June 25th, 1076

“Is that her?”

“Yah-doy, look at her mark.”

“Well sorry, I couldn’t tell. Her mane’s usually...”

“Longer.”

“Don’t usually see ponies her age with manes clipped that short.”

“It’s definitely done up. She must’ve been to Snips’ Clips.”

“Please, she’s a minister. Why would she slum it all the way down here to Ponyville when she can prob'ly afford a live-in stylist?”

“I guess. Why do you think she’s here at all?”

The lines of the article Applejack was reading fell out of focus, her ears tuned to the gossiping mares just one bench over. Blood rushed up her neck when she heard them talking about her mane. She had, in fact, just walked out of Snips’ Clips an hour earlier but it wasn’t her reason for the trip.

Sitting alone on a park bench beside a scruffy little poplar tree, a copy of The Manehattan Times crinkled over the incline of her crossed hind leg.

“You should run home real quick and get mom’s replica Stetson. I bet she’ll sign it.”

Applejack grimaced. She was never going to finish this article.

“I don’t think ministry mares do autographs.”

“Can’t hurt to try.”

“Maybe we could…”

She set her hooves over the newsprint and turned her head to the young mares. “Ladies, I’d like to finish readin’ my paper in peace if y’don’t mind.”

The two lookiloos jumped as if a power line had fallen across their tails and stammered off some embarrassed apologies as they gathered their saddlebags and cantered away. Applejack watched them go, her right hoof absently rising to touch the spot her ponytail had always settled over her shoulder. Now her straw-blonde mane barely swept past her cheek and, strangely, she wasn’t as confident about the decision to cut it now as she had been when she walked into Snips’ salon.

She’d wanted to cut her mane short for the longest time, but something always managed to stop her. Self-consciousness, usually. The worry that ponies might think she’d given into vanity when, ever since becoming the Element of Honesty, they viewed her as the humble country bumpkin who had no patience for chasing trends.

Smoothing the paper across her leg with one hoof, she used the other to pull a stray lock behind her ear. With the gawkers gone, she had the Sugarcube Memorial Park all to herself.

Normally she would find some humor in the name’s irony, but it wasn’t named for her or the affectation she’d never been able to shake. The tiny park, barely a postage stamp on Ponyville’s slowly expanding sprawl, was named for the historic building that once stood here. Sugarcube Corner had been a hallmark of Ponyville until the day it was reduced to splinters by a terrorist’s bomb. The explosion took the lives of the Cake family members, some faster than others, and was the catalyst that had pushed Pinkie Pie into her ever-deepening depression.

She sighed and made a mental note to check in with Pinkie one of these days.

A sigh pushed past her lips as she quietly watched Ponyville’s enviably light traffic make its way around the cobblestone roundabout that encircled the park. The putter of the occasional engine was nothing compared to the growing roar of noise that threatened to clog the urban centers out east. Ponyville had never been home to a wealthy demographic, and the new motorized carriages of this new generation had yet to flood her hometown. She was glad for that, and smiled as she watched a sturdily-built unicorn pull his genuine rickshaw around the bend.

A bronze statue of the Cake family stood at the center of the park, the four of them posing for a group photo as they had in a family photo that survived the fire. No heroic stances, no solemn stares off into the distance. None of the subtext that Applejack had grown so tired of seeing in monuments. Just a family, sitting together in a quiet plot of land, smiling as they waited for the photographer’s flash.

“Oh, wow. You cut your mane!”

Applejack smiled and looked up to see Applebloom trotting across the grass toward her. She didn’t have to check the clocktower to know it would be ten minutes to noon. Her sister, once a filly notorious for finding any excuse to drop her share of the chores so she could run off to her treehouse with her friends, now managed a finely tuned work schedule that made Applejack feel like the family slacker by comparison. She would be ten minutes early to her own funeral if she had her way.

She set her copy of the Times down on the bench as she stood, pulling her sister into a bone-crushing hug. A moment passed, then another, and they still clung to one another. Applejack settled her chin against the top of her sister’s shoulder, holding her, feeling the silent sting of tears in her eyes as Applebloom swallowed the grief rising in her throat.

One-hundred and thirty-five days. That was how long it had been since their brother went missing, his mind apparently set on leaving Equestria for the Crystal Empire without a thought for what he was leaving behind. She blamed herself. Always would, she'd decided. Talking Big Mac into helping her figure out the kinks in her ministry’s power armor, ignoring what must have been a steadily growing discomfort on his part while she and her sister traded data on where adjustments needed to be made, joints modified, hydraulic lines reconfigured. All the while him feeling what must have been paralysis at the thought of expressing his misgivings.

Maybe he’d known what she was thinking. That she saw this new power armor as a family enterprise as much as the farm used to be. Robronco’s exoskeleton design, the Ministry of Technology’s application of state-of-the-art armor plating and mounted weapons platform, and Big Mac’s tired shoulders being made to bear its weight.

“How’re you holding up?” Applebloom choked.

She shook her head, the pain in her little sister’s voice like a knife in her heart. “Good days n’ bad,” she whispered.

Applebloom squeezed her a little harder as her vision blurred.

“I’m supposed to be consoling you, you turkey,” she muttered.

“Tough teats.”

She half-snorted, half-sobbed. “Language.”

“I’ll put a bit in the swear jar when I get home.” Applebloom chuckled, hesitated, then let go.

Applejack watched her sister look up at the sky as she wiped her face, careful not to use the foreleg bearing the blocky piece of computer tech just above her hoof. A Pip-Buck, her company was calling it. Applebloom was convinced it would revolutionize Equestrian society in the next few years, so long as Robronco Industries was able to get the rest of the budding tech industry leaders on board. She was meeting some resistance there, but “ahead of its time” was a phrase her company relished to hear. It meant they were on the right track.

“So,” Applebloom said, her misty eyes glancing at the paper Applejack had just been reading. “If your mane is any indication, today’s either a really good day or a really bad one.”

She coughed out a laugh and wiped her eyes, joining her sister on the bench. Once again, she slid a hoof through the short bob of her mane. “S'pose it’s a good one,” she said.

Applebloom nodded, her eyes lifting to the empty space just above her head. “No hat?”

“Thought I’d try going incognito for a day.”

Not that it worked, she thought.

“Rainbow Dash better like it, if she knows what’s good for her." It felt strange hearing her little sister defending her honor, but it was nothing she and Big Mac hadn’t done when Applebloom brought home her first coltfriend. A pony broke an Apple’s heart at their own risk.

“She’s been encouraging me to go out and get it cut ever since I hinted at wanting to do it. I’m afraid if I stalled any longer, she’d up n’ trim it in my sleep.”

Applebloom smiled at that. “I’m really happy for you two.”

“Me too.”

A stallion pushed a stroller onto the grass beyond the statue, oblivious to the two mares sharing a bench on the other side of the memorial. They watched him pause at a public fountain, drink, then bend down to check on his foal. A small smile crossed Applejack’s lips as they watched him stand up and continue on toward the newly paved street.

“I don’t suppose you wanted to meet me here just to reminisce,” she said.

Applebloom shook her head. “No, but… we really should set a day aside.”

She nodded. “I know.”

The suggestion withered on the vine.

Applebloom shifted on the bench. “Do you remember Spitfire?”

She blew a disparaging breath between pursed lips. How could she forget the abrasive old mare who went over her head and offered Jet Stream a civilian contract within her ministry? The last thing she wanted to do was work with a stallion so high on his own ego that he fancied himself some technological messiah, not to mention his other back-of-the-barn proclivities. Spitfire had dumped him in her lap like the most irritating daycare mom in Equestria.

“She’s stuck her nose in my business enough to make an impression, sure.”

Applebloom fidgeted with the corner of the newspaper. “Yeah. So, that sorta makes three of us.”

“Three? I don’t follow. She talked to you?”

The worry in her voice was unmistakable. “Scootaloo called me last month talking about some meeting she had with Spitfire and her new personal assistant, and they more or less blackmailed her into selling a bunch of her Stables to the Ministry of Awesome.”

She frowned. “More or less?”

Applebloom winced, her eyes lost in the grass. “I mean, kind of? I thought maybe Scootaloo was overreacting about a bad deal, but the way she describes it, Stable-Tec walked away from the table with the entire pot. The MoA is gonna fully bankroll their next ninety Stables in exchange for being given ten of their own.”

“That makes about as much sense as planting saplings in December.”

“I know.” Applebloom sighed, still clearly struggling to make heads or tails of it herself. “But Scootaloo was up in arms because they’re going to build some kind of… silo, right through where Stable 1 was being built. She said it’s like they designed it for maximum inefficiency and called it a deathtrap waiting to happen. Spitfire ended up threatening to leak some dirt she dug up on Scoots and that’s…”

The clocktower at the center of Ponyville cut in with a crisp chime of bells to announce the hour. Applebloom chewed her lip as she waited for the last note to ring. When it finished and they could once again hear the birds chirping in the trees, she continued.

“Scootaloo made me promise not to tell anyone, but two days ago Spitfire showed up with that assistant of hers at my office in Las Pegasus.”

Applejack stiffened.

“They brought a contract with them for me to sign. In exchange for a… ludicrously generous subsidy, Robronco Industries would provide a full license to our most recent iterations of the M.I.L.L.I.E. system. I thought she was joking. Spitfire was buying a bushel for the price of the whole orchard.”

She was getting confused. “But we already have a Millie system installed at the Pillar. What’s she need another one for?”

Applebloom leaned back. The bench creaked. “Search me. It didn’t make sense at the time, and sure enough, when I asked what it was for her sweet little assistant dove in with the dirt. No answer, no explanation. Just a red folder for me, Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle.”

“What did she have on you?”

Applebloom shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I signed the papers.”

She looked at her little sister with bewilderment. “How does it not matter? She could have been bluffing!”

“She probably was.” Applebloom kneaded the edge of one hoof into the soft sole of the other. “Could’ve had an old littering ticket for all I care. She was offering a good deal and I needed her to stop digging, same as Scoots. You already know why.”

She looked away, chewing the tip of her tongue behind closed lips as she watched a group of teenage ponies meander down the sidewalk, one of them latching their feathers around the base of a painted green lamppost and swinging lazily along its axis, singing an exaggerated tune that Applejack vaguely recognized.

Applebloom watched her, waiting for her answer.

She was well aware of the pocket-sized articles her little sister and fellow crusaders were publishing. The Song of Letters was originally a creation of Sweetie Belle’s. A way, in her mind, to push back against the damage she felt her elder sister was doing to Equestria from the helm of the Ministry of Image. It wasn’t the first subversive piece of print to roll off the press, but the one-shot articles it offered readers were far from the typical anti-war tirades that ponies associated with banned newsprint. They were professionally drafted, calmly written opinion pieces that argued, with dangerous honesty, against the war against Vhanna. And it had weight to it. While most ponies were content to ignore the Song, a growing group were starting to listen.

Had anyone else founded the publication, Rarity would not have hesitated to set their house on fire. But Sweetie Belle was her only sibling, and like it or not she shared that house. Covering up those connections was as much an act of protecting her sister as it was protecting herself.

And now someone was threatening the only kin she had left.

“You look angry.”

She took a breath. “That’s the polite way of sayin’ it, sure. Right now I’m well and truly pissed.”

Applebloom continued to stare at her hooves. “Language.”

She smiled, but it didn’t last long. “I don’t like the idea of my sister being blackmailed.”

“That ain't all though,” her sister nudged.

“No,” she said, feeling the heat filling her chest. “No, it ain’t. Spitfire’s job is to manage the department heads in the MoA, not cut contracts with civilians at knifepoint. She doesn’t have the authority to make any of the deals you’re describing. Not without Rainbow Dash’s approval, and even then she already has a legal department to draw up those papers. Spitfire shouldn’t even be leaving the Pillar!”

Something was obviously wrong, but it was like trying to piece together a puzzle without a picture to go along with it. Spitfire had no business doing what she was doing, and yet… she was.

“Maybe Rainbow Dash delegated the work to her?” Applebloom offered.

She shook her head, dismissing the idea. “She would have to restructure half of the ministry just to make that work. Even if she did, Luna would need to authorize final approval. The rest of the ministries would have been notified, too.”

“Doesn’t seem like any of that stopped Spitfire. Maybe she’s acting on Rainbow’s behalf?”

She looked at Applebloom and saw the creeping doubt in her eyes. “Trust me, Sis. Rainbow wouldn’t do that to you. Scootaloo, least of all. Those two are as much family as we are.”

“Yeah, but Spitfire’s always been her idol and…” she stopped, visibly uncomfortable. “Look, I shouldn’t be talking bad about her. I just want to let you know what’s been going on.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t satisfied. She thought back to their carriage ride to the badlands. Rainbow’s stiffness when she asked why Spitfire was accompanying them and how, at the time, it seemed strange that Rainbow would sound so resigned when she credited Spitfire for how smoothly the MoA was running.

She frowned.

Applebloom nudged her hip. “You okay, AJ? You're starting to worry me.”

“Ah’m fine. Jes’... gimme a minute.” Her accent came back thick as the alarm bells in her head were loud.

Bringing up Spitfire had gotten Rainbow’s hackles up. Applejack assumed she was being defensive. A remnant of self-conscious pride from when they were younger and she was used to firing from the hip and asking forgiveness later. But that hadn’t been it.

She thought back to what Rainbow had said.

“She’s the reason my ministry operates as smoothly as it does. I try to keep her in the loop wherever I can.”

And then her tone had shifted. Grown barbs.

“That, and I owe her a favor.”

Applejack lurched up from the bench and spat a curse. A burning, white-hot anger ignited inside her as the last pieces of the picture fell into place. Somewhere nearby, Applebloom paced alongside her asking what was wrong. She was dizzy with anger.

Of course Spitfire had been able to get Jet Stream contracted with the Ministry of Technology without her consent. Of course she had been able to weasel her way into a demonstration of Equestria’s most deadly weapon. Of course she’d promised Scootaloo and Applebloom the moon without hesitating to blackmail them into signing on the dotted line.

Of course she would operate so far beyond the scope of her job that it would give Rainbow Dash no other choice but to lie to her.

Applebloom skirted in front of her, forcing her to stop. “What. Is. Wrong?”

She bit the back of her tongue hard enough to taste blood. Maybe she was getting ahead of herself. No. Something told her she was only just beginning to catch up.

“I just don’t like the thought of her talkin’ you into a corner, that’s all.”

It wasn’t technically a lie. More like an omission of truth. Or suspicion. Maybe both.

Applebloom watched her, clearly aware that there were gears spinning in her sister’s head she wasn’t being made privy to. A moment passed, then another. Finally, Applebloom nodded, her eyes lowered. A carriage horn chirped a few blocks away, the noise of a pony with simpler problems.

“That’s the reason I came all this way to see you.” Applebloom paused to track a white stallion on the sidewalk as he trotted by. He noticed them watching, lifted a feather above his forehead and tipped an imaginary hat before continuing well out of earshot.

Applejack watched the stallion depart, knowing he would find someplace unobtrusive to stop and monitor them. “He’s one of mine,” she assured her.

Applebloom nodded, but lowered her voice all the same. “Scootaloo, Sweetie and I are as close to certain as we can be that whatever Spitfire wants with those Stables, it isn’t above board. The version of Millie we’ve licensed out to Stable-Tec is tightly controlled. The fact that she’s extorting Robronco for full access right after buying ten Stables has me worried. She could take all ten of them off the remote network. Scoots and I would be blind.”

Applejack frowned, realizing this wasn’t just a few red flags but an entire shipment of them. “Best assessment of what she’d want with ten off-the-grid Stables?”

Her sister shook her head. “If I had to guess, black sites. Or she just wants to cash in on ticket sales while ponies are scared. We don’t know, which is why we need your help to keep an eye on her.”

She lifted a brow and uttered a dark chuckle. “If that old bird is doing what I think she’s doing, she’s got a lot more to worry about than me lookin’ through her keyhole.”

“Maybe,” Applebloom nodded vaguely. “We’re thinking a little bigger than a keyhole. How do you feel about the Ministry of Tech branching out into the public works industry?”

Applejack blinked. “As in…?”

“Fiberoptic and high-voltage cable. We’re going to need enough to bury a few thousand miles’ worth. Maybe more.”

Her lip quirked into a rebellious little smile. The same one she donned whenever she and her fellow Crusaders were about to embark on something equal parts dangerous and fun.

“Spitfire ain't the only pony who can play dirty.”

They had been descending the stairwell for what felt like an hour, but when Aurora slowed to check her Pip-Buck she was disheartened to see only half that time had passed. Round and round they trod until the slow clatter of hooves against antique steel treads sank into the Stable’s bowels.

Sweat gathered down the ridge of her spine, tracing faint lines of moisture down her ribs as it fell. The heat rising from below made breathing a labor, each damp inhalation more like a swallow. It simultaneously dried and wetted their throats the further they walked, an uncomfortable sensation that tickled the occasional coughs from everyone except Roach.

She couldn’t help but feel a tug of jealousy toward him, though becoming a ghoul was a heavy price to pay for the luxury of choosing when he needed to breathe. No one had noticed until Julip pointed it out, forcing him into the unenviable position of being at the center of a long discussion about the properties of his altered physiology. Aurora didn’t contribute any probing questions and tried not to groan as Briar filled the time with his own. The minor interrogation taught them that part of Roach’s unnaturally slowed metabolism allowed him to forgo the need to eat, sleep, drink and in their present case breathe for long periods of time. Interesting factoids, and none of them useful to the task of walking stairs. She considered forcing a change in subject, but Roach’s polite and clipped responses to Briar and Julip brought their questions to quick conclusions until the topic eventually stagnated on its own.

The monolithic black letters painted stark black slid past them along the endlessly curving wall. Below them, the landing to the massive donut-shaped disc of Level 19. Ginger passed her magic across the bridge connecting the stairwell to the darkened level, confirming that not all of the Stable's residents had reached the top. Leaving the bodies to their rest, she doused her horn and they continued down.

Five more circuits around the great stairway until Level 20.

Ten more circuits until Twenty-One.

Fifteen until Twenty-Two.

The treads of the stairs overhead were so low that if Aurora reached up with her wing she’d be able to drag her feathers along the damp stalactites of rust growing from their undersides. The painfully shallow decline from one step to another made for slow progress, and as if to add insult to injury the stairs themselves were barely wide enough to accommodate two ponies shoulder to shoulder. It was as if Stable-Tec had gone through pains to invent the least efficient staircase to ever exist.

She tried and quickly failed to make sense of it. Her wing slid along the railing, over layers upon layers of chipped, colorful paint worn smooth by the hooves of the original inhabitants. Every half-turn, her feathers would bump into one of the welded steel braces that connected the railing on one side of the hollow column to the treads on the other. Another half turn and her feathers bumped over the next beam. And again. And again.

The descent gave her ample time to pare down the simple math of the stairs. Five full turns, then a landing. Five more turns, another landing. She noticed a strip of browning cloth, the remains of some sort of banner, dangling from the brace beneath her hooves and timed herself. Half a minute later, the banner was above her. Two and a half minutes between each level. A little more than an hour to reach Thirty-Four, assuming they kept this pace the entire way down.

She frowned. How far down was Stable 1’s generator?

As they passed into the Twenties, she began to notice signs posted on the wall. Most were at eye level but a few barely came up to Aurora’s chest as they passed. Signs that shouted NO RUNNING and YIELD RAILWARD TO STUDENTS slid by as if to chastise her for her inattentiveness. The shorter more colorful signs offered more cheery reminders such as TWILIGHT SEZ: DON’T PRACTICE SPELLS ON THE STAIRS! and THINK OF THOSE ABOVE - DO NOT PUSH OR SHOVE!

As they passed the cartoonish depiction of the Element of Magic and her cheery speech bubble, Roach glanced back at Ginger and pointed it out with mock seriousness. “Twilight says,” he chuckled, indicating her horn.

Aurora smiled as Ginger answered him with a haughty protrusion of her tongue, and hovering her apple-sized sphere of luminous magic near the tip of his own fissured horn for the next several turns.

Past the mid-Twenties, the reminders for school-aged foals grew more infrequent and aging signs of violence became more apparent. As they rounded the landing to Twenty-Nine they discovered that the bridgeway had been ripped apart. Scorch marks blackened the concrete where a fire had burned and Aurora’s feathers came off the railing smeared with char. Graffiti written in beige wall paint flaked off the wall, announcing yet again, DOWN WITH THE UPPERS. Various other slogans adorned the next turn, some still clearly legible while an effigy of a unicorn appeared to have been chiseled out of the concrete by hoof.

The signs of a Stable in collapse were everywhere. As they passed by the landing of Thirty, they came across a section of railing that had been sheared away and dangled precariously over the stairway’s central shaft. Someone had come in later and tied a length of rubber hose from one end of the gap to the other, serving as a makeshift replacement.

The hose had since rotted away, leaving behind the remains of two knotted pieces on either stump of railing. They gave the gap a wide berth as they passed.

Hooves clicked down treads gently warped by the heavy traffic that once thundered up and down them, and Thirty-One came and went. Then Thirty-Two. As they came to the landing of Thirty-Three, Briar clicked off his flashlight. The light from IT one level below filled the stairwell with enough residual glow that they could see without aides, and they descended the last few turns with a sense of something like relief.

Aurora kept her eyes forward as she crossed the bridgeway. In spite of her wings, something about this place seemed to be undoing the confidence she had grown in her novice skills at flight. Falling from here with so many obstacles waiting in the black below made her heart beat a little harder, and she hurried over to the landing where the others were already gathered.

Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead as she walked into what remained of a beige, businesslike lobby decorated with equal portion informational posters and slashes of graffiti. The receptionist’s desk, a crescent-shaped curve of wood centered along a wall pockmarked with bullet holes, lay hunkered behind a jumbled barricade of waiting room furniture. Briar led them through a narrow gap in a tangle of chairs, their tan upholstery dark with different shades of mold. Aurora held her breath as she passed by, following the group through a doorway whose door had been taken off its hinges and propped against the wall.

Aurora glanced down at the trio of steel door pins set on the floor beside it, each placed parallel to one another like pencils on a supervisor's desk.

“Enclave’s definitely been here.” Roach's pale eyes lingered on the skeletal form of a unicorn that had been pushed to the side of the hallway beyond, the pistol laying near its horn, missing its magazine.

“They’ve been sending monthly patrols out to check on this place since before we moved to the mountain.” Briar gestured a feather toward a unicorn slumped in the corner where the hall bent right. Its skin hung on its frame like a deflated balloon, swallowed by the bulletproof vest it wore around its chest.

A mean-looking rifle lay across its lap. Aurora could feel her grip loosening around Beans’ iron bar as she contemplated taking the forgotten weapon.

Briar seemed to read her mind. “Leave it there. That one's booby-trapped.”

She frowned after him as he continued around the bend, then looked more closely at the rifle. At first glance it looked fine. It even had a fresh magazine in the port. Then she bent to look at the end of the barrel and noticed the greyish matter smeared around its rifling, and the similarly colored lump stuffed a few inches deeper.

Her trust in the weapon gone, she trotted around the bend to catch up. “Is that cement?”

At the head of the line, Briar shook his head. “Plastic explosive.”

She blinked, unsure how plastic could be explosive, but the question crumbled when she noticed Julip’s ears stand up. Her head spun and she glared toward the baited rifle as if its mere existence was a personal affront. Then, realizing Julip and Ginger were watching from behind, she pressed her lips together and faced forward.

The carpeted hall took them past a line of open doors bearing the names of Stable 1’s final residents. Aurora peered into one of the offices, its overhead light buzzing resiliently. If it weren’t for the thick layer of muddy dust coating every surface or the withered legs visible behind the desk, it could have been just another workday.

“Tickets, please,” Briar said, pulling her attention to where he slowed to a stop at the hall’s terminus. A steel door, barely larger than the office doors on either side of it, waited between two woefully underwatered potted ferns. Briar held a wing open toward Roach as if expecting him to produce a stub to be stamped.

As the rest of them gathered at the door, Roach uttered a ragged chuckle and shook his head. “Ticketmasters asked that before the train left the station, not after.”

Briar used the same wing to wave him off. “Ah, well, don’t tell Beans. She's young, but she is obsessed with historical accuracy.” He nodded back to Aurora, pointing a feather at the iron bar slung over her shoulder. “Yo-ho?”

Aurora sighed and lifted Beans’ make-believe sword. “Yo-ho.”

“Atta girl,” he said, then turned to the bulkhead.

A silver keypad swayed on a tangled nest of wires where it had been pried from the wall. Deep gouges in the concrete around it pointed to some long-forgotten pony’s frustration of being kept outside.

“I guess I’ll ask,” she said as Briar squinted into the void left by the destroyed keypad. “What’s behind the door?”

“This is the server room for the Stable,” he answered, eyes locking onto something tucked up behind the wall panel. He stuffed the tip of his wing into the square cut-out and fished down a small cluster of frayed wires. “Also happens to be where the power comes in.”

Aurora quirked her lip, strongly doubting that. Even on its best day, the generator back home put out enough vibration to be heard through several layers of good soundproofing. A Stable this large had to have an equally large generator or, likely, more than one. It was quiet enough down here to hear things that weren't there, let alone something that actually was. If a generator was spinning behind that door she would eat her Pip-Buck.

Unconcerned by her obvious doubt, Briar had selected a pair of wires in each wing, winced, and scraped them together. His entire body jumped as a spark snapped across the frayed ends and the lights above momentarily dimmed. Momentum pulled the wires back apart and the connection broke.

The security door clunked and swayed open.

“I hate maglocks!” he laughed, shaking his wings out to lessen the sting. “Goddesses, that never gets any better.”

Julip lifted a curious brow. “Goddesses?”

Briar paused, catching himself, then shrugged. He pushed the door the rest of the way open, ushering them through.

“Old habit,” he said, holding the door. “I grew up in Enclave country, back when they still held Steepleton. My mother was a lifelong believer with the Church even after the Rangers pushed in.”

“I passed through Steepleton when I left New Canterlot,” Ginger said with a note of nostalgia. “It was a gorgeous little town.”

Briar nodded with a smile of his own as she walked by, but stopped Aurora as she approached the door. He held out his wing, nodding to Beans’ sword, which she lifted over her neck and dropped in his dusty feathers. With a grunt, he wedged it into the jamb. Aurora tried not to think of what might happen if the door swung shut behind them.

“Haven’t been a believer for a long, long time,” he continued, welcoming Aurora over the threshold with a sweep of his feathers. There was a pain in his smile that she saw as she passed, as if just by speaking he was pressing a hoof into an old bruise. “Hard to shake the vocabulary.”

Aurora nodded absently, her mind elsewhere as she gawked at the vast forest of servers spread out before her. Long rows of black, whirring obelisks frantically blinked and chittered on a perfectly measured checkerboard that stretched uninterrupted toward each of the room’s stark white walls. The linoleum beneath her hooves had once been white as well, but had since turned the color of dehydrated urine under the endless glare of the fluorescents above.

She stepped toward the nearest of the servers and marveled at how… clean it was. The black pores of its cage were virtually devoid of dust. A jungle of meticulously pathed, color-coded and labeled wires snaked from a highway of conduit tacked into the ceiling and slithered their way into the cabinet to carefully organized racks. Green and yellow LEDs flickered along patch panels installed and switched on centuries before she was even dreamed of, dutifully doing whatever it was they were tasked to do, unaware that the Stable that surrounded them was long dead.

At the top of the server, several fans pushed warm air toward a waiting air duct. A bright, white 40 was stamped into the top of the cabinet in stark relief.

Julip hummed. “So, they don’t believe in goddesses in Ranger territory?”

Aurora took a breath. She was probing.

Before Briar could answer, Ginger stepped in. “Much as I would love to talk religion at the dinner table,” she said, pointedly looking at Julip, “perhaps our time would be better spent discussing those.”

She motioned toward the servers. All eyes followed, but Briar had the look of a stallion who had outgrown the wonder of what lay before him and now viewed it with the same might-as-well curiosity as if it were an uninspired roadside attraction.

“Not much to discuss,” he said, passing Aurora and wading deeper into the rows. “Best me or any of the other Scavs can tell, they’re just servers. Ruminating on old data like cows on cud, back when there were still cows.”

Aurora and the others followed. Heat boiled off of the servers like weak ovens, causing her throat to tickle. She cleared it just as Ginger drew up alongside her.

“It’s dry in here,” she said.

“Only place left in the Stable that can drive off the humidity,” Briar agreed, dragging his feathers across the front of a passing cabinet.

Each one, Aurora realized, had a different number. A different role. She nodded, but she couldn’t shake the feeling of… pity, maybe? It felt silly to feel something like pity for a machine, but there it was. She felt sorry for them. Like they were the last survivors of the event that doomed their minders.

As if sensing her confliction, Ginger drifted toward her until their shoulders touched. Aurora glanced at the brief contact and offered a small smile of assurance. She was okay.

Julip’s voice piped up from the next row over. “I’m surprised your Scav friends didn’t want to, you know, scavenge these.”

“Oh, they did. Still want to, in fact. This Stable is a gold mine of spare parts, old tech, tools, weapons… you name it.” He sidestepped a utility cart, tools and test equipment still waiting to be picked up again. “But for now, nobody wants to risk tampering with anything that might provoke the Enclave to come looking before we’re ready. Once Beans is old enough, we’ll rejoin the Scavs and bring a caravan to strip out what we can. Make enough caps to buy some influence with the Rangers, maybe even get their endorsement so we can quit pretending to be raiders.”

Aurora frowned. “I thought you wanted a spot in our Stable.”

He looked back at her and winced. “I do. Merry almost started packing Beans’ things when I told her you’d offered. There’s nothing more important to us than her safety.”

“Here comes the ‘but,’” Julip chimed in.

Briar frowned at her. “But, right now your Stable is, and I don’t mean any offense, a risk factor. That’s why we haven’t said anything to Bean yet. I don’t want to get any of our hopes up, especially hers.”

She couldn’t argue his reasoning, even if it did dampen the little lump of pride she'd felt for offering them what she viewed as a better life. She’d barely considered the possibility that Briar had plans, even aspirations of his own. Gradually, the what-ifs began creeping in. What if they asked to bring their family along too? What if the Scavs were their entire family and it turned into an all-or-nothing deal? What if Beans turned out to be claustrophobic or Meridian wound up ostracized for being an earth pony? What if, once they entered Stable 10, they decided they wanted to go back outside?

What if the other pegasi she’d spent her life with decided they wanted to leave like she did?

Ginger’s breath warmed her ear. “Breathe.”

She took a quiet breath, held it, and blew it out. The panic had crept into her chest so quickly that it left her shaken. So much of what she said, what she did, even where she chose to take her next step affected the lives of nearly a thousand pegasi waiting for her to fulfill a single promise. One mistake was all it would take to ruin everything.

Ginger’s shoulder continued to press against hers and, slowly, the fear abated enough for her to take the reins again. By the time she felt closer to normal, they had reached the end of the servers.

A blank white wall stood before them.

“Wow,” Julip said, rounding the adjacent server. “That’s a pretty nifty wall.”

Briar shook his head and squinted at the yellowed linoleum beneath his hooves, his feather guiding his eyes as he scanned the tiles. He stopped when he found a square marked so faintly that it could have been mistaken for a fabrication error. Barely the size of a pinhead, the corner of one of the tiles was just barely darker than the rest.

He pressed the edge of his hoof into the seam and the linoleum lifted away like a rug. Grabbing the flap between his feathers, he peeled away a three-by-three section of unglued flooring to reveal an access panel sunken into the bare concrete.

He slipped a feather through a ring in the center of the panel. With a jerk, the panel separated along a rubber gasket and lifted free. Setting it aside, Briar fished his flashlight out of his vest, clicked it on and pointed it into the hole.

A cockroach the size of Aurora’s hoof emitted a keening chitter and scurried down a bundle of wires on legs thick as pencils. She cursed and reared back hard enough to send herself toppling onto her backside, only to shove herself back even more with the meager purchase her hooves had on the smooth linoleum.

“What the fuck is that?!” she barked.

Briar, Roach, Ginger and Julip stared at her from the edge of the hole, equally surprised by her reaction.

“It’s just a radroach,” Briar said, trying his best not to laugh. “It’s fine, they’re mostly harmless.”

Aurora shook her head. “No way. That thing was huge.”

Ginger trotted over and offered a helping hoof, her face touched with an apologetic smile. Then, as Aurora took her leg and hesitantly got up, Ginger’s smile bent into a confused frown. “Have we really walked this far without seeing even one?”

The blood drained from Aurora's face. “Do not tell me there’s more outside.”

Ginger stayed silent.

A distant chitter echoed out of the open panel.

“Wait.” Julip wrinkled her nose and looked at the changeling beside her. “Is that why they call you Roach?”

Roach rolled his eyes and pointed to the hole in front of him. “Can we please get back to this?”

“Nope.” Aurora took a cautious step toward one of the servers, willing to try tipping it over the hole if it came down to it. “I don’t do bugs. No fucking way.”

Julip barely suppressed a laugh and gestured to Roach, much to his growing consternation. “Um, hello?”

“Roach is different. Roach sucks at karaoke and can open bottle caps with his legs. Roach is awesome.” She shook her head and stabbed a hoof toward the hatch. “That thing hissed at me and went to rat us out to its creepy-crawly nestmates. Also, fuck you, he’s not a bug.”

The Enclave mare’s mouth hung open, ready to return fire, but Briar was quicker on the draw. “Woah, woah, woah. Dial it down a little, you two. I don’t think Julip understands what she said.”

Aurora set her jaw, torn between monitoring the insect pit of death and dead-eyeing the mint green mare doing her best impression of a pony simply aghast at how quick to anger she was.

Sensing the growing tension, Briar motioned to pick the panel back up. “Maybe we should take a few minutes and circle back when everyone has a moment to cool off.”

“No,” Aurora said, not wanting to have walked all the way down here just to hit the pause button. “Just… show us. Please.”

After looking at each of them in turn and determining the little moment of chaos was cooling to a simmer, he shook his head with a sigh and pointed his light back into the hole. “You’ll need to come closer to see, Aurora.”

Grudgingly, she allowed herself to be led toward the hole. She stopped a full step shy of it, opting to crane her neck forward to peer down where the light was aimed. The radroach was gone, but the scratch marks it left in the fine dust that coated the wires were perfectly visible. Her skin itched sympathetically.

The light tracked smoothly toward the wall where the splayed cables came together in a bundle thick as Aurora’s leg before similar bundles branched together into a torso-thick mass. The heavy line snaked into a stainless steel port built into the exterior wall and disappeared.

Aurora pressed her lips together and frowned.

“Even if that is the outer wall,” she said, “it’s not a concrete slab. There’s going to be another yard of reinforced steel webwork after that, and another concrete layer after that. It probably just follows the hollow space between layers.”

Briar shook his head. “Not this kind of cable. Look at the black wrapping around the biggest bundle. That’s solid dielectric insulation.”

Aurora hesitated. They were quickly approaching the limits of her vocabulary, and Briar seemed to actually understand what he was talking about. “So it’s an underground transmission line. We’re underground.”

“But you know what I mean,” he persisted.

She did, but that didn't mean she was sold on it.

“Merry and I took a compass around the valley and we found a weak magnetic field that starts at the ramp and runs east. It’s a buried line.”

“Could be ferrous ore,” she countered.

“It isn’t,” he said.

He turned, lifted the cover panel off the floor and pressed it back into place, but the relief that washed over Aurora was short-lived.

“I’ve been to the bottom of this Stable,” he said, something they all knew from the pump that now adorned the back of his cave. “I’ve seen the generator, and it isn’t running. All the pieces are still there, sure, but it ran out of gas a long time ago.”

Her leg was bouncing. She pressed down to stop it.

“No offense,” she said, mustering what she could of her crumbling confidence, “but I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Briar shrugged, unsurprised. “That is why we’re here, after all. That and the family pump. Though, if it’s all the same to you I’d prefer to stay up here while you go spelunking. My leg can only take so much abuse in one day."

His disarmingly polite nature nearly had Aurora agreeing to leave him on his own no questions asked, but alarms sounded immediately in the survival-oriented portion of her brain. Briar was a nice enough stallion; married, a happy father, resourceful and what Aurora uncomfortably accepted as a fan of hers… but she'd known him for, what, three hours at most? For all she knew, he could be planning on running back up those steps and locking the door on his way out.

Sure, it wasn't a creative betrayal. Or profitable. And they could cut his power and water in retaliation.

She quirked her lip. The wasteland was making her paranoid.

Roach seemed to be weighing his own suspicions, evidenced by the subtle tilt of his voice. "You've been walking fine this far."

"Old injury," Briar said, lifting his right foreleg and turning it over so they could see the ragged seam of gnarled, hairless tissue that ran through his fetlock and down to the base of his hoof. "The scar is more interesting than the story of how I got it. Stiffens up if I overwork it, and thirty-four turns on the merry-go-round is bad enough. Rather not lame myself up with the next hundred and ten."

Aurora's ears dropped. "How many?"

"Toldja it was a ways down." He chuckled, but not without sympathy. "Maintenance levels start at the One-Forties. Bottom level is One-Forty-Four. That's where you'll find the cistern and the backup pumps. Generator room is down there too."

Against her better judgment, she started doing the math yet again. Five turns per level, thirty seconds around each turn.

"That's over four hours, one way."

Briar nodded, and the air seemed to rush out of the room. Four hours on the stairs. The scale of this place made Stable 10 feel like a utility closet.

Roach sat. “I’ll stay here with Briar." His tone made it less of an offer and more a statement of fact. “We’ll hold down the fort until you get back.”

“I’ll stay, too.”

Unsurprised, Aurora sighed as Julip headed toward Roach. Maybe it was instinct or something as simple as petty jealousy, but seeing Julip glued to Roach’s hip for the past day was beginning to wear thin with her. Even Roach seemed a little uncomfortable at the sound of her volunteering to stay. His original condition that Julip remain with him for the duration of her service seemed to be backfiring, especially now that she was insisting on remaining in close proximity to the only dustwing in the Stable.

“I’d rather you come down with us.” Aurora pushed away from the server, meeting her eye. “You’re the only one who knows how to safely remove a talisman, after all.”

Confusion flickered over Julip’s features and was gone just as fast. It was a blatant lie, but Julip was in no position to correct her. Her role as Aurora’s fellow Stable dweller was the only story cooling any suspicions Briar might have about her, and breaking that fiction would cause no small number of immediate problems for all of them.

“I guess I am,” she agreed, her path subtly bending away from Roach and toward Aurora. She curled her wingtip and thumped - as much as feathers could thump - it into Roach’s shoulder as she walked by. “You boys behave.”

Aurora rolled her eyes while Ginger once again sidled up beside her. If Julip did have one valuable skill, it was that she switched gears faster than a prewar transmission.

“We’ll try to be quick,” she said.

“Good luck,” Roach called back. “I’ll bang on the railing if you need to turn around.”

If I need help.

She considered changing her mind, let Julip stay here while she and Ginger made their way down, but Briar would have immediate questions. The dishonesty, though well-meaning, had locked them onto a singular path now. If Briar found out who Julip was, he wouldn’t think twice about picking up stakes and moving his family as soon as possible. Beans would be caught in the middle, put at risk before she had a chance to experience real safety.

Once she had the talisman and Stable 10 was in sight, then she could tell them. The Enclave wouldn’t be able to hurt them even if they wanted to once the great gear rolled shut.

The deflated bodies in the hall grinned up at them as they retraced their steps until they came upon the former resident whose empty pistol rested beside its horn. She scooped it up as they passed and gently turned it over in her feathers, checking it for the explosive plastic Briar warned them about. It was empty in that respect as well. Best case, they would come across matching ammunition. Worst case, she could sell it on their way back west.

Through the lobby and across the bridgeway, the great spiralling stairwell loomed out of the sweltering dark to embrace them once again.

Plip.

Aurora’s ear flicked the warm droplet over the railing only for another to land squarely on the rim of her nostril, prompting her to wipe an aggravated wing across her running nose.

The once rough diamond treads had been worn smooth by generations of unrelenting hoof traffic, making for a slick and uneasy descent. The hot, humid air rising up from the darkness below resolved in the light of Aurora’s Pip-Buck as a thin mist, readily condensing on every surface it touched. Down in the Sixties, that included them.

Water collected wherever it could. Along the rails, on the wall, and seemingly at the bottoms of Aurora’s lungs. She could smell and taste the musty air with every breath. She’d read about swimming when she was little and always wondered what it would be like to have enough clean water in one place to submerge herself in it, and now she felt like she understood.

Further back, Julip sniffed at her own runny nose. “I wouldn’t have guessed it could rain inside a Stable.”

Aurora coughed, her mane flopping against her cheek like a wet mop. The sound of water trickling down the walls of the surrounding levels would have been soothing were it not for the fact that it was quickly becoming the main cause of their exhaustion. Walking the stairs was bad enough. Her legs were already burning from the steady, merciless decline. But it was the unrelenting heat that was wringing the strength from her muscles.

She spotted the thick, black letters of Level 64 sliding around the damp concrete cylinder and tried - really tried - not to think about how many more they had left to walk.

Not to mention the ascent, after.

“Yeah,” she grunted.

Shadows of the passing rail swayed back and forth with each step she took, cast by the pale green light of her Pip-Buck. Ginger had since doused her horn. The wet concrete reflected enough light to illuminate several turns of steps above and below.

“I guess this is why Briar calls this place the Boiler,” Julip continued.

Aurora sighed as she recognized the persistent tone of a pony who was trying to force a conversation. She had just begun to adjust to the quiet.

“It’s gotta be ninety degrees down here.”

It was warmer than that. Aurora’s Pip-Buck had buzzed against her foreleg once already, quietly alerting her to a potential fault in what it believed was Stable 10’s heat exchange system. If it weren’t so miserably balmy, she might have laughed at the thought of an automated work ticket popping up into the queue back home. She doubted it worked that way, but it was an entertaining thought.

“You could have suffocated.”

That got her attention. Her gait slowed and she looked at Julip with a bewildered frown. “Excuse me?”

Julip’s expression was every bit as uncomfortable as hers was confused. She avoided their gaze, choosing to stare down at the dripping treads instead. She looked like a filly debating whether or not to tell the teacher she’d stolen a caramel from her desk. For a moment it seemed like she was reconsidering it. Frustration, seemingly with herself, pinched the corners of her mouth into a tight line.

Aurora stopped on the stairs and waited for her to spit it out.

Trapped by her own words, Julip came to a slow halt and gestured vaguely at the unicorn between them. “Not you. Ginger. She could have suffocated. It happens sometimes.”

Ginger looked to Aurora for explanation, but she had none to offer. Turning to Julip, she asked, “I don’t understand.”

Julip offered a tiny shrug. “When I pushed you through the door. I wasn’t trying to be an asshole.”

Ah, Aurora thought. The tension in her chest loosened a little as she understood what this was. Why Julip had been trying to start up a casual chat in the yawning depths of a dead Stable. A mindless drone of the Enclave, maybe she wasn’t. Not entirely.

Maybe she actually felt bad.

They gave her room to talk, and gradually, she did.

“Don’t take this the wrong way. I was watching you hold your breath when you started to go through. Then you stopped. You were about to back out.”

In the pale light, Aurora watched Ginger’s expression soften. She nodded.

Julip’s wings bobbed a quick shrug. “Sometimes, when we’re retrieving artifacts in the field, we have to wiggle through tight spots to get where we’re going. Collapses, mostly. The worst ones force you to empty your lungs so you can fit. If you screw up and try to take a breath, you plug the hole. Panic. Sometimes we can get ponies out before they get too wedged in. Sometimes we can’t.”

Ginger’s gaze grew distant as she understood. “You’ve seen it happen before.”

Julip swallowed, then nodded. “Pegasi my size have better odds of being assigned to the field. We can get into places other ponies can’t. Perks of being small.”

They digested that. Aurora’s first instinct was that Julip was spinning a yarn to wring a little sympathy out of what had until now seemed like an thoughtless act of spite. She’d already proven herself an adept liar insofar as it hinged on keeping Briar from realizing he’d been palling around with an agent of the Enclave.

She could still be lying now, but Aurora's gut told her she was being honest this time. Her ribs were still tender from being ground against the immovable steel door sixty-some levels above, and the thought of inhaling while pinned within its bite… Julip was right. Just the thought of being wedged there, her lungs burning, made her shudder. She wondered what exactly Julip had experienced to know a pony could die in such an uncomplicated trap. It seemed unwise to ask.

To her surprise, Ginger reached out and touched Julip on the shoulder.

“Thank you,” she said, adding, “Perhaps don’t keep something like that to yourself next time.”

Julip leaned slightly away from Ginger’s hoof, breaking contact as subtly as she could. “Yeah, well. Hard to do when you’re afraid someone’s about to make you swallow your own teeth.”

Aurora coughed a quiet laugh, decided that was fair and started back down the steps. After a beat, Ginger followed with Julip in tow.

The conversation faded as quickly as it had come. They weren’t friends, her and Julip. She didn’t see that happening even under the best of circumstances. Julip felt more like a shift supervisor that stayed on site long after she was supposed to punch out. A watchful eye who quietly compiled information for an organization whose motivations were, at best, highly suspect.

Maybe Julip had acted out of the goodness of her heart when she shoved Ginger. Maybe under that thick, scabby layer of grating self-supremacy, there was a pony still capable of being decent. Maybe. But probably not. A turd with a gold nugget inside was still a turd.

Her left knee started to click as they passed into the Seventies. She sighed. The plodding, clockwise spiral of the stairs put just enough imbalance in her gait that it was only a matter of time before her joints began to protest. Little as she liked the idea of climbing all the way back up on a sore leg, there wasn’t any way around it. The gap surrounding the stairwell was spacious, terrifyingly so, but flying into the black with every chance of crashing into any number of bridgeways was a fast track to an unpleasant death.

They were one stairwell away from the finish line, an ignition talisman and the salvation of her home. Briar and his wife had dragged that unwieldy pump up these stairs. She could deal with a little discomfort.

Halfway through the Seventies, they began to smell something odd coming up with the rising mist. Ginger was the first to notice it. A pungent, almost overpowering scent tinged heavily with the odor of rot. For a moment Aurora was afraid they might be coming up on another mass of corpses like the gelatinous remains piled against the door to the security office up top. But as they drew nearer, it clarified into a much smoother and less unpleasant medley. Relief washed over her as the familiar scent of earthy decay filled the stairwell. She couldn’t help but hurry a little as they approached the next landing.

Ginger could tell she was thinking about investigating. “Pit stop?”

“Definitely,” Aurora nodded, peering across the walkway and into the deep shadows of Level 77. “Let’s take a break. I know where we are.”

Grateful for the reprieve, they followed her across the gap and through a sheet of warm droplets spilling down from the levels above. But instead of taking them to an enclosed lobby like they had in IT, the bridgeway terminated at a strip of open floor that, as far as Aurora could tell in their limited light, ran the inner circumference of the level in an unbroken ring. A wheelbarrow lay tipped on its side not far from the landing. A thick layer of mud clung to the lowest corner of the bucket, but it was the wheel that caught Aurora’s attention. She shined her light at it and squinted, confused by the state of it. The vulcanized rubber had been removed from the corroded rim. In its place, two halves of what looked like the composite wood formed a rough approximation of the original.

Layers of masking tape had been added as a sort of tire, but it hadn’t lasted long. The wheel had split apart years ago, ruining the makeshift tire in the process. Likely taken for a trip on the stairs, she surmised. How much work had one pony put into making one wheel, only to discard the barrow for the rust to reclaim it?

And why hadn’t they gone down to Supply for a proper replacement in the first place?

Ginger drew alongside her and lit her horn, sending the little mote of amber light on a wide left toward a wall decorated with dilapidated posters and rusting benches, then to the right where it hovered toward a strange sight. A black cable dangled in from the void above the bridgeway, hanging from a series of steel straps that appeared to be hammered unevenly across the concrete ceiling. Ginger’s light followed it toward the wall where several more hooks led it to a power outlet near the floor. The outlet had been stripped and the cable, oddly enough, spliced in.

She eyed the condensation on the floor with some hesitation. “Don’t step in the puddles.”

It was easier said than done, but the scent wafting around them at least gave them their pick of which direction to proceed. The pungent odor of decaying plant matter was everywhere. She tilted her Pip-Buck toward the curving wall directly ahead where a door stood ajar, held open by something wedged beneath it.

She recognized it immediately. A gardener’s trowel. She headed for the door.

Julip was quick to protest. “Are you seriously going toward the stink? It smells like a sewer in there.”

“It’s just compost,” she said, peering through the doorway and the narrow hall beyond. “How long ago did this Stable go dark, anyway?”

“A few decades at least.” Ginger followed her into the darkened hallway, sending her light flitting into the ransacked offices that passed them on either side. She made an uneasy face. “The, ah… Unicorn Bloom has had ample time to be picked clean.”

Their light caught the shape of a body on the floor as they passed a small conference room, the pony rendered unrecognizable by time and endless damp. It had long since ceased putrefying, lending more evidence that Stable 1 was not a recent failure.

And yet, the smell of compost lingered. Curiosity tugged at her, drawing her deeper into the corridor. It wasn’t long before she reached the end and was presented with two choices. Left or right. On a whim, she turned right. It was a good whim.

She spotted them as soon as the lamplight from her Pip-Buck passed over them. Leaves. Dark and pasted flat against the floor by rot and humidity, but still, leaves. She recognized their coarse, oval shape from her days spent wandering the gardens back home while her father worked. Looking up, she saw more forming a speckled trail toward an open door at the edge of her light. She followed it, turned her Pip-Buck through the doorway and grinned.

Apple trees. Dozens of them stretching all the way back to the far wall of what was unmistakably one of Stable 1’s gardens. Their branches were woven together like a second ceiling, twisted and gnarled with wild overgrowth, their leaves long since fallen to their earthen plots once neatly framed by rubberized walking paths. Those paths had since cracked and heaved. But the dead trees weren’t what stole Aurora’s breath. That had come at the sight of the six trees which survived.

Ginger and Julip approached from behind, the latter’s eyes going wide and sputtering, “That’s impossible.”

Aurora tended to agree, but there they stood, clustered at the furthest corner of the garden with leaves curled along their old branches. Julip was right. It was impossible.

Which meant they were missing something.

Her thoughts went to the cable routed along the ceiling and roughly spliced into the wall. Stepping into the garden, she swept her light along the floor and found it. An orange extension cord spilled out of a plug socket nearby and snaked between the dead trees until it disappeared from view. A thick cocoon of peeling masking tape held the male end in place, suggesting whoever plugged it in did not want it coming loose.

She gestured toward the cord and began following it toward the living trees. “Looks like Briar’s not the only one stealing electricity.”

“Okay, Detective Pinfeathers, then where's the light?”

She chose to shrug off Julip’s tone, having already spotted the answer above their heads. Extension cables of every shade wound their way in and out of gaps in the dropdown ceiling, crisscrossing the uneven walkway and presumably cut into the grow lights above in the same haphazard way the cable outside had been spliced. Someone had been busy.

“I’ll bet he has it connected to a timer,” she said.

“He?”

She tried not to roll her eyes. “Whoever survived long enough to do… this.”

Stepping toward one of the living trees, she lifted a wing and curled her feathers around its lowest branch. Leaves rustled, shaking loose a quick downpour of water at her touch. Eyeing the irrigation lines above, she saw that much of the perforated hose had been replaced with what looked to be aluminum electrical conduits. Even more masking tape had been used to seal joints not builts for plumbing, and she could see the file marks where a survivor had ground drip holes into the soft metal.

It had worked, for a while. Maybe a long while. Time had ultimately accomplished what the Stable’s collapse had left unfinished. The unchecked canopy of branches had reached up toward the grow lights until, eventually, they tangled with the cables that supplied them with power. Aurora could see where frayed wires had been pulled loose and dangled uselessly in dead branches. At some point, there had been nobody around to repair it. Possibly no one alive who knew this garden was still clinging to life, set to a cadence of night and day that went unnoticed until now.

She wondered if the dead pony on the conference room floor was the once who put all this work in. Whether he had done so with help, or just to give himself a purpose.

“Luna’s grace.” Ginger slid down a heaved section of the walkway and stepped into the damp soil. Her eyes were turned up toward the living ceiling, mouth open in a baffled grin. “This one still has fruit!”

An amber shell formed around a nearly ripe apple and neatly severed the stem. Julip joined her at the trunk, bracing herself against it as she stood on her hind legs to reach a nearby fruit with her outstretched feathers. The leaves rasped and dropped another deluge of raindrops when the apple snapped free, startling a string of profanity from her as she bolted out from the branches.

Aurora picked one for herself. Turning it over in the light of her Pip-Buck, she couldn’t see anything to suggest it wasn’t edible. Its two-toned red and green skin was firm in her feathers. No sign of rot. Lifting it to her teeth, she bit off a small chunk and chewed. The flavor popped in her mouth, bright and tart, and she smiled.

“Ish ghud,” she said, and swallowed. “We should check the other gardens.”

Julip sniffed her apple and took a skeptical bite. “Planning on starting a farm?”

Tearing off another chunk, Aurora savored the flavor before eagerly turning toward the exit. Her thoughts went to Stable 6 and the plots of soil that had been engineered to go barren after the first harvest. She wondered if Latch had made any progress with the instructions Roach had left with him.

“We might be helping someone else fix theirs. You coming?”

Her answer came in the form of hooves trotting to catch up behind her.

“Lead the way.”

Touring the gardens of Stable 1 was bittersweet.

Real effort had been made here. For one pony, or perhaps many, this collapse hadn’t been the end. Some survived the unthinkable, much in the same way that the ancestors of those ponies trying to make a life in the wasteland had done. The lights had gone out. The clockwork of routine that guided their hoofsteps from birth to death seized up and went silent. In the space of weeks, days or maybe just a few awful minutes, home had become a tomb.

And yet life had gone on for those left behind. Those who had seen the death at the top and chose to turn around and see what meager life they could coax from the darkness below.

They found the source of the compost odor in a garden that once grew potatoes. The word FERTALIZER had been misspelled across the closed door in fat streaks of red paint, and with so much stink seeping through already none of them saw the need to force it open for further inspection. Deeper exploration discovered more wilted crops than living ones. A few rows of carrots had clung to life in one of the gardens, basking in the flickering purple glow of a light set to a different schedule. A third garden had been refurbished with the same makeshift wiring and homemade irrigation, but the plots were empty save for a few blackened vines in the damp soil.

After nearly completing a full circuit of Level 77, Julip was the first to discover the surviving remnants of yet another orchard modified by the survivors of the collapse. Aurora and Ginger found her inspecting the stringy branches of the nearest tree and their fuzzy green payloads.

“Radiation must be leeching in from up top.” She plucked one of the fruiting bodies, gave it a dubious turn in her wing and flicked it into the dirt. “These apples are all mutated.”

Aurora reached up to the same branch and pulled one down for herself, smirking a little as she used her feathers to force open the seam in the husk. “They’re pecans.”

The thin husk split, exposing the teardrop curve of a brown shell underneath. The familiar shape gave Aurora a gentle pang of homesickness as she remembered the day her mother had come home late from her shift in Mechanical, eyes beaming, a glossy paper voucher held in her cream-colored feathers, and the exciting news that her name had been pulled for the department’s Harvest Day dinner raffle. A younger, shyer Aurora remembered being confused by the significance of a little slip of paper, but when her mom explained they’d won a whole pecan pie as part of the prize, she nearly broken two lamps in her excitement.

They had gone up to the Atrium as a family and claimed their dessert at the participating bakery. Wisps of steam were still curling off the caramelized surface as they rode the lift back down to their compartment, Aurora all the while fearful her mother might trip or get bumped by a jealous neighbor. No such calamity befell them and that evening, after generous helpings of seasoned reconstituted potato, green beans and her father’s favorite recipe of cornbread flecked with rehydrated cranberries, her mother cut the pie and they ate themselves into a coma.

Julip watched Aurora as she reached up and began to gently strip the branches, her father’s voice in her ear from so many years ago, guiding her feathers toward the pecans whose husks had already split open and turned chocolate brown. Those were the ones that would have had time to dry, she remembered. The older, more seasoned harvesters would sometimes pretend to misstep as they worked, cracking the hard shell beneath their hooves and winking at her as they flicked bits of pecan into their mouths.

The three of them filled Aurora's bags and, after some cajoling, Julip's too. At least half would go to Briar, Meridian and Beans once they were finished. A gift, rather than payment.

After a brief walk, they returned to the apple orchard and settled down to rest beneath the cluster of living trees. Aurora sat down beside her saddlebags, her back coming to rest against the bark of one of the trees with a satisfied grunt. Ginger joined her and they watched as Julip reclined against a tree of her own.

Satchels and saddlebags were quickly opened and fresh fruit passed around. Several minutes went by in amicable silence, the three of them resting tired legs and replenishing their strength. A canteen went around, aided by Ginger’s magic so none of them would have to get up to pass it on, and for a while things felt strangely normal. Nice, even.

Dipping her feathers into her saddlebag, she picked out an pecan and used her teeth to tear off the husk. The green flesh was tart on her tongue and she spat it into the dirt. It was dumb luck that the guards back at Blinder’s Bluff hadn’t stolen all the tools she’d taken from home, and a worn pair of pliers had been left behind. She used them to crack open the shell and the nut tumbled free into her feathers. Occupying as the task was, her eyes and thoughts kept turning to the mare in front of her.

She popped the pecan into her mouth and chewed.

“Mind if I ask you a question?”

Julip’s ears perked and she looked up from her second apple. “Knock yourself out.”

Aurora swallowed and picked out another nut. “What happens to you once we’re done?”

A momentary pause, followed by a shrug. “I go home. Hopefully get assigned another field mission. Life goes on.” She bit the apple and pocketed the morsel in her cheek. “Please tell me you’re not thinking about asking me to live in that Stable like all the other ponies you’ve bumped into.”

She chose not to respond to that. “What about Briar and Beans? What happens to them?”

It was the question that had been dogging her since they first encountered Beans outside the derelict locomotive. She could still feel how her wing had tightened around her rifle when she saw the look on Julip’s face, like a predator scenting prey. It was next to impossible not to think about how that moment might have played out if Julip hadn’t lost her weapon fleeing the centaurs.

Beans, Briar, even Meridian had no idea how much danger they were in. Getting them to the Stable was the only way Aurora could be sure they would be safe. And yet, even though she knew the answer, she wanted to hear her say it.

Julip finished her bite and swallowed. Her gaze settled on some invisible point between her and Aurora, her lips bending into an uncomfortable smile. “What, you’re interrogating me now?”

“Yes.”

She blinked. Her smile faded and she looked from Aurora to Ginger, who watched her with unsettling patience. “Is she serious?”

Ginger’s expression betrayed no emotion. “Answer the question, dear.”

Julip pulled her lower lip between her teeth and held it there, seemingly caught between the urge to laugh this situation off or take it seriously. They waited for her to make up her mind, letting the uncanny silence of the dead Stable apply the pressure for them.

Finally, she spat out her lip in a half-whispered, “Fuck. You already know what I have to do. I don’t have a choice.”

Aurora dropped the pliers into her bags. What was left of her appetite was gone.

“They’re dustwings,” Julip added defensively. She gestured vaguely at the space between them, as if Briar’s family was standing in front of her. “Nobody likes culling them, but it’s necessary for the future of our kind.”

Ginger snorted. “‘Our kind.’ Should I assume I’m excluded from that statement?”

Julip opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again with a flicker of stubbornness. “If unicorns were meant to guide Equestria, the goddesses would have given you their blessing too.”

Aurora looked to Ginger for clarification. “Blessing?”

Ginger rolled her eyes and looked at Julip as she spoke. “She’s a member of the Church of the Two Sisters in New Canterlot.”

“I’m not a member.”

She ignored her. “It’s a cult that deludes ponies into thinking the princesses chose pegasi to rule Equestria in their absence. They believe Luna and Celestia took our magic away as punishment for the bombs, as if we had any say in the zebras choosing to launch them.”

Julip glowered at Ginger. “I’m not a member,” she repeated. “I just think some of the things they talk about make sense.”

“Like killing dustwings,” Aurora murmured.

“Like keeping the bloodlines uncontaminated,” she snapped.

It was boggling how she could say the words without a shred of guilt. She looked almost offended, as if this line of questioning was crossing some line only she was aware of. Aurora could feel a little ball of heat begin to swirl in her chest.

“Is that what you thought when you saw Beans? That she's a contaminant?”

There, she thought. A subtle twitch behind Julip’s cheek. A hint of discomfort. Maybe even a crack in that miles-thick armor she wore. They met eyes, briefly, the same way they had when Julip realized Aurora had caught her playing the sea creature to Beans’ utter delight. Her eyes darted down to the apple still held in her wing, as if making sure they weren’t still wrapped in old socks.

She palmed the apple and pointed a feather toward Aurora. “You know what? Fuck you. You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you wanted to kill Beans the second she found us.”

“I didn’t-” Julip stopped, took an irritated breath, and started again. “It must be fucking nice to sit there rubbing one out at the thought of you being the center of moral fucking universe. Do you think I haven’t heard this before?” She took on a high, mocking tone. “‘Oh me, oh my. The evil Enclave can’t leave well enough alone. If only they would see the light and pick daisies in the sunshine like the rest of us.’”

Aurora resumed working on the pecan in her feathers knowing that if she looked at Julip right now, there would likely be violence.

“Excuse me if the Enclave got stuck doing the hard work, Aurora fucking Pinfeathers. Not all of us have the luxury of growing up in a nice, shiny paradise. Some of us drew shitty straws and got stuck with the diseased, dying stinkhole the rest of you get to ignore.” She eyed Aurora’s pecan with disdain. “I don’t like killing. I don’t like the idea that dustwings are born with spoiled genes. I do it because it’s the only way to keep our race strong enough to make it out the other side of this shitty existence. Every day there’s a new mutant born in the wasteland. Real living, breathing monsters like that fucking deathclaw you herded through Autumn's front door. If we let pegasi blood get diluted… if we become weak? It’s only a matter of time before we die out as a species.”

Aurora discarded the husk for the dirt to consume and slid the slick shell between the teeth of her pliers. She stared past them, unwilling to accept the words she’d just heard had come from a pony who truly believed them.

“You think killing Beans and Briar would be doing the rest of us a service."

Julip hesitated, sensing what was coming.

“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” she said, her voice quiet. “I don’t have a choice. I do what's required of me.”

Aurora set the pliers down, still clenching the unbroken nut, and let out a grunt as she pushed herself up off the ground. Her knees clicked to remind her of the beating they’d taken over the last week. She ignored them, too. This wouldn’t take long.

“Okay,” she said. “Get up.”

Julip frowned. “What?”

“Get up,” she repeated. “It’s not going to be a fair fight if you just sit there.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I can’t do that. If Primrose finds out I hurt you…”

“Primrose isn’t here.” She stepped forward, gaze fixated on Julip’s bruised wing. It had been a while since her last brawl. Longer since she started one sober. “Trust me. I’m not worried about getting hurt.”

Ginger’s voice rose behind her. “Aurora.”

It was a warning, and it mystified her to hear it coming from Ginger. She stopped and looked back to where the mare stood. “You heard what she said.”

“Yes, and she cannot begin to imagine what I will personally do to her if she harms that foal.”

Aurora felt her jaw tighten. Her mind bent firmly toward a single thought: they couldn’t afford to leave Beans’ life to chance. To let her last moments be tarnished by the confusion of being betrayed by someone she believed was a friend. She'd given Julip a chance to walk away from that road and it was clear she wouldn't.

In that sense, Julip was no different than Cider, or Autumn, or Gallow. She was a problem that Aurora knew how to solve.

She began to take another step.

“Aurora, no.”

Her chest thumped into a sheet of amber light, stopping her midstride. With her focus still bent toward Julip, she pressed against the barrier, but it didn’t budge. Deep down, she knew it wouldn’t.

She pressed harder, watching Julip tense in response, until Ginger’s muzzle brushed her ear.

“Stop.”

She didn’t want to stop. This was an easy fix. Another life claimed by a dead Stable. No one would blame her.

“Come on,” Ginger said, carefully slipping her foreleg between Aurora and her own magic.

Aurora started to pull away, but the anger in Ginger's eyes made her stop.

“Let’s go outside," she said. "We need to have a talk.”

Roach finished his thirteenth lap of the servers when he finally decided that he was, in fact, bored.

Normally he didn’t have any trouble whiling away the time. For the last two centuries it was more or less all he did. That is, when he wasn’t telling Blue stories or venturing out into the local wasteland for the occasional supplies. Contrary to what most ponies believed about ghouls, they weren’t immortal. Or zombies. Wasteland ponies had a bad habit of latching onto that last one, assuming incorrectly that a ghoul could live forever without so much as a meal or breath of air to punctuate the decades. During the early years following the end of the world, he'd learned that the hard way. He went nearly four straight weeks without so much as a sip of water, and then one night he woke up to his stomach making such an uncomfortable racket that Blue had started growling back.

Turning the corner, he followed the featureless wall down an identical line of black machines.

Boredom was something he rarely felt anymore. He likened it to adapting to minor torture. Eventually it stopped hurting. In the tunnel, there had always been something to do. Rainbow Dash would sometimes emerge and he would help her settle down, chat with her, watch her sink away again. Radroaches would draw Blue out of her sleep and he’d spend a few hours watching her hunt the steadily larger insects across the flagstones. And there were his memories. More than his share of life to reflect on.

But right now, in this room of chittering computers and blank walls, he was bored.

Briar waited around the next corner. He had the hatch open again, the linoleum flooring peeled away like a soft scab. Roach smirked at the sight of the stallion’s head poking up from the hole in the floor. He’d climbed down into the mess of cabling now. Aurora’s doubts about where the Stable’s power was coming from was infectious. He frowned at the wires with such intensity that it reminded Roach of how Saffron would spend hours at the end of each month glowering at billing statements, convinced the utility company was skimming bits out of their nest egg.

He slowed at the upturned linoleum. “Having fun?”

Briar sighed at the cables. “Just indulging in some good-natured paranoia. You didn’t happen to be an engineer for Stable-Tec once upon a time, did you?”

“Afraid not.” He chuckled and leaned forward to see the tangle Briar was standing in. “I worked with plants. Are you sure it’s safe to be in there?”

He shrugged. “Probably not. Give me a hoof?”

Roach hitched his leg around Briar’s and hauled him up. The fine dust from the cavity coated his lower half so thoroughly that he was practically wearing it. He gave Briar plenty of room to stamp the majority of it off and helped him close the hatch.

“Still think all this power’s coming from outside?”

Briar nodded, using the front of his hoof to press the linoleum flush to the ground. “Somewhere, yeah. Problem’s always been that we can’t figure out where.”

“Any guesses?”

He snorted. “No shortage of those. The Steel Rangers like to occupy the critical infrastructure that survived on the coasts. Could be they fixed up a power plant somewhere without knowing which lines they were energizing. That, or the old Equestrian government could have buried a mess of generators somewhere as a failsafe and left them running. I heard Autumn Song set up shop in the solar array west of here. Even with all the clouds, enough light gets through. Could be that's where it’s coming from.”

Roach doubted that last one, especially after Aurora and Ginger told him about the deathclaw that tore through a measurable percentage of the facility down during its rampage.

“Well, it’s an interesting mystery to say the least. Mind if I ask a stupid question?”

Briar cocked an eyebrow, and Roach gestured toward the forest of servers.

“Let’s say you did design a Stable with a backup power supply. Why only power this one level? Why not revive everything?”

“Maybe they wanted to but it was too much juice,” Briar suggested. “I doubt it, though. Stable-Tec wasn’t known to skimp on anything they put their name on. Not that I was there, back then, but… y’know. Scavenging.”

“Sure.”

Briar approached the nearest server, the same one Aurora had reclined against earlier, and opened its cage door. “From what I’ve heard, Stable-Tec wasn’t as benevolent as ponies thought they were. You’ve been around longer than me. Bet you’ve heard the rumors.”

Roach pressed his lips together and nodded.

The server ticked and chattered along with its neighbors, hundreds of lights twinkling on and off in some mechanical language neither of them fully understood. “I had an uncle that used to tell this story to anyone who would listen. About a Stable he found on one of his trips up north close to the ruins of the Crystal Empire. He found the door to it in the sublevel of an old office building. Stable 88 or 89, I can’t remember. Anyway, he told this story about how the whole Stable was painted top to bottom with gibberish. The floors, the walls, the ceiling. Everywhere, symbols and nonsense.

“So he does what any scav would do, and he follows them. Sure enough, he starts finding the bodies. Some of them are wearing Stable jumpsuits, most aren’t. A lot of them are wearing robes, he says. Checks a few of them for caps but all he finds are these little pills. Good quality, he said, like they’d been made in a fabricator. Chems are just as good as caps, better when they’re prewar quality, so he goes about searching the corridors for more until he finds the overstallion’s office.”

Roach frowned a little when Briar paused to gather his thoughts. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had told him a yarn.

Briar closed the server door and leaned his shoulder against it. “The way he tells it, the overstallion’s desk had been converted into some kind of altar, or maybe a pyre. He never could decide which. Three foals were laid out across it, cut open like a bad surgery. Nasty stuff. My uncle got out of there as soon as he saw it. Lost his appetite for scrapping. Sold the pills when he got back to town.”

Roach blanched. “He sold them?”

Briar nodded, but not without some discomfort of his own. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty. He didn’t put together what they were until a few days later when half the local chem users were screaming themselves hoarse, fighting each other, pulling out their manes. He skipped town before anyone else could put together what was causing it. My guess is the dealer he sold the pills to did the same.”

Roach shifted on cracked hooves, trying not to think too hard about what might have happened had his family been designated to seek shelter there. “So Stable-Tec equips them with a schematic to a chem that gives residents hallucinations and waits while the entire community rots. And ponies wonder why zebras dropped the bomb on us.”

“Hindsight,” Briar repeated, his eyes wandering the servers. “Everything they did, they did deliberately.”

“Including hooking a room full of servers onto backup power while letting an entire Stable go dark around it.”

Briar blew out a sigh, shrugging a single shoulder in agreement. “At least some of it went to good use for a little while. It’ll be nice to live somewhere where Beans can move around without having to worry about watching for patrols, even if it is a Stable. Hopefully Aurora finds the part she's missing.”

Roach smiled and walked over to the server across from where Briar stood. He pulled open the cage door and tried to make sense of the meticulously bundled wires and flickering lights. “There’s a lot of data in this room. Have you or Meridian ever tried to open one up to see what’s inside?”

“Oh goddesses,” Briar chuckled. “Don't tell me you’re one of them.”

He turned and frowned at him. “Sorry?”

Briar looked like he was on the verge of laughing. He shook his head at the ceiling as if hoping for divine intervention. “The type of pony who has to stop at every terminal they find just to read two-hundred-year-old messages and interoffice gossip. Merry does that. Can’t leave a place until she at least has a working theory of what happened to it before the bombs fell. Drives me up the wall.”

He felt the corners of his lips curling. He knew the type.

“I’m just curious, is all. It beats grinding my hooves smooth walking laps.”

He noted the grimace form at the corners of Briar’s eyes. Several more hours of listening to Roach clicking around in circles clearly didn’t appeal to him.

“Well, how much do you know about computers?”

It was Roach’s turn to wince. “Next to nothing.”

“Woof.” Briar scanned the array of servers and sighed. “I guess late’s better than never. Okay, Gramps. Time for a crash course in professional guesswork.”

“I can’t believe you’re taking her side!”

Ginger squinted briefly as the full glare of Aurora’s Pip-Buck caught in her eye. She watched her pace one way and then the other, gradually burning off the worst of her pent up anger in the empty hallway.

“Aurora, I am not taking anyone's side.” Her expression hardened when Aurora shot her an indignant glare. Hard as she was trying to keep her voice even, Aurora was not making it easy. “I’m stopping you from doing something that you’ll regret.”

Aurora continued to pace, her eyes snapping occasionally to the orchard's darkened door. “I wouldn’t regret it.”

“Yes, you would.”

She watched Aurora shake her head, stop and turn to look at her again. “How do you even know?”

Ginger crossed the gap between them and pulled a loose lock of damp mane away from Aurora’s face. “I know you’re better than this. We don’t kill ponies for things they might do.”

“Really?” Aurora tilted her head away, pulling the strand out of Ginger’s magic. “Then what exactly was it that we did at that slaver camp? If I remember right, Ward wasn’t the one to squeeze off the first shot.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Ginger could see the regret bloom in Aurora’s eyes. Too late. They cut her, those words, deeper than she expected. It wasn’t just that it was a reckless statement, it was that it came from her. The mare who set her whole world aside to save her.

It took her some time to swallow the anger rising in her throat. She’d had enough of these fights to know how they always panned out. One accusation beget another, carving holes in the fabric of their fledgling bond until there was nothing left to hold it together. It was too easy to turn down that road and much harder to walk it alone. She refused to do that.

“Aurora, I don’t like Julip.” She emphasized each word so they wouldn’t be mistaken. “I don’t like what she stands for or that she’s here with us. However.”

She waited until Aurora looked up at her. “We are not going to kill her to protect Beans and Briar from something she hasn’t done. Even if we did, the Enclave would send someone else to replace her and we can’t afford to do that with a family of dustwings in tow. I have enough magic to keep Julip from hurting them. They’ll be fine. Just… trust me, okay? We’ve already burnt bridges with the Rangers. We can’t afford to test the Enclave, too.”

Watching the guilt form on Aurora’s face was more than difficult. It hurt. Her first instinct was to reach out and pull her into a hug to let her know all was forgiven. But she couldn’t do that. Not this time. She needed Aurora to know that she’d come inches from crossing a line that, love or not, Ginger would not follow her over. There was a reason she hadn’t gone into that slaver camp with guns blazing. There was a reason she hadn’t killed Cider outright when he entered her shop.

It was the same reason she hadn’t snapped Julip’s neck the moment she descended within range of her magic back on the road outside Kiln. Like it or not, and most ponies these days didn’t like it, she believed in giving ponies a chance to be decent.

Few ever did, and Aurora was most likely right about Julip. As soon as her obligations were met, Beans and Briar would be high on her list of objectives to complete. But killing her prematurely wasn’t something she could stomach, and there was a good chance Briar’s family would have already arrived at Stable 10 by the time Julip had the opportunity to hunt them.

Her ears perked as Aurora took a slow breath.

“I wasn’t going to kill her,” she murmured. “I was just going to…”

Ginger frowned, watching her struggle for the right words. “Get her close?”

Aurora looked away and nodded.

She touched the tip of her hoof against Aurora’s chin and gently turned her face toward her. “I need you to be better than that. Can I trust you to do that?”

She could feel Aurora’s jaw work against her hoof as she swallowed. Something told Ginger she was starting to realize how close she’d come to that line.

Her voice was rough when she spoke. “Yeah.”

Ginger nodded. It would have to do. “Okay. Then we should get moving again. I’ll let Julip know we’re heading back to the stairwell. Maybe... you should wait out here until we’re ready.”

Thankfully, Aurora didn't argue with her. She sat in the hall while Ginger went back to speak to Julip. The smaller pegasi regarded her with mild disdain even as she assured her she wouldn't be harmed. After several minutes, Julip slung her satchel over her shoulder and Ginger followed her out with Aurora’s bags in tow.

---

Julip gave Aurora a wide berth as she left the garden. It was only fair.

With their respective bags laden with fruit and pecans they embarked down the last half of the great stairwell. Aurora found herself once again at the front of the line with Ginger behind her. Julip kept her distance, trailing them by nearly a quarter turn.

She didn’t know how much of their conversation Julip had been able to overhear. Probably all of it, with the way the walls carried their voices. Shame kept her silent for the first few levels, and neither Ginger nor Julip made any attempt to spark a conversation to pass the time. Turn after turn, they wheeled around the cylinder with nothing but the sound of hooves beating against the treads and the steady uptick of heat boiling up from the bottom to keep them company.

It was a lonely walk.

Her mane wicked up sweat and directed it down the bridge of her nose. She flicked her head to throw the white mop of hair behind her ear, but gravity and the constant motion of her descent eventually pulled it back between her eyes. As they passed into the Nineties, she stopped fixing it altogether.

She glanced back at Ginger who offered a polite smile in return. Her mind was somewhere else. Likely thinking about the same thing she was.

In the moment she’d felt… justified. They’d both known from the start what kind of mare Julip was, even before they let her out of Autumn’s cage. Her reaction to seeing Beans only confirmed it. Whatever the Enclave’s intentions were in sending Julip to help her, it didn’t matter compared to the simple fact that she felt duty-bound to kill a foal who had shown her nothing but kindness. Even now, Aurora had to fight the temptation to turn around and remove that problem from the equation.

Ginger was wrong. Some ponies were just irredeemably ruined, and Julip was one of them.

And yet somehow she felt like a monster for believing it.

She thought back to the shed at Gallow’s home. The bodies of a family gutted and skinned like so much meat. The flies coming at her like a buzzing cloud. Gallow, screaming in agony as her amateur attempts at executing him turned into a mutilation. She was used to making hard decisions. Bearing the blame for her mistakes. Keeping the generator running smoothly, dealing with Sledge, that was easy compared to this.

The wasteland had been wearing away at her since she stepped out of the Stable. Every day seemed to grind off a layer of something important, something she didn’t think she could fix, until they met Gallow. That night the wasteland put down the sandpaper and picked up the hammer, and something inside her had broken away.

“Something on the stairs below us,” Ginger said.

Aurora blinked the sweat out of her eyes and looked down past the railing. A vaguely pony-shaped form lay over the stairs half a turn away. She tried not to look directly at it as she approached, but it was difficult to avoid stepping on the corpse without knowing where it was. There wasn’t much left. Bones, mostly. A few strips of brown tendon clinging where they could. A pocket of shapeless matter pooled in the sockets of its upturned skull.

The worst part wasn’t stepping over. That came half a minute later as they lapped where it lay and had to hurry beneath it. With one wing holding the rail, Aurora pressed her eyes, ears and mouth shut as she passed through the water dripping through those treads. When she finally did open them again, she spotted several more forms laying across the steps further below.

By Level 110, there wasn’t a tread they could see that wasn’t occupied by a fallen resident. Some still wore clothing. Tatters of jumpsuits, overalls and even a rubber smock littered bones whose flesh had long since sloughed off under the onslaught of unyielding heat and damp. They were earth ponies, she realized. All of them. Not a single one sported a horn or wings. It was a stark comparison to the congealed mound of unicorns at the top of the Stable, their decay snail-paced by comparison to the fallen deeper below.

Ginger was the first to comment. “It’s like they were stampeding up from the bottom.”

Aurora’s hoof squelched into a waterlogged mat of rotted fabric. She made a face. Even she couldn’t stay silent after that. “Makes me afraid of what’s waiting for us down there.”

“Probably the source of this heat. I’m starting to feel like a steamed vegetable.”

She looked back at Ginger and allowed herself to smile at the little joke. Ginger did the same, but her eyes turned back to the pit below.

“I can’t blame Briar for not wanting to make the trip,” she continued, floating a little sphere of light down to the lower turns. Where there used to be stairs, an unbroken path of bones spiralled into the black. “How can there be so many?”

Aurora didn’t have an answer for that. It was as if the entire population had decided all at once to run for the stairs and, just as puzzling, fallen there. There had been a panic. That much was obvious. But from what?

“It’s a repository.”

Aurora’s ears pinned back at the sound of Julip’s voice. Of course she would know something. They had already established that the Enclave had sent their honorary cleanup crew to Stable 1 after it collapsed.

Julip could have picked a better time for show and tell. She glared straight ahead, picking her way around a tangled heap of bones. “Been here before, have you? Nice of you to tell us now.”

“Aurora.”

Ginger’s tone was enough to make her grimace.

“Sorry.” She grudgingly amended her question. “A repository for what?”

The landing for 111 drifted by as she waited for Julip’s answer. The bridgeway was clogged with the dead. When Julip did speak, there was an unsubtle hint of defensiveness to her tone.

“First of all, this is my first time seeing this place in person.” She took a breath. “We all have to learn about it before we receive our certification for field work. Stable 1 is a classic case study on premature societal collapse and short-term resurgence.”

Aurora stared across the hollow void where Julip was picking her way down the steps. “I understood exactly half of what you just said.”

Julip made an irritated noise. “We use the data we harvest to train new archivists. Not every Stable fails in the same way, and knowing what to look for in different scenarios can mean the difference between recovering sensitive tech and leaving it for the Rangers to trip over.”

“Like a fabricator,” Aurora suggested.

“Or a Pip-Buck,” Julip agreed. “In a slow collapse, residents are more prone to writing down their last words and hiding their Pip-Bucks somewhere they think is safe.”

Aurora had to admit that the logic was sound. Most pegasi back home rarely took theirs off except to shower or cook. The clunky ankle-weights were precious commodities within a Stable. Moreso, apparently, out here in the wasteland.

Ginger chimed in behind her. “Then can you tell us what happened here?”

The Enclave mare seemed to debate whether to answer at all. Aurora wondered if she was even allowed to.

“Sure, I guess,” Julip said. “As long as that one stops grinding her fucking axe.”

Aurora held the back of her wing up toward Julip and lifted one feather, and just as quickly she felt her wing being abruptly pressed back down onto the railing in a haze of Ginger’s magic.

“Both of you, stop it.” Ginger said, her tone cutting out any room for debate. She looked back toward Julip and nodded. “Go ahead.”

With a defiant little roll of her eyes, Julip shrugged her wings and told them.

“Well, from what I can remember, this place was basically a dumping ground for unicorns and earth ponies. The selection process wasn’t picky, so long as you didn’t have wings. Stable-Tec pretty much opened the door looking for warm bodies to fill the place.”

Ginger hummed. “Then what was the experiment?”

“No experiment,” she said. “At least, none were on record that I know of. Stable 1 was supposedly one of the controls. Drop in the residents, lock the door, do not open until Hearths Warming. Only it didn’t work out that way. You two saw that billboard leaned up against the high school on the outskirts of Kiln, right?”

Aurora vaguely recalled it. “The one with the miner on it, sure.”

“‘Home of the Fightin’ Colliers,’” Julip recited, surprising both of them. “Used to be a hoofball team for Quarrytown, before it was called Kiln. Their mascot was a coal miner. This whole area, from the Pleasant Hills all the way to Kiln, used to be coal country.”

Aurora could feel herself losing the thread. She frowned, confused. “What does that have to do with this place?”

“Everything,” Julip said. “This silo was built on the same site as Stable-Tec’s first prototype Stable. The original Stable 1 was demolished during the excavation for the Stable we’re in now. Turns out there’s a major coal vein that runs through the same spot, and they punched straight through it.”

She let the last word hang in the air like an omen.

“Back when Equestria was still learning how to make its own talismans, there was an accidental balefire detonation at the site of what was supposed to be Stable 2, not far from here. We think the explosion ignited the surrounding coal deposits including one that lead here. Coal fires burn deep and slow. Took a little over a century to start cooking the lower levels.” Julip glanced at them and shrugged. “By the time the residents noticed anything was wrong, it was too late.”

“You got it?”

Roach grunted as he dragged the terminals, along with the technician’s cart they were bolted to, through the server room door. He nodded, careful not to open his jaw as he pulled the handle with his teeth. Two of the cart’s wheels had snapped as soon as they tried to roll it and with the weight of two terminals weighing it down, hauling it out of the office they’d found it in had quickly become a chore.

The broken castors cut rusty brown lines in the soft linoleum as they hauled it toward the corner of the room where three other terminals sat on the ground. Next to the growing pile, the server bearing the number 01 on its cabinet waited in idle silence.

Briar’s logic followed the belief that the most important data would be automatically stored on the server with the lowest number. Roach wasn’t convinced that was how it worked, but he wasn’t about to suggest they drag terminals all the way to the back of the room to test the opposite theory. The cart skidded to a stop beside their previous failed attempts, the relatively inactive server watching them with quiet indifference.

The two stallions stopped to catch their breath. Roach could feel the heat pouring out from the fissures in his chitin and was grateful for the first time that he couldn’t sweat.

“This would be… a lot easier…” Briar panted, “if you just used… your horn.”

Roach shook his head and staggered to the cluster of wires at the rear of the twin terminals. Whoever designed them to weigh this much deserved to be shot.

“Can’t,” he said. “I’ll irradiate… the entire level.”

Briar gave him a dubious look but didn’t push the issue as Roach began plugging in what they hoped were the right hookups. The last three terminals they tried had all been locked out, and they were beginning to consider waiting for Aurora to return with her Pip-Buck when they discovered the technician’s equipment parked in the corner of a tiny office.

“I’ve taken my share of rads before. Just prefer not to go home with a blown back.”

“I’ll owe you a stimpack, then.” Roach chuckled with the silver prong of a cable pinched between his front teeth. “Let me know if that terminal does anything different.”

Sinking the end of the cable into the back of the server, he dropped back to all fours and came around the cart to see what, if anything, was happening. Standing beside Briar, they watched as the leftmost terminal on the cart began chattering in response to the connection. Like the other three, a cartoonish green mare in a Stable-Tec jumpsuit appeared on the screen, staring impatiently at her Pip-Buck. Unlike the other three, the little mascot blinked away and was replaced by what appeared to be some sort of directory.

“We’re in,” Briar said.

Roach let out a groan and sat down as Briar began pecking at the keyboard.

To him, it was gibberish. Files and folders, he understood. He remembered when Violet’s school sent out letters to parents explaining that the following year they should all consider purchasing their children a terminal to help with their homework. That school year never came, but Roach still recalled walking through a Robronco Store with Saffron and both of them staring at identical-looking floor models as a salespony half their age rattled off his memorized pitch.

They never did end up buying a terminal.

He felt just as bewildered as he watched Briar browse the directory, opening and closing files faster than he could read. His theory of the first server holding the most important information was quickly falling apart as Briar turned up everything from random stock images of the Stable-Tec logo, resident logs of supply requests, sanitation capacity charts and even some drafts to a cafeteria menu that was never finalized. It was all interesting, but none of it was particularly helpful, and quickly began feeling like they were picking random bits and bobs from someone’s junk drawer.

“Maybe it’d be easier if we found the overstallion’s terminal.”

Briar laughed. “Overmare. And if you want to spend the next week of your life looking for her password, be my guess.”

Roach sighed and looked around for something that might help speed this up. A hundred or more servers stared back at him, offering little help.

“Oh, here we go!” Briar scooted over, making room for him. “Aurora said she worked for this department, right?”

He squinted at the document that filled the screen and skimmed the text. “A few times, yeah.”

It was a written warning from one department head to another. Its author, whoever he had been, had not been in a professional mood.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 1
To: Environmental Systems Department Leaders
Cc: Mechanical Systems Department Leaders
Bcc: Overmare Jewel
From: Tilly Fields
Subject: Final Warning - Excessive Power Consumption
8/20/1219

To all concerned parties,

This message is the last warning the leadership team up in Environmental Services will receive in regards to repeated and unapproved use of electrical resources well in excess of your department’s adjusted maximum budget. Beginning August 21st, further violations will result in your supply being hard capped to prevent unnecessary wear on the generator.
While I understand the unicorns in the Upper Thirds may not be used to a little discomfort, I invite them to come down to visit us in the Bottom if they feel the need to complain about the heat. The earth ponies down here have been working doubles for two straight months trying to solve this problem, so when we hear the Uppers complain about - as the Head of Security recently said - “anemic air conditioning,” you will have to forgive us if we don’t feel inclined to sympathise.
The faster we isolate the source of this heat, the faster things return to normal. That means unicorns will have to sweat for a little while. Blame us or thank us later, I don’t care. The fewer ponies I have to send up to replace blown fuses, the more I have down here to fix this problem.

Thank you for your cooperation,
Tilly.

Roach squinted at the date. “1219? That was what, fifty-ish years ago?”

Briar turned to him with a questioning smirk. “You’re kidding, right?”

He shook his head and Briar’s smirk split into a well-meaning laugh.

“It’s 1297. This message is seventy-eight years old.”

Roach rolled his eyes and waved him off. “Close enough. I haven’t had much reason to keep track.”

The stallion beside him shrugged. “Fair. Here, look. Tilly got a reply.”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 1
To: Tilly Fields
From: Clover Hoof
Subject: Re: Final Warning - Excessive Power Consumption
8/27/1219

Good morning Tilly,

Sorry for the late reply, but we’ve been busy up here with some more pressing issues. I had some time yesterday to speak with the overmare and we agreed that it is in the best interest of the Stable for Environmental Services’ power allowance to be amended to include recent necessary increases in consumption.
This is not a matter of keeping unicorns comfortable, as you say. As you are already well aware, this is a matter of keeping the peace. The Lowers have had ample time to determine the reason for the temperature problem and thus far not a single earth pony has reported so much as a theory. While clearly unfounded in fact, there are rumors circulating that the Lowers have manufactured this problem as a tactic to force unicorn residents out of the Farms, and those rumors will only gain traction if they learn Mechanical threatened to cap our power allowance.
You ask us to suffer in silence? I ask you to consider the ponies living above the Hundreds. I mean this as a colleague and, hopefully, as a friend, Tilly. Unicorns will only tolerate so much. Now is not the time for a show of strength. Trust me on this one.

Roach frowned as Briar looked for a response from Tilly, but there didn’t appear to be one. Disappointed, he waited until Briar found a message that kept showing up in the Stable’s mail system. It had been sent by dozens of residents over the course of what looked to be several days, each of them identical, each of them addressed the exact same way.

Briar opened one at random.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 1
To: Level 1 Residents, Level 2 Residents, Level 3 Residents...
From: Hocks
Subject: NEVER FORGET RIVER RUN
9/9/1219

IT FINALLY HAPPENED, EVERYBODY. THE EARTH PONIES COULDN’T HANDLE LIVING AT THE BOTTOM SO NOW THEY’RE MURDERING OUR FOALS.
ON SEPTEMBER, 8TH, 1219 AT 7:45AM, RIVER RUN, A 7-YEAR-OLD UNICORN FILLY, BECAME SO DISORIENTED FROM THE HEAT BEING PUMPED UP FROM THE LOWER THIRD THAT SHE FELL OFF THE GREAT STAIRWELL ABOVE LEVEL 60. HER BODY IMPACTED A BRACE BEAM THIRTEEN LEVELS DOWN AND SHE WAS KILLED INSTANTLY.
RIVER RUN’S FALL WAS WITNESSED BY MANY OF HER FELLOW SCHOOLMATES, FRIENDS, NEIGHBORS AND WORST OF ALL, HER MOTHER AND FATHER WHO WERE WITH HER AT THE TIME.
MANY UNICORNS ON THE STAIRS THAT DAY RECOUNTED FEELING UNSTEADY ON THEIR HOOVES, MANY OF WHOM HAD TO MAKE MULTIPLE STOPS FOR WATER. RIVER RUN IS ONLY THE FIRST. THE EARTH PONIES AT THE BOTTOM HAVE ONLY JUST BEGUN KILLING UPPERS. THE HEAT THEY FORCE US TO ENDURE IS DEADLY. IT IS TOXIC. AND IT IS INTENTIONAL.
OUR MAGIC MAY HAVE DIMMED, BUT THIS ATTACK ON THE UPPER THIRDS WILL NOT GO IGNORED.
STAND READY.

The messages that followed grew darker as it became clear what was beginning to happen.

An announcement from the overmare sought to discourage residents from sharing the anonymous letter already circulating throughout the Stable, but it was already evident that too much was already in motion. Messages were flying back and forth between residents faster than IT seemed capable of removing them. News of an attack in the Nineties only threw fuel on the fire. A unicorn claimed to have been cornered and beaten by a gang of earth ponies from Supply, resulting in a mob of unicorns descending into the Hundreds and destroying several earth pony vendor stalls in a pop-up market.

Briar tapped the terminal where a message from Security glowed, enacting a curfew on all ponies living in the Lower Third. “Stupid move, this.”

Roach shrugged. “Hindsight, right?”

“Hm.” Briar had narrowed the messages down by keywords. Lowers. Uppers. Oppressors. Muds. Hundreds of daily hits skyrocketed into the thousands after the curfew was put into place. “Doesn’t take a lot of brains to know what Stable-Tec wanted to happen by separating the unicorns from the earth ponies.”

“Assuming they’re the ones who did the separating,” he countered. Gesturing at the terminal, he shrugged. “This place lasted more than a century before all that. Could be this is just how things shuffled out over the years.”

Briar made an unconvinced noise.

“It’s how it was in some places, before the war.” Roach insisted. “Not many earth ponies lived in Canterlot. Mostly unicorns there. Some pegasi. Cloudsdale was made up exclusively of pegasi for obvious reasons. I’m not saying it’s right, but I can see how it might happen over time. Assigning ponies to their biological strengths above all else.”

“Literal stratification,” Briar murmured. He shook his head and tapped another message. “What a waste.”

Aurora clutched the rail and coughed, hard.

The air was so thick with moisture that it felt like she was drinking it with every breath. Her legs felt heavy. Even her wings had started to become saturated with the damp, the endless belching of heat from below seeming to melt the oils from her feathers. And she wasn’t the only one suffering. Behind her, Ginger had stopped more than once to catch her breath. Julip wasn’t faring much better, but much of that had to do with the fact that she’d spent the last dozen or so levels talking.

Maybe it was her irritation wearing off or their communal suffering that had exhausted Aurora’s willingness to stay angry. She still wanted to climb up those steps and crack her across the head, just once, for being who she was. She just didn’t have the energy to do it, that was all.

She spat over the railing and cleared her throat. “Okay, so let’s see if I have this straight. This whole Stable gets ramrodded through a coal deposit and nobody thinks to, I don’t know, insulate the walls?”

Julip shrugged. “It’s possible they did.”

They passed the landing of One Thirty-Three. Eleven more to go.

She stepped over a waterlogged saddlebag and a scattered mass of bones beneath it. The bodies had begun to thin out, but not completely. If they looked across the landings, it was clear not everyone made it to the stairs.

“And because the coal fire turned this place into a literal pressure cooker, the residents decided it would be a good idea to start killing each other.”

Julip winced a little, hedging her agreement. “Our records aren’t perfectly clear on who attacked first. What we do know is that there were many smaller incidents that boiled over into a fight between the unicorns in the upper levels and the earth ponies at the bottom.”

“That explains the bodies,” Ginger muttered.

“Not these bodies. These are all from the gas.”

Aurora stopped dead on the steps with a sharp clang. “Are you seriously telling us now that there’s gas down here?”

Julip was quick to hold up a wing, vigorously shaking her head. “No, no, no! It’s all gone, now. We pumped it out during the recovery.”

Aurora frowned, took a deeper breath, and waited for any strange effects to manifest. None did, and she cautiously stepped down to the next stair.

As they resumed the descent, Julip continued. “Eventually, someone got the idea to lead a group of earth ponies up to the deputy station on the edge of the Lower Third and break into the armory. It took twenty minutes for word to travel up the Stable that the earth ponies had armed themselves, and just under an hour for the unicorns working the third shift in Environmental Services to panic.”

She didn’t like where this was headed. “Panic, as in put something in the air.”

“Bingo.” Julip pointed a wing into the gap around which they walked, and where they could almost, barely make out a dark grey surface at the bottom. “The air here needs constant circulation or the ponies at the bottom end up breathing their own gases and keeling over. The unicorns up in Environmental probably knew turning off the blowers to the bottom wouldn’t work fast enough, so they did one better and pulled the CO₂ from the sewage treatment levels and dumped it into the fresh air supply going to Mechanical. After that, they turned off the circulators and waited for the inevitable.”

Aurora grimaced. “That’s disgusting.”

“It’s genocide,” Ginger muttered.

“Pretty much the standard answer for all trainees who go over Stable 1 in the Archives. It might surprise you to know that even the Enclave doesn’t condone what happened here.”

It took every ounce of strength Aurora had not to laugh. “How noble of you.”

Surprisingly, Julip didn’t take the bait. “Yeah, well, if you couldn’t already tell, the whole thing backfired on them.”

Aurora peered through the landing of Level 134 as it passed by, the sight of heavy decay becoming just another part of the scenery. “The heat from the bottom was enough to overcome the disabled circulators, wasn't it,” she said. “Pushed the CO₂ up the stairwell on the draft.”

“And caused a Stable-wide panic,” Julip confirmed. “Exhaust gas flooded the lower levels and ponies in Mechanical were presumably the first to start dropping. Word spreads, slowly, but eventually most of the Lower Third understands that there’s some kind of leak. Earth ponies flood the stairwell like a fucking wave and the unicorns can hear them coming, so they gather what little magic they have and try to stop them at the upper Hundreds. Meanwhile the CO₂ is coming up on the breeze and the unicorns start seeing earth ponies dropping. Then unicorns start going down too, and then everyone starts stampeding to get away.”

Ginger uttered a quiet curse. “And the unicorns who started it all? The ones in Environmental?”

“Probably thought the earth ponies were coming up to kill them and ran up the stairs with everyone else. The vents directors were in the same position by the time the Enclave arrived for artifact recovery.”

It made a disturbing amount of sense. The way Julip told it gave no indication that she had taken a side in what happened. To her it was just an event in history. Something other ponies had inflicted upon themselves, not her. Even the fact that they were non-pegasi didn’t seem to factor into her telling of events.

Aurora wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Ginger was confused by something else. “The pony that locked himself in the cell at the top of the Stable. He was trying to keep the stampede from getting outside. Why?”

“I’m guessing Aurora knows the answer to that one.”

Aurora hesitated. She had a decent idea.

“Stable ponies are told that the air outside is toxic,” she said, embarrassed by how absurd it sounded now. “One whiff is supposedly enough to kill a pony. I’m guessing somebody thought it might be a way to keep us from checking for ourselves.”

“And yet here you are,” Julip said.

The urge to reply with a jab of her own was undone by the simple fact that she didn’t have one. In retrospect, forcing Stable 10’s door into a test cycle was one of the least thought out things she’d ever done.

“Here I am,” she agreed. “I guess that answers the question as to why they installed a massive incinerator where the antechamber should be. What better way to keep residents from escaping than the risk of immolation?”

Ginger coughed, making a frustrated noise as she cleared her throat. “Bit over the top, don’t you think?”

“Depends on what Stable-Tec was hoping to accomplish,” Julip countered.

Aurora felt a pang of relief as the landing to Level 140 slid by. Only four more to go. “You seem to know a lot about that subject. Maybe you could tell me why my Stable’s generator started winding down.”

A pause.

She looked back at Julip and noticed the deep concern settling into her features. The mare hesitated a moment longer, as if debating to speak at all.

“Just spit it out,” Aurora said.

Julip shook her head, her pace slowing. “I thought you said one of the parts in your generator had failed.” She met Aurora’s gaze. “What do you mean it’s winding down?”

This time it was Aurora’s turn to hesitate. Ginger was looking at her with wide eyes but said nothing. From the moment Julip forced herself into their little group, telling her about the broken ignition talisman felt like a bad idea. Like telling an angry drunk not to kick your busted rib right before a brawl. Over the course of the last day and a half, circumstances had forced her to let slip that she was out here with the intention of fixing her generator. It was just vague enough to leave a variety of incorrect assumptions available to Julip while remaining honest enough to deter her from pushing for details.

Something told her she had just whittled down that list.

“Don’t worry about it,” Aurora said, continuing down. “Now hurry up. I can see the bottom.”

Stable 1 experienced the last, heaving moments of its collapse in the middle of September. Strangely, Roach still associated the month in the same way he had when he tended the Canterlot Gardens. A time to trim the perennials down to the cedar chips, rake up a thousand wilting daylily fronds and clean up the flower beds in preparation for winter. That quiet time between harvest and the turning of the leaves. The fall was his favorite season, despite one of his most vivid memories being of balefire sweeping across the changing leaves.

They sat and watched the footage in mutual silence. A camera, fixed above the cafeteria line they had passed by on the top floor, had a clear view of the great stairwell on the left and the door to the deputy station they’d been forced to crawl through on the right. Unicorns milled around little square tables, chatting and eating from plastic trays while a couple stragglers followed the service line at the bottom of the screen.

A stallion loitered outside the deputy’s office, leaning against the open door frame with a white cup hovering near his mouth. Everything seemed fine until the deputy looked down at his uniform’s collar, seemed to listen to something and frowned. Unseen by the ponies at the cafeteria, he backed into the deputy station. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then the door slid shut.

The camera recorded only video. There was no sound to help Roach or Briar identify what the unicorns left on screen had heard, but they all heard it at once. Ears turned toward the stairwell like whips. Several ponies stood, their eyes glued to the empty stairs. Roach imagined they could hear the stampede as it arrived. Hooves beating against metal like some wild, terrifying drumbeat.

And then, all at once, they arrived. Unicorns poured up the stairwell and over the bridgeway like a flood. The customers at the tables instinctively backed away as terrified ponies spilled into the open space and crashed against the deputy station door. Hooves pounded against its surface while more unicorns crushed in from behind, the stairwell belching up residents at an unsustainable pace. Traffic backed up on the bridgeway. A unicorn saw what was happening, tried to shove herself forward to the cafeteria floor and was roughly shoved back. Roach pressed his lips together and looked away as she tumbled over the railing and dropped.

As if sensing the danger, the tide shifted. Faced with being crushed to death or asphyxiation, the ponies trapped on the choked stairwell seemed to choose the latter. As quickly as they arrived, they changed direction and drained back down the stairwell for whatever safety they thought they would find. But not all of them went. The unicorns nearest the deputy door remained, continuing to crush against each other like iron shavings to a magnet. Magic clawed across every inch of the locked door, failing to overcome the locked hydraulics. It was several long minutes before the odorless, invisible vapor finally reached Level 1.

Unicorns stumbled, fell, and were climbed over by increasingly fearful survivors until they collapsed too. Gradually, in the face of a door that would not open for them, the last of them grew still.

Roach blew out a long breath while Briar tapped a key that spooled the recording forward. He tapped twice more until each day on the timestamp passed by over the span of a minute.

“That’s enough for me,” Roach said, pushing himself off the floor. He stretched, trying to turn his thoughts toward more positive things, but he found that difficult given what he’d just seen.

The terminal continued to play the same image at high speed. Roach glanced at it and quickly looked away at the sight. “They’re not going to do anything except decompose. You can turn it off.”

Briar forestalled him with a feather. “Just a sec. I want to see how long it takes the Enclave to respond.”

Roach blinked. That wasn’t a bad idea, but he wasn’t about to watch a pile of bodies putrify in fast-forward. “I heard they know as soon as it happens because they figured out how to monitor all those Pip-Bucks they hoard.”

“Same here. But can you imagine how much the Rangers would pay for an actual response time?”

Roach pulled a face and wandered over to the server marked with a 02. “Can’t say I put them very high on my list of paramilitary organizations to barter with. Wasn’t more than a few days ago that they put a leash on Aurora for having the audacity not to make a donation out of her Pip-Buck.”

Briar nodded with some sympathy, his eyes still on the terminal. “Would have thought she would have hidden it.”

“Didn’t have the luxury of time to think about that,” Roach said, recalling the harried ride to Blinder’s Bluff while Aurora and Ginger were suffering the effects of radiation poisoning, courtesy of his horn. “Now we can’t risk her taking it off. Coldbrook’s got her by the short hairs. Wants her checking in with him on the daily or he figures he’ll send his Rangers to dig out her Stable.”

He cracked open the server cage and noticed that it wasn’t generating nearly as much heat as its neighbors.

“I wish she would have mentioned that before offering my family a home there,” Briar murmured.

Roach grunted, walking a slow circle around the dark server. “She’s a good mare, but yeah. She might’ve jumped the gun on that one. Don’t mention that I said anything to you about it. She’s been so focused on finding this talisman that I think she’s been using it as an excuse not to think about what the Rangers might do after she brings it home. Whether they’ll allow her to bring it home, if I’m being honest.”

He glanced at Briar who for once wasn’t watching the terminal. The screen had gone black. Roach met his eye. “Out of film?”

“It’s digital,” he said, leaning back from the screen. “No power, no footage. Want some advice?”

He leaned against the cage of Server 02 and chuckled. “Be a nice change of pace from giving it all the time. Sure.”

Briar stood and began unplugging the hookups. “Talk to them about it.”

He frowned. “Them?”

Briar nodded, dropping a loose cable onto the cart. “Aurora and Julip. Start planning with them. Get them thinking about a way they can make things right with the Rangers so they don’t need to worry about them once they close the door.”

He mentally kicked himself for forgetting they had roped Julip into this fiction of theirs. The two of them had spun up that little lie faster than lifelong siblings.

“Julip’s probably got it all figured out, knowing her. It’s Aurora I sometimes worry about. Anyway, it’s not my place to air their dirty laundry. I’m assuming you're not getting that response time?”

Briar shrugged his wings, a gesture Roach missed being able to perform. “Negative.”

“Hm.” He glanced at the server he leaned against and its strangely darkened lights. “What about this one?”

Briar turned to look at it, a yellow cable dangling from his feathers. “Looks dead.”

He grunted, thinking maybe the quieter state of it might mean it was full. Computers were never going to be his strong suit. He pointed a hoof at the server at the end of the next row, just beside the one Briar stood at.

“How about that one?”

It was marked with a bright 21 on the door, chattering happily within its ventilated cage.

Briar gave it a doubtful look. “Just picking them at random, then?”

“Unless you’ve got a deck of cards hidden somewhere.”

“I do, but it's a mile up a mountain,” he said. “Give me a hoof with the cart. If we find anything worth me breaking my back over, I’ll buy you and your friends a drink.”

Roach chuckled as he took one side of the cart and pulled. He remembered entirely too much of his solo karaoke act back in Kiln and wasn’t sure he was quite ready for a second show. “Deal.”

Hooking up to the active server went quicker than its quieter counterpart. Just as before, the impatient cartoon mare blinked onto the screen as the connection was established. A moment later, a similar directory appeared.

“All yours,” Briar said, gesturing to the terminal.

Roach looked to see if he was serious, and he very clearly was. “You didn’t say there would be a test.”

Briar grinned. “You didn’t say we’d be playing whack-a-mole with servers. This one’s all you, old-timer.”

He rolled his eyes and sat himself down in front of the terminal, scanning each line one by one while a little green cursor blinked at the bottom of the list. Frowning, he looked at the keyboard for something that would help.

“Just type the name of the subdirectory you want to look in.”

His frown stayed put. “Which ones are subdirectories?”

“All of them.”

He skimmed the list and slowly pecked the keys until the cursor blinked beside the phrase HIBERFIL.SYS, and waited.

“You have to hit Enter.”

Roach looked up at him, then the keyboard, and began typing “enter.”

“Ohhhkay, change of plans,” Briar said, nudging at him to move over. “You point, I type. Otherwise I might have to hurt you.”

Relinquishing the controls, Roach took the more comfortable observer’s seat while Briar opened up the subdirectory for him. The few files it contained were mostly gibberish and Briar politely moved them out of it before Roach had time to suggest further exploration. Gradually, as his suggestions ran into more dead ends, Briar finally did what Roach was quietly hoping he’d do and began once again navigating the server himself.

As with the first server, he quickly began perusing the resident mail system. They skimmed the subject lines, looking for anything of interest, though as they read the terminal hiccupped. Roach frowned as the list of messages jerked down, causing him to lose the line he’d been reading. When it happened again, he looked to Briar to see if he was doing it, but his feathers were off the keyboard.

"Glitch?” he guessed.

Briar crossed his hooves and stared at the terminal with open irritation. “New messages,” he said. “Look at the dates.”

Roach squinted at the text just as it jerked down again, the dates on the new entries impossibly recent. “These are from today,” he said.

Briar shook his head, doubtful. “Probably the terminal pulling up messages that were stuck pending when the network went down.”

It sounded reasonable. “This many?”

“Big Stable.”

Roach nodded, picking at the chitin on his lip with his teeth. Fresh messages kept loading as they watched. He tapped the screen with his hoof, indicating the ones he’d like Briar to open. Normally, this would be prying. An invasion of privacy on par with what Rarity’s Ministry of Image grew used to doing toward the end of the war. But these ponies were long gone. Their messages were more a matter of the historical record than anything else. There was nobody left to be embarrassed.

Someone making a complaint about the quality of the linens from Fabrication. A resident asking a friend if they wanted to meet up in the Atrium for breakfast tomorrow. A teacher sending a sick student copies of his homework with the firm expectation he will have it finished after his three day weekend.

“Someone got caught playing hooky,” Briar chuckled.

Roach hummed thoughtfully, frowning at the message. “What day is it today?”

“Friday.” Briar smiled with understanding. “Yeah. Little creepy, huh?”

He continued to frown as Briar closed the message, and more steadily trickled in.

“Can I try something?” he asked.

Briar hesitated, then scooted over to let him have the keyboard again. “Just remember, I don’t live as long as you.”

“Har har,” he muttered, and successfully highlighted and opened one of the newest messages. According to the header at the top of the window, it had been written by a pony named Taffy Tart.

“Heckuva name,” Briar chuckled.

Roach let himself smile a little. Ponies didn’t often name their foals like that anymore. Or if they did, they weren’t named for anything sweet.

The mare - he presumed she was a mare - had written a brief message.

Taffy T.: Running late. Sandy called in sick again. Gotta close up for her. Sorry. I'll try not to wake you up. Tell the kids goodnight for me. <3

After a few tentative keypresses, Roach managed to highlight the button marked reply.

Slowly, at his own pace, he sent a message of his own.

sysadmin_s01: Hello.

Briar leaned back a little and swatted Roach’s shoulder with the back of his wing. “If I knew you were bored enough to talk to ghosts, I would have pulled up a copy of Striped Menace for you to play.”

Roach grunted, embarrassment warming his chitin.

Taffy T.: Um hi. Who is this?

Briar’s grin drained from his face. Roach’s eyes went wide.

“Bullshit,” Briar whispered.

Roach stared at the screen, disbelieving.

Taffy T.: Hello? I think I sent that to you by mistake. Is this IT?

“Bullshit,” Briar repeated. “This is just data storage. There’s no one else down here but us.”

Roach stood, scanned the servers, and started walking through the rows.

Briar scrambled to his hooves to follow. “Okay, now you’re freaking me out. Where are you going?”

He ignored the question, his eyes on the numbered servers passing by. “What was that Stable you were telling me about before? The one your uncle told stories about?”

“Stable 88,” Briar said. “Or 89. One of those. Why?”

Roach stopped, turned around, and backtracked until he found the server marked 81 and turned down the row.

82… 83… 84…

Blinking lights, stuttering platters and whirring fans passed him on either side, but his attention was bent toward the server near the end of the row. He stopped, his eyes turned up toward the top of the cage where a bright 89 stood out in high relief.

The server inside was as quiet as death.

“That’s it,” he whispered.

Briar was clearly not as enamored with Roach’s discovery. “What is it?”

“The numbers,” he said. His pale eyes followed a slow arc, staring at the nearly two hundred servers that surrounded them. “The backup power. They’re not all for this Stable. They're for all the Stables.”

Briar's eyes widened with understanding.

"It's a network."

The last treads of the great stairwell sank into a mass of bones, clothing and jellified flesh. A faint, sick-sweet odor hung in the fog like a reminder. Here were the ponies who had fallen. Here were the forgotten.

A single corridor on the far wall of the circular landing branched off into the bowels of the Stable. A sheet of half-inch steel had been mounted above the entryway by heavy bolts sunk into the concrete. Rust and what appeared to be drips of old flesh had since coated the makeshift sign, but they could still make out the word MECHANICAL in the center.

Aurora willed herself not to look too closely at the compacted mass of decomposition.

Julip didn’t hesitate to share her opinion. She sounded on the verge of being sick as she said, “I’m not wading through that. No fucking way.”

“You won’t have to,” Ginger said, her horn glowing brighter. “Just be quiet and don’t wriggle like you did last time.”

“‘Last time?’ What…”

Julip fell silent as amber light swarmed around her. As they had when she found herself being picked up off the tracks, Julip’s eyes went wide as Ginger carefully hoisted her off the treads and past the railing toward the corridor.

“Do. Not. Drop me,” she growled.

Ginger blinked several times, her face a mask of concentration. Slowly, she guided Julip over the pooled remains and carried her into the darkened corridor. When she appeared to be past the worst of it, the spell popped and Julip dropped to the ground with an unmistakably wet splat.

“OH MY FUCK YOU DID NOT.”

Aurora carefully shielded her mouth with her feathers, undecided on whether she should laugh or throw up. For Ginger’s part, she appeared genuinely surprised.

“Are you alright? That’s as far as I can cast!”

“IT’S UP TO MY ANKLES PICK ME BACK UP!”

Ginger glowered in the direction of her voice. “I am not a crane! Just wait there or walk to where's it's more… shallow. I'm sending Aurora over next.”

She felt her stomach lurch. “I could probably just fly.”

“From a dead stop? I hardly think so. Now be still.”

She braced herself as she felt Ginger’s magic coil around her like a second skin, hardening just enough to resemble the sensation of a firm but gentle grip. A small gasp escaped her as she felt herself lift up over the railing and effortlessly drift across the congealed, nightmarish pool.

The light of her Pip-Buck illuminated the corridor as she drifted inside. Gravity, pressure and a constant stream of damp air had allowed the mass to flow in a good ten yards before its own viscosity barred further progress. Aurora felt her momentum slow as she neared the spot Julip landed, the Enclave mare already making her way to what amounted to dry land, which was to say not dry at all.

While the remains of fallen ponies only extended so far, beyond that stood a layer of murky water a good few inches deep. Her Pip-Buck caught its rippling surface just enough for her to see the slick of rainbows swirling in Julip’s wake.

Ginger’s spell dissolved and Aurora clamped her eyes, ears and tail shut as she sank a solid foot into what she tried to convince her brain was mud. Just plain old mud. Nothing but mud.

Mud, mud, mud.

Touching the wall with the tip of her wing, she guided herself out of the sludge to where Julip now waited. When she opened her eyes, Julip was staring past her with righteous indignation.

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“Shut up,” Ginger said through clenched teeth. “Trying to concentrate.”

Aurora looked back to see Ginger wobbling through the air, her body jerking and swaying as she tried to keep control of her spell while her deeper instincts fiercely tried to get her to right herself. Her legs shot out and clicked back together as if she were trying to stand on spilled oil, but slowly, unsteadily, she managed to pilot herself into the corridor until her hooves came to rest beside them.

She doused her magic and blew out the lungful of air she’d been holding, tipping sideways until her shoulder thumped against the damp wall. She stayed there, eyes bulging from exertion. Aurora used her feathers to pull a strand of her short fiery mane behind her ear, mirroring Ginger’s gesture outside the gardens.

Ginger looked up at her and grinned through her exhaustion. “How’s that for magic?”

She dropped her wing over Ginger’s back and tugged her up from the wall with a smile of her own. “Try to save some for the generator, okay?”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

There was a wistfulness in her eyes that served as a reminder that her magic would likely decay back to the state it had been when they first met. As long as she made the most of it, however Ginger chose to define that, Aurora would be happy to see her enjoy it.

Water splashed around their hooves as they walked the corridor, the lamp of Aurora’s Pip-Buck reflecting off to cast eerie green ripples of light on the walls and ceiling. In the dark depths of Stable 1’s Mechanical level, nearly every surface was plated with steel much in the same way they paneled the walls and ceiling with it back home. It was reassuring to see that another group of ponies had been irritated by Stable-Tec’s designer, custom-fit wall sections to a point where they scrapped them out and replaced them with flat, easy-to-replace steel.

The panels were so corroded that the waves they created pulled a thin swirl of rust confetti into their wake. Aurora paused at the first intersection, disoriented by so many familiar signposts in such an unfamiliar place. Back home, she would have walked straight off the elevator and made a bee-line across the main work hall to the generator room. Down here, she wasn’t sure.

“Clever stallion,” Julip murmured.

Aurora looked to her, then followed her eyes to the corner of the intersection ahead. Scraped into the rusting wall panel was a little silver arrow pointing to the right. Above it, the roughly scratched word PUMP.

“May as well check that box first,” Aurora said, though she wished Briar had thought to leave directions for the generator room as well. “Feathers crossed they’re easier to get apart than the first one.”

After a minute of walking, checking walls for directions and eventually finding the open door marked with the misnomer PUMPHOUSE, she learned that wouldn’t be the case.

The pump room was a simple setup. At the center of the large space, a deep square cistern sank well below the floor of Level 144. By design it was most likely the deepest point in the Stable, meant to collect groundwater before it could damage the Stable walls and pump it deep into the bedrock where it could disperse into the surrounding water table. Some of it would inevitably flow back into the cistern to be pumped out again, but that was unavoidable. The goal here was the same goal the smaller cistern back home worked to achieve: longevity.

Two beastly pumps loomed at the far side of the cistern, easily half the size of Aurora’s generator. They were the workhorses that kept Stable 1 dry, and not the ones they were looking for. Those smaller auxiliary pumps dotted the outer perimeter of the cistern, intake hoses dipping into the void as if they were trying to save someone stuck at the bottom.

Aurora looked at the cistern with no small measure of mistrust. The only time she ever had to deal with a large amount of water in one place was when she tried to install a bypass to the flow control in her shower and wound up flooding half the residential level. Something about an entire… cube of water, just sitting there, felt unnatural.

With Ginger providing steady light and Julip standing by with the few tools Aurora had left, she spent the better part of twenty minutes fighting one rusted nut after another. They budged only after she had given them their ounce of sweat, squealing loose to be discarded in the shallow water besides the deeper pool behind her. She tried not to think about it and dared not let anything fall into the deep. The fact that it was this close to her was making her skittish enough.

After fighting with the pump’s casing, it finally came apart with the sandy crunch of rust. The water around them turned orange with the fine material as Aurora loosened the impeller blade and pulled it free. It would need to be rinsed off and greased once they got it back up the mountain, but it would to the job.

Briar’s new impeller balanced out the weight of the food stashed in her other bag nicely. Leaving the pump room and its disturbing cistern behind, she felt a little more hopeful that this chapter of her life might finally be coming to an end.

Several wrong turns and one frustrating loop back to the stairwell later, they found the generator room at the end of a heavily graffitied corridor. The majority of the flaking paint had since sloughed off the rusting walls, but enough remained in places for Aurora to piece together a few scrawled words.

Seeing similar slogans painted at the top of the Stable had made her curious, but down here in a place so eerily familiar to her, it made her wonder if something like this could happen to her Stable. Whether the harmless daily complaints about the pegasi lucky enough to work a normal nine-to-five without coming home with bruised shins, aching wings and no energy to do much else except eat and sleep might someday turn into something dangerous. In her heart, she didn’t think it could. But then again, how many earth ponies at the bottom of this forgotten Stable had thought the same thing?

The doorway to the generator room was nearly identical to the one that sealed the servers, except instead of dangling from a few loose wires in the wall the door’s card reader had been neatly disassembled and tucked into its panel box. Even the mounting screws had been put away, as if someone wanted to leave themselves the option of returning for them.

Aurora glanced at Julip, who had grown noticeably quiet. She gestured to the reader with one wing while sliding the feathers of the other into the lip of the unlocked door. “Your people, I’m guessing.”

Julip nodded. “Mmhm.”

With no power to keep them extended, the magnetic locks had disengaged. A sliver of Ginger’s magic grasped the door as well and the thick hinges peeled in protest as they forced it open.

As the gap widened, a bed of radroaches poured over the threshold and into the corridor. Aurora turned her eyes straight up and stood deathly still as a dozen of the horrible things splashed across the water, bumping against their legs as they emitted an excited chitter or liberation. She caught the edge of a sigh from Julip as the mare began using the cup of her wing to scoop up the wandering insects and fling them back down the corridor one and two at a time. Julip hardly seemed bothered by them. More annoyed than anything else. As one of the bugs scrambled toward her hoof she lifted it and dropped it hard in the center of its carapace, popping it beneath the water like Equestria’s most disgusting party favor.

It was enough to give the remaining creepy crawlies the proper motivation to scatter back to whichever crack or crevice they called home. Shuddering, they opened the door to Stable 1's generator room and slipped inside.

October 21st, 1076

Primrose brushed a smudge of construction dust from her jacket and smiled at the rows of investors, press and honorary first residents of Stable 1.

They weren’t here for her, and neither was she smiling for them. She stood behind Spitfire’s left shoulder, close enough that she was able to subtly pick a few bits of lint from her dress blues while the cameras flashed. On Spitfire’s opposite wing stood Rainbow Dash, her vibrant mane swept back and the gold clouds of her element’s necklace glittering in the fanfare. Primrose watched as the so-called Element of Loyalty whispered encouragement into Scootaloo’s ear, the latter mare nervously tapping a stack of notecards against her haunches as she prepared to take the podium.

Flashbulbs strobed as Rainbow finished her pep talk and Scootaloo turned to face the microphone. Primrose straightened a little and faced the cameras, fully expecting to be cropped out of the frame once they reached the printers.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlecolts.” Scootaloo looked down at her notes as the flashes blinded everyone on the stage. “Today is an important day for myself, this company and the history of Equestria. Behind me stands Stable 1. The first of many self-sustaining, fully contained shelters capable of withstanding the full force of the bomb. Our hope is that these shelters will never be needed, but for those of us at Stable-Tec, hope has never been a plan…”

Primrose tuned Scootaloo out. She’d heard it all before. Feathers crossed we don’t have to use these, blah blah blah, thank you for your life’s savings, blah blah blah. For such a substandard pegasus, she did have a knack for pulling the wool over ponies’ eyes. It almost sounded like she believed the tripe she was feeding her rapt audience.

She scanned the crowd, careful not to let her smile slip. Plainclothes agents of the Ministry of Image milled through the crowd, the attention they paid to the ponies around them enough to give them away. The press members weren’t oblivious to their presence, but after a few years of hard reminders to stay in line, most of them were just here to snap photos. The byline was most likely being written for them by their Element of Generosity.

A wingful of wealthy earth ponies and unicorns stood together near the press pool, smiling with that self-serving sense of pride that ponies like them tended to do when they grew tired of pretending to be humble. Naturally, they thought they had things figured out. They had signed up for the same lottery everyone else had, and it just so happened that the lucky fifty first winners were ponies of status. Most of them, anyway. Primrose had opted to select a few token earth ponies from mud country to round out the demographic.

Behind them stood the smooth concrete ramp of Stable 1, its pristine dome bright in the midday sun. They couldn’t have picked a better spot for it. Above sea level, within proximity of a mountain-fed stream and a respectable water table to draw from, surrounded in every direction by ancient granite peaks and accessible by easily protected dirt roads on either end of the valley. This had proven to be a fantastic first step.

Scootaloo’s speech dragged. By the time it wrapped up, the gathered guests and press were eager to move onto the ribbon cutting and see the inside for themselves. As she followed Spitfire off the stage and stood on her mark behind the Stable-Tec branded ribbon, she wondered how their investors might hide their disappointment. It would be another four months before excavation wrapped up. Another six before Stable-Tec’s standby crew would begin taking shifts on the garden levels.

Scootaloo said a few words in the same thread of her speech and the ribbon was cut. The visitors formed an orderly line at the top of the ramp and whispered excitedly to one another as members of Stable-Tec security ushered them down to the open door. Primrose joined the line with a stallion she didn’t recognize, likely another glorified coffee-getter like herself, and watched as ponies reacted to the white tarp fixed to the bulkhead. The plastic tunnel was fixed to plywood flooring that directed them through the Stable’s first chamber and into the security office on the other side.

More than a few ponies asked the security team what the tunnel was for, to which they were given a generic excuse of fine silicate still being airborne from construction. Primrose hadn’t been sure how Scootaloo would divert ponies’ attention away from the incinerator, but this definitely did the trick.

She milled out onto the first level of the Stable, blinking against the odd flash from eager photographers while the majority of ponies headed toward the cafeteria space to sample “genuine Stable-Tec cuisine.” The smell of steamed vegetables, soups and fresh bread was almost tempting, but the line forming at the service line was already several dozen deep and steadily wrapping around itself. Rich or poor, free food was free food.

There wasn’t much to do for the first hour but wander. Spitfire would be busy for the entirety of the luncheon, fielding interviews for ponies who couldn’t lock down time with Rainbow Dash or Scootaloo, touching base with a few key pegasi from the ministry and eventually settling down at a table to tap out a few messages on her brand-new Pip-Buck. Primrose lifted a bread roll from one of the tables, winking at a press member who reacted to the theft with a smirk.

She took a bite and strolled over to the railing where several other ponies had chosen to enjoy their meals. A nearby mare giggled nervously at the prospect of standing over such a long drop, making Primrose chuckle. The idle construction equipment parked at the bottom of the pit had barely scraped the surface of what would be Level 40. There was still a long way to go.

“Ma’am?”

She blinked and noticed the cremello stallion standing behind her.

“The bar will be opening in a moment. You’ll have to step away from the railing.”

No sense in risking someone stumbling over the edge. Already, members of security were asking the other patrons to enjoy themselves a safe distance away. Primrose smiled at him, taking a moment to appreciate the undercarriage, and meandered back toward the guests.

Spitfire was still at her table juggling conversation, lunch and reading her messages. They met eyes briefly enough for Primrose to see she didn’t need saving. She was in her element. If anything, she was putting on an impressive performance that would be best left uninterrupted.

A flicker of color - well, more color than usual - passed through the crowd near the exit. She caught a glimpse of Rainbow Dash nodding polite acknowledgements as she made her way off the main floor and slipped, alone, into the security office.

Hm. That could be fun.

Nobody paid her any mind as she strode through the guests, ducked behind photographers and toward the security ponies at the door. An earth pony saw her approaching and stepped forward to quietly redirect her, but the pegasus beside him put a wing on his shoulder and gestured for her to go on through. Primrose nodded at him, letting her tail graze his ribs as she sauntered by.

She smiled. Loyalty deserved rewarding.

The tunnel crinkled as she trotted through and emerged onto the ramp in time to spot Rainbow Dash sitting down at the very top, a glass pinched between her blue feathers.

“Cider?”

As she climbed the ramp, she caught a glimpse of Rainbow rolling her eyes. She likely thought she was another fan coming to beg for her autograph.

“Don’t know what it is,” she muttered, taking a sip. “Don’t really care. Do you need something?”

Primrose took a deep breath and shook her head.

“Just thought I’d get some fresh air. Stretch my wings.” She gave them a quick flap, enough to seat herself on the retaining wall a few yards from where Rainbow drank. “Saw you out here and thought you might like some company.”

Rainbow took another sip and pulled a face, her speech touched with the hint of slur. “I’m out here to get away from the company.”

She kicked her legs forward and back, her hooves clicking against the concrete wall. A bad habit she hadn’t been able to shake from her foalhood. That, and other things.

“That bad, huh?” she asked.

Rainbow let out an impatient sigh. “You’re one of hers, aren’t you.”

“One of who’s?”

She watched as the Element of Loyalty downed the rest of her glass and coughed a rough chuckle. “Yeah, you are. She send you out here to s-s-spy on me? Make sure I’m being a good little girl?”

So much for playing the naive card. For a mare already half in the barrel, her wits were razor sharp.

“She doesn’t pay me well enough to be your babysitter,” she said, hoping to smooth out some of the rougher edges of that paranoia. “I noticed you leave and thought I’d see what you were up to.”

Rainbow continued to stare ahead, watching Stable-Tec’s people finish packing up the stage. Not far down the dirt road, a line of carriages waited to take any non-flying ponies back home once the event was over. “Got a name?”

She smiled. “Primrose. My friends call me Prim.”

Rainbow glanced back at her and hummed recognition. “Spitfire’s receptionist.”

“Guilty,” she said, extending a pink wing. Rainbow leaned back and gave it a quick shake. “You look like you’ve seen better days. Everything okay?”

“This is my fifth glass of white wine, I think,” she replied, waggling the empty glass without bothering to look at her. “Yeah, I’m having an awesome day.”

Primrose was no detective, but she had the sense that Rainbow was employing sarcasm.

“Want to talk…”

“F-f-fucking don’t ask me if I want to talk about it.”

She held up her hooves, not that Rainbow could see, and decided to wait her out instead. They sat there, not quite together, and watched as an open box truck backed up to the disassembled stage. Like efficient little ants, the earth ponies tasked with packing it up went straight to work hefting panels.

“Today’s my friend’s anniversary,” she muttered.

Primrose glanced at her. “Not a happy anniversary, by the sound of it.”

“No,” Rainbow agreed. “Not a happy one. A year ago today. Got her killed. Poof. Gone just l-l-like that.”

Ah. The gryphon. Spitfire mentioned something about that.

“Know how many of my friends called me today?”

“Not enough, I’m guessing.”

“Bingo. Not fucking enough.” She held up a single feather. “Just one. And I guess… she didn’t even call, since we live together now. Applejack’s the only one that cares anymore. The rest of them…”

Her train of thought seemed to trail off as the wine took hold. She sat there for a moment, shaking her head, her feather still standing upright as if she didn’t realize it was still there.

Then she turned, halfway, that same feather leveled at Primrose. “I would have called if Maud died! Or Sweetie Belle, or… what’s-his-name, Fluttershy’s brother!”

Primrose waited as Rainbow exhausted her list, making a point to ask Spitfire to make her aware next time that the head of their ministry was carrying extra baggage.

“Fuck, even Twilight. If something ever happened to Shining Armor, I’d remember to knock on her fucking door.” She scrubbed her wing across her face, the last puddle of wine dribbling into the dirt. She let out a derisive snort. “God, I’m a f-f-fucking mess.”

She blinked, confused. “Who?”

Rainbow waved her off, leaning a little in the process. “Nothing. Something Gilda liked to say. Look… what’s your name again?”

“Prim.”

“Look, Prim. I’m gonna head out so I can get back pretending I have anything important to do.” She stood, unsteadily, and paused. “Am I supposed to know you’re one of her…”

“Spies?”

Rainbow shrugged.

“It’s fine, yes.”

She grunted, then nodded. “Tell Spitfire I said good luck with her new Stable.”

Primrose’s smile tightened. “You mean Scootaloo’s?”

“I meant what I said. See you around, Prim.”

With that, she opened her wings and threw them to the ground. A few seconds later, a crisp, unbroken rainbow erupted in the sky. The sonic boom thumped in Primrose’s chest like a physical thing.

Swinging herself off the retaining wall, she dropped to her hooves and narrowed her eyes as the rainboom gently pushed aside a wisp of clouds. She needed to touch base with Spitfire, and soon.

One of the Elements of Harmony had been peeking.

Next Chapter: Chapter 27: Hardwired Estimated time remaining: 47 Hours, 31 Minutes