We didn’t get any sleep that night; we were too concerned with just moving and trying to get as far away from Hole as we could while it was still dark out. Come morning, we knew that any pegasi in the skies would be able to see us once they had the sun at their backs. We planned on resting and hiding during the daylight hours, then moving again when it got closer to dusk.

The grassy plains outside of Hole were great for keeping us hidden from the sky, so what little light the moons cast on the ground didn’t give us away in the immediate aftermath of the jailbreak. But the further from the mountain we got, the more the grass thinned out. By the time we crossed a stream, the grasses were only shoulder height. But we were getting closer to the mountains on our eastern flank, and the rough terrain was filled with little caves and hidey-holes to bunker down in. We decided that one of those would be a good place to rest, and we soon found one big enough for the three of us. Once I’d dragged a bush over it, it was almost impossible to see, even up close.

But it was still a little cramped, and the three of us (plus SCaR) were almost wedged in together. If I laid on my back, I had a little bit of room between the rocks on my left and Nova on my right, but I couldn’t sit up all the way or I’d smack my head on the ceiling. Although I grumbled about it once or twice, we weren’t really in a position to complain; running for your life doesn’t leave you a lot of freedom to be picky.

I was just happy to lie down, and I took the time to massage my shoulder a bit. It felt like it was made of rock, and moving it was painful. I’d powered through the last few miles on willpower alone before we found this hollow. I was afraid it was just going to be worse when I woke up.

While Gauge worked on getting SCaR set into sentry configuration so it could warn us if anypony was approaching, Nova saw me massaging my shoulder. Tutting like a worried mother hen, she brushed my hoof aside to get a look at the wound. “What happened?” she asked, worry in her voice. “Are you alright? Was that cleaned properly?”

“I certainly hope so,” I said, shrugging my good shoulder. “That outlaw I was with, Ace, she patched me up. Hunter—head RPR bitch with the aviators—stabbed me in a fight down in the Pit. Ace said the knife was poisoned and she gave me an antidote, so since I’m here, she must have done a decent job treating it.” Grunting, I poked at the rock-hard muscle and winced. “I can hardly move it, though, and that’s not the sling’s fault. Feels like my shoulder’s a solid steel ingot.”

Nova rolled onto her side and began massaging my shoulder with both of her hooves. I flinched whenever she pressed hard, trying to soften my muscles any way possible. It hurt, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with. I just hoped that it’d help in the morning.

“What about your mouth?” Nova asked, and I instinctively rubbed at the side of my jaw. “You were spitting out a lot of blood for a while, there.”

“Lost a tooth in the fall from the bridge,” I said. “Don’t know what happened to it. I might have swallowed it for all I know. But it’s gone and now my mouth hurts like shit.” Sighing, I closed my eyes and shifted my bags to make a makeshift pillow. “Just for once, I’d like to go somewhere new and not get fucking beat up. First the fort, then Sig’s quarry, the dam, now Hole… I’m starting to feel like Auris doesn’t love me anymore.”

Gauge snickered on the other side of Nova. “What, you think she ever loved any of us to begin with?”

“Are you telling me our relationship isn’t real?” I grinned a bit. “Well fuck. What am I supposed to do now?”

My answer came in a big yawn, and I shook my head to try to shake it off. Gauge chuckled, and I could hear him shifting around while Nova worked on my shoulder. “Get some rest. SCaR’s set to wake me if a pony comes within a mile of us. We’ll need to be well-rested and ready for more walking tonight. We have a lot of ground to cover before we make it to this foundry place your outlaw friend mentioned.”

“Yeah, that’s for damn sure.” I tried to find a comfortable position but gave up after a minute. At least I was used to sleeping on rocks, though I really wish we could’ve used those beds in Hole a little while longer. They were so much nicer than a literal hole in the ground. “Goodnight… morning… whatever. Fuck the sun.”

And with those moving words, I quickly fell asleep, Nova’s massage pushing me into blissful unconsciousness.

I must’ve slept like I was dead, because it was so much brighter outside when I woke up. I figured that I had to have been asleep for eight or nine hours. But when the days on Auris are as long as they are, it was only an hour or two past noon when I finally woke up.

Gauge and Nova were already awake; I could hear them talking quietly to each other, trying to let me rest. I was about to sit up, but the moment I heard them whisper my name, I decided to pretend I was still sleeping a bit longer. I carefully pointed one ear at them and listened.

“But I told her, ‘Ember, just say something, okay? We’ll always be willing to listen.’” It was Nova, and she sounded kind of sad. “But I just… what do we do? I’m worried for her, Gauge. I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself, accidentally or otherwise.”

“She’ll be fine, Nov,” Gauge said. “She just… needs time to grieve.”

“But she’s not grieving!” Nova hissed back. “She’s bottling it up and won’t talk to anypony about it! I know that mare meant a lot to her, but she’s gotta talk to us, not just pretend like it isn’t bothering her!” A sigh. “Do you know that she cries in her sleep?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“And I feel so bad for her! Like, I want to wake her up and just hold her, but she doesn’t get much sleep as it is, and… and I don’t know, Gauge. I don’t know what I should do. I want to help her, but she doesn’t want to let us. And if she keeps all that misery bottled up, she’s gonna get herself hurt.”

“Listen…” There was a moment of silence, and then Gauge’s already quiet voice became almost impossible to hear. “We can’t force her to talk to us. She has to decide to do that on her own. And I’m worried for her too, yeah, but I know that she won’t hurt herself. I’m not worried about that. She has us to look after, and I know that she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us or herself. She can’t keep us safe if she gets herself killed; hopefully she’ll realize someday soon that she doesn’t have to stay alive just for us.”

I was almost certain that last bit was directed at me, but I didn’t move. Even if he suspected I was awake, I wasn’t going to let them know for sure. After a few seconds, Nova sighed, and I heard her feathers ruffle. “I suppose you’re right. I just… just wish there was something we can do.”

“We’re doing everything we can just by being with her. Right now, that’s all that should matter—to us, and to her.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right…” Her wing brushed my side as she groaned and stretched. “It’s getting into the afternoon, right? Should I wake her up? When should we get moving?”

“It’s been eight hours at least. Go ahead and wake her. We’ll plan things out from there.”

A second later, Nova nudged my side and gently shook me. I had to pretend that I was just waking up, so instead of groggily rolling over, I flinched and bolted upright. I immediately slammed my horn into the rocks above me, and that was pretty painful, but I’d completely forgotten about them, so at least it looked authentic. Groaning and hissing, I eventually sat as upright as I could. “What is it?” I asked them, forcing some concern into my voice. “Did SCaR see anything?”

Nova placed her hoof on my shoulders to try and calm me down. “No, no, Ember, it’s alright. You’ve been asleep for about eight hours now. We figured that we should get you up.” She smiled at me and nosed the sling. “Feeling any better?”

Grimacing, I tried to move my foreleg. It actually moved a bit more than it was before I fell asleep. “It feels a bit better,” I said. “Still really stiff, but I can move it a bit. I guess that massage helped.”

Nova laughed and shook her head. “It’s probably all that stuff that that bandit put in there, honestly. I’m not a very good masseuse.”

I blinked. “What?”

Nova chuckled and shook her head. “Massager.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Because Nova likes to use the Equiish language like a scalpel, not a club,” Gauge teased me.

“Yeah, why don’t you go fuck yourself, how about that?” I smirked back.

Nova shook her head and rubbed her crests against her temples. “You two, I swear on the stars…”

“Yeah, yeah, we love you too, Nov.” I patted her on the back (which required me to twist my body to get my good hoof over to her) and tried to peer through the brambles I’d dragged in front of our cave. “Fuck, there’s still a lot of light outside.”

“The sun won’t go down for at least another six hours. If we move now, any pegasus in the air might see us.”

Groaning, I put my forehead in my hoof. “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. And we don’t know how far this foundry is.”

“It can’t be too far, otherwise she would’ve given us better directions. Besides,” Nova said, “I don’t think she’s gonna just leave us there. Did you see how she was looking at SCaR?”

The zebra nodded. “Yeah. We’ve got something she wants. Not sure why or what for, but a pony like her will stick around for something she thinks is worth her time.”

“And that’s why I can’t bring myself to trust her,” I said. “For starters, she nearly killed me, so that’s a shitty first impression. But she’s also a bandit—oh, sorry, ‘outlaw’—and I doubt that everypony she’s shot at or stolen from really deserved it. What’s to stop her from just killing us and taking SCaR if we won’t give her what she wants?”

“You, I would hope,” Gauge said, a coy smile pulling at his lips.

I shook my head. “You haven’t seen that mare fight. She’s better than I am. Really fucking fast, too. If she decided she wanted me dead, I wouldn’t be able to react before she cut me down.”

“Sounds like a lovely mare.”

“Psh. You’re telling me.”

“She seemed like a decent mare,” Nova said, surprising me. “I mean, she helped us escape, right? And as far as I know, you didn’t pay her. Did you tell her about SCaR beforehand?”

“No,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she’s not gonna shoot us in the back for him later, though.”

“In that case, we might just be better off ignoring the foundry altogether,” Gauge said. “Did you hear anything about where Yeoman might be looking?”

I shrugged. “A little bit. They’re flying off to the south and searching around some waterfalls there. They think that there’s an installation hidden under one, but there’s apparently like a fucking million waterfalls to look under. It’ll take us forever to find it, supposing that they’re even right in the first place.”

Gauge nodded. “I suppose you’re right. If only that signal could’ve been a little more clear about where these places were.”

“That’s the whole point, though,” Nova said. “Whatever the signal was, it was supposed to be received and authorized by the seven different installations at the same time. It’s like a failsafe to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hooves. To actually know what it says, you have to put the message together from all seven installations, otherwise it’s useless.”

“Well that’s great and all, but it doesn’t really work if there’s nopony around to actually read the message, right?” I shook my head. “And it doesn’t help us, either. Now we have to find where these places are before we can even put the pieces together.”

Nova pursed her lips in thought and Gauge just bowed his head once and went back to staring through the brush. In the lack of conversation that followed, I rolled over so I could dig some rations out of my bags and quickly stuffed my face. With all that’d happened last night, and then with how long I slept, I was absolutely starving. I hadn’t eaten anything decent for almost a day.

As we sat there in silence, I could feel the conversation I’d overheard eating at me. I felt sick and betrayed, and I did my best not to show it. They were worrying about me like I was about to hang myself, and after having nearly been hanged and tasting that fear and desperation to cling onto life, that was the last place I wanted to go back to. I wanted to live, but it wasn’t easy. Besides, I had too many things on my shoulders, too many people relying on me, to fall now. I couldn’t let myself be weak, but I could feel the tears on my muzzle when I woke up, just as I’m sure Nova and Gauge could see them. The little corner of Tartarus where my nightmares took place was the only place I could afford to be weak.

And how dare they talk about Zip that way? They weren’t feeling what I was feeling. I watched her die in front of me in terrible agony. In my dreams, I could still feel her blood on my coat. The happy nights we’d had together were all tarnished by her death. I couldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. I couldn’t make that misery just go away. It took everything I had just to keep my head above the water, so to speak.

White hooves nudged my shoulder. “Ember? What’s wrong?” Nova asked. “Something on your mind?”

“Thinking,” was all I said. I didn’t even look at her; I just wanted to be left alone, and I was feeling pretty vile. I didn’t want to explode on them like I did back at the dam after Zip died. I still regretted everything I said to them; I’d probably regret it for the rest of my life. That they’d forgiven me didn’t make it any better. In fact, I’m pretty sure that made it worse. I didn’t deserve to have them as my friends. They didn’t deserve all the suffering I’d put them through.

Sometimes I wished that they’d just stayed behind at the dam. It felt like the road ahead would’ve been so much easier by myself.

But they were here now, and the only thing I could do was keep them safe. I’d almost failed at that in Hole, but thanks to Ace, I’d gotten them out. I rolled onto my back and started picking out the different splotches of color in the rocks with my eyes. “How’d they find you two?” I asked them. “What happened while I was gone?”

“We waited for you at dinner like we planned on,” Gauge said, “but when you didn’t show up, we knew something had to have gone wrong.”

“I wanted to find you,” Nova said. “If you were in danger, I thought you’d need our help.”

“But we didn’t,” Gauge said, and Nova frowned. “I convinced Nova that you could handle yourself and it wouldn’t do you any favors to just end up getting captured or killed looking for you. I figured you’d stop by the inn looking for us if you were okay, so we went back there and just tried to wait it out. But the innkeep sold us out; she gave the RPR ponies a key, because the next thing we knew, they unlocked the door and stormed in. I tried to hold them off so Nova could run…”

“But they dragged me back from the window before I could jump out of it,” Nova said. She held up her left wing and pouted at a gap in her feathers. “They slammed the window shut on my feathers and I lost a few when they dragged me away.”

“It’s a good thing they did, I guess,” I said. “Ace and I flew up to the window to go looking for you once I was awake again, and I saw some of your feathers in the window. That’s how I knew the RPR had you. Otherwise…” I shrugged. “I might have spent a lot longer looking around Hole to see if you two were hiding somewhere before trying my luck with the RPR headquarters. Who knows what would’ve happened then?”

“Let’s not think about that,” Gauge said. “We’re here, we’re together, and that’s all that matters.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“You got it!” Nova exclaimed. Her forelegs wrapped around mine and Gauge’s shoulders and she brought us all in for a group hug. “So long as we stick together, we’ll be fine! There’s nothing we can’t do!”

Gauge chuckled. “Auris better watch out.”

“We’ll have that code put together in no time at all!”

As I sat there nuzzling her side, I realized that maybe she was right. Where the fuck would I be without these two? I’d probably be dead several times over. And even if we didn’t always see eye to eye, at least we’d always be there for each other.

That mattered more than all the bullets on this shitty planet.