Chops waved his notepad in Weathers’ face, close enough that if he’d wanted to, he’d be able to swat her nose with it. She stared at what he’d written, then angled her neck to look past the singular sentence and down at him. The lines creasing the former colonel turned defector’s eyes marked the weariness she was undoubtedly suffering through.

“Corporal, you know–”

He frowned at her, and she sighed.

“Chops,” she amended. He was no one’s corporal anymore. “I just spent the better half of last night convincing this Stable’s overseer not to secure that mare under guard in a cell. And, keep in mind, not as a punishment for her but as a protective measure for everyone in this room.” She gestured past him, but he didn’t turn to regard the nearly thirty of his fellow former Enclave colleagues. “Meridian’s husband and daughter are dustwings. She won’t be inclined to turn a new leaf just because you have.”

He crossed out the sentence he’d written and wrote a new one below it.

“‘Dustwing’ doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

He paused, then scribbled down three more words.

“It never did.”

Weathers scanned the lines, sighed, and looked off into the middle distance rather than meet his gaze.

They’d all slowly begun coming to terms with the extent of the false bill of goods Primrose sold them. For some, like Chops, the understanding had hit them faster than they’d been ready for. A hard realization that they had been indoctrinated into believing they were heroes of a bygone age rather than pieces of a slow, marching genocide. They were the ones who had been able to break out from the insulating shell of lies and, unprepared for that abrupt shift in perspective, had gone into something like collective shock. There were moments when the murmuring conversations in the room rose in volume just to drown out the occasional, muffled sobs.

Others peeled away that shell layer by paper thin layer, pausing to examine each lie to be sure it held up to their personal scrutiny. Like Dancer. A dozen or so simply weren’t ready to accept that they’d dedicated themselves to participating in something monstrous. So they had gravitated to one corner of the room, each of them engaging in the same moral debate from different angles, feeling out whether the truth they’d been shown weighed on them less heavily than the lies they’d grown so comfortable believing. They philosophized over whether they should consider themselves criminals or victims, and the jury was still out on where they would land.

Those who didn’t fit either group seemed to ebb and flow between them as if waiting for someone else to choose the course of their futures. It was disheartening watching them stare down at their uniforms, worrying over the Remember Cloudsdale pins they’d each worked so hard to earn, and repeatedly cave to the fear of what might happen to them if they committed to unfastening those buttons.

Weathers had made her decision. Her allegiance to the Enclave ended the moment she’d seen the balefire pulsing from the bomb as Aurora and Ginger flew above their heads.

Chops watched her press her lips into a line and stared longingly at one of the vacant beds. Then she glanced at the makeshift airlock behind her and seemed to decide something.

“Let me ask you this,” she said, and the resignation in her tone hinted that she’d already given up hope of catching a few hours of restless sleep. “What are you going to say to her if I agree?”

He began to sign the words, stopped himself mid gesture, and pressed pencil to paper.

“I want to apologize,” he wrote.

Weathers sighed. “That’s honorable, Chops, but I don’t think that’s going to fly the way you think it will.”

He let out a frustrated exhalation and, like throwing another grain of sand onto a vast beach, wished he could just speak the words in his head. There was a power in having a voice and, thanks to his apraxia, the only voice he had was an idiot sounding jumble of utter nonsense. Letters on paper never conveyed all the things he was thinking the ways emphasis and subtleties of speech magically did, and he’d been born without all of it.

He resisted the urge to crumple the notepad in his wing and give up. Things were easier when Dancer had still been willing to talk for him.

The paper puckered beneath the nib a little as he scrawled out the words.

“I know she isn’t just angry at me. She’s angry at all of us. Anyone in black. I am not trying to fix that. I don’t think it can be fixed.”

Weathers’ shadow darkened the paper as she read along. He hated it when people started reading before he was finished, but he fended off the urge to wave her away and just bore through the discomfort.

“I traumatize her filly,” he wrote, working his jaw side to side to distract himself from the knot in his chest. “Meridian wouldn’t have reacted the way she had if I hadn’t been trying to convince her kid that I’m not a bad person. I am a bad person,” he scratched a line under am hard enough to chip the end of his pencil, “and I’m the reason Meridian almost got shot in front of her own daughter. I need to talk to…”

A pair of lavender feathers plucked the pencil out of his, stopping his stream of consciousness before it could grow into a flood. He frowned at what he’d been writing, then looked up at Weathers expecting to find disapproval in her eyes.

Instead, she wore the same tired patience she had when he first asked to talk to Meridian. “Be honest with me. Are you doing this because you want them to stop hating us, or are you doing this because you feel bad about making that kid cry?”

He frowned at the dwindling blank space on his notepad. A beat later, he nodded. Yes, on both counts.

Weathers smirked and looked beyond him at the others watching them. “Well, I don’t think you’re getting both so maybe just try making it up to the kid if you can.”

Chops felt his ears perk up in surprise. He couldn’t help it. When he’d cut her off at the door, he hadn’t expected a yes.

“Don’t look so excited,” the former colonel warned, though she still wore some of that smile when she said it. “I still need to clear it by the overseer, and even then Meridian is liable to lay you out cold the minute she thinks she has a shot at you. Are you sure you want to get your ass kicked by a mare twice your size?”

One of the soldiers listening in whistled. Chops ignored it as he took his pencil back, sliding it over unblemished paper. It was crisp and bleached bright white, not like the recycled stuff they had back home.

It occurred to him, and not for the first time, that he probably wasn’t going back home. It was a possibility that kept knocking against his skull and which, so far, he’d unconsciously held at bay rather than seriously consider. He might never be welcome back in New Canterlot.

He shook off that dark thought and held up the notepad. Weathers read it.

“Something private, away from the kid,” he’d written. The filly, Beans, didn’t need to experience an encore of her mother’s rage. “Ask Sledge for an interpreter?”

He’d ended the statement with a question mark because, more than likely, the best chance of finding anyone who knew wingspeak would be to poll the Rangers and civilians who had come to the Stable’s aid. Chances were slim there would be anyone who fit that bill, but it was worth asking anyway.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Weathers said, and Chops could sense she was speaking to him as an equal now. Just two pegasi stuck in the same shit sandwich who used to wear the same uniform once upon a time. “Can I see that?”

He blinked, realized she’d nodded toward his notepad, and let her take it between her feathers. The sudden reversal felt both alien and conspiratory as he watched her write something on the pad, then pass it back to him.

“Lt. Dancer can’t interpret for you?”

He grunted, one of the few useful noises he could make that didn’t require fine vocal control, and took the pad back to scratch out his reply.

“Doesn’t say what I mean all the time. Gets me in trouble a lot.” Then he added, “Less motivated after I almost broke his nose.”

Weathers tilted her head in an inquiring gesture, but when he didn’t expand on the details she nodded and gave the nearby empty bed one last longing look before turning back to the airlock door.

When she paused, Chops thought it was because she’d forgotten to ask him a question or was about to address the room as a whole. Some general reminder to minimize interaction with the Stable dwellers on the other side of the splintered glass window, or a tepid reassurance that progress was being made on powering the Stable’s water treatment facility so they wouldn’t have to hold their breath every time they were escorted out to use the restroom down the corridor. Without a fix, sooner or later the toilets were going to begin backing up.

“Screw it.” She looked down at Chops and tipped her head to the inner door. “It’ll save time if I don’t have to come down and get you after Sledge says yes. Come on. Let’s go for a walk.”

“You’re falling behind, Greasy Hooves!”

Aurora was too damned tired to roll her eyes, so she settled for a noise of exertion and gave her wings a few hard pumps. The tuft of Fiona’s tail drifted within reach and, were she not pouring every ounce of energy she had left just to stay airborne, she would have seriously considered giving it a good firm yank.

Instead, she grit her teeth and angled out of the gryphon’s slipstream as she caught back up. The muscles in her wings and shoulders were on fire. For what felt like the hundredth time she risked increasing her own drag by bringing her foreleg up to her face, only to remember she wasn’t wearing her Pip-Buck anymore. It was back at Stable 10 where it wouldn’t risk blowing her cover, and the smooth model the Enclave had lent to Ginger was buried safely inside her saddlebag along with the Steel Rangers’ radio.

Clouds swirled beneath them like flowing mud, thicker and more mobile than they’d been when they set out. It unsettled her not to know exactly where in the wasteland they were right now. According to Elder Coronado, the same highway that she and Roach had followed to Junction City at the start of their journey also traced a gently curving line west to the ruins of Canterlot Mountain. It was as good as any landmark to aim for, but keeping the old concrete ribbon in sight had proven more difficult than she expected.

“We should check again to see if we’re on course,” Fiona said after Aurora managed to slide into formation off her left wingtip. “You look like hell, Feathers. Are you sure you don’t need a break?”

A rivulet of sweat rolled up Aurora’s snout and into her eye. She tried to ignore the sting but winced anyway. “No, I’ll be fine. Just give me a few seconds to catch my breath.”

Fiona nodded, keeping an eye on her as they cruised over an unbroken field of churning white clouds. They had reasoned the risk of being spotted above the cloud layer was less risky than being seen trying to skirt below them like most wasteland flyers did. Sooner or later they were going to cross paths with a pegasus whose idea of loyalty involved goddess worship and an innate superiority complex, and it would be better if they weren’t caught trying to fly under the figurative radar when that happened.

“Clouds still giving you trouble?” Fiona probed.

Aurora bent her head under her left wing and spat the foam from her mouth. The last time she’d pushed herself this hard had been… she didn’t even remember. Even a double shift in Mechanical felt like a cakewalk compared to this.

“They weren’t like this before,” she said, gasping for breath. “It’s like flying through soup. How are you not feeling that?”

Fiona shrugged, clearly as confused as Aurora felt. “Maybe it’s because I’m bigger? More mass? Are you sure it doesn’t have to do with, you know…?”

Aurora watched as Fiona twirled the tip of her wing at her, indicating the burns visible down her chest and belly. There had been a long debate back at Stable 10 whether or not to try hiding the whorling, pink scars under a layer of makeup or dye, but eventually Clover and the salon mares had come around to her way of thinking and left them untouched. In a decade or two the scars would twist and spread into the recognizable traits all ghouls eventually shared, but right now they looked like a trail of nasty burns. Having spent her whole professional life around glowing hot steel and enough sharp surfaces to make a foalsitter faint, she could think of any dozen of reasons for how a freelance mechanic could get so badly injured.

But still, Aurora didn’t think her ghouling was the reason why each dive and subsequent ascent through the clouds felt like clawing her way through pudding.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “It’s probably because we’re closer to their source. I remember Julip telling me there are whole factories that do nothing but seed these things into existence.”

Fiona didn’t look convinced, but neither did she push. “Alright. But if you want to take a breather, tell me.”

She wanted to say something snarky like Greasy Hooves never takes a break but she was too exhausted to try. Without another word, the two of them bent into a shallow dive toward the river of clouds and once more the wall of vapor slammed across her wings with unnatural resistance. She had to flap hard and when Fiona began to slide deeper into the fog ahead of her she clamped them flush to her sides and just let gravity pull her down.

When she finally punched through the other side she spotted Fiona treading air a quarter mile away, small enough to hide behind her outstretched hoof. It was agony to brake her descent and arc back up toward the gryphon, but somehow her screaming tendons managed.

The highway they were tracking was little more than a faint line scratched along the northern horizon. They’d strayed south again. She groaned. Another ten or so miles added to a flight that was already chewing into the time they had to figure out… something. Even though SOLUS wouldn’t reach low orbit for another four days, every minute felt like a squandered opportunity to put a bullet in Primrose’s head. For all either of them knew, the minister could be taking her last walk along the streets of New Canterlot right now before deciding to sequester herself away until SOLUS arrived.

She pushed the unhelpful anxiety aside when she noticed Fiona was pointing at something. She followed the outstretched talon down toward the old highway and, barely appearing as a gray smudge on the western horizon, the faint outline of a town.

“Think that’s it?” Fiona asked.

Aurora tipped her nose back at her saddlebags and slid into a shallow glide alongside the gryphon. Fiona’s digits slipped into the pouch containing Ginger’s Pip-Buck and, once she had it out, helped slide it over Aurora’s outstretched foreleg. A button press toggled it on and, one enviably short boot sequence later, Fiona was carefully navigating the full color menus.

A modern map of the wasteland filled the screen, centering on the pale blue triangle that represented their position. Two overlapping icons glowed near the northwest edge of the map, a square indicating the distant town and a narrow, diamond obscured behind it. The word Steepleton shimmered beneath them.

She groaned in relief. “What’s the name of the gods you said your folks worshiped?”

Fiona quirked a smile, then pointed a talon toward the haze of blinding light directly overhead. “Just the one. Everyone who wasn’t a geezer just called it the sun.”

“And the geezers?”

The gryphon heaved her shoulders in one of her oversized shrugs. “They called him Old Cygril.”

“Thank fucking Old Cygril,” she uttered, earning herself a grin and an eyeroll from Fiona. “That’s Steepleton.”

Fiona eyed the distant town for half a second before turning back to her. “Going to be hard to track down Coronado’s contact without flashing that gadget around. How do you want to play this?”

In answer, she banked her glide due north on a trajectory that intersected the highway before it entered the town. “Land. My wings are about to fall off and I don’t think it’s illegal for pegasi in the Enclave to travel on hoof.”

“Little suspicious, though,” Fiona murmured over the wind.

“I’ll fake an injury,” she countered. “Besides, you’re going to be drawing all the attention, remember?”

Fiona rubbed her knuckles against her chest, then held her talons out as if to inspect their quality. “I am the visiting foreigner, after all.”

She allowed herself a tired smile and, after shooting the clouds rolling overhead an unappreciative look, directed her descent toward the old highway.

Steepleton turned out not to be much larger than Junction City had been before the bomb. By all appearances it had grown atop a shallow incline where the two-lane road had crested a natural hill rather than skirting around it. It had taken on a vague elliptical shape due to all the new construction simultaneously vying for position along the road and as near to the strange looking building at roughly the top of the hill. A thin, four-sided spire rose up from it like a weird radio tower. A quick question to Fiona let her know it was a church, and the shingled spire was its steeple.

Aurora had to force herself not to roll her eyes. Steeple. Steepleton. Har har.

As they drew closer to the surprisingly well-maintained rooftops, Aurora found her gaze pulled down to a pegasus duo who had just begun pulsing their wings to bring themselves to a comfortable landing in town. Both pegasi paused to look right back up at her and Fiona, with one of them taking the added measure of pointing a pale pink wing toward them. And they weren’t the only citizens whose attention their descent had caught. Aurora felt her heart climb a few inches up her throat as she spotted several equine forms stopped on the road and staring up at them. Or, more likely, they were all staring up at Fiona.

She looked at her gryphon counterpart and was surprised to see Fiona was already shooting her a flat stare.

“If you ask me if I’m sure we should land, I’ll bonk you.”

Aurora pressed her mouth shut and wondered if she was really that easy to read.

“Let’s set down there,” Fiona continued, pointing at a busy stretch of road where a few colorful awnings leaning out onto the central road suggested a probable marketplace. “Remember, Greasy, you belong here. I’m the bumpkin tourist from out of town.”

She grimaced. “If I’m going to use that idiotic name, you should have one to match.”

“Sounds like sour grapes to me,” Fiona grinned as they banked low toward the market. It looked like word was traveling fast. Nearly everyone they could see had stopped to gawk at the oncoming gryphon. “The only people who know me by Fiona are several hundred miles that-away and bat for the wrong team.”

She didn’t have to explain the strange analogy for Aurora to know what she meant. Fiona was probably right and nobody in Steepleton would have heard of her, but they were already tempting fate by crossing the imaginary line into agreed upon Enclave territory and Aurora wasn’t keen on poking the proverbial bear any harder than absolutely necessary. She shelved the discussion, however. With as much interest their arrival was generating, it wouldn’t do them any good to be heard arguing over what their names as they landed.

Slate roofs and decorative wrought iron balconies slid above their heads as they touched down at the near end of the marketplace. Aurora held back a groan of relief at finally being able to let her wings relax, fully aware of the hundred or more faces turned toward her and to a larger part Fiona. For whatever reason she’d been expecting their arrival to be regarded with open suspicion, whispers, and hostile sneers. Things citizens of an Enclave town would do when she pictured them in her mind.

But the first voice to rise above the wind thrown over the awnings by their landing was of a wide-eyed, adolescent colt whose single contribution was a long, unabashed, “Woah!”

Little blue ears pointed straight up and forward toward Fiona who had landed all of a yard in front of him, and he stared with an open intensity that only foals his age could get away with. If the colt had parents with him, they were probably either too startled or stunned to pull him back onto the sidewalk.

Fiona looked down at the colt and smiled. “Hey there, kiddo.”

Just like that, the ice had been broken. A few of the curious onlookers returned to browsing the variety of wares displayed among the stalls, but most found one reason or another to loiter nearby and gawp. As expected, a small crowd composed of the most sociable citizenry formed around Fiona. Aurora clenched her jaw behind a tight smile as she found herself being jostled out of the way by those who wanted a better look.

For all the questions and colorful comments they peppered her with, Fiona handled the well-meaning barrage like a champ. She regarded each curious face with a smile, answering their questions in turn with answers that were just detailed enough to satisfy the questioner while remaining vague enough to avoid committing herself to a single narrative.

As Aurora waited for Fiona to extract herself from the crowd, she noticed that the vast majority of the ponies she could see were predominantly pegasi and unicorns. She had to make an effort just to spot an earth pony and when she did find one, he was hitched to the front of a small wagon just beyond the farthest market stall. Her false smile sank a little more when she spotted another earth pony following a unicorn mare toward a vegetable stall. The mare didn’t seem to pay her counterpart any mind as she selected a half dozen of something that looked like potatoes and dropped them into the earth pony’s bulging saddlebags.

“If I end up coming back this way, I’ll make sure to take you up on the offer,” Fiona chuckled as she pulled away from the dissipating crowd.

Aurora blinked away from the mare and her… attendant?... and looked up at Fiona.

“Free dinner at that guy’s place if we decide to stick around,” she said, hitching a thumb at a departing stallion. “Something about the stink eye you’re giving me says that’s a non-starter, though?”

She winced, not realizing she’d been pulling a face. “Sorry. Got distracted. Are we okay to go find our–”

Fiona cut her off by dropping a palm on her head and made a show of ruffling her mane. “Oh, I’m sure Uncle Hooves will be fine if we take a few minutes to catch our breath,” she said with a jovial yet pointed expression. “No sense in airing the family drama with half the neighborhood listening, right?”

She pulled back the tangled nest of her mane back behind her ear and tried not to let her internal grimace graduate to something Steepleton’s onlookers could see. She’d been a syllable away from saying our contact.

“Yeah,” she played along, following close beside Fiona as she padded along the colorful stalls. Despite the breakup of the first gaggle of curious onlookers, most of the eyes and ears they passed by were following them. “Guess there isn’t.”

Without stating it aloud, both of them knew their first goal had to be to find someplace private where they could consult their Pip-Buck. Coronado’s contact within the Enclave was here somewhere, but the map marker would narrow “here” down to a single door rather than an entire town.

As they walked, Aurora began taking in Steepleton on a more granular level and the differences between it and everywhere else she’d been in the wasteland were stark. The first thing she noticed was that the brickwork of the stout two-story buildings around them were old but well-maintained. Here and there she could see bright streaks of new mortar where a crack had zigged along the bricks and been patched in. Some of the windows overlooking the street had full panes of clear glass still in the frames while the rest seemed to use some kind of uniform, outward-opening storm shutters.

Her front hoof wobbled on something and she braced for the joint to roll into one of the road’s ever present fissures. But her hoof only tipped so far before stabilizing, and she looked down to see the crack she’d stepped on had been packed with a mixture of sand and gravel. A glance farther ahead showed her half a dozen more cracks filled with the same patch material. It was a painfully simple solution for a problem that had bothered Aurora since she first set out from her Stable, and it probably cost next to nothing to implement. Just whatever time and labor it would take for a crew of workers to source the right materials and bring it to where it’s needed.

By the looks of it, Fiona wasn’t any less impressed though her attention was focused less on the quality of Steepleton’s maintenance and more on the variety of goods on offer at the market stalls. Aurora let her own gaze shift to the cookie-cutter booths and suspected the simple design might be regulated in the same way new schematics had to be approved by Fabrication so nobody caused unintentional damage to the Stable. Each stall was essentially just a simple six-foot wide table with a frame around it to support a sloped fabric awning. Some vendors chose to sacrifice display space for personalized boards advertising special prices or unique products, but the basic design was always the same. Everything that made the stalls pop came from bits of decoration that the owners had attached second-hand, and even then none of the ornamental crates and side tables extended beyond the edge of the sidewalk.

Fiona seemed to notice the same arbitrary limit and whistled under her breath, pointing a long tan and cream feather toward the gutter. “I think those storm drains might actually be intact.”

Aurora didn’t know exactly what a storm drain was, but the heavy iron grate tucked along the curb made it clear there were some underground utilities in play here. As if to demonstrate the fact, she watched as a lanky unicorn led a bucket across the sidewalk by its castors and splashed the sudsy contents over the open grate.

By now, she was essentially just following Fiona and as far as she could tell no one around them seemed to question it. Fiona’s natural curiosity led them out of the designated bounds of the marketplace and up the shallow grade, past what appeared to be several casual eateries replete with outdoor seating. Of course, as soon as Fiona lumbered into view every patron with eyes looked up from their meals and stared at them as they passed by. One timid stallion had even slid halfway out of his chair as if he were preparing to bolt. Fiona smiled without lingering on any one of them, her attention sliding up and away as she feigned interest in the dominant structure they were nearing at the crest of the hill.

The church, or chapel, or whatever the locals called it felt much larger than it had appeared from the air. Its pitched roof easily stood twice the height of its neighbors, say nothing for the pointed pillar erupting from the apex. The steeple - dumb name but nobody asked her - was adorned at the top with a stone sculpture of the old, prewar princesses. They stood together, shoulder to shoulder, in a stance that suggested they were headed somewhere. Then it clicked in her mind that they’d been sculpted to appear to look in the direction of Canterlot Mountain, barely a smudge on the far western horizon, and Aurora had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. Subtlety be damned, the Enclave wanted to drive the point home with as few steps possible.

Fiona nudged her leg as they started past the wide courtyard in front of the church. “Make a show of asking me to visit your church.”

If she hadn’t already been maintaining a neutral expression, she would have balked at the request. Ginger never talked much about the Enclave’s home brewed religion beyond the occasional disdainful remark, and Aurora had no interest in walking into one of their places of worship to fill in the blanks.

“Prefer not,” she murmured decisively.

Fiona deliberately slowed her loping pace as they neared the flagstone path leading into the churchyard. “You and I just blew through this town’s commercial center without stopping. You’re from a legacy family, remember? I doubt the Hooves would skip an opportunity to properly educate the savage gryphon.”

This time she did pull a face. “And you think I know the first thing about,” she gestured at the church, her voice hushed, “this?”

To her dismay, Fiona responded to her gesticulation as if she’d intended to bring her attention to the pretty, pointy building looming over them. Rather than answer Aurora’s concern, she let out an impressed whistle and started up the flagstone path. She could feel the eyes on her as she debated whether or not to hit the release valve on her prosthetic to force a delay, then cursed under her breath as she hurried to catch up.

Despite her long, long list of misgivings about detouring toward a building within which all the lies the Enclave told itself to keep Primrose lording over it like a miniature deity were told… she had to admit, the church was every bit as beautifully built as Ginger once described the one her family had attended in New Canterlot. A lot of care and craft had been put into its construction. The brickwork was a uniform sheet of dark gray accented by bold, white concrete cornices and lines that hugged two ornate forward-facing windows.

Each window looked as if they had been assembled by individual panes of colored glass and joined together by black metal. As Fiona led her to the tall oaken doors set between the peaked windows, Aurora noted that the rightmost depicted Celestia and Luna in serene repose. Eyes closed, horns crossed, and foreheads nearly touching, they appeared to be in the midst of peaceful sleep. On the opposite side of the doors, blue and pink panes depicted Primrose in an identical pose but with an unmistakably sad expression. A monster pretending to mourn her victims.

As they climbed the six white steps toward the doors, Aurora expected them to pull apart ahead of their arrival to reveal some dark and twisted ritual involving long cloaks and plenty of blood. Too many bad horror movies, maybe, or not enough. What she saw when Fiona wrapped her fingers around the tarnished brass handle and pushed was something else entirely.

Instead of some flame-lit dungeon, the doors whispered open into a sparsely decorated vestibule replete with printed schedules for the month’s services and a small collection of pamphlets advertising everything from family counseling to something titled, Community Penitence & You. Beyond the carpeted vestibule - Aurora followed Fiona’s lead by wiping her hooves on a large fibrous mat set inside the doorway - two smaller but no less expensive looking doors were propped open to reveal a cavernous space absolutely filled with the day’s diffuse sunlight.

Aurora couldn’t help it. She whistled and was shocked at how loud it sounded when it echoed back to her. It was enough of a disturbance for the half dozen or so citizens scattered around the cavernous space to glance back at them, and then go utterly wide-eyed at the sight of the gryphon squeezing through the doorway beside her. No one leapt up and screamed in outright panic, but the expression on a nearby stallion’s face definitely had that prey-species-meets-predator-species vibe to it.

As they slowly made their way between the bench-style seating, Aurora couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d entered a space with very specific rules of conduct. Between the twelve equally colorful and patchwork windows - six on each side of the aisle - with their beatific depictions of ponies in silent repose, the immaculately polished wood seating, and the simple yet imposing altar at the opposite end of the chapel, Aurora had every impression that this was not the kind of building where home brew liquor and karaoke would be welcome in any circumstance. She made a point to remind herself not to crack anything remotely approaching a joke.

Just as she began worrying Fiona might be intending to ham up her traveler’s ignorance by making a beeline for the altar, an equine figure appeared from a door just behind it with a wicker basket held aloft by a wisp of magic. He glanced their way, tilted his head for a moment, then donned a friendly smile as he carried the basket to the altar and set it down. Then, without hesitation, he stepped down the raised floor and made his way down the aisle toward them.

Aurora braced herself, but when the stallion reached them he simply stuck out a hoof toward Fiona. To her surprise, Fiona shook it, and he grinned.

“I’m glad to know I remembered the custom,” the stallion said with just a shade of embarrassment to go with the admission. “I haven’t had the good luck to meet a genuine gryphon since I was hardly a colt!”

Fiona returned his smile. “Gone are the days of easy travel. I’m Lila, and this is Ms. Hooves.”

“Pastor Mica,” he said, taking back his hoof. “Hooves. I’ve heard that name once or twice. Or thrice.”

It took Aurora half a moment to realize he was trying for gentle humor with regards to the Hooves family having a reputation for advertising their status, and doing so loudly. She went with a weak smile and felt a wash of relief when his attention slid back to Fiona. In all her years, she didn’t remember being dismissed so politely before.

When Pastor Mica offered for them to sit down rather than stand awkwardly in the aisle, Fiona politely declined for the both of them with a simple gesture to indicate her size. If the rebuttal offended him it never showed, and he took the opportunity nonetheless to ask Fiona the obvious question of why she’d come to Equestria in the first place. She fed him a carefully sanitized version of her reasons, careful to omit any mention of having been chased out by her own community after their botched attempt to burn the family home down around her while she slept. The version Pastor Mica heard had boiled down to a few vaguisms about life in Griffinstone being increasingly difficult due to the steady march of radioactive toxins leaching in from what remained of Vhanna.

“I could either wait to starve or try for something better,” she said, speaking as much for the pastor’s benefit as the smattering of congregants no doubt listening around them. “That was… two, three months back? The food situation’s a lot better here, I’ll say that much.”

She patted her belly for emphasis, though Aurora knew from having spent a night using that block of muscle for a pillow that there was barely any fat there to speak of. Two days later and her neck still ached.

Pastor Mica nodded, but he managed to keep his gaze from wandering. “You’ve been living in the wastes until recently?”

Fiona made a show of trying to keep her tone respectful. “The, uh, authorities in Fillydelphia made a pretty strong case that conditions in Equestria only got worse the further inland I went. They made it sound like things here were the same way they were back home, with most of the population crowded along the coast. I sort of took them at their word until very recently.”

He frowned at that. Not with suspicion, but with an almost protective degree of disappointment. “It’s a shame to hear they were so circumspect with you. The outer wastes have suffered from a lack of responsible leadership for generations, now. I’m sorry your first interaction came from those who saw fit to prey on your trusting nature…”

Aurora had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Fiona had as much trusting nature as Julip had child-friendly vocabulary. When Fiona smelled something fishy she made it her life’s mission to track down the trout.

Still, Fiona’s decision to play herself off as a victim of the big bad Steel Rangers’ duplicity was paying dividends almost immediately. What better way to ward off suspicion by serving up an origin story where every bias the Enclave espoused was confirmed, and where anyone loyal to Primrose had their beliefs vindicated by default? Lila the Gryphon was the living embodiment of the same poor, ignorant wastelanders story they’d been telling themselves for generations, and Pastor Mica was eating it up by the shovelful.

He hadn’t stopped talking while Aurora had paused to muse to herself, and by the sound of it she had only missed some of the self-congratulatory garbage.

“...to say I think you’ll be pleased you made the decision to come,” he said with a face creased with a broad smile, then turned to regard Aurora expectantly. “Is there any chance I could look forward to seeing you and your friend at our six o’clock service?”

She blinked, fully unprepared for the offer. “Oh, ah, no? No. We’ll probably be arriving in New Canterlot by then.”

As excuses went it wasn’t her best, but Pastor Mica didn’t appear bothered in the slightest. He smiled, nodded once more, then glanced back toward the altar where his wicker basket of cloth still sat. “Hard to compete with the Chapel,” he said, and she could hear the capital letter in the word, “but consider it a standing invitation regardless.”

And with that the pastor politely excused himself and went back to the task their appearance had interrupted. Aurora was surprised. She’d expected an interrogation of some kind, not to be waved aside almost entirely. She even felt the slightest bit jealous as Fiona paused here and there to inspect the religious iconography carved throughout the church. Perfect tourist behavior. She even picked out a few pamphlets on their way out.

Upon seeing her skimming the literature as they crossed the courtyard, any suspicions the locals had been holding onto vanished. “Lila” had completely stolen the show, and Aurora found herself on the receiving end of a few subtle nods of approval herself. As far as the lookiloos were concerned, she’d just guided Fiona on a potential journey toward becoming another convert.

Whatever made them happy.

A knuckle rapped on the outhouse door. “You know, if you’re blocked up a cup of molerat grease will clear you right out.”

Aurora spared a moment to glower at the door before turning her attention back to her Pip-Buck. As it so happened Fiona’s detour through the church had done little to alleviate the issue of all the locals gawking at them, even if their suspicions had been resolved. Wandering the side streets hadn’t revealed any hidden alleys or alcoves they could duck into without being followed, either, so when they spotted the row of outhouses through the gap between two apparent restaurants Aurora had made a beeline to them.

Of course there was still the issue of the Pip-Buck’s glowing screen, a feature she still had no idea how to disable, which Fiona solved by parking her substantial bulk square in front of the door. It wasn’t a subtle solution, but it worked. It took several seconds for the Pip-Buck to acquire a network connection, evidently routing through a nearby Stable 75. Once it made the link, Aurora had spent another painful half minute figuring out where the icon representing their contact had disappeared to. Only after zooming out until most of the intersecting roads filled the screen did she confirm they were on the opposite side of town.

And, to add insult to injury, their landing spot when they arrived had been more or less right on top of where they’d needed to go. Joy.

“We need to go back the way we came,” she said, mindful of listening ears. “Our dear old uncle lives on the other side of town.”

Naturally, the walk across town required Fiona to make another pit stop at the church for more literature. Aurora noted that a few of the same onlookers as before were practically beaming now, and she worried if they didn’t put Steepleton behind them soon the locals might ask what her secret was. Easy question for someone who had the first idea how Primrose’s made-up religion worked, and with Fiona having settled on becoming Lila the Friendly Potential Convert, she made a mental note to read up on some of the new leaflets clutched in Fiona’s tawny feathers.

As for “Uncle Hooves,” he turned out to be a she, and the uncle moniker was closer to grandma. They found her tending a clean little store out of which she sold a variety of colorful rugs, blankets, and other woven goods. Aurora had felt a slight pang of deja vu at the soft tinkle of a bell when she pushed through the door, and she was quietly thankful that the elderly mare who was in the middle of completing a transaction with a customer didn’t look anything like Ginger.

The shop keep had looked over to them at the sound of their arrival, glanced meaningfully at Fiona, and then turned back to the paper receipt she’d been filling out with an ebony quill. Judging by the night black sheen of her own coat, the quill had come from her own wing. Aurora had made a point to meander toward a display table of neatly folded blankets to hide her discomfort. Using one’s own feathers as a writing implement seemed, well… gross.

The bell jangled again as the customer left with his new rug and once the proprietor seemed certain no one else was about to stroll in, she beckoned the two of them toward the counter.

“Caps,” she said gruffly as she produced a small leather pouch from behind the counter. It landed on the smooth wood with a thud. With a sweep of one wing, she leveled a black feather toward a door leading to the back room. “Your cart and tools are behind the store. Take the back way and stick to the alleys for goddess’s sake. No more trotting around like a couple of tourists, especially you.”

The feather that had pointed at the back door now aimed squarely at Aurora. “You’ve got a bad case of bobblehead. Keep it up and people are going to wonder whether those wings of yours have a little too much dust on them. Do you understand?”

The door jangled the little bell as a pair of unicorns walked inside, with both of them doing a terrible job trying not to stare at Fiona. Probably she was their sole reason for coming in.

Their contact pushed the sack of caps toward Aurora until she finally tucked it away in her saddlebags. “Save your caps. In fact, I advise you to find somewhere else to spend them. I don’t make a habit of doing business with people who expect discounts on the basis of their family name, legacy or not. Go on.” She tipped her head toward the door, adding to the bit of theater with a dismissive wave of her quill. “Out.”

They did, and with the back door off the table with patrons once again milling toward the store, they were forced to take a circuitous route around the block where there were less eyes to goggle at them. Fiona broke away and pretended to window shop to take any attention off Aurora as she slipped into a feeder alley that linked up with the main alley that ran behind the contact’s store. Sure enough, a wagon about the same size and heft as Mouse’s rig waited in the shadows. Inside of it were her, well, “tools.”

She hadn’t been expecting much but the lidless crate of rust-pocked tools in the wagon’s rear corner had no semblance of purpose whatsoever. If Aurora had to guess, Coronado’s contact had simply scrounged up whatever spares she’d had available in her shop and expected Aurora to sort through the dregs on her own time. She felt a flicker of real anger at the meager showing and wondered if Coronado had impressed upon “Grandma Hooves” the fact that she wouldn’t be immune to the havoc SOLUS would wreak just because she didn’t happen to be standing directly underneath the beam.

Nobody would take her cover story seriously like this. With a grunt and a not-so-muffled curse toward the rug shop’s rear door, Aurora hoisted herself up into the mostly vacant wagon and undid the strap to her saddlebags. They slid over her tail with a whump and she set to work packing everything she had into one pouch. In the other went a couple adjustable wrenches, an ancient ball peen hammer, some locking pliers she doubted would ever unlock, and an assortment of mismatched screwdrivers. If she was lucky, no one would ever ask her about her stated profession. If she was unlucky, she’d have to swallow her pride and pretend to be one of the inept do-it-yourself numbskulls whose attempts at improving their compartments had once resulted in easily half her work tickets back when she’d been an apprentice.

It took a little doing getting her bags back on and cinched, but she was slowly getting used to making her stump and - by proxy - her new leg move in a way that made it an asset and not an obstacle. The thought of hauling around tools she’d never use still annoyed her, but she’d bear under some extra gravity for as long as she needed to get this done.

That big-ass wagon, however, could go kick rocks.

Consciousness slithered back to Chops in fits and sputters.

In a bemused corner of his aching brain, he wasn’t surprised the big mare had suckerkicked him. The deputies Sledge had agreed to dispatch to keep the meeting civil had made the mistake of directing Meridian into the conference room first. Rather than continue straight through the open door, she’d turned and used the wall to shield herself from view just long enough for Chops to step into range. The deputies had been slow to respond and Chops had walked into the conference room just in time to catch a glimpse of Meridian’s massive hind hoof rocket into his shoulder.

There had been a brief sensation of sideways flight before his head connected with the far wall. He must have missed the chaos that had ensued because by the time he pieced together where he was, he spotted Meridian once again in the submissive position on the floor with several revolvers pointed at her. She glared death at him but made no sign of disobeying their repeated commands to stay still. Her expression stated clearly she had accomplished what she’d intended to do when she’d agreed to this meeting, but it masked a deeper worry that Chops could only assume had everything to do with whether the consequences of her actions might affect her daughter.

As he pushed himself up to sit on his butt, someone wrapped feathers around his head and pointed a light at his eyes. He grunted, the sound wetter than he cared for, but didn’t pull away. Instead he used the one wing visible to the Stable dwellers to pantomime writing. Eventually someone found his notepad and pen and placed them in his wing, and he glanced down at the pad to scratch out a quick message. Then he held it out to whoever had returned it to him - it was hard to see anything with that damn flashlight in his eyes - and waited as they read aloud.

“I deserved that,” came Weathers’ voice. “Still want to talk.”

A rumble of expected push-back came from the general direction of the gathered deputies, but a few minutes of negotiation between them and Weathers resulted in a tenuous agreement that Meridian’s hind legs be placed in hobbles before they proceed with anything. A deputy was sent to retrieve the restraints and for several more painfully awkward minutes the only conversation in the room came in the form of the deputies’ low murmurs to one another and the occasional questions being asked by what Chops had to assume was one of the Stable’s medical staff.

The shackles arrived and shortly after they were placed on Meridian the doctor decided he was satisfied Chops wasn’t going to drop dead from a brain bleed. Even so, he made it clear to Weathers he expected to see Chops down in Medical as soon as their meeting was over. Meridian’s kick may not have drawn blood, but it would take a miracle of physics for him to have escaped internal injury. As Chops was helped to his hooves, an electric bolt of pain shot down his front left leg as if to confirm how lacking in invincibility he was. Probably a hairline fracture.

He grimaced and accepted Weathers’ help getting to the table. The deputies, keenly aware of the threat Meridian posed to Chops, seated the big mare across the table and very pointedly several chairs further down. If she got it in her head to lunge for him, she’d have to do so at a diagonal.

Seating herself beside him, Weathers slid Chops’ pad and pen in front of him. He blinked in surprise when he saw her tidy, looping writing below his last message.

“You write, I speak. Stay honest.”

They had run into some trouble trying to find someone in the ranks of the Steel Rangers to act as an independent interpreter. To no one’s surprise the Rangers were a little light on pegasus recruits and of the maybe two dozen that had shipped in with the hundreds of Rangers now occupying the land outside the Stable, none of them had known wingspeak. Still, Chops had been glad when Coronado made the effort to check. He’d expected stereotypical Steel Ranger belligerence.

He tapped a feather on the notepad and nodded his agreement, then flipped to a fresh sheet of paper as he waited for the meeting to start.

When everyone was seated, one of the deputies, a tired-looking stallion whose name patch on his jumpsuit read simply Chaser cleared his throat. “Alright then. Against my better judgment, we’re going to give this a second chance.” He sighed as he took a seat at the head of the table, his body language making it perfectly clear he wasn’t excited to have been elected by Sledge to mediate. “Miss Meridian, you provided assistance to one of our own and the overseer considers your family friends to our Stable. I would appreciate it as a personal favor if you refrained from any more violence today, please.”

Meridian’s gaze slid down the table toward Deputy Chaser like a dragged boulder. The smile she offered was equally craggy. No promises.

Chaser answered by turning to the other side of the table and gesturing toward Chops. “When you’re ready.”

After a breath, Chops began writing. It was slow going. He stopped several times, frowning at the words, occasionally crossing out a sentence entirely and writing it fresh. It wouldn’t be perfect, and that bothered him more than anything else. He’d always written his thoughts out matter-of-factly and trusting context, or later Dancer, to fill in the gaps. This was different.

Here in this place that had been forced into providing him and his fellows with shelter and sustenance, he was being asked to compress the complexities of having a lifetime of closely held beliefs yanked out from under him down to a few sentences. He’d thought about asking for time to prepare something but he’d chosen instead to go with his gut. He wasn’t a poet. He knew what he was writing for Meridian would never encompass everything he’d been struggling with since discovering the truth of the Enclave’s origins. How he and those he’d respected had all acted on the basis of lies fed to them by Primrose.

Deep down he knew there would come a time when he would have to sit down with himself and come to real terms with the last thirty years of his life. But not now. Right now he needed to focus on the first step in that long journey.

When he was finished, he passed the notepad over to Weathers and looked across the table toward the wasteland mare.

Weathers read aloud. “I’m sorry for what we’ve done to you. I’m sorry for what we’ve done to this world. You have every reason to hate us and I don’t think it’s realistic or fair for me to hope you will stop hating us after today. I want to talk with you because I’m selfish. I need to know there’s a road forward for people like me.”

He’d been hoping being candid might resonate with her, but he watched as Meridian heaved an impatient sigh and turned her attention toward the far wall. If she was listening anymore, he couldn’t tell.

When it became evident Weathers had reached the end of what he’d written, Meridian shifted in her chair, causing her hobbles to jangle. “If you’re waiting for me to pat you on the back and say I forgive you, we’re going to be here for a long time.”

Chops reached for the notepad and scratched something down. Weathers skimmed the words before speaking. “I’m not asking for that.”

“Then why are we here.”

Weathers slid the notepad back to him. He stared at the paper, suddenly unsure how to answer that. He did want forgiveness and, because Meridian was the mother of the foal he’d briefly befriended, an immature part of him wanted it to come from the mare seated across from him. He frowned, fully aware how one mare’s absolution wasn’t going to have the effect he wished it would, and scratched down the real answer.

Weathers knit her brow as she read what he’d written, meeting his gaze to make sure. He nodded, not sure at all, and hoped this wouldn’t blow up in his face.

“I don’t know,” Weathers read aloud. “I don’t think I’ve had enough time to absorb the reality that I’ve killed many innocent people. I need to make that right, but I don’t know how.”

He could see the inadequacy of his answer flow past Meridian like oil across water. Brevity had not been his ally and he could feel chagrin creeping across his expression as he waited for her response.

Meridian drew herself up a little and crossed one hoof over the other. She sat in place for several long seconds, eyes examining the convincing patterns of wood grain produced by the Stable’s fabricators. When she finally spoke, her tone dripped with disdain.

“Okay,” she breathed before leveling her gaze on Chops. “I’m going to try to make something very clear to you. You, and her,” she tipped her head toward Weathers, “and all the rest of you Enclave comrades down in Medical are murderers. You forced me and my husband to raise our daughter in a cave. We didn’t teach her how to fly because of you. We didn’t let her meet foals her own age because of you.”

Chops reached for his notepad but the terrible force in Meridian’s voice stayed his wing.

“Don’t.” Her voice trembled with ominous rage. “Don’t. Interrupt me. I want you to hear me.”

He found himself looking down at the table and nodding meekly as she continued.

“It would have been bad enough if you killed pegasi where you lived,” Meridian said, “but you came all the way out here to hunt us. To hunt my daughter because she had the misfortune to be born with wings. You didn’t just murder dustwings, corporal. You stole my daughter’s only chance at having anything resembling a childhood. You forced us to teach her to be afraid of her own body,” she stabbed a hoof toward the door and, symbolically, toward New Canterlot, “because Minister fucking Primrose decided my daughter was born wrong.”

Meridian’s voice broke on the last word and she took several, painful moments to bring herself back under control. She paused to rub her eyes, and when she finally spoke again, her voice had lost any hint of its prior tremble.

“And now you want my help figuring out what you need to do to fix what you’ve done.” She regarded him with equal measures pity and venom. “My answer is no, corporal. No.”

A suffocating silence filled the room when she finished. One of the deputies coughed into their wing. Chops regarded the blank space below his last statement with solemn consternation as he considered whether anything he could write would change the way she saw him. With pained reluctance, he surrendered to the realization that there’d never been a combination of words he could string together to make her see him as anything besides a monster. Especially not now.

On some level he’d known he was walking into a losing fight, but that didn’t help lessen the sting. Staring at the empty paper was akin to reading a list of all the things he’d done to right the wrongs he’d committed. There was nothing there. He’d done absolutely nothing besides seek immediate forgiveness.

He closed his eyes, took a steadying breath, and flipped to a fresh page. His brows knit together as he wrote in fits and starts, forcing himself to go slow so nothing would need to be crossed out. Asking for this conversation had been a mistake entirely his own, but at least he would come out the other side understanding why.

When he was finished he didn’t pass the notepad to Weathers. Instead, he stood and pushed the entire pad across the table toward Meridian. When she frowned at him and reached out to take the pad, he nearly snatched it away. It was his voice. It was precious, even if only to him.

He hadn’t expected her to read what he’d written aloud.

“Nothing I can do will fix the harm I have done, but I’m still committed to doing as much as I can for as long as I’m able. I vow on what little honor I still have that I will dedicate myself to making this world better for the people I’ve hurt. People like you, your husband, and your young daughter.” She paused to consider the next few lines. Her frown deepened. “Out of everyone in this Stable, you have the least reason to show me leniency. That makes you the right person to keep this notepad and use it to hold me accountable to that promise.”

Meridian glanced down the table toward Deputy Chaser and for a split second Chops worried she might be gauging how much damage she could do to Chops before they stopped her. Then her expression appeared to soften. The anger was still there, that would never fade, but when she met his gaze he could see something new there. It wasn’t what he’d hoped to see.

Disgust and pity drew deep lines along her muzzle as she pushed the notepad away. “Chops, I already have one child to raise. I don’t need another.”

And with that Meridian calmly walked toward the door and followed the deputies out of the room. The steel slab didn’t add punctuation by hissing closed behind her. The Stable was still running on reserve. It had been left open for the duration of this brief, humiliating meeting.

Chops stared at the false wood table in abject silence until Weathers leaned forward, retrieved his notepad, and slid it in front of him. After what felt like minutes he picked up the pen. The nib hovered over the paper. More seconds passed.

And he set the pen down and covered his face.

Aurora goggled at the sky around them, incredulous at the presence of so many other wings.

On a purely academic level she’d known there were other pegasi cutting through Equestria’s skies, but until now she’d never actually seen them, so she gawked left and right, over her shoulders and straight ahead while her brain tried to cram the square peg through a round hole.

Other pegasi. Dozens of them coasting just beneath the clouds in groups, pairs, or just flying solo for reasons that were entirely unique to all of them. The first of them appeared not long after she and Fiona departed Steepleton, a single stallion crossing southward with some kind of modified saddlebag attached to his back. Hardly three miles later a trio of Enclave soldiers descended out of the clouds off her left wing, flying in regimented formation seemingly on their way to New Canterlot. Aurora’s heart had jumped into her throat when the soldiers spotted them - or, more accurately, spotted Fiona - and bent along a gentle intercept course toward them.

“Don’t freak out,” Fiona had said, “they're just being curious.”

She’d been right, in the end. The black-clad pegasi had coasted in with expressions that exuded the calm, professional interest of people used to being in charge and they had shown Aurora the minimum courtesy required to avoid being rude before engaging Fiona in conversation. The lead pegasus, a wind-worn mare whose voice carried the ragged edge of a career spent shouting, hit on all the usual conversational bullet points. Are you from Griffinstone? How are you liking Equestria so far? Are you headed to New Canterlot or passing through?

Fiona jumped into the conversation with the exact sort of naive openness a newly arrived visitor from a far flung land was expected to show. She answered their questions with matching ones of her own, giving them every opportunity to preen over the Enclave’s many accomplishments while denouncing the wasteland and its Steel Rangers in the same breath. As they talked, Aurora noticed more skyward travelers resolving over the horizon.

By the time the soldiers were satisfied Fiona wasn’t a threat and offered Aurora their tacit approval for guiding a gryphon to the jewel city of the Enclave, she could make out the threading patterns of pegasi migrating to and from the area along unspoken yet nonetheless known aerial highways. And all the while the hazy nub of Canterlot Mountain ahead of them kept taking on incremental layers of clarity.

Beside her, Fiona trilled an impressed whistle. “Holy shit. That is not a postcard mountain.”

Aurora didn’t have to ask what she meant. Even with miles between them and it, the bomb scarred face of Canterlot Mountain was impossible to ignore.

Back home, the walls of Stable 10 were festooned with machine printed murals depicting the world as it had been before Primrose and Spitfire saw fit to eviscerate it. Sprawling farmland with waves of green crops and fertile soil, gleaming cities filled with life and beauty, and national landmarks ranging from the launch pads of the Equestrian Space Agency to the Tree of Harmony were so commonplace to her fellow residents that they were more often used as visual landmarks to describe specific places within the Stable over anything amounting to artistic appreciation. Of course Canterlot Castle had been included in that wide menu and, thanks to her father’s work in the Gardens, Aurora had many vivid memories of the stretch of wall besides a maintenance closet where all of Canterlot had been captured in one wide, high resolution photograph turned mural.

The shattered mountain that rose up from the horizon looked nothing like the one from Aurora’s memory. The uppermost third of Canterlot Mountain was very simply not there anymore. Where two steep slopes had once merged toward a snow capped peak was now cut away by one jagged slash. The ruined peak, now barely more than a crooked plateau, belched filaments of dark, ashen plumes up into the sky as if fueled by an uncontrolled inferno. It took Aurora several bewildered seconds to remember the weather factories the Enclave had retooled to choke out the sky, but just as with the other pegasi cutting through the air around them, seeing was a very different thing than knowing.

As they joined what looked to be the dominant westward line of wing traffic, the lone monolith of Canterlot Mountain gradually slid off to their right exposing the bright reddish-brown scar where balefire bombs had triggered the old capital’s cataclysmic landslide. From their new vantage point they could clearly make out the terraced weather factories and their forest of churning smokestacks. It amazed Aurora how the blackened clouds rolling off the mountaintop rose in a single, massive column before the inversion layer forced them to flatten out into their endless, radial march across every horizon like an artificial volcano. Were it not for Fiona’s gentle nudging, she might have stared at it long enough to miss the sprawling city emerging from around the haze.

There, beyond the hump of regolith and ruins of the old collapsed capital, stood Canterlot Castle.

A beat later she found herself wrinkling her nose. No, that wasn’t right. Canterlot Castle had slid down the mountain with the rest of the old city when the bombs knocked it from its lofty perch. And yet there was what Aurora’s brain screamed castle. She didn’t have any other word for it. It was a truly massive stone building with gabled roofs pointing in all four cardinal directions with the exception of the west where, as they made their slow arcing circuit around the city center, loomed twin spires that looked every bit like the ones seen in every photo of Canterlot since… well, since photos. And paintings. And probably cave art. Canterlot had been an ancient city even before the Elements of Harmony burst onto the scene and the architectural engineers at Stable 10 all regarded the castle with almost religious zealotry.

And then it clicked into place. The lavishly adorned behemoth in the center of New Canterlot wasn’t a castle. It was another church. There was no doubt in her mind that was the Chapel of the Two Sisters, the birthplace - no, not birthplace, that title was solely reserved for Primrose’s mobius strip of a twisted brain - the hub of the Enclave’s belief system. The twin spires rising up from the two western corners like cylindrical stays had been inspired by, if not entirely rebuilt from, the ruins the nearby mountain had so eagerly sloughed off two hundred years prior. And while the Chapel made Steepleton’s church amount to peanuts in mass and detail, the city that had grown around it might as well ignore the miles of nothing between them and just call Steepleton its suburb.

There was every reason to believe New Canterlot ate almost as many square miles as Fillydelphia if not an equivalent amount, it was that huge. Density, however, was where the city below definitely came up short. The tallest buildings Aurora could see, excluding the obvious one, were three or possibly four stories tall and all concentrated at the junction of two boulevards that intersected at a spacious square plaza in front of the Chapel. What had to be businesses or maybe the beginnings of hotels like the one Eshe had favored for their dream setting flourished along these boulevards like vegetation crowding toward a source of water. As the city grew outward and further away, the gridwork of feeder roads and back alleys hosted an assortment of less well appointed buildings until finally tapering off into something that looked suspiciously like the slums Julip once described being brought up in.

The slums didn’t encircle all of New Canterlot, however. The boulevard rolling west from the Chapel plaza seemed to have enough of a repellent effect on the visibly poorer neighborhoods to punch straight through and make the unsubtle transition from commercial to agriculture. If the Enclave had any aspirations to expand New Canterlot westward, they would have to pave over literal miles of orchards and cropland to do it. The fields were by no means lush or verdant, but they were nothing like the hardpan and scrub grass dominating the rest of the wasteland.

Aurora wanted to make another few passes over the expansive farmland but a nudge from Fiona pulled her attention away and toward the twin wings descending toward them from above. As her body tensed and her right wing jerked instinctively for the rifle slung against her ribs, her trajectory wrenched toward Fiona and nearly threw the gryphon into an unintentional roll. They managed to steady themselves by the time the stranger leveled off beside them, but any chance of keeping it cool had flown far, far out the window.

The stallion, however, acted like it was the funniest thing he’d done all day. “Sorry!” he laughed through an unabashed grin. “Thought y’all woulda seen me coming! Wasn’t tryin’ to scare you!”

He spoke in accented ponish just like Opal preferred to, only his hadn’t been a product of studying old Appaloosan western movies and practice. His was genuine and, to Aurora’s surprise, friendly.

“I saw the two of you flyin’ in circles and figured you might be from one of border towns.” He chuckled at something and tipped his nose toward Fiona. “Well maybe not you. You a real gryphon?”

Aurora held back a snort and looked to Fiona who, to her credit, was cool as a cucumber.

“Last I checked,” she said, adding, “The name’s Lila, recently imported.”

That earned a wider grin from the newcomer. If Aurora wasn’t mistaken, she thought the stallion might actually be trying to flirt with Fiona. That would be interesting to watch if it were on the very short list of reasons why they were here. Before she could intervene, though, Fiona took the liberty of introducing her.

“This little bundle of fun here is Greasy Hooves,” she continued, eyeing her a little too directly as she asked, “You said you lived somewhere around Steepleville?”

“Steepleton,” she said, hoping the easy pitch wasn’t obvious. Still, her knowledge of the town amounted to a very brief visit. She wouldn’t stand up to any more scrutiny than the papers Coronado and Weathers had forged for her. “I have a place to myself a few miles away. I met Lila on my way into town. Figured I’d show her the sights.”

The stallion wrapped his two outstretched primaries around the ends of her, giving her wing a little shake that nearly startled a yelp from her. Was that supposed to be a greeting or an attempt at killing her? She assumed the former but would be happy to deck the touchy-feely idiot if he tried it a second time.

“Cattail,” he said, and it took Aurora a beat to realize he’d just said his name and wasn’t having a stroke mid-flight. “Ashamed to say I’ve never been out to Steepleton, but I hear it’s nice enough. Something tells me you ain’t exactly made many trips to New Canterlot either, have ya?”

She wasn’t sure if he was testing her or searching for a common ground. “I’ve been a couple of times, back when I was little.” His smile took on a knowing quality to it, so she assumed she’d hit on something he understood. She made a show of staring down at the city with open bewilderment. “I don’t remember it being this big, though.”

“Badum-tss,” Fiona added.

Cattail laughed at that. “And people say gryphons can’t be funny. Tell you what, if you two ladies need a guide I can certainly fill the role.”

That settled it, he was flirting with both of them. Aurora felt a laundry list of ways she knew how to say fuck off in Mechanicalese, but it was Fiona who once again spoke first and not with the response Aurora expected.

“You know what, that would be really nice of him. Wouldn’t it Ms. Hooves?”

If the urge to groan could be converted into electrical power, Stable 10’s generator woes would be over. Through a clenched smile she said, “Sure would, Lila.”

Without skipping a beat, Fiona’s smile turned to embarrassment. “You wouldn’t know anywhere we could stay a few nights where a girl my size would be comfortable, would you?”

Cattail’s eyebrows shot up a good half inch before he reeled himself back in. “I suppose one of the hotels might do, but they’re not cheap.”

“We’re kind of looking exclusively for cheap,” Aurora stepped in with a flat tone that murdered any idea Cattail might have had at suggesting alternate forms of payment. She could tell Fiona was guiding him in that exact direction and something about it ruffled her feathers in all the wrong ways.

Something told her that out of all the powers in the wasteland, the Enclave would not approve of a visiting gryphon hoisting her rear for the first stallion to open his coin purse. Or cap purse. Whatever.

“I’ve got some extra caps,” she continued before Fiona could interject again, “but I’m not rich. I don’t want to spend everything I have on lodging and not have anything left over for sightseeing.”

Rather annoyingly, Cattails looked past Aurora to wait for Fiona’s response. Fiona managed to shrug in a way that said she was surrendering to the will of the third wheel, and Aurora could feel that list of fuck offs once again fizzing on the back of her tongue. Sure they were only here hoping to kill the timeless psychopath that turned the key on the apocalypse but hey, how much harm could fucking the locals for free room and board do?

“Well I do know a few spots around the city that won’t break the cap sack...”

Seriously? she thought, they call them cap sacks?

“...but ain’t none of them as pretty as you two, so if you decide you want to see something with a little more class I’d be happy to chip in whatever you don’t think you can cover.”

And that probably involved just the sort of local hospitality Cattails had been aiming for when he decided to drop in. Or maybe not. Aurora wasn’t sure if she was being fair to him. Probably he hadn’t been thinking about sex until Fiona started giving him the wiggly eyebrows and now his brain had ceded all higher processing power to his dick. Or maybe she was the only one thinking along those lines and everything between Cattail and Fiona was above board and just regular old vanilla friendly.

She finally admitted she hadn’t a clue and forced herself to reserve judgment. If Ginger had taught her anything it was that she got dumber the longer she was stressed, and she’d been building up a fresh stock of raw nerves since leaving her Stable for the third time now. By definition, she probably had the mental dexterity of a brick right now.

“Appreciate it, Cattail,” she said. “Lead on.”

Roach gently held the clear sample container between his hooves and gave the mixture of soil and distilled water a vigorous shake. He shot Julip a coy grin as she watched him from the other side of the stainless steel cart, her brow crooked with an expression that said she was going to allow him to keep making a fool of himself as long as it made him happy.

And this did make him happy, at least a little bit. Helping the pegasi in Agriculture do some of the less exciting work of logging the slow rise in soil acidity since the clearcut of their staple crops was one of the few ways he knew how to be productive. Growing and caring for plants had been the hallmark of his professional life before the bombs fell and some things, especially the tedious task of data logging, just stuck. Plus it had been a chance to show Julip a side of him she hadn’t seen before, and more than that it was a much needed distraction from worrying now that Aurora and Fiona had struck out to New Canterlot on their own.

That… bothered him more than it should. Aurora had come a long way from the terrified, innocent Stable dweller that came close to a gruesome end three steps out of her home. As the wasteland always did, it had hardened her in many ways and prepared her for innumerable hardships. She’d been tempered by the fires of trauma and loss while still retaining that core essence of good that Ginger had loved. She had graduated, and he couldn’t shake the sense that whatever happened in the next few days would be decided by her and her alone.

“After this, we should find a bar so I can watch you mix a martini.”

Roach grinned and gave the sample container a quick, final shake before clamping his teeth around it so he could stand. Flecks of loose soil inevitably coated his tongue as he did so and he spared one wistful moment to wish he could still taste as well as he’d been able to before the ghouling. He’d had a unicorn supervisor when he worked at the Canterlot Gardens who had given him endless grief after catching him testing the soil on his tongue, and it had been one of the rare moments he’d wished he opted for an earth pony form rather than a pegasi. No amount of explaining that he could reliably discern the quality of soil that way had deterred the ridicule that followed. It didn’t matter whether or not it worked. Visitors to the royal garden didn’t want to watch the help eating dirt.

He set the sample on the cart between them and smiled as Julip cracked the lid. “I think I remember Aurora saying something about the Stable being liquor-free.”

Julip waved a few dismissive feathers. “This from the same mare who almost drank you under the table at that cathouse in Kiln?” She tugged a thin pH strip from a plastic box on the cart and wetted the end of it in the distilled solution, wiping the grit away on the lip of the container like Roach had shown her to. A few seconds later she squinted at the damp strip and shook her head. “Yeah, this just looks black to me. It’d be easier to see if we were outside.”

Roach narrowed his eyes at the strip, compared the shade of pale green to the laminated chart in front of him, and jotted the corresponding pH level on the spreadsheet. There had been no discernible change in acidity from the day before and that was what Agriculture wanted to see. A drop in pH this early might indicate any manner of problems stemming from the mass harvest the Stable had undergone when the generator gave out, and most concerning would be the beginnings of root rot. That would happen naturally on its own if the recyclers were left unpowered much longer - no recyclers meant no production of chemicals needed to amend the soil for growing - but now with the wasteland having begun pouring in relief supplies it wouldn’t spell the disaster it might have without.

A soft rap from the garden’s open door caught his attention and he looked up to see a very familiar face. “Blue! I was wondering when you were planning to come play in the dirt!”

Rainbow Dash dragged her only remaining wing across the door frame as she stepped inside, smiling a little sheepishly as she navigated the textured walkway between empty plots. “Hey, Sunn–” she stopped herself when she saw him wince. “Or, it’s Roach now. Right?”

He nodded, forgiving the innocent mistake. Sunny Meadows had died, as far as he was concerned, when his family did. Roach had been the nickname given to him decades later and it had stuck. “Easy to remember,” he said, “and it makes writing out checks that much quicker.”

Rainbow smiled at that and upon reaching their plot of dirt and noticing Julip’s perplexed expression, explained what checks had been.

Roach was a little surprised Julip didn’t immediately point out that she used to be an archivist for the Enclave and already knew all about the joys of writing and balancing checkbooks instead of carrying a sack of bits around all the time. The response she gave was utterly devoid of her usual snark.

“Hi,” she said dumbly.

“Hello,” Rainbow replied with a self-conscious chuckle. “Roach told you about me, right?”

“He did,” Julip murmured. She jerked a little when Roach cleared his throat. “You’re, um… sorry, you’re Rainbow Dash. You’re…”

Rainbow looked to Roach for help but he just shook his head and rounded the cart toward her. They shared a hug while Julip floundered. “It’s good to see you’re doing well.”

“All thanks to you,” she squeezed him a bit tighter with her wing and pressed her muzzle toward his ear. “I remember everything now. Thank you for never giving up on me.”

They were both a little misty-eyed when Rainbow broke the hug, but it was that awkward sort of shared emotion that felt infinitely better to express rather than hold in. He and Rainbow had spent more time in each other’s company than with anyone else and it had been his deep paternal instincts that kept him coming back to the tunnel after every wasteland excursion. She was every bit the daughter to him that Violet had been, and just seeing Rainbow back in control of her own mind was a gift.

He circled back to Julip and leaned into her until he felt her lean back. It was a gentle, physical contact they’d developed to silently reassure one another that they were okay. To Rainbow, he said, “She’s a big fan of yours. It might be a few weeks before she grasps basic language again.”

“Hardy fucking har,” Julip groused, then playfully shouldered him away so she could extend a wing. Rainbow did the same, taking the formal greeting with some chagrin. “My name’s Julip. I didn’t know an Element of Harmony would be paying us a visit today.”

Rainbow glanced down at herself, namely the faint scorch mark where dozens of miniscule ruby shards were still embedded beneath her skin. “I think it’s safe to say my Element days are behind me. Call me Dash. Or Rainbow. Just not both together… that’s something Twilight used to do and it drove me nuts.”

Before Julip could cobble together a response, Rainbow’s attention toggled back to him. “Hey, so Sledge asked me to touch base with you before we leave. He wants to know–”

Roach frowned. “You’re leaving?”

Rainbow hesitated, then nodded. “Well, yeah. Coronado and Clover think it’s important the three of us get some distance between us and the Stable in case…” She winced, her eyes flicking momentarily skyward. “In case.”

He didn’t need further explanation. It made sense to assume Stable 10 would be SOLUS’s first target, and it would serve no one to keep all their eggs in the same basket while the clock ticked down.

Sensing his understanding, Rainbow took an uneasy breath and continued. “Sledge wants to know if you’d be willing to help with the evacuation.”

He grunted and moved back to the steel cart, rolling it past Rainbow to the next plot of rich, empty soil. Julip sat down beside him, using the back of her feathers to brush loose dirt off the trowel from the last plot. “I thought he was already coordinating that with Coronado.”

“They are,” Rainbow said, following along and sitting down on the walkway opposite them. “But Coronado isn’t familiar with the area any more than Clover is, and Sledge even less so. And then there’s me. The last time I was outside was a long time ago. You know what’s out there better than most which would make you invaluable as a guide for one of the caravans.”

He pressed his lips into a thin line as he shook excess soil out of the sample container and turned to the cart to add water. Since Aurora shared the news of what Primrose was planning, preparations for evacuation had lurched into high gear and few if any of the Stable residents were arguing after narrowly avoiding the bomb that took Ginger. Come nightfall the first groups would be piled into wagons and taken as far as they could travel in the few remaining days before SOLUS arrived.

It was crucial, then, that the Enclave didn’t become aware of the mass exodus. Already a horde of relief wagons were being turned around early or sent to the Stable with half or empty loads all in the name of bringing as much equipment to the Stable as possible. Families would be loaded up and turned back toward Blinder’s Bluff, only to break away in every feasible direction along the way. The goal was to spread the residents of Stable 10 so far and wide that even SOLUS would lack the destructive power to reach them all.

When the evacuations were complete, only a core group of Steel Rangers and residents would be left behind to ensure the Stable remained operational and defended.

“I think,” Rainbow continued, “that this might be Sledge’s way of asking you not to stay behind.”

“My family is buried here,” he said softly.

He could tell Rainbow was looking to Julip now, trying to enlist her help in convincing him to go with the first wave of evacuees, and he felt a mix of pride and guilt when Julip took the sample container from his hooves and gave it a vigorous shake. She was with him.

“I don’t want you to be buried here,” Rainbow pleaded.

At that, he nodded but said nothing she could add to. After several long seconds he could feel her give up on trying to convince him. She more than anyone understood what he’d lost and why, now that he’d finally crossed the threshold of this place, why he wouldn’t leave it behind. Roach knew they could force him and, if they tried, he would let them. Probably he would leave on his own volition so that Julip wouldn’t feel anchored by his past. But he wouldn’t walk away from his first family without exercising his right to be stubborn. Saffron and Violet deserved that much from him.

“The soil down here is near perfect,” he idly commented as Julip’s litmus strip came out of the solution a healthy, pale green. “Anything they plant is going to grow like weeds.”

Rainbow reached down and scooped up a clod of dirt, crumbling it between her feathers. When her wing was empty she stood, grimacing slightly at the crackle and pop of worn joints. Natural ghoul healing or no, she’d been well into her fifties when the process had taken over.

He stood as well. “Rainbow, one second.”

She stopped, hope and curiosity plain on her face.

“You should know before you leave, you should know we found a survivor at the bottom of Stable-Tec Headquarters and…” he hesitated for a split second as Rainbow’s haggard ears perked forward while the rest of her body went stock still. “And she’s all alone down there. I’m pretty sure she’s the only one keeping the generators down there maintained but the solitude isn’t doing her any good.”

“Is it Scootaloo?” she whispered.

Roach blinked, then shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, I should have… she said her name was Applebloom. She–”

Before he could finish, Rainbow had sat down hard on the floor with a distant expression. For a moment she was silent. Then she heaved a long exhalation before asking with an unsteady voice, “Is she okay?”

“Yes,” he said, understanding by her reaction that clarity was critical right now. “She’s okay, but she’s been down there by herself for a very long time. I think that’s had an effect on her but she did help us when we needed it, so there’s a lot of her left.”

A film of tears coated Rainbow’s eyes as she nodded, silently urging him to continue.

“I think it’s important for someone to go down to get here, but it needs to be handled delicately. She’s protecting the generators responsible for the reserve power being transmitted to the Stables. If they’re damaged, or if the Rangers try to salvage them, the network goes down and Stable 10 will go down with it whether or not Aurora and Fiona take out Primrose.”

Beside him, Julip asked, “Did you know her?”

Rainbow’s lips cracked into a rueful smile. “Yeah,” she breathed, and in a tone that broadcast the understatement like a pulsar, she said, “Her sister and I were close.”

A wooden sign swung from old, prewar towing chains. A silhouette of a white mare graced the board, her neck bent in a low bow above the inn’s name: The Maidenhead.

“Sixty for two people for the first night, seventy-five for everything after that.” The mare behind the front desk chewed on something pasty and gray that looked everything like rubber, but in a way that gave the impression it was perfectly normal. She made a point of looking Fiona up and down with disapproval before adding, “Boss’ll want a deposit in case anything gets damaged, though. Call it a hundred up front.”

Aurora found herself wishing she’d had the forethought to land somewhere to count their caps before arriving. Judging by Fiona’s expression, the contents of the cap sack - still a stupid name - their Ranger contact had given them wasn’t going to stretch very far even with Cattail offering to pick up the slack.

This was the third inn he’d brought them to and now there was pressure to make a decision. It had been bookended between two stores several blocks from the main boulevard, one selling cheap jewelry and the other hawking common wasteland scrap that the front sign called curios. Aurora cast an uncertain look about the lobby, barely half a room in its own right, and noted not for the first time the harsh electric glare of the decorative wall sconces.

“Well?”

She blinked. “What?”

The young mare scowled at her. “Look, I got beds to turn down. You want the room or not?”

Aurora nodded to Fiona who began counting out the caps. As she did so, Cattail slid between them with two dense, wire bound stacks of his own. “For the deposit.”

The mare reached a wing to a row of hooks behind her and snatched off a key at random. It jangled between her feathers as she held it back. “Yeah, nuh-uh. The lady said the room’s for two, and I’m already being nice not counting the bird as a double.”

Fiona looked up from counting to narrow her eyes at the mare.

She shrugged with a level of apathy only a teenager could muster. “Sorry but I stop being nicey-nice whenever this dildo shows up.” She flicked a feather at Cattail. “Boss says you’re not allowed to bring your ‘dates’ upstairs anymore until you pay off the room you ruined.”

Being a pegasus didn’t seem to stop him from trying to cast a shrinking spell on himself. He cleared his throat and began to say something that sounded like a deflection, but as he reached for the caps he’d set on the counter the younger mare’s feathers slapped down on them first and snatched his money away.

“This doesn’t count, by the way.” Before Cattail could protest, the receptionist looked sweetly to Aurora. “I don’t know what he told you, but I wouldn’t touch his dick for all the stimpacks in New Canterlot. Seriously, he’s a spreader, and not in a sexy way.”

“Oh-kay,” Cattail chuckled, giving the floorboards a too-casual rap of his hoof as he backed away, “you ladies have a wonderful rest of your day.”

The receptionist blew a gray bubble and pressed it into the back of her teeth with a sharp pop. The three of them watched Cattail turn, his smile dropping to a scowl just a fraction of a second too early, and shove his way out onto the narrow feeder road.

“Uh,” Aurora said after a long pause. “He was our guide.”

The receptionist snorted. “The only guiding Cattail does is the kind that gets his nose under tourists’ tails. Here.” She pushed the hundred caps for the deposit toward the stack Fiona had been counting out. “There’s a place called Lollipops three blocks north with a good reputation and it’s licensed. Plus your horny friend out there is on the blacklist.”

Fiona regarded Aurora with a smirk that said she was happy to spectate this particular train wreck. Aurora closed her eyes for a moment to reel in her annoyance.

“We’re just looking for a room,” she said.

“They got rooms.”

“For sleeping.”

The receptionist popped another gray bubble. “Yeah. I’m not a kid. I know how sex works.”

She was absolutely a kid, and the fact that she was so flippantly aware of innuendo and apparently had recommendations for nearby brothels at the ready just made her all the more uncomfortable with this line of conversation. Fiona, of course, was happy to watch her flounder with no intention of stopping this trainwreck.

Well, she’d already fallen on her face. It was as good an opportunity as any to see how much water ancestry truly held with these people.

“Listen to me,” she said, summoning the tone she reserved for cocksure Mechanical apprentices who couldn’t absorb basic instructions without humbling first. It took a force of sheer will not to grimace at the sound of her fake name tripping across her tongue. “My name is Greasy Hooves. Lila here is a guest of my family and by extension the Enclave. She crossed an ocean to come here and as much as I’ve tried, I seem to be leading her to citizens who believe her first obligation to us is to provide pleasure.”

The young mare’s face blanched at what very may likely be a serious accusation from a citizen belonging to a legacy family. She sat up a little straighter as she spoke, unsure how to handle the incongruity between Aurora’s severity and Fiona’s entertained grin. “You’re not here to–”

Aurora spoke over her. “No. We’re not. We’re exhausted from flying, miss…?”

“Portia, ma’am.”

She nodded, feigning haughty disinterest. “Of which family?”

The young mare floundered for a half second. “N-none, ma’am. My mom says it’s from a rare play she read. I don’t know which one.”

In the corner of her eye, Fiona twirled her finger in a hurry up motion where Portia couldn’t see. Aurora was fine with that. The self-important caricature was souring on her as fast as she’d tried it on. “I’ll make you a deal, Portia.”

Portia’s ears perked up.

“Waive the room fee for tonight and I’ll forget the indiscretion entirely. I can understand how Cattail colored your impression of us and I was raised to believe people deserve second chances. Fair?”

Evidently the idea of giving up a room key for nothing wasn’t one Portia thought was fair at all, but she looked young enough to still be getting used to the concept of consequences applying to her. Eventually she nodded, albeit sourly, and handed Aurora the key. Stamped on both faces was a tiny 19.

They followed her directions up the stairwell alongside the desk and discovered with some silent amusement that the room numbers started at ten and ran the length of a single, sparsely adorned hall. As with the lobby, the narrow hall was lit with electric lights that glowed from several more floral sconces. They found their room at the far end, and it accepted the key after only a minimal amount of jiggling.

“Mm,” Fiona murmured. “Cozy.”

Aurora hadn’t expected much going in, so she wasn’t disappointed by the single bare mattress on its rust speckled frame. It wasn’t much smaller than her bed back home and she felt a little relief knowing it was far too small to share, even with another pony. She tried not to think too hard about what Cattail thought he’d have been able to accomplish here and decided to be satisfied with “not much” as an answer. Despite her prickly personality, Aurora made a point to thank Portia for shooing the stallion off. She was sure she and Fiona would have been sufficient to the task when it came time to sever ties, but this way his ire was likely focused on the receptionist instead of them.

An old wingback chair sat in a lonely corner near a street-facing window, but beyond that there wasn’t much to speak of. A few drab framed prints tacked to floral wallpaper, a single wall sconce above but not quite centered over the headboard, and a faint odor of heavily spiced food cooking at the little restaurant they’d passed a few doors down. As rooms went, it wasn’t terrible.

Prompted by the scent of food, Fiona opened her satchel and retrieved two of the wrapped parcels of molerat she’d snatched from the Rangers. When she held one up in offering, Aurora shook her head, tossed Desperate Times onto the bed and down beside it. The springs squeaked, and she watched for a few quiet moments as Fiona made quick work of her dinner.

“We need to talk strategy,” she said, keeping her voice carefully low in case the walls were thin.

Fiona balled up the paper wrapper of the first filet and pushed it back into her satchel. “I thought your,” she lifted a hand and tapped her wrist, “was the strategy.”

“It’s a one-time coin flip, and it’s worthless if we try it while she’s below ground. Either we need to find a way in or we have to flush her out.”

“Does the Bunker have a fire alarm we can pull?”

She smirked at that, but it faded quickly. “I think any alarms would send people into the Bunker instead of out. It’s probably the safest place in the city.”

The voice of one of the neighboring shopkeepers filtered in through the window as they harangued some poor passerby over the quality of their saddlebags while promising a good price for a replacement. Fiona got up and slid the pane shut. “Well, I can always give the Griffinstone diplomat angle a shot.”

She made an uneasy sound in her throat. “And if they ask for proof?”

Fiona sat down beside the bed and considered the second unwrapped filet. “Yeah. Shit.”

“On the bright side we ended up making a hundred caps.”

“That Portia kid has balls.” Fiona took a bite of cold molerat and chewed. “Think that Cattail guy’s going to be an issue?”

Aurora decided she did have an appetite after all and reached over with an aching wing and snatched the other half of the filet from Fiona’s hand, taking a comparatively smaller bite before allowing the gryphon to steal it back with one of her sly grins. “The last guy who tried ended up at the bottom of a latrine,” she said, chewing around her words. “Probably not, though. I think he just assumed today was his lucky day.”

Fiona chuckled at that as she finished her meal, then paused to rummage a sloshing canteen from her satchel. They traded swigs in thoughtful silence for some time before Aurora blew out a resigned breath.

“For now, I think it’s safer if you keep playing the impressionable, wide-eyed gryphon. It’ll give me some time to figure out how I’m expected to act and, who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and score a tour of the Bunker.”

“I don’t think there’s enough loaded dice on the planet to give us that kind of luck, Feathers. But hey, ten points for optimism.” She balled her fist and gave Aurora a gentle thump across the foreleg. “Speaking of which, how’re you holding up?”

Her brow furrowed as she gave herself time to consider the question. Once again she had the lives of everyone she loved riding on her shoulders, but she also knew there were other Rangers sneaking into New Canterlot at this exact moment who all shared the same objective. Sledge, Coronado, and Clover would be in the midst of final preparations for evacuating the first wave of Stable residents once night fell. And despite not having Roach and Julip at her side right now, she wasn’t alone.

“I’m doing okay.” And it felt true enough, which was even more reassuring than the sentiment. “Honestly, right now I’m trying to decide if it would be weird if I asked Portia where they’re pulling their electricity from.”

“Generators, probably. It might be less weird if I ask.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “It’s gotta be ignition talismans, though, right? Those weather factories alone…”

Fiona rapped a knuckle against her prosthesis, and she realized her volume had begun creeping upward. “It’s the Enclave,” she said, making an all-encompassing gesture with her hands. “They’ve been raiding and stockpiling tech since the first Stable failed. I think it’s safe to assume they’re not relying on scrap generators and moonshine.”

“Makes you wonder where they have it stockpiled,” she mused.

“I think that’s a question we don’t want to be overheard asking.” Fiona wadded up her empty wrapper and dropped it into her satchel alongside the first one. “That said, we’ve probably got a good few hours left before the city starts closing down for the evening. I say we go rub elbows with the locals and see if we learn something. How about it?”

Aurora offered a grumbling protest in response as she dropped off the bedside and turned to scoop up her rifle. “Let’s ask Portia if she can point me toward a sink, first.”

Fiona paused to look her up and down. “You afraid of a little road dust, city slicker?”

“No, but this room is a closet and I haven’t cleaned my peg leg since I put it on.”

“Ah,” Fiona said, her eyes dropping to regard her prosthesis with fresh foreboding. “C’mon, stankleg. Let’s go find you that sink.”

“I look stupid.”

“You look classy,” Fiona replied, “which is the kind of stupid people around here like, so just go with it.”

Aurora grumbled at the reflection passing along the display window beside her and tried hard not to undo the low bun Fiona had teased her mane into. The inn hadn’t featured a restroom for patrons, but when she had explained she just needed to give her leg a quick wash Portia had taken them through what was likely the first floor storage room and indicated an employee washroom near the back. It was cramped, offering barely enough space for a toilet and pedestal sink, but the fact there was indoor plumbing at all made it feel like a luxury.

The water that spluttered through the tap ran clear and Aurora had made short work of taking a clean washcloth to her prosthesis and leg. It was funny to think that a month ago she would have laid into anyone she caught lingering behind her while she tended to herself, but several weeks in the wasteland had all but worn those jumpy nerves down to nubs. She was aware of Fiona leaning in the open doorway and figured if the gryphon wanted to watch her scrub the nasty from her false leg, then that was what she was going to do. She hadn’t expected Fiona to reach out and just grab a knot of her mane.

“What,” she’d asked, bristling at the sudden contact, “are you doing?”

“Let me try something real quick,” Fiona had said in return, and before Aurora could work through all the possible ways to misinterpret that ominous statement, she’d felt Fiona’s hands going to work gathering her dirty mop of a mane and teasing it into a loose braid.

With her prosthetic laying over the sink basin and Fiona’s less than gentle yanking on her head throwing her balance, Aurora had been forced to focus on not falling while Fiona worked. She grumbled as dirty white strands of hair flipped and flopped behind her reflection’s annoyed expression. Once Fiona had the uneven strands loosely woven into something approaching a cohesive bundle, she twisted the arrangement into a messy bun.

When she attempted to humor Fiona’s burst of creative styling and asked her to please untie her mane, she flatly refused. It was then that Aurora realized she had positioned the bun in the exact spot above her shoulder blades where her wings couldn’t reach.

Passing the display window now, she pursed her lips into a thin line and tried to swallow the bitter pill that Fiona’s selling points made sense. She looked, for all intents and purposes, like a mare who cared about her appearance. That wasn’t usually true on days that ended in y but when it came to walking the streets of New Canterlot, where wastelanders were openly ostracized and dustwings were liable for much, much worse, anything that improved upon her usual style of Mechanical Chic helped. The burn scars that dominated her chest and belly could be explained away by a grievous work accident - she was supposed to be a traveling mechanic after all - as could her false leg. That probably wouldn’t fly once her hair began falling out and her voice turned to gravel, but those were all Future Aurora problems. For now, she was just another greaser trying to look pretty in spite of her blemishes.

And one final glance at her reflection led her to settle on the outside possibility that maybe, in very limited circumstances, wearing her mane up wasn’t the worst look in the world.

Of course it helped that Fiona was pulling attention away from her by the barrel. While the citizenry of New Canterlot didn’t display their stupefaction nearly as blatantly as people had in Steepleton, there were still plenty of staring and more than a few instances of ponies walking out of stores only to stop dead in their tracks when they saw the gryphon padding down the sidewalk. There were also quite a few unnecessary “hellos” from just about every warm body they passed, none of which were very interested in Aurora beyond her possible role as Fiona’s accessory. Even the Enclave soldiers who patrolled the busy boulevard in singles and pairs were happy to regard Fiona with quiet interest, and evidently some among their uniformed compatriots were just as amused with the civilian response to Fiona as Fiona was.

“You’re putting on a helluva show,” Aurora remarked as a pair of stallions heading in the opposite direction stumbled out of the way.

“It’d be nice if one of these people would run up and say gee whiz lady follow me we got a re-e-eal nifty minister who wants to meetcha!”

The ridiculous, squeaking accent she put on was more than enough to make Aurora forget her worries over her mane and she even let herself laugh a little. “I think we’re going to have to put in the leg work ourselves.”

Her attention wandered out onto the open boulevard where a team of earth ponies lurched forward, working together to get a wagon filled with goods rolling. Her expression faltered when she recognized the iron collars around their necks.

Fiona grunted her agreement. “Shouldn’t be too hard to get someone talking. Maybe this… person we’re looking for,” she barely avoided using Primrose’s name as a wide-eyed, paunchy mare trundled past, “makes frequent visits around town? Who knows, she might be in that big church polishing the holy massage wand right this very second.”

Aurora wrinkled her nose at Fiona. “Gross.”

“Depends on what she’s chanting.”

She thumped Fiona in the ribs with the flat of her wing, but her eyes kept tracking the quartet of slaves straining to move the wagon. She couldn’t bring herself to laugh.

They found a cafe style restaurant with an assortment of tables of chairs crowding the sidewalk and Aurora decided it looked quiet enough for them to poke their heads in without being mobbed. It wasn’t much more than a kitchen beneath an awning but the smells wafting from behind the wide counter were intoxicating. When the stallion tending the stove noticed their approach, he turned and did the expected bug-eyed stare before quickly clamping down on the expression.

Aurora selected something off the menu board at random, something called crispy cheddar bombs, and as the kitchen worker began dipping little lumps of cheese into batter she explained how she’d agreed to take Fiona on a whirlwind tour of New Canterlot despite not exactly being a local herself.

The stallion offered a sympathetic smile as he used a pair of metal tongs to flick battered cheese one by one into a vat of bubbling oil. “You from one of the border towns, then?”

She feigned a meek nod. “I got a place not far from Steepleton. I prefer the quiet.”

His expression brightened at that. “My brother lives out that way. He thinks the same way you do. Not a fan of crowds.” He used the tongs to keep the battered balls tumbling in the oil, then used them to gesture up at Fiona. “There’s always the Chapel, if you haven’t stopped by there.”

Fiona made a brief show of hemming and hawing as if she were afraid she might offend him. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to be a distraction.”

The stallion glanced past them at the patrons and passersby beyond. He smiled, a little chagrined that he had just been doing the same thing they were now, and retrieved a pinstriped cardboard raft from a stack further down the counter. “Ah, well, people tend to be better behaved when they’re there. No rule saying you have to visit, of course, but it’s kind of like going to Las Pegasus and not playing the slots, y’know?”

Aurora had a sudden and vivid recollection of listening to Apogee struggling to speak with her father as the bombs began to fall, only to irrevocably lose the connection when Las Pegasus bloomed beneath a bulb of sickly green fire. She forced herself to maintain a polite smile as the memory came and went.

“Tell you what, though,” the stallion continued, his attention fixed entirely on Fiona, “if you do decide to skip seeing the Chapel, you should swing by the west side of town and scope out Snob Hill.”

Fiona quirked her head to the side with a dubious smirk. “Snob Hill.”

“Name’s not the best selling point, I know,” he said, somehow managing to include the tongs in his bear with me shrug. “Honestly, it’s a pretty reliable spot to go if you’re looking to pick up an inferiority complex.”

Aurora glanced up at Fiona, eyebrow raised.

The stallion didn’t seem to notice as he swapped out the tongs for a shallow metal net. With one swipe he fished half the golden brown morsels up from the boiling oil. “The folks up there are all retired officers and legacy families with more caps than the wasteland has dirt. All huge houses and luxury carriages,” he said, pausing to gesture out to the steady stream of pulled vehicles roaming the boulevard, “that make those look like scav haulers. It’s worth a look.”

She’d tuned him out as soon as he mentioned retired generals. Odds were a quick visit wouldn’t land them an impromptu audience with Primrose, but how would they know without taking a chance? She could think of several justifications for wanting to bring a visiting gryphon to the city’s opulent west end, and if it gave someone with real influence within the Enclave an opportunity to flatter themselves then why not?

“I guess it couldn’t hurt,” she said, accepting the cardboard raft while Fiona counted out the requisite caps. “Who knows, maybe we’ll get real lucky and bump into the minister herself?”

The stallion’s lip quirked upward as he sidestepped to take Fiona’s caps. “She does show up at church from time to time to make the odd public announcement.”

Aurora tried to sound casual. “Anything on schedule this week?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” he admitted with a touch of embarrassment, “I haven’t been to church since my parents dragged me in as a colt. No offense to you, I mean.”

Apparently he’d come to assume she was one of the Enclave’s many faithful. Probably he was choosing the safe route just in case his comment about having to be dragged might rankle any of the patrons waiting impatiently behind them. It was probably safer for her too if she didn’t try to stand out from the assumption.

She popped one of the still steaming treats into her mouth - Holy shit these are good, she thought - and offered a reassuring wink as she chewed. “Well, if you ever have a change of heart at least you know where to go.”

The stallion’s smile grew a little strained and Aurora thought she could actually see the moment where they went from an interesting pair of customers to very slightly unwelcome strangers blocking his counter. She took the hint, thanked him for his time, and gestured for Fiona to follow her back to the sidewalk.

She wanted to make a beeline east and check to be sure Primrose wasn’t dusting herself off right now in preparation for one such announcement, but she knew if she did that it would be nothing short of impossible to pry her away for fear that that window might open the second she left. Doubtless someone would eventually notice the three-legged mare and her gryphon pal skulking around the building for hours on end. She distracted herself with another fried nugget of cheese, a ridiculously delicious discovery she had to actively stop herself from hoarding away from Fiona’s probing fingers, and turned their walk toward the setting sun.

“Lime is going to shit when he finds out the Enclave has better bar food than he does,” Fiona murmured as she pilfered another cheese curd from Aurora. “These could get addicting.”

Fiona was right, but as Aurora ate another, she had a feeling the proprietor of Fiona’s favorite bar would have to bend over backwards to get anyone in the Bluff to try Enclave food. For six caps it sure didn’t last very long either. By the end of the first block the little cardboard raft had nothing but greasy crumbs and left Aurora searching for a recycler chute. Then she blinked and tried not to smile at how quickly that ingrained Stable habit had come to her. Ever since she began exploring the wasteland she’d gotten used to the idea of burning her trash before dousing a cookfire or just leaving it on the dirt. Now, surrounded once more by something that could arguably be called civilization, the old rules of where to put one’s garbage suddenly applied again.

They found a trash bin at the end of the block. A uniformed soldier that looked strikingly similar to Sledge noticed and thanked her without a trace of sarcasm or threat. It was the most utterly alien interaction she’d had with an Enclave soldier, and she had to work to keep the surprise off her face as she nodded back.

“Lot of walking,” Fiona said some time later.

They’d found themselves passing down a section of the east-west boulevard where the surrounding shops had shrunk and narrowed into colorful, bookended homes of no more than a couple stories tall. The street had thinned enough that some of the sidewalk traffic was blending in among the odd carriage and wagon, like the rules for who was allowed to walk where were loosening with distance from the city center.

Not for the first time, Aurora glanced up at the empty space directly above them. For all the pegasus traffic high over the city, it seemed either no one was allowed to fly up and down the streets or it was considered unsafe. Given the majority of the citizenry, at least half by her count, were pegasi of one stripe or another she assumed it was a combination of both. Coasting through the narrow space between buildings wouldn’t be much trouble for an experienced flyer on their own, but add in a few hundred sets of wings trying to do the same thing and things would undoubtedly turn into a melee.

Each of the narrow houses had the same simple concrete stoop, the same quadrant of four skinny street-facing windows, and the same electric lights glowing behind them. Some were painted with inviting shades of yellow, green, or blue but most sported the original color of ruddy brown brick they were originally built from. The ponies who watched them pass by did so with expressions of appraisal or concern. This wasn’t where they went to shop or socialize, this was where they lived and raised their families. Even the occasional soldier paused to observe them in case the appearance of a gryphon might herald some unexpected danger.

Aurora smiled up at Fiona. If only they knew.

Chops looked around the Atrium uncomfortably, feeling nonexistent glares warming the back of his neck. No one was watching him besides the larger stallion walking alongside him. Normally that would have been Dancer’s role, but thanks to Weathers using what limited good influence she had with the Stable’s overseer he’d been granted permission to range beyond the confines of Medical with some stipulations attached. The first of which being he wasn’t allowed near the residential corridors on the upper level where Meridian and her family resided.

It surprised him how much that stung him. He understood all the reasons why and didn’t disagree with a single one. The discomfort came from knowing how arrogant he’d been to think he could smooth over all that fear and pain with an apology. He had devoted himself to the Enclave and flown thousands of miles over many long years in the name of scouting the outer reaches of the wasteland to investigate dustwing sightings and execute any of the ones he found. He’d believed it was the will of the risen goddesses. That what he was doing was an act of mercy akin to pulling weeds out of a garden.

Dustwings were the mutated corruptions of pegasi who abandoned the light of the goddesses to proliferate in the irradiated wastes. They represented an existential threat to the Enclave’s ordained task to return the world back to the paradise it had once been. That was what he had been taught. That was what everyone in the Enclave had been taught. And while many considered the culling of dustwings to be unfortunate and even a tragedy, they understood it was their duty.

Only his duty had been a lie, and the mantle of black he had worn bore the blood of those innocents he’d helped to slaughter.

“Scowling at it isn’t going to make it taste any better.”

He blinked and looked up at the stallion seated beside him.

Another stipulation of being allowed to roam around select areas of the Stable was that he only did so when an escort was available. At the moment that escort was Deputy Chaser, a lanky yet not unattractive stallion whose weary expression hadn’t changed much since bearing witness to his humiliating exchange with Meridian earlier in the day. Chaser gestured a fork at Chops’ untouched tray which bore the same thin variety of food scraped together by the collective efforts of local traders, scavengers, and Steel Rangers.

Chops realized he’d been glowering at his dinner since they’d seated themselves at one of the long, bench-style tables that now packed the Atrium from wall to wall, with the exception of the corner near the overseer’s office where the largest chunks of rubble were still waiting to be broken down and hauled outside. The entire place buzzed with conversation, the clacking of cutlery against aluminum trays, and the occasional laughter. Without his uniform to identify him, he knew it was unlikely anyone knew who he was.

Still, in those moments when the din of chatter naturally ebbed, he couldn’t shake the irrational feeling that his midnight coat and charcoal feathers were enough for these strangers to make the connection and condemn him anyway.

He picked up his fork, pecked the tines through the skin of a boiled and quartered potato, and popped it into his mouth. It was warm, starchy, and bland. Sustenance food. He washed down the flavorless meal with a swig of water from the canteen he’d been given and tried to push his thoughts elsewhere.

Beyond the makeshift stairwell leading up to the security office and the open antechamber beyond, the dim noise of a motor rumbled to life followed by an echo of whooping cheers. A few tables from where he sat, a group of mechanics perked up and took up the cheer with a raucous stamping of hooves. Chops frowned confusion, craning his neck around as the spontaneous celebration spread through the Atrium. Had something happened or was this just something Stable dwellers did during communal meals?

So as not to stand out, Chops gave the table a few half-hearted thuds before picking up the notepad and pen beside his tray. Chaser must have noticed his confusion because he hadn’t finished writing the question before the deputy answered it.

“Sounds like they finally got that generator running.”

His brow momentarily furrowed before he realized he wasn’t talking about the Stable’s massive, talisman-driven generator. A new question formed in his mind, and he set to writing it down for the deputy.

“What generator?”

Chaser read the question and shrugged. “Something the outsiders dragged in from one of their cities a few days back.” He paused, used his fork to coat a piece of potato in the grease left by his ration of molerat meat, and ate it. He rocked his head from side to side as he chewed, as if deciding whether or not he’d improved the flavor.

When he swallowed, he pointed the empty fork up the stairs to the grinning mechanics now filing out onto what remained of the upper catwalk to the sound of renewed stomping applause. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the rising din. “Apparently it runs on liquor.”

Chops absently scratched out ethanol on his notepad, but didn’t look to see if Chaser acknowledged the correction. Above the makeshift cafeteria, bathed in the dim yellow glow of emergency lights, the mechanics who were apparently responsible for reviving a scavenged prewar relic basked in the praised offered up by their peers. Some of them grinned while others hammed up the attention with exaggerated heroic poses.

Their blue and yellow uniforms - no, he reminded himself, not uniforms - their jumpsuits clung to their sweaty coats like a dark, greasy second skin. There were visible bags hanging beneath all of their eyes and even as they reveled in their success, there were inaudible conversations making their way up and down the catwalk that gave their appearance a very temporary essence. They were still on the clock and there was still work to be done, even now.

As the applause died down and the voices faded to a dull roar, one of the mechanics stepped to the warped railing and cleared his throat to address them.

“So, uh,” she said, then flushed as a rumble of laughter rolled through the open space. Public speaking had probably not been on the list of skills she’d been trained in as a mechanic. When the room shushed, she tried again. “Yeah, so some good news and bad. I guess everyone already heard the good news, but if you didn’t, we think we got that old heap running again.”

Fresh stamping shook the tables and rattled the trays. Chops had to pick his up to keep it from vibrating off and into his lap.

“It’s not a permanent fix,” the nameless mechanic continued, cringing at how abruptly the celebration died after she spoke. “And won’t ever put out enough juice to get everything back up and running, not unless we’re okay with burning through whatever life it still has left.”

A low, worried murmur susurrated between the tables.

“Will the lights come back on?” someone shouted.

The mechanic licked her lips a little uneasily, and judging by the barely contained smiles of the others standing at either side of her, they’d drawn straws for who should speak and she’d wound up with the short one. Chops set his tray back down and wondered whether unscripted announcements were the norm for a Stable.

“No promises… but probably, yeah,” the mare said, and this time she was grinning as she practically had to shout over the excitement. “Nothing is written in stone, but as long as we can keep this relic from shaking itself apart, we think we’ll have the lights working in a day or so. Maybe with some extra capacity left over for other things, but that’s down the road! We’re going to try to…”

It was no use trying to hear her anymore. The Atrium had descended into joyous bedlam. Chops craned his head around to watch Stable dwellers laughing together, hugging, clinking canteens, and altogether heaving one collective sigh of relief. He saw a stallion twice his size bent over his tray, face covered by trembling feathers, his mouth working between sobs as he tried to articulate something to the mare beside him. Several more had gotten up from their benches to make their way into the corridors, spreading the first bit of good news to reach the Stable since all of this began for them.

Chops watched the mechanic at the railing give up trying to shout over the sounds of celebration and retreat back through the security office with several of her fellow workers. The disorganized announcement and the happy chaos it had spawned felt utterly alien to the rigid and well-understood hierarchy he’d known. And yet, more than that, it felt good. Genuine, in so many ways.

He picked up his pad, scribbled a note, and tapped Chaser on the wing with it until he turned to read what he’d written. The deputy scrunched up his face, then laughed.

“Why would they get in trouble?” he asked.

Chops hesitated, then wrote, “She lost control of the room and couldn’t finish her announcement.”

Chaser looked at him like he’d written gibberish.

He sighed and quickly added, “Should have told overseer first.”

The deputy laughed and Chops felt his cheeks grow hot with perceived mockery. “And give up a perfectly good opportunity to beat Sledge to the punch on an announcement? Naw, that’s not how Mechanical works. They’ve got their own little society down there and one-upping the boss stallion is just another part of it.”

Chops frowned, not understanding.

Deputy Chaser apparently shared some traits with Dancer, because he plainly ignored the confusion he’d caused. “Just wait and watch,” he said, clearly wanting to return to the revelry, “Sledge will be around to say more or less exactly what Mechanical just said. That’s his job, now. They just wanted to steal a little thunder.”

Sure to the deputy’s word, a quarter hour later Overseer Sledge emerged from one of the corridors preceded by more whoops and applause. He smiled with the slightest discomfort creasing his eyes, but he did exactly what Chaser said he’d do. Sledge waited for silence, repeated the good news shared by the mechanics, and added his own reminders that everyone temper their expectations. The generator supplied by the scavengers was decades older than the one tailor-made for their Stable and would require extensive replacements before it could be depended upon. For now, he was leaving it to Mechanical and I.T. to decide where and how to splice the old generator into the electrical grid.

And then his tone sank as he reminded everyone gathered that the first wave of evacuees would be departing one hour after sunset. Wagons would be waiting inside the tunnel and personal belongings must be limited to what could be comfortably carried in their saddlebags. The second wave would depart the next night, and the final throughout the following day.

Chops could see the celebratory mood evaporate at the mention of the evacuation. Face fell, and quiet settled throughout the Atrium. Their momentary joy of seeing their home restored, even by a fraction, was over, replaced by the knowledge of the very real danger they were all still in. SOLUS was still plummeting back toward the signal range of Enclave transmitters. Any realist knew chances were slim that Aurora or any of the Rangers being smuggled to New Canterlot via overland routes would succeed in killing Primrose.

Stable 10, whose founding and living residents alike had preserved the true record of the world’s collapse, was the obvious first target. It was anyone’s guess whether Primrose would stop there. Chops could see Blinder’s Bluff being an immediate secondary target to add confusion to the mayhem.

As Sledge continued to speak, Chops watched those in the Atrium with families regard one another with grim certainty. They would be among the first to leave. There was no question. Many already had their saddlebags tucked beneath tables, ready to go once they were told the sun had set. Others murmured to one another, nodding, verifying some last minute plan or another. If the lights did turn on tomorrow, most of them wouldn’t be here to see it. They would be following the traders, scavengers, and everyday wastelanders who had come to shepherd them into a vast and dangerous world none of them were the least bit prepared for.

“One of the benefits of beating the overstallion to the punch,” Chaser murmured, gesturing a feather out to Sledge. “They’re not the one who gets stuck having to drag everyone back down to reality.”

Chops nodded, feeling sympathy for Sledge. One way or another he’d have had to come make this speech, but the mechanics had forced him to do it now before things spun out of control.

He blinked and looked up at the overstallion, regarding him more fully. He stood there, listening to someone ask a question about the evacuation, visibly uncomfortable but bearing under the weight of his responsibility in spite of it. He’d been forced to drop everything to appear here, now, in front of everyone.

His fork slipped from his feathers and clattered to his tray.

If the overseer of a Stable could be forced into making an emergency announcement, he thought, his heart ratcheting to a rapid staccato, so could a minister.

Snob Hill had been, as it turned out, built on an actual hill.

Well, maybe a hill as defined by ponies. Fiona did what she could to keep the smug off her beak. She’d grown up on mountains. She’d lived in a firetower at the cliff’s edge of a bluff. Compared to the smoking peak looming behind them Snob Hill barely registered as a ripple on the terrain. Still she supposed it qualified. The slight incline as the boulevard slid out from the colorful row houses and into New Canterlot’s wealthy district was easier to see when they looked back the way they came, something she was trying to do as little as possible knowing they would have to retrace all those same steps back to the inn.

Blech, she thought. “So, what’s the plan?”

Until now they’d been making it up as they went, but it was clear that strategy would only carry them so far. People seemed content enough to stare at her but so far no one had been compelled to introduce themselves. Was that another Enclave rule or something more culturally ingrained? Don’t talk to large, predatory avians unless you want to end up dinner with the addition of spooky fingers and well-timed lightning. She rolled her eyes. She’d eaten plenty of ponies and hadn’t gotten so much as a complaint.

She lifted a wing and ran her feathertips along the bars of a wrought iron gate running along the sidewalk. Behind it lay a large property that was beautiful by wasteland standards but which would get the owners run out of town were it to exist during the halcyon days before the war. The “mansion” at the center of the acre of fastidious trimmed scrub grass looked like a brick cube someone had added a gabled roof and ornamental white pillars to as an afterthought. Several attempts at sculpted topiaries dotted a crushed granite path running the length of the property, though Fiona couldn’t guess what they were meant to look like.

A collared mare who was in the middle of trimming one of the patchy shrubs looked up at them, nodded once, then resumed her work. Down the path and nearer the house, an earth pony wearing an identical collar busied himself scrubbing one of the mansion’s wide wooden steps. She’d almost forgotten she’d asked Aurora a question at all until she startled her by answering.

“Talk to anyone who looks like they have something to say,” Aurora said, her attention no less captivated by the slaves toiling away behind a richer set of iron bars. “See if we can’t shake something loose.”

As they walked, the boulevard finally came to an end and branched off in either direction in the form of narrower but no less impressive neighborhood streets. With the crowds behind them and nothing but quiet sidewalk ahead, Fiona wondered whether they’d be forced to start knocking on doors or to just simply turn around.

To make matters worse, finding someone on Snob Hill willing to talk to two random strangers proved difficult. Fiona watched an older couple take notice of them from a distance, slow momentarily, then very deliberately cross to the opposite sidewalk. The couple stared, muttering to one another as they passed the same patch of street. Fiona only caught a few words. None of them were pleasant.

A wagon pulled by a team of collared earth ponies clattered along the quiet road filled with empty wooden barrels and what was clearly a vendor stall that had been broken down for the day. The late afternoon breeze scooped a few bits of loose corn husk from one of the barrels and deposited them across the smooth pavement.

Aurora watched as one of the husked rasped toward them, tumbled onto the sidewalk, and slipped through the bars of the adjacent fence. An old stallion whose collar looked several sizes too large for his neck noticed the little intrusion and briefly scowled at them before stopping his work to chase down the litter.

“So many cheery faces,” Fiona mused under her breath. “How can I pick just one?”

Like the old, broken roads of the far wastelands, trust wasn’t something the people residing on Snob Hill gave away freely. Aurora wondered whether the kitchen worker who’d suggested they come here might have done so knowing the chilly reception they’d receive.

No, she decided. More likely they were simply experiencing the reason why this slice of New Canterlot had been given such an inspired name.

The wagon which was still in the process of dropping husks behind it slowed and turned left down the next intersection. When Aurora and Fiona reached the crossing they watched it roll west toward a distant wall of green.

“Who builds a ritzy neighborhood next to a cornfield?”

Aurora found herself wondering the same thing. “Someone who still has wagons coming in from the city center.” She tipped her nose after the shrinking wagon. “Maybe someone there will talk to us.”

“As opposed to peeking between the curtains? Can’t hurt.”

As they crossed the street to follow the wagon, another appeared back the way they’d come and overtook them a few moments later. Two collared mares didn’t so much as spare them a glance as they hauled their load up the road’s slight incline, a white lipstick of foam clinging to the corners of their mouths as they struggled against their load. Several more barrels and crates jostled between the sideboards and, as they overtook them, a bored looking stallion sitting with his hind legs swung over the open backboard noticed Aurora and Fiona and nodded in acknowledgment.

“No collar on that one,” Fiona remarked as the wagon creaked toward the far fields.

“Nope.” Aurora all but spat the word, her thoughts already returning to the slaver camp on the outskirts of Kiln and the ponies they’d freed from cramped rebar cages. Not for the first time she wondered what had become of them and whether they’d exacted punishment on Quincy’s deluded attempt to foil his own rescue.

“Oh dang,” Fiona said. “Do you smell that? It smells good.”

For a while she didn’t smell anything unusual. Just the same non-odor of road dust caught up in the breeze and the slight, musky tang of Fiona’s body. She lifted her own wing and gave her feathers a cautious sniff. She winced. She racked her memory for the last time she’d showered only to recall Discord’s water closet from several days prior.

Aurora felt a split second of concern that Fiona might have gotten a whiff of her, but the gryphon’s attention was pointed straight ahead to the nearing fields. As they reached the last block of cookie cutter mini-mansions and approached the wall of sickly yet plentiful crops, a stray current of wind bent the immature stalks toward them and Aurora caught the faint, sweet scent they carried.

The division between Snob Hill’s maze of big, uninspired houses and open farmland was too abrupt not to be planned out. There was no transition, just a two lane road rolled out between them. An image formed in her head of Primrose sketching out maps of what would become New Canterlot as she tried to work out the best way to organize her future citizens in a manner that would somehow, inexplicably fuck with their lives. It certainly seemed like something she would do.

They watched the wagon ahead turn off onto a gravel access road tucked between the fields and disappear among the pale fronds. As they approached the gap they spotted the wagon, now several dozen yards up the access road, stopped for the moment while the stallion who had been lazing about on the open hitch now worked to latch a heavy wooden fence gate back into place. The mares hauling the wagon would have their work cut out for them. The remainder of the short road was all uphill.

Aurora felt guilt eating at her as they continued on by. This wasn’t Kiln.

Soon the vast cornfield on their right changed to less conspicuous vegetables while the big houses on the left gradually shed their grand, iron fences in favor of the picket and painted variety. Snob Hill was clearly behind them now as they spotted a trio of unicorn foals playing chase across two connected yards, oblivious to the strangers passing nearby. Somewhere, music played through an open window and the sounds of clattering pans hinted at a late dinner being thrown together.

Fiona let out a low whistle and pointed out into the fields. “Now that’s a mansion.”

Aurora followed her gaze and felt her own expression slacken a bit at the size of the home that rose up like an island of luxury among a low sea of scraggly bean cultivars. Even at half a mile away the mansion looked too big for anyone sane to live in. This had to be one of the houses the kitchen worker had mentioned. For all intents and purposes it looked like a giant had stomped into New Canterlot, gathered up three of the nearby mini-mansions, and slammed them all together into one disjointed mess of a home. It all but screamed look at all the caps I have.

“I made something that looks a lot like that in my old welding class,” she commented. “I had to retake the test.”

Fiona laughed. “Yeah, I don’t know anything about welding but I think if you made that I’d make you retake it too. Someone was indulging in some serious chems when they designed that place.”

She smiled, watching as the scrubby rows of bean plants stopped at a low rock wall on the other side of which began row upon long row of narrow-trunked trees with distinct purple stains to the otherwise green leaves. Aurora found herself musing at the strange orchard, wondering whether the bruised shade was natural or some kind of mutation. A dozen or so collared workers strained with baskets and ladders to sort out the ripened plums hidden among the dense canopies, their muzzles and hooves stained dark from hours of picking. One of the enslaved ponies working near the fence line caught Aurora’s gaze as they adjusted their ladder, the light of the low sun glinting off the ring clamped over their horn.

Aurora realized she was staring and looked away, trying to focus on the road ahead.

She noticed the sign as soon as she did. It swung on the lazy breeze from a heavy crossbeam fixed to the top of two poles, forming an archway that bridged the gap in the fence made by the crushed gravel road that snaked through the orchard. Aurora hadn’t been aware she’d stopped until she heard Fiona call to her. Then Fiona was beside her again, a palm on her shoulder, trying briefly to figure out what was wrong until finally looking up and reading the tastefully decorated signboard for herself.

Fiona pieced it together quickly and tried to pull her along, away from the sign and the storm of emotions rumbling to life within her. She tried to ply her with reassurances, but Aurora didn’t move. She didn’t hear her. Her attention remained fixed on that sign and the fleeting glimpses of the large plantation style home between the trees.

“Aurora,” Fiona urged, her beak all but pressed into the cup of her ear, “let’s go back to the inn, okay? Let’s go back.”

Her wing pressed down along the smooth lines of her rifle, feeling it there against her side. One step. A second one. Then, without preamble or warning, Aurora started walking up the path to the home that forced a teenage mare out into the wasteland.

Chops had experienced many strange things over the past few weeks, but sitting across a desk from a Steel Ranger Elder and the former director of security for Minister Primrose was easily the most disorienting one so far. The two stallions had regarded him with silent interest while he scribbled out note after note trying to explain his thinking. His feathers had begun shaking from frustration and sheer nerves, causing Coronado and later Clover to pass back a slip of paper for help understanding his wingwriting. Too much adrenaline and too many rules of his old life being recently overturned had made a mess out of his usually neat, compact lettering and soon one of the deputies was sent out to hunt down a terminal.

The brief pause had given him just enough time to settle the worst of his nerves before two positively ancient units were hauled in and set to face both sides of the desk. A badly kinked cable was socketed between them and with some fiddling of a tiny switch, the deputy slaved the terminal aimed at the two high ranking officers to the one facing Chops. A generic word processing window was opened between them and Chops went to work recapping the idea he’d been struggling to convey.

For several minutes there was no sound except the harried clicking of an old keyboard and the lazy drone of air recycler fans. His epiphany was too new, still forming a shape in his mind, and so he filled paragraphs where a few sentences would do. Green text bloomed across both screens before, mercifully, the shaggy former security director reached out with one wing and stayed Chops’ own.

“I think what you’re trying to say is if we steal the minister’s thunder and claim the Steel Rangers found SOLUS first, it may force her into making a public appearance to refute that claim,” he summarized.

Chops frowned, then nodded as he typed, “Yes. We divulge everything we know about SOLUS including the communication window that’s coming up.”

“May 1st at around 23:00 hours,” Coronado supplied. “According to Aurora’s dream vision, at least.”

There was the slightest shade of doubt in the Elder’s tone that Chops chose to ignore.

Clover noticed as well. He leaned into the back of his chair and scratched his lip, staring at his terminal thoughtfully. “Since the bomb exploded, all Primrose can reasonably know of the situation here is what her scouts can reconnoiter from the air. They’ll have seen the renewed Ranger presence and the supplies being brought in by the wastelanders and either assume there’s a rescue effort underway or the Elder Coronado is actively competing with scavengers for the Stable’s technology.”

Coronado’s expression soured at the mention of him possibly following the original plans laid out by his predecessor Coldbrook but didn’t comment.

Clover continued. “An announcement like this,” he gestured at Chops’ proposal, “would tip all of our cards at once. We would be not only telling Primrose that we have detailed access to the Enclave’s most closely held secrets, but that we’re actively taking measures to subvert them in real time. If she suspects someone in her circle is feeding information to Stable 10, the renewed attention has every chance of putting the evacuations at risk.”

“Not to mention the danger to Ms. Pinfeathers if she goes the other way and correctly assumes her memories are being served up through the Dream.” Coronado shifted uneasily in his seat, his crooked horn glowing as he picked a pen up from the desk and gave it a few nervous clicks. “If she instructs her soldiers in the capitol to watch for mares fitting Aurora’s description and they find her, she’ll know we’re aiming for assassination and go straight into hiding.”

Chops could sense where this was going and tried not to let them see he was clenching his jaw with frustration. Everything they had said was irrefutably correct. Broadcasting a claim that the Steel Rangers were preparing to take control of SOLUS was a single-use, all-or-nothing gamble. It would spark panic throughout the Enclave and cause no small amount of false hope across the wasteland, and in doing so it would clear the board of all the deception and subterfuge military leaders like Coronado and Clover were used to having in play.

They would be telling Primrose that they knew, and the only pieces left on the board was her and them.

But, if they were lucky, she wouldn’t see the hook hidden within the bait. The Steel Rangers would not only claim to own SOLUS but threaten its use on New Canterlot itself if the Enclave didn’t agree to surrender, and the panic caused by that flimsy ultimatum would force Primrose to make a public announcement where her fearful followers could gather en masse. She would appear before the pulpit in the Chapel of the Two Sisters as she had time and time before, radiating the same calm confidence that had propelled the Enclave out from beneath the ash and rubble it had created.

Primrose wouldn’t be able to resist.

And yet Chops could see the two stallions with the power to make that decision hemming and hawing, because experience and training wouldn’t allow them to do anything else. He grimaced, blew out a wordless sigh, and started typing.

“The wasteland will burn if we don’t act,” he wrote, wingtips clicking harshly over the keys. “The Stable wouldn’t be evacuating if we thought Aurora and Fiona were going to succeed on their own. They need our help. What I’m suggesting will put a lot of good people in danger, but the alternative is we cross our feathers and hope Primrose doesn’t get hold of a superweapon we can’t stop.”

He paused to look up and see Coronado and Clover chewing their respective lips as they followed along. Both looked as if they’d swallowed something bitter. Neither of them moved to interrupt.

“New Canterlot is in broadcast range of the radio transmitter on Blinder’s Bluff. It’s a well-known secret throughout the Enclave and radios there will still be tuned to its frequency. Primrose will be forced to take the stage to contain the panic.”

Clover’s chair creaked. “And if she doesn’t?”

Chops was silent for several seconds before he typed out his answer.

“She’s the leader of the Church,” he wrote. “She’ll have no choice.”

From the front, the Dressage family home looked almost reserved despite its open display of wealth. White clapboard siding matched the narrow white pillars framing the front portico, which shielded a small yet elegant porch space. Off to one side of a traditional oaken front door a single wrought iron chair sat by an open window. Tissue-thin curtains wafted in the gentle breeze, unperturbed by the arrival of visitors. Beyond the big house stood several smaller yet no less impressive outbuildings as well as a reserved area for half a dozen identical wagons waiting for the morning when they would bring the day’s harvest into the city.

Clean white gravel crunched noisily underhoof as Aurora walked up the long drive to the stairs leading onto the open porch. One of the boards creaked under her weight, betraying the presence of a rusted nail somewhere. Above the door two bulbs glowed in their fixtures, the leftmost just a little dimmer than its pair. For all Aurora knew this could be the status quo but something told her they were evidence of a wealthy family experiencing a steady decline.

The porch groaned when Fiona mounted the steps behind her. She barely noticed.

“This is not a good idea,” Fiona warned, her beak brushing the cup of her ear.

“I know,” she whispered, and knocked three times.

Her hoof had barely lifted from the wood when the door pulled back, revealing a skinny earth pony with what appeared to be a permanently sour expression. He stood in a spacious foyer that extended rearward into a hall that briefly narrowed to accommodate a stairwell and its impressively detailed bannister rail. From where Aurora stood she could make out the ornate frames of several large paintings interspersed with smaller, textureless photographs. Dark wainscoting paneled the bottom third of every wall, making the gold and white patterned wallpaper stand a little brighter.

The servant, because what else was there to call a stallion who had answered the door so promptly in a buttoned suit jacket, paused for the briefest moment to regard Fiona with a spark of surprise. Then, with deftness borne from years of practice, he shifted his startled gaze to the outer surface of the door as if to suggest Aurora’s hoof may have dirtied it. Finding nothing, he returned his half-lidded, disapproving stare to them as if the arrival of an armed pegasus and gryphon were an everyday matter.

“Good afternoon,” he said with a deferential bow. “Pardon me, but I don’t believe we were expecting guests. May I ask the purpose of your visit?”

Flowing scrollwork and a narrow band of gemstones ran the circumference of the servant’s collar, catching the light in interesting ways as he spoke. Aurora hadn’t stopped to consider whether there was a hierarchy among the enslaved ponies, and now she suspected that was at least the case here. Usually her first instinct would be to find a way to make that work for her, but her mind wasn’t anywhere near clear enough to attempt anything conniving. It was everything she could do to keep her heart from beating its way out of her chest.

“We’re here to talk to…” she trailed off, realizing far too late that she didn’t know the names of anyone here. With this stallion eyeing her she couldn’t just throw together a convincing lie, so she went with the only option she had: honesty. “We’re here to deliver a message on behalf of Ginger Dressage.”

The servant’s brow crept up a full inch. He considered them for several seconds before nodding once and pulling the door fully open. “Come inside, please.”

Next Chapter: Chapter 50: SOLUS Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 27 Minutes