The next two days went by unremarkably, consisting of more patrols, doing boring things and losing half a night's sleep for yet again no readily apparent reason. I'd already learned that being sleepy while on patrol was a lot less of a big deal than it sounded like it should be, since the security presence was generally strong enough that our presence was a formality. One runaway and an accident that I'd caused were the highlights of half a week's flying around the city and staring at things. Being groggy didn't matter much.

So as it was, I was expecting to just trail after Ida yet again while we flew over another part of the city I knew nothing about while yawning incessantly and lusting after my cot. Much to my surprise, Serge informed me that instead I had duty at the Talon field hospital that morning. The thought hadn't even occurred to me, but it made sense in hindsight that I would be expected to spend some time as, well, a doctor. The Talons didn't appear to share much of anything with the slavers or Fillydelphian army, so of course they would have their own medical facilities. Each platoon had a dedicated medic, and they rotated through spending hours there. From what I gathered there were four platoons in the whole company, so that gave three eight hour shifts with one medic out of the rotation at a time. Except I had to learn the system like everything else, so I was going to be there while someone else was on duty today.

More surprising was the location. Fillydelphia had a number of hospitals before the war, I was told, and one had even been restored into something approaching functional status again. Hearts and Hooves Hospital was supposedly a mess with five times as many patients as it could still support, but it was functional. It seemed natural to have our operation located on the same campus at the very least, but someone decided that didn't make sense and instead had cleaned up some smaller clinic halfway across the city.

That put it just two streets away from second platoon's base of operations, an old high school campus, which did make a tiny bit of sense at least. I glided over the sprawl of repurposed class rooms on my final approach to the clinic, watching a squad of griffons performing target practice in what looked like was originally a sports field of some kind. I didn't have long to wonder if Liese was among them as I dipped under a power line and landed in the street in front of the clinic. Two griffons with long rifles circled overhead, glancing my way once each before returning to their patrol. Pretty minimal security, but being so close to a whole platoon warranted little more.

The clinic itself was a bit more to look at on the ground than its aerial appearance implied. I passed an empty lot for parking sky chariots or carts, the lines almost too faded to see now, and made my way up to the glass double doors at the front. The walls of the building were as dingy as anything else in the city, but all of its windows were present, in one piece and clean. From what I could see through the doors, the front lobby was almost spotless too. That was encouraging. After experiencing inspections I could only imagine what the cleanliness standards of the field hospital would be. Which I would now have to help maintain...

I stepped inside, pausing with a start when something jingled loudly. A bell had been installed just above the entrance and rigged to ring whenever the door was opened. Interesting. I moved to the center of the lobby and looked around, finding everything to be immaculate. All four of the gem lights recessed in the ceiling were working and shining a gentle glow throughout the room. White tile floors led to a receptionist's desk set into the far wall, reminiscent of the armory back at our base. Also frustratingly like our armory, nobody was evidently around. “Hello? Anyone here?”

“Coming!” A door in the receptionist's area flew open and spat out a young, lightly colored griffoness. She bounded up to the desk and propped up on it. “Yes, sir? How can I help you?” I was starting to see a trend here, although she appeared to be a few years older than Otto. Mid teens.

“I was told to report here this morning for training? Kasimir Longtalons? I'm first platoon's new medic.”

“Oh, right! Ms. Darkskies just told me about you. Come on back,” she said, pointing to a door to my left.

The back of the clinic turned out to be about what I expected: a dozen rooms for patients and a door clearly marked as being a lab, likely used to do on site blood work or similar tests back when this place was in its prime. The paint was fading from the walls and doors, and it looked like the carpet had been pulled up to leave bare cement, but I was still impressed at the cleanliness. Whoever the staff were, they probably understood the importance of keeping the place sterile too. I continued winding my way through the main hallway, hoping to bump into this Ms. Darkskies, but instead ran into the young griffoness from the front again.

“She was just checking on Mr. Goldcrest, right over here,” she said, leading me to the third door on the right.

We arrived just in time to hear a griffoness scolding someone. “This is the fourth case of alcohol poisoning in two months, Alfred. The next time I see you in here puking your guts up because you drank half a gallon of some shit someone brewed in a radiator, I'm going to turn on that record of 'Smile, Smile, Smile!' at max volume until the hangover wears off. Your liver will thank me for it, and maybe your CO won't have to wring your neck after all.” There was no time to even shift before she came marching out with an exasperated snort. “Zella, would you get his IV started?”

“Yes ma'am,” the girl at my side confirmed before disappearing down the hallway.

The older griffoness didn't even watch her leave before turning her green eyes to me. “You must be Kaz.” She extended a light gray hand. “Yvonne Darkskies, medic of second platoon.”

I returned the shake with reluctance upon getting a better look at her. Her coat had a few suspicious stains on it that looked an awful lot like vomit residue, but I couldn't make any out on her aged and fading red feathers or pink fur. “Private Kasimir Longtalons, medic of first platoon. But you knew that already?”

“Yeah, Heidi sent word yesterday that you would be joining me this morning. And you can drop the private thing. Leave your rank at the door because everyone bleeds like everyone else in here.” Her eyes followed mine to the blotches on her coat, and she said, “Don't mind that, I'm clean. Just dealing with an idiot who doesn't know the difference between liquor and antifreeze.”

A joke I hoped... Did people really try to distill alcohol in radiators? Yuck! “A repeat 'customer'?” I asked.

She snorted, rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “You could say that. Al's in here at least once a month, and all but one time it was related to him drinking too much. Honestly, I have no idea how he's managed to avoid Brigitte or Gunther strangling him to death over it. I can't count how many hours he's wasted in here.”

Gunther sounded familiar. Lieutenant Gunther Strongclaws, over second or third platoon. I thought. Brigitte, I didn't recognize. “His sergeant and lieutenant?”

Yvonne nodded. “Yeah. It's a good thing he's not under Heidi or he'd probably be scrubbing the mess hall for the rest of his life. All of them.” She shrugged down the hall and started that way. “Anyway, Zella will get him started. Let me grab some solution for his drip. Guess you picked a good day. I can show you around and let you get your hands dirty with someone who isn't spraying blood from three places.”

...which sounded awfully prophetic. If this was in one of the many books I'd read someone would be carted in missing two limbs and gushing blood right about then, but fortunately this was reality where things didn't happen to just be dramatic. We made our way through the lab door and into a surprisingly spacious, if dimly lit room. Sinks set into desks lined the near wall, cluttered with familiar looking bottles of colorful liquids. Islands with various instruments set atop them choked the center of the room, but what really caught my eye on the way to the supply closet was a large enclosure occupying the far corner of the room. A gentle warm glow shone from inside, picking out what must have been a dozen eggs nestled in shreds of cloth.

“An incubator?” I asked, raising an eyebrow at the unexpected discovery.

Yvonne snatched at the closet door, finally coaxing it loose after putting her whole body into it. Was every door in this city rusty and all but jammed shut? “Yeah. I guess you've seen one before, so no need to go into the talk about where babies come from?” She smirked at me and rifled through the contents of the closet, producing a couple of bags, a breath mask and an oxygen cylinder. “Hold this, would you?” She handed the cylinder and mask over.

“Sure. And, yes, I've seen one or two before. I just hadn't really thought about needing one here.”

She gave a deep “Hah!” and shut the closet. “What, did you think the troops didn't have sex or something?”

Err... wouldn't that be against a regulation of some kind? This job really was turning out to be different than I expected. “Uh, well... more... that I didn't expect... you know, anybody would want to raise a griffawn here...”

“Mmm, well, you got that much right at least. Nobody in their right mind would do that willingly, but people will be people, so they happen,” she said, punctuating the last bit with a thumb stuck out toward the nest of eggs. “I'd poke fun but I've even got one in there.”

Interesting... very... interesting... And she had one at her age? “So, who does watch after them?”

“The older kids, mostly, but we help too.” Fantastic. I signed up to be a guard, not a babysitter! I couldn't do that! Yvonne shrugged. “The drop off is anonymous, so nobody knows whose is whose. I don't even know which one is mine, though when it hatches I'll probably have a pretty good idea. Anyhow, you met Zella. She hatched a year or two before I joined up. When the kids get older they help mind the younger ones and eventually start apprenticing here or there. There's only so much room for support staff, of course, so most end up in the rank and file, but not all.”

Suddenly Otto made a lot more sense, even if I couldn't rationalize how they trusted him with weapons, if they really did. But... wow. The whole process made a grim sort of sense. Griffons might have it easier than ponies when it came to, ahem, post reproductive birth control, but it didn't make sense to just throw the eggs out when you were perpetually short on labor. My heart went out to the poor griffawns who never knew anything different. I couldn't imagine being born into this.

Yvonne led us back toward the patient rooms and said, “I'm just glad they're not mixed in with all of Master Red Eye's foals. I don't know how we'd ever sort them out after that.”

“He has foals? I didn't know that. And, uh, why would he want the hatchlings?”

“What, you didn't know about that? Yeah, there's a hotel about a kilo, kilo and a half, north of here where he keeps them. Last I heard there's like fifty of the rugrats now. Sometimes we bring the hatchlings to see them, but they don't stay there. Captain Stern worked something out where he doesn't get to have them too.”

Suddenly the image of the red stallion reclining on a luxurious plush couch in a room filled with the harem of mares it would take to produce so many foals popped to mind. That wasn't at all the image I'd been forming of him so far. “'Get to have them?' So the foals aren't his then?”

“No, not biologically. Or, not most of them anyway. I don't know. Anyhow, whenever a slave, or more rarely a slaver, gives birth he takes the foal and keeps it there. Claims he's raising them properly or something. I don't know what all he's doing with them honestly, but they seem healthy enough so that's what matters I guess.”

...okay. At first, that sounded awful. Taking a foal away from its mother like that? But really, it only took about three quarters of a second to realize that in a lot of ways he was doing them a favor. A newborn would have no hope whatsoever in this city, even in the care of the more privileged slavers. I wasn't about to claim he was a saint for it, but, well... there really was a side to all of this that the outsiders didn't hear about. It was a bad place, but it could be so much worse.

We reached Alfred's room, where Yvonne took up position near the IV drip and started attaching one of the bags. “Alright, you know the drill. We'll let this run for a bit and check on you then. Zella's going to be keeping an eye on you. Don't give her any trouble or I swear I'll have her sing along with that damn record.”

With the bag changed out and the air mask on, he was set as far as we could help him until his body cleared the alcohol. Yvonne led me off back into the clinic proper in preparation for the real tour.

All things considered, hospital duty looked like it wouldn't be too bad. Until the first inevitable casualty at least, but she assured me those were pretty rare these days...

Fate decided not to reward my challenge by having someone drag a dying soldier in while I was on duty that morning. Aside from Private Goldcrest and his alcohol poisoning, only two others showed up for the entire eight hour shift, complaining of mild stomach cramps and joint pain respectively. Pretty minor stuff we sorted out in short order, which left me pretty bored after the first hour or so of learning where everything was and a few general procedures. Most days were a little more exciting she told me, and since I would be training with her for the next few days I'd probably see something or other soon.

In any case, I was happy for my shift to be over. Even the flight back to our base was more interesting than the last three hours of my time at the clinic. At least moving around helped me wake up some, but I was still ready to get some shut eye at the very earliest opportunity. Lucky me, I couldn't hear anything coming from inside of our box car. Maybe I wouldn't have any distractions while trying to sleep.

I shoved the door open, finding the interior pitch black and just as devoid of sounds. Was everyone asleep? The rear door was open, and as far as I could see with the evening light spilling in the bunks were empty. I hadn't forgotten something important had I? Some thorough searching of my memory made that seem unlikely, so I hopped inside, flicked the lights on and started stripping out of my uniform. At least I didn't have to wear all of my armor while working at the clinic, bringing my breastplate alone. Yvonne wasn't wearing any armor at all, so maybe I wouldn't bother the next day. Something to think about.

Just as I was preparing to slip into my cot, my stomach reminded me that it was pretty late in the day and I hadn't eaten anything but a small radboar sandwich that Zella fetched for us for lunch. Sleeping could be challenging at the best of times, so I decided against exacerbating that with an empty stomach and left for the mess hall.

The mess itself was one of the few structures in the base that wasn't a building originally designed for something completely unrelated to what it was now being used for, having once been what was likely a restaurant for passengers on layovers between trains, and was placed suitably close to the small station that was enclosed within the base's fortifications. Whoever laid out the base put the barracks behind the mess, meaning we always approached it from the wrong side. The rails had been pulled up decades ago so it didn't make much difference, but Ida told me that years ago someone got fed up with it and knocked a hole in the wall one night, forcing them to put a real door on this side of the building. That happened years before Lieutenant Blackfeathers took command, apparently.

I ascended the steps and passively read the hand written sign proclaiming that they had 'The Best Food in Fillydelphia,' complete with a stick figure griffon puking an unreasonable amount of vomit all over the words. It looked like someone had painted over the image only to have it redrawn, perhaps several times before giving up. I wondered if that was also done before the lieutenant took over.

Whatever, the food wasn't something I'd write home to papa about but it probably was better than anything the slaves or slavers got, and it smelled plenty good right now. As usual I couldn't quite place the aroma except for it being meat, which was no different from the smell that choked the camp three times a day every day, but beggars and choosers and all that.

No sooner had I slipped inside than I was flagged down by a yellow griffoness sitting among the rest of my squad, even Isaac and Leigh, in a booth in the far corner. Lita grinned at me. “Over here, Kaz!”

I returned the wave and made a small detour to the counter to retrieve a bowl of something presumably edible, dodging broken and missing tiles on the checkered floor as I went. Being in the clean clinic was already spoiling me. It didn't help that it was cleaner than the place that prepared my food, but I trusted that the kitchen was clean enough and resolved to not think further on it. Just like the armory and clinic, an early or preteen griffawn was manning the counter, though I never got her name before acquiring my meal and heading off to the booth.

“We were taking bets on whether you'd find us here,” Lita said as I plopped down in the only open spot next to her.

Five other empty bowls sat clustered around the center of the ancient laminated wood table, which left me in the unenviable position of having to eat while the rest of them sat around and joked at my expense. I shrugged and swirled the contents of my food bowl. Looked and smelled like more radboar. “So, who won the bet?”

“Ike owes Ida and Serge a smoke. I sat out of this one.” She grinned, then looked up over the back of her seat to shout across the room, “Hey, whoever's at the jukebox, turn Sapphire Shores back on!”

Serge waved a hand at the orange griffon across from me. “Keep it, we'll sort it out later.”

Ida leaned over with a smirk. “I'll be taking mine after we're done here.”

Isaac groaned and nodded before turning his eyes to me. He cocked a small frown, shrugged and gave me a small wave.

“Hi,” I replied, returning the small wave. No offense taken, if that's what that was supposed to mean. I took a sip of stew, finding it to be better than expected. There was even a hint of some kind of herbs in it, but it was probably a bit of a stretch to expect anyone to know which ones exactly.

“Oh, hey Kaz,” Leigh said, finally looking up from the portable terminal she'd been tapping away at the whole time I'd been there. “When'd you get here?”

“Just did.” Well, good to know she could focus when she needed to...

“Maybe you should try putting that thing away for a change? You've barely met Kaz,” Serge said.

She nodded back, still focused intently on her terminal. “Yeah, yeah, almost done here. Just a minute.”

Ida propped up on the table and looked at me. “So, you met Vonny? How do you like her and the hospital? A little different from patrolling, huh?”

“She seems nice enough, and yeah, it's a change. It's clean for one thing, but today was pretty boring. Had someone with alcohol poisoning, but that was about it.”

Lita perked up when the dilapidated jukebox ground to life, filling the room with a slurred rendition of some song I didn't recognize until I heard the mare, presumably Sapphire Shores, singing. “Yeah, that's the one!” She trained her smile on me. “Don't worry, it'll get a lot more interesting once you're doing checkups and physicals for everyone. Man, Nadine used to bitch about some of the stuff she saw.”

I raised a hand to cut the conversation there. No details while I'm eating, please! “Right, right. I'll weather that storm when it gets here.”

The song picked up to its regular pace, a pretty energetic song that I didn't recognize but was growing to like. Why was it all of the ponies back in Oatsfield seemed to prefer Sweetie Belle again? I tried to keep my slurps to a minimum to let the others enjoy it while it lasted, but it was Leigh who broke the silence with an intense giggle fit. She pushed her terminal back and covered her beak to try to contain the lingering chuckles.

Lita leaned over to get a look at its screen. “What, did you teach that thing to tell jokes now?”

“No, no,” Leigh said, regaining her composure. “Hey Ike, look at this, I think you need to revisit the kinetic energy equations again. You must have multiplied instead of dividing somewhere. I took a pony's jacket off and threw it at him. It flew over, broke his ribs, then got embedded in his lung!”

...what? Apparently everybody else was just as baffled as me, responding to that only with confused stares. Aside from Isaac, who broke out into a distorted and deep laugh when he looked the screen over. He nodded and took the terminal to do... something...

Serge grunted. “You're playing that game again? Come on, shut that thing off and socialize with your new squad mate.”

Isaac held up a claw and went to work, fixing those kinetic energy equations I assumed.

“Game?” I asked between spoonfuls of watery stew.

Leigh nodded enthusiastically. “Yep, when we've got free time we work on it. We call it 'Talon Fortress,' where you can build up a camp and protect it from raiders and stuff. Or play as a griffon who goes around and shoots raiders and scavenges for food or whatever. It's pretty fun, and a few others in the platoon play it sometimes.” Huh, I wouldn't mind taking a look at that myself.

“Like you don't get enough of that during the day?” Lita quipped. She rapped her talons on the table and dug a cigarette from somewhere. “Anyway, I'm done here so I'm gonna go smoke. Anyone joining me?”

Ida prodded Isaac to get out of her way. “Sure, I'll come along.”

I finished my food and let Lita up. “I'll probably join you in a second.”

“Huh, a doc who smokes? I figured you'd be telling us how terrible it is for our health or something.”

“Oh, it is. Awful habit. Wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Smoke for forty years and it'll mess you up bad.” I shrugged and started stacking the bowls. “But when's the last time you heard of someone dying of lung cancer?”

She gave me a playful shove. “I like the way you think. Alright then, we'll be back at the barracks when you're ready.”

It wouldn't take me but a minute to dump everyone's dishes in the collection tray, which was the least I could do since Ida, Serge and Lita had been kind enough to get my food for me a few times by now. I'd just made it to the smelly collection of dirty plates and utensils in a box at the end of the counter when a female said, “There you are! Kaz, do you know how long I've been looking for you?”

Liese? What was she doing here? Well, I guess we could go between bases freely, but shouldn't she be on patrol or training or anything else back at the school yard right now? “I'm... going to guess a while?”

“Yeah, you could say that. Did you think I was joking when I said we had catching up to do?” She propped against the counter and scrunched up her face at the dirty dishware. “What are you doing anyway?”

“Cleaning up. I... uh... was about to go have a smoke with the squad. Why?”

“You kidding? You can smoke with them any time. Come have a smoke with me. Your sister.” She tugged my leg like she used to do when we didn't yet come up to our parents' knees, saying, “Jeez, you'd think that you kept forgetting I exist or something. Good thing Vonny told me where you were.”

Yeah... I sighed and fell in line behind her. “Okay... where are we going?”

She cast a grin back to me. “Oh, I'm going to go show you some of the city that you probably haven't seen yet. No stuffy hospitals for you right now.”

Fabulous.

For the record, if you've never tried it, it's surprisingly hard to smoke while flying. I had to bum one off of Liese since I still didn't know where everyone was getting them, which seemed like fair payment to drag me off on this little errand I didn't sign up for. Wasted payment, as it turned out. I'm still not sure how she did it, but Liese was merrily sucking away at hers while we soared along to destinations unknown. Not wanting to look like a weakling or idiot, I tried the same thing. After about a minute of having smoke blown in my face and eyes and feeling winded from diminished lung function while doing something very taxing on my cardiovascular system, I gave up and thumped the half expended cigarette into a pool of water in an empty street as we passed overhead.

Now that my beak wasn't occupied by that anymore and I could breathe properly, I flew up beside her and asked, “So, where are we going exactly?”

“The crater,” she said, grinning and somehow keeping her smoke in place with her beak alone.

What, did every place in this city have an ominous name? I suppose next someone was going to tell me that I had duty at The Shopping Center, or The Cart Wash or The Dread Gazebo. “Crater? Like the pit?”

“Nah, nothing like that. It's the biggest hole left in the city after a balefire missile hit it. Highly radioactive still.”

“And we're going there why?”

She grinned wider. “Well... I got to thinking. 'Liese, it's awfully mean of you to just let your brother walk into the pit without knowing what he's getting into. That would probably make him mad.' So, I thought I'd show you the worst of Fillydelphia. You know, to get it out of your system so the pit wouldn't be so bad.”

Liese was my sister, and because of that I was contractually bound by the universe to love her or something, but there were times I just wanted to let her know what it felt like to have my claws tighten around her trachea. “Is that so? I think I'll just head back and get some sleep like I intended.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ugh, you take everything so seriously. That was a joke. Nah, the worst part of Fillydelphia is probably the parasprite pits. Oh, hey, did you hear the story about that mare who accidentally ate-”

“Yes!” I interrupted her. If I heard that story from someone one more time I was probably going to shove my fist down their throat.

“Alright, alright. Jeez. Anyway, the crater is just pretty cool. Sometimes you can even see the alicorns flying around near it. They like the radiation or something. But there's also neat tech that the ponies pull up out of the debris sometimes. I heard they found a suit of prototype power armor down there once. Didn't work, but still, can you imagine?”

She lost me at 'alicorns.' I'd forgotten that the monsters were seen around Filly so often, and any doubts I still harbored about those stories were squashed. Unless Liese was just screwing with me again, which was entirely possible. But if she wasn't, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be near them. And for that matter, why would she? She wasn't all there sometimes, but-

Shouting in the streets below caught my ears, and I snapped my head down at the source. In a small opening between two crumbled buildings sat a lot marked up like some kind of old sports field. Two dozen ponies were crammed into the tiny space, huddled in a corner away from a barrel of burning garbage casting orange light on their faces. No, they were huddling away from another pony. The grimy cream colored unicorn screamed something desperate at them while whipping a gun around in his magic. A gun!? “Liese!” I called to my sister, hoping she'd know what to do.

She was already looking at the disturbance. “Damned slaves... where do they keep finding this shit?” Flaring her wings, she rolled over into an approach, and I followed suit. We weren't even armed! This was crazy!

The closer we got, the more I could make out from the crazed stallion's ramblings. “I'm not going to take it anymore! The next one of you that even touches me is getting their fucking head blown off!” His gun tracked from one trembling pony to the next, eliciting whimpers and terrified expressions. “You think you've all got it, huh!? That every time something goes wrong, you'll just tell Snares it was me, and I'll take all the heat!? Not anymore! And you think you can keep poking and kicking me when I'm about to go to sleep so I don't get any!? Not anymore! It's my turn to-”

Whatever he was going to say was lost as Liese landed on him. He squealed in shock and collapsed under the enormous force. My stomach turned a little when a crunch resonated through the alley, but to my relief I realized it was just his gun clattering to the pavement and not half of his bones giving way. “It's your turn to what, big boy?” Liese mocked, pulling him up. She slammed him against a windowsill of the building behind us, drawing a shriek and definite cracking of something. He pulled his hooves up to cover his face, which offered him no protection from her scything claws against his stomach. Blood poured from the deep wounds... “Huh? Can't hear you. Speak up!”

Confident that she had him under control, I snatched up the fallen pistol before any of the other slaves got any ideas. The last thing we needed was for one of them to start shooting at him or someone else. Something was wrong... the gun was way too light. Unloaded? No, even lighter than that. Wait... it was plastic! He'd been threatening all of them with a toy! “Liese, wait!”

“I've got this.” A faint blue glow circled around her hand as she threw a punch, but her next struck him square in the horn, snapping his head to the side and shattering the spell. She grabbed him by the hoof, spun him around into a lock, and snapped his leg as effortlessly as a twig. That sickening grin returned to her face as he screamed. “Shut up, this is your fault, dumb ass!”

“Dammit Liese, that's enough!” I shouted, moving closer to physically drag her off of the thoroughly incapacitated pony if I had to.

She shot me a venomous glare. “What's your problem? I'm just doing my job!”

I shoved the fake gun in her face, from the side of course, not the barrel, and shouted back, “It's a toy! Not even a BB gun!”

She dropped the unicorn. “So? What if it wasn't? Huh?” She grabbed the gun from my hand and inspected it before throwing it at the stricken pony. He whinnied weakly when it bounced off his head, but barely even flinched. “Am I supposed to just calmly ask every idiot who pulls a gun on someone if they're just joking? Wake up, Kaz! This is the real world!”

I held my tongue for a moment while I visually examined him. Blood ran from his mouth and nose, and from a dozen gashes all over his body from talon marks. Both of his forelegs were broken at the knee. At least two teeth were next to my hand, but there were a few unidentifiable bloody smears around his mouth. He winced and whinnied again as tears formed in his clenched eyes. He was alive, but probably not for long if someone didn't treat him soon. Of course, my kit was back at base, if I was even daring enough to try helping him with my psychotic sister here. “Yeah, well, you didn't have to rip him apart! You had him down from the beginning!”

“Why don't you see how you handle it when someone sticks a gun in your face!?”

“He didn't stick a gun in your-”

“What is going on here?” a commanding female voice demanded from behind us. I recognized Lieutenant Blackfeathers before I even turned to face her, and really wished I hadn't. She was glaring hard enough to punch a hole through me as she strode forward. “Private Longtalons, explain.”

Liese stood up, nice and proper, and pointed at the pony behind her. “I was just handling an aggressive slave, ma'am. He pulled a gun on the other slaves, so I stopped him.”

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow at her, clearly expecting me to explain. “What's your name, soldier?”

“Private Liese Longtalons, ma'am.”

I sighed internally, and before she could ask I explained. “My sister.”

Heidi appraised us for a moment before asking in a calm voice, “Now, tell me, why are you two arguing like a couple of griffawns who can't decide who gets the bigger piece of candy, tarnishing the name of our company and setting such an inexcusable example in front of the slaves?”

Liese jumped on the question. “Because Kaz is mad I beat him up too much.” Thump, thump. That was the sound of her tossing me under the cart. Thanks, sis.

Again, before the lieutenant could ask, I pointed at the plastic weapon sitting two meters away from the increasingly terrified ponies in the alley. “It was a toy, ma'am. Nobody was in danger.”

“You didn't know that,” Liese spat.

Heidi held up a hand. “Quiet, both of you.” She gestured a single talon at a yellow mare pressed as far away from the scene as she could get. “You. Yes, you. Come here.” The pony slinked closer, giving the gun a wide berth, and stopped a good meter away from any of us. “Go get your master and tell him or her what's happened. I don't care if they're sleeping, eating, drowning in a puddle of blood or pleasing their favorite concubine.”

“O-o-o-okay,” the mare whimpered. She squeezed up against the far building to continue to give us as much space as was ponily possible, then slipped off into the street and broke into a gallop.

Learning to shut up was something that didn't come as easily to me as it should have. “Ma'am, he's not dead. He's badly hurt, but if someone-”

She raised a hand to me and narrowed her eyes. “He got what he deserved, and will receive no mercy but release from his suffering.” She strolled over to the dying pony, drew her pistol and chambered a round. “We're not monsters.”

The shot thundered through the alley, echoing from a hundred surfaces and sending the remaining ponies into a whimpering huddle. Heidi watched him shudder and twitch his last before holstering her weapon and facing us. “Liese, return to your base. Kasimir, come here.”

Butterflies-no, parasprites-fluttered in my stomach and I inched closer. “Yes, ma'am?”

Her eyes narrowed further. “I don't have time to deal with this. Some idiot started a fire south of here and the imbeciles in charge can't get it under control, so we have to hold their hooves and put it out for them.” She placed a talon against the feathers of my chest. “You will follow this up. Take his body to the incinerators and dispose of it.” She spread her wings. “And in the future, do not leave the base without your weapon. Am I understood?”

A chill ran down my back. If she could make you feel this terrible just talking to you, I dreaded ever seeing her shout like Lita said. “Yes, ma'am.”

Without another word she lifted off and departed back toward the train station, leaving me to do the dirty work she and my sister had dropped in my lap. I sighed heavily and scooped the broken pony up, trying to ignore the hole in his skull or the fact that he was still twitching. Getting blood on my feathers was the last thing that I cared about at that moment.

I lifted off and turned toward where I thought the incinerators were, spying a rising column of smoke on the horizon framing the lieutenant as she flapped away. At least I didn't cause that screw up...

The flight to the incinerators couldn't have been more than half of a kilometer, but with a pony's corpse in my arms it felt like twenty. Giant smokestacks from my destination loomed ahead, sprouting from a huge building in an equally gigantic cleared yard stained with black soot that stank of coal. An ancient powerplant. That's what they used to dispose of everything unwanted and unusable in the city. Everything from moldy old food too far gone for even desperate slaves to eat, all the way to their bodies once they passed. I shuddered and shut my eyes briefly, wondering if any power was actually produced here anymore.

I was met by a crew of hollow-eyed and ash covered slaves at the entrance, who directed me to the furnaces deep inside the facility. No explanation was needed. Once they saw the body they knew why I was there. To my surprise, the furnace I was pointed to was quite small and open to the sky. As rusted out and damaged as the steel beams running overhead were, I couldn't tell if it was intended or if nobody had taken the time to fix it yet. With its size and the lack of an obvious boiler, I doubted it was intended for power production at least. Just for waste disposal.

Below me trash churned in the flames, flaring up and sending little bits of molten plastic airborne to float in the currents. It was 'ready to go,' some pony told me. Honestly, I couldn't even remember who said it at that point. I just wanted to get this over and done with.

The stallion's body tumbled down for two full seconds before landing with a thump barely audible over the crackling. My eyes stung from the heat as I watched his fur melt and ignite, followed by his skin charring and blackening. I propped up on the rail, letting the searing heat flood past me for as long as I could stand it before sitting back on my haunches and watching the ashes rise up through the vacuous ceiling. Goodbye pony, whoever you were. Just another victim whose name would soon be forgotten among those few who likely knew it. Did he really get what he deserved? I wiped my face and yawned, infuriatingly sleepy enough to be disrespectful. No, he probably didn't get what he deserved.

Time dragged on as I listened to his body vaporizing. What had I expected when I signed up for this? I knew this day would come, and this wouldn't be the last time, certainly. Knowing that didn't help in the least. I leaned back against a warm steel beam jutting from the wall and crossed my arms. Another yawn. What was I doing here? This was a mistake. A big one. I shouldn't have signed up here. Anything would have been better. ...except watching papa slowly die because we were broke...

I felt another yawn rising up, but fought it off. A couple of faint flashes of light popped in and out of the corners of my eyes and a faint, echoing voice muttered something incoherent. I snorted, recognizing the hypnagogic hallucinations immediately for what they were. I wasn't that sleepy, but my stupid body did what it wanted regardless. A gust of cool wind shot past, followed by the overbearing heat returning. Just a strange effect of the air currents or me being too sleepy still. I pounded a fist into the metal grating I sat on, ignoring the spike of pain that shot through my arm. “I'm not sleepy right now!”

A pony in the adjacent hallway skittered off, leaving me alone with the flames. For some time I continued to stare into the heat shimmer silently, pondering where I went wrong. There had to have been another way. Something else I could have done. Maybe Friendship City...

...or... some other... town...

“Kaz?”

I jerked up, shaking my head and fighting off the sleepiness that had overtaken me. Dammit, had I fallen asleep? Seriously? “Wh-huh?”

Ida stepped inside, circling the maw of the now cooling furnace. “Serge told me what happened. You never came back, so I was getting worried about you.”

“I'm fine,” I lied, rubbing my eyes. “Just... sleepy.”

She stopped next to me and cocked both an eyebrow and a small frown. “No offense, but this isn't the best place to get a nap.”

I looked away. “Yeah.”

“Kaz, tell me the truth. Are you alright? I heard what happened, and, well, I know how you are...”

Which was supposed to mean what exactly? She knew I didn't like hurting and killing ponies? Glad to know someone noticed, for all the good it would do. I held my tongue.

She sat next to me. Great. This was really headed in a direction I wasn't feeling comfortable with. “I'm sorry, Kaz.”

“For what? You didn't do anything.”

“I'm sorry you've got to put up with all of this.” I cut my eyes to her to see that her frown had grown. “You remind me a lot of Nadine. She hated all of this. She got really depressed sometimes. Sometimes I was worried what she might do.”

...and what was that supposed to mean? Did she think I was going to lose my marbles or something? I was just... annoyed. Irritated. A lot. That's all. “I'm fine.”

She didn't fall for it, of course. Nobody ever did. “You don't have to act tough, Kaz. None of the rest of the squad is here. Hell, you don't have to act tough in front of them either. I'll kick their asses if they give you crap over having a conscience.”

Irritatingly, that drew a little smirk from me, which I quickly hid. “Does anyone in this city have a conscience anymore? Or does it squeeze it out of you in the first week?”

Ida nodded. “I know a lot of people with consciences. You, Serge, Leigh, Lita, Ike...” She placed a hand to her chest. “...and me. None of us like what happens here. Some might hide it better than others, but we all know it's awful.” Heidi's name was notably absent from that list, surely not an accidental omission.

“A lot of good it does,” I said, looking back at the furnace again. The heat shimmer and floating particles were gone completely.

She shook her head. “Don't start that. Believe me, it could be worse than it is. You just saw what happens when we give in to it. If none of us cared, I shudder to think of how bad it could get.” She leaned closer. “Like that pony you stitched up. He'd probably have died if you didn't. Or Glitter? If someone who didn't care found her they'd have shot her dead on the spot.”

Of course, she was still living in Hell, but I understood what Ida was trying to say. I nodded and shut my eyes, letting silence fall for some time. At length, I muttered, “Ida, there's something I need to tell you.”

“What is it?”

“Thank you.”

“For what?” she asked, sounding sincerely confused.

I locked eyes with her. “For everything. The entire time I've been here, you've been nothing but helpful and supportive.”

She smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, you're welcome. We've all got to stick together, you know? Truth be told I'm really glad you're here. I was worried whoever took over for Nadine would be like that ghoul doctor who swears more than a teenager who just discovered her beak won't rot off if she says 'shit' too many times.”

I nodded, containing the chuckle I felt but showing a little smirk. Fillydelphia had thrown a lot at me already, but even then I knew I would see worse. As bad as that prospect seemed, at least I wasn't alone in this. I was still getting to know Ida and the others, but I trusted that she was being honest. Serge and Lita seemed pleased enough with how I'd handled Glitter, after all. Forget Liese.

The ponies might fear the Talons, and for a lot of good reasons maybe, but there were at least a handful of us who weren't here just to shoot ponies for bits and giggles.

I was going to see to it that I did everything I could to live up to the ideal I signed up for: protecting the ponies of this city, nothing more, nothing less. Even if it killed me.

Level Up - Level 4!

Quest Perk: A True, True Friend – As bad as things seem, don't take your eyes off of the light that shines from your true, true friend. As long as you stay true and keep an eye out for her, Ida will keep an eye out for you!

First in Class - +5 Medicine, +5 Science