October 25th, 1087
Thursday

“Knock-knock.”

Delta silenced a groan as she closed out the program on her terminal. Nearly ten years stuck in this luxury tomb they called a Stable and they were all still bumping into phrases and habits that didn’t work anymore. Of all the things she missed about her old life, she hadn’t expected wooden doors to make the list. Every door in this place opened with the press of a button or flip of a switch. Mammoth hydraulics embedded between the walls hauled hermetically sealed steel doors up and down with the same mechanical hiss, and yet some habits never truly died. Spitfire stood in the open door of her tiny office, hoof tapping the steel frame as if to apologize for the unannounced visit.

Like everyone else, she thought she had a good idea of what it felt like to be a tinned sardine. She slid a feather over her keyboard and toggled open an old diagnostic report while Spitfire invited herself in.

“Can I help you with something, overmare?”

Spitfire shrugged, eyes drifting over the cramped little space her Head of I.T. kept herself cooped up in. Delta waited.

“Nothing really, no. I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”

The graying mare, former commander of the Wonderbolts, walked over to the orderly row of filing cabinets on the far side of the office and browsed the framed photos perched on top. She picked up a picture of a tiny Apogee grinning at the front door of Jet’s apartment in her first homemade Nightmare Night costume. Cardboard boxes, tinfoil, heat tape and marker had turned her into one of Jet’s satellites, complete with a pair of baking sheets tied to her wings as solar panels.

Spitfire smiled. “I haven’t seen this one before. Is it new?”

“Oh, uh, yeah. I found it in storage.”

Her shoulders relaxed when Spitfire set it down and turned toward her desk, her gaze still wandering over the room’s spartan décor. “So how are you holding up?”

She settled into her seat. “Doing fine.”

“Good. That’s good.” Spitfire’s feathers ruffled against her jumpsuit as she shrugged each wing as if to remind Delta she wasn’t wearing hers. She resisted the urge to remind Spitfire that she wasn’t a Wonderbolt and that she didn’t do uniforms. Thank goodness it wasn’t mandatory. Spitfire appeared to notice the stubborn expression settling on Delta’s face and stilled her wings. “Can I expect to see you in the atrium for Remembrance Day tomorrow?”

She averted her eyes to her terminal and pretended to skim the spreadsheet on the screen. “Pretty sure I’ll have my wings full down here. Sorry.”

“But it’s a holiday.”

Her jaw tightened. “I know.”

Spitfire looked at her just like her college friends did when she used to flake out on their plans in favor of study sessions with Jet. Except she and Spitfire weren’t friends. They would never be that. And still, Spitfire stood there in front of her desk waiting for her to bow under the pressure of social obligation. She might have cracked if she hadn’t spent the majority of her life living in her junkyard, alone, or as alone as she could manage when Jet wasn’t dumping Apogee in her lap.

She closed her eyes and sighed. Even now, with streaks of gray in her mane, she kept falling back onto that dusty old grudge.

“Look, I get that it’s going to be a big day and you want all the department heads to be there, but I’m not going to risk my ten year bit on a block party upstairs.”

Spitfire actually puffed up a little at the insinuation her Stable wasn’t completely dry. Delta lifted an eyebrow as she rattled off the usual promise. “No one will be serving alcohol during the festivities. The foals will be there.”

Not officially, no. That never stopped the pegasi downstairs from coming up with home brewed beverages of their own. There was an unwritten rule that Security would turn a blind eye to the bathtub moonshine as long as the adults kept things to a dull roar and nobody got sick or hurt. They also quietly escorted anyone back to their compartments if they had a little too much. In exchange for the accommodation, those wingful of pegasi running stills agreed to pay an additional fee for any materials or produce purchased to keep the moonshine flowing. As long as everyone behaved, everyone was happy. So far, unbelievably, the arrangement worked.

Spitfire chose not to elaborate on what mysterious methods she would deploy to keep Remembrance Day dry, because there weren’t any. Booze would be in attendance as sure as the pegasi who came to drink it. She wasn’t about to heave herself off the wagon just to make Spitfire feel better about the turnout.

Tactfully, she gave up trying to pressure her and changed the subject. “Anything new come in from outside?”

She cleared her throat and frowned at her terminal to make sure the old diagnostics were still up.

“Nothing worth writing home about.” She winced, but Spitfire didn’t chastise her for the slip. Stable 10 was their home now. “I mean, nothing significant. The distress message from last month went quiet today. We caught some chatter on the low band frequencies, too.”

Spitfire crossed the room, her attention captured by a framed blueprint of Delta’s first fully functional thrust vectoring control system. She watched the overmare as she squinted at the fine lines detailing the complex internal plumbing, wondering if she understood what it was she was seeing.

“What kind of chatter?”

“Nothing encouraging. A couple ponies on different sides of the continent got some ham radios working and found each other over the airwaves. They’ve been swapping stories with each other for the last few nights. One of them has some kind of new necrotic disease that’s been going around and the other’s a conspiracy wonk who thinks the Equestrian Army is behind the monsters he keeps seeing. Millie has it all recorded if you ever get bored.”

Spitfire declined with a polite headshake, her eyes still on the blueprint. “It’s gotten a lot quieter out there, hasn’t it?”

It had. In the months following the detonations all of the common frequencies were jammed with competing transmissions. Everyone with a radio and a set of batteries clamored for their voice to be heard, for someone to help. At the beginning, the cacophony had mainly been filled with the voices of public officials, law enforcement, first responders and members of Equestria’s shattered military. Ponies trying to throw authority, clout and medical expertise out for anyone willing to listen in the hopes that their collective orders, demands for cooperation and advice would prevent the remnants of Equestria from collapsing onto itself.

Then came the individual voices. The survivors who stumbled across a working radio and begged whoever could hear them to send water and food, then shelter, then guns. Civilians shouted over one another in one attempt after the other to organize, to defend themselves against the violent groups beginning to clot together in Equestria’s ruined cities. Ponies reported sightings of creatures lurking near the bomb craters that they couldn’t explain, claimed their magic was failing, and regularly panicked that Vhannan soldiers had been seen landing on the coasts. Keeping track of what was real and what wasn’t proved impossible. Listening for too long sent several members of I.T. into spirals of anxiety, proving that there was some merit to Stable-Tec’s decision not to equip the Stables with transmitters of their own. With Equestria coming apart at the seams, the safest option was for each Stable to remain silent and disappear.

Yet as the years marched on, the voices thinned. The survivors succumbed to sickness, starvation and, more recently, predation. The frequencies grew calmer. Those who did broadcast only did so briefly, their voices ghostly whispers. Nowadays, Delta had Millie set to listen for and compile any errant broadcasts for her to review later. It had taken some time, but Equestria was finally succumbing to the bombs.

Delta glanced up at Spitfire and offered a half-shrug in answer. “Yeah, it has. But at least we saved everyone we could. Right?”

Spitfire looked down at the floor and nodded thoughtfully, her chest swelling with a long breath that she exhaled like a burden. Delta watched her half-turn away, her body drifting toward the door even before she spoke. “Well, if you’re doing alright, I’ll get out of your mane. Think about making time for Remembrance Day, though. Ten years is a big milestone.”

She watched her toggle the door open. “Sure is. Thanks for visiting, overmare.”

“Anytime, Delta.”

The door slid down between them with a gentle thump. As soon as she could hear the door to the corridor slide open and shut, she sank her head into her hooves and blew out the breath she’d been holding. That was close. Way too close. She’d been anticipating Spitfire’s invitation to Remembrance Day for the better part of a week and on top of everything else she was dealing with it had worn her down. She could barely look at her. For seven long months Delta had been sitting on what she’d found, too afraid to share it with anyone and not nearly suicidal enough to levy accusations at the overmare directly. Not until she knew the reason why.

She lifted her head and stared at the terminal’s tiny pixels. The security footage played fresh in her mind as if it were spooling out on the screen for her. Spitfire had just… stood there at the Stable’s entrance, Wonderbolts behind her, watching dozens of noteworthy pegasi flocking into the tunnel like frightened birds. The feed from the outside wasn’t meant for her eyes, but Spitfire’s amateur attempt to put a lock on the footage made it stand out like a sore hoof. Delta knew how to cover her tracks better than most.

The footage from that day had been hard to watch. Friends, neighbors, they’d poured into the tunnel with little to their names beyond singed feathers and a lifetime of trauma. It had been surreal seeing herself, ten years younger, delirious and bleeding as Windy’s late husband all but dropped her onto the steps in front of Spitfire before turning around and kicking off against the tide of terrified evacuees. Even today she found herself flinching when the bombs made the camera shudder, her memory cruelly supplying the devastating thunderclaps of each explosion as they chased them all into the Stable.

But then others had shown up. Unicorns and earth ponies. They gathered around the outside platform in a growing tide, their faces pulled taut with terror and outrage as Spitfire and the Wonderbolts around her shouted at them to stay back while the last pegasi retreated to safety. Delta watched the door roll shut on one side of the screen while survivors continued to crush toward the stairs on the other. shouting with terror and outrage as Spitfire and her entourage retreated to safety and rolled the door shut behind them. By the time she stopped the playback, there had been pegasi pounding at the door. She played it back a second time, then a third. She’d read the Operational Protocol Briefs the same as all the other department heads, and Stable-Tec hadn’t minced words when they said theirs had been selected to function as a time capsule for Equestria’s strongest pegasi bloodlines. The original resident list said nothing about inviting non-pegasi to register.

She scratched her eyebrow with the edge of a feather. It didn’t make sense. Hundreds of unicorns and earth ponies had arrived, most of them carrying the same recommended amount of luggage as Delta herself had been told to keep prepared. The next nearest Stable was a good hour’s drive away out in the bluffs. They hadn’t gotten lost. They couldn’t have all just followed someone else’s carriage to the wrong Stable. Every last one of them had come here expecting to be allowed inside and the betrayal on their faces when the door rolled shut had been difficult to witness. Never in her life had Delta seen such simultaneous, concentrated horror before. She saw their faces whenever she closed her eyes. Families coming to the realization at the same time that all their preparation had been in vain. That death had cornered them.

Delta leaned back in her chair, the weight of questions she didn’t have answers for pressing her into the padding. The Stable’s population had finally begun to tick upwards. If things went well this year, they were looking at crossing the 300 mark. Three hundred pegasi in a Stable designed for one thousand. What harm could have come from letting those families join them? She couldn’t make the question go away. It kept her up at night, her thoughts spiraling around it like debris in a storm. Spitfire tried to bury it. Now Delta wished she’d never dug it up. This wasn’t a question she could just toss out over a cup of instant coffee. The fact that she’d opened the footage without seeking her overmare’s permission at all was enough to earn her a thirty day stay in a cell upstairs.

She glanced at the glossy calendar pinned to the wall beside her desk. Remembrance Day was tomorrow. Illicit sources of homebrew aside, Delta knew it was going to be a hard day for everyone. A few of the other department heads had prepared speeches of their own before the overmare took the podium to read the names of those they had lost.

A sigh pushed past her lips. She could spend a few more sleepless nights staring at her pillowcase. Let the Stable grieve first. Once things got back to normal she would think of a way to ask Spitfire about the footage. There was plenty of busywork she could do to distract herself until then.

She pulled a clump of fading blue mane behind her ear so her deeply bagged eyes could focus on the terminal screen. Feathers tacked across the keys, closing her diagnostic camouflage and bringing up the project she’d been working on when Spitfire came knock-knocking.

A few keystrokes and the innocuous little program she’d coded chattered to life. It wasn’t sophisticated software, especially by Stable-Tec standards, but it did what she intended it to do. Best of all, it was secure. The pegasi working under her, Spitfire, and even Millie’s watchful eyes were blind to the little mapping program’s slow but steady progress. It had been difficult work in the beginning. She’d spent several nights underneath the server room floor, careful to reschedule her team to ensure uninterrupted access while she cut dense bundles of fiber optics away from the high voltage braid feeding into the Stable from the outside. Hours of shuffling through the dust on her back, her wings kicking up clouds as she taped label after label onto the conspicuously unmarked wires. Each one had to be tracked up to its individual server, each port identified, each of a hundred or more outgoing lines ruled out before she finally confirmed the suspicions she had when she first uncovered Stable-Tec’s hardened connection from the outside world. Old habits die hard, and ever since Delta was a filly she’d traded boredom for curiosity.

Once she had a functional understanding of which ports handled incoming and outgoing data, it didn’t take long for her to decide what to do next.

She threw a few test pings aimed at their neighbors at Stable 6, but it was akin to flinging a bit down a wishing well. No one answered. Checking the event log confirmed the request had been intercepted by Millie and smothered. Stable-Tec didn’t want anyone turning their network into an inter-Stable chatroom. Fair enough. She wasn’t trying to check in with the neighbors, though. Like so many others, she was deeply curious about the world she’d left behind. There were survivors out there, fewer and fewer each week. It bore considering that if pockets of Equestria’s radio infrastructure had survived the bombs, maybe there were terminals out there that made it too. Maybe even a network! Or, at least, a terminal connected to a working router.

How hard would it be to find out?

So she decided to break a couple policies and code her first worm.

It wasn’t sophisticated, and the script was prone to jamming up if she so much as looked at it funny, but it did what she wanted it to and that was good enough. The software boiled down to a few basic functions once it was running: scan its current network for Robronco’s ubiquitous interoffice mailing software, compile a list of messages sent outside its current network, ping those networks for activity, and relay the results back to Delta’s personal terminal. Whenever possible, the worm would attempt to send copies of itself to any network that answered its ping but it was a coin flip whether or not it could run itself once it arrived.

The question became where to send it for its first test run. A few names came to mind, Spitfire chief among them. She debated sending it to one of her colleagues in I.T. to see if they were quick enough on their hooves to contain it but then she remembered she still had to work with them after. It didn’t take long for her to make the obvious choice. She sent it to herself.

Seconds later, Millie all but had a stroke trying to contain the worm Delta dubbed “Pioneer.” It flew across the server, diving through the mail system at lightning speed while Delta’s terminal vomited up pages upon pages of data confirming a successful connection to hundreds of resident accounts. As it dredged through the Stable’s old traffic it began finding references to outside networks and dutifully reached out to make contact.

Delta felt a pang of regret when she realized her software had discovered their collective attempts to reach friends and family in the days and weeks after the door sealed shut. She’d set her feathers on the keys and began clicking out the command to temporarily stop all network traffic so that Millie could catch up to Pioneer, but no sooner had she begun to type than her little worm pinged one of those outside networks and received a response. A fraction of a second later it had compressed itself into an innocuous file and jumped the gap.

She blinked as a small block of text appeared on her screen.

Pinged 991.08.7.47 [FortHopeGuestnet].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 3 successful, 1 failed. [25% loss].
- - - - - - [FortHopeGuestnet] logged as active node.
- - - - - - [FortHopeGuestnet] added.
- - - - - - pioneer.zip delivered to [FortHopeGuestnet].

So much for a test run. It didn’t take long for data to begin arriving as Pioneer found additional working nodes and began to spread. It worked. And more importantly to her, it showed her just how many fragmented networks managed to survive the balefire. The vast webwork of communication that promised to modernize Equestria was still there. Shredded, scrambled, and often amputated… but it was there, hanging together by the gristle.

Since then, she would spend an hour each day watching the screen populate with the worm’s findings. It was the most worthwhile waste of time she could indulge in.

Now, just a day before Remembrance Day, Delta watched the data roll in to distract herself from the mountain of dead decaying just outside her shiny new home.

Pinged 13.92.183.169 [britehorn].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 0 successful, 4 failed. [100% loss].
- - - - - - All [britehorn] connections have timed out.
Pinged 104.21.22.18 [derpidatadotcom].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 0 successful, 4 failed. [100% loss].
- - - - - - All [derpidatadotcom] connections have timed out.
Pinged 199.232.296.193 [GreenArrowLogistics].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 1 successful, 3 failed. [75% loss].
- - - - - - [GreenArrowLogistics] logged as active node.
- - - - - - [GreenArrowLogistics] added.
- - - - - - pioneer.zip delivered to [GreenArrowLogistics].
Pinged 104.23.134.9 [coolco].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 0 successful, 4 failed. [100% loss].
- - - - - - All [coolco] connections have timed out.

She smirked with recognition at CoolCo and leaned back in her chair, her back starting to feel sore already. Now that the novelty was wearing off, she began to wonder whether this was just another waste of time. What good did it do the Stable to map Equestria’s surviving networks if the world they inhabited was beyond saving? It would make for an interesting cluster diagram, sure. A snapshot proving the resiliency of technology in comparison to the fragility of life. The remnants of Equestria’s nervous system after the grand mal seizure that of its apocalypse.

Maybe, but it was the maybe not that kept dragging her back to her chair. The warm tickle of nostalgia when a network piped up that she recognized the name of. She’d lost track of how many hayburger chains kept showing up in the list, dragged into the light thanks to what Delta imagined were patrons messaging their favorite cheap eats supplier to express disappointment at the cheapness of said eats. As if on cue, another Red Delicious franchise popped up. No response, as always. R-Dubs had been in the business of hardening arteries, not its mailing network.

She blinked.

New lines spilled across her terminal, threatening to carry away what she’d just seen. Familiarity of a different kind sent her heart racing as she slapped the keyboard, stopping the data midstream.

Pinged 23.22.39.120 [JSITermNet0319].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 4 successful, 0 failed. [0% loss].
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0319] logged as active node.
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0319] added.
- - - - - - pioneer.zip delivered to [JSITermNet0319].

Her voice shook as a sad smile touched her lips. “Jet, you paranoid asshole.”

In spite of the last decade, directly defying the bomb rumored to have impacted the launch facility in Las Pegasus, some stubborn facet of his multibillion bit conglomerate managed to survive the balefire.

A little voice in her head told her it was probably nothing. A pleasant coincidence of simpler times, yes, and she could practically see Jet’s smug face as she scanned the network title for the second time. JSI. JetStream Industries. The “family” business.

Leave it alone, she warned herself. Knowing what happened to her won’t fix the past.

Too late.

She’d already picked up the first breadcrumb.

Rainbow swung her hind hooves back and forth beneath her chair, embarrassed that something so mundane could make her so nervous. She quietly observed Deputy Chaser as he squinted at the tangle of wires drooping out of the hole in the wall where their badge readers had been installed. One of the readers lay on the floor, its cables snipped several minutes ago. The poor stallion kept picking up a pad of hastily scribbled notes, setting it down, then picking it back up again.

“Need help?”

He glanced over to her as if considering it, then shook his head. “I’m good, thanks.”

Doubtful. Ever since the Stable went dark, everything and anything that could be done to minimize distractions to the pegasi of Mechanical was being done. For the past several days that mostly meant picking up depleted batteries and dropping off charged ones where light was needed.

She frowned up at the pale yellow bulb glowing behind its plastic dome above her door. Nobody knew how long the emergency lights would last without the generator to recharge them. One entrepreneuring young filly who had only just begun apprenticing in the Gardens was being lauded for her quick thinking by repurposing her mother’s exercise bike into a sort of pedal-powered mini generator that put out enough current to revive the darkened grow lights in her unit to something approaching twilight. More bikes had been dragged down to the Gardens by the end of the first day, though the almost frenzied work had been temporarily stalled after Sledge got wind of it and assigned a team from Mechanical to ensure the gardeners didn’t start blindly yanking wires out of the walls. It didn’t help the overstallion’s image when his deputies commandeered some of these “power cycles” to be hooked into the Stable’s cold storage units where precious food had already begun creeping up to the thaw line.

It hadn’t been a matter of debate. The freezers couldn’t be allowed to spoil.

Yet none of it would matter if they didn’t resolve the water situation. No electricity meant no pumps meant no water pressure. The Stable’s cisterns might last for a week, maybe two with strictly monitored distribution. There weren’t enough materials in the whole Stable to build a power cycle large enough to restore the wastewater treatment level, and he’d all but forbidden anyone from experimenting with purely chemical processes. The last thing the Stable needed was a cloud of toxic gas to contend with.

Still, his efforts to keep them from cannibalizing their delicately structured ecosystem was making him a target for criticism. Rainbow had seen it happen before. It was as if ponies were hard wired to bite the hoof that fed them. Sledge’s popularity was dropping faster than the water level.

Chaser fished a wire nut from the simple toolbox he’d been given and began rejoining the loose connections. If the power ever came back on, Rainbow would be able to open and close her own door without needing permission first.

“Congratulations, by the way.” The words tripped their way past the flashlight still held in his mouth. “Think you’re in the clear?”

Rainbow stole a glance at the bright pink scar embedded into the back of Chaser’s hind leg, a permanent mark she’d chewed into him with her own teeth. “Probably not,” she admitted. While Blue hadn’t made an appearance for some time, Rainbow could still feel her down there, waiting like a safety net should she need it. “It’s progress though. Three unbroken days without Blue feels like a vacation. And thanks.”

Chaser grunted as he moved onto the next wire. “Don’t mention it. What a vacation?”

“Oh. Just an expression. Don’t forget to connect the ground.”

Chaser noticed the lone wire and bent the exposed copper around the nib of his pliers. As he tightened the wire under a grounding screw inside the wallspace, he looked over to where Rainbow sat and noticed her hind legs swinging beneath her chair. “Nervous?”

She snorted. “Wouldn’t you be?”

“Not if I were an Element of Harmony.”

“Former Element.” She gave the corner of her mattress a little kick, spinning the chair in a slow circle and allowing her to reach the intricately scrolled necklace on her desk with her only wing. The empty socket glinted in the dim emergency light. “Besides, there’s a difference between banishing a Chaos god and…”

Chaser arched a brow at her. “Pouring soup?”

She scoffed back. “No. I mean, yes. Kind of.”

“Thank Celestia you’re not the Element of Decisiveness.”

After a few seconds of silence, the two of them laughed.

“Ass,” she chuckled. “You know what I mean.”

He shrugged and nodded. “So you don’t look exactly like the murals. Who gives a shit, right? You’re Rainbow Dash. Any one of us would kill to find your hair in our vegetable water.”

“Tsk. I don’t shed.”

Chaser turned his flashlight on her, panning the beam over her gray-blue bald patches with a touch of theatricality. “Riiight. Well, if you’re worried about how you look you can always throw on one of Aurora’s jumpsuits.”

Her nose wrinkled. “Swing and a miss. Sledge already tried that. Besides, indulging your insecurity doesn’t take away from the fact that I look like a chewed up jerky strip.”

“Figured you wouldn’t want the whole Stable looking under your tail, is all.”

“So we agree it’s a self-control problem.”

She didn’t try to stifle a smirk when he flickered his light across her teats, gave his feathers a spooky wiggle, and went back to his work. When he didn’t take up his end of the conversation, she rolled her eyes.

“What's the point of it, then? Efficiency? Solidarity?”

Chaser leaned forward a little as he tucked the loose wires back into the wall. “It just makes things easier.”

Her feathers for someone around here with the balls to talk straight with her without the squeamish vaguisms. A dull clunk of metal thudded from the other side of the compartment door followed by the muffled click of the door’s inner workings being forced back into service. Another downside of losing power had meant the hydraulic doors no longer functioned. Thankfully someone in Stable-Tec foresaw the potential problem of an entire Stable being trapped in their rooms should the generator have a hiccup and they had designed a manual override into each one. A removable panel like the one Chaser was currently working in allowed access to what Rainbow credited as an over engineered floor jack. It was slow, but it worked.

Chaser leaned over enough to recognize overstallion’s brick red hooves in the narrow gap.

“Hey Sledge,” she called.

“Hey.” His jumpsuit wrinkled a little with each pump on the door’s extension rod. “Did Opal come by yet?”

Was she supposed to? “Not yet. Just me and the deputy talking about his impure thoughts.”

“Quit having impure thoughts, Chaser.”

The deputy shook his head. “Can’t help it, sir. Always had a weakness for vintage leather.”

Sledge let go of the jack handle when the door lifted to chest height and ducked his head through the opening. He choked down a bawdy chuckle when he saw her face. “We’re due upstairs in thirty minutes, Dash. You coming?”

Her jaw tightened with open discomfort. The mood shifted, and she noticed Chaser glance at her momentarily out of something like real concern before pretending to be focused on his completed work.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It feels…”

“Weird. Believe me, I know. It’s kind of why I was hoping to have company.”

Of course he understood. Okay, maybe not all of it, but some. He knew what it was like to be so far out of your depth that it felt like you’d be there forever. From what he’d shared over the past couple of weeks, his transition to overstallion had been rocky. Like stepping onto another planet with zero preparation, surrounded by hostile alien life, and a hole in his spacesuit rocky. Rainbow knew that feeling too well. There wasn’t an instruction book on how to be a ministry mare. The princesses had told them it wouldn’t be much different than being an Element. It would be a little more organized, in fact. Rainbow had been so convinced her life was about to get easier that she’d dubbed her ministry after a catchphrase she’d stopped using in her twenties.

What a wake-up call the war had been.

She pursed her lips. “It’s just soup, right? No autographs or anything like that?”

Sledge smiled. “It’s just soup. Plus, if you’re there to help, we might finally get some ponies into the Atrium who haven’t been eating since the generator shut down. Seeing you might give them hope.”

“What’s left of me,” she corrected.

He pretended not to hear. “It’s clothing optional, if that helps.”

“Gee thanks, Sledge, I really wasn’t sure it’d be worth meeting the Stable if they couldn’t stare at my bare ass the whole time.” She managed to maintain her deadpan stare for a decent three seconds before cracking. The chair creaked as she dropped to her hooves. “That was a joke, dingus. Let me grab my necklace.”

Relief and a touch of confusion mingled in Sledge’s voice. “You sure?”

“It might help convince some of them I am who I am and not a mare someone left inside a microwave for too long.” The gold plates resonated with a comforting jingle as she pushed her muzzle through the loop. Something tightened in her chest as the cool metal settled as it always had across her now prominent collarbone. Old memories of what putting on her Element used to mean, before she began wearing it as a daily reminder of what she was supposed to represent.

She touched an old feather to the vacant socket at its center. “I’ve given it some thought. I want them to see that it’s empty.”

“Why?”

“Because if they think I can save them, they’ll stop trying to help themselves.” She crossed the room toward Sledge, pausing briefly to flick her tail up at Chaser who promptly knocked over his toolbox trying to back away. She shot Sledge a knowing grin as he helped her under the door. Her back crackled as she stood up in the dimly lit corridor on the other side.

“I’ve seen it happen before,” she said, gracefully ignoring Chaser’s sputtering dig about having seen better. “I don’t want to be the reason it happens again.”

Sledge puzzled at her as he led her down the hall.

“What?”

“You just did two things in the same breath that aren’t…”

A grin crossed her lips as she waited for him to finish.

He sighed. “Nevermind. Soup?”

She nodded. “Soup.”

July 19th, 1077
Canterlot Castle

The guard standing beside Primrose coyly lifted his tail and coughed into his calico fetlock. Moments later the cloud of hot stench hit her like a bulldozer. She couldn’t move away, nor could she allow her revulsion to show on her face. Long gone were the days when the princesses tolerated little slips with kindly chuckles and knowing smiles. With a potential end to the war on the horizon, Celestia in particular had earned herself a reputation for having razor thin patience. She was trapped by decorum and, just like the other ministers’ aides in the castle’s lavish throne room, she had no choice but to endure it. The alternative would have her escorted out to the grand hall, and she hadn’t orchestrated this meeting just to have Rainbow Dash flounder through it unmonitored.

As usual, five out of six ministers stood in a tidy row just a few paces ahead on the throne room’s lush, lavender carpet. Primrose and Rainbow Dash had been relegated to the leftmost side as usual, the result of which placed her within bombing range of the palace guard beside her. The sudden odor hadn’t wafted past Rainbow unnoticed either, evidenced by the slightest irritated glance over her shoulder. Benefits of rank, even if Rainbow held it in name only.

Rarity was next in line, her magic quietly clicking away at her ivory Pip-Buck as she penned a quick message to someone within her ministry. At the far right end stood Applejack, quietly disapproving of the topic of discussion as always without doing anything so bold as speaking up. Element of Honesty? Maybe. She’d become much more careful with her words over the past year, not surprising after she kicked Spitfire's door down and spilled the beans on what she’d learned about the little agreement she’d come to with her paramour. So far little more had come from that outburst. Primrose’s little birdies within the Ministry of Technology confirmed she was keeping the secret for the sake of Rainbow’s reputation and the problem seemed reliably contained. Still, contingencies were in place should the situation change.

Fluttershy stood to Applejack’s left. She had little to offer and quite a lot to say. Of the five of them she had the easy job. With balefire technology firmly within Equestrian control and Maiden Pharmaceutical dragging their hooves with the recall of Twilight’s first-generation StimPacks, Vhanna was bleeding resources faster than they could replenish them. The zebras were fighting on borrowed time. All Fluttershy had to do now was wait for the princesses to get bored of grinding stripes into meat and give her their blessing to sue for peace. Of all of them, the dainty coward had sacrificed the least to gain the most.

Her gaze shifted to Twilight. The arguably grape-flavored alicorn hadn’t stopped talking for what felt like hours, clipboard floating in front of her on a bed of magic, several pages already flipped back with many more to go. She stood at the middle of the gathered ministers, a position she’d gotten used to claiming for decades now. More than ever, she seemed to believe herself the de facto leader of her peers while still managing to justify rejecting the higher mantle expected of her. She even spoke with a measured, unchallenged authority that the elder princesses were known for.

“...reassure me that the last trailers of first generation StimPacks have been loaded and are en route to be disposed…”

Primrose feigned boredom, eyes shifting slowly between Twilight and her sibling rulers. There weren’t many ponies in Equestria who could bullshit the princesses as easily as Twilight Sparkle. While StimPack doses were very truly being shuttled to incinerators across the nation as they spoke, a measurable percentage had quietly been diverted. Twilight desired to see the pinnacle of her magical abilities thrown away no more than Primrose could afford to.

The clock ticked and topics shifted. She half-listened to Fluttershy object to the continued construction of new missile silos across Equestria’s less populated locales. It was the same boring argument as all the other times. Unnecessary escalation this, destruction of natural habitat that. Celestia gave her the usual two to three minutes before delivering the same disaffected promise that she would certainly weigh the merits of her concerns, but at a later time. Whether she’d grown a stubborn streak or was just that dense, the Minister of Peace never seemed to catch on that “a later time” translated into “never.” To add insult to injury, Twilight pounced on the trailing hem of the topic and, as she was wont to do in the face of a challenge, tore it apart.

“If I could have a quick minute,” she said, her magic flitting forward and back through her papers, “I think it’s important for us to cover some facts that Fluttershy understandably may not be fully aware of. Namely the… ah, here. The forty-two percent decrease in aggressive rhetoric from the Vhannan palace since we went public with the missile silo program. On top of that, Rarity, I think I remember seeing some numbers come out of your ministry that mention some significant hesitancy from the zebras when it came to using chemical weapons. Is that right?”

Beside her, Rarity offered a curt nod in response. “We’ve decrypted several communications out of Adenia calling for restraint regarding their use of aeresolized blindweed. Publicly they’ve stated their concerns of friendly fire incidents, but the timing suggests that they’re spooked. News of our silos are driving the point home that balefire missiles aren’t just an Equestrian scare tactic, and that we’re prepared to deploy them if they push too hard.”

Twilight scratched her nose with a long feather, carefully avoiding Fluttershy’s withering glare. “Thank you. Now, princesses, it bears saying that I absolutely sympathize with Fluttershy’s concerns and I plan to see to it personally that a panel is formed to review the environmental damage caused thus far, and in the long-term I think Equestria will thank Fluttershy for championing an issue the rest of us have let fall through the cracks. In the short-term, however, I think it’s important for all of us to stay focused on why we’re here in the first place.”

If Fluttershy clenched her jaw any harder she’d chip a tooth, yet she didn’t speak up. Primrose had seen this fight play out between the two of them over and over again to the point that it was practically expected to flare up for every one of these Friday briefings. Just another box to check before they were finally dismissed back to the Pillar.

“Vhanna is losing the war.” A chuckle touched Twilight’s voice, as if she couldn’t quite believe it herself. “They don’t have an answer for balefire and their people know it. They know we could pull out of Vhanna completely and still decimate their armies at the flip of a switch. They know that we’ve found the door to a new golden age of–”

“PINKIE!!”

A blend of startled, curious and exasperated faces turned back toward the throne room doors, their grand carved scrollwork parted down the center just enough for a single, smirking pink muzzle to poke through the gap. Primrose stole a glance at Twilight and noted that she hadn’t so much as moved a hoof to acknowledge the outburst. She stood in place, lips pressed into a thin line as a heavy silence slowly muffled the echoed name.

Back at the entrance, Pinkie Pie had pushed her whole head between the doors. Primrose caught herself before she could react, but few of the Elements behind her were as mindful of their composure.

When no response came to the once bubbly mare’s call, her exaggerated smile dropped like a weighted bag. Her big blue eyes, now a little dulled with age, rolled with unfiltered obstinance as she stepped fully into the throne room and began crossing the long empty space toward her peers. It occurred to Primrose that Pinkie hadn’t attended one of these meetings - really, any meetings outside of the odd public appearance or two - for at least a year now. With the war fast approaching an inevitable victory Pinkie’s Ministry of Morale was becoming irrelevant to the war effort and at this point her absence was practically assumed. And now here she was, loping toward them one casual step at a time with her eyes peering up at the passing stained glass murals as if she were seeing them for the first time and not the hundredth.

A willowy parade tune whistled from her lips as she wandered from one edge of the narrow carpet to the other, pausing briefly in front of one of the armored guards with a mock-serious expression as she pretended to inspect him before moving on. She’d lost weight again, a worrying trend that Rarity’s ministry had been struggling to reverse ever since the bombing in Ponyville. Pinkie was still some ways away from gaunt but she was steadily working her way there, having shed her eminent full figure for a much more angular frame. It was evidence of a life run off the rails, something Rarity ensured was never spoken above a whisper in public and not at all within the press. It wasn’t uncommon for a pony to shed a few pounds with age, after all, and what mare would say no to being just a little slimmer in this day and age?

“To see the light that shines from a true, true friend…” she murmured, glancing only briefly at Primrose and the other aides as she trotted past them. “Bum. Bum-bum-ba-bum.”

She sidled in between Rainbow Dash and Rarity, giving her butt a little shake as her strange tune ended. Standing just behind her now, Primrose was close enough to see the dark bags under Pinkie’s eyes. Rainbow moved a little to seemingly give her room to stand, but the sour odor of sweat wafting off the bubblegum mare likely had something more to do with it.

A deep silence permeated the throne room as many eyes lingered in Pinkie’s direction, none more notably than those of the princesses. For several long seconds, Primrose waited for something to happen. It was like watching a timebomb tick down to zero, and now they all stood in that terrible silence between the countdown and the explosion.

She jumped when Twilight cleared her throat and lifted her clipboard an inch higher.

“Anyway,” she said crisply, “The last item we have for today regards an update from the power armor division of the Ministry of Technology. Applejack?”

Much like the rest of the ponies in the room, Applejack’s eyes were still turned toward Pinkie. Of the five of them, she appeared the most unsettled by her friend’s sudden attendance. It took her a breath before she was able to put aside her clear worry and shift her attention toward the princesses. “Uh… yeah. So, we’re about ready to finalize our contract with Blackhoof Dynamics for large scale production of our type P-60 power armor. We’ll have ink on paper by month’s end as long as their board votes in favor, which they will if they don’t want the contract going back to Robronco.”

Primrose tuned her out. Robronco wasn’t exactly champing at the bit to manufacture P-60s now that they’d turned their attention squarely toward developing a watered down version of the M.I.L.L.I.E. artificial intelligence software for the public sector. The amount of smoke their marketing team had to blow up the board’s ass to manage that big of a pivot was as massive as it was unimportant. As Applejack began rattling off projections and figures, Primrose silently slid her gaze to the hushed conversation developing right in front of her.

Unlike Rainbow Dash, Rarity had chosen not to move from where she had been standing since the meeting began. As a result, she was taking Pinkie’s impromptu appearance as an opportunity to speak her mind.

“You look like you just rolled out of bed,” she hissed.

Rather than the sickeningly sweet banter she was known for in her public appearances, Pinkie only shook her head while staring forward. “Gee, happy to see you too, Rares.”

Rarity ignored the jab. “You could have at least bathed before coming here. You’re not going to get better if you keep neglecting yourself like this.”

Pinkie laughed under her breath. “Oh, fuck you.”

“I’m serious.”

“Neato. I’m allowed to be here.”

The two mares stared daggers at one another out of the corners of their eyes, their barbs drowned out by Applejack’s long-winded ramble. Finally, Rarity broke the stalemate.

“Why are you here, exactly?”

The question had a serrated edge to it that cut deep. Pinkie mouthed something to herself.

“What was that?” Rarity prodded.

“I said you’d know if you ever came down to talk to me.”

Rarity scoffed. “Not this again. Pinkie, we would all be happy to visit you more often if you stopped guilting us into it.”

Pinkie’s lip squeaked as she sucked on her teeth. “Yeah, okay.”

“And you know full well where to find us if you need to talk. That road’s always gone two ways.”

“Good to know.”

“Pinkie, you need to lis–”

“Ministers.” Princess Celestia’s clarion voice cut off the whispered argument with a single word, though only one of the two mares she was speaking to flinched at the reprimand. When neither spoke, Celestia shuffled her wings against her sides and let out an exasperated sigh. “Pinkie Pie, are you here for a reason?”

Even Primrose winced at that. During what few interactions she’d seen Pinkie have with her so-called friends and mentors it felt like they’d mostly defaulted to handling her like some wayward foal. Smile, nod, encourage, walk away, let her be someone else’s problem. Now with the conflict coming to an end, it was as if a switch had been flipped and the years of frustration from having to hoofhold Pinkie through the war was finally breaking through the facade. Nobody in the room wanted the dysfunctional minister here, least of all the ivory unicorn tasked with handling all the damage control caused by her whenever she roamed outside.

And now Celestia herself was speaking down to her like some unruly filly.

If it phased Pinkie at all, she didn’t show it. In response, she narrowed her eyes with a brittle smile and said, “Yeah, I did. Am. I have a reason, I mean.”

A pause. Celestia cleared her throat. “You have the floor, Miss Pie.”

Pinkie licked her lips and took a step forward. “I want to visit Maud.”

Behind her, Rarity closed her eyes and swore under her breath. Primrose felt her ears perk at the unicorn’s reaction and straightened a little, keenly aware that there were layers beneath Pinkie’s innocuous request. Before Celestia could respond, however, Princess Luna lifted her voice to the question.

“Pinkie Pie, you do not need our permission to see your family.”

Pinkie’s eyes rolled. “I do if I want to visit her on my own,” she said, tipping her chin toward Rarity. “I can’t go anywhere without her goons watching.”

“Dear, your security detail is there for your protection.”

“I’m not a deer,” Pinkie snapped. “And they’re not my security! They work for you, because you don’t trust me to go anywhere alone!”

“Pinkie, this is not the time to discuss–”

The earth pony rounded on Rarity, her audience with the princesses forgotten. “Oh, I’m sooo sorry! When’s the right time? Do you think you can squeeze me in between debriefings or should I wait until something opens up?” Her eyes, red-rimmed and defiant, spun toward the petite stallion behind Rarity. “Or do I need to schedule an appointment with your assistant so you have someone to blame this time when… what’s your name?”

Primrose watched the unphased aide standing beside her. “Inkspot, ma’am.”

“When Stinkpot forgets to pencil me in.” Pinkie’s gaze flicked toward Primrose for a split second, the intensity of her stare sending a bolt down her back. A second later she was back to Rarity, barely skipping a beat. “Maud barely talks to me anymore because your people are there listening in!”

Rarity scoffed. “She would speak more if you didn’t dominate every conversation you’ve ever been a part of.”

The throne room went silent. Pinkie’s expression shrank and for a moment Primrose was certain she was gearing up to throw hooves right in front of the princesses, but if the temptation was there it wasn’t as alluring to the once joyful mare as the option she eventually went with.

“Okie-dokie. Whatever you say,” she mumbled, lifting her foreleg and the chunky pink Pip-Buck attached to it. Stickers in varying states of wear and tear adorned the casing around its square screen, some of them peeled and dirty while others had been worn down to a fluffy white silhouette of old paper. Pinkie shook her head and nosed through menus Primrose couldn’t see from where she was standing, the hollow clicks of the device the only sound in the room. Finally something on the device satisfied her and she pressed one of the keys. The quiet hiss from the Pip-Buck’s padded cuff caught several of their ears, and the cauldron of emotions bubbling under Pinkie’s determined expression grew calm with a half-lidded smile of relief.

Rarity made a disgusted noise. “Really. In here, of all places? This is exactly the reason why I don’t trust you to leave the Pillar unattended.”

“Harumph! Pish-posh!” A euphoric giggle stuttered from her uncontrollable grin. “Relax, fashion horse, I got a prescription.”

She put a hoof on Rarity’s shoulder and leaned toward her, noses practically touching, her voice low. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to tell me how much of a disappointment I am. I already know.” Before she could back away, Pinkie jammed her muzzle into Rarity’s and pulled back with an exuberant, “Mwah! That’s my show, everybody! Help control the pet population! Have your pets spayed or neutered!”

Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Twilight, all of the gathered ponies stared after her with bewildered expressions as she shouldered her way past Rarity and through the row of aides behind her. Primrose watched Pinkie stalk by, noting the complete absence of levity in the mare’s eyes as she bore down the carpet without so much as acknowledging the princesses whose presence she’d just made a fool of herself in. Quiet murmurs rippled through the throne room as Pinkie shoved open the grand doors, alone. No aides met her in the hallway beyond. No guards fell in behind her. The doors swung shut without comment. More than ever, Pinkie Pie was an anomaly. A bubble of oil in an ocean that flowed around her because it didn’t know what to do with her.

“Minister Rarity,” Luna’s voice rang from the dias, “once we’re finished, I’d like to speak with you in private please.”

Rarity rattled off some standard politeness that Primrose didn’t bother hearing. Like the others around her, she was still transfixed by the mare who came and went like a squall on a clear day. In that short time the mood in the room had been irrevocably changed. Twilight had fallen silent, her control of the meeting wrenched away. Celestia stared down at her subjects with open irritation. Luna was setting time aside to speak with Rarity, her tone hinting at the uncomfortable discussion that lay ahead for the unicorn. Pinkie Pie was either insanely lucky, or the last few years of existing apart from her friends allowed her to smarten up enough to pull off the most calculated “fuck you” Primrose had ever seen.

She stared back at the throne room doors and wondered.

October 28th, 1087
Sunday Morning

Ping! Ping! Ping!

Delta groaned into her pillow.

“Good morning, Delta Vee. The time is 5:55am. Would you like to delay your next alarm until 6:05am?”

She pinned her ears to muffle Millie’s aggressively cheery wake-up call. For a super-advanced artificial intelligence capable of adaptive learning, Millie was easily the worst thing to happen to Equestria short of its destruction.

“Cancel alarm,” she mumbled.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t quite get that.”

“CANCEL. ALARM.”

A soft chime. “Your alarm set for tomorrow morning has been canceled.”

She could probably uninstall Millie on her own and nobody would be angry. They’d probably throw her a parade through the Stable. Maybe name a day in her honor. She shot a menacing look up at Millie’s speaker, considering it.

Against her better judgment she sat up and waited for the last hooks of sleep to fall away. She barely remembered crawling into bed. The steady scroll of data streaming down from the outside world and into her work terminal still jittered by like the afterimage of a balefire bomb.

Part of her was beginning to worry someone might notice a significant percentage of the Stable’s generous bandwidth being encroached on by Pioneer’s deluge of data. Three days since she set it loose, it still followed the shattered networks left behind like it were tracing cracks through glass. The rest of her just felt a warm sense of pride, knowing all across Equestria there would be hundreds of thousands of terminals sheltering her little worm almost as if she’d autographed their hard drives herself. She imagined ponies a millennia from now following the tenacious little packet of code back to her Stable and being told it was Delta Vee, a survivor of the old world, who left the trail of breadcrumbs for them to find.

Or maybe they would all be too busy trying to keep the stupid bug from getting onto whatever amounted to computers in the distant future. She grinned at the thought and decided she’d happily take credit for either.

Swinging her hooves to the floor, she shuffled across her messy compartment toward the bathroom, vaguely aware of what parts of the floor were occupied the wing guards she couldn’t be bothered to use, a pile of old bedding she’d get around to hauling down to the laundry facilities, and the sad remains of her personal terminal which had suffered an unfortunate high-velocity trip to the ground after one of her techs decided it would be easier to flood her inbox with work questions rather than solve them himself. He’d since been reassigned to the glamorous world of alphabetizing books in the grade school library on Level 2. Plenty of foals bursting at the seams with questions over there.

Plastic crackled under her hoof. She kicked the rogue piece of terminal housing away and swung around the partition into her little bathroom. The Stable would get through the next five centuries whether or not she was accessible 24/7. She flipped the lever on her sink and pushed her head into the stream of clean, cool water. It ran down the back of her neck and trickled along the ridge of her back, causing her to shiver. The fog of sleep cleared away in a matter of seconds. She shut the water off and flipped the wet mop of her blue mane out of her eyes, pausing only briefly before deciding not to bother with a shower. Something she’d picked up from her years working alone in her junkyard, ponies were less liable to bother her if she stank a little. Most of her techs were going to be too busy getting the servers ready for the network traffic this year’s Remembrance Day was already starting to stir up.

She sat down on the toilet and tried not to let thoughts of the upcoming holiday bother her as her bladder emptied.

How many more years were they going to keep treating October 31st as a reason to fucking celebrate? Remembrance Day was as much about remembering what happened as it was a day to schedule a long weekend around so they could all get shitfaced on bottom-level moonshine. Sure, every year a few unlucky pegasi got voluntold to tell a few stories from the good old days and the names of the lost were read per tradition, but once all boxes were checked off and the podium was taken down the atmosphere turned into a party.

Why even call it Remembrance Day if nobody ever stopped to talk about what they’d all seen? Nobody wanted to mention the way everything just… caught fire. Nobody poured shots to the families who hadn’t flown fast enough or the pegasi who arrived inside so horrifically disfigured by balefire that when death finally came for them it had been a mercy.

She got up and flushed. Water ran through the pipes, swirling in the bowl, spinning and spinning. A frown crossed her lips as the water kept running inside the tank. She sighed and lifted the lid off the tank, balancing the porcelain slab in one wing while she dipped the other into the cold water.

“Eugh.” How did they get this far as a civilization and still never figure out how to stop everything in these tanks from getting so fucking slimy? She fished around the bottom of the tank, irritated by the steady hiss of water as the broken flush chain evaded her feathers.

Of course they would probably know exactly how to fix idiot problems just like this if everyone didn’t duck their heads in the sand whenever something difficult came up. She hooked the chain with a feather but slipped away. She grit her teeth, the tank lid getting heavy. Fucking toilet. Fucking algae growing in the toilet. Fucking Elements of Harmony letting a good world go to shit.

Her eyes stung. She almost dropped the lid.

Fucking Remembrance Day and this tin can full of pegasi too braindead to realize the painful memories were the ones worth keeping, not the cheap one-liners about a husband who always burned the coffee or how great-grandma used to talk about the days before electricity.

She got a grip on the chain.

Every single one of them had been through the worst imaginable trauma of their lives, and all anyone wanted to talk about was the one time Aunt Cobbler couldn’t make a cobbler because isn’t it funny her name is Cobbler. Ha-ha isn’t that a fucking riot, isn’t it so fun to pretend they hadn’t all bore witness to violent death, isn’t it a hoot that none of them wanted to talk about their death parents, their dead sisters or brothers or sons or…

The chain slipped and her temper exploded. She heaved the porcelain lid into the air and brought it down on the infernal shitbowl like a mortar, shouting an emphatic “FUCK!!” as water and porcelain shards sprayed across the bathroom floor.

It took a moment for her to feel the sting from the shallow cut across her foreleg. Rather than think about cleaning up, she just stood there, cold water spraying from the broken pipe sticking out of the wall.

Gradually her anger subsided. Well, shit.

“Millie,” she sighed, bending over to pick bits of porcelain off the floor. “Put a ticket in with Mechanical. I broke the toilet. Flag it as urgent.”

Millie chimed. “Your ticket has been received.”

No point in pulling extra bits from her account to expedite it when the neighbors would do it for her once water started seeping into the hall. She bent down and began scooping the larger chunks into her wing, the embarrassing silence following her outburst drawing out the worst of her frustration. She slid a wingful into the cracked toilet bowl and wondered how many mares in their sixties lost their tempers like that. Then she grunted, a chagrined smile on her lip as she realized it was probably better measured in percentage than total. Not too many ponies around these days anymore.

Careful not to drop a hoof onto one of the remaining shards, she opened the mirror above the sink and pulled out a tin of gauze for her leg. She’d gotten sliced worse digging around for wires in wall panels, but this one was in just the right spot to be a bleeder. A splash of antiseptic and a few layers of clean bandages would tide her over until she could swing by the infirmary for a stimpack.

Water splashed ahead of her as she walked out of the bathroom, picked up a cellophane-wrapped oat bar from her desk, and left her compartment for the plumbers to deal with. She opened the door and braced herself for the inevitable punishment that came with going outside.

“Morning, Ms. Vee!”

Socializing.

She lifted a feather and smiled at the passing filly… Skylark, that’s it.

“Hey Skylark.” The kid slowed to let her catch up. She’d only been three when the bombs fell, and she was one of the lucky foals who wasn’t kept up by nightmares every night. If the Stable counselors were to be believed, half the residents weren’t dreaming at all anymore. “Off to classes?”

The plum coated teenager cocked a brow at her. “Um, duh, there’s no school on Sundays.”

She blinked and shook her head. “Wow, yeah. It’s Sunday, isn’t it? Why are you even up this early?”

Skylark shrugged with the nonchalance of a young mare well versed in choosing which adults to share her secrets with and which ones not to. Delta always felt a touch of pride knowing she’d earned the kid’s trust. Whatever trouble Lark wanted to get up to was her own business. It wasn’t as if there was much to get into down here.

She examined one of the colorfully printed murals as Lark filled her in. “You know who Cirrus Whistles is, right?”

The young mare was already grinning. Say no more. Except she couldn’t just cut her off at the pass like that. Conversations were like a game. Pass the ball, don’t hog it.

“Windy’s colt? Pretty sure they’re still finding his hoofprints on some of the ceilings.”

“Well, he got put on as an apprentice at the bakery up in the Atrium.”

The Flour Patch. For a stallion who came from a background in construction, Clayhearth did some amazing things with cornmeal and honey. Turns out when he wasn’t at the jobsite he had been something of a breadmaker in a different sense at home. His husband was one of the shift leaders down in Fabrication, if she remembered right.

“Good for Cirrus.” She stopped at the central lifts and hit the call button. “Don’t you think he’ll be a little busy, though?”

Lark paced around beside her. “So what? A mare can’t be proactive?”

Delta stifled a laugh. She was barely fourteen. “Word to the wise, kid? Life’s not a race. And stalking young stallions where they work might send the wrong signals, if you know what I mean.”

“What? Ew, no! With Cirrus?!” The elevator door pinged. “He’s dumber than a box of hair! I’m going up for lumpers, not… gross, Ms. Vee!”

The doors opened. A severe looking stallion in a jumpsuit stood in the corner and regarded Delta with open disapproval. He didn’t meet her gaze as they piled in, but that never stopped Varnish from opening his fat mouth in the past.

“Like water off a duck, eh Delta?”

Lark frowned up at him, confused.

“Ignore him,” she said and grimaced when she saw their floor already illuminated. “And back up a second. What’s a lumper?”

The filly’s smile returned. “It’s the name we made up for the bagels Cirrus makes. They’re like… deformed or something. Clayhearth is giving them out for free and I’m going to get there early this time!”

“Sounds like he should be charging at least half price if you’re getting up early on the weekend to get one.”

Lark balked at her. “Don’t give him any ideas!”

Behind them, Varnish snorted. “Delta is nothing if not full of ideas.”

She rolled her eyes. “Shouldn’t you be busy polishing someone else’s wood?”

Lark coughed out a squeaking laugh that hit a brick wall as soon as she peeked back at Varnish. Delta didn’t bother looking at him. He was genetically incapable of laughter. Something to do with all the fumes he sucked way back when he ran a successful carpentry business in Cloudsdale. There was an easy insult to be made about the state of his company ever since it went up in flames, but there were some lines even Delta didn’t cross.

Varnish wouldn’t take the bait anyway. He had the composure of a fucking boulder, and a personality to match. Even hearing him inhale before speaking was annoying. “You know, my son has taken a liking to you, Delta.”

“Not interested,” she growled.

“I’m not proposing. I’m informing you that Cedar has developed a concerning infatuation with your…” She could feel him looking her up and down. “Lifestyle.”

“You should talk to his dad about that.”

Not even a chuckle. Beside her, Lark waited impatiently for the doors to open.

“His father believes it would be time well spent for the mare he’s chosen to emulate to set him straight.” His voice softened as much as stone could. “Somehow, you’ve convinced him that basic hygiene is optional. I’d like you to sit down with him and–”

“I’m not having the your-body-is-changing conversation with your sixteen year old, Varnish.” Her hoof tapped the floor as the elevator climbed.

“Either you do or I bring this up with the overmare.”

“Fucking…” She shook her head. Spitfire wouldn’t care any more than she did, but Delta had a long standing aversion to wellness checks. “Fine. Have it your way.”

She lifted her Pip-Buck, thought better of it, and glanced toward the little speaker grille above the elevator keys. “Hey Millie, validate my vocal signature and block all other inputs from anyone without my clearance. I want to send a recorded message to Cedar Varnish.”

Varnish stiffened behind her. “Millie, disregard that–”

“You may record your message now.”

A tinny chime followed.

“Yo, Cedar. It’s Delta Vee. Your dad’s filled me in on some pretty weird stuff that’s going on. Says you’re not taking care of yourself. Not sure what’s got you skipping showers or whatever, but the old stallion thinks you might have a thing for me and while that’s flattering…”

“I never said he had a thing–”

“And while that’s flattering,” she spoke over him, “it’s worth mentioning…”

She stopped short of saying the honest truth. Varnish would just throw it back in her face and Lark would probably add it to the list of things to feed the classroom gossip tree. Either way, it was a quick road to well-meaning knocks on her door and check-ins from pegasi who hadn’t bothered to talk to her in months. Not that she wanted them to anyway.

“Look, kid. Teenagers are walking, talking tear gas canisters of hormonal stink. Your dad’s an asshole, but I know your mom’s not and she doesn’t deserve to come home from work just to get by your ball-stink. Take a fucking shower. Wash your mane. Wipe your ass. Seriously, kid, you’ll die a virgin if you’re showing the whole Stable your bagel and schmear.”

Lark made a revolted noise. “I’m not hungry anymore.”

Varnish remained menacingly silent.

“Send message,” she said.

“Message sent.”

The elevator slowed to a stop. To Lark’s visible relief the doors parted and she hurried off in a fit of hushed giggles, probably in search of the nearest filly to share what just happened. Delta stepped off as well, wondering if anyone would believe it. Probably not.

“That was a mistake,” Varnish said.

“Not even in my top fifty.” She stopped and turned, blocking him from getting off. Then she nudged forward and slapped her wet feathers over the buttons, dragging toilet water across them until every one was lit. She stepped clear of the door, daring him to make her move, but Varnish just stared at her as the doors shut between them. “Happy trails to yooouuu…”

Dick. Any clout he used to have, well, he used to have it. He didn’t anymore. Nobody gave a crap if you ran the number one woodworking supplier in the tricloud area any more than they cared if your ex-husband was the stallion who pulled away the curtain on Celestia and Luna’s control over day and night. None of that meant anything down here. Stable 10 was the great equalizer in that respect. Still she doubted it would stop Varnish from filing a complaint. Big whoop. A slap on the hoof and a few hundred bits pulled out of her account to pay a fine. Worst case, Spitfire makes her clean her compartment.

As she retraced the familiar route to her office, the overhead PA system pinged.

“Delta Vee to the overmare’s office,” Spitfire’s tired voice echoed through the halls. “Delta Vee, to my office. Thank you.”

Huh.

That was quick.

Rainbow could feel Sledge staring at her under the dim emergency lights. Hooves clicked along the walkway above the makeshift cafeteria line built by the owners of the Brass Bit, emphasizing just how packed the Atrium was. He was lucky she only had the one wing or she’d use the other to find something to hit him with. Her soup ladle jutted out from her lips like a ridiculous cigar.

“Shereoushly. I goddit.”

“You sure?” He, along with the colt waiting on the opposite side of the food line, stared at her with equal parts fascination and pity. “Because it kind of looks like you’re…”

The speckled brown teen waiting for his dinner piped up. “Doin’ indoor stuff to that thing. Plus you’re kinda naked?”

Her teeth clicked defiantly around the stainless steel handle. What was with this Stable? “Yeah? Well thish ish how earf ponies ushed to do eht and no one dropped anchor ober it.” She tilted her head, tipping the cooling scoop of watery tomato puree into the bowl cupped by her wing. To be fair she never had asked AJ to explain the range of grips she employed with that jaw of hers. But then again neither did Sledge or Bulgey McColtson over there. She dropped the ladle into the industrial pot in front of her and wiped the saliva off the handle. “Go eat your soup, kid.”

She watched him trot away toward the clutch of friends he’d arrived with, the six of them giggling as they found a quiet corner of the Atrium to eat in. Rainbow took the moment to look at the faces around them, pegasi of every generation either standing in line waiting to be served or finishing up the last spoonfuls of what was intended to be a special meal provided by their overstallion and a genuine Element of Harmony.

Their reception had been a chilled one. She tried not to hold it against them. As Sledge explained it, none of his fellow residents knew either of them beyond what they remembered from some unflattering stories about Sledge and the rote memorization they’d been required to recite about the dusty and unrelatable faces of the old world. To most of them Sledge was still the caricature of a pegasus he’d presented to Mechanical to ensure the work got done. Many blamed him for their current troubles, and those troubles only seemed to get worse with every assurance he gave. Rainbow knew exactly how it felt to fight that losing battle, and for her the only way to win was to stop playing.

Compared to him, she had it easy. Most of the residents stared at her like she was a history assignment come to life. Maybe it had been her ego talking but she’d expected their reaction to be more… reverent. Or at least relieved to know she was alive.

Scratch that. It was definitely her ego talking. Who'd thought spending most of her adult life being called a Hero of Equestria would screw with her expectations? She imagined Twilight excitedly digging up some old psychology book to tell her about the detrimental effects of excessive formal titles, and chuckled to herself.

The next resident stepped up the line and passed an empty bowl to her like all the rest had. She flexed her jaw and bent to take up the ladle again, only to realize Sledge was already dipping it into the pot for her. Fair enough. Her teeth were killing her anyway and even if she had been preserved like some walking, talking strip of jerky, the miracle of her longevity didn’t relieve the discomfort the residents felt watching her try not to choke on a steel handle.

She held the bowl while Sledge filled it. Yeah, okay. There was a significant reduction of spittle involved in his version of the process. She passed the tomato soup back to an elderly, and politely relieved, stallion. “Here you go, sir.”

“Thank you,” he responded, his silver eyes fixing hers with a deeper meaning. “For trying.”

She smiled back, waiting until he’d walked too deep back into the crowd to hear her. “Not sure that’s what I would call it.”

Sledge nudged her with the back of his wing, and she took the next bowl from the line.

He poured and she served. Residents began moving a little more quickly now, sliding along in a steady procession of hunger and worry. She forced a smile as she served them and some of them even smiled back. Some didn’t notice her at all, or only glanced up at her long enough to catch themselves staring and look away.

A few directed a wingful of heated questions toward Sledge, demanding to know why he was here serving soup and not downstairs helping fix the generator. He explained to each of them that the generator wasn’t the issue and that the talisman, a piece of arcane tech none of these residents had a working understanding of, was the source of the problem. None of them wanted to hear him say that they couldn’t just fabricate a new talisman, that it needed raw magic to function. All they heard were excuses for why their meals were being rationed and why their families couldn’t expect the lights to be on by tomorrow morning.

It was painful to watch, but when Rainbow tried to help explain to a particularly loud mare why sending teams of residents out into the wasteland like Aurora had done wasn’t a good idea, he held up a feather to ward her off. Best to distract her with a bowl of soup and be done with her. The only way she’d appreciate the danger waiting outside would be to throw her into the waiting wings of these “Steel Rangers,” and it was safe to assume the issue would be moot by then.

“I wish I had a better answer for you,” Sledge said, exhausted by the ceaseless nagging from the resident currently holding up the line. “It won’t be comfortable, but we’re going to need to make do with the power we’re bleeding off from the outside.”

The middle-aged stallion snatched his bowl out of Rainbow’s wing, oblivious when half of it sloshed out and onto his pant leg. “Yeah, well, we’d all be better off if you’d stuck to turning screws. Thanks for the soup.”

Rainbow stared daggers at him as he walked away, tracking tomato hoofprints into the Atrium as he went. Sledge shook his head and dipped the ladle back into the pot.

“Maybe you should get rid of the Stable suits,” she suggested. “Be a lot easier to spot the assholes.”

He barked laughter before quickly recomposing himself, though she could tell by the subtle bobbing of his shoulders that he was still chuckling under his breath. “Nice,” he murmured. “I…”

Before he could finish his thought, his Pip-Buck chimed. She waved a silent apology to the next pony in line while he toggled on the screen. The smirk faded from his lips as he read, looking briefly relieved but gradually settling into something closer to unsurity. Clearing his throat, he flagged down one of the Brass Bit employees to take over, pulling Rainbow out of the soup line with him as he dipped away into the restaurant’s empty dining area.

They stopped in the corner where the wall met the cash counter, as far from prying eyes as he could take her without dragging her inside the kitchen. He held up his Pip-Buck for her to see. The stalwart computer looked like someone duct-taped it to a grenade and pulled the pin. Twice. “Take a look at this?”

She wasn’t exactly in a position to say no. Glowing beneath the chipped glass was the update from Aurora they’d been waiting days to receive, but as Rainbow read, her stomach dropped.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 10
To: Overstallion Sledge
From: Aurora Pinfeathers
Subject: (no subject)
04/18/1297
[1 file(s) attached.]

Hello, Overstallion. We haven’t met yet, but I think Aurora has mentioned me in some of your correspondences. My name is Ginger. I’m part of the reason why she hasn’t been able to contact you over the last several days but you should know that she is alive and okay. For the most part. That’s actually the reason I’m sending this message. Aurora and I have only begun to know one another, but your people have known her for her entire life. I’m hoping someone from home might be able to help me through this with her. I’m sorry. I know I’m being vague, but I don’t know if she would want me to tell you the whole truth. I don’t think she would want me to tell you anything, if I’m being honest. Bear with me.

Bear with her, too, I suppose. Aurora has done everything she possibly could over the past two weeks to find an ignition talisman and early on she made some enemies, namely the Steel Rangers. One of those Rangers followed us and he hurt Aurora. Badly. She’s recovering from what happened right now, and I promise you all I will never leave her side again until she’s home.

But I need to be able to get her back to you first. I need to know how to help her survive herself. I hope that makes sense? We’ve had some bad days out here and each time she forces herself to put on a brave face. At first she would say she’s fine and shrug things off, but now everything has gotten so much bigger than her. Especially now. I don’t know how she’s going to react when she wakes up. This isn’t her world. Some of the things she’s had to see and do would screw up the toughest wastelanders, but she’s not. And I don’t want her to keep trying to be this hardened, regretless super mare. She’s been at her limit for so many days…

Luna’s grace, she almost didn’t make it today. Whenever the sedatives wear off I’m going to need to know what to say to keep her from trying to bottle this up too. I can’t help her face this alone.

I’ll try to take a picture with this thing so you know what we’re dealing with. Please respond ASAP.

Sincerely,
Ginger Dressage

Sledge looked to Rainbow for the sage advice mares seemed to always keep between themselves. Aurora had always been a complicated one to work with. A rebellious, stubborn, bullheaded pain in the ass if he was being honest. It was part of the reason she fit so well down in Mechanical. She gave as good as she got, and oftentimes she made a point to go just a bit further when she got the feeling someone might be trying to put her in what they decided was her place. Aurora was a scrapper. The fights kept her from spending too much time in her own head.

The two of them looked at the blurry photo of Aurora lying unconscious in the bottom of what looked like a rusted out metal bunk bed. She faced the ribbed panels of a wall with the thin sheet that had covered her gently pulled back to show patches where her coat looked as if it had been torn out by the root. The joints of her wings were swollen. Facing away didn’t fully hide the thick knot of purpling flesh over one eye, either.

But the worst of it was unignorable. Sledge stared at her ugliest injury, speechless.

The last time Sledge saw her, he’d left her sulking in one of the cells upstairs. The broken mare on his Pip-Buck resembled a corpse more than a living pony. If this was what going outside had done to Aurora, what chance did any of them stand once conditions degraded enough to force them to beg help from the invaders outside their door?

Rainbow broke the silence with a whisper, “You should forward that to one of her friends.”

He winced. “Aurora wasn’t much of a social butterfly outside of work.”

“She has to have some friends.”

“She does,” he sighed. “And they’re all out there.”

“What about you?”

“I…” He opened his mouth, then closed it when the right words didn’t come to him.

Their relationship wasn’t exactly friendly or unfriendly. He’d been her mentor, sure. They’d shared drinks together. But before she left they’d never been ones to share feelings or confide in one another. That gulf between them left by her mother’s passing had always allowed him to fall behind the veil of Professional Boundaries when she started getting heartsick. His job was to teach the kid how to do a job, not become her surrogate parent.

Then it clicked. “Actually, I know someone else.”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 10
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Dusky Pinfeathers
Subject: Advice
04/18/1297

Dear Ginger,

I’ve read your message and I’ve seen the photo you took. From the bottom of my heart, I want you to know that I’ll never be able to repay you for keeping my daughter safe. She’s a tough nut to crack. I’ve tried. A lot of that is my fault, not hers. I’m not clear on the extent of your friendship, but I know my daughter and you seem like the type of mare she needs right now. It’s clear from your description of her behavior that something is and has been wrong for some time now. At the risk of sounding accusatory, I suspect you haven’t painted a complete picture of what has happened to her since she left home. It’s probably for the best that you didn’t, or I’d be seriously considering leaving the Stable and finding her myself. Just be aware that she has people waiting for her to come back, with or without this talisman.

This may not be the advice you were hoping to hear, but I think the best thing you can do for Aurora when she wakes up is to be there for her. I know it isn’t a script, but take it from someone who has already made that mistake, she knows when she’s being spoon fed the “correct” phrases and she’ll stop trusting you the moment you try it. I don’t think you know how significant it is for her to trust you as deeply as she does. Whatever you’ve done to help her get this far, it’s working better than anything I’ve tried. When she wakes up, I’m willing to bet you’re the first one she’s going to be looking for. Be there for her, Ginger. Let her grieve if she needs to. That’ll be enough. I’m looking forward to meeting you after you bring her home.

- Dusky Pinfeathers

P.S.: Tell her we found a temporary fix for our generator problem. She’ll ease up on herself if she knows we’re at least treading water back home. And, Ginger? Welcome to the family.

Ginger let herself smile a little when she read his postscript. Careful not to disturb Aurora, she wrapped her magic around her and floated her sleeping body over a few inches to make room for herself on the mattress. Ocean spray hissed against the walls of their temporary home, reminding her of the rainstorms that rolled out of the weather factories atop Canterlot Mountain. She tucked Aurora’s tail to avoid squashing it as she nestled in behind her. What little sleep she’d gotten since Aurora’s abduction may well have added up to zero as far as her body was concerned. It took everything she had not to let herself doze off as she waited for the Stable’s answer.

Be there for her. It was embarrassingly obvious, but for some reason she needed to hear someone else say it to make sense. She pressed her muzzle into the nape of Aurora’s neck and held it there, feeling her heartbeat, reassuring herself it was still there. Ironshod had beaten her so close to Death that Aurora could have plucked a feather from its wing.

They couldn’t keep doing this. Every day brought new dangers that only seemed to get worse each time. And now…

She closed her eyes and tried not to think about it. She’d need a clear head when Aurora finally came around. What she had to do now was focus on the goal: get Aurora home.

With the sea outside to ease her nerves, she dozed off quickly.

The tiny brass bell jangled above the door, bouncing on a delicate curl of spring steel she hoped would set her shop apart from the others in the wasteland. A little bit of effort, even some class, in a wild territory she mistakenly believed populated by ponies who exuded neither. She’d been coming to terms with the fact that her efforts to make Gussets & Garments stand out had been wasted. Not because wastelanders didn’t appreciate the clean aesthetic or the attention she paid them. They did. Some even said as much, especially the small pool of regulars whose reliable business floated her from one month’s rent to the next.

Ginger watched the heavily scarred and equally armed stallion glance back at the door closing behind him, a familiar look in his eye as he left without having spent a single cap. Something on her showroom floor had interested him right up until the moment he’d asked about the price, and out from her mouth came the pithy “dears” and “darlings” she’d convinced herself customers would equate to quality. No, she had just pushed her last real customer away with that patronizing schtick. One day she’d look back on these memories and laugh at how ridiculous she’d been, but for now she’d settle to make this dream an out of body experience so she could wring her own neck.

She smirked anyway as she watched the familiar faces of earth ponies and unicorns milling along the dirt road outside. Neighbors, many of them fellow business owners, walked without any meaningful interaction with one another, occasionally appearing and disappearing as Ginger lost track of them. Another so-called perk of being aware of her own dreams, all the carefully obscured background noise came to the forefront as if she were peering into the guts of a very pretty, albeit hopelessly misassembled machine. She reminded herself to tell that one to Aurora once she was awake. That mare loved talking about her gizmos at night…

The bell tinkled again and she smiled at the crystal clear memory of Aurora walking into her life for the first time. Hard to believe it had only been a couple weeks ago. It felt like months.

“I’ll be with you in a moment, darlings.”

She heard herself rattle off the same tired greeting without conscious effort. Had that really been her first words to her? Wonderful. She remembered she’d been fighting with a stitch that had refused to keep its spacing from its neighbor, and with the price of raw leather being what it was she’d been willing to turn the strap into mincemeat before letting it win.

It was a simple pleasure, then, to watch Roach and Aurora meander toward her. Aurora’s eyes were shamelessly wide as she looked around, taking it all in, quietly comparing the life she knew to the hardfought world she found herself in now. It angered her how little time she’d gotten to spend with this side of Aurora. Perfectly innocent with her saddlebags heavy with tools the wasteland would never ask her to use, her thoughts completely at ease now that she knew Equestria wasn’t as dead as her Stable advertised and that Roach would accompany her to Fillydelphia and back. She wanted to reach out over the countertop and pull that Aurora into a crushing hug. To beg her to go back home and rob the wasteland of its chance to chip away at her with each passing day. Before it could pry apart the cracks until parts fell off.

But no. She could feel the dream progressing out of spite. Roach had brought Aurora here so Ginger could modify the weapon she’d brought from the Stable. A Reinlander Model 700, a sharpshooter’s weapon designed by the Wonderbolts to stay balanced in flight, worth almost half the value as the Pip-Buck she wore.

“I need to have this fitted for my wing.”

Aurora’s sheepishness was as endearing then as it was now. She’d known by the tiny wince Roach shot her that he hadn’t told Aurora the rifle wasn't designed for pegasi to begin with. Marring the wooden stock’s unblemished grain seemed almost criminal at the time and she’d wondered why he wasn’t having her practice with a pipe rifle instead. Of course she didn’t know the two of them were planning a trip to the coast or that time was a factor. She couldn’t have guessed how little it would take for her to be dragged into it.

Memories be damned, she lit her horn and slid her magic across Aurora’s cheek. To her surprise Aurora closed her eyes and leaned into it ever so slightly. A hint at things to come. Good things, for both of them.

But not all good.

Her doorbell rang a third time and she felt herself tense. Now came Cider with his colossal ego, his determination to relieve Aurora of her Pip-Buck, and a confrontation between the three of them that would irrevocably link Ginger to his mysterious disappearance and subsequent discovery of his corpse at the bottom of her latrine. She’d assumed the threat of liberating his testicles from his taint would be sufficient to scare him off but no, Cider was a driven stallion who believed himself untouchable courtesy of his equal share of F&F Mercantile. “No” was not in his vocabulary.

His death would be the first of many to haunt Aurora on her journey east.

She braced herself and looked to the open door where a tiny pink filly with a cotton candy blue mane gazed back at her with a pensive frown.

Primrose strolled into the store, her dull eyes on Aurora. Like the ponies on the street outside, Roach and Aurora quickly lost the spark of memory that made them feel so real. They stood there, expressions frozen, actors waiting for their cue.

“How is she?” Primrose asked.

Ginger watched her examine a mannequin she’d crafted armor for from scavenged road signs. “She’s alive. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

The fun-sized leader of the Enclave nodded. “Have our personnel given you privacy?”

“They’ve been good about that, yes.”

“They knock first? It’s important that they knock first.”

She sounded like the etiquette teacher Ginger endured when she was little. “Your medical team is demonstrating a remarkable level of restraint. It’s appreciated, Primrose. Thank you.”

A smile flickered on Primrose’s lips before disappearing. She took a moment to give the store a proper look around. A noise indicating something like appreciation sounded in her throat. “Did you build all this yourself?”

She nodded.

“There used to be an antique store in Canterlot with the same ceiling. It’s nice.”

Ginger didn’t know whether she was being sincere or if she was buttering her up. Something told her it was both so she ducked the compliment just to be safe. “I have a few questions, if that’s okay.”

Primrose pulled herself up onto the short pedestal Ginger built to display padding samples and sat down with her hind legs dangling over the side. “It’s your dream.”

And it would stay that way, she hoped. She wasn’t excited that Tandy elected to bring Primrose here, but the fact that the minister still looked like a foal with a god complex told her Luna’s creation was keeping an eye on her.

“You’ve seen Aurora’s condition?”

Primrose nodded. “Regrettably, yes.”

Even here, her nerves clenched around her chest like a vise. “Does what happened to her affect her pureblood status?”

“Ah.” Filly-Primrose frowned as if this were the first time she’d considered it. Her gaze slid toward the Aurora locked in place across the counter, that curious smile still on her muzzle. “I don’t see why it should. A broken teacup is still a teacup after you glue the pieces together.”

She closed her eyes and sighed in relief. “And the benefits that come with it?”

Primrose cracked a smile. “Careful. Someone might accuse you of wanting the Enclave’s help.”

Down to brass tacks, then. “And what if I do?”

“I’d say you’re talking to the right mare. However…” She lifted a tiny feather and leveled it toward Aurora. “My debts are limited to her. We can talk shop but I won’t commit to anything without Aurora’s say-so.”

“That’s strangely noble of you.”

She snorted. “It has nothing to do with being noble. You’re a former citizen of New Canterlot who very publicly chose to poison yourself with a life in the wasteland, ergo I’m choosing not to bargain with you. I’m being practical.”

“Or petty.”

Tandy’s voice startled Primrose enough to make her slip off Ginger’s display and land ass-first on the floorboards. Had it happened while they were awake, it probably would have hurt. Within the safety of Ginger’s memory, however, the only thing Primrose injured was her pride. She was on her hooves before the shame could properly sink in, her gaze stabbing vaguely in the direction of the ceiling as if to find Tandy peeking between the tin tiles. Luna’s creature had chosen not to take form, however, satisfied with monitoring their discussion with whatever incorporeal method she’d selected instead.

“You said this discussion would be private.”

“You said you would behave.”

A long pause, during which Primrose visibly struggled to keep the rising anger out of her voice before readdressing Ginger. “I apologize. What I meant to say is that I cannot agree to anything without Aurora’s expressed consent.” Then, to the ceiling. “Better?”

“Better.”

She turned to Ginger as if to ask the same question.

Ginger caught herself looking toward the ceiling too before she answered. “At the very least, I want to talk about her options. And maybe a few other things.”

“Okay,” she shrugged, “but don’t take this the wrong way, I can tell you want to build up to whatever it is you really want to ask. Maybe we skip the appetizers this time? Go straight to the main course?”

She hesitated.

“Limited time offer. Going once…”

“I want you to give her a stimpack,” she blurted, then quickly amended, “The powerful ones from the old world, like the ones Autumn Song used on me. The ones that heal everything.”

Primrose’s smile dipped. “No.”

“That’s it? No?”

“No, thank you.” She clarified, earning herself a stony glare from Ginger. “I’m being serious, Ginger. Maiden Pharma’s stimpacks are more trouble than they’re worth, and the fact that Autumn shot you up with so many and you didn’t devolve into some gibbering monster was obscenely lucky for everyone involved.

“To your other point, they are potent and they do repair significant damage so long as your body is already trying to heal it. Even if I had one lying around, Aurora wouldn’t benefit from it. Not in the way you’re expecting her to, at least.”

She smelled bullshit. “There’s absolutely no way–”

“Take no for an answer.” Primrose stared at her, her expression a warning. “Aurora’s a pureblood and I would like it to stay that way.”

She stared thoughtfully at her sewing machine, knowing the harder she pushed the closer Primrose would get to cutting this impromptu parlay short. Maybe this was why Tandy allowed Primrose to breach her dream in the first place. If she had a sense the minister might be in a generous mood, it only made sense to slip Ginger the opportunity to take advantage.

And she had helped Primrose once before. No matter what the conniving little tyrant said, she owed her.

“If you’re not going to bargain with me, that’s fine. Let’s talk about getting you to talk to Aurora.”

Primrose’s ears perked at that. “She’s already awake?”

She shook her head. “No, but she might be by the time you arrive. In person.”

“Ooh, what a twist.” The little mare chuckled, assessing Ginger more carefully as she did. “Are you going to try to kill me?”

“Not unless you give me a reason.”

Primrose bit her bottom lip, grinning. “Uh huh. I feel like I’ve given you a few already.”

Ginger tipped her horn toward not-Aurora. “You’ve given me a big reason not to.”

Silence reigned for what felt like minutes. Then…

“Okay. I think I can set something up.”

The few ponies working in the Atrium paid Delta little mind as she crossed the vacant communal space. Most of the shops were still closed with the exception of the ones equipped to serve breakfast. She spotted Skylark loitering outside The Flour Patch with several other young pegasi.

A team from Mechanical was busy at work installing vertical poles along the upper walkway from which blue and yellow were slated to be hung. Some of the smaller shops had signs outside advertising a variety of freshly fabricated Remembrance Day merchandise ranging from pins to leg bands to a limited edition set of tiny statuettes depicting the ministry mares standing on individual faux wood pedestals. Just because the world ended didn’t mean someone wasn’t willing to make a quick bit.

Delta climbed the steps to the upper level and rounded the walkway to the overmare’s office. The door stood open for her. Seated at her finely carved desk, Spitfire looked seconds away from dozing off.

She tapped her hoof against the doorframe. “Knock-knock?”

Oh Celestia, she thought, it’s contagious.

“Shut the door,” Spitfire murmured. “Grab a chair.”

She settled into one of the plush seats facing the desk. “So, yeah, the whole thing with Varnish is actually–”

Spitfire lifted a feather to stop her. Eesh. Even the bags under her eyes had bags. “The two of you can torture each other on your own time. You and I need to talk about something else.”

“Oh. Sure.” She could already guess where this was going. Are you sure you can’t attend the celebration? Such-and-so will be there the entire day, why can’t you spare fifteen minutes for appearances?

Spitfire unlocked a drawer and pulled out a stack of papers from inside. They landed on the desk’s polished surface with a slap. Even from where she sat, Delta recognized the formatting at the top of the stack. Her skin went hot.

“I need you to tell me why you thought this was a good idea,” Spitfire said, pushing the stack across the desk with the edge of her hoof. The traffic report from Pioneer’s first few hours lay bare for both of them to see.

Delta licked her lips, picking up the papers between her still damp feathers. “I… got bored?”

Her overmare leaned back in her chair, face pinched with open frustration. “Delta you are a brilliant mare, but right now you’re holding the trophy for the stupidest thing anyone in this Stable has ever done. I need you to take this seriously and tell me what you thought you were trying to do.”

She set the printouts in her lap as she sat up a little straighter. “There’s enough infrastructure left out there for ponies to broadcast messages to each other. I thought maybe… maybe we’re missing an opportunity. Maybe more of Equestria survived than Stable-Tec thinks there is.”

“I promise you there isn’t.”

Up went her hackles. “How do you know?”

“Because I worked in the MoA. I was there when the first prototype bomb was detonated.” She let out a tired chuckle. “A fucking prototype, and the explosion could have flattened a small city. You and I both saw the bombs that went off ten years ago and those were no prototypes. Those were ecosystem killers gift-wrapped by Vhannans. Those ponies you’ve been hearing less and less of on the radio aren’t surviving, Delta. They’re dead just like everything else we left behind.”

Delta chewed the inside of her lip. What bombs did Spitfire see from the safety of the Stable door?

“Well,” she murmured, “agree to disagree.”

Spitfire dropped her hoof onto her desk, hard. “No. This isn’t a debate. This virus you made, this Pioneer? You need to kill that thing before someone out there notices it and puts this entire Stable in danger.”

“Why, so they don't come looking for us and find the corpses piled up outside?”

She swallowed when Spitfire closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, her breath wavering as she exhaled. "You saw?"

"Sorry." She pinched the bridge of her muzzle. "Shit, Spitfire, I didn't mean to say it like that."

Too late for apologies now. She could feel the air being sucked out of the room. Spitfire just sat there, her expression bordering on anger and disgust but for which one of them Delta couldn't be sure.

"Go ahead," she said, voice shaking. "Tell me what you think you saw."

Hesitation stopped up her throat. She'd forfeit a year's dessert rations to rewind the last few minutes. Meanwhile, Spitfire waited.

"I found it by accident," she admitted. "I don't know what I saw."

"But you think it's my fault those ponies died out there regardless."

She stared into her lap to avoid Spitfire's piercing gaze. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "You pointed a gun at them, Spits."

From the corner of her eye she watched Spitfire turn in her chair and gesture a wing toward the rifle she'd always kept mounted on the wall behind her. It rested on a pair of polished brass hooks mounted to a long slab of old driftwood, a permanent fixture in her office since day one.

"This gun, you mean."

Spitfire leaned back and lifted the weapon from its display, bringing it forward so she could lay it across her desk. Delta looked up at it with discomfort, never having been this close to a real firearm before.

"It used to belong to my dad. He and his brother used to run a farm bordering the Everfree, and this is what kept him safe from Timber Wolves." She leaned forward and did something to remove the shallow magazine. Then she showed Delta the end where the bullets presumably came out of. It was empty.

"Magic never ran very strong on his side of the family, so he carried this instead. My parents didn't have a lot of money so when I graduated from the academy he gifted his rifle to me. Figured even if it was made for a unicorn like him, most stallions wouldn't be able to tell the difference. He was always worried someone bigger and stronger than me might not take no for an answer and wanted to make sure I could protect myself."

Delta pursed her lips as she watched her put the magazine back into the gun. "That doesn't really explain what I saw."

"What you saw was an ugly but necessary step to keep our Stable safe."

"We had room for them!"

"And I had to make a FUCKING CHOICE–" Spitfire caught herself, grimacing as she gnawed on her lip to battle back raw emotion.

Delta waited like a soldier noticing her hoof on a landmine. Several long moments passed in pensive silence. Spitfire cleared her throat.

"You don't understand the decisions I've had to make to keep our Stable safe. If I hadn't closed that door, sh… Stable-Tec would have done it for me. So don't you dare look at me like I haven't screamed myself to sleep every night since, because I have." She blinked away the haze of angry tears. "I can't undo what you saw, Delta. I wish I could, but I can't. The only fucking thing I can do now is keep the powers that be happy so that you can all thrive down here, and right now that means telling you to kill that virus and erase every byte it sent from the servers."

This must be what it'd felt like to be Apogee way back when, getting into a little mischief without knowing how much strain it put on her loner mom. Chasing that rat of hers around the junkyard, squeezing what little pleasure she could find during those every-other weekend visits, only to bump into a busted up engine faring and watch helplessly as it toppled over taking out half of Delta's fence in the process. Then came the shouting, the tears, the shamefaced apologies.

She couldn't have guessed her quiet side project would whip Spitfire up like this, because she hadn't known how many plates the overmare was balancing.

Still, her answer for shutting the door on hundreds of refugees didn't cut it. There were corpses at the door, right now, right this moment that Spitfire decided to let die. There was something she was trying to keep her from finding out.

Fuck her pity party.

"Okay, Spits," she nodded, trying her damndest to look sympathetic. "I'm sorry. It'll take a few hours to write the kill script, but I'll get rid of it. No one will know."

Spitfire deflated a little, the exhaustion more pronounced on her face than ever. "Thank you, Delta. I really wish I had a friend like you back in Canterlot."

It took every ounce of strength she had not to climb over that desk and slap her across the mouth. “Hah. Better late than never, right?”

She waited, but Spitfire had nothing to add. Her eyes had grown distant and thoughtful, making it occur to Delta that she might really be glimpsing the real Spitfire. Not the stoic, professionally distant overmare who kept everyone down here at leg’s reach. As fucked in the head as she had to be to do what she did, there had been something real there just now.

Regret.

Her ears perked when Spitfire spoke again.

“You know what’s really stupid?”

She shook her head, watching her as she lifted the rifle off the desk and hesitated a moment before returning it to its place on the wall.

“I named it.” Her chair hissed as she sat back down, her eyes still held hostage by the weapon. “I actually made sure it got cataloged in the Stable archives so that the next overseer knows why I closed the door on them.”

A pause. The air started to feel thick in her lungs. “What’s it called?”

Spitfire swallowed, her voice barely a whisper.

“Desperate Times.”

Okay.

Okay, keep it together, Delta. Just stay cool.

“Morning, Delta.”

“GOOD MORN–” The dappled pink mare flinched away with an uneasy laugh. Just keep walking. “I mean, good morning! Sorry, I, uh… I gotta pee.”

“Oh. Good luck?”

Fuuuck.

She came to a stop outside I.T. and turned the door switch hard enough to startle the pegasi working inside. They offered uneasy greetings as she hurried past their desks and into her own cramped little office where she collapsed into her chair and blew out the breath she’d been holding.

She set her hooves on either side of her dormant terminal with a firm clok.

“Okay. She’s a head case. She’s a fucking lunatic and she killed a holy fuckton of ponies and she knows you know and now you’re talking to yourself, Celestia’s tits.”

It might have been funny if she wasn’t so terrified.

Her thoughts were spinning. If Spitfire could just let ponies die and Stable-Tec was fine with it, what else could she do? What happened if she decided she didn’t like Delta knowing what she knew? Sure there were the cells up in Security, all fucking three of them, but she couldn’t just drop her in one of them and throw away the key. The deputies would want to know when they could get rid of her, sooner than later. Her gaze fell on the heavy pneumatic door sealing her office.

Her throat went dry as she stood up and approached the door. The switch clicked beneath her hoof and the door, like always, hissed up into the ceiling. She stood there fully aware her techs were watching her from their desks, probably wondering why their boss was just standing there looking like she’d escaped death.

She swallowed, hit the switch again, and shuddered as the door dropped shut. A few key words to Millie and Spitfire could turn any room Delta walked through into a prison cell. The manual backup could be locked.

“Millie?”

A soft ping. “How may I assist you?”

She returned to her desk flustered, but not enough to start up her terminal and begin typing. “Send a critical priority ticket down to Mechanical. I want the hydraulic door to my office torn out. Get me something on hinges.”

“Your ticket has been entered into the queue. Is there anything else–”

“No.”

Pioneer’s data stream appeared on the screen, still dutifully scouring the broken networks of a supposedly broken world. But the data coming in was slower now. More manageable, thanks to the filter she’d written. Now she could focus on what was truly important.

Pinged 23.22.51.120 [JSITermNet0409].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 0 successful, 4 failed. [100% loss].
- - - - - - All [JSITermNet0409] connections have timed out.
Pinged 23.22.52.120 [JSITermNet0410].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 3 successful, 1 failed. [25% loss].
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0410] logged as active node.
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0410] added.
- - - - - - pioneer.zip delivered to [JSITermNet0410].
Pinged 23.22.53.120 [JSITermNet0411].
- - - 4 packets sent.
- - - 1 successful, 3 failed. [75% loss].
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0411] logged as active node.
- - - - - - [JSITermNet0411] added.
- - - - - - pioneer.zip delivered to [JSITermNet0411]...

It didn’t surprise her the least bit that Jet would have dumped a few hundred million bits into hardening his network. Once his little postgraduate startup caught the attention of investors, cash flow ceased to be a problem for him. Benefits of “drawing inspiration” from her rocket designs back when he was still interested in pumping mistakes into–

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and pushed the anger away. Apogee had been a good kid. The best kid. The mistake had been letting herself stay angry for all those years. If she’d known what was coming she might have tried harder to be less awful. And maybe she did try, a little, there in the end.

They all had.

She set her jaw. Spitfire wanted every trace of Pioneer scrubbed from the servers. It could be done in ten, maybe fifteen minutes but she’d bought herself a few hours. Plenty of time to do what she needed to do.

Plenty of time. Her feathers settled over the keys and she went to work.

Jet’s overengineered terminal network replied nearly immediately to her query with a simple prompt for employee credentials. It would take more than an apocalypse and a decade of steady decay to knock his generators offline. Stable-Tec wasn’t the only company on the market with the guile to plan for an unpleasant future, nor were they the Ministry of Technology’s only customer for talisman-related power supplies. JetStream Industries’ backup generators might hold out for another decade, maybe even two, but nothing approaching the longevity of Delta’s new home. She knew full well how annoyed Jet had been when the MoT denied his request for the new Mark IV talismans, calling his company a “nonessential wartime asset.” She remembered because she’d made every effort to remind him of it before he convinced her to work for him.

She entered her old credentials and smiled a little when a response came welcoming her back. The simple greeting was quickly replaced by a menu screen she hadn’t seen in nearly a decade. Granted it was a lot greener than she remembered. Jet had been on cloud nine when he announced the company would be going to full color terminal displays, despite color television being around for how many years already. Robronco could brag all they wanted about their state-of-the-art computational marvels, but the pony in charge of keeping their standard terminals operating on a heady diet of retina-scarring green font should have gotten fired well before the bombs fell.

Her first instinct was a good one. She opened her inbox.

Neatly stacked rows of subject lines and familiar names populated the screen. Ponies who years ago asked for her input on the second generation vacuum suit designs, a press interview request from a reporter whose name she didn’t recognize anymore, invitations to more office parties than any one pony could attend, and that obnoxiously persistent reply-all chain that kept getting revived by half the launch complex. A screenshot of mundanity. A reminder that some things never changed.

At the very top waited an unread message from Jet. Several, apparently, given the innocuous little “3” nested into a bubble ahead of his name. It had no subject line, something out of character for a stallion who didn’t understand the concept of brevity and was teased mercilessly by Apogee for his obscenely wordy messages. She opened the first of the chain and her brow dropped when nothing beside Jet’s automatic signature appeared in the box. It took her a moment to notice the untitled attachment.

Against her better judgment, she opened it.

Her terminal went momentarily blank. When it flickered back to life, Jet’s right nostril practically swallowed the frame. She made a noise and let it play anyway.

Feathers hissed and scraped over the camera’s microphone as the angle shifted down, his jaw dropping briefly into view as his panting breath fogged the lens. For a split second Delta thought she knew what she was seeing and had her feather poised over the escape key, but then she noticed the dark crust smeared across his muzzle and stopped herself. Was he bleeding? When did he…?

She glanced at the date the message was sent.

November 3rd, 1087 - 3:12am

Her heart dropped as the rustling and Jet’s heavy breathing filtered from her terminal. She leaned back in her chair, touching the side of her hoof to her mouth as she watched her ex-husband struggling with the camera a full three days after the bombs had fallen. Wherever he was, it was dark. She could hear cables being pulled tight. More grunting. Feathers and fur pressed into the screen as he walked with the camera tucked beneath his wing. Then the screen swung around again. Delta could have sworn she spotted a refrigerator pass through the frame before Jet set the camera onto a table with a vaguely familiar countertop and cabinets in the background.

The line of cabinets had come free from their wall mounts on one side allowing the entire unit to slope down toward the cluttered countertop like a ramp. Jet rounded the table and pulled out a plastic chair, his face haggard but determined as he leaned forward to verify the camera was working. A dim light reflected in his tired eyes, and he smiled.

“Hello, world.”

November 3rd, 1077
Three Days After

“Whatever’s left of it, anyway.”

Jet Stream stared into the security camera’s black lens, feeling ridiculous. No one was going to see this. No one who could make a difference.

He sighed, folding his hooves over his stomach as he surveyed his mausoleum for the hundredth time. Which break room was this? They all looked the same. Fold-out tables, plastic chairs, the kitchenette. All intended to be easy to clean yet always speckled with spilled coffee and crumbs. By the time Diamond ripped him away from the microphone and dragged him out of Flight Control, the light coming through the windows had already turned green. Those last minutes felt like swimming against a riptide of impossible facts.

A balefire detonation had been detected.

Cloudbreaker was being hijacked by one of its own crew.

SOLUS was maneuvering on its own.

When the bomb dropped into Las Pegasus, Diamond Gavel used those last precious seconds of her life to light her horn and throw Jet through the nearest door. He remembered her mouth forming into a horrified circle when the shockwave rammed through the launch complex and turned the empty air of the hallway into a hurricane of green fire and shredding debris. The last thing he saw was the door being violently ripped from its hinge and flung toward him.

He looked toward the mound of concrete, rebar and carpet that had fallen in from the floor above. Diamond was buried somewhere behind all of that.

Turning his gaze upward, his smile vanished. Who was he trying to fool.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.” He chuckled dryly and set his chin on the table. “I doubt anyone’s going to come looking for me here. Feels like rescuing the CEO might not be a big priority right now.”

He brought his Pip-Buck close to his face where he assumed the camera would see it.

“Just about everyone made it downstairs before the bomb hit. Network’s still up too.” He looked at the slow trickle of messages still flowing into the device. He sighed. “They think I’m dead. I’m not going out of my way to correct them. Better for emergency services to focus on getting them out without worrying about the PR, right?”

A low, groaning rumble resonated above the deformed ceiling. He could only assume the building had partially collapsed in on itself, the settling rubble making any hope of rescue feel all the more fictional.

He tapped a key on his Pip-Buck, switching to the live feed from the camera he’d just pried off its wall mount. Good. He was still recording.

“You’d be proud of them, Delta. They’re not going down without a fight. It’s not just survival, either. They saw what I saw and they know there’s something off about how everything went down. I don’t think many of them expect to survive much longer. From what I’m reading, they’re just trying to put enough pieces together to give our dear princesses a parting fuck you. Make it a little less easy for them to pop up next week and blame all this shit on our science. Seems like something you’d be a fan of.”

He paused, unsure what to say. His stomach rumbled.

“I’m going to go. More digging to do.” He hesitated and pulled his hoof off the table. “Actual digging, I mean. I’ll, uh, talk more soon.”

She watched Jet hit a key on his Pip-Buck and the video ended. There was something unsettling about seeing him so… unsure. He’d spent the latter half of his life seeking out crowds, looking for opportunities to be seen. To advertise himself to prospective clients, to high society investors, and oftentimes to mares half his age. Even in college she sometimes had to peel him off of her with a spatula.

Jet hated being alone to a fault. Yet he had gone out of his way to keep himself hidden from the survivors trapped just a few floors beneath him because he didn’t want his presence to eclipse the needs of the many. She swallowed the lump in her throat and opened the next message, quietly wishing it hadn’t taken the end of the world for him to find his decency.

November 4th, 1077
Four Days After

Jet sat down in front of the camera, propped up now by the empty lunchbox of an employee whose name he didn’t know. Big fan of wasting bits on vegetables with the friendly green organic stickers, whoever they were. Not that he was in any position to be picky.

He debated making this recording at all. He was just parroting the work done by the dwindling survivors downstairs. No break room fridges down there to keep them fed and watered. Their own personal journals gave him a grim enough picture of their situation to convince him not to fill the gaps with his own imagination. Half a dozen had died this morning when they mistook an electrical conduit for a water pipe. Luckily the breakers tripped before any damage could be done to the backup generator.

It didn’t matter. The survivors downstairs were discovering the same problem Jet had. Digging through the rubble only caused more to slide down to take its place. Last night he’d gotten close to where he thought the doorway was buried, but the ceiling above just peeled toward the floor even more to backfill hours of painstaking labor while creating a new problem. The shifting rubble was starting to smell faintly of ozone and when he went near it he could taste metal.

Grimacing, he pressed a feather to his Pip-Buck and turned to the unblinking lens.

“Hey, Delta. Remember the intern who kept asking everyone on our floor if we needed anything to drink? The cream soda guy?”

He reached down the table and showed the camera an empty can, giving it a waggle between his feathers. “I found his stash. He’s got six cases of this stuff sitting in the back of the fridge, and it’s all diet. Who does that?”

He tried to smile, but wasn’t up to making the effort.

He flicked the can off the table and sighed.

“So, it wasn’t the princesses,” he murmured, shrugging with genuine disbelief for what felt like the millionth time today. He checked the time on his Pip-Buck to be sure. Yeah, it was still today. “Canterlot got hit, too. Don’t ask me how I know.”

His hoof tapped against the table, his vision blurring.

“Who am I kidding? If you’re still out there somewhere you’ll go digging around for it yourself and… I don’t think you deserve that.” He grit his teeth and looked away. His public relations officer would be losing her shit if she saw him right now. Unprofessional. Sloppy. You’re losing the confidence of the stockholders. He cleared his throat, hard enough to hurt. “They pulled the footage from Apogee’s helmet. The, ah… the relay at the solar array carried a clearer signal than what we got here at Flight Control, so I guess that’s a good thing. Plenty of versions for ponies to find if the ones here get corrupted. Trust me, though. Don’t put yourself through watching it. It’s…”

Words failed him. He blew out a breath and pushed his feathers over the top of his mane in a feeble attempt to recenter himself. Out of everything he was capable of saying, his daughter’s obituary was not on that list.

“You were right, Delta. All the bullshit in the papers about Vhanna having our missile tech was exactly that. Fucking bullshit.” He scrubbed his nose, the smell of radiation making his sinuses itch. “It wasn’t them. It was us. Apogee watched it all happen from orbit and you could see the fucking launch plume before Cloudsdale went up. Those were our missiles striking our cities. Canterlot is just gone. Equestria is fucking gone. Maybe Celestia and Luna got to a Stable in time but even if they did, there’s nothing left. Someone pulled the trigger but it wasn’t them. It makes no sense for it to have been them.”

He rested his head between his shaking hooves.

“I keep thinking to myself… what if it was us?” The last words nearly lodged in his throat, but he forced them out. He curled a wing and gave the flat of the table a weak thump. “It had to have been. I just… someone turned my fucking satellite into a doomsday weapon. Someone modified it right under our noses without us finding out. But they would have had to falsify so many reports. Not one pony. A whole fucking team.

“Delta, I’m terrified. What if I’m the reason? What if I pushed back against the princesses too hard and inspired someone to kill enough ponies that the old traditions would–”

A tickle in his throat grew into an abrupt cough. He grimaced as it sank into his chest, forcing him to abandon his train of thought just to cope. When he finished, he could taste the ozone more strongly.

“Maybe I’m oversimplifying,” he admitted, his voice a touch ragged. “Maybe, but I don’t think I am. Several someones in this company weaponized SOLUS without any of us noticing, and I’ll bet every bit I own that they’re the ones who launched the missiles.”

His cheeks puffed with a smaller cough. Ignoring it, he looked directly into the camera.

“And if you’re watching, whoever you are, be very afraid of that big blue sky. SOLUS was my family’s legacy. If I find out where you’re hiding, and believe me I will, there isn’t a thing on this planet that will save you.”

November 6th, 1077
Six Days After

“I’m not feeling too great today. I’m no doctor, but something tells me it has something to do with the lack of food plus the radiation.” He chuckled at the camera, unsure who he was even talking to anymore. He scratched at his cheek and frowned when one of his primaries fell out of his wing and into his lap. “Case in point, huh?”

An exhausted sigh slid past his lips. He wasn’t getting out of here. He knew that now. Even if he did, he wasn’t sure he wanted to. Most of the survivors in the basement were dead, or had just given up on their last research. He flipped through the menus on his Pip-Buck to see if any of them had said anything in the last several hours, but network traffic had slowed to a halt when the water main they’d been drinking from ran dry.

He scrolled through the last message on the bulletin board they’d created. Apparently one of the building’s custodians, a two year vet who survived the Vhannan trenches, remembered his stash of military issued StimPacks he’d brought home after being discharged. He’d gone to his locker to get them thinking they might cure dehydration like they seemed to cure everything else.

Whatever the results had been, Jet hadn’t a clue. The basement survivors had since gone silent.

He picked up the fallen feather and flicked it onto the hill of empty cream soda cans on the floor.

“I’ve been thinking.” Pure habit had him lift his hooves in mock surrender, despite him being the only one in the room. “I know, I know. Dangerous words, but hear me out. Someone made SOLUS into a weapon and then they just left it there, in orbit. I checked the telemetry. They parked it after it finished off Vhanna and Griffinstone. Right? So what if they’re not done with it yet? Let’s say I’m the big bad guy–”

Too much talking. His diaphragm rebelled and crumpled in on itself, jarring him into a ratcheting series of coughs. Tears beaded on his eyelids as he nearly retched from the effort, surer now than ever that he was coming apart at the seams.

“Fuck,” he gasped, his whole body shaking from the expense. “Sorry. Fuck. Sorry. What was I… oh, right.”

He spat a gobbit of blood onto the floor with all the others. “So I’m the bogeyhorse and I decided it’s all gotta go. Bombs away and kill as much as I possibly can. Horns, stripes, wings, beaks, who gives a crap. Blow it all up. Boom.” He spread his hooves apart in front of his face for illustration. “And I succeeded, right? It’s all dead now. The whole fucking planet as far as I can tell. So why would I care about where SOLUS is in orbit? I don’t need it anymore. Right?”

He slammed his hoof against the table, startling a short series of wet coughs from his burning lungs. “Wrong!” he wheezed, wiping the bloodied spittle from his lip. “Fucking wrong! I put my toy back where it belongs because I know I’m going to play with it again. Except the only way to play with it is to talk to it, and the only way to talk to it is to send commands up through the dishes on the roof of the building I just knocked over. So what does that leave? Narrow band communication. And what can’t you use if you don’t know exactly where your personal death ray is orbiting? Narrow band fucking communication.”

Hooves shaking, he lifted his Pip-Buck for the camera to see.

“Well guess what? I built this company and that is still my satellite.” He turned the screen up to his eyes and began keying in the series of commands he’d authored after realizing the obvious. “Now we get to find out if you had enough brains to build your own transmitter, or if you lazy fucks thought you could piggyback off of mine.”

With a keypress, he issued the command. It took several seconds for the network to pick it up, but once it did he toggled over to the next screen where SOLUS’s positioning data gently ticked along as it progressed through its assigned orbit. The orbit its hijackers had locked it into for safe keeping.

The menu wasn’t interactive. He couldn’t push a button and drag it through the sky on a whim. No button would cause it to self-destruct. Exhausted, sick, and certain he was sitting inside his own tomb, it was tempting to want that. To have a button he could press that would make the last days of his life feel less messy. To place a period at the end of his sentence instead of another comma. Except he couldn’t.

It wasn’t just a bastardized satellite floating out there in the vacuum of space. Their daughter was up there, too. And so as he ran the calculations, doing his best with what little he had to ensure the correct reaction control thrusters were armed, he did so with a singular principle in mind.

He would never abandon her again.

With tears in his eyes, he smiled at the camera and said, “Safe journey, kiddo.”

November 6th, 1077
SOLUS

Through the lens of Apogee’s motionless helmet, many things occurred.

First were the stuttering puffs of pressurized nitrogen pluming out from the gas ports in the satellite’s skin. It crystallized in the vacuum of space like January snow.

Second came the slow, graceful roll of the gargantuan machine. It creaked along its new axis with a gentility that would convince the casual observer that the whole universe had chosen to move itself. But there were no observers here anymore. The last conscious breaths on its silver skin had been taken days ago. It moved in solitude, unseen by the soot stained marble it had flown from.

Third in line, the ports fired again. Flecks of ice peppered the side of Apogee’s suit before floating off to chase the others. The magnets keeping her fixed in place hardly noticed the shift in momentum as Equestria and all of its neighbors in misery rolled overhead, a smooth gray pearl suspended among a field of stars.

Only when the last degrees of motion bled away and the planet above hung still in its reluctant passenger’s visor was the weapon prepared to execute its final command.

With beautiful synchrony, each and every reaction port throughout SOLUS’s superstructure fired. It lurched forward, pulling the starbound mare with it as it skated forward on powdery threads of ice. And as it built up momentum, trading mass for velocity as it curved into the planet’s shadow, Equestria was a little further away. Then further away still as they slid away from one another in the sun’s blinding light. The smoky marble continued to drift away long after the last flakes of nitrogen were gone, the two set upon opposing trajectories that would take Apogee far away from those who disabused her of the one dream which kept her chin tipped toward the sky.

She would inevitably return, diving back toward her home with the speed of a visitor who didn’t want to stay too long. Only long enough to be near those very few who loved her before escaping again into the endless sky, hunted relentlessly across the centuries by those who wanted her back.

October 29th, 1087
Delta’s Office

Ping. Ping. Ping.

“Good morning, Delta Vee. The time is 5:55am. Would you like to delay your next alarm until 6:05am?”

She didn’t bother to answer. She hadn’t slept. She’d barely eaten. Her mane tangled around her ears in clumps and she only had a passing awareness of the sour odor of sweat and stress that permeated her office. She only took her eyes away from her terminal screen long enough to find the mostly empty bottle on her desk, an expensive brandy Spitfire had given out as gifts on their first Remembrance Day, prompting Delta to confide her history of alcoholism once the festivities were over. She had tried to return the bottle but Spitfire insisted she keep it. If for no other reason, she said, than as a reminder that she was a survivor.

Not wanting to push the issue, she kept the bottle with the intention of dumping it out and keeping the container. She couldn’t remember why she hadn’t, and the bottle wound up buried at the bottom of her desk. Now she was reaching for it again.

She took a hard pull, winced, and put it back down.

She never listened to Jet before, so why start? She found the footage he told her not to and played it anyway. She watched her daughter carrying the talismans around the circumference of the satellite, installing each one by one. She watched Apogee’s helmet swivel when Jet asked her to look up at the planet and verify Cloudsdale was still there. Heard her breath quicken when more pinpoints of green light bloomed across Equestria like newborn stars, then sat in silent horror as she watched the moment pass when Apogee realized she was being left behind. She heard her baby sob helpless nonsense as everything she knew burned in front of her eyes, then scream as SOLUS slid above Vhanna and poured death over the continent with surgical precision.

And then she watched her daughter’s father stare at his Pip-Buck, tears shining in his red-rimmed eyes as he sent Apogee off on a new course known only to him. He forgot to turn off the camera when he stood and walked out of frame, leaving her there to stare at a crooked row of cabinets. But something he said had stuck with her and she couldn’t shake it no matter how hard she tried.

His absolute certainty that JetStream Aerospace had an enemy within checked too many boxes to ignore. SOLUS hadn’t only been hijacked, it had to have been fundamentally modified. One pony, no matter how clever, didn’t stand a chance at making those changes unnoticed. There would have needed to be an effort on an interdepartmental scale while still managing to keep the rest of the company in the dark. That level of coordination didn’t just appear out of thin air between a wingful of disgruntled employees. An undertaking like this required meticulous coordination, deep pockets, and…

Her train of thought slid off the rails like jelly across buttered toast. She picked up her favorite pen, the refillable one with the snappy clicker, and used it to jab the notepad beside her terminal and drag it toward her. Unnecessary? Sure. But it made her feel a little better, so fuck it.

Several rows of hash marks filled the top lines of the pad in neat little strings, clusters of five adding up to one hundred and forty-nine. She’d made sure to write the total alongside the letter “L.” Below that began a new tally which, midway through counting, she’d needed to separate into columns. Three in total hastily written in black ink: Equestria, Crystal Empire, Badlands. Beside this new set of marks was the letter “D.” Launches and Detonations.

Her eyes throbbed from the unbroken hours she’d just spent staring at the individual pixels of her terminal screen. At first it had been easy to pick out the explosions. They were impossible to miss. But the longer the bombing stretched on the more often Apogee had looked away from the planet’s surface, its reflection in her visor Delta’s only reference for the detonations taking place in those intervals. But she couldn’t settle for just being sure of it. She needed evidence. Raw numbers she could present to the Stable as proof. They deserved to know who had been responsible for the death of everything. Not Vhanna. An Equestrian.

But not until she had the data to back it up.

So she sat there, watching pixels. Waiting for flashes of white that turned emerald green only seconds after, confirming one detonation after the other. She bent toward the screen so she wouldn’t see the larger afterimage of her daughter’s face, those ruby eyes wide in terror as she watched everything burn beneath her, still unaware that her efforts to bring SOLUS online meant the death of two more nations and countless billions.

One thirty and nine detonations in Equestria.

Four detonations in the Crystal Empire.

One detonation in the Badlands.

Her tallies accounted for all but five missiles. Either their explosions had been obscured by the widening plumes of debris, they had failed to detonate at all, or a mix of both. It hardly mattered. JSA’s launch detection systems had separately agreed on an aggregate total of one hundred and forty-nine individual deployments across Equestria - data that hadn’t been accessed by anyone since those same missiles came back down. It was irrefutable proof that the ministries and Stable-Tec…

Her entire ass nearly left her chair when her office door heaved open with an abrupt hiss. She grabbed for the bottle but missed her target, managing to slap it off her desk only to watch it shatter on the floor beside it.

“Shit,” she muttered.

Spitfire stood in the open doorway with a perplexed frown on her face. Shame wasted no time seeping into every ounce of Delta as she watched her overmare put together what she’d interrupted. Her gaze lingered on the broken glass and the amber liquid speckling the floor around it. There hadn’t been enough booze left to form an actual puddle.

“Oh, Delta…”

She bit back her habitual flavors of “fuck you” and pushed out of her chair, bracing herself against her desk with one wing as she bent down and started picking up glass with the other. “What do you want?”

Spitfire’s hooves ticked toward her to help. She grudgingly watched her pick up her wastebasket and set it down between them.

“I wanted to check in to see where you were on the thing we talked about yesterday.” The door timed out and slid shut, prompting some clarity. “Were you able to shut down your virus?”

She dropped a chunk of glass into the trash. “Yes.”

Her tone made Spitfire pause before picking up some smaller shards. “And you erased it?”

“Yep.” She didn’t make eye contact. What few brain cells she had that weren’t saturated in liquor right now strongly advised against deploying her poker face. “S’all gone. Pioneer, the data stream, Equestria, Vhanna…”

Slow down. The brandy was making her feathers stick together. She blinked, annoyed by the effort it took to focus on the bits of glass and what she was saying. Then she laughed.

“What did Stable-Tec have against the gryphons, anyway?”

Spitfire chuckled, flicking glass and brandy into the waste bin. “Nothing that I know of.” When she didn’t get a response, she added, “Are you okay?”

“Equestria bombed itself,” she blurted.

“Um.” Spitfire’s feathers slowed. “What?”

“I saw it,” she continued, unable to stop now that she was saying it out loud. “I pulled the footage from Apogee’s EVA suit and we watched the bombs explode like… like fireworks.”

The overmare grew still. “You watched footage…”

“One hundred and forty-nine missiles. I counted them. I can prove they were ours and that Vhanna didn’t launch a fucking one of them because they never had them to begin with.” She sat up on the floor, dragging her brandy-soaked feathers across her mane as the video played again in her mind. “And they turned SOLUS into this… thing. I think it was Stable-Tec. I think they knew the war was going to end on its own and they were going to wind up sitting on all of these Stables burning holes in their coin purses and-and somehow they got into the government and Jet’s company and…”

“Woah, woah, woah!” Delta jerked at the weight of Spitfire’s wings dropping over her shoulders. “Slow down. What footage, Delta? Where exactly did you find it?”

She frowned at Spitfire. Hadn’t she been listening?

“I pulled it off JSA’s network.”

Spitfire’s grip tightened. Her expression darkened. “You what.”

“I downloaded it.”

“Fucking…”

She flinched as Spitfire lurched to her hooves and walked a fast, tight circle in the middle of the office. When she stopped, her gaze locked on Delta’s terminal as if the machine had personally insulted her. She closed the short distance to her desk and wrapped her feathers around the monitor, wrenching it across the polished surface and through the air barely inches away from Delta’s head. It impacted the wall with a dense crunch.

“FUCK!” she bellowed at the broken terminal, then wheeled on Delta in the same breath. “You FUCKING nosey drunk! I TOLD YOU TO DELETE IT.”

Delta rose to her hooves, backing away from the approaching mare. “I wi– I did!”

“You fucking liar. You went DIGGING and they’re going to know.”

“Stable-Tec can’t…?”

Her backside hit the wall. Before she could react, Spitfire had closed the gap and was nose to nose with her, the relentless heat of unbound anger pouring off her in waves.

“I. Don’t. Give. A. Shit. About. Stable-Tec.” She grabbed Delta by the jaw, her feathers clamping her muzzle shut. “Stable-Tec is dead, just like your fucking kid!”

Her mind raced. Suddenly the brandy felt like a bad idea. She couldn’t stitch together anything in a way that made sense. All she could focus on was the rising fear breaking through the anger in Spitfire’s eyes. Something was dawning on her as she stood there, trapping Delta against the wall. A mare who had just realized a bigger predator was headed her way.

The overmare’s lip twitched into a contrite smirk. “Since you’re keeping score now, I never had anything against the gryphons. Things are just easier now that they aren’t a part of the equation.”

Spitfire released her grip on her jaw and turned to walk away. Delta stared after her, eyes widening with understanding. But by the time she found her voice, Spitfire was already at the door.

“It was you?”

“Look who’s still sober enough for context clues,” she said.

Her heart clamored against her ribs as the pieces clicked together. She’d never questioned why Spitfire had been at the Stable ready to guide the survivors inside because it was how they all had been trained to expect the evacuation to proceed. The noble overmare waiting to guide her residents to safety. It was a picture the pegasi of Stable 10 had seen on pamphlets, on registration packets, and printed on murals gracing the corridors. No one had the luxury of time to question how faithfully Spitfire and her Wonderbolts recreated that image when they arrived.

No one stopped to ask why they had been there at all, prepared to guard the door while so many evacuees had been forced to shed their belongings just to stay ahead of the bombs. They were all too grateful to be alive.

Too blinded by their own luck to realize Spitfire had been ready for the death of Equestria in a way only the pegasus squeezing the trigger could be.

“Millie, disable all voice command access to this office.”

The hackles rose on Delta’s neck as Spitfire opened the door and smiled back at her. “You two-faced bitch, it was all you!”

She pulsed her wings, launching herself at the departing overmare, but the door slid shut and she slammed into its immovable bulk with a furious shout of pain and frustration. A deep, metallic thunk resonated from deep within. She slapped her wing over the switch but instead of letting her through, the steel slab emitted an irritated chirrup.

It was locked.

Panic formed a stone in her throat. “Millie, unlock the door.”

“Voice command access is currently disabled.”

She hit the switch again. Another angry buzz. The door held firm.

“Millie,” she repeated, tears in her eyes now, “unlock the door!”

“Voice command access is currently–” A pause, followed by the cheerful tone of the Stable public announcement system. “Attention: All residents presently in or near the IT wing, please proceed calmly to the Atrium hall. A hazardous spill has been detected. Please proceed calmly to the Atrium hall. A hazardous spill has been detected. Please…”

Delta’s hooves slammed against the door. No one answered. She looked down at her Pip-Buck and frantically began navigating to her messaging tab and groaned with dawning horror when the device suddenly stopped responding to her inputs. The screen went black, replaced with Stable-Tec’s cheery green cartoon mascot frozen in a thoughtful pose over the words: Access Restricted.

“No, no, no!” She spun in a circle, eyes wide, understanding perfectly well what Spitfire was doing. She stared up at the immovable door and screamed, “HELP!! LET ME OUT!!”

Nothing.

Silence.

Her office had become her cell.

January 19th, 1077
1:35pm

Primrose keyed the main floor of the Ministry of Morale and the elevator hummed into motion around her.

“Spitfire has some concerns regarding the MoT’s partnership with Blackhood Dynamics when you’re finished here. Afterward, I’d like to sit down over dinner and discuss the new narrative the editors of The Applewood Reporter are pushing.” The lithely built stallion beside her squinted at the metal clip board hovering just off the end of his nose, a genuine quill scratching a diagonal line across a short, encrypted memo that to anyone outside their Enclave would appear to be gibberish. Inkspot had a knack for recognizing and decoding simple ciphers in his head, especially the ones he created himself. It was part of the reason Rarity had selected him as her personal aide, and exactly why Primrose had recruited him into her steadily growing organization. Inkspot was one of many blind spots within the Ministry of Image, but of the many magic users pulled into the Enclave he was easily the most invaluable.

She refrained from showing her discomfort as Inkspot skimmed the last of the sheet, pulled it away from the clipboard and swarmed a black aura of magic around the document. The paper quickly dissolved within the complex spell until nothing remained. The spell faded and he cleared his throat as a mote of lingering magic tugged his neatly tailored vest straight against his chest, the tiny blue diamonds pinned to his lapel signifying his place within the MOI.

“Blackhood Dynamics is one of ours,” she stated, though she knew Spitfire wouldn’t be satisfied unless she heard it from Primrose herself. “What’s going on with the Reporter?”

The elevator pressed into their hooves as it slowed.

“Their senior editor just pushed a story questioning whether the zebras are capable of summoning balefire.”

“Fucking Candy Columns…” She shut her eyes and breathed. “Alright, put a pin in it for tonight but I want eyes on those presses in case she has more investigative bullshit planned for tomorrow’s issue. Get ahead of it.”

The bell chimed.

“I’ll pull some strings.” He stepped away from her as the doors slid apart, feigning an unbroken interest in the boilerplate memo now at the top of his clipboard.

“Well, this is me,” she said as a group of ponies beyond the door waited for her to step off. Inkspot arched a brow toward her but said nothing per usual, and she passed through the waiting ponies with a sheepish chuckle. “Not much of a talker, that one.”

One of the mares in the group offered a sympathetic smile before boarding. Another one of Cadence’s arrows missing its mark, nothing more than that.

The elevator doors rolled shut behind her with a gentle thump and the car descended deeper into the Pillar. She lifted a feather and pulled a long blue curl off her face as she took in a front lobby that never managed to feel… right. The Ministry of Morale was, on paper, Pinkie Pie’s domain. She was a mare renowned for the spring in her step, her unwavering positivity and brief bouts of what could be equally argued as insanity or clairvoyance. She was in every way the wildcard among the Elements prone to unpredictable whimsy, which was why stepping into the understated professional decor tended to throw off most visitors.

Beige carpet and a standard drop-down ceiling framed the narrow rectangular flagstone tiled walls. The soft music of a leisurely played piano piped out from a Millie speaker in the ceiling and two well-cared for ferns sat in pots on either side of the lobby’s only signage in bold, black letters.

Three balloons, two blue, one yellow, hung behind the block font as if held there by the bars of a cage. The similarities to Pinkie’s role in the ministry wasn’t lost on Primrose. The Element of Laughter was no more in charge of her own ministry than Rainbow Dash had been of hers after Spitfire stole the reins.

Primrose had been caught up on the ministries’ history by more than a few chatty Enclave associates and it was no secret in the Pillar that there had been early signs that Pinkie wasn’t going to be up to the task of keeping a war weary nation thinking happy thoughts. Following the bombing of Sugarcube Corner that killed the family who had once been her employer and oldest friends, Pinkie had fallen into herself. Some argued that she’d already been struggling after witnessing the violent death of Tirek, but the murder of her surrogate family had been a tipping point. The light had gone out of her, but with the onset of war it fell on her shoulders to carry on and keep smiling. Rarity, tasked with maintaining the facade that everything was fine within Equestria’s strained government, had effectively absorbed the Ministry of Morale’s operations overnight.

It certainly explained the decor. Two doors sat in black frames on either side of the professionally lit ministry logo. She approached the door on the right and looked up at the glass dome mounted above it. She said nothing as Millie silently scanned her, and the door’s deadbolt released with a thud.

She couldn’t particularly relate to Pinkie’s situation. All her life she’d been alone, save for an absent mother and a father who lived his life trying as hard as he could to rewrite the drunk dad stereotype. Abandonment wasn’t in her vocabulary because she’d always been trying to run away. But Pinkie Pie, she’d spent the last half decade living the word down to the syllable. Of course no one was going to say something like it out loud, but it was clear to anyone with eyes that Pinkie Pie was a friendless old mare.

But not for much longer.

Primrose trotted down one stately corridor, then another, pausing once to ask a passing mailpony whether she was headed the right way. The cockeyed mare parked her mailcart against the flagstone wall and confirmed she was on the right track even as she lifted and promptly dropped a stack of manilla envelopes on the floor. Primrose offered to help but was waved off by the fellow pegasus, assuring her that this was just part of her process. Unsure what that meant, She left the mare to her letters and followed the directions until she found the door she was looking for. It stood midway down the hall, a simple wooden slab that belied the reinforced steel core underneath. One of the upsides of being a ministry mare. Their offices were essentially a bunker within a bunker.

Her name glittered on a simple brass plaque screwed into the flagstone. It wasn’t much, and odds were it was all that Rarity would allow. Primrose lifted her hoof and gave the door three firm raps. A trio of chatting stallions shot her some curious looks as she stood at Pinkie’s door trying to decipher the muffled noise she heard on the other side. She knocked again, this time a little harder.

“I said come in!” came a voice from inside.

Primrose frowned and wrapped her feathers around the door’s handle. It turned freely in her grip and she pushed it open just in time for something the size of a softball to explode against her nose. Cold water splashed up her nostrils and down her throat startling a coughing yelp out of her as she reared backward, the door turning into a hard wall behind her shoulders as it slammed closed behind her. Another balloon struck her square between the teats sending a torrent of lukewarm water exactly where it wasn’t welcome and causing her hind legs to reflexively hike up until her butt hit the damp commercial carpet.

“And now you can turn around and get the fuck out!”

She hardly understood Pinkie between racking coughs as her body tried to clear the tickling water from her throat. She opened her eyes in time to shield herself from the third balloon to careen from the forty-something year old mare’s hoof. It smacked her across the foreleg without breaking, flopping uselessly to the floor.

“Tell Rarity that I don’t need any more of her undercover nannies coming around to make sure I’m being a good little filly!” She stood behind a heavy wooden desk that had seen better days, her hooves poised over more jiggling balloons in a metal tray labeled OUT. An open bag of empty balloons sat opposite them in an identical tray marked IN. “You’ve got ten seconds, lady, and I’m pretty sure there’s pee in one of these!”

To make her point clear, she brought a sloshing balloon up to her nose and sniffed.

“Wait, wait, wait! Just…” Primrose flinched as Pinkie hefted the next liquid mortar. “Hold your fire, alright? I'm not with Rarity, I promise.”

Pinkie rolled the blue balloon between the flats of her hooves, its dubiously darker contents churning. “Cross your heart?”

Internally, she groaned. “Hope to die, stick a cupcake in my eye.”

Confoundingly, Pinkie arched a surprisingly judgmental brow and dropped the balloon back into the tray with a snort. “Okay, wow. Haven’t used that one since I was a filly. Nowadays everyone’s sticking needles in their eyes, which makes no sense unless you’re really jonesing, you know?”

Primrose didn’t know. She plucked a shred of purple rubber out of her mane and flicked it to the floor, careful not to move too quickly as she got her hooves back under her. Pinkie wasn’t exactly a crazed shooter with her jaw on the bite trigger, but Primrose wasn’t eager to learn what excuse the secluded minister needed to justify lobbing a piss balloon.

As she stood up she realized it wasn’t just Pinkie’s desk that had seen better days, but her entire office appeared to be in varying stages of disrepair. Filing cabinets ringed the office walls in a tight phalanx, the yellowed labels above each handle reading off a category system of organized chaos. Calendar Events, Commemorations, Conception Day, (Surprise) Conception Day, Confetti (Bombs), Confetti (Cannons), Confetti (Tornado)...

She tried and failed to make sense of the strangest cabinets and turned her attention toward the multitude of cardboard boxes stacked atop them and shoved into sagging piles on the floor. Plastic sleeves of paper party hats snaked out from under the lids of some just behind Pinkie’s desk while a rat’s nest of what appeared to be tinsel had squeezed out through the handle holes of another. From others spilled contents ranging from novelty rubber chickens, stacks of seasoned baking sheets and the metal handles of what appeared to be a random assortment of kitchen utensils. The corners of many boxes were already beginning to deform under the weight of the ones stacked above them, and it didn’t take Primrose long to realize that she wasn’t looking at a backlog of unfinished ministry work but instead the backlog of Pinkie’s entire life. She didn’t just work here. She’d moved here.

As if reading her mind, Pinkie flopped down in her worn out office chair and asked, “Let me guess, you don’t approve of the decor?”

Sore subject. Avoid it. “I was actually hoping you had a few minutes to talk.”

She watched Pinkie give the corner of her desk a kick, sending her chair into a long, squeaking rotation. “Yeah, I bet.” Her hoof thumped one of the boxes on the floor which she used to spin herself back the other way. “I’m actually very, very busy today.”

“Splashing spies with piss projectiles?”

Pinkie pointed both hooves at Primrose and clicked her tongue. “Bingo-bango-bongo. Gold star for the alliteration, by the by.”

Something told her Pinkie might actually have gold stars tucked away in one of her drawers. Mindful of the tray of ammunition on the stained and water damaged desk, Primrose stepped through the sea of dented and dusty moving boxes toward the only guest chair in the office. Pinkie watched her as she rotated in her own seat, her eyes rolling with resigned defiance. She was used to not having a choice.

As Primrose sat down Pinkie stuck out a hind leg and winced when it struck the inside of the desk, bringing her to a stop facing her visitor. “Fine. What does the oh-so-generous Rarity want this time? It better not be an apology unless she plans to give back my terminal privileges. I’m not going downstairs to kiss her ass again. That’s your job, not mine.”

“I came here on my own. Nobody sent me.”

Pinkie laughed, low and venomous. “Yeah, okay. Listen, I know you’re supposed to do the whole lure-me-into-complacency-so-I-tell-you-if-I’m-behaving shit, but can we skip it? She already had my Pip-Buck confiscated,” Pinkie lifted her foreleg and gave it a dramatic waggle, showing Primrose the matted ring of pink fur above her hoof and a tidy row of autoinjector scars. “And sooner or later she’s going to send someone up here to rummage through my shit until they find the naughty-naughty medicine. So just pencil in your fucking bubbles and tell her I’m using again like you’re going to anyways. I don’t care anymore.”

She opened her mouth to dole out the standard assurances… but something stopped her. Something about where she was, the mare cursing at her, and the entire feeling of this place felt different. It felt wrong. She closed her mouth and frowned at the uneven, scuffed surface of Pinkie’s desk. This earth pony, this mare had her life turned inside out because an entitled unicorn from Canterlot happened to bump into her instead of anyone else. She’d allowed herself to be dragged down into a life of heroship by magical artifacts a pony of her breeding had no chance of denying and after two decades of dutifully serving Equestria as an Element of Harmony, Celestia forced a war that threw Pinkie’s world into a wood chipper.

Instead of the bubbly, upbeat cheerleader of joy that she had been known for, the mare seated across from Primrose had been reduced to a paranoid, bitterly lonely shell of herself. She lifted a wing to scratch at the bridge of her muzzle, suddenly aware of how fucked up this was. What was she doing? Was she so desperate to prevent her fledgling Enclave from plateauing that she was willing to put a mare on strings whose life was already corralled by the puppeteers who she used to call friends?

Mark the date, Prim, she thought with a begrudged smirk. You’re actually feeling sorry for an earth pony.

She tucked in her wing and let out a tired sigh. “Alright, look. I was in the throne room this morning when you told off Rarity.”

Pinkie crossed her forelegs. “Yeah, I saw you there. So what? You want my autograph?”

Her eyes shifted momentarily to the glossy square on the desk where Pinkie’s terminal once rested before it had been carted away. She wondered what the minister had done to warrant being cut off like that.

“So,” she said, crossing her feathers that the lie wouldn’t sound too hokey, “I know from experience that being lonely sucks, especially in the beginning. You’re obviously not busy, and my schedule’s open. I thought maybe you’d burn a couple hours.”

The mistrust on Pinkie’s face couldn’t have been more evident if it had been spelled out in neon lights. The last five years may have eroded her lighthearted spirit, but she could clearly cut through bullshit like a razor. Luckily there were some nuggets of truth to what Primrose had said that stopped Pinkie from dismissing her entirely.

Even so, the minister’s gaze began to slide back toward her armory of balloons.

She decided to take a gamble. “Look, I’ll leave if you want me to leave but I can promise you I’m not on Rarity’s side. I’ll prove it if I have to.”

“Jeez, you’re more desperate for company than I am.”

Okay. Ouch.

Pinkie looked up from the OUT tray and watched Primrose for several long seconds as if trying to make heads or tails of who she actually was. Several emotions flickered behind those piercing blue eyes. Paranoia being the foremost, but behind it hid a clear sense of longing. A hopefulness that something better had finally walked through her door, but one that bore the raw bruises of recent betrayals. They were the eyes of a mare who had been hurt in ways few understood, and those who did rarely left the shelter of their own paranoia to meet their peers.

And yet, in some sick twist of fate, here they were.

Then something changed in Pinkie’s expression. A decision had been made. Her chair squeaked as she sat up and opened the top drawer of her desk. She had to use both hooves to grip the drawer, but after a couple hard jerks the entire frame popped loose and she proceeded to dump the contents onto the floor. Primrose felt a tug of curiosity as Pinkie held up the empty drawer for her to see, then flipped it around to display the other side.

A matchbook bearing a faded blue flower lay on the flap taped to the drawer’s bottom panel. Pinkie nipped the corner and pulled it free. Primrose watched as she set the drawer aside and dropped the matchbook onto the desk.

“What’s that?”

Pinkie eyed her. “It’s what you’re here for.”

She blinked, confused. “What do I need matches for?”

A pause. Then Pinkie chuckled. “Wow, you’re really clinging to the whole woe-are-we schtick, aren’t you?”

Primrose frowned and looked at the tiny matchbook for some kind of hint to what she was getting at. Besides the little blue flower drawn onto it, there were no clues to its significance. She quietly wondered how an earth pony even lit cardboard matches, anyway.

Pinkie didn’t wait for her to figure it out. She leaned forward and flicked open the decorated flap. As expected, several unused matches stood together in a neat little row. But instead of tearing one free, Pinkie licked the edge of her hoof and nudged it behind the firestarters until something Primrose hadn’t seen before came free. A tiny square of paper about the size of a postage stamp stuck to her hoof.

The pieces finally clicked. “I’m guessing you don’t mail any letters with that.”

“Right as rain, little miss stranger.”

She watched Pinkie slide the matchbook aside, then transfer the square of paper to the upturned flat of her other hoof before it could fall off. “My name’s Primrose, by the way.”

“If you say so, Cozy Glow.” A warm shudder of nervous energy shot down Primrose’s spine. Meanwhile, Pinkie kept one hoof aloft as she slid out of her chair. “You want to spend some quality time with Pinkie Pie out of the goodness of your heart. You really want to stick with that line?”

Primrose swallowed as the minister picked her way around the strewn wreckage of her own life, careful not to drop the paper as she approached. How was it that she was the one feeling out of her depth?

Pinkie stopped short of Primrose’s chair, those once dull blue eyes now electric. “Have you ever heard of Poison Joke?”

She didn’t move. “I’m aware of it.”

The older mare smiled. “Well don’t worry, this isn’t that. It’s better. You see, a long time ago the girls and I found out what Poison Joke does to a pony back when the Everfree was still wild. It’s mostly harmless and we laughed about it in the end, hardy-har-har, you know? So when everyone started killing each other and they stuck me with keeping Equestria all happy-honkey-dorey, I thought, wait a minute! I know what’ll make them smile.”

Pinkie’s lips curled as she looked down at the little white square in her hoof. Then the smile faded. “The Ministry of Morale was a lot more fun before all the bad things happened. I didn’t have it for very long, but the folks working in Euphorics still listen to me when I get an idea.”

She hesitated before asking, “Euphorics?”

Pinkie shrugged. “Oops. Secret-secrets. Anyway, this little firecracker is one of my favorite things to come from the Poison Joke trials. There’s a big, long sciencey name for it but I call it Punchline. Because it makes everything hilarious.”

She felt herself becoming keenly aware of the door and how far away from it she was sitting. “Okay.”

It must not have been the response Pinkie was aiming for because something in her feverish intensity faltered. For a moment the bubblegum mare studied her as if waiting for Primrose to produce a punchline of her own, but when none came she appeared to seamlessly resume whatever tack she was on.

“Good thing you don’t have one of these on you,” she said, nodding at the chemically impregnated square. “Government property and all. Rarity would probably throw you in a cell.”

There was a clear threat beneath the observation. Primrose cleared her throat. “If you went through the trouble of looking up my name, then you know I don’t work for her.”

“This is the Pillar, Prim. We both know it’s never that simple.”

In one fluid movement, Pinkie scraped her tongue over her upturned hoof and hooked her foreleg behind Primrose’s chair. The gap between them shrank to nothing as the minister seated herself over the startled mare’s lap, pink tangles of her tightly curled mane sliding between her outstretched hooves as they clutched either side of the backrest. Primrose instinctively leaned away into the padding but Pinkie just leaned closer, straddling her, the cup of her tongue flicking out so Primrose could see the paper melting into her saliva. She grinned.

“You look surprised.”

Her breath rolled across Primrose’s face like a warm fog. “Um. Little bit.”

“Good. Still got it.”

With that, Pinkie shoved her lips against Primrose’s muzzle with enough brazen force to scare a muffled squeak out of her. The minister pressed against her with a determination that left Primrose floundering for an escape. She hadn’t signed up for whatever this was, but as Pinkie’s drug-laced tongue began pushing and probing it occurred to her that this was an earth pony seated in her lap. This mare had grown up moving boulders. Even in her middle-age, if she wanted to force this she easily could.

She was holding a little of that strength back. As awkward and, frankly, sloppy this was becoming, she was giving Primrose more than enough opportunity to decline. Because Pinkie wasn’t the dopey, harmless mare most ponies believed her to be. She was clever. Calculating.

She was testing her.

Against her better judgment Primrose relaxed her jaw. Her wings, already creeping toward half mast, closed around the minister. Fuck it. It had been a while. She took a breath and steeled herself for the ride as Pinkie’s tongue invaded her mouth, seeking her own. The contact was electric. Pinkie tasted like sweetness and stress. It felt good. It felt so, so good.

The Minister of Morale broke away and gasped, her body shuddering as a new energy dumped fresh warmth into her body. Then she dove back in, frenzied, alive.

It didn’t occur to Primrose that Pinkie Pie might have developed some tolerances. It barely occurred to her that several milligrams of highly dubious chemicals were now shrieking into her bloodstream, but she could feel those tiny little rainbooms exploding behind her eyes now like fireworks of concentrated joy. She laughed into Pinkie’s mouth. She was right. This was funny.

And when the Punchline finally came, it hit like a truck.

Primrose closed her wings and fell through the narrowing cloud layer like a stone. Her entourage dove after her amid startled shouts and an audible pulsing of feathers, the entire squadron arcing downward like the tail of a falling kite. Two black-clad stallions appeared on either side of her in the rushing mist, jaws squared just enough to convey their annoyance without going so far as to chastise her for the little stunt. They kept pace with her, a trio of missiles in tight formation, while the graying chief master sergeant on her right ordered the soldiers trailing after them to break off into a holding pattern above the clouds.

She rolled her wing in its socket until the knot that had formed there gave way with a satisfying pop. That done, she threw both wings out into the mist and bent her rapid descent into a shallow climb. Her officers followed, their wings beating with an easy synchrony that could have impressed Spitfire’s old Wonderbolts were they still alive. Gradually the mist thinned then fell away completely, replaced by the refreshing chill of a clear blue sky and clean early evening air. Familiar voices chattered from her earpiece and the briefly inconvenienced squadron fell into formation around her yet again as she settled back into level flight. The calm cadence of call and response resumed over their radios as if nothing had happened. It was no wonder Clover had selected this unit for her escort. If seeing their minister drop from the sky didn’t rattle them, Primrose doubted anything would.

Seven hours into this excursion over enemy territory was testing her endurance. It was supposed to take five. Her muscles burned like they were steeping in acid and she had a sneaking suspicion that she was the reason they were so woefully behind schedule. She felt less like the bearer of the princesses’ blessing and more like a butterfly caught in a stiff breeze.

She settled into a rhythm and let her mind wander.

When had she last flown this far from home? Eighteen, maybe nineteen decades ago? Back when the Enclave was at the cusp of establishing itself as Equestria’s postwar government, burdened with the simple task of reorganizing a continent of disparate survivors in a new world devoid of magic. Back when the biggest issues Equestria faced were food, water and shelter. Before the mutations, the raiders and the fucking Steel Rangers.

Her mood darkened.

The Steel Rangers. She’d been too distracted to notice them back then. Just another neighborhood watch group who figured out how to get into one of the old Equestrian Army’s armory buildings. Concerned citizens with guns. Hundreds of them had popped up across Equestria as soon as the dust settled, most of them harmless. Except for the Rangers, that is. While Primrose worried about the rebirth of Equestria’s capital city, the Steel Rangers grew steadily from the survivors that had once been stationed for deployment on the west coast. She hadn’t known about the hardened bunkers underneath Fort Heart and Fort Joy, not back then. They didn’t realize that the coded gibberish appearing and disappearing from random radio frequencies were the early stages of the shattered army reconnecting with other pieces of itself, a loose network of units pulling together into something more dangerous.

The Enclave’s influence spread outward from New Canterlot like a wave expanding in all directions, the organization introducing itself to Equestria one settlement after another. She’d enjoyed those excursions. Meeting with the local leadership, promising material and medical aid, seeing the recognition in their eyes as they realized the Enclave was really there to help, and to have unicorns, actual unicorns, looking up to their pegasi betters as saviors… oh, it had been intoxicating.

When the Steel Rangers mobilized, it all fell apart.

“Ma’am, we’ll be crossing the Fillydelphia red zone in twenty.” Her ear twitched at the sound of the chief master sergeant shouting over the buffeting headwind. “I can have some bodies take the lead if you’d prefer to draft off someone during the next climb.”

At least he had the sense of self-preservation to patronize her off comms. The Vhannan guns that made flying over Fillydelphia central a death wish existed now as scrap metal scattered across the streets and rooftops of that once inaccessible city. The demolition charges that had been hastily smuggled up those towers had done their job with lethal efficiency. Even now she could see the hazy gray smoke staining the cloud tops far ahead like an oil slick in the sky. A smile crept onto her lips. She’d seen the reports before she left detailing the uncontrollable fires that were slowly coring out three of the five remaining structures from the top down.

The events of the last few days couldn’t have gone better if she’d planned them herself. The Steel Rangers and their mewling Elders were drowning in confused chaos over the brazen attack on a city that up until recently was believed to be an impervious fortress, now rendered defenseless. A sustained, albeit superficial attack on Magnus Plaza drove the fiction home that the Enclave was executing an operation to take control of the city. A stampede of transmissions clogged the airwaves with distress calls ranging from analytical assessments to full blown panic. More than a wingful of those transmissions had been authored by a few of her own officers to lend some fuel to the hysteria. Less than a day later, Clover woke Primrose from a pleasantly Tantabus-free dream to the news of power armored units being observed mustering within Manehattan, Baltimare, and most notably Blinder’s Bluff.

Elder Coldbrook, her least favorite neighbor to the east, was responding. Come midnight tonight, he’d understand the fatality of that error.

“Ma’am?”

She sighed.

“Yes, fine. A stallion please.”

The officer nodded and murmured something over the comms. Moments later, a young stallion the color of cut wheat drifted into formation a wing’s length ahead of her and the headwind that had plagued her for the last several hours subsided a little as she settled into his draft. Her gaze slid toward the taut package under his windswept tail and her thoughts wandered off to more enticing territory as their formation drifted toward the Fillydelphia coastline and the oil rigs beyond.

She had an appointment to keep.

Next Chapter: Chapter 38: Return to Sender Estimated time remaining: 30 Hours, 40 Minutes