“Hey, Initiate. Bet that one goes pinwheel.”

“Probably.”

“Bet it hits the fence.”

Latch grunted. He didn’t care where it landed. Elder Coldbrook hadn't demoted him so he could make wagers in the middle of nowhere. He'd made it abundantly clear that this was the reward he earned for enabling the rescue of Aurora's fiery-maned companion, then later allowing Flipswitch into the Rangers' Stable knowing she would strongarm Paladin Ironshod into returning the Pip-Buck he'd stolen.

Ironshod had tried correcting his misbehavior with door duty. Coldbrook hadn't felt nearly so charitable.

“Betcha a beer that it does.”

Ignoring the stallion was hard work, but he was getting used to it. There was no beer out here to bet with. No caps, either. Just the half-edible rations Elder Coldbrook greenlit to be hauled out from some dusty cache somewhere, along with barely enough purifiers to treat the groundwater being sucked out of what remained of the local aquifer. As with every project the Elder wanted done quickly, the Rangers “lucky” enough to be assigned the task found the living conditions deliberately minimal. Comfort bred complacency, or so Coldbrook claimed. The faster they finished the work, the faster they would return home to their warm bunks.

“Watch,” Maxus said, either ignorant or unbothered that Latch had tuned him out. “There it goes. It’s gonna roll!”

Latch didn’t respond. What choice did any of them have? It was their job to watch where the rubble fell. Nobody else would be running in to haul it away. He squinted toward the cluster of Rangers far up the hillside and waited for the boulder - a keystone, they called it - to come loose from the bedrock. It had taken an hour for a squad in full power armor to excavate and expose a rusty colored chunk of ancient geology. It was easily larger than Latch’s home on the Bluff. Most of the work had taken place behind temporary panels of inch-thick steel held in a formation resembling something like a turtle shell. Carrying the panels, even with the aid of power armor, was harrowing work. Ridiculous as it looked, it was saving lives.

Since early morning, the unmistakable shapes of pegasi had begun circling the dig site like vultures drawn to a fresh carcass. Spotting the odd Enclave wings dipping below the clouds wasn’t unheard of. The enemy had no shortage of scouts probing Ranger territory at all hours, but it became clear early on that this wasn't just a few curious scouts. Latch, along with the two hundred odd other Rangers who had set up a base of operations within the isolated forest at the foot of the mountain assumed the Enclave was here to do what they always did: take the Stable for themselves. It felt like a real possibility as they observed more and more pegasi arcing in and out of the overcast until they began to resemble a cloud in and of themselves.

While the Paladins tasked with supervising the dig debated how to address the growing threat, pale morning sunlight reached the excavation site and with it came the first muted cracks of gunfire. Two Rangers tasked with assessing the best path through the rubble, including the stallion who had loudly claimed to be the first to find the dingy little shack camouflaging the narrow tunnel into the mountain, slumped onto the rocks in a ragged harmony of screams. A chorus of gunfire quickly chased the attacking sniper back into the clouds but not a single shot found its mark.

From then on, gunfire fell readily onto any pony who climbed onto the exposed slope. Latch and the other rock breakers were ordered into the trees until countermeasures could be put together. With barely one suit of power armor for every ten Rangers present, priorities quickly shifted to protecting those tasked with bringing down the largest boulders. The work must continue. Latch, along with several dozen fresh initiates half his age, were left to don standard issue combat armor and dome helmets.

As laughably undergeared as they were, he tried to look on the bright side. Here, at least, he stood a chance to dodge an Enclave bullet. That was more than he could say for the round Paladin Ironshod threatened to put in his head after he found out Latch allowed a muckraking gryphon through the door of Stable 6 where she proceeded to humiliate him in front of his peers.

Standing at the edge of the treeline safely out of the boulder’s projected path, Latch smiled a little as the Rangers uphill pried the massive stone loose. Flipswitch was a strange creature, but he could appreciate her sense of troublemaking.

Beside him, Maxus grinned. “There it goes.”

With a final heave, the rocks under the boulder gave way and a significant lump of Foal Mountain began to tumble down the northern slope. The shell of steel panels came down as their bearers stomped toward sturdier ground uphill, and to no one’s surprise the brief opening was rewarded with a spatter of gunfire from high above.

Rock breakers murmured words of encouragement as if to physically will the armored excavators to move faster. A collective sigh moved through the ranks as shields joined together higher up the slope. Bright golden sparks flicked off the bullet-beaten steel, bright enough in the failing evening light to be seen from several hundred yards downhill. Earlier in the day a well-aimed round had sunk into the exposed ankle joint of an excavator’s power armor, locking her limb in place and sending the suit into an unavoidable tumble down to the bottom of the mountain. Latch hadn’t been present when her suit was finally pried open, but he spent enough time in his own to know that the inertial dampeners could only absorb so much. The mare had been pulverized.

The boulder pinwheeled as Initiate Maxus predicted, kicking up a rooster tail of debris as it hurtled toward the steel net strung between the trees below. Latch felt his jaw tense as the stone picked up more and more speed, skipped into the air with a deadly grace before slamming into the dirt at the base of the mountain. Had it remained intact, it would have punched easily through the fence and the backstop of packed soil behind it until a sufficient amount of animate and inanimate obstacles slowed it down. By Celestia’s grace alone the stone shattered, shotgunning comparatively lightweight cannonballs of granite into the fence and up into the trees beyond. Whispered curses rippled through the rockbreakers as they watched several shards arc toward the barracks deep in the treeline.

Even at a good five minute trot from the dusty grey tents of the encampment, Latch could hear the shouts for medics rise into the night air. He had warned his Knight and been rebuffed. This whole operation was a clusterfuck. If there was any justice left in the world, Elder Coldbrook would pitch his tent right where the rocks had…

Dangerous thoughts, he warned himself. Dangerous thoughts.

A Knight behind their line blew a whistle. Latch sighed and followed his fellow rock breakers toward the settling debris while the screams of the injured sang them along.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“All I see are apple trees. Come on, spill it, AJ.”

A thick bed of leaves rasped beneath their hooves as they walked, and as always Applejack was in no hurry to make a race out of these things. Rainbow Dash sighed at her companion’s wry smile as they continued along the western end of the orchard, the Apple Family barn well out of sight behind one of the property’s low hills.

A tickle in the back of her head made her feel like she’d already done this before. She could distantly remember the day prior. It had been her birthday. Per usual, Pinkie had gone to great lengths to organize most of the day down to the letter. Well into her thirties, the mare had yet to show any sign of losing interest in planning parties. If anything, she was becoming more enthusiastic about them. There was even talk of turning it into a personal business. Rainbow, on the other hoof, had begun looking for ways to get away from the limelight that came with what Twilight kept calling their “adventures.”

Rainbow had plenty of examples of adventures in her growing collection of novels. Pirate battles, cave exploring, ancient curses… those were adventures. The last several years of her life had felt more like one harrowing brush with doom after the other. Sure, her younger, invincible self saw them as adventures at first, but their encounter with Nightmare Moon had ended at the behest of the Elements of Harmony. They had just been present. Then Discord arrived and neatly snipped away the seams of reality. Then Chrysalis and her hackneyed attempt to marry herself into Equestrian royalty. Sombra still seemed more like a nuisance than a threat, but when Tirek showed up…

Up til then, she’d been riding the high of fame and their seeming unending winning streak. Wearing an Element almost felt like owning an unbeatable weapon charmed by the most powerful magic on Equus. Then Tirek took that magic away and suddenly the danger felt too real. So real that Twilight, the innocent book loving shut-in, had been forced to make a choice that scarred them all.

There had been no spell to banish Tirek. No incantation to lock him in a stone prison, or send him off to some harmless plane of existence. Rainbow could still hear the wet crack of his skull against the rocks, see the spasmatic jerking of his limbs as his body wrestled with the sudden reality of being independent of a functioning brain. It was the first time they had failed so badly at their roles that the only way to salvage Equestria’s future was to kill for it.

That corner of her mind tickled again, warning her that in a few short years their lives would take an infinitely darker turn.

“You still with me, sugarcube?”

The world seemed to shudder beneath her hooves. Her balance wavered, but she didn’t fall. Looking up, they were well out of the orchard and somewhere in the surrounding woods. They were on a trail she vaguely recognized, one that Applejack and her brother used to walk when they needed to get away from civilization for a while and relax. Rainbow wasn’t sure how she knew that, but she did.

Applejack nudged her with her shoulder. Something about the warmth in that touch, or the memory of it, hurt more than it had any right to. She said something reassuring to Applejack, but it was as if the words were being spoken by another mare’s lips. She reached out with a wing, intent on those emerald eyes, and tried to touch her but her feathers only passed through empty air. Applejack was several steps ahead of her now, her hat dangling from a string tied around her neck as she shook out her mane.

“Told you it was still here,” she jeered, and Rainbow could almost remember her doubts that Applejack’s fillyhood hideaway would be standing.

She blinked, trying to center herself. Trying to hold onto the memory of Applejack gesturing a hoof into the high branches of a mighty chestnut tree in the middle of this forest in which the dark planks of an old treehouse still stood. It looked a lot like the clubhouse she’d built for her sister, minus the ramp. Instead, a series of two-by-fours had been nailed into the bark of the tree to serve as ladder rungs.

Rainbow smiled at the memory, knowing there would be a small red cooler and a checkered blanket waiting for them among the branches. Applejack would explain that she’d noticed how Pinkie’s party had worn her down the day before and she’d figured Rainbow would like something a little bit calmer to balance things out. No streamers, no elaborate baked goods, no press trying to snap photos through the windows. Just them.

She wanted to hug the mare not because it was exactly what she needed, but because of how desperately she realized she missed her. But when she tried, Applejack was already climbing the boards.

Opening her wings, she tried to fly up to the platform above but she didn’t leave the ground. She heard Applejack laugh, telling her to hurry up already, but she couldn’t even get started. It was as if the rules had changed. Like her wings weren’t doing something they’d always known to do.

She put a hoof on one of the rungs, confusion further eroding the memory, and found she couldn’t focus on the next step. Couldn’t climb. Something wasn’t working and she couldn’t make sense of what it was. She couldn’t see Applejack anymore. Wasn’t sure if she was still up there or if she had gone away.

“Hey.”

She tried to skip ahead. Tried to put herself up there with her so she could relive the first day the two of them truly connected as individuals and not just Elements of Harmony. She wanted to drink warm cider and talk about nothing and just enjoy the privacy of a slow autumn day but she couldn’t get off the ground.

“Hey. Coffee time.”

Leave me alone.

Something touched her shoulder and gave her a gentle shake. It was the last jostle the dream needed to finally come to pieces around her. In the confusion she saw a door and smelled something burning, but then it was gone. Against her will, the present poured in around her like a flood. The hum of air recyclers, the sour smell of her own sweat, the ache of her back against an unforgiving chair.

Her eyes were stinging before she could bring herself to open them. When she did, the realness of Opal’s cluttered office sank in like a lead weight. A chipped mug steaming with the crisp smell of fresh coffee waited in front of her, pinched along the rim by Sledge’s ruddy worn feathers. This was now. Her time with Applejack was far, far behind her.

An old grief tore open that she wasn’t ready for. Pulling her hind legs up to the edge of the little chair, she pressed her forehead against her knees and let the tears run down her nose. She was proud of herself, in a way, for not falling completely apart. And still that somehow made her feel worse, as if she wasn’t doing Applejack’s memory justice with her quiet, hitching sobs. There was a distance now. Her years in the tunnel, wandering from day to day with less and less concept of how long she’d been trapped or why she was there at all, had marched by without so much as giving her a single dream to comfort her. Now, just as she finally started to feel herself again, this. Sniffling and enduring the aching loss of the most important thing she’d ever had while a pony she barely knew squeezed her shoulder and left her alone.

As always, the tears eventually ran out and the awkward embarrassment of having cried at all dashed in. Propping her chin on her knees, she stared at the wall until she was sure she was done. Then she dragged her feathers across her face and took a long, beleaguered breath.

“I’m going to kick Luna in the teats for that,” she muttered.

Across the desk, Opal choked on her coffee. “Beg pardon?”

Rainbow sniffed, cleared her throat, and set her hooves on the carpet. “Bad dream. Never had one like that and it just feels… mean.”

Turning to look at the older mare, she could tell Opal was utterly lost. Rainbow frowned.

Opal did the same. “You had a dream?”

She nodded.

“Huh. Times are changing.” Opal leaned forward, tapping the rim of a second mug with a feather. “Coffee’s gon’ get cold soon. Want to talk about it?”

The chair scuffed clockwise on the carpet, helped along by Rainbow’s tired hopping. She scooped up the mug in her tattered feathers, shaking her head no as she tipped the rim to her lips. The warm liquid pressed against her muzzle, soothing some of her sadness with something comforting and familiar. She didn’t relish the idea of dumping a lifetime of hurt onto a mare who spoke with an accent eerily similar to Applejack’s grandmother.

“I’ll be okay,” she said, setting the bottom of the mug against her leg to soak in some of its warmth. “Where did Sledge go?”

Opal rolled her eyes and chuckled. “Old fart thinks his coffee made the Element of Loyalty cry.” She turned back to her terminal, feathers settling onto the keyboard. “He’s probably tryin’ to dig his way outta the Stable ‘fore anyone finds out.”

Rainbow tried to read her face, but Opal’s deadpan was scary in its perfection.

“He’s not that old.” It was the best she could think of.

Opal cracked a smile, waving her off with a hoof. “Good, so neither am I. Sledge went to talk with my geeks in the other room. Making sure they know what they’re looking for.”

After a pause, Rainbow could hear the low hum of Sledge’s voice behind the wall. Sipping at her coffee to rekindle an addiction her brain had all but forgotten over the centuries, she stole a glance at Opal’s terminal. “Which is?”

She answered with a snort. “Search me. Wouldn’t mind audio t’go with that surveillance footage Delta left us.”

“Which conveniently doesn’t exist.”

“Not in the overseer’s office, for obvious reasons.”

Rainbow lifted a dubious brow.

Opal shrugged. “Ain’t sayin’ I like it, just sayin’ that’s how it is. I’m guessin’ Spitfire had something to do with that.”

At this point, none of it surprised Rainbow. Spitfire had jumped through more hoops to get what she wanted during her last years than more ponies did during their entire lives. “She’s good at hiding the truth.”

“So then we look into someone who ain’t.” Opal turned her terminal around for Rainbow to see. The screen was filled with the familiar wall of files that had driven Rainbow’s eyes to the brink of exhaustion, except this time every one of them stood ready to be opened at the press of a button. At the top of the screen, behind a blinking cursor in the search field stood the name of the pegasus who had led them to this point:

Opal tipped her head toward the screen. “Delta Vee’s the only pegasus out’ve an entire Stable who figgered Spitfire wasn’t on the up-and-up, else she wouldn’t been bitin’ her head off the minute the lights came back on.” She tapped the mare’s name with a single feather. “I seen the cables with my own eyes. She knew which ones t’cut. Mighta been prepared to do it a long time fer all we know. That mare had enough ammo to go hoof t’ hoof with Spitfire at the drop of a hat. I’ll bet my bits she’s got plenty more t’ tell.”

Rainbow waited. After a few seconds she wrinkled her nose. “Cliffhangers only work in the movies, Opal.”

“Books, too.” She spun the terminal to face her and settled back into her chair. “I was hopin’ you’d have something to add, being the one to key in on Delta in the first place.”

More dart throwing. Coffee aside, she wasn’t exactly in the right frame of mind to dig for more nuggets of the past. It was a selfish thought, but she wanted a proper night’s sleep for once in a real bed with a real mattress. One that she could bury herself in when the alarm went off and roll out of only once the sheets were knotted around her legs.

She wanted her life back. Pushing that thought aside took more effort than she expected.

“I mean,” she began, smothering that part of her that screamed against diving into new mysteries again, “Delta wasn’t on anyone’s radar back then. At least, she wasn’t on mine anyway. Jet Stream brought her on to work out some bugs in the crewed parts of the SOLUS launches, but she was more of a consultant.”

Opal frowned in confusion.

“A paid nitpicker,” she clarified. Opal nodded understanding. “In retrospect it’s probably a good thing Jet didn’t try to run it by me first or I would have argued against hiring his ex-wife so late in the project. Not enough hours in the day to explain all the bad blood between them. The only reason Delta didn’t outright sabotage the SOLUS launches was because it was their kid who was going to pilot the final launch.”

“What’s SOLUS?”

Rainbow hesitated to answer, the ghost of old fears made obsolete by apocalypse still fresh in her mind. She relented.

“An old project my ministry funded,” she said, then added, “under the table. It was what JetStream Aerospace was working on before… before. It’s hard to explain without getting into the weeds on the technicals. It was going to be a satellite that collected solar energy in orbit for use on the ground. The idea was, with enough of them, we could end the resource shortage that started the war in the first place.”

Opal hummed, nodding at her screen as her feathers worked the keys. “Lofty goals.”

Rainbow sucked at her teeth. “We were so close. If Celestia didn’t have her head so far up her own ass, we might have finished in time to stop all this from happening. I wouldn’t have to sit here looking like this.”

She pressed her lips shut and closed her eyes, embarrassment and anger competing inside her.

“Need a minute?”

She shook her head. “No. Sorry. I just… if I live long enough for therapy to make a comeback, some pony’s gonna retire off of me.”

Glancing up, she was heartened to see a smile crease Opal’s lips.

“Well, Dash, look at it this way.”

She flushed a touch at the sound of her old nickname.

“Everyone born in this Stable wants nothin’ more than t’see that big blue sky up there, but that ain’t fer us. It’s fer our kin, way down the line. A lot of things happened a long time ago that we can’t change. Happens to all of us. Doesn’t matter what cards we get. What matters is how we play ‘em. Whether we make things better for the folks who come after. Now, you got some crummy cards but by my counting you played those damn things like the creators themselves slipped you a few aces on the sly.”

She stifled a grin, but not well. Opal grinned back.

“Yeah yer ugly as sin, so what? You sure ain’t thick in the head, and yer willing to help.” She leveled a feather across the desk at her with an intensity in her eyes. “Two hunnert and twenty years later and yer still helping. You can fall face first into a belt sander fer all I care. This Stable can still count itself lucky to have yer ass on its payroll. Fair to you?”

Rainbow sat a little taller in her chair. “Fair to me.”

“Good.” Opal shot her a look that said she was going to hold her to that, then pivoted back to her terminal. “Now, if I follow what you said before, Delta didn’t care nothin’ about Jet Stream or his satellite until her kid got involved.”

She nodded. “More or less.”

“Good enough fer me.”

As Opal’s feathers resumed their dancing on the keyboard, Rainbow stood up and rounded the desk to look over her shoulder. She watched as the screen refreshed and a considerably shorter list of files appeared below a slightly changed search field:

In every creature there are those primal survival instincts that only make themselves known once an unknowable line has been crossed. Heights, tunnels, insects among countless others trip an ancient alarm that, no matter the logic, screams DANGER.

For Ginger, it was being underwater.

Stepping into the stagnant muck of the crater, she didn’t know such a phobia existed. Wealthy as her family in New Canterlot was, even they had to ration clean water like everybody else. A long shower was a special occasion in their house. Unheard of in most others. Filling an entire bath to soak in just to need more water to rinse off? It was the hallmark of prewar Equestrian waste. It simply wasn’t done. There were no swimming pools in New Canterlot.

So, as the surface of the irradiated pond rose above the power armor’s visor, she realized several things at once:

It was too murky to see.

She didn’t know how to swim.

The only thing keeping her from taking a lethal dose of radiation, drowning, or both were a couple inches of armor plating and a network of seals that might only be a few decades younger than Roach was.

Her breathing grew shallow as her understanding of what she was doing broadened. She could feel her heartbeat quicken. The sweat crawling up the roots of her mane. She made the mistake of slowing to a stop. The armor’s hooves sank into the soft crater bed, stirring clouds of thick silt that obscured her already limited view. Panic clutched at her chest and she tried to turn back, but after a few faltering steps inside the swirling silt she realized she’d lost track of which way the shore was. Which way up was.

“Roach,” she groaned, battling fear and humiliation with every word. “Roach, are you there?”

They should have talked about how they were going to communicate underwater. She didn’t have the first clue how loud the armor projected her voice, whether it worked while submerged, or even if Roach could hear it if it did. For all she knew he was waiting for her at the bottom of the pond, oblivious to her predicament.

“Roach,” she repeated. Silt whirled around her in long curtains, adding a foreboding loneliness to her fear. “I need to get out of-”

She stopped, her ears twitching at the sound of thumps along the ribs of the armor. A few small bubbles churned past her visor, followed by the cracked chitin of Roach’s hoof. A shuddering sigh of relief lifted from her lungs as the changeling crawled into view, his pale eyes searching for hers behind the suit’s shaded visor.

Pressing his forehead against the visor, he released a boiling curtain of bubbles from his mouth as he said, “Trust me, kiddo.”

His voice was distorted and distant, but the simple statement took her back to being sixteen years old and alone in the wasteland for the first time and knowing the raiders that had ambushed her were the sort to do more than just take her caps and rough her up a little. The changeling that happened upon the confrontation had appeared to her as a monster, something wild that tore down her attackers with a ferocity. Coated in their blood, his horn crackling with latent magic, the changeling had approached her hiding place in the rocks and offered to take her wherever she needed to go.

She only let go of her fear of him when he held out one of those cracked hooves and asked for that same blind trust.

Now, dwarfed by her power armor yet clinging to it all the same, he waited for her to understand. Ginger forced herself to take slow, steady breaths just like she had with Aurora. In and out. She’s safe here. In and out. Roach knows what he’s doing. In and out. She could trust him.

The fear didn’t vanish completely, but it ebbed just enough for her to think straight.

“Are we close?”

He nodded and a silky green light seeped from his horn. The suit’s radiation counter began crackling as Roach’s magic lit a path through the silt. The motes hung stationary in the water like lanterns strung inside of a mine. The first step was the most difficult. The second less so as she turned down the crater’s slope, her vertigo fading the more she progressed. Roach leaned aside to allow her to see where she was going, but he made sure not to vanish from view entirely. For that she was thankful.

As she followed his markers beyond the worst of the murk and toward the bottom of the crater, she began to recognize signs of Roach’s attempted excavation. Wide swaths of mud had been gouged out of the crater bed as if scooped out by a deathclaw’s hand. Flecks of irradiated glass created by the bomb glittered under the light of Roach’s horn, scattered among the duller remnants of pulverized concrete. With a little hesitance she stepped down into the gash, following the lights toward even deeper cuts. The water down here gave off an eerie green glow of its own, faint but definitely there. A byproduct of the radiation Roach had dumped as he heaved load after load of mud up onto the pond’s edge.

The radiation counter sputtered a few extra clicks, but a quick glance at the meter built into the suit’s HUD showed her exposure to be no worse than what came in on the wind of a passing radstorm.

A moment came and went when it seemed like Roach might have gotten turned around himself. The scarred crater bed ahead looked the same, her hooves sinking several inches with every step only to wrench free of the sucking mud with hardly any effort. Then she set her hoof down and the armor struck something hard.

Roach felt it too, and he pushed off the side of her helmet with a strange sort of grace. She watched him kick out with his hind legs and maneuver until he floated a few yards ahead of her, his hooves flicking this way and that to keep him level as he sank. His horn took on a brighter glow and she caught herself gasping as he pulled down a column of brackish water onto the film of mud beneath their hooves.

Sand, gravel and mud hissed across the surface of the armor in a great pall as Roach drew down more and more water, scouring the crater floor until the steel beneath shone through the murk. Ginger stepped over the bulkhead while Roach continued to work, eyes widening as she drank in the reality of what she was seeing.

It wasn’t what she expected.

Stepping toward the center, she could still feel the barely perceptible sensation of walking downhill.

The bulkhead, the impregnable cocoon of riveted steel that formed the first and final barrier separating order from chaos, Stable from wasteland, was dented. The entire section Roach had cleared, several hundred square feet of muddy metal, looked as if it had been kissed by the moon itself. Even now as she followed him toward the bottom, silt started settling along the cleared steel in faint lines where the deformation was most visible.

Ginger had grown up with stories of the bombs that fell generations ago. Everyone had. Nobody alive wasn’t aware that the dying world they’d inherited was this way due solely to the poisonous, destructive force of the balefire bomb. No one questioned it. There was too much evidence to say otherwise. And yet, like so many others, she had never been able to fully wrap her mind around the real power those old weapons brought with them. She had no frame of reference. Just stories and ruins.

Standing here, atop a structure whose builders designed to shrug off the instant death of those bombs, now she felt like she could grasp the fleeting edge of that power. Here, on the eastern edge of Equestria, an unstoppable force had clashed with an immovable object. And yet this hereto unknown Stable had not gone undamaged.

Swirling in her own awe, she nearly didn’t notice that Roach’s gaze had fixed on a narrow seam halfway down the dent. Approaching, she carefully maneuvered the power armor through the water toward him. Standing at opposite sides of the line, it was clear to both of them what it was.

A crack.

A brownish mixture of silt and crust had filled the pencil-wide gap, drawing a deformed albeit mostly straight line in both directions. His motions slowed by the water, Roach turned his head left, then right. His eyes narrowed and he kicked out his hind legs, swimming along the seam. Ginger turned in her bulky suit and thumped after him.

Lighting his horn, Roach scooped dense blocks of mud off the seam until he found what he was looking for. A second line of rivets appeared, joining the one he followed at a perfect ninety degree angle. Ginger’s ear twitched against the helmet’s padding at the sound of her radiation meter pecking away, strangely grateful to be able to hear something besides the suit’s hydraulics and her own breathing. She watched Roach ply the pale light of his magic into the junction of the two seams as if feeling for a good grip.

He stood perfectly still for several seconds, eyes closed in concentration. The bulkhead didn’t move any more than he did. Nearly a minute passed but nothing happened. Ginger frowned, her worry growing.

“Roach?”

He lifted one hoof to acknowledge her, but otherwise remained still.

She wasn’t so easily dissuaded. Stepping closer, she tried to see what he was doing. If he was hoping to peel the steel roof open like a tin can, he was going to wind up with a migraine and nothing to show for it. This wasn’t a cheap layer of scrap sheet metal they stood on. This was Stable-Tec. If a balefire bomb could only hope to scuff the surface, one horn wasn’t going to budge it.

Minutes passed. Occasionally Roach would glance at her or hold up the same hoof, continuing to reassure her that he was still working on… whatever it was he was doing. She imagined Aurora looking down at them from the edge of the water wondering what they were waiting for, but the murk was thick as soup and she knew better than to get too close.

A filament of pea-sized bubbles trickled up from the seam. Ginger blinked and took a step back, but Roach was unfazed. The surface of the steel hadn’t moved but the preserved sheen had noticeably dulled. His shattered black carapace began to shimmer as he concentrated. Ginger’s lips silently parted as she witnessed the brief flickers of his centuries-old disguise blink in and out of existence like a sputtering candle flame. It was the same phenomenon she and Aurora had observed when he pulled an earthen slab of wall out of the ground a week earlier, those wisps of wheat colored coat and pine tinted mane spilling out into view for only a moment before disappearing and reemerging someplace else along his broken body.

Bits and pieces of the pegasus he’d chosen to become, married to his husband Saffron and father of their adopted daughter Violet, rose to the surface in an unintentional glamour. A second stream of pearls bubbled up near the first. Then a third, a full yard from where they stood, sputtered to life. In what felt like no time at all, there were dozens of tiny bubbles curling around her visor or tracing the visible crags of Roach’s chitin. Pockmarks were forming in the steel, small at first but growing larger by the second.

Now Roach swam back, his eyes open now and focused on the changing steel. The dulled surface looked almost plagued by dim, orange lesions that quickly grew until Ginger realized she was watching the unnaturally accelerated spread of rust. Great flakes of it lifted away, carried up by the screen of bubbles that were now erupting from holes large enough to sink a hoof into. Manipulated by Roach’s corrupted magic, those holes seemed to be alive in some way. They moved, slowly, dragging themselves down brittle metal until they found each other, collecting in front of the changeling. The holes became one, widening, forcing the two visitors to move further away, burrowing into the steel like a cavity carving its way through a rotten tooth. The void heaved and churned with escaping air, a process that Roach appeared to be annoyed by.

The tunnel of rust undulated and morphed within his pale magic, growing rigid where bracing was needed and crumbling where he wanted space. It had an almost organic quality to it. She stepped around the rim of the entrance to better watch the depths form, wondering where Roach learned to do this and suspecting she already knew the answer.

This had been how the changelings built their hive, once upon a time.

Without dimming his horn, Roach motioned for her to follow as he swam into the chasm. Carefully, she ducked her head and shimmied in behind him.

Passing through the bulkhead felt surreal. Raw steel had been dissolved and reformed into crisscrossing bands of hardened rust, giving her the feeling that she was walking through the musculature of something living. The tunnel was barely wide enough for her to fit in with her power armor. Less than ten steps in her shoulder crunched into one of the tendon-like walls, sending up a puff of rusty water and earning her a chastising look back from Roach. Thankfully, the ceiling didn’t crumble to bits around them. He knew what he was doing.

Several yards down, the grey walls blended with the unmistakable line of the bulkhead’s inner shielding. The half-melted appearance reminded her of a funhouse her parents had brought Ginger and her sister to as fillies. Wrinkling her nose, she ducked under the deformed beams and continued on. She found Roach floating at the end of the tunnel, his magic still weaving away at the material coalescing ahead of him.

Bands of rust and mud swept over and hardened around the unmarred surface of a Stable-Tec doorway. Not the signature gear-shaped gateway they were known for, however. This was one of the hydraulic sliding doors Ginger saw back in Stable 1 and Stable 6. Roach’s magic had caused patches of rust to bloom over its surface but it was apparent he was trying to preserve it while he sealed the tunnel walls against its frame.

“I never knew you could do this,” she murmured.

Roach offered a sheepish little smile in answer, then turned to look at the tunnel curving upward behind them. His horn glowed and threads of rust began to knit the opening behind them shut. Ginger felt her stomach sink as the last dim rays from the small lake’s surface winked out behind the solidifying cap of repurposed material, leaving them alone in a pocket of water lit only by Roach’s magic. The stallion that once was and the changeling that remained blended and resolved in front of her. When the tunnel was sealed to his satisfaction, he dimmed his horn and the flashes of Sunny Meadows went dark with it. The changeling paddled his perforated legs to face the door and tripped the switch with the back of his cracked hoof.

The door slid upward and the abrupt rush of water violently wrenched him into the gap.

Ginger screamed.

As far as having his hooves sucked out from under him by a vortex was concerned, Roach had to admit he had limited experience. Truthfully, just the one. Right now. So far, he wasn’t a fan.

Luckily the disorienting ride was a short one. The flume of brackish water dumped him into the adjacent hallway with as much grace as a stunned carp. The sheer volume of moving liquid kept him pinned to the wall until the door had fully opened, aided with no small amount of Ginger’s frantic magic. He’d assumed there would be air pockets left in the forgotten Stable and was thankful he’d had the forethought to seal the tunnel behind them before cracking the door. With a small lake just yards above their heads it didn’t seem wise to risk having it drain uncontrolled into the one place Aurora felt sure her talisman could be found.

Ginger was in such a hurry to chase him through the doorway that she banged the ridge of her helmet against the receding door. He would have laughed if the panicked questions coming through her suit’s speakers didn’t sound so distraught. With the rushing water quickly receding around them, he forced himself to stand so she knew he was okay.

Then again, this was Ginger. Years of emulating the late Rarity had made her somewhat prone to overreaction.

He tried not to smile as she stumbled into the hallway and went straight to work tapping her hoof into the floor, managing to cut away wide scoops of linoleum tile before finally remembering she had to hold the pedal down. Once she did, the suit hissed open and she clambored out.

“Are you okay?!”

She was within hoof’s reach but was shouting from pure adrenaline. He winced a little but wisely chose not to utter the suicidal incantation of calm down, opting to take the safer course of bracing himself as she threw her forelegs around his neck in a choking hug.

“A little banged up,” he grunted. “I’ll be okay.”

“I thought you were gone!”

He didn’t need to ask to know what she meant by gone. Squeezing her back, he tried to reassure her. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“Celestia’s sun, Roach…”

“I know. I know.”

It took a moment for her to come down from what must have been an awful sight, but once she was able to pack away that younger, fearful Ginger who looked up to him like a surrogate father, the Ginger that was his friend and close confidant pushed back from him to stare daggers.

“Why didn’t you warn me that would happen?!”

“If I’d known, I would have.”

Ginger pursed her lips, for a moment looking as if she wasn’t done chastising him, but she quickly relented. Already her attention had begun drifting to the state of the corridor he had washed up in.

The lights were on. Some of them, anyway. Most of the tubes were dark which, Roach noted, gave the hallway the same sort of half lit dimness as the permanent overcast back on the surface. A long cardboard box filled with spare bulbs lay on its side not far from where the two of them stood, the rush of water having washed it toward the middle of the floor and already bloating the packing material inside. Judging by the condition, it hadn’t been there for very long. He let go of Ginger and stepped around her empty power armor, toggling the switch to the open door. It dutifully slid back down with a thump. If the plug he’d knit together ended up breaking, a layer of hermetically sealed steel would stop the water from pouring in.

Behind him, Ginger asked, “How are there still lights on?”

“Somebody’s been changing them out,” he observed, tipping a hoof toward the now waterlogged box. “Or they had been. Recently, I’d say. Those fluorescents never last more than a few--”

A muffled clack echoed into the vacant corridor. The two of them stood stock still, eyes fixed toward the empty space beyond the cardboard box. He heard it again. It was dim to his ears, coming from an intersection further down the hall, but the sound of a hoof striking steel was unmistakable. He’d heard the same sound every time he returned from one of his excursions beyond the landslide outside Stable 10. Blue never liked being locked inside her room for very long and had learned banging her hoof against the door would eventually end with Roach letting her out. Locking her inside was supposed to be for her protection as much as the residents of the Stable should they ever open the door. As he dragged himself back through the path he’d burrowed, the sound of Blue beating on the door both reassured and guilted him.

“Roach.”

He looked at Ginger and realized she was frowning at the near wall. His eyes flicked to the spot she was squinting at, briefly worried he was the only one hearing the distant thumping, but the slight twist of her right ear as the hoofbeat echoed again assured him he wasn’t. The sound wasn’t getting any louder, or closer. Just the slow, regular clacks of a hoof being lifted and dropped against a far door. One thing at a time, he thought, and allowed himself to look more fully at the wall which had drawn Ginger’s interest.

There was nothing there. Just a smooth, unbroken pattern of parallel horizontal lines that gave the walls a touch of texture. Then he blinked, stepped alongside Ginger and felt his brow rumpling at the realization of what he was actually looking at.

Letters. No, wait. Words. Notes.

“You’re kidding me.” He leaned closer, scanning the wall up and down. It had to be a printing error, or some kind of artistic statement made by the ponies who designed the wall panels. Like the murals that decorated the residential levels back at the Stable in Blinder’s Bluff.

Each rambling word was too neat and tidy, the sentences blurring together to make the lower half of both walls in the corridor look tinted grey at a distance. But the letters… he couldn’t deny that each letter had a slight variation. Each glossy layer of pencil lead pressed onto the wall, then wrapped around the wall behind them. A stream of consciousness from a pony with pristine hoofwriting.

“Normally the ravings of a madmare are a little less tidy,” Ginger observed.

"Or stallion."

"Care to wager?"

He wisely chose not to answer. He pinched his lips together, unsure of what it was they were looking at. The thoughts of someone disturbed, maybe, but mad felt like a stretch. He glanced at the box of bulbs resting in the direction of the steady banging. Insanity drove ponies to do a lot of things. Changing the lightbulbs didn’t feel like one of them.

“Shame we don’t have a working camera. Julip will be livid when she hears how well preserved this place is.” Ginger took a few steps down the wall, her ear flicking at the constant banging. She sighed. “Let’s go see what that is.”

Roach let out an apprehensive rumble and followed her down the corridor. He’d taught her everything he could about scavenging in those early years. They both knew what it was.

The carefully written sentences ran around the corner with them, running straight across a fluorescent-faded mural depicting the six Elements of Harmony. Each mare struck a heroic pose that looked more ridiculously unnatural the longer he stared. A mainstay of prewar Equestria that even balefire couldn’t burn out of the national consciousness.

Ginger sighed as they approached the door. The corridor was lined with them. They always were. Monotonous design was practically a Stable-Tec hallmark. The dull thump from the other side was all that made this one stand out.

No cries for help. Not even a murmur from the other side. Just a steady, repeating thump. Ponies didn’t mindlessly bang on closed doors for minutes on end.

Feral ghouls did.

“Same policy as always, I imagine?” It was less a question in search of an answer and more of a request to proceed as normal. It reminded him of the first time they set out into the wasteland together in search of some textiles Ginger had gotten wind of. Back then, he’d made his policy on feral ghouls crystal clear: killing them was a mercy. When they found their first nest of ferals he’d taken the first few shots to make sure Ginger didn’t hesitate on his behalf. Things went smoothly after that. Of course, back then, she hadn't known about Blue.

He glanced at the nameplate beside the door.

Snips.

A pair of scissors had been engraved beside the name. Roach frowned. The banging sounded agitated. The feral behind the door was already keying in on the presence of prey.

“Same as always,” he agreed. “I got the door. You think you can handle it with your magic? My shells got soaked.”

She nodded and squared her stance with the sealed door. He couldn’t help but feel a quiet thrill at the sight of her standing there, her lit horn the only weapon she needed. It felt like the old days again when magic meant something. Before the balefire swept through and crippled it in every conceivable form. A whiff of confidence swirled off Ginger, too. He smiled a little, glad that she was growing into her new magic so quickly.

As usual, he couldn’t sense anything from the feral struggling to reach them. After a certain point they ceased to feel anything. Only hunger, stupid and blind.

He positioned himself next to the door switch and held his hoof to the handle. “On three?”

A sheet of magic fell over their side of the door, preemptively blocking the feral’s predictable rush forward. “On three.”

“One.”

“DON’T TOUCH THAT!”

Roach startled like a foal caught hovering over a cooling pie and wheeled away from the door so abruptly that he nearly knocked Ginger on her hindquarters. For a split second he thought the ghoul behind the door had spoken. Then he spotted the ponies standing at the corner they had just come from and his heart leapt.

Residents! Genuine Stable dwellers who could help them find what they were after. Only, as he and Ginger turned toward them, he saw the cylindrical object clutched between the yellow pony’s teeth. A white mare with grey blotches paced one way then the other beside the first, with what looked like some kind of leash tethering the two together.

In his excitement, Roach didn’t want to acknowledge what was already clicking in his mind. The pacing mare - he assumed she was a mare - stared vacantly toward them. Her ears, what was left of them, ticked between her counterpart and the two intruders. The grey splotches on her otherwise white coat were naked swaths of withered skin that seemed to actively devour her coat from the flanks up. Her tail had been reduced to a leathery whip of skin coated vertrebrae, as was often the case with most ghouls he’d met.

“Get away from the door! I ain’t afraid to shoot you!”

The canary coated mare spoke with remarkable clarity considering her lips were doing double-duty keeping a spray foam gun pointed at them. The last time he’d seen one of those had been years before the war even began, back when Saffron insisted on the two of them adding a sunroom to their house rather than paying a contractor. He almost smiled at the memory of the two of them picking bits of insulating foam out of their coats.

They obeyed the foam-wielding mare and moved away from the door. The banging from behind it had grown into a frenzy of battering and muffled shrieks.

“Stay there! Don’t… magic anything. I’ll know if you do. I’ll know if you do.”

A quick glance at Ginger let him know they were thinking the same thing. This mare, with her unconvincing bluff and leashed compatriot, had become unhinged.

“I’ll know if…” She paused, blinking rapidly, her gaze focusing on Ginger for some inexplicable reason. “You’re not sick. Why ain’t you sick? Everyone got sick, right sweetie?”

The ghoul wandered to the end of her leash, grunted, and began wandering behind her keeper as if to explore the limits of her range.

“Exactly. So why ain’t she?” The mare regarded Ginger with growing suspicion, her ear twitching toward the ghoul behind her as if listening to her. “She can’t be from Stable-Tec. This is Stable-Tec. She ain’t even wearing the uniform.”

A pause.

“Who are you?”

Roach glanced at the insulating foam gun held in her teeth, resisting the urge to throw the question back at her. “I’m Roach, and this is my friend Ginger.”

The pony hadn’t been expecting him to respond. Her gaze tore away from Ginger toward him with a touch of shock. “You can talk.”

He nodded. “I can talk.”

“Okay. Okay.” The mare began to pace, forgetting to aim her “weapon” and drawing an annoyed grunt from her ghoul when the leash drew taut around its neck. Ginger took the opportunity to tap Roach’s hoof with her own, sharing a worried expression when he looked at her. The subtle interaction jarred the mare from her thoughts and she rounded on them, her attention now fixed to Roach. “Okay, but she didn’t let changelings buy Stable passes so how are y’all here?”

Perplexed, he asked, “‘She?’”

The mare chewed her lip. “Scoot-scoot-Scootaloo. Got to pick all the ponies. Pick which ones lived and which ones died and which ones tried and tried and tried to get out but couldn’t because she had all the keys keys keys.”

She half-sang the last few words as if they were a part of a tune only she knew. Upon seeing the open concern on Roach and Ginger’s faces, she seemed to become a touch more aware of what she was doing and flushed with embarrassment. She was silent for several long seconds, eyes bobbing this way and that across the concrete between her hooves, deep in concentration.

When she spoke, she sounded almost normal. “You came in from the outside, didn’t you?”

Roach nodded slowly. “Yes.”

His answer clearly disturbed her, but she said nothing else. A mop of red mane held to one side of her face as she stared at the floor seemingly out of things to say. Beside him, Ginger broke the silence.

“Do the two of you have names?”

The mare nodded. She lifted her foreleg and gave the leash a tug. The ghoul attached to it turned and wandered toward her.

“Her’s is Sweetie Belle.”

The ghoul offered little sign of recognition, but her mindless wandering slowed. The summer colored mare watched her settle on a spot beside her and sit. She smiled a little, touching the edge of the ghoul’s hoof with her own. The faintest contact. When she spoke again, it was as if she were speaking directly to the feral ghoul beside her, begging her to understand.

“I’m Applebloom.”

October 30th, 1077
11:27pm

“Left wing, now.”

Apogee lifted her wing into the gryphon’s waiting hands and suppressed the shudder that lifted into her chest. This wasn’t the time nor the place. Besides, she was long past those impulsive, hormone-hazed teenage years and Dr. Arty probably didn’t spend the prime of his life studying pony physiology just to fulfill some interspecies kink. This was important. The culmination of both their careers, and the careers of the three ponies in the room with them.

They were going to space.

The mere thought of it made her giddy. All her life she’d dreamed of going up there and seeing what until now only her dad’s probes had been able to see. And tomorrow morning she was going to be living that dream. Her hind legs swung happily beneath the exam table, one of four sets in the prep room. After this, she and the rest of the crew would appear to the tightly managed press pool outside the astronaut complex to answer final questions before being ferried to their ride to the stars.

Dr. Arty loosely wrapped his fingers around the tips of her primary feathers. “Make a grip for me.”

She obliged, squeezing his hand. He sorted her eight strongest primaries into four pairs and fed each into a hardened plastic mitten her dad referred to as “the gauntlet.” Neatly bundled wires dangled from open ports along the cuff, each of which would be connected to her suit once her wings were folded into the position they would remain in for the next forty-eight hours. The joys of being a pegasus. Even when they reached a stable orbit she wouldn’t be allowed to remove her suit due to the risk of accidentally damaging the sensitive sensory tech. The cramps were going to be a joy.

She could feel the narrow, spring loaded metal bars beneath each pair of feathers. Once connected to her flight suit she would be able to use them to manipulate four mechanical “fingers” built into the suit’s hoof caps. It wasn’t exactly state of the art technology - Robronco was rumored to be working on something similar - but it would let her do her job once she had the vacuum of space to contend with. The average pegasus had feather dexterity on par with any gryphon, but all that went right out the window as soon as they were confined to a pressurized suit.

Dr. Arty hummed his approval and helped fold her wing back. For a gryphon, he always impressed her with how gentle he could be. Ever since she was a filly she’d heard little good about their collective demeanor as a species, but Arty definitely bucked that trend. Probably why her dad hired him in the first place.

“Thanks, Doc.”

“Thank me once you’re planetside,” he said dryly, but a firm pat of his taloned fingers on her shoulder told her she was welcome. “Spearhead, you’re next.”

Apogee slouched at the edge of her table and watched Arty go about the same steps with her commander’s gauntlet. Well into his forties, Spearhead hadn’t been the first choice to lead Equestria’s first journey into the great unknown. Some joked that his name was too fitting a match to pass up, but Apogee had seen the results of his physical and mental aptitude tests. He was built like a brick shithouse and cut no corners when it came to his health. He was also something of a painter, too. A trait that would likely help him once Equestria was ready to embark on longer term missions.

Past his table, her other two crewmates chatted as more JSA techs assisted them into their suits. One unicorn, one earth pony, both stallions. There was a running joke among the JSA community that for the first time in history a mare would be outnumbered by stallions three to one instead of the other way around. It wasn’t the only insinuation being made about the crew’s makeup, but she chose to ignore the more colorful theories.

Her jaw creaked with a long, groaning yawn.

Spearhead looked at her. “Need a stimulant?”

She blinked tears from her eyes and shook her head. She didn’t want to go up more jittery than the rocket she would be strapped to. A jab of medical grade caffeine was nothing compared to having five hundred thousand gallons of rocket fuel burning beneath your asscheeks.

“I’m good. Calm before the storm, am I right?”

Spearhead snorted, forcing Arty to hold his wings steady as he fitted his gauntlets. “If you fall asleep, don’t be surprised if you wake up with a mustache drawn on your lip.”

“Do that and I’ll superglue googly eyes to your balls.”

Several of the technicians chuckled to themselves. It was odd how this mission made so many different fields of expertise feel like family.

“Might stick them on myself just to see the censors pull their manes out trying to hide them.” He crossed his legs as if to say, don’t get any ideas. “Speaking of which, have you given any thought to what you’ll say to Rarity’s loyal drones?”

She wrinkled her nose as a pair of technicians hooked her gauntlets to her suit and lifted the forward portion to her shoulders. The press junket outside was no doubt buzzing with anticipation for what she, the daughter of Equestria’s most controversial billionaire stallion, would say just before their unsanctioned launch. As she held her forelegs out and the heavy white sleeves consumed them, she still couldn’t settle on what to say. Everything she tried to script felt too, well… scripted.

“No clue,” she admitted. “Maybe, ‘Hey Celestia, need a lift?’”

Not as many laughs this time around. Apogee kept forgetting that outside her immediate family and some close friends, open irreverence toward the princesses was still very taboo.

With her suit’s collar clamped firmly around her neck and her limbs wrapped in white vacuum-proof material, she quipped that she finally knew what it felt like to be a marshmallow. It was a joke she’d made several times before but it served to lighten the mood for those around her. Arty made his final rounds, checking each crewmember’s vitals and ensuring no one would keel over dead for the cameras. Celestia would love that almost as much as she’d enjoy seeing her family’s legacy burn up in a cloud of its own liquid oxygen. Even after her father sold their rocket designs to the government, Princess Bighorn would lose no sleep if ponykind’s first attempt to touch the sun ended in immolation.

Murmurs past the exam room doors signalled the next step. The four of them took a few minutes to acclimate to the heavy suits, walking and trotting in place to get a feel for the extra bulk. Apogee and Spearhead’s articulating “fingers” would remain disconnected until they reached the command module, but the extra inch the rubberized caps provided made her feel like a stilt walker. Thankfully that would only be an issue for as long as gravity was. According to the countdown clock above the door which they had all been carefully ignoring, they were only a couple hours away from weightlessness.

The doors were pushed open by JSA security and the four of them filed into the hallway just as they had rehearsed yesterday. A couple cameras flashed as they moved up around their commander, the four of them walking shoulder to shoulder so as to appear as equals to the press waiting outside. Apogee cleared her throat. Spearhead blew out a pent up breath as they approached the lobby and the inevitable chaos waiting for them past those doors.

The photos snuck by a wingful of staffers was nothing compared to the next several minutes of supernova bright strobes and the tsunami of questions that crashed over them wave after wave. It felt like walking through the blinding heart of a living star. Their entourage kept them moving, refusing to allow the mission to be delayed by the press or anyone else. She felt herself being guided forward by feathers, magic and hooves alike until they were past the swarm of journalists and heading toward a bus idling beside the sidewalk, waiting to take them across the heavily guarded launch complex toward the culmination of unstoppable Equestrian curiosity.

As they were pushed toward the vehicle, Apogee caught a glimpse of the rocket in the distance and her heart swelled. Perched in the crossroads of four golden spotlights stood the black and white column of raw power which was destined to yank Equestria off the dark path it had fumbled onto and back onto a road toward progress. Miles above their heads, SOLUS waited for them in orbit.

Tomorrow, as thousands of colts and fillies readied their costumes for the Nightmare Night festivities, Equestria would be well on its way to a brighter future.

Maybe it was just her ego talking, but Applebloom had expected more of a reaction. Any reaction. The two intruders, visitors, guests, stow-aways… whatever they were, they didn’t say anything. The changeling, he straightened a little. But the unicorn with him? Nothing. Not a peep. It had been a long time, she thought. A long time. A long long long…

Stop it.

Having someone to talk to, someone who answered back, was hard enough. Two was sensory overload. Sensory overload. She squeezed her eyes shut and mumbled the little ditty she’d picked up during her foalhood.

“...apples forever, apples together, we’re family but so much more…”

Sweetie Belle tugged on her leash, drawn to the sound of Snips having another one of his tantrums. She lost her place in the song and, gritting her teeth, started again from the top.

The changeling spoke right through the middle of the song, his voice like wet gravel and impossible to shut out. “Are you the only pony left? Is there someone in charge?”

Yes and yes.

She made a gesture for him to stop talking and started over again. “Applesforeverapplestogetherwe’refamilybutsomuchmore…”

She knew what she looked like right now and she hated that there were actually ponies here to see it. She wasn’t crazy. Exactly the opposite, as far as she was concerned. Scootaloo might have left her in charge because she was the only friend left who she could trust, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t up for the challenge. She was the CEO of Robronco Industries. Stable-Tec wouldn’t have gotten to where it did without her company’s assets. Everything from the Pip-Buck to the common office terminal. That was her. That was Applebloom. There weren’t enough bombs on the planet that could wipe that fact from history.

And yet here she was, locked underground with nothing but the thoughts in her head and an infuriating artificial intelligence who didn’t know the definition of master.

When she finished her song, she exhaled as something like clarity eased her anxiety. She looked up at the two… visitors, she decided, and swallowed to wet her throat.

“I ain’t crazy,” she murmured.

The changeling was looking at the notes she’d written on the walls so many years ago. For a moment he looked unconvinced, but for someone with so much visible decay, he almost looked sympathetic when he looked toward her again. “Did you write all this?”

She paused, then nodded once.

“Your penmanship is immaculate.”

Slowly, the insulation gun drooped between her teeth until she eventually set it on the ground. They weren’t scared of it anyway. “Thanks. Granny taught me.”

She licked her lips and tried to think of something constructive to ask. Every second wasted was a second she wasn’t solving the problem of decay.

“You came from outside,” she said. Not really a question. Not a question. Nope.

The changeling, Roach, nodded. “We did. Is that okay?”

Treating her like she was a lit stick of dynamite. Padding the sharp edges of their questions. Don’t hurt the sensitive mare. Don’t set her off.

“They bombed the building. The ground caved into the Stable. Crushed the stairs’n filled in the elevator shaft. The only way out is the front door but Millie wouldn’t open it for anyone. Not even me.”

The unicorn, Ginger, perked up at the mention of Millie but stayed silent.

“We had to burrow in through the bulkhead,” he told her. Seeing her confusion, he added, “Changeling magic. It’s how we build new hives.”

“Terraforming,” she said.

“Sort of. Not really.” Roach shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

Applebloom frowned. “I can handle complicated.”

He glanced at Sweetie Belle and nodded. “I bet you can, but we don’t have the time. We came here hoping to find something.”

She surprised herself by chuckling. When was the last time she’d done that? She couldn’t remember. This was starting to sound like the plot of those old black and white detective shows Sweetie pestered her into watching back when they were teenagers.

I’m lookin’ for someone special, see? Someone real important to me. A dame with a chestnut coat and gams that go for miles. Maybe you know her?

A stuttering laugh trickled past her jaws before she could stop herself. Her two visitors stared at her, suddenly less at ease than they had been a second ago. She clenched her mouth shut to make herself stop.

Idiot. Idiot-idiot-idiot…

She’d been alone for too long. Forgotten how to talk to ponies who could answer back. How to behave. All those years of practice she’d stacked up at the helm of Robronco, partnering with Stable-Tec, being one of the faces of Equestrian progress had gone right out the window. Or whatever amounted to windows in a place with none. Her first interaction with actual ponies and she was already losing her grip on the conversation.

“It’s called an ignition talisman.”

She blinked. Roach looked no less worried than he had a moment before.

He’s giving you a free pass, Sweetie Belle said. Pretend it didn’t happen and so will he.

She looked at her decayed friend. Sweetie stared vacantly into the distance, her attention wandering as it always did. Still, she wasn’t wrong.

She cleared her throat. That was a thing ponies did back then. “What do you need one’a them for?”

Roach and the coffee-colored mare beside him brightened, the latter looking to the lesser with a hopeful expression. “Aurora was right.”

He nodded, but his pale insectile eyes never left Applebloom. “Our friend comes from a Stable with a damaged talisman. She took us here hoping you might have a replacement. Do you?”

She hesitated. Now they weren’t just visiting. They wanted something from her.

Scootaloo would have said no. Or that’s what she assumed. Even as the decay was chipping away at her mind, Scootaloo’s actions had made it clear nothing was more important to her than the security of this facility. She wouldn’t have ordered so many ponies to seal the breach after the bomb hit if she didn’t think the shelter was expendable.

It took everyone to close it. It didn’t matter who they were, whether they were meant to be down here or not. Everyone from Stable-Tec staff to the dozens of ponies who had been in the building for conferences, interviews or just visiting family… everyone worked at least one shift in the red zone. Everyone tasted the radiation on their teeth. Felt the creeping sensation of something wrong spread through their bodies. Watched with resigned horror as clumps of coat fell out of withering skin. Listened to the hunting screams of the first to go wild with the decay.

“Applebloom?”

She jerked her head up, pulled from her memories like a fish on a hook. “Um,” she said, trying to think of what came next. They waited for her, too polite to show their impatience. They wanted her answer. No. They wanted one of her ignition talismans.

“I…”

She frowned. Thinking.

Roach could feel his patience thinning, but he tried to stay sympathetic. This mare had regressed so far. By all accounts, she should have gone feral decades ago.

“I don’t think she’d want me to do that.”

It wasn’t a no, but it was closer to one than he cared for. This was the end of the road. If this place had nothing to offer, Stable 10 would cascade into the last days of its collapse unhindered. There just wouldn’t be time to sniff out another source. His gaze shifted from Applebloom to her collared counterpart.

“Her?”

The ghoul lifted her hoof and began gnawing on its worn edge.

Applebloom hooked her hoof around the crook of her leg and tugged it away from her teeth. Sweetie Belle blinked slowly, unoffended.

“Quit bitin’.”

“Ruh.” She turned back toward the wall, staring beyond the tightly written notes scrawled there.

“I meant Scootaloo.” Applebloom’s expression briefly changed. There was grief there and something else. An intense flicker of clarity. Determination, maybe. Roach couldn’t be sure. “This is her Stable.”

“I gathered that much.” He leaned his weight to one hoof to distract himself. The unpleasant sensation of chitin plates compressing against one another gave him something to redirect his frustration toward. This was the home of Stable-Tec. It survived a direct balefire strike and the lights were still on. Obviously, somewhere beneath their hooves, an ignition talisman was spinning in its chamber providing torque to the massive generator seated around it.

A second one couldn’t be far away.

“What about a spare?” he probed.

Applebloom idly lifted a hoof toward the haggard red mop of her mane. “A spare.”

He nodded. “A backup. One you can part with.”

She pressed her cracked lips together in thought, then whispered something to Sweetie Belle. It didn’t seem to matter that the abnormally docile ghoul ignored her. “What if we need it? I know, but what if. Wh… yeah she would. Yeah she would.”

Ginger leaned toward him, voice lowered. “Do we have time for this?”

He sighed. It wasn’t like any other options were making themselves available. He took a risk and moved forward, shrinking the open space between them by a hoofstep. Applebloom frowned at him but her one-mare conversation persisted. Beside her, Sweetie Belle slowly bent her neck toward him.

“Will she try to hurt me?”

Applebloom nodded.

He stopped. “Is there anything here Ginger and I could eat or drink? Medicine, maybe?”

“Are you sick?” She looked at Ginger with a flicker of frustration. “You don’t have it, do you?”

Ginger blinked. “Have what, exactly?”

“The decay,” she spat.

Roach tapped her leg with the side of his hoof, tipping his nose down toward himself as an example. Separated from the world outside, Applebloom didn’t have the vocabulary for what happened to radiation afflicted creatures. Decay was her version of “ghoul.”

“No, dear, I’m not sick. But clean food is hard to come by these days and I imagine there are other ponies here who may appreciate being updated on the state of things outside.”

Applebloom rocked forward a little. “Ain’t anyone else left but me. Just me. Me myself and me myself and me.”

“Rah.”

She squeezed her eyes shut, nodding. “Sorry, Sweetie. You too.”

Roach glanced over at the writing on the wall. This was all hers, then. The work of one mare left alone with only a semifunctioning ghoul as company. He knew that life too well. Only she’d been locked inside her Stable. He’d been sealed out. Until now, he’d never considered himself lucky for his circumstances.

“There’s, um... food down in Supply,” she said, visibly struggling to stay on track. “They’re emergency rations, though. Didn’t hold up like they were supposed to. Might give you the runs. Or plug you up. The tuna does both. You don’t want both.”

Roach tried not to react. “Maybe we could scrounge up something better in the cafeteria. Are your fabricators working?”

Applebloom shrugged. “I dunno. Millie won’t let me use ‘em. Won’t let me use anything even though I’m the one who created her.”

She leveled the end of the sentence toward the ceiling where one of Millie’s innocuous little speaker-microphones sat flush between the fluorescents. He wondered if the AI was listening.

Beside him, Ginger was eyeing the same speaker but instead of showing mistrust, her expression curled with a strange confidence.

“We’re not terribly particular when it comes to food, so long as it’s safe to eat.” She regarded Applebloom with the same pleasant smile she reserved for customers in desperate need of being separated from their caps. Applebloom’s lips tilted to mimic Ginger’s. “Perhaps we could trade stories over an early lunch?”

Applebloom blinked several times in quick succession, then nodded once. Eagerly.

Roach couldn’t help but feel a pang of guilt as Applebloom turned one way, then the other before deciding on a direction to travel. In so many ways she was just like a lost foal. Desperate for conversation, unsure of herself and worst of all incredibly lonely. As Applebloom led her feral friend down the corridor, she checked to see whether either of them were following. The flicker of worry on her face when she first looked was painful to see, as if she was afraid the two of them had been figments. Ghosts and nothing more. The relief in her smile when she confirmed they were in tow was even worse.

They followed her through the residential corridor and toward a familiar bank of elevators seated into the far wall. To Roach’s relief, she turned away from them and pushed open a simple door on their left, leading them into a standard stairwell. Cramming into an elevator with a feral ghoul wasn’t his idea of a good time.

Their hooves echoed against the steps. Aside from a thin mat of dust on each stair, they looked practically untouched.

“So,” Ginger continued, causing Sweetie Belle to crane her neck in search of her voice. “May I ask what happened to the other residents?”

Applebloom turned along the railing and started into the next flight down. Roach thought for a moment she hadn’t heard her and nearly repeated the question himself, but then the ghoul started to speak. There wasn’t much to her story. It started as they usually did, with the bombs falling. Ponies being caught unprepared as sirens wailed and order melted into panic.

“Sweetie Belle and I were down in the lobby when it all happened. We’d both gotten invitations from Scoots. Some new venue. Venue, venue… a club, I think. A soft opening with the local hoi polloi in attendance. Scootaloo thought Stable-Tec and Robronco could use it to freshen up our image with the coastal demographic. Connect with Mr. and Mrs. Everypony.” She rolled her eyes and sighed. Her confused speech began to smooth out the more she talked. She’d had plenty of time to think about it.

“Corporate party crashing, she called it. We were gonna make a whole night of it. Attend the opening, take some pictures - clickity click - Sweetie Belle was going to sing a little then comb the crowd for anyone who might be willin' to distribute her leaflets. After that, who knew? Drinks, knowing Sweetie. Scoots woulda probably spent the night on her Pip-Buck. Didn’t happen, so I guess it don’t matter. Bombs started going off and next thing we knew the entire building was bolting for the stairs. We got swept down with everyone else, then WHAM! Every pony not holding onto something goes ass over teakettle and Millie starts screaming at us about a breach in level one.

“Bomb cracked the ceiling like a rotten nut. It was a mess. Ain’t an inch of the place that didn’t smell like tarnished bits or smoke. Not much we could do other’n patch the leaks and divert as much contaminated groundwater to the pumps as we could. Wasn’t a few days after the all clear came that the decay started to show. Some folks tried to quarantine themselves but it didn’t help. By the time we knew something was wrong, it was too late. Everyone had it, even the doctors. Pegasi started molting. Everyone else started shedding their coats. Losing their manes. I remember seeing hair clumped up in the corridors like dust bunnies.”

Applebloom paused to examine the door on the seventh level and pushed her way into another cookie-cutter Stable-Tec corridor.

“Not long after that, ponies started attacking each other. At the time nobody knew why it was happenin' or how to stop it. The ponies with the worst decay just up and started killing the ones with the least. The sick killing the healthy. Fuck me. I heard it happening outside my compartment. Millie wouldn’t stop trying to summon security. The attacks lasted for a few weeks. Nobody thought to bring food into their compartment. Ponies who were still well enough to feel hunger got hungry. Ventured out. Got killed. Everyone lost their minds and just like that…”

She clicked her hoof against the floor, startling a rah out of Sweetie Belle.

“It stopped.”

Roach swallowed, his throat just a touch dryer than usual. Her accounting of the Stable’s fall hit a little too close to home for him. It dredged up memories from the tunnel outside Stable 10. The moans of ponies coming to terms with their unwanted fates. The sounds of starvation en masse followed by the regular pop of a pistol as it made its rounds among the survivors. And, inevitably, the mindless, undying existence waiting for those who didn’t have the stomach to face the bullet.

Applebloom had listened to her Stable die from behind the locked door of her compartment. He’d done the same inside a utility closet tucked out of death’s view. The main difference here was that the bodies of the dead didn’t litter the ground. The corridors weren’t choked with bones and abandoned luggage.

A quick glance at Ginger and he could tell she was noticing too.

“The other residents,” she prompted. “Where are they?”

Applebloom flicked the red rag of her tail. “They’ve been confined to their compartments until I can cure them.”

Roach blinked. “Cure them?”

She glanced back toward him with a defiant smirk. “That’s the goal, anyway. Beats runnin’ around bucking at trees that ain’t fruiting, right?”

The analogy coasted well above his reach, but he nodded anyway. The notes they’d seen seven levels up extended down here as well, coating the walls in an unbroken haze of pencil lead. “Sure.”

She saw him skimming the nearest lines and looked away. “Writing things down helps me keep my head on straight.”

He grunted. “Make any progress?"

"No."

They came to a set of double doors set beneath a simple blue and white placard. SUPPLY. Dull lips of deformed metal tapered the edge of each door where Applebloom had at one point tried to force them open. On the wall beside them, the panel that housed the switch had been bent off its mounts to expose the hydraulics behind it. The high pressure line was blown out, the brown dregs of dry fluid still coating the interior wall around it. Roach smiled, knowing Aurora had used the same method during her own escape.

The doors, marred as they were, had been parted halfway. Just enough room for them to squeeze in behind her.

An overhead motion sensor tripped a breaker somewhere past the shadows and a smattering of narrow tubes buzzed with fresh light. Just like the empty corridors, more bulbs were dead than not. High as they were hung, the few fluorescents that did work could only provide a ghostly glow within the cavernous warehouse.

Ginger gasped at the sheer volume of space before them. “Luna’s mercy.”

Applebloom glanced back. “Luna’s what?”

She had made her way toward the nearest row of steel racking and was in the process of tying Sweetie Belle’s leash to its corner support. The expression she wore suggested she’d heard Ginger but didn’t recognize the expression. Or, more likely, took issue with it.

Ginger was too enamored with the raw materials piled onto the dusty shelves to notice. She stepped toward them, her eyes wide like an adventurer stumbling into a dragon’s horde. “There’s so much.”

Applebloom finished tying off her friend, which was no small thing without a horn or feathers to form a good knot, and followed her gaze with only mild interest. “I guess it is a bit more than the old hayloft. More’n I’ll ever need.”

She led them past Sweetie Belle who regarded them both with a territorial mistrust that didn’t help to put them at ease. Once they were sure she wasn’t going to chew through her leash and attack them, they turned forward and found themselves swallowed by the shelves.

Roach allowed his guard to drop just enough that he could gawk in earnest at the trove that engulfed them. Metal trunks, plastic cases and nailed wooden crates stood untouched since the day they were placed here, towering toward a ceiling that had to easily take up a portion of the floor above them. Dusty, transparent envelopes glued to the front of each container held printed manifests detailing their contents, the date they were packaged, the name of the pony who sealed them, everything.

They passed a double-stacked row of hardened plastic cases, their rubber seals still dark with oil and fully intact. Roach strolled nearer to read the label as they passed.

Prewar vegetable seeds, still under seal two hundred years later. One case of these and Knight Latch would stand a fighting chance at restarting the gardens at the Bluff. Scanning the shelves, he quickly realized that the entire row was dedicated to seed storage. Forget Stable 6. With mindful cultivation and some skilled grafting, there was enough crop starter down here to feed a measurable percentage of Equestria!

“Applebloom,” he murmured, his pale eyes struggling to grasp the potential of this much raw material. “All that seed. It’s too much for one Stable.”

She shrugged. “Most’ve it ain’t meant for us. Scoots designed this place to be a safety net for the Stables. I think, anyway.”

“You think?”

Another shrug. "Been wrong before. Wrong wrong wrong."

Midway down the second bank of shelving she bent toward a stack of metal trunks, several of which had been pulled out onto the floor and hung open. Applebloom headed for these, though the unbroken dust on the floor suggested she hadn’t been this way in some time. Two trunks had been pushed across the concrete toward the opposite shelves. The word “TRASH” had been written on the lids in fat, black marker. The other trunks had more detailed information written in neat columns. As Roach slowed to examine the first one he quickly noticed that it was a sort of rating system Applebloom had devised for herself.

Beef stroganoff.

2/10

Smells like puke when hot.

Gritty texture. Bonemeal?

Diarrhea, stomach cramps. Beef prob. spoiled.

Orange drink powder good with Berry’s vodka.

He lifted the lid. Inside the crate were six medium sized boxes containing a dozen identical drab green plastic packages. Roach didn’t have much experience with MREs beyond a few that he found while scavenging, and he had heard enough horror stories from ponies who tried cooking them not to sample them. Ghoul or no, his biology wasn’t immune to the unpleasant effects of eating spoiled food.

Applebloom noticed him reading and smiled. “Sorry. Too much information, I guess.”

“Par for the course with these things. Can I ask why you aren’t eating from the gardens? It’s what they’re there for.”

She dipped her head inside one of the open trunks and pulled out a package that she flicked toward them. Ginger caught it with her magic and traded it off to him, her expression dubious as she was given one for herself.

“Not to interrupt, but what is ‘Chili Macaroni?’”

Applebloom let the lid clap shut and set her own package on top before reaching behind the trunk for a jug of water. “It’s good, is what it is. Instructions are on… Sweetie, no.”

The two of them nearly tripped over one another in their haste to turn themselves toward what they both assumed was a feral attack, but when they saw the ghoul still tethered to the far shelf the adrenaline faded. Sweetie Belle had begun to crawl over a plastic-wrapped pallet of dry goods like a bored dog looking for something to explore. Applebloom’s warning made her stop, her faded eyes staring toward them across the distance.

She opened her mouth, uttering a faint, “Rah,” before continuing her climb up the shrinkwrap.

Applebloom looked on with irritation as the mare squeezed over the gap, her leash sliding up behind her. “She never listens.”

Roach blew out the breath he’d been holding and turned back to what appeared to be their makeshift picnic spot. In reality, he wasn't interested in the food. Nor was Ginger. They had their fill of the fruit they’d brought up from Stable 1 before their dive, and the lackluster promise of two-century old prepackaged food didn’t whet what little appetite they retained. The incalculable treasure of materials that surrounded them could be addressed later, if at all .They were here for an ignition talisman, and it would be easier to locate if the only somewhat lucid resident left could be convinced that they were her friends. If suffering through food poisoning was the price they had to pay to jump that final hurdle, so be it.

He bit open the top of his bag and followed Applebloom’s lead by tipping the contents onto the floor. Ginger did the same, and they began preparing their meals.

“So,” Roach said, his thoughts still lingering on the vacuum sealed crops they just passed. “The gardens?”

It took several moments for Applebloom to answer. She was mumbling again, something neither of them could quite catch. Another song. Something about razing a barn. He waited until she was finished.

“Um,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut for a second. “Sorry. Sorry, yeah. Millie won’t let me in the gardens, neither.”

“It sounds like you’ve been having a lot of problems with her.”

She glanced up at Ginger, nodded, then looked back down to the steam rising from her MRE. “Just one, actually. Sweetie and I were never supposed to be down here, so we ain't registered with the other residents. Millie thinks she doesn’t need to listen to anything I tell her. Makes it a pain in the flank for me when I break into anything.”

“How so?”

Applebloom snorted. “Ever hear a carriage alarm? She has that. Lets it run for twenty four hours. Drives me nuts. Wakes up half the Stable too.”

Roach decided not to comment on that last part. “You broke in here. Setting off an alarm for a day sounds like a good trade-off if it means you can grow your own food.”

“Eh. Maybe.” Using her teeth, she carefully lifted the packet of cooked chili mac out of the steaming bag. With her hooves holding the top of the packet steady, she tore open the corner and set it on the ground to cool. “I spent my entire foalhood working the orchards. I’d have to set up my own crop rotations, schedule harvests, worry about soil acidity, nutrient balances… that’s time taken away from my work.”

Roach poked at the package of boiling water in front of him. “Curing the gh-... the decayed.”

“Eeyup. Fat lot of progress I’ve made on that front, too.” She hefted the steaming packet of food with her hooves and squeezed some of the contents into her mouth like toothpaste, still managing to speak around the mouthful. “Sho far, nothin’. None of ‘em shtay shtill long enough…”

Mercifully, she swallowed. “...long enough for me to get a good look at them. Millie loses her mind when I restrain ‘em. Thinks I'm attacking residents, so it gets loud loud loud. All I learned is that meds don’t work and Rad-Away makes ‘em sick. Music gets their attention for a little while, but I had to stop that after one broke the speaker in their compartment and got stuck in the ceiling cavity.

“What I do know is that the decay stops the aging process.” She sucked another mouthful of chili mac from the pouch. “Or slowsh it down, like with the prinsheshes.”

An orange film of masticated tomato sauce leaked from the corner of Applebloom’s mouth. Roach tried not to react.

“Be a lot eashier if shomeone let me use the fabricatorsh!”

She must have expected the chime that echoed from above, as she was already mouthing the response that followed.

“I’m sorry, but you do not have sufficient permission to access these facilities. Please remain where you are. A security team has been dispatched to your location.”

She finished chewing and rolled her eyes. “That’s Millie, my crowning achievement. Capable of processing 100 petaflops per second and about as smart as a can of cranberry sauce. I like to think empty threats are her way of saying hello these days.”

Ginger tore the top off her packet and dipped a plastic fork into the meat-scented pudding inside. “We’ve actually met once before in another Stable. She certainly has a dry personality.”

Applebloom watched her eat. “Which Stable?”

“Six.” She winced a little as she took a small bite. Then her expression brightened and she nipped the rest off her fork. “This is... actually edible."

“Don’t let it cool down or that’ll change. I think I knew someone who was supposed to be in Six. I think. I… sorry. Hold on.” She set down her pouch and pressed a hoof into the space between her eyes, muttering to herself again. “We’ve actually met before we’ve actually met before we’ve actually met before…”

Roach looked to Ginger. She shot him a look that said I didn’t do this all while Applebloom spiraled around Ginger’s sentence like a stuck record. Just as he was considering reaching out to touch her, the ghouled mare snapped to attention.

“You talked to Millie?”

Ginger was caught off guard. “Well, not me per se. But I imagine the bypass that worked for Aurora would work for me as well.”

“So you’re a Stable resident somewhere else?”

She blinked. “No, our friend Aurora is. I grew up in New Canterlot.”

A longer pause. “New Canterlot. There’s a new…” She pinched her eyes shut again, trying to focus. Her hoof leveled at Ginger as she spoke. “You’re not a resident but you can talk to Millie. Can you talk to her now? Can you ask her to help me?”

Roach took a slow breath and hoped Ginger was on the same page.

Thankfully, she was. “I don’t know, dear. It’s possible. If I can, however, perhaps this is an opportunity where the two of us can work out a trade?”

Applebloom blinked several times. “A trade.”

“Yes. If I can speak to Millie, there’s a chance I could convince her to register you as a resident. You could have access to the things you need to conduct your research in earnest.”

Understanding, Applebloom frowned. “You want an ignition talisman in exchange.”

“Yes.”

Roach pushed his untouched meal aside and cleared his throat. “A spare,” he clarified. “Or directions to where we can find one. We’re not here to sacrifice one Stable to save another.”

“A spare. Spare spare...” Applebloom’s frown deepened. When she spoke, she sounded unsure of herself. Like a mare piecing together old memories live in the moment. “A spare a spare a spare. Um… ah, Stable-Tec wasn’t allowed to keep spares. I mean, they were but then they weren’t. Celestia... um, okay. Celestia made a decree recalling all first generation stimpacks. Ministry officials checked all the Stables for compliance. Some did, some didn’t. Scootaloo could’ve gotten put in prison but the new stimpacks sucked. Ministry folk saw we had backup talismans and said no to that, too. Claimed it was dangerous. Ain’t sure where they put ‘em. Probably destroyed ‘em.”

Roach’s shoulders sagged. “Fuck.”

“But…” Applebloom gave her head a jerky shake. “Okay, but I don’t think I need all the generators online. It’s just me down here just me lil’ ol’ me stop it. Um, sorry, just… I’m not sayin’ I can. No promises. I ain’t Pinkie Swearin’ on it or…”

“It’s fine.” He held up a hoof, gently urging her to slow down. “Let’s see what we have to work with first. Ginger, why don’t you give it a try.”

After some hesitation, Ginger inhaled and looked toward the darkened ceiling. “Millie?”

“Welcome, valued guest. Please state the Stable-Tec Identification Number attached to your Pip-Buck to begin your registration.”

Roach blinked. Probably not the response Ginger was banking on.

“Millie,” she said, this time pausing a moment to think. “I forgot my Pip-Buck outside.”

“I’m sorry. A Stable-Tec Identification Number is required to register. Please contact Overseer Scootaloo for a replacement.”

“Well,” Applebloom murmured, “at least she ain’t blowin’ your eardrums out with the klaxons.”

“There is that,” she agreed. Dropping her fork into the now empty pouch of chili mac, she tipped her head back and forth as she mulled her next attempt. “What about… Millie, would you kindly generate a Stable-Tec Identification Number for me to use within this Shelter?”

A pause. “Zero-seven-two-seven-six-six-zero-one…”

Applebloom sat up straight. “Horseshit!”

Ginger waited for Millie to finish. “Millie, I would like to register for residency within this shelter. Please refer to your previous answer for my Stable-Tec I.D. Number.”

“One moment, please.”

Several seconds passed during which Applebloom looked primed to climb the shelves just to throw hooves at the suddenly cooperative AI.

“Welcome, new resident, to the Stable-Tec Headquarters Preservation Program! A Stable-Tec representative will be with you shortly to complete your onboarding paperwork!”

“No-no-no, that’s not okay, Millie! I tried that!” Applebloom was on her hooves now, jabbing one in the vague direction of one of her speakers. “I tried that trick and you ignored me! I have tried every sunfucked trick in the book and you said NO.”

“I’m sorry, but you do not have sufficient permission to access these facilities. Please remain where you are. A security team has been dispatched to your location.”

“Fuck. YOU.”

Roach stood. “Miss, take a breath.”

“NO!” With a flick of her withered hoof, the contents of her MRE skittered across the dusty concrete. “I'm not MISS I'm APPLEBLOOM. Why was it that easy?! I have been down here fighting with that damn voice that damn Celestia damned DAMN VOICE in my head and she says no no no no no NO. ALWAYS NO. What did she say? Ginger what did you say?!”

Applebloom made to close the distance to Ginger, but Roach slid between like a wall of bricks.

“Don’t.”

She blinked at him, tears filling her eyes. “I wasn’t gonna… I wasn’t. I wasn’t. I just want to know. She has to tell me has to. Please please…”

“Calm down, Applebloom.”

“I am calm. I am. Breathe. I am.” She closed her eyes and whispered. “There’s no place I’d rather be than travelin’ with my family…”

Her body began to rock back and forth as she sang, tears spilling down her gaunt cheeks as the words grew thick and muddled. He didn’t recognize the song but he could tell what it meant to her. The grounding effect it had in the fracturing madness of so many decades alone. The loved ones they’d lost were the things they clung most tightly to. It was their totem. The calm within their personal storms.

Roach reached out and touched her shoulder and eased her into a quiet hug just like he used to with Violet. Applebloom didn’t reciprocate. She only allowed herself to lean forward, her forehead thumping into his collarbone, and wept.

October 30th, 1077
Launch Day, T-03:00

“Cloudbreaker, Control. How do you read me?”

“Control, loud and clear.”

“Okay, Spearhead. Have a good one.”

Apogee reached up with her right hoof while simultaneously flexing the tips of her selected feathers. A rubber-padded digit folded out of her flight suit’s nonconductive cap and flexed down, hovering over a metal switch on the control board above her.

“Program 2,” she said.

“Alright, Cloudbreaker, on panel 2 DSKY, insert Verb 75 and do not Enter.”

She toggled the switch. “Verb 75. Standing by.”

Reclined in the seat on her right, Commander Spearhead held the moleskin binding of his notepad between his own set of “fingers.” His expression a mask of grim concentration, he looked back and forth between the readouts he was seeing and the cheat sheets he’d written down for the most common codes the control board would throw at him. If there was a stallion in Equestria more determined to put a pony in space than her own dad, it was Spearhead.

It felt so strange to her to fully trust another pony with her life but here they were, strapped to five hundred thousand gallons of fuel so potent that liquid hydrogen had to be circulated across the combustion chambers to stop them from going molten. Spearhead knew the failure modes of this mission better than any of them and he’d labored over a mountain of checklists and manuals so he would know how to stop them from turning fatal. If any other pony had tried sitting where he sat now, she would have tossed them out of the command module herself before his or her technicolor butt touched the shock absorbing foam.

“Cloudbreaker, Panel 325, Primary Glycol to Rad valve, Pull to Bypass.”

Spearhead pressed his chin into his helmet’s comm switch. “It’s in Bypass.”

To Spearhead’s right sat the mission’s flight specialist. He was the unicorn who would be managing their ascent and do the heavy lifting when it came to the delicate work of putting them on a direct rendezvous with SOLUS. Seated beneath the trio, or more accurately behind them once they were in orbit and gravity didn’t dictate direction, was the crew’s backup EVA specialist. Apogee’s replacement, if something stopped her from performing her primary mission of installing the six M.A.S.T.s that would power the satellite’s primary systems for decades to come.

She dipped her suit’s mechanical “finger” beneath the Gyro Display Coupler switch. At T-0:50 she tipped it into the on position.

“GDC Align.”

“Confirm.” Spearhead’s breathing was a touch heavier. He was excited to get off the pad and see the stars.

Ground control chimed in. “Twenty-five seconds.”

Apogee could feel the adrenaline dumping into her veins. “GDC is good.”

“We see you, Cloudbreaker.”

The commander thumped her foreleg. “Up we go.”

She shot him a nervous grin, eyes never leaving the control panel. “Up we go.”

Over the comm, flight control checks flooded the channel.

“Fifteen.”

“GRR”

“Confirm, GRR.”

“Guidance is internal.”

“Ignition sequence start.”

“10. 9. 8. 7…”

Apogee took her hoof away from the controls and focused on her breathing.

“...6. 5. 4…”

The earth pony below them murmured a short prayer. He’d secretly adopted the gryphons’ religion.

“...3. 2. 1. Igni--”

Whatever Control had left to say was blasted out of her ears by the titanic kick of Cloudbreaker’s five gargantuan engines.

Shiny plastic crinkled beneath her legs. A cobweb, long abandoned by the spider who wove it, tickled the leathery skin of her ear while unfamiliar voices echoed dimly in the other. The tip of her horn tapped against the sturdy shelving. Nested as she was, among familiar walls and the comforting buzz of fluorescent bulbs, she felt safe.

These weren’t things that Sweetie Belle knew, intellectually. The time had come and gone when active thought was a choice she could make. She existed solely on instinct, chasing feelings that brought comfort and attacking anything which threatened pain. Deterioration had visited her as it had so many others: quick, cruel and complete. Except it hadn’t been complete. Not quite. Not yet. The cogs within her mind had been stripped of their teeth, but some still spun. Some still understood, clutching to thought like threads of fog, without comprehending.

“Reh.”

She didn’t have any reference for how long she lay there, only that after a time the pony she knew and the ponies she didn’t came back. They smelled like food which made her stomach twitch, but not much. The pony she knew untied her from the shelf support and gave the leash a quick tug. Sweetie Belle voiced her displeasure but didn’t put up a fight. Sometimes the pony she knew needed her to go different places. That was okay.

The ponies she didn’t know stayed away. That was okay, too. She didn’t like them even if she didn’t know why. Every time she looked at the black one, a couple bare wires in her head would spark a thought about something she mistrusted. Something about the way he looked. As if everything that looked the way he did was dangerous. Or had been dangerous a long time ago.

The pony she knew had a wet face again. That happened sometimes, too. She made noises like she had something in her nose and tugged on the leash again, leading her out of the big place and into the long place. As they walked, her ears twitched toward the sound of their voices. Hearing, but not listening.

“I wasted so much time.”

“You had no way of knowing.”

“Scoots should have told me.”

“Dear, if you’re right and this Stable fell as quickly as it did, I imagine she wouldn’t have had the time to tell anyone. Aurora only discovered Millie’s bypass by pure accident, and only because Millie tipped her proverbial cards to us in the first place.”

“Maybe. It just… I would have never programmed such a sloppy backdoor around her verification system. Millie?”

“Yes, Applebloom?”

“Celestia’s ivory teats that’s still weird to hear. Millie, why is the term Shelter able to bypass your primary permission set? That's something you should have caught."

Sweetie’s leash went taut and she followed the pony she knew down another hallway. She tipped her head toward the ceiling to watch the lightbulbs slip in and out of view until it made her dizzy, so she stared at the lines squiggled along the beige wall.

“Command line ‘Shelter’ was submitted for entry on October 31st, 1077 at 09:22 hours by Overseer Scootaloo. I presented Overseer Scootaloo with a spoken notification that the addition of an unrecognized command line would generate multiple conflicts within my operating system and may cause some of my responses to be undesirable and inaccurate.”

“And she went ahead with it anyway?”

“She yelled at me. I was unable to fully articulate the pending notification, however a text copy was sent to and received by her Pip-Buck.”

“Too little too late always too late always stop it, AB.”

They filed into the stairwell and began to climb. Sweetie felt herself feeling calmer as they ascended. The pony she knew was taking her toward the good place. It always felt better to go up than down. She looked over the railing as the ponies she didn’t know climbed the flight below her and curled her lip at the black pony. He watched her too much.

“Let me put Sweetie to bed before we go down to the bottom. She gets agitated when I take her too far from home.”

“Where is home?”

She let the leash guide her out of the stairwell, briefly eyeing a section of wall with a bright grey lightning bolt of mortar filling an old fissure. The feeling of calm bloomed in her so much now that the ponies she didn’t know could walk right next to her and she wouldn’t want to hurt them. Nothing was dangerous up here. Things sometimes even made sense up here.

“I guess Conference Room 1A, if we’re being specific. Just… keep your voices down. Scoot-Scoot-Scootaloo is next door and once she gets riled up she starts pounding the walls and she hates having her hooves fixed and fixing her hooves is like wrestlin’ pajamas onto a porcupine porcupine porcupine.”

“Fixed?”

“Cracks them all the way down to the quick. You already met Snips. He already knocked one hoof clear off his foreleg and the other one’s going to come off sooner or later. They all do that if… well, they all do it if I don’t stop ‘em.”

“Not sure I know any way to stop a feral from attacking once it gets excited.”

Her friend brought them to the conference room door and toggled the switch. Sweetie Belle inhaled deeply the familiar scents of home and trotted inside without needing to be led.

“It’s easy enough. You just hogtie ‘em. Now hush. Hush. She’ll settle in on her own. Let’s head down and I’ll show you the generators.”

Her ear twitched at the sound of the door closing but she wasn’t worried. She was home.

A pleasant clarity soaked into her old bones as she walked past Applebloom’s sofa, glancing at the crocheted blanket she’d watched her make during the first lonely years after the catastrophe. A large decorative rug the color of golden straw lay in the space where the conference room table once resided. She could vaguely remember how soft it had been when Applebloom first dragged it out of the fifth floor commons area, pinned beneath a pool table that had taken the two of them to heave off of it. Now it was hard and compacted. Worn with age, just like everything else down here.

Plastic tubs stood neatly stacked against the far wall, most of them empty but some still containing uneaten MREs that they both liked. They didn’t eat often. She remembered something about it being a side effect of the decay. They could go decades without touching food so long as they didn’t exert themselves. Trapped as they were, there wasn’t much reason to do that either.

The black pony and his friend had gotten in, though. So they weren’t trapped. They could leave. She tried to commit it to memory. They could leave.

A changeling. That was why she didn’t like him. Maybe they were both changelings. Someone should tell the princesses. She frowned. That wasn’t right. The princesses were dead. Everyone was dead. There was nobody to warn.

She reached the far corner of the room where a single bed had been dragged in. There used to be two, she was sure of that, but now there was just one. She felt less lonely in just the one. As she climbed up onto the smoothed and tucked grey comforter, she tried to remember what she’d wanted to remember. Things sometimes slipped out of her head like that. Like frying eggs on butter.

She missed gathering eggs.

She paused, waiting for the loop around her neck to lift away and drop to the carpet. Then she remembered she couldn’t do that anymore and took it off with her hooves. It hit the floor with a thump and she pressed her muzzle into the pillows stacked at the head of their bed. They smelled like Applebloom.

Sleep came swiftly and she did not dream.

“So I see my sister’s armor held up as advertised.”

Ginger glanced at Applebloom, then Roach. With their feral fourth tucked safely within the confines of her almost domestic accommodations, they were finally able to follow Applebloom from a normal distance without risking being bitten for it. Ginger was also able to see there was some humor still living in this troubled ghoul. The problem was, she seemed to be the only one not in on the joke. She shot Roach a look that begged explanation. He shot one back that asked if she was serious.

Grudgingly, she relented. “Your sister?”

Applebloom blinked before regarding her with the same expression Roach had given her. After a beat, she said, “Yer serious?”

An awkward silence filled the corridor. Roach took mercy on her.

“She’s Applejack’s kid sister.” He stifled a chuckle. “It’s kind of in the name.”

She blinked realization, embarrassed by the sheer scope of her error, and quickly slipped onto the defensive. “W-well, I’ve met plenty of ponies entirely unrelated to her with apple in their name. It isn’t unheard of for parents to name a foal after…”

Applebloom cut her off. “Celestia’s sun, it’s fine. My sis is the one who helped with all the supernatural whatever, not me. Honestly, it’s sorta a relief to meet folks who don’t go on gushin’ about her.”

Ginger wasn’t sure if she was being complimented or placated. Maybe a touch of both. “I didn’t mean to dredge up any bad memories.”

“What? No, big sis and I loved the snot out of each other even when we didn’t see eye to eye on certain stuff. Kinda like that power armor you brought in. I didn’t exactly jump for joy when she told me she’d be directing a war ministry, but I never rubbed her muzzle in it either. At the end of the day we’re still family.” They returned to the same stairwell as before. Applebloom held the door open for them, her speech unusually clear in that moment. “It’s just that there was Applejack, my sister and Applejack, the Savior of Equestria. I can’t speak for the whole family, but for me the excitement of being the little sister of an Element of Harmony wore off fast.”

The old frustration coloring her tone was telling. The stairwell added a touch of echo to their voices as she led the two of them back down.

“Folks who never even met her start thinkin' they knew her better than her own kin. Even after Robronco started takin' off, I couldn’t get away from ponies that felt like they had to tell me they once saw Applejack buying oranges in Canterlot, or where they were when Tirek got killed. Or, Celestia forbid, someone went a day without tryin' to get inside information on that whole will-they-won’t-they between her and Dash. I…”

She stopped herself and glanced back up the steps at Roach. “Sorry. Didn’t think you were openin' a can of worms, did you?”

He shrugged with a forgiving nonchalance. “I was around to see Equestria back before most ponies could point to Vhanna on a map. Family is just one of those subjects that can stay sore no matter how much time passes.”

“Did changelings… have families?”

Ginger was careful not to react as she anticipated his standard it’s a long story for when he wasn’t entirely ready to dole out his life story.

“It’s a long story,” he said, and gave Applebloom the same tensed smile that he always wore to indicate that it also wasn’t a story they should ask about twice. Some ponies had the confidence of knowing they could air their dirty laundry and safely assume they would be understood and even sympathized with. Roach always had to tread a little more carefully. For him, honesty was a precious luxury. Not every pony who realized what he was settled to only call him “bug.”

Applebloom’s expression grew more complicated as a mask of uncertainty fell over her. She fixed her eyes on the stairs, her cracked lips pressed into a hesitant line as silence once again descended between them.

They passed the vast warehouse of Supply on level seven and continued down. As the stairs zigzagged deeper, Ginger briefly flashed back to the endless spiralling stairwell of Stable 1. The aches from that agonizing round trip still hadn’t completely faded and suddenly she feared she might be embarking on yet another dizzying journey into a new abyss. Yet while the shelter did turn out to be larger than the usual Stable, it bottomed out well short of the mark that anomalous silo had reached.

Thirteen floors down, they reached the bottom. Next to the door, a plainly worded sign had been bolted into the wall.

A smooth, humming chorus resonated from behind the sealed door, setting Ginger’s hackles on end. On this side of the wall it was still faint enough to be drowned out by the clicking of their hooves. Now, as they waited on Applebloom to lead them onward, the soft drone carried an unmistakable power behind it. This must be what it was like back at the Stable Aurora called home. A simmering boil of energy muted only by a few inches of concrete and steel, promising a productive day's work to be rewarded with fresh food and a clean bed. Now, here, a thousand miles away, she could clearly imagine being a part of that life.

Applebloom opened a metal box mounted beneath the warning sign and removed three gumdrop shaped pairs of foam attached by a positively meager looking length of string. “Earplugs,” she said.

Ginger plucked a set out from between the ghoul’s teeth and put them in, then helped Roach with his rather than having him waving his shotgun toward his head. Applebloom, surprisingly, managed an impressive amount of dexterity with her hooves alone. As the foam expanded the hum gradually vanished. Then Applebloom opened the door.

She could only describe what flooded into the stairwell as an absence of silence. The tooth-rattling drone of unearthly noise sunk into her body like a physical thing, seizing her ribs and coiling up her throat as if to make her speak against her will. It was like being screamed at by a thousand deranged centaurs, all crying out at the same frequency, each one threatening obliteration.

“It gets loud down here!” Applebloom shouted, tipping her head through the door for them to follow. Her face twitched as she started to walk, her lips stammering out the last couple words on repeat as she stepped over the threshold.

“Is this normal?!”

She could see Applebloom laugh. “I gave up on normal a hundred and fifty some years ago! But yeah, this is normal! The control room is soundproofed! We can talk easier there!”

With that Applebloom began to trot. Ginger and Roach loped after her. The sealed doors of old workshops and storage rooms passed on either side of the poorly lit corridor, greeting them with placards all but identical to the ones she’d seen at the bottom of Stable 1. Seeing so many similarities made her worry taking Aurora’s place on this final leg of the journey had been a mistake. No doubt Aurora would know exactly what these rooms were for and have little fear of the omnipresent bellow they were galloping toward. Mechanical was Aurora's world, not Ginger’s.

The corridor ended at a pair of heavy duty steel doors. The words GENERATOR HALL stood painted in stark black letters beneath the ceiling. Applebloom pushed them open and, unbelievably, the thunder doubled. The world beyond the doors gasped wide to greet them with an unbroken view of a space easily twice the volume of Supply. Maybe it was just her imagination, but it even appeared to dwarf the massive generator hall at the bottom of Stable 1.

Her jaw slackened at the sight of five behemoth generators, intricately constructed monoliths of mechanical ingenuity lost centuries ago churning with wild energy atop five equally massive concrete footings. Unlike the dead and dark generator Aurora had fruitlessly crawled into just days before, these machines were alive. Power on a scale Ginger struggled to understand coursed through their silver chassis as if the wendigos themselves were trapped inside, screaming to escape.

Centered in front of those five beastly machines, two smaller but no less imposing generators spun within self-contained hurricanes of electricity like acolytes knelt before the hooves of their pantheon of gods. Were it not for Roach shouldering her in the right direction, she would have run headlong into a scissor lift long since abandoned along the hall’s perimeter. Ginger forced herself to look away from the machines and focus on where she was going. A yellow painted walkway led them up a set of diamond patterned stairs, then to a thick metal door mounted to genuine hinges instead of the expected hydraulics. They rushed inside, greeted by a ring of terminal stations and an unbroken view of the generator hall through a thick sheet of safety glass that dominated the control room’s forward-facing wall.

Once they were inside Applebloom pushed the door shut, sealing out the worst of the noise. It felt as if she had turned a knob on the world’s volume. The relief was palpable. Ginger lit her horn and popped out the earplugs.

Applebloom made a slow circuit of the long room, her hazy green eyes narrowed at the nearly unbroken ring of blinking readouts and whirring control panels. Ginger wasn’t a mechanic. The clusters of gauges and dials meant nothing to her. The faded words clamped to dusty clipboards might as well be ancient Vhannan glyphs. It was quickly dawning on her that Aurora’s ignition talisman wouldn’t be found nestled safely inside a discarded crate. It was here, churning out enough energy every second to spin up the great rotors of the machine above, making the little generator farm powering Kiln feel like a static shock by comparison.

“At the risk of sounding fatalistic,” she tipped a hoof toward the window and the cacophony of machinery just beyond, “I am not crawling into one of those things while it’s still running. How do we turn them off?”

“Millie?” Applebloom frowned as she completed her lap and walked up to the desk-height panels beneath the safety glass. “What happens if we shut down one of our generators?”

Ginger pressed her mouth shut to stop herself from protesting. A defensive tension settled into her features as she reminded herself, grudgingly, that there was more at stake than just Stable 10. She and Roach had seen with their own eyes that each Stable was a part of a vast network.

Millie’s response was less than helpful. “Removal of one or more primary generators from service is not recommended.”

Roach sat in a swivel chair at the forward control panel, rolling his eyes. “Neither is karaoke.” Ginger smirked and nudged the corner of the chair with her magic, making him spin.

“Millie,” Applebloom continued, stepping toward the window to better see the vast hall beyond, “can you be more specific?”

A pause. “Removal of one or more primary generators from service during periods of high demand may require the remaining generators to operate outside acceptable safety margins. Excess loads over a sustained period will increase the risk of catastrophic failure. At the current time, one hundred percent of Mechanical staff remain listed on indefinite quarantine and are not available to respond to such a failure.”

Somehow, that was even less helpful.

Applebloom appeared embarrassed by the AI’s subpar performance. “Millie, detail the three most likely failure modes.”

“Structural, electrical, and cascade. First, structural failure of one or more moving parts. Most likely candidate: primary coolant pump. Second, electrical failure of internal components. Most likely candidate: capacitor C100 on interface PCB assembly GC79580.”

Ginger could feel her eyelids sinking as Millie rattled off more useless information. Maybe Aurora would have been able to understand some of this gibberish.

“Third, cascade failure of Stable-Tec External Network. Most likely candidate: uninterrupted voltage spike due to breaker assembly overload.”

Roach stuck out a hoof, stopping his lazy spin. “External network. Huh.”

Applebloom arched a brow at him but said nothing. Ginger, however, was keenly aware she was the only one down here seemingly afflicted with mortality. She didn’t have time to entertain another one of Roach’s plodding revelations.

“While I’m young, please.”

He grunted a quick apology. “Remember Stable 1? How the lights were on on the I.T. level and nowhere else? I'll give you one guess where that mystery electricity comes from.”

Her eyes slowly widened with understanding as the pieces fell into place. This wasn’t just another Stable buried beneath the scorched Equestrian hardpan. It was clearly more than that. Those five behemoth machines were meant for more than lighting the corridors for their single surviving warden. They were the glue that held a webwork of subterranean shelters together. The lifeblood of a mechanical organism that survived the cataclysm. These were the machines whose power kept a dustwing filly and her family alive miles and miles away from here. They preserved the links in a long chain that allowed Aurora to contact home.

If Stable 1 with its gauntlet of servers and seemingly limitless connections to the other remaining Stables was that network’s brain, then this place of thrumming generators was its beating heart.

Roach turned in the chair to better see the living machines beyond the glass. So many thoughts were running through his head they were impossible to keep up with. This wasn’t the dilapidated ruin of a technology no one remembered how to fix. These weren’t weapons to be feared and dismantled. This was what one half of Equestria had been so feverishly working toward even as the other strained to destroy itself. This was clean energy on a massive scale, and that was just a side note on the ledger of what he’d come to understand.

It was all connected. Every Stable that dotted Equestria represented a juncture on a vast, buried network of cables that survived the worst apocalypse in living history. Cables that still flowed, unbroken, with live current. Part of him became furious all over again. This was exactly what ponies said Equestria needed to end the war. A source of energy to sub in for the world's dwindling oil reserves. The answer hadn't just been sitting under their noses all along. It existed. Someone had built it. The infrastructure was already there.

Of course they couldn’t take the generators offline. Disrupting the carefully measured balancing act between those five machines and the dozens of Stables unaware they depended on them would be risking a resource of incalculable value. He swallowed; old instincts attempting to whet his perpetually dry throat. Generation after generation, ponies born into the wasteland asked the same question and were told the same answer. Even Aurora asked a version of it: why wasn’t anyone fixing anything? Why did ponies still build their homes from the dead bones of a dead world, nailing scrap to scrap or killing one another for claim over a half collapsed farmhouse? Where had all the builders gone? The inventors? Why wasn’t anyone trying?

The answer often wore different disguises but it ultimately boiled down to the same concept: when everyone had nothing, anything was worth everything. It didn’t matter what banner the ponies in power flew. Enclave, Ranger, Traders or Raiders… once you had something worth keeping, there would surely be those willing to kill you for it. In the wasteland, oftentimes the only things keeping the spectre of death at bay were a few swigs of dirty water and half a dozen bullets. It was that constant, merciless hum of fear that kept so many ponies firmly rooted in today and left thinking about tomorrow to those few who had the luxury.

He stared at those generators, listening to the muted roar, and wondered whether he was getting ahead of himself. Frustration often dragged ambition in its wake. He didn’t think he was. The Rangers at Stable 6 had done it. He’d seen it for himself. What was stopping the rest of Equestria?

He half-stood and leaned across the console, tipping his cracked horn toward the window. The five hulking machines couldn't be risked. But they weren't the only generators in the hall.

“What about those smaller ones? Could one of them be taken offline?”

Ginger and Applebloom approached the window to better see the pair of comparably stubby, cylindrical generators set in front of their monstrous counterparts. Roach remembered seeing pictures of a similar one in the informational pamphlet Stable-Tec sent him and his husband. Saffron had commented that it looked like a stack of bits with wires coming out of it, which was appropriate given how much of their savings had gone into reserving space for the whole family.

Applebloom hummed. “Millie, what about the two little generators? What’re those for?”

“Auxiliaries One and Two produce electricity for Stable 0.”

Roach leaned back and let his legs dangle off the front of his chair. “Millie, is it normal for one Stable to need two generators?”

“I’m sorry, but you do not have sufficient permission to access these facilities. Please remain…”

He rolled his eyes and sighed while Millie rattled off the same threat she’d up until recently reserved for Applebloom. The mare in question did her best not to smile at his irritation. It almost worked, too. When Millie was done informing him of his pending arrest, Roach gestured all yours to his fellow ghoul who promptly repeated his question to the fickle AI.

“All Stables which adhere to the standard design are fitted with one Mk.IV 20MW Stable-Tec generator and one M.A.S.T. ignition talisman rated for 500 years of sustained output. Stable 0 has been tasked with overseeing all administrative functions of the Stable-Tec External Network and its connected Stables, overseers and their resident populations. Due to its elevated role within the program, Stable 0 was classified non-standard and allowed an additional backup generator in the event the primary experiences premature failure.”

Standing beside him, Roach could practically see Ginger bristle at the explanation. “Millie, please explain why all Stables weren’t provided with a backup generator?”

“The expense was ruled unnecessary.”

Ginger looked like she was preparing to sharpen her hooves and tear into Millie for the oversight. Luckily, she caught his eye and saw the expression on his face. What’s done is done. They needed to focus on fixing the problem they had, not the problem they wished they had. Thinking better of her response, Ginger closed her eyes and took a breath. “Millie, will this Stable or the network be in any immediate danger should we take its backup generator offline?”

A pause. “No. Both auxiliaries operate on independent circuits as a safety precaution. The loss of one will have no impact on the other so long as one generator remains online. Their operational status bears no known risk to the external network.”

Ginger sighed in relief. “Well that’s good news at least.”

“Ain’t like I needed a backup yet. Hey Millie, run a quick compatibility check for me please. I need to know whether the talismans in our auxiliary jennies would work in the one Stable… ah, Shelter 10 has running.”

A pause. “That information is restricted.”

Roach blinked. Ginger made a noise of disgust, as if she’d heard that line before. Applebloom looked as if Millie had just spat on the ground in front of her.

The ghoul stared daggers at the ceiling. “Unrestrict it.”

“I’m sorry, you have insufficient permissions for this inquiry.”

“Here we go again,” Ginger muttered. “She stonewalled us, too.”

Applebloom’s gaze flicked toward her for barely a millisecond. “I’m the only reason she knows how to stonewall. Millie, confirm you have access to this room’s security footage.”

“Confirmed.”

Roach watched with growing interest as Applebloom scanned the four corners of the ceiling before spotting the black, apple-sized globe mounted above the door they’d just come through.

She lifted her left foreleg, tucking it up against her chest. “Identify the pony standing on three legs, please.”

“Applebloom; resident.”

“Good.” She spun around, scanning the consoles until she spotted the item she was looking for. Snatching a yellow nib of pencil off its dusty clipboard, she knelt down and began scribbling something onto the middle of the floor. Ginger and Roach exchanged questioning glances but said nothing as the ghoul mumbled to herself, her teeth and tongue manipulating the lead into carefully controlled letters that seemed to spell out nothing either of them could understand. Roach vaguely recognized it as some kind of computer code, but he wasn’t even going to guess what it was meant to say.

When she straightened and stood clear of her writing, she held the pencil between her teeth like a celebratory cigar. “Millie, open a new batch file and copy the text on the floor into it. Then run the file.”

A longer pause. This time, it stretched. Just as Roach began to worry that Applebloom had done something to break Millie for good, a soft chime rang from the AI’s overhead speaker.

“Update complete. Welcome, overmare. How may I assist you today?”

“You can stick a honeycrisp up your ass for starters,” she murmured.

“Haha. Good one, overmare. How may I assist you today?”

Applebloom shook her head, then looked at Roach and Ginger with an expression that said it was worth a shot. “Resubmit my last query, please.”

“Query: ‘I need to know whether the talismans in our auxiliary jennies would work in the one Stable… ah, Shelter 10 has running.’ One moment, please.” Millie was silent for the space of a breath. “Match, confirmed. The talisman designated for Shelter 10 is an identical model to the two used by this facility’s auxiliary generators. However, I regret to inform you that Stable 10 is no longer operational.”

A stone dropped into Roach’s gut. “What did she say?”

Applebloom hesitated. “Millie, what do you mean ‘no longer operational?’”

Direct as always, she answered. “Contact was lost with Shelter 10 on October 31st, 1087 following receipt of a purge order.”

Roach dropped from his chair, his expression stiff. “1087 would’ve been ten years after the bombs dropped.”

Ginger touched his hoof to keep him from pacing. “Aurora’s Stable isn’t active on the network, remember? We saw it ourselves back in the mountains.”

He swallowed his anger for the machine, barely. The fact that Millie was a semisentient AI had nearly tricked him into overlooking the fact that the server with the 10 emblazoned on its casing had shown little signs of life. Not because Stable 10 was dead.

Because someone wanted Stable-Tec to think it was.

“Right,” he sighed. “Ask her what she meant by purge order.”

Applebloom did. Millie’s response was quick. “A purge is common jargon which refers to the deliberate and intentional destruction of a Stable. The goal of a purge is to sacrifice one Stable-Tec asset in order to insulate all others from an existential threat to the program.”

Through Applebloom, he asked, “And how did Stable 10 pose that kind of a threat?”

“On October 31st, 1087 at 15:52, a distress message was sent from Stable 10 indicating a large Vhannan force had begun to and was succeeding in breaching the exterior blast door.”

Roach furrowed his brow. “Excuse me?”

Millie continued. “In such an event, the assumption must be made that any enemy force attempting to infiltrate Stable-Tec property does so in part due to a desire to acquire knowledge required to access other Stables, often referred to as Looter's Theory. As Stables are assumed to house the last survivors of the war, this scenario is not acceptable.”

“But I was there,” he argued. “Nothing ever came through that landslide except for me and a few radroaches.”

Applebloom spat on the flat of her hoof and began smearing the code she’d written on the floor. “Millie, what does a purge order do exactly?”

“A purge consists of three critical stages. Stage one initiates a remote lockdown of all primary Mechanical, Information Technology and Administrative systems to prevent process interruption. Once complete, stage two reports a false state of maximum electrical demand which in turn prompts the target generator to increase output beyond standard operational limits. The final stage simultaneously disconnects all main systems from the generator, inducing a load dump into the ignition talisman chamber. A purge is considered successful when the electrical flux inflicts moderate to severe structural defects within the ignition talisman, causing an immediate discharge of all stored magical energy. Explosive yields stemming from catastrophic M.A.S.T. failures have been known to fall within the range of fifty to one hundred and fifty pounds of TNT.”

Millie’s words hung in the air for several, long seconds. Roach quietly glared at the floor beneath his hooves, processing in grim silence. Judging by the glimpse he caught of Ginger’s paling face, the prospect of removing a charged ignition talisman had just become much less exciting.

“Millie.” Applebloom paused as if reconsidering the question. Chewing her lip, she made brief eye contact with Roach and sighed. “Millie, did that purge order come from this facility?”

A pause.

“No.”

“Then where did it come from?”

Another pause, longer, as if Millie herself was hesitant to answer.

“The order to purge Stable 10 originated from a secure terminal addressed to the Ministry of Technology.”

“Don’t get too close. It’s not like we’re swimming in Rad-Away right now.”

Aurora watched the bubbles glug up near the center of the pond, her front hoof bouncing anxiously against the crater slope. Years spent butting heads with stubborn shift workers, an ever-changing schedule and most of all Sledge normally left her jaded to the shock of a change in plans, but this wasn’t the usual sand thrown in the gears by Mechanical. This was bigger than that. Everything they’d gone through til now had led up to this point. This place. And just when she was starting to feel like her wings were a real asset out here in the wasteland, Fillydelphia was teaching her that they were equally a problem.

Less than a collective foot of flesh, bones and feathers added up to Ginger walking down there in her place. Now all she could do is wait and worry.

“She’s in a model P-45. She has plenty of air, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Aurora blew out a nervous sigh and turned away from the pond, knowing that was only one of the hundred other little dooms dangling in the front of her mind. At least the climb up the crater’s slope was easier with the deep, steplike hoofprints of Ginger’s power armor carved into it. She hopped from one to the other, hoping the dainty hoof work would force her mood to lighten a little. Julip waited for her at the rim with Aurora’s filthy jacket held in the crook of her foreleg.

“We’re still doing disguises?”

Julip tossed the leathers to her, the sleeve of which slapped across her muzzle like a dead fish. Aurora managed to unceremoniously catch the rest.

“While we’re still within spitting distance of twenty thousand ponies who have every reason to mistrust the first pegasus they meet? You bet.”

Wrinkling her nose at the jacket, then Julip, she relented and began shrugging the stinking material back over her feathers. “Didn’t have any problems before.”

“Then why did Roach tell me you caught a bullet during your first flying lesson?”

She paused, then pressed her lips into a firm line. “Can’t take him anywhere...”

To her relief, Julip caught her subtle humor and smiled. It was still weird to see her doing that without some backdrop of disdain to go with it, but not every unexpected change was all bad. With the limp leathers transforming her into a lazy mare’s version of an earth pony she tipped her nose toward the nearby ruins. This close to the crater they weren’t much more than rough outlines of prewar foundations traced by lines of broken concrete. It wasn’t cover in the strict sense that it would protect them in a gunfight, but the heavy Ranger presence in Fillydelphia no doubt kept the raiders away.

The legitimate ones, anyway.

As she cleared some loose debris away so she could sit, Aurora smiled. “Didn’t Meridian say this was where the Scavs were holed up?”

Julip joined her on the makeshift bench, dropping her satchel next to her saddlebags. “Something tells me we’re the only ones interested in this particular bomb crater. We were probably closer to them where we landed in the suburbs. Why?”

She shrugged. “No reason. I just like the feeling of knowing what’s up ahead even though I’ve never been there before.”

Julip slouched forward, her muzzle knotted with confusion. “Most ponies call that travelling.”

Aurora shrugged again. “I like travelling, then.”

Another beat of silence. Julip hummed, her eyes tilting up toward the hazy shape of the mountains they’d just flown out of. “Most ponies seem to. I guess it’s easy to forget you’ve never done that before.”

“The more I’m out here, the more I think there’s a lot I haven’t done.”

Julip nodded. “Ditto.”

Minutes ticked by as she stared down at the water, the surface placid and slowly giving itself back to the skin of orange muck that had been pushed out by the foam of bubbles. She hadn’t the faintest clue how long it would take Ginger and Roach to find the ignition talisman once inside, and the thought of sitting here saying nothing sounded about as healthy as an ulcer. It occurred to her that she had no shortage of questions yet to ask, but none of them felt like questions she wanted Julip to answer. They were Ginger questions. Roach questions. She couldn’t help but feel a little foolish at how quickly she was able to sort them.

Julip must have been feeling the same pressure. When she spoke, there was a hint of resignation in the green mare’s voice.

“Can I ask you a stupid question?”

“I have stupid answers.” She bent down to pick up an interesting looking lump of rock, her feathers poking briefly out from her jacket so she could peek at its semimelted features. Like everything else here, the little quartz infused stone had been changed by the bombs. She flicked it toward the crater and slipped her feathers out of sight.

Julip watched the rock skitter away. “How did you know anyone would want to help you when you came out here?”

Not the tricky question she was expecting. “I didn’t.”

Apparently it wasn’t the answer Julip was hoping to hear, because the younger mare seemed to deflate where she sat. Aurora had to nudge herself a little before she was willing to clarify.

“When I left, I didn’t think there was anyone out here. Everyone just assumed the world outside was dead.”

Julip looked up at her. “What, like… dead dead? Then how did you know there would be anything here?”

“Same answer as before. I didn’t.”

“But you had a map.” She pointed a hoof at Aurora’s Pip-Buck to emphasize her point. “You had access to the whole of Equestrian knowledge.”

Aurora looked at her Pip-Buck and tapped a key, waking it up. “We have maps of what Equestria used to be, not what it became. I wasn’t even sure Fillydelphia would be here. It didn’t matter. The only choices I had were to stay in my Stable and wait for a solution that wasn’t coming, or come out here and try to find one myself.”

“Out here where there was supposedly nothing.”

She nodded. “Yep.”

“That’s…”

“...insane, I know. I was there when it happened.”

Julip shook her head. “Noble, actually. Like, Twilight-fucking-Sparkle noble.”

She leaned down to pick up another rock but decided to snag the strap of her saddlebags instead. Dragging them in front of her, she picked out an apple and held it out for Julip to take. There was a touch of disapproval in the mare’s eyes at the sight of Aurora still using her feathers for the task, but she picked up the apple between her hooves and took a bite.

Aurora took one out for herself and did the same, her eyes following Julip's gaze toward the dusty mountains. “Twilight Sparkle wasn’t noble.”

Julip cheeked the half-chewed bite. “Oh, this I gotta hear.”

She swallowed, rolling her eyes while gesturing indifferently with her late breakfast. “They made us read the Friendship Journal cover to cover when I was a filly. When she was younger? Sure, she did good things. Heroic things, even. Nightmare Moon, Discord, the changeling swarm, all that stuff would have been bad news if someone hadn’t stopped it.”

Julip nodded. “But?”

“But then the villains and ancient curses just go away, and the world still goes to shit.”

“Okay, fair… but she was in charge of a ministry back then. They all had one.”

“They all had Elements of Harmony,” Aurora countered, the bitterness seeping into her voice. “Twilight was their leader. She could have gotten everyone together and used them to find a way to stop what was happening. But for some reason they didn’t? How is it noble to watch everything good in the world just slide off a cliff like that?”

Julip took a second bite of apple. “But they were trying, though.”

“Trying to make new weapons, maybe.” Aurora flicked a wing toward the hoofsteps left behind by Ginger’s armor. “They put in plenty of hours figuring out how to turn ponies into literal killing machines, even though they had the most powerful magic in Equestria at their wingtips.”

“Not all of them had wings.”

“You know what I meant.” Aurora closed her eyes and took a breath. “Sorry. Raw topic. We usually don’t talk about it back home.”

Julip grunted. “Forbidden topics and prewar conspiracies? Pretty much my job description up until recently. Wanna know a secret?”

Lacking ideas on how to turn the conversation toward something less prickly, she conceded with a simple nod. Julip smirked, tossed her apple a couple feet into the air and caught it expertly between her hooves as it came down.

“They tried using the Elements once.”

Aurora stared at her, waiting for the punchline. But it wasn’t a joke.

“Benefits of being a certified archivist is you can look behind most of the censors. It was headline news when it happened, and the Ministry of Image didn’t have half the influence it did later in the war.” Julip looked back at her, but there was no pride in her expression for knowing the things she knew. Just disappointment. “Twilight and her friends took the Elements thinking they could use them to dislodge the entire zebra army from their own shore, but nothing happened. Nobody knows for sure why, but something like ten or twelve big newspapers wound up having their editors replaced after claiming it was proof we had no business in Vhanna.”

She didn’t know what to add to that, so she didn’t add anything. For a while neither of them said anything. Aurora tried unsuccessfully to fit what Julip said into the narrative she already knew. Square pegs and round holes. She gave up on making them fit.

Julip watched her. “You don’t buy it, do you?”

She quirked the corner of her lip. “I don’t not buy it.”

If her noncommittal answer bothered Julip, it didn’t show. The mare finished her apple, dropped the core into a sprig of green feathers and lobbed it toward the pond below. It hit the surface with a watery plop.

“Well, it’s not like Primrose Sprinkletits is gonna let me back in the Archive to get you proof. But if it makes you feel any better, you were less wrong about Twilight than most ponies. Plenty of pre roll footage from her press conferences to convince me she survived on pure ego and bitchfuel in her later years.”

True or not, it tugged a laugh out of her all the same. It took work for her to open up to Julip, but recently it felt easier to do. She wasn’t awful. A little rougher than most ponies, sure, but no worse than some of the hoofbiters down in Mechanical. Plus, from time to time, Julip managed to treat them with some choice vocabulary that Aurora fully intended to teach Sledge.

Half grinning, she bit off the last good chunk of her apple.

Later, she would remember seeing Julip’s ear twitch toward the sound of the Steel Rangers encircling them. For now, she was only aware that something was stopping her from chewing.

From moving.

Already on high alert after breaking a cardinal rule of the Enclave and deep in enemy territory, Julip hurled herself away from their concrete seat and managed to get both wings clear of her jacket before a swarm of unicorn magic locked her in her tracks. Aurora watched as several mingling shades of light encased the smaller mare as if to ensure her open wings were on clear display. Irrefutable evidence of what she was hiding and who she might well be.

Bits of concrete dug into her flank as the magic that kept Aurora from helping bore down on her like a concrete tomb, pinning her down to remove any chance of her reaching for the rifle that lay on the rocks beside her dangling hind hooves. The fully eaten apple hung still between her feathers, the unchewed fruit frozen on her tongue. Their prey caught, the hooves of their attackers crunched across the loose stones toward them with no concern for the noise they made. Aurora and Julip could hear the murmurs of several voices, some strained as they held the two mares in place while others seemed to breathe open sighs of relief. They appeared from the periphery, stepping into view with clear and open purpose. Two stallions and a mare took position off to Aurora’s right, their horns lit, eyes fixed solely on her. Another trio approached Julip to do the same.

It was a mistake letting Julip see their strange, splotchy grey uniforms because she recognized them immediately. Even amid the panic of being frozen mid-stride, Aurora could see Julip’s eyes go wide at the sight of Steel Rangers circling her. She fought ferociously to free herself, the lithe but powerful muscles in her hind legs hardening like stone to push against their collective grip. And she made progress. Maybe it was luck, or maybe the Enclave trained all their soldiers for a situation like this, but Julip began twisting herself toward the unicorn Rangers until their focus dropped solely to keeping her four hooves firmly planted on the ground. Several motes of magic winked out from around her outstretched wings, and Aurora felt a flicker of hope at the sight of their muscles flexing like cords wrenched taut.

A sweep of silver magic caught Julip’s wings before they could launch her free.

A cold stone dropped into the pit of her stomach when Paladin Ironshod, the gatekeeper of Blinder’s Bluff and the stallion who pried the location of Stable 10 out from her stolen Pip-Buck, stepped into view and approached Julip with his horn aglow. She could only watch as he walked within three paces of the former Enclave mare, drew a pistol from a holster around his foreleg and pressed the muzzle between her ribs.

The trigger flicked back and a sharp pop sent a jerk through Julip's paralyzed body, casting a puff of pink mist against the stones behind her right hoof. With one practiced motion, Ironshod holstered his weapon and doused his horn. One nod and the unicorns around him did the same. Julip collapsed to the stones like a marionette with its strings cut. Aurora could only stare in horror, her mind failing to keep up with what was happening or why. She watched Julip’s hooves scrape uselessly against the stones, gasping from shock, then go still.

Ironshod didn’t bother to watch. He stepped across the debris until he was the only thing she could see. He bent down, forcing their eyes to meet.

A grin twisted his jaw.

“Hello again, Aurora.”

“OH, THAT’S JUST GREAT.”

Ginger spat a curse as she jammed her right shoulder another inch deeper into the humming crawlspace, if she could even call it that. A less generous mare would call it a stillborn hybrid between an engineer’s nightmare and a cavediver’s sycophantic wet dream. Positioned as she was, half curled around a coolant pipe the size of her torso while threading head first through a maze of plumbing and dense black cables, she was not feeling one bit generous at all. For the second time in under a minute she had managed to get her horn hooked on one of the myriad components beneath the uncreatively named Auxiliary Two.

Lying within literal leg’s reach of the churning machine was bad enough. She could feel the vibrations through her skin as if she were lying atop some massive tuning fork. Touching her horn to anything solid felt akin to biting the blurred tines. How these machines never shook themselves to pieces, she would never know.

Standing just outside the access hatch somewhere behind her, Roach shouted an equally annoying “WHAT?” into the narrow space.

She jerked her head, scraping her horn along the offending pipe until it skidded free like the rough edge of a hoof along a chalkboard… except the chalkboard was her skull.

“NEVERMIND!”

Bracing herself against her rising temper, she took a breath and steadied herself. Just a few feet further, then a dogleg turn to the right. If Aurora could squeeze into the bowels of one of those monstrous machines currently chiseling away at her long-term hearing, then she could manage a short trip down through one of its little cousins.

A little cousin that could convert her into a finely minced paste should it somehow shake loose.

Pushing that thought away, she sucked in her stomach and crawled past the coolant line. Sweat was already soaking through her coat, causing years of dust to form a dark slurry all along her left side. There was nothing to be done for it. Millie had warned her that it would be hot down here. In fact, Millie had spent the twenty or so minutes leading up to this unpleasant excursion sharing quite a lot of helpful information such as which generator to choose, which floor panel to remove, what symptoms might indicate the onset of hypoxia caused by the surrounding metals leeching oxygen from the access tunnel… generally helpful information, overall.

Sure she had gone absolutely silent when it came to who sent the purge order to Stable 10, claiming the data was unavailable, but at least Ginger had a better understanding of how exposed plumbing could kill her by merely existing.

She kicked off the coolant line, gaining several feet in one go. She could feel her sweat-slicked mane clinging to the side of her face, picking up a good ten decades’ worth of settled dust in the process. As her hooves squeaked off ductwork and the baking temperature continued to slowly baste her in her own juices, she gave brief but serious consideration to seeing whether her magic could be used to propel herself the rest of the way. A quick glance at the sheer mass of high voltage cables snaking around her made her reconsider. One mistaken tug on those lines and she’d go from basting to flash frying.

As Millie predicted, the crawlspace opened up to the right. Kicking along, inch by inch, she navigated the tight turn and found herself momentarily staring at a dead end. A flicker of panic jolted in her chest before she realized the panel the space had bent around had hinges. Thick orange and yellow stripes framed the edges. In the center, the words DANGER: TALISMAN CONTAINMENT CHAMBER stood in black letters, crisp as if they’d been painted on the day before.

Several smaller images along the bottom offered creative depictions of pegasi and earth ponies being dismembered and killed. Ginger ignored them and pressed her magic into the hatch.

As soon as the first gaps formed, an intense lavender light spilled out into the crawlspace. She winced and recoiled as if struck by a physical thing, but seconds passed and she realized the assault was solely visual. As her eyes adjusted she pushed the hatch the rest of the way open, squinting into the light like a foal seeing the cloudless sun for the first time.

What waited behind the hatch took Ginger many seconds to absorb. Sealed within a cylinder of glass, a vortex of energy swirled out along a single axis like luminescent water being funneled up toward some unseen turbine. Shapes of light and shadow shimmered over the cables and pipes, bathing her in the presence of its sheer being. It was magic, she realized, wild and untainted by the world above. It was the magic harnessed by the unicorns who lived centuries ago; that unknowable force that imbued Equestria with heroes and villains with terrible potential.

There, spinning at the center of that torrential cyclone, hung a single dark object that flickered with a speed that breathed life into this forgotten Stable. How many hundreds of miles had they walked? How many obstacles had they overcome to reach this place? She found herself grinning, knowing Aurora’s relief and excitement would dwarf anything Ginger could muster. The silent terror of finding this place empty, of coming back to the surface with nothing but an apology and the hope that Aurora wouldn’t dive into the crater herself evaporated at the simple sight of that talisman rotating at the center of that magnificent maelstrom.

Following Millie’s instructions, Ginger forced herself to be calm as she reached out with her magic. There was no “off” button. No switch she could throw. If there was a magical incantation for her to recite, Millie hadn’t known it. She had to do this by feel alone.

“Propulsion can be seized by the steady application of magic directly across the axis of rotation. This process may take several seconds up to a minute to complete.”

Ginger had wrinkled her nose at the stale description. Roach eventually clarified.

“Hold the tips until it stops spinning.”

She blew out a steadying breath and tried not to think about all the warnings Millie had rattled out, detailing various ways the talisman could shred the feathers from a wing or remove a hoof. She couldn’t think of a situation where sticking a limb into that glowing chamber would seem like a good idea. And yet here she lay, the meaty layer of a ductwork sandwich, preparing to do the magical equivalent.

“You can do this,” she whispered. “You got this.”

Illuminating her horn, she tentatively reached toward the tornadic purple light with a filament of her own magic. It bent like a blade of grass pulled along in the arcane current. She closed her eyes, regrouped, and fed more magic into the simple spell. The filament strengthened, straightened enough for her to push further, the force of the maelstrom strong but not impenetrable. Gritting her teeth, the winds coiled around her magic like something electric, sending a noticeable charge back to her horn that tingled her gums and buzzed down her spine. A part of her nearly broke into nervous laughter, wondering if there was enough magic down here for her to crawl back out with a new set of wings and matching tiara.

She kept her composure, allowing just the slightest smirk as she felt for the talisman. Finding it wasn’t as difficult as she expected. Her magic gently swarmed around it. Were her eyes open she would’ve seen the hazy outline of a translucent bronze shell encompass it on all sides. She dared not touch the sides. Millie warned her about that. About throwing the talisman off center and introducing what she simply called a wobble. She didn’t have to be an expert to know that something striking a hard surface while spinning this quickly would be nothing short of catastrophic. She groped for the calmer eddys swirling along each tip until the shape of the talisman formed in her mind. She pressed inward and felt the resistance build.

Deep within the steel and concrete surrounding her, the two generators began to sing in different harmonies. The all-encompassing hum became two distinct pitches, one unchanged while the other descended down the scales. Ginger expected the talisman to attempt to compensate, to redouble its own efforts to correct the balance, but it put up no such fight. It was never intended to. It twirled and twirled in the grip of her own magic, just a physical thing like any ordinary stone, dumb and uncaring of its circumstances.

Her confidence swelled. She clutched it tighter. A backwash of latent magic streamed up the path of her magic like an ocean wave flowing up a slow river. Dizziness cracked behind her eyes like a whip but her connection to the talisman held like iron. She felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the generator filling her chest, like the first clear breath of air after a long and lingering infection. The dizziness vanished. She felt strangely well.

The generator moaned in protest. Somewhere nearby, a breaker clacked. The machinery overhead spun lower and lower until, finally, all that was left was that singular hum of its nearby twin.

The ignition talisman pirouetted once more, then it stopped.

Ginger opened her eyes. The chamber was dark, save for the soft amber glow of her own magic. At the center of it, an unassuming black object barely the size of Ginger’s hoof. Six obsidian points drew a slightly elongated hexagon that gently, visibly soaked up the fringes of Ginger’s magic, like a battery storing it for later.

Realization dawned on her.

She had it.

They had an ignition talisman.

Next Chapter: Chapter 33: Apogee Estimated time remaining: 38 Hours, 45 Minutes