“Not just something. I want… I think I could build a place for people to live. I mean, with a lot of help, but… a village, or a town…”

Fiona pretended to inspect her talons as she listened, her ear along with the rest of her body leaned against the cool concrete near the window. She swallowed, her throat thick as she fought the hounding guilt urging her to pass the time doing anything other than eavesdropping. She told herself that it was okay. This was what she did. She reasoned that maybe someday this could be a story she could share with the rest of the wasteland once she rebuilt her radio station. But the longer she listened the more that thin justification fell apart.

Roach and Julip were off murmuring privately to one another somewhere down the corridor. She stole a glance back toward them and watched Roach for a brief moment. His low light vision has been serviceable enough for him to navigate the dim halls of this… whatever this place was, but the fact that he wasn’t interested in the dark windows surrounding him told her he hadn’t seen the things moving behind the glass.

It was everything she could do to keep her back leg from taking on a nervous bounce as she waited for Aurora to finish what she’d come to do. It was the flavor of selfish impatience that grew out of fear, and Fiona never knew herself to spook easily. Her gaze moved toward the darkened room opposite the one Aurora had gone into, with its black window staring back at her like some monstrous, unblinking eye. The glass had been treated with some kind of filter, she thought, or maybe it was polarized. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that it gave the thing behind it an added layer of wrongness she didn’t have any reference for.

The word that rose in her mind was spider, and it was wholly inadequate. Dishonest. Forcing herself to admit what it was felt like swallowing hot metal. It lifted the pale white equivalent of a leg, dropped onto the dark smeared floor, and pulled itself forward an inch or two until the next of its legs could repeat the process. It didn’t know Fiona was watching it. It couldn’t. It was only a ribcage. The bones had taken up the role of locomotion as tumescent knots of muscle and sinew twitched and contracted along its spine, no body to worry about keeping alive anymore. It pawed along aimlessly like a caterpillar, showing no signs of awareness beyond the drive to pull itself forward.

Fiona glanced back at Roach and watched as he bumped his shoulder into Julip’s as if to reassure her. He hadn’t seen the things lurking in the other cells. Hadn’t pieced together why the soldiers in power armor had died at their posts. Why the staff on this level had thrown themselves into the killing field of the auto turret down the hall. Why the sign outside this dead end called it an observation unit and not a cell block.

She jumped when the decontamination cycle kicked on and did her best to compose herself before the door slid open. When it did, Aurora didn’t meet any of their eyes. She just stood there under the last arch, her mane and coat dripping with rapidly evaporating cleanser, her jaw working to spit out the words trapped in her throat.

When she did speak, her voice was soft and unsteady. “I don’t know how to take out the tubes.”

Fiona looked at Roach and Julip and saw the blank confusion in their eyes. Then she leaned toward the lit window and understood.

“Show me,” she said, stepping into the decontamination chamber with a gentleness in her voice she hadn’t used in… she didn’t know if she ever had. It felt foreign to her own ears, but Aurora didn’t seem to notice. She backed up to give Fiona room, eyes fixed on the wet floor.

The decontamination cycle was just as unpleasant as it had been at the elevator. When it was over, she followed Aurora into the room. The zebra’s – Eshe’s body lay perfectly still in the old bed’s scooped padding. Aurora made her way back to the side of the bed whose internals stood exposed, a wing reaching out to touch him before stopping inches from his body. She knew how to disconnect him, Fiona realized, but she was afraid of doing it wrong. Of hurting him even though he was so clearly gone.

“I want to bury him,” Aurora said, her throat choked with shame.

“Sure,” she agreed. “That’s a nice idea.”

Aurora gave a shaky nod, the sudden movement sending a few tears sprinkling onto the bed. She watched her hands move first to the tubes in his mouth, then the needles taped to his forelegs, then looked away when Fiona removed the rest. She scooped him out of the bed with one wing like she remembered her mother doing to her when she was little and was surprised at how little his body weighed. Gently, and careful to make sure Aurora could see what she was doing, Fiona wrapped him in her feathers to hold him at her side.

Turning back to the door, Fiona opened her other wing and touched Aurora’s shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go find a place he’d like.”

The sun had just begun its long westward descent when they left Mariposa behind, and it seemed to Aurora that the winds had softened some as they made their ascent.

Before they’d climbed the narrow stairs back to the surface, Roach had asked them to wait while he and Julip checked the barracks for something to wrap Eshe’s body in. They’d come back with a dull cotton bedsheet taken from the personnel level laundry, and Aurora numbly watched as Fiona carefully swept the old fabric around him. She looked away when the swaddling cloth wrapped his face, reminding her too sharply of the mask she’d fixed over his mouth.

Now, with the last living survivor of Mariposa bundled safely in Fiona’s arms, they coasted in silence below an overcast sky.

It was well into evening when Julip asked the group to start looking for a place to make camp. The request jarred Aurora back into the present and she was surprised by how different the landscape below them looked now. Land poisoned and wind scarred by the bomb that fell on Ponyville had transitioned back to the familiar patchwork of browns, yellows, and occasional greenery of shrubs and the odd thicket of trees. Flying beside her with Roach weighing her down, Julip’s normally leaf green coat was covered in dark patches of sweat.

Aurora didn’t need to ask to know Julip had been overextending herself so they could cover more ground. It was written across the mare’s face, and she’d done it so Aurora would have more uninterrupted time with her own thoughts. She met Julip’s straining gaze and nodded her thanks.

“Let’s set down there.” Fiona pointed her beak toward a silver crescent of still water maybe twenty miles off her left wingtip. “It looks pretty.”

They banked toward the shallow lake and leaned into an easy, gentle glide, its features resolving with more detail as they drew near. Low granite cliffs buttressed the water’s edge, curving into one another around the feeder river’s inlet and outlet. The faded line of what had once been a gravel backroad followed the crescent’s outer bend and along it still stood several dilapidated luxury cabins.

They slid through the air above the water, and Aurora frowned at the old timber beams poking out from the water’s mirror surface near each cabin. Her curiosity didn’t go unnoticed, and Roach explained that they’d been a sort of walkway above the water where boats were kept. She nodded without absorbing the new knowledge and turned her attention back to the passing scenery.

Rather than land at one of the cabins where they agreed it was likely they might encounter any number of current occupants with the proclivity to bite, slash, or greet them with gunfire, Fiona proposed the make camp at one of the sightseeing outlooks perched along the hiking trails weaving their way through the tree-topped granite cliffs. They agreed and quickly selected a clearing along the ridge’s inner, wooded bend.

Hooves and paws grazed past the old iron rail along the cliff’s edge, barely missing the coin operated viewers still peering down across the water. The dust kicked up by their landing wafted away on a lazy breeze over a pair of bench-style picnic tables, one of which Julip slumped into as soon as Roach had dismounted.

Aurora found herself looking past the overlook toward the line of tall pines whose roots somehow still managed to pull life up from the rocky soil. A trailhead marker indicated the beginning of one of the gravel hiking paths they’d seen in flight, but a thick bed of gold and brown needles obscured its direction. She wanted to know how so many living trees could survive so close together. Why this forest didn’t seem thin and sickly like all the others. Maybe, she thought, it was just an illusion. Or maybe, like the grove Discord had cultivated to isolate himself, these pines had some of the old Everfree in them.

“What do you think?”

She blinked. Fiona stood beside her now, her burden transferred from her arms to the scoop of one massive wing. Aurora knew what she was really asking, and so she gave herself time to consider. She didn’t take long. This place was alive, uncomplicated, and beautiful. He’d have loved it.

She picked out a natural depression in the forest floor where a trio of healthy, thriving white pines stood in silent sentry. Fiona unwrapped the cloth from Eshe’s body and set him down among the roots as gently as she might a sleeping foal. As the trees murmured overhead, Aurora considered saying a few words before they buried him. Everything that came to mind sounded cheap and contrived. An interruption to the natural sounds of an open world Eshe once dreamed of returning to.

She bent down, scooped a wingful of pine needles and rich soil up from the forest floor, and tipped them across Eshe’s body. Then she climbed back up the depression for more, and the rest of her friends joined her in the burial.

When they were finished, they made their way back to the overlook and made camp along the treeline. Though she was physically and emotionally exhausted, Aurora helped Julip clear the area of dry needles while Fiona and Roach gathered wood for their fire. As if to spite the overcast, the setting sun managed to color the clouds in shades of pink that steadily deepened to rich lavender.

It was nearly dark by the time Roach and Fiona emerged from the trees with what seemed half the forest lugged beneath the gryphon’s wings. Julip had dozed off in the meantime and she lay curled on her side next to the ring of stones she and Aurora had built. She woke with a weary groan at the clunking of firewood dropping onto the granite and managed to stay awake just long enough to move a few yards away when she saw Aurora using two sets of pliers to pry the lead bullet out of one of her rifle’s unfired rounds. She tipped the gunpowder out into a nook of tinder at the base of the neatly arranged logs, then retrieved the old spark igniter from Sledge’s tool wrap. She only had to give the little flint two quick scrapes before the gunpowder ignited with a flash of light and smoke, and the pile of sticks and dry needles sheltered by the cone of firewood had no choice but to catch.

“Probably didn’t need the gunpowder,” Roach murmured wryly beside her.

She offered a tired smirk in return, watching the fire crawl along the tinder and up the inside of the logs. “Says you.”

Fiona snorted from across the ring and carefully used a stick to pry open air gaps to keep the fire from smoking too much.

Aurora smiled up at her, then let the expression fade as she watched the fire grow. Soon it was crackling and putting off enough heat that they each scooted back in turn. She slid her saddlebags a little closer to her hip, unconsciously comforting herself as the firelight flickered.

“I need to talk to you all about something.” She fed a stick into the fire and watched the flames lap around it. “I think my ghouling is headed in the wrong direction.”

A stillness enveloped their camp like an oppressive, physical thing. She didn’t look to gauge their reactions.

“I started paying attention to it after I flew back home with Fiona. Little things set me off that never did before. One second I’m fine, the next I’m pissed off and I don’t know why. It’s gotten worse since we went to Mariposa, and on top of that I just… blacked out for a few seconds while we were down there.” She waited a beat to gauge whether or not she could trust herself to keep talking and found she could. “If I start turning into one of those things, I want you all to know that I’m going to take care of it myself.”

The uneasy exhalations and shuffles around the fire were expected, and she could tell by the way Roach had begun clearing his throat that he was preparing himself to interrupt. She spoke again before he could.

“Hopefully Doc Fetlock has some new ideas for slowing the worst of it down, but I’m not…”

“Aurora,” Roach murmured.

She spoke over him. “...going to get my hopes up. I’ll talk to my dad afterward. That might take a while, so I’ll…”

“Aurora,” Roach repeated, this time leaning over to place a hoof on her shoulder.

This time she stopped just long enough to glare at him. “Can I finish?”

He returned her glare with a practiced expression of supreme exasperation. “No, because you need to listen. You’re not going feral.”

Her frown stayed where it was, but it changed.

Roach took a deep breath, blew it out, and got up to sit down beside her. She watched him reach around her and drag her saddlebags in front of him. As he talked, he began rummaging through the contents.

“You have been temperamental, moody, and short-fused,” he said over the clatter of loose rifle cartridges and caps, “and nobody in their right mind would say otherwise.”

Aurora’s frown softened with growing uncertainty as she watched him shut the flap of one saddlebag and flip open the other. “That’s my whole point. I’ve never been this–”

He stopped rummaging for a moment and cut her off. “Aurora, you’ve just been through the worst three weeks of your life. You lost a limb. You almost lost your home, and Ginger died saving it and you. And then, when you’ve barely begun to recover from all of that, you came all the way to Mariposa to fulfill Eshe’s wish to die.”

He put a hoof around her shoulder and squeezed. “I’ve seen ponies go feral. I would tell you if I thought you were slipping. You’re not. You’re pissed off and distracted because you have been trying to cope with things that no one is meant to cope with.”

“Roach, I know what exhaustion feels like. This isn’t–”

“You’re used to physical exhaustion. Hard manual labor. Double and triple shifts. I’m not so old that I can’t remember how bone tired I felt after a sixty hour week shoveling dirt and digging up plants.” He turned back to her open saddlebag and resumed his search within it. “This isn’t your body saying it’s tired. This is your brain hitting a wall.”

She glanced up at Fiona and saw the not so subtle agreement with Roach’s words in the way she stared back. Turning to Julip, she saw the same small, patient smile curling the mare’s lip. Aurora frowned down at her hooves and tried racking her brain for something that might reinforce her certainty that she’d begun slipping toward the raging, ravenous existence of ferality.

Then she stopped when Roach smiled, dipped his head toward something at the bottom of her saddlebag, and emerged with her canteen hanging from its strap between his teeth. Duly chagrined, she took the container and unscrewed its cap. The water was cool against her tongue and she realized she hadn’t eaten or drank anything since dawn. She hadn’t realized she was starving until her stomach wrapped itself around that sip.

She reached over to pull back her saddlebags, hoping to find something to eat inside that she’d forgotten, but Roach had already pulled out the metal container he’d gotten from his visit to Stable-Tec Headquarters and was nosing the lid open. Beneath a foam layer that held vials of preserved medication and an empty autoinjector to dispense them hid a shallow compartment containing a metal cylinder and a drab green vacuum sealed pouch. The cylinder was labeled Purified Water (32oz) and the pouch read simply, MRE Emergency Ration (Menu D-7).

Roach lifted up the pouch and held it out to her. “You’re in charge of cooking,” he said, his words muddled by clenched teeth. When she took it from him, he added, “Believe me, you’re going to be okay.”

As she tore the pouch open and tipped half a dozen smaller pouches out in front of her, she discovered to her surprise that she believed him. Things weren’t perfect. They weren’t even great. But she felt calmer than she had felt in weeks. Settled. She wasn’t going to devolve into a mindless, howling monster. The dark halls of Mariposa were behind her. Eshe was at peace and her Stable, damaged and carved open by the bomb that ripped Ginger from her life, was having new life breathed into it by their wasteland neighbors.

Absently, she dragged a feather over the packet, listening to it crinkle softly as she reached inwardly to feel the wound Ginger’s death had left on her heart. It still ached. It would, she thought, for years. But she could touch that spot without breaking, if she was gentle.

It didn’t take long after pouring water over the little chemical heater for the MRE to puff up and issue a steady jet of steam from a little cut-out vent. When Aurora retrieved the meal packet and tried half a spoonful of two-hundred year old beef stroganoff, she found she was able to laugh through the jaw-locking flavor of salt. They all took a turn at the ration, each sharing their own brand of revulsion at what the old world thought might qualify as food in the far future. She watched Roach and Julip laugh at Fiona’s exaggerated gagging, her wings twisting open and freezing in strange poses as she feigned poisoning, and Aurora felt reminded of the morning they’d all shared between the Pleasant Hills and Fillydelphia.

Over a meal of seared mole rat they’d reassured Julip even though she’d broken her oath to the Enclave, she had allies in the wasteland. It had been the day Julip truly joined their little group. Now, sitting here, taking back the meal packet from a grimacing yet still jovial Fiona, Aurora knew this was the same moment for their large friend. The gryphon, her shoulders skinned and peppered with fresh scabs from forcing herself down Mariposa’s narrow stairs, had bled for them. She saved Aurora’s life. She carried Eshe’s body.

She gave Fiona a subtle nod as she took the meal packet from her and tossed it into the fire. For as long as Fiona wanted, she would always have a place among them.

They passed around the rest of their water to rinse out the aftertaste of Menu D-7 and, with the fire painting them in dancing golds and reds, they shared bits of who they were by telling stories and sharing gossip. Aurora’s canteen became a sort of totem to determine whose turn it was. After Roach had taken a swig, he talked about how his late husband’s “proper” Canterlot upbringing had made him hilariously unequipped to pick up on innuendo and, once it was explained, he would blush and sputter until someone showed mercy and changed the subject. Several colorful examples followed, the last of which having taken place in the presence of Saffron’s aging mother which wrung a barking laugh out of Fiona.

Julip drank from the canteen and carried the theme along with a personal story shortly after she’d been recruited by the Enclave. After their first few weeks of being mustered from their bunks at all hours of the night, running around the parade grounds until their legs shook, and shouted down by what could generously be said to be a borderline sadistic drill instructor, she and her fellow cadets had decided payback was in order. Their sergeant, known to rarely go anywhere without his dented yellow thermos of tar black coffee, often slammed his thermos against their barrack wall to announce his presence. A plan was formed, and it succeeded in spectacular form.

“It’s not hard to find boner pills in New Canterlot,” Julip said, grinning over the canteen. “Whoever got them into his coffee should get a fucking medal.”

Aurora noticed Roach was lying on his belly now, hooves tucked into his chest. He caught her gaze and she arched her brow, then stifled a grin as the luminescent green glow beneath his chitin brightened.

“If I ever get back on the air,” Fiona said, eyes wide with shameless glee, “you and I are doing an interview on that.”

“I’m not done. Sarge ended up getting the last laugh. We thought he’d leave us alone for the day while he nursed his aching dick, but the fucker just pretended like nothing was wrong.” She was grinning with embarrassment now. “A bunch of us got pulled out of formation that morning to do push ups, and it is not easy to keep count when you’re eye to eye with the angry beanpole on every upstroke.”

It was closing in on midnight by the time their fireside conversation settled into fireside yawns. There had been a few moments where Fiona thought they’d all avoid discussing anything serious and just settle into the comfortable cadence of embarrassing stories from their pasts punctuated by long gaps of silence as they all stared into the crackling fire. Then Aurora had looked up, fixed Fiona with a meaningful gaze, and asked her if she would tend the fire while she took Roach and Julip on a short walk to somewhere they could speak in private.

The exclusion stung for a fleeting moment before she reminded herself that she was still new to their small clutch of companions, and the conversation Aurora’s expression signaled she wanted to have was the same one Fiona had suggested during their chat yesterday. She gave them a lazy salute with her fire poker and watched them file down the old walking trail that bent toward Eshe’s grave.

Whether by accident or ignorance, they hadn’t quite moved out of Fiona’s range of hearing before Aurora started into a faltering, uncomfortable admission that she was barely holding herself together. That Ginger’s final act of saving her from the bomb haunted her. That she felt like she hadn’t deserved that second chance because, in her mind, she was the cause of all the misery and grief that dogged them since leaving Stable 10.

Fiona loaded some deadwood onto the fire, letting the hot sizzle of flames leaping up bone-dry bark drown out the rest. It wasn’t a story she needed to drop eaves on.

They returned to camp a while later, Aurora leading her friends in a V-pattern like the world’s smallest flock of birds. Her eyes were puffy and bloodshot, but the sheepish smile she wore when she met Fiona’s gaze showed just how much weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She’d done the terrifying thing and told her two closest friends about the darkness she was wrestling with and had come out the other side intact and unjudged. Fiona returned her smile and went back to pestering the coals.

Julip was the first to nod off. She lay against Roach, her face nestled into the nook behind his shoulder. Aurora’s head took on a low bobbing motion as she fought to stay awake, the gentle comfort of good conversation something she’d desperately needed and didn’t want to let go of just quite yet. Fiona watched her from across the flickering coals and failed to suppress a smile when Aurora set her chin atop her crossed hooves and nodded off.

Fiona lay on her side to allow the dimming fire to warm her underbelly, one arm propping up her head while her free hand stirred the coals with a charred stick. She watched the sparks dance up along invisible thermals, smiling against her palm as they winked out.

“I’ll take watch tonight,” Roach murmured.

She regarded him, seeing the exhaustion written across the sag of his eyelids, and shook her head. “You need rest.”

He grunted. “Perks of being a ghoul. I really don’t.”

Fiona thought about conceding the point, and her gaze shifted to where Aurora snored quietly beside him. There had been real worry in her eyes when she’d seen how weary Roach’s efforts inside Mariposa had made him.

“You burned out your batteries back there,” she half-guessed, and judging by the way Roach grimaced just then, she’d guessed right. “Sleep will help with that, right?”

He sighed, stared at the fire, then nodded. “It won’t hurt. A trip to Kiln would be better. Get some fresh rads in me.”

When he looked up at her and offered a weak smile, she knew he wasn’t serious about the detour.

“I’ll be back to normal in a couple of days,” he reassured her. “Sooner, maybe, if I let you take watch.”

She twirled the stick between her fingers, drawing loops in the air with its smoking tip. “Look at you, with all the good ideas.” She shot him a wink and laid the stick over the glowing coals. Tiny flames bloomed along its surface. “I promise I won’t dip your hoof in warm water while you sleep.”

He wrinkled his nose at her.

She waved away the implied question. “You need hands for it to make sense. Go to sleep.”

Roach murmured something like thanks, and Fiona watched him delicately roll to his side without disturbing the mare using him for a pillow. After a few subtle adjustments Roach and Julip lay back to belly, his head settled against the cool soil and hers warming into the soft chitin along his neck.

Fiona watched as they slipped into their own tempos of deep, rhythmic breathing and wondered how it had come to be that these two ponies from incompatible backgrounds had come to trust one another the way Roach and Julip had.

She was tempted to reach out and give Aurora’s shoulder a shake so she could ask. It took some effort to shoo that thought away. Collecting stories was an addiction she rarely didn’t feed, and a mare who’d grown up on a steady diet of Enclave rhetoric about blood purity falling in love with a changeling whose body had been permanently altered by balefire couldn’t be anything but a good yarn. She scratched the ridge of her beak, aware that she’d been watching them a little longer than they might appreciate, and let her attention wander back to the dimming embers.

The night was cool, and though there wasn’t much of a breeze up on their clifftop camp, the chilly air was quick to press in as the fire waned. Her ear twitched toward Aurora’s first shuddered breath and, looking toward the dappled pegasus, Fiona pushed herself up and padded over to the loose pile of firewood. She sat down a little closer to where Aurora lay and started laying wood out across the coals. A few minutes later the fire was crackling once more with renewed warmth.

She absently hummed a tune to herself as she watched the fire, listening to the sounds of small creatures scurrying through the nearby pines. Something avian piped somewhere down in the lake valley, and it called up an old memory of when her mom had come home with a couple of the little rockhoppers that pestered about the seaside cliffs of Griffinstone. She’d grilled them right there on the family hearth, and they’d pretended the sickly little birds were a feast.

Her stomach grumbled as if trying to compare this one night on an empty belly with those years of slow starvation. She poked the fire and watched the embers twirl up into the dark, but her gut growled again as if discarding the MRE in the fire had somehow offended it.

She spotted Aurora’s canteen sticking halfway out of the saddlebags she was using as a pillow and, carefully, fished the sloshing container out from under her cheek. She winced when the strap caught on something in the pack and dragged some of the contents out onto the dirt. A few loose rifle cartridges, an old holotape, and an old book. Aurora sucked in a slow breath, shifted a little, and puttered out a soft exhalation. Trying to press everything back into the bags would just wake her, so Fiona gathered the ammunition and unlabeled tape into a neat pile beside it.

The book might have also ended up a part of that pile if she hadn’t swapped the canteen to her opposite hand and picked it up in the other. She gave herself a mental slap on the wrist and cracked the cover. Then she clapped a hand over her beak to stifle a laugh.

It was a foal’s diary. And if the yellowed pages and creaky binding weren’t evidence of its age, the neatly printed dates in the margin attested to its prewar provenance. What was Aurora doing carrying around a dead kid’s notebook?

She skimmed through a few random pages out of curiosity and found herself surprised, and not for the first time, by the naive innocence people showed during those times. Teak had been a teenager or maybe a little younger, but her neat looping letters complaining about bullies and moving to a new city and the unfairness of a mother who wouldn’t let her get her ear pierced weren’t that far removed from the office emails and corporate memos still scattered throughout the wasteland’s plentiful ruins. Ponies, gryphons, zebras… it didn’t really matter who wrote the words. They all looked at the little inconveniences of life, the perceived slights of others, or a minor delay in some seemingly deserved luxury as a great crime committed against them that was worth picking up a pen and committing to history.

Fiona was almost ready to slip the journal back into Aurora’s open pack when she noticed the entry jotted in the margin. Different handwriting in fresh ink.

She took us above the clouds last night. I think I should have been more afraid than I was. She only just learned how to fly, but she’s strong. Instinctual. There’s an entire universe up there. I’m pretty sure she saw me crying and for some reason that isn’t bothering me.

The entry wasn’t signed, but Fiona had a good enough idea who’d written it. The unicorn Aurora had gone off to save had nearly weighed them down enough to send the pair crashing into the side of the Bluff, and even after their near miss Ginger had looked almost disappointed to be back on the ground. Fiona could still remember how Ginger kept watching Aurora on their walk down from the peak with reverence mixed with a dollop of lust. She read the entry again, feeling strange knowing she was reading something that had been written in the same timeframe in which the three of them briefly crossed paths, then flipped through the pages until another rogue paragraph appeared in the margin.

Roach spotted what was apparently a Sparkle-Cola bottling plant way back when and that got Aurora on a long tangent asking why we use caps for currency when the tools to make new ones are sitting there for anyone to take. I tried to tell her that there isn’t anyone left who could fix up those machines and I swear that mare took it as a personal challenge. I don’t know whether that’s annoying or endearing… but it is Aurora. She wants to fix everything, even if it’s impossible.

Fiona glanced at where Aurora slept and thought about what she’d told Eshe. Several pages further along, tucked away next to an entry where Teak sheepishly admitted to lying to her friend about an exam she hadn’t passed, was another diagonal scrawl.

I think we woke Julip last night. Well, Aurora did with my help. Probably should have warned her but then it wouldn’t have been as fun. I worked out if I clamp down on my magic just right, I can make it vibrate. Aurora practically doused the coals…

She dutifully turned to the next page without reading the rest, though she did crease the corner.

Ginger’s entries were all undated and they ranged from casual observation to the intimate with no real pattern to either. The more she read, the more Fiona wondered if Ginger ever intended for Aurora or anyone else to see what was effectively an evolving series of snapshots into their blooming relationship. Here and there she found short, one-sentence entries. Factoids about Aurora, like how she’d grown up in a place where gardens were also graveyards, or notes on the little nuances Aurora expressed without thinking, like how she used her wings to gesture more often than she did her hooves.

Longer entries were reserved for more meaningful reflections; her doubts of finding an ignition talisman in time, a nagging insecurity about leaving her cutie mark uncovered, and a deep-seated fear that she wasn’t equipped to help Aurora process the barrage of hardships the wasteland was throwing her way. There was a long, rambling entry that filled the margins of two separate pages where Ginger had spiraled while she waited for word that Aurora had been found. Then, a page later, an orderly but no less strained admission that she didn’t know what she should say when Aurora woke to find her hind leg had to be amputated.

I don’t want her to think this was her fault, Ginger wrote, but I know she’s going to. For a while. I don’t normally agree with anything the Enclave does, but it’s a good thing they took Ironshod out of Fillydelphia. She still gets shaken up thinking about what she had to do to Gallow. I don’t think she’d try to kill Ironshod, but… best to get her home before this ugly world does any more damage.

Aurora sniffed in her sleep, wrinkled her nose back and forth, and murmured something unintelligible as she settled.

I’m going to ask the Enclave for an ignition talisman. They’ve cleaned out enough failed Stables to have one to spare. I don’t know how Aurora will feel about it but I don’t see another choice. We’re running out of time and I don’t think we can go back to Stable-Tec HQ a second time without Elder Coronado or Primrose noticing. If the Enclave can just give us the talisman, it’ll be over. Done. She’ll be able to put all of this in the past and I can just… take care of her. I think I can swallow my pride for that.

Fiona flipped through the next several pages and found the entries stopped there. Something heavy and complicated settled into her stomach and, with a frown, she closed the journal and carefully slid it back into the saddlebag beneath Aurora’s cheek.

She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been that. She knew how Ginger had died but she had assumed there would be another entry for some reason. Something that more clearly laid out all of Ginger’s hopes and dreams in neat and poetic sentences that felt like a proper ending. Only that wasn’t what had happened. Ginger hadn’t known what was really coming. All she knew was that she’d secured the talisman Aurora had come to the wasteland in search of and thanks to it their future together was secure. They would finally be able to stop and breathe and get to know each other beyond what good sex and mutual trauma had taught them already.

And that had been stripped away by a single betrayal. All the potential Ginger had dreamed of, snuffed out.

Fiona fed another log onto the fire and stared at Aurora as the firelight momentarily brightened. Aurora stretched her legs a little in her sleep, allowing the warmth to bathe the whorls of healed scars down her belly. She felt an irrational urge to reach out and touch the mare. To comfort her somehow. And in the same moment she felt the admonishments rise up in her like a spring. What the hell had she been about to do? Pat the grieving mare on the head and say there there, it’s okay?

She rubbed the ridge of her beak and turned back to the fire, amazed at how she could handle Aurora’s storm of emotions in Mariposa so well and utterly fumble her own in one short day.

When Roach woke, it came in that glorious easing back to consciousness he remembered enjoying before the bombs fell and Saturday mornings still actually meant something. He breathed deep, filling his lungs with the chill of fresh morning air and the scent of Julip’s mane. Either she’d spooned into him during the night or he’d come to her. Whichever it had been, it made for a wonderful balance of warmth against his belly and cool along his spine. Who knew sleeping on bare dirt could be so comfortable?

He lay there for a time, listening to Julip’s soft breathing lacing along the steady whisper of rustling pines. They had spent several nights like this not too long ago during their trek up north, using the surviving forests as cover as they picked their way back from Fillydelphia. The solace of the woods and the knowledge that they were probably the only two people within a day’s walk of wherever they camp had afforded them the rare luxury of true privacy. They’d been bored. Pent up. And, as Julip had once so poignantly argued, “Why the fuck not?”

Roach wore the tiniest smile at that. They’d both been monitoring the pulse of their admittedly spontaneous relationship and both of them agreed it wasn’t love in the romantic sense of the word, but they’d grown undeniably close in a way casual friendships didn’t. Julip had taken a liking to the phrase friends with benefits, though they both agreed that fell short too.

He pressed his nose back into Julip’s mane to suppress his own flustered chuckle. It had been a long time since he’d encountered the pony equivalent of a social blind spot. Queen Chrysalis hadn’t exactly set up lesson plans on casual interspecies sex for her drones. He grinned, inhaled her scent, and enjoyed this for what it was. Maybe more would come from it later. Maybe they’d agree to stop. Either would work for him as long as she was happy. He supposed that was really the only thing he needed to worry about.

The thump and hiss of a fresh log being laid over coals expanded the bubble of his attention out from Julip, and he wondered if Fiona might have experience with this style of relationship.

Cracking one of his pale eyes, he found her seated across the fire ring where she’d been when they’d all gone to sleep. Lazy flames lapped along the bark of the single log she’d set over the coals, the firelight dim and translucent against the usual bank of morning-lit clouds. Fiona had been in the process of nestling Aurora’s canteen into the cool side of the coals, but her eyes had been on the pair of them even before he’d opened his.

“Good morning,” the gryphon chirped, with an unmistakable emphasis on the first word.

Roach sucked in another breath and relished a bit longer how much better he felt compared to the day before. “Morning,” he rumbled, careful not to talk directly into Julip’s ear.

Fiona’s eyes darted toward something near Julip’s legs, then smirked and returned to whatever she’d been doing to Aurora’s canteen. “Need a minute to take care of that?”

He frowned, suddenly worried something was wrong with Julip, and felt an electric shiver run down his groin when he shifted a little to prop himself up. He grimaced and lay back down, fully aware now of the piece of anatomy pressed past Julip’s hind legs and two centuries too old to care about it.

“It’s more scared of you than you are of it,” he said, trying for humor. “Take a walk if it bothers you. I’ll have everything stowed by the time you’re back.”

Fiona arched a brow at him. “I’m not complaining,” she said, her voice taking on an unvarnished chuckle as her eyes shifted down to Julip’s intertwined legs. “I mean, congratulations.”

He rolled his eyes, glad the morning light was here to camouflage the rush of warmth running up his neck. He pulled his hips back with an involuntary grunt, gracelessly using Julip’s body to hide the spectacle. “What’s in the canteen?”

“Nothing for you, ya spoilsport,” Fiona muttered with feigned disappointment, though her expression brightened a beat later. “Coffee, actually. Assuming this stuff’s any good.”

Roach hummed his approval. “What brand?”

Fiona half-turned to retrieve a torn open foil packet. “From the fine people at Instant Hyphen Dark Roast, so sayeth the foil.”

She held up the nondescript packet as proof, and Roach allowed himself a sad little groan. Fiona responded by balling a fist and making a fussy foal sound while twisting it in front of her eye. The gesture didn’t exactly translate to anything Roach was familiar with, but he could at least tell she was mocking him.

“Sorry,” she prodded, tossing the packet onto the crackling log, “the Steel Rangers were all out of gourmet.”

Roach sighed into Julip’s mane, earning a soft groan and a not too unpleasant shift from Julip. “My kingdom for a can of Blue Yak.”

“I’m going to pretend that’s some expensive brand of pre-apocalypse coffee and not you pining over an extinct species.”

He wrinkled his nose. “They really went extinct?”

Fiona shrugged without answering and before Roach could think of a compelling reason to probe the topic further, Julip had begun her waking ritual of stretching all four of her legs until her hooves trembled and clicked back together. She swallowed a couple of times, her jade eyes blinking open occasionally as she gradually accepted the fact that she was awake, then bent her neck back a little until she felt her head touching his chin.

He didn’t need to see her expression to know the smile that was there. He just tipped his muzzle down and kissed the spot behind her left ear. A tendency of his that was quickly becoming a morning ritual.

“Morning,” she murmured. Then her tail flicked, ran up against him, and she craned her neck around to look at him more fully.

She lifted a quizzical brow. It was morning, and so he shrugged as if to ask her whether she’d be surprised to learn water was wet.

Later, when his lizard brain grudgingly accepted that this would not be a carnal sunrise, he and Julip joined Fiona around the fire to pass around the coffee she’d brewed. It was too hot and had an acidic bite to it that tasted like anything but coffee, but for two centuries and change it wasn’t inedible. By the time the coffee made its third lap around the rippling embers Roach felt the caffeine-assisted clarity they wanted.

They passed around the canteen, sipped and chatted about everything and nothing. Julip told a story of some innocent trouble she’d avoided as a filly, and Fiona wondered aloud whether any other gryphons had migrated across the ocean since she left home. Whether it was true or just something she felt compelled to say to reassure Fiona, Julip claimed to have heard about some small gryphon colonies along Equestria’s western coast. Fiona sipped at the canteen, her expression thoughtful, then simply nodded with a noncommittal smile as she passed the coffee to Roach.

He held the warm canteen between both hooves, its lack of flat sides another subtle indicator that it wasn’t designed for earth ponies or, in his case, wingless changelings, and suspected Fiona might still have an unhealed wound where she once had family and friends who looked like she did. Gryphons were rare to come by in the Equestrian wasteland, at least. Whether that was different in Vhanna or any of the myriad smaller, forgotten nations farther south was anyone’s guess.

He made a mental note to gently dissuade Julip from any ideas she might have of searching out other gryphons on Fiona’s behalf. Probably she hadn’t thought of it at all, but it was good to get ahead of it if she had. Roach had more than once been on the receiving end of an unasked for “reunion” by someone who believed they were doing something kind, and each time it had been exceedingly uncomfortable for him and the other unfortunate changeling. It had felt as if their self-assigned matchmaker expected them to become best of friends right there and then or, in one painfully memorable case, to tumble into the nearest room and get to work rebuilding the species. Each time, Roach had felt obligated to apologize for–

Their conversation died when Aurora sat up and stared at them, eyes wide and glazed with fleeting uncertainty as if she didn’t quite believe she could trust where she was. Roach watched as the doubt evaporated and something harder solidified behind her eyes. He opened his mouth to ask if she was alright, but she spoke first.

“Primrose found SOLUS.”

She’d fallen asleep to the sound of her friends deciding who would take the night’s watch and opened her eyes onto her compartment in Stable 10.

Except that hadn’t been quite right. She frowned and pushed herself up from a bed that was too large, too plush, and centered inside a compartment that was simultaneously too spacious to be hers and too strangely adorned to be a part of her Stable. But it was a compartment. Steel ribs spaced evenly along the bulkhead of each wall held a utilitarian metal ceiling above a flat metal floor. Only the ceiling had been coated with ivory paint and the steel floor had been burnished to give it a softer, matte gray appearance.

“Tandy?”

She waited for the mare to appear and was immediately afraid when she didn’t. The bed was large enough to drown in and smelled thickly of old sweat and an unwashed mane that didn’t belong to her. She could feel it cling to her like an invisible stain as she slid down to the floor, turning once to get her bearings.

A glossy wood armoire stood in one corner of the bedroom, its paneled doors and drawers pressed shut. A matching roll top desk sat against the wall near the bed, a terminal glowing amid the pigeon holes and drawers. A plant grew in a glazed pot near the door, some kind of fern, and above it a photo had been carefully fixed to the painted walls with a magnetic frame. She had to move toward it before the dream would resolve the details enough for her to recognize Canterlot Castle perched on its ancient foundations on the side of the mountain from which it got its name. Blue skies and wisps of white gave an idyllic, almost fairytale sense to it.

She turned and noticed that the walls were bedecked with artwork, not just photos. Her dread gave way to curiosity as she made her way around the room, trying to make sense of what this dream was meant for. From one frame hung a detailed painting of what appeared to be a small town being constructed, with nondescript equine figures holding tools, carrying lumber, or resting together around a cookfire. In another stood the thin, yellowed front page of a prewar newspaper. Its headline proclaimed JSA Promises Free Energy above a photo of a stallion whose tiny smirk shone through his attempt to appear stoic. He posed in front of a diorama of the solar array Autumn Song would eventually commandeer. The caption said the stallion’s name was Jet Stream, and Aurora blinked as she realized this was her first time putting a face to the name. He was handsome, and he’d known it.

Moving around the room she found more snippets of their owner’s life. A group photo inside what appeared to be an office. A shallow display case containing a curled tourist’s guide to Cloudsdale, its edges charred. Beside it, a short knife, its blade resting at an angle across a matching leather sheath, glinted beneath the glass. Where the blade and sheath crossed, a creased square of paper lay open so the message written on it could be read.

Aurora went still. Tucked beside the blade was an old photo of two familiar, severe-looking mares posing in a cluttered office. She recognized the shape of her rifle in Spitfire’s wing almost instantly, its muzzle pointed carefully toward the carpet. Beside her stood a shorter mare, her baby blue mane curled over one pink shoulder just barely short enough not to obscure the sheathed knife strapped to the outside of her foreleg. Primrose stared back at Aurora with the same deep, calculating gaze she would regard her with on a listing oil rig two centuries later when she believed she could solve all her problems with one well-placed explosion.

Desperate Times, the rifle Aurora had come to think of as belonging to her, had once been Primrose’s gift to Spitfire. And in return, Spitfire had given Primrose a knife. Desperate Measures.

Was this the message? She looked around for Tandy and still found herself alone in the room. Primrose’s bedroom. Something about that tickled at the back of her brain. Of all the places Tandy could place her, why here? She felt a mixture of disappointment and anger well up inside her. She’d wanted to tell her Eshe had passed on peacefully and, if Tandy was capable of crying, offer a shoulder to do it on.

Being dumped here felt like a kick to the gut.

“Tandy,” she called, rounding on the room as she spoke, “we need to talk about Eshe. Can I have a change of scenery so we can do that, please?”

The terminal on the desk gave an electric whine as the screen blinked to life.

“Dammit,” she muttered, and went to the desk.

Being a dream, the terminal skipped the usual slow boot process and went straight to displaying the still image of a paused video window. The perspective was unusual, aimed down a long conference room table that looked more expensive than all of her Stable’s old world heirlooms combined. Pegasi in dark uniforms sat on either side, their expressions bright and bodies leaned forward with bald excitement over something important.

Aurora sighed and pecked the keyboard. She wasn’t in the mood for puzzles and riddles, something Tandy should have known the moment she fell asleep. They needed to talk about Eshe.

“In approximately five days, ma’am,” a uniformed stallion was saying. “Its orbit is highly eccentric, which means its peak velocity as it passes through the comms window will be somewhere in the range of–”

“Just say it’ll be going fast and save the rest of us the headache, general. We’re not attending this meeting to watch you jerk yourself off with whatever buzzwords the science team taught you.”

Aurora snorted and nearly chuckled before it dawned on her whose voice was coming from the terminal. The general, whoever he was, didn’t look the least bit jarred by Primrose’s snap. He simply nodded at Primrose and, because the screen was playing this… recording of a memory, she supposed, Aurora had a disturbing sense that the general was speaking to her as well.

“We’ll have a twenty-two second window to communicate with the satellite, after which it will drop below the horizon and out of range.”

A pink feather rose in front of the screen, and Aurora realized Primrose was scratching her nose. “These are all things I already know, general. Where’s the good news you were itching to tell me?”

Aurora glanced around the bedroom with a touch of impatience. “Tandy, how long is this going to take? You can just tell me whatever it–”

“The good news is we believe SOLUS can be commanded to use its primary weapon as a maneuvering thruster.”

Aurora spun back toward the terminal. The hairs down her neck stood on end at the word SOLUS.

“The science team already has the bulk of the math worked out.” The general leaned over the table, sliding a manila folder toward Primrose. The perspective took a nauseating dip as she flipped open the folder and looked down at the documents. The schematic of a machine dominated one of the pages, and another detailed thrust to weight ratios for each of its modules.

If Aurora hadn’t heard the satellite’s name, she’d have recognized it from the schematics. She still saw in her memory the grainy footage from Apogee’s helmet camera as she walked the behemoth machine’s skin on magboots.

Primrose paused long enough on one schematic for Aurora to recognize the regularly spaced markers that designated the talisman containment chambers Apogee had unwittingly loaded with balefire. A deep welling of rage rose in her at the unmistakable pattern in Primrose’s thinking. Even during the last minutes of the old world that little monster had been giving her victims bombs wrapped in a red bow. Ginger just happened to be the most recent.

Pages flipped until Primrose found the one the general had wanted her to look at. A painfully dense report written by someone high up in the Enclave detailing values of expected thrust output provided by the satellite’s primary weapon and the resulting equivalent in terms of a deceleration burn. Aurora didn’t understand a word of it, but she continued to watch the terminal nonetheless.

The meeting on the screen ran for another fifteen minutes before it concluded, and in that time Aurora had grasped only some of the basic scientific concepts. The Enclave had plans to fire SOLUS not at the planet, but straight ahead in the direction it wasn't falling to reshape its elliptical orbit down to a circular one. If all went as expected, their window for communicating with SOLUS would shoot open and the weapon itself would once more be a close and looming presence over the skies of their world.

One calculated burn, and Jet Stream’s work to push his bastardized invention out of reach would be undone.

“You’re sure he’ll listen?”

Beside her, Fiona swept her immense wings through the air and Roach, perched between her shoulder blades, squinted against the fresh onslaught of wind as he held onto the gryphon’s neck.

“I’m not sure of anything!” He had to shout to be heard over the din, something Aurora knew she’d have to apologize to him for later. She’d set the pace as soon as they’d kicked out the fire and left the cliffside camp behind, and she wasn’t about to let up now. “Coronado listened to Ginger when she asked for help, so I just assume he has a solid head on his shoulders!”

It wasn’t the reassurance she’d asked for, but she knew it was all she could really expect. None of them knew Elder Coronado beyond his name and reputation which, considering his predecessor, wasn’t a high bar to step over. She sighed, glad that the wind would mask the sound of her frustration, and threw a few more wingfuls of air behind her.

Tandy hadn’t appeared during the dream to explain her absence, but the content of that dream had provided a few unmissable clues. Primrose’s bedroom, Primrose’s terminal, Primrose’s meeting with her generals… they were all neon signs pointing at the same mare. Either Tandy had decided to wait until now to share knowledge of what Primrose was planning, or Primrose had slept recently and done something to scare Tandy into silence. It had to be the latter. Tandy was a creature capable of breaking minds who cared deeply about her tiny community of dreamers, and now Primrose was poised to have her feather on the trigger of a device that could kill every last one of them.

Primrose had declared checkmate and her threat level had skyrocketed well above Aurora’s pay grade.

It was well into the afternoon by the time they reached Blinder’s Bluff and it took every ounce of willpower she had not to make a straight dive into the heart of the mountainside city. Instead, she allowed Fiona to guide them into a gentle landing onto the right lane of the same east-west highway she, Roach, and Ginger had traveled nearly a month earlier. Back then they’d come to beg for a doctor. Now they were here to ask for something much more significant.

Unlike the last time Aurora had been here, there was actual traffic queued up along the dirt tracks that bent off the cracked concrete and toward the scrap metal wall. Wagons, some still bearing the painted-over logo of F&F Mercantile along their sideboards, made up the majority of the line but there were several groups of travelers standing in impatient clutches among them. Aurora felt a flash of frustration when Fiona began leading them toward the back of the line, only for it to evaporate as the gryphon started cutting past them.

If all the eyes of those who’d seen their skyward approach hadn’t been on them then, they were now. A not insignificant part of her worried they’d reach the gate and be interrogated by the reincarnation of Paladin Ironshod, however the worst of the pushback came from those waiting in line. Most of those who complained shrank back when they found themselves being stared down by a gryphon twice their size, but the leader of a trader caravan halfway up the line noticed what was happening and moved to stand in her way.

A long barreled shotgun hovered in front of him, its barrel casually aimed down and to the side. “Why don’t you turn around and find yourself a place in line? Yeah?”

Fiona stopped a couple yards from him, sat down, then lowered her front half in a smooth, feline motion until she was at eye level with the unicorn. Her smile was pleasant, but it had no warmth behind it.

“I will fuck you to death.”

The stallion blinked. So did his compatriot who was still strapped to the lead wagon. “What?” he asked.

“I will fuck you,” Fiona repeated, her voice smooth as silk, “to death.”

A second passed. Then another. Finally, the caravan leader cleared his throat and shuffled awkwardly back into line.

When they were moving again and far enough away that the confused stallion wouldn’t overhear, Aurora reached out a wing and tapped Fiona’s hind leg. “What was that?”

Fiona looked back at the three of them and snorted. “Intimidation.”

“It didn’t even make sense,” Julip said in a tone that almost sounded like complaining.

“Kinda the point.” Fiona flicked her tail, brushing Julip’s snout with the bronze tuft at the end. “Now hush and let me un-piss off the gate guards.”

For a fleeting moment Julip eyed Fiona’s tail like she might try to bite it, but when they looked past the gryphon toward the wall looming ahead of them she stiffened a little.

Just as they had when Roach had carried a sick and barely conscious Aurora on his back, a row of Steel Rangers stared down at their approach from the narrow walkway atop the rusting barrier. They were close enough now that Aurora could make out individual faces, their eyes fixed on the approaching group with something like exasperation rather than open suspicion. Aurora wondered why that was until she remembered the Bluff had been Fiona’s home for nearly two decades. For those Rangers who knew her, seeing the gryphon making a minor scene as she skipped the line was probably high up on their list titled Shit Fiona Does On Days That End In Y.

“My fucking wings aren’t covered,” Julip hissed through grit teeth.

Aurora paused, then closed her eyes. Fiona cursed.

Roach, to his credit, just sidled a little closer to her and offered a reassuring smile. “They’ve seen you and me before, remember? It’s not a crime to be a dustwing.”

“Depends on who you ask.”

Aurora watched Julip fixate on the nearby soldiers, her eyes growing wider the second. She could hear the smaller pegasus’s breathing ratchet up like it had when the horde of ghouls had poured after them at Mariposa. Ever so slightly, Julip’s pace began to slow and Aurora could sense the urge to bolt rising in her.

She dropped a wing over Julip’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Hey. Breathe.”

Julip swallowed thickly. “They can see my wings. They’re going to know I’m–”

“You’re from Stable 10,” Aurora said, keeping her voice calm and level, “just like I am.”

She blinked up at her. “What? They won’t–”

“You were an archivist before all this, right?”

“...yeah.”

“So, if they ask, you’ll tell them you’re a librarian’s assistant back home. You came out here to see the outside world. For research.”

“Research,” she echoed dubiously.

“For the people back home.” Aurora nodded, keeping her grip on Julip firm enough to quash her panic. “Which is where?”

A pause. Then, “Stable 10.”

Aurora looked over to Roach, who nodded. Then she turned toward Fiona and saw the gryphon was smiling with something like approval.

“Makes sense to me,” Fiona murmured, eyeing Aurora a little more pointedly than was strictly necessary as she added. “Only a Stable dweller would be dense enough to be walking around the wasteland with her wings uncovered.”

Aurora surprised herself by grinning. “Oh, fuck you.”

“To death,” Julip chimed in, her voice still tinged with unease but noticeably less than a moment earlier. She took a deep breath, held it for a long moment, and puffed her cheeks as she blew it out. “This is the dumbest thing we’ve ever done.”

Roach grunted. “Top five.”

An armored Ranger on the wall ordered them to stop through his suit-amplified voice.

“Ten, maybe,” Aurora countered, lowering her voice as she added, “Technically we did meet on the same day I told the Enclave my Stable was alive, chucked a brick at a deathclaw, and decapitated the wasteland’s only trade monopoly.”

Julip coughed out a nervous sigh. “Celestia’s tit, okay.”

She breathed a heavier sigh of relief when, despite her fears, the Rangers at the gate directed the majority of their annoyance at Fiona while roundly ignoring the rest of them. To make a point, the soldiers outside the wall who were tasked with screening each arrival pointedly ignored the four of them while their superior on the wall threatened to have Fiona dragged to the back of the long line with an armored escort just to make the point that her status within the Bluff didn’t place her above its laws.

For a moment Aurora genuinely worried they might be forced to the back of the line, and it nearly went that way until Fiona stepped aside and hitched a clawed thumb toward her. “So, yeah, I get what you’re saying about rules and order and blah-blah-fucking-blah, but my friend here says the Enclave’s not done playing with balefire firecrackers and she kind of needs to talk to your Elder before Primrose finds a fresh box of matches.”

When Fiona stopped talking, the air around them went deathly still. Travelers, traders, and Steel Rangers alike regarded them with a mixture of fear and uncertainty as if Fiona were holding a grenade without a pin.

Aurora felt their eyes slide off Fiona and settle on her.

“Name.”

She didn’t realize the word was a question, and directed toward her, until the stallion in power armor repeated it more forcefully.

“Aurora,” she said, then as an afterthought added, “Pinfea–”

“Stay where you are,” the stallion interrupted, then went silent for a moment while his head dipped slightly to one side. He nodded once, paused, then nodded again. “You’ll be provided an escort into the city. You will not deviate from the road. You will not enter any establishments, public or private. You will follow your escort and refrain from discussing anything that might cause undue panic.”

The Ranger emphasized the last two words. “Is that understood?”

They nodded.

“Good,” he murmured, and this time his armor’s speaker cut off early enough for Aurora to hear the electronic click. His helmet tipped to the side as it had before as he spoke to whoever was on the other end of his radio. A nod, then a pointed look back to the four of them while another group of traders were admitted through the open gate. When his suit’s speaker clicked back on, his voice carried an edge of fresh annoyance. “You’ve been offered an opportunity to clothe yourselves.”

Aurora frowned, the non sequitur sending her back to the days when her biggest worry in life was how much shit Sledge was going to give her for showing up at Mechanical without a jumpsuit to cover her dainty unmentionables.

“For the dustwing,” the Ranger clarified.

Were it not for Aurora’s obscuring wing, the officer might have noticed the momentary wave of tension that ran through Julip’s body.

He didn’t, and Julip mustered enough courage to answer.

“Uh,” the Enclave’s most wanted defector managed. “Yes, please.”

Outside Stable 6 and the heart of the Steel Rangers’ eastern operations, Aurora found herself staring at the same scar-mottled blue stallion who loaned her his compass when she first set out to rescue Ginger. He’d listened to her explain why she was here and who she wanted to speak to, but he hadn’t moved from his posting at the tunnel’s heavily guarded entrance. Their escort, a group of six armed Rangers in power armor, looked uneasily to one another when Knight Latch finally spoke.

“He’s not here,” he said flatly.

Aurora blinked. Behind her it felt like the entirety of the Bluff was watching, and she wasn’t that far off the mark. While the hustle and bustle of the market had continued uninterrupted as she and her companions were led along the cobbles, it had also changed. The chaos of vendors shouting their best prices and citizenry raising their own voices to be heard over the noise had smoothed somewhat as if it had been run through steam.

Fiona dropped her haunches to the ground beside Aurora, matching the Knight’s unwillingness to move with an identical gesture. “Then where is he?”

Latch matched her gaze. “Classified. Obviously.”

The gryphon snorted derision, but Aurora spoke before she could pick a fight. “Latch, I need to talk to Coronado now. It’s important.”

He pursed his lips. “I told you he isn’t here.”

“Look, I’m not lying to–”

“I never said I thought you were lying. Elder Coronado isn’t here, and I’m not authorized to tell you where he went.” He spared a glance to the soldiers who shared his posting, then looked pointedly at Fiona. “And, off the record, the last time I did you a favor I got booted down to Initiate and almost got my head taken off when the Enclave steamrolled us at Foal Mountain. So forgive me if I’m not overly eager to stick my neck out for whatever shit you’ve gotten yourselves into this time.”

Aurora stepped close enough to jab Latch in the chest with her hoof. “Hate to break it to you, but you’re in the same shit we’re in whether you know it or not. Do you really think the Enclave only had one bomb?”

He jerked back at her touch, but it also caused him to look down at her own chest and the whorl of scars the balefire talisman had left behind when she carried Ginger on her last voyage into the sky. Whether he knew that part of her story or not didn’t seem to factor. The flash of rage in his eyes drained away, replaced by something like skepticism.

“They have more?”

She shook her head. “They’re five days away from having worse than bombs. They’re getting their satellite back.”

He frowned. “What satellite?”

She didn’t have time to explain SOLUS or how the early Enclave orchestrated its modification as an orbital weapon. The amplified sound of a Ranger clearing his throat behind her made the point clear that discussing it further was off the table anyway.

She grimaced. “You need to listen. The Enclave is close to having a weapon none of us can defend against. This isn’t just you and me. It’s your wife, Latch. It’s everyone who lives here, and in Fillydelphia, and Kiln, and my Stable, and everywhere else. I have to speak with Coronado, so you have to tell me where he went. Please.”

Latch sighed. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where he went.”

She felt the muscles in her legs bunching up. It would only take a second for her to jump him, get a good grip around him, and throw both of them toward the sky before their escort could decide whether to shout or shoot. She could dangle him above the Bluff and threaten to let go if he didn’t tell her, and there wasn’t another flyer in a hundred miles who could stop her.

“But I did see him leave,” he continued, unaware of the growing danger right in front of him. He looked pointedly at the escorts, giving them time to order his silence. They didn’t. Of course they didn’t. When she’d said everyone was in danger from the Enclave’s newest weapon, it included them and their loved ones as well.

Aurora let the tension ease out of her muscles and listened.

“He left a couple days ago,” Latch said, keeping his voice low and limited to their ears only, “with a guard detail and an Enclave defector.”

She was silent for a moment. It was hard not to look back toward Julip. “Who defected?”

He shook his head. “Don’t know his name, but I heard from the grapevine he was pretty high up in their command structure. Coronado’s been debriefing him personally. He’s a big guy, too. Really long coat, like the ones you see on ponies who were raised up north in the tundra.”

“Holy fuck. That’s Security Director Clover.”

Aurora clapped her mouth shut, then realized she hadn’t been the one to speak. It’d been Julip, and every eye among them was slowly turning to stare at her.

Latch went perfectly still. “Who’s she?”

“A friend,” Aurora said, as if that was all he needed to know.

“You’ve got friends who know the name and rank of Enclave officers?”

Fiona’s feathers rustled like dead leaves as she rose to her full height, casting a long shadow over the Knight. “Not important. Which way did they go, Latch?”

His lips pressed into a thin, white line.

Fiona took a half-step forward, her body radiating violence. “Did they go east?”

Aurora’s ear twitched and she risked a glance toward their armored escort, one of which had their head tilted slightly away in the body language of someone having a private conversation.

Latch held his tongue.

The corners of Fiona’s beak curled with an amicable smile. “North?”

Silence. The Rangers around them began to back away into defensive positions.

“How about… west?”

Latch said nothing, but the ridges of his brow visibly deepened.

Unless Elder Coronado was flying express to New Canterlot, the nearest landmark east of the Bluff was her Stable. Aurora felt an old knot tighten in her chest all over again. In her experience, good things never happened when an Elder of the Steel Rangers showed interest in her home.

Fiona turned her eyes down toward her and nodded once. They’d both come to the same conclusion. Coronado had gone to Stable 10.

“Well, shit,” Fiona sighed as she half-turned and dropped her open palm over Roach’s back. “I guess we’ll never know.”

Aurora’s heart started beating double time as she turned to see a stream of Rangers pushing their way toward them through the crowded market. Their escorts stood around them like statues, though most statues didn’t come with shoulder-mounted cannons.

Fiona dropped her butt and her free hand to the uneven cobbles. “Hey, Julip? Aurora?”

Both mares turned to the gryphon.

“Haul ass.”

Fiona tightened one hand around the loose cobblestone and slid the other down around Roach’s belly. The poor ghoul had only a split second to understand what was happening before her shoulder flexed, her body lurched into a bipedal stance, and she hurled him straight vertical with the trailing sound of a shocked whinny chasing him into the open air.

The Rangers surrounding them shouted a variety of colorful profanity as their attention swiveled up to follow the flailing changeling, which was good, because it meant none of them were registering the fact that Aurora and Julip had thrown themselves skyward, nor were they paying attention when Fiona pitched the heavy stone at the helmet of the nearest Ranger. The brick exploded on contact with a sound like a struck bell, sending the power armor and its pilot tumbling backward.

At first, only a handful of Rangers realized one of their own had been attacked. By the time the rest of them tore their visors away from the sky, Fiona was launching herself toward it, leaving behind a torrent of blinding dust and tawny feathers.

Aurora dumped air behind her as fast as her wings could scoop it, and the wake of Fiona’s meteoric passage still nearly sent her and Julip tumbling. They were both too far away to hear the oof! visible in Roach’s expression when Fiona arrested his undignified descent.

Defining Julip’s clenched jaw and violent flapping as “rage” would be akin to calling a serial murderer a “conflict enthusiast.”

“YOU SHIT-EATING MOTHER FUCKER!”

Whether deliberate or not, she managed to time the flip and kick to Fiona’s head on the fucker and whiffed it by a full yard. Before she could shed all of her velocity for a second attempt, Aurora clamped her wings around Julip’s, momentarily turning their combined trajectory ballistic.

She pressed her muzzle against Julip’s pinned ear, yelling to be heard over the wind. “Be angry later! We’re in range of big, fucking guns!”

Julip belted out a syllable that could have been a word, but wasn’t, and twisted away to get her wings open again. When she’d flown clear Aurora did the same, pouring on speed to keep up with the smaller mare as they both trailed after Fiona. If the Steel Rangers had opened fire on them, they didn’t know. Aurora chose to believe they hadn’t had time to decide by the time they’d put the Bluff’s rooftops between them and their escorts.

A tense silence lingered between them as they cleared the tree line and began their slow arc toward the safety of higher altitude. They kept to the cooler air just below the clouds layer where they stood the least chance of being spotted by the Rangers on the ground and the Enclave scouts who traveled the open skies above. They’d flown several miles before the bulk of Julip’s anger cooled to something approaching nonexplosive, and a few more passed beneath them before she sank the last few yards to fly level with the gryphon.

Aurora made a point to position herself off Julip’s opposite wing in case the conversation went poorly.

To Roach, who was awkwardly cradled in Fiona’s arm, Julip asked, “You hurt?”

He shook his head and actually chuckled. “I’m still a little winded and I’m never letting myself get within arm’s reach of Fiona when she starts getting grabby,” he rumbled, “but on the bright side, I no longer have to pee.”

Fiona risked a perfectly neutral glance toward Julip, gauged the smaller mare’s expression, then turned her own back toward the western horizon.

Julip’s jaw slid forward half an inch. “What the fuck was that back there, Fiona?”

The gryphon rolled one shoulder in a half shrug. “Burned bridges, probably. Hopefully not, but probably.”

“You threw him,” she said, her voice a growl. “I repeat. What the fuck?”

“Would you rather I waited for our friendly entourage to decide whether it was easier to arrest us or shoot us?” She cocked an eyebrow at Julip without quite turning her head to look at her. “I figure I should ask, since you’re the one who had the bright idea to tell everyone and their wetnurse that you used to rub shoulders with the Enclave.”

Julip’s frown deepened. Then she turned her scowl forward and uttered something that the wind swept away.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” Fiona said, her tone soft. “It’s nothing Aurora can’t clear up before we land.”

Aurora looked at the gryphon as if she’d grown a second head. “Sorry, what?”

Fiona tipped her beak to indicate her own wrist, jostling Roach a little in the process. “I didn’t let Coldbrook chew my ass over helping you get that Pip-Buck back just so you could forget you were wearing it, did I? Start making some calls, Feathers.”

She eyed the two Pip-Bucks clamped to her outstretched foreleg and made a sound like disgust. “Fine, but I can’t write without my feathers. Either we land somewhere or I’m hitching a ride.”

The gryphon shrugged. “I know my preference.”

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Proxy Connection :: Stable 6
To: Overstallion Sledge
From: Aurora Pinfeathers
Subject: Incident at Blinder’s Bluff
04/26/1297

Hey, Sledge

Don’t get pissed but we sort of caused… I don’t know, an international incident at Blinder’s Bluff. Something like that. Took a detour there on our way home and Julip inadvertently let slip to the local Rangers that she used to be on the other team. Things got a little hostile and I think Fiona hucked a brick at someone’s head. They were in power armor so I don’t think anyone’s hurt, but she is a gryphon so maybe don’t take my word for it. Long story short the Steel Rangers back at the Bluff are probably a seven layer salad of furious and I’d kind of prefer not to get shot at by all the Rangers camped outside the Stable.

Also, is Elder Coronado there with you? We need to talk to him, preferably yesterday. It’s important.

See you in a few hours,

Pinfeathers

Welcome to ROBRONCO Industries™ TermLink
Resident Mail System :: Stable 10
To: Aurora Pinfeathers
From: Overstallion Sledge
Subject: Re: Incident at Blinder’s Bluff
04/26/1297

Pinfeathers,

An international incident requires more than one nation, but yeah, sounds like you and your wastelander friends jammed all your cocks in a spinning turbine. Prefer you not do that anymore. Yes, Elder Coronado is here. He’s sitting in my office as I type, and he was just in the middle of informing me what happened out east when your message came in. These people have radios, Aurora. If you plan on causing any more kerfuffles I’d prefer to know ahead of time so I’m not forced to pretend I’m not sweating my balls off while I reply to your last minute recaps.

- Sledge

So is that a yes or no on the whole getting shot during landing thing? Also, I’m telling everyone you used the word “kerfuffle.”

Coming in hot,

Pinfeathers

Elder Coronado is assuring me his people won’t shoot you or your friends. Tell the gryphon to keep a lid on it.

Tell anyone I said that word and I’ll staple your pissflaps shut.

- Sledge

For someone who gave me a decade of shit for not covering up, you sure like talking about ‘em. If you need to get laid I know a gryphon that’s about your size.

Seriously, I need to talk to Coronado the minute we land. Tell him the Enclave has SOLUS. If he doesn’t know what that means, show him the Apogee footage. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if he knows what SOLUS is. Show him the footage anyway so he understands how deep in shit we’re all about to be.

Pinfeathers

They’re watching it now. Coronado wants your ETA.

Couple hours. Hour and a half if we push it.

I’ve been told to ask you to push it. We’ll wait for you outside.

Coronado inhaled deeply, taking in the clean air and open scenery like it was the salve to a wound he hadn’t known needed healing. Even under the current circumstances it was a nice change of pace being away from the crowds and the noise. For all of Fillydelphia’s size, there were never enough travelers to fill the hundreds of office towers, say nothing for the vast, empty suburbia further inland. Blinder’s Bluff was utterly claustrophobic by comparison, something that was not helped by its narrow, winding roads and unique geography. At some point the city’s protective walls would need to be torn down and rebuilt further out, if for no other reason than to let its populace breathe.

Looking back toward the mass of drab green tents pitched around the Stable’s semi-demolished and freshly excavated tunnel, he imagined a similar city might blossom here in a generation or two. There was a high water table here, and someone had spent no small amount of time and energy working the soil so a forest could take root. Those trees which hadn’t been vaporized by the bomb now lay flattened in the baked topsoil, but his engineers were certain only the first four to six inches had been irradiated to the point of sterility.

It could all be made whole again. Perhaps not within his lifetime, but soon enough.

Provided the Enclave wasn’t getting ready to flip the entire game table.

He took another deep breath, let it pass back out his nose, and resumed scanning the clouds. Sledge and Director Clover - former director, he reminded himself - standing to his left, did the same. Coronado had ignored the murmurs from those among the mares and stallions who wore Steel Ranger brown. He wouldn’t scold them over idle gossip. No need to nanny them when they had commanding officers to do that. He knew how strange this quartet of theirs looked and he was trying hard to distance himself from the idea-strangling micromanagement of his predecessor. He wasn’t Coldbrook, and it was important his former command structure saw it.

On his right, the withered mare that had once been and arguably still was Minister Rainbow Dash seemed to hardly breathe at all.

A radio crackled behind him from one of the power armored soldiers posted in a rough semicircle. Visibility was one thing. Making himself an easy target was another. Their eyes roamed in all directions as they scanned for threats, though one of them had now paused to listen to the fresh communication. A speaker embedded roughly in the armor’s equivalent of a throat toggled on with a subtle tok.

“They’re passing over Junction City now, sir.”

Coronado nodded once. “Where does that put their ETA?”

“Eleven minutes.”

He could have rounded down to an even ten, but Coronado had learned during his debriefing that Paladin Lamplighter was a stickler for details. If he said eleven minutes, they would be here in eleven minutes.

“Thank you, Paladin.”

Somewhere near the tunnel the sound of an engine coughed and sputtered, followed by a cheer as it grew to a throaty roar. To his right, Sledge’s prodigious shoulders bobbed up and down with a quiet chuckle. The team who had been working on the ancient thing were a combination of Steel Ranger engineers and some of Sledge’s people from the Mechanical department. Someone had found the old engine gathering rust in a pile of scrap half-buried in the Junction City ruins, probably owned by a junk vendor who thought they could flip it for an easy payout. If whoever owned it was still alive, they weren’t among the survivors being tended to inside the Stable. The engine had originally belonged to one of the ancient motorized carriages used before the world ended and one of his engineers had asked permission to bring it along, presumably to see if it could be revived. They’d been playing with the thing for several days now and, apparently, it still had some life to it.

Sledge shifted on his hooves, the big stallion still a little uncertain about standing somewhere there wasn’t steel directly overhead. “They’re never going to leave that thing alone now that it’s running,” he teased.

“If I recall,” Coronado said, “you had a hoof in supplying material to replace its gasket head.”

“It’s called a head gasket,” Sledge corrected, smiling a little as he did. “And yeah, I did. It’s good for them to have projects like that. Keeps them from thinking too much about the razor we’re all dancing on.”

On his left, the Enclave’s newly retired security director made a noise in the back of his throat like agreement.

Coronado waited a moment to see if he might contribute more to the light banter, but Clover remained silent. He wasn’t what Coronado would call a chatty stallion, though that was likely in part due to the strangeness of his personal situation. Even now, Clover was fiercely loyal to the Enclave. Only, he was loyal to his Enclave. The one he and so many others who wore the black believed it had always been, even though it was all a facade meant to protect the malignant tumor feeding on it from within.

He pitied Clover as much as he respected him. Pity, for what he’d been forced to give up. Respect, for having done it at all.

“I think it’s fair to say the edge of that razor has dulled somewhat,” Coronado said, his eyes rising to meet Sledge’s. “You and I have the citizens of the wasteland to thank for that.”

“And a certain gryphon we both know,” Sledge added. “Can’t believe she used to play music on the radio before all this.”

Coronado smiled. “I didn’t believe it myself the first time I was told about her. Fillydelphia was just beyond the edge of her usual broadcast range, so it was rare we’d ever pick up the signal. It was a treat whenever we did. I’d just as well assumed ‘The Mare on the Air’ was, well, a mare.”

“I feel like we owe her a fucking statue,” Sledge rumbled.

Rainbow Dash hummed her agreement.

His smile tightened a little. “If you decide to build one, send me the bill. I’ll file the receipt under ‘R’ for Reparations. Celestia knows we owe your Stable something for our part in all this.”

Sledge didn’t say anything to that, but he watched Coronado for what felt like several minutes. It was as if he were trying to gauge whether the apology was real, and Coronado hoped he would conclude it was. Sledge may only be one resident among the hundreds who called Stable 10 their home, but his opinion carried influence that would sway those of his people who were hesitant to trust the wasteland. As much as he was proud of people like Fiona, Ms. Vogel, and the myriad traders and civilians who had come to the aid of the Stable, he didn’t let that pride outshine the shame of knowing a fellow Elder of the Steel Rangers had ordered the Stable’s excavation.

There had been a time not too long ago when Elder Coldbrook had been a respectable leader and a genuinely good person. Then he learned about the untouched Stable that existed in his territory and he’d allowed personal ambition and greed to justify everything that came after. It might take years to repair the damage he’d caused. Generations, even.

He was about to say something more to assure Sledge they’d make this right, but the radio behind him crackled inside the paladin’s helmet at the same time Coronado spotted the dark shapes approaching from the east. He gave a perfunctory nod when Lamplighter confirmed that the shapes were indeed Aurora and her companions, and found himself taking a steadying breath as if he were getting ready to stand for inspection like when he was a new recruit. He wondered where the tension had suddenly come from, but the figures had begun their descent before he’d gotten a handle on it.

“Fucking screwy,” Sledge muttered under his breath.

Coronado tamped his smile down to a polite smirk, having pieced together himself how strange flight may seem to a community of pegasi raised underground. A quick glance at Sledge confirmed as much. The big stallion was clenching his jaw to suppress a grin, and there was a thin film of mist forming in his eyes as he watched one of his own glide toward them.

A teacher watching a student accomplish feats he’d believed impossible.

Their landing threw a wall of dust at Coronado and the others which was quickly followed by the clicking and thumping of hooves and paws. Whether planned or not, Aurora had landed at the head of the group with a slightly uneven, limping jaunt to her steps as she slowed to a walk. Her left hind leg, he realized, was mostly a prosthetic. That hadn’t been in his notes, nor had Sledge or anyone else mentioned it to him.

The rest of the party, a changeling ghoul named Roach, the defected Enclave corporal Julip, and Fiona formed a protective semicircle behind Aurora with the corporal at its rear. It was an imposing way to make an entrance and one Coronado didn’t think he had a hoof to stand on if he wanted to find fault in it. They had, after all, attacked an officer during their exodus from the Bluff. The fact that their collective attention swept past Coronado to the myriad of soldiers camped outside the tunnel told him they were well aware there may be a punishment waiting for them here.

There wasn’t, but he let them wonder for half a minute as the breeze carried the dust from the air.

“The knight captain you attacked,” he began, choosing to forego pleasantries in favor of cutting past the most immediate tension, “will be fine.”

He watched Fiona in particular and felt satisfied when the gryphon let out the breath she’d been holding.

“He’s being treated for a minor case of whiplash courtesy of the fastball you pitched, but the vast majority of the damage was limited to his suit’s sensor suite.” He paused to arch a golden brow at the group at large. “My free advice is that the next time you visit a city garrisoned by Steel Rangers, you declare any smuggled goods to the nearest paladin commander on duty. We’re a military, not a band of thugs. We have protocols meant to handle incoming defectors.”

As he said the words, he could see Julip’s eyes wander from him to the stallion on his left. They widened ever so slightly.

Aurora cleared her throat and took a limping step forward. “We’ll make a note of it next time. My name is Aurora Pinfeathers.”

She held out a wing, and he frowned at it not out of any sort of disdain, but simply because he didn’t know what she expected him to do with it. A moment later, he felt Sledge’s left hoof tap at the back of his right, and he recalled the gesture.

He held his hoof out and she gripped it in her feathers, shaking it. “Elder Coronado of the Eastern…” he stopped himself, and rephrased. “Elder Coronado. Pleased to finally meet you in the flesh. I briefly met your better half in Fillydelphia, when you were taken. I’m sorry to hear she passed.”

Something in Aurora flinched that translated through her wing and up his foreleg. She released her grip on him and he watched her eyes flick toward Sledge before returning. “I… appreciate that,” she said stiffly. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d feel better if we skipped the tea and crumpets and went somewhere we can talk about the shitstorm that’s coming. Sledge, are we using your office for this?”

“Actually,” Coronado said, saving the overstallion from having to explain that work was already underway removing his Atrium’s damaged section of upper deck walkway, and several tons of loose concrete and granite pulverized by the Stable’s flung door, “I have a tent set up near the new well. It isn’t what I would call palatial, but it’ll suit our purposes.”

When no one objected, he let his paladin lead them to a large canvas tent a few dozen yards beyond the rest of the encampment and still near enough the wellhead his engineers had helped the civilians complete. It had originally been intended to be used as a command center for Lamplighter who, until Coronado arrived, had been the senior officer at the Stable 10 site. When they got word that Aurora and her friends were on their way back from their eventful afternoon at the Bluff, the paladin’s documents and belongings had been packed away and secured elsewhere in the encampment while the tent and folding wooden tables he favored were relocated out of earshot of anyone who didn’t have business overhearing what they planned to discuss.

The air inside was uncomfortably warm and had taken on a slight odor of must from the canvas. Paladin Lamplighter had his soldiers procure several chairs for their guests, though an open spot in the middle of one of the joined tables had been swept and left vacant for Fiona to seat herself with some dignity. They filed inside, leaving the armored soldiers to dissuade any civilians from lurking where their ears weren’t wanted.

“Well,” he said, nodding approvingly when he noted Sledge and Clover had seated themselves randomly among their guests. He’d been worried they might default to sitting near him, power gravitating toward power until those who had come to ask for it felt like they were staring up a cliff. Even Rainbow Dash had found a chair away from the head of the table, opting to plant herself beside Sledge whom she sincerely viewed as a personal friend. “The floor is yours, Ms. Pinfeathers. Tell us what you know.”

She began at the beginning, giving him and everyone else a rough overview of the events that led up to what they were dealing with now. The majority of it was information many of them already knew but he didn’t interrupt since it seemed important to her that they all approach this new threat on the same level ground. She explained her first contact with the Enclave spritebot and the decision soon after to free Corporal Julip from her cage. Coronado watched the younger mare try to shrink in her seat when Clover regarded her, like a foal who knew she’d broken the rules and wasn’t certain if this was when she would meet the consequences. He sat at a diagonal from Julip and, noticing the discomfort his attention caused, smiled something like approval and turned his gaze back to Aurora.

By then, Aurora had finished glossing over how Julip had come to join their merry band of troublemakers and was pointedly trying to avoid sharing too many details about how they’d discovered that all the Stables were interconnected by a single, hardened network. He wanted to ask where this hub had been located but refrained from doing so, knowing it would make him resemble too much of Elder Coldbrook in her eyes if he did.

He found himself leaning forward as she shared her perspective on the events that took place in Fillydelphia. Aside from his brief and unplanned visitation by Ginger Dressage, he’d been blind to the finer details of what had gone on inside his city. He wasn’t surprised to discover the Enclave had played a part in finding Ironshod’s illicit hole in the ground by tracking Aurora’s Pip-Buck signal. He was, however, surprised to learn that Ginger’s mastery of her own strengthened magic had allowed her to beat even the Enclave to the punch. Aurora took a break from talking to allow her changeling companion to explain how she’d employed teleportation, a spell previously assumed unattainable, to hurtle them halfway through the city.

Aurora picked up the thread a moment later by telling him about the Enclave’s use of the offshore oil rigs as temporary bases of operation, and that during her recovery on one of them Minister Primrose had approached her with a proposition. The ignition talisman her Stable’s survival depended upon in exchange for her return home. It had been too good to be true, but Aurora and her friends had by then become too desperate to see it as anything other than salvation.

The tent grew quiet as Aurora told them how Ginger’s magic had triggered the balefire talisman and it was only due to a combination of her shield magic, a rudimentary containment chamber built by Mechanical, and Aurora’s uncannily strong wings that Stable 10 was currently alive and not a windborne cloud of its component molecules.

When Aurora regained her composure, she told him why Primrose had wanted Stable 10 dead. He told him about what they’d learned from digging through Delta Vee’s hidden partition on the servers. About Primrose’s conspiracy with Spitfire to hijack Equestria’s balefire arsenal and turn those weapons on itself. Coronado had seen the footage of SOLUS carving irradiated canyons into the Vhannan countryside but he didn’t interrupt her when she repainted that picture. Then she paused again, this time giving Fiona the floor to give them a glimpse of what life was like just a few hundred miles west of that ruined land.

“The poison is everywhere now,” Fiona said, turning her large palms upward in a gesture that might have equated a shrug. “It’s in the water. It’s in the soil. Things over there are a hundred times worse than they are here, and it’s because SOLUS did something Equestria’s bombs couldn’t. It pushed the radiation deep, like a dragging stab wound, and it didn’t leave behind nearly the amount of intact ruins as you have here. At least in Equestria you can find enough basic building materials to build a bunch of shacks on a hill. Back home…” he paused, making a notable effort to undo the word home, “back in Griffinstone, there’s barely anything.”

Explaining her dream was harder than she thought it would be. Not because Tandy had made uncovering the details such a chore, but because the look Elder Coronado gave her when she said the word dream radiated doubt. It hadn’t occurred to her until just then that he had no reason to believe a word she was saying.

Despite her own uncertainty that what she was saying was being received with anything amounting to serious consideration, she soldiered on. She detailed what she’d seen in Primrose’s quarters. The photos she had on display. The knife in its display case. It’s name.

Then she shared what she remembered seeing on her terminal. The disorienting, first-person view into what had appeared to be a conference room filled with high ranking officials Primrose had only referred to by rank, not name. The files she’d read. The diagrams.

She could hear the desperation in her voice as she talked into the silence. She was losing Elder Coronado, and worse, she could see she was losing him. His attention softened. The look of a stallion who was waiting for the liar to stop talking so he could politely divert the conversation to its necessary conclusion. Then, just when she was certain she’d buried any chance she had at gaining the Steel Rangers’ support, the shaggy-maned stallion seated at the far corner of the table lifted a wing and aimed a feather in her direction.

“She knows things,” former director Clover said, “that she can’t know.”

The words shook the thinly veiled doubt away from Coronado’s eyes, and he turned to regard the stallion with something like dubious interest. He wasn’t opposed to being proven wrong, but it was clear there was still work to be done to get him to believe it.

Clover continued. “Everything she said about Primrose’s quarters is accurate, and I’m pretty sure she just described pages from a classified technical report I cleared for limited review among the generals. Either she’s secretly Primrose’s new security director, or she’s a dreamer.”

For a moment Coronado sat in his chair wearing an expression like he’d been handed a gift, only to have it yanked away. There had been hope in his eyes that Aurora had seen clear as day. Hope that she would turn out to be an enthusiastic and creative liar. A fraud he could dismiss and, along with her, the fear that came with knowing the Enclave was days away from wielding the weapon they had used to decimate Vhanna two centuries ago.

He heaved a long, disappointed sigh. Then he looked up at Aurora with a sad smile.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It might be best if you started over from the beginning.”

They took a break when a Ranger leaned halfway into the tent to tell them their dinner was ready.

Aurora had wanted to say she wasn’t hungry and that she still needed to remind the Elder that Primrose was days away from regaining control of the weapon platform that killed Vhanna, but her stomach all but folded in half to remind her she hadn’t eaten a decent meal in nearly two days. She’d been so focused on getting to Mariposa to grant Eshe’s final wish that food hadn’t entered her mind unless it was pushed in front of her by someone else. She tried to scrape the scowl off her face as soldiers turned wait staff passed plates through the tent flap in a strange version of a bucket brigade, each passing a dish to the next until one clicked onto the table and was slid along by those gathered around it.

It wasn’t a feast, and Aurora thought she would have strongly objected if it were despite her waking hunger. Each plate held simple portions of grilled vegetables, a small slice of protein she recognized as common molerat, and a few tiny red-skinned baked potatoes that in total might have the same mass as the ones her father had helped grow down in the Gardens. Steam curled off every plate, carrying with it a buttery scent that tripped every saliva gland at once.

No one waited for permission to tuck in. Around the table those with magic lit their horns, feathers moved, and mouths pawed at the simple meal, the dire conversation of what was coming for them all set aside for the moment. Somewhere in the distant direction of the Steel Rangers’ long open grills, a clanging of metal followed a controlled shout. Someone reminding those nearby that the tin plates and utensils needed to be returned before returning to duty. There was a hint of annoyance in the voice, as if they’d already seen soldiers failing to do so.

If their tent hadn’t been served their meals last, they were close to the back of the line. She glanced across the table at Coronado, expecting to see him waiting for everyone present to appreciate his seeming magnanimous gesture. He wasn’t. His red horn, gnarled as if it were a root growing from his forehead, glowed with magic that seemed to issue from the bright striations along its length. His attention was on his meal and the appreciative smile he wore as he chewed was refreshingly real.

A fork wandered into her periphery, and before she could think to question why it was there the hand that held it pecked the tines into one of Aurora's potatoes and popped it into Fiona’s beak. When she shot a look at the gryphon, Fiona mimed innocence while simultaneously moving her fork in for another theft.

Aurora stabbed her remaining potato before Fiona could get at it, ate it with visible triumph, and watched helplessly as the intruding utensils whisked away a carrot instead. Muttering obscenity around a mouthful wasn’t easy, but she managed. Fiona just chuckled as she chewed, elbowing Aurora to assure her it was all in good fun.

As the rest of the table ate, small conversations began to crop up between them. At first, Aurora only listened. Sledge asked Roach what he did before the world ended and managed not to look too surprised when Roach told him he’d been a master gardener. Elder Coronado wondered aloud to Fiona what it might take to get her radio station back on the air, which sent Fiona tumbling down a long list of electronics she’d need that appeared to actually shock the Elder. Sledge started telling Julip an embarrassing story from Aurora’s apprenticing years, and when Aurora leaned back far enough to shoot the big stallion a death glare, he grinned and told it even louder. When Sledge had finished and Aurora was red-faced from embarrassment, the quiet Enclave stallion with the unshorn northern coat joined the conversation by sharing a story from his younger years.

It didn’t take Aurora long to notice that Clover was a surprisingly shy stallion. He wasn’t uncomfortable speaking, she didn’t think, but he didn’t seem to like making eye contact as he told his story. A soft smile pulled at his lips as he talked to his now-empty plate, only occasionally glancing up at Sledge and then Julip to gauge their reactions before looking down again. Slowly, the other conversations around the table quieted as they all listened, subconsciously aware that the former security director didn’t open up like this often. Aurora pieced together enough of the tale to know it had taken place before Clover had reached enlistment age, and had something to do with his school friends playing a prank veiled as a dare.

“The one thing she decided not to tell me,” Clover said, grinning at his plate, “was that they’d hidden all the erasable markers in Ms. Fraymane’s desk and put one of her permanent ones in their place.”

“No fucking way,” Julip murmured, her own grin reflecting his.

“Ahyup,” Clover nodded. “Best and worst part about being a teenager is we were all horny, stupid, and thought drawing dicks on the whiteboard was the height of rebellion. Probably I wouldn’t have gotten in as much trouble if I’d quit while I was ahead, but I got cocky…”

Fiona laughed. “Cocky.”

Clover’s smile broadened as he continued. “I got swept up with all the attention and decided drawing an eight foot penis wasn’t good enough. So, assuming I could just erase it once I got the reaction I was hoping for, I drew a clover on one of the testicles.”

Roach speared a potato. “Damn.”

Clover looked at Roach and nodded ruefully. There was something complex in the way the former director regarded Roach that on the surface appeared to be discomfort. Still, his smile never faded as he spoke, even if his momentary attention toward the ghoul at the table had dimmed it a little. “Ms. Fraymane gave me three months detention and my mom and dad, rest their souls, spent the rest of my adolescence terrified I’d fallen in with a bad crowd. I think they finally let themselves breathe again when I told them I wanted to join up permanently rather than settle for the Fork.”

He placed just enough emphasis on the last word for Aurora to hear the capital letter, though it didn’t stop Fiona from holding her own fork up with the obvious question written over her brow.

“Four-Comp,” Julip said, but when she saw she hadn’t provided the clarity she’d intended, she added, “Four years compulsory service. Joys of growing up in the middle of everywhere. All able-bodied citizens are required to do four years of basic training when they hit eighteen.”

Clover shrugged not with dismissal, but polite disagreement with the disdain in Julip’s tone. “Gone are the days when the Equestrian Army could rely on recruiters.”

Julip managed to bite back her retort, but only barely.

Sensing the uncomfortable shift at the table, Elder Coronado gently cleared his throat and turned to regard them all more fully. “Well. Now that we’re all fat and happy,” he gestured around the table with a hoof, though his expression didn’t invite an interruption, “I think it behooves us to…”

Fiona jostled with a silent chuckle.

“...give the floor to Minister Rainbow Dash.” Coronado nodded to the pale blue mare who, reluctantly, nodded back. He gestured to himself, then Clover. “She’s the reason we’re here, after all. Ma’am?”

The Elder’s deference to Rainbow Dash landed as subtly as a lag bolt flung into an empty toolbox, giving Aurora the sense that Coronado and Clover hadn’t twiddled their feathers once they arrived at the Stable.

“Just Rainbow is fine,” Rainbow said, trying to shrug off her old honorific like an uncomfortable shawl. “Yeah. So, ah, I’m going to skip the part where I worry about whether anyone believes I am who I say I am because, well, I think we’re all past that by now.”

She frowned down at her empty plate for a moment as if unsure whether she wanted to say what she was about to say. Then she gave her head the smallest shake and sighed. “The important thing to know is that, thanks to me firing off an angry ‘fuck you’ to Spitfire’s old inbox, a good chunk of the Enclave knows that I’m alive and that I’m here.” She leaned over the table just enough to meet Aurora’s gaze with one of faint apology. “I know you’re here to talk about SOLUS, but I’m going to railroad you for a few minutes first. This, ah, kind of factors into your thing.”

Aurora was too busy trying to process what Rainbow had just told them to say anything reassuring, so she just nodded.

Rainbow winced and continued. “So yeah. I had a tantrum and it got caught in director– former director Clover’s net. He showed my letter to Primrose and when she responded poorly, he defected.”

“Hence why any of my security staff who plausibly may have seen the intercept were transported here where the balefire bomb was intended to solve all of Primrose’s problems at once,” Clover added.

Rainbow lifted a feather, indicating herself. “Me being the primary among those problems.”

There was a momentary silence around the table as Aurora felt several eyes tracking toward her. She frowned at her own plate, the remnants of her meal congealing on the metal as they cooled, and tried to decide how she felt about what she was only now just learning. For over a week now, she’d felt as if she were missing something that explained why Primrose had been so quick to use a forbidden weapon against Stable 10. Yes, Primrose had once before attempted to shut the Stable down after Spitfire failed to keep Delta Vee from discovering the true origins of their shared apocalypse, but Aurora had spent several quiet days in Discord’s cabin scouring her memory for anything she’d done to suggest to Primrose she might know.

She’d come up with nothing because she hadn’t known the truth. Not yet. Not until she and Ginger arrived at what they’d agreed would become their new home together, confident in the knowledge that the Enclave’s momentary lapse into charity would be the final page in their trek across the wasteland.

Aurora touched the flicker of anger in her chest like a tongue probing a toothache. She waited for it to bloom into something larger, but the rage that smoldered inside her didn’t spread toward Rainbow. Rainbow’s mistake could be forgiven. It had been, Aurora realized, and the anger she felt cooled like the bits of meat and potato on her plate.

But the rage was still there, white hot and roiling like the inferno of a collapsed star. She held onto it like fragile glass. A precious gift intended solely for Primrose.

“As far as statements go, using a balefire bomb to answer my pissy little note to Spitfire ranks near the top,” Rainbow continued. “And thanks to Ginger and Aurora fouling up her killshot, half of Equestria saw a balefire bomb explode in the sky instead of a geyser of rubble burping up from under the mountain. Any chance Primrose had at discrediting what I wrote went out the window the second that bomb exploded, and it’s already pushing a wedge through the Enclave. Only, if everything Aurora is telling us about SOLUS is true, we don’t have time to work out a clever way to hammer that wedge deeper.”

“Which is a risk,” Clover murmured. He paused just long enough for the first questioning looks to find him. “The Enclave isn’t a log we can split with an axe. It’s water. Liquid. Primrose built the Enclave on a foundation of beliefs based on the assumption that the Princesses chose her to be its leader, the proof of which she demonstrates every day by remaining young.”

Fiona jerked a thumb toward Rainbow and Roach. “These two jokers and a thousand others like them do the same thing without the fancy skin care regime.”

Roach rumbled his disagreement. “Clover’s point is that she’s lived this long without ghouling.”

“So then she has an AutoDoc squirreled away somewhere,” Fiona said. “Or a shitload of stims.”

Clover held up a placating wing. “It’s the latter, but that’s not as important as the fact that she has thousands of citizens and soldiers who believe the Princesses chose her. It’s security on an existential level. Even if I could waltz back into New Canterlot and put all the proof we have on a projector for everyone there to see, most of them are going to instinctively look for a way to slot it into what they already believe until it makes enough sense to be passable. Then they’ll stop thinking about it altogether and the Enclave will continue on like nothing happened.”

There was something in the way Clover spoke that hinted at a solution, and it was Julip who found it first. “It has to come from Rainbow Dash,” she said. “She’s the hammer.”

Both Clover and Elder Coronado nodded.

Rainbow just looked deeply uncomfortable. “More or less. Yeah. Apparently back in the good old days when Primrose thought she’d killed us all…”

They didn’t have to ask to know that us referred to the Elements of Harmony.

“...she made the mistake of enshrining us in the Enclave’s weird religious hierarchy one rung below Celestia and Luna and, more importantly, one rung above her. Technically, I outrank that little fucker.”

Aurora flexed her wings, feeling the unease growing inside her as a slow tension in her muscles. “And if you suddenly appear to tell the world that Primrose and Spitfire killed the world…”

“Wham,” Fiona said, the levity gone from her voice. “The Enclave cracks all the way through, probably turns on Primrose or she eats a bullet, and Rainbow slots herself in as de facto leader before the winged wackadoos can reform around some other self-proclaimed horse prophet.”

They all looked at the gryphon with varying degrees of grim amusement and agreement. All of them, except Aurora.

“Ideally,” Coronado said, his tone optimistic, “we’ll be able to capture Minister Primrose before she or her people harm her.”

“Capture,” Aurora said, spitting out the word like it was a bug she’d swallowed. When the room turned to look at her, she glared back. “We’re talking about this like it’s already been decided. Primrose killed billions. She’s still killing. She needs to be put in a hole in the ground, not a cell.”

Fiona, Roach, and Julip all nodded in agreement. Half the room, and it felt like they barely added up to a fraction.

Sledge shifted uneasily in his chair. Rainbow stared at the table. Coronado and Clover glanced at one another, something like patience passing between them before the Ranger regarded Aurora more directly.

It wasn’t a power move, but it felt every bit like one and the resentment welled up in Aurora like water from a cracked pipe. The four of them, the leadership, had been deep in discussion ever since Aurora and her friends left for Mariposa.

“Aurora,” Coronado sighed, “I won’t patronize you by saying I understand what you’ve been through. You deserve justice. Ginger, more than anyone, deserves justice. A bullet isn’t justice. Killing her, or allowing her to kill herself, runs the risk of enshrining Primrose in the minds of her people as a victim of Steel Ranger aggression. We can’t–”

“So what then?” Aurora snapped, cutting him off. “You arrest her? Slide breakfast, lunch, and dinner through the bars of her cell until she dies of old age? How the fuck does that make up for everything she’s done?”

Clover cleared his throat. “There is going to be a process.”

Her laugh had an edge of mockery in it. “What, a trial? Like they used to do before the bombs, with powdered wigs and some robed asshole to tell everyone she’s been a very bad mass murderer? Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Aurora…” Coronado warned.

“This is Coldbrook all over again. Couldn’t stomach doing the decent thing unless he got everything he wanted first.”

“Hey,” Roach said, leaning forward so she could meet his eyes. “This isn’t the same as that.”

She knew it wasn’t, but she was angry now and her filters had shaken off their seals. She spat a trembling curse under her breath and forced herself to breathe.

They waited.

“I’m sorry.” She pressed the apology through grit teeth. “But she deserves… everything we can do to her. Everything.”

“I don’t disagree,” Coronado murmured.

Aurora spoke as if she hadn’t heard him. “She’s going to use SOLUS again, and I’m damned sure we’re sitting in the middle of her first choice for ground fucking zero.”

Coronado nodded. “I’m aware.”

“So we don’t have time to sit around and wonder whether the Enclave cracks like an egg or a walnut or whatever the fuck. We don’t have time to work out an elaborate plan to abduct Primrose and time it so Rainbow can take the controls. And even if we did, I’m not going to sit on my wings and pretend throwing that bitch in a box is better than dropping a bullet through her skull at fucking range.” She picked up her fork, wondered why she’d done it at all, then flicked it from her wing and watched it clatter across the table’s wooden planks. “When she gets SOLUS, she’s going to use it to carve her name across the wasteland, and my Stable is going to be the dot on the fucking i. With or without you, I’m going to kill her before she does that.”

Her words faded in the tent’s stale air like smoke from a smoldering fire. Coronado stared at her for what felt like minutes but was probably only seconds. Then he leaned forward with his implacable smile, and she braced herself for the threat she knew was coming.

“Aurora,” he said, once again using her name as if he owned it, “there will be a process. A trial, yes, and one that will end in conviction. This is something that has to happen so future generations have a clear record of the crimes she is guilty of. Yes, it’s for posterity and–” he held up a hoof, stopping her before she could interrupt again. “Let me finish. This is for posterity, and for history. We will condemn her for what she did to the world and we will do it in a way that is clearly documented and irrefutable.”

He gestured to Rainbow Dash. “She will smash that mare’s legacy into so many shards as to make it impossible for the next Primrose to try the same trick.”

Aurora swallowed the furious lump in her throat, trying and failing to find the right words to shut him up and put an end to his needlessly complicated version of justice.

“That being said…” Coronado turned both hooves up in a conciliatory gesture, and he sighed as if admitting a secret he’d wanted to keep a little longer. “She doesn’t need to be present, or alive, for any of it.”

He let the words hang between them until she inevitably took the bait.

“But you said you wanted to take her alive.”

“Ideally,” he said, emphasizing the word to remind her he’d used it earlier, “I would like that to be the case. Realistically, no. She already has the gun against our heads and we don’t have time to figure out how best to get her feather off the trigger.”

She wanted to point out they’d known weeks ago that the Enclave was looking for SOLUS, but she had the good sense to bite the words back. She’d spent the better part of five minutes making accusations and now that she was finally getting a sense of how much of an ass she’d just made of herself, she didn’t feel eager to shovel the hole deeper.

Her chair let out a sharp creak as she sagged into it. She didn’t want to sound as relieved as she felt, but the words tumbled out with a sigh anyway.

“So we are killing her.”

Coronado murmured his agreement. “Plan B’s all we got.”

She nodded, then looked down at her foreleg. Two Pip-Bucks were latched firmly above the joint. One hers. One not.

One that couldn’t find Primrose. One that could.

She felt like the biggest asshole in the room, and probably she was. Apologies could come later.

“Security Director,” she said, shifting her attention to where Clover sat at the far corner of the table. “That’s a… high rank in the Enclave?”

Clover watched her through the screen of his overgrown mane and smiled as if she’d asked whether ice was cold.

“He’s Princess Shithead’s second in command,” Julip blurted, then realizing her error, added, “former second in command. Technically.”

Clover snorted at that and shrugged. “Close enough. I’m guessing you want help with something to do with that Pip-Buck we gave you.”

She nodded, not sure if she should be surprised he’d noticed where her attention had wandered. “A friend told me it was possible to modify it to track Primrose’s location.”

“Could. Not a good idea though.” He pecked his fork at a cold chunk of uneaten carrot, reconsidered, and set it back on his plate. “Network traffic is monitored. Plenty of devices connected to it asking one another where they are or where someone else is, and on paper, yeah, yours wouldn’t look much different. Soon as it starts asking for location data on the minister?”

He knit the feathers of both wings together in front of him, then spread them apart in a mock explosion. “Boom. You’ve got every pegasus with a gun converging on you. The odds of you flipping on that spotlight while Primrose is out of the Bunker complex is miniscule, and if you get lucky and she’s aboveground, the chances of you closing the distance before the hammer falls is vanishingly so.”

Aurora turned a frown toward the sleek, white Pip-Buck. She wanted to complain about the time she’d spent getting it working again. About the obligation she hadn’t known she’d felt until right now to do this a certain way. The way she and Eshe had planned together.

“Then,” she asked, “what do I do?”

Clover pushed his plate away and leaned over the table. The shyness was gone, and he managed to look almost sad when he spoke.

“I know Primrose. Either she’s got the science team thinking SOLUS is an energy source like it was intended to be, or they suspect it’s a weapon and she’s not telling them what it’ll do when they flip the switch. I’m betting on the latter. They’re thinking space laser or long range broiler. Everything’s a weapon if you’re angry enough. If any of them knew SOLUS had been co-opted to pour a river of balefire through the sky, there’s not a single pegasus in the Bunker that would pull the trigger.”

Julip chimed back in. “So we tell everyone what SOLUS is.”

“I’ll eat my uniform before I believe she hasn’t planned for that. Primrose loves control above all else. She’ll have ten lockouts in place for every technician working to recapture SOLUS.” He twirled a feather at Aurora. “That maneuvering jargon you mentioned? Guarantee that’s locked in and set to run on a timer in case someone makes sweet eyes at the abort button. Primrose is the only one Primrose trusts with the authority to aim that gun, and if history is any indication she’s had practice.”

He shifted in his chair and sighed. “The only silver lining is that Primrose will have made herself the only person with the authority to pull the pin out of this grenade. Neutralize Primrose and we neutralize SOLUS. Which brings us back to that Pip-Buck.”

Aurora frowned. “You just said using it is a bad idea.”

He nodded. “I did, and it is. But a bad idea is better than no ideas, and right now I don’t have one. I can help you get the authorization access you’ll need to track Primrose’s exact location, and as soon as you send that ping you’ll have a very narrow window to act.”

“After which, I’ll probably be killed,” she said.

A pause. Then, again, he nodded. “Very likely, yes. Provided someone here doesn’t come up with something better.”

They looked around the table, and Aurora felt herself hoping one of them might speak up with a thought they’d been holding back. No one did. Even Elder Coronado frowned at his empty plate, his brow furrowed with consternation.

“Until then,” Clover continued, no happier with the group’s silence than she was, “we should begin discussing the next step.”

Aurora opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, but a twinge of bitterness kept her from speaking. She didn’t like being led along under the best of circumstances, and it felt like former security director Clover had snatched up her idea and clapped it around her neck like a collar. She pressed her lips together and waited.

He settled his wings against his sides, pressed the edges of both his hooves together, and used them to point across the table at her. “We need to decide how we’re getting you into New Canterlot.”

When the dinner finally ended it was deep enough into evening that the Steel Rangers had already finished scraping the ashes from the bottom of their impressively long community grill, and the Stable dwellers who had ventured outside for their ration of food, water and socialization with wasteland strangers had mostly retreated back to the safety of their home. The smothering clouds rolled with contrasting, darker grays as the day faded and the air had begun to cool.

Gunfire split the quiet like an axe dropping through a log, and Fiona surprised herself by not flinching this time. It had been nearly an hour since they all piled out of the tent and, sensing that Aurora might want some space, Roach and Julip had allowed Sledge to lead them down into the Stable.

The slope of Foal Mountain rose up in front of them less than two hundred yards away. An assortment of bottles and cans stood perched on the rocks near enough one another that the shrapnel from one could reasonably knock down its neighbors. Aurora hadn’t encountered that problem yet. With the exception of her first two shots, she’d missed all the rest and her aim was getting progressively worse.

A puff of dust rose from the granite slope behind the targets. A second later, Aurora pressed the ridge of her brow against her rifle and hissed another curse.

Dust kicked up by each errant shot settled on the matted fur where Ginger’s Pip-Buck had recently been.

“Why don’t you take a breather?” Fiona suggested. “Y’know, before the quartermaster decides to charge us for the ammo?”

Aurora let out a sharp, angry exhalation. With one fluid motion she racked the bolt and sent the spent cartridge on a short arc through the air. Then she threw the bolt forward like she was trying to punish the rifle, took half a breath as she sighted her target, and squeezed the trigger.

The rifle emitted a sharp click, and Aurora frowned. Somewhere in the direction of the Ranger encampment, a soldier laughed. Probably it was just bad timing and not meant for Aurora, but Fiona thought she could actually see the flush of embarrassment rise in the mare’s flesh. She was so focused on shooting that she’d forgotten to reload again.

Aurora muttered something and flicked the safety on, then leaned over to rummage fresh brass from the ammo can beside her.

Fiona frowned, padded a couple steps forward, and sat down beside the stubborn mare. Her palm settled around the rifle’s ejection port like a firm yet caring vice. “Take a break. Let’s talk.”

She knew by now to expect the glare, and it came with all the annoyance Aurora could muster. It took another several seconds for Aurora to accept that Fiona wasn’t moving her hand out of the way, and no amount of bitching was going to change that unless it was about whatever had her feeling bitchy. That, of course, wasn’t a mystery at all. Everyone in the tent had known why Aurora stormed out. It was the same reason Roach and Julip were giving her space.

When Aurora finally gave in she muttered, “It’s bullshit.”

Fiona nodded, then grunted as she shifted off her haunches and onto her belly. She was easily twice as long from stem to stern as Aurora, but when she settled into a position that felt comfortable they lay almost shoulder to shoulder.

“It is bullshit,” she agreed, noting the scuff marks on Aurora’s prosthesis where the rifle barrel rested on it. As a stabilizer, it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but Fiona didn’t think it was a great idea for her to pop off her leg whenever she needed a steady shot. “But you get why it makes sense, right?”

Aurora didn’t say anything at first and instead pulled a brass cartridge out of the ammo can. Fiona had taken her hand off the ejection port when she layed down and considered putting it back, but Aurora just flipped the round between her feathers like a nervous person might fiddle with a pen.

“Yeah,” she said, using the tip of the lead bullet to scratch patterns into the dirt. “I just… the last time we split up we had an actual plan and everything still went wrong. Now I’m being told that we have to split up again, only this time we have barely a plan and…”

She shook her head and flicked the cartridge away. It skittered over the hardpan and came to rest a couple yards away.

“She has no reason to come out of her bunker,” Aurora said. “None. And as long as she stays there, there’s no way I or anyone else can stop her. We’re fucked, Fiona. Well and truly fucked and nobody in there wanted to say it out loud even though it’s obviously true. And if she gets SOLUS and decides to use it on us, then I don’t want to be out there on my own waiting for it to happen. I want to be here,” she stabbed the round into the dirt for emphasis, “with my family,” another stab, “and with my dad.”

She choked a little on the last word, then looked angry with herself for having done it. When she breathed, she did so with the slightest shudder.

Aurora was terrified because she wasn’t being given a choice. Clover had taken pains to explain why Roach and Julip couldn’t come with her to New Canterlot. Roach would be killed because he was a ghoul. Julip was a wanted fugitive who, in the last several weeks, had become a minor celebrity for all the wrong reasons. She’d be recognized within minutes of setting hoof in Enclave territory.

And while Clover hadn’t provided any tangible reasons why Fiona couldn’t cross that contentious border safely, his tone and expression had made it clear he thought it would pose an unnecessary risk to what he’d begun referring to as the mission.

Five days until SOLUS passed through the narrow communication window. Tomorrow morning it would be four. There wasn’t time for the Steel Rangers to organize a massive military push against the Enclave. In five days they might be able to move enough soldiers and materials to the border to provoke the beginnings of a shooting war, but by then SOLUS would be over their heads and humming with energetic death.

Their goal for the better half of the last century had been to contain the Enclave. Surround and compress their forces in a never-ending stalemate that would give the Steel Rangers freedom to explore Equestria’s vast ruins for tech that could force the enemy’s surrender. It had been a risk. Their military had diffused along the border like an ever present fog of danger that, until Coldbrook’s recent blunder, had successfully deterred open aggression.

They believed the strategy worked because they didn’t know about SOLUS or what it was. Now the Enclave was poised to control that superweapon in less than a week’s time and the Steel Ranger’s policy of containment had left them utterly unprepared.

Right now, Elder Coronado was frantically sending coded transmissions to his many counterparts across the wasteland. A frontal assault wasn’t in the cards, but he could ask for more covert assets to be sent in along with Aurora. He’d made it clear none of them could afford to make contact with one another once they reached the capital, nor would they be likely to recognize their allies if they needed help. If they had any hope that Primrose would leave the Bunker long enough to stick her head through the guillotine, she could never suspect someone might be waiting to drop the blade.

Her confidence was the only crack in her armor. If she got spooked and went turtle, they were fucked.

“You know what I think?” Fiona asked.

Aurora turned away for a moment, trying to hide her face as she wiped her eyes against the ridge of her wing.

“I think this whole situation is a deep-fried turd freshly pressed out of a feral’s festering asshole.” The corner of her beak quirked into a smile at the sound of Aurora trying and failing to suppress a miserable snort of laughter. “And I think it’s important that somebody tries to fix it before it gets any worse.”

Aurora turned to look at her reticently.

“I don’t think it has to be you, but I think it is important that you don’t sit this one out either.” She rolled off her belly and onto one side, head propped in her hand. “You remember how you felt when you hauled yourself up Blinder’s Bluff with your heart set on rescuing Ginger?”

Aurora turned her gaze toward her rifle and studied it for a moment. Then she nodded, her voice thick. “Yeah.”

“What was going through your head?”

Several seconds passed before she answered. “I was thinking it was the right thing to do.”

Fiona sighed. “C’mon. Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

Aurora swallowed, sighed, and slid the rifle’s open bolt closed. It gave a sharp click when she engaged the safety, and another as she let it tip to its side when she let her wings fold back to her sides. “I was thinking it was my fault she got abducted. If I hadn’t left home, we wouldn’t have met and she wouldn’t have gotten blamed for killing Cider. She didn’t deserve that.”

Fiona nodded against her palm. “Plus you liked her,” she added.

Aurora answered with a sad smile. “And I liked her.”

She let the silence linger for a while as she worked out what she wanted to say next. When she did, she curled her free hand into a fist and reached out to thump Aurora gently on the shoulder. “You’re a good egg, Aurora Pinfeathers. Better than that, you’re one of those idealistic weirdos who sees this world for what it could be, not what it is. Maybe that’s a Stable-dweller thing or maybe that’s just you, but I don’t think one bad knock is enough to shake that out of you.”

“Are you… trying to flirt with me?”

Fiona shrugged. “Little bit. Mostly I’m just telling you what I see, and that’s a mare who’s too brave and stupid to sit on her curvy little ass and do nothing while some fuckwit like Primrose subjects the world to a live replay of her last apocalypse.”

She saw the fluster of confusion bloom in Aurora’s eyes. Too forward, she told herself. Back it up.

“Look,” she continued, “this sucks. This is scary as hell, and there’s a big part of me right now that wants to fly right back to Griffinstone and hide until this blows over. Only I can’t do that because in five days it won’t matter where any of us go to ground. We can’t hide from this and, honestly, I don’t think I could live with myself if I tried.”

She reached out and touched Aurora’s leg. “I don’t think you could either, because you’re the type of person who believes in fixing things.”

They were quiet for a long moment while Fiona waited for some kind of reaction. When it became awkward she pulled her hand away, wondering if she’d crossed some invisible line she hadn’t known was there. She was surprised, then, when Aurora shook her head and turned her lip up in a tired smile.

“You’re a corny fucking bird, you know that?” She sniffled, then chuckled to herself as she rolled first onto her side and then, as if making a conscious decision to give up on her target practice, onto her back.

Fiona watched her spread her wings across the dusty stones and stare up at the rolling clouds, her expression a mixture of chagrin and surrender.

Aurora heaved a long, tired sigh and said, “Don’t think I didn’t notice you sneaking that we in at the end. Pretty sure Coronado said you weren’t allowed to go.”

She let out a derisive snort and twisted her own body until her own back pressed into the dirt. “He strongly inferred that I shouldn't go. He never said I couldn’t. And besides, you and I both know Roach would wheedle me until I went after you anyway. The way I see it, I don’t have a choice.”

“No offense,” Aurora said with a tone that said she was about to say something offensive, “but you’re fucking huge. I don’t think a universe exists where you don’t draw the attention of every living pony in New Canterlot.”

She looked down the streak of cream fur along her belly. “I’m not that big.”

“You could literally fit two ponies inside you with room to spare.”

She turned her head and regarded Aurora with a raised brow as she waited for her to hear what she’d just said.

When it clicked, Aurora grimaced. “Please don’t.”

“No idea what you’re on about,” she deadpanned, then gestured grandly at her sprawled body as she shifted back on topic. “But with regards to the hot mess that is Fiona Goldbeak, the Enclave doesn’t have any standing doctrine against gryphons and I’m well used to rubberneckers. And it’s not like I pioneered the idea of running away from home. I won’t be the first tourist with a beak New Canterlot has ever seen.”

Aurora made a thoughtful grunting sound, a good sign she was starting to focus less on her own fear. “The tourist angle feels thin.”

She crossed her arms behind her head, settling into the conversation. “Okay, so then I’m a diplomat from Griffinstone checking in on our technicolor neighbors.”

“Not sure that’s better.”

“Unless it lands us an audience with Primrose, in which case I can teach you how to paint a room with just one bucket of pegasus.”

“Yeesh,” Aurora said.

“Too much?”

Aurora settled her forelegs over the burn scar along her chest and shook her head. “No, just tempting in all the wrong ways. I don’t think either of us would pass as diplomats though. It’d be more convincing if you were just you.”

Fiona frowned at the dark clouds overhead. They were hypnotic at this time of evening. Deep shade and splashes of light played off each other in slow undulations that tricked her brain into thinking she was staring down at the waves of a vast ocean. “Explain your brainthoughts, horse.”

“I just did. Be you. Be… I don’t know, the gryphon that left Griffinstone to find a better place to live. Only instead of Blinder’s Bluff, you’re considering New Canterlot.”

She rolled the idea around in her head to get a sense of whether she liked it or not. It wasn’t actually that bad at all. If anything, it might give the citizens of the Enclave more reason to try to show her their best selves rather than regard her with suspicion. So much for the tourist angle being thin.

“You know, this sounds a lot like I’m coming with you.”

“It does,” Aurora agreed. “Not sure how Coronado’s going to feel about that.”

“Coronado forfeited his right to have an opinion when he tried to fly you out there without backup,” she replied a little more heatedly than she meant to. She took a slow breath, letting the flash of anger subside. “Sorry. I know he’s not Elder Coldbrook levels of bad, but he definitely thinks you’ve got better odds of being bait than putting a bullet in Primrose. That just seems shitty to me.”

Aurora offered a noncommittal shrug that made it clear she’d been stewing over the same issue and didn’t want the conversation to circle back to what drove her to vent her anger with target practice.

She sucked in a breath of cool air and stifled a yawn brewing behind her jaw. “Were you watching Rainbow Dash during that whole thing?”

Rocks scraped over the dirt as Aurora’s tail whipped across it. Rainbow had barely said a word during the entire conversation, but the stony expression she wore said everything. “She’s being asked to do a shit job she doesn’t want, and knows she’s the only one who can do it. I’d be pissed, too.”

“I thought representing Equestria was her whole schtick. Element of Loyalty, minister of a government branch, that whole chestnut.”

“It used to be, right up until it all backfired on her.” She didn’t explain what she meant by backfired, but the tone she used made Fiona suspect the word encompassed more than just the day the bombs fell. “Sledge said once she got her mind back, one of the first things she made clear was that she didn’t want to be anyone’s leader. She’d been hoping that once the Stable got back to normal she could go back to living a regular life again.”

If Fiona had lips, she’d have screwed them into a bewildered frown. “She’s Rainbow Dash.”

The shrug was audible in Aurora’s answer. “So?”

She hesitated. “Huh. Yeah, I guess you’re right. Damn.”

Aurora yawned. “Yep. Things changed. Now we all have to do things we don’t want to do.”

Fiona stretched her legs, feeling the muscles draw cable tight until they trembled. Somewhere back toward the tunnel, someone laughed. “Hey, Feathers?”

“Mm?”

“Thanks for letting me help.”

“Mm.”

She closed her eyes for a brief moment, knowing if she didn’t force herself to get up now she was going to end up waking up eight hours from now with a sore neck and a few hundred jagged pebbles glued to her backside. With a sigh she cracked one eye open and turned her head to glance at Aurora.

The gray mare’s eyes were closed and her scarred chest rose and fell with a slow, steady rhythm of sleep. Fiona was surprised she’d held out this long. The poor thing had been exhausted since the minute she woke up. She’d half-walked, half-flown, and been half-dragged through the worst the wasteland could throw at her and yet here she was dozing off under its starless sky.

Fiona gave one last thought to getting up and noticed with dim amusement when the featureless void of sleep brushed the silly idea away.

The Dream formed around Aurora like fog evaporating in sunlight. Only the light wasn’t coming from the wasteland’s overcast sky, but instead the full spectrum lights that glowed from the ceiling of Primrose’s personal quarters.

She looked around, saw she was alone once more, and let out a frustrated sigh.

“Tandy, no. We’re not doing this again. Either talk to me or wake me up.”

Primrose’s terminal blinked on but Tandy didn’t appear. Aurora glared around the room, ignoring the terminal being dangled in front of her like bait. She had too much to deal with already to waste time meant for recuperating on this piecemeal choose-your-own-adventure mystery bullshit. A part of her knew Tandy would sense her thoughts the instant they materialized and so she willed her irritation at the empty room in the hopes they would reach Luna’s creation with plenty of italicized and underlined words.

But Tandy still didn’t manifest herself. Nor did Aurora wake.

Her own immovable object called stubbornness rooted her hooves to the floor. The terminal could buzz and chime all it liked. Any time she wasted clicking through menus and watching Tandy’s disorienting first-person memory videos was better spent between the two of them talking like regular, sane beings.

She blinked, and when her eyes opened she was standing in front of the terminal. Had it happened while she was awake she would have puked, no question, but since it was a dream her brain simply backfilled the jarring shift with some vague memory of her having walked the distance. Before she could say anything, a video on the terminal began to play.

Primrose stared up from the screen at such an absurd angle that Aurora felt like she was looking down from a ladder. Her expression was icy with new confidence.

“You will never lift so much as a feather against me,” Primrose growled. “No nightmares. No bad memories. If you so much as have me relive a headache, I will see to it that every last Stable on this continent is reduced to a fog of its component molecules. Do you understand me?”

There was a pause. Then Tandy quietly assented.

Primrose’s smile had enough teeth in it to give her a distinctly rodentish grin. “Good, because if you do try to fuck with me, I will know and I will slaughter every last dreamer you have left. Remember, Tantabus, I don’t need to have dreams to live a long and happy life. You, however, need us.”

The recording ended, accidentally or deliberately she didn’t know, on a frame that caught Primrose in an awkward half-blink, half-sneer. She looked like she was about to sneeze. If it weren’t for the circumstances, it might have even been a little funny.

Aurora pursed her lips and turned to face the empty bedchamber. “Tandy, it’s a bluff. She’s talking out of her ass so that you don’t turn her brain to pudding the next time she dozes off which, if that’s something you can do, it would really help me out if you did.”

The room didn’t answer, nor did the terminal yank her back around for another video. The silence was unnaturally absolute, and it unnerved her a little. She spoke not just to hear something that wasn’t the yawning absence of sound, but to prod a little harder at Tandy.

“You’re afraid,” she said. “I get that. It feels like she has all the cards and she kind of does, but only in my world. Not in here. You’re the only person here with her wings on the controls and I don’t think you believe she can read your mind. If you did, you wouldn’t be showing me what’s in hers. So why don’t you come down from wherever you are and just talk to me?”

Nothing answered. Aurora felt the sting of salt in her eyes. She could barely keep the tremble out of the words as she spoke them.

“Tandy, Eshe is dead. I put him down and I…” she swallowed hard and started to pace around the lavish room. “I need to talk to you about that. I need to hear from you that you’re okay and that you’re not ignoring me because you’re angry with me. Because if you are and it’s because I fucked up and missed something…”

She turned to pace the other way, and the nebulous starscape that was Tandy loomed behind her.

“I am not ignoring you,” she said. “And I am not angry.”

She nodded a little harder than she intended, sending a sweep of white mane cascading across her face. She pulled it back behind her ear, eyes glazed but not quite enough for the tears to fall, and said, “I know it’s what he wanted, but…”

“It was not what you wanted,” Tandy finished.

“No,” she murmured. “It really wasn’t. I feel like that’s selfish.”

“It is,” she said, motionless as a statue. “But he was your friend and you trusted that he knew when it was time for him to leave. I… didn’t trust him when it could have made a difference.”

Aurora began to say that she’d tried to make Eshe’s passing as comfortable as possible, but she stopped when she noticed Tandy wasn’t looking at her. She was staring at the floor with her brow uncharacteristically furrowed. Usually when Tandy felt a strong emotion, the state of the constellations within her would shift and change hue. This was the first time Aurora could remember seeing Luna’s creation demonstrate something like body language. And she wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d just heard Tandy use a contraction.

She put aside her reassurances and stepped closer to Tandy. As she did, her towering alicorn form seemed to shrink until, without Aurora realizing it, they stood at practically the same height. Tandy still managed to stare at the floor even as Aurora put a comforting wing on the mare’s shoulder.

Something swam through the starscape of Tandy’s eyes. “I took away his voice so he could not ask for help. I ruined his life.”

“You made a mistake,” Aurora said, squeezing Tandy’s weirdly corporeal shoulder. “And yeah, it was a big one. So let me ask you a question.”

She bent her neck a little until Tandy looked her in the eye. It was like staring through a window to an alien sky and, in a very literal sense, it was difficult not to get lost in them.

“Did you understand what was happening to him?”

Tandy’s brow lowered into a considering frown. “Yes. The bed was caring for him. He was waiting to be freed.”

It wasn’t quite the answer she was looking for, so she tried again. “Did you know he’d be too weak to leave the AutoDoc when that happened?”

A pause. “Yes, but… the bed heals. I knew that. It is why I… ignored him.”

Aurora caught the subtle change in tense. Tandy had known. She’d known the bed would keep Eshe alive, so she’d put the idea of his distress on a high shelf for some other day. And then Aurora had come to her asking for a way to fix Ginger’s Pip-Buck, and the Robronco technician Tandy had willingly forgotten had become useful again.

Only then had Tandy paid enough attention to Eshe to realize what two centuries trapped in a withering body had done to his psyche. His body could have been repaired, given enough time and resources, but that wasn’t an option now. Eshe had spent nearly ten times as many years existing alone in Mariposa than he’d lived outside of it. His decision to die had been made decades before Tandy came to him for help. Likely it had been made long before Aurora had been born.

It was easy to hate Tandy for what she’d done. To forget, despite the lifetimes she’d lived and lives she experienced by proxy of her dreamers, she was still learning how to grow up. Luna’s reason for creating Tandy might forever remain a mystery, but her sudden death had left Tandy ill equipped and inexperienced for the task of ruling over the Dream.

Now she was learning too late that her negligence had caused one of her dreamers to ask for death.

“Tandy,” Aurora said, her voice compassionate yet firm, “you can never undo what you did.”

Tandy’s eyes widened as if she’d been slapped.

“But,” she continued, “you’re not a bad person.”

Several long seconds passed. “Then what am I?”

Aurora let her wing slide off Tandy’s shoulder, and shrugged. “You’re just another weird, flawed fuck up like all the rest of us.”

For a moment she worried she’d come off as flippant and would need to backpedal to spare Tandy’s feelings, but she’d forgotten Tandy wasn’t limited by things like unspoken intention. The mare-shaped void of constellations and stardust reached for her, and Aurora felt an almost electric buzz at the base of her brain as Tandy crossed the space between them and hugged her.

“Sometimes I wish I could wake up.”

The admission was barely a whisper. Aurora didn’t know how to respond, so instead she put a wing around Tandy and squeezed. The two of them had met under the worst of circumstances and their understanding of each other was weighted impossibly in Tandy’s favor, but they were nothing if not friends.

Tandy was the first to break the embrace. Something deep swam in the creature’s eyes, making it appear as if their dense starscapes were rippling.

“That little tyrant does not know you survived,” she said, confirming Aurora’s hope that she wouldn’t find her face on wanted posters the moment they crossed into Enclave territory. “But she was never trying to kill you. She knows Rainbow Dash is inside your Stable. She sent a message to–”

Aurora held up a feather. “We figured out she’s after Rainbow Dash.”

Tandy went still for a split second as if she’d gone elsewhere. Then she nodded. “So you have.”

She let herself smile just a little. Tandy wasn’t firing on all cylinders just yet, but she was making a recovery. “I don’t suppose you can scrape Prim’s brain for the codes to blow up SOLUS?”

Tandy stared off into the distance again and spoke as if she were reciting printed instructions. “Control authority is only granted after a full biometric scan. You would need her hooves, head, and approximately ten cubic centimeters of blood.”

Aurora glanced over at the display case that held Primrose’s serrated blade, Desperate Measures, then turned in a slow circle as she took in the rest of the room. “I can think of a few ways I’d like to get those. Doesn’t do me much good if I can’t get inside this place.”

“The Enclave Bunker Complex features one access point.” The bedroom blinked away and was replaced by a corridor that looked remarkably similar to the ones built by Stable-Tec, only the steel paneled walls had some kind of textured inset that softened every surface. A pair of silver doors split apart at the corridor’s nearby terminus, revealing the waiting elevator across the threshold. “The elevator is heavily defended at all times due to the concentration of high ranking staff.”

Aurora frowned. “So… I steal a uniform and a keycard, maybe?”

“The corridors are passively monitored by a suite of sensors networked to an independent M.I.L.L.I.E. intelligence. Facial scans are conducted automatically including within the elevator itself. The last attempted intrusion into the Bunker occurred seventy-one years ago. The Ranger who made the attempt was detected by the elevator sensor and shot to death when the doors opened.”

“So…” she said, dragging out the word as she leaned into the elevator and identified the unblinking black dome mounted above the doorway, “what’s the best option?”

“Attack Primrose outside the Bunker.”

She turned away from the elevator. “Something tells me you’re about to say she’s not leaving the Bunker until she has SOLUS.”

Tandy’s head dipped a little as she nodded. “No. She has no intention to expose herself, and her security detail has been doubled since the information leak.”

Aurora blinked. “What leak?”

Tandy looked up at her. “You do not know?” Her eyes went distant again, and she took in a shallow breath. “Oh. Well then, this… may be helpful.”

Fiona gradually became aware of hushed voices nearby. She blinked her violet eyes open and stared blearily at the stretch of cracked dirt and blackened bits of wild grass. Some distant part of her brain reminded her to track down some Rad-Away. Even if she’d managed to piss out all the radiation Roach had dumped inside Mariposa, sleeping on a hardpan that wasn’t finished shedding the rads from the Enclave bomb probably wasn’t doing her any favors.

She threw her tired gaze further distant until the Steel Ranger tents came into focus. If it was safe enough for them, it was good enough for her.

She was about to stretch and yawn when the voices came again from somewhere behind her. The ear that wasn’t squashed against the dirt craned back by habit to give her a sense of range on the skulking threat.

“All I’m hearing are reasons why you don’t have to go.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“I think it is, honey. I really do.”

Fiona frowned at the dirt, careful not to let the expression translate into movement they might detect. Aurora and the unfamiliar stallion were speaking in hushed tones but their intensity was carrying their voices clear all the way over to where Fiona lay. They were fifteen, maybe twenty yards away judging by how much she still needed to strain to hear.

“How many soldiers did they tell you they’re sending, not including you?”

Aurora made a noise like a scoff. “I don’t have a number, dad, and that’s not the point.”

“Then what is?” Aurora’s father - what was his name? Dusk. No, Dusky, with a y - asked. “Why do you specifically need to risk your life when there are better trained pegasi being sent to do the exact same thing?”

Dirt crunched under someone’s hooves and Fiona could imagine Aurora shifting uncomfortably. “They’re not all pegasi out here.”

“Duly noted. You still haven’t answered my question.”

A pause. “I’ll be safe, dad.”

Dusky’s voice had the quiet desperation of someone who could sense he wasn’t making the progress he’d hoped. “She tried to kill you, Aurora. In what way is what you’re about to do safe?”

“She tried to kill Rainbow Dash, not me.”

“That isn’t better.”

Another pause. “I have to try.”

“You’ve been trying,” her father groaned. “Honey you have done more for this Stable than anyone. You–”

“I didn’t die for it,” Aurora snapped.

Fiona winced. In the silence that followed, she had to assume Aurora had too. She’d meant to use Ginger’s sacrifice as a counterargument and instead it had come out like a threat.

Several long seconds ticked by before either of them spoke.

“Don’t do this for revenge,” her father said. “If there’s nothing I can say that will convince you to stay, then at least promise me you’re not doing this because you believe shooting that mare will make up for Ginger’s death.”

When Aurora didn’t answer, her father sighed. “You’re not a killer, Aurora.”

More silence. Someone shifted, crunching dirt.

“I love you.”

Quietly, “I love you too, dad.”

“Are you taking her with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you trust her?”

A pause. “Yeah.”

Fiona felt her heartbeat ratchet up a couple notches and she became vividly aware of her own breathing. Were they looking at her? Did they know she was listening?

“I don’t think I need to tell you how much this scares me,” he said, then as if he were gesturing at the wasteland around them, “All of this. No walls, no roof, just thousands of strangers with knives and guns and no way to keep them out except with more knives and guns. It terrifies me. It was supposed to be empty.”

“Well, it isn’t,” Aurora said, and there was something like relief behind the words as she said them. He’d said his piece and, while he was deeply unhappy with her persistence, he’d given up his position with grace. Fiona started to wonder what her life might have looked like if her own family had been capable of that, but Aurora’s voice pulled her back to the present. “Sure, some of the people out here do bad things, but they’re not all Primroses. Most of them are just doing what they have to do to stay alive.”

Dusky grunted. “That soldier didn’t have to take your leg to stay alive.”

She was quiet for a moment. “He didn’t. But…” Another, thoughtful pause. “But if Ironshod had been brought up in our Stable, with everything we have? I don’t think he would have turned out the way he did.”

“You think someone like him would have done better in Mechanical?”

Aurora let out a soft chuckle. “After Sledge put a few dents in his ego, yeah, I think so.”

Fiona clenched her jaw so she wouldn’t laugh. The mental image of Paladin Ironshod taking shit from a pack of lowly mechanics was a gem she didn’t know she’d needed, and one which she promptly filed away for later enjoyment.

“When are you leaving?”

Her grin faded.

Aurora sniffed. “We still have some details to work out with Elder Coronado, but we’ll be heading out once that’s done. He’s not going to be happy to hear Fiona is coming with.”

“If he tries sending you out there alone, you have him come talk to me. I’ll set him straight for you.”

A sad laugh. “I will. Thanks, dad.”

There came the scraping of hooves and the sound of quieter, muffled noises between them. Fiona found herself focusing on a tiny fissure in the dirt a few feet away to distract herself from the tiny, hitching sobs behind her. Salt stung at her eyes by the time he heard them break their embrace. For a while longer Aurora and her father made little coughs and sniffling sounds. Then Dusky formed something like words amidst the thickness in his voice.

“You come say goodbye before you leave.”

A haggard, “Okay,” was all Aurora could muster.

And then one set of hooves started crunching across the dirt in Fiona’s direction. She closed her eyes and forced herself to take the slow, deep breaths of a gryphon deep in sleep and thought she’d managed a decent job of it in the time she’d had to react.

Dusky’s hoofsteps slowed to a stop beside her. “Promise me you won’t let anything happen to her.”

She hesitated before cracking one eye to look up at the tired stallion. “You have my word.”

He didn’t trust her. He didn’t appear to even particularly like her. But he didn’t press her for more. He simply nodded once and walked away, his eyes cast forward like he was terrified to look back.

“She can’t go with you.”

Aurora leaned back in her chair and actually managed to cross her prosthetic hind leg over the other. If Elder Coronado was the unstoppable force, she was damn happy to become the immovable object.

“Why?”

Seated on the floor beside her, Fiona kept her expression carefully neutral. They’d decided together that this was already how it was going to be, and unbeknownst to Coronado, this meeting was more about breaking him down so he’d accept it rather than making compromises.

Aurora had to work to keep herself from checking over her shoulder. She was used to having Roach and Julip nearby to help with these discussions. They knew the wasteland better than her and could make better arguments in favor of their decision than she could. Plus it was nice not to be outnumbered, and with Sledge, former director Clover, and now former colonel Weathers taking up enough seats in the cramped office to force everyone into a rough circle, Aurora and Fiona were most definitely outnumbered.

To his credit, Elder Coronado hadn’t taken the chair behind Sledge’s desk. He sat off to one side of it, close enough still for him to lean against if he wanted to try out the “casual banter” posture but managing to resist the urge. That was an Ironshod move, and whether Coronado knew that or not, it wouldn’t go well if he suddenly attempted to upgrade their working relationship to something uncannily intimate.

“Because it’s an unnecessary risk,” Coronado droned, his attention alternating between Aurora, Fiona, and the thin stack of printouts floating on a bed of magic above his lap. “Fiona, I mean no disrespect, but you out of all of us have to understand how much you’ll stand out to the locals.”

The room turned its eyes to the gryphon who, recognizing it was her turn to speak, offered a mild shrug in response. “I’m a big girl, Elder. I know how to take care of myself.”

“That’s just not good enough,” Coronado said, rolling his documents into a tube and using it to gesture once at Fiona, and then at Aurora. “You will draw attention toward her, and we simply cannot afford that.”

To the right of Sledge’s desk, Weathers had also crossed her legs and was studiously inspecting the edge of one of her faded lavender stripes. In the same wing that probed the lines along her thigh, she held Ginger’s Pip-Buck. “As much as it pains me to say it,” Weathers began, “the Elder is right. Aurora on her own is problematic enough, what with her having become a minor celebrity after Minister Primrose made the issue of retaking Stable 10 all about preserving her pureblood honor.”

Aurora felt herself cringe at the last two words. They made it sound like Primrose had some vested interest in her chastity.

“We might not have had flyposters glued in storefront windows with her photo on them,” Weathers continued, “but there were enough chapel sermons about her for most citizens to have an accurate mental image of what she looks like. If she’s not outright recognized, she’s going to have people telling her she looks like Aurora. It’s only going to get worse if she has a gryphon trotting along beside her like a fucking lighthouse.”

“In which case,” Coronado jumped back in, “one of those someones will eventually be a member of the Enclave’s military wing. You will be one radio call away from Primrose finding out you’re alive and inside her capital city. I don’t need to explain what happens after that.”

Aurora shrugged. “So I’ll dye my mane and tail and cut them both short. Job done.”

Sledge gave her an appraising look that the others around him didn’t see. He’d never been interested in her before and he certainly wasn’t now, but it was one of the ways he sometimes cut the tension with the crew in Mechanical and it did manage to put a knowing smirk on her face all the same.

Weathers managed a tiny smile of her own, but when she spoke she was all business. “Right now the goal is to reduce the attention on you, not increase it.”

She frowned at that, not understanding.

Fiona leaned over, doing her best subtle-but-not-subtle impression. “She says you look like a slob.”

Weathers eyed Fiona with an expression that bore the most polite disdain Aurora ever remembered seeing. “I’m saying, in this case, less may be more.” She gave Aurora an apologetic wince. “Sledge assures me the Stable has the right supplies to temporarily dye the cutie mark out of your coat and reapply something that better suits the alias you’ll be traveling under.”

She watched Coronado with fresh suspicion as he unrolled the documents he’d used as a pointing stick and held them out to her. She accepted them and began skimming the pages. When she found the name, she stopped and stared up at the kirin.

“Greasy. Hooves.”

He nodded.

She shook her head. “Why… no, I’m not… what? Why are my hooves greasy?”

Fiona was trying and failing to stifle a rapidfire giggling fit.

“Your stated occupation,” Coronado said, tipping his nose toward the papers, “is listed under your name.”

Dumbfounded, she read further. “Traveling mechanic. For what? Literally nobody I’ve seen out here fixes anything. What would I be repairing and why are my hooves greasy.” She lifted her right wing and flapped it like a wet rag. “I have wings.”

Weathers leaned forward. “Your coloration closely matches those of a legacy family who aren’t well known for their business acumen beyond maintaining a small delivery service between the capital and several neighboring towns and small cities inside our - their - territory.”

She frowned at the papers. “And what’s a legacy family?”

“They’re the living descendants of a prewar Equestrian citizen. More importantly, they have the papers to prove it.” Weathers began to roll her eyes, but caught herself. “The Hooves are notoriously vocal about it, which should encourage some of the citizenry in the capital to ignore you out of habit.”

Aurora skimmed the rest of the page. The paper was fresh, probably printed sometime this morning. Still, it looked official, assuming she even knew what official was in this context. Neat, orderly details about her name and residence were boxed out away from more basic information about her supposed business, which simply read Freelance Mechanic. To her chagrin, a grainy photo of a flank that wasn’t hers but which she recognized was glued inside the box designated Mark (If Applicable). The welding torch could only be Flux’s cutie mark.

She let the page droop so Sledge could see where her feather was pointing, and she lifted a brow in question.

“Yeah,” he rumbled, “she already made sure everyone on third shift knows you’ll be wearing her mark.”

“Fantastic,” she muttered, only skimming the rest of the papers before looking to Coronado. “How much scrutiny will these hold up under?”

Weathers answered before he had a chance. “Very little. Clover and I put those together by memory, so the formatting is most definitely wrong and we have no way of verifying if the residence listed actually exists. We’re banking on the possibility you’ll only need them to help yourself keep your identity straight, but if somebody asks to see them I would advise not letting them look too closely.”

“And if they do look at them too closely?”

“Either invoke your new family name and hope they decide you’re not worth dealing with, or start running.”

She snorted, folded the thin stack of sheets, and bent around to shove them into her saddlebags. “Wow, I feel so much better now. What more could I ask for than an identity held together with twine and craft glue?”

Coronado lifted a brow. “Forgive us for not wanting you to be shot on sight.”

“Don’t be shitty, Pinfeathers,” Sledge added.

She bit back the rest of what she wanted to say and flipped her saddlebag shut. “From where I’m sitting, it’s hard not to be. If I’m supposed to be a traveling mechanic, where are my tools? What am I traveling with? Do I have a wagon or am I humping it with whatever I can carry?”

Weathers cleared her throat, pulling the room’s attention back to her. “You will be meeting with a contact in the town of Steepleton.”

Aurora frowned. Where had she heard that name before?

“He’ll provide you with a small cart, a convincing assortment of tools, and a stipend to get you–”

She held up a feather. “What’s a stipend?”

“Money,” Coronado said flatly. “Caps.”

“Oh,” she grunted. “Should’ve just said that.”

Off to the side, former director Clover pinched the bridge of his muzzle between two feathers and muttered to himself, “Goddesses defend us.”

Aurora thought she saw Coronado nod in sympathy and wondered whether it would be considered out of order for her to lean forward and whip-crack a feather against his bulbous nutsack. Probably not an impulse she should act on, she decided, and let them express their collective frustration however they needed.

“I believe it’s worth mentioning,” Coronado said, mercifully unable to read Aurora’s thoughts, “that the caps you’ll be provided are coming out of the pocket of someone I trust, and who is already taking a risk by agreeing to be seen helping you. He’s been an asset to the Steel Rangers for more than twenty years and he isn’t rich.”

She could feel the guilt trip coming and wasn’t sure why it was being laid out for her at all, so she just nodded and said, “Okay.”

Which gave Coronado the perfect opening to once again level a feather at Fiona. “By that, I mean to say I’ve only asked him for enough to feed one pegasus. Not a pegasus and a full-grown gryphon.”

Fiona actually balked. “Full-grown? You’re handsome and an asshole. Fun.”

If Coronado was offended, he didn’t show it. When he spoke, he enunciated each word carefully so as not to be misconstrued. “I’m being practical, Fiona. You are the largest creature in this room by a wide margin. Gryphon diets consist heavily of dense protein, which is abundant enough if you’re willing to hunt it, but which is tightly controlled within the Enclave. Unless you’re willing to eat greens and grains for the next four days, which I strongly assume would not be good for anyone, you are going to need to find a way to feed yourself.”

Aurora looked up at Fiona. “Sounds like he’s saying you can come.”

“Can,” Coronado said, “and should are two very different words.”

It was a decent enough way to say I’ve given up trying to tell you no because it’s a waste of everyone’s time. As much as Aurora disliked being lectured, she thought she could probably get along with Coronado under different circumstances. And, just a little, she felt guilty for making it so difficult for him to help her.

She coughed into her feathers much in the same way and with the same purpose that others had been politely clearing their throats. It even almost felt natural. “Okay, we’ll figure out the food issue when we get there. Where in Steepleton is this stallion we’re supposed to meet?”

At that, Weathers slid out of her chair and stepped forward with Ginger’s Pip-Buck held out in a white and lavender wing. “I’ve marked his location on your map.”

She took the Pip-Buck, briefly caressing its sleek design with her own filthy gray feathers. “It’s safe to turn on?”

“Your head of I.T. seems to think so.”

Sledge grunted. “If Opal says it’s safe, it’s safe.”

Weathers nodded, making it clear she hadn’t needed the endorsement but would take it anyway. “She scrubbed the biometric software, so direct contact with the sensor suite in the cuff won’t set off alarm bells in the network. Even if it would, Opal assures us it won’t seek a connection with the network until you tell it to.”

Aurora furrowed her brow as she slid the device back on and clamped it over the matted coat she’d kept it on. “Okay. What about tracking Primrose?”

Weathers did a decent job hiding the wince in her eyes as she took Aurora’s foreleg in her wings and began manipulating the Pip-Buck’s buttons. Aurora let her turn it on, and soon a full color display of the Robronco logo and spritely animated mascot danced at the center of the screen. But instead of erroring out like it had the first time Aurora tried to use it, the boot process finished and a familiar interface appeared.

“I’ve been assured the software packet…” Weathers paused, looked back to Sledge for confirmation, and continued after he gave her a close enough shrug, “Opal is confident this file will give you superuser access within the Bunker’s network.”

She pecked at one of the white buttons until the screen cycled to the tab marked DATA.

A short list of files populated the window in alphabetical order. At the top waited a read-only file titled Access.bat.

“Be very careful with this,” Weathers said, navigating away from the tab. “Running that file will break things that are not meant to be broken, which means a lot of people in charge of those things are going to be very motivated to have you found. There are enough network repeaters in the capital to make that job very easy for them, so it’s important you only run that software when you’ve run out of options.”

Aurora stared at the Pip-Buck, her jaw locked into a deep frown. “Seemed safer to wear before I pulled out the thermite charge.”

“That actually brings us to the next point,” Clover interjected. “Greasy Hooves is not the sort of citizen who would have access to a Pip-Buck, let alone two of them. It’s my advice you leave your personal device with Sledge and keep your modified Pip-Buck hidden out of sight.”

She chewed her lip for a long moment before uttering a quiet, “Huh.”

The rest of them waited.

She wasn’t sure what bothered her more: that Clover’s suggestion made perfect reasonable sense, or just that it was a suggestion at all. He was giving her space to say no which seemed kind of stupid. And then it occurred to her that he very likely knew it was a stupid suggestion and he was trying to gauge whether she had the good sense to know that. Well, just because she was stubborn didn’t mean she was dense.

She worked the old latch on her Pip-Buck and flinched when it sprang open on a too-tight spring. The little computer gave a quiet tritone chirp when it noticed the disconnect and promptly displayed the cheery Robronco shutdown screen before going dark. Weathers made room for her as she dropped from her chair, crossed the center of their rough circle, and held out her Pip-Buck to Sledge.

He accepted it with something like regret in his eyes and quietly stowed it away inside his desk.

“Well,” she sighed, “that’s one way to lose five pounds. Is that everything?”

She looked around the room, giving each of them an opportunity to share anything they could be holding onto. Each of them looked to one another in turn and, sensing their part of this meeting was over, Coronado made a gesture with his horn that said you’re free to leave.

But Aurora wasn’t ready to leave just yet. As she undid the much gentler latch of Ginger’s modified Pip-Buck, she bent to set it at the bottom of her saddlebag and then turned to retake her seat. Coronado’s gnarled horn tilted along with the curious expression that moved his head a few scant degrees, though it was equally evident he was bracing for whatever new wrinkle Aurora felt like inflicting on their already paper-thin plan to stop Primrose.

“Well,” she began, “I spoke with Tandy last night…”

Aurora stared up at the morning sky and sighed. Her whole body felt drained and they hadn’t even begun their flight yet.

In front of her, the almost forgotten access road that once bridged the wingful of miles beyond her Stable gently transitioned into the old single-lane highway Roach had led her along on that first day outside. Charred logs littered the ground around them like burnt matchsticks. It was all that remained of the old forest Roach planted over a century before she’d been born, and it was a physical reminder of the bomb that took Ginger.

When Fiona’s palm wrapped her shoulder and squeezed reassuringly, she just sighed again and said, “This is a bad idea.”

“Oh yeah,” Fiona agreed. “Everything about this is a double-decker shit sandwich.”

She nodded. Nothing about this felt good. It was all too big. Her search for an ignition talisman seemed like a simple errand compared to the very real prospect that Primrose was completely aware all she had to do in order to win was to run out the clock inside her bunker. Aurora didn’t have an ace up her sleeve. She barely had a deuce.

In four days, Primrose intended to tell the same orbital weapon that eviscerated a continent to pour death down onto the people who, one by one, built her up into the mare she was today. Its only defense, the multi-thousand ton cog that once shielded it from an apocalypse, lay destroyed. If SOLUS fired on Stable 10, there would be nothing left of it to come home to.

“Should we be doing this?” she asked, the words weak in her throat.

She looked up at Fiona to gauge her expression, and she saw the pliable corner of the gryphon’s beak curve into a soft grimace.

“Do you want to be standing here in four days torturing yourself over whether you should have gone instead?”

She frowned. “Fuck no.”

“There’s your answer,” Fiona said, and gave her shoulder another squeeze before letting her go. “We both know if things start looking bad Sledge and Coronado will evacuate the Stable.”

Neither of them asked where they thought the refugees would go, or how likely it was that Blinder’s Bluff would be SOLUS’s next target after Stable 10 became a smoking crater. It didn’t bear thinking about when the answer was nowhere would be safe once Primrose had her weapon.

Several miles down the highway’s eastern leg, a train of wagons shimmered in the warmth radiating off the ancient concrete. Another round of vital supplies from the Bluff with more spread out between them. Clover had said something along the lines that this might be the most well-coordinated relief effort since the bombs fell, and Aurora had been grateful no one had pointed out the irony in that statement.

It felt like years had passed since she and Roach walked along that concrete ribbon and encountered Cider for the first time. The thought of it all made her bones ache.

“That tattoo looks good on you,” Fiona remarked.

She lifted her wing and eyed the unfamiliar cutie mark with equal helpings of disdain and mistrust. To her eyes the subtle lightening of her gray coat where the stylists had bleached her hindquarters near white and then recolored the blank patches gray again looked like the least convincing dye job on the planet. Flux’s cutie mark, a copper welding torch with a jet of blue flame pointed out of its nozzle, graced her hips where the green and blue metallic wing had always been.

If she hadn’t felt woefully unprepared to infiltrate the Enclave’s capital city before, the unfamiliar cutie mark and the itchy, bleach-dried skin beneath made failure feel guaranteed.

“Who knows,” she muttered, dropping her feathers back to her side, “maybe I’ll even live long enough to see mine grow back.”

“Might be faster to just shave your ass,” Fiona chuckled, but it was a mirthless noise. She was just as uneasy over what they were setting out to do as Aurora felt. “How’d it go with your dad?”

Aurora turned her gaze to the cracked pavement. She’d gone down to his compartment to say goodbye and though neither of them said it, they both knew the likelihood they would never see each other again. She had held herself together right up until her dad didn’t, and they’d sobbed into each other like they had when he’d sat down on her childhood bed to break the news about her mom.

“It went okay,” she lied. “Roach didn’t give you any trouble, did he?”

Fiona held out a hand and see-sawed it. During their flurry of goodbyes, Roach had pulled Fiona aside for a quiet conversation away from everyone else. Aurora hadn’t been able to hear the words but she’d recognized the way Roach held himself when he was being protective.

“He…” Fiona paused, reconsidered something, then tried again. “He made me promise I would keep you safe.”

She looked at Fiona and could tell she wasn’t going to go into more detail unless she was forced. She decided to leave it be. “I guess that means you’re obligated to dramatically leap in front of oncoming bullets for me, huh?”

There was relief in Fiona’s grin. “I’ll be sure to get right on that, ma’am. You have our radio?”

“Right here.” She patted the left side of her new saddlebags, a worn down traveler’s affair that didn’t bear her Stable’s number across the leather. “Our Pip-Buck’s in there too. I figure if someone starts getting nosey about what I’m carrying, we can buy some time by letting them search the other side first.”

“Solid strategy,” Fiona said approvingly, then hitched a thumb over her shoulder. “Chef Whinnyknicker back there is raising a stink.”

Aurora blinked, momentarily thrown by the name and the non sequitur.

“Whinnyknicker,” Fiona repeated, her grin widening. “Because those are the sounds you make? Good god, if we survive this I’m flying back to Griffinstone and buying you a joke book.”

She continued to frown, and followed with a furtive glance back toward the faint smear of tents at the base of the carbon-blackened mountain. At this distance, Aurora couldn’t hear a thing from the Ranger camp. “Did we forget something?”

Fiona made a noncommittal sound and bent down so Aurora could see inside the open flap of the satchel around her neck. Nearly a dozen brown paper packages lay crowded together within the canvas and a strong scent of grilled, salted meat wafted out of it.

“Coronado said I had to figure out how to feed myself if I was coming with,” she said, her grin belying any attempt to look innocent. “Sooo… I did.”

Aurora surprised herself by laughing, and she glanced back again at the distant camp where she imagined some poor Ranger cook just now discovering Fiona’s blatant theft. She actually looked forward to the idea of the two of them getting their hides chewed by Coronado, because it would mean there will have been something to come back to at all.

She hadn’t realized she’d lost herself in thought until Fiona thumped a curled knuckle against her. “You ready to fly out there and do something incredibly stupid?”

No, she thought. She wanted to crawl down to the bottom of her Stable and let the Steel Rangers do this part. She wanted to open her work queue and complain about how every single ticket was flagged critical priority and pretend that, somewhere up there in the void, a doomsday weapon was falling toward Primrose’s open wings.

She waited for the panic to come, but it didn’t. She breathed out a long, steady breath and felt the hard edges of Desperate Times slung under her feathers.

“Yeah,” she said. “I think I am.”

In Mariposa, a ribcage walked.

Had any of the medical wing’s staff still been alive to observe its progress, he or she may have described the sequential ticking of bone over tacky, black concrete as centipedal. It crawled, aided by the haphazard net of mutated ligatures and muscles, without much concern for itself. It inched forward, one set of ribs lifting, extending, and dropping back down with twin ticks, much in the same way it had done for the past ninety-six years. Its slow progress pushed a millimeter or two of the organic sludge that caked its six-sided universe, unaware and uncaring of the fact that the protophage would eventually pull the displaced material back together in time for its next orbit to interrupt whatever experiment it was conducting.

Tick. Slide. Tick. Slide. Tick. Slide.

There had been a time when it had not been a something, but rather a somebody. That its universe had once been a place, and that place had once been called a cell. There had been others, and those others had been called doctors, and those doctors had given something to the somebody who lived in the cell that spread through them like a bubble of gas expanding through sand. The something had pressed against that somebody’s mind and scattered it like dust, and the somebody had become something, and the something had become it.

Ribs twisted in sockets of bone and tissue that had once recessed so deeply into the arch of its spine that the linkage of discs had twice so far broken apart. When that had happened the thing that helped it become an it experimented with the slurry of tissue and pulverized bone it had tracked behind it until something better could be built to repair it. At first a breakdown had taken months to fix, forcing it to wait until iterations of failed growths could be reabsorbed and repurposed into something better. These days, it took only hours.

Where there had once been a mind remained only a diffuse miasma of neurons which, by dint of their evolutionary nature, retained a very loose form of consciousness. It did not think, but it felt motivation. It was aware that the thing that had disassembled the somebody it had been could carry a carrot and a stick. The thing only had one real desire: to play.

Play with the building blocks it had been broken down to. Piece them together. See what it did. Add or subtract an evolution, replace or expand, experiment and explore.

When the ribcage taught itself to walk, it received the carrot. Though the tissue and membrane that had been its eyes had been broken down for other tasks, it could explore, so that’s what it did. It learned the boundaries of its hard, cubic universe over decades until the diaspora of neurons could anticipate its walls. It knew, in a manner of knowing, that it would reach the rectangle of cold, inorganic metal the protophage had tried and failed to break down on many thousands of occasions and would try again, as always, on the next pass.

It was also vaguely aware of living material behind one of the walls. Over the centuries the noises it made had grown quiet, however, until it no longer interested it. If it could experience happiness, it would have been happy to walk. Walking was progress. Locomotion. Walking was how it would find hidden corners of its small universe, if any remained.

It might have been content to walk indefinitely had it not been for the new somebodies.

Where the universe had once been a vast, silent, and bland finity, suddenly it could sense the presence of many somebodies behind the walls. Its consciousness bloomed with new excitement at the sensation of movement translated into subtle ground vibration. And there had been something else. Sound.

It remembered sound. First the jagged sensation of something artificial and violent, then closer the buzz of something else. Communication. Voices.

It remembered voices.

The thing that turned the something into an it worked quickly, aided by two centuries of steady experimentation, to locate and bridge the disparate neurons scattered throughout its universe until the sounds of each voice could be decoded into meaning and intention.

It listened as it walked.

“Shouldn’t we be in there with her?”

“Not until she asks. I don’t want us crowding her right now.”

“Hi Eshe. Fancy meeting you here.”

Voices from two directions. One to its left. One from behind. They played and blended over one another at times, but each source came through the cool concrete floor like an ear pressed to a drinking glass against a thin wall.

“Squeeze twice if you still want me to do this.”

A memory frothed together. A sound. Screams and screeching tires. An explosion at a historic bakery. A remote tucked under its - his? - feathers.

“Not just something. I want… I think I could build a place for people to live.”

It had wanted to build once, before it - he - had been convinced to destroy.

“No shoring up old ruins with whatever was laying around or living in tin shacks made from rusty sheet metal. It was all new, or as new as it could be. I’m pretty sure they cut the lumber themselves.”

Ribs shuffled along as they had for ninety-six stagnant years of too much carrot and no stick. It wanted to build too. It wanted to build beautiful things from ruins. It was made of ruins. But it didn’t have any more lumber to cut. It only had the body that had once been somebody, and the carrot of beneficial evolution could only grow so large.

It listened, feeling something like direction forming within its mind, but nothing else the voices said helped define where it was meant to go. There were ruins. Lumber. Somewhere that wasn’t here in its little universe.

If it had been able to frown, it might have. Or it might not. So it listened until the voices rose, then fell, then grew faint, and went silent. For hours it waited for them to return and for hours nothing came back.

A set of ribs lifted, extended, and fell into the organic muck. Then another.

Tick. Slide. Tick. Slide.

Tock.

A rib touched the wall of its universe, and it stopped.

There were new ruins just beyond. New lumber.

The same rib rose, scratching its blunted end up the barrier, and considered the microscopic layer of calcium and protein the dragging movement had sheared away. Already, new material was being transported along its mass to replace what was lost, pulled from muck beneath it. Where the tip of its probing rib had scraped the wall, a barely perceptible layer of that wall had embedded itself into the tip of the rib in the form of concrete dust.

It consulted its fog of neurons for an explanation, and one came to it a half an hour later.

Erosion.

It had worn away a microns-thin layer of the edge of its universe, leaving less of it behind than had been there before. It lifted the rib once more and repeated the motion, paused several more minutes to consider the results, and did it again.

And again.

Reward chemicals trickled across the caked mass. More than ever before. It had found a new carrot.

It did not know how deep the wall went or how long it would take to break free of its confines, and it did not care. Time was irrelevant. It would scratch, and scrape, and dig until it found the ruins and lumber the voices had promised were there.

And when it did, it would play.

Next Chapter: Chapter 49: New Canterlot Estimated time remaining: 7 Hours, 10 Minutes