October 23rd, 1075

The radiator thumped as it warmed, sapping the chill from the afternoon air in Spitfire’s condo. She inhaled deeply as she walked the short hallway separating her bedroom from the living room ahead. The air always smelled fresher this time of year. It helped set her mind at ease for what would come next.

Autumn was a time for change and preparation. The earth ponies were nearly done bringing in the last harvest of the year, their golden fields below the slopes of Canterlot Mountain being scraped clean one square at a time. Winter was weeks away and the Weather Control Pegasi would be spending the next several months ensuring another season of mild, manageable snowfall.

She adored winter. It was the one time of year when Equestria was reminded that, without its pegasi, life would be a maze of unpredictable chaos. The unicorns couldn’t hope to control the tumultuous skies any more than the earth ponies. Ground ponies might dig in their fields and conjure spells, but without pegasi to keep the worst of nature in line Equestrian life would come apart at its seams.

She paused at the bathroom door and clicked on the light to be sure she hadn’t missed anything. A faint trace of citrus cleaner still lingered in the air, a byproduct of an entire morning spent turning her condo upside-down to ensure every mote of dust, stray crumb and smudged pane of glass was spotless before tonight’s dinner. Her modest bathroom was immaculate; one less thing to worry about. She turned off the light and stepped into the living room.

Her hooves sank into plush, ivory carpet as she ran through her final checklist. The decorative pillows that once dominated her sectional couch had been moved to the bedroom to maximize the limited space her living room offered. Afternoon sunlight shone in the polished wood surface of her coffee table where four place mats had been laid out for her guests. Living alone, she never saw any reason to make room for an entire kitchen table. Now she was quietly regretting that decision. Too late to do anything about it now, she told herself, and moved on.

She briefly glanced at the unbroken view of Canterlot Castle outside the sliding glass balcony door, then turned toward the kitchen. She’d considered seating everyone at the long countertop that divided the spacious living room/kitchen into their two distinct purposes, but the stools had a tendency to squeak and she wanted this meeting to feel more intimate than it would if they all just bellied up to the trough. The living room would have to make do.

A quick look on the oven clock let her know her guests would be arriving shortly. She cracked the refrigerator open and scooped a wide glass bowl out from the crisper. Setting it next to the sink and peeling off the film of plastic keeping it sealed, she fished a pair of wooden spoons from a drawer to begin tossing the dressed greens inside.

Another thing she loved about autumn. Sweet potato salad.

She felt the crack more than she heard it. The yellow tip of one of her primary feathers dropped from her wing and wafted into the bowl.

“Oh, for crying out…”

She had to use two more feathers to fish out the broken tip of the first, trying not to think too much about how long it would take to get the vinaigrette smell out of that wingtip. Sighing, she opened the cabinet beneath the sink and flicked the mess into the waste bin.

As if on cue, a clatter of hooves thumped onto the balcony.

She grimaced at the sound of the glass door sliding open.

“Knock-knock,” Rainbow’s voice announced from the living room.

Spitfire shut the cabinet and straightened. “Wipe your hooves before you come in,” she called, turning on the sink so she could rinse her feathers. She watched Rainbow oblige, shimmying her hooves against the rough mat she’d made sure to leave outside, and went back to giving the salad a few more turns. “I have coffee, tea and milk. What would you like?”

“Water’s fine,” she said, sliding the glass door shut behind her. Her eyes wandered as she stepped into the living room, eyeing the mementos and photos that adorned several shelves on the walls. She shrugged off her flight jacket and draped it over the easy chair in the corner of the room. “Nice place.”

“It better be, considering how much they charge me for it.” She set the spoons down, glancing at Rainbow as she retrieved a pair of glasses from the cupboard.

Rainbow stood in the middle of the living room, seemingly unsure of where she should sit or what she should be looking at. Spitfire’s quip about her rent had either gone over her head or just hadn’t registered yet. She was definitely somewhere else, and Spitfire was pretty sure she knew where that was.

She dipped both glasses under the faucet, setting one of them on the countertop for her first guest of the night. “I’m not going to bite,” she said. “Sit down. Have a drink.”

Rainbow blinked and stepped up to the opposite side of the counter, perching herself atop one of the stools. Spitfire pursed her lips as the wood squawked in protest.

“So,” Rainbow said, sliding the offered glass the rest of the way over. “I heard you worked a double shift down in Finance yesterday.”

She sipped some water and returned to the salad, mindful to keep her anger over having to clean up Rainbow’s mess out of her voice. “Yep. It was a long day but everything’s pretty much back to normal. Ticker Tape is taking over candidate screenings, which gave me time to collate and file Whiplash’s audit. I was in meetings for the rest of the day, mostly with I.T.”

Rainbow took a drink to mask her wince.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she continued, “I took the liberty of telling them you’d approved my request to lead the Finance team until we find a new CFO. I needed some system permissions added so I could make some adjustments to the ledger.”

“What do you mean, adjustments?”

She gave the salad a final flip before tapping the spoons off on the rim of the bowl. “Rainbow, you left a paper trail a mile long when you dumped those bits into Jet Stream’s accounts. If I hadn’t been there to finalize that audit, the entire department would’ve known what you were up to. I made that go away for you.”

She picked the bowl up with her wing and carried it around the countertop toward the coffee table. Rainbow frowned after her. “I thought you wanted to recover those funds.”

“I did,” she said, placing the bowl in the center of the four placemats. “Then I realized doing that was just going to draw more unwanted attention and sow doubt in our ministry’s ability to perform its duty.”

“Our?”

Spitfire gestured for her over. “Well, not ours. Bottom line is, you’re welcome. As far as anyone in the six ministries are concerned, the bits you sent to JSI never existed in the first place.”

It took Rainbow a moment to process that. “So does this mean you and I are okay?”

She shrugged. “I think that depends on your definition of okay. It’s going to take a lot of bridge-mending to get us back to where we were, but I wouldn’t have invited you over for dinner if I didn’t think I could still work with you. The other day, you sent a message to my terminal that I can’t help but agree with. We need to set some new boundaries, because the ones we have now aren’t working. I was hoping tonight we could at least lay out the foundation.”

Rainbow took a sip of water, nodded, and swallowed. She looked at Spitfire and then the four placemats set out on the coffee table. “Who else is coming over to help with that?”

“Oh, those,” she said, forcing a smile as she spoke. “A couple of the newer Wonderbolts were asking to meet you yesterday and I remembered how much you used to love talking to your fans, so I may have invited them to join us. I hope you don’t mind.”

Rainbow swiveled in her stool, her gaze wary as she looked past her through the balcony door. “Will they be staying long?”

“Just long enough to trade some stories, maybe get an autograph or two. It’d be rude to eat in front of them, so I didn’t see the harm in laying out some spaces for them too.” She stepped back to the kitchen and began rummaging through the refrigerator, taking notice of Rainbow’s distant gaze toward the castle. “You look tired, Dash. Have you been sleeping?”

Spitfire watched Rainbow out of the corner of her eye, her expression darkening for a moment as the mare conjured yet another lie.

“Does sleeping in my office count?” she said.

Spitfire had to force herself to chuckle. She picked a half-full bottle of dressing from the shelf and let the door slap closed. Scooping her glass from the counter, she carried both back to the coffee table. “It doesn’t seem to be doing you much good. Maybe eating something will wake you up. Come sit down.”

She obeyed, the stool giving another creak as she dropped to the floor, her glass held aloft in her wing. Spitfire waited for her to seat herself on the carpet, choosing the corner of the table nearest the balcony. It could have meant nothing, but Spitfire was willing to bet her feathers that Rainbow was subconsciously looking for an escape.

She smiled as she gripped the spoons sticking out of the bowl like tongs and transferred some greens onto her plate. When she finished, Rainbow did the same.

“So,” Spitfire said, spearing a cube of sweet potato with her fork. “Boundaries.”

Rainbow didn’t take her eyes off her plate even as one of her brows crept upward. “You made it pretty clear this week where you want those to be,” she said, lifting a stack of glazed leaves to her mouth. “More transparency, less surprises.”

“Less lies,” she corrected. “I want to know that I can trust you.”

“You can always trust me, Spitfire.” Rainbow said. “Every decision I make is made with the good of Equestria in mind.”

Spitfire nodded, watching her eat. “I can tell you truly believe that, but I worry the stress of this war is leading you to make the wrong choices. Dangerous ones. I know you better than most ponies, and you’ve always had a tendency to leap before you look.”

Rainbow’s ears slowly flattened. “Celestia and Luna gave me this ministry because they trust in me.”

She swallowed - not enough dressing - and nodded. “And if you recall, you put me in charge of overseeing the department heads for the same reason, except I can’t effectively do my job if I’m worrying about you trying to fly under the proverbial radar without telling me.”

A long silence settled between them, punctuated only by the clinking of silverware against china. After a while, Rainbow set her fork on her plate and turned to look at Spitfire. “Then stop worrying about it.”

Spitfire sipped from her glass and gave a curt shake of her head. “That’s not an option for me. The decisions you make affect my Wonderbolts. Transferring war funds to a privately owned company - and trying to hide it - is exactly the type of thing that makes me worry about where your head is, Dash.”

“I told you already, that money is funding critical research.”

She nodded with mock-seriousness. “Oh, sure. Because Jet Stream Industries needs help figuring out how to improve the solar tech that they invented.” She pointed a fork at Rainbow. “Trying to sell me that bullshit twice doesn’t mean I’m going to buy it this time around. I know you’re not telling me something, and I have a feeling it’s because whatever Jet is actually using that money for is enough for Celestia to imprison you both.”

Rainbow’s expression hardened. “So, what then? You covered up Whiplash’s audit and scrubbed those bits off the ledger so I would owe you?”

“No, Rainbow, I did that because if word ever got out about one of the ministry mares siphoning taxpayer bits into a corporation already on thin ice with the princesses, there’s a good chance the Ministry of Awesome would very quickly become the Ministry of Nothing. This war is on a tightrope and the last thing we can afford is to take a hit like that.” She set her fork onto her placemat. “Those are the decisions that cause good pegasi to die. Needlessly, I might add.”

“Good pegasi. Not ponies?”

She watched Rainbow pinch the bridge of her nose between her feathers. “Do you even hear yourself right now?”

Despite her best effort, she felt a flush of anger creep into her face. “What, I’m not allowed to worry about the lives of Wonderbolts after we sent…”

The balcony’s iron railing rang under the assault of clacking hooves, startling Spitfire out of what was threatening to snowball into an impassioned defense. Later, she thought.

Within the space of a breath, her eyes softened and the professional smile she’d learned to master spread across her muzzle before her guests had a chance to settle onto her balcony.

Pickle and Barley Barrel waved behind the glass, their form-fitting blue and yellow uniforms all but glowing in the afternoon sun, waiting to be let in. The excitement was as plain on their faces as any one of Rainbow’s lifelong fans. Spitfire grunted as she pushed herself to her hooves, careful not to show any irritation as she passed by Rainbow on the way to the door. They were understandably nervous and, after all, she had invited them in the first place. If they wanted to show up looking like they were ready for a peacetime acrobatic routine, she wasn’t going to tell two of her best Wonderbolts no.

The Barrel twins straightened as she opened the door. Let them posture a little, make a good first impression in the eyes of their foalhood hero. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t earned the right.

“Evening, ma’am,” Pickle greeted, his sculpted shoulders coming level with her nose. She nodded as she made room for them to enter.

“Hooves,” she reminded.

They dutifully scrubbed their soles against the doormat before stepping inside. Barley followed close to her brother, her eyes wandered past him to the mare still pecking at her salad. Spitfire could hear her take a steadying breath. “It’s an honor to meet you, Minister Rainbow Dash.”

Rainbow extended a wing toward them with a smile, though she didn’t stand. Any trace of their earlier tensions were gone as the twins stepped forward to clasp feathers.

“Dash is fine,” she said, her lips quirking as she looked between the two. Their flax tinted coats and mint-striped manes were identical down to the last hair. With the exception of Pickle’s swept-back mane and Barley’s much more slender build, they were identical. “Your last names aren’t Barrel, by any chance?”

Spitfire had to keep herself from rolling her eyes while the Barrel twins’ widened. She slid the door shut and gestured to the two empty spots across where she and Rainbow were seated.

Barley took the seat across from Dash, her voice piqued. “You’ve heard of us?”

Rainbow nodded. “I still get the Academy bulletin sent to my terminal every Sunday. If memory serves, the two of you broke some records during your first month of training.”

“Fill up a plate if you’re hungry,” Spitfire broke in, picking up her own fork. “There’s plenty.”

The twins obliged, lumping the colorful medley of greens onto Spitfire’s china. They barely looked at her at all as they spoke. They were here for Rainbow Dash, after all, Ministry Mare and Element. Compared to her, Spitfire might as well be a homemaker. She clicked her fork into her plate, stabbing a mouthful of diced sweet potato.

“We’ve been practicing maneuvers since as far back as we can remember,” Pickle said. “Our parents couldn’t afford to get us into the Junior Speedsters, but Hope Hollow Library had a few books on Wonderbolt formations.”

That caught Rainbow’s attention. “You’re self-taught?”

They both nodded. Barley gestured to her brother with her fork. “He broke his wing in three places when we were twelve because he looked at the forest outside our village and saw an obstacle course.”

He gave his salad a sheepish grin. “Nothing a little magic didn’t fix.”

Barley snorted. “You were in bed crowing about it for a week.”

“I don’t remember seeing that injury in your medical history,” Spitfire said.

Pickle blinked and looked at her, but his worry faded when she shook her head with a playful smile. “I’m pulling your feathers,” she chuckled. “If it makes you feel better, I tore a tendon in mine the week before my qualification exam. My drill instructor never figured it out.”

The twins shot her disbelieving stares. Barley looked at her as if she’d just noticed she was there. “How’d you even fly?”

“Painkillers,” she said with a sly wink. “Among other things. It was a different time.”

“I would have never pegged you for a high-flyer,” Pickle laughed.

Spitfire offered a mild shrug. “I barely passed. I’ve proven myself since then.”

He smiled more broadly, same as his sister, as he shoveled another forkful into his mouth. As he chewed, his face lit up with an expression that said he’d just remembered something and he held a feather in the air as he hurried to clear his maw. Spitfire pretended not to notice the dozens of green flecks covering his teeth as he spoke. “Barley, tell them what you’ve been working on between rotations.”

Barley’s lips pressed into a tight line as her eyes grew wide.

Rainbow looked between the two with something akin to well-humored pity on her face. She waited, taking a sip from her glass before finally saying, “Pretty sure if you don’t tell me, your brother’s going to.”

Barley scratched at her shoulder with her hoof. “I’m... trying to beat your speed record.”

Rainbow set her glass down. “No shit?”

She half-winced. “No shit.”

Spitfire glanced across the table to Pickle and was impressed with what she saw. Not a hint of jealousy or impatience on his part despite having to know that he’d just given his sister an unbeatable hand over any goal or aspiration he might try to share with his idol going forward. Dash was all about speed, even now with her fastest days behind her. Pickle had offered Barley up without thinking twice because he was loyal to her with a selflessness that was getting harder to find these days.

Rainbow could learn something from them.

“So, are your numbers still hush-hush?” Rainbow asked, her old competitive grin curling her lips. “Or can you share?”

It was common practice for Wonderbolts not to share their times with anyone, least of all their opponent, until they were official. Ever since Rainbow obliterated Spitfire’s record when she was younger, the only pegasi capable of exceeding those numbers was the same one who set them. Years later, new classes of Wonderbolts collectively agreed that aiming for Rainbow Dash’s top speed was futile and Spitfire’s second-place slot quickly became the accepted benchmark to beat. Every year, pegasi would shave milliseconds off that number to briefly claim the top spot, however none of them came within throwing distance of the standard set by the mare currently chewing salad in Spitfire’s living room.

Barley tried to suppress her smile, but it was a losing battle. “I can’t give you my exact numbers,” she said, pinching her lips shut for a moment as she considered her answer. “But... I’ve seen colors.”

A hush settled across the table. Spitfire frowned a little, unsure of exactly what she meant but fairly certain it had something to do with Dash’s heretofore unreplicated sonic rainboom.

Rainbow was enraptured by the mare. Her meal forgotten, she leaned forward as she spoke. “How far?”

“Just my hooftips,” she admitted, more than a little intimidated by Rainbow’s sudden attention. “I’m always exhausted by the time I get close, and the turbulence at that speed is… I don’t know how you do it.”

She waved off the compliment. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve already made it to the hardest part. All you need to do once you see those lights is pucker your butt and punch through.”

Barley laughed. “Easy as that, huh?”

“You think I’m joking,” Rainbow chuckled, “but it really is.”

The two of them chatted about ideal posture, angles of attack and a theory of Rainbow’s about scooping wind that sounded to Spitfire closer to quack science than anything real. She cleared her plate as Rainbow brought Pickle back into the fold, giving him a chance to brag about his accomplishments as a high-altitude formation flyer. When he credited his breathing exercises for his lung’s expansive volume, his sister didn’t hesitate to jab at him for holding the record for most hot air blown.

Spitfire stuck her fork into the salad bowl, picking out the brighter bits of sweet potato as the others bantered back and forth. She couldn’t help but feel a little guilty for putting this dinner together. It was a rare day when Rainbow had the chance to give her fans this much of her attention, let alone ones she got on so well with, but Thunderlane’s report had removed the luxury of choice in the matter.

It was a shame, what she had to do, but she took comfort in the knowledge that it was also necessary.

She chewed a morsel of sweet potato, enjoying the marriage of candied starch and tangy dressing as she waited for a break in the conversation.

Her opportunity came when Rainbow asked the twins about their service.

“Actually,” she said, pointing a feather at each of them, “these two just wrapped up a particularly daring mission, what, the morning before last?”

Barley pinched the fork between her lips and nodded. “Saturday,” she said, tucking the bite she’d taken into her cheek. “Are you sure we’re cleared to talk about it outside the Pillar?”

Rainbow chased a chickpea across her plate with her fork. “How thick are your walls, Spits?”

Spitfire answered with a nonchalant shrug. “Thick enough.” She nodded to the twins. “Go ahead.”

Barley glanced at her brother, who seemed unsure where he should begin, and sat up a little as she spoke. “Alright, so Friday morning Pickle and I get rousted out of our bunks by our CO. It’s barely two in the morning so we don’t know what’s going on. Everything’s all hush-hush. I mean, nobody is telling us anything even as they’re taking us to the admin building. I’m thinking, oh shit, here we go, Pickle’s gone and done something to get us both thrown out.”

Pickle cleared his throat, earning a wry smile from his sister.

“Anyway, it turns out we had orders to fly out to Griffinstone to run surveillance. First thought in my head was, why? The gryphons have kept their beaks out of our business since everything kicked off with the zeebs. They’re so far behind our tech, why risk causing trouble? Turns out, not everyone in Griffinstone’s as neutral as you’d think.”

Spitfire kept an eye on Rainbow as Barley spoke, noticing that the mare’s fork hadn’t left her plate for several seconds. Her jovial smile from before was frozen on her face, unmoving as it formed a mask over the worry Spitfire knew had begun brewing behind it.

“So we get there, right? We’re exhausted and freezing our feathers off, but we make the crossing and set up camp in a crag a mile or so away from their aeries. Celestia’s wings, that place is a mess. One landslide and boom, their city would be at the bottom of that mountain. Anyway, we’ve got a target. This gryphon by the name of Gilda has managed to get her talons on an Equestrian holotape, and command’s worried she’s going to sell it to the Vhannans.”

Barley paused to take a drink, giving Pickle room to continue. He grinned at Rainbow, hoping to see her share in their excitement. Her smile was considerably dimmer.

Spitfire could see her pulse beating in her throat.

“Except by the time we get set up, it’s broad daylight,” he said. “We can’t wait twelve hours for Celestia to turn out the lights, so I figure we hide our gear and fly in like a couple of tourists. We get the green light from our mission commander,” he gestures across the table to Spitfire, who smiled politely back, “and we’re on the ground with the birds like nothing’s the matter. We make a few passes by Gilda’s last known address but she’s not home. The entire day she’s a no-show and we start thinking, well shit, she’s already on her way to Vhanna to make the sale.”

He tipped his head to his sister. “When we got back to camp, the speed demon here gets orders to move her flank east and get eyes on the roads near the border. I’m ordered to stay put in case Gilda makes an appearance, which she eventually does.” He paused, his smile faltering as he watched Rainbow. “Are you okay?”

Rainbow stole a sidelong glance to Spitfire, who watched her impassively. The ministry mare picked up her glass and took a sip, forcing herself to nod as she swallowed. “Just a little indigestion.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Go ahead, Pickle,” Spitfire urged. “Finish your story.”

“Well,” he said, trying to pick up his lost momentum, “like I said, the target came home late that night. Most of her shades are pulled so I can’t tell once she’s inside whether she had the holotape on her or if she already made the hand-off. Command, here, thinks at that point it’s worth the risk to make contact and find out. I make entry through the rear door and if you ever want to experience a shit-the-floor moment, try breaking into a gryphon’s house while they’re home. You think they’re huge when they’re being nice, but that’s nothing compared to when they’re pissed off.”

Spitfire chuckled and started gathering empty places as he spoke. She detected the faintest flinch from Rainbow when she reached in front of her to take hers. Good.

“So she’s standing there in the kitchen with a bottle of beer in her hand, and I’m barely through the doorway when she pitches the thing straight at my head. Would’ve punched my clock right then and there if I hadn’t moved when I did.”

Spitfire walked the dishes back to the kitchen while keeping an ear on the conversation as it unfolded. Setting the plates into the sink, her eyes went to a small manila folder sitting atop her unopened mail next to her flour jar. She set the empty glasses atop the dirty china and smiled.

“You fought?” Rainbow breathed.

Barley laughed. “He got his ass kicked, more like it.”

“Ha-ha,” he said, then turned back to Rainbow. “She didn’t give me much choice. Soon as she saw me, I could tell she knew why I was there. I know I don’t look it, but I’ve gotten into my fair share of hoofbleeders. Benefits of being built like an earth pony, I can throw a kick. That whole fight is mostly a blur, but I do remember that she kept going after my wings. Every chance she got, she’d try to get her weird yellow fingers around them. Wanted to break ‘em so I’d be grounded. Didn’t give her a chance.”

Pickle flushed with something akin to pride. “She got me on the ground, had this look in her eye like she was deciding whether to eat me or not. You know they’re all carnivores, right? Anyway, I had enough room to get my hind leg up and I caught her square in the kneecap. She went over like a sack of turnips and I was able to get my feathers on this gaudy clock of hers. Bashed her square across the head. One second she’s squawking, the other she’s not.”

Spitfire watched from the kitchen counter as Rainbow dragged her trembling hoof over the top of her head and down her neck, trying and failing to get her emotions under control.

Rainbow stared down at her empty placemat, breathing hard. “You killed her?”

Pickle, too wrapped up in his story to slow himself down, nodded with waning excitement. “Not before she got a few good licks in,” he said, his feathers already fishing for the zipper embedded in the seam of his uniform. He pulled it down enough to show her three parallel scars that ran diagonally across his chest. Thick, black stitches held the angry red strips of puckered flesh together, still stained from the iodine used to clean them.

Rainbow looked away, her face a tortured mess of nauseated horror. She made a guttural noise and rose to her hooves, lurching toward the hallway as tears swarmed in her eyes. Spitfire feigned worry as she watched her bolt for the bathroom, her hooves clattering over the tile before the unmistakable sound of retching made the Barrel twins recoil.

“Oh dear,” she said as she rounded the counter. “Barley, Pickle, I think it’s best if we call it a night.”

Barley stood, her forehead creased with worry. “Is she okay?”

Spitfire nodded, gesturing them across the living room toward the balcony. “It’s just stress. With everything she has to worry about right now, I think surprising her with guests might have been a little too much.”

“Well, make sure to tell her that we had a fantastic time,” Pickle said as he pulled the door open. “Maybe we could try it again when she’s feeling better?”

Spitfire’s smile made it clear they wouldn’t. “Maybe. Thanks anyway for coming by. You two have a safe flight home.”

The twins filed out onto the balcony, said their reluctant goodbyes and hopped over the railing into the darkening sky. Spitfire watched them go, ensuring they wouldn’t have a change of heart and turn back around to console their idol. They didn’t. She shut the glass door and turned the lock just to be sure.

She crossed the living room and walked into the kitchen, picking up the manila envelope and turning to follow the miserable noises that echoed from down her hall.

Rainbow Dash leaned over the porcelain as another heave disgorged a stream of vile tasting sludge atop what already swirled in the bowl. Her heart pounded in her temples and her skin felt hot, pouring sweat from every pore as if it were trying to wring her dry. What felt like a hundred fragmented terrors swam through her head as she repeatedly tried, and failed, to get her thoughts under control. But no matter how hard she tried, the unrelenting waves of nausea made it impossible.

Everything was coming apart. Her brain refused to accept the fact that Gilda was dead. Her murderer had sat within wing’s reach of her, laughing at her jokes, sharing some of his own. And Spitfire knew it. She’d given the order. She’d invited both of them here for the explicit purpose of making sure she knew it too.

“How are you feeling, Dash?” Her voice came from the doorway, dripping with concern that wasn’t real. Wasn’t meant for her to believe it was real.

Rainbow flinched at the snap of Spitfire flipping the bathroom lights on. “Get the fuck away from me.”

Hooves clicked toward her against the tile. She looked up from the bowl to see a canary yellow hoof press the handle, flushing the remains of Rainbow’s meal into the plumbing. “You forced me to do this, Dash.”

She cringed at the sensation of Spitfire’s feathers sifting through her mane, guiding the stray locks that dangled into the bowl back behind her neck. Every fiber of her being recoiled against that touch. She could picture herself turning around to strike the mare across the muzzle, to make her stop.

But the fight was gone. It drained out of her like there was a hole she’d never been aware of. One that Spitfire had torn wider than she could ever hope to heal. She sank against the toilet, tears splashing the rippling water that flowed back into the bowl.

Spitfire finished organizing her mane, laying it between her shoulders with almost motherly care, and turned her attention to an envelope she’d placed next to the sink. Rainbow didn’t look up as she listened to the familiar rasp of feathers against paper, knowing she was at the mercy of whatever it was Spitfire intended for her.

She imagined spending the rest of her life inside a dark cell in some forgotten corner of Equestria while the ponies who looked up to her, the ones who had made the mistake of befriending her, came to grips with the reality that the Element of Loyalty had betrayed them.

Spitfire’s feathers descended behind the veil of Rainbow’s miserable tears, holding something small and familiar between their yellow vanes for her to see. Rainbow blinked enough to confirm it was what she thought. A holotape, its ubiquitous plastic case smeared in the corner with a rusty streak of dry blood. Her vision blurred with fresh haze at the implication.

“I want you to tell me why,” Spitfire said, setting the holotape on the porcelain tank with a sharp click.

She gathered the bilious muck coating her mouth and spat it into the bowl. “Does it even matter?”

“No,” Spitfire said, “I suppose it doesn’t at this point. I already know everything I need to know. You lied to me, twice, and decided that the best course of action in that moment was to compile, what, two decades’ worth of highly classified intelligence and smuggle it into the hands of a foreign nation whose survival depends on its neutrality. I don’t need to know why, but I certainly want to.”

Rainbow stared at the worm of discolored spittle as it drew slow circles in the clear water, saying nothing.

“Solar tech,” she scoffed. “Banned research for the most part, though that hasn’t stopped you from pouring bits into Jet Stream’s coffers. Griffinstone doesn’t have the infrastructure to make use of any of it, so the obvious conclusion is that you were trying to get this holotape to the zebras.”

Spitfire’s wing slid under her chin and lifted it, forcing her to meet her eyes. “So. Once again. Why?”

Adrenaline flooded her veins, conspiring to shame her even more by making her body tremble in her former mentor’s grip. She had to flex her jaw just to speak. “To catch them up to us,” she mumbled. “So they have a reason to stop fighting.”

She watched as Spitfire narrowed her eyes at her with fresh scrutiny. It was like being back at the Academy, powerless to do anything but wait for the tirade. To get dragged out in front of everyone she knew and have every one of her failings laid bare.

“What you did wasn’t an act of mercy,” she said, tightening her grip around her jaw. “It was the single most misguided act of treason this war has ever witnessed. There isn’t a single pony out there right now who wouldn’t convict you for what you tried to do. Do you understand what that means?”

She glared up at her, eyes stinging. “It could have led to peace.”

The tendons in Spitfire’s neck drew taut. “It could have torn this entire country apart!” She let go of her, circling the bathroom tiles until she rounded on her again. “What was going through your head that made you think giving the zebras more capacity to fight us was a good idea? Things are already fucked enough that I don’t even know if we’re going to win this, and now I barely stop you from pouring gas in their tanks? You’re the Element of Loyalty for Celestia’s sake! Who are you even loyal to?”

Rainbow glared. “I’m loyal to my friends.”

“And now one of them is dead,” Spitfire snapped.

Her words landed like a slap. Rainbow clenched her jaw and looked away, her eyes settling on the stained holotape that Fluttershy begged her to deliver. So many dominoes falling in all the wrong directions.

“We can’t afford this kind of press right now,” Spitfire continued, looking down at her like some idiot animal that couldn’t help that it had soiled the carpet. “Rarity can’t keep all of the papers in line all of the time, and something like this has the potential to snowball faster than the ministries can control.”

“Quit telling me things I already know,” she murmured.

Spitfire slapped her wing against the side of the tub hard enough to make Rainbow flinch. “Then quit trying to fuck this war up any more than it already is! Do you know what kind of position you’ve put me in? What I have to do now just to keep your sorry hide on the princesses’ nice list?”

She looked at her. “I don’t follow.”

“Celestia’s tits, you are dense,” Spitfire sighed. “I’m covering your ass, Dash. Again. But this time I’m not doing it for free.”

Rainbow frowned, spat the last bitter flakes of salad into the toilet and pulled the lever. She regarded Spitfire with open mistrust. “You’re blackmailing me.”

Spitfire balked. “I don’t want anything other than for you to take your wings off the wheel before you drive us toward another cliff.” She sighed, setting a hoof on Rainbow’s shoulder with a little more pressure than a reassuring gesture warranted. “I want you to understand something. These messes you keep making? The ones that I’m going through pains to keep anyone from noticing? Those only go away for as long as I decide they’re gone.”

Rainbow stared at Spitfire’s hoof like it was crawling with spiders. “This still sounds a lot like blackmail.”

“It’s insurance, Dash.” She kept her hoof where it was as she sat down next to her on the tiles, making it all that much harder for Rainbow to ignore her. “What this country needs you to do right now is step aside. You can keep your title, your office, even the salary. As far as anyone knows, nothing will have changed. You’ll still sit at the head of the Ministry of Awesome. You just won’t be leading it anymore.”

Rainbow tried to shrug out from Spitfire’s grip, but she kept her hoof locked on her shoulder. Something about this was wrong. The flicker in Spitfire’s eyes made her clear none of this had been decided here while she was throwing up dinner. She’d been waiting for this opportunity. Planning it. This was the finish line to a race Rainbow Dash didn’t know she’d been losing.

“You killed one of my friends, and now you expect me to give you my ministry?”

Spitfire nodded, her eyes assessing her like so much baggage. “Consider it a wake-up call. After all you’ve done, I don’t think you have much of a choice.”

She wrenched herself free of Spitfire’s hoof, her resolve finally beginning to take form. “I have powerful friends, Spitfire.”

The mare stood, smiling that infuriating smile even as she brought the stark reality of her prodigy’s position straight down onto her head. “You do. I won’t deny that. And what do you think Twilight would say if she found out you betrayed Equestria?” She tipped her head to one side. “Do you think she’d look back at all the years she spent with you and wonder if it all really meant anything?”

Rainbow took a shuddering breath.

“What about Applejack?” she continued. “I have more than a few birdies who tell me the two of you were practically joined at the hip before Celestia gave you the ministries.”

“Stop,” she murmured.

“Just one more,” Spitfire placated. “Just for funsies, let’s talk about Pinkie before you decide.”

Rainbow sagged against the porcelain as the nausea threatened to return.

“We both know how fragile she is right now. She knows there’s no room in this war for Laughter and yet she’s been tasked with keeping the ponies of Equestria smile-smile-smiling to ensure everyone goes to work, buys their bonds and keeps Equestria humming while their sons and daughters get pushed into the meat grinder. I couldn’t do that. I don’t think any pony could stay sane trying to shoulder that kind of burden, and yet that’s exactly what you and your friends are forcing her to do. Alone.”

“Not all of us have time,” she whispered.

Spitfire shook her head. “You had time to sit here and eat my food while your fans massaged your ego. You had time to fly halfway across the world and get two gryphons killed.”

“Wait,” Rainbow said. “Two?”

“Two gryphons and a changeling posing as a zebra, yes,” she answered. “Barley retrieved the tape from them within sight of the Vhannan border. If there’s any part of this I should thank you for, it’s that we know to what extent Chrysalis’ drones will go to escape her hive.”

Rainbow didn’t know what to say. Mortification clung to her like pitch, knowing she’d not only gotten Gilda murdered but one of her contacts as well. Even the changeling, whoever it had been, didn’t deserve to be dragged down by this disaster she’d created for them.

“Listen, Dash,” Spitfire said, her tone softening. “Like it or not, I’m all you have right now. You know me. I’m not one of those villains you used to fight when you were young. I don’t want to take over Equestria or pretend to be someone I’m not. I want to save it and… right now, it needs saving from you.”

Rainbow stared at her without saying a word because, the longer she thought about it, the more she realized there was no point in arguing.

Spitfire was right.

She wasn’t some power-hungry creature fresh out of legend, bent on destroying Equestria for the sole joy of doing it. She wasn’t a serpent whose single purpose seemed to be warping the fabric of reality for his own amusement. The Elements wouldn’t work on Spitfire any more than they had worked against Vhanna’s vast defensive lines.

She closed her eyes.

“How do you plan to lead the MoA without it knowing?”

She tried not to recoil as Spitfire’s smile widened. “You’ll need to make a few staffing changes before that happens. I already have a list of names to replace the current department heads. It shouldn’t cause too much of a disruption if we take it slow.”

“Celestia’s sake,” she muttered. “How long have you been planning this?”

“It’s called a contingency plan,” Spitfire said in the same tone she reserved for particularly dull trainees. “And I have plenty more. Now, can I assume we’re both in agreement on how we’re going to move forward?”

Are you going to give me the keys to the kingdom, or do you want to go down in history as the Betrayer of Equestria? was what she meant to say.

Rainbow, reluctantly, nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

Spitfire hooked her wing under her armpit and for a terrible moment Rainbow thought she was going to pull her into a hug. When it occurred to her that she was encouraging her to get off the floor, she stood.

“You don’t need to call me ma’am,” she said, and for the first time this evening, something in her smile looked genuine. “All I need is for you to keep doing what you have been doing. Represent the ministry. Inspire confidence in the ponies who look to you for it. And most importantly, I need you to trust me when I say you’re doing the right thing.”

Rainbow took a slow breath.

She wouldn’t trust Spitfire if she sprouted a horn and donned a tiara, but choice wasn’t a luxury she had.

“I’ll try,” she said.

Spitfire patted her on the leg.

“I know you will. Now, let’s talk about Gilda’s memorial.”

Midnight snuck up on them quicker than they expected.

From behind the bar a short, sharp whistle sprang from Brandy’s pinched lips. The bartender twirled a chipped hoof in the air in the timeless sign to wrap it up. Roach didn’t miss a note, taking the gesture in stride as his smooth-as-gravel voice scraped through the final verses of Tips Domino’s I’m Trottin’.

Ginger smirked at him from their table as she nibbled the last of their late dinner. The apples were dry to the point of turning to powder in her mouth, but that was fine. Food wasn’t truly food if there wasn’t at least one thing missing from it. That was her experience, anyway. She let her saliva rehydrate the chewed fruit and swallowed. Her stomach accepted the offering with meager disinterest. It felt nice to be full for once.

“He’s almost as bad as me,” Aurora giggled beside her.

Ginger grinned and shushed her with a wave of her hoof. She wasn’t wrong, though. Roach carried a tune like a sieve carried water, but that hadn’t been the point of getting him up there. As long as she’d known him, Roach had always been a hard nut to crack, but the infrequency of his visits to her shop and the stretches of time that yawned between them… well, she had repeated experience in getting him to open up.

Her horn glowed and she idly reached out to pick up her glass. When it didn’t come to her, she looked at it and realized her magic was grasping at the empty air beside it. She ignored Aurora’s snort as she refocused, picking up the glass and washing down the remains of their meal with murky water. Roach had made the decision to switch them all to something a little less potent, which was appearing to be a wise one. The water had been pricy, but it kept their hooves out of the rations Coldbrook had given them while also preventing them from getting so deep into the bottle that their eyeballs might start floating.

Not that they weren’t close to that point already. At least they were blending in with the rest of the bar’s patrons.

There were fewer ghouls occupying the tables now. Many had reached the end of their night an hour before, wobbling up to the bar to settle their tabs before swaying out the door to whatever bed awaited them. A few others seemed to leave in frustration, casting irritated glares at Ginger and Aurora as soon as it became clear they would be occupying the stage for more than a couple songs. For a while Ginger wondered if they had been hoping for a turn on the mic, but when more got up to leave, she decided it was more likely that the simple presence of smoothcoats in a ghoul bar was a little more than they were able to stomach.

Suit themselves, she thought. She and her friends were here to unwind after surviving some of the worst the Equestrian wasteland had to offer. If that meant a few ex-ponies had to find someplace else to drink, so be it.

She winced, knowing that last thought wasn’t fair. Ex-ponies was a term her father had spent a considerable amount of effort attempting to coin. In his mind, it was a way to put a finer point on the quietly spoken opinion that ghouls were no longer ponies once they turned. While it never caught on, the term was another lingering polyp from her childhood.

From the corner of her eye she watched Aurora stifle a yawn. Further back in the bar, Brandy stepped away from his patrons and began approaching the stage, ready to turn off the terminal now that Roach was wrapping up.

Ginger sucked in a deep breath and released it slowly, stretching her legs beneath the table until her lungs ached more than her calves. She and Aurora had been awake over twenty four hours now and their second wind was well behind them. It was time to call it a night.

She and Aurora thumped their hooves against the table as Roach finished. He made an exaggerated bow to them in response and stepped off the stage while Brandy went to work disconnecting the mic.

“How was that?” the changeling grinned.

Ginger slid off her chair as he reached the table, lifting his saddlebags for him. “Would you like an honest answer or a flattering lie?”

Aurora giggled again behind her.

“I already know the honest part, so you might as well give me the lie.”

She settled his bags across his haunches and recalled an audio log she once listened to from a long time ago. “You were absolutely marvelous, darling.”

“Woof,” he said.

“Ask and you shall receive,” she chuckled. “Speaking of, it’s about time we put that room key to good use and get some shut-eye before Aurora makes one of us carry her.”

Aurora gave them a half-lidded smirk as she adjusted her rifle strap over her shoulder. Even as she stumbled through the pit of exhaustion, she didn’t complain. Across the wasteland, Stable dwellers were regarded as weak, unprepared and entirely helpless as a result of living a life wanting for nothing. Ginger didn’t see that in Aurora. Behind those pale green eyes was a tenacity - a different kind than the wasteland bred into its survivors, but there it was, learned from a life that was utterly foreign to Ginger.

It was what drew her to Aurora, like a moth to firelight. The more Aurora spoke about her life before, the more Ginger wanted to learn about her. For someone to grow up with everything only to discover new ways to struggle… she understood that. It reminded her that food, water and shelter didn’t fix everything. They just gave a pony the luxury of seeing their world for what it had become.

“Drink some more water,” Roach said, pointing Aurora at the half-empty pitcher. The pegasus swayed back to the table, snorted as some of the water slopped out of the pitcher, and lifted her glass to drink.

“You too,” he said, eyeing Ginger. “Rad-X only works when your bladder does.”

Ginger raised a hoof in mock surrender, not wanting to delay sleep any longer by arguing the losing side of his point. As she filled her glass, she glanced down at Aurora’s Pip-Buck and squinted at the comically small rad meter. The needle dangled just below the second tick mark. Just shy of two hundred rads were in her system. Not enough to be fatal, but she would start feeling sick in a day or two without Rad-Away to clear out what the Rad-X hadn’t captured.

Aurora stood a couple inches shorter than she did and had been exposed to the same irradiated breeze. She decided that if things did get dicey, Aurora would get the first dose.

She downed her glass, glanced at the puddle of foggy water at the bottom of the pitcher, and promptly poured it into Aurora’s. The mare looked at her, sighed, and drank the last of it before following them to the back of the bar.

Roach, having been the one to barter for the room key, led the way. An open doorway and a set of stairs awaited them. Ginger’s muscles were quick to protest just the thought of climbing them.

Four ghouls sat at a table next to the doorway. Ginger didn’t realize they were staring at her until a hoof snaked around her hind leg, causing her to stumble to an ungraceful halt.

“Excuse me!”

She jerked her leg away but the withered stallion kept his grip on her, smiling placidly as his eyes lingered on her hip. The companions at his table watched with lazy curiosity, one continuing to nurse his drink while the struggle played out. The ghoul holding her leg bore into her with pale, pink eyes. His mottled hide was entirely bald, as if the hair had been burned off of him.

Behind her, she could hear Aurora’s wing already shifting into the hooks of her rifle. Ahead, the subtle click of Roach releasing the lock on the shotgun bound to his foreleg.

“Settle a dispute,” the ghoul said, his voice burbling with a calm, wet rasp. “How many caps would you pay for me?”

Ginger made a disgusted noise. “I’m not your type, now let go of me.”

“Do what she says,” Aurora warned, the barrel of her rifle creeping up his reclined frame.

The ghoul only offered the pointed weapon a dismissive glance. He gave Ginger’s hind leg a tug, forcing her to backstep closer to him.

“Don’t flatter yourself, I lost my taste for smoothcoats a long time ago,” he chuckled, tipping his head slightly to better meet Ginger’s eye. “It’s a simple question. How much am I worth?”

A cold stone slipped into the pit of her stomach as his eyes returned to her hip. To her cutie mark, making the meaning of his question painfully clear. Ginger’s eyes flicked to Roach, whose attention was scanning the rest of the table for movement, then to the rest of the bar where several ghouls were quietly watching events unfold.

Her silence gave him an opportunity to fill it. “I’m able-bodied,” he said, reciting criteria Ginger wanted nothing more than to forget. “I have a strong back. Reliable joints. My teeth aren’t so good anymore, miss, but I’m not picky about what I’m fed. I’m sterile, too, so… no unwanted foals to put down.”

Ginger stared forward as furious tears began to gather. The scars across his body were too familiar. The old wound ringing his neck was as familiar as the rooms of her childhood home. He knew exactly what to say because he’d lived the same life she did, only instead of holding the stick he’d been the one to receive the lashing end of it. He wore his hatred of her as comfortably as he would a collar, and unlike her, he wasn’t wishing he’d chosen to hide his marks.

She jerked her leg, hard, making the stallion wobble backward a little in his seat. When he settled forward, the muzzle of Aurora’s rifle pressed against his sternum.

He offered Aurora a pleasant smile. “Put that down before you get yourself dead. I’m trying to have a conversation, here.”

“She’s done talking to you,” she said.

The ghoul chose to ignore her, looking back at Ginger instead. “I don’t think that’s true, do you? Any time you slavers come around to this side of town, you always got a sales pitch and a price tag. Call me crazy but I’ve never seen a singing slaver before. So, humor me. How much?”

She lit her horn, wrapped a cuff of magic around the ghoul’s grasping appendage and squeezed. He clenched his jaw for a brief moment, resisting the pain that was rapidly building in his leg before finally letting go with a discomforted grunt.

Ginger’s voice dripped with venom. “I don’t own ponies anymore.”

The ghoul rubbed his foreleg, watching Aurora lift her rifle off his chest with that same, confident smile. “And you say that with such a straight face, too. Do those collars on your ass earn you a discount at the auctions, or do you have to bid cheap like the rest of ‘em?”

Roach put a hoof around her neck and nudged her forward. “He’s drunk, ignore him. Let’s go upstairs.”

Ginger allowed him to guide her to the door, her jaw aching with the effort it took to keep herself from turning back and screaming at the former slave. She knew if she did, she would likely prove some point he was trying to make. Part of her didn’t care. She wanted to take his words and stuff them back down his throat until he choked.

She squeezed her eyes shut to clear them as they mounted the steps. Downstairs, the ghoul’s voice chased after her.

“Must’ve done something pretty spectacular to get marks like that,” he jeered. “Hey, maybe you could show me!”

“Come on,” Roach urged, guiding her up the last of the steps. “He just wants a reaction.”

Magic swirled the length of her horn. “He’s about to get one,” she spat.

“Not now,” he murmured into her ear. “You’re exhausted, and he knows it. Don’t let him goad you into something you’ll regret.”

She glared at Roach as they climbed onto the landing, but he didn’t look away from her. He was right. He was always right, it felt like. She exhaled her frustration and let the power in her horn dim.

Three doors stood on either side of the stairwell. Once Roach was satisfied Ginger wouldn’t bolt back down to the bar when he wasn’t looking, he checked the number stamped on their key and scanned the door plaques for a match. As she waited, a wing wrapped around her midsection and pulled her against the mare beside her.

“He’s just an asshole, anyway,” Aurora said, giving her a reassuring squeeze. “Besides, if he knew he was talking to the Ginger I know, he would’ve pissed himself.”

Ginger allowed herself a reluctant smile. “You make it sound like I’m some comic book hero.”

“Dark, mysterious past? Exposed to strange chemicals that give you superpowers that you wielded to save a damsel in distress?”

She rolled her eyes. “My magic is not a superpower.”

“Alright,” Aurora pressed. “Above-standard telekinesis. Still counts in my book. You’re a secret badass.”

She gave Ginger a little squeeze and, despite herself, Ginger felt herself relax a little.

“This is us,” Roach said, indicating the last of the six doors.

Ginger lit her horn and took the key from his hoof, sparing him the indignity of using his mouth. The deadbolt turned and the door squealed open on bone dry hinges.

As the three of them filed inside, curiosity quickly turned to disappointment followed by disgust.

Save for a browning mattress slumped in the corner and a bare bulb dangling off a frayed wire from the ceiling, the cramped little room was empty. Layers of old and new odors hung in the stale air like a thin fog, most of which seemed to be coming from the mattress. Ginger wrinkled her nose and, for his part, Roach didn’t seem to notice. A bloodhound he was not. The myriad scents of urine, stale sweat and sex were hardly a shock to anyone renting a room in the wasteland, but at the very least those rooms came with an actual bed to sleep on.

She looked over to Aurora, expecting her to be well on her way to retching, but the mare seemed to take it in stride even as she made a bee-line to throw open the room’s narrow window.

“I take it you’re smelling something I’m not,” Roach said as Aurora went to work fanning some of the fetid air back outside.

“Many things,” Ginger agreed. “On a positive note, the mattress is all yours this time.”

He grunted. “I’ll stick to the floor.”

Aurora looked back to them while her wings swept gouts of rancid air toward the open window. “Great, then throw that thing out in the hall before it wakes up and tries to eat us.”

Roach shrugged at Ginger. “I would but...”

She looked reluctantly toward the misshapen slab of padding. “Radiation, yes, I know.” Her horn lit and her lips peeled back into a grimace as she hooked the corner of the mattress with her magic and lifted it toward the door. “Luna’s grace, it’s damp! Why is it damp?”

Aurora laughed with a combination of sympathy and surprise. “You can feel it?”

“Of course I can feel it,” she hissed. Magic was unavoidably tactile, and while nothing from the mattress would actually touch any part of her, the sensation of handling the mystery-meat equivalent of a wet sponge was not something that would readily leave her brain. “Keep laughing and I’ll wrap you inside it.”

Aurora shuddered and turned to whip some air across the room toward the open hall. The mattress left behind a series of dark patches where it had been reclining. Ginger hurried it through the door and dropped it against the end of the wall where it slumped, no doubt already making progress on making a new set of stains.

She flung the door shut after it for good measure. Her skin itched at the faintest thought of what might have been soaked into that padding.

“You may want to leave that open,” Roach said.

Ginger looked to him, then Aurora who was in the process of sliding the window shut. “I tend to agree with him, Aurora. I’d like to smell as little like this room in the morning as possible.”

“Okay,” she said, pushing the pane back up.

Already, Ginger could feel the cool air beginning to chill the floorboards. It was a small price to pay in the name of maintaining some dignity.

She watched as Roach sloughed off his bags in the corner near the door, opposite from where the mattress deposited its dubious stains. He pushed them into the corner and grunted as he settled to the floor, his cracked chitin scraping against the boards. He glanced up at Ginger, who watched him with a crooked eye, and lifted what amounted to one of his own brows.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

Behind her, Aurora shuffled her wings against the cool air. Her eyes went from the soiled corner to the relatively clean one that Roach had quietly laid claim to. “Really?”

“What?” he said with a hint of defensiveness.

“I’m not sleeping any closer to that mess than I have to,” Aurora said.

Roach shrugged as if to say, I don’t know what to tell you, and began undoing the straps to the shotgun on his foreleg.

Ginger had known Roach for half her life, but what she didn’t know was beneath that docile, fatherly exterior was a calculated and clever little shit beneath. Even though he probably couldn’t smell the room, he had no intention of sleeping near the collective soil of the Gash’s previous patrons. Now that he’d been caught out trying to claim the safest corner of the room, he was doing everything he could to play dumb about it.

“Alright,” Ginger sighed. “Scoot over.”

Before he could protest, Ginger dropped to her knees on the boards beside Roach, effectively pinning him between her and the wall. Her horn glowed, hoisting Aurora’s saddlebags off her back and settling them next to his, each satchel providing a makeshift pillow. Seeing Ginger’s ploy unfolding beside a clearly uncomfortable changeling, Aurora licked her lips and dropped to the floor beside her with a tired grunt.

“I’m not moving,” Roach protested.

Ginger craned her neck around and smiled. He lay stubbornly on his back, his black legs held limp toward the ceiling. He looked like a wet cat struggling to assess the events that led it to being doused.

“No one said you had to, dear,” she pleasantly replied.

He pursed his lips as she wrapped the straps of his shotgun in her magic and slipped it free of his foreleg. For a moment he looked like he might scramble to his hooves and find another corner to sleep in, but then the moment passed and he blew out a resigned sigh.

Ginger smiled and pressed her cheek against her side of the saddlebag, using her right leg to grip Aurora around the chest and pull her a little closer. Her wings were warm against her and despite having a bit of fun tormenting Roach, she could already feel her muscles releasing the tension they’d collected over the past twenty-four hours.

Laying on bare wood like a can of sardines with what felt like a bundle of wrenches beneath her head, she surprised herself at how relaxing this was. Even Roach’s breathing seemed to grow slow as he settled into what was admittedly the least graceful position she’d left him. The poor thing was like an upturned turtle, and yet he was either too stubborn or too bemused to complain.

Aurora wrapped a hoof around hers and in doing so inadvertently toggled a switch on the Pip-Buck Ginger still wore. The screen blinked on, displaying a rough analysis of Ginger’s vitals on its bulky little screen. Aurora turned the device to face her, browsed the indicators for her general health, radiation exposure, even her hydration before using her other hoof to turn the screen off.

“You should take it back,” Ginger murmured into her ear.

“Mm,” she responded. “Probably.”

When she made no move to do so, Ginger nudged her. “Aurora.”

She felt her wings tense a little against her ribs. It was subtle, but it spoke volumes. She didn’t want it. Not after Ironshod managed to turn a piece of her home against her. Not after Coldbrook threatened to use a copy of her Pip-Buck to peel open and ransack Stable 10 if she didn’t comply with his demands to bring him information on SOLUS. Information that, as far as the three of them knew, even the Enclave didn’t have.

Ginger remembered the look on Roach’s face when the topic of SOLUS came up during their coerced meeting. The fear in his eyes as Coldbrook noticed his reaction and bent his entire attention on the changeling. Roach had told him SOLUS was an observation platform, a spy satellite built by Jetstream Industries.

She had a feeling she was the only pony in that booth who could tell he was lying. He knew something about the satellite, that much was true, but the way he pieced together his facts made it clear to her that they were anything but.

She sighed and let her hoof relax in Aurora’s softening grip. Already, she was dozing. At some point she would need to take this ancient piece of tech back. Coldbrook would have used his copy of her Pip-Buck to send the original a message by now, either to check in or make new demands. Even though her overstallion was aware of the risk to their Stable, she didn’t think it was wise to test Coldbrook’s patience. Stable-Tec might have made its name from building fortresses, but the Steel Rangers made theirs from breaking into them.

For now, she wouldn’t press the issue.

She adjusted herself against the makeshift pillow and reached out to the bulb hanging above them with her magic. The light winked out with a gentle click. Her eyelids grew heavy in the smothering dark.

“Goodnight,” she whispered, but Aurora had already drifted off.

Behind her, Roach mumbled something unintelligible.

She yawned and let herself relax more fully. The chill of the air flowing in from the outside balanced nicely with the warmth radiating off Roach and Aurora. This was nice, she decided. Silly as she felt for committing to the trap she hoped they might stay like this for a while.

She began to sink. Slowly at first as her breathing deepened and slowed, then more swiftly as her mind found that pleasant blankness every pony waited for in the pursuit of sleep. That blink between night and day, the points linked by a long and unknowable void of nothing. Ginger looked forward to the chance each night to turn her mind off and, for a brief while, not be.

Except as she fell away from the world, she found herself rising into a new one. One that had remained empty since the day Equestria burned.

For the first time in her life, Ginger dreamed.

A foal squirmed, lain bare on the cold surface of her father’s desk. Somewhere, far away and yet too close, a mare’s voice screamed nonsense against the uncaring walls of her master’s home. Sensing its mother’s distress, the foal began to bawl.

Ginger instinctively stepped toward the child.

“Don’t touch it,” her father stated.

“But it’s afraid,” she heard herself say.

Her father said nothing. He only stared at her, his angular face a mask of silent judgment. A curl of green flame danced along the fringe of his flawless black mane. He didn’t seem to care that the little mote was growing.

“This creature will never know fear,” he said, ignoring the foal’s growing distress. “That is the one blessing your deceit has purchased for it.”

A deep ache bloomed inside her. The pale blue foal needed to be held. Someone needed to console it, to tell it everything would be okay. That it was safe.

It wasn’t safe.

Ginger knew what would happen. She knew because she had lived it once before. Somehow she was living it again. The worst moment in her life.

Her father’s eyes pinned her to the blood red carpet of his study. New and ancient books, a fortune of paper alone, loomed above her head like titanic slabs. She imagined them falling. The noise they would make. The destruction they would bring to whoever found themselves trapped beneath them. Books filled with their history, their stories and their spells. All rendered useless by the slow, plodding death of their magic.

Her eyes drifted back to the desk, atop which her father had set a small plastic box.

No, she thought. I don’t want to see this.

He didn’t seem to care that the emerald flames had consumed his mane and were gradually charring his smooth, caramel coat. They migrated to his desk, trickling off his hooves like burning water. The foal continued to wail.

“I’ve never asked much of you, Ginger,” he said. Twin copper auras popped the clasps of the box and lifted the lid. “But keeping this from me? You’re thirteen years old. The help…”

The slaves, she thought.

“...look to you as much as the rest of our family for guidance. For direction, Ginger.”

He tugged a red handkerchief from the drawer of his desk. Ginger could feel herself beginning to sob as he draped it over the infant’s crumpled face.

Please, no.

“Every decision you make comes with a consequence,” he continued. From the plastic box, he lifted a narrow syringe and set it on the edge of the desk in front of her. He shook his head as if to say he had no choice in what would come next. “By allowing this to happen, you gave that mare something she hadn’t yet earned. Her mate will believe he can breed without consequence. That the rule of law has no meaning under our roof. Do you understand?”

Tears blotted her face as the foal struggled to remove the handkerchief from its face. He was going to make her do it. Her mother told her she would never have to see this part of their trade. She promised.

The flames climbed the curtains behind him, spreading to the books.

“This isn’t a punishment, Ginger,” he said, ignorant of the blaze that swarmed across his teeth. “A good unicorn owns her mistakes. That is the example we must set for those below us. I am asking you to have the courage to correct yours.”

The infant flailed beneath the square of cloth, too weak yet to roll away from it yet strong enough to try.

Her father nodded toward the needle. “Pick it up.”

Ginger felt herself struggling to light her horn, the magic coming to her too weakly to be reliable. The syringe and its yellowish liquid lifted, slowly, in the dim haze she’d conjured. Then it slipped free, falling like a pegasus through a cloud, onto the carpet. Humiliation seeped into her bones as her father sighed and stood from his chair, rounding the desk on thick hooves that spread the inferno.

“Concentrate,” he whispered.

Against her own will, she did. As he urged her to pool her magic around the syringe, he wrapped that fog in his own. She remembered the sensation of his power directing her, lifting the needle as surely as she would one of her own hooves. She wanted to douse her horn, to let go and run away, but this was her father. The stallion who she loved and trusted more than anyone in the world.

The stallion who guided the tip of the needle into the foal’s belly and pressed her magic against the plunger.

Ginger tried to pull herself away, to scream for it to stop, but her younger self didn’t have that courage. Not yet. She watched through crying eyes as the blanketed foal tried to wriggle away. Listened as its cries grew weaker. Quieter.

And went silent.

“There,” her father said. “All better.”

She stood there, frozen. Staring at what she had done.

Her father left her to open his study door. She heard hooves pad across the carpet and her elder sibling, Rosemary, walked up to their father’s desk with a small burlap bag floating ahead of her. Ginger looked down at the carpet, unable to watch her do the work.

“Good job, sis,” she whispered as she carried her burden back toward the door. Then she heard her hooves stop, followed by a tiny gasp. “Ohmigosh!”

Ginger blinked through her tears and stared after her. Rosemary beamed back, the burlap bundle beginning to smolder in the air beside her.

Her father, still waiting at the door, had a similarly misplaced smile on his lips. “Congratulations, dearheart.”

She wiped her face, not understanding. Their eyes didn’t quite meet hers. Instead, they stared at her flank. A chill ran up her back at the memory. She craned her neck to follow their gaze and saw for the first time, while her home was devoured by flame, the symbol that a cruel universe had chosen for her mark.

She awoke with a start, breathing hard and primed to flee. It took her several seconds to piece together where she was.

A chitinous leg lay across her chest, its owner’s snores burrowing into the back of her mane. Pressed into her stomach were Aurora’s wings, still insulating her from the cool breeze flowing in from the open window. The sensation of paralysis was gone but the emotion of reliving that moment still lingered like a ghost in her mind. Damp lines chilled her face and her eyes were gummy with drying tears.

It had felt so real. Had she hallucinated the entire thing? That day was fifteen years and several hundred miles behind her. It was a chapter of her life that she thought she’d moved beyond, and yet here she lay, plagued by the memory of the thing she did. She knew if she listened closely, she would hear the wails of that foal all over again.

She flattened her ears and buried her eyes in Aurora’s mane. No, she thought. She had suffered enough for what she did. What her father forced her to do. She wasn’t going to spend the rest of her life torturing herself.

Aurora stirred in her sleep and rolled over, draping a wing over Ginger’s body, feathers bending where Roach’s foreleg gripped her. Ginger allowed herself to be wrapped by them despite the growing feeling that she had done nothing to deserve her trust. She had tagged along with Aurora and Roach because the only other option was staying behind at her shop and waiting for a hunter to claim her bounty. They had anyway, and in doing so she had forced Aurora into a position where she felt obligated to save her and nearly died in the attempt. If they were a ship, she was most certainly their anchor.

As she watched Aurora sleep, she thought back to the flight they shared above the clouds. After discovering her past through Autumn, Ginger wouldn’t have blamed Aurora if she had left her at the array. Most would have. And yet, she hoisted Ginger onto her back and took her into the sky without reservation for how it might change them. Skirting below the Enclave’s permanent fog of clouds, they opened up to each other. Admitting to Aurora who she had once been - who her family had expected her to become - had been a relief she hadn’t known she needed.

Somehow, Aurora had taken her confession in stride.

You’re going to move forward, she told her. No more hiding what you did and no more lying about your mark. First chance you get to negate some of the evil you’ve done, you do it. Deal?

She leaned over and kissed Aurora’s forehead. It still felt strange to feel this way about a mare she still barely knew. Aurora represented something Ginger wished she could discover in herself. An unashamed sense of what was right and wrong, and the courage to act on it. Ginger wanted to know what that felt like, and being near Aurora, she thought she almost could.

Her thoughts swarmed around the promise they made. She thought about the caravan of ponies filtering out of the solar array in the aftermath of her rescue and wondered whether any of them had managed to escape. Chances were they were simply being escorted away by their masters, hurrying down the known wasteland trade routes that protected slavers and their cargo. Trekking to places like Kiln, Fetlock and the ruins of Appleloosa.

She could still hear the ghoul’s voice from earlier, clutching her hind leg and defying her to give him a price. He had been a slave, once. He knew the indignity and abuse that came at the hooves and horns of ponies like Ginger. She had wanted to tell him she understood despite knowing it was a lie. She could never understand. All she could hope to do was make up for her part in it.

A good unicorn owns her mistakes, her father reminded her.

She shut her eyes and tried hard to forget his voice. To forget the lessons he strove to teach her while the “help” broke their backs to ensure their masters wanted for nothing.

Her thoughts drifted to the strange vista of Kiln spread before them when they first approached. The oddly spaghetti-western style buildings constructed by the ghouls who lived in them, set apart from the smaller ramshackle structures thrown together on the northern edge of town furthest from the crater. A place assembled by slavers to safely move their cargo and loosely protected by Steel Rangers.

There were ponies less than a mile away, caged, waiting to be auctioned and delivered to whichever family had the caps to spend. She wondered if any of them would be taken west to work on whatever venture her former family dealt in these days. Likely there would be a few. Possibly more.

A thought occurred to her.

She’d never been east of here. Never been east of Junction City, for that matter. All she knew about what lay beyond the mountains ahead was what she had heard from travellers and scavengers who had come back from them. Vast corpses of cities many times larger than Canterlot, new and old, pecked at by raiders, ferals and nameless creatures that crawled out from the ruins to haunt the spaces not yet secured by the Steel Rangers. Anything of value beyond the mountains would be heavily protected by those who controlled them, and that included the slave routes.

Unlike Kiln.

The idea solidified in her mind and every inch of her rallied around it. This was the place. This was the only place that made sense. If she hesitated now, she knew she’d talk herself out of it. Find some reason to wait until the window was safely shut.

Gently, she lifted Aurora’s wing and folded it back against her side. She wrinkled her nose, then settled back to sleep. Roach didn’t so much as stir when she unwrapped his hoof from her belly. Best he didn’t wake up with his leg around her and develop a complex, anyway. She pushed herself up and turned, sitting with her half of Aurora’s saddlebags in front of her. Lifting the flap, she tugged the satchel up and searched the contents under the light of her magic.

The Rangers charged with safeguarding their confiscated supplies during their stay at Blinder’s Bluff had taken some liberties with what they chose to return. Ginger’s pistol, one of the first weapons she’d successfully trained herself to use after leaving home, had unsurprisingly gone missing. As had her leather jacket and the bloodied combat armor Aurora had been shot in when she mastered gliding. Her knife however still lay in its sheath, thrown among the contents of Aurora’s tool wrap. The simple weapon likely wasn’t worth the trouble stealing for what little it would fetch from the traders. It would have to do. She buckled the blade to her thigh. The plastic clasp released a sharp click.

The stump of Roach’s ear twitched and his milky eyes opened. He looked up at her, at the knife she’d equipped, and frowned.

“Where are you going?” he rumbled.

She stopped, closed her eyes and sighed. Of all times for him to be a light sleeper, why now?

“There’s something I need to do,” she said.

His frown deepened. “With a knife.”

“Hopefully not,” she said, her words clipped. Already, she could feel her opportunity slipping away. That gap between inspiration and action widening.

Roach pushed himself up without bothering to minimize the noise his chitin made against the rough boards. Aurora stirred in her sleep, her ears flicking at the noise.

When he spoke, there was an air of accusation in his voice. “What happened to us not running off on our own?”

She wanted to tell him that was his rule, not hers, but she caught herself. He was angry with her, but he was also afraid. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was already playing out a litany of what-ifs had she gotten out the door without waking him. Since the day they met on that lonely road east of New Canterlot, he’d taken up the mantle of being her protector. She knew part of that was his way of making up for what he couldn’t do for his daughter. He didn’t deserve to have his fear thrown back at him, least of all by her.

He pressed her. “Does it have anything to do with the slaver hub north of town?”

“You know it does,” she whispered.

“Ginger,” he said, “that ghoul got into your head. You don’t have to prove anything to him.”

Aurora stretched her legs and inhaled deeply as she shed the last layers of sleep. “Prove what to who?” she mumbled. The fatigue was heavy in her eyes as she squinted toward the window. “Celestia’s teats. It’s still dark out. Why are you guys up?”

Ginger chewed her lip and stared at Roach, knowing her chance was gone now. She was caught. He leveled his eyes right back at her. He didn’t need to say a word for her to know he wasn’t going to answer Aurora for her.

Seeing the tension between them, Aurora sat up. “What’s going on?”

Ginger broke her gaze with Roach and sighed. “I was going to take a walk to the slave pens and…” she hesitated at how ridiculous it sounded now that she was saying it. “I wanted to set as many free as I could.”

Aurora’s lips parted with confusion as she absorbed what she said. “You were going to go alone?”

She felt Roach’s eyes on the back of her neck and the guilt that came with knowing what she had tried to do. “I didn’t want either of you to get hurt on my account.”

Aurora winced. It wasn’t much, just a twitch that was gone as quickly as it appeared, but the hurt in her eyes had been there all the same. Ginger’s ears dipped with shame. What had she been thinking? Why in Equestria did she think slinking off into the night to do something that could get her killed was a good idea? Her jaw clenched as she watched the mare who risked her life to save hers doubtlessly having the same thoughts. Possibly second thoughts.

She could still see her father standing in his study, the infant foal squirming on the unforgiving surface of his desk. She could practically smell the pipe smoke on his breath as he stood next to her, guiding her fledgling magic with his own, making her do something that sent her fleeing into the wasteland just to escape a memory that would dog her for fifteen years.

Something passed across Aurora’s face. She wiped the crust from her eyes and pushed herself off the floor. “I’m sorry, but I’m coming with you.”

Her heart skipped. “What?”

“Same,” Roach added, biting the strap of his saddlebags and throwing them over his back.

She watched him begin fixing his shotgun around his perforated foreleg, then turned to see Aurora begin pressing rounds into a fresh magazine. She wanted to tell them to stop, to forget she said anything and for the three of them to go back to sleep, but the determination on their faces made it clear that their minds were made up.

Whether she wanted them to or not, they were going to help.

“How do we want to approach this?” Roach prompted.

“Well,” she said, and realized as she said it that she hadn’t thought that far ahead. She took a moment to consider her - their options. Roach deftly tightened the straps around his foreleg as she mulled it over.

They had a salvaged shotgun, a knife and a glorified hunting rifle between the two of them. Hardly armed for bear and most definitely not prepared to fend off a counterattack. Without knowing how many slavers were in Kiln, let alone how well armed they might be, their best odds rested in making as little noise as possible, which would be difficult to say the least.

She looked to Aurora. As much as that mare had managed to burrow into her heart, she was a mediocre shot at best. Her biggest advantages were her wings.

And then there was her magic, the single most difficult puzzle she was still trying to solve. The only spell she felt any amount of confidence using was her shield, but she wasn’t certain if she could hold it against sustained gunfire. When she put her magic between Aurora and Autumn Song’s bullet, the sheer rush of adrenaline kept her from feeling the worst of the pain. When Gallow’s mother fired one round after another into her shield, she had felt every shot as if the inside of her head were being rung like a bell.

Kicking a nest of angry slavers was not the ideal stress test for her magic. Relying on that spell too much would land them in a heap of trouble.

This wasn’t a problem they could shoot their way through. Not without innocent ponies getting caught in the crossfire. Somehow, they needed to convince the slavers to part ways with their slaves without things devolving into a gunfight.

Then it hit her.

“I’m a Dressage,” she said, and a smile began to form on her lips. She turned to Roach, grinning. “I’m absolutely a Dressage.”

He shrugged. “Just because I escape a hivemind doesn’t mean I can read yours,” he said. “Maybe explain it for the duller students in the class.”

“I might need to copy your notes,” Aurora added with a tired smirk.

Their jabs aside, it relieved Ginger to hear them willing to listen. She felt awful for trying to skulk off without them, but knowing they were still here to support her soothed that ache.

“Our family,” she said, recoiling at the simple truth of the word our, “is one of the most premiere names in… that industry. My dear father is responsible for establishing many of the common practices used by dozens of the largest slaver factions east and west of New Canterlot. Suffice to say, the Dressage name carries some clout. I think it’s about time I get some use out of it.”

Aurora slung her rifle over her shoulder and turned it sideways to inspect the safety. Ginger couldn’t help but smile a little at how fastidious she was becoming with the weapon. Hardly anyone in the wasteland bothered to maintain them, let alone ensure they were safe.

“And that’s going to convince them to let their slaves walk free?” Aurora asked.

“Hardly,” she said, tipping her horn toward the collar and chain seared into her flank. “I’m going to purchase their contracts, and I’ll be using this abomination of a cutie mark as a line of credit.”

She watched as Aurora’s eyes widened and turned to Roach, who had a similarly impressed expression. “That’s not a bad idea,” she said.

“Sounds a lot easier than luring a deathclaw as a distraction,” he nodded. “Assuming this works, what are we supposed to do with these slaves? We can’t take them with us, and I doubt the Stable has time for us to take them back to the Bluff.”

“Well, for one, they won’t be slaves,” she said, paused, then added, “I hadn’t given any thought yet to what they would do after.”

The admission sucked some of the air out of the room. Her plan relied heavily on her charisma alone, but she was confident this could work if they played their cards right. Blinder’s Bluff was a day’s walk from Kiln. Longer if they stopped to rest. They couldn’t afford to backtrack all that way themselves, especially with Coldbrook likely still fuming over having been cut out of Aurora’s Pip-Buck the minute they were beyond the wall. One of them would have to step up and lead the rest.

“We can send them to Nurse Redheart,” she suggested.

Roach looked dubious. “That’s a lot to drop on one pony without warning.”

“But she would help them,” she insisted. “Redheart must have pumped a hundred caps worth of clean water and Rad-Away into Aurora and I without thinking about charging either of us. She’s a good pony. It’s a burden, but I think she’d understand.”

“Hm,” he muttered, chewing his lip before finally nodding. “She’s been a good one since the beginning. Probably knows a few ponies on the bluff that would be willing to chip in, too.”

“And by the time they work out they’ve been duped, their cargo will be long gone,” Aurora said. “It’s karmic justice. I like it.”

“It’s less than they deserve,” Ginger said, glancing between their meager supply of weapons, “but we can’t play cards we haven’t been dealt. We should go now while it’s still dark. I don’t like the prospect of pulling off this gambit in broad daylight when a slaver might be so inclined to follow us.”

Aurora wrapped her feathers around the doorknob and opened it. “You think one of them might try to pull something?”

Ginger and Roach followed her out into the brightly lit hall, the three of them squinting against the glare of the bulbs strung along the ceiling. The mattress she had discarded into the hallway was surprisingly occupied. A green earth pony lay curled atop it, her satchel and a compact weapon hugged beneath her foreleg. They stepped around her and descended the stairs to the bar.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” Ginger said, recalling the thick ropes Trotter had used to bind her legs. She lowered her voice as they walked across the bar floor where a smattering of patrons still occupied a few stools in front of Brandy. “I don’t think it would send a convincing message for the slavers to see us heading east and their captives go west.”

Ginger spared a look back at the table where the ghoul stallion had hooked her leg. It was empty now. Chances were slim to zero that they would ever cross paths again, but that didn’t quench her desire to prove him wrong. She was more than a slaver’s daughter. More than a name or the mark given to her by an uncaring universe. When this was over, he would realize just how wrong he had been.

At the end of the day, she could live with that.

She pushed through the brightly painted doors and into the night with Aurora and Roach at her side. Fifteen years she wasted hiding from her past, pretending she was a mare who died centuries ago. Now, with the help of her friends, she was finally going to make up for the life she stole.

Bathed in the sickly green light cast by the gaudy sign of the Glowing Gash, breathing air tainted with the faint flavor of metal, Ginger turned north toward the slave pens.

Her friends followed close behind.

October 29th, 1075

Hardly anyone attended Gilda’s memorial.

The meager turnout didn’t surprise Rainbow in the least. To most ponies, Gilda was a name none of them had heard before. Rarity had ensured that her death was mentioned in most of the larger papers, but more than a few publishers found one excuse or another to relegate their four or five required sentences to the back pages.

Rainbow didn’t blame them. Gilda had never gone out of her way to make friends during her brief stint in Equestria with the exception of herself and a wingful of other ponies. Why give an anonymous gryphon more space on the page than she’d earned? It wasn’t just business, it was basic logic. What more could anyone expect?

It still stung.

She stared out at Fluttershy’s vegetable garden, huddled in one of the creaking wicker chairs she kept tucked beneath the leaf-shaded veranda built into the rear of her cottage. A cup of chamomile tea rested in her lap, held by a feather that hadn’t lifted it to her lips for some time now. She sighed and forced herself to take a sip. After everything she put Fluttershy through this past week, it was the least she could do.

Fluttershy hadn’t taken the news of Gilda’s death any better than Rainbow. The tears and apologies spilled out of her like a broken dam before Rainbow had a chance to tell her that she hadn’t been implicated, and the only one of them currently under a microscope was herself. She had no choice but to tell her that Spitfire had made the decision to have Gilda killed, but Rainbow stopped short of sharing that she had quietly lost her ministry in the blowback.

Keeping Fluttershy calm was paramount if she hoped to keep Spitfire from sniffing her way into the Ministry of Peace, and if that meant lying to one of her oldest friends to do it, then she would.

She sipped cold tea, enjoying its lingering sweetness while the evening sun turned the sky beautiful shades of golden lavender. Murmurs found their way to her ears through the nearby window as if to remind her that, as much as she wanted to, she couldn’t sit out here forever. She would, she told herself, but not right now. Right now, she just wanted to sit outside and pretend she was okay.

The wicker chair crackled as she wrapped her free wing around her legs. It was cooling down in earnest now. The little garden was empty now, picked clean ahead of next week’s scheduled frost. Despite all the rigors of her duty as a ministry mare, Fluttershy never succumbed to the pressure of selling her home like the rest of them. When she offered her cottage up for the memorial, Rainbow leapt on it. She could count the opportunities the past year had given her to visit Ponyville on her hoof and she doubted the next one would present itself any time soon.

As unnecessary as Rainbow felt it was, this had been her own small way of apologizing. Accepting was a kind of forgiveness, even though she could tell it would be a long while before Fluttershy gave herself permission to move on.

The murmuring voices inside the cottage coalesced into a chorus Rainbow recognized as goodbyes and a little twist of guilt wrapped around itself in her belly. Standing in Fluttershy’s den as one pony after the other offered her the same condolence, the same awkward hug and the same misty-eyed reassurance that they were there for her… she didn’t have the energy for it. The past week had been a constant parade of sympathy messages on her terminal, cards and impromptu visits from ponies whose names she couldn’t remember. To say it was exhausting would be the understatement of her lifetime. She’d been worn numb.

She tried not to grimace as the back door clicked open. Through the corner of her eye, she could see Twilight leaning out over the threshold.

“Hey, Rainbow Dash,” she said with the same delicate tone as everyone else, as if speaking too loudly might shatter her like the teacup in her wing. “I’ve got to head out.”

“Okay,” she said.

Twilight pulled the door shut behind her as she stepped out onto the veranda. “Is there anything you need?”

Rainbow pressed her lips together and shook her head, biting back a jagged remark that nearly made its way across her tongue. “I’m good.”

Twilight lingered for a moment, long enough for Rainbow to begin considering how not good she was. Sitting here, back in Ponyville with her closest friends reminiscing together for the first time in what felt like ages while she hid outside, she felt disgusted with herself. The muscles in her jaw ached with the effort it took to keep her placid mask in place. Despite her efforts, she found herself needing to blink the haze from her eyes.

To her credit, Twilight pretended not to notice. The last thing Rainbow wanted was for her to wrap her in yet another crushing hug and feed her reassurances. In the face of a tragedy that few of them were affected by, the only option any of her friends seemed to have was to do their best to squeeze the tears out of her until the tap ran dry.

“Well,” Twilight said, bowing her head slightly so she didn’t rake her horn through the living awning of leaves above her, “the princesses are inside right now in case...”

Rainbow shook her head.

Twilight nodded and lit her horn. “Okay. Take care of yourself, Rainbow. You know where to find me if you ever feel like talking.”

Behind a locked door that you never answer at the bottom of the Pillar, she thought. “Thanks for coming, Twi.”

She didn’t bother watching the shimmering sphere that swept into existence around Twilight. One moment she was there, surrounded by her magic, and then a flash and displacement of air and she was gone.

Rainbow watched the last lavender motes of Twilight’s magic wink out of existence one by one, leaving her once again in relative peace. She cleared her throat and sniffed while the chilled breeze that slid across Fluttershy’s property did the slow work of drying her eyes. She lifted the cup of tea to her lips and drank what was left, hoping to drown the sour taste in the back of her throat with honeyed water.

Now that Twilight mentioned it, Rainbow could hear the almost musical voices of the princesses as they chatted with her friends. She set the empty cup down onto the wooden porch, knowing at some point staying out here would cross a line between taking a breather and blatant avoidance. She considered taking Twilight’s advice and getting up to make at least a brief appearance for the princesses, but as she shrugged off her blanket of feathers she could tell her heart wasn’t in it yet.

She sagged back into the chair and wrapped herself tight, content to watch the squirrels chase each other through Fluttershy’s empty garden a little while longer.

The sun had barely finished sinking below the horizon when the back door opened a second time. Rainbow jerked awake when it clicked shut, her brain rebelling against the task of dragging her out of the nap she’d just begun to settle into.

“Fluttershy said I might find you out here.”

Rainbow sat up a little at the sound of Luna’s voice. Gone were the days when she might have tensed with fear in the presence of the princess of the night, nor did she any longer feel obligated to jump down from her chair and prostrate herself before the younger of the two Celestial Sisters like most ponies were expected to. That didn’t mean she was immune to the undeniable force of Luna’s presence.

Her shoulder popped as she straightened in her chair. “Sorry, I must’ve dozed off.”

“Oh, I’m the last pony you should apologize to for that,” Luna said dismissively. “You’ve had a long week, and I know how exhausting these things can be.”

Rainbow offered a weak smile as the deep indigo mare stepped past her, considering an identical wicker chair near the porch steps. Luna was comparatively smaller in stature than her sister, but the mare still stood a full head taller than Rainbow. It was a toss-up whether the brittle furniture would support her weight, and one that Luna wisely chose not to test.

She turned toward the empty space next to Rainbow and indicated it with a subtle dip of her horn. “May I sit?”

It was kind of her to offer the illusion of choice. “Knock yourself out,” she said.

She watched while Luna made herself comfortable on the sanded oak planks, near enough that her shoulder brushed the right side of Rainbow’s chair. A quick flicker from her horn and her star-streaked mane began flowing away from her like a diverted river.

“Tia wanted me to give you her regards,” she said.

Rainbow allowed herself to relax back into the chair’s woven curves. “Is she still here?”

Luna shook her head. “She left a little while ago with everyone else. Fluttershy thought it best to spare you the trouble of seeing everyone off.”

“Great,” she muttered. One more screw-up to throw onto the pile.

“Everyone handles grief in their own way,” Luna said, her tone free of judgment. “I never had a chance to meet this friend of yours. Were you and Gilda close?”

Rainbow felt herself drawing inward again. “We used to be.”

Luna nodded as if she understood. “Ah. Is it safe for me to assume that you would prefer to talk about literally anything else?”

Rainbow surprised herself as a tiny smirk pulled at her lip. Despite having lived well more than a generation for every one of Rainbow’s years, the time it took Luna to finally shed her Old Canterlot verbiage and adjust to modern parlance had taken place in a relatively short amount of time. Speaking with her now, it was easy to forget that she was centuries - some believed millennia - old.

If anyone understood how tired she was, it would probably be her.

“You assume correctly,” she chuckled.

Luna leaned into the side of Rainbow’s chair, making the wicker creak. Her eyes traced the darkening sky as she decided on what to say. Gradually, a conspiratorial smile creased her cheek. “Did you know,” she began, “before Tia and I were born, magic was much less common?”

Rainbow furrowed her brow before twisting a little to better see the alicorn. “How so?”

“It’s difficult to remember the specifics. None of the scrolls I grew up with are around for me to reference these anymore, and I wasn’t a particularly good student as a filly,” she said, her tone melancholic as she sifted through her own memories. “But what I do remember is that the world used to be more… untamed than it is now. Unicorns only had a rudimentary understanding of magic back then. It was something they could feel, but there wasn’t enough of it for them to channel. There used to be a scroll about it, listing all the different cults and religions which grew up around the belief it existed at all.”

Listening to Luna speak was like salve to a wound. “If that’s true, then where did it come from?”

Luna shrugged. “Nobody knows. Half the fun of reading some of those scrolls were the theories. Some ponies believed magic was a gift from some ancient god or gods, which usually led to them leveraging their following in pursuit of influence or power. Those never lasted very long. Others thought that magic was a byproduct of our planet. Something leached out from the rocks that unicorns were uniquely equipped to detect. There was even a cult of alicorns that believed our world existed near a natural river of magic that stretches from one end of existence to the other, and that we’re slowly being pulled into the current.”

She paused to chuckle, and Rainbow couldn’t help but smile a little too. “I’m so glad we’re beyond debates like those. I can only imagine what it must have been like for every pony born with a horn on their head to have a personal stake in proving they were right.”

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around Equestria having enough alicorns to form a cult,” Rainbow said.

Luna rolled her eyes. “Believe me, we’re all better off that the Trinities bred themselves out of existence before magic started to truly bloom. Everything I remember reading about them pointed to their inability to stop stroking their own egos. Had one of them ever learned to manipulate magic, they most likely would have perished from dehydration in their chambers.”

Rainbow didn’t quite allow herself to laugh, but the mental image had her smiling at the floor nonetheless.

Luna hid her own smirk behind her hoof. “I’m sorry, that was a little more crude than the occasion deserves.”

“Trust me, if Gilda was here…” she stopped herself, feeling that familiar lump rising into her throat just in time to spoil the moment. She swallowed, hard, and shook her head with embarrassment.

Gilda never traded in vanilla jokes, preferring to sling whatever nugget of humor seemed funny at the time no matter what shade of red they tended to turn unfortunate ponies caught in the crossfire. She would have appreciated knowing one of Equestria’s royalty was capable of doing the same.

She didn’t want to think about that now.

“When did magic become,” she prompted, gesturing at Luna’s horn. “You know, what it is now.”

Luna took up the thread without skipping a beat. “From what I read, it took some time. Centuries before most earth ponies or pegasi agreed that existed at all, let alone was getting stronger. Unicorns would often report feelings as if it were pooling around them, sometimes manifesting from them at the urgence of a particularly powerful thought or desire. By the time Tia and I were born, seeing a pony harnessing magic was no more uncommon than finding a pegasus in flight.” She lifted Rainbow’s empty teacup into the air on a carpet of her own magic, admiring the delicate network of tea-stained cracks that webbed its interior.

She touched the tip of her horn to the cup’s rim and it split apart along those fractures, reducing it to a glittering cloud of porcelain confetti. Rainbow leaned against her armrest, happy to enjoy this little distraction as Luna formed vague shapes in the air with the teacup’s remains.

“We were only there to witness the very end of that golden age,” she said, forming the chips into dozens of nondescript equine figures. “All at the same time, those disparate theologies, faiths and doctrines were suddenly proven right. Magic was real. We could touch it. Change it. Even show it to those who couldn’t understand what we felt for so long but couldn’t properly express.”

The ponies evaporated again into an amorphous cloud.

“It was what destroyed them, in the end. What made any one of those religions special when all the others were experiencing the same epiphany as yours? The unknown mystery of magic was the glue that held them together. Take away the mystery and suddenly all of those gods and deities and prophets were open to scrutiny. To study. It turned the very bedrock of those beliefs to sand.”

Rainbow raised her wing and sifted the tips of her feathers through the constellation of shattered china. The razor-sharp chips flowed through the delicate blue vanes without so much as cutting a single one, simultaneously guided and shielded by the royal blue glow of Luna’s magic.

Whether it was weariness, middle-age or a visitation from her headstrong youth, Rainbow gave voice to a thought that she knew she should never utter. “That sounds a lot like how ponies believe you control the moon.”

She expected Luna’s tone to change. For her to demand an explanation, or warn her not to say anything she regretted. Something dramatic.

Instead, the princess of the night offered an imperceptible shrug in return while continuing to play with the remains of Fluttershy’s teacup. She looked at Rainbow with an inquisitive smile. “Do you believe I can?”

Her candid reaction caught Rainbow off guard, and for a long moment she didn’t know how to answer. Every neuron in her head screamed at her to make the obvious choice and lie, that anything else was risking the same fate Spitfire had used to threaten her into surrendering her ministry. Possibly worse.

Definitely worse.

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat while Luna waited, patiently, for her to answer. The thought of stealing Spitfire’s thunder by handing her own destruction to someone else had a certain appeal to it.

“No,” she said, and with that word she could feel a weight being lifted from her shoulders. She took a breath to steady herself and added, “I think if you could raise the moon, it wouldn’t have just done it on its own.”

Luna blinked and looked past the floating porcelain to the distant horizon, where the waxing crescent of her moon hung low in the late evening sky. She sat there for several long seconds, chagrined as the moon continued its lazy ascent without her. Then she licked her lips and broke into a grin, her shoulders bouncing as she silently laughed to herself.

Rainbow waited for fire and brimstone to rain from the stars, but it never came.

Luna looked at Rainbow as if she were seeing her for the first time. Instead of anger, there was a tangible joy in her voice as she said, “And here I thought Twilight was the smart one.”

Rainbow wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she chose the safe route and kept her mouth shut.

Luna turned back to the floating bits of china and chuckled as she drew them back together, each shard sliding perfectly into place until the original shape of the cup solidified. She touched her horn to the aggregate form as she had when she split it apart, and the fractures clicked together with an audible clink.

She lowered the restored teacup back to the smooth boards. When her horn went dark, it was in better condition than when Fluttershy had carried it out to Rainbow on the veranda.

“You’re not angry?”

Luna shook her head. “I don’t see what good it would do if I were. Besides, it’s nice not having to pretend for one night.” Her smile wavered a little, and she regarded Rainbow with a serious edge to her voice. “I wouldn’t advise broaching that subject with my sister. In fact, I would rather you didn’t share any of what we discussed here. She has a tendency to overreact.”

Rainbow didn’t want to picture what an alicorn princess overreacting looked like. “Okay,” she said.

Luna’s eyes tracked her with something akin to curiosity as she adjusted her wings around her legs, trying to trap some of the warmth that had escaped when she passed her feathers through the cloud of teacup. “Something is still bothering you.”

It felt as if the mare’s eyes were boring a hole into her mind. Rainbow looked away, suddenly uneasy at this new attention. “I just miss my friend, is all.”

The alicorn made a face. “No, I know what grief looks like. I’ve seen it thousands of times over. You’re afraid of something.”

Rainbow chewed the inside of her lip, shaking her head. “It’s just stress from work,” she said. It wasn’t a complete lie, but the core of mistruth drew a frown across Luna’s muzzle. “Really.”

Luna placed a hoof on the arm of her chair, brushing against her feathers in the process. “Rainbow Dash, if you’re ever overwhelmed with your duties, I can always…”

“It’s fine,” she said a little more sharply than she intended, and quickly backpedaled. “I’m sorry, it’s just… Spitfire’s already offered to help me out while I process everything. I’ll be better in a week or two.”

Luna pulled back her hoof and nodded. “She’s a good friend for doing that,” she said, though there was a brittleness to her smile that hadn’t been there before. She pushed herself to her hooves, careful to keep her head low much like Twilight had done earlier, and regarded her for a moment. “I’m sure the guards are wondering where I am by now, and you look like you could use some sleep. Do you have anything pressing to take care of tomorrow?”

Rainbow almost snorted. Thanks to Spitfire, her agenda was getting lighter by the day. “Just a few meetings.”

“Skip them,” Luna said, arching her eyebrow as she spoke. “You’ve gone through enough and you deserve a break. Take the day off tomorrow.”

She pursed her lips, her mind already rifling through the list of excuses for why she couldn’t. They were all usually very convincing.

Luna’s wing settled on her shoulder, derailing Rainbow’s train of thought. She glanced down at the dark feathers gripping her, then at the alicorn they were attached to. Luna didn’t touch anyone. Nobody touched Luna. The hackles down her mane instinctively bristled at the unexpected breach.

Luna bent down until she was at eye level with her. “Believe me, I know what it’s like to burn out. Take a day.”

Rainbow forced herself to nod. “Okay,” she said, gently pulling herself free of Luna’s feathers. “Just the one.”

She folded her wing back to her side, her smile taking on a renewed warmth. “Good. Equestria needs you at your best, even if that means being a little selfish once in a while.” She turned and stepped toward the stairs leading to Fluttershy’s garden, turning her gaze to the first stars to peek out through the veil of night. “I enjoyed speaking with you. It isn’t often I’m able to be so candid.”

Rainbow slid out of her chair and quickly found herself shivering without her shawl of feathers to insulate her against the biting air. If it bothered Luna, she didn’t show it. “I should say goodbye to Fluttershy.”

“Please do the same for me,” she said. She unwrapped her wings as she descended the steps, testing her feathers against the slow breeze. “We’ll speak again soon.”

She watched as Luna flapped her wings toward the damp grass and pitched herself into the sky. Her dark coat bled into the deep blue of the night until Rainbow could no longer distinguish her from the surrounding stars.

She stood there for some time, thinking about the strange history Luna had shared. An Equestria without magic, broken into strange factions with stranger beliefs. Cults and their unknowable gods.

She wondered if any of it was even true.

“Ugh.”

Aurora scraped her tongue against her teeth and spat. The irradiated breeze flowing in from the crater was not making her cottonmouth any better. All she could taste was sour metal.

“I told you to drink more water,” Roach said.

“I finished that pitcher, didn’t I?”

He shrugged in response. Technically she had shared it with Ginger, but that had seemed like plenty at the time. Her body disagreed. Thankfully Brandy’s selection of liquor had been so watered down that, aside from a dry mouth, they had dodged the less pleasant effects of a hangover.

Ginger seemed barely affected at all. In fact, she seemed more awake than ever. It was only a few minutes past four in the morning according to what Ginger reported from their Pip-Buck, which meant they had squeaked in less than four hours of sleep. Aurora trotted in place as they followed one of the narrower dirt roads north, toward the dim glow of what appeared to be stadium lights. It was an old trick she learned down in Mechanical whenever Millie woke her with the inevitable message that someone needed her to cover a shift. The exercise helped her get much-needed adrenaline to her brain, just enough to last her the trip to the break room coffee pot.

She wondered if slavers drank coffee. It occurred to her that since leaving Stable 10, she’d been on a strictly decaf diet. During the last six days she hadn’t had much time to consider that sad fact, but now that the idea was in her head it was all her body wanted.

Ginger eyed her as she rapidly alternated hooves. “Are you alright?”

“Just getting the blood pumping,” she said, trying to ignore the mad bobbling of her rifle on its strap. She knew she looked ridiculous, but that was alright. The important thing was that she could feel herself waking up with each puff of cool night air.

She couldn’t help but feel a little excited. Pulling one over on ponies who bought and sold their kin like loaves of bread appealed to her in so many ways she lost count. She clearly remembered the ring of chain link cages built into the walls of the tank Autumn had kept Ginger prisoner in, but until they left the array Aurora had never seen a real slave before. From so high up they had appeared to look like any other pony, excluding the explosive-laced collars around their necks. Ginger had told her there was more to it than that, and she believed it, but the concept of owning another pony was so foreign to her that in a strange way, her curiosity overrode her apprehension as they approached the encampment.

A wide stretch of dirt marked the end of what the ghouls of Kiln claimed as their settlement, and the simple constructed buildings fell behind them. Ahead lay what appeared to be an old running track of some kind. Behind it stood the ruins of a large, squarish charred structure that had collapsed some time ago in the past. A portion of billboard-sized signage leaned on a slant against the side of the building, standing on the stumps of torn girders that had once been its supports. Someone had to have placed it there, she realized. This close to ground zero, the area had been scraped clean. And yet, someone or several someones had organized to drag the top half of a billboard to the blasted remains of what must have been a substantial building.

On it, the faded and flaking image of a comically muscled grey earth pony winked at her, wearing denim bib overalls and a miner’s helmet. He held a sizable pickaxe between his teeth, his lips split into a confident grin. Either the sign was charred black, or the pony was meant to look like he was covered in soot. The caricature stood framed by a slogan whose letters were difficult, but not impossible to make out.

Aurora didn’t know what a collier was or what they were fighting over, but she suspected it was meant to be in good fun. Kiln had been built atop the remains of Quarrytown by its surviving residents, and it was clear just by looking at the quality of their housing that they took a measure of pride in keeping that memory alive. The billboard had to have meant something special for them to have dragged it all the way here.

To each their own, she thought.

They passed the billboard and drew up even with the blasted structure that held it up. The sign leaned against a pair of rusted beams that bent away from the crater like candles whose wax had softened and rehardened. Rivulets of solid steel drew paths down what remained of the beams. Inside lay a jumbled heap of black bricks, burying any evidence of what the building had once housed. More bricks scattered the grounds behind it, leaving a minefield of edged stones half-sunk into the dirt which drew a path straight to the slavers’ encampment.

“That must be where the colliers did their fighting,” Aurora said, half-joking, half-hoping one of them would explain the billboard to her.

Ginger didn’t comment. Her face was a mask of concentration. Roach was already surveying the scene that lay in front of them, making mental notes of any hidden dangers they might not have a clear view of once they entered.

The encampment sat atop an oval track that looked suspiciously similar to the decathlon running track pictured in the history books back home. A conglomeration of sheet metal, salvaged wood planks and chain link ran a complete circuit of the inside track, replete with barbed wire crowning the top. At least six ponies that she could see plodded along a platform behind the wall’s edge, providing them with as much cover as it did a view of the surrounding terrain. It was a crude but effective wall for any pony without feathers, but she had a feeling flying over the top of it would be met with a less than pleasant reception.

She kept her wings to herself as Ginger pulled slightly ahead, leading the two of them to a wide break in the wall near what used to be the starting line where two armed unicorns tracked their approach. Their shadows stretched ahead of them, thrown long by a bank of stadium lights propped atop makeshift scaffolding beyond the far wall. Three bulbs burned with enough energy to drag away the night and thrust the camp into an early twilight.

Past the entrance, a line of wagons and pitched canvas tents ran the circumference of the inner field. Through the gaps between them, Aurora could make out the forms of several ponies curled on the floor of cages clustered at the center of the grounds.

Her curiosity died on the vine.

“Stop.”

One of the unicorns, the color of honey, stepped out from the break in the wall with his magic gripping the stock of his “rifle.” Aurora squinted at the weapon. It looked like the product of a misbegotten romance between plumber’s scrap and a woodpile. If she didn’t know any better, the barrel was a length of half-inch metal pipe held to a two-by-four by at least a dozen steel cable ties.

The rifle’s threaded muzzle lifted slightly toward the dirt beneath their hooves. “That’s close enough,” the guard said. “Turn around and find someplace else to be. Camp’s closed until morning.”

The stallion wore the strangest armor Aurora had ever seen. Leather pads run through with sharpened stumps of rebar adorned both his shoulders, matching the shorter studs buried into the catcher-style padding down the fronts of his forelegs and chest. His mane was cut short, leaving little more than a couple inches of buzzed brown hair that ran from his forehead to the nape of his neck. His partner, a pink mare keeping her distance back at the break in the wall, bore the same manestyle and armor.

Aurora tried to think of a reason to have three-inch long rusted spikes so close to either side of her neck and failed to come up with a good one. One wrong fall and he’d be chewing on one of those through his cheek. It must be purely for intimidation.

She worked to keep her face a mask of neutrality. These slavers looked ridiculous.

She noticed Ginger smiling at the stallion as if she were trying to instruct a lovably dense student. “Darling, I won’t fault you for an admirable performance of your role, but I haven’t come all this way from New Canterlot just so your boss can get his beauty sleep. Now, be a dear and tell the slavemaster that a Ms. Dressage is waiting outside with an offer he’ll want to hear for himself.”

The stallion narrowed his eyes at her and squinted at her mark in the dim light.

“Or,” she continued, “you can insist that I wait outside with my entourage until daylight and explain to him yourself why my offer just became much less generous.”

For a moment it seemed like the stallion was giving serious thought to stonewalling them out of sheer belligerence. He pressed his lips into a narrow line and let his strange weapon hang from its strap.

“Wait here,” he grumbled. On his way through the wall, he looked at his counterpart still at her post. “Make sure they don’t go anywhere.”

The mare indicated the ground they stood on and cocked an eyebrow as if to emphasize what they had already clearly heard. Aurora glanced at Roach, who was doing an excellent job looking bored, then to Ginger, whose lead they were both committed to following.

The three of them stood in place, waiting for some time before they heard the crunching of hooves over packed soil.

A visibly irritated and compact unicorn appeared at the gate, bedecked in a rumpled cotton shirt framed by a red vest that he had buttoned haphazardly on the way. His coat was the color of old rust and was missing in several patches from what appeared to be a bad case of mange. If his appearance bothered him, he didn’t show it as he came to an abrupt stop beneath the arch of his wall.

He stamped the dirt with his hoof. “Come here.”

Ginger’s smile tightened as she led them to the gate.

“Pickett tells me you have an offer for me that couldn’t wait,” he said, his sunken eyes glaring up at her from his almost comically small frame. “I’m also to understand you claim to be one of the Dressages out of New Canterlot. I’ll do you the service of speaking plainly when I say I’m unconvinced of either.”

Aurora watched as Ginger pivoted slightly, just enough to give him an unbroken view of the chain and collar on her flank.

He lifted his chin slightly as he paused to consider. “Cutie marks have been faked before.”

“And I assume you’re well aware of what my family does to impersonators,” she replied, her voice as pleasant as if she were complimenting the unkempt mop of his white mane. “I assumed my escort would already speak to my authenticity.”

She gestured to Aurora, who straightened.

The stallion turned to her, looked her up and down for a long moment, then pursed his lips and nodded once to her before turning his attention back to Ginger. “I suppose she does, though I feel the need to express my concern in bringing an Encl… an uncovered pegasus this deep into the wasteland.”

Ginger continued to watch him, waiting.

“Ms. Dressage,” the slavemaster grudgingly added. He shot Roach a mistrustful glance, his eyes lingering on the strange holes tunneling through the lower halves of his legs. He broke his stare and looked back to Ginger. “Name’s Ward.”

She smiled. “Well, Ward, I wouldn’t worry yourself about my traveling companions. They’re quite competent.”

“Mm,” the slavemaster grunted. “I ain’t so worried about them as I am about you. Last I heard, Autumn Song had a bounty on your head to the tune of two thousand caps for killing her kid brother.”

Aurora noticed the muscles in her companion’s shoulders tense by the barest degree.

Ginger cleared her throat and proceeded to weave a lie with such casual confidence that even Aurora found herself briefly second-guessing the events leading to Cider’s death.

“Her ‘kid brother’ had it in his head that their monopoly on the eastern trade routes put him in a position to leverage a twenty percent tariff against the slaver guilds,” she said, shrugging. “They both miscalculated.”

Ward blinked rapidly as her meaning sank in. “Ah,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “I suppose that would explain why we’ve been hearing stories of Rangers turning caravans away from her headquarters. Then I assume the traders who still claim to represent F&F Mercantile are flying a dead banner?”

Ginger nodded. “Their company has been dissolved, in a manner of speaking, yes.”

“The world is changing,” he said, and met her gaze. “So. This offer you mentioned?”

His business-like tone couldn’t mask the eagerness behind his eyes. He lifted a hind leg and used the edge of his hoof to scratch a cluster of scabs on the inside of the other. Aurora wished to everything holy that she could unsee that.

“Before we discuss that,” she said, nodding past the tents and toward the ponies held at the center of the field, “I’d like to see your stock.”

Ward’s chest puffed up beneath his wrinkled shirt. Clearly he saw an opportunity forming beyond whatever deal awaited him. Aurora spent enough years in Mechanical to know what a brown-noser looked like, and Slavemaster Ward looked ready to bury his entire muzzle in…

She winced and banished the thought before it could sear itself into her brain.

“Right this way, Ms. Dressage,” he said, ushering them past the gate and into the encampment.

It was quiet beneath the stadium lights, as long as one ignored the ratcheting snores coming from the ring of inward-facing tents. Many looked custom crafted, stitched together from a patchwork of canvas and other materials. Dark layers of fabric and tarp draped over the openings of many of the tents facing the glare of the lights, some going so far as to hang their dusters to block the unwanted light. Embers smoldered in haphazard piles near most of them, remnants of cookfires allowed to burn out.

They followed Ward into the field where the slavers formed their modest trade hub around, and Aurora’s eyes quickly fell on the cages at its center. A lump of ice formed in the pit of her stomach.

She took a steadying breath and exhaled with a slow, bewildered shudder.

Ginger’s ear turned toward her and, carefully, she risked a glance over her shoulder, mouthing the words stay calm.

Aurora flicked her tail hard enough for the hairs to crack the air, but she forced herself to breathe again and steady herself. She felt disgusted in herself for wanting to see this just minutes before in some misguided desire to sate her curiosity. Up until now, slavery had resided in her mind as an abstract concept. Just a strange new word in her vocabulary that, shy of a few glimpses at the solar array, she didn’t have a context for.

Now she understood.

An uneven concrete pad had been poured at the center of the field with a forest of crooked rebar posts sticking up from it, drawing a deliberate grid of perpendicular lines in the cement. Those lines formed the walls of twenty cages divided into two rows of ten, broken only by twenty roughly welded rebar doors held shut by a padlock on a length of heavy chain.

The cages’ sheet metal ceiling was barely high enough for its occupants to stand upright. Ponies of every color lay curled at the bottom of each cage, either asleep or staring silently into the distance, three or four crammed into a space barely comfortable for one. They were like looking at a carpet of bulging ribs, a tangle of overlapping legs and bulging ribs as they did what little they could to rest.

As they drew near the cages, the flies began to land on Aurora. They sent her back to Gallow’s shed and the cloud of insects that had swarmed through the door. She closed her eyes for a moment and focused on her breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

It hardly did any good. When she relented and opened them again, she could see the distress on Roach’s face. He stared at the ground, his jaw clenched. She met his eye only briefly, and something passed between them. An understanding that what they were seeing needed to stop. One way or another, they couldn’t walk away having done nothing.

“This is it,” the slavemaster said, slapping his hoof against a length of rebar with a clang that startled its nearest occupants awake. “Thirty-six stallions, twenty-nine mares and six foals. Seventy-one in total and another twenty or so expected to arrive via caravan in three days.”

Ginger nodded, but said nothing. Her body was rigid like a board.

“Oh, I know,” Ward said with a sympathetic smile. “The smell can be off-putting around this time. We tend to wait until morning before we have them muck out their pens.”

Aurora felt her stomach churn as she noticed the fetid lumps heaped in the corners. There were no tools nearby. Nothing to aid them in completing that task. Every horn she could see bore the same magical suppression ring that had been forced onto Ginger. Every neck wore an iron collar to denote their lack of status. And yet they couldn’t be provided a single bucket to relieve themselves into, forced instead to use the floor they slept on.

“Do you see anything you like?” Ward prodded, noticing that Ginger still hadn’t moved.

Aurora followed Ginger’s wooden gaze through the bars to a pair of ponies barely half the size of the ones surrounding them. They stared back at her, their eyes dark and empty, jarred awake by Ward’s yapping and not likely to fall asleep again now that three strange ponies were gathered outside their cage.

She remembered enjoying a bowl of onion soup at the Brass Bit back at the Stable, watching a gaggle of foals chase each other across the Atrium with fearless abandon. They had to have been close to the same age as the two foals staring up at them from the mass of sleeping bodies.

When Ginger finally spoke, her voice had a husky edge to it.

“All of them.”

Ward’s scabbed ear twisted toward her, drawing his attention away from a pair of guards making their way across the field on their regular rounds. “I’m sorry? All of them what?”

Ginger turned to him. “I’d like to purchase all of them.”

The stallion’s mouth hung open for a breath as he processed what she said.

“That’s the offer I came here with,” Ginger continued, the mask of calm settling back over her features. “There is a good likelihood that my family will be acquiring a series of mines north of Canterlot Mountain, and we’ll be needing a fresh labor pool to get them up and running.”

“And you want to buy me out of my entire stock to do it,” Ward said, his eyes drifting over the ponies locked in his cages. “Does your father realize not all of these slaves are ready for hard labor?”

She nodded. “He’s an ambitious stallion. He’ll find work for them.”

He considered that for a moment. “I don’t doubt he will, and yet I can’t help but wonder how he plans to pay for seventy slaves at the same time.”

“Seventy-one,” she corrected. “My father authorized me to offer you five hundred caps for each, regardless of age or condition.”

Ward’s eyes bulged.

“However,” she continued, “that payment is contingent on delivery, which our people will oversee. Once they’ve arrived safely in New Canterlot, a courier will be sent back with your payment and commendation.”

The slavemaster’s grin faded. He stared up at her with barely concealed suspicion. “You’re insane if you think the three of you can transport more than twenty times your number in slaves. They would kill you in your sleep.”

Ginger’s smile stiffened as she watched another set of guards pass by the far side of the cages. She waited for them to be out of earshot before tipping her horn back to Aurora. “Our mutual benefactor will be providing escort. Covered pegasi, of course, once they land.”

Ward turned his head skyward, squinting. There was nothing for him to see, but the lie had him convinced enough to make an ass out of himself anyway. When he finally pulled his head out of the clouds and looked to Aurora, she offered a single firm nod in return. It was everything she could do to keep herself from puking as she did.

“Thirty-five thousand, five hundred caps by my count,” he said, nibbling at the hook. “And an accommodation? What does that mean?”

“A title, to be chosen by my father, and property within New Canterlot on which to live on,” she said with a pert smile.

Ward surveyed his rusted walls and the makeshift tents clustered inside them. He had the look of a pony who had thought he had wealth but realized he’d been living in squalor compared to what was being offered. The gears were spinning so quickly in his head that they were close to flying apart.

“I want a stake in your father’s mines as well,” he announced.

Greedy little shit, Aurora thought.

Ginger made a show of being put off by the add-on, glancing at the ponies inside their rebar hell, then turning back to him with a thoughtful nod. “Two percent,” she said.

“Ten,” he fired back.

“Five.”

“Deal.”

He stuck a mangy hoof up toward her chest and, after a moment of reluctance, Ginger shook it. Inside the cages, several of the enslaved ponies shared hopeless expressions at the prospect of their new future.

Aurora chewed the inside of her cheek, wanting desperately to tell them not to worry.

“You picked a good time to stop by,” Ward said with the cheer of a pony who thought he’d just won the lottery. “The Rangers are out hunting wildlife near the foothills. Won’t be back until they see the next caravan, which means the friends of your friend shouldn’t have to worry about being seen.”

Ginger nodded, though her thoughts were already shifting to their next step. They needed to get these ponies moving. “That is good news,” she said.

Ward grunted his agreement. “All those ghouls have them too spooked to send more than a single squad in at a time. Between the radiation and the Rangers shooting at everything that moves out there, there’s barely a critter out there to worry about. Chased ‘em all up to the mountains. Hell, you could tell the Enclave to land right now and the Rangers wouldn’t believe a word anyone said.”

“That’s really great,” Ginger said, her eyes on the western horizon. In a couple hours the sun would be up. They needed to hurry this along. “I tell you what. All I need now is for you to bring me something with your name on it so I don’t forget it. And if you could bring a key with you as well so we can get things moving, that would be even better. Can you do that for me, dear?”

“Consider it done, ma’am.” He was halfway toward the largest tent in the encampment when he spun around on his hooves and called, “Don’t go anywhere!”

Ginger waved back, muttering through her teeth. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

The slavemaster disappeared behind the flap of his tent and the three of them deflated.

“I can’t believe that worked,” Aurora whispered.

“Careful,” Roach said, eyeing a pair of nearby guards. “Eyes and ears.”

The three of them waited as the short-shaven stallions were past.

“How are we getting them all out without actual backup?” Aurora asked. “If these rebar junkies get the idea to help, we’re in trouble.”

Ginger focused on the dirt, deep in thought. “We do what they expect. Take a portion of them back into Kiln in shifts, small enough that they don’t feel obligated to assist. If we’re lucky, the ghouls in town won’t object.”

“That’s a big if,” Roach warned.

“You saw how fast that bar cleared out when they saw me on stage,” Ginger said. “Radiation isn’t the only thing keeping these slavers out of town. I get the feeling if they try entering in numbers, they’ll encounter trouble with the locals.”

Aurora nodded agreement. “We should get these ponies on the same page.”

Ginger cast a look over to Ward’s tent. “Do it. I’ll wait here for Little Red.”

“Got it,” she said, then to Roach, “You take this row, I’ll take the other.”

They got to work, moving as naturally as they could to opposite corners and moving inward. Aurora took note of the ponies patrolling the catwalk, each armed with a variety of the same pipe-based weaponry. Two more pairs walked slow circles around the grounds, their eyes occasionally turning toward their three new visitors. If anything went wrong, it wouldn’t matter how ridiculous the things looked. At the end of the day, a bullet was still a bullet.

“Tsst,” she hissed, causing a trio of mares laying in the nearest cage to flinch. They opened their eyes and looked at her with as much trust as they might a lit stick of dynamite, barely even moving their heads. Aurora let her eyes wander the grounds as she whispered, “We’re friends. We’re going to get you out of her. Just act normal and follow our lead when the time comes.”

For a moment Aurora didn’t think they would acknowledge anything she said. Then, a willowy voice:

“Okay.”

Aurora blew out a quiet breath and moved to the next cage.

She repeated the same line, keeping it quick and to the point. We’re here to help. Stay calm. Wait your turn and don’t do anything to arouse suspicion. By the fourth cage she was reciting the lines on autopilot, eager to make her way to the tenth cage before the slavemaster emerged from his tent.

She also realized that the ponies in each cage had been sorted. Stallions in one, mares and foals in the other. When she reached the fifth cage, two mares and a foal lifted their heads when her hooves stopped outside their cage. One of the mares curled her hind knees up to protect the foal nestled against her ribs.

“What’s happening?” she whispered.

One of the guards on the catwalk had stopped walking and was looking at her. Aurora froze, unsure whether to keep moving or to risk speaking.

On the other side of the cages, Roach abruptly cleared his throat.

“What’s the head count so far?” he asked, loud enough for his voice to carry.

His eyes flitted to the curious slaver watching them, then back to her with a look of impatience.

“Two mares and a colt in this one,” she said. “I’m almost finished here.”

The guard swayed on his hooves before turning and wandering off down the catwalk.

She bent her neck toward the cage and eyed the two mares and the young stallion in their care. “Keep him close. We’re here to help.”

Before they could respond, Aurora hurried to the next cage.

In the sixth cage, four stallions lay stacked atop one another, eyes open and watching her approach. Three of them looked like they hadn’t eaten in days. They were skeletal, but alive, and Aurora had the sickening feeling that was the point. Somehow she understood that every unnecessary calorie would cut into Ward’s bottom line. They had crossed a threshold between a salable product and scrap, and a slaver wouldn’t be interested in spending caps they wouldn’t get a return on to revert that process.

The fourth stallion in the back of the cage was smaller, almost small enough that she mistook him for a colt. He was filled out better than the other three, healthy-looking even, if it weren’t for the smears of blood and offal that marred his snow white coat.

She went through her lines, careful to ensure there were no wandering eyes from the wall, when a familiar voice croaked from inside the cage.

“Miss Pinfeathers?”

She stopped.

Risking a glance into the cage, she could see the white unicorn stallion had lifted his head and was staring back at her. His left eye was ringed purple and swollen shut, but the other glared at her, blue as a glacier. The little black tie he had worn around his neck hung at an angle, filthy and crushed beneath the iron collar he now wore.

The last time she saw him, he was fleeing the array while a deathclaw shredded through his employer’s security team.

“Quincy?” she whispered. “What happened to you?”

Autumn Song’s receptionist narrowed his good eye at her. A mixture of anger and embarrassment played across his face as the mare who singularly turned his world upside-down watched him through the bars.

“What do you think happened to me?” he snapped loudly enough that Aurora immediately regretted asking. She hushed him but he ignored her. “I got away from that massacre you brought down on our heads and the next thing I know these brainless mouthbreathers are dragging me off the road in this fucking bomb collar!”

Across the cages, Roach looked at her with wide eyes. “Shut him up,” he murmured.

Aurora glanced toward the wall. Several of the guards had stopped their patrols and were looking down at them with renewed curiosity.

“Listen,” she whispered harshly, “we can talk about that later. You need to put a lid on it so we can help you.”

Several of the ponies in surrounding cages hissed for him to be quiet, but their participation was turning the guards’ curiosity into suspicion.

“Help me?” he spat. “The same way you helped us two days ago when you lied to us, got dozens of our best employees slaughtered and tore down our first real chance of rebuilding this shithole of a planet?”

“Everything alright down there?” one of the guards called out.

“We’re fine!” Aurora called back, doing her best to smile her way through the growing urge to reach inside Quincy’s cage and strangle him.

“Like hell we’re fine!” he barked, pulling himself out from beneath his cagemates and stumbling across them toward the bars. “I hope you all know they’re planning to kill you!”

Aurora, Roach and Ginger froze. The few guards who had been ignoring the ruckus up until now weren’t anymore, their attention bending toward Quincy and Aurora like a river eroding through a weak bank. Horns began to glow, forming auras around a menagerie of homemade pistols and rifles. The few earth ponies among them subtly widened their stances, ready to move to cover in the event things took a turn for the worst.

And they did.

The flap to slavemaster’s tend flew open and Ward stepped out, a ring of keys dangling in his magic and a visibly irritated expression on his face. His eyes snapped to his now stationary guards, then to his cages, then to Aurora. His frown deepened.

“What is this?” he stabbed a hoof toward Roach and Aurora. “Are you insane? What’re you stirring them up for?”

“It’s just a standard head count,” Ginger said, hoping to calm the situation. “One of them went into hysterics, we don’t know why.”

Ward stomped toward the cages and sighed when he saw Quincy practically standing on top of the emaciated stallions. “Goddesses… of course you started him up again.”

He slammed a hoof on top of the sheet metal ceiling, causing all of the ponies beneath it to jump. A foal near Roach startled awake with a whimper.

Quincy flinched, spinning on his heels to find the slavemaster’s sunken eyes bearing down on him.

“Shut your hole before I come in there and give you a reason!” he barked. Straightening, he cleared his throat and turned to Ginger. “Sorry about that, he’s a new capture. Been spouting garbage ever since he got himself collared.”

Ward bent back down and met Quincy’s eyes. “And if he keeps it up, I will not think twice about teaching him the value of a still tongue.”

“She’s lying to you,” Quincy stammered. “I know these mares. They’re the ones responsible for destroying the JetStream Solar Array a-and tearing down F&F Mercan-”

Ward slammed his hoof against the cages again. “I don’t recall asking you to speak.”

A light-coated stallion laying beneath him knocked his hoof against Quincy’s in the hopes of shutting him up. Quincy swatted it away, emboldened now that he had an audience. He turned and pointed a hoof at Aurora.

“That’s Aurora Pinfeathers,” he said. “She’s the dustwing that got dozens of good ponies killed. Whatever she’s claiming to be, she’s lying. The only reason she’s here is because you’re her next target.”

Ward narrowed his eyes at Quincy but this time he didn’t try to silence him. Then, his attention gradually shifted to Aurora. “He seems to know you. Should I be worried?”

Aurora could feel her heart in her throat. She swallowed, trying frantically to come up with an alibi.

“I can barely hit a target with this thing,” she chuckled, shrugging her wing beneath her rifle. “Killing dozens of ponies isn’t exactly in my skill set.”

In the corner of her vision, Roach closed his eyes with a wince. Behind Ward, Ginger took a slow, tense breath.

She had not given a gold star answer and Ward was quick to key in on it. “And when exactly did the Enclave start sending untrained pegasi into the wasteland?”

“She’s not with the Enclave,” Quincy whined.

Aurora grit her teeth. Shut up shut up shut up.

“She’s that fucking Stable pony that got Cider killed,” he continued, coasting fearlessly on his own momentum.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” she said.

“I know exactly what I’m talking about. Who do you think Miss Song paid to relay her brother’s reports? Me. That used to be my job, you travelling shitstorm.” He turned to face her, pressing his face between the rebar until the rust stained his cheeks. “Cider called in to say he met a Stable mare travelling with a bug on the road west of Junction City. All he wanted was to buy your Pip-Buck and you killed him for it.”

Aurora pinned her ears flat. “He tried to rape me.”

Quincy scoffed. “Welcome to the fucking-”

He was cut short by the force of Aurora’s hoof crashing into his snout. He stumbled backward with a gutteral yelp, tripping over the stallions beneath him and earning himself a rough shove into the fly-infested heap of offal in the corner of the cage. His mouth twisted with disgust as he pushed himself off the floor and turned back toward Ward, grinning at his new master.

Blood ran from his nostrils, staining his teeth an awful pink.

“I told you so,” he said with all the defiance he could muster. “They’re all frauds.”

With those three words, Aurora knew it was over. She looked to Roach and saw him eyeing the open gate they had entered through. Ginger’s horn had taken on a preemptive glow, her eyes scanning the guards above them.

Slavemaster Ward stared across the cages at Aurora, his eyes hard as glass.

“All three of you lay down on the ground,” he rumbled.

“Now.”

October 30th, 1075

Fresh, autumn air warmed by the late morning sun flowed over her bed, pressed forward by a gentle tide that guided it throughout the rest of the cottage. Rainbow awoke slowly, squeezing every precious second she could out of the first real chance she had to sleep past her alarm in years. She stretched beneath the secure weight of Fluttershy’s goose down comforter, reaching as far as her legs would go until her muscles trembled.

Rolling onto her back with a satisfied sigh, she let her mind wander.

The Pillar and the ministries contained within seemed so pleasantly distant now. Waking up in Ponyville, listening to the sounds of its newest generation coming in on the breeze, it almost let her believe she was young again. That, somewhere out there in the world, an ancient evil or impending cataclysm was looming which only the Element of Harmony could seal away. That, at any moment, Twilight might burst through the door with the girls in tow, ready to embark on one of their old adventures.

She draped her foreleg over her eyes and smirked. Back then, she would have given anything if it meant never having to encounter another domination-hungry villain ever again. Now she missed it? A weary chuckle rose in her throat. Maybe Spitfire’s heartless little coup was a blessing in disguise. Maybe Luna was right.

She sank a little deeper into the plushly padded mattress. Maybe she did need a break.

The shrill clatter of bells downstairs decided otherwise.

“Come on…” she groaned.

The kitchen phone ignored her, ringing over and over again until finally Rainbow threw open the covers and trudged down the steps to silence it.

The stairs emptied out into Fluttershy’s living room where Gilda’s memorial had been held the night before. After Luna departed, Rainbow had spent the better part of the next couple hours helping her move furniture back and wash the intimidating stack of dishes left behind. She confided in Rainbow that she had invited the princesses less out of politeness and more to see if they would.

In her mind, it was a way for her to face her worst fear that despite all of Rainbow’s assurances, she might still be under suspicion. Celestia and Luna not only arriving but staying long enough to make small talk had alleviated much of that dread.

Rainbow had stood next to her, drying off plates while the yellow pegasus washed, listening to her while she laid out her regrets for not having been more careful. Fluttershy wasn’t sure how she or Zecora would move forward with the Vhannan ambassador now that their only current diplomatic inroad had been ruined. Rainbow wasn’t sure how to help her there. Diplomacy wasn’t her strong suit any more than sprint flying was Fluttershy’s. All she could do was say what felt honest and hope it would be enough.

A neatly folded blanket rested in the corner of the divan where Fluttershy had insisted she sleep, offering her bed to Rainbow and allowing her no room to argue. That mare had come a long way from the days when she let ponies treat her like a doormat. Once she was set on something, a pony would have better odds at chopping a tree with a chicken egg than they would changing her mind.

She scrubbed her eye with the back of her wing as the phone continued to wail, probably Fluttershy calling from her office in Canterlot to remind her where to hide the spare key. Her hooves clicked over the kitchen tiles as she pulled herself up to the counter and scooped the receiver off the wall.

“Hello?” she grunted.

“Mornin’, sunshine!” an unexpected but familiar Apaloosan twang answered. Rainbow slouched over the counter, smiling at the sound of Applejack’s voice. “Fluttershy said you’d still be asleep. How’re you holdin’ up?”

“Better than yesterday, hopefully worse than tomorrow,” she said, tracing a feather over the line of little roses glazed around the edge of a nearby flour jar.

“That’s good,” Applejack said.

Rainbow nodded as if they were in the same room. A large part of her wished they were.

“I heard Luna gave you the day off,” she said, though the pause that followed suggested there was more coming. When Applejack spoke again, it was with some hesitance. “But I was sort of hoping I could bend your ear about something, anyhow. It’ll only take a minute.”

Rainbow flicked a dusting of flour off the rim of the jar in disappointment, hoping Applejack had called to talk about literally anything else but work.

“Sure,” she said, trying to sound more chipper than she felt. “Go ahead.”

Applejack sighed relief through the speaker. “You’re the best. Alright, you remember the pendant we took off Zecora when she n’ her filly got back from Vhanna?”

She nodded again, recalling with a little pride how slickly she’d lifted Teak’s talisman into the folds of her wing before Twilight could confiscate it as well. The only pony who spotted the innocuous theft was on the other side of the phone, and judging by the fact that Twilight hadn’t come to berate her for it, Applejack hadn’t told anyone.

“Pretty hard to forget,” she chuckled.

“Well, lucky for you these talismans appear to be exactly what the Ambassador Abyssian claimed them to be. And yes, I checked both. Zecora had half the mind to tan your hide after she caught Teak wearing hers around the house.”

There was no heat behind her statement. Any residual fallout from that revelation had already settled without Rainbow knowing. Applejack had a knack for sussing out which problems were worth getting worked up over and which ones were better left to cool on their own. They may just be an earth pony and a pegasus, but it didn’t take much for the two of them to separately agree that the gifts brought back from Vhanna weren’t a threat.

“Now, as far as we can tell, my people in R&D don’t reckon these healing stones are magical at all,” she said. “They’re mostly howlite with traces of white quartz. Same thing the ponies up here dump around their flower beds to make them look pretty. There’s nothing magical about them.”

Rainbow rummaged through the cabinets for a glass. “But you’re not calling me to tell me they’re just rocks.”

Applejack paused. “No. To be honest, I already tried talking to Twilight about it but the minute I told her these stones are magically inert, she lost interest. Figure, heck, Rarity’s too busy telling the world what to think to stop to look at a couple rocks and Pinkie… well, you know.”

“Yeah.”

Another pause. “Anyway, I don’t mean to make it sound like you’re my last choice. I just thought with everything going on this week…”

“I know,” Rainbow said before she could finish. She found the glasses above the sink and pulled one down. “So what’d you find out?”

Something squeaked on Applejack’s end of the line. The chair in her office. Even the Ministry of Technology had to contend with made-to-break office furniture. “It’s hard to explain, if I’m being honest.”

Rainbow chuckled. “Uh huh.”

“Har har,” she said, the smile audible in her voice. “But seriously, Dash, it’s wild. You saw how these stones are carved, right? How finely cut they are? Well, we put the one Zecora had under the best microscopes we’ve got. Those carvings never stop. They just keep getting smaller and deeper no matter what magnification we put them under. It’s like staring into two funhouse mirrors facing each other. That rock gave half my staff vertigo.”

“Freaky,” Rainbow said, hoping she sounded like she understood in the least bit. “Last I heard, zebra manufacturing still lagged us by a few years.”

“More than a few,” Applejack said with a touch of pride. Her ministry ensured hundreds of Equestrian industries felt the continuous, unyielding pressure to advance, and that strategy began paying dividends at the start. “But I’ve already spoken with Zecora and she confirmed our suspicion that these weren’t manufactured, but formed with magic. The zebras can’t channel spells like our unicorns, but they’re no more disconnected from magic than you n’ me. Same way I know the right time to plant and harvest without going off some bunk almanac or you can walk around on clouds like they’re terra firma, zebras have this sort of… meditation, Zecora calls it, that lets a buncha them concentrate their thoughts into making these little stones.”

Rainbow turned off the tap and frowned out at the little bridge that spanned the brook outside Fluttershy’s cottage. “So, what, they’re telekinetic?”

“That’s the first thing I asked Zecora, but she says that’s not it at all. She says it can take days or weeks of unbroken meditation for zebras to make them. It’s kind of like they push magic through the stone and it eats away at it until the right impressions are left behind.”

“Like a river eroding its banks,” Rainbow supplied.

“Kind of? I’m not sure I understand it all, but Zecora says these talismans tend to be pretty weak. They’re good for curing a headache or giving a warrior a little extra courage, but nowadays even the zebras have a pill for everything.”

Rainbow swished a sip of water around her mouth to clear the worst of her morning breath. “Mmkay. What’s to stop them from making a stone that could get someone sick?”

“Nothing, I suppose, though I think it’d be a waste to spend that much energy making something that would only end up making a pony queasy.”

Fair point, she thought. Her brain was starting to wake up in earnest now, eager to puzzle its way through this new line of thinking. “So the magic makes the talisman, but the stone itself isn’t magical. I assume you know how it works?”

“We think so,” Applejack said. “Soon as the stone’s internal structure is done, it’s effectively ‘on.’ The same naturally-occurring magic that’s present all around us is drawn into the stone like a weak siphon, passes through the artificial internal structure and gets emitted with properties identical to a rudimentary spell - in this case, a healing spell. Some of the unicorns down here have fiddled with Zecora’s talisman while it was under sensors and confirmed it.”

“Huh,” she said. “So if you pump more magic through it…”

“Already tried it,” Applejack said. “Doesn’t work. The output stays constant and everything else gets turned into waste heat. Trixie came a dog’s hair away from melting the thing before someone stopped her.”

Rainbow got a chuckle out of that. Trixie had surprised everyone when she applied at the Ministry of Arcane Science, and surprised no one when her resume had been roundly rejected. She wanted to help, but that bridge with Twilight had been thoroughly burned so many years ago. She made the rounds at each ministry and eventually Applejack had taken pity and gave her an innocuous filing position within the Ministry of Technology. Over the last several years, she managed to climb her way out of the archives and into a position within Research and Development, lending her somewhat limited magical abilities to whatever project required it.

They were all well into their forties by now, and yet Trixie had never grown out of the mindset that she had something to prove. Rainbow wondered how many times her unfortunate coworkers had to save her from her own well-meaning ambition.

She gulped down the rest of the glass and set it in the empty sink. “So when exactly did you have the ‘yeehaw moment’ that made you call me up?” She couldn’t help but grin a little as she listened to Applejack make a series of flustered noises.

“Dash, I do not have yeehaw moments,” she said, trying to talk over the trickle of laughter coming from the pegasus. “But hypothetically, if I did, it woulda been a couple days ago.”

Rainbow chuckled. “And?”

“Well,” Applejack said, “for starters, I’m pretty sure we can reverse engineer the process. It’s pretty clear whatever magic does when it carves these things, it follows a predictable pattern, kinda like your river analogy. If I build a dam here, what’ll the water do? Where’s it going to divert to? That sort of thing. I’m pretty sure all these little pockets and voids the zebras make are like that. They might not know how it works on an architectural level, but they don’t have the resources I do.”

Rainbow waited a moment, then she sighed. “AJ, you’re losing me here. We have spells an order of magnitude more powerful than zebra talismans. This sounds like you’re trying to invent the wagon when you could be driving a gas-powered carriage.”

She leaned over the sink to watch a line of geese tracing their way south across the cloudless sky, thankful that pony invention was a long way from the day when self propelled vehicles might clog Equestria’s skies. In spite of the dreams of so many younger minds, she preferred keeping that possibility firmly cemented in the realm of science fiction having already seen what gas carriages had done to Equestria’s rapidly expanding road network. Even Ponyville was getting in on the pave-craze, giving up its charming central dirt road in exchange for unforgiving concrete.

“That’s just it,” Applejack insisted, holding onto a thread whose importance Rainbow was struggling to follow. “With the right talisman, ponies like you and I could cast a spell too!”

Rainbow blinked. “What?”

She couldn’t tell if Applejack even heard her. “I mean, just think about the implications this could have. Imagine if the earth ponies and pegasi out fighting on the front were able to use a healing spell without calling for a unicorn medic just by wearing a talisman? What if they could deploy a shield spell under heavy fire, or install one on their weapon… heck, we could probably fabricate talisman bullets. Gimme a second, I gotta write that down.”

Rainbow had no choice but to wait as Applejack set the phone down to pick up a pencil and scribble her note. Fluttershy’s kitchen window had the added benefit of facing north, giving Rainbow enough of a view to spot the hazy shape of Canterlot Mountain far to the northeast. The waterfalls streaming over the vast platform of their capital city appeared like grey, translucent wraiths as the autumn wind spun their tails into a misty fog.

The line clattered as Applejack worked the phone back into the crook of her neck. “Still there?”

“Still here,” she confirmed, adding, “Still kind of lost, too, but this is interesting. How about I just come by the Pillar and you show me what you’re talking about?”

Applejack hesitated. “But it’s your day off. I didn’t call just to drag you back into work, sugarcube.”

Rainbow couldn’t help but smile a bit wider at the affectation. There was something about her way of talking that made her feel happy. Grounded, even. “It wouldn’t be work for me. Just give me a tour of what you know so far. I’m a visual learner, anyway, and this is tickling that part of my brain that my old Daring Do novels used to. Plus, if you make me wait until our schedules align, it’s going to drive me nuts. Have mercy on me.”

She could hear her mutter something through one of her low, hitching chuckles on the other end. “I guess I did this to myself. Fine, come on over and I’ll show you what we’re working on,” she said. “But if Luna finds out and decides to give me the business over interrupting your vacation, I’m blaming you.”

Julip awoke to muffled voices and the reeking stench of the mattress beneath her. She wrinkled her nose as her tired brain reminded her that she was undoubtedly sleeping atop fluids she would rather not imagine the origin of. Wasteland ponies were disgusting, there was no doubt about that, but this was a far cry from some of the places she’d been forced to crash.

Thanks to the ghoul downstairs, she’d missed her opportunity to intercept Aurora. Reintroducing herself after threatening to kill her more than once was going to be tricky enough without Ol’ Wrinkledick putting her marks in a foul mood. Why these ponies tolerated the living dead in such quantity, she would never know. Their cards had already been punched. Allowing them to continue shambling around, competing for the living for precious resources, it was an insult to the natural order of things. Even the immortal princesses succumbed to death in the end.

And yet somehow, ghouls fancied themselves above that.

Now that Aurora and her friends were awake, Julip considered getting up and knocking on the door. There wasn’t going to be a neat and tidy way to ingratiate herself to them and now was as good a time as any. If they said no, so be it. She was nothing if not persistent. Her job here was simple: protect Aurora and discover what happened to Stable 10. Minister Primrose mentioned nothing about making daisy chain tiaras with them. Just keep the pureblood alive and grab any info she had.

Her wings ached from the flight in, however, and laying down on anything - even a semi sentient bacteria colony like this mattress - felt good enough that her muscles resisted the idea of getting up. Her eyes slid shut.

She awoke again to the door behind her being thrust open.

“You think one of them might try to pull something?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

She fought the urge to flatten her ears in frustration as they filed past., but relieved that neither Aurora or the Dressage mare recognized her. Okay, maybe she cared a little about how she presented herself. She represented the interests of the Enclave, after all. Being nudged awake on a discarded pad might be setting her pride a bit too far out of reach.

She cracked an eye as they descended the stairs to the bar. Where were they going? Who might try to pull something?

Red flags sprang up in her mind.

She forced herself onto her hooves with a heaving yawn and gathered her things.

They led her north, past the edge of town, and made a bee-line for the slaver encampment.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

Julip watched them from the shadow of the destroyed school. The Dressage mare chatted first with one of the guards, then minutes later with a short stallion whose clothes and air of authority made it clear he was the slavemaster of the outpost.

Something wasn’t right. Ginger Dressage had cut her ties with the trade back when Julip was still a young filly. Why was she leading Aurora here, and why were they being allowed inside?

She wouldn’t get any answers with that wall blocking her view. Quietly, careful not to disturb what remained of the precarious structure, Julip slipped inside the old school building and climbed the slumped shape of the collapsed roof. It took her just high enough that she could see over the top of the barbed wire, giving her a clear view of the unicorns patrolling the wall and the cages inside. She loosened her SMG around her shoulder and lay prone where the dust-covered roof rose toward the remains of the second floor window frames, ticking the selector switch on her weapon to semi-automatic.

With some luck, they would be in and out and Julip could feel like a moron on her own time for indulging her paranoia. She didn’t trust slavers. They were just as liable to grease your hoof with a few caps as they were to lock a collar around your neck and drag you off to nowhere places like this dump of a town to be bought and sold. They were a necessary evil, but then again, so were bear traps.

Ginger loitered at the cages, talking to the slavemaster about something that seemed to get his attention. Caps, probably. Was she buying? What did they need a slave for? Whatever the reason, the slavemaster looked excited as he trotted away toward one of the tents obscured from Julip’s view by the near wall.

As soon as he did, Aurora and the ghoul did something strange. With a suspicious level of coordination, they made their way down opposite corners of the cages, stopping at each one and seemingly interested in anything but the slaves inside. At a passing glance, it looked like they were killing time while the slavemaster was busy. Julip squinted, wishing her weapon had a scope, and could just make out movement on Aurora’s lips. She was talking to them.

Why talk to the slaves? And why wait until their master was gone to...

Julip’s face went slack with understanding. A pegasus, a ghoul and an ex-slaver walk into a camp.

They were trying to free them.

“Oh, fuck,” she hissed. “You fucking fuckers.”

Her heart kicked into high gear. She wasn’t equipped for whatever hogshit they were intent on rolling in. She counted seven - no, eight guards on the wall. Unicorns, mostly, but she did spot two earth ponies carrying pipe rifles with those ridiculous bite triggers installed. Four more ponies patrolled the grounds below in pairs, distracted enough with their own conversation to notice what was happening at the cages.

That left the slavers still asleep in their tents. By Julip’s count, at least half would be occupied, likely accounting for the encampment’s daytime security.Not that any of it mattered. If Julip was right and they were about to attempt some sort of breakout, they would be woefully outnumbered once that hornet’s nest felt the kick.

She was too far out in the sticks to call for backup and too poorly equipped to risk preemptively firing on the guards without taking a hailstorm of bullets in return. The best she could do was hope they didn’t fuck up and get themselves killed. If they did, and Julip had to return to Minister Primrose with that report in her wing, desk duty would be the least of her concerns.

And of course, Karma reared her ugly head to remind Julip that she wasn’t finished making her life a living hell.

Aurora Pinfeathers fucked up.

One of the slaves started giving her hell so loudly that Julip could hear his shrill voice across the gap. Almost immediately, the hive began to buzz. Patrols stopped and turned to see what was happening. Horns lit around the perimeter wall like little fireflies, bringing their rifles to a ready position as whatever plans the three of them had devolved. The slavemaster reappeared, yelling something she couldn’t understand but undoubtedly translated to some version of what the fuck are you doing?

More yelling, between the unseen slave and his master. Her master? The slave’s voice was pitched so high she couldn’t tell if it belonged to a mare or a recent gelding. The slavemaster went still, looked at Aurora and said something while stabbing his hoof at the dirt.

And then something strange happened.

Something that made Julip forget her weapon and stare.

This was bad.

This was really bad.

Ginger reminded herself to stay calm. She needed to think.

Goddesses it was hard to think.

Ward wanted them on the ground. Not an option. If they submitted, on went the collars and rings. She didn’t think they even made rings to fit a horn like Roach’s, what with a fissure running down it like split bark on a tree. They would kill him because it was the simpler route. Submission meant Roach would die and she and Aurora would be in worse shape than they had been at the array.

Shooting their way out wasn’t an option, either. Cheap and easy as pipe rifles were to make and maintain, they were about as accurate as a blind pony chucking rocks, but they made up for that problem with sheer volume. It didn’t matter what the bullet was fired from. All it took was one, and they had plenty.

She stared directly at Ward, meeting his dark little eyes. Hostage, maybe? Maybe not. Slavers in small camps like these were loyal to caps, not the leader who doled them out. They might just let her kill him and choose a new slavemaster once they had them in shackles. She could still feel the ring Trotter had put on her, like a bottleneck in her brain stopped up by a valve that was never designed to open.

Then a thought occurred to her.

Suppression rings.

Growing ever more impatient, Ward lit his horn and drew a silver pistol from beneath his vest. An expensive weapon. Nickel-plated for the sole purpose of making it shiny. Flashy or not, it wasn’t a showpiece. He leveled it at Ginger, held in a white shine of magic, and tipped the barrel once toward the dirt.

“The ground, Ms. Dressage,” he ordered. “All of you.”

“I hardly think that’s necessary,” she said. It surprised her how much her voice trembled. Slowly, her horn took on a bronze glow.

Ward’s eyes snapped to the light and tensed. “Put that out!”

She didn’t. She couldn’t afford to.

Slowly, she lifted a hoof and gestured it toward Roach behind her. The flap of his saddlebag shimmered. “Ward,” she said carefully, “I am still willing to pay you as a gesture of goodwill. I’m just getting our caps to show you. Is that alright?”

He narrowed his eyes at Roach’s bag. “Slowly.”

She took a breath to steady herself and risked a glance behind her. Aurora stood stock-still on the far side of the cages. When they met eyes, Ginger prayed she knew how important it was that she didn’t move. That the odds were impossibly against them, and any sudden movements could cause the unstable ground they stood on to liquefy beneath their hooves.

Turning her attention to Roach’s bag, she gradually peeled the flap back. He didn’t move an inch, watching her for a signal even though she couldn’t risk sending one. Not yet.

Slowly, their caps snaked into the night air, ferried toward Ginger in faint bubbles of her magic. They clinked together one by one in a floating stack, close enough to Ward that if he wished, he could reach out and take them. She needed to put him at ease. Show him that despite their attempt to deceive him, this was an honest offering.

She needed him to believe just one more lie.

Her eyes grew distant as she tried to focus on many things at once. The slow parade of caps was doing its job. In the edge of her vision she could see the eyes of the nearest guards watching the procession, weapons ready should she attempt to do something unfortunate like include a frag grenade into the offering.

It occurred to her that they did, in fact, have a grenade. The one Gallow’s mother had failed to lob into the gap in her shield just a day before. Ginger could feel her magic touch its cold, deadly shape within Roach’s bag. She left it where it lay. Another time, perhaps.

She focused. It was all she could do just to keep the caps moving. She could feel a headache forming behind her eyes as she ushered a portion of her magic further back, beyond Roach, through the bars of the slave cages, seeking. Feeling for what she needed.

She found them. Tiny pockets of nothing that gently resisted the touch of her magic.

Removing them was simple. A firm grip and a twisting pull. She braced to hear someone shout but only silence followed. Good. Onto the next.

A cap tumbled out of her tenuous grip and clinked against the dirt. She frowned at it, unable to afford the extra effort to pick it back up.

Twist and pull.

And again.

“We’ll be here until sunrise at this rate,” Ward growled. He waggled his pistol at her, urging her to hurry along.

She winced. It was everything she could do just to concentrate in silence.

Twist and pull.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’ve never been good… with magic.”

Ward sighed and looked up to the nearest guard. “I can see that for myself.”

Twist and pull.

And again.

One of the captives gasped surprise and Ginger watched as Ward’s attention shifted toward the noise.

No. Keep watching me, she thought. The muscles in her jaw twitched, her horn faltered, and the faint magic holding the caps aloft evaporated sending the parade of bottle caps jangling into the dirt.

Twist and pull.

“For fuck’s…” Ward muttered, staring down at the mess with disgust. “Just leave ‘em and get on the ground before I put you there. All this bullshit for what, fifty caps.”

And again.

Her options were running low. Another delay and he would notice. Her horn glowed a shade dimmer, dark enough that the swirling force around it was all but translucent in the glare of the stadium lights. With no other choice, she bent her knees and settled her stomach against the packed ground. Her heart was ready to beat its way through her chest even as she swept her payload skyward, hoping beyond hope that none of them slipped through and fell as she felt for each one until she had a rough count.

“Hey!” he barked, gesturing his weapon toward Roach and Aurora. “That means you too!”

She turned her head left, then right, counting the guards on the catwalk. Eight in total, six of them unicorns. There would be enough.

“You!” Ward said, gesturing to one of the pairs charged with patrolling the grounds. “Collars and rings, go get them. And hurry up.”

Ward didn’t know. None of them did. Ginger caught Roach’s eyes and stared at him. He watched her, blinked, and noticed the wispy haze still wrapping her horn. She could see his chest billow against the dirt, understanding that something was about to happen.

Through the bars, past the slaves with naked horns, Aurora had already noticed what was happening. Her eyes flitted skyward, toward the guards spaced along the circular catwalk, like a foal who knew which jar the cookies were in and couldn’t stop looking at it. Ginger could feel the headache coming in full force now.

Ward turned back to her, his gaudy pistol still trained on her. He narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing?”

He tapped the muzzle of his weapon against the tip of her still-glowing horn. “Douse it,” he said.

Ginger met his suspicious gaze with one of abject defiance. “With pleasure.”

Her horn went dark.

The magic holding six suppression rings above the horns of Ward’s wall guards released with perfect synchrony.

Holding them aloft had been easy. Tracking the tips of each unicorn’s horn by feel alone had been the driving force of the pain behind her eyes. Each ring found its target, snuffing their magic like so many candles. Rifles clanged against the catwalk around them in a jarring cacophony.

For the briefest instant, Ward looked up toward his guards in confusion.

It was enough. Ginger’s horn flared, gripping those six rings and ramming them down hard onto their bewildered new bearers’ horns. Cruel backward-facing teeth bit deep into the living bone causing several of them to cry out in pain.

Before Ward could react, her bronze magic swarmed around his red and wrenched his pistol around until it found its owner. She didn’t blink. She didn’t hesitate. She pulled the trigger and the muzzle belched fire. The slavemaster’s head snapped back as if it had been flicked by the hoof of a giant, his lifeless body crumpling sideways into the dirt.

“Roach, Aurora!” she hollered. “Earth ponies first!”

She didn’t wait for them to respond. Catapulting back to her hooves, she swept up Ward’s fallen pistol bolted away from his body in time for the ground behind her to erupt from a swarm of bullets. The two earth ponies still wielding rifles on the wall fought the powerful recoil of their weapons with the force of their teeth alone, trailing a poorly aimed hailstorm of lead on the heels of Ginger’s hooves.

Roach’s shotgun clapped thunder and one of the attackers screamed. Aurora’s rifle barked its own report, dropping the second. The unicorns around them bellowed profanity as some shrank back against the barb-wire ledge for cover while the rest pawed with frantic hooves at the unforgiving rings latched onto their horns.

“We’ve still got four on the dirt!” Roach yelled.

“More in the tents!” Aurora added.

Two unicorns on the ground, caught off-guard by the melee and finding themselves in the firing line of all three of their aggressors, bolted toward the tents for cover. Ginger tracked them behind the green dot of the pistol’s foresight and squeezed off four shots, dropping both just short of their goal.

Gunfire erupted behind them from the break in the wall, sending geysers of dirt spitting into the air deadly close to where Roach ran. He had been making a bee-line for the slavemaster’s tent where the second pair of guards had been sent for collars. They were hiding inside, waiting for an opening.

Ginger grit her teeth as she split her magic a second time, forming a disc of magic beside Roach right as another volley peppered the dirt around him. She spat a curse as several rounds slapped against her shield, forcing her to drop Ward’s pistol just to keep the barrier intact. The guards at the entrance held their fire as he vanished between the tents and began to move forward to intercept him.

Roach skidded to a stop beside the dead slavemaster’s tent and pumped four rounds through the canvas. The slavers inside barely had time to scream as they were torn apart.

Back by the cages, Aurora’s rifle cracked twice. The two ponies who greeted them at the gate minutes earlier crumpled as each of her shots found their mark. With their advance on Roach cut short, Aurora ducked behind the cages and began fishing through her saddlebag for her spare magazine.

“How many left?” Aurora called out.

“Tents and catwalk!” Ginger yelled back.

Slug after slug fed into the well of Roach’s shotgun aided by the green glow of his magic. Now wasn’t the time to worry about extra rads. “I’ll take the tents,” he growled.

“We’ve got the catwalk,” she called back and snatched Ward’s pistol off the ground. The barrel panned as she darted toward Aurora, the commotion of the disarmed unicorns above keeping her nerves on high alert.

Aurora already had her rifle lifted, settling on a unicorn along the northern wall who was struggling to remove his suppression ring. Further down the catwalk, a portly stallion was half-tangled and bleeding in the barbed wire in an ill-gotten attempt to escape by throwing himself over the wall.

Her rifle pounded against her shoulder and the first slaver’s body bucked back into the wire.

Ginger leveled her pistol toward the south side and took aim. One by one they removed the last threats above while Roach ran from tent to tent, passing some and firing into others as bleary-eyed slavers scrambled out of them. Gunfire flickered against the encampment walls like a radstorm gone mad until, gradually, it stopped.

Ginger gulped down each breath, riding the crest of her adrenaline. A high, insistent ringing whined behind her ears as she surveyed what remained of the slaver camp.

Bodies littered the catwalk. More lay motionless in the dirt. Inside the cages, seventy-one ponies stared out at the carnage with expressions ranging from relief to horror. Foals bawled, overwhelmed by fear while their parents looked on, trying to digest the reality of what they had just witnessed.

Roach stumped another lap around the perimeter, his shotgun poised to neutralize any stragglers. Blood drizzled from the catwalk above his head. More stained the floors of the tents beneath them, widening pools that flowed into the deep hoof marks scraped into the hard soil.

Aurora blew out a cautious breath. “Did… is that it?”

“We’re clear,” Roach called from the gate.

Ginger whispered a sigh of relief and let Ward’s pistol drop to the ground. She looked down at her chest and grimaced at the thin spatter of the former slavemaster’s blood. Things hadn’t happened the way she planned. She tested out feeling guilty for what they just did, seeing if maybe it would stick, but it slid off her like oil on water.

In some immeasurable way, Equestria had gotten just a fraction better.

“I think we did,” she breathed. She turned her head skyward and exhaled. “Holy shit, Aurora, that was close.”

Behind her, Aurora’s rifle let out a quiet rattle. Ginger turned to see Aurora’s wings trembling hard.

“Hey,” she said, worried. “Are you okay?”

Aurora looked over her shoulder with a reassuring nod. “Yeah, I’m okay. Adrenaline always gives me the shakes.”

Ginger’s expression softened and she stepped toward Aurora, intent on pulling her into a crushing hug. Aurora’s smile widened and she turned to meet her halfway, her quivering wings opening toward her.

From the corner of her eye, Ginger saw something move. A glint of blue light. A bloodied rifle turning toward them in a weak fog of the surviving slaver’s magic. Her heart dropped.

There was no time to move. No time to shove Aurora out of the way.

She could see the trigger retract.

Instinct took over. Her horn bloomed with magic bidden by a simple yet impossible thought.

GO AWAY.

A translucent bubble of magic flickered around the slaver’s bleeding body and popped.

With a rush of displaced air, he was gone.

Ginger blinked confusion. She pulled Aurora away from where she stood, out of what had once been the stallion’s firing line. In the place where he had lay bleeding, a shallow yet perfect bowl of soil was missing. The blood that had pooled around him now reversed course, drawing muddy rivulets into the otherwise flawless crater.

Aurora stared, bewildered.

“Did…”

“I don’t know,” Ginger said.

Aurora looked at her, mouth agape, then back at the divot. “Did you blow him up?”

She sat down, suddenly dizzy. “No. I don’t know,” she repeated. “I think…”

Then they heard it. A noise, faint at first but approaching fast. A high scream.

A scream coming from above.

They looked up just in time to see the flailing form of the slaver dropping from the sky like a missile. His hooves pinwheeled in abject panic causing the straight path of his descent to bend. The three of them watched his body slam into the stadium lights at terminal velocity, rupturing the bulbs in a spray of sparks before finally impacting the ground beyond the wall with a meaty thud. The makeshift scaffolding holding up the lights buckled under the impact, and they stared on as it lurched sideways, followed the slaver’s corpse the rest of the way to the ground with a metallic crunch.

Roach’s bewildered voice called from the gate. “What the hell was that?”

Ginger’s mouth tried and failed to form an answer. She looked up at the dark expanse of clouds that churned overhead, unsure whether to trust the words when they finally tumbled over her lip.

“I think I teleported him.”

The lone stallion standing beside Rainbow dutifully avoided eye contact as he waited for his ministry’s floor, which was an easy guess if she went by the trio of blue diamonds sewn into his lapel. Thus far, Rarity was alone in her efforts to coordinate ministry staffers’ dress code. For the rest of them, the sharp little suits she forced on her team felt a little too on the nose for comfort.

Their elevator had only just gotten up to speed before it slowed, chiming to a halt on the second floor. The stallion politely maintained his position of staring at the floor number mounted above the doors as if the two digits were the most entertaining thing in the world. Rainbow didn’t think she would ever understand this strangely popular elevator etiquette, but it was undeniably contagious. She stepped out into the Ministry of Technology’s front lobby without disrupting the strange pony’s studies.

Her hooves padded across what at first glance appeared to be polished wood flooring, stained to resemble well-worn cherry planks. A few steps across the strangely pliable surface reminded Rainbow it was just a vinyl substitute. She had to remind herself to pick up her hooves slightly more than she was used to, knowing from past experience that vinyl tended to grab at her hooftips and send her sprawling rather than allow them to slip forward like genuine wood.

The lobby was sparsely decorated, notably compact and heavily monitored. In other words, it was secure. Rainbow glanced up at each of the softball-sized black hemispheres positioned at either far corner of the lobby. They stuck out like a sore hoof against the soft, meadow-gold paint surrounding them. A single, black couch sat along the wall to her right, flanked by a pair of healthy ferns. To her left, a small table displayed a dozen or so different pamphlets containing easy-to-digest anecdotes about Applejack’s ministry. Above it hung a wide-set painting of Applejack’s family farm, her iconic purple-shingled barn surrounded by a sea of apple trees.

Rainbow regarded the lobby’s single piece of artwork with a pang of nostalgia, but nothing compared to what Applejack must feel whenever she walked by. The war required all ponies to make sacrifices, most of all by those tasked with prosecuting it. While the birth of the ministries had meant the end of the Apple Family farm on paper only, being listed on the Ponyville ledgers as a community historical site that had since been kept up by trusted members of its community, the loss of that responsibility had taken Applejack years to adjust to. Rainbow knew she stepped into each day with the belief that the forfeiture was temporary and, after the war ended, she and her siblings would return to pick up where they left off.

She approached the far side of the lobby, toward a recessed kiosk that stood adjacent to a pair of grey, magnetically sealed security doors. A single mare sat behind the kiosk’s bulletproof glass, her brow arched above a pair of familiar blue eyes that softened in recognition. The sight of the merigold mare, now well into her sixties, still managed to jangle Rainbow’s nerves a little.

“Good morning, Minister Dash,” Ms. Harshwhinny greeted, her voice tinny through the speaker mounted into the narrow sill beneath her window.

“Morning, Ms. H,” she said, tipping her nose toward the nearest camera. “All clear?”

Ms. Harshwhinny smiled down at her terminal, a hoof held in the air as she waited for the system to determine whether to allow her through or to lock down until a security team could be sent to detain and eliminate her.

Rainbow could almost feel the sensors bouncing their array of invisible light off her body. Pillar security was daunting the first few times around, but at this point Rainbow hardly paid it any attention. Still, there was always that one corner of her brain she couldn’t shut up. The part that wondered what would happen if a glitch somehow caused Harshwhinny’s terminal to spit out the wrong conclusion. It had never happened before, and there were more than a few different tests in place to verify the first result, but on some level Rainbow would always be a worrier.

Harshwhinny’s smile touched her eyes at the flicker of her terminal. “I’m happy to inform you that you are not a changeling,” she chuckled, and pressed a key on her terminal. The security doors emitted an electric buzz and the magnetic locks deactivated with a heavy click. “You can head inside, minister.”

Rainbow nodded back as she made her way to the doors, still unsure what to make of this version of Harshwhinny that had mellowed so much with age. She suspected Applejack hadn’t put her in that kiosk just to be a smiling face, and she definitely did not want to be nearby if that terminal had less friendly news to report.

The doors clicked shut behind her on whisper quiet hinges. The wood vinyl gave way to a road of plain, cream linoleum tile, directing her through an innocuous hallway that led her past a series of closed office doors and potted ferns. Rainbow stopped outside Applejack’s door, holding down the intercom buzzer in the wall and waiting for a response. Unsurprisingly, none came. Applejack had been the most vocal against the cookie-cutter design of their offices, but had lost out in the name of keeping the Pillar’s construction as streamlined as possible. She hated being cooped up.

A cream-coated earth pony Rainbow vaguely recognized from one of Rarity’s first boutiques came to her rescue, directing her around the corner into a hallway that led her to the Ministry of Technology’s R&D wing.

The doors here were adorned with simple, black keycard slots. Heightened security for more sensitive information. The narrow placards fixed to the wall above each slot assigned each room a lab number, offering little information to the average looky-loo to what might be going on inside. Rainbow wondered whether the keycard she kept locked in her desk might work on these. Most likely it would, though she doubted anyone inside would appreciate the intrusion.

The corridor came to a dead end outside another security door, this one manned by a single camera positioned in the center of the ceiling directly above it. No keycard, no pleasant face. Just a lone mechanical eye that controlled the lock. The placard next to the door read PROTOTYPE GALLERY.

An uncanny voice spoke through a speaker in the ceiling. “I’m sorry, the Gallery is currently restricted during testing. Please try again--”

Rainbow rolled her neck, ignoring Millie’s standard greeting. “Millie, please verify credentials and override.”

A pause, then a heavy clunk as the maglocks released. “Confirmed. Welcome, Minister.”

She pushed through while trying not to think too hard about Robronco’s creepy new artificial intelligence. As much as she respected Applebloom for turning her little startup into a titan of Equestrian industry seemingly overnight, the technologies her company continued to invent had begun to develop an almost invasive quality to them.

“Millie,” the user-friendly name assigned to an otherwise less comforting Robronco Personal Assistance and Intelligence Network, or “R-PAIN,” had been retrofitted throughout the Pillar under the assurance that all aspects of its functionality was airtight. It would still be a few years until Millie found her way into the civilian market. Until then, she was another annoyance exclusive to the ministries.
The doors thumped shut behind her, leaving her to stand alone in a cramped airlock beneath a trio of decontamination arches. She closed her eyes to keep her claustrophobia from hitting too hard. Worse than anything, she hated this. The arches sputtered and began dousing her with a measured combination of sterilized water and purified air. She lifted each wing, exposing their undersides to the deluge to hurry the process along. When the sensors chimed and the forward door slid open, she all but galloped through it.

She trotted through the large locker room situated beyond the showers, drawing a few notable stares from ponies in the process of donning ministry-branded jumpsuits in preparation for their shifts. Rainbow kept her eyes forward, knowing how ridiculous she must look now that she’d effectively stepped out of the world’s least enjoyable wash-dry cycle. Her tousled mane would smooth out, she told herself, and followed the rows of lockers and pushed through the far door that led out to the gallery floor.

The Prototype Gallery opened around her so pristine and white that it felt like she was stepping into another world. The damp flats of her hooves squeaked over bright, nonporous tile that lent itself well to the rigorous cleaning it was expected to endure. The gallery was far from sterile, but Applejack had made it clear from the beginning that everything her ministry put into the field needed to be reliable. That meant identifying line drips, venting gasses and chowdered flakes of metal early. The glare of a ceiling packed with fluorescents made sure everything was under a literal spotlight.

The gallery stretched. Two thick painted yellow lines ran parallel down its length, starting on either side of Rainbow’s hooves and ending at a single, thick rolling door. A bright orange forklift sat parked next to the garage door, its forks set into a pallet strapped tight with stacked plastic totes. The right side of the walkway had been repurposed since Rainbow last visited. Rather than hosting rack after rack of weapons in every shape and configuration she could fathom, the space now served as a parking lot for dozens of bright red engine hoists. Their stumpy frames held aloft webworks of eerily pony-shaped steel by hook points at what amounted to their shoulders and flanks. Rolling benches stacked with heavy, curved plates from which bindles of wire curled out from waited at the ready nearby.

Before she could wonder what the strange machines were, her question was answered when she turned to her left.

Along the wall’s length hung a narrow paper stripe printed white and black at even intervals. Rainbow recognized the measuring lines right away, having flown along them more than enough times back at the Wonderbolt Academy as they struggled to accept she was flying as fast as their radar reported. Sure enough, she spotted one pony in the process of packing up some expensive filming equipment while a second pushed a roll cart along the walkway toward Rainbow, one hoof pressed over the top of a dark terminal as he guided the equipment back the way she came. The stallion offered her a respectful nod as they made way for one another. The mare lugging the camera equipment lurched after him without so much as noticing her.

The track itself was little more than a series of black rubber mats lined end to end. Deep, hoof-shaped impressions led Rainbow to the far side of the track where a familiar orange mare glowered at the mechanical pony that left them. Applejack seemed less than impressed with the machine now that a pool of hydraulic fluid was sputtering from a joint in its shoulder.

Rainbow gawked at the thing as she trotted over. “You never said we were building robots.”

A trickle of sweat ran around the curve of Applejack’s muzzle as she cast a look over her shoulder that could melt steel. Her irritation quickly faded in recognition. “I ain’t,” she sighed, and turned back to the pony-shaped carapace. Rainbow noticed the handle of a wrench sticking out between two pieces of heavy plate. “This bucket of bolts has a genuine idiot inside.”

A muffled voice complained from inside the strange headpiece. “Hey!”

Rainbow chuckled as she came alongside Applejack at the front of the machine. There was only one stallion she knew with a voice as slow and low as that. “Big Mac? Are you… inside that thing?”

“Not by choice,” he muttered.

She lifted a hoof and gave the shell’s “nose” a firm thump. It may as well have been a solid statue for how little it moved. Beside her, Applejack positioned her hooves around the wrench and shoved the handle up until it bit into her shoulder. For a moment she stood there on her hind legs, sweat beading down her back while toned muscles rippled with effort. It was something to behold.

The wrench slid upward an entire inch before binding up again. Applejack slumped back to the floor, breathing hard, and glared up at the suit’s opaque black visor. “Are you sure it’s not responding?”

“I told you, everything’s baked in here,” Big Mac said with a hint of defensiveness. A steady clicking came from inside the foreleg next to Rainbow. “The eject switch is shot too.”

Rainbow leaned over to peek through the gap that Applejack had fed the wrench through. Hydraulic fluid dripped from a line that looked like it had snapped free of some kind of port, and the bolt the earth pony had been trying to turn looked like it had been stolen off a tractor. Letters that spelled RELEASE followed a curving arrow above the bolt.

“What happened?” she asked.

Applejack wrapped her forelegs around the wrench and jiggled it loose. The heavy end clunked against the immobilized suit. “He grew,” she growled. “And he’s being awfully cagey on how exactly that happened.”

Rainbow looked up at the suit’s visor, but it’s abashed occupant remained silent. “Okay. Anything I can do to help?”

“You could help me beat my brother’s ass once I get him outta this tin can,” she chuckled as she reseated the wrench. When she dropped to all fours again, the tip of the wrench hung a good two feet above her shoulders. “Should be loose enough. Big Mac, I need you to stay still for this.”

“Ain’t much else to do in here,” he answered.

“You’ll want to stand back, sugar,” she said, shooing Rainbow away from the front of the suit.

She backed away and watched while Applejack pivoted, lining her hips up with the exposed length of wrench and bent her front half low. Like a spring coiled too tight, she snapped her rear hooves out hard into the underside of the handle. The bolt emitted a brief, sharp squeak as the tool ratcheted backward with enough force that it left a bright silver scar on the suit’s shoulder plate.

The suit didn’t move, but Applejack seemed heartened as she spun around and retrieved her tool. After seating it again on the release bolt, it turned with hardly any effort at all. After a few rotations, something beneath the metal skin emitted a hiss-clunk and the suit split along a seam down its spine like a cracked walnut.

Applejack dropped the wrench onto the tile and kicked it away. “That should do it, Big Mac. Try now.”

He didn’t need to be told. The two halves that sealed the suit’s backbone slid open to allow a notably… larger Big Mac to back out of the complex webwork of wires and steel struts that comprised the suit’s inner framework, which seemed determined to make his exit as graceless as possible. The exoskeleton’s inner padding gripped his right foreleg tightly enough that he had to jerk himself free.

“You’re soaked,” Applejack complained before peering into the suit and making a face. “And so is my power armor.”

“Got hot in there,” Big Mac agreed. His hay-colored mane clung to his neck like a wet scarf.

Applejack stared up at her brother and shook her head. “Something tells me that has less to do with the batteries burning out and more with your growth spurt.”

Big Mac pressed his lips together and shrugged.

Something passed between the two that Rainbow couldn’t quite translate. Siblings seemed to have that effect. That indecipherable trust that some of them held in the other, even when they knew there was something being kept from them.

Applejack finally sighed and shook her head in defeat. “Fine, I’ll stop prying. Go cool down and get some water in you. I’ll have someone from Manufacturing come up and take a look at that armor.”

“See you, Bigger Mac,” Rainbow added.

That earned an embarrassed grin from the stallion. “Good to see you too,” he said, then to Applejack, “I’ll let you know when this wears off.”

She lifted an eyebrow at him as he turned to leave. “You’d better.”

Big Mac plodded away, at least two inches taller than Rainbow remembered him. Standing inside that suit must have felt like having steel vacuum-sealed to his skin. The thought of being trapped inside that thing chilled the back of her neck.

Applejack shook her head as she watched him disappear into the staff locker room. “Sorry about that,” she said. “I thought I’d be able to squeeze this test in before you arrived. Didn’t think I’d end up having to pry him out at the end.”

Rainbow smiled a little as Applejack flicked her tail against the behemoth suit’s chest. She looked up at the darkened visor, then down at the intricate series of armored plates that clung to the suit’s exoskeleton. “Just glad you still have some buck in those legs,” she said, tipping her chin to the suit. “This thing looks like it could uproot a tree by leaning on it. I thought you were focusing on weapons systems this quarter.”

“Believe it or not, that’s what we’re tryin’ to do with this monster,” she said. She gestured to the dangling pieces of armor on the other side of the gallery. “But right now we’re still trying to work out the kinks with the power armor itself before we start adding weapon platforms. Folks down in Manufacturing are looking into a way to lighten the armor plates to give us more runtime, but the major flaw we have to patch right now is the power source. Robronco’s got some of the best made batteries in the industry, but they’re not designed to keep something like this movin’ for more than a few minutes.”

Rainbow traced the lines of the steel shell with her eyes, wondering where Applejack had even managed to store those cells. “For what it’s worth, AJ, it’s still pretty impressive.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Applejack’s lip. She looked up at the suit and sighed. “Forty-four prototypes ain’t nothing to sneeze at. Here’s hoping the P-45 turns out something we can field test.” She shook her head. “Either way, you’re here for talismans, not tin ponies. How about I show you what I was doing an awful job explaining over the phone?”

Rainbow held out a wing in a lead the way gesture and followed the mare out of the gallery.

A separate elevator at the periphery of the ministry descended far enough down its shaft that a frown began to settle on Rainbow’s muzzle. She looked at Applejack for an explanation and her friend offered a sheepish smile in return.

“We needed extra space for manufacturing,” she said simply.

Rainbow’s knees bent slightly as the elevator’s brakes engaged, slowing them to a stop. “How far down are we?”

The doors slid open to a polished concrete floor. Rainbow blinked confusion at the stark, steel panels that lined the corridor.

“A fair bit,” Applejack said, guiding her into the corridor. “Deep enough for us to link up with the train yard a ways down Canterlot Mountain, though the connecting tunnel’s still something of a climb. Celestia didn’t like the idea of shipping freight through the middle of the capitol, so this was the compromise Scootaloo conjured up.”

Rainbow hadn’t known that. At least, not completely. She’d known that the Ministry of Technology was self-contained, handling its own design, manufacturing and prototype testing within the Pillar in order to keep unwanted eyes away from the advancements they were making. She had just assumed that meant all three of those steps took place within the cylindrical walls of the Pillar itself. All of that was somewhere above her head. Now they were walking somewhere deep in the heart of Canterlot Mountain.

Sure enough, the corridor bore the unmistakable hallmarks of Scootaloo’s early Shelter Project designs. Bare steel walls joined by exposed girders every several meters, a webwork of plumbing and cables that ran the length of the slightly arched ceiling, even the bulky gasket-sealed doors that had featured prominently in Scootaloo’s initial presentation ahead of her request for funding. It was a little more bare bones than the updated schematics that she sold Rainbow on, but Scootaloo had definitely used this extension as a proving ground for her early designs.

“Applebloom really appreciates what you’re doing for her, by the way,” she said, making room for a grease-stained stallion lugging a pair of saddlebags that clanked as he walked.

Rainbow stared after him for a moment before nodding acknowledgement. “Scoot’s always been an ambitious kid. Applebloom, too.”

Applejack nodded, leading her into a wider intersecting corridor.

They passed a stubby hoof jack parked flush with the wall. Its tines rested beneath a pallet stacked high with long wooden crates bearing black, stenciled letters describing weapon models Rainbow didn’t recognize. As they walked by, a winged mare carrying a clipboard stepped into the corridor ahead of them with a pen held between her lips. Her eyes widened for a moment as they approached, focused entirely on Rainbow. To her credit, she didn’t try to stop them or barrage Rainbow like some of her younger fans tended to.

Rainbow glanced at the illuminated sign above the door the pegasus stood in and was surprised to discover the room beyond was a test firing range. The ministry hadn’t wasted a single bit.

She led her past a long row of windows that peered into a wide, open air room that the sign above its central door simply called “Mechanical.” Ponies crouched over workbenches or huddled around machines taller than two of them stacked atop one another, none of which Rainbow had the first clue what they did. There were nearly as many rolling whiteboards scattered throughout the work stations as there were ponies to write on them. Minds that bent themselves to the goal of building the disparate inventions that would win the war.

“Y’all ever here from Sweetie Belle?”

Rainbow blinked, the abrupt question jarring from her reverie. The Mechanical wing drifted behind them, and Applejack guided her to a steel door resting below a lit sign in the style of all the other lit signs down here. It simply read FABRICATION L1.

“Last I heard, she was still in Ponyville,” Rainbow said.

Applejack made a face and punched the button to open the door. “One of these days I gotta convince Applebloom to forgive her.”

“Maybe,” Rainbow said, watching the heavy door slide into the ceiling. “I wouldn’t push too hard. Kick a tree enough times and it’ll stop bearing fruit.”

Applejack shouldered her as they stepped over the threshold. “I should introduce you to someone I know. She used to own a whole orchard and everything.”

“Har har,” she grinned and followed her inside. “So this is it, huh?”

Her question was rhetorical. After stepping inside, there was no mistaking the room for what it was.

The sign in the corridor helped, too.

The room was surprisingly compact for what Rainbow had been expecting. Barely half the size of the prototype gallery, the Fabrication room made use of every square inch it had been given. Ponies sat or stood around five rows of laboratory grade desks, plugging away on terminals while their colleagues offered notes or argued some arbitrary point of data.

As the door slid shut behind them, Rainbow watched a member of the fabrication team pluck a holotape out of his terminal and head further back into the lab with it gently pinched between his teeth. At the rear of the lab, six hulking white machines loomed between two trios of black server racks. Rainbow knew what the servers were - they were everywhere in the ministries these days - but the sleek, ivory cubes pinned between them were utterly foreign to her.

She watched the stallion bring the holotape to one of the cages and press the cartridge into a terminal mounted inside. Applejack led her past the forward workstations back to the six strange machines. The cube nearest the stallion emitted a cheerful chime as unseen parts within began to move. As they approached, a low hum began to roll out of its chassis, a noise that Rainbow felt in her chest better than she could hear. The stallion squinted at the terminal one last time before turning to the front of the machine where a square seam interrupted its otherwise featureless casing.

He spotted the two mares headed toward him and visibly straightened. “Ministers,” he chirped.

Applejack offered a disarming smile in return. “Don’t let us bother you, I’m just giving the tour.” She paused a moment and looked around at the various ponies working the lab. “Actually, can I ask you to see if your team can’t save your work and clear the terminal for a few minutes? It’d be easier if I had some visuals.”

The stallion fidgeted for a moment as if he were on the edge of telling her no, but thought better of it. He glanced at the humming cube next to him, pursed his lips and nodded quickly. “We can move over to Lab Two, sure. I’ll let them know.”

Applejack smiled as he trotted back through the tables to his team. “Five bits says one of ‘em gives me the stink-eye.”

Rainbow glanced at her and she winked back, nodding toward the four ponies the stallion was speaking to. Sure enough, a red-maned mare mouthed something that was probably best left unheard and shot a withering glare over her shoulder.

“Told ya,” she chuckled.

Rainbow clenched her teeth to keep a straight face as the team began feeding holotapes into their terminal and gathering up their paperwork. “We never shook on that.”

“I’ll get you one of these days,” Applejack whispered, turning briefly to the white machines behind them. She thumped her hoof against the chassis of the nearest one. “Now, the first step of the tour starts with these. They’re called fabricators and, get this, they do most of the fabricating.”

Rainbow pressed her tongue into her cheek and cocked an eyebrow. “Wow.”

“I never said it would be complicated,” she said with a smirk. “These puppies are basically glorified printers. Raw materials are fed in through lines in the back room and the techs here give them the instructions on what to spit out the front.”

She stepped over to the machine that was busily humming. A fan clicked on inside the ceiling vent above it, siphoning away the faintly acrid fumes that the fabricator gave off as it worked. There was a lot more going on inside that machine than Applejack was letting on, and that was perfectly fine as far as Rainbow was concerned. “What’s this one making?”

Applejack glanced at the terminal the stallion had inserted the holotape into. “Prototype fabric of some kind. Some kind of polymer threaded around a modified ceramic core.” She looked over to the group of techs headed out into the corridor, minus the stallion who was headed back to wait for the machine to finish.

“Body armor?” she asked, gesturing to the fabricator.

He nodded sheepishly. “Yes ma’am.”

“Send me the ballistic results when you’ve tested it,” she said, and clapped him on the back as she led Rainbow to the empty workstation. “Keep it up.”

The tech stared back at her, his eyes wide. “Y-yes ma’am!”

They left him to his work before he had a chance to start gushing. Applejack pulled a chair up to the terminal and carefully used the tip of her hoof to enter her credentials. Rainbow peeked over her shoulder as a list of schematics populated the screen.

She ticked down to a file titled TALISMANPRIME.SCH and tapped a key. The screen went momentarily dark before the walnut shape of Zecora’s healing talisman filled the screen. “Now, you’ve already seen this,” she said as she chicken-pecked the keyboard. “What we’re interested in are the internal structures.”

Applejack tapped a key and the terminal began to chatter like mad. Line by green line, an image began to load of something that resembled an ant colony but on a scale of complexity that made the little terminal’s fans kick in.

Rainbow squinted at the impossibly alien curves, tunnels and branches that filled the monitor. “Woah.”

“Just wait.” She keyed the zoom feature and the image stuttered briefly before grinding through an even more detailed rendering of the seemingly random system of voids that filled the stone’s interior. “See what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Rainbow breathed. “How deep does it go?”

Applejack leaned back in her chair. “We’re seeing structures finer than peach fuzz,” she said. “The geeks upstairs are calling it a product of magical sculpting in the same sense that a stream erodes a canyon. Only with these talismans, it’s done with intent.”

Rainbow stared at the strange structures on the screen. “And here we thought zebras were magicless.”

Applejack shrugged. “Ain’t no shame in being wrong. What matters is what we do now that we know better.” She straightened in her seat and reopened the list of schematics. Just a few lines below the model of Zecora’s talisman was a long list of numbered files all bearing the same TALISMAP prefix. She opened one at random and, more quickly this time, the monitor began to draw a thin, tubular spiral down the center of the screen. Its length was studded with inward-facing hooks that appeared to be designed to interrupt the flow of the magic passing through it. “After scanning the talisman given to Zecora’s daughter and comparing them, we were able to identify some identical structures like this one found in both.”

“Which means you could build a blueprint for how they work,” Rainbow added, not quite able to hide the excitement pulling at her cheeks. Then she paused for a moment as she snagged on something Applejack said. “Wait, only some of the structures match?”

She nodded. “Less than half. We think it’s a combination of using a subpar medium for the talisman and inconsistencies in the way they’re created. The end result is the same, but chances are all this excess chowder in the design is part of the reason why both stones are so weak.”

Rainbow gestured to the image on the screen, drawing a feather down the irregular spiral. “But if you can figure out what these things are doing and refine them while getting rid of all the background noise, you could make a more potent healing stone?”

“Exactly,” she said. “And not just healing stones. If we deciphered this thing’s alphabet today, we could start printing custom talismans tomorrow. I mean, just think about how this could change Equestrian medicine or the field hospitals out on the front. We don’t know the limits to what magic like this could cure.”

It all seemed a little far-fetched to Rainbow, but she couldn’t deny the prospect of a painless future was an attractive one. Broken leg? Here’s a talisman. Bad heart? Here’s a talisman. The idea seemed like something out of one of her old adventure novels. Another mcguffin that, in the right hooves, could save the world.

She picked up a pen left behind on the desk and idly gave it a spin between her feathers. Before it had a chance to slow, she gave it another flick and watched as it gyrated along the black surface. “So, in theory, a talisman with the right design could cast any spell a unicorn can.”

“In theory, sure, but the first step is learning this new alphabet.” She tapped the screen with her hooftip. “This is just one letter, and right now we don’t even know if it’s drawn right. Once we’re sure, we can start learning how to spell words and stringing them into sentences. But when we do… I mean, Dash, this is going to be big. This is the kinda thing that draws the line between eras.”

Assuming Equestria held out long enough to reach it, Rainbow silently added. With Spitfire hijacking her ministry, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her wings were no longer on the wheel and the only option available to her was to sit back and wait to see where the war took them.

Listening to the Barrel twins revel in their victory, unaware they had executed Rainbow’s oldest friend, had been paralyzing. The option of feeding Vhanna the research they needed to advance their solar energy program and step away from the war was no longer on the table. In place of it was Rainbow Dash’s neck, and Spitfire had ensured she would be the pony to stand above her holding the axe.

What terrified Rainbow the most was that she didn’t know what Spitfire would tolerate before she finally decided to swing. Suddenly, her natural bravado felt like a liability. That one wrong word might be the end. On some level she knew Spitfire wouldn’t be operating on a hair trigger. She wanted the Ministry of Awesome and the more time Rainbow had to think about it, the more it became evident that Spitfire had been positioning herself to better influence the course it took from the beginning.

She needed to be careful. There wasn’t a doubt in her mind that Spitfire had allies helping her in the ministry willing to tail her in the middle of the night and kill without hesitation. She wondered how long it would be until Spitfire had someone reading the messages on her terminal. When would she come knocking on her office door asking about the messages she and Jet Stream had shared, demanding to know what SOLUS was. She had been sure to keep those communications intentionally vague, back when her primary concerns were the prying eyes in Rarity’s ministry.

It occurred to her that it might be wise to send Jet a letter warning him about Spitfire.

An orange hoof flitted past her muzzle, startling her back to reality. “Equestria to Dash,” Applejack said. “Anyone home?”

Rainbow blinked embarrassment. “Sure, yeah,” she rattled, then forced herself to slow down and start over. “I mean, yeah. I’m here. Sorry.”

She studied her for a moment before her scrutinizing expression softened to something closer to understanding. Applejack leaned toward the terminal and logged off. “It’s a little crowded in here,” she said. “How about we head topside for a bit? Get some fresh air?”

“Don’t you…” Rainbow said, but the meager protest fell apart as soon as she began to speak it.

Applejack glanced at her, that coy smile of hers pulling at her lip. She made no move to rush her decision, and Rainbow started to realize it was entirely hers to make. A part of her still wanted to finish her question and ask Applejack if she had work to do, to give her the option to back out despite being the one making the offer. The terminal ticked and the screen went dark.

When was the last time the two of them had spent time alone together that didn’t involve work? A year ago? More? Rainbow distantly recalled them sharing a meal back at Sweet Apple Acres. Back when she still thought the two of them might have a shot together. Before the ministries.

Before all of this.

Rainbow looked at her. What the hell, she thought.

“Yeah. That’d be nice,” she said.

Applejack dropped out of the chair, her hooves clicking on the concrete, and tipped her head toward the door. Rainbow followed her into the comparatively quiet corridor, already feeling the next words tumbling across her tongue before she could think better of them.

“Do you think we could grab some lunch?” She swallowed and added, “Somewhere quiet where we could just talk. Make up for lost time.”

Applejack chuckled. “Careful, sugarcube. That sounds an awful lot like a date.”

As they approached the elevator, Rainbow mustered just enough courage to shrug. “Would… that be so bad?”

She paused a moment before tapping the call button. “I guess I was under the impression you were too busy.”

“We all are. I just think…”

The elevator arrived with its cheerful chime. The doors split open but neither of them stepped forward. Applejack waited for her with a sympathetic smile.

“I’d like to try.”

Applejack nodded slowly before smiling a little more broadly. “Alright then.”

Rainbow’s wings spread with excitement as Applejack stepped onto the elevator. She followed her in, her heart in her throat. “Really?”

“Better late than never,” she chuckled, pushing the button to ascend. “Besides, this is a fine time for you to show me where you’re living these days.”

Rainbow blinked. “I thought we were getting lunch?”

“We still can. I’m talking about tonight,” she said. “Figure if we’re going to be making up for lost time, we might appreciate the privacy.”

“That would be kind’ve nice.”

Applejack stared at her, eyebrow arched. Rainbow stared back at her, wondering if she’d said something wrong.

“What?”

“Dash, I thought you were the quick one.”

Rainbow frowned confusion. As the elevator doors began to close, her eyes shot wide with understanding. She looked at Applejack, at the playful smirk on her muzzle. Her ears perked up.

“Oh.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 20: No Good Deeds Estimated time remaining: 57 Hours, 7 Minutes