SCaR was the first one to notice that Ace and I had returned to our camp. The drone, which I’m assuming Gauge had set on high alert, flew up to us and squawked a few times before flying back to the camp with a happy trilling sound. Moments later, Gauge and Nova emerged from the tent they’d huddled down in, Gauge holding a pistol awkwardly between his teeth. Upon seeing us, he spat it out (which made me flinch, because I didn’t know if the safety was set or not) and trotted over to us. “Oh, thank the stars you’re safe, Em,” he said, hugging me and nuzzling my shoulder. “When the three of us heard the gunfire, we were afraid you were in the middle of it.”

“I mean, you ain’t wrong about that,” Ace said. “Found the dumb bitch in the middle of a shootout with three other ponies. Apparently there were nine when she started, but she’d dropped six of them by the time I got there.” She winked at me and added, “She can punch above her weight class, that’s for sure.”

“She simply got the drop on a group of slavers and rogues,” Surge said, ruining whatever thunder or pride I could’ve reaped from that. “She needed Ace to bail her out when they actually started fighting back.”

I sighed. “You couldn’t let me have just one thing, could you, Sparky?”

“What use would I be to this party of traveling misfits if I didn’t provide some common sense and perspective every now and then?”

Nova’s eyes narrowed, then widened in surprise. I already knew what she was about to say before she said it. “Who’s she?” she asked, pointing to Teka, who had just emerged from the shadows behind me and Ace. “And those tattoos! They’re amazing!”

Teka saw Nova pointing at her and pretty much squealing in excitement and frowned. “A wywe pohna’ae’un,” she grumbled. “A pohna’ae.”

“And that language!” Nova bounded past me and Ace to sit in front of the young mare. “This was really made from scratch? It sounds beautiful!”

“Dr. Hozho’s experiments stripped all knowledge of language from the subjects’ memories,” Surge explained. “They had to build a language from scratch. After nearly two hundred Auris years, this is what they came up with.”

Teka looked between all of us and frowned. “U’a tokto mnoet,” she said. “Allae ho’hn konkow lalalu.”

“Maybe we can teach her some Equiish,” Nova said. She sat down in front of the Feati mare like an over-enthusiastic teacher ready to sink her fangs of learning into a new student. “My name is Nova. Nova. This is Gauge. Gauge.” She pointed to herself and her coltfriend in turn, and then pointed to Teka. “Your name is…?”

Teka looked at me and Ace, then back at Nova. “…Teka,” she said, adopting the shorter version of her name that we’d been using. “Tekawenye Kakehote, ia Teka feh.” Then she pointed to Ace. “Ace?” she said, earning a nod from the bounty hunter. When she pointed at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. “…Embaw?”

“Ember,” I corrected. “It’s Ember.”

“Embaw,” she said again, frowning down the length of her muzzle. “Em… bow?”

“They don’t have an ‘R’ analogue in their language,” Surge said. “Fascinating…”

“Of course they don’t have the fucking letter ‘R’ in their language,” I grumbled, crossing my forelegs. “Does this mean I’m gonna have to listen to this bullshit all the time?”

As if on cue, Teka repeated her butchering of my name. “Embuh.”

“That one was closer,” Gauge said, slapping me on the shoulder. “She’s trying, at least.”

“Fuck off.”

“At least it’s better than you trying to pronounce her full name.” When I glared at him, he broke out a shit eating grin. “Go ahead, try and pronounce the full thing.”

After a moment to glare at him, I crossed my forelegs and looked the other way. “There’s a reason Ace and I decided to just call her Teka. The full thing is way too fucking complicated for us.”

“Right.” He shook his head. “So you found her with those slavers or whatever?”

“They were beating her senseless for no reason other than they could,” I said. “That’s why I lit their asses up. I wasn't going to stand by and do nothing.”

“Also, she’s a Feati mare,” Ace said. “Sparky may know generally where we’ve gotta go, but if anypony would know exactly where this thing is, it’s the Feati.”

Teka’s ears perked up when she recognized the name of her tribe. “Wuh wippa M’a Feati?” she asked, looking between all of us. “Ho’hn sahln’an saksi e immapohna’hn’un imma’un.”

“I really wish we could understand her,” I grumbled, finally deciding to drop a bag of supplies and food I’d scavenged from the slavers’ camp. “This would be so much easier if we could just ask her where the Feati are.”

“Maybe we can,” Nova said, and she moved to sit down in front of Teka. “Maybe not directly, but maybe I can make her understand.”

Ace scoffed and trotted away, shifting her attention to securing our new supplies for the night. “Good luck with that, filly. She don’t speak a lick of Equiish.”

“If anypony can figure out how to talk to her, it’s Nova,” I said. “She’s great with that kind of shit.”

I sat down on a rock and started taking apart my rifle now that I’d used it a bunch. I hadn’t really oiled it since I’d left the installation on account of not needing to use it, so I figured now was a good time for basic maintenance. And while I worked on my rifle, Nova worked on trying to communicate with Teka.

I’m not going to lie; Nova made agonizingly little progress. The two mares had no common ground to build off of other than a single word, ‘Feati’. Still, it was interesting to watch her work, watch her try to use that single word in different ways to get a message across. It reminded me of why Nova was a scientist and I was just an idiotic forgemare. I didn’t have the patience or the ability to think outside of the box like her when it came to shit like this.

But the point at which Nova was walking in place and saying “Feati, Feati” over and over again was about where I decided to draw the line with a loud and obnoxious yawn. “I’m fucking toasted,” I said, walking over to the tent Ace and I had been sharing. “Let’s continue this shit in the morning.”

“What should we do about Teka?” Nova asked me. The mare in question cautiously looked back and forth between the two of us, wondering just what we had in store for her.

I shrugged. “Let her eat and drink and then lay out a bedroll or something for her.” I pointed to the supplies Ace and I had liberated from the bandit camp. “We’ve got a spare now.”

“Aren’t you worried she’ll run off?” Nova asked.

“Or steal our shit while we’re sleeping?” Gauge chimed in. “We don’t know that we can trust her yet.”

“Guys, this mare was getting beaten senseless when I found her,” I said. I pointed to the bruises and welts covering her tattooed body. “I saved her from that. I’m pretty sure I saved her from being raped, too. I really don’t think that she’s gonna cut my throat while I sleep.”

“She could still run off,” Surge said, adding her two bullets to the conversation. “We should at least keep an eye on her.”

I turned to Gauge. “Just have SCaR do it. Have him let us know if she tries slipping away or something. I really hope we don’t have to drag her back and force her to take us to her tribe, kicking and screaming.”

“Or we could let her go and follow her,” Gauge said. “I bet she knows the layout of the land. She could probably find her way back home from here if she wanted. We could just follow her to it.”

I looked at the skinny young mare and saw how she started treating her bruises with that weird healing magic. “Something tells me that’s gonna be a lot harder than we think it is,” I said. “She can probably glide across the forest floor without making a sound. As far as we know, they don’t have any guns, and somehow they’ve survived for this long in the middle of the Spines without any modern technology. They’ve gotta be good at moving through the forest and shit.”

Yawning, I tweaked Teka’s ear with my magic, making the young mare jump. Rubbing her ear, she looked around the campsite before turning to face me. “Teka,” I said, then pointed to a bedroll off to the side. “Sleep.” To try and get the point across, I closed my eyes, hung my head, and made exaggerated snoring noises for a second or two.

I saw Teka blink and slowly rise to her hooves. She walked across our camp like she was on air, her hooves barely disturbing the ground under them or even making a noise. She hesitated in front of the pile of liberated supplies, but grabbed a bedroll between her teeth and quickly withdrew to the edge of the camp. Once there, I saw her drop the bedroll to the ground and start fumbling with the latch, trying to figure out how to get it open.

“She’s quiet, that’s for sure,” Gauge said.

“I told you it’d be hard to track her,” I said. “Let’s just hope that she doesn’t run on us.” After a second to look around, I spotted a feathery silhouette moving through the trees, humming a tune to herself. “I guess Ace is volunteering for first watch. Who knows what sort of bad news we might have attracted with that firefight earlier.” Yawning, I started to stand up and reached for my rifle. “I should help her.”

“Ember, it’s fine,” Nova said, standing up even faster. “You look like you could sleep for a hundred years. Get some rest; I’ll keep Ace company.”

I frowned, rifle still held in my magical grasp. “But—”

“Ember,” Nova said again, using a scolding, motherly tone. “You and Ace always take watch all the time. Gauge and I hardly have the chance to help. Just because I’m bad at using a gun doesn’t mean I can’t help the ponies who can use one keep a lookout.”

After a moment of thought, I sighed and sat back down. “Fine,” I said. “I should probably be here at camp anyway. Our new guest will probably feel a lot better if the one who rescued her isn’t too far away.”

“Good.” Nova flashed a smile at me, then turned and kissed Gauge. “I’ll be back in a bit, sweetie. Make sure Ember doesn’t do anything else stupid.”

“I hardly have to do any work, then,” Gauge said. “Sparky will keep Ember in line for me.”

“It’s a lot more difficult of a task than you realize,” Surge said. “Especially when her every instinct is to do something stupid.”

“It’s not my every instinct,” I protested. “Only like ninety percent of them.”

Gauge chuckled and waved me off. “Go to sleep, Em. Me and SCaR will keep things under control here. Besides…” He pointed off to his right and my left. “Somepony’s already got the right idea.”

I blinked and looked in that direction to see Teka curled up in a ball on her bedroll. She hadn’t actually made it inside of the bedroll, but she looked comfortable enough on top of it. Maybe that was just how her tribe slept. Either that, or she didn’t know the thing could open after unrolling it.

“That’s a good sign, I guess,” I said, shuffling back towards my tent. “She’d only sleep if she wasn’t afraid of us. Or just really fucking tired.”

“Probably a combination of both.” Gauge waved once as I lifted the flap of my tent. “Get some sleep, Em. You deserve it.”

“Fuck yeah I do,” I mumbled, and then slipped inside. After a few minutes to settle down and kick my bedroll into a more comfortable position, I finally drifted off to a restful sleep.

I sat at a table in the Stardust, my attention focused on the outside. Space was weird here, different. The ships used some sort of teleportation spell to cross the great distances between the stars, but I wasn’t completely sure of how it worked. The physics and magic involved were leagues above anything I ever studied. They were created by our High Queen herself during my lifetime; it was amazing to think that interstellar travel didn’t exist when I was a foal. So many of the things we had now were thought up by our High Queen’s mind, and the war had given us the drive to perfect the technology we needed to use the theories she created.

The reflection of another mare darted across the porthole, a splash of white and yellow against the shifting purple fibers of the universe our corvette was slipping through. Without even turning to look at her, I gave voice to the concerns I’d had since we’d left Equus two days ago.

“Do you think Auris is going to be everything they said it would be?”

The other mare’s reflection stopped in the window. “You know better than I do that the Synarchy never tells us the truth, Surge. I don’t get to know all the secrets like you.”

I turned around and shot her a warning glare. “Flask, keep it down! You know you can’t say things like that.”

Flask scoffed and sauntered closer to my table. She was a pretty mare once, though years of stress and our mandatory military service had taken their toll on her, just like everypony else. “What are they going to do, doctor? Shoot me now? Throw me out an airlock? We’re two hours from entering the system. We’ll be on the planet in another day.”

“Yes, Flask, they would. I’ve seen enough of the inside to know how things run. The only reason I’ve let you and my team run… looser is because the Synarchy needs us and they know it.”

“Sounds like even more reason for them to not give a damn about what I say.”

“Flask…” I hesitated. What I was about to say was nothing short of treason. “You know the war isn’t going as well as they say.”

Flask wasn’t concerned. She shook her head and chuckled once, giving me a look. “Doctor, everypony knows the war isn’t going as well as they say. We’d have won by now if it was.”

“No, Flask. We’re losing.”

The mirth evaporated from her face almost immediately. “…Losing?”

“Yes. Losing.”

“But that’s not what the vids say,” she protested. “They showed a tour of the battlefield at Antler Ridge after the fighting and—!”

“Flask, that footage is ten years old.” My breath caught in my throat as unpleasant memories resurfaced. “I know because it was my husband who took it after the battle. The Synarchy got it from him.”

“But… do you know how bad it is?”

I didn’t have anything to say. I was afraid that if I said anything, I’d send her into a panic.

“Doctor Surge, please! You had the ears of some of the High Queen’s advisors! What’s happening on Equus? I… I left my husband and my three kids behind because I thought we’d help win this war!”

Tears started to well in her eyes. I could see her doubting nearly every decision she’d made for the past few years, wondering if she made the right choice to sign her life away on my stupid project and leave her family behind. “Flask…”

The metal grating actually bent when she stomped her hoof. I was at least glad she took her earth pony strength out on the floor and not my face. “Tell me!”

I steeled myself for what I said next. “…There’s a reason why the military is shoring up defenses around major metropolises. It’s only a matter of time.”

Once more I saw my words leave her speechless. “Celestia! How… no, that can’t be right! You must’ve heard wrong!”

“We’re splitting at the seams, Flask. It’s only a matter of time now.” I fidgeted with the cup of coffee between my hooves. “The Coalition just has too many soldiers and too much industry. We can’t carry the weight of the world on our backs.”

Flask hung her head and walked over to my table. Sighing, she sat down across from me and rested her head in her hooves. “How did we get into this mess? How did we get here?”

I said something I’d never thought I’d say in my lifetime. Perhaps leaving Equus and crawling out from under the hoof of Equestria’s government had freed those words. Still my voice was barely more than a whisper. “Through the same blind fanaticism to our government that ponykind has had for generations. We needed a change, but we never got one. Now it’s all crashing down.”

“Then why are we even out here?” Flask cried. “Why are we even going to Auris? If the war’s already lost, why bother? I should be home with my family, not traveling lightyears away!”

“I don’t know, Flask,” I said. “The High Queen and her council must simply be getting desperate. They’re grasping for anything that’ll give them a miracle to end this war.”

“Why doesn’t our High Queen actually do something?!” she shouted. “She has the magic of four alicorns in her. She could win the war in a single blow, and she’s done nothing!”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “Have you ever seen the High Queen up close?”

Flask shook her head. “No,” she said. “Only at parades and marches.”

“I have. She uses illusions in public to maintain her appearance. But… she looks like a skeleton.”

Flask narrowed her eyes at me. “How would you know? How’d you get close enough?”

“It was an accident. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.” I shook my head. “During the first test of our prototype mana reactor. It was just me, her, and her retinue in an observation room when we powered it up. It sucked the illusion off her body. She looks so frail.”

I took a deep gulp of my coffee like it was something stiff. “I had to swear under penalty of death not to tell anypony about what I saw. If you so much as say a word of this to anypony… if word gets out…” I swallowed hard.

Thankfully, Flask put her hoof on mine. “It’s safe with me,” she said in a shaky voice. “But if our High Queen’s too weak to save us… what do we do? What can we do?”

“Our job,” I said, putting my cup aside. “We carry on like normal. But if this whole thing’s going bottom up… we might have to fend for ourselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“When we move into our new facility, I want to have a private meeting with all our crew,” I said. “If Equestria surrenders, the soldiers we’re with might mutiny. I don’t trust them to keep the peace when they’re light years away from anypony who can punish them. Besides,” I added, “most of the soldiers assigned to Auris are there because of behavioral misconduct and demotions. These aren’t model Synarchy soldiers. These are the ponies they don’t want on the front lines. And in a war this desperate, that’s saying something.”

“Celestia have mercy,” Flask said, shaking her head. “Celestia save us all…”

I woke up the next morning nearly out of breath. What was that dream? Did… did Surge just admit to that other mare that the Synarchy was a sham? A fucking lie? That didn’t seem to make sense at all. Almost every moment I’d had interacting with her, she’d seemed all pro-Synarchy. What was going on?

That confusion eventually washed away and I gathered my bearings. I was still inside the tent, so Surge hadn’t moved me or something while my mind was sleeping, though I couldn’t tell if she was also awake or not. My skull was quiet for the time being. But even if she had wanted to move me, she might have had trouble doing so, because Ace was basically using me as a body pillow. Her breath tickled the back of my neck, and she had her forehooves wrapped around my midsection, my branded flank tucked underneath one of her hind legs.

I tell you one thing, I wasn’t expecting to wake up that morning as the little spoon. What was even more strange was that I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to move at all or go anywhere while still held in Ace’s embrace. It was comforting and warm… and reminded me of good times that seemed so far away.

Honestly, I have to wonder at this point whether I just have a thing for cuddly pegasus mare badasses or what. Because I was two for two since leaving Blackwash.

My ears twitched at the sound of Nova’s voice outside. I guess she was already up, and by the sound of it, she was trying to communicate with our native guest again. That was good; it meant Teka hadn’t tried to run off in the middle of the night. If she trusted us enough to sleep at our camp, then maybe she’d trust us enough to take us where we needed to go.

I reluctantly used my magic to get myself out of Ace’s grip without waking her up. For a moment, I thought about trying to teleport, but then I remembered that my horn was still taxed and sore from all the teleportation I’d done the day before. Instead, I settled with just lifting her legs with telekinesis and shimmying out of our tent. She stirred and lifted her head for a moment, but when she saw it was only me, she sighed and went back to sleep. She may have been a light sleeper, but she knew how to catch what she could, when she could. Years of wandering Auris will do that to you.

There wasn’t any direct sunlight outside of the tent, and I could smell rain in the air. It’d probably be hitting us within a few hours, so I needed to make sure my horn was ready to hold a rain shield for five bodies. At least I had Surge to help with that. Playing host to two souls was great for my mana reserves. But in the meantime, I needed breakfast. We had a long day ahead of us.

I saw my two best friends sitting around our campfire, which I guess Gauge had restocked with wood for this morning. Nova was continuing to try to pantomime things to Teka, who mostly gave her confused looks, while Gauge was kindling a small fire he’d started with SCaR’s thrusters. While he struggled with that, I simply lit my horn and made the wood erupt into a healthy blaze. When he looked up at me, I winked at him. “Leave the fire to the expert.”

“Well, the ‘expert’ was sleeping, so I tried to make do myself.” He reached into one of his saddlebags and pulled out some slabs of what was basically hardtack, threw them in a pan, and poured some water in it. “Breakfast will be ready in a few. Maybe you can help Nov with her hopeless cause.”

I glanced at Nova, who shot Gauge a look. “I’m making progress!” she protested, pouting. “I’m learning a bunch of things! Like, pegasus is ‘pohna flaga’ and unicorn is ‘pohna magis’. And from that, I can tell that ‘pony’ is probably ‘pohna’ and they describe our race by what makes us special!” She extended her wing and pointed to it. “My wing is a ‘flaga’ and your horn is a ‘magis’! Isn’t this so exciting?!”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure,” I said, sitting down at her side. Teka gave me a look of exasperation and frustration, and her silvery tattoos briefly flickered red and yellow. Smirking, I bumped Nova’s shoulder. “I think she just wants food. Maybe save being a language-ologist for after breakfast.”

Nova groaned and put a hoof to her forehead. “They’re called linguists, Em.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I said.”

Apparently Nova’s frustration with me being an idiot amused Teka. The young mare allowed herself to smile for a brief moment and she nodded to me. “A U’a hatot,” she said. Then she pointed at Nova and frowned. “S’a takka allae. Takka takka takka.”

Even I could figure out that one. “I think she says you talk too much,” I said, struggling to try and keep something resembling a straight face. “I think I agree with her.”

“I do not talk too much!” Nova protested. “I’m just trying to learn her language! It’ll help us out later!”

“Takka takka takka,” Teka repeated.

Nova spun in place and crossed her forelegs. “Gauge, I don’t talk too much, do I?”

“Whatever you say, Nov,” he said without looking up from the fire.

I snickered and patted Nova on the back. “Don’t worry about it too much, Nov. Somepony’s gotta do all the talking for us.”

A loud yawn broke the peace of the morning, and a tent flap rustled open. Ace stepped into the dreary morning light and rubbed her eyes with her wings. “Fehhh… morning already?” she mumbled, glancing between the three of us. She sniffed the air and saw the hardtack thing Gauge was preparing over the fire and grimaced. “We use up all our fresh food? I hate ReadyTack. Ain’t nopony can make a blander thing if they tried.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “The Sentinels have been living off of military rations stocked away in the Bastion since before the Silence. It’s like eating chunky cardboard soup. It’s got about the same consistency, too.”

Gauge made a face and shuddered. “Honestly, eating next to nothing while I was in captivity was almost better than that crap they ate. How did they keep morale up when that’s all they had to eat every day?”

“Beats me.” I shrugged and took a sip of water, then offered it to Teka. “You want some? You look thirsty.”

After a moment, Teka nodded her head. “Hatot bele U’a,” she muttered, taking the thing between her hooves. She took several long gulps, sighed, and the tattoos covering her body flickered and pulsed a few times. When she passed it back to me, I saw a lining of frost coating the outside of the waterskin, and the water inside was chilled and nearly freezing.

Nova saw the ice on it, slowly beginning to melt under the heat of the day. “Teka did that?” she asked in surprise. She whipped her head to the mare, dumbstruck. “How did you do that?”

Teka, of course, didn’t understand any of that, and turned her nose up at Nova. “La takka,” she grumbled. “U’a yut.”

“Yeah, what she said.” I saw Gauge taking the food off of the fire and started rubbing my hooves together. “Let’s get some of that, I’m starving, and Sparky’s still sleeping or something so I can at least enjoy the quiet in my brain during a meal for once.”

“Right.” Gauge cut up the food and put it onto little tin plates, and I passed them around the fire. Teka gave hers a suspicious look and poked it once or twice with her hoof, but when she saw the rest of us eating, she picked the plate up and took a nibble of a corner. Almost immediately, her face screwed up and she gagged, spitting the little bite she’d taken out and pushing the ReadyTack aside. Honestly, I couldn’t blame her. It was like eating tree pulp or something.

Then, almost without warning, the young mare stood up and trotted off into the woods. The four of us all stopped chewing and watched her slip between some bushes, wondering what that was all about.

I swallowed what was in my mouth and looked around at my friends. “So… bets on if she’s gonna come back?”

Nova pouted and hunched over some. “Aww… I feel like we were starting to make progress, too!”

“Your cooking scared the poor filly off,” Ace said, winking at Gauge. “ReadyTack ain’t luxury dining, that’s for sure.”

Gauge sighed and took another bite. “I can’t control that,” he said around his mouthful. “I’m just using this since we have plenty of it and you only need a couple of bites to fill up.”

“Thank the stars,” I muttered, forcing myself to swallow another mouthful. I only had like two left, but this shit was awful to eat. “I don’t think I’d be able to deal with this stuff otherwise.”

“It sure as shit ain’t carrots,” Ace agreed, forcing the last of her morsel down her throat. Grimacing, she wiped her muzzle and set the tin aside. “Y’all sleep good?”

Nova and Gauge nodded. “I always sleep well when it’s just us two,” Nova said, shooting a flirty look across the fire at Gauge.

“She snores,” Gauge said, smirking. He leaned out of the way when Nova flung a pebble at him, chuckling. “You’ve gotta be quicker than th—!”

He fell backwards as another pebble struck him square in the chest like a bullet. Blinking, I stared at Nova, who was seemingly frozen in place with worry, her prosthetic wing extended and pointing in Gauge’s direction. When the zebra coughed and sat up, an apologetic smile wormed its way onto her muzzle. “Sorry… I’m still not used to this thing.”

“It’s… alright,” Gauge said between coughs. He rubbed a sore spot on his chest and shook his head. “Just be careful with that thing. I don’t want it to shoot lasers at me or something.”

“You need to give that thing a big shakedown,” Ace said, pointing to the prosthetic. “Figure out what it can do and all. Better yet, get Sparky to tell you how it works. I betcha she knows.”

I yawned and gulped down the last of my disgusting breakfast. At least I wouldn’t need to eat for another six hours. “You know I sometimes share dreams with her, right?”

“You’ve mentioned it,” Nova said, her ears perking up. “I’d love to be able to do some testing on it someday. That sort of interaction between soul memories is something never studied before! Or… well, at least not on Auris. Maybe on Equus, but who knows?”

“Right.” I shook my head. “Anyway, she had this dream last night, and I saw it through her eyes. It was a conversation with a coworker or something while she was still traveling to Auris.”

“What was it about?” Gauge asked. “How much she hates us striped folk?”

“I bet it had something to do with the Synarchy,” Ace grumbled. “That mare’s got a thing for fascism.”

“Maybe…” I said. “Or maybe not.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “What do you mean, Em?”

“She seemed disillusioned with the whole thing,” I said. “She was saying things to her friend that she made it sound like would probably get her executed for treason. Bad things about how the Synarchy was losing the war and it probably wouldn’t be long before they surrendered. And then she said that their High Queen couldn’t save them even though she was supposed to be super powerful because she was actually frail as shit and just hiding it with illusions.” Shrugging, I added, “I’d love to know more about what happened in those last days, months, years or whatever that got us into this fucking mess of a planet, but Surge doesn’t know anything about what happened, just like us.”

“Their High Queen was Twilight Sparkle, right?” Ace asked. When I nodded, she crossed her forelegs. “Didn’t she have the magic of the other alicorns that died? How could she be weak and frail?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Surge doesn’t know either. But Equestria’s immortal goddess ruler was apparently knocking on Death’s door and nopony knew it. She probably was too weak to save herself from a fly, the way she made it sound.”

“Stars,” Nova murmured. Her wings fidgeted at her sides as she thought, but ultimately she kicked her rear hoof in frustration. “Darn it, now I want to know what happened to her, too!” she exclaimed. “We’re trying to piece together forgotten history more than two centuries after it happened with nothing more than hearsay and little notes left here and there. It’s frustrating!”

“I just want to know how it relates to the code,” I said. “Why was it sent, and what was Auris supposed to do with it? Why did it arrive now instead of earlier? What the fuck was the Dusk Protocol supposed to do?” I rubbed my hooves against my temples and chewed on my lower lip. “Fuck, I hate thinking.”

Apparently, my overheating brain was enough to wake Surge up. I felt the fuzzy edges of her consciousness fumble around mine, and my limbs twitched and horn sparked a few times as she sort of kicked at the controls some. When she slipped back into her co-pilot seat in my brain, my body yawned in response, even though I wasn’t tired. My posture straightened some, and Surge darted my eyes around. “I see we’re already eating breakfast,” she said.

“Yeah,” I responded. “Be glad that you were asleep for it.”

“Oh, I am. ReadyTack is horrid, if nutritious.” She contorted my face into a frown and looked at the blank spot around the fire. “What happened to our little savage? Did she run off in the middle of the night?”

“Weren’t the middle of the night,” Ace grumbled.

I shook my head at her. “She’ll be back. She just… went for a walk.”

Gauge rolled his eyes. “I don’t think she’s coming back, Em,” he said. “She’s probably going to slip back to her tribe so us outsiders don’t follow her.”

“But I tried communicating with her that we wanted to take her back,” Nova whined. “We could’ve all gone there together!”

“Which is probably why she left, truth be told.”

“Assuming she could even understand you in the first place,” Surge said. “Did you make any progress on that front?”

“A little,” Nova said. “We can pick out a few words here and there. Mostly nouns that we can point to and other stuff I can kind of figure out from context. Her language is strange. It sounds like something completely alien yet familiar at the same time. Pony is ‘pohna’, and talk is ‘takka’, and both of those kind of sound the same in Equiish.”

Surge nodded my head. “Given that Dr. Hozho’s test subjects knew language before it was magically stripped from them, it makes sense that some things would have similar analogues, likely construed from memory of what the words were supposed to sound like.”

Nova frowned at the fire. “I don’t even know what to say when you mention things the Synarchy did. Your lack of ethics is horrifying.”

“We were fighting a war,” Surge said, as if that would somehow make everything better. “We tried everything to win it. Ethics were standing in the way of our very survival as a species.”

I sighed. “Look, girls, can we not get into this argument again? I at least need a cigarette first.” As I said that, I pulled one out of my box and lit it. After a long draw on it, I started really feeling like myself again, like I was ready to conquer anything.

A twig snapped in the undergrowth, and both Ace and I instinctively reached for our guns and pointed it in that direction. Instead of some bandits seeking revenge or a horrifying monster native to this forest, we saw Teka wandering out of the purple bushes. She held a bundle of roots and berries in a makeshift basket she’d made from some long blades of grass and dropped them on the ground in front of her. When she saw our guns pointed at her, she shrank back a bit, at least until Ace and I realized who we were pointing them at and set them aside again.

“A sotto bele stomm hatot,” she said. “Allae saffowy” To show us what she meant, she sat down in front of her pile of berries and popped a few in her mouth.

I found myself licking my lips at the sight of actual food. Suddenly the five of us were silent, watching Teka work on her breakfast. I hesitantly lit my horn and put a field of telekinesis over one of the berries, holding it there for a few seconds and raising my eyebrows in a questioning manner when Teka looked at me. “You mind?”

Though she didn’t understand what I said, she at least knew what I meant. Dipping her head, she nosed the pile a little closer. “Timm.”

I assumed that meant it was okay, so I floated the berry over and popped it in my mouth. At first I worried it was actually poisonous, because it had a really strong bitter taste, but after about five seconds, it became tart and sweet, bordering on sour. By the time I swallowed it, my stomach was starting to remind me that I’d only eaten a couple of bites of incredibly nutrient-dense hardtack and didn’t actually fill it with food. “Holy crap, those things are good.”

“I’m just excited that she’s back,” Nova said. Grinning at Teka, she waved her natural wing. “Hello, Teka!”

Teka blinked and looked at her for a few moments. Eventually, she replied with “Teol, Nofa.”

“I guess they don’t have ‘V’ in their alphabet, either,” Surge remarked. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a true challenge to stretch my mind around. It feels refreshing.”

“Yeah, well, that’s something we can take care of later,” I said. Turning to Ace, I nodded to our tent. “We should start getting this stuff packed up. It’s gonna be raining soon and I don’t want to have to hold a shield over the whole campsite while we’re packing up.”

“Can’t we just wait for it to pass?” Nova asked. “We can just hunker down in our tents and wait until it’s dry to move.”

But I didn’t want to do that. “Yeoman has a head start on us, and his team can fly and scout the area while we’re stuck on the ground. Besides, we’re not even at the Spines yet. The trees aren’t petrified.”

“It’s about another day’s walk to the southwest,” Ace said. “If we move soon, we can reach it by nightfall.”

“And we’ve got a guide to take us right to her tribe,” I said, looking at Teka, who had a smattering of berry juices and root bark on her muzzle. “We don’t have to go searching for her home if she’ll take us there.”

“I don’t know if she’ll do that,” Gauge said. “I still don’t trust her to actually cooperate with us. We’re outsiders, and tribal ponies usually tend to be protective of their homelands.”

“And how many tribal ponies have you met?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow.

He shook his head and stood up, collecting his things. “Whatever,” he said. “Just be ready for us to find our own way when she ditches us.”

“She’s not gonna ditch us,” I insisted. Then, turning to Teka, I smiled at her. “Teka,” I said, catching her attention. Then I moved my hoof in a circle to gesture to all of us and pointed through the trees. “Feati?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

She frowned at me, a particularly juicy berry still perched between her teeth. Then her tongue moved and the berry disappeared into her jaw. After a moment to chew and swallow, she looked at the trees around her, glanced at the sky, and pointed to the southwest. “Feati,” she said, keeping her foreleg outstretched. “Feati stumm.”

I shot a smirk at Nova, who shook her head. “See, Nov? That wasn’t so hard! You don’t have to learn the language to talk to her, you just gotta do a little charades!”

“Charades will only get us so far,” she grumbled. “I just want to know how to talk with her when we actually need to.”

“We’ll worry about that as we get to it,” I said. “That’ll take some time anyway.” Then, stretching my legs, I plucked another berry and crushed it between my teeth. “I’m gonna help Ace pack. I want to get moving as soon as possible. We’ve got a long and wet day ahead of us.”