September 8th, 1077
Fillydelphia

Inside a little store pinned to the corner of Shore Road and 15th Avenue, a stern-faced clerk stared as his only customer set his shopping basket on the clean linoleum and deftly pinch the twisted end of a bag of pumpernickel bread between his teeth. Esheke Obiakolam, or Eshe as he preferred to be called, never returned the clerk’s consternation. Doing so would only invite trouble, namely for himself, and these days a neutral smile was all a first-generation Vhannan immigrant could do to keep himself safe. He tried not to harbor any malice toward the clerk. The scrawny unicorn was young and no doubt impressionable. Likely he had been reading the inflammatory headlines stacked in their display beside the counter, each article reviewed and approved for print by the everpresent Ministry of Image.

Eshe stole a sideways glance toward those papers and felt a familiar ball of anger rise in his chest. Hate the poison, not the afflicted. He set the bread atop the canned vegetables, butter, and half dozen eggs in his basket, then made his way to the counter. The clerk said nothing as he rang up the groceries, and Eshe noticed the unicorn’s anger had been subsumed by nervous discomfort. The zebra on the other side of his counter wasn’t behaving in the way he was being instructed to believe, and that subconscious knowledge brought with it a faint edge of guilt the clerk didn’t quite understand. Eshe remained pleasant, but quiet, his thoughts already drifting to his next errand. No sense in saying anything for the sake of demonstrating he wasn’t a craze-maned brute. He stacked his bits on the smooth countertop, waited for the clerk to count it, then took his groceries and stepped outside.

The door jingled shut behind him, but he didn’t hear it. The sound was swallowed by the roar of midday Fillydelphia traffic. A box truck idled noisily at a red light, its winged operator watching opposing traffic fly through the intersection with open annoyance. Behind him, a string of motorized carriages coughed exhaust up toward the windows overlooking the two-laned street. From the corner of his eye, Eshe saw several drivers look toward him as he emerged onto the sidewalk with his paper bag crinkling between his teeth. He wasn’t the only expatriate here from Vhanna, not by a long shot, and yet the reaction was always the same. On a continent dominated by ponies of every combination of coat and mane imaginable, the sight of monochrome drew stares like a magnet.

He let out a little sigh as another paper-thin layer of his personal armor wore away. The monochrome pulled eyes onto him, sure, but it was the stripes that kept them there. There were days when he hadn’t been able to muster his patience like he had this morning. Those were the days when he wished he could snatch his immigration papers from his office safe in Manehattan, storm out into the middle of the street and waggle them in the faces of anyone who dared gawk at him as if he were a lesion blemishing their perfect utopia. He would scream, “Read it! I am a goddamned citizen! I have as much a right to exist here as you!”

His lip curled away from the paper bag. Hollow words. Worse, expected words to those who would savor the chance to watch a zebra crack under the weight of their own silence. He had no doubt some of the ponies who stared at him from behind their windshields spent as much time imagining what they would do if such a confrontation arose as Eshe practiced what he would say, and that was the problem. He would say. They would do. It had been less than a year ago when he had overheard his first zebra joke.

“What’s black and white and red all over?”

He shuddered. It probably hadn’t been directed toward him. Likely the mare who told it to her trailing friends was too absorbed with getting to the punchline to notice him standing there, but one of her friends had and the horrified look in her eyes when she caught sight of Eshe had been strangely heartening to see. Not everyone in that clique had laughed. The floor hadn’t fallen out from under the world just yet, even if a few million ponies were happily prying at the boards.

He walked the ten or twelve blocks between the grocery and the spacious, grassy plaza outside the Royal Luxury Suite in the business district on the city’s south end. The concierge had recommended this time of day to explore the city and he hadn’t been wrong. With the warm sun high overhead, the deep shadows cast by the steel and glass towers were barely long enough to reach the manicured lawn. Not wanting to be cooped up in his hotel room earlier than he had to be, he found an empty bench bordering a fragrant birm of late-blooming flowers and cedar wood chips and sat down.

His irritation quickly waned as he watched the traffic trickle alongside the hoof traffic on the sidewalk. Dangerous as it could be for him some days, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to relax and watch people simply exist. As always a few glances strayed toward where he sat, but he was too far away for them to be sure if he was staring at them or at something behind them. He smiled to himself as he sank against the painted metal, enjoying the gentle warmth of the autumn sun against his coat.

It was hard to believe that not ten years ago he’d been pulling a bulging suitcase through an excited crowd at Port Ochre, eager like so many others to make a life for himself in one of the great, shining cities across the sea. He’d been a younger stallion back then, one filled with boundless optimism for what lay ahead ever since the ticket from Robronco Industries arrived in the post. After too many years writing outdated lines of code for his bosses at Interswitch Services, Vhanna’s floundering answer to Equestria’s computer juggernaut, he’d taken a calculated risk by sending an “application” of a sort to his competitor’s CEO. The message never made it all the way to Applebloom’s personal terminal, and that had been the plan. The corporation would have people whose job it was to filter messages from outside the company, and the packet of code Eshe had written arrived in this individual’s inbox as innocuously as any other. Only, when his application was opened, the packet of code it carried quickly exploited an unpatched checksum flaw in Robronco’s then-rudimentary artificial assistant program.

To Applebloom, having the speaker above her desk crackle with Millie’s stilted voice as it dictated the cover letter of a stallion whose name she couldn’t pronounce aggravated as much as it amused her. It was several weeks before the first correspondence from Robronco’s internship department arrived. Two months after pulling his stunt, an envelope arrived with an invitation and a boat ticket.

A carriage on the street blared its horn, and someone else responded in kind. Eshe inhaled deeply as the daydream slipped away and glanced down at the crimped-shut paper bag on the bench beside him. The hotel wouldn’t mind it if he used the toaster he’d spotted in the dining area during breakfast, or if they did he would repay them for the faux pas with the rest of the fresh loaf he’d just purchased. They might even let him fry an egg or two if the lobby wasn’t too busy. He never liked to eat anything heavy before these conferences, and as much as he enjoyed his career at Robronco their speakers were rarely as entertaining as they were during product launches. Too much in his belly would leave him fighting to stay awake, and given his team was to blame for the recent delay in the Pip-Buck’s long awaited public release… well, he didn’t want to give anyone else reason to think he wasn’t giving the company his best.

A quick look at the shadows on the ground told him he should probably get moving. The meeting didn’t start until 2 o’clock but he knew the lead techs he’d chosen to come with him for the trip would be waiting for him outside the conference hall to avoid having to search for him in full view of their employers. He nipped the paper bag between his teeth and rose to his hooves, deciding he would have time to abuse the hotel’s unguarded breakfast line for a quick bite and relieve his coworkers’ anxiety after.

As he pushed through the hotel’s gilded revolving glass doors, he noticed the young mare behind the concierge desk watching him without a smile. He found himself frowning in response, wondering for a brief moment if she disapproved of him bringing outside food into the hotel and then remembering it had been her who suggested visiting the corner store in the first place. Her expression didn’t match her eyes. They were wide and scared, and they weren’t quite directed toward him.

A large hand settled on his shoulder. He flinched away from the surprise contact only to bump into a large creature standing on his opposite side. Gryphons. Two of them, stone-faced and grim, had slipped in on either side of him like the covers of a book slamming shut.

“Esheke Obiakolam, please come with us.”

They spoke his full name with shocking fluency. Before he could object, the same hand dug its talons into his shoulder and steered him across the lobby toward a waiting elevator.

The wagons ground across the broken highway, causing water to slosh within their plastic drums. Old ropes, drawn tight across their liquid cargo, creaked under the pressure but held fast to where they’d been painstakingly tied to the wagon frame.

Those traders unfortunate enough to be hauling supplies into Junction City at the time Fiona and Ms. Vogel agreed to the move hadn't hesitated to voice their complaints. Wagons were commandeered as city resources, a claim several travelers insisted was invalid given the utter lack of said city. Ms. Vogel had set them straight in the only language they understood: currency. Their property would be unloaded and placed under guard while the rest of Junction City’s surviving residents worked to load the boards with any container capable of holding liquid.

Within the span of an evening every trader wagon within the ruins of Junction City had been converted into water haulers. Ms. Vogel might be a curmudgeon but she understood the opportunity they had as soon as Fiona spelled it out. Stable 10 couldn’t produce water and there weren’t enough people alive in Junction City to drink what their wells and cisterns held in reserve. On the other hand, Stable 10 was the best shelter the wasteland had to offer in a hundred miles. The Stable dwellers would have medicine better than what the growing supply trains brought in by the traders could deliver, and most importantly it was defensible. Sledge would be pissed once the wagons carrying the sick and injured arrived behind them, but if he wanted his people to have water then he would do the right thing and treat hers.

The wagoneer in the driver’s box had chosen that moment to glance down to her as she loped along the roadside. “Something funny?”

He’d been paid well enough to watch his wagon endure the modifications necessary to carry such a heavy load, and the tone of his question was amicable enough. He’d caught Fiona smiling to herself and she answered with a level waggle of her broad wing.

Seeing the confusion on his face, she remembered he wasn’t from the Bluff and hadn’t learned the gestures she’d brought here from Griffinstone. “A little,” she clarified, still smiling as the blackened face of Foal Mountain grew larger in front of them.

She’d been thinking about how unlikely this migration would have been had it not been for the bomb. It wasn’t strictly funny in the literal sense. Truthfully it was more than a little sad that it took a cataclysm for these ponies to come together for a common cause, but that was just the way of the world. What had her smiling was the realization that the naive optimism Aurora had brought with her to Blinder’s Bluff was catching.

The lead wagon sank into a fissure in the road and lurched, causing something to jostle loose among the cargo.

“Keep going.” Fiona flashed the driver a smile before dropping back to squeeze up into the wagon bed. “I got this.”

“I thought you were going to wait for Mouse to return with your shopping list.”

Aurora’s nose hovered close enough to the Pip-Buck’s ring of exposed innards that it nearly touched them. Still, she managed to wrinkle it in response to his renewed prodding. Ever since Mouse went off to find supplies Discord had begun nannying her with renewed vigor. It would have almost been endearing if he wasn’t finding new and creative ways to say the same thing.

You’re going to break it.

The white shell of Ginger’s Pip-Buck lay in two mirrored pieces next to a neat row of thick security screws. Discord sat in the easy chair next to the couch, a genuine wood file held between his fingers as he studiously reshaped the tip of a very avian looking claw. Flecks of that claw were now firmly embedded into the six-pointed driver indent in each screw, confirming Aurora’s hypothesis that the fasteners were more of a visual deterrent against would-be tinkerers and wouldn't stand up to brute stubbornness. After what some might call mild badgering, Discord pressed the tip of his claw into the screw and jerked it counterclockwise. The screws popped free one after the other and at the end of it Discord’s claw looked like it had lost a fight against a lemon zester.

She squinted her eyes, ignoring his pointed question, and forced her blurry vision to focus on the newly silvered contact points on the exposed board.

Two such curved boards accounted for two thirds of the Pip-Buck’s inner circumference, with the touch screen taking up the remaining third. Aurora wasn’t much for computer hardware beyond what she’d learned early on in her apprenticeship under Sledge. There was a very narrow intersection of the responsibilities of Mechanical and those of IT, namely the use of certain diagnostic tools and a capability of finding the power source to a faulty system, unplugging it, and waiting ten seconds before cycling it back on. But whereas she was familiar with the basics of a control board for the Stable’s air recycler units and a few models of water heater, the impossibly compact pathways printed onto the Pip-Buck’s circuit board was a whole different level of complexity. She had spent the better part of an hour turning the exposed wiring this way and that, squinting at chips with their tiny silver feet and not understanding any of it. And then she spotted the busted capacitor.

It was tiny, a cylinder barely larger than the threading on the screws Discord removed. A thin X had been punched into the flat spot pointing up at her and she’d been able to make out just the faintest crack where the intentionally weaker surface had failed. As soon as she recognized what it was she’d felt the familiar itch of a problem she knew how to fix. Or, at least, she assumed she knew how.

Now, with the capacitor freed thanks to a liberal application of back-and-forth wiggling and one of its silver legs pinched delicately between her feathers, she lined up the conductive metal with the capacitor’s original connection points and pressed them down until she was sure she had positive contact.

With her hoof, she reached for the power button below the screen and pressed it down.

Several tiny LEDs blinked on across the board, followed quickly by a brief vibration as the device powered up. Careful not to shift the rudimentary short circuit Aurora craned her neck to confirm the screen was running through some kind of boot session. Plain white text populated the screen, vanished, and repopulated again. The lines were gibberish to her but she tried to keep an eye for any red flashing errors anyway.

The screen went dark.

Aurora frowned at it, waiting for something to happen, only for the smell of burnt feathers to sting her nose. She looked back to see the feather she’d used to keep the shorted circuit in place was smoking and she yanked it away, cursing as she nearly dropped the exposed Pip-Buck in the process. It tumbled into her opposite wing and she quickly set it back down on the coffee table with a look of betrayal.

Discord leaned forward in his chair, reached out to her smoldering feather, and snuffed it between his pinched fingers. “Let’s wait for Mouse.”

A notification icon blinked on the margin of Opal’s Pip-Buck screen and the temptation to ignore it was powerful.

They were in trouble. That fact hadn’t changed since the generator first went offline but things hadn’t improved since then. Her head throbbed, a symptom of worsening dehydration as much as from the blow she’d suffered when she made the mistake of interrupting a fight in the corridor outside IT. Two mares well into their fifties had gotten into an argument over… something, Opal still wasn’t sure. Whatever it had started as, starvation made it worse. A canteen had gotten crushed when it was just a scuffle and that had caused it to devolve into a full on melee. Opal had heard it through three sets of doors and thought, wrongly, that her advanced age would give her the advantage of shaming the two into stopping.

She’d caught a hoof across her left eye for the trouble and was pretty sure neither mare realized she’d even been there. Someone else had come in to break up the fight and now she could smell the odor of bleach wafting through the technician space and into her office. Opal didn’t remember the last time she’d seen so much blood, but it had been everywhere.

She rubbed the welt over her eye and sighed. The Pip-Buck kept blinking, adding an unwanted pulsation to the dim emergency lights. Combined with the dizziness brought on by quarter rations of water and a blow to the noggin, the silent rhythm threatened to add nausea to her list of discomforts. The Stable was dying. Slowly, yes, but dying all the same. The sick and elderly were succumbing first. There was even talk of an exodus, though fear of the dangers outside still kept residents well clear of taking any real steps to leave. Unsurprisingly, the idea of leaving behind everything they knew as home in favor of a guaranteed death out there wasn’t terribly contagious. And as Opal had tried to make peace with what little future she had left, someone had chosen this time to try calling her.

Ain’t like yer fixing to keel over right this exact minute, she thought to herself. Better to go here, talking to someone, instead of out there with all the monsters.

With a grudging motion she lifted her foreleg onto her desk and rolled the clunky old screen to face her. Her wing felt like lead weights hung from it as she pecked at the buttons, and her frown deepened with disappointment when she opened the notification and realized it wasn’t a call after all. Just one of the system alerts she’d set up back when Aurora was out in the wasteland and half the Stable was breathing down her neck for word of any new messages. She motioned to dismiss it, then stopped as she read the first line and her brain caught up.

17:15:34 External reconnect request received.
17:15:34 User: null
17:15:35 Device ID: PBX-01442.MOT
17:15:36 Network node ST117
17:15:38 External reconnect failed.

Slowly, Opal wiped her feathers over her face and took a deep breath. On top of everything else, someone out there had just connected to her servers for a whopping four seconds. She sighed. Did it really matter? On a scale of zero to doomed, they were so far off the far end that an intrusion from some nameless outsider barely registered. Were there grave robbers in the wasteland like there were in the adventure novels she’d read as a filly?

She sat at her desk and stared into the perpetual twilight for a long while. Her heart kept ticking away. Her headache kept throbbing. An irritated groan only the elderly could muster passed her lips. On creaking bones she pushed up from her chair, waited for the rush of vertigo to fade, and unenthusiastically started making her way back to the corridor.

Not unexpectedly, a deputy was exclusively patrolling this stretch of walkway while a young pegasus worked to scrub the blood and bits of ripped mane off the floor. Opal turned in the direction of the server room and walked, nodding out of habit to the deputy as she passed and feeling relief that she hadn’t asked about the lump on her head. The last place she wanted to be was down in Medical. Like so many residents her age, she knew the odds of coming back from there grew less and less favorable the older she got and she wasn’t about to let someone a quarter her age dangle her in front of Death like a baited hook.

She scanned her laminate at the door and it slid up and out of her way as if it were the most normal thing in the world. Other doors held open by jack handles stood agape behind her, scandalized by this single continued source of steady electricity. Opal tried not to worry over the splices Mechanical had cut into the main conduit leading in from the outside. Were it not for their ingenuity they’d all have died, evacuated, or worse weeks ago. Unfortunately the Stable was a closed system and the auxiliary power provided by generators at the bottom of a bunker beneath Stable-Tec Headquarters, generators Aurora claimed were large enough to make Stable 10’s output look like a disposable battery, didn’t provide enough juice to run the recyclers at full capacity.

Slowly but surely, she and her fellow residents were depleting the available water faster than the recyclers could extract it from their waste. Opal was surprised nobody had come to her begging to divert all the power to the recyclers. Likely they knew it wouldn’t solve the problem, and this far down the road there was little benefit in delaying the inevitable. They’d gain a day, maybe less, before pegasi were fighting each other for whatever trickled into the empty cisterns. Nobody wanted to make that last longer than it had to.

The door slid shut behind her and she slowly made her way through the servers to the nearest technician’s terminal. As expected, it blinked with the same notification that had appeared on her Pip-Buck. It provided no new data, of course, and she didn’t relish the idea of fighting fatigue while she investigated the breach. Still, this was her job and she didn’t like the idea of giving up the ghost knowing she’d slacked off at the eleventh hour.

Feathers ticked across the keyboard and the network logs appeared. She scrolled down to the flagged line of text, hit Open, and skimmed the activity log generated by the connection. A grunt rattled her throat. Nothing. Whoever it was had disconnected before doing anything. For a moment she wondered whether it was a probing attack akin to someone cracking the door to see if it would open. If that was the case it was a stupid tactic. Any intruder worth their salt would know a log of their presence would be filed and they would have at least made an attempt to delete it before disconnecting. She rubbed her face again, wishing the world would just leave them alone.

Still, something about it bothered her.

User: Null.

Pip-Bucks had hardwired biometric scanners built into the chassis whose sole purpose was to catalog and identify a wearer. It was why when one of the greasers came upstairs with a Pip-Buck covered in hammer dents, one of the technicians could grab a replacement without going through the hassle of transferring files or access settings. They just snapped on a new one, paid the replacement fee, and the Pip-Buck would import everything from the servers’ last restore point. It also reduced the risk of someone getting into another resident’s account.

So why did this device not have a user at all? That, technically, wasn’t possible.

Her curiosity now piqued, she sat down and began to dig.

“Hey. Eat.”

Weathers picked up the cup of what was colloquially becoming known and reviled as mash and stuck it in the young specialist’s face until he grudgingly accepted it. Not even pushing twenty years old, somehow this colt had managed to be one of the thirty-three survivors out of an entire company. Benefit of strong wings and a lithe frame, she guessed. The only reason he’d ranked specialist rather than private likely had to do with good breeding and a few pulled strings. Probably the reason he had the sack to be a picky eater in a Stable filled with the starving.

“Get that down your gullet and don’t let me catch you wasting calories again.”

He didn’t quite answer, but his feathers ended up wrapping around the spoon’s handle and that was enough for her. She left him to eat his ration of overripe vegetable… blend, and carried her own cup with her down the rows of gurneys that had since been converted into her people’s temporary barracks. Weathers had to give Sledge credit. In the face of the unprecedented chaos following the rupture of Stable 10’s great cog, he’d been in a frame of mind to understand her soldiers would need medical treatment and that the safety of his home might hinge on keeping them, for lack of a better word, detained.

While she disliked the presumption that her people would have anything to do with the bomb, the truth bore out differently. The Enclave, Primrose’s Enclave, had delivered and detonated the weapon that had put them here and as angry as she was for their situation she couldn’t bring herself to blame Sledge or anyone else in the Stable.

The isolated ward, normally intended to contain outbreaks of disease, made an ideal setting for her soldiers’ detention. The single door leading out, a slab of form-fitted steel Stable-Tec had embraced a little too fully, featured a rectangle cut into its face to make room for a sheet of tempered glass. The observation window was necessary for medical staff making their way through the airlock behind it, complete with a trio of decontamination arches and a second steel barrier on the opposite side. It allowed for Sledge’s people some level of safety as they ratcheted the doors open and shut, and it permitted her people to feel more like patients and less like prisoners.

Even if the meals blurred the distinction.

Gathered in the corner of the ward furthest from the door were the two surviving members of former security director Clover’s staff. It had taken some needling from Colonel Weathers to get them to even speak to her, let alone do so candidly. They’d been herded into the tunnel by their Black Wing escorts and were convinced they’d be executed with a bullet, not a balefire bomb. The lesser they’d been able to accept as a risk of being in the spycraft business, but the latter had well and truly thrown a bucket of wrenches into their mental gears.

As soon as Weathers got them talking they’d been surprisingly forthcoming about what little they knew about their predicament. Clover had stumbled across something damning, that much they were certain of, and whatever it was prompted him to haul ass. The word “defection” wasn’t explicitly stated though it was heavily implied. Weathers wasn’t sure what she made of all that, especially the bit about the director being fired on inside the bunker, but the two stallions commiserating in the corner weren’t here on vacation either. As she ate spoonfuls of the off-tasting ration, she couldn’t deny that Minister Primrose stood firmly in the eye of the shitstorm devouring the Enclave.

A feather tapped her shoulder as she passed a gurney. Corporal Chops, the mute stallion from the tunnel, held up a patient’s chart on a clipboard. Disregarding the lines and boxes stamped across the paper, he’d written a sentence below a long column of others he’d already crossed out.

“When will we be allowed to leave, ma’am?”

She couldn’t help a tiny smile of approval that he’d taken the time to write down ma’am. Probably he’d come up under a commanding officer who never gave him a pass on it, and it’d been drilled into his head just as deeply as his speaking counterparts. She liked the corporal, unlike his counterpart Lieutenant Dancer. That one had mouthed back to her as a balefire bomb was being carried away above their heads, and no amount of penance was going to undo that damage in her mind.

Dancer was currently asleep, or at least faking sleep, in the next gurney. She fought down the urge to slap him awake.

“The overstallion is still working on that,” she said, mindful of the dozen or so nearby ears subtly turning her way. “The residents here aren’t convinced that we didn’t have something to do with the bomb, and I can’t say I blame them. I’m making some progress with that, but it’s slow going. Sorry, corporal.”

She shrugged, hoping to emphasize the sentiment rather than appear dismissive. Chops nodded thoughtfully, paused, then picked up the pen chained to the clipboard and began to write again. When he finished he turned the paper her way.

“Please make sure Minister Rainbow Dash understands this wasn’t us.”

When she finished reading he took the pad back and scrawled again, harder.

“Primrose isn’t Enclave.”

It surprised Weathers how visceral her reaction to the words were, despite agreeing with them. She could feel her heart skipping into overdrive, her skin beneath her coat radiating a bloom of uneasy warmth at three words that just a week prior would have earned this corporal a blindfold and a bullet. He’d penned treason and gave it to an officer several rungs above him like it was a reminder for her to buy sugar at the market.

She found herself nodding. “I’ll keep reminding her, but I’m pretty sure she already knows. And I’ll save you some embarrassment; she doesn’t like being called minister. Stick with Rainbow Dash.”

Chops seemed to mull this over with clear discomfort. Weathers lifted a wing, patted him on the shoulder, and left him to his thoughts.

She made a few more slow laps of the ward before finally retrieving a wheeled cart near the door and pushing it past each of her soldiers. Empty cups and spoons clattered into military-near stacks and the standard last-minute questions were asked, mostly in regards to the potential return of their uniforms and - most importantly - their Remember Cloudsdale pins. When the medical staff hurried them down to the ward they hadn’t been thinking about saving what they’d been forced to assume were irradiated garments and Weathers hadn’t the heart yet to tell them they’d been thrown outside among the dead. That could wait. Until then they would have to trust that she was still looking into it.

As if on cue, albeit early, the ratcheting thuds of the outer airlock being worked caught everyone’s ear. A few turned to watch, lacking much else by way of entertainment in a ward lit by emergency lights, while others barely reacted at all. Conversations went uninterrupted as the outer door closed and the inner one began to rise in jerky stages, though that changed as soon as someone recognized the raspy, muttered sounds of exertion from the visitor.

Weathers suppressed a smile when the first soldier dropped from their gurney and faced the door in full parade rest. The sudden movement caused others to look toward the door where four faded blue legs slid into view, followed by the Element’s unmistakable mark. A burst of noise and hooves made Weathers, and Rainbow Dash, to flinch as every soldier in the room capable of standing promptly did so.

Meanwhile, Rainbow leaned her only wing into the task of lifting the door the last couple of feet, bending down with each push to frown uneasily at the Enclave survivors. Weathers thought she heard her mutter something under her breath as she hauled down on the ratchet handle one last time before ducking inside, eyeing the soldiers warily.

Weathers met her halfway. “For what it’s worth, I asked them not to do that anymore.”

A few chuckles rippled through the group, none quite loud enough for Weathers to identify the culprits. Rainbow rolled her eyes, clearly undecided whether to say something crude and endearing herself to them even more or remaining silent in the hopes that they stopped treating her like the second coming of Celestia. She opted for the silent treatment and turned her attention back to Weathers.

“Nurses will be down in a few minutes to start rounds, and they’re asking that all patients be wearing at least the bottoms of their jumpsuits before they come in.” She eyed the group for a moment, zeroing in on the gurney where Dancer still snored. “That one, especially, doesn’t know how to keep it in his sheath.”

Weathers followed Rainbow’s gaze and glared. Her people had resisted putting on any articles of clothing that weren’t their uniforms, especially when they still didn’t fully understand this Stable’s bizarre culture around staying covered. Given the circumstance that their patients had recently cheated death, the psychological trauma of which was worryingly absent among the group, the medical staff had elected to be accomodating rather than demanding. That is, apparently, until recently.

She let out a long sigh. “Goddesses give me strength. You all heard her, get dressed! And someone make sure the lieutenant keeps his trousers on or we’ll roll dice to see who gets to staple his dick to the floor.”

Rainbow pursed her lips and nodded, apparently satisfied with the immediate enthusiasm some of the soldiers showed in their task of rousting Dancer from his sleep. Several others were retrieving their gifted jumpsuits from beneath their gurneys and were, at first glance, considering how many sets the bewildered lieutenant could be squeezed into before he popped. Weathers cleared her throat and warded the more exuberant soldiers away from the idea with a look of warning, and soon the room settled into an amicable flurry of pegasi trying to work out exactly how the single-piece jumpsuits worked.

“So,” Rainbow said, her voice lowered as indicated toward her Pip-Buck, “Opal called a meeting. I was on my way up and thought it would be a good idea for you to attend. Any chance these guys will behave if you duck out early?”

Weathers regarded the room full of flapping wings and tangled legs and wasn’t sure if the nurses would end up having to untie half of them from their jumpsuits. “I thought you wanted a break from having a bodyguard. Pissing on graves in privacy and all that.”

Rainbow coughed into her wing. “You looked into that?”

“Didn’t have to. Just put two and two together and figured there’s only one plot of dirt down here you’d want to water, given the chance. Can’t say I didn’t stop by and add my two cents afterward.”

That actually made Rainbow blush, or as much as a ghoul was capable. “Anyway, they’re waiting upstairs. Are you coming?”

Part of her wanted to stay and indulge a little longer in the illusion that they were all still soldiers. But as she watched her people don Stable jumpsuits she knew that time was over. Whatever they were, they weren’t Enclave anymore. At least not the one Primrose ruled.

“Yeah,” she said, turning to the door. “Lead the way.”

Sledge anxiously leaned forward in one of the folding chairs Opal had dragged out of storage, his eyes occasionally darting away from the glare in the linoleum floor to look up at the glare on the wall. She had dimmed the lights in the server room by a few degrees to make the projector screen more visible, and Sledge quietly kicked himself at having not considered turning the lights off entirely. The power savings would’ve been negligible - the benefit to the recyclers even less so. Still, it ate at him like an ulcer. How many little things could he have done differently?

His hooves shuffled impatiently beneath his chair as another aching pain of hunger cramped his gut. He was tired and he stank of sweat and stress. Privately, he kept thinking about what might be different had he taken Aurora more seriously when she’d attempted to leave all those weeks ago.

“Um, sir?”

A hoof tapped the server room’s open door frame. He looked up and regarded Deputy Stratus without much enthusiasm, then suspected Opal was doing the same from where she stood next to the technician’s cart and he tried looking a little less beaten. It wasn’t like the deputy was interrupting. The presentation wouldn’t start until Rainbow Dash arrived.

“What?” he grunted.

“We have more visitors in the tunnel.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. He was too numbed by the recent days to feel surprised anymore. Their Stable was a treasure trove of well-tended technology and the wasteland hadn’t minced its intentions to take it. Invasion by osmosis. He shook his head.

“Did they say what they wanted?”

“They don’t know we spotted them yet. They look like they’re trying to clean up the Enclave’s encampment, but none of them have come close to the door yet.” The deputy offered a half-shrug. “A gryphon is with them. We think it’s the same one from before.”

Turns out it hadn’t taken the hint. Sledge picked at a nugget of crust in the corner of his eye and tried to muster the energy to get up and shoo the bird away again, but he couldn’t. If anything, gravity around his chair grew even stronger. He was tired, and any fight at this point was a losing one. He didn’t get up.

“Keep an eye on them,” he sighed, “but don’t talk to them. If they try snooping around the antechamber, let ‘em. You can fall back to the deputy station and drop the decontamination doors behind you.”

It was obvious his answer wasn’t what Deputy Stratus had expected, and for a moment he lingered in the doorway as if expecting Sledge to reveal the punchline. When he didn’t, the deputy lightly gave a gentle cough. “Maybe you should come see for yourself, sir.”

He shook his head, less in answer and more to keep himself from bursting. What did they expect him to do? Just march out of the Stable and scare the wasteland away with some clever profanities? This wasn’t Mechanical, it was the entire Stable and they were barely a speck compared to the vast expanse of the ruins of whatever was left of Equestria. Shout and bluster all he wanted, he wasn’t…

His eyes stung. Every step he’d taken since the day they found the drain in the generator had been the wrong one. Delphi had chosen the wrong person to lead, and he wasn’t going to take whatever new bait the world was throwing at him now.

One way or the other, the outside was getting in and he was tired of fighting it.

Maybe Deputy Stratus had seen something in his face he’d failed to keep hidden, or maybe the silence itself was an answer. Whichever it was, the deputy relented. Giving the doorframe a thump, he turned around and left.

Minutes passed, or maybe only seconds. However long it had been, Opal’s voice broke the quiet with a frail question. “How long has it been since you last got some shuteye?”

The pity in her voice made him feel like a little colt again and his throat threatened to lock up on him. He swallowed, forcing back the rush of emotion, and did what he could to make the dabbing of his eyes appear casual. He knew he wasn’t fooling her, but damned if he wasn’t going to try.

“Hard to sleep when no one leaves you alone,” he murmured. Then, seeing the way Opal’s lips drew an uncomfortable line, he hastily added, “I didn’t mean you, I just… everyone knows where my bunk is and they all want to know when things are going to be fixed. I don’t know how to tell them they aren’t.”

He listened to her feathers working the keyboard, the occasional plastic clicks punctuating the silence.

“Didn’t figure you for a quitter, Sledge.”

The matter-of-fact delivery of that accusation stung, and deeply so. A flicker of anger warmed his chest. “I didn’t quit, Opal. We lost.”

When she didn’t immediately respond he looked up from the floor to see if she might be watching him, but her eyes hadn’t left the terminal. Her expression had changed, though. It had grown brittle, her narrow jaw set firmly as one screen after the other flipped across the reflection in her bifocals. She remained that way for an uneasy stretch, clearly taking the time he hadn’t to compose her words carefully.

There were no traces of levity when she finally did speak.

“I thought about quittin’,” she began, her eyes still on the terminal screen. “If I’m being honest, I gave up a little bit just this afternoon. Thought about how easy it’d be to just sit back and give up. And why not? Delphi did, and it ain’t as if life hasn’t been nothing but hurt n’ worry since. Yet here I am, still at it. Y’know why that is?”

He smiled, shrugged, and turned his waning attention to the open door. What was taking Rainbow Dash so long?

Opal’s hoof slammed the top of the terminal like a gunshot.

“Dammit, Sledge! I’m talking to you!”

The outburst had jarred him back to attention and for the first time he could see furious tears in the old mare’s eyes. “I ain’t standing here because I think it’s fun! This ain’t fun. These are the worst days of my life and you’d best believe it’s the same for everybody else. But I still do the work because it means it might help. Yes, might. Don’t you give me that look. Like it or not, Sledge, we’re the ones in charge. We’re the one everybody’s waiting to hear good news from.”

Opal stopped to scrub at her eyes, rubbing the tears away with such ferocity that the vanes of her dusty blue feathers split. She flicked the tears to the floor and leveled a single feather toward the open door, her gaze locked fully on him now. “Maybe we won’t figure this out, but those people don’t deserve to spend their last days thinking we’ve quit on ‘em. I won’t do that to them, and you best not either. Understand me?”

When she finally wound down her voice was shaking, and not from frailty. Shame and self-loathing washed over Sledge in waves. He knew she was right, but that didn’t change how utterly exhausted he was. The respect he felt for Opal’s persistence was greater than it had ever been, but her speech wouldn’t turn on the generator. He knew it, and he suspected the other residents were already in the process of making peace with it too. It didn’t feel right to string them along with kernels of hope when their destination was unchanged.

And yet he couldn’t say that to her.

“Yeah,” he sighed, forcing the barest smile. “You’re right. Maybe we’ll figure something out.”

The expression Opal gave him was unconvinced. She blinked several times as she tried to process a response, but a voice from the doorway interrupted her before she could.

“Is…” Rainbow said slowly as she entered, “everything alright?”

Sledge glanced over and lifted a wing in greeting, leaving the explanation up to Opal. Colonel Weathers followed close behind, their brows knit into twin frowns as it became clear they’d arrived at an inconvenient time.

Opal was surprisingly quick on the draw, turning back toward the terminal while using the feather she’d inadvertently left pointed at the doorway to mime picking something out of her eye. “Everything’s fine,” she murmured, then gestured to the two empty chairs next to Sledge. “Take a seat so we can get started.”

“How do you not have grease?”

Discord held up his arms, half-offended, half-bemused by the pegasus currently rooting through his kitchen drawers like some hungry raccoon looking for food. Had he known deterring her from one project would only result in her immediately searching for another, he’d have let her continue burning her feathers off with her Pip-Bucks. “Putting aside the issue of my mortality, I’m nowhere near what I’d consider enough of a midlife crisis to need a fully stocked tool shed. I’m quite happy limiting grease for cooking.”

He watched as the mare yanked open the drawer next to the sink, clearly disbelieving that he could lack something she considered so vital. A touch of embarrassment warmed his face as she eyed yet another one of his disorganized attempts at storage, then plucked out a screwdriver with a clear yellow handle. She squinted at the brand stamped into the plastic, frowned back at him, then set the tool onto the countertop alongside the others she’d found.

“If I end up finding a soldering kit in one of these drawers, Mouse is going to kill you,” she muttered. “How do you ever find anything in this mess?”

He shrugged, tapping a finger against the side of his head. “I have a system.”

She blew out a breath at that and continued her search. “I mean, I guess. You’re the one who’s been living here for two hundred years. Are you positive you don’t have anything that could be used as grease?”

“If I do, I’m sure you’ll find it.” He spared a glance back into the living room, toward the coffee table where Fluttershy’s gramophone now sat awaiting repair. He’d been just a bit more than hesitant to allow her to look it over, and had carried it to the table himself just to be sure she didn’t drop it. Sentimentality was still a new concept to him, at least insofar as he’d been willing to take it seriously. Yet another one of the many, many ways his time on this world had changed him. “And it’s one hundred and eighty.”

She looked back at him. “What?”

He rolled his eyes, spinning a finger in the air to indicate she could safely keep rooting through his things. “Years. That I’ve lived here. One hundred and eighty laps around your sun. It would have been more but I had some difficulties finding a place to go, what with anyone who saw me immediately assuming I had something to do with the apocalypse.”

He felt a tiny rush of excitement at being able to say that out loud to someone willing to hear it. Granted he took every chance he got to talk Mouse’s ear off during his sporadic visits but the stallion wasn’t much for conversation. This pegasus currently ransacking his cottage had a much more curious nature to her, even when waves of deep depression seemed to pile over her.

As if on cue, the mare’s mood momentarily darkened. She closed the drawer and opened the one below it, blowing out a sigh as she poked around. “Believe it or not, I think I know how that feels.”

Discord folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the kitchen door frame. “You’ve yet to strike me as a mare who has enjoyed an uneventful life. My door remains open should you ever like to discuss it.”

She nodded and changed the subject. “So you built this place on your own?”

He let out an exaggerated sigh. “Is it so hard to believe that I understand the complex relationship between a hammer and nail?”

“This coming from the guy who keeps half a dozen different screwdrivers and zero screws.” She shook her head, and as she did so Discord caught a glimpse of the tiniest smile. “Seriously, though, it’s a nice house. It reminds me of a cabin my friends and I camped in once.”

He smiled. He couldn’t help it. It felt… remarkably good to have his recreation of Fluttershy’s home complimented in any capacity, like an affirmation that the work he’d put into building this cottage had been well spent. He opened his mouth to thank her and was cut short when he noticed she was holding something up in her wing, eyebrow hoisted, and a questioning grin on her lips.

“I’m going to do you a favor and not ask why this jar of petroleum jelly is half empty.”

His eyes went wide. “Okay.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

With a flick of her feathers she gave the jar a little toss and snatched it out of the air. Gathering the various screwdrivers in the other, she grabbed a dish towel from the sink and limped her way past him and into the living room. “This’ll work as a short-term substitute for grease. Hopefully that’s all this little fella needs to get going again.”

She didn’t so much hop onto the couch as flop onto it like a fish in a boat, but despite missing a full leg she managed to get herself seated in front of the record player. Discord followed, pushing the coffee table a little closer to the couch so she didn’t have to lean forward to reach it, then proceeded to seat himself in his easy chair to observe.

“Ah, no,” she said, eyeing him as he bent down to sit. She indicated the cushion beside her with a hoof thump. “Get over here. You’re helping.”

He hesitated, an uneasy smile spreading across his snout. “I’m flattered by your confidence, but that may not be the best idea. My hands are more of a liability than an asset these days.” He snapped his fingers to demonstrate, then gestured at the open living room when nothing happened.

She only stared at him. “And?”

Discord balked. “Had that worked, your leg would be growing back right now.”

Whether to mock, or more likely just to dismiss him, she snorted. “Then I’m glad there’s no such thing as a cosmic undo button, because I’d probably end up wearing it out. Besides, I got the leg figured out. Now come here and sit down, I’m going to need those liabilities of yours to help me take this thing apart.”

He found himself watching her for a long moment, surprised at how this mare who’d come close to dying on his couch had just doled out orders to him with the complete expectation that he’d do as he was told. A bewildered chuckle jumped from his chest as he surprised himself by walking around the coffee table to scooch in beside her. A dutiful worker was he, apparently. He bit down on his cheek to stop himself from smirking too broadly as he thought about the kick Fluttershy would get out of seeing him now.

At her memory, his smile faded by a few degrees. Not entirely, though. Not all the way.

“Okay,” she prompted, craning her neck to a comical angle just to catch his eye. “I’m going to tell you what to do, and then you’re going to work slowly.”

He tried not to chuckle. Some part of him could sense that this was important for her, and belittling it would be akin to hammering a wedge in the fragile trust she’d begun to develop with him. He glanced down at the screwdrivers, his good dish towel and, uncomfortably, the petroleum jelly she’d unearthed and couldn’t help but feel doubt that this was all the tools they required.

“I’ll leave the confidence to the professional,” he said, leaning uncertainly toward the gramophone to demonstrate as much. “What do we do first?”

She indicated the empty stretch of table to the right of him. “That’s where your tools are going. Keep them together, and make sure to leave room for the parts you’re going to be taking off.”

When he dutifully shifted everything to where she pointed, she shifted forward and pulled the record player to the edge of the table. Her feathers whispered against the wooden horn, something Discord had been extremely careful not to jostle when he’d moved it here for her to examine, then moved down its fluted panels to where it connected to the silver curves of metal that converted the record grooves to amplified sound. “We’ll need to take this apart before anything else. The horn looks like it’s just friction-fitted. I’ll hold the assembly steady while you grab the horn and very carefully twist it.”

Discord frowned, suddenly all nerves. Spare no thought for the gramophone itself, that wooden horn had been Fluttershy’s favorite feature. She’d fawned over it when he first conjured the instrument here for her, marveling in the daffodil pinstriped accents along the cone. He dreaded that meddling with it now might damage it.

He took a steadying breath and retracted the claws in his right paw. He gripped the horn with it, terrified of scratching the wood, then used the palm of his other hand to brace it as he gently applied torque. Aurora’s wings kept the rest of the instrument still as he increased the pressure, and with a quiet rasp of dry wood sliding free from old metal, the delicate horn rested in his hands.

He stared at it for several seconds before collecting himself and setting it onto the empty cushion next to him. His record player was missing its horn now, but in a way that oddly made sense. Disassembly, not destruction. He reminded himself to breathe again.

“Well alright,” he chuckled, a touch giddy from jangling nerves. “What’s next?”

The pegasus rewarded him with an approving smirk, then explained to him the steps he would need to take to take apart the nickel-plated tubes leading down to the hinged armature. Neither of them knew the exact terminology for the machine and, to his relief, that didn’t seem to matter. With some help from his machine-minded counterpart he located the little slotted screws that fastened the narrowing tubes to a cast iron brace which kept the weight of the assembly from tumbling off the back of the instrument.

She showed him how to organize each piece they removed in the empty section of table, taking care to reassemble each screw, nut, and washer into single units before setting them next to the parts they came from. The more he worked, the less wary he felt about each new step. It was simultaneously a humbling and embarrassing lesson to be taught when his first and only instinct had always been to snap his fingers with an unflinching understanding that whatever he willed would simply be.

He’d used to consider the physical act of building and destroying to be primitive. He wondered now what he might be missing.

After removing what they’d ruefully agreed to refer to as “the player assembly,” they stopped for a few minutes to review what they had left. Essentially just a polished oak box with a record platter on its lid and a heavy crank sticking from one side, they settled on removing the remaining accessories first. The platter was simple enough, it just lifted away from the central post. A large screw fixed the handle to a slotted shaft, something that startled Discord with how much effort it took before the threads finally snapped free. He was dismayed to see red spots of rust dotting the screw and realized with some worry that it may have been a mistake not to have had someone tend to the record player sooner.

Platter, handle, and lock screw joined a speed control lever and its multitude of small linkages on the table, and they found themselves looking at a rather unremarkable wooden box dotted with several holes.

“Time to open the lid,” the mare announced, indicating four large screws that the record platter would normally hide from view. As Discord slowly backed them out, she added, “You’re doing really good.”

He stopped to let out a nervous chuckle. He’d almost thought he’d been doing something wrong. “Thank you.” Then, after resuming his work, “Earlier you said something about figuring out your leg?”

Sensing the question in his tone, she nodded. “I asked Mouse to try to find me some materials to build a prosthetic.”

He set the screws on the table and glanced at her. “I don’t remember hearing that come up while he was here.”

She made a noncommittal see-saw gesture with her wing. “Maybe I didn’t technically ask. More like add it to the bottom of the list I gave him.”

Lifting away the lid, Discord spared a moment to furrow his brow at the surprisingly compact block of clockwork screwed to the bottom of the box. “Devious.”

“Me, or that?”

He shrugged. “Yes.”

She laughed, then shooed away his hands as she bent forward to poke her nose around the mechanism. For all intents and purposes it looked like a black cube of modern art inspired by Borg. At the top of the block frame, fitted around the central post responsible for turning the platter, was a metal canister of some kind that was steadily becoming the focus of the mare’s attention. Below that lurked a dense array of gears, sprockets, and something with four metal spheres dangling from metal arms in radial symmetry. Discord quietly hoped that she didn’t expect him to disassemble any of that.

All of it was uniformly caked in thick, black gunk. He waited as he watched her pick up the smallest of the screwdrivers and press the tip into a nugget of muck clinging to one of the gears. It resisted her probes in a way Discord guessed maybe it shouldn’t, evidenced by the flicker of a frown. She instructed him to take the dishrag and promptly attacked the four heavy screws keeping the gear assembly fixed to the bottom of the box. When it was free, she picked it up with both wings and held it up for him to take. He did so, taking care to keep the towel between it and his hands.

“So,” she said, pointing a feather at the globs of ancient gunk clotting the clockwork, “all of this is old grease that’s picked up a couple centuries of dust and dirt. This block of gears is a spring motor. Friction is its enemy and this old grease is producing plenty of it.”

Discord hummed his understanding. Already the rag was taking on black stains where it came into contact with the layered cogs. “It’s gotten everywhere.”

She nodded. “That’s grease for you. Normally I’d fill an ultrasonic bath with some good degreaser and let it run, but since that’s not possible you’ll have to do your best to wipe off as much of the excess as you can. Anything you can’t get at will get incorporated with the, ah… jelly. It’s not a perfect fix, but it should loosen things up enough for the mainspring to drive the motor again. Sound good?”

It sounded great. “Can’t hurt to try.”

She gestured her wings as if to say all yours and he proceeded to awkwardly work the rag across the little gears with his fingers. He went with his natural inclinations to chase after the biggest gobs first, wiping them off the gears as best he could without snagging the cloth on their teeth. Where he couldn’t get the rag with a finger, he opted to use the tip of a screwdriver to press into the tighter caps. His brow stitched together in concentration as he recalled her lesson about friction being the enemy, and began going after the black smears caked around the shafts each gear turned on and worked to clean out the nuggets of gunk trapped between their teeth. Little by little, patches of bright steel were beginning to stand out from decades of neglect, and his nervous smile softened a little as his confidence grew.

Beside him, the mare used a feather to point out spots she thought were worth hitting, leaving it up to him how he’d go about it. His head tipped left, then right, seeking out better angles of approach as his palms grew black from the work.

“My name is Aurora.”

He blinked and looked over to her. “It came back to you, did it?”

She rolled her eyes and indicated the motor he was no longer cleaning. “Come on, you never bought into my alleged amnesia.”

He smiled, then resumed trying to tease some old crust from the odd bit with the weighted arms. “No, but I assumed you had your reasons. What changed?”

Aurora seemed to consider the question as if the decision hadn’t been a conscious one. After a while she leaned forward and picked up the lever from the dismantled speed controller. She turned it over in her feathers, likely to give herself something to focus on.

“I don’t know,” she murmured, and to Discord it sounded like a true statement rather than a dodge. She took in a breath, then released it as the evening light glinted off the metal. “Maybe this is reminding me of who I used to be, before… everything else. Before…”

She trailed off and seemed to struggle with finding the right words. Discord waited, his hands going through idle motions as he glanced at her, but she eventually shook her head and tossed the lever back onto the table. They sat in silence for the better half of a minute before he decided to give her a nudge.

“You were barely alive when Mouse brought you here. What happened to you?”

Another deep breath, and another long exhalation. Aurora sat up a little straighter, her eyes focused somewhere far ahead of them as she worked her way toward an answer. “Well… my home was breaking down, and I put it on myself to be the one to fix it. I had an idea of where I needed to go so I packed up and left. I met some people along the way and one of them… I don’t know. It felt like meeting a part of myself that I didn’t know was missing.”

Discord grunted. “I know that feeling.”

Aurora looked up at him with a sad smile, then returned to staring at that distant point in space. “Yeah. She was always there for me, even when I didn’t deserve it. I feel like I took advantage of that. Like, for all the kindness she gave me, I repaid her by sucking her into the mess I was making. And because of that, she ended up making a deal with the exact same people she’d run away from as a kid. All on my behalf. All because she thought they had the solution to my Stable’s crisis.”

Mouse’s theory was turning out to be right on the mark. She’d been involved somehow with the explosion at the Stable out east, which answered the question of how she’d come to arrive on his doorstep blinded and near death. Saying as much, however, served no purpose other than to rub salt in her wounds so he remained silent.

Aurora clicked her tongue with a matter-of-fact shrug. “They gave us a bomb instead, and neither of us knew the difference. Even though we’d been lied to about talismans before. I think we were just desperate to be done with the wasteland. We didn’t even question it, we just… plugged it in and barely got it out of the Stable before it went off.”

She paused, appearing to Discord to be gauging her own emotions before shaking her head and continuing as dryly as she’d begun. “The worst part is that in the end, she saved my life. She decided to let herself die so that I would have a chance. So after everything that we went through, after overcoming all the shit this world threw at us, I ended up losing her at the finish line.”

The room was silent for several minutes. Discord had been preparing to have to console her in some way but, bafflingly, she remained eerily dry-eyed and composed. He swallowed and slowly resumed cleaning the spring motor in his hands. She wasn’t allowing herself to feel it yet. He remembered what it had felt like to stare up at that towering wall of grief and guilt, knowing with perfect clarity the terror he’d felt knowing he would have to reconcile what his actions had cost him and the people he loved.

Fluttershy didn’t sacrifice herself for him. She’d rejected him, and somehow that had been even worse because he understood how powerless he was to change her mind. Even now, there were days when Discord considered whether he’d really moved on or whether he was still living in the shadow of his mistakes.

For a while he considered conjuring up a clever platitude to share with Aurora, but ultimately decided against it.

“I’m sorry you lost her,” he murmured.

“So am I.” She leaned forward and picked up the Pip-Buck she’d been working on this morning. A single, singed feather caressed the blank screen. Then she pursed her lips and put the device back on the table beside its outdated twin. Glancing at the spring motor, she feigned an unconvincing smile. “I think that’s clean enough. Let’s get it packed with jelly and mounted. Then after you wash that mess off your hands I’ll walk you through reassembly. Are you up for that?”

He looked down at the motor in his hands and took a moment to admire the pockets of shine that had emerged from beneath the crust. Perhaps Aurora would find a way to slough off similar layers that had built up around her. He smirked at the clunker of an analogy. She’d opened up to him, at least a little. Maybe the comparison would fit better with time.

He eyed the myriad of neatly organized pieces which had once been Fluttershy’s gramophone and decided that this daunting project was as much therapy for Aurora as it was humbling for him. Picking up a screwdriver with his grease-stained fingers, he flourished it like a ceremonial saber.

“I await your instruction.”

The stallion harnessed to the other side of the wagon’s oaken tongue made a hawking sound and spat the foam from his mouth. “You got business at the Bluff, or is ya plannin’ to go east after that?”

He hadn’t asked the name of his fellow puller yet and Clover hadn’t deigned to offer it, not out of impropriety but rather because his Pip-Buck and shameful attempt at hiding his wings under a stiff coat that still held its long-dead owner’s shape wasn’t fooling the old stallion. The question of whether he’d turn east was as much as a litmus test for Clover’s intentions as it was polite conversation. Behind them the wagon’s owner, a young unicorn barely out of his colt years and flush with caps after his first commission with F&F Mercantile turned into a personal windfall following its collapse, snored into his chest from the driver’s seat.

“I have some personal affairs there which need addressing,” he answered vaguely, then turned the spotlight away from himself. “How about you?”

The old stallion snorted. “I go where the kid says, for as long as there’s caps waitin’ at the next stop. Other’n that, I don’t make plans. Still surprised you didn’t cut yerself in on my share.”

Clover pursed his lips and shrugged, feigning disinterest in the thin stands of poplar trees growing wild in what used to be acres of open farmland. The deep, parallel plow marks were mostly eroded smooth now but a keen eye could tell how the rocks sticking out from the soil had been disturbed by ancient machines. He was used to seeing the uniform rows of the wealthy orchard owners and New Canterlot’s attempts at creating manicured patches of greenspace within the young city. Wild growth wasn’t an unfamiliar concept to him, but he rarely saw it outside of intelligence reports and after-action photos. The water table out here must be close to the surface for their roots to have found purchase.

“Careful,” the old puller warned. “Might be raiders out there starin’ back atcha.”

Clover smiled and turned his gaze back to the broken road they traveled on, leaving the bait untouched. “If you were listening to my conversation with your employer, I assume you’re aware that we traded my labor for protection.”

The puller rolled his eyes before settling them down toward his foreleg. “Yeah, you and that fancy gatchet’ve yours are too good for our money. Y’got the wings for flying, so why’re you chewing my ear as a puller when you could just flitter the rest of the way north?”

He regarded the stallion more fully. “I can think of more difficult ways to get myself shot.”

A grunted concession, then more verbal maneuvering. “Surprised you’re not beggin’ for a rest. You’ve been pullin’ for most of a full leg.”

Clover couldn’t help but smile a little. Wastelanders were the furthest thing from the rubes many of his compatriots chose to believe them to be, and this old timer was a prime example. Nine hours after hitching his proverbial wagon to this, well, wagon, his temporary coworker had waited until the young boss had dozed off before starting his interrogation.

“Hard to survive if you’re out of shape,” he said.

The puller spat again. “Hard to stay in shape if’n you look like a mammoth.”

It wasn’t quite an insult aimed at his appearance, but close enough to one that Clover could have been justified in responding to a perceived barb. Instead, he laughed, and pointedly lifted one of his wings to better display the dense tangles of his coat. “My bloodline might have spent a few generations vacationing in the north.”

The stallion eyed his wing as he let the jacket slide back over it, and Clover waited amiably for a reaction. Silence lingered for a quarter mile before he let out an annoyed grunt.

“Y’know, back when I hauled for the slaver guilds I had a chance to spend some time over the border. Lot of folks in Enclave country liked talkin’ about bloodlines. Especially the blue bloods who figured they had somethin’ to brag about.” After a meaningful pause, he added, “You strike me as the type who wouldn’t have any trouble at all blending in with those types.”

“The world can be full of surprises,” he mused.

“Oh, it sure can. Why, you should’ve seen my face when I heard it was a flock of self-important birds who popped a doomsday bomb on a Stable.”

Clover felt his smile grow brittle. He’d spent the first night as a fugitive in a freight container that had spilled off a derailed train, and the explosion had rung the metal walls like a bell. From his vantage point he’d been able to see the pinpoint of green light rising over the horizon, and he was ashamed to admit his first concern had been for his Pip-Buck. It was pure luck that he’d chosen to sleep inside the container and that the steel walls had protected the only evidence he had of Rainbow Dash’s survival from the EMP.

It hadn’t taken him long to work out his distance from the epicenter and the possible targets for a balefire attack. To say he’d been emotionally compromised for several hours after was an understatement on par with comparing morning frost to a glacier. His former employer, minister of the Enclave, and only mare alive able to claim to have deployed the balefire-tipped missiles responsible for Equestria’s violent ejection from a golden age, had just willfully deployed the same destructive force upon a Stable whose only crime was that it somehow harbored the Element of Loyalty. The irony of that fact wasn’t lost on him, but all he could think about in those first hours was whether this outsized attack was somehow meant to be a message for him. A twisted punishment meant to make him reconsider which side he was on.

“Y’sure are quiet all a sudden,” the puller murmured suggestively.

He sure was. Accepting that he’d tipped his cards, he shrugged and let the rest of his smile fall. “They’re responsible for more than just the bombing of Stable 10. Anyone who knows that and still chooses to serve them isn’t a part of an Enclave that I want to be associated with.”

With that, a direct question finally came. “You one of their grunts?”

Clover considered the question. “Until very recently, yes.”

“Hrm. Never cared for you folk, but I s’pose that’s no surprise to hear.”

“It’s no worse than the things mine have said about you.”

A nod of agreement, the first genuine sentiment the stallion had offered since he let them harness him in. “We’re still about two, three hours out from the Bluff. Figure we’ll take the wagon along the southeast side. You plannin’ on surrenderin’ yourself once we get there, yeah?”

Why lie now? He nodded.

“I don’t feel like spending the day in a locked room with one of Coldbrook’s nasties, so you’ve got a few miles to make up an excuse to stop and unhitch. If you can’t, I’ll tell the boss I need a shit and you can bolt. I don’t care which you do as long as I’m not standing next to you when you tell ‘em who you are.” He shook his head, likely aware that he’d need to convince the young stallion sleeping the day away of the importance of forgetting about the dustwing they’d picked up for this last leg. “Traffic’s usually light on the east end of the wall, if y’prefer less of a crowd.”

“I do,” he agreed. “If it’s any consolation to you, Coldbrook isn’t leading the Bluff anymore. Elder Coronado took charge not too long ago.”

“The kirin?” The stallion barked a laugh. “Not sure if that’s much better.”

“Why do you say that?”

He shrugged, jangling their tack. “They’re known to have a fiery temper.”

Little more than a week into his transfer and Elder Coronado felt a deep, compelling urge to take a vacation. He sat behind the desk previously occupied by a stallion whose perceived competence had rested squarely on the shoulders of others, and when the first card fell his first instinct was to grab at the entire fragile house and squeeze. For a stretch of territory whose only real claim to fame was a medium-sized city and a dysfunctional solar array, Coldbrook had wasted no time making a mess out of both. And of course, on top of that, the High Elder had seen fit to give Coronado temporary command of Coldbrook’s territory on top of his permanent duties in Fillydelphia. A city, which he reminded the High Elder repeatedly, which had been defanged by the Enclave and whose pegasi were now no doubt roosting in the rooftops like so many pigeons.

The daily briefs coming in from all corners of his nearly doubled territory were stacked high enough that he may as well throw a board across them and stack tomorrow’s reports on that. And to top it all off, the Enclave had decided to violate all pretense of fighting for an uncontaminated Equestria and popped a balefire bomb over the Stable both sides claimed to be saving.

Elder Coronado needed a break.

He pushed out of Coldbrook’s chair and crossed the bare office, pausing long enough at the door to run magic over the wrinkles in his tan uniform. Several of them bent back into shape, unfazed the weak aura he could conjure. With a sigh he did his best to ignore it, then pressed the switch on the wall. Out of habit his eyes followed the door as it receded above him. He needed to stop doing that. It reminded him of the way first time visitors to Fillydelphia would stare up at the old skyscrapers. That made him smile a little. Things would be better once he got this region back under control and a new Elder was promoted to take his place.

Until then, he would take a walk.

The door slid shut behind him and, as always, more than a few curious eyes turned his way as he started down the corridor. He didn’t mind. Being seen was part of the job, and if his presence reminded the soldiers here that the kirin were still alive and kicking all the better. At a glance he could easily tell which Rangers were native to Blinder’s Bluff and which were supplementary from other parts of the eastern wastes. He gave Coldbrook’s former people credit, they at least didn’t scurry away with their tails between their legs. When Coronado first arrived he had made it clear that the crimes of their former Elder did not reflect upon them as Rangers. As far as speeches went he suspected it may have landed flat. Soldiers who likely never worked directly with Coldbrook were still finding reasons to stop him and apologize or reassure him that they weren’t all crazy.

Coldbrook never struck him personally as unhinged, but he wasn’t about to stick his neck out for the stallion by making excuses for him either. If there was a takeaway from the steady trickle of apologies it was that his skills as an orator needed some work.

Eventually he chose a corridor he hadn’t been down before and turned into it on a whim. The scenery didn’t change much. Polished concrete floor, paneled steel walls, visible plumbing and conduits snaking overhead to wherever Stable-Tec designed them to go. Still, it was something new and reading the placards on the walls as he passed helped to distract him from the mountain of problems on his desk. Officers, enlisted, and administrative staff trotted around him in both directions like a stone in a river, sometimes pausing long enough to acknowledge him with a brief, “Sir,” or “Afternoon,” before hurrying on to where their duties led. Stable 6 was a busy place at the best of times and after recent events it was a hive of activity.

He tried not to think about it but found it impossible not to. The Enclave had, for the first time in decades, mounted a successful incursion into Ranger held territory. That much was Coronado’s failing as it was Coldbrook’s for allowing the Vhannan guns above Fillydelphia to be simultaneously destroyed. That feint of theirs had forced Coldbrook to send support eastward, all but removing the armor preventing the Enclave spear from sinking in from the other side. Hundreds of soldiers were sloshing across the wasteland like water in a bath, chasing threats as they appeared rather than anticipating them in advance.

With the detonation of the balefire weapon, both sides had come to an abrupt standstill. Knowing what he knew about the Enclave, exposing themselves to a fresh radiation hotspot would cost them more than their health. There would be the issue of social status to consider, as well as the purity of their bloodline. As horseshit as that was on paper - radiation didn’t care if it drifted over Enclave territory - willful exposure had real consequences. Radiation was conceptually and physically taboo, and if the mounting intelligence pointing to the Enclave as the faction who delivered the bomb was true, Coronado could only imagine that the pegasus who pushed the button would be sweating bullets right about now.

“Good afternoon, sir,” a female voice chimed behind him.

His ears perked in surprise and he slowed a little to let the mare catch up. He stole a quick glance at the bars on her collar and noted the folder floating ahead of her. Inwardly, he sighed. So much for his break.

“Captain. What do you have for me?”

“Items of note,” she replied in a standard non-answer. Normal procedure in a place with so many eyes and ears. He lit his own horn and she allowed a crimson haze to swarm over her gold, pulling the folder in front of him. “There is one item I’ve placed at the front that needs your attention. The rest you should be safe to put into a shredder, sir.”

He smiled at that. The office towers of Fillydelphia had no shortage of paper shredders, and every single one had been converted to rust by the sea air. “Thank you, Captain.”

She nodded, but continued to follow him.

“Ah,” he said. “You’re dismissed.”

With that she did a u-turn and joined the flow on the other side of the corridor. Elder Coldbrook had been a true taskmaster, apparently. Officers assigned to Magnus Plaza tended to have enough autonomy to understand when they could go. Tucking the folder near his shoulder, he spied a green and white sign indicating one of the stairwells and dipped out of traffic.

He descended a few levels, paused at the landing, then decided to go down a bit more. There was so much of Stable 6 he hadn’t seen and getting away long enough for these detours was like pulling teeth. Thankfully the stairwell was mostly empty, save for those who didn’t feel like waiting for an elevator. It grew practically barren the lower he went until only his hooves echoed off the concrete walls. He couldn’t help but smile at the familiar giddy feeling he got as a colt whenever he wandered into places the adults didn’t venture.

Naturally, that was the moment an engineer appeared around the steps below and paused to give him a worried look. Seeing the new Elder trotting downstairs with a toothy grin was probably every enlisted’s personal nightmare. Coronado quickly snapped his lips shut and nodded as he passed the stallion, fighting hard not to let his composure crack in the process.

Stable 6 wasn’t terribly deep and it wasn’t long before he found himself running out of stairs. Somewhere behind the double-doors at the bottom emanate a shuddering drone that seemed to vibrate the ribs in his chest. His hooves tingled with the reverberations, giving him a strange sensation of sliding on ice rather than concrete. A chipped plastic sign screwed into the wall depicted a genderless pony wearing oversized earmuffs, and apparently no one had thought to leave a supply of ear protection nearby for him to doff. He briefly considered rectifying that right now but managed to push the idea aside.

He pushed through the doors marked MECHANICAL and flattened his ears at the assault of raw sound. Ahead of him opened a proverbial cavern of open space buttressed by thick, reinforced pillars. But what impressed him the most was how devoid of equine activity the space was. As far as he could tell the engineer he’d passed on the stairs had been the only one down here and he was utterly alone. Likely that wasn’t the actual case. He knew there was always a skeleton crew on duty inside the generator room beyond the half-lit void sprawling ahead of him.

Still, he couldn’t help but be impressed with how thoroughly the Enclave had stripped this Stable down. This must have been where the Stable dwellers built and repaired their machines, and he thought he could picture the rows of work stations delineated by the yellow lines painted on the floor. In regular intervals retractable power sockets hung from the ceiling like stalactites, and Coronado suspected if he were to find something to plug in it would still draw power. There was nothing to test the theory with, of course. All the tools, parts, and raw materials were conspicuously absent down to the last hammer and nail. Signs suspended from chains pointed to departments which no longer existed. Only the generator remained, evidence of the Enclave’s early assumption that they could return later for the electricity.

Gradually, his curiosity began to wane and the folder floating at his side reminded him of his duties. He grunted, turned, and wandered toward the open door of a small room equipped with a kitchenette. He tried not to think too much about going to a break room to do work and kicked the doorstop out from under the door as he passed by. It clicked shut behind him, muffling the worst of the noise. With no chairs to sit down in, he opened the folder onto the empty countertop and began skimming the document at the top.

His eyes moved back and forth across the page. As they did his brows knit closer together until, by the end, they were nearly touching.

“Well,” he murmured. “Alright then.”

FROM: East-Central Chapter, Elder Coronado
TO: High Elder, All Chapter Elders, All Clearance O-3 Admin Staff
INFO: Defection and Detainment of Enclave Security Director at Blinder’s Bluff

1. (U) Subject is Clover, Security Director to Minister Primrose of the Enclave.

2. (C) Subject crossed into Steel Ranger territories via flight, departing New Canterlot at approximately 1530 hours, 21 April 1297. Proceeded toward Stable 10 via circuitous route east of landing point, location undetermined. Witnessed balefire event over Stable 10 and altered course to avoid airborne contaminants. Stable 10 rejected as potential refuge. Proceeded east to Blinder’s Bluff, where the subject approached and identified himself to Initiate Flick (E-C Chapter) at southeast gate. Subject was taken into custody willingly and has remained cooperative.

3. (C) Preliminary investigation disclosed following:

A. Subject identified as Security Director Clover, most recently assigned to the service of Minister Primrose of the Enclave. Subject obtained access to communications intercepted by software monitoring network traffic generated by hereto unknown Stable-Tec assets. Subject arrived wearing a Pip-Buck inconsistent with known Stable-Tec issued variants, but which operates on standard Robronco operating system known to have been acquired by Stable-Tec. Subject activated Pip-Buck at the request of Paladin Timbers (E Chapter) and displayed a communication sent by registered Stable 10 resident Rainbow Dash, MOA Minister, addressed to registered Stable 10 resident Spitfire, MOA Department Manager. Communication makes detailed claims linking Spitfire to global catastrophe dated 31 October 1077. Communication mentions secondary subject named “Primrose” during these accusations, which defected subject claims to be Minister Primrose of the Enclave.

B. Subject surrendered Pip-Buck to Paladin Timbers. Subject has been detained at Blinder’s Bluff, Stable 6, Level 4 Secondary Deputy Station, Cell 1. Level 4 Deputy Station has been given General Restricted access.

4. (C) Contents of intercepted communication designated “Your Legacy” are attached to this document.

“Opal, I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

He endured an impatient sigh from the old mare without bothering to mount a defense. She was going too quick with all these projected screens and while his surly attitude hadn’t scored any points with her today, his own charity was running dry too. She’d spent the last five minutes building up to the point of all this and the more screens she showed the more lost he felt. This latest screen had something to do with Aurora, given her name was scattered across the log entries, but everything she said felt too reserved to be good news.

More than ever he wanted to get up, walk down to his compartment, and sleep.

“This,” Opal said, speaking slowly as she lifted a primary toward the projected terminal display, “is the network activity for the anonymous Pip-Buck that pinged the servers today. There ain’t much of it, only a few days’ worth, and the device number assigned to this particular Pip-Buck was never issued to our Stable. Normally I’d expect the firewalls to catch that and reject the connection…”

Sledge blinked slowly. “But?”

She glared at him for a moment. “But nothin’, the firewalls would have done their job if the connection attempt hadn’t terminated on the other end. Heck, it wouldn’t have gotten as far as it did were it not trying to reconnect from an old session. Call me crazy but–”

“You’re crazy,” Rainbow wryly obeyed.

Opal waggled her brow at her. “–but an unknown Pip-Buck trying to reconnect to our network from the other side of the continent is something I’d want to investigate. Turns out our mystery device has been poking around the archives as recently as last week, and had been at it for days before that. All of it, every file and record, had to do with Aurora.”

Sledge nodded to avoid saying anything that might betray his exhaustion with all this. The world was filled with spies and liars, and had been since before the bombs fell. What good did it do to beat this latest revelation into their heads when they could be starving without the burden?

“Do you think it was us?” Colonel Weathers asked, clearly finding the presentation much more interesting. “Or, rather, Primrose?”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Rainbow chimed.

Opal shook her head. “That was my initial thought as well, but no. I looked into why this device was able to connect in the first place and it boils down to the user’s biometrics matching those of one of our registered residents. I’ll skip the drumroll, it’s Ginger’s signature. She registered with the Stable via Aurora’s Pip-Buck weeks ago after Elder Coldbrook flashed a copy of its operating system and, apparently, Aurora’s credentials. The information she pulled up on Aurora backs it up.”

She gestured to the log entries pointing to notable moments in Aurora’s life inside the Stable. Her birthday, school records, photographs, even the certificate she’d received when she completed her apprenticeship under him. Sledge found his eyes stinging and turned them back to the floor as he listened to Opal explain how they’d locked down Aurora’s account on her request, fearing the Rangers would find a way to use it to force open the Stable door. Evidently all they needed to do was bait the Enclave into doing it for them. He could still hear the explosion that kicked the door in over their heads.

Rainbow leaned forward in her chair. “So Ginger’s alive, then.”

“Possibly,” Opal hedged, “but I wouldn’t bet on it. The Pip-Buck never registered a user, so nobody was wearing it. Could be someone… found it. I don’t think that’s likely to be the case, either. Given the distance it traveled in the past week…” She trailed off, and Sledge could hear the hesitance in her voice. She wasn’t trying to be dramatic. She just didn’t know how to say it without getting their hopes up.

Sledge cleared his throat. “Someone flew it out there.”

She worked her jaw uncomfortably, then offered the barest nod. “I ain’t sayin’ it’s Aurora.”

The hostile conversation with the gryphon earlier this morning came back to him like a sore hoof. He closed his eyes and sighed, recalling how the creature had insisted she’d spoken to survivors who claimed to have seen Aurora at the time of the explosion.

“But you wouldn’t have asked us to come if you didn’t think it was possible,” Rainbow nudged.

Sledge opened his eyes to watch Opal fidget behind the terminal, visibly discomfited by the obvious being stated so clearly.

“I think…” she grimaced, forcing herself to continue, “I think it’s important for all of us to stay informed. We don’t have anything conclusive right now so sharing this with the rest of the Stable is liable to harm more than help. For the time being, we should– Sledge?”

He’d gotten up and had begun moving toward the open door. “Appreciate the update, Opal.”

“I wasn’t done,” she called back.

“It’s all I have time for,” he said. “Fill me in later on anything important. Right now we’ve got squatters setting up camp in the tunnel and I need to have a chat with their ringleader.”

Crates dropped onto the flagstones one after the other forming low rings around the bases of the four pillars nearest the tunnel’s mouth. Wagons that had struggled to navigate the deep fissures of the access road connecting Foal Mountain to the nearby highway stood parked hub to hub, each of them pulled up to the charred remnants of the same old growth log. Like everything else in reach of the explosion, the forest which once helped to conceal the road had been reduced to so much debris. Hauling the powdery trunks off the concrete had been an ordeal that involved copious amounts of sweat and cursing to accomplish, some of which Fiona contributed herself.

With the road cleared - or cleared as much as it could be, since no one was volunteering to drag the rusted carriage wrecks away - a steady trickle of wagons had begun to flow in both directions. Some stayed long enough to help unload crates, scavenge wreckage from the tunnel, and play a part in deciding how the camp would be organized. These were the old timers whose collective experience surviving in the wastes could be heard in the way they discussed the local resources, proximity to the highway, and the relatively flat terrain not far from the entrance. As Fiona carefully rolled a sixty gallon water barrel down a wooden ramp dropped off the back of a parked wagon, she overhead two bandaged stallions murmuring the word settlement between them.

The barrel reached the dirt with a thump and slosh. Breathing hard, she paused to rest her forehead against the cool plastic. Her long tail swung behind her in wide arcs, something she used to do to draw stallions’ attention back at the Bluff and now only did to help the sweat evaporate off the backs of her hind legs. Only after the earth pony behind her cleared her throat did she finally straighten and throw herself into rolling the barrel onto the makeshift drag sled.

Several complaints rose in her throat as she worked the lashing around the barrel, each amounting to a colorful variant of, “I’m exhausted.” She knew better than to bitch about a little exercise, though. None of them had come all this way expecting a beach chair and a cold lemonade to be waiting, so she swallowed her grousing and slapped a palm against the barrel when she finished tying the last knot.

“Two more after this,” she gasped. “Let me know if you need help offloading.”

She had barely finished the sentence before the mare harnessed to the sled leaned forward and the ropes went as rigid as steel cable. Wood boards scraped noisily toward the tunnel until the earth pony and her cargo were swallowed by the shade.

Fiona glanced over to where the elderly stallions were currently debating how much radiation the burned forest might have absorbed from the bomb and whether the deeper heartwood could safely be harvested for lumber. Despite the deep, burning ache of muscles unused to manual labor she couldn’t help but let the corner of her beak twitch with the faintest smile.

Things were, as far as she could tell, going extremely well. Better than expected, actually. As she hopped up into the lopsided wagon she couldn’t help but guess that some of that had to do with Ms. Vogel. Wastelanders were a mistrustful bunch as a rule and yet somehow this disparate fistful of traders, scavengers, and blast survivors were coming here to essentially reestablish a town with only minimal bitching. Fiona imagined the old mare had thought up some clever ways to threaten most of them into compliance. And why not? It wouldn’t be the first time people needed the promise of a swift kick in the ass to get them to do the right thing.

The last two water barrels came safely down the ramp with significantly more effort than the first pair. Fiona took the opportunity to watch the earth pony drag off the cargo from the shaded side of the wagon, her backside thumping into the dirt as she stole what she hoped would be a long, uninterrupted break. The muscles in her arms, shoulders, and hind legs twitched beneath her short coat like she’d sat down on a live wire, and for several minutes she simply watched them dance while she sucked in cool air and blew out hot. If she thought she’d fit, she might have considered popping the lid of the last barrel and spoiling herself with an impromptu bath. She snorted and let the back of her head rest against the wagon’s sideboard for a few, luxurious seconds.

She woke to a hoof prodding her shoulder and uttered a long groan to make her irritation known. That earned her a firm smack in the same spot that jarred her back to the real world. Opening one eye, she recognized the face of one of the older stallions who had just recently been chatting logistics and who now leveled an impatient, if not sympathetic expression her way.

“Up n’ at ‘em,” he said as he tipped his horn toward the tunnel. “Got a jumbo-sized pegasus eyeballin’ us from the Stable who says he wants to talk to you.”

The stallion took a step back as she pushed herself off the dirt with a grimace. Every joint in her body felt like it had been cast in lead and left to harden. She hissed with discomfort as she bent her neck to look down at the unicorn. “Did he shoot at anyone?”

“Not yet,” he murmured, “but I wager he’d like to.”

“He’s got all the charm of a grizzly, yeah.” Fiona sucked in a slow breath and exhaled, smiling as she did. “Let’s see how loud he growls this time.”

Sledge paced across the platform just outside the Stable and listened to the gryphon speak.

It – she – stood barely ten paces away from him with one of her dagger-like talons idly scratching grooves into one of the concrete steps. Even though he was standing a good three feet above her atop the platform her eyes remained level with his. This sudden feeling of smallness compared to the gryphon set off alarms in the most primitive corners of his brain that were difficult, if not outright impossible, to ignore. It wasn’t just that she was nearly twice his size, it was the fact that evolution had equipped her with the tools necessary to hunt, kill, and tear the flesh off of her prey. Sledge didn’t exactly remember the first few words of greetings she’d offered, or the awkward introduction that followed. All of that had been lost while he’d fought down a powerful, primal urge to turn around and bolt for a place to hide.

It didn’t occur to him until she was halfway into her spiel that she wasn’t just etching random marks to spook him. She was, in fact, scraping a familiar sequence of numbers and symbols he recognized as longform math. He blinked at that for several seconds, processing the sheer normalcy of something he’d been taught to do as a schoolcolt. It took nearly a minute for him to realize she’d stopped talking and was staring at him, one eyebrow arched.

He closed his eyes and shook his head. She’d asked him something just now and he’d completely missed it.

“Sorry,” he grumbled, “could you say that again?”

She took a patient breath and glanced briefly at her notes. “How many survivors do you have left in the Stable?”

He hesitated to answer once again, but this time not for a lack of understanding. Guilt settled over him like a physical thing as if he were being asked to admit to the exact scale of his failings as overstallion.

“A little more than nine-hundred,” he said. It was an estimate. He hadn’t the heart to ask someone to keep an exact death toll.

The gryphon smudged out a figure from the edge of the step and scraped in the one he’d provided. “Okay,” she murmured. “So a few days. Not great, but not bad.”

He blinked. “A few days of what?”

She returned the expression with just a touch of frustration at how slow he was on the uptake. “Of water,” she said. “That’s what your guard said your people needed this morning.”

He nodded, vaguely remembering Deputy Stratus’s outburst during their first and possibly unnecessarily hostile encounter with the gryphon. “That’s right, but…”

The words trailed off as he watched the gryphon grimace and twist her shoulders one way, then the other, until a muffled crunch elicited a faint sigh of relief. Before he could pick up where he’d left off, she’d begun summarizing the notes she’d made. “We’ve got twenty-five barrels here to help fix that problem. That’s fifteen hundred gallons, or roughly three days’ worth if you ration everyone to half a gallon per person.”

Sledge stared past her toward the flurry of activity taking place at the far end of the tunnel. A faint haze of daylight lit the opening and he could make out the long shadows of several barrels lined up alongside one of the pillars. Something forced his throat to constrict and this time he couldn’t blame thirst. Compared to the pitiful rations offered up by practically empty cisterns, half a gallon sounded luxurious.

Still he kept clawing hope at bay. “How long will your supply last?”

The gryphon frowned at her notes. “Ms. Vogel says Junction City used to have a population pretty close to where your Stable is at right now, so there really won’t be an issue with supply as long as we have people willing to work the pumps and haul barrels back and forth.”

Sledge felt suddenly weak, so he sat down to process what he was hearing.

She continued. “Food is going to be harder to get, at least in the short-term. There’s enough salvageable calories back in town to keep ours and yours from starving but you should tell your people to expect to get used to feeling hungry for a few weeks.”

He felt stupid for having to ask. “Why so long?”

“You try convincing traders to send produce into a radiation zone.” She shrugged and glanced back to the activity holding Sledge’s attention. “We got lucky with some smaller companies who decided to take a risk, but the larger caravans are getting stopped or diverted as they come through Blinder’s Bluff. Right now most of the supplies we need are giving this whole area a wide berth until the Rangers’ scouts report back.”

He stiffened. “I won’t surrender my home to Coldbrook.”

“You couldn’t if you wanted to, that asshole’s been shitcanned. Elder Coronado’s the stallion you’ll be wanting to talk to now, and from what I’ve heard he might actually be the type to listen.” She looked meaningfully toward the broken Stable door. “It’s not like you can shut them out anymore. You’re going to have to figure out a way to work with them because at the end of the day your water and food are coming out of their cupboards.”

Water and food being the two resources his people couldn’t afford to go another day without. He could feel a headache brewing behind his eyes. “And the Enclave?”

The gryphon leveled golden eyes toward him. “Nowhere near here and showing no signs of wanting to come back. Try not to jinx that. Making nice with the Steel Rangers might be a heap of shit for you, but the Enclave’s a heap of shit with razors buried in it.”

“I’d prefer not to ‘make nice’ with either,” he muttered.

She shrugged. “You’ll hate the Rangers less once they reopen trade. At least for now you have water.”

He nodded at that. The more he watched the strangers work on the other end of the tunnel, the more he understood there was nothing he could do to stop them that wouldn’t end with this windfall being snatched away. He felt equal parts fear and relief at no longer being fully in control. “Thank you… miss.”

“Fiona,” she smiled.

For some reason he hadn’t expected her name to sound so feminine, and yet there it was. “Thank you, Fiona. At the risk of sounding ungrateful, I don’t think I’m out of line in not assuming you went through the effort of organizing this rescue for free.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a partnership if it were,” she agreed, and while Sledge didn’t recall agreeing to anything of the sort he didn’t object to the idea of cooperation either. “Your people can start bringing water inside as soon as you can muster them, but we have sick and injured who need medical care we don’t have the resources to treat.”

He considered that. The Stable had medicine to spare, but the medical staff were just as dehydrated as anyone else. He decided that they, as well as the frailest residents, would need to be prioritized. “How many patients?”

She frowned, something Sledge didn’t realize was possible with a beak. “Fifty-ish, most of them with deep burns. We’ve been losing a couple each day from infections. They’re good people.”

The fact that she had to lean on convincing him that they were worth saving made him feel ashamed for asking. He agreed to the exchange of goods before his worry-trained brain could spin up a reason to convince him to delay. It would take some time, he explained, knowing it would be as much a challenge to find doctors willing to venture past the Stable door as it would be convincing them to treat outsiders. Sledge suspected he would need to come up with some creative threats to motivate enough of them into action and, barring that, have his deputies drag them out by force.

For her part, Fiona responded to the caveat more than reasonably. The patients were still somewhere out there wherever Junction City stood, waiting to be brought over once enough basic necessities were in place to continue their care. The wagoneers would need time to recuperate before making the trip back, and she estimated they would begin arriving by late morning tomorrow. In the meantime the Stable could drum up volunteers to clear a path through the wreckage still littering the antechamber and shore up a makeshift ramp from the security office door to the bottom of the Atrium while others went to work bringing water inside.

It was a start. No, more than that, it was upward momentum. Stable 10’s descent into ruin had been forestalled by this stubborn, terrifying creature who had happened to be in the right place at the right time to bump into Aurora nearly a month earlier.

He shut his eyes and worked hard to maintain his composure. He’d been so close to giving up.

When he opened them again he could tell Fiona was looking for a reason to cut this short and leave him with his emotions. “There’s one more thing,” he said in a husky voice. “You said you spoke to survivors who claimed they saw Aurora.”

Fiona nodded, clearly hesitant to add more to a topic that had resulted in him shouting her away once before.

“Did they say if she was with anyone?”

“Um, no,” she murmured. “They said she was alone.”

A tiny bit of hope deflated within him. “Did they hear her say anything, or do something they couldn't explain?”

He watched her gaze return to the math scratched onto the steps, her expression screwed up in concentration as she considered the question. “I spoke to a mare who said she saw Aurora coming out of the garment store Ginger Dressage used to own. Others said she looked scared. Disoriented?”

She stopped before she could say something else she’d remembered and Sledge could see her reluctance to continue picking at what she rightly believed to be a wound which hadn’t begun to heal. It was all hearsay, he told himself, but that would only be true if it had come from one witness. Fiona claimed to have spoken to several.

And now, with Opal fretting over an unexplainable ping on the network…

Fiona opened her beak, hesitated, then added, “One of them said they saw her putting on a second Pip-Buck.”

The air went out of him as if he’d been struck in the ribs. He raised his foreleg to look at his own Pip-Buck, saw that it was trembling, and slowly pressed his hoof back to the concrete.

“Are you okay?”

He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. His mouth felt cottony when he finally responded. “You originally came looking for her because you thought she was alive,” he said, pausing briefly to swallow. “Please. Tell me you still want to find her.”

Aurora didn’t exactly remember when she’d fallen asleep. The last clear thought she’d had was of her telling Discord not to overtighten the screws that mounted the record player’s lid against the spring motor. Old habits died hard. Even though she’d seen enough scrap wood lying around the wasteland, she couldn’t shake her natural tendency to treat the material with the same reverence she had when she was just another resident of her Stable. Wood was one of the few materials that the fabricators couldn’t reproduce, and she’d answered her fair share of work tickets from residents who managed to damage a family heirloom and hoped the fixers down in Mechanical could undo their mistake.

Frowning up at the glimmering hotel lobby of the Royal Luxury Suite, she hoped Discord wasn’t taking her inopportune nap as an opportunity to try reassembling the instrument on his own. Probably not, she thought. He’d nearly shaken himself to pieces just taking it apart, and that was the easy work.

Her hooves rasped gently over the carpet as she made her way beneath the hotel’s magnificent chandelier and toward the dining tables tucked away next to the breakfast bar, where Eshe was currently inspecting a tray of baked goods. Tandy watched him from the same seat she’d occupied at their table the night prior, her dark depthless form having taken on a few more shades of detail since then. Aurora sighed relief under her breath. As far as she could tell, Tandy’s physical appearance tended to reflect the mood she was in. The fact that she wouldn’t be talking with an alicorn-shaped hole in reality tonight suggested the creature’s turmoil had calmed somewhat.

She opened her mouth to say hello but the words stuck in her throat when she spotted the banner strung high on the wall above the cereal dispensers and coffee carafes. Green letters in exaggerated computer font stood out from a black background announcing WELCOME TO BRONCO-CON ‘67!

She stared at the banner, then to all the smaller decorations she only now realized adorned all aspects of the hotel. Several smaller tapestry-style banners hung from folding aluminum stands advertising everything from event schedules, Robronco merchandise booths, and something called company alumni. Weaving between tables decorated with paper placemats advertising a rare, interactive experience with “The Real M.I.L.L.I.E.,” Aurora couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit out of step with what was going on.

Tandy watched her approach and offered what could be mistaken as a sympathetic shrug as she took her seat. “He insists this is necessary.”

Aurora followed her gaze to the zebra who was now carrying a ceramic plate loaded high with all manner of pastry, then glanced down at the placemat in front of her. An uncanny looking mare, clearly artificial, grinned up from the advertisement with an approximation of excitement. Great, she thought. Now she was going to spend the rest of her life worrying there might be a warehouse full of autonomous, hoof-gnashing MILLIEs waiting to run amok.

Eshe’s plate clunked onto the placemat beside her. A blueberry muffin tumbled off Pastry Mountain and rolled toward her, which she snatched up in her feathers.

“This is mine now,” she declared.

He made a dismissive noise, evidently satisfied with his hoard. “Empty calories.” He held up something flat, flaky, and heavily frosted between his teeth. “Tantabus, would you like one?”

Tandy stared at the offering, then to the offeror. “My name is Tandy.”

Eshe’s eyes went wide for a moment before looking away.

“Noted.” Taking a bite of what by all accounts looked like an unnecessarily fancy cinnamon roll, he turned to Aurora and gestured with an empty hoof toward the unusual decor. He spoke around a mouthful as he said, “Impressive, yes?”

“It’s very festive,” she managed.

He nodded cheerily. “It’s a mild exaggeration of a convention I attended the same year as my capture. Truthfully, Robronco never held one in Fillydelphia. It was always in Manehattan, right next to the theater district.”

She stole a glance to Tandy who simply stared between the two of them with silent impatience. Yeah, she thought. They weren’t here so Eshe could reminisce about his old job. That said, she wasn’t about to dismiss his unsubtle hint that he’d been captured.

“I wish I’d been around to see it for myself,” she lied while making a show of removing Ginger’s Pip-Buck from her foreleg. She half expected Tandy to expedite the process by simply making the device appear on the table sans the manual effort, but apparently she was just as eager to get Eshe’s thoughts back on task. “Anyway, I thought you’d like to know I made some progress while I was awake.”

Eshe swallowed his bite and leaned across the table to get a better look. “Oh?”

With a nod to Tandy, she began to explain her errant attempt at shorting the blown capacitor she’d tracked down. As she walks Eshe through the process, Tandy lit her ridiculously long horn and mimicked the disassembly process as Aurora remembered it. Three sections of the white chassis split apart and became semi transparent as they drifted aside to indicate their non importance. The Pip-Buck then rotated until the board Aurora had tinkered with faced both of them. Eshe needed no help identifying the dead capacitor, but his striped face somehow managed to grow a shade paler when she described what she’d done to short the connection.

“That was,” he murmured, “exceedingly stupid of you.”

Well. So much for happy Eshe.

“I mean,” she said, careful to keep the defensiveness out of her voice, “it worked for a couple seconds. The screen even turned on.”

He gestured toward the curved glass of the screen. “Do you remember what it displayed?”

Before she could answer, Tandy had lifted a wing and made a flicking motion toward the Pip-Buck. Several images cycled against the black background and Aurora was grateful she had been saved the embarrassment of trying to articulate what she’d seen. Of course not all of the images shown came with perfect clarity. Several lines of white text were too vague to read, probably due to Aurora not having had enough time to file them away in her head before they changed. Still, Eshe sat forward, his dark eyes focused intently on the legible bits of text.

“You’re right, it did try to boot up.” He paused, pulled a face of disgust at all the illegible lines he couldn’t read, then seemed to give up. “Best I can tell, it got as far as searching for an open network before something in the RAM timing forced it to shut off. Nothing started smoking before that, did it?”

Aurora resisted the urge to lift the freshly burnt tip of her feather in evidence of just that. “Nothing in the Pip-Buck, no.”

He eyed her for a beat, then shrugged and bit off another chunk of pastry. She eyed her own muffin, tore a piece off the top, and experimentally popped it in her mouth. The flavor was… present, insofar as cardboard could be improved by infusing it with sugar. She chewed, swallowed, and gently nudged the rest of the muffin aside.

Eshe wasn’t nearly as picky. He seemed to relish each bite, going so far as to keep eating even as he spoke so as not to interrupt what must be for him an extraordinarily rare experience.

“Well,” he said, chewing loudly, “either you’ll be able to turn it on again, or you won’t. You didn’t do it any favors trying to bypass a capacitor with tinfoil and bubblegum.”

“I didn’t–” she stopped, took a breath, and started again a little more calmly. “I could do without the lecture, thank you.”

He shrugged. “Stop doing stupid stuff like this and I won’t lecture you.”

Across the table, Tandy visibly darkened. “Enough. Explain to her how to fix it.”

Eshe held up his hooves in a calming gesture. “Sorry. I tend to be more direct than people like,” he glanced at Tandy, “and it’s been a long time since I’ve had a real conversation with anyone.”

As usual, Tandy stared unblinkingly until he broke eye contact. Aurora wondered if that was on purpose or if she had similar social blind spots to Eshe.

“It’s fine,” she said, hoping she sounded sincere. “It’s my fault for getting impatient anyway. I just really need this thing to start working again if I’m going to track down its owner.”

Eshe gave her a curious look as he stuffed the last of the pastry into his mouth, then turned back to face the open circuitry of the Pip-Buck hovering over the table. He leaned toward it, hoof outstretched, and made a vague pulling gesture. Of course the Pip-Buck did nothing until Eshe frowned at Tandy, who made a genuine noise of disgust before moving the device closer to him. Aurora had to stifle a laugh. Sci-fi projection screen, this was not.

What felt like several silent minutes ticked by as Tandy rotated the device this way and that for him, the subtle movements punctuated by meaningful hums and grunts from the stallion as he took inventory of the miniscule pathways of gold circuitry and the odd chips and cylinders they traveled through. Aurora hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of hardly any of it when she’d dedicated a fair chunk of the day to committing the circuit boards to memory, but Eshe apparently had a better understanding of what he was seeing.

When he was finished he asked Tandy to scoot the device between him and Aurora, something she did without comment.

“You’ll need to resolder this connection here,” he pointed the edge of his hoof toward one of the tiny gold legs of a chip a few inches from the display screen, then rotated the perspective to point out a cluster of thin wires whose insulation had wrinkled and pulled away from the connection points, “and replace these.”

She stared intently at the damage he pointed to and hoped she’d be able to track it down when Mouse came back with her supplies. Replacing the wires wouldn’t be too hard, but she dreaded soldering such a fragile connection. “Any chance I can get away shorting this?”

Eshe eyed her like a teacher forced to deal with an especially dense pupil. “Do you know how to rebuild an integrated circuit from scratch?”

She frowned. “No.”

“Neither do I, so don’t try to short anything else. These are incredibly sensitive components, not a household plug socket you can rewire with whatever’s lying around.”

“Welcome to the wasteland,” she muttered. “Apparently that’s all we have left to work with.”

He stared at her. “It’s very important to me that I know you’ll do this right.”

That got her attention. It had been obvious to her from the start that Eshe was in some kind of unique situation, one that Tandy had expressly forbidden him from discussing, but as far as she was aware all he expected in return for his guidance was whatever documentation Aurora could find for him on AutoDocs once she got Ginger’s Pip-Buck working again. That innocent request was beginning to sound more and more like a lie, or at the very least a misdirection. Tandy, for her part, didn’t have much of a poker face. She’d tensed at Eshe’s plea for reassurance which could only mean he was treading dangerously close to the aforementioned forbidden territory.

She looked over to Tandy and was surprised to see the creature staring back at her, the look of warning clear on her nebulous face. Something about that sent a chill up Aurora’s spine, but that bolt of worry was immediately followed by irritation. If Tandy was keeping tabs on what she was thinking, there wasn’t anything Aurora could do to stop it. On the same token, Tandy made no secret of wanting revenge on Primrose any more than Aurora had and both of them knew the only chance they had of hunting her down was with this Pip-Buck.

Forcing Eshe to trade an old muzzle for a new one just to keep him from telling her what was going on was becoming a distraction. If Tandy thought they would use Eshe to get what they needed and then throw him away once they were done, she could go kick rocks.

On cue, Tandy’s eyes widened ever so slightly. Aurora glared back, glad to know for certain that her thoughts weren’t private.

Caught between them sat Eshe who had become acutely aware of the tension growing between the two mares. “Is… everything alright?”

A smile formed on Aurora’s lips that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Actually, no. Tandy, could we go somewhere private for a minute?”

Tandy didn’t say yes. She didn’t even answer. One moment Aurora was seated in the hotel lobby and the next she was standing in her compartment in Stable 10. The change in venue was so abrupt that Aurora managed to feel vertigo in her own dream, and she had to brace herself against the wall dividing her sleeping area from the bathroom.

“Do not encourage him,” Tandy warned.

Luna’s creature sat on the edge of Aurora’s bed, a scene that was as bizarrely inviting as it was unsettling. The details of her compartment were perfectly accurate down to the homemade timer she’d installed into the light switch to stop Millie from blinding her awake every morning. Filthy wing guards hung from their hook beside the door, along with a less filthy set of Stable clothes. It only took her a fleeting instant to decide she hated it.

“Take us somewhere else.”

“No.”

She scoffed, but Tandy didn’t so much as budge. Evidently she hadn’t brought her here to make her comfortable. “This is a dick move, Tandy.”

“I do not care. You intend to entice Eshe into topics of discussion he vowed not to divulge. That, Aurora, is also a ‘dick move.’”

Hearing that from the creature in charge of a shattered dream realm might have been funny if it weren’t so fucking frustrating. Aurora had no idea how Ginger tolerated all this high and mighty garbage but it was wearing thin fast.

“Fine,” she spat. “If you’re not going to let him tell me what’s going on, then you tell me. What did he mean when he said he’d been captured, and what does he want with an AutoDoc owner’s manual?”

Tandy flushed, or as well as a creature speckled with an alien starfield could. The nebulas swirling near her face shifted in hue for a moment before the tangible features of a mare solidified around them. It was disorienting to watch.

“You do not need to understand his situation. You should stay focused on punishing the little tyrant.”

“So there is a situation. Good to know.” She let go of the wall and stepped toward her desk where a duplicate of her terminal sat open on a familiar screen. Her ticket queue, she realized, opened to an old work request she’d been sent by Tally Mane way back when.

Aurora guessed if she tried to read it all the words would be there in the order she remembered. Whether those memories were accurate was another thing. She pulled out her chair, wooden legs scraping convincingly across concrete, and sat down. “And don’t you dare suggest I don’t care about doing right by Ginger. I’m doing everything in my fucking power to find Primrose.”

Tandy’s eyes narrowed. “She lives in New Canterlot. Perhaps you should start there.”

“That isn’t…” She closed her eyes and grit her teeth. “You’re being difficult on purpose. You know full fucking well I can’t just fly over and hope I get lucky. At least not as a first resort.”

“You need Eshe’s assistance,” she agreed. “Something he is better equipped to offer if you are not distracted.”

“I’m already distracted!” Tandy opened her mouth to argue but she sliced the air with her wing, cutting her off. “I’m distracted by all the red fucking flags that keep popping up around this guy! I mean I’m all on board with him having worked for Robronco, that’s fine, that’s not even in my top ten list of weird shit I’ve had to deal with. But the whole bit with you only letting him speak in Vhannan, his request for documentation on AutoDocs, and him dropping hints that he’s been captured by… somebody and you sitting there looking like you’re about to shit diamonds?”

She lofted open a wing in with an expression that invited her to argue any of it. “Come on, Tandy. I wasn’t born yesterday. And if you’ve spent as much time in my head as I think you have, then you know I have limits. I’m not going to play dumb and pretend we’re not exploiting this guy. He wants help, and you’re not letting him ask for it.”

When she was finished a long silence filled the space between them. Tandy stared at her, meeting the stubbornness in her eyes with placid calm. Aurora had a feeling she hadn’t exactly stunned Tandy into a loss for words. There was too much intelligence behind those luminous eyes. No, Tandy was thinking.

Then she spoke, and the words fell easily from her lips. “I have allowed Eshe to tell others of his current situation. He listened to all seven of them die from the comfort of his bed, fully aware that he had led them into a labyrinth they stood no chance of surviving. Ginger would not want that fate for you, Aurora.”

Her ears pinned back. Her jaw clenched. “Don’t talk about her.”

“You know I am correct.”

That did it. She stood, forcefully enough to send her chair smacking into the terminal desk. “Would you just shut up? You were never there with her! All you know about her comes from what you pulled out of her head, so don’t sit there and pretend that you–”

Tandy’s expression remained unchanged even as her horn radiated fresh light, but this time the scenery didn’t change. Instead, a third occupant appeared in the empty space next to where Aurora’s old wing guards hung.

A foal, barely a year old, stared up at her with wide blue eyes. Several nearly combed reddish curls hid a tiny ear the color of toffee. Aurora’s heart leapt into her throat, and she leveled a dangerous glare toward Tandy with a shaking voice. “Don’t.”

Tandy was unmoved by the thinly veiled threat and continued apace. “You knew her for three weeks, but I knew everything about her since the moment she had a name.”

Aurora watched helplessly as Tandy’s horn pulsed, and the toddling foal flickered into a yearling. Long, awkward legs lifted and fell with nervous energy as a version of Ginger she hadn’t met stared between them as if fearing she were in trouble.

“You need to stop.”

“I knew how she grew up feeling self-conscious about the color of her mane. I saw how the older fillies discovered that secret fear and used it against her until one day she ran home from school to beg her mother to let her dye it.”

That horn flashed again, and Ginger grew a little taller and filled in just enough to hint at her emerging beauty.

“I watched her endure the endless courtship of entitled little colts who believed her rejections were a personal challenge. I listened to her confide her deepest fears with a sister whose loyalty was never guaranteed. I witnessed her kill an infant foal at the behest of her father and heard her grieve so intensely that she became ill.”

Yet another flash, and suddenly Aurora was staring at the Ginger she knew. That calm, confident pose of a mare whose heart had opened to her without question or hesitation looked to Aurora and smiled. Somewhere distant, she could feel warm tears welling up at the cruelty of what was being shown to her. The Ginger that stood so painfully close to her was real in every way except for the one that mattered. It was temptation without fulfillment.

It was too much.

As Tandy opened her mouth to add more kindling to the list, Aurora stepped toward the creature, cocked back her hoof, and swung at her muzzle. In an imperceptible instant Tandy was standing next to the far side of the bed and Aurora’s hoof arced through empty space. She landed across the edge of the bed with a graceless oof! and had to brace her wings against the headboard to keep her fall from continuing the rest of the way to the floor.

She shoved herself back to her hooves and rounded on Tandy with a ragged voice. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

For the first time since meeting the creature, Aurora saw genuine surprise in Tandy’s eyes. “I only meant to illustrate the difference–”

“BY BRINGING HER BACK?!” She snapped a feather in the direction where Ginger now stood, pointedly keeping her eyes away from that spot for fear the wound tearing open inside her would carve itself even wider. “WERE YOU WAITING FOR A CHANCE TO DO THAT?!”

“No.”

“THEN WHY?”

Tandy’s brow furrowed. Her voice grew quiet. “Because I miss my friend.”

Rage, grief, and now unwanted shame boiled inside her like a storm and though her vision was clear she could feel the tears sticking in her eyes. As violence once again drew the muscles in her body into tight cords, her vision locked to where Tandy stood, she didn’t notice change around them until a familiar voice spoke behind her.

“Aurora?” Eshe murmured. “Is… everything okay?”

She blinked, forcing herself to look away long enough to recognize the absurdly decorated hotel lobby. They were among the breakfast tables and Ginger’s ghost was gone. Aurora snapped her eyes back toward Tandy and saw a mixture of uneasy defiance in the creature’s gaze.

Tandy had panicked. For once her cold, logical approach to disagreement had backfired so thoroughly that she hadn’t known what to do.

Aurora knew what she wanted to do at that moment. She wanted to throw chairs at the creature. She wanted to scream profanity and vitriol until she puked. She wanted Tandy to feel just a sliver of the pain she’d just caused and she wanted it to stick. And she knew, deep down, that it would only make things so much worse.

She wished Ginger were here to be the voice of reason. She wanted Roach to step in and say those meaningful things that always brought the temperature down to a simmer. She wanted Julip to kick Tandy square in the donut.

More than anything, she wanted her fucking friends back.

Ignoring Eshe, she lifted a pointed feather at Tandy. “You crossed a line. Do you understand that?”

Tandy nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you understand why?”

Genuine hesitation. “Not entirely.”

She took a deep breath and blew it through clenched teeth. It would have been so much easier to hate her if she’d said yes a second time. Malice was something Aurora understood because she’d been at the receiving end of it since day one. Ignorance, childish ignorance at that, just made all this too much to deal with right now.

“You’re good at digging around people’s heads. Figure it out yourself, because I’m done for tonight.” She swallowed, wishing she had Roach’s patience for this.

“I am sorry.”

“Yeah, Tandy. You should be,” she agreed. “Now wake me up.”

Aurora opened her eyes, grabbed the first thing she could reach, and hurled it across the living room. The screwdriver cut a notch out of the far wall before it clattered uselessly beside the fireplace. She couldn’t see the damage she’d caused, not with her eyes wet as they were.

She scrubbed her feathers against her face and uttered a heated, “Fuck.”

From the opposite side of the couch, a tired voice cut into the silence that followed. “Bad dream?”

She shook her head, not an answer to his question but out of a need to give her churning emotions some kind of physical outlet besides the one incessantly twigging at her jaw. She’d gone this long without descending into a blubbering mess and she wasn’t about to give in now. She needed to stay focused. If she could do that, she’d be able to see her business with Primrose to its ultimate conclusion.

Discord, meanwhile, frowned toward the screwdriver laying across the room before checking that his still-disassembled record player hadn’t suffered any collateral damage from her freak outburst. He knew, to the degree Aurora had shared, that she’d been having dreams courtesy of the late princess’s creature and while he’d been diplomatic with his response to that news he hadn’t been particularly warm to it either. Now, with her lashing out in the dead of night at seemingly nothing, his polite filters fell just a little.

“Did Luna’s ward demand another twenty-five cents to continue the call?”

She didn’t have the spare energy to ask for a translation. Everything not tied to her lingering anger felt small by comparison and even though the dream was over now, she felt herself resisting the slow receding of adrenaline as if her own body’s attempt to calm her down was an affront to what she needed to feel. A few angry jerks pulled herself up into a sitting position on the couch. She set her hind hoof, the only one she had, against the edge of the coffee table and found herself immediately fighting the urge to shove the table as hard as she could. The hoof came down before she could lose that fight. It wasn’t Discord’s furniture that had her so flustered.

“Fucking Tandy.” She spat the words like she’d sipped something foul. “I told you she’s helping me fix my Pip-Buck, right?”

“It came up, yes.”

She wrapped herself in her wings. “Yeah well she’s basically just a referee between me and another dreamer who knows all about this stuff. Only tonight I tell her I don’t like how she wants me to pretend there’s not something off about him, and her answer…”

Swallowing thickly, she steadied herself and took a step back. She explained, as best she could, the problems she’d begun to notice around Eshe. His temporary allowance to speak ponish, the terms of his assistance only being that she find some documentation for him on AutoDoc beds, the weird way he stared at the wear and tear visible on the Pip-Buck and herself as if seeing things in less than perfect condition was still a new experience to him. His hints at having been captured by someone and Tandy’s silent warnings for him to be silent. And in spite of all the red flags, her certainty that once Eshe gave her what she needed Tandy would go right back to cutting him off from the rest of the dreamers.

“I thought I was being reasonable telling her to come clean about who Eshe is,” she said, the flimsy shudder in her voice returning. “And she showed me Ginger.”

She hugged herself more tightly beneath her feathers, bowing her head to wipe her eyes against the edges of her wings. “She showed me what she was like when she was little. I had to watch her grow up in snapshots while Tandy went down a fucking list of reasons why she knew her better than me. She just ripped me open and dug her hooves around just to make a fucking point.”

Discord watched as she grit her teeth to maintain composure. Half a minute passed before she trusted herself to speak without crumbling. Shutting her eyes, she let the back of her head thump into the couch cushion.

“It’s bad enough that I’ve fucked up at every. Single. Turn.” Her voice quavered, barely holding together. “I just want a break. I want it to stop.”

She sniffed loudly, wiping her face against her foreleg in a vain attempt to fool herself into thinking she didn’t look like the utter mess she felt like. Sometime during her recollection, Discord had placed a hand on her shoulder that she only just now noticed. The utterly foreign sensation of a strong grip squeezing took a moment to translate into a gesture of support and not something less wanted.

“You didn’t screw up everything,” he said.

Aurora laughed bitterly. “Every decision I made out here led to the death of my home, my only family, and the one person out here dumb enough to love me. Sounds like a real lucky streak.”

The hand on her shoulder squeezed a bit harder, just enough for the discomfort to stave off any more sarcasm. “This may come as a surprise to you, but despite your species being especially sensitive to the primordial essence of this universe not a single one of you has shown the slightest inclination toward fortune telling. That is to say that you, Aurora, cannot predict the future.”

She swallowed thickly. “Your point?”

“My point,” Discord continued softly, “is that you are punishing yourself as if you can. From the bits and pieces you’ve shared with me over the past several days, you seem like the type of person who tries to make good decisions. Does that sound about right?”

She stared at the empty fireplace and let out a resigned sigh. “Of course I tried, but that’s not the point.”

He took his hand away and leaned forward, propping his elbows against his knees while looking back at her. It startled Aurora to see mist in his yellow eyes. “That is the point. We make the best choices we can out of whatever our circumstances ask of us. We do the best we can in a world which has learned it is easier to prey on optimists rather than make room for them. Trust me, I’ve done my share of both.”

His scraggly brows rose as he chuckled off some personal tension, finally breaking eye contact as he did. She watched him for a moment and could tell he’d come close to sharing something with her he’d realized he wasn’t ready to put to words. Tempting as it was for her to pursue that secret, she pulled back and stared absently across the room.

“If I made the best choices, then why do I feel so fucking miserable?”

“Because,” he said, “somebody you loved is dead, and you’ve forbidden yourself to grieve.”

She frowned. Tears were already drying on her face and her throat was tender from fighting down the sobs. Discord was right. Once again, she’d been successful in beating back the overwhelming tide that kept rising within her. That thing inside her that broke as she stared up at the boiling fireball was still there, untouched, because she knew the second she gave it her attention the dam inside her would break.

She sniffed, shifted her wings a little to better cover herself, and chose not to argue Discord’s point. He knew he was right and so did she. The grief, she told herself, could come later. After the work was done. After Primrose was lying in the dirt with tears of her own drying on her face. But first, Aurora needed to find her, and to do that she needed to complete her work.

Her gaze shifted to the partly disassembled Pip-Buck on the coffee table. “I don’t think I’m falling back asleep.”

Discord bent his neck to scratch his face, then took a long breath and sighed. “That makes two of us.”

She watched him stand and side-step the coffee table, his tired eyes pausing briefly on the carefully disassembled gramophone. His expression said everything. He wanted to finish the project.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” he said. “And don’t start without me.”

A long, wracking yawn rattled Fiona’s beak open as the first beams of sunlight peeked over the clouds. Fat beads of water rolled across her fur like rain tipped sideways, forming on her face, shoulders, and the leading edges of each wing until they grew large enough for the wind to catch. The combination of constant damp and cool air chilled her more than she liked. Still, she was a big girl. She’d grown up in the dilapidated aeries of Griffinstone. If she could handle the bone-chattering cold of winter in those mountains, she could deal with a little nip in the air.

That, and she didn’t feel like being spotted by some keen-eyed Enclave scout. Dipping in and out of the clouds was an uncomfortable yet effective way to avoid that particular conversation.

As her expansive, copper-banded wings sped her through the thinnest haze of the upper clouds she stretched her arms forward, interlocked her fingers, and pushed both palms ahead of her with two satisfying pops, one from each shoulder. She sighed relief and rolled her neck back and forth to relieve the tension that had built there as well. Flying was as much a full body workout as it was wingwork, and the last several hours reminded her just how out of practice she was. When she was younger, bending her body through the wind came effortlessly. Now she thought she knew what it felt like to be an earth pony stuck alone at sea on a too-large ship, running frantically from steering wheel to rudder to sails and back again. It was exhausting.

Her face scrunched involuntarily with another yawn. She should have told Sledge she’d leave in the morning instead of blindly saying yes to him, but he’d been desperate and had caught her off guard. How does anyone say, “Let’s stick a pin in that for tomorrow,” when they’re convinced the person they assumed dead is out there, alive, and as recently as that morning? She certainly hadn’t known how, and now she was… well, wherever she was. West, somewhere. After passing north of New Canterlot and out the other side of Enclave territory, Equestrian civilization seemed to just peter out.

She sighed and angled herself down through the clouds. Several seconds later she was spearing through the clear skies below the rolling overcast with her eyes trained on the distant features of the wasteland below.

Sunrise was still a good twenty or thirty minutes away for anyone down there. Luckily for her, she didn’t require much light to be able to make out the shadowed features of the western wastes. A handful of narrow ribbons knit back and forth from horizon to horizon, bending around the gentle contours of unremarkable terrain. A wide, muddy river to the north worked its way between the ruins of a broken dam. Dots of firelight clustered around the former reservoir, some of them burning so brightly that Fiona assumed they were bonfires. Most likely a raider encampment, judging by the lack of any permanent housing. She didn’t bother getting closer to confirm her assumption. Seeing the dam only confirmed she had at least another hour of steady flying to go before she reached the very rough radius from which Stable-Tec’s network picked up the ping.

Pumping her wings, she ascended back into the obfuscating clouds.

Ms. Vogel hadn’t been thrilled when Fiona told her she’d be heading west, but she understood why it needed to be done. With the town’s survivors setting up camp at the Stable it would only be a matter of time before rumors of Aurora’s survival reached the ears of other residents. Once that happened it would only be a matter of time before someone started petitioning for a search. The last thing Sledge needed on his plate was another resident taking it upon themselves to run off into the wasteland without knowing what was out there or what trouble wearing their wings in the open would invite. Fiona was the logical choice and, quite frankly, she wanted to do this. Even if all she might accomplish is stealing a dead mare’s Pip-Buck away from whoever found it, she’d bring it home if it meant giving a devastated population some modicum of peace.

Meanwhile, Ms. Vogel would enjoy full authority over the effort to move what was left of Junction City into the Stable’s tunnel. Fiona had no doubts that the convoys to and from the ruined city would continue. She only wished she could be there when the old mare finally met Sledge. He’d shown his ability for barking, but it was nothing compared to Ms. Vogel’s bite.

She grinned at the thought and played out several colorful interactions between the two as she cruised west.

The terrain’s inky darkness resolved into long, crisp shadows by the time she gauged she’d flown far enough. Sledge hadn’t given her all that much to go on beyond a wide swath of area in the northwest wastelands Fiona knew to be relatively barren. Even before the sky came crashing down on civilization there hadn’t been much by way of major cities or even that many notable towns out here. Part of why she hadn’t bothered scouting this pocket of the world out for a place to call home in the first place was because northwest Equestria was widely known to have been undeveloped save for a modest port city that everyone nowadays agreed had been reduced to a new, glowing bay. Her only references for this quarter of desolation was the Stable Aurora’s Pip-Buck had pinged off of, Stable 117, and a general location of where that was located.

Dipping back below the clouds, she eyed the dusty roads and spotted the first needle-like shadows of travelers making their morning treks to who knew where. Farther off to the south she could make out the centipedal shape of a wagon train. The muddy river still snaked its way in graceful arcs to the north, and a few low hills stood split between shade and sunrise further ahead. Nothing out here screamed Stable 117! No Vacancy! as far as she could tell. Probably its entrance was buried by erosion or tucked into some natural alcove she couldn’t make out from the air. Her attention shifted back to the wagon train still making its way along a gray ribbon off her left wingtip. If Sledge was right and Stable-Tec had a dedicated network over radio as well as a backup of buried cables, the odds of Aurora having flown this far to arrive at an open Stable were astronomically high.

No, if Aurora had survived this long after being exposed to the bomb, it meant she’d probably gotten help. That meant a settlement, town, or possibly even a raider tribe had taken her in. Hoping it wasn’t the latter, she bent her wings and turned into a sharp turn toward the wagon train.

As she drew close enough to make out the individual ponies guiding the seven wagons she adjusted her course into a wide arc around them. Any spotters worth their salt would have noticed her coming from several miles out and she had no illusions that she could sneak up on them. Easier to make herself known while staying out of range of their weapons.

The muffled crack of a shotgun echoed from the caravan as it drew to a stop. She watched the guards arrange themselves around the wagons in preparation to defend it should she fail to heed the warning shot. As she passed over the road behind them she flattened her wings against the wind and pulsed them to slow herself, landing on the concrete a good fifty yards from the nearest caravan guard.

“Hello!” she shouted, her wings held out level with the roadway in case the need to beat a hasty retreat arose.

She waited a moment until she saw their ears perk toward her. Several other guards swarmed toward the rearmost wagon, weapons held between teeth and in hazy magic. The outsized response made it clear they weren’t used to seeing gryphons. When they didn’t return her greeting, she continued.

“I’d like to speak with whoever is in charge!” On a whim, she added, “My flock got turned around in the night and could use some directions!”

She pointed toward the clouds to emphasize that she was not the only giant, taloned bird in the vicinity. Several eyes followed her finger skyward and she could see mouths begin moving just as quickly.

Finally, a voice rose up from the crowd of guards. “We have nothing of value for you to steal, creature.”

Oh, goodie. These were the fun type of wastelanders. She sighed, careful not to let her annoyance show. Several of them had donned binoculars.

“We only need directions,” she repeated, pausing for the slightest beat to cobble together a bit more fiction. “Our navigator was shot down when we passed too close to Canterlot last night and we have several who won’t be able to fly for much longer without a doctor.”

There was a pause as a stout stallion pushed his way to the front of the group. Their leader, apparently, or whoever owned the wagons. “Your navigator was an idiot for flying your group through Enclave skies. How many of you are left?”

“Twelve, including me, but I don’t think they’ll like it if I tell you more than that.” She glanced furtively at the rolling clouds, where her imaginary friends supposedly circled.

The caravan leader mimicked the gesture, either believing her or understanding the risks involved with not believing her and being wrong. Ponies tended to have an exaggerated concept of what gryphons could and could not do, something Fiona had been happy to set straight with her clients on the Bluff. Stallions, especially, were prone to leave bigger tips when she allowed them to believe they’d managed to dominate her.

The rough response she was getting from this caravan leader led her to believe he was the same caliber of stallion. Very likely he wanted to walk away from this rare encounter with the inflated ego of someone who had met his natural predator and showed her who’s boss, but the specter of many more gryphons wheeling above the clouds kept him from pushing his luck too far.

“Good to hear Griffinstone still sends their best and brightest,” he mused loudly for her benefit. She allowed the insult to go unchallenged. “And it’s called New Canterlot, by the way. Where’s your flock supposed to be heading?”

A few more kernels for his ego. “Van Hoover?”

Several chuckling groans filtered through the guards. Weapons were beginning to drop. Several had already returned to their holsters as it became clear to them Fiona was as dangerous as she was intelligent. “Van Hoover’s gone. Blown into the ocean when the bombs fell. Nearest thing there is to a city out here is Crow’s Grove.”

“Where is that?” Quickly, she added, “Do they have a doctor?”

The stallion pointed a hoof in her direction, indicating the road behind her. “About forty miles that way. Word to the wise, they don’t take charity cases.”

Crow’s Grove. Forty miles west. She turned to leave, then stopped and looked back to the caravan. “One last thing. Have any of you heard anything about a pegasus mare showing up around here in the past few days?”

Immediate suspicion colored their leader’s response. “I thought you said your people just got done tangling with the Enclave.”

No Aurora sightings, then. She turned, loped down the highway and threw down her wings without offering an answer. They could work out whether they’d been duped or not without her help.

She had a direction and a destination now. It wasn’t much, but it was more than she had ten minutes ago. She kept the roadway below her as she angled due west, her eyes scouring the horizon for Crow’s Grove.

The lights out in the corridor began brightening by degrees, and Primrose greeted the new day with a half-lidded glare and a groggy groan.

She leaned forward over the war room’s conference desk and massaged her aching eyes. The room stank of stale coffee and stress sweat. A trash can near the door overflowed with discarded paper cups, and a half-eaten plate of last night’s dinner sat neglected where she’d pushed it away. The terminal screen in front of her glowed patiently with unanswered inquiries regarding the bomb, her implication of the Steel Rangers being behind the attack, and a steady uptick in rumors that had begun swirling through the Enclave’s lower ranks.

Her stomach churned. Whether from hunger or queasiness, she couldn't tell. An orange pill bottle filled a third of the way with tiny white tablets sat beside her terminal, a neat scrawl of dates and times penned over the label for each time she’d taken a pill. When she was a young mare, a teacher had regularly complimented her tidy penmanship. That had been several lifetimes ago. Instead of filling out homework, now her orderly lettering kept track of how much Rebound she was taking to stay awake.

She cracked an eyelid and squinted at the pill bottle, then hissed a curse under her breath. Three pills yesterday. Triple the recommended dose of a notoriously addictive drug. When it kicked in, it kicked hard, but once she started feeling it beginning to wear off the exhaustion was so much worse. She glanced down at her Pip-Buck, tapped the screen, and stared at the time. Then she wondered why she was checking at all. The corridor lights brightened at 7am every morning and she’d just watched them do that.

She groaned again. She couldn’t keep taking more pills to fend off sleep, and meanwhile the Tantabus had all the time in the universe to sharpen her hooks. Primrose could still feel the absolute, soul-blackening terror she had felt when the infinite nothing hurtled toward her from all directions like some all-consuming swarm. That had been no bluff. The Tantabus meant to inflict such suffering so as to break her mind, and this delay was only going to make that experience that much worse if it came to pass.

“Fucking Ginger,” she muttered at the desk.

How was she to know the Dressage’s runaway daughter had befriended the Tantabus? Until a week ago she hadn’t believed something so utterly alien was possible, and yet Ginger had somehow managed to weasel deep enough beneath the creature’s armor to find… what, consciousness? A unique personality? It’s fucking soul? The exact amount of sense that made to her was zero. Primrose had dealt with the Tantabus since the first night after Canterlot got scrubbed from the planet’s surface and the most emotion that creature ever deigned to show her was two centuries of casual disrespect. Then one nobody-unicorn dies and the sentient nightmare flings itself off the deep end.

Of course her generals had so far shown themselves to be less than useless at the task of devising a permanent solution for the Tantabus problem. Their staff had been given nearly unrestricted access to the archives and not a fucking one of them had so much as a hypothesis to offer. Whether that was incompetence or flat-out reluctance, both were equally plausible. Up until recently she’d had them believe the princesses had graciously allowed their kingdom to suck down a few hundred zebra missiles while they waited for the world to remake itself in a manner worthy of their godly return. That sugary-sweet lie had been immensely useful right up until one of those princess’s psychotic orphans decided Primrose’s brain was an egg they desperately wanted to scramble.

Hell, her brain was already soft boiled thanks to the fucking pills. Ordering her generals to turn their resources toward removing the Tantabus as a threat had been a mistake, and it was one she couldn’t just undo. She skimmed the top of her inbox and flinched at how openly some of the Enclave’s top brass were questioning that order. Most were asking for clearer mission parameters. A few gently posited that the Tantabus may be the product of a nightmare, and that the goddess may be testing her in some manner. Exactly one general titled his latest message with such flagrant candor that she nearly forwarded it to Clover’s inbox before remembering he’d turned traitor and fled.

She sagged in her chair as she pecked at the keyboard, highlighting each new message and systematically answering each with a harsh key press.

Re: Potential Heretical Implications of Attack on Dream.

Delete.

OPS Report 04.21.1297 – Steel Ranger Mobilization @ B. Bluff

Delete.

ST10 Atmospheric Contamination Survey (ORANGE)

Delete.

Re: Tantabus; Additional Information Requested

Delete.

Last Minute Addendum to Spring Harvest Festival

Delete.

She continued through the wall of unread messages until her inbox was once again a blank slate she could better digest. It was soothing in a way as long as she didn’t think about the growing pile of problems looming behind the unsolved quagmire of the Tantabus.

Hooves clicked through the corridors as the first shift rose to greet the new day. She rolled her head toward the open door and watched deeply loyal pegasi filter past, cups of coffee held in their wings as they cast their own curious gazes through a doorway normally shut to them. Almost all of them immediately averted their stares when they realized who it was they were looking at. Primrose soaked it in. Her generals might be growing weak in the spine, but at least she still commanded the respect of those who did the lion’s share of the heavy lifting.

Her thoughts wandered and her eyes returned to the pill bottle. When was the last time she went out for a Stimpack? She frowned. March 1st, it had been. Nearly two months ago, which meant it would be another month until she was due for her next jab. She closed her eyes and ran the numbers through her sluggish brain. In ideal conditions, Twilight’s little medical marvels would linger in a pegasus’s system for roughly half a year before the magic constructs that made them work ran out of juice. Postwar Equestria was far from ideal conditions. Background radiation would remain elevated for centuries more to come which meant the medicine keeping Primrose youthful was being constantly nibbled at by balefire remnants and reducing its efficacy. That low-level radiation wasn’t nearly the amount needed to trigger the runaway mutations the Ministry of Image had so diligently attempted to bury, however it meant she needed to take four Stimpacks each year instead of two.

That meant her next dose was due in June. If she could hold out until then, it was possible she might enjoy dreamless sleep sometime after. And, of course, she’d begin to age and her security detail would notice her falling through the fucking clouds when she tried to land on them.

She spat a curse. There had to be a way to kill the Tantabus or at least hurt it, but she could barely think with only a bottle of pills keeping her awake. She needed a distraction. Something to take her mind off things for an hour or two before she wound up pacing a rut into her own skull.

Primrose stared at her empty inbox. Then, resignedly, she tapped down to the trash folder and opened her deleted mail. The same old careful recriminations populated the screen and she considered finding the general who had the balls to preach heresy at her and tying them into a knot. No, that would just heap more problems onto her plate. They had their jobs and she wasn’t going to mollycoddle them because they were uncomfortable doing it. She kept scrolling.

Eventually she landed on the bland subject line informing her of some change being made to the spring harvest festival. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d bothered to attend an event put on by the local yokels, but she definitely knew why. Harvest festivals were almost uniquely an earth pony tradition that utterly refused to die. Like ticks, or cockroaches. For some reason, after rooting around in the dirt and spreading liquefied shit over the fields, the Enclave’s citizenry felt an irresistible need to drag a few barrels of their least mutated foodstuffs into the middle of New Canterlot and hold them up as if they’re miracles from the goddesses. The festivals had such a gravitational suck to them that unicorns and even well-bred pegasi debased themselves by taking part in the festivities.

Against her better judgment, she opened the message and skimmed the first paragraph. A noise of disgust escaped her throat, drawing a curious look from a passing officer out in the corridor. Several influential pegasi families had petitioned the event organizers to include a thirty-minute memorial in honor of the purebloods lost during the balefire attack on Stable 10. There was no mention of fatalities, nor any apparent concern that no hard numbers existed yet on that front, and the focus was predictably on the loss of the residents’ pureblood status due to their presumed contamination. Spitfire’s name featured prominently on the list of bloodlines lost during the attack, and near the bottom of the addendum there was a passing mention that the Dressage family would be in attendance. Ginger’s name was tastefully absent, leaving the implication of her family’s presence for her to divine on her own.

The standard invitation for their minister was attached, per usual. The matter of the memorial had already been decided and the organizers were making it clear that a seat would be reserved for her should she make an appearance. She grimaced. The festival wasn’t until the first of May, more than a week away. They were trying to pressure her into attending this year’s fucking potato show by throwing together a last minute black-veil event while leaving it up to her whether she wanted an empty chair with her name on it right between the cornbread stand and the fucking dunk tank.

Grudgingly, she clicked the message and restored it to her inbox. As she did, her right ear drifted toward the open door.

It took her several seconds to recognize the distant noise as desperate shouts. She frowned toward the door. The corridors had a way of turning words into muddled gibberish at a distance, but this one was making up for it with sheer volume.

“You know what we did! You know what we did!!”

Her hackles spiked. She stood so abruptly that her chair toppled backward behind her. Eyes wide, neck flaring with uneasy warmth, she hurried out into the hall.

Several groggy officers were milling toward the commotion ahead of her, coffees gripped between their feathers as if to shield them from becoming tangled in whatever drama was unfolding just out of sight. Primrose shoved past each of them, her mind suddenly sharp and aware. Another shout of protest led her around an intersection. It was cut off by a meaty thud and a pained, “Oof!”

A crowd was gathering halfway down the corridor. Heads poked out of offices. At the center of the scuffle were two security personnel and one frantic stallion whose uniform marked him as a member of Enclave Intelligence. Spittle flecked around the intelligence officer’s mouth as he struggled on the floor, his bulk evenly matched to the leaner frames trying to keep him pinned. Papers from an open folder lay strewn around the scene, and as Primrose pushed herself to the front of the murmuring onlookers her hoof settled atop a white sheet bearing unremarkable letterhead.

Paperclipped to the corner was a square, self-developing photograph of an industrial style shelf containing several uniformly spaced and categorized steel strongboxes. A flashlight’s beam pointed to the space where one such container had been removed. In its place, a folded piece of paper stood propped where the photographer had placed it. The words Mk.1 Balefire Talisman were neatly penned across it to remove any question of what was unaccounted for.

“IT WAS OUR BOMB!” the intelligence officer screamed, tears smearing his eyes as he attempted to sweep more papers toward the silent onlookers. Then he looked up and saw Primrose staring down at him, and his face twisted with open disgust. “SHE’S A LIAR!”

She stepped out from the crowd and strode across the damning evidence. One of the guards tried in vain to press the stallion’s muzzle against the concrete to silence him but he only turned his head and belted vitriol at Primrose's approaching hooves.

“YOU GAVE THE ORDER! YOU POISONED THE WONDERBOLTS’ CHILDREN!!”

A low murmur rippled through the gathered personnel. Primrose gripped the shoulder of the nearest guard and shoved her away. Her wing then darted to the holster of the second guard as he and the raving stallion shot to their hooves.

In an instant the rogue officer was on his hooves. He bent, scooped up a wingful of crumpled papers, and flapped them inches from her face. “HOW COULD YOU BETRAY EVERYTHING THE ENCLAVE wait–”

His words came to a sudden halt at the sight of the black pistol held in her wing. She didn’t wait for him to beg or grovel. He was beyond saving. She squeezed the trigger and with a violent flash of fire the pistol bucked upward and several ounces of viscera followed the bullet’s path out through the back of the officer’s skull. She watched him drop as if his legs were made of wet cardboard, his body spasming atop a widening smear of pulverized tissue. Still holding the sidearm, she lowered it toward the dying stallion and pulled the trigger twice more. The traitor’s body finally lay still.

She could feel warm droplets clinging to the fur on her face and chest, and the pungent odor of tarnished copper was already flooding her nose. What hearing she had that wasn’t ruined by the sound of three gunshots in an enclosed space picked up the absolute stunned silence from those surrounding her. They were still trying to process what they had witnessed and the fact that they were conflicted at all was an enormous red flag. There was doubt in many of their eyes. Several regarded her with fear, as if the weapon in her feathers might turn on them next.

She flicked the pistol to the floor and leveled an accusing feather at the stallion’s cooling body. “This,” she said, her voice rising to be heard by aching ears, “is how we answer disloyalty.”

A few soldiers slowly nodded while the rest stood transfixed by the blood pooling around the dead officer. Primrose tried to think of something to say that would pull the rest of these idiots out of their stupor but her brain fog was returning with a vengeance and the words simply wouldn’t come to her. Let them figure it out on their own, then.

Sensing there were no more loving words to expect from their minister, the crowd began to disperse while many more security personnel arrived in response to the gunshots. Tired and exhausted, Primrose felt some relief at the sight of a black pin fixed to the lapel of a stoic mare. She reached out with bloodied feathers and gripped the mane of the Black Wing soldier, pulling her ear close.

“Pick up these documents. Burn them. Then take a team to the Intelligence Wing and find out how he got them.”

The mare regarded her with a thousand yard stare, nodded, and began peeling papers up from the bloody floor. One of the guards who resoundingly failed to keep the frantic officer contained bent down to help, but Primrose stuck out a hoof and lifted his wing away from the spilled folder.

The stony expression she gave him brooked no argument. “I wouldn’t.”

The guard straightened, snapped off a crisp salute, and stood back.

For several long minutes Primrose watched the mute soldier gather dripping pages into a squelching pile under her wing, all the while doing her best not to show any reaction to the contents of the pages. Had she been any slower in getting here, had she hesitated in removing this young officer as a threat…

She shook her head. She didn’t want to think about it. Those who witnessed the execution would return to their work full of the knowledge that treason, spoken or otherwise, would have immediate consequences. They would fall in line. Maybe they would sleep a little less easily and guard their words years to come, but they would fall in line.

Yet as Primrose left to go clean herself up, she was unaware that the cover sheet and its paperclipped photograph had not made its way into the wet stack gathered by the Black Wing mare. Unnoticed by anyone during the spectacle it had been picked up, discreetly folded, and carried away.

“Thirty caps for that one.”

The young filly, barely old enough to call herself a mare and not much longer from snout to tail than the bundle of firewood she was leaning against, eyed Mouse with the dispassionate patience of a seasoned haggler. Like her father, Melody Chipper knew when she could push and when it was time to give in. You never left her stall feeling like you’d been swindled but you rarely walked away with a bargain, either. Crow’s Grove was too far north for good firewood to be given away, and the Chipper Family always made sure they were paid for their labor.

“That’s solid hemlock,” she added, tipping her yellow snout toward the wire-tied cylinder of five precisely cut firelogs. “No knots, cracks, or burls.”

Mouse lifted a hoof, brushed the dirt off on his steel prosthesis, then used the clean edge to pick at the gunk pinched in the corner of his eye. There’d been a time when he’d tried it the other way around, but the black eye he’d given himself hadn’t been worth the novelty. He swallowed a yawn. He’d made the trip back from Discord’s place in two twelve-hour stretches of straight walking and he was dying for a nap. Being out in the wastes with nothing but the supplies in his saddlebags made him nervous and so he’d pushed himself. Now his internal clock was all turned around and he was fighting to keep his eyes open while the morning warmed an overcast sky.

“What do you want for the two straight pieces on top,” he asked tiredly.

The filly frowned at the bundle, then back up to him. They stood in an old theater parking lot adjacent to the bustling street market and several cords of cheaper, cured firewood stood around them on pallets. Flakes of tree bark littered the empty parking stalls where less picky customers had dragged bundles off the piles. The youngest Chipper’s father sat on a stool behind his street-facing stall, with his hind hoof propped on the dial of an expensive looking banker’s safe. By day’s end, the family would be a little more wealthy.

Mouse couldn’t help but feel a twinge of jealousy. The firewood stall was always open, every day, courtesy of a large family all of whom filled vital functions of the family business. Somewhere further north, a team of brothers, sisters, or cousins were undoubtedly well into a busy day of harvesting deadwood from the less toxic hills of the old Crystal-Equestrian National Park.

“It’s bundled for a reason,” the filly said with an air of annoyance. “Thirty caps for all five logs. Like I said before, it’s excellent quality wood.”

With a resigned sigh, he nodded. “Alright, thirty’s fair.”

Melody gave him a look of pointed agreement, used her horn to tie a loop of rope to the wire, and strode off toward an unattended customer eyeing a cord of twisted walnut limbs. Mouse had to half-walk, half-waddle with the bundle hanging from his jaw by the rope handle but managed to carry it to the roadside stall with his dignity intact. Melody’s father, gregarious stallion that he was, counted Mouse’s caps while sharing some gossip about the Unbound caravan that arrived yesterday.

“Poor Rake is beside himself. He’s afraid of going into his storage room for fear he’ll be buried in an avalanche of circuit boards and crank radios.” The stallion chuckled. “He must know something the rest of us don’t.”

Odds were he did. Mouse feigned an amicable shrug, picked up his newly purchased firelogs and hefted them up into the shallow rickshaw he’d rented for the day. Several wooden milk crates sat inside it, included in the rental as a convenience to prevent a shopper’s sundries from jostling into a tangled mess, and Mouse did what he could to shove the trimmed logs into the small gap the crates had been unable to fill. What he ended up with was a mess. He paused to rub his eyes again. It would have to do.

As much as it bugged him to waste money on the peddler’s cart, he wasn’t pulling the thing around for the fun of it. His eyes wandered to one of the milk crates, already half-full with items from Aurora’s lengthy shopping list. He sighed again. He’d gotten absolutely swindled on the tools she needed, especially the tiny star-shaped screwdriver, but at least he’d gotten a fair deal on the wood she wanted for her new leg. He gave the cut end of the straight log a thump with his hoof. Dense, yet lightweight. No way Mouse would ever replace his prosthetic with wood, but then he wasn’t a pegasus.

The thought of watching one trying to fly with a steel anchor made him snort. Smirking, he stepped into the rickshaw’s one-size-fits-most harness and wheeled around toward the market proper.

He made a few stops, coming up empty on most of them but persisting toward the next all the same. While the socializing that came with trips to the market was something he wished he could avoid, Mouse couldn’t deny that there was something he enjoyed about not having to dig through rubble or put down ferals to find valuable things. He could understand why so many ponies chose not to go out into the wasteland at all, content to wait until a trader arrived with whatever they needed or to make do with a lesser substitute. Comfort was nice, sure, but that was only possible if the traders kept bartering and the scavengers kept digging. Having spent most of his life as the latter, Mouse couldn’t imagine spending what remaining time he had hoping someone else would come through for him.

A pretty mare whose name he was too sheepish to admit he’d forgotten sold him several leather straps and a decent short knife for an even hundred caps. It was a sweetheart deal at that price but letting go of that much currency at once never didn’t sting. The straps went into the crate where he’d thrown a good selection of brass buckles, leather sewing thread, and a nib of Cazador wax with a foreboding looking sewing needle pressed into it. Dragging the rickshaw toward what he hoped would be his last stop, he tried not to think too much about what this was costing him in terms of time his shop sat closed, time he wasn’t spending out scavenging, and caps out of his own saddlebags.

Sparing a moment to give Verdant the evil eye when he spotted the little shit out among his ramshackle wagons, he turned his focus back to the list Aurora had given him. Were he gifted with a sparkly new horn he could have just held the sheet in front of him and checked items off while he walked, but the genetic lottery gave him a good memory instead. She’d needed a soldering iron and some pretty specific solder to go with it. Luckily, the town’s largest dealer of scrap electronics had the good fortune of being paid a visit by the wasteland’s most sensible cult.

Finding Rake’s shack wasn’t difficult, what with a good two dozen customers waiting in front of it. They spilled off the uneven sidewalk and into the road, forcing pedestrian traffic into a bottleneck that earned them more than a few colorful nicknames. Rake was rarely ever stocked up to half his limited capacity at the best of times, and judging by the harried, wide-eyed look the wiry stallion gave the crowd outside his bookended storefront, he was well and truly out of his depth.

While scrap was generally a reliable source of steady income for anyone willing to work at finding it, electronics had always been a niche market and was becoming more of one with each passing year. The factories which once churned out terminals, televisions, and battery-powered gizmos of the old world had long since decayed into silent, cavernous ruins. Motorized carriages were something you found rusting on the sides of the road, not something anyone drove. Sure, maybe if you lived near a city that garrisoned Steel Rangers or the Enclave you might find customers, but even then the parts they asked for leaned toward the specific. The only real caps to be made by selling electronics were the common components needed to restore radios, and anyone who wanted one of those tended to already have two or three spares socked away already.

The mare leading the Unbound caravan hadn’t been lying. The bomb out east had created an unrivaled demand for some of the most neglected scrap the wasteland had to offer, and the traders of Crow’s Grove were just now piecing together that Rake’s stupendously ruinous purchase of cultist junk may well be the densest concentration of unassessed wealth this side of New Canterlot.

Mouse pulled the rickshaw up onto the curb and smirked. Poor Rake looked ready to shit.

To keep the crowd from overwhelming his store, Rake had shoved his clerk’s counter flush against the front door. Considering the sheer volume of crates visible behind the store’s narrow window, Mouse couldn’t blame him for it. There were shouts from customers in the growing crowd all clamoring to have their voices heard. Everyone wanted the first pick of whatever they thought would resell for the most profit and they were offering absurd quantities of caps, some hollering for specifics while others demanded a chance to buy his entire stock. Rake’s barricade was just as much there to keep himself safe as it was to manage the chaos outside.

To his credit he was being smart about things. Over the din, Rake shouted reminders that he was only selling fifty units per customer. He had a ledger on the desk and was writing, in shaky magic, simple promissory notes for each order that he then taped to the inside of the narrow window for other customers to see. They would be filled in the order they were received and when he ran out, he ran out. After waiting for several minutes, Mouse could tell most of the ponies in the crowd were customers who already held promissory notes and who were now haggling between one another for even better exchanges. Pushing through them to reach the open doorway, he eventually reached the barricade and the exhausted unicorn behind it.

Rake looked up from his ledger at Mouse and worry flickered over his narrow face. “Sorry, Mouse. Everything’s already claimed.”

He thought about the two crates the Unbound had quietly delivered to his garage and decided he’d survive. He shrugged. “If I weren’t headed out of town today I’d offer to help sort that inventory for you.”

The haggard stallion closed the ledger and gave him a strange look. “I thought you just got back in.”

“I did, but I have a customer.”

Rake held up a hoof and leaned over to shout at the small mob to go darken someone else’s doorstep or he’d void their orders and draw a lottery instead. Mouse turned and snorted at how quickly that worked. The crowd dispersed like grease in brahmin milk, breaking apart into smaller groups still in the process of haggling over promissory notes made ahead of their own.

“Animals,” Rake hissed, sliding the ledger aside. Untangling the knot of secondary and tertiary dealings was going to be a nightmare come tomorrow. He sighed relief for the spectacle’s respite and turned back to Mouse with a weary frown. “What does your ‘customer’ need?”

Mouse listed off the items. Mindful of the new faces wandering toward his doorfront yet again, Rake wasted little time and disappeared among the crates. When he returned he carried an electric soldering iron with a badly corroded tip, a plastic spool with a few thick loops of silvery metal bent around it, and a square of wrinkled sandpaper.

Holding up the iron so Mouse saw the broken stubs of red and white insulation he said, “If you can wait a few days I might be able to find something better in one of those boxes, but this is all I had on the shelf before the kooks came in. I can give you a discount on the iron, obviously, but the sandpaper’s five caps. You’ll need something to take the corrosion off the tip before you give it heat.”

He nodded. “Total?”

“Call it twenty-five with the solder.”

“How about we make it fifteen and pretend you’ll care about the other ten once you’re swimming in caps?”

Rake’s modest chuckle reassured Mouse that he hadn’t caused too much offense, but as he waited for the inevitable counteroffer he noticed the smile on the stallion’s face slip behind a bewildered mask. Mouse started to frown until he realized Rake wasn’t looking at him, but past him. He turned to see whatever it was that had ground their haggling to a stop and found himself, like everyone else in the marketplace, staring in shock at the absolute mountain of a gryphon looming over a nearby stall.

Fiona pulled five dented caps from the pouch slung around her neck and handed them to the beverage vendor. “You’re sure you haven’t heard anything?”

The mare running the stall took the caps and held up a tin cup, her eyes never rising enough to meet Fiona’s. The unicorn was terrified. Fiona took the cup of weak instant coffee she was selling and fought hard not to give into the powerful urge she felt to reassure the vendor that she wasn’t violent. At least, not by nature.

“No ma’am,” the mare murmured. “We don’t get too many dustwings here. Too remote. Too obvious a place to hide. N-not that there’s anything wrong with dustwings.”

Not too many gryphons either, judging by the unashamed stares that fixed on her as she padded into town. There had been an elderly mare knitting what looked like a scarf on a second storey balcony who paused her work to offer a kindly hello, but she had been the only one to do so. Of the prewar gryphons who survived the cracking of the world, only a few of their living descendants still called Equestria their home. Their resentment from being dragged down by the flames of a war they had played no part in ran deep. So deep that when Fiona had announced she was leaving the poisoned mountains of her home to chase the faint broadcasts she’d picked up on the crystal set she built as a fledgling, her own mother had told her not to expect an open door in their house should she decide to come back.

“Ma’am,” the mare said. “I… need the cup back.”

Fiona blinked and handed the empty cup to her with a forced smile. It was like walking into Blinder’s Bluff for the first time all over again. It never occurred to her how much that city had warmed to her over the course of nearly a decade. Most people knew her by name there, even the ones who didn’t approve of how she made her caps or that she wasn’t ashamed of it. It took three long months of putting herself out there, always looking for ways to help, and sharing her ambitions before anyone called her by her first name. The survivors of Junction City had regarded her arrival with uncertainty, but only because some of them knew about the gryphon who lived at the Bluff. These folk had none of that to brace their reaction, and for a little bit Fiona felt as if all that progress made at the Bluff had somehow never happened.

“Thanks,” she chirped, leaving an extra cap on the mare’s counter before she turned away. “Good coffee, by the way.”

The mare finally met her eye with a bewildered frown, well aware that her coffee was cut too generously with water and lacked any appreciable flavor besides bitterness. Still, eye contact. A step forward.

Pausing to get a sense of who she might get an honest response out of next, she surveyed the loosely bound crowd of ponies scattered along both sides of the street. She almost laughed at how hard her heart was beating. The nerves she had from being stared at from so many people at the same time was almost overwhelming. Eager, or more accurately desperate, to focus on just one gawking onlooker she picked out a trio near her on the broken sidewalk who regarded her with as much curiosity as they did fear.

With a steadying breath, she headed over.

“Hey there,” she greeted, making sure to stop a few extra paces away so they wouldn’t have to crane their necks to talk to her. Two of them held yellow slips of carbon paper, one held by magic and the other pinched neatly between surprisingly white teeth. Traders, then, or members of a guild who had access to a steady supply of tooth powder. “Sorry for interrupting, but have any of you heard word of a gray pegasus coming through this way? I’d be happy to pay you for any information you can spare.”

The two unicorns and earth pony exchanged glances before the one with the receipt in his teeth answered, his expression tight with anxiety. “Apologies, but no.”

Yeah. Story of the day. She’d been asking the same question to anyone who didn’t look ready to bolt away since she entered town and no one had a clue what she was talking about. Even the doctor that ran a hospital out of a building that looked suspiciously like a bookstore had given her nothing to go on, though he hadn’t let her inside to see his patients so who knew if he was on the up and up. Maybe there were windows or an unlocked door in the alley behind the building. She’d have to circle back and check.

She turned up a palm. “Any chance you might know someone who has?”

One of the unicorns cleared his throat uncomfortably. Fiona realized her taloned fingertips were drawing the entirety of his attention and she quickly put her hand down.

Three heads shook in unison, and she was feeling more than reluctant to keep interrogating random people in a gawking market. She needed a nap. The roofs around here were mostly flat. Maybe someone here would let her catch a couple hours of sleep up there.

“Alright, well,” she glanced at the store signs up and down the market street, hoping to spot an inn. “If you hear anyone mention a mare named Aurora Pinfeathers, come find me. I can pay–”

A clatter of dropped metal across the road cut her off, and she turned to watch a shaggy brown stallion chasing what looked like a pen across the pavers. He snatched the object off the ground with his teeth and stood bolt upright like a student checking to see if the teacher had caught him passing notes. The earth pony stared directly at her, eyes wide. Wider than anyone else’s in fact.

He looked downright guilty as he slung a pair of saddlebags onto the desk currently barricading an open doorway, his ears and eyes swiveling to point directly away from her as he nosed open one of the flaps.

Maybe that nap could wait a little longer.

“Need a hand?” The light morning hoof traffic in the street ground to a halt as she crossed. The stallion didn’t answer as he dropped what looked to be a broken soldering iron into the bag. In the space of a few seconds he’d gone from goggling at her to ignoring her completely. Tiny red flags were springing up all around this furball.

Sparing a polite smile for the proprietor behind the desk, she reached over the stallion’s head, plucked a spool of solder off the wood surface, and glanced at the faded label before dropping it into his bag. Rosin solder. Huh.

“Sorry,” she smiled. “That stuff’s toxic. Figured you didn’t want it in your mouth.”

She stuck out a hand in an attempt to disarm his aggrieved glare. “My name’s Fiona.”

It didn’t work. The stallion turned back to his bags, fished out twenty dented caps and stacked them neatly on the merchant’s desk. Without a word to Fiona he threw his saddlebags back on and side-stepped her outstretched palm.

Well, no good lead had ever come to her without a chase. She turned and followed him into the street.

“I have a couple questions for you if you have a second.”

The stallion grunted as he threw a shoulder into the straps of a rickshaw and began pulling. “Don’t have a second. Late for work.”

“I’ll be quick,” she chirped. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. A pegasus mare name Auro–”

“Aurora Pincushion something or other,” he interrupted. “Heard you already. Don’t know any pegasi.”

She watched his ears. They stood upright, pointed forward, well away from where she trailed beside his little cart. Fuzzy little lie detectors, pony ears were. She glanced at the contents of the crates in his cart, then looked back at him. “Do you always do a lot of shopping when you’re late for work?”

“I’m a reseller. This is my work.”

Several narrow screwdrivers lay atop a shallow stack of what for all purposes looked to be random junk circuit boards. A bundle of narrow gauge scrap wires sat in the next, jostling with each bump in the road next to a trio of strange looking books. On a whim she reached in and opened the narrow volume at the top. The stallion jerked to an immediate stop.

“Put that down.”

Fiona glanced at the pipe pistol aimed at her chest, then down at the handwritten words in the open book. She made a face. “Rule #198: Employees are the rungs on your ladder to success. Don’t hesitate to step on them.”

“I said put it down.”

“Rule #222: Knowledge is Latinum.” She snorted, looked at him, then flipped a few pages. Her eyes widened. “Wow.”

The stallion’s discomfort was showing fully now as if she were reading from his foalhood diary. If embarrassing him happened to shake loose some honesty, then she’d give him a jostle. “Rule #268 A) When in doubt, lie. B) When in doubt, buy. C) When in doubt, demand more money. D) When in doubt, shoot them, take their money, run and blame someone else.”

She pinched the book shut, skimmed the title, and dropped it back into his cart. “You buy some weird books.”

After several uneasy seconds he lowered his weapon and turned to resume pulling. “Don’t touch my stuff.”

Ask and you shall receive. She loped forward and slowed beside him. She could practically see his hackles stand on end in response. “About that. You know you’ll make more caps buying in large quantities direct from scavengers and not random shinies from the shops, right? You’re basically forcing yourself to markup someone else’s markup.”

The stallion’s ears flattened in annoyance. With a jerk he pulled the rickshaw a little more quickly, leaving the market behind and likely hoping she’d choose to stay where there were more people to bother. To his dismay she continued to follow him, easily keeping pace with her longer legs.

“So on top of reselling at a loss, you fix terminals?”

That caught him off guard. He regarded her as if her head were screwed on backward. “Do I look like I fix terminals?”

She shrugged. “I only ask because of the solder you picked up back there. That rosin core stuff is pretty specialized.”

He grunted. “Solder is solder. If you don’t mind, gryphon, I have somewhere to be.”

Her smile grew a touch brittle. “Alright, fair enough. If you do happen to hear anything that might help me find my friend, though…”

“Yeah,” he dismissed her. “I’ll be sure to whistle.”

She slowed, allowing him to gradually pull away. “She has people back home who are worried about her. If you see her, tell her that.”

The stallion didn’t answer and soon he was too far up the street to be heard if he did. She waited there, watching as he slowed to turn a corner and disappeared. Counting the seconds, she continued to wait. Ten seconds. Thirty. Sixty.

Then she began to follow.

A second cup of tea warmed Aurora’s feathers as she watched Discord seat the gramophone’s horn into the amplifier pipe. After a bit of hesitation he released his grip on the wood rim, paused to stare at the reassembled instrument, then smiled. “There she is,” he breathed.

She took a sip, enjoying the caffeinated sweetness, and let him enjoy the moment. He’d done a good job. The workspace that had once been filled with individual screws, washers, and fragile components was empty save for a few crumbs of rust from the gramophone’s spring motor. With the minor exception of when Discord had very nearly avoided cross threading one of the screws securing the wooden lid, he had made no mistakes and there had been no moments of panic. Everything was as it had been when she first guided him through disassembly, only now in better working condition than before.

Aurora knew this next part too well and didn’t want to spoil it for him, so she waited for Discord to work it out on his own.

“I imagine I should get a record,” he chuckled.

“Pick a good one,” she said, feeling herself mimicking his nervous grin.

He passed through the dusty shafts of gray light from the windows and paused at the crates he’d used to display a broken instrument that Aurora felt confident wasn’t broken anymore. Stone-flecked fingers flipped through thick cardboard boxes before he stopped, smiled mischievously, and slid one out. He carefully carried it back to the couch, sat down and opened the cardboard flap to extract the black sleeve containing the record.

“This was a personal favorite of ours.” He tilted the label for her to read.

He was already removing the shellac disc before she could make sense of the words, setting it delicately through the nickel plated post in the platter. Aurora reached over and unapologetically stole the empty record sleeve to examine more closely while Discord turned the crank. Names that sounded like gibberish filled the credits and a heart-shaped outline framed a black and white photograph of two creatures she’d never seen in any of the prewar history books back home. Flipping it over to the back, more photos lined the bottom above brief bios for each… singer? Performer? Aliens?

“This record isn’t from here, is it?” she asked.

Discord let go of the crank and smiled at her, shaking his head. “No. No it isn’t.”

She watched him steel himself before flipping the brake switch, then sigh with relief as the record spun. When it came up to speed he lowered the tone arm and gently set the needle into the grooves. Not the first groove, though. Very deliberately, he positioned the needle some ways into the recorded music.

A faint hiss rose from the horn. Then,

“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers. Way out there beyond this hick town, Barnaby…”

Discord leaned back into the couch and lifted a finger as if to conduct the swelling orchestra. “...there’s a slick town, Barnaby…”

In the most bizarre yet endearing turn of this mess which was her life, Aurora found herself being serenaded not only by the eager voice coming from the speaker horn but by the grinning, bare-fanged Lord of Chaos sitting beside her. It was ridiculous, a little terrifying, and exactly what she needed. Tandy might know with granular certainty that Ginger would have wanted her to enjoy this, but Aurora knew without having to crack her memories open like some cheap reference book. The clarity of that realization came to her like a desperately needed balm, and some of the tension she’d carried since waking from that dream fell away.

Sipping her tea, she shut her eyes and listened to the music play.

When the needle slid over the last notes and the orchestra faded, she felt better. Better than she had in days. The pain was still there, deep down in that place she still refused to let her thoughts venture, but it was duller now. Maybe a little smaller, too.

“Can you… make more of these?” The held up the record sleeve, then mimicked a snapping gesture with her other wing.

His smile waned by a few degrees and a sad chuckle crossed his muzzle. She let him take back the sleeve and watched as he carefully replaced the fragile record inside. “No. No, not anymore.”

She frowned at her empty cup, thinking. “Did I tell you about what happened at the solar array? There were these stimpacks that…”

Discord lifted a hand to stop her. He smiled with an uneasiness that suggested he was trying to think of a way to simplify something well beyond her understanding. “I’m aware of them, but no, they can’t fix me.”

“They fixed Ginger,” she murmured.

“Ginger was never broken to begin with. Neither are you, or any other ponies out there.” He frowned, and she felt a brush of guilt when she saw him reading the confusion in her eyes. Then he looked at the cup in her feathers and reached out to tap the rim with a claw. It let out a feeble tink at his touch. “This is an awful cliche, but each of your species is like this cup. You’re born empty, but over time the power in your system… erm, world, fills you up. Only, your predecessors taught themselves to conjure and weaponize Entropy. Balefire. It burned that power away, like fire consumes gasoline.”

Aurora nodded, recalling the morning after she, Ginger, and Roach had liberated the slaver encampment outside Kiln. Roach had grown worried that Ginger may be rapidly depleting a finite store of magic. Thanks to Tandy that hadn’t ended up being the case, but they had been following the same logic as Discord’s.

“Because of the bombs, there’s not enough magic left to fill our cups,” she said. “But there’s an entire dream realm out there somewhere. If you could dream, Tandy could help you. If you had your powers back you could…”

She lifted her feathers to make the snapping motion again, but stopped when she saw the calm in Discord’s eyes. “You’re just humoring me, aren’t you.”

He smiled, and set the record on the table. “Luna was an incredible wielder, and she was efficient. She had to be, because the power she took to create her dream realm had to come from the same well her subjects drew from. She wasted nothing and took only what she needed.” He laughed, quietly, staring off into space as he spoke. “Were I able to consume all of Luna’s creations, not just her oasis from the waking world, it would hardly rank as a drop in the ocean required to reach the Continuum again.”

Something told Aurora it would be healthier for her mind not to think too hard about what he just said. “You’re a big cup,” she summarized.

He brightened at that and laughed again, without sorrow. “Yes, Aurora. I am a big cup. And besides, I’ve had my fill of semiomnipotence. Trust me when I say having the power to whisk away every mistake is a burden, and a torturous one. Nothing feels earned. You grow pompous. Arrogant. Angry at any and all sentient life for the crime of still needing to make mistakes to learn. There are still parts of me which are still like that, pieces of me which can’t resist the urge to tempt fate.”

He gestured with a knowing look to the bookcase on the far wall with its strange works. “But Fluttershy changed my perspective. Or, rather, she gave me hers. Death is a part of life. You and I, and everyone else trying to survive, we would never know what gifts we have were it not for what we’ve lost. I’ll never be able to snap my fingers and undo the war. That’s a fixed point in time now.”

Aurora chewed her lip and sagged a little in her seat.

“But if I could somehow cheat?” Discord nodded slowly to himself. “I would be selfish. I’d bring back the people we both lost and regret nothing.”

Silence filtered into the room as she digested what he’d said. Ever since the bandages came off and she opened her eyes to see Discord for the first time, the smallest grain of hope formed in her chest that there might be a way to fix everything. But over the days that hope faded as she watched him write his books, wash dishes, cook meals, and tidy up around the cottage. Sometimes he snapped his fingers like a nervous tick and seemed disappointed that nothing had happened. He was a fallen god in many ways. An alicorn whose horn had been lost. A bird without its wings. But rather than raging against it, curling himself into a ball and screaming until his throat bled, Discord accepted it. He tried to move on as best as he could, learning the simplest things that all mortals had the benefit of growing up with.

Like the rest of them, his time was finite. Rather than allow himself to languish over what he’d lost, he accepted that pain as a part of himself and made the best out of what he had.

Aurora looked down at her missing leg. Coming out here, trying to help her Stable had cost her more than she’d known she could lose. It hadn’t occurred to her that moving forward was possible.

Setting her empty cup down on the coffee table, she sat up and turned slightly to hug the creature beside her. It was awkward, unannounced, and completely unexpected to him but she couldn’t think of a way to thank him that wouldn’t crack that carefully constructed dam. She squeezed the equivalent of his ribcage until the silence stretched a little too long, and let him go.

Discord looked down at her, nonplussed. “If I’d had anything to wager, I would have gambled on you hitting me. You don’t strike me as the type of mare to take no for an answer.”

She took a breath, thinking about her answer. “I usually don’t, but you helped me put some things into perspective.”

He leaned forward, propping his elbows against his knees as he watched her. “Are you ready to talk about Ginger?”

The calm invitation had its own gravity and nearly pulled her in. She needed to talk about what happened, but not now. It was still too fresh and her throat all but closed up as she pulled herself back from opening that door. “No,” she said thickly, and took a sharp breath to gather some strength. “Maybe later, though. But, um, I did want to talk to you about something else.”

Discord continued to watch her, showing no signs of impatience as she worked toward addressing the other skeleton in her closet. The one she’d been waiting for him to bring up, but which he seemed reluctant or unwilling to broach.

She cleared her throat. “I overheard you talking to Mouse before he left. About what’s happening to me.”

“Ah.” Discord looked down at the floor. “I didn’t realize you were listening.”

“It’s pretty quiet around here. It would have been more work to ignore you. I thought I’d take the pressure off and let you know that I know.” She lifted her feathers to the burns healing along the side of her right foreleg, brushing them through the patchy gray tufts of fur that had begun to grow in. “How long does it take?”

She waited for him as he sat up a little straighter, it suddenly seeming inappropriate to him to be slouching given the sensitive topic. “I couldn’t begin to guess, Aurora. I’m not… I haven’t traveled much since the war ended. For obvious reasons,” he gestured to himself, “I try not to go places where I’ll be recognized. Mouse is well-traveled, however. He may have a better understanding of the ghouling process than I do.”

The bare patches of scarred skin rasped under her feathers. The damaged nerves fired unevenly in a muted cascade of pins and needles. “I’ll have to ask him when he gets back. I’m definitely healing faster than I should, but I can still think clearly. Who knows how long that’ll last. I think I’ll be pretty pissed if my mane starts falling out. Ginger liked my mane.”

Discord watched quietly as she looked herself over, absently picking at the new growth of her coat. “You’re taking this better than I thought you would.”

She stopped to think about that and found herself shrugging. “I mean compared to everything else that happened, this is nothing. I should be dead. I feel like I’m living through the bonus round after my life ended.”

“That certainly is one way to look at it.”

“Yeah,” she chuckled. “It hasn’t really hit me yet. I keep thinking it’s probably a good thing I was never the type of mare to spend hours in front of the bathroom mirror, because best case I’m going to live a very long time and I’m probably going to be very ugly doing it.”

She paused and stared at the empty cup. “Worst case, I’ll be a monster and I won’t even know. What a fucking coinflip that is.”

The cottage grew silent, and it stayed that way for several long minutes. They listened to the leaves rustling in the breeze outside, the life thriving within Discord’s painfully green oasis filling the empty space of their conversation while the morning grew a few shades brighter. A flitter of wings caught their attention and they both looked up to see a pair of finches standing on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. Aurora caught herself smiling, remembering her arrival with Ginger and Roach at the cabin east of Junction City, and their winding debates over the origins of cutie marks and Roach’s certainty of the extinction of birds.

The finches chirped as if reproaching the dimness of Discord’s cottage, then turned and flew off toward the trees.

“You mentioned you had a garden outside,” she said, breaking the silence. “Can I see it?”

He nodded and stood. “Some fresh air would be wonderful.”

She half walked, half stumped down the porch steps and out onto a carpet of cool grass that reached her fetlocks. The air smelled clean out here, refreshingly so. She’d been cooped up inside for too long.

Discord followed alongside her, standing almost vertical like a totem pole with a slight bend. She didn’t understand how he didn’t just fall over but somehow he managed with hardly any effort, his yellow eyes wandering across the scenery as readily and fully as her own. Trees as tall as the ones Roach planted outside her Stable stretched toward overcast clouds, filling the gray sky with dark, rich greenery. Thick vines hung from the oldest of these like mossy ropes that acted as perches for the birds that thrived among the branches. The air was damp, pungent with earthy sweet smells that reminded her of home. Reminded her of her younger years when her mom would take her down to the Gardens to surprise her dad.

A small brown creature scurried over the loamy soil of the footpath Discord kept clear for walks like these, its tiny form popping up atop a fallen log a few seconds later to watch them pass. It looked like a mouse but it was wrong somehow. It might have even been cute were it not for the unblinking, bulging black eyes.

Discord saw her bewildered expression and followed her gaze. “Chipmunk,” he said. “They’re harmless during the day.”

She had to crane her neck to stare at him. “What do you mean during the day?”

He shrugged, smiled, and didn’t answer. Aurora kept a close eye on the rodent until it was well out of sight.

“We walked halfway across Equestria and never found a place like this,” she wondered aloud. “Everything was already half-dead or struggling. I can’t believe this is all growing so well.”

“It better grow, I planted it.” He shot her a wry grin and teetered his open palm side to side. “Most of it, anyway. I dug up as many seeds from the Everfree as I could find before the radiation could wither the roots. It was my forest, after all.”

Aurora snorted. “You planted the Everfree Forest.”

He scoffed with feigned offense. “Not on paper, no. I may have dabbled in a little chaos from time to time, but I had plenty of other hobbies.”

“Like horticulture.”

“In a manner of speaking.” He looked away, smiling guiltily as they strolled. “The Everfree was never technically my doing, but I did call it home for a spell back before civilized four-legged society built quaint villages and myths around it. Call me sentimental but I didn’t see the point in leaving Equestria’s most tenacious woodland to wither. So I took a piece of it with me.”

He gestured broadly at the dense piece of forest he’d managed to transplant with a touch of pride in his eyes. Aurora couldn’t help but laugh a little as she remembered all the foalhood stories she’d been told about the terrifying mysteries of the impenetrable Everfree.

“You brought it with you because it was home to the most unpredictable, unruly plant species on the continent, didn’t you?”

He offered a casual shrug in response. “Game recognizes game, Aurora.”

She rolled her eyes and chose to enjoy the scenery without further comment. The path twisted and bent around the trunks of trees wider than the generator’s central shaft, and she couldn’t help but hold out her wing to touch them as they passed by. Every now and then she spotted the four walls of Discord’s cottage, each time from a slightly different angle as the trail guided them around in a winding orbit. Soon they were passing a small patch of dirt Discord had cleared for his vegetable garden, and as far as she could tell he hadn’t done a terrible job at all keeping the narrow rows evenly spaced and irrigated. Not long after that they came to a dark, boggy ring with a dark puddle of water barely six feet wide at its lowest point.

It had drifted out of sight before Aurora put together that the bog had been a natural spring, and suddenly the thriving forest made a little more sense. Discord hadn’t chosen this spot at random. He’d done so because it sat atop a natural aquifer. As far as somebody with an instantly recognizable face and a reputation to go with it was concerned, this was in every definition of the word a jackpot location to begin a hermit’s life.

By the time they had walked a full circuit of the trail, she could feel the tea’s caffeine wearing off. She was tired. The two or three hours of sleep she’d gotten before she demanded Tandy wake her were woefully inadequate, and while she wanted to make another round of the walking trail her body was already warning her that it would make every step of it miserable if she ignored it.

She spotted a stone bench not far from the trailhead and turned toward it. A long slab of unfinished green slate stood atop two short boulders with just the slightest slant favoring the far side. She needed a respite from smelling her own funk in the cushions of Discord’s couch. Discord seemed to understand her desire for a break and padded toward the bench to sit down. She hesitated, unsure how to tell him that she fully intended to crash on the bench, but then she noticed the oak tree bordering the grass beside it and changed course for the inviting grass growing at its roots.

“Would you like me to set an alarm?” Discord joked as she bent her front legs, then her hind to settle onto the cool ground.

She smirked. It was a decent joke. “I need to talk to Tandy,” she sighed. “Wake me up if it looks like one of those chipmunks is getting any ideas.”

A chuckle. “They know better than to eat the guests.”

“Ass,” she murmured. He said something in reply but she didn’t catch all the words. She’d begun to listen to the gentle sounds of the wind stirring the forest and the soft crinkle of grass against her cheek. She embraced the calm. Exhaustion took over, and once more she slipped under.

“I AM SORRY.”

“LUNA’S TITS!”

Tandy was practically nose to nose with her when the dream took shape and those lidless, ghostly eyes were too much to process this close up. So, being the reasonable and prepared mare she was, Aurora flailed backward into a tangle of hooves and feathers. The crash from the breakfast tables spilling over behind was resounding in the cavernous hotel lobby, and she quickly found herself on the floor staring up at the fluttering tips of the BRONCO-CON ‘67 banners hung overhead.

“Personal space, Tandy! Shit!”

She shoved a toppled chair away from her, paused to look up at the constellations glittering in Tandy’s extended wing, and sighed as she dropped her foreleg into her feathers to be helped off the floor. It was unnecessary. Tandy could have wiggled her nose and the dream, including its occupants, would reset as if nothing had happened. The lobby tilted right-side up as she got to her hooves. Despite how much anger she still felt toward Tandy, the gesture of helping her hadn’t been made thoughtlessly. She was trying to mend bridges, in her way, and something about that took the worst edge off Aurora’s resentment.

“I am sorry,” Tandy continued, still standing a little too close for comfort and completely oblivious to what Aurora had just said. “Truly. Please, believe me, I did not want to hurt you. I would not do that.”

There was a very real possibility that back in the waking world, Aurora had pissed herself a little. She tried not to think about it. Oh, did she ever try not to think about it.

“Tandy, slow down. Seriously, let me get my bearings.”

The not-quite-alicorn fell silent, her unblinking eyes watching Aurora as she walked a small circle to situate herself better within what was starting to become a familiar hotel. Eshe’s decor still colored the building with tacky green and black terminal-themed colors. A cardboard cutout of The REAL M.I.L.L.I.E. stood near the orange juice dispenser. That was new. No Eshe, though. Huh.

“Eshe is awake.” Tandy supplied.

Aurora sighed. Of course he would be. It was morning. “Gotcha. Yeah, so about Eshe…”

“I want to talk about what I did to you first.” There was no force behind the words, it only seemed that way from the bluntness with which she delivered them. “Please. Eshe says it is important we… ‘hash it out.’”

“You told him what happened. Awesome.”

She stepped over an overturned table and made her way to the same chair she’d been using since they started meeting here.

“Should I have not spoken to him?”

She sat down and focused on her breathing to keep her temper in check. In. Out. In. Out.

When she felt calm, she shook her head. “No. I mean, yes? I don’t know. Did he at least help you understand why I didn’t want to be here in the dream with you?”

Tandy took the seat across from her, eyes fixed toward her. “He tried, but he grew angry on your behalf and would not speak to me either.”

Yeah. Sounds reasonable. “I’m guessing you woke him up, too.”

She shook her head. “I cannot wake Eshe. The AutoDoc sends him back here when I try.”

Cryptic. She tabled that for later, alongside the growing mountain of questions filed under What-The-Fuck-Is-Going-On-With-Eshe.

“Please, do not hate me.”

“I don’t hate you,” she said, though there was a touch of a growl in her voice she couldn’t mask. “I’m pissed off with you. Tandy, you treated what I had with Ginger like it was all worthless. You told me things about her life that I had no business knowing. Stuff that I have no way of knowing is true. I mean… you said she killed a foal.”

Finally, Tandy looked away. “Her father forced her when she was young. He had that power over her, as the family patriarch. I discovered Ginger reliving that moment in a nightmare and freed her from it. It was our first encounter.”

Aurora recalled the day Ginger fell asleep on the railway tracks outside Meridian and Brian’s cave, and the sudden eruption of magic that caused the rail’s steel to superheat and burn a trapped Julip. Ginger hadn’t told her what she’d dreamt about to spur such a violent reaction, only admitting that she’d dreamed for the first time in her life.

Renewed anger shook her voice as she spoke. “You have all of our memories, Tandy. Every last one of them. You of all creatures should have known Ginger wouldn’t have wanted me to know that.”

“Eshe said the same, but he would not allow me to explain that knowing your memories does not allow me to understand your intentions.” She paused. Actually hesitating for several seconds as she searched for the right words. “But she wanted to tell you, Aurora. I am not telling you this to ease my guilt or cause you more harm. I am telling you because she trusted you to understand and love her in spite of it. But she never found the right time.”

Aurora blinked a haze of angry tears away until she could properly glare at the speckled pattern of the table between them. “That doesn’t excuse what you did. How you did it. You treated our relationships with her like it was a contest. You made me feel cheap, Tandy.”

Tandy shrank a little in her chair. “I did it because you shamed me.”

That caught Aurora off guard. She frowned up at Tandy, lost to what she was talking about. “I didn’t shame you.”

“You told me not to talk about Ginger. You said it in a way that made it seem I did not have a right to discuss my friend.” Tandy wouldn’t meet her gaze anymore, but the quiet anger in her voice reflected exactly what Aurora had been wrestling with. “I have never felt that before. I did not know how to respond other than to prove to you that you were wrong. Ginger was my friend. My only friend. I did not love her in the way you loved her, but I knew I did not want her to go away.”

She was right. She’d shut Tandy down without stopping to consider whether she was a real person. Definitionally she might not be, but suddenly that didn’t seem to matter as much as it had just seconds ago. Ginger never spoke ill of Tandy. Not once ever. Somehow Aurora had forgotten and that brief charity Tandy enjoyed had truly died with Ginger.

Tears welled in her eyes. She nearly lost it. She was always dancing on the razor’s edge of losing it.

“I didn’t want her to go away either,” she muttered miserably. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“I am used to being dismissed, Aurora. Dreamers have always regarded me as an echo or an errant spell. I suppose in many ways I am.” She sat up a little straighter, though her discomfort was strangely still plain in the way her eyes looked not quite directly at Aurora. “However I answered your cut with a gash. I… do not know why I behaved so recklessly. Days ago, I considered offering to show you Ginger as a way to aid you in your grief but thought better of it when I considered it may lead you to believe she was alive and dreaming still. Apparently, I do not think clearly when I am angry.”

Aurora leaned forward in her chair and dragged several feathers through her mane. “Well, at least we have that in common.”

They were both quiet for some time as each of them processed what the other had said. Aurora was painfully aware of how little apologizing she’d done compared to Tandy, but she could feel that the time for that was over. They’d both said what they wanted to say. All there was to do now was to decide on how to move forward.

The answer to that was obvious enough. She might not have a choice in whether she slept or not, but she’d come here willingly. Ginger would never have wanted to be the reason Aurora burned a bridge.

“Tandy, she doesn’t have to be your only friend.”

Luna’s creation finally met her eyes again. She said nothing.

Aurora tried not to make a face. She really did. “Look, it’s going to be really weird if you make me come out and say it.”

“I understand,” she said. One by one, new stars began to shine along her dark expanse. “I do. Thank you so much. Thank you, I… excuse me.”

Without warning Tandy disappeared. Her chair stood empty, and Aurora sat alone in an empty hotel with the sneaking suspicion that the last guarding of Princess Luna’s dream had just stepped away to cry.

Half a moment later a thin stack of papers appeared on the table neatly bound by, of all things, a novelty sized paperclip with Bronco-Con ‘67 branding up and down the wire. Pausing to look around the empty lobby with a hint of concern, she picked up the papers and scanned the text printed at the top. A tiny smile formed as she read.

The next page contained detailed diagrams marked with numbers, arrows, and a shocking level of technical jargon even she didn’t recognize. He’d fallen back into his old job like a comfortable pair of wing guards. Good for him. With a tired smile she quietly thanked Tandy for the delivery and began to study.

September 8th, 1077
Royal Luxury Suite Hotel, Fillydelphia

A taloned hand on either shoulder guided him to the hotel elevator. Neither gryphon spoke, but their keen eyes lowered toward him occasionally as they stopped him in front of glossy silver doors. Eshe’s heart was in his throat. He wanted to demand what he had done to attract the attention of hotel security but too many of his colleagues, and people who knew his colleagues, were within earshot and he knew too well the stereotypes Equestrians held for zebras who balked at authority. He grit his teeth and waited for the elevator doors to close on them before finding his voice.

“Tell me what it is you think I have done.” A Vhannan accent bled into his words as he spoke. “Where are you taking me?”

The gryphon to his left exchanged a meaningful glance to his partner on Eshe’s right. The silver feathered avian to his right turned dull green eyes toward Eshe and said, “The hotel staff reported property missing from your suite, sir. The owners prefer that you gather your belongings and leave on your own rather than involve the police. We’re just here to make sure you find your way out without causing a scene.”

Eshe’s jaw hung open with outrage. He had not stolen so much as a toothbrush since he first came to Equestria! He nearly said as much but forced himself to stop short. If the hotel had assigned security to meet him at the door, especially two gryphons nearly twice his size, then they had already decided his guilt. Cold anger smoldered inside him as he tried fruitlessly to accept the injustice. The thought of having to explain his absence for the remainder of the convention shamed him into further silence. There were those working with him in Robronco who would see things as they were and sympathize as best they could. Perhaps the company may even lodge a complaint with the hotel, but it would be a far cry from making this sting any less and there would be plenty of colleagues back at the home office who would privately revel upon having their assumptions of his character validated.

The elevator doors parted onto a group of guests wearing Bronco-Con ‘67 lanyards and laminates. They quickly backed away as the gryphons led him out, their whispers burning his ears as they stared. The gryphons stopped him at his suite and one of them bent toward him, taking hold of the laminate hanging down from his own lanyard and swiping it through the card reader. The light winked green and the lock popped, but Eshe found himself frowning now. Why would hotel security need his laminate to unlock the door? Why not use their own?

Had he not been so frustrated by the shame being foisted upon him he might have reacted sooner, realizing something wasn’t right and tried to bolt. Instead, with a perplexed expression on his face, he allowed them to lead him into the room and close the door behind him.

A black suitcase he didn’t recognize rested on the foot of the room’s single princess-sized bed, pressing a deep rectangular dent into the duvet. The silver-feathered gryphon went ahead of them to pull shut the gauzy inner curtains meant to give guests privacy without sacrificing sunlight. The other, a hawkish patterned male, slowed his gait ever so slightly to stay between Eshe and the door. His luggage, he realized, was nowhere to be seen. The only indication he had that he was in the same room he’d woken up in this morning was the fact that one of the hotel security had used his laminate to open the door.

The silver gryphon turned from the window, pointed at the bed, and told him to sit down. Too late it began to dawn on him that they were not security. The gold gryphon held a paper sack in one hand that he discarded onto the credenza next to the big screen TV. His groceries. He’d been so thrown by their accusation that he hadn’t even noticed him taking the bag of groceries from his teeth. For a split second he considered yelling at the gryphon for treating his property so poorly, especially food, before it occurred to him that they had very likely escorted him here to rob him.

“If you have my luggage, then you have all my money already.” He couldn’t help but look again for his own hard cases, bewildered as to why they would steal his belongings and come back to intercept him.

The gryphons herded him toward the bed and his hackles stood up. For one terrible moment he thought he knew what they’d brought him here for and he suddenly wished he’d been lodged in a hotel with thin walls. The silver one snapped his fingers and pointed not to the bed, but to the padded reading chair in the corner beside it. “Sit down, Eshe.”

Unsure whether it was safe to feel any relief at all, he swallowed his fear and sat in the corner between the bed and the window. Gold stood sentry in the short hallway leading to the door while Silver moved to the black suitcase. Eshe’s only path of escape required him to somehow get past Silver and Gold, in that order, in a straight line that would give both ample time to react and give chase. He squirmed in his chair as he tried, and failed, to muster that courage.

Twin clicks drew his attention to the suitcase as Silver popped open the latches. He opened the case, removed a thick manila folder from the top of a foam insert, and took a step toward Eshe while he opened the folder. He removed a sheet of paper from it and handed it to Eshe who, lacking a flat surface to set it on, awkwardly set it onto his lap with his hooves.

His blood went cold. It was a deportation order, or rather a photocopy of one. His name was on it, typed in the neat block-style lettering of a ministry typewriter.

“On September 8, 1077, the Court ordered Respondent (Eshe Obiakolam) removed to Vhanna in absentia pursuant to section 120(a)(2)(A) of the Equestrian Nationality Act (ENA or Act). On August 27, 1077, Respondent, through counsel, filed an agreement to conclude the removal proceeding. On August 31, 1077, the Ministry of Image (MOI) filed a timely response in agreement…”

The words blurred together as his eyes lost focus on what he was reading. His neck felt suddenly hot, his head swimming. Was this a sick joke? He couldn’t be deported, could he? He was an Equestrian citizen. He’d spent years filing forms, responding to government check-ins, waiting in endless lines and enduring the baleful stares of clerks who would have refused to submit his paperwork had they a reason that could stick. He’d done everything he was supposed to do and his government-issued ID was proof of that.

He shook his head, disbelieving. His acceptance form was framed and hanging on his bedroom wall.

“Am I…” he whispered, blinking at the deportation order with confusion. “Is this real?”

Silver withdrew a second sheet from the folder and carefully slid it over the top of the one in Eshe’s lap. Another photocopy, this one of a search and seizure warrant. And another form appeared atop that. Documentation of an arrest that never happened. An evidence intake sheet listing the seizure of several hard drives from his home containing proprietary schematics of Robronco Industries prototypes. Page by page the fiction grew clearer. The threat more real.

His voice sounded distant when he asked, “Why are you doing this to me?”

The gryphon stared at him with dispassionate eyes. His voice was deep, calm, and entirely detached. “We haven’t done anything to you yet. None of what you’ve read has happened. Right now all of that is hypothetical. Nod if you understand.”

Slowly he nodded, but he didn’t understand. It just felt safer to go along with it.

“You have a choice to make, Eshe Obiakolam.” Silver reached out, pinched the stack of papers in his lap, and returned them to the folder. “One option requires you to complete a small amount of work which will never be traced back to you and which will allow you to continue your life as a free citizen of Equestria.”

“The other only needs for you to tell us no, at which time all of the documents you just read will begin to appear in filing cabinets you do not want them to be in. Your apartment in Manehattan will be crawling first with police, then Ministry of Image officials who will want to know what a Vhannan expatriate is doing with experimental Robronco schematics on multiple hard drives. They will find evidence connecting you to contacts within the Vhannan government. You will lose your job, your citizenship, and more than likely your freedom. You may be deported, but the odds are better that you will spend the next twenty to thirty years inside an Equestrian black site. You’ll disappear, Eshe, and your absence will be exactly as unpleasant as you’re thinking it will.”

He felt unsteady in his chair. He wanted to throw up. “But I didn’t do anything.”

A taloned hand patted him on the shoulder. “We know you didn’t, buddy.”

“Why, then?”

From the hallway, Gold answered. “Because you're nobody. You’re single, you’ve got no family here, you’ve got no loyalty back home. Your most endearing trait to those who know you is that you punch in on time and grind out hotfixes for last year’s Pip-Bucks. You don’t bitch about it and you don’t bury your nose under the boss’s tail asking for more. Other than the stripes, you’re invisible. Right now we need the stripes.”

His brain couldn’t keep up. “I don’t understand…”

Silver’s fingers squeezed his shoulder. “Stop talking and just listen. Your country, the one you’re in right now, is planning to conduct a balefire test tomorrow in full view of the changeling hive. The Ministry of Image has already enacted a media blackout for the detonation, and our intelligence confirmed movement between the test site and a munitions depot linked to prior tests. The war with Vhanna will be over soon and we believe Equestria intends to provoke a response from Queen Chrysalis that will justify the eradication of the hive.”

Eshe closed his eyes, trying to follow. “But… why would we go to war with the changelings? They’re barely a threat to anyone anymore.”

Silver humored him with a shrug. “I don’t know, why would a country who just handily defeated its rival want to kill a weakened hive of shapeshifters who replaced a princess and invaded its capital city? C’mon Eshe, use your big boy brain. When have the ministries ever once shown hesitance to wage war for selfish reasons?”

Eshe didn’t have an answer for that. “I can’t stop a bomb, though.”

Gold laughed and muttered something derisive. Silver just shook his head and smiled. “Yeah, no, we’re not sitting here talking because we think you’re secret agent material. The bomb’s going to pop, that’s a given fact at this point. Our friends in Griffinstone only want footage of it so the ministries can’t pretend the changelings acted unprovoked. All you gotta do is lug a camera.”

He looked past the gryphon to the black case on the bed. Nestled in the foam padding was what appeared to be a very heavy duty video camera with an expensive looking wide angle lens. Several smaller lenses were packed in cutouts in the foam, along with a spare battery pack. He was beginning to understand why they had chosen him, and he wasn’t liking it at all.

“If I get caught,” he said slowly, “it’ll look like I’m spying for Vhanna.”

Gold shrugged. “Don’t get caught and you’ll be fine.”

That cold feeling settled in his gut again. “What does Griffinstone plan to do if I bring back footage.” It wasn’t a question, not really. Questioning would mean he had a choice.

Silver sounded a little less smug when he responded, as if he appreciated Eshe’s ability to see past the limits of his own predicament and recognize the bigger picture. “There are certain parties who have a vested interest in countering what they believe could be the start of unchecked Equestrian aggression, but who are hesitant to take action without proof.”

He was talking about a coalition. Griffinstone and other anonymous countries who no doubt now regretted remaining neutral in the war were watching for red flags that might signal the Equestrian war machine’s sudden interest in other, weaker neighbors. That could be true or complete bullshit as far as he’d ever be able to tell. Neither of these two gryphons were going to let him walk out of this room to verify any of it, and Eshe had a strong feeling that they already had their own plan for removing him from the hotel should he say no.

“All I have to do is record footage?” he asked.

“That and a little hiking,” Silver nodded. “It’s worth mentioning we’re not the only team conducting pre-mission interviews right now. The window on this thing closes when the first candidate accepts. So, you know. Tick-tock.”

His eyes went wide. How many others were being given the same ultimatum, staring down into the same black hole of carefully curated scenarios threatening to destroy their lives? Had they been pulled away at the same time he did or were there gryphons talking to ponies while he was strolling out of the corner grocery? His coat went damp with flop sweat with the understanding of what his yes would mean for those others. The cost of being first to accept was almost unbearable.

Almost.

He squeezed his eyes shut, and in a meek voice he said, “I’ll do it.”

A heavy palm slapped his shoulder and he looked up to see Silver grinning as if the two of them had always been the best of friends. Behind him, Gold had leaned into the suite’s bathroom and produced a black radio, already in the process of speaking to someone on the other end. Silver meanwhile tossed the manila envelope whose contents contained the end of Eshe’s life onto the bed and shut the briefcase filled with recording equipment.

“Atta boy, Stripes,” he said with congratulatory zeal while his hand sought something tucked between the case and the duvet. A dense rectangle of colorful paper crinkled between his talons as he unfolded it once, twice, and again until a tourist’s map of eastern Equestria spread open on the bed.

Cautiously, Eshe slid out of the chair and moved toward the map. Gold reappeared in the room as he did so, clicking off the radio and holding a thumb up to Silver.

“Congrats,” Silver said, making room for Eshe in front of the map. “Now let’s talk transportation.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 45: Old Friends Estimated time remaining: 16 Hours, 31 Minutes