I woke up on my back, legs tied down with ropes, and something under my neck keeping my head tilted back. It was hard to see around the room without really moving my head, but I could see a few things. A desk that was on the verge of falling apart, a table with legs made out of different random shit, and several plastic bags lying on the floor, printed with some numbers and the letters “U-Art” on them. They were empty, though it looked like the insides were stained with blood.

That was when the pain hit me, though it was dulled and muted. Groaning, I tried to move, but my restraints held me down. As the memories of what’d happened to me started coming back, I began to panic, worrying if somehow Hunter had managed to catch me and Ace, and I was currently trapped in her slave fuck dungeon or something. And she was not a mare I wanted to have anywhere near my cunt. I don’t think I would’ve survived her fucking me.

“Calm down, calm down. I’ll get them off of you.” It was Ace’s voice, and I saw a shadow move in the corner of my vision. Hooves fumbled with the restraint around my neck, and soon I was free. I gasped and shook my head, feeling much better not having something pressing around my neck, and saw Ace move onto the rest of my restraints. One by one, she freed me from the ragged bed I was lying on, and I was finally able to sit up and stretch my limbs.

My head also started swimming, and Ace steadied me before I could fall off of the bed. “Careful,” she said, patting me on the back. “You were thrashing something fierce when I brought you here. Hunter’s knife was poisoned, and I needed to keep you still while I gave you some antidote. I also gave you some pretty strong painkillers while I worked on your shoulder. I ain’t the best surgeon, and I sure as shit ain’t a unicorn, but I’ve patched up worse than a knife wound before. Dumped a lot of blood into you so you wouldn’t bleed out and shit. Couldn’t really do much for your eye or your nose, though, but at least those aren’t life-threatening.”

I touched my swollen left eye and looked down my muzzle at my crooked nose. Looks like Hunter had given me a black eye and a broken nose on top of the stab wound. I looked at my shoulder to see a big red line oozing the smallest bit of blood through my coat. It was held together with thread; I guess she’d made some makeshift stitches. “Uhm… thanks,” I managed, wincing as I tried to move my right foreleg. “Still hurts like fuck, though.”

Ace just shrugged. “I dumped a bunch of Stabil-Ice and whatever other shit I could get my hooves on into the wound before I stitched it shut. Hopefully that should fix the worst of the muscle damage. It’ll probably be sore for a few days, but we’ll have to make do.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll tough it out, I guess. Somehow.” I knew walking was going to hurt like all fuck unless I bound this thing up in a sling so I didn’t have to move it. I just hoped that whatever Ace dumped into the wound would be enough to get me going again before too long. I looked around me again at the small room now that I could actually see things clearly. “This your place?”

“I guess you could call it that,” Ace said, looking around. Apart from the bed I was sitting on, the desk, the table, and a chair in the corner, there wasn’t really much in this stone room. In fact, the room didn’t look so much like a room but a cave that somepony had decided would be good enough to live in. There weren’t any personal items or shit in here apart from a small arsenal of firearms and magazines sitting in an unzipped duffle bag in the corner of the room. “It ain’t permanent. More like a hideout, really.”

I frowned at her. “Yeah, hideout. Because you’re a bandit.”

She just shrugged and sat down in the chair, crossing her forelegs and letting her beige wings hang loose. She was kind of dirty-looking, but then again, it seemed like merely stepping hoof into the Pit made you dirty. Her black mane was wild and sort of rose up out of her skull before swooping down halfway over the right half of her face, while it was nearly shaved down along her neck. Her tail was really short for a mare, barely peeking out between her legs as she slouched in the chair. She was thin but roughly the same size as me, and covered in old scars and wounds from bullets, knives, and the horrifying monsters of Auris. Her mark was an ace of spades inside of a reticule; fitting, considering her name and profession.

“I ain’t no bandit,” she said. “I’m an outlaw. There’s a difference.”

“Oh yeah?” I crossed my legs and glowered at her. “What’s that?”

“One shoots ponies ‘cuz they’re greedy. I shoot ponies ‘cuz I don’t like them. One’s a piece of shit, the other just pisses off the ponies with the bullets and authority to put her face on a bounty poster.”

“Yeah, I bet your face is on a lot of bounties. I bet those miners north of here know all about you.”

Her blue eyes flicked to me. “That’s where I recognized you from,” she said. “I knew you were familiar.”

I threw my good hoof into the air. “You almost took my fucking head off!”

“Almost,” she said. “It still looks firmly attached to your shoulders to me. Unlike the other ponies on my team that you helped rip apart.”

“What, you want me to feel sorry for them?” I asked her. “That’s not gonna happen.”

She waved her hoof. “No way. Fuck them. They were just bullet-hungry shitbags who’d help me do what I needed to do. They—hold on. Do you actually know what those ponies in the mountains were doing? Because I didn’t attack them for no reason.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it fucking matters you dense fuck,” she said. I wondered if she was getting impatient with me.

“Well, they were miners. They were looking for ore seams in the mountains, just minding their own business until you attacked them.”

Ace snorted and leaned back in her chair again. “That’s bullshit.”

“Why is that bullshit?” I asked her. “Why should I believe you over them? They helped me get into Hole, after all. They’re nice enough!”

“Listen…” she stopped and frowned at me. “What was your name again?”

“Ember.”

“Ember. Nice name. But listen, just because they’re nice ponies, don’t mean that they ain’t doing shit work. Did you even see any mining equipment up there? Any big machines, that sort of thing?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but I couldn’t think of anything. Where were the machines? I’d just assumed that they’d been in one of the tents or somewhere far away from the campsite, but now that I actually thought about it, those miners or prospectors or whatever didn’t really seem to have a lot of gear on them. “No, not really. But what does that have to do with you attacking them?”

“Because they ain’t miners, they’re surveyors on a contract from Hole,” Ace said. “They’re out there combing the mountains, looking for old Equestrian installations. And when they find them, they’re gonna turn them over to Hole, and the RPR is gonna get whatever’s inside. So I’m trying to disrupt their operations by poking out their eyes in the field.”

“But just because they’re doing work for Hole doesn’t mean that they’re bad!” I exclaimed. “You’re just attacking innocent ponies instead of the ones who deserve it! That’s no better than being a fucking bandit!”

Ace frowned and looked away, shrugging her wings. “It ain’t always that easy. Sometimes you can’t hit the big wigs yourself, so you prune their branches. Cut enough off, and eventually the damn thing’ll wither and die. And I didn’t get my bounty just from attacking their surveyors, caravans, whatever,” she added, glaring at me. “Sometimes I save ungrateful bitches like yourself from their slaving patrols and kill a few officers while I’m at it.”

I threw my hooves into the air, frustrated and too tired to have this moral argument right now. “Alright, alright, fine. I’ll drop it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re scum.”

She just shrugged like she didn’t give a shit. “I’m used to that. I can count the ponies who like me on a wing, and it don’t bother me none.”

Silence stepped between us, long and overbearing. Eventually I shook my head and rubbed my shoulder some. “So now what? Is that bitch Hunter dead?”

“Fuck no,” Ace said. “She got carbon fiber weave under that armor of hers. Even if my dinky nine-mils poked through her armor, they wouldn’t get through the weave. It just winded her, that’s all.”

“So why didn’t you just shoot her in the neck?” I asked her. “You had plenty of time.”

“Because killing one of the RPR’s top bitches ain’t gonna make my life easier,” she said. “I have a ten-k bounty on me right now. Killing Hunter would double or triple that. Then the bounty hunter companies will really start sniffing me out. I’d be surprised if I lasted a year after that.”

“I thought you were supposed to be this tough, badass outlaw,” I said.

“I didn’t get that way by getting myself killed,” she shot back. “Dumb glory hounds get their head on somepony’s bounty board and then die in a week. The smart ones like me just try to keep low and not show our faces anymore than we have to.” She smirked at me and wiggled her eyebrows. “Makes it harder for the artists to draw them on their posters.”

Groaning, I swung off of the bed and winced as I moved my right foreleg. I could hardly even put weight on it without a piercing pain tearing through my shoulder. “You got a sling or something?” I asked Ace. “I’m not gonna be moving very fast if I have to drag my leg everywhere.”

A length of cloth landed on the table in front of me, and I picked it up in my magic. “Make do with that,” Ace said while I tied it off into a sling. “We’ll need to get moving soon.”

“You never told me what the plan is,” I grumbled, looping the sling around my neck and tucking my hurt leg against my chest. It was uncomfortable and only a little less painful than before, but at least I could move freely now. Well, as freely as a three-legged unicorn could move.

“Getting you out of Hole,” Ace said, standing up and fluttering to the corner of her cave where she’d piled all her gear. “And me too. I ain’t gonna stick around any longer than I have to now that I’ve pissed Hunter off even more than before.”

“We can’t leave until we find my friends,” I said. “They’re waiting for me, and—how long was I out?”

Ace stopped shuffling things around for a moment to think. “Dunno… three hours? Four?” She shrugged. “Long enough for me to go and scout out the RPR patrols for the evening. The moons are pretty low in the sky right now, so there won’t be a lot of light for them to track us.”

My heart skipped a beat. I’d been gone for that long? Who knew what could have happened to them in the meantime! Hunter could’ve had them in chains by now! And even if she didn’t, what were they thinking? Did they assume I’d gotten captured? Were they looking for me right now? Were they hiding in our room at the inn, waiting out the storm?

Ace must’ve seen the panicked look on my face, because she stopped what she was doing and turned to me. “You alright?”

I just stared into space, trying to process the million different ways I could’ve just gotten my best friends killed. In the meanwhile, my mouth decided to go on without me. “I… I missed dinner…”

Ace looked around her little hole in the wall and pulled out some smoked meat and dried fruit from a bag. “…here?”

“No, I don’t mean that!” I exclaimed, at the same time snatching the food from her and stuffing it down my throat. It’d been a long time since lunch and I was starving, okay? I began to pace in circles in front of her bed. “I was supposed to meet Gauge and Nova at dinnertime and we’d all discuss what we found. But I was too busy being poisoned and passed out to make it!” I turned to her and swallowed hard. “If they’d been waiting for me, Hunter could’ve found them easily. She knows what they look like. She stopped us outside of Hole and nearly arrested us there.”

“If Hunter’s found them, then she’ll have taken them to their headquarters,” Ace said. “That’s where they keep all their slaves until they finish processing them for auction.”

I remembered that one conversation I’d overheard earlier today that’d mentioned that the RPR headquarters was on the fifth ring in the mountain. “They didn’t just take them to jail or something?” I asked, hopeful.

Ace snickered and shook her head. “Jail? There ain’t no jail in Hole. Everypony’s already a criminal here. Just that sometimes if you piss the RPR off enough they make you a slave so they don’t have to deal with you none.”

Add that to the list of reasons why Hole was such a lovely place. “So what are we gonna do?”

“Well, let’s not rule anything out just yet,” Ace said. “They could still be wherever it is that you all are holing up. If they’re smart, they would’ve realized something was up when you didn’t show and booked it somewhere safe.”

“And if they aren’t?”

Ace stuck her wing under my rifle, which she’d apparently nabbed during that chaos back at the bar, and flipped it to me. I caught it in my magic and checked the bolt, seeing a fresh set of brass inside. “We’ll get creative,” she said with a smirk.

I collected the rest of my shit from where Ace had put it and checked everything over. At least she hadn’t rifled through my ammo bag, so that was a plus. It seemed like everything was how I left it, more or less, just shaken up during our frantic escape. As for Ace, she took her time donning all her holsters and slings for her weapons. She had a brace of wing grip pistols, one under each wing, two knives strapped across her chest, and a magnetic rail on her back to drop her compacted sniper rifle in. A few magazines of ammo covered her chest, almost like makeshift armor. If I hadn’t lived among the Sentinels for a few weeks, I’d have been amazed at the amount of firepower she had on her. My own battle rifle felt small in comparison.

“Nopony will ever notice us,” I quipped, looking at this mare ready for war. “Completely natural.”

“Good,” she said, brushing past me toward the exit. “Ain’t nopony gonna stop us then.”

I followed her into the tunnel leading away from her hideout, stopping only when she did. She dug into her bags and pulled out a bottle with a rag stuffed in the top. I could smell oil of some kind and wrinkled my nose. She just held it up to me. “You know how to light?”

“‘Do I know how to light?’” I echoed her, rolling my eyes. A single flare of my horn was all it took to set the end ablaze. “My ass mark isn’t a flaming coal for nothing, you know.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly the reason why I had a burning coal as my cutie mark, but I didn’t think she needed to know that I’d only learned how to cast pyromancy a few weeks ago.

Ace wasted no time taking the bottle and hurling it back the way we came. It smashed against the bed before erupting into flames, and I flinched backwards at the sudden heat. “Umm… why?” I asked her.

“Because I’m done with this place,” Ace said, turning away and walking back along the tunnel. “And fuck if I leave anything behind for the RPR.”

She trudged onwards like a resolute mare of steel, while I lingered in the tunnel. I watched the dirty blankets on the bed burn and curl, and the table near it let out a groaning whoosh of sparks as the flame got to it and burnt it in two.

For some reason, I shivered as I followed this lawless mare out of the tunnel, a mare who, it seemed, had nothing to lose.

“What’s the plan?”

I’m pretty sure Ace had grown tired of hearing that over the past half hour, if her ears flattening against her skull was any indication. But to be fair, I wouldn’t have kept asking it if she’d just tell me things for once.

“This is why I like working alone,” she grumbled, peering around the corner of a building. Farther down the street, there were at least a dozen guards standing between us and the mineshaft that gets us out of the Pit. Only problem was, as best I could tell, there wasn’t any way to get past them, save shooting them to pieces. And supposing we even did manage to kill all those ponies, we’d lose the element of surprise, and reinforcements would be on our ass almost immediately.

I rolled my eyes and cuffed her over one of her ears. She flinched and shot me a piercing glare, but I was too annoyed to care. “I’m not a fucking amateur, you know,” I spat at her. “I’m a sergeant in the Sentinels. I fought at Celestia Dam and killed Carrion. I can handle myself, even in a sling. Just tell me what you need me to do and I’ll fucking do it, okay?”

Ace frowned at me for a second, looked back around the corner at the guards, then shoved me away from the street so we could talk in the alley. “Fine, I’ve got a plan.”

“Fucking finally,” I muttered.

“I could just fly past them and leave you here, you know,” Ace shot back. “But I’m trying to be a nice bandit and save your hide. So listen. I’m gonna go and make a distraction a few blocks away. Hopefully it should get those guards away from the shaft. While they’re gone, do whatever it takes to get out of the Pit. I’ll meet you behind the fifth building on the left as soon as you exit. Just try to do it quiet-like so we don’t get caught, alright?”

I nodded. “Easy enough.” Of course, I had no idea just how I was going to do any of this, and we were betting a lot on Ace’s distraction working in the first place. Still, we didn’t have any other options, so it was all or nothing. And fuck it, that’s how I liked to live anyway.

“Fifth building on the left,” Ace said again. Then, spreading her wings, she darted down the alleyway, disappearing behind a few of the buildings, leaving me alone.

I had no idea what kind of distraction Ace had in mind, but I figured it’d be a bad idea to sit on my ass and just wait for it. I was going to have to figure something out on my own to deal with any stragglers without just shooting them. I sighed and began to slink along the buildings, my rifle holstered but with the safety off. I didn’t want my super-glowy fiery magic to give me away.

There wasn’t a whole lot of room behind these buildings; they were mostly stone and wood just jammed against the natural walls of the cavern, and since space wasn’t a concern down here, they didn’t need to dig into the stone to make rooms. But even though I had to try to scramble over rock with only three hooves, it meant that light didn’t get back here. Couple that with my black coat and I was like a shadow, moving around unseen as I stalked my prey. Or… something like that. Point being that I was able to get really close to the guards without them noticing me.

Now to see what I had to work with. Well, for starters, there were rocks. A lot of them. Not sure what I could do with those other than chucking them someplace to try to lure guards away, but if these ponies had the slightest bit of brainpower, they wouldn’t all go wandering over to investigate the noise. But maybe I could make something work. I was a unicorn, and telekinesis is a very versatile spell.

And then of course the tunnel fucking blew up somewhere in the direction Ace went. Seriously, she wanted me to be quiet?! I’m pretty sure all of Hole heard that one!

But it was time to act, not bitch, so after recovering from my surprise, I peered back around the corner of the building at the guards. After some worried conversation, eight of the guards galloped off toward the noise, leaving four behind to guard the mineshaft. Even though I knew they weren’t all going to go investigate, I was still disappointed that I’d have to work some.

I unslung my rifle and leaned it against the corner of the building just in case I needed to grab it quickly. I could probably kill all four of those guards with some accurate bursts, but the noise might draw back some of the guards who went to go investigate the explosion. With that in mind, I started collecting as many rocks as I could possibly find, just adding them to a growing stockpile I levitated in front of my face. This plan was stupid, but it might just be stupid enough to work.

With something like a hundred rocks in my magic, I peered around the corner, lined up my shots, and flared my horn to life. The rocks flew toward the guards, pelting them before they could even get the chance to react. My vision briefly faltered for a moment as I burned so much magic at once, but the effect was something like a giant shotgun that shoots rocks. When the blackness faded away, the four guards were lying in bloody heaps on the ground, some twitching as they bled out.

I waited for the tingling in my hooves to go away before I collected my rifle and galloped over to the mineshaft. I didn’t even bother with trying to hide the bodies somewhere; it’s not like it really would’ve done anything, since the RPR already knew I was somewhere inside Hole. Instead, I sprinted past those four, trying to climb the stairs as fast as I could before somepony happened to see the dead guards sitting at the base.

Fuck, you would think being a machinist all your life and running around Auris for a few weeks would get you in shape, but I was winded by the time I finished climbing the million steps between the Pit and Hole. Then again, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier, been poisoned, and had to do it all on three legs after I’d just nearly blacked out casting. I could at least blame my panting on that.

Almost immediately upon surfacing I had to force myself to gallop to the side at the sound of thrumming hooves. I barely managed to slip behind some old mining machines before a battalion of RPR ponies began to gallop down the stairs to the Pit, definitely investigating the explosion down there. I held my breath as they passed, worried that even the slightest noise or movement was going to give me away, and my heart and muscles screamed in protest after all the stairs I just ran up. But as soon as the last pony disappeared into the mineshaft, I gasped and spent the next minute sucking wind before I managed to limp away from my cover and head off to the left.

There were a lot of ponies milling in the street and standing in front of buildings, talking to each other in worried voices about the noise they’d heard down below. But nopony was moving. They were all standing still, too curious to go home but too afraid to investigate any closer. All they did was force me to have to shoulder past and around them, and I could hear whispers around me wherever I went. I was attracting attention, and that was definitely a bad thing.

But I made it behind the building Ace told me to meet her at without incident. Groaning, I collapsed onto the rock and leaned against the siding, just trying to rest a bit and recover my stamina for any more sprinting I was probably going to have to do today. My shoulder was also acting up, and I could hardly move it at all; the muscles were so tight that I was worried they were going to snap in two, and no amount of massaging made them loosen up. I could only hope that Ace cleaned the wound out well; though we didn’t have to worry too much about disease on Auris, since its microbiology and shit isn’t compatible with our bodies (at least, that’s what Nova tells me), we’d still brought plenty of diseases over from Equus when Equestria colonized the planet. To put it another way, I really didn’t want to get tetanus, because I’d probably die from it.

Wings fluttered above me, and I flinched and grabbed my rifle, but it was only Ace flying over the building. She touched down in front of me, her face streaked with soot and a few small cuts, and the end of her mane smoldering a bit. She looked me over, saw that I was still in one piece, and nodded. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”

“What the fuck was that?!” I hissed at her. “An explosion?! Right after you told me to be quiet?! Now you’ve got the whole fucking prickwing nest stirred up!”

“Yeah, stirred up in the Pit, not up here,” she said, crossing her forelegs. “I got a little closer to the blast than I really wanted to, but it did its job. We have to move now before they come back up; those bodies you left at the bottom of the stairs really didn’t help us none.”

“How was I supposed to know you were gonna—” I decided to stop before we wasted even more time arguing. “I’ll bitch at you later about this. What next?”

“Where were y’all staying?” she asked in that rough, almost-country accent of hers. “We gotta check there first before the distraction wears off. We can still hope they’re safe and sound.”

I looked around, trying to gain my bearings, but gave up after a few seconds. “We were at an inn on the first ring. It was… to the left when you enter?” I tried to piece my mental map of Hole together to try to figure out where we were, and I ended up pointing over my shoulder. “That way, I think. We had a room on the outside.”

“Then that makes things easier.” Ace stooped down and spread her wings out. “Come on, hop on up. Hunter probably has ponies watching the inn, so we’ll have to take a look through the window.”

Grunting, I stood up and slowly climbed onto her back. I spent a little bit trying to find a comfortable position because of all the gear and weapons she had, but eventually settled into crossing my forelegs over her chest and pressing my neck against hers, just trying to slot our bodies together like puzzle pieces. She grunted and stood up to her full height, then began to flap her wings. “Ugh… I’m glad I exercise,” she said through clenched teeth, and a few moments later, she began to fly us up.

She flew in the direction I’d pointed her in, flying just high enough to not be noticed by ponies on the street but low enough so we wouldn’t be visible from the higher rings. I bit my lip and kept watch around us, just waiting for somepony to shout in alarm and send a hail of bullets at us. But I didn’t see any RPR ponies, and nobody noticed or did anything about us, and we were able to cross Hole in a few minutes and hover in front of the inn.

“Which room were you?” Ace asked, her eyes drifting between the ten windows lining this part of the ring.

“We made a right from the common area and were the fourth door,” I said. I counted four windows over from the rightmost and pointed to it. “That one.”

Ace brought us over with a few more flaps of her wings and pressed her nose against the glass. I pressed my cheek right against hers so I could look into the room at the same time. “That’s… not how we left it,” was all I said.

It was empty, clean. The beds were made and the door was open, and none of our shit was anywhere. And with the obvious lack of my two best friends, there was nothing to even remotely tell that I’d slept here last night.

“You sure it’s your room?” Ace said, floating back a bit and looking at the nearby windows. “Maybe you’re remembering wrong?”

I shook my head. “No, I can see the little graffiti on the wall over the bed I slept in. This is the same room. It’s just… like we were never here…”

And then I saw it. A tiny, white feather stuck in the corner of the window. It looked like it came from the crest of a wing, like a pegasus had tried to push the window open with their wing but it’d closed on them before opening all the way. I plucked it out with my magic and held it up to our faces, slowly spinning it around to get a better look at it.

I had a sinking feeling in my gut as I figured out the implications. Ace, meanwhile, just slowly nodded once. “And as far as the RPR’s concerned, you ain’t ever were there.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “Property doesn’t rent rooms and leave a record of itself. Property never, ever, escapes them. And when they finally catch that property, they make sure that nopony knows it escaped to begin with. Don’t want other slaves getting ideas.”

She flew away from the outside of the inn and landed on a nearby bridge. I slid off of her back, still kind of in shock, with the feather clutched in my magic. Ace, meanwhile, simply looked further up the mountain, to a big series of rooms protruding from the fifth ring. “Hunter’s probably signing paperwork right now authorizing two new slaves to go on stock at the auction house tomorrow. Within a week, they’ll be bought and have their owner’s brand applied to their flanks. After that…” she shook her head and shrugged. “Well… let’s not talk about that.”

She turned to me and nudged me with a wing. “I’m sorry. I really am. But unless you want to end up like them, we gotta get out of here. I ain’t fixing to become a decoration at the auction house myself. And neither are you, I don’t think.”

But my eyes were locked on that building. “I’m not leaving them.”

“And just what can you do, really?” Ace asked, her wingtips twitching in irritation. “You’re just gonna get yourself caught and killed. If you’re lucky, that is.” She shook her head. “Forget it. They’re gone. It sucks, but they are. You ain’t gonna be able to free them. So let’s move while we still can.”

I turned to her and narrowed my eyes. “Then I’ll get myself caught,” I said, and she just raised an eyebrow at me. “We got out of the Pit with your plan. Now I’ve got one of my own. So are you gonna help me or not?”

Ace chewed on her lip for a few seconds, and I could tell she was weighing the options in her head. But eventually, she sighed and shrugged her wings. “Fine. Fuck it. I’ll help. But this shit better not get me killed.” She jabbed her hoof into my chest. “You owe me. Twice over. And you can bet I’m gonna call that in when we’re done here.”

“So long as you don’t ask me to kill innocents and do bandit shit then I’m fine,” I said. Then, looking back up to the RPR headquarters, I tapped my hoof against my chin. “Now, where can we find a uniform and some hoofcuffs?”