, in their place the primal throb of revulsion. All around her, noise: Luxury giving orders, the mare refusing to be quiet, the screeching and honking of traffic disrupted by their erratic movements, the growing sirens that seemed just behind, the body thumping loosely in the trunk, the pony struggling and ramming his head uselessly into the seats. It was all April could do to hold her mouth closed, clenching her bared teeth painfully, breathing rapidly through her nose, wings utterly out of control and splayed behind her, back hooves trying to withdraw even more so the bound pony could not touch her again. Dim yellow light flashed onto them as they turned onto the freeway that would take them back down the mountain, and then the light became a slow strobe as they left the city behind and hissed down the black road.

The river was four miles downhill, and they turned off the freeway and drove, at a sensible speed, through a small industrial neighborhood until they had passed from the sickly glare of street lights and signage and into the freezing midnight of the forest. Slowly on a dirt road, they bumped and rumbled until the starlight vanished above the trees, then came back to illume an empty overpass in the middle distance. They crawled up a rise to a small lookout point, killed the lights, and waited for fifteen minutes. When no one had appeared, Winter Leaves turned off the car and got out with the others.

He and the mare took the dead weight out of the trunk, leaving Long Luxury alone to handle the freshly struggling pony. With wings and hooves, she got him onto her back and walked, her huge wings in place to keep him from knocking her over. April followed behind, numbly repeating the same thought, “no way, there’s no way.” They took a hoofpath up to the overpass, crossed a short bridge over a dry gully, and came to a crook in the river. On three sides, the forest kept it veiled, and on the other was the overpass’ thick, concrete abutment. Luxury set down the pony against the rough wall, then smoothly removed his pillow case and looked down at him. For a second, April thought he was missing the top of his skull, but it was just his mane, short and curly and flesh-colored in the starlight, parted around a horn that gleamed at the base with a magic suppression collar. He said something against his ball gag, and Luxury turned to the body with a pent-up sigh.

“That was too close.”

“Everything’s too close these days,” the mare said.

“How long do we have?” Winter Leaves asked.

“Not long,” Luxury said. “I saw a service phone up the path back there. Go call the warehouse, tell them plans have changed, and to let White Wine know.”

“You got it.”

Luxury unrolled the blanket and let the body be revealed, then dragged it over to where their hostage fruitlessly struggled. “How’s that make you feel?” she asked. He glared up at her. “That’s okay,” she continued, and produced a nail file from her saddlebags. “Dump the stomper.”

“Teeth?” the mare asked, dragging him back to where the river lapped against the path.

“No teeth.”

The mare looked at April, and her heart stopped again. “Grab that loose brick over there, bring it over.”

April looked where she indicated. “Uh.”

“Tonight, please,” Luxury said around the nail file in her mouth.

April grabbed the brick in shaking hooves and hobbled over to the body, where the mare took it. She had angled the stallion’s head and opened his mouth. His pinstriped vest was charred away from deep, black pits where the pulse crystal had hit him, and his rosy sunglasses were flattened in a fold of blanket. Behind them, the hostage struggled and screamed as best he could as Luxury worked, and the brick came down.

“You can help,” the mare said, but April could not even look. She turned her head until her eyes were forced to follow, and there he was, jaw askew, a couple white teeth gleaming in torn gums. April could not feel her body as it took the brick that was offered her, and, out of sight, Luxury was speaking slowly.

“We don’t have much time, Whippoorwill, but we have enough. I’m going to introduce you to Mrs. Angle Grinder now. How’s that horn feeling?”