September 9th, 1077
Badlands

Eshe flopped onto his backside just behind the lip of the final ridge. The arid air stung in his throat as he gasped for breath, his body and lungs not used to the nine-mile hike from the spot Silver and Gold deposited him to the rocky escarpment that ringed the bomb test site like a natural bowl. He dropped the black case of expensive film equipment beside him and let the even more valuable piece of equipment hanging from his neck slide toward the pit of his foreleg. Yet another chunk of granite had lodged itself against the wall of his hoof right where the last one had. Lacking any tools to work it loose, he carefully wiggled the rock between his teeth until it came free. He spat it out and watched as it clattered down the dusty slope, kicking up tiny puffs of dirt as it went.

He worked up some saliva and spat out the grit. The gryphons had stayed with him in that hotel room the entire night, forbidding him to leave and refusing to discuss anything with him that didn’t strictly deal with the details of his so-called “mission.” When one left the room, the other always stayed between Eshe and the door. When Eshe had to use the toilet, Gold watched from the open bathroom door. Strangely, he had spent a considerable chunk of yesterday worrying about how his boss was reacting to his absence. Eshe was by no means even a senior technician on the Pip-Buck project but he was one of the few zebras on Robronco’s payroll and he was fully aware of how visible that made him, especially with a war on. His failure to attend would be noted and he hadn’t been able to help but worry about how he would explain himself once this whole mess was over.

The heat had made his coat slick with sweat, and his white stripes had long since taken on a dirty shade of tan. It was a stark change from the chilling cold above the clouds. Eshe had never flown before, lacking wings or any friends with them who were willing to bear the implied intimacy involved with carrying a passenger beneath them, so he hadn’t been surprised by his immediate, instinctual terror when he’d been escorted up to the hotel’s roof and promptly hauled over the edge in Silver’s grip. In the wee hours of the morning few pegasi had been out to hear Eshe’s horrified squawks, and the hand that clamped over his muzzle seconds later silenced him for the remainder of their rapid ascent. When Silver finally let go, Eshe’s ribs ached from where he hung against the gryphon’s other arm. There was no moon out that night. Except for the glittering filaments of Equestria’s brand new network of highways and the occasional cluster of lights to mark the suburbs, towns, and eventually villages further south, the ground below was a featureless blanket of rolling black velvet. The lack of visual information was comforting, in a way, and Eshe endured the three hour flight delicately balanced between mild anxiety and abject panic.

Their landing point ended up being in a stand of juniper trees growing along the bank of a muddy river. There, Silver had retrieved a small bundle wrapped in patterned green cloth from a crook in one of the trees and unrolled it to reveal a blocky device roughly the same size and shape of the old platter-style hard drives he’d used back when he still wrote code for Interswitch Services back in Vhanna. It sat snugly inside a form-fitted leather case that hung from a sturdy nylon strap. Several knobs were visible under the flap, all of which except one Silver instructed him not to touch. The largest knob was a simple on/off toggle which Silver explained would generate what the gryphon called a modulating refraction field around him. The effect would only last a few minutes, ideally within which Eshe would be able to set up the camera equipment in view of the test range and get behind cover.

He lifted the strap around his neck with a sore hoof and stared sullenly at the stealth device. It had worked exactly as advertised, its only charge chewed up thanks to raw nerves. That had been over an hour ago, after he mistook a condor gyring overhead for a patrolling pegasus. It had taken the better part of a mile’s hike for his heart to stop trying to beat itself through his ribs, but by the time it had he knew he’d made a mistake that could end up costing him his career, his livelihood, and very possibly his freedom. The gryphons hadn’t minced words about how many cameras would be pointed right back toward him once he crested that last ridge. The Ministry of Technology would have eyes watching the test platform from every conceivable angle. Whether or not someone caught him today wasn’t an issue anymore. A week from today, a month, or longer yet, someone would eventually notice the zebra skulking along the backdrop behind the bomb. He just had to hope none of those lenses were powerful enough to allow someone to identify him.

His sole throbbed. He dreaded to think how many more rocks were waiting to jam themselves into that same spot during the long walk back, but that worry was a more welcome thought than that of what remained to be endured in the next half hour.

With clumsy hooves and teeth he managed to get the black case open and attach the wide angle lens to the camera’s shutter mount. Bits of dust and some spittle marred the clean lines when he was finished. Rolling onto his belly, camera pinched securely between choppers, Eshe gathered what few nerves he could scrounge and crawled up the last yards of the ridge.

The topography was exactly as the map had depicted. That wasn’t a surprise. It was what maps did, after all. A shallow basin large enough to accommodate a medium sized city spread out below him filled with all manner of scrub grass, small bushes, and along its wide perimeter grew the odd juniper tree or two. The low cliffs bracing the depression bore colorful striations where millions of years of geologic history lay exposed in neat, pancaked layers should Equestria ever find the energy to value such a thing. A few puffs of white slid lazily over a crystal blue sky. Were it not for the commotion in the middle of the ancient lakebed, it all might have been picturesque.

His throat went dry.

The basin was not as large as he’d imagined and he wondered whether the gryphons had hurried him through his slapdash training so he wouldn’t have time to notice the now obvious problems of scale. He’d read enough articles about past bomb tests to understand at a rudimentary level how large those explosions had been, and the Equestrian public never seemed able to satiate their fascination with the factoids scattered throughout each new column. Before and after pictures of mock-up houses built at five, ten, even twenty miles away from ground zero were images not readily forgotten, and they had all spent the past year learning new terms like “shockwave” and “blast damage” and “thermal radiation.” Less than a month ago Eshe had treated himself to a movie which had been preceded with a ten minute ministry newsreel showing him and the other moviegoers footage of mannequins posed to look through several brands of kitchen windows while a bomb was set off ten miles distant. The last pane of glass had shattered into tiny cubes rather than shards, the entire purpose of what became obvious as a sponsored advertisement for Glassecure Windows, but it was the puffs of smoke that rose off the clothes of each mannequin that came to the front of Eshe’s mind now.

At the center of the basin, at best five or six miles away from where he crouched, stood a tiny scaffold tower held upright by four thick guy wires. Eshe knew what the dark pinpoint atop the tower was and felt his hackles jump at the realization of how deadly close he was to it. A hot sweat rose up his neck and for a split second he prepared to turn and run away as fast as his legs would carry him. But he didn’t. Anchored by the knowledge of what the gryphons promised they would do to him if he failed, he turned his attention to the bulky camera and the instructions he’d been given.

He trembled as he scooped out a shallow trench in the dirt and set the camera into it. Peeking through the eyepiece, he centered the bomb tower in the frame and fiddled with the focus knob until it appeared more or less crisp against the fisheyed background. The basin dominated the rest of the frame, allowing Eshe to spot what appeared to be the government’s quick and dirty staging area for the weapon’s deployment on the basin’s edge just a few miles off to his right. Given something less terrifying to focus on, his panic ticked down by the barest amount. The camera’s casing scraped a little as he turned the lens to better see the equipment left to endure the bomb’s wrath.

Two motorized carriages sat parked several yards apart from one another, one facing toward the bomb tower and the other facing away. A yellow excavator, its scarred bucket bent and settled against the ground, slumbered a dozen or so yards away besides two long cuts in the soil. Speckled across the tread-worn dirt hunkered what looked like twenty or so concrete domes with narrow slits cut through their smooth faces as seemingly random angles. It took Eshe a moment to understand he was looking at observation cameras, and after another beat he knew they’d been positioned deliberately. Some monitored the parked vehicles. Others stared unblinkingly at the excavator. The vast majority of them, however, were aimed toward two peculiarly deep channels cut into the soil a hundred yards or so further from the basin wall.

None, he noticed, were pointed toward the box truck parked on the near side of the cuts. The glare of the morning sun rocked back and forth along the brightly painted panels of the rear container as if something inside was trying to tip the vehicle on its side. His eyes narrowed. Sheltered in both trenches were what appeared to be twenty or more still forms laying in the dirt. Mannequins, he assumed.

He pressed the record button. According to Silver, the holotape inside the camera would store five minutes of footage before looping back to record over itself. The gryphons only cared about a window of thirty seconds before and after detonation, giving Eshe the remaining time to recover the camera and shut it off. Using the flat of each foreleg, he scooped several mounds of loose rock and soil over the case until only a few inches of expensive lens was exposed.

His ear twitched. Across the wind came a high, distant wail.

He froze.

Light flooded the basin and Eshe realized with a start that the stripes down his forelegs were curling away in sheets of ugly, black smoke. Confused, wiped a hoof against his coat and marveled at the exposed, reddening skin. He would later remember thinking he was looking at someone else’s leg because he didn’t feel the burns. Then the blast tore through his eardrums, and he became vaguely aware that he was airborne. He wouldn’t remember his body breaking against the trunk of the juniper tree fifty feet downhill behind him.

Knocked unconscious, Eshe never saw the chaos unfolding in the shadow of that sickly green mushroom cloud, and that was good. He never saw the motionless forms of the anesthetized prisoners laid out in the trenches begin to move, stirred awake not by medicine wearing off but by the unbelievable pain caused by ravaging mutations. Willowy screams rose up out of the basin in a tortured chorus. Muscle and bone grew faster than their fragile bodies could cope with. Skin split, healed over, and split anew. Hooves cracked, fell away, dropping to the freshly excavated dirt as jagged bone ruptured their soles to bend into wicked claws. All the while, lying on its side several yards from where it had been parked, the brightly painted box truck had been torn open from the inside. Its sole occupant, broken by grief and rage, stared up at a boiling sky he hadn’t seen in two years.

Big Mac spared the briefest moment to stare toward the trenches, at the bloodied, howling things being birthed inside it, then turned his snout up to the rising column of fire and bellowed defiant rage before bounding away into the haze of smoke and dust.

Elsewhere, as the thunder of the distant detonation rumbled above their portable trailer, Ministry of Image staff bristled at a piece of blue-skied footage one of their many mechanical eyes had sent back prior to the countdown. In the center of the frame stood the bomb tower. The camera, meant to test some obscenely expensive composite shielding whose name no one in the trailer could pronounce, stared straight across the test range at the construction. Several ponies crowded the monitor, uncaring of the balefire that had just been unleashed seconds ago. Everyone was talking at once. Someone stepped out of the trailer, a radio pressed to his lips, barking orders with barely contained anger.

Ministry officials squinted curiously at the edge of the screen, up along the edge of the northern ridgeline, where a lone zebra lay crouched in the dirt.

Mechanical arms articulated out from their ports in the AutoDoc and gently clamped over each of his hooves, simulating exercise in their immobile patient.

Eshe barely noticed. His thoughts were, for the first time in ages, elsewhere. He absently watched the twisted, hairless skin of his legs stretch and retract over withered bones as the machine simulated a gallop on his behalf. Somewhere within the bed a pre-recorded voice repeated encouragements for him to participate, cheerily reminding him that patients who exerted themselves during recovery enjoyed a 30% reduction in muscle degeneration on average. The words drifted by unheeded as they had for decades upon decades. Pale, gray walls looked down on him in silent disappointment. Another day wasted by a patient whose life was behind him.

With eyes half-lidded by frailty he silently reviewed his options with Aurora and felt the faintest breath of hope that he didn’t dare yet reach for. Her flare-up with the Tantabus had since cooled, a fleeting tiff that seemed to have left the Tantabus willing to allow Eshe to speak somewhat freely. She’d gone so far as to give Aurora the reference guide he’d compiled for her without making any changes of her own, and for the last three nights they had enjoyed something akin to the study nights Eshe remembered suffering through as a young stallion in university. She’d picked up on the hardware aspects almost immediately, a benefit of her apparent history of repairing machinery, but the software was trickier. Aurora had been spoiled by Stable-Tec’s idiotproof user interfaces and the happy helping voice of Millie’s AI.

When it came to coding, that knowledge was a square peg to her round hole.

The corner of his lip moved a little at his clever euphemism, then settled. Eventually the exercising arms retracted and returned to attach a slightly yellowed tube to his jugular port. The AutoDoc chirped its goodnight as cold medicine rushed into his veins, and the awful world fell away one more time.

Aurora sat back in her chair, satisfied with herself, and gave Tandy a nod that said she could reset the Pip-Buck once more. Without sound or fanfare, the sleek white device once again lay on the table in a state of disrepair. She picked up her soldering iron and went to work.

“You’re getting good at that.”

She smiled without taking her eyes off her work. Smoke coiled off the tip of the iron where the smallest bead of liquid metal clung. Despite none of this being real, Tandy had cobbled together a good approximation of the discomfort from getting solder smoke in one’s eyes. Aurora constantly had to move her head this way and that to avoid the stinging wisps.

“Getting better,” she agreed, though she didn’t add that the very real risk of making a mistake during the live run terrified her. Fixing Ginger’s loaned Pip-Buck was her best chance at tracking down and killing Primrose. It was a thought that sounded ridiculous when she thought about it too long, but the idea of skulking around New Canterlot hoping an opportunity might drop out of the sky was even worse. She paused to focus up on her work, adding, “Heck, I could do this in my sleep.”

Eshe snorted as he bent toward the straw poking up from a glass of some kind of red fruit juice. “Booo.”

She smirked and touched the bead of molten solder to the end of a broken pin standing out from the side of a microchip whose serial number had as much meaning to her as the name Eshe had given it. According to him, that tiny square of silicon behaved like a timing belt with a brain, and the pin that had gotten fried by the bomb’s pulse was responsible for data input. She appreciated his attempt to describe it in terms he thought she might understand, but Aurora suspected if she’d let him continue stringing together analogies he’d have begun throwing around plumbing terminology just for seasoning. All she needed to know was that the little chip was important.

Solder jumped from the iron to the broken pin without much fuss. Using capillary action to her advantage she drew the tip toward the broken connection point and smiled as the solder glommed onto it just as eagerly. When she pulled the iron away the less than two millimeter break in the connection was bridged with new, cooling metal.

It took all of ten more minutes for her to find and fix the rest of the damage, and after a quick inspection of her work she pressed the power button and felt a rush of satisfaction when the display came to life. Sure, the screen showed the same fuzzy jumble of nonsense pulled from her memory by Tandy, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

She moved to ask Tandy for another reset, but Eshe was already holding up a black hoof to forestall her. “Let’s spend some time on code, first.”

Her eyes closed in frustration. “That stuff is techno-gibberish that only you understand. There has to be a program I can run or a setting I can change instead.”

“You asked me to show you how to make your Pip-Buck display Primrose’s location once it reconnects with the Enclave’s network, and I told you there is no big red button you can press that will do that for you. Turning a Pip-Buck into a tracking device from the end-user’s side is going to require techno-gibberish. A lot of it.”

She could already tell he was just as frustrated with the prospect of another teaching session with her as she was with having to wear the dunce cap for one. As the two of them fumed for similar reasons, Tandy vanished Ginger’s Pip-Buck and replaced it with two terminals set in front of each of them. Familiar lines of computer nonsense populated both screens, ending with a blinking cursor that awaited her input.

“We’ll start with a simple penetration test,” Eshe droned.

Aurora felt herself take on a petulant slouch as she watched his careful keystrokes, something she was surprised he could do with just his hooves, appear behind the cursor. What she would generously describe as a creative use of punctuation and abbreviation came together to form a command that meant absolutely nothing to her. He pressed a key and the terminals churned out a short list of placeholder ports for a network that had gone down two hundred years ago, meant to represent whatever the Enclave was using today. Since Eshe had recognized the operating system Aurora had seen when she attempted to short circuit the Pip-Buck, odds were high that the Enclave hadn’t bothered to reinvent the wheel by designing a brand new network to run off of it.

She was more impressed that Eshe could remember what some of these screens were meant to look like after so long than she was with his prowess at hacking. She made sure not to say that last bit aloud. She had committed that sin yesterday and got an earful about the nuances between engineering and hacking. There was a line between the two, though where it was is anyone’s guess.

“Can you tell me which ports are open?”

She pursed her lips at the screen. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”

“Nope.” The trailing half of the word popped with exasperation. “How about we do a quick run-through on all the steps and circle back afterward.”

Without waiting for her to agree, Eshe launched again into a lecture he’d been fruitlessly trying to drill into her head. Aurora groaned inwardly and settled in for the renewed attempt. She didn’t interrupt. Doing that would only kick him off into a whole other tangent, after which he would lose his place and start over from the top. The terminal screen changed now and then to reflect what he was explaining, but her ability to feign attention waned when he dove into a mind-numbing presentation about packet sniffing. She’d known a stallion who was into that sort of thing.

When Eshe finished, even Tandy looked ready to doze off. Considering where they all were, that was an accomplishment. He looked across the table at them, sagged a little in his seat, and sighed. “You have no idea what any of that was, don’t you?”

She was tempted to respond with something snarky, but managed to settle for a shrug. What did he expect her to say? Fixing hardware, that she could understand. Learning a second language and using it to trick a bunch of other computers into thinking Ginger’s Pip-Buck was King Shit of all other Pip-Bucks, that was so far out of her wheelhouse that it might as well be on another planet.

Still, she felt a pang of guilt when Eshe looked away and sighed. He had tried approaching this nut from every angle and still it wouldn’t crack, and both of them knew what it meant if Aurora’s shot in the dark idea didn’t pan out. It was a tall order asking him to figure this out for her, and from all appearances he’d done so with ease. The roadblock was getting what he knew into her head. Unfortunately for both of them, Tandy’s ability to conveniently share memories and experiences between ponies didn’t translate into practice or knowledge. Aurora could stare at a screen and watch a computer whiz at work for months and still not have the slightest clue how to do any of it herself.

“You know,” she began, keeping an eye on Tandy as she spoke to Eshe, “I’ve got these wings. They’re pretty handy. It would be a lot easier if I flew over to wherever you are and let you do all this hacking stuff.”

Tandy shifted uncomfortably in her chair but said nothing. Ever since the two of them hammered out the roughness between them, conversation across the table flowed a little more freely than they had before. Tandy was still clearly protective of Aurora and didn’t want her going anywhere near the place Eshe had strongly hinted at being confined to, but she was also forcing herself not to be less an obstacle and more a concerned friend.

Eshe didn’t have to be beaten over the head to understand the dual meaning of her offer. She’d invited him to finally speak openly about his situation and Tandy hadn’t gotten up and flipped the table to stop him. Sitting up a little straighter, he began to speak.

“I can’t help you out there,” he said, gesturing vaguely to indicate the waking world. “I would if I could, but I can’t. I’ve been stuck in that AutoDoc for too long.”

He was leaving out details, not to be mysterious but because they were deeply personal. He winced as he felt the silence close in around him but it was obvious that this was his first time talking about it to someone other than himself. Discomfort was getting in the way of the things he needed to say, a feeling Aurora knew all too well.

“I can’t… function. I’m trapped. I…” he shook his head, his temper rising as insufficient words tripped over themselves. “Tandy, can you show her?”

Tandy blinked surprise at suddenly being brought into what had been a two-way conversation.

“If she is willing, yes.” She looked at Aurora. “The experience will be distressing.”

“At this point in my life I call that a Tuesday.”

A tiny smile touched Eshe’s striped muzzle but he didn’t look up from the table’s surface to meet her gaze. Tandy only nodded and lit her horn, something she didn’t need to do but chose to as a visual cue for Aurora to brace herself for the transition.

The hotel lobby didn’t vanish, shift, or spiral away. It simply wasn’t there anymore, nor was she sitting down. She was lying on her back, catching up to the changes that suddenly were. The switch had occurred so seamlessly that for a moment she wasn’t sure if she’d fallen asleep a second time, a thought that came with a whole host of deeply existential questions. She shifted uneasily and turned her focus on her new, drab surroundings.

Only she didn’t shift at all. With the exception of the slow rise and fall of her chest, nothing moved. Something immense and invisible pressed down on her with so much force that while she could feel her muscles pull taut, she was paralyzed by the weight of it. Except for the breathing. That never stopped, nor did the pace of it change, and Aurora realized she wasn’t the one performing that action. The body she occupied had been so atrophied by immobility and time that she was effectively paralyzed. Somewhere unseen, the soft putter of an air motor drove a mechanical diaphragm. The pliable plastic tube her teeth rested against told her the rest.

The first sparks of animal panic flashed in her mind and she had to force herself to remember that there was no danger here. This was a memory. Eshe’s memory. She was experiencing a sliver of his reality and while she hadn’t been told, she knew he’d been abandoned here. Dull, concrete walls loomed around her, blotched and peeling with the moldy decay of empty years. A grid of drop-down ceiling tiles hung above her, several of them bloated and deformed by moisture that dried up before the foam squares could slip out of the framework.

The immense weight she’d felt had been nothing more than gravity. Eshe’s body was as much a husk as the room he was in. The AutoDoc didn’t care. It dutifully gave care to its patient as if he had a future beyond his bed. Though she couldn’t look down to see them, she could feel the tubes snaking their way into her abdomen. His abdomen. She felt his catheter, the pressure of another tube pinched beneath his tail. He was little more than an interchange along a highway of nutrients, nothing more. For a terrible moment, Aurora felt the overwhelming smallness of Eshe’s existence. Forgotten and alone in the most literal sense, his life had been reduced to that of a component of a machine that refused to stop running.

She was back in the hotel. She felt her sleeping body jerk from the shock of being yanked from Eshe’s memory. It took some time for her to adjust to being herself again, time which Eshe and Tandy let pass in silence. When she was ready, she met Eshe’s gaze. His sad smile hid behind it a depth of despair she knew she would never understand, nor did she ever want to. People drowned in the ocean in which Eshe swam.

“Dreaming helps me pass the time,” he said, as if to answer the question for her. “The effort that Tandy puts into making them feel real puts Princess Luna’s work to shame.”

Tandy’s eyes widened slightly and the barest flush of color painted her stars.

Aurora noted that he omitted the part where he’d been forbidden to communicate with other dreamers for a large chunk of his life, but she decided not to spoil the compliment by bringing it up. She was still reeling from what she’d just experienced.

“I don’t know what to say. I… assumed you lived this long because you were a ghoul.” A thought occurred to her embarrassingly late. “Are you a ghoul?”

Eshe slid the juice glass in front of him and sipped at the straw. “I don’t know. Maybe. At this point I don’t think it matters, do you? All I want is for somebody to turn off my AutoDoc.”

She blinked. “That’ll kill you.”

Tandy’s chair creaked as she adjusted herself. Eshe’s sad smile didn’t falter. Aurora’s understanding didn’t faze him. If nothing else, he looked relieved that she finally understood what it was he wanted her to do for him.

He nodded and spoke with a solemn, steady voice. “That’s kind of the idea.”

Fiona held her monocular to her eye and watched her prey from across the dusty hardpan.

With her free hand she noshed on a strip of salted jerky she’d gotten back in Crow’s Grove from one of its wary vendors. The meat had a gamey tang that earned it a cheaper price compared to the other, more marbled options on sale, but she hadn’t had time to haggle. The shaggy brown stallion never stopped moving. His first stop had been at a tiny bookstore tucked into a blind alley at the center of town where he traded the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition and its counterparts for an utterly irresponsible amount of caps. She overheard the store’s proprietor, a mare of around fifty years who looked to have a few screws loose if the disheveled mess of her mane was anything to go by, use his name at least a half dozen times before he departed for his next stop.

She spent a few boring hours perched on a rooftop a block down from Snap-Traps, one of those ubiquitous dual-use buildings whose simple utility had become popular across Equestria. Some kind of all-purpose survivalist supply shop occupied the ground floor and a simpler living arrangement took up the upper. Fiona stayed tucked in the shadow of a disused air conditioning unit as she watched Mouse appear and disappear in the street-facing windows on both floors. A garage door next to the storefront rattled open and she watched the solitary stallion load the crates of mixed supplies from the rickshaw into a larger wagon stored inside the garage. He wore a heavier duty set of saddlebags now as well as what appeared to be a sledgehammer, one face of which had been roughly forged into a mean looking axehead. It hung from thick steel eyelets on a custom harness, its weight balanced in such a way that the weapon would drop head first to the dirt and give him easy access to the leather-wrapped handle if he dipped his shoulder. Judging by the pits and gouges along its length, its earth pony bearer had already gotten a good amount of use out of it.

Just looking at it made Fiona’s jaw ache sympathetically. Of all the creatures to survive the cataclysm, the stubborn fuck-off tenacity of earth ponies never failed to impress.

It was well past noon when Mouse hitched himself to his wagon and bore east on his way out of Crow’s Grove. She stopped at a few vendors to exchange the last of her caps for a few meals worth of food and water, pausing occasionally to ask about Aurora and only half-listening to their unchanging answers. Mouse was the lead she needed to chase, just not so blatantly that some concerned citizen might catch on and run out ahead to warn him of the tail he’d acquired. Painful as it was to wait, she’d given him a half hour before padding her way back into the town’s narrow side-streets and quietly thrusting herself skyward. She spotted Mouse’s wagon a few minutes later, lazily tracing a line along the eastward trail, and fell into a wide gyre through the bottom most layer of clouds far behind him.

That had lasted through the end of the first day. By the second her wings had threatened to cramp and she grudgingly landed in the cracked hills a few miles north of the road. Tracking him was easy. Doing so while not being spotted was less so. Mouse was anything but an idle traveler. His head was constantly on a swivel, eyeing the ridges and hills with endless rapidity. More than once he turned to look toward where she’d found cover and every time she feared she’d been spotted. Logically she knew the chances of that were razor thin. She always kept one of the low hills between her and him, climbing up the leeward side just enough to see him pulling away at a distance of miles. From where Mouse stood he would only see the top of her head, and barely enough to distinguish from the rocks and shrubs at that. Still, it unnerved the primitive corners of her brain whenever he scanned the horizon in her direction and they seemed to meet each other’s gaze.

Despite his diligent suspicion of the hills that rose up around the hoof-beaten road, Mouse thankfully hadn’t noticed her. Midway through the second day he pulled his wagon into the dust off the trail and set up the temporary camp where, three miles to the northwest, Fiona watched from the shade of sandstone overhang. The monocular she used to keep tabs on him had, before her departure from the Bluff, been used by her to eyeball the trader wagons back when Flim & Flam Mercantile was still around. Sure, flying out to make trades before the wagons reached the gates was technically cheating, but being nice and waiting for a vendor to get his hooves on good radio equipment first and extort her for the kindness was technically horseshit. Besides, she wouldn’t have had to cheat if Elder Coronado hadn’t banned her from piloting her hacked Enclave spritebots around town.

Now that monocular was focused on Mouse, and what it showed Fiona was… well, concerning.

After dozing in the back of his wagon for an hour, the lone stallion had emerged with what by all accounts appeared to be a bear trap dangling between his teeth. A quick scan of the terrain around him showed no sign of predators that she could see, and for a dark moment she worried he was preparing to lay the trap out on the road for an unlucky traveler to put their leg into. Astonishingly, he did something else that made her suspect he was a little unhinged. He carried the trap several yards away from the wagon, far too close to lure any worthwhile prey, and wrestled the steel jaws open with a bodily gesture that suggested a grunt. Normally that would make some sense, but to Fiona’s absolute confusion Mouse had opened the trap upside-down. The jaws yawned into the dirt. She began to worry that her choice to follow this pony had been a mistake.

Still, she watched, chewing on jerky she wished she hadn’t wasted caps on. From his saddlebag Mouse produced a chunk of some sort of purplish, near-spoiled meat that he carefully pushed into the shallow gap beneath the trap with a long stick like a cannibal sidelining as a pool shark. With the bait in place, he proceeded to stamp his hooves around the circumference of the trap and then bolt back to the wagon.

For several minutes nothing happened. Even more nothing happened, but Mouse didn’t move. His eyes scanned the nearby horizon and his self-confident smile didn’t so much as flinch. Whatever he was seeing, it was visible only to him. Fiona felt her shoulders sag. This had been a waste of time.

No sooner had the thought crossed her mind than did the soil beneath the trap rupture and the steel jaws slam together, passing effortlessly through the bone and gristle of the molerat whose head suddenly found itself liberated from its partially emerged body. The trap, launched skyward by its own closure, tumbled in roughly the same direction as the decapitated head. The metallic clack of the jaws reached Fiona’s ears a scant few seconds later.

“Ho–!” she bit off the exclamation before it could give away her position.

She watched, her frustration galvanizing into rapt fixation, as Mouse dropped from the wagon and trotted over to the mammal’s twitching body with a small knife held in his mouth. With the speed and efficiency of someone performing a deeply familiar task, Mouse dragged the dead molerat from its hole and went to work gutting the carcass. An hour later, with his brown muzzle dyed with the faintest stain of rust, Mouse tended a modest cookfire within which several strips of seasoned meat sizzled on a collapsable spit. After feeding himself he par-roasted the rest of what he could harvest from the carcass, wrapped the pieces in strips of cloth, and stowed them into a crate on the wagon. A few kicks of soil smothered the fire and he was off again, pulling the wagon back up to the broken road once again.

That clever little hairball had her worried for a minute. She hastened to finish chewing her mystery jerky and downed it with a pull from her canteen. Then she pulled herself to her feet, packed her sparse supplies back into her satchel, and padded along after him.

The next few hours slid back into uneventful monotony. Mouse plodded along far ahead of her, his eyes on a constant swivel for bandits and raiders. Every so often the terrain would smooth out, forcing Fiona to stop behind the last bit of natural cover until her quarry was barely visible on the horizon, then dart across the clearings and play catch-up in new shadows.

Traffic along the road was thin, but not absent. Fiona noticed whenever Mouse spotted a wagon on the approach, he fastidiously stopped to check the pipe pistol strapped to his foreleg and the harness attaching him to his wagon. She assumed he had a quick release built into the latter but never got confirmation on that. The few travelers who passed did so without causing trouble, though all parties involved continued to watch one another long after they’d drifted beyond firing distance.

Then, as evening was beginning to darken the eastern horizon, Mouse made an inexplicable deviation. The wagon lurched behind him as he pulled it off the dusty pavement, prompting Fiona to begin looking for a comfortable patch of cover to hunker down in for the night. But the stallion kept on walking, seemingly leaving a perfectly good highway behind in favor of what could only generously be referred to as a side trail. She didn’t know this area any better than she knew the underside of Celestia’s tail but she did have enough wasteland smarts to know he was either heading detouring around some known obstruction further up the pencil-straight highway, or he was nearing his ultimate destination. She hoped it was door number two, because as much as she enjoyed having an excuse to enter Sneaky Bird Mode she was suffering from an ailment she hadn’t dealt with in years: boredom.

With a sigh, she followed. Night came, and with it the nocturnal critters of the Equestrian wastes. Color washed out of the scenery as her vision adapted and she was surprised to see that Mouse was still keeping more or less to the bare whisper of a trail he’d chosen to follow. Once or twice the wagon bucked when a rock snuck beneath one of the wheels, eliciting a hard jerk in the opposite direction as he swung away from the larger detritus, but he always kept clear of the larger boulders and deep, wheel-shattering folds in the terrain.

Midnight had come and gone by the time she noticed the dark wall on the horizon. After a few more miles she recognized it. Trees. An entire forest of them, she realized, packed so dense with vegetation that her night vision couldn’t make heads or tails of how deep it ran. It stretched north and south for one, maybe two miles before abruptly giving way to barren wasteland once more. Fiona stopped walking for a long time, puzzled by how utterly out of place it looked. It was as if someone had pressed a giant cookie cutter into some undiscovered land untouched by bombs, radiation, and war, pulled it all away and deposited it here in the middle of nowhere.

Unsurprisingly, Mouse was pulling his wagon straight to it. She wanted to bolt into the air and fly ahead of him, drawn by some primal temptation to beat him to the forest and… what? Explore it? Protect it? Claim it for herself? She shook her head and let the temptation ebb. Red flags, she reminded herself. This wasn’t Griffinstone where the biggest and only threats came from the mutations and poison blowing in from the Vhannan ruins. This was Equestria, a land that had avoided the dying everywhere else by finding dangerous, unpredictable, and oftentimes lethal ways to survive. An inexplicable woodland oasis growing out of the hardpan wasn’t just a red flag, it was a neon sign glowing out of a gas fire.

Crouching low behind a splash of briars, she watched Mouse approach some sort of prewar checkpoint a quarter mile from the forest’s edge and roll right on by. His wagon crunched along as he led it around a pair of rusting ambulances, avoiding the bodies in tattered hazmat suits strewn nearby. Her hackles rose as images of crumbling Equestrian biological test facilities ran through her head, and yet Mouse didn’t seem worried. He continued forward.

When he reached the tree line she spotted several small objects sprout up from the underbrush and swivel toward him with a cackling echo of chuk-chuk. A moment later the figures vanished as abruptly as they appeared, and Mouse slowly disappeared into the overgrowth.

Fiona blinked. She knew that sound. Those were Robronco-made auto turrets. Dozens of them, built directly into the greenery and painstakingly camouflaged. All of them drawing power, set on alert, and programmed to ignore the earth pony scavenger who just crossed through their firing line.

“Red flags,” she murmured to herself. “Red fucking flags.”

The thudding of hooves climbing the porch hauled Aurora from her dream of Eshe’s hotel and dumped her firmly in the present. With a bleary groan she opened her eyes to a room half-lit by emberglow left by the fire Discord had lit beneath the mantle just a few hours prior. Discord was already up out of his easy chair and scuffing his way to the front door having woken well before her. Claws scratched idly over the bits of stone fused to his skin, followed by the bracing intake of a long breath before he opened the door.

“G’morning.” The compound rumbled around the lidless crate clenched in Mouse’s jaw as he pushed his way into the cottage, unaware or more likely unconcerned by the disapproving glower Discord shot on his way past. “Where d’you want it?”

Discord shut the door and gestured vaguely toward the floor. The crate landed with a thud that jarred Aurora more firmly into wakefulness than she liked. The couch that had become her bed was warm and the night air was just cool enough to be uncomfortable if she paid attention to it. Her body demanded she curl back up and doze before discomfort grew into annoyance, when she would be forced to get up and throw a log onto the red embers.

Before she could string together the words to effectively communicate her displeasure, Mouse had already pulled the front door back open and disappeared outside. For a moment she and Discord exchanged the same chagrined expression. Mouse reappeared shortly after, hooves tromping noisily over the floorboards with another open crate swinging precariously from his teeth.

Discord sighed and pulled the box away before the contents could spill. “I don’t suppose you have the faintest clue what time it is.”

Mouse shrugged and turned back to the door and the wagon no doubt parked outside. “Late. Dunno, didn’t stop to pitch a tent tonight. Got places to be.”

A short bundle of logs stood up over the rim of the second crate. Aurora sat up to get a better look and felt some of her irritation with Mouse fade at the sight of several pieces of metal hardware piled alongside what looked to be genuine hemlock. The chilly air forgotten, she slid down to the floor and limped around the coffee table toward the crates. Gray feathers dipped down and picked out a long, flat strip of mild steel roughly half the length of her hind leg. Three more lengths leaned against one another inside the crate, partially obscuring a heavily worn but somehow still intact cardboard box. Aurora gently pulled open the lid and felt a pang of nostalgia at the jumble of mismatched wood screws, bolts, nuts and washers. She had a junk drawer just like this back home, and the memory of it turned her smile bittersweet.

Mouse arrived with the third and final crate, dropped it beside Aurora, then turned toward the dim fireplace and threw on a quartered log from the basket beside it. Not one for small talk, the stallion elected himself fire tender by dint of the iron poker now held in his mouth.

For his part, Discord seemed to briefly debate chiding Mouse more about the early hour, but he eventually settled down on his knees beside Aurora instead. Only after both of them silently accepted that neither would be going back to sleep any time soon did conversation begin to trickle.

“Did he find everything you need?”

Aurora leaned across one crate to look into another, quietly counting each item against her mental inventory. “Most of it, yes. The tip on this soldering iron isn’t as fine as Eshe said it needs to be, but there’s some sandpaper here. I should be able to grind it down.”

Mouse paused long enough in his task of excavating an air pocket beneath the firelog to add, “Right now’s a bad time to get picky about electronics.”

“Duly noted.” She didn’t know what he meant, nor did he volunteer further explanation. Satisfied at least that Mouse had delivered on the majority of her list - she chose not to point out that the security drivers he’d brought weren’t the right size - she pushed herself to her hooves and glanced toward the dark kitchen. “Everything I need is more or less here. I’m going to warm up some tea and try to knock some of the slush off my brain. I’m not going to be able to sleep until I get started on the Pip-Buck. Either of you want a cup?”

Discord held up a finger to indicate yes.

Mouse grunted and shook his head. “Coffee.”

Retrieving a candle from the table beside Discord’s easy chair, she dipped the wick into the coals and pulled the guttering flame out before her wingtip could catch as well. “Fresh out,” she called on her way into the kitchen. “Sorry.”

That sparked off some quiet grumbling from Mouse directed at Discord as he asked what had happened to a shipment of grounds he’d delivered the winter prior. Aurora set the candle next to the sink and ran fresh water into a dented kettle, trying not to chuckle as she listened to Discord insist that the grounds in question had been so utterly stale that they were better used as fertilizer for his blueberries. That apparently was where the can had been dumped immediately after the first pot had been brewed, an admission that Mouse seemed to take personally. She held her tongue, choosing to focus on tapping a measured portion of tea leaves from the cupboard into Discord’s rust-spotted infuser rather than add her two bits to the argument. Mouse was, as far as she could tell, the sort of stallion who would die on the hill he stood on and Aurora couldn’t help but feel she would probably fall right alongside him.

Wasting coffee, real ground coffee, bordered on the criminal and she’d known an entire Mechanical department who would readily string up anyone who so much as joked about throwing away good beans for something as petty as flavor. It wasn’t just a drink. It was a social ritual. A coming together for a pack of filthy, stinking assholes who were quick to violence at the mere suggestion of punching in for another twelver before they could imbibe upon the acrid, bitter piss that trickled from the communal pot. Even terrible coffee was nectar to anyone staring down the barrel of another long shift, and woe betide anyone foolish enough to deny it to those who craved it.

Suffice to say, Discord was wrong. A sad smile curled her lip as she clicked the infuser shut and plunked it into the cold water.

Returning to the living room, she paused to nestle the kettle next to the warming coals and began emptying the contents of each crate in earnest. Soon a gentle fire was rolling beneath the mantle and the coffee table, once again pressed into service as her workbench, lay strewn with the tools she needed to revive Ginger’s Pip-Buck. A squealing kettle was retrieved from the coals, cups were poured, and while the boys seated themselves on the couch to ruminate on Mouse’s latest excursion back home Aurora dragged the coffee table near to the fireplace where she went to work sanding the soldering iron’s rounded tip into a sharp point.

She grimaced a little as she ground away the iron cladding that coated the dull nib and exposed its copper core. Given sufficient time the molten solder would greedily dissolve the copper, and while her intended project would never last long enough for that to become a problem she still couldn’t shake the guilty feeling that came with wantonly wasting a perfectly good tool. Old habits die hard. After several minutes of steady scraping the needle-like nib gleamed golden in the firelight. Soon it was soaking up the heat of the fat, red ember she’d laid it upon while she turned and turned Ginger’s Pip-Buck between her feathers, studying the pathways she needed to bridge and remaining mindful of the places where she couldn’t afford to let a stray drop of solder short onto neighboring connections. She would get one shot at this, maybe two if whatever mistakes she made weren’t fatal.

When she felt ready, she picked up the iron by its insulated handle and touched the blackened copper to the unspooled solder. Silver metal deformed into a droplet that jiggled beneath the sharpened tip. Satisfied, she flicked the droplet into the fireplace and turned to her work.

For all the practice she’d gotten in her sleep, she’d been right to assume the dream was a pale comparison to the real world. Tandy hadn’t simulated the nervous tremors in Aurora’s feathers, the dulled tactile senses from her bomb-damaged right wing, or the rising tension she felt from the knowledge that this wasn’t a trial run that could be rewound with a thought. She wet the rapidly cooling iron with fresh solder, fully aware her chances of hunting down Primrose and coming out the other end alive would drop to zero if she screwed this up. She took a steadying breath, careful not to exhale on the molten metal jittering over Ginger’s sleeping Pip-Buck, and touched the broken connection.

Solder beaded onto the broken foot of that tiny black chip, elongating just slightly as she drew the tip of the iron across the gap. Liquid silver touched the opposite contact, shivered as she pulled the iron away, and immediately began to harden with the departure of its heat source. A tiny silver peanut barely two millimeters wide closed the connection. No mistakes. No disasters. Aurora let out the breath she’d been holding and propped the iron back onto the glowing coals, readying herself to repeat the process.

She did so with the quiet alacrity that came with a reassuring success. Despite everything she’d gone though, all the death, killing, and loss, there were still things in this world that she could fix. She’d given Discord back his music. Now the Pip-Buck in front of her, disassembled to expose the electronic guts which had been torn through by Primrose’s bomb, lay clinging to its bright new metal stitches. The last connection jealously held its shiny patch of solder rather than sharing it around with its neighbors like Aurora had feared. The capacitor she had shorted out days earlier lay alone on the coffee table, replaced by a fresh one harvested from the scrap electronics Mouse had dragged in out of the wasteland for her. Another tiny piece of the world put back to rights by her own feathers.

She turned the Pip-Buck’s smooth screen toward her and paused for a moment to look at the deeply damaged reflection staring up from the glass. There had been something in those eyes that Ginger had fallen in love with. What it was, Aurora could only guess at. Maybe she couldn’t see it for herself because it wasn’t there anymore. Or maybe it was and she didn’t know what to look for.

Frowning, she held down the power button and listened to the device chatter to life. Nothing smoked. Sparks didn’t fly. Somewhere beneath one of the curved boards a high capacity holotape spun up and the screen went from black to sky blue. Mouse and Discord went momentarily quiet as both of them turned to see the fruits of her labor. Aurora didn’t notice. She was too captivated by the full color animation of Robronco’s cartoonish pony mascot trotted on screen, posed in the center with an exaggerated grin, then faded away as the company logo filled the blue field. Seconds later a simple graphic of a slim white Pip-Buck hovering a few pixels away from a disembodied foreleg indicated that she should put the device on to continue. A beat later, white text bloomed along the bottom margin to supplement the pictorial instruction.

Aurora pressed the power button again and the successfully repaired Pip-Buck shut itself down. She wasn’t ready for that next step. Not yet. Not when she still had a choice to make. She picked up her cup, took a long sip of warm peppermint tea, and went about reassembling the Pip-Buck’s outer casing.

“I take it the repair was a success?” Discord probed.

She nodded, not wanting to jinx it by saying so aloud. “It booted up and stayed on without overheating.”

Mouse grunted. “I got a TV that does that. Doesn’t get any channels, though.”

Asshole. She tightened each security screw with one of the missized drivers Mouse had brought her, containing her frustration whenever it slipped and slightly rounded one of the heads. “I don’t know what’ll happen if I wear it while it’s on. A long while back I ran into an Enclave spritebot and they knew exactly who I was.”

She eyed her own Pip-Buck, still nonfunctional where she’d left it on the table. According to Sledge, a mare named Delta Vee saved Stable 10 from disaster by hacking apart the lines connecting their home to Stable-Tec’s greater underground network. Ever since then the Enclave had been blind to the life that continued to flourish below Foal Mountain. Only after Aurora crawled out from under the rockslide was her Pip-Buck able to identify the surviving remnants of Stable-Tec’s primary radio network and, in doing so, giving its current Enclave minders a snapshot into the Stable they long assumed dead. Her first mistake on a long road of many.

“If I can use it to track Primrose, then the Enclave can definitely do the same thing to me. I’m dead as far as they think, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as possible.”

Looking down her bare foreleg, she bent her neck and nipped the trailing end of a bandage still covering a patch of skin near her shoulder. The burns she sustained there had gone deeper than most and the new flesh that grew over the old was still tender and prone to splitting when she rolled in her sleep. She undid the gauze one wrap at a time until it lay piled at her hoof. With both wings she went about rewrapping it just above her fetlock. When she was done, she slid Ginger’s Pip-Buck over the wrappings and cinched the latch down until it snapped secure. Now she could turn it on without worrying it might match her biometrics to whatever data the Enclave had snatched out of the air after her conversations with their spritebot.

“There. Good enough,” she said, eyeing her handiwork. Once Eshe walked her through the code she’d need to enter in a way that didn’t make her head hurt, she could get to work fixing the next problem: a living, breathing Primrose. Then after that ugly work was finally behind her, she would decide whether or not she was the right mare to do the thing Eshe had asked her to do.

One fix at a time.

“I’m going back to bed,” she announced, standing as she did so. “Clear off or make room.”

Discord made a shooing motion at Mouse who, after much rolling of eyes, dropped down from the couch and resumed his post as self-appointed fire poker. Discord scooted to what had since become “his” side of the couch when the two found themselves sharing it, pausing just long enough to offer Aurora a hand to help her make the jump onto the old cushions. She half-hopped and was half-pulled, but she made it. Joys of missing a leg.

Seeming to know what she was thinking, Discord snapped his fingers at Mouse. “If you intend to stay here till morning you can do more than make a mess of my fireplace. How much progress can you make on that wooden leg before you go running off again?”

Aurora curled up on the cushion beside Discord and listened to the two talk. She’d made her own progress tonight and felt a touch of pride in that. She hugged the smooth lines of Ginger’s Pip-Buck to her chest and felt, deep down, that she’d brought back a small part of the person she’d lost in the sky above their home. She eased back to sleep with the meaningful knowledge that the world hadn’t ended for her just yet. She’d come to the wasteland bent on fixing something that was broken. Ginger was gone, but a piece of her was still here helping her right a terrible wrong.

Let Primrose think she was safe. That she was the victor. Let her believe all her problems lay dead and dying in her wake so that when Aurora stepped through that mirage with a gun in her wing Primrose would suffer the terror and uncertainty in her last moments that Stable 10 had felt in theirs. By then that slithering bitch’s fate would be decided and no amount of loyal Enclave pegasi would prevent the correction Aurora had come to make. Wings and hooves would descent on her like a rain of stones but Ginger’s death would be made right, no matter–

Automatic gunfire crackled outside, a sudden cacophony that grew louder with each turret that joined the assault. Aurora and Mouse instinctively flattened themselves against the floorboards, eyes wide and ears pinned back. Discord didn’t join them on the ground. Wearing an expression of deep worry, his arm slid behind the couch while yellow eyes stared out past the open window.

THUD.

Aurora stifled a yelp. Discord was on his feet. Hoof. Whatever. Their collective attention jerked toward the ceiling where something or someone had just landed on the roof.

“What was…”

Discord held up a hand to hush her, his eyes tracking the scraping sound still emanating from the roof. His other hand slid out from behind the couch with a heavy caliber pistol in his grip. Aurora was momentarily torn between the sounds of the creature overhead and the weapon she hadn’t known Discord owned. It was a nasty looking thing, all squared angles and raw mass that looked eerily similar to the one carried by the lead slaver back in Kiln. A soft click announced the toggle of its safety, a sound echoed by the pipe pistol strapped to Mouse’s foreleg.

Finger and foreleg had curled around their respective triggers as a distantly familiar voice called out from the night.

“Motherfucker actually hit… you’ve got to be kidding me.” A pause. Mouse and Discord exchanged wary looks, but Aurora’s brow furrowed at the announcer-like inflections of the mare overhead. “Hello-hello? Anyone home? It’s me, Mouse, the very nice gryphon you talked to back in town? You said you would whistle and, well heck, you never did. I might need to borrow your first aid kit if you got one, buddy. You there?”

Aurora rose to her hooves and tilted her head toward the open window. “Is that Flipswitch?”

A pause. “Holy shit. Aurora?”

“Holy shit. Roach?”

Having already been on high alert since joining the quarter-mile long queue to enter the Ranger-held city, Julip hadn’t been prepared for any of the residents of Blinder’s Bluff to recognize them so quickly. It was a risk they both agreed they’d need to take, and Roach had repeatedly promised her that should things become dangerous for them he would do what was necessary to protect her. Still, it caught her off guard when Roach’s power armor thumped between her and the burn-scarred blue stallion trotting toward them.

Her wings dropped flush around her barrel, hiding as much evidence of them as she could beneath the sweltering duster she’d scavenged from the cab of a truck several days and hundreds of long miles north of here. It stank from decades of mildew and decay, was several sizes too big for her, and had come off the corpse of something that had crawled into the truck and died, but it kept her wings out of sight and that was good enough for now. The approaching stallion, dressed from shoulders to shitter in the Steel Ranger’s finest shade of brown, wore a cracked radio on the lapel of his uniform. It didn’t take a mental leap to assume the soldiers who asked him to identify himself at the gate had radioed that info over a channel this stranger was tuned into.

They’d been led into the city only after Roach allowed a prickly mare to verify that the ammo cans slung beneath the suit’s gatling guns were empty. Elder Coronado’s generosity in loaning them the suit had stopped, reasonably, short of equipping them with ammunition. That had made some elements of Roach and Julip’s journey through Crystal Alley a little more eventful than they otherwise would have been, not that either of them had complained afterward. The real danger of that decision came only after the two of them made their way south back into Ranger territory, and with it, the ever present threat of being spotted by Enclave scouts. They’d gotten lucky on that front. No uniformed pegasi took pot shots at them and no bandits along the road thought it would be wise to try relieving them of their possessions when two of those items were shoulder-mounted turrets capable of turning them to ground meat. If they were loaded. Which they weren’t.

Julip was never one to shy away from trying to bluff someone, but sustaining a con for over a week without knowing if any of her former compatriots might have recognized her in the brief moments she took off her disguise had worn her nerves down to bloody nubs. And now she was here, waiting with Roach for the quartermaster for what had once been her sworn enemy to verify their story with the quartermasters in Fillydelphia. They were casually surrounded by a good dozen other Rangers, two of which wore power armor of their own and whose weapons were decidedly not missing their ammunition belts, and she could feel each and every pair of eyes as they slid over her petite frame with clear and unguarded suspicion.

And now one of them was prancing his way up the cobbles with Roach’s name in his mouth. Maybe it was just the nerves, or maybe it was because they’d become intimately close friends and were verging on something possibly more permanent, but she felt instantly suspicious of this friendly newcomer.

Defying Roach’s attempt to shield her from sight, she stuck her head out from around his armored backside with narrowed eyes. “Who the fuck are you?”

The stallion slowed, suddenly unsure of his own confidence. “Um.”

“Be nice.” Roach’s gravel voice came through the suit’s speakers heavily distorted, and not for the better. Changeling ghouls and modern technology rarely mixed well, with a few notable exceptions. He tipped his armored horn toward the soldiers with a soft whirr of bearings and servos. “That’s the Knight I told you about. He’s a friend.”

Julip eyed the stallion up and down. Half of his blue-furred face was a twisted mass of angry pink flesh that gave him the countenance of a ghoul, except for the way his burns looked as if they were following the paths of running liquid. She’d seen the same kind of injuries back in New Canterlot when casualties were flown home to be treated. Gasoline bombs were a cheap and common weapon used on both sides when a structure needed to be flushed of enemies quickly and its other contents were of little value. This guy looked like he’d taken a molotov cocktail to the face.

Roach turned to address the quartermaster’s security. “Can I leave the armor with you guys?”

Several soldiers looked to the officer in charge, who seemed pacified by the arrival of a higher ranking and apparently friendly counterpart. The unicorn shrugged, indicated a spot on the cobbles he could leave the armor, and murmured something into the radio that floated out of his uniform pocket. Roach didn’t wait to hear the quartermaster’s response. He’d already stepped to where he’d been told and the seal running down the suit’s spine cracked with a hydraulic hiss. Julip half-expected a cloud of steam to come rushing out when the panels bloomed open given how stuffy it had gotten when she’d been inside the armor with him. No such luck, though she caught herself smiling just a little when she heard Roach suck in a lungful of unfiltered mountain air.

“So you’re Latch,” she said, wanting to distract the stallion while Roach shimmied his way backward over the armor’s padded belly. “Roach told me the two of you had plans to fix up your Stable’s gardens.”

The Knight glanced down at her for the briefest moment before his attention turned back toward the changeling emerging from his steel cocoon. “That’s what he said when they all left, but I hadn’t expected him to come back.”

Latch’s nose wrinkled as the breeze carried the funk contained by the armor past them, and then something like recognition registered in eyes that turned speculatively back toward Julip. She could smell it too. Their trek through the northern wastes hadn’t taken them past any bodies of water that weren’t dangerously stagnant or heavily polluted by radiation, so opportunities to wash their paired odors from the power armor hadn’t arisen. She and Roach had shared several such instances after their first stumbling foray into sharing the power armor and evidently their noses had acclimated as the days passed. Not so for poor Latch. The stallion politely pressed his lips together, moved himself upwind of the venting armor, and cleared his throat.

“It’s good to see he’s found a companion,” he said with as much neutrality as a stallion who had just gotten his sinuses assaulted by said companionship. Julip wasn’t sure if it was possible for a blush to show through mint green fur, and she didn’t want to know. She quickly looked around as if suddenly interested with the colorful shacks that snaked their way up the flat-topped bluff while Latch changed the subject. “The city’s pretty packed. I hope you have plans for lodging.”

Having finished vacating the power armor and seemingly unaware of what just transpired between Latch and her, Roach pursed his lips at the crowded streets they’d been escorted through as he came to stand beside Julip. “If I’m being honest, we were hoping the Rangers might let us use one of the compartments down in the Stable like last time.”

“Something tells me that’s a bust,” Julip said. They’d both observed the ponies camped out in the cramped alleys between several of the buildings on the way here, and then there was the abundance of Rangers loitering around everywhere with nothing to do. Any soldier with half a brain who wasn’t either on duty, drinking, getting in fights, or screwing would be clocking valuable bunk time. This many soldiers standing around with nothing to do meant there were probably less bunks than there were bodies to fill them, and that just as likely meant the Stable’s compartments were full up.

“Good eye,” Latch grunted, nodding in the same direction they were looking. “I just got off gate duty at the Stable. It’s not like how it was the last time you were here, Roach. With everything that happened, you two might–”

Latch abruptly stopped and his face dropped as if he’d suddenly remembered something. His frown deepened, but not in that classic way a ranking officer might when they realized they were probably getting too familiar with the civvies. No, he looked like someone who had stopped short of saying something deeply insensitive. For a moment Julip worried he’d clocked her wings and had been about to draw attention to them, but his eyes weren’t on her. They were on Roach.

Her friend noticed the change too, and soon worry lines were creasing the broken bits of chitin down his face. “Everything okay?”

Latch opened his mouth, seemingly undecided on his answer, and then closed it in favor of giving his hoof an uneasy couple of taps against the cobbles. “Yeah, ah… are you two aware of what the Enclave did?”

She and Roach looked at each other to see if one of them knew more than the other. They didn’t. Chances were Latch didn’t know their actions in Fillydelphia had created the opening the Enclave used to destroy the turrets guarding the city’s skies, and neither of them seemed eager to be the one to share that here where seemingly every other person they saw wore a Ranger uniform.

Roach cleared his throat. “We heard some things out on the road, none of them good.”

Latch grunted as if he understood. “How you holding up?”

“One day at a time,” he said. Latch nodded at the ground, and Roach quickly pivoted the conversation before he could continue a potentially dangerous line of questioning. “Did you end up making any headway on that list I left with you?”

That seemed to pull the Knight back to reality, though he seemed just as disquieted by the abrupt shift. “I… yeah, a little bit. I’m still waiting on a requisition for phosphorus, but we got a pretty decent supply of nitrogen and potassium sources put together before last week. One of the older mares up on the hill got word of what we were doing and gave us some potted flowers, so I’m watering those under the grow lights now.”

That last part seemed to lift some of the pall cast by the earlier questions and Roach was quick to jump on it. “Did she say what kind of flowers they were?”

Latch paused to think. “They’re purple and kind of stringy. I think she called them ‘catch.’”

“Vetch,” Roach corrected, his smile widening a bit. “It’s an old cover crop. Keep it watered, you’ll need it once we can get the soil amended. If your people can’t get a fix on a phosphorus source, gunpowder makes a halfway decent all-around fertilizer. Just, you know, don’t blow up the Stable doing it.”

Latch winced at that. “I’ll ask the quartermasters about it later. Anyway, I’m still on gate duty until 19:00 hours and I’m going to catch shit if I’m not back soon. I just wanted to swing over and make sure you’re still in one piece. Come find me once you find a place to hunker down and we can talk more. And uh, again, I’m sorry about what happened.”

With an awkward nod just to himself, the Knight turned and trotted away. Julip looked up at Roach with the obvious question on her face, but he only shrugged in response. He must have heard about what Ironshod did in Fillydelphia or he wouldn’t have danced around whatever was making him so uncomfortable just then. She wondered whether the guilt had been spreading before their arrival and worried whether they were going to have to assuage any of it by day’s end. Unsure how else to proceed, they started back toward the busy central artery of Blinder’s Bluff in search of a room.

Finding one, however, was more difficult than Latch made it seem. Julip kept up with Roach’s long, loping strides well enough but the crowd was the real problem. The Bluff’s main road, demarcated by a set of twin rails that curved in parallel toward the base of the city’s geographic namesake where, if she could see past all the jostling bodies packed around them, a tunnel contained their terminus and the well-defended Stable 6. Someone passing on her right flicked her tail and she caught a face full of yellow hair. A Ranger stomping out his patrol in a much cleaner set of power armor than the one she’d ridden in on the way here practically stepped on her before adjusting his gait to narrowly avoid her.

“Watch it!” she hissed. “This place is a fucking clown show.”

A unicorn passing in the opposite direction shouldered Roach hard enough to send him skittering before blending in with the choking hoof traffic. His patience with such obvious slights deeply impressed her, and it was equally difficult not to tear each offender a new hole to shit from in his defense. She glared back to where the unicorn had vanished and hoped he got his horn stuck in a sewer grate.

“Stick close to me.” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the din of competing voices. Somewhere to their right a pony was shouting prices for pickled carrots, further confirming her own belief that there really were some parts of the wasteland that could be fixed with a little cleansing fire. She tucked a little closer to Roach as they came upon the rows of tall, narrower shacks advertising rooms for sale. Most, if not all, bore wooden and sheet metal signs across their doors declaring variations of OVER CAPACITY and NO VACANCY, NO INQUIRY. Roach didn’t appear to trust any of those signs, especially the ones trying to ward off those who might pester the owners for an exception.

Soon they were climbing the steps of one such shack and pushing their way into a lobby that may just as well have been someone’s living room. A couch and chairs occupied one corner of the small space to face a console radio which, given the Bluff’s enthusiastic support of Flipswitch and her Hightower Radio, strongly suggested it was in working order. An unfriendly looking stallion parked in a rolling chair behind a rolltop desk informed them rather roughly that there was no room and that they should get out before they pulled a crowd in. They obliged and moved onto the next shack.

Door after door bore the same result. Irritated landlords expressed a spectrum of reactions for their seeming disregard for their signs, ranging from bewilderment to revulsion to genuine apology and even more genuine anger. Several proprietors without signs hung on their doors sent them back out to the road with the complaint that if everyone else had no vacancies they should assume they had none as well. Another suggested that Roach do the decent thing and waste his caps on a cheap hooker in Kiln rather than the one he’d dragged in off the cobbles. That individual was currently sleeping off a concussion on the floor behind his cheap little concierge desk. Nice of the asshole to have a glass jaw, even if it left Roach’s hoof a little sore for the trouble.

On their way to the next shack, one that prominently displayed no less than two signs deterring new visitors, Roach let a touch of frustration show in his voice. “We might have to head upslope and start knocking on doors. Either that or we could find a spot in the woods beyond the wall until things here calm down.”

“Normally I wouldn’t say no to sleeping outside,” she said, dodging the leg of a mare twice her height, “but there’s too many people out here who probably had the same idea, and I wouldn’t put it past some of these fucks to pull a gun on us while we’re sleeping. I vote trying the shacks uphill if we have no luck here.”

Roach led her up the steps of the double-signed inn without much hope in his expression. “If push comes to shove, Aurora and Ginger ran into a gryphon that ran the radio station on the summit.”

Julip wrinkled her nose. “What, that Hightower station? We sometimes picked that broadcast up way out in New… uh, back home. Pretty sure the DJ’s just a local mare.”

The sly cut of his grin suggested he knew something she didn’t. She’d heard about gryphons trickling into Equestria from across the ocean but had never met or even seen one with her own eyes before. She wondered why she’d never read about that when she worked as an archivist. Huh. You learn something new every day.

“Well, if she’s willing to help, I’m willing to hike. I just hope…”

Roach had already pushed through the inn’s door, but she didn’t follow. When he noticed he stuck a hoof out to keep it from clapping shut in her face, curious and a little worried about why she’d stopped in the shade of the narrow porch. His eyes followed hers toward a lone foal seated on a simple plank bench, a colorful storybook with deeply browned pages propped open in her lap. If it weren’t for the red scarf tied around her forehead and the curved, bladeless bar of an ancient schoolhouse paper slicer propped up beside her, Julip might not have noticed her at all.

“Beans?”

At the sound of her name the filly looked up and her big hazel eyes grew wide as saucers. She squealed and the book flopped onto the porch in a flutter of pages, forgotten by its reader as she threw herself across the gap and latched dust-colored wings around Julip’s neck. Mass, momentum, and a bit of genuine happiness sent her tumbling onto her butt as she laughed. “Holy shit, kid! I missed you!”

“That’s a bad word,” Beans gigglingly admonished. “It’s okay, I won’t tell! The people in the wagons said lots of swears and I didn’t tell on them either. Mom and Dad said…”

Hooves tumbled through the inn at the sound of Beans’ shout and Roach came within inches of being sent sprawling when the front door burst open behind him. Meridian filled the door frame ready to inflict murder and worse, only to look down at who her daughter had tackled and have the anxiety drain from her face.

Julip already had her hooves raised in a pitiful attempt at self defense. Who was she kidding? If a living bulwark of a mare like Meridian chose violence, it would be easier for Julip to roll over and accept her future as a smear. “Don’t shoot?” she peeped.

“Mom, Dad, look! It’s Julip!”

It was understandably taking Meridian some time to calm herself. “I see that. Roach, too,” she agreed, her eyes moving from Julip to the changeling standing all but directly beneath her chin. Roach looked as if he too were imagining his future as a stain and had the wide, frozen eyes to prove it. “Sorry, I… I didn’t think any of you were still alive.”

Beans giggled as she stayed locked to Julip’s neck even as Julip sat up. The kid was tenacious and would probably refuse to let go unless she decided it was her duty as a sea captain or her mother told her so. He was hard to make out in the scant gap between Meridian and the door frame, but Briar was back there too and likely keeping his own private heart attack at bay.

Roach gave a familiar chuckle. “Things in Fillydelphia didn’t go exactly as we would have liked, but all made it out more or less intact. I didn’t think you were actually going to take Aurora up on her invitation, though. Did the roads give you any trouble?”

Instead of answering, Meridian only frowned and looked back to where her husband stood. The two shared an exchange that Julip couldn’t make out, but the feeling that something bad had happened was starting to flower in her.

“Hey,” she whispered to Beans, “let’s put our wings away before someone sees, okay? First mate’s orders.”

The auburn filly nodded with a conspiratorial grin and let go of Julip’s neck, allowing her to get to her hooves and tuck her exposed feathers back beneath her duster. Beans did the same, far too late for the brief exposure to go unnoticed by some passers-by, but if asked Julip was more than prepared to deploy a shivering, teary story of her life as a dustwing. In the meantime something was brewing between Beans’ parents.

The passing silent seconds had grown disconcerting by the time Meridian’s head sank, she nodded to Briar, and then turned to fix Julip with a gaze that warned of things she didn’t want her daughter to hear. “Julip, there’s a sweets vendor on the other side of the road. Do you think you could take our Jellybean over so she can pick something out for herself?”

She tensed. “Sure… is everything alright?”

Meridian’s smile made it clear nothing was alright. “I need to talk to Roach about something. He’ll fill you in when you two get back. Okay?”

Whether sensing trouble or simply already knowing what was about to be discussed, Beans’ excitement for a trip to the candy stall began to change to reluctance. “I don’t want any candy.”

“Oh, but I do,” Roach insisted, crouching down to her level with a grin and a cheesy piratical jounce to his voice to go with it. “Yer first mate Roach has been spyin’ them bags o’ taffy what be on display over thar, and only the captain has the authority to relieve him of his booty.”

Beans smiled at that. “Julip’s my first mate. You’re the second mate.”

“Yar,” he crowed sadly as he eyed Julip. “Demoted already, and by the scullery maid at that.”

“Oh-kay,” Julip groaned. Dipping down beside the filly, offering herself as transportation rather than an argument for free admission to the looney bin, she gave her wing a tiny shrug beneath her jacket. “Hop on, kiddo. Uncle Roach thinks we need to spend all our caps on candy.”

Beans clamored onto her back and cheered when Julip rose to the height of her less than proud statue. Any thoughts of what the grown-ups were about to discuss were gone from the kid’s mind and whether spoken or not, it was her job to keep it that way until they were done. She eyed the gaps in the hoof traffic, braced herself to be jostled, and dove into the current. When they emerged on the other side she had to do a little backtracking, nearly a full block’s worth, to reach the chattering crowd of eager foals and exasperated parents waiting around the busy stall.

An older mare ahead in line glanced back at them, then at the visibly impatient Beans who had just plopped her chin a little painfully onto the top of Julip’s mane, and offered a pained smile to her in sympathy. Unsure what the protocol was, she mimicked the expression and added a what are you going to do shrug to go with it. It seemed to translate well. The mare laughed, rolled her eyes at the world in general, and turned to check that her son hadn’t wandered off.

“I want a peppermint stick,” Beans whispered into her ear.

Julip said okay and glanced down at her satchel to make sure it was still there. She and Roach had pilfered a decent stash of caps on their circuitous route from Fillydelphia so the extortionate price of thirty caps for one stick wasn’t going to hurt as much as it probably should. Stealing a glance back across the street, she spotted Roach still standing on the porch with Meridian. Briar had managed to squeeze his way out of the inn too and currently had his hoof on Roach’s shoulder. The two stallions were almost nose to nose as they spoke, their expressions deeply pained and their faces animated.

She frowned at them for a long moment, watching as Roach slowly went from confusion, to horror, and then finally sliding into a deep stillness that seemed to reach across the busy cobblestones to freeze her as well. Briar reached forward and jerked Roach into the kind of hug stallions always seemed to reluctantly, but forcefully throw themselves into. Someone behind Julip cleared her throat and she snapped out of it and moved into the gap that appeared when the line moved in front of them.

It took every ounce of willpower she had to face forward and try to remember what it was Beans had asked for. Peppermint stick. Beans wanted a peppermint stick and Roach had asked for taffy. When their turn came Julip made their order, fished the caps out of her satchel to pay, and began looking for someplace to take Beans where she could distract her. They couldn’t go back to the inn until the adults got themselves under control.

They found an empty wrought iron bench pressed up against a store window that advertised discount guns and armor. Julip gave Beans her treat as they sat down and noticed that the kid’s eyes were on the scene playing out across the road. She didn’t seem surprised by it, just silently attentive as she absorbed this new thing like all kids did at one age or another.

Then, with no prompting at all, Beans looked down at her treat and spoke. “A bomb exploded the Stable. Aurora and Ginger died.”

A cold stone dropped into the pit of her stomach. “Oh,” she said. “Oh shit.”

“That’s a bad word.”

She didn’t have anything to say to that. Across the evening traffic Roach stared over Briar’s shoulder and off into the distance, his pale green eyes large and wet. He looked like he’d taken a bullet to the gut. The sight of him caused her vision to go murky and she blinked at the clouds to keep the tears at bay. Beans could be wrong about Aurora and Ginger. She was just a kid after all, but something in the simple certainty which the filly had spoken and the utter brokenness of Roach in Briar’s grip told her she wasn’t wrong at all.

Elder Coronado stood behind the chair of his desk, his thoughts lost in the photograph hung from a loosened bolt sticking out of his office’s wall panel. He’d brought it along for this assignment to help keep himself centered and it had never failed in that purpose yet. A kirin mare and unicorn stallion smiled out from the small wooden frame, and standing between them showing too much teeth in his awkward teenaged grin was a much younger version of himself. It was a copy of the only family photo he had of them all together like that, the original stored safely away in his safe back home. Coronado liked to take one with him whenever he got sent out on an assignment without a defined end date because he found that as the weeks turned into months and these strange surroundings began pressing in around him as if to squeeze him into a new, unfamiliar shape, being able to look up at a piece of where he’d come from helped him resist all that. His parents shared a grave together now, but their memory and the values they’d instilled in him as a colt glimmered just as brightly now as they did when they were alive.

He stared at that photo for a long while before turning back to the stallion seated across the desk from him, his shaggy coat all but swallowing the heavy straps that kept his wings immobile. Former Director Clover looked back at him with patient curiosity. That surprised him, though he didn’t let it show as he took his seat. Across his career he’d had the opportunity to speak with several captured Enclave officers, all of whom had regarded him with a spectrum of vitriol ranging from silent disdain to open hostility. However Clover was his first defector and while the circumstances of their meeting were unquestionably unique to both of them, Coronado had expected at least some of the haughty superiority to bleed through which he’d come to expect. Clover offered none of that.

“Hm.” The chair’s wooden frame crackled as he settled into it. He noticed the pegasus look up at his horn with genuine interest as Coronado lit it to sort through his paperwork. He tried not to smile at that. It was something all new recruits did, and a few senior ones too, when he used his magic. Kirin hadn’t been particularly sociable before the breaking of the world, say nothing for after. Something about the way their horns grew left some layers a little more translucent than the rest, making for something of a unique light show when magic was channeled through it. He let Clover stare, opting to focus on the papers arrayed before him. “I’ve had some time to read your intake report and the notes taken from your interview with Paladin Barnes. You tell an interesting story, Director. Why should I believe it?”

Unable to shrug with his wings bound, he did so with his shoulders in the common way. “I doubt we would be speaking to one another if you didn’t already. I could list off the reasons why I might be lying, the foremost being the obvious possibility that I hope to somehow misdirect you into taking action that would harm the Steel Rangers, but you already know by now that your intelligence officers have verified everything I’ve told them thus far. And if after speaking to them you still have reason to disbelieve me, excluding my recent loyalties of course, I would very much like to get it out of the way now.”

The smallest of smiles curled his lip as he glanced down to skim the summary report for the data taken from the confiscated Pip-Buck. “They did warn me you didn’t beat around the bush.”

Clover nodded once. “I prefer to be direct, yes.”

He flipped past the summary and looked over some of the highlighted lines in the detailed report. It was pages long. Long enough that the lone paperclip holding them all together had bent under the burden. The Director’s Pip-Buck had corroborated all of his claims since surrendering himself, nor had he attempted to purge any data prior to his arrival. Encryption codes, confidential internal memos, shift schedules for his security teams, even private conversations between him and Minister Primrose were all there waiting to be scooped up and examined. Coronado had no doubt in his mind that Clover’s replacement had been hard at work making sure every access code in New Canterlot was changed and security rotations shuffled, but there was no denying the contents of that Pip-Buck were an intelligence goldmine. He could see no scenario in which Clover could return home without being greeted with a bullet. Giving the Steel Rangers access to just a fraction of what he’d brought with him was treason written in permanent ink.

And the crux of it all lay within one single message originating from a terminal inside Stable 10. That was the blind spot that bothered Elder Coronado, because whether or not it was real it was evident that Clover sincerely believed that Rainbow Dash, the Element of Loyalty from a time remembered only by books and ghouls, had survived the bombs and had proof that Commander Spitfire and Minister Primrose had been the ones to launch them.

Leaning his chin against his fetlock, Coronado skimmed a highlighted paragraph printed beneath the copy of Rainbow Dash’s message. The techs had tried and failed to detect any discrepancies in the metadata that might suggest a forgery. They’d come up with nothing. Even the line tacked to the bottom, added by a clearly frustrated Ranger, sounded petty by comparison.

Although our examination did not succeed in finding evidence of fabrication, it is the opinion of Head Scribe Dune to regard the content and providence of the message in question with the utmost suspicion.

In other words, The Enclave made this, the Enclave made this, don’t fall for it you moron, the Enclave made this.

Laying the papers back down on his desk, he regarded Clover with a curious expression. “What do you want to happen here?”

The former director frowned. “That’s a broad question. Are you asking about what I want to happen to me, or the broader world?”

He chose silence as his answer. He wanted the pegasus in front of him to decide.

Sensing the choice, Clover opted to answer both. “If Equestria ever hopes to prosper and stand above the rubble we’re scraping out an existence in today, its people need to know its true history. Not the version we’ve been fed.”

“This version,” he said, tapping a hoof against Rainbow Dash’s message, “argues strongly that the Enclave alone was responsible for dropping the bombs. Some might interpret that to imply premeditation, which further suggests Primrose wrote the legend of the princesses’ ascendency as a means to justify locking herself into a position of unquestioned power as their prodigy.”

“I’m aware.”

“And that doesn’t bother you that this has the potential to topple the Enclave?”

Clover stared down at the documents between them, his expression hard. “I count myself lucky to have been born in New Canterlot. I was raised with the belief that service to the Enclave would bring my people closer to rebuilding the world our ancestors stole. I choose to still believe that day may still come, but I can’t see a future where Primrose guides us there. I don’t like you, Elder, nor do I like how your people do things.”

Coronado felt a rueful brow lift at that.

Clover continued. “Unfortunately for me, I’m too much of a pragmatist to think I’ll ever find a perfect ally for what needs to be done. The Enclave will never fix our world with Primrose at the helm, not when that means eventually giving the citizenry access to knowledge and technology that might lead them to the truth of what she did. I came to you because you’re my safest bet as someone with the resources and willingness to distribute that truth on a large enough scale. And, whereas I’m concerned, most capable of ensuring I remain safe during the Enclave’s inevitable growing pains.”

There it was. He leaned back in his chair. It gave a satisfied creak. “I take that to mean you’re positioning yourself to take over when Primrose is gone.”

To his surprise, Clover shook his head. He appeared genuinely offended by the suggestion. “Absolutely not.”

It begged the question. “Why?”

Clover tipped his nose to the reports. “Because we have someone better qualified to lead.”

The answer was so blazingly obvious that he felt embarrassed for not thinking of himself long before this meeting began. Minister Rainbow Dash, possibly still alive and hiding within the irradiated caverns of Stable 10, out-qualified any other potential usurper in every category that mattered. It would be no contest whether Primrose was still in power or not. Rainbow Dash would only need to be recognized for who she was and the Enclave’s citizenry - especially their citizenry - would find their own way to justify discarding Primrose in favor of a true hero of Equestria.

He regarded Clover with a thoughtful gaze and could see the same gears spinning in the other stallion’s head. If Rainbow Dash had survived and was willing to lead the Enclave, what did that mean for the Steel Rangers? Would there, at that point, even be a distinction between the two? If not, what would that make any of them? Clover had clearly been mulling this myriad of scenarios over in his head much longer than he had, yet he seemed just as discalmed as Coronado felt.

“I think,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “our first step needs to be verifying whether or not Rainbow Dash is alive. We need to get eyes inside of Stable 10, preferably belonging to both our people if we expect to have any credibility when we go public.”

Clover’s stoic expression softened with relief. Evidently they had come to the same conclusion. “It’s my understanding that the bomb I saw explode shortly after I escaped did so over the top of Foal Mountain. I have to assume that some of my people were able to find shelter inside the Stable and may already know what we know.”

He nodded in agreement. “There were survivors, though I can’t say whether any of them were Enclave. Civilians in the area are well underway with organizing a relief effort at the mountain. Tomorrow morning my Rangers will be escorting a merchant caravan out of the Bluff to render aid and security.”

“And reclaim Stable-Tec’s resources,” Clover added.

“No.” It could be argued that the barb was unnecessary given the context of their meeting, but it wasn’t unfair in light of the extremely unpopular actions taken by the former Elder who preceded him. “I am not Coldbrook. We will go there to see whether Rainbow Dash is still alive and then decide whether Stable 10 can be salvaged.”

Clover’s wings shifted uncertainly beneath their bindings. “We?”

“You’d rather stay here?” He gestured widely to indicate Stable 6, its corridors and compartments choked with Rangers, some of which were unlikely to treat him pleasantly should Coronado embark on a diplomatic trip west. “As you say, there are likely to be Enclave survivors sheltering in the Stable, but I can’t predict what their disposition may be when a couple hundred Rangers arrive. I think it might be prudent to bring along a familiar face from whom they can take orders from.”

He gave Clover time to consider that. When he had, the stallion’s eyes went to the photo hanging behind Coronado’s chair.

“Before I give you my answer, I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“Why the Steel Rangers? What makes all this worthwhile for you?”

He didn’t have to give it much thought. He already knew the answer. “Ammunition.”

Clover frowned. “What?”

“Ammunition,” he repeated. “I want to live in a world where I don’t have to think about how much I have, how much I need, whether it’ll penetrate plate armor, or whether the other guy has something that can punch my ticket while I’m taking a shit. I hate waking up each morning looking for my sidearm and going to bed each night knowing I’ll sleep soundly because it’s loaded. Most of all I hate the fact that a million other wastelanders are forced to lug around a hundred rounds of dead weight for the rest of their lives because they can’t be sure if the next person they meet won’t be just as scared as they are and decide it’s easier to pull a trigger than it is to keep walking. Have you ever been to Fillydelphia?”

The sudden question threw Clover off guard. He shook his head.

“My Rangers and I worked our asses off to make that city feel safe, and in a small way we got there. Bandit attacks were so rare near Magnus Plaza that some of our lifelong citizens stopped taking their weapons with them down market row.”

Clover’s brows went up.

He nodded with a touch of pride. “It’s corny, but I watched people start to exist again like they did before the bombs fell. Nobody told them to do it, they decided on their own. That’s what makes it all worthwhile.”

“I can understand why,” Clover murmured. “What time does your caravan depart?”

“0430 hours, bright and early.”

Satisfied, Clover leaned back in his chair. “You have yourself a diplomat.”

Fiona padded down the cottage’s shake roof and hopped off the side. Paws and claws sank into the soft grass below, a sensation she couldn’t place having felt before. The damp blades were dark and cool to the touch, and the soil beneath compressed ever so slightly beneath her weight. She was used to the unyielding, rocky ground found pretty much everywhere she’d ever been. Even where scrub grass forced its way through the hardpan the dirt would readily crack and crumble. She wondered where the forest got its water from and, more importantly, how it could be so neatly contained within a border barely five miles across at its farthest points.

The shallow slice across her right hip left by a lucky bullet stung more brightly in the damp breeze. It carried on it the strong odors of fragrant plants and loamy earth, not unlike the smells from her childhood whenever her mom would bring home and prepare the scant handfuls of vegetable matter the poisoned soil of Griffinstone would bear. Their neighbor, a crotchety old bird known for throwing rocks at any fledgling caught flying above his property, owned a rot barrel that he claimed turned his garbage into fertilizer. Every spring he would crack the barrel open unannounced and shovel the putrid contents across the dirt behind his shack, leaving everyone within a hundred yards to slam shut windows to keep out the stink and shout obscenities toward the source. And yet every fall his back property would bear a few more tomatoes, a couple ears of corn, and sometimes enough potatoes to keep him from spending his chits at the downhill markets. The dense forest and its sifting breezes smelled a lot like the mornings when he hacked apart his garden and churned up its soil for roots.

Fiona smiled at the memory. She hadn’t thought about that old fart in at least a decade.

The creak of the front door and the uneven sound of hoofsteps pulled her back to the present and she watched with increasing puzzlement as Aurora Pinfeathers limped down the board steps and onto the grass. Confusion shifted to shock as Fiona noticed the whorls of pink skin that stood out along the right side of her body. Up until now she hadn’t fully subscribed to the rumors that the mare had withstood the radiant flash of the balefire bomb. And yet there she was, the feathers along her right wing noticeably shorter and disorganized compared to the untouched layers of its counterpart. There must have been enough left for her to have made it all the way out here, but just barely.

More bewildering was how old the burn scars looked. The several Fiona caught without flat-out staring looked to have healed over almost completely. New skin drew long, threading patterns where tortured flesh had died, split apart, and made way for a patchwork of lighter scars. The survivors she helped treat in the ruins of Junction City still had weeping wounds that required their bandages to be removed, washed, and reapplied at least twice a day. Their skin was still furious red where it showed through burned coats. It would be weeks longer before they healed to the degree she had.

Aurora tugged her into a quick hug, her head barely reaching the base of Fiona’s neck. “It’s good to see a familiar face.”

She returned the gesture with a brief pat on the mare’s undamaged shoulder. From the top of the stairs, Mouse watched the exchange with open mistrust. The foreleg he kept his pistol strapped to hung not-so-casually crossed in front of the other where it would remain visible. Standing in the doorway behind him glared, of all creatures, a gray-bearded dragon. A silver pistol hung in his palm, evidently even less welcoming of visitors than Mouse.

“Yeah, it’s been a minute.” Eyeing the two observers up on the porch, she asked, “Friends of yours?”

Aurora offered a sheepish smile back toward the old house. “Something like that. It’s a lot to explain.”

Her tail swept the grass as she looked up at their glowering faces. “I’ll take your word for it, Feathers.”

“This is my home, Aurora, not a bus stop,” the old dragon called.

Fiona pulled a face. “What’s a bus?”

“Nevermind. How did you find me? Better yet, why are you here? The last time we talked was… well, we were all in that bar with Elder Coldbrook. I didn’t think we were on the best of terms after that.”

“Eh, we weren’t, but I don’t really do grudges.”

That was a bald-faced lie if ever one existed, but she wasn’t about to tell Aurora that. Through bits and pieces she’d worked out at least a little of what had happened after Coldbrook sent her and her friends packing from the Bluff. The ghoul she’d been with hadn’t apparently come with them on their way back to Stable 10, and she didn’t have to dig too deep to work out what fate had befallen the unicorn mare Aurora had rescued from Autumn Song. Like everyone who went looking for trouble in the wasteland, Aurora and her friends had encountered some fashion of it between their last meeting and now.

Dredging up Fiona’s unresolved anger over Coldbrook’s decision to put her in debt in exchange for keeping her radio station didn’t seem appropriate with Aurora looking like someone had spent a happy afternoon beating her bloody with a flaming baseball bat. “And actually, your overstallion’s the reason I flew out here looking for you. Him, and a bunch of ponies who saw you in Junction City when the bomb popped. Oh, and that dude over there.”

She aimed a talon at Mouse, whose face hardened with the mild accusation.

Aurora had begun turning to regard the overgrown mop of a stallion before she stopped and frowned up at Fiona instead. “Sledge is alive?”

Her tone was edged with hopeful skepticism, and Fiona realized she just casually strung together a series of words that utterly opposed the reality Aurora believed she had left behind. Her body felt unusually weighted as she nodded. “I talked to him a couple days ago. He told me one of their computers got a ping from your Pip-Buck that put you somewhere way out here.”

She watched Aurora slowly look down at the device clamped around a knot of cloth wrapped around her foreleg, a Pip-Buck that looked utterly different than the one she’d humiliated Paladin Ironshod to retrieve for the mare. “How many survived?”

“Oh, ah, well…”

The list of things that made Fiona uncomfortable was a short one, practically negligible in most circumstances. At the top of that list: bugs. Not the giant, foal-sized roaches or obscenely bloated flies that swarmed near the glowing boglands pooled at the bottom of her clifftop home in Griffinstone. It was the tiny ones that still skittered around in abandoned houses and clouded the air near a fresh body. Just the thought of being able to lose track of them and suddenly feel tiny itching feet under her feathers and in her fur drove her up the fucking walls.

A bit lower down the list, and only a bit, were stallions who refused to shut up before, during, and worst of all after sex. It wasn’t idle flirting she disliked - that was part of the fun - it was the one-a-week customer whose idea of romance was to explain in vivid detail exactly what parts of her anatomy he liked, what he promised to do to the aforementioned section of her that had caught his interest (there was rarely ever variety), and once started would narrate every tiny thing he was seeing, doing, and feeling. It was like being subjected to a slam poetry session by someone with a captive audience, with the only benefit being that the reading rarely lasted more than ten minutes. The worst part was that they almost universally never tipped.

The worry on Aurora’s face ticked up a degree, telling her she was taking too long to finish her thought. And of course, joining the ranks of that exclusive list of things that made her deeply uncomfortable was, well, this. Personal stuff. Of any kind. A bit ironic given her line of work but when she was in a room with a paying customer she always had the advantage of spread legs or a lilted tail to ever-so-gently guide clients away from regailing her with stories about recent breakups, job stress, and deep personal insecurities. It wasn’t that she disliked the customers who had issues - their caps spent the same and oftentimes Fiona could absolutely relate - it was because if she didn’t tamp down the oversharing it would open doors in the client’s mind that were best left shut. And locked. And bricked over. Once in a while she had to remind some, gently of course, that they weren’t paying for a marefriend or a new best buddy. That they weren’t going to meet up later to talk more over beers. And that little nudge consistently worked.

Maybe, she was realizing, a little too well. Aurora wasn’t a customer and there were no rules she could enforce out here that wouldn’t come off as, well, bitchy and insensitive. Every synapse in Fiona’s brain twisted uncomfortably. Helping Vogel feed and water her patients was a pretty low-conversation gig, and he encounters with Sledge had been so comfortably combative that it felt like half the shouted conversations she had back at Someplace Else.

Easy stuff.

But Aurora wasn’t asking her to change someone’s bandages or fly out to investigate a lost friend. She had believed, up until thirty seconds ago, that everyone she knew back in Stable 10 was dead and was just now discovering that wasn’t true. There was enough baggage here to flatten a building and Fiona had to make a physical effort not to respond with her typical brand of overt humor.

“Yeah,” she said, avoiding eye contact like the literal plague. “They’re still alive. Most of them, I think.”

Aurora’s eyes widened. “What do you mean ‘most of them?’”

“I…” She held up a hand, more to stop herself than the wet-eyed pegasus. “The ones I talked to looked malnourished and one of Sledge’s security people said they had run out of clean water. They didn’t say if anyone had died and I didn’t ask, you know?”

Aurora sagged where she stood. Her words tumbled out on each exhalation. “They’re back to square one. No generator. Not enough power coming in from the outside to run the recyclers and the pumps at the same time. Oh no. Oh no no no…”

She was verging on tears. Fiona floundered to get ahead of her. “Wait, hold on, they do have water now! They do. I got them–” Don’t take credit, you idiot. “–I mean, it’s coming in from the Junction City ruins. They set up a supply route before I came out to look for you. Don’t freak out, okay? They got water. They’re all good.”

The poor mare looked more confused than ever, and frustration for only being fed things in piecemeal was beginning to show. “Sledge went to Junction City? How did he…”

“No, just slow down a sec.”

Aurora fixed her with a glare.

Oh, she hated this. She hated all of this. All of this, she hated. “Junction City came to the Stable. The survivors are kind of relocating there for the time being.”

That seemed to spur a flashback in the mare. She stared through Fiona, her face pinched into a thoughtful frown as she processed what she was hearing. Mouse and the weird, patchwork dragon guy continued to observe from their proverbial high ground on the porch. Both weapons were still very visible, and it took all the self control Fiona had not to antagonize them by pointing out their supposedly impenetrable ring of turrets hadn’t been built to track targets through several hundred yards of dense forest. Whichever one of them set them up had been hoping for a killing field shaped like a disc. The killing field they got, thanks to the unchecked overgrowth, looked more like a donut with their quaint cottage stuck smack dab in the hole. Her thoughts were happily skipping through that field of euphemisms when Aurora finally spoke again.

“How bad was it in Junction City.”

She hesitated to answer. Aurora had to know by now it hadn’t been good. After all, she was one of those survivors. “It wasn’t great,” she admitted. When Aurora stared at her with expectant silence, she gave in and added, “Ms. Vogel said that the fires woke up a lot of people and got them moving before the shockwave reached them. Maybe a hundred or so had gotten clear of the buildings by then. The rest… I mean, the city got flattened and it was mostly built from scavenged wood.”

She hoped that painted enough of a picture without it being too gruesome. During the few days she spent helping, she’d seen enough charred bodies trapped under the rubble to know that few of those in Junction City had died quiet deaths. Aurora seemed to understand it too and thankfully didn’t ask for more detail.

“Did Sledge say anything about my dad?”

Fiona shuffled her wings uncomfortably. “No.”

“What about the radiation?”

Without thinking, she quirked her beak. “I didn’t bring a meter with me, sorry.”

Wrong answer. Oh boy, wrong answer. Aurora shot her a look that was sharp enough to cut. “We carried a live balefire bomb past every level of my Stable. Did he look sick. Did they look poisoned.”

“No,” she said, mentally kicking herself as she did. This was why she avoided stuff like this. “They looked hungry and dehydrated, sure, but radiation never came up. I mean they were all wearing Pip-Bucks and those things have radiation alarms built into them, right?”

“Yeah, and they all have volume knobs built into them, too.” She began to pace across the grass, walking toward the porch steps then turning to head roughly back in Fiona’s direction. “Why didn’t I fix my Pip-Buck first? I could send them a message telling them I’m alright.”

She watched her walking away. “Are you alright?”

Aurora’s tail flicked the air as she turned back. “Fuck no, do I look alright to you?”

A quick beat later she hid her face behind her feathers and muttered, “Sorry.”

“Full disclosure, I’m not good at any of this.” She circled a finger through the air between them to indicate the entirety of their rocky conversation. “Your Stable’s pretty beat up, but it’s in good hands. That’s kind of what you came out here to do, right?”

Aurora looked up at Fiona as if trying to decide whether she was serious or not. “I came out here to fix our generator, not to turn my home into something for the Enclave and Steel Rangers to go to war– you’re bleeding.”

She blinked. “What?”

“You’re bleeding.” She was circling around Fiona before she could reply. “Celestia’s tit , you got shot. Why the fuck wouldn’t you lead with that?”

“It’s just a graze,” she dismissed, sidling her back half away before Aurora could get within poking range. She tried not to make it too obvious when she stole a look at the wound to make sure she hadn’t misjudged it. Sure enough, an eight inch gash no deeper than the pad of her thumb peeled apart her tan coat to expose glossy red tissue. A bright sheet of blood covered most of her flank, thinning to individual rivulets further down her leg. It wasn’t pretty, but it wasn’t an emergency either. “Relax, okay? I’m not about to keel over and die.”

Aurora stopped in her tracks and swayed a little as if she’d been slapped. She passed a long moment glowering at the slick of bloody grass beneath Fiona’s hind paw. “Fuck you.” Abruptly, she turned back toward the house and started marching up the porch steps. “And stay there.”

Fiona stood on the grass, gobsmacked as she watched the mare stormed past her two friends and vanished into the house. The glare Mouse reserved for Fiona somehow managed to darken, but the dragon had no time for her. It bent through the door calling after Aurora in a low voice, clearly concerned.

“What did I say?”

The sounds of rummaging echoed from the open windows along with some spirited conversation she couldn’t make out. From his post at the top of the steps, Mouse leaned against one of the porch posts and simply continued to glare.

A minute later Aurora marched back out with a fat roll of gauze in one wing and a squarish brown bottle in the other. In a flat tone she said, “Hold out your hoof.”

“Um.” She stopped short of correcting her and held out her open hand. Both the gauze and antiseptic plopped into her palm. “Thanks?”

“Flush that out, wrap it up, and go tell Sledge that I’m fine.”

The bottle sloshed in her hand. “Okay, but I kind of implied I’d bring you back with me.”

Aurora’s eyes darted to the gash on her hip before snapping back to meet her gaze. “I’m not dragging anybody else into my shit, especially not anybody back home.”

“If you need help with–”

“I had help.” She flinched at the heat in her own voice, her tone tempering as she forced it to cool. “It just didn’t work out. I’m good. Tell Sledge I have something I need to fix, then I’ll come home. Okay?”

It was very much not okay. “Tell him yourself. I’m not flying all the way back just to say I found you safe and sound but you mysteriously wanted to stay in the woods with an antisocial junk seller and a crotchety dragon hermit.”

But Aurora had already turned back to the house. Fiona watched her limp her way back up the stairs and ask the hermit to turn off the turrets. He grumbled something by way of acquiescence and thumped off into the house, leaving Aurora to pause at the open door and look back. “Goodbye, Flipswitch.”

“It’s Fiona,” was all she could think to say.

Aurora nodded and disappeared into the house, leaving her on the grass to tend to her wound while Mouse glared his disdain from the top of the steps. With no other options, Fiona unscrewed the cap from its bottle and went to work splashing stinging liquid across her bloodied hip. She dabbed gauze against torn flesh a bit harder than she strictly needed to as she tried to decide whether she was pissed off or completely disoriented. Somewhere along the way she’d stepped in shit and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out when it had been. One minute Aurora’s happy to see her again, the other she’s tossing gauze in her hand and telling her to beat it.

She sat in the grass and hefted her leg to wrap her wound. Mouse made a noise and averted his eyes. Normally a reaction like that would make her feel better, but this time she barely noticed. She was too busy replaying the conversation she just had in her head and kept coming to the same bewildered question.

What the hell just happened?

Aurora remained slouched in the couch’s suspiciously mare-shaped dent, staring dully at her reflection in the dark screen of Ginger’s restored Pip-Buck. Oak logs spat and crackled atop the coals of a renewed fire, the thin fog of burning wood worth a fortune in bits back home rolling occasionally into the living room and giving everything inside the cottage a warm odor of smoke.

Discord had all of the windows open to vent what the chimney couldn’t carry away. Another dawn had arrived to help chase away the night chill but Aurora had hardly noticed. Her thoughts were far away as Discord paced uneasily from one room to the next, fretting to himself about yet another visitor he hadn’t wanted and just how long it would be until his cottage would be reduced to some roadside attraction.

Mouse, who had since busied himself with whittling away the bark from two lengths of the hemlock he’d brought for Aurora’s new leg, grumbled around the chewed hilt of a fat knife that Discord was overreacting. He sounded confident when he said that the gryphon still loitering outside had come here to collect Aurora, not steer a hundred curious gawkers toward a patch of green forest that most people he knew actively avoided for fear of catching some kind of prewar supervirus. Even the Cinder raiders steered well clear of the unnatural forest, few of them interested in testing the perimeter of what rumors led them to believe to be the site of an unmarked bioweapon research facility. Munitions factories and ammo dumps they would attack with crowbars and explosives without second thought, but not even the Enclave or the Steel Rangers were suicidal enough to risk releasing a toxin for which the wasteland likely had no cure.

His dispassionate logic did little to assuage Discord’s growing anxiety, and the worried muttering had only grown more frequent as the first diffuse rays of sunlight slid through the leaves. Hoof and paw pad-thumped across the rugs toward the window facing out onto the front porch, and Discord once again paused there to eye the gryphon sleeping outside.

“She’s still out there.” He gripped the edge of the window, meaning to pull it shut, but that would make the woodsmoke pool more thickly on that side of the cottage. Frustrated, he left it be and leveled a finger at Mouse as he resumed his pacing. “You of all people should be concerned. She’s using your wagon as a motel.”

Mouse grunted as he dragged the blade through another shallow cut. Hemlock bark and curled shavings sprinkled his lap and the floor around him. “Can’t get into my provisions if she’s sleeping. I were you, I’d be more worried about how she figured she could drop in the way she did.”

Discord folded his arms and wandered into the kitchen for what seemed the hundredth time. “Oh forgive me for not factoring idiotic hubris into my home security’s design.”

Another wood strip curled away and dropped into the nest of shavings. Mouse paused to press the log against the upper half of his hind leg, then rolled it over and did it again, idly gnawing the knife’s handle as he did so. A moment later he was back to carving. “Nah. That gryphon’s no dunce. Saw her asking questions about Aurora all over Crow’s Grove before she zeroed in on me. She’s got experience sifting bullshit. I’ll bet she figured you set those turrets not to fire toward the cabin faster than you can take a shit.”

Discord emerged from the kitchen sipping at a glass of tepid water, his eyes returning to the open porch window as soon as it came into view. “I’m choosing to believe that was an abstraction.”

Mouse grunted again.

Discord narrowed his eyes. “I’m hiding the clock next time you visit.”

Aurora only half-listened to their bickering. She had turned on the Pip-Buck again, listening to the near silent whine of a hard disk coming up to speed as it ran through the same boot sequence it had the last few times. The Robronco logo splashed once more in full color, pixels dancing and dissolving into a stream of green text racing up the screen before finally settling on a simple pictorial instruction directing a pony’s foreleg through the cuff of a tiny Pip-Buck. The cloth she’d secured between it and her own foreleg was still stopping the device from recognizing her. Chances were when she finally wore it without that barrier, someone working the computers in New Canterlot would be asking themselves why a dead pureblood pegasus had just logged onto the network with Enclave property assumed to have been destroyed. She decided she was tempting fate fiddling with it and powered it down.

“She’ll go away once she figures out I’m not going with her.” She let the cushion cradle her neck as she closed her eyes, the hours of lost sleep catching up to her. “She barely knows me.”

For a while neither of the boys said anything. Discord paced. Mouse whittled. Aurora settled into a semi-comfortable position on the couch and, for a moment, felt herself nodding off. She hoped by the time someone woke her up Fiona would be well on her way back home.

“She ain’t gonna leave without you.”

The simple confidence in Mouse’s voice made her brows knit, and the silence that followed only irritated her that much more. She wanted to stare daggers at the stallion, but kept her eyes shut out of sheer stubbornness. “She will.”

A grunt. “Nah.”

Motherfucker. He’d gone right back to whittling as if that single syllable was argument enough. She rolled her jaw with new anger, trying to squeeze as much sarcasm into her reply as possible. “Thank you for your profound wisdom. How could I have been so blind?”

She felt shitty as soon as the words left her mouth, but she didn’t apologize. Mouse gave her the impression that he wasn’t the type to take a little backsass personally. Judging by the smooth rasp of his knife through wood, it hadn’t even registered.

“Your people sent the bird,” he said, his voice muddied by the knife between his teeth, “to find you, a mare who dropped out of the sky half cooked and more than half dead. Whoever you have back home, they’re probably not so sure you’re alive right now. Doubt they’ll be satisfied if you send that gryphon off with some flimsy promise that you’re okay.”

Anger welled in her throat, bringing with it a litany of responses each of which were as scathing as they were out of line. She swallowed them, letting her silence speak for her until she could cobble together a believable deflection.

“Both of you know what’s happening to me.” Feathers absently rubbed the burns down her right foreleg, rasping pointedly across unnaturally healed gnarls of skin. “I don’t have time. If I end up losing myself to this… process before I can kill Primrose, then she gets away with it all over again. She wins.”

Mouse had no snappy reply to offer nor a dismissive grunt. For a moment Aurora thought he was ignoring her in favor of whittling, but even the soft scrapes of wood had gone quiet. Opening her eyes she realized the stallion was staring at her with deep furrows carved across his brow. He fixed her with a steady stare she’d seen too many times before during her journey toward the coast. It was recognition. A sudden understanding that the mare he was speaking with was dangerous not to others, but to him.

“You’re going to try killing Primrose,” he stated flatly. “Minister Primrose. Of the Enclave.”

By now Discord had slowed his pacing and was beginning to pay closer attention to the conversation. He already knew what Aurora was after. She’d said as much more than once, and each time he neither argued for or against her admittedly vague plan. It didn’t occur to her until now that Discord had always found some way to gently maneuver the conversation toward other things without contributing to the topic of assassination himself.

Before Aurora could say yes, she did in fact hope to send a bullet via express delivery to a destination just behind Primrose’s fourth rib, Discord had addressed Mouse with a tone suggesting he wasn’t strictly welcome for the remainder of this conversation. He suggested Mouse take the prosthesis parts out to the porch where he could keep a weather eye on their avian guest.

Mouse was no dummy. He could make a stink about being shut out or he could do as he was asked. He opted for the latter, knowing the result would be the same either way. Aurora wanted to point out Mouse would be able to hear anything above a whisper from the window facing the porch but opted against being petty. Now that all her cards were on the table, Discord was taking the reins. She let him. She wanted to know what he was thinking.

Once Mouse had taken his crate of supplies outside and left them to their privacy, Discord rounded the coffee table and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. After a moment he said, “You should go home.”

She sat up straight. “Wait, you’re kicking me out?”

He met her indignation with a passive frown. “No, Aurora, I’m stating the obvious. You have family out there looking for you, and a friend outside who found you on their behalf. Why you’re not jumping at the chance is beyond me.”

“I already told you, I don’t have time.”

Discord cocked a brow. “Ghouling is a long process. At the very least you have several weeks before you’ll know which way it’ll go.”

Hearing it described so bluntly startled her more than the uncanny speed with which her burns had scarred over. She wanted to feel angry at him for giving this curse of hers a fixed deadline but settled for merely kicking herself for prompting him in the first place. Something sour grew in her gut as she tried to bolster a weak argument against going with Fiona.

“It’s not just this,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the splotches down her right side. “What if the Enclave spots me? What happens if Primrose finds out I’m still alive and finds some hole in the ground to hide in until someone comes to put me down for good?”

“You can wear a disguise.”

She balked at him. “I can’t just… look, it’s just not that simple.”

“Tell me how it’s not.”

“It just isn’t!” She grabbed the armrest with her wing and pushed herself off the couch. Her hooves led her toward the wood shavings still scattered on the floor where she began scooping them up, squeezing them into little balls, and lobbing them into the fireplace where they burst into a crackling frenzy. She watched them blacken and fall apart, flatting themselves into shrinking mounds over the coals. Then her gaze shifted to Ginger’s Pip-Buck, still clinging dutifully to her foreleg. “I need to do this first.”

Discord watched her for what felt like a full minute before speaking. “Killing, you mean.”

She flicked another ball of shavings into the fire. “Yes.”

“But before you kill Primrose, you have to kill this Eshe fellow.”

Her jaw clenched. “He asked me. He’s suffering alone.”

“Do you want to, though?”

She looked up from the fire and glared at him. “Are you offering to do it for me?”

“No, I’m not.” He leaned forward in his seat, propping his elbows against his knees. “Put the anger aside for a moment and consider the fact that all your enemies have every reason to assume you’re dead. You’re on nobody’s radar. You have a chance to go home, be with your loved ones, and put all of this behind you for however long you have left.”

“Are you actually suggesting I should go home, keep my head down, and wait until the radiation turns me feral? Because that’s a real shitty plan, Discord.”

“It gives your loved ones closure. That’s a fair bit better than leaving them to wonder whether you’re still alive and why you never came home.” When she didn’t answer, he added, “Would Ginger have wanted you to spend your final days obsessing over how to kill Primrose, or would she have wanted you to be safe and happy?”

She turned away, retreating to the glow of the fire. “Would Fluttershy have wanted you to become a lonely recluse?” The words slid off her tongue like ice and she regretted them as soon as they were spoken. “Fuck. I’m sorry.”

Discord cleared his throat, no doubt swallowing some harsh words of his own. “Forgiven. You’re one of the good ones, Aurora. You deserve to be happy.”

“I want to be happy.” She swept the last of the shavings into the fire, stirring up a cloud of embers that swirled up the chimney. “But I have to do this. I promised Eshe I’d help him. And Primrose… she deserves worse than what I can do to her, but I’m going to try my best to make it hurt.”

“Eshe, who is trapped somewhere inside an MOI blacksite with presumably active defenses, and Primrose, who is one of the best protected creatures on this planet.” Discord let his words hang in the air for a moment to be sure she understood. “You’ll have better odds in a group than you would–”

“I said no.”

She turned to see the bewildered frown sink the corners of his lips and knew she was tipping her hand. She couldn’t help it. As much as she didn’t want to talk about it, that tiny piece of her begged to say the words out loud. Rather than torture herself by watching him piece it together, she distracted herself by pacing toward the restored phonograph perched proudly in the corner of the room. Her hoof bounced uneasily on the boards as she gave the crank a few slow, idle turns. Then she let go of it, knowing how absurd it would feel to play music right now.

Her wing slid back to her side and she stared at the old instrument for a long, quiet breath. “Ever since I went outside, I’ve done nothing but get everyone around me hurt or killed.”

The couch let out a little creak as Discord leaned forward. “I’m sure that isn’t true.”

She angled her gaze away from the phonograph she’d fixed just enough to see him out of the corner of her eye. In spite of his reputation, his name, he reminded Aurora of her father in so many ways. Somewhere along those many years he’d developed a paternal side that he wore as naturally as that cheshire smile.

“Before Ginger died, a mare named Autumn Song put a bounty on her head and tortured her thinking she was me. Fiona out there? She lost her livelihood for helping me. And after that, we ran into… this kid, barely out of his teens, who was early into his ghouling and was half crazy. His mom shot Roach in the neck. Grazed him, really, but still. Then Julip got shot. Ginger said she came really close to dying. Real close. And then Primrose sent the bomb to my Stable…”

The words trailed off as it grew too hard to keep her voice steady. She paused for a moment to brush the mist out of her eyes, determined not to let herself break.

“Well, it sounds like your Stable’s okay. You still have that.”

She shook her head, unable to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Yeah, I still have that. Except I’m the reason they almost all died. They’re only breathing because Ginger figured out what the talisman was doing before it could detonate, and now she’s dead. So why would any of them want me to come back home when all I’ve done is make everything worse?”

Discord knit his fingers together, watching her forcing the cracks in her composure back together. “I think you already know why, but if it helps to hear somebody else say it I can do that for you.”

She sniffed, staring at the floor while simultaneously hating and admiring his deft manner of nudging her away from the tempting catharsis of self-loathing. As had been the case since she’d first woken on his couch, bandaged and battered by tremendous pain, he offered a sympathetic ear freely. He would listen up to a point, always stopping short of mindlessly patting her on the back and saying “there, there.” Because at the end of the day he knew it wasn’t what she needed.

Her hooves scuffed over the dry boards and she paused beside the open window facing the front porch. Unsurprisingly, Mouse’s ear was turned toward her as he sent curls of hemlock leaping down the porch steps. Inside the wagon, Fiona slept with her chin rising and falling against her chest. Aurora still didn’t understand how Fiona had come to meet Sledge, let alone talk to him long enough for the grizzled former head of Mechanical to ask for her help.

She touched the two Pip-Bucks she wore and wondered what kind of homecoming she would receive, if she received one at all. Would she be stopped at the door, deemed too dangerous to return to the Stable she’d exposed to enemies far more deadly than a broken generator? Worse, would she be given a hero’s welcome that she didn’t deserve, forced to smile through warm welcomes and sanitize stories of the wasteland for which none of them were prepared.

Staring out at the dozing gryphon and recently retired radio DJ, she knew it wouldn’t pay to worry. The decision had been made for her the moment Fiona dropped onto the shingled roof.

She was going home to finally see the mess she’d left in her wake.

The sound of hooves descending the porch steps gave Fiona a good enough excuse to pretend to be roused from her feigned sleep. She curled her toes and then spread them wide as she stretched, pretending to carelessly shove several of Mouse’s crates into a jumbled crush in the wagon’s corner. She could practically hear the stallion grumbling at the sight of the little mess, though that was wishful thinking. Something told her he was just perpetually grouchy no matter what day it was. Plenty of those back at the Bluff, so why should western Equestria be any different?

She made a show of scratching the invisible crud out of her eyes as she watched Aurora, Mouse, and her dragon friend make their way down the grass toward her. Mouse was muttering off some advice about the two halves of carved wood tucked under Aurora’s wing while the dragon followed, his eyes fixed on Fiona with much less hostility than before. Something about the way it stared made her sit up straight and get to her feet, as if he knew she’d been listening in to the bits of conversation that drifted through the open windows rather than dozing. She stepped over the sideboards and dropped onto the grass in a graceful, feline movement that momentarily distracted both of the approaching ponies. By the time they reached the wagon, however, Mouse was talking again like she wasn’t there at all.

“You can find some decent pneumatic pistons in a lot of old swivel chairs. That’s what I used for my knee joint, anyway. Spent a lot of time modifying it, so it’s not something you can plug in and walk around on. Still, might be worth your time looking into is all I’m saying.”

Aurora glanced up at her before nodding to Mouse. “No, it’s a good idea. Thanks.”

“Sure. Your Stable probably manufactures better stuff than we get out in the wasteland, but yeah. If you stick with a wood core, avoid drilling too many holes in it. You’ll get cracks and it’ll go to shit. Better to clamp some metal hoops around it and add connection points to that. After that you can weld a chassis over the skeleton.” They stopped beside the wagon, and he lifted his own prosthetic foreleg as an example. “Worked for mine, and steel scrap’s cheap.”

Aurora nodded as she turned her attention up to Fiona. “Discord switched off the perimeter guns. How’s your hip?”

She glanced back at the neat wrap of bandages hiked up like a garter on her left thigh. “I’m counting on that graze turning into a cool scar.” The corner of her beak turned up into a smirk. “I’m assuming I’m not flying back alone?”

Her answer came in the form of Aurora holding out in her wing the two carved lengths of what were to become her prosthetic hind leg. Without having to ask, Fiona retrieved her sparingly packed satchel from the wagon and slid both pieces under the flap. The worn leather bulged at odd angles from the rigid load but there was barely room enough to stow them away.

“I’m going, but I’m not staying long.” Aurora stared off past a wall of oaks she must have mistakenly believed to be west, toward Stable 10. Fiona kept that to herself. “Did Sledge say he was going to pay you?”

She hesitated a moment before eventually shaking her head no. “Funny enough, we weren’t thinking about caps.”

“I’ll figure something out,” she murmured. “Before we go, I need a couple assurances from you. Non-negotiable.”

Fiona eyed the mare.

“First, you don’t tell anybody about this place.” Aurora gestured around at the little oasis among the trees, then to the spindly old dragon behind her. “Or about him. If anyone asks, you found me holed up in that Crow’s Grave town where you met Mouse.”

“Grove,” Mouse rumbled.

Aurora didn’t acknowledge the correction and instead waited for a response from Fiona.

With no real reason to argue, she shrugged and nodded. “Alright, I was never here. What else?”

She expected Aurora to tack on a caveat that she not speak to her during the flight back, or that she leave her alone as soon as they arrive. From the snippets she’d overheard during her feigned nap, Aurora was convinced she was some sort of death magnet for everyone around her. Even now, Fiona could see the clear difference between the mare she was speaking with now and the wide-eyed Stable mare who nearly flew head first into the side of Blinder’s Bluff. The wasteland did what the wasteland always seemed to do. It had smothered Aurora’s light under a heavy blanket of dust.

“That’s it,” Aurora said, missing the opportunity to isolate herself further. “I need you to carry some other things, too. Food and water. Some hardware for my leg. My saddlebags are back home, and–”

“Got it.” She had a good idea why Aurora’s bags were back at the Stable and didn’t want to force her to explain it. Giving the contents of her satchel a good shuffle, she decided a few more things wouldn’t bust the seams. It would be like lugging a rock halfway across the map, sure, but that’s why they made painkillers for sore muscles. “It’s a long flight. If we don’t take breaks, I’ll bet we’ll arrive before dusk.”

“We’ll see. I haven’t flown since… well, since.”

Fiona could sense the awkward silence coming before it had a chance to settle in. There wasn’t much in the way of preparation that needed to be done, not for this flight. It was just a matter of taking off and stacking the miles behind them. Only she could tell by the way Aurora kept looking away there were goodbyes to be said.

“I’m going to take a couple minutes to check out those flowers.” She turned toward a patch of orange petals perched atop a thicket of swaying green stalks. “Give a shout when you’re ready to go.”

Green light flashed beyond the mouth of the tunnel and the explosion followed close on its heels.

Someone standing in line ahead of Dusky shouted a reflexive curse while others shifted uncomfortably on their hooves. He glanced up in the direction of the voice, his body tired and his thoughts in a fog of grief. In the end it hadn’t been the death of the generator or fear of the growing number of violent incidents that had driven them outside, but thirst. The great cisterns which the creators of their Stable dug at the height of a forgotten war had finally, inexorably run dry. Reclamation systems meant to run for another three centuries found themselves lacking the power needed to keep up with the demand even at quarter rations. The entire Stable had been reduced to sipping from the same vanishing puddle and, if the defeated whispers in the halls were to be believed, most of Dusky’s friends and neighbors had been prepared to lock themselves in their compartments to die with what little dignity they could manage.

No one asked what that resolve meant for those with children. The answer to that question was clear in the eyes of parents who had already spent the last several weeks dreading it. And Stable 10 had come close to those nightmares becoming a reality. Close enough that, even now with water arriving by the barrel from strangers from the outside, many residents weren’t just holding their own bits in their feathers but bits belonging to several families at least. They had slid so close to the precipice that it was still visible in their minds, so much so that some were too ashamed of what they had prepared to do to leave their compartments to collect water.

Thunder, a word Dusky hadn’t until now experienced outside of old books and grainy films, rippled into the mouth of the tunnel to echo across uneven flagstones and smooth concrete pillars. He glanced past the end of the long water line out toward the sickly, flickering sky, then down to the half dozen bits in his wing. He rolled one over, reading the worn Sparkle-Cola logos in the shifting light provided by cookfires and lamps built into the bulky armor suits worn by the recently arrived Steel Rangers, and tried to find the humor in the idea that civilization had carried on after the bombs fell and that the currency of choice had fallen to the lowly bottlecap. The outsiders just called them “caps,” according to Sledge. Out of stubborn principle his fellow residents chose to call them bits, possibly as a way to maintain a firm line between inside and out.

It didn’t matter to most that the door had been knocked open and the outside air already flowed through the vents of their Stable. Some taboos defied reason. They had all been taught from birth that the outside world was toxic and would remain so until an invisible clock known only to Stable-Tec counted down to zero. Only then could the outside world be resettled. It was true because Stable-Tec said it was true.

The line moved forward. Dusky folded his feathers over the six caps’ pleated edges and stepped into the spot that opened ahead of him, the six empty canteens slung over his neck clattering in a flowing chorus of others rippling behind him. Three belonged to a young family of outsiders that arrived earlier today. They were pegasi except for the mother who made up for her lack of wings with sheer brawn. They arrived on an armed wagon train, more new words for him to learn, along with what seemed like enough soldier folk to fill a whole Stable on their own. This family claimed to have met Aurora during her expedition through the barren lands outside, an assertion that had quickly gotten them escorted inside to speak to Sledge and, once the earth pony named Meridian relinquished her considerable weaponry, to Dusky. Their conversation had been brief as it was intense. Meridian and Briar hadn’t planned on meeting him, hadn’t known he existed until they were introduced. None of them knew exactly what to say and the platitudes they offered felt hollow. He didn’t know these people, but they were here now and they’d known his daughter. Probably they had felt guilty when he’d volunteered to find them some canteens down in Supply, but he’d excused himself before giving them a chance to say otherwise.

The fourth and fifth canteens had been assigned to a pair of new arrivals Sledge wanted him to speak to but for which he hadn’t yet made the effort. He worried if he indulged the overstallion without resistance then the parade of strangers would never end. Aurora had made friends out there in the wider world and for that he would forever be proud of her. For now, that had to be enough.

He lifted a feather to the last canteen, his canteen, and wondered how long it would take for the fog to lift.

He yawned as he stepped forward with the movement of the line. The world beyond the tunnel was stuck in a worsening haze of darkness that refused to divulge any details of what lay beyond except for the occasional flash of lightning. A “radstorm,” he’d heard someone further back in the line call it. Not a thunderstorm. The outsiders called it a radstorm.

A middle-aged mare passing the line with freshly filled and considerably heavier canteens sloshing from their straps met his wandering gaze, pursed her lips into a pensive line, and nodded once to him. He nodded back. She didn’t speak to him, nor did Dusky need her to. The meaning was the same no matter who it came from:

Condolences.

He cleared his throat and stepped forward with the line. They filed along between columns holding up an arched roof taller than any ceiling he’d seen before. He felt exposed, but more than that he felt like an intruder in a place of power. This was the tunnel through which the first generation of survivors, their ancestors, retreated into the Stable. This was a place built by people who saw the end of their shining civilization on the horizon and who knew their magic, as miraculous and powerful as it was, would not be able to save all of them.

His gaze went to the broad posters still preserved behind glass frames along the walls. Faces of dead princesses and ministers stared out from yellowed paper toward their descendants. Slogans from a war long ended warned them against forgotten enemies, cowardice, and dissent. They were cracks in the facade of the perfect world the bombs were said to have reduced to ash. Warnings, Dusky thought, not to defy those who would fill a Stable with pegasi and callously leave anyone else to die on their doorstep.

Lightning burst across the sky outside and a shredding whip crack of thunder caused the entire water line to falter. One of the outsiders shouted reassurances above the uneasy murmurs and, when the ponies dressed in all manner of leather and rags near the tunnel’s opening didn’t show much concern for the weather, the line continued to move. Dusky watched a mare tilt her full canteen to her lips as she left the line and sauntered over to a group of unicorns busy stacking crates in front of one of the ancient war posters. The tunnel carried her voice as she asked whether they might see rain before the storm ended. The consensus between the outsiders was that this wasn’t a raining kind of storm. Dusky had to reach deep to remember the illustrations of different types of weather they all learned about as students and vaguely remembered rain being a phenomenon when water fell from the sky rather than misters plumbed across the garden plots. He felt a strange urge to leave the line and join the small clutch of residents huddled together at the end of the tunnel, eyes wide and mouths hung slack as they watched the crashing storm with no fear whatsoever. The canteens around his neck clattered impatiently and he let temptation fade.

When Dusky’s turn came at the front of the line, a unicorn stallion wearing tightly bound bandages around his midsection filled each of his canteens from a tap fixed at the base of a blue barrel while a wingless, hornless mare took his caps and wrote the names stamped into each canteen into a worn ledgerbook. He flinched a little each time the unicorn let water burble over the lip of each canteen and dribble onto the wet flagstones, but kept quiet. More than a dozen identical barrels stood lined up against the wall nearby, ready to be tapped and poured. He thanked the outsiders, received polite but distracted acknowledgement, and soon he was stepping aside to make room for the pegasus behind him.

There was a moment where he wasn’t sure what to do next. He stared at the flagstones, at the way age had forced their edges to sink beneath layers of dust until the floor was an uneven remnant of its former self. He stood there until someone else left the line, jostling him a little as they passed, and slowly his hooves began to rise and fall as he joined the scattered trail of pegasi back to their Stable.

Lightning flashed again, and so too came the rumble of thunder. A few gasps rippled down the line as he passed by but he paid it no mind. Murmurs followed, and a few shushed whispers. Neighbors, he assumed, who were just now seeing the storm for the first time. But the voices grew louder. He glanced at the line and saw widened eyes fixed on something behind him, then growing wider with recognition and almost at once turning to him. He frowned, suddenly worried he’d dropped a canteen and spilled precious water, and stopped to take a look back.

The creature approaching him towered over the other residents still waiting in line and instantly reminded him of a charcoal tracing of a golden eagle that his brother had once made when they were still young and curious. His hackles rose, but only for a moment. Then his eyes went to the mare limping along beside the creature and he forgot to breathe.

Before his mind could process what he was seeing, he found himself gripped around the neck by his daughter. Seconds passed as he stood there, mute with shock, unbelieving. The tunnel shimmered behind grateful tears and he realized he was crying. He threw his hooves around Aurora and squeezed her, wanting to be sure this was real, and the uncomfortable oof she made drove home the fact that she wasn't imagined. She was here, truly alive and home once more. Canteens clattered as his knees gave beneath. The tears grew into convulsing sobs, and he felt ashamed that Aurora had to ease him down to the flagstones. Distantly he was aware of all the times he'd held her like this when she was so very little.

As a disbelieving crowd began to peel off the water line and mill toward them, his only daughter rocked him gently as he wept.

Word spread into the Stable of her survival as soon as her father recognized her in the tunnel. He’d taken it upon himself to bear water not just for Beans and her family, making good on a promise Aurora hadn’t thought possible to keep, but for Roach and Julip too. Her first impulse upon hearing her friends were here in her Stable was to ask where they were staying and renew the bond they’d been forced to break after departing the oil rig with the Enclave. In between her nights with Tandy and days with Discord, she’d worried about what might befall them on their way back to the Bluff. Apparently nothing had, or at least nothing so significant to delay them.

Thoughts of reuniting with them fizzled at the idea of telling them that Ginger was gone. Roach had, in his way, all but adopted her as a surrogate daughter. The two of them only first met when Aurora was in her last days of schooling, dealing with hormones and worried about embarrassing her mom if she failed her apprenticeship in Mechanical. She’d forced herself to be strong for her dad, but holding him while he sobbed into her shoulder had rattled her. She couldn’t handle that twice in the same day.

Which is why she felt some relief in knowing she wasn’t staying long.

Limping alongside her bleary-eyed father and using Fiona’s bulk to push through the first curious onlookers to trickle out into the tunnel, Aurora heard only pieces of what he was saying as they passed through the shattered mouth of her home. Their shadows chased ahead of them over the threshold and joined the deeper dark of the unlit space beyond. Only the light from the lamps back in the tunnel offered them any clue to where it was safe to step. Her chest clenched at the sight of the great cog slumped in the far corner of the antechamber, a full third of it buried beneath shattered concrete, steel, and the mountain’s exposed bedrock. A thin layer of chalky dust coated the yellow 10 at its center as it did a wingful of other rare surfaces in the antechamber yet undisturbed by so much traffic. Aurora noticed the paths cut through the loose rubble like trails carved through wood by termites. Rusty splashes that weren’t shadows darkened much of the floor around it.

She tried not to stare at the evidence of so much carnage, but how could she avoid it when it was everywhere? She knew what the dark stains on the rubble were. She understood the forces the door was intended to withstand and could piece together herself what had happened to anyone caught standing on the other side when the blast roared through the tunnel like a superheated battering ram. Her Stable survived the bomb, yes, but not without casualties.

To her relief, the emergency lights still glowed dimly behind their plastic domes once they reached the security office. Pale light illuminated deep fractures in the wall where it had buckled from the violence of the outer door’s impact. Plastic sheeting hung in the doorway to the Atrium, the heavy zipper running down its center seam having been lifted open and the flaps held apart by straps some time before her arrival. A safety precaution by someone with their head on straight quickly demoted to a necessary nuisance by the hundreds of survivors whose thirst overrode their fear of breathing contaminated air. Plastic crinkled as they passed through and Aurora’s heart sank at the sight that greeted her on the other side.

Instead of stepping onto the second level promenade, she found herself at the top of a makeshift set of hastily welded stairs. Much of the upper level lay in ruins on the Atrium floor, where the largest pieces of twisted steel rails and catwalk were thrown onto the collapsed section of wall below the overseer’s office door. It didn’t take much time for Aurora to figure out in which direction the outer door’s impact had propagated when it struck the far side of the antechamber. For anyone standing in the Atrium when the bomb went off, seeing that section of wall burst apart must have felt like the end of the world. She swallowed as she remembered how popular the Atrium was with the Stable’s youngest residents, then tried her best to distract herself as they descended on uneven steps.

She almost tripped on the last one when someone’s hoof slammed a welded step behind her. The sharp bang came again, and again, causing her to look back to see a stallion she didn’t recognize stamping the iron. No sooner had she tried placing him did another hoof start sounding ahead of her, belonging to the waitress she’d spoken to ages ago in the Brass Bit. Then more hooves joined in, and Aurora slowly realized the Atrium was filling and the stomping crowd was looking at her. Applause. It swelled, echoing off the ruined walls of her home as people she knew and many more she didn’t trickled in from the corridors to join in. Someone whistled. Another fired off a peel of their own, and yet more kept spilling through gaps in the crowd. Many were smiling at her, some were not.

A film of tears blurred the mass of familiar faces. She could feel the floor vibrate beneath her own hooves and the noise soaked into her like something physical. She swallowed harder and blinked to clear her vision, knowing she wasn’t worthy of anything like this. The rings under their eyes were because of her. The great door had been destroyed because of her. Ginger was gone because…

From the heart of the thundering crowd emerged a familiar face that stopped her cold. Pale green eyes, lit with an inner glow, met hers. Pegasi on either side of him flinched away once they noticed who they were standing next to but the calm smile pulling at the shattered black chitin around his muzzle didn’t dim. Roach had lived too long to be bothered by his own appearance. He stepped forward, leaving the thundering applause behind as he crossed the floor of a Stable he’d spent centuries standing as its lone sentry.

She forced herself not to step back, but the urge was powerful. She didn’t want to tell him. Not here. Definitely not now, when he looked so relieved to see her! And then it hit her. Of course he was relieved. They all were, because they knew what happened. Roach already knew what happened.

His smile broke ever so slightly as he wrapped her up and crushed the wind out of her, and for a moment Aurora was lost for words. Her father had politely stepped away to give them room. She could see Julip stepping nervously out from the crowd, unsure whether she should cross the gap or keep her distance. She half expected Sledge to bowl his way through the Atrium shouting all manner of joyful profanity but if he was here he’d chosen to remain in the background. Then it occurred to her that Roach was sniffling.

“I’m so sorry.”

His apology rumbled softly in her ear, but it roared through the brickworks containing her grief like a cannonshot. Roach knew Ginger was gone and the first thing he thought to do was apologize to her. The last vestige of Aurora’s strength dissolved like sugar in water, and the first sob to roll up her throat was a noisy, ugly thing she couldn’t stop. More followed. Her chest shook with them as all the pain, the guilt, the shame of being given a second chance at life at the cost of someone loved by many bore her down to her knees.

Quickly the applause fell silent, the crowd shamefaced and uncertain, as Aurora fell fully apart.

Primrose stared at the capsule, then at the paper cup. With a grimace she tossed back the pill and chased it with a swallow of water. The cup made a hollow noise when she set it on the table. Slouching a little, she raised the edge of her hoof to the pulsing ache just behind her right eye and went about massaging it.

“Ma’am?”

She sighed, then twirled a feather in the air for the young officer to continue. Already the faint buzz of stimulants and something new, something the doctors promised would clear some of her sleep-deprived fog, were beginning to work their magic. Rebound alone wasn’t keeping her awake anymore and if they didn’t figure out a solution to her problem soon, either someone was going to start putting out feelers for a replacement or she’d be leading the Enclave with a Jet inhaler up her ass.

She giggled at that, causing the worried gazes of two loyal generals and a glorified computer geek to turn her way. It took her half a second to compose herself, but the damage was done. She glared back at them, daring them to say anything out of line, and soon everyone’s attention was forced back to the only lit monitor in the war room.

The young officer, one of the stallions charged weeks ago with decrypting the data the Enclave had pulled from Autumn Song’s servers well before the local tinned soldiers arrived at the solar array, aimed the tip of a retractable wand to an object on the monitor. “As I said, ma’am, the telemetry sent from the solar array explains the eccentric orbit we assumed SOLUS had been moved into after the bombs fell. We can only assume what Jet Stream’s intentions were when he sent the command to fire the reaction controls fully lateral, but my best guess is he was hoping to raise its apoapsis high enough for–”

Primrose could feel the fog lifting already. She sucked in a refreshing breath through her nose and savored the temporary clarity. “Kid, I never went to space camp. Put it in words I can understand.”

The captain frowned thoughtfully at the display, and Primrose suspected he’d already been giving her the dumbed down version. “Jet Stream survived at least a week after the bombs fell. So did pieces of the network his company built.”

She was well acquainted with Jet Stream’s spider web of fiber optics buried beneath the wasteland. They were the prime reason his ex-wife’s homemade computer worm had jumped from StableTec’s network and onto the servers Autumn Song would later guard as jealously as a dragon on its horde. Better yet, it was the entire reason Primrose had been forced to shut down Stable 10 two centuries ago.

For all the good it did.

The captain continued on trying to tread the line between keeping things simple and insulting her intelligence. “A week after the bombs fell, he sent commands to SOLUS telling it to reorient to face the direction it was traveling and then fire its reaction control thrusters to accelerate. We reviewed our records from the launch of the fuel module and estimated the amount of propellant on board would allow it just over six minutes of continuous thrust before its stores depleted. Since we know where the satellite was when it began accelerating and how long it accelerated for, we got a pretty good idea of what its new orbit looked like. After that, it was just a matter of running the clock forward.”

He tapped the screen, which depicted a slightly pixelated map of the world. The pointer came to rest on a white line that slashed diagonally across the planet’s surface. Primrose couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose at it. She’d seen plottings of SOLUS’s orbit more times than she could count, all of them wrong, but every one of them drawing different forms of orderly oscillating waves. This single line had escaped her notice because it looked like the computers had simply misaligned two halves of the map. She had to squint to see the faint curve on either end of the slash, the only evidence she could make out that this was truly meant to represent an object in orbit.

She sat back in her seat, confused. “So where is it?”

“We observed its latest fly-by tonight,” the captain beamed, and moved his wand to a timestamp printed near the leftmost end of the line. “We lost direct contact a little over an hour ago as it ascended beyond the range of our receiving equipment. Our next window to communicate with SOLUS will be on the evening of the first of May.”

Her eyes were wide, and not just from the pill. “We’ve established communication?”

To her dismay, the captain winced. “Not… exactly. It’s still broadcasting telemetry. I don’t think it ever stopped after the last transmitters at JSA went dark. We can hear it, but we can’t talk to it yet.”

She gestured for him to explain.

“Um,” he wavered. “Well, it’s two things, really. Mainly it’s just encryptions. JSA used proprietary code for the SOLUS project so we’re still learning how their systems stored the keys. I’m not sure when we’ll have them for you but I guarantee it won’t be long.”

“And the other problem?”

“The clouds, ma’am.”

Her expression darkened. The captain wasn’t the first pegasus to complain about the clouds her factories pumped into the air, but it was a rare day when anyone thought themselves so important to bring it up to her directly. “Those clouds keep the Enclave safe, captain. Without them, any simpleton with binoculars can radio our movements to their allies like they’re the morning traffic report.”

The captain floundered, clearly too young to understand the last part. “I’d never suggest we clear the air, ma’am. Never.”

She kept him fixed in place with a glare. “Then what’s the problem?”

“Th-they cause interference with long-range signals, ma’am. SOLUS is traveling shy of seven miles a second by the time it drops within signal range and at that speed our window to send commands before it drops below the horizon line is incredibly narrow. Less than twenty minutes.” He cleared his throat. “Under current, ah, conditions it takes nine to transmit a complete command and receive a denial.”

Two shots at cracking the encryption, followed by an eight day wait for it to come around again. Not ideal, but leagues better than where she thought they were just a day ago. She had to remind herself that this was ultimately good news for her. They knew where SOLUS was. Enclave observers had seen it pass overhead with their own eyes. How far along could the Steel Rangers be? They had Autumn’s servers, certainly, but how much of what was on them could they understand when their best computers amounted to whatever consumer-grade terminals they’d been able to dig out of the rubble?

She leaned back in her chair, feeling the tired muscles in her back stretch as she reminded herself that the Rangers in Blinder’s Bluff had gotten hold of Aurora Pinfeathers’ Pip-Buck long enough to flash a copy of its software for themselves. It was a small miracle they’d managed to lose possession of the device but even so, it was more than she wanted them to have. If she sat on this too long it would only allow her enemies to pry that window of opportunity even wider.

“I want the encryption problem resolved before the next fly-by,” she decided. “Take whoever you think will be useful.”

The captain balked. “I can think of a few names off the top of my head, but this encryption is going to take longer than–”

She cut him off with a swipe of her wing. The pill was working. She felt fantastic, and the gears were finally turning without the slightest hint of rust. SOLUS could fix everything. Not just her problem with the Steel Rangers. That goal had just been demoted to an afterthought. A bonus that came after something greater.

With a weapon like SOLUS at her disposal she would have leverage. Real bargaining power against the stranglehold the Tantabus had trapped her in. Luna’s creature was sentimental to a fault. Prone to loneliness. It craved company and had already demonstrated its willingness to ruin the minds of those who threatened its playthings. And what good was it to be the master of a dream realm without any dreamers?

Primrose found herself giggling in her seat yet again, but she ignored the worried looks from the others in the room. Her Enclave had the weapon. Knew where it was. Understood how to talk to it. And now they had the raw data within which lay the key to activate the machine.

SOLUS wasn’t just a bargaining chip. No, it could upturn the whole damn table.

Next Chapter: Chapter 46: Mariposa Estimated time remaining: 14 Hours, 35 Minutes