I stared into the vent. I couldn’t bring myself to move. My mind was broken.

I failed her. I fucking failed her again. She begged me to save her, to not let her die. And I failed her.

She was dead. She was dead, and it was all my fault.

Gauge collapsed, still in shock, tears streaming down his face. “No,” he muttered to himself, as if by just saying that, Nova would come back to us. “She can’t be, she can’t…”

Swallowing, he stood up and put his hooves on my shoulders. “We have to find her. Wherever those vents go, we have to find her. I won’t believe she’s gone until I see the body.”

I sucked in a shuddering breath and nodded. This was just like when I jumped down the scrap chute in the foundry, right? Nova was just… somewhere else in the facility. She had to be. “We’ll find her,” I said, meeting Gauge’s eyes. “We’ll find her, and she’ll be alright. I just…”

I felt another hoof on my shoulder, and I tilted my head to see Ace standing next to us through my teary eyes. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “There weren’t nothing you could do.”

“If only I was stronger,” I whispered, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “I could’ve pulled her out…”

Gauge straightened up and looked at his drone. “SCaR, go follow the vents. Find her, figure out where she’s gone.”

Ace managed to hook the drone with her fetlock before it could buzz into the vents. “Think for a second. We might need this drone to get through anything else we come across. It ain’t gonna do us no good to send it down the vents if we need it to open a door.”

My zebra friend just shot Ace a cold, determined glare. “If anything, Nova needs SCaR more than we do. I won’t let her sit all alone, wherever she is. I can get through doors fine on my own.” He slapped Ace’s hoof off of the drone, and SCaR warbled once before slipping into the vents.

The outlaw rubbed her hoof and frowned at Gauge, but that confrontation didn’t last long at all. Another explosion rocked the installation, this one much bigger, and I could hear metal ricocheting down a hallway somewhere way back toward the entrance. A moment later, distant and muffled shouts began to echo through the installation.

Ace and I looked at each other. “Ain’t got no more time to waste,” Ace muttered, and spreading her wings, she immediately flew back to the main hallway. “Come on! We gotta get moving!”

I reluctantly drew my rifle and nodded to Gauge. “We’ll find her,” I said to him, and I wiped the tears from my cheeks. “I promise you. We’re gonna fucking find her.”

Gauge bobbed his head, and together, we galloped down the hall after Ace.

We rounded the corner, and I was glad that Ace had taken care of the turrets and the force field while they didn’t have power. The emitters for the field flashed and sparked, and the turrets twitched and tried to track us as we ran up to them, but Ace had detached their ammo belts so they were harmless. I cursed as I saw Ace struggling with the big door at the end of the hallway; apparently that was locked, too, and I immediately regretted Gauge sending SCaR down into the vents after Nova.

At the sound of a troop of ponies clambering down the ramp, I moved behind one of the turrets and leveled my rifle at the far end of the hallway. “Ace, we got bigger shit to worry about. Gauge, get that fucking door open!”

Ace grabbed the chain gun she’d stolen from earlier and mounted it on the back of one of these turrets, even as it poked its empty barrel into her ribs. Seriously, I could hear the firing pins clicking as they tried to shoot us to pieces, but I couldn’t focus on that. I saw the first hooves appear at the far end of the hall, and after switching my rifle back to regular semi-auto mode, I began shooting. I didn’t want to give them a chance to fire at us; the turrets weren’t exactly the best cover. Of course, none of them tried to push their luck when Ace’s chain gun started firing, spewing lead downrange at an amazing volume.

“How’s that door coming?!” I shouted over the death machine in Ace’s grasp. I really had to struggle to be heard, and I had to turn away just to hear Gauge’s response.

The zebra was basically in the guts of the panel next to the door, trying to tie two wires together; I don’t know how he was managing it with only his hooves, but even I knew that you didn’t want to stick a live wire in your mouth. “Another minute!” he shouted, cursing when one of the wires slipped out of his grasp. “It should—!”

To both of our surprises, the door suddenly split open, revealing a massive cargo elevator. I blinked, then looked at the wires in Gauge’s hooves, which weren’t attached or connected or anything. “Did you do that?” I shouted.

“No, I didn’t!” Shrugging, he dropped the wires, letting them hang from the panel. “I’m not going to question it! Come on!”

I slapped Ace on the shoulder to get her attention, then dashed over to the elevator. The barrels on the turret Ace had salvaged were glowing red hot from her continuous suppressive barrage, and I don’t know how many shots she’d fired, but a second later it clicked on empty. Ace wasted no time in throwing the weapon aside and drawing her own rifle as she backpedaled into the elevator, but a unicorn at the far end of the hall threw up a magical shield to shelter their comrades as they stormed in after us.

“Hit it!” I shouted to Gauge when we were all inside, and he immediately slapped the button to trigger the lift. The thing shook and groaned, and the heavy metal door began to slide shut, even as bullets started to ping and ricochet around us. We huddled out of sight by the corners so we wouldn’t get shot, but before the door closed all the way, I got an idea. All it took was a quick burst of my telekinesis, and I reconnected the belts on one of the turrets. The door shut a moment later, but we could all hear the turret wind up and begin firing a devastating, thumping barrage at Yeoman’s crew that’d followed us.

I panted with sweet relief as the elevator continued its journey unimpeded. “That should slow them down, at least for a while,” I said. I chuckled and added, “I guess it was too much to hope that they wouldn’t get through, right?”

“It was only ever a matter of time,” Ace said. Then she popped a rare smile at Gauge. “Good job on that door.”

But Gauge just shook his head in confusion. “It wasn’t me, though,” he said, and Ace lowered her eyebrows. “I didn’t do anything. It just opened on its own.”

I cleared my throat. “Do you think it had anything to do with… you know, that mare or whatever that was on the speakers?”

Ace glanced at me. “Glad I ain’t the only one who heard that.”

“Do you know what that was?”

She sighed. “Just because I ran with the Runners don’t mean I know everything about these places. Each one’s unique, I can tell you that much.”

“This place is fucking haunted,” Gauge muttered, and I could see him shivering. “Feels like there’s ghosts crawling along my spine, it’s so cold and creepy.”

I shivered as well, and that’s when I realized that it actually was getting colder. When I opened my jaw and slowly exhaled, my breath clouded in front of my face. “Why the fuck is it getting colder? Shouldn’t it be warmer?”

“Warmer?” Ace asked me.

“Yeah! Warmer! We’re getting closer to the center of the planet, right?”

Gauge blinked. “Ember, I don’t think that’s how that works.” Another blink. “At least, I think...”

“Even if it ain’t, it shouldn’t get this cold, this quickly,” Ace said. She started rubbing her forelegs together. “It must be because of the labs. Maybe they needed it cold down here for something.”

The elevator came to a shaking stop, and the door at the opposite end from where we entered opened. I could see the frost that’d gathered on the walls of the small room in front of us, and a pair of deployed turrets pointed in the general direction of the elevator were covered in icicles. Me and Ace immediately raised our rifles, but when the turrets didn’t react, we held our fire. Only then could I see that they were completely encased in ice, and I realized that their firing mechanisms were probably frozen solid.

“Can’t you keep us warm with some of your fire magic?” Gauge asked me. His teeth were starting to chatter and he kept rubbing his forelegs together to try to keep them warm. “I could really use some fire!”

“I can’t manipulate the fucking temperature in anything short of five hundred degree swings,” I muttered.

“Can’t you just make a fireball and keep it near us? Keep away the chill?”

“We don’t need her wasting her magic,” Ace interrupted, pushing past us. “She already tired herself out good with that shield earlier.”

I nodded in agreement. “That’d take a lot of energy to just maintain a fireball like that. Maybe we should just try to get through here quickly.” Then I looked at the door in front of us, and how it and its panel were covered in ice. “Though maybe I can help, at least a little bit.”

And then I summoned a wall of fire in front of the door. It wasn’t very big, and it didn’t last long, (and I realized I just accidentally made an innuendo,) but it got the job done. It only took a minute to melt the ice covering the door, but we all used that minute to try and get ourselves warm and ready. None of us knew what was in store for us on the other side.

Then two things happened at once. The door in front of us opened all on its own, and the door to the elevator slammed shut. My ear and a half twitched as the elevator began to ascend again, but Ace didn’t leave me much time to think on that as she dragged me into the next room. I still voiced my concerns about it, however. “They’re going to be down in a minute.”

“Then let’s get a move on.” She turned to Gauge. “Can you fuck with this door?”

“I can try,” Gauge said, and he immediately went over to the panel and shut the door.

While he fiddled with the panel, Ace and I stepped forward. We weren’t in a room anymore so much as we were in a cavern. I wasn’t sure if the mountain was naturally hollow or if this was something that the Synarchy had done, but it reminded me a lot of Hole, just much, much smaller. There were some maintenance and support structures lining the walls of the cavern, though they were all covered in ice, and at the far end I could see the walls of several buildings built into the rock. They too were covered in ice, which told me that either the ponies who lived here had to deal with it constantly, or something else was going on. Given all that’d happened in the past few minutes, I was pretty sure that last one was more likely.

More pressing than that, though, was the huge icy moat between where we stood and the buildings on the other side. It was probably fifty feet across, far beyond my ability to jump or even levitate myself and Gauge across with my magic. Of course, Ace could fly the gap easily, but I doubted that it would just be as simple as that. After all, there was a bridge that connected the two sides—or, at least, I assumed what I was looking at was one. There were two big metal structures built into the ground and covered in ice, one on each side, and they protruded slightly over the gap. They must’ve made a bridge somehow, but it was currently retracted.

Ace must’ve come to the same conclusion as I did, because she pointed to the gap with her wing. “We need to get that bridge extended. Only way to cross.”

“Can’t you fly us over?” I asked her. “It’s not that far of a flight.”

The outlaw chewed on her lip. “I could, but I doubt it’s gonna be as simple as that.” She pointed out several rectangular structures just sitting on both sides of the moat, their tops covered in an inch or two of ice. “Bet there’s turrets in them things there. I try to fly, I’m likely to get blasted to smithereens. I could probably dodge them and cross on my own, but weighed down…”

She shook her head and instead pointed to a large tower on the right—one that was mirrored by a twin on the other side. “I bet those towers control the bridges. We extend the bridge, you two can cross.”

I nodded. “Good. Gauge and I will take care of this one. You want to clear the other?”

Ace sighed and shook out her wings. “Might as well. Cold’s gonna ice my wings over if I wait any longer.” She shivered and hugged herself with her wings. “Good thing I’m a pegasus. We like the cold.”

And with that, she spread her wings and took off. I moved in the direction of the tower, but stopped and waited for Gauge after a few steps. While I waited, I watched Ace cross the moat as fast as she possibly could. She made it about halfway across before the ice-topped boxes shattered the ice covering them and deployed turrets. They took a second to wind up, and my heart jumped into my throat when they started firing, but Ace was already diving low to get behind the tower for cover. A moment later, she disappeared from sight, and the turrets stopped firing.

Gauge stopped beside me. “I crossed a bunch of wires, but I really don’t know if that’s going to keep them out,” he said. He gave the door behind us a worried look for good measure and shrugged. “I don’t really know how these doors work; they seem simple enough at a glance, but I don’t trust them to not open on their own.”

We trotted up to the tower; I could already see the frosted glass on the windows glowing from some computer lights within. “It had to have been that mare we heard, right? That was just… too fucking spooky.”

The ice-coated door suddenly opened in front of us, shattering the thin wall of ice and allowing entrance to a dark room. Within a moment, the lights began to flicker on, and ancient machinery hummed with life. But behind that noise, I heard what sounded like the pained wails of a mare over a speaker. They died within a second.

I just turned to Gauge. “See?”

He nodded. “Whoever that is, she must’ve been the one who activated the vent purge that caught Nova. We have to find her and get her away from whoever—or whatever—is doing this!”

“We will, Gauge, but first we have to cross the fucking moat.” Rifle raised, I walked into the tower, taking aim at the various shadowy corners. I didn’t know where a turret might pop out from, but to my surprise, everything was quiet and still. Nothing moved, and more importantly, nothing shot at us.

“There aren’t any turrets?” Gauge asked, double-checking all the corners I’d glanced over. “I would’ve expected a place like this to be defended.”

“If there are, maybe that mare is keeping them down,” I said. “I have a feeling we’re being led somewhere. We’re supposed to cross this bridge.”

“If it is that mare doing this, then I wonder why she can’t deploy the bridge herself, or why those turrets shot at Ace.” Gauge walked over to a big computer instrument thingy and poked it, then frowned. “These machines are all powered on.”

I found a staircase in the corner and began to climb it, though I wasn’t about to lower my guard just yet. “And?”

“They shouldn’t be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that they’re not all supposed to be on at the same time. There’s a ton of different instruments here, and not all of them work together.” He pointed to a big machine in front of him with several slots on it. “There’s an etch glass machine here. It can read, etch, and send messages, but they’re not programmed to do all of that at the same time. But all of them are on, and if my ear isn’t lying to me, they’re all running right now, even though there’s no glass inside.”

“I don’t see what a broken machine has to do with anything,” I said, finally making my way all the way up the stairs and into the control room of the tower. After a brief glance around, my eyes settled on the bright red lever on a desk panel, currently pulled toward me. That had to be what we were looking for.

“I don’t know either. It’s just… weird.” He joined me in the control room a second later, just as I walked over to the lever. “Is that it?”

I put my hoof on the lever. “Only one way to find out…”

I pushed the lever forward, and after a second of delay, I heard something ancient and enormous shriek and groan back the way we came. A little fire brought to my horn was all it took to warm the glass enough to melt off the frost covering it, and as soon as I did that, I saw half of the bridge extend across the moat.

“Well, that’s our part done,” Gauge said, turning his head toward the other tower where Ace hopefully was at this point. “Now we just have to wait on the other half. Want to go wait outside, Em?” A worried look flew onto his face as he turned back to me. “Em? What’s wrong?”

I must’ve looked pale or something (a challenge with a black coat), because I certainly felt awful. I stumbled forward and placed my hooves on the panel to steady myself as my head exploded with a violent, burning pain. Once again, I felt my limbs twitch and spasm on their own, and I vaguely heard my own voice moaning and wailing through the red haze clouding my vision. Hooves touched my shoulders, and I snapped my jaws at them in retaliation before I even knew what I was doing. Then I crumpled onto the floor until the molten agony began to recede.

I panted, panted, panted as I slowly recovered from the latest episode. I’d nearly forgotten that I was turning into a fucking fungus zombie with all the madness and terror this installation held. I still had another few days left before I was gone, if what Mawari had said was true, but I couldn’t possibly imagine what those last few days of my life would be like. This was horrible enough.

Then I heard two things: a distant thud, and Gauge’s voice. I focused on the latter first, and I managed to sit up with Gauge’s help. It took me entirely too long to remember what the words he was saying even meant, or that ‘Ember’ was my name. I just closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness and nausea to pass, and I squeezed his hoof with my own when he offered it to me.

“I’m fucking dying,” I murmured when I could finally speak again. “I’m fucking dying and it sucks dick.”

“Ember, just… j-just hang in there, okay?” Gauge asked, and at once, I could feel a number of things in his voice. Fear. Sorrow. Frustration. “I’m not gonna lose you. I-I’m not going to lose Nov and you today.”

I swallowed, tasting bile, but I forced myself to chuckle through a grimace—not for anything Gauge said, but just for his sake, and maybe my own, too. “You still got me for a few days yet,” I remarked, somewhat bitterly. “It’s taking the spores a bit to find my brain. I don’t have much of one to begin with, hah!”

Gauge didn’t find it funny. That much I could tell at a glance. “Ember…”

“Listen, Gauge, I can spend the last few days of my life moping about and feeling sorry for myself, or I can make fun of it until it has the last laugh.” I closed my eyes and inhaled, and a shiver ran down my spine; I could feel the itching at the base of my skull again, worse than before. “I hope that ‘manatronics, robotics, and cybernetics’ can help me out. Think I can get a computer for a brain?”

“It might help,” Gauge said, though the strained smile on his face told me he was just trying to play along. Then he pointed out the window. “Ace extended the other bridge while you were… yeah. We should cross now before—shit!”

I groaned and rubbed at my eyes as I turned to the window. “What’re you—fuck!”

The reason for both of our outbursts was probably what you’d expect. Down below, I saw something like ten or twelve ponies go galloping across the bridge that we’d so helpfully constructed for them. I guess my only saving grace is that the bridge was connected when they came across, otherwise all twelve of them probably would’ve run to my tower instead of going straight over the gap. And I might be a good marksmare, but I can’t go twelve to one and even hope to survive.

That didn’t stop me from smashing out the window and taking a few potshots at them while they were exposed on the bridge. They jumped at the sudden rifle fire behind them, and a pair of pegasi broke off to fly back to me. I dared to hope for a moment that the turrets guarding the moat were still active, but it seems that they powered off when the bridge halves connected.

“Gauge, get down!” I shouted moments before the two pegasi began strafing the tower. Bullets flew through the windows, scattering glass and pelting us with shards. Lead ricocheted off of the metal floor or bored right through the grating, and sparks flew all around the little command center. I huddled myself under the control panel and pointed my rifle at the opposite window and just waited. The moment that I saw a feathery figure fly in front of the window, I unleashed full-auto hell on it. A spray of blood and a burst of feathers was the end of that pegasus.

A line of bullets cut through the tower from left to right, and as soon as they hit the far right corner, I clambered out of hiding and ran to the window. I saw the pegasus turn around for another run, but I started firing first. Yeoman’s lackey began diving and weaving to avoid my bullets, but after a second of frustration, I dropped my rifle and reached out with my telekinesis instead. I tell you one thing, the bastard didn’t see that coming at all. Neither did he see the icy wall I sent him into with a tug on his wing. There was a solid crack, and both the pegasus and a sheet of ice fell to the ground. I put two shots into his body just to be sure, but I’m pretty sure the huge icicle sticking out of his chest made that unnecessary.

“We need to fucking get across that bridge, now,” I shouted, and before Gauge could get off the floor, I was already galloping down the stairs. I burst through the door and began galloping to the bridge, sparing only a single glance back toward the elevator. Sure enough, that door was wide open, without any sign of damage. It didn’t look like that mare cared who she helped get deeper into the installation. All I wanted to know was why?

Gauge managed to catch up by the time I put my hooves on the bridge. More pegasi circled the other tower, so I could only assume that Ace was still inside. In front of me, the door leading directly into the labs was wide open, most likely courtesy of the mysterious voice. I could see down a long hallway, but I was too focused on helping Ace out to pay too much attention to it.

I slid to a stop at the end of the bridge and raised my rifle. Several bursts of my BR14M chattered through the air, and I sent one of the pegasi down in a bloody heap. The second turned in surprise at the sudden attack, but the moment she hesitated, her guts exploded out of her right side as a high caliber round went right through her ribs. She just had enough time to clutch the exit wound with her hooves before she fell to the ground, definitely dead.

Recounting this all after the fact, I’m amazed at how desensitized I was to death by that point. I didn’t even flinch at that gory and brutal death. I barely registered it as I ran over to the tower and shouted up at the control center. “Ace! Come on, we have to move! They’re ahead of us!”

Ace burst out of the tower with a flourish of her wings, knocking loose any glass that still clung to its frame after she’d shot it. She landed hard on her hooves next to me, and she and I galloped straight into the belly of the installation’s labs. “How many left?” Ace asked me between breaths.

“I got two, you got two. Should be eight,” I said. They had to be all that was left of Yeoman’s team, what with the few we’d shot outside of the installation and however many the turret took down before they were able to get to the elevator. But the cold truth of the matter was that only Yeoman himself had to escape with the code for us to be too late. I’m sure that as far as he was concerned, everypony else on his team was expendable.

That didn’t mean they were going to make our lives easier. This long hallway we galloped down split maybe a hundred feet in from the door, but the only thing we cared about was the open door in the middle with the sign ‘Manatronics & Central Processing’ above it. The left and right branches I could only assume went to the robotics and cybernetics parts of the installation, but they didn’t have what we all were after. I figured that out for sure when the moment we entered the door, bullets pelted the floors and walls around me. Only a shield I threw up on reflex saved me from getting shot to pieces, and me and Ace immediately retreated to the safety of the doorframe before my shield collapsed, weak as it was.

I rubbed at my smoking horn and winced when my hoof ran over a crack in the enamel. I already knew I was going to have a pounding headache in the morning—supposing that Yeoman’s lackeys and the wailer spores left me with enough of a brain to even feel it. But I had much more pressing concerns to worry about. As Gauge slammed into the wall next to me, safely out of the line of fire, I had to wonder—just how the fuck was I going to get past this?

Ace seemed to be looking to me for an answer even as she blind fired around the corner with the one SP-9 pistol in her wing. “You got a spell in you or not?” she shouted over the noise of the gunfire. “How’s your horn?”

“Cracking!” I shouted back at her. “But I’ve been through worse!” Though that was technically true, it didn’t mean I’d be all that helpful. The last time I pushed burnout worse than this was when I chased Yeoman at the dam, and I’m sure you remember how well that went for me.

“Got any fire?” she shouted. “You blast them, I’ll follow up with the guns!”

I nodded, then slapped Gauge on the shoulder. “Catch me when I collapse,” I told him, and I began building mana on my horn. I let the spell grow and swell, and when I started to feel faint, I braced myself on the doorframe and whirled around the corner. The fireball flew from my horn into the room beyond in a bright light, and I heard the ponies inside scream as the fire spread. Ace blurred past my face, and Gauge pulled me back from the doorframe as I started to fall over.

The outlaw’s rifle rumbled in the next room, but I was too dizzy and faint to give it much thought. I spent the next minute or so just recovering my strength, because that took a lot out of me. I was vaguely aware of Gauge patting my cheek as I probably just laid next to him, panting, but it took a bit before my eyesight came back to me. When it did, I forced myself to stand, because I couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

Gauge was there when I inevitably staggered and needed to catch myself on something. I took a second to catch my breath, using his shoulder, then stood up straight again. “That’s never not going to worry me,” he said when I found my hooves and planted them under me.

“Try being the one who has to do it,” I groaned, and I plucked my rifle off the ground. I was rewarded with a spike of pain in my skull for my efforts, but I soldiered through it. Every second counted.

The gunfire abruptly stopped, and I staggered through the doorway to find Ace standing at the top of a small set of stairs, absolutely covered in blood. She panted and sheathed a dripping red knife, then swallowed and used her powder-stained wingtip to wipe some of the blood off her muzzle. Lying all around her were the shot up (and in one case, sliced open) bodies of four ponies. All she did was spare me a nod as I staggered up the stairs to her. “Can you walk?”

“I’ll live,” I grunted. “For the time being, anyway.” Swallowing, I pointed to the door ahead of us. “I swear, if that door doesn’t take us to a big computer room…”

“We ain’t gonna find out just from standing around,” Ace muttered. She drew her rifle and flew to the open door, stopping just long enough to gesture to Gauge. “Keep her standing. I’ll clear everything else.”

Then she darted off down the hall, wingtips scraping the walls with each flap. I grimaced and started after her, and Gauge stuck to my side for support. “How much you want to bet there’s another trap up ahead?” I asked him. He just shook his head and kept on walking.

We passed by a lot of doors in this hallway, each one providing entry to a different lab. Or at least, that’s what they would’ve done if they weren’t all locked. I had a feeling that they weren’t just locked on accident; I felt like we were being guided deeper into the facility, toward something important. What that something was, I didn’t know… but it turned out all we had to do was round the corner and look to our right.

I didn’t even know what I was looking at at first. It looked like an enormous version of a ringbird’s rotor assembly, to be honest. It was this big metal ring, probably twenty feet tall and a hundred feet in diameter. It was held off of the ground on massive supports, and heavy copper pipes protruded from one side and disappeared into the ground. Catwalks surrounded the top of the structure, upon which I saw a trio of ponies trying to shoot at a figure flying as fast as she could along the ground.

But even as I worried about Ace trying to dodge three (and suspiciously only three) ponies shooting at her, I found myself more enthralled with just what exactly the ring thing was doing. This crazy glow hovered above it, shifting all the colors of the rainbow and then some, before the ring sucked it down. Some sort of paneling in the center of the ring glowed and absorbed the glow, and little wisps of this whatever it was flickered at the bottom of the ring before vanishing almost immediately. Whatever this thing was, it was still running!

I tried to fire a burst at a pegasus perched on the catwalk above the ring thing, but my bullets just bounced off of the glass looking into the room without putting more than a few cracks in it. “Bulletproof, fuck!” I hissed, and I pointed at the open door a little further down the hallway. “There! Let’s go!”

I staggered to the doorway, but at least by this point I didn’t need Gauge’s help to stand anymore. I pushed off of him and flicked my ear at the frame. “Stay back here. Don’t get shot.”

“Don’t push yourself,” he cautioned me. “Just… be safe, okay?”

“Heh. ‘Safe.’ Gauge, I haven’t been safe since the Crimson attacked Blackwash.”

One of these days, I’m sure my friends are going to strangle me for saying shit like that.

I cantered through the door and immediately took cover behind a huge crate full of some sort of pieces or parts for the big ring thing. In the back corner of the room, up some stairs and behind the ring, I saw the faint glow of a computer screen. Lines of text blurred across it, but I was too far away to make them out. All I knew was that Yeoman had to be up there, and I needed to get there fast.

Sucking down a deep breath, I galloped across the open ground toward the stairs. A few stray bullets bit the ground around me, and I ended up diving behind a forklift for cover. I managed to poke my head around the corner just long enough to get a glimpse of the pony shooting at me; he was on top of the catwalk, laying down on his stomach to minimize his profile. He responded by shooting at my exposed head, but thankfully he missed. One bullet still managed to shave a lock of my mane off, and the others slammed into the body of the forklift. That was when I heard a hissing noise, and I spun around to see a red glow coming from the engine of the forklift.

Fuck me, right?

With the pegasus shooting at me and keeping me suppressed behind a bomb, I did the only thing I could do; I let my horn surge with power and ripped the fusion plant out of the forklift, chucking the whole thing at him. Once more I felt the tendrils of burnout and exhaustion slip into my vision, but at least I wasn’t getting shot at for the moment. The reactor smashing into the catwalk and violently exploding as its miniature fusion core detonated took care of that problem for me. When I could see again, I found the catwalk as little more than twisted shrapnel, but the ring itself didn’t seem damaged at all apart from a black scorch mark on its superstructure. Whatever this thing was made out of, it was tough.

Ace was in a shootout with the other two ponies somewhere above me; I didn’t really waste time taking a look. As soon as I could stand again, I hit the stairs and galloped up them as fast as I could. Somepony took some potshots at me, but I saw Ace’s beige feathers blur by along with the snapping of her rifle, and that shooting stopped abruptly. While Ace dueled with the lone survivor out by the ring, I burst into the room with the computers—and promptly got shot in the leg.

I’ll admit, that came as a complete surprise. I don’t think my brain even registered that I’d been shot until my right foreleg collapsed underneath me mid-stride and I rolled and tumbled into a desk. The heavy steel thing shook with a loud bang as my skull slammed right into the drawers, and I laid there groaning for a second. But I remembered that if I was shot at once, I’d be shot at again, so I picked my rifle back up and propped it on the back of the desk.

It was the closest I’d been to Yeoman since the dam. There he was, maybe fifteen feet away, pulling a sheet of etch glass out of a terminal underneath an enormous monitor. Whatever text it’d been displaying disappeared as soon as he slipped the glass into his bag, and he ducked down before I could put the sights on his brain. I fired all the same, growling in frustration, until I heard a series of reports as he fired back. Only, he shot under the desk, at my hooves, and I jumped into the air in surprise and landed on my back, scrambling like mad to get away from the line of fire.

He took that moment to fly from the computer to a door at the back, which he promptly opened and jumped inside. The image of him standing there, etch glass protruding from the corner of his saddlebags, and Fortitude, my fucking family rifle, in his grasp, is burned into my mind. And then he galloped up the stairs before I could shoot, disappearing from my line of sight.

“Get back here!” I screamed at him, and I hobbled over to the stairs as fast as I could, which wasn’t fast at all. Before I could make it to the stairs, however, the door slammed shut, much faster than I thought possible. I flinched in surprise, but I immediately mashed the release button with my magic. Despite all that, it refused to open, and I couldn’t think of anything else to try other than screaming in frustration.

I noticed that the shooting had all stopped; in fact, the place was eerily quiet except for my own screams and the humming of the ring in the main room. Eventually, I gave up (mostly because I was starting to feel really dizzy) and fell to my haunches, simply staring at the door.

He got away! All this for what?! All the pain I suffered, the danger I faced, for nothing! Nova might have even died and we didn’t have anything to show for ourselves!

“Ember?” Gauge’s voice. “What are you—?”

“He got away,” I croaked, and only then I realized just how hoarse I was. I looked over my shoulder at him and Ace, and I pointed at the blank computer screen on the wall. “It was there… and he took it! He took the code piece with him and he got away!” I growled in frustration and fired my rifle at the door in front of me, which obviously didn’t do shit. But it made me feel a tiny bit better, for all the good that was going to do. “Stupid door shut on me! I was gonna chase him, and the stupid thing just slammed shut!”

I felt Gauge wrap his foreleg around me as he sat down at my side. “Breathe, Ember,” he said. “This isn’t over. We’ll catch up to him yet, I’m sure of it.”

“Nova fucking died for nothing…” I murmured, still unable to look away from the damn door that’d let the bastard escape.

Gauge didn’t have anything to say to that, but apparently Ace did. “We ain’t found a body yet, Ember,” she said. “Don’t say anything until we know for—what the hell?”

The surprise in her voice snapped me out of my rage, at least for a little bit. My curiosity got the better of me, and I turned to her. “What is it?” I asked with a shaky voice.

“Weren’t that computer screen blank just a second ago?”

“Computer…?” I stood up, wincing as I accidentally put pressure on my wounded leg. At least it didn’t feel like I’d gotten shot in the bone, which was good; a little Stabil-Ice and it’d be good as new. But for the moment, all I was concerned about with the computer screen and the message that’d suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

>UNICORN

>USE YOUR MAGIC

>FREE ME

>LET ME LIVE!!!

“What even is this?” Gauge asked. “That voice upstairs, and now this? Who is this? This has to be a pony, there’s no way this is just a security program!”

“Maybe we should ask it,” I said, and I stepped forward to get at the keyboard. “If it’s in the computer, maybe it knows what the code piece is!” I let slip a tiny, hopeful smile; maybe shit wasn’t as fucked as I thought it was!

My horn sparked to life, and the orange glow of my magic washed over the keyboard as I prepared to type a response. “What should I—?”

A bolt of blue lightning jumped from the keyboard to my horn. My vision exploded in pure white, and I fell away from the keyboard with a scream. It felt like somepony drove a length of glowing steel fresh from the forge through my horn and into my skull, impaling every single vertebra in my spine on the way down.

The last thing I remember was a mare’s joyous laughter before I passed out.