The blinding sun dangled just over Aurora’s left shoulder, making it hard to tell what Roach was thinking when all she could see was the silhouette of her passenger’s face. She expected more of a reaction when they broke through the dense carpet of clouds. It certainly had stirred one in her.

No longer filtered by overcast, Celestia’s sun flared to full brightness radiance like the tip of a welding torch. Its rays warmed her skin while the brownish haze sank low beneath her hooves, providing her with an unusual sense of… something. Something she wasn’t sure she could define. Of peace, maybe. Or rightness. It took her a beat to settle on the latter. Coasting through the sky while clean, untainted air filled her lungs felt right to a part of her she hadn’t felt since taking Ginger up into the night sky several days before. A primal instinct buried in the back of her brain that recognized this as the way things were meant to be. Not smothered in perpetual twilight. Clear. Free.

And yet, as far as she could tell, Roach hadn’t so much as batted an eye.

“You’re quiet,” she nudged.

With the wind fluttering in her ears, she felt him grunt his answer more than she heard it. He spoke up, seemingly unaffected by the dome of sky that surrounded them. “Sorry,” he said, his muzzle buzzing in her ear. “Just enjoying the view. Haven’t been up here for a while.”

She acknowledged him with a nod, opting not to tack a bad joke to the end of his understatement. “Everything alright?”

His chest bounced against her spine as he chuckled. “I didn’t expect it to be this quiet, that's all. I’ll be fine.”

The beginnings of a frown creased her lip. He waved her off, or as much as he could without letting go of her shoulders. “Saffron and I used to make trips out to the cities before the war, and the ministries, and…”

His belly tensed as he cleared his throat. She waited.

“He had family out here,” he finished. “Back then, the whole east-west corridor was clogged with pegasi. During rush hour you couldn’t take your eyes off of where you were flying or you’d wind up crashing into someone. Wings as far as you could see, especially around the cloudborne communities.”

He paused, his neck pivoting this way and that. “There’s nothing up here, not even a house. Suppose it must’ve all come down like Cloudsdale did.”

Aurora tried to imagine it. Cities in the sky, buildings created from the very clouds that held them aloft with the aid of invisible, intangible pegasus magic. She had seen countless photos of Cloudsdale in the history books, seen the aging footage of pegasi in blue-yellow uniform performing aerial shows for hundreds of cheering spectators. And yet somehow, up here where the clouds tumbled and rolled along their uninterrupted journey east, she found herself having trouble believing it had all been real. That this empty blue sky had once been a home for ponies like her.

But it had. Deep down, she knew that.

Only now, it was home to the Enclave.

“I can take us back down if...”

“Not yet.” His answer came quickly, and just a little more abruptly than he probably intended. Aurora forgave his tone.

She tipped into a gentle bank as she waited, glancing at the Pip-Buck at the end of her outstretched foreleg to be sure they were headed back toward Ginger and Julip and not further away. The screen refreshed and the blip representing their waiting party drew a pixel nearer. As she turned her attention forward again, one of Roach’s cryptically perforated hooves pointed past her cheek and toward a slowly churning blister in the otherwise calm cloud cover.

His ragged voice buzzed in her ear. “Thunderhead.”

She blinked. “Whater-what?”

The tension built up by old memories eased, and she could feel him physically relax as he traced a rough circle with the tip of his hoof. “That bump breaking through the clouds. Give it fifty miles or so and it might turn into a thunderhead.”

Seeing her confusion, he smiled. “They’re big clouds that stir up the best storms. You might be the first pegasus in Equestria that doesn’t know what those are.”

She shot him a look, but it was all bluster. He chuckled as the hill in the clouds bent off along her right wing, and she shook her head as the thought of an entire Stable of pegasi who might beg to differ. Then she remembered something. Something that in the midst of all the chaos and confusion of their journey she’d nearly forgotten.

Roach must have been watching her face, because when her expression shifted he leaned forward until one of his opaque eyes was fully even with hers. “Share with the class?”

“I saw you.”

She winced a little when she watched his eyebrow twitch with a touch of worry. She shook her head and leveled out a little, kicking herself for blurting out the first thing that came to mind. He waited as she tried again.

“The night before we arrived at Blinder’s Bluff, when those raiders started shooting at me. You saved me and Ginger by pulling that wall out of the ground.”

Roach opened his mouth with a silent, “Ah.”

She continued. “I saw you, I think. Or at least the ‘you’ that you’re always telling us about. It came and went while you were casting, like a terminal screen with a short circuit. Kind of… there, but not there, all at the same time.”

A smile touched his cheek. “Green mane? Wheat colored coat?”

A pause, then she nodded.

“That was Sunny Meadows. Last pony to see him was Rainbow Dash back in the tunnel, right before my disguise fell for good.” He sighed, but his smile didn’t budge. She felt his chest bounce between her wings in a quiet laugh. “So? How did I look?”

Some part of her had been prepared for him to grow all quiet and stoic at her admission. His nonchalance was a welcome relief, if not a greater sign that taking Roach up here had been a good idea after all. In answer to his question, she shrugged and offered a middling judgment by way of tipping one of her hooves side to side.

His reaction spurred a giggle out of her as he found himself caught both grinning and gawking indignantly at her. It was the first time she could remember seeing him this expressive and she couldn’t help but grin back. “That’s what you get for fishing for compliments.”

He snorted. “Fair. I appreciate you telling me. It feels good to be seen again, even if it’s only in bits and pieces.”

She pulsed her wings around the warm rush of an updraft, lifting them higher. Roach’s hooves tightened around her shoulders as they ascended.

“While we’re on the subject,” he continued, “I was hoping to ask you a favor.”

Squinting one eye against the wind, she turned to watch him with the other.

“Once we find an ignition talisman, I want to stop back at the cabin.”

She gave him a curious look. With all the trials they’d gone through starting with their reception at Blinder’s Bluff, she’d barely given the half-collapsed vacation home any thought at all. “Tying up loose ends, eh?”

He blinked. “How did you…”

“Good idea. There’s a whole refrigerator full of condiments that know what we did. No witnesses.”

He stared at her. She grinned back.

Slowly, he shook his head. “The pickle jar.”

“The evidence is still there, Roach. If one of them squeals, it’s straight to the slammer for the both of us.”

She grinned even wider as he mouthed something to himself that he knew she wouldn’t be able to hear, but his tolerant smirk reassured her that he could still take a bad joke.

“You’re a strange egg,” he said. “No, I don’t want to raid the fridge again. I wanted to bring back the journal Ginger took from the cabin when we left.”

Her smile dimmed.

“I should have asked her not to take it in the first place, but I didn’t want to bog you two down by having to explain why. It’ll be a quick in and out, if that’s alright.”

Pursing her lips, she nodded. “It’s fine, yeah.”

After hesitating, she added, “Ginger told me that it mentioned your daughter.”

She felt him sigh, but instead of clamming up he did something that surprised her. He talked.

“Teak was one of Violet’s best friends. A quiet filly, from what I remember, but back then most zebras had learned it was safer to keep their heads down. Saffron and I had some opportunities to meet her parents, which is a whole story in itself.”

Considering what Ginger had filled her in on thus far, that was an understatement.

“The cabin we stayed at used to be their family vacation home. Teak’s father got it in the divorce and let our family use it in the winter. Violet loved that cabin. With how much we used it we should have been paying rent, but looking back I think Teak’s father just wanted an excuse to have company. He always struck me as a lonely stallion.”

Aurora must not have been doing as good a job at looking interested as she thought, because when she caught his eye Roach winced apologetically.

“Anyway,” he said, “if Violet were still around, she’d chew my ear off if she knew we were wandering around the wasteland reading her friend’s journal.”

Ouch. Unintended or not, she felt that gentle rebuke in the pit of her stomach. Two days or two centuries, it didn’t seem to matter. Once a dad, always a dad. She nodded.

“We’ll make time, I promise.”

The worry that rimmed his eyes began to ease and as he turned to gaze ahead at the crisp blue expanse of sky ahead, something caught his attention and he let out a quiet chuckle. He tipped his nose off to their left where a green-brown speck had just broken through the cloud layer.

“I was wondering when they were going to get tired of waiting,” he murmured.

Aurora blew out a breath of relief as the speck hovered in the air for several seconds before a fuzzy pair of green wings began to beat away from the clouds and up toward where the two of them had been coasting for the better half of an hour. Even with Julip’s change of circumstance, Aurora hadn’t been able to completely dispel the worry that came with leaving Ginger alone in her company. All of that lingering tension finally let go as she watched the two of them ascending toward them one lazy gyre after another.

“Fun’s over,” she chuckled. “Back to work.”

“If you start feeling foggy…”

“I’ll tell you. I know, now let’s go.”

Sledge swiped his badge and the compartment door hissed up and into the ceiling. He stepped into the corridor and Rainbow followed close behind, the wrinkled lines of Aurora’s jumpsuit hanging loose on her bones like shed skin. She wasn’t totally sure if Sledge had insisted on her donning the uniform because he was afraid the residents would react to who she was or because of his clear and ever present discomfort with her nudity. Or maybe it was a little of both.

Despite the gravity of the moment, she couldn’t help but wear a tiny smirk as they left the stuffy little compartment behind and trotted through the open corridors. An entire Stable filled with ponies who felt a moral duty to cover themselves would have been Rarity’s dream come true. A year or two under her tutelage and the entire population would be wearing their own plumage in overwrought headwear and enough lace to strangle a dragon.

She couldn’t stop a giggle from bouncing out of her throat, drawing a worried look from Sledge. She decided it would be easier not to explain and waved him off.

The brief distraction was worth the indulgence. It distracted her from the murals that adorned the wall panels beside them, memories of a distant time that still felt too close. They boarded the elevator at the end of the hall with a wingful of other pegasi whose idle conversation came to a screeching halt the moment they spotted the ragged stump of a wing poking through the hole in her jumpsuit.

As the doors shut in front of her and in their reflection she could see their eyes roaming her body, frowning at the patchy coat clinging to her gaunt cheeks, the ragged veil of her once vibrant mane now dimmed by a fog of gray hairs. She became vividly aware of the whiplike shape of her tail as it tucked uncomfortably toward her legs.

“Eyes forward, all of you,” Sledge rumbled. “That includes you, Coaldust.”

A black stallion behind Sledge snapped to attention, suddenly very interested in the elevator’s architecture. By the time the elevator chimed and the doors opened to the top floor of the Stable, every pegasus that joined them had found one reason or another to pile off early.

“Thanks,” she murmured, following him into the residential corridors surrounding the Atrium.

He murmured the sheepish stallion equivalent of you’re welcome and guided her past a group of loitering pegasi, one notably not wearing a jumpsuit. The young stallion stiffened slightly as the overstallion swept by without comment, but the growing edge of frustration on Sledge’s face was impossible to miss. He turned Rainbow down an adjacent hall leading away from the Atrium, following a narrow white line painted on the wall just overhead.

“Trouble in paradise?” she asked.

“Nudists,” he growled. “Long story.”

Rainbow cocked a brow as they passed a wide mural depicting Princess Celestia and Luna posing on a grassy hillock, the white towers of Canterlot Castle visible on the distant mountain between them. Both alicorns wore their respective crowns and crests, and nothing else. Rainbow met Sledge’s eye and indicated the passing mural with an upturned wing.

“That’s different,” he insisted. “It’s history.”

She shrugged, catching the curious eye of a passing mare. “If you say so.”

Sledge waited until the mare was out of earshot. “I know it’s not what you’re used to, but at the rate things are going I’ll be happy to see this Stable survive the end of this week. One thing at a time.”

“Yes, my liege.” She dipped her head into an exaggerated bow without breaking pace, grinning at the strange expression on his face. “Too much?”

“You’re fine,” he said, his lips tilting into a smile. “I’m just glad to see you come out of your shell, Rainbow.”

She paused, started to answer, then realized she didn’t know how to respond to that. The moment came and went, and she decided there wasn’t much for her to say. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this playful. Until now, she had assumed her years managing a war from her desk at the Ministry had smothered that spark.

It felt good to have it back.

“Any word from your escapee?”

Sledge snorted. “If her last message is any indication, she’s found her stride. Making more friends by the sound of it. I told her at the rate she’s going she’s going to be the one responsible for fitting half of Equestria down here, not me.”

Rainbow let out a ragged chuckle, startling a wide-eyed frown from a passing technician. She cleared her throat but her smile stayed right where it was. “You never did tell me where she was headed.”

He slowed, squinting to better read the plaques fixed to the passing doors. “The one and only Stable-Tec Headquarters.”

She paused, opened her mouth to say something and quickly decided against it. As dark memories rose to the forefront of her mind, she shoved them down and kept her tone neutral. “That’s a long flight.”

“And a longer walk.” One of the overhead fluorescents flickered, emitted a light tink and went dark. “Don’t ever tell her I said this, but she’s about the closest thing to family as I got down here. I’m glad she’s finally making friends out there, but I still wish she’d saved all that until after she brought back a fresh talisman. She could’ve been there and back days ago.”

Rainbow glanced back at the dead bulb. “You sound like Twilight, way back when.”

Sledge looked at her, dubious. “Can I ask you an honest question?”

Pursing her lips for a moment, she supposed there wasn’t much he could ask that she couldn’t answer. It wasn’t as if anyone was going to blackmail her for giving away state secrets a second time. “Shoot.”

“All of us here grew up reading the Friendship Journal. How much of it is actually true?”

“Ah.” She thought about it for a moment, then offered up a shrug. “All of it? As far as I remember, anyway. If anything we probably left a few things out. Those letters were going to Celestia, after all.”

Watching Sledge’s expression change was interesting, and it made her wonder just how many of their adventures had slipped out of the realm of fact and firmly into question. To be fair, it wasn’t like she could blame him. Even before the skies turned green with balefire, Equestria had been quickly becoming a place with fewer and fewer mysteries. The pegasi of Stable 10 would have never seen a magic spell before outside of whatever historical footage they had available. The adventures she and her friends had gone on, voluntarily or not, must’ve sounded like fairy tales to them.

Sensing Sledge’s discomfort, she turned her attention to the passing doors and said, “Heading to the Stable-Tec building isn’t a bad idea. Scoots had all the offices mocked up to look and feel like a Stable. It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t have a few ignition talismans on display for investors.”

Beside her, Sledge let out a pent up sigh of relief. “Good. That’s really good to hear.”

She thumped his foreleg with her own. “Perks of being well traveled.”

“I take it you’ve been there.”

She paused, her smile fading as her gaze grew distant. “Just once.”

Sledge said something that she didn’t quite hear. A comment about Aurora, maybe. She wasn’t sure. For a brief moment she was there again, seated across from Scootaloo, the two of them enjoying a laugh over the inexplicable scheduling glitch that brought her all the way there a full day before their meeting. Neither of them knowing that the next time she saw the sky it would be ablaze with emerald fire.

A brick red foreleg slipped around her chest, slowing her to a gentle stop.

“Hey,” Sledge murmured, his voice a low whisper. “Are you still here?”

She blinked. “Yeah, I’m still here.” The look of worry in his eyes made it clear he thought Blue was making an early appearance. She put a hoof over his foreleg, lightly pushing it away. “I’m still me, I promise. I just… zoned out. Bad memories.”

He didn’t look convinced. “We can always come back later.”

“No.” She shook her head and looked up at the plaque screwed into the wall beside the door ahead. The name DEPT. HEAD OPALESCENT stood emblazoned across it. Stepping forward, she set her hoof on the door’s switch and pressed down. “We have to do this now.”

The door lifted open and she stepped inside.

October 31st, 1077
Stable-Tec HQ, Fillydelphia

“Wood paneling, huh?”

Her feathers whispered over the cherry veneer, the fall of their hooves dampened by the commercial grade carpet that lined the hallway with a complimentary golden shade of grain.

“That is definitely a decision that you made.”

Scootaloo jabbed Rainbow’s flight jacket with the joint of her wing. “Don’t knock it, I think it looks classy.”

“Hey,” she chuckled as she absently adjusted her collar, “my parents would totally be on your side! Yaknow… forty years ago.”

The tangerine mare jabbed her again hard enough to make her cough out a good hearted laugh at her own expense. She raised her own wings in mock-surrender before settling them back to her sides, her eyes wandering the almost homey decor of a facility that boasted some of the pinnacle defenses against unwanted intrusion. She didn’t have to admit it, Scootaloo likely already knew, but she still couldn’t help but appreciate how over-engineered this place was. Every square inch had been built with deliberate intent. The lift that took them down here made it feel like she was floating, the brakes so gentle that she hadn’t realized it had stopped until the doors whispered open.

Even the ceiling lights had been perfectly recessed, gently glowing with a full spectrum that made the enclosed corridors feel like they were being bathed in natural sunlight. Every color popped. Had she not been personally invited to the grand opening of several Stables across Equestria already, she might have convinced herself that Scootaloo had spent her ministry’s wealth on this single place alone.

Scootaloo’s office waited at the end of a short hall decorated with magenta aubrieta flowers that spilled out of their pots and wove their way down the legs of their stands on a healthy network of vines. Photos taken from important places in the successful mare’s life - Ponyville, Cloudsdale, even a shot of Zecora’s hut nestled among the tangled branches of the Everfree - hung from the walls in unique frames that complimented the settings they were assigned to. A young stallion wearing an intern’s badge tutted a polite good morning to them both as they passed before tipping the spout of a copper watering can into the rich soil of one of the flowerpots.

As Scootaloo let the little black bulb above the office door verify her identity, Rainbow chuckled.

“What?”

She tipped a feather to the nearest vine of vibrant flowers. “Matches your mane.”

The office door released an audible click and she nudged it open, rolling her eyes as she went. “Keen observation from the mare with a box of crayons shooting out her butt.”

The intern behind them sputtered and hurried down the hall and around the corner, only just managing to conceal his laughter.

Rainbow pulled the door shut behind them, shrugging off her jacket and dropping it on one of the brass hooks beside it. Scootaloo’s office was the perfect temperature, just warm enough to be comfortable without being stifling, and bore the faint scent of cinnamon in the air. Back at the Pillar, Rainbow was just happy when she couldn’t smell whatever Spitfire decided to heat up in her office next door.

“You’d better be nice or I’m gonna tell Applejack.”

Scootaloo smiled at her as she rounded her desk. Her office was unsurprisingly humble, considering her position as Stable-Tec’s CEO. A simple wooden desk, drawers on either side, and a smallish terminal seated slightly to the right of her chair so she could make eye contact with the ponies who came to see her. The wall to Rainbow’s left had been dedicated to objects from Scootaloo’s past. A scuffed purple helmet sat atop the board of a blue scooter, the space shared by a neatly folded and slightly discolored cape from her cutie mark seeking years. An old microphone with a blob of white paint resembling a skull sat alone on a shelf, a memento from a talent show. There was no small amount of memorabilia featuring Rainbow Dash, items she’d collected en masse before they became close friends.

The rest of her office was almost charming. Framed photos hung in creative little clusters on the opposite wall, taking some attention away from the wood paneling Scootaloo refused to stop enjoying. Even her desk looked like it would fit better in a schoolhouse rather than the personal office of a CEO of a multibillion bit company. There was nothing here that didn’t feel entirely Scootaloo. Rainbow couldn’t help but feel a little jealous that her own office wasn’t this inviting.

Scootaloo blew out a guilty breath as she sat down. “I feel like I haven’t seen Applejack in so long.”

“You just visited her ministry last month.” Rainbow settled in the seat across from her, her necklace clinking as it settled against her breastbone. “I thought you two took some time to visit, after.”

“Eh.” Scootaloo pulled a face. “We were, but she got called away right as the meeting was wrapping up and I had work piling up here… easier to reschedule once the shit hits the fan like that. You know how it is.”

She did, but that didn’t mean she accepted it.

“How have you two been?”

She smiled a little. “Good. Real good, actually. Applejack’s trying to talk me into getting a dog.”

Scootaloo gasped. “What kind?”

Rainbow lifted a pair of feathers to her chest, absently fiddling with the edge of her necklace. The ruby lightning bolt rattled gently in its socket. “She wants another collie, like Winona. I’m… still on the fence.”

“About what? You always loved that dog.”

She offered a meek shrug. “Winona was alright, but she was always such a wingful. I swear Applebloom was sneaking zapapples into her bowl when no one was looking.”

Scootaloo leaned back in her chair and smiled. “I’ll have to ask her about that next time we hang out.”

That got Rainbow’s attention. “Since when do you have time to hang out?”

The younger mare gestured her stubby wings around them. “Rainbow, what do you think we’re doing right now? Don’t tell me you’ve been spending every day cooped up in that Pillar I built you.”

She winced. “I mean, I spend plenty of time at home with AJ.”

Scootaloo’s eyes drifted to the element hanging around Rainbow’s neck. “What about the others?”

She chewed the inside of her cheek, sensing a well-earned grilling headed her way. “We still talk.”

“Well that’s a half-assed excuse if I’ve ever heard one.” Scootaloo slouched forward in her chair, eliciting another creak as she splayed both forelegs over her desk, hooves turned upward in the universal sign of you gotta give me something. “I mean, I know Rarity isn’t easy to open up to these days. What about Twilight?”

Rainbow’s feather touched the gem’s cool surface. “She’s too busy trying to fight the war by herself.”

“All the more reason to make sure she’s doing okay. We both know how she gets when there’s not someone around to drag her away from her research.”

That was true. Why hadn’t she thought about that?

“How about Pinkie?”

She grimaced. At the same moment, her feather slipped into the gap beneath her element and the gem popped free of its mount, dropping into her lap.

“Shit.” She tried to hide the guilt in her eyes as she scooped up the gemstone and pressed it back into its socket. At this point she didn’t even have to look to know which of the prongs had wiggled loose again. She found it with a feather and pressed it back against the stone.

Her ear twitched at the brittle sound of metal cracking, and the errant prong tumbled free of the necklace and onto the carpet.

“Oh for Celestia’s…”

She bit off the end of the sentence and bent down to pick up the gold nib. With her other wing, she let her element tip back into the safety of her feathers.

“Can I help?” Scootaloo offered.

She straightened, stood and shook her head. “I got it. This thing’s just getting old. There’s a jeweller in Canterlot I’ve been meaning to drop by to get it fixed.”

Stepping toward the coat hook, she dropped her element and the broken tine into her jacket pocket. “Guess I know what I’m doing on the way home.”

“Guess so.” There was a touch of worry in Scootaloo’s eyes as she watched her return to her seat, but she knew better than to lecture an Element of Harmony about the care and maintenance of their bestowed gems. “Well, who knows. Maybe your terminal mixing up your calendar was a good thing? You definitely need a break.”

“Yeah.” She let out a sardonic chuckle, tracing the edges of the now empty socket. “Yeah, we all do. But this war just keeps going and going. I actually miss the days when we’d have to drop everything because Celestia forgot to set an egg timer for some ancient evil. Life was a lot easier when we could just…”

She gestured vaguely to her necklace. “You know. Rainbow laser our problems away.”

Scootaloo was painfully aware that the Elements of Harmony had refused to activate during the first battle on the shores of Vhanna, and the implication that came with it. It was a large part of why she and so many other ponies had chosen to begin proactively working toward protecting themselves should the zebras ever get the upper hoof.

Rainbow flicked her empty necklace, dropped her wing in her lap and sighed. “Maybe we should get the dog.”

“That might not be the worst idea.” Scootaloo smiled encouragement from across the desk, very much in Applejack’s camp on this one. As the chuckles ebbed and the office grew quiet, she cleared her throat. “Speaking of bad ideas.”

“Already beat you to it.” Rainbow made a grand gesture with her feathers. “Cloud Stables.”

She laughed, shaking her head as she leaned over to open a drawer. “That is a bad idea. But, seriously, I was hoping I could get you to look at something for me. I kind of need a second opinion.”

Rainbow cocked a brow. “I’m sure your gynecologist has a phone number you can call.”

“Har-dee-har.” She produced a manila folder from the drawer and slid it across the desk. “Seriously, though. Take a look at this and tell me if you notice anything.”

Her smile lost its playful edge as she eyed the folder and she scooped it up in her feathers. Scootaloo waited in silence as she flipped it open.

“A job resume?”

Scootaloo nodded. “Just a sanity check.”

She sat up a little, her necklace thumping against her coat as she began reading the application. At first glance it was all standard fare. The cover letter listed the applicant’s name as Cloudchaser, a pegasus stallion currently residing in Manehattan. He included the usual paragraphs detailing what he was looking for, namely a job within Stable-Tec’s network security division, and listed several certifications below. She flipped to the second page and found nothing out of place there either. Job history, graduate’s degree, all the careful phrasing meant to emphasize his value while tactfully dismissing his weaknesses.

Turning to the last page, she skimmed his references. The usual parade of employers already pre-coached to give him glowing reviews. Rarely ever worth calling unless something seemed fishy during the interview process. Rainbow was about to close the folder and send it back when the final reference made her stop.

She frowned. “How does an unenlisted pony from Manehattan know Spitfire?”

“Oh, good, I’m not losing my mind.”

She flipped back to his job history. “So, what? You think he’s lying to get hired?”

“Him and about ten other pegasi.” Scootaloo pulled a small stack of papers from the same drawer, all resumes. “Except these are the ones we’ve already hired.”

Growing more confused, she leaned forward and flipped open the first resume. As expected, Spitfire’s name was listed among several other references. “Well, far be it from me to spare her a reason to be pissed off. These ponies will be lucky if she doesn’t draft them into the Wonderbolts out of spite.”

Scootaloo shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what she’ll do. When my hiring team finally brought this to my attention, I double-checked their onboarding checklists. They called Spitfire for every one of these candidates and she apparently recommended them on the spot. Most of them list some kind of service record with the Wonderbolts which is how they got through in the first place, but now we’ve started seeing resumes like these come through with barely any affiliation at all.”

Rainbow’s breathing began to slow, her shoulders stiffening.

“She’s been putting her people in my company deliberately,” Scootaloo continued. “I called the ministry last week to set up a meeting so I could tear her hide in person, but she’s got a pain in the ass secretary down there who’s been stonewalling me any time I try to get through.”

“You called her?” Rainbow put her head in her hooves and groaned. “Scoots, you should have told me first.”

“I know, I know. But you can already tell how this looks, and I handle stuff like this all the time. I thought if I could talk to her, I could hold her hooves to the fire until she backed off.” She picked up the stack of resumes and dropped them back into her drawer. “I’ve already fired the pegasi she vouched for, anyway. Probably staring down the barrel of a dozen lawsuits once they inevitably lawyer up, but I can handle that too. I just didn’t want to put more problems on your plate than you already--”

A piercing tone blared overhead, cutting her off. It was joined by a light that pulsed urgently from its fixture in the corner of the office. As quickly as it came, the alarm tone went silent and a stallion’s recorded voice began repeating a chilling warning.

ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER. ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER.

Rainbow pressed her hooves to her ears as the spoken alarm traded off to the peeling tone. “WHAT IS THAT?”

Scootaloo had already rolled over to her terminal, her small feathers stuttering across the keyboard. When she didn’t immediately answer, Rainbow felt the cold weight of fear begin forming in her gut. The look of singular determination in her eyes made her look like a different mare.

ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER. ALL EVACUATE PERSONNEL TO SHELTER.

The tone returned, pummelling their ears.

“SCOOTS!”

She held up a feather as her eyes scanned the screen, the young mare taking deeper and deeper breaths the more she read. She blinked, her lavender eyes welling. She said something too quiet for Rainbow to hear, but the word “Cloudsdale” was clear on her lips.

Impatience getting the better of her, Rainbow got to her hooves and hurried around the desk to see what it was that had Scootaloo frozen in her chair. She read for several seconds. Then she stopped, her legs feeling suddenly too heavy for her body.

---

---

ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER. ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER.

Rainbow stumbled away from the terminal, her legs lagging behind the instructions pouring from her screaming brain. “I need to leave,” she mumbled.

Scootaloo stared after her, wide-eyed. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”

“I HAVE TO LEAVE!”

The klaxon buzzed so persistently that her eardrums ached. She went for the door, her wing lifted toward her flight jacket.

“DASH, YOU NEED TO STAY HERE!”

She stopped and turned. “I HAVE TO GET APPLEJACK!”

ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER. ALL PERSONNEL EVACUATE TO SHELTER.

Scootaloo shoved her chair aside, shaking her head. “YOU WON’T GET THERE IN TIME! SHE’LL BE SAFE IN THE PILLAR! STAY HERE!”

She felt the thumping of hooves against the other side of the door. Scootaloo made a frustrated noise neither of them could hope to hear and reached past her to unlock it. “WE NEED TO GET TO THE LOWER LEVELS.”

The door swung open, thumping Rainbow in the shoulder as Scootaloo’s security detail swarmed inside. “MA’AM, WITH US PLEASE.”

Alarms blared from both sides of the door now. Rainbow squeezed around, startling the gathered security ponies, and shoved her way out into the hall.

“RAINBOW!”

She forced herself not to answer. Every fiber in her body was moving by instinct alone, taking her down wonderfully decorated hallways and toward the elevator. Her heart was hammering in her throat when she reached the silver doors and punched the recall button. She hit it again, holding her hoof against it in a fruitless effort to make the lift move quicker.

She felt the thump of hooves against the carpet just as a pair of diminutive tangerine wings wrapped themselves tightly around her neck.

Scootaloo clung to her. Not to drag her back into the reinforced bowels of her shelter, she realized. Just to say goodbye. Taking a breath, Rainbow settled her feathers around her friend and squeezed. They remained there, neither letting go, until the elevator doors chimed open.

Standing on the tips of her hooves, Scootaloo pressed her muzzle against Rainbow’s ear. “Fly fast.”

She squeezed Scootaloo one last time, knowing in her heart of hearts that this would be the last time they would see each other. Letting her go, she stepped onto the elevator and pressed the button that would carry her up to the lobby, both of them knowing she would never make it to Canterlot. That she stood little chance of reaching her assigned Stable before the bombs began to fall. That for all intents and purposes, she was resolved to go to her death doing the only thing she could.

Trying.

The elevator doors rolled closed, silencing the noise and sparing her from having to watch Scootaloo be pulled away. The floor pressed gently against her hooves, ferrying her up to the surface of a nation bracing for the imminent coming of death.

Safely beneath the dense canopy of clouds, with the four of them cruising eastward on the final leg of a long journey, Aurora felt an almost giddy excitement swell her chest. The last of the Pleasant Hills slowly shrank away far beneath her dangling hooves, the terrain resolving into a lumpy, rolling curtain of low hills and shallow gulches that bore a striking resemblance to the comforter on a half-made bed.

The highway that had taken them this far zigged and zagged through the rumpled foothills, occasionally crossing paths with nearly identical ribbons of asphalt running north and south. She couldn’t help but stare down at the complicated geometry that branched each of these crossroads together; filaments of concrete climbing artificial hills to connect the lanes of one artery to the lanes of the other which hung precariously above its dance partner on gargantuan concrete pillars.

This was it, she realized. They were really here. The tiny villages and quaint farming communities that dotted the empty landscape were quickly being replaced by larger pockets of prewar sprawl. The little roads that branched off the main highway no longer stretched out to nowhere. They were buttressed by larger and larger networks of narrow streets, forming dozens and then hundreds of neatly organized squares along which she could just make out the remains of centuries-old neighborhoods. An organized, thought out version of what Blinder’s Bluff had grown into.

They were too high, nearly high enough to graze the lower edges of the clouds, to make out any signs of survivors living amongst the ruins. But something told her that come nightfall there would be pockets of firelight blooming here and there among the suburbs. Just enough to tell the skies: We’re still here. We’re the ones who survived.

Something brushed against her ear. She gave it a flick and glanced back at Roach, who looked entirely preoccupied with something else. As much as a ghoul could, he wrinkled his nose at the dirty clouds overhead. She sympathised. They all would have preferred the endless blue vista and crisp air of the open sky above, but they had agreed to let Julip take the lead from here on out. She was the only one who knew exactly where they needed to land to avoid being shredded by the Steel Ranger’s mysterious Vhannan cannons, and none of them wanted to risk overshooting their target only to dip below the clouds and into the sensor range of those weapons.

Far ahead, tracing out a hazy bump on an otherwise flat horizon, stood the city center itself. Aurora stole a glance at her Pip-Buck and fought the urge to celebrate with an excited whoop. The little device chugged as it struggled to process the myriad of highways, roads, avenues and side streets that mercilessly converged in finer and finer detail toward the little green icon labeled FILLYDELPHIA. They were here. She’d lost count of the days, but it didn’t matter. They were-

Her ear snapped again, causing her to bank slightly and shoot an accusing look over her shoulder. The slight change in pitch seemed to jostle him out of whatever thoughts were consuming him, and he looked genuinely surprised to see her expression.

Another flick. This time, she caught the faintest glimpse of bronze light in the corner of her eye. The pinched smile forming on Roach’s face confirmed her suspicion and she looked across the narrow gap off her right wing, where Ginger rode atop Julip’s shoulders with an expectant grin.

“Took you long enough,” she teased.

Julip glanced back at her precious cargo, then Aurora, then rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the highway below.

Aurora gave her wings a quick pump and rejoined their rough formation. Eyeing the dimming wisp of magic around Ginger’s horn, she said, “The universe gives you the power to manipulate reality and you’re using it to mess with my head.”

Ginger chuckled. “You looked ready to pop, dearheart. And besides, picking on you is my responsibility. Nay, my duty.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Oh, keep it up. I’m not keeping track or anything.”

The unicorn shrugged and lit her horn. A pulse of magic flickered directly in Aurora’s path, replacing the empty air with a near perfect sphere of cloud that hadn’t been there before. The dusty brown vapor swept harmlessly over her and Roach, eliciting an irritated snort from the latter. As Ginger giggled from her perch atop Julip, Aurora glanced back to see Roach scrubbing his nose against the inside of his foreleg. Further behind them, she spotted an unmissable void in the cloud cover where Ginger had plucked the boulder-sized blob from.

Her practice was paying off since she fired off her first teleportation spell on the outskirts of Kiln. Aurora couldn’t help but add a playful edge to her warning, if for no other reason than to give Ginger a reason to show off.

“Keep it up, you,” she chuckled. “You’re just going to make it harder on yourself later on.”

Ginger answered with a smirk, and her horn swirled with renewed magic.

“Actually, if you could hold off throwing more clouds at us,” Roach rumbled, his voice showing the first touches of real irritation. “There’s something in them that I’m not liking.”

Aurora frowned, and Ginger’s horn went dark as the mood among them shifted from a lively back and forth to subdued concern. Before either of them could ask what was wrong, Julip took the initiative to start a shallow descent.

“Come on,” she called back. “We’re going to need to land soon anyway. Let’s get some distance from the clouds.”

Pitching forward, Aurora followed.

As she drew level with Julip’s wingtip, the freshly former corporal of the Enclave looked over to Roach and watched him. Aurora realized that there was a faint touch of worry in her eyes, something she didn’t seem to want any of them to see. When she caught Aurora looking, Julip pinched her lips into a line and faced forward.

To Roach, she said, “You’re having a reaction to the fallout. It usually clears up after a minute.”

He squeezed an eye shut, clearing his throat harshly enough to shudder down his hooves and into Aurora’s shoulders. She grimaced as a pang of guilt bloomed in her chest.

“I assume you’re going to explain how you know that,” Ginger pressed.

“There can’t be any fallout up here,” Roach grumbled. “It settled out of the atmosphere months after the bombs landed.”

Julip avoided eye contact as she led their descent, aiming toward the same highway that the centaurs had forced them to flee from days earlier.

“It did, but that hasn’t stopped us…” Julip paused to correct herself. “...stopped the Enclave from pumping it back into the sky. We… they seed the clouds with it.”

Aurora looked to Ginger to see if she understood what Julip was saying. Judging by her expression, she did.

“Ginger?”

The unicorn pulled a face as if she’d bitten into something bitter. She looked to Aurora, then to Roach, almost apologetically. “My father used to call it New Canterlot’s ‘Return to Sender’ initiative. Some of the ponies we owned would be sold off to work the quarries under what’s left of Canterlot Mountain, usually the ones that fell below quota in our fields. Unicorns typically mine the minerals irradiated by the bombs that collapsed the mountain while teams of earth ponies haul it up to the processing plants further up slope. It gets pulverized, fed to the weather factories at the peak and injected into the sky.”

Aurora could feel Roach shift with growing irritation. “They’re irradiating the clouds on purpose.”

Ginger said nothing, but Julip answered for her. “There’s a popular theory within the Enclave that Equestria fired the first missile, and Vhanna was forced to retaliate. Nobody believes the Elements of Harmony would sanction a first strike, so the blame usually goes to someone in the Equestrian military with an itchy trigger-feather. The Steel Rangers were born from what remained of that military, so sending up all the irradiated soil from Enclave territory to blot out the sky over the Rangers has some popular appeal among the citizenry.”

“That’s asinine,” Roach growled. “Poisoning the sky doesn’t just hurt the Rangers, and it’s half the reason so many ponies are dead-set against the Enclave in the first place.”

Julip continued to watch the ruins below. “I never said it made sense. It’s just something they do.”

A thought occurred to Aurora, another piece of the puzzle clicking into place. “That’s where the radstorms come from, isn’t it.”

Julip nodded again. “It’s deliberate. Just enough particulate to keep the clouds from breaking up, but not enough to let any of the trapped moisture rain out of the sky. The Enclave has enough salvaged data from the prewar weather factories to ride that razor’s edge for centuries, uninterrupted. If ever there is an atmospheric disturbance, the radstorms balance it out before a drop hits the ground.”

“Which is why Equestria is still a barren dust bowl,” Aurora muttered.

Julip clucked her cheek and pointed a feather at her. “Bingo.”

“That’s…”

It dawned on her that she didn’t know how to finish her sentence. Nothing Julip was saying sounded exaggerated. If anything, it was more likely she was leaving details out. Not to protect any Enclave secrets, but to keep it simple enough for Aurora to grasp. It wasn’t just the pegasi who bore Enclave insignia who supported poisoning the sky. The general population, civilian families like Ginger’s seemed to be going along with it. Even going so far as to provide material support to keep the quarries filled and the machines running, bent toward something as mindless as smearing the very soil of Old Canterlot over an otherwise beautiful dome of blue and gold.

And for what? Pure spite. An entire industry that existed for the sole purpose of saying fuck you to the other side.

Minutes passed in destitute silence. Once again, the wasteland had found a way to kill what little joy tried to sprout in it. As Julip led them toward the sprawling ruins below, the silhouette of Fillydelphia began to resolve out of the haze. A foggy blotch grew into a cluster of straight, vertical edges that reached toward but never managed to touch the dirty overcast sky. There were some buildings that seemed to be half-finished. Spikes of steel jutted out from stone facades, like the boards of a broken picket fence, shards of what had been monolithic towers snapped in half by some impossible wind.

Before she could make out more detail, Julip’s wings flared as she slowed to land. Aurora mimicked her form, turning her feathers against the current of air as they bent their trajectory toward a cluster of short buildings just a few blocks west of what had been the main highway but had become something closer to a boulevard.

They touched down on a roof of an abandoned convenience store framed on all sides by a crumbling brick half-wall. As Roach and Ginger dismounted, Julip motioned toward them with a hoof while simultaneously pressing a single feather to her lips. They followed her, silently, toward the rusting remains of a bulky air conditioning unit near the center of the roof. The flaking tar paper crunched like leaves beneath their hooves as they retreated from view of the nearby street, gathering in the shadow of the dead machine.

Almost immediately, Julip slid off her mailbag and began rummaging through the contents. From it she retrieved a battered leather jacket nearly identical to the one Ginger had lost to the grubby-hooved wall guards at Blinder’s Bluff. They watched as the mare folded her wings behind her back far enough that they criss crossed over her spine. Aurora winced, but Julip didn’t bat an eye as she picked up the collar with her teeth and flung it across her back, obscuring her feathers.

“We need to find you something to cover up your wings,” she said, nodding at Aurora while she fished her forelegs through the jacket’s sleeves.

She wasn’t so sure that was necessary. “Elder Coldbrook already knows we’re headed this way. The Rangers will probably be expecting me.”

“Probably,” Julip agreed. “That’s the problem. Rangers aren’t stupid. They know how to count, and if they’re expecting three ponies to show up and see four of us, they’re going to start wondering who I am. You might be able to wear your feathers through the checkpoints without getting shot, but I can’t. Best that we pose as travellers until we’re inside the city, then we can start working our way to Stable-Tec Headquarters.”

Aurora hummed thoughtfully as Julip slung her mailbag back over her neck with her teeth. “You make it sound like you’ve been here before.”

Julip shrugged. “I haven’t, but I had to memorize a lot of maps before I qualified for field duty. The Rangers fortify their strongholds the same way for the larger cities. Multiple checkpoints at the outskirts, anti-air batteries covering the interior, lots of ponies in power armor watching the roads in between. Stable-Tec HQ should be near the metro area, but I don’t remember exactly where. You’ll have to guide us there with your Pip-Buck.”

She nodded, checking her own map to get a better idea of the city’s layout. The densest chunk of Fillydelphia, the metro area as Julip called it, was unmistakably highlighted by the convergence of dozens of roads and railway lines centered along a wide ribbon of water aptly named the Fillydelphia River. It traveled a few miles south of the city before emptying out into the Celestial Sea, a vast body of water simply represented by the absence of data on the map.

On the far side of the city, tucked away on the strip of land bordered by river and sea waited the waypoint she had set more than a week ago while making preparations to leave Stable 10. A simple green square simply marked STHQ.

Less than twenty miles from the rooftop they currently stood on.

She swallowed. The urge to bolt into the sky and make a bee-line straight to her destination was immense, cannons be damned.

“Ginger, it’ll draw less suspicion if you’re carrying Aurora’s rifle.”

Aurora blinked. “Wait, a minute.”

“No bite trigger,” Julip stated, nodding to the weapon in question. “Once we get you covered up, you’re an earth pony. Doesn’t make sense for earth ponies to carry a rifle like that, especially without a bite trigger. Besides, if we get into trouble, Ginger won’t have to tear off a disguise to use it.”

“You’ve given this some thought,” Roach murmured.

Julip nodded. “Have been since you told me where we’re going. Try to bear with me for a while. This won’t be comfortable, but it’ll get us through.”

Aurora sighed, then lifted Desperate Times over her shoulder and held the strap out for Ginger. Her counterpart surrounded it in her magic, taking care to settle the weapon along her left side where the hooks she’d added for Aurora’s wings would be somewhat obscured from view.

“What else?” she asked.

Julip paused. “How many caps do we have?”

The three of them pulled a variety of faces.

“Maybe a hundred,” Aurora offered. “Not many. Most of what we had left from selling that spritebot were in Roach’s bags when the centaurs attacked.”

“What about the map you took off of Quincy?”

She frowned, shed her saddlebags and shifted some of the contents until she found the item in question. “I doubt it’s worth anything,” she said, giving it to Julip whose brow furrowed at the highlighted network of roads. “No x marks the spot that I could see, anyway.”

Julip grunted. “Looks like an early snapshot of F&F Mercantile’s supply lines.”

“So about as valuable as any other roadmap out here. That explains why Quincy didn’t try to stop me from taking it.”

“Quincy wasn’t looking to start a competing trade company,” Julip said. “But a lot of ponies are now that a certain two mares blew up the local monopoly. We might not need to bribe anyone with this.”

Aurora looked to Ginger, who shrugged. Roach was the only one who seemed to follow where Julip was headed, but he only tipped his nose back to the short green mare when they looked to him for explanation.

“Okay,” Julip said, gears spinning. “First we get you a disguise. Then we sneak onto the main road and slow roll until we find a mark.”

Aurora hesitated. “Repeat that last part again?”

A wry smile crossed Julip’s muzzle as she rolled up the map and slipped it in her satchel. “In the words of the late great Twilight Sparkle, it’s high time we went out and made some new friends,” she said. Grinning, she added, “We’re going to buy our way into a caravan.”

When Rainbow Dash envisioned visiting Opal’s department, she imagined a white, open office space lined wall-to-wall with ponies seated at cubicles doing the diligent work of maintaining the Stable’s digital systems. When the door hissed open, she was greeted with a room not much larger than the compartment she’d just left.

A rectangular conference room table butted up against the far wall and still managed to dominate the workspace. A well-used whiteboard hung from the same wall, different shades of marker scribbled in different wingwriting to form a densely cluttered, yet strangely organized framework of tasks. Colorful plastic magnets kept additional notes and even a few doodles pinned to the board.

Spread across the conference table was what Rainbow could only describe as madness. Desk toys shared space with disassembled terminals. Cables snaked from soldering irons, work terminals and test equipment toward holes cut through the surface of the table. Aluminum trays of half-eaten food sat nestled beside more than one of the work stations, pushing aside electrical components for devices she couldn’t identify.

Six pegasi looked up from their terminals, including a stallion seated in the corner with a Wonderbolts branded thermos pressed to his lips. All eyes went to Sledge. Then, as if on cue, they shifted down to Rainbow Dash.

The stallion in the corner took one look at her mane and choked.

Sledge didn’t give them time to gush. “Opal in her office?”

A mare seated nearest them nodded, her eyes wide as saucers as she lifted a helpful wing toward a door on the right side of the cluttered whiteboard. He had to squeeze his frame between their chairs and the wall, and somehow he managed not to break anything on his way to Opal’s door. Rainbow followed, stealing a glance at the stallion in the corner and shooting him a quick smile that left him gaping.

When the door dropped shut behind them, she let out a bright peel of laughter. Or as bright as it could be with her throat feeling like two sheets of wet sandpaper all the time. Sledge rolled his eyes at the mare seated behind a simple desk barely a few steps from the door. If the workspace behind them was small, Opal’s office was a shoebox.

The elderly mare tore a bite off the half-eaten bagel in her wing and hurried to finish chewing as she pushed her lunch to the side of her desk. She dusted the crumbs out of her wings and sat up. “Got here quicker ‘n I thought. I’ve got that surveillance tape decrypted like yeh wanted.” She waggled a feather at Rainbow. “Glad yer in good spirits. Don’t suppose I can convince yeh to skip the viewin’ so’s not to ruin yer mood?”

Rainbow’s smile faltered. “How bad is it?”

Opal’s gaze drifted to the screen on her desk. “It ain’t pretty, but… I s’pose you’ve seen uglier things. Come on around. I got it queued up.”

She stepped one way and Sledge went the other, rounding the desk for a clear view of Opal’s terminal. The overstallion’s hind leg thumped a metal bookcase along the wall as he turned, causing a row of labeled binders to tilt but not quite far enough to fall.

“Mix those up and you’ll be the one reorganizin’ em,” Opal warned without any heat in her voice. Sledge lifted his wing from its leather guard and pressed the binders flush with the shelf before he got himself in any more trouble.

Rainbow offered him a conspiring smile before peering down at the terminal. A single frame of video stood frozen on the screen, displaying every color of the rainbow as long as that color was green. Applebloom had been a smart filly, but Rainbow never understood why Robronco couldn’t find a way to display more color than Applejack’s crappy tube television.

Even without color, she recognized Spitfire’s swept back mane in a heartbeat. The camera peered down from the rear corner of the overmare’s office, slightly fisheyed to provide a clear view of all four walls and a single door in the farthest corner. The slats to the medallion shaped window had been pulled shut and the room was in shambles. A potted fern near the door had been shattered, leaving dark soil sprayed across the carpet. The remains of a phone lay beneath the shuttered window, wires pointing back to the desk from which it had been thrown from. The only items in the office that escaped damage were two weapons mounted on the wall behind Spitfire’s desk. A rifle and a pistol. The service weapons issued to each Wonderbolt during the war. Having never been deployed herself, Spitfire’s had been ceremonial. Rainbow remembered the day she came to her office to complain that ministry security refused to let her display them in her office because of her insistence on keeping them loaded. Battle ready, she called it. Looking back, it should have been a red flag that the mare believed the ministries should bend to her ideals. Too late, now.

Spitfire sat alone behind an ornate wooden desk, her forehead bent against her joined hooves as if in prayer. It took a moment for Rainbow to recognize her strange posture. She was crying.

Opal licked her lips and lifted a feather to the keyboard. “Like I said, it ain’t pretty.”

She hit play.

“Watch the ruts.”

“I see ‘em.”

“Then get away from ‘em.”

A beleaguered sigh, a groaning of wooden beams, and the lead wagon slowly lurched away from the fissure snaking its way toward them from the left half of the boulevard. The two trailing wagons followed, rolling past yet another easily avoided expense. The earth pony pulling the lead wagon, a cross between a workhorse and a small building, muttered something impolite beneath his breath that only the caravan leader was able to hear.

It quickly led to a heated exchange of whispers between the two. Judging by the comparable bulk of the caravan leader, the two stallions were obviously related.

Following behind the lead wagon, Aurora only half-listened to the two stallions arguing. She was still trying to comprehend just how easy it was for Julip to buy protection from this little caravan.

“This isn’t fair,” she muttered.

To her right, just beyond Ginger’s pinched but dutifully neutral smile, Julip only offered a smug little grin in response.

Ahead, the wagon crunched over the scaling concrete, a form of decay Roach attributed to the seawater that the eastern breeze brought in from the other side of the looming towers. A part of her wanted to ask whether that had anything to do with the aggressively orange smears of fresh rust along all the doorframes, hinges, and myriad of other poles, boxes and signs bolted along the sidewalks.

Sidewalks. She wanted to ask about those too. And the hundreds of rusting carriages shoved over their curbs, piled against the single-storey storefronts like so much detritus.

But she was too irritated by Julip’s easy victory to broach the question.

“Absolute…” she pinched her mouth shut, leaving herself to finish the bullshit in her head.

With her first step out of Stable 10, literally her very first step, things had found a way to go wrong immediately. The feral ghouls that attacked her in the tunnel. Her first encounter with Cider. Her last encounter with Cider. Teaching herself to use her wings only to nearly fall for a trap set by an Epicurean convoy. Trying to fly again and getting shot out of the sky by a sniper’s bullet. The fiasco at Blinder’s Bluff. The fiasco at the JetStream Array.

Coldbrook.

Gallow.

Julip.

Beans.

Dancer and Chops.

It had to be some kind of cosmic prank. There were days when it felt like she couldn’t sneeze without setting some disaster into motion. And now, with Julip guiding them, they’d found enough discarded clothing to fashion functional disguises and managed to interrupt a trader caravan without being shot at, mugged or kidnapped. Aurora half expected the caravan leader, a middle aged stallion who introduced himself simply as Tad, to try to slap chains and collars on them in some ill-gotten callback to their encounter with the slavers of Kiln.

But he hadn’t. The caravan stopped, its guards made a show of drawing their weapons, and their leader just… talked to Julip. She explained that they were new to Fillydelphia and wanted help getting in safely, and in exchange she offered him F&F Mercantile’s map.

And Tad accepted.

And nobody shot at them.

Aurora was almost offended by how easy Julip made it look. No, scratch that. She was offended.

What the shit.

It took them the better part of an hour to reach the first checkpoint, but as they approached it became obvious that the contingent of armor-clad Rangers that occupied the makeshift ramparts had been monitoring their approach for several miles. A collection of iron beams and steel panels formed a wall not much different than the one that surrounded Blinder’s Bluff, with the single exception that they had constructed it in the natural choke point of a large intersection. As they approached, a rolling gate mounted on a simple cog-and-socket track slid open to allow a small wagon and its entourage of armed guards to leave.

Without sharing so much as a word, Tad’s doppleganger maneuvered the lead wagon into the right lane. The single wagon approaching them eased into the left. The two groups passed one another with simple greetings and a few polite nods between opposing guards, and then they were behind them.

Aurora fumed.

Julip shrugged.

Clearing the checkpoint didn’t take long. Two ponies stomped out of the gate in full power armor, one stopping to ask Tad a series of boilerplate questions while the other made his way down the caravan, stopping to peer into the canvas covers that shaded their contents. Aurora thought she met the eye of the pony performing the inspection, but she could hardly be sure when all she could see was her own reflection in his visor.

To her relief, he didn’t ask about the ragged coat she wore over her wings. He probably couldn’t even smell the stink that wafted off the rotting fabric, a byproduct of the semi-damp muck Julip found it in. For all intents and purposes, Aurora looked and smelled like a vagrant. Ginger, donning a stained and faded purple ball cap bearing the stitched logo of a cereal brand called Fizzy Berry Pops!, drew slightly more attention with the few sprigs of fiery mane poking out from under the hat but still garnered no suspicion beyond her strange fashion statement.

Roach, however, gave the stallion in armor pause as he made his way back up the caravan.

“What happened to you?” came the modulated voice from within the suit.

He cocked a brow, then made a show of looking down at himself. “Too much radiation in my diet,” he rumbled.

The Ranger persisted. “Funny. I’m asking about your skin.”

Aurora felt herself tensing. Here it was. The other shoe finally dropped. Fate finally tracked down that string and gave it a hard yank. Nothing could ever be this easy.

Roach let out a sigh touched with exasperation. “I helped a young mare escape a raider ambush a ways west of here. Raiders didn’t like that and put a rope around my neck. Took me to their camp and forced me to stand in their cookfire hoping I’d burn to death. Turns out ghouls don’t burn to death so easy.”

The Ranger paused, his helmet turning slightly to the blackened chitin of Roach’s hide as he absorbed the blatant lie. There was a hint of apology in his voice when he spoke. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“No hard feelings. Are we good?”

The helmet tipped up and down with a single, uncomfortable nod. As he stomped up the road to rejoin his partner, the four of them could hear the latter stallion utter a quiet, “dumbass,” as he motioned for the contingent on the wall to open the gate. The wall of steel rolled aside and they passed into Ranger territory without so much as a challenge.

A second checkpoint waited for them a mile up the road, the blockade clearly visible in the distance from the first. Getting clearance to go through was even easier than the first. Another duo of Rangers greeted them at the gate, and this time they simply verified over radio what the stallions at the first checkpoint had observed. A head count was taken, verified, and the gate rolled open without a word exchanged between Tad or the Rangers.

The boulevard that stretched beyond the gate was nothing like the highway they’d followed for the last several days. Aurora’s eyes went wide. Bombs or no bombs, it was clear that the ruins of Fillydelphia were still very much alive.

The skyscrapers of the city center dominated the skyline ahead, but leading up to it was a long road of smaller buildings in varying states of dilapidation, decay or deconstruction. A short queue of chuck wagons and carts waited their turn to be let through the gates. Traders, Ginger explained, headed out west in search for more of their preferred wares. Much like the caravan Tad led, most of the wagons they passed bore fresh coats of paint over what had once been F&F Mercantile logos. Some of those traders were still in the process of conducting last-minute business while they waited, serving those ponies who saw the opportunity to make a deal with traders eager to make a few extra caps on their way out the gate.

As they passed the queue, Aurora could better see the patchwork of mangled storefronts lining the sidewalk that had been repurposed again and again over the decades. Shattered display windows had been closed up with a seemingly random assortment of lumber, scrap metal and whatever else these ponies had been able to get their hooves on. Wide slashes of paint, salvaged marquees, even some cobbled together letters taken from a slew of what appeared to be road signs advertised a few small businesses along the boulevard. Others simply informed passers-by to stay out or risk eating a bullet.

Those that weren’t occupied were actively being torn down for scrap materials, and most of them had already been ripped down to the studs. The discolored gaps between what had once been an unbroken row of buildings reminded her a little of Gallow’s picket-fence smile. She pushed the memory away, annoyed that her mind always seemed to find a reason to dredge the young ghoul up.

“S’pose you’ll be wanting the guided tour?”

Aurora’s ears perked up. Tad had sidled alongside Roach, though he was looking to Julip for her answer.

“Whatever will help us get to where we’re going. We don’t plan to stay long.”

Tad collected his thoughts, his black-tipped ears lowering a little as he worked out how to pare down what must have been a mountain of information. Aurora let herself smile a little. She had the exact same problem when new pegasi were assigned to Mechanical. Anyone unfortunate enough to ask her where the brass fittings were would undoubtedly get the life story of why the brass fittings were there.

The caravan leader puffed out a sigh and gestured a hoof in a wide sweep, indicating the makeshift storefronts lining the street. “Well, right now we’re in what the locals like to keep calling the Suburbs. Majority of your low value trade’s gonna take place around here. Components, common scrap, junk, just about anything you might need in a pinch but would be wasting your own time to steal. Joys of living close to the wall. Ain’t technically a suburb, though. Those’re back the way we came. Funny thing about that. After the bombs hit…”

“What about the towers?” Ginger prompted.

Aurora stifled a smirk.

“Hm.” Tad stared out at the concrete pillars and shrugged. “There’s going to be where you find most’ve what you need. Weapons, armor, plenty of ponies what know how to turn a wrench if you’re looking for repairs. What else… oh! See those buildings with all the glass on them?”

Aurora budged over so Ginger could see past the wagon. It took a moment for any of them to see which tower he was pointing at. At first glance, none of Fillydelphia’s remaining structures had many if any windows to speak off. Here and there a shard might reflect some of the midday gloom, but it was only until Ginger directed Aurora’s attention to a pair of identical spires that she noticed a few rust streaked sheets of what had once been a resplendent greenish-blue glass facade.

The more Aurora paid attention, the more she noticed. The city skyline had not suffered the end of the modern world unscathed. Many of the structures tall enough to be seen from here bore signs of massive damage. Large swaths of stonework had been flayed from their steel girders, the bulk of it beginning from the left side of each structure and peeling away toward the relatively shielded surfaces on the right. Many of the towers were frozen in a state of partial collapse, some even tilted so far off their foundations that their rooftops had come crashing against their neighbors before settling.

The towers that Tad was indicating stood on the far right extremity of the metro area and, with the exception of the superficial damage to their facades, looked to have been completely shielded from the blast that tortured its windward counterparts. Aurora stole a glance at her Pip-Buck, the gently bouncing needle on its display confirming elevated radiation. A balefire bomb had landed nearby.

“That’s Magnus Plaza. Steel Rangers run the show in Fillydelphia from there. If you’re in the market for some freelance work, that’s the place to go.”

He nodded to Aurora. “Might wanna stow that Pip-Buck of yours if you end up heading that way. Just a suggestion.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she murmured.

Tad shrugged, shifting his attention back to Julip. “Headed anywhere in particular?”

Julip glanced her way, and she offered a single nod in answer.

“Stable-Tec HQ.”

The stallion frowned. “Huh. Alright. I’m guessing there was another Stable collapse.”

Aurora shook her foreleg until the ragged sleeve of her jacket obscured her Pip-Buck. “We’re just here to sight-see.”

Tad hummed, his eyes drifting to the lump at the end of her sleeve, and just as quickly his interest in her evaporated. “Well, I’ll give you some free advice since you’re headed that way. Stop in the city first and pick up some lead-shielded armor. Those rags aren’t going to stop the radiation on their own.”

She shot him an wary frown. “Care to elaborate?”

He just chuckled. “You really are tourists, aren’t you?”

She waited. Eventually he relented and tipped his muzzle just beyond the northern skyline.

“Look, I’m not sure what you’re hoping to find over there, but take some precautions. That side of town has been glowing since the world came to an end.” Seeing her confusion, he took a breath and sighed.

“Stable-Tec Headquarters got flattened,” he said. “Where do you think the bomb dropped?”

Aurora stared at the winding cracks in the concrete as they slid beneath her hooves. That edge of panic was back, clawing at her chest in search of a way out. She felt sick. Tears pricked at her eyes as she alternated between trying not to think about what Tad had told them, and not being able to take her mind off of it.

Stable-Tec Headquarters was gone. Flattened was the word he used. The target of one of the world ending weapons that forced one lucky sliver of the population underground while the rest was left to fend for themselves on the surface. A weapon destructive enough to mandate the use of a blast door so over engineered that the mere sight of it had humbled her, a pony who had come to be familiar with prewar tech as if it were a second skin.

If Stable-Tec’s only known operational hub was gone, what chance did Stable 10 even have anymore? What did it matter whether Coldbrook wanted to pry it open if it had been doomed to collapse from the start? What was the point of coming all this way to the ruins of a city a thousand miles from home?

The great towers of Fillydelphia loomed directly overhead now. Earth ponies and unicorns wandered the shaded sidewalks while others pulled ramshackle wagons behind them. Hundreds of darkened windows hung above them, some of them covered with colorful sheets and bits of wood while the majority just stood empty. Dark, black voids where a bomb that would continue to punish the world centuries later had shattered every shard of hope it could reach.

The one thing that gave her comfort was the welcome warmth of Ginger’s shoulder against hers. She could feel it through her tattered, reeking coat and knew without speaking a word that Ginger was letting her know she wasn’t alone in this.

It helped.

Not much. But it helped.

Tad and his wagons departed with a sincere good luck and just a touch of apology for being the bearer of unwelcome news. He left them among the vast stone behemoths of central Fillydelphia, surrounded by the sights and sounds of a city in the midst of rebuilding itself. It would take many more generations before Fillydelphia would ever boast a population like the one it had before the war, but it was well on its way.

She assumed they had to be close to Magnus Plaza given how many Steel Rangers she was seeing. They walked the sidewalks, monitored the crowds gathering around temporary trade stalls, and she even caught sight of a uniformed mare seated at what appeared to be a genuine restaurant of sorts, enjoying a bowl of something steamy that was being served in front of a partially collapsed bank. Unlike the Rangers of Blinder’s Bluff who felt like an occupying force, the Rangers here felt less intrusive. Present, unmistakably so, but almost as if they were an ingredient in a recipe rather than the spoon that stirred it.

At an arbitrary intersection, one piled on each corner with more abandoned carriages, Aurora reluctantly took a left turn north. The others followed. No one seemed up for small talk anymore. They knew where she was going.

She ignored the traders that shouted after them, boasting their wares. Dressed as they were, they hardly stood out. Ponies made way for them and they did the same in turn. They passed by several vendors who hung painted signs along their wagons advertising armor, vestments, and fresh clothing. Aurora didn’t stop at any of them. She overheard Julip ask Roach whether they should take Tad’s advice and pick up some lead shielding, and he quietly asked her what they expected to trade to pay for it. They barely had twenty-five caps for each of them. As far as buying new gear was concerned, they were broke.

An hour later, the city center was behind them and their collective mood darkened even further as the short buildings along Fillydelphia’s northeast side began to show clear signs of catastrophic damage. No junk shops were open for business here. No ponies enjoying lunch on the sidewalk. No Rangers patrolling the road. The asphalt itself buckled and heaved up from the roadway as if a giant’s hoof had shoved it away from the blast site. Before they went further, Julip stopped them long enough to tap out double doses of Rad-X from a little glass bottle tucked within her bag.

“We should have enough time to take a look depending on how bad the radiation is.”

As it turned out, the radiation wasn’t bad at all. Aurora’s Pip-Buck chittered and spat with a little more energy than it had before, but even as the shattered buildings around them devolved into charred timbers, empty foundations and finally no foundations at all, the gauge’s needle barely grazed the bottom edge of yellow.

As they stepped onto the edge of ground zero, she understood why.

The charred soil surrounding the bomb crater had consumed the better part of ten city blocks from end to end. Within that radius, nothing had survived. Not even the pavement of the street they followed to get here. In the span of a nanosecond, all of it - every building, every carriage, every pony caught in the epicenter - had been converted into a sphere of superheated plasma. Erased from existence as if they had never been there in the first place. The ground itself had been carved away leaving behind flecks of glass and hardpack soil that sloped gently toward the pit at its center.

A pool of stagnant water the color of vomit had seeped in to fill the crater. Dust and debris collected on its surface forming a frothy skin around the outer edge. They approached the crater, coming a stone’s throw away before Aurora’s Pip-Buck finally started chattering with enough emphasis to halt their progress.

Looking down at her map confirmed her fear. Her little waypoint marked STHQ lay dead in the middle of the crater. This had been where Stable-Tec’s headquarters once stood. This was the place she’d fought day after day to reach, hoping that her salvation would be waiting inside the same building that gave birth to so many places of refuge. Hoping that somewhere inside, she would find what she needed to rescue the one she called home.

But there was nothing left. Only glass.

She sat down, staring into the crater, too numb for words.

Delta pressed a feather against the headset hooked to her ear. “Okay, good. Now try applying a little more lateral rotation until your right hind leg can reach the… you got it. Good job, kiddo.”

Apogee was breathing hard as she came over the radio. “Thanks. Give me a second to catch my breath, okay?”

She watched Apogee thump her helmet against the one-to-one mockup of SOLUS’s cylindrical core module, a factory perfect replica of the one currently holding formation in geostationary orbit over Equestria. The wafer-thin display mounted to her foreleg gave her an unobstructed feed to the camera mounted to the helmet of the safety diver behind her.

“I’ll give you sixty, then back on mission. I want you to get a feel for how the suit moves with the reaction control surfaces disabled.”

She smirked at the sound of Apogee’s groan and tapped the mute button on her headset. “Well, she hasn’t fired me yet.”

“Might have something to do with you being her mother.”

She arched a brow at Jet, who had taken to following her on her slow laps around the behemoth swimming pool. Of course, he wouldn’t be satisfied with just calling it a pool. As always, anything owned by JetStream Industries had to be branded by JetStream Industries. His cumbersomely titled Neutral Buoyancy Workshop was a simple and, admittedly, clever solution to training the reflexes of his potential astronauts to work in microgravity. Today, as with every foreseeable Wednesday going forward, was Apogee’s scheduled day for eight luxurious hours of extravehicular practice. It was also Delta’s best chance to expose any unforeseen problems in the operation of her vacuum suit.

“Might have something to do with not wanting to be the first mare to suffocate in space,” she countered, spurring a discomfited frown from Jet.

Let him fidget, she decided. He was the one who wanted to pack her into a bulky marshmallow of a suit which would have ballooned in size the moment it hit vacuum. No amount of funding was going to help him see past his blind spots. Apogee was right to ask her for help.

“Alright, kiddo, break’s over. Let’s see you reach the next hoofhold up and get into position to install Talisman Number Five.”

Apogee puffed out a little grunt. “Affirmative.”

They continued around the corner of the pool, eyes shifting between the tech on their forelegs and the rippling surface of the water. Six SOLUS modules as well as a waterproofed model of the return capsule rested below the waves like a strange flock waiting to be known by their shepherds.

“Just so you know, she doesn’t like being called kiddo,” Jet observed.

She narrowed her eyes at him. “It can’t be any worse than what I’ve heard you call her. How’d your night go yesterday? Any regular guests, or have you moved past pegging your-”

He made a noise of disgust and wrapped his feathers around her muzzle while using the other wing to tap the screen fixed to his foreleg. Delta grinned beneath his carefully firm grip as a familiar, and visibly irritated grey-coated mare appeared on the screen.

“Diamond, make sure the audio records from the NBW get scrubbed for today.”

The bespectacled mare mouthed something under her breath. “I’m your lawyer, Jet, not your secretary.”

He smiled silently at the screen with a face that said, “I’m sorry, I was too busy being handsome to hear you.”

“Fine.” Diamond reached to hang up the call, but then she narrowed her eyes at the screen and her brow flattened. “Jet, I feel the need to ask what you’re doing to your wife.”

“You’re the best,” he said, and before she could protest he cut the connection and took his feathers from Delta’s muzzle. “Please don’t bring up my private life where I have cameras installed.”

She snorted. “Embarrassed?”

He shot her a look of challenge. “If you want to have this conversation, Delta, we can. Or we can focus on ensuring our daughter survives long enough to go on more than one mission.”

His abruptness startled her silent. Jet was rarely this direct about anything, happy to rely on vague promises of financial ruin or social humiliation to get what he wanted rather than stating the facts so plainly. Delta looked back to her screen where Apogee was busy aligning one of the dummy talismans into its containment chamber.

“Sorry,” she murmured, her eyes trailing across the water to the other side of the pool. She blinked as she recognized an unmistakable flash of color standing among a small group of pegasi on the opposite end. “Should I ask why Rainbow Dash is visiting, or are you going to make me guess?”

Jet only shrugged. “She’s the entire reason SOLUS is getting off the ground. She can visit whenever she likes.”

“So you are going to make me guess.”

He rolled his eyes. “She asked if she could come out to give her old captain a tour of the facilities. Nothing formal.”

She muttered dubiously. “A tour.”

“Forget your tinfoil hat at home?”

She lifted her favorite feather at him in response. “Laugh now, but you know the government’s only helping you now so they can figure out how to fuck you later. I don’t trust them.”

It was Jet’s turn to scoff. “One of them’s an Element of Harmony.”

“I meant the ministries. Some of the things they get up to is...”

“Careful,” he warned. Lifting a wing, he waved the minister and her plus one over as if they were two of his best friends in the world. Delta watched as the commander of the Wonderbolts immediately broke off from Rainbow Dash, leaving the latter to practically trot around the pool after her. In the same motion, Jet touched a feather to his earpiece. “How’s the suit feeling, Apogee?”

Apogee’s voice puffed from beneath the ripples. “Best exercise I’ve gotten since college!”

Delta tilted a brow, her eyes fixed on the oncoming mares. “You were never in athletics.”

“Yeah, well…” she trailed off, leaving Delta to put the pieces together on her own. “The suit’s working better than expected, but it would be easier to handle these crummy little talismans if I could use my wings.”

“Those crummy talismans are the key to ending a global war, sweetheart,” Jet chided. “And until we can design a tactile interface that won’t fold your wings like a lawn chair, we’ll need to do it the earth pony way for this mission.”

“Gross visual, dad.”

“Very real failure mode, kiddo.”

Delta ignored him as he shot her a knowing look. She was here to help her daughter, not get chummy with her ex-husband.

“Let’s have you swing over to Chamber Six without guidance and compare performance once we have you out of the water. Spades is right behind you if you need an assist.”

“That’s an affirmative.” After a pause, she added, “You know, after debriefing you, me and mom should fly over to the city for something to eat. There’s this new Yakistanian place near the strip that…”

“Gonna have to stick a pin in it for now,” he said, nodding in greeting to Rainbow Dash as she and Spitfire crossed the last few yards between them.

“We could order in?” Apogee offered.

Jet smiled at his daughter’s persistence. Delta felt a touch of one graze her lip as well, but less readily.

“Next time, okay? Focus on the mission.”

A reluctant sigh. “Sir, yes sir.”

He cut the connection and dipped his head, acknowledging but not apologizing for the delay. “Minister Dash. Commander Spitfire. How goes the tour?”

Rainbow opened her mouth to speak, but Spitfire’s voice was quicker to answer. “It’s been very enlightening thus far. I wasn’t aware the Ministry of Technology’s partnership with your company allowed you access to talisman technology to this degree.”

If there was a note of disapproval in Spitfire’s voice, Delta couldn’t find it. As the mare with the orange mane glanced into the pool beside them, her eyes focused on the submerged modules and the two white-clad ponies making their way around the centermost piece of SOLUS. As Spitfire watched, Delta noticed the faintest edge of an earpiece in her ear.

“The MoT has been extremely helpful.” Jet offered her a polite smile before pointedly turning to regard Rainbow Dash. “Actually, I was hoping-”

“Have you given any additional thought to our offer?”

Delta blinked, and so did Jet as Spitfire took a half-step toward them. For a mare who some claimed was responsible for sending hundreds of Wonderbolts to be shredded apart in the Vhannan skies thanks to her lack of imagination, Spitfire had some brass clackers to shove herself back to the head of a conversation she wasn’t a part of.

Rather than shouting her down like Delta was want to do, Jet’s smile simply grew a little less polite. “I haven’t, because I have no interest in taking you up on it.”

“That really is a shame,” Spitfire persisted. “A Stable could really benefit from a mind like yours. From an investment perspective-”

“It would be a waste of my time and resources.” His patience was wearing thin, but he was miles away from losing his temper. “I have all the respect in the world for ponies like Scootaloo, but I’m not interested in putting my name on Stable-Tec’s roster. Our future lies in the stars, not below ground.”

A beat passed where nobody spoke. Even Rainbow Dash looked like a bird on the razor’s edge of leaping away to find the safety of another branch. And yet Spitfire was unfazed. The corners of her eyes crinkled as she smiled at Jet even more broadly, then abruptly turned to regard Delta with the same potent intensity. “Then it looks like we have an open slot.”

Ten minutes later, Delta found herself seated in one of JetStream Aerospace’s lavish conference rooms.

The sweet scent of exotic orchids meshed with the lingering stink of cigars that cost more bits than she would be lucky to make in a month. Soft, thick carpet grazed the bottoms of her hind hooves. Even the view through the wide, west-facing windows offered a picturesque scene of the grassy dunes and the crystal blue sea just beyond.

Delta paid none of it any attention. Just more ways for Jet to polish his ego in front of his guests. She shuffled through the documents on the table before her, reading and re-reading the fine print for the inevitable trap. “I don’t follow. I thought Stable-Tec was a private company. Why are the ministries choosing residents?”

Spitfire smiled at her from across the table. Beside her, Rainbow Dash said nothing. If anything, the ministry mare looked almost irritated. Probably rightfully pissed that her tour had been subverted for an unscheduled meeting.

“This Stable won’t be like the other Stables, Ms. Vee. Our ministry’s goal, should the worst ever come to pass, is to ensure the survival of the best potential Equestria’s pegasi have to offer.”

“Then you should be talking to my kid, not me.”

Spitfire idly peeled back one of her documents, skimming the signature at the bottom. “We have and she’s already accepted a leadership role within our IT staff.”

Delta blinked. Apogee had mentioned nothing about securing a spot in a Stable. When had that happened? When was she planning to tell her or Jet?

“First time hearing about it?” Spitfire posited.

A haze of shame filled her chest. She’d assumed things had been getting better between her and her daughter.

“Don’t feel bad, some ponies favor keeping the news to themselves. Registering for a Stable has something of a stigma attached to it.” Spitfire tugged the form out of her thin stack of papers and pushed it across the table. Delta took it, recognizing Apogee’s looping signature on the bottom. “I don’t blame someone with her potential celebrity wanting to keep it private. The tabloids can be merciless, as I’m sure you already know.”

Delta grit her teeth at that last bit but chose to leave it be. She drew a feather over Apogee’s Stable registration form, shaking her head. “I’m her mother.”

“You are,” Spitfire said, “which is why we’re offering you a place as well. Having a family member at wing’s reach may ease the worst of the adjustment period.”

She passed the form back across the table. “Adjustment period. You keep talking like you’re taking this end-of-the-world shit seriously. Last I heard on the news, the talismans the zebras make aren’t powerful enough to compete with my hangover pills. Did that suddenly change?”

For the first time since her arrival, Rainbow Dash spoke. “No. Vhanna doesn’t have the manufacturing capabilities.”

“Yet,” Spitfire added with a touch of force. There was clearly some kind of schism between them, but what it was was anyone’s guess. “History tells us that nothing stays a secret for very long in this world. The zebras have been following in our hoofsteps since the day Vhanna was discovered. This is strictly my opinion, but I believe there is a non-zero chance that they’ll have some form of balefire technology at their disposal within the decade. If that happens, I imagine those of us registered to a Stable will look a lot less foolish.”

A non-zero chance. Up until now, no member of Equestria’s government was even willing to entertain the idea of zebras getting a hold of balefire. Admitting such a disaster was even possible was grounds for investigation by the Ministry of Image followed by an unceremonious change in career. The fact that Rainbow Dash wasn’t moving to correct her spoke volumes.

By now, every pony in Equestria had seen the heavily redacted footage released to the press by the ministries. Shots of a towering fireball the color of emeralds boiling into the atmosphere had dominated the front of every newspaper for weeks now. Balefire: Equestria’s new superweapon that spelled inevitable defeat for the zebras. Some ponies had already begun advocating for its immediate use overseas. “Scorch the Stripes” was becoming a common phrase among the war-weary population, even while a smaller group of voices in Equestria called for laws banning the use of balefire altogether. They were widely ignored.

Delta chewed at her lip. Jet made it clear he wasn’t attaching his name to Stable-Tec. Did he know Apogee had signed up? If he had, at least she knew she wasn’t the only shitty parent in this family.

Apogee wasn’t the type of mare to lose sleep over nothing. Signing that form meant she was spooked over this whole balefire business just like all the other ponies selling their livelihoods for a ticket in.

Spitfire was offering them that ticket for free.

She picked up the pen.

“Which one do I sign?”

Fiona hoisted her tail and the Steel Ranger behind her tripped over their hooves a second later.

“If you don’t stop that, the deal’s off.”

The gryphon whistled the first notes of If I Had a Great Long Pistol to herself and did as she was ordered, though not quickly and certainly not to any great effect. Unlike the ponies escorting her up the last winding turns of Blinder’s Bluff, her tail was all lithe muscle and peach fuzz. There were days when she would love to have the feather dusters the natural inhabitants of Equestria boasted but this was absolutely not one of those days.

The mare behind her, a cherry pink little thing whose name she hadn’t bothered to ask, was full of empty threats and not much else. She could no more rescind Coldbrook’s deal than she could stop the stallion behind her from ogling the pert little cleft she felt no guilt about putting on display. A little bit of torture for the mighty Rangers who saw fit to turn her life on its head.

They were lucky she didn’t throw them down the fucking cliff.

Padding her way along the last stretch of trail, she dug her talons just a little deeper into the soil. There were hoofprints everywhere now that they were off the cobbles. Of course Coldbrook had sent ponies up here to sniff around. She ambled into what they liked to call a trot, her larger body forcing her guard to gallop just to keep up. Let them get some exercise. Forcing her to walk was unnecessary so why shouldn’t they be forced to push out a little sweat?

Sure enough, there were signs of tampering. The fencing she had wrapped around her fire tower’s pylons had been snipped open and her little mound of scrap spritebot parts was all but picked clean. The corners of her beak tilted unhappily at the sight of so many repair projects wiped out without her being consulted. For every bot she was able to bring back and turn into a zombie, there were often up to ten Enclave sprites she could infect with her custom code before someone shot it down. Now she was going to have to start collecting all over again, and in the meantime her swarm of snoops in the wasteland would continue to dwindle.

“If any of you touched my nest,” she warned.

“If someone did, it wasn’t us,” the mare snapped back. “And put. Your. Tail. Down.”

“No.” With that, she leaped up to the railing atop the tower and dropped down onto the catwalk. The Rangers below could only watch as she walked the perimeter, looking for damage.

To her annoyance, the locked hatch she kept over the stairs had been cut open. Taking a breath, she leaned into the open door of her broadcast station and tried not to lose it at the sight of so many of her things so obviously out of place. Her chair had been pushed aside, footlockers filled with spare vacuum tubes, lengths and gauges of wire, tools and boards lay open but had thankfully gone unpilfered. Whoever had been sent up here at least knew if they wanted to ever use this station again, they would be wise not to raid her stashes. She completed the circuit and leaned against the wood railing, drooping her arms over the edge.

“So when am I expecting scripts?”

The mare shrugged, leaving the lovestricken stallion behind her to speak up. “P-paladin Ironshod said he would have a draft up to you before your first broadcast.”

She scoffed. “A draft. And what about my bits?”

“Saw enough of those on the way up,” the mare growled.

“Yeah and I didn’t charge, so lucky you. You know what I’m talking about. My livelihood. When do I find out how much my allowance is?”

The stallion stepped in front of his counterpart. “We don’t have a timeline on that yet.”

Her tufted ears flattened. “You do realize I’m broke, right? How am I going to eat?”

“Ma’am,” he said, his tone beginning to firm up just enough to match the rest of his anatomy, “those are questions you can ask Paladin Ironshod once he returns to the Bluff. All we need to hear from you is whether your equipment is in operable condition and we’ll be on our way.”

Fiona rolled her eyes and dropped to all fours on the catwalk and returned to her overengineered broadcast booth. She leaned against the frame and scanned her little home a second time, spying a few of Lime Royale’s hoof-drawn bottles still on the floor beside her console. She made a mental note to take a few of those down to Someplace Else to redeem the deposits. It would be enough to cover a few meals and maybe even a full bottle if she could sweet talk the old goat, but if Coldbrook decided to be an asshole about her allowance she was going to need to start tapping into brothel hours again.

She blew out a sigh and pushed off the old frame. Trading sex for caps rarely bothered her unless someone got a little too clingy, or if she made the mistake of taking caps from one of the cryers. God, she hated dealing with cryers. But beside that it was lucrative, she excelled at it, and it was just fun. That is, until Coldbrook stuck his soiled little nose into it and turned it into work.

Even if he agreed to pay her his most generous estimate, which he wouldn’t, it would barely cover half of what the Rangers wanted her to pay for the electricity required to broadcast. Like it or not, she was going to have to come up with her share of the caps by the end of every month and recreational romps with the locals weren't going to cut it. That meant no more freebies, no more discounts for her favorites and definitely no more buying rounds for Lime’s regulars.

She slumped against the railing and gave the ponies below an irritated thumbs-up. “Everything looks fine.”

The stallion nodded and started to turn away. “We’ll let Elder Coldbrook know.”

“Hey,” she said, stopping them. She lifted a finger toward the stallion. “You gotta be anywhere soon?”

He blinked.

The mare lit her horn, the universal sign of pony mad. “We’re on duty,” she reminded him.

And with that they turned to leave. Fiona watched them, cheek in palm, then spent some time taking in the familiar vista of distant bluffs once they were gone. When that got boring she pushed off the rail and slinked back in amongst her equipment, checking to be doubly sure nothing had been tampered with.

She threw the switch on a rusty junction box she’d scribbled NO TOUCHY on and smiled as her equipment lit up. Her headphones were still where she left them by the console, the needles perched above her mix board settling into their presets where she liked them. Her transmitter showed all green, broadcast strength peaking at 20 kilowatts. She walked the cramped circle around the main console, checking outputs and settings for any signs of meddling. A little, she realized to her annoyance, but not much.

Plopping down into her modified chair, she picked up a pad and pen and scribbled herself a reminder to thank Misty Manes for being such a cantankerous bitch. When Coldbrook got the bright idea to shack her up at the one inn in the Bluff with room for a gryphon, he hadn’t bargained for the owner throwing her right back out onto the cobbles. If it weren’t for her all but nailing the doors shut to keep Fiona and what she unaffectionately referred to as her private business out of her building, Coldbrook might not have been forced to strike a deal at all.

It probably also helped that a few hundred ponies had started a letter writing campaign to get her back on the air, but she couldn’t be expected to thank them all. At least not at the same time.

Rolling her chair to the other side of her console, she flicked on the three terminals and the encoder beside them. While they warmed up she fished a bit of prewar tech she’d scavenged out of an abandoned school years ago and untangled the wire attached to the back. It had taken some creative wiring to get the JoyBoy controller to interface with the stolen encoder, but it was time well spent.

The screens flicked to life and she began flipping through them one at a time. Terminals weren’t ideal for displaying live video but they did a decent enough job as long as one wasn’t bothered by having neon green light burned into their retinas. Fiona solved this problem by reaching between the terminals and fishing out a pair of too-small, pink framed sunglasses intended for a pony of questionable taste. She dropped them onto the bridge of her beak and scanned the screens for anything interesting.

The feeds flipped from spritebot to spritebot and she quickly began to settle into her old routine. If she was going to go live tonight she needed something to talk about other than whatever pro-Ranger garbage Ironshod had left for her before he bolted out into the wasteland for who knew what reason. She was five days behind on anything worth reporting and while the ponies of Blinder’s Bluff tried to keep her in the loop, nobody would tune in for long if all she had to offer were the rumors everyone already knew.

Her thumbs tapped the controller this way and that through the network of spritebots she’d been able to spread her software into. It had taken her years to build up her little army of mechanical eyes and while they still regularly went offline due to scavengers, wildlife, and some very annoyed Enclave technicians, it was rare for her to get caught peeping. Whenever that happened, she could kiss that spritebot bye-bye.

She started flicking through them at random, looking for patterns in what she was seeing that might indicate some interesting activity. Unsurprisingly there were several vantage points of the JetStream Solar Array down south. The Enclave always liked to watch the Rangers whenever they were doing something abnormal. All there was to see this morning were a few dozen patrols and a couple ponies stomping around in power armor. If the deathclaw was still there, the Rangers seemed not to care. Probably it had just moved on back to its old territory.

One drifted on its own around the perimeter of an old settlement up north, watching regular ponies doing regular pony things. Another hovered through a patch of woods that she recognized as the forest not too far west of here. She wasn’t sure what that one was up to and gave it a few minutes before moving on. A few empty roads, a caravan unaware it was being monitored, more roads, a trio of raiders snoring the morning away under a strip of canvas, more roads.

Lots of roads. Equestria had too many roads.

She frowned when she came across a pocket of activity further west. Two different angles of the same old mountain, the foot of which was covered in a relatively young forest for the area. Foal Mountain, she remembered. There was always this unexplained patch of trees at the foot of it too young to have been there when the bombs fell. The two spritebots were milling around those trees, one of them using part of a prewar traffic jam as cover as it monitored a squad of Rangers on patrol. Her beak parted in recognition, remembering that this was where Coldbrook said Aurora Pinfeathers’ Stable was buried.

From the other bot’s perspective she could see a faint haze of dust filtering between the trees, but not much else. Coldbrook had hinted that they were going to dig the Stable out but it looked like they were blasting it out instead. She kept watching the feed but nothing else happened except a brief sighting of another patrol.

She found herself wondering about that mare and whether she was smart enough to know Coldbrook was an opportunistic dick. She probably did, or she wouldn’t have let Fiona help her get her Pip-Buck back. A pulse of anger rose in her chest at that, knowing it was her own fault for helping them. She could have said no and that would have been the end of it. No punishment, no payments due, no scripts to parrot over what was always intended to be an honest broadcast. And yet she was still pissed at Aurora.

Grimacing, she turned off the terminals and shut off the encoder. She needed sleep or her debut broadcast was going to be worse than Ironshod planned to make it, and she wasn’t going to sleep if she didn’t get something to eat.

Gathering up three of Lime’s bottles, she stepped out into the morning and hopped off the railing. The news could wait. Aurora could wait. She could do the broadcast ad-lib and fill the empty air with good music. Bring some cheer back into the lives of these horny little horses, even if she had to do a little work to make it happen.

Come sunset, Hightower Radio would be back on the air.

“Dearheart, I’m so sorry.”

She nodded. It was all she could bear to do without giving into the wall of grief that felt determined to crush her. She swallowed, her eyes fixed on the charred soil beneath her hooves, letting Ginger do whatever she felt might help her cling to whatever little hope that had yet to abandon her. She swayed gently as the mare seated in the dirt beside her rubbed the muscles between her wings. It wouldn’t fix this. It wouldn’t undo all the time she’d wasted. But it felt good. If her dad were here, Aurora knew exactly what he would be thinking.

Ginger’s a keeper.

For all the trouble she dragged her into, for all the pain and suffering she’d endured all for the thin chance that she might be able to help ponies she never met but knew were important to Aurora, Ginger had stayed by her side since the start. No one would have blamed her if she’d asked to part ways after what happened at the array. None of this had been a guarantee. Choosing to come here had been a shot in the dark, but it was the shot that made the most sense from the narrow view of the world outside that Stable life afforded her.

But she tried.

A cool breeze had started to sweep into the crater, carrying with it the smell of saltwater and the sound of waves washing the nearby beach. She had never seen the ocean before. Seen pictures, sure. Even some footage once when she was a yearling. But, as with everything in this world, never with her own eyes.

She didn’t have time to look now. None of the pegasi she’d left behind did.

She needed a new plan. She just didn’t know where to start.

Looking up, she was comforted to see Julip and Roach walking slow circles around the rim of the brackish pond that had risen to fill most of the crater. Roach’s hooves splatted through the sucking mud along its nearest edge while Julip kept her distance, mindful of the lingering haze of strong radiation that the water still contained. He carried on a quiet conversation with her while keeping his head low, looking for anything in the muck that might point them in a new direction. They wouldn’t find anything, but it felt good that they were taking the time to look. It probably beat sitting here with her while she felt sorry for herself.

Maybe this was it, the shoe she’d been waiting to drop. Probably not.

She set her cheek against Ginger’s shoulder and blew out a long, tired breath.

“I don’t know what to do, Ginger.”

Her companion kissed the top of her mane. “That’s okay. Let us think of the next step forward. You just focus on resting.”

She wasn’t so sure she could do that. As Roach made his third lap around the pond, she gave her head the faintest shake. “He’s not going to find anything.”

“Probably not,” Ginger agreed, watching with some amusement as the black-clad changeling gradually turned brown from speckles of mud. “But you know him as well as I do by now. He hates a puzzle he can’t solve.”

“Not much of a puzzle left,” she muttered. “Bomb vaporized all the pieces before we were born.”

Her comment gave Ginger pause, but after some thought she pressed her point. “We’re right to assume the buried lines linking the Stables have to come together somewhere. It only makes sense that they would lead to the one place Stable-Tec could monitor them.”

“Equestria’s a big place.”

“You’re right, dear, it is. But we’re here now. We may as well upend any stones we can before we leave.”

Sploosh!

Aurora’s eyes flew wide at the sight of Roach, suddenly knee-deep in the filthy water, dunking his head below the irradiated surface. Before she could think of something to shout, Ginger was already scrambling to her hooves with some choice words tumbling out of her mouth.

“Roach, get your head out of there right now!” Her attention snapped to the little green mare standing several yards away. “Julip! What does he think he’s doing?”

“Hey, fuck you! He didn’t tell me he was going for a swim!”

Aurora pushed herself up with mounting concern as Roach sloshed deeper into the pond, head still submerged. Ripples went out in every direction and even more followed as he ventured further.

“Roach!” Aurora called, placing a wing around Ginger’s shoulder and easing her back from the water’s edge. “For Celestia’s sake, he can’t hear us.”

Ginger stiffened. “Worse! He’s ignoring us.”

“Can he even swim?”

“It doesn’t matter, he’s a ghoul. He’ll die of old age before he drowns.”

Julip trotted along the circumference of the pond, stopping once she met up with them. “Why don’t you magic him out?”

Ginger shook her head, climbed a few yards up the slope of the crater, and sat back down to wait. “Because he’ll just run back in. Once he’s decided he’s finished, we’re taking him straight to the nearest decontamination shower. I’m not spending another day peeing Rad-Away because he decided to get himself irradiated.”

With nothing else to do, Aurora and Julip sat down on either side of the annoyed unicorn and turned their attention to the pond.

Seconds passed. Then minutes. Here and there a stray bubble bounced to the surface, but Roach didn’t appear. After fifteen minutes Julip had taken to digging shallow trenches in the charred dirt, then filling them back to start again. Aurora watched plumes of tan silt rise to the surface, evidence that Roach was doing something down there to entertain himself while providing no inkling as to what that might be.

A half hour after his swim began, it ended. A familiar black horn broke through the muck at the center of the pond, followed by the changeling attached to it. He seemed confused for a moment before finally realizing he’d come up facing the wrong way, then paddled until he spotted them along the crater’s rim.

“I found something!” he rasped.

“Did it happen to be your mind, or have you still lost that?” Ginger called back.

He was just far enough away for her to believe he hadn’t understood, but the mischievous chuckle that rode the ripples back to shore indicated otherwise.

“There’s metal at the bottom!”

Aurora wrinkled her nose with confusion. “And?”

“Metal plates!” he shouted. “A bulkhead, still intact! It looks like blast shielding!”

Her expression changed. She sat up straighter.

“Aurora, I think it’s a Stable!” He let out a wild laugh and began making his way back to shore. “There’s a Stable under Stable-Tec!”

Next Chapter: Chapter 31: Dive Estimated time remaining: 42 Hours, 4 Minutes