October 20th, 1075

Spitfire stared up at the blank surface of her condo ceiling. The air was too warm. Her mattress was too warm. Even her pillow was too warm. The world was conspiring against her to be entirely too warm. She flipped her pillow over, plumped it, and tried to relax.

She couldn’t sleep.

She couldn’t remember how many times she’d peeked at her alarm clock, either. And yet here she was doing it again.

2:09am.

Flip-flip.

2:10am.

“Luna’s grace,” she groaned.

There were pills now for nights like these. Spitfire tried one once and the following day had been an unwaking nightmare. They had pills for that too, apparently, but she could see where that rabbit hole led and gave it a wide berth. She could suffer a few sleepless nights. Considering what her job was becoming, she expected to have no shortage of them.

This one was gearing up to be a doozy. No sense in spending it staring at the ceiling.

She rolled off the bare mattress and stepped over the crumpled sheets on her way to the bathroom. A feather flipped on the lights over her landscape-wide vanity mirror, forcing her to squint the last few steps. She winced at the sight of the mare in the toothpaste-speckled reflection. She was reaching the point where she would have to stop saying she was getting old and admit she had finally gotten there. At fifty, she was learning that some honesty went a long way with one’s self. Still, this was one lie she was willing to cling to just a bit longer.

Running the tap, she plucked her comb off the edge of the sink and dipped it under the flow of water. She ran the wet bristles through her haggard mane until the yellow band her mother dotingly blamed for her notorious temper fell in line among the greater sweep of orange. Gone were the days when she moussed her mane into place for the cadets at the academy. The natural look was in, someone told her once. Looking at the errant locks already coming apart from her damp head, she smiled a little. Something told her this wasn’t what they had meant.

It was good enough for a workout, and she needed to burn off some steam.

She swiped her water bottle from the kitchen counter and slung a well-worn Wonderbolt duffel over her shoulder. She quickly scrawled the word “gym” on a slip of stationary and left it on the coffee table where he would find it and, if he had any brains, her. Sliding open the balcony door, stepped into the unseasonably warm night air and hopped off the railing.

She didn’t bother to grab her keys. She rarely ever did. Front doors were more of a ground pony thing.

Her condo sat along Canterlot’s northern rim, close enough to the mountain slope for her realtor to sell her on the lie that the cool air coming off the snowcap would save her money on air conditioning. It was pricey real estate, providing an unbroken view of Canterlot Castle from her living room couch. She could even see the six columns of The Pillar built directly into the ancient stone. Between the two lay the historical district of central Canterlot replete with thatched roofs, faux stone walls and cobblestone streets. Spitfire thought it felt strange for architecture she’d grown up with to be labeled historic, but there it was. In the face of so much progress, she supposed it only seemed fair for someone to want to preserve a part of what was quickly becoming the old world.

Thankfully, she didn’t need to fly far to get where she was going.

Mustang Fitness was barely ten blocks from her condo in what some stubbornly referred to as “new construction” and was one of the few 24-hour gyms that catered predominantly to pegasi. She landed on the cement sidewalk outside and trotted past the unbroken line of windows that dominated the front of the squat building. She stepped inside, setting off a two-toned chime that alerted a tired-looking fitness instructor behind the desk. He looked up, recognized her, and nodded politely before turning back to the tiny television Spitfire knew was hidden beneath the raised countertop.

The gym was always a different place after dark. Better, she would argue. All of the equipment was wiped down and clean. Benches were pushed neatly out of the walkways. It even smelled different. No lingering odor of sweat and musk, just a faint chemical-citrus scent of store bought disinfectant. But best of all, it was quiet. The one downside to a pegasi oriented gym was the necessity to equip the machines with lighter weights which made considerably more noise when the weights clacked into the stacks.

It was a necessary evil. Pegasi could be just as dense as ground ponies, almost equally so if they were trying to impress someone. Put a stack of iron on one end of a pulley and eventually someone would come along who wanted to prove they could lift all of it. For ground ponies, it could lead to a torn muscle or a bad dislocation. For a pegasi, the same weight could amputate a wing.

Spitfire had never been much for weightlifting. Maybe in her younger years, but not now. All she wanted now was to run.

She followed the long line of treadmills that ran the length of the window, the dark street outside difficult to see behind the gym’s bright reflection. She walked behind a tall mare cantering on a machine near the middle of the row, noting the Wonderbolt-branded shorts gracing her toned flank. Spitfire pushed down the urge to ask her if she was enlisted, knowing the answer would likely embarrass the mare out of the gym once she recognized the pegasus asking. Wonderbolt marketing was nothing new, but since the start of the war it had changed from a niche fanbase of flying enthusiasts to a fashion staple for ponies seeking fitness cred.

Turning the Wonderbolts into a brand had been one of Rarity’s less forgivable schemes. The only thing that kept Spitfire from marring Rarity’s flawless ivory face with a shiny new black eye was the mare’s unsettling ability to destroy a pony’s reputation in the space of a few words. She had more strings to pull than a shed full of spiders.

She left the mare to jog in peace and dropped her duffel next to the treadmill at the far end of the row, next to the wall. Setting her water bottle into the cupholder, she stepped onto the textured rubber surface and turned the machine on. The belt began to move and she eased into a steady, loping trot.

Much as she hated to admit it, the simple act of running on a treadmill calmed her more than flying the open skies ever could. Here, she could clear her mind and focus on nothing beyond the steady rhythm of her hooves. She didn’t have to worry about the pitch of her wings or how tiring the return trip home would be if she flew too far. Here, in the company of a few quiet strangers, she could stare out into the lamplit sidewalk outside the window and just be.

A pleasant burn bloomed in her hocks. She accepted the challenge and turned up the speed, willing herself into a mildly uncomfortable canter. In the window’s reflection, she noticed the pegasus in branded workout shorts giving her a sidelong glance. Spitfire ignored her, hoping she wouldn’t ask who she was or worse, stop and try to get an autograph. She was relieved when the mare eventually faced forward in silence.

She didn’t know how Rainbow did it every day. The prospect of constantly being stopped in the streets to shake someone’s wing or sign a random pony’s cutie mark was enough to make Spitfire break into a flop sweat. Ponies being afraid of her, she could handle. Bumping into the odd pegasi she trained back at the academy was barely an inconvenience. Facing down the steady march of adoring fans, all of whom professed an admiration she couldn’t hope to match? She’d rather pluck out her own feathers.

She picked up her water bottle and unscrewed the cap.

Rainbow Dash.

She took a swig and put the bottle back into the cupholder. The balls on that mare. Rainbow was a lot of things. Brash, bullheaded, optimistic, faithful to a fault… but a liar? Spitfire could feel the angry flush crawling up her neck. It wasn’t just that Rainbow lied to her, it was the fact that she went over her head to fire Whiplash in full view of everyone who worked under her. And for what? To cover up the fact that she was siphoning ministry funds to one of Jet Stream’s delusions.

She turned up the speed again. Her hooves beat into a full gallop.

It wasn’t just the fact that Rainbow lied to her. Working near the top of any ministry was going to require a few gentle mistruths to grease the gears or else the entire machinery would bind up. No, it wasn’t the lie that stung. It was that their friendship meant so little to Rainbow that she didn’t trust her enough to tell the truth. She couldn’t remember the last time she tore into anyone as unreservedly as she did with her yesterday, but that mare needed to know she crossed a line.

Spitfire wasn’t concerned about whatever it was Jet Stream wanted the money for. Like many ponies, she was privately eager to read about the new advances coming out of the stallion’s aerospace division. What bothered her was one of the few remaining friends she had left viewed her as an obstacle instead of an option.

Her muscles burned like she was wading through molten lead. She focused on her breathing and pushed through.

Taking direct control over Finance was going to make her job as ministry director that much harder. The Ministry of Awesome was more than just a terribly named conduit that fed taxpayer bits to the other branches. It was an opportunity for pegasi to prove their worth to the sister princesses. Spitfire had done her own headhunting for the past several years, seeking out talented pegasi who shared the same vision she did. With the right ponies, she could make that vision a reality.

The first days of the war had been brutal for the Wonderbolts. Equestria had led the incursion into Vhanna with pegasi leading the charge. The thought had been that their air superiority would overwhelm the enemy and push them back, making quick work of a short and painless war. The reality was that Vhanna had been prepared for years, and the canisters they fired into the skies had been a devastating success. Pegasi dropped from the sky like hailstones in a storm. Good pegasi died. Fleetfoot and Soarin were some of the first. By the end of the second week, the Wonderbolts had been decimated. The invasion slowed. With its precious few remaining aerial elements recalled from the fight, the war found a new equilibrium in the trenches.

Some pegasi volunteered to join the fight there, but Spitfire refused to let the rest of her Wonderbolts die a lonely death in the mud. They were meant for the sky.

She knew it would only be a matter of time before the fighting grew desperate enough for the princesses to call the last Wonderbolts back to the front lines. One hard push from the zebras and the order would drop down the chain of command like a stone. She wasn’t about to watch her people be sent back to the trenches of Vhanna just to be torn apart by zebra bullets. Not without options.

She could feel herself finding her second wind, the tension building in her chest relaxing. Rainbow was just as desperate as she was to end the fighting. She just wished the mare had enough vision to go about it the right way.

Her mind wandered while her hooves beat. In a few hours she would need to start getting ready for the day. It wouldn’t be worth chasing down what little sleep she might be able to sneak in during the meantime. She watched a group of unicorns barely into adulthood stumble down the far sidewalk, silver cans held aloft in sloshing fields of magic. One of them laughed loudly enough for his voice to echo in the street. Spitfire frowned after them.

She was nearing the end of her workout when a pair of dark wings shot across the pavement. The stallion attached to them skidded a good yard, his standard-issued shoes throwing sparks as he slowed to a stop. Spitfire felt a stone grow in the pit of her stomach as Thunderlane spotted her in the window, his amber eyes wide with relief.

The mare in the branded workout shorts let out an excited gasp at the sight of him. Thunderlane didn’t notice her. He stood there, his eyes fixed on Spitfire, his jaw clenched with concern. He had something, and it wasn’t good.

Spitfire stopped the treadmill and gathered her things. As she trotted to the door, the mare glanced after her with dawning realization of who she’d been sharing the gym with. Spitfire pretended not to notice and pushed through the door, the night air chilling her sweat-slicked coat.

Thunderlane joined her on the sidewalk and quickly led her away from the gym. His short powder blue mane looked as bad as hers. Worse, even.

“Bad news?” she asked.

He frowned, staring forward. “Can we go back to your place?”

If she hadn’t known Thunderlane since he was a rookie, she might have thought he was propositioning her. She might have even accepted if she wasn’t aware he was about as interested in mares as she was. Thunderlane’s relationship with Soarin wasn’t well known outside the Wonderbolts, but when Soarin died leading the spear’s tip above the Vhannan front lines, the stallion had taken it badly. So badly that Spitfire had spent the next month making regular visits to his apartment to help him through the worst of it. She’d stepped into that role as an instructor worried about the well-being of one of her charges. Now she regarded Thunderlane like the younger brother she never had, and he was fiercely loyal to her in return.

“Is it something that can wait that long?”

Thunderlane sighed uncomfortably.

“We can talk about it up there,” she suggested, pointing a feather skyward.

“Too many patrols,” he muttered.

He stopped outside a narrow alley between two small shops, considered the windowless walls for a moment and quickly ducked into the claustrophobic space. She hesitated before following. “You know those are our patrols, right?”

“Less ears are better.”

She frowned, trying her best to avoid stepping in the soggy trash collected on the ground. In the still air between the walls she could smell the sour sweat still drying on Thunderlane’s back.

“You’ve been flying,” she observed, concern gripping her around the throat. She hadn’t expected him to have to fly anywhere. Just observe for a while until Spitfire was confident Rainbow was truly finished trying to curry favor with Jet Stream. Thunderlane looked like he’d flown a marathon. “She didn’t see you, did she?”

He shook his head. “I was tailing above her the whole way to the coast.”

“The coast?” Spitfire stared at him, trying to determine if he was joking. The exhausted sag of his wings made it clear he wasn’t. Jet lived just outside Las Pegasus on the west coast. “You’re telling me Rainbow Dash flew to his home?”

“She went east,” he corrected. “She’s wearing one of the minimum-albedo stealth suits from R&D. Kept checking on something she had tucked underneath. I’m not a hundred percent sure, but it was the right size and shape to be a holotape.”

Her mind began to race. It could be nothing, she told herself. “Do we know where she was headed?”

Thunderlane shrugged his wings. “That’s the thing, she just kept going right over the water. I followed her for a few miles just to be sure. My guess is she’s making a crossing.”

“In a stealth suit,” Spitfire said, probing him for any sign that he might be stretching the truth. “In October.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” he said.

It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for her, but then again Rainbow Dash never was the type to shy away from a challenge. Donning a prototype stealth suit just to… what, sneak a holotape out of Equestria? The only thing on the other side of that churning black ocean was Griffinstone, and Equestria had no meaningful ties with the gryphons beyond a few tenuously friendly connections before the war started. Ever since the fighting started, Griffinstone had maintained their staunch neutrality. Spitfire couldn’t blame them. They were geographically pinned between two warring superpowers. If it weren’t for the jagged mountain range they made their homes in, the gryphons might have woken up to find ponies landing on their shore as well. Choosing a side would turn that nightmare into a reality and they had no interest in learning whether they could survive the wrath of either nation.

Which begged the question.

“What’s waiting for her in Griffinstone?”

Thunderlane blinked. “When we were in junior speedsters together, there was this gryphon that Dash would hang around with. Griselda something.”

“Gilda,” Spitfire said.

“You know her?”

Spitfire nodded. Gilda had developed a renewed propensity for appearing on academy grounds not long after Rainbow arrived for Wonderbolt training. Spitfire was willing to ignore it as long as it didn’t become a problem, but then a group of rookies discovered the two of them in the communal showers and it did become her problem. Rainbow had been mortified when she and Gilda found themselves hauled into Spitfire’s office, and the verbal beating she gave them had nearly put the mare in tears. For Gilda’s part, she endured the worst of Spitfire’s wrath with a placid smile, seemingly unconcerned that her midnight dalliance with Rainbow was an inch from having the mare’s dream of becoming a Wonderbolt pulled out from under her. Whatever Rainbow saw in that gryphon, it was a mystery to everyone but her.

“She has a reputation,” Spitfire said simply. She sighed and stared up at the sliver of sky visible between the rooftops. “Okay. This could be nothing, or it could be… more than nothing. Either way, I’m not going to sleep until I’m sure. Do we have any assets near Griffinstone?”

Thunderlane scratched the whiskers along his chin. “Not near, per se. Closest I can think of are the Barrel twins, but they’re on leave in Manehattan last I heard.”

“Pull them,” she said, the decision already made in her mind. “I want them kitted and airborne in an hour. Full surveillance on Gilda until we’re sure she isn’t involved with anything she shouldn’t be. If Rainbow is looking to rekindle an old flame, that’s entirely her business, but if she’s...”

She stopped short of saying passing intelligence. “...compromising the integrity of the ministry, I need to know.”

“And if she is?”

Spitfire chewed her lip. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there. For now, I want eyes on the gryphon.”

“Understood. I’ll get the ball rolling,” Thunderlane said.

She turned and began walking back toward the sidewalk, feeling a little more tired than she intended when she left her condo. Thunderlane’s hooves clicked in sequence with hers.

“Spitfire?” The worry in his voice was unmistakable. “What do we do if Dash is…”

“She isn’t,” she said, saving him the trouble of saying the words. “Like I said, this is just a precaution.”

“But what if she is?”

Spitfire stopped walking and closed her eyes. She turned and looked up at Thunderlane, placing a wing over his shoulder to calm him.

“Then I will deal with it.”

Julip’s hooves clicked across a polished mosaic of lavender marble. Like so many pegasi before her, the interior of New Canterlot’s oldest chapel pressed her into subdued awe.

When the capital city of Equestria fell, it was said to have done so with horrific splendor. Reports from surviving evacuees told the same story. Celestia and Luna had stood together, shoulder to shoulder, atop the great promenade outside the castle. As the city’s population began draining down the mountainside, the princesses wove their combined magic into a mighty shield through which no weapon could penetrate. Or at least, that was what they believed at the time.

No one saw the missile impact, but everyone who lived through the blast agreed that a flash of light swallowed Canterlot Mountain for what seemed an eternity. The first signs that the princesses had fallen were seen in the scorched rubble tumbling like dark streamers out of the sickly green mushroom that boiled into the sky. As the light dimmed, the few remaining survivors watched as the bedrock supporting Canterlot crumbled beneath the city like chalk. What remained of Equestria’s seat of power slid down the slopes in a burning landslide, leaving a black, smoking scar in its wake. The princesses had failed. Canterlot and everyone in it died that day.

But the Enclave survived.

The Chapel of the Two Sisters had been built in the memory of the alicorns who died trying to protect their people. Most citizens simply referred to it as The Chapel, but Julip had always called it by its full name. Named after the castle where it was thought they were first born, it felt fitting to resurrect something forgotten in the service of preserving the memory of two ponies too important to forget. Even now, striding across a marble mosaic that had taken a generation of survivors to pull from the rubble of Old Canterlot, she felt like she was passing along a page in her people’s history.

Stained glass windows on the west wall caught the meager afternoon light, splashing dim rays of color across wide rows of polished wooden pews. Unlike the floor, the windows were near-perfect reproductions of the ones that once graced the halls of Canterlot Castle, each depicting a scene from Equestrian history. The bestowing of the six Elements of Harmony, the defeat of Nightmare Moon, Discord’s imprisonment and the ascension of Twilight Sparkle were all there in vibrant color.

Julip couldn’t shake the sense that it was all too far away. When Old Equestria died, so much magic died with it that looking at these windows felt like she was looking into a fairy tale. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to witness the defeat of a magic-devouring centaur or stand against an army of insectile creatures bent on harvesting something as intangible as love.

And yet, it happened.

As she neared the steps of the chancel, she stole a quick glance down her chest and brushed a few green strands of shed hair off her crisp black uniform. Her feathers slowed over the brass wings pinned beneath the right side of her collarbone. A small monochrome disc joined the two wings together, split down the center with the silhouette of each princess captured mid flight in light and shadow. She pressed it against her chest, taking comfort in knowing she had earned those wings in the eyes of her fellow pegasi and the goddess sisters.

Julip paused to genuflect before the chancel’s two short steps, aware that more than a few of the eyes watching from the pews behind her were doing so with silent judgement. The two empty thrones in the center of the risen alcove loomed over her as if to remind her of her own insignificance in comparison to the two alicorns who once ruled from them. She bowed low, her wings spread wide until their tips grazed the broken tiles.

She counted to five and straightened, tugging her uniform flat by the hem before turning around.

A lone mare wearing an uncomplicated blazer watched her from the front pew. Her pale, pink coat and long aster-blue curls were comforting, in a way, like she might produce a tray of warm cinnamon rolls at any moment. At first glance she looked barely old enough to drink hard cider, but Julip was well aware that the youthful blue glint in her eyes belied the unfathomable depths of danger she represented.

The mare nodded toward the empty space beside her with a pleasant smile. Julip tried to ignore the pounding heartbeat in her throat and approached the single most powerful pegasus in New Canterlot.

“Minister Primrose,” she said, voice hushed to mask her nerves and avoid disrupting the quiet prayer of the smattering of pegasi seated elsewhere in the chapel. The pew creaked beneath her as she sat down. “It’s an honor to meet you, ma’am.”

“Nonsense,” the mare said, but not without a hint of a smile in her voice. “If I’m to believe the report from your debriefing, you’re a hero of the Enclave. The honor should be mine, corporal.”

Julip nodded, mindful not to let the blush of pride show on her face. She traced the edges of the two thrones with her eyes to distract herself from the nervous brew of fear and excitement churning in her stomach. With the exception of scheduled cleaning by a few trusted members of the congregation, Celestia and Luna’s thrones remained untouched.

“They’re beautiful,” Primrose prompted, as if reading her mind. “If I may ask, are you a believer?”

Julip allowed herself to smile just a little. “Yes, ma’am. I’ve been a member of this chapel since I was old enough to choose. My family has attended every Remembrance Day sermon held here since I was a filly.”

“Every one?” the mare inquired. “You’ve never missed?”

She nodded, careful not to let her guard drop. “When I was ten I got feather flu on Remembrance Day and didn’t tell my parents because I knew they would make me stay home. The whole congregation caught it.”

Primrose turned to face her more fully. “On the bicentennial. I remember that sermon. And its aftermath,” she chuckled, surprising Julip. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell Pastor Rivers. For a pious stallion, he certainly knows how to hold a grudge.”

Julip pursed her lips, knowing better than to insult a member of the clergy in the Sisters’ house. “Everyone has their sins.”

She thought she’d done a good job hiding her discomfort, but something she let through blipped on Minister Primrose’s radar. Julip pretended not to notice the flicker of a frown appear on the mare’s lip, or notice the abrupt change in topic.

“I read through your records, corporal,” she said so casually, she may have well commented on the weather. Julip tightened her posture. “You’ve been enlisted in the Enclave for twelve years now, but you never received anti-interrogation training. Is that correct?”

She paused, caught off-guard that someone like Primrose would know anything about her. “I… yes, ma’am. That’s correct.”

“Yet you were detained by Autumn Song for over two months and never disclosed any information regarding SOLUS,” she said.

It wasn’t a question, just a simple statement of fact. She had spent the last forty-eight hours moved to and from a dizzying line of offices, interrogation rooms and guarded barracks while pegasi wearing more stripes than she ever hoped to see drilled her about the events of her capture, imprisonment and very unlikely escape. Julip knew not to add anything to Primrose’s summary or risk facing renewed scrutiny. She nodded.

Primrose stared at her for a long moment, then her smile returned. She slipped the tip of her wing into her blazer and retrieved a thin stack of what looked to be photographs from her breast pocket. “The Enclave needs more pegasi with your fortitude,” she said, holding the photos toward her.

Julip took the pictures and found herself frowning at them. “I can be stubborn sometimes,” she said, distracted by the scarred and bloodied stallion staring up from her at the top of the stack. His eyes were red from the camera flash. Something about the photo suggested it was the only light he’d seen in a long time. “Should I know who this is?”

The minister shrugged, her powder blue eyes tracking Julip’s expression. “I don’t know. Please, take your time with each and tell me if you see anything that stands out.”

She nodded with uncertainty and lifted the terrified stallion away to reveal another, this one frozen in mid laugh. He was seated in a public venue she didn’t recognize with several empty glasses grouped around his gesturing hooves. A heavy leather duster wrapped his shoulders, but he was too drunk or excited to notice the tips of his feathers were visible beneath their covering.

The next photo revealed a mare stirring a cookpot, the light from the small fire below it coloring the rough stone walls around her yellow and orange. It was a cave, Julip realized, and the mare was holding the makeshift wooden spoon between her feathers.

She narrowed her eyes. “These are all dustwings.”

“Keep going,” Primrose said.

Julip flipped to the next picture. A mare watching two young colts wrestle outside a weatherbeaten farmhouse, one of them grappling the other with his small wings. Then the next, a tired stallion bracing a wagon while his partner lined a wheel up to its empty axle. If Julip hadn’t already spotted the trend, she would have missed the barely noticeable ridges in their armor that masked who they truly were.

She moved onto the next photo and paused.

A dapple-gray mare’s face filled the frame, her mouth bent open as if she were arguing with the pony taking the photo. Her filthy white mane covered one of her eyes. The other blazed like a furious emerald lit from within.

Julip tapped the photo. “This is her. The pegasus who freed me.”

“How sure are you?” Primrose asked.

“I told her I’d kill her if she opened my cage, and she did anyway,” she said. “Even gave me a stimpack for my trouble. A good one. You don’t forget a face after that.”

Primrose nodded, holding her feathers out for the photo. “Do you remember her name?”

She handed the picture over. “Most I got was ‘Pinfeathers.’”

“Aurora Pinfeathers, if our records are accurate.” Seeing the confusion on Julip’s face, she explained. “This is a photo taken from one of our spritebots outside a defunct restaurant not far from where you were being held. She apparently reactivated the bot after attacking it a few hours prior in an attempt to elicit our help. Facial recognition pulled up a match from Stable 10.”

Julip frowned. Every pegasus knew about Spitfire’s Stable to the east and how the zebras had targeted a little known nearby village in the forest at the foot of Foal Mountain. The detonation was thought to have destroyed it.

“I thought Ten was gone.”

“Apparently it isn’t,” the minister said, her voice tinged with a bare hint of annoyance. “Spitfire’s old preservation project seems to be thriving, though it seems that she went through pains to make it seem otherwise. Stable 10’s signal went dead in 1077, but this Aurora’s Pip-Buck is behaving like a relay between us and whatever firewalls Spitfire built to keep…”

Primrose stopped speaking as a young, brown colt trotted to the front of the chapel and made a bee-line for the two of them. Julip pressed the stack of photos face-down in her lap and watched the little one produce a flip-book and a fountain pen in each wing, holding them up to Primrose without an ounce of reservation.

“Can you sign my notebook?” he chirped.

“Please,” Julip added.

The colt glanced at her, then back at Primrose with even wider eyes. “Please!”

The minister slipped Aurora’s photo into her pocket while simultaneously bending forward to accept the pen and paper from her fearless fan. “Absolutely, I can,” she said, her voice spilling over with exaggerated cheer that had the colt dancing on the tips of his hooves. “May I ask your name or shall I guess?”

“Jet Streak!” he said eagerly.

Julip noticed a flicker of hesitation in the minister’s eyes, but an instant later it was as if nothing had happened.

“Streak,” she said, beginning to write, “With a K?”

“Yes ma’am!”

She nodded with mock-serious frown that made little Jet giggle. The nib scraped across the lined paper in neat, controlled arcs, jotting out a simple message before dropping into the stylized loops of her autograph.

She returned Jet’s notebook and pen, and he bolted away so quickly he needed to flap his free wing just to stop himself from crashing into the far row of pews on his way down the aisle. A bay mare with black-tipped wings waited halfway down the chapel, the embarrassment visible even from this distance as her son returned to her. She bent down and whispered something in his ear, and Jet turned to cup his feathers around his mouth.

His echoing “THANK YOU!” caused several parishioners to jump in their pews and turn toward him with a mixture of amusement and annoyance.

Primrose waved a wing to both him and his mother, the latter of which was doing her best to guide her son out of the chapel where she could focus on finding a dark corner to hide in.

“Cute kid,” Julip said.

“He has the lungs of a drill sergeant,” she agreed, retrieving Aurora’s photo from her pocket. “Corporal, I know you’ve only just returned home, but I would like you to undertake a mission for me.”

Her heart skipped. This was why she was summoned. Not to be interrogated or to have her loyalty tested, though she had the impression that the minister was surveying her responses for red flags. No, she was here to be given another opportunity. Another chance to show that if the Enclave invested in Mint Julip, it would pay dividends.

She swallowed. “What’s the mission?”

Primrose gave her Aurora’s photo and took back the rest. “I want you to go east and find this mare again. She’s a pureblood. Purer than any pegasus in New Canterlot. Purer than me, corporal. I want to know why she left her Stable and who authorized it to be unsealed. If Spitfire’s Stable did survive, it has done so without our guidance. Two centuries is a long time to go it alone, and there is the unavoidable possibility that Aurora’s departure might signal a deviation from Spitfire’s intentions.”

Julip pinched the photo between her feathers, dragging one across Aurora’s filthy mane. “Alright, but why send me? I’m just a technical officer. Shouldn’t something like this be handled by Intelligence?”

The minister looked at her. “Are you trying to say you’re not capable of having a conversation with one mare?”

Julip felt the weight of her gaze, the mind churning behind it, and reflexively swallowed. “No, ma’am. I can do that, but I just think…”

She stole a glance at the minister and saw her expression darkening. This wasn’t an offer, she realized.

“I can do this, ma’am,” she said. “Do we know where she’s headed?”

“We do,” Primrose nodded, sifting through the photos until she found one toward the bottom.

She slipped it between Julip’s feathers. Three ponies stared up at Julip from what looked to be a ravine. They were half-caked in mud and looked out of breath. The grey pegasus in the middle had a rifle leveled at the camera, one eye obscured by its scope.

“She and her companions are traveling toward Kiln. Are you familiar with the area?”

Julip shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

“You will be. Kiln is a not insignificant trading node under the Rangers’ protection, though you’re not likely to see any of them in the town proper. Ghouls built it on the north rim of a balefire crater, of all places, and peddle just about anything they can make from the glass littered inside it. The immediate area near the crater is highly irradiated. I would assume your target will have the sense to stay to the outer edge of town if they go there at all. Start your search there.”

Julip nodded, her gaze drifting to the unicorn in the photo. “What about the muds?”

The minister’s tone hardened. “Rephrase that, corporal.”

She blinked bewilderment at the sudden change in her tone. “I mean the unicorns, ma’am. I’m sorry.”

“Do better, please,” Primrose said flatly. “That unicorn is Ginger Dressage and her family holds more influence here than most pegasi ever will. The other appears to be a changeling, if our intelligence is to be believed. If they’ve traveled together this far on hoof, there’s a good chance Aurora will have heard her fill of who her friends suppose us to be. I need you to approach the three of them with open wings, not petty insults, and prove them wrong or this will all be wasted effort. Is that understood?”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, tucking the remaining photos into her blazer. “Check in with Sergeant Hayflinger at the quartermaster’s station. He’s been instructed to have everything you’ll need ready for you to pick up. You’re to be in the air before sunset. I suggest you get something to eat before then.”

“Yes ma’am,” she repeated.

“Remember,” Primrose said, “our first priority is Stable 10. Find out what made this Aurora Pinfeathers leave and whether or not there is anything left of Spitfire’s program to salvage. As soon as you know, you report to the nearest relay station and await further instructions. Now get to it, corporal.”

Julip nodded, dropping out of the pew as if some invisible force was pushing her out of it. Her hooves clacked against the tile and for a moment she stood there, trying to think of something to say. Something to demonstrate her loyalty not only to the Enclave, but to the mare who stood at the helm since the days when balefire poured into the sky.

She took a breath.

Minister Primrose stared at her, waiting.

“Ah…” she said. “Yes ma’am.”

She clenched her jaw, snapped off a crisp salute and mumbled every gutter word she knew as soon as she was out of earshot.

“Okay, hold up a sec, I need to switch. This thing is getting heavy.”

Ginger gave Roach a knowing look as they slowed. He offered a small shrug in answer as they slowed, and not for the first time, while Aurora awkwardly uncurled her left wing and let the spritebot’s dead weight spill onto the roadway with a deep clank. It weighed close to fifty pounds if it weighed anything at all, but Ginger only had her guesses to rely on.

As soon as Aurora had dropped them off safely on the other side of the riverbed she made a bee-line straight for the departing sprite-bot. It hadn’t gotten far. Ginger and Roach watched her land in front of the bot and immediately began asking it questions. As they approached, they watched the floating ball of circuits stare dispassionately back in the face of Aurora’s interrogation before abruptly going dark and dropping hard onto the pavement.

Someone, somewhere, had decided the best course of action was to deactivate it. Not one to be ignored, Aurora hefted the bot off the ground and resolved to take it with her.

When Ginger asked why, her answer had been simple.

“I’m going to sell it. If the Enclave’s going to spy on us, we might as well get something in return.”

Ginger waited as Aurora lifted the spritebot with her rested wing, her face pinched as she adjusted her grip. “If it’s getting that heavy, why not just let me carry it for a few miles? Give your wings a break.”

“I’m alright,” Aurora chuckled as she caught up. “Anyway, this is good exercise.”

Roach watched her trot ahead of them, eyeing the burden tucked snugly under her feathers. “You’ve been getting good exercise since we left the tunnel. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

If Ginger hadn’t been paying attention, she might have missed the brief flicker of tension that surfaced in Aurora’s shoulders. As soon as it appeared, it was gone. More and more, she was starting to recognize the subtler cues of Aurora’s body language. The way the muscles in her neck twitched when she was holding back a remark or the barely perceptible way she bounced her hips when she had a song stuck in her head. Aurora wasn’t quite an open book, not yet, but the more Ginger learned to turn the pages the more this thing they had between them felt right.

And yet she had her own worries. Questions she was too afraid to ask for fear that they might smother their seedling relationship before it could bloom. She could see the same uncertainties plaguing Aurora. Worries about whether this new and fragile relationship they were trying to cultivate might be premature. Superficial.

She and Roach caught up to Aurora, the debate about the spritebot cooling. Ginger made a point to nudge her ribs against her empty wing.

Aurora looked at her and noticed the worry in her eyes. Her expression softened and she pecked Ginger behind the crease of her lip, her smile a little more genuine.

Ginger allowed herself to smile back, grateful for Aurora’s reassurance whether it was intentional or not. She glanced at Roach whose eyes were fixed on the road ahead. She found herself sighing. Ever since Junction City, they’d been plagued with one bad thing after the other. Between Cider, his deranged sister, Coldbrook and most recently the horrors discovered at Gallow’s home, the three of them had their nerves drawn so tight they were at risk of snapping.

They needed a break.

“How long until we reach Kiln?”

Roach looked up, then at the surrounding regolith. The forest was far behind them now and the scrub grass had been quickly replaced with cracked earth and jagged, wind-whipped boulders. They passed a partially collapsed gas station several miles back but Aurora had been inexplicably resistant to go near it. From here, the coast was only a few days away. There would be no more trees, Ginger knew. Not enough to be worth counting. With the ruins of Manehattan, Fillydelphia and Baltimare spread out over the horizon, so too would come the great scars left by the end of the war. Wounds too deep and too wide for two mere centuries to heal.

They watched as he squinted up at the rolling clouds and the dim light of Celestia’s sun glowing through them. “An hour,” he said, then decided to hedge a little. “Two, maybe. We should have enough time to offload the spritebot and find someplace to sleep. Speaking of which, how are you two holding up?”

Ginger looked to Aurora who did the same to her. The two of them hadn’t slept since their night together at the bottom of Stable 6 and that had been over twenty four hours ago. It felt like weeks. The mere mention of sleep had her teetering on the edge of a yawn, but the prospect of shelter and a bed kept her moving forward.

Aurora, on the other hoof, seemed to have hit her second wind.

“Oh, I’ll wake up a little once I get something to eat,” she said, knowing she had to look as exhausted as she felt.

Roach tipped his nose toward the empty horizon. “The last time I came out this far was before either of you were born,” he said matter-of-factly. “Kiln used to be a gathering place for ghouls looking for somewhere to live. I heard it’s changed a little since then. Lot more non-ghouls living there these days, radiation or no radiation. You’ll both want to keep an eye on your exposure while we’re there.”

Ginger glanced at the Pip-Buck still clamped to her foreleg. It didn’t feel like wearing a boat anchor anymore, but it still took an extra effort to swing her leg forward when she walked. Every now and again the needle that ticked away each ionized particle slipping through its detector would bounce within the gauge, crawling millimeter by millimeter toward the yellow range. They were going to need to start looking for a source of Rad-Away or risk staring down the same unpleasant symptoms they’d experienced during their first night on Blinder’s Bluff.

She looked to Aurora, who seemed undaunted by the unwieldy weight of the Enclave’s spritebot. Her coat was slick with sweat, something that would normally concern most ponies in the wasteland, but in a strange way she seemed to be enjoying the physical challenge. No doubt one of the many ways growing up in a Stable differed from the outside. Something that one day she hoped to understand.

They settled into a not unpleasant silence. Roach spent the time observing the desolation as it passed around them, pausing to monitor the scant wildlife stalking the horizons. There were more rodents out here, large black things resembling prairie dogs that weren’t keen to approach the roadway but were happy to monitor them from a distance. Occasionally Aurora would key into something Roach had seen and that quiet fear would climb into her face, the apprehension of a pony finding herself in a strange and terrifying world laid bare. Nothing attacked, but plenty of things watched.

Eventually, Ginger lost interest in the surrounding badlands and turned her focus toward her magic. Ever since Aurora’s attempted rescue and Ginger’s subsequent leap ahead of whatever barrier stunted unicorn magic since the very first days after the war, the energy that spilled from her horn felt… corrected. She wondered if it felt the same way for Aurora when she was first learning to fly. It was strange to think of having magic “back” again when she couldn’t remember a day without it.

She lit her horn and focused on what she wanted. A small sphere of bronze light popped into existence a few feet in front of her, briefly drawing Aurora and Roach’s attention.

Picking up objects, grasping them, moving them around all came to her by second nature. Learning to light crystals in the small apartment above her former shop had taken much more practice, but the crystals did most of the work once she channeled enough magic into them. Even so, it was a benchmark most unicorns couldn’t manage. Ginger knew it didn’t mean she was particularly powerful. Only that she had figured out how to organize her thoughts in a way that bridged the gap between what she wanted to happen and what actually happened. Once it worked, something in her head clicked and it just made sense.

Forming tangible magic out of thin air was much more challenging. When she dropped her first shield, the spell hadn’t come with any conscious effort. At that moment, all Ginger could think about was the revolver pointed at Aurora’s head and Autumn’s slow pull on the trigger. Centuries of pure magic pumped into her veins and the raw desire to get something in front of the imminent death leveled at the mare who risked her very home to rescue her had been more than Trotter’s suppression ring could hold back. The shield she so desperately wanted had suddenly been. Peeling the crescent blades from the dome’s surface had come like a second nature she didn’t know she had. Moving them toward Autumn’s horn made sense. In that terrifying moment, everything made sense.

Mindful not to step into the fissures that plagued the old highway, Ginger narrowed her eyes at the sphere in concentration. It gradually flattened on eight sides, forming an imperfect cube that felt as wrong as it looked. She dispelled it and tried again, first the amorphous sphere and then the structured lines of the cube. It felt silly, but she could feel a resistance in her mind that felt like progression.

Baby steps, she reminded herself. She couldn’t always rely on things to work out in the heat of the moment. When Gallow’s mother fired shots into her shield, the impacts rang in her skull like flashes of a migraine, and she had come dangerously close to losing her grip on the spell. Aurora and Roach were already seeing her unlocked potential as an asset, but they couldn’t depend on her if she didn’t know what she was doing.

So she practiced, hoping to glean understanding from each failure. Maybe something would come of it. She hoped it would. The sphere became something else, imperfect and hard to grasp, so she started over.

Again and again and again.

It appeared as a welt on the horizon. A shallow lump on the otherwise flat line that delineated lifeless soil from a smothering blanket of clouds. As they followed the dim path of the descending sun, the deformation widened until Aurora could distinguish between the solid rim of the bomb crater and the jagged collection of square buildings clinging to its left. The Pip-Buck on Ginger’s foreleg had already begun to chatter and they each took a dose of Rad-X before venturing further.

The highway itself bent directly toward the crater’s center, forcing them to divert onto a hoof-hewn dirt path staked on either side with rusted lengths of rebar. A steel sign taken from the highway stood atop two wooden posts outside of town, painted green from top to bottom in wide strokes. As far as Aurora could tell, the sign was well-cared for. A uniform, white border trimmed the edges, matching the neatly spacedwriting painted in the center.

Kiln reminded Aurora of the old Appleoosan films that would occasionally be shown back home by the Archive department. At the end of every month, pegasi would suspend a white sheet from a wire suspended across the Atrium catwalk, giving residents lucky enough to be scheduled off an opportunity to catch a glimpse of prewar entertainment. She found herself grinning at the unmistakably western architecture as they approached the edge of town. It felt like she was walking onto the set of High Moon, though Hayville had only been a fraction of the size of Kiln appeared to be and there were more cables strung across the main street than just telegraph wires. Ginger nudged her shoulder, giving her a curious look.

“I’ll tell you later,” she said, unable to wipe the smirk off her face.

It was too surreal. The false front buildings facing into the wide dirt boulevard screamed spaghetti western.

They made room on the dirt road for a covered chuck wagon pulled by a pair of earth ponies wearing patchwork armor. A unicorn leaned out the front with a very modern rifle gripped in his magic, its muzzle aimed skyward while still making a clear display of his willingness to defend whatever it was his team was hauling. The canvas cover looked clean enough to be new. Aurora managed to resist the urge to greet the driver with a badly accented howdy, but only just. They passed each other without a word spoken or a shot fired.

As they crossed into the edge of town, she spotted a wide, wood-fenced area built against a slab of blackened regolith. Thick cables ran from the confines of the perimeter to a series of posts that led into town. Aurora listened for the putter of the generators and was surprised to hear none. Given the size and remoteness of the town, it made sense that the power was only switched on as needed.

“Looks like it grew since I was here last,” Roach commented as they crossed into the town.

Aurora nodded absently, her eyes drawn to the painted signs above the buildings they passed, a small part of her hoping to find a general store. She was a little disappointed when one didn’t present itself, each business instead bearing personalized signage and more than a few attempts at levity.

It was a strange dichotomy compared to the residents of Kiln. Aurora tried not to stare, pretending to struggle with the spritebot under her wing when one of the ghouls glanced her way. There were so many of them. Ponies in varying states of decay milled through the dusty street, gossiped along the wooden boardwalks and generally seemed content. A pair of mares, or at least she thought they were mares, crossed the street ahead of them with curious eyes turned toward the strange new visitors. It took them a moment to recognize Roach’s strange hallmarks of his own decay, but when they did they seemed to relax.

Aurora hefted the spritebot a little higher in the crook of her wing and leaned toward him. “I feel welcome already.”

He stifled a chuckle. “Not many smoothcoats frequent this part of town unless they’re trading in bulk. Most ponies stay on the northern outskirts where the radiation from the crater is less potent.”

She hesitated. “Then why aren’t we over there?”

“We don’t want to go up there,” Ginger said, biting off each word. Seeing Aurora’s confusion, she pursed her lips and looked north through the gaps between buildings. “Kiln is a node for slavers. Most of the ponies on the outskirts are either in pens or guarding them. I would much rather soak up the extra rads here than pay to sleep in one of their beds.”

An approving whistle peeled off the nearby boardwalk, delivered by a ghoul stallion who was unapologetically listening to her as they passed by. She cleared her throat and lowered her voice.

“Besides,” she said, “the company here is significantly more lively.”

Aurora lifted an eyebrow at the stallion that had whistled and shook her head, her grin gradually returning. There was definitely a different vibe here. Everyone seemed to wear their proverbial collars a little looser than the ponies at Junction City or Blinder’s Bluff. No one was shooting looks over their shoulders in search of the next great danger. It occurred to her that, nestled in the irradiated shadow of a centuries-old crater, these ghouls genuinely felt safe.

She had to admit despite the stares and curious whispers and the very real possibility that her pee would glow in the dark if they stayed too long, Kiln was showing some potential of growing on her.

A part of her wondered if Gallow would have fit in here.

She looked at Roach and waited until he saw she was staring.

“What?” he asked.

“Smoothcoats?”

“Ah.”

She watched him fumble for words.

“It’s a sort of blanket term for non-ghouls,” he said sheepishly. “It’s not meant as an insult.”

“Not usually,” Ginger clarified. She wore a small smile of her own at the sight of Roach’s sudden discomfort at being thrown under the carriage. “It’s alright, dear. He certainly means well.”

“Alright, now you’re both just ganging up on me,” he half-heartedly complained.

Aurora flicked him across the flank with her tail. “Don’t worry, I was just curious.”

He smirked and shook his head with the embarrassed relief of someone who just dodged a bullet. Aurora watched him out of the corner of her eye as he turned his attention back up to the signs posted above each business. He eventually spotted one that seemed to fit the bill - a place called Rusty’s Rectifiers - and gently diverted the two of them toward a storefront whose twin windows displayed a variety of small salvaged electronics.

As she stepped onto the boardwalk, she added, “You might’ve talked yourself out of that song, though.”

Roach and Ginger both opened their mouths to object, but it was far too late. Aurora hefted the spritebot through the shop’s front door while shooting a wry grin back to her companions. They followed her inside with a collective silence that foretold dire consequences.

The shop was small. Much smaller than Ginger’s back in Junction City. Bare steel shelving hung on rails hammered to either side of the cramped salesfloor, offering a variety of scrap in varying conditions. Everything from keyboards to vacuum tubes to spools of tarnished copper wire packed the shelves to the point where they looked less like displays and more like a junkyard brought indoors. Scraps of paper tied to each item advertised a price written in pencil. On what looked to be a salvaged kitchen island at the center of the shop, a medley of circuit boards lay over one another like slices of bread. Aurora recognized some of the parts, but most were entirely foreign to her. Things ripped out of technology that Stable-Tec deemed unnecessary for the longevity of her home and decided weren’t worth bringing inside. Curiosity bubbled within her at the sight of so many new gadgets.

The entire shop smelled like soldering smoke, a scent that got stronger as she approached the wall-to-wall workbench that served as the shop’s sales counter. The ghoul patiently waiting behind it was shorter than most ponies Aurora knew. His brown coat, drawn tight over protruding ribs, featured a long tear where a three-inch wide strip of leathery flesh was simply gone. The gash had taken his left ear and eye with it, leaving behind a strip of bare skull that eventually curled over the front of his muzzle. Aurora did her best not to react with anything beyond her now strained smile.

The ghoul smiled liplessly at her.

“Looks like you caught a whopper,” he rasped, grey eyes dipping to the spritebot beneath her wing. He patted the countertop with his hoof, disturbing the metal shavings that littered its rough surface. “You can set that down right here.”

As she did, the shopkeep nodded hellos to Roach and Ginger. Then he placed his hooves on the spritebot’s shell and gave it a slow turn, stopping briefly to make note of the large dent in its chassis where it had struck the road after deactivating.

“Looking to trade or sell?” he asked.

“Just selling for now,” she said with a glance at the smaller shelves over his shoulder. A collection of more valuable scrap stood on display across the wall behind him, including a worn but intact cardboard box with original advertising for a do-it-yourself solar charger. The faded Jet Stream Industries logo was emblazoned across the top flap. She grimaced and turned her attention back to the bot in front of her. “I like your store.”

The dessicated muscles around his jaw twitched with the remnants of a real smile. “Thank you, miss. I do my best with what I have.” He dipped his head under the desk for a moment and returned with a long flathead screwdriver loosely held in the natural pocket behind his incisors. “I’ll be truthful, it’s not every day I have a dustwing in my shop, let alone one selling me Enclave tech.”

Aurora scratched the back of her neck, unsure how to respond.

“Well,” he said, pressing the rusted edge of the driver into a narrow gap in the bot’s paneling, “give me a few minutes to open this up and I’ll let you know what I can buy. Take a look around in the meantime. Name’s Rusty, by the way.”

“Aurora,” she replied, approaching a shelf along the wall. Ginger and Roach were browsing the circuit boards on display on the island out of politeness rather than any need to purchase anything.

An access panel in the spritebot’s chassis sprang open with a metallic snap. “That’s a pretty name. My wife and I went to the Crystal Empire for our honeymoon. The lights were so bright on our first night that we thought the sun was rising early.”

Roach looked up from the display with piqued curiosity. “You’re prewar?”

He nodded, setting the screwdriver down in order to pick up a narrow flashlight. He clicked it between his teeth and shone the light into the spritebot. “I was twenty-three when the bombs dropped.”

“I’m sorry,” Roach said.

Rusty shrugged and peered into the dark chassis. “Don’t be. It was a long time ago, and I’ve had plenty of time to live a few good lifetimes since then.” He reached a hoof into the bot and tugged out a thick bundle of red cables that spilled onto the countertop. “How old were you when it happened?”

Aurora paused to glance back at Roach, who for a moment became distant and still.

“I’m not sure,” he finally answered. “We didn’t have birthdays where I came from. My husband and I used his birthday for the both of us.”

“Huh. I didn’t think your kind got married.”

A subtle smirk pulled at Roach’s lip. “We didn’t. I had to move to Equestria for that.”

Rusty gave something inside the bot a firm jerk with his hoof and carefully extracted a long, green circuit board that he laid next to the bot. “Well, changeling or not, I’m always glad to meet a new face from the old days. Kiln might be the largest ghoul town east of New Canterlot but most of its citizens caught the rot a long while after we blew up the world. Not a lot of folks around here want to hear an old fart tell the same stories about the times before.”

Roach chuckled sympathetically. “Ponies move on.”

“Ponies forget.” He dug out a black cube with two thick silver prongs on one side, set it next to the circuit board and ducked his hoof back in to continue gutting. “The Enclave and Steel Rangers are no different than Equestria or Vhanna, except instead of oil it’s old world tech that decides which side dies. Do you remember the day it happened?”

Roach nodded.

“But do you remember why it happened?”

“No one knows why it happened,” he said. “One day it just did.”

“Exactly,” Rusty said, peering over the top of the bot for emphasis. “One day it just did. There was no warning. Nothing on the news to tell any of us things were falling apart. Certainly no warning from the Ministry of Image. It was just another boring Wednesday morning and… then I noticed all the pegasi in the air. A whole mess of them flying east from Cloudsdale. I was out harvesting wheat and I remember my radio cutting out and hearing this mare reading a bulletin telling everyone to seek shelter. I was halfway to the house when I saw the first flash.”

Aurora set down the gearbox she’d been looking at and turned to listen. Ginger and Roach were doing the same.

Rusty took a ragged breath before continuing. “By the time I got inside, the sky was starting to go green in the west. It was like a wave that kept getting closer. I couldn’t find Firefly or the kids so I just assumed they were downstairs in the root cellar. It was always a mess down there. She had taken up making preserves and there were boxes of jars everywhere. I thought maybe they were hiding, but by the time I realized they weren’t in the cellar it was too late to do anything. One minute I was alone down there, the next I was watching our house being torn to pieces right over my head. The heat was so terrible and I remember thinking that if I didn’t get somewhere safe I would die, so I yanked the sump pump out of the basin and forced myself in as deep as I could fit.

“I remember thinking to myself as soon as this was over, I needed to go back upstairs and find the kids.” He shook his head with a bitter laugh. “Our house was being dragged into the firestorm one wall at a time and I still thought I might be able to find them hiding under their beds. Wasn’t until later that I remembered they were doing chores with their mother in the barn. By that time, everything was gone. The house, the barn, even the fields. All of it just… scraped black.”

He let out a heavy sigh. “Point is, none of us knew it was going to happen until it did. It doesn’t matter what theory you believe in. What matters is that someone responsible for not pushing the button woke up that morning and decided it needed pushing. Every year that goes by, there are less of us who remember what it was like to lose an entire world.” He stared pointedly at Roach. “Nobody wants to hear old ghouls like us lament a time they were never around to see, and even less want to be lectured about how close the Rangers and Enclave are to making the same mistakes.”

Rusty gave the spritebot’s innards a hard yank, tearing something loose with the rapid pops of breaking wires. He dropped a pair of bulky vacuum tubes onto the growing pile of components and went right back in for more.

“Anyway, you didn’t come here to listen to me bellyache.” He dropped the flashlight, picked up his screwdriver and spun the bot around. He glanced up at Aurora before attacking the screws that held the spritebot’s grille in place. “Mind if I give you some personal advice?”

Aurora shook her head.

“Don’t gawk so much,” he said, a gentler smile returning to his torn face. “It makes it more obvious you’re from a Stable.”

She coughed. “How’d you know that?”

Rusty wriggled the last screw loose with the tip of his hoof and slid the grille away, his dim eyes regarding the cluster of lenses within with something like approval. He looked up to her, screwdriver still bitten between his exposed front teeth and aimed at her. “Well, for one, you keep looking at those old motors like they’re worth doing anything with besides melting into bullets. And two, I own a radio. Doesn’t take much figuring to match you and your unicorn friend up with Flipswitch’s broadcasts this week.”

Aurora frowned. She hadn’t considered Fiona’s program had enough range to reach all the way out here. She pursed her lips at the fresh memory of her storming away after having her station pulled out from under her.

She picked up the hoof-sized cylinder in her wing. “Well, not that anyone’s keeping score, but this isn’t a motor,” she said. “This is a SureDraft planetary gearbox. It’s a precision tool.”

“Sure it was, back when anyone knew what it was for,” Rusty conceded. “But these days I just call them motors. Makes them easier to sell for scrap. Only customers I ever get that know what half of these things were used for are Steel Ranger mechanics, old ghouls and Stable ponies. No offense, but you don’t look like Steel Ranger material to me.”

She set the gearbox back on its shelf, regarding the little paper tag denoting MOTOR, 19 CAPS with mild irritation.

“What about the Enclave?” she asked.

“Aurora...” Ginger warned.

Rusty looked her over for a beat before shaking his head with a dismissive laugh. “An Enclave pegasus might tolerate a unicorn out of necessity,” he said, nodding apologetically to Ginger, “but they wouldn’t be caught dead traveling with a ghoul, let alone enter a ghoul’s shop to sell their own tech. You’re about as Enclave as I am a Wonderbolt.”

Aurora glanced at Roach, who shrugged in response.

“He’s got your number,” he said.

She snorted and watched Rusty pry the cameras free of their housing. “Just because I know the difference between a motor and a gearbox doesn’t necessarily mean I’m from a Stable.”

Rusty lifted the assembly out of the spritebot and peered into the lenses. “No, but that wasn’t my point. My point was that you’re gawking. You keep looking at my shelves like everything is new and interesting when it’s just junk I’ve scavenged or traded for. That, and you keep watching me like I’m going to take a bite out of you.”

She felt her cheeks grow warm. “That’s not what…”

“Oh, don’t worry,” he chuckled, waving her off. “Despite my current state of affairs, it takes a lot to get under my skin. And you’re not the first Stable pony I’ve met, either. If I were a betting ghoul, I’d say you worked somewhere in maintenance.”

“Mechanical,” she said, her chest puffing out with a bit of pride. “Led the first shift and generator certified.”

Rusty set the camera assembly on the desk. “I’m not sure if that’s good or bad, but I’m going to wager I was pretty close.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t make wagers with our dear Aurora. When it comes time for her to pay her due, she seems to get cold hooves,” Ginger chided as she browsed a shelf filled with spooled wire on the opposite side of the shop. Aurora shot her a look, but it was quickly returned with an arched brow and a you-did-this-to-yourself smile.

Rusty watched the exchange play out with open curiosity. Seeing no real animosity between the two, he set his tools down and turned to Aurora. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a Stable mare that would welch on a bet.”

“It was barely a bet,” she retorted.

The ghoul behind the counter was grinning now. “Barely still counts in my book. What was the wager?”

“Just one song,” Roach supplied, doing his utmost to play up his disappointment in her. “It’s Magic by Doris Bray.”

Rusty let out a low whistle and shook his head slowly. “Shame. That’s a great song.”

“It really is,” Roach sighed. “The last time I heard it was a century ago, and then I thought to myself, Roach, wouldn’t it be something if you could listen to it one more time? But I suppose it’s my fault for getting my hopes up.”

Aurora stared at Roach, dumbfounded.

He was pouting. He was literally pouting.

Behind him, Ginger was doing her best not to laugh.

Rusty thumped his hoof against the counter, drawing three distinctly different gazes. “Well, I’m sorry to inform you all that I can’t in good conscience do business with a grifter. It’s a personal policy, you see.”

“Wait,” Aurora said, her eyes dropping to the absolute mess of parts Rusty had turned the spritebot into. “Are you being serious?”

He nodded stoically. “I’m afraid so. Unless, that is, you’d be willing to give my friend Roach your word that you’ll make good on that promise you made.”

Aurora opened her mouth to speak, but upon seeing the three conspiratory grins turned to her, she knew there was no point in arguing. She was outnumbered, outgunned and at their mercy.

She tipped her head to the rafters and shook her head in resignation. “Fine. But only this once.”

“Oh no,” Rusty said. “You can’t sing in here. The acoustics are awful.”

Aurora felt a fresh flush of mistrust crawling up her shoulders. She narrowed her eyes at the ghoul.

“There’s a place on the east end of Kiln called the Glowing Gash that serves a decent beer, and the food’s close to edible,” he said. “Last time I was in there, they still had a working karaoke machine. Lot of folks there wouldn’t mind hearing a smoothcoat sing, either, if I’m being completely forthright.”

“Ooh!” Ginger chirped.

“Wait, hold on,” Aurora interjected, unsure she liked the excited curl of Ginger’s grin. “We need to find a place to sleep for the night first.”

“The Gash has rooms upstairs,” Rusty added.

“You’re a sadist,” she growled.

“And before that, I was a farmer,” he chuckled. “Reap what you sow, and all that. In the meantime, we’ve got a heap of good salvage to haggle over. You said you wanted payment in caps?”

She could practically hear her window for weaseling out of the ridiculous bet slam shut. Roach was smiling so wide she thought the broken chitin along his muzzle might develop new cracks. Ginger had a different flavor of eagerness in her eyes. She genuinely seemed excited.

It was no use fighting.

“Yeah. Caps are fine.”

Rusty leaned into the countertop, somehow managing a warm smile despite his lack of lips. “Alright then, ma’am. Let’s talk numbers.”

Aurora’s saddlebags let out a satisfying jingle with each step she took.

Despite the looming dread of things yet to come, she was proud of herself. The spritebot had fetched one hundred fifty caps which, as far as she was concerned, was a better trade than the apples she’d been swindled out of on her first day in the wasteland. She wasn’t much of a haggler but Roach had assured her that Rusty’s price had been a fair one.

The clouds above were turning a darker gray, signaling the waning hours of the day were upon them. As they followed Rusty’s directions east through town, a series of deep electric thunks began echoing from the direction they’d just come. They paused to look over their shoulders in time to watch the city of Kiln light up one block after the other. Incandescent bulbs, halogen rings and strings of lights caught the glow as it streaked ahead of them toward the other side of the settlement.

Something occurred to Aurora that she hadn’t realized when they first arrived in Kiln. This place wasn’t a cascade of ramshackle huts built from the bones of prewar structures or a carefully preserved pocket of buildings the bombs hadn’t been able to destroy. The structures that surrounded them were simple and almost uniform, wooden planks joined to wooden beams to create something that a pony or ghoul could live in. They were built to last because, at the end of the day, they had been built.

She wondered why that hadn’t been the case in Blinder’s Bluff or Junction City.

The buzzing glow of electricity brought with it another noise. A twanging, brassy sound that reminded Aurora of the times she would find the best after-hours parties in the Stable simply by following the sound of music played too loud. As they drew closer to the source, the tune grew clearer until she recognized the distinct trumpets of Root Petite rising through a pair of narrow, brightly-painted doors outside which several ghouls chatted and smoked.

“Oh… good heavens,” Ginger’s voice complained beside her.

Aurora gave her an incredulous look. “What, you don’t like rock n’ roll?”

“Yeah,” Roach said with clear apprehension. “Maybe we should find someplace else to stay the night.”

Aurora frowned at both of them, following their gazes to the wide, framed sign that dominated most of the building’s false front. Her eyes shot wide and she barked a laugh that drew more than a few amused looks from the ghouls gathered outside.

The billboard-sized sign depicted a painstakingly detailed image of the lower half of a decidedly female pony, her hind legs spread wide and skyward. The artist had made sure to leave nothing to the imagination. The gigantic mare’s impeccable white coat was marred with slashing black lines that spelled the words GLOWING and GASH across each upturned leg. Where the faceless mare’s legs joined, two neon green doors stood in place of her marehood, a matching pair to the doors waiting for them across the bar’s front boardwalk.

Beneath the lights, a purple sprig of tail curled toward the bottom of the sign. The words TIP GENEROUSLY were painted in small letters along the length of her dock.

“Ho-lee-shit,” Aurora laughed. “This is perfect!”

“I’m going to go back and kill Rusty,” Roach groaned.

Ginger nodded, her eyes glued to the sign. “I’ll help.”

“Oh come on,” Aurora jeered, throwing a wing over Roach’s shoulder. “It’s nothing you don’t already see every day. Besides, Rusty said they rent out rooms and I really don’t feel like knocking on doors all night looking for someplace else. Plus, I owe both of you.”

Roach heaved a reticent sigh. “You’re going to make me go in there, aren’t you.”

Aurora shrugged. “You’re the one who wants me to sing. Unless you want to call off the wager.”

His face hardened. “Never.”

She slapped him across the back with a grin and turned to Ginger. “You ready?”

Ginger pressed her lips into a tight smile and sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

Aurora danced a jig on her hooftips and led them up to the boardwalk. The ghouls gathered outside watched them step onto the planks with equal parts surprise and curiosity, though most of the latter was directed at Roach as he followed the mares through the narrow doors of the Glowing Gash.

Despite being seated in the irradiated shadow of a crater formed by one of the hundreds of bombs that killed Equestria, the bar was electric and alive. Aurora felt her jaw slacken as she took in what felt like a scene from another era.

The Gash wasn’t a large place, but it made efficient use out of the space it had. Three heavy square timbers held aloft lacquered rafters that gave the old wood a warm, almost vibrant red tint. Vintage gas lamps hung from the ceiling, snaked through with wires that lit their retrofitted bulbs.

To the left was the bar proper, a long polished strip of oak that bore the wear of constant use and signs of fastidious care. To the right, two rows of tables just large enough to seat four apiece drew parallel lines toward a stone-mantled fireplace that dominated the rear of the establishment.

Directly opposite the bar, positioned next to the smaller tables where patrons would have the best view sat a short, kitschy stage. Heavy red curtains hung on the wall behind a crooked microphone stand in an imitation of the grand performance stages that used to dominate the Manehattan theater districts. At the foot of the stage facing toward any would-be performers was a small terminal screen sitting atop a single, large wood panel speaker turned on its side.

The stage was currently occupied by a pair of ragged stallions doing their best to butcher the lyrics of Root Petite as thoroughly as they could. As far as Aurora could tell, they weren’t even drunk. They were just having a good time at the expense of a little pride. She smiled as they stumbled and laughed through the final lines until the song mercifully ended. A smattering of applause rose from a pair of withered mares at a table near the front of the stage who the two stallions were trying, and succeeding at endearing themselves to. A few ghouls at other tables smiled in polite acknowledgement as they returned to their conversations or simply tried to tune out the singing altogether, preferring to focus on their drinks.

As the daring duo queued up another song, she realized several ghouls at the bar were already beginning to notice them. For a split second she felt like the dusty outlaw taking her first steps into a crowded saloon, but the internal fiction soon faded as she realized none of the glances aimed at her or her two companions were particularly hostile. Just curious, as if wondering whether they knew they were on the ghoul side of Kiln. For the second time, Aurora had a burning urge to yell howdy.

It didn’t occur to her that she was drawing so much attention because she was blocking the door.

Roach gently cleared his throat, as much good as it ever did his voice, and nudged past her with a subtle nod for the two of them to follow. She walked alongside Ginger who seemed relieved that the inside of the bar wasn’t a direct reflection of the eye-catching advertisement it featured outside. He led them to the long row of bare wood stools in front of the bar and waited for the ghoul on the other side to finish with his customer before trying to flag him down.

A cracked blackboard behind the bar advertised a long list of beverages and a substantially shorter list of food options. Ironically, despite the heavy emphasis the Gash had on hanging hunting trophies on its walls, the only meat the menu offered was something called rad-rat fillet. She wrinkled her nose at that culinary dice throw and decided the rations Coldbrook had given them were the safer option.

The bartender eventually, and a little reluctantly, slid down the line to serve the visitors that were drawing so much of his patrons’ attention. Roach kept the pleasantries brief, which suited the pale stallion just fine, and after a brief exchange they made the short walk to an open table near the stage with three mugs of house beer and one room key. A few eyes lingered on Ginger and Aurora as they dropped their saddlebags and took their seats around the little table.

After nearly a straight day of walking, sitting down in a hard wooden chair felt like bliss to Aurora’s aching hooves. Judging by the groan that slipped from Ginger’s throat, the feeling was mutual.

“All things considered,” she said, tipping her horn toward the bar as a whole, “it’s not nearly as tacky as I expected.”

Roach nodded his agreement, his eyes on the two stallions belting into the microphone on stage, and shook his head with a smirk. “I’m just happy it isn’t a strip club.”

Aurora glanced at Ginger, who shook her head in response. “Alright,” she said, “I’ll bite. What’s a strip club?”

Roach hesitated, looking between the two of them with a mixture of disbelief and a flush of embarrassment. Aurora took a tentative sip from her mug as she watched him debate whether to answer at all. Whatever the house beer was supposed to be, “consumable” was apparently an optional feature. It tasted how the river muck had smelled, with the added benefits of being room temperature and flat. It was absolutely undrinkable.

She took a second sip to be sure.

“They were popular in the larger cities before the war,” he said uncomfortably. “Folks would pay to watch ponies put on a few layers of clothes, come on stage and take them off.”

Aurora shot him a dubious look. “What, so they could get off?”

Roach shrugged. “Yes and no. There were strict rules against touching the dancers… or yourself.”

“And these places were popular?” Ginger asked, taking a moment to sample her beer. The flavor was enough to make her start coughing, and she pushed the offending mug away as if it had just bitten her. “I fail to see the draw to watching someone take off a few articles of unnecessary clothing on a stage, let alone paying for a service that you’re forbidden to enjoy.”

“I’ve heard of ponies being into denial,” Aurora offered, drawing a look from Ginger. “What? I’ve only heard of it. I’ve never… you know.”

“It’s not a denial thing,” Roach insisted. “It’s just common decency.”

Aurora rolled her eyes. “It sounds like extra steps.”

“Eh, don’t knock it till you try it.” He shrugged, his eyes drifting to the two ghouls on stage. “There are worse things to enjoy.”

Aurora cocked her eyebrow at him, shook her head and turned to find Ginger giving her a similar look. The unicorn’s muzzle curled with unspoken promises.

“I will say this much,” Roach continued, his tone softening, “It’s been one hell of a week.”

“It has,” Ginger agreed. “Not that I’m complaining. If I’m being honest, I was probably a year away from throwing that sewing machine through the window. The past several days have been refreshing, in their own way.”

Aurora took a swig to mask her sudden discomfort. The tepid beer was slightly better than terrible, which was par for the course back home. “All of them?”

“Well,” she conceded, “I could have lived a happy life without Autumn Song worming her way into it, but these things do tend to happen. Though perhaps not in such dramatic fashion as our experience. Either way, it feels good to have this… this thing we have.”

“A purpose,” Roach supplied.

“Exactly that,” she nodded. “These days it seems like the only ponies working toward something are doing it for wealth, glory or both. Autumn and Cider’s trade network, for one. Or the hundreds of raider warlords in the West. Even the Rangers do it, confiscating everything of value in the wasteland in the name of protecting us little ponies.”

Aurora watched her lean forward, retrieve her mug, and drink. When she set it back down she continued without missing a beat. “There’s so little left of the world for the rest of us. Merely existing feels like an accomplishment some days. I thought renting my own shop in the middle of nowhere was the start of something new for me, but it turned out to be a different prison.”

Roach glanced at her with genuine surprise. “I thought that shop was your dream?”

She laughed. “I did too. Growing up in New Canterlot, surrounded by all that history and Enclave loyalists pretending to have never left it behind, you start to believe you’re living in a place where the old stories seem possible again. It was infectious, especially among the lower breeds.”

Aurora blinked. “Breeds?”

She watched Ginger open her mouth as if to apologize, close it and smile. “There’s a... pervading belief within the Enclave of a natural hierarchy within the species. The alicorn princesses are unsurprisingly at the top of the pecking order, followed by pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies and… according to them, dustwings. In the absence of any surviving alicorns, the Enclave views itself as the proverbial beacon on a hill. The purest and nearest bloodline to the old diarchy.”

Aurora looked at Roach, the stallions belting a drunken duet of The Wanderer, and the withered ponies that filled the tables and barstools around them with the low hum of conversation punctuated by the occasional gravelly laughter.

“What about ghouls?” she asked.

Roach took a deep pull from his mug. He chuckled as he set it back down. “We don’t rank.”

She frowned. “But some of you were actually alive before…” she gestured vaguely with her wing, “...before all this happened.”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t mean much these days.”

“Yes it does!” she insisted. He looked at her with a smile, but it was the same weary smile a parent offered to their energized children. “Every place I’ve been out here has either been nailed together with the old world’s leftover junk or repurposed from something that happened to survive. But this place,” she thumped the table for emphasis, “this place was built by ponies who remember how. That deserves something.”

“Damn right it does,” a voice rumbled from the table behind her.

She shrank a little in her chair at the sudden attention. Roach nodded acknowledgement to the ghouls seated over her shoulder, then tossed her a sympathetic wink as she drowned in her own embarrassment.

“If it makes you feel any better,” he said, “the Enclave sees us as corrupted wildlife. They don’t hate us. They pity us for what we’ve become.”

“Only so they can justify the euthanasia,” Ginger added darkly. “I can’t say I’m terribly broken up about leaving that life behind when I did. Rather glad, actually. If I hadn’t, I would have never met either of you.”

“And they say you have to go to Las Pegasus to win the lottery,” Roach chuckled.

They settled into amicable silence as the weight of their travels sloughed away. Aurora finished her drink and watched with relief as another table urged one of their friends to take the stage while the two stallions finished what was looking to be their last song. The pale blue mare shushed her eager companions as the duo stumbled back to their table, leaving the stage open for her to approach the little terminal ahead of the microphone stand and begin sorting through its selection.

Meanwhile a waitress made her rounds between the tables, collecting empty glasses and jotting orders on a pad with a nib of pencil held between her teeth. Aurora tensed as the unicorn approached but Roach tapped her hoof beneath the table, his expression unworried.

The waitress lifted a narrow brow at Aurora’s wings as she cleared the empty mugs and took down a fresh order from Roach. The mare on stage was well into her third song by the time she returned with three black bottles bearing identical labels identifying them as something called Sparkle Dark.

Aurora turned hers over in her feathers with a dubious look. “Rum cola?”

“Aged to perfection,” Roach jokingly answered. “Don’t knock it…”

“...until I try it, I know,” she finished, giving the cap a firm twist. As with the Sparkle Cola they discovered back at the cabin, the bottle in her wing had lost its carbonation to the centuries. She dropped the bottle cap into her saddlebag and took a tenuous sip. The fumes alone made the roof of her mouth tingle, save nothing for the too-sweet flavor of liquor infused soda. She grimaced as she swallowed. “I’m knocking it. Oh, I’m knocking this so hard.”

“It’s not great,” he agreed. He slid his cap across the table along with Ginger, who seemed to be enjoying hers a bit more than the watered down beer.

Aurora took another pull from the bottle and frowned at the label. Barely legible, she had to squint to read the words at the bottom: The Official Beverage of Twilight Sparkle. She snorted, pointing the tiny endorsement out to Ginger. “Is this for real?”

Ginger read the line and nodded. “Sure. It was one of the ways the ministries financed the war effort back then. A brand deal with a ministry mare was a license to mint bits depending on which one a company could sign. I’ve heard it said that the Ministry of Image originally came up with the idea and, ironically, Rarity’s endorsement was the most difficult to get.”

“Huh,” she said. She had assumed that the makers of Sparkle Cola had lifted the name for a fast profit without any actual consideration to what the Element of Magic actually thought about it. It felt strange picturing the indomitable Twilight Sparkle leafing through brand deals and deciding that the best product to put her name on was, of all things, a soda.

She took another swig. Sparkle Cola’s rum counterpart wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad enough for her to set down the bottle either. She wondered whether that was deliberate. “So what did Rarity endorse?”

Ginger offered a mild shrug. “Her own clothing, mostly.”

Aurora felt a twinge of disappointment at that. “That’s it? There weren’t any hot dog stands with her name on them?”

Roach laughed, drawing an irritated glance from the mare on stage.

“Now that I would have paid to see.” He took a deep pull from his bottle and grinned. “I’ve heard Rarity called a lot of things and risk-taker isn’t one of them. She wouldn’t put her name on an orphanage if there was a chance one of the foals might grow up to be a dissenter. She was all about controlling the narrative, that mare, and she had most of Equestria wrapped around her hoof right up til the end. That kind of influence is a power in and of itself. She wouldn’t risk losing it by putting her name in the hooves of someone who might publicly step out of line.”

Aurora wasn’t sure she wanted to believe his depiction of the Element of Generosity. She shuffled her wings uncomfortably. “That’s definitely not the Rarity I read about back home.”

“Because she’s not the Rarity Equestria started out with,” Roach said. His voice fell a little as he spoke. “Or at least that’s what I’ve been told. I missed most of their early years.”

His tone made it clear he was referring to Blue. Aurora nodded and took a sip of rum, grudgingly enjoying the warmth of cheap liquor as it pooled in her belly.

Ginger set her bottle down and stretched her aching legs as far as the table’s center post would allow. “I wanted to be just like her.”

Roach chuckled and gave her a teasing smirk. “How simply dreadful, darling,” he rasped.

She kicked him under the table with a defiant smile of her own. “Oh, shut up. You know what I meant.”

He lifted his hooves in mock surrender and said no more. Aurora waited as she watched Ginger gather herself up to continue, her eyes becoming distant as she struggled to string the right words together.

She clasped her hooves on either side of her bottle and slowly turned it back and forth as she spoke. “Growing up in New Canterlot, my little sister and I fawned over anything to do with Rarity. She was an iconic unicorn of her time and even though most fillies our age eventually grew out of it, I just couldn’t get her out of my head. I had books about her, pictures, holotapes - you name it. If it was new and had to do with Rarity, I was usually the first in line to buy it. Growing up in our house, caps weren’t an issue. That’s part of the reason I was so drawn to her.”

Ginger paused to light her horn and take a sip from her bottle, her eyes briefly tracking the ghoul on the tiny stage as she set the microphone back in its stand and made her way back to her cackling friends.

“Rarity started with nothing,” she said, smiling in the direction of the baudy mares. “She fought, kicked and scraped for everything she would eventually have and none of it came easy. When she became an Element, she could have cashed in on the title alone and lived an easy life, but she didn’t. I thought she was being noble, but the more I learned about her the more I began to understand something that my parents weren’t interested in teaching my sister and I. They could give us everything. Money, gifts, influence, anything we wanted.”

She took another, deeper pull from her bottle and winced as the cheap rum burned its way down her throat. “All except for the knowledge that we’d done anything at all to earn it.”

Aurora watched her stare at the half-empty bottle and twist her face with frustrated embarrassment. She gripped the neck in her magic and slid it away from her toward the table’s center.

“Sorry,” she sighed. “I get chatty when I drink.”

Aurora stared at Ginger, puzzled. She had stopped short of something important and part of her wanted to help coax it out of her. She knew it was selfish, but there it was. In so many ways, Ginger was still a mystery to her. Like a book Aurora had only read the first chapter of. There was more there than a painfully privileged childhood and an obscure boutique in the middle of nowhere. Ginger had lived a life and Aurora was becoming keenly aware that she knew close to nothing about it.

“That’s because you’re drinking on an empty stomach.” Roach pushed back from the table and dropped to his hooves. “I’m going to see what they have for food. Give me a few minutes.”

They watched him weave through the tables toward the crowded bar while the ghoul on stage sang the last ragged verse of Way Back Home alongside the recorded tones of its long-dead trio of background singers.

Aurora nudged her bottle toward Ginger’s until they clinked. “You know, I never expected to get this far,” she said.

Ginger leaned forward, setting her cheek against the flat of her hoof. She allowed herself a small, weary smile. “Roach told me a little bit about how you two met. He has a tendency to be in the right place at the right time.”

She nodded. It didn’t take much to remember the sensation of teeth clamping against the back of her leg, or the relief she felt once she was sure Roach had appeared out of the darkness to help her.

The mare on stage finished, setting the microphone back into its stand before sheepishly heading back to her table to a smattering of stamped hooves. Aurora wondered what her voice had sounded like before she became a ghoul.

“We thought there was nothing out here,” she said. Her eyes panned the bar, the tables, the ghouls chatting around them in pairs and groups. Finally, she looked at Ginger. “Why hasn’t anyone tried to fix it?”

“What?” Ginger chuckled. “Equestria?”

She shrugged, then nodded. “I mean, yeah.”

Ginger smiled. “Most ponies are happy to just survive it, Aurora.”

“Sure, but…”

She trailed off when she caught sight of Roach walking back to the table with a chipped white plate heaped with some sort of sliced, dehydrated fruit clamped precariously between his teeth. Aurora couldn’t tell whether he was grinning at her or if it was just an effect of carrying the dish, but there was definitely a glint in his eye that hadn’t been there earlier.

Following close behind him was the bartender. As Roach set down the dish, the grey ghoul slipped wordlessly past their table and continued toward the stage. Several patrons took notice, including Aurora.

She eyed him, and then Roach with growing suspicion. Without a plate to mask it, his grin was unmistakable. “What’s he doing?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said, putting little effort into his feigned innocence. He picked up what looked to be a dried slice of apple from the plate and popped it into his mouth. “Looks important, though.”

She chewed her lip and turned to watch.

He looked like a strip of leather that spent an hour inside a Robronco industrial blender. His hide was sliced in more places than it was intact, a patchwork of wounds that didn’t seem to faze him any more than the ghouls that filled the bar. The speakers popped as he tapped a hoof against the empty mic, drawing the rest of his patrons’ attention.

“Evening, everyone,” he rasped. A murmur of acknowledgment rolled back from his patrons.

A shout rose up from the bar. “Oh, Brandy, sing us a song!”

He smirked as the rest of the bar chuckled. “Maybe next time, Stitch. Reason I’m up here is because we’ve got some new faces in the Gash tonight.” He gestured toward their table which was immediately followed by just about every eye in the building. “A unicorn, a dustwing and a changeling walk into a bar. Someone write that down for me before I forget.”

Several ghouls around her laughed.

“All jokes aside, I’m told that one of these ponies has a song she wants to share.” Brandy’s foggy eyes swung directly to where Aurora sat. Then he turned back to the bar. “Now when was the last time any of us has heard a smoothcoat sing? Too long, I’d say. So how’s about we give you rotheads a break and let our very own Aurora Pinfeathers put some time in on the mic?”

Aurora glared at Roach as a gentle thunder of hooves thumped encouragement from their tables. “I’m going to kill you.”

He gestured toward the stage with a wry smile. “A bet’s a bet.”

“Oh, don’t look so worried,” Ginger said, a dry slice of apple floating in front of her mouth. “It’s karaoke. The whole point is to sound foolish.”

She shuffled her wings again while the bar only grew more adamant that she take the stage. It was clear to everyone, not just her, that a trap had been sprung and with expert precision. Nobody was expecting a good performance. Only a little entertainment to ease them into the night. There was no malice in their applause. Just well-humored participation in the ambush.

Aurora tried and failed to stifle a smile. She gnawed her lip, eyed Roach’s bottle and snatched it up in her wing. Several whoops went up from the neighboring tables as she drained it, letting rum that was probably better poured into a sink fill her with not unpleasant heat.

“I see how it is,” she said to him as she pushed away from the table. “Just remember. You asked for this.”

Stepping up on stage, small as it was, felt surreal. For a brief moment, she felt like she didn’t deserve to relax like this, if one could call it relaxing. Even now, the generator she was charged with maintaining was winding down and she was still days away from knowing whether this journey to StableTec HQ was going to pay off.

Then the moment passed and she reminded herself that she needed this. Not an opportunity to butcher a perfectly innocent song, but the chance to unwind a little before the spring inside her snapped. She needed to be able to turn her worries off just this once and have a normal, stupid evening to herself.

She turned toward the microphone and faced the bar. It was like she was in that tunnel again, staring into the gaunt faces of ponies withered by generations of unstoppable decay. Only these ponies stared back, some busying themselves with drinks and idle conversation while others waited for her to sing with good-natured smiles across their muzzles. Back at the bar, Brandy busied himself with the backlog of drink orders that built up during his trip to the microphone. Sitting at their table to her left, only a few steps off the stage, Roach and Ginger waited with barely contained glee as she mustered the courage to begin.

Aurora didn’t sing. She loved music, sure, but singing out loud was something she only did in private and only when Millie’s speaker was turned up enough that she couldn’t hear herself over the recording. She couldn’t carry a tune any better than a unicorn could fly, and right now she was definitely considering the aerodynamics of the two horned ponies guarding her saddlebags.

“Come on!” a voice shouted from the back of the bar. “Before we’re dead!”

Chuckles rose from the bar as more heads turned to see what she would do.

She mimed their laughter, narrowing her eyes at Roach. This was his fault for suckering her into that bet knowing full well her shooting was years behind his own.

He watched her with a victor’s grin, unaware of what she had planned for him.

The terminal perched atop the speaker in front of her glowed with the words YOU SIGH in bright green font. She wouldn’t need the lines. Her mother had been an unapologetic fan of Doris Bray for as long as she could remember, filling their compartment with her music so often that Aurora could identify her record by the scratching pops that played before the first track. The words were burned into her brain like a brand, and she knew just how to weaponize each one.

Scooping the microphone off its stand, she leaned forward and tapped the keyboard.

The bar that had been playing rock and roll since they arrived quickly filled with a swaying chorus of strings that swept up through the bars, hung suspensefully on a high, then dipped low to make room for the iconic voice adored by parents and loathed by their embarrassed children.

Aurora held the microphone below her lips, stepped away from the center of the stage and turned directly toward Roach.

“You smile,” she sang, “the song begins. You speak, and I hear violins. It’s magic.”

He blinked as she approached the edge, the microphone wire snaking behind her, realizing that her attention was fixed entirely on him.

She stepped down, continuing. “The stars desert the skies, and rush to nestle in your eyes. It’s magic.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Ginger casually place a hoof across her muzzle to hide a smile. Roach’s grin started to tighten as it dawned on him what was happening. That the trap he’d laid for her had just snapped shut around his leg. A murmur of laughter rose from the nearest table as the ghouls there came to the same realization. He was trapped.

“Without a golden wand or mystic charms,” she crooned, draping the feathers of her other wing along his shoulder. Her hoof wrapped around the leg of his chair, turning him to face her as she stepped forward. “Fantastic things begin when I am in your arms.”

His chitinous lips pinched together in a tight line as she drew the tip of her wing up his neck, gently cupping his chin.

“It’s magic.” She fixed him with a coy smile as the band swelled, mercilessly aware of the discomfort her sudden attention was causing. His eyes shot wide as she drew close enough to him that she could taste the rum on his breath. “How else can I explain those rainbows when there is no rain?”

She sang bare inches from his lips. “It’s magic.”

His opaque eyes swiveled to Ginger in a plea for help. On cue, a gentle pressure formed against her chest, pulling her away from the mortified changeling. She grinned, allowing Ginger to foil her plan to wring as much embarrassment from him as possible.

“Why do I tell myself these things that happen are all really true,” she continued, turning toward Ginger for the last verse. The unicorn arched an eyebrow at her as she stepped toward her, snorting as Aurora batted her eyelids like a swooning mare on the old television soaps. “When in my heart I know, the magic is my love for you?”

A piano joined the sweeping strings of violins to play the last notes to a conclusion, followed by a smattering of applause from the bar.

“You’re terrible,” Ginger half-heartedly accused.

Aurora pecked her on the nose and grinned. “You’re next.”

Before Ginger could protest, she lifted the mic back to her lips and turned to address the bar. “Ladies and gentlecolts, as much as I’d love to butcher another song for you, my dear friend Ginger has been waiting forever to have a turn.”

She flicked the mic into the air, forcing her to snatch it out of the air with her magic. The speakers whistled with interference at the touch of her aura, sending a wave of irritated groans through the bar. She quickly adjusted her grip away from the receiver, gripping the mic around the base. The whining speakers quieted, leaving her speechless under the attention of dozens of ghouls.

Aurora leaned toward her as she pulled out her chair. “She’s taking requests.”

“Do something by the Pony Tones!”

“Show us your teats!”

Ginger shot a glare toward the last suggestion as Aurora sat down. “Jingle Jangle Jingle by Kabarda Kay,” she blurted before any more requests could bubble up from the crowd. Bronze light formed under Aurora’s foreleg, hoisting her up out of the chair.

“What are you-”

“It’s a duet, darling,” she said, guiding her back toward the stage. “And by my count, you owe me a few of them.”

The air above the eastern wastes didn’t smell or taste any different than the murky sky above New Canterlot, but Julip could still sense a sourness building in the back of her throat the moment she crossed through the contested zone and into Steel Ranger territory. Short of carrying a physical map, the only visible signs that she had slipped over the lands controlled by their besiegers were the numerous forward operating posts that dotted what used to be verdant farmland. Dry soil churned dark by power armor and whatever machines the Rangers had been able to resurrect over the decades. Nothing the Enclave couldn’t repel, but daunting to see in any capacity nonetheless.

Sergeant Hayflinger had everything ready when she reported in with Supply, and she nearly let the disappointment show on her face when he presented her kit for this… diplomatic mission, was what he called it. Minister Primrose had insisted upon a subtle approach to increase the likelihood that Aurora Pinfeathers wouldn’t feel whatever trek she was on was being hijacked. Going in armed to the teeth wasn’t a good approach, she knew that, but after being abducted and imprisoned by that ambitious little mud pony, the prospect of traveling light rattled her. Beg and plead as she might, she knew Primrose wouldn’t allow her to leave armed for bear.

Her kit was lightweight and portable, or at least that had been Hayflinger’s choice of words in lieu of telling her she was being sent out underarmored and undersupplied. It was what it was. She had been requisitioned a reliable compact submachine gun with enough 10mm clips to last her through two or three fights if she was conservative. They were distributed evenly throughout the inner pockets of her Ranger-issued leather armor, which had been relieved from its original owner on some forgotten battlefield behind her. The Enclave had more of the stuff than they knew what to do with. Hayflinger had at least done a respectable job and sewn in fresh composite plates, for what good they would do against an armor-piercing around. At least if she accidentally shot herself she’d stand a decent chance of surviving that.

The final insult had come in the form of her saddlebags, or the lack thereof.

“Don’t want you to look too put together,” he’d said as he pushed her substitute across the supply counter.

She grimaced as the wind buffeted the canvas mail carrier’s bag slung over her shoulder. The thing was a relic, barely suitable to carry wasteland salvage let alone her meager allotment of supplies. She had enough for two days, maybe three. After that she would need to find sustenance from the polluted scraps these muds survived on. Again.

The twisting shantytown of Blinder’s Bluff glittered at her on the southern horizon, a lump of dirt that buzzed with electricity stolen from a Stable that the Enclave had either neglected or simply decided not to shut down completely. After the rise of the Steel Rangers, they had learned to be more thorough in leaving nothing of use behind.

Julip felt the urge to spit at the passing bluff, but she held back. That sort of behavior was for initiates drunk on their own pride.

She pumped her wings and let the town drift behind her.

In truth, she didn’t hate this place. Not really. She hated what it had become. A poisoned, disjointed land rife with chaos and death, all thanks to the twisted remains of a military that refused to die. The Rangers weren’t just content to be pretenders to the princesses’ thrones, they sought to hoard everything which had once made Equestria a great nation. They wore their technological riches like a badge of honor while the ponies they claimed to protect lived in squalor.

It infuriated her that the muds couldn’t see that. Couldn’t see how they were allowing themselves to be taken advantage of. How their unwillingness to fight back against their overlords was fuelling a machine that was slowly grinding away the Enclave at its fringes. New Canterlot was supposed to be the seed of Equestria’s new beginning. A better one, led by the only breed of pony left unscathed by the corrupting effects of balefire.

The innate connection earth ponies had to the soil had been severed. Magic had yet to coalesce after the bombs slashed it away like water kicked from a shallow puddle, making unicorns just as incapable as their hornless counterparts.

Pegasi, however, still controlled the skies. With alicorns gone from the world, it was their responsibility, their right, to take the reins and guide Equestria back to prosperity. To what it had once been.

She tipped her feathers to adjust her course and squinted at the dim orange point of light descending into the horizon ahead. For now, she had a job to do. Whether or not she wanted to wasn’t a concern. Minister Primrose had put her on this path for a reason. Stable 10 wasn’t just intact, it was operational, and the pegasi who freed her from the solar array was one of its residents.

What she couldn’t understand was why Aurora Pinfeathers, a pureblood, would leave.

Something bright caught her eye on the road below. Green streaks of phosphor drew lines that flickered like an aged neon sign. Tracers, she realized. Raiders, possibly, but more likely a fledgling trading company trying to eliminate a competitor. News of the decaying trade routes in the Rangers’ eastern territory had already reached the Enclave’s ears courtesy of assets already embedded in the area. The death of Cider and the subsequent dethroning of that horned bitch Autumn Song didn’t make F&F Mercantile disappear. It shattered, leaving the shards to be fought over by countless opportunists hoping to secure what meager power was still available to them.

No doubt some of those guns would turn toward Aurora should their owners discover she was responsible for their old employers’ collapse.

She continued east, always keeping the highway in view as it snaked through the flattening landscape like an artery across burnt skin. Gradually the sparse greenery began to thin and fall away until all she could see was a dull expanse of dirt. Waiting against the eastern horizon stood the dim silhouettes of the Pleasant Hills, a range of ancient mountains worn smooth over eons. Before the war, the low mountains had been a source of recreation and seclusion for the ponies who could afford to live there.

These days, the hills were a haven for raiders, corrupted beasts and worse.

The highway reached a shattered interchange, splitting the lanes and bending half of them toward the southeast. Firelight glowed beneath a portion of roadway that had yet to collapse, evidence of bandits or traders or both. She followed the new branch of road deeper into terrain that grew more desolate with every mile.

Black lumps appeared in an otherwise unbroken expanse of dead soil, deep gouges trailing behind them that all pointed toward the source of the explosion that hurled them here. As the sun slid below the horizon and a deep shadow swallowed the world below, she spotted the dim green glow of her destination.

The crater that swallowed Quarrytown so long ago was still alive in a sense. Though the lapping flames of balefire had long since been extinguished, radiation still smoldered across the glassed cup of its pit. Julip adjusted her heading toward it like a moth turning toward a particularly pretty flame. She tried not to think about it. The Rad-X in her bloodstream would protect her from most of the exposure and if things got bad enough, she had chems to help her flush anything else from her system if need be. Detoxing radiation was never a pleasant process, but the alternatives were even less so.

It was why so many ghouls flocked to Kiln. It was one of the few places in Equestria that the Steel Rangers were unwilling to pour resources into controlling. They kept a presence on the outskirts where the background radiation was tolerable, but they would never truly own Kiln. The ghouls saw their town as a safe haven.

As far as the Rangers and Enclave were concerned, it was voluntary quarantine. It was one of the few things either side agreed on.

Despite her reluctance, she descended.

“Fuck,” she muttered into the wind. She could already taste metal.

Her hooves skated across the dirt as she landed, kicking up a light plume of dust while being mindful to do so behind one of the house-sized blocks of blackened bedrock that littered the area. Whether anyone in the town saw her coming down remained to be seen. Out in this blasted hell, the key to staying alive was knowing what you didn’t know. What she did know was that dustwings rarely took to the skies anymore. Not since the early years of the Enclave, when culling contaminated pegasi was necessary to keep the bloodlines clean.

Dustwings had largely gone to ground since then, collecting in the darker corners of Equestria where the Enclave’s sprite bots struggled to detect them. It was believed that many had left Equestria altogether to avoid being hunted. That suited Julip just fine. Though she understood the cullings were necessary to prevent the defects of the wasteland from spreading to New Canterlot, she tried to avoid reading those articles on the notice boards. Something about them always left a bitter taste in her mouth.

She didn’t waste time. If the intelligence Minister Primrose shared with her was accurate, Aurora wasn’t shy about keeping her wings on display. If the rumor mill in Kiln was anything like the ones back home, the ghouls here would already be whispering about the new dustwing in town. If she was smart, she would keep a low profile and draw as little attention to herself as she could, but judging by Julip’s last encounter with Aurora, she didn’t think she was the type of mare to lay low. One pegasus showing up in Kiln would be suspicious enough. Two on the same day? She might as well land in the center of town waving an Enclave flag over her head.

She shrugged off her weapon and the heavy mail bag, scooping out a heavy bundle of brown leather from the latter. The jacket wasn’t her first choice in apparel for this mission, but then again, Hayflinger hadn’t given her much of a choice in the first place. She unrolled it, sliding her forelegs through the sleeves. As expected, it only reached midway down her barrel, leaving the final third of her wings visible out the back. With a wince, she shimmied her wingtips up the ridge of her spine until one set of feathers contacted the other. It was hardly comfortable, but it wasn’t her first time either. She knitted her feathers together until she was confident her grip would hold.

A quick check over each shoulder assured her there were no errant feathers visible. She gave the joints of her wings a slight roll to flatten her profile. It wasn’t perfect, but it was serviceable. As far as any of the ghouls of Kiln would be concerned, she was just another earth pony wandering in from the wasteland.

She bent down and picked up her weapon and satchel by their straps, using her teeth to throw one, then the other, around her neck. The flavor of old leather coupled with her own stale sweat wasn’t much better than the radiation drifting in from the crater. She was just grateful she wouldn’t have to taste the worn bite trigger screwed to the side of her weapon. Hayflinger had attached it to the left side of the stock as camouflage, leaving the trigger assembly intact and available for her to use on the opposite side. A keen observer might see through--

“What are you doing?”

Julip flinched, barely stopping her wings from coming undone and reflexively grabbing for her submachine gun. The gravelly voice behind her bore an air of authority that expected an answer. She knew forcing herself to appear calm would just bring suspicion, so she embraced the unexpected shot of adrenaline and spun around.

“Excuse me!” she snapped, her words dripping with feigned indignant shock. She looked the ghoul up and down to keep him off balance, but the sight of a pony in such sorry shape carrying a rifle so large was threatening to throw her off hers.

She took a step toward him. “What are you doing? I came out here to relieve myself, not to be spied on by every stallion in Kiln!”

The ghoul took a step back, but he wasn’t reeling from shame like she expected. He was keeping his distance, his eyes drifting from her weapon to the dry soil beneath her hooves. The frown that appeared on his muzzle was barely more than a twitch of his lip, but there it was, a sign that he was thinking a little harder than she could afford. She needed to derail that.

She flicked the black strands of her tail and clamped it down. “You know what? I’ll hold it.”

They stared at each other for a beat. The ghoul finally relented and tipped his chipped horn toward the town. “Rangers have latrines for smoothcoats on the north end of town, near the auction block. If you want privacy, I suggest you go find one.”

Julip adjusted the strap of her satchel with her teeth, careful to maintain a mask of irritation. “I suppose it was too much to expect some common decency,” she muttered, then added, “I told her coming here was a bad idea.”

“Kiln is a safe settlement,” the ghoul said.

She rolled her eyes. “And rife with peeping toms.”

His impatience began showing in the creases around his yellowed eyes. If he saw her land, he was doing a remarkable job of not asking her about it. He kept watching her face and the subtle twitches of the muscles along her neck, blind to the real threat folded neatly across her back beneath her jacket. She could draw on him right now and he wouldn’t know until the first burst punched through his unarmored, dessicated flesh.

To him, she was just an annoying earth pony that he wanted gone. She could work with that.

She mustered an embarrassed smile. “Look, I’m sorry, that was uncalled for. You just spooked me is all.”

He regarded her with an arched eyebrow before turning to leave. “You know where the latrines are, ma’am. Have a safe night.”

“Maybe you could help me,” she called after him. He stopped and sighed. If he had ears left, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see them flatten against his hairless head. “I’m trying to find my friends. There would be three of them, two unicorns and a dustwing with a white mane. Have you seen them?”

“Last I heard, they were at Brandy’s place,” he said. “The Glowing Gash, east side of town. Take the dirt road over there and follow it straight through, you can’t miss it.”

Strange name. Ghoul humor, she assumed. “Could you take me there?”

The ghoul snorted. Julip frowned.

“Trust me, ma’am,” he said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

With that, he departed, presumably back on whatever route his patrol normally took him on.

She decided not to wait to see if he would circle back. A quick shuffle of her wings gave her confidence that their grip across her back wouldn’t come loose. She trotted out from behind the blackened monolith and picked her way across the dirt to the strip of wagon-rutted soil that amounted to a road out here.

It led her into the heart of Kiln, which was closer to the crater’s northern rim than she was fond of. Her mouth tasted as if she were sucking on a prewar bit, the metallic taste even more pungent as she entered the town proper. With the sun already set and the clouds turning deep grey above her, Julip couldn’t help but appreciate the effort these ghouls had gone through to install working lights along the boardwalks. Granted, they weren’t the reproduction lamp posts that graced the paved roads of New Canterlot, but it was better than nothing.

Here and there, a ghoul or two could still be seen loitering outside. A stallion nodded greetings to her as he leaned against the railing outside a tiny inn, a lit cigarette perched between cracked lips. She hesitated before returning the gesture, hurrying her pace a little as she did.

Several of the businesses lining the road were closed now, though many still displayed a sample of their wares behind dusty windows. There were a surprising amount of stores offering clothing, armor, even weaponry behind glass that would take little effort at all to break. She wondered whether Kiln had ever been attacked by raiders before, but then of course it would have. The stallion that caught her on the outskirts was evidence enough that the town was prepared to defend itself, and she doubted he was the only one here carrying heavy weaponry. Even if a thief were brazen enough to risk being irradiated by the eerie glow pouring out from Kiln’s crater, the odds they would survive long enough to escape with enough loot to make the attempt worth it were probably close to zero. These ghouls weren’t particularly wealthy, but given enough time, they would get there.

Midway through the town, she passed a storefront displaying, of all things, jewelry. Julip slowed a bit, unable to puzzle out why, of all creatures, ghouls would bother wearing a necklace or earring. She smirked derision at the glittering array of green stones dangling from scuffed velvet stands behind the glass. What was the point? A post for a rotted flap of ear? A pendant to accentuate the fashionably exposed sternum?

Then she noticed the advertisement posted among the displays.

“Crackpots,” she muttered, leaving the store behind. Given the right amount of desperation, ponies would buy anything with the right promises attached. In New Canterlot, it was zebra charms and miracle chems offering everything from longevity, lasting youth and cleansing properties.

Apparently here the bogey pony was the inevitable loss of one’s sanity. She couldn’t fault them for wanting to prevent going feral, but even in Enclave territory it was well understood that some ghouls would inevitably just… punch out. It was a cloying fear that kept predatory businesses like Balestone For Her afloat, leeching caps out of ghouls in exchange for a misguided belief that a few shards of irradiated glass dug out of a balefire crater would prevent what was inevitable for some.

It was all shit. The knockoff talismans, the chems, the jewelry, all of it. Even the apocalypse couldn’t kill off the hucksters looking to make a quick cap. They were a part of the scenery, like radroaches in the cupboard.

She began to worry she’d passed the Glowing Gash when, finally, she saw it.

Her eyes went wide. The ghoul on patrol hadn’t been lying, it was impossible to miss. The signage took up the majority of the building’s second floor and glowed like a house on Hearth’s Warming Eve. It took a moment for the shock to wear off and the indignity to rush in and take its place. It was clear who those splayed legs were meant to belong to, laid out like a common whore with none of the dignity or respect she deserved.

Julip forced herself to look away from the baudy depiction of Rarity, seething at the thought of how many ghouls had stood where she stood and laughed. The weapon slung around her neck felt heavier, begging to be picked up. To be used until the barrel was glowing hot and every bullet given a home. The Ministries were sacred. Of all Equestria’s many heroes, the five ministry mares had earned a better legacy than this.

Her jaw twitched as she fought to get herself back under control.

This isn’t your fight, she reminded herself. Calm down. Keep moving.

She kept her eyes low as she mounted the boardwalk and tried not to think about how the painted green doors were identical to the mockery painted above her head. A ghoul stepped outside as she reached them, allowing her to slip inside and saving her the displeasure of having to touch them.

Compared to the relative tranquility outside, the music inside the bar assaulted her ears like a physical thing. She flattened her ears in an attempt to drown some of it out, but it only managed to blunt the brassy notes flying off the little stage built against the far wall. The place was crowded with ghouls filling tables, stools and standing in clusters wherever space allowed, most holding drinks at varying stages of consumption.

She instinctively began moving toward the bar, but upon seeing it was standing-room only, she decided to deviate toward one of the pillars that seemed to draw an invisible line between bar space and table space. The air here was warm and thick, the product of too many ghouls and not enough ventilation. Probably no ventilation, since the fans spinning along the ceiling weren’t doing much beyond mixing the stale air. Not that anyone here seemed to mind. She heard the further along a ghoul made it through the transformation, the worse their sense of taste and smell degraded. There could be a corpse putrefying in the corner for all anyone here were concerned.

Julip thanked the sister goddesses that there wasn’t.

She sidled up against the empty pillar, ignoring the strange looks she was getting from the ghouls near her as she began scanning the crowd.

“Oh Sweetie Belle!” warbled the two mares on stage. “Though I may have done some foolin’ this is why I never fell!”

They were awful, turning a perfectly good song into a pitchless disaster. Julip scowled toward the stage, wishing someone would unplug that damn speaker so she could concentrate.

Then she blinked.

“Oh, no,” she groaned.

Aurora Pinfeathers and Ginger Dressage, the two mares in Equestria that had every reason to keep their heads down after causing the single largest disruption to trade in the region since modern civilization ended, were trading verses in front of a packed bar of what had to be approaching a hundred liquored-up ghouls. Julip blew out a frustrated breath as the two of them intoned about spurs that jingle-jangle-jingled to a jovial crowd of onlookers.

There was nothing for it except to keep an eye on them until they were finished. Best she could do for them now was watch the heads around the room and make sure nobody decided to settle a score with them. In a bar full of ghouls, she doubted there was much risk of that. It wasn’t as if F&F Mercantile ever hired rotters. Bad for business, or it used to be. As far as she could tell, the three of them were the only smoothcoats here.

She settled against the pillar, careful not to knock over a framed news clipping tacked into its polished surface, and watched as Ginger sang the lines of a long-dead stallion while Aurora pranced an alternating half-step around her in a blatant attempt to embarrass her. Julip shook her head and got comfortable. There was no line at the stage and those two looked as if they were only getting started.

It was going to be a while.

October 21st, 1075

The morning sky blazed deep crimson as the sun crept up toward the eastern horizon. A handful of narrow clouds brightened to radiant gold, always the first to bask in the first rays of daylight. A grove of acacia trees stood black as ink a few miles ahead of them, their iconic flat canopies always the first to greet them during these long trips to the Griffinstone-Vhannan border.

Gallus took a long drag, pulling the bright ember down the final inch of his hand-rolled cigarette. He let the damp-earth flavor of the mesmer leaf smoke linger in his lungs for a moment before exhaling. The cool breeze swept up the haze and carried it toward Vhanna, the single best source of mesmer leaf in all of creation. Grinding the dim ember between his fingertips, he dropped the last nib into an empty soup can tucked away at the corner of the wagon. He leaned his shoulder against the canvas-wrapped bow at the front of the wagon and enjoyed the simple pleasure of being alive.

The interior of the wagon could be generously described as eclectic, though most gryphons regarded it as the typical chaotic mess of colors indicative of mesmer users. Gallus didn’t care. Stitched into the canvas roof were cloths of every pattern and color. He found most of them at flea markets in Griffinstone but ever since he and Cicada decided to travel together, she had begun adding strips of fabric from her home in Kafa. On a recent trip, she had brought him to a bazaar in neighboring Selale where a vendor she knew of sold tiny glass bottles in shades of pink and lavender. Now dozens of them dangled from lengths of twine along the ribs that held the colorful ceiling aloft, tinkling against one another behind him as they caught the morning light.

The rest of the wagon’s interior was stuffed with crates, boxes and even a small dresser filled with a blend of their personal effects and items they hoped to trade. Which items fell in which category changed day by day, but at the end of every trip the two of them were usually happy with how their deck of belongings had shuffled. They were careful to always leave enough open space on the floorboards for the half dozen blankets they’d collected which constituted their shared bed.

Gallus smiled. The wagon had cost him barely anything and it felt more like home than anything he had in Griffinstone. He might never be rich. He might never own a color television or know what it’s like to live in luxury like the ponies in Canterlot or zebras in Adenia. Here, under the endless sky, anywhere was home and everything felt like luxury.

And the view was to die for.

As beautiful as it was to watch the sun pour warmth over the horizon, it was nothing compared to the hypnotically gorgeous mare strapped into her harness a few paces away. When Gallus first met Cicada in one of Kafa’s many coffeeshops, he’d been convinced she was only listening to him talk about his dreams of travel just to be polite. But then she’d asked to come along for a leg of his journey, which turned into two legs. Then two days. He was admittedly slow on picking up on her signals. Zebra culture had more subtleties than gryphons and they had been travelling together for nearly a week before he realized his attraction to her was mutual. That had been three years ago.

They took shifts pulling, Cicada in the morning and Gallus in the afternoon. He smiled a little wider as he enjoyed his share of this particular ritual, knowing Cicada would be just as distracted when it was his turn to put on the harness. It never failed. Every time she settled into a rhythm, the striped dock of her tail would curl skyward, bobbing left and right with the tick-tock motion of a metronome. During the first months of their relationship she worked hard to keep her modesty in check. Now that they were well past the point of being shy around each other, they hid nothing.

Two of the wheels slipped into a rut left by another traveler, jerking the wagon’s frame and making the glass bottles bounce madly on their strings. Cicada bent her shoulders back toward the middle of the packed dirt road, hauling the wagon out before the wheels could bind up. Gallus put a hand on his hip, making sure the pouch tied to his belt hadn’t come loose. It was still there. He could feel the reassuring edges of the holotape beneath his fingers.

Cicada glanced back at him with apologetic orchid-tinted eyes. “Sorry, hon. Anything spill?”

Gallus shook his head. “Nope, we’re still golden.” If any of the crates had taken a tumble, they would have heard it. It took a force of will to tear his eyes from Cicada’s sidling hips to the road ahead of her, where deep slashes cut through the soil. “Too much load and not enough road.”

Cicada snorted. “Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard.”

He opened his beak, paused, and closed it. A wry crease formed around his eyes and he leaned back into the wagon, reaching for the hollow instrument hanging from a loop of leather he’d sewn into the canvas. “It’s not bragging if it’s true,” he said.

Settling forward with his kitschy instrument nestled in his lap, Gallus dragged his fingers across the strings and watched Cicada turn her head skyward in a wordless plea for mercy.

“Already with the banjolele?” she whined.

His fingers tweaked the tuning pegs while his eyes returned to his partner’s curving stripes. He’d found the diminutive cousin of the common banjo sticking out of a dumpster in Griffinstone and couldn’t resist saving it from an otherwise deserving death. Gallus had never once in his life played an instrument and his singing was almost criminally bad.

So naturally, he combined the two.

“Only because you’re so inspiring,” he said with an unmistakable grin in his voice.

“Uh huh,” she said. To his dismay, her tail descended and the world grew a little less wonderful. “Touch those strings and you’ll be cut off from my inspiration for the rest of the day.”

Gallus gave her his best pout, which didn’t amount to much without a lower lip. She looked back at him, eyebrow raised, but there was a hint of a smile on her ebony muzzle that told him there was hope for the future yet. He sighed, knowing it was best not to torment her this early in the day, and lay his banjolele flat across his lap in surrender.

She smiled more fully, shot him a forgiving wink and settled back into a rhythmic trot.

The wheels shuddered over another rut.

“You’d think they would know not to bring that much weight onto a dirt road,” Cicada complained. “They just paved the old trade road to the south. A hatchling could drive better than this moron.”

Gallus dragged his thumb along the smooth heel of the instrument, nodding agreement. One of the things he loved about Cicada was how unreservedly she adopted gryphon phrases. Whenever he tried to use her people’s terminology, the words felt clunky and disjointed. She never had that problem. Words specific to gryphon, pony and zebra flowed out of her like a second nature, and she readily encouraged him to keep trying. He was getting better at it, but even now words like filly and fetlock felt strange on his beak.

“Probably wanted to avoid traffic,” he offered. “Same thing we’re doing.”

She led the wagon back toward the smoother side of the road. “Maybe. Is it bad that I’m hoping to find them on the side of the road with a broken axle?”

“Careful,” he warned. “Honesty like that has been known to endow creatures with magic necklaces.”

“Yeehaw,” she laughed. “Didn’t your cousin know her?”

Gallus held his hand in the air and made a see-saw gesture. “Sort of, but only through Rainbow Dash. Gilda never hung out at her orchard or anything.”

He watched her nod and look out at the flat vista of ochre soil and scrub grass. The sun’s rim was cresting just to the left of where the road disappeared over the horizon, casting long crisp shadows behind every rock and blade of grass. He knew she loved this time of day more than anything. It was why she took the morning shift to pull. In a way, it let her participate with the waking savannah.

“I’d like to own a farm someday,” she announced.

He blinked. “What, really? Why?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It sounds peaceful.”

“Huh,” Gallus said, a little unsure if she was serious. “What would you grow?”

“Oranges,” she answered.

“Oranges,” he chuckled. “I don’t think we’re in the right climate for oranges.”

She arched her neck backward, smiling with those dazzling violet eyes. “So we go wherever that is and grow oranges. Easy.”

Gallus paused for a moment, watching the way her mane caught the wind as she trotted. Strange and out of the blue as it was, he had to admit that he didn’t hate the idea. He pictured her walking through a grove of trees with saddlebags or carts or whatever they used to harvest oranges and decided he kind of liked it.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll grow oranges.”

She looked at him with a puzzled smile. “Really?”

He shrugged and nodded. “Why not? Once we sell the holotape Gilda gave us, we’ll have enough coin to go anywhere we want.”

“We can already go anywhere we want,” she teased.

“You know what I mean,” he said, feeling the rising excitement of new possibilities. “We could go to Equestria, or the islands in the Celestial Sea. They grow mangos there. We could have a mango-orange orchard. Morangos.”

Cicada laughed. “Yes, and what else?”

“We could build a house near the beach,” he said, smiling in spite of how silly he felt. “I could watch you swim in the ocean, and you could listen to my music.”

“Is that what you call it?”

He lifted the banjolele out of his lap and pressed his fingers against all the wrong frets, his other hand hovering over the strings. “Careful, or I’ll claim one of the rooms of the house for my recording studio. I’ll make sure it’s right next to the bedroom so I can serenade you to sleep.”

She arched a playful eyebrow at him. “Then you’ll be spending those nights reacquainting yourself with that hand of yours.”

He gasped with mock surprise. “That’s both cruel and unusual.”

“Are we still talking about your--”

Cicada’s head jerked to the side as something punched hard into her neck. Her forelegs folded midstep and she crumpled to the dirt in a heap. The wagon’s momentum continued to drag her forward by her harnesses until the traces finally bit into the road, slowing the wagon to a stop.

“Cicada?” he whispered, frozen with disbelief. Blood pooled out of a small hole in her neck just above her shoulder. She spasmed with a wet cough that painted the rusty soil, eyes wide and searching. Something finally clicked in his head. He scrambled out of the wagon with a scream. “Cicada!”

The banjolele snapped when it struck the ground, the strings briefly tangling around his hind leg. He barely noticed it as he stumbled to a stop next to her, his hands stopping short of touching her as the wound in her neck pulsed with the terrified beat of her heart. She looked up at him, eyes full of tears, trying to understand what was happening. Looking at him for help. For answers he didn’t have.

“Cicada, it’ll be okay,” he tried to say, but the lump building in his throat turned his words into an unintelligible mumble. He pressed his hand over the wound to stop the bleeding, but the widening pool of blood forming in the dirt under her mane was enough to tell him there was another larger hole on the other side.

Somewhere in his brain, he knew she’d been shot. He knew she would die and he knew he was in danger too.

A shimmer ran down Cicada’s body and for a brief moment he was staring at something beautiful and terrifying. Her damp coat was jet black, smooth and unyielding to his touch. Her mane was gone, replaced by a strange lavender membrane that he didn’t understand. A terrified sob caught in her throat as she shimmered again, and the creature vanished.

Gallus stared down at her, trying not to let her see the frustration building in his chest. She never liked it when he smoked, and now she was dying while the mesmer leaf conjured hallucinations at the worst possible time.

“M’sorry,” she murmured through a mouthful of blood.

He opened his beak to console her, but the bullet that plunged between his shoulder blades stole the words away. He crumpled to the ground next to her, vaguely aware of the dull echo of thunder that wasn’t truly thunder.

He tried to get up, but his arms and legs weren’t working. His eyes went wide with terror as he realized he couldn’t breathe. He could feel his lungs gradually collapsing, pushing the air over his tongue against his will. Panicking, he swallowed and tried to speak, but failed. Cicada shimmered again, her muzzle less than a foot from his beak, and his eyes widened with confusion at the sight of the opaque, lavender-tinted eyes staring back at him.

All he could do was watch her struggle. He could still see her in those strange eyes. Green light swirled around her horn and then she was back again, her beautiful stripes and that tear-streaked face. A terrible pressure was building in his head. He was going to suffocate.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her eyes growing vague. “I love you.”

He mouthed I love you too and saw the smile begin forming on her lips when she understood. Then he watched as her light dimmed and, slowly, she grew still.

With nothing left to hold her disguise together, it dissolved. Gallus watched it fall away, leaving behind a black creature he didn’t understand.

But it had her eyes.

As his vision tunneled and the Vhannan vista behind her went black, his last fleeting thought was that the creature next to him was still, somehow, his Cicada.

Wherever she went, he would follow.

“Delta One, status.”

“Delta Two, both targets are confirmed down.”

“Delta One, copy. You are clear for retrieval.”

“Delta Two, copy. Moving in.”

Barley Barrel set the safety and pushed herself up from the ruddy soil, using her blonde feathers to dust off what she could from her pitch black flight suit. The wagon and its deceased occupants were hardly a smudge on the distant road nearly half a kilometer away.

She spread her wings and took to the air with the aid of a galloping start, gliding near to the ground to avoid kicking up a dust plume that might be seen by passing travelers. If she was lucky, the suppressor fixed to the end of her rifle muddied the reports enough to go unnoticed, but she wasn’t planning to be here by the time anyone who heard the shots arrived to investigate.

She touched down behind the wagon and climbed inside. The cramped space was filled with garbage and reeked of mesmer leaf smoke. Barley held her breath as she scanned the menagerie of containers, flipped through the blankets tucked between them and moved to the front of the wagon where she had watched the gryphon sit. Tipping the open mouth of an open soup can toward her revealed a half dozen crushed mesmer butts. Not what he was looking for. She spotted a footlocker tucked away along the opposite corner and lifted the lid. A few dozen loose gold coins from Griffinstone and a lanyard strung through a hundred or so donut-shaped Vhannan silvers. Still, no holotape.

She pursed her lips into a thin line, hoping the gryphon hadn’t hidden it somewhere in the mess behind her. If he had, Barley would search every box until she found it. If someone came up the road while she was searching… well, sometimes bad things happened.

She hopped out through the gap at the front of the wagon and landed on the hardpack with a grunt. The gryphon and his companion lay together like a scene out of a quarter-bit romance novel, except at the ends of those books the maiden tended not to reveal herself as a parasite.

She dipped her chin to speak out of habit, despite knowing the thin membrane adhered to her neck would pick up and transmit her voice without help. “Delta Two, were we aware the female is a changeling?”

“Delta One, we were not aware of that,” the voice chirped in her ear. “Female target is listed as a zebra identifying as Cicada. We’ll make a note. Proceed with retrieval.”

“Delta Two, copy.”

Barley glanced at the changeling, noting the clean shot through the base of her neck. She was proud of that shot. A little more so now that she knew she’d taken one of Chrysalis’ infiltrators.

Hindsight being what it is, most ponies were of the opinion that the princesses should have sent the Elements of Harmony back to the changeling hive to wipe that threat off the map while its queen was still reeling from her failed attempt to usurp the princesses. Some were even known to whisper desires for the Wonderbolts to fly north to the Crystal Empire and tear it down too. These days, there was little love for the so-called Princess of Love. Not after she and her husband turned their backs on Equestria.

If that ever happened, Barley would pull every string she had to get assigned to that mission.

The changeling had nothing on her. She turned her attention to the gryphon and the belt around his waist. A small collection of pouches hung from bits of twine that threaded through holes he’d punched through the leather to keep them from sliding around. She snapped them off his belt with a firm jerk of her wing, one at a time. The first was empty, save for a bright blue guitar pick. The second contained a cheap flip-lighter with a generic zebra symbol etched into the front. She tossed it into the dirt.

The last pouch opened to reveal a single orange holotape. Barley discarded the empty pouch and zipped the holotape into the pocket sewn into the hem of her flight suit. Whatever was on it had been worth stealthing within spitting distance of the Vhannan border to retrieve. She wasn’t about to lose it.

“Delta Two, I have the package.”

“Delta One, copy. Fantastic work. Follow your high-altitude waypoints south-southwest back to the rendezvous and we’ll bring you home.”

Barley smiled as she tightened her rifle strap over her shoulder. Once it was secure, she pulsed her wings and slid skyward. “Delta Two, copy. Any word on my brother?”

A pause.

“Delta One, Delta Three reports mission success.”

She pumped her foreleg in silent celebration. “Good to hear, Delta One. I’m on my way to the rendezvous. There’d better be a drink waiting for me when I get there.”

A chuckle on the line. “Delta One, copy that. We’ll see what we can do.”

Barley breathed a contented sigh. This day couldn’t have started better if she tried. As she climbed through gryphon airspace, the sun lifted fully out of the horizon. A bright, yellow disc that warmed her skin. Her first mission outside Equestria had gone off without a hitch. Somewhere behind her, two enemies lay in pools of their own betrayal. How the gryphon got his hands on an Equestrian holotape, she would likely never know. It wasn’t important.

What was important was the fact that she and her brother had just saved the lives of countless ponies on the front lines by denying Vhanna something it wanted.

“Delta One, those drinks are going to have to wait until you’re back home,” her earpiece chattered.

Barley shrugged and copied back. The request had been a joke, anyway. She wasn’t expecting a party boat to be moored to the gryphon coast just because she asked for one.

“Delta One, you’ll be flying direct to Canterlot with your brother,” the voice said. “The commander would like to congratulate both of you in person.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 19: Chains Estimated time remaining: 59 Hours, 40 Minutes