December 12th, 1147
Sixty Years After The Bombs

Roach let out a little grunt of effort as he pulled himself through the winding tunnel he’d burrowed into the worst of the rockslide. The burlap pouch clutched between his teeth contained a respectable variety of jerkeyed meat and a small glass jar of genuine, homemade apple butter. The latter hadn’t been a part of the original agreement, but the elderly mare had insisted he accept it nonetheless. As a gift, she told him, not as payment. He knew Lily wouldn’t relent before he did, and the jar of sugared apple spread went into his bag along with a modest sprinkling of caps.

He’d begun making more frequent trips out into the wasteland over the last few decades, but rarely did he go out during the winter. Lily was a special exception. Of the scattered ponies who survived the turbulent years immediately after the bombs, she was one of the last of that melancholic generation. Pretty soon the only ones who remembered life before the war would be the ghouls. The thought worried him. Even without the bombs, the radiation and the strange mutations that plagued Equestria, the world had undeniably changed. It had become more violent. Less forgiving. So much was being forgotten that he wondered how long it would be until even the prewar ghouls would be viewed as an oddity rather than an anchor to a better time.

Lily’s reward swung beneath his chin as he pulled himself through the last stretch of the tunnel. He wasn’t the only pony helping with her little farm. More than once, he’d come to check on her when another survivor was already hard at work clearing tainted snow from her meager field. Most of them chose not to speak to him, or if they did they did so sparingly, referring to him as “changeling,” “bug” or, more recently, “roach.” That last one got stuck in his head for some reason. Seemed appropriate given the changing times.

Lily was the only pony who still called him Sunny, and it was that reason he kept coming back season after season. Even so, he was minding his generously donated nicknames less and less.

Roach crawled out into the larger tunnel outside Stable 10 and tapped each of his hooves against the flagstones, sending bits of damp soil and melting snow tumbling from the cavities in his legs. The door to Blue’s utility room was pushed open which meant she was probably wandering among the pillars again. He stretched his translucent wings, letting the insulated air of the tunnel warm his sides while being mindful not to push them too far. The membranes had become brittle in recent years and he could already feel the joints growing loose in their sockets. Initially he’d thought he was finally going to molt out of his cracking chitin, but over the years it had become clear that wasn’t what was happening. The answer was much simpler. His wings were starting to decay. It wouldn’t be long until each one fell out like a dead tooth.

He settled them against his sides and pushed the superficial worry away. There were plenty of earth ponies in the wasteland who managed just fine. If or when it happened, he would just have to make do. Maybe he could look into the new bite triggers he'd seen the guards in Steepleton use. A project for tomorrow, he decided.

His hooves clicked over the flagstones, making his way deeper into the tunnel. The framed posters on the walls drifted by in the comforting monochrome of his inborn night vision, the old slogans and fear mongering warning of a desolate future should Equestria fail in its duty to defeat the bloodthirsty zebras across the sea. He sighed. The old corpses surrounding the pillars lay as testament to that failure. Sixty years on, seeing them reclining against one another still elicited a twinge of deep sadness inside him. If he wanted to, he could still hear their desperate screaming. The panic in their voices as they begged the overmare to open the door. The quiet sobbing that echoed off the walls, made quieter with each passing gunshot.

Coming home never got any easier.

He found her at the end of the tunnel, curled up beneath the Stable’s immovable door. Her ears perked up as he climbed the steps and she bent her neck around to look at him, her face momentarily unsure of him before recognition slowly set in. She smiled.

“Hi, Sunny,” she murmured.

He smiled back and sat down beside Rainbow, happy that he’d made it back in time to catch her in one of her rare moments of lucidity. Lily’s jar clunked inside the burlap pouch as he set it onto the dusty concrete. “Hey, Rainbow,” he replied, using his teeth to toss open the pouch. “I brought you something.”

Rainbow sniffed as she sat up. She’d been crying. He pretended not to notice.

“Luna’s grace, if it’s a hayburger I’ll kiss you.”

He chuckled at the empty threat and lifted the jar for her to see. She wrapped her feathers around the glass and blinked at the murky contents.

“It’s a treat,” he said. “Lily made it for us.”

She smiled a little more eagerly and spun the lid. When she pulled it away, the rich scent of cinnamon, nutmeg and caramelized apples lifted into the air. For a brief moment, Roach was back home. His real home. He could feel the rungs of the kitchen chair against his back while he admired Saffron’s unbreakable patience for baking complex recipes. In just a few short minutes, Violet would wander into the kitchen for one thing or another, though her real goal would always be to sneak off with a taste of fresh batter.

He watched Rainbow Dash gently screw the lid back on, her jaw working back and forth as she set it beside the burlap pouch. It was obvious that she was enduring some powerful memories of her own, so he didn’t object when she turned and snatched him into a crushing hug. Her ragged wings wrapped them like a cloak for what felt like minutes. Neither of them spoke a word.

When he finally felt her feathers loosen, he let her go and settled on his haunches to face the door. His lip tilted up his cheek as he felt her scoot next to him and set her head against his shoulder. He’d lost track of how many times the two of them had sat like this, each of them wishing for different reasons that the Stable door would end its decades-long silence and roll aside.

He watched as she picked up the jar and tapped out a small puddle of apple butter into the upturned lid. She offered it up for him to taste. He leaned slightly forward as she tipped it against his cracked lips, letting the silk smooth dessert glide across his senses before pouring a little for herself. Roach closed his eyes and let out a contented sigh.

They ate quietly, each taking their turn enjoying the gently spiced treat until the jar ran empty and they were left with just the comfort of each other’s company. As Rainbow’s breathing grew slower, Roach started humming the melody of a tune Lily had been playing off an old record. Blue was always calmer when she awoke to music.

“I remember that song.”

He put a hoof around her shoulder, encouraged that Rainbow was hanging on this long. She was nearly as stubborn as his own daughter had been. Absently, he began rocking her side to side as he continued to hum the notes.

He couldn’t help but smile as Rainbow sang the words, their voices echoing off the immovable door in defiance of what had been taken away from them.

“...and what we are a part of is bigger than we know. And the height of our ability is further than we go.”

Rainbow turned her face toward the showerhead, laughing a little as she spat a squirt of hot water from her mouth. “And fear is just another problem we will figure out. And we will grow our garden come sun, flood, or drought.”

There was something about taking her first shower in two hundred and twenty years that coaxed the old tune out of her. It had been one of dozens of songs Applejack used to listen to regularly, songs which Rainbow had never been shy about giving her a little ribbing over their hokey rural themes.

She paused to watch the water swirl the drain between her hooves. What she wouldn’t give to have her back. Grimacing, she knew exactly what Applejack would say if she caught her pitying herself like this. There would be plentiful y’alls and ain’ts sprinkled throughout a lecture that could be boiled down to five easy words: you need to move on.

Easy to say, harder to do, but she indulged in a bittersweet smile at the memory of Applejack’s voice despite the pain of knowing she was probably the last pony alive who remembered how it sounded. Her time in the tunnel with Sunny felt less like centuries and something closer to a jumbled, weeklong fever dream. Sledge claimed to have surveillance footage of the two of them spanning that time, and maybe one day she would ask to see it, but first she needed to let herself process this strange new reality of hers.

And that started with figuring out what it was Spitfire had been trying to erase, and why this Delta Vee mare disobeyed her.

A deep thump caused the puddles around her hooves to ripple and the compartment abruptly went pitch black. Almost immediately, the emergency light above the toilet kicked on, bathing her in a dim yellow twilight. The shower sputtered and the water flow became anemic. Sighing, Rainbow used the weak trickle to rinse the suds from what amounted to her mane while the ponies next door uttered muffled complaints. Her shower cut short, she tapped the shutoff button and rubbed herself down with one of the neatly folded towels shelved near the open doorway.

The blackouts were starting to crop up off schedule, now.

Her eyes blinked open and she was in the main room, laying on the bed. Frowning, she pushed herself into a sitting position and wiped a damp streak of drool from the corner of her lip. The power was back on. On the desk, her terminal glowed with the dryly worded message of an improper shutdown. Blue must have gotten restless and taken her for a stroll. At least she’d decided to sleep on top of the bed this time, instead of underneath it.

Fixing her gaze on the featureless wall across from her, she focused on getting her train of thought back on track.

Spitfire.

Wait, no. Delta Vee.

She got up and sat down in front of the terminal, dismissing the notification. It finished rebooting and presented Rainbow with a directory of options she was gradually starting to become familiar with. At the top of the list was the partition Delta Vee had sealed away, burying the first decade of Stable 10’s history beneath layers of deadbolt encryptions. Her first instinct was to reopen the partition and start the painfully dull process of reading filenames in hopes of bumping into something significant.

Something told her that was the wrong move. She leaned back in her chair, the feathers of her only wing sliding off the keyboard and onto her lap.

Delta Vee. Stable 10’s first Head of IT. Rainbow couldn’t place the mare anywhere in her memory, but if she was Jet Stream’s wife there was a good chance the two of them had bumped into each other at the very least in passing. With curiosity biting at the back of her mind, she reached forward and ran a resident search on the mare’s name. Not surprisingly, only one result appeared beneath a subdirectory labeled DECEASED. When she selected the entry, a grainy photo of a baggy-eyed mare appeared beside her resident profile.

At first glance, very little about Delta Vee stood out. The greenwashed picture, an irritating limitation of terminals that Robronco never resolved, purported to show a pale blue mare with a short, bichromatic teal and navy mane. Dark eyeliner wrapped red irises that, despite the terminal’s singular palate, gave Delta Vee an uncannily piercing stare. The deep bags beneath those eyes hinted at many sleepless nights. For a photo of a mare in her early fifties, there was still a glint of rebellion there.

She scrolled past the general information. Weight, height, blood type… she was surprised to find that they had documented her addictions as casually as they might mention her favorite foods. They had been separated into two columns: PRE-RESIDENCY and POST-RESIDENCY.

The first column was substantial: tobacco (cigarette, blindweed), alcohol, psilocybin (mushroom), cocaine hydrochloride, ketamine…

The second column was much more succinct: alcohol (intermittent recovery, functional).

Rainbow let out a low whistle. She’d known the ponies out in Las Pegasus had a reputation for hard partying, but some of the drugs Delta Vee had favored before the end had been highly illegal. She wondered whether any of that mattered once the Stable door was sealed. Maybe they viewed the withdrawals as punishment enough.

Continuing down, Delta Vee’s family history crept into view. Sure enough, Jet Stream’s grainy but unforgettable face drifted into view along with a brief summary of the two’s marital status. Rainbow couldn’t help but smirk, knowing he would balk at his legacy being boiled down to “husband.”

Beside his summary was a second younger face. The freckled mare, barely halfway into her twenties, beamed up from the terminal with barely contained excitement. Judging by the blank background behind her and her smart little suit jacket featuring the JetStream Aerospace logo on the left lapel, the picture had been pulled from an employment record. The cheerful mare was their only daughter, Apogee.

Someone had entered additional notes into Apogee’s mention. Unbeknownst to Rainbow at the time, Apogee had been something of an up-and-comer in her father’s blossoming private space program. No doubt nepotism played a heavy hoof in her being selected to pilot the first of many crewed missions, but the entries archived beneath her grinning face told a broader story of a mare eager to push limits that Rainbow hadn’t been aware of.

She frowned at the mention of her holding the record for something called an “extravehicular activity” before realization dawned on her that the mare had gone outside while in orbit. There was no citation to support the claim, but something told Rainbow it was true nonetheless. She wondered how something like that worked. Maybe if Celestia hadn’t been so rigidly opposed to space exploration, she would know.

According to Delta Vee’s file, she was the only member of her family to make it to Stable 10 before Spitfire made the decision to seal the door. It was a story Rainbow knew too well. Delta Vee and Rainbow’s mother were only two of many pegasi whose families had been left behind. The only difference was that Rainbow had survived.

Her mother had grieved, but inevitably she found a new life within the Stable. She’d adopted an orphaned colt who would later call her his mother. Delta Vee seemed to have coped by burying herself in her work, eventually rising to the head of IT where she made the decision to defy her overmare. The question was why.

She looked at the greenwashed photos of Jet Stream and Apogee.

The answers, she realized, were staring her in the face.

Their hooves echoed off the generator room floor, a sound that deeply unsettled Aurora as the three of them stepped inside.

Green and amber light played across the rusting walls, offering them the first glimpse of two behemoth machines that looked nothing like she expected. Seated into the floor of a truly cavernous space, the twin generators looked like something out of a mechanic’s fever dream. Rather than the simple cylindrical shape Aurora was used to, these looked more akin to the locomotive stripped of its wheels and scaled up by a factor of ten.

They were large enough that the hexagonal room must have been built around them. Permanent scaffolding joined them together in a choreographed webwork of stairways and gantries. As Aurora approached, she rested her hooves atop a yellow safety railing that encompassed the work space around them. She was in awe.

Ginger leaned against the railing beside her while the globule of her magic flitted between the machines’ foundations. “These are what you worked on back home?”

She laughed. Not because it was funny, but because of how absurd the comparison was. These generators made what she did feel like foal’s play. “I’ve never seen anything this huge before.”

Behind her, Julip snickered.

She ignored her, eyes turned up to where the very topmost gantries came within jumping distance of the ceiling. If she was a betting mare, she’d gamble that she was looking at the underside of Level 143.

Ducking through the railing, Aurora found herself walking through a workspace that must have taken dozens of ponies to manage. Parked beside the nearest gantry stairwell, an empty electric forklift sat in a puddle of heavy corrosion from its neglected batteries. A row of plastic pallets lay neatly at the foot of the first generator, stacked high with hard cases clearly labeled to indicate the replacement parts they contained. The closer she looked, the more she saw evidence of some sort of mass maintenance project left unfinished. A second forklift sat parked beside the first generator’s twin with a sheet of forged steel hanging from a chain secured to the forks. How the hydraulics in the mast survived under load this long, she didn’t know. The lift’s driver had died in his chair, hoof still vaguely reaching for the levers.

She caught a glimpse of more remains in the gangways overhead, their dark shapes casting long shadows in the light of Ginger’s magic.

Ginger and Julip followed close behind her as she walked a slow circle inside the perimeter of the safety railing. Their hooves clicked against dense unyielding concrete instead of the steel grating Aurora was expecting. There were no hidden underbellies to these generators. There very likely couldn’t be. In a way that made her task easier, but she wasn’t ready to celebrate yet. The talisman chambers could be anywhere on these monsters.

Glancing over her shoulder at Julip, she nodded up at the generator looming over them. “I don’t suppose the Enclave had you study the blueprints to these things?”

Julip shook her head, her eyes focused on something else. Aurora tilted her Pip-Buck’s screen toward whatever had caught her attention and frowned at the sight of an open access hatch in the side of the second generator. The panel leaned against the inch-thick chassis, alongside four heavy bolts set neatly in a row beside it.

Her gut began to churn with worry. The Enclave had been down here, rooting around inside the sleeping machines. She swallowed, refusing to let go of her narrowing chances that the Enclave had left the one component she came here for unmolested.

As silence began to stretch, Julip spoke. “Can I ask…”

Aurora’s ears went flat, her anger toward the mare still smoldering from her abortive attempt to beat her back in the gardens. “No. You can’t.”

She could feel Ginger’s eyes on her. Monitoring her. The fact that she was against her on this, that she was actually defending Julip’s right to a second chance they both believed she wouldn’t take, pissed her off even more. From the moment Julip tracked them down, she had been at the crux of every disagreement Aurora and Ginger were having. The fact that Aurora hadn’t told her or Roach about seeking out the Enclave outside the solar array. The decision to let Julip accompany them at all. The mare’s insistence that dustwings like Beans and Briar amounted to defects in the lineage of pegasi. Even her kiss-ass apology to Ginger earlier on the stairs.

Everything had been fine between them until Julip dropped out of the sky. It made Aurora regret freeing her in the first place.

And yet Julip, a mare whose only skills seemed to be lying, stalking, reciting ancient history and not much else, continued to follow them like a first-day trainee who was too stubborn to get a different assignment.

Best of all, she was dead-set on testing Aurora’s withering patience.

“Since you just saw what I saw,” Julip pressed, “I’ll just go ahead and say it. A recovery team has already been through this Stable. It’s picked clean. That probably means your ignition talisman, too.”

Her heart skipped a beat. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, give it a rest. You’re the one who insisted I come down here with you, and you’ve been telegraphing this whole generator problem of yours for the past two days.” Julip’s hooves clicked off the concrete a little faster, her tone growing more pointed as she drew up just outside of Aurora’s wingspan. “What did you think was going to happen once we got down here? Contrary to what you may think, I’m not an idiot. If you were looking for spare parts, you could have fabricated them without leaving your Stable.”

Aurora grit her teeth, her eyes scanning the chassis of the first generator while she tried to ignore the mare just a few feet away.

“Earlier you said your generator was slowing down. Not falling apart. Not broken. Slowing.” Julip cut in front of her. Were it not for the gentle pressure of Ginger’s magic, Aurora would have had no qualms about knocking the mare on her little green ass.

“Move,” she warned.

“You’re looking for an ignition talisman,” Julip pressed. “I can help you get one.”

“Don’t need your help,” she muttered, turned around and brushed past Ginger as she resumed examining the generators. “I got what I need down here.”

“Yeah,” Julip called. “Two broken down generators with no power supplies. That’s what you fucking have!”

Ignoring her, Aurora retraced her steps, walked toward the square section of panelling the Enclave removed and searched the ground. A heavy ratchet lay in the narrow shelter the tilted panel created. She scooped it up with one wing and shined the light of her Pip-Buck into the cavity of the opened generator.

She could hear Ginger behind her murmuring some choice words to Julip in an attempt to de-escalate the growing tension. It wouldn’t help. Aurora was one wrong word away from sending the ratchet hurtling toward Julip’s fat fucking mouth. She didn’t need this right now.

She struggled to focus on the words stamped across the myriad cables, hydraulics and cooling lines strung beneath the generator’s steel skin. Leaning in, she could just make out a void deeper along its superstructure large enough for a pony to fit inside. She backed out, avoiding any eye contact with Julip, and walked several paces down the length of the generator. Her lips pressed into a narrow line as she spotted another panel leaned up on the ground, bolts standing upright like soldiers lined up for inspection.

Grabbing the straps of her saddlebags, she flung them roughly over her tail and crawled up into the access hatch.

“Aurora,” Ginger called behind her. “That doesn’t look safe.”

She opened her mouth to reassure her but stopped short of answering. She was too angry to trust herself to speak. With the ratchet still clutched under her wing, she pushed herself into the cramped space and squirmed deeper into the generator’s corpse.

The narrow metal tunnel was packed dense with electrical lines, each of them stamped with serial numbers nearly identical to the cable Briar had buried outside his family’s home. The voltage ratings on the lines were terrifying to consider, so she didn’t. The generator was off. Any capacitance in the lines would have dissipated well before she was born. If there was a silver lining to squeezing her way through the claustrophobic channels of a deadly machine, it was that she didn’t have to worry about the cables rubbing against her wings shorting out and flash-roasting her organs.

She grunted as the ridge of her wing hooked through a limp coolant line, forcing her to drop the ratchet and kick it further ahead with her foreleg. Feathers designed to point one way pinched the sensitive skin they sprouted from as they were made to bend backward when she jerked herself free. The abrupt but brief pain put tears in her eyes, but it didn’t stop her from moving forward.

The tunnel bent ninety degrees to the right, forcing her to roll onto her side in order to squeeze around. As she made the turn, she frowned as the light of her Pip-Buck bounced off the panel of a dead end in front of her. It took a split second for her to spot the hinges. She awkwardly scooped the ratchet up in the crux of her foreleg and thumped it against the panel barring her way. It popped open, swinging lazily into a larger void within the machine. She crawled forward and dropped inside.

The space she found herself in was barely larger than her shower back home, but at least she could breathe. Setting the ratchet down, she directed her light around the small empty space and tried to understand what it was for. The cables spilled out of the crawlspace, followed the bare steel and sorted themselves into various, innocuous ports in the surrounding walls. She walked a tight circle, trying to get a sense of where to go next when a sharp bolt of pain shot up her foreleg.

“Ow!” She jerked away and turned her hoof over with fresh irritation. A dark bead of blood was already forming around the silver head of a security screw. Wincing, she gripped the screw between her teeth and yanked it out before she could think twice. It hurt more coming out and she kicked the wall behind her in a vain attempt to redirect the pain.

Spitting the bloody screw onto the floor, she grit her teeth as the pain slowly lessened. “Little motherfucker.”

The screw rolled into the corner where three identical points of metal stood upright near the wall. Aurora narrowed her eyes at them, then turned her light to the floor beneath her hooves. A seam, machined with such precision that it was practically invisible, drew a perfect square at the center of the space. There was no ring to pull. Not even an indent to manipulate with her hoof. Just a perfectly smooth piece of steel and four tiny holes at each corner.

Her throat went dry as she recognized its purpose. It was designed so that only a unicorn could easily lift it. Anyone else, whether they were earth pony or pegasus, would have to make a deliberate effort to pull it away in the hopes that they came to their senses before they succeeded.

There was only one piece of a generator that required a unicorn’s horn to handle. Her heartbeat quickened as she picked up one of the screws, seated it into the corner of the panel and gave it a few short twists. Just enough for the threading to catch. Just enough for her to have something to grip with her teeth.

She shut her eyes as she bit down around the head of the screw and pulled. The panel wasn’t designed to be lightweight, but she steeled herself and pushed down against her hooves. It lifted, barely an inch, but it was enough room to grab the ratchet on the floor and stick it through the gap. She breathed a sigh of relief as she set it down, ran her tongue across her teeth to reassure herself they were all still present, and wedged her wings through the gap to lift the panel away.

There it was. Seated within a glass chamber whose operation she only had a rudimentary understanding of. Two impossibly fine contact points machined to within a micron of accuracy, their conical points separated by exactly eight inches of space between which had rested the object Aurora had risked her life to find.

It was empty.

The ignition talisman was gone.

For a long while, everything felt too distant to wrap her head around. She sat down and her foreleg started bouncing with directionless energy. She stood, frowned into the empty chamber, blinked several times, and turned silently toward the crawlspace.

Something inside of her felt… disconnected. She wriggled around the tight corner, pushing with her hind legs and pulling with her front. Little grunts and gasps echoed dimly through the silent machine as she made her way out. In the corner of her mind, she thought about stopping. It was cozy here, safe and simple. She didn’t want to keep going, but if she stayed here someone would just crawl in to get her.

It hadn’t hit her yet. As she stumped her way toward the dim amber light at the end, she wondered when it would.

Ginger’s face appeared at the other side, relief washing over her features as she backed up to make room. Aurora winced as she gripped the edge, pulled herself forward and dropped her front hooves to the concrete floor. She didn’t look at Ginger. She didn’t say a word to either of them.

Julip stood just beyond Ginger’s left shoulder. Maybe it was the look on Aurora’s face or the fact that her wings were empty that prompted her to say what she said. Either way, it didn’t matter. The words rolled off the little mare’s tongue like bile.

“Whelp.” Julip said, with just a hint of self-satisfaction. “Told you.”

That was it.

Her hind legs found purchase on the edge of the crawlspace and she lunged. A sheet of amber light wrapped against her chest but the anger was pouring into her now like hot slag. She scrambled over the top of Ginger’s barrier, fell, stumbled back to her hooves and had to sidestep another sheet of magic before throwing herself at the Enclave bitch.

Julip surprised her by ducking beneath the wide arc of her hooves and retreating toward the generator. Aurora landed in an uneven slide, the stab of pain returning to her injured hoof and adding another flash of heat to her frenzy. She spun around and sighted Julip who stood just close enough to the generator’s chassis to give Aurora some options.

She was going to hurt her. In the corner of her eye she could see Ginger yelling something, but the words weren’t registering. She was not going to walk out of this Stable without something.

She lunged again, this time intent on pinning Julip to the wall of the generator and beating her against it until she stopped making noise. Beans would thank her. Briar would thank her. Ginger, with her horn spiralling with fresh magic, would forgive her.

The shield dropped in front of her like a wall. Her wings struck open, closed even harder and propelled her across the slick concrete before the barrier could reach her. The gap between her and Julip slammed shut like a door with severed hydraulics. She threw every bit of her weight into the punch, driving the bloodied edge of her hoof toward Julip’s intense little frown.

She missed.

In the blink of an eye, Julip darted sideways, latched her wings around Aurora’s shoulders as she slid by, effortlessly pivoted and shoved Aurora, hard.

Every part of her body slammed into the unyielding steel chassis at the same time, sending a shock of white-hot pain through her body like a hammer. A wavering second passed where she was too dazed to think, verging on losing consciousness from the sheer disorienting pain of headbutting the wall. Something wrapped tight around the roots of her wings, immobilizing them behind her back.

Julip.

Dizzy, but determined, she tried to jerk herself free but only succeeded in sending a spike of agony down her wings. The mare was leaning on a pressure point she didn’t know she had. Another hoof had wrapped tightly around her uninjured foreleg, restricting her ability to move in any direction that wouldn’t send the nerves down her back into a spasming panic.

She said she didn’t know how to fight. Just an archivist, she said.

More fucking lies.

It was difficult to speak with her face shoved against the unforgiving steel. She couldn’t see Ginger. Why wasn’t she pulling Julip off? Where was she?

“Let me go,” she snarled.

“Stop fighting,” Julip answered.

Aurora jerked against her in answer, and Julip leaned harder against her wings to repay the effort. She knew what she was doing. Aurora had no idea how, but every movement Julip made was expertly effective in stopping her. She screamed over her shoulder.

“Get off of me you fucking cunt!”

Julip didn’t budge and, to her bewilderment, Ginger appeared in her limited line of sight. Her horn was conspicuously dark. “Aurora, stop. Right now.”

Confused and furious, her vision misted. Her voice cracked as she begged. “Get her off me.”

“Not until you calm down.”

The mist turned to tears. Ginger wasn’t on her side this time. She’d crossed the line. Her jaw worked back and forth as she tried to pull herself together but it was like holding water in her feathers. Unable to trust herself to speak, she pressed her forehead against the cold steel and blinked until her eyes were clearer. Licking her lips, she nodded.

A moment later, the pressure on her wings lifted and Julip took a step back. When the Enclave mare spoke, her voice was subdued. “Look, I shouldn’t have said…”

Aurora whirled around and clubbed her hard across the face with her hoof. Caught off guard, Julip toppled to the concrete in a heap.

“Aurora!”

She refused to meet Ginger’s eyes. Not out of anger, but because she didn’t think she could bear to see the disappointment in them another time. She watched Julip’s dazed expression slowly tighten with pain. A shallow gash had opened up across her left eyebrow and with any luck would leave a scar. She could see Ginger’s lit horn in the corner of her eye, ready to stop her from throwing another punch.

She’d done enough damage.

Her hopes had gotten so high that the reality of what a mistake this all had been was only now beginning to register. How much time had she wasted by dragging them all down here? Time that Stable 10 didn’t have? That Sledge, her dad and even Carbide didn’t have? She could feel her thoughts sinking toward darker thoughts. Bitter tears once again pooled in her eyes. Everything was coming apart. This wasteland and its nonstop parade of traumas had pushed her past her limit. She couldn’t do this anymore.

Sparing a glance for Ginger, she could only see mistrust in her eyes. She turned and walked away.

June 26th, 1076

“Hold the door, please.”

A shockingly bright green stallion’s head snapped up from the newspaper hovering in front of him and quickly stuck his leg between the elevator doors. They jerked to a stop just in time for Applejack to squeeze in. As the doors slid shut, she leaned over and tapped the button for Rainbow’s ministry. Slowly, the elevator descended.

A yawn snuck up on her faster than she could stifle it. She turned away from the stallion and cupped her mouth against the back of her hoof. Sleepless nights were something she was used to these days, but last night had been anything but normal. Yesterday’s visit to Ponyville had brought things to light that kept her mind from settling even as the sun crept toward the horizon this morning. On any day of the week, learning that her little sister was being blackmailed would be more than enough to make her see red, but as far as she could tell Applebloom had already handled it. They’d met outside of Canterlot so she could deliver a warning that something was rotten within the ministries. Applebloom had no idea how right she was.

The elevator chimed and Applejack pushed past the doors before they were fully open. A trio of pegasi waiting on the other side practically tripped over one another to clear the way. More than a few gathered in the semicircular lobby area regarded her as she passed with carefully neutral expressions, their eyes tracking her as she bore right and walked into a carpeted hallway.

She tried to talk to Rainbow about it during dinner. She thought that the privacy of their new townhouse just downslope of the capital might make her feel safe, but the second the word “Spitfire” rolled out of her mouth Rainbow locked up tighter than Pillar security during a drill. It was the first time she could recall seeing her choose to say nothing. Not a single word in answer to her question of what she meant when she said she owed Spitfire a favor. Why Spitfire might be acting on her behalf outside the Pillar. Whether or not she needed to intervene.

Rainbow’s eyes had remained glued to her dinner, verging on tears. Right until that last question, and the look of desperation she gave Applejack burned itself so vividly into her mind that she had lain awake beside her without so much as trying to sleep. The distress in her voice when she told her no, to please stay out of it, not to say anything to Spitfire at all. It was like she was trying to stop her from stepping on a landmine.

That hopelessness in Rainbow Dash’s eyes had been the final straw. Spitfire had gotten too big for her britches. Whatever she was doing, it was ending today.

She strode past Rainbow’s door, grateful that it was closed and that none of the pegasi walking the hall thought to greet her by name. Her eyes narrowed at the placard fixed beside the open doorframe.

She shouldered past a departing page on her way in, nearly toppling the wiry stallion and startling an unfamiliar mare seated behind a bland desk on the other side of the room. A secretary. Since when were minister counselors assigned secretaries?

The mare stood, half-bewildered and half-annoyed by Applejack’s brazen intrusion, and politely positioned her cotton candy pink backside in front of the door to Spitfire’s office. “Ma’am, do you have an appointment?”

Recognition dawned as Applejack closed the gap. Pink coat, baby blue mane. This was the Primrose mare Spitfire had brought along to blackmail Applebloom.

“Ain’t got no appointment,” she growled, drawing up nose to nose with the pegasus. Her voice bore a threatening edge. “Move, before I move you.”

A flicker of deep malice shot across the secretary’s face, then it was gone. She stepped aside and Applejack wasted no time flinging open the door to Spitfire’s office.

She felt satisfaction at the sight of the orange-maned bitch jumping in her chair. The secretary who wasn’t a secretary drew up behind her, sputtering apologies intended to be heard by the ponies who had stopped in the hallway. Whoever she was, she was playing a character. Flying under the radar in the same way Spitfire had been doing.

Applejack looked back, placed the flat of one hind hoof against the secretary’s bubblegum pink chest, and shoved her hard enough to scare a yelp out of her as she tumbled backwards into the anteroom. She would be fine, which was more than she could say about Spitfire.

She closed the office door behind her and turned to face the former captain of the Wonderbolts. Spitfire had composed herself and now regarded Applejack from behind her desk with calm curiosity. It took every ounce of her strength not to throw herself over that desk and beat that serene smile off her smug little muzzle.

She crossed Spitfire’s office in four steps, pushing through the two guest chairs and planting her front hooves on the impeccably clean mahogany finish. Then she shoved. The desk began to slide and she leaned in harder, sweeping up Spitfire behind it as desk ornaments clattered off the wood and fell. The desk stopped when each side slammed into the display cases on either side of Spitfire’s shoulders, the glass panes shattering and showering onto the bitch that had the audacity to threaten her family.

Pinned between the wall, her desk and a confetti of glass, Spitfire opened her eyes and surveyed the damage with growing irritation. After another moment passed, she turned her attention to the mare who had caused it. “Minister Applejack. I almost didn’t recognize you with your mane so short.”

She opened her wings and calmly brushed the glass off of her lap. “How can I be of service?”

Applejack kept her hooves on the desk. “Shut your yap and open your ears, because I ain’t gonna repeat this. Stay away from my family. Stay away from my friends. Stay the fuck away from Rainbow Dash. Whatever it is you think you’re doing, it stops right now. If I find out you didn’t listen and I have to come back here, you best believe you’ll be picking your teeth up off this nice carpet of yours. Do you understand me?”

One second. Two. Three.

Spitfire’s chair emitted the faintest creak as she leaned forward, hooves neatly crossed over a desk sparkling with broken glass. It crackled under her weight as she looked up at Applejack with the faintest of smiles.

“I understand.”

Applejack chewed on the inside of her cheek as she watched Spitfire, then took a deep breath and dropped to the rumpled carpet. “Don’t make me come back here,” she repeated.

Spitfire continued to smile as she departed, promising nothing.

Aurora climbed the stairs, alone.

Her legs stank from the gelatinous mass grave she’d been forced to wade through in order to reach the bottom step, but her thoughts weren’t focused on the greasy offal that clung to her. They swirled around the prospect of what she’d lost. The expression on Ginger’s face, the sound of her yelling for her to stop, the desperate effort she’d put forth to keep Aurora from reaching Julip…

She’d been on the move since the very beginning. Every day had brought along new challenges, new ponies with ill and good intent, and even a gryphon whose career Aurora had singularly destroyed by dragging her into the mess that only grew with each step she took forward. They hadn’t gone a single day in the last week without some new roadblock appearing, and then Briar had shown her the cable he’d buried outside his home and her long trek to Stable-Tec finally seemed to be over. An empty Stable still generating usable power. It was as if the wasteland had decided to stop torturing her and give her the one thing she’d come here to find.

And just as the ignition talisman seemed within reach, the wasteland yanked it away.

All that disappointment, all that anger had to go somewhere and Julip had offered herself up on a silver platter. Only Aurora hadn’t expected the little archivist to fight back.

Her jaw ached from being slammed against the generator’s chassis. Any harder and she might’ve been forced to add whatever passed for a dentist in the wasteland to her list of things to find. There was a good chance Julip knew that too. A fragile, inexperienced bookworm she was not. Whatever Julip claimed to be, she wasn’t as sheltered as she pretended.

The levels slid by one after the other while gravity and exhaustion conspired to drag her back down. By the time she climbed out of the Hundreds, a deep burn had sunken into her legs. Navigating the traffic jam of bodies only made the going tougher, but she kept at it. The heavy rain of condensation on the steps resaturated her coat, rinsing the filth from her legs with water contaminated by the corpses lying on the stairs just overhead.

She tried not to think about it and pressed on.

The bodies began to clear and for a few turns she felt herself settling into a comfortable ascent. It was reminiscent of the mandatory minimum workouts back home, before her work in Mechanical started to take its place. She’d never been fond of the treadmills, favoring wing curls more than anything else, but she wasn’t particularly fond of nutrient bars and she still ate them. This was a lot like running the treadmills. All she had to do was find a rhythm and set her brain to white noise for a few hours.

It worked for all of twenty minutes. By the time she reached Level 90, her legs were on the verge of folding under her. Her muscles felt like they were being sliced into by red hot knives. She needed a break.

The bridgeway to Level 90 clanked on loose bolts beneath her hooves as she hobbled across. Following the same pattern as the majority of the levels they’d passed, this one featured an open walkway that ran the inner circumference. Water globbed together on the impossibly smooth ceiling, releasing fat droplets that plipped against the concrete floor like a hundred leaky sinks. Aurora dug the battered canteen from her saddlebag, unscrewed the cap and positioned the container’s mouth below a slow trickle near the landing, then went to find someplace to sit.

She spotted a single bench set between a pair of plant pots whose soil had grown a healthy colony of milky white mold in place of whatever used to grow in them. The rusting steel let out a quiet crunch as she sat, peppering the back of her dangling hind legs with orange flakes. Her head settled against the cool concrete wall and she closed her eyes. A moment passed. Then another, but the tears she was expecting to come never formed. She let out a quiet sigh and resigned herself to watch the droplets fall through the light of her Pip-Buck.

As the warm bench sapped the ache from her muscles, a thought occurred to her and she tilted up her Pip-Buck to see the screen. She was surprised to discover the bulky device still had a strong connection to the Stable’s network, but the more she thought about it the more it made sense. She’d been picking up the signal since they left Kiln. Whatever the Stables used as antenna, they didn’t cheap out on signal strength.

Navigating the menus, she pulled up her inbox. Two new messages waited at the top of the list. Both were from Coldbrook. Both looked important.

She dropped her foreleg into her lap and whispered a tired, “Fuck.” Her hopes were set on seeing something from her dad, or maybe even Sledge, but of course there wouldn’t be anything from them. Not while she was the one wearing the Pip-Buck. Stable 10 was only able to communicate to them when Ginger had it on. Just another checkbox on a long list of things to backfire.

She cast her eyes around Level 90. Several bodies decorated the floor everywhere she looked. Ponies who had a little more to complain about than she did.

She pressed her lips together and forced herself to put her problems into perspective. She’d crossed a line with Ginger and stormed off like a sullen filly. Not exactly one of her best moments, but probably one that could be salvaged if she kept her temper in line. Finding a talisman down here had been a long shot from the start, and a good majority of her disappointment was her own fault for willfully ignoring how slim those odds actually were. She’d made a mess of things, yes, but maybe it was still fixable.

Maybe. Going back down to apologize with Julip smirking over Ginger’s shoulder was a recipe for more violence. Maybe when they were out of the Stable there would be time to clear the air. To see if Ginger was even remotely interested in giving her a second chance.

She closed her messages. Coldbrook could wait.

With a wince, she slid off the bench and brushed the rust from her backside. Her muscles were reaching that tipping point between rested and stiff. Sitting alone feeling sorry for herself would only make the rest of the climb hurt even more. Things had gotten complicated enough already. No need to add laming herself to the list.

Keep it simple, she thought.

She pushed herself into a slow walk around Level 90’s inner walkway and gradually worked herself up to a trot. Her knees throbbed in protest at first but after a lap she began to settle into a comfortable rhythm. A few go-arounds and she’d hit the stairs. Just enough monotony to clear her head.

Stagnant water splashed beneath her hooves. On the second lap she plucked her canteen off the ground and took a swig of the Stable’s runoff, ignoring the brackish aftertaste it left on her tongue. At first she tried not to look too closely at the remains scattered along the concrete but after the third lap her apprehension started to wane. The bodies were too decomposed for her to be certain of their genders. Patches of leathery skin clung to hip bones and a few skulls, but beyond that there was little left of the ponies they once were.

She slowed, stopping beneath a bent ceiling light from which a thin stream of water drizzled. Draining her canteen, she held it aloft beneath the trickle and looked around at the fallen residents as she waited for it to fill again. Two crumpled forms lay together against the far wall with a large green tank nestled between them. The remains of an air hose and gas mask still clung to the face of an earth pony. The unicorn beside it had curled into a fetal position, its sockets seeming to stare at the tank.

Aurora narrowed her eyes, capped her canteen and approached the bodies. She recognized the gas mask as the same type they kept in the emergency lockers back in Mechanical, but instead of plugging a filter canister into the muzzle port, someone had jury-rigged a high pressure hose into the port with a good half inch of duct tape. Careful not to disturb the dead, Aurora turned her light on the tank and let out a pitying sigh.

It was an oxygen tank identical to the ones that were sometimes sent down to her team from Sanitation’s gas reclamation system. The same system whose carbon dioxide flooded Stable 1. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Two ponies finding temporary salvation from the very same source of the poison that was killing them. Breathing pure oxygen to avoid suffocating was akin to putting more grease on a failed bearing. It was a patch, not a fix. The fact that these ponies had chosen to share a tank rather than rig up a second suggested they’d known that. They didn't come here expecting to survive. They’d come to do something before they died.

She found her answer behind an open door a few yards away. It had been forced. Deep crescent shaped dents clustered around a broken handle, the same size as the bottom of the oxygen tank. Lying on the floor, a black plastic placard had fallen from the wall. Water puddled across the neatly arranged white letters:

Aurora peered through the door but didn’t step inside. Her light passed over three parallel rows of desks, each workstation denoted by its own terminal and what was left of rotting cubicle partitions. A trio of offices hid behind glass doors along the far wall, the second of which had been shattered. It was the only sign of disturbance, suggesting the ponies crumpled beside Aurora had known where to go in order to put an end to the gas leak.

She pulled her head out of the control room and rested her cheek against the wall, her eyes settling on the ponies who likely made it possible for others to have a fighting chance. Despite their efforts the Stable had collapsed regardless, but she supposed that wasn’t the point. The point was that someone had survived. Maybe not long enough to figure out how to open the door, but long enough to make something of a life for themselves. Long enough to take power from IT and revive the gardens.

Long enough to try.

“Good job, you two,” she murmured, and turned back to the stairwell.

Ginger’s ear twitched. Once again, the distant echo of Aurora’s hooves rang against the stairs.

“Break’s over, she’s moving again.” Her muscles ached as she pushed herself up off the treads. Several steps down, Julip bent her neck to one side with an audible crack. They both winced. “Come on.”

They resumed their climb much in the same way they’d made the majority of the descent: in silence. They made no comment as they picked their way through the logjam of decaying residents, said nothing as the rancid water that rained through the stairs above pattered against their faces and soaked their coats all over again. There was seemingly nothing to say.

She noticed that Julip wasn’t hanging back as far as she had on the way down. She drew close enough at times to make Ginger feel crowded, as if Julip was doing everything she could short of actually touching her to get her to walk faster. Were there room, Ginger wouldn’t have been surprised if the pegasus took flight and left her behind. Letting Aurora get out of their sight was a decision Julip was clearly regretting.

Ginger had to admit she felt the same way.

They followed Aurora’s hoofsteps turn after turn, careful to give her the space she needed while staying on the edge of earshot in case she needed help. Every so often she would dim her magic and peer up past the railing. Far above, a faint green ring wound its way up the stairs like a distant lighthouse. There was something reassuring about knowing that if Aurora looked down, her amber glow would always be in sight.

As they pushed past the Eighties, the prolonged silence between them started to become more irritating than the uncomfortable prospect of actually talking to the mare. Ginger let out a smallish sigh.

“If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

A flash of annoyance forced Ginger’s thoughts into a tangle, and she bit back the reply boiling on her tongue. Clearly she wasn’t the only one stewing on what happened.

She kept her eyes on the treads. “You knew she was hurting. Saying ‘I told you so’ was just salt in the wound.”

A moment passed, then another. It seemed like they were sliding into another long chapter of uncomfortable silence when Julip muttered a curse under her breath.

“Yeah, well, she paid me back for it so I’d say we’re even.”

Ginger glanced over her shoulder. The blob of magic that hovered ahead of her cast just enough light for her to see the crescent-shaped mass swelling around Julip’s left eye. Even her sage coat couldn’t completely mask the purpling bruise.

“Thanks, by the way,” Julip muttered, her tone shifting. “For trying to keep her off me.”

She sucked on the corner of her lip and exhaled. “Sure. Just… stop needling her. She’s putting herself through tartarus to get back home and you’ve only been making things more difficult.” She faced forward, her eyes searching for the next bridgeway to tell her how much further they had to go. “That being said, thank you for not hurting her back there.”

A quiet snort punctuated their hoofsteps. “It’s not like I had a choice.”

It was about as close to a you’re welcome as she supposed she would get. Still, there was just a touch of something in Julip’s tone. Whether she intended for Ginger to hear it or not, there was a faint wisp of resentment around those words.

Maybe Roach really had cracked that armor of hers.

“They keep you on a short leash, don’t they?”

“That’s why they’re called orders and not suggestions.”

Barely a pause. Probably a line she’d heard from a dozen other Enclave soldiers. Just another tool to use when the ponies wearing their uniform started thinking a little too hard. Ginger considered letting the conversation fizzle out where it stood. Julip wasn’t exactly what she would consider a trustworthy mare, and something told her they were talking themselves toward a can of worms that she wasn’t sure she wanted to open. But it would be another couple of hours before they reached the others up in IT, and the prospect of making the climb stewing on her own thoughts was even less attractive.

“The Enclave does tend to be... rigid." She recalled the stone-faced pegasi who crisscrossed the skies above New Canterlot when she was younger. “Perhaps it isn’t my place to say so, but you don’t seem like their typical recruit.”

This time there was a pause. She could almost hear the shrug in her voice when she answered. “I don’t know. Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess. And you’re using that Old Canterlot accent again, by the way.”

She winced and quietly cursed herself for spending so many hours memorizing and mimicking the inflections of the late Element of Generosity. “Can I ask why you enlisted?”

“Like I said. Not much of a choice.”

Ginger quirked her lip. “For a pegasus in New Canterlot? I always assumed your type could choose whatever path you pleased.”

Julip puffed out a rueful chuckle. “Yeah, okay.”

The dismissal surprised her. “I’m being serious. I grew up in the south burrough a few streets down from Baker’s Corner. There was a stringwheat store on the corner that supplied half the neighborhood with flour, and the stallion who owned it was a pegasus.”

“Good for him,” Julip murmured.

“Plenty of pegasi made good livings for themselves. The Thatcher family was always up and around shingling roofs after the spring windstorms, and there was a mare I remember as a foal who opened a soda parlor for a while before--”

“I get it.” The words thumped out of Julip’s mouth like rocks, bringing Ginger’s train of thoughts to a crashing halt. “I’m perfectly aware of all the successful pegasi in New Canterlot. I live there, remember? That doesn’t mean we’re all born rich.”

Ginger frowned. “My father always said pegasi were given a monthly stipend once they turned eighteen.”

Julip whispered something under her breath that Ginger couldn’t quit hear, but the irritation came across loud and clear. “Leave it to unicorns to believe in bullshit like that.”

A stretch of silence, then a sigh. “Sorry,” she added.

Ginger shrugged, unsurprised to hear her father might have taken it upon himself to spread baseless rumors amongst the rest of the family. “It’s fine. I just assumed.”

They passed the bridgeway to Level 90. Aurora’s hooves clanged against the treads that sounded like miles away.

“I didn’t exactly grow up in a family that was good with caps,” Julip admitted. “My mom didn’t work, and whatever money my dad brought home usually wound up filling the liquor cabinet before the dinner table. Most the time I had to feed myself, so I started picking up odd jobs as a courier. I spent the first year making enough caps to buy just enough food to keep me going, and then somehow word got out about the filly with the mailbag and I got roped into running chems for a family of earth ponies out on the west end of the city.”

Ginger blinked, then lifted a questioning brow at the tattered canvas bag slung around Julip’s neck.

She made a face. “It’s a running joke. I got sent out to deliver a shipment of Stiff to a brothel on the north side, but the door handle hooked my bag and I ended up spilling a couple thousand doses of dick pills in the madame’s lobby right in front of a pair of Enclave officers.”

Ginger couldn’t help but laugh a little. “Oh no.”

“Yeah. I got as far as the sidewalk before one of them tackled me. The only reason I wasn’t tied to a post and shot for chem trafficking was because we were in a unicorn brothel and half the ponies on the street got a clear view of what both those stallions were there for.” Julip’s voice grew a bit brighter, suggesting she’d had plenty of time to appreciate the strange predicament. “A pair of officers with their fifth legs wagging around while they try to arrest a mare half their size isn’t a great look, and that’s ignoring the fact that they were on the doorstep of a non-pegasus fuckhouse surrounded by enough dick pills to give a deathclaw a permanent kickstand.”

She was laughing in earnest now. “So what did you do?”

Julip was smiling now. “At the time, I wasn’t doing anything but trying to kick them in the family totem to get away. Turns out they were a little brighter than me. They dragged me back inside, had the madame clear the lobby and they offered me a deal. If I agreed to keep my mouth shut about their nightly visits to the Horn Hole, they would find me a position under their command in the Enclave where I wouldn’t have to sling chems for food.”

“That’s how you enlisted?”

“Yep. They made sure I got pushed through basic training and I ended up getting assigned to the one thing they knew I was good at.” She shrugged a wing, lifting the strap of the old mailbag with it. “I spent five years running missives between officers stationed around the territory, but I got tired of seeing the same towns over and over again. I wanted to see the rest of Equestria. So, a little over a year ago I put in for a change of assignment to the archivist division.”

Ginger pieced together the rest on her own. “Considering the state you were in when we let you out of Autumn’s cage, I’d say that might not have been an ideal career choice.”

Julip hesitated. “Yeah.”

She peeked over her shoulder at the smaller mare and noticed the humor had drained from her features. Julip’s gaze stayed fixed on the treads, her eyes conflicted.

“How long were you there?”

Julip pursed her lips and offered a shallow shrug. “About a month.”

A chill ran down her neck. An entire month under the so-called care of Autumn Song. Ginger had barely survived a day. She didn’t want to think about how much pain that mare had inflicted after having weeks to perfect the process.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” she said. It was all she could think to say. There was no way to erase an experience like that.

“Thanks.”

They passed the bridgeway to Eighty-Eight in somber silence. Ginger’s light passed over the thick black slashes of letters scrawled hastily along the curving wall.

Ginger blinked at the last word of the poem. “What’s a Hell?”

“Gryphon mythology. Basically Tartarus, but with more emphasus on the torture.” Julip seemed to hang on a different line of the passing scrawl. “So… on that topic, Roach told me what Autumn did to you.”

She side-stepped a rotted pair of saddlebags molding on the stairs. “He did, did he?”

“Yeah. He didn’t say much. Just that Autumn did, well… a lot to you. And that she healed it so she could do it again.” She paused enough to tell Ginger she was choosing her words with care. “That’s where you got the stimpack from. The one you used to completely heal my wing.”

There wasn’t any denying it. She looked back and nodded.

Julip nodded too, as if she had confirmed a suspicion of hers. “And that’s why your magic is so powerful. Why you were able to make that bubble around us when you fell asleep outside the cave.”

Again, Ginger nodded.

“You can dream, can’t you?”

Her patient gaze abruptly dropped into a startled frown. “What?”

Encouraged by her reaction, Julip hastened up the stairs until they were shoulder to shoulder. “When you were asleep, you looked like you were fighting something. And then when you woke up… it wasn’t how normal ponies wake up. You looked scared, and not like something scared you when you woke up. It was like you saw something that scared you in your sleep. That’s what dreaming is supposed to be!”

“Okay,” Ginger managed, trying her best to douse this fuse Julip had managed to dig up and set alight in the space of a few moments. “That isn’t--”

“Did you see her?” The Enclave mare’s voice took on a hint of desperation.

“I don’t know who--”

“The night goddess, Luna,” Julip pressed, anticipating and trampling over Ginger’s sentences with disturbing accuracy. “Every pony who has ever dreamed reports seeing Luna, and right before they wake up she always tells them a forgotten secret. Did you see her? Did she tell you anything?”

What secrets? she thought, hoping beyond hope that Julip couldn’t read her thoughts. She wasn’t even sure if the mare she saw was Luna or just a manifestation of panic as she tried to fend off her father’s frenzied assault. For all she knew, the stress of the last week had caused her to hallucinate. Yet as she considered that possibility she knew it wasn’t true. The first instinct was often the right one, and her immediate thought after waking in Aurora’s grip was that she had just gone through something that few if any ponies had ever experienced after the bombs fell.

Ginger tried not to let frustration appear on her face. The eager desperation on the younger mare’s face was the same expression so many ponies belonging to the Chapel of the Two Sisters wore when they believed they were in the presence of Proof with a capital “P.” Proof that the princesses had ascended to a higher plane, reserving their grace for a day when Equestria finally healed and - according to the pegasi who dominated the congregation - restored the natural order of the three races.

There was an opportunity here, she realized.

“I’ll tell you what I saw,” she said. “But I want something in return.”

Julip’s eagerness gave way to suspicion. “...okay.”

“I want your word that you won’t report Briar or Beans to the Enclave.”

Her mouth opened, stopped, then bent into an uncanny resemblance of betrayal. Ginger didn’t blame her. Most ponies didn’t react well to having something they considered sacred be reduced to a bargaining chip.

“I can’t agree to that.”

Ginger lifted an eyebrow as the mare fell out of sync with her hoofsteps, gradually falling behind. “Can’t or won’t?”

A silent moment passed and Ginger realized she was only hearing one set of hooves on the stairs. She stopped and looked back to see Julip staring up at her with the look of someone who had just been slapped across the mouth.

“Julip?”

Julip shook her head a little faster than normal. “You don’t understand. I have to report them. I don’t have a choice.”

“You’ve been saying that a lot, today.”

A mint green wing flung open over the railing hard enough for the tips of Julip’s primary feathers to crack like a whip. “Because it’s true! Do you not fucking listen?”

She held up a placating hoof and descended a few steps, hoping to take this pot off the boil before they both got burned. “Okay, I’m sorry. Help me understand why.”

Julip shook her head, harder this time. Her foreleg started to nervously bounce against the tread. “I can’t do that, either.”

“You’re not exactly giving me a lot to work with, here.”

“All I’m asking is that you tell me about your dream!” Julip countered, and Ginger could see the fine glaze of tears forming in her unswollen eye. “You almost killed me with that bubble. You owe me!”

A sigh pushed up from her lungs. As much as she hated the idea of Julip being right, she was. Even now in the dim light of her magic, Ginger could see the slight discoloration where the heat of the rail had left her with what could have easily become scarring burns. Thankfully she’d awakened before that could happen, but the sheer terror in Julip’s eyes as she had retreated down the tracks was hard to dismiss.

“Alright,” she said. “Fine. I think, maybe, I dreamed of Princess Luna.”

Julip stared up at her like a pony might regard a rusty landmine. “Prove it. What did she look like?”

Ginger hesitated. What had she looked like? She tried to remember the sudden appearance of the mare whose voice came from every direction at once. The exhaustion that lived in white, featureless eyes as she surveyed the wreckage of Ginger’s memory and the way her dream had pulled itself apart like froth in a muddy river.

“She had...” She stopped herself, her mind set on describing the Princess of the Night as her foalhood story books depicted her: a regal alicorn donning a crown blacker than midnight and a matching chestplate bearing the crescent moon, mane sweeping the air like a windblown banner of stars.

But the more she thought back, more details surfaced. “She didn’t look like anything, exactly.”

Julip’s eyes grew narrow with doubt.

The words were irritatingly hard to find. “She was there, but it was like looking at the absence of something. Like a cut-out filled with stars. I don’t remember her face, or if she had one, but her eyes were there. They glowed, like Roach’s, but white like the moon and much, much brighter.”

The pegasus’s leg stopped bouncing and her expression slowly began to soften. “What did she say to you?”

“She said I shouldn’t be there.” She frowned. No, that wasn’t quite right. “She said the door shouldn’t be there. She called me… ‘little shade.’ I don’t know what that means.”

Julip closed her eyes, turned and sat down on the metal tread. All the resistance and outrage drained from her as if a plug had been pulled. “She thought you were a lost spirit.”

Ginger traced down the railing until she stood on the step behind the Enclave mare. She sat down, knowing she would pay for taking another break from the climb once she stood up again. “I think she’s the reason I woke up. She cast a spell and my grip on everything just fell apart.”

“Pastor Rivers taught us that when Luna ascended, she took charge of guiding lost spirits to wherever we go after we die.”

She leaned forward enough to catch her eye. Julip looked at her, then at the glowing spiral of her horn, and a deeper frown settled across her lips.

“Did I say something wrong?”

Julip shrugged, looking away. “Pastor Rivers also said unicorns and earth ponies can’t be Dreamers. Only pegasi have that ability, and only if we’re lucky enough to be chosen by the goddesses.”

Just another hook for the Enclave to hang their narcissistic hat on. Regardless, it didn’t seem like a good idea for Julip to go on thinking she was some sort of blasphemer. Not when she was the only mare keeping the rest of the Enclave from rendering their twisted brand of “assistance.”

“I could have been wrong,” she offered, hoping to ease the tension. “I hadn’t slept well in days. I wouldn’t be surprised if the exhaustion made me see things that weren’t there.”

She watched as Julip crossed her wings across her knees and settled her chin against the bed of feathers. “My mom might have been a drunk, but we always made it to church for Remembrance Day every year. We were there for the bicentennial when Minister Primrose told the congregation that she was a Dreamer and that she’d spoken to the goddess. The way she described her is exactly how you did. You weren’t wrong. Pastor Rivers was.”

It was like watching a single, critical thread coming loose from a skein of fine yarn. That look of smoldering betrayal once again bent the features of Julip’s small face, but this time it wasn’t directed toward her. She was realizing for the first time that, somewhere out there, a stallion she regarded to be infallible had been wrong.

It was the first time Ginger had ever seen the foundation of a believer’s faith crack.

“It’s against regulation for any pegasi to share Enclave secrets with anyone who doesn’t wear the uniform,” Julip murmured.

Ginger’s ears perked up as Julip chewed at the corner of her lip.

She spoke carefully, as if each word was a bullet that could spin back toward her at any moment. “Deviation from the mission is not acceptable. Mission failures that result in the loss of Enclave resources or artifacts is not acceptable. Upon return from every field mission, all participants are debriefed to verify that mission parameters were met as described and no discrepancies regarding actions, assets or artifacts exist.”

It was a recitation of some kind of rulebook. Laws, maybe. Something that had been drilled so deeply into Julip’s mind that she could regurgitate another pony’s words with clinical accuracy. Coming from a mare who moments ago described the circumstances of her conscription with absurdly crude detail, it was as if she were speaking a different language.

Tears were pooling in Julip’s eyes, and Ginger couldn’t escape the feeling that using something precious as a bargaining chip for Julip’s silence had been cruel. From the outside, the goddess cult that had formed at the center of the Enclave was a joke that wasteland ponies spent endless nights mocking. This close to it, however, was something entirely different. She’d taken something she hadn’t known was fragile and shattered it, and now Julip was the one left picking up the pieces.

Julip met her eyes and didn’t look away even as fresh lines traced down her cheeks. “Deception during any point of your enlistment is a criminal offense and is considered grounds for capital punishment. Inconsistencies that cannot be put to rights will be regarded as deception. Failure to relinquish any resources or artifacts during debriefing is regarded as deception. Failure to disclose all discoveries determined to be of significant value during field operations is regarded as deception.”

She swallowed to clear her throat, took a slow breath, and continued. “Failure to report the existence of new or known dustwing activity is regarded as deception. In the event that any personnel is suspected of concealing or obscuring critical information from the Enclave, biometric and behavioral data will be harvested to aid an official determination.”

Ginger watched her scrub her face with the back of each wing and ply the black mop of her mane back behind her ears.

“If you lie to them, they’ll execute you,” she murmured.

A pause. Julip nodded.

“That complicates things.” She pressed her lips into a line and tilted her head until her neck released a sharp crack. The relief was temporary, but welcome. “If you think about it, this could be an opportune time for you to part ways with the Enclave.”

Julip shot her a look. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

Ginger gestured vaguely at the air. “Basic survival?”

She watched as Julip made a noise of disgust and shoved herself onto her hooves. Mimicking the gesture, Ginger found herself following Julip up the stairs instead of the other way around. Absently, she noticed the braids of Julip’s mended tail were holding up well against the perpetual damp.

“If you think turning traitor to the Enclave is an investment in my health, you’re fucking crazy.” She was marching up the treads with purpose, now, forcing Ginger to keep up. “I’m not afraid of a few rules if it means I’m getting three square meals and a good night’s sleep every day.”

“Like you are right now?”

Julip’s ears pinned back, but she said nothing.

“Okay, let’s try this instead.” She sped up until they were shoulder to shoulder again. “You’re the only one who got assigned to this mission, right? Nobody else is here who will argue what the truth actually is, so when this is done and they debrief you, there’s nothing to stop you from telling them the truth as you understand it.”

Julip gave her a strange look. “What, like brainwash myself?”

She shook her head. “Aurora offered Briar’s family a place at Stable 10. Once we have the ignition talisman, they’ll be coming with us. Chances are high that we’ll pass through Blinder’s Bluff on the way. So, when you get back to New Canterlot for your debriefing, tell them you found a family of dustwings and the last you knew they were headed to Blinder’s Bluff. You would be telling them the truth, technically, and whether the Enclave goes looking for them won’t be a problem because they’ll be inside the Stable by then.”

“That’s one idea, I guess. Doesn’t explain why I let them get away, though.”

Ginger tipped her chin to indicate the mailbag bouncing against her shoulder. “We disarmed you and forbid you from attacking them. Easy.”

Julip looked at her before turning ahead, her attention bending toward the long climb ahead.

“Yeah,” she murmured. “Easy.”

Roach’s ears, or what was left of them, twitched at the sound of distant clicking.

With one hoof he tapped Briar on the shoulder, motioning for him to stop typing. With the other, he flicked his shotgun free of its rail.

“Aurora?” he called.

A moment passed before her faint, familiar voice echoed from the far side of the server room. “Present.”

Stowing his weapon, he let out a ragged sigh while Briar turned back to the waiting terminal.

They were connected to what Briar was calling a “zombie” server, a name no doubt inspired by the ghoul lurking over his shoulder. Roach let his gaff slide without comment as they poked at what was left of Stable 21. The database, like the other darkened servers, had been uploaded for preservation after an apparent evacuation order was issued by the overstallion. The connection was severed several days later, suggesting either the server or the hard line that linked 21 to this network had been destroyed. Scavengers, maybe, but more likely the Enclave breaking the Stable down for sensitive tech.

Which left one question burning in the back of Roach’s brain. If the Enclave had been here to strip down the Stable, wouldn’t they know the IT level was still active? And if they did, why leave something so valuable so poorly guarded that any pony with a crowbar could reach it?

“Over here,” he said, catching Aurora before she could venture too deep into the servers. “How’d it go down there?”

She poked her head into their row and paced her way toward them. “Not great.”

He frowned as she approached, stepping back from Briar and the terminal to meet her halfway down the row. A shot of worry ran through him when he realized she was alone. “Where’s Ginger and Julip? Are they alright?”

“They’re fine. Just… fell behind. They’ll be up in a few minutes.” She pinched her eyes shut as she sat, her knees popping as she bent her legs. She continued to recline until her wings and the back of her head pressed into the cage of the server behind her, causing it to rattle. “Congratulations, Briar. You were right. No talisman.”

Roach watched Briar turn from the terminal with a solemn shake of his head. “I’m not celebrating.”

Aurora looked like she was on the verge of tears, but they didn’t make an appearance. She swallowed, nodded, then turned down to the saddlebags still cinched around her hips and already spilling some of their contents onto the yellowed linoleum.

“I know,” she said. It was as close to an apology as he would get.

Roach followed her exhausted gaze to the little objects sliding from her upturned bags. A gentle smile tugged at the corner of his lip. “You found apples down here?”

She picked one up in her wing and held it up so he could better see. “And pecans. Someone jury-rigged the gardens to keep running. I’m going to save some for Latch when we get back to the Bluff. See if he has any luck planting them.”

“And our impeller?”

Aurora spared Briar a brief glance as Roach bent to sit down beside her. “Got that too. I’ll help you install it once we’re back up.” She lifted an eyebrow at their terminal. “What have you two been doing?”

She blinked, her frown deepening as Roach thumped her bent knee with the back of his hoof. “What?”

“Tell me what’s wrong.”

She looked at him for a moment before offering a mild shrug of her wings in answer. “I told you, I got my hopes up. The talisman wasn’t down there.”

He pulled up his own knees, mimicking her posture while letting her know he wasn’t going anywhere. “What else?”

Her ears tipped down and she looked away. “I’ve been walking stairs all night. I’m just tired.”

He waited.

Several long seconds passed before she finally relented. Quietly, she said, “Pretty sure Ginger and I are over.”

That caught him off guard. “What happened?”

Another little shrug. “I got in a fight with Julip. Twice.” She glanced pointedly toward Briar, who had an ear turned toward them but had since resumed pecking at the terminal. “I can’t get into why, but Ginger wasn’t happy the first time. The second time… she just looked at me like that was it. I blew it.”

He took a breath and nodded understanding. Ginger had what most ponies in the wasteland would call an outdated sense of justice. One that she’d already begun forming well before he intervened in the raider attack that nearly ended her journey out of New Canterlot over a decade ago. While he would never say it aloud, he always felt that Ginger had been born to the wrong generation. It was part of the reason the wasteland had been so unkind to her from the start, and why she rarely ventured outside Junction City.

And then came Aurora.

Unstrapping the shotgun from his foreleg, he wrapped it around Aurora’s shoulders and gave her a gentle squeeze. “You want some advice?”

He smiled as her head dropped against his shoulder.

“Sure.”

“As far as I remember, Ginger has never been this… attached to another pony like she is to you. I don’t have to be a changeling to tell the two of you are strongly attracted to one another, and I don’t have to be a father to know both of you have very distinct personalities. You’re going to bump heads with her from time to time. It sounds like you already did.”

He felt Aurora’s despondent chuckle in her shoulders. “Thanks for the pep-talk, dad.”

“I’m not done,” he said. “You’ve known Ginger for a week. In the Stable, you two would be a nice long honeymoon phase and a little hiccup like this would be easy to sweep under the rug. But you’re not in your Stable. The wasteland has a tendency to cut that phase short for everyone and you two aren’t the exception. Once you’ve both calmed down, talk to her.”

Aurora took a breath and sighed. For a moment her thoughts seemed to be elsewhere.

“It’s not that easy,” she muttered.

“I never said it would be.” He gave his shoulder a gentle shrug, nudging her until she sat up. The emotions wafted off of her like a complex bouquet of sadness, worry, hope and comfort, but the most overpowering of them all was fear. She reminded him of Violet in that moment and he couldn’t help but offer her the same reassuring grin that his daughter searched for when she was afraid. “Look. You had a fight. Maybe not the typical lover’s quarrel but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just say this is your first. That doesn’t mean the world is going to end a second time. Talk to her. Tell her why you did what you did. It’s going to stink, but it’ll be worth it.”

The scent of hope rose off of her just a bit stronger. “Alright.”

He gave her another squeeze. “You’ll be okay. Just give it some time to settle and let me know. I’ll find something to occupy Julip and I while you two talk.”

Slowly, the edge of a smile took shape along her muzzle. “Thanks, Roach.”

He waved her off with a smile of his own and started the noisy process of getting to his hooves. “Any time. Now come on, let’s get you up and fix your bags. I want to show you what we found while you were away.”

June 27th, 1076

Primrose rested her cheek against her hoof while the tip of her pen, held loosely between two pink feathers, slowly clattered back and forth between the keys of her desk terminal.

The day following Applejack’s unannounced and frankly unanticipated outburst in Spitfire’s office was business as usual, but a part of her was still on edge. If she was being honest with herself, she was exhausted. Normally she slept like a filly, but last night was an endless drag of fitful sleeps and starts. It had gotten so bad that she worried Princess Luna might take notice and try to ease her worries.

The last thing she needed was an alicorn snooping around her head. The odds of it happening were slim enough to be negligible, but she wasn’t about to risk it. She’d thrown open her duvet, made a pot of coffee and spent the remainder of the night working to fix the problem that had plagued her.

Someone should have alerted her that Applejack was on the warpath, but that didn’t happen. Several pegasi had watched her storm by without considering the possibility that Primrose and Spitfire might be attacked. Applejack might be a dirt pony, but she was a strong dirt pony. Freakishly so, and the pegasi Primrose was tasked with managing knew that.

They needed a better structure than what this ministry currently offered.

Her eyes scanned the list of names glowing on her terminal’s screen. Spitfire’s was naturally at the top. A narrow line descended from it, touched Primrose’s name, then split into an organized network of brackets that widened with each subsequent pegasus. Those who she felt certain she could trust the most hovered near the top. A higher echelon of natural leaders, communicators and what Primrose was gradually beginning to think of as loyalists. Names who, if pushed, might be willing to prioritize their fellow pegasi over less desirable connections.

It was dangerous thinking, but Equestria was full of dangerous thinkers these days. She smiled to herself.

“Just like old times,” she murmured.

“What’s like old times?”

She jerked in her chair, sending the pen in her feathers flying to the carpet. A familiar black stallion stood at the corner of her desk with one eyebrow cocked toward a sky blue mane. She flicked her feathers over the keyboard, closing the document before snapping at him.

“You’re supposed to knock, Thunderlane!”

“Have someone install a door, then.”

She refused to acknowledge the open frame out to the carpeted hall and bent down to pick up her pen, but he plucked it off the ground before she could reach it. Ever the chivalrous male, he held his feathers open for her to take it. She snatched it away and slapped it on her desk.

Undeterred, his eyes went to Spitfire’s door behind her. “Any appointments for her this morning?”

“Do I look like her secretary?”

His eyebrow began to lift again.

Primrose bit back the urge to jab her pen into his finely sculpted neck. Calming herself, she settled into her chair and crossed her legs in her best attempt at looking bored. “She has a two o’clock with Rainbow Dash, then she’s out for the day. We’re taking a trip to Las Pegasus to check on the progress over at JSI.”

Thunderlane nodded, his smile spreading to the corners of his eyes. “Good. That means she’s free. Thanks.”

“I didn’t say--”

But he was already pushing open the door, and it hissed closed behind him with a punctuating click. Friendly muffles permeated the wall almost immediately.

“Fucker,” she muttered.

Reopening the document, she skimmed it over and decided it wasn’t going to get any better without Spitfire’s input. She attached it to a message, pecked a quick “Potential Reorganization” in the header and sent it off to her inbox. With that done, she decided to cool her nerves with a quick walk.

The halls were busy this time of day. Ponies dodged one another, folders tucked under wings or a steaming mug levitating ahead of them. Most everyone within the ministry kept to themselves, stopping only to chat with colleagues working on the same projects or making minimal small talk if they found themselves pulled through traffic alongside another pony for too long.

Primrose ignored them, and they ignored her. She stopped in the ministry cafeteria, filled a styrofoam cup with molten hot coffee, and nursed it with little sips as she slipped back into the main hall. She wandered until the cup was empty and her tongue just a little burned before making her way past potted ferns, around a stallion whose ass lingered in the hallway as he leaned into someone’s door, and back to the administrative wing.

As she passed Rainbow Dash’s door, she gave it a sharp thump with her wing. The cloying flow of hoof traffic whisked her back to her own corner of the world before the mare had a chance to open the door. Petty, sure, but it made her smile.

The reception area of Spitfire’s office was, unsurprisingly, still empty. Dropping the empty cup in the trash, she rounded her desk and plopped herself down at her terminal. She opened her inbox and sighed when no new messages appeared.

Glancing over her shoulder, Spitfire’s door was still closed. She listened, trying to hear if she was still in her impromptu meeting, but all she heard was the low patter of hooves in the hallway and silence. She closed her terminal, got up from her chair and knocked on the door.

She hated playing the polite receptionist role, but Rarity’s people tended to show up exactly when they weren’t wanted. “Ma’am? It’s Primrose. Do you have a minute?”

Spitfire’s unmistakable chuckle rolled through the polished wood. “Come in.”

Primrose stepped in and relaxed a little when she confirmed Spitfire was the only one in the office. She shut the door behind her and approached her desk, a feather indicating the terminal Spitfire had seemingly pushed aside. “I sent a document that I wanted to discuss with you. I’ve been thinking about what happened yesterday and…”

She paused. Spitfire was listening but her gaze was drifting, eyes half-lidded. And her breathing was off, too. Erratic.

“Are you okay?”

Spitfire tried to offer a reassuring smile, but it turned into a sloppy grin. “I’m fine.”

Primrose frowned as a not-quite-silence settled in the office. Her ears perked toward Spitfire’s desk, where the mare reclined just a little too far in her chair. Her hips, obscured by the edge of her desk, rocking slightly in her seat. And the quiet, unmistakable sound of someone hard at work just out of view.

Her eyes dipped to the plush carpet where a stray wisp of sky blue tail hair curled from underneath her desk.

“Huh,” she said, understanding exactly what she was interrupting. She looked at Spitfire who stared back, unashamed. Primrose’s smile grew brittle. “Hello, Thunderlane.”

The noise stopped. Spitfire glanced down into her lap, nodded just a bit lower, and the noise promptly resumed.

She sighed as Spitfire sagged a little in her seat. Normally she wouldn’t so much as bat an eye. Celestia knows Spitfire’s reputation had a certain... gravity to it that even she had a passing interest in exploring. Prudishness wasn’t a word that registered in her personal vocabulary, and a little morning breakfast between old friends was pedestrian compared to what Primrose had dabbled in.

Yet Thunderlane couldn’t have picked a worse time. She wanted Spitfire to be clear-headed about this. Not distracted by some overeager stallion tucked between her legs.

“I can come later.”

Spitfire half-laughed. “Now is fine. What do you have for me?”

It took her a moment to decipher whether she was being invited to stay or join. She closed her eyes, forced herself to ignore what was happening just beyond her line of sight, and gestured to Spitfire’s terminal with a feather. “I’ve drafted a list of the pegasi you’ve enlisted to help… guide the ministries. It’s in your inbox.”

Somehow, Spitfire managed to scoot forward without suffocating the stallion tending to her. As she opened her terminal, Primrose arched a brow at the splay of blue hair being pushed out under the front of the desk. She lifted her hoof, settled it atop the short arc of sensitive vertebrate where the blue strands met, and rested her weight on that single point.

Thunderlane’s head cracked the underside of the desk like a gunshot. A string of profanity followed him up and out of his unoriginal hiding place, pushing Spitfire away from the terminal and out from her own desk. For a brief moment, Primrose caught a glimpse of the absolute state of disaster her chair’s upholstery was in. She made a mental note to have someone bring in a replacement.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” he bellowed. His muzzle was slicker than greased owl shit, but he didn’t seem to notice or care as he stabbed a prodigious black hoof toward the door. “Go back to your fucking desk. Whatever you’re barging in here for can wait until we’re done.”

The outburst was more than enough to kill Spitfire’s mood. Primrose eyed the pent up stallion but said nothing, knowing order was about to establish itself.

Spitfire took a breath and composed herself, rolling her chair back to her desk. Her eyes flicked irritation at Primrose but there was no heat in them. Not anymore, at least. “Stand down, Thunderlane. You’re talking to one of your superiors.”

True as that may be, Thunderlane’s loyalty lay firmly in Spitfire’s camp. They had years of history together. Decades, even. Primrose might stand an inch higher than him on paper, but she doubted she’d ever wake up to that muzzle between her thighs.

“Minus the benefits,” Primrose chirped. “Speaking of which, you have a little something…”

She indicated her lip with a feather. He narrowed his eyes at her, turned and scrubbed at his mouth. While he cleaned himself up, she turned to Spitfire who was tactically ignoring their exchange. Primrose rounded the desk, placing herself between Thunderlane and his paramour while the latter scanned the document she’d sent.

She had to respect how quickly Spitfire could turn off one half of her brain and pour herself into the other. Her eyes darted down the brackets, brows knit with consideration as she recognized what Primrose was proposing.

“This is almost identical to the Wonderbolts’ rank structure.” She looked at Primrose beside her. “I assume this has to do with what happened yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?” Thunderlane asked.

Primrose waved him off and nodded to Spitfire. “Yesterday proved there will be ponies willing to fight us if we push too hard. If one of us is attacked, we need to be able to respond to it internally. Right now we’re organized to run a bureaucracy, but we need to be able to function like a branch of the military if we expect to protect ourselves without risking exposure.”

Spitfire pulled a face. “What we’re doing has been working so far. It’s inconspicuous.”

“It’s messy.” She reached out and tapped the terminal screen. “A hierarchy framed like this offers greater protection.”

“Insulation, you mean,” Spitfire murmured. She leaned back in her chair, but this time there was nothing overtly sexual about it. She was thinking. “I don’t doubt that this would work, but this feels like we’re building a landmine without instructions. This war is going to end and I don’t want to spend the last years of my life in one of Luna’s prisons because the princesses thought I was organizing some kind of coup. This could blow up in both of our faces.”

“To be fair, you did organize a coup against Rainbow Dash.”

Thunderlane’s voice emerged uncomfortably close to Primrose’s ear, enough so that the hairs buzzed with his low basso. For a stallion nearly twice her size he barely made a sound as he stepped in to peer at the monitor.

Slowly, she leaned away from his mouth and fixed him with a flat glare. He backed away.

“Rainbow Dash was a different situation, but you do have a point.” Spitfire shrugged, her decision made. “In for a bit, in for a barrel. I’ll have to move some of these pegasi around to make it work.”

“It should have a name,” Thunderlane offered.

Primrose snorted. “Oh yeah? Any suggestions there, Cumgums?”

Spitfire coughed out a laugh, but to his credit the stallion ignored the dig. “You could call it the Council. The Council of--”

“Okay, no.” Spitfire cut him off with a wide slash of her wing, still chuckling despite herself. “If anything’s going to blow up in our faces, it’s a Power Ponies comic book villain name like that. Let’s just keep it simple and call it what it is.”

Primrose liked the sound of that. “Well, if we’re being honest, we’re like those zebra city states the Vhannans never fully took control of. We’re doing the same thing here inside the ministries.”

Spitfire smiled. “You’re saying we’re an enclave nation?”

She shrugged. “It does have a ring to it.”

Several moments passed, but Primrose could always sense that the decision had been made. The word had a simple weight to it. Approachable, mysterious, and maybe just a little bit powerful.

“Enclave,” Spitfire murmured. “I like it.”

The last turn to Level 34 was arduous, but Ginger and Julip shoved themselves up onto the bridgeway with audible relief. They staggered over the landing and into the comparatively glaring light of IT’s decayed lobby. Releasing the spell that had lit their way from the bottom felt like a cramped muscle finally letting go. She tried not to think about the thirty-four levels they still needed to scale. Right now, she was barely able to hold herself upright.

Her strange conversation with Julip had melted into the back of her mind for the remainder of the ascent. As much as she hated to admit it, the condensation that rained down the lower half of this strange silo had provided more relief from the heat than she realized. As soon as the stairs dried and the mist retreated, all they were left with was smothering humidity that plagued the climb. The coffee Meridian had served them felt like a lifetime ago. Ginger could feel herself dozing again even as she followed the sway of Julip’s tail down the hallway.

“Woah, woah, woah! Ginger!”

The Enclave mare’s panicked voice shook her out of her daze and she looked ahead to see the reason for her panic.

Down the hall and past the threshold of the server room, Aurora had spotted them and was barreling toward them at a full gallop. In the confusion, Ginger only vaguely recognized the Pip-Buck hanging from Aurora’s teeth as the pegasus hopped through the doorway and shoved past Julip.

“Gingeryouneedtoputthison!”

She was frantic, but thankfully not interested in another brawl with Julip. Bewildered, she watched Aurora lift her foreleg and clamp her Pip-Buck around it. Roach and Briar were only just crossing the threshold by the time the device recognized its secondary user and booted Ginger’s backdoor account.

“Okay okay,” Aurora sputtered, her feathers clicking through the menus faster than Ginger could process. In her panic, she skipped past the inbox and cursed aloud as she backtracked.

“Aurora, slow down,” she insisted, but her words fell on deaf ears. She looked past her to Roach for some kind of explanation, but even he seemed hesitant to intervene. He gave Ginger an apologetic shrug as the Pip-Buck emitted a rapid tik-tik-tik-tik under Aurora’s onslaught of button presses.

Ginger could feel her wings trembling as she zeroed in on a message floating at the top of her queue and commanded it to open. Aurora’s eyes fixed on something near the top of the little screen, then to the bottom corner. She blinked several times, comparing the two against each other, then let Ginger’s leg go with a heavy sigh.

“Oh, thank Celestia,” she whispered. Squeezing her eyes shut, she dragged her feathers over her head and down the white mop of her mane. “Luna’s grace I thought they were all gone.”

Ginger opened her mouth to ask what was going on, but Aurora only just then seemed to realize she was there and threw herself into a crushing hug that nearly caused Ginger to fall over. Wide-eyed and unsure how to respond, she returned Aurora’s silent embrace while her eyes toggled between the two onlooking stallions for an answer.

Roach broke the silence with an awkward explanation. “We were telling her what we learned about the servers while you were gone and didn’t realize that might have been premature, given you weren’t here to wear the Pip-Buck.”

Aurora’s voice faltered mid-sentence. “The tenth server is dark. I thought we were too late.”

Despite the exhaustion, lack of sleep and deep aches that tortured muscles Ginger didn’t know she had, the unfiltered terror that cut through Aurora’s words lifted that weariness like a veil. She took a sharp breath and exhaled a quiet curse.

“The servers are some kind of data backup for Stable-Tec,” Briar supplied. He paused to glance at Julip and her black eye, frowning slightly before continuing on. “Their numbers correspond to the Stables. She went to look at the tenth server and found out it was dark, and… yeah. Gave her something of a scare.”

“I’m sorry,” Aurora mumbled into her shoulder. “I was acting crazy and I let things get to me and I’m so sorry that I ruined everything…”

Ginger craned her neck back until she could see Aurora’s face. “Hey. Breathe. One thing at a time.”

Aurora nodded and tried to blink away the tears. Ginger lit her horn and gently plied them away with her magic.

“They’re okay.” She took another breath and exhaled, trying to think past the adrenaline. “Um... Sledge sent a message about an hour ago. I think Carbide’s done with the talisman’s containment chamber, or close to it. I didn’t really read it, I mostly just looked at the timestamp. Sorry for almost tackling you.”

She managed to smile at that and, reluctantly, Aurora let her step back from their embrace. “Forgiven. We can talk about the other things later. Now, if we could, let’s go back to the part where Briar said this is some kind of database for the Stables?”

Briar stepped forward. “Actually, it’s a little better than just that.”

“All of them?”

Briar sat down in front of the half-broken roll cart and settled his feathers across the keyboard of one of the terminals. He shrugged as the screen came to life. “Only the ones with a stable connection.”

“Zing.”

Aurora closed her eyes and took another breath. She hadn’t been looking forward to seeing Julip again, or her misplaced sense of humor. Her only consolation was that the mare had a proper shiner from where she’d cracked her across the face. Combined with the brackish stains coating her legs and the slash of knots holding the lower half of her tail together, she looked better fit to live in a belltower than wear an Enclave uniform. She smirked at that.

Ginger was too busy watching the screen to give either of them much notice, though she did occasionally look back at Aurora with an even mixture of worry and relief. She looked exhausted. Worse than when she’d nearly fallen asleep mid stride back on the railway. Still, maybe Roach was right. If anything, it gave her something to cling to while Briar explained how he thought the servers worked.

“There’s a lot of things about this I don’t understand yet, but what we do know is that the Stables are linked to this hub by a hardened connection.” He lifted a caramel wing and motioned to the far side of the server room where they’d all seen the massive bundle of buried lines vanishing into the bedrock beyond the wall. “If I had to guess, I’d say that Stable-Tec expected to be able to retrieve the data whenever they decided it was safe for the Stables to open. Maybe to check up on how their old experiments panned out. I’m not sure.”

Ginger frowned at the terminal. “You said you were able to speak with one of them.”

“That’s the exciting part.” Briar flicked through several directories before landing on what looked to Aurora like one of the residential message windows from back home.

She stepped over to better read the messages glowing on the terminal. Just as quickly, she noticed the dates they were sent stretched back years. Then she remembered Briar had been connected to one of his so-named zombie servers and lost interest in reading the log.

“This Stable isn’t active, but you can see how the connection to its server is still present.”

He punched in a few keys and the word “hello” appeared below the most recent message, addressed from sysadmin_s01. The server chattered briefly before falling silent again.

“Sent and received. Stable 21 might be dead, but its servers aren’t.”

Julip crossed her foreleg and leaned against the server marked 22. “But that would mean they still have power.”

Briar nodded. “Just the server, if I had to guess. But yes.”

Julip’s confusion seemed genuine, which was a rare occurrence in Aurora’s limited experience. She looked to Roach, frowning as she spoke. “Roach, you told us the Enclave strips down the Stables that fail. I’m pretty sure they would have noticed a server running in the dark.”

Roach did a decent job concealing his bewilderment, unprepared to be roped into Julip’s somewhat necessary misdirection. He feigned ignorance which, given the fact that he couldn’t know where Julip was going with the question, came easily. “Well. Maybe they’re aware that the Stables are connected and chose not to do anything about it.”

“I doubt that.” Briar chuckled, half-turning to Julip. “If the Enclave knew about this, there would be patrols flying over this Stable twenty-four seven. Or, knowing them, they would have packed this level with enough explosives to send it pancaking all the way to the bottom. All it would take is for one Ranger to wander in, figure out what we just did, and you can bet your feathers there would be Steel Rangers outside every failed Stable looking for tech the Enclave might have missed.”

“I imagine that would be a bad thing for the Enclave,” Julip said.

“Losing the only technological advantage that keeps them alive?” Briar snorted. “Yeah. They wouldn’t like that too much. My guess is whatever mop up protocol they have for dead Stables has a blind spot in it.”

Aurora hummed. “Last one out, turn off the lights.”

Julip frowned. “What?”

She shrugged, repeating herself. “It’s a sign we have next to the break room door in Mechanical. A lot of departments have versions of it posted all around the Stable, but it becomes such a habit to shut off the lights that nobody really notices the signs. Maybe that’s what the Enclave does after they’re done breaking down whatever tech they want. Last pony takes out the ignition talisman.”

“Maybe,” Julip said. “Assuming that the pony is blind and doesn’t notice the one level in the Stable which didn’t get the memo that the plug just got pulled.”

She gestured at the lights buzzing overhead. “Kind of hard not to notice that.”

They were all quiet for a moment as they absorbed the reality that they didn’t have all the answers. Briar made a sucking noise between his teeth and gave his shoulders a nonchalant bob. “Well, whatever’s going on is definitely above my pay grade. All I know is that we’re sitting on a direct line to every surviving Stable in Equestria. We have a genuine opportunity here to change thousands of lives.”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

Briar looked up at her and stretched his wing to encompass all the servers surrounding them. “They’re all waiting for a message that Stable-Tec isn’t around to send. They’re never going to get the all clear, and I don’t want to think about how many of them are alive just to fulfill some dead pony’s experiment. We can tell them it’s safe to come out.”

Beside her, Ginger blinked. “You’re right…”

“Assuming you could convince them it’s not a trick,” Roach murmured, but the hope rising in his voice was unmistakable. “But still, it would be worse not to try.”

A chill ran down Aurora’s spine at how quickly the conversation was building momentum. A week ago she would have been fully on board, but after seeing what the wasteland was able to inflict upon them in such a short amount of time, she wasn’t so sure this was a good idea.

“Hold on a second,” she said, but Briar was still talking.

“We’d want to work from the outside in. Open the Stables nearest the coasts and furthest from Enclave territory so that the Rangers could get to the residents first.”

“But we don’t have a map of where they all are,” Roach interjected. “Maybe there’s one here?”

Aurora held up a wing. “Guys.”

“Hey,” Julip added. “Slow down a second.”

“Doubt it,” Briar said, turning back to the terminal. “But the original residents would have had instructions for where to go if the bombs ever fall. I wager they kept copies in their archives.”

Aurora planted her wing firmly on his shoulder. “Would you slow down?”

He chuckled up at her. “Yep, just a minute. This is making--”

A sharp snap of breaking plastic cut him off and the terminal sputtered dark. As quickly as it began, the snowballing brainstorm session came to an abrupt end. Aurora and Briar looked up to see Julip holding the broken ends of the terminal connections in her wing, the contacts sheared clean off the wires.

“Listen up, fucker!” she barked, catching everyone by surprise including Julip. She hesitated, dropped the wires to the floor and gestured vaguely at Aurora. “She’s trying to say something.”

All eyes turned to Aurora. If ever there was a more uncomfortable spotlight to be standing under, this was it.

Obviously Julip had her own reasons for not wanting a hundred or more Stables popping open like so many soap bubbles, but it had nothing to do with Aurora’s apprehension. This wasn’t about the Rangers or the Enclave. Far from it. But Julip had given her a platform and as much as she disliked the little green goblin, she had to appreciate her ability to suck the air out of a room. She wasn’t about to squander that.

“Okay. Listen,” she said. “None of you are considering the very real possibility that telling these Stables they can unseal the doors will lead to their immediate deaths. If it weren’t for Roach and…”

She paused before she could mention Blue. Julip hadn’t earned the right to know about her.

“If it weren’t for Roach, I would be dead inside the tunnel outside my Stable. With Cider… he was sloppy and I got lucky. And then there were those raiders, and that mess at the solar array, not to mention Gallow and those monsters in the foothills.” She sighed, hating that she was taking this away from them. “None of them are prepared for what’s out here. I’m still not prepared for what’s out here. You’ve all got to slow down and think this through, because once you tell them it’s safe to live on the surface again it isn’t going to matter if you tell them about the monsters and the murderers. They’re either going to make a run for the door or never open it again.”

Beside her, Ginger blew out a sigh. “She is right.”

Aurora looked at her, glad for the support. “Even if we do this perfectly and everyone walked out armed and trained, you’re talking about thousands of Stable ponies spreading into every town and encampment in Equestria at the same time. Thanks to Ginger and I, the trade routes are more or less a shooting gallery now. Sending a horde of new ponies out to compete for the same resources would be like dumping gas onto a fire.”

When she was finished, Roach hummed thoughtfully to himself. “You’re saying we should let the Stables continue undisturbed.”

She winced. There was a quiet judgment in his voice. One that only a changeling who had spent the last two centuries waiting outside the resting place of his only family could cast.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying.” She stared out at the servers, picturing the countless lives each one represented. “I’m saying that this might not be a decision we’re qualified to make. Not on our own.”

She watched Roach look over to Briar, and something like resignation passed between them. They must have been stewing on this for hours, now, getting themselves more and more worked up for the very real chance at saving innocent lives only to have heartless logic pull the rug out from under them.

Aurora knew that feeling all too well.

“Okay.” Briar stepped away from the darkened terminal and nodded. “We’ll put this one on the back burner for now until we have a better idea how to do this.”

“If at all,” Julip added.

“If at all,” he agreed. A weary smile graced his lips as he turned to regard Aurora. “In the meantime, I recall you promised to help fix my family’s water pump. How’s about we get going on that and leave the Stable-cracking for someone with more capable hooves?”

Aurora let out a relieved sigh. “Elder Coldbrook’s ears are probably burning right now.”

“Who?”

She shook her head. “Nobody. Let’s get out of here before we sweat to death. I really need to see the sky again.”

Grey rocks crunched and clattered against iron rails as Aurora and Briar released their passengers, the two of them settling onto the ballast stones a few paces away from where Julip had landed. The clouds were already starting to take on the sharper shades of early morning grey. In another hour or two, it would be dawn.

The five of them walked the last few yards toward the cave with a sort of communal exhaustion. Aurora tried to appease the little beast urging her to sleep by squeezing her eyes shut for a few seconds, but she felt just as tired when she opened them. She was just glad that Briar had been okay with them flying to the railway’s ledge. She’d had plenty of climbing for one lifetime.

The cave was pitch dark and just as quiet. Ginger swayed on uneasy hooves beside her, her expression a mixture of pure fatigue and an amused little smile that let Aurora know she was aware of how she must look. As Briar motioned for them to stop short of the woven netting while he proceeded ahead, Ginger leaned against her shoulder with that self-aware smirk. The small gesture went a long way to reassuring her that the damage she’d inflicted on both of them would heal with time.

The four of them waited while Briar pressed his chin against the receiver woven into his lapel and murmured a few quiet words. The response was nearly lost in the crackle of static, but Meridian’s groggy voice was unmistakably relieved. They filed into the cave behind him, filling the cozy space with the soft scraping of hooves on haphazardly assembled floorboards.

There was barely enough light to see Meridian rising from the bed in the corner, her movements gentle and slow despite her size. She bent over Beans who lay cuddled under several layers of old blankets and lightly kissed her cheek. The filly stirred, peered up with half-lidded eyes, and burrowed herself a little deeper beneath the covers.

As she watched Briar and his wife whisper into one another’s ears as they embraced, Aurora couldn’t help but feel sad for the fact that this family had to live like this. In hiding, constantly vigilant of whatever might fall from the sky and always afraid that one mistake might lead the Enclave to their doorstep. The irony of that last thought didn’t escape her. She looked toward Julip who, despite her swollen eye, seemed content to lay herself down against the stone wall as if nothing was wrong. As if her presence here didn’t represent an existential threat to Briar and Beans’ safety.

With her focus spiraling toward Julip yet again, it took Aurora a moment to realize Meridian had whispered something to her.

“What?” she hissed back.

For an earth pony capable of carrying a weapon as big as Aurora, Meridian had an uncanny reserve of patience. Smiling, she said, “I asked if you found what you were looking for.”

Ah. She shook her head. “No such luck. Found an impeller for your pump, though.”

Dipping a wing into her saddlebag, she lifted out the heavy disc of cast steel that had been threatening to wear a permanent limp into her step. Meridian regarded the part with a relieved smile, then looked to Briar. Her husband plucked the impeller from Aurora’s feathers and set it gently on the floorboards in front of the reclaimed stove.

“Sleep first,” Meridian said, keeping her voice low yet hospitable. “Before your friend falls over.”

Aurora followed her gaze to Ginger whose eyes were barely open and her head was gradually inching its way toward the floor. She nudged her, pulling her just barely above her listing slumber to offer a knowing smile. Ginger grunted, blinked around the darkened cave to see that Roach was bedding down on an empty patch of floor a tail’s length from Julip, and blinked back toward the entrance.

Ginger dropped off the floorboards and onto the stones. Aurora followed her outside without asking why. She already knew. After the incident shortly after their arrival at the cave, she didn’t blame Ginger for wanting to sleep well away from anyone else.

When they were a dozen or so yards from the cave, Ginger stopped and lit her horn. Aurora watched from a distance as the bleary-eyed mare formed a dim hemisphere of magic over a patch of stones beside the mountain. Several seconds passed as nothing happened. Ginger swayed slightly as she frowned in concentration, and for a moment Aurora thought she had finally tapped into the last of the magic she’d been forced to take. Simple spells would be a struggle from here on out, and the shield Ginger had been perfecting over the last several days would cease to be a part of their arsenal.

The little dome flashed. Like a soap bubble, it peeled apart and blinked out of existence, as did the sharp bed of stones that it surrounded. Aurora’s ears twitched at the distant clattering of rocks beyond the cliff’s edge. Where Ginger’s dome had settled now sat a flat slab of dark, cool gravel a good six inches lower than the surrounding stones.

Ginger dropped into the shallow foxhole. Impressed, but too tired to bother her with questions, Aurora logged teleportation as one of Ginger’s budding skills and followed her into a divot barely wide enough for one of them, but they made it work.

Curled up like cats, her mother used to say. They didn’t have cats down in Stable 10, but that never stopped her.

With her cheek warming against the shackle and chain emblazoned over Ginger’s hip, Aurora shut her eyes and welcomed the deep relief of sleep.

Hours Earlier

Primrose opened her eyes and sighed. She knew those pills looked suspect, but it was too late now.

She was back in Canterlot. Not the broken, dilapidated mosaic of cobbled-together slums and boroughs the wasteland ponies insisted on calling New Canterlot. The real Canterlot, perched high atop the snow capped mountain from which it had taken its name. The one that she and so many others saw as a single bomb sliced through the ancient bedrock that anchored it, sending the city and its remaining inhabitants sliding down the burning slopes in an avalanche of glowing rubble.

Primrose found herself seated alone at a sidewalk table outside a coffee shop bemoaned for its absurd prices and occasionally eccentric staff. Nine bits for a cup of coffee was exorbitant no matter what flavor they added, but Primrose never came here for that. It was the lithe, tangerine-colored stallion beneath the storefront awning who she was here for.

How a pegasus with his talents wound up here, serving cups to unicorns too stingy to leave a tip when he could be slicing open the skies with those broad wings of his was a mystery. As tinny music blared from a little coffee-spattered radio, the stallion sashayed from table to table, swinging a brown plastic tray of hot beverages in one wing while the other twisted and curled to the beat of the song. Despite the quick rhythm of his hooves, the bump of his hips and the occasional strange lift to his hind legs as he danced between tables, he rarely ever spilled a drop. And when he did, Primrose found it was completely eclipsed by his sheer personality.

He shot her a smile of recognition as he swirled toward her table, deftly sliding a pristine cup of espresso off the tray and down the curl of his wing. She grinned as the cup glided across the smooth table and came to a gentle stop in front of her. The barista winked, turned and danced his way to his other patrons.

She absently touched the place on her hip where she used to keep her pouch of bits before remembering that this was just a dream. Counting out a tip would only serve to confuse the delicate illusion.

She sipped the coffee and thought she could remember what it tasted like. The old spook must be in a good mood tonight if she was letting her have this dream. She glanced up, hoping to see the piercing blue sky Canterlot was known for, and frowned a little at the unnaturally dense blanket of clouds that obscured the mountain’s peak. It stretched from one horizon to another as it had for the last two hundred and twenty years.

Her lip twitched toward her jaw.

She knew this memory well enough that she didn’t need that flat-assed ghost to dredge it up for her. The events played out in her head like so many others over the decades, and lingering on what was lost was not how she would move Equestria forward. She would ask for his name. He would say it was Butterscotch. After some small-talk he would find a pen and jot down an address in the margin of her receipt.

Setting the cup on the table, Primrose stood and left the café.

Before the end of the world, before balefire rained from the skies and burned through Equestrian magic like embers in gasoline vapors, breaking a dream was exceedingly difficult bordering on impossible. Layers upon layers of illusion kept each dream contained to a little pocket of reality. Even Twilight Sparkle had never worked out how to break a dream.

Now it was just a matter of opening a door.

Primrose crossed the street and pushed open the door of an antique store she had never been inside of. A tiny brass bell tinkled overhead and the door closed behind her, sealing her inside.

The acrid, smokey scent of burning invaded her nose with her first breath, making her grimace. Two and a half centuries old and she still couldn’t put a hoof on what balefire actually smelled like. Cordite, or burning plastic. A combination of both, maybe, laced with a chemical sting like sipping the foam off rootbeer. She didn’t think she’d ever pin it down. It was a foreign odor that had no comparison. Balefire smelled like balefire.

Doors burned around her, above her, and most dizzyingly, below her. What amounted to a “floor” here wasn’t so much a tangible surface as it was the absence of falling. Green flames licked the air in every conceivable direction, devouring millions of shattered doors like a holotape of Equestria’s demise stuck on a permanent loop. At one time each door had belonged to someone. Someone who lived and breathed and dreamed about the happy little world they once occupied.

And then they didn’t.

It was impossible to look at them all without feeling nauseous. Here, there was no horizon. No merciful haze in the distance to spare her the view of infinity. Her first time standing here hadn’t been pretty. She hadn’t known to focus her eyes on the passing doors rather than the space between them. At the time she hadn’t known what it was she was experiencing. She’d awoken, screaming as she fell out of bed, nearly toppling a rack of shelves stacked high with the means of her survival. It took weeks before she understood it. Longer before she realized she had nothing to fear from it.

She walked the endless hall of doors for what felt like ages. They slid by one after another, like the ticking of an untrustworthy clock. She knew better than to trust her perception of time here. There were few things more irritating than convincing one’s self that minutes had gone by only to wake up and discover the night was over. She walked, watching every variety of door drift by like some twisted floor show. Burning remnants of a wood panel, an aluminum screen shriveling under green flames, melting glass dripping into bright orange lines and even the blasted, glowing shards of a cell door caught her eye as she trotted along. Eventually, the mare who acted as this realm’s guardian would sense her presence and come to send her away. All it took was a little patience and…

There. Primrose picked up her pace with a victorious little smirk as the alicorn’s dark shape came into view. Cheap quality sleeping pills be damned. As much as she hated being subjected to the same old dreams every time a chem failed to do its job, it was a rare treat to be able to turn the screws on one of Equestria’s dearly departed princesses again.

“Hello, Lu-u-una,” she called in the tilting sing-song tone she knew she hated. “If it’s alright with you, I’d like to forego the pleasantries and skip straight to the part where you wake...”

She stopped and narrowed her eyes at the unfamiliar pony parked in front of the otherworldly silhouette of night. A unicorn mare with a coat the color of Butterscotch’s overpriced lattes, and a short, fiery mane that curved along her jawline. The mare stared down at her, startled.

Primrose stuck a feather out at the newcomer.

“Who is she?”

Next Chapter: Chapter 28: Loyalty Estimated time remaining: 46 Hours, 5 Minutes