The last motes of amber light curled through her tangled mane and one by one winked out of existence. She stood behind the counter of Ginger’s shop, the air perfectly still. Mannequins stared sightlessly toward the cracked display window. Reams of cloth and leather rested untouched in their pigeon holes under the desk. It was as they had left it, as if their journey together were ready to begin all over again.

Only it wasn’t.

Her jaw trembled and she ran, bolting out across the showroom floor at a dead sprint. This didn’t have to be the end. There was still time. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she rejected being forced to take this second chance at life alone. Unthinkingly, she threw her weight into the door, throwing wooden splinters and herself out onto the dusty sidewalk of Junction City, scaring a collective shout from a clutch of night workers loitering near the window. She barely noticed them as she stumbled out into the road, somehow managing to stay upright as her eyes rose toward the distant green pinpoint falling through the clouds.

She still had time.

Ginger had time.

And then the sky ripped open with the birth of a second sun.

Heat, raw and terrible, closed around her without mercy. She stumbled and fell to the dirt, screaming wordless agony as the odor of burning hair filled her nose and mouth. Emerald light pierced bone and tissue like they weren’t there, forcing her to see the boiling sphere of death rising beside her. She tried to scream for Ginger but the words seared her throat and burned her teeth, forcing her to curl into a ball as she waited for the death she’d just been saved from.

But she didn’t die. The broiling air cooled as the thermal wave passed, its ugly work finished. Aurora forced her eyes open and groaned as the serrated edges of her pain began to dull and go silent. A bad sign. Nerve damage, or shock. Both. Screams that weren’t hers echoed in the unnatural silence that followed. Dazed, she barely registered that her peripheral vision was going black. Her right wing rustled like dry brush when she moved, prompting her to lift it and stare at the singed remains of her dapple gray coat. She could see ugly patches of her charcoal skin emerging where the stiff hairs had charred and curled to the root. Whether it was luck or instinct, something had compelled her to tuck her wings under her belly when the heat struck. Her flight feathers had survived.

A small object dropped from their grip. She frowned and picked it up. A Pip-Buck. The one the Enclave had given to Ginger. The screen was dark. Black smears in the shape of Aurora’s feathers covered its chassis. The clasp hung open in her grip.

Thinking became difficult. Like a sleepy foal stumbling her way out of bed to brush her teeth, Aurora absently slid the device onto her foreleg, locking it down behind the blank screen of her own Pip-Buck. She dragged a leg beneath her, then the other, her mind a fog as she fought through the trauma and stood. Her eyes refused to focus anymore. To the east, a hazy blob of emerald fire sliced a clean hole through the clouds above Foal Mountain.

Someone ran in front of her, his mouth making concerned noises she couldn’t process into language. Home, she thought. Everything would be okay if she could get back home.

She stumbled forward, pushing past the stranger. One wing lifted, then the other. She swiped at the air, struggling to bring them into synchrony. Her vision faded until she could barely make out the road in front of her. She pushed herself into a sloppy gallop, her feathers slapping against a burning cart as she clawed at the air. Finally, her wings hit a downstroke together and she felt the ground drop away. She pumped harder, building speed, the wind hugging her with a soothing familiarity.

All she had to do was keep the mountain ahead of her. Sledge would let her in. The doctors would give her medicine, and she wouldn’t have wasted the gift Ginger had given her.

Little over a minute had passed since then. The thermal wave of the explosion had reached Junction City at the speed of light, crossing those twenty miles in the space of a thought. The bomb’s shockwave took considerably longer. By the time it crashed over the burning town it was traveling at subsonic speed.

It slammed into Aurora like a freight train.

Her wings snapped backward like saplings in a hurricane. Muscles sheared. The immensity of sound burst her eardrums and in an instant the storm around her was silent. Violent eddies of furious wind tossed her through the sky until she lost all sense of up and down, left or right. The world around her blacked out and for a moment she feared she was losing consciousness, but the unrelenting chaos continued. The wasteland wouldn’t give her an easy death, she realized. It wanted her to die falling, her senses ripped away, left wondering when she would slam into the dirt.

And yet, as if she were the punchline of some unending cosmic joke, she managed to claw enough of the tortured wind under her wings and throw it beneath her. Gasping for breath, blind eyes searching for any kind of landmark to guide her way, she felt the wind once again caress her pummeled body. A frustrated sob jumped in her throat as she grasped for something, anything that might lead her home.

Tears traced her burned skin. She wanted it to stop. She wanted to go home. She wanted to curl up in her bed and listen to her dad tell her everything was going to be alright. But the wind kept coming and the pain didn’t stop. Blind, deaf, and utterly useless, she wandered through cruel skies, alone.

Minutes Earlier…

Rainbow lingered a few steps behind Weathers and listened while the colonel spoke with the two misfit soldiers. The shorter of the two stallions was mute, gesturing to his companion with quick and concise gestures. Through Weathers, Rainbow learned his name was Chops. His colleague and intermediary, Dancer, relayed a confusing story of the two of them being assigned to monitor the progress of a corporal who had been sent to ingratiate herself within Aurora’s group only to lose track of them after the corporal in question appeared to have renounced the Enclave.

Chops was evidently the more suspicious of the two, judging by Dancer’s reluctance to translate his theories without softening the edges first. He believed they were suspected of leaking classified information to Ginger which ultimately allowed her to cut through an ongoing Enclave mission aimed at rescuing Aurora, but Dancer refused to divulge any specifics. The crux of the soldier’s theory was that their loyalty to the Enclave had been called into question, evidenced by the apparent fact that they had been dumped here by armed escort. After members of the Black Wing arrived with their mysterious crate, and with them came several officers of the Enclave’s Intelligence Wing who appeared visibly shaken by their situation, it became clear to Chops why they were being left inside the tunnel while the rest of the encampment was forced to disarm and wait outside.

“He thinks the Black Wing has a cover story laid out,” Dancer said, his voice low enough to be nearly inaudible. He watched Chops signing and grimaced, shaking his head no. Chops glared back and stamped his hoof, a sound that echoed off the tunnel walls like a gunshot. Dancer shot a furtive glance to the officers nearby, then looked reluctantly toward Weathers. “He thinks they brought us here to make us go away and they’re going to set it up to make it look like we attacked the brass over there.”

Weathers stiffened and glanced back to where Rainbow lurked. “This could be a problem.”

Understatement of the century. “I have ears, kind of. I heard.”

While she spoke, Chops signed something to Dancer while quickly gesturing over to her. Dancer snorted and shook his head before addressing Weathers again. “He wants to know who the ghoul is, and what’s up with the getup.”

“It’s not a getup,” she bit back, but quickly thought better of outing herself given the circumstances. “My name’s… Blue. I’m just…”

Every nerve in her body fired in a wave that started at her hooves and ran up to her ears. She gasped at the sensation of her skin, her organs, her very bones shuddering as if she’d stepped onto a live wire. It was gone just as quickly, but her reaction to it hadn’t gone unnoticed. Weathers and the two soldiers stared at her with a deeply ingrained mistrust as if they were expecting an attack to come from her. She stared back, just as confused as they were.

“Is she still all there?” Dancer asked.

She understood the insinuation without needing it explained. “Yes, I’m still all here. What was that?”

Weathers cautiously shook her head. “I didn’t hear anything.”

Her element was beginning to warm against her chest. She wasn’t crazy. Something was wrong. It rolled through her again, stronger this time, and this time she recognized it. She straightened. “That’s balefire.”

Dancer laughed. “I hope not.”

She pinned him with a stare before looking up at the colonel. “I can feel it. I’ve felt it before and I’m telling you it’s here, and it wasn’t before.”

“The Enclave would never bring…” Weathers stopped herself, and Rainbow could tell she was remembering the footage Sledge had let her see. She glanced at Chops and Dancer, who watched her with growing curiosity, before rephrasing. “My Enclave would never transport balefire. That being said, I can’t speak for the Black Wing. They’re… different.”

The chattering energy was getting closer, but from where she couldn’t tell. She turned back toward the open tunnel but saw no one coming. Just a hundred or so disarmed soldiers standing around outside while their strange escorts guarded the entrance.

“Different how?” she pressed.

Exasperation bloomed on Weathers’ face. “Different like… most guard dogs can be taken off their chains in a camp, except for one that has to be kept in a cage because it’ll maul the first pegasus to fall asleep.”

Dancer snorted. “Or because it’s feral.”

Chops tapped his shoulder and signed. Dancer tipped his head toward his counterpart. “Or rabid.”

Rainbow’s hind hoof adopted a nervous bounce. “So they’re crazy.”

“Loyal to a fault, is how I’ve heard it best described.” Weathers stared down the tunnel and frowned. “However there is a fine line between bending Enclave law and defying our principles. Even the Black Wing wouldn’t be capable of defending their actions if they deliberately brought a corrupting–”

Mechanical thunder echoed from the direction of Stable 10, silencing everyone. The door had begun moving and for a moment Rainbow thought their problems had been solved. Whatever mop-up mission the Black Wing had come here to execute would amount to nothing if their intended victims found shelter within. She had already begun thinking of how she would begin apologizing to Sledge for leaving when the cog lurched to the side and a pair of gray wings rocketed through the gap.

All thoughts of mending bridges evaporated beneath the overwhelming howl of wild balefire as its source streaked over their heads. It resonated within her like a gargantuan tuning fork, causing her to retch while the others watched with momentary confusion as Aurora and Ginger hurtled between the pillars and out into the open air. Held in the unicorn’s grip was a glass box, and inside what appeared to be a living storm.

Pain bloomed behind her eyes. “That. That was balefire.”

Behind them, the door to Stable 10 continued to roll open. Colonel Weathers whispered a curse. “It’s a bomb. They brought a bomb!”

Rainbow didn’t need to be told what that meant. Two centuries of wasting away in a dark tunnel taught her the price of taking too long when an apocalypse was unfolding. She jabbed a feather toward the Stable. “Get inside! Now!”

“Lieutenant, corporal, you have your orders. Take her inside.”

Dancer stepped toward her. “We can’t take a ghoul–”

He didn’t finish before Weathers clamped her feathers around his neck. “You will obey my orders and escort the Element of Loyalty back into that Stable or I will do everything in my power to make sure you find yourself in the custody of the first Steel Ranger I find. Now say yes ma’am.”

“Yes ma’am.”

She released him and turned to face Rainbow. “Go. Tell Sledge to make room for guests.”

Rainbow hesitated as she turned to run. “What do you mean guests?”

But Weathers had already turned away and dropped into a sprint, her shouts echoing off the walls, commanding the attention of officers and enlisted at the tunnel’s entrance. Several tore their eyes away from the Black Wing’s pursuit, ears turning toward the colonel as she shouted for them to get inside. A young stallion was the first to move. More followed. Then, as if compelled by deeper instinct, a tide of pegasi began to flood toward the door.

It was happening again. As Rainbow bolted across the Stable’s threshold, she could feel the slow arc of history circling back onto itself.

The door emitted another boom and began rolling back the way it came.

Enclave hooves thundered toward safety. They rumbled over the flagstones punctuated by panicked shouts and a dull chatter of distant gunfire. Rainbow backed up the ramp, turning to face the closing door as a river of fearful faces sprinted for their lives. And she knew. There wasn’t enough time for all of them. As soldiers clamored over the catwalk and streaked through the narrowing gap on jostling wings, she felt herself pulled further up the ramp by Dancer and Chops, sparing her the worst of the crush as soldiers - no - her fellow pegasi swarmed around them.

The opening narrowed. Frustrated shouts poured from the tunnel as the bottleneck narrowed, slowing the evacuation to a trickle. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, light sliced through the gap and a terrible roar of fear rose from behind the door. Rainbow looked away as pegasi who made it inside clamored to pull their friends through even as the door rolled across their trapped bodies, their cries squeezed silent before they could become screams.

The gap closed, and the armature began pushing the gore-greased door flush with the Stable’s skin. It wouldn’t finish.

The tunnel focused the bomb’s shockwave like a battering ram. It heaved Stable 10’s impenetrable cog backward with a shearing force that tore the armature off its mount, heaving it and the impenetrable cog backwards into the crowded antechamber. In that moment, with death and steel hurtling toward the survivors, the stone around Rainbow’s neck awakened.

Thunder rippled from the south.

Roach stirred and cracked his eyes toward the dark mass of clouds outside their temporary shelter. The skies were calm. No flickers to warn of an approaching radstorm. Only the departing echo of the crackle that woke him and the chilled breeze rustling the dead pine branches of their lean-to. That, and the soft snore of the mare next to him.

With her back warming his belly, he lay there and listened to the sounds of the dead forest around them for what felt like hours. The power armor they’d absconded with days earlier stood sentry within a haystack of brambles Julip hastily gathered after they made camp. They’d traveled an old road that had led them well north of the wasteland’s east-west corridor and far from any population centers worth the Enclave’s attention. In a few hours there would be enough light to see the slopes of the mountain range that defined the line between Equestria and the Crystal Empire. Nothing remained of that place these days besides radiation rumored to be strong enough to make the clouds glow, though Roach hadn’t seen anything like it himself.

Julip’s wings shifted between them and she mumbled something in her sleep before quieting down again. They were deep in raider territory, evidenced by the scouts they’d seen dogging them ever since they left the region the Steel Rangers creatively referred to as Crystal Alley. Raider sightings hadn’t been the most eventful thing to happen to them on their journey back to Blinder’s Bluff, not by a long shot, but even a weak tribe too indecisive to do much more than observe from afar could be deadly if they let their guard down. Julip ended up surprising him with her field experience when she cobbled together their camouflage.

Still, something was bothering him. A subtle pressure behind his eyes, like the beginning of the migraines he would get back when he was still capable of having them. He’d felt the same way when they arrived in Kiln, the Crystal Alley, and so many other sources of fresh radiation. Some days he felt as if his body was tuned to it like an old radio.

He sighed, tucked his nose into Julip’s mane, and listened uneasily to the gentle disturbances on the wind.

As the swaying needle of one record player slid across the final crooning lyrics of one wasteland staple, Fiona deftly twirled a second vinyl disc between her fingers and dropped it onto the empty platter of a second. She wasn’t a personal fan of The Ink Blots but she knew a mare who bussed tables down at the watering hole who had a soft spot for the group. To each their own, she thought as she pressed a set of headphones to her ear and adjusted the needle to the first opening notes of Maybe.

She hummed-slashed-yawned the last notes of the closing song while pulling the output sliders on her mixing board to zero. Her tired reflection smirked back at her from the old firetower’s window panes. One more hour til sunrise and, more importantly, another shot at rubbing shoulders and a few other things with the newest regiment of Steel Rangers to arrive at the Bluff.

She tipped her beak toward the boom mic and keyed it on. “That was The Ink Blots, singing about the things we’re all thinking. Up next, a little something for a little someone I know. Be sure to tip your waitress, ladies and gentlecolts. This is Beyond the Sea.”

One finger clicked off the mic while another hit play on the spare record player. As she brought the volume back up, her headset bloomed with the buttery smooth voice of a stallion so beloved he was rumored to have performed for Griffinstone royalty once upon a time. Fiona leaned back in her chair and listened to the wood crackle. Part of her hoped it would finally break so she could pay someone to build one more suited for her size.

Knots of tension crackled in her neck as she tipped her head from side to side. Maybe something with a high back, like those big padded thrones the old pony princesses were always sitting in. Sure it would be nice, but it would never happen. Records weren’t cheap and her broadcasting equipment represented more than a decade of saving, bartering, and scavenging. At the end of the day music was her passion. There weren’t many people alive these days who could say their job was to make thousands of strangers’ lives a little less shitty. Of all her favorite kinks, the one in her neck was a small price to pay.

She chuckled at her own stupid joke and put the played out record back in its sleeve, then half-stood to slot it into the bowing shelf behind the console.

Her thoughts wandered as she fingered through her collection for the next song. Now more than ever, the ponies of Blinder’s Bluff and beyond needed something to keep their spirits up. The Enclave’s surprise attack on Fillydelphia scared everyone into watching the skies, but more paralyzing than that were the rumors that Paladin Ironshod had led a small force to the city days before to capture and torture Aurora Pinfeathers. The Enclave claimed they acted to rescue Aurora after they learned of her disappearance and admonished the local chapter of Rangers for dragging their hooves with their own rescue effort. Elder Coldbrook’s auspicious lack of a response or even a denial had done little to buoy his falling star. The reason for his silence on the matter became clear just two days later when the Steel Rangers announced Coldbrook was being reassigned in the west and for the time being his command would be assigned to Elder Coronado.

Fiona didn’t know much about Coronado aside from being a member of a rare subset of ponies the locals called a “kirin.” Most of the people she’d spoken to since the announcement didn’t care so much about the shape of his horn than they did the fact that they were expected to feel safer in the care of a stallion whose city had just been forcibly declawed by the Enclave. Regardless, the decision was made. Seemingly overnight Blinder’s Bluff had gone from a comfortably populated trade hub to a claustrophobic Ranger stronghold, and more soldiers were flowing through the wall each day in preparation to halt the Enclave’s march eastward.

At least without Coldbrook breathing down her neck she didn’t have to worry about adhering to his insanity. Rather than lining his pockets with the caps he demanded she pay for access to Stable 6’s electricity, she was now free to keep putting her hard-earned cash into the hooves of Rangers willing to part ways with information not technically meant for her ears.

Her fingers stopped at an obscure jazz album she hadn’t played in a while. The cover song was meant to get its audience up and dancing, but it had a manic pacing to it that made her feel like laughing instead. Why not, she thought, and tugged it off the shelf. The folks downhill could use a laugh right about now.

She loaded the empty platter and waited for the old crooner to finish before gently fading him off the air. Her thumb hovered over the play button, ready to inflict I Got Rhythm on her listeners as she keyed back onto her mic.

“For those of you tuning in late, you’re listening to Hightower Radio with Flipswitch, your Mare on the Air! That was Beyond the Sea. This next tune is one that’s sure to get your hooves moving, so get up off that chair and–”

A sharp, electric screech pulsed from her headphones.

“–fuck you too!”

She swatted them away from her ears. They clattered to the floor and she stared after them, bewildered. The buzz of arcing electricity yanked her attention away from the offending headset and up to her broadcast equipment where she watched the lights behind the level gauges gutter and die. Wisps of blue smoke curled up past the knobs of the high-range transceiver near the window. The single bulb hanging overhead grew dimmer and dimmer as if the life were being choked from it before emitting a quiet tink and going out.

Her broadcast board went with it. The turntables wound to a stop. A stinging scent of charred circuit boards pooled in the cramped tower. She dragged her talons through her hair and down the nape of her neck, eyes closing with silent anger. A fucking power surge had just cooked her station. Thousands of caps worth of old tech, years of scavenging and bartering, all gone.

She pushed out of her chair to crack a window before the stink of burnt plastic could soak into the walls. As she did, two things caught her eye.

First, the eclectic mishmash of string lights and lamps that lit the northern slope of Blinder’s Bluff had gone dark too. It was like someone had draped a velvet blanket over the city, erasing it from existence. Yet she could still make out the shapes of ponies stepping out onto the winding cobbles. The colorful roofs of their homes cast long shadows toward the east. It was too early for sunrise, though. The pliable corner of her beak twitched town and she looked west, and her eyes grew wide.

The horizon bloomed with a maleficent green glow; one she immediately recognized from the days of her youth, before she abandoned the dying cliffs of Griffinstone for a life on a different shore. Hightower Radio became an afterthought. She pushed through the door and climbed the tower railing, and jumped with wings snapped wide to catch the unsteady air. She nosed over the edge of the bluff, picking up speed as she bent toward the growing crowd of confused Rangers gathering at the bottom.

The sun rose.

Aurora didn’t know how far she’d flown. She didn’t know whether she was closer to the clouds or the dirt. At first the rushing wind felt like a salve. It swaddled her, drowning out the dark thoughts soaking into her mind like waste oil seeping through a cracked drum. For an hour, two hours, she didn’t know how long, she focused solely on the sensation of air coursing across her feathers. The gentle lift it provided as she spread her wings into the current was a blessing she didn’t deserve.

And the sun continued to rise. She felt its warmth beat against face. Even through the blindness she could tell it was directly ahead of her, a red glow amidst a lack of everything. Like a moth to a candle she honed in on it, if for no other reason than to assure herself she wasn’t flying in a pitiful circle.

Time passed. She started to hear the muffled drone of the wind. Her eardrums crackled like splinters being pressed into her skull when she attempted to clear them by working her jaw around, so she stopped trying. A while later the burns along her right side started waking up. The rushing air scraped across her raw skin and damaged nerves revolted, causing her body to buck erratically at the sensation of being scoured. A low groan crawled up from her throat as she turned to try to shield her wounds only for them to light up again at the touch of the slightest breeze. The only way to stop it from hurting was to slow down and if she slowed down she would start to fall. A horrible realization rose in her gut. She couldn’t land. Not if she couldn’t see the ground.

She couldn’t think about that. Not yet. Not until she absolutely had to. All she had to do right now was grit her teeth and beat her wings. The pain wouldn’t last. All of this would end when the time came. For just a while longer she wanted to remember what it felt like that day out on the highway, when Ginger taught her to fly.

The sun followed its arc across the dome of the sky until following it was impossible. The only beacon she had hung overhead as if to taunt her, and she felt her course drifting. Every correction felt like a mistake. Each imaginary line she tried to follow bent in her mind. Her wings started to ache, a little at first and then a constant drone of acidic discomfort that grew worse with every flap. Her throat stuck to itself, clogging with phlegm as she worked harder and harder to catch her breath. She knew she was in trouble when she started to hear her heartbeat pounding behind her eyes, her head feeling weighted with lead as she tried to fight off the inevitable.

Beaten, burned, and pushed beyond her limits, consciousness slipped, and she fell.

Crack.

The right trace of the clapped out wagon dropped suddenly, wrenching hard against his shoulder harness. The steady crunching of the spoked wheels over dusty stones was joined by the deep, braking scrapes of splintered wood. He grumbled something under his breath that his late mother would surely disapprove of and stopped, brushing away the sweaty mop of black mane to better glower forward at the long strip of hardpack still needing to be traveled. This patch of the wasteland wasn’t the worst place to be stuck in, but it was miles from anywhere he’d consider safe. A vast expanse of flat terrain speckled with rocks and scrub grass would limit his options if the local raiders were out scouting today. No point in giving the Cinders a free meal.

He gave himself a generous ten seconds to feel sorry for himself before shrugging out of his harnesses and stepping over the left trace. His tail flicked annoyance at the sight of his wagon tilted toward him with its neatly organized crates slopped toward the corner where he stowed a puckered burlap bag filled with assorted dry goods meant to keep his belly full until he could reach the next town. He sighed and reached over the shallow sideboards to shove the wood crates away. Thankfully the burlap hadn’t ripped. The last thing he needed was to spend the night picking oats out from between the boards. Nothing for it if the pouches inside were ruptured. Food was food, no matter how mixed up it got.

After one more hard shove against the crates, he dropped down to the road and stared at the half-moon of his shattered wheel. Pieces of wooden spokes littered the long groove dug behind it, but luckily the wagon ground itself to a halt before the axle hub could get too beaten up. It would take the spare wheel he kept strapped underneath the wagon bed without much argument, as long as he could rebalance his supplies enough to lift the front left corner off the dirt. If not, well, the wasteland had no short supply of rocks to pick.

Easy or not, it didn’t excuse the pea sized hole in the core of one of the busted spokes. Termites. Halfway down the sanded and lacquered surface, a faint speckle belied the point where the tunnel’s emergence had been packed with sawdust and glue to mask the defect. He let it drop from his hoof and did his best to rein in his rising temper.

With his eyes on the horizon, he got to work. Boxes of crap he’d pulled from a wreck site rumored to belong to the fallen city of Cloudsdale jostled and scraped to the wagon’s high corner until the gods of gravity deigned to drop the airborne wheel onto the road. He stacked a couple more crates on top to prevent everything from shifting once he climbed down, then went to work hammering the locking pin out from behind the busted wheel.

“They don’t make cheap shit like this in Manehattan,” he grumbled as the axle spat out the iron pin.

He wrapped his good hoof between the spokes and gave the wheel several quick, hard shakes. It sprang off the hub on the last jerk and he let it drop. The dust it kicked off the road had barely settled by the time he’d flopped onto his back and shimmied his way to the spare wheel bolted to the belly of his wagon.

With his teeth, he nipped the rust-speckled cotter pin out of the wood post keeping the spare in place. It dropped onto his three waiting hooves with enough weight to force a squeaking grunt out of his throat as he lowered one end of it onto the hardpack. “Fucking Verdant,” he hissed, kicking the wheel out from the wagon’s shadow. “Selling, agh, this termite food like it’s, unf, goddamn mahogany!”

The spare had a few new gouges in it by the time he got it leaned up against the bare axle. It wasn’t the first time he’d been sold a bill of goods by a rat with a silver tongue, but this was different. There were just certain things a scavenger didn’t pull on a fellow scavenger, especially not the long haul types. Verdant knew better than to pull shit like this. Calling a mutfruit an apple or selling a map to a stash he knew had been picked over was one thing. Fair trade. That was the kind of cap scraping shit that everyone did to survive. Passing off junk wagon wheels off as top quality?

He hefted it up onto the hub and shouldered it into place with a grunt. Shit like this got earth ponies like him killed. He didn’t have a horn like Verdant did. Everything Mouse did came from the labor of his teeth, three hooves, and the gray matter between his ears. Dragging a cart for days on end just to get to the next town was hard enough without having to stop twice a day to take apart and clean out the joints of his foreleg. He couldn’t reload the pipe pistol strapped to his good leg with a magic fart from his forehead. Everything he did was noisy, deliberate, and slower than everyone else. Some days it felt like all he had was his brawn, and a fat lot of good it would do him if someone caught him out here in the middle of fuck-all nowhere fixing a busted wheel.

Digging an old rag from the jockey box at the front of the cart, he wiped the dirt off the locking pin and smeared a few drops of gun oil on it before hammering it back into the new wheel’s hub and the axle head. He and Verdant were going to have words once he got back to White Tail. The Rangers might end up having to pull them apart, but a week in a cage would be worth knocking a few more gaps in that swindler’s grin.

Mouse smiled at the thought as he climbed in and began reorganizing his wares. It wasn’t much of a haul. Not enough to cement his confidence that the map he’d purchased last month had actually led him to the debris field of Equestria’s most famous floating city. Chances were better that the murky river he’d seen a quarter mile north had flooded enough to wash out a small town, maybe even before the bombs fell, and spat out whatever floated along its engorged banks. Given how firmly buried and packed with dry mud some of the larger furniture was, he had a feeling he was right. Even so, he’d pulled enough good junk from the dirt to cover the cost of the trip, and there was plenty he’d left behind to justify reselling the map to someone else.

He hopped over the sidewall and landed on the road with a grunt, taking a moment to verify no one had appeared on the road since he last checked. Nothing. Not even a molerat. With his wagon righted, he ducked between the traces and started working back into the harnesses while he reviewed his route. If he pushed himself he could make up the time he wasted fixing the wagon. That would put him at the Grey-V-Boat, a prewar tourist trap full of useless zebra kitsch, just before sundown.

Squinting up at the hazy bright spot in the clouds, he wondered whether he should make a stop at Old Lear’s after he got underway again tomorrow morning. Probably not a bad idea. He wouldn't be back this way again until fall and for a mutant who preferred to talk about things that made little to no sense, the gravel-faced lizard could be entertaining at times.

That, and it safely preserved his face on the whitelist for Lear’s auto turrets.

He shuddered. So many turrets.

But as he began turning his attention away from the sky he spotted something moving overhead. Wings. Gray against the unbreakable overcast. He instinctively bent his hoof around his pipe pistol’s bar trigger, knowing his chances of landing a shot from this distance were close to zero. That would change in a short few seconds. The Enclave’s lone scout was gliding low and slow, banking toward the open road ahead of him. Whoever they were, they weren’t making an effort to sneak up on him. A bad sign. His heartbeat slid up to a higher tempo as he shook off his harness. The wagon would give him some cover, but not much. He’d need all the time he could get if he wanted to figure out whether this was some idiot private looking to shake him down for food and supplies, or something worse.

The scout cut through the air above the road and continued right on past. Mouse frowned. They were still banking left but not enough to bend them back toward the road in time for a pass behind the wagon. Something wasn’t right. At first he thought the scout was flying above something of interest running across the hardpan, but then he noticed their hooves swaying limply in the wind. Their head hung low beneath their shoulders, as if asleep. Mouse watched, with no small amount of suspicion, as the gap between the pegasus and the dirt rapidly shrank and slammed shut.

Enclave or not, he didn’t know anyone who could watch someone tumble that hard without wincing. His hoof straightened away from his pipe pistol while a curtain of dust rolled away from where the lone flyer impacted. A glance skyward confirmed no one else was coming, at least not from above. It was entirely possible for there to be raiders or Rangers nearby who may have felled the pegasus, in which case they would be on their way here looking for their kill. The smart move would be to harness up and put some distance between himself and the wasteland’s newest corpse.

He nibbled at his chapped lip, the gears in his head already turning. What little success he’d wrung from a life of scavenging was predicated upon his cardinal, unbending, foundational rule that he did not under any circumstances fuck around with anything to do with the Rangers or the Enclave. As far as he was concerned they were both radioactive, and it didn’t matter to him which one was worse. Too much exposure to either was detrimental to an honest wastelander’s health, and he wasn’t looking for an excuse to wake up in the morning to find a nifty little lump growing on his left nut. The world was fucked up enough without a bunch of warlords arguing over who’s best princess.

Still. The Enclave was known for hoarding good tech. Rare tech.

“Fuck it.”

He slid down the shallow embankment, hustling as quickly as he dared across the cracked scrubland toward where the soldier fell. No one was around to see him but that could change well before he was back on the road and out of sight. The Rangers had a tendency to imprison scavengers caught looting their fallen brethren. The Enclave… well, he’d never met a true blue pegasus who wasn’t a dustwing or a corpse. Something told him they wouldn’t take kindly to catching an earth pony rummaging through the pockets of one of their own. He needed to do this fast.

A long trail of flattened brambles and divots cut into the soil led him to where the flyer’s body had come to rest, curled semi-fetally on one side. He checked the vacant sky one last time before stepping near enough to see one of her hind legs was missing. Amputated just above the knee. The impact had caused the wound to tear open, allowing a slow ooze of fresh blood to track across the staples. As he rounded the body’s tangled limbs it occurred to him “it” was a mare. He frowned. Out of uniform, and a bit older than the twenty-somethings the Enclave supposedly selected for their long range scouting operations.

His frown deepened as he looked at the body, then the hardpan around her. No weapon, no saddlebags, not even a canteen or a pair of binos?

“Not Enclave, then,” he muttered.

He stuck out a hoof, lifted her mane away from her face, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It never mattered how long someone lived out in the wastes, seeing death always left an impression on a pony. It wasn’t serene like the flickershows made it out to be. Like all the others he’d seen, this mare had seen the end coming. Her green eyes stared, half-lidded, at some distant point in space beyond him. He let her mane slide off his hoof and tried not to think about it. Dustwings lived sad enough lives without him trying to guess at where this one came from.

Still, he couldn’t help but feel annoyed. She looked healthy. Toned, even, like those rich assholes in Paradise Springs who spent their mornings prancing up and down their tidy little streets because it was supposedly good for them. He could spend the next ten centuries scavenging and selling smashed typewriters and cracked vacuum tubes and never come close to the level of luxury those self-titled “aristocrats” enjoyed. Jogging. That’s what they called it.

Wherever she’d come from she’d known comfort alright. Who needed basic survival skills when you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth? He scoffed and started to turn away, but something tugged at his leg. The charred tips of two gray feathers clung weakly around his shaggy fetlocks.

He wrenched his leg away in alarm. “Shit!”

The mare’s wing fell to the dirt. For a moment he worried she would reach toward him again - something in his head refused to shake off the certainty that she’d been dead just seconds earlier - but her feathers pulled away. A badly broken foreleg slid out from beneath it and clutched her empty wing for comfort.

But what caught his eye was the Pip-Buck… no, two Pip-Bucks clamped above her hoof.

The thought that formed in his mind repulsed him, but he wouldn’t deny the temptation was there. Anything he wasn’t willing to pry off a corpse was fair game for the next scavenger, and he knew that next scavenger wouldn’t shy away from the veritable fortune of tech worn by this dying mare. She didn’t even seem aware of them. Her waning focus was on whatever she thought she was holding in her wing.

He stood over her, shut his eyes, then grimaced. There was a fine line between honest scavenging and… that. Kneeling down, he pushed her mane away from her eyes. Before he could stop himself, the world’s dumbest question came tripping out of his mouth. “You alright, miss?”

If she understood him she made no indication she had. Her expression was rigid with pain and her eyes, those haunted emerald eyes stared through him as if he weren’t there at all. Her pupils, barely two pinpoints, were hard and unresponsive like two tiny black stones. A chill ran down his neck. She’d been up there with no idea what was ahead of her.

“Miss, you hit the ground pretty hard. I got my wagon up there on the road but you’re going to have to help me get you...” He looked at her other legs and swallowed a curse. An ugly, swollen knot had already begun growing around her hind ankle. The longer he looked her over, the more he realized this wasn’t just a leisure flight gone wrong. “Just stay put. I’ll figure something out.”

Promises, promises.

He could kick himself later. He crossed the distance to the road at a dead sprint and hoisted himself up into the wagon. For as much shit he took from the other vendors back home for sorting his wares across multiple crates, rare was the day his organization didn’t pay off. He knocked the lid off a sunbleached Sparkle-Cola box and pushed his snout past musty rolls of gauze and dubious chem tins until his teeth settled around the glass cylinder of an autoinjector.

With the diluted stimpack hanging off his lip like a ridiculous cigar he trotted an uneasy circle on the floorboards as he worked out the problem of getting the pegasus up into this heap. There was no way in Tartarus she’d be able to walk, even with help. He’d busted his leg once and knew there weren’t enough stimpacks in the world that could have pushed him beyond that pain.

But he couldn’t just drag her by her tail, and he hadn’t exactly broken down next to an old hospital with a surplus of stretchers. All he had was a few crates of useless scrap, a medical box more stocked with dubious, unsorted chems than proper medicine, and a weak stimpack he’d cut with saline last winter. He didn’t pack for this trip expecting to become a mobile triage unit, and now he found himself stuck in this situation with less than shit to show for it.

He dropped back down to the road and half-trotted, half-ran back to where the mare lay. This is why I travel alone, he thought as he knelt down and awkwardly sank the needle into her neck. The injector engaged and a weak dose of old stim shot into the tissue between her carotid and jugular. Her numerous injuries would have to learn to share. That was his last dose. If he put his hoof in a rut between here and Crow’s Grove he’d shit out of luck.

If the stim was doing anything for her, he couldn’t tell. He could barely tell if she was conscious let alone stabilizing, and judging by the shallow rise and fall of her chest she was likely neither. Once upon a time his dad would tell him how deeds were like investments and how the good ones paid better than the bad, but his dad wasn’t out here watching his last stimpack go to waste for a mare whose recklessness he was paying for.

He swore under his breath and gave her a little shake with the flat of his hoof. “Miss, if you can hear me, I gotta get you up.”

She didn’t answer. He sighed and hoped pegasus wings were designed to bear weight. If not, well, one problem at a time. Maneuvering himself close enough to drape her feathery appendage around his neck was beyond awkward, but then again no part of this was normal. She wouldn’t be able to hold on once he stood up and nature hadn’t left him with many pleasant options to prevent it.

“This is going to hurt.”

He turned away from her, set his teeth across the narrow ridge of her wing, and bit down.

Hard.

An awful noise howled out of the mare as she found herself hauled off the ground when Mouse stood. His immediate instinct was to drop her but he fought it off, focusing instead on the wagon waiting on the empty road a good few hundred paces away. The mare’s wailing devolved into gibbering pleads for him to stop. He could hear her hooves scrape and drag over the rocks, her ribs shifting unevenly against his when one of her legs managed to briefly bear some weight before folding out from under her and eliciting another terrible cry of pain. Mouse tried not to notice the sensation of his teeth breaking her skin or the taste of warm blood puddling across his gums. Those were things that were happening elsewhere which could be dealt with another time. He put them out of his mind.

Like a feral dog carrying a pup, he dragged her up the embankment and over the sideboards of the wagon. Her body flopped into a gap between the crates like a ragdoll and he spat out her mangled wing.

As she lay there on her back, mouth locked open in wordless agony, he saw what he hadn’t been able to see out on the hardpack. Burns, red and angry and caked with clods of bloody dirt blotched her right side from her neck down to her hoof. More than half of her coat was just gone.

His brain did the math without being asked. Home was another three days west of here at a brisk walk. Four days, if he was being honest, with a passenger this badly injured. They had a doctor, sure, but the old crone couldn’t cure dead, which was what the mare in his wagon was going to be in short order with those burns. Her body was going to burn through the stim he’d given her just fighting off shock, say nothing about infection. There wasn’t a doubt in his mind that if he chose to take her to Crow’s Grove, all anyone could do for her then was to bury her.

He shook his head and climbed down from the wagon, trying to think of alternatives. There was no shortage of raiders in the area who would take her in, but the question with them was always what they would do with a wayward traveler once they got their hooks into one. He’d done some reluctant business with a few of the smaller tribes in this area, and while they didn’t ascribe to slavery by name they weren’t subtle about their “initiation” processes either.

He wasn’t about to bet her luck on a chance meeting with a Ranger patrol, either. Not out here, where a suit of power armor was as much a liability as protection. Out here clearing raider nests was left to the locals, and no one Mouse knew was stupid enough to try. Backwards as it seemed, the Cinders were just as much a hostage of their own influence as the towns that dotted their southwest territory. Gone were the days when they could terrorize, murder, steal, and pillage to their heart’s content. They’d gotten too big for that. It still baffled Mouse to think raiders like that had the self-control for any kind of symbiosis with their victims, and yet here he was throwing his schedule into the shitter for a half-dead mare that fell out of the sky.

What a time to be alive.

No raiders. No Rangers. As he stepped over the wagon’s traces and shrugged on the old harness, he knew who it was he needed to take her to. That big blowhard wouldn’t be happy about it, not one bit, but Mouse couldn’t rightly recall a time when Old Lear was happy about anything.

Voices of soldiers and civilians buzzed off the tunnel walls. In the span of a few hours, everyone who owned a weapon was carrying it. Fresh recruits from Fillydelphia loitered around the pillars, wide-eyed and worried that their march to Blinder’s Bluff had taken them out of the fire and into the frying pan. Fiona watched a pair of unicorns in fresh brown uniforms struggle to assemble an old, battery powered work light whose tripod was more rust than anything else. Ponies clad in power armor stomped by, nearly flattening her tail. The cannons mounted to their shoulders clicked and whirred on freshly oiled gimbals, ammo belts strung and loaded.

She paced outside Stable 6’s entrance as closely as the Rangers would allow, which wasn’t close at all. Coldbrook might not be in charge anymore but the soldiers who served under him were still here and they knew better than to let her inside without their new commander’s authorization. She swore under her breath for what felt like the hundredth time this morning and glanced out at the crowd still milling around the cobbles outside the tunnel. Word of a balefire detonation had spread fast. Suddenly, everyone in the Bluff was watching the skies for the next bomb. It wouldn’t be long until general fear morphed into paranoia.

Her home was vibrating like a kicked cazador’s nest and all she could do was walk ruts in the tunnel while the Rangers fortified. Having access to a working transmitter had given her a purpose. Without it, she couldn’t shake the weight of uselessness.

“Flipswitch?”

She stopped pacing, turned, and tried not to look disappointed when she recognized the stallion who’d spoken. He was hard not to recognize. Not many ponies wore burn scars like Knight Latch. Judging by the shine of sweat down his neck and the road dust powdering his blue fetlocks, he’d just come in from pounding ground outside the wall. After using him to get into Stable 6 two weeks ago, she doubted he was going to grease those wheels for her again.

“Can we talk for a second?”

She kept her eyes peeled for any others coming into the tunnel who might be susceptible to flattery even as she lifted a paw to greet the approaching stallion. “Hey, Latch. Sorry, I’m a little busy.”

He matched pace beside her. “It’s about our mutual friends.”

“We don’t have ‘mutual friends,’ Knight.” She looked down at him, letting some of the annoyance she felt show. “Last I checked, you weren’t interested in getting to know me.”

“And you took that personally?”

She scoffed. “No.”

They turned, or rather she turned and he followed like a lost puppy. She shuffled her wings. Maybe she’d taken his rebuffing a little personally. Latch crossed the flagstones beside her, careful not to lodge a hoof between the old rails running the tunnel’s length. “Remember those two mares and the ghoul Coldbrook tried shaking down?”

Of course she did. It wasn’t every day an Elder of the Steel Rangers blew up his whole career over a grudge. “What about them?”

“Well, they made it out to Fillydelphia like they said they would.”

She started looking for something hard to bash her head against. He was reporting her own news back to her now. “I heard,” she said through a clenched beak.

“Did you also hear that the balefire bomb detonated directly above the Stable that pegasus claimed to come from, and that both those mares were seen arriving there with an Enclave escort three days ago?”

She stopped pacing.

Latch saw the question in her face and nodded, lowering his voice. “After the Enclave attacked the excavation site at Foal Mountain, those of us who survived regrouped at Junction City expecting them to advance but they never did. Our scouts reported seeing them fortifying the tunnel and redirecting traders, and it stayed like that until we spotted a big group of them come out of the clouds and make a bee-line for the Stable. Someone reported seeing our mutual friends flying with–”

She cut him off. “Stop calling them that. They’re not… why would they be with the Enclave?”

Latch shrugged. “Aurora did claim to be a member.”

“So Ironshod would let them through your junkyard version of a wall and take them to Redheart for meds.” She shook her head, anger seeping into her voice. “Just because I wasn’t there doesn’t mean I don’t have ears. Don’t you dare walk around the Bluff spreading rumors like that.”

“I’m not spreading rumors, I’m telling you what I know.” Sensing her rising aggression, he straightened up at her. “You know, if you spent more of your time investigating your stories and less of it lifting your tail for the first barfly to flash their caps, people might take you more seriously.”

The words tangled in her mouth. She swallowed them and glared down at him.

He shook his head and looked toward the Rangers’ heavily guarded base of operations. “I won’t pretend to know what’s going on, Flipswitch, but I have a duty to report what I heard. Once word gets out, the Bluff is going to look to you for a silver lining. I’m doing you a professional courtesy. There isn’t one."

Someone knocked on the door and the slender mare between her legs slowed her lapping to see if she should stop. Breathless and so frustratingly close to release, Primrose locked her hocks behind the technical sergeant’s head and pulled her muzzle back to its only duty.

“Ignore it,” she urged, working her own legs to give her current courtier’s tongue more real estate to work with. “Just… goddesses, right there.”

The mare, whose name Primrose had already forgotten, did as she was ordered. And oh was she good at her work. She had a tongue that flowed like quicksilver and an electric kiss, each making for an ecstatic combination when shown where they were needed. And Primrose needed this.

The knock came again and went ignored. One treat at a time, she thought. Her muscles shuddered and she winked, brushing against the young mare’s lip in a spasmodic kiss of her own. She was close enough to the edge to cut herself on it and the sergeant could taste it. She was teasing her, holding back just enough to keep her minister at the height of ecstasy. A dangerous move, denying her leader, and one that drove an animalistic moan from her lungs with deep appreciation.

She earned this. Days of chewing caffeine tablets just to stay awake had taken a toll on her, and this was her prize at the end of the gauntlet. It was all worth it. The headaches, the fatigue, the constant drumbeat of paranoia that began as soon as those tongueless killers began their flight to Spitfire’s Stable with the balefire talisman in tow. All that waiting, all that agonizing over the hundred things that could go wrong came to an end once word reached her that the Enclave’s favorite little pureblood Aurora had taken the talisman inside herself and shut the door behind her.

That had been eighteen hours ago and counting, and it had been a constant fight since then to keep a grin off her face. The instant the comms director reported loss of radio contact with more than two dozen scouting units positioned over the eastern wasteland she knew her plan had been a success. Stable 10, Aurora, Spitfire’s secrets, and the last Element of Harmony were nothing more than ashes on the breeze by now. No more worrying. She could finally, finally close the book on that chapter of her life and turn the entirety of her focus on the future of her Enclave.

The sergeant burrowed her muzzle deeper, hungrily, causing Primrose’s breath to hitch in her chest. She reached out to her nightstand with a free wing and opened its drawer, retrieving the syringe from inside. The last time she tried this the sensation had defied description. As the first needy clenches of a powerful orgasm bloomed between her hips she jabbed Twilight’s miracle stimpack into her shoulder and braced herself for the intense collision of two feather-curling euphorias.

Raw ecstasy roared like a storm through her for what felt like minutes. The knocking at the door dissolved, her muscles clenched, and her thoughts narrowed to the singular focus of grinding as much pleasure from the sergeant’s muzzle as she could. Her brain buzzed with uncut bliss. Days, weeks, and months slid off her like warm butter. And as her legs fell back to the bed, rubbery and trembling from the exertion, the sergeant extracted herself with something amounting to dignity and began the gentle work of licking her clean.

Primrose relaxed on the scattered bedsheets and closed her eyes, smiling at the ticklish sensation of the young officer easing her down from her peak. This one - there was no doubt in her mind - was a keeper.

And again, a hoof thumped against the door.

She lifted her head to look down at the mare. “Let me up before one of them gets the idea to break the door down.”

The sergeant lifted her snout and settled her chin atop Primrose’s belly. “You sure? Your tail is soaked.”

Her hips jumped with lingering sensitivity as her companion rolled to one side and hooked a sandy wing around Primrose’s, pulling her up into a sitting position. Primrose snorted. “You weren’t kidding.”

The cremello mare crawled up to her and kissed her without so much as asking. “Stay put. I’ll get you a towel.”

Voices muttered beyond the sealed door followed by a more forceful pounding. The sergeant glanced at the door on her way to the master bathroom but refrained from asking questions. It was an unavoidable burden for the Enclave’s minister to be pestered so frequently, though today was the one day it didn’t bother her. She knew the generals would inevitably waste precious hours hemming and hawing over the best way to break the news to their leader. Primrose shook her head and chuckled at the thought of them breaking into a nervous sweat, drawing straws for who had to tell her, probably donning an extra bulletproof vest or two under their uniforms just in case their leader didn’t take the evaporation of a thousand pureblood pegasi particularly well.

The sergeant cocked a brow at her crooked smile as she held out a fresh white towel. She sat on the bedside and watched Primrose wipe herself off, showing no signs of trying to hide her own satisfaction in her work.

Smug little shit. With her tail at least somewhat decent, she flicked the towel at the sergeant and scooted off the bed. “I need to see what they want, but I doubt it’ll take long. You’re welcome to wait here, sergeant…” She stole a glance at the wrinkled uniform near the edge of the bed. “...Hayride? Interesting name. Maybe when I get back you can tell me more about it.”

She smiled at that and watched her leave with a glint in her eye that promised an encore when she returned. Primrose wasn’t usually one to concern herself with returning the favor, but this mare lit a fire under her tail that practically made her feel obligated to reciprocate. She hit the door switch and let herself grin despite herself. There was nothing like a bonafide original stimpack to make her feel all warm and charitable inside.

As expected, the corridor outside her quarters was filled with half a dozen of her top-ranking officers, each of which looked like they had a lit stick of dynamite up their tailpipes. She wiped the smirk off her face and cleared her throat, letting the door slide shut behind her.

She looked up at the stallion who’d done the knocking with a flat expression. “Something better be on fire, general, because you just interrupted some of the best sex I’ve had this side of a century.”

He took her broadside like a true professional. “Ma’am, you’re needed in the war room. There’s been an incident at Stable 10.”

Several of the commanders behind him stared at their hooves, faces pinched with fear. She slipped into her mask of concern without skipping a beat. “Explain.”

“Not out here, ma’am.”

Her expression darkened. He was dangerously, dangerously close to disobedience. Word of a balefire bomb going off would be impossible to keep contained, even here in the Bunker. She’d bet her left teat everyone down here and a measurable percentage of New Canterlot already knew Spitfire’s little shithole of traitors had been converted into a glowing crater by now.

To their credit, none of the gathered personnel broke protocol. They were well and truly deep into damage control by now, and whatever mechanisms they’d put into place to keep the citizenry calm could just as easily be undone if Primrose was seen losing her composure. She gave her wing an impatient flick down the corridor, allowing the general and his subordinates to lead the way. There was a snowball’s chance in Tartarus she’d let any of them walk downwind of her.

As hooves stamped ahead of her she took the time to observe the uniformed soldiers still out in the corridors, hurrying off from one office to another to finish the day’s work. There was certainly an air of fear about them. No one met her gaze. Conversations grew hushed as she drew near, and pegasi found other places to be. It was a chore not to laugh, to shout, or grab any random officer and drag them back to her quarters, but she managed to keep it together. The relief was a balm she didn’t know she needed. She could finally breathe again.

An hour or two of pretend horror, a tearful speech, and a selfless proposal for ceasefire in the name of rebuilding. No. Better than that, a joint proposal for their two powers to work together to assist the wounded. The local elders would balk at the suggestion. Mistrust of the Enclave was practically bred into them at this point. And meanwhile, their people would needlessly suffer. They would be forced to turn to the Enclave for help.

And all the while they would ask themselves who stood the most to gain by destroying a Stable of innocent pegasi. The Enclave, whose reverence of their pureblood brethren was known to everyone, or the Steel Rangers whose own Paladin had captured and tortured a Stable dweller for having the audacity to tell them no.

Her cheeks burned from the effort it took not to smile. This day couldn’t be more perfect if she tried.

They passed through multiple checkpoints before the general stopped to run his badge through a scanner at the end of the corridor. He made room for the other commanders to file into the war room, only following once Primrose had stepped inside behind them. The other generals were already seated at the conference table that dominated the room, their expressions grim as they observed the procession.

She seated herself at the head of the table, mindful she was being watched as she picked up the brown dossier in front of her. Several uniformed pegasi were already flipping through their own papers, foreheads rested against hooves, some nervously scratching themselves with a feather or two. She was surprised there weren’t photos paperclipped to the pages. For as long as they’d waited to bring her in for this, someone could have flown a camera out there and back with time to spare to develop the film.

She didn’t look up from the pages when she spoke. “For Celestia’s sake, people, someone open their mouth and give me the short version.”

Somewhere down the table, a voice piped up. “A balefire detonation occurred in the vicinity of Stable 10, ma’am.”

Serious face. Serious face.

She dropped the packet. “I’m sorry, what?”

Of course none of the generals volunteered to deliver the news. One of their lieutenants, a stallion somewhere in his late thirties, was reading directly from the page in front of him. His eyelids fluttered almost as badly as the tip of his feather shook beneath the line he was on. Of all the time to have his minister’s full attention. She almost felt bad for him.

He swallowed loud enough for the room to hear. “Initial reports estimate a yield between three to five megatons, comparable with the tactical warheads used by the zebras at the end of the war. Communication with the battalion positioned outside the Stable was lost at the time of detonation. Given the size and altitude of the explosion we assume, at minimum, ninety percent of our forces in the area were killed.”

She paused. “What do you mean, altitude?”

No sooner had she asked did one of the commanders pick a remote from the table and point it at the bank of monitors facing her from the far wall. They blinked on one by one, each depicting a piece of a larger image.

When the picture finished loading she no longer had to fake her concern. Her eyes widened. Her heart beat harder.

“This is an image taken from one of the spritebots we had monitoring the area for enemy movement.” The frame depicted a green shifted portrait of a section of wasteland that used to be covered in tracts of farmland and open plains. It had been patrolling the empty highway per its programming and was by pure chance heading in the direction of the black notch of Foal Mountain on the horizon.

Almost vertically above the mountain hung a perfect, white sphere.

Primrose sank into her chair.

“We stopped receiving data from the bot after it recorded this frame, which coincides with the electromagnetic pulse we’d expect from an airburst of this size. The communication blackout is extensive. We have scouts arriving from patrols out as far as three hundred miles with damaged radio equipment.” He continued. “We suspect the bomb may have been planted during the retreat of Elder Coldbrook’s forces, and that it was discovered prior to detonation. Current estimates suggest background radiation in the immediate vicinity should drop quickly enough for us to begin relief efforts in one to two days.”

The room was spinning. She lifted a hoof to stop him. “What do you mean relief efforts?”

He looked to his superiors, confused, before clearing his throat. “To the Stable, ma’am. The survivors will need–”

The survivors.

Primrose stood from her chair, wrapped her feathers around the dossier, and pitched it down the table.

“FUCK!!”

Papers fluttered like snowflakes and the war room fell deathly silent.

She dropped back to her seat and stared up at the screens, her eyes pinched shut between her feathers.

“Fuck.”

Rainbow woke to the sensation of birds pecking at the skin around her neck and chest. Disoriented and in pain, she made a feeble gesture to swat the carrion off of her with her hoof, only to feel it being pushed back down by someone’s wing. The pecking continued as around her voices became clearer through the whistling in her ears. She opened her eyes and frowned toward at least seven pegasi staring down at her while two others peeled debris loose from her skin. Her first instinct was to sit up but the soldiers quickly redirected her to the grated floor, their syllables still too muddy to decipher. Even so, they way they looked at her like an injured foal filled in enough of the gaps for her to stop trying to move.

She didn’t know precisely how much time passed after she woke up, but before long a singed but familiar striped face leaned over her and sighed with visible relief. Weathers thumped the shoulder of one of the pegasi trying to peel something off her chest and mumbled something directly into the cup of his ear. The soldier nodded and pulled open a pocket in his uniform where he’d been collecting the bits of golden debris that had embedded itself into her. As Weathers mouthed okay, the soldier looked up at her and asked a question that drew the eyes of the other survivors. She nodded in answer, and the same eyes swiveled down to Rainbow with something like nervous reverence. Before long they were hoisting her up to her hooves and helping her the rest of the way up the ramp.

The reality of the disaster surrounding them dropped into her stomach like a stone.

Where the antechamber’s rear wall had once stood now loomed a gash carved deep through the bedrock behind it. With nowhere else to go, nameless pegasi guided her through the destruction, carrying her over shattered girders and loose stones while protecting her from the severed cables strewn in their path. It was as if a gargantuan shotgun had been pushed against the wall and fired. No one spoke. They followed the path of the wound, their hooves making the only sound. Someone lifted her front legs over the jagged end of a decontamination arch as they stepped into what had once been the security office. Desks, papers, and bent bars pointed toward the communal space beyond. Rainbow felt tears sting her eyes as she stepped toward the bent lip of the catwalk, her attention pulled down to where the great gear had come to rest on its face in the center of the Atrium.

The yellow paint of its formidable 10, still legible beneath the debris, stared back up at her like a tombstone.

Bricks cut into her shoulder blades. A collar of pale light tightened around her neck and the sky flashed with unnatural lightning. She tried to breathe but couldn’t. He wouldn’t let her. Cider’s magic pinned her to the wall like an insect on a framed display, his eyes sliding with the line his hoof traced down her belly. She knew what he was thinking. What he had already justified as his touch drifted between–

The wagon jumped over a loose stone and jostled her awake. She gasped, both from the rush of pain and the terror of a face that had already gone foggy in her mind. She’d been somewhere, but it was gone before she could hold onto what it was. Dizziness settled in its place, fraying the edges of that brief clarity.

Everything hurt. Pain signals shrieked from too many sources to make sense of, like static over an untuned radio. She could taste bile in her mouth and smell blood in her sinuses. The gentle pull of gravity was a firm blanket across her chest that let her know she was lying on her back, her hooves and face slopped unevenly against a backstop of rough wood. Through her one open eye she could see a vague point of light overhead, but watching it hanging motionless with no sense of what was around it made her nauseous and she closed it.

For a while she drifted in and out of consciousness. She felt a little worse each time she came around. She remembered hearing something falling in the wagon near her and the wheels abruptly stopping, the change in motion more than enough to induce an awful chain of retching that briefly shooed away whoever chose to make her their burden. She remembered being dragged by the wing, or maybe that hadn’t happened at all. Nothing felt real. She fell asleep.

She woke again. Her nose was cold and something scratchy covered her legs. The reddish blob of light was gone, too. It was nighttime and she was under a blanket. Somewhere close somebody was snoring. It sounded like an impact wrench with a shredded gearbox. Someone told her that joke once and it never failed to make her smile. Except tonight.

The next time she opened her eyes she was moving again and the blanket was gone. Her belly churned around something foreign. The foulness in her mouth was gone too. She didn’t remember getting up for a glass of water. Maybe Ginger had gotten it for her.

The bright spot was back. She turned her nose into the crook of her wing to hide from it.

It changed positions and her eye hurt again. As she ducked deeper under her feathers she could sense that the wagon was stationary again. She frowned at the sound of hooves near her hind legs, shimmying closer to her shoulders as something scratchy settled over her head. She was too exhausted to be alarmed, and the blanket almost felt nice. Safe, even. Like when she hid under her covers whenever the air circulators made scary noises.

Someone was talking to her about keeping her head down. A stallion by the sound of it. Something about turrets not recognizing her. She didn’t catch it all. It sounded important.

She started moving again. Her world lurched for a moment as if everything were falling, then leveled off as the wheels ground over softer terrain. And the air… changed. It sounded different. Smelled different too. Her nose wrinkled. It reminded her of dinner with her dad. Salad? No, leaves. It smelled like the forest Roach planted outside the Stable, and the memory of it gave her pause. Those trees were gone now, and Ginger hadn’t gotten her any water.

She curled into herself and tried to go back to sleep.

The wind slipped through the window and lifted the paper ahead of his quill, causing the precise stroke of his lowercase r to invade the margin of the line above it. He calmly lifted the nib off the page and set the quill aside to assess the damage. The word garment was going to look strange to whomever received this book, but of course the entire story would be strange. He chuckled to himself and recovered his quill, dabbing it into the deeply stained inkpot glued to his desk. Too many errant spills over too many years taught him a valuable lesson in prevention. Not much he could do about the wind, though. It would blow when it chose to and he wasn’t about to shutter the windows of his own cottage just to keep one page still. The breeze smelled too nice and denying himself that enjoyment would torment him until he could no longer concentrate on the words.

One denial of pleasure would beget another. He smirked. It sounded like something mon capitaine would love to lecture him about. Careful not to rest his knuckle on the drying text, he carried on writing, reciting the words from a memory that used to span realities and which he could feel regressing into something much frustratingly finite.

“She tore off one garment and clothed him with it…” he mumbled as his quill scratched away. “With a second garment she clothed herself…? Well, that hardly makes any sense.”

He recorded each word anyway. It didn’t matter whether he understood them or not. That wasn’t the point. Accuracy was. Breadcrumbs were. His formers hated when he left breadcrumbs.

As he wrote, he would pause on occasion to watch the finches play in the gnarled branches beyond the window. Little flits of yellow and black chased and called to one another. Tiny creatures arguing over tiny bits of territory that meant nothing to anyone who wasn’t them. Strange creatures, finches. He’d witnessed the birth and death of civilizations and these little birds had inhabited them all. Yet no one seemed to notice, or if they did they didn’t care. Not very long ago he’d viewed them as pests. Feathery parasites whose existence was as much a universal constant as gravity. Not even the Continuum knew how they had spread so thoroughly throughout the universe, and they were supposed to know everything. After coming here, being exposed to the creatures here, he’d grown to enjoy hearing their songs.

One such finch landed on the windowsill above his desk and hopped along its edge, tiny eyes observing the strange creature within while piping little calls to its mate somewhere in the overgrowth. He slowly lifted a finger toward it, hopeful it might perch itself there, but it had a little too much spunk to allow itself to be handled. It nipped at one of the little gray stones embedded in his paw and retreated back to the trees.

Discord smiled after it and turned back to his unfinished draft of Gilgamesh.

He didn’t get very far.

A flurry of tiny wings rushed deeper into his forest at the approach of wagon wheels. He watched them until he could only see leaves shuddering along his walking path, then turned to the handmade calendar he kept pinned beside his bookcase. Still April. Mouse was never one to keep a rigid schedule, but all the same he was early for his summer visit. Pushing back from his chair, he scanned his bookcase for something to trade. His eagle’s talon came to rest atop the leatherbound spine of Hamlet. A classic, or so an old friend insisted a lifetime ago. Mouse claimed to know an old biddy who paid good caps for “rare” literature. He palmed the poem and carried it with him out of his tiny study and through the main room which Rarity would have insisted upon calling his parlor, Twilight his living room, and Fluttershy his den.

He tapped the book across the hardwood mantle of his fireplace as he passed, his yellow eyes drifting toward the little momentos he kept there for himself. As far as he was concerned, this was his den.

The front door squeaked when he pulled it open. He made a mental note to grease the pins and watched, not without a little bemusement, as a stallion in dire need of a good shearing dragged his wagon through the overgrowth. Several dozen turrets hidden amongst the trees actively tracked his progress before ducking beneath their armored housing once he was out of range.

Curiously, he waited as Mouse passed the flat spot in the grass where he usually left his wagon and proceeded to drag his cargo straight to the porch steps.

Also, he was out of breath.

“I’d have trimmed the grass if I’d known you were coming to visit.” Standing at the top of the steps, he had a clear view into the wagon. The vaguely equine shaped lump in the burlap sheet caught his eye. His fingers tightened around the book. “You brought a guest.”

His suspicion grew as Mouse wriggled out of his sweat slick harness and hurried to the back of the wagon. There was something off about his silence. Mouse was a mutterer. This was a different side of him.

He watched the stallion clamber into the cart, his arms slowly crossing as it became clear what was happening. This wasn’t an ambush, and something told him the conspicuously motionless figure beneath the sheet wasn’t waiting to sit up and ask for an autograph. He shut his eyes and sighed as Mouse pulled away the burlap.

“You’re the closest creature who can help.”

Discord stared at the pegasus pinned between the crates for several long seconds before finally responding. “No.”

The stallion balked at him. “What do you–”

“I mean,” he interrupted, his tone hardening, “no. I am not a wetnurse and this is not an inn. Take him somewhere else.”

“Her.”

“Fine. Her. Take her to a hospital and pick a needle to stick her with.”

To his growing annoyance, Mouse had begun maneuvering the mare’s wing around his neck. “You know we don’t have places like that anymore. Is your couch empty this time?”

“You will not bring her into my home.” He bristled as the stallion bit down on the mare’s wing, eliciting a wheezing groan from her. “What are you doing.”

“M’ringing ‘er inzide yer home.”

He stepped down the porch. “Just use one of your easy-fix needles on her and leave her somewhere to heal.”

“Can’t. M’all out.”

“You’re out.” He scoffed. “Isn’t that convenient.”

Mouse ignored him and began eyeing up the drop to the ground. He bristled.

“Mouse.”

“Lear.”

Even through a mouthful of feathers he managed to spit out his pseudonym with a good measure of heat. It was clear to both of them this unfortunate he’d brought was teetering on the edge of death, but as Discord stared Mouse down it was even clearer that the raggedy mop of a stallion hadn’t made this detour for a polite debate. Something in his eyes warned this would be his last visit if he was barred from taking her inside.

An old habit drew his thumb and third finger together. Even now, he missed the days when transmuting a troublemaker into a singing tube of chapstick was an option. Altruism had never been his strong suit.

“Fine.” He left the porch, refusing to look the closest thing he’d had to a friend in centuries in the eyes as he rounded the wagon. “Spit her out, for god’s sake, before you tear her wing off. I’ll bring her inside.”

The barest smirk touched the corner of Mouse’s eye as set the limp mare near the edge of the cart for him to take. Discord hefted his little friend over his shoulder like a cask of wine, eyed the stallion to make clear his objection to having his solitude hijacked, then turned back to the porch steps.

Then he stopped and looked back at him. “I want you to know that there was a time when I changed the gravitational constant of the universe for fun, and you’ve got me putting Band-Aids on boo-boos.”

Mouse answered with a blank stare. “That’s nice, Lear.”

“That’s–” he tightened his jaw into a smile. “I escaped mortality once, so try not to look too surprised when I do it again. Now go practice whatever passes as humor for you on whatever you have worth trading while I take this one inside.”

As he climbed the porch and reached out to open the front door, the mare emitted a retching gurgle accompanied by the wet patter of something vile coating his back.

“Charming,” he groused. “You, madam, are not going near my couch.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 42: Paths Crossed Estimated time remaining: 22 Hours, 44 Minutes