I couldn’t stop staring at my left flank. It was amazing.

Instead of scarred, white flesh cutting through the lines of my cutie mark, there was nothing but colored hair. For the first time in weeks, I was free from what the Crimson did to me. Even though the stupid mark was permanently seared into my flesh, and even though I could still feel it if I ran my hoof over it, Manchado’s illusion hid it from sight, for the time being. It was like she’d let me live for a few days like I wasn’t somepony’s property.

Hooves grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back. I yelped in surprise and kicked out my hooves, only to find them scrabbling against hard stone, kicking some pebbles down a steep hill in front of me. I fell onto my ass, dropping my bags all over the ground, and tottered backwards to see Gauge staring down at me.

“You really need to watch where you’re going,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Em, you should really stop falling off of things!” Nova squawked, grinning at me. “One of these days I’m not gonna be fast enough to catch you before you go splat!”

Groaning, I sat forward and threw my bags back onto my shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I’m just so…”

“Emancipated? Free?” she clarified when I gave her a blank look. I nodded, and she glanced at her own illusory flank. “I know what you mean. Even if it’s still there, just pretending that it never happened is…” She shuddered, and Gauge patted her shoulder.

“If only they could just heal the thing and make it go away,” Gauge said.

I stood up with my bags and shook my head. “I went and asked the Sentinels’ doctor, Hacksaw, about it once. In addition to telling me to quit my whining and to stop being such a little bitch about it,” I said with a half-smirk, “he told me that you can’t fix cutie marks.”

“But why?” Gauge asked. “Do you really have to carry those things for the rest of your lives?”

“Because healing magic doesn’t remove scars,” I said, shrugging. “Healing spells don’t fix flesh, they just make it grow faster or something, so it scars. You can’t fix a scar with a scar. That’s why my stomach’s all fucked up,” I said, raising on my hind legs and pointing to the three claw lines of pink skin showing through my black coat, “or why I’m missing half an ear.”

They were quiet for a little bit as that all sunk in, but Nova cleared her throat and made a show of shrugging her shoulders. “But, like, so what, then?” she asked. “It doesn’t change who we are as mares. It’s just a mark, and it comes with a backup, right?”

“But it means we’re property,” I said, bitterly.

“In Hole, maybe, and maybe some other places, but not everywhere!” she said. “Not in the valley, not anymore. Not at the dam, either. And who knows? Maybe not the rest of Auris, if we can find this code thingy and get it back to the Sentinels.”

“We don’t even know what it does,” I said.

“That’s why we need to get to Hole,” Gauge said. “Somepony there might have an idea about what’s going on. And the sooner we can get in and out of there, the sooner we can go someplace safe where you two don’t have to worry about your brands.”

“Right.” Cracking my neck, I looked out in front of me. The mountains had finally begun to fall away at our sides, and there was nothing but tons of open grassland as far as the eye could see, apart from an old and broad mountain range further to the southeast. Behind us lay the small valley that led through a split in the mountains to Sawdust’s and Manchado’s mining camp. They’d given us supplies after casting the illusions and sent us on our way. It’d been several hours since then, but thankfully with Auris’ twenty-eight hour days, we still had another three or four hours of daylight left to make it to Hole.

And rising out of the grasslands like a disgusting wart…

“Is that it?” Nova asked, flying up a bit to get a better look. “It’s…”

“Exactly what I thought it was going to look like,” I said. My eyes darted over the disgusting mound of gutted rock sitting all alone in the grasslands. We’d learned a few more details about Hole from talking with Manchado and Sawdust, including some of its history. Hole was founded in the remains of an ancient Synarchy mine that hollowed out the inside of this lonely mountain sitting in the middle of nowhere, hence the name. Even from here, this far away, I could see a few clearly pony-made watchtowers perched on the mountain’s rocky face, watching the entirety of the land below. Some slums crawled up the mountainside, reaching ever higher; I wondered what they were going to do when they eventually made it to the top of the mountain.

“They sold ponies from Blackwash there,” Gauge commented. “Who knows how many before them.”

“Nothing we can really do about it,” I said, shrugging. “That place might be even more secure than the dam. Just think of how much business they do there. They probably have more bullets than the Sentinels.”

“It’s a city, too,” Nova said, her eyes wide in a weird mixture of awe and disgust. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She was right; that was the first time any of us had seen a real city before. Blackwash was just a town, and the Bastion and the dam were just forts. Hole was a real city, home to thousands of ponies, each scraping out livings in their own ways. They probably had a real government and local politics, too, things that were almost alien to us in Blackwash. Admittedly, a small part of me was a little excited to get to learn more about Auris. The rest of me was mostly disgusted.

“We should get going,” Gauge said. “The sun will be setting in a few hours, and tolans roam these plains.”

“I’m all for avoiding the giant death lizards,” Nova said. “I don’t want to be turned into pega-bits.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said. Adjusting the straps of my bags and making sure my rifle was ready, I began to follow the path down out of the mountains and onto the plains. “Let’s get going.”

It took us a deceptively long time to actually cross those plains and make it to Hole. It felt like every time I looked up, the mountain was in the same spot, never getting closer. That is, whenever I could see it, really. I couldn’t tell from standing on that ledge earlier, but the grasses down here were six or seven feet tall on average. Their spiky orange tufts swayed above my head, and their thick stalks spilled a white sap whenever we broke them. It was why we couldn’t graze on Auris, despite that overwhelming instinct to just bend over and take a bite off the ground whenever we were hungry. A pound of that grass and you’d be sick for a day with horrible stomach cramps and shit. Two pounds and you’re dead, vomiting out bits of your insides.

Nova flew above the grass, and she’d given some of her load to Gauge and I to shoulder so she could do so. Her sharp pegasus eyes scanned the grasslands while we forged our own path through the grass, keeping an eye out for trouble or other ponies. But even she couldn’t see deep into the shadows of the grasses.

If my reflexes had been faster, and the safety on my rifle been turned off, I might’ve gotten all of us killed. Instead, when we were less than half an hour away from Hole, with the mountain looming above us, four ponies camouflaged in the oranges and reds of the grasses burst out from either side of the path, weapons raised.

SCaR let out an alarmed chirp and deployed its electric probe while I fumbled with my rifle, but before I could even get it on target, I had a gun barrel shoved almost up my nose. I blinked at the soot-stained steel in my face and wrinkled my nose at the smell, and after a second, I let my magic die away. I didn’t want to give the stallion a reason to shoot me.

There was a surprised squawk above me followed by a thud, and I quickly glanced to my side to see Nova struggling with a net wrapped around her and two pegasi holding it down on either end. Behind me, Gauge looked like he’d all but stopped breathing as a pair of automatics stared him down from either side. While SCaR whirred angrily above us, it didn’t try to tase anypony.

The grasses around us rustled some more, and a tall brown earth pony in cobbled together armor lazily strode out. She didn’t say anything until she stood almost right in front of me, and all it took was a wave of her hoof to get the other ponies to lower their weapons. Her eyes looked me over—or, I guess, I assume so, since I couldn’t see them behind her chipped aviators—and her nostrils flared after a moment. “Why weren’t you on the caravan path?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.

You know, I never felt myself really wanting for anything in life. Maybe sometimes I wish I was a little smarter so I could understand the nonsense Nova spouts half the time, but then I’d actually stop and think about my actions before I did them. If there was anything, though, I wished that I was good with words. You know, a real silver tongue that could talk me out of any situation.

Instead, I just answered her with, “This isn’t the caravan path?”

It was stupid, and the second I realized what I said I realized just how stupid it was. Yeah, of course this wasn’t the caravan path, you fucking idiot. The lack of an actual path was a good hint.

Gauge groaned, and I could imagine him rolling his eyes. Nova stopped her struggles with the net to only look at me for a second, probably in awe of my stupidity. At least SCaR didn’t care. I think.

The mare slowly reached a hoof up to her aviators, then slowly pushed them down the top of her muzzle until I found myself looking at orange eyes. “…Excuse me?”

“Uh… like, what I meant was, we weren’t on the caravan path because we didn’t come that way,” I said, feeling a fresh wave of sweat breaking out under the heat of both the summer sun and the mare’s stare. “We came from the mountains, and there aren’t really any roads that go to Hole from there, so…”

I felt the brand on my flank burning, and I suddenly became paranoid about whether Manchado’s illusion was up to snuff. I wasn’t entirely sure because they didn’t have any badges or anything, but I figured that these ponies might be part of the RPR. They certainly looked the part. I mean, why else would they be stalking through the grasses in camouflaged armor?

“And what were the three of you doing in the mountains?” the mare asked, glancing over my head to where the tallest peaks of the distant range were just visible through the tall grasses around us. “That’s Crimson territory.”

Before she could come to a conclusion and ask her guards to feel up our flanks for marks, I decided to cut in with the only thing I could think of: the truth. “Carrion’s dead,” I said, earning surprised looks from the ponies around us. “The Crimson got blown the fuck out. The Sentinels are in charge of the dam now.” I made a show of giving Nova and Gauge a sympathetic glance before turning back to the mare. “We figured that somepony would want to know the details. They might be worth a lot of bullets to the right people. That, and we just wanted to get out of the valley in case things went to shit again.”

The mare thought that over for a bit, and I could see her teeth working the inside of her cheek. “And how do I know any of this is true?” she asked me. “We’ve seen runaways from the north before.”

I puffed out my chest a bit. “Runaways? Us?” I tried to sound indignant, and it took all my willpower to keep my knees from shaking. “Do we look like runaways to you? Stocked with weapons, bullets, supplies, and most importantly, meat on our fucking bones?” I took a bold step forward and stood eye to eye (or at least tried to) with her. “When was the last time you saw a runaway, huh? I thought you guys were supposed to be good at your jobs.”

Okay, so maybe I did have a little bit of a way with words, because I’d certainly caught Aviators here off guard. Most importantly, however, I was right that she was RPR; she wouldn’t have expected any runaway slave to talk so boldly to her if they knew who they were talking to. She frowned and looked me over for a second before backing off a step and spitting into the dirt. I decided to count that as a victory.

“Don’t you think you know my job better than me, bitch,” she said, flinging her aviators back into their natural position with a toss of her head. I bit down on my tongue as she leaned to her right to get a better look at our left flanks, covered by Manchado’s illusion. After a moment’s scrutiny, she frowned and gestured to her troops, who began to rally around her. “You’re wasting my time. There are a pair of runaways loose out here, and they’re probably getting farther away while I sit here talking to your whore face. So how’s about you apologize and compensate me for the trouble and we go our separate ways.”

“And why should we do that?” I asked her. “You’re the one who jumped us and shoved guns in our faces.”

“Because I’ll break your legs over your back like twigs before I haul your pretty little ass back to the auction house and sell you for two bricks of fifties if you don’t.” She smirked at whatever facial expression I made as I tried to imagine that and stuck her hoof out. “Way I see it, I was paid to find two runaways, so I’m either coming home with two runaways and two mags of .308s or three runaways. I don’t give a shit either way.”

I wanted to say something back at her and try to wipe that smug grin off her face, but Gauge put his hoof on my shoulder and pressed hard. “Let’s just give them what they want,” he said, eyes matching the big mare’s. “For the inconvenience.”

I glared at the mare as I undid my ammo bag and dropped the two mags into her outstretched hoof. That was sixty Cs I wasn’t going to see again. She moved her hoof a bit to feel the weight, then just smiled at me as she pocketed them. “You might want to get moving,” she said, and a twist of her hoof caused the barrel of what looked like an anti-tank rifle to appear from the side of her armor. “The grasses get dangerous after sundown. We sometimes see parts of pretty little mares like you strewn all about when we go hunting. Wargs aren’t known for their table manners, and they don’t like to clean up after themselves.”

I quietly let the threat go over my head. Instead, I helped Nova stand as two of the RPR ponies took the net off of her. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

“You’d do well to,” Aviators said. Then, gesturing to her squad, she pointed off to her left. “Alright, come on, the longer we’re out here, the longer you’ll have to wait to get shitfaced! Move it!”

As one, the ponies disappeared into the grasses again, except for the big mare. She just gave me a poisonous grin and winked. “I’ll look for you when I’m back in Hole. Maybe we can sit down and have a few friendly drinks.” And then, with a snort, she galloped into the grasses after her squad.

Gauge, Nova, and I just stood there as we listened to the rustling of the grasses grow fainter and fainter. After what felt like an eternity, I just turned to the two of them with a smile. “I think she likes me.”

I kept looking over my shoulder during the rest of the walk to Hole. It felt like there were dozens of ponies hiding in the grasses around us, all watching us and ready to jump out at a moment’s notice. Gauge had put SCaR on high alert, but it was hard to trust the little sentry robot’s scanners; after all, Miss Aviators and her RPR squad jumped us without it even detecting them.

“Do you think she knew?” Nova asked in a low voice, her eyes shifting left and right through the grasses.

“No,” I said. “If she did know, she would’ve captured us and taken all our shit. The three of us, our gear, and SCaR are worth a lot more than two random runaways, I’d think.”

Of course, that was just what I told Nova. Deep inside, I worried that the RPR mare didn’t let on as much as she knew. I had a sickening feeling in my gut that rather than going through the trouble to drag us back to Hole, she was content to let us walk right into the city ourselves and then arrest us once we were there. Her parting comment about having a few ‘friendly’ drinks only reinforced that in my mind.

Though I’d relieved Nova’s fears a little bit, she still seemed on edge, like her coltfriend. Gauge, ever the one to drop a wry comment here or there, had been all but silent since the encounter. And knowing Gauge, that meant he’d been thinking. Hard. “Speak up, Gauge, I can’t read minds,” I said, smirking a little bit as I jolted him out of his thoughts.

“Hmm? Oh.” He shook his head and quickened his trot a bit to walk by my side. “Maybe we should just pass Hole over. Those illusions are only going to last a few days, and we don’t want to be caught inside when they wear off.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We can get in easy, assuming that security there doesn’t feel like copping a feel off of Nova and I for entering. We’ll be in and out in like a day. We just have to check around, ask if anypony knows where any big Equestrian installations are.”

“I’m not worried about getting in,” Gauge said, frowning. “Getting out is going to be the hard part.”

“We’ll make it work okay? Trust me.”

In truth, I had no idea how I was going to make any of this work. Who was I going to talk to? Who could I even trust in a place like Hole? What was I going to do if the RPR came for me? In the end, I decided to adopt my usual plan of ‘fuck it’ and just improvise on the fly. Because when had that led me wrong since I left Blackwash?

And then, all of a sudden, the grasses of Auris suddenly came to an end. In their place, an enormous titan of stone loomed, covered in shacks and stone cottages.

“That is a fucking big rock,” I said, craning my neck up toward the peak. I could even see pegasi fluttering around it like birds, streaming in and out of an enormous hole bored into the side facing us. It looked like a giant wormhole, like a giant world-eating monster had drilled its way into the planet’s core from that mountain.

“It’s amazing!” Nova exclaimed, fluttering several feet higher like that was going to help her get a closer look inside the hole a few hundred feet up the mountainside. “There are so many houses, and so many ponies! I wonder if there’s any old mining equipment inside there. Just think of what it took to do that to a mountain!” Turning to me and Gauge, she clopped her hooves together. “You could fit like twenty Blackwashes inside that mountain alone!”

“Is it really hollow?” Gauge asked, staring up at it. “Like, the whole thing?”

“We’ll find out when we get there,” I said. “Knowing the kind of ponies that run this shithole, that’s probably where the real happenings are. These houses here just look like slums.”

And it was true. As we trotted into the outskirts of Hole, I was amazed at just how much poverty there was. While the settlements in the valley were little farming communities of only a hoofful of buildings, here there were nothing but clusters of stone shacks made from excavated material strewn at random across the low slopes of the mountain. Many of them looked even shittier than the little aluminum shack I grew up in, with mud and dirt serving as cement to try to keep the rocks that didn’t fit together (which were all of them) in place. Thatched roofs made from the grasses surrounding the mountain kept the worst of the wind out, but I bet they leaked like nothing else when it rained. And on top of that, the ponies looked miserable. They were all covered in dirt and assorted bodily injuries. Homeless ponies with crippled limbs and mangled faces sat in the dirt roads, begging for a few bullets. I noticed that quite a few of them had slave brands on both their flanks, though unlike mine and Nova’s, they’d been burnt through with a big ‘X’ on top of the old brand. Were they rejects? Trash? The thought made me sick.

“Travelers!” It was a filly’s voice, and it was filled with excitement. The three of us stopped as an olive green filly galloped up to us, carrying a basket full of fruits I’d never seen before. Her voice and hoofbeats were like a beacon, because soon a swarm of colts and fillies were converging on the three of us, pressing in close with their goods or just to check us out in excitement.

My head split open and I flattened my half-ear at Nova’s high-pitched squeal of excitement. She immediately stooped down and held out her forelegs, wrapping a few of the children up in hugs. Gauge gave her a concerned look, and I understood exactly what it meant. If Nova had her way, the two of them would probably have like five kids in a few years. I pitied the poor stallion.

And then a basket of fruit shoved into my face took my attention off of the two of them. The olive filly stood on her hind legs, holding the basket over her head and basically jamming it into my muzzle. “Fresh fruit, fresh fruit! Four bullets a manem! Best fruit in Hole!”

Frowning, I took a strange fruit that was mostly orange with a soft green strip of flesh running from top to bottom. It certainly looked juicy, but it was hardly bigger than my hoof. “Uh… these are ‘manems’?”

The filly set the basket down and vigorously nodded. That let me get a good look at her knotted and torn mane, her dirty coat, and the slight hint of gauntness to her face and thinness of her ribs. She must’ve been a street urchin peddling what she could to survive. “Yeah! Manems are delicious! I eat them every day!”

They certainly looked tempting, and I could’ve really gone for some food that wasn’t trail rations and meat I hunted along our hike. Plus, I was sure that Gauge and Nova would appreciate it. I looked over my shoulder to see Gauge trying to pry a few dirty children from Nova’s forelegs, saying something about how she didn’t know where they’d been. My mind made up, I turned back to the kid in front of me. “I’ll take six for six.”

The filly frowned at me and took the basket away. “Four bullets a manem!” she shouted back at me, glaring daggers at the bag she suspected was where I kept all my ammo.

“For those tiny little things? Come on,” I said, taking a step back. “I bet I can find another homeless kid selling bigger manems for less.”

After a moment of some serious battle between the filly’s greed, pride, and simple necessity, she offered the basket to me again. “Three bullets a manem! Special deal! Just for you!”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you two bullets a manem because you’re adorable,” I said, pulling out a magazine of ammo from my ammo bag and counting out the twelve rounds. I dropped them in a pile at the filly’s hooves and tucked the rest of the mag back in the bag. She immediately scrapped them together and tipped the basket so a bunch of manem fruit fell out, and I gathered up my six. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

The filly slowly scooped the rest of the manem back into her basket and stood up. Then she gave me a really big smile. “You too!” And without any warning, she turned around and galloped back up the street, followed by a bunch of the other kids.

“Aww, why’d they run off?” Nova asked, pouting. Gauge had finally removed the last of the children from her forelegs, but they’d left plenty of dirt stained into her white coat. Gauge was looking at her like he was going to have to scrub her down for parasites or something. “They were so cute!”

“Beats me,” I said, tossing a pair of manem fruit at each of them. “But I got something tasty to snack on… I hope.”

Nova wasted absolutely no time biting into the fruit. The orange part didn’t really seem like it wanted to give under her teeth, but the green part readily burst open in a juicy mess. The thing split in two from there, and she held the halves up to the corners of her muzzle to try to work the flesh out of the hard orange exterior with her teeth. “It’s good!” she exclaimed, wiping her chin. “Try it!”

I gave the fruit a suspicious sniff, but it didn’t really smell like anything. A bit of dirt, perhaps, considering it was dumped on the ground. I rubbed it against my coat to try to get any shit (literal and metaphorical) off of it before taking a bite. All at once, an almost overwhelming sensation of sweet and tart assaulted my mouth, almost shriveling my tongue with how powerful it was. It was almost like too much of a good thing, so I carefully worked my way through the rest of the fruit to not die from taste overload or some shit.

“Pretty good,” I said, chucking the two mostly-empty shell halves away. “Definitely beats the stale shit we’ve had to eat these past few weeks.”

Gauge discarded the shells of his first manem fruit as well and nodded. “We might have to get more of those before we leave. They’d be good for the road.”

“Mmhmm.” I pocketed the last manem fruit and grunted as I stood up. “Alright, we should probably get go—!”

The abrupt sound of a bunch of metal objects hitting the ground at my side cut me off, and I looked over my shoulder to see several magazines for my battle rifle spilling into the dirt. Somepony had undone the leather latch holding the thing shut, and I could see several empty pockets inside the bag. I just stared at it for a moment before glaring back in the direction the children ran off to. “Welcome to Hole, Ember, you fucking dumbass.”