We didn’t see Yeoman as we left the installation behind, even though I expected to find him behind every tree. Occasionally my eyes would shift and focus on something I didn’t want them to, and I’d remind Surge about our agreement for her to stop messing with my body. In return, I let her freely use my mouth to talk about whatever she wanted. Which, when she wasn’t being extremely racist to Gauge or insulting our general intelligence, was incredibly interesting. Screw reading logs and letters to find out what the past was like; there was a mare who grew up in it, lived it, right in my head.

“Military service was mandatory, of course,” she was saying, in the middle of explaining what life was like growing up. “The Synarchy was surrounded on all sides by brutes and beasts who hated it, and hated us. We needed soldiers to defend it, because something was always attacking us.”

“Always?” Ace asked.

“I left Equus when I was thirty solar years old—roughly twenty-two solar cycles here on Auris, for comparison. Equestria had been fighting the Coalition all thirty years of my life, and the war had started before I was born. We needed everypony we could get.”

We threaded our way through some trees and found a clearing on a hilltop surrounded by a river on three sides and the rising mountain behind us. “Good place as any to make camp,” Ace said. “Sun’s going down, too. Might as well rest here for the night; ain’t gonna get very far in the dark.”

The rest of us nodded and started setting things up, but the conversation continued while we worked. “The war had been going on for more than thirty years?” Nova sounded incredulous. “The toll on Equestria’s population must’ve been catastrophic!”

“Mares were encouraged to have children if they weren’t actively fighting or contributing to the war effort; the Census Bureau was always busy filling out Maternity Licenses for mothers. Mares were eligible once they completed their five years of mandatory military service and turned twenty. They were expected to have two children in five years as part of the license or face steep penalties. I did my part; I had two foals of my own.”

“Twenty?” I raised my eyebrow and turned to Nova. “How long’s that in Auris years?”

“Fourteen winters,” Nova said. “Stars, that’s such a short time…”

“You’re telling me, I’m twenty winters and getting laid is enough of a challenge.” I started shoving the stakes of our tent into the ground with my magic; thankfully it was damp, so it was pliable enough to not be too much of a hassle. “And you served? What was that like?”

“Military service began at fifteen, regardless of who you were. Rich filly, poor colt, everypony served. You were released from compulsory service at twenty. If you wanted to serve longer, you could easily re-enlist, and they’d give you better training and specializations instead of making you a front line grunt or an expendable deckhoof on a starship.” Her chuckle was lost on the rest of us, who just found that horrifying. “I was with the artillery corps when I was fifteen, then got transferred to engineering when I was sixteen. Spent a lot of time on the EOF Horizon, a home world cruiser. I thought the heat of the engine core was bad enough when we were on patrol, but the Horizon was in combat a few times while I was on it. The core gets hot enough to ignite paper at a five foot distance; we had to wear special suits to service and maintain it then.”

Gauge whistled and sat back against a splintered tree stump. “I would’ve loved to have been on one of those. It sounds amazing: working in the guts of the greatest technological achievements ever made.” He sighed. “It’s everything I dreamed of as a greaser.”

“A technological achievement designed and perfected by ponies first, then copied by the other races,” Surge felt the need to elaborate. “But I digress. When I returned from the Horizon, I applied for secondary schooling and was accepted. After five years of intense study, I earned my doctorate and married a marine I met on the Horizon during my mandatory service. We had two beautiful children.” I felt a feeling of sorrow and incredible loneliness brush against my subconscious; I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be for Surge to be trapped here, centuries later, while her family was dead and waiting for her in the afterlife.

Nova must’ve been thinking the same thing, because she wrapped her flesh and blood wing around my shoulders and nuzzled my cheek, trying to get through to Surge and comfort her. Words weren’t necessary, and I doubt they would’ve helped, anyway. From what I was gathering about her, Surge was too much of a no-nonsense and logical mare for those words to really mean anything to her.

In any event, she steeled herself and pushed away those emotions. “I worked in the best facilities the Synarchy had on Equus while I raised my children. I devoted myself to manatronics and cybernetics with a wild passion. I wanted to help the Synarchy win, and I felt like it would be my work that would turn back the Coalition and give us an edge. I climbed through the ranks of scientists so fast I was in charge of my own lab in four years. But two years later, the High Council pulled my number and decided I needed to take my team to work on Auris. That’s how we ended up here.”

The rest of my friends nodded, but I had a few questions from what I’d seen when she’d jumped into my brain. “I think I saw one of your memories, earlier,” I said, and I could feel Surge’s surprise. “When you first jumped into my head. It was weird, but I think it was your last day on Equus, or at least the morning of it. Where was your family? It just looked like you were living by yourself.”

The sensation I received from Surge’s consciousness told me that I’d asked a bad question. “They... the High Council needed me on Auris to head this project more than they needed me on Equus,” she said, and I could feel the heartache not just in her words, but emanating from the mare’s consciousness in my brain. “My husband was recalled to active duty as well, so he couldn’t look after our children. So the Synarchy took them, raised them, gave them everything they needed.”

“…Oh…”

I kind of envied my friends at that moment. They could at least shuffle their hooves and look away and shit. Me? My mind was locked in my skull with this mare. It was just another reminder that I’d never have any privacy so long as she was in my head.

“I’m… sorry?” Hey, it was the best I could do.

“Don’t be. They received better care from the state than I could’ve given them, as busy as I was.” Her words were bitter, but I could feel that she believed them—or at the very least, was willing herself to believe them. “I’m sure they served the Synarchy well, but… well, I wish I knew what happened to them. I wish I could’ve seen their faces one more time. I left Equus without speaking to them, and for all I know, they died in whatever calamity brought about this ‘Silence.’”

I saw Nova fidgeting, torn between her sympathy and respect for Surge’s boundaries and her desire to learn more. In the end, it was the latter that won out, after a few seconds of silence. “I know it’s hard… but do you know anything about what happened?” she asked. “These code fragments we’re chasing… we don’t know anything about that, what they’re for or anything, or why we got them in the first place. One was sent to your installation, and if you were in charge, then surely you knew what that means?”

I watched Ace start laying the foundation for a fire while Surge formed her answer; I couldn’t even imagine how many times Ace must’ve done this, her hooves moved so mechanically and effortlessly. “The Dusk Protocol was an apocalypse scenario,” she said, getting a few surprised looks from my friends. “The Synarchy had been stashing weapons and everything we’d need to function and continue the fight without our home world if Equestria were to fall. The protocol would’ve been sent to the most important centers on Auris, and each of us would have to send our parts to the Ivory City, where the code would be put together and solved. But that’s all I know. Even though I was the head of the facility that got one, I’m certain the High Council felt I was still too young to be trusted with information as to its exact purpose. That, and I wasn’t a part of the inner party. I’m surprised my facility was even entrusted with participating in the Protocol in the first place.”

Ace finished arranging rocks for a fire and crossed her forelegs. “Well, whatever it was, that signal didn’t make its way here until it was too damn late. Auris fell apart without her momma, however many light-years away y’all were.”

“So you’re saying that if that signal had shown up when it was supposed to, Auris wouldn’t be the shithole it is today?” I asked Surge. “We’ve had bandits and slavers and all sorts of horrible shit for two hundred winters because we didn’t get what we were supposed to, when we were supposed to?”

“Why didn’t we get it?” Gauge asked. “What happened?”

Surge shrugged my shoulders; I at least allowed her that motion. “If I knew the answer, I don’t think we’d be where we are right now. Something must’ve happened to the signal; I couldn’t possibly imagine what. If I had more information, I’d be able to construct a hypothesis, but all I can do is guess right now.”

“Alright, so we ain’t gonna find out more about that, then.” Ace dumped a bunch of fuel into the firepit and gestured to me. I nodded and lit it all up with a thought, and just like that, we had a fire as the dark fingers of night started clawing through the mountains. “Why this code, though? Why not just send a signal to the Ivory City to wake everything up directly? Don’t seem like it’d be that hard; this sure as shit ain’t the easiest solution.”

“Auris was a secret,” Surge said. “And the High Council wanted it to stay that way. The other species didn’t know about it. Sure, they knew we had a colony somewhere, but they didn’t know where. There are a lot of stars in the galaxy, after all, and you wouldn’t expect a blue star world to be the one we settled on. And the Council was loading this planet with weapons and munitions. Splitting up the code would ensure that it would only be activated as a unified last resort from all the important center on the planet, not prematurely by somepony with other plans in mind.”

Gauge snorted and turned away, focusing on his supplies and fetching some food for us all to eat. “I assume it worked better than this on paper, right?”

“I was not a part of the plan’s formulation, merely a custodian of one of the installations that would play a part in the Synarchy’s resurgence,” Surge spat at him, absolutely bristling. I think she just hated the fact that a zebra was calling something thought up by pony minds ‘stupid’.

“Can we please stop fighting about every little thing?” Nova pleaded with them. She nibbled on her dinner, using her strange new metal wing like a tray to hold her food. “What about now? Auris is in pieces, and we haven’t heard from Equus in two centuries. What’s the point of the code now?”

“If you’re asking why it arrived now, again, I can’t answer that.” I kept her out of my mouth just long enough to take a bite of my own meal and swallow it before I surrendered control again. She immediately used my lips to grimace. “I was never a big fan of meat… disgusting,” she muttered, but I just shrugged and rolled my eyes while I couldn’t talk. “Regardless, the point is that many of these installations were sealed and locked, designed to stand the test of time.”

My mind went back to the Bastion and the huge metal door that remained closed no matter how much the Sentinels tried to open it. Could this protocol open that door and give them access to whatever was inside?

Surge must’ve read my thoughts, because she nodded my head. “Assembling the code and using it would unlock all of the installations around Auris and make their locations known to the Ivory City—assuming it’s still standing, that is.”

“Oh, it is,” Ace said with a scowl on her face.

“Oh?” Surge seemed genuinely surprised. “That’s good, then. Maybe reason, sanity, and moral decency are still alive and well somewhere on Auris.”

This time, Ace burst out laughing. “Reason? Sanity? Moral decency? I hate to disappoint you, but that ain’t what you’re gonna find in the Ivory City. It’s run by a madstallion with a lust for power and the technology to wage war on the rest of Auris. I’m from a town called Thatch, which ain’t too far from it. We’ve been fighting him since before I was born.” She leaned in, and her laughter turned to a frown. “There ain’t nothing good about the City. Auris would be better off if the damn thing was razed to the ground.”

Surge thought for a few moments; it was like listening to somepony mutter through the walls in another room of the same building. “I’m curious, outlaw…”

“Ace,” said outlaw harshly corrected.

“If I thought you worth the courtesy, I would’ve used your name.” Ace scowled at me, but I could only shrug while Surge used my voice. “But regardless of how little respect we have for each other, I think we all deserve to know, or at least Ember and I; I certainly don’t feel any recollection of it in her memories. Explain where you’re from, this Thatch, and why I should feel sympathetic towards their side of the struggle against the final bastion of the Synarchy still on Auris?”

Ace sighed. “I ain’t no historian; I don’t know how the town started or all that. But we’re in the Crystal mountain range, near Lake Luna. At least, that’s what we’ve always called them; I assume they’re the same as they used to be when you were still… uh, alive. Not sure if you’re familiar with the place, but—”

“I am familiar,” Surge interrupted. “Apart from the mining town in the north between my installation and Celestia Dam, the settlement at Lake Luna was the closest population center to me. Never saw much of it while I was working, though; it was simply a logging camp at the time, providing raw lumber for Auris’ growth.”

“Right, well I’m sure the town elders would love to have you tell us about it sometime.” She inhaled and shut her eyes. “Ever since the Ivory City started conquering little settlements around its borders, Thatch has held its gates open for the refugees. Reclaimer, the monster who rules that city, must’ve turned on all the old factories, because his troops are better armed and better trained than anything I’ve ever seen before, and they’re brutal. They burn down farms and slaughter the farmers to make way for their own settlers. They choke the life out of distant settlements and force them to surrender by severing caravan ties. He’s a land-hungry bastard, simple as that.

“Whereas, in Thatch, we try to unite the settlements, not scorch them and plant our own ponies in the remains,” she continued; it was somewhat surprising how animated she could get when she was talking about something that interested her. “We’re building a trust of settlements between us and the Ivory City, trying to strengthen ourselves to stand up and fight Reclaimer’s forces. And for the most part, it’s working; he ain’t going nowhere to the west thanks to us, even if he still pushes in the other cardinal directions.” She sighed and shook her head. “But the best we can do is raid his caravans, ambush patrols, just hold him off. Eventually, he’ll gobble up enough resources and claim enough land to push us aside with ease. And he’s trying to get his hooves on this code as well. If he does, it’ll be the end of Thatch and any last chance there is for hope and harmony on Auris. What you’ve told us about it makes it pretty plain and clear that whoever gets ahold of it is gonna run the show.”

“I see. And why should I support upstarts standing in the way of progress, of rebuilding the Synarchy, instead of throwing my weight behind Reclaimer? It seems to me that your town is the menace to society, not the City.”

Ace opened her mouth, but no words came out. I don’t think she even knew what to say. It was Nova, however, who filled the silence. “Dr. Surge… how many of your inventions helped people?”

I could sense Surge’s confusion even before she spoke. “What do you mean? I developed more efficient batteries, portable cores for war machines, even refined the latest generation of mana artillery! I was one of the Synarchy’s greatest minds; I did so much to help ponykind!”

“Not just ponies,” Nova insisted. “Everyone. What did you do for the zebras? The griffons? All those other species?”

“Nothing,” Surge hissed. “I helped them die. They were monsters that wanted to kill us!”

“Does Gauge look like he wants to kill us?” Nova asked, pointing her metal wingtip toward her coltfriend. “What about the griffons on Auris? You’re in Ember’s head, so you can see her memories or something like that, right? Look at her time with the Sentinels. Look at the fighting at Celestia Dam. All those griffons fought with her for something better. Do you see what they all accomplished when they fought together against the Crimson, a band of ponies who hated their neighbors and all the other races?”

Memories from the assault on the dam suddenly flew to the forefront of my mind, and I could feel Surge watching them with me as they replayed behind my eyes. Across from us, Nova stood up and nodded at me and Surge. “We aren’t like the Synarchy. None of us are. And we’re better for it.” Flicking her tail, she turned around and walked away from the fire. “We should build a better future instead of dragging this planet into the same mistakes you made.”

We all watched Nova walk off into the darkness. Soon, the only thing we could see was her silhouette moving towards the cliff overlooking the river. I noticed that her metal wing had several glowing red lights on it; at least it meant she was easy to keep track of in the dark. Eventually, those lights stopped moving, presumably as she sat down to look at the stars. Nova always loved to watch the stars at night.

Gauge stood up and nodded to Ace shortly after, then he too disappeared into the night, making his way to Nova’s side. That left just me and Ace (and Surge) sitting around the campfire, watching the fire I’d created consume the logs around it.

Ace flung another log onto the fire. The sparks roared up into the night, and the sap in the wood began to pop and sizzle as the heat got to it. Seconds faded into minutes before she finally spoke. “You’re a fucking cunt, you realize that, Surge?”

Surge had been focused on her own thoughts up until then, leaving me some peace in my skull. Unfortunately, Ace broke that. “Trading foolish insults, now?”

The outlaw just shrugged. “Ain’t interested. I’m just saying what I’m seeing.” She sighed and looked us in my eyes. “I just… I don’t understand none of how ponies from back then acted and thought. My ma used to read me stories of what Equestria was like a long time ago—before the Synarchy.”

“Oh?” I asked, interested. My mom certainly never read me any stories like that. “What was it like?”

“A land of peace, friendship, harmony,” Ace said. I didn’t miss the wistful twinkle in her eye, and I didn’t blame her; that sounded amazing compared to the hell of Auris. “Two regal sisters raised the sun and the moon. Six friends using the magic of friendship to stop monsters—”

I burst out laughing at that. “The magic of friendship? Really? That’s fucking great.”

“It was true,” Surge murmured, dragging my voice back from cackling and sarcastic to somber and thoughtful.

Ace blinked. “Wait… honestly? You ain’t bullshitting?”

Surge shook my head. “From what you just said, it sounds like everything your mother told you was true. We were ruled by two great alicorns, once. Four, actually, but Celestia and Luna held the power. And the six friends? Those were Twilight Sparkle and her friends.”

“They were real?” I asked, incredulous. “Celestia and Luna? The four alicorns? I always thought they were just fairy tale stuff. Nopony at Blackwash believed in them.”

“They were real,” Surge insisted. “And Equestria was happy and peaceful. Harmonious. And then, straight from Tartarus, a centaur by the name of Tirek came. He drained all of Equestria’s magic, sucked it out of every last pony; stallions, mares, foals, all of them. Except for the four princesses, that is.

“They knew Tirek was coming. They knew he was powerful, too powerful for them to stop. So three of them gave their magic to the fourth—to Twilight.” Surge hesitated in her story, giving me a chance to take a bite of food. It’s hard to eat popcorn and listen to the campfire story when your mouth is being used to tell it, so to speak. “Twilight fled with their magic. When Tirek made it to the palace and found the three others there, exhausted and magic-less, he… well, he killed them. Slaughtered them. Then he found Twilight, and when he tried to get her to surrender by offering to trade her magic for her friends, whom he’d captured, they told her to run instead of surrender. So she did. And he killed them, too.”

Surge sighed, and I didn’t blame her. I didn’t expect this story to get this depressing. “She ultimately came back and fought again. This time, she didn’t hold back. She defeated him. Destroyed him and avenged her friends and the other alicorns. But now she was the only one left. Ponykind looked to her for a leader, and she did her best.”

When her silence dragged on for a few seconds, Ace shifted some and cleared her throat. “I’m guessing it didn’t go so well.”

“Twilight had been groomed to be a diplomat, an ambassador. A leader one day, maybe, but she never had the chance to finish that training,” Surge said. “She… wanted to be peaceful, at first. She wasn’t ready to make the hard choices that face a princess or a queen every day. The other races took advantage of us while we were weak.”

“Through war?” I asked.

“Not through war; Equestria was still the largest and most populous nation on Equus, and we were guaranteed to win any war. But our High Queen wasn’t a fighter, not then. So they would threaten and refer to old treaties to back their claims, and she’d cave.” She pointed my eyes in the direction Gauge and Nova had gone. “The zebras were the first to push their demands. They made Equestria vacate our holdings and colonies in Zebrica. That emboldened the griffons, who demanded the secession of the northern territory around Griffonstone, land that Equestria annexed from them centuries before. Then the deer demanded the end of logging and milling around the Whitetail forest and for us to recognize their sovereignty, followed by the harpies in the southern skies…”

“Sounds like she was a terrible leader,” Ace said through the feathers she was preening. “Weak-willed and just giving land away to whoever wanted a slice.”

“We were watching our borders shrink by the day,” Surge agreed. “This went on for years. Decades. I think it may nearly have been a full century of the other races whittling away at our borders. There was unrest, dissent, ponies were talking about removing her, evening assassinating her… so finally she stepped up to the plate. She demanded that the zebras renegotiate their treaties with Equestria, and when they refused, she sent in the army. The griffons denounced us for what they called unprovoked aggression and tried to intervene militarily, so we fought them too. Then the caribou jumped in, followed by the Empire of the Claw, a land filled with tigers and other big cats. It seemed like the longer we fought, the more people we were fighting. Soon it wasn’t a war about old treaties, it was a war for our very survival. Had we lost, the other nations of the world would’ve torn Equestria to pieces. We couldn’t afford to lose. So we didn’t.

“When the smoke cleared ten years later, we came out on top,” she continued. “The zebra homelands were decimated, the griffons were bankrupt and in ruin, and the caribou forests had nearly been razed to ashes. Equestria signed peace treaties with the different nations, and we returned our borders to how they were before Twilight came to power, and even expanded beyond that. But now the rest of the world wanted to kill us, so Equestria reorganized into a synarchy, a nation jointly ruled by its new High Queen, her trusted councilors who had helped guide her through the wars, and the will of the ponies of Equestria. And that’s how we stayed for a hundred and twenty years before what you call the Silence began.”

That was something to marvel at. It seemed like a tragedy paired with weakness and mistakes had ultimately transformed Equestria from a peaceful and harmonious state to a militant, isolationist, and xenophobic synarchy that saw enemies in every shadow. A bit more than a century later, it all blew up in some way that I still didn’t understand. But now it seemed much less mysterious to me, especially given what I’d heard in Surge’s memory early. “Do you think that ‘Coalition’ won?” I asked her.

“It’s possible,” Surge admitted. “Even though it’s the outcome that everypony feared, it’s probably preferable to other apocalypse alternatives. Though it doesn’t explain why they didn’t find Auris afterwards when they started combing through the Synarchy’s rubble.” She shook my head. “There has to be an alternate explanation.”

“Nuclear weapons?” Ace offered. “If y’all were advanced enough to build a colony lightyears away, y’all must’ve been advanced enough to wipe each other out at the press of a button.”

“Unlikely. Our High Queen used her unbelievable power she inherited from the other alicorns to protect the Synarchy from nuclear weapons. The other species all had their own defense programs, some rooted in ancient magic, others in technology pilfered from us. All our wars were fought in the conventional style, because anything else simply didn’t work.”

“So you’re saying that y’all got so powerful that your big bad toys didn’t work on each other no more?”

“We were always searching for an edge. We had the best scientists and the brightest minds, but any edge we brought to the battlefield would be lost within a year when the enemy got their claws, hooves, whatever on it, too. So we were always searching for an answer.” She waved my hoof back in the direction we came. “Auris was a colony, yes, but it was also a testbed for sensitive weapons. We needed to experiment with our arsenal somewhere secret, somewhere safe. In addition to my manatronics work, for example, we were trying to manufacture advanced prosthetics, cybernetics, even drone soldiers to enhance our hoof soldiers.”

“Doesn’t sound all that smart to be leaving it behind with the door wide open, though,” I said. “That kind of stuff falling into the wrong hooves would be bad.”

“We should blow the whole damn thing up,” Ace said.

I frowned at her. “Like what you did at the foundry?”

Ace rolled her eyes. “We done had this argument already. I ain’t gonna retread old ground.”

“The defenses—however few are still intact—will keep the place mostly secure,” Surge assured us. “As for the knowledge, well, I spent years analyzing every file in our closed database to stave off the boredom of immortality. I memorized everything.” It was true, too; as she said that, I saw blueprints and schematics and complicated formulae I couldn’t even possibly fucking understand go whizzing around the edges of my mind. Honestly, with a pony much, much smarter than me in my brain, I didn’t know how long it was going to take before I just went completely fucking insane.

Ace took a few moments to nibble and straighten a crooked feather on her wing. “If you’re so confident in its safety, then I don’t see no harm in letting it be. The technology inside will be useful when we ain’t chasing this doomsday code protocol thinger all across Auris.” She sighed. “Hopefully we’re gonna be the ones picking through the remains, not Reclaimer.”

“Speaking of which, you said you were one of the ponies trusted to respond to the code, right, Surge?” I asked, kind of crossing my eyes down my muzzle instead of having a physical pony to look toward.

“I was, yes.”

“So, like, do you know where the other installations that held the code pieces are?” Once again, I could see bits of data from the message go flitting through my subconscious as Surge remembered them. “We got an installation list a long time ago, but I hardly remember any of it. But if you were around at the time, then maybe you—?”

“Dr. Hozho,” Surge said. “She was the lead researcher on linguistics, ethics, and sociology. Her father was also on the Council that advised our High Queen. She would have been trusted in the party. Her facility in the Spines would have received a code piece.”

“Linguistics? Ethics? Sociology? That don’t seem like the most important thing you could be studying while at war,” Ace said. “You sure she was important enough to get a piece?”

“She was a cryptanalyst by job title, but she was… something more.” I saw brief flashes of a mare through Surge’s memories: tall, slender, faded green, sharp eyes and a small but angular muzzle. A melodic accent that carried the inflections in her words along like a leaf riding a river’s current. The occasional furious outburst in a language I didn’t understand, and Surge didn’t either. “She sought to try to understand the Coalition’s codes organically, but her real value was in learning how they thought and acted. Her experiments were often strange or controversial, but she provided us with incredible insight on how the different species planned and behaved. The last I heard from her, she was still running an experiment in the Spines.”

“What kind of experiment?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Surge admitted. “I don’t know what any of the other installations on Auris were researching. We weren’t allowed to directly communicate with each other. But I do know she got her pick of the litter of all the political prisoners the Synarchy had acquired over the years. And I know she churned through them at a frightening pace.”

“And all that means…?”

“Nopony working on linguistics research would need so many subjects for her experiments,” Surge said. “Whatever she was researching in that installation, it went beyond simple sociology.”

I scowled. “That’s all kinds of fucked up,” I said. “So much for that whole ‘ethics’ research.”

“I bet she was more focused on figuring out which ethics she could bend and which ones she could kick into the dirt than actually applying them,” Ace said with a bitter chuckle. “Y’all pre-Silence ponies were messed up, you really were.”

“And you post-Silence ponies are backwards and barbaric.”

I flipped my cigarette box open with a sigh. “Yeah, yeah, the whole insults thing is already old. Can we try to be more productive? Like, can you show us the way to this mad doctor’s installation so we can get the next piece? We need to stay ahead of Yeoman if we want to stop the Ivory City from getting all the pieces of the code.”

“I don’t know where exactly the installation is, only that it’s in the petrified forest to the southwest we called the Spines. I’m afraid you’ll have to go looking around yourselves.”

“The Spines is a damn big place,” Ace commented. “Been there a few times. Enormous trees packed so close together you can’t hardly see a hundred meters ahead of you. Thick canopy means the sun never touches the ground. And these huge, petrified trees stretching up for a thousand meters... I ain’t ever seen anything like it anywhere else on this world. And folks go disappearing there all the time, and nopony knows why.”

“Sounds like the fucking perfect place to go looking for a piece of this code.” I lit the cigarette and stuck it in my mouth, sighing as the chemicals hit my blood. I could feel Surge’s revulsion, but I didn’t care. I needed this fucking cig after all the bullshit I’d been through today. “Guess that’s where we’re going next.”

“We’ll stop at Three Rivers on the way there,” Ace said. “It’s a neutral settlement, biggest one west of the continental divide. It’ll be a welcome change of pace after Hole.”

“Good. We need to stock up on supplies and shit. Also, Mawari and Denawa are there. Maybe we can meet up with them.”

“I might pass up on that offer,” Ace said, rubbing her neck. “They’re likely gonna be right sore with me after I blew up the foundry.”

“Right... good point.” I stood up and arched my back, listening to the vertebrae in my spine crack. I wasn’t thin enough yet to actually see them, but if I ran a hoof along my back, I could feel them more than usual. All this running and fighting and nearly dying was really doing a number on me. I can’t believe that a town on the peak of a volcanic mountain could scrape together enough food to keep me better fed than this.

Ace watched me stand, then her eyes flicked to the red lights of Nova’s wing in the distance. “You gonna talk to them?”

I shook my head. “Gauge has it covered. I’m just gonna finish this cigarette and pack it in for the night.” Yawning, I added, “I have to sleep for two now, you know.”

“You better make Surge promise not to take your body for a joyride while you’re passed out.”

“I’m unsure of what state of mind I’ll be in when Ember’s body falls unconscious,” Surge said. “I may be my own consciousness, but I may not even be able to influence her brain in a REM state. It might even put me to sleep too; I don’t know.” When I frowned, she added, “Fine, I promise not to use your body while you’re asleep.”

“Thank you,” I said, trotting away from the fire. “I’m gonna take a piss. Surge, just… try not to be creepy about it, okay?”

I sensed a bit of amusement coming from her. “I make no promises.”

Ace snickered and waved at me as I left. “You girls have fun!”

“I’ll piss on you, how about that?”

“Find somepony else who’s into it, Ember. That ain’t me.”

“Ugh,” Surge grunted. “I’m surrounded by foals.”

“Get used to it, missy,” I teased, making my way through the bushes. “We’re all like, ten on the inside.”

“That much, I have certainly gathered.”