Dawn broke over the ocean in a muddled smear of rose gold. The endless overcast spread past the beach like a vast migration, a carpet of sickly gray clouds marring what might have otherwise been a stunning sunrise. Ginger sat alone on the rocky dune overlooking the shoreline watching seawater churn between the ruins of a once luxurious beachside neighborhood, now sunken with the tide.

Waves popped and splashed against the rows of degrading walls, little vortexes forming where the foam ebbed and flowed through broken windows. The sea had moved and the houses didn’t. They hadn’t even put up a fight. The ruins never complain about what happened to them. She rested her chin on her knees and wondered if the same thing was happening to her.

She chewed her lip. Stop thinking like that.

A slammed door caught her ear and she looked left toward the salt washed two-story home Minister Primrose told them to hide in until things blew over. She watched Julip walking stiffly away from a side entrance, pacing back and forth between two windows before directing her attention to a pair of rusting trash cans half buried in the sand collecting against the foundation. She kicked one of the cans with a hind leg and shouted something. A beat later, the delayed sound of crunching metal and a muted “Fuck!” reached her ears.

Julip was in a mood, which probably meant she was recovering. Good for her.

Ginger watched her pace some more before disappearing behind a detached garage. They hadn’t been here more than an hour and the prospect of doing nothing while they trusted two decidedly untrustworthy rivals to run the show was wearing down everyone’s nerves. The Steel Rangers hoped to flush Ironshod out by combing the streets and flooding the radio while the Enclave had pulled who knew how many pegasi off their missions to quietly sneak them into the city. It wasn’t a matter of if they would find Aurora, but when.

And yet here they sat, waiting, because Primrose didn’t trust one of them not to do or say something that might expose her people to Coronado. If that happened, finding Aurora would be the last thing either side had to worry about.

She hugged her knees and glanced at the slim Pip-Buck Primrose had given her. Maybe someone in Fillydelphia knew a way to modify it so she could help with the search. She fiddled with the map, half-looking at the tiny location indicators and half staring through the device to the waves beyond. There were more points of interest detailed here than Aurora’s offered by a wide margin. A few minutes of scrolling around, zooming in and reading the names of some of the buildings showed her it was operating on prewar map data. Nothing that reflected the state of Fillydelphia as it currently was, charred and half-destroyed by the bomb that decimated its northern bouroughs. She wondered if Primrose would take issue with her poking around on it. Knowing her, probably not. Ginger couldn’t think of a time Primrose didn’t seem two steps ahead in a game nobody else knew they were playing.

If there had ever been anything sensitive on this Pip-Buck, Primrose no doubt had it scrubbed. Any potential value it had was in the tech itself, and the thermite charges built into the device would ensure it turned to glowing slag before anyone had a chance to study it.

She flicked through the menus and turned on the radio.

Not much to pick from, she thought. A few named stations peppered a short list of nondescript frequencies. Most of them were broadcasting the same message recorded by Elder Coronado. A couple were nothing but empty static. She tried looking for Flipswitch’s station at the Bluff but either Fiona was already sleeping the day away or they were too far out to pick up her music. As she prepared to give up the Pip-Buck caught the faint edge of a stallion’s voice. It was an old song. A really old song. Most stallions nowadays wouldn’t be caught dead crooning a hokey song like the one that floated to her ears. He claimed that he didn’t want to set the world on fire. Ginger thumped her chin onto her knees and exhaled. What a stupid song.

“Whatcha listening to?”

Her ears perked up and she glanced toward the voice. Julip was carefully picking her way along the rocky ridge, her gait slow and cautious of her still-healing injuries. Ginger turned back to the waves.

“Nothing.” She clicked the radio off. “How’re you feeling?”

Julip sat slowly, grimacing all the way down. “Better than yesterday, worse than tomorrow. Dancer helped me take the port out, so I guess I’m done blowing blood bubbles.”

“That’s good.” She watched a wide ocean wave break in the middle, spreading wash in either direction like rolling ribbons. “He and you used to be…?”

“Friends,” she said. Whatever anger she’d directed into the trash cans just a few moments earlier must have emptied her reserves. She looked exhausted. “Just friends. He and Chops joined up before I did and I got assigned to their flight for basic training. We still hung out in our off hours after getting our EOS, though.”

Ginger arched a brow for clarification.

“Enclave Occupational Specialty. Our jobs, I guess you could say. Dancer and Chops got assigned to field reconnaissance together and I put in for a gig in the archives.”

Ginger looked back toward the safehouse and wondered whether it was wise to leave Roach alone with those two. Chops seemed much more docile compared to Dancer, but that wasn’t saying much when the common denominator between them was a shared disdain toward ghouls. Then she reminded herself that Roach wasn’t helpless, nor was he complacent when it came to the ponies around him. If either of them did try to take advantage, Roach would ruin their day.

“I saw Chops signing to you earlier. How much wingspeak do you know?”

Julip smiled a little, embarrassed. “Just the basics. Chops taught me letters and numbers. Some words, too.” She lifted a jade wing and made a slow series of gestures. “I can read signs better than I can make them. Dancer’s really good at doing the back and forth with him, but they’ve known each other since they were colts.”

She frowned. “Hm.”

“What?”

“Oh. Nothing.” She shrugged and scooped up a ball of sand with her magic, making shapes as she spoke. “It just feels strange to think of them like that.”

Julip watched the sand with open interest. “Like what?”

“Friends.” The word came out sounding more ignorant than she intended. She quickly corrected herself. “Outside of their… service, I mean. I always assumed the Enclave discouraged that sort of thing.”

Julip quirked her lip at Ginger. “You lived in New Canterlot. Didn’t you ever go to a bar?”

“I left when I was thirteen.”

“So?” When Ginger arched a brow at her, she nodded understanding. “Oh, yeah. It’s... really hard to picture you as one of those rich ponies up on Snob Hill.”

She snorted a laugh, the sandball briefly losing its symmetry. “Is that what people used to call it?”

“Still do,” Julip grinned. “When I was younger, I used to cut school with my friends and steal pears from those stuffy fuckers who own the north orchards.”

Her ears perked up. “You stole from the Butter Family?”

She laughed. “Come on, everyone stole from the Butters. It’s practically a rite of passage in my neighborhood. Besides, if they couldn’t afford a couple bushels every summer they would have hired more watchponies to stop us.”

Ginger smiled at that and let the sand plop onto the beach. “They could have, but I don’t think it was ever a money problem. Their whole family had that old-fashioned air about them. I’m pretty sure if you knocked on their door and asked, Ms. Nilly would’ve sent you home with one of her scratch baked pies and an invitation to supper.”

She watched Julip scoff at the rolling waves, doing the math on how many times she must have snuck out into the orchards thinking she and her friends were getting away with some grand heist. “No shit?”

“No shit,” Ginger chuckled. “They’re good folk. I haven’t thought about them in forever.”

Julip continued to shake her head and smile, her attention pulled out by the waves crashing across the sunken neighborhood past the beach. Ginger did the same, grateful for the distraction. She could see what Roach saw in the feisty mare. Beneath her past affiliations, her quick anger and nearly constant cursing, there was a real person in there. Much of who she was remained to be seen as far as Ginger was concerned, but maybe she wasn’t completely beyond saving.

She turned her head and glanced past Julip toward the safehouse.

Harbor House, Primrose had called it. Fitting, given how close it sat to the water even if the sea hadn’t been gentle to it. Once upon a time it must have been an impressive little place despite being as wide as it was tall. Two brick chimneys still stood at opposite corners of the old home. Its pale brown wooden siding was still speckled with chips of sungold leaded paint, hinting at a warm seaside palette. A second floor balcony faced the water, the rails individually turned on a lathe and painted red for a bit of accent. As she watched, Roach stepped out onto the empty balcony with a chair in tow. She watched him sit down beside the railing and begin undoing the straps of his shotgun with his afflicted magic, taking advantage of the rare opportunity to clean out the antique weapon without fear of irradiating anyone he cared about.

She shook her head and turned back to the water. “So, is that trash can going to be giving you any more trouble or do you want me to teach it another lesson?”

Julip blinked before pulling a strand of black mane away from her face and looking toward the house. Her ears dipped as she understood. “Oh. Um, no. That’s okay.”

There was some resistance there that went deeper than Ginger’s bad joke. “Want to talk about it?”

“No,” she said with fresh irritation. “But if I don’t, he won’t let me hear the end of it.”

“Who, Roach?”

Julip shrugged, avoiding her gaze.

“Did I do something?” Her brow dropped as she waited for an answer, but Julip’s discomforted silence offered enough of a clue for her to connect the dots. “It’s about taking help from the Enclave, isn’t it.”

The young mare shifted uneasily, her wings sweeping around her own tucked legs in a mirror of Ginger’s posture. “I mean, yeah… but it’s not just that I’m pissed off about it, or even about just that. I’m not mad at you. Or... maybe I am? I shouldn’t be. I don’t know, it’s all weird. I mean, fuck… I’m not sure I’m even allowed to be mad anymore!”

Ginger set her cheek against her knees, watching. “Julip, you’re allowed to be angry.”

“It doesn’t feel like it,” she groaned. “I know you’re doing everything you can. I mean, I get it. Okay maybe not the whole relationship part, but… look, Roach told me that Chops came to you and not the other way around, so I can’t be pissed at you for that. And I already knew Primrose had a hardon for Aurora because, hello, here we are talking instead of me being parked behind a terminal back in the archives. It’s just that… fuck, I don’t know.”

She quirked her lip and waited.

Julip sank into a frustrated slouch. She stared out to sea for several long minutes until finally sorting out what she wanted to say. “I feel like none of this would be happening if I hadn’t fucking panicked.”

Ginger hummed. “Back at the crater, you mean.”

She nodded, her eyes shining. “When the Rangers showed up, I just bolted. Like a reflex, you know? They just… were there, all around us and all I could think was that they were there for me. I keep playing it back in my head and I know there was nothing I could’ve done and it’s because I let my guard down. The one fucking time… and even if I hadn’t…”

Julip screwed up her face and looked away, the hard ridge of her right wing coming up to scrub at her eyes. Waves crashed into the beach below.

Ginger waited quietly beside her, watching the younger mare hide her mouth behind her feathers as she stared blearily toward the water. A touch of impatience wormed its way into her chest. It was a selfish impulse. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to be here right now, burdened with listening to Julip confess herself to tears. She was barely holding it together as it was and she had plenty more to cry about.

She grit her teeth and threw a few more rocks on top of the rumbling geyser of anger growing in her heart. They all had their own problems to deal with. Right now, Julip needed help dealing with hers.

“Hey,” she said, placing a hoof on Julip’s shoulder. “It’s o–”

Julip’s wings jerked open as if touched by a live wire, throwing Ginger’s foreleg aside and striking her across the face. The two of them let out equally startled curses as Ginger toppled backward on the sandy stones and Julip sputtered profanity like a rifle stuck on automatic, her wings pinning hard to her sides just as quickly as they’d sprang away.

“Shit-shit-shit,” she babbled, hooves pressed to her mouth in open shock. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to… fuck, Ginger, let me help you…”

She grimaced at the deep throb under her left eye and tried to wave her off, but a cluster of feathers practically hoisted her off the ground before she could get her hooves under herself. Ginger stumbled a little from the sudden handling, managing to open one eye while the other throbbed angrily, remaining closed. Julip was on her hooves too, her hardened demeanor all but erased for the moment. She waited, all nerves, eyes wide like a foal who’d just been caught doing something bad.

Gently, Ginger nudged Julip’s bracing wings aside. She shook her head and forced herself to smile. “Celestia’s sake, you hit like a truck.”

Julip’s worry deepened. “A what? Seriously, Ginger are you okay?”

She nodded, despite being unsure where she’d heard the phrase or how she knew to use it. “I’m fine. Really.”

Julip looked unconvinced. Less so when Ginger touched her left cheekbone and jerked her hoof away. “Whelp,” she muttered. “That’s going to be a shiner.”

“Aurora’s going to kill me,” Julip moaned. “Goddesses, Roach is going to kill me!”

“It was an accident,” she said, her throbbing eye allowing itself to open a tiny bit as she offered Julip a reassuring smirk. “And nobody is going to kill you, especially not Roach.”

Julip tore her eyes away from Ginger long enough to look to the balcony where Roach had been joined by one of the shelter’s littler residents. A small yellow colt not much younger than Beans trotted from one railing to the other, chatting breathlessly at the bemused changeling. Julip’s worried gaze lingered before reluctantly turning back.

“He’s going to be pissed at me. I was supposed to… open up to you about what was eating me, not deck you in the face.” She stared at Ginger’s squinted eye and grimaced. “I guess it’s too late to tell you that I don’t really like to be touched.”

Seeing her expression change, Julip added, “It’s nothing like that. Nothing bad. It’s more… I don’t know. We never did the whole talk-about-your-feelings stuff in the Enclave. We definitely didn’t get all touchy feely, either.”

“Oh,” she said. “I can talk to Roach about that if you want. I know he’s been trying to make you feel welcome and probably doesn’t mean to make–”

“No, no, no, that’s fine. Roach is fine. I mean, he’s okay. Just… don’t tell him I said anything?”

Ginger blinked and did her best not to smirk. “Okay.”

Julip watched her for several seconds before clearing her throat to compose herself. “Anyway, we should get back to the house before a mirelurk tries making us its breakfast… or something.”

Julip was on her hooves before Ginger could argue. Bemused, she got up and followed. The sand formed around their hooves as they followed the weathered stones back to Harbor House. As they approached the side door, Roach glanced their way and lifted a hoof. They waved back with Julip trying a little too hard to appear casual. Ginger allowed herself a tiny smirk as they passed the dented trash can and filed inside.

Once upon a time, Harbor House had gone by a different name or no name at all. The once richly appointed home had endured innumerable changes since the bombs fell. Lavish wallpaper and rich wainscoting had deteriorated in the typical fashion, peeling away and cracking apart as the weather wore away the interior and the foundation shifted out of kilter. Somewhere along the line several walls on the first floor had been pulled down and the ceiling in the resulting open space had taken on a drunken sag that had been hastily shored up by a thick wooden pylon dragged up out from the submerged piers. Someone had gone through great effort to prevent the house from caving in on itself. Thus far those efforts still bore fruit.

It was that care put into making it habitable again that made Harbor House stand out from the abandoned and withering homes surrounding it. Broken windows were now neatly boarded shut and in some cases even replaced with clean panes. There were no holes in the floor, no detritus hanging from the ceiling. Even the garbage that almost always collected into a petrified mass in the corners of most abandoned structures had been scraped up and thrown outside. While its original owners would have screamed bloody murder to see what their house looked like now, compared to most of the wasteland it was downright welcoming on the inside.

That is, save for the pegasi who occupied it.

Ginger passed over the threshold and into a kitchen that still retained some of its charm. Painted cupboards hung above an off-level but otherwise intact granite countertop, the original gas stove swapped out for a fat cast iron replacement whose chimney pipe bent out through one of the boarded windows. A pink mare looked up from her work of slicing up a bowl of lumpy beets, her gaze only briefly leaving the kitchen island to acknowledge Julip following Ginger inside. The mare grumbled something under her breath and turned back to the knife in her feathers.

“She’s back,” she droned for the rest of the house to hear.

Ginger closed her eyes and ignored the pegasus, knowing full well that her and the others’ “hospitality” was contingent on none of them starting any trouble that might cast suspicion on Harbor House’s legitimacy. And what a laugh that was.

Adjacent to the kitchen was the large gathering space that had doubled as a staging and assignment area for newcomers. A stained pool table dominated the near side of the room, surrounded by a few wooden chairs and cluttered with the remnants of the residents’ most recent meal. An empty beer bottle sat in one of the side pockets where a red stallion idly scratched a feather over the white stubble of his close-shaved mane. He was reading a book he’d taken from what amounted to Harbor House’s library: four mismatched bookcases forming a rough square around the salvaged pylon that kept the ceiling upright.

Ginger hadn’t the first clue which title had engrossed the stallion, but he hardly paid either of them any attention as they walked by. Two more pegasi glanced up at them from a cozy arrangement of couches at the far side of the room, a pair of pipe pistols sitting in plain sight on the coffee table between them to pull attention away from the dim glow of plasma rifles tucked under each sofa. One of them, a pot bellied stallion with an axe to grind, made a show of picking up one of the pistols and checking the magazine as they passed by. Ginger watched him as they turned toward the stairs even though she was confident he was all ego and no action.

Before following Julip up the steps, she paused to scoff at the chalkboard propped up on its tripod against the bannister.

The welcome board would have been a ray of sunshine in the wasteland if it weren’t all bullshit. Primrose had sent them here so they could be safe, and she appreciated that. But now that they were here, Ginger didn’t need to dig up many clues to understand what Harbor House really was. None of the pegasi here were dustwings. They’d come out from the west on the Enclave’s orders; actors meant to give the illusion of safety for wayward pegasi.

Harbor House was an open trap posing as a safe shelter.

They reached the carpeted second floor and followed the sound of excited chatter to the rear balcony. Roach sat in his chair, wearing a tired smile as the young colt peered over the railing on his hind legs without skipping a beat of his long and breathless story. Ginger reminded herself that the little pegasus wasn’t at fault for his role in being here. Likely he didn’t understand the true purpose of this house, or why he’d been flown so far from New Canterlot to live here. She steeled herself and stepped out through the sliding door.

Roach looked up from his disassembled weapon and regarded her with a sad smile. “Hey.”

She crossed the planks and leaned against the railing beside him. “Hey. Any news?”

The little colt perked up at their arrival then frowned when he saw Roach’s attention shifting toward grown-up talk. He watched a few seconds before trotting off to bother one of the other adults in the house. Ginger watched him hop past Julip as the mare dragged two more chairs out onto the porch.

“Dancer left to check in with his people.” Roach gestured toward the water. “Flew out over the water. I think Chops is still asleep in one of the bedrooms. Want to bet on whether the Enclave’s forming a navy out there on top of everything else?”

Ginger set the offered chair aside and let Julip park herself between the two of them. If she spent any more time literally sitting around, she’d go crazy. She slouched against the railing where the little colt had been and peeked at Julip. “Who knows what’s out there.”

“Sharks,” Julip said.

Roach smirked. “Radsharks.”

“The raddest.”

Ginger watched them chuckle at the awful pun and tried to smile with them. She didn’t get very far. Her muscles revolted against the attempt. She’d burned up what little empathy she had with Julip. Now the worry was settling back in, strong as ever.

A hoof touched her shoulder. Roach. He’d gotten up and stood beside her now, levity replaced by a complex mixture of shame and concern. Julip was watching her too, the parts of Roach’s shotgun held safely in her lap.

“We’re going to get her back,” he murmured.

She shook her head, feeling the worry slide away and make room for something even worse. Grief. It had been a full day now since Aurora was taken. Twenty four hours and hardly a crumb to tell them where in all of Fillydelphia she was being held. Ironshod might not even be holding her anymore. He could have whatever it was he wanted and discarded her to rot somewhere. Already she was beginning to grieve what felt more and more like the probable end to this disaster. She steadied herself and asked the question she’d been dreading to give a voice.

“What if we’re too late?”

She hated how the words cracked in her throat. Hated how the simple act of speaking pushed her to the verge of tears. But she refused to give them permission to flow. She glared up at the rolling overcast and tempered her emotions, letting the heat of her anger rise in her chest and give herself something to latch onto. She looked at Roach with one eye trying to force itself shut, something she could tell he’d noticed when she stepped out onto the balcony and was giving her room to vent by not asking.

“What happens if she’s already gone?”

Not dead. Gone. She couldn’t bring herself to say the other thing.

Roach took a long moment to look at her, his pale gaze thoughtful and patient as he considered the question. When he spoke, his tone was subdued. He’d been trying to avoid thinking about it too.

“If that happens,” he said, speaking slowly. “Then we do what she would want us to do. We take the talisman back to Stable 10. Save her people.”

Julip let out an affirmative breath. “What he said. We finish the mission.”

They were both heartfelt answers. She chose not to ruin the moment by correcting them. She didn’t want to know what the plan was after they left Fillydelphia. What she wanted to know was what they would do to Ironshod. To his Rangers. To Elder Coldbrook if their actions resulted in Aurora… being gone.

Ginger knew exactly what she wanted to do. The question was whether Roach or Julip would condone it, or worse, try to stop her.

Roach nudged her. “Right?”

She took a deep breath of the briny air and nodded.

“Right.”

“I’m telling you, this is some bullshit. I didn’t sign up for any of this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t ‘uh-huh’ me like your hooves ain’t dirty.” Rivers brought the stub of her cigarette to her lips, inhaled, and imagined she could actually taste the tobacco buried within the ashy smoke.

In reality these scavenged cigarettes tasted like dried shit but it was all she could scrape together after being kicked from the Rangers. No more Knight’s credentials meant no more pulling strings with the quartermasters which meant no more first dibs on the fresh tobacco imported out of Maretime Bay. She’d spent the better part of the last two years trying to forge new connections with some of the regular traders from F&F Mercantile, but with the whole organization going teats up in the space of a week she’d been forced to start from scratch. It was hard enough learning which of the newly independent trading groups could be trusted to sell decent smokes, let alone at a price she could swing.

When Ironshod knocked on her door he’d come offering a spot on what he insisted was just a recovery team. High-reward, low-risk. He claimed the biggest hurdle was the travel time. As a Knight she had worked as a field medic under his command, and the fact that he’d climbed half the Bluff to find her instead of someone in good standing tipped her off that this probably wasn’t going to be on the up-and-up. That was fine, she figured. He was offering each of them enough caps for even the most morally firm of them to let a few discretions slide. Maybe their quarry would arrive home with them a little more bumped and bruised than when they found her, and that was okay too. Nobody ever walked out of an interrogation with a smile on their face.

She stared at the crumbling nub of the cigarette and tightened her magic around the ember, snuffing it out. Whatever Ironshod was doing down there had stopped being an interrogation a long time ago. He was practically getting off on it. She flicked the stub at the stallion reclined in the booth beside her.

It bounced off his nose and he shot her a foul look in return.

“If word gets out that we were part of this - and it will - you fuckers’ll probably just get stripped of rank. I’m going to be the one sitting in a cell.”

“Keep your voice down,” he hissed. After a pause he shifted in his seat and added, “If you’re so worried, why are you still here?”

Rivers rolled her eyes and lit her horn, hoisting her saddlebags off the tacky restaurant floor in a haze of aquamarine magic. She needed something to drink to wash the film of smoke out of her mouth. “And risk King Krazy coming after me next? No thanks. I’d rather eat…”

Her voice trailed off at the unmistakable clanks of Ironshod’s hooves climbing the cellar stairs. She and the other Rangers dispersed among the dining room sat up a little straighter or turned their attention to gaps in the boarded windows to look busy. As his hooves approached from within the kitchen and stopped short of the cash counter, she glanced up at him. An electric chill ran down her spine at the sight of Ironshod staring directly at her.

“Take a medkit downstairs and patch up our guest,” he rumbled, rounding the counter toward the lobby doors. A loose loop of rusted chain held them shut. He unwrapped it and dropped it onto the tiles. “I’ll be back in ten. Be finished by then.”

Without another word he pulled the doors shut behind him and was gone. The rest of them exchanged glances in pensive silence, none of them quite sure what to make of Ironshod’s abrupt departure. He’d been adamant that none of them went outside for any reason, even to shit. The restaurant’s tiny bathrooms were more than proof of that.

Several of them turned from the door to Rivers. No one was going to offer to take her spot, so she dragged herself out of the booth and yanked her medkit from her saddlebags. Hopefully this meant Ironshod had gotten what he wanted and they were finally going to head back home.

Steeling herself for whatever twisted shit he’d gotten up to, she walked to the back of the restaurant with her heart in her throat. She knew what she was heading toward would be ugly. The blood tracked on the dirty tiles, staining Ironshod’s shoes, taking her to the hatch tucked away in the darkened kitchen was all evidence enough to the stallion’s brutality. As she descended the stairs she caught the eye of Scribe Cotton, the bookish mare Ironshod had dragged down with him to “assist.” Cotton sat slouched on a stool just outside the freezer door, her gaze distant, stripped of the optimism she’d exuded over the course of the trek here.

Rivers contemplated checking on how she was holding up, but Ironshod only gave her ten minutes. She gave the mare a thump on the shoulder with her magic and passed wordlessly into the freezer.

She stopped midstep and took in the sickening scene a breath at a time. The Stable mare Ironshod was convinced was connected to the Enclave sat slumped in an old metal chair, her hind legs and half-thawed tail stained with her own frozen piss. Her gray coat from her chin to her crotch was smeared dark red as if she’d been made to wear a bib made from her own coagulated blood. Her left leg was swollen up to her hip, gashed deep just above the knee and not cleanly either. Rivers closed her eyes in brief revulsion. Ironshod had caved in her hind leg so badly that the ripped edges of skin and fat had buried themselves into the wound. Worse, it wasn’t bleeding; not like an injury like that should be. Either it had miraculously clotted over before the mare could bleed out or Ironshod had done so much blunt damage that he’d managed to collapse her femoral artery beyond the point of reopening.

The Stable mare was looking up now, her bloodied and misshapen face regarding her with miserable indifference. Rivers knew that expression. Ironshod had beaten the fight out of her.

She blew out a short breath and got to work, starting with the ruined leg. Setting her medkit on the wire rack beside her, she popped the lid and uncapped a square brown bottle. If shit for brains wanted his prize to survive the walk back to the Bluff it wouldn’t pay to have her going septic on the way. She splashed the ragged wound with antiseptic, startling a gasp followed by a low, dragging moan from the beaten mare. Rivers tried her best to ignore her. She emptied half the bottle into the wound and wrinkled her nose against the rising odor of alcohol and denaturing blood. She didn’t miss that smell.

It didn’t get any better as she moved down to treat the cuts sawed open by the plastic ties keeping her attached to the chair. What kind of information had Ironshod expected to get out of her with tactics this brutal that could be remotely trusted? Interrogations were never meant to be enjoyable but this was well past that. She set her jaw as she drizzled more alcohol and dabbed clean cotton into the wounds. Even through the grazing touch of her magic she could feel how hot the mare’s skin was, her revolting against round after round of freeze, thaw and infection.

The mare remained silent save for protesting groans in response to Rivers’ pokes and prods. There wouldn’t be time for decent stitchwork if Ironshod stuck to his time limit. She wondered if they might be able to commandeer a wagon on their way out of the city. Even a simple sledge to drag her on would be better than having her walk on that leg, assuming she could walk at all at this point. Reluctantly she moved up to the mare’s swollen face. Tipping the last of the antiseptic into a clump of sterile cotton, she tried pressing the wad to her sliced lip but the mare jerked away before it could touch her. Rivers sighed, her frustration growing.

“Hold still.”

She tried again only to get the same result. Normally this would be when a prisoner felt cornered and lashed out, telling Rivers to insert a variety of instruments into an equal variety of holes. Some ponies resorted to taunting. Egging their captors on in an attempt to take control of their fate in some twisted way. Others would stare at them in silence, stoic and defiant. A show of resolve. This mare did none of those things.

As Rivers tried to think of a different tact, she noticed the muscles along the mare’s forelegs trembling against their bindings like a plucked guitar string. It shook her shoulders, her chest. That kind of shaking couldn’t be faked. She was terrified of her. What kind of Enclave soldier breaks down like this after only one day?

A shitty one. Or someone who was never enlisted in the first place.

Still, that didn’t answer the question of why she’d been caught hanging around with that green pegasus. According to the intel they had when they left, she hadn’t been a part of their group when Ironshod first encountered them back at the Bluff. He’d been sparse on details when it came to the second pegasus, but then Ironshod was always the type to keep his cards close to his chest. Operational security, he sometimes called it. She’d heard others call it paranoia. Something for the shrinks to diagnose. All she knew was that the Enclave captives she’d seen as a Knight never showed fear like this. They had a whole culture built around it. Something about “shaming the goddesses” or some other nonsense.

She lifted away the prisoner’s mane and tried to focus on getting her cleaned up, tending to the few cuts and bruises she’d let her near without flinching. There were a lot of them. When she finished disinfecting what she could, she went back to her medkit and lifted out a narrow syringe.

“I’m going to give you a shot.” She spoke less for the prisoner and more for herself. It helped her get past the feeling that she was talking to a kicked dog. “It’ll help with some of the pain.”

The mare said nothing. Rivers positioned the needle below the peculiar silver wing depicted on her hip and slid it into the dense muscle below. A quiet hissing breath was all the complaint the mare offered in return. She capped the needle and packed it away, withdrawing a wider syringe that most wastelanders could recognize blindfolded. “Your name’s Aurora, right?”

The mare looked away, refusing to engage.

Rivers thumped the stimpack against Aurora’s hip, triggering the pressurized mechanism which deposited the medicinal cocktail into the underlying tissue. It was a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of medicine her hind leg would need just to be salvageable, but this wasn’t a hospital and she wasn’t a surgeon. A stimpack was the best she could offer.

“I’m Rivers,” she offered.

“Good for you.”

She speaks, she thought to herself. Painkillers were probably starting to work. Celestia bless the conversational lubricant of Class A barbiturates. Rivers packed up the little medkit and paused just long enough to confirm she couldn’t hear hoofsteps upstairs. None. Good. Ironshod was still out doing whatever it was he’d felt the need to do.

“Sorry.” She smiled, feigning innocent curiosity. “I know our meds probably don’t hold a candle to what the Enclave has, but they do help.”

Aurora shook her head, saying nothing. She pressed on.

“You know, I’ve heard bits and pieces about your religion.” She dropped the medkit into her saddlebag and stood. “It’s sort of interesting, you know. The whole idea of the princesses ascending when the bombs fell, watching over us as we find our way forward… it’s a pretty hopeful message. Can’t say it’s surprising you people are so dedicated to keeping the story alive.”

She waited, watching Aurora’s face for anything that might give her away.

Nothing. Not even a twitch of an ear to show she was listening.

“Anyway,” she continued, “I was hoping you could set the record straight on something I can’t make heads or tails on. Why did the princesses choose your Minister Primrose to watch over their thrones? Like, if it were me, I’d have picked the Elements of Harmony. You’d think they would have earned it, you know?”

Aurora grew flustered as Rivers waited for her answer, eventually giving her head a meager shake with an even weaker shrug. “I don’t know, you apparently know more about their cult than me.”

A cult. That was far from the response she’d been expecting. It wasn’t a secret that some ponies living under the Enclave didn’t buy into the weird religion touted by their leader, but the strictures drilled into their enlisted pegasi were as uncompromising as they were black and white. To an Enclave soldier, denying the story of the ascension was akin to spitting on the twin thrones themselves. It didn’t matter whether or not a soldier partook in the faith. Certain things simply weren’t said, even under duress. Aurora hadn’t even tried to dodge Rivers’ question with some precooked response, she’d gone several steps further by degrading its very authenticity.

Rivers’ silence eventually caught Aurora's attention. “What?”

The lobby door upstairs slammed shut. Heavy, metallic clunks tracked their way across the freezer’s ceiling toward the cellar stairs. Their time was up.

“Nothing,” she said. On her way toward the insulated door, she paused and looked back at the sad sight strapped to the chair, adding, “Hang in there.”

Aurora stared after her with exhausted bewilderment but she was out the door before she could say anything else. Rivers passed Cotton on the way and could tell by the scribe’s baffled expression that she’d been eavesdropping. Cotton looked at her for an explanation but she only stared back with a quick shake of her head, lips pressed into a thin line.

Ironshod’s hooves thumped down the cellar steps. Rivers took a breath and placed herself at the bottom tread before he could reach it.

“Sir,” she said, “I need to speak with you.”

“Ma’am, I need to speak with you.”

Primrose held up a feather to Clover, her attention held firm by the latest update from her east wing commander. Colonel Hawker was a dry-spoken stallion in his fifties who knew how to get to the point and get there quickly. He knew the cities of eastern Equestria better than any other pegasus in the room, including Primrose, and he didn’t mince words when he expressed reservation about the scope of the orders she’d just dropped in his lap last night. She needed to hear what he had to say. Clover could fidget for a few minutes.

She nodded for Hawker to continue. Satisfied, the desert hued stallion lifted a wing to indicate the projection behind him and resumed speaking.

“With respect, ma’am, I cannot in good confidence tell you to expect this mission to progress undetected by the enemy. The collapse of F&F Mercantile has emboldened the local raiders to start coming out of their holes and we’ve heard chatter suggesting the Rangers are responding by placing wagon convoys under stricter scrutiny at the coastal checkpoints. While I understand you feel Elder Coronado may be distracted by his search for Coldbrook’s rogue Rangers, his people working the checkpoints won’t be. At the pace we’re pushing our pegasi through their checkpoints, I’ll be surprised if we evade detection for much longer.”

Primrose leaned back in her chair and considered the still image projected onto her office wall. She didn’t disagree with Colonel Hawker. The map of Fillydelphia behind him supported his concerns. Half a dozen black markers surrounded the city’s populated southern half, showing her the rendezvous points of the six squadrons still scheduled to make their way through the checkpoints. Twenty-four pegasi in each squadron. It didn’t make for much of an invasion force, but then the goal wasn’t to invade anything. Far away as Fillydelphia was, the Enclave as it was now couldn’t even if she wanted to.

That didn’t mean they were out of options, however. Retrieving Aurora was their first objective, to which alpha squadron had been assigned. Simple, minimal risk to her soldiers, immensely popular with the masses.

The second objective had been borne out of the opportunity created by the first and was what had Hawker’s balls in a twist. His five remaining squadrons had more difficult orders to execute. Atop the five skyscrapers marked red on the colonel’s map lurked the air defense system that passively patrolled Fillydelphia’s skies. Five Vhanna-made turrets capable of eviscerating the most agile flier within the fraction of a second it took the guns to detect, target and fire. The Steel Rangers had poured decades into scouting the Vhannan ruins to bring the feared technology back across the sea one floundering barge at a time. The same technology that crippled the legendary Wonderbolts now prevented the Enclave from flying within line of sight of some of the Rangers’ most vital strongholds.

Neatly overlapping circles delineated the effective area of denial of each turret, creating a vacuum in which the Rangers had been allowed to thrive. She wanted them gone. More critically, she wanted the Rangers to know the Enclave could take them away at a moment’s notice.

She wanted them to panic.

Primrose regarded Hawker with respectful neutrality. “You’re worried that we may be leading our soldiers into a trap.”

Colonel Hawker nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It worries me greatly.”

He stopped to give her room to respond, but she waved him on to continue.

“When the Rangers do catch on, our forces won’t be in a position to retreat. If they’re forced to fight their way out of the city, Coldbrook and the other Elders will have every reason to use the resulting deaths as justification for a retaliatory strike. Given the delicate state of affairs surrounding Stable 10, this is not an ideal time for the Enclave to provoke them.”

Coming from anyone else, those were dangerous words. That didn’t make them any less true. She was more than painfully aware of the stalemate they and the Rangers were in. The Enclave had become trapped within a pocket of territory containing Canterlot Mountain and its surrounding towns and villages, compressed around the core of its manufacturing and defensive power. The Steel Rangers monitored those borders on all sides like gravity searching for a weakness before crushing a star into its final collapse. If the Rangers had their way, the Enclave would simply cease to be. Erased from history like so many of the losers in Equestria’s most ancient conquests.

She’d worked too hard to allow some fringe element of the old military ground everything she worked to create into dust. This was a chance to knock the Rangers on their heels. To strip away a piece of their invulnerability and make them afraid.

“Colonel,” she said, turning her attention wholly toward him, “I agree with your sentiment that this mission does not meet the Enclave’s usual standards for preparation. If I’m being completely honest, we’re absolutely rushing this thing, and you can rest assured that any mistakes that come of it will fall squarely on my shoulders. Not yours.”

“Ma’am-”

She held up a feather. “Let me finish. While I hear your concerns regarding possible failure, I ask that you consider what may happen in the wake of our success. For nearly a century now, the Steel Rangers have felt entitled to move about Equestria with impunity because they believe their centers of power are untouchable. For all we know they might very well be. This operation is taking place a thousand miles away well beyond the reach of our supply lines. It could be a failure waiting to happen, but I’m willing to eat that crow on the chance that we finally put a crack in their armor.”

Hawker’s lips formed a thin line, but he knew better than to interrupt.

“Paladin Ironshod overstepped the very instance his people trotted off with Aurora, and Coldbrook hasn’t done himself any favors by turning Foal Mountain into the east wasteland’s largest mining operation. Those two things alone have given us a blank check to control the narrative.” She swept a hoof across the air, smiling as she did. “‘Steel Rangers kidnap innocent Stable dweller; seek to ransack her home and sell the survivors to the slavers.’ A little embellished at the end, yes, but that never stopped the Ministry of Image back in their heyday. That alone will sow mistrust between the wastelanders and their Elders. What happens if suddenly the great guns of Fillydelphia come falling down? I’ll tell you. The Rangers will shit in their power armor. They’ll have to shift their focus to protecting the coasts just to keep their populations from panicking, and the cage they put us in just might finally weaken enough for us to try something more decisive.”

She leaned forward, the projector on her desk blowing warm air against her hooves. “I imagine you more than anyone would hope to see the day when the Enclave can finally stretch its legs.”

Hawker breathed deep, his frustration plain on his face even as he worked to cobble together a diplomatic answer. He’d come here hoping to convince her that this was a misstep. Now it was dawning on him that his loyalty to the Enclave may come into question should he leave with the wrong words on his lips.

“Yes ma’am,” he said, staring forward. “I see how this could be a moment of significance.”

She watched him for several long seconds. He was beaten down. Time to pick him back up. “Hawker, I don’t expect you to blow smoke up my ass just to make me happy, but I am asking you to tow the line for a little while. Not forever. When this is done and over with, I expect you to continue speaking your mind. Someone around here needs to keep me honest.”

The slightest smile touched the corner of the old stallion’s lips. He nodded, though the tension hadn’t fully left his shoulders. “I understand. That’s all I have, ma’am. Unless you need anything else…?”

“I’m sure you’ve got a full plate, colonel. Dismissed.”

She and Clover waited with patient smiles as Hawker snapped a crisp salute and packed up the projector. The door clicked softly behind him.

“I thought I was the one who kept you honest,” Clover murmured.

“You are,” she said. “I want a detail put on the colonel. Keep it quiet. Nothing intrusive.”

Clover traced along the edge of her desk. “Thinking he’ll flip?”

She shook her head. “Him? No. He’s a good egg, but I’d like some assurance that he’s not going to get cold feathers. There’s too much at stake.”

Her security director hummed, likely already deciding on what form Colonel Hawker’s shadows should take. “I’ll see to it. In the meantime, there’s a matter of some urgency that needs your attention.”

Primrose frowned, bracing herself for whatever bad news Clover had for her.

He cleared his throat. “There is a possibility that the unfortunate events which took place at the Jet Stream Solar Array last week have borne fruit after all. Our guest in New Harmonies has offered to cooperate.”

It was warming up now that the sun had risen a little higher behind the clouds. Cobalt Bristles stopped on the sidewalk to look up at the overcast rolling past the gaps in the charred rooftops and noted the scent of moisture in the air. He pulled the rags away from his muzzle and breathed deeply, tasting the weather coming in from the west. The gentle coastal breeze was flexing its muscle now, whistling through the ruins. A storm was coming. A proper one by the smell of it. Someone at the weather factories back home must’ve gotten too generous on the dew pumps for rain to make it all the way to the coast. Kiln must be a mudhole right about now.

His wings shifted uneasily beneath his scavenger’s vestments, the right gently clutching the stock of his stubby rifle while the other kept a feather on his tracking beacon. Just a quick press, less than a second, was enough to send a strong ping with a unique signature encoded within the pulse. Little by little he and the dozens of pegasi streaming into Fillydelphia were refining the pureblood’s position. Her Pip-Buck was still intermittently active, answering for several minutes straight before going silent again for an hour or more. There were any number of explanations for it disappearing off and on like that. Could be damaged. The Rangers could be screwing around with it. For all they knew someone had it in a box and couldn’t leave it alone. He had yet to think of a reason that sounded good.

He gave his beacon a press and let go. It made no audible sound to tell him anything had happened, and he didn’t bother checking if it had. He trusted his equipment.

The Steel Rangers would key into a sudden uptick in unexplained beeps in their city, so they’d been kitted with basic, silent transponders. Less than that, really. They were pretty much battery packs with an antenna. Old fashioned batteries, too. Not the mini-MAST cells that kept half the terminals, Pip-Bucks and myriad other machines clicking away after the bombs fell. There wasn’t even a chassis built on to protect the board that coded the signal. It was practically glued on. Anything more than that and none of them would have made it past the city checkpoints.

And yet it worked. Enclave tech always worked. The closest thing to real modern tech they’d been given were the earpieces they all wore. The wire was thin enough to tuck into the fluff around their ears. High collars hid the rest. The rudimentary comms equipment shared the same antenna as the transponder, making for some truly awful audio quality.

An electric crackle assaulted his eardrum. “Good copy. Signal is strong. Proceed one block east and one block north.”

Other soldiers would be receiving similar transmissions. Short and simple. Ping, update, new directions. Ping, update, new directions. Like anchor points on some vast spider’s web, they were closing in on the missing pureblood.

He advanced toward an intersection walled high with the rusted hulks of old carriages. Faded paint had been splashed across them in wide arcs, territorial graffiti from a gang or group no one remembered anymore. A lot of Ranger territory was like that. After a few years in the field a soldier learned to identify which markers were current and which ones weren’t. He could tell this one was old. A sloppy depiction of an alicorn peeking over a crude horizon line stared back at him with big cartoon eyes, the words Twilight Wuz Here scrawled along the bottom carriage. Someone’s idea of a joke. It’d be funny if Cobalt didn’t see it on nearly every field mission he’d been assigned to. Even now, nobody was quite sure who was drawing it or why. Just another thing they found out here alongside the mutants and the bullet casings.

He turned east as instructed and picked his way through the remnants of an old encampment, its wooden walls pulled apart by scavengers ages ago. The tripod of a suspended grill stood over a black smear on the pavement where cook fires once burned. A couple crates, most likely empty, lay stacked against a shattered storefront window. Someone had taken the time to pose a pair of mannequins in the center of the street, one bent so that its snout could be pressed firmly between the hindquarters of the other. Cobalt snorted. Now that was funny. Wasteland ponies got up to some weird stuff when no one was looking.

Leaving the forgotten camp, he turned north and pinged the transponder a block later.

“Good copy. Signal is strong. Proceed north two blocks.”

He wondered how many pegasi back home were operating the comms today. It had to be a headache coordinating this many of them at once. Better yet, a migraine. This whole mission had dropped out of the sky with no warning and right from the start it felt like the only thing holding it together was duct tape and wishful thinking. Normally an operation like this would take weeks to prepare. Even now, he had the sense that their objectives were being written on the fly. First it was “find the pureblood.” Then it was “escort the secondaries to the safehouse.” Now it was “please slow down while we try to blow up some prewar auto-turrets with absolutely no patience for aerial fuckery.”

He decided to give the folks back home a break. It’s not like there were any pegasi who wouldn’t love to see the zebra guns dumped in a scrapheap somewhere. The things were pure overkill. If they saw you, that was it. You’d go from one whole pegasus to many, smaller pieces of pegasus before you knew you were being targeted. It was by the grace of the goddesses that the Rangers hadn’t reverse-engineered the targeting software. Even so, that would change given enough time and who knew how long the Enclave had left once that happened.

They’d been reporting strong signals for the past hour and so far he’d seen nothing out here except a pair of chem fiends and half a feral ghoul. The road north was clear as far as he could tell. A few wrecked carriages and some rubble from a partially collapsed office building, but no signs of life. The northern ruins of Fillydelphia were eerily quiet even compared to the old ghost cities further inland. Normally areas like these, especially the ones standing around a bomb crater, were swarming with all sorts of irradiated boogaboos. Half the fun was kicking open a locked door to see if some new variant might pop out to say hello. Something about their absence gave him the creeps.

Out of habit he glanced at the burned-out buildings for any more creatively placed doodles. He didn’t see any. Pursing his lips, he noticed just about all of the windows staring down at him were vacant too. Nothing was boarded, no sheets to cover any openings. The bomb fell, everything that could burn did, the survivors left and that was it. No squatters, no camped out scavengers, nothing. If anything good could be said about the tinheads protecting this city, they’d done a lot more to keep their ruins clean than most chapters. Anywhere else, this place would be crawling with bandits and black market trade. Maybe they’d cleaned it out ahead of some kind of expansion initiative, or a natural buffer against some local threat. Who knew? Steel Rangers could always be depended upon to claim more territory than they needed.

Something caught his ear up ahead. Running water? No. It clicked as he was ducked to the right, only pausing long enough to listen once his shoulder touched the bricks of the neighboring building. Someone was taking a leak.

He slid his wing under his rifle and hit the transponder while he scanned the road ahead.

“Good copy. Signal is strong. Continue north.”

Yeah, well someone was using his path forward as a latrine. He stayed still until he was certain the sound of piss wasn’t coming from one of the buildings where someone might have eyes on him. A hoof scraped the asphalt around the corner ahead. Weighing his options, Cobalt lifted the wing with his compact automatic out from under his ragged disguise and gave the weapon a quick visual check. Everything looked good. He pressed a feather against the safety switch and slowly crept forward.

As he drew closer to the cross street ahead, the trickle tapered off. The intersection was framed on each corner by two blackened businesses on the near side and a densely settled mound of rubble across the street. It was the parking lot wrapping the fourth building that someone had chosen to use as a toilet: a dilapidated but otherwise structurally preserved Red Delicious restaurant.

He frowned. At first he didn’t see anyone. Trucks and carriages littered the L-shaped lot, some of them sagging together in orderly lines along the sidewalk while others formed a jumbled crush of vehicles that extended around the drive through wrapping the rear of the building, all owned by ponies who’d been caught in the blast while waiting for their dinner. Wait, no, breakfast? Someone told him the bombs fell in the morning. Not important. He inched toward the corner and stopped, eyes scanning the rusting hulks.

There. The faint silver glow of magic from behind one of the rusting hulks. A stallion matching the description of Ironshod loitered in the parking lot, horn lit and giving the end of his dick a dignified shake. He was facing away from Cobalt, his eyes on the boarded restaurant. That building was definitely not abandoned. He was unarmed and unprotected. It would be easy to shoulder his weapon and gun down the unsuspecting Ranger from where Cobalt stood, but the report they’d all been given said there were more. If they were using the restaurant as their hideout then they would have the advantage of cover if he pulled the trigger now. That and they wouldn’t be squeamish about using the pureblood as a hostage.

His nerves jangled, eagerly telling him to pull the trigger anyway. That was Paladin Ironshod literally standing there with his dick out. How many chances did anyone ever get to put down an actual paladin? He grit his teeth and forced himself to relax his grip. His weapon dipped. All the glory in the world wouldn’t be worth the minister’s wrath. He backed away from the corner, careful not to put any loose debris underhoof that might alert Ironshod to his presence. Halfway down the block was an alley. He ducked toward it and took cover behind the buckled panels of a dumpster.

With an eye on the open street just a few yards away he pressed a feather to his transponder and let go. He pressed it again, held his breath, and released. One second on, one second off, over and over. It was a simple pattern. Deliberate, conveying the agreed upon message.

Come to my location, it said. I’ve located the target.

Primrose read the bold letters bolted into the prison’s stone archway as she waited for the guards to clear the narrow grounds penned between lofty outer walls. She’d had it built to resemble the old Equestrian castles her father had been obsessed with when she was little, and the end result for New Canterlot’s sole working prison had come out better than she’d hoped. It boasted a disquieting strength while shielding the public from the unfortunate savagery that sometimes erupted within. She breathed in and sighed. Just like dear old dad.

A harsh electric buzz signaled all clear and she was escorted past the open gate and through the chain link corridor toward the central building. She spared a glance at the strip of bare dirt that amounted to an exercise yard, the morning light casting the wall’s shadow over its entirety and making the air between the two structures noticeably cooler. Clover trotted beside her, his eyes always a step ahead of her own. Her director of security was good at his job. Better than many of the directors who held the title before him, and one of the few who had the balls to admit his complete disillusionment with her carefully crafted fiction of the goddesses.

She glanced at his broad features, the subtle density of toned muscles gliding beneath his uniquely brindled coat. He noticed her looking but said nothing, only meeting her gaze for a moment before politely smiling and resuming his task of monitoring for threats. There weren’t any. They’d all been locked up well before their arrival.

He was a strange stallion, she thought. Always calm and precise when he spoke. Never one to show heightened emotions or hold a grudge. She’d offered her bed to him only once, an offer he’d declined with no malice or ill intent while drawing a clear line between his personal life and his duty to her. Clover was old-fashioned in every sense of the phrase. Were he to stumble into a time machine and find himself thrust back two hundred and twenty years, he would fit in with the ponies of Old Equestria like a squirrel in a forest.

Prison staff guided them inside, leading the two of them through a series of heavily guarded double gates and down a maze of wide linoleum corridors. Every so often they would pass a bright scar along the spinach green walls, a mark left by a security baton or some other blunt object. Signatures left behind by the brawls that would often erupt within the prison between inmates and their wards. When she had this place built she had expressed no interest in modeling it after the prisons of the old world. No sprawling cell blocks, no open bars through which the inmates could socialize and form their own little colony away from the greater world.

Four walls and a soundproof door, a box for every pony whose crimes against the Enclave warranted total isolation. These weren’t the murderers or rapists of New Canterlot. Those issues could easily be resolved with a length of rope or a bullet. New Harmonies was a merciless march of unceasing monotony earned by those who stood in direct defiance to the Enclave’s mission. They were the traitors, the heretics and those who had sought to spread the dangerous ideals of a world rendered obsolete. These walls were a warning to the rest of her finely crafted society, and they worked very well.

Their escorts stopped on either side of an unremarkable cell door bearing an unremarkable placard beneath its shuttered viewport.

A third guard stepped in front of them and approached the door. He nosed open the viewport and pressed a wing against the intercom on the wall.

“Stand against the wall.”

Primrose and Clover waited off to the side. After a moment the guard signaled to his counterparts with a nod, and the door’s locks were released. Two of them swept in like rapids sucked into a narrow canyon while the third stood watch outside. Primrose followed them inside and watched a familiar mare in a dirty white jumpsuit have her hind legs placed into narrow, rigid hobbles.

“I’m on a tight schedule, Miss Song. You can wait for him to fix your shackles or you can say whatever it is you have to say.”

Autumn Song sneered at Primrose through the matted tangles of her once neatly candy-striped mane, her forelegs splayed over painted circles on the wall in a humiliating position that a mare of her former stature never thought she’d end up in.

Recovering the leader of the now-defunct F&F Mercantile had been a close thing. Jet Stream’s once prized array had been under aerial observation for several weeks by the time Aurora made her harried debut on their radar, but the situation had devolved into a frenzy of confusion as the Enclave tried to confirm the intel stating she’d come from Stable 10 and her sudden decision to aggravate the region’s alpha deathclaw into rampaging through the facility. Without clear orders on what to do, recon teams could only monitor the situation until an opportunity presented itself. Only when Mac’s carnage subsided and the gunfire below went dark did they risk investigating the aftermath.

They discovered Autumn in one of the old holding tanks with a revolver held between her hooves, her cleanly severed horn spluttering with uncontrolled sparks as she struggled in vain to work the trigger. The gun was taken away before she could use it and the appearance of the Enclave around her had provoked a surge of unfiltered honesty from the mare. Primrose had listened to the open comms as she tearfully rattled away apology after apology, confessing like a cornered foal to her betrayal. In retrospect she had probably been hoping one of them might end her suffering in the way she hadn’t been able. She’d been a miserable thing when she finally arrived in New Canterlot.

Primrose stared back at Autumn unflinchingly. She wasn’t a threat to anyone now, least of all the Enclave. After several more seconds of unproductive silence, she turned to leave.

“Wait!”

She held back the urge to roll her eyes and stopped, leveling impatience back into the bare white cell.

Autumn’s hooves slid off the wall and she awkwardly shuffled in her hobbles to face her betters. She was visibly disoriented, her pupils wide as she rode a wave of endorphins triggered by the mere presence of something other than silence. Primrose might have been inclined to pity her if she hadn’t orchestrated the ambush that plucked Corporal Julip from the wasteland.

Former corporal, she supposed.

“I-I want to make a deal,” she stammered, her eyes darting between Primrose and the guard standing just beyond her reach. She swallowed, waiting, her hind leg bouncing with nervous energy that made her hobble jingle like Hearth's Warming bells.

Primrose glanced at Clover, shook her head and turned back around to face Autumn. “Miss Song, your company is in ruins, your caches have been ransacked, a deathclaw has turned your home into its den and your family is dead. You have nothing of value to offer.”

Autumn blinked rapidly at the floor, impotent fury twitching across her face like a stutter at the mention of her brother. “Then why keep me here this long? I’ve been stuck here for three weeks and nobody will tell me why. There has to be a reason why.”

The guard beside her adjusted his stance, preparing to intervene. Autumn didn’t notice.

Primrose leaned her shoulder against the doorframe. “One week.”

Autumn lifted her gaze from the floor. “What?”

“You’ve only been here for one week. Technically six and a half days.”

For all the many traits she bore of her infamous ancestors, her time here had whittled away her confidence to the barest nerve. Neither Flim or Flam would recognize their descendant as one of their own if they were the only three ponies in the room. Faced with a little alone time and she bore none of the endless tenacity those two stallions once wielded.

She floundered as she tried to count the days in her head and inevitably failed. It didn’t take long for the prisoners of New Harmonies to lose track of time. The lights in their cells were only turned off when they reached the bleeding edge of exhaustion, and even then it was up to the guards to decide when to turn them back on again. Someone had decided it would be fun to put Autumn on an accelerated cycle.

Yet just when it appeared the reality of her situation had chipped away at the last of her fortitude, she surprised Primrose by collecting herself just enough to look momentarily composed. She’d latched onto something in her mind like a lifeline.

“I found SOLUS,” she blurted.

Primrose straightened and looked at Clover. His standard placid expression had bent with suspicion. She took a slow breath as he backed away from the cell, glancing either way down the corridor to see who might be within earshot. She waited until he indicated to her that there was no one else. Just these three guards whose faces he was already in the process of memorizing. She hoped their retirements wouldn’t cause too much trouble for the warden.

She cleared her throat. “And where is SOLUS, exactly?”

“Space.”

Primrose sighed as the imprisoned mare let out a sharp bark of laughter before giggling herself into quick silence. She’d come unglued.

“Deep space,” she added, grinning at Primrose while she spoke. “It’s in a high eccentricity orbit. Like… like Luna tried to kick it out of orbit and whiffed it. That’s why nobody can find it anymore. Not without a dish to track it with. It’s not even on its original inclination.”

If she thought what she was saying was profound, she was deeply mistaken. SOLUS would have been easy to locate if it had stayed on a fixed orbit like Jet had intended, but it clearly hadn’t hence why it had been lost. And yet every few years their listening systems would detect its degraded carrier signal pinging away, reaching out to land based networks rendered silent by the bombs.

“I don’t imagine you have more than just vagueisms to show for your discovery?” She could feel her impatience rising, unsure if she was being strung along and unwilling to risk deciding incorrectly.

“Not mine,” Autumn muttered. “Your colonel found it.”

“Corporal.”

She shrugged. “That’s what I said. She found it locked up in a custom partition on JSI’s old network. Whole list of vectoring instructions that got sent up a few years after the big boom.”

“After the bombs fell.”

She nodded, pausing to scratch her chin against her shoulder. “Yeah. Not sure how anyone got a signal out but they tried covering their tracks after they did it. Your mare cracked those files like a rotten egg. Recompiled the commands that got sent up and used the servers to do math that would’ve made Quincy’s head spin.”

Primrose didn’t ask who Quincy was. Autumn answered anyway.

“He was my receptionist,” she said. “Good kid. Don’t know where he is now. Dead, probably.”

“Focus. You’re saying Julip knows where SOLUS is?”

Autumn lingered before finally shaking her head. “Maybe. Doubt it. Cider set up the servers she was working on so that we could watch what she was doing. Had everything recorded and she barely had its current orbit worked out before she started purging all the files she could get at. Could be she memorized it.”

She was going to have a talk with that mare as soon as this problem with Aurora was resolved. “Where did you record her work?”

Another shrug. “Holotapes that I locked up before that Stable bitch came and ruined my life.”

Her stomach dropped. “You saved it on holotapes? Where did you put them?”

Autumn tried to put on a defiant little smile but it was cut short when Primrose strode across the gap between them and wrapped her feathers around the mare’s neck, shoving her back against the wall hard enough to daze her. She choked for air in her grip, eyes bulging toward the guard who had wisely found something else to occupy his attention. Primrose set her jaw and squeezed until the chains between Autumn’s legs began thrashing as she tried and failed to find air. Only when true panic floated into the mare’s face did she relax her grip enough for her to suck in a long, wheezing lungful of air.

“If you want to make a deal,” Primrose hissed, “this is your only chance.”

She could feel Autumn’s muscles flex as she swallowed against her grip. “Sell me,” she rasped. “Sell me to the slavers. Any of them. I’ll work. I don’t care where, just don’t leave me here. Please.”

“Four walls and a roof are more than most ponies have,” she countered. “But if you want to give this up, you need to tell me where those holotapes are.”

If she was planning to stall, the prospect of spending her life staring at these featureless white walls was enough to loosen her tongue. “In my office desk. Bottom drawer. I keep it locked but the key is attached to a magnet…”

She dropped her and made a disgusted noise as she turned to leave. In her fucking desk, she thought. These days they were teaching foals to crack safes with bobby pins and a screwdriver and yet that facility has been crawling with Rangers for an entire week. This had gotten out of control. The odds that someone hadn’t already emptied Autumn’s desk was… Celestia’s sun, they could already have it. She shot Clover a worried look as she stepped into the corridor, one that she saw reflected in his own eyes.

“We need to move on this now.”

Clover hummed. “We’re behind the eight ball, ma’am. I’m open to suggestions if you have any.”

Behind them, Autumn’s frustrated yelling echoed through the corridor as she began to realize there was to be no deal. She’d been milked for the information she’d kept secret for so long and found herself discarded just as quickly. She hadn’t lost enough of her sanity not to know when she’d been played.

Primrose ignored her furious screams. “We need to get eyes back on that array and put someone inside. Dredge the servers. Maybe what the corporal found is still there.”

“And if it isn’t?”

She took a breath. “Luna’s tits, don’t jinx us, Clover. We’re already up to our necks.”

“You’re out of line.”

“Oh, stuff it already, I am not in your chain of command anymore. Have you bothered to stop and look at what you did to her down there?” Rivers grit her teeth, forcing herself to lower her volume. The narrow alley choked with vehicles that amounted to the restaurant’s drive through provided enough cover to shield themselves from prying eyes, but out here raised voices carried far. She looked both ways before hissing, “You shattered her leg and let her freeze in her own piss! I looked into her eyes and there’s nobody home. Are you so dense that you really think you can trust anything she’s told you after all that?”

Ironshod glowered down at her, but something told Rivers she’d driven some of her point through his thick skull. She watched him turn toward the six locked suits of power armor parked in the alcove formed between the drive through windows, silently inspecting one of them as he digested what she’d said.

“Listen,” she continued, “even if you’re right about her, even if she does come from some ‘Enclave sleeper cell’ disguised as a Stable, at this point she’s damaged goods. Anything you get out of her now is gonna be unreliable because as far as I can tell, she’s just sitting down there waiting to die.”

He looked at her with the expression someone might reserve to placate a talkative foal who had shared something they believed to be profound. Rivers deflated.

“If you don’t have the fortitude to see this mission through,” he murmured, “just say so and I’ll cut you loose.”

“That isn’t…” She closed her eyes. He was trying to bait her off topic. “Open your eyes for once, sir. We’ve got Elder Coronado breathing down our necks to turn ourselves in and so far you haven’t gotten anything valuable from that mare besides some tacky hoofwear. Celestia’s sake, Ironshod, you’re beating the shit out of a Stable pony. Not an Enclave spy. What’ll people say when we get back home?”

The paladin wrinkled his lip at her with a stubborn, mocking smirk. “The first overmare of her Stable was Spitfire. The Spitfire who founded the Enclave.”

“And the mare in that freezer isn’t.” She shook her head. Trying to reason with Ironshod was like pushing mud uphill. “If she’s with the Enclave, why did she come all the way out here scraping around for tech? Why didn’t she take the obvious trip west to New Canterlot and ask them for help?”

Ironshod said nothing.

“None of her decisions benefit the Enclave,” she added. “If anything, she’s put them at risk. She’s a civilian, Ironshod. The best thing you can do right now is let me patch her up as best I can and release her to Coronado. We might get leniency.”

“And do the others feel the same way as you?”

A pause. Reluctantly, she nodded. “You're their commander. They’re worried about you.”

He sighed. His demeanor softened as he did, his features relaxing as he took on the appearance of a defeated stallion. She hadn’t expected to get through to him.

“Alright, Rivers,” he murmured. “Let’s head down. You can give me the full pitch there.”

The thawing air that flowed in through the open door left Aurora shivering uncontrollably in her chair. Hard, jarring shudders raked over her in bursts that she could feel building up along frost-damaged muscles over time, her body struggling to reconcile with the warm air coming in after being subjected to so many cycles of penetrating cold. She tried to move, her locked joints screaming at her to get out of her bindings if nothing else than to walk around. The narrow zips holding her down just sawed deeper into her legs for the effort. She hissed a stuttering curse, forcing herself to remain still.

If there was a bright side to her situation it was that she was warming up enough to think clearly again. The mare who had tended to her wounds had seemed unusually sympathetic, at least for someone working for Ironshod. She looked around the empty freezer with a flicker of optimism, hoping maybe there would be something she could get to that might help her escape. Empty wire racks and dingy steel walls. This wasn’t like the films she watched back home where the sheriff left a key hanging on a nail next to the cell door.

She grit her teeth and considered straining against her bindings until one of them snapped. Probably she could keep herself from screaming long enough to break one limb free, but then what? Do it three more times? Hope the Ranger posted outside wouldn’t hear the plastic break and ignore a crippled mare hobbling over the threshold? She looked down at her broken leg and tried not to think about why everything below the ragged gash was going from purple to black. Even if she knew exactly where she needed to go once she was outside the freezer, she was in no condition to walk let alone run.

The intractable reality of her situation smothered that flicker of hope like a guttering flame. She wasn’t leaving. Maybe someone would find her and know where she came from, maybe not. All she could do was wait. When the urge to sleep finally came, she’d take it and wish for something better on the other side.

Her mind wandered. She thought about Ginger and wondered whether she and Roach had ever found the talisman they’d gone looking for. She hoped they did. It helped her to know that even if she died, Stable 10 had allies who could carry the torch. She’d left home thinking the world was empty and to some degree she’d made her peace over the possibility she’d never see it again. She’d had no idea how quickly that simple plan would branch out into so much more. Befriending Roach, falling in love with Ginger, experiencing a vibrant and living world that so many ponies dismissed as a wasteland but was so much richer than that. Tears stung at her eyes, eating away the frost. She could fly now, and nobody looked at her twice for not wearing a stuffy old jumpsuit. She’d met a gryphon and defeated a colony of slavers! What would her dad think when he found out?

And there it was. At the core of it, she knew what she’d miss the most. Her dad, working by himself in the gardens, not knowing where Aurora had gone or where she’d fallen. Not knowing whether to mourn or wait. That childish urge rose in her like a fountain. She wanted to go home. She wanted her dad.

Somewhere above her head a door slammed shut. She bit back on her emotions and wiped her eyes against her shoulders to hide the tears. Her body tensed at the clank of metal shoes making their way across the floor, accompanied by a second set of hooves that led the first down a set of stairs she couldn’t see. The mare from earlier appeared in the doorway, the features on her face relaxed with a touch of self-satisfaction. They made eye contact only briefly, but in that short time it seemed to Aurora that the mare was trying to convey a sense of reassurance to her. Any comfort she might have gleaned from the Ranger was quickly overshadowed by the looming presence of Ironshod at the door. Aurora swallowed. Something about the way he eyed her from across the gap felt wrong.

“Rivers is very worried about your health, Aurora.”

Aurora frowned at him, then to Rivers. If his mocking tone bothered her, she wasn’t showing it. Her attention was focused on Aurora’s injuries, particularly her damaged hind leg.

“She’s going to need antibiotics. Strong ones. Stimpacks aren’t going to help now that the tissue’s begun to necrotize.”

Ironshod leaned against the doorframe. “Naturally.”

Rivers breathed out a little sigh before assessing the rest of Aurora. “I can stitch up these gashes but her straps are filthy and they’ve cut deep. Blood poisoning is like-”

“Disinfectant and stitches.”

The Ranger turned to look at Ironshod who stared impassively back. “We don’t have enough disinfectant with us to guarantee she’ll survive more than a few days. She’ll crash in less than that if she goes septic.”

Aurora frowned between the two of them, trying not to get her hopes up. Was this over? Were they really moving onto treating her injuries?

Ironshod sniffed and cleared his throat, his horn glowing softly as he apparently scratched himself. “Say what’s on your mind, Rivers.”

For several seconds the mare was quiet, her gaze returning to Aurora’s ruined leg. She made a face and, reluctantly, shook her head.

“She needs a surgeon, not a field medic.” Rivers met her eyes for a flicker before turning toward Ironshod, firm in her decision. “We should give her over to Coronado. He’ll have the facilities for this kind of treatment.”

Aurora held her breath to keep herself calm. This was it. The nightmare was over.

Ironshod’s face darkened. “Can she walk on that?”

Rivers turned to look at Aurora’s injured leg.

In the same instant, Aurora caught sight of a black object floating out of a holster strapped to Ironshod’s leg. Her eyes widened with recognition.

“Gun,” she mumbled, her voice cracked and dry from disuse. Rivers glanced at her, the weapon behind her leveling. “Gun!”

Light and sound pierced the stale air and Rivers jerked forward, her chin bouncing off the chair’s armrest on the way to the floor. Aurora could feel an unwelcome warmth tracing wet lines down her chest, a dark bead of something that wasn’t hers clinging to the tip of her eyelash. She watched in silent horror as Ironshod looked away, his attention on the Ranger posted at the door just a hoof’s reach away, leveled the gun again, and squeezed the trigger. Another deafening crash of sound. Hooves splayed out onto the floor outside, clicking against one another as the last signals jostled mindlessly through the Ranger’s dying body.

With ears ringing and burnt gunpowder stinging her eyes, she couldn’t hold back. She screamed for anyone to help her, apologizing to anyone who might need to hear it so long as they let her out of here. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to disappear. For a moment Ironshod stared at her, his eyes lightless, and she tensed against the bullet that she knew was coming. Knowing that no matter what she did there was nothing she could do except wait for it.

Instead, he peered up at the ceiling like a predator making a terrible decision. He turned, pistol aloft, and walked away.

Primrose heard Clover clearing his throat over the wind and sighed. Her eyes glossed over the primary details of the report open on her Pip-Buck while her wings cut through the open air above New Canterlot. She was more than familiar with the city below and could navigate with her periphery vision just fine. Clover, as well as her usual entourage of armed pegasi flying in tight formation around her, were less willing to trust the torchbearer of the old world not to glide blindly into some poor family’s stovepipe. He cleared his throat again, more insistently.

She glanced at him, already exasperated from their chat with Autumn. “Some days I wonder if you’re my director of security or my nanny.”

He shrugged. “You don’t pay me to let my guard down, ma’am.”

“No I do not.” She shook her head and used her chin to toggle off the screen. Clover relaxed as she turned her attention back to where she was going, her mood growing pensive as she took in the sprawling vista of her capital. Autumn had chosen the worst possible time to drop this wild card in their lap. The possibility of the Steel Rangers being in possession of SOLUS was enough to make her whole body flash hot with dread, but she did her best not to fall down that rabbit hole. For all anyone knew, the Rangers hadn’t the foggiest idea of what they had. If they had it at all.

Maybe she was trying to fuck with her. Probably not. Faking conviction like that was no easy skill to master, and despite being wastelander dross that mare had looked every bit convinced that what she was saying was true. The real question was, what would happen if she wound up being right?

She pressed her lips into a line. “Do you think she was telling the truth?”

Clover perked up and looked at her. Neatly shingled rooftops slid below them as they arced toward the golden figures perched atop the Chapel’s iconic steeple. He was quick on the uptake and banked a fraction of a degree until their wingtips practically overlapped.

“I think she believed she was,” he said, hedging as he always did. “I might also hazard a guess that she may be trying to spur us into rash action as punishment for her incarceration. Possibly she might have offered to take us to the holotapes she claimed to have recorded if we stayed longer. Earn our trust and win her freedom, like in the movies.”

Primrose let herself chuckle at the thought of her and Clover wearing old Appleoosan sheriff’s badges, being led through the dusty southern desert by an infamous bandito on their way toward stolen loot. She missed the anticipation of waiting for a promising new western to release. They made so few before the bombs fell and the lack of attention the genre received in that time was criminal. Discovering that Aurora had similar tastes in film days earlier had been utterly refreshing.

Thinking about the old days helped take her mind off the stress of what Autumn had shared. The formation descended, escorting her closer toward the pleasing bends and curves of the cobblestone roads that decorated the city center. She inhaled deeply as she always did when she flew close to the market square, the scents of fresh ruffage and cooking meat filling her nose and motivating a fresh appetite. For all of its faults, she was proud of what her Enclave had accomplished here more than anyplace else. New Canterlot might not boast the lavish grandeur that the capital it was modeled after once put on display, but it was getting there a little bit at a time like an ugly scar that grew beautiful with age. Even the mountain from which the ruins had fallen showed signs of healing.

She stole a peek at the singular peak that had once been the root of Equestria’s far-reaching influence. It stood above her city as an ancient guardian, its charred western face gradually lightening to match the surrounding geology. A single, broken lip of old Canterlot’s shattered foundation still clung to the scoured rockface. A reminder to those who lived below of what had been lost and what they were building toward. Higher still, shrouded in the dense mists that veiled the mountain’s snow capped peak stood the factory complex she had salvaged from the fallen remnants of Cloudsdale. Were it not for her Enclave, Equestria’s weather technology may have very well been lost. Now its vast gears turned with unmatched efficiency, belching out an endless parade of perfectly seeded clouds. The Steel Rangers and their myriad of elders may claim vast swaths of Equestrian soil, but as long as the Enclave stood firm in its defiance they would never have the skies.

The Chapel of the Two Sisters rose above them as her escorts dropped the last few yards onto the cobbles in front of the grand structure. Without aid of the construction equipment that made building so simple in the old days, the chapel and its grand spire had been assembled stone by stone from the ruins of Old Equestria. The concept of god worship had once been something alien to Equestria, a practice relegated to ancient history ever since the princesses took power. Now it paved the way toward the future Equestria deserved.

After the bombs, the knee-jerk reaction many had within the Enclave was to press Primrose to take up a new throne in her own name. But she’d known better than to give into the temptation. The dust hadn’t yet settled and Equestria wasn’t ready for a new ruler. She knew that the first thing the survivors needed was hope that they would be okay. More than that they wanted to know that it wasn’t just them against this desolate new world. That somewhere, the princesses were still alive and watching over them as they always had. And, somewhat conveniently, able to shoulder the blame when anything went wrong.

With the help of her advisors, the Enclave adopted many key tenets of popular gryphon sun worship and molded them to something palatable to those climbing out of the ruins. The princesses had not died. No, they ascended to godhood. Magic was not gone, it was merely being safeguarded by those very goddesses who once wielded it without equal. Harmony would return when they deemed Equestria fit for their presence. Until then they would guide ponykind with gentle nudges, listening to their prayers and answering them in subtle ways.

Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

It was an excellent primer in those early years. The idea of ascension had been initially laughed down, widely seen as the ludicrous attempt to sucker ponies into just another one of the cults beginning to form at the time. Yet as the decades wore on and the story of the goddesses spread, more than a few ponies began to notice something peculiar about the mare at the head of the Enclave. Something was happening. She wasn’t aging like the rest of them.

Like the princesses, she remained young.

Primrose spent several years quietly waving these concerns off, crediting her appearance to good genes. It was one of the easiest acts she’d ever had to put on. All she had to do was wait for someone to finally connect the pieces and inevitably float the hypothesis that she was blessed. The Enclave embarked in a so-called investigation into her longevity, predictably announcing finding nothing medical to explain the phenomenon and feeding that narrative to the populace to fuel their fervor. They did the rest, feeding water to the seed of a religion whose growth the Enclave carefully cultivated into what it was now. Even the Steel Rangers hesitated to denounce the belief that the princesses were now goddesses, instead accusing Primrose of tricking the hopeful into blind belief. To this, Primrose never gave an official response. No sense in muddying the water when the believers were eager to explain away the doubters themselves.

“Ma’am?”

She blinked. Clover was watching her with a touch of concern. They’d come to the stairs at the foot of the chapel where the head priest stood waiting to greet her, a formality that the caretakers of this ornate building had created on their own volition. Primrose composed herself and smiled apologetically to the aging stallion.

She dipped her head in a respectful bow. “Ah. Peace to you, Reverend Father.”

He smiled at her as her entourage led her up the steps, ignoring the weapons bristling beneath their wings. “And peace unto you, Minister. A busy day, I take it?”

Father Belfry, an uninspired yet appropriate name he’d chosen for himself when he joined the priesthood, held open one of the carved wooden doors for them as they entered. He was a kind stallion and often prone to oversharing when it came to how he envisioned the church’s future after he was gone. Not often, but sometimes Primrose would give him an ear just in case he happened across an idea that might be worth pursuing. Those long listening sessions often left her feeling guilty, however, and she did her best not to indulge him too much.

“Very busy,” she agreed as she stepped onto the white flagstones of the chapel’s outer vestibule. As with the open square outside, the public area of the chapel had been cleared out by security ahead of her arrival. After nearly avoiding having her head taken off by a bullet back in ‘32, her private strolls through the city had abruptly ended. “I wish I had time to talk…”

“...but the world spins on, I understand.” He let the door shut behind them, following her through the vestibule for a few steps as she was led to a locked side door. “I’ll save you a seat at tonight’s service.”

He always did. She smiled at him again to let him know it was appreciated without needing to tell him she wouldn’t be in attendance. Too many things were in motion now for her to waste an hour for the sake of making an appearance. Father Belfry nodded and watched as Clover stepped forward to peer into the retina scanner mounted in the door’s frame. “Grace go with you, minister. And don’t forget to eat something while you’re downstairs.”

“Thank you, I won’t. Take care.”

He bore his kindly smile as the secure door slid shut and locked behind her. The armed elements of her entourage took position near the door while Primrose and Clover continued on down the narrow, wood paneled hall. She could feel his eyes on her as they passed through another locked door on the far end, the blast proof steel dropping behind them as they stepped onto the elevator it protected.

“What?” she asked.

Clover feigned ignorance as he pressed his hoof against the reader on the wall and the car descended. “Nothing. I just think it’s nice that you let your mane down around him.”

She rolled her eyes. “He’s the high priest.”

“That isn’t why you do it, though.”

Sometimes she hated Clover for being so flippant with her, especially when he was right. She swatted him across the shoulder with the back of her wing to let him know his honesty was grudgingly appreciated. “Belfry’s led the church for forty-odd years now. He’s practically family. Sue me for being polite.”

He smirked. “You know one day I’m going to look up what that means.”

“I’m sure I’ll have egg on my face when you do.” One of the perks of rebuilding a decimated society had been allowing lawyers to die off with all the other pests. As the elevator slowed to a stop, she took a breath and composed herself. “Back to work.”

The doors split open. They stepped off and into the reinforced concrete antechamber. Two soldiers stood at the bunker door on the other side and, recognizing her, one of them dipped their chin to their radio and murmured, “The Minister is here.”

Primrose frowned.

The second stallion’s voice was grave as he addressed them. “Ma’am. Sir. There’s been a situation.”

They all came pouring down in a single deluge, weapons drawn as they streamed by, none of them noticing him pressed against the wall at the foot of the stairs. Every one of them blindly assuming their prisoner had gotten loose and stolen a weapon. It was the same tunnel vision that kept them locked in the middle ranks. The same limitation that prevented them from thinking too hard about the opportunity for advancement he offered. It was why they’d never amount to more than just bog standard grunts.

He reached out with his magic as they stormed past. Click by click he switched their safeties on. The first Ranger to reach the freezer door began shouting nonsense at Aurora. Get down. Drop the weapon. Reflexive demands that fit the picture he expected to see, not the one in front of him. The others lined up along the wall next to the door as if they were preparing for a raid. They were the first to finally notice Ironshod waiting against the other wall.

No time to do anything fancy. He’d seen plenty of good soldiers get themselves killed trying to show off. He leveled his pistol at the stallion at the rear of the line and put him down with a shot to the neck. The others recoiled with shocked disbelief, more than a few having the sense to lift their weapons in defense. He dropped his pistol in favor of the subcompact that clattered to the floor beside the freshly dead Ranger. Someone’s magic groped at him in an attempt to put him on the ground, none of them seeing the dead Ranger’s assault rifle floating back into the air in time to react. They were too confused by their own weapons, realizing too late that their safeties had been engaged to put up a fight.

Ironshod readied the rifle, pointed it roughly down the tidy line of traitors and held down the trigger. Thirty-two rounds roared down the row like a scythe through wheat, the first few dropping like wet sacks while four survivors rolled over the floor in confused agony. He let the rifle fall to the floor and took up his pistol again. He counted the shots.

Bang. One. Specialist Fields.

Bang. Two. Sergeant Perique.

Bang. Three. Specialist Clayhoof.

Bang. Four. Corporal Melody.

He winced. His eardrums throbbed. A thin wisp of gray smoke curled up over the barrel of his weapon, iron sights aimed down the ragged hole above Melody’s left eye. A small voice in the back of his mind howled at him for what he had just done and for a moment his vision misted. These had been his allies. A team he’d chosen. Maybe even friends had their lives been different and they had met as civilians and not soldiers. He grit his teeth and squelched it.

No, he’d seen through what Rivers had done. The outbursts, the open challenges to his authority, this misplaced sympathy for the enemy that had quickly evolved into her attempting to commandeer his mission. Recruiting her had been a mistake. He’d invited a virus into the fold and she’d wasted no time in infecting the resolve of her fellow Rangers. That childlike pity for an enemy in chains had nearly undone everything. But he stopped it just in time.

It was just him now. Him and the Enclave spy.

He stepped to the freezer and gazed toward Aurora, his lips curling away from his teeth into a bitter sneer. She stared back at him, eyes wide with terror as she struggled against her bindings, the metal feet of the chair drawing smears on the floor in the widening pool of Rivers’ blood.

He watched her struggle. It was all an act. Even now she was playing at his sympathy, probing the weaknesses of his character for a thread to pull. Anything that would let her walk away from this, back to her handlers. Too late for that. Far too late.

The frosted wall behind her glowed green. Her Pip-Buck toggling on again. Something it had been doing since she arrived. Something it hadn’t done while it was briefly in his custody back home. A homing beacon or a distress signal, he assumed. Something she’d been able to trigger during the ambush.

He inhaled one last breath of the sour, frigid air and closed the door. The lock dropped into place with a solid click and the ancient cooling system hummed into service. For the first time, Aurora’s screams didn’t pierce the insulated wall.

Rivers was right. She’d finally given in to the inevitable. As a source of information Aurora had been spent. Yet she wasn’t completely worthless. He looked up the darkened stairs and smiled.

Let her be bait.

Primrose paced one way, then the other, her feathers pinching the bridge of her muzzle as she tried to keep herself from picking up one of these fucking chairs and hurling it at the bank of monitors mounted to the command center’s far wall. Second Lieutenant Brightstroke was still rattling off the long list of shit that had hit the fan during her short visit to Autumn’s cell, the young lieutenant defying the first syllable of her name while simultaneously trying to induce the second on everyone else within earshot.

She reached the end of the long row of connected desks, the officers seated at each terminal doing their best not to make eye contact as she passed. Meanwhile, Clover walked the carpeted aisles rimming the shallow amphitheater, ready to step with a cooler head if she needed him to.

Brightstroke hardly paused to take a breath between sentences. “Scouts are confirming the presence of a small running generator on the roof however they have not seen any active defensive systems in place that it might be powering. The Rangers have not set up exterior defenses either and have no scouts of their own that we’ve identified, which lines up with the theory that they’re operating without sanction and may be unlikely to reveal themse…”

She cut the lieutenant off with a flick of her wing. “Stop, please. Go back to the gunshots. How many were there?”

Brightstroke didn’t skip a beat. “We don’t have a confirmed count, but most of our assets in the vicinity agree there was sustained automatic fire followed by four distinct shots shortly after. Executions, likely, though we are unable to confirm the presence of additional hostages.”

She turned back and followed the narrow aisle’s gentle curve, ambling her way behind the seated officers and glancing only briefly at the lieutenant standing at the front of the room. A thin, wooden dowel floated in pink haze beside her, ready for use should something on the monitors behind her need a good pointing at.

She didn’t bother to ask who lost the laser pen this time.

“No one was seen entering the building other than Paladin Ironshod and the mare with him?”

“No, ma’am. Not since our first scout identified their location.”

Which meant either someone had turned traitor, or Aurora had somehow gotten her feathers on a weapon and tried to shoot her way out. Primrose shut her eyes for a moment and blew out a frustrated breath. When she didn’t speak immediately after, the fidgety lieutenant filled the silence.

“Alpha and delta flights have the structure surrounded and are ready to attempt an extraction, ma’am.”

Extraction isn’t the damn priority. She cleared her throat to bite back the retort before she could give it a voice. She could see them peeking at her from the corners of their eyes, ears turned unsubtly toward her as they awaited the answer they were all clearly expecting. It was the same murmur she heard in the bunker’s common areas, the prickling whispers that reached her ears when no one thought she was around to overhear. Ever since Aurora Pinfeathers made contact with the Enclave in her desperation to rescue her companion, it was all anyone in New Canterlot could talk about.

A pureblood pegasus, alive and in the wasteland. Free of the disease, contamination, decay and who hailed from not just a Stable but Spitfire’s Stable. A place long thought to have been buried and forgotten but which had now spat out a descendant of the greatest generation of pegasi to have ever lived. And of fucking course the news had spread like a grease fire, burning its way through the city with no hope of containment. It had taken every ounce of willpower she had not to have the comms officer who answered that call thrown into a very, very deep hole in the ground. After all, this was something to be celebrated.

Yippee. Woohoo.

Getting ahead of it had been… well, non-negotiable. Seeing as Aurora had shown an uncanny sense of compassion by freeing then-corporal Mint Julip, the logical choice was to send the cantankerous mare back into the field to find her liberator and figure out why she had left Stable 10. On top of all that, it was imperative Primrose know exactly what sort of knowledge that dapple gray bundle of problems had taken along for the trip. She had the answer to her first question, something which aggravated her greatly, but she had nothing to show for the second. She had to assume that with Julip now disowning the Enclave, getting anything of value out of Aurora willingly was no longer on the table. Worse still, now that the Steel Rangers were all but literally knocking at Stable 10’s door, she couldn’t afford to allow Aurora to think she couldn’t trust the Enclave to act in her interest.

She took a breath. Her ability to leverage ponies into action had gotten her where she was now, but suddenly all of those familiar tools had been taken off the table. Aurora’s friends had already made contact with Elder Coronado, and that silver-tongued kirin had the influence and raw resources to force Coldbrook to reverse his assault on Stable 10 on his own. One mistake on her part could easily send Aurora running off to Coronado for help while simultaneously cutting Primrose off from any chance of containing this mess.

Aurora needed to be managed and more importantly, most of New Canterlot expected Primrose to leave no stone unturned in the effort to secure her safety.

At least on the bright side, the Stable dweller’s foray into Fillydelphia had presented an opportunity too tempting to ignore. Never before had the Rangers of a coastal stronghold grown so assured of their security that they would be willing to devote so many resources toward what most chapters would call “civilian matters.” And of all cities, Fillydelphia, where the ancient guns of Vhanna sat perched upon their lofty towers.

Primrose paused her stride and turned to face the array of monitors behind the chatty lieutenant. Markers denoting the dozens of pegasi successful in entering the city were converging toward a mass already growing in the city’s northern ruins. However five small pockets still remained where they had gathered throughout the populated city center, each forming a point of a pentagon in the middle of which stood Magnus Plaza.

“We don’t move for extraction until all assets are in place. If our pureblood is still alive, I want to give her every possible chance to stay that way. No half-measures.” Her chest tensed as she awaited pushback. While unease could be seen in some of the less patient officers in the room, none spoke up. Good. “In the meantime, what’s the status of those turrets?”

The lieutenant glanced at the screen on her foreleg. “Teams one, two and four are in place and awaiting orders. Team three got hung up by a patrol midway up The Evergreen but removed them without detection and are making their way up. Team five reported good progress at the Drake Building but are handling a ghoul problem in the upper levels. Apparently the Rangers use an old window washer’s crane to bypass…”

“Lieutenant.”

Brightstroke clamped her mouth shut and nodded.

Glancing at Clover, she could tell he knew she was trying to finesse an unfinessable situation. The more unfamiliar ponies seen gathering in the shadows surrounding a picked-over restaurant up in the ruins meant greater and greater odds that someone would notice, but she wasn’t willing to pull the trigger on that extraction until she knew her teams were in position to hijack those turrets. If one mission was discovered, the other risked immediate exposure and subsequent failure. Their timing had to be perfect.

She paused for a moment before speaking. “Have anyone who hasn’t already made it into the city fall back and disperse. We have too many chips on the table already. And relay a message to beta, charlie, and echo’s flight leaders to move their hooves north before Aurora dies of old age out there.”

An officer seated behind one of the glowing terminals sat up a little straighter, his feathers settling onto the keyboard in front of him as he pecked out the relevant encoded message.

Primrose met the lieutenant’s eye, nodded her appreciation, and turned to leave. There wasn’t anything left for her to do here except loom, something Princess Luna had once been known for. Spending a millennia sealed away at the bottom of Canterlot Castle tended to breed some social insecurities in a pony, or so she heard. Primrose walked past the seated officers and was joined by Clover as she ascended the shallow steps toward the door leading out. She had an excess of energy to burn and there were several miles worth of bunker for her to walk it off in.

Clover stepped ahead of her and pulled open the door. In the heavily guarded corridor beyond, he leaned toward her and murmured, “You’re juggling quite a bit, ma’am.”

She grit her teeth at the insinuation. “You think we’re overreaching?”

He nodded, mindful of the light traffic in the adjoining corridors ahead. “I do.”

“So why be coy about it?” She smiled at a mare who slowed to make way for them. “You have a voice in this, Clover. Tell me we should wait for another day to attack those turrets and I’ll send the order.”

She watched his expression as they walked, but Clover said nothing. He was rarely a conflicted stallion, but this wasn’t a situation any of them had a clear answer for. This was risk rearing its ugly head in its ugliest form.

He shrugged his wings, a gesture of futility. “Were we living in a perfect world, I would ask for a few weeks or months to plan this operation thoroughly. As things stand now this may be our only realistic opening to make a move. The situation with Aurora is moving quickly and I’m not confident our forces will be able to balance this many plates without dropping one. You need to be prepared for this to go sideways on you, ma’am. I’d be surprised if it didn’t.”

Primrose chewed on that as they passed a common area where one of the off-duty shifts reclined in plush sofas. A television playing reruns of a popular Manehattan sitcom while a clutch of pegasi faced off against a team of unicorns in a raucous game of ping-pong. She ignored the stack of caps pushed against the center net, a violation of her regulation forbidding gambling outside of licensed - and taxable - establishments, and they continued on.

“If one or both of these missions fail, we’ll all pay the price for it,” she agreed. “But.”

She lifted a single brow at him as she spoke. “If we succeed, we stand a chance to shatter the Rangers’ confidence in their Elders. Coronado’s chapter has been a bulwark for more than a century all thanks to those guns of his. Imagine instead of turrets guarding their skies the Rangers look up to see wreckage falling into the streets. Coronado’s neighbors will have no choice but to respond as if we’re preparing a greater assault on his city. Not even Coldbrook would be able to talk his way out of sending his Rangers east in support.”

She couldn’t help but grin as she spoke, knowing full well she was lauding in a victory she had yet to achieve. “Of course most reasonable minds would know we can’t afford a fight on two fronts, but according to their own propaganda we’re desperate enough to try anything. Public opinion will force Coldbrook to act, and if he’s forced to divert enough able bodies toward the coast it could create an opening for us to break out of this fucking bubble they’ve penned us into. We could take back our territory, possibly even as far east as Foal Mountain. We could have room to breathe again.”

Clover waited for her to finish before taking a slow, deliberate breath. She felt her lip twitch with the slightest bit of defensive anger at his hesitance. He wasn’t the least bit optimistic. He didn’t trust her foresight. She could tell.

“Prim, I want everything you just described. I do. But I’m worried that you’re not considering what might happen if this fails, and maybe badly. We may be looking at a full wing of pegasi grounded and forced to fight their way out of that city while having to worry about the wellbeing of a pegasus known to catalyze new problems wherever she goes. If this goes south, we stand to lose all of them. What then?”

She tried not to glare at him just then. She really did.

Grudgingly she muttered, “Then we’ll lick out wounds and move forward. But we’re not going to botch this. Trust me, Clover. I have all of this under control.”

Thunder rattled the old beams of Harbor House.

The winged residents of the shelter had grouped into the kitchen with the notable exception of Julip who, to distract herself from the unwanted stares, occupied her feathers by dealing cards onto the weathered coffee table. She and Roach sat together on the moldy couch, both of their attentions divided between the game Julip was trying to teach them and the heated conversation coming from the other room. Now that Chops was up and about, he and Dancer had gathered the other Enclave members and broken the unpopular news that Harbor House was to be abandoned.

Being assigned to what amounted to paid vacation with the perk of disposing of the occasional wayward dustwing was a cushy gig, and suddenly the arrival of a traitor and two wastelanders who understood the purpose of this place had thrown their comfortable posts down the toilet. None of them were happy with the prospect of returning home for reassignment, least of all the somewhat pot bellied stallion who was now arguing they would be better off killing their guests to preserve the House. One of his compatriots slapped him across the chest with their wing and ordered him to quit bitching, and when the chastened pegasus turned to eyeball the three outsiders through the doorway he’d been dismayed to see those same guests seating themselves on his couch where the faint green glow of several plasma weapons illuminated the floor behind their hooves.

The argument had devolved into complaining grumbles as Dancer laid out their updated orders from New Canterlot, namely the routes they would be taking to return there safely. Ginger half-listened as she sank into the broken recliner, her attention pulled to the warped window behind Roach and Julip where the points of an old picket fence still managed to poke out from under a ridge of blowing sand and scrub. The storm’s approach was steadily darkening the midday sky rather than bringing the usual eerie green glow that accompanied the radstorms Ginger was used to. Half a day gone with no news. Every second ticking by wasted sitting here doing nothing.

“Your turn, Ginger.”

She reluctantly tore her gaze from the approaching weather and looked down at the cards still laying face-down on the table in front of her. The recliner sighed as she straightened and picked them up, keeping an ear on the conversation in the other room. The deck belonged to one of them and despite the mutual dislike between Ginger’s group and the one currently being evicted, she couldn’t help but appreciate the care and attention which had been put into each card. Each one had been individually drawn with a ballpoint pen with an artist’s skill down to the numbers and suits.

She selected two and placed them at the center of the table, one face-down. Julip had tried her best to explain the rules but Ginger hadn’t gone out of her way to listen. Something about the face-down card being a multiplier for the face-up. Julip called it Hoof n’ Claw. Ginger looked dimly at the table as Julip took her turn, her thoughts elsewhere.

Her ear twitched at the sound of many hooves shuffling in the kitchen. The meeting had wrapped up and she watched through the open door as the residents of Haven House filed out through the back door of the kitchen, most of which shot ugly looks back at her as they walked out. Ginger pursed her lips and glanced at the dim glow of the weapons still stowed beneath the furniture. She didn’t pretend to know the rules Primrose held her soldiers to, but abandoning equipment this potent couldn’t be normal. Granted, nothing about the last several days came close to normal, but it still struck her as needlessly wasteful even for the Enclave.

“Finally.” Julip flicked the tip of her wings toward the kitchen in a shooing motion, then grumbled as she took a fresh card off the deck. “Bad enough I have to take shit from those two.”

She looked back to the kitchen where Dancer and Chops still stood at the rear door, watching the others depart. Dancer glanced over his shoulder and noticed the three of them staring. An unsettling prickle ran up Ginger’s spine as Dancer murmured something inaudible to Chops, pretending not to have seen them watching, and the two stallions casually stepped outside.

The door slid shut.

Something was up. With the card game promptly forgotten, she got to her hooves and started toward the kitchen. Then she reconsidered and diverted toward the front of the common area and the staircase at the front of the house. Sensing trouble, Roach and Julip had risen as well and followed close behind her. She turned to them and touched a hoof to her lips before mounting the steps. They crept to the second floor as quietly as the creaky building would allow.

The kitchen’s back door hung below the boarded-up window of one of the upstairs bedrooms. A few slivers of dimming daylight filtered in between gaps just wide enough to peer through. The departing Enclave members were on the beach now, following the shoreline north on hoof. She spotted Dancer and Chops huddled on the windward side of a low dune that had built itself up along the old fence line, but they weren’t speaking. Ginger grimaced as she watched Dancer sign something to Chops, his lips pressed closed. Chops haltingly responded with a series of gestures but stopped midway when Dancer talked over him. More than once Dancer looked back to the house, his eyes scanning the windows. She didn’t have the faintest idea of what either of them were saying.

Which was why Julip startled her when she began whispering, eyes slitted against the gaps between boards. “Until see… um, signal… us group stay.”

Ginger looked at Julip for a better translation, but the younger mare’s eyes were still glued to the gesturing outside. She uttered a frustrated grunt when Chops began signing again, his back partially to the house and his feathers moving much faster than Dancer’s.

“Building… tall? Slow the fuhh… guns, safe. Er, not safe.” She shook her head. “I think he’s talking about the city’s turrets?”

Dancer’s heated voice carried across the distance. “What do you expect me to–” He stopped himself, glaring toward the house, and made a series of hard gestures as if he were hammering the words into the air.

“What do you expect me to do about it?” Julip supplied, adding, “I not… orders writer. I not plan maker.”

Chops jabbed a hoof toward the city, his expression incredulous.

“Plan bad. Guns signal… the gun signal will be too late. Danger big. Unicorn… punish? Unicorn punish us.”

A low rumble rose from Roach. Ginger’s expression darkened as well, her ears burning.

Dancer flicked a wing toward the house.

“What think…” Julip went quiet for several seconds, her mouth working silently as she deciphered Dancer’s frustrated movements. “What do you think Primrose will do to us if we fuck up again? You heard the radio. They identified…”

Julip stiffened, her brow lowering as she read the conversation with pensive silence. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, visibly regretting asserting herself as translator. The words dropped from her lips with a deep reluctance. “They identified the rogue Paladin and he’s cornered. All she needs us to do is keep our mouths shut until they extract the pureblood. Our orders couldn’t be any…”

Ginger lost focus on the dictation, the words jumbling into nonsense as her world narrowed to a pinpoint around Dancer and Chops, wings waggling, the two of them discussing the risks and merits of keeping her in the dark as if it were no more important than deciding who got to sleep and who took first watch. They knew where Ironshod was hiding which meant they knew where Aurora was, and they’d kept that from her.

Her magic pulsed and the boarded window, dusty walls, Julip and Roach blinked away with a rush of displaced air. For a split second she was weightless, suspended above the sand as the dune and Dancer and Chops materialized with a startling violence of wind and sound that made her eardrums pop. Dancer was the only one capable of shouting his surprise but both stallions reared away from her abrupt materialization with equal measures of shock.

Dancer’s feathers reflexively dropped toward the holster strapped high on his hip, but incensed as she was Ginger reacted swiftly. She wrapped her magic around their sidearms, wrenched them from their holsters and planted each weapon into the sand with sufficient force to render them irretrievable without the aid of a shovel and a strong back. Chops already had his wings in the air, not wanting to go through the miserable experience of being shuffled a second time.

Time was something the two of them had wasted too much of already. She fixed Dancer with a dangerous stare as distant lightning silhouetted the city skyline behind him. “Where’s Aurora?”

His eyes lingered on the divot in the sand where his gun had vanished. Even now, the stallion was recovering from what he’d seen her do. “I… look, Ginger, we don’t know yet but we’re getting close. Once they find her you’ll be the first…”

Her magic slid under his belly until it found what she was looking for and latched on with a vice grip, cutting him off with a startled yelp before he could finish. Her voice shook as she took a step toward him. “I will put your balls in your mouth if you lie to me again. So don’t.”

Dancer staggered uncomfortably in her grip but wisely kept himself from lashing out. Back when she was just another unicorn in Junction City he might’ve been able to yank himself away, but not anymore. Not without losing something precious in the process. He looked to Chops for help but his partner kept his distance, head shaking quickly in the universal gesture of don’t give her any ideas.

“I, er, we don’t– ah!” Her grip tightened with a glare that dared him to lie again. “We can’t tell you yet!”

The back door of the house flung open with Roach and Julip sprinting out onto the sand. She glanced their way and knew the first thing Roach would do is try to de-escalate this. She grimaced and looked back to Dancer. “Tell me, or I swear I’ll geld–”

“Ginger, stop!”

Roach’s voice grated in her ears. She didn’t break her gaze with Dancer. “Take Julip back inside. I’m handling this.”

Neither of them listened and soon they were sliding down the dune’s loose slope, both of them breathing hard from a cocktail of adrenaline and exertion. She wanted to put her hooves over her head and scream into the wind as Dancer looked furtively over his shoulder as they passed behind him, both of whom quickly saw exactly how Ginger was trying to squeeze him for answers.

“Ginger,” Roach said, speaking her name like it was an exposed wire on a landmine. “Slow down and think.”

“I don’t need to think. He knows where Aurora is.” Her gaze shot to Chops. “They both do.”

Chops took a step back, his wings dropping into a frantic blur of signs. Dancer grit his teeth as he read them from the corner of his eye, then quickly shook his head no. “Don’t be fucking stupi-ah!”

Ginger relaxed her grip just slightly enough to secure Dancer’s silence, but Chops was still signing away at his partner with hard, slashing motions. She took a deep breath as Roach stopped beside her, close enough that he knew she’d have to work to ignore him. Her hoof bounced angrily against the sand, the silent argument between the two stallions continuing despite her. She met Roach’s cool gaze for only a fraction of a moment but it was plenty of time for her to know she’d already lost control of this… whatever this was.

She gestured weakly at Dancer and hated how she sounded as she repeated the obvious. “He knows.”

Before she could cobble together a stronger argument, Roach’s leg settled around her shoulder and lowered his head to her level. She could see the glow of her horn reflected in his eye. “He does, but he’s also here on Primrose’s order. Ignore him for now and think about what could happen if she finds out we mutilated one of her people.”

She swayed forward a little, her body compelling her to get away from him so she could pry what she needed out of Dancer. “I don’t care what she thinks.”

Roach’s grip around her shoulders tightened. “Hey. You do because Aurora does. The Enclave is the only thing keeping Coldbrook out of the Stable you two plan to live in when this is all over. Right? That’s the plan?”

She swallowed the little ball of hate in her throat. “That’s the plan.”

“Good,” he murmured. “Then let Dancer go and let’s think of a better way to go about finding her. Okay?”

She narrowed her eyes at Dancer who nodded frantic agreement with Roach’s suggestion. Pinching the corner of her lip between her teeth, she looked away and doused the spell. Dancer’s back end sagged with visceral relief.

Roach gave her shoulder an approving squeeze. “Don’t think for a minute we’re giving up on her. We just need to apply pressure that these two will respond to.”

She glowered at Dancer who promptly slunk away with a bow-legged gait. “He was responding to my pressure just fine.”

Roach’s chuckle only sounded a little forced as he released her shoulder. “You might consider exploring a tactic that doesn’t rely on castration.”

“I’ll consider it when we stop taking turns being kidnapped,” she seethed, flicking a disgusted hoof at the two stallions. “The Enclave doesn’t exactly have a regulation requiring these idiots to talk when wastelanders ask nicely.”

Yet as she finished speaking, she realized another conversation was still taking place well after her horn went dark. While Dancer had hobbled away to nurse his bruised balls, Chops’ signing had grown slower and more deliberate. He was speaking with Julip who, to her credit, was doing her best to piece together what he was saying. Her responses lacked confidence, she seemed to be signing questions that he could interpret and answer. Ginger and Roach watched the two former allies until, finally, Julip nodded and turned to them.

“Okay, so two things,” she said. “Chops doesn’t want anything to do with us anymore. Or, more specifically, Ginger. You scare the shit out of him and he wants off this mission.”

Ginger frowned. Chops watched her without blinking as if she were some wild animal who might lunge at him at the drop of a pin. She grimaced a little, surprised by the slight twinge of guilt in her chest. “Duly noted,” she said. “What else?”

Julip glanced at Chops and signed something that he observed in his periphery, unwilling to let Ginger out of his sight. When she finished, he nodded.

“He’ll tell us where Ironshod is holed up, but there’s a condition.”

“Fine, okay, what condition?”

To Ginger’s surprise, Chops directed a series of gestures to her. His expression was grave as he executed each motion.

Beside him, Julip translated. “He says he wants our guarantee that we can keep our stories straight when Primrose asks why we didn’t stay at Harbor House. If she believes Chops or Dancer were the ones to tell us, she’ll assume they let me override her orders a second time and accuse them of disloyalty.”

Which meant they would wind up strapped to a wooden post on the dangerous end of a firing range. The Enclave had never been one to shy away from a public execution, especially when dealing with accused traitors. The same abrupt end awaited Julip if ever Primrose managed to lure her back home. Ginger looked at Chops and felt the raw edges of her anger soften. Julip was proof positive that not all ponies bearing the Enclave’s uniform were beyond redemption, and as much as she hated to admit it, Chops at the very least didn’t strike her as… terrible.

More crucially, he was offering to point them toward Ironshod. And wherever Ironshod was hiding, Aurora was sure to be nearby. Enclave be damned, she’d make a deal with the Lord of Chaos himself if he were making the same offer.

“Deal.” She turned to Chops. “Tell us what we need to do.”

“Tell her to stop!”

Roach’s voice grew simultaneously distant and near as the streets of Fillydelphia shrank and rushed back in around them. “Ginger, hit pause on the teleports for a secauugh!”

She ignored them as she bore down on her magic, the three of them stuttering north along Fillydelphia’s maze of streets as she cycled through the process of casting, reorienting herself, focusing on the farthest patch of empty avenue she could make out in the distance and casting again. She was really getting the hang of this. A real spell, not the common levitation every unicorn with an intact horn could pull off. This was magic and this was exactly how they were going to beat Dancer’s report to the Enclave soldiers gathering around Ironshod’s literal hole in the ground.

Startled cries from ponies flickered in and out of her ears as she ferried the three of them north toward the ruins where Aurora was being kept. Block by block she kept track of how far each jump stretched, the map of the city Chops had fetched from inside Harbor House hanging open in her mind as they progressed. Julip and Roach were not enjoying her novel form of transport in the least bit if their yelling was any measure, but it was no picnic for her either. Each jump felt like layers of vertigo being stacked on top of one another in one big nausea sandwich, but she kept up the momentum. They were covering ground in minutes that would have taken hours. Hours Aurora didn’t have.

Streets filled with ponies hurrying to escape the sudden downpour tapered into lightly patrolled roads. Emptying roads became cluttered with fallen masonry. Broken wagons. The burned relics of steel carriages dating back centuries now sinking into churning puddles of rusty rainwater forming around them. Each short jump was like another frame in a long slideshow highlighting Fillydelphia’s decay as the building surrounding them grew shorter, the streets narrower, and the damage from the balefire that gutted the city’s northern half unignorable.

He had her in a restaurant, Chops told them. A Red Delicious building tucked on the corner of an intersection in a suburban business district. It was the same restaurant chain Aurora had once found a deathclaw making its den, and something about that connection gave Ginger the confidence to keep going. If Aurora could escape a deathclaw unscathed, she could survive Ironshod.

“Oh goddess...” A croaking retch rattled up Julip’s throat as her stomach emptied itself. One jump through the ruins later and the contents were splashing against the wet pavement several blocks behind them.

“Let her catch–” Another lurch, another jump across the ruins, “–her breath!”

Not a chance. Ginger dragged her waterlogged mane out of her eyes and fixed her next jump. If it weren’t for the storm she could see more clearly what lay ahead and really give these jumps some legs, but something nagged at her that this spell wouldn’t take her somewhere she couldn’t see. Or if it did she might end up like the traveling magician Gallow had admired so much.

“We’re nearly there! You’ll have to hold it in!”

Julip could handle it. She could feel the heat from Roach’s eyes burrowing into the back of her head but she ignored him. This was a few short minutes of temporary discomfort compared to the over twenty-four hours of terror Aurora must have felt since she was taken.

Her body ran hot with anxiety at the thought of it. What had Ironshod wanted from her in the first place to come all the way out here? It couldn’t have been to kill her or she and Roach would have found her lying on the crater rim alongside Julip. Information, then. She could feel the sweat wicking up the roots of her mane. Aurora was as bad a liar as she was impulsive. A bad combination for someone staring down the barrel of an interrogation.

No, she thought. Aurora was a clever mare. She wouldn’t give him a reason to hurt her. Probably she was suffering from boredom and little else, waiting for Ironshod to agree to some kind of bargain that would see her walk free and allow him to brush this off as a simple mix-up. Probably.

Maybe.

She spotted the second lone “wastelanders'' galloping through the rain in the same direction but Ginger didn’t stop to say hello. Throwing each spell forward felt natural, like stepping through a door bridging vast distances. See the destination, form the spell and step into that new place. A rush of wind, a burst of light, again and again. Dancer’s report would be bouncing its way back from New Canterlot by now. She recited their constructed lie in her head. The pot-bellied stallion from Harbor House had switched on a receiver in the house just long enough for the three of them to catch the updates being broadcast to echo squad over the Enclave’s encrypted frequency. They’d waited for the House residents to depart before overpowering Chops and Dancer, both of whom now wore matching shiners courtesy of Julip, and escaped before either stallion stood a chance at stopping them.

Wind and light. Wind and light. Her stomach churned with sympathy for Julip but there wouldn’t be any sense in stopping now. A team of four ponies hurried along the sidewalk in single file, wings visible and hefting plasma weapons of similar design to the ones Roach and Julip had snatched up before they left Harbor House. A few blocks up the street the unmistakable shape of an apple leaned drunkenly atop its marquee. The Red Delicious. She charged her horn and released the spell.

The rust-caked sign, its dented post and the intersection that the restaurant stood on roared into existence around them. She held her breath in anticipation of the chaos she’d already built up in her mind’s eye: Enclave soldiers huddled behind hastily made barricades, their myriad of rarified weaponry prepared for engagement, shouts of surprise and disbelief at the sudden appearance of three ponies who Primrose had specifically sequestered away from the volatile showdown between enemies forged from the same emerald fires of war.

And yet save for a few shallow strips of windblown debris piled against the curb, the four corners appeared to be empty. No Enclave, no Rangers. Just a boarded up restaurant penned in by the skeletal remains of long vacant offices.

She hardly had a moment to catch her breath before a deep pain bloomed between her eyes like thunder, flaring as if her body were punishing her for the sudden magical exertion. Her eyes clenched hard and for several exhausting seconds she bore the worst of it, feeling her own heartbeat pounding in her head like a sharpened pickaxe until the torment began to subside into a more manageable ache. Maybe the unicorns before the war had a better word for that bolting pain but all Ginger could compare it to were the awful headaches she and her sister used to get when they ate too many ice chips at once.

When she opened her eyes again, Julip had wandered off to her right where she had her forehead propped against the edge of a broken newsrack shimmering with rain and stringy bile. Roach stood guard beside her but even he looked miserable. He stood with legs splayed, balance ruined, his face a mask of discomfort as he squinted at the surrounding buildings with open suspicion. Fresh guilt washed over her as it dawned on her that the rapid teleports must have been an awful, nonstop carnival ride for their equilibriums. As the ride’s operator, Ginger had felt none of it.

There would be time for apologies later. Tightening the cinch on her saddlebags, she turned her attention toward the lonely restaurant and the rusted carriages forming the loose ring around it. Something didn’t feel right. With the amount of Enclave that Chops claimed to already be in place coupled with the pegasi they’d passed on the way, there should be someone here.

The sky above flickered like a tripped breaker followed quickly by a deep crack of thunder. She could actually feel the weight of the downpour grow heavier against her back as if the city itself were trying to drown her. Pushing toward Roach, she indicated the rainwashed buildings overlooking the restaurant. “Do you see anyone?”

He shook his head, his words cut with lingering discomfort. “Give me a second.”

She grimaced and stepped toward Julip who spat a gob of muck into the running gutter. “Hey. I’m going to assume your old friends have scouts watching the restaurant. What happens when they see us?”

Julip scowled up at her. “They throw us a party. I don’t fucking know, right now they’re probably hoping someone else gets their rank stripped for using illicit chems during assignme–” Her back arched with a heave that brought up nothing. Her wings hung loose at her sides as she spat to clear her mouth, every word colored with exhaustion. “I don’t know. They probably won’t shoot if that’s what you’re asking, but if you go in there and fuck up Little Miss Majesty’s plan to disable the city’s air defenses I can guarantee her friendly act will dry up faster than a cyst in a salt mine.”

She chose not to picture that as she glanced back the way they came, toward the towers of the city center now shrouded in rain. She didn’t know exactly which skyscraper each of Fillydelphia’s turrets stood perched on, but she knew they were there. Powerful weapons known best for their role in decimating that first wave of Wonderbolts sent to initiate the shooting war with Vhanna, now one of the crown jewels of the Steel Rangers’ formidable defense systems. She tried to imagine caring about those guns tumbling to the streets below and decided she didn’t. Her priority was Aurora.

But if avoiding conflict with Primrose meant the Enclave would continue to slow Coldbrook’s advance into Aurora’s home, she wasn’t about to upset the applecart. If the Enclave wanted to use them, no harm in using the Enclave right back.

“We’ll go in quiet and keep this contained.” She squinted up at the relentless deluge. “The storm should help with that.”

“Yeah, count me out.” Julip didn’t so much shake her head for emphasis as she did rock it miserably against the ridge of the newsrack. “I can’t walk straight right now let alone shoot, so here.”

Julip shrugged her right wing, bringing the strap of the plasma rifle she’d taken from Harbor House over her ears and off her shoulder. Ginger frowned at the ungainly weapon, lit her horn and pushed it back toward the young mare. “You’ll be less of a target if you keep it. Roach, keep her safe.”

Taking a breath, she turned toward the darkened restaurant and stepped into Roach’s outstretched foreleg. He swayed uneasily beside her, his expression grim.

“No. You don’t go in there alone.”

“I’ll be fine,” she insisted. “I have my magic.”

The changeling was unmoved. If anything her reassurance only worried him more. “You know exactly two spells, and who knows how long that’ll last. If you keep betting all your chips on magic, eventually you’re going to lose.”

He didn’t know about her dreams. He didn’t know what Tandy had gifted her.

“Ginger,” he pressed, “think about how much you just used to get us here. What happens if you go in there spells blazing and your tank runs empty? What would it do to Aurora if you get yourself killed?”

That wasn’t fair and she could see he knew it too. The rain flowed like tiny rivers through the cracks formed by his desperate expression, his eyes pleading for her to wait.

She was long past waiting.

“Get Julip out of the rain and keep her safe. End of discussion.”

Before he could argue she turned her attention to the restaurant, lit her horn and was gone.

Amber light, a rush of wind and a twinge of pain behind her eyes. Her hooves dropped onto the raised sidewalk wrapping the dilapidated Red Delicious, the shattered and boarded front door standing motionless in front of her. Above her head, rain hammered against the building’s rusted awning and splashed behind her in broken curtains of dirty water. It was anyone’s guess how long it had been since Fillydelphia last saw a storm like this. Ginger wondered if it was possible for a city to drown.

Her ear twitched at the mechanical sputter of a generator somewhere above her. She frowned through the cracks between the boards. No lights on. The sliver of the dining room she could see looked empty except for the silver sheen of puddles forming beneath drips in the ceiling. Already she could hear the voice in the back of her head worry that she was too late and Aurora’s captors had moved on. Her heart went to her throat at the thought of it but she pushed it down as hard as she could. She focused on the rattle of the struggling generator to reassure herself. They were here.

A quick glance over her shoulder into the pouring rain. She could make out Roach, still standing across the street where she’d left him with Julip now using him as a crutch. She could imagine any Enclave scouts were still struggling to report her sudden appearance, but they wouldn’t stay quiet forever. If any of them felt there was a chance to salvage their carefully constructed mission without making a mess of things, they’d take it. She steadied her nerves, turned back to the restaurant door, and carefully hooked her dimmest magic around the handle.

Gaskets crackled and hinges whined as the door opened, and she slipped inside.

Sounds from the storm outside became distant as she pulled the door shut. The generator’s rattle morphed into a muted, droning buzz that resonated through what remained of the skeletal drop-down ceiling. Forming her magic into a dense semicircular shield ahead of her, broken glass crackled under her hooves as she stepped out of the vestibule and into the dining area.

No Rangers. No Aurora. Just a scrambled jigsaw puzzle of overturned chairs, tables and a few errant bits of equipment that signaled the brief occupation of a heavily armed force. Parts of a heavy rifle lay disassembled on the table of one of the booths, the rest haphazardly scattered across the floor. A canvas rucksack lay nearby, looking trampled. Through the damp she could taste cigarette smoke still in the air. She waited for several seconds, listening, feeling the steady patter of water glancing off her saddlebag. She rolled her hip, aware of the precious cargo inside. A single, onyx talisman crafted by lost technology. Something Aurora had risked everything she had just to search for and which now rested safely within a bandaid box in Ginger’s bag. She didn’t even know they’d found it. That once they found her, they would be able to go home.

She relaxed her magic and the shield evaporated, darkening the empty building even further. Something had happened here. Tables and chairs had fallen like dominos pointing toward the front of the restaurant. Scuffing on the dirty tiles traced converging lines through a narrow gap in the counter behind which stood the black shadows of the kitchen area. Yet no one had jumped out to confront her. That many Rangers would generate some kind of noise. Shifting hooves, the rasp of flicked tails, the dull hiss of breathing. Nothing. Just the deep rumble of thunder outside and the rain percolating through holes in the ceiling.

A light spell would have been nice to learn, she thought. She felt foolish as she approached the front counter, hoping to spot a decorative crystal she could illuminate with a bit of magic. Nothing of the sort availed itself. Ponies before the war had the luxury of reliable electricity. Her eyes settled instead on a faded stack of plastic cups poking out of a dispenser beside a gaudy, apple-themed beverage dispenser below the menu board. She plucked one out with her magic, its natural glow providing a small amount of light on its own, and floated the cup into the kitchen along its long wall of stovetops and fryers. No one appeared in the dark. No power armor lurked in the shadows. It looped around stations filled with rotten condiments and back toward her, passing a behemoth ice machine before she set the cup down onto the counter.

It occurred to her it was possible the Rangers had either gone or they were somewhere outside, chasing down the source of their sudden evacuation. Perhaps they’d left Aurora behind in the meantime? Emboldened by her imagination, she doused her horn completely and stepped into the kitchen. The click of her hooves bounced off the kitchen’s easy-clean plastic paneled walls, her eyes refusing to dispel the ghost of amber light lingering in her vision. But as she passed a rusting grill top nearly the size of a dinner table and stepped into the restaurant’s dishwashing space, she realized she wasn’t seeing a remnant of her magic’s light at all. Dim electric light spilled up from a hole in the floor tucked away in the corner, barely illuminating a set of stairs below its wide frame. The restaurant had a basement.

The tracks left on the filthy floor led directly to the hatch. She approached it, slowly, her heart crashing in her chest. As she drew closer she caught a whiff of something pungent and sour, like copper that had pickled in some pony’s toilet. She held her breath as she took the last few steps toward the hatch and, hesitantly, looked down the dimly lit stairs.

She was startled to see someone grinning up at her, the stubby barrel of an automatic weapon floating on his silver magic. Ginger hardly had time to throw herself away from the hatch before an explosion of bullets sprayed inches from her nose and buried themselves into the rotted ceiling. Her hasty retreat planted one of her hooves onto a fallen broomhandle and she stumbled backward against the basin of a wash sink.

“I was wondering where you’d gone!”

Ironshod’s voice. The same paranoid stallion from the wall when they first arrived at Blinder’s Bluff. She heard the dull clatter of a weapon striking the basement floor, followed by the metallic clack of another being made ready to fire.

“I’d of thought Feathers would’ve cut you loose miles ago,” he shouted up to her. “Makes a person wonder whether you really did cut ties with folks back home or if you’re just another set of eyes for the Enclave.”

She ignored him as she rose to her hooves. He’d heard her coming and she’d given him ample time to be ready. Wary that he may rush the stairs, she scanned the kitchen for anything she might use as a weapon and grimaced at the empty racks lining the walls. Of course scrappers would have picked this place apart. She needed time to think of a strategy. Ironshod seemed like the type who liked to hear his own voice.

“I’m only here for Aurora,” she called, looking into each of the sink basins for anything she could use. A few rusted pans. A soup pot. A metal spatula. A cluster of dead radroaches. “Is she here?”

A low chuckle. “It won’t matter to you if I say she is or isn’t. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think she was.”

The heavy pot let out a wet crackle as she pried it loose from the rust that bonded it to the sink. It wouldn’t stop a bullet and she hoped she wouldn’t need it to. She sure as the sun didn’t have time to reassemble that rifle back in the dining room. Beggars can’t be choosers. “If you have her, then do the right thing and let her leave. We don’t have to fight.”

“That’s where we differ.” She could hear him moving down there. “Unlike you, I’m not afraid to get my hooves dirty. Your comrade down here found that out when she lied to me. She didn’t think I’d be willing to do what’s necessary to protect my people. To protect families from the Enclave incubator you all tried and failed miserably at keeping us from finding.”

She gave the pot a test swing to feel its weight, hating how awkward and unbalanced it felt in her magic. “Is she alive?”

The smile in his voice sent a chill down her spine. “Definitionally, yes.”

“She’d better be, for your sake.”

A rumbling laugh. “A good Ranger fears failure before death.”

“Cute.”

Approaching the open stairwell, she plied her magic until a dense shield took form over the hatch. She needed a clear view to the bottom if she stood a chance. Almost immediately a short burst of fire pummeled the shield’s underside, sending bright ripples through its structure while driving fresh agony through Ginger’s head. She bared down as Ironshod fired a second volley, then a third. The sensation of the last two bullets piercing through her shield felt like she’d been struck across the brain with a lead pipe, briefly causing the spell to falter before she could redouble her focus.

“That’s some impressive magic. We heard rumors about something similar from the slaves coming to the Bluff out of F&F Mercantile’s base of operations. Guess it wasn’t complete bullshit after all.”

The sharpest corners of the pain were quickly subsiding into something comparable to a terrible headache. Manageable, but still distracting. She crept toward the edge of her shield.

“So what’s the game, Ginger? Am I your prisoner or is this just another threat?”

She didn’t answer. As quick as she could without throwing herself off balance, she poked her head over the stairwell and jerked herself away. It was enough to put together a rough picture. Ironshod was using a wall at the bottom of the steps as cover, the side of his head and full body of an imposing looking rifle exposed. The floor was pitch dark and smeared with something yellow. It took her a second peek to realize she had it reversed. The yellow streaks were the floor, and it was drenched with blood. Too much blood to have come from one pony.

Her thoughts briefly flashed back to the shed behind Gallow’s home and the sheer depth of blood caked across the wooden floorboards. Her leg took on a nervous bounce as she realized the only voices she could hear were Ironshod’s and her own. The absence of Aurora calling up to her was akin to a physical hole bored into the world around them. Her thoughts began to spiral. Her breath grew fast and deep.

She tightened her grip around the pot handle and summoned her magic. Ironshod’s taunting laughter didn’t register as she formed the spell.

“Gone are the days of magic duels. If you have a grudge to settle why not be a real mare and come talk to me face to–”

A flash of light and rush of wind. The dark kitchen dissolved. Her hooves dropped into the semicoagulated blood pooled with a sickening splat. She faced the ascending steps. Ironshod’s gun hovered a few inches in front of her, the stallion himself standing against the wall to her left with barely two feet of empty air between them. He had just enough time to form an expression of genuine shock as the soup pot in her grip swung forward and collided with his open mouth.

The pot rang like a struck bell. The force of the blow sent Ironshod skidding across the blood pooled floor.

Breathing hard, Ginger took a moment to absorb her surroundings. The small space was lit by a single, struggling bulb in the center of the room. A few empty shelves stood along the far wall against which Ironshod lay crumpled and disoriented. Piled in the furthest corner were the myriad sources of the blood slowly covering the floor like liquid rust. Her stomach threatened to crawl out of her throat at the sight of the conspicuously absent Rangers. More than one had been shot neatly through the forehead.

She turned back to Ironshod with accusation on her lips only to realize he’d half-rolled over, one eye buried against the bloodied floor while the other pale green marble fixed wide on her. His horn was lit. Instinct kicked in and she wrapped her magic around his hind leg. She yanked him toward her and the rifle he’d been levitating behind her fell harmlessly through his suddenly unfocused magic. Ironshod sneered through broken teeth as she dragged him to her. He’d only be safe if he was unconscious. She fumbled her magic for the soup pot and brought it to bear only to catch a glancing blow from his hind hoof across the chin. The pot fell and she staggered sideways barely managing to stay upright as the room spun around her.

She’s barely steadied herself before he was on her. The full weight of his considerable frame barreled into her like a freight train, knocking her off hooves and sending the two of them tumbling past a steel door caked in frost. She hardly had time to process what it was before two steel shoes slammed hard against her sternum pinning her back against the floor. Her saddlebags flopped out like vestigial wings, the well-tailored leather from Scootaloo’s Stable sinking into the blood. Ironshod stood above her like a wolf pinning its prey.

He moved quicker than she thought he was capable. He clubbed her across the jaw with a free hoof, filling her vision with bloody red spots. She tried grasping at her magic but he had an eye on her horn and struck her harder, and harder again until she released the tenuous fibers of the shield spell she’d been feeling for. Her mouth began filling with blood which she spat up, too disoriented to direct it anywhere but straight up where it rained down on her in a pathetic mist.

Satisfied with his work, Ironshod directed his attention to the bodies piled in the corner and pawed his magic at one of their holsters. He grinned a bloodied smile of his own as he wrenched the weapon from the dead. Ginger followed his gaze and felt a bolt of fear at the sight of a heavily engraved sawed-off shotgun crossing the gap between them. Adrenaline shoved aside enough of her shock to allow her brain room to think.

Magic swirled up her horn and Ironshod twisted back to strike her. His hoof speared down at her face with sufficient speed for its iron rim to spark off the square surface of the shield that bloomed ahead of it. He grunted an unintelligible curse and dropped his hind hoof across her knee. The bone held but her lungs pushed a scream past her throat as the pain shot through her body. She clawed at her magic in the thin hope of teleporting away but she couldn’t focus. The raw agony refused to allow her the slightest picture of a place that wasn’t this tomb he’d goaded her into. Her horn flickered and flashed as she opened her eyes, tears streaming as he kept her pinned, the shotgun he wielded pressing hard against her forehead.

“I should blow your fucking brains out.” His lips peeled away from shattered teeth as the shotgun’s yawning barrel drifted down the bridge of her muzzle, brushed along her neck before settling into the space between them. He pressed the barrel against her intestines and smiled coldly at her terrified expression. “But you ruined my mood.”

She shook her head and whispered, “Don’t.”

“I think I will.”

Her heart dropped as his expression hardened. There wasn’t time for a clever spell and words wouldn’t dissuade him now. She did the only thing she could think of and rolled hard toward the wall. Ironshod’s hooves slipped out from under him and the shotgun discharged with a roaring BOOM that punched into the floor with the sound of rent metal. Pain bloomed across Ginger’s hip and for one terrible moment she knew she’d been shot.

But she hadn’t. Neither of them had. Ironshod’s fall had turned the muzzle just enough for her to dodge death and directed the dense cloud of lead shot through the space occupied by her saddlebag. Bits of metal and leather and shattered concrete crunched under her as Ironshod grasped at her with hoof and magic, wasting no time trying to get back atop her. She let him. Her focus was entirely on the gun tumbling in the space between them, its smoking barrel lurching this way and that like a top ready to fall. Setting her jaw, she focused what magic she could gather and pushed the barrel against Ironshod’s belly.

She squeezed the trigger but it didn’t budge. Silver magic had wrapped around the shotgun’s safety switch like a vice and when she met Ironshod’s gaze it was wild and triumphant. His hoof came down across her muzzle like a hammer. Her vision blurred. Laying on the other side of the room was the dented soup pot. She reached out for it. A weak amber haze wrapped the handle, enough to pull it closer. Ironshod’s ear twitched at the sound of the dragging metal and he turned toward it.

She seized the moment, wrapped as much magic as she could muster around the shotgun between them and tore it free from his control. His head spun forward in time for his forehead to make firm contact with the butt of the gun, staggering him. She drove the heavy stock into his temple and he stumbled off of her. She didn’t stop. Again and again she rammed the weapon into his skull until the stallion tumbled, falling against the heap of corpses he’d stacked in the far corner.

Blow after blow, Ironshod’s strength diminished. His endurance drained. He held up his forelegs to protect his face only to have those assaulted with the same desperation. It took what felt like minutes but couldn’t have been more than a few seconds for her to realize he wasn’t fighting back. His limbs had fallen limp, his jaw grit into a softening sneer as he either slipped into unconsciousness or died. She didn’t know which.

She didn’t care which.

Breathing hard, she stopped. A part of her wanted to keep going. To beat him until there was nothing left but a stain on the floor. It took great effort to push that temptation down, but somehow she managed. With a shuddering breath she gathered herself. She kept the mangled shotgun trained on him in case he decided to start moving again, her lips curled into a grimace as she tugged a jacket away from the lifeless body of a mare at the top of the pile. She paused to read the bloodied patch stitched on the chest. Rivers.

She tore off the sleeves and bound Ironshod’s hooves with good, sturdy knots before using the rest of the jacket as a makeshift hood. The paladin mumbled something in slurred gibberish. Alive, then. Hopefully by the time Coronado’s people took him into custody he’d be cognizant enough to understand whatever punishment the Elder deemed fitting.

She turned to assess the room.

Her eyes stopped at the freezer door. During their struggle, blood from the floor had splashed against the smooth metal surface and was already beginning to form a soft crust of frost. Her heart pounded with realization. She rushed to the door and fumbled with the handle. It snapped back with an icy crunch and she pulled, hooves wrapped around the latch until the brittle gaskets crackled apart and the door lurched open.

The cold air thickened into a dense, pooling mist as it poured from its frigid confines. She stepped inside, gaze fixed on the terribly misshapen figure seated inside. A rock formed in her throat when she recognized the mare’s dapple gray coat, soaked in her own blood. Frost rimmed her closed eyes. Her chest was still.

“No,” she whispered. Her second breath propelled her forward. “No no no, Aurora!”

Warmth.

She curled into it, her body seeking the source for nothing else but the comfort it gave her. Survival was secondary. It would happen or it wouldn’t. All Aurora could think about was not wanting to die in pain.

There was plenty of pain. Consciousness came and went with it. Ginger was crying. She wanted to tell her not to cry but her throat wouldn’t work. Then came the jostling. The nauseating sensation of gravity swinging around her like a foal’s toy on a string. She focused on the warmth and nothing else. It felt nice.

Someone was pouring water on her. It started as a trickle then slowly she could feel it against her back. Her body must not be working right because it felt like tiny jolts of electricity on her skin. Her nerves jangled with fresh agony at the overwhelming sensation and she became vaguely aware that she was screaming. The movement stopped and she heard Ginger’s voice in her ear, piqued with frantic reassurance.

“It’s okay. You’re okay. It’s just the rain. I love you. You’re okay.”

She didn’t understand what rain was and it didn’t stop hurting. Her skin felt like it was on fire. Each hair of her coat was a sharp needle. It hurt to be moved. It hurt to be. Her body swarmed with signals telling her so many things were wrong that she couldn’t pick them apart.

“Roach! Julip! We need help!”

She tried to open her eyes and managed only one. Wet concrete. Like in Stable 1. She lifted her head off Ginger’s neck and tried to understand where she was. The ground shuddered like a mirror with fat, heavy droplets. Dirt, dust and rust gyred in puddles big enough to swim in. A black creature and green pony dropped from a broken window across the street, their faces stricken.

Her cheek thumped against Ginger and she used her working eye to stare skyward. Several figures watched from the rooftops.

More jostling. They laid her out on the wet pavement. Questions of what happened, is she alive, and where’s Ironshod bounced between them. Too much to follow. Questions she didn’t have answers for. The ground felt warm, too. Comfortable. She closed her eye and focused on it.

Hooves dropped in around them. Unfamiliar voices spoke with intensity.

Somewhere close, five mighty explosions shattered the sky.

Next Chapter: Chapter 37: Remembrance Day Estimated time remaining: 32 Hours, 38 Minutes