October 31st, 1077

The terrified voices of pegasi, unicorns, and earth ponies echoed throughout the momentary blackness of the Ministry of Technology. Few understood what was happening. Fewer believed what their Pip-Bucks said was even possible, that the zebras had ever begun developing balefire weapons let alone been able to deploy them from an ocean away.

When the lights stuttered back on, whimpering cries morphed into sobs of relief. Coworkers and colleagues of Applejack’s ministry, now survivors of a catastrophe whose scope and breadth would take days for them to fully comprehend, studied the swaying lamps of the supply warehouse few of them ever recalled entering before. The deep, elemental rumbling that had shaken their subterranean workplace until the lights finally flickered out had seemed as if the entire mountain was collapsing around them. Now able to see once more, with the only sounds to be heard that of the still-wailing emergency alarms and their own bewildered cries, those who had spent the majority of the last five years working together began to notice strangers among the survivors.

These new faces, many of them pegasi and most of them huddled together in shaken, tearful groups of their own, had to have come from the other ministries high up the mountain via the express elevators that connected them all. With trembling steps the Ministry of Technology survivors would slowly mingle with these newcomers and find that though they all came from different ministries of their own, they had been members of an interministerial association called The Enclave. Their Pip-Bucks had instructed them not to shelter in place like all the others working topside, but to evacuate here.

None of them understood why whoever had sent these separate instructions had not done so for the rest of the ministries, but when word spread that rubble had fallen down and blown out the doors of all four express elevators the mystery was quickly forgotten. A new panic loosed itself throughout the collective survivors as a group rushed out to the railway past the loading docks, the only other way out of the complex from where they had gathered, only to find themselves hemmed in by blast doors that had dropped across the tracks during the chaos. Radiation alarms in their Pip-Bucks chattered wildly when they drew near those impenetrable steel gates, and it was at that point they understood the futility of escaping. For all the weapons, the armaments, and the stockpiles of heavy equipment stacked neatly throughout the warehouses, every one of them knew the death that awaited them if they chose to breach those seals.

Unbeknownst to those lucky survivors, one mare among them was observing the aftermath of their downfall with silent interest. Those who noticed her would never question the spots of blood drying on her pink coat, nor ever come to know how long she had been down there among them before the alarms began to sound. In the coming days they would inventory the supplies they had, but no one would think to open the hermetically sealed crate tucked inconspicuously among the stacks outside the loading docks, its manifest label stating simply, HAZARDOUS WASTE. This would prove lucky for Primrose. For should over the course of the next decade somebody have made the disconcerting decision to open the lid, not only would the survivors of that early Enclave have recognized the broken bodies of two of their own, but they would have all come to understand just why they felt all the Laughter had been stolen from their world.

A soft knock pinged off the compartment door. Aurora leaned over on her mattress and reached a wing toward the switch, only to glance up to see Sledge watching from the other side of the open frame. She folded her feathers and shook her head. “I keep forgetting.”

“Makes two of us,” he murmured, eyeing the interior of her compartment. “Can I come in?”

She waved him in and he stepped over the threshold, eyes sliding over amenities a few well-meaning engineers down in Mechanical assembled back when Rainbow Dash lived here. Apparently they moved her up to a compartment on the uppermost level, just a door down from Sledge’s new digs in fact. A lecherous thought scampered across her brain which she kept to herself. Sledge was a bachelor from stem to stern, and he’d gladly go to his grave that way. Rainbow Dash, well, Aurora could only assume he lacked the parts she was interested in. She filed it in the back of her head for a time when emotions were less raw and times were less fraught. After that, Sledge was in for the teasing of a lifetime.

She watched him cross her cramped little living space toward the tool chest and its makeshift coffee setup. Aurora had taken all of an instant to recognize the old percolator from the break room and had wasted even less time starting a fresh pot. The room still smelled faintly of bitter grounds and it was a lovely thing.

Sledge didn’t bother asking before pouring a cup for himself. The burner had shut off hours ago but he still sipped at the old mug as if it were scalding hot. His eyes fell to the narrow book in her lap and he nodded in its direction. “Don’t think I’ve ever seen you read anything that wasn’t a maintenance manual. Is it any good?”

She peered down at the neat, looping cursive and shrugged a noncommittal shoulder. “It’s a diary. We picked it up in an old cabin not long after we set off from Junction City. I’d forgotten Ginger still had it on her.”

The diary, along with all their other possessions from their trek through the wastes, had been tucked away safely inside their two sets of saddlebags. Aurora looked to the worn number ten embossed into the set she'd inherited years ago, then regarded the bright, unmarked leather of one of two identical field support bags Ginger and Roach had acquired during their dive down to the bunker complex beneath the Stable-Tec HQ crater site. Ginger's bags were empty now, their contents reverently transferred into Aurora's old set one piece at a time. She didn’t quite know what had prompted her to open the diary's cover - maybe some vain hope she’d discover something in Teak’s childhood thoughts that would explain why Ginger had done what she did - but what she did find had her flipping through the pages until a mare coming off third shift poked noticed her still awake and gently told her the time. That convinced her to put the diary aside and lay down for a short nap.

Her short nap had lasted the better part of twelve hours. When she finally woke, most of the Stable was winding down for the night. She hadn’t even been that tired, but after taking a personal inventory she recalled the long flight back to the Stable and the rough night of little sleep that preceded it. Finding Ginger’s writing scrawled in the margins of Teak’s diary had been a shot of caffeine, and the moment she looked away her body had forced her to catch up on the sleep she lost.

Tandy hadn’t minded the company, though, and had taken the opportunity to tour Aurora and Eshe around the corners of Old Canterlot that her creator had gone to pains to keep private. Privately, she worried that she might have disappointed Tandy with how often her attention had wandered during the dream. The confectionary shops, bookstores, and the little theater that played obscure films at a discount had been interesting but what held Aurora’s attention was the infrastructure that made it all work. She’d kept stopping to look at utility meters in the alleys, transformers strung up on wooden posts, and big wooden tanks hidden behind rooftop billboards. She was used to the idea of all these things being efficiently contained within the confines of a deliberately designed Stable, not scattered haphazardly across a living city. And yet, according to Tandy’s recollection of Luna’s memories, this was how the world worked way back when. It was how Blinder’s Bluff worked now. With the great cog blown off its metaphorical hinges, maybe this was the way Stable 10 needed to work too.

When she finally woke, her thoughts had inevitably drifted back to Teak’s diary and the notes Ginger had written. Now, with Sledge here, she realized she hadn’t so much as showered before opening the book again. Not that there was water to bathe with, but that didn’t lessen the embarrassment of knowing she probably smelled like something that dropped out of the back end of a molerat.

If Sledge noticed, he didn’t show it. “You holding up okay?”

She shrugged. “Better than yesterday. I kind of sucked the life out of the party when I showed up.”

“Nothing anyone’s holding against you. We’re all just glad to know you aren’t… erm…”

“Yeah,” she said, saving him some embarrassment. “Me too.”

They were both quiet for a while as they digested their new reality. Aurora stole a glance at one of Ginger’s notes, a quick charcoal scribble. “Snores when she sleeps on her right side.”

A tiny laugh snuck out of her when she read that, earning her a curious brow from Sledge.

“She was taking notes.”

He sipped his coffee and walked over for a better look. Aurora held the diary open and tapped the entries on the margins. A moment later, he snorted with a rumbling chuckle. “Says here you like to sing when you’re shitfaced. If I remember, you were always the first to leave soon as anyone said the word karaoke.”

Ginger hadn’t phrased her entry exactly the way Sledge quoted it, but there was a brief mention of her enthusiasm for bad karaoke being proportional to her consumption of cheap beer. Aurora smiled at that, remembering the night the three of them enjoyed in the unfortunately named Glowing Gash and the following evening sleeping on the floorboards of an even cheaper upstairs room. She tried to remember which side she had slept on that night before deciding Ginger’s memory was more reliable than her own.

“Who knows, maybe radioactive beer is special.” She could still taste the Rad-X they’d had to eat to prevent their visit to Kiln from making their hoofprints glow in the dark. Yet in spite of the tremendous bomb crater the town resided in the shadow of, part of her still wanted to go out and visit the ghouls she’d met when they passed through. They all seemed so ordinary compared to the rest of the wasteland. As if the radiation was the only part of their world that changed after the bombs fell. “And if you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.”

Sledge smirked as he watched her press the covers together. “That’s sort of the reason I came down to see if you were awake. The radiation, I mean.”

The bed frame squeaked as she sat up a little straighter. “How bad is it? Roach told me the deputies had already reopened the corridors we took the bomb through. I thought that meant the contamination was minimal.”

His expression made it evident they weren’t on the same wavelength. “It’s not that. There’s radiation, yeah, but the numbers are closer to background than anything we’re picking up in the tunnel. Folks out there are doing okay, so… erm, it’s not that. Your friend, the changeling, he’s up in Medical right now. He asked me to wake you up so you could let the doctors take a look at you. See if there’s anything they can do about your condition.”

She let out a sigh and pivoted her hind leg over the side of her bed. “I already told him there’s nothing they can do about it. He knows it too.”

Sledge took a sip. “I think he wants to give you the best chance of making it through the other end of it. Can’t fault him for that.”

“I’m not.” She dropped to the floor, wobbled a little before getting her balance situated, and turned to drop the diary back into her saddlebag. She didn’t think anyone would walk into her compartment and make off with it, but then again she hadn’t thought someone would trick her into walking a balefire bomb into her home. “I just don’t think our Stable has the magical mystery cure for ghouling, is all.”

“You don’t want him getting his hopes up,” Sledge supplied.

“Him, Julip, my dad, you,” She began to lift her bags, planning on throwing them on before remembering she wasn’t going anywhere they’d be needed or out of reach. Setting them down, she instead settled to shove them under her bed for safekeeping. “You’ve still got my rifle, right?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I’m not,” she lied. She still felt weird without the old bolt-action hanging beneath her wing, especially now that she had her bags again. “You owe me a canteen for the coffee pot, by the way.”

“Pinfeathers.”

“I know.” She rubbed her eyes between her feathers, fully aware of how transparent her stalling was. “I just didn’t expect yesterday to be so intense. My dad kept offering to set up the bed in my old room and Roach kept worrying over all my scars and Julip kept apologizing for not seeing all this coming… I mean, my face is still sore from all the crying.”

Sledge frowned into his coffee. “You never were the weepy sort. Still, Roach is waiting for you upstairs. I’ve already talked to him and he sounds pretty confident that this ‘ghouling’ thing is decided once it starts happening, but he’s never had access to a proper hospital either. More radiation isn’t going to hurt your chances, but who knows if we might have a treatment here that could help them?”

“Be easier if I had my rifle.”

“Be nicer for them if you didn’t.” He downed the last of his coffee and, realizing there was no good place to set it down, hung its handle from the empty wall hook where her wing guards were meant to hang. “You leading the way or am I?”

She answered with a theatrical grumble and graciously swept her wing toward the door for him to lead. After a reluctant look back at her old compartment, she breathed an uneasy sigh and turned to follow.

October 31st, 1097

The Pillar’s survivors gathered along the edge of the loading dock that overlooked the disused railway below. Behind them, their home for the past two decades stood as a silent sentinel over what kind of life they had all endured together.

Supply shelves reaching from floor to ceiling had been bridged at the ends with sheets of plywood and the long rows encased between them had been further partitioned to create something resembling single-room apartments. It was a design they had agreed upon as a group in that first year and it had worked better than any of them expected. The Ministry of Technology had lacked little in the way of building materials, all of which had been curiously gathered inside the warehouse the Enclave members among them had been directed to evacuate to. Elsewhere in that same warehouse they had discovered a stockpile of the same food rations the Equestrian Army ate on deployment on the Vhannan front. There was medicine, tools, clothing, and folding cots. Most importantly had been the discovery that the plumbing, having been placed on an independent system due to the vertical distance between their location and the rest of the ministry higher up in the mountain, still worked and the cisterns being fed by wells bored deep into the water table showed no radioactive contamination. Few of them had questioned their remarkable luck. Those who did found themselves shunned by the others.

They had built themselves a life here, but the time had come to see what had become of the one the bombs had taken away from them.

An impatient whine from a filly unused to seeing so much tension in her mother’s face was the only sound that broke the silence. The other children gathered among them, seven of them in total, stared down the train tunnel where twin ribbons of iron disappeared into the darkness. They could all hear the crunch of ballast stone beneath the hooves of the stallion who had volunteered to sample the air at the blast door. All was silent except for one filly’s fussing. None of them paid much attention to the pink mare standing in the back, eyes the color of bricks distant and uninterested in the impending discovery of what she already knew.

A shout echoed out from the tunnel. “No radiation!”

His exaltation was echoed by a wave of celebratory cries that ran the length of MoT and Enclave survivors alike. Tears flowed freely as friends, neighbors, and new families turned to clutch one another, leaped into the air, or fell to their knees under the weight of so much relief. For those who once worked inside this concrete tomb, it was time to go out and see what had become of their homes. It was a moment of sorrow. Of knowing there was nothing waiting for them out there except possibly closure. For those who had done their small parts to aid all the ministries under the banner of the Enclave, it was the joy of knowing that they might finally be reunited with family members safe within the Stables. Chief among those Stables were 6, 7, 10, and for some of the highest ranking unicorns and earth ponies, Stable 1.

Preparations were being made within the first hour. By the end of that day, saddlebags were being unpacked from crates and stuffed with food and supplies. On the morning of the third day ten suits of power armor lay crouched beneath a steel beam they had welded to the face of the southern blast door. Enclave and MoT survivors watched from the rails as the signal went up and forty mechanical legs tensed, servos groaned, and inch by inch the steel barrier that had insulated them from the horrors of an apocalypse lifted out of the dirt.

The corridors were unusually active this late in the evening, but Aurora supposed that was to be expected now that the survivors of Junction City and - to a much larger extent - the Steel Rangers had begun delivering crucial resources during the week following the bombing. While life inside the Stable had become decidedly less comfortable since the generator finally gave up the ghost, there was a growing sense that the bottom might just be done dropping out from beneath them all. They had water again and rumor was the Steel Rangers were working out temporary contracts with the newly independent trading guilds to secure food deliveries to the Junction City folk. The Stable would continue to live off half-rations of what was left in Supply’s emergency stockpiles, but those would last well past the timeframe Elder Coronado had suggested for their first delivery.

It would be rough living compared to what they were used to, but most understood they were in a much better position than before. They had water, food, clean air, and security in the form of the Steel Rangers who no doubt relished the fact that they’d taken the Stable back without a fight from the Enclave. The people of Stable 10 could finally relax. As a result, many had turned the residential corridors into communal spaces where neighbors chatted in open doorways, foals ran rampant from one compartment to another, and a palpable sense of relief flowed easily through it all. Their lives were going to be different, but they were going to be okay.

Sledge grunted as a filly a third his size screamed past and hooked his hind leg with her wing, shamelessly using him to swing herself out of the hall and into the compartment her friends had already darted into. A mare inside greeted them with stern warnings to slow down and start getting ready for bed, but Aurora knew those kids were too energized to hear any of it.

Some of the adults noticed her following the overstallion and their casual smiles quickly diminished to something more funerary. Aurora grimaced on the inside while doing her best not to let them see her discomfort. A stallion close to her father’s age touched her shoulder as she passed and said he was sorry for her loss. She offered a polite smile and a nod in response, unsure what else if anything she should say to that.

Ginger would tell her to be patient with them. She’d assure her they were just as unsure of what to say, and Aurora knew she’d be right. It was just one of those things people needed to do to clear the air. It wouldn’t last forever. Besides, she’d survived worse things than well-meaning condolences.

Sledge looked back at her. “Last flight of stairs coming up. Think you can manage one more climb?”

She made an unhappy noise. Spending the past week recovering had meant little if any real exercise, and now her hind leg was paying her back for the neglect. Walking in a straight line was okay, but climbing steps pissed her knee right off. They’d been taking each flight one at a time with walks across each level to give her joint some time to settle. It wasn’t a perfect solution but in the absence of a functioning generator to drive the Stable’s elevators, it was the best she had to work with.

“I’ll be okay.” She tried not to sigh too loudly when Sledge stepped ahead to hold open the stairwell door. Seeing the stairs reminded her of how she felt during her ascent from the bottom of Stable 1. It was entirely reasonable to think half the reason he knee was giving her grief stemmed from the climb up that endless spiral staircase. “Fair warning, I learned some new profanity while I was outside. Probably going to use all of it.”

He chuckled as he started up. “I’ll cover my ears.”

They arrived on the Medical level without offending too many delicate sensibilities, though Aurora hadn’t exactly considered how far up and down the stairwell her voice could carry. By the time she left the stairs she’d needed to grit her teeth just to keep every third step from startling the nurse at the reception desk. He waved them through and Aurora found herself walking down the same shiny floor she’d been following doctors down since she was a filly. Only now the shine came from the dim emergency lights along the ceiling rather than stark white fluorescent tubes. A right turn took them down a wide corridor away from exam rooms and offices and after passing through an unlocked set of double doors with the bright red letters of NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT centered down the seam, Sledge led her past a procession of surgeries and recovery rooms.

It wasn’t difficult to guess which one they were heading toward. Julip’s green back half stuck out of the open door whose frame she’d taken to leaning against, and Aurora felt oddly heartened to see that she’d kept the tiny black braids in her tail where Ginger and Beans had worked together to reattach what had been salvaged after Ginger’s nightmare on the rails. Probably Julip had lost track that the intricate little knots were still there, but Aurora chose to believe otherwise.

The sound of their hooves drew the ear of the Enclave’s former soldier and she took a step back to see who was coming. Her lip pulled up into one of her characteristic smirks. “Look who finally woke up.”

Julip balled the end of her wing and lifted it. Aurora did the same, and they bumped feathers as Sledge led her into a surprisingly cramped room. Not for the lack of floor space, either. There had been plenty of that available before Roach, Julip, Fiona, Sledge, and a very uncomfortable looking doctor piled inside.

The doctor, her personal physician, Doc Fetlock, looked thoroughly irritated by the presence of so many visitors while simultaneously helpless to shoo any of them away. It would take some heavy equipment to get Roach or Julip to budge on someone’s request other than Aurora’s, their mutual bond and recent events being what they were, and if Paladin Ironshod hadn’t been able to collar Fiona then the poor doctor stood no chance at all. Aurora wasn’t even sure she’d had the pull necessary to get them to scatter. At best, she thought, they probably would loiter outside the door.

She scanned the room for anything remotely shaped like a speculum before vaguely moving in the direction of the sterile white bed opposite the open door. Evidently this was either a recovery room, or one of the quarantine wards they assigned residents who were too sick to risk sending back to their compartments. Somehow Fiona had squeezed herself into the corner of the room not occupied by labeled cabinets or expensive medical equipment. Roach sat on the floor at the head of the empty bed, and the doctor stood uneasily at the other end with a clipboard pinched between two feathers.

“She’s all yours,” Sledge rumbled to the doctor, then made a one-eighty back toward the door. “I’ve got some things I need to take care of yet before I log some hours on a mattress. All of you know where to find me if something comes up.”

Julip shot a sour look after him as he retreated down the hall. Aurora just tried not to laugh. She’d noticed the faintest flush on his face as he turned tail and suspected the nail-spitting, steel-hided Head of Mechanical had been afraid to stick around and risk seeing something he didn’t want to see.

She reminded herself to give him heaps of shit about that every chance she got.

As if reading her mind, Doc Fetlock cleared his throat and spoke. “You can take a seat on the bed or stand, it’s up to you. For now I only have a few questions I’d like to ask to better understand your condition.”

Aurora gave the bed a glance before opting to climb up to give her hind leg a breather. She noticed Roach’s eyes drift briefly over her deeply scarred stump before shifting up to meet hers with an apologetic shrug. She shook her head to tell him she wasn’t keeping score. She’d have to be blind not to understand how distracting it was.

“Your friends,” Fetlock said with a note of disapproval, “are adamant that they remain present for as long as you’re comfortable.”

She glanced at Roach and then Julip. Neither of them looked the slightest bit disconcerted with being called out, nor did she expect them to. As far as she was concerned, they were both family. Fiona, however, looked slightly less resolved. Up until now Aurora assumed someone of her profession would be immune to social discomfort, but there the gryphon sat looking unsure if she should leave or stay.

“They stay,” she said, surprised by the firmness in her voice. “All of them.”

The doctor huffed out a tiny sigh, giving up any further argument. With his free wing he plucked a ballpoint pen from the crook of his ear and poised the nib atop a blank line on his chart, just below a block of scribbled notes. “Roach has already given me some basic insights into your condition… this ghouling process. Apparently the symptoms and severity vary from person to person with no reliable indicator for how extensive they will be. He tells me, including himself, you’ve already met several other ghouls during your journey outside the Stable most of whom still retained their faculties. Is that right?”

Aurora settled on the edge of the bed and considered the question. “Mostly, yeah. I ran into a few ghouls that had gone feral out in the tunnel, and a stallion who was starting to go feral a few days after that. But yeah, all the other ghouls we met were more or less all there.”

“We avoided the abandoned towns,” Roach chimed in.

She frowned at Roach. She didn’t remember ever being told they were taking detours and wondered whether that had been for her own protection.

The doctor didn’t share her concern. “Would you say there are more or less feral ghouls than non-feral?”

She gestured to Roach to answer. He hesitated, sucking on the corner of his lip before responding.

“More,” he said. “Significantly more.”

Fetlock scribbled some notes in his clipboard, pinched the pen beneath the spring-loaded clip, and stepped toward Aurora’s right side with his freed wing held open. “I’d like to look at your foreleg, please.”

She held up her hoof, pressing her lips into a terse line as the doctor squinted over the scars coiled down the outside of her leg. Something about having them examined so closely bothered her, but she managed to endure Fetlock’s curious scrutiny.

“Second, possibly third degree burns,” he muttered to himself. “Significant regrowth. Aggressive, even. Did all of these scars come from the explosion?”

It took a beat before she realized he was speaking to her again.

“Yeah,” she said, frowning at the splashes of bare skin where her coat hadn’t begun growing back. The doctor turned her leg this way and that, his glasses balanced precariously at the end of his nose. “I was out in the open when the flash got me.”

“Mmhm. Thermal radiation.” He poked a knot of scars below her knee and she jerked her leg away. “I’m sorry. You still have sensation there?”

“It’s sensitive, yeah.”

“Painful?”

She shook her head. “No. Just sensitive. A lot more than it used to be.”

He scribbled that into her chart. “Interesting. How are your other senses? Taste, smell, eyesight…?”

“I went blind for the first couple of days after,” she admitted. Seeing the way Roach and Julip’s expressions grew suddenly concerned, she tried for some levity. “I don’t have x-ray vision just yet.”

His eyes lifted toward hers and fixed there as if trying to judge something from the way she looked back. “But it has recovered since?”

She winced. “Mostly.”

“Define mostly.”

“I can see fine,” she asserted. “It’s just that things are a little fuzzy around the edges now.”

He wrote something down that looked suspiciously like the words prescription glasses. “What about your appetite?”

Julip smiled from the doorway. “Yeah Aurora, have you been keeping regular?”

Doc Fetlock spun around with what was probably a withering glare, which gave Aurora time to bite down on the inside of her cheek to keep from cracking up. Even Roach and Fiona were politely avoiding eye contact with the doctor, both wearing the tiniest of smiles. It felt good to get some of the awkward tension out of the air.

“All the internals feel okay,” she said, a little relieved when the doctor turned his attention back to her rather than making the mistake of stomping on the living landmine that was Julip.

“What about your mind?” Roach rasped.

The question caught her off-guard, but judging by the doctor’s exasperation it was one he had been building up to. She blew out a deep breath and looked at Roach. “I don’t feel like it’s gotten any better or worse. I mean, I don’t remember much of my flight after the bomb, but I don’t feel all scattered like Gallow was.”

“Gallow?”

She glanced at the doctor. “One of the ghouls I ran into. He was showing signs of going feral.”

He hummed at his clipboard. “I’ll have to ask the overstallion to see if one the outsiders can send for him. He might have some insights into how–”

Roach jumped to interrupt. “She’s healthy, though?”

“Well…” the doctor demurred, turning from Roach to Aurora, “I can only speak to what I’m seeing, and that isn’t saying much at all. Perhaps if the outsiders can restore our power, then we could see about taking some blood and tissue samples from you for a proper analysis. In fact, before you leave today I’d like to take a blood sample regardless to get a baseline cell count.”

Needles. Yay.

“As for the meantime,” he continued, “you’re in much better condition than you ought to be, considering what you survived. Whether or not you’re healthy, I can’t say. If you feel okay, then it’s safe to assume you’re probably okay. But if you notice anything start to feel different, or worse, I want you to tell someone sooner rather than later.”

Because if you keep it to yourself and lose your mind too quickly, you might attack somebody close to you.

The unspoken reason resonated through the room like a silent drum, felt but not heard. Aurora frowned and nodded into her lap.

“Worst case,” Julip murmured, “you catch a case of immortality and spend the next century or two convincing young, innocent Enclave soldiers to defect.”

She smiled a little at that. “Nobody would ever accuse you of being innocent.”

“Fuckin’ right they wouldn’t.” She shot a quick smirk at Roach, yet another unsubtle hint that the two were closer than they’d been the last time they were all together. “You want to tell her or should I?”

Roach stiffened. “Uh.”

“About her leg,” she prodded.

It took him a moment to catch up, and another to realize they were waiting on him. “Oh! That’s right, Sledge asked some of the people on your shift to work on your prosthesis. They wrapped up this afternoon while you were asleep.”

At that, Fiona reached behind her back and held out the finished limb with both hands. Aurora couldn’t help it. She grinned like an idiot as she slid down from the bed to take in the sheer craftsmanship evident in the construction. The two lengths of hemlock Mouse had procured and cut to size still retained much of the shape he’d initially carved into them, though the rough strokes of his knife had since been sanded down to gently tapered contours. As she accepted the gift from Fiona, she couldn’t help but notice how much lighter it was than she expected. It had heft, but no more than felt right.

Her feathers slid over the bright silver of each leg joint. “This is all titanium. How did they even work this without a lathe?”

Fiona made a see-sawing gesture with her hand. “Sledge said they had to get creative.”

She looked closer at the connection points where smooth hemlock gave way seamlessly to titanium coping. In the dim light she could just barely make out the spots where someone hadn’t quite been able to polish out the crescent marks left behind by an understandably frustrated hammer. Someone had been highly motivated to persuade their design to work. It comforted her to know her failure to save the generator hadn’t burned her bridges with her fellow greasers.

She couldn’t be sure, but she suspected the pneumatic pistons built into each joint had been harvested from some of the various machine jacks they used to move heavy equipment. With diligent maintenance those parts were liable to outlast her. Then her attention fell to the prosthetic hoof. At first glance it looked like it was made from solid titanium, but logic quickly overrode that assumption. There was zero chance someone milled a hoof from stock titanium, not without electricity, and she quickly the carefully matched seams where two sheets of metal had been cut to shape and wrapped around a stock medical grade prosthesis part. She held back a smirk, knowing how annoyed her people must have been to be forced to install a premade component on their work of art, and pretended not to have noticed.

“It’s amazing,” she finally said, running her feathers over the soap-smooth rim of the socket. “Really, this is… wow. Can I put it on right now, or…?”

Behind her, the doctor shrugged. “I don’t see why not. If you need some privacy, I’m sure–”

“C’mere Julip, I need your shoulder.”

Julip left her spot at the door to oblige, leaving the doctor to swallow his disapproval as his patient used the smaller mare as a crutch as she sat down. Aurora trusted her remaining hind leg to bear the effort of sitting about as graciously as a hot metal poker, and the last thing she needed was to spoil her first time with the new leg by falling on her ass. When she got seated on the floor, she wasted no time turning the prosthetic around in her wing and pulling the socket over the ugly stump. It seated into place with a soft expulsion of air. It was intuitive, and she felt confident that suction would be sufficient to keep it attached when she stood up.

“Okay,” she said, pushing off Julip’s shoulder with a grunt. “Help me up.”

“Goddess, you’re heavy!” the smaller mare complained.

“Quiet down in the peanut gallery,” she parried, and after a bit of effort she was up once more, but this time standing on all fours. The relief in her aching leg was swift and she lingered a bit against Julip’s shoulder, relishing the difference. “Ohh, that’s so much better.”

The seal around her stump strengthened as she let more of her weight settle on the mechanical leg. She let go of Julip, the younger mare practically fleeing to Roach wearing an embarrassed grin of her own, and tried to get a sense for this new feeling of support without exertion.

“You’ll want to give yourself breaks every few hours or so,” the doctor said as he stepped beside her, running a probing feather to check for gaps along the socket. “Your friends were wise enough to install a release button inside the thigh. I’ll let you find that on your own time. Pressing it will open a relief valve which will break the vacuum inside the socket and make removing your leg relatively easy.”

Her instinct was to lift her leg to look for the valve but chose not to tempt fate. With her balance so deceptively restored, she imagined the floor was looking for any excuse to come up and smack her in the head. “Do I need to do anything specific to, yaknow, walk?”

“Aside from being careful where you step, no. It’s been calibrated such that when you lift your leg to step forward, the pneumatics will straighten each joint to receive your weight on the next step. Sledge expressed confidence in Mechanical’s design, although not before suggesting you take some time over the next few days to calibrate each of the pneumatics to a setting that feels closer to what your natural leg used to do.”

“That’s a lot of words just to say no,” Roach mused.

If the doctor saw the humor, he didn’t laugh. “It’s a custom prosthetic, not a peg leg.”

Roach rolled his eyes, an accomplishment given their lack of definition beyond two faintly brighter glowing points. Beside him Julip looked as if she were contemplating the good doctor’s demise.

From her corner, Fiona spoke up again. “Just throwing it out there, but that’s not going to come flying off if she tries kicking someone in the balls, is it?”

Fetlock looked up at the gryphon with measured amounts of unease and amusement. “That’s… a scenario I wouldn’t expect it to come loose during, no.”

She realized Fiona had brought up a good point, and no doubt she’d done so deliberately to bring it to Aurora’s attention. She wasn’t planning on sticking around the Stable for long, and the wasteland never fell short of figurative and literal curveballs to trip her up along the way. If she allowed herself to grow dependent on this new leg, she needed to know she could depend on it through any weird shit she was planning to stroll into.

She made a mental note not to forget to bug Sledge about it in the morning. Maybe he could whip up some straps like the ones Mouse had suggested she use. It wouldn’t do any good to ask him now when he was practically dead on his hooves. And it wasn’t as if he were the only one fighting off sleep. She noticed as the conversation lulled, Julip’s head started to bob toward the floor. Roach, well, sleep was more an indulgence than a necessity for him. And Fiona was practically nocturnal, though even she seemed to be edging toward exhaustion.

“Well, there’ll be time later to work out the kinks.”

Julip snorted. “Kinks.”

She ignored her. “I’m going to have my wings full tonight getting used to this thing, and you guys look beat. How about we regroup in the morning?”

A consensus of nods ran around the room, with the exception of one.

“I have a few more questions to ask regarding your condition,” the doctor pressed, “and I would like to take some blood samples.”

“Okay. We’d better get to it, then.”

Roach tapped his hoof against hers as he led Julip to the door. “We’ll catch up in the morning.”

She smiled and watched him go, then nodded up at Fiona as she rose to leave as well. “Did Sledge get you a compartment in the Stable?”

The gryphon shook her head. “Nah. He offered, but I can’t fall asleep in these things. No offense.”

She shook her head. “None taken. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

Fiona fired off something resembling a salute, padded out into the hall, and trotted off in the same direction as Roach and Julip.

“The world gets bigger every day, it seems.”

Aurora glanced toward the doctor, thought about that, and found herself in agreement. She considered saying something to add to his observation but saw that his clipboard and pen were once again at the ready. He had boxes to check and hypotheses to form.

“So, uh, before we get into all that, I need to ask you something first.”

Fetlock frowned. “About?”

She chewed the corner of her lip for several seconds before deciding to just ask the question.

“How much experience do you have with AutoDocs?”

December 2nd, 1137
60 Years Later

Word was spreading throughout New Canterlot about a pegasus immune to age.

The world the survivors of the Pillar had stepped out onto four decades ago was as foreign to them as it was deadly. The capital city of Canterlot had been destroyed. It had slid down the side of the mountain, they had learned, like an avalanche not composed of snow but of buildings, busy streets, and people. Many of the survivors they met in what the locals had begun calling the wasteland seemed to agree the zebra’s first target had been the floating city of Cloudsdale, triggering an understandable and long-lasting fury among the wasteland pegasi and which proved just as infectious to those who had just emerged. That a peaceful city with little to do with the war effort had been Vhanna’s first target was too much an insult to bear, and the mantra Remember Cloudsdale would soon pass the lips of those who believed pegasi were the foremost victims of the bombs.

Magic, they discovered, had been so scattered by the entropic fires of the apocalypse that the unicorns of the wasteland could hardly harness enough of it to lift a tin cup. The clouds above would not bear the weight of the pegasi. The soil did not bend to the will of its tenders. Over those first few years the survivors from the Pillar would notice their own power weaken and fail as the poisons of the new world robbed them too. They quickly realized what remained of Equestria was slowly dying, and if they had any hope of having a life worth suffering through they could not subsist on the scraps rotting in irradiated ruins. Equestria would not continue existing without a city from which to rebuild the wheels of power, and those wheels would not turn without leaders to direct their movement.

A council was decided upon and soon the difficult work of building something out of nothing had begun in earnest. Scouts were dispatched to explore what remained of their world and at the same time teams were organized to retrieve the building materials stowed away in the Ministry of Technology warehouses. Within the year the first real houses had sprung up in view of the freshly scarred mountainside. By the end of the fifth year they had constructed and powered a radio transmitter from which a message to all survivors was broadcast across the continent. All survivors of the war would be welcomed and provided for in New Canterlot provided they were willing to put in the work. The trickle of newcomers that arrived over the course of the next year was disappointing, but that disappointment paled in comparison to the horrendous news the scouts had returned with in those early days. The news of Stable 10’s destruction hit the Enclave population hard, but there was nothing to be done. Life, unfortunately, had a nasty way of going on with or without them.

Yet forty years after stepping into the wasteland, as winter capped the slopes of Canterlot Mountain white with new snow and residents of that growing city warmed themselves in front of roaring fires, there came fresh rumors of a mare named Primrose who should have been well into her twilight years and inexplicably wasn’t. She showed no withering like the corrupted things seen wandering the wasteland, and when council members arrived at the door to her single room inside one of the unadorned shared houses near the fringes of town it had seemed to them that they had been expected.

Primrose answered their questions as best she was able, and from the council’s interview a picture of her began to emerge that no one knew quite what to do with. The mare had served as a secretary for Commander Spitfire and her duties within the Pillar could be summed up in a single word: unremarkable. Her life outside of work had been similarly unnoteworthy, with the exception that she sometimes made time on weekends to sign herself up for the tour groups that frequented Canterlot Castle. Further probing coaxed her into offering up the embarrassing admission that she had felt particularly drawn to the late princesses, though for what reason she could not explain. When asked, she could not recall the last time she’d fallen ill or felt particularly abnormal. She ate two square meals a day, never once missed a day on the compulsory scavenging details which steadily chewed through the rubble of the old capital, and slept no better or worse than she had before the bombs fell.

Her answer to their last question, the one they had intended to wrap up with, had prompted a last second addition by one of the council members. He asked what she meant when she said her sleep was unchanged since before the world burned, and she answered as candidly as she had every other question. She lay down, fell asleep, dreamed, and always woke up with the dawn.

It was the admission to dreaming which would change her in the eyes of her peers from a medical curiosity to someone with far more ordained potential. Whispers spread like wildfire of the forever young mare who had once felt compelled to see the immortal princess and who to this day closed her eyes on the waking world and opened them onto Luna’s Dream. Neighbors who before now had never paid her much mind were knocking on her door to offer favors, seek advice, and ask direct questions about her condition.

Primrose received all of them with a grace and patience that some thought better fitting of an alicorn princess and not this lowly former secretary. They did not know about the crates upon crates of recalled Stimpaks she’d discreetly ordered her allies among the Enclave to reroute into the ministry storehouses, each crate forebodingly labeled as medical waste to deter the curious. They did not know every answer to their questions, no matter how rude or probing, was deliberately honed to a surgical edge. None of them believed this kind and quiet mare was the reason their world had burned or that they, the survivors of that culling, were being manipulated into building a throne in their own minds for them which they would eventually place her upon.

The only creature who knew the truth, the entire truth of this world aside from herself, was the lonely creation of a dead princess. And as the rumors coalesced into belief, and that belief grew into a following, Primrose would step out into the ashes of the world she ended and with mock-reluctance accept the council’s resignation. New Canterlot, The Enclave, and her own power would rise atop the bow shock of a religion driven forward by those who craved to be ruled.

And elsewhere in the wasteland, remnants of Old Equestria’s shattered ground army would take notice and make plans of their own.

It was well past midnight by the time she left Fetlock’s office. He’d been understandably resistant to the notion of discussing how to kill a patient under the care of a medical machine, and after explaining Eshe’s unique circumstances she’d regretted the dawning horror on the old stallion’s face. It was clear he’d never considered what might happen to someone strapped into an AutoDoc if all the medical staff suddenly disappeared. They talked about Eshe’s withered condition, about the tubes Aurora remembered running in and out of him and whether simply turning off the bed would be enough. Fetlock had shaken his head.

“He’ll suffocate to death without the ventilator breathing for him. It’s a deeply unpleasant way to go.”

Fetlock began to suggest a more immediate method of death but she’d cut him short, making it crystal clear she wasn’t prepared to shoot Eshe while he lay there waiting for the bullet. He didn’t deserve a violent death and she didn’t want to put him in a position where he had to be the one to coax her into pulling the trigger. That was no way to spend one’s last moments.

Eventually they came around to something that felt like a solution. If this Mariposa place was equipped to operate AutoDocs, Fetlock surmised that they had to be stocked with a supply of drugs for the living breathing doctors on staff to use. If Mariposa was some sort of detention center, it was even more likely that they would keep anesthetics in stock.

“Propofol,” Fetlock had suggested. “It’s a potent anesthetic. Give him a little and he’ll drift off like he’s going to sleep.”

Aurora hadn’t been able to look the doctor in the eye as he continued.

“Administer enough and… well, his heart will eventually stop beating. He’ll go without feeling anything.”

The uneven echo of clip-clop-clip-thump rebounded through the empty corridors. It had been a few hours since she’d spoken to Doc Fetlock and her thoughts about what she promised to do for Eshe refused to settle. She pictured Gallow dying a terrible death on that stretch of lonely road, reduced to having pieces of his body flung away by bullets his executioner had been too unskilled to place accurately. What if, when the time came, she didn’t have it in her to fulfill her oath? What if she did it wrong and Eshe’s last seconds were some unforgivable agony?

Her prosthetic leg swung into each step when she shifted her stump forward. It was taking some getting used to but a little bit of practice was taking her a long way. It didn’t help that every so often she needed to stop and wait for the world to stop spinning. Fetlock had gotten almost all the samples he’d asked for, blood being the foremost liquid he stole from her. No generator meant no bakery. No bakery meant no cookie. He’d injected her with a tiny amount of glucose to keep the worst of the nausea at bay while she adjusted, but all she could think about was that she’d given him blood and hadn’t seen so much as a chocolate chip in return. It was practically criminal.

She’d already figured out that she didn’t have to hike her entire hip into the air for the pneumatics to kick in. They were always primed, ready to slide forward as soon as the friction holding the dense elastomer cap of her new hoof to the floor gave way. The trick was to be careful and not let herself think of the prosthesis as a fully functional limb waiting to do what she imagined a normal leg would do. If she took enough pressure off her stump, it would fulfill its simple function of extending each joint as if she were taking a step forward. Great if she was actually walking, inconvenient if she was just shifting her weight while standing still.

It took some time before she was able to walk with something approaching confidence, but once she crossed that mental threshold her inner stubbornness came out in force. Before leaving his office, Fetlock told her it would be better if she carried her new leg with her when she used the stairs. Using them would require some instruction from one of the nurses and he didn’t want to fall asleep tonight just to be shaken awake because she’d taken a nosedive down a flight of stairs. But after pacing around the halls in Medical for several hours with only… a few spills to account for, she’d taken to eyeing the emergency stairwell door like a personal challenge.

As it turned out, climbing and descending stairs was not something that came naturally to someone wearing a false limb, even one as finely crafted as the one Aurora wore. When it came time for her to lower her prosthesis down to the next step, she found out the hard way that the textured metal cap on the edge of the tread gave just enough resistance to stop her false hoof from sliding off the edge. The only way she could bend the false leg’s knee was to put more weight onto it, which wasn’t how taking the steps generally worked. After spending a good part of fifteen minutes stranded with her ass in the air, she’d been able to bend her stump high enough for the hoof to skitter over the stair’s edge where it promptly extended itself. All the while the occasional echo of hooves came from above and below, teasing her with the possibility of being caught making a fool of herself by someone working the third shift.

By no means did she conquer the stairs by the time they ran out completely, but at the very least she considered herself to have figured out how to get down the damn things without killing herself. There was no getting away from hobbling during the descent but if she remembered descent with her prosthesis first on every third step, she’d do a passable job of it at the price of her dignity.

She’d been surprised to find a few pegasi still at work when she wobbled through the doors of Mechanical, and they’d been just as surprised to see her at all. She counted five of them seated at a cluster of workbenches in the welding cell, though without power none of them were doing any welding. Best she could tell, they were working on completely different projects that could be done without voltage meters or power tools. A mare with a pair of magnifiers balanced across her muzzle was using a narrow wire brush to scrape oxidation off the electrical contacts of an old pump. At the bench beside her, a young apprentice was in the process of emptying the drawers of a battered tool cabinet and cleaning, oiling, and reorganizing a rat’s nest of drill bits. The other three were at work with similar maintenance tasks, helping to knock out whatever projects they could in the absence of their normal work. Likely they were the only ones of their shift willing to come down and endure the eerie silence, knowing they were unlikely to earn a single bit for the work they were putting in. It was admirable, and it took an effort of will for Aurora not to park herself at a bench among them and help.

The five holdouts looked up when she limped out into the main work hall, but none of them stopped what they were doing just to greet her. Here and there a grease-stained wing lifted a few inches or a chin tipped her way and, as far as the folks of Mechanical were concerned, it was the equivalent of a hard slap on the back and a how-the-fuck-are-you. They’d known for more than a day that she’d come back home and she’d gotten her resounding applause then. Tonight there was work to be done, and they weren’t volunteering to take shit for slacking from the next shift on her account.

She lifted a wing in greeting and started on the first wide, looping circuit around the four concrete walls of the main hall. It was trickier to navigate the floor without the overhead lights to point out the patches where old grease slicked the ground and the odd work mat had worked its way a little too far into the walkways. Once, deliberately, she’d slowed at a spot behind one of the mills where coolant had given the concrete around its frame a notable glisten and she wiped her prosthetic hoof through the sheen. To her surprise the elastomer didn’t seem bothered by it one bit. If anything her false leg had a better grip on the floor than her natural hooves did. Points to whoever designed it, but a crucial difference she’d need to stay aware of.

“Thought I’d find you down here.”

Roach’s rasping voice caught her off guard. Try as she might, she couldn’t quite hide a flush of insecurity that hit her as she emerged from behind the mills. The clutch of pegasi who had moved to work nearer one another were doing just a poor job of not staring at the changeling ghoul passing their benches.

“How’s that leg of yours working out so far?”

She wiped coolant on the bare concrete. “Still on the fence. Why, did something happen?”

Roach shook his head as he closed the distance, then tipped his chin down the line of the wall she’d been following before she’d stopped to muck around behind the mills. “No, no. Julip’s sleeping. I thought I’d pass an hour or two getting acquainted with the Stable. See the sights and all that.”

“Mm.” She leaned into a steady walk. Roach kept pace easily beside her. “Have you been to the, ah…?”

His voice softened and he gave the slightest nod.

“Yesterday,” he said, “while you were resting. Your father was kind enough to show me where they were buried.”

They traded in silence for several seconds. Aurora frowned guiltily at the floor, watching the seams in the concrete slabs pass between them. Dim echoes of their hoofsteps filled the silence and she wondered why she had felt compelled to ask whether he’d gone to the Gardens. Of course he had. They were the reason he chose to remain inside the tunnel even after managing to dig himself out. There was no question that he would take the first opportunity to see the graves of his first family, of the husband and daughter he’d been cut off from two centuries prior.

She decided to change the subject before the silence strangled them both. “Glad to see the two of you made it home. We were worried you might run into trouble on the way back.”

The unintentional we stung as soon as she said it and she could tell Roach had caught it too. His jaw tightened ever so slightly and then he was nodding as if he hadn’t noticed. “We avoided the roads wherever the terrain would allow it. It’s pretty sparsely populated that far north, even by current standards. Mostly just raiders and radscorpions until you’re west of Crystal Alley.”

She screwed up her face with confusion. “Crystal Alley?”

“A remnant from when the bombs supposedly melted a significant portion of the Crystal Empire and threw the debris across the border,” he said, pausing just long enough to glance back at her false leg. “The radiation levels up north can put Kiln to shame. Julip knows more about it than I do. I’m just glad we managed to get that power armor upright.”

Aurora hummed. “She was able to walk around in one of those tin cans without stilts?”

“Mm. She’s nothing if not resourceful.”

There was something of a bashful pinch to his smile that hinted at, or rather confirmed Aurora’s private suspicions. “Is it safe for me to assume you two are more than friends?”

He snorted. “That obvious?”

She let her own smile answer him. He lowered his head like a foal caught with his feathers in the cookie jar and who wasn’t quite sure whether he was getting away with it.

“We’re… closer than before, yeah. It just sort of happened.” He looked up at her with a shrug, as if to apologize. “We wanted to wait before we told you.”

She winced inwardly. It was easy to read between the lines. Roach and Julip hadn’t wanted to share the facts of their evolving relationship with Ginger’s death still so fresh in their minds, and here Aurora had pried the admission from him without thinking. Now it was her turn to eyeball the floor while she thought of something to say that wouldn’t make an uncomfortable moment unbearable.

Lifting a wing, she pulled the old ghoul over in a casual hug. “I’m happy if you’re happy. Congrats.”

His smile broadened and he nodded his appreciation. Aurora let him slip out from under her wing and they spent some minutes walking the perimeter of Mechanical in amicable silence.

Despite her protests against returning, she couldn’t deny the peace that came with being home again. In the dim yellow glow of emergency lights, with the missing hum of the generator smothering the empty workbenches, she still felt pulled to the comforting routines of her old job leading the first shift. It was as if a part of her still believed she could walk into the generator room and tell the old, grease-stained terminals to run through the entries left by Flux on the third shift. As if she could still walk the painted catwalk around the great generator and throw a wrench against every nut and bolt the ancient machine insisted on shaking loose. As if her decision to leave the Stable and search the ruins of a dead world for their salvation had all been part of one terrible, lovely fever dream.

A hoof tapped hers, and she looked up from her brooding to see Roach eyeing her. “Cap for your thoughts?”

Her gaze wandered to the passing row of tool lockers and she let the feathers of a wing devoid of machine oil slide over the grated doors. “Same ones as always. Thinking about home. How things were before.”

He nodded. “About the ghouling?”

Her wing slumped away from the lockers. She sighed, suddenly aware of the cool bottom level air against her patches of bare skin. “Little bit.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not a whole lot to talk about.” It was an unsubtle deflection, but she trusted Roach wouldn’t press the issue. Either she would lose her mind and need to be put down or she wouldn’t. She found herself remembering something Discord had said before she left. “Time offers plenty of opportunities, but rarely offers any second chances.”

Roach blinked at her. “That’s… uncharacteristically insightful.”

“Ouch.”

“For you, I mean.”

“Double ouch. Let me know when you need a break from that hole you’re digging.” She bumped into him to make sure he knew she was kidding. “It’s something that the hermit I told you about said while he was patching me up. He has a weird way of looking at the world that makes a scary amount of sense. He’s an old fart like you. You’d like him.”

Roach cocked his brow. “Is that so?”

She nodded, pretending not to notice his arch expression. “Yeah. I mean I appreciate you asking Doc Fetlock to look me over. Who knows, maybe he’ll figure out a treatment? And maybe he won’t. Either way it’s out of my control and it’s not going to do me any good to worry about it. Right?”

She watched as his smile diminished into an uncertain frown. “I suppose not.”

“Right. If I go feral, I go feral. If not, great.” She paused for a beat to slow herself down and carefully consider what she said next. When she was ready, she met Roach’s uneasy gaze. “I shouldn’t be alive right now. When – no, Roach, please just listen. When I flew Ginger out of the Stable with that bomb between us, I wasn’t thinking for ways the two of us might survive. As far as I knew we were both dead the second that balefire came alive. I knew we were both going to die somewhere over the Stable and the only thing I was focused on was getting us there before she lost her grip on that box. I think, on the way up, I made peace with that. I think Ginger did too.”

Roach looked ready to interrupt, but she held up a feather to forestall him. “I should be dead, but I’m not. She gave me a second chance, Roach. Every minute that has passed since she dropped me in that shop is a minute I could be spending making things right. Does that make sense?”

His hooves clicked in lockstep beside her own. After a thoughtful moment, he nodded. “I think I do, yes.”

“I’m going to kill Primrose,” she stated bluntly.

His jagged horn pulsed with a brief, eager glow. “Julip and I are coming with you.”

There’d been no doubt in her mind that they wouldn’t. When the four of them had departed from the oil rig, Julip was still seething over being detained while the architect of all the lies she’d been fed strutted around under the protection of a heavily armed retinue. She wanted revenge for being duped into serving the mare responsible for turning the world into the ruined nightmare it was today. And Roach… he had spent two centuries grieving the loss of his first real family and was now reliving all of it with the death of his surrogate daughter.

Aurora felt all the confidence in the world that a bullet from her rifle would be a pleasant death compared to the unfettered animal carnage with which Roach would descend upon her.

“Of course you’re coming with,” she agreed. “But before we go after Primrose, we have to do something else first.”

He fixed her with one of his opaque eyes. “And that is?”

“We need to find a place called ‘Mariposa.’ There’s a zebra there who helped me fix up Ginger’s Pip-Buck. He’s going to show me how to use it to track down Primrose.” She chewed her tongue for a moment before sheepishly adding, “After that... it’s complicated.”

Fiona jerked awake to the crashing sound of a metal hoof pounding the tunnel flagstones. Groggy and disoriented, it took several sluggish seconds for her brain to catch up to the rest of her senses. Someone outside the tent was shouting orders in a booming voice amplified by their power armor. The sound of stirring bodies filled her ears, including that of the stallion who had been sleeping in the crook of her arm like an oversized stuffed animal. She opened her eyes just enough to get a read on how much daylight had brightened the side of the simple canvas A-frame and quickly resolved that there was more of it than her tired body cared to acknowledge.

The Ranger with whom she’d spent the night, a low-ranking enlisted fresh out of Fillydelphia and flush with caps, shrugged on her satchel and rifle with a grunt. Fiona waited for her to decide which post-coital courtesy to say, then frowned when she ducked out of the tent without so much as a thank you. Once the last muster call was done echoing through the tunnel she sat up, or sat up as much as she could without lifting the tent off its posts, and went about the usual business of cleaning herself up. Once she’d made herself decent and recounted the caps she’d earned she slung on her own satchel and slinked out into the busy tunnel.

The crisp scent of meat cooking filled her nostrils as she endured the usual stares ranging from fearful, disapproving, lustful, and simply curious. She ignored the judging eyes and murmured a few hellos to those friendlier faces. Several of those latter answered with good mornings of their own before letting their attention turn back toward the great cookfires set up by the Rangers out on the scorched soil. Fiona considered following the last trickle of soldiers toward whatever wasteland proteins were on the menu, sighting the black rows of half-barrels filled with the coals of wood collected from the toppled forest which once obscured Stable 10’s access road. Somewhere not far from here she imagined there were several dens missing their resident rodents.

While she debated rustling up a dish of early morning molerat, she noticed a sprinkling of Stable jumpsuits dotted among the armored and armed Rangers. A couple of youngsters rode atop their parents’ shoulders, their wings and wide eyes gawking up at the looming clouds as if seeing them was some kind of personal miracle. Their parents funneled into the line forming at the open grills, their faces filled with a fear which hunger had forced them to defy. The adults looked half starved to death, their children much less so. Fiona spared one last glance at the grills, at the meat glistening on racks above the coals, before padding off toward the other end of the tunnel.

On her way to the Stable she passed a dozen or so new tents and even a few makeshift stalls that hadn’t been here when she’d left to find Aurora. The traders were making the doorway to Stable 10 as much a home for themselves as the Steel Rangers were refortifying it. In a way it reminded her of Blinder’s Bluff but in reverse, with the populace owning the Stable and the Rangers living outside. Even now it looked as if some of the trading companies Ms. Vogel had badgered into transporting water were setting up the beginnings of another node on their trade network. And why not? The Stable dwellers might not have caps yet but the soldiers coming in from the Bluff would have all manner of currency and little to nothing to spend them on.

Fiona consciously patted the satchel swinging below her neck. The caps she’d earned last night jingled loosely among her belongings, evidence that even she wasn’t above engaging in a little freelance commerce.

A quick glance back at the little tent city behind her told her all she needed to know. The wasteland was making itself at home. She just hoped Sledge and his Stable wouldn’t hold that against her.

“Sir,” an uncertain voice said. “Or, ah, miss?”

A Stable dweller, one of a pair assigned a post at the broken mouth of their home, was moving to stand in front of her. Fiona recognized him as the deputy who several days prior ran screaming from the sight of her, shouting to anyone who could hear him about the monster he’d seen. He was the same stallion who not much later spoke out of turn to tell her about his people’s desperate need for water.

“It’s ‘miss,’” she answered, slowing but not quite stopping as she approached the gaping entrance. Was she suddenly unwelcome here, too?

To her surprise, the deputy stuck out a foreleg. The gesture was bewildering and she found herself stopping just to give herself time to decipher it. A pair of hungry Stable dwellers skirted around the odd scene with questioning glances before continuing on their way to collect their morning meal. Unsure what was expected of her, she lifted a clawed hand and clasped the end of the deputy’s hoof and gave it an awkward shake.

The other deputy still at his post cleared his throat to suppress his laughter.

“Um.” He looked as uncertain as Fiona felt as she let go. “I… okay, well… I’m supposed to tell you Aurora wants your help with something. She’s in the overseer’s office with the others.”

When she hesitated, he added, “Follow me. I’ll show you the way.”

Diamond-patterned steel panels, hastily pieced together with wing-tightened bolts, clanged underfoot as they crossed what was a makeshift bridge over the broken trackway for the Stable’s rolling door. Fiona could feel the cooler air flow across her body as they passed into the dim shadows of a shelter on life support. Dust stirred up from the rubble of pulverized concrete floated lazily in the daylight streaming in from behind them, forming a horizontal shaft of glittering motes that ended at the spot where the great cog had come to rest. Powdered concrete like gray frost coated the tilted edges of its massive teeth, just as it had settled on every other surface in the antechamber where hooves and wings had yet to disturb it. The deputy led her along a path cleared of rubble, taking her up the long ramp and through the defunct arches of a narrow decontamination chamber.

When she stepped out into the Atrium, the first thing she noticed was the row upon row of neat and orderly chairs lining the main floor. A small crew of pegasi were working to erect a short stage at the front of the empty seating, tightening bolts manually as the framework slowly came together. The deputy, Deputy Chaser she now remembered, turned left and led her along the second level catwalk from which she watched four Stable dwellers emerge from a corridor carrying a long panel of blackboard. Scribbles of chalk still decorated much of the slate surface in simple arithmetic. As they rounded the Atrium’s perimeter, making their way toward an office cut off from the other side by rubble blown out from the wall, she asked the obvious question.

Chaser glanced down at the stage in mid construction and seemed uncertain. “Better off asking Sledge. All I know is the whole Stable’s invited. Sounds like we’re all getting a crash course on what’s beyond the tunnel.”

As they rounded the last turn toward the overseer’s office, Fiona watched someone fiddling with a battery powered lantern. It blinked on with blinding brightness, earning the poor pegasus a litany of abuses from those around him who hadn’t been ready. The lantern clicked off and she stepped into an admittedly cozy office.

The first person to greet her was the diminutive green pegasus who had loitered in the doorway of the doctor’s office. Now she was standing with the group of ponies gathered around a lone desk near the center of the room and had caught sight of Fiona before the others. “Luna’s left teat, you’re fucking huge.”

“Julip.” The changeling beside her hissed with a quick swat of his hoof. Looking to Fiona, he said, “She meant to say good morning.”

Sledge, Aurora, a ghoul she didn’t recognize and an even taller mare whose black uniform she knew immediately glanced up from their cups and offered a variety of similar greetings with differing levels of warmth. The Enclave stranger seemed least at ease with Fiona’s appearance. Beside her, the sickly blue ghoul simply stared at her with momentarily wide eyes as if she had mistaken her for someone she knew.

“Morning.” Slowly, she approached the small gathering, looking to Sledge in hopes of an explanation. “Your deputy said Aurora needed to see me.”

Deputy Chaser hadn’t proceeded beyond the doorway. A quick glance over her shoulder confirmed he had posted himself on the catwalk just outside, though the angle of his ears told them all he was listening.

Sledge stepped to the side, making room at the desk for her between him and Aurora. Rolled out across its surface was what at first glance looked to be an antique map of the old world. Upon closer inspection however, Fiona noticed the immaculately crisp edges and sharp, black letters of every city, town, and landmark. Her claws pressed a little more firmly against the floor beneath her as if her body was trying to stop her from reaching up to touch the surface of that unblemished paper. She lowered her haunches, seating herself to make her oversized figure less of a visible distraction at the makeshift table.

Beside her, Aurora picked up a dented thermos from where it sat in the sky blue expanse of the Celestial Sea and unscrewed the lid. Steam curled through the air as she tipped the end over an empty mug, cutting the acrid smell of concrete dust with the aroma of coffee. Aurora offered up the mug.

“Do you remember the first time we talked to each other?”

Fiona took the mug between her palms, inhaling the steam. “You were getting ready to fly off to the old solar array down south, sure.”

She dipped her beak and took an experimental sip, wondering how they had managed to brew a pot of coffee without power. Glancing at the map she noticed several landmarks had been marked with thin discs of polished iron. It took a moment for her to recognize the ancient coins for what they were, old prewar Equestrian bits whose gold cladding had long since been worn away with constant use. One bit marked the mountain beneath which Stable 10 was hidden. Following the thick black line of a numbered highway east, another iron bit rested below the unremarkable crossroads of that highway and an unlabeled road. Blinder’s Bluff, judging by the distance. Another bit marked the solar array. Another New Canterlot.

Aurora leaned forward, tapping a section of highway between Foal Mountain and the Bluff. “Somewhere around here, you used a Spritebot to warn us about a convoy we were heading toward. Remember?”

The coffee was thick enough to chew. She looked around the table, her gaze slowing as it passed over the striped mare in the black uniform. “Sure, yeah. Why?”

The Enclave mare took that as her cue to speak up. “Those Spritebots are operated over encrypted frequencies. We need you to tell us how you broke through those safeguards.”

Fiona blinked before eyeing Sledge, then Aurora. “I’m not the only one who sees a colonel of the Enclave standing over there, right? Because if not, then I have a few follow-up questions beginning with how the fuck and why the fuck.”

“Former colonel of the Enclave,” the mare stated harshly. “Minister Primrose is a pretender to the thrones which she used balefire to vacate. She does not command me or my soldiers. My name is Weathers.”

Across the table, Julip lifted a wing. “Ex-corporal. Same. Except for the name.”

A quick nod from Sledge confirmed to Fiona that they were telling the truth. Enclave defectors, there was something you didn’t see every day. Her attention then shifted toward the ghoul standing between the disillusioned soldiers at the far end of the map. “And who are you?”

Between the ghoul’s blink of surprise and the sudden, visible shock of those around the desk, Fiona was willing to bet everything in her satchel that she’d unwittingly stepped in shit.

“Uh,” the ghoul rasped uncertainly, “the name’s Rainbow Dash.”

The name rang a grand total of zero bells. Judging by the expectant gazes leveled at her, however, she took a stab in the dark and assumed the one-winged ghoul had been somebody important. She decided to just roll with it for now. “Nice to meet you, I guess?”

“Holy shit,” Julip laughed.

Roach hushed her. “We were talking about how you hacked the Enclave’s Spritebots.”

All eyes pivoted her way once again, with the notable exception of Julip’s and Rainbow Dash’s. Julip had buried her face behind a wing and was shaking with barely contained laughter. Rainbow Dash just grinned at the smaller mare, enjoying her quiet fit. The rest did their best to ignore the distraction as they waited for Fiona to respond.

“I mean,” she said, “I didn’t exactly hack them, per se.”

Weathers cleared her throat in a vain attempt at dragging Julip back into the conversation. “However you define it, it’s critical that you tell us how you were able to hijack our - their - network undetected.”

Her brow furrowed. “Why?”

“Because I need you to do it again.” At her side, Aurora set a foreleg on the edge of the map. Clamped above her hoof was that strange, white Pip-Buck she’d been tinkering with back at the dragon’s cabin. The beveled screen was dark as before, but Fiona suspected the mare wouldn’t have summoned her to ask after things like hacking Spritebots if she hadn’t gotten it working.

With a metallic click, the Pip-Buck slid free of a cloth bound around Aurora’s foreleg. She set it on the desk in front of Fiona, hesitating ever so briefly before taking her feathers off the smooth cuff. “The Enclave gave this to Ginger. I had… gone missing, and they were grasping at straws trying to find me. Primrose used it to talk to Ginger directly.”

She set down her coffee and picked up the device, turning it this way and that in her hands. “I kind of feel like I’m stating the obvious here, but this isn’t exactly a Spritebot.”

Aurora picked up her own mug and drained the puddle at the bottom. “No, but it’s as close as I’m going to get to tracking Primrose down. They use those things to keep tabs on where their people are. I need you to make it so I can use it to see where Primrose is.”

Fiona frowned at her reflection in the darkened screen. “That’s… not as easy as you make it sound.”

“I know that.” Aurora pulled a stray strand of white mane away from her face. “Trust me, I know.”

“Tell her about Eshe,” Roach nudged.

Aurora held out her wing for the Pip-Buck with a sigh. Fiona dropped it into her feathers, her curiosity piqued by the strange name. “What’s an Eshe?”

“He’s a friend. A ghoul, technically.” Aurora carefully secured the device atop the cloth bindings. “He used to work for Robronco before the war. Knows all there is to know about how these things work.”

She tapped her talons against the mug. “Then why do you need me?”

Aurora paused for a beat. Then she began to explain. Fiona listened as she told her about Eshe, this zebra who had somehow become trapped on the bed of an AutoDoc down in the bowels of a prewar ministry prison for traitors to Equestria. She told all of them about his history with Robronco, how he had been a self-taught coder who helped design the operating language that made Pip-Bucks capable of the computational agility that they quickly became known for. She explained how after the explosion above Stable 10 she had begun to dream just like Ginger had once done, and that she and Eshe had conspired to repair her Pip-Buck while they both slept. And finally, Aurora told them about the complex lines of nonsensical text, numbers, and symbols that Eshe had repeatedly tried and failed to teach her to recite.

“...and I mean none of it sticks. Not a damned bit of it.” She paused only to uncap the thermos and pour herself a fresh cup. After a long pull of tar-black liquid, she added, “I thought I could just bring her Pip-Buck to him and have him type everything in, but then he showed me what his situation really was and… it’s not good. He can’t breathe on his own let alone talk. Even if he could survive without a tube down his throat, which he can’t, I doubt he has any muscles left in his jaw to hold a pencil to write. He basically just exists down there and nothing else. If he wasn’t able to dream…”

Aurora shook her head with a shudder. It was a sympathetic response that ran the length of the table. Nobody wanted to consider how far gone a person might be after two centuries of being able to do nothing but stare up at the same ceiling day after day.

“He can’t help,” Fiona summarized, hoping she didn’t sound calloused as she did so. “At least, not any more than he already has. I wouldn’t beat yourself up over it. Robronco’s coding is a hot mess of gibberish held together with duct tape and ten-penny nails. Not exactly the kind of thing you learn after a couple nightly cram sessions.”

An assenting murmur went around the desk. The former colonel leaned over the map for the thermos. “Which is why she’s asking for your expertise. The Enclave’s overland communication network is, supposedly, impenetrable.”

Fiona snorted at that.

“Emphasis on supposedly,” Julip chimed in, now past her fit of the giggles. “Half the reason the Rangers never cracked our encryptions is because the upper brass always had their dicks in a twist around OPSEC. Those Pip-Bucks are all kitted out with thermite charges in case the enemy got lucky and dropped a field commander. And don’t get me started on the Spritebots. Never any fucking around when we had an urgent report to send because any scrapper with a pistol knew they could trade a few caps in bullets for a few dozen caps in parts.”

Weathers sipped her cup, merely nodding her agreement.

She tried to avoid their expectant gazes by focusing on the point on the map where the worn surface of a prewar bit marked the location of the Bluff. She imagined her firewatch tower perched at its peak, its four walls filled to bursting with all manner of precious equipment she both used to cycle through Spritebot feeds with impunity and broadcast truth and music. Somewhere along the road this gathering of ponies had gotten an inflated sense of what she was capable of doing, and Fiona couldn’t help but feel the overconfident personality she wore for all newcomers to the Bluff had played a large part in that.

Resting her elbow on the clean edge of the map, she propped her head up between her thumb and forefinger. “Look, I don’t think I can help you.”

“If the problem is compensation,” Sledge rumbled, “we can work out a trade. Aurora said your radio station is toast. We have transmitters in Supply. Good ones. Repeaters, too.”

That was nearly tempting enough to convince her to just fake it. How much better range could she get with radio equipment manufactured inside a Stable? With access to repeaters it wasn’t unreasonable to think she couldn’t reach not just the eastern coastline, but all the way west to the Las Pegasus ruins.

It was tempting, but it wouldn’t be right. She shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her beak. “No, it isn’t an issue of payment. It’s an issue of me not knowing the first thing about hacking anything.”

A silence enveloped the overseer’s office.

“But you can hijack the Spritebots.” It was Aurora’s voice, and she didn’t sound happy.

“I’m not exactly ‘hijacking’ them,” she admitted. “It’s more like… I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.”

Silence again. This time, however, Aurora wasn’t the one to break it. A ghoul’s voice, too feminine to be Roach’s, spoke into the gloom.

“You stole the keys,” Rainbow Dash murmured. “You tricked someone into giving you access, and you never gave them any reason to look for a breach.”

Fiona looked up at the ghoul, shrugged, then nodded. “Pretty much, yeah. How’d you know?”

Rainbow answered with a shrug of her own. “Same thing happened to me a long time ago.”

Something about the way in which she spoke hinted at an underlying guilt that masked a deeply significant truth. Looking around the desk, Fiona could sense she was the only one present who didn’t know what the old mare referred to or how that undoubtedly tied into the way they all looked to her with both reverence and sadness. In the dying remains of Griffinstone there was little time nor will to teach something as distant and unimportant as Equestrian history. There were faces and names every gryphon recognized. The alicorn princesses, the places on the old maps that pointed to the largest cities to have existed generations before any of them were born, and the collective knowledge that Equestria had birthed the weapons that ultimately ruined their planet. But this mare standing across from her, with her missing wing and thinning veil of colorful mane and tail, was as unremarkable to Fiona as any other stranger who might wander into the Bluff.

And yet the looks the others gave her said she was important. She considered asking the question aloud and confirming to Aurora, Roach, Julip and the others that she was wholly ignorant. One embarrassment at a time, she decided. It was bad enough she’d gotten their hopes up.

“I’m sorry I led you on, but this isn’t something I can help you with.”

She nudged the mug away and stood up. Before she could turn to leave, however, Julip held up a wing. “Woah woah, hold up a second.”

Curious glances pivoted toward the feisty young mare.

“You just said you schmoozed a comms officer into giving you the keys to the fucking kingdom, but you never told any of us how.” She lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug, as if to ask if she was the only one who wanted to know. “I mean, who do you have to fuck to do that?”

“Julip,” Roach whispered.

“I’m not saying she fucked anybody!” Julip looked around the desk, half-grinning, before turning back to her. “I mean, did you?”

Fiona couldn’t help but smile the tiniest bit. Abrasive as she was, she was starting to like this little shit-starter. “It wasn’t that complicated.”

Colonel Weathers leaned forward. “It had to have taken some skill, though.”

When Fiona hesitated to answer, Aurora nudged her with a wing. “She’s on our side.”

Easy to say when you’re not the one spilling the beans to someone in an Enclave uniform. “Sure, yeah, it wasn’t simple but it wasn’t exactly rocket science either. I just sort of asked.”

“You asked.” Now it was Weathers’ turn to be suspicious. “And somebody just gave you credentials?”

“Sure, I guess.” Sensing that answer wasn’t going to fly very far, she elaborated. “It was a while ago, back before anyone knew I had a station and everyone tried to charge a fortune for any information they brought in from outside the Bluff. Most of the stories I had to tell were ones I had gone out to dig up myself. When you’re trying to build an audience, one or two nuggets of news a week doesn’t get you anywhere. I couldn’t hire anyone, and I sure couldn’t–”

Weathers was spinning a feather in a steady circle. Get to the point, it was saying.

“I wanted more eyes on the wasteland. The Enclave has thousands of mechanical eyes buzzing around every corner of the continent. Figured I could capture a few for myself, so I did and found out I couldn’t get any of my hardware to talk to it. Like you guys said, encryptions and firewalls.”

“Which you got around by asking nicely,” Sledge said.

She seesawed her open palm. “Eh, I wouldn’t say I was nice about it. I found a Spritebot snooping around the Bluff and busted its cameras.”

Roach reached out for the thermos. Sledge nudged it closer with his wingtip. The ghoul nodded his thanks before turning his attention back to Fiona. “How, exactly?”

A flush of embarrassment ran up her neck. There was no eloquent way of painting what she did. “I… smashed it against a rock.”

Across the table, Weathers let out an approving chuckle. “That’s one way to get Comms to check in.”

“Pretty much,” she agreed. “A few seconds go by and suddenly someone’s voice is coming out of the bot going on about damage to Enclave property, demanding identification, and sounding like I was making a shitty day a lot shittier for breaking his toy. No idea who he was, but the bot was blind so he had no idea who I was either. So I lied. I pretended I was some no-rank private who got separated from her unit, couldn’t rub two sticks together to start a fire, all that stuff.”

Julip scoffed. “And that shit worked?”

She smiled and sat back down. “It did once I got the waterworks going. Soon as I started crying about how I was lost and was afraid the Rangers were going to capture me, the dickhead on the other end changed his tune real quick. Started asking me for a name, serial number, anything to identify myself so the bot could make a connection with a commander back home. I guess he got sick of me after a while, because he ended up giving me his serial number just to shut me up.”

Weathers covered her face behind her wing. “Celestia’s grace.”

“Keys to the kingdom,” Julip chuckled, clearly enjoying the disappointment of her former superior. “Nobody’s gonna bat an eye if they see a comms officer scanning through Spritebots. Shame we can’t use their credentials on the Pip-Buck.”

At that, Aurora looked down at the device on her leg. “Why not?”

“Insufficient clearance,” Weathers supplied. “If the Enclave was lax enough to give any officer with access to a terminal in the comm center visibility on their minister, it wouldn’t have taken this long for someone with a grudge to start working out a way to weaponize it.”

“It’s a little more than a grudge,” Aurora murmured.

Weathers held up a hoof in deference. “I don’t believe the vocabulary yet exists to adequately define your reason for seeking revenge.”

Aurora glowered darkly at the network of lines and curves on the map in front of her, the intensity of which threatened to burn a hole straight through the desk beneath it. They were sorely in need of a change of subject.

She looked over to the former colonel, quietly noticing how each pin and patch were exactly where they were meant to be. When Weathers met her eyes, she spoke up. “Theoretically, who would be the lowest ranking officer I’d have to convince to hand over their credentials?”

Weathers blew out a thoughtful breath. “Don’t aim low. Aim high. There are easier targets at the top of the chain of command.”

“I doubt I’m good enough of a bullshitter to pretend to be a general. You sure there aren’t any high ranking janitors out in New Canterlot?”

Weathers smiled at that, but shook her head. “No, but when we’re done here, I’m going to introduce you to some people who might. Up until a week ago they served on Security Director Clover’s staff. Their loyalty to Primrose vanished the instant they saw Aurora carrying that bomb above their heads. They’ll have some ideas for who is most likely to have replaced them and, most definitely, what secrets the less reputable of them would prefer to keep private.”

Fiona blinked. “That could work.”

“It’ll have to,” Aurora agreed.

Around the desk heads began to nod. With the plan decided, Fiona watched as all eyes began to turn toward Aurora who was already picking up another worn bit from the edge of the map. The slim coin glinted under the dim emergency lamps as she reached out and set it down in the center of a seemingly unimportant lake near the southeast edge of Old Equestria. The wooden desk clicked beneath it. Written in curving blue letters over the water was the name Lake Mariposa. A small town bearing the same name clustered around the lake’s outlet.

“Next on the agenda,” Aurora said, her expression grim, “we need as much information as we can get on this town. This won’t be the first time a group has come for Eshe. I want to make sure we’re the first one to survive.”

“Deputy Chief Billings.”

“Chief Billings, now.”

“He can wear any title he likes. It doesn’t change the facts of how he came into his wealth.”

“Allegedly.”

“Allegedly nothing. The only reason Billings has never landed in front of a tribunal is because half the judges on it are guilty of the same crimes he is.”

“It never fails to impress me how many feathers can all fit in the same collection basket.”

“Spoken like a stallion who hasn’t seen the chapel’s ledger. No one I’ve seen in the clergy appears to be suffering from want.”

“But Deputy Chief Billings…”

“Chief Billings…”

“Yes, Chief Billings is shameless. He’s the one who will bend for you.”

“Provided you can contact him.”

“Too busy with his promotion to count his hoard, the poor fellow.”

“Polishing his medals is more likely.”

The chatter of snickers that rippled out of the three stallions set Fiona’s hackles on edge. Beside her, Weathers looked equally uneased. These weren’t soldiers like the thirty-odd other people locked in the same recovery ward, these were officers who had risen to the lofty heights of politicians. They were the three survivors belonging to the security staff of Primrose’s bunker, tasked and trusted with different facets of the same informational gem. Their meandering bitterness over being exiled and nearly murdered had jammed a thorn in their collective craws, and they had no qualms about selling out the least loved stallion slated to replace them.

Fiona tried to follow their wandering thread of muttered insults, accusations, and barbs as best she could. Huddled together in the far corner of the war, the three former security chiefs had formed a sort of in-group among the rank and file survivors among them. Few if any of the soldiers seemed interested in them. If anything, they were entirely too distracted by the gryphon in the room to notice them at all.

“Alright, let’s rewind for a second.” She made a few marks on a loaned notepad below Billings’ name. “You said the new chief has been stealing caps from the church. You’re talking about the Chapel of the Two Sisters?”

The eldest stallion pulled a face. “Is there another?”

Okay, point taken. “And on a scale of one to ten, how much shit could that put him in if he’s found out?”

“Up to his ears,” said the one reclined on his cot.

“The Black Wing would certainly pay him a visit were he simply accused. Given the current state of the minister’s paranoia, I would not be surprised if she levied judgment herself.”

“Worrying, given her new alacrity for deploying balefire. The poisonous bitch.”

His two compatriots showed reflexive discomfort at the outburst, but only for a moment before they relaxed into the comfort of knowing they were no longer accountable to Primrose.

Fiona scratched everything down that she could. “What else do you have on him?”

They looked between themselves with thoughtful expressions. The eldest spoke first.

“He has, from time to time, taken pleasure with the stock that comes in from the slaver’s guilds. Earth ponies, if I recall. Not strictly criminal, but shameful behavior I gamble he would just as soon not want disclosed. Least of all to his wife or their young children.”

A murmur of agreement went up from the other pair.

Fiona underlined this bit twice. “I’ll need help contacting him.”

The three officers chuckled. When they realized she wasn’t sharing their sense of humor, the eldest once more composed himself with a placating smile. “Our credentials were doubtless revoked well before the Black Wing came to drag us from our offices. As much as I would enjoy disrupting whatever sham of an inner circle the minister has rebuilt around herself, we were taken to this mountain with little more than the clothing on our backs.”

Her pencil scratched across paper. “But you’re sure about this Chief Billings guy? He’ll fold?”

The trio nodded among themselves. “For a short while, yes. I don’t doubt he’ll give you what you want, but he’s no imbecile. He’ll begin destroying any evidence he thinks you may have access to as soon as you’re done speaking. Once he feels safe, don’t doubt for a moment that your Pip-Buck will be turned into a homing beacon for the Black Wing.”

“That will be the first thing Billings does, not the last,” the bedded officer muttered.

“So a short window.” Fiona jotted this worrying fact down and circled it.

“Exceedingly,” the elder agreed. “Assuming you’re planning to accomplish something permanent, I would advise whoever wears the Pip-Buck to stay well clear of whoever intends to pull the trigger.”

“And whoever pulls the trigger, be prepared to fly quickly.”

A scoff. “It would hardly matter whether they flew, walked, or crawled. In the end the result will be the same.”

Murmured agreement.

Fiona found herself frowning at her notepad, the pencil fixed uncertainly on the lined paper. “Care to explain what you mean?”

The eldest chuckled. “It should be obvious even to a slow-witted creature such as yourself. Minister Primrose rarely ever leaves the city let alone the Bunker. If your pureblooded friend intends to assassinate her, she will have to do so from within New Canterlot. Within the heart of her power. Once she pulls that trigger, she will be faced with the fury and rage of every loyal pegasi in the capital city.”

He shook his head and shrugged. “Successful or not, they will kill her.”

For the first time she could remember, Aurora listened to the outside air gently murmuring into her Stable.

She sat on the diamond steel flooring of the antechamber with her shoulder leaned against the lowest rung of the railing along the upper platform. Past the rail, the ramp led down to the sheared threshold of her home. With a tin plate of what the Ranger cooks outside had dubbed Molerat Fritters warming her feathers, she speared her fork into a slice of fried meat and stared out at the steady traffic of her friends and neighbors as they milled over panels laid across the gap. She chewed the sinewy molerat as the people she and Ginger risked everything to save took their first steps into the outside world. Some of them met her gaze as they carried their ration of food and water back inside, but none of them said hello. They could see her thoughts were someplace else.

Hoofsteps behind her pulled her back to the present. She glanced back to see Roach and Julip picking their way around the bits of rubble still waiting to be carried away.

“Keep wandering off like this and I’m liable to put a bell on you.” Roach sat down beside her, knowing by now he needed no invitation. He was always welcome company. Even Julip, with her propensity to put Sledge’s worst tirades to shame, was a comforting sight. “You talk to your father yet?”

She folded a flap of seared rodent with her fork and shoved it into her mouth. “We spoke.”

A green fan of feathers appeared over her shoulder and plucked a bit of meat off her plate. Despite her grim state of mind, she couldn’t help but smile a little.

“Guessing he didn’t take it very well,” Julip said.

“He’s against it.” Staring at her plate, she felt her appetite fade and held it out for Julip to finish. It was yanked from her feathers before she could think of reconsidering.

In truth, her conversation with her dad had gone about as well as could be expected. He’d been able to tell she had bad news as soon as she arrived at their old family compartment, and it hadn’t taken him much effort to cut past the small talk to get to the meat of what she had to tell him. When she said she had to leave again, this time with the aim to kill the undying mare responsible for all the pain and loss their world suffered over the last two centuries, the first words out of his mouth were to simply ask why. Why couldn’t she stay home? Why couldn’t the soldiers massing outside the Stable hunt Primrose down? Why did it have to be her?

She didn’t have any good answers for him and she wasn’t going to risk the last conversation she might have with her dad ending with a well-meaning lie. In the end, she could only think to tell him that Primrose was a problem that needed to be fixed, and she needed to be the one to do it. After everything that happened, if she chose to stand aside and do nothing, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to live with herself.

“Sledge is going to keep an eye on him while I’m gone,” she continued, pausing to swallow her last morsel of molerat. “He’ll be okay.”

Roach hummed sympathetic agreement. Agreement with Aurora, sympathy for her father. “Well, you won’t be alone.”

“Or unarmed,” Julip added around a mouthful of molerat. At that, the polished hickory butt of a familiar weapon thumped against her shoulder. “If you don’t take it, I’m keeping it.”

Her smile widened a tiny bit as she brought her rifle forward and into her lap. It smelled faintly of oil and still wore the high polish the Enclave had restored it to during their time aboard the oil rig. The memory soured in her mind as quickly as it had come and she felt tempted to grind a wingful of concrete dust against the weapon until every inch of it was scoured of their handiwork.

“Got the rest of your stuff back here too, if you’d bother to look.”

She took the hint and glanced back where Julip sat behind them. Her smile returned at the sight of her saddlebags strapped to the smaller mare’s midsection with the girth cinched so far that the excess strap looked obscene dangling between her legs. She let herself laugh a little as she set the rifle down to relieve Julip of her belongings.

“Your Pip-Buck’s in the left pouch,” Julip said as she finagled the buckle free from her belly. “King Red said to tell you he had it brought up from storage. It’s not the same one you came in with, but–”

“It’ll work,” she finished for her, knowing the replacement would be functionally indistinguishable from the one that got cooked by the bomb. “Thanks for bringing everything up for me.”

Roach gave her prosthetic a thump with his hoof. “Thought we’d save you a trip on the stairwell.”

Taking her bags from Julip, she set them down across her rifle on the floor and considered the more likely reality that Roach had known she was worried that the longer she stayed, the more likely it became she would see the logic in her father’s pleading and convince herself not to leave at all.

“Your safety’s off,” Roach said.

“What? No it’s–” she frowned at the bolt-action half expecting to be wrong, but the switch was exactly where it was when she set it down. The quiet chuckling from her friends told her she’d been had. “You’re a jerk.”

“Part of my youthful charm,” Roach agreed, then uttered a very not youthful grunt as he pushed himself onto his hooves. “If we’re going to get going, then we’d better get going.”

Green feathers landed on her shoulder, causing her to wobble on her butt as Julip used her to stand up. “I stand corrected. You’re both awful.”

“Guilty,” Julip chirped. Her attention shifted toward Aurora’s new leg, and the slightest touch of real guilt colored her grin. “Need help?”

Aurora waved her off. She wanted as much opportunity to get used to the new leg with as little help as possible. If she got the idea in her head that someone would always be around to lend a shoulder, the learning curve would only get steeper. In the case of sitting on her ass, the trick was to lean onto the prosthesis until she could get her good hoof planted and then roll her weight onto the working leg. She had put the theory into practice during the night when she’d gotten too woozy to stand. Joys of letting Fetlock have his pick of the platelets, she supposed.

Once her saddlebags were secure, she shouldered on Desperate Times and found her right wing instinctively brushing across it in search for the brass hooks she’d grown to expect. They were gone, of course. Taken away by the Enclave in their effort to restore the weapon to the way it had been when Spitfire possessed it, leaving behind imperceptibly small dots where screw holes had been filled in and stained to match the surrounding wood. Yet another way in which they had taken Ginger away from her.

She set her sights on the yawning maw of the Stable and considered saying something, but the moment came and went. Without a word she picked her way over the rubble and descended the ramp.

One of the engineers let out a long whistle. “This whole panel is on a four-eighty circuit.”

The stallion crammed in the narrow space beside the first pried a tidy bundle of rotted wires out of the way with a long screwdriver. “Yeah. Breakers buses are all rusted to shit, though.”

“Twenty one decades since they were last serviced. Surprised they’re still on the wall.”

“They built this stuff to withstand a bomb.” He dug his wing deeper into the tangle of wiring while holding a lighter into the new gap with the other. “Insulation’s melted, but I bet it would still work if it hadn’t been left to rust. I think I can see where the main power is coming from.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep. Goes straight down. Bet it’s our generator that powered the lights out here. If I can pull the serial off that cable we can track down where it feeds into Mechanical. Maybe Flux will let us try running a line to bypass the busted genny altogether.”

“Good luck with that.”

The engineer snapped the lighter shut and turned his attention up the maintenance panels as if he hadn’t heard the doubt in his colleague’s voice. “Bet you every bit I own that Supply has replacements for everything in here down to the screws. We’d only have to rebuild some of it for it to work as an auxiliary inlet for power, and those soldiers look like the types who know where to find…”

“We should go back inside.”

The subtle discomfort in Sledge’s voice caused Rainbow Dash to turn away from the conversation coming from the claustrophobic utility room she’d called home for the past two hundred years, the same dirty little hovel where right that moment a team of Mechanical’s engineers were peering inside rusted out panels and discussing the potential of what they were uncovering. It was daunting to think she’d spent the majority of her life trapped inside her own head, constantly fighting to tread water in the ocean of feral mindlessness that Blue had been.

Somehow, despite it all, she recognized every inch of that closet-sized room. In many ways she missed the simple comfort of feeling safe inside it. That existence was behind her now, and the Stable she hoped might become her new home stood vulnerable to an enemy she helped create. Her fantasy of shrinking into obscurity and living out her years as another face among hundreds had evaporated the second that door was blown off its locks. She’d done nothing before and the entire planet had paid the price. She wasn’t going to sit on her wings again.

“It’s not like I can fly away,” she replied, her own words taking on the slightest edge. Sledge was standing uneasily beside her, notably between her and the tunnel’s unshielded terminus. She had wanted to come out here an hour earlier but Sledge had asked her to wait on account of Aurora was still out in the tunnel trying to work up the courage to leave again. “I’ll go inside once I’ve seen more. Okay?”

Sledge continued to stare down at her and for a moment she worried he would stay planted between her and the outside. Then, with a heavy sigh, he stepped back and gestured toward the end of the tunnel with a broad red wing.

“Fine,” he rumbled. “But if there’s any sign of trouble, I’ll haul you back into the Stable myself.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said, and she didn’t doubt he would if push came to shove. Leaving the engineers to puzzle out the wiring in her old utility closet, she stepped past Sledge and resumed making her way toward the tunnel’s balefire-blackened mouth.

So far the outsiders - as Sledge had taken to calling them - had yet to notice or recognize her, but that streak of peace would only last so long. Sooner or later her mark would give her away where her disheveled mane and coat seemed to conceal her. The gryphon she met down in Medical, the one who brought back memories of Gilda as abruptly as a carriage crash, hadn’t the first clue who she was even after being spoon fed her name. She had a feeling that was bound to be the exception and not the rule. Someone from the Stable was bound to say something to an outsider. After that, the snowball would grow on its own terms.

The threshold for what constituted the “end” of the tunnel were two opposing berms of rubble flanking the transition where the wall’s masonry broke up to give way to the exposed geology of Foal Mountain’s scoured hillside. A path dug through the point where the berms would have met served as a natural choke point where the Steel Rangers, decorated in shades of dusty brown uniforms and mismatched assemblies of power armor, monitored traffic moving to and from the Stable. It felt like only a few years ago when she had ridden the Pillar’s express elevator down to where Applejack had put in so many late nights perfecting her power armor prototype.

Ancient servos in the neck of one such suit of armor whirred as its pilot watched the two of them pass the checkpoint. Whether he recognized her, she didn’t know. Her attention had been stolen away by the unbroken mass of clouds hanging low in the sky above.

“Wow,” she whispered. “It’s still up there.”

She realized her pace had slowed when she looked down and saw that Sledge had gotten a few steps ahead of her. His gaze occasionally darted skyward as well, but his eyes betrayed a visceral discomfort. Rainbow wondered whether Stable-Tec had equipped their Stables with resources that might help residents prepare themselves for a life beyond the tight confines of their windowless world. Back in the days where there still was a world, all of those lucky enough to secure a spot in a Stable had found themselves bombarded by constant, unsubtle reminders that their lives underground would be a great experiment in the erasure of personal space. Their existence would forever consist of corridors and compartments. Once the door was sealed no amount of kicking or screaming would undo the decision they had all made.

Sledge let out a disconcerted grunt and turned his stern glare toward the rows of military-styled tents radiating out from the shattered ribbon of asphalt that cut the encampment down the middle. What was going through his head and those other Stable residents whose self-contained world now lay open to a million choices they’d never known until now? How long would it be until some residents began to wander out toward the horizon to see what was out there? What would Sledge’s world look like once survivors of the wasteland saw the safety of his Stable and asked to move in?

“Hungry?” he grunted, tipping his nose toward the rows of halved barrels along the roadside atop which some sort of small game sizzled alongside the soupy contents of mess kits belonging to hungry Rangers.

She wasn’t sure who was getting the better menu, the soldiers or the civilians, and shook her head regardless of which was which. “Later, maybe. I just wanted to see the sky again.”

“The great, gray mess that it is.” He shot another untrusting glance overhead. “All the books said it was blue.”

“I don’t think that’s changed. I’ll ask Deputy Chaser to keep an eye on the weather from the entrance. We can try again when the sun comes out.”

She’d begun to turn back toward the tunnel when an unfamiliar voice chimed in from the food line. A Ranger in a beaten brown uniform rolled a spoon on a faint wisp of magic while the contents of a soot-blackened tin sputtered lazily on the edge of the open grill. “The sun doesn’t come out,” he said with just enough mockery in his tone to turn a few exasperated glances his way. “Just ask the Enclave cannon fodder your overseer has locked up down there. Only time those clouds ever break is when their factories do, and that’s never.”

“Leave ‘em alone, Lampwick. They don’t know.”

Rainbow eyed the soldier and couldn’t make heads or tails of the rank insignia stitched above his pocket. “What don’t we know?”

The soldiers who tried to defend them sighed and turned back to stirring his own meal, leaving them to satisfy Lampwick’s need to hear his own voice. “Sky’s closed, simple as. Has been ever since the Enclave built their big fuckoff weather factories on what’s left of Old Canterlot. Can’t have their scouts flying around up there where we can see ‘em so they pump out all that shit like some big smokescreen.” He offered a flippant mock-bow to them. “Welcome to the wasteland. Hope it’s everything you hoped it to be.”

She felt her brow grow furrows. Weather factories? What were they seeding the clouds with that would carry them this far from Canterlot without at least some dispersion? She frowned skyward, trying to puzzle an answer from what little she could remember during her stint as a cloud wrangler.

“Open your eyes, dumbass. She’s not a Stable-dweller. She knows that stuff already.”

A laugh from the food line. “She’s a ghoul, Lampwick.”

The laughter trickled down the line from others who had been listening to him bluster. The stallion’s face reddened enough to match Sledge’s ruddy coat. Clearly he didn’t enjoy being proven wrong.

If he had shown a little compassion, Rainbow might have considered helping him save some face by pointing out that she hadn’t come from the Stable or the wasteland. But before she could decide, Sledge’s wing was already on her shoulder and guiding her back toward the tunnel. It was his way of saying he’d had enough fresh air for the day, and if she argued with him he was liable to make good on his threat to carry her over his shoulder.

As she started walking, the sharp sound of a spoon bouncing off the asphalt caught her ear. She glanced back to see Lampwick staring at her, his eyes wide and fixated on her flank. His comrades were quick to notice the disturbance and turn to see what it was that had frozen him in place, their brows creasing with understanding as they recognized the faded colors of her mark.

She sighed at the sound of someone breathing her name. Sledge drew to a stop alongside her.

“Welp,” she smiled tiredly at him, “so much for a quiet day out.”

He frowned over her head at the gathering eyes. “We should get you inside.”

She shook her head and turned to watch the rippling gossip spread in every direction. She knew there was only one good way to handle this. Rarity and Twilight had spent the last years of their lives drilling too much of that crap into her head for her to forget any of it.

Her old friends would shit gold if they were alive to hear the words that tumbled out of her mouth.

“Sledge,” she said to him, “I’m going to give you a crash course in something called public relations.”

“Alright,” Aurora said, all but shouting so that her voice might carry across the headwind, “what do we know about Mariposa?”

Julip swayed alongside her while Roach dangled precariously from her grip. “Shit all!”

“Correct,” she grumbled. Their combined brainstorming session in Sledge’s office had borne little fruit. Stable-Tec, for all of its history books, had not seen fit to print a detailed history of every tiny no-name village in Equestria. If you wanted to read up on prewar cities you were getting the cities. Manehattan, Canterlot, Cloudsdale, and a select listing of other major metropolises were their only glimpse into what city life was like before the bombs fell.

Rainbow Dash, having been the only mare in the room alive at the time Mariposa warranted its own tiny black dot on the map, hadn’t much to say about the little town either. She didn’t remember having ever traveled there which either meant it was too small to benefit the direct attention of the ministries or it hadn’t been the site of one of the innumerable tiny disasters the Elements of Harmony had been dispatched to resolve. It was, as she put it, just a back country town out in the middle of nowhere. Equestria had thousands of places like that that were almost definitely lively, wonderful places to live and just too small for anyone to remember.

It had been Colonel Weathers who had the most knowledge to offer. The Enclave posted regular patrols along Equestria’s old borders, not so much to spy on the non-present Steel Rangers as to simply keep track of any incursions from whatever creatures, tribes, or enemy forces might exist in or beyond the southern Badlands. Mariposa was one of many waypoints along that patrol route and she seemed to recall that the town, like its neighbors, had been abandoned and fallen into ruin. Beyond that she could only guess.

“Eshe said all he knew about the place was its name,” she said. “And yet the last group he asked to help managed to find out where he’s being held. Wherever that is, I’m guessing it’ll stand out somehow.”

“A prison will have to have a large footprint, that much we do know,” Roach hollered over the wind. “If the ministries were running a prison in plain sight I think it’s safe to say Rainbow Dash would remember something about it.”

Julip squinted at the sickly looking forest passing beneath them. “Underground, maybe?”

He nodded. “That’s how I’d do it. Stable-Tec popularized the idea that subterranean equaled security. Hard to scale a prison wall if there is no wall.”

Aurora looked down at the blockier, Stable-issued Pip-Buck clamped between her hoof and Ginger’s Enclave-issued device. The green lines of the map ticked over by a pixel’s width, their position relative to the Stable sliding that much farther south-southwest. Where Mariposa appeared on the paper map in Sledge’s office, a tiny green flag stood out on the screen. They were still several hundreds of miles away from where they were going and even now, barely ten minutes into the flight, she could tell Julip wasn’t going to be able to carry Roach in one marathon flight. Not if Roach wanted to avoid becoming a changeling-sized pancake on the ground below, that is.

“Let’s plan on taking breaks,” she said in as charitable a tone as she could muster. “You two know the wasteland better than I do, so you’re in charge of deciding where and when. That okay with you?”

Neither of them objected, but she thought she could see the smallest hint of embarrassment in Julip’s expression. It wasn’t that she was weak, it was just that Roach was nearly one and a half times the size of her petite frame and providing even more drag against an uncooperative wind. If Aurora thought she could hang onto him with just three legs she would have tried, but now wasn’t the time to see what happened if she tore a muscle in the only good hind leg she had left.

It wasn’t long at all before they’d settled into the same casual banter she had missed during their overland trek to Fillydelphia. It felt good. After nearly an hour of battling a headwind that refused to let up, she could tell Julip was starting to strain. She could feel it in her own wings as well. Muscles still sore from her long flight two nights before were starting to sing a little more stubbornly now. A quick check of her map showed they had made embarrassingly little progress toward Mariposa, crossing off perhaps a tenth of the distance.

“I’m already looking,” Julip said, practically shouting now that she’d begun lagging behind.

Aurora turned her attention to the ground far below as well. There wasn’t much that stood out to her among the sparse stands of dying trees. There had been something resembling the foundation of a home a few miles back that looked tempting, but she’d held her tongue as soon as she saw the similarities between it and the burned foundation of Gallow’s home. She’d hoped to spot a town or village at some point in the last hour but as far as she could tell nobody before the bombs fell or after had thought enough of this stretch of country to bother populating it. Even the old fields of prewar farms, overgrown and barely distinguishable from the nature around them, were few and far between.

She thought back to the murals decorating the walls of her home and the wide vista of a bright, colorful orchard growing wild around a rustic, lavender barn. Her dad would love to see the ruins of a place like that. Something about that thought brought on a powerful urge to hold out until they flew over one such farm, but a quick look back at Julip was enough to make her drop it.

“There,” Roach said, pointing down almost directly below them. “Box truck on the road. See it?”

Both mares squinted in the direction he’d indicated. Julip was the first to spot it. “Looks kind of obvious, doesn’t it?”

Aurora caught sight of the truck and wondered what was so obvious about it. From her perspective it was barely the size of a pea. She had to narrow her eyes to slits to tell it was laying at a strange angle, almost as if it were preparing to fall onto its side and hadn’t gotten around to it yet. Flashes of yellow paint popped through gaps in the scraggly canopy of leaves above it which must have been what caught Roach’s attention. If it was on a road she couldn’t tell. It looked as if it had been parked in the middle of the woods and abandoned.

“Looks like shelter,” Roach said.

Julip wrinkled her nose but didn’t argue. “Let’s go in a little closer. Keep your eyes open for any movement down there. We’re not exactly near any of F&F Mercantile’s old trade routes so it could be a raider outpost for all we know.”

They began to descend. As they circled closer to the treetops and got a lay of the land, Aurora began to see the faintest trace of what must have been a gravel road buried beneath dense layers of windblown soil and scrub brush. It was faint, but at the right angle she could make out the unnaturally straight line where the forest appeared to not quite be able to knit its branches together. She watched Julip dive low enough for Roach to dangle a hind leg down and swat the highest branches above the rotting truck. A racket of dry leaves and dead sticks tinkled down onto its yellow container, but no one stuck their head through the open door at the back to see what had caused it. No mole rats erupted from the dirt. No shots cracked off at them from somewhere farther away. The truck, as far as they could tell, had been well and truly forgotten.

Following Julip’s lead, she threaded the north-west seam cut by the unremembered road and came to a half-wobbling, half-stumbling landing a few yards ahead of the truck’s rusting bumper. To her relief, her new leg stayed firmly fixed to her stump. Gold star for Doc Fetlock. He hadn’t been lying when he said it could take a beating.

“Shit,” she hissed as she brought cautious feathers under her rifle. Ahead of her, with eyes and weapons of their own trained on the rear corner of the truck, Roach and Julip glanced back at her with bristling concern. She shook her head to calm them. “It’s nothing. We’re good.”

The two shared a curious look before turning their attention back on the listing truck and the open doors at the rear of it. From what Aurora could tell it looked like whoever had driven it here had put both of the wheels into a ditch that had since filled in with soil. The bottom right edge of the vehicle had vanished beneath the new ground level, and as they cautiously rounded the back end, they saw that the open rear door was similarly trapped in the dirt by its trailing corner.

“Trailer’s empty,” Roach said, lowering his foreleg and the shotgun he always kept belted to it. “Looks like we’re late to the party.”

“I’m not seeing any tracks either,” Julip agreed. With the truck’s frame thoroughly rotted, she only had to manage the slightest hop to climb into the shade of the box trailer. “Wonder what it was hauling.”

Roach was next to climb inside. He turned and extended a hoof, which Aurora gratefully wrapped her feathers around, and helped pull her up. “Your guess is as good as mine. I didn’t see any labels when we landed.”

“Smells like dirt,” she said.

Julip snorted and pointedly thumped her hoof against the layer of compacted soil that had collected over the low edge of the paneled floor. “Think so?”

“Shut up.” She shot her a grin as she sat down, then reclined her back against the tilted wall. “Oh that’s nice.”

Roach grunted as he knelt down on the only level ground inside the trailer. Julip, to her surprise, took the same route as she had and stretched out against the wall like some oversized beach chair.

“You ain’t kidding,” the smaller mare groaned. “Fuck me sideways, my wings feel like they’re ready to fall off.”

Aurora’s eyes flicked toward Roach who, upon noticing her gaze, caught her meaning and shot back an expression that dared her to say what she was thinking. She quelled a laugh and quickly turned to inspect the view of less than naturally rowed trees stretching beyond the trailer door.

“So what were you going to say when we landed?” The tip of Julip’s wing swatted her over the shoulder. “You, with the potty mouth.”

“Har har,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s nothing. I forgot to ask Sledge something.”

A pause. “Spill.”

She lifted the hoof of her prosthesis an inch off the dirt and shrugged. “I wanted to see if he could design a harness for this thing.”

Roach lifted a brow. “We shouldn’t have left if it doesn’t fit.”

“It fits fine,” she insisted, seeing the uncertainty in their eyes. “But I’d sleep more soundly if I knew it was strapped on.”

She knew she’d made a mistake as soon as she finished the sentence. Julip barked a sudden laugh that crashed off the paneled walls, causing Roach to simultaneously flinch and suppress a grin. It wasn’t long before her laughter tapered into staccato giggling, and she wore the most shit-eatingest grin Aurora had ever seen on the younger mare.

Aurora looked to Roach in the hope he might referee what was about to happen, but seeing the what goes around smirk he’d donned, her face flattened with grudging acceptance.

“I mean,” Julip beamed, pausing ever so briefly to wind up her pitch, “Sledge isn’t the last stallion I’d go to if I needed a strap–”

An explosion of deforming steel cut her short as the sloped roof panel buckled inward and shook loose a blinding haze of loose dirt and pulverized rust. The three of them were on their hooves and shouting before whatever had impacted the trailer had slid off and onto the road. Roach was first through the open door, coughing on the grit he’d breathed with the sawed-off shotgun snapping forward along its rail. Julip was right behind him, eyes pinched into watery slits as she hauled Aurora along by their interlocked wings. Hardly ten seconds had passed between the assault and their evacuation, barely enough time for Aurora to get her mind up to speed to start processing where the danger could be.

When she zeroed in on Roach standing just beyond the rear bumper, she realized his shotgun was already dropping toward the dirt. Raw anger battled with relief over his face. Chitin, bunched into a snarl just a moment ago, was beginning to relax.

“I could have fucking shot you!” He shouted as pounding adrenaline forced him to pace in an anxious circle. “What the hell were you thinking?!”

Standing alongside the truck, lavender eyes thrown wide with chagrined amusement, stood a familiar gryphon. Aurora unlinked her wing from Julip’s to take a step forward, unsure whether to tear Fiona a new asshole for scaring them half to death or to ask the more important question of how she had found them in the first place.

“Sledge said you guys flew off for Mariposa,” Fiona hedged, looking between the three of them for something like approval. “I was thinking maybe I could help?”

Roach was quicker on the draw than Aurora and stole the question out of her mouth. “How did you even find us?”

The gryphon shrugged with a flush of embarrassment. “K-i-i-inda wasn’t expecting to, but I knew where you were going and thought worst case I’d meet you there.”

Julip hitched a feather toward the truck. “And you just decided to check out this wreck, out of all the other places we might be resting?”

“Why not? It’s obviously good shelter.”

She smirked at Roach, who rolled his eyes when she said, “Told you so.”

“Well just hold on.” Aurora dipped the barrel of her rifle to the side and reengaged the safety. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she’d unset it. “Fiona, don’t take this the wrong way, but I only asked you to come to the meeting today to see if you could help with Ginger’s Pip-Buck. We’re going straight back to the Stable after we’re done in Mariposa.”

She could only hold back so much of a grimace when a cursory glance confirmed that Fiona wasn’t even carrying a weapon. Not so much as a kitchen knife, let alone what they may need to contend with whatever prevented Eshe from being aided by the first group. “If you talk to Sledge, I’m sure he’ll find you a compartment to stay in until we get back.”

She’d meant to give Fiona an easy out, but the gryphon only seemed to bristle at being offered that opening. Her casual smile faltered for a fleeting moment. Then it returned, harder and much more certain than before.

“If you want,” she began, her tone flat as a professional haggler’s, “I can rehash everything I already told you back at the old dragon’s house.”

Aurora opened her mouth to object, but could only shut it with a sigh as she remembered Fiona’s explanation of how she had lost her radio station when the electromagnetic pulse pushed out by the bomb turned her equipment into expensive paperweights. With her choices reduced to plying her only other profession full time, which would pay the bills and earn her some semblance of comfort, or leaving the Bluff to lend what limited other skills she had to aid the survivors of Junction City she had chosen the latter. Even though it paid close to nothing in caps and the work was despairingly nonstop, she’d chosen to step away from the creature comforts she could have and help those who needed it. Aurora could tell when Fiona had explained all of this that it had been a deeply uncomfortable confession because, like most people with any sense of dignity, she knew it came painfully close to boasting.

Fiona didn’t want to explain her reasons a second time, and Aurora wasn’t about to make her.

“Or,” the gryphon continued, her tone softening as she understood she was being given that reprieve, “you can say, ‘Yes, Fiona, we are all very sorry we tried to shoot you and would love your help.”

Seeing that Roach and Julip were waiting for her to answer, she took a moment to chew on that. She didn’t like that Fiona was out here without a means to defend herself, but maybe she wasn’t giving the gryphon credit where it was due. She was, compared to the rest of them, huge. Julip could practically trot through Fiona’s legs without having to duck. Heck, she made Sledge look positively normal. Viewed from the right angle, her size alone could be an asset.

“You’re not one to take no for an answer, are you?”

Fiona grinned and shook her head. “Afraid not.”

She glanced between Roach and Julip and received no objections.

“Alright,” she said, “you’re on guard duty while the rest of us… well, rest.”

Just like that, Fiona became their fourth. As she turned back to the rear of the now thoroughly dented truck, she pushed away the immediate thought that she had somehow just replaced Ginger. It wasn’t that, and she scowled at herself for even thinking it. Ginger would beat her over the head, or more likely use her magic to turn Aurora’s mane into something ridiculous, if she insisted they put their lives at risk on the principle that anyone who might tag along was her substitute.

First her front hooves, then a strong jump with her hind leg got her up into the back of the tilted trailer. Wrinkling her nose at the tang of freshly rust-dusted air, she shot Roach an unpleasant expression as forewarning. He was up inside next, though he didn’t seem bothered by the metallic odor. Benefits of being a ghoul, she thought. Something she had to look forward to.

Julip had one hoof up inside the trailer before she stopped to look back at Fiona. The gryphon was lingering outside, her head already swiveling to scan the sickly forest for threats. A beat later, Julip was back on the road and thumping Fiona with the back of her wing.

“Want to hear something funny?”

Aurora watched Fiona crane her neck down to see the diminutive mare. “You got jokes?”

“Better.” The grin was audible in Julip’s voice. “So Aurora was telling us how she wanted Sledge to make her a strap-on…”

April 24th, 1297
New Canterlot

“Are you crazy?! You can’t just take–”

A wing shot out to press the staff sergeant’s mouth shut. Still clutching a crumpled paper with a photograph clipped on the corner, the young specialist shook with a hot mixture of fear and adrenaline. Dark speckles where flecks of the intelligence officer’s blood and brain matter had spattered him still stained his uniform. It was an image he hadn’t been able to get out of his head for the last three days and even now as he stood inside the foul trench-style shithouse behind a bar whose finest patronage were a few muds yet to be ruined by cheap chems, he could see the hammer of the pistol Minister Primrose had held descending toward the striker.

Only after the staff sergeant had calmed himself did the specialist remove his wing from his mouth. “I didn’t have a choice,” he hissed.

His squad leader pressed his lips into a tight line, the anger in his eyes close to boiling. He flicked a feather toward the row of vacant board toilets. “Crumple that up and get rid of it. Burn it. Shove that fucking document down your gullet and swallow it before it gets us both killed.”

“And what about what it says, sergeant?” The paper rattled between his trembling feathers as his eyes skittered over dense paragraphs. “This talks about one of our depots. This photo was taken inside the munitions bunker less than a half hour’s flight north of the capital!”

“Keep your fucking voice down,” the sergeant whispered. “It doesn’t matter who the bomb came from. It happened and it’s done.”

The specialist turned and paced in a tight circle, his nerves fraying past the point of repair. “You don’t believe that.”

“I have a wife and child back home who need me to believe that document isn’t legitimate.”

“But you know it is.” He could hear the whine in his voice, and he hated himself for it. “Sarge. Please. I have family in Stable 10.”

“Ten generations removed and who you didn’t have a clue existed until the pureblood appeared. That’s not a strong enough argument to do… whatever it is you’re planning on doing.”

A tear of laughter rolled out from the bar nearby before being swallowed by the shrill notes of the house music.

“What would that wife and kid say if they knew you could have done something good and pretended the option was never on the table?”

The staff sergeant’s expression grew brittle.

“Look, Sarge,” he pressed, shaking the document at him, “we both know this isn’t what the Enclave stands for. We don’t try to murder entire Stables.”

“We kill all the time, son.”

“Not with balefire. Not me.” He pinched the emblem pinned to his uniform, of the black and white pegasi encircling the letters R.C. “And I think if I went back to the barracks and asked any soldier who believed what this symbolizes, there wouldn’t be a single one who would sign on with what the minister did.”

His sergeant watched him for several agonizing seconds, never reaching out to accept the damning document being offered to him but not quite looking away from it either. “I think you’d change your tune if a couple of Black Wings put you in shackles and dragged you out to New Harmonies.”

“I’d go,” he hissed with all the defiance he could muster. “I’d go because it would just prove that I’m right about this, and that this sheet of paper has nothing but the truth printed on it. Minister Primrose is guilty of using a weapon forbidden on pureblood civilians. And if she doesn't give a shit about them, then shouldn't that make you ask why we cull the dustwings? If blood doesn't matter then what are we even doing? What else has she told us to believe that are outright lies?”

His senior officer and closest friend, a conflict of interest the two of them had kept quiet throughout their induction into the Enclave, said nothing for a long while. Then something passed between them, something unspoken. The staff sergeant reached out and snatched the document from his feathers, his expression grim as he skimmed the text. When he finished he offered back the paper, his jaw tight as if he were straining under a new, terrible weight.

“I have a son,” he hissed.

“You’ll be safe,” he assured him. “I just need to see her schedule.”

“You know I’m not high enough in the chain for that.”

He folded the document and pressed it into the sweaty pit of his wing. “But you know that friend up in Intelligence.”

“And right now she’s shitting bricks that make yours look like pebbles. She barely avoided the purge of Clover's people.”

“But she has access.”

He watched his friend blow a breath through his nose and stare defeatedly up at the single bulb burning between them. Dead flies and living ones clung to the glass in droves, baited into the community outhouse by the stink only to be lured toward a light whose only gift it had to offer was death. He was already stuck. Guilt by association. If the specialist pursued this alone it wouldn’t be long until the wrong set of ears overheard him and the Black Wing came to relieve him of the burden of knowing the truth.

The staff sergeant looked down at the emblem pinned above his left pocket, closed his eyes, and nodded. “Yeah,” he sighed. “She has access.”

“Honey, close your mouth before you swallow a fly.”

Beans did as she was told, though not without the youthful overexuberance that resulted in a sharp click from her teeth. She didn’t notice her mom flinching at the sound, or the sympathetic smile from the elderly stallion who said he was something called a “teacher.” The books stacked atop the shelves that towered over her had her complete and undivided attention. The rest of the room, with its rows of chairs and tables, and all the letters and numbers and beautiful pictures dancing across all the walls, were utterly forgotten the moment she’d been shown the books. They were the most colorful thing she had ever seen in her entire life. Even in the dim half-light of Aurora’s giant home she could tell that every single narrow spine, with their titles that made her imagination run wild with so many adventures she’d never known before, was brand new and had never been glued or sewn back together by anyone ever.

She felt like she’d found the Pirate Treasure of Cutthroat Cove, and the teacher and her mom had told her she could pick whichever ones she wanted. She wanted to read all of them but she knew it was impolite to be greedy for real. There were rules to stealing her mom and dad said she wasn’t old enough to learn yet, and she didn’t want to steal from the teacher because he was nice. He was letting her take books from his “library,” another new word. And the library belonged to the “classroom.” When the electricity came back, he said she would get to meet lots of other foals the same age as her and he would teach her even more things she didn’t know. And there were the books. She could come back every day, he said, to choose a new book.

At first she worried there were too many to choose from to make up her mind, but a little voice on her shoulder told her that was really a good thing. Having so many good options made it so it didn’t matter which ones she chose first. Soon she was pointing a stubby hazel feather toward the biggest book she could see. Its deep red cover and gold letters made it look like the best one of them all. The teacher’s white feathers tipped the cover backward and it slid away in his wing, which was promptly lowered for her to see.

She knew her letters, but some of the words on the cover were too big for her to spell out in her head. A picture of a gold creature with sharp black stripes prowling the cover made her gasp with excitement. There were other animals too, of strange scaly things and big feathered birds that looked too vivid to actually be real. She didn’t care what the story was about. This was what she wanted.

“Wild Animals of Equestria and Beyond,” her mom read for her. “I don’t think this one is a storybook, honey. Are you sure?”

She already had the covers pulled apart on the big purple rug. On the left page stood a giant orange with brown splotches all the way from its knobby knees to the fuzzy antenna on its head. She grinned at how its long neck bent around the words on the page, then cocked her head at the strange bird with its weird blue fan of feathers that looked like they were topped with eyeballs.

“That’s a peacock,” the teacher chuckled, tapping the bird with the edge of his hoof. “It’s like a turkey but with better makeup.”

She could tell by the way he talked that the teacher was making a joke, but she didn’t know what turkeys were or why it was bad at making things up. Closing the book with a loud clap of glossy paper coming together again, she looked up at her mom with a sheepish smile. “I like this one.”

Her mom’s own smile was enough of a yes for Beans to scoop the heavy book under her tiny wing. It was hers to borrow, the teacher explained, telling her that the rule was she could keep it for one week before she had to bring it back for somebody else to read. But once she did she would be allowed to take another book, or more than one if her mother said it was alright. It took her a minute to completely understand the rules, but once she did she said so to the teacher and it was soon time to go.

“Say thank you,” her mom reminded her as they turned to leave.

“Thank you Mister Teacher.”

The old stallion’s smile touched his eyes. “You’re welcome, Beans. And you can call me Mister Ives from now on.”

“Okay,” she said, and before she knew it she was following her mom down the big square tunnels of Stable 10.

Her new favorite thing, aside from playing pirate and reading and talking to Julip and being with her mom and dad, was her new home. For some reason her mom and dad had been afraid she wouldn’t like it here, but what wasn’t there to like? The Stable was way better than their cave on the railroad! It was huge and had a million rooms and it went so far underground that none of the bad ponies would never find her ever. Plus she didn’t have to wear a stinky coat to hide her wings because everybody here had wings too! Well not everybody, her mom didn’t have wings and neither did Roach or any of the Ranger ponies living outside, but that didn’t matter either because the Rangers were the good guys and would keep them all safe!

Riding on her mom’s back with her new book safely under wing, she gawked unashamedly at all the new faces they passed by. Her dad said these ponies weren’t dustwings like him and her, but a special kind of pegasi who hadn’t gone outside ever in their whole lives. He didn’t explain why that made them special, and Beans wasn’t sure if she’d feel very happy if she had never gotten to see the sky. Who wouldn’t want to? It was the prettiest thing in the world, especially at night when the clouds got all lit up by the moon. Her dad once said he met a unicorn who tried to tell him the moon wasn’t real, but he knew better than to believe that. He said so himself that he’d seen it before and it had been the most beautiful thing he’d ever looked at.

Two stallions looked at her mom in the funny way all the Stable ponies did, but they said hello and she and her mom said hello back. Stable ponies were weird like that because none of them had ever seen an earth pony before. Beans wondered if either of the stallions had gone up to see the moon.

“Time to jump down, honey.”

She blinked. “Why?”

“Because mom needs to talk to the doctor alone for a minute. Come on, hop down.”

Sometimes she would start thinking about one thing and it would turn into all kinds of things and before she knew it a whole lot of stuff had happened she hadn’t been paying attention to. She hadn’t really watched where her mom had been walking, all the metal tunnels looked the same to her, but the place they were in now was the same place they’d been to yesterday. She could tell because all the doors had little holders for lots of papers and thin wooden rectangles, and the pegasi who walked around all wore white coats that were different from the same old blue and yellow outfits most the other Stable residents wore.

“Beans,” her mom prompted a little more firmly.

She’d gotten her head stuck in the clouds again. That happened a lot. It was part of what made the days on the mountain so much fun, even if it did get her in trouble sometimes.

Careful not to drop her book, she slid off her mom’s back and stared up at the doctor - the pegasi in white coats were called doctors, she’d learned - waiting in the open door of his office. He didn’t have the same smile that Mister Ives had shown her.

“Sit here,” her mom said, tapping the edge of a plastic chair next to the door. “I’ll be out in five minutes, okay?”

Beans nodded, plopped her book into the chair, then hoisted herself up beside it. She’d done the same thing yesterday. Once her mom was done it would be her turn to talk to the doctor. They had to visit every day because that was the rule if they didn’t want to go into something called a Quarry Teen. Beans didn’t know what a Quarry Teen was but the way her mom and dad made a face whenever they said it made her think it wasn’t a very fun place to go.

Talking to the doctor wasn’t much fun either. He really, really wanted to know if she felt sick. Beans didn’t think she felt sick at all. She wasn’t stuffy or goopy or tired, but he asked anyway and she always said no. She was a little afraid if he kept asking she might actually get sick, and then what would he say? But she hadn’t so far, and neither had her mom or dad.

Behind the wall she could hear her mom and the doctor’s muffled voices. Boring grown-up stuff. She sighed and looked up and down the tunnel. This one wasn’t made out of metal. It had smooth white walls with a pretty metal railing all the way down both sides. Curiously, she leaned away from the wall and reached out with her wing to touch the rail that emerged from behind her chair. She wondered where it went, and that was enough of a question for her to warrant finding out.

Hopping down from the chair, and with her book back under her wing, she trotted off to see where it led.

As always, she never meant to wander away. It always just sort of happened on its own. At least that was how Beans always reasoned her propensity to explore worked. With the tip of her wing lifted high to trace the flat side of the wall railing, she told herself she wasn’t wandering off at all. Sometimes when her mom and dad told her to stay in the main room of the cave back home, she’d still poke her head into her dad’s workshop behind the partition. They never got mad then. Aurora’s Stable was just one big cave. As long as she kept her feathers on the rail, she wasn’t even leaving the metal tunnel. This, she decided, was even less against the rules than walking around their other home.

Some of the grown-up pegasi in their white jackets and weird matching jumpsuits looked at Beans with slightly concerned expressions as they passed her, but none of them stopped to ask where she was going. Beans didn’t know about the dark weeks the Stable had just begun to crawl out of, so she assumed the harried and beleaguered gazes of everyone who lived in it were just how Stable ponies were. Aurora had been a lot like that. Beans remembered her as a super serious mare whose adventures came first and playtime came last. Julip was kind of like that too, but Beans could tell it was all an act. Deep down, First Mate Julip wanted to goof off and pretend. She just needed help remembering how sometimes.

A tired looking doctor stepped out from a door behind her and said something about her not being allowed down here. Beans looked back at him as she feathered her wing through the still air alongside her, the wall rail a distant memory by now. The old stallion didn’t look like he was willing to do more than shake a hoof at her, and she ignored him in the hopes he wouldn’t give chase. He didn’t.

It was only after the first tickles of worry that she might be wandering farther than her mom would be happy with that she turned a corner and saw the walls with the big, long, see-through cut-outs. She gasped, knowing exactly what they were as soon as the emergency lights on the ceiling reflected across their surface.

“Windows!” she breathed. They were just like the ones the little houses in her storybooks had in them, only these ones were big and wide and when she got up close to them she could see teeny criss-crossing wires threaded through the panes.

Immediately she was up on her hind legs, hooves plastered against the bottom edge of the glass, and staring into the strange rooms inside. Some had weird machines inside with wheels underneath and tubes and wires springing out everywhere. Some had stubby chairs surrounding big, long metal tables. Beans noticed that a lot of the tables had even more glass stuff on them, just like the windows, but shaped like funny cups and canteens and pipes. There were shiny boards on the walls with words she didn’t understand written in lots of colors, and she wondered if maybe this was where the doctors went to have fun. Another window had a room full of empty white beds all along the walls. The last one she stopped at, one whose big metal door was attended by two stallions who had been watching her run up and down the tunnel since she turned the corner, had beds in it too. Only this room and its beds were filled with pegasi in black uniforms.

“Hey kid,” one of the stallions said. “This isn’t a playground. Go find your parents.”

Tiny hooves still planted against the glass, Beans didn’t stop staring at the pegasi. She recognized them. Not as individuals, but for the uniforms they wore. She’d always been told to watch the sky for pegasi in black.

“Go on,” the stallion said more firmly, and made a shooing gesture with his wing.

“Are they in jail?” she asked.

By now many of the Enclave soldiers had taken notice of the foal staring in at them, and some had begun sitting up on their beds to frown at the change in their routine. Those nearest the glass made faces and ignored her, almost like they were mad at her.

“Kid, you gotta go.” With an exasperated sigh the second guard, a portly stallion with a splotchy white and brown coat, stepped away from the door and began walking toward her. “Come on. Let’s go see if one of the doctors knows where your mom and dad are.”

She didn’t budge as he slowed to a stop near her. Her lips pursed with the youthful and exasperating impetuousness that only foals could muster. She had found something interesting and someone who wasn’t her parent wanted her to go away. She felt a little afraid of the guard, too. What would he do if she said no? Her mom and dad said strangers could be dangerous, but Julip and her friends hadn’t been. Plus the guard was talking to her like her dad sometimes did when he wanted her to help sweep the cave but was too tired from his trips out to the trade roads to make her.

She stayed put, and to her relief the pudgy stranger muttered something under his breath about having tried before turning back to his post.

“How’d you catch so many?”

One of the ponies nearest where she stood staring who had shot her a mean look suddenly laughed, and to her shock, she heard his muffled voice repeat her question to the other bad pegasi stuck in the room. A few of them chuckled or shook their heads, while the rest seemed to regard her with even more interest than they had before. Beans hadn’t known they could hear her and now her cheeks flushed hot with embarrassment for having just learned the hard way. She caught the eye of a mare who was staring at her and stuck her tongue out at her. The mare’s face, its gentle yellow coat half-covered in bandages, hardened at the insult and she returned it with two quick words that made it clear through the glass. One of those words she wasn’t allowed to say.

The two guards at the door watched, but neither seemed any more willing to answer her questions than they were to tell the pegasi behind the glass not to swear. Suddenly the windows didn’t feel fun anymore, and her hooves slid a little down the pane.

Like the bears in one of her books liked to say, she’d sure stirred up a beehive. Inside the room lots of the bad pegasi were awake and talking to the friends nearest their beds. Beans could tell by the way they looked and gestured at the window that they were talking about her. Among the muddy words she could pick out, the word “dustwing” was spoken the most. It was like they were all just noticing her for the first time.

Among them, a thin stallion with purple feathers and a gold mane stared daggers at her from where he reclined on his bed along the room’s far wall. He was saying something to her and even though she couldn’t make out the words she could tell none of it was nice. Every so often one of his wings would make the same shooing gesture that the stallion guarding the door had made, but with increasingly more force and anger behind it. The stallion on the bed beside him, with a mane, tail, wings and coat so deeply black that he looked to Beans like a living shadow, stared impatiently at his friend with a notepad held between his feathers. The darker pony gave the pad a little shake but the purple one ignored it and kept on talking at Beans.

Finally, the purple stallion reached across his own bed and flung something at the window. The glass let out a dull bong as the pillow harmlessly bounced off, but the attack had been surprising enough to scare a yelp out of Beans and send her tumbling back onto the cold floor.

Both guards let out sighs. One opened the door and walked into the tiny self-contained room beyond while the other asked something that sounded like, “You okay?” She didn’t try to understand. Her little heart pounded in her ears as she got back up, and she could feel angry tears stinging at her eyes. She wanted to throw something back but didn’t have anything to throw.

The other guard thumped the inner door and warned the bad ponies he was going to tell on them once the weather came back. She didn’t know what the weather was going to do to them. Maybe Stable ponies could turn the rain on like they did in her storybooks?

Swallowing her fear, she looked back up at the window and thought about asking the guards to make it so a radstorm would grow inside the room. It sure would show the stallion who threw the pillow to get zapped on the butt by a lightning bolt. She thought about it, but decided not to ask them to do it. It had only been a pillow, after all, and just the thought of surprising them all with a storm was enough to chase off the feeling that she might cry.

When all seemed calm again, she reared back up and thumped her front hooves defiantly against the glass. To her surprise, the purple stallion wasn’t on his bed waiting to throw things anymore. He was lying doubled over on the floor with one of his wings covering his face. The pegasus with the midnight coat and notepad was standing over him, breathing hard, and visibly angry. A lot of the other pegasi were watching them now, and none of them were talking.

The pegasus on the floor lifted his head to say something to the other stallion, but he stopped when the notepad came to a stop in front of his nose. He read the words and his one visible eye seemed to lose the fire within it. Beans desperately wanted to know what the black stallion had written and hoped, as he walked toward the window, he might show her.

The disappointment in her face must have been easy to read when he sat down at the glass and flipped to a blank page. The stallion glanced up at her, saw her expression, and smiled as he dragged a pencil over the paper and held it up.

“Hi. My name is Chops.”

“And they just let you transmit anything?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”

“No censors?”

“Nope.”

“That’s…” Julip shook her head, the wind tossing her black mane back in streamers. “How does that even work? What’s to stop you from saying something against the Rangers?”

Fiona flexed her wings forward and flung them back in a great sweep. Perched atop her back, Roach watched with thinly concealed worry whenever the turbulence of those wingbeats caused Julip and Aurora to sharply drop in altitude. Aurora especially struggled with the sudden sensation of air simply dropping out from under her, but she had learned she could avoid the problem entirely if she didn’t lag behind.

That was a tall order, though. For all her bulk, Fiona put on a lot of speed once she got going. Julip was no slouch either - the former Enclave lieutenant had been flying since she was a kid - and now that she had somebody to challenge her it was up to Aurora to pick up the pace. As she gave her own gray wings several hard pulses to keep up, she caught the concern in Roach’s eyes and gave him her best nonchalant shrug. She’d kept pace with Fiona on the way home and all it had cost her was an entire day to recover. This time they were taking breaks. It would be a breeze by comparison.

“Who says I didn’t give the Rangers shit?” Fiona laughed. “That was half the fun! Hell, I like to think Hightower Radio did more to keep those tin cans honest than the Paladins did.”

Aurora couldn’t help but smile at the way Julip kept looking at Fiona. She was just a little starstruck to be meeting the famous Mare on the Air in the flesh, and the fact that the former DJ was entirely un-equine only captivated her even more. Despite the short time they’d known one another, Aurora had a sneaking suspicion that this was the fastest Julip had warmed to anyone. Were she Roach, she might actually feel a little jealous. But a quick glance past Julip to where he held on for dear life on Fiona’s back, the changeling didn’t seem the least worried.

Good for them, she thought, and proceeded to tune out their conversation so she could concentrate on the changing scenery around them.

It wasn’t hard to distract herself with what lay below. After several hours of flight the thin carpet of scrub grass, cracked soil, and raggedy forests clinging together in the crevices between hills, the terrain beneath her wings had slowly but inexorably grown more and more inhospitable. A quick glance at her Pip-Buck’s map confirmed that, if she had a pen, she could draw a nearly straight line north from their position to the outdated icon representing Canterlot. They had some distance left to cover but it was dwindling fast. A wide, bending ribbon of murky liquid one might be tempted to call water followed their path as if a carpet had been rolled out to guide them along.

The river, as far as she could tell, was as dead as the land it touched. The ground wasn’t arid like she’d seen all during their slow march to Fillydelphia. It was sterile. Devoid of anything that might suggest the presence of life or living beings. No grass clutched the riverbanks. No trees grew, save for the broken corpses of those that had fallen decades ago. The abandoned remnants of wood-framed houses stood sunken and pitiful at the ends of dirty roads which the blowing soil had worn smooth. Before Julip and Fiona’s conversation had taken over, the obvious question of what had happened to make this place so forbidding had been answered by the appearance of the river out of the west and the ominously circular body of water that briefly interrupted its meandering path. The roads, stripped foundations of buildings, and stone monoliths peeking up from the water that Roach told them had once held a bridge aloft spoke to another small city that Primrose and Spitfire had marked for one of the bombs. Its crater had since been filled to the brim by the river and the deadly contaminates it once held had used every one of the two hundred and ten years since to poison every brook, creek, and tributary downstream.

She wondered if, nearly due east of them by now, even the deathclaw she’d led into Autumn’s solar array would turn its snout up at the thought of making this true wasteland its home. The memory of that bellowing monster stomping after her after waking to her intrusion into its lair came so abruptly that for a brief moment she could feel its claws reach out for her all over again. It was so vivid that when Fiona’s talon touched the tip of her wing, her entire body bucked with a shock that could make a frayed generator feed blush.

The wind nearly bowled her backwards into an unceremonious flip, so unprepared was she to be yanked to the present. She recovered, barely, by bending her head and wings level into the airstream. By the time she caught up with the others, Julip had mostly gotten her laughter under control. Alternatively, Fiona looked like she was ready for a verbal beating.

“Sorry. I’m sorry. I was just trying to–”

“It’s fine,” she interrupted, the ache in her wings glowing even hotter from the wasted exertion. “I was distracted.”

She held short of asking why Fiona decided to bank around to her other side and touch her feathers, but only just. Distracted or not, she could feel inexplicable anger rising in her chest. Had she been trying to sneak up on her? Why hadn’t Roach said anything to warn her? Why the fuck had she decided it was fine to go grabbing at her wing? She couldn’t stop herself from leveling an accusing glare at Julip.

The other mare’s laughter shrank at the sudden attention and was swiftly replaced by a confused frown. “You okay?”

Aurora could hear the deathclaw’s bellow. It had been so long since then, but even now she was convinced there had been as much sorrow as rage resonating through that terrible howl. She nodded in answer as she struggled to calm raw nerves.

“I was trying to get your attention,” Fiona said. “Those are buildings on the horizon.”

They flew several more miles before Aurora could begin to see what Fiona was talking about.

The structures that rose up from the lifeless distance weren’t what she would call buildings, her mind reserving that word for the impressive constructions still towering over the Fillydelphia skyline, but they were… something, alright. How Fiona had spotted the haggard collection of half-collapsed hovels and from such a distance wasn’t worth guessing at. Gryphons had good eyes, that was all she bothered to tell herself. As they drew ever closer she could feel her temper beginning to cool. It had been a misunderstanding. She would need to apologize for that. But for now she kept her focus on the little town opening up below them. Nobody had to ask. They began to descend to meet it.

It became increasingly clear to them that the houses in the process of falling in on themselves were what was left of Mariposa’s “nice” neighborhood. They hugged the place where the riverbank once flowed, now several dozen yards away from its current track, and a similarly curving road snaked its way along the crumbling house fronts. Where lavish topiaries once grew now stood brambles. Much shorter roads, which Roach called driveways, contained the rusting hulks of motorized carriages. Several others mingled together in a tangled mass of skeletal steel at the intersection of two streets, now partially buried in a low dune of topsoil that had begun reclaiming the area.

Farther from the riverfront properties were smaller, densely crowded homes identifiable only by the uniformly shaped concrete slabs peeking out from the rubble. Aurora couldn’t be sure but she had a strong feeling that these houses hadn’t experienced any more catastrophe than their more ornate peers - only that they had been in poorer condition than them when the bombs finally fell. Time had taken its toll on Mariposa, but some parts of the town had gotten a head start decaying.

They flew low over a central road that seemed to have been Mariposa’s version of a main street, and it was uncanny how much alike the indiscernible mass of crumbling storefronts looked to how Junction City stood in her memory. Here was where carriages had come en masse, either by panic or providence, and snarled themselves together in an impassable jam that choked the main road. Here and there she could make out flecks of bleach white against the ruddy brown stains of rust. Bones. Thousands of them, scattered among the wrecked vehicles like spilled seeds doomed to die above the soil.

“Not a lot of places to hide a prison,” Roach called out.

Aurora flinched a little as Julip nosed up and tipped into a gentle bank that sent her coasting above her head, settling within wing’s reach of the changeling atop Fiona’s back.

“You’re the one who said they’d probably hide it underground,” Julip intoned.

Roach grumbled something to himself. “I was hoping Mariposa had a little more real estate to work with than this. The plots are all too small.”

“I thought you were into that,” Aurora chimed before she could stop herself.

Fiona was quick to shoot Roach a wolfish grin, joined by sheepish chuckles from him and the former Enclave mare. Aurora could feel some of the tension she’d created between them lift a little, and she eased into that brief moment of normalcy without hesitation.

“You know what I meant,” Roach insisted in a woefully inadequate attempt to divert their less savory thoughts. “The ministries were powerful, but even they couldn’t build a facility under an entire town without it noticing.”

“Stable-Tec did it all the time,” Julip countered.

He shook his head at her. “Under a major metropolis where construction was a part of everyday life, sure. But not under a place like this. This is the kind of town people ran off to when the cities got too crowded, all riverfront properties and homeowner’s associations and zero tolerance for anything that might threaten their idyllic, make-believe pastoral backyards.”

Aurora glanced at him as they slipped into a wide, circling pattern over the town. “Sore subject?”

He rolled his eyes. “A little. We thought about buying a house in a place like this way back when, but we could never afford it.”

“Who’s ‘we?’”

He regarded Fiona with some hesitation before answering her. “Some other time, maybe.”

For all of its rigidity, her beak still managed to quirk into something of a disappointed frown. Aurora had to believe Fiona would be able to piece enough of it together from context. He was a ghoul after all and the gryphon had probably forgotten more about how the wasteland worked than Aurora had learned since following him into it. They’d find time to fill her in, she thought. Just not now.

“What about that?” Julip had leveled her hoof down river, well outside the boundaries of the town they circled. The three of them turned to see what she’d spotted.

A narrow road drew a winding line south through the barren banks of the old riverbed. Sections of it had long since been washed away where the water had snaked into and under the asphalt strip while other stretches dipped and settled along the eroding embankments. Rusted electrical pylons crossed the distant landscape, drawing a mangled dotted line from the eastern horizon and into the west. Where the rotted power lines met the run-down road stood a cluster of dull, gray and brick red buildings several storeys tall. Sprouting from the roof of the largest structure, a windowless gray cube so close to the river that it looked at risk of tumbling into the fetid current, stood a single narrow smokestack.

Roach had described what prisons built before the war, a distinction whose necessity made Aurora uneasy, looked like and the complex of buildings they’d begun flying toward didn’t look anything like that. There were no big walls topped with barbed wire or windows shielded behind metal bars. She couldn’t even see a chain link fence, though there were several small storage tanks near the road that she knew were one or two modifications away from becoming holding cells. Still, the interconnected nature of all the buildings gave her the sense that they shared the same, singular purpose.

“I’ll bet my wings that this is the place,” Julip said as they dove along the road skirting the property. “This place is bigger than the solar array!”

Aurora wasn’t so sure about that. Including the miles of panels that ringed the defunct power plant, Autumn’s solar array beat out whatever this complex was by a fair amount. On that point Julip was probably wrong, but on her guess that this was the place Eshe had ended up… she didn’t disagree with the possibility.

Here the carriages along the road hadn’t rammed into one another in a blind panic, nor were the hulks rotting in an orderly line outside the empty cubicle-style checkpoints the small, manageable models they’d seen in town. These vehicles made the box trucks they’d taken respite in earlier in the day look like a foal’s toy. Their rubber wheels might have rotted off the rims and their long frames had taken on dangerous lists beneath the weight of shipping containers, but the row of tractor trailers had most definitely been a part of some kind of convoy whose purpose came to an abrupt end when the world did.

“Let’s set down there,” Roach said, indicating the empty checkpoints.

Aurora, Julip, and Fiona touched down on the windworn asphalt between the nose of one sagging truck and the trailer of another. The metal sleeves that held the opposing checkpoint gate arms in place pointed toward the murky sky, but it was anyone’s guess where the wooden arms had gotten off to. Probably blew away on the wind like everything else, Aurora thought.

Fiona jabbed a thumb toward the crooked sign still clinging to the high girders above the gates. “I always wanted to start a newspaper.”

The others had to squint to make out what the sign said. The painted letters had flaked away so thoroughly that it was difficult to tell specks of rust from text.

"Zero points for originality," she muttered.

“It’s a paper mill,” Roach rasped. “Different from a newspaper, but on the same supply chain.”

Aurora walked alongside the cab of the nearest truck and gave the door handle a hard jerk. It lurched open with a low peel of momentum and weight overcoming decades of rust. Aside from a scattering of bones from what must have been the driver, and the tattered gray threads of what looked like a vest puddled around them on the floorboards, there wasn’t much to see. She wrinkled her nose and shoved the door shut. She had to lean into the motion just to get it to latch. The thing was heavy.

When she noticed Julip watching her, she shrugged. “Hoping to find something that might point to Eshe being here.”

Julip nodded and turned her attention to the next truck in the convoy. “That’s not a bad idea. Whoever they were, they were here for a reason.”

“Kind of a stretch to think that reason was anything other than doing their jobs, isn’t it?” Fiona said, following her to the same truck. “It’s a factory. Or a mill, if there’s a difference. Places like these needed trucks to move product.”

Julip tapped the fender. It gave a muted dink in response. “Armored trucks?”

Fiona shrugged. “Maybe it was special paper.”

“Uh huh. Gimme a boost. I wanna check that guy’s pockets. See if he’s got any of that special paper.”

Aurora and Roach shared an amused chuckle at the sight of Fiona hoisting the smaller mare up into the bench-style seat of the cab. Leaving the two of them to plunder their truck, she and Roach paired off to work the next one in the line. The results were the same. Bones left behind by a driver. Scraps of gray cloth. Nothing else. Nothing to explain why the trucks were here or why their drivers died behind the wheel.

“If we had bolt cutters I could open one of these trailers,” Aurora grumbled. Unlike the box truck Fiona had nearly caved in, the steel containers mounted to the bed of each trailer were locked tight by bulky padlocks whose keyholes were discouragingly caked in rust.

The passenger door had similarly been oxidized shut. Roach smirked at her as they rounded the driver’s side. “Sledge told us about the trouble you get into when you have bolt cutters.”

She’d gripped the door handle before she caught onto what he meant. She paused to laugh to herself, remembering the mess she’d made of the Security office door’s hydraulics during her escape from the Stable. “Slander and lies,” she grinned.

“Mmhm.” Roach lit his horn and her eyes went wide.

“Woah-woah!”

The driver’s side door groaned a little before it gave way, but she wasn’t worried about the pulverized rust or bones that tumbled around her. The radiation meter on her Pip-Buck chattered furiously, and Aurora wasn’t that far behind it in giving Roach a piece of her mind.

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” he said, gesturing mildly at the burns that crossed the right half of her body.

She pursed her lips as she listened to her Pip-Buck quiet down. “Yeah, well I don’t feel like tempting fate either.”

Roach grunted, watching as she climbed up to inspect the cab. “Which way the ghouling goes is decided as soon as it starts.”

She grimaced at the bits of mane clinging to the driver’s skull and at the quiet certainty in Roach’s voice. “You don’t know that for sure.”

“Pretty sure I do.”

She peeled the fading edge of a strangely formal vest - why so many vests? - from the seat fabric and tried to ignore him while she prized open its breast pocket. A pack of gum plopped onto the seat, its bright pink wrapper looking deceptively fresh.

“I wouldn’t have done that if I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I’ve met ghouls who got so much radiation in their blood that they literally glow in the dark. It’s not pretty, but their minds were intact, Aurora. Dosage isn’t the deciding factor. The victim is.”

Her voice went flat. “So I’m a victim now?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

She was sorely tempted to give into impetuous anger again and ask him what he did mean it to sound like, but she bit her tongue before it could spit venom she couldn’t undo. She turned her focus to her breathing.

In. Out. In. Out.

After the better half of a minute she felt something like logic and reason return to her. She needed to get a handle on the hair trigger that seemed to have gotten embedded in her head. Roach… probably had a point. He probably even knew what he was talking about. With a sigh, she looked down to where he stood waiting.

“You’re positive?”

He met her gaze without flinching. “One hundred percent.”

At that, she nodded and turned back to the tatters in the cab. The vest was stiff as a rock, but she wanted to see if anything had gotten trapped underneath it. It took several feathers to peel it off the seat, but when it did the stark black fabric unbleached by daylight gave her pause. A piece of vertebra had partially fused to the seat but that wasn’t what caught her eye. A tiny blue jewel twinkled on the vest’s preserved lapel.

“Any luck?” Roach asked.

It took some fiddling, but eventually the pin dropped free into her waiting wing. “Found some jewelry.”

He nodded, his attention already moving down the line of vehicles. “Sounds like dinner’s on you tonight. Next truck?”

“Let Fiona toss Julip into that one. We’ll take the one after that.” She hopped down, admiring the tiny blue diamond pinched between her feathers. “You know, this kind of looks like one of Rarity’s diamonds.”

Roach stopped and glanced at her. “What?”

“Her cutie mark,” she clarified. “A couple more of these and they’d be a dead ringer.”

“Let me see.”

She snorted. “Get your own.”

But he wasn’t laughing. “Aurora, let me see it.”

After a moment’s hesitation she relented and held out the tiny lapel pin. He didn’t scoop it up in his corrupted magic, nor did she realize she was bracing for him to do just that until she felt her muscles untense upon seeing his upturned hoof. She tipped the gem into it and, careful not to drop it, Roach regarded her find with something bordering on resignation.

He returned the pin to her wing and breathed a sigh. “Well, we’re in the right place.”

“You don’t sound happy,” she said. She watched him as he turned his opaque eyes up to the block buildings beyond the paper mill’s decorative, yet imposing, wrought iron fence.

“I just figured out why the earlier groups Eshe sent to help him disappeared,” he muttered. “I don’t know how he did it, but somehow your friend managed to make himself a guest of a Ministry of Image black site.”

The sun began to set before they could search all of the trucks. Faced with the prospect of spending a night in the shadow of a factory they didn’t have time to check for threats, they made camp on the roof of the tallest building in the complex.

In reality, calling their current circumstances “camping” was being generous. The unadorned and poisoned flatlands of the region offered no resistance at all to the wind, which came and went in periods of great sustained gales and disquieting stillness. Where huge air conditioning units and ventilation ducts provided something close to shelter, jagged pebbles of stubborn roof gravel that time and sunlight had fused with the tar paper that everywhere else had been scoured clean by the wind. Aurora had tried sweeping away some of the stones only for her hoof to simply bounce off with a fresh chip in it for her effort. Given the choice between a bed of sharp rocks and the wind, they grudgingly chose the wind.

Aurora tipped her head up and scowled at the lazy movement of the clouds overhead. It wasn’t fair that they were unaffected by the lowland winds. She grumbled under her breath and rightly concluded that atmospheres were stupid.

Sitting to her right, Julip’s prickles were beginning to show. “I’m never going to sleep in this fucking hurricane.”

On her left, Roach grunted. “We’re not sleeping in a building we haven’t cleared.”

On her right, “Then let’s go clear it.”

On her left, “By the time we finish, it’ll be dawn.”

Aurora shut her eyes and tried to keep her tone level. “Guys. Please.”

Roach and Julip exhaled individual sighs and let the matter drop, but she had a feeling it would keep coming up again until Julip finally settled in enough to doze.

Settling in was a tall order, even for Aurora who had spent years honing an uncanny knack for sneaking in the odd five minute nap in the deafening din of her generator. It was the feeling of exposure that was keeping her up. A needling sense that there were no walls within wing’s reach, no roof over her head, and nothing to dampen the foreboding howl of an unchecked tempest that didn’t have the good decency to get it over with and turn into a proper storm. It was all suspense and no payoff. It was driving her nuts.

And to add to their misery, every gust had a reliable way of picking up Fiona’s wing and dropping it unceremoniously across their heads.

“Sorry,” the gryphon said as she unburied them from her feathers. “There’s not much I can do about it. It beats the alternative, though, right?”

Being the largest among them by far, Fiona had been selected to serve as their windbreak. Given she was the one who would be taking the brunt of nature’s wrath, it had been her choice where to hunker down. With limited options she had decided to lodge herself, quite literally, in the wide gap between two monstrous filtration units nearest the lee side of the building. Laying on her side with her back to the wind provided some relief from the constant pummeling, but there was also the issue of Fiona’s bulk for Aurora, Roach, and Julip to contend with. A pillow she was not. Where Aurora lay, she was all ribs and muscle. Like Roach, she had settled on curling up on the tar paper roof with her saddlebags tucked under her head. It was better than nothing.

Julip swatted away Fiona’s feather with an irritated growl. It was bad enough for her that she was practically being whipped in the head whenever Fiona’s heavy wing crashed down on them. Having drawn the short straw, though, she found herself sleeping at Fiona’s haunches, which gave her an entirely different cornucopia of gryphon anatomy to worry about. Aurora almost felt bad for her. Almost. She wasn’t blind to the way Julip and Roach were eyeing each other as they prepared to bed down for the night, and happy as she was for them she wasn’t yet willing to risk waking up to an object lesson in how “close” the two of them might already be.

“We could clear an office or something. One room. Five minutes.”

Aurora lifted her head, eliciting a crinkle from something in her saddlebag. “Julip.”

Even the wind had had enough and promptly swirled Fiona’s wing off her side and back onto the three of them.

“Leave it,” Aurora grumbled when Fiona started to apologize again. “It deadens the noise, at least.”

Rustling feathers behind her made it clear Julip didn’t agree, but after a solid minute of trying fruitlessly to shove the feathered appendage away she finally gave up with a defeated, “Fuck me.”

“I’ll take a raincheck,” Roach chuckled.

“I’m off the clock,” Fiona added.

Aurora kept her mouth shut and listened to the sounds of bodies settling into comfortable sleep positions. Hooves scraped the rough rooftop. Tails rasped. A yawn. A sniff. Soon Fiona’s chest had taken on the slow, steady expansion and contraction of sleep and the rhythm grew infectious. Even Julip rolled over and began to doze. In the near absolute dark beneath their canopy of tawny feathers, Aurora found herself watching the dim half-glow of the soft tissue between the plates of Roach’s broken carapace. She wondered if he was truly asleep or just waiting for the next sunrise. Before she could decide, however, her eyes were already sliding shut.

“It’s not funny.”

Eshe smiled at her. “I’m sorry. It’s just that you keep asking, and… yes, Aurora. I’m sure.”

She nodded at the sidewalk, feeling embarrassed for needing to be reassured again. The concrete slabs had a subtle ochre tint she thought was too beautiful to be made for pedestrians to walk all over. Further up the busy street, a blat of compressed air from a motorized carriage chastised the striped driver of a wooden rickshaw who hadn’t obeyed the colored lights strung above the intersection. The hotel in Fillydelphia was gone, replaced tonight by a location closer to Eshe’s youth. It was a memory he brought to Equestria of his hometown in Vhanna, a rapidly modernizing port city along the coast.

“Sadahi?” she asked.

“Sa-ha-di,” he enunciated.

They made way for a trio of zebra colts who ran by screaming excitedly in a language Aurora couldn’t understand, and didn’t need to. They were playing chase just like she had when she was young. She smiled as they skidded down a narrow alley, their shrieks of pursuit blending with the sounds of a small city on the verge of something greater than what it was.

“It’s all so… blue.”

The words landed with an inadequacy that seemed almost fitting. Port Sahadi was a place of such vibrant color that it seemed as if it had been dipped in liquid sky. Nearly every building, the tallest and fewest standing a mere five floors above the bustling street, was painted in eye-popping indigo. Brick, wood, stucco, it didn’t matter what the outside was built from. Everything that could hold a sapphire coat shone brilliantly blue against a towering backdrop of deep red mountains. Nothing had been dulled by neglect. Even the exposed mortar where paint flakes had inevitably chipped off were so white that it strained her eyes.

Eshe closed his eyes, inhaled a lungful of salt air, and released a homesick sigh. “She was a place of beauty. I’m glad to know you’ve had the chance to see it.”

She caught a glimpse of their reflection in a passing storefront window. The glass was clean, the gold script of the store’s name pristine and unworn. Even the weeds that grew in the cracks along the gutters looked green and healthy.

“My Stable had doctors,” she began to say.

“No.” He spoke softly, yet firmly. “I’ve had my fill of doctors. I haven’t done much with my life to believe I have any great rewards coming to me, but I do believe that I deserve to rest. If there is something after life, I want to see what it is. If there isn’t, then at least I’ll have peace.”

Tears swam in her vision. She didn’t know why. She barely knew this stallion, and yet she couldn’t do a thing to keep herself from choking on her emotions.

“I’ll understand if you need to change your mind,” he murmured, and she could tell that he truly meant it.

She could walk away from this and he wouldn’t think a single bit less of her. He was giving her an out. They knew where he was now. They were sleeping on the roof of a building somewhere above his bed, and it would only cost her half a day’s flight and a wingful of caps to hire someone more qualified to do what Eshe was asking. One less scar on her soul. One less awful memory to bury.

She blinked away the tears, her voice husky as she said, “No. I can do it. I’m going to do this for you.”

“Thank you,” he said, his striped shoulder touching hers as they walked together. She didn’t break from that subtle, intimate contact and nor did he. They walked like that for some time, crossing streets and taking in the sights of a city whose fate neither of them knew or cared to know.

“Do you know what?” he asked.

She looked at him and saw he was smiling. Turns out it was catching. She couldn’t help but return it. “No. What?”

“I am willing to gamble that you, Aurora, have never once enjoyed authentic Vhannan kitfo.”

She wiped the moisture from her cheek and laughed. “I don’t know what that is, Eshe.”

He grinned. “Do you like spice?”

She paused to think. “Like… salt?”

“Oh, no. No no, we are going to fix this.” He tipped his head down the ochre sidewalk with an eager smile she couldn’t say no to. “Come. Come with me. I know a wonderful mitmita stand not far from here. Their kitfo will redefine everything you thought you knew about good food.”

She began to trot after him. “Do we have time?”

“Aurora, we’re dreaming!” he called back. “We have all the time we’ll ever need!”

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