It was as cold as the surface of the Moon, empty and dark.

Dust slept on the silver floors and surfaces. There was a photograph on the desk that looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in centuries.

Every shelf in the library was crammed full. Economics and science books, yes, but also adventure stories, fantasy novels, mystery and romance paperbacks. Twinkleshine found a first edition of The Mystery of Rainy Lud, one of her favorite books. The pages were yellow and the ink hard to read in places, but the binding was in good repair. This wasn’t the library of somepony who dog-eared her books.

The others were exploring their own favorite sections. The emptiness kept anypony from straying too far. For a time, everything was forgotten: the cold, the dark, the fear, the silence.

They waited a long time down there.

---

“A private table,” Twinkleshine said. “Thanks, Party Platter.”

The hostess gave her a perfect smile. The reservation list for Qua, the fanciest and most expensive restaurant in Manehattan and therefore Equestria, extended over one year into the future. Any openings were filled almost in the same moment.^* Even Princess Celestia had to write the day before to make sure there would be a table open for her.

^* The efficient market hypothesis was first generated by an economist trying to get a reservation at Qua.

“Wonderful,” she said. “I’ll put you down for sometime next year.”

There was a subtle shift in the way Twinkleshine was standing. Without really seeming to do anything, there was a cock to her hips, a bat to her eyelashes, a tease of something more at one corner of her smile.

“Tonight, please.”

“I’m afraid we’re totally booked.”

Twinkleshine sighed inwardly. Something might have sighed back.

Burn up inside.

Twinkleshine closed her eyes and opened them. The look she gave Party Platter was…hot.

“Please?” said Twinkleshine.

Party Platter stared back, her face flushed red and her pupils dilated. Twinkleshine counted the seconds for her to recover. She was up to eight before Party Platter glanced down at her guestbook, blushing, and drummed her pen nervously against it.

“I-I could move some things around—”

“I know you can. For me.”

Party Platter fought back a dumb smile. “Wonderful,” she managed. “Perfect, Twinkleshine, that will be no trouble.” And the Buckings have a table for six tonight. Let's see, I could move the Riches to tomorrow night, they’re bringing their daughter though, what about Coco Pommel? But she’ll make such a scene, why must you do this to me, Twinkleshine?

“We’ll want wine, something old, I’m thinking. Three tasting menus. No disturbances.”

“Of course, Twinkleshine.”

“We’ll arrive at seven.”

“I can’t wait!”

And as Twinkleshine left, Party Platter realized that she couldn’t wait. Twinkleshine was pretty enough to make a straight mare break up with her boyfriend. Infamously, this had actually happened as part of Twinkleshine’s legendary first week in Manehattan. Manehattanites were always attracted to the latest and greatest, and Twinkleshine and the new Daughter Bank were definitely both. Add to that Twinkleshine’s gorgeous ivory coat and full pink mane, her expensive lifestyle, and her wit, and she was swiftly becoming a genuine celebrity.

Maybe I’ll move Fancy Pants, Party Platter mused. Oh, heck, somepony’s going to be mad no matter what.

---

“This place is cute!” Minuette said. Under her breath, she whispered, “I’m underdressed.”

“You look great,” Twinkleshine assured her. “I haven’t seen you in so long.”

Minuette was distracted by the tasteful, modern glamor of Qua, dark tables and silver walls. There was a great view of the city from the second floor, the street lights glowing like enchanted baubles on a Hearth’s Warming tree.

“It’s stunning,” Minuette sighed.

“What are you talking about?” Twinkleshine grinned, moving next to her. “You live in Canterlot. Manehattan is just part of the silver ring holding that great diamond up.”

“But this is the city of poets and artists and musicians. If I want statues and fountains, yes, Canterlot, but what if I want smoky air and a beat rising from the street corner?”

Twinkleshine laughed. “Then stick to your Mane Hatter stories. Here you’re more likely to get a lungful of some bum’s breath.”

“What about the beat?”

“Okay, the music is pretty good here. But I hate jazz.”

They laughed, then Minuette sighed again. “But it really is lovely. I’d trade with you in a heartbeat, but I could never be in charge of a Daughter bank. You don’t know how excited we were when the news of the Daughters came out—I mean, it’s not like all of us dropouts keep in touch or anything, but wow, to think it was our cohort.”

They sat down while Minuette kept talking.

“It’s been fun, and kind of annoying, being the ‘expert’ on the Daughter banks at my job. But I’m sure I don’t really know what really goes on inside one.”

Fishing for information already? Twinkleshine unfolded her napkin and motioned at the waiter for glasses and wine. You can take the mare out of the school, but….

But Minuette, you’re a dropout. You don’t know, none of you know, the gap between regular prodigies and us Nine.

“It’s busy,” Twinkleshine said. “Try this, it’s a Chateau, uh, something or other. All I know is that it costs a lot and it’s supposed to taste like chalk.”

“Chalk?” said Minuette in disbelief.

“Oh yes, chalk is a sign of good quality. I’m completely serious.”

“I can tell by your face that you are!” Minuette laughed as the waiter poured her a glass. “I can’t imagine how far in advance you must need to get a reservation at this place.”

Twinkleshine smiled slightly. “So did Moondancer tell you when she was getting here?”

“You know her. She’s always late.”

“That’s a habit she got from Twilight. Twilight never came to anything I invited her to.”

“Just be happy Moondancer is coming at all.”

“I know.”

Moondancer showed up into Minuette’s second glass of wine, bent to one side under a heavy bookbag. Her hair was as much of a multicolored mess as ever, although done up in a severe bun like she was a librarian or a schoolteacher.

“Sorry I’m late. I was reading about the restaurant in the paper on the subway and missed the stop.”

Twinkleshine got up and hugged Moondancer. “It’s fine, I knew I’d either have to ban reading material from the city or wait for you. If I were really smart I would have told Minuette to come half an hour later than what I told you.”

Minuette and Moondancer embraced as well.

“It feels like so long ago that we were all starting in the same class in Princess Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns,” Minuette said.

“It was long ago,” Moondancer said. “Look at us. We have jobs and go to reunions. We’re old!”

When they were all seated and had a glass of wine, the waiter brought them their first course. In between bites of foie grass, they swapped information about their lives. Minuette did financial planning for the government, and Moondancer was a librarian at the royal library.

“You get paid to read!” Twinkleshine said.

“I get paid to read,” Moondancer agreed, and laughed.

Twinkleshine told them stories about life as part of the elite cohort of Princess Celestia’s academy. She stuck to funny stories, like the time one of Nova’s experiments escaped from its cauldron and hid under her bed and refused to leave until they agreed to let it die, or the time when Gamma forgot algebra while giving a practice lecture and stared at a simple system of equations for an actual minute, completely blank.

They asked about the Daughter bank, and Twinkleshine told them about her meetings with Door Avenue executives and what it had been like cleaning up the monetary mess after Nightmare Moon. She had them both choking with laughter when she told them how she had caught the manager of Manehattan’s largest hedge fund staring at her rump during a gala, and how she had spun that into a major concession regarding financial regulation.

“You always were gorgeous,” Minuette sighed, staring at a picked-apart bowl of lightly salted sprouts in some kind of foam sauce. She had finished her third glass of wine, and she was considering a fourth. Twinkleshine had to be breaking the bank on these fancy bottles, but it was a sacrifice well worth making, in Minuette’s increasingly slurred opinion.

Twinkleshine glanced at her. “I've been talking through most of the dinner. I’ve hardly tasted these, um….”

“Charred asparagus with tomatillos in a radish-infused dressing,” said Moondancer, who didn’t forget anything after she had read it once. Hadn’t been enough to keep her from begging Twilight to let her drop out, Twinkleshine thought.

“Yeah, that. Come on, it’s like having a conversation with Twilight. I’m doing all the work here.”

“So how is Twilight, anyway?” asked Moondancer, sounding very casual.

Twinkleshine hid a smile behind a sip of wine. “I haven’t seen her since the NGDP Targeting Festival last year. I mean, I get letters from her, all the Daughter banks send correspondence.”

“Oh, and what about Trixie?” said Moondancer far too quickly.

“What about Lemon Hearts?” Minuette said.

Moondancer’s face darkened. Twinkleshine waved over another bottle of wine.

“I don’t know,” she said as she took a sip from something gold-colored and rare. “She still lives in Canterlot, doesn’t she? I haven’t seen her in years, I’m embarrassed to say.”

“I dropped out earlier than Moondancer, so I don’t know exactly what happened,” Minuette said. “Lemon Hearts won’t talk about it. Part of the reason I came here is because I was hoping you would want to come clean.”

She had said the wrong thing. She knew it by the crack in Twinkleshine’s perfect face and perfect smile. For just a flash, Twinkleshine looked ready to kill.

“I wasn’t involved,” Moondancer said. Twinkleshine turned that demonic stare on her, but Moondancer was looking down at her lap and didn’t notice. “I was already on my way out then. But I heard about it, and I knew about that kind of thing from the girls in the cohorts ahead of us. Minuette, they hurt her.”

Twinkleshine calmly regarded her glass of wine while Moondancer told Minuette what she had heard, of how Twinkleshine, Twilight, and a few others had torn into Lemon Hearts’ mind and practically turned it inside out.

“Amazing how events get exaggerated over the years,” Twinkleshine said. “We just teased her like we teased everypony, and she couldn’t handle it.

“That’s not what I heard,” Minuette said. “I heard it was worse.”

“You heard wrong. Lemon Hearts and I were friends. Why would I want to hurt her?”

“I don’t know. Why did you?”

Minuette felt a twinge of fear. Was she pushing too hard? Twinkleshine’s face was becoming fiercer, yet strangely more beautiful. There was a hint of fire and shadow in her eyes, something that didn’t look like it belonged in their world.

“I got hazed too,” Twinkleshine said. “We all did. It was part of being Sisters.”

“She never was a Sister,” Moondancer interrupted. “She dropped out before she made it.”

“Neither of you were Sisters,” Twinkleshine said with open contempt. “Lemon Hearts wasn’t going to make it. We helped her figure that out.”

She looked through lidded eyes at her glass of wine. “If not for us, Lemon Hearts would have been broken on the first day of real school. We saved her.”

“From what?” Minuette demanded. She was trembling.

“From an education,” said Twinkleshine, and drained the glass.

She looked at Minuette, who was looking at her with a mix of disgust and concern.

“We used to be friends. Remember? It was the six of us,” Minuette said. “Us three, Lemon Hearts, Trixie, and Twilight.”

“Trixie and Twilight had a falling out,” Moondancer said quietly.

“I know about that, everypony knows about that. I mean everypony; ponies at my work asked me about it after Twilight was in all the newspapers for saving Equestria. But what about the rest of us? How did we drift apart?”

“You dropped out.”

“I know that, Twinkleshine. What I’m saying is, don’t you remember? That time in the One Bank, in the Silver Room, where we….”

They were trapped. And yes, they were afraid. But the empty silver corridors that trailed in a dozen different directions had an odd, calming presence. It was the sheer nothingness of the place. Nothing alive had been inside it for a long time.

“It was so fun finding it,” Moondancer said. “When we were trapped inside the Bank, I was scared. But it was also nice, because I had never been with ponies like….”

“Like what?”

“Like myself.” Moondancer lowered her eyes, embarrassed. “I mean, Twilight and me especially, but with all of you. I hadn’t even known I was lonely.”

“We weren’t alike,” said Twinkleshine coldly. “Some of us became Sisters.”

“Stop it!”

If they hadn’t been in a private room, Minuette’s shout would have drawn the attention of the entire restaurant. As it was, Twinkleshine stared at her, frozen by Minuette’s flashing eyes.

“You are not better than us,” Minuette said. “You toughed it out, that was all. It’s not even intelligence, not mostly. You were just willing to stick it out. I didn’t want to be a Sister, okay? I didn’t want to be.”

“You really think you could have been?”

“You should know you can’t tell preferences from ability—”

“As if ability won’t predict preferences—”

“Shut up. Shut up. Celestia above, shut up.”

The door opened. The waiter came in to clear some plates and bring new ones. Twinkleshine’s gaze remained fixed on Minuette.

“These are stuffed bean pods with rosewater and white lily petals,” the waiter said. “Enjoy.”

He left. Twinkleshine blinked and looked away. “Eat,” she said.

Twinkleshine lifted the delicate lips of the pod to her mouth. She caught Minuette’s eye when Moondancer wasn’t looking.

Keeping her eyes on Minuette, Twinkleshine extended her tongue and licked along the edge of the pod. Her tongue slid up the pod and inside it, feeling around the inside of the walls. Her lips met those of the pod as she slurped and sucked, the pink rosewater spilling down her chin. She pushed deep with her tongue, pulling a wet, creamy lily petal into her mouth and swallowing. Her eyes never left Minuette the whole time.

Moondancer hadn’t noticed, absorbed as she was in her typical self-distraction from the world around her whenever it was inconvenient.

Minuette had noticed, and she looked away. She was quite cute when she was afraid, Twinkleshine thought.

Dessert and more wine followed. Twinkleshine cracked some jokes, and the mood lifted a little. She was able to get Minuette to smile, in a nervous sort of way, and Moondancer ate most of the cucumber sorbet.

Stumbling over each other, they staggered outside and shivered in the frosty night air. The wine in their stomachs was warming, but the sudden way the air knifed through their clothes was capable of piercing even the shield of alcohol.

Leaning against each other, they went into an alley by the restaurant and sank against the wall. Moondancer squeezed her eyes shut, trying to focus herself.

“It’s way later than I expected, and I planned to take the train back tonight,” she said. “Um, this was f—it was good catching up with you two. Twinkleshine, say hi to Tw—to Trixie and Twilight for me the next time you write to the other Daughter banks. Bye, you two….”

They watched her disappear into the evening gloom. Then, quite suddenly, Twinkleshine kissed Minuette on the lips.

She grinned as Minuette jerked back. “I always thought you were cute, Minnie. Ever since first year.”

“I have a boyfriend,” Minuette said.

“Me too.” Twinkleshine leaned in again.

Minuette pushed her away. “I’m serious.”

“I can do a lot better than you, you know, I’m the most important pony in Manehattan. I know you think I’m pretty. I saw the way you looked at me while I licked that bean. I could try the same on yours.”

“Stop.”

“Or what? You’ll have me arrested? You’ll fight back? I’m the most powerful pony in Manehattan. Come back to my place, I guarantee you’ll enjoy it, Princess Cadance has books about how to do that.”

Minuette trembled against the wall, but her voice remained steady. “I don’t know what reaction you want. You want fear? I’ll cower. You want me to admit you’re stronger? Fine, you’re stronger. Are you proud of this? Being able to do this to me? You, a great Sister, over me, an early dropout? Princess Celestia would be so impressed.”

Twinkleshine grabbed Minuette in a pink magical glow and shoved her against the wall, forcing her head back. “If you apologize, and beg a little, I’ll still make you enjoy it.”

Minuette couldn’t answer. Her throat was being constricted.

“What’s that, Minuette? I can’t hear you talking now. That way you spoke to me inside there, I knew how you wanted it to end up. You wanted me to remind you that you’re a little girl, and I’m your Big Sister.”

Something black cracked from out of the air against Twinkleshine’s head. She stumbled back and whirled as Moondancer, horn glowing protectively, approached from the alley entrance

Twinkleshine dropped Minuette, who wheezed and collapsed to her knees. She glared at Moondancer, breathing furiously.

“You just struck the chief executive economist of a Daughter bank of Equestria! I’ll—”

“If I don’t send a second letter to somepony I will not name by tomorrow morning, then she will send a letter to Twilight Sparkle saying that you did to me what you helped do to Lemon Hearts,” Moondancer said rapidly. “So no, you won’t do anything.”

“You sneaky bitch,” Twinkleshine said, panting. She felt a surge of power from within, but winced and forced herself to calm down. No use killing somepony over a little joke; she wasn’t so drunk or so angry to forget what really mattered. “Fine, I can respect that.”

She grinned and winked at Minuette. “Me and Minnie were just playing around. I think she had a little too much to drink. Write to me again, Minnie, the next time you want to catch up like this.”

“Come on, Minuette,” Moondancer said quietly. Once Minuette was behind her, Moondancer turned as if to leave, but Twinkleshine called out.

“Why did you double back?”

“Because I know what you did to Lemon Hearts.”

“You heard about a prank that Twilight and a few others, and yes, I did.”

“I know what you did because Twilight told me! If I left out any details, it was only because it was hard to make them out through Twilight’s sobs!” Moondancer turned fully and faced Twinkleshine. “What happened? The Sisters are supposed to be the finest economists, the foremost scientists of friendships, why are you all like this? Nasty and vicious and controlling and cruel and demanding and neurotic and paranoid and completely incapable of normal relationships!”

“Are you describing your ideal lover, Moonface?”

“What happened in your cohort, after the rest of us dropped out? It was never this bad, and then it got so bad.”

In the darkness, Twinkleshine’s eyes were sunken and black.

“We did what orphans do. We raised each other.”

“You needed a mother.”

“Yes, some of us.” There was an air of unconcern in Twinkleshine’s voice as she started to walk away. “But make no mistake, Moondancer, Minnie. You two didn’t choose to leave the family tree. You fell off the branch.”

She walked deeper into the alley, and out into a street she didn’t know, a part of the city she didn’t recognize. A normal pony would have been scared, but Twinkleshine would have welcomed an attacker.

The Silver Room had been cold and dark and quiet. Twinkleshine blinked muzzily in the daylight before the golden, glorious form of Princess Celestia.

Minuette started to cry. Lemon Hearts hugged her, and Trixie exhaled a shaky sigh of relief. Twilight was staring at Princess Celestia with utter devotion. There were books fallen and scattered all around Princess Celestia, and even Moondancer didn’t so much as glance twice at them.

Princess Celestia spent a while with them after, with donuts and warm drinks for the six of them, as she answered their questions and soothed them with magic. And she told them:

“There is power in friendship, and I suspect the six of you have become good friends today. It is auspicious, I think, that there are six of you.”

She smiled, as radiant as the Sun. “This was your adventure today. Remain friends, and I suspect you six will have more of them.”

But that was a long time ago, and Twinkleshine had long since let go of childish things.

Next Chapter: Goodnight Sun Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 17 Minutes