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Ministry Interoffice Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Rainbow Dash
From: Spitfire
Subject: New Clearance Restrictions
8/20/1075

Dear Rainbow Dash,

At your convenience, I would like to schedule a meeting to discuss your recent decision to restrict several clearances to the senior members of our finance department. While I understand that there may be good reasons for doing so, I have been fielding complaints that I don’t have answers for, and to be completely honest it’s starting to undermine my team’s confidence in me. I’ll have my Pip-Buck on me all day today. Let me know as soon as you’re free.

Thanks,
Spitfire

To: Rainbow Dash
From: Spitfire
Subject: Fw: Clearance Restriction
8/21/1075

Dear Rainbow Dash,

I wanted to verify that you’ve had a chance to read the attached message I sent yesterday. Finance isn’t happy. Whiplash has been on me all morning because he can’t access the general ledger. Ponies are starting to ask questions that I don’t have answers for, Dash. You need to message me as soon as you read this.

Thanks,
Spitfire

To: Spitfire
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: Re: Fw: Clearance Restriction
8/21/1075

Hey Spitfire,

Sorry about not getting back to you until just now. I’ve been trapped with I.T. for the last couple days. They needed to upgrade some of the firewalls in the ministry network and they wouldn’t let me off the leash until I signed off on it. You know how they get. They promised me none of the departments would notice the clearance reduction during the upgrade, so I didn’t think to let you know. That’s on me, and I totally owe you lunch for having to deal with Whiplash. Let Finance know they should have their normal clearance within the next hour or two, and that anyone affected will be getting an extra day of paid vacation for the trouble.

-RD

To: Rainbow Dash
From: Scootaloo
Subject: Shelter Project Funding
9/08/1075

Dear Rainbow,

I know I already talked your ear off during dinner last night, but I wanted to sit down and put into words what I don’t think I was able to properly express yesterday.

Thank you so much. When I left Robronco to start this company, I wasn’t sure whether I was freeing myself or making a huge mistake. But like Applebloom told me on my last day, nobody knows whether the parachute will open until they jump. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to pay you back for being that parachute. Without your endorsement, Stable Inc. would still be some nobody construction company operating out of a warehouse at the foot of Canterlot Mountain. You gave me the chance to prove that it could be something greater. Designing The Pillar for the ministries has been the crowning achievement of my career. I can’t wait to show you what else I can do.

Would you believe I actually thought about retiring after we cut the ribbon. I mean, how do you go back to designing backyard bomb shelters and single-family panic rooms after that? You allowed me to discover security - real security - on that scale isn’t just a fantasy. It’s a tangible thing now. Something we can step inside of and be proud of. And it should be shared.

The Shelter Project is the next step in this journey and I cannot put into words how grateful I am for the Ministry of Awesome’s continued funding. I’m not ignorant to the sacrifices you made in partnering with me on this, and I only hope that the two of us can support each other in the face of our detractors. Providing peace of mind in the face of war isn’t defeatism, it’s a moral responsibility. I welcome whatever tribunal or investigation comes once this war ends, because it will have meant the Shelters were never used. I don’t recognize the world I’m living in anymore. I don’t recognize the ponies we’ve become. Someone has to raise the alarm before we create a weapon we can’t take back.

Thank you for believing in me, Rainbow. One way or another, we’re going to save lives.

Your friend,
Scootaloo

---

To: Rainbow Dash
From: Spitfire
Subject: Clearance
9/19/1075

Hey Dash, I just got a visit from Whiplash. Finance is having issues with their clearance again. Looks like the general ledger and the transaction processing software are locked out. I went ahead and told Whiplash to put a work order in with I.T. to have them look into it, but I’d appreciate it if you would keep me in the loop on these firewall updates going forward.

Thanks,
Spitfire

To: Spitfire
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: Re: Clearance
9/19/1075

Sorry about that. Ledgers are back up.

-RD

To: Rainbow Dash
From: Spitfire
Subject: Re: Re: Clearance
9/19/1075

I didn’t ask for an apology, I asked to be kept informed. This ministry is the sole financier of the nation’s war effort. I take it very seriously when the department that facilitates those transactions isn’t able to do its job. Whiplash has been on edge since the first time this happened and now he’s demanding a complete audit of the general ledger. I’m running out of reasons to tell him why he can’t hold up the entire ministry with an unscheduled audit.

To: Spitfire
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: Issue Resolved
10/18/1075

Spitfire,

After speaking with I.T. this morning, we’ve determined that Tuesday’s glitch with clearance was due to a software conflict that arose when I transferred approved funds to Stable Incorporated. The denomination exceeded the preset cap allowed for privately owned businesses, which I overrode to save time. I’m told that going forward this won’t cause any more problems.

-RD

To: Rainbow Dash
From: Spitfire
Subject: Re: Issue Resolved
10/18/1075

Seriously, Dash? You couldn’t get off your blue ass to tell me that a MONTH ago? It’s Friday afternoon and Finance has been shut down since Wednesday because I finally told Whiplash to run his fucking audit! Now I have to go down and tell him he not only wasted four weeks growing an ulcer over nothing, but he also clogged up two day’s worth of work because you couldn’t bother logging onto your terminal?

I expected this kind of bush league garbage back at the Academy, but not from the head of a fucking ministry.

Spitfire

To: Finance Team Leaders
From: Rainbow Dash
CC: Spitfire
Subject: Whiplash
10/19/1075

For Immediate Distribution to the Finance Team:

It is with mixed emotion that I must inform you that, effective immediately, Whiplash is no longer employed as the Ministry of Awesome’s Chief Financial Officer. Out of respect for him and his staff, we will be unable to share details regarding the reason for his separation. We wish him the best of luck with his future endeavors.

I would like to thank you all in advance for your discretion, and would ask that any resumes be directed to Spitfire’s office no later than next Friday.

Thank you,
Minister Rainbow Dash
Ministry of Awesome

To: Spitfire
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: Meeting
10/19/1075

Hey Spitfire,

Before you head out for lunch, stop by my office. We need to work out some boundaries.

-RD

October 19th, 1075

Rainbow glared at the jewelry laid out across her desk. Gold plates ornately shaped to resemble swirling clouds bit into the wood surface as she held the necklace still, pinning the centerpiece with one hoof while keeping the lightning-shaped ruby centered in its setting. For the second time this year the gem had worked itself loose from the impossibly tiny prongs. It landed on her office carpet as unceremoniously as a dropped stapler, thankfully choosing to fall while she was throwing her jacket over her chair rather than during the flight across Canterlot. The last thing she needed was Rarity breathing down her neck about having to suppress rumors that one of Equestria’s Elements of Harmony had been discovered lying on the cobbles.

The weather was beginning to cool off outside. As advanced as the Pillar’s forced air systems were advertised to be, Rainbow’s office always felt like an oven during the first few weeks of autumn. She could already feel the sweat beading down the ridge of her muzzle as she worked.

Leaning over her necklace with the tip of a ballpoint pen pressed against one of the countless prongs, she was glad for once that the office hadn’t come with a window. She didn’t need word to get out that the one ministry mare who still wore her Element had somehow managed to break the damn thing.

Her stomach peeled in protest. Lunch was less than an hour away but she had skipped breakfast to put the finishing touches on her CFO’s separation notice. Now she was paying for it with a disgruntled chorus from her gut, though she couldn’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t entirely due to hunger.

Spitfire was starting to become a problem.

She ignored the gnawing ache. “Come on,” she breathed.

The golden barb bent, slowly, until it folded flat against the ruby’s flawless surface.

“Yes!”

She chewed her lower lip and grinned, moving the pen an inch along the gem to the next outwardly bent prong. One down, way too many to go. On the bright side, she had the better half of the next hour to finish up before her next…

Three unmistakably gentle knocks tapped her door.

...meeting.

She made a face. Were it anyone else, she wouldn’t have answered. Though Fluttershy never visited unannounced without a good reason, the mare had a tendency to sniff out the breaks in Rainbow’s schedule to show up. She sighed. Whatever it was, Fluttershy would have to make it quick or she would find herself directly in Spitfire’s warpath.

She reached her free wing across the desk and buzzed her in. The door clicked open and to Rainbow’s chagrin, Fluttershy stepped in with Zecora in tow.

Fluttershy paused to look at the Element spread across the desk before pushing the door shut. “Did we come at a bad time?”

Yes, she thought. “You’re fine, I’m just… cleaning.”

Rainbow tried not to wince at the disbelieving look that played across Fluttershy’s eyes, but the rose-maned pegasus was polite enough not to press the issue. With her pen still poised to bend the next prong, she watched them climb into the comfortable chairs across her desk. Her smile strained. This wouldn’t be a short meeting.

Something was off. She could feel it. Hell, she could see it. Fluttershy was blinking too much and she seemed incapable of making eye contact with her. She was nervous about something, just like the old days. If Zecora was suffering the same anxiety, she didn’t show it. She wore the same impenetrable smile she’d mastered when they were young. She was an open book written in a language Rainbow couldn’t read.

“No Teak, today?” Rainbow half-joked, hoping to ease the tension in the room.

“She is in school,” Zecora replied, diplomatic as ever. “I did want to thank you for keeping her company after our return from Vhanna last week. Had I known my debriefing would take so long to complete, I would have asked someone to take her off your hooves in the meantime.”

For a moment, she wondered if Zecora’s comment was a subtle dig at Fluttershy but a quick glance between the two mares was enough to convince her there were no hard feelings brewing between them. In truth, Rainbow had expected the debriefing to run longer than just a few hours. Zecora’s first visit to Vhanna was the first real tangible step Equestria had taken toward de-escalation since the war began. It was owed more than a cursory update.

“It was no problem,” she said, and meant it. The afternoon spent with Teak had been the first real free time Rainbow allowed herself to enjoy since taking on the mantle of ministry mare. Sneaking the young mare’s gifted talisman out of Twilight’s sight had been a spur of the moment decision, but it felt unfair to let her snatch it away without at least consulting them first. If there was even the hint of a chance that the little white stone was a threat, Zecora wouldn’t have let her daughter anywhere near it.

When Rainbow offered it back to Teak over dinner, she made her promise to keep it between them. At the end of the day, she wasn’t about to blame the kid for letting her mom in on the harmless subterfuge.

“She’s a pretty awesome kid,” she said.

Zecora mirrored her softening smile with one of her own. “She hasn’t stopped talking about it. You’ve made quite the impression on her.”

“She has a tendency to do that,” Fluttershy chuckled, though the tension in the pegasi’s voice betrayed her attempt at levity. Whatever they were here for, this wasn’t it.

Rainbow’s smile tightened a little and she turned her attention back down to the Element beneath her hoof. She pressed the tip of her pen against the next upright prong and carefully folded it toward the edge of the gem.

“I don’t like seeing you on edge, Fluttershy,” she said, pressing the prong flat. “What’s up?”

Her office went quiet. It stretched. Rainbow glanced up from her Element and noticed the indecision playing across the pegasi’s face. She looked younger, somehow. Like back when a simple question was enough to send her cowering into feathers like a frightened bird.

It seemed like ages had passed since then, and yet here in Rainbow’s office sat the same young mare she had met so long ago. Except this time it wasn’t shyness pressing her lips shut. It was fear.

She frowned and pushed her Element to the side. “Fluttershy, talk to me.”

Fluttershy breathed deeply, her eyes fixed on the bland carpet. For a moment, Rainbow thought she would stay mute and force her to start guessing what was wrong.

“First,” she said, her voice barely higher than a whisper, “I need to know that everything Zecora and I say here stays in this office. Undocumented.”

Rainbow paused for a beat, looking between the two of them for anything that might give her a clue to what they were really here for. Fluttershy stared back at her, on the verge of speaking but unwilling to do so until she had her assurances.

She settled back into her chair. “You know you can trust me.”

“I know,” Fluttershy said, lifting her gaze to the necklace on the desk. “I know, but I need you to promise me.”

There was something in the way Fluttershy looked at her Element that made her feel uneasy. The significance of what the gem and its inborne power represented wasn’t lost on her.

“Okay,” she said. “On my loyalty as your friend, nothing leaves this office. I promise.”

Fluttershy let out the breath she’d been holding in. “Thank you.”

Rainbow nodded. “Just don’t go telling me you killed somebody.”

“Not on purpose.”

Rainbow went still. It took her a second to realize Fluttershy was joking. She sighed relief and shook her head.

A small smile appeared across Fluttershy’s lips and vanished just as quickly. “Have you spoken to Gilda any time recently?”

Gilda’s name caught her off guard. Her chair creaked as she leaned back, trying to think of the last time she and the notoriously standoffish gryphon crossed paths. “Not in a long time,” she said, then asked the important question. “Why?”

Fluttershy looked pensively to Zecora. The zebra cleared her throat. “My visit to Vhanna was more productive than I have led you all to believe. A path has presented itself. One that, with your help, may facilitate a peaceful end to this war.”

Rainbow regarded Zecora with polite skepticism, careful not to say the things Zecora had to know she was already thinking.

Since the beginning of the war, there had been no shortage of theories on how to end it. Every idea that could be conjured up had been, and even then more came rolling into the ministries from sources ranging from well respected newspapers to hoof-written letters from every crackpot with a pen and a free afternoon. Ponies from across the country demonstrated novel and disturbing levels of creativity in this single endeavor. Most ideas orbited the central notion that assassinating the Vhannan leader would finish the war, while others followed a more eccentric path. Everything from covertly flooding the newly densified Vhannan cities with tailor-made chems to enlisting Equestria’s pegasi to disrupt the weather and destroy their crops. Just about any pony had a theory on how to end the war, and precious few had anything to do with what Rainbow would call “peace.”

As much as she respected Zecora, Rainbow felt the same walls of doubt creeping into her mind. A pony could only sift through so many impossible ideas before the mere thought of one working seemed just as impossible.

Zecora noted her doubt and pushed forward anyway.

“Ambassador Abyssian and I feel that for either side to consider laying down arms, there must first be a light at the end of the tunnel. For both of us,” Zecora explained. She folded her legs across her lap and regarded Rainbow with an intensely neutral gaze. “We think that light may be solar energy.”

Rainbow blinked. First Jet Stream, now her? It took a conscious effort to mask her intrigue under a veil of vague curiosity. “Oh?”

Zecora nodded. “We all know the numbers by heart at this point. Equestria has two years before its oil reserves run dry, but Vhanna could have a decade or more waiting beneath the savannah. We could have retrofitted our refineries to burn coal again were it not for the war demanding so much from the private sector, and the princesses made it clear they won’t tolerate delaying the supply chain for anything short of a natural disaster, and maybe not even then. Our only options are to defeat Vhanna before we run out of reserves, which is becoming increasingly unlikely to happen the longer our front lines stay mired in trenches, or we find a different way out.”

“And you think solar is that way out,” Rainbow said.

“I do,” Zecora nodded. “Equestria and Vhanna are sitting on enough raw material to make real, meaningful strides in solar energy that would provide a growing safety net for our industries should we reach the bottom of our oil reserves. Ambassador Abyssian believes once Vhanna sees Equestria moving toward a solution that doesn’t require zebras to live in destitution as a side-effect, it could give him a strong case with Vhannan leadership to consider a temporary ceasefire.”

Fluttershy shifted in her seat. “Zecora shared with me that Abyssian also admitted Vhanna’s research into solar energy trails our own by several years. They would need to be caught up.”

Rainbow waited for the other shoe to drop, but the lingering silence told her it had already fallen. She was already putting her neck on the line for Jet Stream and his SOLUS project, but what Fluttershy and Zecora were suggesting bordered dangerously close to real treason. Providing aid to Vhanna was tantamount to picking up a zebra rifle and firing it at an Equestrian soldier. It simply wasn’t done. With Princess Luna’s legendary and often disturbing ability to peek into the dreams of sleeping ponies, it was hardly even thought.

She looked at the Element splayed across her desk and chewed the inside of her cheek. “You both know Celestia doesn’t like to see us playing with solar,” she warned.

“That hasn’t stopped you from diverting funds to Jet Stream Industries,” Fluttershy whispered, her eyes barely moving from the carpet.

Her heart skipped a beat. “I don’t know what you’re…”

“One point eight billion bits paid out through twelve shell companies over the past three months,” Fluttershy continued, her ears low with discomfort.

Rainbow leaned forward and pressed her face against her hooves. “Fuck.”

“Don’t worry,” Fluttershy mumbled. “I haven’t told anyone.”

The payments were the lifeblood that would make SOLUS possible, a project set into motion despite both Rainbow and Jet Stream knowing they were risking the wrath of both princesses by endeavoring to complete a functional prototype. It was meant to demonstrate that the technology was possible. An orbital solar collector capable of beaming a measurable fraction of that energy to solar farms dotted across Equestria and any other nation capable of replicating the technology once it was published. Once the genie was out of the bottle, even Celestia wouldn’t be able to put it back inside. How she dealt with that was her business, but for the time being Rainbow had been careful to cover her tracks. To send the funding to Jet as quietly and through as many channels as possible.

Apparently she hadn’t been subtle enough.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

Fluttershy squirmed a little. “You cut my ministry’s payroll budget down fifteen percent last month. I might’ve gotten a little angry with you.”

Rainbow stared at her.

“I’m good with computers,” she added sheepishly.

“You’re good with computers.”

Fluttershy looked ready to bolt, but somehow she managed to keep herself together. “I started teaching myself how they work in my spare time. None of you ever ask for my ministry’s help in anything, so I ended up with a lot of it. Robronco’s code was made to be intuitive so it wasn’t hard to learn, and my clearance lets me get a lot of places without needing to write anything new.”

Rainbow stared at her, dumbfounded. “You hacked us.”

“Just your finance department,” she admitted. “I’m sorry. I was just so mad.”

Rainbow continued to stare, sliding her hooves over her short-cut mane until they settled behind her neck. She could feel a knot forming there. “Okay,” she said, forcing herself to keep the anger out of her voice.

Fluttershy had, through a volatile mix of boredom and frustration, hacked the Ministry of Awesome. That was… new.

Rainbow wasn’t sure if Fluttershy’s intrusion into the MoA was a blessing in disguise or a curse that had the potential to spread.

“Okay,” she breathed. “How much did you see, exactly?”

Fluttershy forced herself to look up from the floor. “Just the transfers of funds and where they’ve been going. That’s part of the reason why I convinced Zecora that we should involve you in this. If you’re supporting Jet Stream’s research, that means you can appreciate how important it is to share what we’ve…”

Rainbow’s eyes shot wide as she shoved herself out of her chair, practically flying across the space between her and the walnut-laminated stereo credenza that rested against the far wall. She lifted the lid with one wing and flipped on the power switch with the other, filling the office with the pregnant hiss of speakers waiting for an input. To her relief, Fluttershy didn’t finish her thought until a familiar, if not embarrassingly catchy ear-worm from their first post-winter cleanups together drowned the room at a volume that bordered on painful.

Rainbow crossed the floor toward the two mares, both of which were pinning their ears at the onslaught of impossibly cheery music. Fluttershy dropped out of her chair and met her halfway, pressing her mouth close to Rainbow’s ear.

“We need your help getting Jet’s research to Vhanna,” she nearly yelled. “If we can catch them up with what we know, Abyssian may be able to organize enough support to push for a ceasefire.”

Rainbow winced as the key changed. “You’re asking me to help you commit treason.”

“Not if we use Griffinstone as an intermediary,” she countered. “They’re a neutral state and they leak like a sieve. Anything we share with them is bound to cross their border into Vhanna, and it’ll cross over faster with the right contacts.”

She glanced over Fluttershy’s shoulder at Zecora, who hadn’t moved from her chair. The zebra watched them with a stillness that defied the clear risk she had taken by not only involving Fluttershy in this plan, but a second ministry mare as well. Somehow, she’d managed to roll the dice twice and come up with the only arrangement of pips that wouldn’t end with her disappearing.

Rainbow had a feeling Zecora was the sort of zebra who would willingly stare down the barrel of a loaded cannon if her convictions demanded it.

“Is that why you wanted to know if Gilda and I were still in touch?” she asked.

Fluttershy nodded, the edge of her ear tickling Rainbow’s lip. “You two were always close. She seemed like a good first choice to get a holotape to Vhanna.”

Rainbow frowned as Fluttershy unfolded one of her wings, producing a small square of orange plastic the size of a coaster between her canary feathers. The holotape rested in her wing with a gravity that defied its size, drawing her eyes with the weight of what it contained. It was half of a promise. One that Fluttershy nervously waited for her to complete.

“How did you…”

“It’s best that you don’t ask,” Fluttershy said, spreading her feathers a little. The holotape slipped between them and fell into Rainbow’s waiting wing. “That holotape has copies of everything Vhanna needs to modernize their solar industry. Blueprints, chemistries, even some of the atmospheric data gathered from the sensors during JSI’s early launch trials. It’s all there. We just need to get it to them.”

She stared at the diskette and all the implications that came with it. Loophole or not, no matter who eventually walked this information into Vhannan territory, this was treason in its purest form. Their good intentions wouldn’t matter if they got caught. Celestia and Luna were far from the pleasant and kind rulers they made themselves out to be. They had prisons for traitors. Very dark, very temporary prisons.

“Fluttershy,” she hissed, “this is dangerous.”

“I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do,” she said, her voice shaking. “We can’t do this. If Rarity finds out… if the princesses find out…”

“Which is why we’ll be careful,” Fluttershy insisted. She took a step back and placed her wings on either of Rainbow’s shoulders, her grip surprising her with how firm it suddenly was. “Rainbow, if you don’t want to do this, that’s okay. We were never here. You weren’t involved.”

Rainbow looked at Zecora who stood no chance of hearing them over the blaring music. Plausible deniability, she realized. If Luna ever decided to pay a visit to Zecora while she dreamt, all she would glean from this meeting was an obnoxiously overplayed seasonal song.

Fluttershy held her wing out for the holotape. “I know how to keep a secret. Just promise me you won’t tell anyone, either.”

Rainbow could feel her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest. Hesitantly, her feathers closed around the holotape and folded against her side. She swallowed the nervous lump in her throat, trying to dust off the bravado of her youth. “In case you forgot, I’m the Element of Loyalty. I don’t rat out my friends. Least of all the ones who remember how we used to do things,” she said, taking a moment to gaze at her office. “Before we became this.”

She steeled her resolve before she had a chance to reconsider. “Just tell me when you need it delivered.”

Fluttershy’s features visibly softened. For a split second, she looked younger. “As soon as you can manage without anyone noticing you’re gone.”

The song ended. The brief silence gave Rainbow time to consider some options before the next track rose from the stereo to assault their ears. Doris Bray, an oldies favorite of Rarity’s, singing a slow, alluring melody called “It’s Magic.”

“Then I’ll leave tonight once the sun sets,” she said. The significance of not saying “once Celestia sets the sun” wasn’t lost on either of them. This was where her allegiance truly lay. “Two hours to get to Griffinstone if I stay subsonic, then two hours back. That gives me an hour or two to find Gilda and convince her to help.”

“And if someone needs to get a hold of you?” Fluttershy asked.

Rainbow thought about that. “Ponyville still has lousy surveillance. It wouldn’t be unbelievable if a weather pony caught me dozing on a cloud in the morning. I could say I needed a quiet place to sleep. Old habits die hard, and all that. Sign an autograph and get a name to fall back on if anyone in Canterlot asks questions.”

“That does sound like you.”

“Used to, anyway,” she agreed. “It’ll work.”

A worried smile creased the corners of Fluttershy’s eyes and she pulled Rainbow forward into a tight hug. Rainbow made an uncomfortable noise at the sudden contact and felt the heat rise to her cheeks as Zecora smiled politely at the far wall. Rainbow was closer to retirement age than she was to her first mug of spiced cider, and yet she was still never sure what to do in these closer moments.

She lifted a hoof and gave Fluttershy an awkward pat on the back.

When Fluttershy finally freed her, she stepped away and dialed down the volume on the stereo until Doris Bray’s internationally acclaimed crooning dropped to a tolerable level. When she turned back, Fluttershy was looking at the necklace on the desk. She didn’t seem to notice Zecora dropping out of her chair in preparation to leave.

“You should have a jeweler look at that,” she said with a touch of worry.

Rainbow followed her gaze and allowed herself a smile. “It’s nothing I can’t fix myself,” she said.

Fluttershy quirked her lip at the Element before turning back to her. “Be careful with it.”

“I will,” she chuckled, but upon seeing the expression her friend wore, she realized they weren’t talking about the necklace.

She sobered, meeting her eyes. “I promise I will.”

Fluttershy stood silent for several seconds, as if trying to think of a way to do this thing without involving one of her closest friends. Then she turned toward Zecora, who waited at the door, and glanced over her shoulder to Rainbow. “Let’s have lunch sometime this week. Someplace private.”

“I know a few places.”

“Send me some suggestions tomorrow morning. As soon as you can.” She stepped toward the door and set her wing against the handle. “Stay safe, Rainbow.”

“You too,” she said. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

She watched Fluttershy hold the door open for Zecora before following her out into the hall. Somewhere nearby, a pony was whistling the lyrics to the song that had just poured from her credenza. The door turned on well oiled hinges and clicked softly shut.

Rainbow lifted her wing and slowly unfolded the feathers. The holotape stared back up at her in perfect silence. It was just a thing. A collection of metal and plastic that could do nothing except exist. Here in this place, it contained little more than blueprints and equations of things that were already known. Knowledge gleaned from a road well-traveled. But to the Vhannans, it would be a scientific revolution. A eureka moment that could relieve the crushing pressure that forced their mares and stallions into the trenches.

With some luck, it might just be the key to pulling Equestrian’s soldiers out of theirs too.

This was the right thing to do, she thought. No matter what the laws said, no matter what might happen to her if she got caught, this was the reason why the Tree of Harmony chose her to bear the Element of Loyalty.

She closed her feathers around the holotape once more.

This was her loyalty.

Five bangs rattled her door and drove a bolt of terror ran up her spine. She grimaced. A second volley pounded against its frame before she reached her desk. The angry freight train that was Spitfire had arrived. Rainbow opened the top drawer of her desk and set the holotape onto a stack of crisp documents, shut the drawer and turned the lock with the nib of her feather.

Settling back into her chair, she took a slow breath to steady her nerves and pressed a key on her terminal. The door buzzed and it flung open hard enough for the handle to leave a dent in the strike plate on the wall.

Spitfire wrapped her wing around the door and slammed it shut behind her like a gunshot. With the other, she jabbed a feather at Rainbow from across the office, her eyes rimmed red with accusation.

“We need to talk.”

Sledge leaned against the countertop while he waited for the grease-crusted coffee pot to heat up. He pretended not to notice the eyes lingering on him as he spun the handle of his signature red mug left, then right, then left again. The dry mud built up over years of the same coffee still sat at the bottom. It had been almost a full week since he last set hoof in Mechanical. He couldn’t help but feel a little pride in that nobody had gotten up the courage to wash it.

The break room door swung open and a cacophony of air compressors, power tools and shouting ponies briefly banished the quiet. Sledge surprised himself by flattening his ears against the noise. He was growing used to the comparative silence of his office at the top of the Stable. Six days ago he would have let the onslaught do whatever damage it pleased to his hearing. Now he wondered how much of it he’d never get back.

The door clicked shut, sealing away the worst of the noise. Hooves approached and he glanced over his shoulder to see who they belonged to. Carbide, the stallion he’d designated from Pinfeathers’ shift to build a containment chamber for Stable 10’s faltering talisman, tipped his chin toward him as he pulled out his earplugs with a charcoal black wing.

“I heard you were down here,” he said with a weary smile. Sledge nodded.

Carbide dropped the plugs into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and opened the cupboard, his yellow eyes searching the array of chipped and dented mugs.

Sledge could see the speckled blue handle of Carbide’s mug hiding behind a heavily worn Wonderbolts collectors cup claimed by Flux, but he didn’t point it out. It wasn’t how things were done down here. He didn’t pretend to know why. They just weren’t because it was how it had always been, and that was good enough. He waited until Carbide’s feathers nudged Flux’s cup aside and found it himself. It clicked against the countertop next to the pot, which greeted it with a rising gurgle and the promise of good coffee.

Carbide leaned into the counter, mirroring Sledge on the other side of the pot. “Any news?”

The quiet chatter from the break tables grew just a little quieter, ears subtly turning toward this new conversation.

Sledge watched the first wisps of steam curl and dampen the sides of the filter basket.

Two hours ago, he’d been roughly shaken out of bed by Opal Lace, Stable 10’s head of Information Technology. Pinfeathers’ duplicate messages had come pouring in some time during the night from a Pip-Buck that none of the servers could recognize, triggering warning prompts none of her staff could make sense of. At first Opal thought the system might have thrown a glitch that caused it to regurgitate an old, corrupted message on a loop, but when she opened it and read the tagline she dropped everything and sprinted up four flights of stairs to Sledge’s compartment.

He had read Pinfeathers’ message at Opal’s desk. Raw relief battled with the deep concern as his eyes skimmed across each line. She warned of a group calling themselves Steel Rangers who may try to coerce him into opening the Stable door. That they would strip the Stable down to the screws if he did. She claimed a pony named Blue was trapped in a tunnel outside and needed to be retrieved. Pinfeathers said she was important but stopped short of explaining in what way. That, more than anything else, stuck with him.

A thin black trickle of coffee sputtered into the stained carafe. The familiar scent filled his nostrils and seeped into his lungs, a sip before the first sip. He never knew he could appreciate the smell of home as much as he did right now.

Sledge noticed Carbide was looking at him with a touch of concern and it occurred to him that he had asked him a question. He considered avoiding answering altogether. The thought of saying nothing until he could make a formal announcement about Pinfeathers was sorely tempting.

He looked at the rising puddle of coffee and frowned. That wasn’t how things were done down here, either.

“She made contact last night,” he said. His throat constricted, catching him by surprise. He tilted his head and cleared it. “She’s alive.”

He watched Carbide sag slightly into the countertop. The dull murmur of chatter from the break tables went quiet. A chair scraped and a mare in a grease-stained jumpsuit hurried through the door. Sledge watched her go, then turned to the clusters of pegasi still at their tables. Some stared back, eyes growing damp with shock. A grizzled stallion he recognized from the scrap station pressed his mouth against the back of his hoof, tears staining his cheeks while his tablemate lifted a wing from her guard and wrapped it around his shoulders.

These were her people. The pegasi of first shift who she spent years learning from, working alongside and finally earning the trust and respect required to lead them. She’d grown up with them, shared drinks with them and bloodied more than a few of their noses during her time in Mechanical.

Her father already knew. These ponies, these were her second family though the relief washing over them may as well have come from her own flesh and blood. If anyone deserved to know, they did.

He gestured to the door with his ruddy feathers and addressed the room. “Quit your bawling and get your asses out there. First shift deserves to hear it from first shift.”

Chairs stuttered against the pitted linoleum as pegasi stood. A few had to be helped to the door while others shrugged their wings into their leather guards. The last to file out was a young stallion, barely an apprentice and naked as the day he was born. Sledge and Carbide watched him as he closed the door behind him. A small but growing percentage of the Stable’s pegasi had taken to leaving their jumpsuits in their compartments, claiming a strange form of solidarity with Pinfeathers. Sledge suspected most of the participants were using it as an excuse to make fools of themselves, but he had enough on his plate as it was. Chasing down nudists wasn’t something he had the luxury to worry about.

Carbide scrubbed his feathers across the corners of his eyes with a shameless smirk, nodding after the departing stallion. “These are some strange times.”

Sledge welcomed the excuse to laugh. He shook his head, lifted the carafe off the warming plate and poured himself the first cup. Coffee sputtered on the hot metal while Carbide held out his mug for Sledge to fill. Sledge obliged, then returned the carafe to the coffee maker.

He lifted the steaming mug to his nose and breathed deeply. “Who’s he apprenticing for?”

Carbide set his cup on the counter to cool. “Who, the kid? He’s working under Amber.”

Sledge whistled, disturbing the column of steam. Amber was the mare responsible for training the majority of the first shift’s welding team. Married, too. “How’s that working out for him?”

The charcoal stallion shrugged. “I give her another day before she splashes slag across his bare nuts.”

Sledge managed to get his mug down onto the counter before he started laughing. It felt good, like a relief valve being spun on an overpressured tank. He had to prop himself against the counter with a wing as his shoulders shook, coffee slopped from his mug soaking into his sleeve. Carbide laughed along with him until both their sides hurt. It felt like old times even if those times weren’t so old yet.

When they calmed, Carbide pulled a clump of napkins from a dented dispenser and held them out to him. Sledge took them and mopped up the spilled coffee, using what was left to wipe off his sleeve.

“You know, when you told us she left, I didn’t believe you.” Carbide’s feathers played across the handle of his mug. “But the more I thought about it, the more I knew that of course Aurora would be the one to leave. Once she gets her head around some idea, it’s safer to just get out of her way. There’s not a wall thick enough that she won’t punch through if she thinks there’s a solution on the other side.”

Sledge nodded and lifted his mug to his lips. The coffee scalded them as he sipped, but he was well used to the feeling. It burned his throat and warmed his stomach. He took another sip and savored the taste before speaking. “I know you two used to be close.”

“Used to be,” Carbide agreed. “Didn’t work out, though.”

He grunted and continued nursing his coffee. Aurora and Carbide’s brief relationship, however serious it had been, came to an avoidably painful end not long after Nimbus died. The day after the funeral, Sledge discovered Aurora grinding the burrs off the unfinished steel panels at her late mother’s workstation. When he tried suggesting she take some time off, the look she had given him had stopped the words in his throat. He decided the best thing to do for her at that moment was to give her space to work.

Carbide flowed into that space as readily as grease in a chipped hoof. Despite her protests and the repeated warnings from several of the elder members of first shift, he smothered her. Each time he tried to fix her broken heart, it broke a little more until finally she reached her limit. Carbide spent two days in the infirmary with a broken jaw. When he came back, they were over.

“Still,” he said, finally picking up his cup. “I’m glad she’s alright.”

Sledge nodded, knowing there was nothing to add, and they drank in amiable silence for several minutes, an unspoken breakroom tradition that predated all of them. When his cup ran empty, Sledge poured half of what was left in the pot into his mug, leaving the other half for Carbide. Privately, he decided it would be good for him if he made this brief visit a daily tradition of his own.

He pushed away from the counter and held his mug out to Carbide who clinked it with his own. He drained what was left, rinsed it under the sink and set it in the dingy drying rack knowing that someone would eventually set it back in the cupboard for him to find tomorrow. One more layer of mud to add to the rest.

The lights flickered overhead. When they settled down, he could swear they were a little dimmer than before. Somewhere in the heart of their generator, their talisman spun a little slower.

He nodded, mostly to himself, and started making his way out.

“Sledge.”

He stopped at the door. “Yeah.”

Carbide stared into his cup as he spoke. “Next time you talk to Aurora, make sure to let her know she’s not alone.”

His mind went back to the last words of her message. “She’s not alone,” he said. “She’s made some friends out there that are helping her along.”

“Huh,” Carbide said, his head bobbing with surprise. He glanced at Sledge with a disbelieving smile. “Aurora Pinfeathers making friends. Who would believe it?”

Sledge chuckled his agreement and turned the door handle. “Like you said, these are strange times.”

He lifted a wing goodbye and stepped out onto the main floor, letting the door click shut behind him. His ears flattened against a deafening noise that, to his confusion, never came.

He stood there, confused. For the first time since he could remember, the bangs and peeling of tools and hot metal were absent save for the irregular thrum of the Stable’s waning generator. The pegasi of the first shift stood gathered in a dense knot at the center of the workfloor while smaller clusters gathered around its edges. Laughter, rich with joy, echoed against the high ceiling. Sledge watched them celebrate the first good news since Aurora left.

He wanted to join them. To laugh and cry and let himself share in the rare moment of revelry. But he was their overstallion now. He knew if he stepped out onto the floor with them, the moment might break like a soap bubble wandering too close to a wall.

Nobody noticed him as he walked away, turned down the far hall and approached the service elevator waiting at its end. The call button chimed under his feather. The doors split open and he stepped inside, turned, and lit the button marked ATRIUM.

The elevator closed, shutting out the laughter and ferrying him away.

He blew out a breath to clear his head. He needed his focus for what he had to do next.

The doors chimed open at the top of the Stable and he stepped out into a world he was still adjusting to.

Pegasi milled through the corridors ringing the Atrium without so much as a mark on their crisp blue jumpsuits. A trio of foals bolted past the elevator door, squealing with laughter as they weaved around the hooves of adults who had once played similar games but had since forgotten the rules. Sledge nodded greetings to a mare carrying a pink paper box tied shut with a length of twine by her teeth, something he recently learned was a popular staple from the bakery in the Atrium. She dipped her nose in response, careful not to disrupt her pastries, before continuing on her way.

It was startling how quickly the Stable seemed to have adjusted to seeing him as their leader. Already, the signs of mourning for Overmare Delphi were beginning to fade. The rhythm of life marched steadily forward and each pegasi gradually fell back into their routines. Just a few days ago, the Atrium had been papered over with rose-colored ribbons, vibrant bouquets of artificial flowers and easels adorned with memory boards featuring key moments of Delphi’s life. Sledge had particularly enjoyed a foalhood photo of the overmare, her sleeping face mashed into the crease of a schoolbook that lay open on her bed. It reminded him that they had all been young once.

As he strode into the wide cavern of the Atrium, it felt as if the remembrance ceremony hadn’t happened at all. He tried not to let himself feel angry about it. Life had to move on. Otherwise, what was the point?

He ascended the steps to the upper level and spotted Chaser and Stratus waiting at the top, just outside the newly refurbished door to the deputy station. New, unpainted composite panels framed the same heavy door. The entire hydraulic system that operated it had to be ripped out and replaced in the aftermath of Pinfeathers’ jailbreak. The mare was nothing if not resourceful, much to the continued embarrassment of the security mare that had been responsible for keeping an eye on her.

“Sir,” Chaser said as the two stallions fell in behind him. “Are we still doing this?”

Sledge continued past the deputy station to the sealed door at the far end of the gantry. He fished his ID badge from his pocket between two feathers and slid it through the reader. It chirped and the door to his office slid open.

“Yes we are, deputy,” he rumbled.

Chaser and Stratus had both been there when Delphi announced her resignation, and as a result they had all been witness to what happened after. Later, Chaser would be the pony to place Aurora into her cell at his command. Whether that had bonded them, Sledge couldn’t say, but he wanted them with him for this.

He led them across the room to his desk where two freshly laminated badges lay in front of his terminal. The screen still glowed with the same pale green image taken by one of the cameras mounted outside the Stable door. He stared at it for a moment as he gestured for the two deputies to take their badges.

“Is that…?”

Sledge looked at Chaser, who frowned at the grainy still image. He hadn’t believed it himself, at first. He might never have without Pinfeathers’ message to confirm it. The camera was positioned high in the air, presumably mounted directly to the tunnel ceiling. At the top of the frame stood a slightly squashed shape of a gear emblazoned with the number 10 at its center. A rounded stone platform waited beneath it, leading to a flagstone pathway flanked by pillars that trailed off the bottom of the screen. Pale, unmistakably equine shapes lay in clusters around the base of the two pillars caught in the frame. It was a graveyard, but the bodies at the edges of the screen weren’t what concerned him.

Waiting on the platform in front of the great gear of Stable 10, was a single figure. Discolored by the phosphor green night vision, the pegasus was hard to distinguish from the bodies surrounding it, but there it had stood merely an hour earlier.

Standing, because it was alive.

Were it not for Opal and her team, chances were he’d still be in the dark about what waited outside the Stable instead of seeing it glowing on his terminal. Since the moment he put the call out for every department head to start looking for a solution to their failing generator, Opal had turned her entire team toward the task of scouring every server, every terminal and every Pip-Buck for any data the first residents might have brought with them that could help.

She ran into the first roadblocks almost immediately.

The first heavily encrypted files swam into their net within minutes. By the end of the first day, they had a few hundred. Then a few thousand. While it wasn’t out of the ordinary for these files to exist, the sheer quantity they were finding raised alarm bells. The bulk of them dated back to the first few weeks after the Stable was sealed, but some of them had been locked down before that. Everything ranging from supply manifests to early versions of the population roster had been sealed with an encryption that exceeded even Crusader-grade security. When Opal sent one of the documents to Sledge to see whether he override it, the system spat back a polite denial.

That lifted eyebrows. Whoever encrypted these files was trying to hide something.

Unfortunately for them, Opal and her team did not like being told no. With Sledge’s blessing, they bent their collective intelligence toward tearing through the prewar encryption brick by brick. It took them less than a day.

They found the camera footage from outside the door buried at the bottom of a chain of gibberish folders that hadn’t been touched in over two hundred years. The last user to open them had been the Stable’s first matriarch, Overmare Spitfire.

Sledge nodded at his terminal. “That’s our VIP. Remember, she answers to Blue.”

Chase nodded as he and Stratus each took a badge. “And these?”

“Hopefully unnecessary,” he said. “The door to your deputy station is keyed to those badges, and only those. I want to keep this contained between the three of us until we know what we’re dealing with. Pinfeathers said Blue may be violent, so there’s a chance we’ll have to detain her until she’s cooperative. Leave your guns on my desk, please.”

After some hesitation, the deputies complied and each removed a revolver from the holster around their foreleg. Stratus frowned as he set his weapon next to Chaser’s, his eyes on the figure frozen on the terminal. “Do we know if she’s armed?”

“Can’t say for sure,” Sledge admitted. “Pinfeathers never specified. There’s a lot of things she left out, and I get the feeling there was a good reason for it. Either way, I’m not willing to risk one of us accidentally shooting her in a struggle. Be ready to take some licks if she puts up a fight. Our job is to bring her inside without harming her.”

He stared down at each of them. “Any other questions?”

Both deputies shook their heads.

“Alright then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

They followed him out of the office in silence, flanking him on either side as the trio made their way into the deputy station. Chaser hung back to secure the door behind them, ensuring no visitors would wander in unexpected.

Sledge eyed the holding cells as they passed them and allowed himself to feel the guilt that formed in his chest. Having Pinfeathers thrown into a cell had, in retrospect, been a terrible mistake. If he would have listened to her, he might have been able to help her. Supply her with more than just a saddlebag full of apples and stolen tools. Maybe he would have even gone out with her.

Stratus trotted ahead and swiped open the door on the far side of the deputy station while Chaser went to the lockers and gathered three yellow flashlights. The passage containing the decontamination showers was narrow, forcing them to file through one at a time. Somewhere above them, a sensor pinged, startling a flinch out of Sledge despite knowing the showers wouldn’t fire when traveled in this direction.

The antechamber waited for them on the other side, dimly lit and bordering on a state of disrepair. He frowned at the thin patina of rust that coated the diamond-textured grating beneath his hooves, unable to help but notice that the network of pipes snaking beneath were dappled with the same brown stains. Several of the caged lights studding the spaces between the massive girders around the wall hadn’t come on at all, their bulbs left to decay until they finally went dark. It irritated him that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a work order come into Mechanical for this place. He made a mental note to have Flux add it to the rotation.

He tore himself away from the signs of neglect surrounding him and turned his attention to the reason they were here.

Recessed into the far wall of the antechamber stood the door.

It was all so strangely familiar. He remembered sitting down in Opal’s chair down in I.T. to view the security footage captured by the black dome mounted above the door behind them. His office was still being sanitized at the time and he didn’t have the stomach to go near it until the work was done.

He watched Aurora silently appear on screen and make her way to the kiosk at the edge of the platform he stood on now. Dangling by its strap hung the same rifle Overmare Delphi had turned on herself mere hours earlier. Aurora stood there, reading something on her Pip-Buck before searching for the camera and finding it. He watched her mouth move but there was no audio to listen to. She spoke silently, the agony of what she was preparing to do plastered across her face. What she was actually saying was anyone’s guess, so Sledge chose to believe it was an apology. When she was finished, she turned and plugged her Pip-Buck into the kiosk. Minutes later, she was gone.

Sledge approached the same kiosk, his hooves making the panels beneath him rattle quietly in their frames.

“I’m going to need both of you down by the catwalk,” he said.

The deputies began their descent, their eyes slowly lifting as the titanic disc of steel rose above them. When they were in position at the edge of the catwalk, Sledge lifted his Pip-Buck and tugged the coiled length of cable from its housing. It sank into the marked socket on the kiosk’s control board with a sharp click.

Sledge waited as the screen went dark, then bloomed to life as a curtain of green text spilled across the screen. Eventually the wall of software checks and verifications settled and the quiet chittering from his Pip-Buck slowed. The screen flickered once and he found himself presented with a menu similar to the ones Aurora had once been offered.

At the bottom of the list, the words TEST CYCLE greeted him like a taunt. He didn’t need the Stable closing behind them once they were on the other side. Instead, he selected an option Aurora would have never seen: OPEN DOOR.

He tapped it with a red feather and watched as the chamber sprang to life.

Blue’s ear twitched.

She opened her eyes.

Ticky ticky ticky.

That was the noise the bugs made when they didn’t think she could hear. But she did. She was good at hearing.

Ticky ticky ticky.

She rolled over on her sleeping bag and looked toward the door of the small place. It was dented and didn’t stay shut anymore. She wondered who did that.

Ticky ticky ticky.

Blue rose to her hooves and walked to the door. She pushed her head through the gap and it made a funny squeak.

Focus.

The noise was gone. She scared it away. She was alone again.

Her leg hurt so she moved it, stretching it behind her until it popped. It hurt a little less which was good. Sometimes he had to move it for her. He wasn’t here anymore.

She pushed the rest of the way through the door and looked at the boxes on the ground next to it. He didn’t like it when she looked in the boxes. She tried to remember why, but it hurt to try so she stopped. She left the boxes alone.

Blue opened her eyes.

The stone floor was warm against her face. She could hear whispers coming from the little tunnel. Not the big tunnel. The big tunnel was for her. The little tunnel was where he went to hide. She wasn’t allowed in the little tunnel.

Her ear twitched. She sat up.

She was next to the little tunnel. She must have come here when she went away. She went away sometimes but she always came back. A dark stain smeared the stone near her back leg. Bits of bug shell lay next to it. She didn’t remember catching the bug but that was okay. It was always good to catch bugs.

Whispers again.

She made a face and looked at the little tunnel. It was too dark inside to see. She tilted her head to listen better but the whispers were all mixed up. Did the little tunnel ever whisper? She wasn’t sure. Maybe he was coming back. Then she could listen to him sing.

She stood up and stretched her leg.

Pop.

She turned toward the small place and stepped on a piece of gravel. It squirted out from the tip of her hoof and chittered across the stone, startling her at first. Then she smiled and trotted after it. Pressing her lips together between her teeth, she looked at the pebble and pressed the edge of her hoof down on it until it skipped free and hopped away again. Her eyes widened a little and she ran to where it stopped, batting it with her hoof and chasing it wherever it went.

Blue opened her eyes.

She was in the small place again. Her leg hurt, so she moved it.

Pop.

She frowned. It felt like someone had taken something away from her, but she didn’t know what. Lots of things got taken away.

Something loud scraped the floor behind her and she sprang to her hooves. Her mouth hung open, ready to hurt the Her. She was sneaky and she lied. She always lied. She lied about everything.

But she was alone.

Blue made a face. She didn’t remember why she was angry. Sometimes she forgot things. Her book lay on the floor, pushed up against the wall. Sometimes she bumped things when she woke up and they scared her.

The book wasn’t scary, though, even if it did scrape.

She bent down and gently took the open cover in her teeth. She moved it back to where her necklace slept and let it fall with a thump. Dust puffed into the air around her necklace and she watched how the little motes gently settled around it, but not on it. Dust wasn’t allowed on her necklace. Those were the rules. Sometimes when she was scared, he would put it on her. He knew how to make it stay and it made her feel better. Sometimes it made her remember, but mostly it didn’t. She liked it anyway. That, and when he sang.

She sat down on the sleeping bag and touched the necklace with her wing. For a moment she felt something come back. Colors. A ring of colors.

Rainbow.

Something exploded in the tunnel and she screamed.

Her heart pounded hard enough to hurt. The booming didn’t stop. It got worse. Shrieking echoes shook the walls outside the small place. Terrible, awful shrieking that wouldn’t stop no matter how hard she screamed back at it.

It was happening again. Bombs and death and clouds of pegasi who tried to get away but died anyway. She remembered and it was bad. She saw their wings catch fire and watched the tips of her feathers blacken and curl. The flashes were so bright that she couldn’t see and the thunder cracked louder than any stormcloud she’d ever gathered. Cloudsdale was gone. Canterlot was gone. Everything was happening just like Scootaloo said it would. She needed to get to the Stable. She needed to make sure mom and dad were safe.

She moaned. “No, no, no…”

She flattened her ears and tried to squeeze out the noise coming from the tunnel but it didn’t work. It hurt too much. The sound, the light, the memories. It all hurt too much.

And then, with a sound like hammer striking iron, it stopped.

The thunder rumbled away. But the light.

The light stayed.

Rainbow Dash opened her eyes and listened.

Her heart raced. She licked her lips and stepped toward the dented door, her hooves turning the faintest shade of blue as they drifted into the dim light that spilled through the crack. She pushed it open and felt a lump rise in her throat at the sight that greeted her.

The Stable was open. She stared at it as tears misted her vision, causing the light to shimmer. It was real. She was here and it was real.

Three silhouettes stood on the platform, framed by a disc of golden light. She winced, her head already starting to feel fuzzy.

No, she thought. Focus.

Rainbow lifted her wings and pulsed them toward the flagstones. She shot into the stale air. Columns blurred past her outstretched hooves, each one capable of slapping her out of the air should she drift too close. She pulsed her brittle wings again, straining to keep herself level with the door. How many days had she beaten against it only to be answered with silence? She tried not to think about it. She didn’t know how long she had before it happened again, but she could feel it coming, like a fog pouring into her mind.

The doorway grew larger.

She could hear the screams. She could see the unicorns gathered on the platform, straining to force it open with magic that was inexplicably failing them. She remembered Sunny Meadows telling her that she had to be brave for them. That even though they were shut out, she had to convince them it would be okay.

She remembered hearing the first gunshots and knowing it wouldn’t.

Rainbow hurled herself forward, over the platform, through the door and realizing with a yelp that she was going too fast to stop. The other side of the impossibly bright room swung toward her like a hammer.

It didn’t matter.

She was inside.

Her body slammed into the top of the ramp and bounced hard enough for her to hear bone break. Someone belted a curse as she crashed into the far wall of the room, hooves clanging against metal while she crumpled to the floor in a heap.

“Blue!” someone yelled. Another pony swore, his voice thick with revulsion.

Rainbow tried to stand and a red hoof dipped under her shoulder to help her up. She got her legs under her and staggered, the shock of the impact making it hard to concentrate.

A bolt of pain shot through her right wing when she tried to fold it and she swung her head to look at it. The limb was barely connected, hanging on by only a few wet strands of gristle and sinew. The hollow bone stuck out like a tree root breaking soil. Blood, thick and dark, oozed from the wound like tar.

She bent her head and tried to ignore how wrong it looked.

“We need to get you to the infirmary,” a deep voice rumbled.

Rainbow pushed him away. She needed to focus.

It was hard to focus sometimes.

She grit her teeth and tried to stay on track. She needed to find her parents, but the fog was getting thick.

“No,” she groaned. She swayed but caught herself against the wall. Her eyes tracked up to the stallion that stood over her. She didn’t recognize him, but the jumpsuit he wore was enough for her to know he could help. She wrapped her good remaining wing over his shoulder for balance and met his eyes. “Windy Whistles and Bow Hothoof. Did they make it inside?”

The stallion frowned confusion. “I don’t recognize their names, but…”

“My parents,” she insisted. “Did my parents make it in?”

“I’m sorry,” he said, bewildered. “Your name is Blue, right? We need to get you to the infirmary.”

Rainbow dropped her wing and staggered forward. She was out of time.

“Mom!” she yelled desperately. “Dad!”

The room lurched and she stumbled. Sometimes she fell, but that was okay.

“Mom!” she screamed, her voice cracking. “Please, I’m here! Dad!!”

This wasn’t the small place. They weren’t here.

She spun around, the remnants of her wing swinging across the floor like a foal’s toy dragged by an old length of thread. It hurt. The red stallion stood frozen in place, staring at her as if he were afraid to touch her. He’d better not. Two more stallions stood behind him with the same horrified expression. She followed their eyes to her ruined wing.

When had that happened? Blue frowned at it, unsure how…

“No!” she howled. “No, no, no please no…”

“Ma’am, just calm down,” the red one said. “We can help you.”

She shook her head hard, trying to make room in the fog. “Mom,” she sobbed. “I don’t want to go, please I’m sorry I don’t want to go I don’t want to go I don’t…”

Her hooves tangled and she fell. Her broken wing twisted between her ribs and the onrushing floor, pinched, and tore free.

Blue opened her eyes and screamed.

Chaser stumbled away from the decayed pegasi. “Fuck, her wing!”

Sledge saw. Blue clamored to her hooves while making an agonized noise he had never heard any pony ever make before. Her wing lay still, half trampled beneath her hooves as the mare frantically looked at her surroundings as if she were suddenly afraid of them.

No, he realized. Not afraid. Lost.

“Ma’am,” he said, stepping forward. Her head snapped toward him like a cracked whip, and he froze. “Blue, you’re hurt. I want to help you.”

Blue lifted her remaining wing, winced, and looked back at the nub of torn flesh behind her right shoulder. Then she spun toward Sledge, her face twisted with mistrust. Her eyes darted to the deputies behind him and her chest billowed. She let out a wordless scream, as if to ward them away, and took a step backward.

Sledge glanced at the deputies out of the corner of his eye, not daring to turn his head. Stratus had begun to approach. He slowly lifted a wing to stop his progress. “Stratus. Stop moving.”

The deputy did as he was told and nervously licked his lips. “What the fuck is she? She looks like one of those bodies out there.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. Whatever the blackish substance leaking from her wound was, it was long past the point of resembling anything close to blood. Is this what happened to the descendants of the war’s survivors? Did they all look like this?

“She’s a friend of Pinfeathers,” he said, more for his own reassurance than theirs.

“She could be contagious,” Chaser warned.

Sledge shook his wing to shut him up. It turned out to be a bad idea.

Blue’s eyes locked onto the curtain of red feathers and launched herself toward them with an animalistic scream. Sledge jerked away, her one haggard wing slapping into his chest as she sailed through the space his feathers recently occupied. Momentum carried her past him and she barreled straight into Chaser.

The two of them tumbled over the grating in a flurry of limbs. Chaser yelled a string of curses as he struggled to separate himself from his attacker, but the mare was scrabbling against his jumpsuit like an angry cat. Before Sledge or Stratus could stop her, she was on top of him, hooves stamping against his chest in a frenzied attack.

The jagged edges of her hooves sliced holes across his jumpsuit. In the space of a few seconds, they were coming up wet with blood. Sledge rushed forward to help but Stratus was closer and got there first. The deputy tackled Blue from the left, wrenching her off Chaser and dropping her hard against the floor. Blue let out a frustrated screech as she hit the diamond-patterned steel, her legs squirming and kicking at his underbelly all while he strained to wrangle them to the ground.

Sledge rushed in to assist. “Keep her pinned!”

“Not as easy as it looks!”

A hoof caught Stratus across the foreleg, knocking it sideways and freeing Blue’s shoulder, allowing her more freedom to twist away. Her pale magenta eyes searched frantically for an escape before locking onto the approaching overstallion. They shot wide. Fresh panic seized her and she twisted away so violently that an audible crackle ran down her spine. She slapped the grating with her last wing with enough force that Sledge worried she would break that one off too.

Stratus regained the advantage and shoved Blue’s shoulder down, pinning her back against the grating. Blue snarled up at him, craned her neck toward the offending appendage and clamped her teeth around his ankle. She bore down, hard.

The deputy’s usual gruff voice shot to a squeal. “Fuck!!”

Instinct overrode sound logic and Stratus wrenched his leg out of Blue’s red-rimmed jaw, shearing off a ragged flap of flesh that remained clenched between her teeth.

Blue screamed again, another unmistakable attempt to make him go away. The bloody flap fell from her lips with another wordless bellow. Wherever the pony was who had flown in asking for her parents, she was gone, replaced by this terrified animal.

Entirely focused on his shredded leg, Stratus didn’t notice her coiling her hind legs beneath him until they pistoned up and into his belly. His spine arched from the impact and his legs folded under him. Blue shoved him away and hurried back to her hooves, her eyes wild and searching.

Sledge looked at the two deputies on either side of her. Stratus was down, struggling to catch his breath. Chaser was trying to sit up, staring at the blood running down his chest in shock. The lacerations were shallow, but Chaser was already starting to hyperventilate with abject panic. Sledge set his eyes on Blue. He needed to get this under control.

Blue was already turning toward the terrified deputy, his movements tickling some primal nerve in her brain. Her lips curled away from her teeth like a wolf sighting a threat. She was keyed up now and too fast for Sledge to risk going in for a tackle. He needed her to come to him.

“Hey!” He stamped a hoof into the grating with a satisfying clang. “Blue! Over here!”

The pale mare spun to face him, her teeth bent into a bloody snarl. She bent her forelegs low, preparing to lunge. It was like she had regressed to something more primitive. A primordial version of herself driven by an instinct to survive.

They stood barely ten steps apart.

She closed the gap in three.

Sledge was no stranger to a brawl. Though his new role as the Stable overstallion demanded a level of decorum he was still adjusting to, he would always be the big red bastard from Mechanical.

Blue rammed into his chest, her patchy mane cracking against his neck like a whip. What she packed in speed, Sledge made up for in mass. He coughed out a grunt, stepped back and absorbed the impact. Blue’s ears flattened defensively as she realized the stallion hadn’t fallen like she’d expected, and Sledge used the break in her concentration to his advantage.

His left wing shot out beside her, practically scooping her off her hooves, and shoved her hard. Her nimble frame banged against the upper platform’s railing, forcing a panicked cry from her lungs. Before she could squirm out of his feathers, Sledge pivoted beside her and pressed his full weight into her ribs, fixing her to the sturdy pipes like a nail driven into a wall.

Blue belted a scream and stabbed the air with her hind legs, hoping and failing to strike anything that would set her free. Sledge wrapped a hoof under her neck and pulled her sunken cheek tight against his shoulder, immobilizing her head and, more importantly for him, preventing her from putting her teeth to use again. She twisted, trying to find some way to wriggle free and escape, but she found none. He adjusted his stance in step with her struggling, taking away any inch she thought he might give.

Eventually, slowly, Blue gave up struggling.

Sledge held his grip, careful to leave just enough slack so Blue could breathe. He looked to where his deputies had fallen and was relieved to see Chaser back on his hooves, the underside of his jumpsuit a bloodied mess. He was helping Stratus up. They were bruised and beaten, but they would survive.

“How’s that leg, Stratus?”

Stratus sucked a breath between his teeth as he settled his weight on his damaged limb. Despite how ugly the wound was, his foreleg held. “Hurts as bad as it looks, but it’s nothing a few stimpacks won’t grow back. Which are coming out of your salary, by the way.”

Sledge looked to Chaser. “How about you?”

“I’m gonna need stitches,” he said irritably.

Sledge grunted. “Yeah, this didn’t pan out like I hoped it would. Let’s bring her inside. Chaser, I need you to hold her head still.”

“No offense, overstallion, but there’s no fucking way.”

“Yes fucking way,” Sledge rumbled. “Get over here and help me.”

Chaser narrowed his eyes at the pinned mare.

Blue let a ragged growl rise out of her throat in response. Sledge felt her muscles go taut as she watched him approach. She flinched, flashing her teeth as Chaser tentatively lifted his wing toward her. Her hooves skidded against the grating as she tried to pull away, but she was too firmly trapped by Sledge’s bulk to succeed.

“Blue, you need to calm down,” he said.

She snapped her teeth at Chaser’s wing with an audible click. A snarl crawled out of her and she jerked her head against Sledge’s grip, the tendons in her neck pulling rigid. Chaser retreated a step as Sledge strained to keep her still with an irritated grunt.

“Blue, stop,” he grumbled, but she yanked back with renewed desperation. He clenched his jaw. “Blue, stop!”

She twitched as if she stepped on an exposed wire. Her struggling slowed and after a few tenuous kicks, she went perfectly still. For a terrible moment Sledge thought his grip might’ve been too tight and that despite his best efforts, he’d knocked her out, but when he looked down at her face it was clear she was still with them.

Only not quite.

Blue’s eyes stared forward, unfocused, but still strangely aware somehow. Her breathing relaxed and the tension that held her body tight like a cable began to soften.

Chaser took a step left, then right, seeing the change as well. She stared through him as if she didn’t know he was there. He looked up at Sledge. “I think you tripped her off switch.”

Sledge frowned at Blue, then at Chaser.

“Back up,” he said, and the deputy was quick to obey. Slowly, Sledge eased his weight off Blue’s ribs. When she didn’t move to attack, he loosened his grip around her neck and gently took his hoof away. Her head sagged a little as if in a trance.

“Okay. I think I can work with this,” he said. “Stratus, get the door. Chaser, go with him and open a holding cell.”

The two deputies didn’t need to be told twice. As they went to work, Sledge stepped alongside Blue and carefully draped his wing over her shoulder. Her lip twitched when his feathers settled over the nub of what was left of her right wing, but beyond that she offered little protest. She lifted her head a little, her eyes wandering toward him but never quite focusing. It was like she was sleepwalking, only something told him it wasn’t that simple. Something in her had simply shut down, like a machine with a blown circuit. The lights were on, but no one seemed to be home.

He nudged her away from the railing and, slowly, she followed.

“That’s good,” he reassured her. “You’re doing real good, Blue.”

Blue grunted, her head dropping again as he led her toward the decontamination chamber.

Now that she was calm, Sledge began noticing small details that he hadn’t been able to see before. Her coat was almost completely shed away save for a few patches of hair he could see under her neck and around her shoulder, leaving behind pale blue skin that bordered close to grey. Her mane, or what was left of it, was a thin curtain of knotted monochromatic stripes. This close, he could spot a few strands of green mingling behind her ear. He silently wondered what could cause a pony to decay so thoroughly.

As he led her under the narrow decontamination arches he adjusted his grip around her barrel, ready for her to panic. The sensor chimed above them and water sputtered from the nozzles in a hard spray. Blue flattened her ears against the jets and groaned with discomfort.

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay.”

Blue continued to make a miserable noise as a filthy puddle formed beneath their hooves. Sledge lifted his wing away from her to give the spray access to her right side, knowing the shower wouldn’t stop until the contaminants collecting in the tanks below registered safe levels. Blue shuddered under the barrage and soon the sour odor of urine filled the narrow chamber.

Sledge set his jaw, careful not to let her see any discomfort on his face. Eventually the smell dissipated under the steady wash and the water circling the drains ran clear. As the streams weakened, he put his wing back around her and felt the trembling stop.

“Good job,” he said.

The sensors chimed and the door to the deputy station slid open. Chaser stood waiting for them on the other side, a towel from one of the lockers held out in his wing. Behind him, Stratus sat at the nearest desk with a first aid kit open in his lap. He eyed Blue with open dislike.

Sledge accepted the towel and led Blue toward the cell nearest the Atrium door. He realized as he aimed her through the open bars that this was the same cell he asked Chaser to put Pinfeathers in. He tried not to read too much into it.

“Okay,” he said, guiding her to the steel bench that served as the cell’s bed. “Can you sit down for me?”

Blue slowly turned to look at the bench, then panned her head across the concrete floor.

She sat down on the floor.

“Close enough,” he said. Blue grunted agreement.

Chaser’s hooves clicked outside the cell door. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be in there with her, overstallion.”

“I appreciate the concern,” he said, and used both his wings to part the beige corners of the towel. Careful not to startle her, Sledge lowered the artificially spun fabric over Blue’s back. It clung to her dripping coat like a second layer of skin and gradually turned a shade darker as it wicked the water off of her.

“Feel better?” he asked, knowing at this point she wouldn’t answer.

A droplet of water ran down the bridge of her muzzle and tracked into her nostril. Blue’s nose wrinkled, followed by the rest of her face. Her entire body bounced with a sneeze. Then she frowned, blinked and looked up at Sledge.

He held his breath. She fixed him with her gaze for what felt like minutes, her pale magenta eyes narrowing with unsurity. Then she turned and looked at the metal bench on her other side. Without a word, she crouched low and shimmied herself into the shaded pocket of space beneath it, the towel dragging behind her like a foal’s blanket.

She turned, curled up on her side and let her cheek settle onto the concrete with her spine pressed against the dark corner of the wall. Her wary gaze followed him from the safety of her little shelter as he stood up and walked out of the cell.

“What now?” Stratus asked, his face tight with discomfort as he held a gauze pad against his torn skin.

Sledge rolled the cell door closed, leaving enough room for Chaser to reach in and turn the lock. He watched Blue through the bars, wondering the same question himself. Pinfeathers had been sparing on the details when she told him about the mare trapped outside. When he opened the door, he expected to find a refugee of some kind. Violent, maybe, but someone he could reason with.

Blue’s tail thumped the ground beneath her damp towel. She nudged the end of her muzzle under one of its folds and huffed a sigh.

“Patch yourselves up and then get down to the infirmary,” he decided. “Tell them you got into a fight with a violent drunk from Mechanical if they ask what happened. They’ll believe it. Under no circumstances are you allowed to tell anyone that you went outside, or brought anyone in. I don’t want either of you kicking off a panic.”

Stratus winced as he tightened a strip of gauze around his bloodied foreleg. “We’re going to have to tell them eventually.”

“I will tell them when I have something to tell them,” he said, drawing a warning growl from Blue’s cell. Sledge ignored her and gestured toward the Atrium door. “The badges I gave you have priority clearance for that door. Only me and the two of you can open it. I did that because I trust both of you to keep this quiet.”

Stratus pursed his lips, then nodded.

“Are you going to stay here?” Chaser asked. The wounds across his chest wept through the damp fabric of his jumpsuit. As long as they stuck to his story, he would be able to deflect any questions that would eventually climb the Stable to his office.

“I’ve got a few things I need to tie up before I can make a formal announcement.” He looked at the clock above the deputies’ desks. “The two of you should get going.”

He left them little room to argue. Chaser helped Stratus down from the chair and swiped his badge at the door. It hissed open on new hydraulics and sank shut behind them.

Sledge blew out a sigh and sat down outside Blue’s cell. The strange mare’s ear twitched toward him.

“What am I going to do with you?”

She looked at him and murmured a grunt.

“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”

This was bad. This was really bad.

Rainbow punched through the clouds as fast as she could manage without risking cracking the sky with a sonic rainboom. If that happened, everyone within thirty miles would know she was out flying, and right now she couldn’t afford to be seen. The October air sank through her blackened flight suit like a frozen knife.

She kept climbing, sliding higher into the thin night air. There was a full moon tonight and while she knew she couldn’t lay that at Luna’s hooves, she did anyway. It was one of the few things she could still blame the princesses for that wouldn’t land her in a prison cell, or worse, an unmarked grave.

This was their fault and they knew it. If Celestia and Luna hadn’t wrapped themselves so thickly with the myth that they controlled the sun and moon, they’d be able to open their eyes and recognize the solutions that the ponies they ruled could so plainly see. If it weren’t for the princesses, Equestria might have embraced this solar energy thing long before it went to war over stones that refused to bleed no matter how hard they squeezed. Jet Stream knew it. Fluttershy and Zecora knew it. Celestia and Luna knew it, and the only reason they continued to throw roadblocks in the way of progress was because they believed admitting they weren’t omnipotent meant admitting they had been lying to ponies for millennia.

They would rather see Equestria burn.

Rainbow pressed a hoof to her hip to reassure herself. The rigid lump tucked into the hem of her black flight suit was still there. Fluttershy’s holotape was a long shot, but it was better than nothing. Rainbow wasn’t even sure if the zebras had software compatible with Robronco format. She thought about how cruel it would be if she flew all this way just to find out Vhanna couldn’t translate the data.

She tried not to think about it. Her mind was already swarming with enough worry.

A thin veil of multicolored light began forming a dim cone across the tips of her outstretched hooves. She bent her wings down to slow herself even though every instinct screamed at her to push faster, to shatter the night with a dazzling ring of light that had become her calling card. She frowned as the colors brimming over her hooves darkened and disappeared. From the ground, a pony looking up in the right direction might have thought they spotted a shooting star.

She listened to the wind whistle past her ears, watching the dull black shape of Foal Mountain drift by on her left. Only a few miles behind the mountain lay the ruins of a village known as Hollow Shades. The only road that led there anymore was an old train line that had fallen into disuse, though she had heard rumors that Applejack had her eye on the secluded ruins as a site for another munitions dump. Judging by the glitter of construction lights coming from the black mass of trees, they weren’t just rumors.

They wouldn’t be able to see her up here from so far, but the lights made her nervous enough to bank away. On her new trajectory, she would thread the gap between Fillydelphia and Baltimare and avoid the lion’s share of any pegasi traffic near the cities.

She forced herself to ascend higher. The air was getting thin enough to become a concern but it also meant she could fly faster without risking a rainboom. The tradeoff forced her work harder to breathe but the burn in her lungs was worth the pace she was setting. The less time she was away from Canterlot, the less evidence Spitfire had to prove her case.

Rainbow grit her teeth against the wind and held back the urge to scream. It would only be fair if she did. Spitfire had already done her share of it.

She’d never seen her so angry before today. It didn’t make it any better that Fluttershy knew what was going on, too.

Maybe she should have told Spitfire about the bits being funneled to Jet Stream Industries. The two of them had been close, once upon a time, and that was exactly the reason Rainbow had chosen her to help manage operations within the Ministry of Awesome. In retrospect, Spitfire had every right to be furious.

Trying to mask the payments by locking Finance out of the general ledger had been a terrible idea, but she didn’t know how else to get it done without risking involving someone else. When Spitfire told her that Whiplash had started an audit, she panicked. Firing him had bought her time with everyone except Spitfire. If there had been red flags in her mind about what Rainbow was doing before, firing the one pony who was raising suspicions about the clearance glitches succeeded in dipping those flags in kerosene and setting them ablaze.

Spitfire assumed it meant Rainbow was embezzling ministry funds, though to what aim she couldn’t figure out. She threatened to go to Celestia if she didn’t explain herself, and Rainbow had no doubt in her mind she would make good on the promise if her answer left Spitfire unsatisfied.

Lying was off the table. The former drill instructor of her youth knew every tell she had, and if she was caught spinning yarns to her now everything would come crumbling down around her. The prospect of being fired or imprisoned was bad enough. What she feared most was sitting in a cage somewhere, forced to watch the war play out with no chance of stopping it.

So she told the truth. Most of it, anyway.

She told Spitfire about her meetings with Jet Stream and how she believed in his company’s dream of one day unlocking the stars. She told her that she felt it was her duty as one of Equestria’s protectors to support the ponies who could make a positive difference in the world, but that she was afraid the princesses would punish Jet Stream if they found out he’d accepted her help. She’d actually managed to get misty-eyed during her confession which seemed to distract Spitfire from pressing her for the exact details of what Jet Stream Industries needed the bits for.

She was taking a big enough risk admitting that she had diverted funds out of the ministry in secret. Telling Spitfire about SOLUS would be admitting that she and Jet Stream were participating in research that directly challenged Celestia’s claim to power, and she wasn’t about to fall on that sword just yet.

Admitting that she tried to deceive Spitfire had been enough. She endured her outpouring of disgust and the accusations that she had betrayed their trust. She let Spitfire tell her that their relationship from this point forward was purely professional, and that any shred of friendship the two of them had once shared was gone.

Before leaving Rainbow’s office, Spitfire made her conditions explicit.

“If you ever pull this shit with me again, I promise I will come down on you so hard you will wish Celestia got to you first.”

Rainbow swallowed to slake the dryness gathering in her throat. To prevent any more misuse of ministry funds, Spitfire told her that she would be taking over Whiplash’s position as chief financial officer in addition to her current duties. In any other situation, that decision would come down from a ministry mare but she had Rainbow by the teats. She wasn’t about to test Spitfire’s resolve.

Spitfire was now hellbent on completing the audit that Rainbow had tried to stop in order to suss out exactly how many bits had gone missing and where they had landed. That was fine, so long as she kept quiet. All of the funds Jet Stream needed to get SOLUS off the ground were spread across so many shell companies and foreign accounts that it would take Spitfire years of beating her head against the red tape necessary to siphon them all back to the ministry. Rainbow wouldn’t stop her from taking back what she could, but she’d never find it all.

It was a problem she would deal with another day.

An hour passed and the glowing cities of Fillydelphia and Baltimare slid onto the horizon. At this altitude they looked like puddles of light spilled on black velvet. The street lights of the suburbs that spilled between them gave off a dim glow in the vague shape of interconnected grids. The coastal cities of Equestria had grown impossibly large thanks to the population boom of the last two decades. It was part of the reason Equestria’s population still supported the war as rabidly as they did. With so many children to protect, no one was willing to give serious thought to the possibility they might lose.

The twin cities rolled forward until they stood at the tips of each wing, as if she were a scale holding them in some tenuous balance. Her black flight suit absorbed their light and gave a little back. She slipped over the waves of the Celestial Sea, unseen.

The autumn air over land was uncomfortable. Above the churning sea, it was frigid.

For nearly an hour, unstable winds buffeted her nimble frame, turning the crossing into a test of endurance. With no lights below to guide her she used the sky, keeping the bright spray of lavender stars on the tips of her hooves. She had made this journey many times before back when she was younger and her body better accustomed to the abuses that the winds sometimes inflicted upon its travelers. When she finally spied the bright lanterns of Griffinstone’s aeries, her wings trembled.

Little had changed for the gryphons since she last visited their ancestral home. Small, thatch-roof houses lay in tightly packed rows along any flat surface their architects had been able to clear in the craggy coastal mountaintops. It was too dark to tell whether the edges of their makeshift city had expanded since her last visit, but nothing remained static over a lifetime and she wasn’t willing to bet that the gryphons hadn’t founded new territories on neighboring peaks.

She could feel a cramp brewing in her right wing. The trip back home wasn’t going to be pleasant. She settled her feathers into the wind and banked around the large cluster of lights that made up Griffinstone proper. The last time she was here, Pinkie Pie had tagged along. The visit had become something of an impromptu adventure, which looking back seemed to happen to them more often than it should have. Gilda had been on the fence about leaving Griffinstone altogether back then, but last Rainbow knew her old friend had never made good on that dream. The ministries didn’t have much information on Gilda beyond an address and confirmation that she still lived there. At least it was something.

Rainbow slipped soundlessly over the aeries until she spotted a few familiar landmarks. A chipped wooden archway painted gold and bedecked with a shabby rendition of red wings. A dead tree spiraling out of a nearby ledge, the houses that once perched precariously on its limbs conspicuously absent now. She found herself above Gilda’s neighborhood and was relieved to see that the dilapidated and abandoned houses she lived next to had been rebuilt.

The cobblestone street had been swept clean of debris and was adorned with functioning gas lanterns. Most of the windows were dark, but here and there she could see silhouettes moving past ones that were still lit. It took several passes before she was confident which of the near identical houses belonged to Gilda. The lights were off, which was a blessing in disguise. It meant that the alley behind it was dark enough to remain unseen.

Cobbles scraped under her hooves as she landed and her wings sang with relief. The alleyway was little more than a narrow paved strip that butted up against the back of Gilda’s house. She had no yard or white picket fence to lounge in, not when footage came at such a premium. A pair of trash cans stood sentinel next to the flimsy back door to her house. An entirely foreign smell rose up from them to greet her.

She approached the single step outside her door and nearly kicked over a coffee can half filled with bent cigarette butts. Rainbow frowned and lifted her hoof to the door, giving it a gentle knock that Fluttershy would be proud of.

She waited a moment before knocking again, more firmly this time.

An irritated “Fuck off!” snapped from the open window above her head. Rainbow had to suppress a smile and gave the door another series of thumps.

“I said fuck off!” the voice barked.

Were she here for anything else, the gryphon’s attitude would have been plenty reason for Rainbow to start playing her door like a bad set of drums. She resisted the urge and knocked again, trying to impress urgency with each thud.

She listened as a string of expletives followed their owner’s footfall through the house and down to the first floor. A light snapped on inside and Rainbow stepped back just in time for Gilda to yank the door open. “What the holy fuck do…”

Rainbow offered a sheepish smile as Gilda stood in the doorway, suddenly unsure how to finish her sentence. She was larger than Rainbow remembered, standing a good foot taller than she did. The feathers on one side of her face were mashed flat and the corner of her beak was slick with sleep drool.

A large part of her expected Gilda’s face to light up with excitement. To welcome her in and pepper her with the same jabs she did so long ago. Her smile widened expectantly even as Gilda pinched the ridge between her eyes and sighed.

“What do you want?”

Her smile faltered. “I…”

She cut her off. “Actually, you know what? Forget I even asked. Go home, Dash.”

Rainbow was barely able to get her ankle in the door before Gilda slammed it shut. The flimsy wood slapped against her leg and wobbled open again. She bit her lip to stifle the curse rising in her throat.

“Gilda,” she pleaded, “I just need five minutes to talk.”

Gilda scowled at her. “You want to lose that hoof? Keep it there.”

Rainbow could see her settling her hand back on the door knob in preparation to shove it closed. Before she could, Rainbow shoved her shoulders into the gap and stared at her with a desperate intensity.

“If our friendship ever meant anything to you, you’ll give me five damn minutes to at least tell you why I’m here.”

Gilda pressed the door into her shoulder. “I can make you leave.”

Rainbow winced. “I hope you won’t.”

Gilda glowered at her for several long seconds before mouthing something unpleasant. She released the knob and turned into the house. “Five minutes,” she said. “Then you leave.”

Rainbow sagged with relief and hurried inside, pushing the door shut behind her.

She followed Gilda into what she could only describe as a cozy, if not cramped little kitchen. White cabinets topped with a grey granite countertop filled the right side of the space, interrupted only by a mismatched stove and refrigerator. The hardwood floor was clean, albeit heavily scarred by Gilda’s duelling sets of talons and claws. A square table rested against the opposite wall, framed by three sturdy stools.

Gilda gestured to the table with a brown feather as she padded in the opposite direction to the counter. As Rainbow pulled out a stool and sat down, Gilda picked up a silver can from the edge of the sink and swirled it in her hand. Satisfied there was something left inside, she sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinets.

She aimed a finger at a decorative clock sitting in a recessed shelf above the table. It was made of solid brass with ornately curving rays intended to resemble their ancient sun god. Two brass gryphons kneeled at either side of it, their claws clasped as if in prayer. Rainbow couldn’t remember the name they had for him, but she was surprised to see the effigy in Gilda’s home.

“I didn’t know you were religious,” she said.

“I’m not,” Gilda said. “They were my grandmother’s. If you want to talk about her, that’s fine by me. Either way you’re down to four minutes.”

Rainbow nodded. It was now or never.

She dipped her feathers under the hem of her flight suit and set Fluttershy’s holotape on the table.

“Look, Gilda,” she said. “I came to ask you a favor.”

Sledge stepped down the ramp toward the empty doorway of Stable 10.

He estimated it would be a few hours until Chaser and Stratus got back from the infirmary, and he had something left that Pinfeathers wanted him to do. He stared up at the gaping void left in the impenetrable skin of his home and wondered what thoughts might have gone through her mind when she made this same trip. Had it looked like the open maw of some nameless beast, patiently waiting for her to step past its steel teeth and into the nothing beyond? He shuddered.

Sledge had always prided himself in his ability to project calm confidence in the face of hardship. It was likely why Overmare Delphi had chosen him to lead the Stable in her absence. The trick wasn’t in training his mind not to feel fear or uncertainty. He was close friends with both. No, the trick was to occupy them so that they never thought to make homes in his eyes where other ponies would be able to see.

He walked up onto the extended catwalk and craned his neck at the impossibly large chasm the great cog had rolled out of. It was hard not to admire the amount of work that had to go into designing a blast door of this caliber. Even with an entire wing dedicated to fabricating and replacing the millions of moving parts that kept their Stable alive, they could never come close to the level of precision required to forge something like this.

A tiny smile curled his lip as he stepped out onto the platform, masking the thunder of his own heartbeat.

He was terrified.

All it would take was one errant string of code to trigger the door and seal it shut behind him. There was no control board out here for him to use. No socket hidden near the door for his Pip-Buck. He’d checked. If the door decided to close, there would be nothing he could do to stop it. He knew on a logical level it would never happen. That there was no gremlin in the machine to betray him. It didn’t matter. Every instinct he had screamed at him to stop. He nearly listened.

Three yellow flashlights lay on the curved platform where they had dropped them when Blue darted above their heads. Sledge picked one up and clicked it on with a feather. Never in his life had he been thankful for fresh batteries. The beam sliced through the darkness like a knife, giving him courage. He swept the cone of light across the concrete pad until it settled on one of the two mangled bodies they had discovered earlier.

The nearest corpse was missing most of its face as if it had been sandblasted off. The one further away was absent of its head entirely, the same pulped injury visible over the stump of its neck. He knew another had been crushed in the teeth of the massive cog, but something about that body made his stomach flip when the others didn’t. He avoided looking at it. The two intact corpses looked as if they had been here for decades, but the smeared pool of blood clotted between them was clearly recent.

He stepped forward, following the edge of the platform down onto the flagstone pathway.

His heart pounded across his ribs as the Stable shrank behind him. The lightless tunnel was silent save for the clicking of his hooves on stone, a sound that the cracked walls greedily devoured. He panned the flashlight toward the massive pillars that held the vaulted ceiling at bay and immediately recognized the shapes gathered around them.

The still image on his terminal could only show him so much detail. Details that had been mercifully blurred now lay around him in crisp, unforgiving detail. Bodies, dozens of them, reclined against one another in lazy heaps as if sleeping. Partially mummified skin hung from their bones, some so decayed that they were little more than skeletons while others were so well preserved that Sledge couldn’t shake the fear that they would leap to their hooves and bolt toward him.

Clustered around pillars or laying alone or in groups against the far wall, there were hundreds of them. He passed the beam across the tunnel, frowned, and brought the light back to a trio of ponies huddled together at the base of a pillar. They were unicorns, all three of them. Sledge stepped toward them, unable to stop himself. He’d never seen a unicorn outside the murals and books back in the Stable.

He stopped short. His wing holding the flashlight sagged.

The two adults lay slouched toward each other, their foreheads touching, horns crossed. Their features had decayed so badly that the slightest touch might cause them to crumble. Beneath their horns, a much smaller body sat cross-legged between them. A tiny book lay open in its lap, the pages stiff and faded by time. The foal’s tiny head had come to rest against the leg of one of its parents, its eyelids shut as if it had only just fallen asleep.

He walked away, unable to shake the sense that he was violating a sacred place by just being here. He had so many questions and nobody to ask. The only mare who might know what happened here was miles away, and she had been so afraid to even ask him to rescue Blue that he wasn’t certain it was wise to ask her about the graveyard mere yards outside their home.

The most he could do was put one hoof in front of the other.

Luggage littered the floor in neatly stacked piles the further he walked. Clothing and other belongings lay in less organized mounds nearby. He wondered if Blue had done this, or if it was something the ponies surrounding him had done while they were still alive. He gave the mounds a wide berth.

By the time he reached the utility room Pinfeathers described in her message, the Stable door was small enough that he could obscure it with his outstretched hoof. He approached the misshapened door and shone the light into the confined space beyond.

Neat lines of conduit fed into breaker boxes along the wall. Every switch was still thrown into the ON position, dashing his hopes that he might be able to restore the lights and make his trip back a little less harrowing. He turned the beam to the far wall where a shredded bundle of brown fabric lay rumpled on the floor. There, splayed across the rumpled fabric glinted the golden plates of an ornate necklace. A book rested beside it, its yellowed pages wrapped in a cover he dimly recognized.

He crossed the tiny space and lifted the necklace by one of its clasps. It twisted gently between his pinched feathers, allowing him to admire the quality. The only visible defect it presented was the glaring omission of its iconic lightning bolt ruby. Besides that, it was a near-perfect replica. No wonder Blue would want it back. It must have cost a pretty bit to get someone to put this much work into making it.

Laying the necklace across the cover of the book, he bundled the tattered bedding around Blue’s possessions and tucked them under his wing. A few sweeps of his flashlight confirmed there was nothing else of hers to retrieve. He adjusted his wing and left the tiny den, careful to keep his eyes fixed on the flagstones as he hurried through the tunnel.

As he climbed up the platform toward the door, he slowed and then stopped. He looked at the edge of the catwalk that bridged the Stable threshold and it occurred to him that this was exactly the spot that Blue had stood when he found her on the security footage. He turned around and lifted his flashlight high, passing the wide beam across the ceiling until he found what he already knew would be there.

It was barely the size of a golf ball and perfectly black. Mounted to the ceiling in the middle of a line of air ducts hung a dark bubble. Inside, Sledge knew, was a small mechanical eye that stared back at him in amiable silence. Insulated by millions of tons of granite and fed a steady diet of power from the Stable’s generator, it had been built to last and could theoretically outlast the Stable itself.

A thought crossed his mind. How far back did that footage go?

He crossed back into the Stable and tried to dismiss the question. They had just taken in a mare from the outside. Sledge and his deputies witnessed her crash into the Stable so violently that she had torn her wing clear out of her shoulder and yet instead of bleeding out in the antechamber she’d thrown herself into a frenzy that had both deputies sitting in the infirmary. And then, just as abruptly, she disconnected entirely as if a breaker in her mind had blown. Out of all the problems he’d just inherited in the last thirty minutes, browsing old security footage wasn’t his primary concern.

And yet the question clung like a thistle. Opal had explained to him that the Stable’s servers had been built to act as time capsules. Everything was saved. Deletions weren’t just unheard of, they were almost viewed as criminal.

Out of all the documents, messages and voice logs that had been sealed behind a seemingly inexplicable fortress of encryptions… why had Overmare Spitfire chosen to bury the footage of that one camera, but not the feed from inside the antechamber? They both looked at the same door. Just from different sides.

He glowered at the diamond pattern of the floor as he ascended the ramp.

What was outside the door that Spitfire didn’t want him to see?

Blue’s severed wing still lay on the panels where it had sloughed off near the kiosk. Sledge gingerly stepped around it, making a mental note to have one of the deputies come back in and retrieve it for disposal.

Plugging his Pip-Buck into the kiosk, he punched the command to reseal the Stable and watched as the toothed megalith that withstood the end of the world slowly rolled toward the open void and slid into its perfectly matched socket. The complex system of hinges and bolts that pinned the door into place left him in awe. He envied the ponies who had been given the chance to create something so vital and pitied them for the end they faced after they were finished.

Sledge suffered the indignity of being doused by the decontamination chamber a second time while carefully shielding the bundle under his wings from the spray.

Back in the deputy station, Blue hadn’t budged from where she had taken shelter from the bright lights and strange ponies who had captured her. She watched Sledge as he stepped out of the chamber and scrubbed himself down with a fresh towel from the lockers, leaving the deeply stained bundle of cloth while he underwent the transformation from soaking wet to only moderately wet. Satisfied, he retrieved the bundle and brought it to Blue’s cell.

A pang of guilt needled at his chest as Blue’s eyes tracked him from under the bench. First Pinfeathers, now Blue. His first week as overstallion wasn’t even finished and he’d already put two mares behind bars that he wasn’t sure belonged there. Not a great start, he thought.

“I’m back,” he said to her, earning a narrowed set of eyes as he set the bundle on the ground. “I brought something for you.”

Careful to avoid moving too quickly, he gradually pulled the stained bedding away from the items inside. One at a time, he pushed the book, necklace and finally the ragged fabric through the bars. Blue lifted her head off the cement to better see what he was doing and he swore there was a glimmer of recognition on her face as he passed the items through.

To his surprise, she cautiously shimmied out from under the bench and stood. The towel he’d given to her clung to her backside like the train of a dress, still damp and stained a rusty brown where it had originally covered the stump of her wing. The wound looked to have bled all that it would bleed and a thick, dark clot had formed over the torn flesh. If it caused her any pain, she didn’t show it.

She looked at the meager collection of her belongings and then up to Sledge. Her ears went flat and she opened her mouth, teeth bare, in a silent show of mistrust.

Sledge didn’t have to speak her language to know what she was saying. Get away, she said. He turned and walked back to the lockers where he waited. Slowly, Blue stepped toward her belongings and picked them up between her teeth, returning them to the shaded patch of floor beneath the bench one at a time. First the necklace, then her book and finally her bedding.

He watched with fascination as she dragged the bedding under the bench before carefully turning around and sprawling herself across it with her tail pressed into the corner of the wall. She glanced at Sledge for a moment before reaching a deeply cracked hoof toward the other two items and pulling them close to her chest. A barely audible noise rattled her throat that Sledge decided to interpret as satisfaction, though it could have easily been anything else.

If nothing else she looked comfortable, and very likely that was the one thing Pinfeathers would want to hear from him.

Sledge pursed his lips and blew out a sigh. This was easily the strangest day of his life. He wondered if the same could be said for Blue.

It would be a while until Chaser or Stratus got released from the infirmary. Blue was comfortable, and she probably wouldn’t want some strange stallion staring at her in the meantime. If there was ever going to be a time to dig into the question that was burning a hole in the back of his brain, it was now.

He crossed the deputy station, followed by a mildly curious gaze from Blue, and walked back to his office.

“Dash, I can’t be involved in this.”

Her five minutes had expired an hour ago. Gilda across from her at the table, her elbow propped next to an empty can of Kirin Beer and her cheek resting against her closed fist. She stared down at the holotape in the middle of the table, shaking her head against her knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” she said, shrugging. “I mean, I know we were friends but this is… I don’t even know what this is.”

Rainbow leaned forward, seeking Gilda’s eyes with her own. “It’s a chance to end this war,” she said, and not for the first time tonight. She could feel Gilda slipping, but she was running out of ways to ask the same question. “Please. Just help me do this, then I’ll be out of your feathers forever.”

Gilda didn’t return her gaze. She looked toward the holotape, her eyes focused somewhere far beyond it. “Do the princesses know you’re here?”

She licked her lips, knowing she couldn’t avoid the question. “No,” she said.

Gilda took a slow breath and closed her eyes. “I didn’t think so.” She exhaled and looked her in the eyes. “Why are you so convinced that giving the Vhannans some tech will end your war with them?”

“I already told you why,” she said.

Gilda fixed her with an irritable stare. “Tell me again.”

The nape of Rainbow’s neck was starting to develop an itch from the sweat trapped under her flight suit. She resisted the urge to scratch. “The resource shortage is what’s fuelling the war. If the Vhannans get this data, they’ll finally be able to start building solar farms that will brace their industries’ demand for that fuel. It’ll relieve some of the pressure and give them something to fall back on when the last oil wells inevitably run dry. They already see us experimenting with the same tech on a small scale, but they see it as a way for us to prolong our ability to keep fighting. Sharing what we know might be the relief valve this war needs to finally end. It’s a way out for both of us.”

Gilda sat up and plucked the empty beer can off the table. She tipped the open mouth toward her to see if there was anything left, then set it back down with a hollow clink. “Do you know what I would do, if I were a zebra?”

Rainbow shook her head.

“I would take the solar tech, build as many solar farms as I could just like you expect me to, and I’d still keep fighting,” she said. She looked across the table at Rainbow, noting the growing frown on her muzzle. “Look, I don’t have anything against ponies. I’m just saying, that’s what I would do. Vhanna still controls their oil fields, and you guys are running on whatever reserve supply you stockpiled before you started the war.”

Gilda paused for a moment to see if she would try arguing that last statement, but Rainbow stayed quiet. They both knew she was right. “My point is, they have more fuel to burn than you do and a grudge to go with it. The princesses proved they were a threat to Vhanna when they gave the order to shoot. All they have to do to win is wait for you to run out of gas, and you giving them this,” she flicked the holotape’s corner with her talon. “This might do you a lot more harm than good.”

Rainbow watched the diskette spin on the polished wood. Gilda always had a way of pulling the rug out from under her, if not to prove she was right, then at least to prove she could. And maybe she was right about this too. Maybe the Vhannans would take their data in one hoof and keep beating the wardrum with the other.

But even if Gilda was right, it wouldn’t matter. Either the zebras would fight or they wouldn’t. What mattered was that she at least roll the dice and hope for a better outcome than the one they were marching toward now. Unless something changed, Equestria would be staring down the barrel of zebra cannons at the end of two years.

“This might not accomplish what I’m hoping,” she said, “but there’s no way of knowing unless I try.”

She saw Gilda’s jaw clench a little as the gryphon digested her answer. Gilda’s eyes dropped to her black flight suit and the obvious implication that she had used it to come here under the cover of stealth. “And what happens if Celestia or Luna find out?”

“They won’t,” she said.

“That’s not an answer,” Gilda pushed back. “God, you never changed, did you? Try thinking about more than just yourself for once. Griffinstone has stayed out of this war because we wouldn’t stand a chance against either of you. Do you know how terrifying that is for us? To open a fucking paper every morning just to read about some new machine you two have invented to kill each other?”

Rainbow opened her mouth to answer, then stopped. A dense, black little ball formed in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know what it was like. She hadn’t even thought to ask.

“Gilda, I…”

“The thought never even crossed your mind!” She was incensed now. Her wings lifted from her sides with every furious accusation. “That’s why you thought you could just fly over and drop this in my lap, because who fucking cares what we think? Who cares if the mad queens of Equestria find out that a gryphon in some backward corner of the world fed their enemy knowledge? Am I close, Dash? Does that sound about right to you?”

Rainbow stared at the table. “You know I don’t think that.”

“Then why?” She slapped her hand against the table. “Why would you come all the way here and ask me to do this without giving the slightest thought to what might happen if the wrong pony connects the dots? What might happen to me. We have families here too, Dash!”

She put her head in her hooves. “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Gilda said, shaking her head. “That’s about what I thought.”

A long silence passed over the table. Rainbow listened to Gilda’s clock tick away the seconds until the sound of it felt like a claw scratching against the surface of her skull.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “I didn’t think this through.”

She reached for the holotape but was startled when Gilda palmed it off the table before she could take it. Rainbow watched her as she held the diskette between the knuckles of two fingers. Gilda stared back at her dispassionately.

“You never did, Dash. It’s what I liked about you.” She closed her fingers around the holotape. “I still kinda like it. I just needed to make sure you knew what you were risking by doing this.”

Rainbow felt the little ball of guilt grow heavier. “If you’re not comfortable with the risk, you don’t have to do this.”

Gilda snorted. “If I say no, you’re just going to end up doing something more stupid than flying across the ocean in the middle of the night.” She ran her fingers over her head, then settled her elbows on the table while gripping the back of her neck. She sighed. “I’ll do this for you, but this is the only favor you get from me. Okay? After this, we’re done.”

Rainbow nodded, trying not to think about the finality of that statement. “When do you think you can move it?”

The gryphon offered a noncommittal shrug. “Depends on what kind of risk you want to avoid. I know a guy that owes me some favors who crosses the border into Vhanna every few weeks to stock up on mesmer leaf. I can see when he’s making his next trip and have him drop it off where the right zebras will find it.”

“Do you trust him?” she asked.

Gilda chuckled and stood up to walk her empty can to the trash. “I think Gallus spends too much time getting high and not enough looking for a real job, but beyond that? Yeah, I trust him.”

Rainbow ran a wingtip over her mane until it settled over the back of her neck where a knot had begun to form. She let herself relax a little and her muscles sighed their collective relief.

“Long day, huh?” The can clinked into the trash.

“Long year,” she breathed. “Too many of them.”

“I hear you.” Gilda returned to the fridge and retrieved a fresh pair of beers. “You’re welcome to stay the night if you want. I could help you unwind a little?”

Rainbow settled her chin against her chest and let the exhausted smile spread across her muzzle. What she wouldn’t give to say yes. To spend one well-deserved, sleepless night in Gilda’s bed like they had done on the sly so many years ago. But she couldn’t. As much as her body ached for a reminder of one of those nights, she couldn’t risk it.

“I can’t,” she said. “I really, really want to but if I don’t get back…”

“I get it. You’ve got people watching you,” Gilda said, waving her off. She pulled the crisper open and put the beers back. “Hey, can I ask you something personal?”

She glanced at the clock, then nodded. “Sure.”

“Did you ever end up telling Applejack how you felt?”

Rainbow sucked on the corner of her lip. Her ready-made excuses for staying quiet on that subject rose to her mind’s surface, ready to deflect any question of why. She shook her head.

“Oh,” was all Gilda said.

Rainbow shrugged meekly in response. “It would be a distraction,” she said. “Like you said, we have people watching us.”

“Well,” Gilda said, “I don’t want to get you in trouble by keeping you here. Would it be okay if maybe I swung by your neck of the woods sometime and we caught up?”

Sensing the natural end of her visit, Rainbow stood up from the table and nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “That’d be nice.”

It was a rare sight to see Gilda smile unreservedly and yet there it was. Despite how tired she felt, Rainbow couldn’t help but do the same.

With nothing else to say, Gilda walked Rainbow back to the door. She reached for the knob, paused midway, and instead drew her arm around Rainbow and pulled her into a crushing hug. Rainbow let out a surprised squeak before relenting and giving her a hearty squeeze of her own.

“Sorry it took me so long to visit.”

Gilda surprised her with a short, genuine laugh. “Same. You and I always sucked at this kind of thing.”

“We really did,” she chuckled. She broke the embrace and settled back onto her hooves. “Thanks again for doing this. You’re helping a lot of…”

“Nah nah nah.” Gilda shook her head. “Don’t get mushy. I hate mushy. I’m only doing this for you. You’re the one who thinks she’s saving the world.”

She let her have that one and pulled open the door, letting the cool autumn air flow inside. Gilda followed her to onto the threshold and watched her shiver against in the chill.

“I’ll see you around, Gilda.”

Gilda lifted the holotape between her fingers and shot her a tired smile.

“See ya, dweeb.”

Sledge dropped into his chair with a beleaguered grunt. The day wasn’t even half done and he was already feeling the familiar old aches of exhaustion. He stifled a yawn, forcing himself to sit up and roll closer to his terminal. He wasn’t done.

Something told him he wouldn’t be done for a long time.

The tip of his wing dipped toward the desk’s bottom drawer out of habit, seeking the bottle of amber liquid inside. His feathers were already wrapping around the handle before he stopped himself. He didn’t need Chaser and Stratus coming back up to find him two hooves into his drink. If anything, he needed to get the stuff out of his office entirely. It was getting too easy for him to open that drawer and too dangerous for Stable 10 should he fall into that spiral.

He folded his wing and turned his attention to the screen.

The still image taken from outside still glowed on his terminal, washed in phosphoric shades of green. Blue stood frozen in time on the platform, her dull eyes fixed on the sealed door. At the top right corner of the screen, a white timestamp read:

A little more than three hours ago. It felt like half that. Sledge tapped a key and the seconds on the timestamp began ticking forward. Blue remained still, just like when she first walked into frame. He pressed the same key again and the video sped up, minutes passing in the space of a few seconds. Blue began to move in jerky twitches, little shifts in her posture exaggerated by the accelerated passage of time. She alternated between looking at the door, then at one of the corpses near it, then back to the door. He watched her rear onto her hind legs and pound on the door for nearly a full minute before settling back on all fours. Then her head bowed as if she were sleeping, just like she had in the antechamber, and she lumbered out of frame.

Sledge stopped the playback. He knew what would happen next and his gaze drifted to the two revolvers laying on his desk. Having the deputies go in disarmed had been a risk, but he was happy he’d trusted his gut.

He turned back to the terminal, his attention hovering over the grainy image of the tunnel. There was something there that Overmare Spitfire didn’t want anyone, not even the overmares or stallions who came after her, to see.

He rubbed his eyes, unable to stop seeing the afterimage of that family of unicorns whenever he closed them. None of it made any sense. Stable 10 had been set aside to preserve the strongest bloodlines of Equestria’s pegasi so that one day they would once again tame the skies. It was something they all learned at an early age and was extensively detailed in Stable records. Survival wasn’t just their goal, it was their mission. Stronger Together and all that.

So why were there so many earth ponies and unicorns among the bodies outside? If Stable 10 was reserved for pegasi, what were they doing there?

They were looking for shelter, he thought to himself, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe it. The ponies outside hadn’t stumbled across the tunnel in the midst of panic. They’d brought luggage. Bags. Toys for their foals. The idea that they had somehow managed to pack during the apocalypse sounded like a bad joke. The ponies outside were prepared because they knew Stable 10 was here. They thought they would be let inside.

Sledge looked at the fuzzy white timestamp on the screen. Opal had tried her best to explain to him the sheer volume of data the Stable servers were capable of storing, and that a significant portion of that was being steadily claimed by this feed and several more like it. If there were answers to be found, they would be here.

He reached forward and pressed a different key. One by one, seconds began ticking in reverse. He tapped it again and the minutes dissolved.

Blue slid backwards into the frame and renewed her beating on the door. He tapped the key again, watching her stutter around the platform in the space of a breath and disappear off screen.

Hours on screen blinked by and Blue returned to repeat the same ritual at the door, then vanish again. Then she was back. Sledge watched her go through the same motions of visiting the door and disappearing over and over again until the timestamp had rolled back by several days.

Suddenly a flurry of activity took place on the platform. The sallow green image hiccuped and the screen was briefly flooded with gold light and deep shadows. Sledge stopped the footage, and his terminal settled on the familiar still image of a sealed door and a darkened platform. Except now the cement semicircle was completely empty. The two mangled corpses were gone, as was the smeared pool of blood between them. Already knowing what he was about to see, he braced himself and played back the last few minutes.

After waiting, the perspective from the camera shuddered and a thin curtain of dust filtered down from the ceiling. He felt an eerie sense of otherness as he watched the Stable door begin sinking into the blast-proof wall that dominated the tunnel’s terminus. Seeing it from this side sparked something like awe in him as great shafts of light pierced the darkness. The image stuttered as the camera’s night vision briefly washed out and was quickly replaced by a scene he recognized. Golden light spilled over the grey platform and threw long, pitch black shadows behind the ridges of each uneven flagstone.

Aurora’s silhouette stepped silently into the open doorway. Overmare Delphi’s rifle hung off her right shoulder, its muzzle swaying in sync with her gait. With a single step, she became the first pegasus to leave the Stable in over two hundred years. Sledge found himself taking a slow, sympathetic breath for her as she stared into the darkness.

Then she froze. The natural light gave the footage better resolution than the night vision mode could manage, and he could see her ears spin forward. As if something pulled from a horror film, Sledge watched three black figures streak out of the darkness toward her. He saw her fumble for her Pip-Buck and switch on the lamp just in time to see the first one scrambling across the platform toward her. She barely had time to tuck her tail before the monster tackled her, sending the two of them sprawling into the blast wall. Then the second one was on her. He watched as the light from the Stable began to wane in the shadow of the now closing door. Legs kicked and flailed out from the dogpile, blood smearing the concrete with each frantic movement.

The third creature lingered nearby as if unsure what to do now that the frenzy was in full swing. Sledge watched its attention shift from Aurora to the closing door. He felt a flush of anger as the thing made up its mind and bolted toward the gap between the wall and the approaching gear. It mistimed the approach and dove headlong toward its own demise, spasming violently as its upper half was crushed in the uncaring mechanism’s jaws. Sledge made a face and looked away until the camera hiccuped and swapped back to the more forgiving green sea of night vision.

Two gouts of light flickered from the edge of the platform and Sledge watched the two monsters fling away from Aurora with each flash. Sledge watched as a black figure - a unicorn, judging by the dark spike jutting from his forehead - approached her. In the poor resolution he couldn’t make out the details of Aurora’s face beyond her wide eyes and the dark stain that had begun to pool around her hip. They seemed to speak for a moment before the unicorn spun around, caught by surprise as Blue’s decrepit wings slid into view and rushed toward them. But she stopped short of attacking, which seemed to be her sole intention.

He watched the next several minutes play out with little more than confusion. The unicorn stooped over Aurora, rendering her some kind of first aid that he had to assume was a stimpack of some kind, only to be rewarded with a swift kick to the chest. Blue moved in, ready to defend her counterpart, but the unicorn said something that made her back down. Blue left, and minutes later Aurora was on her hooves and limping away into the tunnel with the unicorn at her side.

Sledge rubbed his muzzle with his hoof, torn between worrying about the pool of blood she walked away from and the knowledge that she had survived. The temptation to get up and go outside just to give the two bodies on the platform a good hard stomp was hard to ignore.

Once his temper had cooled, he tapped the keyboard again. The footage began spooling backward. He sped it up, not wanting to see Aurora’s attack in any more detail than he’d already seen.

The Stable door blinked and the platform was bare again.

He settled into his chair as the picture dove back into history. Days passed by with each second. When the timestamp had walked itself back to the tune of one month, he slowed the video a little.

It didn’t take long for Blue to appear again on the platform. Sledge shook his head, surprised to still see her there. A second figure wandered through the frame, its gaze unfocused and its gait unsteady. He recognized it as one of the creatures that would eventually attack Aurora and narrowed his eyes at it, willing it to get off his terminal. It did just that, wandering in reverse until it drifted off screen near the far edge of the blast wall.

Sledge tapped the keyboard and the footage leapt back again. He leaned on his armrest, watching Blue flicker in and out of frame so many times that he thought maybe it was a tracking artifact burned into the footage. He pressed stop and the date on the timestamp read 11-03-1262. Almost five years ago.

There, curled up outside the door, lay Blue.

“What?” he whispered.

She slept there until the unicorn who saved Aurora came to wake her. Sledge watched him gently shake her shoulder until she lifted her head off the floor. She stood up and seemed to take some time getting her bearings before following him down the short platform steps. She was limping, favoring her hind leg until she stopped altogether. She looked back at her hind leg, as if she didn’t know what to do with it.

The unicorn turned, saw she was struggling, and came back. She watched him as he sat down next to her and used his hooves to gently extend her leg until it pointed straight back. Then he pushed it forward, holding the hoof as close to her hip as she seemed willing to allow. He repeated the process several times until something he saw on Blue’s face let him determine it was enough. He got up and resumed leading her away. She followed close behind, her limp gone.

Sledge frowned at the screen as he set the recording to backtrack again. The tunnel must have been their home.

He stopped the video again, this time seeking out a more specific date. 09-30-1213. The day he was born.

The platform was the same as before. Empty, devoid of motion, and depressingly green. It felt as if time outside the Stable had no meaning. The same bodies loitered around the pillars and the same massive gear stood at the top of the screen, its bold number 10 standing tall for a lifeless, uncaring tunnel. Anything that was important was taking place on the other side of that door. Somewhere beyond that number, his late parents were deciding his name.

He indulged in a melancholic smile and wondered what they would say if they knew he was the overstallion now.

He lifted his hoof toward the keyboard, preparing to spin back the footage as far as it would go, but he stopped. He felt the creases forming between his eyebrows as he saw her walking out from the bottom of the screen.

Blue approached the platform, trotted up the steps and stopped outside the door.

“No,” he said.

He couldn’t be sure, but her mane looked a little fuller. Her tail a little less disheveled. She stood there as she had done all the times before. He saw her chest expand and slowly empty, her mouth open in a furious scream that no one could hear. Then she resumed attacking the door with her bare hooves. Sledge’s chair groaned as he leaned back, unwilling to believe that anyone could live in that desolate tunnel, performing the same ritual for fifty-four years.

Bewildered, he sent the footage creeping back. Blue backed out of frame and several hours later she reappeared to do exactly the same thing as before. Then she left, only to come back again with the black unicorn in tow. He watched as she curled onto the ground, the unicorn seemingly putting her there instead of waking her up, and then he departed just as quickly. Blue eventually stood, assaulted the door, and left.

Over and over again, the cycle repeated like a record stuck on a sickening loop, Blue railing against the door and the unicorn coming to calm her, without end.

Sledge threw the footage back another fifty years, knowing by then they would truly be gone. He punched the keyboard and the footage began to play. 04-02-1173. Almost the exact midpoint between now and the end of the war that put them here.

He stared at his terminal, at a loss for words.

There she stood.

Sledge put his elbows on the desk and dragged his hooves behind his head until his nose almost pressed against the wooden surface.

One hundred years. How did anyone live one hundred years?

He could feel his heart beginning to pick up its tempo as he looked up at the screen. It was undeniably Blue, and she looked markedly better than before. He could make out a definitive pattern of monochromatic stripes in her mane, and the bones of her hips were much less protruded than before.

The skeletal corpses surrounding the pillars and the far walls had changed as well. A few had shifted positions, sitting upright now rather than laying spilled across the stones. Fragments of clothing appeared on several of them, still little more than tatters.

He swallowed and sent the footage further back.

A decade slid by. Then another. He watched as the uneven flagstones began to shift, settling together until their seams came in line with each other as if seeking an equilibrium. The bodies around the pillars grew clothing. Then skin. They fattened and wide, dark stains took shape beneath them. Sledge grimaced as his brain made sense of what he was watching. Mummification was being undone. Putrefaction played out in the wrong direction.

He slowed the playback a little despite his growing discomfort. Decades slowed until only years were ticking by.

1087. 1086. 1085.

Every time he slowed the footage, Blue dutifully appeared and flickered on and off the platform like frames from a prewar film reel. It wasn’t possible, and yet there she was.

1079. 1078.

The stains darkened and the bodies abruptly ballooned like a field of flowers blooming at the same time. Sledge recoiled. Blue returned to hammer door over and over again like awful clockwork.

1077.

Suitcases, luggage and all manner of belongings materialized around their owners cluster by cluster. Sledge all but jumped out of his chair in his rush to slow the feed.

12-01-1077.

He felt like he was stuck in a dream. Blue and her unicorn companion stood at the base of the first pillar, rooting through luggage, her ritual seemingly broken. They both wore something around their muzzles. Cloth, he realized, for the smell. The bodies would be fresh enough to stink. It was his first time seeing Blue doing something other than mill back and forth from the door, and it felt like he was seeing a glimpse of the mare who had begged him for her parents less than an hour earlier. She stood facing away from the camera, her shoulders bent as she busied herself empty the suitcase in front of her into a neat pile of clothing, papers and other personal treasures.

The unicorn lifted something in his magic for Blue to see. A flask he had found. He waited for Blue to look but she had stopped sorting, her head bowed. Sledge surprised himself by recognizing the significance of her slumped posture. She had done the same thing when he pinned her to the railing. Something in her had simply disconnected, like a toy robot in need of being wound up again.

He watched the black unicorn get up and stand next to Blue, nudging her with his hoof until she startled out of her trance. They spoke, she shook her head in response to something he said, and though Sledge couldn’t hear the words he could understand the comforting leg that wrapped around Blue’s heaving shoulders. Her companion rocked her as she sobbed.

Sledge couldn’t shake the feeling that he was intruding on something intensely private and forced himself to look away. His eyes settled on the timestamp.

December, 1077. Barely a month after spellfire turned the world to ash.

He keyed the terminal and watched the days count back.

Something was immediately different about the footage. Blue and the nameless unicorn were mysteriously absent. For several weeks the tunnel was motionless. Stains darkened beneath the larger gatherings of bodies, shrank, and disappeared.

Then, like a kicked anthill, everything came to life.

Corpses sprang to their hooves one by one, many preceded by flashes of white that Sledge distantly understood to be gunshots. Ponies he had only just begun to grow used to seeing as empty vessels were now milling across the flagstones in tight clusters. He watched their expressions shift from hopelessness to worry to fear and finally to abject panic. As the mixed crowd of ponies approached the peak of terror, the wash of green flickered white.

When the picture returned, it was in full vibrant color. The tunnel’s ancient lights, not too ancient back then, snapped back on and with them came crisp resolution that Sledge was grateful not to have when the tunnel had been lined with the dead. The clustered ponies began to spread throughout the tunnel, afraid but unaware of the darkness that would eventually come to consume them.

10-31-1077.

Sledge felt his heart beating again. This was the date. The day on which every history book ended and every terminal inside Stable 10 switched on. It was like pulling open the curtains on a great secret. He hesitated and allowed the video to keep spooling back. When he finally hit play, the tunnel was a different scene entirely.

The Stable door stood open like a promise. Twelve pegasi stood evenly spaced around the perimeter of the platform, each one wielding the unmistakable black shape of a rifle in the crook of their wing. Their slim blue and yellow jumpsuits were strangely familiar, and it took Sledge a moment to realize they weren’t Stable jumpsuits but instead Wonderbolt flight suits.

The sight of them, even on his meager terminal screen, filled him with quiet pride. At the end of all things, the Wonderbolts had earned their spot as legends for risking their lives and getting the first residents to safety.

He watched as pegasi arrived alone and in groups, several landing on the flagstones so hard that they fell and needed to be helped up by the unit members stationed at the platform’s rim. They hurried into the Stable half-flying, half-galloping.

Pegasi of every shade filtered past the armed contingent and into the Stable. As the minutes ticked away, new arrivals began showing up in worse shape than their predecessors. A mare landed on the flagstones with her foreleg sheeted in blood and needed to be carried inside. An older couple flew into frame so quickly they looked as if they had been thrown. There wasn’t so much as a suitcase between them as they bounded over the platform, their eyes wide with fear. Pegasi began flowing past the camera as if an unseen valve had been thrown open. They arrived by the dozens in a tangle of wings and jostling hooves, forcing the Wonderbolts to make room in their formation for all of them to pass.

The picture shuddered and the pegasi filtering through their ranks opened their mouths in silent screams. Some looked back toward the tunnel entrance. Most ducked their heads and shoved forward, following the crush of pegasi over the threshold and into the packed antechamber. Sledge tried not to think about the logistics of processing so many terrified residents.

As they pushed their way to safety, Sledge noticed a single pegasus shoving her way back out. Even in the chaos, her fiery slicked-back mane was impossible to mistake. Sledge watched Spitfire, the first overmare of Stable 10, navigate through the gradually thinning crowd and drop onto the platform outside.

It was surreal. Overmare Spitfire stood at the focus of the Wonderbolts’ arc, watching as the flow of pegasi became a trickle. She kept checking the sleek new Pip-Buck adorning her foreleg as if she were checking the time. After a moment, Sledge realized that was exactly what she was doing.

Minutes passed and the flow of pegasi trickled to nothing. The camera shuddered again. The bottom of the frame bloomed with distant light for several seconds before returning to normal. The Wonderbolts on the platform shifted nervously on their hooves, eyes cast far off frame.

Spitfire finally straightened and began speaking. She pointed a yellow feather skyward and spun it in a tight circle. Wrap it up.

Sledge could almost hear the sigh of relief that came from the Wonderbolts as they broke ranks and filed toward the open door. He didn’t know if he would have the discipline to walk as calmly as they had.

Then they slowed. Their ears and eyes turning toward a source of sound he couldn’t see. Their faces, particularly Spitfire’s, contorted with irritation as an earth pony laden with luggage galloped into frame. She was yelling something to the departing pegasi as she stumbled, caught herself and scrambled up the platform toward them.

One of the Wonderbolts looked to Spitfire, who shook her head in answer.

His unspoken order received, the stallion stepped toward the earth pony with the feathers of his empty wing spread open in an unmistakable gesture for her to stop. The mare’s ears went flat with confusion as two more Wonderbolts took up position behind him, their weapons held with quiet threat.

Sledge felt a stone tumble into the pit of his stomach.

The earth pony tried to step around the lead Wonderbolt but he moved to block her, his mouth working as he ordered her back. She shrank away, bewildered as Spitfire and the rest of her Wonderbolts retreated into the Stable. Behind her, another survivor galloped into the frame with a young filly in tow. Seeing what was happening, the breathless parent made a more concerted effort to lead his daughter around the guards and was stopped at the end of a raised rifle. The Wonderbolt wielding it shoved his weapon forward with unmasked aggression, pushing the small family back off the platform.

But they were arriving in groups now, a second wave of refugees that were entirely different than the first. Unicorns and earth ponies hauled suitcases bulging with whatever they could carry toward the platform, followed by a thin mix of pegasi that helped the others along. The camera shuddered, harder this time, and the trio of Wonderbolts blocking the platform began to grow nervous. They barked for the crowd to step back, shoving the frontmost ponies so hard that they spilled off the steps into confused heaps.

Sledge watched a Wonderbolt lift his rifle and squeeze off a stuttering burst toward the ceiling. The terrified crowd shrank back from the gunfire only to look up and see the other two weapons leveled toward them, their bearers screaming at them to back away. Many of them did, shielding their children behind them as they guided them back onto the flagstones. Others stood their ground, shouting in defiance of the rifles aimed at them and gesturing at the open Stable door with hooves, horns and wings alike.

The three Wonderbolts kept their black barrels trained on the crowd as they retreated toward the catwalk. A few stepped forward to follow but another strobe of gunfire forced them back. Sledge watched the ponies left behind scream and plead as the pegasi crossed the catwalk. At the front of the formation, he could see Spitfire holding up a placating hoof as if she were feeding them reassurances. Whatever she was saying, it was being shouted down by the ponies at the edge of the platform.

It didn’t matter.

Slowly, the Stable door and its massive 10 rolled into view.

A unicorn stepped forward, his hoof pointed at Spitfire in accusation. Someone pitched something small through the narrowing gap, striking a Wonderbolt across the shoulder. As it dawned on them that they were being shut out, there was a visible shift in the crowd. The devil behind them became more terrifying than the one staring through the closing door ahead. They burst over the platform en masse. At least a dozen auras swarmed the gear’s descending teeth in an attempt to halt it, but it continued lazily along its track without so much as slowing down.

The crowd reached the door just in time to watch the last slivers of the Stable disappear behind it. Hooves, wings and magic battered the steel as the unseen coupler behind it shoved forward, driving the door into its socket.

And just like that, it was done.

Several ponies wheeled around in abject panic, mouths open in silent screams as the realization of what just happened became clear to them. More pressed forward to beat themselves against the uncaring barrier, unable to know that their efforts would yield no fruit. Their futures were already written.

Sledge felt numb. He leaned his forehead against his hoof, staring at the keyboard beneath his nose. He closed his eyes and tried to make sense of what he just witnessed.

They had been told that they were descended from the best and brightest pegasi Equestria had to offer. That their Stable had been reserved for them so that when it finally opened with all the others, they would be ready to tame the wild skies. They were one of the many seeds strewn beneath Equestria’s soil, and it was their duty to survive. To keep living so that one day others could look up and see the sun.

It was all a lie.

Overmare Delphi’s anguished voice echoed in his thoughts.

This is why they didn’t give us a single unicorn. It’s another one of their Celestia-damned experiments.

She had known the truth. Maybe she hadn’t seen the footage, but she had known all the same. Sledge glanced up at the screen, at the crowd gathering outside the door, and tried to count the unicorns he could see. He lost track at fifty. There was no point in looking for more. All the unicorns they needed were laying outside where Spitfire had abandoned them to die.

He leaned back and stared past the screen, past the terrified ponies gathering there, toward some indeterminate point beyond his desk. For the first time in his life, he didn’t want to be here anymore.

A flicker of color caught his eye and, grudgingly, he hauled his attention back to the screen. More ponies were flooding into the tunnel, too many to have come by coincidence. They were there because someone told them to be there if the worst ever happened. And yet they found themselves staring up at a dead end.

All of them, including a blue pegasus making her way across the platform.

Sledge blinked the haze from his eyes and squinted at the screen. The crowd made way for the mare, parting in front of her as if tugged by an invisible force. The expressions on their faces were unmistakable. Joy, relief, hope. She would do what they couldn’t. She would open the door and lead them to safety. She would save them.

Blue reached the door to Stable 10 and looked up, her magenta eyes pinched with confusion. Sledge barely noticed. He leaned forward in his chair, his gaze fixed on her short, multicolored mane. At first he thought he had mistaken her for someone else. That had to be it, he decided. Blue was the gaunt, shadow of a pony that had retreated beneath the bench of her cell like a kicked puppy. This mare - this impossibly familiar mare - passed through the crowd like a messiah.

The mare listened to the ponies around her as they filled her in on what happened before her arrival. But instead of performing the miracle they were praying for, the mare did something else. She placed her hooves on the surface of the door and looked up, her eyes seeking something high above her.

They settled on Sledge and grew narrow.

She opened her beautiful canopy of blue feathers and launched herself toward the camera fast enough to make him flinch in his seat. Suddenly, his screen was filled with Blue’s nimble frame, her face contorted with barely contained anger. She hovered there, treading air while she spoke to the unblinking lens. She spoke quickly, her lips moving too fast for him to read the anxious words tumbling out of them. Then he stopped trying.

His attention dropped to Blue’s neck, and the gemless gold necklace that hung around it. Then she turned, stabbing a hoof toward the sealed door below, and his jaw sagged.

Emblazoned on Blue’s hip was a cutie mark he and every resident of Stable 10 knew by heart. A cloud pierced by a tricolor bolt of lightning.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. Then the truth dawned on him in full force. He jumped out of his chair, sending it toppling behind him. “Holy shit!”

Rainbow Dash stared out from his terminal with desperate anger as she screamed at the camera. She was beginning to understand what Sledge already knew. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled across her cheeks as she tumbled into a frantic cycle of the same three words. Let us in.

Sledge reached forward and stopped the video, freezing Rainbow Dash’s terrified face mid-scream.

Let us in.

He stared back. They had let her in, he realized.

Two centuries too late.

The door to the deputy station slid open and Sledge walked inside.

His hooves felt unusually heavy as he shut the door behind him. The station was quiet, save for the steady sigh of the air recyclers. It was almost peaceful. Blue looked up from beneath the bench as he approached her cell, but he knew that wasn’t right. Not anymore. Her eyes, though faded, could no longer hide the truth behind who she really was.

He shed his wing guards and lay them on the ground outside the bars. It was hard for him to explain, but they felt wrong. Maybe Aurora would know why that was. She seemed to have found so many answers out there already.

The lock let out a dull clunk as he turned the key. Part of him expected it to have been picked already, but it's lone occupant was too far gone for that. He slid open the door and paused to gauge her reaction. She gazed up at him with silent curiosity, her cheek still resting on her stained bedding. If she wanted to attack him, she would. He stepped inside anyway.

To his relief, she didn’t attack. Even when he lowered himself to the floor beside her bench, wincing when his right knee let out a sharp click, she only watched. The composite wall was cool against his back. It felt good to have something solid pushing back against him. The last hour felt too much like a dream.

He settled his hooves into his lap and looked at her for a quiet moment, then asked, “You’re her, aren’t you?”

Rainbow Dash’s ear flicked the air.

He offered a somber smile in return and looked down at the necklace beneath her foreleg. It wasn’t a replica. It was a part of a legacy that they would never get back. Maybe, somewhere out there, the other five Elements of Harmony were lying in the rubble of some forgotten ruin waiting to be discovered. Maybe they had all been destroyed except for this one empty necklace. It didn’t matter. The bombs had fallen. The time for saving the world had come and gone centuries ago.

He took a deep breath and let it out, slowly.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” he admitted with a half-hearted shrug. “I don’t know if there’s a cure for what you have or… whether you can even understand me.”

Rainbow huffed through her nose. It could have meant anything.

Sledge sighed. “Would you believe last week I worked in Mechanical? I’m an overstallion now. It’s a pretty good promotion, if you can ignore the fact that this whole place will be dark within a month. The power holidays are helping mask the brown-outs, but pretty soon folks are going to know how bad it’s getting.” He tipped his head toward her. “I saw what happened outside. How afraid everyone was when Overmare Spitfire closed you all out.”

A low growl rumbled past Rainbow’s lips. Sledge tensed.

“Maybe I should change the subject,” he offered.

He took her silence as agreement. For a long while, they watched each other in amiable silence. Occasionally she would flick her tail or turn her attention to her necklace or book. She kept both near her head. Sledge wondered whether she knew what either of them were anymore. If their initial meeting or the footage were anything to go by, her state of mind ranged wildly between lucidity and a walking coma.

It reminded him of his father before he passed away. His dad had always been a pillar of the family. A guidepost that Sledge had striven to reach in his younger years. He was the stallion to never forget a name after hearing it. But then he did. Gradually, over the course of months, he began to lose track of things. Then ponies. The first time his dad looked at him and sheepishly asked whether they knew each other, Sledge knew he was gone. He died less than a year later.

This thing that Rainbow Dash had probably wasn’t what his father had suffered through. Not exactly. But it was close, and that was bad enough. Through some unimaginable process, her body had persevered while her mind decayed. Watching her rest, he wondered about those first moments in the antechamber.

She had asked for her parents. Begged for them, even. In that brief span of clarity she had sought answers to a question that had to have been plaguing her for centuries. Sledge looked down to the darkened screen of his Pip-Buck and sighed. He might not be able to fix her, but at the very least he could offer her closure.

He pressed a feather into one of its recessed switches and the little computer woke up.

Navigating the archives was straightforward, even without an overstallion’s credentials to help him along. He descended through the categories layer by layer like a taproot seeking water. Preserved Documents. Public Media. News & Events. Birth, Marriage, & Death. Then finally, Obituaries.

He filled her mother’s name into waiting field.

Whistles, Windy.

A single obituary scrolled down the screen accompanied by a grainy photo of a mare wearing a small, uncomfortable smile. Wrinkles pinched the corners of her eyes. Signs of a joyful life, his own mother used to say. He invited Rainbow closer with a gentle pat on the ground, but her expression turned wary. She didn’t move.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to if you don’t want.”

Rainbow flicked her tail. She eyed his Pip-Buck as he turned toward it and began to read:

---

Windy went to her final rest in the gardens on November 9th, 1097. In her own words, she lived a life “rich with spices that made each day worth living.”

She was born May 5th, 1011 in Cloudsdale where she was well-known as a notorious prankster. Being a single child, Windy turned the lion’s share of her mischief toward the unwitting pegasi in her neighborhood. A resident who lived near Windy at the time shared her story of Windy spending an entire night flying down to the farms on the ground for the sole purpose of abducting as many roosters as she could and depositing them into the backyards of her neighbors. Not a single pegasus slept in after sunrise that morning.

Her mother and father were not immune to her notorious sense of humor. When Windy was given a pet canary for her thirteenth birthday, she named him “Fart” so her parents would have to scream his name to come home whenever he escaped his cage.

At age sixteen, Windy began her long and illustrious career in education as a teacher’s aid at her high school. She graduated with honors, but did not attend the ceremony. She and her friends were preoccupied removing the top center drawers from every teacher’s desk they could get their hooves on and replacing them with ones taken from the furthest corners of the school.

Despite her reputation as a schoolhouse rascal, Windy had a well-known admiration for her teachers and went on to attend the University of Cloudsdale in pursuit of a degree in education. During her six years in college she met an athlete named Bow Hothoof, and the two made sparks. After receiving her masters degree, Bow proposed. They were married in the summer of 1035. A year later, Windy gave birth to her only daughter, Rainbow Dash.

Though Rainbow Dash was loved by many for her feats in service of Equestria, that loved paled in comparison to the adoration Windy had for her daughter. Those who worked with her at…

---

A soft scraping noise pulled him away from the text.

Rainbow Dash tentatively eased herself out from her nook. Bit by bit, she approached Sledge, her towel hooking the bottom lip of the bench and peeling away as she stepped out.

He didn’t move, fearing if he startled her she might retreat or worse. She didn’t. As quietly as she had gotten up, she bent her knees next to him and settled back down with her head resting in his lap. There was a clarity in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. She watched the glowing text on his Pip-Buck like a filly waiting to have a fairy tale read to her. She was coming back.

Sledge leaned forward so she could see the screen. If the subtle adjustment bothered her, she didn’t show it. Acting purely on what felt right in that moment, he slowly spread his feathers open and draped his wing around her. She rolled her shoulder, tucking it under the blanket of feathers, and he smiled as he kept reading.

---

Those who worked with her at Little Trotter Elementary were regularly ambushed with new foal photos, stories and updates on the long list of sniffles and coughs every new parent has ever lost sleep over. Windy was known for smuggling her daughter into class whenever she couldn’t find a sitter, and on more than one occasion she was reprimanded when fellow teachers reported a rainbow-colored foal flying loose in the hallways.

Windy retired from Little Trotter Elementary after thirty-three years of service. She was a beloved teacher in reading, mathematics, and science courses during her tenure, however she often admitted her favorite class to teach was history. She and Bow enjoyed their retirement managing their community garden and maintaining a modest fanclub in honor of their daughter.

On October 31st, 1077, Windy and Bow received orders to evacuate. Like so many of us, they were unfortunate enough to see Cloudsdale fall. They were among the first to reach the Stable, but in the chaos Windy became separated from her husband. Only after the Stable was sealed and the survivors were registered did she learn Bow Hothoof had gone back out to help direct pegasi to safety. He is presumed to have died in the blast that struck shortly after the overmare ordered the door closed.

---

A gentle sob shuddered through her. He couldn’t see Rainbow’s face, but he could feel the dampness soaking into his jumpsuit where her cheek lay. He set his empty hoof over her shoulder.

“Welcome back,” he said.

She wrapped one of her hooves around his foreleg and hugged it tightly against her chest, saying nothing.

---

Those of us who were blessed to know Windy Whistles knew the strength in her heart. Many of us, including Windy, lost everything that day. Mourning claimed more lives than we could ever imagine, but Windy managed to turn her grief into a purpose. When she received her assignment to Fabrication, she gave it back and refused to accept anything other than the job she knew. She resumed teaching, and for the fillies and colts who shared her classroom, she became a surrogate mother. She loved us, and we could only hope that she knew how much we loved her in return.

I lost my parents when the world outside ended. I was too young to understand at the time, but they had enrolled me in Stable-Tec’s Foundling program. They spent their life’s savings making sure if the worst ever happened, I would be safe here. When I went to school on level three for the first time, I remember not being able to stop crying. I wanted to go home so bad and I didn’t understand why no one would let me.

I remember Mrs. Whistles getting down on her knees and asking me if I wanted my parents to come get me, and I said yes. She didn’t know I was a foundling until she checked my resident file. I remember her looking like she was going to cry and feeling bad for making her so sad. She could have sent me to the counselor’s office and no one would have blamed her. Instead, she took me out into the hall and asked if I wanted to come live with her.

When I was eight, Windy formally adopted me. We were two rafts stranded in a stormy sea and she lashed hers to mine without thinking twice. She saw the best and worst of me every day and loved me through it all. She taught me the importance of finding joy in the little things, whether it be cleaning the compartment or watching reruns of bad sitcoms. She always shared stories of her life outside and what it was like to be the mother of an Element of Harmony. There have been plenty of opportunities for her to use her daughter’s memory to make life easier in some way, and each time she turned them down. She taught me how to be humble, and to never spend someone else’s honor for my own gain. Windy Whistles was the best mom I could ever hope to have. Someday I hope to be just as good a father.

Mom passed away peacefully in her sleep surrounded by family, neighbors and friends. Mourning her most of all is her son, Cirrus Whistles.

---

He cleared the roughness forming in his throat. “She was preceded in death by her beloved husband and daughter, together reunited in the garden of eternal rest.”

Those final words rang off the bare walls like a lonely bell. He closed his eyes and listened to her muffled sobs, like a small child only just realizing she was lost. There was no child in the cell with him. Only a skeletal mare who Death had chosen to ignore, leaving her to flake away in a black tunnel until she had been reduced to peering through the shrinking window of her own mind while baser instincts dismantled the foundation of who she had once been.

He looked down at her, knowing there was nothing he could say that could fix her. Nothing he could do that would make any of this okay. Everyone she ever cared for had left her behind centuries ago.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He scrubbed his nose into the corner of his other wing and sniffed, unsure how to respond. The last few hours were not how he planned this morning to go.

Her sobs gently subsided and for a while she lay there, covered in his feathers, her eyes skimming the last lines of her mother’s obituary. She let go of his hoof to reach out and turn the black knob on his Pip-Buck, rolling back to the top of the listing until her mother’s picture slid back into view. She took a slow breath and shakily exhaled.

“How long have I been gone?”

Sledge’s lip twisted with hesitation. “The war ended two hundred twenty years ago.”

She went still. “Oh.”

He grimaced, wishing he’d used a softer touch.

“It feels like I’m trapped in one of her nightmares,” Rainbow continued, her eyes lifting from her mother’s photo to the dull walls of the deputy station. “I hoped I was, but… this is all real, isn’t it?”

She turned her head toward him, seeing him for the first time.

He nodded. “Afraid so.”

Rainbow closed her eyes and pinched her lips together. She pushed herself up with a creaking grunt, leaving a damp patch where her cheek had rested against his jumpsuit. Sledge turned off his Pip-Buck display and followed suit, wincing at the sharp pop from his knee as he stood.

She stepped toward the cell door and frowned. Her ears dipped. “I hurt someone, didn’t I,” she asked.

“You got confused when we brought you in,” Sledge said, his eyes lingering on the ghost of her cutie mark. “Do you know why that happened?”

Rainbow looked back at him, shamefaced. “Not really. Only that it comes and goes.” She frowned, almost wincing. “He said the radiation does it, but I got stuck in between.”

“Your friend from the tunnel,” he said. “The unicorn?”

She began to nod, then shook her head.

“Changeling,” she corrected. She turned away from the bars, her attention drawn by her belongings below the bench. As she crossed the cell toward them, she saw the confusion on his face. “One of the shapeshifters from Chrysalis’s hive.”

Sledge feigned understanding. He didn’t remember anything about shapeshifters from his prewar history classes growing up.

Rainbow scooped up her Element and sat down on the bench with it in her lap. She pinched one of the clasps between her feathers, frowned, and set it back down. She looked over her shoulder at the torn stump of her wing and let out a miserable sigh. “Great.”

“Here,” he said, stepping toward her. He picked up the necklace and she bent her head a little, allowing him to link them under the fringe of what remained of her gray mane. Stepping back, he watched her straighten and touch the edge of the empty socket with her hoof, smiling tightly.

“Thanks,” she said. Her smile dimmed a little and she squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “I knew this wouldn’t last.”

Sledge frowned. “Are you okay?”

She shook her head, less of an answer and more dismissal of his sudden concern. “I’ll be fine. Just take it off, please. I get panicky sometimes if I can’t see it.”

The clasp came apart with some difficulty, and in the meantime Rainbow’s breathing became more deliberate. She clutched her Element in her hooves, steadying herself.

“I haven’t been clear like this for a long time.” She glanced up at him and forced a grateful smile across her stricken muzzle. “I never got your name.”

“Sledge,” he said.

She repeated him, sampling how it sounded. “Can I ask you a question?”

He nodded.

“Why did she do that to us?” Tears played at the corners of her eyes. “Why didn’t she let us in?”

She swayed slightly, then further. Sledge placed a hoof on her shoulder to keep her from falling off the bench. She was fading again.

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

Her eyes went unfocused. “Find out,” she said. “She’s a murderer, Sledge. She killed us.”

“I know. I saw,” he said, guiding her off the bench and onto the floor. She blinked, looking at him with confusion.

“She killed us.”

Sledge nodded. “You’re safe now. Lay down for me, okay?”

She bent her knees, already drawn to the safety beneath her bench. Sledge held her Element in the cup of his wing as she crawled over her book onto the tattered bedding. Once she was settled in with her back to the corner, he laid her necklace on the floor where she could see it. She pulled her knees close to her chest, her expression slowly settling.

“Killed,” she murmured.

Like a cooling filament, the last glow of Rainbow Dash went dark.

Blue settled her cheek down into the stains and stared off toward nothing.

Aurora lay in the dirt, her breathing slow and rhythmic. Roach lay beside her with a self-satisfied grin pulled across his cracked lips. He was close enough that she could slug him if she wanted to, and oh did she want to. Out of the corner of her eye, he stared at her with that same dopey grin he’d been wearing between their turns, and if he kept it up he was going to find himself walking with a limp.

She sighed, lifted her cheek away from her rifle and glowered at him.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” he cheerily replied.

Aurora muttered a colorful threat that made him smile even wider, returning her focus toward the target on the far side of the mostly dry riverbed. At first they intended to only stop for a short rest before crossing the quarter-mile wide stretch of mud. Little remained of the bridge that once spanned the shallow chasm, worn down to its caissons which jutted out of the mire like broken teeth. After finding a comfortable patch of ground to sit and catch their breath, Roach took notice of a boathouse that had fallen halfway down the far bank. Whenever it had collapsed it dragged a woodpile down with it, strewing dozens of quartered logs around its broken frame.

The terrain was beginning to reflect a true wasteland now that they were drawing nearer to the cities of the east coast. Fillydelphia was only a few days away and their little country road had grown two more lanes, shed its asphalt for proper concrete and sprouted bent and rusted road signs pointing to places that no longer existed. The forests were behind them now, as were the rolling valleys and bluffs, replaced by a wide unbroken vista of cracked soil and strange outcroppings of regolith that Ginger referred to as “shock rock.” Shards of bedrock peeled out of the earth and thrown in every direction for dozens of miles when the bombs fell.

Roach explained that they were approaching one such bomb crater, though it was still several hours away. It explained why the flora had thinned out so abruptly. Apparently a small town of sorts had sprung up nearby and was the last pocket of civilization between here and the deserted suburbs surrounding Fillydelphia. It would also be their last opportunity to restock on supplies.

After their encounter with Gallow and the fiasco Aurora had made of his death, a cloud had settled over the three of them that didn’t appear likely to clear up any time soon. The lumber spilled around the far bank presented an opportunity that Roach leapt on. After suggesting they take a break for some target practice and receiving stiff resistance from Aurora, he decided to challenge her to a friendly competition instead.

“Five shots each,” he suggested, pointing at the chopped timbers. “Loser has to sing for us, winner chooses which song.”

Aurora was no stranger to carrying on a song once she had enough of Carbide’s homebrew sloshing in her gut. However, she was also notoriously terrible back home for not being able to carry a tune and she was unapologetic about singing the occasional verses out of order, much to the consternation of anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot. Because she was so terrible, she never sang sober as a personal rule. It was never a bad idea to have a built-in excuse for poor performance.

The bet tickled her interest, though. Roach’s voice was, to be generous, run ragged. It didn’t seem to bother him in the least bit and judging by the glint in his eye, he was counting on her to accept simply over the temptation to hear him belt out a tune. It was a hard gamble to turn down. After some friendly encouragement from Ginger, she relented and shook his hoof.

Looking back, that might have been a mistake.

Now she trailed one target behind him and he was doing his absolute best to make sure she knew it.

“If you think you’re getting in my head, you’re not,” she said.

He shrugged. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Last shot to tie, by the way.”

She mimed him with a barely suppressed smirk and turned her eye back to the stub of quartered wood they’d selected for the next target. Despite the last several days and the traumas the wasteland seemed content to throw at them, moments like these made them bearable. Roach seemed to understand that most out of all of them.

“No pressure,” Ginger chimed behind her.

Aurora pressed her tongue against her cheek and tried hard not to chuckle. “Who’s side are you on?” she accused.

A gentle nib of magic ran down the back of her neck, trailed between her wings and followed the dimples of her spine. It did not help her aim in the least bit. Aurora sucked in a deep breath, trying to steady her aim in the wake of such blatant sabotage.

“I’m biased,” Ginger cooed. “I’ve never heard you sing.”

“Prepare to be disappointed,” she said, slowly bringing the chunk of wood behind the crosshairs. “I hope you like singing along to Doris Bray.”

She squeezed the trigger and the rifle kicked with a crisp, earsplitting crack.

The bullet missed and slapped into the muddy embankment.

She frowned. “Huh.”

“Did you miss?” Roach pressed eagerly. Seeing her face tense up, he slapped the dirt with his hoof and laughed. “You did, didn’t you?”

“I’m pretty sure I saw it move,” she muttered.

“Uh huh,” he said, holding a hoof out for the rifle. “Gimme.”

Aurora rolled her eyes, flipping the safety on before grudgingly allowing Roach to take her weapon. She shifted onto her right elbow and shot a look behind her. Ginger smiled sweetly in return.

“Oh, you whiffed it,” Roach laughed.

“I barely whiffed it,” she grumbled as she stood. “We’d be tied if Ginger hadn’t been playing with my ass.”

Ginger feigned guilt. “And I’ll never forgive myself for it.”

“Okay, rein it in a little you two,” Roach chuckled, his knees clicking as he pushed himself to his hooves. He held the rifle out to her, allowing her to slip her wing through the strap. “You owe us a song, Pinfeathers.”

She stifled a groan, knowing it would take some serious work to get Sledge’s preferred moniker out of Roach’s vocabulary ever since he read the message he sent.

Sledge had kept it brief. With some help, he managed to get Rainbow inside the Stable and had her temporarily housed in the same holding cell that she picked her way out of a week earlier. He knew who she was, and to Roach’s relief he stopped short of writing her name. She had injured herself to the tune of shearing off one of her wings in the process, but the injury didn’t seem to bother her.

If there’s anything you can safely share about her condition, let me know, Sledge wrote. I’m not sure I have my head around it as well as I should.

Roach had said he would try to think of a way to explain it that wouldn’t explicitly tip off anyone listening that Rainbow Dash suffered from the same process that created all ghouls. For all they knew, the Steel Rangers were oblivious to their ongoing communication with Stable 10, but none of them were willing to risk it. He’d been mulling it over ever since they left Gallow’s home.

Ginger spotted a thick root jutting out of the dirt nearby and neatly snipped a section off with her magic. She floated the short length of wood out to Aurora with a grin. “You can’t sing without a microphone, darling.”

Aurora laughed with a thick deadpan, pushing the “microphone” aside with her wing. “Hardy-har. Roach hasn’t even picked a song yet.”

“Give me a minute, I’ll think of one,” he assured her.

Ginger dropped the root back to the dirt and smiled a little more genuinely to show her teasing was over. She stepped toward the edge of the riverbed and peered down at the wide expanse of muck below. “Perhaps you could think of one on the way down.”

Aurora latched onto the suggestion like a castaway to a piece of driftwood. She joined Ginger at the edge of the bank in the hopes of delaying her sentence. Mercifully, Roach didn’t object as Aurora began picking her way down toward the riverbed. It was about time they started moving again, anyway.

They half-walked, half-slid down the slope with Roach nearly toppling them over as he pulled up the rear a little faster than he intended. The first dozen steps from the bank proved promising. The cracked ground was pliable like damp clay at first but quickly softened into a thick, shallow mud that sucked at their hooves and grew deeper the closer they came to the middle of the riverbed.

It became apparent to Aurora they would be up to their chests before they were across and she stopped, stumbled around in the slop, and beckoned them back to the bank. “This isn’t going to work,” she said. “Let’s shake this junk off and I’ll fly you both across.”

It turned out to be a good call. By the time they reached solid ground, Aurora’s legs were aching from repeatedly hauling them out of the mud. They felt like they were coated in lead. As she scraped thick layers of muck out of her fetlocks, she tried not to think about what might have happened if they hadn’t turned around.

“It’s magic,” Roach said.

Ginger looked up at him, then at the bronze aura that was lifting the last of the riverbed out of her coat. “Okay?”

He shook his head, looking pointedly to Aurora. “I mean, It’s Magic, the song. You said you wanted to hear something by Doris Bray. So do I.”

Aurora snorted. “You want me to croon to you?”

Roach shrugged, undeterred.

She sighed, flicking a gobbet of mud off her hind leg as she tried to remember how it went. It was a slow song. One of those swaying, romantic tunes that ponies rarely listened to outside of weddings or the privacy of their own compartments, ideally accompanied by someone else. She could hear the melody in her mind and had to push down the bubbling urge to start giggling out of sheer embarrassment. She turned back toward the sucking riverbed, scanning the far bank for something to distract herself from the growing weight of silence as Roach and Ginger eagerly awaited payment for a bet gone sideways.

“You sigh, the song begins...” Roach prompted, his voice lilting with the first notes of the song.

“I know how it goes,” she said, waving him off.

She cleared her throat, took a breath, and spotted something grey on the far side of the riverbed. “What is that?” she asked.

“Oh, boo!” Ginger heckled good-naturedly. “A bet’s a bet, filly. No sneaking out of it.”

Light glinted off the object’s curved surface. Her hackles shot up.

“I’m serious,” Aurora said, slipping a wing under her rifle and bringing the scope up to her eye. “There’s something up there.”

Ginger and Roach stopped wiping the mud from their legs and followed her sights to the opposite bank where a broken strip of gray asphalt hung over the ledge like a bent lip.

The object wobbled across Aurora’s crosshairs. She stared at it, her jaw clenched. The object’s steel grille stared back beneath a cluster of swept-back antennae.

“It’s a spritebot,” she said.

Ginger stepped beside her. “Is it doing anything?”

She nodded. “It’s watching us.”

“I don’t hear any music,” Roach said, and for a moment Aurora thought he was still on about that Doris Bray song. He clarified before she could ask. “They’re always blaring music.”

Aurora tried to listen. All she could hear was their breathing and the whisper of a very slight breeze. Somewhere behind them, she swore she heard a bird singing.

The spritebot made no sound. It simply hovered, observing them. Then it turned on its axis and slid away, disappearing behind the embankment.

Aurora lowered her rifle, frowning. “I don’t like it.”

“Could be one of Fiona’s,” Roach offered, though his tone made it clear he wasn’t about to risk his own caps on that wager.

She shook her head, remembering their first encounter with one of Fiona’s hijacked spritebots outside Junction City. It only made sense that she used Hightower Radio to take over the little bots from afar, and Coldbrook didn’t seem like the type to give back something he’d made such a performance over taking away. “No, I don’t think it’s her,” she said.

Her eyes lingered on the lip of the road, a new worry churning in her belly. There was only one other entity piloting the spritebots, and they knew much more about her than she did about them.

“It’s the Enclave,” she said. “They’re watching us.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 18: Worlds Collide (Part Two) Estimated time remaining: 61 Hours, 21 Minutes