September 2nd, 1077

“Hello! Please display your identification clearly so–”

“Verify credentials and override.”

The elevator doors sprang apart. “Confirmed. Welcome, Minister.”

Rarity’s hooves thumped hollow against the carpeted square as she entered, turned, and promptly struck the DOOR CLOSE button with the folded corner of the Manehattan Times. Her steely blue eyes tracked a tour group whose unnaturally cheery guide had been leading them in her direction, undoubtedly hoping a chance run-in with a minister might earn him richer tips once the tour was over. Whatever his intentions, the guide caught her glare and hesitated long enough for the silver doors to glide shut between them.

Exhaling some of the tension she’d been holding in, she glanced down at the paper lofted by her magic. It crumpled a little in her grip. Page nine. Who the fuck’s idea was it to bury her headline in page nine?

Millie’s uncanny voice interrupted her thoughts. “Please select a destination.”

Her destination wasn’t available among the buttons arrayed next to the door. “Ministry of Technology, Warehouse Two.”

A pause. Then the elevator lurched into motion, and Rarity began taking her usual slow, steady breaths. She’d been a much younger mare back when she’d spent hours navigating the twisting, claustrophobic caves around Ponyville. Younger, she recalled, and not nearly as aware of her own mortality as she should have been. Secreting away to unmapped caverns just to avoid paying a jeweler for her gemstones had been, well, it had been a decision for sure. Time and experience had taught her less dangerous ways to widen her profit margins, and with age came the clarity of foresight. She hadn’t concerned herself with roof collapses or entrapment back then. These days, she was just happy she was still able to get onto this elevator without kicking someone in the process.

It wasn’t claustrophobia that bothered her. No, nothing so irrational as that. It was the cold calculus of knowing she was trusting her survival to the Pillar’s builders. As the elevator dropped into the hollowed bedrock of Canterlot Mountain like a shiny bit flicked into an open well, she understood the risk she was taking with each descent. Compared to the billions of tons of rock stacking above her head she was barely a speck. Something could shift in a way the Pillar wasn’t designed to resist and she would die, just like that. Reduced to a gory smear between layers of regolith.

She breathed out, slowly, feeling the soothing whisper of air leaving her lungs. It was hard to resign herself to something so vastly beyond her control, but she managed. Calm once again took hold. Keenly aware of the electronic eye monitoring her above her head, she regarded her reflection in the doors and spotted a wrinkle in the lapel of her vest. A blue mote pressed it flat, then moved to straighten the tiny blue diamond pinned to it. The floor pressed into her hooves as the elevator finally slowed, her understated outfit perfected well before the doors split apart.

Her ears slapped backward as the dulled noises of a busy warehouse flooded over her. Members of Pillar security, bedecked in bulky black armor and armed with identical long guns, stood at attention beyond the doors. She assumed they checked the camera feed from the elevator as soon as it began its descent from the topside lobby and had stashed away whatever paraphernalia Applejack allowed them to have down here. The security checkpoint, little more than a glorified shipping container with windows pointed out to the warehouse beyond, was choked with the odor of sweat and microwaved noodles. One of the security officers glanced guiltily toward the absolute biohazard that was his desk. Rarity pretended not to see it, mercifully passing between them without comment while Millie’s voice welcomed her from an overhead speaker.

She pushed through the far door and the full cacophony of the warehouse assaulted her senses. Gone was the stink of cheap greasy food, replaced instead by the pall of engine exhaust and high, staccato tones of safety alarms that blared from the dozen or so heavy forklifts skittering up and down narrow aisles of industrial shelves. Bright yellow paint marking pedestrian paths hugged the aisles and walls, leaving the lion’s share of space for the dense tires that whizzed in and out of sight. Mixed in were the echoing shouts of warehouse staff, their words jumbling into nonsense by the time they reached Rarity’s ears. Somewhere nearby, she heard the harsh clack of a pallet jack being shoved across wooden boards. She should have asked one of the security officers for earplugs. This place wouldn’t let her leave without donating a splitting headache as thanks.

With a sigh, she found the nearest painted hoofpath and followed it into the shelves. Steel crates stamped with ominous designations filled each of them, the shelves themselves bearing magnetic placards to further indicate their contents. When a forklift’s horn announced its emergence from an aisle ahead of her, she stopped while the operator maneuvered the turn and read the black letters painted on the massive crate.

The operator thumped his hoof against the horn twice more, pivoted the lift ninety degrees, and rolled away in reverse while blissfully unaware of how close the crate had come to swatting Rarity across the nose. She followed its wake of diesel exhaust, mindful not to trust these ponies to see her should another come roaring toward her, and watched as it rolled to the far wall, turned, and disappeared from view toward the loading docks. It took her a while to fully retrace its path, dodging forklifts laden with crates or scurrying into aisles with empty forks in search of a load while drivers for the most part only gave her a cursory glance. Some recognized her but none slowed down to say hello. They had work to do and she was very clearly in their way. She did her best not to stray from the painted path and somehow managed to reach the loading docks without being squashed.

A voice boomed beyond the opaque plastic strips hanging across the wide threshold. “Pick it back up and shift it over, there’s room for one more!”

The forklift operator who almost clipped her was now juggling between steering wheel and control levers as he maneuvered his load onto the end of a waiting flatcar. A string of identical cars waited atop twin rails running the length of the loading dock from tunnels on either end. A team of ponies worked within the adjacent bays, stacking and binding smaller crates in dense packs that were hoisted up into identical flatcars by a swarm of more compact forklifts. Despite the outcome of the war growing more inevitable with each passing day, the tools of death would still find their way onto the rails and ultimately the ports which would ship them to captured Vhannan ports a world away.

Supervising the logistical chaos stood Applejack, a mare whose office could easily be repurposed as a broom closet and who would never be the wiser. Going on five years now she had flatly refused to waste her time sitting behind a terminal. No one who knew her had been surprised by that, and Rarity suspected that Applejack got a deep sense of satisfaction from forcing her counterparts to come all the way down when they needed to chat. Buried safely within the mountain’s lower third, the Ministry of Technology’s warehouses and manufacturing facilities were so far below the offices of its sister ministries that they may as well be a separate world. It was arguably more secure than the rest of the Pillar, accessible only by an elevator controlled by Millie and Stable-Tec’s heavily guarded tungsten gates custom built to seal the rail tunnels leading in and out of the mountain’s foothills.

Applejack spotted her from where she stood near the couplers of two train cars and, as usual, she didn’t smile. Instead she tapped a hoof against the headset clipped to her ear, then looked up to the forklift operator with the crated power armor and shouted, “Okay, load’s clear! Get me one more suit then go on break! We’ll have the train moved up by the time you’re back!”

Rarity kept to the yellow line running between loading bays, her newspaper held to her chest as she dubiously watched the forklift back away from the flatcar and continue that way all the way out to the shelves. Meanwhile, Applejack made no move to leave her post.

“Rarity,” she greeted over the din.

Her dismissive tone stung. “Have you read the papers yet?”

Applejack rolled her eyes without looking at Rarity or the newspaper she held out. Her attention was fully dedicated to the loaders around them. “Pretty sure that’s still your job. Why? Tabloids find something new to write about Dash and me?”

She flinched at the crash of a pallet being dropped onto one of the flatcars. It helped mask her discomfort to Applejack’s flippant disregard for the media spectacle she and Rainbow Dash were at risk of becoming.

“No, not quite.” The paper rustled as she opened it, then folded it backwards so the article that brought her here faced out. She held the paper aloft for Applejack to see. “There, at the very bottom. Look.”

Reluctantly, Applejack tore her eyes away and glanced at the page. She found the column and skimmed it for a few seconds before wrinkling her nose and shrugging. “What about it?”

“What about…?” Flustered, she flipped the paper around and read the first lines of the article aloud. “‘At 5:05am yesterday, the Equestrian government completed a successful balefire detonation at Blackstone Proving Grounds. Military leaders report that the intensity of the blast marks a significant milestone in the superweapon’s continued development, marking the first time in history a manufactured explosion has exceeded five thousand kilotons, or five megatons.’”

She looked up from the page, waiting for a reaction. Applejack just stared back, her attention already drifting back toward the workers on the loading floor. “Not sure what you’re wanting me to say, Rarity. Sounds like the test went fine.”

A scoff hissed out of her throat before she could stop it, earning her an impatient glare in the process. She bit the inside of her lip and scowled at the article wishing she didn’t have to constantly explain these things as if they were unsolvable puzzles. “Yes, the test went wonderfully. So much in fact that the Manehattan Times dumped it on page nine. Page nine! The largest explosion in the planet’s history and it’s buried behind…” She flipped back a page hard enough for the paper to snap the air. “‘...Earth Pony Aeronaut Wows Top Wonderbolt.’”

Applejack held up a hoof. “Hey! Birchbark! Use the straps correctly before you lose your teeth!”

A mare easily twice their size looked at Applejack with chagrin. She set down the crate suspended from her tensed jaw and quickly slung the yellow straps across her shoulder instead. Applejack returned to the conversation once she was satisfied. “So what, you don’t like being upstaged?”

She arched her brow. “This isn’t upstaging, it’s willful ignorance. It's a malaise. The public is getting bored!”

Applejack looked away and sighed. “More like folks are eager for things to get back to normal. We’ve got hooves on the ground in three major Vhannan cities and there’s a good chance they’re gonna surrender before we reach the capital. Probably none of this,” she gestured at the loaded train behind her, “is going to see combat, and that’s not exactly top secret. Call me crazy but if folks want to read a feel-good story about that earth pony’s flying machine, I say let ‘em.”

Her eyes narrowed. “And you’re happy with that? With years of Vhannan aggression petering out like some cheap wind up toy?”

“Can’t say I rightly care how it ends, so long as it does.”

The newspaper crackled in her grip. “It can’t end with a whimper, Applejack. History books will print our names on the same pages as this war and it will look ridiculous that we had a weapon capable of–”

“Shut your fucking mouth.”

The words rolled out of Applejack like lumps of hot iron. For the first time since she arrived Rarity had her full, undivided attention and the heat that radiated from it was palpable.

“If you’re gonna suggest we use one of my bombs…”

“They’re not your bombs.”

“...to end a war that’s already decided, I will lay your fancy white ass out on the floor right now in front of everyone.”

Fear bristled the hairs along Rarity’s back. Instinctively, her horn pulsed a little brighter.

“Try it,” Applejack warned. “But I don’t think things will go down the way you hope.”

A part of her wanted to prove her wrong, but she knew better than to let herself be goaded into a narrative she couldn’t control. After a tense moment Rarity composed herself, allowing her horn to dim as she feigned interest in the train stretched behind her. “I didn’t come here for that. I do, however, come to ask for a favor.”

Applejack didn’t budge. “You already know my answer.”

She sighed, regarding the mare with disappointment. “Fine. Call it a requisition. You’re going to move up the next balefire test for me, and with a change of venue. About seven hundred miles south-southwest of the Blackstone Proving Grounds.”

Applejack mapped the rough location in her head, then frowned. “If you think Chrysalis is going to let us use her hive as a test site, you’re out of your gourd.”

She tapped the edge of her hoof against the concrete, neither confirming or denying her assumption. “You said it yourself, the war is ending. Vhanna might capitulate tomorrow for all we know. But they’re not the only ones we’re at war with, are they?”

“We’re not at war with the changelings.” She dropped her voice to a harsh whisper, her Appaloosan twang growing thick with anger. “And I ain’t fixin’ to start one! Fer cryin’ out loud are you thick?”

She touched her chest with feigned shock. “I never said a word about starting a war. I simply think, reasonably so I may add, it would do some good to remind the so-called Queen Chrysalis what she faces should she attempt to interfere with Equestria any more than she already has.”

Applejack stared her down. “That was more than twenty years ago and she ain’t done a thing to us since.”

“Not for a lack of trying,” she countered, thinking of the steady trickle of reports of changeling sightings from all corners of Equestria. It baffled her that Applejack was actually standing in defense of the creature. “And for the record, this wouldn’t constitute an attack. We would be conducting a test on our own soil. Whether the explosion would be visible from the changeling hive or not wouldn’t be a factor, officially.”

“Officially.” Applejack spat the word. “I’m sure you’ll tell the press to print that somewhere between ‘the changeling menace’ and ‘anonymous sources say.’”

Rarity smiled. “You have to admit it would energize the public.”

“Out.”

Her smile faltered.

“Get the fuck out.” Applejack closed on her, planted a hoof against her chest and shoved her hard. Rarity sprawled backwards on the concrete as Applejack’s voice rose to a shout. “Get the fuck out of here!”

Several forklifts slowed to a halt and dozens of eyes turned toward her as if noticing the two ministry mares were there for the first time. Rarity scrambled to her hooves as Applejack approached again, this time backing away before she could reach her. “Applejack, this isn’t how you treat–”

“OUT!!”

She stopped talking and started walking, her heart beating in her throat as she struggled to maintain a veneer of pleasant neutrality over the utter humiliation burning her cheeks. She had come down here as a friend and was being thrown out like an unwelcome intruder. It roiled her. More than that, it infuriated her. There were ponies who deserved to be tossed out on their asses but not her. Not the Minister of Image, whose sole efforts kept the rabid press from making their work impossible and ensured military secrets stayed secret.

Her teeth ground hard enough to hurt. Had she bent a few rules to keep them safe? Absolutely, all of them necessary. She could bear a few blemishes on her record, but she couldn’t shake what happened just seconds ago. She knew it as surely as she knew her own name. A friendship had just ended, but she couldn’t understand why. Over what? Putting the fear of Celestia in a few changelings?

A harsh, electric beep forced her to stop. She composed herself as the laden forklift rolled out from the shelves and resumed her departure after it passed.

Applejack was wrong. This war was an opportunity to accomplish something good for Equestria. It birthed weapons capable of ending a threat with monstrous efficiency. Letting the world treat that accomplishment with less excitement than some toolshed tinkerer’s flying machine was unacceptable. Irresponsible, even. Vhanna may soon be waving the white flag after the punishment they continued to suffer from Equestrian soldiers too juiced up on stimpacks to know they’ve been shot, but Rarity refused to allow the world to quietly forget the weapon that first gave the zebras pause.

As she shoved her way past the security checkpoint and stepped back onto the empty elevator, she considered her options. Applejack would already be drafting a complaint against her proposal and she’d need to counter it. Of the six of them, she could think of only one mare with the clout to swing that argument in her favor.

The elevator chimed and its silver doors rattled shut.

“Please select a destination.”

Millie’s unblinking eye waited overhead. Rarity met its gaze with a dull smile.

“The Ministry of Arcane Science, please.”

Magic flowed afresh from Twilight’s horn and into the wards that kept the passage below the grand library sealed. A subtle, persistent ache pulsed behind her eyes. The harbinger of a migraine already on its way. With the binding spell to Big Mac’s prison renewed she sighed and wished she could close her eyes and rest her forehead against the false bookcase without spearing one of the empty shelves. Migraines were easier to cope with before the princesses imbued her with a telephone pole for a horn, and the continued presence of the beast beneath her library had turned into one endless headache.

Turning to face what had up until a year ago been her pride and joy, she regarded the rows and rows of barren shelves with disdain. The puff of balefire that fueled Big Mac’s grotesque transformation still lingered beneath the library, weakening her magic after each visit. Of course, the contamination hadn’t stayed contained for very long. Radiation, they were calling it now, clung to everything it touched like a stain. Her researchers were still studying exactly how it worked, but the leading theory revolved around invisible primordial particles emitted by balefire itself. With each visit she had been spreading that contamination through the Pillar, and when her own people developed tools to detect it during balefire tests the reaction to finding it lingering in their labs had not been a positive one.

Radiation levels in the Pillar were minimal, certainly not even a health concern by all estimates, but Twilight’s continued dips into the hot spot beneath the library had driven the numbers to several times higher than background. By the time Twilight was made aware a search for the source was underway there had been no fewer than a dozen of her own researchers waving clunky black boxes around her books. Her harried appearance among them had startled several from their readouts and handed her the opportunity to declare her own library the source of the contamination. The move had been a risk, but the gamble to throw herself under a carriage to avoid the bus had paid off. She blamed herself for breaking protocol and teleporting directly to the Pillar after the last test explosion she’d attended for the purpose of resuming a thread of research she’d been forced to pause. Her reputation for being a bookish recluse did the rest.

The invaluable tomes of the grand library were promptly stacked into sealed containers and wheeled away to be digitized, and Twilight had been given a formal reprimand signed by Princess Luna. A slap on the hoof, really, but it annoyed her to see Luna’s royal seal at the bottom of the letter instead of Celestia’s. Her last real interaction with the elder princess had been unpleasant, and now it seemed like she was deliberately avoiding her.

The pressure behind her eyes bloomed again and she grimaced. She left the warded passageway behind, reassured that Big Mac’s bestial groaning would be stifled by the carcass she’d dragged in reach of his grasping claws. Her magic sifted through the carpet behind her and scoured away the dark stains left by her hooves. She cleaned the last of the stinking muck off her soles as she pulled a chair out from one of the tables at the library’s center where a copy of Starswirl’s personal journal sat open on the otherwise vacant surface.

She sat, sighing as she settled into her creaking seat, and rested her cheek against a freshly clean hoof. The journal was a subpar reproduction of the one she’d wrested the first flicker of balefire from. As with all the other copies this one omitted that spell. She flipped through the too-new pages anyway, their crisp edges lacking the fragility of the one shredded during Big Mac’s change. Still, there were variations here that stood out from other copies. A spell or two had been added, likely parsed from some unrelated book to make this print unique. A chapter containing alleged testimonials about Starswirl was added, as well as a lengthy bio of the book’s editor that felt deeply self-serving. She slouched over the book and skimmed the page headers for anything relating to fire or reversals she might have missed, but nothing stood out.

Eventually she stopped turning pages and just stared past the words. A whole year of digging for something that could undo what she’d done to Big Mac and her shovel just kept coming up empty. By now she was dangerously close to accepting Discord’s warnings as truth. That balefire wasn’t just some clever bit of magical engineering and truly the cannibal twin of magic itself.

She closed the book and rubbed her temple. At this point Big Mac’s biology resembled a fruit smoothie, say nothing for his mind. If he was still in there somewhere she couldn’t see it. All she saw was a twisted, suffering animal that when it wasn’t clawing butchered carcasses away from her would stare up at her with the open malice of a predator whose prey it couldn’t reach. Someday, and she suspected that day was coming soon, she would have no other choice than to put him out of his misery.

A click from the library’s arched wooden doors sent those darker thoughts scurrying to the back of Twilight’s mind. A frown pinched her face at the sight of the brass handles tilting and the beginnings of a firm chastising formed on her lips as the doors parted. The grand library was restricted to everyone, and while her researchers might question why that didn’t seem to apply to her she felt confident they would value their careers enough not to ask it aloud.

She rose from her chair, ready to intercept the trespasser, only for the righteous lecture to wither at the sight of Rarity stepping inside. The smaller mare spotted her just as quickly and was smiling as the doors swung shut behind her.

“Good gracious, Twilight,” she tittered, her eyes panning the vacant bookshelves before returning back to her, “you look terrible. Have you really not moved past the empty nest syndrome by now?”

Rarity’s voice echoed off the empty walls better than if they were inside Celestia’s throne room. Twilight winced at the unwelcome sound and held a feather up to her lips, beckoning quiet. “I have a migraine. It’s quiet here.” She eyeballed Rarity as the unicorn descended carpeted steps. “Or it was.”

Rarity maintained a smile as she strolled up to the table, a carefully manicured hoof coming to rest atop the backrest of the chair beside her. To her credit she did try to lower her voice, but the rasping quality of her whisper wasn’t an improvement. “Then I’ll try to be brief. I need a favor. Or, rather, my ministry does. It has to do with the next balefire test.”

Twilight rolled her face along her hoof to regard her friend. “The test was yesterday.”

Patient as ever, Rarity persisted. “Yes, well, that is true but I’m referring to the one scheduled for next month. I’d like your help getting it moved up just a skosh and possibly relocated further east.”

“Rarity, I’ve got a migraine not brain damage.” She lifted a wing, rolling a feather in the air. “Skip the lead-in and tell me what you want.”

Rarity pursed her lips, shrugged, then pulled the chair out and sat down. “I want you to help me move the test site out of Blackstone and onto a bit of Equestrian soil near the changeling hive. Within the week, ideally.”

“That’s a big ask,” she murmured. “Dangerous, too. Did Chrysalis publish something you didn’t like or is the bug up your butt more of the figurative variety?”

As expected, Rarity’s smile softened to something more genuine. She wasn’t getting an immediate no, which was always a guarantee to lighten her mood, and ever since donning her mantle as head of Equestria’s unblinking eye it was scarce for anyone to give her a ribbing.

“The latter, actually,” she admitted. “I’m concerned Vhanna’s impending surrender will send the wrong message to our neighbors. Namely that we can be relied upon not to deploy balefire during war. For the moment, Equestria is an unparalleled military power but I worry that won’t last forever.”

Twilight nodded, having privately worried about the problem of containing Equestria’s secrets herself. It wasn’t inconceivable to bump into a unicorn or two in Vhanna or Griffinstone, say nothing for Equestria’s cousins in the Crystal Empire. When, not if, balefire technology crossed their borders there would surely be talented magic users on the other side waiting to reverse engineer it. That fear was a large driver behind the push to keep sinking missile silos into Equestrian soil and arm them with warheads capable of increasing magnitudes of destruction. The threat of those balefire-tipped missiles would be a deterrent by dint of their very existence, and one of Rarity’s many hats required her to ensure their enemies and allies were made keenly aware of that arsenal’s growth.

Which was why Rarity was so worried. If Equestria gave its neighbors the impression it would hesitate to use balefire in its defense, then all they succeeded in doing was turning their own sovereign soil into the world’s most expensive minefield.

“I’m going to assume you’ve already begun drafting official apologies to Queen Chrysalis if radiation happens to drift toward her hive?”

Rarity smirked. “Naturally I don’t expect that to happen or I wouldn’t have suggested the change in venue. But, yes, I have some of my people working on that.”

Seeing some fallout flutter into that wasteland of hers would absolutely scratch an itch more than a few citizens have been waiting decades to scratch. The failed changeling attack on Canterlot and subsequent non-punishment had left a lot of people feeling cheated, but it had been Celestia’s prerogative at the time not to pursue open conflict against Chrysalis. Too many new threats had been cropping up and Equestria’s military at the time amounted to a few hundred Royal Guard and a clubhouse of pegasi with a spandex kink.

Twilight rolled the idea around in her head, happy to have something up there that wasn’t painful to focus on. “No bullshit, Rarity. Are you hoping this turns into another war?”

Her friend shook her head with no hint of duplicity. “No, certainly not. And even if it did, it wouldn’t be much of one. We would squash them, no pun intended, and while I’d personally love to see those bugs get their comeuppance I don’t believe our allies in Griffinstone would care to see us turn into a global antagonist.”

“I don’t think they would either,” Twilight agreed. “At the very least it’ll look like we’re provoking them.”

“I prefer ‘deterring’ better than ‘provoking.’ We already know she’s been sending her drones out to border towns to feed, and then there was that incident in Appaloosa with that poor colt.”

Twilight knew the one, and she shuddered to think what it had felt like for those parents to bury their son one day and wake up to an inexperienced drone sleeping in his bed the next. Had it happened after the ministries were formed, the story would have been quietly packed away. Instead it spread like a sickness until anyone who had ever picked up a newspaper knew about the tragedy. It had also been one of the few times Queen Chrysalis ever addressed the actions of one of her drones, floating the idea that it was possible not all of her children uniformly obeyed the will of the hive.

That suggestion sank like a lead weight, and Chrysalis wasted no time in retreating to the buzzing depths of her home.

Despite all this, Twilight couldn’t shake some reservations of her own. “Do we have any facilities near that stretch of the border large enough to house personnel and equipment?”

Rarity smiled. “Two, actually, the closest and best suited being the Hackamore Munitions Factory.”

“You’d have to ask Applejack about that one,” she said.

Her friend’s smile tightened slightly. “I tried and she was strongly opposed.”

“To using her factory?”

“To all of it,” Rarity admitted. “Frankly I think Rainbow Dash has rubbed off on her.”

She snorted, earning a cocked brow from Rarity.

“Yes, well, that too I suppose. But I do worry about Applejack’s disposition as of late. It’s as if she expects the ministries to be mothballed once the war is over.” She shook her head, clearly flustered. “Maybe Dash can talk some sense into her, I don’t know.”

Twilight shook her head, sparking another bloom of pain inside her skull. “No, don’t do that. Rainbow’s almost as checked out as Pinkie, and besides, you said there was a second option for the test. Let’s hear it.”

“It’s one of yours, technically.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Uh huh. On paper and not much else, I’m guessing.”

Rarity let out a breath and composed herself. “Only if you have access to the papers, which I guarantee you don’t.”

It wasn’t a subtle clue. Twilight hummed understanding. “One of your black sites.”

“One of Equestria’s black sites,” she corrected, “yes. We built it after acquiring the deed of a paper mill on Mariposa Lake. The mill itself was closed down for obvious security reasons, so there’s plenty of real estate available for a staging area above ground without disturbing the operations of the facility below.”

“Facility.” Twilight couldn’t help but ask. “Not a prison?”

Rarity glanced away, her smile becoming more businesslike. “They both mean the same thing in this context. Prisoners are brought in through a separate entrance. We don’t see them, they don’t see us. Location aside, the important thing is that the changelings see the bomb with their own eyes. Chrysalis doesn’t get newspapers delivered to her doorstep and if they don’t see the blast they won’t care. I need this location.”

“And the timeframe? Is that critical?”

She nodded. “Applejack’s already liable to loosen my teeth when she hears my people came down and took one of her balefire talismans. Imagine what she’ll do if I try during peacetime.”

Fair point. And in all fairness, Twilight wasn’t too sure she’d be this open to the idea of an accelerated test schedule if they weren’t already at war. “Unofficially, I get what you’re trying to do, but officially I’m going to need more to sign off on than ‘I want to scare the shit out of Chrysalis.’”

Rarity shrugged. “Call it a research project, then.”

She rolled her eyes. “Gee whiz, Rarity, that solves everything. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Oh, don’t be shitty. I’m sure one of your researchers would love to have their pet project vaporized so they can study the ash.”

“Sure, and I’ll spend the next week of my life drowning in proposals.”

“First time I’ve known you to be scared of paperwork.” Rarity drew slow circles in the dust on the table’s glossy finish. “What about Maiden Pharma?”

Inwardly, she groaned. “What about them?”

She watched Rarity drag her foreleg across the dust, clearing away the doodles. “For starters, the billion-bit miracle drug you sold them turned a battalion of Equestria’s finest into shambling monsters two months ago. I imagine they might have some interest in deducing whether Stimpacks were to blame or our balefire.”

Her heart skipped, beating faster as she thought about the shambling monster feasting below their hooves. She knew the combination of the two had triggered the rampant mutations, not some independent defect.

And she nearly said as much, but something stopped her. She frowned thoughtfully at the patch of wood Rarity had wiped clean and wondered if this might be an opportunity for her to clear away a problem of her own.

“Well,” she began, choosing her words carefully, “if we went that route, I’d need a supply of first generation Stimpacks.”

Rarity shot her a curious look. She could smell an ulterior motive like a shark to blood. “Yes, and it’s such a shame we don’t have a current list of hospitals who have found excuses not to ship out their unused stock. Whatever will we do?”

She ignored the sarcasm. Rarity was right. Less than half of Equestria’s hospitals had complied with Celestia’s edict for all doses to be destroyed, so there was still a ready supply. That left a different problem. “We’d need volunteers as test subjects. That could take months to organize, and Maiden’s lawyers will shit bricks if they get wind of it.”

“Twilight, I’m not suggesting we actually replicate what took place last–”

She silenced her with a feather. “No, this is a good idea. We could set up a blind experiment on Maiden’s behalf. One group takes a Stimpack, the other gets a placebo, both get exposed to the radiation and we observe the results. It makes sense.”

Rarity straightened uncomfortably. “No one would volunteer for that, and like you said, there’s the matter of time.”

The gears were spinning fast, her migraine quelled by the rush of adrenaline. “We don’t need volunteers. That black site of yours… Mariposa. The prisoners there don’t technically even exist anymore. We could use them. The bad ones.”

“The bad ones,” Rarity parroted dubiously.

It could work. She’d only have a week to figure out a way to get Big Mac to the test site without anyone knowing, but it was possible. Timed appropriately, Big Mac would blend in with the rest of the creatures created by the blast. He’d either be captured or, at the very least, he’d be free for a little while before the end. In her heart she knew she’d never undo what she’d done.

This was better. Yes, she decided. It was the best option for him.

She met Rarity’s gaze. “Set it up. I’ll get you the approvals you need.”

Her friend hesitated, then stood. “I… suppose I’ll go and make some calls. I hope your migraine gets better.”

Twilight pushed aside Starswirl’s journal and smiled. “It’s gone.”

The inside of the Chapel of the Two Sisters was standing room only.

High above the rows and rows of sagging pews, mounted under the dull colors streaming through the stained glass medallion depicting Princesses Celestia and Luna in an embrace commonly believed to be their final moments before their ascension, hummed the brass notes of the cathedral organ. Below that it seemed all of New Canterlot was in attendance, their hushed voices blending into a hivelike drone of collective worry. Calamity had struck Stable 10. Balefire, a weapon of the old world, had been unleashed. No one knew the fate of those pureblooded pegasi, whether they’d survived or if the fire had purged all life from inside. Not even Primrose.

She sat alone in the pew directly across from the pulpit, behind which Reverend Father Belfry stood adjusting his gold-rimmed spectacles. On a normal day he would have begun the service by first lighting the ivory and onyx candles behind their respective empty thrones, whispered a short prayer for his flock’s perseverance against adversity, then opened the gilded book set atop the pulpit to the page of the day and begun the service with a story from the old world. However this wasn’t a normal day and the congregation that crowded the aisles and choked the doors could sense it.

Belfry sniffed once, solemnly dragged a feather across the open book before him, and looked up over his glasses at the gathered crowd. “This is quite the turnout.”

Nervous chuckles flowed down the pews. Primrose smiled, her eyes flicking toward the armed Black Wing soldiers dotted along her periphery view. Their gaze swept the congregation like spotlights, and none of them showed much interest in what the reverend father had to say.

“I would normally start the hour with a reading from The Pact,” he said, his voice naturally amplified by the stone architecture around them, “but today we will begin with an announcement from the mare to whom the goddesses entrusted their everlasting life, your minister, Primrose. Minister?”

The pew emitted a short squeak as she stood. Somewhere among the silent hundreds, someone giggled. She smiled as she climbed the two short steps of the sanctuary platform, pausing briefly to face the vacant thrones and bow. She had written these ceremonies, the myths, and eventually The Pact itself several lifetimes ago. In those early years after the chapel’s construction was finished, she’d felt like a clown standing here bowing to furniture owned by a couple dead alicorns. Now it was another habit of life, like brushing her teeth or showering. A pegasus who was invited to the pulpit bowed in deference to a higher power, end of story. Not doing it, well, it simply wasn’t done.

Her duty fulfilled, she turned to take the pulpit. “Thank you, reverend father.”

He stepped aside with a beatific smile, allowing her to step into a space rarely occupied by anyone but himself and his many predecessors. A sturdy wooden stool waited for her under the pulpit’s bottom shelf. She slid it out, allowing the polite sound of chuckles as the congregations watched her step up into view.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” they echoed back.

She closed the open pages of The Pact and slid the book aside, waiting for the tide of voices to subside. “I’m sure that by now all of you have heard the rumor that one week ago, a balefire bomb was detonated outside of a Stable whose purpose was to house the pureblood descendents of Equestria’s strongest pegasi. Unfortunately, the rumor is true.”

Gasps and muffled cries rolled toward the chapel’s rear and rebounded back. Primrose looked down for a beat, her ears tucked back as she feigned grief and shame. Half a minute passed before she took a long, steadying breath and lifted a wing for silence. The faces that looked up from the pews were openly distraught, many of them covering their mouths to muffle quiet sobs.

“For the last several days,” she began, then stopped as a mare near the back row stood from her pew, her daffodil yellow church dress chasing her down the central aisle as she sobbed her way into the crowded vestibule and the doors leading outside. Primrose ticked off a few seconds before starting again, her voice subdued. “For the last several days, your Enclave has been conducting an investigation to uncover exactly how this abhorrent attack took place and who was behind it.”

“It was the Steel Rangers!” someone belted.

Several others quickly chimed in, their rough voices melting together as they shouted in agreement. Primrose had to bite her tongue so as not to smile. They were even more eager to swallow the lie than she could have hoped.

She lifted a feather again and waited for calm. “We don’t know that yet. Not for certain. But… upon reviewing footage captured by spritebots in the area at the time of the explosion, evidence of a covert Ranger operation in the vicinity of Junction City was uncovered.”

A roar of outrage erupted from the pews. Profanities that would normally result in the utterer being hoisted by their mane and tail and deposited onto the cobbles outside bounced freely between the chapel walls. Primrose glanced at where Belfry stood, his expression mollified at his congregation’s conversion into a furious mob, and she winced with an apology that almost felt sincere.

Outrage quickly boiled over into open fear as those nearest the front began shouting directly at her.

“How did they get the bomb?”

“Who’s defending New Canterlot?”

“My daughter was on the front lines! Is she alive?!”

The Black Wing soldiers strung along either side of the chapel watched the turmoil expressionlessly, though a few of them had let their wings drift forward toward their rifles. Mongrels, she thought. She struck the pulpit’s hardwood surface with the flat of her hoof, startling the congregation into an uneasy silence.

“New Canterlot is safe,” she assured them, “and we will remain so as long as its citizens remain strong. The Enclave will protect you, all of you, just as it has protected you for two centuries.”

She paused, inviting the first frustrated voice to pipe back up. It didn’t take long.

A young stallion barely into his twenties half-stood from his seat. “How do we know they don’t have another bomb?”

The worried murmurs were back. The Rangers never had any balefire bombs to begin with, of course. She and Spitfire had gone through pains to ensure the talisman manufacturing plants tasked with fabricating the technology that would end civilization weren’t left standing for someone else to stumble across before their young Enclave could truly step out and establish a foothold in the ruins. Just as they had in those final hours of the great war, the balefire talisman was a weapon wielded by one side and one side only. The Steel Rangers had as much access as Vhanna so long ago.

The faintest of smirks touched Primrose’s lips as she recalled her recent stroll through the depot beneath the ruins of Canterlot Mountain, where she’d personally selected the last of so very few destructive gemstones from their home among the dark and forgotten shelves.

“They don’t,” she said flatly. “I’m certain of it. As grim as it is for me to say, the Steel Rangers–”

“I heard that it detonated in the sky.”

Her eyes flashed over the pews in search of whoever had spoken, but the echoes caused too many others to look around at their neighbors for her to pick out its source. Heat crawled up the nape of her neck as she worked to conceal her anger. “There is no–”

“That’s why none of the radios work anymore,” someone else agreed.

“Traders are saying it was like seeing a second sun!”

Suddenly the chapel was swarming with competing voices, some arguing that they knew someone who heard something about seeing the fireball in the clouds while others tried to shout them down. Her back itched. Her wings felt too heavy. How the fuck had anyone close enough to see the explosion gotten all the way to New Canterlot in so little time? Why hadn’t she anticipated that possibility?

The noise made it hard to think. She needed sleep. More than that, she needed to get this under control before they remembered she was the one with all the answers.

“Rumors,” she bellowed, her voice carrying above the din, “are exactly what the Rangers want from us!”

Heads turned toward her, but not all of them regarded her with the rapt silence they had before. There was something snaking its way through the congregation that hadn’t been there before. Something as deadly as any poison.

“Their bomb,” she shouted, her voice loud enough to be heard by the crowd packed near the doors, “was meant to make us afraid! To shake our faith! I ask you to look at yourselves now and decide whether they succeeded or failed.”

She snapped a feather toward the thrones behind her. “Are these just empty chairs? Do they not await the goddesses’ return as we do?”

A low murmur of no rippled through the congregation.

She lifted a wing to the ceiling. “Do these walls your ancestors built from the coals of armageddon only serve to shield us from the wind?”

Firmer now. “No.”

They were hers again, gathering momentum. She pushed again. “Do the Steel Rangers sleep under our roofs, plant in our fields, or live in the protective shade of our sacred mountain?”

“No!” they chanted, and she pounded the pulpit to echo their sentiment.

“No they do not. They cannot and they never will. The Rangers had a chance to bring their weapon here, into the very heart of Equestria, and instead they chose to use it to destroy an innocent Stable which they coveted and we sought to protect.”

Angry murmurs softened, making way for the grief that so briefly overtook the chapel.

“They took advantage of the goddesses’ absence and punished the only pegasi certain to be outside their reach. They inflicted balefire on those who knew nothing of our war because the Rangers wanted us to know they were angry.” She grit her teeth, pretending to briefly lose her composure. It worked. A few fresh sniffles joined the whispered profanities. “They were furious that we, the guardians of Old Equestria, dared protect the innocent from their technological lust. So they killed that Stable because it was the only way they could think to hurt us. Because they knew the wrath of the goddesses would be waiting if they tried to bring that tainted weapon here.”

Stamped applause rumbled from the pews. A few pegasi whooped. Several more, Primrose saw, sat very still. They watched her as impassively as they had since she took the pulpit.

A flash of anger rose in her as she recalled expelling the vast majority of Clover’s security staff shortly after his escape, and the fact that several members of that team had been adept at identifying and tracking suspected sources of dissent. Now all she had was a stand-in director who couldn’t find his own asshole with a mirror, and the all but feral remnants of the Black Wing. These pegasi and unicorns staring her down were going to walk out without so much as a stern look, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“The Steel Rangers have revealed to the world what we already knew they were,” she said, feeling the momentum of her speech slipping. “Monsters. Degenerates. The thrones behind me sit empty because creatures like them have made this world unworthy of their light, and now it’s only a matter of time before common wastelanders look up and realize who their oppressors are. Soon the very earth beneath the Steel Rangers’ hooves will slip, and there will be no one left to stop their fall.”

Again the applause came, vibrating the floor with hearty approval, only it wasn’t the unified cacophony she’d come to expect. A frown touched her lip as she saw too many congregants, too many pegasi moving their hooves with placid effort or not at all. Something deep within her flinched. The ghost of Clover and the truth he’d fled with haunted the back of her mind, and she began to see it.

Doubt.

As Primrose stood there at the helm of this complex machine she built, she felt the vibrations. She heard the groan of something bend out of alignment and she saw, as her subjects stood from her pews and cheered for more lies, the cracks beginning to open.

Hooves shuffled in nervously from the corridor, the low murmurs that had run ahead of these pegasi falling silent as they approached the door. Behind a podium too narrow to completely obscure the energetic bounce of her hind leg, Primrose observed these six individuals with rising impatience. They meandered toward empty chairs, metal feet skittering back as they took their seats behind darkened terminals at a table they all knew were reserved for her generals, tacticians, and makers of war. These pegasi knew that world through their proximity to those who lived it and nothing more. Bespectacled, paunched bellies, some of them gray-maned and closer to their twilight years than middle-age, these pegasi weren’t soldiers. They were the Enclave’s keepers of knowledge.

Primrose nodded to an armed stallion posted outside the war room. He leaned toward the wall to swipe his laminate, and the blast proof door hissed down with a heavy thump. One of the senior archivists jumped at the sound, his eyes bulging with barely contained fear as thoughts doubtlessly whirled around the many reasons he and his colleagues had been dragged from their stuffy warrens to be seated here before their ruler.

Old habit tempted her to let the silence stretch, but she hadn’t summoned them to make them sweat and she didn’t have the patience for it anyway. Seven days. That’s how long she’d gone without sleep now. One full week since she was jettisoned from that dream, screaming and pissing from the utter certainty that she had been fractions of a moment away from being obliterated. Her body craved sleep worse than the chem fiends who begged for caps on the outskirts of the city craved their next hit. A week in and she could already feel the caffeine pills losing their punch. She’d begun double-dosing, had briefly considered tripling were it not for the thunder of her own pulse between her ears. She didn’t want to think about how bad the come-down was going to be.

The tip of her hind hoof was tap-tappity-tapping again. She dropped it flat against the floor, startling her small audience to attention.

“Good morning,” she started, and tried not to grit her teeth when they returned her greeting as if she were still behind Belfry’s pulpit. “Since we don’t have the luxury of time, I’ll jump right into why you’re here. The dream realm of Princess Luna is under siege.”

Backs straightened, and confusion shifted toward concern. She hadn’t brought enough of them to stir up a proper buzzing murmur, making her words land like bits thrown into an empty well. From the head of the conference table, she turned to level a feather toward the screens in front of them while using another to tap a key below her own. The fuzzy photograph of an old book, its deeply foxed pages bent open to an entry dominated by a smudged charcoal sketch on its upper right page. The smoky silhouette of an alicorn stared up from the page.

“Do any of you recognize this creature?”

The eldest of the group, Head Archivist Nock Fletcher, nodded with a face puckered with consternation. “The Princess’s Tantabus.”

A few others murmured agreement, albeit with a skeptic’s tone. Knowledge of it had been jealously guarded by Luna, herself. One could spend several lifetimes scouring the old tomes for mentions of it and never find one because the creature was, if set against its creator’s own existence, barely an infant. It had been borne from a deep, instinctual need to suffer punishment for crimes that this new world seemed unwilling or incapable of inflicting. The Tantabus had served, then, to dredge through Luna’s darkest regrets in search of kindling for when she finally lay down to sleep. Only one book, a singularly rare arrangement of pages, mentioned that creature at all. A diary quilled by the late younger princess herself.

And that was the crux of Primrose’s problem.

“The Tantabus is alive and well within the Endless Dream.” She watched their faces for any signs of doubt as she shared her slightly bent truths. “Until now, it has kept mostly to itself. For the few of us who still dream, it sometimes crafts new fictions within which it believes we will enjoy ourselves. In Princess Luna’s absence it has come to believe its duty is to rule her realm as its own.”

One of the archivists made a noise of disgust. Four others stared at Primrose, their eyes wide with growing dread. The sixth, the Head Archivist, wrinkled his nose without looking up from his screen.

She observed him as she continued speaking. “For the past two centuries I believed it was safer not to interfere with the Tantabus or its delusions, and this has been true so far. Unfortunately, very recently, the situation changed. It grew bored. More likely it has been growing more and more so over the decades. A dwindling pool of dreamers to play with is probably the cause. The Tantabus, by dint of its original purpose, has unchallenged access to the memories of those it encounters. This includes myself.”

The quiet within the war room turned deathly as understanding dawned on the elderly pegasi. Finally, Head Archivist Fletcher looked up from the diary entry to regard Primrose with raised brows, but in that surprised expression were deeper undercurrents of disapproval. He was angry, not at the situation she described but because he was only learning about it now. Fletcher was a stallion who didn’t just want to be in the know. He expected information to be given to him, freely and immediately. Now he was turning that sense of self-righteous obligation at her like a pointed feather, and her hackles jumped in response.

“Until recently, I believed the last balefire weapons to have been lost at the conclusion of the great war,” she continued, returning Fletcher’s steady gaze with her own, “but the tragedy at Stable 10 makes it clear I was wrong. Worse than that, it tells me the Tantabus is willing to use what I know for its own entertainment. I believe it coaxed a member of the Steel Rangers to smuggle one of those bombs to Stable 10 and set it off, if only to observe my own reaction once I fell asleep. To that end–”

“Minister, please tell me if I’m speaking out of turn,” Fletcher interrupted, his head slightly bowed in mild deference. She turned toward the rattle of dry vocal chords wearing a brittle mask of patience. “But are you suggesting the Steel Rangers aren’t responsible for the bombing?”

“No. I’m not suggesting that.” She narrowed her gaze at him, then looked away, shaking her head. “Whoever among them committed this atrocity, they were free to reconsider from the first step to the last. They succumbed to temptation, but the Rangers will be held to account. Your purpose here isn’t to absolve them of their crimes, Archivist Fletcher.”

His eye twitched at the incomplete use of his honorific.

“All of you are here,” she continued, sweeping a wing across the table, “to find a way to prevent this from happening again. Any projects or tasks you were working on up to this morning are postponed, and all Archive staff aside from yourselves have been placed on earned leave.”

Fletcher blanched. “What about our research?”

“Postponed indefinitely,” she intoned. She lifted a hoof and tapped it against her terminal’s screen with a firmness that made the image stutter. “Your sole duty to the Enclave from this point forward is to find some way to contain or kill this creature. All of you are cleared for full access to both digital and physical collections.”

“B-but only I am allowed–”

She stopped him with a look. “Any attempt to obstruct this endeavor will be treated as treason. Am I understood?”

“Yes, minister,” they chimed.

“Good,” she said, the exhaustion creeping around her brain like an invisible predator. “I want daily progress reports in my inbox by end of day. Get to it.”

Chairs scraped again as they rose to leave. She didn’t watch them go. Instead her attention was on her Pip-Buck, the first lines of a separate order already pecked in an outgoing letter to her new security director. Head Archivist Fletcher hadn’t spoken much in their brief meeting and yet he’d said plenty. A team would intercept him on the way down to the Archives. His tenure there had run its course.

A tap, and the message was sent. Her gaze returned to Luna’s smudged sketch of the creature she’d created, never knowing it could cause so much trouble so long after her death. The still image of the Tantabus stared up at her until, finally, Primrose reached forward and turned off the screen.

A hoof nudged against her shoulder. “You quittin’ on me already, girl?”

Fiona shot a hand down toward the sidewalk, her exhausted brain momentarily convinced she’d been falling at some indeterminable velocity. Her palm met the charred concrete with a soft pat, and she blinked several times before she was entirely sure where she’d landed.

Dodge was standing more or less level with her, something he could only manage with her sitting with her back to the makeshift hospital like she was right now. She’d gone out for a quick break, she remembered. She brought two fingers up to rub her eyelids and stopped only when she saw the dirty clots of soot now clumped under her talons. The stallion smiled sympathetically, but there was a touch of impatience there in the creases of his eyes. He was just as exhausted as she was. Probably more than her, actually, since three of his legs and most of his midsection were a patchwork of thickly wrapped gauze. She didn’t think he could do this work while simultaneously recovering from so many burns. If she was being honest with herself, coming to Junction City might not have been the most suitable career change she could have chosen.

“Sorry,” she groaned, forcing aching muscles into painful locomotion as she pushed herself up from the sidewalk. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

Dodge made room for her to stand. He had to. She was twice the size of anyone else here, and he didn’t exactly carry the natural heft of an earth pony. He was a willowy little guy who looked like he’d spent most his life skipping more meals than he ate. A faded scar of pink flesh that had nothing to do with the bomb was still visible beneath a mottled roan coat, a mark worn by those whose value had for a time been measured in terms of age, physicality, sex, and she had to assume Dodge’s case, virility. It’d been some time since he’d last worn a slaver’s collar, but Fiona couldn’t stop herself from trying to assemble his life story from a glance.

“You’d sleep better if you ever went to bed,” he commented, gesturing with a bandaged leg toward the empty door a few concrete slabs from where she’d sat down. She tipped her head one way, then the other, relieving her stiff neck with a single glorious pok.

He was right, she thought as she padded to the open door with him. Four days earlier she’d arrived in Junction City filled with a determination that she was going to do the work instead of telling people… no, who was she trying to kid? She’d lectured the wasteland about the work other people were doing that she thought they should all be taking part in. For the entirety of her flight from the Bluff she tried to figure out what it was she’d accomplished sitting in her firetower, other than playing two-century old records in the dead of night and telling anyone who would listen about the state of their steadily decaying world. It was shockingly easy for her to beat up on herself like this, and by the time she’d arrived in the metallic-tasting skies above Junction City she’d resolved to turn down the masochism a few notches so she could focus on doing what she’d come here to do.

Which was… well, she hadn’t been sure. “Help” was a devious word in how impossibly broad it liked to be. Her cynical side, borne out of her formative years spent enduring the toxic morass - hah, more ass - of Old Griffinstone told her to expect a town burned to the ground, littered with corpses, a crossroads scorched of all life. What else could there be in the wake of a weapon that once knocked all of civilization into the bottomless ditch they all lived in now?

As it turned out, quite a lot. According to several survivors she’d spoken to when she landed, Junction City had caught fire like a struck match. Everything had been dark and peaceful one second, and by the next a new sun had risen and anything caught by its sickly light had caught as quickly as kindling. Had that been the end of it, Junction City would have burned. However the shockwave had shot across the rooftops like the wingbeat of an old god, simultaneously snuffing flames and caving in walls with equal ferocity. Not all the fires stayed out. Many had rekindled in the stillness that followed and burned eagerly while others encountered too many inflammable materials strewn out by the explosion to spread with speed. Those slower fires were smothered by a small collection of survivors who’d dug themselves from the ruins of their homes and recognized the danger. Dodge had been one of them, and now gauze marked the many awards he’d earned for his effort.

Over half the town had burned, and thin filaments of gray smoke still curled up from the embers where wooden shanties used to cluster around the edges of the town proper. The sturdier, two-story structures that lined main street had been the only to survive and only just. Most of those second floors had been ripped away by the blast, turning carpets and wood paneling into roofs. Several of those upper floors now sagged drunkenly into the lower, the structural integrity of the walls below all but shattered. From one end of the main road to the other, wrinkled black beams reached toward the overcast sky like broken fingers seeking something to hold as if jealous of the weaker structures that had collapsed completely and jealousy clung to the bodies cooling in the rubble.

Yet despite the destruction wrought by the bomb, there was work here to do. What Fiona hadn’t bargained for when she struck out to lend a hand was how hard it would be for her to stop.

“I’ll rest tonight,” she promised, knowing full well she’d find an excuse to sneak outside after a few hours of corpselike sleep. “Maybe all your horns will start working by then.”

Dodge held open the door for her, his expression uncomfortable. The fires weren’t the only thing the explosion snuffed out. Though the radiation it released was dissipating quickly, its side-effects weren’t. “Hopefully, but I doubt it. Not for a while at least.”

They stepped inside what had a week ago been a successful dry goods store and had since been converted into a hospital. A few more than fifty ponies lay in various states of discomfort on the filthy floor where display shelves knocked over by the blast had once created aisles in the long, narrow store. Those shelves had since been dragged out into the road, added to the piles of debris that had to be pulled into charred heaps along the sidewalks so that wagon traffic could enter the town. It was thanks to the newly independent trading companies formed in the wake of F&F Mercantile’s collapse that Junction City’s few dozen survivors had bundled burlap sacks to rest their injured bodies on instead of the cold floor. They formed two rows on either side of the floor, and some of their heads turned along the walls to see who had arrived only to lose interest at the sight of familiar faces.

The odor of stale urine and worse was a physical thing she had to make a deliberate effort to walk into. Near the door an open crate sat half-full of empty stimpack injectors waiting to be dumped with the others on the outskirts amidst the burned shacks. Fiona had been dismayed to see stims being used in lieu of real medicine, but the apothecary’s store had burned and the only traders who came out this far tended to carry the wasteland’s staple fix-all and not much else. The stink of infection scratched at her nostrils and she gagged a little whenever she paid attention to it. If the past four days were any indication, at least three of these ponies wouldn’t be alive tomorrow morning.

She’d sent word to Nurse Redheart with a few traders and even a scavenger who said they were headed back to the Bluff, but she didn’t think the old ghoul would just load up a wagon with several thousand caps worth of high quality medical supplies and set out on her own. Even if she did, her gut told her the Rangers would stop her from coming. They might treat her like shit, but she controlled the only clinic on the Bluff worth trusting. Someone over there was bound to know her absence would leave them all in the care of the grifters and quacks they’d be left with.

Two mares in little better shape than their patients slowly walked the aisles, each monitoring their own row of patients for signs of distress for which their treatments were severely limited. The taller of the two walked with a slight limp she’d claimed was due to arthritis and not the deep bruise down her foreleg. Ms. Vogel, as she insisted she be called, had spent the last several decades charged with administering and collecting payments on the various properties the town council rented out to its residents. Now she was Junction City’s de facto leader, a position she did not want and planned to offload on the first Ranger she saw. Yet for all her protests, the old mare had the spark of leadership in her that few did. This hospital, spare as it was, wouldn’t exist were it not for the shrill orders she’d shouted at those capable of standing. And it was her take-no-shit method of dealing with incoming traders that ensured many of them would be making a return trip as soon as they replenished their wagons. There were rumors she’d threatened to make note of anyone who reneged on those promises, though what she would do with that list she left deliberately vague.

Dodge indicated Ms. Vogel with the tip of his horn. “She needs someone to water the patients. I’m going to start warming up some broth. I could use your help cutting vegetables when you’re done.”

She nodded, and Dodge left. The butcher shop next door had been commandeered to store the supplies trickling in from the local traders, and a few of them had managed to get the kitchen in the back up and running again. No one was sure what kind of food the injured could stomach without vomiting it back up, but a brief experiment with solids had left several messes. Fiona didn’t think the fetid air of the dry goods store did much good for anyone’s appetite, but leaving them to the mercy of the elements didn’t seem like a better option. Boiling finely chopped carrots and tatos in lightly salted water was as good as they would get until one of the patients kept down something sturdier.

Ms. Vogel glanced up at her as she navigated the boards between pairs of patients, quietly mouthing the word “water” when she had her attention. Fiona nodded, and the elderly mare patted her arm as she slipped to the back of the room where a blue plastic drum held down the floorboards. The store’s owner had used it to store his own water allotment from the town well and now they were doing the same. She released the metal clamp that held the lid secure and pulled it away while using her free hand to fish a glass bottle from a crate on the floor. A quick sniff let her know it had indeed been rinsed out, and she dunked it into the cool liquid. Bubbles formed in the rust colored water as the bottle filled. She repeated the process with three others and, lacking anything to carry them on, she hooked their glass necks between the knuckles of one hand and carried them to the first round of patients.

She braced against a touch of apprehension as she bent down beside a middle-aged stallion against the north wall, remembering with some embarrassment his startled shout from yesterday when he opened his eyes to, well, her. It was too easy to forget what she looked like to most ponies since the ones she spent most of her time around were well used to her. It was believed that there had been a time before language, cities, or nations when her primordial ancestors killed and devoured creatures less adept at hunting. Prey species, she’d heard them called, thought she knew better to say something so dangerous aloud. She’d heard enough talk like that when she was little and didn’t want to be responsible for importing it to the Equestrian wastelands.

Careful not to loom over the former shopkeep, she sat askance of him and gently shook his shoulder. He cracked his eyes, saw the offered bottle, and allowed himself to be sat up against the wall so he could drink. He didn’t thank her out loud, but she saw the sentiment in his eyes and nodded before moving on to the mare next to him.

Others entered the hospital while they worked, some to drop off useful supplies they’d salvaged from the town’s many fresh ruins while others asked for painkillers, water, a quick stimpack, or something to eat. It hadn’t taken long for Vogel’s hospital to turn into what it was now, a place where the ingredients of life were stored and shared. Fiona had strong feelings about this that she couldn’t quite put into words.

It felt… right. No one asked for caps in exchange for what they brought, nor did they dicker over prices for what they needed. Several of these ponies had only just recovered enough to leave this hospital, their bandages barely a day old in some cases, and yet their fetlocks were stained black with soot just like the others digging through the rubble for anything that might help them all survive. It could have been the shock forcing them to work together, but Fiona wasn’t sure that was entirely it. They’d experienced trauma together, and the old petty priorities had been evicted to make room for new ones. Something similar happened two centuries ago. Faced with the choice of dying alone or surviving together, those spared by the apocalypse had chosen the latter. She wondered how naturally that decision had come, and what changed afterward for everyone to revert back to infighting and war.

“I saw what you did.”

Fiona blinked. She’d been holding a bottle of water to the lips of a horribly burned mare. She’d been standing outside when the bomb exploded, likely engaging in the same profession Fiona part-timed in to pay her own bills. Her front half was a mass of gauze, save for the end of her muzzle which was glossy with weeping, inflamed skin. She couldn’t see Fiona, and even if she could it wasn’t as if Fiona had done anything but help since she got here.

The mare had to be senseless from the pain. Fiona pressed the rim of the bottle back to her lips, but she dipped her head away.

“You’re the one who brought the bomb here,” she hissed. “You hid in the clothing store and didn’t think anyone could see you, but I did.”

Fiona wrinkled her brow and looked back to Ms. Vogel, who only sighed and shook her head. “Olivine believes she saw the Enclave evacuating from Gussets & Garments just before the explosion. I was hoping,” she said, eyeing the bandaged mare, “that we had put that debate to rest so the other patients could rest as well.”

Olivine made a face, which was an accomplishment under all that gauze, and swallowed her pride enough to drink from the bottle. Fiona shifted her wing away from the mare’s hoof, unhappy that she’d pushed herself along on aching legs just to catch a random accusation like that, but she held back the urge to tell the mare who she was. She’d learned early on at the Bluff that no one liked that much ego, and if she was being honest with herself it did feel nice to just be regular Fiona again.

Still, she couldn’t ignore the clanging of alarm bells in her head. Gussets & Garments. Cider’s body had been discovered in an outhouse behind the same store.

She cleared her throat. “How many soldiers did you see?”

If Olivine could sneer at her, she would have. Instead, she showed her dislike by remaining silent. Fiona knew the next patient was waiting for his turn, but her inner journalist refused to let this go. It may just be a coincidence, maybe, but she knew better than to let go of the thread of a story with a hook like this. She turned back to Ms. Vogel, who had already stopped what she was doing in anticipation of additional questions.

The elderly mare waited a beat for Fiona to lose interest, then deflated slightly when it became obvious that wouldn’t happen in her lifetime. “There were no soldiers. She saw the pegasus who caused all that trouble with F&F Mercantile. Apparently she had been squatting inside Ms. Dressage’s apartment, or robbing it.”

She spoke this last part softly, as if saying it too loud might inspire those around her to see the growing stockpiles of communal supplies for the liability they were. “Several citizens reported seeing her taking off toward the Enclave’s encampment after being caught in the flash, though Olivine has taken to expanding what she saw into fiction.”

Fiona set the bottles on the floor, her task temporarily forgotten. “Aurora was here?”

Ms. Vogel gave a noncommittal nod. “Supposedly. It could have been a local dustwing for all anyone knows. It certainly was not a secret Enclave platoon.”

One of the other patients let out a thick chuckle that devolved into a coughing fit. Ms. Vogel’s younger helper took one of the bottles from Fiona and brought it to the hacking stallion. Fiona’s frown deepened as she moved onto the patient besides Olivine. He’d sat up under his own strength, paused for several confused seconds, then muttered something about his horn and took the bottle between two awkward hooves.

While he drank, Fiona took the two empties to the back and put them in the crate with the word DIRTY slashed across it in sooty black letters. Four fresh bottles were plucked from the box beside the water barrel and the gears spun freely in her head as she watched liquid burble down the empty neck.

Aurora couldn’t have been here. Knight Latch told her she and Ginger had been spotted arriving at the Stable with an Enclave escort. Would he lie about something like that? The pliable bridge of her beak wrinkled and she decided he hadn’t been. Latch was always a dick to her, but only because she didn’t wear a gilded chastity belt. And, maybe because she wasn’t exactly nice to him either. Still he’d shared the news of their sighting freely without asking for any favors in return.

The bottle bubbled full, and she dunked the next one into the barrel.

Okay, she thought. I’m Aurora. I live in a Stable and don’t know my eyes from my asshole when it comes to the real world. My sole purpose is to find a magical gewgaw that’ll keep my home from falling off a cliff and I think it’s in Fillydelphia. And I found one there, probably around the same time the Enclave showed up, and came back home under their protection. Which means the Enclave is helping me, just like Latch thinks they are. Fine. Then why, after all that, do I show up in Ginger’s store right when a balefire bomb pops off above my home? Do I have a reason to leave the Stable right after I got back? And hadn’t the Enclave been broadcasting all that shit about pureblooded pegasi a few weeks ago?

She tapped her talon against the next bottle as it filled. Things weren’t lining up in the nice, orderly fashion she preferred them to. The Enclave had shown all signs of wanting to protect the Stable from the Steel Rangers. They’d been taking pot shots at the excavation teams since the first shovel broke gravel and didn’t stop until they finally overwhelmed the Rangers’ defenses. Stable 10 was some weird bugaboo shrine to pegasus-ness for them, which was why it never made sense to Fiona for them to be the ones to detonate balefire right on top of it.

What did they stand to gain from contaminating the one place in the wasteland they gave a shit about? If they wanted to prevent the Rangers from carving out all that premium tech, then they should have set the thing off on the inside. Irradiating the mountain didn’t take that option away from their enemy. If anything it put the Enclave at a disadvantage because they were so squeamish about sending their pegasi into high radiation zones. The Rangers could care less about sucking down a few rads. Their power armor would shrug the worst of it off as an afterthought.

Had the Steel Rangers planted the bomb? She dipped the last bottle into the barrel, not liking how much sense that made in her head. Where did Aurora fit in all this? Even if she’d known there was a bomb, she would have had… what, seconds to react? She’d met this mare and seen just how bullheaded she got when she thought something she cared about was in danger. Hell, she’d blindly flown several hundred miles and sicked a death claw on the Jet Stream Solar Array because a bounty hunter had abducted her traveling companion instead of her. If she knew a balefire bomb was ticking way inside her home, there wasn’t an army in the world strong enough to make her sit quietly inside Ginger’s shop.

And, apparently, she hadn’t.

The last bottle stopped gurgling. They clinked between her fingers as she carried them to the thirsty patients. Ms. Vogel watched her approach, and she sagged just a little as she saw the question forming on Fiona’s beak.

“Has anyone… been to the Stable since the explosion?”

The old mare licked her lips and shook her head. “Not to my knowledge, no. The travelers I’ve spoken to are waiting to see if the Enclave or Rangers are going to try retaking the mountain. No one wants to be caught in the middle if the fighting breaks out again.”

If, not when. Ever since the explosion, the flare-up between both powers immediately cooled. She didn’t blame them. If one of the old world’s bombs had been recovered, it likely meant there were others waiting to be used. No doubt both were still trying to figure out which side pushed the button, and why. Fiona had a feeling she already knew why. The bomb had been someone’s way of saying back off, and it worked.

“Should I ask Dodge to finish with the water?”

Fiona looked toward the open door and the blackened ruins of Junction City beyond. Fifteen, maybe a thirty minute flight from here to the Stable? She wouldn’t be gone long, she wanted to say, but the look on Ms. Vogel’s face warned her against the lie. Fiona hadn’t been instrumental in digging out survivors, nor had she been the one to organize them. That had been their own doing as much as it had been Ms. Vogel’s, and Fiona had just been another set of helping hands. Both of them knew the town wouldn’t collapse without her.

The old mare quirked her lip and nodded toward the door. “Thank you for the help.”

Rainbow Dash walked down the old stairs in deep contemplation, hardly noticing the two teenaged colts who hurried past her with empty cantines clunking beneath their wings. They were likely on their way down to the cisterns with the hopes of double-dipping on their day’s ration of water. She’d heard rumors that one of the techs down in water storage had been caught allowing some pegasi to exceed the half-ration limit and hadn’t taken long for word to spread. Several fights had already broken out in the morning lines and when the daily allowance of a young mare had been revoked, she’d bloodied one of the water techs so badly he had to be carried to the infirmary.

She touched the spot below her neck where several gold pebbles were still embedded and tried not to meet the gaze of a stallion who passed in the other direction. Like the necklace that once held her element, Stable 10 was beginning to crumble and too many of its people were looking to her for a solution. She didn’t know how to tell them she didn’t have one.

The door to the Agricultural level was held open by an overturned utility cart. Bottles of cleaning solution and clean rags stained brown from dry soil scattered over the floor lay where they’d fallen. Rainbow paused in the dim glow of the corridor’s emergency lights, then sighed as she bent down and righted the cart. The door hissed closed as she dumped its spilled contents back onto its upper shelf and wheeled it against the wall.

“Someone’s going to turn it back into a doorstep once you leave.”

She closed her eyes, managing not to jump at the husky growl of Weathers’ voice. “How many times do I have to tell you to stop following me?”

She didn’t need to see Weathers to know she was answering with one of her half-shrugs. “As soon as you give me a good reason.”

Rainbow shot a look at the colonel and wondered how a mare so large could move around so silently. Weathers stared back, implacable as ever. A ragged trail of surgical staples ran from her left shoulder all the way back to her tenth rib. She’d been sliced open like a trout by a chunk of tungsten shrapnel when the Stable door’s locking pins shattered like so much glass. Not everyone had been so lucky. Of the hundred or so Enclave soldiers that managed to reach the antechamber, less than thirty were still alive. Some had been caught in the path of the Stable door when it tore loose, while more were killed outright by the cloud of metal rails and floor panels turned into shotgun spray by the shockwave that roared in behind it. The survivors had been brought inside and taken to Medical, where a bewildered infirmary staff set to work cutting away alien uniforms to assess injuries ranging from concussion to exsanguination. A recovery ward had since been converted into a makeshift holding cell until Sledge made up his mind what to do with the Stable’s unexpected guests.

With, Rainbow noted, the exception of one.

“You shouldn’t be out walking around with your side ripped up like that. I could have Sledge lock you up in Medical so you don’t pop a stitch.”

Weathers nodded affably enough at the half-hearted warning. “You could. It’s just another stripe to me.”

The skin at the back of her neck warmed, though she wasn’t sure whether that was bull-headed anger or just discomfort around not knowing if she was allowed to comment on Weathers’ ghostly markings. Those final years of the war had been awful for any Equestrian zebra, but the Ministry of Image’s propaganda wing had amplified that misery to something worse. Rainbow broke her gaze and looked toward the corridor of gardens, speaking quickly before Weathers pulled her any closer to a topic brimming with landmines.

“I can walk around on my own,” she repeated, emphasizing her point by walking into the soil-strewn corridor. To her irritation, four large hooves followed behind her. “Colonel, please. I stopped being a ministry mare a long time ago.”

“You’re an Element of Harmony,” she countered with an immovable certainty that made Rainbow even more uncomfortable. “Even though you’re… changed, you’re still one of the bearers. And besides–”

“You swore an oath,” Rainbow finished, fighting hard not to roll her eyes. A clod of soil stamped with someone else’s hoofprint slid when she stepped on it and she stumbled a little, sending fragments of it skittering ahead. In the corner of her eye, one of Weathers’ wings was held part way open, ready to catch her if she’d fallen. Rainbow ground her teeth and picked her way around the littered floor more carefully. “You made that oath to Primrose, not me.”

“I swore it to the Enclave,” she corrected.

“Same difference.”

“No,” Weathers said a touch more gruffly, “it’s not.”

This time she did roll her eyes. “You’ve been saying that for days now and you’ve never once said why. Are you going to tear off the bandaid yourself or do I have to do it for you?”

She waited, eyes flitting to one door’s numbered placard to the next in search of the one she wanted. The gardens had been picked clean even before the bomb exploded, but now she could see the cracks forming in the dirt plots behind doors left open. With barely enough power coming in from Stable-Tec’s hardened network to keep the air circulators running, the idea of getting the water purification plant working again was a pipe dream. Even with rationing in effect, clean water was quickly running out. Already, there were rumblings of what had to come next. Either the residents of Stable 10 could stay here until they died of dehydration, or they could take their chances outside. Rainbow feared many of them would choose the former.

She read the placard of an approaching doorway and stopped to look down at the Pip-Buck she’d been given. In the corner of the display, a persistent notification blinked at her in the hopes she might finally seek medical attention for a list of conditions that could fill a small library. She ignored it and scanned the Obituaries page she’d all but memorized by now. The location matched the narrow plaque marked Permaculture 49. She stepped over a shriveled carrot stalk on her way inside.

Weathers’ silence had gone on long enough, she decided, but when she began to speak she felt the heat that had been building in her chest quickly cool. She sighed. “Look, there’s not some easy, storybook way to draw a line between what you thought you were doing and what happened. I mean, seriously, take it from someone who’s been there. Primrose used you, and even though I don’t know you all that well, I can tell that’s going to hurt you for a long time. Trying to convince yourself that none of the bad parts were your fault is just…”

She paused, picked up a chunk of dirt from an excavated plot, and flicked it down the narrow walkway. It scattered into pieces as it went.

“You can be the best liar in the world but you’ll never be able to fool yourself completely. There will always be a part of you that knows.” She glanced back at Weathers, meeting her eye. “It’ll torture you, and the worst part is it hurts worse the more everyone else believes the lie.”

Weathers watched her for a moment, then frowned and looked at the passing plots. “This wasn’t my decision. I didn’t want any of this to happen.”

Rainbow nodded as she counted the passing rows. “I didn’t want any of this to happen either, but it did. Be glad you only have one bomb on your conscience.”

It was as close to an admission as Rainbow had ever spoken without beating herself over the head with it. She’d never been great at tempering her words with, well, thoughtful reasoning. Twilight would have been the first to tell her as much. Who knew she would only have to wait two centuries for it to come naturally.

Behind her, Weathers had stopped following and was looking down at one of the rows. Deep gouges had been dug into the cracked dirt where one of the residents had been digging in hopes of finding a vegetable the gardeners had missed.

“You may be right, but that doesn’t change what we saw happen in the antechamber.”

Rainbow grimaced, her pace slowing. Ever since the Enclave survivors dragged her into the Stable, it was all they wanted to talk about. She hadn’t seen any of it. She’d been too busy being knocked unconscious by the blast and she suspected more than a few of the soldiers who claimed to see her feat of magic had been out as well.

According to them, the gem she’d spent the war wearing for comfort had, for lack of a better word, exploded. Not literally of course, or else she’d have an answer to whether or not a ghoul could survive violent decapitation, but the pulse of magic that burst from the stone had done so with a force that momentarily distracted the fleeing soldiers from the behemoth cog hurtling toward them like an uncorked bottle. That detonation did something to the airborne door that Rainbow still didn’t believe possible. Several thousand tons of tungsten alloy, hurtled into the Stable with unfathomable force, ricocheted.

She would’ve happily chalked it up to a mass hallucination were it not for the dark ring of burns wrapping her neck. The ornate golden scrollwork of her necklace melted from the sheer volume of magic dumped by her elemental stone, explaining her fuzzy memory of waking up to pegasi plucking bits of gold from her skin.

Weathers had collected those remnants from her soldiers and turned them in, along with her dull and lifeless gemstone, to the Stable’s overstallion. The floor safe beneath Sledge’s desk might not be the Canterlot Castle vault, but it would have to do for now.

“I think,” Weathers began, her frown deepening as she spoke, “that when pegasi begin to abandon the Stable, word is going to spread about what happened. Who’s to say that might wind up being a good thing for the residents who leave, but once it gets out that Primrose tried to have a balefire bomb smuggled inside…”

She trailed off and Rainbow stopped walking, turning to see if Weathers had pieced together how badly broken the Enclave’s fiction really was.

“...they’re going to find out the truth. The real truth, about everything. Once that happens… I don’t know. I don’t want to think about what Primrose might resort to if the Enclave turns against her, but if that does happen I think it’ll be important for you to be protected.”

Rainbow shuffled her wing and resumed walking. “Pass. Not interested.”

“I wasn’t asking–”

The words leapt from her throat with renewed heat. “Good, then don’t ask. I’m not going to be someone’s mascot again. I’ve done that to death already.”

She could hear the frown in Weathers’ voice. “There’s going to be an exodus when the water runs dry, and most of these pegasi have roots in Cloudsdale. They’re going to go west. Into our territory. It’ll be like putting a lit match to a fuse.”

Rainbow drew up to the fifth to last planting row from the back, listening to the colonel’s voice ring in the empty garden. She paused to check her Pip-Buck again, peered down the featureless dirt, and decided this was as close as she was going to get.

“Are you going to stop them?” she asked.

Weathers snorted. “With what army?”

It’d been meant as a joke, but she couldn’t bring herself to smile. Too many new corpses had just joined the old ones outside the Stable’s shattered door, and she didn’t have the lifetime of combat experience that allowed Weathers to laugh off the trauma.

She stared down at the crust of soil beneath which Spitfire’s obituary recorded her burial. Her ears pinned backward. “Colonel, what do I have to say to get you to stop following me?”

Weathers didn’t immediately respond, which was an answer in itself. “You need protection, ma’am.”

“Don’t call me ma’am.” She chewed the inside of her lip, already feeling herself resigning to yet another stint of bodyguards and inflated importance. Her bladder twitched, reminding her why she’d made this special trip. “Does your protection involve following me into the bathroom?”

Weathers blinked. “Definitely not.”

“Great,” she sighed, her eyes on Spitfire’s grave, “because I could use some privacy.”

While Rainbow Dash drained her bladder several levels below, Sledge paced uneasily across the Atrium commons.

His hooves still crunched over bits of pulverized concrete left that seemed to migrate on their own from the piles of debris he and a hundred other residents had swept into the corners. The end of the outer door’s flight through the antechamber had shifted solid bedrock with such violence that the layers of steel and concrete composing the Stable’s skin shattered like an eggshell. It was a small mercy that the Enclave insisted upon making their delivery so early in the morning. An hour later and the entire Stable would have been queued up in the Atrium for the first food ration of the day, and hundreds would have been wiped out by flying debris instead of the single kitchen staffer who’d been standing in the same puddle of onlookers wondering why Aurora and Ginger had just come through like their manes were on fire.

All that kept the Atrium wall from caving in completely had been a dense lattice of rebar that now bulged out from the far corner like an angry tumor. The catwalk bridging Sledge’s office to the rest of the Atrium lay in a tangled heap of collapsed steel in front of several pop-up businesses, none of which he believed would ever be in business again. He didn’t have much in his office that he couldn’t find elsewhere. Terminal access was ubiquitous, and he hadn’t filled Delphi’s desk drawers with much more than a bottle he hadn’t the courage to open and a stack of onboarding documents he’d read and quickly forgotten about. Still, he missed the privacy having his own office afforded. He’d briefly considered trying his luck at flying to the open door, but he’d felt ridiculous the second he began opening his wings. He had no idea what he was doing and was liable to bash his brains out against the wall in the attempt. He’d quickly tucked his wings back into the protective sheaths slung over his back and tried to forget the temptation altogether.

After the survivors had been dragged into the Stable, after being hauled down to the infirmary himself to have a gash across his forehead knit together, after ordering all residents to evacuate to Mechanical until the radiation seeping past the blasted door could be contained, he’d retreated to his old compartment from before he’d been made overstallion and waited on the edge of his bed for the grief to come. He didn’t sleep much that first night. He didn’t think anyone did.

The next few days were a blur. He remembered sitting down with Dusky Pinfeathers to break the news about Aurora. That memory wasn’t going anywhere. At some point he had told his people in the machine shop to get their tools and build a temporary stairwell from the Atrium floor to the stranded security office above. The only reason none of the pegasi who survived the explosion had to be thrown ten feet to the ground below was thanks to the Enclave, whose pegasi had wings skilled in their original purpose. Whether it was him or someone else who suggested the thickly layered plastic sheeting that now sealed the security office, he wasn’t sure.

A hastily cut steel frame held the seal in place and, hopefully, was keeping most of the bomb’s radiation on the far side. Sledge watched the blurry shape of Deputy Chaser moving behind the plastic barrier and wondered, not for the first time, why he was still in charge. He knew the idea to regularly test the outside air hadn’t been his. That had come from one of the Enclave soldiers he’d sequestered in Medical until something, he didn’t know what, could be done with them. The deputies had been quick to volunteer for this role, and a rotation was established shortly thereafter.

Three minutes was all the time Sledge had been willing to allow for each test, and Deputy Chaser was nearing the end of minute one. It was funny how this deputy had quickly become his go-to ever since his arbitrary assignment to retrieve Rainbow Dash from the tunnel outside. Not too long ago, Sledge had been trying to put himself to sleep by reading an archival record pertaining to civilian law and order and found himself repeatedly encountering the word sheriff before it clicked that this role stood one run higher than a deputy. He wondered why Stable-Tec hadn’t included sheriffs in the Stable hierarchy and, upon deciding Stable-Tec’s decisionmaking hardly deserved his trust at this point, wondered if Chaser might accept such a promotion.

At the very least it would take some work off Sledge’s already full plate. He stopped pacing and glanced down at his Pip-Buck, noting the time.

“One minute elapsed.”

The plastic muffled Chaser’s response as he called back. “Copy, one minute. Radiation levels are showing lower than last reading, getting close to normal background. We might be in the clear.”

Sledge sucked his teeth, trying not to get his hopes up. “That’s good. I still want readings from the antechamber and the outer door, then I want you out of that jumpsuit and back down.”

“Copy. Back in two.”

A week ago he would have broken into a nervous sweat ordering anyone to undress, but the archived manuals all agreed about what to do during a radiation emergency. Exposure was cumulative, and radiation was glad as ever to do continual damage as it clung to clothing. The jail cell nearest the plastic seal had been designated for the slowly growing heap of contaminated jumpsuits and Sledge, despite his best efforts, was gradually growing accustomed to seeing his deputies descend the makeshift stairs wearing little more than a smile.

He resumed pacing, his eyes skirting toward the bloated section of bent wall plates and shattered concrete held above him in its rebar basket. As if to taunt the Stable for its water crisis, a sheen of moisture had slowly spread around the rupture. It leaked in so slowly that most of it evaporated before it could drip onto the rubble on the floor, leaving behind a smeared calcium stain that grew thicker each time the air recyclers kicked on.

Another minute elapsed.

“Two minutes!” he called, even though Chaser would be out of earshot in the antechamber’s wreckage.

He was impressed, then, when he heard the distant sound of Chaser’s voice calling back. The deputy had good ears, or more likely Sledge’s decades in the din of Mechanical had worn his own hearing down to a nub. Probably more than a few of his people had given their old boss shit without him catching on. He snorted. It felt good to laugh, even if the smile was gone within his next breath.

Another glance at his Pip-Buck reported that Chaser was burning through his final minute. Sledge looked expectantly at the plastic barrier, waiting for the deputy to appear. A faint pop echoed from somewhere behind it and he imagined Chaser was crunching over concrete gravel as he disrobed. He kept waiting. A few more pops. Then a few more, followed by a distant shout that quickly grew louder with the hard gallop of hooves.

Sledge’s eyes went wide as a terrified stallion yanked up the heavy zipper at the center of the seal and shoved his way through, revolver held tightly in his free wing, his contaminated jumpsuit still on as he rambled, half-panicked, about the monster outside devouring the Enclave corpses.

Fiona picked up an empty magazine from the flagstones, then pitched it at the open Stable door and the stallion who just fled back through it. His aim had been slightly better than if someone had duct-taped a pipe rifle to the back a horny mole rat, and that was being generous. Still it had been years since the last time someone shot at her with intent to kill and she disliked it now exactly as much as she had back then. With no return fire to keep him pinned, the shooter had gone for help which meant more of his skittish, trigger-happy friends would probably be on their way to try their luck.

She slinked back behind the cover of a beefy concrete pillar and eyed the shattered remnants of the Enclave encampment around her. Tent poles, mounds of charred canvas, and a baffling quantity of unassembled rifle components lay scattered among spilled cook pots and shredded rucksacks. She’d spent the better part of an hour loitering outside the tunnel’s wind blasted maw, calling inside for anyone alive while the blackened stumps of a charred oak grove stood in silent sentry behind her. The bomb’s devastation had peeled Foal Mountain down to its very bedrock. Its northern slope, smoothed by millennia of erosion and faltering plantlife, had been scraped ragged by the unimaginable winds and scars of red-gold bedrock stood bare like the flayed back of a gigantic, lifeless golem. In less time it took to down one of the throat-curdling shots at Someplace Else the bomb had lifted any loose material it could and used it to sandblast half a mountain.

Junction City’s destruction felt inconsequential compared to the total annihilation experienced here. When she landed, her wingbeats lifted snowy currents of ash from stony soil. Anything capable of burning had been burned. It stood to reason, then, that the door at the end of the tunnel hadn’t been left open to welcome new visitors. Stable 10 was likely as dead as the mountain languishing on top of it, or so she’d assumed. She became more convinced of this seeming fact after she worked up the courage to venture inside. Halfway down the tunnel, black-uniformed corpses littered the flagstones in varying degrees of immolation, decomposition, and both. Fiona didn’t have to look hard to recognize the terrible violence they’d been subjected to in the end. Dark smears stained the concrete where whole bodies had been thrown and broken against unmoving pillars. Pieces of flesh and cloth clung to the corners of flagstones where others had skidded. They lay together in heaps, eyes bulging, coats burned down to the roots like the wicks of spent candles, mouths forced as wide as they would open and further by the merciless physics of dying while standing inside the barrel of a pressure vessel.

There was nothing alive here, she’d decided. The only help she could give was to gather what she could from the dead and see to it that Ms. Vogel found a use for it. She’d been rummaging through the pockets of a dead corporal, then, when the Stable dweller spotted her from the open door and started shooting.

“Guess you must have scared it off,” a dubious voice murmured from the Stable door. “Radiation levels are looking better, at least.”

“It was standing right there! Sledge, I’m telling you we need to get rid of those bodies and build a barricade or something. They’re attracting mutants!”

Fiona stifled a dark laugh, careful not to lean too far out beyond the pillar’s protection. “You’re not easy on the eyes either, asshole.”

The voices went silent for a long stretch, neither Stable dweller apparently expecting anything sentient to be skulking around the tunnel. A few slow heartbeats later, the older stallion with the growly voice responded. “Hello?”

“Hi.” A beat later, she added, “Either of you gonna try shooting me again? I really didn’t appreciate it the first time.”

“Don’t trust anything that thing says.” The other stallion had meant it to be a whisper but had forgotten they were essentially standing at the mouth of an amphitheater. “I saw it eating one of the bodies.”

Fiona’s expression flattened. Hell, she could practically hear the little revolver’s nervous clatter in his wing. Shit aim or not, she didn’t feel like giving Ol’ Knocky Knees another chance at punching her ticket. When that inevitably did happen, she preferred not to go out known as the gryphon who allegedly feasted upon the irradiated dead.

“I only eat ponies who pay me for the pleasure, fucko.”

She could practically hear the quip whistle over their heads.

The elder stallion - the younger of the two had called him Sledge - was quick to cut to the chase. “Are you from the Enclave?”

This time she did laugh. “Sir, there aren’t enough caps in the world that could buy me a ticket into their purity party. I’m here alone.”

A grunt. “Then you can leave alone. This Stable is closed to outsiders.”

She blinked, then frowned. “Yeah, okay, but I can’t really do that. I came here to check up on a friend. She lives here. Name’s Aurora.”

A stony silence answered her. Even with two yards of concrete behind her, she could feel that elder stallion’s gaze bearing down on her. She licked the ridge of her beak, impressed at the record time she’d managed to talk herself into a corner. Of course this Stable’s guardians would know who she was referring to. Anyone east of New Canterlot who owned a radio would have heard something about the Stable mare who killed the bosses of F&F Mercantile, say nothing for being responsible for the shake-up in Blinder’s Bluff and Fillydelphia. The mare had emerged into a wasteland whose competing powers were balanced in a nervous equilibrium and wasted no time chucking a grenade into the middle of it. Few, Fiona suspected, other than a choice selection of wastelanders would name someone like that a friend.

“I helped get her Pip-Buck back a few weeks ago, and I’d heard–”

“Aurora is dead,” Sledge snapped, his tone brittle. “She and Ginger went up with the bomb. They’re dead and we lived. Leave us alone.”

Her brow knit together. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well I’m sorry to inconvenience you,” Sledge growled. Fiona flinched, forgetting how far her own voice would carry. This stupid tunnel had better reception than her low-band receiver back home.

“That’s not what I meant to say.” She gathered herself, knowing she was about to cause these people some pain. “There’s a town not far east of here that got caught by the explosion. I’ve been helping with the recovery and I met some survivors who say they saw her.”

“They’re wrong.”

She grimaced. That had been the younger stallion. He’d sobered quickly on the topic of Aurora and his elder wasn’t stepping in to blunt his denials.

“I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you, but I’ve made a living being able to pick the liars out from the honest ones. At the very least…” she hesitated, then stopped. What good would it do to tell her what they thought they saw, other than to twist the knife? She wasn’t here to prove a theory. She wasn’t even sure she had a theory to prove. All she knew was Aurora had been spotted somewhere after the explosion, and that hinged on the word of survivors who didn’t have much to gain from lying.

She pinched her eyes and fought down the urge to curse. What was she doing here? Even if Aurora had been in Junction City when the bomb popped, everyone who claimed to see her agreed that she’d run straight into the cauldron and burned herself half to death. She’d flown west while the town caught fire and never made it home. And even she could prove that with concrete evidence, what was the point? Aurora had been a decent enough person but calling her a friend was arguably something of a stretch. Chances were good that if the mare were alive she wouldn’t be able to remember who Fiona was beyond big scary radio gryphon.

“Face it,” she breathed. “You're chasing a corpse.”

For once her voice didn’t carry. She let out a sigh, staring absently at the death packed so thoroughly into the tunnel around her, and stepped out from behind the pillar. As expected, two stallions stood in the entrance, one slightly behind the other. Their stern expressions faltered at the sight of her, but only just. Both of them looked physically and emotionally drained, as if the simple act of existing took a significant effort. And here she was needling them because she’d never learned how to stop chasing leads.

“I…” she stopped, gathered her nerve, and tried again. “My name is Fiona. I’m not a monster, I promise. I’m a reporter and I promise I mean you no harm. I was hoping to find Aurora here, but… yeah, um… yeah. I don’t think I’m going to find her here and you guys look like you need help.”

The larger of the two, the aptly named Sledge with his rough bass in his voice, looked her up and down with open distrust. “We took help from the outside once already. It didn’t work out.”

Their gazes drifted to the Enclave corpses heaped against the Stable’s outer hull. Understatement of the century.

“Yeah. I can see that,” she murmured.

Behind Sledge, the stallion who shot at her not fifteen minutes earlier sheepishly stepped forward.

“We’re running out of water,” he said.

“Deputy,” Sledge rumbled.

“Sir,” he pushed back.

She could see a fight brewing between the two of them. Despite the revolver still held in the deputy’s feathers, she lifted her own in a sign of calm. “Because your generator isn’t working, right?”

The two looked back to her. Sledge more than anything else appeared afraid, as if everything were once again spiraling out of control. She sympathized with him. She’d interviewed too many Rangers who had come back to the Bluff after multiple tours in the field, and suddenly something as simple as letting another person choose what to make for dinner triggered a landslide of paralytic anxiety. She’d bet a pretty cap that Sledge was a lot like them. Control wasn’t an ego thing for him. It was sanity. It allowed him to sleep soundly at night, knowing he only needed to trust himself to keep his people safe.

Except, through no fault of his own, this time he hadn’t.

“Aurora told me a little about your electricity problems,” she continued, careful to maintain compassion in her voice. “I’m not sure there’s anyone out here who can fix your generator, but the well in Junction City is clean and the survivors there have more than they can ever drink on their own. How many of there are you?”

The deputy began to speak but Sledge snapped a wing open, silencing him. “I won’t repeat myself again. This Stable is closed and you need to leave. Now, please.”

She waited, only for a little bit, long enough to give the deputy time to speak up again. He didn’t, though from behind Sledge’s wing she could see something like hope and regret mingling in his expression. Regret for how he reacted to finding her in their tunnel, hope for the help she said was out there.

As she turned to leave, a small part of her felt a twist of guilt for inserting herself into these traumatized Stable dwellers’ lives. Yet the gears had already begun spinning and while there might be nothing here to satiate her inner journalist, a new drive had rooted itself in her mind. It would take some time to organize but once the details were hammered out, this Stable’s grizzled leader was going to know just how persistent she was.

“Good evening, Patient First Name Patient Last Name,” a cheery, disembodied voice greeted. “The time is now 21:55. Visiting hours will end in five minutes. Please place yourself in the AutoDoc Medical Bed located in the corner of the recovery room, adjacent to the window. To encourage restful sleep, 10cc of pentobarbital will be administered via jugular port.”

Eshe Obiakolam did not respond. He stared at the ceiling, unable to do much else, like he had since he first accepted the fact that he would die here. Thick, military-grade straps kept him secured to the bed, well outperforming their intended lifespan. The AutoDoc’s once plush, supportive padding beneath him had long since become rock hard from endless sanitations. Beige had turned dark brown from constant contact, his coat worn down to bare skin, sores, and finally thick calluses wherever the bed cradled him. It had been a long time since he could pull at his bindings or twist away from the machine’s articulated limbs that curled out of its carapace like insectile legs. Time had withered his muscles. His head, cupped by pillows that reeked of bleach, could only point forward. Straight toward that same patch of ceiling that the soldiers left him to stare at when the klaxons and the shuddering earth sent them screaming for their princesses.

He closed his eyes and wished he could stop hating them.

A long time ago, the ceiling had been a neat checkerboard of silver tiles. The pattern broke in four places to accommodate recessed overhead lights, of which one still weakly glowed. There had been a number of times when he wanted nothing except to be able to sit up and look through the observation windows he could just make out from the corners of his eyes, but that chance had been snatched away when the machine keeping him alive encountered the first of several timekeeping glitches.

Somewhere along the line during the AutoDoc’s development, a software engineer had been tasked with writing a simple block of code meant to track the time a patient spent in the machine. Doctors, the real ones with years of schooling and lifetimes of loan debt, worried about things like bedsores, muscular atrophy, blood pooling, and a host of medical complications they didn’t trust a multibillion bit corporation like Maiden Pharma to worry about. So a rudimentary timer was written into the AutoDoc’s code, dutifully tallying the seconds. And while in the majority of cases, AutoDocs were sold to hospitals who catered to wealthy patients who could afford a rejuvenating six to eight hours a month in the revolutionary new device, Eshe was not a majority case.

So the clock knit into the brain of the machine kept counting. It ticked off the seconds while army doctors stared down at him, first from within orange hazmat suits and later just white coats. It counted when the building shook like a struck bell, unphased by blaring alarms and panicked shouts from the medical staff. It did so even as the world around him grew deathly quiet, punctuated occasionally by faint scratching against some nearby door and the heavy thump of gunfire. The smooth edges of his bed went gray with undisturbed dust and yet those silver arms burst into view like clockwork, pushing liquefied food through one tube while removing waste from another. Needles pricked him with vitamins, antibiotics, and just enough recalled solution to keep his immune system alive while his muscles deteriorated and his mind stayed sharp. All the while the neatly patterned ceiling tiles grew crusty orange borders that spread like a rusting disease, the bed kept the time, and Eshe’s waking nightmare continued.

And then, thirty-one and a half years later, the AutoDoc’s clock ticked off its 999,999,999th second and, lacking room for another digit, ticked backwards to zero.

He’d been asleep when the AutoDoc crashed. While he floated through his medically induced nap, the circuits and processors surrounding him experienced something akin to a small stroke. For approximately seven seconds, Maiden Pharma’s pinnacle of medical technology could not understand when in time it existed. The simple clock written by an underpaid coder over a decade prior had been piggybacked upon over the course of dozens of patches, updates, and upgrades by others who saw no need to waste precious minutes creating a clock of their own. A tool meant to track a patient’s time in bed unwittingly became a critical component that, when it failed, caused everything that relied on it to fail as well.

The safeguard for such a collapse was simple: full reboot. It did this automatically and without any notable issue beyond the light corruption of Eshe’s patient file. He was immediately deemed a new patient, and as such certain sanitary measures had to be taken before he could be treated. For liability purposes, Maiden Pharma preferred this be done by a living person if at all possible. Fresh from its reboot, the bed’s software alerted a technician with a critical priority work ticket. Of course, that technician was dead so the ticket went ignored. Rude. A backup technician was alerted when the first failed to respond, however that technician was also dead.

With its admittedly thin legal obligation to alert two living persons to the issue, the AutoDoc proceeded with the reset on its own. Silver appendages snatched out waste lines and disconnected IVs, the lines and tubes drawn away to be sanitized while other arms reached down toward Eshe with fresh needles and an array of sensor pads. His blood was drawn, his vitals taken, and the picture of the AutoDoc’s newest patient was grim at best.

While Eshe slept, a clear tube snapped to the port installed below his jaw. The slow drip of Stimpack meant to keep his white blood cells fat and happy now came in a singular flood, staving off his decaying death for another day and propelling him through the barrier of dreamless sleep into a realm ruled by a dead princess’s guilt.

The cheery voice crackled from the bed’s speakers. “Sleep duration is estimated to last eight hours. Administering sedative. Good night, Patient First Name Patient Last Name.”

Eshe’s chest rose an inch and fell, pressing a wheezing groan from his lungs as the cold medicine rushed past his jugular port. He stared at the ceiling where pieces of those pretty metal tiles drooped from their frames like rusted, pouting lips and waited to meet his new jailor. The creature whose love for its dreamers ran so violently against his wish to die that it forbade him to speak to them, lest it lose even more to Mariposa’s defenses.

Sleep took him, as it always did, in a dizzying fog. The bed, the lab, its rotting ceiling sank behind heavy eyelids and when he opened them next, the creature was waiting for him.

He stood in the lobby of the Royal Luxury Suite in Fillydelphia. His black hooves sank into the luxury carpet like they had a lifetime ago, a sensation heightened by his bed’s deprivation. A sculpted webwork of curving silver and gold supports dangled crystals hung on long, stationary threads overhead. Eshe still remembered seeing the artpiece for the first time and being dazzled by its simple complexity. The concierge desk was empty. No friendly young mare to tip him off to the best corner stores and remain painfully silent as heavy hands of gryphon agents guided him to his doom. Even now, it seemed, he resented that mare. Just one word may have prompted someone to stand up and help, and his life might have been different.

The Tantabus waited for him at one of the little tables organized near the breakfast bar. Dispensers of familiar cereals waited beside a wide, steel warming plate stacked high with fresh waffles. Eshe’s lip twitched at the sight of one of the syrup dispensers standing in a sticky, golden puddle. Luna’s creature never shied away from pulling details from his memories that he couldn’t on his own. It liked to bring him here, to this hotel, whenever it meant to chastise him for his attempts to communicate with the others during their communal dreams of Canterlot because it knew the sobering effect it had on him.

Yet as he crossed the lobby and passed the gilded chalkboard happily reminding guests of the free breakfast their room key afforded them, he noticed the Tantabus wasn’t alone. Beside her sat a pegasus he didn’t recognize. Her unremarkable gray coat was speckled white in a few places, matching the pale shades of a not unpleasantly styled mane and tail. This stranger tracked his approach with dull green eyes, keen but untrusting like a dog who knew a loving stroke was just as likely as a debilitating kick.

“Eshe,” the creature said, “this is Aurora. I am permitting you to speak to her on the condition that you do nothing to endanger her.”

He understood the creature’s warning. Don’t tell her where you are. Don’t ask her for help. He nodded, eyeing the mare’s proffered wing, and awkwardly stuck out a hoof for her to clasp and shake. Pegasi were always a little too eager to adopt the customs of gryphons, he thought, but he knew better than to say as much.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he murmured and took a seat across from them. It felt so good to speak freely again. “May I ask why I’m here?”

The Tantabus turned its starscape eyes toward their guest, then flicked ever so briefly back to Eshe when he thought to himself that the creature’s form had grown darker since the last time she bothered him. He dipped his nose, acknowledging its warning with a subtle nod, and followed her gaze as it turned back to Aurora.

“Tandy says you know how these work,” Aurora said, and from beneath the table she produced a foreleg.

Attached to it were two distinctly different looking devices, one slim and glossy white, the other a blockish matte brown. A smile touched his muzzle. Of course he knew how they worked. Pip-Buck hardware had paid a sizeable percent of his mortgage.

“I’m familiar with them, yes.”

“Repair them.”

He blinked at the Tantabus, startled by the force in her voice. What had his crime been this time, answering a question?

Aurora looked at the creature as well, but instead of being wary of it the mare fixed it with something close to exasperation. No fear or wariness, not like he felt whenever this ruler of dreams turned its attention toward him, just mild annoyance. And possibly a touch of friendliness to go with it.

“Sorry,” Aurora said, turning back to him. “It’s important to us that you show me how to fix these. They were damaged in an explosion, and I need to get this one working so I can find its owner.”

She held up the slimmer of the two computers, an experimental model Eshe vaguely remembered submitting to quality control among so many other failed touchscreen designs. He regarded the Tantabus for a long moment, trying to glean some kind of insight into what her stake in this mare’s problem was. Aurora seemed friendly toward her in a sort of businesslike fashion, but Luna’s creature rarely made her intentions easy to interpret.

“If I help you,” he began, “I want something in return.”

Aurora nodded as if it were the most reasonable request in the world, but she only did so because she was reasonable. The Tantabus, however, stiffened. It knew what Eshe wanted, and in asking he would violate his own agreement not to put the pegasus in danger.

He considered his words carefully. “I’d like you to look up everything you can on AutoDoc beds once we’re done. I’m not allowed visitors and it’s been a long, long time since I’ve had a research partner.”

A sharp, splattering hiss startled Aurora from her sleep. Fragments of old fears ran through her mind as she tried to diagnose the danger. Burst hydraulics, ruptured seals, the blood of a machine firing through a pinhole too small to see yet capable of fileting anyone who walked through the jet. Her heart hammered her ribs until her brain caught up with reality.

The smell of something familiar tickled fond memories that felt distant, even though they were barely three weeks old. Meat, fresh and raw, cooking over an open fire. Roach had cooked the four of them a simple meal of roasted molerat the night before their expedition into Fillydelphia and both the memory and the flavor lingered in that special place where her best experiences were stored. Her chest tightened at the bittersweet reminder but she pushed it away before its grip grew stronger.

She stretched her legs out as best she could with one missing and another in a splint, and used her good foreleg to pull herself up from her cocoon of blankets into a sitting position against the armrest. In the week since she woke up in Discord’s cottage she’d begun to feel less like an invalid and more, well… capable. While she hadn’t been about to throw a party, yesterday had been a particularly good day. A milestone, even.

She glanced down and touched the deep, whorled mass of scars covering her chest like some horrendous breastplate, and grimaced.

Just before sunset she’d patiently sat on the same cushion she was on now while Discord peeled away the layers of her blindfold. He’d done so slowly, dabbing a wet rag in a bowl of water set beside him and letting it soak against the last layers of gauze until they pulled away from the scabby, tender skin along the right side of her face with little fuss. Half of her expected to open her eyes onto black nothingness and confirm her sight was lost forever. The other quietly hoped to see everything as normally as she always had. What she got was something in between. It took several minutes for her eyes to adjust to the dim light of evening, and when she could finally keep them open without squinting she’d been rewarded with a view filled with indistinct, fuzzy blobs. She reported as much to Discord who told her not to worry, assuring her eyes weren’t done healing. She’d nodded, grudgingly burying her disappointment, and forced herself to chalk it up as a win.

It turned out Discord wasn’t blowing smoke. As she looked around she could quickly tell her clarity had improved. She could make out the shapes of things in the room enough to tell what they were. A blurry table sat a few feet in front of the couch, and beyond that a gray pillar facing her from the opposite wall that she recognized as a fireplace. She smiled a little as she looked down at the blankets puddled around her, a colorful patchwork knit of blacks, yellows, and oranges that when she squinted had the appearance of being handmade. To her left, a small table the same height as the armrest bore an object that gave her pause, but upon closer inspection she realized it was someone’s attempt at a candle. A fat, brown chair sat at an angle toward the coffee table just beyond, marking the place Discord chose to sit and talk nonsense during meals.

She found herself reflexively blinking in a vain attempt to clear her vision and forced herself to stop. She’d drive herself crazy if she didn’t, and like a newborn filly eager to look at all the new and colorful things she didn’t want anything distracting her from taking it all in.

As she suspected, there were two doors set into the wall to her left. One she knew led out to the porch, where there would be steps down to the outhouse path. The other stood open, leading to a room Aurora couldn’t sort out the contents of. A desk, maybe, and something green above it. A framed picture, or maybe a window.

Next to the fireplace was the kitchen, something she didn’t have to see to know was there. She could only wake up to the sound of cooking so many times to know what the room it came from was dedicated to. There was no door, just a void in the wall where one would fit, and a horizontal surface running the limited span of what she could see beyond. A countertop, she assumed. She wasn’t terribly focused on puzzling it out, though. The kitchen was no longer visible. It was obscured by the creature stepping out of it.

It paused in the door frame before continuing into the room. “Oh, good morning.”

She said nothing as it continued past the fireplace, the sound of sizzling meat still emanating from the kitchen as it padded into the other room.

“Tell me if the smell bothers you,” it said, returning to the living room with something held at its side. A coffee cup. “According to the tin it’s pork but who really knows. Oh, since you’re up, how do you like your…”

It slowed as it recrossed the fireplace. If she’d been trying she would have noticed the growing concern on its elongated face, but she hadn’t. The only thing her mind would focus on was the unnatural shape of the creature standing across from her.

In some distant corner of her brain she knew what she was looking at. Like all the fillies and colts who had grown up before and after her, Equestrian History was a class they had all been required to endure. Oftentimes it had been a boring barrage of dates, names, and political events Aurora had been too young to appreciate. Like many of her classmates she hadn’t cared about ancient alicorn cults or a lineage of gryphon royalty whose marriages rarely strayed outside their own gene pool. What she and so many of her peers really wanted to hear about were the stories they’d seen painted across the Stable’s walls in great, colorful murals. They wanted to know about the sibling princesses and the amazing world they ruled. They wanted to know about the Elements of Harmony and their famous adventures. And, unanimous among all of the young Stable dwellers, they wanted to know about the evil villains whose defeat proved Equestria’s might. Villains like Nightmare Moon, the changeling queen Chrysalis, and the serpentine chimera standing in front of her with the coffee mug dangling from his scaly finger.

For several, agonizing seconds she could only stare at the blurry patchwork creature in uneasy silence. A flicker of anger bloomed in her chest, aimed at herself for not knowing what to say. When he told her his name she’d assumed he was joking, or possibly trying to intimidate her. He couldn’t actually be Discord, because Discord had been defeated. He’d been imprisoned, or killed. The history books had never been clear on what ultimately became of him, but that didn’t matter anyway. Discord was someone who lived in history books, tucked neatly between the fall of Nightmare Moon and the obliteration of Equestria.

And yet, there he stood, yellow eyes returning her stare with obvious discomfort. She thought about Blue, withering away in the dark of her Stable’s forgotten tunnel, her life and legacy remembered only by the ghoul who’d been there to watch her mind go. Since her first uneasy step into the outside she’d quickly learned that the bombs hadn’t killed Equestria as much as they changed the ones who survived.

Inwardly she grimaced, and she forced herself to stop staring. “Sorry. I didn’t expect…”

The apology fizzled on her tongue. She sank into the couch, her gaze dropping to the fuzzy coffee table, and wished she could just be the mare she’d been a month ago. Life had been so much easier to cope with when all she had to worry about was getting a few hours of sleep in between shifts in the generator room. She hadn’t needed to ingratiate herself with anybody, worry about their lives, or rely on them for anything beyond showing up on time and doing their work. Had that made her a shitty boss? She tried not to think about it. Those days were over. Their simplicity had been permanently muddied by everything she’d encountered since leaving home, and all she wanted now was to go back to that orderly, uncomplicated life.

Caring, she had learned the hard way, hurt too much.

Discord waited a moment longer for her to finish her thought, and when she didn’t he dipped his chin and resumed walking. “I’m glad you’re seeing better than you were yesterday. Now, as I was saying, how do you like your eggs? They’re powdered, so I’m afraid your choices are limited to scrambled or fried.”

Irritatingly, she found herself fumbling for an answer again. He saved her the embarrassment of another painful silence with a gentle prompt.

“They’re better fried.”

“Sure, that sounds good.”

He disappeared back into the kitchen and soon the sounds of cooking resumed in earnest. For a long time Aurora sat still, listening to the domestic sounds that felt gravely at odds with this new reality taking shape around her. She’d lost everything, that much she knew on a strictly logical level, and like it or not the wasteland was the only option she had if she wanted to have some semblance of a future. If. She was still too numb to decide whether that option was as unattractive as it used to be, but even if it wasn’t off the table she definitely wasn’t there yet. It was, however, getting easier and easier to maintain the wall between her and the shattering grief she knew she should really be dealing with. There was a real chance she was all that was left of Stable 10. By all rights she should be curled up on the ground bawling until she choked, but right now wasn’t the time. She’d carve out a day to be a useless pile of mourning later.

With some of her sight restored, she let her attention wander toward a familiar shape tucked into the far corner of the room. Set on a stack of four wooden crates sat a box from the top of which curved a large brass flower. She had to squint to be sure the slivers of color stacked edgewise in the crates were albums, but as blurry as things were she had no doubt the object above them was a record player. Like many things in the wasteland she recognized it from pictures she’d seen in the Stable. This, however, was her first time seeing a real one and she wanted a better look.

Glancing down at her splinted foreleg, then back to the record player, she grit her teeth and shimmied herself down the cushion’s sagging edge. Her hind hoof settled on the floorboards and then, slowly, she braced her unbound front hoof against the coffee table and slowly brought the injured leg to the floor. Then she put some weight on it. And a little more.

She expected a bolt of pain to rocket up her leg but as she settled what she felt amounted to a normal burden onto it, all she got in response was a dull throb. Emboldened, she took a step forward. It wasn’t comfortable walking with one leg locked in full extension but this was sure as heck an improvement. Still, she was surprised at how heavy she felt on her own legs. Cautiously she took one wobbly step at a time, navigating the coffee table and the center of the living room until she found herself standing in front of the old record player.

At this range she could easily see the worn corners of bare wood standing out from its glossy, dark grain. The decoratively cut edges of the base and lid reminded her of the jewelry box her mom kept in her night stand, an heirloom from a bygone era. The antique had been well cared for, that much was obvious from the clean felt pad on the turntable platter and the faint shine of new brass glinted like dusty gold in the morning light. A crank handle jutted out from the right side and her wings wriggled in their wraps with a natural urge to turn it. She bent forward to squint at the tiny black plate tacked to the front and frowned at the unfamiliar provenance.

She wrinkled her nose. “Chicka-go?”

Discord paused in the doorway, spotted her in his periphery, then arched a messy white brow at her. In both his hands were two plates, steam coiling up and away from their breakfasts. He stood close enough that she could make out flecks of gray tracking up and down his body, but it took her brain a second longer to realize they were bits of stone.

“You’re recovering… quickly.” He looked from her to the gramophone, then smiled apologetically as he took their plates to the coffee table. “It doesn’t work.”

Aurora gave the tiny brass letters a lingering stare before carefully pivoted back to the couch. “Then why keep it?”

“Decoration,” he said, a little too quickly to be believable. She watched him as she used her good leg to hoist herself onto the couch, and to her surprise he didn’t comment on her newfound mobility. He seemed to stare across the room at the old record player as if lost in thought. Then, after an uncomfortable silence, he shrugged and picked up his fork. “Sentimentality too, I suppose. I gave it to a very good friend of mine a long time ago.”

She didn’t have to prod to catch the subtext. Discord had mentioned once before that he’d lost someone close to him. Not wanting to pick at someone else’s wounds, she changed the subject.

“When do you think your friend will be back?”

As with all their meals, Discord sat on the table across from her with a plate in his lap and the other in his hand. With her wings still bound to her sides, the simple task of eating had become a lesson in humility from the get go. He used a fork to cut a piece of what appeared to be a whitish yellow pancake folded in half, the middle of which was speckled with meat matter. He speared the bit he’d separated, popped it into his mouth and chewed as he repeated the process from the plate held in his hand. While she hadn’t explicitly stated as much, Discord had picked up fairly quickly that she preferred not to be fed from a dish positioned a few scant inches above his balls.

He held the fork out to her and she nipped the fried concoction from it. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call us friends. Mouse and I have a strictly transactional relationship.”

She almost didn’t hear him, the food was that good. It was greasy, salty, and best of all savory. Very happy neurons exploded in her brain as she chased the bits of maybe-pork with her teeth. She didn’t care that she didn’t know what pork was, only that it tasted fantastic. Any worries she had about maintaining her dignity vanished as they ate. Anyone who dared to laugh at her would only be doing so to hide their jealousy of her chef quality egg-pork-flaps.

“So you and him just,” she paused to swallow, “trade back and forth?”

Discord lifted his eyebrows thoughtfully. “More or less. He brings me certain things that I need - food, medicine, ink and paper, things like that - and I repay him with the books I write.”

She squinted up at him. “You’re an author?”

A wry smile curled his lips. “No, not quite. You could say I’m more of an unlicensed publisher.”

“I have no idea what that means.”

He held out a morsel of eggflap and chuckled. “Neither did Mouse. Even so, he says he’s been able to make a tidy profit from what I give him so he hasn’t stopped showing up yet. He’ll be back sooner this time, though. You’ll never hear him admit it but dropping you on my doorstep places him in my debt, and that stallion won’t sleep soundly as long as he thinks he owes anyone anything.”

Aurora wrinkled her nose. “Sounds like a loner.”

Discord thumped the empty fork against her nose. “Takes one to know one.”

“Fair.” She wiped her nose against the back of her foreleg. “So if he delivers things to you, does that mean he takes requests? Because if he does there are some things I need.”

The fork scraped against a glassy piece of rock embedded between Discord’s left hand’s distinctly avian knuckles. “He already knows to bring back fresh stimpacks. Though, at the rate you’re recovering, he might be wasting the trip.”

It was a nice thought, but she could still tell she was far from one hundred percent. The joints of her wings still throbbed furiously when she shifted them too much beneath their bindings.

Her gaze dropped back to the sheet of scars covering her chest and she immediately forced her thoughts elsewhere. She thought about the dream she had last night in which Tandy introduced her to the zebra named Eshe, and an idea sprouted.

“I may need his help again.”

The old road tilted one way, then the other as Mouse bent the cricks out of his neck. A loud, jerking pop broke the tension that had built up while he slept last night and the relief was such that he let out a low, pleasant groan. The relief was short-lived, however, as he turned his gaze back down to a more prescient problem.

His prosthetic foreleg lay on the roadside in front of him, its shaped steel segments scoured and scratched so thoroughly by his travels that the metal had taken on a dull matte texture. He spent a moment glaring down at the thing, took a breath, then with his multitool clenched between his teeth he got back to work freeing the tiny pebble that had inexplicably gotten itself lodged behind the knee hinge.

In reality, though, the pebble had gotten caught in the joint for a frustratingly simple reason: he had pushed himself too hard last night. Without a wagon pulling against him he’d embarked on the trek back to Discord’s hideaway assuming he had more calories to burn than he truly did. Sure he was saving effort by not hauling a load behind him but he’d forgotten about what that load always contained. Fresh food, water, muscle stimulants, a veritable cornucopia of energy sources that he didn’t have with him now. Among the supplies he’d stowed in his saddlebags for the pegasus he’d dragged off the hardpack was only the bare necessities of food and water to keep himself fed. It startled him how easily he’d been able to assume his wagon’s absence would make this walk easier without considering how limited his diet would be during the trip. So he’d skipped a few of his usual stops and when he did rest he’d done so for less time because he didn’t feel tired.

He grimaced as he maneuvered the pliers into the joint, pecking at the offending stone. He remembered making camp in the lee of a boulder, building a fire, arranging his saddlebags into something amounting to a headrest, and then he woke up to a hazy gray sunrise. It had taken him a few seconds to work out it was morning and then a few more to realize he’d conked out without taking off his prosthetic. For the entire night he’d been shifting and rolling in his sleep and in the process dragging his leg over the rocks, several of which had found cozy new homes.

The offending stone sprang free and clattered harmlessly over the road. He worked the knee between his hooves and it bent obediently. With a neutral grunt he dropped the old multitool onto the saddlebags beside him and began the tedious process of belting on the limb. As he worked, he caught sight of a familiar shape in the distance. A wagon train, likely on its way to Crow’s Grove. He tracked their approach as he bit the leading end of a strap, flicked it over his shoulder, then deftly caught it after it wrapped behind his neck. Without taking his eyes on the other travelers he slid the strap through a buckle welded onto the prosthetic, set the pin through a well worn grommet, then repeated the process with a second opposing strap.

By the time he was back on his hooves, the wagon train had drawn close enough for Mouse to identify the cultist scrawls along the sideboards of each cart. He suppressed a groan as he moved to the far side of the road, both advertising his deference to their right of way as a caravan and his disinterest with engaging them, yet a sharp whistle still peeled up from the lead wagon and calls to stop rolled down the line.

This time Mouse did groan. He didn’t have anything particularly against ponies who believed in this Year Zero stuff, but they had a persistent nature that made them difficult to be around. That, and they had this rule about smiling with their teeth. He avoided eye contact with the earth ponies harnessed to the front of the lead wagon. Their open grins coupled with a sheen of sweat and heavy breathing from exertion gave them a feral look that sent prickles up his back. He was pretty sure nobody from the Canticle of the Unbound was a cannibal, but seeing the wheezing smiles from their wagon haulers never failed to make him wonder.

“Good morning, brother!” a familiar voice piped as he lumbered past the second wagon. “Have you heard the good news?”

He did his best not to grimace. The Unbound were always full of good news, and boy were they all about spreading it. He tried to guess what it would be this time and came up with a few entertaining options. One of them had seen a cloud change directions. The power supply to an old air raid siren shorted out and started blaring again. A dud grenade defied corrosion and separated someone’s hoof from their leg. Anything was fair game for a cult who believed the bombs hadn’t just ended civilization but were responsible for the cessation of time itself.

It was kooky, and the scrawled nonsense along their wagons didn’t make it any less so. Phrases like See you next yesterday! and The apocalypse is now! made crossing paths with their members an exercise in balancing interest with exasperation. To the Unbound, time flowed only for the believers and everyone else was trapped in some vague, time locked first moment of a period they called Year Zero. The strangest part, in Mouse’s opinion, was that they were adamant that only a fraction of the bombs which were launched had detonated and that there were thousands upon thousands of balefire missiles hanging motionless somewhere above the clouds. Say nothing for the Enclave pegasi who had yet to report a mysterious volley of civilization-killing weapons parked in the sky, or the fact that the flamboyant nature of their cult made remembering the past visits very, very difficult to forget despite “the past” being impossible for anyone but the Unbound to experience.

As far as cults went these folks were a little more scrambled in the brains than most. Still, Mouse kept his opinions to himself. What they lacked in sanity they made up for with a skill for scavenging, and he could do business with scavengers all day long. So as he caught sight of the caravan’s middle-aged leader trotting down the line of wagons after him, he dutifully slowed to let her catch up.

“Morning, ma’am,” he said with as much polite neutrality as he could muster. “I don’t have anything to trade today, sorry.”

Tight gray curls bounced in a brown mane that reminded Mouse of the container of miscellaneous springs he kept in his workshop. The mare was weathered and gaunt, more a product of her age than a lack of sustenance, but she had energy enough for both of them. She didn’t even seem bothered that he wasn’t in a position to exchange goods, though her wide eyes did pause to look him over all the same.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you so unburdened, Mouse.” She smiled as if this were a good thing, and Mouse’s lips tightened as he realized she was alluding to something vaguely religious that likely only she understood. “There’s good news today, like I said. Would you like to hear it?”

He turned to look at the half dozen wagons now lined up beside them on the road, their frames practically bulging with a startling amount of electronic scrap and more than a few unnaturally cheery congregants. “You know I’m only interested in practical information, Miss Delilah.”

Her grin transformed into a more natural, knowing smile. “And you know the more you’ve listened, the more unbound you’ve become.”

This time he did grimace, namely at the suggestion that their repeat business somehow alluded to him giving into their way of thinking, but she waved off his visible discomfort with a hoof. “The news is both good and practical. Besides, I wouldn’t have stopped the whole caravan just to preach to you.”

He snorted at the lie. “What’ll it cost me?”

Delilah thought about it, then shrugged. “A credit at your shop the next time we visit. Two hundred caps’ worth.”

Mouse’s eyebrows climbed his forehead. “For rumors?”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “For verifiable fact.”

Something about her tone said she wasn’t joking. Even her beatific smile had dimmed, just barely, but it was an immense change of expression for a cultist who he suspected could grin through a gunshot.

“Mouse, you’ve always dealt fairly with me and mine, and you know I’m not the sort to repay kindness with trickery.” After a beat, she added, “If you prefer, I am willing to negotiate the price after you’ve heard what I have to say.”

A twinge of guilt made him look over to the wagon parked beside them. Yeah, they were all nutty, but he respected the Unbound for their restraint. They didn’t kidnap, lure, or cheat anyone into their congregation, nor were they particularly violent except for when they encountered raiders or road bandits. They just believed that time only worked for them because of… reasons? Sure they all had lifetime memberships to fantasy land, but hey, at least they didn’t eat people.

Mouse skimmed a couple choice proverbs scratched into the wagon before noticing a caricature of an alicorn peeking over a line of purple paint. Someone had written twilight wuz here underneath it, and it was all he could do not to roll his eyes.

He looked back to Delilah and nodded. “I’m fine with haggling, sure. Hit me with the good word.”

Her smile restored itself and she spoke eagerly. “The Clock ticked again. One of the balefire missiles fell from the sky and exploded out east, about ten days’ walk or more beyond Steepleton. I’ve spoken with several traders fresh out of New Canterlot who agree there’s some kind of dead zone out there now for electronics. Everything for hundreds of miles in every direction got fried.”

Mouse wasn’t so sure he believed her. Probably Delilah believed every word she said was true, but given the company she kept, that wasn’t exactly a glowing review. It definitely wasn’t convincing him to write her down for a credit worth two hundred caps. “That’s a big blast radius for just one bomb,” he demurred.

She shook her head. “If the fireball were that wide, you and I would be dead too. No, no, everyone I’ve spoken to agrees the explosion sent something out that overloaded a few million exposed circuits like a radio station with a bad transmitter. I haven’t met anyone who understands the exact science, but suffice to say a week ago a large chunk of the eastern wasteland watched everything with a microchip go up in smoke.”

His eyes moved back to the wagons, each of which was laden with crates heaped full of electronic scrap. He straightened a little as he pieced together the puzzle Delilah was laying out for him. Whether a bomb from the old world had exploded, a nasty radstorm had taken shape, or the Steel Rangers had gone on a tech-confiscating bender, something had wiped out a sizeable chunk of the electronics salvage market out east and the damage had been significant enough for the well-to-do trading guilds of New Canterlot to send their own precious traders out into the wasteland looking for electronic scrap.

Piles of which now glittered in Unbound wagons. Delilah was right. He’d never run scams on them or charged less than a fair price whenever her people rolled into Crow’s Grove. Now she was returning that favor and he could sense she wasn’t, at least knowingly, lying to him. If even some of what she was saying were true, the price of electronics was about to experience a significant spike.

He shrewdly eyed the wagon beside him. “You’re not going to sell all this before the price goes up, are you?”

Delilah offered a shrewd smirk in response. “The Unbound are less interested in getting rich and more interested in remaining a non-target for raiders. As for payment, can we agree on the aforementioned credit?”

He considered haggling her down, but his eyes kept rising to the piles of dented terminals and circuit boards parked beside him. “Two hundred caps,” he said, “and two crates of what you have up there, delivered to my shop.”

She watched him for a spell. “Two hundred and fifty caps and one crate.”

Good news indeed. He considered the counteroffer and decided not to offend her by splitting hairs. “Deal. My neighbor owns a bakery next to my shop. She’ll let you inside.”

Delilah acquiesced with a polite smile, then did something unexpected. She looked up to a young unicorn slouched over the sideboard of the wagon and asked him to get her something from one of the crates. After a few attempts to identify exactly what she was pointing to, his magic gripped the woven strap of a compact radio. Mouse regarded it dubiously as the follower gave the little box to Delilah, who held it out to him on the flat of her hoof.

“A gift,” she reassured him. “We found dozens of them in a shipping container a few years ago and they work especially well. The handle on the side turns a mainspring that drives an internal dynamo, and the on/off switch releases and locks the mainspring.”

Mouse settled his weight on his prosthetic, using his other hoof to take the strap. The radio hung from it like a canteen. Sure enough, folded into the little chassis was a small, folded crank handle.

“A clockwork radio,” he mused. “Thanks?”

“You’re welcome.” She dipped her head in a mock-bow, then pressed her teeth against her lip and belted a whistle that made Mouse jump and nearly drop his new nicknack. Wagons lurched into motion beside them and Delilah turned to leave with them, pausing just briefly enough to smile over her shoulder. “Take a listen when you have a chance. The Clock ticked once so it stands to reason it’ll tick again.”

With that she and her congregation departed, the steady grind of steel-rimmed wheels fading as they shrank away. He eyed the little radio before tossing the carry strap around his neck and resuming his long walk in the opposite direction, his hooves stamping over the broken asphalt while he considered these new ripples coming out of the east.

By noon, Aurora had grown firm in her decision that having limited mobility and a measurable percentage of her vision no longer required her to be a bump on the proverbial log… or in her case, a literal couch potato.

Discord, and as far as she could tell he was actually Discord, seemed less enthusiastic about her sudden desire to move around. She didn’t particularly care, though, because he hadn’t spent the better part of a week slowly replacing the funky smell of his couch cushions with her own brand of perfume. She needed a shower. No, better yet, she needed a long soak under a decontamination arch. Anything to blast the stink the bandages had collected. A trip into the kitchen - little more than a hallway equipped with cupboards, countertops, a sink, and an icebox - drew her to a narrow door at the far end that led into an absolute closet of a bathroom. There was room enough for a clawfoot tub which, bizarrely, had been sliced in half and messily brazed to a piece of sheet iron to form a seal. Seeing her sudden interest in what Discord had settled for as a shower, he’d begun to suggest a sponge bath as an alternative but promptly aborted the offer when she glared back at him. She hadn’t decided whether she should be surprised at his utter blindness for personal space and had settled instead to simply accept his ignorance as the price of being his guest. At least he’d stopped using her dinnerplate as a nut warmer.

She closed the door, taking care not to slam it, and gave the kludged-together shower a quick once-over before deciding the mismatched hot/cold knobs bolted to the wall would have to do. She wanted her wings back and didn’t trust Discord not to wring his hands over it being too early to undo the bandages. He’d said it himself that she was healing faster than normal, and as far as she cared that was a good thing. If she could already put weight on a fractured bone then her wings should be good as new, and she wasn’t willing to play the part of the helpless Stable mare anymore. Maybe her expedited recovery had something to do with Ginger’s final act of spellcasting?

She pushed the thought away. Still too raw. There was a list of things she needed to do and grieving was somewhere on it, but nowhere near the top. She wouldn’t be able to function if she let that dam break now. Later, she promised herself. After Primrose’s corpse had begun to cool.

Hooves thumped into the half-tub like a drunken wardrum, the slight pitch of the enameled iron pushing her toward the wall. Trying not to think about the slight crunching texture against her teeth, she manipulated the knobs until a sputtering stream of lukewarm water sprang from a showerhead much closer to the ceiling than the tub. Discord was a tall creature. It didn’t make sense if the showerhead only came up to his chest. She frowned. Did he technically even have a chest? He was more serpent than mammal if you didn’t count the paws, claws, hooves, horns… she wrinkled her nose and let that train of thought go sailing right off the cliff she’d aimed it toward.

With a diffuse sprinkling of warm water over her back, she spent the next few minutes listening to the showerhead cough and hiss as water soaked into her coat. The water beneath her hooves ran brown for a long while with bits of grit and sand leaving a trail toward the drain. Days of odor her nose had learned to selectively ignore came back fresh and pungent like a trash recycler with a bad gasket, but eventually those smells faded as the water ran clearer. With her mane drizzling, she glanced around and failed to see anything that might suggest the presence of soap and assumed it was either stored somewhere out of sight or that Discord simply never found much use for it living out here on his own. Likely the latter, and since Aurora didn’t remember picking up any noticeable funk from him she guessed he probably didn’t need it.

Eventually the bandages grew saturated and her wings especially started to sag from the weight. She’d counted on this happening and carefully tested the muscles in each joint, gently reaching each wing down toward the tub basin until the waterlogged gauze began to stretch. Discord hadn’t so much as wrapped each wing individually as he had simply spun gauze around her midsection and subsequently immobilized the limbs in the process, and after some effort the bandages grew loose enough for one wing to spring free and then the other. Flecks of something black sprinkled the tub’s wet surface like pepper and she realized belatedly that they were bits of charred feather. She looked to her left wing, found nothing alarming, then to her right where the damage was plainly apparent.

Rather than a full array of dense feathers in grayscale, her right wing was a haggard mess. Like the mass of scars down her chest, several smaller twists of ugly pinkish skin traced visibly down the forward length of her wing. Where her wing had shielded her body from the heat of the balefire, her coat was unmarred, but the vanes of each feather had burned so deeply that the shafts stood out like the bristles of an old straw broom. New vanes had already begun to grow back but several of the feathers were dead down to the roots. She judged that she would have to pluck out at least a quarter of them and hope they too began to grow back, though even if they did they would likely lack the uniformity they once had.

She lifted the damaged wing and flexed the feathers. Many, but not all, obeyed and only weakly at that. Her left wing unsurprisingly demonstrated a better response but she’d never been left-winged. She was a righty, and it bothered her that her first instinct had been to turn her right side into the bomb’s furnace. Stupid. She turned her damaged wing into the stream and watched the last bits of char rinse away.

It wasn’t long until she’d begun working the bandages around her foreleg loose. The Pip-Bucks underneath were waterproof but she didn’t relish the idea of them basting in whatever soup was forming around them now. The gauze, along with four wood dowels that formed the splint, sloughed off and added to the mess of bandages in the tub. She looked down at the twin devices, one blockish and brown, the other a trim curve of white, and she stared at the latter for what felt like minutes.

In an instant she was back above the clouds, her feathers grasping past the balefire talisman for Ginger and coming away with her Pip-Buck instead. She’d known with utmost certainty that it was the last time she’d ever touch her and before she could raise her voice in protest–

“Stop it.”

Her voice shook as she glared down at the reflection in the puddle. It took several slow, controlled breaths to pull herself back from the brink. From becoming that helpless mare again. The one who sank hooks into those who got too close and dragged them down with her before they even knew what was happening.

She exhaled, harshly, and finished washing.

Despite the washroom’s lack of a toilet or sink - it truly was just a washroom she supposed - a set of obscenely pink towels hung from a bar that Discord had nailed to the wall beside a full length mirror. She paused to look at herself, sighed at her ragged reflection, and snatched down one of the towels to pat herself dry. Flipping the damp cloth over her shoulder, she stepped back into the kitchen and quietly limped her way back to the couch.

“Feeling better?”

An old wooden chair creaked from the adjacent room as Discord leaned back on its back legs, an inked quill held gently between his fingers. He’d gone back to writing one of his books and his yellow eyes briefly fixed on the splints missing from her foreleg.

“You’re out of hot water,” she quipped, and even managed to smile a little as she flipped the cushion. Climbing up onto the couch, and with her wings finally mobile again, she began working the clasps on her Pip-Bucks. “So, hey, could I get something to write on?”

Her own Pip-Buck sprang open, flicking beads of water across her lap. She wrapped the towel around it to scrub it dry only for the fabric to come up caked in the thick residue of her years in Mechanical. With a grimace she settled with wiping the smears off the screen, then set it on the coffee table to air dry while she used the towel’s clean side to dry the one the Enclave had loaned Ginger. A streak of deep gouges marred the otherwise flawless white plastic where gravel had bitten into it when she fell. The screen had escaped damage, however, despite being as dark and unresponsive as its older twin. Somewhere beneath that shell was an undetonated thermite charge that still threatened to take away the only thing left Aurora had of Ginger’s. She needed–

Something fluttered and harmlessly speared her in the temple before getting caught by the damp in her mane. A folded sheet of paper shaped like a wedge. Tucked at the center was a small nib of pencil. Aurora eyeballed Discord whose blurred features still managed to convey smugness. “You couldn’t just hand this to me like a normal person?”

“One does not simply hand someone a paper airplane.”

She flattened the sheet on the coffee table and took up the pencil, offering an eye roll as her only response. She had learned Discord seemed to enjoy setting out small traps for her to walk into which would result in him talking about things that made absolutely no sense.

Armed with a writing implement, Aurora began scratching out a bulleted list of equipment laid out by Eshe.

“...funny how something so simple can have so much flavor.”

A bland laugh. “That’s so true, Brulee. Tatos really can bring a nice, hearty texture to any meal when you plan ahead.”

“That’s great, so great.” More colorless chuckling as the program host transitioned away from her guest. “Well we’re coming to the top of the hour which means in a few minutes our new guest Luster Stone will give us a sneak peek into how he finds precious gems in Old Equestrian coal country. Stick around for that, but first let’s take a look at the news.”

A bored yawn pulled at Mouse’s jaw as he walked. The little radio swinging below his neck had worked after he’d paused to crank the dynamo and for his efforts he’d been rewarded with the fuzzy conversations from a talk radio show. After a few hours of listening he’d determined with some confidence that the station was situated somewhere in Enclave territory, which meant it was likely sponsored by the faction. The host maintained too much cheer for a wastelander and there weren’t enough chems on the planet to make a Steel Ranger laugh as much as Brulee. And of course there was the constant use of Old Equestria, which suggested the existence of a new one. The Enclave was especially dogmatic about that.

The dull voice of a stallion with a script droned through the radio now, the contents of the news probably too sensitive to trust to someone whose job was to make commentary. It was the same bite-sized report that had followed up the previous hour, but Mouse lifted his ears to listen anyway.

“The explosive device,” the nameless stallion muttered, “was confirmed by authorities to have been planted in the Stable by a yet unknown detachment of Rangers whose orders were given by now ex-Elder Coldbrook. Casualties within Stable 10 remain yet unknown as relief efforts have been stalled by unprecedented levels of radiation in the area, however ministry officials fear the balefire contamination has all but spoiled the bloodlines of any survivors.”

The newscaster shuffled his papers and continued. “Yesterday, Minister Primrose attended a candlelight vigil outside the Chapel of the Two Sisters in honor of the only two confirmed deaths in the attack: Ginger Dressage, eldest daughter of the Dressage Family in New Canterlot, and Aurora Pinfeathers, the pureblood pegasus who sought help from the Enclave for her people and whose heroism the Steel Rangers repaid with imprisonment, torture, and death. Both mares were sighted by multiple Spritebots in the area when they evacuated Stable 10 with the balefire device, and this week Minister Primrose called their selfless sacrifice a testament to Enclave values.”

Mouse would have rolled his eyes if he hadn’t already done it for the last two times he heard that line. As the newscaster kept rattling off headlines, drifting into a not unsubtly shrugged off mention of what he called “small riots” in several Enclave villages on the eastern border, Mouse refocused his attention on the last leg of his journey.

Over the last several miles the road and the terrain around it had begun to change. The compacted gravel of the already disused backroad had grown less and less distinct against the surrounding hardpack until only the suggestion of a road could be discerned, and only with diligent scrutiny. Here and there dark grasses had begun to join the sparse patches of scrub brush and hearty weeds. Strands of green pressed up through and widened cracks in the road and far ahead, too far to make out with any real detail, stood the first stands of actual living trees.

Mouse paused to drink the last swallows from his canteen, scanning the horizons for anyone else as he corked the lid. As expected nobody had followed him, not even the Cinders who sometimes hunted the oversized rodents whose dens lurked nearby. For all his odd quirks and penchant for rattling off what sometimes felt like senile nonsense, Discord had done a convincing job of making such an idyllic patch of wasteland feel utterly foreboding.

He passed the remains of what looked to be a military checkpoint with all the accouterments of the long dead Equestrian Army. A dilapidated booth stood off to one side of the faint path, clusters of grass hiding the not quite professionally poured concrete pad it stood on. A striped wooden arm lay across the road, having dry rotted enough for gravity to pull it off the hinged post just outside the booth. Mouse had offered to reattach it but Discord insisted it was critical for it to look untouched. If anyone wandered this way he wanted them to think the area was thoroughly uninhabited, a fact that would be reinforced by the official looking signs Discord had repurposed during those early years after the bombs coated the world in radioactive ash.

And the signs were convincing. For anyone paying attention, they told a story. Inside the booth, a mare’s skeleton sat slumped in a rotting chair, the army uniform hanging from her bones speckled down the front with dark stains as if she’d died choking on blood. That alone was a red flag to any would-be scavengers because it meant she’d been in uniform when they still meant something and she hadn’t died from the bombs. Anyone curious about how the supposed guard had gone out would find clearer answers in the plant life that aggressively sprouted from the skull’s empty sockets and open jaw, though he’d left less ambiguous warnings further down the road in the form of official-looking signage. One such posting stood well ahead of the checkpoint:

A few patches of fresh rust had begun to crawl over the bright black and yellow paint, but the sign was still legible from a distance. Another half-mile up the road, Mouse passed the first of many bodies clad in tattered yellow vinyl. There would be a half dozen more by the time he reached the first stand of trees and each one of them would be pointed away from the dense wall of flora ahead. Because he was taking the eastward approach, he was treated to the rusted hulks of emergency vehicles all clumped together in a mockup of a response to chaos. Mouse’s lip quirked into a grin as he slipped past the ambulances, their doors hanging open to display more bones which the wasteland had no shortage of. Muted sunlight shone into the vehicles through bullet holes which Discord had inexpertly sprayed across each.

A mysterious biological bugaboo was only as fearsome as the effort made to contain it and the Lord of Chaos had spared no expense in the theatrics. Were anyone to take the long way around the dark forest they would continue to find evidence of a mass evacuation at odds with military containment, and that narrative had remained effective for two centuries and counting. Referred to by locals as The Plagued Trees, anyone with a brain knew it would be easier to sell a case of sheath scabies than anything scavenged from these parts. And, of course, those who didn’t heed the obvious warnings never came home.

Mouse’s ears perked at the unmistakable chirp-chirps of two auto turrets detecting his approach. It didn’t matter how many times he’d walked this trail, his skin prickled each time the twin sentries popped their barrels up out of the grass. They followed him for several steps until the facial scans they had run returned a positive result on Discord’s whitelist, and the guns went back into standby mode.

The mechanical greetings continued as he crossed into the forest proper, dodging over the black thorny vines that slithered in from the edges of a path barely wide enough for his wagon. The trees grew taller the further he walked, their canopies stretching so wide that the few rays of light that made their way through were swallowed up before they reached the forest floor. The perpetual twilight of what Discord sometimes called his second Everfree provided a strange sort of comfort to Mouse, as if some deeper part of himself was relieved to be surrounded by the steady thrush of overhead leaves and the damp, earthy scent of living soil. Nearby insects went quiet as he navigated the narrow path, resuming their chirps and chitters only after he passed. It was nice, he decided, being able to walk between moss-caked trees without the distraction of steering a load of goods. Hard to believe Discord had planted this forest himself with seeds taken from the original Everfree. Not for the first time, Mouse thought it was a shame he was one of the few able to visit this place. Given enough time here it was possible to forget about the desolation just a dozen miles in any direction.

Slowly, Discord’s cottage emerged from a clearing maintained near the forest’s center. A few narrow shafts of sunlight shrank and grew in the shifting gaps in the canopy, providing enough natural light from which to tell day from night without giving any hints to airborne scouts of what the forest hid. Luckily the Enclave was practically phobic about contracting wasteland diseases and went through pains to keep their fliers well upwind of the seemingly carnivorous plant life. The ruts his wagon had cut into the lawn a week earlier were still visible and he winced a little as he followed them up to the front porch. Again he felt a twinge of unease at not having to unharness himself from his wagon, but he managed to suppress it as he mounted the wooden steps.

He stopped at the front door, thumped his hoof against it a few times, and glanced back at the trees as he listened for a response. Soon enough he heard footsteps. The knob spun and he turned toward the door just as it swung open.

A hard-faced mare stared up at him from the other side. Mouse froze, confused, and his hoof reflexively curled around the trigger bar of the pipe gun strapped to his foreleg. It took another beat before his brain caught up with his eyes and recognition dawned on him. The mare continued to stare at him, her expression growing increasingly uneasy as silence stretched. Green eyes darted down to his pipe pistol before returning to him with an arched brow.

“You’re the one who brought me here,” she said.

It wasn’t a question so much as an observation.

“Uh, yeah,” he said. Unsure what to add, he relaxed his grip and glanced past her into the cottage. “Sorry, Discord usually answers the door.”

“He’s writing one of his books.” She gestured a wing vaguely toward the open door of Discord’s writing room.

In response, an avian looking hand appeared in the doorway holding up a finger in what Discord claimed was the universal sign for hold on a minute. The mare snorted, rolled her eyes, and started making her own way toward the couch. Mouse closed the door behind him while frowning after the mare. Absent one leg, she had a pronounced limp, but more evident to Mouse was the fact that she was walking at all. He distinctly remembered her foreleg being badly broken, so much so that he’d been forced to haul her up by his teeth just to get her moving.

“There,” Discord announced with an exaggerated sigh. The Lord of Chaos emerged from his writing room and regarded Mouse with admonishment. “Good enough for today. I swear you have a supernatural knack for showing up when I’m at the start of a critical paragraph.”

He shrugged, too aware of the second set of eyes watching him from the couch, and stopped beside the fireplace to loosen the straps of his saddlebags. “Next time I’m delivering meds I’ll take the scenic route.”

The bags slid to the floor with a thud.

“Not sure she needs ‘em, though.” He tried not to appear like he was staring, but were it not for the pink scars swirled across her chest and down one side, Mouse wouldn’t have believed she was the pitiful thing he’d picked up off the hardpack. “You healed up fast.”

To this, Discord grunted wordless agreement and bent to pick up Mouse’s bags. “Must be something in the water.”

Understandably the mare was growing visibly uncomfortable with the color commentary and pointedly shifted her attention as Discord unpacked the contents of the first bag onto the coffee table. Clean gauze, several stimpacks, and a pill bottle were the first items set out and more soon followed. “I don’t have any caps for this.”

“Discord’s paying for it, not you.” The words left his mouth with a little more harshness than Mouse intended, but he didn’t exactly make an effort to soften them afterward. The more time he had to look her over the less certain he felt about the necessity of risking this trip. Had she already taken stimpacks before she fell? He felt himself beginning to glower.

Sensing this, Discord looked over his shoulder to Mouse and tipped a brow toward the bookcase on the other side of the fireplace. “I believe we settled on two books, but I recommend you take a third.”

He frowned, sensing the task attached to the invitation. “I can’t run another errand right now, Discord, I gotta get back to the shop. Peri’s good about keeping an eye on the place as a favor but she’ll skin me alive if I’m not there to cover my own rent.”

Discord waved him off as he plopped an IV bag of RadAway next to the carrots Mouse had pulled from his garden. Then he reached past the supplies and picked up a sheet of paper near the pegasus. He held it out for Mouse to take, his expression lacking some of his usual joviality.

“It’s a short list. Here.”

Mouse grabbed the paper between his teeth and walked it over to the bookcase, where he laid it flat on the floor. He skimmed the items before frowning up at the mare. “It’s an extremely specialized list. The heck you need rosin core solder for?”

To answer his question she lifted a slim Pip-Buck from the table. “I need to get this working again.”

Sure enough, toward the middle of the list, a fine-tipped soldering iron had been noted as well as a deceivingly brief request for “electrolytic capacitors, variety, 100pF to 10µF.” He shook his head and wished he had hands so he could hold up the list with the appropriate level of disgust. “Are you trying to build one from scratch? If that Pip-Buck’s not working it’s because you smacked it on the dirt when you fell. You probably knocked a couple connections loose, not fried the electronics.”

He shook his head at the list, anger building that they’d just assumed he was going to do this. “I’m sorry, but this is overkill and those little computers are hardened against everything short of a balefire bomb. I’m not going to spend the next month of my life pulling apart terminals for…”

He trailed off and looked up toward the couch. The mare stared back at him, her shoulders ever so slightly stiffening as his gaze went from her, to the Pip-Buck in her wing, and back to her. Too many things fell into place at one for it to be a lucky guess. The strange burns, the broken Pip-Bucks, and the fact that she’d fallen from the sky without so much as a saddlebag or a sidearm… she was from that Stable on the radio. The one that got hit with a balefire bomb.

He considered saying something, but it was clear on the mare’s face that she very much wanted him to keep his mouth shut. Weird, but not unreasonable. Unsure how to proceed, he made a show of shaking his head in frustration before turning to the bookcase.

“I’ll see what I can do but I’m not making any promises.” He lifted a hoof toward a book titled Ferengi Rules of Acquisition 5th Edition and pulled it off the shelf. “Everything she’s got listed involves electronics and I’ve got it on good authority that the market for that will be booming soon.”

Behind him, Discord acquiesced. “I’d appreciate it if you made an effort, but understand if you can’t find everything.”

The mare was less accommodating. “I need as much as you can find, especially the security drivers and the soldering equipment.”

“Rosin core solder, I got it.” He pulled a second book down and cracked it open, squinting at the vertical rows of nonsensical squiggling dots. He held it up for Discord to see. “Should I even ask?”

The draconequus smiled. “Up to you.”

He decided not to. Trying to decide whether Discord’s stories about species living among the stars were true or not gave him a headache, and cost him time he could otherwise use to scavenge. He selected a third book at random, not bothering to read the title, and tucked the mare’s list between the pages.

Taking his lightened saddlebags back from Discord, he glanced at the mare as he packed away his payment. “I never got your name.”

She shrugged, using her wings instead of her shoulders. “Can’t remember it.”

He grunted, looked at Discord and could see he didn’t need to point out the obvious lie. If Discord hadn’t called her out on it then he probably had a reason. Probably he was just giving her time to decide whether she could trust them with it. That was fair. Mouse didn’t exactly give out business cards when he was in mixed company either. Faking amnesia, though, was a bold tactic. Maybe she’d even find someone dumb enough to buy it someday.

“Well,” he said, shrugging his saddlebags back on, “like I said, I’ll see what I can do.”

Discord appeared surprised to see him make his way toward the door so soon and all but said as much. “You’re leaving already?”

“I’ll be back in two weeks with what I can find on this list, but I gotta get back to the shop.”

Discord held his palm toward the mare in a sign for her to wait and turned to follow Mouse onto the front porch. “Give me your canteen, I’ll fill it up.”

The door hadn’t even closed behind them before Mouse felt his canteen whisked up and off his neck by the strap. “I know where the pump is,” he complained.

“Yes, well, as much as I cherish the sound of teeth clicking against the handle I’d rather avoid that particular nightmare, thank you very much.” He strode ahead of Mouse with the canteen raised. “Besides, it gives me an opportunity to talk to you about something in private. I have this rash, you see…”

The pump gave out several fruitless squeals as Discord worked the handle before finally a splash of clear liquid coughed out of the spigot. He bent slightly, holding Mouse’s canteen with one hand while the other operated the handle, and filled it with cold water.

They were far enough away from the cottage that the trees mostly obscured it from view. Discord noticed Mouse eyeing the new slabs of sandstone he’d added to the dirt path leading down to the wellhead and allowed himself a chagrined smile. In spite of his self-imposed isolation it did feel good to see someone appreciating his work.

Mouse grunted. He’d never been much for idle conversation. “Something tells me you want to talk about your houseguest more than dry scales.”

Water bubbled up from the mouth of the canteen and Discord tipped out just a little to make room for the cork. Leaning against the pump, he held out the strap for Mouse. “You two barely exchanged five sentences with her before having a lightbulb moment. I wanted to hear your thoughts on her.”

He waited as Mouse shrugged the strap across his shoulder, the stallion’s eyes drifting back up to the cottage. “She’s lying about not knowing who she is. Figured you already know that, though.”

A nod. Discord was fairly sure his guest didn’t think she had fooled him either, and to that effect they’d come to an unspoken agreement not to discuss it further.

“She’s healed up quicker than normal,” Mouse added, not trying to hide that he was hedging.

“Remarkably so,” Discord agreed. “I have a theory for that, but I suspect you do too.”

The stallion seemed to regard the ground with deep interest before finally letting a shoulder rise and fall. He touched the little crank gadget hanging from his neck. “Been listening to the radio and there’s talk that the Rangers tried to set a balefire bomb off in a Stable way out east. Happened around the same time she kissed hardpack and she’s got burns like I never seen before. Not on anything living, anyway.”

Discord took a deep breath through his nose, held onto it, then exhaled it in a resigned sigh. “She’s ghouling.”

Mouse nodded. “That’s my guess, yeah. That scar on her chest is a hundred percent radiation damage, and it’s already healed over.”

He clenched his jaw and looked up the trail.

“If either of those Pip-Bucks still worked, their radiation detectors would be throwing a fit.” The stallion followed his gaze, his tone softening a little. “Probably right now she’s just happy to be up and walking and isn’t thinking about the how.”

“She’s dead set on fixing those Pip-Bucks,” he murmured.

“Might be all she’s got left of home,” Mouse guessed in response. “If I can find the stuff she needs I’ll bring it back, but you should talk to her about what’s going on before then.”

Discord flicked his tail, the thought of having such a fatalistic discussion simply at the bottom of the list of things he wanted to do. The entire reason he’d come here and taken this ridiculous form was to have a break from nudging, pushing, and oftentimes hurling wayward species from their constant desire to seek self-destruction. This detour had been meant as a temporary vacation from all that seriousness and now here he was, apparently mortal, expected once again to bear the yoke of being the bearer of awful news.

The urge to snap his fingers just to see if it would work was powerful, but he drummed them against the pump handle instead. As much as he hated to admit it, Mouse was right. His impromptu housemate had slipped into the first subtle stages of ghouling. Whether her mind remained intact when it finished was another matter entirely.

Next Chapter: Chapter 44: Stripes Estimated time remaining: 19 Hours, 12 Minutes