The earth erupted at her hooves and belched out another deformed rodent.

“Get AWAY!”

Her father’s revolver, a prewar heirloom bought at auction to be displayed and forgotten among the other relics in his study, cracked fire and sent the molerat whip-sawing backward over the rim of its burrow. The revolver spiraled out from the tenuous grip of her magic, thrown by the sheer force of its own kickback.

Ginger spun on her hind legs, following the sloppy arc of her only weapon as it clattered onto the broken pavement behind her. The slab beneath her hooves rumbled as another molerat raked its claws against the soil, giving barely enough warning for her to stumble away before the asphalt ruptured. She tumbled, scraping her shoulder against the unforgiving road, and stretched her magic toward the revolver.

The mottled abomination turned its pink eyes toward her and squealed just in time for another precious bullet to turn its ribcage into pulp.

She raked the back of her hoof across her eyes to clear her vision. The molerat’s yellowed teeth yawned apart as it gasped and twitched beside its hole. Her legs shook as she tried to focus on her magic, urging the switch that locked the cylinder to move so she could see how many shots she had left. Her eyes swam when it finally clicked, allowing her to confirm she had only two rounds remaining.

The three molerats lying dead on the road around her accounted for the rest.

Several long seconds ticked by as she waited for the next rodent to surface, but none did. The revolver hung heavy in her magic. Carefully, she depressed the hammer and set the weapon back into the holster high on her foreleg.

Five days ago she was enjoying the safety and security that came with being born a Dressage. Then her father had discovered the slaves’ foal and her part in hiding its existence from him. Before then, she had never taken a life. Never even seen death, not with her own eyes. The sight of that foal, wriggling beneath her father’s red handkerchief, going still as he lifted away the syringe… he thought he was teaching her something. Some perverted lesson about honesty and standing and the greater hierarchy from which came order and law. Something.

As she gathered up her nerves and tried to weather the storm of adrenaline still thundering in her veins, she turned east and wondered what her father might have said when he realized she’d left. Whether he’d be more devastated by the loss of a daughter or by her theft of an invaluable antique.

One of her mother’s jewelry boxes jangled beneath the flap of her saddlebag, packed with as many caps as she could pilfer from the basement strongbox. The other bag sloshed with two half-empty skins of clean water and a small amount of dried fish that she’d been able to barter off the traders who she’d paid to smuggle her into Steel Ranger territory. She parted ways with the traders early in the morning. Watching their caravan of wagons turn south and shrink into the distance was the loneliest feeling she’d ever felt.

She should have brought more bullets, but she remembered that she wouldn’t learn until much later how rare and ultimately worthless 8 millimeter rounds were. She frowned, trying to make sense of the displaced clarity of that knowledge. For a moment she felt as if she were floating, her mind and body falling out of synchrony.

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them.

The revolver was out again. Her vision swam, tinted molerat pink from the blood running into her eye. A stallion clad in mismatched leather armor lay dead on the road beside her, the wooden bat he’d clubbed her with still rolling away from them toward the curb. The charred studs of a desolated suburb stuck into the air like the black ribs of some dead and forgotten beast. She swayed and caught herself, the blow to her head throwing her vision into a nauseating spin.

The first shot caught the bat-wielding raider in the crux of his hind leg, but the wound wasn’t immediately fatal. Nor was the gash he’d opened across her brow, but it would be if left untreated. She squeezed off another shot as he staggered around for another attack, but the bullet spat off the broken sidewalk and lodged itself into the decaying walls of the house behind him. For a brief moment they met eyes. Then the stallion’s lost focus, and he fell while his racing heart pumped the last of the life onto the concrete.

A stone came arcing out from one of the burned out houses and caught her across the shoulder. She gasped and spun toward her assailant, squeezing the trigger at the window she thought it had come from. The revolver emitted a sharp click.

A mare’s voice called from behind her. “She’s empty!”

“Won’t be for long!” another answered, and Ginger remembered the chill that raced down her back upon hearing the baudy laughter in his voice.

She bolted, but didn’t get far. A unicorn colt half her age bolted out of cover and skidded to a halt in front of her, the barrel of some sort of homemade rifle leveled at her in a haze of his magic. Ginger turned to run away but there was suddenly a raider behind her, an older stallion with a blade clenched between his teeth. They appeared in the windows of the dilapidated houses, weapons coming into view one by one as their prey searched for and failed to find an escape.

One of the raiders stepped forward and threw something onto the broken road in front of her. A ring.

“Put that on yer horn, little miss.” His lips split into a gap toothed grin. “Or I do it for yeh and a little bit extra fer the trouble, yeh?”

She tried to close her eyes, but she found she couldn’t. They stayed open as they had when the ambush happened and when it had come to its terrible end. She found herself remembering the details out of order now, her mind trying to skip past the death that spread around her like some kind of plague. The strange, muffled screams as raider after raider found themselves entombed in guided pockets of deadly radiation. The sight of their coats shriveling and burning as the air trapped around them heated up like an oven. The sting of a Rad-Away needle being clumsily pricked into her neck by the teeth of the strangest pony she’d ever seen.

The bubble of sickly green light that formed around the stallion’s head startled all of them. The frenzied chatter of the geiger counters he and his fellow raiders carried only added to the confusion. The stallion collapsed within a matter of seconds and the light faded only to reappear around the head of another. And another. Looking back, Ginger remembered that it was the sound of Roach’s shotgun that helped the raiders understand they were being attacked, but by then it was too late for them.

Looking back to the crumpled house from which the youngest raider had first bounded out from, she noticed a door on the front hinges where no door had been earlier. She blinked, and it was gone. Except it wasn’t. Even as she felt herself pulled back to the events replaying in front of her, she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was still there. Hiding somehow.

Ginger stepped toward the house and it appeared again. A familiar panel door with a prominent glass pane held together along the seam of an old crack by layers of yellowed tape. There was something comforting about that door, and the closer she came the more real it felt.

She smiled when she recognized the painstakingly painted letters of Gussets & Garments gracing the center of the glass. What was her shop door doing out here? You’re dreaming, dear, she told herself, and that made sense. Her fears forgotten, she wrapped her magic around the well-worn brass handle and pushed through to the other side.

Somewhere, among the endless expanse of burning doors and strange, ghostly stars, a tiny bell tinkled and the door clicked shut.

“Hello?”

They stretched for as far as she could see. Which was far. Too far. Infinite.

She crushed her eyes shut against the wave of nausea that overtook her. Was it possible to throw up in a dream? A groan rose out of her throat. She didn’t want to find out.

“It helps to focus on the doors, little shade.”

Her eyes shot up to the mare looming over her, and she froze. She was the same mare as before, except this time Ginger wasn’t cowering beneath a thick haze of her own shield while she looked on. She was here. Right in front of her. A tall, razor crisp field of stars in the unmistakable shape of…

“Princess Luna?”

It had to be. In all of known history, only one mare carried the stars in her mane. It only made sense that this one, who carried constellations across her entire form, would be her.

The mare’s eyes, pale and white and the only part of her that felt solid, narrowed into the gentle curve of a smile. “I’m afraid not, little shade.”

That wasn’t the answer she was expecting. She almost didn’t believe it, but something told her this creature had no real reason to lie to her. She frowned.

“Then… are you real?”

“That is a complicated question,” the creature said. “The simplest answer I can offer is yes, but that is not entirely accurate.”

Ginger tried not to let her eyes wander to the infinity that surrounded her. “So this is still a dream.”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she sighed. Knowing this place was all in her head was comforting, in a way. Easier to absorb. Still, something bothered her. “You resemble her, though. I’ve seen pictures.”

“She is the one who created me,” it admitted.

Ginger risked a glance at the starry expanse where the creature’s face was. “I don’t… where are we?”

The creature’s head turned to survey the thousands of smoldering doors around them. Ginger tried to do the same and even managed to skip from wreckage to wreckage without overwhelming herself, but quickly the distances grew too vast and her mind revolted. She shut her eyes again and refocused them on the door she’d stepped out of, and the stripes of tape holding the old glass together.

Luna’s creation hummed thoughtfully at the expanse. “I have heard it called many things, however the most common name has always been ‘The Dream Realm.’ It isn’t a particularly descriptive name but I have found ponies particularly enjoy being mysterious when the mood suits them. Luna was the architect of this place as well. As you have likely discovered, each of these doors leads to a dream.”

Ginger hadn’t put those two points together, but decided it was best not to interrupt.

“Or, they used to prior to the Cataclysm.” A momentary pause. “I was not intended to travel beyond Luna’s dream. She created me as a form of atonement for the pain she caused under the banner of Nightmare Moon.”

“Do you… have a name?”

“Luna called me her Tantabus.”

“I’ve never heard of…”

“Hello, Lu-u-una.”

Ginger and the Tantabus blinked and turned their attention toward what could arguably be described as the most sickeningly adorable filly she’d ever seen. She trotted towards them on tiny pink hooves, her baby blue curls bouncing against each pudgy cheek with every precious step. For a brief moment Ginger thought she recognized her, but she couldn’t place where.

Just as quickly as she appeared, the pint-sized filly turned her beaming little eyes to Ginger and her expression flattened into a startling glare. “Who is she?”

If she was a figment of Ginger’s imagination, she was a disturbingly good one. The filly’s eyes drilled into Ginger’s like carbide bores. The Tantabus’s voice rose up from behind her like a wave.

“Return to your dream.”

A flash of light, and the filly was gone. Ginger’s mouth worked to form the words, but the question was jostled by a dozen others.

“Who was that?”

“A pest.”

She quirked her lip. “Why did she call you Luna?”

A pause. “I have told her what I am as I have told you. She has convinced herself that I am a liar.”

Interesting. “Why would she think that?”

“Because she is a pest.” The Tantabus shook its head. “Though I suppose it would be fairer to say it is because she is remarkably stubborn in her chosen philosophies. She believes since I share some of Luna’s memories while having no significant memories of my own, I am indistinguishable from my creator.”

Ginger felt her brow creasing under the weight to too many bizarre, contextless revelations. Not only could she dream, but she could apparently dream of the space between dreams where Luna’s seemingly sentient creation was acting as some sort of guardian of this dream realm. Or, more accurately, a vagrant of some kind. One who now claimed to have a dead princess’s memories?

Even in this dream, her head was starting to hurt.

“Before you ask,” the Tantabus added, “I do not know the access code to the Equestrian Strategic Gold Reserve.”

Ginger blinked.

“It is a joke. The Reserve was destroyed in the Cataclysm.”

A joke. Of course it tells jokes. She risked a look around, nervously browsing the nearest doors and trying to place them. So many were in states of decay that made them impossible to identify. Smoldering bits of wood drew charred lines where some had been, but there was no debris. No broken frames to suggest where they originated.

“You should return to your dream as well, little shade.”

She looked to the Tantabus, expecting it to light its horn and send her back, but it only watched her with those piercing eyes. Waiting, as if pausing to hear her opinion. Ginger glanced back to the quaint little shop door, her door, just a few steps behind her and grimaced.

“I haven’t had particularly good luck with this… dreaming business.”

She was surprised when the creature turned toward her door, sounding almost apologetic as she spoke. “I am sorry. I have no control over the shape your dreams choose to take. If you do not wish to return to your dream, I can wake you instead.”

“Oh! Please don’t do that!” The words coughed themselves out before she could temper them, causing the creature’s featureless eyes to widen. Ginger stiffened and closed her eyes for a moment before adding, “I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in days. I really need this.”

Even without lips to complete the act, the Tantabus seemed to smile. “Then perhaps you would like to keep me company while you rest. It has been some time since I’ve met a pony who wasn’t the little minister.”

Ginger glanced to the place the strange filly had recently stood. Growing up in New Canterlot, she knew of only one pony who called herself minister. Judging by the disdain the Tantabus showed for the filly, she thought it was best not to suggest any association with Minister Primrose.

“I wouldn’t mind a little company,” she admitted. Her gaze once again wandered the infinity of doors with renewed trepidation. “However, is there a different place we could go? Someplace less…”

“Challenging?” The Tantabus hummed sympathetically and the burning door beside her puffed out of existence, instantly replaced by an arched pair of ornately stitched curtains. “Certainly. Come with me.”

The curtains wafted on a gentle breeze, parting and rejoining as pale, silver light streamed through the gaps. For a moment, Ginger hesitated, unsure of where she was being taken or whether it was even safe. This centuries-old being could be taking her anywhere. Possibly even tricking her into stepping into another day of her life she’d rather forget.

Faced with the choice of the unknown beyond the curtains and the impossible that currently surrounded her, she took a step forward and pushed deeper into this strange existence.

Sledge could count on one hoof all the times he’d been afraid for his life. This, right now, was that one time.

It was his first time since having the mantle of overstallion thrown onto his shoulders that he’d been back inside of Stable 10’s generator room. It felt ridiculous that it had taken him this long to come back, but every time he thought about paying the old girl a visit he knew it was the wrong time to make the trip. Mechanical was in good feathers with Flux leading the department, and there were already enough things to stress about without the old boss lurking around. There was nothing he could do here that wasn’t already being done.

And yet, standing here barely a wing’s breadth from the beating heart of his home, he felt the useless panic rising in his chest all the same. The floorplates bucked so violently beneath his hooves that many of them had to be tack welded to keep them from jumping loose. If he locked his knees, his vision would immediately blur from the deafening vibrations emanating from the generator. Every bone in his body hummed with the furious noise bellowing out of a machine bent on tearing itself apart from the inside. It was electrical chaos contained inside a fragile mechanical system. If it went - when it went - his entire Stable would come apart at the roots.

The placid expression he wore was a mask. He was terrified. Of the generator, of his new job, of the ramifications of bringing a living Element of Harmony into his Stable… of everything. What he wouldn’t give to turn back the clock to when he was young and just learning how to turn a wrench, when outside was limited to the corridors beyond his work station and not the deadly, living world that existed beyond his home. Delphi could have picked anyone to captain this sinking ship, so why did it have to be him?

He blinked, coming to attention as Carbide’s jet black rear end backed up out of the gap in the floor next to the rioting generator. His wings grappled the edges of the access hatch and he used them to shove his front half up and out, seating himself on the edge of the floor.

Carbide’s mouth moved, forming words easily drowned out by the generator and the plugs he and Sledge had crammed into their ears before entering the workspace. Sledge waited until Carbide stopped, groaned, and began pecking his thoughts into his Pip-Buck. Seconds later, Sledge had a new message from the stallion waiting in his queue.

Hooked it up. Not going to know if it works til we try, he wrote.

Sledge nodded and typed in his response.

How sure? %?

Carbide offered a shrug of his own. Dont know. Nvr been done.

He grimaced. Carbide’s team had spent the better part of the week perfecting what they hoped would amount to a containment chamber for their failing ignition talisman once Aurora arrived with a replacement. It had looked similar to the one nestled beneath the heaving generator, assuming one ignored the bright patchwork of welds that kept the chamber intact. Nobody knew what would happen once the talisman was removed. It could go inert or it could dump its charge into every inch of metal surrounding it. Carbide’s containment chamber was designed in preparation for the latter event.

Hows talisman look?

Carbide read the message and grimaced. Wobbling. ETA on unicorn?

Everything hinged on the unicorn friend Aurora had made out there. A mare named Ginger. He didn’t need to see the warnings posted around the talisman chamber to know what would happen to a pony who came into direct physical contact with that much energy. Aurora could come back with a hundred ignition talismans. Without a unicorn to make the switch, it wouldn’t matter one bit.

Week. Maybe two, he wrote.

Dont have 2 weeks, Carbide replied.

I know.

He watched the barrel of Carbide’s chest expand as the stallion took a slow, deep breath, then nodded.

Tell her hurry.

She pulled the curtains apart and a grand vista of night erupted around her. She gasped.

They stood upon a wide balcony fitted with a finely carved ornamental stone railing that showed no sign of damage. Her hooves clicked against the polished floor, but her attention wasn’t aimed toward the balcony’s luxurious masonry. Her gaze bent upward toward the unbroken dome of the midnight sky.

“The clouds are gone,” she whispered.

Stars glittered along the mysterious magenta band that dimly glowed overhead just as it all had been when Aurora took her for the first time into the air. The moon was wide and bright, hanging above it all like a pearl illuminated by some inner light. The dark pattern of craters that many believed represented Nightmare Moon’s imprisonment colored its distant surface with the darker grey dimples of a vaguely equine profile. It was magnificent and dizzying, and she nearly toppled onto her hind end trying to see it all at once.

“There were many clear nights like this back then,” the Tantabus agreed. “She was particularly fond of this one.”

“Who…”

Tearing her gaze from the beauty above, that was when she spotted the dark mare curled atop a deep blue cushion at the edge of the balcony. It was unmistakably her. Ginger held her breath as she found herself standing hardly ten steps away from the Princess of the Night.

“This is only a memory. She is not aware we are here.”

She watched as the Tantabus walked beside Princess Luna, who was humming a happy little melody to herself as her eyes scanned the sky, and draped her forelegs over the edge of the balcony to stare up at the stars.

Ginger risked taking a breath and followed. True to the creature’s word, Luna never stirred as she approached the stone railing on the opposite side of the cushion. The thought occurred to her that, if she wanted, she could reach out and touch that ethereal mane with her own hoof. It flowed, following a wafting breeze of its own, as if tempting her to do just that.

“Tonight was the peak of the Cerberid meteor shower. It was the first she’d seen since being released from her banishment.”

Pushing away temptation, she looked to the same patch of sky Luna’s attention was so calmly fixed on. It was dark, save for a thin cluster of stars, but every few seconds a filament of light would skirt between them. Ginger’s ears perked when she understood what she was seeing. Meteors. Genuine debris from some distant corner of space reaching the end of an eons-long journey. Here and there, little blips of light appeared and vanished. Some brighter, some not. It was breathtaking.

Beside her, Luna continued to hum her little tune, her eyes never leaving that wide patch of sky.

“How often do you visit this memory?”

The Tantabus regarded her for a moment. “Often.”

She nodded, then reached out and touched the trailing swirl of Luna’s mane. It coiled around her hoof, engulfing it with the strange constellations that dwelled within it, but she could feel nothing. Embarrassed, she pulled her foreleg away and turned her attention back to the view.

“This is the castle, isn’t it?”

The Tantabus continued to watch her. “Canterlot Castle, yes. We are on Luna’s private balcony on the northern spire.”

“I wish Aurora could see this,” she murmured.

A pause. “Who?”

Watching the meteors flit across the sky, she told the Tantabus about Aurora. About how they first met when she walked into her shop. About where she came from, where she was going and how the two of them had realized a mutual attraction early on that became something deeper after the events at the solar array. The words spilled out of her like a torrent, and she realized she hadn’t actually told anyone about them before. Not like this, anyway. The Tantabus listened, interrupting only to ask clarifying questions before allowing her to proceed. It was therapeutic. When she was finished, she felt… organized.

“Does she dream like you?” it asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone dreams like me.”

A melodic chuckle rippled up from the creature. “Some ponies still do, but few.”

“Like Primrose.”

If it had a brow to arch, it might have done so. Could be doing so right now for all Ginger could tell. Silhouettes didn’t offer up clues from body language, but the questioning pitch of its voice certainly hinted at a new curiosity. “You know her name?”

Ginger shrugged. “I was born in New Canterlot. Everyone there knows who she is. That’s who that filly was, right?”

After a moment, the Tantabus nodded. “Yes. She frequents Luna’s realm more often than I would prefer, but I cannot stop her from entering it. Only discourage her. Many of her nightmares originate during her foalhood, so I force her to appear as such whenever she enters the space between the doors.”

“It didn’t look like it bothered her.”

The Tantabus slouched against the rail a little. “She adapts quickly. It is a trait that I believe enabled her to survive the cataclysm, and how she continues to survive even now.”

That managed to surprise her. For as long as there was a New Canterlot, the Enclave claimed that Primrose had always been at its helm. Most ponies quietly believed that to mean when the old one died, a new one was installed to take her place. A transition of title, not of literal immortality.

She chewed her lip thoughtfully, then asked, “Do you know how she does it?”

“Sustain life beyond her years?” The creature looked back to Luna, sighed, and turned her attention to the Cerberids overhead. “Dangerously. You experienced the magic found in Twilight Sparkle’s failed experiment yourself. It restored your magic just as it restores the little minister’s youth, though I choose to believe it is only a matter of time before such a crude method of immortality fails her.”

She turned away from the stars and stared past Luna, regarding the Tantabus directly. “You’re saying the stimpacks Autumn Song used on me are what Primrose uses to stay alive.”

“Yes."

She leaned over the balcony and tried not to let herself get frustrated. Ever since they arrived at the wall outside Blinder’s Bluff, she had been trying to keep Aurora from getting anywhere near the Enclave. Ginger had risked everything to escape New Canterlot and the brutal, superficial society Primrose had built there, but at every turn it seemed like something happened that inevitably dragged all of them back toward it.

“You look disturbed.”

She shrugged and looked away, turning her eyes to the twinkling lights in the deep green fields far below Canterlot Mountain. This had all taken place well before the war with the zebras began. Before the oil boom and the frenzied growth of modern industry. The ponies in the little twinkling hamlets down below didn’t know what luxury they had.

“It’s different,” she murmured. “Growing up, being told about all the things we lost. It always felt so far away, like it didn’t really matter. Seeing it all, though? It hurts.”

She tried to smile in spite of herself, but she couldn’t manage it. “How broken was Equestria that ponies saw all of this and decided it was all worth destroying? They killed themselves and left us with nothing.”

The words hung in the air as meteors dripped from the sky. The Tantabus said nothing in return. Ginger didn’t expect it to.

“If we can’t find an ignition talisman in Fillydelphia,” she continued, “we’re going to have to ask the Enclave for help.”

“The ones who hold power in the bastardized remains of my creator’s home.”

“The one and only,” she agreed. “They’ve been picking apart Equestria for prewar tech since the bombs fell and they have a reputation for gutting Stables as soon as they go dark. We tried working with the Rangers but they put Aurora on a leash for the trouble. The Enclave is the only other power that I know would have a stockpile of talismans.”

The Tantabus stared at her from her side of the railing. “You keep very few secrets.”

It came so matter-of-factly that Ginger wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or just an idle observation. “Thank you?”

It tipped its horn toward her as if it approved of her response. “You are welcome. The little minister tells me very little of what has happened to the world since the cataclysm. I only see glimpses from the dreams of those few who still have the ability, and fewer from those who pass on.”

She frowned. “Pass on? Is that why you’ve been calling me ‘little shade?’”

Luna’s creation hesitated. “I am aware now that you are not dying.”

“But when we first met, you thought I was.”

For a brief moment, a patch of stars around the creature’s cheeks glowed a little brighter. Ginger held back a smile. It was embarrassed.

“The answer to that question is also complicated.”

“Hmm… imagine it is...”

Aurora looked up from the Pip-Buck on Ginger’s foreleg and cocked a confused brow. She waited, glancing between the unicorn’s fluttering eyelids and her darkened horn, to hear if the sleeping mare would say anything else. When she settled into the rhythmic breathing of deep sleep, Aurora carefully resumed tapping the rest of her response out to Sledge.

Typing with one wing wasn’t ideal. Doing so with the little screen facing upside-down was even less so, but the little pothole Ginger had carved into the stones offered little room for one of them to move without waking the other. She had gradually twisted the device around along its cuff, careful not to disturb Ginger’s mumbling sleep, and made do as best she could. Occasionally she would look over to her companion’s sleeping face and just watch her lips move in silent conversation before turning back to her messages.

It was well into the midday hours now and Aurora wasn’t looking forward to adjusting to a normal sleep cycle once she was back home. Though, the way Sledge was describing the situation, that window was falling rapidly shut. They needed a talisman. More than that, they needed time.

I know this isn’t the news you were hoping to hear, she wrote, but the Stable we spent last night exploring turned up empty. There’s a group out here that calls themselves the Enclave who strip down defunct Stables for tech. Nobody out here trusts them. I’m not sure I do, either. My original plan was to go to Stable-Tec Headquarters and look for clues, but now it’s starting to look like the Enclave might be our best option. Keeping that in the back pocket for now. Ginger and Roach wouldn’t approve. I’m afraid if I ask, whatever happens after will be out of my hooves. For now, I’m sticking to the plan. Get to Fillydelphia, find Stable-Tec HQ and find… something.

In the meantime, we might have discovered something in Stable 1 that could help take some of the load off the generator. Maybe it can buy us time. You’re going to have to butter up Opal for this, but if you can convince her to…

She pecked away letter by letter until the message was ready to send.

“What’re you writing?” a bleary Ginger mumbled.

Looking up, she saw that Ginger’s eyes were slitted open and a restful smirk from having caught her off-guard had crawled along her lip. Aurora smiled, tapped a button to send the message, and let her take back her foreleg.

“A letter to Sledge,” she said, resting her head more fully against Ginger’s flank. She watched the slow rise and fall of her belly and felt a happy warmth fill her own chest.

Ginger lit her horn and twisted the Pip-Buck to the outside of her foreleg. “Can I read it?”

She hesitated, not wanting Ginger to know she was considering the Enclave as a last resort, but something told her that wasn’t a great long-term strategy for the two of them. “Sure, go ahead.”

She watched as Ginger navigated the Pip-Buck’s interface and started scanning the lines Aurora had just sent. It wasn’t a particularly long letter, and she could tell when Ginger reached the line concerning hers and Roach’s disapproval when she pressed her lips together and sighed. The puff of breath ruffled the hairs that made up Aurora’s mark, the outstretched metal wing whose bands of reflected light so eerily matched her birth name.

“Sounds like we’re both thinking about the same thing lately,” Ginger said. When Aurora gave her a confused look, she added, “Asking them for help.”

She nodded once and shrugged her free wing. “I would have a home field advantage. Pureblood and all that.”

Ginger thumped her in the belly with the back of her hoof, making her jump. “Don’t joke like that. Our hosts might hear you.”

She winced and lifted her head, glancing up the tracks toward the narrow edge of Briar and Meridian’s cave. Luckily, everyone was still tucked behind their home knit camouflage.

“Sorry,” she said, and began pushing up from the warm divot.

Ginger stood as well and soon they were stretching out muscles that had gone tight from their spiralling trip down and back up Stable 1’s immense stairwell.

“And hey,” she continued. “I’m sorry for blowing a fuse down there. It wasn’t fair of me to storm off and leave you alone with Julip.”

To her relief, Ginger paused her stretches to pull her into a quick but firm embrace. Aurora wobbled a little on her hooves when Ginger let her go, wishing it would last a bit longer.

“I shouldn’t have let you walk off like that, either. We were all on edge, and to be fair she did earn herself that black eye with the remark she made.” Ginger took a deep breath and blew it out, shaking her head as she did. “I will admit, the trip up with Julip was certainly interesting.”

Aurora listened as Ginger elaborated, explaining the stilted conversation she’d had with Julip midway up the stairs. About how Julip had pushed her hard for the details of her dream, and how the Enclave mare had made it very clear that if she deliberately failed to report Briar and Beans during her next debriefing, she would be taking a short trip to the firing squad for the deception.

“You’re making it sound like she doesn’t want to inform on them.”

“The impression I got from her was that she’s worried more about what will happen to herself than them.” Ginger quirked her lip, second-guessing herself. “But she doesn’t seem to enjoy this aspect of her job, either. I don’t think she’s ever been forced to give it this much thought until now.”

Aurora snorted. “That’s a nice way of saying you pestered her.”

She dodged another chastising swat.

“Regardless of my conversational technique,” Ginger stated, brow arched at her, “I think Roach’s initial approach to Julip might have been the correct one. Under all the rank, regulation and decorum the Enclave sank into her head, there’s a mare under there. And I think telling her about my dream shook something loose in her. Goddess knows they haven’t been peaches and cream for me either.”

Something about the way her tone shifted stirred up a cloud of worry within Aurora. As if sensing this, Ginger’s expression quickly softened and she gently shook her head as if to dismiss it.

“Don’t worry, it’s nothing bad. I’ll tell you about it once I’ve had some time to get it all straight in my own head.” Her eyes grew momentarily distant before refocusing on her with a renewed smile. “And I forgive you, by the way.”

And just like that, the weight of all the guilt she had carried up the treads lifted away. They were going to be okay, after all. The relief of it all swamped her.

“Are you crying?”

She wiped at her face with a wobbling grin, feeling the heat rising into her cheeks as Ginger stared at her with that beautiful smile. “No. Shut up.”

“Okay, tough girl.” She held her cheek in a cup of magic and pecked her against the other, coaxing a weepy little laugh out of her in the process. “I can wait.”

She turned her eyes up to the clouds, letting the mountain air dry them as she cleared her throat and brought herself under control. What an absolute mess the last twenty-four hours has been. Between Julip’s needling, being taken in by gunpoint and then with hospitality by Beans’ family, exploring the dead Stable in the valley and nearly letting the excursion push her into doing something she couldn’t take back, she was happy to just be a little misty-eyed and not strapped to a gurney up in the Infirmary back home.

Holding her wings out to Ginger, she pulled the unicorn into another hug and held her for several long seconds. A proper one this time, she decided. Long enough to communicate the fact of how much she adored this strange, complicated mare and her capacity to tolerate the nonsense Aurora was putting her through.

“We should really get back to the others,” Ginger chuckled.

“In a minute,” she murmured.

“In a minute there might not be any leftover soup left for us to barter for.”

She wasn’t going to be baited so easily, but her stomach betrayed her with a long, twisting groan. Her ears flattened, and Ginger pulled out from the drape of her feathers. The moment ended.

Ginger turned and nodded toward the cave. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat.”

Aurora sighed, smiled, then followed.

“Like a beehive?”

Roach squinted at Beans, wondering where in the world she ever heard of bees when the bombs supposedly wiped them out centuries ago, but decided it was best not to mention it and risk embarrassing her over what was a surprisingly good comparison.

He popped a bit of crushed pecan into his mouth and chewed as he considered his answer. Beans watched him from a chair near the family stove, her chin against the backrest as she waited. Roach sat where he always preferred to sit: on the floor where the cool surface always seemed to sooth the little aches deep beneath his chitin. Julip, for her part, was still dead asleep barely a step away from Beans’ chair, her back against the cave’s chiseled wall and the bulk of her face tucked beneath a drape of green feathers. While she didn’t show any signs of addiction, Julip was definitely sleeping off the lingering effects of Rebound.

He swallowed, enjoying the faint taste of their unexpected harvest. “Sort of like a beehive, yes. Changelings are a little closer to hornets, though.”

Beans frowned over the back of the chair, deep in thought. “But hornets are mean. You’re not mean.”

She really did know her insects. Maybe some hives did survive the radiation. Certainly enough of Equestria’s larger fauna did, albeit with some dangerous mutations.

“Not all hornets sting,” he said.

Meridian glanced up at him and gave him a subtle, approving nod before turning back to her work. She sat on the floor on the opposite side of the cold stove with a wide strip of leather unrolled in front of her. On it lay Aurora’s rifle, Desperate Times, stripped down to the screws. Roach had bitten his tongue when he awoke to the sight of her disassembling Aurora’s weapon, but despite her lack of wings or magic, Meridian was surprisingly delicate with her work. She reassured him that she was only repaying them for retrieving the impeller for their pump. The longer she worked, the more the front of her muzzle blackened with the spent gunpowder and metal residue coating its inner workings, and the more convinced Roach became that she wasn’t trying to scrap the priceless heirloom.

“So you’re a good hornet. Like mom and dad are.”

His eyes widened at the comparison. From the workshop behind the curtain, Briar barked a well-meaning laugh that only encouraged Bean’s analogy.

“Mom and dad are raiders, but they don’t do the bad stuff like real raiders do. So… you’re kinda the same.”

She had a better handle on the world than he thought. He smiled and chuckled when she reflected his expression. “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

From the corner of his eye he noticed Meridian’s left ear turn toward the front of the cave. She moved casually, as if she were leaning to stretch her legs, but the barrel of the cannon mounted to her shoulder followed the new angle of her body toward the netting. He blinked and realized he could hear the crunching of stones from outside.

The stiff brush in Meridian’s mouth dipped to the corner of her lip like an old stallion’s pipe. “Aurora and Ginger, stop walking and let me know it’s you please.”

The crunching stopped, replaced by Aurora’s hesitant voice. “Um, it’s us?”

Meridian nodded to herself and turned back to brushing the dirt out of the trigger assembly held between her hooves. “Thank you, ladies. Come on in.”

Roach blew out an uneasy breath and reminded himself never to sneak up on mares with cannons. As Aurora and Ginger filed into the cave, Beans stood on the wooden chair and held open one of her little wings. He watched as Aurora opened hers and lightly slapped her feathers against Beans, earning herself a beaming grin from the little filly as she asked her mother where Briar was. Pointed toward the workshop, she nodded a quick greeting back to Roach and disappeared into the workshop.

Color him impressed, but Aurora didn’t so much as flinch when she passed the broken down pieces of her rifle. Then he remembered that she had likely never seen a weapon taken apart like Meridian had done and suspected the passing glance hadn’t been enough for her to recognize it. Probably for the best, he decided. She did have something of a short temper.

The conversation shifted and for a while Roach found himself back in his usual position as the quiet observer. Ginger leaned into the workshop for a while, chatting with Briar and Aurora as they went to work finishing the repairs on the pump, then turned and noticed the disassembled weapon in front of Meridian and asked the obvious question of what she was doing. Meridian told her, and after a worried peek by Aurora through the curtain, it was apparent that they could either trust her enough to let her finish her work unbothered or get in the way and risk having to put the weapon together themselves.

With the matter quickly decided, Meridian changed course and asked if they were hungry. It wasn’t difficult to tell that they both were and after some discussion, Aurora offered up a pistol she’d taken from the Stable in the valley in payment for what was left of Meridian’s vegetable soup. It was cold and there wasn’t much left, but neither of them seemed to mind as they divvied up the last spoonfuls at the workshop curtain and savored their late breakfast.

Roach decided at that moment that he and Meridian could stand to be friends if they wouldn’t be departing soon. She had a rare talent at cooling tensions by sheer force of will rather than the usual wastelander tactic of inflaming them until bullets took flight. A good hornet indeed.

Beans, however, was a bee with boundless curiosity.

“Can you do magic like Ginger?”

He nodded, glancing at the unicorn as she sat down beside him. “Not as well as she can, and not without hurting other ponies, but yes. If I’m forced to.”

She wrinkled her nose, her eyes on his cracked horn. “Mom says changelings can turn into other ponies. Could you turn into me if you wanted to?”

A grin pulled hard at his cheeks, but he shook his head. “I haven’t been able to hold a disguise for a very long time. Sorry.”

Beans deflated a little, but her relentless spirit already pushed her to begin asking her next question just as a ripping snore sawed out from under Julip’s wing.

“Woah,” she laughed.

After a pause, a second more aggressive growler of a snore snarled between her feathers.

Meridian looked up from the rifle with an impressed smirk. “She’s worse than Briar.”

“Way worse,” Beans giggled.

Deaf to her audience, and much to Beans’ amusement, Julip continued to emit a racket that drew quiet laughter from the workshop and which made all other conversation virtually impossible.

“Beans,” Meridian said, “I think you should wake up our guest before she brings the mountain down on our heads.”

Roach watched the filly spring off her chair with an eager little grin, rear up beside Julip and plant her hooves on the sleeping mare’s side. With all the strength her little body could muster, shoved Julip back and forth along the floor accompanied by a persistent, “Wake up, wake up, wake up!”

Groaning, Julip lifted her wing a few inches away from her face and glowered with uneven blinks at the ponies in the room before finally settling on the happy pegasus in the midst of accosting her. Her red-rimmed eyes narrowed and she lifted her wing over Beans’ head.

Before she could get out of the way, the drape of feathers dropped over the filly’s tiny frame, startling a whinny from Beans and causing her mother to rise abruptly to her hooves. Julip’s wing scooped her off the boards and pulled her tight into the crux of the green mare’s front leg which pinned her even further. Julip grunted, turned her head toward the cave wall and promptly fell back asleep.

Beans, now lying upside-down in Julip’s slowly relaxing grip, gaped past the stove at her staring mother as if she’d just won first prize at a carnival game. Only in this case, she was the prize.

Beside him, Ginger covered her mouth with the back of her hoof. Roach was dumbstruck.

“Mom!” Beans hissed, one of her wings popping free of Julip’s feathers. “I’m the teddy bear!”

The four of them laughed and Julip, disturbed yet again, lifted her head and stared unsteadily at the three adults in the room with one eye still pinched shut. Then she noticed the bundle she was holding onto and the other eye popped open. She flinched, stumbling to her hooves while Beans rolled out of her grip in a fit of snorting laughter.

“Woah, what is…”

She blinked with heavy eyelids, trying to make sense of things as she looked at Beans and then the imposing form of Meridian standing just a few feet away.

“I didn’t…” she paused, squeezed her eyes shut and then looked back to Beans when she finally opened them again. “What were you doing?”

“Being your teddy bear!” the filly blurted.

A question formed on Julip’s lips, but it was clear she could tell the answer would just confuse her more. She scrubbed her face with her good wing and plopped her backside onto the boards as she fought to stay awake. The question forgotten and her wings falling limp to her sides, Beans immediately scurried back under Julip’s feathers to continue this new game of theirs.

Roach chuckled at Beans as she pulled the drape of feathers over her muzzle with her own little wings, their feathers rustling against one another like autumn leaves.

Julip swayed a little under Beans’ manipulation, but she didn’t try to shoo her away.

“What time is it?” she muttered.

“Noontime,” Meridian answered, though by the way she spoke it sounded more like a rough estimate. With the potential threat to her daughter seemingly dispelled, she sat back down and began the process of reassembling Aurora’s rifle.

“Grab something to eat,” Roach said. “Once they’re done with the pump, we’re hitting the road again.”

“We may need to travel overnight again,” Ginger added. When he gave her a questioning look, she added, “Her Stable may not have as long as we thought.”

Julip made a convincing show of concern, though she stopped short of asking Ginger what she meant. Instead, she looked back to Meridian. “I’d kill for some more of last night’s soup.”

The corner of Meridian’s lip bent into a smirk and she lifted an eyebrow at Ginger. Roach wisely chose to keep quiet while Ginger shifted uneasily beside him.

“Funny you should say that.”

With a final shove, the last bolt of the salvaged water pump turned into place. Aurora wiggled the rusted wrench free and dropped it into Briar’s waiting feathers. She puffed out a satisfied breath as she regarded her work.

“There. Good as new.”

Briar chuckled. They were both well aware that the antique pump’s impeller was only the first part to break down. Given a few months, something else would eventually need replacing. And something else after that. But for now, it would do its job just as it had centuries ago. Even as she brushed the dark wet granules of mineral deposits off her feathers, she knew this pump would last longer than it needed to. Long enough for Briar and his family to pack up their humble home and begin making plans to travel west, toward the safety of Stable 10.

At least she hoped.

She made room for Briar as he stepped in to reconnect the power. It impressed her what he and his wife had been capable of accomplishing so far away from anything Aurora might consider civilization. Hunted and alone, they made do with what they could scavenge from the dead Stable in the valley. She wondered what they might do once they got settled inside her home.

Briar would be a shoe-in for Mechanical. Meridian would be more of a challenge. There weren’t many jobs in a Stable for cannon wielding earth ponies. Security, maybe? Or possibly she could find a place in the Brass Bit up in the Atrium. With the scant ingredients she had to choose from in the wasteland, Aurora could only imagine what sort of dish Meridian could whip up with a full pantry of fresh ingredients.

She hardly noticed Briar flip the startup switch, giving her a startle when the bulky pump shook to life. Soon she could hear the gentle burble of water splashing into the blue plastic tank beside them. Just as promptly, Meridian’s voice called out from the other room.

“Is it working again?”

Briar lifted his muzzle toward the curtain. “Better than before!”

The relief in her voice was palpable. “Good, just don’t jinx it before I can get some water on the boil. Beans, it’s your turn. Let Julip finish her apple and go fill up the kettle.”

Aurora smiled at the sound of the filly’s drawn out groan of protest. A minute later she was pushing through the curtain with a dented, floral decorated kettle swinging from the handle held in her mouth. The young mare plopped down on the boards beside them, positioned the open kettle under the tank’s plastic spigot and let out a dramatic sigh as she opened the tap.

As rust-tinted water trickled into the kettle, Beans looked at the whirring pump with curiosity. “It’s quieter.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’ll make up for it,” Briar said, chuckling as his daughter poked out her tongue at him. “Our friends are going to be leaving soon. Did you ask Aurora your question?”

Beans’ eyes went wide with embarrassment and, just like that, she was staring intently at the kettle with her lips pressed firmly shut. Aurora glanced at Briar, noted the unapologetic expression of oops on his face that only a father could get away with, and then looked down at Beans who simply stared intently at the trickling water as it approached the kettle’s rim.

She didn’t have to be particularly good with foals to recognize the mortified look of a young mare unprepared to be shoved into the spotlight. Whatever Beans had wanted to ask, she’d wanted to do it on her own. Only now, as Aurora and the others were getting close to leaving, was it obvious to her father that the opportunity was going to pass faster than Beans would be able to muster her courage.

Remembering something her mother used to do when she was little, Aurora got down on her belly beside Beans and twisted the tap shut before it could overflow. Beans glanced at her wing and swallowed.

“You can whisper it in my ear. I promise I won’t tell anyone. Okay?”

After some hesitation, Beans nodded. Aurora waited as the filly pushed herself up from the floor and pressed her tiny muzzle into the cup of Aurora’s ear, the raspy whisper of her voice sending pins and needles running down Aurora’s spine. It took a minor feat of strength for her not to wince.

“Can I have, um, one of your feathers?”

Her question asked, Beans took a step back and stared at her, waiting.

Aurora had expected the little pirate queen to ask something strange, but not quite so odd as for a piece of her anatomy. She quickly stifled a laugh that would undoubtedly mortify the sheltered filly and, awkwardly, spread her left wing for Beans to inspect. “Take your pick, kiddo.”

A bright grin spread across Beans’ face as she turned her attention to the curtain of grey feathers opened before her. Her chest puffed out a little as she dragged the tip of her comparably smaller wing across them like chimes, inspecting each one as if she were one of the quality assurance ponies working in Fabrication. Aurora wasn’t sure what it was she was looking for, exactly, but she kept an even face as her feathers were shifted this way and that by a filly clearly on a mission for something specific.

She glanced over at Briar who offered a mild shrug and not much else. As he did, Aurora felt a sharp pop and a flicker of pain shoot down her wing as Beans identified and jerked free the feather of her choice. Even through watering eyes, she could see the half-sympathetic, half-laughing smile bubbling along Briar’s muzzle. She blinked away the tears and took a slow breath to dispel the urge to curse before turning back to Beans with as much of a smile as she could manage.

Gently pinched between Beans’ teeth was one of Aurora’s primaries. One of the few grey and white striped feathers that accented the speckles along her shoulders and hips. She must have wanted it for the coloration. Before Aurora could ask, Beans garbled a polite “phenkew” around the gifted feather and scurried out of the workshop and into the other room.

Briar reacted to her confusion with a small shrug. “Aside from me, you two are the first pegasi she’s known that she hasn’t needed to hide from.”

Aurora hummed understanding while she pressed the edge of her wing against her hip, wiping away the dot of blood that had formed where Beans had extracted the feather. “What does she keep from the other ponies she meets? Locks of mane?”

Briar laughed, caught himself and shook his head. Still grinning, he stepped around her and retrieved the kettle Beans left behind. From the other room, the sharp clap of the filly’s costume box closing gave them a decent idea of where her memento had been stored. “Thank you for your help.”

As he turned toward the curtain, she stopped him. “Hey, um, real quick?”

The kettle sloshed as he looked at her. She touched the edge of her neck, where Briar’s barding folded into a collar.

“Can I get the frequency on that radio?”

He paused. Then, understanding, smiled.

“Are you sure?”

“Just take it before I change my mind.”

Content to observe, Julip watched Meridian practically push a roughly treated first aid kit into Roach’s hooves. She didn’t understand why he was so hesitant to take it, but she didn’t ask either. The little fabric bags usually held little more than some basic stitching supplies, a few low dose stimpacks and a tube of antibiotic if they were lucky. They were good for taking care of scrapes, but the wasteland was usually harsher than that.

Still, it was a meaningful gesture. Julip watched her turn back across the room to the open cupboards while Roach was left staring at the little medkit. After a beat, he slid it over the floorboards for Julip to add to her mailbag. It jangled with a few other new supplies, all courtesy of the earth pony who just a day earlier had hinged seemingly everything on a transactional basis. Roach appeared torn about the sudden bout of generosity, but Julip suspected it had something to do with Aurora’s promise of shelter as well as the repair of their pump. When she did the math, Meridian’s family had reaped the majority of the reward from their excursion into Stable 1. This was likely her way of balancing the books.

In addition to the medkit, half a box of 12 gauge shells jostled against a scuffed and faded thermos filled to the brim with Meridian’s tarlike brew of instant coffee. Julip could just make out the silhouettes of six prewar comic book characters on one side of the thermos. On the other, a tentacle-maned villain whose name escaped her.

With her nose deep inside the cupboards, Meridian asked, “Aurora’s rifle wouldn’t happen to fire fifty caliber cartridges? I have maybe twenty rounds of that.”

As if on cue, Briar led Aurora into the room. The stallion stepped between the conversation toward the stove and set about preparing a kettle. Aurora continued down to the edge of the planked floor where Ginger reclined next to Roach.

Julip tried not to think too hard about all the potential ramifications of a pureblood sitting down beside a dreamer, and focused more on the twinge of jealousy she felt instead. She’d been injected with the same, invaluable prewar stimpack Ginger had and she hadn’t had so much as a whisper of vision when she slept.

“Pretty sure she uses .308s,” Julip said, earning a frustrated huff from Meridian as she shut the cabinets.

“Well, I think we’re just going to have to owe you.” Meridian sighed, glancing around the room yet another turn. “Are you sure there isn’t anything else you need? Fillydelphia is a big place and there’s a lot of mountains between here and there.”

“Honey,” Briar murmured. “They’ll be fine.”

Meridian pinched her lips together, unconvinced. Then her gaze went to the family mattress and she stepped toward it, nudging up the edge of it with her nose and using a wide hoof to fish out something black and familiar.

“Here,” she said, picking up the pistol Aurora brought up from the Stable.

Julip froze as the towering mare approached her, holding the weapon between her teeth for her to take. Her eyes flicked toward where Roach, Ginger and Aurora sat. The three of them looked understandably on edge. Their first real action after spotting her spying on them outside of Kiln was to disarm her, and there was likely a reason why none of them had since suggested returning to their centaur-trampled campsite to retrieve the submachine gun.

Meridian dropped the empty pistol into her feathers, oblivious to the quiet tension forming around her.

“I’ll bet my feathers that’s a forty-five.”

“Safe bet,” Briar snorted.

Meridian swatted a hoof against his backside as she hurried back to the cupboards. Meanwhile, Julip stared at the pistol in her wings. She knew this model and its caliber from her studies in the archives. Standard issue for Stable Security, which quickly explained why it was where it had been when Aurora picked it up.

She glanced at Beans. The filly was preoccupied with the contents of her costume box, rummaging through scraps of old fabric and home made props in search of her next outfit. A knot formed in her gut, and she stood. She crossed the small room, held the pistol out to Aurora and slid it into her wing.

Behind her, Briar spoke up. “Not your preferred weapon?”

“Wouldn’t know how to shoot it even if it was,” she lied. “Odds are I’d just wind up with legs like Roach.”

A rough chuckle rumbled from the changeling while Aurora quietly slid the pistol into her saddlebag. The floorboards thudded, heralding Meridian’s approach. Seeing that the pistol had made its way back to the mare she got it from, Meridian held out a faded cardboard box with her teeth while Aurora’s rifle swung loosely from its strap around the earth pony’s neck. Bullets clinked as Aurora packed the little box into the same bag as the pistol, then opened her wings to accept Desperate Times.

“I think that’s everything.”

There was something final in Meridian’s tone, and Julip wasn’t the only one to sense it. She stepped back as Aurora and her strange medley of companions got to their hooves. Saddlebags shuffled, joints popped, hooves scraped over the dry boards as it became evident that there were no more trades to be made. No offers to fulfill. To Julip’s surprise, a faint sadness fell over her as eyes turned to the netting that led out to the rails. She frowned a little, unsure where that was coming from.

“Keep your radio on,” Aurora said, nodding to Briar as she spoke. “If we find what we’re looking for, you’ll know.”

Briar dipped his chin toward his collar. “Roger that.”

From the edge of the boards, Roach scuffed his hoof against the loose stones beyond them and bowed his head. “Well, that’s us. Thank you for the hospitality, Meridian. And Briar, for the computer lessons. I think it goes without saying that we should all keep what we learned down there close to the chest.”

A murmur of agreement made its way around the cave. The revelation of the hardwired network that bridged the Stables was not something to be carelessly traded away to the Rangers or the Enclave. Even Julip found herself nodding.

“You’re going already?”

All eyes turned to Beans, the strange little filly who brought them together. A roughly stitched blue and yellow cowl resembling the old garb of the Wonderbolts adorned her face at a slant. More bits of blue and yellow cloth hung over the lip of her costume box, costumes ready to be assigned their wearers.

“I thought we had time to play Wonderbolts and Shadowbolts,” she whimpered.

Briar turned from the warming stove and knelt beside her. “Honey, they have to leave.”

“But…”

“Jellybean.” His voice was firm, but gentle. “Remember what we talked about?”

Beans sniffed, then nodded. “We’re gonna go live with Aurora after they find the thingy.”

“And they can’t find it if they stay to play with you. Right?”

“Right,” she mumbled.

“Now be good and say goodbye.”

Julip watched the little filly hurry over to Aurora, hug her foreleg with her tiny hickory feathers, then to Ginger to do the same, and then Roach who she practically tackled. Most ponies would be afraid to touch a changeling, much less a changeling ghoul, but from the moment Roach broke out his ragged pirate voice he’d become her very favorite among them.

When she was finished, she turned to Julip and squeezed her leg in a tiny version of a hug. Julip sighed and, a little grudgingly, ruffled the kid’s mane with her good wing.

“I hope your tail grows back,” Beans said.

She smirked, flicking the line of tiny braids Ginger and Beans had woven into what was left of it. “Me too.”

Her smile faded as Beans lingered, her big eyes staring up at her as she worked up the pluck to ask what she wanted to ask. Finally, Beans scrunched her nose and reached up with her hooves, pulling Julip’s head down so she could whisper in her ear.

Julip winced a little as she listened, and she noticed that Aurora had turned away to shield the beginning of a laugh. Then she frowned.

“You want my what?”

They exchanged goodbyes and, with a lingering discomfort none of them knew how to dispel, resumed their journey.

On Meridian’s request, they took the first few miles at a leisurely trot. The quicker they put distance between them and the cave, the less likely they were to draw attention to the area. Gradually the rails began to bend downhill. The persisting aches in Aurora’s legs eased a little, but not by much. Her joints had taken a beating on Stable 1’s impossibly deep stairwell. More than what a good night’s sleep could heal.

The silence that accompanied them away from the cave gradually broke down once the four of them agreed it was alright to slow down to a more comfortable walk. Ginger had drifted to the rear of their makeshift column to engage their Enclave escort in quiet conversation. Aurora caught bits and pieces, enough to glean that Ginger was explaining the details of her most recent dream.

She glanced at Roach who kept pace beside her. His pale eyes turned to her in return, and he shrugged as if to say he didn’t know any more than she did. She returned the gesture and settled on bending an ear to listen. Between the steady thud of hooves on dry rail ties and the occasional skitter of rocks being kicked ahead, it was hard to parse together anything that made clear sense. Ginger talked about a world of burning doors. A creature that either guarded them or simply existed among them.

A glance back at Julip let her know that the shorter mare was enthralled by the details, especially of the creature she met. From what Aurora could put together, Ginger had mistaken the creature for Princess Luna. Learning that it had been something else was apparently blowing Julip’s mind.

She chuckled, faced forward again and let the two of them gossip in peace.

The rails bent around the slope of the mountain and snaked through a narrow valley formed by the rise of the next. As they slipped into the shadow of the twin peaks they came upon the second derailed train in the same amount of days, though it had been swept well clear of the tracks by a poorly timed rockslide. Steel shipping containers mingled with the splintered remains of wooden box cars. Further evidence that when the bombs fell, much of Equestria had yet to reap the benefits of modernity.

As they drew close to the wreckage, they could hear the scrapes and shuffling of hooves within one of the intact metal containers. Another one of Briar’s deterrents for wayward travelers. They gave the overturned train a wide berth as they climbed the rubble left by the slide and rejoined the rails a half mile beyond.

She shuffled her wings against her sides to scare up some warmth in the brisk valley air. Roach had drifted ahead of the group, put on alert now that the rails were showing little sign of turning away from an intercept with the road that the centaurs had scared them off of. She hated the fact that they would all need to bring up their guards again. The last couple of days with Meridian and her family had been a welcome break from the constant tension.

Gradually, a set of hooves began crunching toward her over the ballast stones. For a hopeful moment she thought they would be Ginger’s, but then their owner spoke up.

“Hey.”

She pursed her lips as Julip drew up beside her, but she forced herself to be polite. “Hey.”

Several seconds ticked by as the attempted conversation faltered. Evidently Julip hadn’t thought of what she would say beyond the initial hello. Given just a short couple of days earlier she’d been breaking the ice faster than it could form, creating an awkward silence she couldn’t dispel was obviously uncharted territory for her.

Aurora wasn’t sure if it was pity or charity, but she decided to throw Julip a bone.

“So,” she began. “How’s that wing of yours?”

Julip’s relief was unmissable. “I feel like a plucked chicken. She yanked out two of my best primaries at the same time.”

That was worth a smirk, even if that wasn’t what she was asking about.

“I still don’t get why she wanted feathers from us.”

Aurora glanced at her to be sure she was serious. Then she remembered Briar hadn’t been in a position to explain when she started rifling through Julip’s wing.

“She wanted something to remember us by,” she said. Then, smiling a little more, she added, “And she obviously took two from you because she liked you a lot more.”

She watched Julip’s gaze grow distant. “That kid was lonely.”

Truer words, she thought to herself. In a lot of ways, Beans was lucky to have the opportunity to grow up in a place where the Enclave wasn’t likely to discover her. Her parents were resourceful enough to ensure that she remained protected, but the cost of being shielded from the world was already coming due. On some level Beans understood there was a chance she’d never see them again. Parting with a few feathers to help her remember them was a small price to pay compared to the one she was paying now.

Sensing the conversation was stalling again, Julip changed the subject. “You throw a nasty right hook, by the way.”

She cocked a brow at her. “Yeah?”

Julip smirked despite herself. “Yeah. Back when I was still in training, I took a few good hits. Still, I can’t remember the last time anyone gave me a nap.”

“You were asking for it.”

She watched Julip stare down at the passing rail, thoughtfully chewing the inside of her lip as their hooves beat out a slow rhythm.

“My mom always used to say that my mouth would get me into trouble,” she chuckled, looking up at Aurora to gauge her reaction.

Her right eye was still a swollen mess but the worst of it had begun to subside. Still, the deep purple bruise was visible even beneath her coat. It would be days before the shadow of that wound started to fade. Despite her feelings toward what Julip represented, she couldn’t help but feel a touch of guilt upon seeing the damage she’d inflicted up close.

“Force of habit, I guess.” Julip shrugged and stared ahead. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the shit I’ve been putting you through.”

Not an eloquent apology, but it was something.

Aurora blew out a sigh. “Ginger told me what you told her on the stairs. About how you don’t have a choice except to do what they say. I’m guessing it’s not much of a stretch to assume that can get stressful.”

Julip blinked, then nodded. “We have high standards for loyalty.”

“The Enclave sounds a lot like how Roach described living in a changeling hive. Do exactly as you're ordered, question nothing…” She shook her head, watching Roach as he trotted back to them after scouting out the next bend in the tracks. “Did you know it would be like that before you joined?”

“Everyone does,” she answered, not without a bit of defensiveness in her tone. Before her temper could flare again, Julip stopped herself and started over. “It’s part of the reason why so many pegasi join in the first place. It’s why I joined.”

“You wanted to take orders for the rest of your life?”

Julip winced. “It’s not that. It’s…”

“Hard to explain?”

“To a Stable dweller? Very.” She chuckled, then grew subdued. “Look at it like this. Up here in the wasteland, a pony needs to sleep with one eye open or risk waking up with their throat slit. Food, water, weapons, shelter… if you have it, you’re a target, and I’m probably not shocking you by saying there’s not enough to go around for everyone. It’s been like that ever since the bombs fell and until someone takes the reins, it’s not going to change.

“Even in New Canterlot a pony is lucky to make it to thirty before someone finds a reason to put them down. For pegasi, at least, the Enclave is an oasis. There’s a routine, and order, security… it’s how the world used to be way back when. I can sit down in any bar in New Canterlot and know that every pony in a black uniform has my back, no questions asked. Every one of us has sweat and bled for the Enclave. You can’t find that anywhere else in Equestria.”

Aurora wanted to point out that the Steel Rangers likely told themselves the same story, but she thought better about drawing that comparison aloud.

“They’re my family.”

She chewed on that for a bit. “Can I ask you a question that might piss you off?”

“Let me guess,” Julip said, hopping up onto the rusted rail and holding her balance as she walked. “Why can my family lie to me, but I can’t lie to them?”

Aurora closed her mouth and shrugged.

“Been thinking about that one myself, lately.” She wobbled and pitched her left wing skyward to correct her balance. “Part of me has to believe there’s a reason. Like when you’re at the market with your mom and you see a pony pushing a needle into his eyeball. Sometimes it’s better to tell that filly he’s taking medicine so he’ll see better instead of saying he’s a fucking degenerate junkie who can’t find a good vein or the brains to do that shit in whatever gutter he--”

Julip stopped, shut her eyes, and pressed her lips into a hard line. A moment later she opened them again and hopped off the rail, her ears flat with embarrassment. “Sorry. Old baggage.”

They rejoined Roach just in time for him to catch the tail end of their chat. He pulled in behind them without missing a beat.

“Who’re you calling old?” he rumbled at Julip.

It was an opportunity to break away from a topic that had become uncomfortable, and Julip practically lunged for it. “Never thought I’d be asked that by a certified antique,” she jabbed.

Aurora coughed out a laugh and risked a look back at Roach, who was doing his best to appear wounded.

“You kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Julip snorted at him. “My mother drank enough bourbon in a day to give me alcohol poisoning through osmosis alone.”

The casual observation hit them like a wet blanket, threatening to kill the repartee before it grew legs. As if on cue, Ginger drew up from behind Roach and threw a little gas on the sputtering fire.

“Darling,” she began, earning a quiet groan from the group, “having a lush for a mother is nothing. Mine bought and sold ponies so she could afford to buy silver wall sconces, and she added their foals to the house staff so she had someone around to polish them.”

Aurora let out a low whistle.

Roach simply laughed, drawing eyebrows from the two mares.

“Where do I even begin?” he rasped. “My mother filled a hive with thousands of her nameless children, sent us out to abduct and replace ponies to harvest the emotional magic of their loved ones, and deliver that magic back home where most of us were forced to breed her so she could lay more drones. And when that wasn’t enough to satisfy her ambition, she personally abducted a betrothed alicorn princess in a half-baked gambit to marry herself into Equestrian royalty… because somehow she thought doing so would allow her to take control of Equestria.”

Then, as if an afterthought he added, “Oh, and thanks to her failed coup, Equestria saved one balefire bomb for the hive. Because if dear old mom was going to be good at anything, it was being her own pest control.”

The three of them stared at him in collective silence, baffled by the easy grin he shot them in return.

“Do I win?”

Slowly, Julip nodded. “Yeah. Holy shit, Roach. You win. I don’t think Freckles is going to be able to top that.”

Several seconds passed before Aurora realized Julip was referring to her. When it clicked, she had to forcibly stop herself from cracking the mare across the shoulder with her wing.

“They’re called dapples,” she asserted, and her frown deepened when Julip stifled a giggle. “And anyway, my mom was awesome. She’s the whole reason I got into fixing things in the first place.”

She smiled at her hooves at the welcome memories. “Mom was always there to help. I think you guys would have liked her.”

A moment passed. Then another.

“So,” Julip said, “that makes you the Beans of the group.”

“The what.”

Julip counted each item off on her feathers. “For one, you were both technically raised inside of a mountain. You both had plenty of water, food, neither of you have seen much of Equestria and you both had tinkerers for parents, so… you’re the Beans.”

The similarities were a little unsettling, but as Roach and Ginger chuckled at the comparison and she gave it some thought, it occurred to her that as far as jokes went it certainly struck at the root of their similarities. Maybe that was why she got along so well with the filly where other foals made her feel like bolting away to save her sanity. Beans did, in a way, reflect a lot of her own upbringing.

She smiled.

“Okay. Fine then,” she chuckled, embracing the absurdity of this day so far. “I’m the Beans.”

Sunset, or what amounted to a sunset in a world where the clouds never parted, came faster than felt entirely fair. Knowing she had slept the first half of the day away with Ginger didn’t do much to ease her disappointment at seeing the overcast sink into deeper shades of grey. Her body was awake and despite the miles she knew she could put it through before calling it a night, the hazy beacon of the sun descended behind the western slopes anyway.

They’d made good time. The mountain Meridian, Briar and Beans called home was little more than a hazy notch in the clouds among many more peaks like it. The tracks continued to lead them north until, inevitably, they met up with the broken highway they’d left behind and bent parallel with it, separated only by a deep drainage ditch covered in a thin layer of weeds. Wherever the road was going, the rails were evidently going to follow it for the foreseeable future. They crossed the ditch one by one, leaving the rails to meander on to its next stop while a comparably comfortable strip of shattered asphalt promised a straight shot to Fillydelphia.

But that would have to wait until tomorrow.

The first wagon to pass them on the old road did so without making any explicit threats, but the heavily armed guards trotting on either edge of its lantern light made it clear they were prepared to defend themselves if necessary. The wagon’s canvas cover had been whitewashed just as the ones back in Blinder’s Bluff had been, until only the faintest shadow of Flim & Flam Mercantile pinstriping could be seen beneath. It bounced and swayed over the cracked roadway without incident, though a few splintered bullet holes dotted across the back flap hinted that hadn’t been the case with all their encounters.

“We should look for a place to make camp,” Ginger murmured.

Roach grunted his agreement, his eyes lifting to the rocky escarpments that overlooked the roadway. “Might be an idea to set up on one of those ledges. Aurora and Julip could fly us up.”

Aurora peered up at the quickly darkening sky, then at the jagged ledges that build up the mountainsides like gargantuan steps. Decades of unchecked erosion and smaller rockslides had built up no small amount of debris along the edges of the roadway that in turn created more than a few loose pathways up the slope that a determined pony could use to climb up to the lower ledges, but there would be no way of climbing it quietly.

The thought of sleeping beyond the reach of an unwelcome ambush did have a certain ring to it.

She glanced back at Julip. “Think your wing can handle a short flight?”

Julip nodded. “I’ll tough it out.”

The decision was made unanimous when Ginger volunteered herself to be ferried up the slope by Julip, leaving the heavier load to be carried by Aurora. Once they were assured that no travellers were within sight, two sets of wings dislodged a wide plume of wasteland dust from the asphalt and lifted toward the craggy southern slope.

They settled on a wide table of granite a good hundred feet up the mountainside. A narrower ledge - small for several thousand tons of exposed bedrock, that is - hung just a few feet higher upslope creating something akin to a roof over a portion of their stone campsite. Roach determined with a stallionesque stamp of his hoof that nothing short of another apocalypse would dislodge the slab, let alone the weight of four ponies, and after some tenuous steps near the precipice the other three were forced to agree. Despite the height and the steady westerly breeze that cut between the stones, it beat camping anywhere near what Aurora considered “grabbing” range of the freakishly mutated centaurs that descended on them two nights prior.

Of course, their proximity to the road below also meant there would be no fire tonight.

Aurora shuffled off her saddlebags beneath the shelter of the overhang and set her rifle beside them. With the unofficial center of their camp declared, Julip slid her mailbag against the pile and blew out a tired breath as she flopped onto her side to use it as a makeshift pillow.

Aurora sat on the other side of the bag pile and was quickly joined by Ginger, who noted Julip’s audible exhaustion with a questioning smirk.

“No Rebound tonight?”

Julip draped a foreleg over her eyes, winced when it touched her softening bruise, and grunted. “Still coming off what I took the night before last. Hate that stuff.”

Aurora leaned back against the cool granite wall, allowing the chill to sooth her aching shoulders. “We’ll save some coffee for you in the morning.”

“‘Preciate it. Tell the ghost pony I said hi.”

She glanced at Ginger, that last bit intended for her. “Ghost pony?”

Ginger rolled her eyes. “The Tantabus. It’s a long story. Give me a wing?”

They adjusted themselves so Aurora could slide her feathers behind Ginger’s back, leaving the last half of her wingspan to be used as a blanket. She cast a quick glance to Roach who had parked himself just close enough to the ledge to keep an eye on the road. The answer was obvious, but it felt impolite not to at least ask the question.

“You taking the watch tonight?”

He nodded. “Gonna keep an eye on the road, yeah. I’ll give you the traffic report in the morning.”

She frowned. “The what?”

Roach just waved her off with a touch of a smile and turned his attention back to the road.

Settling back against the stone, Aurora wrapped Ginger a little tighter in her feathers before relaxing to see if sleep might come with the quiet. She closed her eyes. The mountain air was cool and crisp, softening her tired muscles and filling her lungs with the complicated but not unpleasant scent of unfiltered air. She felt Ginger tuck in against her, another sign that she hadn’t done damage to their strengthening relationship that time couldn’t heal, and yet despite the deep comfort she felt in that moment she remained awake.

She opened her eyes and let out a frustrated sigh. “Worth a shot,” she muttered.

Ginger hummed a laugh against her shoulder, then lit her horn. An identical glow formed beneath the drape of Aurora’s feathers, and for a brief moment her eyes went wide.

A click, followed by her unclasped Pip-Buck floating out from under her wing gave her a welcome burst of relief. Ginger pecked Aurora on the neck and dropped the device around her foreleg. “Mind out of the gutter,” she murmured. “Let’s occupy it by planning the next leg of our journey.”

A scant few feet away, Roach gently cleared his throat to remind them he was very much within earshot.

Aurora flushed and secured the clasp around her foreleg, ignoring the little shake of Ginger’s silent giggling. With her free wing, she ticked the screen’s brightness down until Stable-Tec’s neon green mascot was reduced to something below blinding. Then a thought occurred to her, and she immediately felt dizzy.

“Oh no.”

She started punching keys on her Pip-Buck, trying to force it through its slow boot process.

“No, no, no…”

Ginger tensed. “What’s wrong?”

When was the last time she’d responded to him? A day ago? No, longer than that. Two days at least. She’d been putting it off, not wanting to acknowledge their ridiculous agreement. Not after his underling Ironshod went out of his way to make a copy of her Pip-Buck.

She spat a frustrated curse as the Stable-Tec mascot disappeared from the screen, leaving the device to chitter as it gradually spun up its software.

Julip groaned. “And I’m awake. What’s going on?”

Roach sat down at her hooves with equal concern. “Aurora.”

She cursed again, giving Julip a run for her money and nearly breathless as she spoke. “I forgot to check in with Coldbrook.”

Feathers mashed against the device’s clunky inputs the moment her menus glowed to life. The screen shuddered as it dove toward her inbox. Four messages shimmered at the top of the list. All of them from Coldbrook.

“Fuck.”

She opened the newest message. It was not cordial in tone or nature.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 6
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Elder Coldbrook
Subject: Final Warning
04/12/1297

Good evening, Aurora.

My expectations were simple: a daily report on your progress as assurance that you are continuing to cooperate per the terms of our initial agreement. As of the time which I write this message, it has been two consecutive days since your last contact. My technicians assure me that your Pip-Buck has been activated on a multiple of instances during that time which leads me to believe you are either unwilling or incapable of making contact.

Whatever the case may be, your inaction leaves me to assume you have broken our arrangement or have been claimed by the wastes. On the slim chance that you do read this message, be aware that I have sent instructions for my Rangers to begin excavation of your Stable. If what you’ve said regarding the decline of your generator is true, then I think you would agree this is for the best. Your continued silence has only served to demonstrate that the dwellers you’ve abandoned are better off in the care of the Steel Rangers.

Sincerely,
Elder Coldbrook

Her heart was pulsing in her throat so hard that she felt like gagging. She clamored to her hooves, kicking pebbles across the ledge as her shaking limbs worked to keep up with her spiralling thoughts.

Excavating.

They were digging toward her home.

“I… I gotta go back,” she stammered as she scooped up her saddlebags.

Roach appeared beside her and placed a cracked hoof on her wing, staying it before she could shoulder her rifle. “You need to slow down and think.”

“What’s there to think about?” The words came out harsher than she intended, but right now wasn’t the time for debate. She lifted her Pip-Buck so that Roach could see the words still glowing on its screen. “Coldbrook sent this hours ago!”

Julip rolled onto her hooves and stood. “Wait, Coldbrook? You mean eastern division commander of the Steel Rangers Coldbrook?”

Aurora hesitated, then nodded before trying to sidestep Roach.

He blocked her way and put a hoof firmly against her chest. “Aurora, it’s a twelve hour straight flight back to Stable 10. You don’t have that kind of endurance, and even if you did what would you do once you got there?”

She swiped his hoof away. “I’ll figure it out.”

“You’ll get yourself killed!”

The stinging bolt of anger in his voice didn’t stop her so much as the brief but dim crackle of green energy from his fissured horn. Her Pip-Buck chattered in response. After a moment of shocked hesitation, she checked the device. The dose had been low, but not negligible. They would need to start looking for Rad-Away again.

Behind her, Ginger spoke with a mercifully calmer voice. “Come here and sit down. Let’s figure this out together.”

Reluctantly, almost grudgingly, she turned away from Roach and returned to the back of the overhang. She felt like an overcharged capacitor with nowhere to send the excess current. Too much… stuff kept happening since the day she followed Roach out into the wasteland.

She dropped her bags besides Julip’s and let her butt drag against the stone wall until it hit the ground.

“Alright,” she said, leaning forward against her bent knees. “I’m not thinking straight, so someone help me out. What are our options?”

One after another they sat down around her. Ginger on her left, Roach in front and Julip, surprisingly, on her right. She offered a miserable smile to their collective gazes despite still wanting to push her way through them and chase the sun west until she was nose to nose with the stallion bent on gutting her home and leaving the remains for the scavengers.

“You can contact Coldbrook,” Ginger suggested. “Tell him what happened, and that you still plan to abide by the agreement.”

Aurora glanced at her Pip-Buck. His words glowed back at her with a finality that felt irreversible.

“Or,” Julip piped up, “you could build a time machine and stop yourselves from making a deal with the Steel Rangers in the first place. Why didn’t any of you tell me you were working for a fucking megalomaniac like Elder Coldbrook?”

She shot Julip a cold glare. “Same reason I’m not telling him we’re being helped by the Enclave. It’s complicated.”

Julip pursed her lips and exhaled from her nose. “Alright, fair. Can you… tell me what’s going on? Maybe I can help.”

Aurora glanced between Ginger and Roach. Neither offered an objection, though their discomfort was visible.

“Look, I’ve already put together enough pieces to know your Stable’s generator is on the fritz and that someone, I’m guessing Coldbrook, tried to convince you he had the ignition talisman you need to fix it by sending you a photo of a shield talisman. Obviously he’s not playing straight with you, so what’s the harm in telling me how else he’s trying to screw you over?”

Aurora watched her for several seconds before coming to the conclusion that she was probably right. The Enclave as an organization definitely seemed like a pack of self-aggrandizing sycophants, but Julip had already shown enough cracks in her armor for Aurora to suspect she might not be completely awful.

Hesitantly, she told her.

At first she only gave basic details. How they had received a chilly welcome at the gates of Blinder’s Bluff, followed by Ginger’s abduction by a stallion whose name they never got. How Ironshod had resisted letting Aurora leave to pursue her at first only to have a burst of inspiration that resulted in her surrendering her belongings, including her Pip-Buck which was quickly used to program a functional clone within Stable 6’s limited systems. She set the framework so that Julip would understand the leverage Coldbrook ultimately had over her when she returned to the Bluff with Ginger safely in tow.

And despite her intentions to keep key details from Julip, she realized the holes in her story were glaring without them. She relented and explained the deal they had struck with Coldbrook. That in exchange for information leading to SOLUS, the shadowy project that Autumn Song had imprisoned Julip for the sole purpose of discovering, Coldbrook would refrain from unearthing her Stable and forcing his way inside.

Julip lifted her eyebrows and puffed out a long breath. “And he anticipated that I would make contact with you? How?”

“Not you specifically, but someone from the Enclave, yes.” Aurora turned up her wings in a vague shrug. “I told him about the spritebot I used to ask the Enclave for help. It wasn’t a stretch to assume your people would come looking for me.”

“And now he thinks he has fucking salvage rights to an operable Stable.” Julip licked her lips and mouthed a choice bit of additional profanity too quiet to hear. “That’s not…”

She watched as Julip pressed mouth shut and paused to gather herself. The Enclave mare wasn’t just angry. She was indignant, like Coldbrook had violated some unspoken code.

“That’s not how it works. We don’t open Stables before they reach their mode of failure.” She gestured sharply with one wing, as if she were lecturing Coldbrook in person. “We’re supposed to wait.”

Aurora had more than a few questions about what Julip was telling them, but now wasn’t the time to resume dissecting the Enclave’s various rules and justifications. Coldbrook had already pulled the trigger and Stable 10 had no idea the bullet had begun to move.

“Well, he’s doing it anyway.” She touched Ginger’s leg. “And I don’t think a strongly worded letter is going to convince him to stop.”

“He’s been looking for an excuse since the beginning,” Roach agreed. “He’s not the type of stallion to turn down the Rangers’ first chance at beating the Enclave to an intact Stable on honor alone.”

Aurora’s eyes slid toward her rifle. “We could shoot him.”

“Aurora.”

She winced at the warning in Ginger’s voice. “I know, I know. Just feels good to say.”

“I don’t doubt it.” She bumped Aurora’s shoulder with her own, stirring a weak smile out of her. “Hypothetically speaking, I wouldn’t mind relieving him of those big black nuts of his.”

She snorted. “What is it with you and gelding stallions?”

Ginger shrugged. “Family tradition.”

She caught Roach’s shudder in the edge of her vision and let herself grin a little more freely. It didn’t last, but it helped her think a little more sanely to let off a little steam. “Alright. I’ll still send him a message, but he’s already shown us with that talisman gambit that he’s not a stallion of his word. Sledge is in no position to mount a defense. Not if Coldbrook knows a way to get past the door. So what do we do?”

A long silence slid between them with the late evening breeze. Aurora didn’t want to say it, but Coldbrook had all the cards and owned the machinery that printed them. They were so little a threat to him, she was surprised he’d gone through the formality of telling them he was breaking faith in the first place.

Roach cleared his throat, shifting uncomfortably on his haunches as all eyes turned to him. “What about…”

He tilted his head toward Julip who suddenly looked as guilty as a foal caught with their wing in the cookie jar.

“...her people?”

Aurora shook her head, hard. “No. I mean, no offense Julip, but I’m not about to trade a debt with the Rangers in for a debt with the Enclave.”

A beat passed before Julip responded. “Technically, there wouldn’t be a debt.”

She wrinkled her nose with suspicion.

Julip shrugged at the floor, the gears already spinning in her head. “We’ve been at war with the Steel Rangers since there were Steel Rangers. Plus… Stable 10 is clearly special to Minister Primrose.”

Aurora frowned. “I thought you were helping me because I’m a ‘pureblood.’”

“Yes,” Julip said, then winced a little. “And no. She also asked me to find out why you’d left the Stable in the first place.”

“Well that was considerate of her. Not surprising, I guess. They’re all pegasi down there.” She thumped her head against the cool stone. “The Enclave loves their pegasi. I assume she had to send you because your people couldn’t monitor my Stable remotely.”

It was Julip’s turn to frown. “I never said that.”

She eyed the Enclave mare and took her discomfort as enough confirmation for the time being. They needed to make a decision. “What happens if I say I do want their help? What are they going to do?”

“Do I look like I work in Ops?” Seeing that wasn’t a welcome answer, she rephrased it. “Okay… well, if I had to guess, the first step would be to disrupt whatever it is Elder Coldbrook is doing to have the Stable ‘excavated.’ They’re not sitting on a fleet of prewar construction equipment so I’d assume they’re doing it manually. Probably with power armor.”

“He did say a few days earlier that he was positioning a company of Rangers at the mountain,” Roach rumbled. “Could be he already has armor on site.”

“Given the Stable’s potential value, he’ll want to protect it.” They watched Julip lean over and fish an apple out of her bag. “Might explain why the Rangers haven’t responded to that mess you three caused back in Kiln. If I were Coldbrook, I’d recall every pony with a mobile suit to Foal Mountain. Fortify the place before anyone else gets wind of what they’re doing, which is ironic because a big fucking troop movement is exactly the kind of thing that the Enclave will notice.”

Julip looked at the apple, hesitated, then set it back into her bag. She scratched at the corner of her muzzle, her gaze distant as she pondered. “I don’t think it matters if you ask for our help or not. That much activity? Scouts are going to report that if they haven’t already.”

She looked humbled by the scope of the mess she found herself in. “Primrose might actually have to fight for that territory just to keep the Rangers out of your Stable.”

Aurora knit her brow. “You’re saying there’s going to be killing.”

“Obviously. The Rangers won’t back off if we throw water balloons.”

Something about that bothered her. Coldbrook was the enemy here, not the soldiers who took his orders. One of those soldiers, Knight Latch, had been responsible for lending her the compass that allowed her to navigate her way to the array. She imagined there were ponies just like him within the Enclave. Like Julip, who signed on for the three square meals and a safe place to sleep.

She wanted to help her Stable survive, not force ponies to kill each other over it.

“Let me see your Pip-Buck.”

Aurora looked at the device, then Julip, confused. “Why?”

“It’s a Model 3000, right? It’ll have an emergency transponder built into it. I can use it to contact the Enclave.”

That didn’t track at all. “This only receives signals. It doesn’t transmit them.”

“I didn’t say transmitter. I said transponder.” Julip waited for her to understand, but when she continued to stare blankly at the mare she let out a groan and moved their bags out of the way and held out an open wing. “Look, you can let me show you or we can wait for whenever the Enclave figures out what Coldbrook is up to on their own time. Either way, we’re getting involved and I think you’d prefer to be able to set the guidelines before Pri--”

She hesitated. “Before someone else does.”

Aurora looked to Ginger, then Roach. “Objections?”

“I’ll support whatever you think is best,” Ginger murmured.

Roach simply nodded. “The enemy of my enemy, and all that. I don’t see another option.”

Swallowing, she turned to Julip. “Alright. What do I have to do?”

Julip shuffled closer to her and cupped the Pip-Buck in her wing. Turning Aurora’s leg this way and that, she seemed to confirm to herself that this was the correct device.

“Technically speaking? We need your Pip-Buck to think you’re dead.”

“Don’t bend that rail,” Roach warned.

Julip rolled her eyes and kept twisting. “I’m not going to bend the rail.”

She spared a glance at the partially disassembled assault shotgun lying on the granite between them and quietly hoped the steel mechanism he used to extend and retract the weapon from his foreleg could withstand a little torque. It was hard to tell if it was starting to deform in the dim green light of Aurora’s Pip-Buck, but what was he expecting from what by all accounts looked like a slider taken off a dresser drawer?

“Okay,” Aurora grunted. “Any more and my freaking leg is going to come off. When’s this transponder supposed to go off?”

Julip gave the tourniquet another twist, earning a hiss of discomfort from Aurora, and kept the rail from unwinding itself with her free wing. She used the other to tip her Pip-Buck up so she could read what its health diagnostic was reporting. The results were encouraging.

“It thinks you’re having a stroke.”

Aurora groaned. “Yippee.”

She ignored the complaint, her attention focused solely on the Pip-Buck as it detected the sharp spike in blood pressure and the precipitous weakening of her pulse. Not too surprising given her circulation was being pinched off, but the Pip-Buck didn’t know that. As far as it was concerned, Aurora had just flatlined.

It immediately belted a piercing shriek that sent hooves flying toward ears.

Julip pinned hers back and struggled to get Aurora’s hoof away from her head, wrapping the warbling device into the crux of her leg in an attempt to muffle the high pitched wailing. She only managed to dampen it to the level of a grievously wounded radrat.

“So much for camping undetected!” Roach shouted. “Half the highway’s going to hear that!”

“Shut it off!” Ginger agreed.

“I don’t know how to change the volume, I’ve never used these things before! I’ve only ever recovered them!”

A confusing shoving sensation dug into her shoulder and she realized Aurora was pushing her off the device in an attempt to get at the controls. She let go, blasting the four of them with another unfiltered electric keening until its owner flicked through the menus and dropped the volume to zero.

The last echoes bounced back and forth across the chasm like a struck bell.

“Well, everybody in Equestria knows I’m dead now,” the Stable mare complained in a lingering half-shout. “What good was that supposed to do?”

Julip winced at the onset of a fresh earache and flipped a disgusted wing at the Pip-Buck. “It’s supposed to broadcast a distress signal, not deafen us.”

“Well it’s doing something,” Aurora muttered. “I’ve never seen that icon before.”

Grabbing Aurora’s leg again, she turned the screen to where she could see. A tiny depiction of a domed ambulance light flashed on and off in the corner of the screen.

“Nothing to do now except wait and hope our hearing comes back.” She let go of Aurora’s leg and left her to unwind the partially dislodged tourniquet. “The rail’s not bent, by the way.”

Roach hummed, taking the strip of steel back from Aurora to inspect it for himself before passing it off to Ginger. Julip didn’t want to know how long it took him to assemble the contraption without the aid of a unicorn or pegasus’s finer manipulation skills.

No raiders came rushing to climb the hillside, nor did any wasteland mutants come sniffing around for the source of the piercing noise. Anything that had been close enough to hear it, and given the volume it was probably a lot of anythings, hadn’t been close enough to pinpoint their particular ledge. Nearly an hour passed with nothing to show for the commotion beyond four headaches and a whole lot of quiet.

Then, finally, the sound of wings.

The others went on alert when the retrieval team made its first pass. They streaked past the ledge like pale ghosts passing through the dim light of Aurora’s Pip-Buck, and the mare’s wings slowly parted with the unfiltered instinct of trepidation. Julip glanced at them to make sure Aurora and Roach weren’t going for their weapons. They weren’t, not technically, but Aurora had shuffled within easy reach of her rifle and the muzzle of Roach’s shotgun touched flat against the granite, its rail unlocked.

“Hey,” she hissed. “Relax.”

Easier said than done. Even Ginger’s horn had taken on the faint glow of magic. As the shapes of pegasi slid past the ledge again, this time slowly enough for them to plainly see them staring back at them, Julip just hoped the unicorn was conjuring a shield and not some sort of magical beam cannon.

About the same time that she expected the third pass, two sets of hooves clicked quietly onto the rock overhang above their heads and a thin mist of dust slid down into their light.

“Ident.”

She grimaced. “Can we skip--”

The stallion’s voice cut her off. “Ident.”

“Corporal Mint Julip, one-nine-three-six-four.”

She puffed her chest out a little and flicked her eyes at the others with a touch of embarrassment. She hated using her full name. Understandably, they were too preoccupied with the Enclave patrol standing six feet above their heads to care about anything else.

They waited while the stallion radioed her details back to New Canterlot for confirmation.

“You’re green, corporal.”

She rolled her eyes. "No shit."

A pause. Then, "Good to hear going bookworm hasn't made you soft, Barrack Bitch."

She blinked, realizing she could place his voice. Her heart swelled. "Gryphonshit. Dancer, is that you?"

The stallion dropped from the overhang, pumped his wings and planted his lavender hooves on the ledge in front of her. His wingmate, a midnight black stallion she didn't recognize dropped to the granite beside him. Both wore the Enclave's standard issue field uniform amounting to a dusty brown top that doubled as lightweight body armor. Identical automatic rifles hung from straps over their shoulders, tactically positioned to remain within easy reach of their feathers.

She nearly knocked him off the ledge with the force of her tackling hug, but he was ready for her and squeezed back just as hard.

"I haven't seen you in years! They said you were assigned duty out west!"

Dancer gently nudged her back a step. "I was, but that was before I put in for a tour on coastal recon." His eyes drifted past her to the others. "Hate to be rude, but that's her isn't it?"

She let him go and followed his gaze. Aurora was regarding Dancer with a healthy amount of suspicion.

"You know me?" she asked.

He see-sawed a wing. "Of you. All the patrols out here were briefed about a pureblood pegasus traveling under guard. Would have never guessed BB was your escort." He glanced at Ginger and Roach with markedly less enthusiasm, but he kept his tone mostly neutral. "Hello."

Ginger said nothing. Roach grunted.

Sensing the tension, Julip turned to the unfamiliar black stallion and extended a wing. "Just the two of you, then?"

The stallion shook her wing and nodded, his eyes on her muzzle.

"That's Corporal Chops. He doesn't talk, but he can read lips just fine."

Chops nodded again, then lifted a quick feather to Dancer and began using both wings to form a complicated series of strange gestures. Julip looked to Dancer for clarification but his attention was on Chops' feathers.

"He wants to know if you're free for a smoke and a poke tomorr--"

Chops smacked him on the shoulder with the back of his wing and stared daggers at him.

"Okay, okay," he laughed. "He asked if you're in trouble."

Julip quirked her lip. "Lot of flapping just to ask that."

He showed her the back of his wing and lifted a single feather in reply.

"Well that I understood."

Aurora stepped forward from the wall. "We need to send a message to your superiors."

Dancer looked at her and smiled. "I have a lot of superiors."

"She means Minister Primrose," Julip clarified

That startled bewildered looks from both stallions. Dancer frowned at the others as if suddenly grasping the gravity of the mission she'd been assigned.

"Julip," he chuckled, "we came prepared to recover a Pip-Buck, not patch you through to the minister's secure line. You'd need a--"

"--Spritebot, I know. Can you recall one here? It's important."

Dancer looked dubious but didn't argue. He made a brief gesture with his wing, and Chops tugged a standard issue transceiver out of his uniform. "Like you said, it's above my pay grade. It'll be a hot minute before it gets here though. Traders have been getting feisty lately and we've had to pull the bots away from the roads to keep them out of the crossfire."

At the mention of traders, Chops glanced down at the road below and frowned. He set his feathers on Dancer’s shoulder and gave him a subtle shake, tipping his nose west. Dance followed his indication and hummed.

“Speaking of which,” he chuckled, “would your… assets object to sleeping under a real roof, tonight? It’s promising to be a busy night tonight.”

Julip stepped past Dancer and peered over the ledge. Barely visible in the late evening light, a pair of wagons had encountered one another barely a mile away. Aurora joined her and the others followed suit as they watched what appeared to be an argument unfolding between the drivers of the wagon approaching and the one departing. The latter had pulled into the middle of the road, blocking the pass. They were too far away to hear the argument, but as two ponies appeared to bolt to the back of the blocked wagon it was clear what was about to happen.

A yellow flash stuttered from the blocked wagon, the delayed reports of the gunshots crackling in like popcorn. The sound of gunshots continued to spill over the ledge for several seconds until, as quickly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. They watched as the ponies who had been trying to pull their cargo west were unceremoniously dumped along the side of the road and the survivors from the attacking wagon began to hitch pullers to the front of their prize.

Dancer just shook his head and smiled. “Like I said. Feisty.”

A part of her almost chuckled at yet more evidence that the Steel Rangers, for all the territory they boasted about taking from the Enclave, couldn’t effectively prevent skirmishes along their own trade routes. A blatant gunfight like that would never go unpunished within the Enclave’s borders.

But something stopped her. Beside her, Aurora looked deeply disturbed by what she’d seen. The question of why was plastered across her face so thickly that she might as well be screaming it. Ginger and Roach looked more disappointed than surprised. A benefit, maybe, of prior exposure.

She tapped Aurora on the leg. “Turn off your Pip-Buck before they see it.”

Aurora swallowed, nodded and doused the screen. With nothing left to light the ledge, the six of them were little more than silhouettes. She lowered her voice to a whisper as one of the survivors below went to work looting bodies. “Where are you operating out of?”

She wasn’t surprised when Dancer looked down the line at Aurora and the others, but the unfiltered mistrust in his voice touched a nerve she didn’t realize she had. “That’s off-limits for present company. We’re not headed there, anyway. Chops and I have a temporary camp set up about sixty miles east.”

Ginger spoke up with suspicion of her own. “And this camp is safe?”

“Safe enough.”

Julip bristled as Dancer’s tone shifted further.

“You should be thankful I’m offering and not ordering. If you want to take your chances on a rock, that’s your business, but I can tell you now a spritebot is going to have some trouble travelling that road without being shot for scrap.” He turned his attention back to Julip. “We’ve got an old hunting shack to ourselves far enough off the road for a bot to rendezvous more quickly, anyway. It’s your mission, BB, but the offer’s open.”

She tapped the edge of her hoof against the granite, not at all comfortable with the irritated stares she could feel radiating off the others. “It’s just Julip, actually. And it’s not my decision, it’s hers.”

Dancer’s frown grew more complex as he watched her gesture to Aurora but he didn’t object. Still, Julip could sense his unsubtle disappointment. Not because she was putting Aurora on the spot - a position that she clearly would have rather had time to discuss in private - but because she’d asked her at all.

“It’s worth mentioning we have medical supplies,” he added, giving Julip’s ribs a thump with his wing. “You know you’re supposed to land on your hooves, not your face, right?”

She feigned a smile, suddenly conscious of her black eye. She was relieved when Aurora saved her from having to explain herself.

“Do you have Rad-Away?”

Dancer looked up at her and nodded. “One dose for Chops and I, sure.”

After a moment, she nodded. “Fine. On the condition that you give us both doses and treat Julip’s injuries. No cost.”

His smile grew lopsided. “There’s always a cost.”

“Not tonight there isn’t.”

Julip watched her. In the near black of night, all the nervous little quirks that gave her away were invisible to Dancer. She was pulling the pureblood card on him and if Julip had to guess, she was probably pissing herself while doing it.

Dancer invited the silence that followed with some of his own, waiting for her to say something more that he could exploit. He’d always been a clever stallion ever since she first met him on their first day of training, and he had an ear for loopholes. Probably why he got partnered with a mute. More time for him to play a conversation to his advantage.

For her part, Aurora said nothing more. Julip couldn’t help but approve.

Dancer caved, offering a shrug as his answer. “Okay. On the house. But the unicorns sleep outside.”

Roach was quick to take offense. “I’m not--”

“Deal.” Julip looked at him and hoped he could see the apology on her face as she cut him off. If there was one thing she could bet on from any Enclave soldier, it was that they wouldn’t tolerate a whiff of challenge from a ghoul, let alone a changeling ghoul. “Meds, shelter and access to a spritebot. That’s all we need.”

Dancer looked between the four of them and chuckled as if the tension he’d been dredging up had all been a friendly gag between pals. He clapped Julip on the wing, sending a shock of dull pain shooting through her bruised joint.

“It’s really good to see you again, Julip.” He smiled, then turned to face the ledge. “Let’s see if you can keep up.”

After the first ten miles streaked beneath her in an indistinguishable blur of scrub brush and boulders, Julip gave up trying to keep track of where they were going. Dancer and Chops sliced through the air ahead of them like feathered blades, flying so close to the uneven ground that she could smell the dust kicked up in their wake. She had to squint to keep the wind out of her eyes as she looked to her left where Aurora pumped her wings to keep up. Roach clung to her back like a wet cat, practically putting her in a chokehold. The sight might have been funny if it weren’t for the clear discomfort in the changeling’s eyes. Aside from the brief trip to and from Stable 1, it had been more than two centuries since he’d last flown.

She grimaced as Ginger’s grip tightened around her shoulders, irritating the inflamed muscles of her injured wing as her weight pressed harder against the joint. More and more, this felt like a stunt. Like Dancer was forcing her and Aurora to keep pace just for the sake of scaring the shit out of the non-pegasi in their company. She scoffed. Who was she kidding? That was exactly what he was doing.

Leaning forward, Ginger had to shout into the wind for Julip to hear her. “How is your wing?”

“Hurts like… a bitch!” she panted back. Then, looking back and seeing Ginger’s concern, she added, “I’ll manage!”

Ginger pursed her lips, no doubt able to feel the discomforting twitches and jerks spurred by Julip’s compounded injuries over the last several days. “I have questions about your friends before we land.”

With the wind whipping by so harshly, there was no chance of the stallions overhearing. Still, Julip took a moment before replying. “I only know Dancer. Never met the mute before.”

“Do you trust him?”

She tilted her head in a sort of shrug. “We spent our first three years in the same unit before splitting up. Yeah, I trust him.”

“Do you trust him not to hurt us?” she clarified.

The question gave her pause. Dancer had given her a cool reception as soon as he confirmed the company she was keeping. It wasn’t as if she’d had a choice, but it hadn’t surprised her either. If their roles were switched, she probably would have reacted the same way. She had, in fact, but that was before she’d gotten to know them a little.

Sure they weren’t pegasi, but Ginger and Roach weren’t that bad to be around.

“I don’t think he’d go that far. If he’s heard about Aurora, then he probably knows enough about my assignment to realize doing anything to you or Roach could spoil the mission.” She pumped her wings several times, drawing even with and gradually sliding just ahead of Aurora. “But he’s not letting that stop him from being a dick. Just keep your guard up and try not to piss him off.”

She felt rather than heard Ginger’s noncommittal grunt, but it was the only advice she could think to give.

They’d been airborne for hardly half an hour when the two stallions pulled up without warning and flared their wings, braking so abruptly that Julip and Aurora barely had time to bank away as they shot by inches above their heads. She fumed, letting out a quiet groan as her wing trembled against the hard bank she was forced to inflict on it, and backtracked toward a dilapidated shack settled amongst a tangle of overturned trees.

Like so much of Equestria in the old days, a forest had once grown here. The ground was uneven and pitted where stumps had been torn free from the soil by some titanic force, leaving fallen timber to settle and dessicate like spilled matchsticks. Julip didn’t need to imagine too hard what had killed the forest. Somewhere not too far away would be a crater, likely forgotten shortly after the target in the mountains was reduced to plasma. If the uprooted trees were any indication, the valleys had spent a brief moment of their ancient existence funnelling the most tornadic winds in Equestria.

She touched down just outside the shack with Aurora not far behind, the pair of them crouching to allow their respective passengers down. Ginger took care not to touch Julip’s throbbing wing as she dropped to the ground, and the unicorn lit her horn to better see the structure Dancer claimed to be his camp.

It wasn’t much to look at. Four walls, one of which had been blown into the wooden structure and later cleared out to make space inside its single room. A potbelly stove, more rust than metal at this point, leaned against one corner while a loose pile of corded wood had been shoved against the other. Neither looked to have seen any use for the better part of a generation.

Chops patted Dancer on the flank, his eyes on the same transceiver from before, and formed a short series of signs with the empty feathers. Then he pointed past Julip and down the valley, see-sawed his wings as if making an estimate, and held up five feathers.

“Spritebot will be here in five minutes or so,” Dancer translated. He stepped up into the shack and gestured at the barren floorboards. He smiled at Aurora, but it faded as his eyes flicked toward Roach. “Welcome to our humble abode. No pets, I’m afraid.”

Julip opened her mouth to shut him up, but she was surprised when Chops thumped his hoof against the metronome depicted on Dancer’s hip. The disapproval on the mute stallion’s face was impossible to mistake in the dim glow of Ginger’s horn, and Dancer held up his wings in mock surrender. He offered no apology and went about prying up a set of loose floorboards as if nothing at all had happened.

Chops dipped his head toward Aurora by way of apology, though the gesture didn’t quite extend to Roach.

“We’ll wait for the spritebot out here,” Aurora said, nodding back.

The subtlety of the gesture was unexpected, especially coming from a mare who had been dead set on pummeling her not very long ago. He wasn’t acknowledging Roach, so she wasn’t accepting the invitation to enter. Julip watched Chops for any sign that he’d taken offense, but the stallion only nodded and motioned toward a fallen log next to the missing wall of the shack.

She changed her mind about the stallions. If Dancer had been paired up with Chops, it was because someone had to have enough sense to keep Dancer from throwing gas on anything that flickered.

Julip kept a close eye on Dancer from outside the shack as he hauled an Enclave issued canvas duffel out of the gap in the floorboards. From inside he withdrew two IV bags of Rad-Away and lobbed them through the open wall to Aurora. She caught them, thankfully, but his carelessness was clearly unappreciated as she gently set them into her saddlebags. Dancer wouldn’t give Aurora the satisfaction of an apology, not unless his career was at stake, and instead he shot Julip a knowing smirk as he lifted a stimpack from the bag.

“Don’t throw that,” she warned.

He snorted, carrying the syringe to her. “What do I look like, a colt? Here.”

She snatched the syringe from his feathers, angry that someone from her first assigned unit could be souring on her so quickly. Turning the needle over, she read the label and confirmed it was a standard issue stimpack and not something that would have her rocking back and forth in the corner while the walls melted.

Satisfied, she clenched her jaw and jabbed the needle into the meat of her thigh. The plunger discharged with a chilly hiss of compressed air. It wasn’t one of the luminescent stimpacks that Aurora had given her when they first met, but it would eventually do the same job. It would just take a few hours.

Chops stepped over to the fallen log where the others had gathered and waved to get Aurora’s attention. He pointed down the valley and her ears perked up. “It’s here.”

Sure enough, the blinking red beacon from the approaching spritebot was dimly visible as it glided toward them across the valley floor. The tire-sized ball of alloy and circuits clicked and whirred along its final approach, a nest of antennae bristling behind it. Julip took a breath and stepped next to Aurora as the other mare stood.

“You wanna do the talking or should I?” she asked.

Aurora watched the bot approach. Something about it seemed to unsettle her. “They’re your people. You know how to talk to them better than I do.”

She nodded and took a step forward. The bot’s sensors immediately targeted her above the others and slid to a stop in front of her.

“IDENTIFY YOURSELF.”

Julip cringed, hating the heavily modulated voice the bots always used. “Corporal Mint Julip, one-nine-three-six-four.”

For several seconds it bobbed and sloshed in the air as it awaited confirmation from New Canterlot.

“VERIFIED,” it buzzed. “CORPORAL MINT JULIP, SERVICE NUM--”

Pop.

An irritated and very real stallion’s voice piped through the bot’s speaker. “This is Technical Sergeant Loft, corporal. About time you checked in. What’s your status?”

She glanced back at Aurora. “The target is healthy and cooperative, sir.”

Behind the bot’s concave grille, a series of lenses twitched and adjusted. “Ma’am.”

Aurora blinked, then nodded.

“We detected a Pip-Buck transponder not far from these coordinates. I assume that came from yours.”

She nodded again.

The lenses twitched again and the bot swayed toward Julip. “This unit received a separate distress signal from the pegasi behind you. Perhaps I misunderstood your assessment, corporal, but if the situation is as happy and healthy as you report then I fail to see the reason for you to be activating this much radio traffic this deep into enemy territory.”

Julip tensed, but stood her ground. “I need to speak with Minister Primrose, sir.”

A pause. “That’s a long line to wait in, corporal. If you have something to report, you can leave it with me and we’ll decide on our end if it needs to be run up the flagpole.”

“Sir, this isn’t something I can leave with you. I need--”

“You need to check your attitude, corporal. Make your report.”

Her blood boiled. Fucking rank-pulling desk duty dumb motherf…

Aurora’s wing swung past the corner of her eye and she watched as the mare’s grey feathers wrapped through the spritebot’s grille, yanking the machine to within inches of her nose. “The Steel Rangers are trying to break into Stable 10. Get off your ass and get Primrose.”

A longer pause.

“One moment.”

Pop.

Aurora gave the bot a little shove and glowered at the idle unit as its servos gently countered the momentum, leaving it to hover in silence several feet away. Julip stared at the bot, running the mental calculations to determine if she was going to be spending the next year scrubbing outhouses when she reported back home.

“Sorry,” Aurora murmured.

She shook her head. “It’s fine. I mean, that was probably information way higher than that tech sergeant’s clearance allows, but it’s fine.”

Aurora pursed her lips and shrugged. “I’m surprised you didn’t go full Julip on him.”

“Full…?” She laughed at that. “I can usually keep a lid on full Julip when the other choice is latrine duty. Usually. Sprite pilots aren’t generally that fucking stubborn, though.”

“You think he’s getting your boss?”

She lifted an eyebrow at her. “Chain of command. He’s getting someone to get someone to get someone to get my boss.”

Aurora blew out a breath and shook her head. “Not even the apocalypse can kill bureaucracy.”

Several minutes ticked by, and while they waited Dancer and Chops parked themselves at the edge of the shack while Ginger and Roach kept a close eye on them from the fallen log. There was no small amount of strained silence between the four of them, though Julip didn’t blame them for giving the stallions the side-eye. On any other day their rifles would be trained squarely on Roach’s head, a reflex that she was beginning to have reservations about.

Ginger was his ace in the hole. To any pony who didn’t know her, that horn was a minor threat. After seeing the unicorn poof a slaver and reappear him several storeys above the dirt on pure instincts alone, Julip didn’t want to think of what might happen to Dancer or Chops if they did try something stupid.

Pop.

The groggy but alert voice of a very familiar mare filtered out from the bot. “Corporal, this connection is being relayed to my office over a secure encryption so you may speak freely. I’m told you have something to report.”

She straightened at the sound of Primrose’s voice. “Yes, ma’am. The Steel Rangers have indicated to Aurora that they intend to breach Stable 10.”

“Ah. I suppose General Huckster wasn’t exaggerating after all.” The distant sound of tapping came from the bot’s speaker. The eraser of a pencil against a desk. It pivoted slightly, swayed, then came to bear on Aurora. “I apologize, it’s been decades since the last time I’ve had to navigate one of these things. Aurora Pinfeathers, correct?”

The Stable mare swallowed and nodded. “First try.”

Despite the bot’s limited audio quality, the minister’s chuckle retained a musical quality. “I’m certain the corporal has already explained to you who I am and that there may be certain expectations of decorum for this conversation.”

Julip blinked. She hadn’t thought to mention that at all.

“Feel welcome to be yourself, Miss Pinfeathers. You answer to your overmare, not to me. Call me Primrose.”

To her credit, Aurora didn’t correct the minister’s use of overmare and simply nodded. “I appreciate knowing that, Primrose, but my Stable is--”

“Under the protection of the Enclave, Miss Pinfeathers.”

Aurora regarded the spritebot with mild suspicion.

“You look disappointed,” Primrose observed.

She shook her head. “Just surprised. I expected to have to negotiate terms before you agreed to help me.”

Primrose chuckled. “Dear, you rescued a valuable asset from a mare who we were in no position to aid ourselves.”

Julip felt her cheeks warm.

“Most ponies in the wastes would have left Corporal Julip to die without a second thought. You risked your own safety and offered an invaluable artifact to heal her injuries and ensure her safe return. We’re indebted to you for that generosity.”

“Thank you. Or, you’re welcome, I guess?” Aurora closed her eyes and gave her head a quick shake. “About my Stable. Can I ask how you’re planning to stop the dig?”

If the bot had the capacity to shrug, it would have. “Remove the diggers.”

“Remove them how?”

Primrose chuckled again, tapping the unseen pencil as she spoke. “An armor piercing round fired during a steep dive has always been sufficient for puncturing the Rangers’ power armor.”

“I don’t want them killed,” Aurora stated.

Julip cleared her throat. “She mentioned to me earlier that she didn’t want the Stable to turn into a warzone, ma’am.”

The bot turned toward her, said nothing, then pivoted to Aurora. “I don’t want to seem rude, but I don’t see much of an alternative if the goal is to stop the Rangers from digging.”

Aurora was silent, waiting for the minister to offer an alternative. Julip nibbled on the inside of her lip as she hoped Aurora would come to realize what she’d been aware of from the beginning. But she stayed quiet, attempting to play the same game of chicken that had worked on Dancer.

Unsurprisingly, Primrose deflected.

“Fluttershy would have loved to meet you,” she laughed. “She always wanted the fight to go her way but didn’t want any of the mess.”

Aurora hesitated. “You knew her?”

“I worked with her. Or, I suppose I worked adjacent to her. It was a long time ago, but she had an admirable reputation for wanting to prevent suffering wherever she could no matter how unrealistic that desire was.” Primrose sighed, and her voice grew distant as a chair creaked over the speaker. “She made some poor decisions as a result.”

Aurora glanced at Julip, but she had no idea what Primrose was referring to. The minister never reminisced about her prewar years. If anything she tried to actively obscure them whenever she spoke publicly about it. This was a moment of uncanny clarity from a mare who excelled in obfuscation.

“But…” she continued, “I suppose this situation isn’t as impossible as the one the zebras forced us to face back then. If I recall correctly, Foal Mountain has always been in a geologically tenuous position even before Vhanna lost its mind. It might not be exactly comfortable for any Rangers caught in the way, but I imagine they couldn’t stop someone from dropping impact charges above the worksite.”

Aurora wrinkled her nose. “You want to trigger another landslide.”

“It would be a tactical first for the Enclave, but yes.” She chuckled. “Yes, I think that might be very effective.”

From his seat on the fallen log, Roach spoke up. “And what does Aurora do when she wants to go back home and finds the tunnel buried?”

Primrose turned the bot toward him and was quiet for several seconds. “I imagine that’s a bridge we can cross when we come to it, changeling.”

Aurora stiffened. “His name is Roach.”

Another pause. “So it is. My apologies, Roach, I wasn’t aware that changelings had names.”

“I have a question for you,” he rumbled.

Somewhere in New Canterlot, a pencil clicked flat against a desk. “Well, let’s hear it.”

“Do the Steel Rangers have the capacity to breach the Stable door with brute force?”

Julip glanced back at him and noticed that Dancer and Chops were regarding him with the same questioning frown. Ginger, for her part, was doing her best not to draw attention to herself. This was probably the largest gathering of New Canterlot residents she’d been a part of since she left home.

“Obviously they don’t,” Primrose said flatly. “Stable-Tec designed the shelters to withstand balefire.”

“Then what’s the harm in letting them dig if they’re just going to end up hitting a dead end? The worst Coldbrook could do is occupy the tunnel outside the door, and if the Rangers do that they’ll be fish in a barrel for any pegasi capable of handling a rifle.”

That piqued Primrose’s curiosity. “You’ve been inside the tunnel?”

The corner of his eye twitched ever so slightly. “Aurora told me about it, yes.”

“Interesting.” The bot turned back to Aurora. “Your friend makes a surprisingly good point, assuming you’re certain there’s absolutely no vulnerabilities the Rangers could exploit within the door’s operation.”

Aurora stared into the distance, weighing the options. “I can send a message to my overstallion and have Mechanical cut power to the antechamber. Take the door offline completely.”

Julip looked between the gathered ponies and watched as the proposal, crazy as she thought it sounded, was met with quiet approval.

“I believe I can work with that.” Primrose turned the bot toward Roach and it bobbed once, as if nodding her acknowledgement before diverting back to Aurora. “I’ll hold my pegasi in reserve and have them continue to monitor the Rangers’ progress. Once they clear the debris, I’ll have a squadron of snipers take position outside their reach and see if we can’t make ponies in power armor dance.”

To Julip’s surprise, Aurora actually chuckled at what she assumed had been a nonsense metaphor. “Is that from a western movie?”

The bot crackled with her laugh. “A book, actually. Savannah Sky.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

Primrose hummed. “Westerns are a guilty pleasure of mine, though the ponies around here tend to think they’re a little gauche these days. I’d be happy to give you a copy if you ever find yourself in New Canterlot.”

It was a polite offer, and not one she let linger for very long. With the matter of Stable 10’s protection decided for the moment, the spritebot turned back to Julip. “I have a few more minutes before General Huckster breaks down my door looking for marching orders, and I believe your friends may benefit from some time to themselves. Let’s give them some privacy. In the meantime, I’ll take your field report personally.”

A stone dropped into the pit of her stomach.

“Field report, ma’am?”

One of the lenses twitched. “Yes.”

Her eyes slid to where Aurora had been standing, but the mare was already returning to her friends. If she could convince the minister to let one of them come along, maybe glaze over the…

“Now, corporal.”

She stiffened to attention.

“Y-yes ma’am. Lead the way.”

Just tell the truth.

Her heart was beating in her throat as she followed the bot into a thicket of overturned trees.

It’s Minister Primrose, she thought. She’ll leave them alone once she knows how important they are to Aurora.

She wanted to believe that was true, but the seeds of doubt that Ginger’s dreams had sown had already sprouted. If Primrose was wrong… if the goddesses hadn’t solely given her their blessing like Julip had believed with conviction since her youngest years… what else was she lying about? The Chapel of the Two Princesses had grown around the stories that Julip accredited to her immortality. If none of that was true…

She closed her eyes and tried to push the thought from her head. Ginger could just as easily be the one lying.

Her tail flicked the air behind her and the braids Ginger had woven to repair it pattered against her buttock. She could still feel the rail, superheated by the sleeping unicorn’s magic, roasting the skin along her belly.

Try as she might, she couldn’t convince herself that Ginger was lying.

She followed the spritebot.

It slowed amongst the upturned branches and turned to face her. “You’ve had quite the month, corporal.”

She nodded. “Yes, ma’am. I have.”

The speaker scratched with the sound of a sheet of paper being flipped over. Julip’s ear twitched at that. Paper was a luxury most ponies couldn’t afford, but the minister was notoriously old fashioned. “So far our interrogation of Autumn Song corroborates the debriefing you gave following your return to New Canterlot. The fact that you didn’t provide her with any of the information she was seeking is commendable.”

“I was told Autumn killed herself.”

Primrose could be heard scratching a few notes. “According to statements she made, that was Aurora’s intention but she was unable to load the revolver they left for her to use. By the time we located her, she was attempting to reattach her horn.”

“Ma’am?”

“It was removed. Apparently, if she is to be believed, with a spell cast by the Dressage mare.” A lens within the bot whirred as it adjusted focus. “I would appreciate it if you could direct some of your effort toward finding out how much of that is true.”

She nodded, painfully aware of the potency of Ginger’s magic. “Yes, ma’am.”

More scribbling came over the speaker. Paper scuffed over paper as sheets were lifted, set down, and jotted over. For a moment Julip was hopeful that her field report had been forgotten.

“I see you met the survivors of Stable 2.”

Julip opened her mouth to correct her, but instinct made her stop. She frowned and looked at the bot. “I’m not sure I follow, ma’am.”

“The centaurs,” she stated. “Our reconnaissance fliers discovered your campsite in the western foothills and found some light supplies along with your service weapon, which was crushed. Tracks around the camp were heavily deformed.”

“Oh,” she said. “We had an encounter with them, yes ma’am. Thankfully I was the only one to sustain injury.”

If Primrose heard or cared about the last part, it wasn’t enough for her to remark on. “That herd of monstrosities has always been territorial around the mountain passes, but I suppose it’s hard to complain when they’re so effective at flushing dustwings from their nests. Speaking of which…”

No, she pleaded. No, no, no.

“...Lieutenant Dancer and Corporal Chops have been following up on some recent sightings in this region over the past few weeks. They’re looking for a dustwing stallion with a tannish coat and chocolate highlights. You wouldn’t have happened to see someone matching that description lately, would you?”

Her mouth worked to form words, but her heart was beating so hard that they tangled on the way to her tongue. She had to be honest. That was her oath to the Enclave. Only the truth. Only ever the truth.

The edges of her vision began to red out. She felt dizzy.

“I…” Her brain jammed. She forced herself to concentrate on the words she needed to say. She had an obligation. “That’s… a vague description, ma’am.”

Primrose was quiet for several, long seconds. “I’m aware. Have you seen him?”

She stared beyond the hovering ball of circuits and bent her mind to putting the sentence together. Yes, ma’am. He lives in the mountains between two derailed trains. He’s hiding there with his wife and dustwing foal. His name is Briar and his daughter is…

“Corporal?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You look ill.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to steady her jangling nerves. “Radiation exposure, ma’am.”

Another pause. “I see. You still haven’t answered my question.”

She took a breath and exhaled.

Calm down. She’ll understand.

“No, ma’am. I haven’t seen any dustwings.”

Her heart plunged through the floor of her stomach. A voice in the back of her head screamed for her to say something to take it back, to undo the lie before Primrose imprinted it onto her priceless paper. She shuddered a slow breath as she heard the pencil scratched over the connection, logging her first deliberate deception to the organization that had given her so much.

The deathly silence that followed was nauseating, but she couldn’t speak. They would execute her for this. The suite of sensors ticking away within that hovering ball of death would know the truth, and it was only a matter of time before someone reviewed the data and discovered that Corporal Mint Julip had attempted to shield a dustwing from the Minister of the Enclave. Her heart rate, her breathing, every dishonest twitch in her face observed, transmitted and irrevocable.

“Alright.” Primrose spoke with a tone that suggested a window had been held open for Julip, and it had just slammed shut. “Let’s move onto Miss Pinfeathers.”

Shaking, Julip nodded.

The pencil tapped against paper.

“What exactly is she looking for?”

Aurora leaned sideways on the log, bumping into Ginger’s shoulder as she tried to get a better view of Julip’s conversation.

“We can switch places if you want,” she chuckled, nudging her back.

She shook her head and sat up straight. Julip and her boss had gone into one of the thicker tangles of fallen trees, far enough that their voices didn’t carry. All moving around would accomplish was changing the shapes of the narrow windows she could see through between the screen of sticks and limbs.

A frown creased her lip as she realized, yet again, Dancer was staring at her.

“What?”

He didn’t answer, and merely shrugged and found something else to occupy his attention. The stallion seated at the edge of the shack beside him looked between them, signed something Aurora couldn’t understand and that Dancer wasn’t paying attention to translate, and went back to fiddling with the slender black rifle held in his feathers.

The silence was deafening. There was no love lost between the two Enclave stallions and Aurora’s companions, and the occasional glare Dancer kept shooting toward her friends left no question that normal circumstances would have resulted in bullets flying. She avoided Dancer’s occasional staring and watched Chops checking the lines of his weapon.

“Why did they name you Chops?”

He looked up at her, then leaned away from Dancer so she could see his mark. The silver rectangle of a meat cleaver adorned his flank. She found his mannerisms interesting as he began to gesture in the air with his feathers, his mouth working almost on autopilot to form the words he was communicating through signs. When he realized Dancer wasn’t watching, he swatted the violet stallion with a hoof and started from the beginning.

Dancer barely turned his head as he translated. “His folks run a butcher shop back home that he worked at before joining up. He got his mark after he figured out a safe way to cut… the fuck’s a floater?”

Chops held his wings in the air and bobbed them around, pantomiming the creature in question. He looked around at them to see if anyone understood, and when they didn’t he waved them off and began signing again.

“He says they’re mutated worms. Toxic.” Dancer shrugged. “Parents changed his name to Chops after he got his mark. Before that he was named Mouse because he didn’t talk.”

Chops moved his feathers in a smooth crescent cutting motion to emphasize his skill, then frowned a question at her while Dancer watched his feathers.

“He wants to know why you were named Aurora.”

She paused, lifted her wing away from her flank to show him her mark. “My parents decided on it before I was born. I’ve only ever worked with machines, so when my mark showed up during my apprenticeship I figured it made sense.” She glanced down at the steel wing reflecting an aurora across its silver feathers. “Wing, metal, aurora. A little on the nose, but it’s not like we get to choose.”

Chops was confused and his wings worked faster.

“He wants to know if everyone in your Stable gets a mark that matches their name.”

She shrugged, seeing just a touch of jealousy in his eyes.

“I always assumed so, but maybe not? My Stable has this stupid thing about residents wearing pants that...”

A glint of silver flashed in the corner of her eye and she turned to see the spritebot departing. As it shrank away into the murky, moonlit valley she looked back to the thicket and watched Julip as she walked stiffly toward the shack. When she drew close enough to make out her face, Aurora felt the hairs along her neck stand up.

Julip looked like she was barely holding it together. Her hooves slapped through sticks and scrub grass as her unblinking eyes stared through the ground, unwilling to meet the collection of curious faces that were watching her approach.

When she stepped into camp she swallowed and leveled a feather toward Dancer. “You two have new orders from the minister, effective immediately. You’re to fly west to Foal Mountain and monitor the situation there. You’ll receive a detailed assignment once command sets up operations in the area.”

Dancer bristled. “Are you… right now? We just finished a twelve hour patrol!”

“Well what a fucking shame,” Julip shouted, hiking up her hind leg with all the subtlety of a grenade. “You won’t get to suck my dick goodbye! Now get off your asses, get your shit and fuck off before the minister sends someone down here to help you!”

The stallion got up from the edge of the shack prepared to argue, but Chops stopped him with an open wing. He stared a silent warning at Dancer who, after a beat, rolled his eyes and turned back to the meager shelter to retrieve their duffel bag.

Aurora watched with bewilderment as Dancer shouldered the bag over his rifle and followed Chops away from the shack toward the clearing where they’d first landed.

“I’ll be sure to tell command you’ve been on your best behavior, BB.”

Julip’s ears pinned flat as Dancer threw down his wings and took to the air. Chops paused, looking back at Aurora and snapped off a crisp salute before taking off and blending into the black overcast above. She stared after him for several seconds before looking to Julip. She was watching the sky, too, her chest rising and falling with shaky breaths as she squinted toward the slow moving clouds.

When she appeared satisfied that they were gone, Julip’s face twisted with discomfort. She staggered over to the corner of the shack, propping herself against the torn siding with one wing, and vomited.

The three of them were up and off the log at the same time. Aurora winced as the mare tucked her tail and heaved again. She was what Sledge referred to as a vocal puker. Without thinking, she stepped behind Julip and began gathering her stringy black mane into the cup of one wing while simultaneously trying to blindly navigate the contents of her saddlebags with the other.

Finding her canteen, she held it up to Ginger who quickly unscrewed the cap with her magic. She lowered it to where Julip could see it. “Drink some water.”

Julip made a disgusted noise and pushed it away.

“Don’t bother. I’m already dead.”

July 3rd, 1077

“This proposal of yours certainly is ambitious, Miss…?”

“Primrose, your majesty.” She beamed up at the alicorn seated on the dais, giving her a good view of her dimples while being careful not to notice the vacant midnight blue seat beside her. Rainbow Dash had assured her both princesses would be present to hear her proposal, but apparently that wasn’t the case. Spitfire had warned her that the multicolored minister had been finding little ways to act out after Applejack barged into the office to, as the dirt ponies liked to say, “drop her plows back in her own field.”

Something to touch base with Spitfire on when she finished up here. Half an audience or not, she smiled for Celestia.

“I know this is more of a Ministry of Morale type of project, but I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. Reviving the Junior Wonderbolts program with a nationwide talent search would go a long way towards encouraging the next generation of Equestrian pegasi to actively engage with the idea of civic service without the negative baggage of a recruitment drive.”

She widened her smile by a hair as she waited for Celestia’s answer.

The alicorn flipped the top sheet of Primrose’s proposal, skimming the index she’d provided. “You’re correct that this would be more appropriate for the Ministry of Morale’s consideration.”

“And I still want Minister Pinkie Pie to be involved in this, but I can’t seem to get in contact with her at all. Plus, I thought an endorsement from you might help with turnout. If you approve, that is.”

She waited, eyes bright and cheeks rosy, well aware that Pinkie Pie had developed a reputation among the other ministries for being a black hole for anything that came across her desk. The minister’s continued spiral of self-destruction was no secret to the princesses either, but removing her from office would cause more damage to Equestria’s tenuous collective morale than leaving her at her post while Rarity’s office quietly absorbed her responsibilities behind the scenes.

And the Wonderbolts needed this program if they were to survive after the war. Spitfire didn’t mince words when she said pegasi were dying in Vhanna faster than new recruits were signing up. They needed a way to pull young pegasi into the program, and the adage of serving your country was barely effective against the constant stream of bad news from the front.

The doors flung open behind her, slamming against the walls of the throne room like twin gunshots. Primrose belted a startled yelp and spun around to see another alicorn marching up the magenta carpet, her purple eyes narrowed with fury.

“You cut my contract with Maiden Pharmaceutical?!”

Twilight’s accusation reverberated across the throne room. She shouldered Primrose aside as she passed and stared daggers over her shoulder when she opened her mouth to protest.

“You’re meeting’s cancelled,” Twilight growled. “Leave.”

Primrose leveled her gaze at the Element of Magic and lowered her head in a grudging bow before turning around. Behind her, the two alicorns didn’t wait for her to depart. She pivoted one ear to the side to listen.

“Next time I would prefer if you’d send a message ahead of time, Twilight.”

“Well I don’t have a dragon to do that for me anymore, and next time I’d prefer if you talked to me before cutting my ministry’s department in half.”

Celestia’s voice grew low. “Do not use that tone with me again.”

Primrose’s eyes went wide as her shadow stretched ahead of her toward the door, her spine tingling at the unmistakable sensation of raw magic being summoned by the Princess of the Sun. It was all she could do not to run the rest of the way out.

She didn’t dare look back at Celestia’s display of power. The deep hum that came from the throne was enough, and it evidently fulfilled its purpose of bullying Twilight into obedience.

“I’m sorry, princess.” There was still a grating anger deep in the alicorn’s voice, but the heat behind it had been sapped. “But the Maiden Contract was a critical step toward ending this war. I don’t understand how you could set us back so far without even consulting me.”

The sharp lines of Primrose’s shadow shrank as the power radiating from the throne dissipated. Glancing at the stone-faced royal guards positioned on either side of the doors, she wrapped her feathers around the door’s golden handles and pulled them open. As she stepped out of the room and into the hallway beyond, Celestia’s answer slipped through the closing doors.

“I cancelled your contract because yesterday the stimpack formula you sold to Maiden Pharma eradicated a small battalion of Equestrian soldiers.”

Primrose stopped, shot a frown over her shoulder and stepped back toward the doors before they could shut completely. The weight of one settled gently against her wing and she tipped her ear toward the narrow sliver she held open. This was idiotic, she told herself. If the guards standing barely three feet away noticed, she could kiss her job with Spitfire goodbye and any ambitions they had for their fledgling Enclave.

She glanced back at the empty hallway behind her to make sure no one was there to see her. The corridor was empty save for the stained glass windows and the warm midday sunlight streaming through them. The doors on the opposite side of the corridor were sealed for now, but anyone could step through them at any moment.

“What do you mean, ‘eradicated?’”

Primrose’s ears perked at the strange tone in Twilight’s voice. A barely detectable defensiveness that Primrose had used to load the deck whenever the cards were starting to tip out of her favor. Twilight was giving herself a free opportunity to feign ignorance when, in reality, she was anything but.

Pulled in by curiosity, she leaned forward and listened.

“Eradicated, as in eliminated. Wiped out. Half the battalion was given stimpacks to test their healing effects on balefire radiation while the other half took a placebo. When the test bomb was detonated, the first half suffered rapid, uncontrollable mutations and began killing the ponies in the control group before scattering into the Badlands. We’re still tracking several of the… things they became.” Celestia’s voice hardened. “Our representatives from Maiden determined that the magical framework at the core of their stimpacks suffered some kind of cascade degradation. They’re still trying to understand how, but it’s clear to me that the spells you constructed were deeply flawed.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Twilight objected.

“Perhaps and perhaps not. Whichever the case may be, you’ll be relieved to know that you enjoy a certain level of immunity as a ministry mare as well as an alicorn.” Celestia dismissed Twilight’s apparent involvement with a casualness that made Primrose balk.

“Maiden Pharmaceutical has agreed to voluntarily halt all production of magically assisted medication in exchange for certain leniencies as they begin researching a chemically based replacement.” Celestia sighed, as if already exhausted by the topic. “Consider yourself lucky that they made back the bits they paid your ministry, Twilight. If I hadn’t been able to convince them to walk away without demanding reimbursement, I wouldn’t have been able to sweep this under the rug for you.”

Twilight sounded subdued. “Thank you, princess. I’m sorry for my outburst.”

The throne room was quiet for a beat. “It’s a start. I want you to oversee the recall and disposal process for the stimpacks Maiden already delivered to the open market. Start working on this today.”

“Celestia, that could take months. I have duties within my ministry to--”

“Delegate them. This is your new priority.”
Punishment was more like it. A slap on the hoof.

Carefully, Primrose lifted her wing off the door and let it drift the rest of the way shut. She hurried away, the gears in her head spinning as she left the hall of windows behind and trotted through the ornate corridors of the castle.

Twilight Sparkle was about to be buried under a mountain of work.

Luckily for her, the Enclave might just be in a position to help.

Next Chapter: Chapter 29: Links Estimated time remaining: 44 Hours, 20 Minutes