Colgate woke up with a splitting headache and a dry mouth. Between her and Rouge, there lay the empty bottle of red wine, a thin curve of dark purple on the sheets under its spout. She rolled over and looked at Rouge’s cherry pie, mostly intact, forgotten about as soon as they started drinking.

She picked her way through their trash and supplies to the bathroom where she splashed her face and took a long drink from the faucet. It didn’t help.

Remembering why she had wanted to return to the motel, Colgate went back to the bedroom and dug through the closet until she found both pulse crystals. She lifted one and turned a slow circle in the room, thinking of nothing as she did so. She had operated one once when she was younger, but only once, on a firing range.

“Hey Rouge.” She approached the bed and lowered the pulse crystal, affixed to her hoof, so that her partner could see it. “Hey, Rouge. Wake up.” She poked Rouge with the crystal’s tip.

Rouge stirred, rolled over, mumbled something, and Colgate jabbed her harder in the small of the back. She turned back around, eyes open, and froze.

“About time.”

“Uh… wait, what’s going on?” Rouge wiggled away, sending the wine bottle clattering against the end table and off the bed.

“It’s noon.”

“What?” She rubbed her eyes, then looked at the clock. “Oh, noon. For Celestia’s sake, Cole, don’t point that thing at me!”

“What?”

“That crystal. Dammit, you scared me half to death.”

Colgate looked down at it. “I wasn’t gonna shoot you.”

“Well I should hope not. Geez, some way to wake up, huh? Staring straight into one of those things. All right, I’m up, I’m up.”

“Before you ask, we’re out of booze.”

“Yeah, I was afraid of that,” Rouge said grimly. “I’ll be back. I’m gonna see if anyone left something on one of those little carts outside, ‘kay?”

Colgate nodded, placing the crystal on the bed. “Oh, she was afraid for her life. I get it now.” Colgate shrugged to herself and went back to the bathroom. The sink was stained with what looked like vomit, which didn’t surprise her. Upon a second examination, there was yet another bottle of isopropyl alcohol beside the toothbrush holder. Its lid was open, its contents mostly depleted.

She could hear Rouge singing to herself out in the hall, and rubbed her head. The previous day’s events were coming back to her, and she tried to order them. As memories fell back into place, she looked through herself in the mirror. Something made sense that had not the day before.

“Hey, Cole, wanna help a buddy out? I forgot the dang room key!”

Colgate let Rouge in and playfully swatted her face with her tail. “I figured it out.”

“Huh?”

“No food?”

“Nothing good. Hey, figured what out?”

“What to do next.”

“Oh, that, right.” Rouge passed her and grabbed the rubbing alcohol. Then, thinking better of it, she set it down and grabbed the bottle of toothpaste instead.

“We need to get out of here.”

“Right, yeah. Probably get somewhere safer, right?” She squeezed out a dollop onto her tongue.

“You’re not going to get anything off that.”

“Mouthwash works.”

“Toothpaste doesn’t.” She snatched the tube away from Rouge. “Don’t waste that. You think this is free?” Her voice took on a sudden heat, and she threw the toothpaste back onto the counter, where it skidded into the sink.

Rouge just stared at it, then her, and grabbed the rubbing alcohol.

“Go down and get us a newspaper.”

Rouge spit and coughed, leaning over the sink as her chest heaved and her throat worked soundlessly.

“Rouge, come on, that’s dangerous. Every time you make a racket like that, someone’s bound to hear us.”

Rouge wiped her mouth shakily. “Crud, hadn’t thought of that. Okay, what’s this about a newspaper?”

“Just get one. Downstairs, I’m sure they serve them with breakfast.”

Rouge only blinked. “I don’t feel so good, Cole.”

When Colgate returned to the room, Rouge was in the shower, singing again, and she slapped the newspaper down on the bed with a quiet curse. She opened it to the property listings, but every time she tried to focus on a house, her eyes slipped off the page. Her mind felt alive with activity and untethered emotion, and it was all she could do to keep herself seated. Going after the newspaper herself had been a bad idea.

A wanted mare, she had no business showing her face anywhere, she knew, but it had been her duty. Rouge was unfit, even at the early hour, and she knew they had too little time to waste.

She had walked into the breakfast area, returned a greeting, and sat down at a small table by the buffet counter, immediately recognizing her mistake. Sitting implied she planned to stay, which she did not, and rising so soon right after would only draw further attention. Mind spinning, eyes flashing all around the common area for watchers, she had risen from her table slowly and crept to the nearby newspaper rack. Wanting to tip it over to cover her escape, she was barely able to make it back to their room quietly. Fear and paranoia tangled inside her, and she had no way to release them.

The shower shut off, and Colgate jumped to her hooves, alert. Rouge was still singing, her voice loud and off-key. Colgate wondered how much more rubbing alcohol her partner had managed to consume in her brief absence.

“Oh, you made it!” Rouge said, emerging. “What’s up?”

“Come here and help me,” Colgate said, feigning calm.

“You wanna explain your latest scheme, good buddy?”

“We need to find an empty house to stay in for a while. This place is no good anymore.”

“Oooh, squatters, huh? I can dig.” Rouge shook water droplets everywhere, and Colgate watched a few bleed onto the newsprint.

She blinked slowly, her mind suddenly reeling into even higher tension. The indignity of the scene, of the water everywhere, Rouge’s carelessness, made Colgate want to strike her across the face. Instead, she went into the bathroom.

The door had not even swung closed before Colgate had swept everything off the counter in a curtain of blue magic. The bar of soap slid across the floor and went behind the toilet, the rubbing alcohol spilled onto the tile.

“You okay in there?”

“Find us a house, good buddy,” Colgate said, her voice still even. The anger was fading as quickly as it had appeared, and, by the time she had left the bathroom, she had dismissed its cause.

“Sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” She pointed at the paper. “Preferably something close. We don’t have a car, remember.”

“Right, yeah, good call. Hey, how are we gonna get in? What if it’s locked?”

“We’ll get in.”

Rouge smiled devilishly. “Darn right we will, Cole.” She put a hoof to the paper and scanned the listings. “Where are we?”

“You mean our address?”

“Yeah.”

Colgate looked at the newspaper with her. “I’m not sure.”

Underground, inside an enchanted, concrete vault, Fancy Pants and Fleur dis Lee, his wife, sat down to sandwiches and lemonade. They ate alone at the long meeting table under the standing set of royal armor. From its head extended a lethal, six-foot barb, for rushing opponents.

Outside the arched doorway, transparent from their side but solid from the other, they could see their Daturas moving about the massive library. With the third battle for Canterlot fast approaching, there was much research to be done, for projects inside the city and elsewhere. Luna had just relayed the news that they would not be able to rely on Snowdrift for reserve Daturas; she had put the entire Datura population there on Tartarus duty. Fancy Pants didn’t envy them.

“How’s the caravan?” he asked.

“Good. They’ll be able to start field-testing any day now, I’m told. Zecora has a few of her zebras clearing a space in the forest for them to play in.” Fleur smiled peacefully. “Ink Pearl was able to help them quite a lot. If she’s not careful, she might be looking at a promotion.”

Fancy Pants grinned in response. “I miss being able to discuss that.”

Fleur laughed and put her hoof on his. “What about your malcontents? Did that get taken care of?”

He sighed. “Actually, no.”

“No?”

“It’s the craziest thing.” He pushed his lemonade aside and put up his hooves. “It looked great, your girls did a fine job of setting the place up.”

“Apparently not, if it wasn’t taken care of.”

“I’m not sure it was their fault,” he said quickly, recognizing the fire buried in his wife’s voice. “Colgate and Rouge made it there right on schedule.”

“Did they wait until the morning?”

“Of course they did.”

She smiled.

“They headed to the watchpoint, just like normal—actually, better, they split up. I should have known something was wrong right there, that one of them suspected something.”

“They split up from the hotel, you mean?”

“They did, and it wasn’t a bad job, either. They got inside the watchpoint, just like normal, but nothing happened. Then…” His horn flashed lightly. “Fire. They set the house on fire.”

Fleur frowned. “They set it on fire?”

“Yep. I checked the spells in place. Fleur, baby, the trap was never sprung.” He sighed again. “So as soon as it was clear, I had someone disable it. They’re back in town now, doing what I don’t know. I’ve got someone tailing them.”

“That is weird,” Fleur said at length. “Why didn’t you off them then and there, though? Why let them back into town?”

“Because I’ve got a feeling. And, if I’m right about this, you owe me.”

“Okay.”

“I think I may have something in Colgate. You remember which one she is?”

“The crazy unicorn? Kicked out of Ponyville?”

“Her. I get the feeling she’s behind this; I certainly can’t imagine her useless friend doing anything. But that Colgate.” He shook a hoof, tapping the lemonade glass with the other. “I think she’s smarter than I gave her credit for.”

“Smart enough to get thrown out of the most understaffed Datura team in Equestria,” Fleur said. “Yeah, she sounds like a real bright one.”

“She’s absolutely untrustworthy, you’re right, but I think she knew what she was doing at the watchpoint. I’m not sure, though.”

“Could have been the voices talking, Fancy. She might have seen the watchpoint, the alcohol, and simply said ‘why not?'”

“Yeah, I know.” He took a bite. “Doesn’t explain why she was so cautious approaching it, though. I think she caught on right away, and this was her way of sending a message, or something.”

“So you think she might be useful to me?”

“I don’t want to be firm on it, but, yes, my gut tells me so.”

“You planning on testing her?”

He grinned. “Oh, yes. Once my pony gets back to me about her whereabouts, she’s going to have a little run-in with the Canterlot police.”

Fleur laughed loudly, and Fancy Pants chuckled. He loved his wife’s laugh. “Fancy, you sneaky pony! Those poor police, though.”

“They’ll be fine. Oh, but Fleur, you are going to have to put her through rehab before you can take her on fully.”

“Oh, right, the pills. I forgot. Stupid mare.”

“What do you think is worse, her pills, or Rouge’s alcohol?”

“Oh, I’ve got no idea. Would you mind taking your pony off her tail, though? If she’s gonna be a potential asset, I’ll put my own girl on it.”

“Sure, no problem. I’ll call him back once Colgate gets settled, then she’s all yours.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“And once Colgate’s out of the picture, I’ll figure out something to do with Rouge. Or, maybe she’ll take care of that for me.”

Fleur raised an eyebrow, and Fancy pants sipped his lemonade. “You mean she accidentally kills herself?”

“Maybe. If not, I’m sure one of your girls can make it look like an accident.”

Fleur shook her head. “No way, no how. She’s just a poor alky, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Harmless.”

“I suppose.”

“Just let her live her life, Fancy. There isn’t much left to it anyway.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“I’m always right.”

“Har har. Yeah, but if Colgate can escape the police, she’ll probably have my recommendation.”

“Supposing I take her. What am I supposed to do with a crazy unicorn?”

“I bet she’d make a good missile.”

“Oooh, no, I’m not going to do that,” Fleur said. “If she’s smart enough to see my trap, and good enough to escape your police, I’m not going to try to weaponize her. She’ll see right through that too, I bet.”

“Yeah, could be.”

“You owe me so damn much,” Sweet Dreams said, keeping her head down as they waited for the traffic light to change. Colgate and Rouge sat in the back, the newspaper between them.

“We’ll get you back in good time, I promise,” Rouge said quietly. They had needed to pull over once for her to throw up, and the smell of rubbing alcohol lingered in the car.

“Bet you will.”

Rouge only fiddled with her seatbelt.

“Are you at least sober this time?”

“Yeah, sober as a skunk.”

“Probably why your head hurts so much,” Colgate said.

“We’ll do something about that as soon as we get home.”

“They’re not gonna have anything, you know that,” Sweet Dreams said, accelerating. “It’s a house for sale. That means it’s cleaned out. Do you even know if you’re gonna be alone there? What if you walk in on a showing or something?”

“We’ll figure it out,” Colgate said.

“I hadn’t thought of that, Cole,” Rouge said. “What if there’s already someone there?”

“There won’t be.”

“Hey, if there is, don’t go calling me again,” Sweet Dreams said. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this.”

“You’re a true friend, Sweet,” Rouge said.

“Yeah, yeah. Rouge, you realize that you’re in trouble too, right?” She looked at Colgate in the mirror. “Both of you are in the same pile of crap. You know that?”

Colgate shrugged, and Rouge chuckled.

“Lunatics,” Sweet mumbled. They turned on to an empty street and went all the way down to the cul-de-sac, where Sweet paused to look at their newspaper. She drove them to the corner and stopped in front of a white house with a well-kept lawn, its “for sale” sign waving gently in the breeze.

“We here?” Rouge asked.

“Get out,” Sweet said. “This is your stop.”

“Thanks, Sweet,” Colgate said. “You’re a good mare.”

Sweet Dreams just looked sourly ahead as the two got out and made their way up to the front door. Before they had tried it, she was down the road, turning onto the main thoroughfare.

“Locked,” Colgate said.

“Crap,” Rouge said.

“We’ll go in through the back.” She led them between the wall and a short picket fence, looking all around as she moved, watching for neighbors.

“Shit, Cole, I just realized something.”

“Hm?”

“I forgot to check if it had a pool.”

Colgate paused. “Damn.”

They rounded the corner. Their new back yard was a barren, desert landscape with a dry pond in one corner and a blooming acacia tree giving shade to the patio’s far corner. Colgate noted the hoofprints in the soft dirt as they moved toward their house.

“How do we get in?” Rouge asked.

Colgate tried the back door, then the patio door, both locked, and walked over to the pond. She levitated a flat stone, its top half baked white and its bottom half flecked with dried moss, and carried it back.

“Breaking and entering?”

Colgate lobbed the rock through the glass patio door without hesitation. Sparkles of glass covered the carpet inside, but nothing more; no alarms. She used her magic to clear the larger shards from the hole and stepped through, taking care to step around the broken glass as best she could. Rouge followed, mouth ajar and eyes wandering.

They stepped into a warm den, empty bookcases facing a square, glass dining table, a plush, red couch between. Wires trailed discreetly along the baseboards, where they had once connected to a TV set. The carpet was clean and vacuum-striped; Colgate didn’t mention it.

“Well, my fears are realized,” Rouge said from the kitchen. “Empty fridge, buddy.”

“And the cupboards?” Colgate asked, testing the couch.

“A couple cups. Someone left their little box of toothpicks here.”

“Will you be okay being sober for a night?” She got up and went to the bookcases, looking for dust. There was none.

“Me? Hope so. I’m gonna check the bathroom next.”

Colgate went down a short hallway to the kitchen and looked at the sink, then the oven. Both were perfectly clean.

“Nothing!” Rouge called out.

“You’ll be fine,” Colgate said, looking in the fridge. Also clean, and there was no smell. She went to the front room and parted the curtains, from where she could see down the street to the houses in the cul-de-sac, as well as the house on the opposite corner. Someone was gardening in the front yard, a floral sun hat pulled low over her head. Colgate spent a minute watching her lean form as it stooped to pull weeds, and didn’t hear Rouge enter the room.

“Home sweet home, though, huh?”

Colgate jumped and whirled, but suppressed the urge to hurl an insult. Rouge flinched back anyway, and Colgate forced a smile. “Everything is very clean here.”

“Yeah, pretty sweet deal.” She visibly relaxed. “Too bad about the pool. Hey, you don’t suppose the water’s still on here? They got a pretty primo garden hose, I saw. Picture it, Cole: you, me, a twelver of beer, and then we get that hose in the mix. I’m talking about some kinda awesome night.”

Colgate smiled a real smile. “I like that idea a lot. What do you think, inside, or out?”

“You mean the house?”

“Hey, it’s not our place.”

Rouge laughed. “Indoor pool? Heck yeah, I’m down. Carpet’s gonna stink up real bad, though.”

Colgate shrugged.

“Yeah, you’re right.” She laughed again and hopped up and down. “Tonight! We’re doing this tonight!”

Colgate’s smile turned to a toothy grin, still genuine. “I love it.”

“Wait, but what about the beer? Cole, we can’t go out there.”

“Even you?”

“I’m, you know, connected. You heard Sweet Dreams. I’m in it too.”

“I think she was just trying to scare you.”

“You think so?”

“Probably.”

“Hmmm. I dunno.”

Colgate looked back out at the neighbor. “We might need to worry about something worse than a wet carpet, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this place is pretty clean.”

“Yeah, so? Sweet deal, right?”

“It means that someone’s been around,” Colgate said. “And recently. Who’s to say they won’t be back?”

“Ooooh, I hadn’t thought about that.”

Colgate went back to the den and looked at the broken glass. The sun only reflected off of some of it, and she knew it was only a matter of time before someone got cut.

“So what do we do?”

Colgate sat back on the couch and looked at the blank space on the wall where a TV had once sat.

“Cole?”

“Thinking,” she snapped.

“Sorry.”

Across the back fence, Colgate could see a house with a large bay window, its curtains closed. “Someone’ll look out and see the hole in the patio door, and then they’ll probably call the cops. I could break their window too, to distract them. No, wait.” She frowned, shuffling through impulsive ideas, rejecting each one, swinging, as she did so, farther and farther from the original problem. “If I knew the name of the hotel pony, I could turn him in for letting us stay there.”

“Cole, buddy, talk to me,” Rouge said. “Whatever it is, let’s solve it together. Yeah?”

Colgate looked at Rouge. A wave of cold was slowly overtaking her, and she tried to sink deeper into the couch. Rouge watched with wide, concerned eyes, glazed but clearly sober.

“Remember Grass Graves? You talk, I think. Good team, huh?”

“Sure,” Colgate said. She took a second to order her thoughts as best she could. “We’re gonna be in trouble.”

“Okay, why?”

“The minute someone sees that broken glass, they’ll call the cops, and we’ll need to move again.”

“Hmm, and Sweet Dreams doesn’t wanna drive us anymore,” Rouge said. “Okay, so cops on our tails. How soon, you think?”

“How in Tartarus would I know that?”

“All right, sorry. Hey, okay, check this out. It’s the middle of the day and that house’s curtains are still drawn. Good chance there’s no one home, right? No one there to let the sunshine in.”

Colgate nodded. “So we’ve got today, at least.”

“To do what, though?”

“If it’s cops, we’ll need to escape.”

“And get somewhere safe.”

“Yes, that too,” Colgate said. “I keep coming back to that garden hose.”

“Yeah, I really hope the water’s on.” Rouge studied the broken glass for a minute, mouthing silent words. “Okay, I’ve got something. Well, kind of something. It might be hard to set up. Do you still have those pulse crystals?”

“In our bags.”

Twilight spent the night at the ship’s side, watching a wall of dark brown clouds creep over featureless desert, intermittently dozing and pondering their position. Fragile dreams intersected with fragments of plans, giving her only sleepy confusion and, in moments of wakeful clarity, frustration. There was little to think about that she had not discussed with the others, but she couldn’t sway her restless mind out of its rut. She kept thinking of Discord, Vanilla, and the angel. Its illegality, and the calm way Luna had dismissed it, had not gone unnoticed.

Fluttershy prodded her awake that next morning and, seeing how tired she still was, helped her to bed, promising that they had everything under control. They knew where they were going, and Big Mac, with Applejack’s advice, was growing into a competent pilot. There was no immediate cause for concern.

Around three in the afternoon, Twilight came out to the deck and joined them for lunch. They were crossing over a dark valley, the desert finally showing signs of giving way to the more verdant sections of Equestria. According to their map, they were not too far from Applewood.

An hour later, they passed over the first gap in the land they had seen since Roan. The sheer drop to the vague, dark planet below unnerved them all as their ship passed over, and, for a long time, no one spoke. It had been so long since they had done anything to restore the country on their own, yet it was healing all the same. Twilight remembered, months ago, the princesses telling them that only they had access to the power necessary to bring back the crumbled countryside. A bold-faced lie, she now realized.

The evening turned dark burgundy as the sun set behind the parallel dust storm, rolling across the landscape steadily like a physical manifestation of the evening. At times, they could see where it ended, miles away, but those times were few; often, the storm appeared as a wall of dark brown, faceless and impenetrable. Applewood was in distant sight, but was not the focus of their conversation. Much closer, they could see the dead lights and designs of Applewood’s famous amusement park.

Its Ferris wheel made it immediately recognizable, even for the strange, uneven clutter that riddled the park’s skeletal acreage. Wisps of smoke mingled above the land, uncoiling from tiny fires buried in the jumbled scenery. Closer, they could see a wild gray crack of sky where the ground had been pulled apart behind a tottering roller coaster, and, closer still, they could see threads of bridges, unlit and scarcely visible in the dying light.

“Stop,” Fluttershy said, and Big Mac complied without asking or looking back. Had it been Rainbow or Rarity’s request, he might have—so Twilight imagined.

“What’s up?” Vinyl asked. In the evening, she was able to lift her goggles, and looked at them with her unseemly, red eyes.

Fluttershy smiled and fluffed her wings. “I feel an Element.”

“Now that’s the kind of news Ah like to hear,” Applejack said. “Down there, in all that hubbub?”

“I thought Luna said it was in Trottingham,” Rainbow said. “Isn’t that, like, a thousand miles away?”

“More than that,” Twilight said. “I think.”

“So either it moved, or we’re about to get two in a row,” Rarity said.

Applejack laughed. “Better’n better, girls! Octy an’ Pinkie are gonna be fit to burst.”

“Octavia,” Rainbow corrected. “She goes by—”

“Aw, she ain’t here,” Big Mac said, grinning. “Ah’m gonna set us down outside, if that’s all right. Ah don’t wanna rattle any cages by droppin’ in in the middle of things.”

“Yes, good,” Fluttershy said.

“Uh, actually, not good,” Rainbow said, looking over the edge. “Check this out.”

They joined her and looked where she pointed. At the park entrance, a metal gate growing out of collapsed stone from an earlier wall, they could make out the words “Discord World” in tall, swooping white letters. On both sides of the sign, there glowed a pair of globular light bulbs, held aloft magically.

“That could be trouble,” Rarity said. “He did make it seem like there was something strange coming, in his last letter. This is probably it.”

“Said to ‘watch the skies’,” Vinyl said. “We’re the only thing in the sky right now.”

“Nevertheless, we should be careful,” Twilight said. “If he’s made this place his own, who knows what’s waiting for us?”

“Nearly there,” Big Mac said.

The park flattened as they approached the ground, and they had soon settled in a shallow basin of fragrant earth, close enough to see the individual spokes of the park’s fence.

“It’s basically night time,” Rainbow said. “I say we get in, get out, and fly out of here before he knows what happened.”

“I’m sure he’s expecting that,” Twilight said.

“Well… maybe.”

“There are obviously ponies living here,” Vinyl said. “So if it’s a trap, it’s a safe trap. I mean, it’s not immediately dangerous.”

“It’s the kind of trap that’s sprung when we’re noticed,” Fluttershy said. “I get it.”

“So we just go in unnoticed,” Applejack said. “Twi, you an’ Rarity seem to have that under control. Ya got me all ‘round Roan just fine.”

“I’ll be honest, I really don’t want to try something like that again,” Rarity said.

“It’s not gonna be as grisly as Roan,” Rainbow said.

“I know that, dear. I’m referring to the act itself. I don’t like sneaking around like that. It feels dirty.”

“I know what you mean,” Twilight said. “But still…”

“I have an idea,” Vinyl said, a light popping on her horn to get their attention. “Big Mac and I aren’t you girls. We can get in without disguises, I bet.”

“Unless they know we’re associated with ‘em,” Big Mac said.

“I doubt it. Looked like a bunch of homeless in there.”

“Homeless ponies know things too,” Rainbow said.

“Didn’t mean it like that. Just meant they probably don’t have access to the same information we do. Less up on current events.”

“This sounds dirty too,” Rarity said. “I don’t like it.”

“Rare, come on,” Rainbow said.

“Ah could try it,” Big Mac said. “Ah’m not a remarkable stallion.”

“Vinyl, on the other hoof,” Twilight said.

“Just wash all that crap out of her mane, and she’ll be fine,” Rainbow said.

“Thanks, Dash,” Vinyl said.

“Just sayin’.”

“She has a point,” Rarity said, scrutinizing Vinyl. “I could revert your mane to something more, well, natural, and you’d hardly look yourself.”

“Goggles,” Applejack said.

“We can switch ‘em for some wraparound shades,” Vinyl said. “I can handle that for a little while.” She smirked. “And how do you know this isn’t my natural hair color?”

Applejack and Rainbow laughed.

“I propose we wait until light,” Twilight said. “If this is a trap, which it sure looks like, then we’ll want to go in when we can see everything.”

“Fine by me,” Vinyl said. “I’m tired anyway. I don’t wanna adventure.”

“That’s the spirit,” Rainbow said.

“We can’t push ourselves,” Rarity said. “Rather, we can’t push ourselves in this way. If it’s the wrong time to try something, it’s the wrong time.”

“Let’s just be grateful Octy isn’t here to badger us about it,” Applejack said.

“Exactly. Come, Vinyl, let’s go below.” She looked at her mane and tail. “This could take a while.”

They woke up the next morning from a fitful rest, none of them sleeping well in spite of Rainbow and Twilight’s night watches. The day was dull and windy, and the amusement park appeared lifeless and foreboding. No ponies moved within, but no one felt alone on the ship.

Vinyl wore a pair of reflective sunglasses that Rainbow had dug out of the bottom of one of her bags. Against her almost white coat, they looked like unfeeling beetle eyes, further contrasted with the long, light blue mane that hung in loose locks down her neck. Un-styled, her hair was so voluminous that it nearly hid her horn.

After breakfast, she spent close to half an hour with Fluttershy, learning the spell necessary for her to track the Element herself. She hadn’t the magic to match Fluttershy’s range, but, inside the park, it would be enough.

Big Mac took the lead across the fallow field between their ship and the park. “Discord World” loomed over them, casting a scythe-like shadow over the dead grass before a long, metal gate, through which they could see a tall, clapboard house built against the ticket booth.

“Let’s just get in and get out as quick as we can,” Vinyl said. “I already don’t like this.”

Big Mac nodded and walked a little closer to her.

“Tickets here!” a voice called, and they both looked carefully at the booth-house. At the top, the window was boarded up, on its uneven covering a painted version of Discord’s face. They stared at it for a minute, and both started when it blinked. “Get your tickets!”

“Um, no thanks, just visiting,” Big Mac called uncertainly.

The face only stared down at them as they walked underneath, stepping carefully around the gray crater of a dead campfire.

“Enchanted park,” Vinyl said. “Is it too late to go back for Twilight?”

“We can handle this, Miss Vinyl. Now where is it?” Big Mac asked softly.

Vinyl lit her horn as they walked, but stopped. “Wait, hang on.” She tried again, and the voice yelled at them again to get their tickets. “It’s hard.”

Big Mac stared at a nearby hovel, its walls arched to partially surround a battered cotton candy machine. The door had been torn off, taking a piece of wall with it, and lay in the overgrowing grass beside a heap of empty burlap bags.

“Okay, this way.” She took them deeper into the park, past more burnt-out campfires and one that still smoldered, more tilting houses, but no faces and no ponies. Bottles and wrappers clogged the grass and weeds outside the paths and sidewalks, but there was no smell in the air save for the heady combination of smoke and coming rain. Along a gentle slope, they had to carefully skirt a bend in the walkway where an errant bumper car had come to rest. They could see the scratches on the cement where it had been dragged.

“Hold up. Look at this,” Big Mac said as they rounded the car. From behind, it had seemed harmless, painted an innocuous pink that clashed with the dull ground on which it rested. Its front, however, bore Pinkie Pie’s manic, grinning face. Someone had colored in the whites of her eyes with orange spray paint.

“Discord World indeed,” Vinyl said. “Probably best we didn’t bring the others after all.”

“Up there.” He pointed at the top of the hill, where a pair of huts had become a splintered impact site under a food court’s shredded, blue tarp. They slowly walked to its edge and stared into the wreckage for signs of life, of which there were none. Most of the floor was covered in pulverized thatching, with only a single, small bare patch beside a dented potbelly stove. On the concrete, Vinyl could see stubs of bolts; the benches they had kept in place formed a rough border around the scene, upended carelessly, but all facing inwards, as if shoved aside. Across a desolate lawn, a snack shop, its top bulging out with the awkward shape of a bulbous façade, appeared to be sinking under its own weight. To one side, an iron rod was embedded in a tree stump. As they passed, Big Mac saw Rarity’s cutie mark painted on the stump’s surface. He shivered.

“Storm’s still out there,” Vinyl said, nudging him and offering a weak smile.

“Ah think it’s comin’ this way.”

She looked at him, her horn pulsing once.

“Give it about an hour, Ah’d say.”

She pursed her lips and cast her spell again, looking all around. From where they stood, a roller coaster arched its back dangerously, the plaster siding before its drop either hanging off or chipped entirely away. Below, a tangled trio of rooftops poked up, each with its own smokeless stovepipe chimney.

“Y’ever come here?” Big Mac asked when she began walking again. The poker in Rarity’s mark bothered him more than he would have liked to admit.

“A couple times.” She looked back at him, but he nodded, indicating he had heard her fine. “Um. We didn’t come that often, ‘cause of the crowds and the lines.”

“Ya probably wanted to avoid stuff like that on yer down time.”

“That’s right. But the rides were always fun.” She looked around again. “Trying to see The End of the Rainbow. That was my favorite coaster. It takes you up into this bank of clouds, and you can’t see when you’re gonna drop. When you do, you go through the cloud, get all wet, and then… it just went so fast, Mac.”

“Sounds great.”

She grinned. “You don’t sound enthused.”

“Ah ain’t, Miss Vinyl.”

“You can drop the ‘miss’.” She slowed and brushed her tail against his side. He had never been so close to her, and was surprised at how soft her tail was.

“Sure thing. Vinyl.”

She smiled again, a little stronger, and trotted back ahead. “Not much farther, I think.”

They walked between a pair of shacks, both windows blown inward to reveal disheveled, but unfurnished rooms. The grass vanished at a hard line just after, and Vinyl paused at the dust, looking down at the riot of hoofprints. A bicycle chain lay uncovered around another bench, overturned, under a Ramada’s shattered rooftop.

“Big Mac, can you feel this?” Her voice was serious, and its natural softness in the stern tone made his fur stand up.

“Like feelin’ watched?”

“That too, but no. The magic.”

He shook his head.

“I know earth ponies can’t feel it easily, but there’s a lot here. Just thought this time you might.”

“Sorry, Miss—sorry, Vinyl.”

“This is really freaky,” Vinyl said, stepping over to an empty patch of ground beside the Ramada. A trash bin lay on its side nearby, a spray of wrappers wreathing its mouth, its metal edges singed. “This shouldn’t feel like this.”

“What’s wrong?”

“There’s no one here, but there’s magic everywhere. It wasn’t too bad earlier, but here, it’s really something else.”

“Are we in trouble?” he asked, taking a step back.

“Oh, no, no, it’s old magic.” She went back to him. “Which is even crazier. Someone cast a ton of spells out here. All around, it feels like.”

Big Mac looked around, then shrugged. “Feels normal to me.”

She patted his wither. “Us unicorns are more sensitive to it than you earth ponies. Trust me, something’s up. Or it was up.” She walked to the edge of the rest area and beckoned him on. They walked past a dislodged curve of roller coaster railing, one of its support legs fallen nearby. The gaudy stripes around its sides were dampened in the dust, and there was a dark band of scorch marks near its top, where the bolts appeared sheered away.

“So what d’ya think happened?” Big Mac asked as the first speckles of rain found the dust.

“No clue. Wanna say a fight or something, but all the ponies are gone.”

“As well as any stuff they might have with ‘em.”

“Ooh, yeah, that too.” She lifted her sunglasses a crack. “So cloudy out here, I can almost go without these.” She paused to cast her spell again. “So, Pinkie with the angel. Weird, huh?”

Big Mac rolled his eyes. “Ah’m glad fer it.”

“Me too. You caught that Fluttershy was super-supportive of her going?”

“Eeyup. Plain as day. Ah can guess why Pinkie wanted to go.”

“Guilt.”

“Guilt.” He paused, mulling over how much of his thoughts to reveal to Vinyl, hardly better than a stranger, despite everything that had happened in Roan. “An’ Ah think she should feel guilty.”

Vinyl just shook her head, looking around. The wall of dust was coming ever closer, and they could see a distant forest slowly fading into it.

“You don’t think so?” he asked.

“I don’t like to pass judgment like that. Guilt isn’t something you assign to just one pony.”

Big Mac took a minute to respond. “In Pinkie’s case, it seems pretty clear-cut, though.”

“In a way, sure. She failed to help us out when we needed it.”

“Refused.”

“We don’t know that. Some ponies freeze up under pressure, and it’s not their fault. Either way, we could blame her, but couldn’t we also blame whoever didn’t help her overcome what was stopping her? If it was fear, shouldn’t some of the guilt go to all of you?”

“How d’ya figure?”

“Lots of time to talk it out before the dam. Lots of time to unearth any misgivings, and deal with ‘em.”

“Ah s’pose. Seems like a stretch to me, though.”

“Point is,” Vinyl said, sniffing the air, “there’s more sides than Pinkie’s in this. Making her into a straw-pony isn’t gonna help anyone.”

“Ah guess this is why we don’t share with the others.”

“The accusations would fly like crazy. Probably.”

“Think so?”

“Maybe. No, I don’t, actually. Thinking out loud, is all. You’re better friends than that.”

“Ah like to think so.”

“Sorry, Big Mac. Should have thought before I said anything.” The rain picked up, and they took shelter under an awning by a broken staircase, leading up in a tight spiral to a dry water slide. The smell of damp dust was in the air, and the forest had been swallowed.

“We’re gonna need shelter in a couple minutes,” Big Mac said.

“Thought you said about an hour.”

“Ah was wrong.” He shrugged and walked across the pathway, wind coming to sweep the dust at his hooves, to the Tunnel of Love. Fluttershy’s beneficent face and wings overlooked the entrance, both scratched savagely by unknown hooves. Vinyl followed at a distance, running with her head down to keep her sensitive eyes from the dust.

She lit the tunnel to reveal a line of scarred rails and two walls of mostly broken plaster decorations. Discord mingled amongst the various cutie marks and hearts that filled the tunnel, his serpentine form twisting in loose spirals or tail-eating circles, some depictions painted and others in crude marker. A couple were slashed. A jagged crack in the ceiling afforded them a look at the sepia sky as the dust storm finally met the theme park, and a howling gust of wind filled their shelter. Big Mac righted an overturned cart and held it up for Vinyl, who climbed in after a moment’s hesitation. Dust swirled lightly inside, and Big Mac squinted against it. Both ends of the tunnel were obscured, and Vinyl strengthened her light, accomplishing little.

“We’ll just wait it out,” Big Mac said. “Any idea how close we are to that Element?”

“Not far, but I can’t tell where exactly it is.”

“Could be under some rubble, fer all we know.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.”

Big Mac sighed and looked out through the crack in the ceiling, waiting for the storm to pass. He was eager to return to the ship, for the excited greeting and the compliments he knew he would get for bringing them their next Element. He withheld a sheepish smile, knowing he was being vain, not caring.

He looked up in time to see something dark pass over their tunnel, an oblong shadow behind the clouds, so fast and shapeless that he thought nothing of it. A loose piece of cloud or a free tarp from somewhere on the park’s desecrated grounds, he figured.

He and Vinyl jumped up at a sound, the latter bumping her head on the cart’s rail. Worryingly close, it was the sound of solid impact, of large objects colliding. There was metal and glass, and Big Mac felt himself trying to sink into the wall in spite of himself. A groan carried through the air like the death cry, its phantasmal, sonorous monotone yawing from one side of the tunnel to the other as the wind carried it.

Then the ground trembled with a weighty crash, more glass breaking within the sound, and he didn’t move, waiting for it to continue or repeat. All that followed was the long, cold suspense of the uncaring wind.

The dust storm’s outermost fringes ruffled their fur before Rarity had erected a shield around the ship, turning it into a smooth droplet of magic to deflect the winds. Toward the back of the ship, where she had been practicing her magic to rotate through levels of humidity and temperature, Rainbow leaned out to stare pensively into the brown wall.

Twilight joined her, noticing with a spark of pride the remaining moisture in the air, where Rainbow had most recently conjured a fine mist. “Anything out there?”

“Yeah, actually.” Rainbow shielded her eyes, though she did not need to. “I can’t tell what it is, but there’s something big flying around out there. Doesn’t look like a ship.”

Twilight frowned and followed Rainbow’s eyes, but saw nothing. “I can’t tell.”

“You know, Discord did say to watch the skies.”

Twilight nodded. “Storms come from the sky. I don’t… do you think this could have been summoned?”

“Is that possible?” Fluttershy asked, approaching. “Um, sorry to interrupt.”

“It’s hard, but it’s possible.”

“It’ll get you life in the dungeon, too,” Rainbow said. “Not that Discord cares about that, I guess.”

“That would be some really good timing,” Fluttershy said. “Um… because I think I remember seeing it outside Roan.”

“Vanilla’s a precog, though,” Twilight said. “Oh, crud, Dash, I think I just saw it.”

“Applejack, we need to get into the air,” Fluttershy said, turning around.

“I would have said it,” Twilight said quietly, meeting Fluttershy’s level gaze.

“There it goes again,” Rainbow said. “Fluttershy, can you see it? It looks kind of animal-y.”

“I didn’t know there were even animals out here,” Twilight said. “Then again, if this storm is summoned, so’s that probably.”

“There it is,” Fluttershy said. “My, that’s large.” She glanced at Rainbow, who smirked. “I can’t see any wings.”

“How high?” Applejack asked.

Twilight jerked out of her thoughts and looked down. Applejack had them effortlessly hanging around thirty feet off the ground, close to the Ferris wheel’s axle. Twilight could barely see it through the dust.

“Keep us here for now, but get those propellers ready too,” Fluttershy said. “We might have to move quickly.”

“Okay, hold on,” Applejack said, walking over to them. “What exactly are we ‘bout to clash with?”

“It looks like a big, flying fish,” Rainbow said. “Shy? Any flying fish monsters that you know of?”

“A couple,” Fluttershy said. “It could be a pisces, and it could be a cetus. They’re both constellation-forms, like Trixie’s ursa minor.”

“They fly?”

“They can survive in the water or the air. Um, since they’re not flesh and blood, they don’t need to breathe.”

“Are either of ‘em dangerous?” Applejack asked.

“Um, well, maybe.” She balanced on the gunwale briefly. “They’re not typically aggressive, like an ursa, but they can do a lot of damage if they crash into anything.”

“Like that Ferris wheel,” Rainbow said.

“Or us,” Twilight said. They all gasped as the shadow loomed into view for the first time, not near enough to pose a threat.

Stars spangled the creature’s dark, glistening skin as it cut through the dust, one massive fin stretching down like a spike of midnight to nearly touch the desolate landscape. Its tapering tail ended in a pair of beautiful, bat-wing flukes that thrust upwards in a half-moon arc as the whale angled itself to ride a current of air. Its graceful form slid near the park’s border and then turned sharply to fly over it, where it briefly vanished.

“Twi? Ideas?” Applejack asked. “Ah’m ready to get us outta here, but we’ll have to come back fer my brother.”

“I’m thinking,” Twilight said. “I’m thinking.”

“We can’t hurt it,” Fluttershy said.

“Twilight, if you have to, do it,” Rarity said. “If it starts tossing us around, my shield won’t last long.”

“No killin’, Rare,” Applejack said.

“No, no, I wouldn’t suggest that. I mean, well, just a good poke or something. A little lightning bolt to scare it off?”

“Rarity, stop,” Twilight said. She jumped as the cetus suddenly appeared again, heading straight for them. They froze, Applejack’s engines kicking in after a second, but the whale passed over them, giving a quick view of its speckled underbelly.

Twilight looked back just in time to see its tail, trailing a ship’s length behind, dip down and strike the Ferris wheel as it turned awkwardly in the wind. A scattering of glass popped off and was swept away, and the wheel shook, its altered angle not immediately apparent from their position. In the wind, it was suspended for a moment before sagging down like a wilting leaf. Its supports were buried in the storm, but they could see the dully reflective windows and bright paint of each capsule as the wheel gradually lost its shape, and, like a string of Hearth’s Warming lights uncoiling from a spool, settled to the ground in a slithering crash that was only partially visible.

“There that goes,” Rainbow said. “It’s coming back around, girls.”

Worried, but putting her questions aside, Twilight moved to the ship’s starboard side to watch the dark form. It bobbed up and down a few times in the distance, steadily approaching, its shadow changing with its orientation into a flanged boulder bearing down on them. It was above them still, but could easily dip and ram their ship.

“Twilight?” Rarity asked.

“I’m going to deflect it,” Twilight said, trying, as she did so, to figure the best angle at which to cast her spell. “Fluttershy, does this animal have any predators?”

All around the ship, dust billowed and swirled, and Twilight could hear rain hitting Rarity’s shield as well, though couldn’t see it. With a quick jot of pride, she remembered that it was the shield only that held them steady in the morass.

As the great whale’s starry, faceless head burst through the brown curtains of shifting winds, Twilight flinched back and cast her spell, a powerful, blunt force blast to knock it away. It flashed from her horn in an unfocused magenta explosion, from the middle of which ran a solid-looking lance of magic to punch the cetus off its course. She saw the spell’s impact and saw one fin flip up as the whale changed trajectory as they spun off in the opposite direction with a shout of alarm.

The park spiraled into view for a moment before they stabilized, and Applejack and Rarity were picking themselves off the deck when Twilight turned around. “Sorry, sorry! I forgot, I’m sorry.”

“The heck was that? Did it hit us?” Applejack asked, racing to the wheel. She closed her eyes briefly, assessing whether the ship was damaged.

“No, we just got pushed the other way by my spell. Sorry,” Twilight said. “I forgot to ground us.”

“Ugh, warn us next time,” Rainbow said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Um, excuse me,” Fluttershy said, stumbling as the ship shuddered. “Twilight, I don’t really know of any natural predators, but—”

“Well, great,” Rainbow said. “Maybe we should get that lightning bolt ready after all.”

“But,” Fluttershy pressed, “you might be able to scare it off with a big enough noise.”

“Should Ah turn the engines up?” Applejack asked. “Will that help?”

“Here it comes again,” Rainbow said.

“Twilight,” Fluttershy said.

“Everypony quiet!” Twilight shouted, pushing herself away from the rail and going to the torch. “Let me—”

Rarity screamed and fell to the deck as the whale’s shadow passed over them again, its starry skin gliding so close that Twilight could make out the indistinct flowers of distant galaxies patched on to its body. Its tail cudgeled the air just above their balloon, and Twilight thought she could see the glittering result of a scrape with Rarity’s shield.

It glided over the park again, vanishing just beyond the rise of a roller coaster, waving back and forth gently in the storm.

“Twilight, a really low sound might help,” Fluttershy said. “Whales use really low frequencies to talk to each other.”

“Tell it to go away?” Rarity asked.

“No, scare it off. If we can make a low enough sound, it might think there’s an even bigger cetus nearby.”

“Or it might want to be friends,” Rainbow said.

“I doubt that,” Fluttershy said. “Twilight, can you make a magical sound like that?”

“Well, not off the top of my head,” Twilight said, staring out into the dust to try to find the starred cetus. She was listening, but distracted. “But it shouldn’t be that hard. How low are we talking about here?”

“Too low for us to hear. I think… oh, I think they usually talk at around twenty hertz.”

“So ten of these hurts should be okay if we wanna be big?” Rainbow asked.

Twilight looked at Fluttershy, who nodded after a moment. “All right, I’ll get the books.”

“Wait, hang on,” Rarity cried. “What are we supposed to do while you’re researching?”

“Bring us lower, Applejack,” Rainbow said. “Maybe we can keep it going above us while Twilight’s… ugh, reading.”

“Sorry, Rainbow,” Twilight said. “I’ll try to be quick.”

Rain pelted the scarred concrete inside their tunnel, blown in through the entrance and exit and falling in an unbroken stream through the hole in the ceiling, but there were no more crashes.

While Vinyl was huddled under the cart, sunglasses pressed as tightly to her face as possible to keep out the dust, Big Mac stood at the tunnel’s edge. He was searching for a better shelter, somewhere they would not be beholden to the gale, which, if it became stronger, could turn the irritating dust in their tunnel into a real breathing hazard. With one eye on the shifting shades of obscured park before him, he scanned the sky for the dark shape. He had seen it a couple more times from his shelter, but didn’t know whether Vinyl did. He imagined, in the sunglasses, she had not.

On one side of the tunnel’s exit area, once roofed, he could see the corner of a food court and hear its tarp flapping loosely; and, on the other side, a windswept path with no clear terminus, but a map of the park silhouetted in dust beside it. He shivered, his chest and face sticky with filthy rainwater, and trudged back to Vinyl.

Lifting her cart, he helped her to her hooves and told her his plan, and she nodded with a flash of pastel orange light. In the storm, both of them knew she would not be heard, so she had to communicate through her light.

At the tunnel’s mouth, beside a pair of Discords engaged in a tango on the wall, Vinyl grew a purple ball of light on her horn. She shivered as well, and the sight of rain and dust beading off her sunglasses momentarily picked at Big Mac’s nerve.

“Let’s go,” he shouted, knowing he didn’t need to, that he could simply begin walking and she would follow. The issuance of the order, nonetheless, made him feel better.

It was not the dust alone that concerned him; it was the lack of visibility in a place with collapsible structures. Big Mac knew the rain would be weighing down on many of the buildings, soaking into wood or filling imperfect gutters and eaves, while the wind would tear through clapboard walls and throw open unsecured doors and windows. Able to see only a few feet in any direction, any crash was a threat, and one about which neither of them could do much but wait and hope it was occurring elsewhere.

He stopped at the map and leaned in close, Vinyl providing a helpful beam of white light. They were near the middle of the park, close to a log ride and a roller coaster, one called “Lake Witch” and the other “White Demon.” The two rides formed a rough V that protected a gift shop, which Big Mac tapped with his hoof. “Let’s go there.”

Shielding his eyes as best he could, he pushed against the wind in what he hoped was the right direction. He had only taken a few steps when Vinyl yanked his tail and emphatically pointed to the sky. The same dark shape he had seen through the crack in the tunnel’s ceiling coasted over them again, its form long and smooth, with tapered fins and a large, deltaic tail. For Big Mac, whose thoughts were not on the ship and his friends, it was a herald of predation and disaster that froze his heart and made his resolve nearly buckle in a terrific wash of adrenaline.

Another of Discord’s creations, come to protect his park, was Big Mac’s first thought. A colossal watchdog, perpetually cloaked in storms, set to patrol Discord’s land and guard any Elements hidden within. As it sped over their heads, he let out an unheard, shaking sigh, relieved that it had not seen them, or at least was not immediately coming for them.

Vinyl flashed a red light behind him, and he moved again, squinting his eyes against a gust of grit. A small tree swayed on the far side of the nearby picnic area, and Big Mac thought he could see a flap of sheet metal at its base.

The metal chute at the end of the log ride was dented and offset, its paint almost totally flaked away, a tree branch sticking over its lip like a limb, and Big Mac could just see the contours of the drop before it. Rain streamed down the slide in a tinny, insistent cataract, divided closest to the bottom as it hit a crude waterwheel set aside a stilted cabin. Below its deck, Big Mac could see the dark gap where soil had been washed away.

Steering Vinyl farther from the log ride, lest they be too close when the cabin inevitably fell, he stumbled in a gopher hole. A dirt-encrusted golf ball sat in tangled grass just beside it, and he kicked it away as he got up.

Vinyl flashed another light, and he looked at her. She pointed at his leg and wobbled her hoof in the air. “You okay?”

“It’s fine,” he said, his eyes rolling up for another possible glimpse of the dark harbinger. It had passed only minutes ago, but he felt it should be coming back soon.

Another shattered building rose up in the distance, rain streaming off its corners and a tattered flag fluttering on a length of rope from one piece of askew scaffolding. Over the house’s door, in sharp, menacing letters, was painted “Lake Witch,” and, under, “Ride if You Dare!” Someone had tried to paint over it, but the new lettering was unreadable.

Big Mac whipped around at the low sound of shifting earth, at first thinking it was a growl from the mysterious shadow. Vinyl came up beside him and wrapped one hoof around his, and, together, wet and shivering, they watched the log ride cabin come loose. Wet arrowheads of mud and stone plunged first, snarling in the wind and rain as they trailed down the mild slope, coming to rest mostly against the metal trough where it had depressed the ground. Wood creaked and groaned, and the entire building shifted briefly before giving way and sliding down. Above, more mud raced to join, carrying a dark brown carpet of garden and shrubbery with it to violently shove into the cabin as it came to rest a scant ten feet lower, impacting its back and forcing its face to partially burst out, a contained explosion.

Only a second later, the waterwheel tilted and, with a rough screech, fell off its stanchion to pummel the log ride’s slide. It hung awkwardly in the slide for a moment before leaning out and crashing to the ground, ripping away a chunk of the slide’s siding and crushing a sorrowful, soaked popcorn stand.

When the spectacle had stopped, both ponies looked up again, ranging the sky with their eyes for signs of the monster. Big Mac didn’t see Vinyl quickly lift up her glasses, but felt her poke him excitedly. He looked at her, and she, smiling, waved her hoof in a large circle around her head. He frowned, trying to figure out what she was saying, and she replaced her glasses. Dimming the purple light for a moment, she summoned a dust-brown bulb of light, held it for a second, and then faded it away.

Big Mac looked around, then understood. Visibility was returning. He smiled at her, and she nodded along, then pointed. “Onwards!”

At a trot, they went under the entrance point for the Lake Witch and emerged in a grassy quadrangle. Large pillars surrounded it, between them strung gray sails to provide shade, many of which were perforated or hung by only one corner. Wedged between a pair of pillars was another shoddy house, both sides caved in to reveal a sparse network of tree branches and a metal pole, the only things keeping the ceiling up besides the tension of the compressed walls.

Big Mac took them past the house, past a ruined shaved ice stand, and down a different mud-choked path toward the gift shop. He heard Vinyl’s soft gasp and looked up wildly, seeing the shadow circling low on the northern side of the park. The spire of some defunct ride stood against the wind, and the shadow floated gracefully past, one extension of its bulk seeming almost to float up to miss the top. The shadow, clearly massive, did not move like something with strength. There was no ponderous momentum in its motion, no labored tugging of body parts against one another; it floated and flowed like a living cloud, buoyed on the currents with surety and poise. He shuddered, the immensity of a body so secure in its place making him feel oppressed, watched, small. From the look on Vinyl’s face, she felt it too, and he signaled to her to follow him off the path, where they stood, hooves entwined again, under a dripping pinyon pine. The thought of lightning did not cross his mind.

When the monster vanished into the dark distance, they splashed and stumbled their way toward the gift shop. The dust had all turned to mud at their hooves, though they could still see vestiges of it to the north. The rain, meanwhile, was coming down harder and colder, the wind spraying it into their faces and sides. As they trotted down the path, keeping their heads low, heat lightning flickered overhead for the first time.

The gift shop door was already ajar, and they entered into what resembled an abandoned living room. Store shelves had been pushed to brace the walls while the counter had become a lopsided table, a splintered board nailed on to one side.

Big Mac followed Vinyl’s flash around a corner, stepping over a greasy puddle under a sagging section of ceiling. On a bare spot of floor, encircled with glossy, white paint, a life-size Discord doll reclined on a patchy blanket, a smaller doll of each of the Elements of Harmony under one of his coils. Each stuffed figure smiled gaudily, their colors faded and their fur damp and, in some places, coming off.

“Didn’t like the Elements much, I guess,” Vinyl said. Big Mac could barely hear her with the rain outside.

“Speakin’ of, how close are we to the next one?”

Vinyl doused her lights to cast the more complicated spell. “Not far. Once that thing’s gone, we can get it.”

He nodded, thinking, trying to see into the sky from a grimy window.

“Ah’ll bet bits to a hat pin this critter heard our engines an’ thought it’d made a friend,” Applejack said, watching with wonder and disgust as the cetus edged farther away from them. Twilight, back on the prow, horn lit stridently, didn’t respond. The sound of rain pounding Rarity’s shield was more distracting than she had said it would be.

“It was here before we took off, though,” Rainbow said.

“It could have been the storm,” Fluttershy said. “Large storms like this can produce low-frequency sounds. If the cetus was already nearby, it could have been attracted. Um, I know that happens out at sea. They sometimes get hurt because they get too close to hurricanes.”

“Well, this ain’t the ocean,” Applejack said.

“I’m sure we can assume Discord summoned it,” Rarity said, sweat beginning to soak her fur from keeping up their shield.

“Probably,” Rainbow said. “Vinyl and Big Mac are okay, by the way. I saw Vinyl’s little light show down there, a couple minutes ago. They’re on the move, or they were.”

“Thank goodness,” Applejack said. “Though Ah have to admit, Ah wasn’t all that worried. They’re smart ponies.”

No one said anything, and Applejack nodded, as though their silence confirmed her words. She looked back out at the cetus, too far off to be more than an odd shape, and sighed.

“Okay, I’m going to give it a rest, and we’ll see if it comes back,” Twilight said, settling back. “This is actually harder than I thought it would be.”

“You gonna be able to finish it?” Applejack asked.

“I’ll be fine.”

Vinyl stood at the gift shop door for five minutes, watching the skies, while Big Mac rested and calmed down. When those minutes passed, and the monster had not appeared, she got him and they went back into the rain, following a path down a row of trees toward a covered petting zoo. “Petting” had been slashed roughly, over it written “Discord.”

There were no animals in the enclosure, but a strange, circular indentation in the ground, lines faintly visible at the edges, where the rain had not completely soaked in. Vinyl lit her horn again, then went to a destroyed shed and stared down at the remnants.

“Here?” Big Mac asked.

She nodded, nudging a bag of animal feed. Big Mac, understanding immediately, used his teeth to tear open the bag while Vinyl gored a second one with her horn. They dumped the pellets on the ground, a cloud of wheat-smelling sawdust rising up as their bags emptied. Inside the third bag, Twilight’s diadem tumbled out onto the pile of wet bunny food.

“Bingo,” Vinyl whispered.

“Let’s get goin’, then,” Big Mac said, looking closely at it, seeing his own distorted reflection. “Ah don’t wanna tempt that monster up there any more’n we already have.”

Applejack touched them back down at the entrance of Discord World, guided by Vinyl’s silver spotlight. While Fluttershy explained the cetus, and what they had done to chase it off, Twilight cleaned her Element in the bathroom sink, withholding a shout of joy at finally having reclaimed her tiara. When it was sufficiently clean, she gingerly lowered it onto her head, where it still fit perfectly. In the mirror, she stared into her own eyes with a look of dour determination, then broke it with a silly, open-mouthed grin. “Five down, one to go,” she said, confident that the Element in Trottingham would be similarly easy to acquire.

Back on the deck, Rarity had dissipated her shield, and they flew north through the departing storm, Trottingham not quite a week away.

Colgate and Rouge had spent the entire day before setting up their plan for hasty escape. It had taken them half the day to fully form, and the two of them had worked into the night getting every detail right, and then slept together on the couch, letting the night breeze lull them.

Rouge woke up early, complaining of a headache and a dry mouth, and Colgate only stared at her mercilessly. Her own head felt thick and full, her muscles tense and raw. She was covered in sweat from the night before, and as she looked out at the yard, the garden hose called to her. Neither of them had showered since the hotel, and she doubted she would have the opportunity soon. The garden hose had been dedicated for a single, specific task, and could not be safely removed from where they had left it. Knowing this, she was still tempted.

Then, Colgate noticed the house across the wall. Its curtains were open, and she stared into the reflected sun. Rouge was gargling water from the kitchen sink.

“Looks like you were right,” Colgate said, rubbing her eyes. “Curtains’re open.”

“Shoot, really?” Rouge asked.

“Yes, really.”

“Aw, crud. Well, Cole, hey, we might not have to do it at all. You know, it depends on if they call the cops.”

“They will. They always do.”

Rouge opened a cupboard, searching uselessly for something to drink. Her eyes lingered on a bottle of surface cleaner. “Wanna get set up? Just in case?”

“Yeah, let’s.” She yawned. “Aw, shit, Rouge, it’s too early. What time is it?”

“Dunno. Stovetop says eighty-eight eighty-eight. Uhh, the sun’s up. Noon?”

Colgate shrugged.

“Well, I’ll wake up the scanner.” She fiddled with a black box beside the couch, a police scanner, one of several items she had had delivered to their new house the day before, brought by the scared, shy college student whose house Colgate had vandalized: Whipped Cream. He had supplied all the tools they needed, but no alcohol; Colgate had been adamant that Rouge remain sober for the proceedings.

While Rouge searched among static for police activity, Colgate went outside to make sure everything was still in place. The garden hose was pulled around to the utility closet, where its nozzle was wedged between two pipes, ready to spray straight into the bottom of the water heater, which they had turned all the way up the day before. On the opposite side of the yard, their staircase of stones gave Colgate enough of a boost to get over the fence, which she had practiced only once the night before.

“We’re all clear for now, buddy!” Rouge called. “Everything good outside?”

“Looks fine,” Colgate said, stepping back in, avoiding the glass still embedded in the carpet. “Are you going to put on your makeup now, or later?”

“I’ll do it when they’re on their way.” Another item she had had Whipped Cream bring, a full makeup kit, she had used the day before to disguise herself to safely visit the neighbors, setting up a potential storm of distractions for curious police.

Getting Colgate, and Rouge later, safely out of the house was important, but they also needed a way to escape the neighborhood. They needed a car, one they could take. After a sunny stroll in her fake face, Rouge had found a car parked in the driveway just on the edge of the cul-de-sac across from them; even more, she said, its owner lived alone. Reaching the car would involve them passing six individual houses.

“Four-forty-two, north Paisley Way, copy,” the scanner said.

“That us?” Colgate asked, tensing up as though it were.

“No, that’s a ways away. We’re on… crap, I forget. Cole, c’mon, they’re not gonna do anything today. Let’s just tank it and get some booze. Kick back, huh?”

“No chance.”

“Well hell.” Rouge yanked open the cupboard under the sink and grabbed some window cleaner.

“You’re an idiot if you think that’ll do anything for you.”

Rouge shrugged in an imitation of Colgate’s noncommittal gesture and sprayed into her mouth, gagging immediately. “Ugh, this is horrible!”

“It’s a cleaning agent,” Colgate mumbled. “You stupid, compulsive, stupid…” She shook her head violently, imagining trying the cleaner herself. The thought made her angrier; how dare Rouge thrust such a thought on her?

“Easy, easy. I’m putting it down.”

“I’m fine.”

“I know.”

Colgate looked at her, receiving a warm smile.

“What?”

“Do you know?”

“Sure, I’ve got a pretty good Cole sense. You know, you’re not the most expressive pony out there, except when you’re, you know, mad at me.”

Colgate frowned, not liking the implications of being known so well. She looked at the phone and the list of numbers next to it, and the notes next to each. “Stray dog,” “gas leak,” and “Colgate.” Three numbers, three lies, each designed to move the ponies within the houses or otherwise obfuscate the police’s job, when they came. The list made Colgate nervous. They had discussed the details for most of the day, imagining as many possible issues as they could, but the calls would only work once, and could not be practiced. Timing would be everything.

They didn’t even have food. At three in the afternoon, shortly after Rouge had attempted, again, to drink the window cleaner, Colgate heard their address on the police scanner. Canterlot’s law enforcement was on its way to investigate what looked like vandalism.

Colgate rushed to the phone and Rouge rushed to her makeup, putting on a perfect imitation of her disguised face from the day before with deftness and precision Colgate had not seen in any other activity. Once she was ready, she took the phone and made the first call, deepening her voice.

“Yes, hello? I need to speak to the pony handling the Colgate story.” She grinned into the receiver. “Sweet Dreams. I’m a… not a friend, but kind of an associate. Yeah, I met her yesterday, that’s what I’m calling about.”

A pregnant pause on the other end before Rouge continued.

“I’m at sixty-five oh-one north Lemongrass Avenue. As soon as possible, please, and as many ponies as you can spare. I think she’s following me.” She sighed dramatically. “No, ‘cause I haven’t actually seen her today. It’s just a hunch, that’s all. I don’t wanna call the cops for nothing. I hope it’s nothing. Uh-huh. Yes, as soon as possible, I’m ready. Okay, great, thanks. I’ll be waiting outside. Sweet Dreams, yes. Okay, bye.” She hung up. “Half an hour, Cole.”

The first link in their plan, calling a team of reporters on the Colgate case to swarm the corner house. Colgate would eventually be going past, but, by that time, they would be engaged in something much more immediate.

“You’re on, Cole baby,” Rouge said. “Hey, this is kinda fun. I haven’t done this kind of thing before!”

“Go, go,” Colgate said. “Tomatoes, right?” Their signal word.

“Tomatoes.” Rouge exited the house and Colgate picked up the phone. She had approximately five minutes to make two calls and get over the back fence, five minutes being how long they had estimated it would take the police to arrive, given the two-or-three minute conversation with the local news.

While Rouge was knocking on the neighbor’s door, Colgate called Canterlot animal control to report a stray dog, a golden retriever with no collar and a big bark, and then the Canterlot gas company to report a leak at one of the houses in the far cul-de-sac.

As soon as she hung up, she was out the patio door, out into the desert landscape, and to the stone staircase. Resting for a second to make sure she could hear two voices at the house’s front, she vaulted the fence, landing uncomfortably on a back leg. The neighbor’s dog looked at her with friendly bemusement.

“C’mon, Daffodil,” Colgate mumbled, approaching the dog as Rouge had taught her, slowly but without fear. There was a latched gate to the alley behind both houses, but it was easily opened, and it was through this that Colgate needed to release the dog after removing its collar.

The dog gave two short barks, and Colgate folded her ears down quickly before opening them again to make sure both voices persisted. The sound plucked at her nerves, its insistent insouciance making anger flare up. She could see herself kicking it in the snout, barking back at it as loudly as she could, a just reciprocation in her mind.

Shaking her head and closing her eyes, feeling briefly only the midday sun on her lidded eyes, she could hear Daffodil’s collar jangle. Pony and dog looked at each other for a second before Colgate gently tugged at the dog’s collar, trying to find the buckle that held it on amidst so much golden fur. Daffodil barked again, and Colgate gave the collar a yank, rewarded with a quieter, more demure yap.

“C’mon, dammit,” she said, rising and trying to move at the same time. She knew she couldn’t dawdle, could sense the police cars coming nearer. Rouge had to be back in their house to greet the police, and Colgate had to be back in the yard for her signal.

One of the first questions Rouge had asked: why did they need to go to so much trouble if they had a police scanner? Why not use the early warning to grab the car and get a head start? Because they needed to escape in confusion, Colgate had said; it was too easy for someone to notice where they were going if they took the car in broad, placid daylight.

Daffodil licked Colgate’s cheek when the collar came off, and Colgate didn’t look at the dog as she draped it over her own neck. It wasn’t part of the plan, but she figured she might use it. She walked the dog to the gate and let it out, having to give it a firm push to get it across the threshold into the alley.

She couldn’t hear Rouge as she went back over the fence, using the edge of the neighbor’s elevated flower garden as a step up. As she landed in the dust of her own yard, she heard the first sirens in the distance, and had to resist the urge to race inside and make sure Rouge was in place. The most uncomfortable part of their entire plan was her inability to verify that Rouge was doing her job. Each pony had to trust the other in multiple places, something real Daturas did all the time, Rouge had pointed out.

Colgate crept into the utility closet and pulled the two pulse crystals out from underneath an overturned bucket, which she had cleared of black widows the afternoon before. Holding them to her hooves, waiting for the enchanted straps to respond and affix themselves to her pasterns, she was entering into the more dangerous phase of the operation, where she would be most conspicuous to police and civilians alike.

The sirens stopped, and she could hear the police knocking through the shed’s unlocked door to the house. Rouge’s voice answered, and Colgate sighed in relief. She chatted amiably with the police, her only job to keep them talking as long as possible, to give the reporters, dog catchers, and gas technicians time to arrive.

“Who?” she asked innocently when they asked whether she had heard anything about Colgate, who an anonymous neighbor thought they had seen. Stalling the police might be the one job Rouge could only do better if she were drinking, Colgate thought.

She went outside and folded herself next to the wall, sliding along, ears up, still able to hear the conversation as it leaked through the hole in the patio window. She stopped five feet away from the hose spigot, able to reach it with her magic from that distance, and waited for Rouge’s signal. Eventually, the police would ask about the broken glass, and Colgate would need to leave.

“How’d that happen, ma’am?” a crisp female voice asked.

“Neighbor kids, probably,” Rouge said. “It was like that when I got here.” There was a slight pause, then she said, “I was gonna start a tomato garden, but now I’m not so sure.”

Colgate jumped as if given a sudden shock, and twisted the spigot quickly. Rouge had said her code word, meaning that an officer was coming near to the back yard, and it was time for Colgate to activate the first distraction. Water hissed down the hose and Colgate ran for the back fence, for that time fully visible to anyone looking out. Pleasant tension tightened her insides as she vaulted the fence again with more practiced ease, heedless of the voices behind her, which were quickly buried under the sibilance of vaporizing water.

She wanted to stick around and watch, but could not. Rouge would feign fright and do what she could to get the police distracted, rush into the steam, brave getting burned, and double back into the house, where she would have maybe thirty seconds to put on more makeup and gallop through the front door to her next task.

“What? Holy crapola, what is this?” she heard Rouge crying as she went for the other side of the neighbor’s yard. Other voices joined together behind her, Rouge’s the most frantic among them, and Colgate used a decorative planter to get herself into the next yard, belonging to the house on the street’s inside corner. There was nothing for her to do there; she went immediately for the low gate to the front, which Rouge had identified the day before. In the alley, Daffodil barked twice and was silent.

Through the cracked picket gate, Colgate watched the street for activity. Alone in the grass and under the ceaseless sun, Colgate felt free. Her own corner of the foreign lawn, her own place to watch and wait for her next move. She leaned out cautiously to see more police malingering outside their house, as they both knew to expect.

“Just stay out of sight,” she thought, crouching behind the gate and waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive. The walls were thin enough that she could hear the ponies inside the house moving around, one asking the other what they saw out the window. Colgate checked her back, seeing no one. She shifted her weight nervously, relishing the fear as much as she wished she didn’t feel it.

“Hey!”

Colgate jumped as her attention snapped to the space above and behind her. An open window framed a young colt’s incredulous face.

“You’re not supposed to be there!’

She frowned. “Yes, I am.”

“Moooooooom!”

Before she could react, the colt dashed off, and she stood, as if to give chase. Though angry at the child’s audacity, her mind felt clear.

A car pulled up and stopped in the street outside, and she spared it a glance as she tried to form a plan, the parent’s inquisitive voice floating nearer.

“Hey!”

She whipped back and locked eyes with a police officer, frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, a retracted baton clipped to his hoof. The gate, ajar for Colgate to watch, gave the officer a perfect line of sight.

“Get off our property right now!” someone shouted, but Colgate wasn’t listening. She dashed back into the yard, straight for the fence, but balked; there was no way back from where she had come. A pair of officers was heading her way while the mother and colt watched, suddenly awestruck as Colgate dove into their pool, obeying the first idea she had. She scraped her knees on the bottom and had to surface quickly, trying to think, knowing in the back of her mind that Rouge would be continuing the plan, having no way to know that Colgate had been caught. She grabbed a floating chlorine dispenser as she got out.

The police were just behind, pushing single-file through the gate, calling for her to stop. She did, then turned and ran across the patio, lobbing, as she did so, the dispenser through the glass—her old trick. The glass shattered, and she, heedless of the fire the shards raked across her sodden skin, jumped in to skitter across a tile floor. The napping husband woke up with a start and raced to cover himself.

The pulse crystals clattered against her pasterns as she ran down the hall, expecting to find an exit. She could double back at any time and attempt a standoff, she knew, but would need something to lean against; on three legs, Colgate was not quick, as she imagined the police would be.

“Hey! What?”

She shoved the mother, an earth pony, out of the way as she barreled through a door, slamming it back onto the wall with a house-shaking bang. She was in the master bedroom, and could see the lights of police cars through the window, the same window from which she had been spotted.

The colt wailed from the corner, a high, prepubescent shriek that reminded Colgate more of the police sirens than of an equine voice. Her tension tightening still, moving upwards into true fear, she ran for the window and scrambled out, banging her horn on the sill. Her vision came back only after she was outside, lying in the grass, having pushed herself through an interval of darkness in which she trusted her orientation to chance.

Freedom, of a sort, flowed back into her. Outside the house, and the police with too many supplies to follow her out the window, she had given herself a tiny head start. It would be perfect to slip in amongst the reporters, grab Rouge, and vanish in the confusion—so perfect that she almost saw it when she ran back through the gate. Instead, she saw only the minor confluence of police as she ran into the street, a group forming outside her door.

It was too late. She was out of hiding, in the air, the plan dashed and ruined by cruel circumstance. She turned a quick circle on the blacktop, the sun wheeling over her head as she tried to think of what to do. She wanted to run up the street, away from the cul-de-sac and to the larger road ahead, but it would be easy for them to intercept her.

She switched back to pelt deeper into the neighborhood, noticing the parting of curtains at one of their target houses. Just behind, she heard raised voices, warnings, and demands to stop where she was. All she could think was, “Where is Rouge?”

On the street, her wet hooves were able to find purchase, and she ran at full speed without slipping. She turned the corner, her chest already burning, her face streaming with sweat, her vision clouding. Her thoughts of Rouge were fading, and she thought instead of her pills, their memory too distant to be real. If she had her pills, she knew, she would be unstoppable.

“Celestia! Booze!” She jumped onto the sidewalk and didn’t stop herself from banging into a trash can, almost sending herself sprawling. “She got distracted. That’s why she’s not here.”

The cul-de-sac, not thirty feet away, constricted as realization stacked on realization. Rouge had gotten distracted, and would be no help. Colgate would be on her own in the middle of the neighborhood, in the middle of the day. She needed a car, but didn’t know how to drive one. Still, Colgate raced for the house on the end, her legs on fire, while the police trailed behind her. The hum of tires joined the fray.

Rouge, with one poorly-done imitation of a black eye, raced the opposite way from Colgate. She needed to wait outside for the newsponies to arrive, then be seen running toward them, feigning terror, her story that Colgate had sent someone to “give her a message”; the injured face. A lie that would bring newsponies and police together, hopefully, so Colgate could slip closer to the target house, and the car.

When she heard the police rallying and calling for someone to stop, her heart sunk, and she stopped running. She looked back, knowing what she would see. The small group of officers marched like ants through a gate, cautious but clearly ready for action.

And like that, Rouge, too, knew that she was finished. She could feel her future folding around her, options slipping away, escape more and more unlikely. Alone in the middle of the street, the sun baking her on the macadam, and too far from safety to do anything except pray for salvation, or to wake up, Rouge walked.

She took two steps before pausing. In her sudden, terrific, all-too-real depression, leaving the neighborhood as quickly as she could had seemed the best choice. Colgate could handle herself, but Rouge would disappear.

“Should I abandon her? Can I?” She watched Colgate streak across the street, police in her wake only a few seconds later. She watched one get in the police car. She knew that Colgate would rely on her, not only to facilitate all the diversions, but to drive them both to safety, wherever it was. “I need a drink.”

Colgate crouched in the hot, crowded space between a huge, dry tree and the target house. Carpenter bees moved around her head, and she watched one vanish down a hole into the tree. The sight of it made her shudder.

She was next to a bathroom. Overhead, through the cracked window, she could hear a shower running, someone within, speaking to herself. Still no sign of Rouge.

The police car drifted by again like a predator, its driver the same level of patient calm each time it passed. No one had seen her hide, but they had also not seen her leave. In time, she knew they would find her.

Even so, as she settled into a more comfortable position, poking herself on dried grass and twigs, Rouge’s betrayal was at the front of her mind. Part of her had expected it.

“Is it any surprise, Cole? They tried to kill us off once, it’s no wonder they would get to Rouge somehow. Fancy Pants is too smart for her.” She watched a bee swoop within inches of her face, a little black bullet, one of an unseen multitude crawling inside the twisted tree. “This is the perfect time to do it, too. Of course.”

It was always at the height of danger, she thought. In Ponyville, outside the Tartarus gateway, and Canterlot, chased by the police. “Always close to something great, and then they pull the rug out from under me.”

“No, darling, I insist, you take it. It’s much too valuable for me,” the shower pony said. Running lines, Colgate figured.

“Face it, Cole, good buddy: you’re betrayed once more.”

She rose, located the pulse crystals still near her hooves. She could make it easy for herself and for Rouge, turn herself in, throw herself on the mercy of the court, and see what happened. She could accept discommendation from the Datura and, in a few years, fewer even, if she behaved well in prison, get her life back on track.

“Hey! Over here!” she shouted, then clamped a hoof to her mouth. As quickly as the idea had appeared, it collapsed. Feeling as though every eye in the neighborhood had turned her way, she knew then that she wanted no option that would so wholly gratify Rouge and the ponies she served.

When no one came, she knew that they were toying with her. Having heard her brief instance of weakness, they had jointly decided to wait and watch her squirm under the regret of so rash a decision. “That kind of cruelty is inequine,” she thought. “How do I wind up entangled with these kinds of ponies all the time?”

Then, she realized with a slow shock, cruelty though it was, it was also their mistake. The pony was still in the shower, still talking, and no one had the time to reach the back yard to watch her. She crept away from the tree, past a garden hose buried in leaves and sticks—thoughts of Rouge—and let herself into the yard. She picked up a baseball and, once again, put it through the nearest window. As soon as the glass had stopped falling, she trotted back to the tree to listen for any signs that the shower pony had heard the commotion. She had not.

She climbed awkwardly through the window, momentarily caught halfway as she had to lean and sweep broken glass off the short bookcase she would crawl over. Each time a pulse crystal banged against something, her paranoid mind pictured it shattering in its holster.

She walked through the house, knowing it to be empty except for the shower pony, another thing Rouge had learned the day before. Through the front window, she saw the police car edge into view again, then stop. Officers moved in a loose formation around the house opposite while a frightened pony in pajamas explained something. Colgate could just see the news vans arriving at the street’s corner.

She followed the sound of the shower up one of two hallways and stepped into an unoccupied bathroom off to one side. Flicking the light on, her eyes rested on the medicine cabinet. Paying no mind to the bedraggled, miserable looking face in the reflection, she opened the cabinet with more force than she had intended and inspected the contents.

Unthinking, unfeeling, she opened a bottle of ibuprofen, emptied it onto the counter, and, alternating between the sink and the pills, took them all.

She rested for a second, slapped the empty bottle onto the floor, and went for the door, mind already cloudy with excitement. She wanted to scream, to dance, to jump into a pool and splash her friends. Even Rouge’s betrayal disappeared under the sunrise in her soul, the pills’ very existence enough to improve her mood and her thinking, long before the active ingredients would. So suddenly, so easily, her problems had been solved. She felt she could have floated up to the ceiling if she wanted.

The shower stopped, but Colgate didn’t mind. She went to the bathroom, listened to the pony inside. Still running her lines, banging around, drying herself off. She heard a drawer open and close, and imagined her new partner, still unaware, taking some pills as well. Not as much as Colgate, of course; no one else had the same vim for life.

She readied her pulse crystal and waited for the door to open.

Rouge walked down the sidewalk to where she did not know. She sang as she did so, not happy, but to give her voice something to do. Whatever happened, happened, she figured. Colgate makes it, or Colgate doesn’t. Either way, she needed a drink.

She stopped to rest on the grassy shoulder at a traffic light, putting herself in the shade of a small shrub, and watched the anonymous Canterlot citizens move. No one seemed frantic or annoyed. No one seemed worried. She greeted a passing pony and received a friendly greeting back, no snap of the eyes or irritated “thinking.”

“You got a little something to drink?” she asked the next pony, who only stared at her and hustled past. Rouge shrugged.

“Wait, duh. Ponies don’t carry that stuff with ‘em. I need money, then I can get my own.” She smiled, pleased by her own cleverness.

She settled back on the grass and waited for more pedestrians to come her way. “Ma’am? Sir? Spare change?”

Colgate’s pulse crystal, reflected in the other unicorn’s frightened, shining eyes, seemed to her a shard of emotion come loose and caught before the rest of it escaped the pony’s mouth in a deflated “huh?”

“I need you silent,” Colgate said. Strength ebbed through her veins, and her mind felt sharper than it ever had. Perhaps she had taken too many pills, she thought, but it seemed unlikely.

“What do you want?” the pony whispered.

“Drive. Drive me, I mean. I want you to take me away from here.”

The two stood where they were for a second, then Colgate moved to one side to allow the pony to pass her. Keeping the pulse crystal aimed at her the whole time, she followed her on three legs out to the living room, into the garage, where they stopped.

“Open the door and look out,” Colgate said, moving to the side, where she would not be visible from the street. “Describe what you see.”

The unicorn hesitated.

“Use your hooves. That horn remains inactive.”

She nodded, fumbling with her hooves at the garage door latch.

Colgate watched her horn as the garage door swung open, knowing the sudden band of sunlight would be a good time to fire off a quick spell. The unicorn was too dazed to think of it.

“I see police,” she said. “And the news. Looks like a utility vehicle coming in from this side, too.”

“Where are the police?”

“They’re… Luna, they’re talking to Berry Delight over there.” She didn’t look at Colgate. “What did you do?”

“Nothing you wouldn’t do, good buddy. This is what needs to happen. You and I get in that car, and you take me away from here.”

“The car?”

If Colgate were not hiding, she would have smacked the unicorn. “Yes, that car. Can you drive?”

“Y-yes.”

“Silently. Okay?” Suddenly realizing that the pony was afraid, Colgate switched to a kinder tone of voice. She used to use it on patients just before surgery, a lifetime ago. “I’m not going to hurt you if you do what I ask, okay?”

“Okay. Sure. R… right now?”

“Are the police looking?”

“Not really.”

“They could be coming right now. She’s lying to you.” “Now. Do it now. Let’s go.”

Colgate moved out into the light behind the pony and climbed awkwardly into the back seat, where she could just see the tip of her horn as she settled into the driver’s seat. The only sound was that of the car starting.

“Sorry about all this. My name’s Powder Rouge. I’m trying to get away from that crazy pony, Colgate. You heard of her?”

“I… um, okay. Where are we going?”

“Take me up the mountain.” She rapped the headrest with her spare hoof. “I can see your horn still, by the way. No magic.”

The pony didn’t speak, and they pulled out of the neighborhood. Colgate expected to see a police car glide behind them, but there was nothing. Relief flooded her, a tiny part of her mind still persisting that it was a trick. She took a deep breath, then another. Her breathing was finally slowing down.

“What’s your name?”

“Me?”

Colgate slapped the headrest again, hard, and the pony jumped. “S-sorry! My name’s Fluffy Clouds, ma’am. Fluffy Clouds.”

“False. That’s no name for a unicorn.”

“I… I specialize in cloud and air-based magic. I’m a forepony on one of the smaller weather teams here. I…”

“C’mon. Keep talking. It’s better than quiet.”

“Um, okay.”

Colgate slapped the headrest.

“Sorry, sorry! I’m thinking. It’s… do you mind if I turn the air on?”

“Go ahead.” Watching the nub of horn, she pushed her crystal closer. “No magic.”

“I can’t do it with my hooves. The dials are too small.”

Colgate frowned and leaned to one side, using her magic to turn on the air conditioning and the radio. Fluffy Clouds had turned it down as soon as the car was started.

“What’s your station, Fluffy Clouds?”

The unicorn’s terrified eyes found Colgate’s in the rear-view mirror. “Um… twenty-five point four. The jazz station.”

Colgate found the station and was silent, watching Fluffy Clouds’ face, her horn, and the road. The freeway that would take them up Canterlot Mountain was not close.

Ink Pearl, the mare who had helped set the trap at the watchpoint, followed the car from the sidewalk. Her amulet bent light around her, making her close to invisible, while her shoes allowed the traversal of an entire block in a single step. Both were standard Datura equipment, but not for ponies like Colgate or Rouge.

Fleur dis Lee had told Ink most of what Fancy Pants had shared with her, and ordered her to tail Colgate and see what happened when the police inevitably found her. Rouge, Fleur had said, was of no consequence, and could be ignored if the two should split up.

Ink took a step and put herself a block ahead of the oncoming traffic. She leaned against the wall and waited for it to catch up to her, wishing all the while that she had not been selected for the job. Watching ponies, especially failures like Colgate and Rouge, was her least favorite type of assignment. She wondered whether Fleur knew, but put that thought out of her head. She was one to complain, but she never questioned authority.

To Ink’s thinking, it was preposterous that her talents—and manifold talents they were, she being the most senior member of her team, except Fleur—should be wasted tracking the delinquent pony from Fancy Pants’ reject team. Colgate’s actions were best left to be catalogued by the Canterlot justice system, not its hidden elite, but, again, she didn’t question Fleur’s orders.

Her teammates were on the other side of the city, setting up magical barriers and surveillance systems, testing watchpoints, and creating magical storage spaces for all the siege machines that would come from Ponyville, fight, and be decommissioned in Canterlot. They had to move extant areas of operation, and the dangerous magical artifacts contained therein: a laborious, tedious process that Fleur had dubbed “night marches.” Verify route, tear down security magic, load artifact into special transport unit, drive silently, load into new bunker, replace security magic. The tedium of these marches, for Ink, was calming.

All the while, the spare Daturas that were neither in Canterlot nor amassing in Ponyville were collecting their strength to make a concerted effort on as many Tartarus gateways as they could, all concurrently. The order, with the emphasis on simultaneity, had come straight from Princess Luna herself, and Ink knew nothing about it, except that it had made plenty of nervous ripples in the Datura.

Then there was the angel to think about. All seven team leaders had been briefed on Octavia’s plan and told to bring their teams up to speed on angels. Finding an expert on the subject, Fleur had said, was proving difficult.

Ink Pearl turned and followed the car to the on-ramp for the one-hundred, the freeway up the mountain. She would need to move slightly faster to keep up, but didn’t mind. That Colgate had thought to go uphill, rather than find another seedy corner of the suburbs, surprised her.

“Okay, Fluffy, put on those hazard lights and stop around here,” Colgate said. It was five o’ clock, and her head was pounding. She felt like she might throw up, and her breathing was labored. She hadn’t had any water since taking Fluffy Clouds’ ibuprofen.

“Right here?”

“Good enough. Stop the car.” A saxophone wailed on the radio, and Colgate turned it down. “This is… Celestia, okay, okay. It’s hot in here. This is where I get off. You, just turn around, or go the rest of the way up, or something. Go about your business, forget that this happened. I took good care of you, didn’t I?”

“I suppose so.”

“I didn’t hurt you.”

“Not… really.”

“So go and get back home. Listen to your jazz, practice your lines, do whatever you do. Forget about all this, okay?”

“Look, Miss Rouge,”

“If you try to follow me, or have someone else follow me, you’ll regret it. Is that clear?” She wiped sweat out of her mane, her breathing harder. She felt nauseous.

“Please, just let me go.”

“I’m gonna, well, that’s fine.” She crawled across the seat, opened the door. “That’s fine. Bye sunshine. We were nice.” She fell onto the side of the road, pushed herself up, and stumbled into the tall grass before the trees. They were halfway up Canterlot Mountain, and Colgate’s pulse crystals clinked and clanked jauntily as she tried to run uphill into the wooded area beneath the home of the aristocracy.