Even without its radio tower, the communication center was easy to find simply by following the Sentinels going to and fro. Messages needed to be relayed across the Fort, and the low building in its center served as the nerve center. I had to be careful to make sure I wasn’t bowled over by soldiers charging in and out as needed as I tried to enter.

I found Gauge and Sigur chatting in front of an assortment of monitors and screens and other techy shit that I couldn’t make sense of. Sigur had taken off his helmet, which I spotted on an empty desk at the back of the room, and Gauge was covered in so much grease and grime he almost didn’t look like a zebra. I tweaked his ear with my magic as I approached, interrupting their conversation, and smirked at the zebra. “Greasers gonna grease, right?”

“You know it, Em,” Gauge said, grinning at me. “They had me crawling through a lot of tight spots trying to reconnect wires. The Sentinels did a number on this place when they pulled out all those years ago, and the spider rats haven’t helped. SCaR’s welding probe was useful for a little more than just repairing comm lines down there, that’s for sure.”

I grimaced, imagining the little eight-legged monstrosities that had to have been crawling around under the floor panels. “Fun. Hope you didn’t make out with any.”

“No, I’ll leave the spit-swapping to you,” Gauge shot back. I glared at him, but that only seemed to embolden him. “When’s the wedding?”

From the side of the room, Sig simply chuckled. “I was wondering that myself. It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Zip act like that.”

“Shut up,” I grumbled, swatting the griffon on the shoulder. Before they could tease me any more, I decided to change the subject. “So you got everything to work?”

Sigur nodded. “Yeah, mostly. We were just in contact with Platinum Rampart a few minutes ago, at least until comms died again. Gauge has his robot checking the lines now to figure out where the break is. Still, that was enough time to get some important orders across and let the Bastion know that we won while we finish securing the link. It’ll probably be another few days before this base is up and operational again.”

“Their leader also said that they’d be organizing teleportation ‘trains’ to get the rest of us into their base,” Gauge said. “They start tomorrow at dawn and will probably take all day to move everypony. They can only move like twenty-five at a time.”

I could feel Sig’s eyes boring into my skull with smug amusement.

“Well, that’s good,” I said. I spotted an empty chair and dragged it over with my magic, dumping my bags on the ground and leaning my rifle against the wall. “I’ve been there before. The Bastion’s pretty fucking huge. It’ll fit everypony easy. Plus, it’s safe.”

“Good,” Gauge said, sitting down next to me with a weary sigh. “After all that we’ve been through, I don’t want this to all be for nothing.”

“The Bastion will protect you,” Sig insisted. “It’s kept us safe for years now. And though we have to split our forces across two points now, hopefully some of your townsfolk will help bolster our numbers.”

“There’s still capable stallions left that’ll be itching for revenge,” Gauge said. “Though they killed most of our militia in the attack, there are plenty who know how to handle a gun. They’ll fight with you for sure.”

Sig leaned back against a desk and grunted as he stretched sore muscles. “Good to hear. And I know Ember will be sticking with us, at least. She proved that she’s more than capable—if a bit reckless.”

“Eh heh…” I rubbed my neck and looked at my hooves. “I mean, I’m alive, right?”

“Right,” Sigur said with a little dip of his beak. “Point being,” he said, turning back to Gauge, “we’re going to need all the help we can get if we want to shatter the Crimson once and for all. So, what I want to know is this: can we count on you to help? From what I’ve seen, you’re a capable mechanic, and we could use all the help we can get.”

Gauge, true to form, simply looked Sig in the eye and said, “The Crimson still have my marefriend. I’d be trying to help even if you wouldn’t let me.”

Smirking, the griffon extended his hand and shook Gauge’s hoof. “Glad to hear it. If you’re half as good a mechanic as Ember claims you are, then you’ll be incredibly useful to us. In fact, I’ve got a special project in mind that we could use you and your friends’ help with…”

We were interrupted by the doors opening and Thunder Dash walking in, flanked by two other Sentinels. Upon seeing him, Sig broke into a quick salute, which Thunder acknowledged with a nod. Gauge and I merely offered waves, though he ignored us entirely. “Are the lines repaired yet?”

“Almost, sir,” Sig said, gesturing to the blank monitors. “We were briefly in contact with Platinum Rampart. We were able to relay news of our victory and give him a quick status report. We sent a runner to find you, but we lost contact again before you could get here.” He tapped a talon against one of the floor panels that’d been pried out and stood against the wall. “We’re trying to establish secure lines. We should be ready in another hour or two.”

Thunder nodded and limped further inside. I noticed that the bandages on his leg had been freshly changed, but they were already spotted red and brown. At least he’d seen some treatment since I saw him last, though if the expressions on the Sentinels behind him were anything to go by, they were just as worried as I was about his leg.

“What’s the situation?” the pegasus asked, reaching the rest of us. I immediately stood up and offered him my seat, but he pretended he didn’t notice me, so I just kind of awkwardly hovered near the chair until I sat back down again.

“The Bastion will be sending teleportation trains to get the liberated ponies back over the course of the day, starting at dawn. We’ll need to take stock of how many survivors we have and how many will be willing to join us.”

“I’ll have it taken care of,” Thunder said, dismissively waving a wing. “What about the wounded?” he asked, though I could tell that he only counted himself in that category as an afterthought, if he even thought about his injury at all. “Will we be getting the standard deployment?”

Sigur shook his head. “I had the foresight to ask Rampart for an additional team of medics, as well as antibiotics and fungicides. There’s apparently a blue lung epidemic amongst the slaves, and they need treatment as soon as possible.”

I shuddered at the mention of blue lung. Though the spores usually never made it far enough up the mountain to hurt us in Blackwash, there had been a few isolated incidents I remembered, mostly in kids that wandered too far down the mountain and started nosing around things that they shouldn’t. The fungus was easily treated with the right medicine, but that medicine was something that we never had. Though you could survive it if you were lucky, it’d leave you with a crippling shortness of breath for the rest of your life. Otherwise, the fungus literally ate your lungs from the inside out until you suffocated.

Gauge was already holding out his hoof and shaking his head by the time I shot a worried look at him. I guess he really hadn’t been with the slaves long enough to catch any of the spores. Still, I planned on keeping an eye on him for coughing or wheezing over the next week just to be sure.

Thunder simply nodded in agreement to all Sig had said. “When you get in contact with Rampart again, tell him that I’m bringing specialist Springtail back for an autopsy before her burial.”

Sigur cocked his head. “Odd requests, if you don’t mind me saying, sir. Do you think it’s—?”

“Weapons from the Ivory City?” Thunder interrupted. When Sig nodded, he gravely returned the nod. “Yes. The bullet that hit Springtail was powerful enough to defeat her deflectors and pierce her chest piece. She died almost instantly, though from the entry wound the round would have missed her heart. If I were to make a guess, she was likely hit with some kind of fragmentation round that delivered massive organ trauma as soon as it entered.”

Sig grimaced, and Gauge winced. That was a pretty nasty way to go. “Was the weapon located?” the griffon asked.

“No, but we’re examining the ammunition left behind to see if there are any more rounds like it.” Thunder’s eyes momentarily darkened, and he added, “It was likely meant for me. Spring darted in front of me as she was changing cover and accidentally took the shot. I kept the rest of the team tight behind cover until the infiltration teams had thrown their defenses into disarray.”

Sigur simply bowed his head. “‘Her watch is finished.’”

“‘And now she may rest,’” Thunder responded, almost on reflex. I guess it was ceremonial thing or something. Kind of depressing, if you ask me. Then, straightening his shoulders and shuffling his wings, Thunder gestured to the awfully familiar computers stacked near the monitors. “Any luck on the code?”

“Yes, some,” Sig said, glancing at Gauge. “With the help of some of the ponies taken from Blackwash, we were able to unlock the computers. As to anything new about the code…” he shrugged. “Nothing. We can’t make sense of it.”

“Pull it up,” Thunder ordered. “Let me see.”

Sig gestured to Gauge, and Gauge in turn went to the nearest computer bank and powered them up. From there, the screens flickered, displaying lines of garbled gibberish and symbols that I couldn’t make sense of. In the middle of the screen, however, was a familiar message.

>>>WARNING!!! ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS ENCRYPTED FILES!!!

>>>ENCRYPTION LEVEL: ONYX STAR

>>>LOCKING FILES…

>>>OVERRIDE: EOH PROTOCOL DUSK

>>>EMERGENCY OVERRIDE INITIATED.

>>>ROUTING EMERGENCY FILE BROADCAST

>>>FILES DOWNLOADED: 7/7

>>>BROADCASTING FILES…………100%

>>>ACTIVATING GPS…………

>>>ERROR!!! COULD NOT CONNECT TO SATELLITES.

>>>ACTIVATING WISPR COORDINATE TAG…………100%

>>>BROADCASTING DISTRESS FREQUENCY 27.065MHZ

>>> FAFA | E | 36-J

“It’s a record of the last thing we received from the signal,” Gauge explained. While Thunder frowned and read the printout, he elaborated. “There was more, something about pinging installations with a bunch of numbers and letters, but that’s all gone. The computers were damaged when the Crimson forcefully tore them out of the listening post in Blackwash. It’s a miracle we even recovered this much.”

Sigur furrowed his… head feathers? Griffons don’t really have brows… Anyway, Sig did that and pointed to the screen. “Is that the code? The FAFA thing?” He looked to me for confirmation, and I merely shrugged.

Thankfully, Thunder seemed to have an answer. “Part of it,” he said, limping forward to get a closer look. “The ‘FAFA’ bit is a piece of the code, and the ‘E’ is likely part of the cipher. It looks like ADFGX code.”

I blinked. “What what?”

“It’s a military code that Equestria used before the Silence,” Thunder explained. “A message would be encoded using combination pairs of the letters A, D, F, G, and X. This code would then be further scrambled with a transposition key, usually an easily remembered word with unique letters. After writing the letters beneath the key, the key would be arranged so its letters are alphabetical, and the columns under them broadcast one at a time. So, if this is really ADFGX code, then ‘FAFA’ are the four letters under the letter ‘E’ in the key.”

“So… we don’t know what any of this means?” I asked.

“Not without the rest of the code,” Thunder said, shaking his head. “It looks like it was split into seven parts, though if there are only four letters in this part, then it must be a short message. You’d have to find the other six parts if we want to translate what was sent to us.”

“And the 36-J?” Gauge asked. “What does that mean?”

“Likely the codebook and alphabetical key needed to break the code,” Thunder said. “There are codebooks at the Bastion, and I’ll have some aides look through them to find any matching that identification. In the meanwhile, however, this fragment of the code is useless.”

Frowning, I pointed at the code. “So my town got destroyed over something that’s just fucking gibberish?!”

Thunder fixed me with a hard glare that immediately cowed me. “Without the rest of the pieces, this is gibberish, yes. But ponies will kill for this, if they know what it is. There are other fragments out there; who knows who has them?” He shook his head. “‘Who’ has them isn’t that important right now, however. We know that the Crimson wanted the piece at your settlement, and the presence of Yeoman at the attack means that the Ivory City is involved as well. They likely contracted the Crimson to recover the piece for them, since they’re a ways away from here.”

I held up a hoof. “Okay, I’ve heard their name a few times now. What’s the Ivory City?”

“It was supposed to be the planetary capital of Auris,” Sig said from the side. “Back when Equestria was actively building the colony before the Silence. It was the only real settlement that they actually finished.”

“It was supposedly home to ten thousand ponies inside a few rings of walls and sturdy fortifications to make it difficult to take,” Thunder said. “Equestria at the time had enemies everywhere, and they were worried that they’d try to take her colony as well. But when everything fell to pieces, those walls didn’t stop the city from falling, too.”

“Nopony really knows what happened to the Ivory City for a hundred and fifty years or so,” Sig continued, picking up where Thunder left off. “It was apparently a hold for gangs and slavers like the Crimson, but about fifty years ago they got driven off. Since then, the City has rebuilt itself into a powerful faction to be reckoned with in the very center of the continent.”

“But that sounds like they got rid of their problems,” I said, tilting my head to the side. “Why are they bad, then?”

“Because of their leader,” Thunder said. “We don’t know much about him this far away, but he apparently goes by the name of Reclaimer, and the stories we’ve heard from the merchants lead us to believe that he’s trying to build his own little empire in the ruins of the old world. The problem is that he’s ruthless and underhoofed, completely willing to massacre towns and buy off bandits to do his dirty work for him in the name of ‘civilization’ and ‘rebuilding’. He’s a terror who will either burn himself out or put the entire planet under his hoof.”

I could see the pieces falling in place. If a pony like that found out about the signal and the code, then it makes sense that he would try to get all the pieces before anypony else could. At the least, it seemed that we thwarted him by getting this piece here before the Crimson could send it back to him.

“So what would a code like this even do?” I asked. “If it’s apparently just a short message, how could that help Reclaimer?”

“Maybe it won’t,” Thunder said, shrugging. “For all we know, it could be a distress signal. It could, however, just as likely be a password to activate something we don’t know about. There are dozens of hidden military installations across Auris; any one of them could hold something that would allow Reclaimer to conquer the planet. Advanced weapons, huge stockpiles, forbidden arcane knowledge, we’re not sure. But there is one thing we know for sure: Reclaimer wants this code, and he’s willing to buy off bandits like the Crimson this far away from his sphere of influence to get it. Therefore, we cannot let him get his hooves on the rest of this code.”

“But how?” Gauge asked. “From what I’ve been hearing, you Sentinels are a little too short on numbers to make a crusade into the center of the continent to go deal with this Reclaimer guy.”

Thunder sighed, an honest to the stars weary sigh, and bowed his head. “I don’t know. But we will have to find a way. For now, however, we need to focus on taking down the Crimson.”

“Speaking of this code, I heard something that might be interesting,” Gauge said, holding up his hoof like a colt waiting to be acknowledged by the teacher. When Thunder turned to him, he pointed to the screens still displaying the messages we received at Blackwash. “I heard a few of the Crimson talking while they were trying to get us to make the computers work again. Apparently, they got a piece of the signal too, at this dam or something. It must’ve been sent to them after Blackwash decoded the message and scattered fragments of this code across the planet.”

Thunder’s eyes narrowed. “The Crimson’s base of operations is Celestia Dam. It provided power to most of Auris before the Crimson took it. But if the Crimson have a second piece of the code, then we can take it from them.. By now, they’ve probably already sent a copy of it to the Ivory City and deleted it at Reclaimer’s request. But I know Carrion, and he’s smart enough to know something like that is valuable. He will have likely made a copy of it to sell to whoever will give him the most cartridges, which means that we still have a chance of getting it.”

Well, that accounted for two of the seven pieces. I could only assume that a third was somewhere in the Ivory City if Reclaimer knew about it in the first place. “That still leaves a bunch unaccounted for,” I commented, staring at the FAFA mocking me from the screen. “Where would they be?”

“Installations somewhere on the planet,” Thunder said, “Though if they’re inhabited or not, I couldn’t tell. I don’t even know where they are. I do know for certain that word of this will likely be getting out soon, and there will be salvage parties scouring the Wilderness looking for pieces to sell to the highest bidder. There will be so many fake code fragments out there that the only way to know for certain if you have a legitimate piece is to find the installation it was sent to and take it from there. Maybe then we could solve this mystery…”

But then he sighed, and the stallion looked like he was ten years older. “But that is a problem we cannot deal with right now. The Crimson still stand in our way, and they’re the most immediate threat. If we have this piece of the code, we can delay whatever Reclaimer is trying to do so long as we hold onto it. He can wait until Carrion is dead.”

Then, turning to Sig, he gave the griffon a casual salute. “Find me again if you establish a secure connection with Platinum Rampart. In the meanwhile, prepare the logs from those computers for transmission. Once the code and anything else that might be hiding in their data stores has been sent and backed up, destroy them.”

“Will do, sir,” Sig said, saluting back. Thunder turned around and began to limp out, but Sig cleared his throat before he left. “Um, sir? Your leg…”

Thunder stopped and looked over his shoulder. For a second, I thought he was going to reprimand Sig for bringing it up, but after a moment, he just nodded. “I’ll have the medics take a look at it. They should’ve treated the slaves by now.” Then the door hissed, letting the night air in for a few seconds before it shut again, taking Thunder and the other two Sentinels with him.

Sig ran a talon through the brown feathers on his head and sighed. “One day, Thunder’s stubbornness is going to kill him. If he doesn’t die in battle, blood loss or infection will get him after it.”

“You kinda have to admire a stallion like that, though,” Gauge said. “Making sure everypony under his charge and protection is taken care of first is definitely the sign of a true leader.”

“Thunder hasn’t led us wrong, and I trust that he’ll continue to do so.” Shaking his head, Sigur added, “Though I wouldn’t be surprised if it shortens his lifespan considerably. One of these days, he’ll come up against something more stubborn than him.”

“Hopefully that day won’t be for a while yet,” I said, staring at the shut door that Thunder left through. “He’s a good pony.” I briefly entertained the idea of admitting to Sigur that Thunder had said he’d recommend me if I wanted to join the Sentinels, but thought against it. No use telling everypony about it and then revealing that I had no idea whether I wanted to join or not. That, and I’m not sure how Gauge would take it. I’d probably need to have that discussion with him sooner or later.

Sigur looked at Gauge and grabbed a coil of wire lying on the ground. “Well, ready to get back to work?”

Gauge made to stand up, but I gave him a nudge with my magic. “Before you bury yourself in grease again, do you have a few moments?” I shuffled my hooves. “It’s been a bit, and I want to talk.” Smirking, I added, “And I’m sure your little baby can take care of himself down there for a few more minutes.”

Confused, Gauge cocked his head to the side. “O-Okay?” He looked to Sig for confirmation, and the griffon just shrugged. With a shrug of his own, Gauge stood up and walked over to me, and I led him out the door.

We walked in silence across the Fort, me deliberating what I wanted to say next, Gauge simply following and waiting. When we found a quiet spot in the middle of the courtyard, not too far away from the glow put off by the still-smoldering wreck of the ringbird, I cleared my throat and rolled my shoulders. “I never really got the chance to ask, but… how is everypony? Are they… alright?” I winced, remembering our earlier conversation. “Apart from… you know.”

The zebra nodded, telling me that he did in fact know what I was referring to. “Those of us that were left here are as good as we could be, everything considered,” he said with a shrug. “The Crimson beat us when we didn’t listen, so most of us just tried to keep our heads down. There were a few of us that were getting on their nerves, though.” He swallowed hard before adding, “I’m certain they would’ve killed some of us if we’d been in their mane any longer. Me and some of the others were trying to do everything we could to get back at them. Sabotaging systems and that sort of thing. I took a shit in one of their AC units when nopony was looking,” he proudly added with a smirk.

I choked on a laugh and shook my head. “Stars above, Gauge. No wonder they beat your flank.” We both chuckled quietly for a few moments, before the mirth died away completely. In its place, I only had a cold pit of fear and worry in my gut. “Did they ever… well, really hurt anypony?”

Gauge sighed. “Some of the Crimson would take a few mares out every night. We did our best to protect them, but they kept us separated. There really wasn’t anything we could do except try to comfort them when they returned them the next morning.” His nostrils flared as he sucked in a hard breath before adding, “There was a buyer who came by yesterday. A few of them, in fact.”

I felt my heart drop. “Buyers?”

“Yeah. The Crimson put a bunch of us out on display. The buyers spent an hour poking, prodding, ‘testing’ out the merchandise. End of the day, they left with twenty-six of us.” He shuddered. “They burned away their cutie marks and branded them with two marks. They put their job on their left flank—farmer, maintenance, sex slave,” he said with a glance at the heart on my own branded flank. “They burned the cutie mark of the buyer over their right mark. Then they were just… gone.” He hung his head. “I don’t know where they came from, or where they’re going to take them. They’re lost, Em. If we ever find them again, it’ll be a miracle.”

I fidgeted, my hoof digging deeper and deeper into the ground. That news hit me hard, and I felt like I’d somehow failed those twenty-six ponies. Damn it! Stars damn it! Even after all I’d done, I couldn’t save everypony. I’d hoped that maybe, just maybe, I’d be fast enough to save my kin from being bought off like property, but I couldn’t even do that right. Twenty-six? Blackwash was only a few hundred ponies! I knew I’d never find those ponies again. Gauge was right. They could’ve been taken anywhere. Was this going to hang over my head the rest of my life? The ponies I couldn’t save?

No, I couldn’t let that get to me. I never had a chance of saving everypony from Blackwash to begin with. Ponies had died in the attack. I could never get those lives back. I could never save everypony. I prayed that maybe one day I’d find some way to track down the slaves bought off and free them, but at the moment there wasn’t anything I could do. At least, not for them.

I did my best to shake it off, literally shaking my head and shoulders as if that would help get rid of the thoughts. “And the mares Carrion touched?”

Gauge trotted in front of me and put a hoof on my chest. “Em…”

I swatted it aside. “Gauge.”

The zebra sighed and shook his head. “Okay. Fine. Come with me. But you don’t have to do this,” he said, his eyes practically pleading with me to stop.

He was right, really. I didn’t have to do this. But those mares had been ravaged instead of me. When a stallion does that to you… that’s not something you just forget. That doesn’t just go away. They’d carry those scars in their memories for the rest of their lives. The least I could do was find them and give them a shoulder to cry on if they needed it. And I was certain that they needed it.

Gauge led me across the interior of the Fort, where most of the Sentinels were finishing up their tasks and getting ready to turn in for a well-deserved night’s sleep. We stopped in front of a simple access door leading down into an underground bunker, the doors propped wide open, and voices rising up from a staircase. Gauge shuddered as he stared at the single red light illuminating the whole stairwell. “This is where they kept us. Heavy blast doors that we’d never be able to break through, all the walls made of hardened concrete and lead. The only daylight we could see was the flickering reflection of the sun off the walls of a vent in the ceiling.” He made a small attempt at a smile and nudged my shoulder. “You had it good, sleeping on the dirt.”

“I guess so,” I murmured back to him. I stared down the dim stairwell, feeling each beat of my heart in my chest. “Gauge,” I said, licking my lips and swallowing hard. “Can you wait here for me? I feel like… I need to talk to them myself.”

He looked surprised, but he nodded nonetheless. “I’ll be right here. Just call if you need me.”

“Thanks.” Then, with a shaky breath, I slowly stumbled down the steps.

Another open door greeted me at the bottom of the stairs, and as soon as I entered, I could smell the awful reek of shit. The bunker was just one big, empty room, with columns embedded in the walls giving the ceiling strength, and harsh halogen lights buried within blocks of bulletproof glass set in the walls kept it lit. In one corner of the room, the slaves had hung a threadbare blanket to provide some privacy for what I assumed was the shit bucket. I would’ve been surprised if the Crimson had even given them that much.

And the ponies… most of them were mares, huddled in small groups against the walls, silently sitting in each other’s embrace, whispering things to each other while they shook and shivered. A few Sentinels, whom I noticed were all mares, did their best to move from group to group and simply talk to the frightened ponies. A few stallions milled about the place, wandering about in a daze, bruises and other injuries covering their bodies.

I shuddered as I walked through the room. Some of these ponies looked like they’d been here for a long time. At least we were helping more than just ponies from Blackwash.

I found the three mares I was looking for huddled together and whispering in the very back of the room. A bottle of fresh water and a plate with some rations on it had been set in front of them, though the three didn’t look like they’d touched it at all. They must’ve noticed me approaching them, because it was a long, straight walk from the stairway, but they didn’t really choose to acknowledge me until I stopped in front of them.

My heart jumped into my throat and I fought for breath. Dahlia’s brilliant orange coat was covered in dirt, dried blood, and welts. One of Copper Coil’s green eyes was swollen shut, and she did her best to hide behind the knotted and sweaty veil of her mane. Poor Meadow Lark, the filly of fifteen winters, stared dead ahead, straight through me, like I wasn’t even there. If it weren’t for the shuddering rise and fall of her green chest, she would’ve looked like a corpse.

Dahlia’s eyes widened in recognition first. “E-Ember?” she whispered, her eyes searching every bit of me like they were trying to pry my coat off and find the lie underneath. “Is… you’re alive?” She swallowed hard, then stood up on shaky legs. She held her right hind leg in the air, close to her body, and I could see that it didn’t really bend the right way. Stars, what happened to these ponies?!

She hobbled toward me, only stopping when we were face to face. “We never saw you here. We thought the worst had happened…” Tears began to form in the corners of her eyes, and I saw her struggling to breathe evenly.

I held out a hoof and stepped closer, guiding her head to my shoulder. It was like I’d burst a dam, for as soon as she felt my careful hooves wrap around her, she began bawling and clung to me for dear life. I found myself having to shoulder more of the earth pony than I would’ve liked, and I grunted as I planted my hooves to give her something to lean against.

“It’s over,” I whispered in her ear, rubbing my hoof up and down her spine. “It’s over, okay? He’s not going to touch you. He’ll never touch you again.”

Dahlia’s wailing must’ve snapped Copper Coil out of her fright, because she managed to look me square in the eyes with her one good eye. “You don’t know what that monster did to us!” she hissed, standing up and arching her back like a cornered cat. The natural spreading of her forelegs lowered her head towards me, a head topped with a cracked horn, sparking with magic. “He wanted you, Ember! He asked for you when they took us here, and when you weren’t here, he grabbed us instead! Do you know what it’s like?! Do you know what it’s like to have your hooves bound, to be thrown onto a bed, unable to crawl away, as a monster holds you down?! Do you know what it’s like to feel him inside of you, ripping away your dignity with every second he forces himself on you?! What about when your body betrays you and gives him what he wants?! What then?!”

Her voice cracked as she rose into hysterics, turning her words into painful, frenzied, but frightened screeching. I wilted under the tirade, and probably would’ve collapsed if I hadn’t been holding onto Dahlia. Tears streamed freely from her face, but I couldn’t tell if they were from anger, fear, or something else. Gently letting Dahlia back to her hooves, I walked away from the earth pony and stood in front of Copper. “I… I-I’m so sorry,” I managed, trying and failing to meet Copper’s eyes. “This never should have happened… not to you… not to any of you.” Grinding my teeth together, I held out a foreleg as an invitation for a hug like I’d given Dahlia. “Please, I’m sorry.”

For a second, I thought that was enough to calm Copper down. The unicorn stopped panting and simply looked at me with her mouth slightly agape. Just as I started to relax, however, her hoof flew from the ground and struck me beneath the base of my horn, sending me to the floor in a single blow. Dahlia let loose a little surprised scream as I crumpled, and I felt her hooves on my shoulder, trying to help me get back up. I just laid on the ground though, not really by choice, but because I couldn’t see straight and I felt like I was going to vomit. Figures that another unicorn would be the one to hit me there, because not many pegasi or earth ponies really understood what a blow to the forehead is like when you have a horn. We’d all smashed our heads on shit as foals, and there are so many nerve endings at the base of the horn that it’s not something you’re going to forget. I’ve heard it’s a similar amount of pain as getting kicked in the balls, though I’ll just have to take the word of the unicorn stallions who’ve told me that before.

When I could finally see straight again, I forced myself to stand up on trembling legs. Sticky blood tricked down my muzzle from where Copper had hit me; I didn’t think she’d really hit me that hard. At least she’d stormed away after all but knocking me out; I really didn’t want to have to go for round two. This time, Dahlia was the one who leant her shoulder for me to lean on, at least until the world stopped spinning around me.

“I’m sorry, Ember,” she said, looking after Copper with a sad frown on her face. “She just… she’s taking it really hard. Carrion hit her more than the rest of us.”

“Don’t apologize,” I grumbled, wiping away some blood with a fetlock. “I probably deserved it.”

“You didn’t,” came a frail whisper from behind us. I turned around to see Meadow looking up at me with soft pink eyes. “If it weren’t for you… Carrion would’ve only been the first.”

I felt my heart breaking in two. This poor filly didn’t deserve any of this. Shuddering, I knelt down in front of her and ran a hoof through her mane. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, feeling my eyes well up with tears. Her face looked dead, empty, like Carrion had drained it of life. “I’m so, s-so sorry…”

Meadow surprised me by wrapping her hooves around my neck and pulling me into a hug. I sniffled and wrapped my hooves around her, holding her close, bleeding into her mane, and cried. This shouldn’t ever have happened. This filly shouldn’t have ever had to know the fear she felt when Carrion took her. But she was the one holding me now; she was the one who was being strong. And as much as I wanted to comfort her over what happened to her, she was the one comforting me for my failures.

I couldn’t save everypony from the Crimson. I couldn’t even save the survivors from the scars they’d carry with them for the rest of their lives. What good was I if I always failed?!

But I didn’t fail. Not all the time. Meadow stroked my mane and hummed, and I realized that she wasn’t the one shaking. I was. Just a day ago, this filly must’ve been terrified, huddling down in this bunker wondering if the next time that door opened she was going to be sold off to be some stallion’s fuck toy for the rest of her life. Now here she was, singing a happy melody, because she knew that that wasn’t going to happen. She knew that she was free. And she knew that I helped free her.

Nopony here deserved what happened to them. But because of me and the Sentinels, they had a chance to move on, to make a better future for themselves. Maybe I couldn’t save everypony, but that didn’t make the lives I did save any less precious. If anything, it made them more special. And they wouldn’t be free today if it wasn’t for me.

I took solace in that thought. It was the only thing I could do.