“I hate kids.”

Nova, Gauge, and I had found a place to sit a little further into the slums of Hole and a little bit up the side of the mountain. It was a shitty restaurant with food that I couldn’t entirely rule out as pony meat (not through any evidence but simply because I couldn’t put it past a shitty place like this), but at least it was someplace to sit and eat and drink. I’d taken the time between ordering our food and waiting for it to be served to search through all our bags to see just what those fucking kids had stolen from us. They hadn’t really bothered Nova and Gauge apart from stealing a few bags of food, but they’d done a number on my ammo bags.

“What’s the damage?” Gauge asked, holding a glass of water between his hooves.

“Well, we left the dam with six hundred rounds,” I said. “I used two full mags between there and here, including what I shot at those bandits. Plus another fifty from bartering with Manchado and Sawdust, sixty to that RPR pony, twelve for those manem fruits, and another ninety that those damn kids stole. So that’s two hundred and seventy-two out of six hundred gone so far.”

“At least we still have more than half what we started with.”

“For what that’s worth,” I grumbled. I spared a glance at Nova, who was uncharacteristically quiet. I think more than being angry or anything, she’d had her feelings hurt when she learned that those kids were just mobbing us to try to steal our bullets. The poor mare loved kids.

Pulling a cigarette out of my bags, I stuck it between my lips and lit the end. “Ready to go?” I spoke around the end, glancing at the two of them. “We still need to get to Hole proper.”

“Might as well,” Gauge said, sliding his chair back. “Let’s find somewhere to hunker down when we get there. We’ll need someplace to hide if those ponies come looking for us.”

I nodded, knowing full well that he meant the RPR. The less we talked about them in public, the better. Who knows who could be eavesdropping, waiting for anything that they could tip off to the RPR for a nice reward?

I stood up, shouldered my bags, and dumped a bunch of bullets on our table to pay for our meal. “Alright, let’s move,” I said, navigating our way between the tables filled with patrons getting their dinner. Long shadows were already beginning to fall, and half of the slums were shrouded in darkness as the mountain blocked out the setting sun. “How much you want to bet that ponies can’t get inside the mountain after dark?”

We set off, following the main road up the mountain to the giant hole bored into it. We kept a wary eye on any more dirty children running around, not wanting a repeat of what happened at the outskirts. Once or twice, a few kids looked like they were thinking about it, but I leered at them and stomped my hoof to get them to scram. We passed a few beggars as well, and Nova, bless that poor mare’s soul, looked like she was about to break in two. Sighing, I pulled a mag of ammo out of my bag and tossed it to her. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks, Em,” she said, smiling at me and quickly trotting up to a few stallions sitting against a building. They also had those burned cross marks on their flanks; it felt like we were seeing more of them the closer we got to the heart of the mountain. And they almost all had crippling injuries that made it difficult for them to even move. I guess that was life and death in a fucking slave city shithole. When a slave can’t work anymore, they just toss them onto the streets.

Gauge must’ve read my face while we watched Nova mete out a few bullets each for the stallions. “At least they’re free this way,” he said. “Their masters could’ve just worked them to death. I’d take being free and homeless over slavery any day.”

“I’d rather they not be enslaved in the first place,” I said. “This place is disgusting.”

“Any place that openly does business with bandits and slavers is disgusting, yeah. Not like there’s much we can do about it.”

I sighed and hung my head. Much as I hated to admit it, Gauge was right. We were only three, and only I really knew how to use guns. And I doubted that shooting up random RPR ponies would solve anything. Though if I saw that mare with the aviators again, I wouldn’t mind cutting her down if I could get away with it.

When it looked like Nova was going to chat those ponies up for their life story and shit, I turned around and looked up at the mountain. It loomed over us, and we’d be at the bottom lip of the hole in a few hundred yards. I could see inside of it from here, and it was actually amazing. Glowing lights lit up the windows of buildings carved into the interior wall of the mountain, with rickety walkways attached by rope and chain to the support pillars holding the cap of the mountain up. There were hundreds of those buildings, all carved into different shapes and sizes, and going who knows how deep into the shell of the mountain itself. Rope bridges joined opposite points of circles together, and pegasi fluttered from one house to the next while their ground bound cousins used a never-ending series of stairs and platforms. It went up for almost as high as I could see, and I could only assume it went down as far, if not further.

“Why does the coolest shit have to belong to the shittiest ponies?” I asked Gauge. “The Fort, the dam, now this…”

“The Sentinels have the Bastion. And Sig’s family has that quarry,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, but like, that shit’s nothing compared to this. Just look at it! They hollowed an entire mountain! It doesn’t get much cooler than that!” I made a quick estimate of the number of houses and came to the conclusion that there were approximately a fuckload. “Thousands of ponies have to live here! Tens of thousands, even! There are so many that they live in slums outside of the mountain because there’s not enough room inside!”

Gauge slowly nodded. “You know, it always amazes me how stubborn you ponies can be, sometimes,” he said, to which I only gave him a confused look. “You all came from a planet light years away and made this planet another home. Even the end of the world wasn’t enough to wipe you all out. And here we are, standing in front of a mountain home to one of the biggest cities on the planet. That’s nothing short of amazing.”

“It’s not just ‘us ponies’,” I said, touching his shoulder. “There were plenty of zebras in Blackwash too, and then there’s Sig’s griffons as well. It’s not all ponies.”

“No, but it is mostly ponies.” Sitting down, he absentmindedly pawed at the dirt under his hooves. “I learned a lot of things working at the dishes and then going through old data when we were at the Bastion. Equestria didn’t like my kind. They didn’t like griffons either.” Chuckling, he added, “Actually, I think the list of people they liked is shorter than the ones they didn’t like. They were always ‘Ponies First.’ And my grandpa always used to say—”

“That the zebras were brought to Blackwash as prisoners to do cheap and dangerous labor, yeah,” I said. “Expendable labor to do all the shit jobs for the installation so the ponies could focus on doing the important ones. You’ve told me this a ton of times, Gauge.”

“And after learning about the quarry that the griffons are from and just… well, seeing what Equestria’s legacy is being used for, that only drives the point home for me.” He shifted to a more comfortable position to sit and grunted. “Sig’s family at the quarry? They’re probably descended from griffon workers forced to cut stone for the settlements of Auris. How else does a flock of griffons end up someplace like that and thrive if they weren’t there to begin with?”

I cocked my head at him. “So is there a point to all this?”

“I just… I don’t know.” He hung his head and sighed. “This code that we’re chasing is Equestria’s legacy. It’s something the Synarchy wants us to have. But is a world like that really something we want to bring back? Do we want to let the Synarchy be reborn on Auris?”

I frowned and tried to think about it for a bit. It was a new angle to the code I hadn’t really considered. I mean, yeah, we were trying to find the pieces so that Reclaimer couldn’t awaken the ‘Azimuth’, whatever that was. But what would happen if we got the whole thing and turned it over to the Sentinels? Did we really want to unearth the Synarchy’s darkest secrets? Did we really want to bring that to Auris?

“The Sentinels aren’t like them,” I said. “Fusillade wouldn’t try to bring Equestria back. They’re good ponies. They only want to help people.”

“I suppose. But supposing that we don’t get the code back to them…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “Something tells me that Reclaimer isn’t as altruistic.”

“Hard to say without having met the fucker, but if what they say is true?” I shrugged. “That’s why we’re out here. As far as we know, we’re the only ones apart from the Ivory City that knows what this code is, more or less. If we don’t try to stop them from getting it, then who will? And besides, all it takes is one piece. If we can get it before them, then they won’t have the full thing they need to break it.”

Nova came trotting back over to us, several bullets lighter. Grunting, I stood up and caught the empty mag she tossed at me. “Thirty bullets? Really? You can buy a nice meal for three!”

“And now they’ll have a lot of nice meals to look forward to,” Nova said, carrying herself proudly.

I sighed and tucked the empty magazine into my bag. “Yeah, whatever. I’m not giving you any more. I hope it was worth it.”

“It was,” Nova said, walking right up next to me and smiling, “because they told me a lot of interesting things about where we’re going.”

Gauge smiled at his marefriend and rubbed against her side. “Look at you, gathering the intel.”

“At least somepony’s doing it,” I said. “Don’t ask the stupid forge mare to do anything with ‘intel’ in it. I just shoot things.” I gestured for them to follow me, and we set off toward the hole in the mountain. “So, what’d you find out?”

“For starters?” She shook her head. “Nopony’s heard anything about a code around here.”

“That’s not very useful,” I said. “If the code came here, I doubt that the RPR would be telling everypony about it, especially not random homeless ponies.”

“No, but they have seen a pegasus missing half his face poking around here since a week or two ago.”

I abruptly stopped and turned to her, my breath catching in my throat. “Yeoman was here?”

“Is here,” Nova clarified. “He’s been seen at the mountain a bunch since he got here. He and the RPR are working together on something, but nopony knows what. But he has been leaving with a team of ponies every few days at dawn and returning two or three nights later.”

“They’re looking for something,” Gauge concluded. “They don’t know where the pieces are either.”

“No, but I’m sure they have a good guess,” I said. “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “If Yeoman and the RPR are working together, it’s only a matter of time before they find something. How long you bet it’s gonna take a bunch of ponies that are experts in tracking runaways to find an Equestrian installation?”

“It’s taken them two weeks so far without any luck,” Gauge said. “There’s hope.”

“However slim it may be,” I muttered. Sighing, I shook my head. “Alright, new plan. Once we get inside the mountain, we’re going to find someplace to lie low, and we’ll see what we can find out. If we can find Yeoman or listen to some RPR ponies, we might be able to get an idea of where to look. Once we do, we’ll have to try to book it to where they’re looking and somehow find it before them.”

“And if they’re wrong?” Gauge bit his lip. “It’d be putting all our eggs in one basket if we follow them somewhere and it turns out it wasn’t the right place to look.”

“We only have one egg; no matter what we do we’re putting all of them in one basket,” I said. I paused a moment. “Did that even make sense?”

“I get it!” Nova exclaimed.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Gauge said. “And what do we do if Yeoman spots us first? I don’t think he’ll be fine with letting any of us live long if he knows we’re after him and the code.”

“We’ll wing it, okay? One thing at a time.”

Nova and Gauge looked at each other. “I don’t like this plan…” Nova muttered.

But we didn’t talk about that anymore, because we made it to the lip of the hole into the mountain. A small crowd milled outside of a chain fence protected by a lot of ponies with guns, and pegasi hovered at various points in the air, using meagre clouds to rest their wings when they got tired. Guards wandered among the crowd, chasing the destitute and discarded slaves away with harsh words and quick batons. The three of us just stood off to the side for a moment, trying to take it all in and work up the courage to go further.

“Right into the belly of the beast,” Gauge murmured.

“That’s for sure.” Spotting an opening in the crowd, I began to trot forward and gestured for them to follow with a shake of my head. “Well, if we’re gonna get fucked, might as well get it over with now.”

I made my way through the crowd, Nova and Gauge following me and trying to act natural. After a bit of nervous waiting in line, we found ourselves in front of a bored pony in a worn-out set of armor made from scrap mining gear. Next to him, however, was a very shiny pistol, and I could smell the oil coming from it. Despite outward appearances, I wasn’t keen on fucking with him or any of his friends standing nearby.

“How many?” the stallion asked, holding a tally counter in his magic.

“Three,” I said, clearing my throat to try to flush any phlegm (and terror) out of it. “Me, the zebra, and the pegasus.”

The guard looked the three of us over with a profoundly bored stare. How many ponies had he checked into the mountain today? “Business?”

“Oh, uh… business?” I said. When he frowned at me, I managed a smile. “I mean, business is my business. I’m with, uh…” I stood up straighter as an idea hit me. “Manchado and Sawdust from the mining excavation to the north. They needed me to come back and get some more supplies.”

The unicorn pulled out a holographic tablet and poked around in it with his hoof. “Supplies to the contracted party were sent out two days ago. You’re not due for another supply shipment for two weeks.”

“We were attacked by bandits,” I said. I mean, it was half-true, right? “We fought them off, but they did a number on the supplies. So we’re here for more.” At his skeptical look, I sighed and shook my ammo bag a bit. “I have the bullets to buy them here, okay? I’d think that Hole would be happy to do a little more business.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” He tapped a few things into a calculator at his side, which spat out a number on a growing roll of paper. “Taxes are going to be seventeen bullets for each of you.”

If I’d been drinking something at that moment, I might have spit it out. “Seventeen bullets? Each? What is this, an extortion racket?”

“Entry tax is ten rifle bullets per person. Business is another four bullets. Arms is three.” He finished by pointing to the rifle on my back and the drone buzzing around Gauge’s head, then shrugged. “Somepony’s gotta pay the RPR.”

Sighing, I opened my ammo bag for what felt like the millionth time today and dropped the bullets in front of the stallion. “Fifty-one bullets. There.” At the rate this was going, I was gonna be out of bullets in two days!

The stallion counted them and then added them to a box. “If you leave, you have to pay the tax again. Any stays longer than three days have to be registered with the RPR. And remember, we have laws here, unlike the rest of this planet. Don’t break them and you won’t get shot.” He pressed a button under his desk, and an electric latch on the fence behind him slid open. “Don’t cause trouble.”

Even though I had a ton of questions, I hurried through the gate with my friends. Once we were on the other side, I sighed in relief and took a moment to recollect my nerves. “That was easier than I thought it would be. I thought I’d have to bribe him or something.”

“I bet that’s what some of those taxes were,” Gauge said, looking back in that direction. “They probably skim some off the top for themselves if ponies look like they can afford it.”

“We must look like a fucking walking bank or something because everypony is trying to steal from us,” I grumbled. I looked around us, trying to gain my bearings, and instead only felt more disoriented. There were a few crooked streets that seemed to weave around buildings haphazardly plopped in the middle of the stone floor, and they were clogged with ponies doing business out of little carts. The buildings themselves stretched upwards where they couldn’t expand outwards, eating up as much space above them as their rickety constructions could support. Directly above us, a crisscrossing series of bridges connected the different sides of the outer ring together, and the voices of thousands of ponies echoed off the hollow mountain interior to form a roar like a waterfall. It was as confusing as it was mind-blowing.

Nova took wing and hovered above us, trying to pick out signs on the buildings in the streets. When she didn’t see anything satisfactory on the ground, she pursed her lips and flew higher and higher. Only after she passed the first of many bridges did she come back down to us and tuck her wings back against her side. “I think there’s an inn on the first ring and a bit to the left. Like, eleven or twelve o’clock if we were standing at the bottom.”

For those of you with twenty-four hour clocks instead of twenty-eight, she meant at roughly nine or ten. It’s confusing, I know, but we make do.

“Might as well go for it, then,” I said, forcing myself to stifle a yawn. “I could use a good night’s sleep.”

Gauge looked behind us and nodded. “The sun’s already gone down, and it’ll be pretty dark soon, especially inside the mountain. Plus,” he added, turning to me with concern in his eyes, “if what Nova’s homeless friends said is true, then Yeoman is may be back here pretty soon with the RPR. We don’t want them to corner us.”

As much as I wanted to use that opportunity to avenge Zip, Gauge had a point. It was going to get not only me killed, but him and Nova, too. And as much as I wanted to gun the fucker down, I had to look out for my friends first. They were counting on me to keep them safe, and damn it, that was what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to fail again.

I slowly bowed my head and turned to Nova. “Alright, Nov, lead the way. I just hope they have decent beds.”

“Any bed is gonna feel great after sleeping on rocks for so long,” Nova chirped. “Is anypony else’s back messed up? Because mine’s pretty messed up.”

With Nova’s vantage point, we navigated the streets of Hole proper, taking extra care to stay out of the way of the RPR ponies we saw loitering about. And fuck were there a lot of them. At least they didn’t seem interested in seeing if there were any hidden slaves among the crowds; for one thing, they knew that slaves would be trying to get out of the mountain and all its guards, not in, and for another, there were slaves everywhere. Everywhere I looked, I could see them following their masters like dogs, the brands on their flanks obscuring dozens of different and unique marks. But as much as I wanted to help them, I couldn’t; that’d only get us caught, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen next. So I tried not to, and we managed to make it to the perimeter of the mountain, where a staircase anchored to the stone walls by steel cables rose to the first ring of buildings.

I put my hoof on the edge and pressed a few times. The wood underneath it wobbled a bit as the cables swayed back and forth. “Well that’s just fucking awesome,” I said. “Gotta love fucking shitty post-apocalyptic engineering.”

“Don’t worry, Em, if you fall I’ll catch you again,” Nova said, smirking at me.

“And what about your coltfriend?” Gauge asked, indignant.

Nova waved her hoof. “SCaR will catch you! Won’t you, little guy?”

The sentry drone trilled and beeped once before flying up the stairs without us.

I snickered and patted Gauge’s shoulder. “That’s cold, dude. Cold.”

“Whatever.” Shaking his head, he took the first few steps up the stairs, then promptly shuffled to the side as a pair of ponies carelessly trotted down from the other direction. “Let’s go, alright? Solid ground would be pretty nice.”

“Foals,” Nova teased, hovering next to us as we climbed the stairs. “You two act like you didn’t grow up on a mountain!”

“We grew up on a mountain, not inside one!” I shouted at her, feeling the planks shifting under my hooves. I stared ahead at Gauge’s ass and gave him a telekinetic shove. “Can you hurry it up, fat ass?”

“Fuck off,” Gauge retorted, “or I’ll take this fucking thing down with me!”

It took us a while of bickering and shouting, but we all made it safely to a relatively stable platform. We could get a good look at the buildings around us now. They’d all been carved from the stone of the mountain, at least to an extent. Many of them had add-ons of corrugated steel and wooden planks jutting out from their stone walls, and quite a few had small balconies for ponies to sit and admire Hole below them. Two or three large platforms big enough for a hundred or two hundred ponies to gather jutted out from the ring, and these platforms were connected to each other by bridges and to the other rings by staircases. But it turned out that the real Hole was hidden beneath the stone, because we found an archway cut into the mountain from the platform we were standing on that opened into a narrow road following the perimeter of the ring.

“How the fuck did they do all this?” I asked, jaw hanging slack as I just tried to comprehend the sheer hugeness of it all. “There’s rooms on either side of this tunnel! Does it go the whole way around? Just how deep into the mountainside are we?”

“I have no idea,” Gauge said, his eyes tracing the supports holding the tunnel up. “But it is amazing.”

“Amazing doesn’t even begin to describe it!” Nova sung. “I bet there’s nothing else like it in the world!”

“If only it could’ve been attached to a prettier face,” I said, beckoning for them to follow me as I set off into the tunnel. “Imagine if this place was run by the Sentinels instead of the RPR.”

“To be fair, it hasn’t seemed like it’s that bad,” Gauge said, watching the mostly contented and relaxed ponies around us.

“Did you forget all the slaves we passed on the way over here?”

“Well... no,” Gauge said. “But I was expecting it to be worse, I suppose. Most of the slaves we passed at least looked like they were fed and cared for, for the most part.”

“They probably don’t want to let an investment go to waste,” Nova said.

“Give it time,” I said. “I bet we’ll find a guard kicking a puppy somewhere around here.”

But we didn’t, and we made it to an inn after a bit of searching and asking around. It wasn’t all that big, given that it didn’t have a lot of space to work with in the first place, but they’d somehow crammed ten or fifteen rooms into this thing. I gave the innkeep, a mare in her forties by the looks of it, some bullets, and she showed us to a room. There were only two beds, but I wasn’t going to complain about that; I had a bed all to myself, and Gauge and Nova were going to share.

The innkeep left the key on a wobbly nightstand before leaving, and when she did, I dropped my bags on the wooden floor and flopped onto the bed. Springs creaked and the bedframe groaned, but it was still the softest thing I’d slept on in weeks. “This is fucking awesome,” I said, almost moaning in ecstasy. “Once I throw my bedroll on this thing, it’s gonna be amazing. I don’t think I’ll ever wake up.”

“If only we didn’t have to,” Gauge said, looking out the window at the far end of the room, which gave a nice view of the city below (and above) us. “Too bad we’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll do it,” I said, making some last adjustments to my bed and closing my eyes. The bedroll could wait. “We’ll do it in the morning. Whenever that comes…”

Gauge said something else, but I didn’t hear it. I was out like a light.