January 20th, 1077
11:45am

She awoke to a flat pillow, the sour scent of her own sweat, and the shredding agony of Celestia’s sun trying to burrow into her skull through her eyelids. All in all, not her best morning. A miserable groan rolled out of her chest as she twisted over in her bed and stared blearily at the furious red digits of her alarm clock, then groaned even louder when she saw the time. She was going to have some smoothing over to do with Spitfire. Her body ached in silent protest at the very thought of flying up to Canterlot. It felt like someone had tied her wings into a slipknot and yanked.

Her apartment out in the eastern foothills of Canterlot Mountain was, as the leasing company described it, “quaint.” She wasn’t about to help the landlord prettify his marketing and called it what it actually was: cheap. Steepleton wasn’t exactly the up-and-coming town it had promised to be when she was little thanks to the highway that bypassed it on its way to the booming capital city. Now it was just another no-name pocket of civilization withering in Canterlot’s shadow even as the price of living rose out of control. Those able to afford to live in sight of the mountain tended to work on the mountain and those who couldn’t had long since moved away. Every night when she rode the breeze out of Canterlot she debated pulling a few strings to throw a few extra bits onto her salary and renting a nice spot in the city, then ultimately decided against it. On paper, she was Spitfire’s administrative assistant. She had set hours and reasonable pay. She was meant to be invisible.

And invisible secretaries were meant to live in shitty apartments, especially when they shared the helm of a less than legitimate shadow organization operating clandestinely within Equestria’s first wartime government.

Against reasonable judgment, she forced herself to sit up and take in the first reluctant breaths of consciousness since…

“Huh.”

When had she gone home last night? She frowned as she struggled to remember much of anything from the day before. Several minutes slid by. Nothing. The cruddy air conditioner jammed into the window rattled on, sending a cluster of plastic panel shades clicking and clacking against one another.

She’d gone to work. Spitfire had left her a message saying she was flying out to the new Stable out at Foal Mountain for some quick final inspections. She’d be back in the afternoon and needed Primrose to stand in for her to make sure Rainbow Dash stayed on script during the morning meeting with the princesses. She remembered being annoyed that Rainbow hadn’t even gotten a chance to speak thanks to Twilight hijacking everyone’s time, yet again, and then shit had hit the fan when Pinkie Pie barged in and…

She blinked, her head swaying a little, and looked over her shoulder. The other half of her full-sized bed was empty, but it hadn’t been. Her sheets bore… several new stains in evidence of that.

She pressed her face into her feathers and uttered a low, “Oh. Oh, fuck.”

Needles stabbed her eardrums and she flinched. A weirdly familiar rattle of paper resonated from the other side of the apartment. Her stomach churned with reluctant hunger, stuck in that gray space between nauseating hunger and craving the food that would relieve it. She let gravity pull her the rest of the way out of bed, dropping her hooves onto her cheap offwhite carpet. Sparing a glance at her dresser and its opened drawers, she wondered which one of them had gone rummaging through her neatly folded sweaters in the middle of summer. She sighed. That was tomorrow Primrose’s problem.

Outdated linoleum crackled under her hooves as she trudged into her meager kitchenette. Several of the particle board cabinets stood open, the last of which contained a stack of cereal bowls she’d gotten cheap because robin’s egg blue had gone out of style. Beside the sink stood a box of sugary cereal she was fairly sure wasn’t hers. She wrinkled her nose at the artificially flavored chocolate pebbles and left the kitchenette behind.

She found Pinkie Pie seated at the little dining room table Primrose had shoved into the corner next to the front door, the top of which had seen little use beyond acting as a parking spot for her keys and whatever junk mail she’d been too lazy to walk to the trash can. The table was less there for function and more to satisfy an unspoken obligation, as if to say, “Look, I’m doing okay for myself. I have a kitchen table.” Pinkie had shoved her junk mail, keys, and the decorative wooden bowl holding a few loose bits and an old lighter - she was hanging onto it in case she ever picked up smoking again - all the way to the table’s far edge. It didn’t free up a ton of room, but what little it had was now occupied by an open newspaper and a bowl of cereal. A measurable percentage of Pinkie’s muzzle was presently submerged in the milk while her eyes scanned the black and white panels of the funnies page.

Primrose pulled up a chair and dropped into it, her forehead descending to rest against the table. “Ugh,” she groaned. “What dimension is it?”

Chocolate milk dribbled off Pinkie’s chin as she lifted her muzzle to chew. “Yeah,” she chuckled, wiping her hoof across her face. “You’re kind of a featherweight.”

She couldn’t tell if Pinkie was making a dig or an innocent observation. Neither were particularly wrong. She lifted her head enough to look at her. “I feel like it’d be better if I don’t ask what happened last night.”

Pinkie smirked. Not with the mistrust or aggressive confidence that Primrose remembered bits of from Pinkie’s office yesterday, but with something like understanding. Whatever suspicions Pinkie had harbored seemed to have left her now. The mare sat up a little straighter and pushed the half-eaten bowl of cereal in front of Primrose’s nose.

“Here, finish this up. Sugar helps with the wooziness.”

Primrose hesitated, but her stomach had the final say. She scooted forward in her seat and, lacking a spoon to eat with, picked up the bowl between her feathers and drank. Pinkie occupied herself with one of the comic strips on the table while she waited. By the time she put down the empty bowl, she was surprised to feel just a little less awful.

Pinkie folded the paper in half to read the strips at the top of the page. “We didn’t fuck, if you’re still wondering.”

She blinked, suddenly grateful she’d finished drinking before having that bomb dropped on her head. Her brain was still playing catch-up and she wasn’t completely convinced there wasn’t a but coming. “That’s… good to know?”

“Sorry to disappoint,” Pinkie snorted.

She shook her head, confused. “No, I mean, that’s not… then what happened to my bed?”

“That was all you. Repeatedly. It was actually kind of hard getting you to stop at times, what with the extra limbs and all.” Her lips curled into a smile as she watched Primrose’s cheeks shift from pink to bright red. “You were super pent up.”

“Stop.”

“I’m surprised you can sit down.”

“For Celestia’s sake.”

“Have you ever put jello in a blend–”

“Pinkie.” She fixed her with her sternest glare. “I get it.”

Point made, Pinkie leaned back looking quite satisfied with herself as her eyes wandered Primrose’s embarrassingly small apartment. They passed several minutes like that, the cheap clock in the kitchen ticking away while Pinkie feigned interest in the stark lack of decor and Primrose attempted to organize her thoughts with pure will. She should have known better. Pinkie Pie was the emotional equivalent of a box of landmines sucked into a tornado. Now she was here, in her apartment, and…

Wait. Her brow furrowed as a question finally surfaced in her mind, labeled IMPORTANT.

“Ma’am,” she began, her work etiquette kicking in as an afterthought, “don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you here?”

Pinkie propped her cheek against her hoof, smiling as if she’d been waiting for the question. “Right now, or at all?”

She shrugged. “Both.”

“Well, I’m the one who gave you the Punchline so getting you home safe is kind of my responsibility, right? It wouldn’t be very nice to let you loose in Canterlot just for you to go jumping off the side of the mountain thinking your wings were made of spiders.”

The thought of that made her feathers itch. “Fair, I guess.”

Pinkie chuckled dryly. “And I stuck around because the only other thing I have going on is wasting my forties watching my former friends convince themselves that war crimes are fine now that we’re winning, so why the fuck not burn a day doing something I’m actually good at like babysitting the mare I drugged?”

“A lot to unpack, there.”

She snorted. “My life in a nutshell. Sorry about yesterday, by the way. The jumping your bones part, I mean. You’ve got so many friends in high places that I thought you had to be one of Rarity’s plants.”

Primrose knew plenty about the eyes and ears Rarity had lurking all around Canterlot. Keeping them looking in the wrong direction ate up a measurable percentage of her Enclave’s resources. “You’ve drugged her people before?”

“Well, no. They always find a reason to be somewhere else before I can slip ‘em the crazy-hornies.”

Glancing at the tips of her feathers, she couldn’t argue that they looked well used. Pinkie wasn’t as grating as she assumed, either. The war had worn down those sharper edges, no doubt, but it was hard to believe an earth pony of her stature got to where she was on giggles and gumdrops alone. She had a feeling she was seeing depths that this mare rarely put on display. Sure she was a little odd, but maybe she could be more than just a patsy?

Just because her fellow Elements of Harmony discounted her as useless didn’t mean it was true.

“So,” she said, wincing at the puddle of milk at the bottom of her bowl, “did I at least have fun last night?”

Pinkie set her cheek against her hoof with a coy little shrug. “You saw the bed.”

She smirked, then chuckled as she settled on a decision. “If you don’t have to be at the Pillar, maybe you and I could ditch Canterlot for the day and hang out? I heard there’s a new walking trail that cuts through the Everfree now. Could be fun.”

Her brow lifted. “What, like a date?”

“No,” she said, surprised by how hesitant she was to say the word. “As friends, maybe?”

Pinkie frowned a little more deeply, but it didn’t seem like she wasn’t at least considering it. Primrose found herself wondering what was going through her head. There was an unmistakable eagerness in Pinkie’s body language, as if she were being physically compelled to throw off the last few years of agonizing loneliness.

Primrose waited, unsure whether adding anything might spoil her chances. As much as she hated to admit it, a part of her hated the isolation she’d imposed on herself. Spitfire made for decent conversation when she wasn’t salivating over her imagined utopia for pegasi. Whenever she got onto that tangent she was impossible to listen to. Competition between the races wasn’t their enemy. It was magic. If only she could get that through Spitfire’s thick fucking–

“Yeah. I can do friends.”

She blinked. Was that an innuendo or?

“Might want to wait until that chocolate milk comes back up before we leave.” Pinkie picked up the spoon and leveled it at Primrose. “Punchline and chocolate go together like… well, they don’t.”

As if on cue, her guts churned. “Are you serious? Why did you tell me to drink it?!”

Pinkie offered a guilty smile. “Puking kills the hangover?”

“Celestia’s…” She stood from her chair.

“You miiight want to hustle your bustles. Personal experience.”

Primrose bolted for the bathroom, nearly not making it in time before her stomach turned itself inside-out. As she hugged the bowl, her body working to purge the last of the Punchline from her system while Pinkie sat beside her on the edge of the tub trying not to laugh, a singular thought stuck in her mind.

This had better be worth it.

February 3rd, 1262
Friday Morning

“On behalf of Overmare Delphi and the innumerable residents whose lives were touched by Nimbus Pinfeather’s dedication to our Stable, I’d like to extend my deepest condolences for your family’s loss.”

The words draped over Aurora’s young shoulders like a suffocating cloud. Her dad murmured the same, tired thank you that they’d both been saying over and over again since… since it happened. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The words felt hollow now. Cored out by repetition until they were nothing but familiar sounds. Noises they made that made pegasi they’d never known feel repaid for fulfilling an empty social obligation. She hated it. None of them knew her mom like they did. To them she was a coworker, maybe a friend. To Aurora and her dad, she’d been their entire world.

Papers rustled between the mortician’s feathers. Her father leaned forward and picked a pen out of the plastic cup on the old stallion’s desk. Signatures were needed. Bits needed to be paid. The heartless strictures of a dead world leaking into the one meant to pave the way forward. Nobody works for free.

The mortician gently cleared his throat as he passed another paper across the desk. He spoke with perfect gentleness as his feather settled next to a bullet point he’d marked earlier. “Just an acknowledgment that the plot you selected for Nimbus is subject for seasonal tilling.”

Antiquated squeamishness from the old world carbon copied for two centuries with barely a letter of it changing. The first residents struggled to stomach the thought of their loved ones being stirred around in the dirt for the crops. Like it or not, there was nowhere else to put them. The paperwork was never optional.

Her dad scratched his initials onto the form, his red-rimmed eyes only skimming the last few paragraphs before signing again at the bottom. He was exhausted. They both were.

The mortician reached forward with a ghostly white wing and took back the signed papers to set them off to the side. The chromed clip of his pen caught the glare of fluorescents above as he guided the tip down his prepared checklist.

“Will the burial be attended by family only, or will there be others?”

“Just Aurora and I,” her dad said, then added, “Her friends will be holding a memorial in Mechanical tonight. More room for everyone down there.”

The mortician nodded. “She was lucky to have been loved by so many.”

Aurora clenched her jaw and looked away. A knife twisted in her chest every time that old goat had something to say, like this entire process was manufactured to wring the tears out of them. Her face was tender from crying. It was all she’d done since Tuesday when her dad showed up at her compartment, alone, barely able to keep himself composed long enough to make it inside. He’d woken up that morning and her mom hadn’t. A stroke, they said. Quick, painless. One minute she’s there, the next she’s not. A gentle death that came without warning, and which upturned their world with unfathomable violence.

Her dad had always been the family’s rock. Quiet, kind, reliable… he kept his worries private, or at least out of Aurora’s reach. Then, as she’d been cleaning her compartment after a brain-numbing overnight shift sharpening drill bits, her dad appeared at her door like a lost colt seeking the only stability he had left in life. She’d never heard him cry, not until that morning when he sagged into her wings and sobbed without restraint. A stretch of time passed when he could barely form coherent noises let alone words to express his grief. His wife was gone.

She had never fought so hard to keep herself together. Something in her knew he needed her to be stronger than him, to hold him up so he could finally come to pieces. She gathered up the mournful screams building in her chest and shoved them into a box, pushing them deep as she could until she ached inside. It wasn’t perfect. Little sobs locked up her throat and tears dropped off her chin and slid down her dad’s unkempt mane. But she didn’t break. Even after he ran out of tears and they sat in silence on the edge of her mattress, she kept it together so that he didn’t have to.

She had Millie order breakfast from the cafeteria despite his protests and she answered the door when it arrived, ignoring the delivery mare’s confused expression as Aurora took the bundle from her wing without bothering to wipe her eyes. They ate from the recyclable containers together in silence. Powdered eggs fried up in artificial butter jokingly referred to as “bomb squat” by those unfortunate enough to have suffered the laxative effects of too much fried Remembrance Day food. Her dad almost finished his toast before putting down his plastic fork and setting the food aside as he devolved into hitching sobs yet again.

“Well, we can be thankful that all the paperwork is in order,” the mortician said, jarring Aurora to the present, “Now both of you can focus on what’s really important.”

Her dad nodded with a polite smile. Aurora started to push out of her chair. The thought of burying her mom was beginning to feel too real. Too permanent. She needed some air.

“But before you go,” he added, interrupting her escape, “I do feel the need to ask whether the two of you would like some time to choose something to wear to the burial.”

Aurora looked at the old goat and saw he was staring very pointedly back at her with the faintest expression of disapproval creasing his eyes. Hot embarrassment crawled up her neck as her father beside her pressed his lips into a hard line, torn between his own concerns about his daughter’s refusal to wear her assigned jumpsuit in public and his instincts as a father to stand up for his child. She stepped in before he risked humiliating both of them.

“I’ll throw something together,” she muttered.

Her dad reached out and touched her shoulder. “Honey, you don’t have to–”

“It’s okay, dad.”

“Your mother wouldn’t mind.”

She dropped out of her chair, gaze fixed on the far wall. “I have a clean suit in my locker at work. Burial’s still at three, right?”

“Aurora…”

Shame balled up in her throat. Her over-packed box of emotion cracked open. “Just stop! Mom’s not here anymore to care what I do so you can stop pretending you’re not embarrassed of me, okay? Please!”

Stupid. That was stupid. She watched her dad close his mouth and look away, but not before seeing the fresh shimmer of water in his eyes.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m fine.” He didn't look at her. It wasn’t okay. “I’ll see you in the Gardens. Get some rest, honey.”

“Yeah. I will. Love you, Dad.”

He turned to her as she headed for the door, his smile pained.

“I love you too, Fixer.”

Ginger paced a slow circle around her foalhood bedroom, her magic occasionally reaching out to pick up miscellaneous objects of her youth she’d all but forgotten about. One of Tandy’s skills was an innate ability to pull details from a dreamer’s subconscious to the surface with admirable clarity. She paused to admire the polished surface of her dresser, which had always been the one place her parents allowed her to leave a mess. Several strips of colorful cloth braided for her by her mother lay in a pile at the base of the dresser mirror along with memories of anxious mornings deciding which ones to tie into her shoulder-length mane and in what style. A thick, hoof-written book titled The Road Forward lay face down, pages spread open against the polished wood when at some point she couldn’t be bothered to or rebelled against the proper notion of the bookmark.

It was less a book and more a tome - the hoof-written daydreams of some distant relative of her father’s who believed he knew exactly how to raise Equestrian prosperity from the dead through the power of imitation. He believed a full understanding of how Equestria rose to prominence was unnecessary in the pursuit of doing it again. “The key to success isn’t in the performance, but in the belief that the performance is adequate.” The book was required reading as far as her father had been concerned, and at the time she’d been hard pressed to look at the wealth surrounding her and still argue the results.

A mote of green fire began to smolder at the corner of the book. She gathered her magic and snuffed it out.

“Be careful. Magic is kindling to balefire.”

She looked toward the padded bench fitted into the bay window facing the fields. Tantabus - Tandy, as of late - reclined in the early afternoon light in exactly the same way Ginger had when she daydreamed as a teenager. Back when her future had already been safely determined by her parents, before she sheared off the bulk of her mane and ran away.

“I know,” she murmured, eyeing another little flame as it appeared and grew along the skirt of her bed. After watching it spread, she lit her horn and smothered it. “They’re not that hard to put out.”

Tandy glanced back at her with Nightmare Moon’s feline eyes, though none of the malice Ginger learned to associate with the storybook villain lingered behind them. Just unsurity and a pinch of worry. “I still advise against it. The corruption burns well enough on its own without being fed.”

Touchy, she thought.

“I am only touchy because I still do not understand why you defended the little tyrant.”

She pursed her lips and tried to remember how many nights ago it had been when she chastised Tandy for tormenting Primrose with her own father’s memory. Four, five? The last several days bled into each other like watered down ink. She’d initially assumed Tandy would grasp why inflicting such cutting traumas on defenseless ponies, even ones like Primrose, was wrong. Apparently the lesson didn’t stick.

She lifted a crystal bowl of fresh potpourri off a shelf above her bed and paused to smell it. It baffled her how she could still remember the bright scent of crushed lavender. “You were opening wounds without understanding the pain it caused. We went over this after you showed me Luna’s last memories.”

Or, more accurately, had her experience from the princess’s own eyes as if the world were ending around her in real time. Reading about the apocalypse in books, hearing stories about it… they were nothing compared to the helplessness Luna felt when she realized she was experiencing her final seconds, and that all her plans of making up for lost time with her big sister had amounted to nothing.

Ginger shuddered.

“Primrose has inflicted agony upon billions with stolen years and she hurts more with each passing day. She deserves punishment.”

She set the potpourri down and grudgingly allowed a spark of balefire to take hold in the dried flora. “She does. Just not right now.”

Tandy, the sentient creation of one of Equestria murdered royalty, crossed her hooves across her chest and huffed. “You think she will aid you and your friends if I allow her to rest.”

“I do.”

Tandy shook her head. It felt like each time they met, she became a little more real. “I know that creature, Ginger. She has no loyalty to anyone but herself, nor is she capable of charity. Remember that if nothing else.”

An uneasy silence settled between them in the wake of a crystal clear warning. An unnecessary warning. Ginger knew full well Primrose couldn’t be blindly trusted. How many throats had she cut to get to the top of a faction that even in its confined state - though that was rapidly changing now - posed enough threat to keep the Steel Rangers in a perpetual standoff for over two hundred years? How many groups and individuals had tried and failed to assassinate her over the generations, only to have their own blood shore up the myth that the Minister had been blessed with the late princesses’ longevity? Of course Primrose wouldn’t approach the bargaining table without a counteroffer, nor would she permit anyone to leave with the better half of the deal. Asking a favor of a mare like that was a losing proposition from the start.

Emerald fire crept along the edge of her dresser, threatening to ignite the colored braids she’d left behind. Annoyed at being reminded of the obvious, she spun up her magic and plunged it around the crackling flames. The fire resisted for a moment before dimming, sending a jolt of caustic heat ricocheting like grenade shrapnel inside her skull. Her eyes clenched shut with an embarrassed curse as she forced the flame to die.

Tandy’s hooves crossed the carpet. “I warned you to leave it alone. Your horn, please.”

Chagrined, she tipped her forehead toward Tandy and winced a little when fresh magic sparked across the gap. The acrid touch of balefire vanished from her mind and she felt rejuvenated much like she had the first time, albeit her pride remained freshly injured.

Tandy regarded the burning bedroom with a sigh and released the illusion. Ginger’s room fell apart around them and was quickly replaced with the now familiar endless landscape of burning doors.

“You are an extraordinarily capable unicorn,” Tandy said, “but I fear your desire to preserve Aurora’s home is blinding you from the danger Primrose poses to you both. Would it be so impossible for the people of her Stable to step outside?”

She frowned. She’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind, but that had been before Elder Coldbrook decided Stable 10 would better serve the Steel Rangers as a downpayment on their future. “That’s for them to decide. I want what’s best for Aurora and that’s making sure her people don’t wind up victims like in Stable 1 or end up spending the rest of their lives with someone else holding a certificate of ownership over their head.”

Again, silence. These chats used to be easier.

“Luna once told me that dreams are often the easiest time to explore uncomfortable truths.”

She wasn’t sure what the right answer to that was, so she just nodded.

“This mare you fell in love with has a difficult road ahead of her and will need your support. Keep this in mind when Primrose comes bearing miracles.”

She blinked. The doors around her continued to burn.

“I’ll try.”

April 20th, 1297
Present Day

Aurora woke to the smell of stale sweat, the warmth of a familiar body curled against her back, and the grudging surety that the more consciousness gained on her the worse the deep, throbbing pain sloshing up and down her body was going to get. She tried to coax herself back to sleep by ignoring the strange odor, the thump of hooves nearby, the steady cadence of Ginger’s breath sinking through the roots of her mane. In spite of her efforts, consciousness had gotten an unfair head start that it wasn’t going to give up, and she could feel herself being dragged away from dreamless sleep in its wake.

Her chest rose with a deep waking breath, a reflex she regretted immediately. The sour odor of old sweat and musty fabric flooded her sinuses. The rest of her body took her habitual stretching as an opportunity to fill her in on the myriad pain signals that sleep had been blissfully keeping her unaware of. From her hooves to her head, every muscle jerked and trembled in a churning mob of competing aches. A grunt rose out of her throat as she tried to roll onto her back in hopes of finding a better position to lay in, but her spine went rigid at the jolting shock of agony that shot up her hind leg.

“Ow-ow-ow! Fuck… jeez.”

The cutting pain dulled to a warning throb that felt… weird. She frowned and sank back onto her side. Behind her, Ginger took a slow breath and stirred a little before settling. She could hear muffled voices nearby, unfamiliar and unreserved in the way they spoke. She couldn’t make out the words, but she listened anyway. Two ponies, probably mares? Who knew. She barely had enough energy to remember why she hurt so much, let alone sleuth out where in Equestria they were now.

Cracking one eye open, she was greeted with an uninspired beige wall. She touched it with a hoof, the textured panel made of the same easy-clean plastic they used in the communal showers back in Mechanical. Throw in the ambient hum of the air recyclers and she might believe she was back home at Stable 10. Wouldn’t that be nice. She closed her eye and tried to imagine she was back in her compartment, but indulging too much in wishful thinking was risky. She could feel powerful emotions rising to the surface again, the lid on that neatly packed box sliding loose.

She opened her eyes and pushed them to the back of her mind. Shifting her weight onto her foreleg, she propped herself up enough to take a look around. The first thing she noticed was the browned mattress sagging in the bunk above her. Definitely not Stable 10, then. The second thing she saw was Ginger sleeping beside her, her own foreleg still gently gripping Aurora’s barrel and likely the only thing keeping the unicorn from tumbling butt first off the bed. A row of four gray lockers stood in a neat row past the end of the bunk, the twin of which stood vacant just beyond. Beside the second bunk stood a closed door and nothing else. The rest of the narrow space was barren. Not even a creepy pre-war poster to brighten up their little corner of the sardine can.

Her shoulder started to ache and she lay back down, puzzled.

Behind her, Ginger stirred. Aurora listened to her take a long relaxed breath, the equally languid exhale spreading across the back of her neck like a warm compress. A moment later the shaded bottom bunk bloomed with amber light. She didn’t need to look to know Ginger was pulling the mess of fiery curls out of her eyes. She let herself smile a little at the groggy sound of the mare’s voice.

“Mm. How long have you been awake?”

“Few minutes.” She grimaced, pushing through the fresh bolt of pain that leaped up her hind leg as she rolled to face her companion. She’d nearly done it herself when Ginger’s magic braced her lower half, helping her along with a touch of worry in her eyes. This cramped little bed made moving around seem ridiculous. “Where are we?”

Ginger’s horn darkened. “We’re safe, but… how are you feeling?”

“I feel,” she said, hesitating for a fraction of a second.

Sore, scared, exhausted, confused Like the wasteland is a low grit belt sander and every day it finds a new corner of me to shred.

She set her jaw into a reassuring smile. “Fine. I feel fine.”

She watched suspicion pull at Ginger’s brow and worried she might push for more than just a boilerplate nonanswer. Mercifully, she didn’t, but the look on her face made it clear she wasn’t satisfied. That was okay. Ginger’s entire life had been uprooted when Aurora showed up, and there would be more than a few recently unemployed traders on the roads who would pay good caps to put a bullet in both of them. The less Ginger had to worry about, the better.

Her smile grew a little tighter. “Really.”

Ginger gave no sign that she believed her. “Do you remember what happened?”

She blinked. “With Ironshod.”

“That and… after.”

She let her cheek settle into the flattened pillow and shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, he ambushed us. Killed Julip. He, um… had a freezer he put me in and…”

Tears stung at the corners of her eyes as the memories resurfaced. The things he did to her had made her wish for death. She’d made peace with that. “I don’t want to talk about that part. All I know is you rescued me and that’s good enough, right?”

Ginger just nodded. “And after? Do you remember anything between then and now?”

She tried to think. Her mask faltered as she remembered how the warm rain stung her frostbitten skin like scraping thorns. The sound of wind buffeting her ears as someone unfamiliar carried her on their back. Pegasi standing over her, putting something around her muzzle. After that, everything got muddy.

She shook her head. “Only bits and pieces, like a bad dream.”

Ginger glanced down and hooked one of her hooves under Aurora’s, forming new and interesting shapes in the thin sheets covering them. Then she took a long, pensive breath and met her eyes. The body language of bad news.

“I need you to know that I’m always going to stick with you, and no matter what happens I’m going to keep loving you for who you are inside and out. Okay? No matter what, Aurora.”

Definitely bad news. As she nodded that she understood, she braced herself as she waited for the other shoe to drop. And waited. Seconds passed and it became obvious Ginger was struggling to form the words. Ginger finally looked away as a palpable, barely contained anger radiated behind the deep waters of her eyes.

“He hurt you, Aurora. Badly.” Her lip lifted over her teeth as she spoke, each word speaking to the violence she desperately wanted to inflict upon Ironshod. “The Enclave, well, they did their best. I made sure of it.”

She trailed off, the words locking up in her throat. Aurora swallowed. “But?”

“They said whatever he did to break your leg, he crushed a major artery. Normally you would have bled out, but the medics think putting you in a freezer kept your blood pressure low enough for it to clot.”

Frowning, Aurora looked down toward the end of the mattress. Her left leg ached from hip to hoof in time with her heartbeat, but something was wrong about the way the sheets were shaped around it.

Ginger soldiered on. “They gave you so many stimpacks, Aurora. They really did try, but there was so much damage.”

She sat up in what little space the bunk overhead allowed her to, and even the simple process of getting her back up against the wall spelled out significant clues to what Ginger was working herself up toward saying. As Ginger propped herself up beside her, their eyes settled on the telltale asymmetry below Aurora’s waist. She began pulling away the covers even as Ginger continued to lead up to what Aurora had already worked out for herself. She was trying to soften the blow, and Aurora loved her for that, but fresh memories of sitting in that frigid chair, her own frozen piss clinging to her groin, knowing in no uncertain terms that the ruination Ironshod had inflicted upon her with one calculated downstroke of his hoof told Aurora everything at once what Ginger was trying to ease into.

The covers slid off her hind legs, and she stared.

It took several seconds for what she was seeing to register as real in her own mind. On her right side, a hind leg that looked little different than it had a week ago. Lithely toned muscle fully coated in her gently matted gray coat, complete with a wingful of small welding scars unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know where to look.

And beside it, a heavily bandaged stump. For a long while it felt like she was looking at a particularly clever illusion. Where there had been a knee and a hoof, there was nothing. Empty space. The absence of something she assumed was permanent.

Her shoulders sagged. “They cut it off?”

“It was too far gone to…”

“I know,” she said, too abruptly to stop her voice from catching in her throat. She cleared it. “Yeah. I mean, I get it.”

Sitting there in that quiet room, gaze trapped by this new unwanted reality she now had no choice but to function within, she felt momentarily paralyzed by… something. Anger, maybe. Fear? Indignation that the Enclave had seen fit to amputate a part of her without so much as asking how she felt? She couldn’t decide. Best to pack it all away. Deal with it later.

“Are you okay?”

She nodded, forcing a lopsided smile that trembled only slightly on her lips. “I’m fine. It’s just a leg.”

Silence. She could feel Ginger watching her. Giving her space to digest what she’d just said. It cornered her like an accusation. You’re lying to yourself. You aren’t fine. She puffed out a dismissive chuckle, eyes stinging with embarrassment. “I mean, it’ll take some getting used to but it’s not the end of the world. Fastest twenty pounds I’ve ever lost, that’s for sure.”

“Aurora.”

“What?” Her voice shook. “It’s not even one of my good legs. It’s the one Roach’s ghoul buddies chewed on when I left home. Besides, I can get around just fine on three.”

To prove her point she pushed Ginger’s hoof away and scooted around her to the edge of the bed, grinding her teeth against the bolts of pain shooting into her hip every time her stump bounced against the mattress. She knew she was being stubborn and that Ginger would resent the theatrics, but she couldn’t worry about that now. There was too much riding on her ability to keep moving and she was sure as shit not going to let a psychopath like Ironshod be the one to decide her journey was over.

Her single hind hoof touched the floor and she stopped. Seated on the edge of the mattress with the bandaged stub of her missing leg sticking out of her hip like a useless lesion, it dawned on her that she didn’t know how to get down without falling over. Futile anger welled in her chest as she sat there, paralyzed, unable to muster the courage to take the first step.

Frustrated tears stung in her eyes.

“Hey.” Ginger’s voice softened. “Why don’t we slow down for a minute?”

“I can’t.” The words shook as she spoke. “I have to figure this out. I need to find that talisman and I can’t do that if I can’t get off this fucking bed.”

“Aurora.” Amber light cupped her cheek, turning her head until she could see the pain in Ginger’s eyes. “I need you to slow down and listen to me for five seconds. While you were resting I was able to touch base with the Stable, and your father told me they found a temporary alternative to the generator. They’re going to be safe, and you can–”

“You talked to my dad?” The world lurched around her. Her heart pounded. “Why would you do that? What did you tell him?”

Startled by her reaction, Ginger hesitated. “I… I asked your overstallion for advice and sent a picture. I didn’t think he’d share it with your…”

The rest of her words were lost in a haze of Aurora’s abject panic. She stared at her, tears falling freely now. “He saw this? Ginger, no! Why did you…”

Her breathing ramped up, her lungs fooled by soaring anxiety into thinking she was being cornered. All the neatly packed boxes in the back of her head, all of it came spilling out. Her dad knew she’d been beaten. Tortured. He’d seen her. Ginger had pulled away the veil and showed him everything Aurora wanted to bury, down to her rag-wrapped stump.

“He’s my fucking dad! We’re all we have left of each other! He doesn’t need to know about this! Now all he’s going to do is sit there and worry and think this is his fault!”

She gestured vaguely with her wings, not knowing what it was she even wanted to say. She wanted to scream. She wanted to rip off these damn bandages and let herself feel the hurt her surgeons tried to save her from. But she couldn’t do that. There was something keeping her from flying off the handle. From doing something she’d immediately regret.

As pissed as she was at her, Ginger wasn’t throwing it back, and Aurora realized this wasn’t about what Ginger did. It wasn’t about the unfairness of her overstepping a line that neither of them had thought to establish. It ran deeper. The viscous fury in Aurora’s chest began to cool, though her wings trembled like leaves.

She licked her lips, trying to find the words. “I just…” Her voice cracked. “I don’t want him to be afraid for me, you know?”

Ginger’s hoof wrapped around her own, a gentle touch that helped her along.

“Him and mom called me Fixer, so that’s what I do.” She wiped her face, but the tears kept coming. “I fix things. That’s all I’ve ever been good at, except for one time I can’t and I end up out here… doing things I never want him to know about.”

A sob shuddered its way out of her chest but she shoved it back down, hard. Beside her, Ginger lit her horn and lifted her an inch off the mattress, bracing her ruined leg as she scooted away from the bed’s edge until their backs touched the wall shaded by the overhead bunk. She tried not to complain about the deep, radiating pain that flared when Ginger set her down.

Ginger didn’t explain herself as they sat together, nor did Aurora ask. Sitting as they were, it reminded her of when she would build forts in the family compartment with her mom, turning the living area into a mess of sheets, pillows and furniture. She slipped a wing behind Ginger, staring at the rumpled sheets around their hooves.

“I deserve this,” she murmured.

Ginger tensed in her feathers. “No you don’t.”

“Why not? Doesn’t this… I don’t know, balance the scales for everything I’ve done?”

“Aurora, you haven’t done anything to–”

“I have.” She shrugged, her brain still trying to reconcile with the absence of her leg. “I’m a murderer. I murdered Cider, I murdered all those guards at the solar array, and the slavers…”

“You didn’t have a choice but to defend yourself!” Ginger turned to face her more fully. “And if you don’t remember, you saved my life. I’m alive because of you.”

Her jaw stiffened at the repudiation, but stubbornness pushed her forward. “I could have let him go.”

Ginger shook her head. “Cider would have followed us.”

“Gallow.”

She paused. Her posture softened. “Aurora…”

“I know. Believe me, I know. But I can’t stop thinking about it.” She swallowed, nerves fraying all over again. “He was just a kid listening to the adults. That’s all he knew to do, and we told him to go sit on the road until we were gone… and then we opened that shed and I didn’t see him as a kid anymore. He trusted us to leave him be and I went after him anyway and then I fucked it up and…”

She buried her face in her wing just as the first sob stole her voice. The words were there, everything she wanted to say laid out in her mind now that the gates were finally open. All she could do was whimper unintelligible syllables, her throat choked with tears, her body shaking.

“I fucked up so bad…” Magic pulled her against Ginger’s chest. Guilt, shame, selfish worries flooded her. A maelstrom of carefully ignored emotions set loose all at once. “I can’t stop hearing him screaming. Every. Night.”

Ginger kissed the top of her head, words failing her.

“He was going to kill himself,” she groaned, recalling the note of disgust in Roach’s voice when he first told her. Gallow had wanted them to leave his pistol where he could find it so he could turn it on himself. They’d left him with nothing. Less than nothing.

“Aurora?”

She shuddered.

“If you could go back and do things over, would you have let Gallow live?”

“Ye–”

“Slow down and think. Be honest with yourself.” She pulled away from her, their eyes briefly meeting before Aurora looked back down at the sheets. “After seeing what that colt did to the family in that shed, knowing how many wagons he dragged into the woods, would you have trusted him to walk back to Blinder’s Bluff alone? Or to follow us?”

She lifted a feather and dragged it under her eyes. “That’s not fair.”

Ginger’s tone remained firm. “Yes or no?”

She chewed her lip. “I guess not. But–”

“But you don’t know what he would have done. Roach doesn’t know. I don’t know. All we know is his mother groomed him to kill and butcher innocent travelers until they had enough caps to buy their way in with the Epicureans. She tried to kill us, and he was helping.” She put a hoof under Aurora’s chin, tipping her eyes up to meet hers. “You have every right to regret what you did, but you had no control over why it had to be done.”

She swallowed and offered up a half-hearted, “Okay.”

“And, hey.” Ginger swept the tears from Aurora’s cheek with her magic, her own eyes misting over as she spoke. “No more shutting us out. Especially me. It hurts too much.”

For a long while they sat together, neither sure what to say. She hadn’t considered what it must have been like to deal with her. Every I’m fine a red flag signaling the opposite while her ironclad stubbornness prevented any of them from getting near enough to help. She couldn’t help but feel humiliated.

“I’m sorry,” she managed to say. “I didn’t mean to make it so hard for you.”

Ginger cleared her eyes and chuckled. “Not touching that with a ten foot pole, Ms. Pinfeathers. From now on, though, it’d be nice to turn down the difficulty in that head of yours. Fair?”

She took a long breath, held it, and let it out slowly. The world had stopped spinning and her panic had eased. Things were going to be okay. And if not okay, at least Ginger would be around to help her along.

“Fair.” Her gaze dropped, however. The hunk of bandaged limb the Enclave chose to leave her with begged the question. “So… what do I do about this?”

Ginger gestured to the empty floor beyond the edge of their bed. “Let’s start with standing, then see where it takes us.”

“This sucks.”

“Mmhm.”

“We should be doing something.”

“We are. We’re behaving until Aurora wakes up.”

Julip scoffed, her black mane lifting in the sea breeze. “I fucking hate behaving. This place gives me the creeps.”

Not much to disagree with, there. Roach only shrugged as the two of them leaned over the rusted pipes that made up the many miles of the derelict oil rig’s railing. Three days had passed since the Enclave plucked the four of them from the Red Delicious parking lot and the chaos unfolding at the center of Fillydelphia. Delirious, beaten, and barely conscious, Aurora had been barely recognizable. The explosions that rocked the city center eliminated any argument for seeking medical attention from the locals, who were probably occupied with their own troubles at that moment. Whether the Enclave was abducting, escorting or aiding them was up to interpretation. For the time being, their goals had briefly aligned: help Aurora.

Roach glanced over his shoulder as a stallion in black uniform traced his patrol across the catwalk behind them. No disguises out here. Not after the bombs decimated practically every viable watercraft within spitting distance of the Equestrian coast, and the ones that survived had been left to decay or sink on their own. Rumors were the Steel Rangers had salvaged a few prewar ocean haulers that docked in the comparably calmer waters on the western shore, but nothing which posed a threat. While tight-lipped around Roach and Julip, the soldiers assigned to this rusting outpost navigated the mazework of catwalks and gantries like second nature. They’d been stationed here a good long while.

He watched Julip pucker her lips and spit over the rail, the two of them tracking the spittle as it tumbled and broke apart before they could see it hit the plated walkways below. They stood at the top of a stack of glorified shipping containers on the platform’s leeward side, each one retrofitted into worker housing when the rig was in operation centuries ago. Ginger, Roach and Julip had all been assigned a container to sleep in one row down while Aurora recovered from her surgery in the yellow-lit rusty horror show these soldiers called their infirmary. It was only until last night that Aurora was finally moved to the container with the rest of them, and only after the Enclave deemed it safe by their own hazy standards of care. It didn’t take very long for the new living situation to feel indelicate even as Roach and Julip tried their best not to strain Ginger’s already frayed nerves. They’d slipped away as soon as morning arrived.

Roach glanced up to watch a formation of pegasi laden with heavy duffel bags approach from the east and land on what had once been a freight receiving platform suspended on cantilevers off the windward side. Another supply drop, right on time, lending to his theory that this wasn’t a temporary base of operations. The quartet shuffled off their heavy loads and were back in the air before the ground team had climbed the short steps to the platform, off to places unknown.

“You know, you’re the reason I quit working with these assholes,” Julip grumbled. “And now we’re here as their guests of honor.”

He shrugged and turned his gaze toward a clutch of uniformed pegasi passing around a cigarette beneath the platform’s central oil derrick. Lucky for them the salty air had corroded just about every inch of paint on the rig including the no smoking signs. “Ironshod really threw a wrench into things.”

Julip gave her tail an irritated flick, casting off into the sea breeze a knot of black hair that Ginger and Beans had braided in place. “Prick’s going to wish he’d been able to off himself once Primrose gets her hooks into him.”

She paused as a uniformed mare slid past them, ear turned toward the conversation just like everyone else who came up to check on them. Their eyes met briefly and Roach imagined daggers flying in both directions. Her status as a defector wasn’t a secret, it seemed, even out here. Julip shot her a cocky smile as she sidled away.

“At least Ironshod doesn’t have to pretend to be all nicey-nice,” she complained. “You do know she’s going to ask for us to do something for her in return, right? Probably something that’s going to get us all killed.”

“Then we’d better not agree to anything that’ll get us killed.”

She shot him a look. “Easy to say when you’re immortal.”

He laughed. It felt good to laugh. “I’m ugly, not immortal.”

“You’re not ugly.”

He glanced at her and smiled. “Well… thanks. I hear what you’re saying, though. We’re just going to have to be careful if things do boil down to bargaining. And who knows? Maybe they won’t. We did give her a gift wrapped distraction to sucker punch the Steel Rangers on their home turf.”

The reminder of what happened made Julip deflate a little, and she looked past Roach toward the hazy smear of smoke still snaking its way out from the west. Hidden below the horizon, the high reaching towers of Fillydelphia were still burning.

She sighed. “Maybe, but I doubt it. Ponies like Primrose don’t take a morning shit without some hidden agenda tied to it. Heck, a sprinkling of flattery in a chapel was all it took from her to get me to fly out here and spy on you guys. I was one hundred percent aware that one of you might punch my ticket if I got caught, and I never even thought to ask Primrose for a single thing in return. Not even a promotion. She’s slick like that. She lets you think she’s doing you a favor and not the other way around. So… you know. Be careful if she offers you the moon. Chances are she’s planning to drop it on your head.”

For a mare able to pack a shocking amount of profanity into the most mundane observations, these more eloquent moments she had kept catching him off guard. It reminded him that there was more to her than her past. In a different time, he wondered what kind of life someone like Julip might have made for herself.

“You think Ginger’s going to tell her about the talisman?”

“No,” he said, hoping Julip would catch the momentary firmness in his tone. “We don’t tell her. Knowing we were that close and we lost it during the rescue would break her.”

Julip frowned up at him but she didn’t push the issue. He could tell she understood the cold logic in their decision even if she didn’t appreciate being left out of it. Ginger had been beside herself when she first noticed the pulverized black shards spilling out of the hole torn through her saddlebag when Ironshod pulled the trigger on her. And now with Fillydelphia looking more and more like the epicenter of a new war, sneaking back down into Stable-Tec Headquarters for a second talisman risked tipping both factions off to the treasure trove Applebloom guarded.

Roach looked back at the bags on his own hips, the words STABLE-TEC FIELD SUPPORT emblazoned within a nine-toothed cog only partially obscured by the buckled flap. To the casual observer, it probably meant nothing more than a lucky scavenge. The Enclave was not known for observing casually, however, and wearing his bags openly presented a risk in itself. Yet he had precious cargo of his own to worry about, a gemstone more irreplaceable than any talisman.

So far only one Enclave soldier had attempted to search his bags and he’d repaid the effort by decking the stallion with a bruised apple. On an outpost fed on rations and whatever their scouts could scavenge locally, the assault had been overlooked in exchange for the rest of the fresh fruit the four of them had brought up from Stable 1. While the Enclave still insisted he forfeit his leg mounted shotgun, his bags and the Element of Loyalty remained in his possession.

A small victory given the shitstorm unraveling on shore.

Julip sighed. “I still think this sucks.”

“Sure does.”

They watched the smoke-spoiled clouds drift overhead in silence. Soldiers passed by, stopped to listen, and left once they learned there was nothing to overhear. For a long while Roach could almost believe they were moving, the clouds hanging stationary above them while the oil rig and all its inhabitants slid across the open ocean like the cruise ships that Saffron always threatened to buy tickets for. Better days.

A metallic thud signaled the opening of a door from the catwalk below and they looked down through the rusted grating at Ginger’s earth and fire palette stepping out of their container. Beside her, with one wing slung over her back for balance, Aurora gradually followed her out into the muted daylight.

Ginger murmured something encouraging, her attention split between leading Aurora to the railing and making sure she wasn’t moving too fast. Aurora’s voice bore the frayed edges of a mare who had cried her throat raw, her tired nod more perceptible than her spoken answer. Roach couldn’t begin to imagine how that conversation went.

He tapped his hoof against the catwalk to let them know they were overhead. The two mares looked up and met their gaze, Ginger doing her best to reassure Roach and Julip with a worn smile.

Aurora, however, wore her exhaustion like a second skin. From her red-rimmed eyes to the deep sag of her shoulders it was clear to anyone that she was carrying more than just a physical burden. But then her gaze shifted away from Roach and her eyes widened with disbelief.

“Julip?”

The little green mare stopped short of delivering her usual snark as the moment’s significance dawned on her. She looked to Roach first, but a split second later her eyes were boring indignant holes through the grating at the unicorn being dragged along below by a suddenly determined Aurora. Ginger was barely able to look up at her in apology before she was carried toward the steps at the end of the catwalk in an undignified scramble of hooves.

Through grit teeth, Julip asked, “She didn’t tell her I’m not dead, did she?”

“You stay put,” he murmured back.

Aurora stumbled up the stairs and toward them, her wings alternating between gripping the railing and wiping her eyes.

“She’s going to hug me. I don’t like being hugged, Roach.”

“Welcome to the family, green bean.”

“I swear t– oof!”

Julip nearly fell ass over teakettle from the force of Aurora’s wings clamping around her, but somehow she managed to keep them both upright. Neither mare spoke, one frozen with physical discomfort and one refusing to loosen her grip as she reckoned with the realization that Julip had survived too. Aurora shook her head, tears navigating well trodden tracks along her cheeks as she struggled for words. Despite her own protests, Roach caught Julip looking up at the clouds in a subtle attempt at keeping her own eyes dry. Something unspoken passed between the two of them. The relief of a shared guilt being lifted off of them as each came to terms with the other’s survival.

Maybe it was selfish, but Roach felt a bolt of pride when Julip finally spoke.

“He didn’t get us,” she said.

Aurora shook her head, blinded by tears. “He didn’t get us.”

And there it was. A shimmer of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel and the reason why each of them kept putting their lives on the line for the others. Despite their differences and the hardships they’d faced, they were sewing together the lasting bonds of a real family. Even Julip had finally come around.

Careful not to spoil the moment, Roach cleared his throat and looked beyond the high railing and let the wind dry his eyes. He forgot how badly he missed this. After some time and a good amount of sheepish recomposure between the newly minted friends, Aurora plodded over to him and thumped his hip with the back of her wing.

“Hey,” she said with the slightest smile in her voice. “Thanks.”

He looked at her, perplexed. “For what?”

“Too many things to keep track of. Just, thank you for all of it. Especially with me being, well, me.”

He had a feeling he knew what she was referring to. He glanced at the catwalk and the absence of the hoof that would have helped her stand on it. “So…”

The word hung between them with the weight of all the questions attached to it. Aurora tried to shrug off the seriousness of what he struggled to put into words, but her eyes weren’t bloodshot and tired for nothing. Every ounce of her radiated exhaustion as she propped herself against the railing.

“Ginger told me she thinks it’s safer for me if we went back home.”

First time he’d heard anyone mention giving up. He managed to mask his surprise as his gaze flicked past Aurora to the unicorn in question. Ginger stared at him with a silent intensity that warned him not to pry. He eyed her back. She expected them all to just pack up and go home without discussing it? Absolutely not.

He glanced down at Aurora, his tone gentle. “It certainly would be safer. What about the ignition talisman?”

A mote of magic bloomed around his shoulder and gave him a sturdy shake. He flicked his tail hard enough for the old fibers to snap the air, warding her off. Aurora didn’t notice the exchange, her attention briefly held by the black-clad soldiers milling around the platform below. Out here, surrounded by the ocean, the Enclave didn’t have to blend in. Many of them were watching the four of them from their posts, keeping tabs on their guests without going so far as to risk anything amounting to a sociable interaction. Roach imagined Dancer or Chops might have risked a sideways glance by chewing the fat with them had they not been reassigned back to New Canterlot as soon as they’d all been safely evacuated from the burning city.

Aurora clenched her teeth against some invisible discomfort. The medics who removed her dead limb warned that she’d likely experience phantom pain well after she recovered, possibly for the remainder of her life.

“Ginger says she’s made arrangements to get one.” More news. Now Julip was staring at Ginger with fresh confusion. “Besides… with the exception of meeting you guys, coming out here has just been one clusterfuck after another. I mean, I didn’t get ten steps outside before something tried to kill me. And then the whole thing with Cider and Autumn just… haven’t you gotten the feeling that the further we go, the more danger I put you all in?”

Dammit, Ginger, what did you say to her? He took a breath and nudged the trailing edge of her wing. “Why don’t you hang onto me while we talk. Ginger, Julip, do you mind if we have some privacy?”

He didn’t care that Ginger stiffened or that she seemed ready to argue. She’d been putting things in motion behind his back and now they were all along for the ride. Ginger was lucky he didn’t tear that thermite Pip-Buck off her foreleg and send the thing flying into the sea.

Luckily, she relented and followed Julip down the stairs. As they departed, Roach braced Aurora with his body as she dropped an unsteady wing over his back, her grip staying rigid as she tried to take some of the pressure off her remaining hind leg. He only spoke once he felt sure Ginger was out of earshot.

“Did I ever tell you about the two ghouls that attacked you when you left the Stable?”

Aurora frowned. “No?”

He grunted. “Chalk it up to embarrassment on my part. Their names were Mayberry and Paisley. The only reason I know that is because I matched their faces to the Stable registration forms I found in their luggage. I went through a lot of luggage after… well, after it was just me in there.”

Before Rainbow Dash gave the reins to Blue.

“I’m pretty sure they were the last two to go feral,” he continued, remembering those terrible last days when those who hadn’t mustered the courage to kill themselves succumbed to the decaying effects of the radiation. Trapped in a cavern with dozens of feral ghouls waking around them, those who hadn’t transformed hadn’t stood a chance. “A lot of ponies think ghouls live forever, but they don’t. After a decade or two without eating they shut down and die like anyone else. I didn’t even realize most of the ghouls in the tunnel had died until I saw one just… fall over. They were always so quiet. Mayberry and Paisley especially. They always stood together under one of the old posters on the tunnel wall and just stared into nowhere.”

Aurora had the same blank look. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Bear with me.” If he was being honest with himself, he didn’t know either. “Up until then, I’d made some friends on the outside. A couple of stallions that survived the bombs by hiding in a sewer. By then they were getting old. Golden kept getting sick and it was taking him longer to recover. They were my first friends I knew I was going to outlive, and the idea of starting over just made me feel so… tired. Going back home to make sure Blue was okay kept me grounded, and I got it in my head that if I fed Mayberry and Paisley too then we could be a group together. And hey, maybe I wouldn’t feel so lonely. Plus it gave me someone different to talk to.”

“So you kept them alive.” He could see the regret bloom in Aurora’s eyes. “And I made you kill them.”

He grimaced. “That’s not my point. Aurora, they were gone. Completely. At least I hope they were, because I was keeping them alive out of selfishness. I used to bring radroaches into the tunnel to watch them hunt because it was something to do. Entertainment to pass the time while I waited for the door to open. I barely considered what might happen if someone did step out.”

Feathers squeezed around his midsection. Tactile reassurance. He missed the days back when his disguise bore wings.

“Sometimes,” he continued, choosing his words carefully, “when we get attached to another person we forget how hard it is to make good choices. I got so attached to Mayberry and Paisley’s company that I ended up treating them like pets. I convinced myself of so many lies to keep justifying it. They would keep Blue company when I was away, or maybe with time someone might find a cure for what happened to them. For all I know they had family of their own that survived the bombs and who were looking for them, and meanwhile I was playing with their corpses in what should have been their final resting place.”

Aurora was staring at him now with speechless pity. He offered a little smile to forestall her initiative to console him. Saffron liked to reprimand him for rambling, especially when he was working his way toward making a point. Old habits die hard.

He sighed. He would have preferred a less complicated moment to pour his heart out, but right now seemed fitting given the circumstances. “Look. That mare down there adores you more than anything in the world. You’re messy, you’re impulsive, and you’re about as subtle as a jackhammer…”

“Hey!”

He smiled a little broader. “And Ginger loves all of that. I know it because I thought the same thing about my husband, and there was not a force in this world that could pull us apart. I also know if Saffron were standing here in your place and I had the chance to get him back home where I know he’d be safe from all of this… this shit the wasteland keeps throwing at us…”

Aurora’s shoulders sagged with understanding. “You’d do everything in your power to make it happen.”

He nodded. “Even if it’s the wrong decision.”

Time passed and he spent it waiting for her to get angry and come to Ginger’s defense. To berate him for even suggesting she might take the easy way to the finish line by letting her think it was okay to turn around and go home.

But she didn’t. She looked tired. Her eyes drifted down to the lower deck of the oil rig where Ginger and Julip stood alongside their own railing, the two of them staring out to sea as if expecting to see something rise out from under the waves. Every so often Ginger would lift her hoof to the rail and read something on her gifted Pip-Buck before tilting it to Julip for her to do the same. There was only one person on the other end of that device and she was the reason Roach felt the need to throw water on Ginger’s decision to throw in the towel on Aurora’s behalf.

As if reading his mind, Aurora broke the silence. “The Enclave gave her that Pip-Buck, didn’t they?”

“She’s been in direct contact with Primrose ever since they offered to help find where Ironshod was holding you,” he nodded, adding, “Ginger even convinced Princess Luna’s dream-creature to stop giving her nightmares.”

Aurora made a face. “She can do that?”

He shrugged. “Apparently so.”

“Why?” A moment later, she answered her own question. “Oh. Me.”

“Hasn’t been easy keeping her expectations grounded.” He glanced behind them as an Enclave soldier walked by, the uniformed mare only briefly registering disgust before turning her attention back to her route. “It doesn’t help that she has some actual pull with Primrose now. I think this is the longest any of these soldiers have spent near a ghoul without filling it with plasma rounds.”

“I don’t know what those are.”

Down below, Ginger had backed off the railing and was leading Julip back the way they came. Time’s up. “I hope to keep it that way. A lot has happened over the past few days, Aurora, but I know you can handle it. You’ll remember what we talked about, right?”

Already her attention was drifting to her companion. She nodded absently, her wing sliding off his back. “I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks, Roach.”

He knew an empty platitude when he heard one, but he didn’t press the issue. Her mind was elsewhere. Of course it was. Off she went, limping toward the top of the stairs while he watched, the warmth along his back cooling where her wing had sat. He never stood a chance.

“Sure,” he murmured. “Don’t mention it.”

“Okay. Shit, hold on.”

Waves lapped at the four rigid pillars keeping the now-vintage oil rig fixed to the sea bed, the bright yellow paint that once coated them having been eaten away long before any of them - well, most of them - were born. Roach’s recollections of how the world used to be helped ease Aurora’s embarrassment by filling what would have been worried silences with anecdotes from the old world. The four of them had made six respectable laps of the rig’s seaward facing catwalks along which they found evidence of recent and not too recent repairs to its superstructure, and Aurora could feel her body slowly getting the hang of walking again.

At the beginning of their seventh lap, she’d reluctantly conceded that she was running on fumes. Embarrassed to be the only one breaking a sweat, the temptation to hide the radiating pain in her hip as it took up the work of two legs was strong. She could feel herself starting to box up how she actually felt in favor of easing her friends’ worries about her condition, and nearly gave in. It would be easy to pretend she was fine and to push herself through two, maybe three more laps before someone made the decision to stop for her.

Now they stood at the foot of the diamond-patterned steps to their accommodations several flights up. It might as well have been a hundred. The muscles in her single hind leg screamed from the unbalanced exertion and for all the good her stump was doing just dangling there, it hurt twice as much. They didn’t have a vote as far as she was concerned. The wasteland didn’t care how many legs she had. Ironshod sure hadn’t.

Fucking stairs.

“Be ready to grab me,” she warned.

She could hear Ginger smirk without looking. “Oh, gladly.”

The things Roach and Julip had to deal with. Her brow creased in thought as she approached the first stair. Right hoof. Then– wait, no. Left hoof. Then right. Then… hop. A fresh pang of pain shot down her hind end and her knee nearly buckled, but she saved it by grabbing the rails with both wings. She repeated the process. Left, right, hop. Another stair higher. Step, step, hop. Step, step, hop. Eventually the rickety stairs were ringing with several hoofsteps following behind her.

“You’re doing good.”

Ginger’s encouragement gave her the determination to muscle through another painful step. Still, Roach’s warning earlier in the day stuck uncomfortably with her like a stubborn popcorn shell between her teeth. Now that she was paying attention, she’d noticed they were all hiding something from her. Something had happened and she wasn’t so blind that she couldn’t tell she’d been at the center of… whatever it was. Roach wasn’t saying anything. Ginger insisted she just wait a little while. And Julip, well, she was barely keeping it together with so many Enclave blackshirts staring daggers at her.

She winced her way up the first flight wishing someone would tell her what the fuck was going on.

No sooner had she reached the top of the steps than she had her answer. She stopped, holding the railing for support as they streamed down through the thin overcast. Black shapes held aloft on wings of every color descended from the sky like flakes of falling ash. Dozens of them, each one fixed in a formation of concentric diamonds as if they were single points etched into a sweeping pane of glass. Aurora felt her jaw go slack at their aerial precision, bringing back fillyhood memories of the archival videos their teachers played in school when Wonderbolt Week arrived. It was beautiful.

“I wonder who that is,” Roach chided.

She glanced back to see Ginger very pointedly ignoring his tone, her eyes temporarily glued to the slim curve of her own Pip-Buck. A low rumble began to swell across the oil rig as Ginger read the text on her foreleg. Hooves, stamping the rusting catwalks in greeting as the pegasi formation tacked the winds in a wide circle around the platform. Aurora watched as the centermost diamond broke away and descended toward the loading platform hanging over the rig’s far corner where several personnel gathered to meet them.

Expression turning grim, Ginger whispered something under her breath. “We should go meet them.”

She clutched the railing and stared at her. “Ginger, I love you to death, but my hip is killing me and I’m going to tear my mane out if you all keep up this air of mystery shit. Who are those ponies and why do we have to do anything?”

An uncomfortable silence drifted between them like fog, Aurora planting herself as she waited for an honest answer. Her worry grew as Ginger remained silent, lips pressed into a thin line as she wrestled with the secrets she knew it had been a mistake to keep.

The rest of the diamond formation had broken into smaller elements now, rotating around the platform in a slow moving vortex of wings and rifles. Each one of them scanned the open ocean, eyes peeled for incoming threats. Layers upon layers of protection rotated around them. An unnecessary amount of firepower. Pure overkill.

Except, as Ginger relented and began to speak, she realized it wasn’t.

“The Enclave… technically owes us a favor. Or, they owe you a favor. It seemed like a waste not to call it in.”

Roach stared at her from the steps, eye wide. “Wait, this is the arrangement you–”

“Those are her personal guard,” Julip stammered, her ears flattening as she watched a breakoff formation cross the air above the platform. “Is she here? Ginger, did you seriously ask her to come here?!”

They were filling in blanks faster than Aurora could keep up with. She could see the indignant anger welding Roach’s hooves to the steps while Julip’s delicately reformed confidence formed deep, undercutting cracks. For her part, Ginger stiffened against their rebuke as if silence would help them understand her thoughts. But it was only making things worse. She could feel the fissures widening.

Her body ached but she stepped forward anyway, the railing creaking under her wing. “Ginger? What did you do?”

Ginger swallowed. “I asked for help.”

She waited. Rebuked by Roach and Julip, she’d stood unfazed, but it was the deepening concern in Aurora’s voice that cracked that armor.

“From who?”

Her companion’s eyes dropped to the grating in shame.

“From Primrose.”

Pots dripped along the drying rack. Water sloshed as dirty ones were plunged into the turbulent wash basin, churned by feathers and hooves as each one was scrubbed clean and made ready for the next meal. With only her left wing at her disposal, Rainbow had been assigned to the rinse sink. Unlike many of the ponies she encountered on the soup line, the pegasi of the Brass Bit welcomed the extra help. There weren’t many of them and the stream of dirty stainless steel was endless.

Sledge looked up from his Pip-Buck at her and smirked upon seeing Rainbow chumming up with a young buckskin waitress from the restaurant. Caramel, something. She’d been moved to the kitchen within the past two weeks when she, along with a growing sliver of the population, had chosen to leave their jumpsuits at home. He’d been afraid the two of them working together would be a distraction to the rest of the staff, but the three remaining pegasi working the kitchen either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

Caramel and Rainbow worked and chatted, none of the three wings between them slowing from their established rhythm while they discussed a book series the two of them learned the other had read. Sledge didn’t know enough about boobytraps or artifacts to dip his hooves into their conversation and instead opted to tuck himself out of everyone’s way where he could catch up on Opal’s generous list of new messages.

He leaned against a barrel of pureed tomatoes and scrolled through them.

Ever since cracking Delta’s heavily obscured Partition 40, Opal and her team were making discovery after discovery. Stacks of damning evidence curated by a mare who Sledge may have never heard had the generator not spooked Aurora out of the Stable. Delta Vee had been a force to be reckoned with, and what initially appeared to be the rebellious disobedience of a stubborn pegasus had grown into something else entirely.

They’d learned Delta’s arrival at the Stable represented a total loss of everything she’d ever known or loved. She struggled with maintaining her sobriety while adjusting to a cramped, impersonal existence. She excelled at her role in I.T. and found some semblance of happiness in the work while seemingly content with building few if any new personal connections. For almost ten years she existed within her new routine, seemingly resigned to the fact that she would likely die without knowing what happened to her daughter.

Then she’d gotten bored, and everything unraveled.

Opal’s messages came in faster than he could keep up with. Partition 40 was a treasure trove of history previously assumed erased. With the locks cut off the door, everything Delta had preserved which Overmare Spitfire sought to destroy was laid bare.

Everything.

Sledge’s stomach churned at the unreads.

Subject: Unscheduled Meeting w/ Dept. Heads on 10/31. Hours before bombs. How?
Subject: Second resident registration list?! DO NOT DELETE!
Subject: Listening to call records; Spitfire gave key pegasi EARLY WARNING.
Subject: Delta Tapes, Batch 11: Pioneer virus, early survivor communication logs.
Subject: Disturbing anti-magic sentiment among Spitfire inner circle.
Subject: Ponies locked outside all on second resident list. Respond ASAP.
Subject: Delta Tapes, Batch 12: Delta downloading files off surviving JSA networks.
Subject: READ IMMEDIATELY. TIME SENSITIVE.
Subject: OVERSTALLION - OPEN THIS SURVEILLANCE VIDEO SOUP CAN WAIT.
Subject: SLEDGE THIS IS AN EMERGENCY GET OVER RIGHT NOW YOU NEED TO [...]

He scraped the bridge of his muzzle between his feathers. “Celestia’s perky pissflaps. Hey, Rainbow, we need to go. Opal’s got something.”

Rainbow and her new friend looked his way, their conversation hitting a sudden wall. “Opal’s had something all this week. Can it wait?”

Caramel, either by dint of working for the taskmasters who owned the Bit, caught onto his uncomfortable silence before Rainbow could. “Go ahead. You know where to find me if you feel like geeking out later.”

He didn’t wait for the two of them to put a bow on it. In his limited experience he knew Opal tended to lean out to the dramatic when she wanted a response, but if she was willing to come over and tear her overstallion and an Element of Harmony away by their ears it would just be easier if the two of them brought said ears to Opal.

Rainbow caught up with him as he ducked out of the Atrium and into the busy corridors, the two of them weaving and juking their way between ponies still hanging onto their empty bowls and those who saw the loitering crowd as an excuse to twiddle their hooves as well. Whatever kept them occupied. He ducked between two stallions who were too lost in each other to be bothered to move for him, though they practically leapt out of the way when Rainbow Dash slipped through the same gap.

The closer they came to the halls of I.T., the thinner the crowd became. “What’d she find?”

He shook his head. “Dunno. Something big, by the look of it.”

“Any news about Aurora?”

“Not yet.” He glanced down at her. “You did good back there, by the way.”

She smirked at that. “Unintentional perk of Rarity’s intensive public relations seminars. Smile, shake hooves, kiss the foal, don’t pass along national secrets to the enemy via neutral powers. It’s kind of hard to mess that up.”

Rainbow had begun sharing some of the bits and pieces of her last few years with him in the privacy of her compartment. He didn’t have what he could confidently call a full picture, but she told him enough to know how close she’d come to getting advanced schematics of Equestria’s solar energy systems across the Vhannan border. She’d lost something along the way and her plan had ultimately failed, but whenever she started talking about what happened after she completely locked up on him.

“I see you made a friend,” he said.

She excused herself as she slipped by a bewildered pegasus. “Caramel? Yeah, she’s pretty cool. I give her points for bringing up the Daring Do series and not asking questions about,” she gestured to herself with her wing, her body, the faded yet unmistakable cutie mark on her hip, “all of this.”

He shot her a little grin. “She single?”

“Gee whiz, in the whole hour we were talking we never got around to deciding whether we should hook up.” Rainbow snorted at him, and damned if it wasn’t just his coat turning his cheeks red. “What kind of fanfiction do you read, anyway?”

“What’s a ‘fanfiction?’”

She chuckled. “Before your time.”

When they reached the I.T. wing, they found Opal standing outside the server room door with her nose buried in her Pip-Buck. She was typing what looked suspiciously like another message to Sledge when she finally heard them coming. Her pale blue feathers dropped from the device as she blew out an exasperated sigh, turning to smack the door switch with the edge of her hoof. Unlike all the other doors in their crippled home, the hydraulics here still had power. The door hissed open as if nothing at all were wrong.

“I was this close to comin’ out to find you myself, Sledge.” The unfinished message still glowing from her foreleg as she hurried inside, grumbling to herself every step of the way.

He followed with Rainbow in tow, the three of them filing into the blindingly white space that housed the Stable’s servers. All of the lights beamed down at full intensity, causing Sledge and Rainbow to reflexively slit their eyes until they could adjust. They followed Opal through the diligently humming machine, their black cages and blinking lights unbothered by the rest of the Stable being on life support.

“Do I want to know?”

Opal impatiently ushered them toward a tech cart near the center of the room where, once he forced his eyes open a bit more, Sledge noticed several cables snaking out from the back of a large terminal atop the cart and into the open cage of an adjacent server. “Ignorance is bliss n’ all that. Here’s another. Misery loves company.”

Rainbow did as she was told and the three of them gathered at the cart. There was a tension in the air that was new and not particularly welcome. The tension coming off Opal was muted by reluctance, confliction, and anger. Sledge began to worry she’d found something out about their generator he wasn’t aware of, or that the power they were leaching from the Stable-Tec HQ ruins all the way across the continent might be in jeopardy. Whatever the crisis was, it felt existential.

When Opal unlocked the terminal, Sledge wondered whether within the hour he’d be opening the Stable door.

As if reading his mind, Rainbow asked, “Is the Stable going to be alright?”

“Depends,” the old mare muttered, her feathers dropping onto terminal keys a little harder than necessary. “I don’t much feel like telling ‘em. You two do whatever you think’s best. Now hush up and watch.”

Without preamble, she pecked a key and the first of several files excavated from Partition 40 opened up. Tidy green columns began populating the screen. Names appeared in the first column in alphabetical order. Ages in the next. Then gender. Breed. Address…

“Them’s the names of all the pegasi who got registered to Stable 10,” Opal said, her accent getting stronger as scrolling through the list made her more agitated. She tapped the ascending number beside each first resident’s name. “Little over five hunnerd, total. Nothin’ near enough t’fill this tin can even if everyone got inside, which they didn’t. Not enough t’ set off alarm bells with Stable-Tec neither, which it shoulda. Place like this was s’posed to hold a thousand from the get-go, not half. So I got to thinkin’ about all those ponies what got locked out. Hunnerds of ‘em all thinkin’ they were gettin’ in.”

She closed the list and opened another file.

The same columns dropped down the screen. Names, ages, genders, breeds…

Except they weren’t pegasi. Unicorns populated the list alongside earth ponies, their names alone hinting at their status within the prewar world. Then the list was gone, Opal’s feathers working overtime as she struggled to contain her outrage. A still image taken from the security camera mounted in the tunnel outside appeared on screen, the flagstone floor clogged with panicked evacuees doomed to die mere yards from safety. Several of their faces were framed in green squares, names appearing beneath each box.

“Had to come here because it’s the only place Millie’s listenin’. She matched sixty-two names from that second registration list to this image, but I’m bettin’ every one of those ponies were s’posed to be residents.”

Sledge had suspected it when he first watched the chaos playing out beyond the door, but he held short of saying as much. Beside him, Rainbow didn’t look all that shocked either, though her expression had taken on an unmissable sourness. He simply nodded, knowing this wasn’t what had Opal out of sorts. She was walking them through her process.

“Obvious answer is Overmare Spitfire didn’t want non-pegasi getting into her shiny new Stable. She trained Wonderbolts in peacetime, commanded ‘em during the first attacks against Vhanna, and used her clout when she got back home to call dibs on Stable 10 and hire Wonderbolts as its first department heads. Sound about right?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. “I didn’t think so neither. Delta Vee wasn’t no Wonderbolt. She was the no-name ex-wife of a rocket manufacturer who didn’t know the first thing about leading I.T., and if it weren’t for Bow Hothoof she might’nt never made it to the Stable in the first place.”

Rainbow chewed the corner of her lip at the mention of her dad’s name.

Opal kept going. “Turns out like all them other ponies, she wasn’t s’posed to.”

Her feathers trotted over the keyboard, closing the list of names of those now dead outside and opening a different file. A still frame from Opal’s office took up the screen, except the mare seated behind the desk wasn’t Opal. She hit play and the picture moved, the scratchy audio of keys being pecked by Delta’s feathers the only sound being picked up. The timestamp in the corner dated the recording back to October 27th, 1087. Almost ten years to the day after the bombs first fell.

They watched Delta startle at the sound of the door opening, knocking a bottle of liquor off her desk in the process. It was clear as the two of them converged on the shattered glass that there was deep tension in the air. Though barely a smudge of pixels on a screen, Sledge could sense the similarities between Delta’s mood and Opal’s. Both had just learned something they wished they could unlearn. To that point, Delta was rambling about having erased something Spitfire wanted gone.

Then the conversation took a left turn. Delta was drunk. Her filters had come apart at the seams. She asked about Spitfire’s problems with gryphons, then announced Equestria had bombed itself. The latter statement sucked all of the air from the room. Just a few days earlier Sledge, Rainbow and Opal had made the same discovery courtesy of the breadcrumbs Delta left behind. Now he was beginning to understand why she’d made it so difficult to stumble across by accident. Spitfire’s mood darkened immediately. The conversation grew heated, both mares talking over one another. A terminal went flying. Suddenly Spitfire was forcing Delta against the wall, belligerent, shouting at her that she should have deleted what she found.

Something passed between the two of them that Sledge couldn’t make out, but whatever it was it punched through Delta’s boozy fog like a thrown spear. “It was all you!” echoed out of the terminal as Spitfire made a hasty escape.

“What was all her?” Sledge stared at the screen, bewildered, as he watched Delta being locked inside her own office as if it were one of the cells up in Security. It hadn’t occurred to him until now that such a thing could happen.

Opal stopped the video, freezing Delta in place as she screamed at the locked door. The picture flipped briefly to the list of files and loaded the next one. “What’s the one thing that mare went through pains t’ preserve that Spitfire wanted deleted?”

The answer was obvious. It had been singularly the most prescient discovery in Stable history; that Equestria had been the sole aggressor at the end of the war, and the bombs that ended the world originated from Equestrian missile silos.

Rainbow held her wing over the keyboard before Opal could rush into whatever came next. “Spitfire might have been a ten ton bitch, but global genocide’s way out of her wheelhouse.”

Sledge waited as Opal bristled at being stopped. There was a note of warning in her old eyes. “So yer vouching for her good character?”

“I’m just saying, she couldn’t have if she wanted to. She would have needed authorization codes from two separate ministers.”

“She had yours, didn’t she?”

Rainbow blinked. Her face fell. “Fuck.”

Opal gently pushed her wing aside. “Took me some diggin’ but I figured out where the audio from Spitfire’s phone calls got put. Can’t say there’s much worth defending on them. Might wanna sit down, Rainbow.”

She pressed play.

A camera high above the Atrium began playing back footage recorded years and years ago. The little business alcoves that he’d always known to surround the broad public area were conspicuously empty. Only a few pegasi loitered on the upper catwalk surrounding the vacant pavilion, each one of them wearing the iconic blue and yellow flight suits of the Wonderbolts. Their cowls hung loose against their shoulders and flight goggles glinted off their chests.

Two pegasi stood apart from the rest of the group. Spitfire and Thunderlane.

Sledge read the timestamp and immediately recognized the date.

He held his breath.

October 31st, 1077
Stable 10

Spitfire paced her third long lap around the Atrium and Thunderlane followed alongside her, his attention far more focused on the contents of the clipboard in her wing than she was.

“Before we head home, we should give Misty another refresher. She still needs practice on the fabricators.” He tapped a feather-wrapped pen against the summary sheet of each department lead’s aptitude scores, where Misty Fly’s results sat well below the curve. “I think I know a trick to help her stop transposing the feed rates between titanium and steel.”

She glanced at the sheet. “She doesn’t need a trick, she needs to slow down and read the laminates. It shouldn’t be this hard for her to learn how to fabricate one of the presets.”

“She’s fine on presets. Her score took a hit again because she tried out a custom blueprint during the test.”

Then tell her not to fuck around with custom blueprints. “Okay. Fine. Do whatever.”

Thunderlane frowned. “Are you okay?”

Fuck. She took a breath and waited for her frayed nerves to calm a little before answering. “I’m fine. I just have a lot on my plate today.”

He hummed thoughtfully and thumped her midsection with the back of his wing. “If you need to decompress, there’s a curry place in Canterlot I’ve been wanting an excuse to try. My treat?”

She knew the place. She also knew it didn’t matter how she answered, so it didn’t cost her anything to cheer him up. “Sure. We’ll see where the evening takes us.”

His ears perked. “Really?”

“Why not.”

With one minor crisis averted, she moved onto the next. The rest of the department heads were getting antsy waiting for their scores when as far as Spitfire was concerned their scores weren’t an issue. If push came to shove, Millie’s AI could always step in to fill any gaps in their performance. Right now, she was more worried they might start wondering whether they could fly home.

“Why don’t you take Misty down to Fabrication now,” she decided. “I’ll grab a few Pip-Bucks from storage and quiz everyone while you’re–”

Millie’s pings interrupted her. “Overmare Spitfire, there is a call from Stable-Tec waiting for you in your office.”

Finally.

“Scratch that,” she said. “Let me get this call first.”

He blinked after her. “Okay?”

She trotted across the Atrium and mounted the steps, fishing her badge out from the collar of her flight suit as she approached the overseer’s office door. Her gaze flicked up toward the camera mounted behind the unblinking black dome above her door and felt a brief chill as if someone were staring back at her.

The door slid shut behind her and she engaged the lock.

Sat beside the pristine terminal on her otherwise empty desk, a pale green telephone waited. A single orange light blinked at her as if the mare on the other end were impatiently tapping her feathers. Spitfire took a moment to compose herself before sitting down in her high back chair and lifting the receiver.

“Hello?”

A pause. The video-only camera stowed in the rear corner of her office clicked as it panned the room. Then, “Glad to see you’re ready.”

Primrose’s voice dribbled down the back of her neck like chipped ice. Her throat felt cottony as she nodded at the reflection in her terminal. “You should know by now that I don’t shirk my duties. All our department heads are present and accounted for, and the gun locker is stocked. How’s everything on your end? Any problems?”

“None.” The line rustled. A hoof thumping the handset on the other end, followed by a muffled giggle. Spitfire pretended not to hear it. “We’ve already sealed ourselves in. Twilight, Rarity, Applejack, and Fluttershy are attending a press junket at Canterlot Castle. Rainbow Dash should be in a meeting at Stable-Tec HQ in Fillydelphia right about now, and Pinkie is…”

“With you,” she finished, trying hard not to let the irritation reach her voice. “Why is that, again?”

“Simple pleasures.”

“Does your ‘simple pleasure’ have any idea–”

A slurred, breathy voice pressed through the line. “Shhhhh! It’s A-a-ahpplejack’s birzday t’day! Shh-shh-shh-shh!”

She pulled the handset away from her ear and looked at the camera with annoyance. Was Primrose insane? She could already hear her asking whether it mattered at this point. It probably didn’t. At least, not to them. When she settled it back against her ear, she said, “Is that how you got her to come down to the Ministry of Tech?”

The grin was audible in her compatriot’s voice. “She’s very motivated by parties and extremely honest after a little datura root tea. Isn’t that right, Pinkie?”

In the distance now, “Thaaaaat’s right! Ooh! We should hide b’vore she gets, um… uhh…”

“Someone get her a chair.” Primrose’s hooves echoed out from the phone, mingling with the quiet murmurs of several other pegasi who had a better sense of what was coming. The split was a necessary step, Primrose insisted. Future generations needed an innocent victim to glom onto. Pegasi whose unscripted reactions would be witnessed and attested to so when they rose from the ashes, they would have deniability.

Primrose, on the other hoof, insisted on being surrounded by others within their Enclave who were in the know. The next several years would need to be molded while the metal was still malleable, before anyone else could push Equestria in the wrong direction.

Primrose’s tone hardened. “Do you have her codes?”

Spitfire glanced up at the camera and nodded.

“Alright. Warm up those feathers. We’re going to need to be quick.”

Her heart pumped harder as she sat up and switched on her terminal. Rainbow Dash had forfeited exclusive access to her launch authorization codes when she forfeited her role as minister. Using them hadn’t been a part of her plan back then. She’d only wanted to remove a dangerous mare’s feathers from the nation’s purse strings. But seeing that first green mushroom rolling into the sky just over a year ago had opened her eyes to a future without the burden of magic. A future where influence and power wasn’t determined by whether or not you were born with a horn. An even playing field.

A societal reboot.

“Hey Pinkie, let me see your Pip-Buck real quick.”

Spitfire’s feathers hovered over the keyboard, her terminal ready to connect into the Pillar’s heavily guarded network. In Rainbow Dash’s vacant office, a prompt would appear on her terminal. The ministries’ Millie would notice the intrusion and attempt to break the connection, but Primrose had Enclave assets ready to run interference from within the bowels of the Ministry of Technology. Spitfire’s window might last a few seconds or a few milliseconds. She took a slow, steadying breath to ease her trembling feathers and waited for her cue.

“How’dju make it do that?” Pinkie asked. “Oh wai… wait, Prim yernot s’posed to see–”

Primrose ignored her. “On my count. Three. Two. One. Now.”

Her feathers dropped to the keyboard. Hundreds of miles away, a remote connection opened between Stable 10 and the Pillar. Rainbow Dash’s terminal was awake and ready for the thirty-two digit string that would give all creatures without magic a fair chance at life. She punched in each character of the Gold Code with deliberate intent. On the other side of the line, Primrose authorized Pinkie’s from the source.

“Prim, no! I said NO!”

Worthwhile change couldn’t happen without a little discomfort, but the world would endure the growing pains. This was the only way to prevent a future where magic dictated free will. This was how two pegasi could smother tyranny before it had a chance to leave the crib.

Pinkie sobered up too slowly. Spitfire typed too quickly.

A breath before Millie severed the connection and the screen went blank, Spitfire saw the briefest glimpse of CONFIRMATION COMPLETE flicker across the monitor. On the phone, Primrose was breathing heavily. She’d had to fight Pinkie for those last terrible seconds. Now the ministry mare was being dragged away, her horrified profanities fading.

“Good luck, Overmare.”

The harsh gonging of the Pillar's klaxons cut across the line. Their chosen targets - government facilities, manufacturers of war, cities containing archives of Equestria's oldest magic - were being selected by systems put into place over the span of months by only the most trusted pegasi of the Enclave. They'd agreed Cloudsdale had to be first to fall. Primrose would need a symbol, a nexus to rally survivors around.

Something to throw the dogs off their scent once the dust settled.

In the Atrium, all stayed silent. No alarm, no sirens. Not yet. Not until the first missile found its target. She savored these last moments of peace. They would be difficult for her to find in the coming days.

“Good luck, Minister.”

She hung up.

Rainbow wasn’t fully aware of the footage stopping or the concern on Sledge and Opal’s faces when they noticed her staring numbly into the middle distance. It was as if her subconscious decided enough was enough, that she had reached her limit and was no longer accepting new data.

“Rainbow. Hey.” Sledge was practically nose to nose with her, his eyes wide with worry. “Come on back.”

She wasn’t going anywhere. Blue wasn’t coming back. Sledge pulled her into a bear hug as if to squeeze a response from her, but she didn’t have one. Spitfire had used her codes to launch a world-ending catastrophe. That weird little secretary of hers had taken advantage of Pinkie’s mental decline, something Rainbow nor any of the other girls had done a damn thing to help her cope with, and stole the Gold Codes right off her foreleg.

She leaned her head against Sledge’s powerful neck and let him hold her. It felt nice. He had the same ruddy brick coat that Big Mac had, wherever he had gone. Deep down she wanted to scream. She wanted to punch her hooves through every fucking server in this room until something in her body broke. But she couldn’t get there. She could barely muster enough tears to cry. So she stopped trying.

“You can let go, big guy.” She tapped a hoof against his chest, gently nudging him away. “Thanks.”

Her assurance did little to calm his nerves. “If you want to talk about it…”

She shook her head and looked to Opal. “Is that everything you had to show us?”

The elderly mare glanced up to Sledge, then back to her with clear bewilderment. “I s’pose it was.”

“Is Millie still running in here?”

Opal’s brow furrowed. “Yes.”

“Good. Can I have the room to myself for a minute?”

The two of them hesitated.

Rainbow winced at how brisque she was being with them. “Sorry. I just need to send a message. To her. I want to set the record straight.”

Sledge was the first to catch on. He nudged Opal with the flat of his wing and tipped his head to indicate they should leave. She went along with him, albeit reluctantly, uncertain of what Rainbow was talking about. That was fine. She could explain it to her later.

“We’ll be outside when you’re done,” he called back. “Give her hell.”

She smiled a little at that, but only briefly.

The door hissed closed leaving her alone among the servers. She grimaced as she sat down on the cool linoleum, propping her back up against the cage of the machine behind her.

“Millie?”

“Yes, minister?”

“I want to dictate a letter to a dead mare. Can I do that?”

A pause. “Please provide the name of the recipient.”

“Spitfire.”

Another pause. Longer, this time. “Please note Overmare Spitfire’s resident account has been flagged ‘unsecure’ due to multiple breaches. Any messages sent to this account may be visible to third parties.”

“As one of those third parties, I say it’s fine.” She wrapped her ragged wing over her knees, resting her chin atop the tattered remains of her feathers. “Tell me when you’re ready.”

“You may begin dictation after the tone.”

Ping.

She swallowed. “Hey, Spitfire. Long time no talk…”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 10
To: Overmare Spitfire
From: Rainbow Dash
Subject: Your Legacy
04/21/1297

Hey, Spitfire. Long time no talk. You’ve been dead for a long time. For almost two centuries at the time of this dictation. Ten generations of pegasi have grown up inside this Stable believing you were their savior. That you guided the first residents to safety and helped them cope with the loss of everything they ever knew. And I guess part of that is true. You were there. You probably talked a lot of them off the ledge when they thought there wasn’t anything left to do except die. You were always good at that. Back at the Academy you had this way of pushing us until we broke, but then you would pick us back up and make us believe we’d come too far to toss off our flight suits and quit. I wish you were still alive so I could ask you whether you actually believed the things you said back then, or if the Wonderbolts meant just as little to you as the rest of the world when you sentenced them to die.

You died, Spitfire, but I didn’t. I wasn’t allowed to. While you enjoyed the last of your sunset years in comfort, I was forced to wander inside the tomb you filled with corpses when you shut the door on us. While you convinced your Stable’s new residents to keep surviving, I listened to the families of ponies who weren’t good enough for your perfect utopia shoot their own foals so they wouldn’t have to see their parents die. I heard their screams when the radiation turned many of them into mindless, gnashing shells. I almost became one of them. I remember glimpses of what I did when I lost myself and it makes me pray the ghouls who did go feral don’t have the luxury of memory.

With time, I hope others will come to know what I’ve learned. That you were no hero, Spitfire. You were a monster. A selfish, insecure weasel who saw a future where pegasi weren’t on top and it made you scared. And I want future generations to know that my hooves aren’t clean either. I was too much of a coward to call your bluff. I was afraid of Equestria knowing what I had done to help end the war, because just like you I was obsessed with preserving my legacy.

Well, fuck legacies. To all concerned parties reading this message, I, Rainbow Dash, head of the former Ministry of Awesome, certify the following facts to be fully truthful and verifiable against the records found within Stable 10’s electronic archives. There, that should be official-sounding enough.

First point. Around three years into the war, Minister Fluttershy and Ambassador Zecora were looking for ways to build diplomatic bridges with Vhanna. They had spoken with Ambassador Abyssian and had come to the conclusion that a ceasefire wouldn’t be on the table when Equestria was the only side who stood to benefit. It’s probably not common knowledge how bad things were back then. Vhanna had our armies stuck in trenches since the invasion began and both sides knew Equestria was running out of warm bodies to throw into the meat grinder. They had every right to bargain. Fluttershy and Zecora struck a deal with Abyssian by promising to give his country the schematics for Equestria's most current solar energy research. It wasn’t technically illegal. Celestia had been stonewalling solar for years, and giving Vhanna a light at the end of the tunnel was supposed to be enough to bring them closer to peace talks.

Fluttershy asked me to deliver the schematics to a contact in Griffinstone who would smuggle them across the Vhannan border. I agreed to do it and delivered them to an old gryphon friend I grew up with named Gilda. I was followed by a fellow Wonderbolt who informed on me to Spitfire, who at the time was in charge of managing the day-to-day of my ministry. Spitfire gave me an ultimatum shortly after: I step aside as minister and allow her to take my place, or she tells the world I’m a traitor to Equestria. I wanted to preserve my reputation and chose the former.

Second point: Spitfire assumed my duties as minister and I became a figurehead. Nobody else knew. We both made sure everything looked normal from the outside. During those last couple of years I let my focus wander away from the war effort and toward the private sector. I gave JetStream Aerospace my endorsement, a company I had already diverted two billion bits into when I was acting minister, and assumed Spitfire was going about the business of running my ministry. At some point during this time she hired an assistant named Primrose. Creepy little pegasus. Unbeknownst to me they formed an organization within the Ministry of Awesome that they named The Enclave.

Third point: The discovery of the balefire bomb developed into an overnight rush to arm our existing missile tech with balefire warheads. I don’t know exactly how many we had ready to fly by the time Spitfire and Primrose pushed the button, but it was a lot. Oh yeah. Spitfire and Primrose launched the missiles. Sorry, spoilers. Spitfire ended up getting a hold of my gold codes when she took the reins of my ministry. Primrose stole Pinkie Pie’s. I don’t know how and I’m afraid to speculate. But since I’m on the record, it’s worth saying that I was a shitty friend to her toward the end. No one had a harder time coping with the war than Pinkie Pie, and the rest of us avoided her. There’s no good excuse. Not really. I’m sorry, Pinkie.

Fuck. Anyway. Fourth point: Our missiles landed on our own soil. Spitfire and Primrose planned it that way from the start and footage taken from orbit proves Equestria attacked itself. None of our bombs landed in Vhanna. They weren’t supposed to. The Enclave did something to JetStream Aerospace’s satellite that allowed it to pour balefire directly onto targets in Vhanna and Griffinstone. They framed the zebras, plain and simple.

Last point, I guess: Primrose and the Enclave? Still alive. Something tells me Spitfire got played by that little weirdo. The ponies I’ve gotten to know here in Stable 10 say they’re told as foals their mission in life is to be the seeds of Equestria’s future, namely by retaining the genes of the strongest fliers from before the war. Kind of hard not to take that personally. Call me crazy but if Primrose has been out there playing princess for the last two hundred years, then I guess she had loftier goals than just keeping the bloodlines pure. Either that or she ended up a ghoul like me, in which case I would like to refer her to the yak cultural touchstone of karma and how many have found it to be quite the bitch.

Sorry. I ramble when I’m furious. You didn’t just betray me, Spitfire. You didn’t betray Equestria. You and that little gremlin of yours betrayed every living creature on this planet. You used the princesses’ war to justify genocide and you were too much of a coward to accept the credit so you tried to make Vhanna your scapegoat. And then you murdered the scapegoat. So let that be your legacy, you foul bitch. You were a liar. A thief. A murderer.

You were a villain.

Signed,
Rainbow Dash

The air conditioning ticked off, cutting the steady and pleasant flow of cool air across Clover’s mane.

He reached over and plucked his thermos from his desk, an old dented up Coolco branded container he’d found on an early reconnaissance mission he’d been a part of back when Primrose had some interest in quashing a growing raider faction out west in Vanhoover. He’d been impressed to find the glass lining unbroken and rather than selling it for a wingful of caps, opted to keep it instead. It had taken him several days to clean it up to a point where he was willing to drink from it, but once he had the mortar-sized flask had served him dutifully over the following years.

He unscrewed the cap and poured himself a cup of clear ice water. Clover blamed his earth pony ancestors for his preference for the cold. Left unchecked, his unusually dense brown coat would grow thick enough that flying became a challenge, and right now he was beginning to think he was due for another trim. Lifting the cup to his lips, his long whiskers tickled his feathers. Definitely overdue.

The water went down smooth and chilled his insides for a fantastic few seconds. Wearing the mantle of Minister Primrose’s Director of Security had its perks. For one, he spent most of his time safe within the walls of the painfully uninspired yet accurately titled Bunker. The Bunker had been built in the decades following the fall of the bombs and had drawn direct inspiration from Stable-Tec’s own shelters. Many of the amenities the Enclave’s top brass enjoyed down here had been harvested from those very first failed Stables. Down here they had fresh water, food, refrigeration, air scrubbers, state-of-the-art fabrication facilities, and Clover’s personal favorite, an on-site full-body barber.

He cheeked an ice cube and made a mental note to get himself a thorough trim before the minister came back from her trip east. She’d be disappointed he wasn’t as fluffy as she preferred, but then again it would make his job much easier without Primrose trying to coax him into bed with her.

His terminal chirped. He took a second sip and glanced at the screen, tapping the arrow keys to locate the tab that had just loaded. Another memo, he assumed, or someone in the Bunker sending him quote-unquote “intel” on a colleague they’d been bickering with. As he cycled through the tabs he hadn’t gotten around to closing he wondered if he should ask the barber to do something different with his jawline this month. He had Rockhoof’s build, after all. Maybe he could pull off the beard, too?

The new tab popped open. For a moment he thought it was just another message sent by someone hoping to put a superior officer under investigation - that rarely ever worked, but still they tried - but something caught his eye that made him hold short of deleting it.

He swallowed his ice and set down his water as his blue eyes narrowed at the bulletin line above the document.

He frowned. Their hard line to Stable 10 was well understood to have been lost ages ago. It was exactly why Primrose had practically laid an egg when their Spritebot identified Aurora Pinfeathers as a current - and currently recovering - resident. How were they just now seeing traffic from a dead overmare?

He scrolled past the notice. Aurora's Pip-Buck must be serving as a proxy. She and the Stable were known to be bouncing communications back and forth across Stable-Tec's overland network, with Stable 6 being the nearest neighboring–

His musings hit a brick wall when he saw the name Rainbow Dash in the header. Not in the subject line, but as the sender.

And it'd been sent recently.

Today.

He began to read. As he did, his hackles began to rise. Primrose needed to see this, immediately. She needed to confirm his hopes that this was a hoax. That the author of this letter was some tasteless prankster.

Because if it wasn't, Clover was going to have some uncomfortable questions for his employer.

“What a trash heap.” Curled, bile-green linoleum tiles crackled under her hooves as she stepped into the rig’s enclosed processing module. “I thought we put them up in Shearwater, not this dump.”

“Shearwater collapsed some time ago, ma’am.”

Primrose scoffed at her counselor as their armed attachment led them through the short corridor. “When?”

“Eight years ago. Thirteen pegasi died in the accident.”

She grunted. “And this was the best alternative?”

A soldier at the front of their detail paused to lift a drooping wire with the barrel of his rifle. Counselor Aeolian ushered her under, careful as always not to touch her person or display anything that might be interpreted as annoyance with her minister’s tone. There was only one pegasus who got away with that kind of shit and he was currently running the show in her stead a thousand miles away in New Canterlot. Aeolian might be a pretty mare with all the pastel charms of the old days, but she knew better than to lay a feather on her better.

Bits of rotted ceiling trickled behind them as they ducked below the wire. “Yes, ma’am, I assure you Caravel 9 is the safest alternative for our guests now that the Fillydelphia corridor is open to us again.”

“It’s a shithole,” she muttered.

“The closest viable alternative risked transporting our pureblood within range of Manehattan’s guns, ma’am.”

She shook her head. “Let me rephrase myself. It’s embarrassing. I can practically smell the asbestos in here.”

Perhaps smartly, Aeolian pretended she hadn’t heard. “The pureblood and her traveling companions are–”

“Use her name, counselor.”

“Aurora and her friends have been housed in the quarters module since they were evacuated from the city. They’ve been notably more active as of today now that Aurora is awake. They were assisting her on a walk of the platform’s perimeter when we landed, though you should be aware your arrival has spurred some conflict between them.”

Aeolian directed her through a white door with the letters OPERA IONS still clinging to its rust-speckled surface. Primrose stepped over the T on the way inside.

“They’re being escorted here as we speak. I would advise against including the changeling Roach or your former corporal in this meeting. Their input could be more of a burden than a benefit.”

She chewed on that as the attached soldiers spread out in the operations room, their trained eyes scanning the four corners for potential threats. Primrose found herself drawn to the far wall where a row of windows provided an unbroken view of the drilling platform below. She spotted a clutch of soldiers leading her guests down the catwalks towards them, then stepped back to peruse the room their meeting was to be held in.

“I don’t anticipate things becoming as contentious as you think they will, counselor.” She strolled across the open floor, ignoring the irritating crunch as each hoof settled atop rotted tiles.

The ghost of deja vu settled over her as she realized how long it had been since she’d been in a setting like this. Not the rot and decay, that had become a global staple. It was the soulless, uncreative layout of a space that could have only been designed by some stuffed up pony with a business degree and a dragonshit title like Lead Layout Specialist or Efficiency Liaison. The perfectly square room with its cheap fold-out tables shoved against walls that were more whiteboard than drywall would give any managerial drone a hardon. Every board rattled off some mind bleaching detail about shift schedules, monthly targets, and safety checks. A fire extinguisher still stood inside its red wall mounted box and yet some obscure regulation buried in one of the many fat, now-molding binders in the room required someone to slap a placard with a fire extinguisher drawn onto it just inches above the fucking box itself.

“And they wonder why the world caught fire.” Seeing the perplexed looks from a few of her keen-eared soldiers, she realized she was speaking aloud. “Anyway. We’re here to make a good impression for fucking once. Thanks to that mare on the radio…”

“Flipswitch,” Aeolian provided.

“...thanks to Flipswitch, half the wasteland knows what Elder Coldbrook is trying to do at Foal Mountain and that the Enclave is there to fight them off. Now that geriatric sack of spells can’t even claim to have held his own territory and he’s practically shitting himself trying to find reinforcements. And maybe he’ll get them, and maybe he’ll hit back.”

Her counselor looked momentarily concerned, but the sound of hooves crunching into the hallway gave her the excuse to direct it elsewhere.

Primrose lowered her voice by a degree, smiling as she spoke. “It doesn’t matter what the Steel Rangers do to us, because we’re about to have something they don’t.”

Aeolian quirked her brow in question.

“Hearts and minds, counselor. Hearts and minds.” Before the counselor could speak, Primrose turned to the doorway as the mare whose name was on every wastelander’s lips limped over the threshold. “Aurora! Come in, come in. Your friends, too! Please, make yourselves comfortable. Counselor, some clean chairs would be appreciated.”

Aeolian dipped her head and smiled at their guests as she stepped past them. As they waited for chairs to arrive, Primrose observed the four companions as they gravitated toward the natural light coming through the grimy windows. Enough of it spilled in to nearly be mistaken as full daylight. The weather factories embedded atop Canterlot Mountain could only do so much, and the choking overcast her pegasi used to mask their movement thinned significantly this far from home. She took a moment to look up at the sky herself, marveling at how similar the formless clouds resembled smoke.

“While we wait, I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this opportunity to apologize to you in person, Aurora.” She looked down the windowsill, taking the appropriate amount of time to acknowledge her injury. “When you rather cleverly convinced Chops and Dancer to return to New Canterlot, I let injured pride rule my judgment and gave them exclusive instructions to relocate you themselves.”

She waited a beat, then looked to the mare Aurora braced herself against for support. “You may already know that Ginger and I have been speaking in private through unconventional means. She explained to me how your troubles in Fillydelphia transpired and didn’t pull any punches, I might add. She made it clear to me that I had wasted precious hours sending Chops and Dancer rather than assigning a different unit to the task. One that was already nearby. But I chose Chops and Dancer because, in part, I wanted to shame them. In doing so I stole time that Aurora couldn’t afford and which cost her gravely.”

All four of them watched her with varying degrees of suspicion, not least of all her former corporal. She didn’t blame them the least bit for being wary.

“I’m sorry, Aurora.” Her ear twitched as Counselor Aeolian returned with a uniformed officer in tow, the pair of them carrying five folding chairs between them. “I wish there was something I could say that would make up for what happened to you, but I doubt there is.”

“No, there’s not.” Aurora regarded her with a weary intensity, a mare who understood now that the world was filled with titans and was too exhausted by them to care. When Aeolian presented one of the folding chairs to her, however, she stiffened as if the cheap seating might jump up and bite her. “I prefer to stand.”

Primrose quietly observed Aurora’s fellow companions reject the offered chairs as well, some more rudely than necessary. Her counselor simply nodded and leaned them up beneath the windowsill should any of them change their minds. She flicked a feather toward the door. The counselor took her meaning and departed without a word. The rest of the soldiers posted around the room stayed put for more obvious reasons.

She stepped past the unwanted seating and casually placed herself in front of the pane beside Aurora. Julip and the changeling both stepped away as if physically repulsed by her proximity. All things considered, it was safer for them if they were.

“May I show you something?”

Aurora stared through the glass. “I’m taken.”

“Good one, but not what I had in mind. This might interest you as well, Ginger.” She turned slightly to bring her foreleg and the slim lines of her Pip-Buck up to the sill, her pink feathers coasting across the keys until a detailed map of Equestria shuddered across the screen. Intrigued, Aurora leaned in to see as Primrose selected the updated overlay she’d received during the flight in.

A series of parallel diagonal lines filled the entirety of the map from Las Pegasus to Fillydelphia, turning it a harsh shade of green. Then, as if an eraser were being pressed into the center, a clearing grew around the pixelated shape of Canterlot Mountain. A satisfied smile pulled at Primrose’s cheeks as the void within the Steel Ranger’s territory then pressed eastward, pouring beyond territorial lines that had been etched into her maps for generations. A new river flowing over the banks of an ancient reservoir, following the winding highway that centuries ago had been lauded for tying Canterlot to Equestria’s east and west coasts.

“I don’t get it.” Aurora whirled a feather around the tract of land reaching east. “What is that?”

“It’s progress,” Primrose murmured, her eyes flicking over to Ginger. “This is how far we’ve pushed in two days. Just two.”

“That’s Enclave territory now,” Ginger added, sliding a hoof under Aurora’s wing to help point her feather toward a bright green square on the map, positioned a mere ten miles within the Enclave’s new borders. “Right there is Stable 10.”

Silence enveloped the room as Aurora stared at the screen, her brow slowly creasing as she turned on her own Pip-Buck. An old model. Primrose kept quiet as she watched Aurora wobble a little, clutching Ginger for balance as she cycled the knob on the side. Soon her own map appeared. Aurora looked from Primrose’s device to her own, adjusting her map until a single waypoint marker glowed at the center. Above it read the word HOME.

Aurora positioned her Pip-Buck beneath Primrose’s, and swallowed.

Her voice shook as she spoke. “You took it away from him?”

She nodded. “We did.”

Aurora was fighting for composure now. Ginger lit her horn, lifting a loose strand of mane from her companion’s cheek. “Did they…?”

“They didn’t get in, Aurora.”

Maybe she was getting soft, but watching this pegasus she barely knew coughing out a relieved, “Good,” pulled a little too readily at her heartstrings. She looked away to blink a few times, clearing her vision before turning back to the stricken couple. As much as she enjoyed seeing her successes being appreciated, consoling others wasn’t a skill she was particularly adept at. Best to lean into her strengths.

She cleared her throat as she brought her hoof back to the floor. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Julip and Roach observing the three of them with grudging interest, neither of them able to ignore Aurora’s relief. Through body language alone she could tell they wanted to get closer, and her proximity was preventing that. Screw it, let them scamper in for a group hug. Her body was screaming for a sit down anyway. With Aurora floundering for words - she wouldn’t say no to a thank you - she hooked her wing around one of the folding chairs and dragged it a few paces away down the glass. On cue, Roach and Julip swept in as Primrose plopped herself into the chair with a satisfied sigh.

It didn’t hurt that some distance between them helped put her soldiers at ease.

“So, here’s the thing.” She crossed her wings across her lap, the tips of her feathers articulating the strangeness of their situation. “Normally this would be the part when I start talking about how you might repay me for placing your home under our protection.”

The mood in the room shifted palpably. Aurora’s head swiveled toward her along with everyone, including Ginger. Point made. These ponies didn’t like theatrics.

“But,” she added, wary of the fact that should Ginger want to, she could probably make her last seconds alive very unpleasant with that horn of hers well before the surrounding soldiers could put her down. The Tantabus had a nasty habit of donating magic to needy causes. “But, this is not that kind of situation.”

The changeling spoke up before she could elaborate. “Ginger, you remember what happened last time we bargained with someone like her?”

Ginger glared at him. “This is not the same–”

She held up her wings. “No, no. It’s alright. He has a–”

“And here’s the part where she butters us up. I can smell it coming off of her like cheap perfume.” Roach took two steps forward, placing himself firmly between her and Aurora. Fucking changelings. He did his best to stare her down with those strange, milky green eyes as if she wouldn’t be happy to add a few more holes to that deformed body of his. “You said you were sorry for wasting precious hours, but we’ve been stuck on this shipwreck of yours for three days. Why don’t we cut to the chase and you just tell us what you came all the way out here for.”

He glared at her. She stared back. “Are you done?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Then decide.”

And there it was. A twitch along the cracks along his neck. A flinch. It took him just a second to understand he wasn’t just poking a landmine, he was stomping on it. The only reason he was still breathing was because said landmine had the decency not to explode.

She didn’t wait for him to scurry away. Precious hours, and all that. “Aurora? The rest of you, included? I’m not going to sit and pretend we’re all friends here. If the situation were any different, well… certain people in this room would no longer be breathing. That being said, I understand that at this moment I am not in a position to ask, let alone demand, anything.”

Her chair creaked as she lifted a wing and picked out Roach, Ginger and Aurora with the tip of her feather. “The three of you in particular have repeatedly treated my people with something akin to decency. I understand that Ms. Julip is not an easy mare to get along with, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to find that she’d been left to die at the bottom of the solar array where you found her. Both lieutenant Dancer and corporal Chops reported similar treatment. That’s… notable, given past history with wastelanders.”

Julip leaned over to Roach as he returned to her side and whispered something in his ear. He snorted. Primrose pretended not to notice. It would be so easy.

“Aurora, I truly am sorry we couldn’t save your leg and I promise you Paladin Ironshod is already paying the price for desecrating a pureblood. That being said, I’m not so naive to believe the situation that arose in Fillydelphia came to be because you all felt a sense of duty to the Enclave. When Ironshod dragged you out of that bar, he did so because Julip and you let your guards down.” She paused when Aurora glanced back at Ginger, clearly unaware she had shared that particular detail. Ginger pursed her lips and shook her head, forestalling another interruption. “I can understand why you might have wanted to keep that private. Normally I wouldn’t claim to owe anything for reaping the benefits of someone else’s complacency, but as things stand as they are, I don’t have the luxury. Things are too public now and I have the Enclave’s legacy to consider.”

Julip flicked a chunk of linoleum in Primrose’s direction, eyebrow cocked. “In other words, you don’t want the entire Enclave to think you got lucky. They need to believe you earned this.”

Her expression went stony. “In so many words? Yes.”

Aurora frowned. “So you’re bribing us.”

“I’m offering to repay my debt.”

Roach rolled his eyes. “That’s a first. How long until you decide you want something in return? It took Coldbrook about five seconds.”

That hit a nerve. “I am not Elder Coldbrook, and you are not the reason I flew halfway across the continent.” She leveled a feather at Aurora. “She is. Now may I talk to her?”

She waited while the changeling exchanged a wary look with Aurora. Something unspoken passed between them, a look of warning Primrose had seen time and time again over the centuries. Don’t trust her. She lies. Not terrible advice, despite how hard she was trying to stay fucking civil.

As soon as their little exchange was finished, Aurora turned off her Pip-Buck. “Alright. Floor’s yours.”

Finally.

Primrose leaned forward in her seat and cleared her throat. “Aurora, I want to send you home.”

Silence. With the exception of the tiny crease forming on the injured mare’s brow, no one moved. Even Roach and Julip stopped short of scoffing, the two of them visibly startled by the proposal. Aurora was the first to budge, turning to look at Ginger. Ginger hadn’t the first clue what Primrose had come out here to offer, naturally. She hadn’t lived this long by broadcasting her intentions, good or ill. Ginger only knew she was making the trip and that there was a possibility they may come to a mutually beneficial end to their involvement together.

Primrose smiled as the two of them whispered to one another. Maybe allowing her to assume there’d be more haggling had been a little mean.

Aurora averted her eyes and chose her words with care. “I… it’s not that easy.”

A chuckle bubbled out of her. “I don’t disagree, considering what you’re looking for isn’t out here.”

Oopsie. It was hard not to gloat as she watched Aurora and her companions go stock-still. Ever since the modern magical world turned to ash and that first annoying generation of savvy survivors died off, Primrose noticed it was becoming easier and easier to surprise the local yokels with what she knew. It was hardly a challenge anymore. Wastelanders had grown used to thinking the world’s networks were irreparably shattered and that information traveled along the broken roads buoyed alongside rumor and hearsay. These days, anyone certain of anything was peddling bullshit. Real information, reliable information traveled slowly and had to be carefully trimmed away from the lies like fat from a choice cut of meat.

Unless, that is, one had direct access to the genitals of a certain stallion who happened to know certain verifiable truths.

Primrose waved a dismissive feather at their deepening discomfort. “Sorry. I’ve been told I have a bad habit of being unnecessarily cryptic.”

“No shit,” Julip muttered.

“Well you’ll be happy to know that Paladin Ironshod is very motivated to answer our questions now that he’s in our care, and he shared some insight into your dealings with them.” She gestured to Aurora’s foreleg. “He tells us you were once in regular communication with his elder via your Pip-Buck, and that you were offered a talisman in exchange for providing his Rangers the coordinates to SOLUS. Seeing as fire isn’t pouring down from above it’s safe to assume you never did manage to locate SOLUS.”

The confusion radiating from the four of them confirmed they had no idea what it was Coldbrook had sent them to find. To him they had been little more than a set of dice he could throw. Bad odds were better than no odds, and wastelanders did have a history of digging up things that shouldn’t be found.

“Don’t worry about SOLUS; some weapons are better lost. What I want is to give you what you need to get back home.”

Aurora looked dubious. “And you just happen to have an ignition talisman lying around?”

“Aurora, I represent the Enclave. I have more than a few to spare.” A tiny smirk touched her lip at the sight of the poor mare’s face going slack. Suddenly she looked torn like a foal unsure whether to accept candy from a stranger’s carriage.

Except this wasn’t some cheap sweets Primrose was offering. This was salvation. The assurance that the worries of Stable 10 and its people were at an end and that after nearly a month of wandering, Aurora’s search was over. A project that Primrose had thought snuffed out would once again thrive. There was a sort of poetic irony that she would be the one to provide that security, but she didn’t dwell on that now.

All she cared about was the answer she could see teetering on Aurora’s lips. Yes. Yes, please help me. I want to go home.

Aurora took a slow breath to keep her heart from crashing its way out of her chest. She looked back at Ginger and could tell by the shock and pride in her eyes that she hadn’t expected this to be the offer her arranged meeting would conjure. Neither had Aurora. When Primrose first spoke about repaying debts and cementing her legacy, she expected some kind of quid pro quo amounting to material support in exchange for something else. For the Enclave’s hospitality to turn into something darker. After all, the only reason she was still alive was courtesy of their hasty evacuation and medical attention. Why wouldn’t they use that as a negotiating chip for… something?

It was too generous. She glanced over her shoulder to Roach and remembered his warning. Something for nothing was not how this world operated.

“No,” she murmured. When Primrose blinked in confusion, she repeated herself more firmly. “No. At least, not without–”

“Proof?”

She shook her head. “The catch. If all you wanted was to give me what I needed, we could have had this conversation over the Pip-Buck you gave Ginger. But you came all the way here, in person, and you look more exhausted than I am. I’ve already been promised the moon before and it ended up with a battalion of Rangers trying to dig up my home.”

“It was closer to a company.”

“I don’t care.” She winced as another phantom pain shot past her stump as if her missing leg had suddenly gotten a cramp. She grit through it, the discomfort a reminder of where the Rangers’ dirty dealings had gotten her. If Coldbrook had been a lit stick of dynamite, Primrose had the potential to be an even deadlier warhead. “If what you’re offering is real, then yes, I’ll happily accept. But I don’t think it is. I’ve just had too many bad experiences to just… trust like that anymore.”

She waited as Primrose sat back in her seat, her charitable smile fading into something more genuine. The leader of the Enclave, an organization Aurora had come to know for how ruthless it was willing to be in the pursuit of its own interests, one that enslaved and murdered without regard, stared back with a calculating coldness.

“If I understand you correctly,” Primrose said, “you’re not asking me to just show you my cards, but to rifle through my entire deck.”

“Ah…” She was out of her depth, but she suspected Primrose was giving her the opportunity to overstep. Ginger’s slowed breathing let her know she was on extremely thin ice. Her blunt honesty was plenty enough for the folks down in Mechanical, but Primrose wasn’t a nail to be attacked with a hammer. She required something different. Deference.

“No, ma’am.” Her throat was turning to sandpaper with every syllable. Then the familiar, warm pressure of Ginger’s magic gently squeezed her shoulder, bracing her against the storm of unsurety in her own head. She relaxed just a little. Just enough to speak with something nearing confidence. “If my old overmare ever taught me anything it’s that leaders in your position have problems to worry about that make mine look like a vacation.”

Primrose tilted her head with an ever so slightly arched brow. A tiny acknowledgement that she wasn’t wrong. It was something.

“Still. From one pegasus to another,” she pressed, relieved that the nod to their mutual breeding seemed to be landing, “I believe it’s my responsibility to the mares and stallions back home to know all the terms of your offer. Especially any that might come up once I’m home.”

A smirk crossed Primrose’s lips. “Do you really think I would leverage your Stable’s security at the last second?”

She shrugged. “Why not? I would.”

“I can see why you gave the Rangers so much trouble. You’d shit on Celestia's throne if it meant helping your people, wouldn’t you?” Her smile broadened as she stood up from her chair, the effort revealing just how exhausting the flight had been for her. “Okay. I do have a few terms which I thought might be better reserved for later.”

“Condition One,” Primrose continued, walking a wide path that led her around the room’s perimeter and the soldiers posted at each corner. “In exchange for one ignition talisman I would like to be provided with a hard copy of the data on your Stable’s servers.”

She frowned. “Why?”

“Because up until recently Ten’s preservation initiative was thought to be dead along with the descendants of Equestria’s greatest flyers.” Primrose looked at her from across the room, her gaze thoughtful. “If I can understand how your people survived the disruption that took it off Stable-Tec’s network, the Enclave will be better equipped to provide assistance to other Stables on the verge of collapse.”

Disruption? Little bit of an understatement to describe the landslide that buried them. She shook her head and shrugged. “Alright. We can do that.”

Primrose nodded. “Good. Condition Two is a little more straightforward. Before your Stable reseals itself, your overmare needs to make a public statement to the Wasteland disavowing both the Steel Rangers and the Enclave. Don’t thank us or acknowledge that we helped you in any way. Make it clear you want to be left alone, and lock us out.”

“Wait, why?”

“Because I can’t guarantee the Enclave will control the territory your Stable is sitting on a hundred years from now, and the last thing you can afford is for some junior archivist with something to prove,” Primrose gestured a wing toward Julip, who promptly raised a middle feather at her in return, “deciding to remind their superiors about the one time they nearly broke into an untouched Stable and had it stripped away at the last second. It’ll be a lot harder for Coldbrook’s grandfoals to justify a ‘liberation’ if your Stable tells the entire wasteland to kick rocks and stay off your property.”

Fair point. “I’ll make sure to talk to Sledge about it.”

“It’s entirely up to you,” Primrose said as she made her way back to where she started. “As for the last condition, consider it non-negotiable. Your changeling friend will not be permitted to remain in the Stable when it’s sealed.”

Her stomach dropped and she wheeled around as best she could, stumbling as she held herself against the window sill with her opposite wing. “Yeah, no, you’re right. That’s not fucking negotiable.”

Primrose arched a brow at her as she stepped between the four of them, seemingly unconcerned by Aurora’s abrupt shift in tone.

“Roach has more right than anyone to live with us if he chooses.”

Julip stepped toward Primrose, startling a response from the heavily armed guards silently observing the negotiation. “His fucking kid is in there!”

The spearhead of the Enclave shouldered past her former corporal, a gesture that if it had been any less gentle had every hallmark of devolving into an unrestrained brawl. It was Roach’s perforated hoof across her chest that caused her to back down.

“Frankly, I don’t care if Queen Chrysalis herself lives in that Stable, I will not lift a feather to help you if it means contaminating what may be the last unmolested population of pegasi in Equestria by installing a ghoul as a permanent fixture within its walls.” She stopped a wing’s length from Aurora and Ginger, her attention very suddenly fixated on the latter. “Ginger, this would have been pertinent information to share with me before I agreed to this meeting.”

Ginger spoke through clenched teeth. “It never came up.”

“I’m afraid it just did.” She closed her eyes and scratched at the bridge of her muzzle as if this was all very taxing to her.

Aurora could feel her legs beginning to tremble. Her skin felt hot as she wrestled with the impossible. She couldn’t decide this. She promised him he’d have a place. He’d waited outside that door for centuries waiting to know whether his family had made it inside. And if they had he deserved to live there in the place they once called home.

Her vision swam. “Come on. You can’t make me choose that.”

Primrose stared at her with some bastardized version of compassion. “If I recall, Aurora, you were the one who asked to know my terms. Now you do.”

She looked to where he stood, his expression conflicted. “Roach, I can’t…”

The words stopped in her throat, bewildered into silence at the abrupt sight of him staring back at her in the same way he had on the road to Junction City. His opaque eyes held back the same deep sadness she’d seen when he first started sharing tidbits about who he was. Why he was. He wanted to reassure her but the sick knot in her gut only wrenched itself tighter.

“It’s fine,” he lied, betrayed by the unmistakable tightness in his jaw. “Say yes.”

She shook her head. “No. She doesn’t know what you went through.”

He crossed the gap between them, his expression pained. As her resolve began to crumble he nudged his shoulder into hers, turning her away from Primrose and toward the windows overlooking the ocean. “Hey,” he whispered, “don’t listen to her. Don’t look at her. Okay? Just breathe.”

She wrapped a wing around his midsection just like she had barely a few hours ago, except now the other covered her muzzle to prevent them from seeing her losing it. He was building himself up to another conversation that she didn’t want to have because she knew exactly what he was about to tell her, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“Aurora…”

“Don’t.”

She felt him kiss the back of her ear. “I stood watch outside our Stable so that I knew it would be safe.”

“No you didn’t.” She squeezed the tears from her eyes but more welled up in their place. Her voice shook. “You need to know if your family made it in. You deserve to be with them.”

“Aurora, she did make it in.”

Blue. She’d all but forgotten about Blue.

“And now I need to know that the rest of my family’s going to be safe there, too. That means you, kiddo. Alright?”

Waves broke against the platform’s pillars, peeling away rust flake by flake, eroding the foundation in an endless fight that could only end one way. Aurora never thought she would ever relate to a fucking oil rig. “She can’t keep you out.”

“She’s not,” he murmured. “I’m choosing not to go. Someone has to stay outside to make sure you’re safe.”

She shook her head, hard.

“Yup. This is a good deal, Aurora. Your job right now is to say yes, go home with Ginger, and be happy together. Take her down to where you work and show her how kickass a screwdriver can be.”

She coughed out a sobbing laugh.

“Besides,” he said, dipping his head down until she met his eye, “do you really think Knight Latch and the other Rangers at Stable 6 have the first clue how to grow their own food? I kind of promised to come back and give him pointers.”

“Fuck Latch,” she muttered.

“Pretty sure he’s married.”

His body rocked against hers as he chuckled. Under the cover of her dampened feathers, she allowed herself the tiniest smile before resolving to sulk again.

“Hey.”

She looked up.

“This is how it has to be. I know you don’t like it, but this gets you home.” The humor was gone from his eyes, replaced by a quiet intensity that brooked no argument. “We’ve all been through too much to turn this down and try to find our own way again. Please. Say yes.”

Slowly, even though it hurt, even though every fiber of her heart screamed at her for betraying it, she nodded. Her head hardly moved as she looked behind them where Minister Primrose stood, waiting, her gaze as emotionally devoid as the decision she’d forced upon them.

Uttering the word felt like swallowing glass. “Okay.”

Primrose smiled. “Okay. I’ll start making arrangements to have the ignition talisman delivered to Stable 10. When would you like to leave?”

She turned back to the view outside and the hazy line of smoke drifting out from the invisible coast. She felt used. Violated. A pawn who had done little but allow herself to be kicked down the road by powers greater than she could have ever hoped to stand against.

“Now,” she said, pressing down the violent anger swarming out of the raw wounds of grief. “I need to get the fuck out of here.”

Primrose’s reflection nodded in the window before turning toward one of her black-clad followers. “Go collect some provisions from the galley and bring up their belongings.”

“You’re not coming with us.”

She smiled at Aurora as if that much were obvious.

“Safe travels, Ms. Pinfeathers.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 39: Home Estimated time remaining: 28 Hours, 59 Minutes