“Does this hurt?”

Doctor Able’s feathers prodded and squeezed along the muscles of Primrose’s wings, pausing to ask the same question in the same tone like some kind of robot. Squeeze, twist, move. Squeeze, twist, move. Like the wasteland’s least attractive masseuse.

“No,” she said, and he moved along another inch down her right wing to repeat the procedure again. She grit her teeth as he came upon the delicate joint of her midwing and the furious bundle of tendons her one-way flight to this garbage patch of an oil rig had managed to irritate.

He set his own feathers around the joint and applied light pressure. “Does this hurt?”

It felt like he was forcing a railroad spike between her bones. She closed her eyes and nodded. “Little bit.”

She didn’t need a doctor to tell her she strained her wing, but Counsellor Aeolus had insisted she get checked. Well, not so much “insisted” as threatened to have her wing put into a cast and have her carried back home on a stretcher. The scary part was that Primrose wasn’t sure if she was exaggerating or not. Judging by the severe concern expressed by the tactical and logistics officers Clover had sent along with her entourage, nobody was comfortable letting her head skyward without an examination from her accompanying physician. All because Aeolus had noticed her wing hanging just a few inches lower than the other.

A sigh rolled out of her chest as Dr. Able opened and closed, twisted and flexed the problem joint. Two centuries of absolute control of her own fate, give or take a decade, and she was suddenly being tended to like a helpless filly. There was something disconcerting about how immediately the Enclave’s world stopped spinning at the mere suggestion of their minister being in nonperfect health.

“Well, the good news is you’ll survive,” he murmured, walking his feathers down the length of her wing one final time. “You strained a tendon. Nothing you won’t be able to fly on for short bursts.”

She frowned. “Flying from here to New Canterlot isn’t a short burst.”

Dr. Able nodded in the way he always did when his patients pointed out the painfully obvious. “That’s the bad news. We’ll need to make regular landings on the way back home. It’ll add some time to the return trip, but not much. Alternatively, if you’d consider lifting your personal moratorium on wasteland medicine just this once, a half-dosed stim would resolve–”

“I don’t use chems.” She pulled her wing away, wincing against the twinge of pain. Dr. Able didn’t flinch at the snap in her tone, only nodding once again as if she’d rattled off a calm no thank you. The fear of her was visible solely in his slightly widened eyes.

She resisted the urge to roll hers, trying to remind herself that he was - technically - deeply invested in her safety. While not on record as a believer of her divine provenance, he was a valuable asset back home as a respected member of New Canterlot’s more reputable medical community. He boasted unrestricted access to his dear minister and could not, in his own words, explain away her shocking longevity. Dr. Able never went to far as to credit it directly to a blessing from the late princesses, nor was he so suicidal as to suggest it wasn’t. All in all, he was a smart stallion. She wasn’t going to disappear him for suggesting something as mundane as taking a wasteland stimpack.

Still, she had an image to maintain.

“I’ll keep an eye out for any clouds worth sitting on.” Glancing down at the slim lines of her Pip-Buck, she could see yet another unread message from Clover had dropped into her queue. “I need to take this. Can you go check that Counsellor Aeolus is getting the pureblood ready for her trip home?”

“I can do that, ma’am.” He headed for the door. “Do you need anything else before I go?”

She looked up from her screen, then at their surroundings. The oil rig’s cafeteria smelled like seawater and hoof fungus, and that wasn’t exactly a good thing considering there was a unit of her Enclave stationed here on a regular basis. Tracks in the grime on the floor pointed to the tables being lined up ahead of her arrival, swipe marks across the walls indicating recent unsuccessful attempts at cleaning away flaking paint, all cast in the dirty yellow light of aging bulbs. It was the first room on the rig to offer some privacy for Dr. Able to examine her, and one that she would like to purge from her memory at the nearest convenience.

“Just go help Aeolus,” she said. “The faster they leave, the faster I can leave.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She waited until the door clicked shut behind him before she pulled up a somewhat clean plastic chair and sat down to navigate through Clover’s recent messages. Progress updates on their forces pushing east, mostly. A couple requests for her to check in with him. Confirmation of life, he called it. Grim, but necessary.

She skimmed the latest changes from the warfront. Nothing unexpected. The Steel Rangers were finally putting together that her attack on Fillydelphia had been a feint, and that Elder Coldbrook had been forced to overcommit his Rangers to the effort to defend it. With word finally reaching them from home that they’d been fooled, the Rangers had begun backtracking as quickly as their power armor could manage. The goal at this juncture was to take Blinder’s Bluff and hold it in preparation for the Rangers’ arrival. With their stronghold taken, picking the rest of them apart would be a game of attrition. The trick now was getting enough pegasi to the Bluff in order to capture it.

Scrolling down, she couldn’t help but smile a little at Clover’s growing irritation with her nonresponses. He downright became passive-aggressive in a few, noting that he’d confirmed through one officer or another that she was alive and well while still requesting she contact him personally. If middle management still existed, he would be a perfect fit for the job.

Then, at the bottom of the list, his most recent message waited for her. As she read the subject line, her smile faltered.

Fwd: Your Legacy

She flexed her wing a little as she tried to get comfortable in the hard plastic seat. Had someone threatened Clover? Her hoof rested on the dirty table and she tapped open the communication. At first glance it looked like anything else Clover might fire her way. Short, sweet, none of the fat so many ponies loved to chew when they could boil a conversation down to a few sentences.

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Ministry Interoffice Mail :: Crusader Encryption Enabled
To: Minister Primrose
From: Security Director Clover
Subject: Fw: Your Legacy
04/21/1297

Minister Primrose,

I am forwarding on an intercepted message originating from Stable 10 earlier today. Upon personally reviewing its contents, I have verified no other members of the Enclave accessed it and have since restricted access to you and myself. You will understand why once you read it. I would like to discuss this message and its apparent author with you at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely,
Clover Fields
Security Director

---------- Forwarded message ---------

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…

The skin on her neck went hot. She whispered under her breath.

“Bullshit.”

It was an obvious hoax. Rainbow Dash was dead. Someone in that Stable had falsified a name to screw with her. Yet she kept reading. The words slid by one line after the other, claiming to know things about Spitfire no one could know. Things from the Wonderbolt Academy that Primrose herself had been denied entry into when she was a teenager. Small wingspan, the recruiter told her. She frowned. She was getting distracted. Whoever the author was, they were weaving a convincing fiction.

Then the accusations came and a pit began forming in Primrose’s gut. This pony knew Spitfire had instructions to seal the Stable early. They knew about the pocket of tunnel which survived the collapse, sealing in the survivors. She swallowed.

They claimed to be a ghoul.

A ghoul inside Stable 10.

She propped her forehead with her other hoof and stared slack-jawed at the screen. This wasn’t happening. It was impossible. Rainbow Dash was dead. Primrose had specifically altered her schedule to place her in fucking Fillydelphia where she stood no chance of making it to Ten. That was the whole fucking point of all of this because if the Elements survived, magic survived. And yet like a merciless parade the accusations piled up, too accurate to be parsed from the archives or stitched into a narrative with hearsay. The author knew exactly how Spitfire had gained power over the MoA. She knew about the bits that had been siphoned off to fund JetStream Aerospace. How Spitfire had hired Primrose as her number two and how both of them had birthed the Enclave within the armored corridors of the Pillar.

Cold sweat wicked up into her mane but it did nothing to chill the anxious heat radiating from her body like a fever. The gears in her head spun hot. If Rainbow Dash had survived, maybe Primrose could use that to her advantage. There were always angles. Always options. If Spitfire had been able to goad an Element into a cage, then there was nothing to say…

The next paragraph stuck between those gears like a steel pipe. Teeth shattered. Her machinations died in the crib. She stared at the lines in silence.

“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.”

Shit.

Shit shit shit.

Rainbow Dash was alive. She was in Stable 10. And she knew.

She jammed a feather against the screen and scrolled back up to the header to make sure she was the only recipient of this disaster. For what little relief it provided to know, Clover hadn’t added anyone else. It was clear from his words that this was something he wanted to discuss with her one on one, which meant he couldn’t decide whether or not to believe it.

Her Director of Security was having doubts. She needed to reassure him. She needed to patch this crack before it could spread.

She took several moments to compose herself. It wouldn’t help if he saw her teetering on the edge of panic. Once she had her breathing under control, she pulled a few loose curls out of her face, initiated a new video call over her Pip-Buck, and waited. Seconds passed. A cartoon Scootaloo stood in the center of the screen pretending to hold a telephone receiver to her ear, an unused graphic one of the Enclave’s Pip-Buck technicians had dug up to compliment the new functionality. It took every ounce of patience she had not to put a hoof through the screen.

Before she could, Clover’s face appeared without warning. A nearly spent cigarette hung from his lip as he settled down into his office chair, the angle pitching as he set the foreleg holding his Pip-Buck across his lap, the stallion not bothering to look down at the screen to greet her. Judging by his expression, Clover was closer to coming to his own decision than she thought.

“Ma’am,” he acknowledged. “Did you read the communique from Ten?”

It occurred to her how far from New Canterlot she was. How, left by himself, a stallion in Clover’s current position could cause irreparable damage well before anyone within the Bunker could stop him. She bristled at the curtness in his voice but managed to keep her frayed pride in check. He only knew what he thought he knew. He could be brought back around, even if it meant forgiving him for the disrespect.

“I’ve had some time to look it over, Clover, yes. It’s a novel approach as far as propaganda goes. It’s good that you contained it.” She frowned as she watched him take a drag on his cigarette. For all that was left of it, he may as well be inhaling the filter. He never smoked before, at least not in front of her. “I’m assuming the Rangers concocted it. Celestia knows Elder Coldbrook is so up to his neck in shit with the High Elder right now that he’ll be willing to throw anything at his problems just to see what stuck.”

Clover ashed the cigarette against his hoof and cut her off. “The message isn’t Ranger propaganda. I checked. It originated within Stable 10.”

His directness caught her flat on her hooves. “Then clearly one of the residents has a colorful imagination. That message is a lie.”

She watched him glance down at his Pip-Buck, but she didn’t see her face reflected in his eyes. He was reading something. She couldn’t make out what.

Without taking his eyes off the screen he asked, “Ma’am, was the message from Stable 10 authored by Rainbow Dash?”

“If you think you have the right to interrogate me, Clover–”

“Answer the question, ma’am.”

He doubted her. That fucking snake. She could already see him planning on the best way to disseminate the news throughout the Enclave, to poison them against her with a dead mare’s confession. She grit her teeth. She needed to get control over this.

“It obviously wasn’t. Rainbow Dash is dead.”

A pause. “Did you at any point have access to Minister Pie’s launch codes?”

Pinkie Pie. There was a name she hadn’t thought of for a long, long time. “Absolutely not.”

Clover’s frown deepened. “Did you help Overmare Spitfire launch Equestria’s arsenal?”

“You already know I didn’t. Celestia’s sake, what would I stand to gain from blowing up my own country?”

Lines of text she couldn’t read were populating in the screen’s reflection in his eyes. He was reading. Worse, he was making a decision.

“Ma’am,” he said, then visibly reconsidered the title. “Primrose, until now I’ve respected your dedication to the Enclave and New Canterlot’s reconstruction. I’ve devoted the past nine years to serving at your side because I believed in the Enclave’s goal to rebuild Equestria under the same sky. I still do.”

He pinched a holotape between two feathers and held it up for her to see. “It’s the reason I prayed this letter would be a hoax.”

“It is a hoax,” she urged.

He shook his head and placed the holotape into his uniform’s breast pocket. “It isn’t. Your biometrics show you’ve been lying to me since you called.”

A cold stone landed in the pit of her stomach. “You monitored me? Are you fucking… Clover, a five minute conversation is not enough time to establish a reliable baseline and you fucking know it!”

He looked genuinely saddened by her response. “Primrose, you’ve barely taken that Pip-Buck in two centuries. The baseline isn’t the problem.” She watched him as he worked at the little black and white pin fixed to the collar of his uniform. Two alicorns circling one another like night and day. The letters RC stamped into the metal. It came apart with some effort, evidence that like her Pip-Buck, Clover rarely ever removed the pin from his uniform. Pegasi had died trying to recover theirs in battle.

Clover set his down on his desk.

Anger rose in her throat. “I suggest you rethink your chances to seize power, Clover. Letter or no letter, I promise you it won’t end the way you think it will.”

The view from her screen lurched and the speakers let out a harsh rasp of sound that had her believe he was ending the call. But the picture settled. She was watching Clover from his Pip-Buck’s perch atop his desk. His eyes were on his feathers as they massaged matted brown fur where the device had been clamped.

“This isn’t a coup,” he said. “It’s my resignation.”

His heart was trying to break its way through his ribs, but somehow Clover was managing to keep his composure. The indignation in his former employer’s voice was impossible to miss, and he knew his time was running short. He needed to leave.

“You can’t resign,” her voice rattled from the Pip-Buck on his desk. “It doesn’t work that way.”

He knew. “Can’t hurt to try.”

One last glance at his memorial pin. Remember Cloudsdale. He stood from his seat, hesitated, then picked it back up and dropped it into the same pocket as the holotape. Leverage, if he escaped. Something he knew Primrose was within her means to make very difficult, very quickly.

“Where will you go?”

He took a breath and started walking toward the door. “Somewhere.”

Behind him. “You won’t get far.”

“Maybe.”

“It’s just one letter. You can ignore one letter.”

He settled his wing on the switch. “Goodbye, Primrose.”

He heard her shout something on her end that the tinny speaker couldn’t parse before killing the connection. The fragments of the oftentimes white-hot temper he’d spent years helping to quench with careful logic. Swallowing his fear, he toggled the door and stepped out into the busy hallway.

Sixty seconds, two minutes tops. That was how long he’d calculated for it to take for her to give an order, have it reach a radio operator, cross the vast expanse between the coast to New Canterlot, then be read by an operator inside the Bunker.

He offered polite nods to the uniformed pegasi in the halls. The enlisted ponies knew not to address him without reason. A group of officers he’d come up the ranks with greeted him as they passed by, and for a split second he thought they might ask him to stop and chat. But they had work of their own to do. The Enclave’s push east had the entire Bunker buzzing. Excitement was in the air. For the first time in their generation, they were fighting the enemy in force and finally taking back the land the Steel Rangers stole. In so many ways, Clover knew the stance he was taking today would be a disruption. The taste of betrayal soured in his throat, but he kept walking.

He turned onto the corridor that would take him to the guarded elevator leading to the surface. He could see the double doors at the end of the hall and felt the sweat beading on his brow. A uniformed mare glanced at him, nodded, then looked again at his empty collar as they passed each other. He tensed, waiting for her to call out to him, but if she said anything it was drowned by the dull murmur of conversations happening between them. Taking off the pin had been a mistake. Leaving his Pip-Buck in his office was beginning to draw eyes, too, but in the heart of New Canterlot it wouldn’t take long for his colleagues to track his position.

The elevators drew closer. He could make out the bored expressions of the two guards posted on either side of the silver doors. His ears twitched around, homing in on a mare’s voice just behind him.

“I’m looking for Director Clover.”

Ice washed through his chest. He hurried. Just a few more yards.

“Excuse me,” he murmured. “Excuse me.”

“Director?”

He began to shove.

“Director Clover! Stop!”

A quiet curse slipped his lips as he pushed through traffic, catching the attention of the guards at the elevator. They recognized him immediately. They should. He’d been the one to hire them. Their expressions shifted from confusion to rigid concern as they noticed whoever was behind him.

Clover didn’t bother to look for himself. He practically toppled a short stallion as he pushed toward the silver doors, all pretense of calm gone from his expression. “Do not let that mare near me!”

The guards stiffened, their attention shifting from their employer to the mare shouting at him to stop. He reached the elevator and jammed his laminate through the reader while the armed stallions advanced toward the parting hallway traffic. Just a few extra seconds. Somewhere above, the car began descending.

“Director Clover, you’re ordered to remand yourself to our custody immediately!”

He risked a glance toward the advancing voice. The elevator guards stood with one wing held out to stop her advance while the other rested on their rifles. Several other officers followed in her wake, their eyes wide and focused solely on the slightly rotund stallion waiting stupidly for the elevator doors to open.

The dull noise of the approaching car drew closer.

“You idiots, that stallion has been charged with treason against the Enclave!”

The elevator dinged. Clover hurried inside and ran his badge through the waiting reader. From the hall, the two guards were looking back at him with visible confusion as if trying to decide who to believe or whether this was an elaborate test.

The doors began to close. The mare leading the charge shoved past the guards and unholstered a pistol. A combination of shit aim and a retaliatory tackle from his security team sent the three shots she squeezed off ricocheting off the doorframe rather than excavating various pieces of his anatomy. A confusion of shouts ran through the corridor that were gradually muffled by the doors clicking together.

The elevator chimed and he began to ascend.

“A little tighter, dear. I promise you aren’t going to break me.”

Aurora flushed a little as she wrapped her feathers around the leather strap hanging from Ginger’s bags, giving it another good pull before folding the excess into the buckle. Ginger didn’t exactly need help putting on her saddlebags what with her restored horn and, according to Chops, a disturbingly precise ability to manipulate the fabric of reality.

She wasn’t so sure about that last part, even if the mute corporal hadn’t minced his words. With Ginger’s bags secure, Aurora put a wing against her back and carefully pivoted back toward the bunks the four of them had been assigned. Chops and Dancer sat in chairs against the container’s rear wall, their attention regularly toggling between an ongoing card game and the four ponies whose supervision had since become an exercise of rubbing their noses in their own mess. It wasn’t much of a punishment, apparently. Chops and Dancer didn’t seem to mind the assignment at all and as far as Aurora could tell, Ginger, Roach, and Julip weren’t bothered either.

She glanced between them one more time, wishing she knew a little more about what she’d missed while locked in Ironshod’s freezer. Chops seemed okay, but Dancer seemed… less okay. When the stallion in question noticed her gaze he lifted a brow. Aurora pretended not to notice and continued her inventory of their meager belongings.

“These apples are getting soft,” she mentioned, gesturing to the neatly organized pile on their mattress. “Think they’re worth trading?”

Ginger lit her horn and hefted three of them from the heap. “I doubt we’ll need to if we’re flying straight back to your Stable.”

She looked over to the other bunk where Roach and Julip had seated themselves at the end of the mattress, their attention on the pile of parts laid out over Roach’s lap. He was explaining to her the homemade mechanism he’d created for his leg-mounted shotgun - the same weapon the Enclave had chosen to disassemble before delivering back to him. A second pair of soldiers next to the container door, a mare and stallion whose names Aurora hadn’t bothered to ask for, watched Roach with open disapproval as he walked Julip through the construction. With eight bodies warming the small space, they’d been forced to prop the doors open just to keep the shipping container from becoming a hotbox.

“Roach, Julip? Either of you hungry?”

Julip glanced up from her lesson and shrugged. “I could eat.”

Roach politely declined and leaned back a little so Ginger could lob a bruised apple into Julip’s waiting wing. She bit into it and turned her attention back to the intricate spring system he was demonstrating, watching with quiet admiration whenever Roach managed to use a combination of hooves and teeth to rebuild the delicate assemblies. Aurora and Ginger chose their own fruit and resumed their packing as they worked.

“Kind of noticing a lack of ammunition,” she commented, glancing pointedly over to the unnamed soldiers. “Should I assume that’ll be returned when you find my rifle?”

The mare nearest the open door bristled. “Your weapon is not lost, ma’am, and you will have your ammunition returned after you’re delivered to your Stable.”

“Ooh,” Ginger whispered, “she called you ma’am.”

“Don’t I feel special.” She allowed herself the smallest smirk and readdressed their guards. “Thanks for the info.”

The spicy mare averted her gaze. “You’re welcome, ma’am.”

No sense in antagonizing them even if the stallion beside her remained silent, clearly less invested in his own pride. Aurora got the sense that he’d been pulled away from a better assignment to help keep an eye on them. Or, more accurately, keep an eye on Chops and Dancer. It made her wonder whether their loyalty to the Enclave might be in question after Julip’s defection. Maybe the reason Primrose wanted to shove her back into the metal box she came from was to keep whatever infection Aurora already transmitted to her people from spreading.

She was not going to miss the wasteland.

“I’m surprised that’s all we managed to collect,” Ginger mused, sidling beside her as she lifted a roll of pristinely wrapped gold prewar currency. “Treasure hunters, we are not.”

Aurora resisted the temptation to say something mushy about having found each other. She didn’t want to get booed out of the container. With Ginger’s help she fastened her own bags and started divvying supplies among the group. Julip, notably, hadn’t been given her mailbag. One last snub from her former comrades. When asked what he wanted to carry, Roach only offered a tiny shake of his head that seemed to indicate not now. Perplexed, Aurora and Ginger split the rest between themselves.

“Hey. Hey, dipshits,” the mare at the door hissed. “Cards away. Counselor’s coming.”

They watched as Dancer and Chops packed their game away and got up from their seats to stand at attention, though neither appeared to be in much of a hurry to do so as their counterparts. With Ginger to help her maneuver, Aurora winced as she hopped her back end around to face the approaching hoofsteps. As much as she disliked bowing to the graces of the Enclave, she had too much riding on Primrose’s generosity to throw it away with bad decorum.

A startlingly tall mare appeared on the catwalk outside with an armed entourage in tow, though mercifully as their newest guest ducked through the doorway the ones accompanying her chose to remain outside. Her plain black uniform lay crisply against her willowy frame, her coloration nearly identical to the long-dead Element on Kindness despite her imposing height. Her vibrant pink mane hung to one shoulder in a single thick braid that had begun to frizz in the salty air. The muzzle of a familiar rifle poked out from beneath her wing.

Pink eyes scanned the cramped space for several seconds before finally settling on Aurora. “Ms. Pinfeathers, our minister would like this to return home with you.”

Aurora read the patch stitched into the counselor’s uniform. Aeolian. She found herself trying to work out the pronunciation even as the mare approached with her rifle held out for her to take. Almost absently, she accepted her rifle nearly without noticing the changes it had undergone. The brass hooks that Ginger had installed were gone, the boreholes filled and sanded flush to the original stock wood. Unvarnished and surrounded by bright scuffing they stood out like blonde hairs in a brown wig.

She frowned, clutching the weapon awkwardly in her wing as she dropped the leather strap over her head. A strong scent of solvent and fresh gun oil drew her attention away from the de-modification and toward the rest of the weapon. It had been disassembled and cleaned down to the heads of the screws keeping it together. The nickel plated barrel had been polished to a mirror shine and the mud and grime from days in the wasteland had been meticulously removed. Even the narrow scope had been washed and cleaned. It was in better condition than when she stole it from the Security office.

“We’ve done all we can to ensure Desperate Times is display ready, though the damage to the original wood will need to be repaired by an artisan in your Stable.” She tipped a yellow feather toward the barrel. “Luckily, the original rifling wasn’t worn too badly.”

“Thank you,” she said, biting back her annoyance over Ginger’s work being undone. Curiously, she added, “How do you know its name?”

Counselor Aeolius shrugged as if the answer were obvious. “Commander Spitfire was known to own a named Reinlander Model 700 identical to this, and you just so happen to come from her Stable. That, and Minister Primrose recognized it during her review of your equipment. She owns your rifle’s sister. A knife, made by the same manufacturer.”

She had to do some creative balancing but managed to get one wing gripped around the bottom of the rifle and the other on the bolt. It racked back without sticking or grinding, something it hadn’t done since she first brought it with her into the wasteland. The chamber as well as the magazine beneath it had been conspicuously relieved of their ammunition. “I didn’t know weapons had siblings.”

Aeolius smiled impatiently. “It’s called a turn of phrase. Now, if you and your companions are ready to depart, your escort is waiting for you on the freight platform. I would prefer to have the four of you airborne and on course before nightfall.”

Before Aurora could respond, Roach lifted a hoof. “Before we leave, the four of us need to speak in private.”

His request caused the counselor’s expression to go brittle, but rather than respond she instead regarded Aurora with an inquisitive arc on her brow. Aurora let Desperate Times lay slackly against her side, trying to ignore her brain’s most recent attempt to convince her of a persistent throb where her hind leg used to be. “Just give us ten minutes.”

Satisfied, Aeolius ordered the Enclave personnel out of the container before turning to leave herself. “Please try to keep it brief.”

As the door creaked closed behind her, Roach set aside his disassembled weapon and got up from the mattress to shoved it the rest of the way shut. By the sudden pensiveness on Julip’s face, something was up. As Roach led Julip to where she and Ginger stood beside the bunks at the rear of the container, a familiar dread settled at the bottom of her gut. Roach had noticed something the rest of them hadn’t. She found herself wondering if they were actually hostages here, or whether Primrose was trying to run a con with the promised ignition talisman like Elder Coldbrook had just a week earlier.

But when Roach broke the news, there was no revelation. No grand conspiracy or imminent danger. Just simple, thoughtful logic.

“So,” he murmured, careful to keep his voice low enough not to carry to the pegasi standing outside, “Julip and I had some time to talk, and we think it might not be the best idea for either of us to join you for the whole flight home.”

Aurora opened her mouth to ask why, but stopped short. She knew on some level this was meant to happen the moment Primrose drew a line in the sand against Roach being allowed into her Stable. A part of her had hoped to delay talking about it until they were closer to home, but Roach was intent on having the conversation now.

She gnawed the inside of her cheek, eyes dipping toward the floor. “Where will you go?”

Julip chimed in, her voice uncharacteristically gentle. “We’re going to make our way to Blinder’s Bluff.”

“Or, barring that, Kiln.” Roach shrugged, knowing full well Kiln’s background radiation made it less of a backup plan and more of a last resort as far as Julip’s internal organs were concerned. “We’ll start with the Bluff first. If Coldbrook blundered as badly as the pegasi here say, I don’t think we’re going to register on his shit list. Plus I promised to help Knight Latch restore Stable 6’s gardens, and who knows? If they’re still hooked up to Stable-Tec’s network with the dummy version of your Pip-Buck, we might find a way to keep in touch.”

Emphasis on might. She liked hearing him talking hypotheticals even less than she did worrying about it in her own head. “I’m sure Knight Latch will be glad to have a gardener’s brain around to pick.”

“Master gardener,” Julip corrected, not without a cheeky grin. “And if we don’t get chased out, I’m going to be his apprentice.”

That caught her off guard. Even Ginger was at a loss. “You’re going to learn how to garden.”

Julip grinned a little wider, leaning into the challenge. “You got a fucking problem with that?”

“Ah, no. I mean… I just can’t picture you pruning tomatoes, is all.” Or, for that matter, the tomatoes surviving the experience. “Are you sure going back to the Bluff right now is the safest idea, though? We didn’t exactly leave behind many friends when we left, and speaking as the last mare they thought was with the Enclave, the reception might not be great if they find out who Julip is.”

Roach glanced at Julip, who exchanged the same look of middling confidence. “As far as anyone at the Bluff needs to know, Julip is just a dustwing we met in the Pleasant Hills who asked for our protection on her way to Fillydelphia. It happens all the time.”

Aurora looked over to Ginger who appeared less than convinced. Still, if it was the story they were going with, weak as it was it still beat telling the truth.

Yet the question lingering between them still remained.

“When are you planning to leave?”

And just like that the mood darkened. Julip’s smile faded and Roach gradually averted his eyes. The tiny chitin plates at the corner of each lip tightened as he looked up at Aurora and Ginger.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, his voice lowering as he lifted the flap of his saddlebag.

From it he fetched a neatly folded square of gauze with a noticeable lump in the center. He didn’t unwrap it, and judging by his expression as he held it out to her he didn’t want it to be. He set the bundle in her wing, his expression more serious than she’d ever seen it before.

“When you get back home, find Blue. Ginger can tell you what it is once you’re somewhere private.”

Aurora frowned as she slipped the wrapped object into her saddlebag.

“It’s a gift from Applebloom,” he said. “She’ll understand when she sees it.”

Thunderlane made his way to the Atrium, concern and confusion competing across his face. His service revolver, a weapon that had gone ten years without use save for the test bullet fired from it when it was manufactured, bounced against his hip as he matched Spitfire's stride. She kept the irritation off her face, knowing he had questions about the so-called chemical leak. Just her luck that today of all days her head of security was actually watching his Pip-Buck.

“I just got the ping from Millie.” His wide hooves stomped alongside her, the glow from his Pip-Buck still open to the localized message Millie was programmed to send in the event of a hazard, real or faked. “I’ve got two security details setting up to block hoof traffic into the main corridor and one cracking open hazmat kits. Any idea what they’re going to be dealing with?”

She stared forward. “I have no idea, Thunder. I’m sure they’ll handle it.”

They wouldn’t find a spill, nor would they be able to disable the lockdown without Spitfire’s credentials. Once they exhausted their options they would radio back to Thunderlane and declare the leak to be in error, and she would sigh sympathetically and apologize, promising to manually override the lockdown herself when she had a moment to step away. But in the meantime she would invite the IT team to use the remainder of their shift to mingle in the Atrium, have some cake, maybe indulge in the certainly-not-spiked cider that was quickly becoming a Remembrance Day tradition. There would be time later to write code, answer work tickets, whatever it was they did all day.

Thunderlane coughed. “That’s why I’m asking, Spits. You just came from IT so I’m kinda hoping you saw what happened.”

That touch of annoyance became a barb. “If I knew I would tell you. Whatever the issue is, Millie has it contained.”

“I know that. I was only asking so I could let my guys know what–”

She stopped mid-stride. He slowed to a halt a few steps ahead and reluctantly turned to look at her.

“Are your people competent enough to handle it?”

He nodded with a hesitance that made a stallion his age look pitiful. “Of course they are.”

“Then why are you nannying them like they’re not?”

She waited. He didn’t have an answer for her that wouldn’t invite another rebuke, so he remained silent. Smart choice.

“Good.” She resumed walking. The sounds of festivities in the Atrium were clear enough to make out individual voices, and the last thing she needed was for someone to walk into the corridor and ask why she was chewing out the Stable’s most popular living Wonderbolt. When she was sure he was following, she added, “Put it out of your head, alright? It’s IT. Someone probably fried a circuit board and tripped Millie’s sniffers.”

He uttered a noncommittal noise that made her want to pull her mane out. She didn’t need to deal with a sullen old stallion today. Delta’s absence was only going to go unnoticed for so long, and eventually someone was going to remember seeing her enter her office and not leaving during the evacuation. She needed to figure out a long term solution to her Delta problem, and soon.

She sighed. For now, at least, she hoped some time in confinement might convince the former drunk that she wasn’t a mare to be fucked with. Not every truth needed to be printed in fat bold letters on the front page. The hard truths, the ones nobody wanted to think about but had no qualms about reaping the rewards from, were better when forgotten.

Thankfully, Thunderlane had enough brains to know when to drop the subject. She glanced down at her Pip-Buck as they walked. 3:09pm. A little late, but then again one of Equestria’s so-called heroes would have said they were fashionably so.

Heads turned as they stepped into the Atrium, all smiles and humility as a small ripple of stamped applause rolled through the crowded space. She made a point to look up at the bright blue banner hung just behind her podium, the words HAPPY REMEMBRANCE DAY! beaming above her gathered residents in bright yellow font. Delta’s self-righteous little tantrum could wait. Today was a day of celebration. Ten years of survival against odds that no pony or creature had ever faced in written history. Pegasi crowded the railing on the second level. Some had brought their own seating, and had camped out along the periphery where the crush wasn’t so dense.

To Thunderlane’s credit, crowd control was buttoned up tight. She spotted more than a few security patrols herding pegasi away from the main seating, and another ordering a young couple down from where they were treading air near the overmare’s office window. Spitfire caught herself chuckling at that. The Atrium and the main hall of Mechanical were the two largest spaces in the Stable and it wasn’t unreasonable for a resident to feel the itch to stretch their wings, though more often than not it would be the original adult residents who got caught breaking the rules. These two stallions couldn’t have been more than toddlers when the bombs fell. Rebellious teens. The old drill instructor in her felt a bolt of pride knowing she’d selected such flight-hungry residents for this Stable, even if as its overmare she understood the importance of discouraging it.

The longer they all clung to their desire to fly, the more they would look at the door and wonder when the day would come when it opened again. Many of them had accepted the hard fact that they would die here and that flight was meant for a generation none of them would live long enough to see. Some weren’t so easy to convince. It hurt her every time they came to her asking whether the atmospheric reports were trending toward recovery yet. Whether they’d have a chance to see the skies again.

She shook off the uncomfortable thought before she reached the stage. She had a speech to give and she’d been delayed long enough. Renewed applause chased her up onto the low stage. As she stood behind the podium she lifted a wing to beckon silence. The applause dwindled until only a few stubborn Wonderbolts at the front were the only ones remaining, their enthusiasm finally silenced by a coy arch of her brow. They grinned back, unashamed.

She cleared her throat. Her voice resonated off the walls as if rolling from the tongue of Princess Luna herself.

“Today is the day for which we cross a threshold together. Today proves, Stable 10, that we are not just surviving. We are not just living for tomorrow. Each and every pegasi here, whether you hail from Sanitation, Supply, or Security, has demonstrated the inherent tenacity of our breed and the strength that we have to thrive. Today, on this tenth Remembrance Day, we celebrate the lives of every pony here in concert with those who we lost on the way.”

Eyes glistened. Pegasi set their jaws in grim solidarity. Several hid their mouths behind feathers. This was the loyalty she deserved.

“Now please,” she continued, her voice growing soft as it did every year. “Join me in a minute of silence for those we are missing.”

And they did. As a hushed silence fell over the Atrium, Spitfire couldn’t stop from feeling the nervous itch of danger at the base of her neck. All of the pegasi gathered around her had sacrificed everything to be here, but the real tragedy was that they would never know why. Delta’s reaction to the truth was proof enough of that. They would never accept that their collective losses were the cobblestones on a road to a better future. One where pegasi could achieve more than break up the occasional storm, where their greatest contributions to Equestria couldn’t be overshadowed on a whim by anyone with a horn on their head.

Balefire had brought death to millions and that was a burden Spitfire would struggle with for the rest of her life. But the death of magic was worth the cost. The wholesale conflagration of that arcane crutch Equestria propped itself up with had been so long overdue. Ever since Celestia and Luna took advantage of their unnaturally long lives to install themselves into a ruling class whose membership they dictated, a great correction of the scales had loomed on the horizon.

It had come and gone, and yes it had been painful. Yes it had taken the innocent with the guilty. But it had come. And she would be damned if she would allow all that work to be spoiled by someone as low-living as Delta fucking Vee.

Several pegasi in the Atrium began to look up, their moment of silence concluded. She took a breath and gathered herself before reciting the remainder of her speech. They listened, occasionally interrupting her with applause before allowing her to proceed, and when she concluded she stepped back from the podium for the next speakers to do their part.

A short procession of faces familiar to everyone by now climbed up to the microphone and told stories about their lives before the Stable. A middle-aged stallion spoke about a flower garden he could never get to grow in the high altitudes of Cloudsdale and got a knowing laugh from the crowd when he said it was probably a good thing he didn’t work anywhere near the Agricultural level. A former Wonderbolt told them about her frustration over not being deployed to Vhanna during the first waves of Equestria’s assault, but having since accepted that her purpose had never been to kill zebras. It was to survive so a new generation could continue on when she was gone. She lifted a feather to two pegasi seated at the front row and introduced her husband and son to the crowd, earning her fierce applause.

Spitfire stood patiently behind each of them, listening to their stories and reacting accordingly. She greeted them as they climbed onto the stage and smiled as they departed for the next speaker, a tidy parade of stories selected from a raffle of nearly two hundred submissions, each one curated to elicit a sense of mourning without being overshadowed by the greater message that everyone gathered here was as much a family as the people they shared a compartment with. Stable 10 wasn’t just a shelter. It was their home. One that their hard work, their dedication and tenacity had kept running for a decade now and was poised to last centuries. The pride in their faces was unmistakable. They weren’t just refugees of a great calamity.

They were survivors.

As with every Remembrance Day, the speeches eventually came to an end and the celebration began in earnest. Music was piped in through Millie’s overhead speakers, this year featuring a selection of uptempo jazz that kept the Atrium lively. Ten years had passed. Those who preferred to mourn their loved ones could do so in the privacy of their compartments. The stage was hastily disassembled and chairs moved against the walls to make room for those who wanted to mingle.

Food and drinks were provided by the staff of the Brass Bit, rolled out on trays behind a long line of tables set end to end in what several pegasi jokingly compared to their memories of the lunch hour when they were still in school. Gone were the days of gryphon cuisine, much to Spitfire’s constant disappointment, but as she joined the buffet line and filled her plate she discovered that the cooks had managed to create something edible out of the fermented fish rations Stable-Tec had chosen to plague them with.

She tonged a little of everything onto her plate and plucked a fork from the tray at the end of the line, and soon she was eating, chatting, and laughing with her fellow Stablemates. Pegasi dressed in pressed jumpsuits filtered through the crowd, steel trays held aloft with classic cider alongside a new beverage concocted by some entrepreneuring resident that tasted like molasses and brandy without the bite of alcohol.

It didn’t take long for Thunderlane to find and follow her, drink in wing, like a lost puppy, but she wasn’t about to kick him aside. He was, like several residents in attendance, one of the founding members of her Enclave. While he and the rest of her surviving Wonderbolts would never know what their efforts within the ministries had ultimately accomplished, they deserved her respect if nothing else. And, as much as she hated to admit it, having Thunderlane around felt nice. In his sweet ignorance he’d been the first to clue into Rainbow Dash’s disloyalty and opened a door for his fellow pegasi that may have otherwise stayed shut. He reminded Spitfire of how it felt to be innocent.

“Look,” he murmured, pointing her back to the buffet tables. “They’re bringing out cake.”

She snorted. The oaf had almost washed out of the Academy thanks to his love of sweets, and now that they were both retired he didn’t even try to hide it. She followed him back to the line for a clean plate and found herself smiling a little more genuinely as they clung to the periphery of the Atrium with sweet crumbs sticking to their lips.

She stole a glance at her Pip-Buck when a waiter offered to replace her empty plate with another glass of sugared brandy. Almost 5pm. She took the offered drink and sipped at it while Thunderlane told her a locker room story she’d heard before, smiling politely as he spoke while keeping her ears open for the interruption that came like clockwork once a year.

On cue, the music cut out, replaced by Millie’s disturbingly realistic voice. “Overmare Spitfire, please report to your office to receive an incoming call. Overmare Spitfire, please report…”

Several heads turned toward her as the music resumed. She sighed, rolling her eyes for added theater, and downed the rest of her drink before handing off her empty glass to Thunderlane. Most residents assumed it was Stable-Tec calling to congratulate her, but anyone who watched the missile arc through the roof of the Stable-Tec Headquarters building would know that was a lie. Stable-Tec was dead and good riddance to every last one of them. Were it not for her they would have turned Stable 10 into another one of their sadistic experiments.

Weed out the weak to feed the strong, my ass, she thought as she climbed the stairs to the catwalk above. If that deformed little headcase Applebloom had a single bone in her body tuned to leadership she would have seen what her demented board of directors had been doing right under her snout. Directing that bomb into their headquarters ensured their sickness died at the source.

The lights clicked on as she entered her office, illuminating the bare walls of a barren workspace. She hadn’t bothered to decorate. Didn’t think it would bode well for her to be lavishing herself in her personal belongings when so many arrived here with nothing. A few potted plants whose species she didn’t remember the names grew in the corners, their leaves in need of dusting. Behind her chair, her father’s trusty rifle hung from its hooks on the wall.

She sat down and stared at the telephone beside her terminal. The call waiting light blinked off and on. Primrose waited for her to pick up on the other line, still tucked away in her little shelter at the bottom of the Ministry of Technology. She’d refused to hide away in a Stable. Someone needed to stay behind, she’d insisted. Somebody needed to make sure the balefire did its job. Spitfire never got a clear answer for what that meant. It was evident that when the bombs finally dropped and their collective work was done, the two of them were no long bound to one another. The Enclave’s purpose had been served. What they did after was their own business.

The telephone continued to blink.

And yet she insisted on these calls. An annual reminder that she was still out there, watching.

She settled her head against the flat of her hoof and plucked the receiver off its cradle with her feathers. “Happy Remembrance Day, Primrose.”

“To you as well,” a slightly tinny voice responded. As with every passing year, Spitfire found it unsettling how her voice never seemed to deepen with age. “How goes the party? Still beating the liquor out of everyone’s wings with a stick?”

She smirked at that and reached forward to pick a pencil out of her pen cup. It danced along her feathers as she made small talk. “I’ll keep doing it until I see proof 25 hasn’t imploded.”

Months before the end, the Enclave had managed to pry confidential files out of Stable-Tec’s secure network. In them, several papers detailed the locations and numbers of its full roster, but more importantly were the secret dossiers laying out the twisted experiments slated for each one. Stable 10 had been one of the few on that list marked as a control. Stable 25, however, had been built below the old sewers of a small city in the northwest and earmarked to include a slim majority of residents with a history of unrepentant alcoholism. The details of the experiment had been disturbing, with much of the focus circling Stable-Tec’s expectation that the disease would spread unchecked over time. The expected result was a Stable-wide collapse. The variable Stable-Tec was solving for was time.

Spitfire had never shied away from a drink, but in a confined environment like this all bets were off. Reading those papers had convinced her that nothing short of total sobriety would do. The first generation could grumble, but the second wouldn’t so much. She doubted their grandchildren would know what liquor was, let alone crave it.

“I think you’re being too cautious,” Primrose chirped. “Their overstallion is performing far better than Stable-Tec gave him credit for.”

She tapped the pencil’s eraser against her desk. “You’re still monitoring them?”

“Of course I am. You should be too. They have three hundred unicorns among them and they’re farther from any detonation site than most Stables.” A pause. “Some of them have already relearned how to levitate objects.”

She shifted in her seat. “We knew one-hundred percent eradication wasn’t realistic. We still set them back thousands of years.”

“Which means in a thousand years we’ll be right back where we started.”

She scoffed. “You’re being too paranoid.”

“And you’re not paranoid enough.” Even across hundreds of miles, she could feel the heat coming off Primrose’s voice. “Balefire was supposed to be the death of magic, not a stubbed hoof. I’m not happy with this, Spitfire.”

The more she grew to know her, the less happy with anything Primrose seemed to be. Life, for her, was graded on a pass-fail system. All in or all out. Equestria’s balefire arsenal had been overwhelmingly effective as far as she was concerned. Dreams were a thing of the past and radiation still chattered heavily out of the dosimeters embedded in the tunnel walls outside.

“I don’t know what you expect me to do about it, Prim. We did what we could. You should move on. I have.”

After several long seconds of silence from the other end, she could sense they weren’t going to wrap up this call with the usual well-wishes and congratulations.

“I have to get back to the party,” she added, eyes dropping to the phone’s empty cradle. “Take care of yourself.”

“Who’s Delta Vee?”

She’d nearly missed it. Her wing froze inches above the cradle before returning to her ear. “What?”

“Who is Delta Vee?”

She lifted her chin to the ceiling and mouthed a silent curse. “She’s my head of IT. Why?”

“Your head of IT has been busy this past week.” Paper rustled from the other line. Her heart picked up speed. “Are you aware she released a worm onto Stable-Tec’s network? ‘Pioneer.’ We’ve been watching it spread. Is she looking for something she shouldn’t be?”

Shit.

“Delta has been in charge of monitoring overland radio communications for several years now, mainly to assess the state of decay in Equestria.” She flipped the pencil in her feathers, tapping the tip nervously against the desk. “We’ve been hearing less and less from the outside. I assume she made Pioneer to monitor digital communications.”

“So you know what it does.”

She hesitated. “I didn’t–”

“Our Enclave was formed on a foundation of mutual trust, Spitfire. I’ll give you one more chance to be honest with me. Only one. Do you understand me?” She waited before sighing over the tinny line. “I need you to tell me what she found.”

Her mouth felt cottony. She wanted to hang up and fly away, but she couldn’t. With her heart beating in her throat, she answered.

“She didn’t find anything, Primrose. I promise.”

Silence.

“You promise.”

The sharp sound of feathers typing crackled across the line. She wanted to demand what Primrose was doing but her voice died in her throat. She fucked up. She knew it well before Delta’s distorted voice rose out of Spitfire’s receiver.

“It was you?”

“Look who’s still sober enough for context clues. Millie, disable all voice command access to this office.”

“You two-faced bitch, it was all you!”

A single click and the recording ended.

“You. Promise.”

Panic rose in her chest. “Primrose, that wasn’t–”

Her former secretary cut her off with a venomous little laugh. “Shut up. You’re just like the rest of them, aren’t you? Never satisfied, always trying to climb one rung higher than whoever’s above you. Blackmail was always your tool, wasn’t it. Was that your plan for me?”

“No, I–”

“You didn’t kill her.” More feathers tapping keys. “I’m looking at her right now. Either you’re stupid or you kept her alive for a reason, and we both know you’re not stupid. So that leads me to think you’re hoping you can use her.”

She dragged her wing down her mane, trying desperately to keep up. “Prim, I’m not planning anything! What would I even want from you? There’s nothing but death and balefire between you and me!”

“Golly, I’d be inclined to believe you if you weren’t such a terrible liar.” Keystrokes, harder this time. Angry. “You’ve compromised your Stable, Spitfire.”

She stood up, her chair rolling away to thud against the wall behind her. “No. I did not compromise this Stable!”

“You allowed that mare to operate unchecked,” Primrose continued.

She shook her head, hard, sensing the inevitable. The pencil falling from her grip.

“You did this to yourself. No one else is to blame but you. I hope you accept that.”

Her voice trembled. “This wasn’t my fault.”

“Oh, save the oxygen. You’re going to need it.”

A single clack of a key being pressed resonated from the phone.

“Only one of us gets to live forever, Spitfire, and it’s not you. I’ll give your Stable thirty minutes. Evacuate, or don’t. I don’t care. Do with it what you like.”

The line went dead in her feathers.

She placed the receiver back in its cradle and sat down.

Half an hour later, Stable 10 plunged into darkness.

A warm breeze rolled over the top of the receiving platform, stirring through Julip’s mane and around the hooves of the Enclave pegasi gathered behind them. Aurora stood beside her, stretching her wings as best she could for a mare with one hind leg. Ginger and Roach waited nearby, the two of them sharing one last whispered conversation as they prepared to leave. She tried not to stare, but it was hard to when Julip felt like she was the one taking him away.

She averted her eyes when Ginger yanked him into a crushing squeeze. Roach had told her his story of finding her during one of expeditions into the wasteland, and the two had come to regard one another as family long before Aurora poked her head out of the dirt. Julip wondered what Ginger must think of her now. A poignant prewar term came to mind. Homewrecker. She scraped a hoof along the platform’s rusted grating, smearing bright orange lines while the two of them said their goodbyes.

A curl of feathers tapped her in the ribs. “Hey.”

She glanced up at Aurora, the mare who freed her from that cage beneath Autumn’s solar farm and the pegasus who came within inches of kicking her teeth in just days later at the bottom of a dead Stable, and offered a tiny acknowledging smile. “What’s up?”

“Thanks for being a friend.”

Aurora knuckled the feathers of her right wing and held them out into the space between them. Julip hesitated for a moment, unsure what she was doing or why, but once it clicked she gave her head a little shake and mimed the gesture, allowing Aurora to give her wing a sturdy bump.

“You are one weird mare,” Julip said, before adding, “It’s good to see you out of your own head.”

Aurora smiled at that. Before she could return the compliment her attention was pulled away when a mote of magic cupped her cheek, turning her head toward the unicorn casting it. Roach and Ginger had found a place to push the final pin into their friendship and were making their way back, much to the visible relief of the soldiers around them. Julip caught a glimpse of a stallion rolling his eyes for the benefit of his uniformed counterpart and had to physically restrain herself from chewing baby’s-first-sergeant a second asshole.

Her poker face was garbage, encouraging Roach to stand directly in her line of sight. For a changeling with no discernible pupils, it was odd to see him all misty-eyed. “Ignore them. Are you ready?”

She sighed, a little disappointed with how quickly her anger fizzled. A week ago she would have laid into those two idiots until one or both of them dropped plops. With Roach around, it kind of felt okay to just let it go.

“Yeah,” she said, watching Ginger and Aurora having a similar conversation just three feet away. “Just make sure you hang on.”

The dark ocean waves troughed and peaked beneath the platform in an undulating parade of whitecaps that stretched away nearly as far as she could see. Straight ahead, Equestria’s eastern shoreline drew a hazy gray line across the horizon. The smoke that up until recently drew dark smears across the clouds overhead had thinned significantly, but the sky trail leading back to Fillydelphia was still visible to the keen eye.

With some luck, it would be enough for what they needed to do.

Their formation leader, a stout mare who would be hating her job within the next fifteen minutes, took note that her four charges were ready to go and started barking orders that Julip reminded herself she wasn’t beholden to anymore. Black uniforms gathered into a diamond pattern around them with several of the pegasi checking weapons and rolling the last cracks and pops out of their joints.

Julip took note of the myriad weapons surrounding her, knowing in her heart of hearts that few if any of the Enclave soldiers standing at the ready intended to deliver a defector and a ghoul to an uncontaminated pegasi Stable. She knew how easy it would be for the two of them to have an “accident.” The boilerplate excuses were simple and many. The traitor’s wing must have cramped. The ghoul went feral. The traitor was seen slipping chems. The ghoul poisoned her with radiation. They rolled off the top of her head with disturbing ease.

Ponies disappeared in the wasteland. With the wind whistling in their ears, one suppressed gunshot could go unnoticed for miles.

She steadied her breathing. No one here was menacingly fixing an attachment to their weapons, but the question remained of what happened after Aurora and Ginger were safely inside the Stable. She didn’t trust the Enclave not to do what they always did once saner minds were out of sight.

Their field officer, touting a major’s pips, rattled off the details of their ascent profile, the vitality of staying above the cloud layer at all times, and of not falling behind. Their escorts were reminded that there would be no stops or waypoints, that this was a long haul flight which regardless of their success or failure would appear in their personnel records as a career highlight. She advised they take measures to ensure its notation would reflect honorably on them, insinuating heavily that failure would have detrimental results on their future with the Enclave.

As always with these high stakes missions, the pegasi on the receiving end of their commander’s lecture masked their nerves with eagerness. She shook her head at the low murmur of a nearby soldier joking about his partner tripping off the platform during takeoff. It felt different being on the outside while they egged each other on. They weren’t fooling anyone.

“You two,” the major said, gesturing a mottled purple feather toward Ginger and, less enthusiastically, Roach. “Get on whoever you’re getting on, and don’t make a scene of it.”

That job, apparently, was already taken by several members of their escort. A jeering whistle went up as Roach climbed onto Julip’s back, forcing her to take several slow breaths to stop herself from finding its source and sealing it with the owner’s teeth. Ginger was able to climb aboard Aurora with little fanfare, making it clear what the chuckles were insinuating. She focused all of her attention on the hazy peaks of Fillydelphia’s distant towers, knowing she would only have to endure this for a little while longer.

“FORM UP!” Julip winced. The major had the kind of voice that got shrill with volume, and boy she had volume. “Spades! Cobble! Quit giggling and form the fuck up! On my mark!”

Major Shriek’s “mark” amounted to holding her wings open at the front of the formation and a firm stamp of her hoof against the platform. A moment later she was sprinting forward and flinging herself off the edge.

Hooves thundered over the rusted platform as row after row, Enclave soldiers dropped over the edge and scooped themselves into the sky with pulsing wings. As she ran, a bolt of concern shot through her and she looked to her left to see if Aurora was keeping up. To her surprise, Aurora wasn’t running at all. She was gliding, three legs and a stump pulled up while Ginger’s magic propelled her along with the rest of the formation.

“That’s cheating!” she shouted.

“You made great practice, dear!” Ginger called back, and with an exhilarated whoop she pushed Aurora off the platform’s edge and into the wing-whipped air beyond.

Julip and Roach could do little besides laugh as she leaped into the wind after them.

Just as he had during their hillside descent toward Stable 1, Roach locked his hooves just below her neck and kept her whipping mane to one side of his face. Unlike Ginger, he couldn’t use his magic to aid her unless she was okay with glowing in the dark for the rest of her life. As she scooped wind and threw it behind them she decided that was alright by her. Sure she was smaller than the average mare her age, but she could kick cloud with the best of them. More than that, she wanted Roach to see her strength. She wanted to impress him.

She stuck her tongue into her lip and laughed at herself as they ascended. Fuck, it only took her almost dying from a gunshot to the lung to give a crap about what anyone thought of her. Scratch that, she thought, Aurora and Ginger could bite her ass if they had a problem. They didn’t, as far as she could tell, but the ass-biting was still on the table if they did.

Roach’s throat buzzed warmly against her shoulder as he said something to himself. She glanced at him to see if it was meant for her but he smiled and shook his head, his attention captured by the vast ocean flattening out beneath them.

No, something had changed between them. He actually cared about her. Even more, he kept putting in the effort to build her up to be a better mare than she’d been when he’d found her. Waking up from her surgery on that dusty table and seeing Roach asleep in the chair beside her confirmed in her beyond all doubt that she wanted that friendship to continue.

Her wings cut through the turbulence of the pegasi ahead of her, but as they began to approach the bottom of the cloud layer she started to even off her ascent. It didn’t take the rest of the formation to notice she was lagging behind and she resisted the urge to smile as she watched their diamond pattern begin to deform. Fillydelphia had resolved into a proper cityscape just a few miles ahead of them, appearing clearly enough for her to pick out the now charred towers surrounding Magnus Plaza. The plan was to be well above the protection of the clouds by the time the city was beneath them, but those plans were rapidly changing as their formation leader shouted down at them to pick up their ascent.

If she was good at anything, it was weaving convincing lies.

She put on a show of struggling to comply, flapping her wings more aggressively while quietly allowing extra air to slide uselessly between limp feathers. On either side of her now, pegasi were shouting at her to tighten up her form. Telling her she was flying sloppy, to get her shit together. A helpful stallion let his frustration get the best of him and he started loudly asking her why she’d taken the bug on as cargo if she couldn’t carry the fucking thing. Julip rewarded him with a seemingly accidental but nonetheless jarring slap across his jaw with the end of the wing, prompting him to keep his distance.

Several yards ahead, Aurora and Ginger watched the act with knowing eyes. Julip grunted and cursed, actually whipping herself into a sweat just to keep her fiction as an overwhelmed flier from falling apart. By now the formation had begun to reform around her, none of its members particularly happy about the immediate deviation and several of them worrying whether they would need to turn back to put Roach on one of their backs instead.

By the time they reached the first wispy fringes of the clouds, Fillydelphia was directly below their hooves. Julip didn’t have to feign much of her relief as the cool mist enveloped them. She’d just spent the last few miles flapping around like a chicken with a bowling ball strapped to his back and, act or no act, she’d burned a few calories making the sluggish climb.

Visibility shrank from miles to yards in the span of a few labored breaths. Aurora slowed until she and Ginger were at Julip’s wingtip, the two of them wearing the same sad smile. The formation around them were just shadows in the fog. Around her chest, Roach’s hooves drew in a little more tightly as the moment they’d discussed back on the oil rig finally came.

“Fly safe,” Aurora murmured.

She didn’t know what to say. The words, if they were words, jammed in her throat. She cleared it and looked back at Roach. His belly swelled into her back as he took a deep breath and nodded once.

Julip closed her wings, pinning his hind legs behind her ribs, and they fell away from Aurora and Ginger like stones.

For a brief moment they were alone together in the mist. Then the clouds gave way and the ground spread out beneath them like a vast welcome mat of towers. Julip held her hooves out ahead of her as they nosed down, the wind transforming from a torrent to a deafening flood of noise that pinning her ears back did little to shut out. They dove toward the city, eyes watering, wind buffeting against them as gravity lent them more and more speed. Neither of them could risk looking back. Not for the fear of being chased by a furious swarm of Enclave soldiers but because doing so risked bending their set trajectory off course. They couldn’t risk being seen flying level over the city, not for anything. Not with Coronado’s Rangers primed to kill anything they might see traveling the skies above.

It needed to be a straight shot, which meant it was going to hurt like hell.

Fillydelphia’s north side grew larger and larger, the bomb-flattened buildings surrounding the murky green speck at its center, all of it rushing up to meet them. She had a split second to confirm the lack of Rangers on the ground. Nothing. No bullets dropped down from the sky behind them, no power armor stomping around the familiar crater directly ahead. They were clear.

Roach braced against her. She threw her wings open and hurled them toward the ground as hard as she could, sending bolts of brief agony through her shoulders as an unforgiving combination of weight and inertia carved at her muscles. Vertical velocity violently bent laterally as the tips of her hooves slapped off the placid surface of the crater pond and dug hard into the glassed gravel along the shoreline.

“Fuck-fuckity-fucking…!” she stammered as she slid, stumbled, and eventually skid to a stop in a cloud of irradiated dirt and dust. Against all odds, Roach hadn’t gotten dumped into the pond and was still clinging to her neck, albeit tightly enough to make it a struggle to breathe.

She scanned the clouds above for any sign of pursuing Enclave. Nothing. Good. They were probably only now realizing they’d come through the top of the clouds minus two and they would likely waste even more time canvassing the mist for them before anyone was brave enough to kill their career and suggest Julip had made a break for it. Even longer before Major Shriek admitted she’d been duped by a traitor and a changeling, and fell back on her primary objective of getting the Enclave’s chosen pureblood home.

“I think we’re clear,” she choked out, thumping Roach’s interlocked hooves with one of her own. “Everyone off the ride.”

Chagrined, Roach let go and dropped sideways off her back. “That was… terrifying.”

She pivoted to get her bearings, wincing at the sensation of an entire quarry’s worth of gravel lodged in the soles of her hooves. They weren’t far from the side of the pond where she and Aurora had sat and eaten while they waited for Roach and Ginger to return from the intact Stable-Tec complex below the water.

The front half of Ginger’s power armor still lay on its side on the shoreline, frozen midstep where she’d discarded it.

“Can you drag that out of the water by yourself?”

Roach was already on her way toward the abandoned P-45, his cracked horn glowing with its malignant energy. “I’ll manage. Go find something to cover yourself up with. The faster we’re out of here, the better.”

Just like the last time they were here, the ruins surrounding the crater weren’t particularly fruitful when it came to supplies. She hurried around the perimeter, staying low and keeping behind cover as she snuck in and out of what little standing structures remained. They couldn’t risk venturing near the larger and more commonly utilized ruins south, not after the Enclave had shown themselves not too far from where they were now during Aurora’s impromptu rescue. She’d bet every green hair on her ass that the Steel Rangers were patrolling those ruins with a vengeance now. If Ginger had managed to scrape together any goodwill with the local Elder, it was gone.

Julip didn’t know much about Coronado other than he was a crookhorn. She grimaced. Kirin. They looked enough like ponies to avoid the worst of the deep, social suspicion bred into the Enclave and Steel Rangers, but they rarely found themselves accomplishing much more than the common earth pony. Kirin, like gryphons, couldn’t expect to be trusted with the rebuilding of Equestria. It wasn’t their country, after all. It wasn’t their mess to clean up.

She spotted the remains of an old campsite dug into a mound of blackened, compacted rubble not far from the pond’s north end. As she snuck toward it, she found herself feeling bad for Elder Coronado. Kirin or not, he tried to help them find Aurora without asking for anything in exchange. They hadn’t known Primrose would use his generosity as a wedge to pry open a larger tactical opportunity for the Enclave. For all the trouble he must be in now, Coronado couldn’t have predicted that helping one mare would result in his city’s fangs being torn out at the root. She felt a frown burrow into her muzzle as she lifted the tattered flap hanging over the shallow dugout.

Nothing waited for her inside. Whoever camped here had taken everything they’d brought, save for the ratty square of burlap they’d used to cover the hole. Screw it, she thought. They didn’t have time for her to be picky. She hooked her feathers around the scratchy textile and yanked it loose, sending a small slide of pulverized concrete dust into the little shelter, and threw it over her shoulders. It would cover her wings and help camouflage the green of her coat from any scouts Primrose might decide to send to recover her. And she would. That much Julip was dead certain of. Defecting from the Enclave was one thing. Defecting during a mission assigned by the minister herself was entirely another. That cotton candy psycho was disturbingly adept at multitasking and nothing so small as the Enclave’s first breakthrough into enemy territory in a century would distract her from a grudge.

As she made her way back to the pond she looked up at the distant, smoldering towers that once housed Fillydelphia’s guns. She wondered how long the assault on the city would stick in the mind of someone like Coronado, and how far he might push himself to enact revenge. And despite now being able to see through the lies that the Enclave raised her on, Julip found herself worrying about what all this meant for the people she left behind in New Canterlot.

Dark thoughts. She pushed them away and hurried back to where she left Roach.

He’d gotten the power armor onto its hooves and was in the process of pulling apart the heavily armored panels by the time she caught up to him. When he saw her coming with her burlap adornment, his lip quirked into a smile that he couldn’t quite stop from evolving into a chuckle. “You look like a bag of potatoes.”

“Tatos,” she corrected, mimicking his grin while shaking her head with well-meaning annoyance. “It’s the best I could find. How’re you getting on with that tub o’ heavy?”

He forestalled her from getting too close, gesturing instead toward the saddlebags laying on the dirt a few yards up slope. “There should be Rad-X in the first aid kit. The ministry apparently didn’t plan for someone like Ginger to poof herself out of the suit without cycling the locks, so I’m trying to do that manually.”

She went over to where his bags lay and started rooting through them for the first aid kit. “It still works though, right?”

He nodded, his black horn lit like the balestone jewelry the ghouls in Kiln liked to sell. “Yeah, it’ll be fine as long as all the seals held up. You can walk most of these things through a lake without an issue even though they weren’t designed for it. It’s when they get wet on the inside when the problems start popping up.”

“Sounds like you speak from experience.” She found the first aid kit and cracked it open. The neatly organized and remarkably pristine contents caught her off guard, but then she remembered where he’d gotten them from. Everything, from the individually packed squares of alcohol wipes to the band aid tin, featured a tiny Stable-Tec logo with FIELD SUPPORT emblazoned in the center.

“I had a friend sixty, seventy years ago who tried to start a business salvaging abandoned power armor for caps.” The suit let out a sharp clunk as another panel jerked open. “It never got off the ground, and I wasn’t much help, but we screwed around enough with the suits he did have for me to pick up a few things.”

Julip found a genuine, unbroken blister pack of original formula Rad-X in a box beneath the band aid tin. Her years as an Enclave archivist made breaking two of the pills from the foil feel like she was committing a small crime. The alternative, however, likely meant multiple doses of RadAway and several days trying to drink more water than she pissed. She took the pills and trotted closer to the exosuit.

She dropped her wing around the suit’s ammo feed line, tracing it to the port of the shoulder mounted minigun. “Maybe once we’re out of Coronado’s territory we can track down some ammo for these bad boys.”

Roach snorted, bracing the suit with his hooves as he wrenched open the last plate. “With whose caps? We’re broke.”

She shrugged, happy to have a moment to themselves where she could muse aloud. “I dunno. Didn’t you say Aurora said she could make herself a millionaire by fixing up a bottling plant somewhere?”

Roach smiled at that, shaking his head just a little as he stepped behind the power armor as the plates bloomed open. He stepped into the suit a little hesitantly. It wasn’t a perfect fit to his lanky frame, leaving plenty of unused space that the internal padding couldn’t quite fill. “Ah well,” he muttered. “It was just a hypothetical she suggested. Pretty sure she was just making fun of the currency.”

The suit emitted a sharp hiss as the panels closed around him. Heavy lugs dropped into place as the halves of each pair drew together, sealing him inside. When the cycle finished, the armor’s forward facing lamps kicked on and the hulking machine shuddered into motion.

His voice rumbled out from the internal speaker. “Ready to go?”

“Yeah.” She hurried over to Roach’s saddlebags and slung them over her hips, working the buckle under her belly as they fell into stride beside one another. “Where to now?”

“Back to Blinder’s Bluff, hopefully… but I was thinking we could take the scenic route there. There’s a highway up north near the Crystal Empire’s border that I wanted to visit again.” The suit’s helmet swiveled toward her. “Plus I doubt the Enclave will look for us there.”

They climbed the north embankment and into the rubble beyond. “Only because they’re too busy starting a war.”

“Which they’ll lose.” She must have looked at him funny, because he followed up with a quick, “Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She shrugged, trying not to think too hard about the friends she’d made in the archives. Her eyes tilted toward the rolling clouds above. “Do you think Aurora’s going to be okay?”

“Who, the mare who ventured into the wasteland and lived to come home with the key to her people’s survival? This may come to a shock to you, Julip, but folk heroes tend to live pretty comfortably.” Servos in Roach’s helmet whirred as he followed her gaze. “Yeah, I’m sure she’ll do just–”

A lump of broken concrete snagged the rim of Roach’s armored hoof mid-sentence, sending him and his power armor lurching forward in an unceremonious display of mass and momentum. He toppled onto his chin like a felled tree, throwing rocks and gravel ahead of him in a dirty brown curtain. Julip covered her mouth behind her feathers, partly to avoid breathing in the settling dust and partly to stop him from seeing her stifled laughter.

Hydraulics groaned as he dragged an armored hoof underneath himself, the suit’s microphone picking up and happily transmitting what he’d tried to mutter under his breath. “Fuck me sideways.”

“Nice offer, but I’ll pass.” If Roach was listening, she had no way of knowing. Rather than stand and watch him flounder for better footing she took pity on him and stepped over to throw her shoulder into the approximation of the suit’s ‘ribs.’ Her small contribution probably didn’t amount to much, but it was better to try to help a little rather than do a lot of nothing. He’d taught her that and, weirdly enough, he was right about it feeling good.

She caught herself grinning a little wider as they pushed him upright. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to drag your hooves?”

He snorted. The suit’s speaker translated it into electronic flatulence. “My mother was too busy trying to overthrow Equestria to find the time.”

“Excuses, excuses.” She hopped a piece of jutting rebar and trotted ahead of him, then stopped for a moment to look back. “Hit the gas on that thing, slow poke! I want to see Manehattan road signs before sunset!”

He groaned in response, but not without some levity. She grinned as he thundered after her in his monstrous suit.

No caps, no weapons, barely enough food or water for two day’s travel… something about setting out with close to nothing excited her. Maybe that was why the head archivist couldn’t wait to get rid of her and her field commander thought she was nuts. And maybe some of it came from surviving a near death experience. Probably a mix of all three.

She didn’t care.

This time, for the first time, she wouldn’t be doing it alone.

Aurora stretched her wings as far as her joints would allow to loosen muscles that, after several unbroken hours of flight, had begun to ache. She let out a small, satisfied groan as warm air from a powerful thermal below soothed her discomfort. Ginger shifted slightly against her back, and Aurora could feel her occasionally look this way and that as the clouds slid below their hooves. And as if to remind her of its absence, the leg Aurora gave to the wasteland regularly twinged with fresh phantom pains.

It came to her as a relief, then, that she’d reflexively used the quiet moments of their flight to contemplate how she might fix the problem of her missing leg. She smiled at the prospect of sitting down with the designers in Fabrication and banging out a few prototype designs. Doubtless the medical staff already had plenty of templates to choose from, but she didn’t want default. Sure it was selfish, but maybe she’d earned the right to be a little demanding. It wasn’t as if she was going to ask them to build a gatling gun into the thing. Just some shielded bearings and a nice set of hydraulic shock absorbers.

And maybe a tiny gatling gun…

“Oh no,” Ginger spoke into her ear. “I know that smile. What’re you up to?”

She grinned more broadly while ignoring the disquieted looks coming from the pegasi in formation around her. Losing Julip and Roach had left them just the slightest bit on edge for any more unplanned deviations. It was why the formation leader had dragged them so high above the cloud tops, where any shenanigans Aurora might pull could be aborted well before she had a chance to leave their sight.

“Just contemplating my future as a cyborg,” she joked.

Ginger shook her head, then used her magic to activate the slim Pip-Buck clamped around her foreleg. Reading the screen required her to practically put Aurora in a headlock. Aurora kept her eyes forward, the suspense building as she waited.

“We just passed Blinder’s Bluff,” Ginger reported, her grip around Aurora’s neck loosening a little as her attention shifted to the gray clouds below. “I imagine that explains them.”

Aurora glanced down and nodded her agreement. Over the past half hour the skies had gone from one unbroken blue expanse to being spotted with other wings flying in small V formations. Of the entourage Primrose had assigned to escort them home, Aurora noticed one stallion ahead of her standing out from the rest. As he scanned the skies around them she caught glimpses of a boxy muzzle made of some sort of composite strapped over his mouth. A pigtailed wire ran out of the covering and into an impressively shallow radio mounted onto the back of his uniform. She imagined he was the reason the airspace around them remained unimpeded by any of the armed pegasi flying just a few hundred feet below. Somewhere beneath the Enclave’s manufactured clouds, a battle was being waged.

She sighed. “Everything that’s happened… it’s hard to get my head around it all.”

Ginger set her chin in the crook of her shoulder. “Dear, the Wasteland was a shitshow well before you stepped onto the stage.”

“Language,” she chided, earning a chuckle from the mare. She shook her head, glad for once that she could see things clearly again. “Trust me, I’m not blaming myself for what the Ranger and Enclave are doing to each other. It just doesn’t feel like I’ve been out here for two weeks, is all.”

“You’ve been busy.”

She snorted. “It’s like we never stopped running from one crisis to the next. I wasn’t outside the Stable for one minute before I got bitten up by one of Roach’s ferals. And then there was Cider.”

“Mm,” Ginger hummed. “And his sister.”

“Those raiders after we left that cabin.”

“Gallow and his mother.”

Hearing his name still gave her pause, but she moved past it. “Kiln was kind of nice, minus the slavers.”

“What I wouldn’t give to hear Roach sing karaoke again.”

They laughed at the memory together, Aurora surprising herself by wondering whether the bar they’d sat down in at the Bluff had a corner set aside for butchered music. Then she frowned.

At her proximity, Ginger keyed into it immediately. “What’s wrong?”

“We never let Fiona know we were okay.”

She could tell by Ginger’s expression that she hadn’t given all that much thought about the gryphon DJ. Since practically being evicted from Blinder’s Bluff by Coldbrook’s disingenuous bargain, the topic of Fiona rarely came up. The last they heard from her, she’d cooked up a plan to procure a suit of power armor from the local Rangers on their behalf. Whatever she told Coldbrook had worked, but the price of admission into Magnus Plaza had been the hacked spritebot Fiona used to communicate with them in the first place.

Since then, they’d heard nothing from her.

Sensing her tension, Ginger looked down at the passing clouds. “We’re in the neighborhood.”

“And in the wrong company.” Her brain was already dishing up convincing justifications for a detour. Her wings felt ready to fall off. She could do a quick fly by of Fiona’s firetower, that’s it. The gryphon had gone out of her way several times already to help them no matter how hard it got her hooves… hands slapped.

But she knew better, now. Swinging by the Bluff would unnecessarily elevate Fiona on everyone’s radar, especially Coldbrook’s. She didn’t want to think about how many more Ironshods the Elder might have under his command, but for a stallion in his position the number had to be higher than zero. Having Aurora appear in the skies over Blinder’s Bluff with an Enclave escort in tow would be more than enough to prompt an investigation of their resident avian.

As if to settle the issue, a cool tailwind slipped into her airstream and lofted them forward. Ginger pecked her on the cheek for good measure. “She’s a tough bird, just like you.”

She thought about it and decided Ginger was right. Fiona had been their ally in one form or another from the beginning, not because she’d been forced to be but because she’d chosen to. Her radio show gave her a power that even Coldbrook couldn’t take away for long. The Wasteland stayed up late listening to the voice of Flipswitch, the ‘mare’ of Hightower Radio, because she was a staple of the airwaves that even the Steel Rangers knew better than to mess with for long.

Still she made a mental note to ask Sledge about getting access to the Stable’s radio receiver. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to broadcast anything herself, but the prospect of tuning in every so often eased her worries.

“I’m going to miss flying.”

Ginger squeezed her around the neck. “Me too. The view up here is unbeatable.”

Aurora paused, realized Ginger was staring deliberately at her, and snorted. “You’re a whole bag of corny.”

She grinned back. “I will apologize for nothing.”

A pleasant stretch of silence settled in as time passed, the two of them occasionally pointing out strange formations in the clouds below. They looked like rivers from this altitude, each running parallel with its neighbor as they flowed and curled around the air currents below. To the north, just off her right wingtip, green lightning flickered within a dark anvil on the horizon. The clouds around it were swollen, forming smaller pillars around the storm’s center. It was too far to present any danger to them, although the ponies in the radstorm’s path couldn’t say the same. Aurora watched the storm as it drifted away behind them and felt a pang of guilt at being grateful she wouldn’t have to worry about such bizarre hazards anymore.

It was late afternoon by the time Aurora noticed the shallow dome in the clouds several miles ahead. The sky behind them had taken on the saturated tones of royal blue while the opposite horizon glowed with purple gold fire. Ginger audibly gasped as the setting sun pushed long shadows over the cloud tops. The contrasting light and dark was stunning to behold, reminding Aurora of their first flight together.

She stifled an embarrassed laugh as Ginger scooted up along Aurora’s back and held out her foreleg. The tiny lens built into her loaned Pip-Buck projected the sunset onto the screen in full color. A click of a button preserved the image, and Ginger wriggled a few inches back to examine the photo.

“Do you think Sledge will let me keep this?” she asked.

Aurora glanced at the device. “With or without the thermite charge?”

“Oh, ha-ha.” She turned the black chassis this way and that before toggling the screen back to the map. “Hey, guess what?”

“Hm?”

She pointed down. “We’re here.”

Aurora followed the tip of her hoof toward the low hill of clouds she’d spotted earlier. A long crescent of shadow trailed the far side making it all but impossible to miss. Her heart climbed into her throat as she turned on her own Pip-Buck and used her hoof to mash her way through the tabs. The greenlit map shuddered onto the screen, and with it appeared a marker she’d created weeks ago on the road to Junction City. Back when she was afraid she’d lose it for a much simpler reason.

It read simply, Home.

She swallowed. She made it back.

Without waiting for the formation leader’s instructions, Aurora pitched wings forward and began descending toward the clouds. Ginger let out a nervous whoop as the wind poured against them, her magic clutching around Aurora’s belly as they accelerated. She felt a touch of annoyance as their Enclave escort reformed on either side of her, their tidy diamond spreading into a broad V off her fluttering wingtips, but as the clouds engulfed them she found she didn’t care whether they followed her. Grudgingly or not, armed or not, they’d brought her home. They were lucky she didn’t kiss them.

They punched through the bottom of the clouds like a missile and for a split second Aurora didn’t recognize what she was looking at.

Immediately below her waited the craggy slopes of Foal Mountain. She spotted the old highway which had taken her and Roach to Junction City, and the half-dead forest of trees Roach had planted a century earlier still shading the access road packed with rusting carriages leading to the base of the landslide. But that was where the similarities ended.

She felt the air stop in her throat when she spotted the black gash cut into the hillside. Where boulders and desiccated soil had filled the tunnel entrance now stood an empty void. Trees had been felled to create a clearing around the opening where dozens of dark shapes walked the perimeter. The tiny shack Roach had built to hide the exit of the tunnel he’d dug was gone, swept in with the scree discarded further along the foot of the mountain. Elder Coldbrook had made good on his threat, or at least begun to before the Enclave swarmed over the digsite.

Her wings pulsed, slowing their dive into a more cautious descent just a mile above the ground. The Enclave pegasi coagulated around them like a scab.

Several suits of power armor had been discarded onto the rockpile a few hundred feet away from the tunnel entrance. Not much farther away, an ominously dark plot of soil showed the signs of being recently tilled. It took her a moment to understand she was looking at a massive grave. Craters speckled the ground near the tunnel entrance and several of the nearby trees were blackened by fire. She’d known the Enclave had taken the territory surrounding Stable 10, but she hadn’t considered the cost.

As the treetops rose around her it dawned on Aurora that she had never truly understood what war was. She only knew what she’d read in books. To her, war was a thing that happened in distant places to ponies who died generations ago, where soldiers waited in ochre trenches while bullets whizzed overhead. It involved mushroom clouds boiling up over tiny cities that in her naivety she assumed were simply gone, just like the rest of Equestria. War, to Aurora, had just been another word. As her hooves touched down on the broken asphalt at the foot of the Foal Mountain, she began to understand the scope of her ignorance. Dark stains of dubious origin speckled the road’s surface.

Ponies she’d never know had killed each other here, and recently. Judging by the shattered hulks of power armor that had been dragged against the rockpile, the Steel Rangers had suffered the lion’s share of those casualties.

Ginger slid off her back with a grunt while the rest of the formation landed. “What a mess,” she murmured.

Aurora could only nod in agreement. Countless uniformed pegasi peered out at them from the freshly excavated entrance. The tunnel beyond was brightly lit and in the process of being fortified. Several soldiers near the opening stopped to stare at their visitors for a moment, sandbags still clutched under their wings. The sounds of construction echoed from inside along with the shouts of those tasked with overseeing the work. Aurora felt the excitement of being home begin to wane. The tunnel had been a burial site for those who had been trapped inside, and the Enclave was disturbing it. Despite its lack of ammunition, her wing started curling around the stock of Desperate Times.

Before she could do anything stupid, the formation leader stepped in front of them. “Don’t be getting antsy hooves. Colonel Weathers is on his way to greet us.”

That took her off guard. “Who?”

“The base commander.” She held back little exasperation as she saw their confusion and clarified, “The mare in charge?”

Aurora glanced at Ginger, who shrugged back. They’d been running into ponies “in charge” on what felt like a daily basis now. Their formation leader promptly gave up, repeated her order for them to stay put, and marched off in the tunnel’s direction. It took a force of will for Aurora not to follow her out of spite alone. She could see the Stable’s massive geared door standing far behind all the new activity, its teeth still locked firmly in place. That was her home, not some pressed-uniform officer from the other side of Equestria.

Ginger spoke softly into the cup of her ear. “Easy girl, it’s just a formality. Chain of command’s everything to these nutballs.”

“We didn’t agree to let these nutballs set up shop outside my Stable.”

“That’s why we had Sledge pull Blue inside, in case somebody broke through. We’ll make nice, get in, and lock the door behind us. We’re okay.”

She huffed out a sigh. “I guess.”

“I guess,” Ginger grumped back, pecking her on the cheek. “Do I have to remind you that you, Miss Aurora,” she kissed her again, “that you valiantly traversed a deadly wasteland,” and again, “and succeeded in your mission to save,” and again, “your,” and again, “home?”

Aurora practically had to fight her off to get her to stop, and when she did the two of them were laughing like fillies. Several members of their entourage had made a point to look away, evidently not as enamored by Ginger’s affection. She ignored them because despite inflicting some well-meaning embarrassment, Ginger made a good point.

When she forced the Stable door to cycle open two weeks ago, she’d been pretty certain she wasn’t coming back. As far as any of them knew, Equestria was a dead world. She’d spent every last bit she had saved on fresh produce just so she stood a chance at surviving what she expected to be complete desolation.

Standing here again with the promise of her Stable’s future safely secured had been a wish, not a plan.

She flicked the tip of her wing against Ginger’s belly, smiling as she did. “Thanks for the pep-talk. I still might need more convincing once we’re inside, though.”

Ginger arched her brow. “Oh? Do tell.”

“I was thinking we’ve earned a little time to ourselves,” she murmured.

“To decompress,” Ginger added.

She nodded in full agreement. “Sure, that too.”

A mote of amber magic tugged Aurora’s chin toward Ginger’s, while a second ventured off on its own. It grazed beneath her tail and she practically forgot balance as a concept let alone as a practice. The remainder of Ginger’s magic was ready to catch her, the unicorn uttering a mischievous giggle as they kissed. Neither of them noticed the visitor approaching them until she stopped and cleared her throat.

“Aurora Pinfeathers?”

Their eyes shot wide as Ginger’s magic vanished and Aurora spat off a familiar curse themed around Princess Luna’s teats. They rounded on the Enclave officer like two students being caught kissing in the corridor by their instructor. The mare standing in front of them practically had the height on them to complete the illusion, though the politely uncomfortable expression on her face made it clear she was happy to feign ignorance.

Aurora wiped her feathers across her mouth, nodding. “Y… ah, yeah. That’s me.”

After a pause, the unusually tall officer introduced herself. “I’m Colonel Weathers. Minister Primrose radioed ahead to let me know we’d be expecting guests.” She glanced down at Ginger. “She tells me the two of you will be taking up residence in the Stable. It’s a pleasure to meet both of you.”

It took a beat for Aurora to gather herself enough to speak competently. Colonel Weathers stood a full head above them and had a slim frame that begged a comparison to the alicorns of the old world. She wasn’t exactly princess height but she absolutely breathed thinner air than the pegasi around her. Most notable of all were the ghostly pale stripes in her otherwise unremarkable lavender coat and flat mane. To her credit, Colonel Weathers took her staring in stride.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she managed, averting her gaze from the mare’s strange stripes to the tunnel behind her. A measurable percentage of the work being done between the pillars had ground to a halt. “They’re going to let us inside, right? No tricks or last minute conditions?”

Weathers tipped her head to the side with a cautious smile. “I sense paranoia.”

Ginger coughed. “We’ve been led on before.”

“Ah, well if the uniforms didn’t already give it away, we’re not Steel Rangers.” She stepped back and to the side, extending a broad wing toward the mountain. “I have orders to escort you safely into your Stable. Nothing else.”

Hesitantly, Aurora dropped a wing across Ginger’s back for stability and took a limping step forward. Weathers watched them pass by with open curiosity before falling in alongside Aurora’s opposite wing, making it clear to the cohort staring out at them that they were here under her guidance.

As they crossed the pulverized threshold between the broken road and the tunnel’s heavy flagstones, Aurora felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu. Her eyes drifted to the utility room Blue and Roach spent decades sheltering inside of before the door finally opened to them. Now two Enclave technicians stood in the same space, a flashlight held between the lips of one, as they examined the maze of conduits feeding out of the walls. The luggage Roach had stacked into neat piles down the center of the tunnel was gone, but their absence left behind light markings on the flagstones where they’d sat for generations.

Past the machine gun nests and defensive sandbag walls, the encampment beyond resembled something closer to the central street of a small town. Canvas tents large enough to fit four or more pegasi stood in two orderly lines beneath the massive posters fixed to the tunnel walls. Several soldiers gathered around cookstoves in the space ahead of the tentline, chatting amongst one another while others watched their colonel’s guests, their invading eyes vanishing and appearing behind the larger sheets of canvas hung between the tunnel’s pillars. These partitions marked off spaces whose purpose was designated by labels painted onto the pillars themselves.

Aurora frowned up at the fresh markings. Some of them she understood. Two stallions sat in metal chairs on either side of a makeshift armory, which amounted to several dozen locked crates and containers of varying dimensions, with strange green-glowing rifles laid across their laps. Other areas were too abbreviated to understand. Enclave acronyms, she assumed. One appeared to be nothing less than a storefront where one soldier had stopped mid-barter to watch them pass by while his counterpart behind the table did the same.

The more Aurora looked around, the less comfortable she was with how cozy the Enclave had become with the space outside Stable 10. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“I don’t want any of them going inside my Stable.”

Weathers looked down at her as they walked, showing no sign of offense. “You have my word that they will stay on this side of the doorway.”

“Or you.”

A flicker of disappointment appeared on her face. It was quick, but it had been there just the same. “I was designated by the minister herself to receive your ignition talisman when it arrives. Are you sure?”

She hesitated. “I thought it would be given to me.”

“Ultimately, yes, it’ll be turned over to you after it arrives. Last I heard, that might not be until tomorrow.”

It was Ginger’s turn to be suspicious. “Why the delay?”

Weathers put a hoof on a soldier’s rear to prevent him from backing into her as they passed. The tunnel hadn’t been this crowded when the bombs fell. “Nobody is delaying. If you’d prefer, I can arrange to have cots brought out for the two of you and you can spend the night on base so you’re present when the talisman arrives.”

Aurora watched the colonel closely as she made the offer but couldn’t pick out anything that might hint at deception. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there. She’d been here before, speaking to the person in charge with the promise of her Stable’s salvation on the line, only to discover Coldbrook had been acting in bad faith from the start.

As if reading her mind, Weathers looked down at her with something amounting to understanding. “I’m guessing by all the daggers that it doesn't work for you. Alright. What would you propose instead?”

She hadn’t expected that. Her lip quirked into a thoughtful frown, wondering where the line was between this officer’s charity and dignity. Asking for too little could invite more unnecessary dealmaking once the talisman arrived. Asking for too much risked burning a bridge she and her Stable desperately needed to maintain. As far as she could tell in the short time they’d spoken, Weathers seemed more than willing to put her cards on the table. If the talisman was truly on its way as promised, then Aurora decided there wouldn’t be any harm in waiting after all.

She shifted her gaze forward, toward the behemoth cog set into the blast proof wall at the tunnel’s terminus. Just seeing it filled her with a homesickness she’d fought to keep at bay for days. If waiting was the only choice, the Enclave could do it on her terms.

“We’ll wait inside,” she said, nodding at the door. “Me, Ginger, and you.”

Weathers lifted her gaze to the door, her expression hesitantly neutral.

“We will provide a bed for you.” Aurora continued while noting the tiny approving nod from Ginger. “Once, and only once the talisman is delivered and verified to be functional, you’ll be allowed to leave.”

After several seconds, “Some might interpret that as taking an officer of the Enclave hostage.”

“That implies we’re taking you against your will rather than extending an invitation, dear.”

Aurora smiled at her before looking back to Weathers. “You can always say no.”

Weathers could hear the unspoken but. “How much time have you spent out in the wastes, Aurora?”

“Enough to be dangerous.”

She smirked at that. “Apparently so. Something tells me if I decline this invitation, the two of you will find a way to make my job here much less pleasant than it is currently. Is that a fair assessment?”

As she spoke, two uniformed mares noticed their approach and quickly snapped off twin salutes as they made way for the colonel. It hadn’t occurred to Aurora that she had any leverage at all, especially here surrounded by enough fire and horsepower to put the first breath of conflict in the ground. The Enclave controlled the very mountain that sat atop her home and a growing expanse of miles surrounding it.

And yet as they passed the saluting mares, she noticed one of them steal a glance at her with something in her eyes approaching reverence. She’d already nearly forgotten her supposed status within the Enclave as a “pureblood” pegasus, something that meant immensely more to them than it did to her. It meant, in spite of the company she kept and the weeks of radiation she’d sucked down since leaving home, that they were willing to bend over backwards to keep her safe from the nasty contaminants of the wasteland.

It was, she realized, her most powerful bargaining chip.

“Colonel, we didn’t fly all the way here to make your life difficult.” That earned her a dubious look from the striped mare, but she pressed on. “Call it an honesty check. You have nothing to lose if everything you’re telling us about the delay is true. If anything, you’ll be getting a free day off and a tour of a functioning Stable.”

That got her attention. “Then I shouldn’t expect to be remanded to a cell for the entire duration?”

“That depends on you.”

The end of the tunnel approached and the gridwork of tents tapered away behind them, forming a wide clearing around the semicircular platform ahead of the wall. The open space was overwatched by half a dozen pegasi stationed behind sandbag walls along the arcing top step, each of them equipped with high powered rifles that made Aurora’s look like a foal’s popgun in comparison. The nearest stallion stopped daydreaming and lifted his feathers in a crisp salute which Weathers returned without skipping a beat.

As they climbed the steps, Aurora noticed something she hadn’t the last time she was here. The edges of the steps had been painted with thick yellow paint, except down the centerline where it and the underlying concrete had been worn smooth by what could only be centuries of repeat traffic. She wondered whether these were Roach’s hoofmarks, or someone else’s.

Beneath the great door of Stable 10, several dark blemishes stained the platform. Those she knew the source of. Aurora’s missing leg throbbed sympathetically at the irony. The Wasteland had a grudge against that leg all the way back then. This time there was nothing left for the ghouls to gnaw on, nor were there any ghouls at all. The bodies Aurora and Roach left behind had been cleaned up by the tunnel’s newest occupants, likely tossed onto the rubble pile outside with the rest of the refuse.

With Ginger’s help she limped to the door and placed her hoof against its cool surface.

“What do you say, colonel? Want to come inside?”

She could feel the haggle coming. No, she couldn’t step away from her duties. No, that simply isn’t how this relationship will proceed. No, here is a concise list of reasons why stalling you is a better fit for the Enclave and, by the way, we’re going to need you to get something for us in return.

Colonel Weathers approached the door, studying her own reflection in its pitted surface.

“I’m sure my lieutenant will appreciate taking command for a day.” She glanced down at Aurora. “I accept.”

Her hoof slid off the door. She looked at Ginger and was relieved by her reassuring smile. This was okay.

“I’ll tell Sledge we’re here.” It felt like she was hearing someone else speak, because part of her wasn’t ready to believe this was happening. “Once you’re back, we’ll open the door.”

Weathers nodded and turned to descend the platform, chased on by more salutes.

This was happening.

Things were finally going to be okay.

Sledge was dozing at his desk when his Pip-Buck jittered with a priority message’s arrival. His chin jerked up from his chest with a start. He must’ve made a noise when he woke, because he had barely checked the clock before Rainbow Dash let out a raspy groan and stretched in one of his visitor’s chairs, his terminal spun around to face her. Her chipped hind hooves slid from where they’d been propped up on his desk, swinging to the floor one at a time as she came around. Sledge was no worse for wear. With the official word of Rainbow Dash’s survival making its way from one end of the Stable to the other, Aurora’s little compartment had begun drawing significant traffic from curious residents. The door might be thick, but it wasn’t soundproof, and the muffled sounds of pegasi interrogating Sledge’s deputies made their research difficult and sleep all but impossible.

Rainbow had shrugged off the sudden uptick of onlookers. She’d been through worse back when she was in her prime, and he was inclined to believe as much. If it bothered her, she hid it expertly. Her neighbors, however, weren’t accustomed to the noise. Their admiration of the historical figure next door was showing signs of waning fast as it became apparent on top of their home nearly imploding around them, they were looking at sacrificing their sleep schedule as well.

There were many situations Sledge could talk his way out of. Explaining to an exasperated mother why her foal might not sleep tonight was not one of them.

His Pip-Buck buzzed again. He sucked a deeper, waking breath through his nose and resigned himself to what was looking like another long night of putting out fires. The generator had gone dark days ago leaving the entire Stable on what could only generously be called life support. He lifted the screen off his ruddy belly and frowned at yet another petition from Sanitation asking for power to be diverted from IT so the waste pumps could be turned back on. The message was a winding litany of consequences that he didn’t have the mental bandwidth to digest, much less respond to. Compared to the energy demands of the entire Stable, the power coming in from Stable-Tec’s hardened network was little more than a trickle. They’d been lucky to siphon off enough to keep the air recyclers going, and even then they weren’t operating at one hundred percent. Pockets of the Stable already smelled stale.

He turned his screen off and sighed, reclining his head against the backrest of his chair as he looked across his desk at Rainbow. He smirked just a little. Tired but still awake, she’d produced a small blue racquetball that a sheepish little filly gifted to her as she and Sledge walked the half-lit corridors together. He held up a wing and she flicked it at him, the ball making a satisfying pok when he caught it.

Rainbow nodded at his Pip-Buck. “Anything worth worrying about?”

He shook his head and tossed the ball. “Our ship’s taking on water and Sanitation is complaining about a shortage of mops.”

“Heh.”

At this point she was privy to just about everything that came across his Pip-Buck. It was easy to forget she wasn’t just one of the six Elements who took down Nightmare Moon, Discord and Tirek. She once led an entire ministry. Two hundred twenty years later, she still had a solid grasp of the little nuances she’d picked up back then. Despite the harsh gravel that her decay inflicted upon her voice, she didn’t shy away from chatting up residents who seemed the most off put by her appearance. She exuded a sort of inviting confidence that she privately admitted to have resisted learning during her first years as a ministry mare. Whatever it was, it broke down the last vestiges of hesitancy Sledge had with involving her in his unfortunate role as overstallion.

She bounced the ball off his desk and into the cup of his wing. “Guess what I found while you were napping?”

“Hit me.”

She reached forward and spun his terminal around to face him, its screen open to the same partition they and half of Opal’s department had been pouring through over the past week. Seeing it made him feel even more exhausted. In total they’d examined less than a tenth of the data Delta squirreled away. Barely a year out of the decade Spitfire wanted history to forget.

Rainbow sat back in her chair and shrugged. “Nothing. As far as I can tell, nobody questioned IT’s so-called hazardous spill. Spitfire posted a couple folks outside the department to keep people away and gave Delta’s team the day off. Delta paced circles until the power cut out on Remembrance Day.”

“At which point the locks would have disengaged and she would have been able to lift the door manually,” Sledge concluded, recalling the soundless altercation between the two mares which took place in this exact office. “Power comes back on, and a few minutes later Delta’s kicking down the door and going nose-to-nose with the overmare.”

“I mean, unless you think differently I feel like we’re done. Delta figured out what those two did and she preserved it all in Partition 40 for someone else to find.” Rainbow lifted her wing for the ball and Sledge obliged. With it firmly in her grip, she tapped a hoof against a growing sequence of upheld feathers. “Spitfire takes control of the ministry, and she and that secretary of hers use its resources to fund their secret club. That allows them to springboard into Celestia knows how many other ministries, probably all of them, and gain access to Pinkie’s gold codes. They push the button and watch the fucking fireworks…”

He watched her wince, pausing long enough to contain her emotions.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “They kill the world and hope that magic will die with it. Everyone assumes Equestria is the victim of Vhannan bombs, mission complete, until Delta pulled footage from SOLUS and makes the mistake of sharing it with Spitfire.”

Sledge tipped his head to the side until his neck cracked, a nasty habit he doubted he’d ever shake. Remembering the bottle that had tempted him at the beginning of his tenure, he decided there were worse vices to have. “I’d still like to know what that phone call was about. The one right before the generator went down.”

Their eyes drifted to the surface of the desk where the first overmare’s telephone was notably absent. In a Stable with access to direct communication via state-of-the-art artificial intelligence, an analog telephone had stuck out like a sore hoof. It didn’t take a detective to guess who Spitfire might have a private line to.

“If I had to guess, it’s just a lot of Spitfire and her creepy little secretary rubbing each other off over how evil they were.”

He lifted a brow at that. Rainbow shrugged a little defensively. He tried to remind himself that all of this felt significantly more recent to her than it did anyone else. Her decades roaming the tunnel in her semi-feral fugue stuck in her memory as foggy fragments of a singularly horrible nightmare. Her calm facade was just that: a facade. The wound of what she perceived as her greatest failing as an Element of Harmony was still there and a long way away from healing.

“It didn’t look like she enjoyed much of that call.” He didn’t need to elaborate beyond that. They’d both seen the panic in Spitfire’s eyes when she hung up.

Rainbow pitched the ball into his wing, smirking just a touch. “No she did not.”

He let her have her moment of vindictive pleasure despite not entirely sharing the sentiment. For everything they knew Spitfire and her accomplice to have done, they deserved much worse than having her gilded legacy dragged into the light where future generations could see the deep, rotting tarnish it was truly covered in. But he didn’t feel the deep, cutting hatred toward them that Rainbow did. Not because they didn’t deserve it, but because he hadn’t been there. The end of the war, the bombs falling, all the death those two mares were responsible for were chapters in the history books he’d grown up with. Stable 10 was his entire world, not a prison he’d been forced to settle for.

He knew better than to say it out loud. She was reluctant to admit it, but he could see the burnout in Rainbow’s tired gaze. She needed a break.

His chair creaked as he leaned forward and turned off his terminal. They both did.

As he held up his feathers to flick the ball back across his desk, his office door emitted a sharp squeak of metal on metal as it began to move. Not with the smooth hiss of powered hydraulics, but with the furtive, repetitive jerks of a slab of metal being hoisted away from the floor by its backup jack handle. With a dead generator at the heart of their Stable, it was the only way to get these multi-ton doors to budge.

It was also the reason Sledge and Rainbow had been afforded any privacy in the first place. Residents were naturally hesitant to knock on the overseer’s door. Tacking on the additional effort to open the damn thing had a way of filtering out all but the most critical interruptions. If the pointedly southern profanity huffing and puffing from the growing gap beneath the door was any indication, this was likely to be critical.

The ratcheting paused long enough for Opal’s flustered voice to carry through. “Sledge, you best be in here or Celestia help me I will form a search party!”

“I’m here and so is Dash.” He set the ball next to his terminal and sat up. “What’s wrong?”

Winded, but far from beat, Opal’s shadow shifted at the foot of the door. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong! Aurora’s come home! Now get your big red butt up and finish openin’ this door b’fore I keel over!”

He blinked, replaying what she just said to be sure he heard it right. One look toward Rainbow confirmed it.

She gestured toward the door, smiling. “Go get your friend. I’ll be here.”

Aurora was back.

Like a rubber band flung loose, Sledge shot to his hooves and bolted toward the door.

April 21st, 1297
11:20pm

Fifteen days. Aurora stood on fidgeting hooves, her balance as frayed as her nerves.

It felt like she’d been away for months. But she’d done the math. She’d counted the nights she spent under the wasteland’s endless overcast, or staring at the ever-burning bare bulbs of Nurse Redheart’s clinic, or wondering if the next time the freezer fans clicked on they would finally snuff her out, or waking up to the warmth of Ginger’s face pressed firmly into the nape of her neck.

Fifteen days. Eight more than she naively calculated she would need to walk to Fillydelphia and back. Deep in her heart, she’d known the chances of returning here were slim to none. She’d drained every bit out of her account, which wasn’t much, to fill every empty square inch of her saddlebags with whole apples that a merchant in Junction City would swindle her out of for a sprinkling of dented bottle caps less than twelve hours later.

A lanky stallion with a short, candy striped mane would proposition her for her Pip-Buck. Her prickly response would cause him to follow her and put Ginger in the precarious position of fending him off, an action that would earn her a bounty once word reached Autumn Song that her brother’s corpse had been found in her latrine. One rotten first day was all it took to set off a chain reaction neither Aurora nor her newfound friends could stop.

She swallowed, her throat bone dry and her body practically vibrating with nervous energy. After everything they’d gone through, they’d all survived. A little worse for the wear and a fair bit lighter than when they started, but alive just the same.

Her left hip bumped into Ginger’s as she swayed a little unevenly on her three legs. A kindly stallion at the Enclave’s medical tent had taken the time to remove her old stained bandages, disinfected the gnarled mass of inflamed skin and stitches that capped her stump, and wrapped her back up with new ones. As she started to leave, he advised her that she should break herself of using Ginger as a crutch. By his expression he meant well, but Aurora couldn’t help but not appreciate the undertone. As she stood beside Ginger at the great cog of her lifelong home, she kept her wing firmly planted across her back for balance. The last thing she wanted Sledge to see when the door opened was her falling flat on her face.

She uttered a self-deprecating giggle at the thought. He’d never let her live it down. Ginger shot her a bemused look as asking to be filled in on what was so funny, but she chose not to tempt fate by explaining it. She gave her a reassuring squeeze around the ribs and stared back up at the yellow 10 painted on the behemoth gear just a few short steps away.

“I wonder if there’s enough power left to open a door this large,” Weathers mused.

She shot a glare over her shoulder where the colonel waited just outside wing’s reach. The encampment behind her was vacant now, short of a few personnel Weathers insisted were reliable and, more importantly, essential. The majority of the enlisted soldiers had been moved outside where they would be tasked with whatever busywork could be assigned to them. Aurora didn’t care what they did so long as there weren’t hundreds of armed pegasi lurking near the threshold of her home. The few officers who remained loitered in groups on the flagstone walkway, eager to witness the opening of Spitfire’s fabled preservation project.

Aurora didn’t pretend to understand their excitement.

“Don’t joke about that,” she warned, fixing Weathers with a stern look that glanced off the mare like water against grease. “Just… be patient. Okay?”

Weathers held up the ends of her feathers in mock surrender. “It wasn’t a joke, but you’re right. I apologize.”

She blew out a nervous breath and faced forward without a response. Outwardly, Weathers seemed almost decent in spite of the black she wore. But so had Coldbrook. So had Ironshod. There was a reason the colonel was leaving her weapons behind. Why Ginger insisted upon searching the pockets of her uniform. If the wasteland taught her anything, it was that Aurora no longer trusted any wastelanders cunning enough to command authority.

If Weathers’ expression up until now was any indication, open mistrust was something she was deeply accustomed to.

Ginger nudged her foreleg, her voice low. “It has been a while since Sledge said he spotted us on that camera. Has he sent anything else? Perhaps they’re waiting for a cue from us?”

Aurora glanced back at the tiny, barely visible black lens embedded in the arched stonework above. Apparently Opalescent had been keeping tabs on the Enclave’s growing camp when she caught sight of her and Ginger waiting at the platform for Weathers. Sledge’s borderline panicked message for her to stay put, they were opening the door, don’t move, give him a few minutes had been endearing in just how many spelling errors he’d managed to cram into a couple sentences. She imagined him running around the Stable, trying to type without barreling anyone over. That had been fifteen minutes ago.

As her mentor and the head of Mechanical, he wore two emotions: stoic and angrily stoic. His tolerances for laziness and poor planning could be measured in microns. It was just how he led and despite all odds, the pegasi working beneath him knew him to be a harsh but fair leader. The thought of him flustered and, Celestia forbit, behind schedule pulled a tiny smile across her lip.

“He’ll be here,” she assured Ginger while checking her Pip-Buck again. Her brief exchange with Sledge still glowed on the screen, including her hasty explanation that the encamped soldiers outside the Stable weren’t the Steel Rangers she’d warned him about over a week earlier. No new messages. She didn’t go as far as to describe them as friendly, rather choosing to go with Ginger’s description: mostly benign. She made sure to tell Sledge to keep someone close to the control console for the door should the gathered soldiers do anything stupid, just in case.

BOOM.

The door rang like a struck bell. Were it not for her grip on Ginger, the bolt of fear that shot through her would have sent her tumbling backward onto her own ass. She kept her hooves beneath her, barely, as the familiar noise of steel engaging steel rippled through the Stable’s armored hull. In the back of her head, she couldn’t blame the ghouls who once shared this tunnel with Roach for being drawn to the sound. It was unignorable. It beat in her chest harder than her own heart.

For a moment, silence. Then a low, moaning peel of sliding metal. The great gear of Stable 10 sank into the wall as if creating a mold of itself in the void it left behind. Another teeth-rattling thud echoed off the tunnel walls and, slowly, the door rolled clear of the threshold she’d first crossed what felt like a lifetime ago. The blare of klaxons, pulsing warning lights, and a wide and rusty catwalk rolled out from the antechamber to welcome her home. The home she used to think she’d never get to see again.

A mote of magic crossed the bridge of her nose, pulling a loose strand of mane that lay there back behind her ear. The armature disengaged the door and swung back toward the opening, blocking Aurora’s view of the figures gathered in the unusually darkened antechamber at the top the ramp.

As it retracted out of the way, her heart climbed up into her throat. Waiting for her at the top of the ramp stood not Sledge, but someone else.

“Dad…”

Her vision blurred. Before she knew it her hooves were pounding over the threshold, the sobs of a daughter wanting her father rising unbidden in her throat. She could barely make out where she was running when they met at the bottom of the ramp, wings crumpling around one another, one bawling apologies into her father’s mane for going away while the other clung to his only child with a tearful ferocity.

His voice came out strangled as he murmured into her mane, “Welcome home, Aurora.”

Ginger tried in vain to tuck herself off to the side where she wouldn’t interrupt but the swimming, disbelieving eyes of Dusky Pinfeathers found her as soon as she lifted a hoof to hide her trembling chin. For the briefest moment he stared at her, uncertain of this new wingless stranger standing on the breach of his home. Then, while Aurora struggled to calm herself, he looked up at the horn upon her head and any question he had was gone. He opened a wing, tipping his feathers for her to come over. She did, and as soon as she was close enough he hooked her around the back of the neck and pulled her in.

“Thank you, Ginger,” he choked. “Thank you for bringing her home.”

She nodded and wondered how her own father would react if she suddenly turned up in New Canterlot. Not likely. She dispelled the thought before it could spoil the moment.

“She saved me first. I was just repaying the favor.”

He smiled at that before clearing his throat and letting Aurora slip from his wings ever so gently, feigning to scratch at his eyes to clear his own vision. Ginger took a small step away, swallowing thickly while Aurora laughed with an unmistakable combination of relief and embarrassment. Within the span of a few minutes something in Aurora had changed, as if the pent up stress of the past two weeks was finally loosening its grip on her. She was beaming, tears and all, so much so that Ginger hardly recognized the mare she’d committed herself to.

It was beautiful, and as Aurora put her wing over Ginger’s back and pulled her close again, she knew she would do everything in her power to protect it.

It was only when Aurora’s father looked past them did she remember they’d brought a guest. “I’m sorry… I don’t think I know your name.”

She looked back to where the colonel stood just a few paces inside the Stable, hooves together, her uniform combined with her semi-rigid posture doing her little good to help her if her intentions were to appear approachable. She gave him a quick, clipped nod before answering. “Colonel Weathers, sir. I’m–”

“She’s our insurance policy.”

The jarringly deep interruption came from a ruddy red stallion leaning over a section of rusted railing at the top of the ramp. Until now Ginger had only known Overstallion Sledge as a name in a message header. Aurora’s description of him hardly did the stallion justice. He was built like the earth pony stallions who tended the fields of her youth. A large, imposing figure… or at least he would have been if he didn’t look equally as exhausted as she and Aurora both felt. She could see the quiet reluctance on his gaze as he directed two other stallions, their comically tight jumpsuits adorned with identical belts holstering antique revolvers that looked just as likely to misfire as to work. It was strange to see irons that old without the accompanying wear and tear. The metal was just as pitted as it was pristine.

The colonel didn’t object to her armed escorts as they took positions just outside her wingspan, though there was no doubt she noticed the worrying state of their weapons too.

“Colonel Weathers will spend the night under observation. We can discuss a limited tour of the Stable once we’ve all gotten some rest.” Sledge looked toward an elderly mare standing behind a nearby console. “Let’s close it up, Opal.”

Heads turned upward as the heavy armature groaned into motion once again, unlocking from its housing in the Stable’s ceiling and passing over them all as it swung into position. Seeing the door rolling open from the outside had been a humbling experience, but watching the armature hauling the steel cog sideways into the chasm gave Ginger chills. The emergency lights studded around the antechamber visibly dimmed under the strain of power required to physically shove so much mass off its track and into the perfectly machined void waiting to receive it. Her heart fluttered with momentary unsureness as the door sealed them inside.

When it was done, she felt something else. Something foreign. She felt relieved.

No, not just relieved. She took a slow, deep breath and let it out. Nothing could get to her in here. Not the Enclave, not the Steel Rangers, not Autumn Song. This place had shrugged off the worst cataclysm in Equestrian history and kept on living as if nothing at all happened.

She felt something Aurora had striven to find since embarking on her journey away from this place, a thing that on paper made sense but in practice was widely assumed to be a fantasy reserved for those few ponies at the very top of the Wasteland’s cannibalistic food chain. For the first time since she was a little filly running wild with her sister through the richly adorned halls of her childhood manor, Ginger felt safe.

“Hey, Pinfeathers. Get up here.”

She and Aurora looked back to where Sledge still stood, his eyes flicking down to them even as he watched the colonel being led up the ramp toward a single door at the far corner of the antechamber. Exhausted as he was, the grizzled overstallion managed to pull his lips into a grin.

Aurora required little help navigating the steep incline, but Ginger stayed beside her just in case. Surrounded by the familiar walls of her own foalhood home, it didn’t surprise her that Aurora practically trotted toward her old boss and she only barely dodged Sledge’s wing as he scooped Aurora up into a bone-rearranging hug of his own. Ginger made a point to put just a little extra distance between her and the overstallion, finding herself standing beside the elderly mare from the console who let out a low, mirthful chuckle.

“Don’t let ‘im fool ya,” she whispered. “He’s hurtless as a kitten if’n he likes ya.”

Ginger blinked polite confusion but thought she understood the gist of it.

If Aurora’s missing hind leg bothered Sledge, he hid it well. She gave him points for having the tact not to draw attention to the painfully obvious. Most stallions built like he was tended not to have much less body mass left for brains, or at least that was her experience. Sledge had the awareness to keep his feathers away from her stump, and when he put her down he did so with a gentleness that allowed her to find her balance before he let go.

“Welcome back,” he rumbled, eyes a touch mistier than they had been yet far too proud to shed actual tears. His grin was an excellent mask. Now she knew where Aurora got it from. “Now go put some clothes on, you deviant.”

“Never,” Aurora countered, hesitating only briefly before allowing herself to look at the half-lit antechamber more properly. It didn’t take long for the happiness of her return home to fade as she began to come to grips with the reality surrounding them. “So. The generator really went dark.”

He nudged them all toward the same narrow door Colonel Weathers had been ferried through, talking as they walked. “You’re lucky you weren’t here when it kicked offline. Felt like Celestia landing on her ass at the bottom of the Stable.”

Ginger snorted, earning an approving smile from the overstallion.

“Could’ve been a lot worse. If you and your friends hadn’t worked out there was a hardened network between the Stables, the air recyclers wouldn’t be running and we’d all be guests of that colonel of yours instead of the other way around.” He slowed just outside the sealed door and waited. From the other side the muffled hiss of running water caught Ginger’s ear. A small placard above the door read: DECONTAMINATION.

When she glanced back at him, he was staring at her horn. He looked away as soon as she spotted him watching, leaving her with the untimely realization that she was the first non-pegasi to step hoof into Stable 10 since…

Since ever.

She stiffened slightly as the door to the now empty decontamination chamber slid open. She followed Aurora and Sledge inside, leaving Opal and Aurora’s father to wait their turn. The dripping nozzles pointed at them from their symmetrical arches like gun barrels, the short and narrow enclosure lit with a vague yellow glow from a single fogged emergency light overhead.

What was it going to be like living here, she wondered? Eyes regularly fixed on the protrusion growing out of her forehead, her days spent fielding questions from pegasi who had never seen a unicorn let alone experienced magic before? Would her breed dictate the work she did? Would they resent her for regaining the ability to dream?

Liquid gurgled up into the arches and unceremoniously purged the swirling concerns from Ginger’s mind in a sputtering torrent of lukewarm water. The lack of warning startled a yelp from her, to which Aurora answered with an apologetic laugh. In seconds the confined space was filled with a thick mist that grew thick with the odor of old sweat that both mares had collected and grown used to since departing Blinder’s Bluff over a week earlier. Ginger felt her cheeks flush with embarrassment, knowing Aurora’s overstallion was being perfumed right now with their stink.

As if reading her mind, Sledge coughed. It was all she could do not to curl up into a ball of shame and pray to disappear as he turned his head back to look at them. Water streamed out of his mane to join the murky puddle swirling under the grating beneath their hooves, the levity gone from his face as he spoke over the spray.

“Once you dry off, I need to catch you two up on some things we uncovered while you were out there.” He paused, then added, “You didn’t tell the colonel about Blue, did you?”

Aurora frowned. “No.”

“Good. I get the feeling you and I know two very different Enclaves.”

Aurora’s brow knit together as she watched the video spool forward on Sledge’s terminal. The face of a young mare with a short aquamarine mane and ruby red eyes reflected off the concave shield of her helmet, her expression locked in abject terror as the screams of her crewmates crackled over the comms, their vehicle hurtling away from a satellite Ironshod and Coldbrook had been racing to find before the Enclave. She watched the bombs explode and witnessed SOLUS make its slow procession over Vhanna where it unleashed death where it had promised peace.

When Sledge reached over to stop the video, she didn’t know what to say. Those things happened two centuries ago, more than that, and seeing the fiery birth of the wasteland she’d barely survived felt simultaneously distant and real.

“Overmare Spitfire did that.” Sledge spoke with an anger that, had she not known him as well as she did, she might have mistaken it as directed at her. But she did know him, and she knew he was boiling inside because those responsible were beyond his reach. So he seethed as openly as his title allowed, knowing it wouldn’t be wise for an overstallion to be seen breaking things just to feel a little better. “Her, Primrose… the Enclave dropped the bombs.”

She folded her hooves across her chest and tried to let the last hour sink in. Somehow none of it surprised her. Why would it? The Steel Rangers had risen from the ashes of what remained of Equestria’s old military and while their stated intention of safeguarding dangerous technology was outwardly pure, in practice the faction gave power to monsters like Ironshod and Coldbrook who had no qualms about cheating, stealing or killing to acquire the last nails they needed to seal the Enclave’s coffin for good. On the other wing, the Enclave was no better. The reason they continued to thrive at all was their perpetuation of a lie that placed Primrose on the altar of power, a crown bestowed upon her by the goddess alicorns who supposedly gifted her with their mythical longevity. Primrose had spun a cult around herself like a cocoon, one that now ironically forced her hoof to help preserve the “pureblood” residents of Stable 10.

She pursed her lips and wondered if the world had been better before the bombs, or if the history books she used to pour over were just candy coated lies of a different variety. A little of both, she decided. Ponies like Primrose didn’t grow up to be egomaniacal tyrants in a vacuum. Something had pushed her down this path. Benefiting from anything Primrose provided felt like swallowing acid, and clearly it bothered Sledge even more than her, but if keeping her Stable safe meant willfully adding another layer to the Enclave’s fiction of god-given superiority… fine then. It was a small price to pay to be safe again.

“You’re quiet,” he murmured.

“I’m thinking,” she countered. Over the last hour Sledge had dumped a mountain of new information into her lap. He’d been following breadcrumbs ever since he watched hundreds of residents find themselves fatally trapped outside a prematurely sealed Stable, a thread he would pull until he unearthed a hidden partition and a decade of history Delta Vee had preserved despite the risk to herself. He’d learned that the Enclave had been born inside the great Equestrian ministries and spread through them like an unchecked cancer.

Were Rainbow Dash herself not sleeping on the floor beneath the office’s medallion window, she might not have believed how something like that could happen. How two ministry mares could have their launch codes compromised, or how something as dangerous as the Enclave could fly under their radar for so long. And yet here they all were, ten generations after the world hurled itself off a cliff, trying to stay awake long enough to decide what to do with what they knew.

Hard as she tried, she couldn’t settle on anything that couldn’t explode in their faces. Stable 10’s fate hinged on the Enclave’s charity. She’d done her job. She’d gone out, faced down the wasteland, and come back home with a solution. Let someone else hold Primrose’s hooves to the fire. It was her turn to be selfish. She’d suffered enough for one lifetime.

“Do we really need to do anything?” she asked.

Sledge looked at her as if expecting her to say she was joking. When she didn’t, his expression darkened. “Are you serious, Pinfeathers?”

She rubbed her eyes, trying to chase away her exhaustion. She wanted to go to bed and sleep away the next week, not sit here and debate strategy. “I’m just saying right now we’re not in a position to bargain, especially not with Primrose. The Enclave is filled with shitbirds who believe she’s the second coming of Celestia, I know, but they’re also the only group out there who might genuinely have the talisman our generator needs to spin.”

Sledge shook his head and looked away from her to hide his disgust.

“She does have a point,” Ginger chimed in. “The Enclave has reason to treat Aurora favorably. We can’t trust the Steel Rangers to regard us with anything except hostility after what they forced us to do.”

She watched him as he regarded Rainbow Dash for several long seconds until she started to worry he might rouse her from her sleep for a second opinion. Of the four of them in the room, the Element of Loyalty had easily suffered the greatest indignities inflicted by the Enclave’s creators.

“Aurora,” he said, “you make me believe in reincarnation because no one can become that stupid in one lifetime.”

Ginger’s eyes flared wide. “Watch your mouth.”

“It’s okay,” she said, putting a hoof on Ginger’s shoulder.

“It’s not okay,” Sledge shot back. “We are not going to sit here with our feathers up our asses doing nothing.”

“And we’re not going to,” she insisted, hoping to keep Ginger from relocating Sledge’s feathers where he’d just indicated he would not stick them. “Sledge, use your head. Primrose wants to fix the Stable because Coldbrook made himself into the villain when he made good on his threat to excavate the tunnel, and now she has a chance to cement herself and the Enclave in history as the ones who saved Stable 10. She has every reason to make good on her promise because anything else makes her look weak. So all we have to do is do nothing for a day, two days tops, and let them bring us what we need to get back to full power.”

He shifted in his seat, watching her. “And then what?”

“We boot them out, lock the door, and send everything we have on the Enclave to my old resident profile the Rangers are monitoring. Let Coldbrook or whoever wound up replacing him take it from there.”

She waited, but he just turned back to the terminal and stared quietly at the screen. When he didn’t speak, she added, “We don’t have to make ourselves a target.”

He shook his head. “You weren’t here to find all of this shit. I can’t just walk away from it.”

“We’re not walking…” she stopped mid-sentence to slap her wing into the center of his chest. “I wasn’t here? Fuck you, you weren’t out there! Ginger and came this fucking close to dying because we both pissed off the wrong psycho, so forgive me if I’m not jumping at the chance to twist the teats of a cult leader and her literal army. You have no idea how hard it is to take two steps out there without stomping on a landmine!”

He genuinely shied away from her, showing something like regret for the first time she could remember that hadn’t been coaxed out of him with bathtub liquor. “I didn’t mean to say–”

“I’m not finished!” He clammed up and looked away again. “I’m a fucking tripod now because a stallion with tiny dick syndrome convinced himself I wasn’t on his team. We are not going to put everyone here in that same boat with someone like Primrose. Not without a plan, and neither of us are running on enough sleep to work out a crap plan let alone a good one. Now I’m finished. Asshole.”

Sledge grunted thoughtfully before glancing past her to where Ginger watched them, visibly bewildered but not unsympathetic to her outburst. “Is she ever like this with you?”

Ginger saw the olive branch and took it. “No, you seem to have a way of bringing out this side of her all on your own, dear.”

“Yeah, he’s a real fucking gem,” Aurora grumbled. “Seriously, Sledge. Let’s just wait on this one until the Stable’s in the clear. I don’t want to find out the hard way that Primrose keeps a garage door opener for Stable doors tucked under her tail just in case. Okay?”

He rolled his shoulder and gave her a nod. “Okay.”

A pause. It dragged into a long silence. Her head dipped.

“Go to bed, Pinfeathers.”

She sucked in a deep breath and reluctantly slid out of the chair. “Mm. You’re not the boss of me.”

“I’ll make a note of… ah. Come back. Take the rifle with you.”

Ginger lit her horn before Aurora could bring herself to turn around. She was beaten and her body was finally driving that home for her. An exhausted smirk touched her lip as the leather strap set itself along her neck, the comforting weight of Desperate Times now just weight. It felt good to know she wouldn’t need it anymore.

The door heaved open and hissed shut behind them, and Aurora realized Ginger wouldn’t have to waste her magic casting shields anymore either. Somehow that relieved her even more. She could experiment with it. Do things with it that would better the Stable or, if she decided, stop using it altogether and get her hooves dirty. Ginger was finally getting the life she deserved, not the one she had shoveled at her.

Those happy thoughts carried her through the corridors, into the empty lift, and down to the lower residential levels where she’d grown up. She was grateful no one was out loitering the hallways. They made it all the way to her compartment uninterrupted. Her door lifted out of her way, hydraulics whining against Ginger’s magic, and she didn’t question why the breakroom coffee pot was sitting on a tool chest next to her desk.

Ginger asked something about a shower but Aurora was already on an intercept course with her mattress. She only vaguely remembered her head hitting the pillow.

The longer she waited for the door to open, the more convinced she became that it never would.

Delta paced circles around her tiny office, now in shambles. Millie was unresponsive. Her door refused to open. Her terminal lay shattered on the carpet where Spitfire had hurled it, all thanks to her own shit judgment. She should have kept her trap shut until she knew who she could trust. Of course Spitfire knew the truth. Every creature who so much as breathed Ministry air was liable to be involved in something unethical. That was their purpose, after all. To do the terrible, illegal things the princesses wanted to do but couldn’t risk being tied to.

She kicked the door with impotent frustration as she passed it for the hundredth time. The experiments, the missing ponies, the black sites. Equestria had never been a perfect country but it had been a whole lot better before the ministries came around. Fucking Rarity McPerfect’s goons in their pressed suits sauntering in and out of major publications like they owned the ink. Twilight enriching herself with contracts from Maiden Pharma. Nobody gave a shit about Robronco Industries peddling their A.I. to every company they could. Even Jet caved to them, and not a peep from the ministries because of course the ministries were involved.

The rot was so pervasive that nobody noticed some middle-management snake like Spitfire festering right under their noses.

Furious tears stung at her eyes but she didn’t let them fall. Jet was dead. Apogee was dead. Everything she had cared about died when that bitch pushed the button. And now that she knew that Delta knew, it was only a matter of time before her candle got snuffed too.

She felt defeated. For once in her life she had proof. Not a suspicion, vague connection, or a gut feeling. She had tangible, empirical proof. And now that she had it, it didn’t matter. Ten years and a gold bit short. The world was in its death throes. The princesses were dead. There were no judges to convict Spitfire of any crimes. No prisons to throw her into. Whatever this existence they had now, sealed in a box underground for the rest of their lives, was Spitfire’s prize to win. Execution, maybe? She grimaced at the thought.

Overhead, the lights blinked out. The everpresent breeze that always filtered from the ceiling vent sighed and went silent. In an instant Delta’s office was plunged into darkness.

She stopped pacing and instinctively looked up to ask Millie what was happening, and almost as quickly knew the answer. This was it. This was how Spitfire decided to get rid of her. Soon, she imagined, she would hear the quiet hiss of something being pumped into the room. Or she might hear nothing at all. Maybe the point was to cut off the air recyclers to her office until she smothered herself.

With her wings held out in front of her, she fumbled her way to the door and sat down on the beaten carpet. She bet it would be the second one. Hoped it would be. In a way, she almost appreciated that Spitfire might go with such a peaceful option. Turning off the lights would help make going to sleep feel natural. She wondered how long it would take. Six hours? Twelve? A day? She decided not to think too much about it.

Time passed. She didn’t know how much. Minutes. Hours. With her head resting against the door she could almost hear the murmur of voices nearby. She couldn’t tell what they were saying. Maybe they weren’t voices at all. Who knew what noises the Stable made that the background noise covered up? She wondered if Stables could settle over time like the foundation of a new house, gradually sinking a little more each year until cracks started to appear.

What she wouldn’t give now to have this overengineered coffin just sink and take her down with it.

She was jarred from her dark fantasy by a sudden clunk on the other side of the door. On instinct she scrambled to her hooves and spun away from the wall, eyes straining to see anything in the pitch black. A heavy thud of something metal being shoved into the wall left her standing there, suddenly afraid, heart pounding in her throat as the slow chatter of a ratchet pulled the door off its seals.

Chak-chak-chak. Pause. Chak-chak-chak. Pause. Chak-chak-chak.

Dim yellow light squeezed in through as the gap widened, not the sterile white glow she expected. Whoever was on the other side said nothing save for the occasional grunt as he jacked up the door. The voices she heard earlier slipped through the opening with fresh clarity. In her bewilderment she stood stock still, hooves rooted to the carpet, listening to the humorless voices of three other pegasi somewhere in the main corridor.

“This one’s clear.”

“Okay. Lock’s set. Go help Downburst with the next one, then each of you start taking offices on your own. We need to get faster at this.”

The first stallion sounded out of breath, yet resilient. “Got it.”

“We’ll rest for five after this hall.” A pause. “Thunderlane, we’re moving ahead. How’s that door?”

Chak-chak. The door stopped just shy of chest height for Delta. On the other side, an exhausted Thunderlane answered, his voice strangely muffled. “Halfway up. I can stop here. Give me a second.”

Before she could react, two black legs appeared in the gap and crackled as they bent low. A masked face tilted sideways under the gap and a flashlight clicked on in Thunderlane’s wing, blinding her. For a split second he didn’t register her, too confused by the state of her office to notice the mare standing just a couple yards in front of him. When he finally looked up enough to meet her squinted eyes, he sputtered a curse and vanished from sight. A beat later he was hauling the door the rest of the way up.

“I’ve got Delta over here!” He grunted against the jack, stopping only when the door was shoulder height. “Might need first aid! She’s not wearing–”

It clicked in her head that he was going to come in and she immediately fumbled back toward her desk for something to defend herself with. Thunderlane was Spitfire’s closest friend and confidant. Her pleasant thoughts of dying in her sleep evaporated in the face of what felt like the beginning of a much more violent end. Her feathers wrapped around her wooden name plaque and she brandished it like a pitiful club.

Thunderlane stopped mid-sentence, his attention locking onto her improvised weapon with equal parts confusion and hesitation. But instead of lunging at her, he held open his empty wings and took a step backward. “Woah, woah. Everything’s okay. I’m here to help.”

Another flashlight clicked on behind him, forcing her to shield her eyes. “Where is your mask?”

She ignored him, her eyes straining to see past them and into the darkened corridor beyond. A single yellow emergency light glowed from its plastic dome just outside the far door. It suddenly occurred to her that the lights hadn’t just gone off in her office. Her grip around her name plaque loosened at the sound of ratcheting echoing in the corridor. Thunderlane wasn’t here to finish her off. He was just as surprised to find her here as she was to see him.

She dropped the plaque onto her desk and tried to steady her nerves.

“Ms. Vee, we need to get a mask on you. There was a spill.”

Her body shuddered with a deep, sustained tremble. She got along with adrenaline about as well as a migraine. “There wasn’t a spill. The over…”

She stopped herself. The overmare falsified one to trap me in here sounded like a great way to slap away the bone the universe saw fit to throw her.

“The lockdown was a false alarm. Millie wouldn’t acknowledge my override codes and I wound up stuck here.” Seeing Thunderlane and the stallion behind him look past her at the wreckage of her office, her tone went brittle. “I might have panicked a little.”

After a moment, Thunderlane nodded. “You’re okay now, though?”

“I’m fine. Just a little shaken up.” She stepped forward and they moved aside, allowing her to duck under the open door and step into the technicians’ office on the other side. Two of the terminals were still glowing with interrupted work still on their screens. She resisted the urge to run the rest of the way to the next door, and only barely. Only when she stepped out into the darkened corridor did she finally breathe. “Where’s Spitfire?”

“Last I saw her, she was headed upstairs to take a call from Stable-Tec. Probably figuring out how she’s going to keep the uppers happy once they hear about the blackout.” He followed her, drawing some looks from the two pegasi busy lifting their own doors further down the hall. “I can tell you’re still a little spooked, but I could use an extra set of wings opening doors if you’re… are you sure you’re okay?”

She was frowning at the floor, thoughts whirling in her head. Every year, each overseer of each Stable received a direct call from Stable-Tec HQ. Who exactly was calling, whether it be Director Applebloom or some middle manager they’d never heard of, Spitfire had never been clear on. She’d never questioned it until today, after being shoved against the wall of her own office by her own overmare. Spitfire’s words had crystallized in her mind.

Stable-Tec is dead.

There had been fear in her eyes when she said it. Real, palpable fear. The kind of fear a filly wears when she knows she’s done something to invoke the wrath of a violent adult, and the only thing left to do was wait for the beating. Sealed inside a bunker capable of shrugging off the most malevolent weapon Equestria had ever constructed, what hope could anyone on the outside have to do anything to hurt Spitfire?

Unless they had a direct line into the Stable.

And if Stable-Tec was gone, then who was calling?

Her gaze lifted to the emergency lights studded down the corridor, and it dawned on her. Spitfire couldn’t have had enough time to cover up everything Delta had uncovered. The blackout couldn’t be a coincidence. This was her punishment.

Someone was trying to kill the Stable.

Sweat was running down her mane by the time she bolted through the wrenched open door and into the darkened security office. Thunderlane was on her heels the entire way and not without complaint. He had no idea what she was doing.

If Delta was being honest with herself, she barely had any idea either. All she knew was that she didn’t have time to explain it. Thunderlane was too close to Spitfire. He would waste time arguing how nothing Delta said made sense, trying to convince her Spitfire wouldn’t do the things she did. So she let him chase her.

“Delta…” he huffed, bracing himself against the doorframe with a wing, “...what are… you doing?”

“Bolt cutters,” she said, her eyes wide as she scanned the empty cells, her nervous hooves trampling a packet of papers that had presumably fallen from a desk when the lights went out. Security was known to keep a set of bolt cutters around in the event they needed to get past a lock someone might not want them to. She spotted the lockers lined up next to the decontamination chamber door and started pulling them open one after the other until she found what she was looking for.

Yanking the tool off its hook, she held it up for Thunderlane to see. “Keep up. I’m going to need your muscles.”

She squeezed past him and back out into the Atrium, sparing the briefest look toward the sealed door of Spitfire’s office. I’ll be back for you later, she thought.

“Would you stop… for a minute and tell me… what’s going on?!”

Her hooves thumped down the steps to the bottom, followed by the unsteady clomping of the winded stallion. Ten years of sedentary work had done nothing for the former Wonderbolt’s physique, and she wasn’t exactly in peak condition either. Her legs were burning from the sudden exertion. She would have apologized to him if she thought they had time.

To his credit, he did manage to keep pace with her even if he didn’t know why he was doing it. As they ran she went over her logic over and over again, testing her own resolve to be sure she wasn’t acting on impulse or anger. That the conclusion she’d come to was anything but rock solid. Everything held up. Spitfire had been terrified to learn Delta had seen her daughter’s EVA on SOLUS. She’d run the numbers and come to the conclusion that every missile the ministries launched had impacted somewhere in Equestria. That SOLUS had been converted into an impossible weapon. And that Spitfire stood at the center of it all.

Now someone was trying to tie up loose ends by snuffing out every pegasus here. Already she could taste the air growing stale. Without power, they were trapped inside. No lever in Equestria was long enough to lift the behemoth door out of the way for them to escape. Someone out there - someone who even Spitfire feared - wanted the truth to die with Stable 10.

She skidded to a stop outside the one door in IT she knew would still have steady power. Luckily, Thunderlane and his deputies hadn’t reached the server room door by the time they found her. Still sealed on its own hydraulics, she couldn't imagine good things happening when a pair of frustrated deputies with ratchet handles tried to mangle a door that wanted to stay shut. She could feel their growing confusion as she punched her digits into the keypad mounted to the frame.

“It’s a full blackout,” Thunderlane reminded her.

The door chirped and sprang open, flooding the dim corridor with sterile white light. She didn’t wait for them as she stepped inside, her own eyes crushed into slits from the harsh fluorescents. Confused murmurs followed her into the rows of humming black obelisks, LEDs flickering from behind their cages like they hadn’t so much felt a stutter from the power outage. And that was because they hadn’t. Something Delta knew from the first day of her training was that every Stable, regardless of size or purpose, had been strung onto the same hardened network. Stable-Tec hadn’t sugar coated the reality that not every Stable would survive the centuries it would take Equestria to become habitable again, and that data stored by those dead Stables would be invaluable to those tasked with jump starting civilization. Stable-Tec, if there was still a Stable-Tec, had been nothing but obsessed with redundancy.

“Delta.”

The bolt cutters thumped against her hip as she hurried between the servers. As she did she caught sight of a technician’s cart left alongside an opened cage, cables still connecting its terminal to the server. The cutters weighed heavily in her grip, but she needed to be sure. “What?”

His tone had gotten firmer. Surprise and confusion were quickly giving way to irritation and a need to take control of the situation. “I need you to tell me what you’re doing, and explain why everyone lost power except here.”

She couldn’t blame him. He’d just chased her across half the Stable so she could bring bolt cutters into the only data center that made half the server tick. She changed direction, hoping it would throw him off, and made a bee-line toward the cart and its dormant terminal.

Stable-Tec had rules about who could and couldn’t know about its network. Tell the wrong pony and suddenly everyone knew, and then it would be a matter of time before residents started demanding to speak with other Stables to check up on friends or loved ones. Harmless communications, compounded by centuries, could spark wars. Only the overseer and their head of I.T. were privy to the network’s existence, and if they had any hope of returning to normalcy after this, that status quo needed to be maintained. At least for now.

She leaned the cutters against the cart and woke up the terminal. Rather than answer Thunderlane’s question, she posed one of her own. “What do you know about the blackout?”

He slowed to a stop a few steps away, his eyes on the bolt cutters. She picked them up and moved them to her other side.

“The generator had some kind of malfunction,” he said, watching her as she logged onto the server responsible for handling Mechanical’s data. “From what I’ve been hearing, it overloaded and tried to rip itself apart. They got it shut down before that happened.”

Delta hadn’t been down to Mechanical in at least a year, and longer than that since she last saw the heart of their Stable for herself. She couldn’t imagine what it took to stop a machine the size of a house from spinning when it didn’t want to cooperate. When she was still at Jet Stream Aerospace, the best way to shut down a malfunctioning engine was to blow it up remotely. Down here, she doubted that was an option.

She pecked at the terminal, opening Mechanical’s network log. “Was anyone hurt?”

Thunderlane hesitated. “Two casualties. They got caught by an arc.”

Her feathers paused over the keyboard. “Oh.”

He nodded. “So you understand my concern when I see you running in here, lights still on, with a set of bolt cutters in your wing.”

That was fair, but she resumed typing all the same. “I have a hunch. Give me a few seconds and I’ll tell you if I’m right.”

It wasn’t just a hunch. Every fiber of her being sang with certainty that she knew how to fix this. She flew down the log entries in search of confirmation. She needed armor. Something to keep Spitfire from bringing the entire Stable down on her head once the crisis was over. The overmare couldn’t kill her, not anymore, but she could easily use her as a scapegoat and Delta didn’t want to see what mob justice looked like when led by the mare who ended civilization.

Just as those dark thoughts trickled into her head, a single cluster of entries scrolled up onto the screen. As certain as she’d been, seeing it stole her breath away. She read them twice. Three times. Then she turned the terminal to Thunderlane to read.

10/30/77 16:50 - External Network Login - Server #75
10/30/77 16:50 - M.I.L.L.I.E. safeguards disabled.
10/30/77 16:51 - Mechanical console opened.
10/30/77 16:51 - [WARNING] System permissions disabled.
10/30/77 16:51 - Generator Operations console opened.
10/30/77 16:51 - [WARNING] Ignition Talisman governor set to: NULL
10/30/77 17:25 - [WARNING] Energy output exceeds safe maximum values.
10/30/77 17:27 - [WARNING] Energy output exceeds safe maximum values.
10/30/77 17:28 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman overheat.
10/30/77 17:28 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman overheat.
10/30/77 17:28 - [WARNING] Energy output exceeds safe maximum values.
10/30/77 17:29 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman overheat.
10/30/77 17:29 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman fracture.
10/30/77 17:29 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman fracture.
10/30/77 17:30 - [WARNING] Ignition Taliman fracture.

Thunderlane’s expression darkened with understanding. “This was deliberate.”

Delta hefted the bolt cutters, jaw clenched, and marched toward the back of the server room. She didn’t wait to see if he was coming. Thunderlane’s hooves kept stride with hers, convinced enough not to interfere with what she intended to do. The details could come later.

The floor hatch waited where it always did, ready in the event one of her poor techs needed to access the crawl space below. The last pony to crack the seal had been whoever installed it over a decade ago. With how strictly Millie monitored the temperature and humidity in this room, it was entirely possible for a century to pass before the cables showed any sign of deterioration. She bent down and gripped the handle, turned it ninety degrees and pulled hard. The oiled gaskets crackled apart and the hatch lifted away.

Thunderlane held it open as she lowered herself down. The hardened steel cutting head thunked down beside her and she leaned on the handle, her eyes already locked onto the torso-thick cylinder of cables extruding from the Stable’s outer wall.

“There we go.” She shuffled toward a heavy duty cloth cinch strap keeping the disparate bundles together.

“You’re not planning to electrocute yourself, right?”

He didn’t bother masking his concern, making her wince. Of course he was worried. He still had no idea what she was doing.

“No,” she said, pressing the cutter around the strap and snapping the handles together. The bundle bulged apart. She set down the cutters and pulled the smaller clusters further apart with her feathers, squinting at the letters printed against the insulation. “Someone out there already tried to kill us. I’m cutting them off so we can survive.”

“Out there? Outside the Stable?”

She grimaced. “So it would seem. Where are your deputies right now?”

A pause. “Guarding the hall.”

“Good.” She dug her hind hooves against a floor support and heaved her weight against a bundle as thick as one of her legs, shoving the electrified bundle away. A thick, multicolored core of fiber optic cables rolled free from underneath. “We need to keep this between you and me.”

“And the overmare,” he added.

She bit her tongue. “Sure,” she said, and sank the fat blades deep into the colorful cables.

The cutter heads sheared shut with a bright crunch of breaking silica. She pulled the handles apart and repositioned the head, taking a second bite. Nothing exploded. The servers didn’t catch fire. Her hesitation vanished. Another cut. And another. She sawed her way through the umbilical one bite at a time until sweat trickled down the bridge of her nose, fiber optics shredding apart until finally the last few stragglers remained. She dropped the cutters over them and snapped the blades together with a muttered curse, hoping it would make a difference.

She paused to catch her breath, her feathers still gripping one of the handles. “Got a radio on you?”

Stupid question. She knew he did. Voices had been crackling out of the thing since he freed her from Spitfire’s would-be prison. He didn’t sound any less dubious than before when he answered yes.

“I’m going to need it to coordinate with Mechanical before we try bringing the power back on.” She grunted as she wrapped a wing around one end of the severed data line and pulled it as far from the other stump as it would allow. They’d never work properly even if they did drift back together, but if she was good at anything it was embracing her paranoia. “Help me up.”

He stuck a charcoal wing down and she hooked it with hers, hoisting her out of the crawlspace. “So that’s it then? Crisis averted?”

“Not a fucking chance.” She took his offered radio and turned back to the servers, the plan formulating in her mind as she trotted into the rows. He followed her back to the technician’s cart. “We’re out of the woods, but that doesn’t mean the wolves are gone. Once we have power again, someone upstairs is getting her ass kicked.”

Ping-ping.

Ping-ping.

Ping-ping.

“Mmh. Aurora, turn that off.”

Sheets rustled. Ginger buried her muzzle into the back of Aurora’s neck, her own head sinking back into the warm dent in their pillow. She didn’t open her eyes. Her hooves tucked in around Aurora’s belly and pulled her a little closer, waiting for her to silence her Pip-Buck so they could drift off for another few blissful hours. It was dark in Aurora’s compartment. Ponies slept at night. Night was dark. It was all the convincing Ginger needed to slide off into another one of Tandy’s strange dreams.

Aurora shifted under her legs and grumbled something as she fumbled with her Pip-Buck. Light spilled into the room and Ginger hid from it in Aurora’s shadow, already feeling herself drifting. A long pause and the light went away.

Ping-ping.

Ping-ping.

Ginger frowned. A moment later, Aurora was pulling her leg away from her midsection. She let her fiddle with her hoof, distantly hoping it might lead to something enjoyable. Then the light returned. Another pause. Aurora mumbled a tired shit and thumped her hoof against Ginger’s foreleg.

“It’s Primrose.”

She grimaced. “What time is it?”

Aurora half groaned, half chuckled. She started to sit up. Ginger had half the mind to light her horn to stop her. They were resting. Primrose could wait.

“Come on.” Aurora shimmied her hind end onto the pillow. Ginger cracked an eye to look at the strange details of her winged cutie mark up close. “Up and at’em. Early bird and the worm. We gotta take this.”

Ping-ping.

She shuttered her eyes for a moment before opening them again to push herself up onto her butt. She squinted against the glare of her donated Pip-Buck, half wishing she could pull the stupid thing off and toss it in the corner to watch the thermite charge turn it into slag. She grunted as she sat up. “I distinctly remember telling you birds are extinct.”

Aurora smiled. Ginger couldn’t remember who told her that, but she’d believed it until Aurora insisted she’d seen one during their first night together at the ruined cabin. Now she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they weren’t all gone. Just rare.

Ping-ping.

“Yes, yes, alright.” She pulled up her hind legs and propped the screen against them, using her magic to peck the buttons until she hit the one that finally answered the call. Her Pip-Buck stuttered, then a moment later Primrose’s mildly annoyed face filled the screen. Between the two of them, Ginger was certain she was the first to hide her irritation. “Minister Primrose. I don’t think we were expecting you to reach out so soon.”

Primrose smiled that fake little smile of hers and waved a wing at them as if to dismiss any potential concerns. “Nor did I! I’m just relieved to see you kept your gift. It’ll make this much easier.”

Aurora shifted on the mattress. “Is something wrong?”

Another dismissive wave. Another porcelain smile. Wherever Primrose was, it wasn’t the oil rig or any place Ginger recognized in New Canterlot. The walls were bare cinder blocks speckled with what appeared to be mold. The camera shifted as she reached for something, giving the two of them a glimpse of several sagging metal shelves bright with rust. Somewhere offscreen, water trickled against bare cement.

“Nothing’s wrong. I only wanted to be certain that my people delivered the correct ignition talisman. I wasn’t aware there were so many variants.” She pulled her wing into frame. A black object rested in her feathers, its six symmetrical points drawing an elongated hexagon that Ginger recognized immediately. “The box says these are all Mark IV ignition talismans, but I’ll be honest, it’s all gibberish to me.”

Aurora leaned forward, rightfully suspicious after the deception Elder Coldbrook tried to get away with. “That sounds like the one we have here. Can you send a better picture to Ginger’s Pip-Buck? I don’t want to say yes to anything until I can get it confirmed by someone I trust. No offense.”

Primrose shrugged. “None taken. Give me a minute to send some shots. Talk to your people and send me the exact details of the model you need. I’ll be here for a few more hours, but sooner is preferable.”

Maybe it was due to being tired, but Ginger had to ask. “Where’s here?”

“That,” Primrose said, “is what we tend to refer to as a state secret. And speaking of invaluable government assets, I don’t suppose I need to ask about Colonel Weathers’s accommodations but I will anyway under the circumstances. She’s being treated well?”

Ginger looked to Aurora, who answered with confidence. “We assigned her a compartment for the night and agreed to allow her to tour the Stable in the morning.”

The minister’s brow tilted. “It’s past noon.”

“Oh.” Aurora frowned, then shrugged. “Shit, I guess.”

Primrose let slip a knowing smile. “Shit indeed. At the risk of being demanding, I would appreciate it if someone were to check on my colonel while you verify the correct talisman for your generator. Fair?”

They answered at the same time. “Fair.”

The little tyrant smiled. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

With that, the screen flickered and went dark. Ginger snorted at the little green depiction of a non-ghouled Applebloom trotting in place above the word disconnected. She put it away and wondered if that lonely mare was holding up alright.

“Hey,” Aurora said, bumping her shoulder. “We should get up.”

She tipped her head back, stretching her tired muscles, and hummed in the affirmative. “Do you want help?”

To answer her question, Aurora shimmied herself to the side of the mattress and dropped onto her hooves with a little grunt. Her gait still had a pronounced hobble to it that was likely to never fully go away without the help of a prosthetic limb, but that was a conversation they had yet to have. If she had to guess, Aurora would want to build her own. Ginger quietly resolved to overcome her inexperience with machines so she could be a part of that process.

She slid out of bed and offered her back for Aurora to hold onto, but she declined. “I gotta get used to this, right?”

Ginger pecked her cheek then lit her horn, grasping the bottom lip of the compartment door in one aura while slinging on Aurora’s saddlebags with another. Aurora didn’t need any more weight on her hind leg than she was already putting on it, and Ginger wasn’t about to leave the stone tucked inside sit unattended in a busy Stable. “Just don’t overdo it. I don’t want to have to carry you.”

She lifted the door, catching Aurora’s grin out of the corner of her eye. “I carried you the entire way here, Ms. Ginger.”

“Let me rephrase,” she said, smirking beneath an arched brow. “You don’t want me to have to carry you.”

The door thumped shut behind them and as they stepped into the light traffic of the corridor, several eyes jumped straight to her horn. She flushed a little, unsure whether she should say hello or just smile and ignore them, and all the while she could tell Aurora was still grinning at her.

“Dearheart,” she murmured, “keep that up and I’ll find a way to turn your mane orange.”

Aurora limped alongside her, expression unchanged. “Thirteen-year-old Aurora beat you to it.”

It was a fight not to laugh at the image that conjured in her mind, but she was quickly distracted by the sight of an approaching stallion who was trying hard not to be seen staring at her forehead and doing a terrible job of it. She sighed, knowing well in advance that this would be an unavoidable aspect of living in a Stable full of pegasi. It did little to prepare her for the real thing, and it was clear there wasn’t much she could do about it. They would need time to adjust to her and vice versa.

Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have some fun with it.

“Okay,” she said. The gloomy corridor began glowing with amber light as she looked at Aurora. “Up you go.”

Aurora blinked. “Up I wh– waugh!”

She let out a devious little laugh as her magic swept Aurora’s hooves off the floor and into the air. Aurora groaned as she rolled onto her back, legs bent uselessly toward the ceiling, and glowered at Ginger as she floated alongside her. Several pegasi stopped what they were doing to watch the absurd display, some out of concern and the rest out of intense curiosity. It was likely their first time seeing magic. For Aurora, however, it had become old hat.

“Har-har,” she yucked, “The joke’s on you. This is nice.”

To emphasize her claim, Aurora stretched and tucked her forelegs behind her head while letting the white tip of her tail drag along the floor.

“You’re collecting dust,” Ginger chuckled.

Aurora shrugged her wings. “Didn’t I tell you that I moonlight as a mop?”

“You’re a strange mare, Aurora.”

“You love it.”

She smirked. “Against all odds, I do. While you’re lounging, maybe you could point me in the direction we should be going.”

Aurora bent her neck back until she was looking forward, albeit upside-down. She wore a toothy grin as she earned herself several double-takes from her fellow residents, and Ginger began to realize it wasn’t just her magic that was attracting their attention. Several pegasi visibly flushed at the sight of Aurora with her belly, among other attributes, bared for all to see. It wasn’t until Ginger noticed a visibly annoyed stallion holding his open wing directly across his daughter’s line of sight did she realize they were doing something wrong. Aurora was either oblivious or had thicker skin for the disapproving glares being levied by her neighbors, because she did nothing to hide herself from them.

“We’re going all the way to the end of the hall to where those mesh lift gates are. The stairs are right next to–”

She sputtered when Ginger slowed, turning Aurora back onto her hooves and setting her as gently onto the ground as she could without disturbing her injury. That done, she doused her horn and continued down the corridor, pointedly ignoring the eyes that followed her.

“Woah, hey!” Aurora limped after her. “Are you okay?”

She took a breath and offered a small nod. “I might have thought you were exaggerating when you told me how much the ponies here value their clothing.”

It took several seconds for Aurora’s confusion to resolve into immediate understanding. It wasn’t often Ginger saw her show her embarrassment, but judging by the way she looked at the floor she could tell it had little to do with her neighbors. “Yeah. Sorry. I wasn’t joking about that. Folks around here can be…”

“Prudes?”

“That.”

Ginger flicked her tail with irritation, then grew more irritated that doing so only drew more attention. “You’re okay with it? The staring?”

Aurora shrugged with a resigned smile. She tipped a feather toward the end of the corridor where a tired looking pegasus was giving a doorstop a little kick to secure it beneath the open stairwell door. He glanced at them, stopped, and his muzzle curled into a friendly smile.

“If they stare, they stare.” She gestured at a mural splashed across the end of the corridor depicting a pastoral scene of a city in the clouds. Pegasi hung stationary against a blue sky, some treading air, laughing, socializing, while others held their hooves forward to cut through the open air. The only pegasi wearing anything were a trio of Wonderbolts in the distant background. Everyone else clung to the sky in their bare coats. “It’s not like they don’t know how it used to be.”

They stepped into the stairwell, and Aurora dropped her wing over Ginger’s back and held on as they descented. Ginger noticed her wince a little as her hind hoof dropped onto each step. Her hip was already starting to bother her.

“When I was younger,” she continued, her voice echoing off the walls as she hopped into position to tackle the next flight down, “my mom used to tell me how the first generations never wore their jumpsuits all that much unless they were doing dirty work, like the stuff we do in Mechanical.”

She understood what Aurora meant, but she lifted her eyebrow anyway.

“You’re nasty.” Aurora grinned at her without skipping a beat. “Over time more pegasi started wearing theirs while they were on the job, no matter the job, until the ones trotting around without them were the odd ones out. Folks get embarrassed, so they cover up, which leads to more embarrassment and more covering up until everyone’s doing it and no one remembers how it started.”

They made room for a stallion passing the opposite way. Ginger set her jaw when she caught him looking back at them, gaze wandering.

Aurora noticed, too, and shook her head. “Fast forward to today.”

She processed it in silence for the next few flights. She didn’t doubt there was something to be said about how Stable 10 got to be so insecure about something so insignificant, but a question still lingered.

“Then why do you do it?”

Aurora paused before answering. “Because there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s not like I’m pulling myself open for everyone.” She used her free wing to gesture at herself. “If the princesses could sit on their thrones and not care if the world saw their teats, then it’s stupid for me to feel like my life is ruined just because someone snuck a glance under my tail.”

She stopped to take a steadying breath. Ginger could only sympathize. She knew all too well what it felt like to choose a path she knew was right, that harmed no one, and yet still felt like she had to defend herself whenever some stranger walked into her shop and expressed surprise when they saw she was still in business. It tended to be exhausting.

Aurora sighed. “Besides, it’s hot work around the generator. Once those jumpsuits get sweaty they start sticking, and when that happens you might as well be naked for all the good they do.”

“You paint a colorful picture,” she murmured. As they turned with the railing again, a group of workers entered the stairwell behind them, effectively ending the topic. “I get the feeling there are a lot of things here that’ll take time to adjust to.”

Aurora squeezed her around the barrel and smiled. “I’m glad you’re here.”

As they descended the last of the stairs they came across a slow moving line of pegasi wrapping the outside wall, all of them carrying one or several identical containers. The Stable 10 logo embossed into the metal threw her initially but as they began excusing themselves on their way past the line, she recognized the outdated flat cylinders for what they were. Canteens. Aurora didn’t have to say anything for Ginger to know the sight of the water line deeply bothered her. It only made sense that without power, the Stable wouldn’t have pumps to move water to the upper levels.

The line curled into an open doorway where a sheet of paper hung on the wall in a plastic sleeve. It was a checklist. As they passed, Ginger lit her horn to better read the stout markered letters.

A startled murmur rippled back up the line at the sight of Ginger’s horn, causing her to immediately douse the light and avoid their stares. Another reminder that adjusting to this life was going to take some time, for her and for those around her.

She stole a glance at Aurora and watched her struggle with the descent, her face flickering with discomfort with each step but still pushing forward in spite of it. Her worry eased. It would be worth it.

She surprised herself by recognizing the smell of Mechanical well before arriving. The same odor of grease and solvent tickled her nose as it did when Applebloom led her and Roach down to the bottom of the bunker beneath the crater of Stable-Tec HQ. A part of her still felt guilt for never telling Aurora the truth about what happened there, but every time she considered it she ended up reaching the same conclusion. Doing so would only inflict unnecessary pain, and even if it didn’t, there was no sense in risking that now.

They were here now. Home. As little as she trusted the Enclave, Primrose had demonstrated nothing but enthusiasm in her efforts to get Aurora back to where she came from. There were many things Ginger felt guilt over, but exploiting the so-called minister for their own gain wasn’t one of them.

Let the Enclave and Rangers duke it out like they always have. The fact that there were still pockets of the world like this Stable where she and Aurora could live out a quiet life together was a blessing. She could handle the smell of a little brake cleaner.

Unlike the deafening halls beneath Applebloom’s bunker, however, the steel-clad walls of Stable 10’s Mechanical wing greeted them with ghostly silence. She could feel Aurora’s wing tensing around her as the stairwell door clapped shut behind them, the sound of its latch echoing in the distance like a lonely gunshot. A few voices could be heard beyond the narrow corridor that led to the main workfloor that Aurora once described as a buzzing hive of constant activity. The emergency lights down here did little to help penetrate the wider gulfs, leaving those still down here to navigate by flashlight or the green glare of their Pip-Bucks.

One such light turned in their direction as she led Aurora onto the workfloor. It held there, masking its owner, for several seconds before it dipped and the pegasus carrying it began making their way toward them. As they approached, Aurora glanced down and activated her Pip-Buck to better illuminate the darkness.

“Luna’s left nut,” the approaching stallion blurted. “I thought Sledge was pulling my tail when he said you made it back!”

Ginger jerked with surprise when she realized the stallion was hardly a few paces away from them, his jet black coat blending so easily with the surroundings that his eyes seemed to float on their own.

“Hey Carbide.” Aurora took a step forward and let the stallion slap a wing around her back in a friendly, but somewhat distant hug.

“About time you got–” Ginger winced as his gaze inevitably shifted to her injury. “Holy shit, Pinfeathers. What happened?”

He let go and she shrank back a little to be closer to Ginger’s side. “It’s… a long story.”

“Are you okay?”

She lifted a wing and tipped it side to side. “Taking it day by day, but yeah. I’m okay. This is Ginger, by the way.”

Carbide looked to her as if seeing her for the first time, and as expected his eyes went wide at the sight of her horn. “And you’re a unicorn.”

She couldn’t help but smile a little. “So I’m told. And are you the Carbide who was put in charge of containing the damaged talisman?”

He laughed, shaking his head. “For all the good it did. If I would’ve known it only had a week left before it ran out of juice, I wouldn’t have spent all that time designing a container for the thing. Now it’s just a paperweight.”

“I can think of a few ponies who would pay good caps for that paperweight.”

Carbide regarded her with open confusion. “Caps?”

Aurora waved him off before they could get too far into the weeds. “Later. I actually need to talk to you about our talisman. I know the power’s out but I was hoping you might still have the spec sheets I sent you about a week-ish ago.”

Carbide quirked his lip. “The ones that topside hotshot whoever promised you?”

“Those ones, yeah.”

He nodded, just a little perplexed. “The ones you sent here.”

“No shit, Carbide. That’s what I said.”

“The ones you sent from the Pip-Buck on your leg right now.”

She blinked. Carbide smiled.

“Fuck me sideways.” She gripped Ginger with one wing and glowered at her own Pip-Buck as she pecked at the buttons with the other. “Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“Been a long coupla weeks, huh?”

She shook her head as she brought up her old sent messages. “You have no idea. Did Sledge mention I learned how to fly?”

“Wow,” he murmured, then again as it sank in. “Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Fucking flying. What’s that like?”

“Terrifying.” She pulled up the message and opened the attachment she’d sent not long after killing Gallow. It was any wonder she remembered having sent it at all. “Exhilarating. Ginger taught me.”

Ginger’s eyes widened at suddenly being thrust into the spotlight again. Carbide stared at her as if he were unsure if it was true or not.

“I only helped a little at the beginning,” she clarified, afraid he might ask her to teach him too. “Aurora picked the rest up on her own once she got the hang of it.”

“Wow.” He seemed stuck on the word. “And you two are… together?”

Unseen by Ginger, Aurora glanced up from her Pip-Buck and shot him a look of warning. He cleared his throat and pretended to see something interesting on her screen.

“So yeah, anyway,” he stumbled, tapping the photo of the spec sheet on Aurora’s foreleg, “that’s a copy of the documents for the mark four talisman our generator uses. Used. If you look down a few pages you’ll hit the technical specs. Height, width, diameter, fractal strength, all that stuff.”

Ginger glanced at the photos of the weathered paper, then keyed on her own Pip-Buck and navigated to her message queue where a single unread message from Primrose waited to be read. “I’m fairly certain Primrose said the one she had was a mark four.”

Aurora leaned against her to better see the photos Primrose had sent. “That’s what I heard. Is it a match?”

The photos were a little fuzzy, but the six sided obsidian gemstone Primrose had positioned atop what looked like a reinforced cooler lid was hard to mistake for anything else. She’d taken several shots of it from multiple angles, each one carving away any doubts they might have had. In the final shot, a slip of paper had been set beneath the stone. Neat, curling letters spooled out across it.

Mk. IV Ignition Talisman, S/N #43,028.

A black feather reached in and tapped the screen. “Yep, that’s the same one I pulled out of the generator.”

Aurora looked up at Carbide. “How sure are you?”

He shrugged. Ginger kept her mouth shut.

“Hundred percent. Easy.”

She watched Aurora hesitate. “It looks weird. Is it supposed to be darker in the middle?”

“Aurora,” she said, wishing she had a wing of her own with which to give a reassuring squeeze. “That’s the one. I’m sure of it.”

Aurora chewed her lip for a while longer before eventually nodding. “Okay, um… yeah. Okay. Go ahead. Let her know.”

The half-finished repairs on the surrounding workbenches glinted with the gentle light of her magic as she typed up a confirmation and sent it on its way, ferried along a convoluted system of wires and radio relays that she doubted she would ever fully understand. Still holding onto her, Aurora let go of some of the stress she’d been keeping inside and blew out a breath.

Carbide shifted on his hooves, evidently not comfortable with silence. “So that’s all it takes? We’re getting a replacement and my containment box goes in the recycler?”

She couldn’t tell whether he was actually whining or just putting on a facade. Aurora apparently knew him well enough not to have that problem, and promptly flicked her free wing against his shin.

“I’m sure it’s a very nice box, Carb.”

He grinned. “Want to see it?”

Aurora hesitated.

“Come on.” He turned, taking a step to somewhere further back in the cavernous space. “My guys did overnights working on the thing. You gotta at least take a look at it before we trash it.”

Aurora opened her mouth to protest but he stared back as if the single most vital strand of their friendship anchored on her seeing what he made. Ginger did her best not to look put out by the detour when Aurora turned to gauge her reaction. She smiled back, offering half a shrug to let her know it was fine. They weren’t under the gun anymore, and this was barely a pebble in the road compared to the craters they kept tumbling into in their efforts to reach Fillydelphia.

Relieved to see she wasn’t bothered, Aurora waved a feather at Carbide. “Alright, alright. Let’s go see your magic box.”

There was a flicker of excitement in the stallion’s eye that, for a moment, belied all the silent gloom around them. She couldn’t help but feel a little encouraged as he turned and led them through rows of workbenches, past battered yet fully stocked tool chests, around plastic carts labeled SCRAPS, TEXTILES, FLAMMABLE and many other things that she only had a passing understanding of. As they walked, Aurora pointed out a lone workbench set next to the aisle that she said used to be hers when she apprenticed. Ginger smiled a little at the unmistakable hoof-shaped dents on the metal surface. They probably weren’t hers, but she knew enough of Aurora by now not to bet against it.

She tried as best she could to explain the workflow, though Ginger couldn’t bring herself to admit she wasn’t retaining much. It seemed like anything that broke down in the Stable that was small enough to transport down to Mechanical for refurbishment wound up here. Somewhere off to her left, too far in the impenetrable dark to properly see, were sorting tables normally occupied by pegasi old enough to apprentice for work. Some items ended up on workbenches like Aurora’s, usually the things they could fix with the tools they had. Some were diverted to a holding bay while specialist workers could identify more complicated problems, usually mended with the help of the pegasi up in Fabrication. The rest were often sent to the recyclers; a series of room-sized machines attached to Sanitation which were tasked with breaking down the Stable’s refuse into their component materials.

It startled her how a solitary community with a population that rivaled Blinder’s Bluff could generate so little waste. Even Junction City with all of its two hundred or less permanent residents had a garbage heap not too far from town. And yet here Aurora, her family, and the families of so many others had grown up without need for wealth, expansion, or influence.

It was any wonder why Roach hadn’t fought to earn his place here when he knew Blinder’s Bluff sat atop a Stable of its own, its potential entirely untapped by the Rangers who controlled it. Maybe someday soon their gardens would bear its first harvest and Roach would finally be recognized for the stallion he once was and not the parasite much of the wasteland treated him as today.

A pang of deep loneliness shot through her as she realized she would likely never see him again.

Aurora squeezed her ribs, her eyes worried. “You okay?”

She shook off her melancholy and did her best to smile. “I am now.”

The exchange went utterly unnoticed by Carbide who, in his eagerness to show them the fruits of his labor, had gotten a ways ahead of them. They dropped into a trot and caught up just as he reached what appeared to be the entrance to yet another Stable. A single, unbroken wall of steel panels stretched from one abyss to another. Grease, dirt, and metal shavings clung to the bottom panels where work had up until recently been done. Ginger took care not to touch any of it as they followed him through the single open door at the end of the aisle and into another darkened space that smelled strongly of burnt carbon.

“Watch your hooves,” he warned, swinging his flashlight down toward a floor made up of symmetrical square panels. “We haven’t closed anything up yet.”

As promised, many of the panels had been pulled away and stacked into shallow piles nearby. She lit her horn, forming a simple shield in the shape of a sphere that hovered above the ground a few steps ahead of them. Thick bundles of conduit, insulated wire, plumbing and Celestia knew what else snaked around the gaps in the floor. It was nothing like what she had seen at the bottom of Stable 1. No stains, no rust, no decay. Only pristine components whose purpose she could only guess at. To a scrapper, a place like this would be a gold mine. It was no wonder the Enclave went to such efforts to be the first to a Stable when it collapsed. These were the materials that spelled the difference between a town and a prosperous city. They were why the Bluff had become the economic hub of the eastern wastelands.

She levitated the light higher to illuminate even more. Doing so finally caught Carbide’s attention and, to his credit, he didn’t stop in his tracks to gawk even if he did gawk a little just the same.

“Woah,” he said, doing his best to keep his eyes on where he was going.

Normally she would have answered him, but she found her attention dominated by the appearance of the massive machine at the center of the room. Any semblance of polite dignity she had went out the window as the Stable’s generator loomed out of the darkness. Her eyes widened. While it paled in comparison to the vaguely locomotive shaped behemoths that powered Stable-Tec’s network, it was evident that this entire space had been constructed for the sole purpose of housing this house-sized monolith. For a split second she felt as if they had stepped into a shrine and it occurred to her that a single talisman, a black stone she had held in her own magic, was the catalyst that made it possible for all of this to work.

How did ponies before the war not live in constant fear of the things they were creating? And why had seemingly no one stopped long enough to ask whether it was all worth the risk?

She tried not to dwell as Carbide showed them to a conspicuous gray roll cart that had been pushed up against the generator’s striped guardrail. The cart itself looked as if someone had detonated a grenade under it, gathered all the shards, and melted them back together. In Ginger’s experience something so beaten and used had no business still standing upright, and yet there it was, more repair than original. More Stable 10 recycling in action. She had to admire their persistence.

Resting on the top shelf sat a glass cube reinforced along the seams with heavy steel brackets. It didn’t look like much until she drew her magic closer to better see and noticed the glass panes reflecting her light with an unsettlingly iridescent shimmer that forced her to wrinkle her nose and look briefly away. The patterns forming along its surface were dizzying in their complexity, tricking her into seeing depth that wasn’t possible. She looked to Carbide with some reticence.

“So, ah, yeah. This is the talisman containment system I designed.” Carbide’s eyes flicked up at the glowing sphere floating overhead with a touch of nervousness. “My magic box, if you want to call it that.”

Aurora eyed the device with a chuckle. “Oh, I’m absolutely calling it that. Ginger, bring your light closer. This thing is wild.”

She shook her head. “I can see it just fine.”

Aurora paused, noticed her discomfort, and mercifully chose to divert Carbide’s attention from it. “Explain how this thing works. I don’t see any power connections.”

Carbide slipped his wing beneath the cube and lifted it from the cart. The strange glass rasped against his feathers as they slid against some sort of texturing. “That’s because there aren’t any. We still don’t know for sure if there was anything in the talisman that could have caused it to deplete so early in its lifecycle, so I didn’t want to risk connecting it to anything that might lead back to its eventual replacement.”

Ginger hummed. “You were trying to quarantine it, in other words.”

He nodded. “Flux was the first to suggest it. Being a black crystal and all, she thought the talisman looked an awful lot like the ones the history books show King Sombra growing. We didn’t have magic experts to consult so I thought it’d be best to lean on the side of caution.”

She could appreciate that even if the logic was flawed. She’d lit her apartment above the store with crystals for years and the only problem she ever had with that was when the radstorms rolled through and snuffed the things out.

Something she didn’t have to worry about anymore. She smiled a little, watching Aurora limp closer to the container. “How did you make the glass do that?”

“I didn’t. Matte Press up in Fabrication figured it out on his own. He calls it ‘fractal printing.’ It’s the same process the ministries used to manufacture M.A.S.T. talismans way back when, but we don’t have the equipment to get anywhere close to the granular detail they were working on.” Carbide unlatched the lid and pointed his flashlight into the box to demonstrate.

She gasped. Aurora cursed. Radiant shards grew from all six sides like shifting, glowing spines. Aurora nearly fell as she backed away, catching herself at the last minute on the railing. Ginger ran to her side immediately, her horn glowing in case she needed to drop a shield between them and the device.

But nothing happened. The tendrils of light continued to shimmer through the glass, shaking a little now with Carbide’s chuckling, but the display was ultimately benign.

“Crap, Aurora, since when were you ever this jumpy?” He clicked off the light and closed the lid. “Need help getting up?”

Ginger answered with a flat note of warning. “She’s quite fine. Are you finished with the demonstration?”

“Ah… yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

She nodded, once, and glanced down at the slim screen of her Pip-Buck. “We should go. It’s already past one and we haven’t eaten anything yet.”

Aurora’s wing settled across her back once more. “Thanks for showing us your thing, but yeah. Doctors would throw a fit if they found out I didn’t eat.”

Carbide nodded rather than call out her white lie. Ginger wasn’t sure she was willing to even give him that much. She didn’t like him. Surprises like the one he just pulled were what got good ponies killed.

He lifted a feather to his forehead in a mock salute. “I’ll see you later, then?”

Ideally not.

“We’ll be back down once the talisman arrives.” Aurora put some weight on her as she turned toward the way they came. “Don’t throw away that box, either. Who knows if we might need it?”

He grunted. “Not like the recyclers are working anyway. See you later, bosslady. It was nice meeting you, Ginger.”

She smiled at him but refrained from responding, leading Aurora back through the door and down the rows of empty workbenches in pensive silence. She didn’t care about Carbide, but she could tell by her silence that she’d embarrassed Aurora. When they reached the stairs, Aurora held onto the doorframe with her wing and stopped them.

“You didn’t have to be rude to him.”

“He nearly made you fall.”

“I can handle a fall, Ginger.”

“I know you can.”

“Then let me.” Aurora stared at her unblinkingly, driving her point home. “We’re not in the wastelands anymore. We’re safe here. You don’t need to protect me down here. Okay?”

She couldn’t agree to that, but she could see that Aurora wouldn’t be satisfied until she knew she’d at least try. She took a deep breath and exhaled.

“Okay,” she affirmed. “I’m sorry.”

Aurora watched her with those vibrant green eyes of hers as if searching for more. Eventually her shoulder relaxed and she let go of the doorframe. “Don’t worry,” she said as she mounted the first step. “We’ll adjust to this. I promise.”

A tiny smile crossed her lips and she nodded, hoping that was true. She did feel safe here. It was the other pegasi who bewildered her. Seeing so many of them in one place and not a single one of them with their guard up was beyond alien. It felt irresponsible, as if they were happy to be so vulnerable.

Hopefully with time she would learn what it felt like not to worry. She’d gotten her first taste of this this morning when they woke and it had been a tiny piece of bliss. It would be nice to have that again.

Aurora nudged her shoulder. “Hey.”

“Hay is for horses.”

She blinked at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “One of my customers was a gryphon. He… made an impression.”

“Huh.” Aurora grimaced as they reached the landing and seemed to deflate a little as they turned to climb the next. “So, speaking of making impressions, we should salvage the one we have with Weathers and let her stretch her legs.”

“Is that really a good idea?” She lit her horn, forming a cushion under Aurora’s missing leg to ease the worst of the climb. The breath of relief she made felt good to hear. “She’s a colonel. They don’t give those pins out to just anyone.”

Aurora winced a little as she pushed into the cup of her magic. “Primrose expects her to be treated well. I don’t want to burn any bridges with her until we’ve crossed them.”

She wrinkled her nose. “And you’re okay with her gathering intelligence on your Stable?”

“What’s she going to find that the Enclave hasn’t already found in a dozen others?”

There was that. She frowned as she tried to come up with an answer to her question, but nothing came to mind. It occurred to her that Aurora was probably right. The Enclave had cracked open more than enough failed Stables to know what to expect when entering a new one. Even now, Ginger was seeing the similarities between Aurora’s home and the several shelters their journey had taken them to. Unless Stable 10 was hiding Equestria’s lost princesses or the secret to time travel, there likely wasn’t anything to be found here they hadn’t seen already.

But still. They were the Enclave.

“I suppose if she’s kept under guard she won’t be able to do much harm,” she hedged.

Aurora snorted. “That mare is huge, but she’s not piss-off-an-entire-Stable huge.”

On the stairs above them, she could already hear the voices from the water line. “Mm.”

She bore the stares of the pegasi still waiting in line for water, doing her best not to let her discomfort show. They murmured, some averted their eyes, and a few little ones could be forgiven for pointing at her with mouths agape. She smiled a little more genuinely at them. They reminded her of the foals they freed from the slave cages outside Kiln, all squeals and curiosity, oblivious for the moment to the lives they’d escaped thanks to the distraction a little levitation provided. That may not work here, but she decided she would find a way.

By the time they climbed the final step, she could hear the pain in Aurora’s breathing. Her hind leg clicked with each step now, though whether that added to or relieved her discomfort she was too afraid to ask. So as they stepped back into the Level 1 corridor, she asked the next closest question.

“Is it too early to start thinking about getting you a prosthetic?”

Aurora’s eyebrows went up. “Um. Yeah, once the power’s back on, that’s going to be pretty high up on the to-do list.”

She paused to think. “Is… there a place here that makes those?”

“Oh, yeah. There’s this little Ma n’ Pa shop in the Atrium that sells replacement hooves, legs, all that good stuff.”

A quick look at Aurora let her know she was joking. She shook her head with a quiet laugh. “You’re terrible.”

“I blame the endorphins.” She gripped her a little more tightly, trying to pull some of the weight off her third step. “But, really, I was thinking I would take a stab at building my own.”

The immediate question in Ginger’s mind was whether or not the Stable had a doctor available who might be more fitted to, well, fit an artificial limb to their patient. She admittedly didn’t know much about them beyond the slapdash variety of limbs she’d seen carrying the odd traveler in and out of Junction City, but she wasn’t so sheltered not to know it was more than a matter of strapping two-by-four to someone’s body.

The longer she thought about it, the more she realized Aurora probably knew that too. Fixing things had been her life prior to leaving the Stable. Losing a leg to Ironshod was more than likely a personal challenge she needed to overcome. She was trying to prove to herself that she could undo the damage he’d done.

Her doubts subsided.

“Maybe we could work on building that together?”

Aurora immediately perked up. “Yes! I mean, yeah. Definitely.”

“Easy, girl.”

“Nope. Now I’m excited. I’m excited and it’s all your fault.”

She smiled. “I regret nothing.”

As luck would have it, they hadn’t been the only ones thinking about giving the colonel a break from confinement. Making their way back to the Atrium, they walked into an unexpected scene. Or, more accurately, they heard it from the corridor.

Shouting. A shrill, ragged voice echoed out from the Atrium and hardly so much as a sound filled the breaths in between. A crowd had formed, encircling the scene with quiet disbelief. Ginger and Aurora had to push their way through, nudging pegasi aside until they could see what was happening. What they saw made Ginger’s hackles rise.

Colonel Weathers stood, flanked by two armed deputies, at the center of the gathering. She stood stock still, shoulders locked, her eyes fixed forward well past where the mare shouting obscenities leveled a single haggard feather at her uniform. A cracked bowl lay discarded on the floor. Some kind of thin soup was already in the process of congealing around it.

“Luna’s night,” she whispered, the mark on the ghoul’s hip unmistakable even from a distance. She’d known she would be here, but it was something different to see her in person. With every violent gesture of her wing, the gold plates of her necklace swung out and thumped her chest. “That’s–”

“Rainbow Dash,” Aurora finished, just as taken aback as Ginger. “Yeah. Looks like she’s making friends. Where the fuck is Sledge?”

A stallion beside her was fast to answer. “Overstallion went down to Agriculture after letting the military mare out for a walk. Apparently she introduced herself in the food line and Rainbow Dash lost it.”

“Over what?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Something about her uniform.”

That didn’t make sense. Ginger turned back to the one-sided dressing-down and watched the deputies trying and failing to get her attention long enough to defuse her. Rainbow just shouted above them, shouting obscenity after obscenity at the colonel about her uniform, her decorations, the Enclave…

“Shit. We need to get them away from each other.”

Aurora let out an exasperated sigh. “I’m open to ideas.”

“Weathers respects you. Take her somewhere else. I’ll keep Rainbow Dash occupied… that feels weird to say.”

“Something else to get used to.” Aurora started limping toward the colonel. “Don’t break her. She’s a national artifact.”

Wonderful. She trotted away from the crowd to the irate Element of Loyalty.

“YOU IDOLIZE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH!! THE ENCLAVE ARE FUCKING MURDERERS AND YOU’RE WEARING THEIR FUCKING UNIFORM!!”

Ginger braced herself and planted her hooves in front of the same ghoul Roach once described in noncommittal details, sharing little more than the nickname he’d given her and the fact that she tended to be feral with fleeting moments of lucidity in between. For several seconds Rainbow Dash didn’t even acknowledge her, simply jabbing her pointed wing over Ginger’s head as she dispensed her vitriol.

Then, finally, the once proud heroine paused to level her magenta eyes toward her. “Can you fucking move?!”

Behind her, Aurora was already leading Weathers and her escorts into the crowd. Ginger took a breath and summoned enough courage to respond. “I’d like to speak to you in private.”

“I’m not talking to you.” Rainbow pushed her aside and stepped forward, verging on pursuing the colonel. “HEY! I’M NOT FINISHED WITH YOU YET!!”

She lit her horn, forming a narrow barrier to block her path. A low murmur went up among the onlookers.

Rainbow stopped and turned, her eyes smoldering. “Put this Twilight Sparkle magic bullshit away before I snap that horn off your head. I said I’m not done with her.”

Her heart slammed against her ribs. She hadn’t felt this nervous since she packed up her belongings and left New Canterlot. This wasn’t some wasteland nobody she could overpower and walk away from. This was an icon of the old world wanting to blacken the eye of a representative of the faction whose hooves this Stable’s wellbeing now rested in. There was no room for error. Not with what felt like a hundred eyes watching this unfold.

“You are done with her.”

Rainbow’s lip curled away from her teeth, readying another insult, when she looked to where Weathers had gone and realized she couldn’t see her. The colonel was gone with only a narrow gap in the crowd to have marked her passage.

She turned fully on Ginger. “Well fuck you, too. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

“I still need to speak with you.”

Rainbow scoffed and walked around her, stopping only to pick the chipped bowl off the ground. “Make an appointment.”

Now that it was clear the fight was over, the crowd had begun to disperse. Several lingered, outnumbering those who had left, and they found pockets of like minded pegasi to gossip with in the hopes that something might flare up again. To her credit, Rainbow ignored them completely as she made her way around what was some kind of hastily assembled food line and retrieved a damp rag. Ginger watched her bend down and start wiping up the spilled soup.

“Do you want some help?”

“No,” she said, her tone brittle. “Thank you.”

At least she was coming down from whatever had set her off. She wondered if Roach had told Rainbow what the Enclave was during her moments of clarity or if she’d found out through some other means. The latter seemed more likely. As much as Ginger hated the Enclave for the pain, death, and suffering they inflicted in the name of restoring the old ways, she’d always been able to control the worst of her emotions.

This mare in front of her couldn’t, and the more she watched, the more Ginger thought she could see the scars of trauma.

Even Rainbow Dash appeared to understand she’d crossed a line. Sensing Ginger wasn’t going away, she glared up at her. “What?”

No judgment. Keep it simple.

“Can we go somewhere private and talk?”

Rainbow looked up at the ceiling in frustration. “How many times do I have to tell you no? I don’t know you. Go… find a lightbulb to screw in, I don’t care. I have to clean this up.”

She stood and deposited the bowl in a waste bin at the end of the food line. After pausing long enough to calm herself, she tossed the rag onto the line and started setting lids over the open pots.

Ginger stepped up to the opposite side and assessed the mess. “Are you really going to pack this all up by yourself?”

Rainbow glanced up and over to the far corner of the Atrium where three pegasi in matching aprons kept their distance. “Looks that way.”

“Ah. I suppose it does.”

She looked down the line. Several soup pots still steamed atop chemical burners, probably well on their way to forming skins. Empty bowls sat stacked on a bus cart near the waste bin. Dirty spoons bloomed out from several of them like weeds. More lay in trays on the bottom shelf.

“These all need to go to the kitchen?” She hoped there was a kitchen. They couldn’t possibly throw everything in a recycler.

Rainbow pursed her lips and raised her brow as if to say, yes, obviously the dishes went to the kitchen, but she stopped short of saying as much. The worst of the anger had gone out of her. Now she was beginning to realize she would have to deal with its fallout.

“I’ll help.”

She endured the look of incredulity Rainbow shot her as she rounded the service line, summoned her magic, and lifted two of the soup pots off their burners. “My name is Ginger, by the way. Where’s the kitchen?”

Rainbow opened her mouth to protest, stopped, then closed it. She flicked a feather toward a tidy little storefront that sported a row of booths and half a dozen freestanding tables. A lightly tarnished sign mounted to the half wall above the entrance dubbed it the Brass Bit in stylish, cursive script. She suspected the tarnish was a patina, and it certainly worked.

A section of the serving counter had been left propped open. Before Rainbow could find a reason to object, she hurried off with both pots in tow.

The space behind the restaurant was less of a kitchen and more of a nook. An oven, fryer, a wide flat stovetop and a pair of metal sink basins occupied one tiled wall while the other appeared to be a solid countertop sectioned off for dish storage, vegetable cutting, and other prep work. At the end of the line stood a familiar door that gave Ginger pause. It wasn’t the same freezer, but it was close enough. She set the pots onto the cold stovetop and tried not to think about it.

She returned to the Atrium and picked up the last pot. Rainbow said nothing, but she didn’t stop her either. It went on the stove next to the other two. After squinting at the controls, she figured out how to turn the burners on their lowest settings and arranged the pots so they would stay warm.

They continued like that for several minutes. Rainbow wiped down the surfaces while Ginger pulled the dirty dishes out of her way. Only when the bowls and spoons were in the sink, the chemical burners doused, and the remaining dishware picked up where residents had left them around the Atrium did Rainbow finally acknowledge her.

“You’re the unicorn who helped Aurora.”

It wasn’t a question so much as it was a statement of fact. Ginger didn’t know what to do with that, so she simply nodded.

“I guess the horn gives it away,” she continued, wrapping her feathers over the edge of the waste bin and pushing it toward the kitchen. It trundled along on rollers mounted to the base. Clever design, Ginger thought.

Rainbow’s eyes dipped to her saddlebags as she pushed past her. Ginger braced the motley stack of bowls in her magic and rolled the bus cart after her. “Stable-Tec Field Support. Bet it took some work to get those restored.”

“They’re part of the reason I wanted to speak to you.”

Rainbow nodded, pretending to be interested. The wheels of the trash can stuttered over the kitchen threshold where she parked it, bundled the bag shut in her wing, and carried it to the freezer door. Ginger stopped short of following and watched Rainbow pull the door open and set the bag alongside several others. She wondered where else the residents here had been forced to stow their garbage.

The door pulled shut and slapped against the gaskets, making Ginger jump.

Rainbow kept her eyes low and turned to leave. Ginger felt herself tensing as Rainbow started tracking toward the narrow gap between her and the door, but in a moment of pure impulse she moved to block her.

“I would really prefer to do this now.”

Rainbow’s necklace swung forward with a soft jingle when she stopped. They stood there, staring at one another in the hopes the other would back down for what seemed like an eternity before, finally, Rainbow grit her teeth and stepped away. She paced back into the kitchen, shaking her head as she bit back something she clearly wanted to say, then turned and leaned her gaunt shoulder against the countertop.

“I’m having a real hard time deciding whether you’re a fan, a history nerd, or just nosy.” She gestured back and forth between them. “We don’t know each other, and I sure don’t know your friend. I get that you two are helping the Stable but what you’re doing right now is seriously weirding me out. And if you’re just here to lecture me about what I said out there, do yourself a favor and save it. Sledge is going to be pissed enough for the both of us, and that toy soldier bitch deserved it.”

Silence reigned. Ginger needed a moment to navigate that minefield.

“Alright,” she said, hoping there wasn’t an ego attached to the fame. “Lot to unpack there. I’m not a fan, or a stalker, or whatever. I was hoping to speak with you when we arrived yesterday but you weren’t around.”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “I would have been a distraction. Besides, I see that tunnel enough in my nightmares.”

She frowned. “You dream?”

“It’s a figure of speech. Nobody dreams anymore.” Seeing her discomfort, Rainbow let out a sigh and added, “Look, I’m not going to apologize for what I said to Colonel Whatsherface. I’m sorry that I made a scene, but everything I told that towering bitch was true.”

Hesitantly, she nodded. “I’m not saying I disagree with you, but Colonel Weathers is… grudgingly… a guest here. I don’t have anything kind to say about the Enclave. I lived the first half of my life shielded from knowing the things they did to be where they are and I’ve been marked for the rest of it for having been forced to do something for them that I can never take back.”

Rainbow eyed the dirty bowls on the bus cart and reached out with one of the wings responsible for birthing an aerial phenomenon, hooking a feather over the lip of the cart and pulling it toward the sink. “So you cornered me just to say I should be nicer because she’s a guest.”

“That’s not what I’m saying.” She lit her horn and started helping unload the dishes in with the rest sitting at the bottom of the sink. “I’m suggesting that given the stakes, a little diplomacy will go a long way to ensuring the Enclave’s cooperation. They’re not offering this talisman out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it because their little cult has a deep fascination with preserving this Stable. I don’t want anything happening that might make them have second thoughts.”

Rainbow muttered something under her breath, then turned a knob next to the faucet and watched the sink begin to fill. Once the neatly stacked dishes were submerged, she cut the flow and stirred in a capful of chemicals that emitted a strong antiseptic odor. “I can’t believe they’re still around.”

Ginger hummed agreement despite her feeling that they weren’t talking about the same Enclave. She debated probing a little but thought better of it. “A lot of things survived.”

“Like those bags of yours.” She chewed at her lip as she reread the embossment. “Sledge told me Aurora was trying to get to Stable-Tec’s Headquarters over in Filly. Looks like you found it.”

She lit her horn, undoing the strap cinched around her belly. “We did.”

Rainbow turned to stare at the tiled wall. “How much is still there?”

“It was hit by one of the bombs.” Her bags slumped onto the floor between them. One of Rainbow’s hooves started up a nervous bouncing. “Half of the city is gone or ruined, but Roach found a bunker beneath the bomb crater. He’s okay, by the way. It wasn’t safe for him to come here.”

She slouched against the sink and nodded. “Okay.”

“He misses you.”

“Okay.”

She waited to see if she would say more, but Rainbow just continued staring at her own miserable reflection in the tile wall. Maybe she should have mentioned Roach at the start. Too late now. She tried to remind herself that this could have gone a lot worse than it was currently. At the end of the day she might not walk away with an autograph or a story she wanted to tell, but at least she could say she did right by her.

“When we were down there, we found…” she hesitated. We found Applebloom. She couldn’t just say that, could she? It wasn’t just a lone ghoul inside that bunker. An entire cache of untouched resources lay beneath that crater, and with it several power sources tied directly to Stable-Tec’s hidden network. What if Rainbow Dash insisted they organize a rescue? How could they accomplish that without the Steel Rangers or the Enclave noticing? The Rangers had already shown their willingness to kill for the opportunity to exploit the resources of one Stable. What would happen if they used the network to locate all the others hidden in their territory?

Rainbow crossed her hooves over the lip of the sink and looked at her. “You found what?”

She couldn’t tell her. Scootaloo was too far gone and Applebloom had chosen to stay to protect the Stables. She didn’t want to be rescued.

“Ruins,” she lied. “Mostly ruins. But when we were looking around, Roach found your jacket.”

Rainbow frowned. “My jacket?”

She nodded, opening the flap of her saddlebag. “It was hanging inside of an office.”

Recognition dawned on Rainbow’s face. “I completely forgot about that.”

From the bottom of her bag rose a neatly folded lump of gauze. She drifted it to Rainbow who, while bewildered by the gift, turned from the sink and accepted it in her remaining wing. Uncertain of what to do, she searched Ginger for an explanation.

“It was in your pocket,” she murmured. “I’m pretty sure it still belongs to you.”

Rainbow swallowed.

She bent her feathers, rolled the bundle over, and nudged the flaps of gauze open. Her eyes grew wide. She sat down, wing trembling, stunned into silence by the gemstone resting inside it. For a long while she tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. She lifted a hoof and touched the empty necklace around her neck, and Ginger watched Rainbow bite back tears as she pressed her lost element into its socket.

It clicked against the metal.

She froze. Her eyes, vibrant and alive just seconds ago, were vacant.

Rainbow Dash was gone.

Hello there, Readers!

I don't usually do author's notes, but I wanted to make a point to share that the end of this chapter is the official jumping-off point linking Fallout Equestria: Renewal to my other, much less safe for work One Size Fits Most. It took a while for us to get here but hey, here we are!

If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/486632/one-size-fits-most