“Oh sweet fucking Celestia, this thing smells bad!”

Twilight nodded in agreement as she and Dash hauled the alicorns body towards the closest external door of the train coach, a slick trail of black blood following behind them as whatever fluids that had been in the alicorns body discharged themselves onto the floor. But the smell wasn’t the only discomfort they had to deal with. Pieces of burnt skin kept flaking off of the alicorns body, like charred newspaper.

As they reached the door Dash pulled the down and then leaned out, gripping the handle in her hoof and opening the door, fighting against the force of the wind. Twilight took a moment to wipe her brow.

“Shouldn’t we check its pockets?” She called over the roar of the wind as it sped past, Dash shook her head.

“There’s no time, Cutter.”

“But it might have something we could use!”

“There’s no time!”

The train was passing over a lattice work bridge, passing one of the points where some impossibly ancient cataclysm had chipped an enormous crevasse into Canterlots megastructure, ripping open a tapering cleft that ran all the way down to the next ledge below them.

Dash hopped over the alicorns body and together the two mares pushed the creature out of the open doorway. The body tumbled like it was a bundle of rags, all four legs flailing as the trains forward momentum snatched it away from them. Twilight had just enough time to watch as the alicorns body slipped between the rails and began to plummet into the dark void below them, the night swallowing it up entirely.

There would be precious little left to recognise once the body hit the ground again, of that Twilight was sure. She’d seen the corpses of enough fallers to know that as soon as the alicorn impacted with the next ledge, leagues below them, the force of the blow would send its limbs popping out of place like some sort of grotesque jigsaw puzzle. Briefly, she imagined that body of the alicorn would paint a confusing picture for some counterpart of herself down below, a striving young pathologist working in whatever was Ponyville’s equivalent of the Third District Morgue.

They were dealing with the body of the dead stallion when one of the partition doors down the length of the coach slowly opened, the heads of two of the rowdy business ponies cautiously peeping out. They were followed shortly after by the mare who had been sitting with her filly in the next compartment down.

None of the three said anything.

They simply looked from Rainbow Dash to Twilight, at the remaining dead body with a hole punched straight through its chest, and then at the gory display of carnage that had been painted on the walls and floor of the coach.

“Nothing to see here, Folks,” Dash said.

As one, all three returned to their compartments.

“Perhaps ... perhaps we shouldn’t throw this one overboard.” Twilight spoke quietly, tapping the stallion’s body. The pony had died with his eyes wide open, and those self same eyes now seemed to look up accusingly at her, as if even beyond the grave the stallion held her responsible for his death.

“What do you care?”

“He was innocent in all of this, just a pony in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we throw him down to the next ledge, nopony will ever know what happened to him. He might have friends and family for all we know. We should leave him here and just let someone find him.”

“Yeah, great idea, Cutter, and when they find him your hoofprints are gonna be all over him.”

“Rainbow Dash, trust me when I tell you that’s the least of my concerns right now, Twilight told the mare, purposely omitting the fact that her hoofprints had been deliberately altered to make them nonspecific, making a true match hard to prove.

They pulled the stallion into an empty compartment and hefted him up onto one of the stained seats. Propped up in one corner, eyes still open and with a gaping hole in his chest, there was no way that the stallion could be taken for anything else than a corpse. But at least he wasn’t lying face down in the corridor anymore.

“Still another ten minutes to Trottingham Court,” Dash muttered, pulling up her sleeve and examining her watch. “After all the commotion, something tells me this coach ain’t the safest place for us to be right now. We need to find an empty compartment and lay low, and I mean real fucking low.”  

“Do you think there are anymore alicorns onboard the train?”

“Cutter, if that thing was an alicorn it sure as fuck wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before. I mean seriously, the fucker didn’t even have any wings! And where the fuck was its horn?” Dash gave Twilight a sidelong glance. “Cutter, are you really sure you know who’s coming after you?”

“It was an alicorn,” Twilight told her as they began making their way to the back of the train, attempting to look as inconspicuous as a pair of ponies could when they had bodily fluids staining their faces. “It just wasn’t like the ones we’re used to seeing when they’re flying around up in the Celestial Levels. The alicorns have been trying to find a way for them to survive outside the boundaries of the Levels for decades now, possibly even centuries. That thing – the ghoul – was one of their deep-penetration agents, surgically altered and genetically adapted to be able to function down here.”

“Haha, deep-penetration.”

There was a long moment of silence.

“Oh yeah, that’s right, Joe’s not here to tell me to shut up!”

“Dash, this is very serious!”

“Never mind,” Dash sighed. “Look, Cutter, I don’t really know a whole lot about genetic alter-whatever, but that thing looked half-past dead to me.”

“That alicorn was dying the moment that he crossed the boundary out of the Celestial Levels. But just the simple fact that they managed to create an agent who can operate this far down is a very significant advancement for the alicorns.”

“You seem to know a lot about these Post-equine fuckers.”

“When they’re trying to kill you, you make a point of studying your enemy.” Twilight paused momentarily as they passed a washroom. “Dash, I need to get this muck off my muzzle before we go any further, do you mind?”

“Just don’t take all week, Cutter.”

Nodding, Twilight pulled the door open and slipped inside, locking the entrance afterwards. A light in the ceiling automatically flickered into existence, bathing everything in a sickly yellow. She took a moment to steel herself before she hesitantly reached up and removed her glasses, staring at herself straight in the mirror. She tried to match her face against that of the ghoul’s, trying to tell herself there was a whole world of difference between her and that thing.

When Twilight had first come to Neon Heights, all those long years ago, she’d been able to pass for a regular pony in daylight. But now, after she had been forced into exile and cut off from home, she was beginning to revert back into an alicorn. At first it had just been the little things, like small lumps of mane falling out that she’d been able to comb-over, and when the purple tint of her eyes had began to deepen unnaturally she’d taken to wearing glasses.

Turning the tap on, she dabbed away at the blood and gore with some soap and a few scratchy paper towels. Her skin felt as if it was stretched perilously tight over the alien bone-structure of her skull hidden beneath, and that it might snap at any moment. Twilight had been around Pre-equines long enough to know that she was starting to look more than a little bit weird.

Half-past dead.

Taking a deep breath, she reached behind her back and began to slowly feel her way across her coat, searching for where the hard ridge of her forelegs formed her shoulder blade. It wasn’t there. Instead, she felt a soft, cancerous bud of flesh. There was one on the other side as well, the two perfectly symmetrical with one another.

For now the buds weren’t likely to give her any trouble, as to the untrained eye of the casual observer they would look like nothing more than just a bit of excess fat on her shoulders. But Twilight knew full well that within little over a month’s time they would become noticeable and that it wouldn’t take much longer afterwards before the pinions began to properly develop.

But that wasn’t to say she hadn’t tried to stop them

For years she’d practised a kind of chemotherapy on herself, dosing herself with a potent cocktail of drugs in an attempt to hold the reversion process at bay, and when the drugs had begun to fail she’d been forced to go back to Donut Joe.

Black-market surgery, performed in a squalid, filthy annexe of Joes Donuts, had kept the wing buds at bay. Every twelve months, the buds had been meticulously cut away, the wounds stitched and bandaged. Then, it had been jumped up to every six months as the growth rate had begun to accelerate. Then every three.

Now she was overdue.

≤ΘΘΘ≥

By the time Twilight and Dash had disembarked the train and made it to the platform a steam train, forged in the likeness of a snorting iron black dragon, was already being backed up into place where previously the internal-combustion locomotive had been. The machine snorting smoke as its boiler was heated and the coal fire stoked, preparing for the next leg of the journey towards the boundary.

Everything happened with stopwatch precision, fixed to a routine that hadn’t changed in centuries.

“Maybe we should have stayed onboard,” Twilight said to Rainbow Dash in a hushed voice as they followed a group of other disembarking passengers away from the platform and into the station hall.

“Either way it’s a risk we’ve gotta take, Cutter,” Dash muttered back, her eyes subtly glancing across the hall, searching for any signs of danger. “Yeah, we could’ve stayed on the train, but at least now we aren’t trapped with nowhere to go if another ghoul shows up.”

From somewhere behind them came the shrill scream of a mare, followed by shouting and the growing commotion of hooves as guards rushed to the source of the disturbance.

“Sounds as if they’ve found the body,” Twilight muttered, more to herself then to her companion, as she made a conscious effort to alter her stride.

“You can look back if you want, Cutter,” Dash told her in a low voice, her eyes still looking all about them. “Everypony else is, after all.”

Twilight nodded before she snatched a wary glance back over her shoulder. Passengers and station staff were gathering around the carriage where their confrontation with the ghoul had taken place, including some of the rowdy business ponies they had seen earlier. Though she couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, Twilight could see that there was certainly a lot of enthusiastic shouting and hoof-pointing going on.

An elderly pony, white whiskers on his muzzle, began to blow loudly on a metal whistle, the blasts seeming to form some sort of code as they echoed off the vault-like height of the stations metal roof. As she watched, Twilight saw two stallions emerge from the coach, carrying between them the barely conscious form of the guard, his head lolling from side to side in a comical manner.

“That’s them!” came a loud cry, Twilight feeling her blood chill as she saw one of the business ponies pointing towards her and Dash, singling them out from the crowd. “They did it! They killed that stallion! I saw them!”

Twilight turned around slowly, trying to look agreeably perplexed as if she had no idea of what she could possibly be accused of. “Is something the matter?” She began, but her voice trailed off as she realised she didn’t even sound very convincing to herself.

“Stop there,” Another stallion called out, a black bearded, uniformed figure who might have been some sort of senior guard, or perhaps even the station master. That was when she noticed the insignia set into the button on his uniforms lapel.

“Shit!” Dash hissed. “The Conversion Bureau!”

The stallion began to unbuckle some sort of object from his belt, advancing steadily on the two mares with a grim look in his eyes. As he pulled the object free it was revealed to be a long nosed service revolver, which the stallion began to level at his targets, the gun unwavering in his grip.

“Stop!” he proclaimed in an actorly fashion, his voice raising to a deep boom. “Stop or I will shoot!”

“Well, this isn’t going to end well.” Dash muttered as she began to pull up her sleeve.

“Dash, no!” Twilight hissed, grabbing the mares hoof. “No more killing, please!”

A single, echoing shot rang out through the station as the stallion with the revolver fired a warning shot up into the vaulted roof, disturbing the night’s audience of roosting bats and birds, causing an explosion of sooty wings to fill the space above them. “This is your last warning! One more step and I will shoot!”

Faster than Twilight could think, Dash whipped her hoof free and flung something towards the stallion. For a brief moment Twilight had the absurd notion that she’d thrown a piece of candy or some sort of glass ball at the bureau agent. But when it landed at his hooves it exploded in a bright flash of light, the concussive boom it made even louder than the earlier revolver discharge.

The air began to fill with a thick, choking cloud of blue-white alchemical smoke, blocking off the stallions line of sight as those caught in the gases blast-radius began to hack and cough. Dash tossed a few more into the melee for good luck before she spun on her hooves and bolted for the door.

“Fucking peg it!”

Twilight followed behind the pegasus, her saddlebags suddenly seeming a lot lighter as the slapped against her flank. Around her hoof the alicorn gun made a noise that sounded like a cross between a bleep and a harsh whine, as if it sensed the threat of combat.

The two companions fled from the platform area and passed through a wide double doorway into the ticket office, their hooves ringing loudly on the black-and-white tiled floor as they galloped past late night commuters, who were only just beginning the register that something was going on by the platforms.

A station official, more alert than most, spotted them as the dashed across the room angling for the door that led outside. Slamming down the hoofset he had been holding back into the holster of a wall mounted telephone he bolted across the room, bravely attempting to interpose himself between the two fugitives and their escape route.

Growling, Rainbow Dash drew out her machine-pistol and fired a burst from the fresh magazine she had loaded on the train. The weapon spat out a tongue of blue fire, and a hail of bullets smashed into the tiled mosaic set above the door, directly over where the guard was standing. A hail of shards and ceramic chips rained down on the stallion, who was forced to shield his eyes from the fragments for fear of becoming blind.

Twilight risked another glance over her shoulder.

The bearded agent from the Conversion Bureau wasn’t far behind them, his gait stumbling as he still attempted to wear off the effects of the smoke grenade. He paused for a moment; head lowered as he wiped his brow and tried to catch his breath, before resuming his pursuit. Other officials – not to mention several passersby – were hard on his heels.

Just then, Twilight registered something odd about one of the passengers sitting in the waiting room.

With elegant, unhurried calm, the earth pony folded up the newspaper he’d been reading and placed it down onto the vacant chair next to him – nopony else was sitting anywhere near him – and slowly rose to his hooves. He was clad in a long grey trench coat that was cinched tightly around him, covering up most of his grey-white coat. A wide-brimmed hat sat on his head, tilted to prevent anyone from getting a clear look at his face.  

The ghoul slowly reached into one of the pockets of his coat with a black-gloved hoof, as if he were searching for a cigarette lighter.

Twilight felt some part of her mind seize up, even as her legs propelled her forwards. She still had the alicorn gun strapped tightly around her hoof, the weapon emitting a faint bleeping noise every few moments, but she daren’t risk taking a shot at the alicorn. As sparsely populated as the waiting room was, there was still a chance that she might hit someone. Also, the growing crowd of ponies chasing after her was beginning to block off any chance of a shot at the ghoul, who was now beginning to walk out of the room with a leisurely pace, his spindly legs giving him a long stride.

From underneath the brim of his hat, a black-toothed smile began to appear.

“What the fuck are you doing, Cutter?!”

Twilight was snapped back to the current situation as she felt Rainbow Dash seize her hoof and drag her out through the stations double doors and into the night. But before the two had even felt the cold air on their coats, the service revolver roared once again.

Rain fell down on Twilights face, clear and cool where it had fell from the sky, dirty and muddy from where it had sluiced down from one of the higher levels. For a moment the world was a massed confusion of cars, cabs, trams, and slot buses. The air was filled with the patter of rain, the honks of cars on the slots, the loud, electronic voices emanating from the neon advertisement boards high above, and the shouts of the mob chasing after them.

Twilight stood transfixed, seemingly unable to even will her body to move.

Rainbow Dash didn’t seem to be having the same problem. Singling out one of the cabs that was pulling into the pick-up zone outside the station, she ran straight for it, forcing the driver to slam down on his brakes to avoid running her over. The pegasus flung open the passenger and stood by it, yelling obscenities at the top of her voice until Twilight had dashed over and climbed inside before climbing in after her and slamming the door shut.

“Drive!”

“Where are we going?” the cabbie asked in a calm voice, spinning round in his seat to look back through the glass panel that separated him from the back of the cab.

“Just drive!”

“Dash!” Twilight panted, unused to so much physical exertion. “I think I saw another ghoul.”

“Fuck me! This day just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it!?”

As the cab began to pull away, Twilight glanced through the back window of the cab. As she watched, the ghoul emerged from the station, taking less than a second to notice which cab she was in before beginning to slowly make his way to one of the other taxis lined up outside the building.

Then a slot-bus swerved up behind them, blocking off her view. When it had cleared, all the unicorn could see was a confusion of blindingly bright headlights.

Upfront, the cabbie was still pestering Dash with questions on their as of yet unspecified destination, and the mare was still replying with the same answer. “Just get us away from the station.”

Knowing that if Dash refused to give an answer the cabbie might begin to ask questions, Twilight reached into her saddlebags and fished out a small bag of bits. “We can pay you. Just take this up front.” She reached up to the small partition in the glass panel

The driver snatched up the bag without any protest. “Sure thing, Miss, but it’d still be nice to know where exactly we’re headed.”

“Hit a right here,” Dash answered.  

The driver yanked hard on the steering wheel, directing the guide wire of the vehicles pick-up shoe into the diverging slot. The cab jerking sharply as it followed the shoe. The cab sped down a small side road, lined with cheap hotels and low rent tenement blocks. This wasn’t a prosperous area of Neon Heights by any standard, being as close as it was to the boundary with Geartown and the edge of the zone. Nopony lived here if they could afford to live further up the spiral, away from the boundary and the risk of being caught in a zone shift if the boundary went into flux.

“Take a left,” Dash told the cabbie, looking out of the back window of the taxi.

The cab veered sharply in response, swinging out of the side road and back into thicker traffic. As they cleared the bend, Twilight saw a set of headlights swing onto the side road. “Dash, I think we’re being followed.”

“You fucking think?”

“I saw the ghoul going for another cab, and someone’s just come down the alley we’ve just been in.”

“Shit! You, hit another right!”

Ignoring the pegasus mares language, the stallion simply shook his head. “Nope, can’t do that. It’ll take us too close to the boundary.”

Rolling her eyes, Dash pulled up her sleeve and tapped the barrel of her gun against the glass partition. “Just do it!”

The cabbie turned around, and upon seeing the gun gave Rainbow Dash an unimpressed look and simply shrugged, as if he probably saw this kind of thing once or twice at the least every shift. “Look, Lady. I don’t care what shit you’re gonna point at me, but there’s no way I’m taking this cab closer to the boundary. Besides, it’s not like you’ll get anywhere, we’ll be off the grid in a couple of block.”

“Has this thing got flywheels and batteries?”

“Of course.”

Dash flicked off the safety switch on her gun and pressed the snubbed nose of the barrel against the glass, right behind the stallions head. “Then do what I say, Crotch Stain.”

Deciding not to risk taking a bullet to the back of the skull because of some crazy mare’s demands, the cabbie shrugged and took a right at the next intersection they passed through, taking the cab down a long, dark street lined on either side by abandoned tenement blocks, windows boarded up and doors locked tight.

The ride became rougher as they progressed, and not just because of the poor condition of the asphalt under the tires. Years of dirt and garbage, combined with a lack of enthusiasm on the behalf of the Public Department of Waste Management, had caused the slot beneath them to become filled with compacted garbage cluttering up the electrical path.

The vehicle kept surging in spastic bursts of speed as the pick-up shoe beneath them kept loosing contact with the traction current, the flywheel coming to life with a coughing spit of jerks and squeaks. Twilight glanced back. They had already come a fair way down the street, and so far nothing as of yet had turned off the main thoroughfare behind them, perhaps she might have been wrong about them being pursued. She sighed with faint relief, half-believing that she was right.

A pair of headlights swung onto the street.

“Dash!”

“I know!” the mare tapped on the partition with her gun. “Oi! Which way is the boundary?”

“Straight ahead.”

“Then keep going. Cutter, see if you can take them out, prove to me what a badass you really are.”

Twilight nodded and began to wind down the window of the cab before halting. “Dash, I can’t do it! What if I hit the driver?”

“Then fucking improvise!” Dash glared at her, eyes wild and angry with suppressed emotion. “Aim for the slot, see if you can burn it out.”

Twilight twisted round and leaned out of the window, raising her hoof slowly. The alicorn gun – which had been beeping the entirety of the ride – unpacked in the blink of an eye, emitting a faint whining as it did so. Further down the street the other cab was slowly gaining on them, headlamps flickering every time the pick-up shoe hit a blockage in the slot, blue sparks lighting under it as the current in the slot jumped the gap.

With the unsteady, surging motion of the cab, Twilight had problems keeping her aim, the unpredictable leaps in speed meaning that every time she lined up a shot, she would suddenly be jerked out of position. Gritting her teeth and steeling her nerves, Twilight aimed one more time for the slot and fired the weapon, expecting another brilliant lance of crimson energy.

Nothing happened.

Twilight felt her heart seize up as it seemed her best form of self defence had finally ceased to function. Squeezing the trigger again, the gun fired and sent out a lance of energy. The unicorn mentally sighed to herself, but she couldn’t help but notice that there seemed to be less brilliance in the beam this time.

However, none of that seemed to matter, as her shot had missed the slot, instead blowing out a manhole-sized crater in the tarmac. Twilight re-centred her aim and tried again, but once more the weapon remained unresponsive. With a growing sense of dread, Twilight pumped the trigger a few more times, but to no effect. On her final pump the gun fired once more, but the beam seemed to sputter out of existence as soon as it had appeared.

Twilight pulled herself back into the cab, hoping that the hole she’d blown in the tarmac might slow the other cab down. But as the vehicle passed over the hole it continued forwards, its own flywheel and momentum carrying over the empty stretch.

“Dash, something’s wrong with the gun!” she half-yelled, shaking her hoof as if it might make a difference. “It’s dying on me, but there should still be at least a few hours of life left in it!”

“Ask it what’s wrong,” Dash said, her voice baffling calm given the situation. The mare leaned out of her own window and took aim, firing a long burst from a pistol, uncaring about whether she hit the slot or the cab. She exhausted the magazine in one burst and then slumped back into the cab, pulling a fresh one from one of the many pockets in her coat.

A single shot from the following cab rang out, puncturing a perfect hole dead-centre in the rear window and the glass partition before exiting out of the front window.

“Oh shit!” the driver shouted, ducking down low against the wheel. “Who the fuck did you two piss off this much!?”

“Shut up, I’m trying to shoot here!”

“Look, Lady. This ain’t my problem, just get the hell out of my cab and you don’t have to pay. I’ll even give you your bits back.”

“If you stop driving, I will do a fucking pile-driver on your nuts and then shoot them!” Dash shot the stallion a look in the rear-view mirror before she leaned back out the window and resumed firing, the fact that she was holding the weapon out of the cab being the only thing that stopped Twilight from being deafened.

“Come on, you stupid thing!” Twilight cried, waving her hoof around. “You’re not working, why?!”

“My earlier estimates were based on the theory that the current zone conditions would remain stable.” the weapon responded, its voice slower and much more mechanical-sounding than before. “I have detected that we are about to make a transition into a lower-state zone. Because of this my operational effectiveness in energy discharge mode is now... twenty-two percent and... falling. I will become inoperable in... thirty-five... minutes. Functionality will be... severely compromised within... eight minutes. In order to preserve optimum functionality... I am now sacrificing... all... nonessential... all nonessential functions... nonessential fun fun fun...”

The gun fell silent.

Two more shots rang out from the following cab, Dash replying with another vicious burst of bullets. Twilight, unsure about what to do, took a gamble and leaned out of her window and pumped the trigger repeatedly until the gun emitted a single pulse of the crimson beam. This time Twilight didn’t care about what she hit. Someone in that cab was trying to kill her.

Twilight thought that justifiably eclipsed all other considerations.

Suddenly the cab swerved hard to the left, sending dash flying back into the vehicle where she slammed into Twilight flank. “Did I tell you to make a fucking turn?” she growled, swapping in another magazine.

“I had to, the slot was about to end!” the cabbie replied.

Dash cursed something unintelligible and fired a single shot through the partition, just missing the stallion’s ear. “Make a right turn.” she said, before leaning back out of the window and firing again. The stallion whimpered and turned right, the pick-up shoe disengaging from the slot as the cab surged forwards on the stored energy in its flywheel. Two more shots clanged loudly against the right-side door and then they were in the shelter of another dark street. At first the flywheel gave them an edge of speed, but the contraptions slowly dying screech attested to the fact that it was losing power all the time.

Twilight looked back again and was unsurprised when she saw a pair of headlights appear at the top of the road, the headlights themselves dimming as the following cab came off-slot and lost current. She leaned back out of the window again and tried firing the alicorn gun again, but nothing happened until the fifth or sixth pump, and even then all she got was an ineffectual flash of crimson and little else.

The cab slowed, the tires beneath it screeching as the driver was forced to swerve around the abandoned husks of cars that had been left parked on the abandoned street, metal kissing metal as the fender collided with the other vehicles in a storm of sparks and a series of agonised squeals.  Each time they lost momentum the flywheel seemed unable to push them back up to their previous speed.

Twilights only consolation was that the following cab had to go through the exact same thing.

“We can’t go any further!” the stallion up front called, desperation beginning to taint his voice. “Shoot me if you want, but we’re about to hit no-pony’s-land. From now on we’re gonna start feeling the boundary.”

“Keep driving, Crotch Stain,” Dash said, leaning back in to reload her gun.

“I’ll black out; I’m no good with zone shifts!”

Twilight leaned back in and dived into her saddlebags, digging around through the contents until she produced a stoppered bottle of white pills. She tipped out six onto her hoof and passed two through the hole in the partition to the driver. “Take these,” she said in the most commanding voice she could muster.

“Are you trying to poison me or something?!”

“They’re antizonals. You’re going to cross the boundary with us anyway, so you may as well take them.”

Dash swept up two of the pills and shoved them into her mouth, swallowing them in one gulp. “Do what the pretty mare says, Crotch Stain, you’ll live longer.”

With one hoof on the steering wheel the stallion held the pills up to his lips, hesitating for a moment before he popped them in and swallowed.

“We just need to get to the other side of the boundary,” Twilight told him as the stallion gulped down the pills. “After that you can make your own way back to Neon Heights. The pills should help you stave off the worst of the effects of the zone transition.”

“I feel weird!”

“That’s the transition, not the pills. It’ll take a couple of minutes before they come into effect.”

As she spoke, one of the electrical watches on Dashes hoof began to buzz loudly, alerting them to the imminent transition about to occur. Twilight glanced back, feeling a knot tighten in her stomach. She could already begin to feel the physiological effects gaining strength. She felt lighted heated and was beginning to sweat, her heart racing in her chest. At the edges of her mind she began to feel untethered inside her own skin, as if the anchor that kept her soul in her body was threatening to snap.

The transition between Neon Heights and Geartown was mild, she knew, especially compared to the one Shining Armour would have had to have gone through when he had plummeted from the Celestial Levels. All Twilight could do was hope that the transition might have a similar effect on the ghoul in the following cab, who must already be stressed from his own descent from the Levels. But if Twilight had once been an alicorn then so to was the ghoul, which meant that if she could take the transition, chances were that so could her pursuer. It seemed to her that the only thing she could do was put her faith in Faust, her physical resilience, and her medical judgement coupled with the arsenal of chemicals in her saddlebags.  

It wasn’t much, but it would have to suffice.

The high pitched whine of the flywheel began to die into a low, complaining moan, the cab now only maintaining half the speed that it had possessed when it had come off the slot. At the end of the road, the buildings began to thin out into a desolate no-pony’s-land. Almost nothing still stood intact; any buildings that had once been here before the last zone shift having long since succumbed to weather, rot, and fire – not mention the occasional intrepid pillager – leaving only the barest shells remaining.

Twilight felt a slight shiver in her spine as she remembered Caramels stories of zone mutants.

On the other of the wasteland – the strip of land now curving away in either direction, following the gentle curvature of the spiral – was Geartown, a tentative margin of low, dark buildings lit by the warm orange-yellow of gaslight lanterns.

Twilight looked through the back window, hoping to see some sign of the other vehicle abandoning the chase, but it was still behind them, and seeming to gain ground as well. The rutted, barely serviceable road beneath them had reduced their speed to little more than a brisk jogging pace. Twilight wasn’t really surprised by the condition of the road. Vehicular traffic between the zones only really occurred further up the spiral, at locations like Circuit City and the Cyber Polities where the modes of transportation were similar enough to allow such movement. In locations like Neon Heights, the populace preferred to use public transportation services such as trains and elevators, all of which had been painstakingly engineered to withstand multiple transitions during their operational lifetimes. Twilight felt the knot in her stomach suddenly tighten as the sensation of the transition began to increase, nausea sending her head whirling and bile threatening to rise at the back of her throat.

Then it came.

There was a single moment of absolute soul-rending chill, as if billions of tiny doors had opened up inside every cell in her body, letting in the icy draught of creation.

And then they were through.

The cab lurched and stalled under them, the engine coughing and screeching before resuming its ailing progress. Twilight felt the sensation of the transition begin to ease, but even as they slowly ebbed away she couldn’t had but shake the feeling that something profound her changed within her. After all, this was the first time she had left Neon Heights in nine years.

“I ... I don’t feel so good,” The driver said, his face visibly paling.

“It’ll pass, for now just keep driving,” Twilight told him. From somewhere under them came a heavy, metallic crunching sound, followed by a violent shuddering that caused Twilights muzzle to smack against the partition.

“Rainbow Dash!”

“I know.” The pegasus leaned back in through the window, seeming none the worse despite the transition. “Relax, Cutter. The flywheels just seized up, it probably couldn’t handle the transition is all.” The mare banged on the partition. “Oi! Switch to the batteries!”

The cabbie threw a switch on the dashboard, another clunk emitting from under them as he did so. “I switched, but they’re not gonna get us very far.”

The engine resumed its hesitant progress, the electrical transition system in the batteries emitting a shrill whining noise. Another shot smashed through the rear window, punching another hole through the partition. Dash leaned back out, yelling some obscenity that Twilight couldn’t understand as she fired back at the following cab. This time the burst from her machine-pistol abruptly ended with a grinding sound, the tongue of fire coughing once before disappearing.

“Shit!” Dash leaned back into the cab gritting her teeth as she fiddled with the safety switch and banged the weapon against the door before trying to fire again. The gun gave one final, short burst before it jammed once more. “Everything’s quitting on us!” Dash growled, pulling the weapon off her hoof and chucking it out the window. “And that was my favourite gun as well!” muttering to herself, the pegasus reached into her coat and pulled out a long nosed, black revolver.

“Dash, I think they’re slowing down.”

“Try the alicorn gun again.”

Twilight leaned back out and pulled the trigger, but no matter how many times she pumped the mechanism the gun refused to fire, the weapon seemed to be totally inert. Twilight thought about chucking the weapon away, but some impulse told her to hang on to it and she leaned back into the cab. Most technologies malfunctioned when they passed from a high state zone into a low state zone, but for all she knew the celestial weapon might have some function that allowed it to heal itself, or at least affect some kind of temporary recovering at the least.

“Dash, the cab’s stopping. Maybe the ghouls decided to–” Twilight didn’t even have time to finish her sentence before one of the pursuing cabs front doors was flung open, ripping off its metal hinges and flying loose as the ghoul emerged, its spindly legs coupled with its grey trench coat evoking the image of some monstrous spider emerging from its burrow.

There was no sign of the other cabbie.

“You were saying, Cutter?”

The ghoul paused to reach back into the cab for his hat, pressing it down on the bald, grey-white dome of his head. He started walking, taking determined steps away from the abandoned cab, his long legs rising and falling in exaggerated, puppet-like strides. After a few steps he raised a hoof and shot at the cab with a revolver.

“He’s gaining on us,” Twilight said.

“Crotch Stain, stop the cab,” Dash told the driver, her voice calm yet determined.      

The cabbie looked back at her, his expression incredulous. “Stop?”

“Stop.” the stallion was about to protest, but before he could open his mouth, Dash brought up her revolver and shot through the glass partition, punching a smoking hole into the dashboard to emphasise her point. The cabbie snatched his hooves away, yelping as the cab came to a jerking halt.

Dash booted open the passenger door on her side, climbing out as proceeding to empty the revolver into the ghoul, the revolver barking over and over with each metal slug that left the barrel. The figure of the ghoul stumbled back, raising a hoof to his face as his hat blew away in the wind but he only paused for a moment before resuming his advance, raising his head to show that one of Dash’s shot had gouged a bloody furrow through the right side of his muzzle.

Cursing, Dash fired once again, but the ghoul just wouldn’t go down. He kept coming on, limping on one side as his right hindleg dragged across the floor, the ankle twisted at a sickening angle. Raising a foreleg, he fired at Dash, the shots chiming discordantly against the open door and smashing the rear window to pieces. All the while Rainbow Dash seemed oblivious, calmly swinging open the revolvers cylinder to reload, even as one of the ghoul’s bullets whipped through her mane. Halfway through her task she paused and dug into a pocket of her coat, pulling out a small, feminine revolver that she passed to Twilight.

“Is it loaded?”

“Push the trigger and find out. You do know where the trigger is, right?”

“I’ll manage.”

Through the remains of the screen, the cabbie called out. “Lady, you got anything for me?”

“Advice, shut up and keep your fucking head down!” Dash said before she began to empty the revolver again, the long nose of the barrel jerking with every shot she fired. The bullets ripped holes through the alicorns coat and flesh, yet the Post-equine seemed to absorb the shots like the pegasus was doing nothing more than chucking gravel at him.

Twilight leaned out of her window and fired her own revolver, the weapon kicking back with fierce recoil that was belied by the guns small exterior, but even then she got nothing more than the impression that she was shooting at a mirage, some insubstantial figment of her imagination that had never been real.

Then – just when she was starting to think that nothing they had was going to anything more than slow the ghoul down – the ghoul staggered again, a savage shriek tearing from its throat as one of Dash’s shots blew away part of his hoof, the same one that had been holding the revolver. The ghoul tumbled to its knees, reaching out with its good foreleg to grab the gun before staggering upwards and onwards, continuing to shoot.

He had now crossed half the distance between the two cabs.  

“Cutter?” Dash asked her voice near flat as she took aim again. “What the fuck is that sound?”

“What sound?”

“The one coming from the gun around your hoof.”

Twilight really had too much going on in her mind to notice the noise until Dash had pointed it out, but now that Dash had drawn her attention she found it impossible to ignore. The weapon was beginning to buzz around her hoof, and the buzzing was getting louder, as if some increasingly angry wasp was rattling around inside, furious at its imprisonment. Suddenly the weapon became hot, so hot that Twilight yelp and shook her hoof, trying to fling the weapon away. There had been no transitional phase, one moment the metal had been cool around her hoof, the next it was threatening to sear her coat if it was left on for even another moment. As she watched a pink glow had begun to leak from the previously invisible seals where the weapon had fused together.

“Cutter, I think you better do something about that gun.”

“I can’t, it won’t come off!”

Twilight dropped the revolver as the weapon suddenly became hotter around her hoof, a sear pain shooting through her foreleg as if the gun was trying to consume her. She cried out loudly, falling through the door as it collapsed under her, depositing the mare roughly on the hard ground. The weapon was beginning to rattle around her hoof, as if the mechanisms inside had malfunctioned to the point of self destruction. Twilight raised her hoof and was about to slam the gun against the side of the cab when the rattling came to a halt and a cool, soothing sensation began to work its way into her hoof.

“Cutter!” Dash snarled, as another shot punched the ghoul in the chest with little effect. “Chuck that damn thing before it blows us up!”

Twilight still had her hoof raised, and was about to smack the gun against the metal of the cab before something made her stop. With an unsettling sense of dynamism, she felt the weapon change around her hoof, its form altering into a subliminally new, but profoundly different form. Twilight felt suddenly struck by a conviction that the weapon had just completed some sort of larval transformation from an energy-discharge device into a more primitive state of being.

What was unsettling was that this sudden realisation didn’t seem to come from anywhere except the gun itself.  

She raised her hoof, gritting her teeth as a spasm of pain from her rough landing danced up her spine. Taking the ghoul in her sights, she took a breath and squeezed the trigger.

There was no lance of crimson, but there was certainly a result.

Even though her aim had only been approximate, most likely off by a few inches, Twilight could have sworn she felt the gun twist her hoof, correcting her inaccuracy. There was the sudden, numbing blow of force as the recoil travelled up her foreleg, followed by the crash of thunder of a bullet as it was released from the weapons firing chamber. For a few moments afterwards Twilight could hear nothing but ringing, but as the noise faded she was greeted only with silence.

And as for the ghoul, well, he was certainly not coming any closer.

Silence settled over them, until it was suddenly broken by the crunch of Dash’s hooves on the gravel of the road as she slowly approached the point where the ghoul had been standing, her revolver raised as she warily scanned the ground in front of her. Twilight got to her hooves and pulled her saddlebags out of the cab, putting them back on before trotting to catch up with the pegasus.

“Do you think he’s dead?” Twilight asked as she approached Dash, who had come to a standstill. But when the Unicorn reached her, she saw that there was no need to vocally answer her question.

Scattered in front of them, like some sort of jigsaw of spoilt meat and grey, gristly flesh, was all that was left of the ghoul. The pieces spread out in front of them in a clear funnel pattern, each nothing more than a chunk of pink-grey meat. All of them were faintly steaming, and Twilight could see no sign of bodily fluids anywhere. The safest bet was that whatever projectile that had been fired at the ghoul had simply evaporated all his internal bodily fluids on impact.

Dash prodded one of the chunks with her hoof before stomping on it and grinding it into the dirt. “Yep, Cutter, I’d say that’s a fair bet.”

“I... I didn’t expect him to get as far as he did” Twilight muttered as she glanced across at the scattered remains, mentally reassembling the parts that hadn’t been totally blown out of all recognition. In her mind’s eye, she could see how the ghoul was able to function, how his body had been able to cope with the stresses of an alien zone.

The ghoul had been an alicorn once, before knives and genetic intervention had remodelled him for life below the Celestial Levels, down with the filthy Pre-equines. It was the same kind of forced adaptation that had been worked on Twilights own body, but with far less elegance and refinement.

If Twilight had been remade with watchmaker precision, the ghoul was a disposable cigarette lighter by comparison.

“You think this was a suicide mission?” Rainbow Dash asked, holstering her revolver back inside her coat.

Twilight thought back to Shining Armour, the alicorn who had sacrificed itself in order to warn her of the dangers that hunted her. She looked down at the alicorn gun. Her hoof was shaking. “Most likely, yes.”

“What made them come down here if they knew they were going to die?”

“Belief, I suppose, the burning conviction that they were acting correctly, serving the true cause. But I don’t think it was just belief alone that made them do this, they probably also had their minds reconditioned with psychosurgical brainwashing in order to overcome their survival instinct.” Twilight paused, glancing to Dash to find that the mare was staring at her. She studied the pegasus’ expression, searching for the slightest clue that she knew about her true nature. “It’s all entirely feasible, Rainbow Dash. You’d be amazed at what they can do up in the Levels.”

“You know a lot about how they operate for a pony who’s never been to the Celestial Levels.”

“Like I said earlier, it helps to know them when they’re hunting you.”

Dash found another piece of meat and kicked it idly with her hoof. “Good call about the gun, by the way. You were right not to listen to me.”

“I didn’t really have much choice; I can’t seem to get the thing off my hoof.”

“But still. Good job, Cutter.”

“Can I get that in writing?”

“Quit while you’re ahead, Cutter.” Then Dash doubled over and wretched a thin stream of vomit over the ghouls remains. “I fucking hate alicorns!”

Next Chapter: V: A trip to the spa-house Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 2 Minutes