“No more water! No more bogs! No more freaky snakes eating frogs!” Scotch sang as she trotted down the road, prancing on her hooftips.

“We get it,” Pythia said with a glower. “You’re glad to be out of the swamp. Do you have to sing about it?”

“No more monsters! No more crocs! No more muddy, cruddy socks!” Majina sang, prancing along with Scotch as the pair circled Pythia.

Her mouth moved silently before jabbing a hoof at Majina. “You don’t wear socks! None of us wear–” She halted and stabbed a hoof at Precious. “No! Don’t–”

The dragonfilly blinked, smirked, and joined the pair. “No more oceans. No more boats. No more …. something something coats!” Scotch regarded her with a grin, and she laughed. “What? Rhyming is hard!”

Pythia let out a snarl of frustration and charged out of their circle. Scotch halted her prancing and frowned at her back. “What’s your problem? Honestly, this is the prettiest place I’ve seen, ever!” She swept her hoof out at the grasslands around them. There were hills far to the south, and something that looked like a huge cloud far off in the distance. The sky was the bluest blue she’d ever imagined, and all around them, as far as the eye could see, was gentle rolling land covered in the greenest grass she’d ever imagined. It was a glimpse into the world as it had existed before the war.

She would have loved to munch down on it, but the strands had a sort of sour milk stench that put her off it. Precious had nibbled the end of a leaf and pronounced that it tasted like ass, and given they were in a hurry, Scotch hadn’t tried eating any of it herself.

The cloaked zebra whirled on them. “What’s my problem? My problem is that we’re out in the open here! Riptide has those fliers, and the three of you are acting like children!”

Majina blinked, considered Scotch and Precious, and replied, “Uh… we kinda are.” Scotch’s ears drooped at that. Honestly, what did she have to do to not be a child anymore?

Pythia hissed, “Fine. Like morons then!” She stared at the horizon. “We should be travelling at night. It’d be safer. Not out in the open like this, and certainly not singing and bounding around like we’re going to a… a… tea party!” She let out a ‘fugh!’ of disgust and trotted ahead of the three.

Majina peered around. “Mama always said not to make tea of strange plants, but maybe when we get to town they’ll have a book about–” She was cut off by Pythia’s long, suffering groan of frustration. “Oh… so… no tea?”

“No. Frigging. Tea,” Pythia growled.

In any case, Pythia had a point about being exposed. Maybe a good point. Still… “What’s got her mane in a tangle?”

Precious smirked at Pythia’s back. “Miss ‘I can see the future’ missed those three monsters that caught us.”

Majina sighed. “We were looking for you, and she did her scrying thing that said you’d be at the park, right? Well, we found some food in the camper, only the camper turned out to be a trap. Pythia didn’t see it in time.”

“She didn’t see it at all,” Precious countered with a snort.

Scotch glanced at Pythia ahead of them and trotted up next to her, taking in a breath.

“Yes, I missed it,” Pythia snapped immediately. “No, I don’t want to talk about it. No, I don’t want to explain why I missed it. Yes, it might happen again. No, I don’t know any way of being more precise about it. And no, we’re done. Good talk!” she said, then ran ahead another few steps.

“Actually, I was going to ask if you were okay,” Scotch said, bringing Pythia to a stop. The cloaked filly didn’t look back at her as Scotch approached. “You’re not, are you?”

“I’m not supposed to be okay,” she hissed, hunching her shoulders. “I’m cursed. ‘Okay’ doesn’t come into curses.”

Scotch patted her shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay. Everypony said Blackjack was cursed, and she… oh. Yeah. Bad example.”

Majina nodded solemnly. “Possibly the worst ever.”

“So, yeah. No such thing as curses, right?” Scotch said with as encouraging a grin as she could manage.

Pythia bowed her head. “But I am cursed, and pretending won’t change that.”

“Every time I hear a zebra say the word ‘curse’, I want to throttle them,” Scotch Tape muttered as she trotted around in front of her. Pythia kept turning her head away from Scotch, and the filly reached up to flip back her hood.

Pythia immediately seized it in her hooves, saying in a quavering voice, “Leave me the fuck alone!”

“Why? Because you’re too ashamed to cry?” Scotch asked, Pythia’s shoulders twitching, little choking noises coming from the hood. “If something’s wrong, tell us.”

“I’m seeing too much!” Pythia shouted, her face appearing inside the hood, tears streaking across her circular stripes. “Okay? I’m seeing ten times the shit I did back in the Hoof!”

“What do you mean?” Scotch asked, cocking her head.

“I mean… fuck… I hate trying to explain it.” She rubbed her head. “It’s like… like looking through a window in my head that’s showing the future. The more I look through it, the further I can see, but inside that window is a second pair of windows. Sometimes three… and inside each of those are more windows… with windows inside windows inside…”

“We get it,” Precious said. “Lots of windows.”

“You don’t get it! Because in some of those windows, people die!” Pythia snapped, and then swallowed. “I die.” She trembled clenching her eyes shut. “Or worse things happen to me. And so I try and do things or say things to close those windows. Only because no one sees it, they think I’m crazy. Like when I scream, running from a room because I saw a raider with a hankering for zebra-bashing enter a saloon.”

She shook her head; Scotch moved next to her, trying to put a hoof across her shoulders, but Pythia pulled away. “I know you’re not crazy. I’ve seen you fight. So what’s different now?”

“I keep seeing,” Pythia said. “Not just two or three windows. But ten… twenty. Normally, I need my star map to do that. It acts like a roadmap so I can see all the steps to get to the good and safe futures and how to avoid the… the bad futures. Only I keep seeing things like a whole wave of Riptide’s freaky fliers swooping down on us, but I’m not seeing the steps that lead up to it. I don’t know if we can affect them. Maybe something else will happen a hundred miles away that changes that future.”

“Sounds like it’s not worth the trouble,” Precious commented with a frown.

“It’s all I have!” Pythia shouted as she rounded on her. “I’m not strong like you! I take a bullet, and I’m dead! I’m not nice like Majina! People don’t just like me. I’m not even cursed like Scotch. She got separated and found the one zebra in the swamp to take her to the people who helped her. Do you know the odds of that?” She sat down hard, covering her eyes with her hooves. “I see so much, and I’m not even sure if I’m seeing it right or not.”

“Maybe,” Majina said delicately, regarding the other two. “Maybe you’re not?”

Pythia glowered at her with bloodshot eyes. “Don’t tell me what I’m seeing and not seeing.”

“No! I mean…” Majina faltered, and Scotch gave her an encouraging smile. “Maybe… maybe you’re only imagining some of the things you ‘see’. How can you tell the difference between a real vision and an imagined one?”

Pythia chewed her lip and then pulled her hood back over her face. “I… I just do. Who wants to imagine… things… like that happening to them?” Then she looked at Scotch and said, “Only looking through one window gives me like four or five seconds. I might not be physically able to move fast enough to get away.” Then she raised her hoof towards Precious and snapped, “Do not jump on me and stick your tongue in my ear! Yes, I saw that, and that’s gross!”

“I didn’t do it!” Precious growled, and then she averted her eyes. “I might have thought about doing it…”

Then Majina pounced on Pythia’s back, hugging her around the neck. “Hee! Bet you weren’t watching my future!”

“Get off! Get off!” Pythia cried out, her voice rising sharply in alarm, then panic.

“Majina! Get off her!” Scotch Tape said sharply. The filly slid off, and Pythia ran a few steps away, panting and breathing fast.

“Sorry,” Majina said, her eyes filling up with tears.

“Don’t be sorry! Be less stupid!” Pythia snapped, then turned and trotted quickly down the road.

Scotch knelt and gave Majina a hug. “I think she has a problem,” Scotch said. “She doesn’t really think you’re stupid.”

Majina closed her eyes and pressed her face into Scotch’s neck. “She wouldn’t be wrong,” the filly whimpered.

“Well, that’s one theory,” Precious growled as she glowered at the cloaked shape before them. “My guess is that she just wants everyone else around her to be miserable too.”

They walked in silence for several hours, and no fliers or other threats manifested. Pythia hadn’t been wrong about them being exposed out here, but for once they were making good time. The road might have been obvious, but it was in good condition and cut clean through the swaying strands of sharp green grass, passing over numerous small streams that meandered their way across the plains. Sometimes they were so overgrown that only the sound of the water flowing through the culverts gave any hint at all the water was there. Here and there, silos rose up like silent, rust-streaked gray sentinels.

As beautiful as the sights were, Scotch soon found them unnerving. If there was all this grass, where were the zebras? Clearly, once, this place had been used for agriculture; scattered throughout the plains, rusting combines and tractors stuck out of the green like beasts sinking in a bog. Those heavy silos and the adjacent buildings looked intact enough. And yet the only zebras in this fertile place were skeletons tangled in the grass beside the road, the bones of animals with them. What had killed them? The silence unnerved her. No birds. No beasts. Nothing but the rustle of grass in the breeze.

Scotch spotted something gleaming around the vertebrae of one skeleton on the edge of the road, hooves outstretched as if trying to claw back onto the concrete. “Wait. What’s that?” Scotch said, bringing them to a halt as she investigated the shiny. She moved to the body and saw it was a necklace twisted up in the grass; the golden chain shone brightly, and there was a green pendant carved in the shape of a leaf.

The filly reached for it with a hoof, then paused. Nothing on her E.F.S. She looked over at Pythia, who seemed more interested in the clouds than the bones. “Do you see anything biting my hoof off if I take it?”

Pythia glanced at her. “I see you lying in the grass, bleeding to death, your skin flayed off. I have no clue as to why,” she said as she regarded the necklace entangled with the bones. “All that does is get you cut.”

“It does?” Scotch frowned. “How?”

“Don’t ask me,” Pythia said as she turned her back, and Scotch let out an annoyed grunt.

“Well, we’re going to town. We’re going to need money. That has to be worth something,” Scotch said, and Precious’s ears perked as Scotch considered what might cut her. The bones weren’t super pointy. Though she couldn’t see far into the strands, she didn’t see a dangerous predator on her E.F.S. Scotch reached in with both hooves to disentangle the grass from the golden chain.

“Youch!” Scotch cried out, jerking her hooves back, blood dripping from lacerations in her hide. “Ow. Ow. Ow,” she hissed as she clenched her teeth.

“Here,” Majina said, fishing out some of the purple healing seaweed. While no good for a broken leg, it did halt the bleeding. “What happened?” she asked as she stared at the bones.

“I don’t know! I just reached out and something cut me!” Scotch said, examining the bones and grass for some hidden wire or something sharp enough to slice her so cleanly. Then she saw the faintest sparkle in the grass… no. On the grass.

Scotch carefully pinned a single stand between her hooves and stared at the edge. Tiny points of glass jutted from the edge of the leaf like miniscule, hooked razor blades. She experimented and watched as it easily sawed against the tip of one hoof. She carefully abraded it between her hooves and saw that the tiny point of glass was connected to a glass splinter almost a centimeter in length. Thick, dense black fibers grew along the interior of the leaf, running all the way to the tip. Anypony trying to eat this would be eating a mouthful of broken glass. “The edges of the grass are super sharp!” Scotch warned.

“Pfft, I’m not impressed,” Precious said as she chomped down on several stems and tried to rip the grass up. Scotch didn’t know if Precious could eat gems or not, but she didn’t spit out a mouthful of blood as she pulled and shook her head, claws scratching at the road as she strained. The strands of grass didn’t break, and she finally spat them out. “Okay! No weed is staying between me and my shiny!”

“Your shiny?” Scotch objected, given she’d seen it first, but Precious wasn’t going to be deterred. She inhaled and blasted it with flame… which made the grass smoke and steam a little and nothing else.

“Oh, come on! What kind of stupid grass is this?” Precious demanded as she glowered at her treasure still tangled in the smoldering green. “You don’t burn! You don’t break! I can’t imagine what would eat you!”

Scotch stared all around them at the empty farms. “Maybe it’s a weapon,” she said absently.

Precious blinked at her. “What, like for whipping people with razor sharp flogs of grass?”

“No, I mean, during the war, this place had to have been a huge farm, right? Those concrete silos are enormous. So seed the land with some of this grass. Who’d look too closely? But once it got established… you can’t burn it, or yank it out of the ground, or eat it. So either you waste a lot of time dealing with it, or else it takes over your land one stalk at a time. Two hundred years later…” Scotch gestured at the endless sea of green all around them.

“That’s messed up,” Precious muttered. “I mean, yeah, war and all… but now no one can use it. Maybe poison… but what’s that do to the food you want to grow?”

Majina carefully used her saddlebags as boots and disentangled the gold chain and leaf from the bones. She held it out to Precious. “Here you go.” Then she patted the skull with a hoof. “We’ll take good care of it.”

“I saw it first,” Scotch repeated under her breath, pouting.

Precious slipped it around her neck and let out a squeal of delight. “I got a shiny! Look at it! It’s all gold and shiny and pretty and heee!” She danced in place in glee.

“Hate to break up this party, but if this grass is deadly, then you realize we’re stuck on a little ribbon of concrete that’s easy to search? That’s assuming there aren’t any stretches where this damned grass has grown over the road,” Pythia said sourly before resuming her walking.

“I swear, she has a vendetta against joy,” Precious said with a glare after her.

“She also has a point,” Scotch admitted. “If we can’t get off this road, then all they’ll have to do is run us down.” She didn’t even want to think about what would happen if they came across a section completely grown over. They hurried to catch up, but the suddenly ominous landscape around them seemed to be pressing them in tighter and tighter. Now that she was paying more attention to the sides of the road, she became aware of more and more bones tangled up in the grass. The glass edges of the leaves were like razor sharp hooks that clutched at their white prizes.

After an hour, though, the four friends faltered. It was a long way to travel, and the sour-smelling grass that had looked so delicious was likely only edible for Precious… and that only with a lot of work to get it up, and assuming she could choke it down at all.

Then Majina spotted it: a black cloud rising along the road behind them. “I think something is coming!”

And here they were, trapped, with nowhere to go. Nearby was one of the silos, perhaps only a hundred or so feet from the road, with plenty of metal buildings around it to hide in… if they could reach them.

“Precious. Can you clear a path?” Scotch asked.

“I can try, but won’t it be pretty obvious where we went?” Precious asked.

“Hopefully these stalks are springy enough that they’ll pop up behind us and the wind will hide our trail.” Hope was all they had right now.

The dragonfilly nodded and started towards the buildings, stomping on the bases to bow the grass out of their way and let the others follow. “Kinda tickles,” Precious commented.

Tickles. That was a word for it. ‘Burns’ would be a better one. Brushing against a leaf would give you a scratch as the little glass hooks tried to grab something. Anything. The springy stalks kept trying to press the leaves against their hide. Once that happened, it wasn’t hard for the stalks to scratch a bloody furrow. If they stepped on leaves, they scratched and ripped the pads of their hooves. Pythia’s cloak had to be abandoned, the canvas latching on to too many hundreds of green leaves as she brought up the rear. The damned things seemed to curl about their limbs, and Scotch could imagine a pony in barding and clothes getting hooked, tripped, and tangled like so many others. Pythia tried hard to disentangle it, but the grass refused to release it.

“Leave it,” Scotch told her as Pythia bit the end, trying to tug it as her legs bled. The zebra released it and followed Scotch out of the grass.

Still, by the time they reached the concrete pad around the silo, Scotch felt as if she’d been flayed. Dozens of scratches bled freely, and the three quickly took mouthfuls of agoloosh, the dried seaweed stitching their hides back together. “I liked that cloak,” Pythia growled as she looked over her shoulder. “It’s going to cause problems…” she muttered. The grass and breeze were helping, though, the path they’d taken disappearing in a waving field of green.

“We should find a way inside,” Scotch said, regarding Pythia. The zebra stared off and gave a little nod as she looked up at the massive concrete structure. It had to be twenty stories tall! There were eight massive cylinders set in blocks. If this thing were full, it would have been able to feed the Wasteland… forever! Around the base, in the middle, were a number of large metal sheds and buildings that were for the loading and unloading of the silos. Rusting tractors and long trailers sat peacefully oxidizing in the open.

The front door was locked, and the windows were all shielded with boards screwed to their frames, but there was one small, uncovered window big enough for them to wiggle Pythia through to open the front door. Immediately they were assaulted by the sharp sweet reek of grain and the mellower scent of dust. They left the waiting room and moved carefully through the building. There wasn’t any power, and Scotch wasn’t eager to turn anything on.

“What do these say?” Precious asked, pointing at red glyphs on the walls.

“Well, that says ‘Round Stone Granary number 7’. And that one says ‘Blessed be a bountiful harvest’ or something like that,” Majina said as she considered some of the others.

Precious stared for a beat. “The bright red one says that?” she asked skeptically.

“Oh, no. That one says ‘Extreme fire danger. Fire forbidden. Explosion hazard.’ I wonder if they were storing fuel here?” Majina mused and sniffed. “I don’t smell anything but grain dust.”

“Well, no fire, then,” Scotch said. “Got it?”

Precious sulked. “What’s the point of being half dragon if you can’t set stuff on fire whenever you want?”

“Shhh,” Pythia said from the front doors, peering through the dirty glass. The grass obscured their view a bit, but they could see the source of smoke as it rolled into view. It was as if someone had taken a tractor and mated it with a steam locomotive. The contraption rolled along the concrete road slowly, but faster than most fillies could walk. Black smoke poured out of the stack as pistons turned the wheels with an almost comical huffing and puffing of steam. The gargoyle sat behind the controls, its claws gripping the levers as it cruised along, the centaur and hound lounging on a platform at the rear that carried crates of coal.

Towed along behind it was a longboat on a trailer, occupied by Lamprey and the other Atoli from the Riptide, who seemed none too happy about this development. Orbiting them were a trio of the leather-clad fliers. For an instant, it seemed as if they were just going to cruise by without incident. Then one of the three dipped down to the grass and struggled for a bit, diaphanous wings buzzing excitedly. “Crap,” Pythia said as it tugged her cloak up. “I knew that was going to be trouble. We need to hide.”

“They don’t know for sure it’s your cloak. Do they?” Scotch asked.

“I have no idea, but they’re coming in here,” she said as the flier headed towards the granary.

The rooms offered scant places to hide, however. They were mostly offices which were stripped of everything but desks. From the restroom came an excited buzzing and chittering noise. The flier had found the window Pythia had entered through. “Here,” Pythia hissed as she tapped a small metal door set in the back. It opened with an alarming grate to a long concrete tunnel leading in both directions along the silos. They pulled the door almost completely shut. Dust in the passageway was so thick it was all Scotch could do not to cough as the flier crawled into the offices.

The equine shape scuttled along the walls and ceiling like an enormous fly. The ends of its hooves were covered with chitinous barbs that gripped the surfaces with ease as it crawled about the room seemingly at random, making its little clicking noises. Its glassy green eye windows stared as it cast its baleful gaze about.

Slowly, it headed towards the front door, and then paused. It seemed to be doing something to the crashbar… nuzzling it. Or rather, licking it with a long thin proboscis.

“Crap,” Pythia muttered.

“It’s tasting us?” Majina asked in a horrified whisper.

“One roasted bug coming up,” Precious said.

“No fire,” Scotch reminded her. “Pythia?”

But the zebra filly didn’t answer. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. “No… no… no…” she whispered. “What do I do… where’s the future where I don’t get caught?”

The flier alternated between licking and taking breaths from its gas mask. The vapors issued reeked of garlic, and it didn’t seem capable of going long without it. It licked the desks where they’d brushed against them, moving closer to the little door.

“We run… caught… she uses fire… boom… we hide… it finds us,” Pythia whispered.

Scotch scooped up two hooffuls of dust. “Close your eyes and hold your breath,” she said quietly, then threw the dust into the air, then repeated it again and again. In moments, the four of them were covered head to toe in white powder.

The door was wrenched open with a screech of metal, and immediately a cloud rolled out over the flier as Scotch struggled to hold her breath. The green eyes provided illumination enough that when Scotch peeked she saw three other white lumps. The flier crawled into the space, its gas mask hissing as it moved through the swirling dust. It turned its head this way and that, but when it removed its mask and flicked its pale white tongue out, it recoiled. It crept towards Scotch, and she clenched her eyes shut, but that didn’t stop her from feeling the tickle against her dust-covered skin. It crept around the doorway, flicking its tongue several times in the dusty air before letting out a shriek.

It restored its respirator, and then the leather-clad creature skittered back out and flew to the doors, this time disappearing through them. Immediately, the four erupted in coughs and hacks as they crawled from the passage and back into the office. Scotch shook the dust from her coat, which merely made the office air harder to breathe, then crawled to the windows and watched the flier return to Lamprey. A minute later, the steam tractor resumed lumbering down the road.

Scotch waited as long as she could before opening the door and entering the clean air. She flopped onto her back on the concrete, coughing and sucking in deep breaths along with the other four. “Good idea,” Majina said between coughs. “How’d you know… that would work?”

“I guessed if all it licked was dust, it’d go away. I didn’t think we’d nearly suffocate too.”

“Too bad you didn’t see that future, huh?” Precious asked Pythia as the filly sat apart from them.

“Yeah. I was a little distracted by the futures where we were… you know what? Forget it,” she said as she walked away from them.

Scotch pushed herself to her hooves and followed her as she walked along the concrete pad. “What’s wrong?” Scotch asked.

“I made a mistake coming here,” Pythia muttered.

“Oh,” Scotch replied, and couldn’t hide her smile. “I have that thought every day, I think.”

“You don’t get it!” Pythia whirled on her. “I…” She grimaced and clenched her jaw. “I’m not… seeing… like I should.”

“Right, you said that,” Scotch pointed out. “The too many windows thing.”

“No. You don’t understand.” She took a deep breath. “Before everything that happened with Blackjack, I had to work to see more than a few seconds into the future. I needed my map and my pendant and the help of some pretty sketchy stars to even have an idea of one future. I used their guidance to winnow out which was the most likely window to happen, and even then, there were shadows and blind spots that I just didn’t understand! But over the last year, I’ve needed them less. More for confirmation than actual seeing. And then on the Abalone… I saw…” She sniffed and shook her head. “I saw too much. I don’t know what it was I saw… but it was bad. And since then, it hasn’t stopped. You say I should turn off my sight, but I’m not sure if I even can anymore! And it’s not okay. I… oh…” She went silent, looking away.

“What?”

“You were going to say ‘It’s okay’ and that we should find some other zebra that knows this scrying stuff, only I interrupted you.” Then she clenched her jaws as if keeping herself from responding.

Scotch moved next to her as Precious and Majina approached. “You really shouldn’t do that. It’s rude to say other people’s sentences,” Majina said, then screwed up her face, thoughtfully. “I mean, it probably is. I don’t remember it in any etiquette books Mom had, but it probably should be!”

“I can’t help it,” she said with a tiny smile, then stared to the east, in the direction the strange steam tractor had travelled. “I can see at least a dozen futures where they come back to check on this place a second time. And two dozen where they don’t.” She sighed and closed her eyes, rubbing her temples. “It was so much easier back when I had to work just to see one future.”

“Well, since there’s nothing you can do about it, let’s look around for a place we can hide or anything we can use,” Scotch suggested. “I’m not in a hurry to go trotting through razorgrass again.”

The grain silos were full of nothing but dust and flame warnings. They opened up one hatch to discover the entire empty space filled with suspended dust. Behind the silos was broken concrete, the cracks sprouting thin veils of green that bit into your hide if you moved through it carelessly, and several more smaller rusty buildings that were workshops for farm equipment. Scotch regarded several of the rusted pieces of equipment, thought back to the machine shop back in the swamp, and just lamented. So much good tech, so little oxidation protection.

There were also barrels. Lots of barrels, all of them empty. One whole shed was filled to the roof with them. “What are these?” Scotch asked, turning one so Majina could read an intact label. Pythia groaned, covering her face with a hoof.

“Weedkiller. Carnico Agricultural Products. Poison. Two hundred liters. Inflammable.” She said as she read the glyphs on the label. “Good thing it doesn’t burn, right?” she said brightly.

“Um… yeah.” Scotch didn’t correct her. “What did they need all this weedkiller for?”

“Probably for the grass from hell?” Precious suggested as she gestured at the concrete pad around the shed. “There isn’t a single blade of the stuff in the cracks within fifty feet of this shed.”

“If there’s a poison for it, why didn’t they just kill all the grass?” Majina asked with a frown.

“Maybe they were trying, but megaspells went off and they couldn’t make it anymore?” Scotch proposed. “Let’s keep looking.”

The last building behind the silos was some sort of bunkhouse. There was a padlock on the door, but years of exposure had oxidized it to the point where dragon breath and a well-swung chunk of concrete could break it off. Something had been spray-painted on the outside ages ago in gold paint, but it was so faded and flaked off that Majina couldn’t even guess the glyph’s meaning. Most of the interior was empty, but the bunk beds were still there, along with mattresses, though someone had slashed big X’s in each one. And bodies. The corpses were long desiccated, curled up in the corner. Casings gleamed dully through the dust on the floor, and sunlight peeked through bullet holes in the outer walls. “Raiders?” Precious asked. “Place looks tossed.”

She had a point, but there was a lot of stuff in here that was probably pretty valuable back when these four had been killed. “I’m not sure,” Scotch replied. “I mean, nothing was taken.”

The three of them started to go through the junk in the bunks, while Majina just seemed to contemplate the four bony bodies huddled together. Scotch found the first good sign since they’d reached the silo: a pistol. She had only the most basic understanding of how to use it, but Blackjack had taught her enough that she didn’t think she’d shoot her friends by accident. Pythia found a sheet that could double as a cloak with a bit of rope and imagination. Precious found some boxes of food and bottles of purified water with their seals still intact. The zebras had these weird crackers of hay and some sort of dry flatbread, not bad at all!

“You want some?” Scotch asked, extending the box to Majina. The filly’s eyes just lingered on the black blood staining the concrete floor. She didn’t answer. “I know it’s bad, but it happens here too.”

“Yeah. Think we can bury them?” Majina asked with a sad smile.

“Considering everything outside is either concrete or razorgrass, I don’t think so,” Scotch admitted. “I don’t think any of us could tear through that stuff with our hide intact.”

Precious snorted. “Oh yeah? Watch this.” And she stormed outside. For nearly half an hour, she waged war with the razorgrass behind the bunkhouse, the growth fighting her every step of the way. Still, she managed to tear a square meter patch clear and dig out enough soil to inter the bodies, then flopped down on the concrete next to the weeds. “Yeah. That’ll show you who’s boss,” she said, panting and jabbing a shaky claw at the grass.

“Thanks,” Majina said, giving the dirty dragonfilly a hug before starting to transfer the remains. They were mostly bones, rags, and some tatters of hide that vermin had left behind, so even Majina could move them. As she transferred the last body, she paused and frowned. “I think there’s something in here,” she said as she tapped the bloodstained barding. One claw swipe from Precious later, Majina was able to extract a bloodstained notebook.

“What’s that?” Scotch asked, glancing at Pythia and receiving a baffled look.

“I have no idea,” Majina said. “Who would sew up a notebook inside their clothes?” The four got the remains interred and buried.

“Thanks for doing that,” Scotch Tape told Precious.

“Yeah, well, I don’t like sleeping with bones. They give me the creeps. Like, what if they start moving or something? Things like that can happen, you know,” Precious said seriously.

Back in the bunkhouse, Majina flipped through the notebook while Scotch Tape assessed the gun. Okay. It was an automatic… and that was as far as Scotch’s knowledge of firearms went. She had one magazine for it loaded with twelve bullets, and another six still in the box. While the others enjoyed their stale crackers, she sidled up to where Majina lay on one of the slashed mattresses. Cut or not, foam was still foam, if a bit stiff. “Anything interesting?” Scotch took one look at the pages and realized she’d never understand written Zebra. Some of those pages looked fractal!

“It’s a journal from the end of the war,” Majina said as she flipped through. “Lots of the entries are smudged or stained, but it goes from a few years before the Day of Doom to a few years after.” She opened up to one. “This one is talking about the problems with the grass. They consider it an annoyance since it’s such a pain to tear out.” Another page. “Here they’re talking about how they’re not growing different kinds of food anymore. Abran… that’s the author, I think… his father used to grow twenty varieties of grain. Now they only grow five. And a half dozen pages later, one.” She flipped through. “More complaints about the grass.”

“Do they talk about why it’s such a pain?” Scotch asked.

“Sure. Abran says the glass edges are just a start. The plants have something called ‘carbon fibers’ growing naturally in the stems and leaves. The grass itself is so… Um… what’s this glyph? The opposite of acid?”

“Alkaline?” Scotch suggested.

“I guess. It’s so that they can’t use it for food. It’ll just make the eater sick. It also sucks all the nutrients out of the soil. The official word from Roam is it’s a pony weapon. Fortunately, it can be killed by that poison stuff.”

“Well, that’s good,” Scotch suggested.

“Not good. The weedkiller is expensive, and it kills everything except one type of poison-resistant grain. Apparently, the seeds for that type are really expensive too. The farm was in debt when the zebras won the war.”

“Wait? What!?” Scotch blurted. “Who says the zebras won the war?”

“That’s what this says.” She tapped the book. “Victory was achieved at great cost, though it feels like defeat. Rice River didn’t get hit by a megaspell, but lots of other places were. Something called ‘martial law’ was declared, which doesn’t sound like a very good law to me. The military kept coming and taking more and more food, and they’d shoot anyone that didn’t like it. Farms without money couldn’t keep the grass away. Eventually, they ran out of food, and the army shot up half the town looking for food that wasn’t there. Lots of people starved before they went away for good.” She flipped through and frowned. “Then it looks like someone else started writing.”

“How can you tell?” Scotch asked.

“Uh, cause the writing is totally different. See?” Majina flipped back and forth between two pages, and Scotch couldn’t tell them apart for the life of her. “Also, the subject changes to a ‘Bartoli’.” Ugh, would zebra names ever make sense? “Anyway, the new writer was apparently on the run from some place where they were trying to find a new way of dealing with the grass. It’s a lot harder to make it out.” She stared at several pages. “Apparently they hid here. There was something the Orah had that would do it.” She peered at a smear with her eye nearly on the paper. “I really wish I could read what that something actually is.”

“Do they talk about who might have killed them?” Pythia asked.

“Yeah. I can’t read who was after them, but they knew they were in danger. There’re lots of scientific glyphs here I don’t know, so maybe there’re notes? They had to flee for their lives. The last entry is begging the spirits for a day of rebirth. Then nothing but blank pages.” She glanced over at the bloodstained corner. “Except for this.”

She opened the back cover of the notebook, where a small plastic baggie had been taped with a little glyph label printed upon it. “Sample F-198J. Origin: Orah swamplands,” Majina translated. Inside the baggie was a light tan powder, like flour.

“What is it?” Scotch asked, tapping the baggie. Whatever was inside was caked together and didn’t budge.

“Uh, Sample F-198J. Like I said,” Majina said, and snorted. “If you want more than that, you’ll need to find a zebra that reads science.”

Maybe it was a chemical? Some kind of grass poison? It didn’t make her PipBuck click, so it wasn’t radioactive. She filed it away in their growing list of mysteries. “So, how are we going to get east? If we walk, we’re going to be sitting ducks. Even if there are other roads we can take east through the grass, they’ll eventually run us down.”

“Well, I was thinking–” Majina began.

“About the evil plot fairy?” Precious said with a grin. “You know, the one that puts in all those bad… er… holes? In plots?” Her smile melted as Majina and Scotch regarded her flatly. “What? Talking about stories is hard!”

“One day, you’re going to meet one of the horrible monsters you’ve created, and you’ll lament not coming up with a way to defeat them,” Majina said primly, before refocusing on Scotch. “But it was the tractor they were using. Do you think you could get one of the steam tractors here to work?”

Scotch’s eyes popped wide at the thought. Could she? “I… have no idea, really! I mean, the concept is pretty straightforward. Boil water, use the pressure to push a piston, which turns a crankshaft. If the transmission still works or I can stick it in a low gear…” She trailed off. “Maybe?” She quickly added, “You understand, though, that if something goes wrong, at best we’re stuck in a bathtub on wheels. At worst, we’re on a bomb loaded with scalding hot steam.”

“So is that better or worse than being caught by Riptide’s people?” Pythia asked.

Scotch turned to her. “Do you see this working? I mean… future-wise?”

She blinked and stared off into space. “Yes… and no… and yes… no… nope… yeah… no… Oh stars!” Her eyes popped wide before she covered them. “Okay. I just saw what steam burns are like. No way!”

“And what does the future look like if we walk?” Scotch asked.

Pythia blinked again and screwed up her face. Her expression turned more and more tormented, and then she slumped. “I hate this idea… just so you know.”

They slept in the bunkhouse, with Majina studying the journal till the light faded out. The next morning, they trotted back to the sheds. There were at least three tractors in there, and while it might be tempting to try and get the biggest one, a hulking behemoth with wheels twice her height, she settled on the smallest one, a little one that had a small two-wheeled wagon already attached. It also had the least corrosion and seemed the most manageable. Scotch tasked the other three with scavenging the sheds for parts while she worked.

Back in her stable, before she’d gotten her cutie mark, she’d been taught how to make plumbing work. It was honestly a miracle she didn’t have a toilet for a cutie mark. Steam piping was just a different kind of plumbing… one where, if things went wrong, you got four poached fillies. Still, the small tractor’s innards seemed to be made mostly of stainless steel, which raised her hopes immensely that it could be repaired. She snaked a wire through to pull a cleaning cloth around the dry interior and found it rust-free as well. There was a coal bunker with plenty of coal. Everything was in need of a good dose of oil, and she had to replace every single seal that’d dried out and cracked; Precious found some rubber replacements that would fit, though, and Majina located a manual. It was loaded with ‘sciency’ glyphs she didn’t understand, but Scotch was able to get some answers from her when she got stuck. Thankfully, the transmission was not only in good shape, the gear ratios were nearly identical to some winches back in her stable. The tires also weren’t flat, so there was hope. In fact, she suspected they were solid, as she couldn’t even find an air valve.

Finally, following the manual’s directions, she filled the firebox half full with coal, and then the fillies filled the boiler with water from an old pump well. She poured it through a cloth to strain out all the bits of dirt and debris that spewed out when Precious went to town on the pump handle. Finally, the boiler was half full, as it was supposed to be.

“Now all we have to do is wait and try it out,” Scotch said as the tractor started to make noises like a teakettle.

“We should give it a name!” Majina suggested brightly.

“A name?” Pythia echoed flatly.

“It’ll work much better with a name. Things with names always last longer. I think we should name it the ‘Little Impalii Two!’.”

“Road Raider!” suggested Precious with a grin.

“Useless Contraption,” Pythia offered flatly.

“The Soul of Prince Hamapapan!”

“The Crusher!”

“Count Peu-Peu the Bold!”

“What?” Precious asked, momentarily baffled.

Majina sniffed. “I’m sure the count would be honored to have a trusty steed named after him.”

“Whatever. How about the Mangler? The Annihilator! The Decimator!”

“It only destroys a tenth of its enemies?” Pythia snickered.

“Yeah!” Precious said enthusiastically, then blinked. “Wait. Huh?”

“The Whiskey Express,” Scotch said as she stared at the machine.

All three blinked at her. “Well, it’s not… too bad,” Majina said delicately. “Are you sure we can’t name it after a famous hero?”

“Come on, how can you not want to ride around on the ‘Mangler’?” Precious asked with a pout.

“If this thing blows up, who gets mangled?” Pythia asked back. “Besides, I’m pretty sure that she’s the only one who can make this thing work. So ‘Whiskey Express’ it is.”

“Now it shall be indestructible, until such time as it must give its life for our success,” Majina said with a sage nod, patting the tractor’s boiler and then jerking her hoof away. “Yeouch!” She waved her hoof in the air to cool it and gave the steam tractor a dirty look.

“Yeah. Ask all the named guns Blackjack had how indestructible they were,” Scotch said with a smile. “Okay. So here’s what we need to do. I’ll make sure the trailer’s good too. The rest of you go through the bunkhouse and collect anything that might be worth selling when we get to Rice River. I’m tired of depending on charity.” She imagined that, somewhere on the other side of the world, a certain filly’s ears were burning. “I’ll drive it around a little, and we can see how it works.”

They went to work. Scotch took care to re-oil the front wheels. The brake pads were old, but there wasn’t any flaking, and they constricted when she… okay, after she tied wooden blocks to all the pedals, they flexed when compressed. The seat had a metal back support that she could lean against to see out over the wheel. There were so many things that could go wrong, but Pythia was right: out here in all this nothing, they’d be caught out in the open sooner or later. With those fliers, not even the grass would be safe cover.

They dumped two dirty sheets worth of junk in the metal trailer, along with a bucket full of coal, the oil can, and tools she’d found in the shed. Then it was time for the moment of truth. The others backed out while Scotch turned a knob that trapped the steam. Theoretically there was a safety valve to prevent terrible explosions, but she really didn’t want to test it. The gauges twitched, stuck, and then resumed moving in little jerks as the pressure built. “Please work, Whiskey. Please please please…” she begged quietly. “My friends really need you to get us to Rice River.”

She had to look down to make sure she was working the clutch right, pumping the pedals a few times, and then she pushed a lever till the notch was all the way up to the smallest gear. Then she pressed the pedal on the right.

The entire vehicle gave a lurch and a squeal as something hissed underneath, but then the machine crept out of the metal shed. “It’s working! It’s working!” she cried triumphantly as they crawled out into the yard behind the silos. She felt an elation she hadn’t felt since she’d gotten a toilet in the middle of the Wasteland to flush.

So she could be forgiven for having missed the red bars on her E.F.S., right?

The flier dropped right onto Majina, hooking its spindly claws into her hide and lifting her right off her hooves as its wings buzzed loudly. She let out a screech, struggling to free herself as the flier started to carry her away. Precious launched herself at the filly, snagging her hind legs and dragging the pair back to the ground. A second flier dived for Pythia, but the filly deftly rolled to the side, the flier’s legs snatching at thin air. It swooped at her again, but she kept moving back and to the side with each attempt.

That left the third one on Scotch.

It landed atop her, heavy and reeking of garlic, its claws latching on to her as its wings buzzed, attempting to lift it into the air. Scotch hooked her hind legs around the steering wheel and held on for dear life as she hammered away at the creature’s face. “Get off,” she screamed as she smashed the glass goggles wildly.

Then one of the lenses shattered, and she stared into an equine eye, wide, milky, and filled with green light. The rancid, garlicky vapors leaked out of the breach as it gave a distinctly inequine squeal, nearly yanking her right out of the seat.

Scotch felt her grip slipping. She abandoned her attempt to hit the flier and fumbled at the controls. She found a valve and hoped it was the right one, twisting it hard.

From a pipe atop the boiler in front of her, a jet of boiling hot steam erupted with a shriek, blasting into the air. The flier let out a scream of its own, trying to twist itself out of the plume, but Scotch was an earth pony, and, better yet, had leverage. With her hind legs still tight, she twisted and pushed the flier’s hind end into the steam. It instantly tried to release her, but Scotch hooked her forehooves around its ‘wrists’ and kept it in the steam for a few seconds longer. Its suit burst open and its wings trembled and failed. When it tumbled to the side of the Express, Scotch quickly closed the valve, hoping she’d get her pressure back soon.

They’d need it.

The flier with Majina dragged Precious along the concrete towards the far side of the silo. Precious dug in her claws and skidded to a halt, the two playing tug of war with Majina. Around the corner appeared three zebras and the hound from the swamp. Around the farther, more distant edge of the silo came the centaur and two other zebras. The hooved charged, while the hound ambled towards the four.

Scotch Tape ran to the flier holding Majina when Pythia let out a cry. “Scotch! Duck!” Scotch looked towards her just in time to have the other flier tackle her. “I said ‘Duck’, not ‘Look at me’!” Pythia shouted as the flier tried to latch its clawfeet into Scotch’s hide. Right now, Scotch really wished she had a magic horn to handle that gun. How nice it must have been for Blackjack just to think and point and shoot! The best Scotch could manage was to keep rolling from side to side to keep it from using its wings and lifting her into the air.

“Pythia!” Scotch shouted, then stared at the sight of the zebra running away towards the shack with all the barrels. She might not have been very big or strong, but she could have done something, right?! Scotch wrestled with the flier. How long would it take the zebras and centaur to reach them? The silos were huge, and there were those patches of razorgrass to navigate…

Speaking of patches.

Scotch twisted her head, spotting a large clump growing in a pothole ten feet away. With all her strength, she rolled over towards it. Once. Twice. Thrice. In. The clump was maybe only half a meter across, but it felt like she’d just plunged herself into a bonfire. The leaves clutched her hide, ripping with abandon. However, as much as it hurt, she lacked thin, diaphanous wings. When those buzzing wings got caught, they shredded like thin cellophane. The red veins inside began to spurt, and that covered mouth let out a screech that would have shattered glass. It released her, struggling wildly to get away. Scotch carefully pulled her legs away, getting cut but not trapped.

The razorgrass did not oblige the flier. The long strands did not break. They did not tear up from the hole in the concrete. They twisted tighter and tighter around the flier, its leather splitting and releasing green clouds of garlicky-smelling vapor. Then, all at once, the contents spilled into view.

Scotch stared at the too-white flesh, gleaming and reeking and twitching as its flailings failed. She knew what it had been. She could not, did not want to, know how it had become this thing. Only that she would put a bullet through her head or those of her friends rather than become this pulsating, slimy, skinless thing. Mercifully, it stilled before her eyes.

She turned and raced to where Precious and Majina struggled to escape the third flier. And where was Pythia? Rolling drums from the shed to the base of the silo! The dregs were sloshing all over the place as they covered the distance between the shed and an open hatch. The centaur raised a rifle, firing as he advanced. Someone shouted ‘Alive’, but not before he took a few shots. Scotch scampered up Precious’s back and across Majina and tackled the flier, weighing down its wings. She even tried biting and tearing them, but thin though they were, it was like trying to bite through a sheet of tough plastic. Fortunately, the flier released the zebra filly and started to lift towards the skies. Scotch dove off before it rose too high, landing in a pile on top of the other two.

“Come on. We have to go,” Scotch panted. Why were they staring at her like that?

Majina didn’t say a word. She just reached into her saddlebags, pulled out some agoloosh, and jammed it into Scotch’s mouth, forcing her to chew and swallow. Precious scooped her up on her back, running to the idling tractor. What was…

Oh, yeah. That’s a lot of blood.

The razorgrass had all but flayed the skin off her limbs. The weed stopped the bleeding, but there were still tatters of hide that would need medical attention soon. Pythia rolled her last barrel and ran to join them. “Go. That way!” she said, pointing towards the hound. Scotch took a moment to settle herself in the seat.

“What were you doing?” Scotch asked.

“No time! Trust me!” Pythia shouted.

“Hope she’s seeing the right thing,” Precious said as the other two climbed into the trailer. Scotch worked the clutch, pulled a lever, pressed the peddle, and the Whiskey Express started to roll.

“Fire!” Pythia said as they passed over the trail left behind by the rolling barrels. “Don’t argue with me, fire!” she screamed, pointing a hoof at the slick trail. Precious took a breath and let out a plume of emerald flame that washed over the trail. The fire immediately began to creep along the slick. “Drive! Fast as you can!”

“I’ve never done this before!” Scotch warned as she shifted into second. “Come on, Whiskey Express. You can do this! Be a good tractor!” she said as they picked up speed. The zebras moved to intercept, and Scotch cranked the wheel around.

“What are you doing? Away! Go away!” Pythia screamed as they passed over the burning trail, heading towards the centaur. He stopped, now taking aim with his rifle. Scotch cranked the wheel a second time, now dropping it into third as they started to reach speeds at the line between exciting and scary. “What part of ‘get out of here’ are you missing?!”

“Do you want to drive this thing?” Scotch shrieked back at her, charging the three zebras and the hound. Now they were going fast enough that they couldn’t simply jump on her. Not that they didn’t want to. Two attempted to hook their hooves in the trailer, but gouts of flame in their faces dissuaded them. The third tried to pull Scotch out of the seat, but his limbs slipped on the blood still slick on her legs as he was dragged along. Then one of his hind legs was caught under the large wheel, and with a crunch and bump, the tractor rolled right over him. Bullets zinged out, and one of them pinged off the metal plate behind the seat Scotch occupied. ‘Alive’ seemed to have become more of a guideline.

All that was left was the hound, slouching in their way, picking something from a nostril and then sampling it curiously. Scotch wouldn’t dare swerve around him. She was having a hard enough time just holding onto the wheel and turning it at all! But he’d jump out of the way too. Right?

Instead, it reached out and grabbed the boiler, and all four of them were nearly ejected from the vehicle as it lurched to a crawl, the wheels slipping along on the concrete as they fought for purchase. Scotch was lucky enough to be thrown into the seat rather than onto the boiler in front of her, and stared into the hound’s jaundiced eyes as it grinned, its hands smoking on the hot metal. Slowly, the grin faded, narrowed eyes widening. “Ow,” it stated as if perplexed as to the source of its pain.

Scotch Tape didn’t know what to do. She fumbled for the gun, but she had to hold on and keep accelerating in the hopes the hound would let go or something.

Then the flames reached the open hatch. Each silo was roughly seventy thousand cubic feet of space, and though technically ‘empty’, more than a thousand pounds of grain dust lingered, much of it suspended in midair.

The warnings about fire were there for a reason.

The silos were shells of reinforced concrete a half meter thick. For such an emergency, they’d been designed with vents which would let the rapidly expanding gasses escape but not admit fresh oxygen. These vents were one hundred and ninety years past their last inspection. They popped out like corks as the silo boomed like bottled thunder. That shockwave shook free the last remainder of dust caked to the walls, which, mixed with fresh oxygen and heat from the initial explosion, proved far more energetic.

The silo blew itself apart. Since it was directly adjacent to three others, those too exploded a second later. The blast distracted the hound enough that it forgot it was holding back a tractor, watching the explosions with delight as the silos burst one after the next. Scotch downshifted and floored it, and the nose of the tractor lifted and came crashing down on the hound, bouncing right over him as the granary exploded.

Coming around to the side facing the road, Scotch immediately spotted the gargoyle frantically driving away from the blast towards the west, with Lamprey screaming and pointing at them with a hoof as he beat on the gargoyle’s shoulders. Pieces of concrete began to rain down, much of it as gravel… quite a bit of it as boulders. A chunk bigger than the gargoyle’s tractor slammed down feet from him, but the zebra never took his eyes off the four fillies. Scotch drove through the narrow patch of razorgrass, the stalks seeming to try and twist up around the axles. Still, she managed to get back on the road, heading east and leaving the smoking, flaming ruin behind them. Hopefully it would take time for their pursuers to regroup.

With a steady stream of ‘pockety pockety’, the tractor trundled its way down the road, leaving the rest of silos exploding behind them as a thick, black column of smoke and dust rose into the clear sky.

Driving a steam tractor was a bit harder than Scotch anticipated. Less than ten minutes passed before they had to stop and cut off the remains of razorgrass twisting around the axles. The carbon fibers within only succumbed to sawing with a hacksaw they’d salvaged while Precious sustained fire on the threads. The noxious smoke made them gag, but there was nothing for it; the fibers were working their way into the transmission.

Once underway, she found herself facing the unfamiliar sensation of making progress. The wind tugged at her mane as they pockety puttered their way along. Fortunately, the road remained clear of razorgrass. There were numerous side roads, some of which appeared passable and others overgrown with grass. Still, as long as they stayed on this road going east, they shouldn’t face much risk of getting lost. For once, it looked as if they were going to make it to Rice River without any more problems.

Then the road forked. The split came so abruptly that Scotch nearly plunged off the road and into the grass between the forks. She jerked the wheel to the right and glanced into the trailer behind her to see her friends sprawled out and giving her dirty glares. She gave a sheepish smile in return, hoping this was the right way.

Three hours later, after taking turn after turn after turn trying to get back on the main road, one of the gauges started to dip lower and lower. She had to stop and have Majina translate the glyphs. After five minutes, it became clear: they needed more water. Scotch kept an eye out for a stream or something, but all she could see was grass… grass… gra–

Wait. Was that a farm? The cottage beside the road issued a thin trail of smoke from its chimney. If zebras were living here, then they had to have water, right? “Be ready for trouble,” Scotch shouted as she slowed the Whiskey Express. A clearing of about an acre or two had been carved out of the endless green. The farmhouse clearly had seen better days, all the windows covered with boards. Still, there were no corpses out in the open or heads on pikes. That was promising, right?

As they pulled into the yard next to the house, there was a flurry of movement as zebras darted from the small plot behind the house into the structure. No red bars, so Scotch kept her gun away. She turned to Pythia and Precious. “See if you can find a well or wherever they get their water from. Majina, we need to ask directions.”

They trotted out, and Majina and Scotch Tape moved to the door. It’d been shot up, and it looked as if someone had tried to set the porch on fire. She turned to Majina, gesturing to the closed portal. She swallowed, but then rapped her hoof on the door. “Hello?” Scotch Tape sat behind her, waiting for red bars to appear.

Majina knocked three times before the door opened and a single zebra mare emerged, eyes on the ground. She didn’t even clear the door before it slammed shut, knocking into her rump and sending her face into the ground. She didn’t get up as she lay there, quivering.

Scotch hadn’t ever seen a more wretched creature, and she’d met ghouls. Her entire body was one mass of scars so complete that it was hard to make out her stripes. The tips of her ears and tail were cut off. “I… I am for your pleasure,” she croaked. Majina gaped at her in horror.

“Um, that’s great, but really all we need is some water and directions to Rice River. I think we made a wrong turn,” Scotch said with as warm a smile as she could manage.

She raised her face, gaping at the pair in shock. “You… you… you…” she repeated faintly. One of her eyes was missing, and the other was a pale blue. “Children?”

“I swear, I am going to find a magic spell to make me a few years older if it kills me,” Scotch Tape said, and the young mare flinched and dropped her face to the ground again.

“Take me as you wish, but I beg and plead you not harm the others,” she whimpered, trembling.

Scotch shared a horrified look with Majina. “Look. All we need is water, a bucket to carry it in, and directions to Rice River. Then we’ll be going. We’ll even trade… something… for your trouble.” There had to be something in their bags of junk worth something.

It took her a minute to raise her face again, her eye staring from one to the other, then to the wagon, then back at the ground again. “I… I don’t understand. You are… you are a pony?”

“Yeah,” Scotch Tape said, sharing another look with Majina. “Is that a problem?”

The scarred mare lay at Scotch’s feet. “Please, I will be your slave forever, if you will make your grass go away! You can take my life! I’ll give it gladly! Just please make the grass stop!”

Scotch Tape backed away, her mouth working silently as the young mare wept, staring up at her, eye full of desperation. “I’m sorry. If I could, I would in a heartbeat, but I don’t have any way to do anything to the grass. Believe me, I really wish I had a horn right now so I could zap it for you.” Scotch swallowed. “Please get up. I don’t want you to pleasure me or… or die for me. We just need water for our tractor and directions to Rice River. Please.” The young mare closed her eye and trembled as she collapsed and wept.

“Please… take the grass away… please…” she whimpered.

“What’s your name?” Majina asked as Scotch backed away, stricken.

It took her a bit to compose herself. She peeked at the pair again and answered after a minute. “A… Aleta,” she said as she rose once more. “You are sure there is nothing you can do about the grass? You are a pony. Can’t you use your pony sorcery to undo this?”

Scotch fought to keep her melting smile up. “Earth pony. No horn. Sorry,” Scotch Tape said to the downcast zebra. “I’m Scotch Tape. This is Majina.”

“Scaough Taep?” she said, her head turning a moment, as if not sure she’d said it right.

“Close enough,” Scotch said with a smile. “Water and directions?”

She glanced at the door behind her, then nodded and limped off the worn porch and started around back. There Scotch beheld a small miracle: a tidy and carefully tended garden with a cleared-out perimeter separating the plants from the encroaching green. Precious was poking some of the vines as Pythia studied her star map away from the house.

“Please, don’t!” Aleta blurted, stretching out a hoof towards Precious, and when the dragonfilly scowled at her, she nearly collapsed. “Please… don’t…” she repeated in a whisper.

“I wasn’t going to mess with them,” Precious said, twisting her face. She glanced at Scotch, then back, her brows knitting. “What happened to you? Raiders?”

“Raiders?” Aleta asked in a little voice.

“The scars?” the dragonfilly said, gesturing with a claw.

“Bandits? Robbers? Vile scum of the world to be vanquished by the righteous to demonstrate their virtue?” Majina suggested with a smile.

“No. Reavers… no. We service reavers. Give them some of our crop to go away.” She trembled, tucking her truncated tail between her haunches. “Sometimes they are unkind, but they let us live so they may feed when they return.” She glanced at Scotch and then quickly stared out at the gently waving fields of green. “The grass does this to us. It cuts us as we clear it. Wounds become infected. The hooks break off in the skin. They bore deeper and deeper.” She lifted her hooves. “It will kill us eventually.”

She walked to a wooden box set in the corner and lifted it up, exposing a water pump and metal pail. Majina pumped. Precious carried. Scotch filled the water tank. Pythia did whatever she pleased. Aleta trembled, eyes downcast, glancing at the others warily, but curiously as well. “How did you come to be here?” she asked as Scotch refilled the firebox.

Majina took a deep breath, smiling broadly. “Well, it’s all very exciting! You see–”

“We took a boat,” Scotch said, mixing the embers with the fresh coals.

“We didn’t just take a boat,” Majina said sharply. “There was–”

“Yeah, we went through a swamp too,” Scotch went on, and Majina began to make a whine in the back of her throat like a teakettle before Scotch finished, “and then we drove here on the Whiskey Expr– urk!”

Majina seized her by the neck, squeezing and shaking her as she shrieked, “That is not how you tell a dramatic narrative!”

Aleta just stared as if they’d all lost their minds. “You get used to it,” was all Precious said. “Where did that grass come from, though?”

“It’s a pony weapon. They seeded it during the war,” the young mare said quietly.

Precious stared flatly. “Eh… I don’t think so.” Aleta just blinked at her. “Not saying ponies couldn’t do something like this, but look at me. This is what ponies do,” she said as she gestured to herself. “Now, if it was some kind of grass monster… or formed magical vines that slithered after you… or transformed you into ponies… that would be totally pony stuff.”

“I… don’t know about that,” Aleta muttered.

Maybe Precious had a point. The insidious nature of the grass boggled Scotch’s mind. How could anything be so nasty and pernicious and not be an intentional weapon? The entire tribe should be dealing with this. Fighting it en masse and tearing and burning every last stalk up. When the water tank was filled, she tried to pass one of their bits of junk to pay for the water, but Aleta didn’t accept any of it. Just kept her eye low and trembled. Scotch spotted more scarred zebras watching them warily from the house. The kids at least looked like zebras. The adults… how could anyone survive being covered with that much scar tissue?

“We should get going,” Pythia said as she approached the tractor. “I consulted Thurban, Ashur, and Pythegilos, and they all agree trouble’s coming.”

Aleta gave a little scream, collapsing back. “Starkatteri! Starkatteri!” she cried out, and then buried her face in the dirt. “Doomed! Cursed! Forever!”

“No! She is, but... I mean you’re not cursed!” Scotch Tape said sharply, then gaped at Pythia. “Tell her she’s not cursed!”

“Oh, I’d say she’s cursed. Just look at this place. Losing the land to weeds and reavers,” Pythia said coolly. “They’re dealing with a bitch of a curse.”

“Cursed. Cursed,” Aleta moaned.

Scotch Tape’s butt hit the ground as she grabbed her own mane, pulled as hard as she could, and let out a scream at the top of her lungs, “You’re not cursed!”

“I think she might be,” Majina murmured as she stood atop the tractor seat, shading her eyes with a hoof as she stared out over the grass.

“Not you too,” Scotch whined. Was every zebra just crazy? That had to be it!

Precious joined her on the seat and added, “She’s right. Smoke coming from the road. It’s another tractor.”

Their own was putting up a noticeable stream of gray smoke. No doubt Lamprey’s remaining flier would spot it. They’d come right to this farm looking for Scotch Tape, and she doubted they’d be as kind as their party had been. After all, they wouldn’t be coming for food; they’d assume that the zebras here knew something. Given how readily her family had thrown her out to Scotch, Aleta would probably be sent to answer them.

“Get in the trailer,” Scotch said to the mutilated zebra. She blinked up at Scotch. “You’re cursed. If you stay here, the curse will stay with your family. Get in!” And then, to stop any further arguments, she drew the gun and pointed it at her, her jaw shaking as Aleta stared at her in horror. Tears ran down her scarred cheek before she slowly crept into the tractor. Once she was in, Scotch shouted at the house, “I’m taking your daughter to Rice River! She’ll come home once she’s shown us the way!” There. Now, if they did stop and question the family, they’d get an answer and would hopefully be after her and not interrogate these people who didn’t deserve any more grief.

She stoked the fire, using Precious to blast fire over the coals and get the temperature and pressure to build enough that they could start rolling away from the farmhouse. “Put some of that grass in there,” Scotch instructed. Precious went and ripped up a large mouthful without question, to the shock of Aleta, and trotted back. When it was shoved into the fire, it immediately smoldered and turned their smoke thick and white.

“You know this is the opposite of hiding, right?” Pythia said sourly.

“I don’t care. I’m not letting these people suffer just because we stopped here!” Scotch snapped.

“Yeah. ‘Cause that’s absolutely the source of their suffering,” Pythia replied dryly.

Scotch didn’t answer. Everyone got into the trailer as Scotch took the wheel, and Aleta’s family just watched from the door, not a single bar going red as their daughter was abducted. Maybe they thought she really was cursed, too, and that this was taking the curse away. Maybe they believed the fillies were really raiders or reapers or whatever. Maybe they’d written her off the second they’d pushed her out the door. It didn’t matter. Scotch worked her controls and started the Whiskey Express down the road. Part of her wanted to speed up and put as much distance as she could between them and that black plume chugging up from the south, and the other wanted to move slowly enough they were spotted and the farmhouse would be spared.

She was rewarded by the sight of a red bar zipping around her. The last flier made a pass around them, wings buzzing as it flitted over the grass. Scotch grinned at it and waved her hoof at the creature. Then she opened up the throttle, and the pistons began to pockety pock faster and faster. The flier reversed, nipping back towards the pursuing tractor.

“Congratulations,” Pythia shouted at her. “Happy?”

“Yes!” Scotch Tape answered, imagining Pythia’s groan. It was now a race. If they ran into a dead end… if a seal burst or the water ran out… if they didn’t reach somewhere safe…

Well, as the Stable 99 motto went, ‘Don’t think about it’.

The saving grace was that the roads were all almost perfectly straight and elevated above the fields. Scotch had the strength to hold a steady course, but if she had to crank the wheel, they were in big trouble. Here and there, rusting machinery lay abandoned along the road, steam tractors like theirs tangled up in the grass.

Behind them, the dark funnel grew larger. Soon the black blot of their pursuers came into view. Then it grew. The flier paced them, keeping a distance, but it’d be impossible to hide now. Lamprey was running them down, and his tractor was bigger and faster. More water would mean a longer range. Hopefully they were already low. It was just about the only chance the fillies had.

Soon she could hear the powerful ‘chugity-chug’ of their pursuers, deeper and throatier than their own. Once they made contact, they could drive Scotch off the road or possibly board the Whiskey Express. The gargoyle perched behind his own larger boiler, grinning maniacally as Lamprey stood next to him, clinging to the seat. She could see the hungry grin twisting his lips.

If he doesn’t kill me, he’ll make me wish he had. My friends and Aleta will be corpses. If I give up, he might spare them. Maybe.

They passed a sign next to the road. Of all the glyphs Scotch could make out through the rust, the only one she identified was the glyph for ‘10’. Hopefully that was a sign for Rice River. It was the only hope they had left, that the settlement wouldn’t allow a bunch of raiders to take a bunch of fillies away or kill them outright.

The front of the tractor chasing them had a wedge on it, and when it made contact with the trailer, the Whiskey Express let out a shriek and shimmied. The wheel threatened to skip right out of Scotch’s hooves. The trailer was twisting to the side, and it was all Scotch could do to keep the Whiskey Express in front.

“You can do this, Whiskey. I’ve had my hooves in your guts! You can go faster!” she implored the vehicle. In truth, she had no idea what the tractor’s top speed was. She just knew that if the other tractor kept pushing the trailer, eventually it’d jackknife, and either the Whiskey Express would wreck or the trailer would snap right off. Still, to her astonishment, the pressure gauge crept up, and while they didn’t pull away, it did reduce the shimmy enough that she could keep ahead.

So the Atoli came after them. The zebras moved onto the narrow strip of metal next to the boiler, struggling to keep from falling or getting cooked against the hot metal as they crept towards the trailer. Majina opened up their sacks of junk and gave a toaster an overhead toss with both hooves; it pinged off the boiler, bounced, and smashed the gargoyle right in its grin. The beast rolled in the seat as Lamprey grabbed the wheel, but not before the tractor weaved enough that one of the creeping zebras was thrown to the road, disappearing under the massive wheels with barely a bump.

“Go away!” the filly shouted as she tossed more debris at the next zebra in line. The pirate didn’t attempt to jump down, though. He tossed a hook on a chain. It caught on the trailer, and immediately the tractor behind them slowed. The chain went taut, and Scotch lurched as they slowed too. Scotch glanced back at the triumphant grin on Lamprey’s face. The zebra who’d thrown the hook now moved to jump.

So Precious jumped first. She scrambled right up onto the front of the tractor pursuing them, claws gaining purchase on the hot metal, then took a deep breath and blasted green flame at the zebra clinging to the side of the large tractor. He ducked his head, but that didn’t stop his mane from catching fire. Apparently the combination of hot steel and burning head was more than he could manage. His hoof batted at the flames in his mane, and he slipped, falling from the ledge of metal with another small bump from the tractor.

Precious climbed up on the boiler, her face contorted at the barely tolerable heat of the metal under her feet. She might have breathed fire, but she wasn’t a fully fireproof dragon. Still, she slowly crawled towards Lamprey and the recovering gargoyle, gripping the pipes with her claws.

Then the centaur loomed up behind the pair, aiming his gun straight at Precious’s face. The round impacted right between her eyes, and she tumbled to the side, limbs slashing wildly. She caught the chain hooked on the trailer, and it broke from the side of the tractor with a ping of rust. Precious landed on the road on her back, her scales shedding a stream of sparks as she was dragged along behind. The Whiskey Express pulled away, the dragon filly barely missing the front wheels of the larger vehicle as she was dragged along.

“Pull her in! Pull her in!” Majina screamed at the top of her lungs. The older Aleta stared at her, and then began to haul in the chain, pulling the dragonfilly to the rear of the trailer where they could lift her from the road. Blood trickled down her face like tears from the bullet wound between her eyes, and her lavender sides were bleeding where they’d been scraped raw against the concrete.

“Did I get ‘em?” she said weakly.

“Yep. Now chew your agoloosh,” Majina replied, shoving the weed into Precious’s mouth.

Then the trailer lurched as the tractor rammed them with its wedge. The impact nearly knocked Scotch from her seat, and only her death drip on the wheel and the clear road kept them on track… though the wrecks were getting more numerous. Some were even half on the road. If they hit something…

No. Don’t think about it. Just steer.

“Are you going to do something?” Precious screamed at Pythia. “Don’t just sit there! Throw something!”

Pythia reached over and undid the hook from the back of the trailer, and then, the next time the ram impacted, she hooked the wedge. Two more zebras were moving along towards the front of the larger tractor. Scotch couldn’t imagine what they’d been promised or threatened with to dare this. Pythia moved the chain carefully over to the side and tossed it at the front wheel… only to get a faceful of zebra as one of them launched himself at her. The chain bounced off the wheel rather than getting pulled in around the axle, dragging along underneath the tractor.

“Die shall you! For all your annoyance suffer shall you!” the zebra spat at her, then drew a razor sharp fishgutting knife from a sheath on his hoof.

Precious pounced on him, latching her jaws into his neck as her claws scraped and slashed at his hide. He struggled to throw the dragonfilly off him, but Pythia rolled about beneath him, tripping him up and foiling his attempts to get leverage to toss her off him.

On the next ramming, the other zebra launched himself at Aleta and Majina. The scarred mare lifted a sack of junk, interposing it between them and deflecting him to the side. Majina shrieked in terror as she shoved him, and he tumbled half over the edge. He caught himself on the lip of the trailer, struggling to clamber back inside.

And all Scotch could do was grip the wheel tightly as they approached a bridge. The wrecks were now constant, jagged brown teeth studding the road. She threaded the needle at speeds that made her sure she’d wet herself. Twice she grazed wrecks with bangs that she was sure heralded a bloody and horrible crash, but somehow the Whiskey Express recovered.

So, of course, that was when the flier attacked. It dove right at her, legs spread wide, wings buzzing wildly as it latched its hairy clawed legs to her face, completely blinding her. She was just guessing now, driving straight ahead as she struggled to keep a grip on the vibrating wheel and shove the flier off her face.

“Hey! Get off her, you stupid bug thing!” Majina yelled, then plucked something from the bag and jumped from the trailer to the Express. Perhaps being made a bug thing made your skull extra tough, or perhaps bowling pins were harder than Scotch imagined, but Majina pummeled it repeatedly till Scotch could glance around its torso in time to swerve and miss a wreck that protruded all the way into the middle of the road. The tractor behind them simply knocked it aside with the catcher. Majina gave shrieks around the neck of the pin as she rained down a beating upon the flier, and it finally untangled from Scotch, bobbing unsteadily over the fields as it wandered its way north.

The zebra stallion Aleta struggled with started to clamber onto the trailer, and so Scotch swerved, the tires going right to the edge of the razorgrass-lined road. The stallion let out a scream as the strands flayed the hide from his lower half, and suddenly he was violently ejected from the side of the trailer, disappearing into the growth beside the road as if eaten alive.

Scotch swerved back into the middle in time to be rammed again. Majina, her teeth still locked around the neck of the bowling pin, clambered back into the trailer, beating the bloody remaining zebra as he fought to slice Precious and Pythia to ribbons. Aleta reached over, bit a pin, and pulled. The back of the trailer dropped open, sending up sparks as it dragged along the concrete. Pythia and Precious gave a heave, and the stallion tumbled down the ramp and under the pursuing tractor. He seized the trailing chain as it swayed, pulling it straight.

Straight under the rear wheel.

The chain went taut as the wedge-shaped ram snapped, dropped down, and caught the roadbed. Instantly it came apart in a shower of steel and sparks. The entire front of the vehicle that wasn’t boiler was torn off and passed underneath, where it caught the trailer towing the boat. That immediately flipped into the air end over end, sending the last of Lamprey’s zebra pirates flying out into the grass. Gouts of black smoke and steam erupted as something vital breached, and the pursuing tractor immediately fell behind.

Scotch clutched the wheel, staring straight ahead as something strange rose up inside her. It built and built and finally could no longer be contained. She threw back her head and let out a whoop of pure delight as she tasted the sweet, sweet taste of victory.

They’d won.

Now Lamprey, Riptide, and the bounty hunters were still after her, but for once the fillies had gotten into a fight and hadn’t hid or gotten away by blowing things up or with the help of a strong, powerful adult. They could survive here without the protection of someone stronger than them! The road was now rising up a concrete bridge, and she slowed down to saner speeds as they crested the peak.

A city.

Scotch Tape had never seen a real ‘city’ before, one not left a ruin gutted by balefire bombs and neglect. What spread out before them was a real city. Sitting on a brown streak of water snaking its way north was a huge expanse of brown buildings. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of fires sent smoke up into the sky. On the western side of the river, they formed a semicircular arrangement radiating out from a central point. The far side of the river was much more hilly, with larger white structures, not skyscrapers, but big enough for her to see from this distance. To the north she could make out the sea, with two sailboats in dock while a third, darker vessel lurked on the horizon. From here, she could see the expanse they’d covered stretching out to the west, the darker green of the swamps hidden by that enormous mat of green razorgrass.

Still, even as a city, a cloak of gloom hung over it. The smoke created a pall that rivaled the cloud cover of the Equestrian Wasteland, only with no pegasi maintaining it. Some of those distant houses might be above the smog layer, but the rest were trapped. Barely visible on the far side of the city was a huge structure with dozens of smokestacks pouring out their dark haze. Without a breeze, it simply pooled overhead.

The Whiskey Express rolled down the bridge, crossing one of the river’s many tributaries, and into the outskirts. Immediately, it was clear that the size of the city was illusory after all, the brown and rusted derelicts around them lacking any sign of habitation. Any open patches of ground or available cracks in the concrete were taken by razorgrass. Some of the structures actually had clumps of the stuff growing inside! The road was clear, though she had to twist the wheel to and fro to make it around huge hulks of steam tractors twice or three times the size of the Whiskey Express.

“Scotch! You need to stop!” Majina shouted. “I think there’s something wrong with Precious!”

Scotch glanced behind them at the bridge. No sign of pursuit, but she doubted that Lamprey would give up. Precious was curled up in the trailer, trembling. She found a side street that was relatively free of the grass and drove down it till she found another street between two buildings she could pull into.

“Just eat the agoloosh! You’ll feel better!” Majina insisted as she extended the purple seaweed to the dragonfilly. Aleta and Pythia got out of the trailer as Majina kept bumping the weed against her bloody lips.

“Leave me alone,” she muttered. “I’m fine.” She didn’t look fine, though. She’d lost half her hide being dragged along the road, and her face was a bloody mess. The rifle bullet she’d taken to the face had swollen into a round puckered wound right between her eyes.

“You really don’t look fine,” Scotch Tape said, peering at the injury and wishing she had bor– had Glory here to help. Precious’s eyes were staring off in two different directions. “You’ve got some serious injury to your head. I think you need a doctor.”

“No doctors. I’m fine!” she slurred into the floor of the trailer.

“You’re not,” Majina said gently as she extended the weed once more.

“I said I’m fine!” she snarled, but her voice was distorted, sounding vaguely drunk, and faster than Scotch expected, her claws came slashing out, catching Majina in the face and ripping three bloody furrows in her cheek. “There! Eat your own weed!” the dragonfilly slurred as Majina fell back with a scream. “Least you deserve! You’re useless! What did you do in that fight, huh? Read them a story? Huh? Huh?” Precious made another swipe, but collapsed on her side, clutching her head. “Ow…”

“Precious!” Scotch snapped, then turned to the trembling Majina, who clutched her face as she stared at the staggered dragonfilly. “Are you okay?” she asked Majina, but she didn’t answer. Scotch looked back to Precious. “I think that bullet might still be in your head.”

“Ridichuloush. I’m bulletproo…” And Precious passed out.

Majina cried softly as she shook, and Scotch touched her shoulder. She pulled away.

“We need a doctor,” she said as she turned to Aleta.

“I think we need more than that,” Pythia said sharply as she stared at the ruins around them. Zebras were emerging. Thin, hungry, haggard zebras. “I think we stopped in a bad neighborhood.”

Scotch immediately darted for her pistol, checked it like Blackjack had showed her, then waved it in their general direction as she tried to shout to them to get back, but it came out as just slobbering on the handle. Besides, there were more of them than she had bullets!

Aleta crumpled into a ball, clenching her eye shut.

The largest and healthiest zebra mare, which was pretty relative given how ulcerated and scarred her hide was, pointed a hoof at them. “We want that. Hand it over and all your stuff and you can walk out of here.”

Scotch pointed the gun at her, and the scabby mare sneered at Scotch. “Try it. You won’t be walking out of here.” Scotch swallowed. Precious needed help, and she doubted many doctors here worked for free. But if they fought…

“Relax. I got this,” Pythia said as she stepped forward, drawing back her sheet to expose her glyphs to the crowd. The effect was immediate, eyes widening and every zebra backing up several steps. “This vehicle is consecrated to the stars, and everything within it. If you take it, your spirit will forever belong to Ashur, burning eternally in his sanguine flames. If you leave, I might just decide on helping my… minion instead of repaying your discourtesy,” she said as she gestured behind her at Precious.

“Ooooh! Consecrated to Ashur!” a mare called out, and instantly the crowd parted. A quartet of fully grown, healthy, and armed adults approached, the crowd breaking before them.

The one among them not pointing a weapon was a mare dressed in a suit, a threadbare suit with a few stains and protruding stitching, but still a suit. Her mane was brushed back and slicked with some kind of gel. Hard contempt shone in her mud-colored eyes as she sneered at the fillies and scarred mare. However, all that that was nothing compared to the strange, arcane glyphs covering her face in lieu of stripes. She grinned from ear to ear at them. “Ashur! How scary!”

The crowd seemed to bleed away, but it didn’t depart completely. Some watched with fascination as she faced off against Pythia. The filly gaped for a moment at the sight of the well-dressed Starkatteri before immediately restoring her contemptuous glare. “Who are you?”

“Scylla. And you’re on my turf, little glyph,” she said with a grin. “That’s a sweet little tractor you’ve got there. Should be worth quite a few cases of ammo. Thanks for bringing it to me.”

Pythia glanced back at Scotch Tape, her eyes round before she resumed her own matching sneer at the well dressed mare. “Yeah, well, my name is Pythia, and I can see all the ways this ends up. None of them are pretty for you.”

“Aw, little filly can see the future,” Scylla laughed, though she was the only one, her voice echoing off the bricks around them. “So can I. I knew you were coming an hour ago. I saw a great bounty coming my way.” She grinned at her. “The Stars thank you for your donation to our organization.”

“Please. I should charge you for wasting my time,” Pythia sneered back. “You’re not going to mess with us. You’re going to give us directions to a doctor– a good doctor! One who can help my minion here. She’s unique.”

“Unique? Ha! I saw three just like her last week.” She stepped closer to Pythia. “Admit it. She’s special to you.”

“She’s useful, unlike you,” Pythia replied. “Don’t cross me. You won’t like what happens if you do.”

“Aww, what are you going to do? What have you got?” Scylla asked with a grin. “Going to burn me with Ashur? I use that curse all the time. I can counter it, no problem.”

“Ashur’s for vermin like this.” She waved a dismissive hoof at the lingering dregs of sickly zebras. “No, I have plenty of more interesting ways to deal with you.” Pythia gestured her head at the stallion beside her. “You won’t like it, but I guarantee your stallions will,” Pythia countered with a grin of her own.

“Oh dear. Going to curse me with desirableness? Cute!” She then reached over, grabbed the head of one of her entourage, and kissed him deeply enough to make Scotch blush. “I already have that curse, sweetie.” The stallion she kissed definitely didn’t seem to agree.

“No. Babies,” she corrected, and Scylla’s grin disappeared a moment. “Lots of babies. So many popping out of you… one after the next… screaming… sucking… whining… shitting little babies.”

Scylla pushed the stallion away, resummoning her smirk. “As if you could pull off that,” she muttered.

“I’d invoke the sun, and since we’re in Carnilian territory, a ‘birthing curse’ shouldn’t be hard to manage. Heck, I doubt there’d be a clause or censure in it for me,” Pythia said in complete contemptuous disgust for the older mare. “Piss off. We have things to do.”

Scylla’s smile melted a bit as her eyelid twitched. “Oh. Well then, all those little shit machines will have your death curse on them,” she said as she stared at her. “And if you kill me, I’ve got hundreds of curses ready to go off with my death. I’ll ruin this whole damned city. What do you think about that!” she snapped, making the crowd back away from her a little more.

And now Pythia smiled. “I think that you’re about to make me show you,” she said as she gestured around them. “I can see you’ve built a nice little thing for yourself. Really. You’ve got it nice. But you’re messing with the wrong filly. I won’t waste a curse on you. I don’t need to.” Her voice was cold, and certain, and loaded with menace. “I’ll destroy everything you have here. Everything you are, with just three little words. You might kill me, but that’ll just give you my death curse. Even if you don’t, everything you have here would be taken from you. Everything. With just three little words.”

Scylla’s eyes narrowed, widened, and narrowed again. Then she smirked. “As if. Nothing you say can hurt me,” she said, then examined her hoof a moment, polishing it on the sleeve of her suit jacket. “Still, I like your style. You might be suited for the Syndicate. So in the interest of your future employment, I’m going to let you walk.” She nodded to the others. “Let’s go.”

“Wait!” Pythia snapped. “Doctor. A good one. Where can we find one?”

Scylla frowned at her. “Go to the city plaza. That way,” she said, gesturing with a hoof. “Ask around for Doctor Galen. Tell him I sent you. Tell me if he doesn’t give you a discount.” Then her smirk returned. “In return, you’re going to meet someone.”

“I can’t wait,” Pythia said evenly. Scylla turned and trotted off. The rest of the crowd dispersed as well, with the large, ulcerated mare glowering at the ponies. “Let’s go,” Pythia said as she climbed into the trailer. “Coming?” she asked Aleta and Majina, both of whom climbed into the trailer as well. “Eat some agoloosh,” she told Majina.

Scotch put the gun away, turning to Aleta. “You don’t have to. You can go home if you want.” Aleta just stared at her in bafflement.

“Don’t be stupid. Of course she can’t go home. She’s cursed,” Pythia said.

“You didn’t curse her! Or at least, you better not have!” Scotch declared.

“Of course I didn’t,” Pythia answered. “You did. Now drive, and let’s get Scalybutt McBadattitude to this doctor before I lose it,” she said, and Scotch saw her legs were shaking. Quickly she got into the seat, and they started to roll along the curving streets in the direction Scylla had directed.

I cursed her? I’m not a zebra. How did I curse her? I don’t even believe in stupid zebra curses! Scotch thought furiously as she wove her way around to a larger boulevard. More steam-powered tractors huffed and wheezed along the streets the closer to the river they travelled. The razorgrass disappeared, replaced by dozens and dozens of tiny, well-maintained gardens. As they drove along, the population density steadily increased, along with the overall healthiness of the zebras. Spindly trees and stumps lined the streets, showing that once this had been a lush metropolis. Now it seemed every zebra was struggling to maintain just their own little patch of ground.

Every block, there was a sign of some sort. Aleta translated. ‘Carnico: remember your can. Remember your debt.’ and ‘Pick up your allotment right away from Carnico.’ Some of the signs showed caricatures of grass cringing away from a smiling drop being drizzled from a can while healthy smiling crops grew safe behind it.

Eventually, an unmarked line was crossed, and they were in the city proper. Scotch had never seen so many zebras in one place. It was almost dizzying to watch so many stripes going about carrying bags or baskets with produce and goods every which way. Here, at last, were some living trees carefully cultivated and decorated with red ribbons and little brass bells. Every block seemed to have a little park of a few hundred square feet decorated with bits of growth.

And then they reached the ‘plaza’, a huge semicircle where eight roads came together. That was it? When they stopped for a moment behind a stalled tractor, Scotch rose on her hind legs and looked back. This relatively nice section of civilization was less than a half dozen blocks clustered along the river. The rest might as well have been ruins straight out the Wasteland. Across the wide, muddy river were larger, newer-looking buildings and factories. There were even electric lights she could see in the distance. A lone stone bridge stretched across, wide enough for ten vehicles to cross side by side.

“Come on,” Scotch said, pulling into an alley near the plaza. “We need to find that doctor.” After having people try and take the Whiskey Express once, she sought a way to disable it. Finally, she dumped the steam and then detached the pressure release valve. There. If anyone tried to steal it, they’d just get a faceful of steam.

Finding Doctor Galen was easy. Zebras took one look at the injured Majina and pointed the way. They considered the rest of them with that questioning stare that asked ‘What is this motley troop doing in our home?’ The doctor’s clinic was on the fourth floor of a gray, soot-stained office building, and they wound all the way up the twisting stairs. A large red glyph was painted on the wall next to the door. “What does that mean?” Scotch asked.

“Proditor,” Aleta murmured.

Zebra for ‘traitor’.

Inside, the doctor’s office was almost empty, two young mares and a receptionist the only people present. The former kept their eyes low as the bloody and scarred band entered, but the receptionist rose to her feet. “What is the meaning of this? Who are–?”

“We’re patients,” Pythia said, gesturing to Precious on Aleta’s back and Majina. “The dragonfreak took a gunshot to the head, and this one got her face clawed by said freak. We were sent by a zebra who looked like me. Said you would help.”

The door next to the receptionist’s desk opened, and a handsome zebra stallion emerged. Tall and broad, he seemed more like a person who belonged on a farm. He wore a somewhat stained white doctor’s coat, his mane short and well groomed, and a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose.

Like the other Carnilian zebras, his stripes were broad and long, but his appeared as if they’d been brushed with red paint. “What’s going on here?” he asked in a calm and steady voice.

“They just barged in here without an appointment–” the receptionist began.

He went straight to Precious and tilted her head, inspecting the wound. “Osane!” he snapped over his shoulder, and a mare emerged with matching stripes, just as red as his. “Prep for surgery. Gunshot wound to the head.” She nodded and disappeared into the back. He looked at the two wide-eyed mares in the waiting room. “I’m sorry to do this to you, but could you please come back tomorrow? I’ll take care of you then. Unfortunately, this injury won’t wait.”

“Of course, doctor,” murmured one. The other sniffed, dropping her eyes back to the floor.

He touched the upset patient’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you before you start to show. They’ll never know,” he told her gently, then turned to the receptionist as they departed. “I’ll take care of this. Why don’t you go home before it gets late? I know your foals will be glad for some extra time with you.” The receptionist nodded as he gestured to Aleta. “Bring her in. Quickly. This is going to be messy, but we’ll need to extract the round before we use healing potions. Leaving a lead bullet in a brain is a death sentence. Hopefully the jacketing is still intact and holding it together.”

Aleta meekly followed the doctor’s directions, carrying Precious inside. He took one last look at Majina and told the receptionist, “And give her a healing draught. I’ll settle up later.”

“Yes, Doctor Galen,” she said, digging behind the counter a moment and producing a small potion. Majina didn’t take it, so Scotch took it for her, unstoppered it, and offered it to the filly. Only then did she drink it as the receptionist walked out of the office, locking the door behind her.

“Wait here. Don’t go,” the doctor instructed the three of them.

Scotch Tape shared a look with Pythia, and they took seats on the vacated couches. “Not how I expected to get to Rice River.”

“Not at all. I thought we’d get off a ship, find our way south from there,” Pythia admitted, flopping on her back.

“Nice job with Scylla, by the way. I thought that Starkatteri were… I dunno. I didn’t expect that,” Scotch admitted.

“I didn’t either. Maybe things are different here. I’ve never seen a Starkatteri like her before,” Pythia said, then smiled. Then she started to laugh. It was two parts mirth, one part nervous relief, with just a twist of evil. “Ha! That’ll show her to try and out-mystic me! She didn’t even have a cloak!”

“That’s a bedsheet,” Scotch said with a little smile.

“Details,” Pythia replied with a sniff. “I knew that she was bluffing. She might have some manipulation skills, but the second she made that crack about hundreds of curses going off, I knew she was lying. Probably uses superstition as a protection racket.”

“She was lying?” Scotch asked, aghast.

“If she has the ability to rig hundreds of ‘curse bombs’ ready to blow, she’d be the strongest Starkatteri in history. The Curse of Damocles is a bitch to pull off on one individual, but those rubes don’t know that. She’s probably using their fear to extort them, and fear of her death curses to keep them from kicking her out on her ass.”

“Curse of Damocles?” Scotch asked. She glanced at Majina, but the filly wasn’t listening as she sat in her own seat.

“Basically a spiritual grenade set as an I.O.U. to someone who owes you or someone who wronged you. You really need to be in the right spiritually to pull it off well. Try to do it out of petty spite, like she suggested, and it’ll go off in your face. If the person can’t square things with you, the curse goes off. Usually pretty ugly, too, as it signals to every spirit that you’re fair game and it empowers them to really exert themselves on you. If you’re lucky, they just kill you and don’t do amusing things with your corpse.”

“Every time a zebra says the word ‘curse’, I want to scream. I mean, why not just call it a spell? Would that be so hard? The Spell of Damocles. Voila!” Scotch said crossly.

“Well, yeah. You could say that if you were a unicorn. But a curse isn’t like magic. You do magic. A curse is more like… like a stain. A mark. It stacks the universe against you so that all those little things just go wrong. Unicorns cast spells and move things with their mind. Pegasi fly. Earth ponies do… whatever you do. Zebras direct the power of the cosmos against you.”

“Guess that’s why you won the war,” Scotch said with a snort.

“I dunno. Not a shaman,” Pythia said with a shrug.

“Wait. So all that talk about her having tons of babies… that was a bluff?” Scotch gaped at her.

Pythia frowned in annoyance. “Well, yeah, duh. Just because we’re a tribe of mystics doesn’t mean we can all do magic. Half of it is just lying and tricks to keep people doubting enough that they don’t ream our rear ends.”

The door opened, and Aleta emerged. The scarred mare stood and whirled, then snapped at the closed door. “Murderous! Foul! Evil! Wicked! You’re disgusting! Disgusting!”

Scotch blinked at the mare, who realized they were all watching her, and she crumpled a little. “He is a bad doctor. The worst.”

“You mean he can’t do the surgery?” Scotch asked, now really alarmed.

“Oh, he seems like he can,” she said with a disdainful snort and a glare at the door. “Filthy Proditor has the skills for that, it seems. Murderous foal killer.”

“Wait.” Scotch blinked in bafflement. “What?!”

Majina sighed, looking at Scotch with weary eyes. “He’s Carnilian. They’re the tribe of life. Sex. Birth. So how do you betray all that if you’re a doctor?”

Scotch blinked, and then her eyes went wide. “You mean…” she trailed off, trying to think of the word.

“That’s right. The doctor Scylla sent us to is an abortionist.”

Author's Notes:

(Thanks a bunch for reading. Sorry, my brain isn't up for notes. Sorry. Enjoy this little exchange from brushing.)

swicked: IT’S GLASSGRASS
Bronode: NO IT’S NOT. GLASSGRASS IS STUPID.
swicked: YOU’RE THE STUPID ONE, STUPID! IT’S FREAKING GLASSGRASS!
Hinds: I’m staying out of this one, I think.
swicked: YOU SHUT UP TOO
Bronode: GLASSGRASS IS STUPID! YOU’RE STUPID! STOP BEING STUPID!
swicked: I HATE ALL OF YOU SO MUCH I COULD SCREAM
Somber: …I miss Heartshine so much…