Reach

by ToixStory

First published 16th of March, 2013

One hundred thousand years forward in a magic-less future, museum employee Starlight travels across the industrial country of Teton to locate the first unicorn born in millenia. What she will find, however, is far beyond her imagination.

The world has changed in one hundred thousand years. The magic that once shaped life itself has faded into myth and legend. An age of industry has set upon the flightless and hornless ponies who now populate the world. Great metropolises of steel and brick rise from the republics and monarchies that dot the planet. In the seaside city of Gracia, sparkling capital of the Teton Republic, a young museum worker named Starlight makes her living in this brave new world, oblivious to the magical heritage that dwells inside her and the ponies around her.

That is, until one day when an earthquake in the west prompts Starlight and her new friends to embark on an adventure to the desert city of Sundown. It is here that an event not seen in tens of eons has occurred: a unicorn has been born.

~

Edited by JustAnotherTimeLord & presentperfect
Art Design by HyperPonyGBX5 & rambled
Produced by DocDelray

Prologue: Tomorrow Comes Today

A warm summer sun washed over the quiet mesas and sand dunes that surrounded the city of Sundown. It was a shining city of downtown high-rises and surrounded by suburban homes made of sandstone. Further out, massive fields of oil wells pumped day and night, bringing bubbling crude to the surface where it was put into barrels and shipped across the country.

The city clustered around one long highway that stretched across the desert valley. It was the same road, the Red Road, that ran across the country, connecting the cities of Teton from sea to shining sea. Though the modest desert city was not the largest, its choice of location had always stood as a testament to the perseverance of ponykind.

Past the edge of the city, in the shadow of the mesas, was a large camp. White tents were scattered across the rocky valley floor and their flaps blew in the restless wind. Ponies ran to and fro through the camp and around the edge of a large building in the center. It was a squat, metal building with heavy rivets that kept it in place over the ground.

Guards were kept posted outside the building at all times, and kept a sharp eye out for intruders. When they spotted the party walking toward them that day, their backs stiffened and nostrils flared. It wasn’t until the oncoming group flashed their badges that the stallions stepped aside from the entryway.

The mare at the head of the small column turned to face her party. She wore a white hat with a wide brim over her golden mane. One teal hoof held it against her head to keep it from blowing away in the wind.

“This is the primary dig site!” she yelled over the ambient noise. “We’ve been expanding on pre-existing mine shafts and wells to expedite the digging process!”

The mare pointed out the building behind her and the logo on it, a phoenix with its talons crossed. With a smile: “By doing so, we have limited the costs to the university substantially!”

A thin stallion in the back, dressed in a blue blazer that hung off his lanky form, raised a hoof in the air until the mare called on him. “But it still is costing the University of Sundown money, Miss Sunny?”

“That’s Professor Sunny,” the mare said. “And yes, but we have alleviated some of the larger costs the university was concerned with by funneling them through national grant programs and private investors.” Sunny beamed. “With those measures, the Department of Hippology is operating with the lowest overhead of any research branch!”

“Yes, yes, we understand, you’re saving us money,” a rotund mare at the front said. “But what the university financial committee is here for today is not cost-cutting, but results. We are all aware of your track record, Professor.”

Sunny glared at her. The corners of her mouth wavered to keep the smile plastered on her face, but she managed. “Yes, of course you are. But I am here today to prove to you that we have done far more here than we could have ever predicted.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” said the rotund benefactor.

Sunny ignored her and led the party through the entryway of the squat building. The interior was lit by bright red lamps to allow for natural night vision should they go out. A platform took up the middle of the room, painted bright yellow and with a security panel on one end. The sound of the crowd’s hoofsteps on the metal echoed around the chamber.

Sunny took up position at the security panel and faced her flock. They milled around, looking for some of what they had been promised. The young mare shook her head and pulled a lever on the panel.

“You all may want to steady yourself,” she warned. “It’s a bit of a ride.”

The platform shuddered and, with a high-pitched groaning noise, began to descend. Dull maroon lights built into the surface of the floor sprang to life, lighting the way for the moving rotunda.

A counter appeared on a digital screen attached to the security panel. Two hundred petra. Three hundred. Four. The sediment and rock around the platform warped and changed. It was darker, more packed together.

They passed another at a thousand petras down, then another at three thousand. The lights flashed over the stone and minerals in eerie silence. The benefactors huddled on the middle of the platform and watched thousands of years pass by in the blink of an eye.

At four thousand petras below the surface, the platform passed by the edges of the old coal mine. The walls were smoother, having been cut away by pony machinery. Below that layer, fossils in the wall appeared.

They were familiar to Sunny, but several of the gathered audience gasped at them. A massive dog-like creature that had walked on both four and two legs was one. The other prominent bone structure was that of some sort of hybrid creature: a flying animal with the back end of a mammalian predator.

Sunny looked away and watched the screen on the panel. It showed oxygen, nitrogen, and other gas levels at optimal down the tunnel. There appeared to be no breaks or leaks. The company had been keeping careful since re-opening the old mine shafts had hospitalized several workers. When the screen read ten thousand petras, she pulled the lever again and the platform began to slow down.

The brakes ground on the side of the shaft, filling the air with an ear-splitting screech. Sparks flew and bounced across the metal floor. Several of the delegates grabbed at their ears and cried out. Sunny just stared straight ahead and waited for the platform to come to a screeching halt at the bottom of the long, dark shaft. Looking above them, the ponies could no longer see the surface, just dark walls that spiraled up into nothing.

In front of the platform was a tunnel carved out of the rock, and lit by more red lights. Sunny hopped over to it and beckoned the crowd after her. “Readings from our sensors went off the charts when we were drilling down here,” she explained. “We have been excavating here ever since.”

She led the group of ponies in a trot down the tunnel, past stacks of excavation equipment and examination tools that lined the passage. Thick wires snaked along the ground, bringing electricity so far underground.

The group emerged out of the tunnel into a chamber in the shape of an upside down bowl. The walls sloped up to meet a point about thirty petras above them, fifteen times the size of the average pony.

“Most of our work has been concentrated here,” said Sunny, “though we have a few other branching tunnels to spread the site. So far, none have been so fruitful.”

The fat mare coughed and spoke up again. “And just what is so fruitful about this chamber, Professor?”

Sunny glared at her. “If you’ll all try to keep up, I’ll show you.”

She led the party across the chamber, toward a grouping of rocks that jutted out from the center of the hall. The boulders rose like spikes toward the ceiling. Large lamps on stands surrounded the site, and boxes filled with tools were piled around.

Sunny took them in a circle around to the back of the rocks. When they reached the other side, many of the benefactors gasped and murmured among themselves. Sunny smirked and watched them fall over themselves, much of their hostility gone.

There was an object embedded into the center of the largest rock among the group. It was a large, glowing crystal, not unusual in the cave, but what was different was the shape. The cerulean crystal was carved into the shape of a perfect heart. The curves were far too sharp to have been made with anything but tools. Somehow, it glowed even when lights didn’t shine on it.

“This is the . . . object you spoke of?” the rotund mare asked.

Sunny nodded. “We uncovered it a month ago while clearing away debris. We’ve been studying it, but the progress has been slow.”

“Has it always been this active?” a stallion asked, moving closer to the heart. It almost seemed to pulse and glow with pale blue light.

Sunny stared at it, and shook her head. “I’m sure it’s just, uh, perfectly normal.”

The stallion reached out a hoof to touch the heart. Sunny saw and galloped over to him, smacking his hoof away and standing in between him and the heart. “No! We don’t touch the artifact!” she barked.

He backpedaled and coughed. “I’m sorry you didn’t make protocol clear,” he mumbled. “Besides, why do I not get to touch the artifact, but you do?”

“What?”

“You’re touching it.” The stallion pointed to her hoof that was pressed against the surface. “Right there.”

Sunny watched the heart begin to glow and pulse, faster and faster. “Oh, so I am.”

A blast of light shot out from the heart, throwing her off and away the heart into a pale blue heap on the ground. She cried out and bit her lip as her hoof glowed bright blue and pulsed with energy.

Ponies gasped and shouted around her. They ran across the chamber away from her, leaving her alone next to the heart. With a grunt, Sunny raised herself to her feet and looked at the heart.

A beam of light extended from the top of the heart to the top of the chamber. Sunny watched as it expanded and rippled. It engulfed the heart and flooded the chamber in blinding light.

Then, the shaking began.

Sunny screamed and hugged the ground. The world convulsed and heaved around her. It spun and thrashed like a newborn child, tossing her in the air before slamming her back into the ground again.

She fought her way across the uneven ground toward the center of the chamber. Her legs threatened to buckle out from under her, so she crawled the rest of the way. The crystal heart spun in the air above her, surrounded by the beam of light.

Sunny grabbed on to a rocky spire and clung to it for dear life. She curled her body around the stalagmite and shut her eyes. She was yelling, but couldn’t hear herself over the noise of the earthquake tearing apart the chamber.

Then, just as quickly as it had started, the shaking stopped.

A few spare rocks fell from the ceiling and hit the ground around Sunny’s head. She stared at the crystal that drifted down to the ground. It touched a bare area of ground next to her and stood on a perfect point.

“What in hades just happened?” she muttered.

The first thing Police Sergeant Carpenter noticed when he woke up was a light fixture swinging on the ceiling above him. The fluorescent bulb flickered and cast a sharp glare on his cerulean coat.

He let out a groan, and the police officer rose to his shaky hooves. He shook off dust from his navy blue uniform and looked around. Slick, tiled floors were cast in a red glow from the hospital’s warning lights. He could hear warning sirens going off all around Sunset General Hospital and shook his head.

The memories came slow to him. Carpenter had been sitting in the waiting room when the shaking started, then he remembered rushing to get to his wife in the maternity ward and then . . .

His eyes widened.

Frankincense.

The name of his wife spurred his memory back and he cantered down the hall once more. The heaviest shocks had hit before he had managed to find the room, leaving him directionless.

Carpenter’s eyes scanned the rooms, looking for any sign of his wife. The burly stallion bit his lip. Each room looked identical to the last in his eyes, and he started to shake.

“Frankincense!” he yelled. “Someone, anyone, help! My wife’s having a baby!”

No reply reached his ears. Carpenter briefly considered the idea that he might have been the only pony in the hospital to survive the quake, but quickly shook the thought away. His hooves echoed in an empty hallway as he ran toward the end of it.

Carpenter ran around the corner and nearly slammed into a group of nurses. They were clustered around an open door and peering inside. When he skidded to a stop in front of them, they all turned and stared at the newcomer.

“Oh thank Solaris,” he gasped. “Can I have some help? Please, it’s my wife! She’s having a baby and—”

One of the nurses stepped forward. “Are you Sergeant Carpenter?” she asked.

He nodded and surged forward. “Yes, I am! Is that my wife in there? Is she alright?”

“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t go in there,” the nurse began. “Your child had some, ah, unforeseen complications.”

“Complications?” Carpenter exclaimed. “Like . . . like what? He’s alright, isn’t he? The doctor told us he was going to be a healthy little colt!”

The nurse put a hoof on his shoulder. “Your child is fine, Mr. Carpenter, but right now we’re not sure—”

He didn’t wait for her to finish. With the assurance that his little baby colt was at least alive, the police sergeant barreled past the gaggle of nurses and into the maternity room. The main lights were off, so the room was cast in an eerie red glow from the emergency lights in the corners.

Carpenter stepped around fallen IV stands and rolls of bandages. His wife lay on a gurney in the middle of the room, away from collapsible walls. Several doctors stood on the other side of the hospital bed, watching Carpenter but not moving to stop him.

The policestallion could see her teal mane matted to her head, his wife’s light yellow coat streaked with trails of sweat. To the new father, though, she looked beautiful.

“Honey, honey, I’m here,” he told her, standing by her side. “It’s okay, I made it.”

She smiled up at him and motioned to the bundle of swaddling clothes lying in her hooves. “This little one did too,” she said. “I think he wants to see his daddy.”

Carpenter bent down and smiled. His wife moved back some of the cloth covering the colt’s face. When she did, the new father’s expression of joy turned to surprise, then horror.

Sticking out of the colt’s tan forehead was something he had only seen in fairy tales: a unicorn horn.

Chapter 1: Lost in the Supermarket

The cold windowpane of a creaky city bus felt cold on Starlight’s head. Early morning light shone between towering glass skyscrapers clustered around downtown Gracia. The bus shoved its way through honking taxis and wayward tourists who managed to wander onto the road.

Starlight reached out an ivory hoof and pressed it against the frosted glass. She traced a little music note before drawing away. She smiled at her creation until the bus jerked to a stop and threw her forward into the back of the seat in front of her.

She grumbled and hauled herself back up. Her violet mane fell over her eyes, and she had to push it back behind her ears. Starlight hated riding the bus, but hated the subway more. Riding a clicking and clacking train beneath apartment complexes and thick skyscrapers wasn’t her idea of fun.

The bus turned down forty-eighth street and sped toward a towering granite building. Sweeping columns held a red-tiled roof over carved stone steps that led up from the sidewalk. “Gracia Museum of National History,” said the gold letters engraved in the building.

Starlight stared at it and groaned. When the bus stopped in front of the museum, she shoved her way to the front of the bus and out onto the sidewalk. Tourists crowded around her, and she had to push her way through them to reach the front steps to the museum. She took them two at a time up to the gold-tinged double doors.

She sprinted inside, her hooves clopping against the museum’s smooth tiled floor. She passed by tapestries depicting wars and hunting, and weaved her way through a hall of panoramas detailing the various cities of the Republic of Teton.

A scale model of Gracia, the capital, stood out amongst the others, a sprawling mishmash of gray apartment buildings and colorful skyscrapers. There were models of the fort city Skyhall, built into the side of a mountain and overlooking Amperdam, the city on the river, and of Sundown, a sprawling metropolis in the desert flats.

Starlight passed by them without a second thought on her way toward the back hallway of the museum. She took a sharp corner and skidded to a stop at her familiar door, only to come face to face with her boss.

His eyes peered at her from his wrinkled, light blue face. “You’re late again, Miss Starlight,” he said. “The children you’re supposed to be giving a lesson to are waiting inside, and getting quite restless.”

“I know, Mr. Staten, I know,” Starlight said. “It’s just the bus this morning and the traffic—”

“No excuses.” The aging museum curator sniffed. “You may be the daughter of my old friend, but I do not play favorites. Be late again this month and I will dock your pay again. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Mr. Staten.”

“Good. Now, get in there and do your job, Miss Starlight.”

Staten turned on his hoof and walked away, head held high. Starlight sighed and opened the door the museum’s rear classroom. Officially an “Education Center,” the goal was for Starlight to entertain the kids with history and keep them out of the hair of their parents.

As Starlight had found, keeping colts and fillies entertained with history wasn’t an easy task.

The children watched her as she walked to the front of the white-washed room. They sat on a brightly-colored carpet, while she pulled out a stool for herself. She reached into a bookshelf on the wall and pulled out a picture book, one of her favorites.

“Hi, kids,” she said in the cheeriest voice she could produce, “today we’re going to learn about history! Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

The foals kept quiet, just looking at her.

Starlight cleared her throat. “It’s a lesson about the founding of this very city!”

She opened the book and began to read.

“. . . and in 1812, after our war of independence against the Republic of Fiorza, the temporary capital of Applewood was burned down by retreating soldiers. So, instead of attempting to reconstruct the old city, the founders of the new Republic of Teton decided to move their capital to the land previously denied to them,” Starlight told them, cracking a smile and making gestures with her hooves in an attempt to make the story seem more exciting.

“So, they moved the homeless ponies out to here and set right to work building this new city. They called it Gracia, as it was given to them by, according to the settlers, the Grace of Adana. Now, today in 2048, this city holds over ten million ponies!”

The foals oohed and aahed at the figure. Starlight grimaced when they showed more interest in the number than anything else. She ran a hoof through her mane, done up in a braid, and turned the page to reveal a simplistic drawing of Gracia at night. The fanciful picture of the city showed it glowing in a million electric lights. The kids smiled and clopped their hooves.

Starlight set the book back with the others once they had calmed down. She looked at the clock. It was nearly one o’clock, almost five minutes after their parents were supposed to pick them up. She groaned. If her gut feeling was right, Booker was late on his tour again.

One of the foals stuck her hoof in the air and waved it around. She didn’t stop until Starlight sighed and called on her. “Yes, you had a question?” she asked.

The little filly stood up. “Could you read us another story?” she asked.

Starlight bit her lip. “Maybe,” she said, “though it’s just about time for you all to go . . . maybe something about Sundown?”

The girl shook her head. “No! Read us something about magic!”

“Yeah!” one of the other foals cried. “About ponies who can use magic!”

“And fly!

“And have pictures on their butts!”

The children began to chatter amongst each other, and their high-pitched voices rang in Starlight’s ears. She grit her teeth. Just about the time the foals got to the subject of whether flying or using magic was better, Starlight clopped her hooves together as loud as she could.

“Enough!” she cried. They quieted down and the attention fell back to her. “Those are all just stories,” Starlight tried to explain.

“They’re wonderful to talk about, but they’re not real. This is a museum of history, which means it actually happened. Nopony has ever flown or used magic or had a picture on their flank.” A chorus of groans met her and she sighed. “That doesn’t mean stories are bad, but you have to remember what’s real and what’s not.”

Luckily for her, Booker chose that moment to arrive with the parents at the end of the tour. The children went streaming out of the room toward their parents and left while chattering about what they had learned, most of which was what they had heard from other classmates instead of Starlight, of course.

Starlight glared at the lithe stallion. “Nice of you to finally show up.”

“One of the old couples just wouldn’t shut up!” he protested.

“Oh, like you’re not late every time. You always just leave me here with . . . with them!”

Booker laughed and started to walk off toward his next tour group. “You know, for somepony who reads to foals all day, you don’t seem to like them very much.”

He was gone before she could get a word in edgewise, so Starlight just huffed and started rearranging the bookshelf. Oh, sure, like it was easy telling kids stories about the Gold Rush out near Sethton when all they wanted to hear were stories about dragons and unicorns and ponies named after their destiny. Heck, at that age, she wouldn’t have wanted to hear about that other stuff either.

Her eyes alighted on one of the books near the back of the shelf. The Case for Celestia. She smiled. Maybe she could spice up the next reading just a little bit. It was a Friday, after all.

Starlight grabbed the book just as another group of foals began to pile in and sit on the carpet in front of the reading chair.

It was the second Friday of the month: payday. After work, Starlight lined up with the other employees in front of a swivel top desk in the museum’s back room. There, an ancient mare who looked to have been installed when the museum opened slid a check across the desk and let them go home. Starlight was behind Booker, as usual.

The line moved forward and Booker became next to receive his check. The mare across the desk glared at him from beneath her sharktooth glasses, but slid his pay across nonetheless. He took it in his hooves and sniffed it, then smiled at Starlight. “Smell that?” he asked. “That’s the smell of the last paycheck before promotion.”

“You finally got it?” she asked.

He nodded. “The decision’s already been made. Starting Monday, I’ll be coordinating all the tours instead of running them.” He waved the check in the air. “Soon it’ll be goodbye knock off pasta and hello discount pasta!”

Starlight laughed as he left and waved after him. Then, she took her place behind the desk. Though the little slip of paper was the cut the same size of Roger’s, she couldn’t help but see it as a tiny little thing. Perhaps it was because half of it would be used up before she could even cash it. Then, the rest would be gone to go to pay for her apartment.

She sighed, accepted the check, and walked past the desk. There was an old row of lockers by the exit door. Starlight reached hers and produced a pink wool overcoat out of it, which she threw over herself. The weather pony had said it was supposed to be chilly out tonight.

Most ponies didn’t mill around the area very long, so Starlight found herself alone in the locker room. That was, until she felt a familiar, morose presence.

“I heard you did quite the job telling fairy tales today,” a raspy voice said.

Starlight turned around to catch sight of Staten, still as old as ever. He looked at her through foggy glasses wrapped around a coat that had started to pale with the years. His aqua mane, too, showed some signs of aging. The grimace on his face, however, was as strong as ever.

“I just figured the children might like to hear some, uh, historical interpretations,” Starlight said. “I mean, I thought you would be okay with it since we got that new exhibit . . .” Her voice trailed off and she gulped.

Staten sighed and shook his head. “I suppose if it doesn’t stray from the records too far it, then it’s alright,” he said. He reached over toward a coat rack and pulled off a black windbreaker and matching hat. “Though, I trust that you will keep those stories at a minimum, Miss Starlight?”

She nodded. “Of course, Mr. Staten.”

“That’s what I like to hear.” He coughed. “Oh, and would you remind your father that my offer to dinner still stands? He doesn’t seem to have been returning my calls lately.”

“I’ll be sure to.”

“You know, that offer extends to you, too,” Staten said. “Outside of work, the daughter of an old friend is always welcome to dinner.”

Starlight gave him her best smile. “I’ll definitely think about it, Mr. Staten.”

The curator gave her a small smile before heading out the door to brave downtown Gracia at dusk. Starlight sighed. Mr. Staten was enough on a normal day, let alone payday.

Starlight hurried to grab her things and whisked her way out the door. Soon she was lost in the crowds walking home from work and just another face among millions.

There was a small supermarket shoved between a laundromat and a pizza parlor just a block from her apartment. With her new check in her pocket, Starlight stopped in the squat concrete store to pick up a few things. Her growling stomach, though, called for more than a few things.

A bell dinged as the double doors slid open and she walked through. She took a basket from a station by the door and set out to prowl down the narrow supermarket aisles. Late in the evening, the customers had begun to thin out, so the little corner store was devoid of many customers other than her.

She took her time to pick out her items: pasta, fruit, and about half a dozen kinds of cheese. She rolled her eyes at the new “gluten-free” products that were being offered for all the ponies riding the wave of the latest diet craze. Sure, ponies were supposed to be herd animals, but Starlight preferred comfort foods that allowed her to lounge around on the couch after work.

As she placed the food in her basket, Starlight took a little time to breathe. There wasn’t too much noise and she had the aisle to herself, so she closed her eyes and let herself get lost in the supermarket, if only for a moment. Until she opened her eyes again, she could forget about the stresses of her job and stave off what was waiting for her back home.

She tried to think about the icy-green waves that lapped at the rocky shore outside Gracia. To think about when her father had taken her there as a filly, and how she had dove off the rocks into the water. For a moment, Starlight was happy.

Then she opened her eyes.

With a glance around to make sure nopony had seen her, she walked up to the front of the store and placed her basket on one of the checkout counters. The cashier, to her annoyance, wasn’t paying much attention. He, like everyone else in the store, was watching the teletube placed up in the corner.

Starlight couldn’t hear what the reporter was saying, but she could read the words scrolling by on the bottom of the screen. Something about an earthquake out near Sundown. Nothing big, she supposed, but to her surprise it mentioned something about the IS.

She noticed for the first time that the idle chatter of the employees and customers in the checkout lanes was all focused on that one subject.

“I heard they’re closing down the road,” said one.

“Well of course they are; it’s standard procedure,” said another.

“No, no, no, not any roads. The road,” answered the first.

“No, they wouldn’t!”

“Already have. No traffic getting through the whole city. The IS be setting up checkpoints and everything. I have a cousin out in Amperdam and she told me the whole thing . . .”

Starlight cleared her throat to get the attention of the cashier in front of her. She glared at him, and tapped her hoof on the counter. To her, anything to do with Sundown was unnecessary: far-off concern. Not every pony saw it that way, to her annoyance.

The cashier scanned the items without taking his eyes off the tube. He shoved the items into bags and waited for her to pay.

Starlight pulled out her card from another pocket in her coat and gave it to him. She sighed to herself when somepony turned up the volume on the tube.

The cashier tapped her on the shoulder. “Ma’am?” he said. “Your card is declined.”

Her heart sank. “Try it again,” she said.

He swiped it through the machine again, then shook his head. “It’s still coming up as declined. Is there any other way you could pay?”

Starlight took out her paycheck with a little reluctance and showed it to him. The cashier just shook his head and pointed to a sign taped to the steel register: NO CHECKS.

“But that’s not fair!” Starlight cried. “How can you not accept checks?”

The cashier shrugged. “Too many bounced, I guess. It’s not my decision. Now, are you going to pay with cash or another card?”

Starlight shut her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. This isn’t happening, this isn’t happening . . .

She distinctly remembered putting the rest of the cash she’d had on hoof into her account just a few days ago. One hundred rounders should have been more than enough for some groceries and a few snacks.

Then, she remembered.

Anger began to well up inside her. She wanted to scream. Her late insurance payment. A stupid envelope that she had left on the counter one day too late.

“Ma’am, we’re going to be closing soon,” the cashier said.

Starlight shook her head and began to walk away. “Take it,” she said, “just take it. Take it all back.”

A few ponies began to stare at her as she walked out of the store, but she returned the look until they found something else to gawk at. With a heavy heart and empty stomach, Starlight trotted out of the store and down the street back to her apartment.

Starlight walked down dirty and cracked sidewalks toward her home with her head down. The eyes of passing strangers all seemed to focus on her, silently judging while her empty stomach growled. She looked down and kept her own eyes on her hooves. One in front of the other, carrying her home.

Overhead, thunderclouds boomed and began to spill their cargo onto the city below. Fat droplets smashed into the ground around Starlight, and trickled down her neck. Ponies around her extended umbrellas into the sky, whose handles lit up with bright lights to help them guide their way.

Starlight ignored the rain and turned a corner onto a lonely sidestreet. A lamp post above her flickered on and off in the storm. Lightning boomed in the distance and Starlight picked up her pace. Her apartment building sat wedged between two others that looked just like it near the end of the block. Far removed from the glass skyscrapers and peace of downtown, Starlight’s slice of Gracia was scrubbed over with dirt and grime.

Overhead, a police spinner flew by. Its twin rotors buffeted the ground beneath it while it scanned over the apartment complexes with a bright searchlight. Starlight watched it for a moment until it moved on.

The rain began to fall harder, and Starlight trotted down the sidewalk until she reached her apartment building. She noticed a few dark vans parked on the opposite side of the street, but soon turned her attention away. She cantered up the front steps and through the dingy lobby to a silver elevator on the other side.

Starlight leaned against the wall of the mirrored box. She rubbed her forehead and tucked her pink jacket tighter around her. The elevator took her up six floors before grinding to a halt on in a hazy hallway lit only by a window at the other end.

Starlight stepped out and her hooves slid over the worn maroon carpet. She walked down the hall to her apartment as she always did. Her eyes traced over the wallpaper while her mind drifted off to other topics. Her stomach growled and she thought about Mr. Staten’s invitation to dinner.

Her hoof reached out to touch the door lever to her apartment . . . then she stopped. She looked closer, and her heart stopped. It was only barely visible, but her door was already open a crack.

The only key to the apartment was in her jacket pocket, so she started to back away. She kept her eyes on the door and moved toward the elevator. Then, the light above the elevator doors dinged, the car was riding back down.

A crash came from inside her apartment, and Starlight scrambled away. With nowhere else to go, she backed toward the window. Then a shout came from inside the apartment.

“She’s outside!”

Starlight turned and ran to the window. She gripped the pane and slid it up just as she saw a dark figure emerge from her apartment. He turned toward her and yelled to his partner.

She didn’t stick around to hear what he said. Starlight crawled out the window and landed with a soft thud on a rusty fire escape. She reached up and slid the window shut before running down the stairs.

The metal stairs creaked and groaned under weight, but Starlight didn’t slow down. She could hear the glass breaking behind her and more yelling. Sweat ran down her forehead and mixed with the rain that poured overhead. She slipped on a bottom stair and nearly fell off the fire escape before catching herself against the railing.

Thunder boomed in the sky above.

The stallions above her closed in on her. They took the steps three at a time, jumping down the stairways in their pursuit. Starlight guessed they were only a couple levels above her by the time she reached the bottom.

She looked behind her once, then jumped down to the alley below. She hissed from the impact and pain shot through her legs. She didn’t have time to think about that, however. Her mind ran on instinct.

She ran out of the alley just as the stallions got to the ground. She took a sharp turn and sped away from her apartment building. The pouring rain got in her eyes, blinding her. Lightning seemed to flash around her and the cars sped by at a dizzying speed. She could hear the assailants getting closer and closer, barging through the few ponies on the street with her. Soon, they would catch up.

She turned right onto another street in the hope she could find a place to hide in a crowd. But when she got around the corner, her stomach dropped. The entire street was empty. Not a car, not a pony, nothing.

Starlight sprinted down the street, but knew they would catch up to her soon. Their hooves all over her, grabbing her and forcing her to the ground . . .

A cry escaped her mouth when a strong hoof suddenly grabbed her. Instead of pulling her to the ground, though, she was pulled into a small side alley. The hoof shoved itself against her mouth to muffle her screams while the two stallions pursuing her passed by.

They yelled and called out to her. When they didn’t notice her, they moved on and out of hearing range. Only then did the hoof come off her mouth.

She coughed and swung around to face whoever had dragged her into the alley. “Okay, what gives?” she growled. “And who are you?”

With a snort, Staten walked out of the shadows. He was shaking, and his eyes were bloodshot. “Starlight,” he rasped, “I’m going to need your help.”

Chapter 2: She's Leaving Home

Rain beat against plate glass windows that encased a small diner wedged between two office buildings a half dozen blocks from Starlight’s apartment. She sat in a red leather booth scooted against one of the windows and watched cars splash through the street outside. A cup of coffee sat on the table in front of her, steam rising from the brown liquid.

A bell above the diner’s front door dinged and Starlight’s head shot up. She let out a breath when she saw it was Staten walking in. He shook drops of rain off his pale aqua fur and walked across the polished tile floor to the booth. He sat down with a heavy sigh and leaned his hooves against the tabletop.

“We haven’t been followed, as far as I can tell,” he said. “We should still stay on our guard, however. We can’t stay in one place too long. The IS has their hooves all over this part of town.”

Starlight shook her head. “I just, I don’t get it . . . why me?”

Staten reached across the table and took her untouched coffee. He drank half the cup in one gulp before sliding it back over. “Because the government decided you’re a liability. If you hadn’t escaped, you’d be in a spinner bound for Lupine right now.”

“Because . . . why? What, do I have any unpaid parking tickets that I don’t know about?” She shook her head. “And what was that in the alley about you needing my help? What gives?”

Staten tapped his hoof against the table and looked out the window. A bolt of lightning flashed over the city, illuminating the apartment blocks and office buildings in white light for a moment. Thunder pealed a second later, rumbling over the city blocks.

“I got a call from my daugher shortly after you left the museum today. I think I told you about her? She lives out in Sundown.” He shook his head. “Anyway, I got a call from her today. She was worried, she thought someone was coming for her, but she didn’t say who. What she did say, though, was what they were coming for: the crystal heart.”

“Crystal heart?” Starlight asked.

“It’s an artifact my daughter and her team found deep under the sands around Sundown. Your father and I had found inscriptions of the heart in our digs out in the Ayanmar Mountains, back in our heyday. Details and legends about its power, buried deep in ancient tombs and catacombs.”

Starlight stared across the table at the older stallion. “So the government is trying to get to me because of some crystal at the bottom of a cave?”

“That crystal is an enigma, a legend . . . and nopony knows more about it in the entire world than your father and I. If the IS had taken you, they would have a bargaining chip if Noctilucent didn’t want to comply.”

“But if they couldn’t catch me, then . . .” Her eyes widened. “The IS is going to come for my dad!”

She tried to shove her way out of the booth, but Staten held her back. His strong grip surprised her, and she was forced back down. She glared at him from across the table.

“Stop, there’s no point to getting worked up,” he chided. “They wouldn’t be so foolish as to wait and see if they succeeded with you. Their agents were sent to his house at the same time, I’m sure.”

“We can’t just leave him there!”

“He. Is. Gone, Starlight,” Staten said. “You would just add yourself to the list of prisoners if you tried to go save him, and then you wouldn’t be useful to either of us.”

“Useful?” Starlight snorted. “Since when have I been useful to you? We both know I got that job because of my dad. Why in Adana’s name would you choose me over him?”

He sighed. “When I got back to my house, the IS was already swarming all over it. I got away unseen, but knew they would be coming after the both of you as well, so I had to make a choice . . . I chose you.”

“But why? How am I useful to you?”

Lightning flashed outside, closer this time. The lights in the diner flickered overhead. Staten tapped his hoof the table and looked Starlight in the eyes. She felt like he was staring right through her, down into her mind.

“As long as you are free, your father still has hope. He’ll stall and give misinformation to the IS for as long as he can, and buy time for me to get to Sundown. If I had saved him, he would have done nothing but try to save you from the IS, and we both would have wound up in the hooves of the government.”

Starlight stared down at the even, brown surface of coffee inside the porcelain cup in front of her. Thunder boomed outside and the liquid rippled, sending tiny waves crashing against the sides.

“I just don’t see the big problem here. So what if the government gets the crystal? How’s it going to hurt anypony?”

“There are legends, dark legends, of events that transpire when the crystal is activated. A downward spiral of chaos and magic that can upturn the world. From what my daughter, Sunny, described, the process has already started.”

He slammed his hoof on the table and a couple patrons across the diner stared. “We can’t let the IS get to it. They’ll seek it’s power, and once they try to harness it, that will be end for all of us. Every last stallion, mare, and foal.”

“And you want me to help.”

“Like I said, as long as you’re with me, we’ll stay a step ahead of the government. We can do this, Starlight, but I need you.”

Starlight took one more look at the older stallion, then sighed. “Beats rotting in a holding cell, I guess. Where do we go next?”

Staten slid out of the booth and stood up. “We go back to your parents’ house. They’ll already be taken, so the house should be clear. We’ll get what we can for the journey, and figure out where to go from there.”

“And how do you expect to get halfway across the city without being noticed?” Starlight asked, following him out the door and into the pouring rain.

Staten smiled. “The subway of course.”

“Oh. Right.”

She sighed and followed him toward a set of stairs that led down to the nearest station, gritting her teeth and wishing the whole night would turn out to be just another lousy dream.

Their silver subway train clicked down the tracks, sliding its way underneath the city. Starlight rested with her back against the back of a hard plastic bench seat. Staten sat beside her, his hooves on his lap. Besides them, there was only a single pony napping on the bench at the far end of the car.

Starlight stared out the window across the car from her and watched brick walls fly past as the subway trundled on. Her hooves rested at her side and her mane hung down over one eye. She didn’t bother to blow it away, instead tucking herself further into her seat.

She had never liked the subway. Her parents had taken her on it when she was younger and it had frightened her. To be stuck underground in a train that was crowded with dozens of ponies would get her breathing hard if she thought about it too long. When it had come time to attend school, she had been more than willing to take the bus.

A light flickered overhead. Staten licked his lips and opened his mouth to say something, then seemed to think better of it and shut it again. Starlight did her best to ignore him. She could feel the questions welling up inside, but steeled herself from speaking. If she was going to focus on anything, it would be her parents.

The car hit a bump and Starlight knocked against Staten. She righted herself as quickly as he could and scooted away from him. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“It’s alright,” Staten replied. He took the opportunity and leaned a little closer to her. “You know, I’m sure your parents are alright.”

“I don’t remember asking about them,” Starlight hissed. “And from the way you talked back in the diner, you didn’t think that way, either.”

Staten raised a hoof. “I’m just trying to reassure you—”

“Do I look like a little kid to you?” Starlight snapped. “I’ve been away from them for years. I don’t need somepony to remind me my mommy and daddy are okay.”

“Just trying to help.” Staten sighed. “Your father and I were close, back in the day. I’m sure he told you about the digs we did out past Levan and elsewhere. Those trips were fruitful, but what we found were just . . . trinkets . . . at the time. A stone inscription of a dragon and a pony, things like that.”

“So why’d you two ever drift apart?” Starlight asked.

“When my wife left and Sunny went off to college, I fell on hard times. I blamed everypony . . . including my friends. It wasn’t a time I like to remember. I—”

Staten trailed off and looked down at his hooves. “I never went back. He offered me, I offered him, but . . . I just couldn’t. Then this happened and I—.”

“You came for me,” Starlight whispered.

Staten nodded. “Your father would have gone to the ends of the world to find you and bring you home. If he couldn’t do it, then I could.”

Starlight looked away. “You should have saved him . . . I can take care of myself.”

The train slid to a squealing stop at Fel Street Station. The granite station was lit by simmering fluorescent lights that cast it in a harsh glow. For all purposes, it was empty and devoid of life.

Starlight hopped off her seat and trotted out of the car onto the solid floor of the station. She made her way to the stairs leading back up to Gracia without a single look back at Staten.

Fel Street was like another world compared to the rainy morass that Starlight’s apartment sat on. The street was straight and broad, and lined with wooden buildings that were three stories high at their tallest. The arched windows looked out on manicured grass lawns and trees that bloomed in the summer rains. Light came from bulbs burning in ornate lamp posts on the sidewalk rather than spinners flying overhead.

Starlight splashed through puddles on the sidewalk that still gathered in the same places that they had when she was a little foal. The gravel crunched comfortingly beneath her hooves and the air smelled fresh and clean. Despite the situation, she found herself smiling as she trotted down the street toward a blue house on the end.

She could hear Staten’s clumsy hoof-falls echo behind her. He grunted as he tried to catch up to her, muttering curses under his breath. Starlight laughed to herself and kept ahead.

For a moment, it almost seemed like a silly little game she had played as a foal. Then she arrived at her house.

Starlight came skidding to a stop when she saw the front of her childhood home. The window that her father had fixed after a wayward ball had sailed through now lay on the ground, its frame broken and sagging. The mahogany door that she and her mother had painted together one cold November stood open, hanging on by its hinges.

Staten caught up to her and stood by her side, panting. When he saw what had been done, his breath caught and he tried to move toward Starlight. “I am so sorry,” he began.

Starlight didn’t hear him. Her eyes glazed over as she stepped up the front walk. She pushed open the door and found herself plodding through her own house like it was an alien planet. Everything was out of order. The furniture lay torn and on their sides. Vases were broken, pots were spilled, and her father’s prized book collection lay on the floor like a pile of trash.

Tears welled up in her eyes. She stood in the middle of her living room, the one place she could call safe, and felt like a stranger. She fell in a heap beside the piles of books. Many had pages ripped out and spines bent. The ones under became a little more wet as tears ran down her face and dropped onto the pages.

She hadn’t been on the best terms with her parents, not since dropping out of school, but to see the safest place in the world have its heart ripped out was too much for her. She stared into space and her ears started to ring.

Starlight was vaguely aware of somepony calling her name, but could only just make out the voice over the ringing. She didn’t look up, however, until she felt a hoof on her shoulder.

“Starlight!” Staten was calling. “Are you okay?”

“What?” she asked.

“You zoned out,” Staten said. “I know this is tough, and I’m sorry . . .”

Starlight shrugged off his hoof and stood up. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine.” She wiped at her eyes and sniffed. “I’m not stupid; they just took my parents to jail or whatever. It’s not like they’re dead.”

“Yes, but you looked like you were taking this pretty hard—”

“I said I’m fine!” Starlight snapped. “Besides, why do you care so much? You caused this.”

“I did my best to find you before they got to you,” Staten protested.

“I told you before, I’m not a little kid!” Starlight growled. “I can take care of myself. If you had gone to my Dad first, none of this would have happened.”

“But you—”

“Save it. I’m going to go check out my room.”

Before Staten could get in other word, Starlight turned, stomped up the stairs, and slammed the door to her room shut.

Staten watched her go and sighed. He would let her stew for as long as he could. She wouldn’t be in any mood to help him at the moment.

He picked his way through some glass strewn about on the carpet and into Starlight’s father’s study lab. Noctilucent had been one to go to great lengths in keeping every damn surface that he had ever worked on spotless and in order, so to see the neat little office of his turned into a demolition zone pained Staten.

The modest chairs were upthrown, stuffing leaking out their sides, and the massive oak desk that he recognized from Radshapur had its drawers emptied and on the ground. The ancient tabletop was scuffed and chipped from hurried hooves that hadn’t cared for its legacy.

Staten found what he was looking for in the middle of the room. It was an oil painting in a gold frame that Noctilucent had commissioned for his family. Even now, his steely blue eyes gazed up from the floor where the police had left it. It was, much to his relief, unharmed apart from being taken off the wall.

“I hope you’ll understand, old friend,” Staten said to the frozen relief of the square-jawed stallion. “You can take whatever the IS throws at you, but Starlight? No, she . . . she’s not ready for that.” He smiled a little. “Don’t you worry now, I’ll take good care of her.”

Still smiling, he raised his hoof and brought it down against the glass. It shattered, allowing the aging stallion to rip a hole through the oil canvas and tear it out of the frame.

He grinned when he saw it. There, taped against the back of the frame, was a shiny compact disk. Staten wrenched it out and looked it over.

“Noctilucent,” he said, “you were nothing but predictable. A good thing the police didn’t bother to get to know you first.”

He looked around and retrieved a small burlap sack from the corner. The police had emptied it out for him already, so Staten was able to place the CD inside without a problem. He grabbed some scarves and stuffed them in the sack for padding, then slung it around his neck.

Satisfied, he moved out of the room and closed the door behind him, as if to spare the carnage inside from the rest of the house. He heard nothing from downstairs, so he shook his head and started up toward Starlight’s room. Under his breath, he rehearsed what he would say to her, an almost impossible task for what he needed her to know.

Starlight was laying on her old bed when the professor showed up again. Her room, like the others, had been ransacked. Unlike the others, it was hard to tell the difference from the state it had been in during her teenage years. The walls were still painted midnight blue and posters of bands and city fairs and shiny metal airframes stretched all over them.

Her bedspread was still the same tacky black rose spread that she had somehow convinced her mother to buy, but looked back on the decision with a small grimace. It was comfortable enough beneath her back, however, while she stared up at the spinning ceiling fan.

She had spent a lot of time in that position through the years. After a hard day at school or at her part-time job, she had lain there and let her thoughts slip away and carry her troubles with them. It had been where she’d laid the night after announcing to her parents that she was dropping out of Gracia U.

Staten knocked on the door. Starlight sat up and blinked a few times before settling her gaze on him.

He coughed. “May I come in?”

“Why not?” she said, laying back down. “It’s not like nopony else has today.”

Staten sighed as he stepped over an upturned CD rack, the discs scattered amongst the floor. He stood beside Starlight’s bed. “We can’t stay here for long. When the IS figures out you’re not coming back to your apartment, they’ll come back here.”

“Let ‘em.” Starlight rolled over. “They’ve taken everypony else, so why not me too?”

Staten looked at her for a moment, then shook his head. In one swift motion, he grabbed the bed’s comforter with his teeth and yanked back, flinging the blanket off the bed and spilling Starlight on the floor.

She yelped and held her head while she climbed back to her hooves. “What the heck did you do that for?” she growled.

“You don’t get to make that decision,” Staten snapped. “I let your father get captured so I could take care of you, like he would have wanted. It wasn’t my choice, but his. So you don’t get to lay here and be captured with the rest of my staff.”

“It doesn’t even matter,” Starlight shot back.

Staten walked up to her until their noses were almost touching. “I didn’t choose you over your father so that you could get captured too. If you’re sitting in an IS jail cell with them, you aren’t worth anything. But on the outside, you can fight back. You can free them, you understand?”

Starlight stared at him, at his eyes flaming in anger, and nodded. “Yeah, I get it.”

He threw open her closet and tossed a bag laying on the ground to her. “Good. Now, pack up some things and make it quick; we’re leaving as soon as we can.”

Starlight gulped, then did as she was told. She hadn’t seen this side of the professor before. His eyes were crazed in anger and desperation. He looked at her like she was his last hope, and he would be damned if she didn’t comply.

She stuffed a couple stray rounder bills and whatever coins she could find into the pockets of a pink coat from her closet, along with a few other valuables. Even her old music player. Then, she took what clothes she could fit in the burlap bag and slung it over her shoulder. She wrapped the coat around herself

When she looked up, she saw Staten in the hall, looking out a window to the street in front of the house. “Is there another way out that’s not as noticeable?” he asked, turning away.

Starlight nodded and beckoned for him to follow. She led him to the small bathroom down the hall from her own room. There was a large, fogged glass window on the other side of the toilet. She reached up and undid the bolts keeping it in place, letting it swing open to reveal nothing but the night air on the other side.

She looked one last time at her room, surrounded by her old sanctuary, before dropping down to the terrace below and onto the soft grass of her backyard. Staten followed, albeit at a slower pace, and soon joined her.

There was a tall wooden fence around the perimeter of her parents’ spacious backyard, and a gate near the back, built out of the same wooden slats as the rest. Starlight trotted over to it and let it open, careful to peek out before letting it swing away. There was a small road behind all the houses for cars, and it was deserted.

Staten caught up with her. “Nopony’s around. Good,” he said. He walked past Starlight and started up the street. “We’ll need to move fast, though.”

“Uh, professor, where are we going?” Starlight asked.

“Just a quick stop-over in Horizon, then out of the city. We should be on the road in just a few hours.”

Staten continued on ahead, but Starlight stopped and looked back one more time. Her parents were gone and her home trashed . . . but even on a night like this, there was a faint glimmer of hope. Like the professor had said, she could fight back. She could free them. And, better, get back at the IS and make them pay.

Starlight smiled and trotted after Staten.

Chapter 3: Like A Rolling Stone

Starlight and Staten took the journey to Horizon by hoof. The borough was on the edge of Gracia, near the industrial districts and dockyards. Starlight, even growing up on Fel Street, had heard the stories. The cutthroats, dealers, and smugglers had been regulars for the cautionary tales that parents told their foals.

Dingy tenement buildings leered above them, dark against the night sky. Most were sagging and aging at a rapid pace. None of the construction crews that kept the downtown modern and edgy came to the district. A few rusty cars rumbled down the narrow streets while ponies in long trench coats and low hats walked by, not looking anypony else in the eye.

Starlight became very aware of her bright pink jacket and kept close to Staten. The professor himself hadn’t said much on their journey across the city, just looking back over his shoulder every once in awhile to confirm that she was still following him.

Eventually, they came to a stop under a neon sign that glowed in a language Starlight didn’t know. Drops of rain hissed as they fell on it, though most of the storm had stopped some time ago. The professor leaned against the brick building and looked around.

“Why did we stop?” Starlight asked.

“Just trying to get my bearings,” he answered. “It’s been awhile since I was last here, after all.”

“You’ve been to Horizon before?”

He nodded. “Once or twice. You would be surprised as to what kind of jewels can be found here if you look hard enough.”

Starlight eyed the ruined buildings around her. “You’d think they’d stick out . . .”

Staten shook his blue-green mane, sending drops of water everywhere. More specifically, all over Starlight’s face. She grimaced and spit out what flew in her mouth. “Are you done?” she grumbled.

“There’s a bar not too far from here,” he said. “We should be able to find a smuggler or the like there.”

“Is it that kind of place?” she asked.

The professor smiled. “You can search across this entire planet, but nowhere else will you find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

“Oh.” Starlight paused. “Can we go somewhere else, then?”

“Just keep your head down and you’ll be fine,” he told her, continuing down the street.

With a sigh, the young mare followed. They turned on a street lit up by more neon and gaudy signs advertising cheap mares. She shuddered a little. The decaying sidewalks, thankfully, were empty.

The only ponies they passed were two stallions garbed in black, matching outfits and smoking against the side of a strip club. Their eyes followed them as they went past, but didn’t do anything more.

When they had passed by them, Starlight leaned in close and whispered, “What was with them?”

“IS agents,” Staten said. “Not looking for us, most likely. They’ll be there to watch out for the corner mares. Pay them no mind.”

When Starlight looked back, though, they were gone. She kept close to the professor for the rest of the journey.

The bar turned out to be the imaginatively named “Horizon Cantina.” It was a fat little building with a faded brick exterior and a single door that led further inside. The windows on the outside had heavy iron bars welded over them.

Staten strode in while Starlight did her best to disappear in his shadow. The interior was dark and hazy with cigarette smoke. The patrons didn’t look up as they walked in, but kept leaning forward on the large bar in the middle of the room or in one of the booths.

They walked over to the far end of the bar where the smoke was heavier, but the ponies there were in lighter clothes and at least looked somewhat amiable. The professor took Starlight by the shoulder and looked her in the eye.

“I’m going to go look for transportation,” he said. “You stay right here and go nowhere else, understand?”

“I’m not a kid,” she said. “I’m twenty-four.”

He snorted. “Right, sure. Just don’t go wandering somewhere.”

Before she could say anything else, he left, leaving her to sulk. Starlight leaned against the dirty countertop of the bar and surveyed the place. She’d seen places with worse atmosphere on a few lousy dates, but the clientele here far more lacking.

There was a pony with an eyepatch and a row of empty shot glasses in front of him to her immediate right. He was shouting to a buddy next to him, even though they were less than a petra away from each other. A few patrons glared at him, but said nothing.

Starlight watched as the stallion eyed her and did his best to smile. She ignored him. After a minute of this, though, he grew bolder. He scooted down the bar and nodded to her.

“My friend likes you,” he said.

“Well, that’s great,” Starlight said.

He coughed. “I like you too,” he said. “Let me buy you a drink.”

She perked up a little at the thought. The only ponies who ever seemed to buy drinks for her had been the fat, nerdy types, and that was more for favors than anything else. Favors that she tried not to think about in civilized conversation.

Before she could decide, however, Staten returned.

“Ah, sweetie, there you are,” he said, placing a hoof around her. He smiled at the stallion. “My daughter’s just turned twenty today! Doesn’t she just look so mature?”

The stallion returned the smile and grunted something in return before turning back to his friend. Starlight growled and threw off the professor’s hoof.

“I had everything handled just fine,” she said.

“Did you?” Staten leaned over and tapped an old corkboard hung up on the wall featuring a variety of wanted posters. One near the bottom had a yellowed picture of the same pony with the eyepatch, and a reward of one hundred thousand rounders for his arrest or death.

Starlight’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“Anyway,” he continued, leading her way, “I believe I have found us a transport out of Gracia. For a low price, too.”

“Who is he?” Starlight asked.

“You’ll see.”

They started for the other side of the bar, but before they got too close, they found their way blocked by a crowd of ponies. Pushing their way toward the middle, they found that the crowd was ringed around two stallions sizing each other up and preparing for a fight.

One wore a black jacket over a long white shirt that complimented his wavy, copper mane and the roguish smirk that played host on his face. The other had on a plain maroon shirt and brown suspenders over his sandy brown coat and chocolate mane. He was smaller and more rugged, but in the way that a truck looked more rugged than a sports car.

They squared up and grinned at each other. The bartender, from within his labyrinth of mixes and cocktails, called, “Alright you two, break it up!”

The rogue looked up at the bartender while the truck took a swing at him. The blow connected with the stallion’s right cheek, and he stumbled a bit before catching himself. When the truck came in for a kick, though, the rogue was prepared.

He thrust his shoulders into the truck’s midsection, sending them both to the ground and with the rogue ending up on top. With a few powerful punches into the prone stallion, the fight was over. The patrons mumbled and went back to their drinks after rounders changed hooves.

“Well, at least he can fight,” Starlight said.

“Were you watching the same fight I was?” Staten asked. “He just got his flank kicked.”

She whirled around. “Wait, you’re saying . . . we got the loser?”

“Evenin’,” the stallion said in a husky accent, ambling up to them. He spat a mixture of saliva and blood on the wooden floor and grimaced at it. “Damn, must be losing my edge. You get the girl?”

Staten nodded. “Redington, meet my daughter, Starlight. Starlight, meet Redington, smuggler for hire.”

The smuggler extended a hoof and smirked. “Call me Red.”

Starlight stared at it until “Red” sighed and put it back down. “So you’re going to be getting us out of the city?”

“Just as soon as we get on outta here,” Red said. “You’re looking at the best smuggler in all of Teton.”

“Well, I hope your driving is better than your fighting,” she said. “How much is my dad paying you, anyway?”

Staten coughed. “I have half the money now in bonds and credit, and will give the other half to him when we get there.”

“Speaking of which,” Red said, glancing down at his bare hoof, “it’s about time we got out of here. Not a good idea to stick around the late night crowd around here.”

“Agreed,” the professor said, making his way toward the door. Starlight followed with the smuggler in tow. He took a jacket from a coat rack by the door and put it on. It was an old airframe pilot’s jacket, with the fluffy down collar around the neck and patches up and down the side. Starlight fought the urge to roll her eyes.

Once back outside, Red turned left. “There’s a garage down this way,” he said. “I’ve got the Odyssey parked down there, gassed up and ready to go. Just follow me.” He went on ahead of them, allowing Starlight to drop back with Staten.

“Why, again, can’t we just take an airframe? Or even a train?” she asked.

“Security,” he said. “The IS is going to be watching every station in and out of the city. The only places they can’t watch at all times are the roads, and a smuggler is the only one who can get us through any checkpoints we might come across.”

“Yeah . . . but him, really?”

“I have a good feeling about him,” Staten said.

Starlight snorted. “Like that helps.”

“Don’t be so quick to knock it.” He laughed. “I said the same about you.”

A few blocks away from the bar, the trio arrived at a monolithic concrete parking garage that was at least five stories high at first glance. Starlight whistled as she craned her neck up. “Your car is here?” she asked.

Red nodded. “Parking’s cheap here. Too bad about the neighborhood, though.”

Sure enough, as they walked up the ramp to the first level of the garage, they witnessed a couple ponies scurrying away from a car with stolen wheels in tow. Starlight drifted closer to the professor.

The smuggler led them up the wide ramps of the garage, warning them to keep away from the cramped stairwells that any civilized pony would take. His voice echoed through the around the low-ceilinged tunnels.

After a while, Starlight’s legs began to burn and she found herself wheezing under her breath. Staten didn’t seem to be in much of a better shape, but they both managed to keep up with the silent smuggler.

Some time later, they arrived at the very top level of the garage that was open to the night air above. Moonlight guided them across the otherwise unlit surface until they reached the far end, near the edge of the platform.

Starlight stopped for a moment when it became clear exactly which vehicle they were heading toward. Not a sports car, not an off-road utility vehicle, heck, not even a sedan. Instead, just a great, big . . . RV. The ugliest part of an ugly house put on four tiny wheels, painted off-white with a dull brown stripe going around it. The thing sagged and looked to be on the doorstep of death itself.

“What a piece of junk!” she cried.

“Hey, this piece of junk has gotten me from Sethton to Gracia and back,” Red snapped, whirling around. “She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts. I’ve made a few special modifications myself. But, we’re a little rushed, so if you two will just get on board . . .”

He made a scene of opening the thing’s door and bowing for Starlight and Staten to get on. Before she did, Starlight noticed the name Odyssey etched into the side of the RV in sloppy red paint. She rolled her eyes.

Red tried to put a hoof on her shoulders and help Starlight up, but she threw him off and got in the vehicle by herself.

Inside, there wasn’t much to see. There were two plush seats in the front for a driver and passenger, a recliner to one side of the midsection, and across from that, a small kitchen table with wraparound couch. A bathroom near the back and a door leading to what Starlight assumed would be a bedroom completed the look. Starlight wrinkled her nose and took a step back from the whole thing.

“Where are these ‘modifications’ you were talking about?” she asked.

“Hey, I know she’s rough on the inside,” Red said, “but under the hood, she is one pretty lady.”

“Sure.” She sighed and shifted her bag to her other shoulder. “Is there at least somewhere I can put this?”

Red cocked his head toward the bedroom. “Throw it back there.”

Starlight, grumbling the whole way, walked on the thin carpet toward the rear of the RV. She refused to even think of calling it the Odyssey; it wasn’t deserving of such a name.

She opened the door to the bedroom and prepared herself for the worst. To her surprise, however, she found that the back bedroom was clean, if only because it was so sparse. Between two whitewashed walls were only a bed and a nightstand with a lamp and alarm clock on it, making the room the first part of the RV acceptable to her senses.

There was a sliding window at the back overlooking the city below the parking garage, and Starlight took the opportunity to look out it after setting her bag on the bed. The lights of downtown Gracia shined over the dullness of Horizon and reminded her that the city wasn’t always bad.

That idea was cut short, however, when she looked down. At the bottom of the parking garage were four police cars, their lights flashing in the gloom. They paused for a second, then started up the ramp.

“Uh, guys?” she asked, emerging from the bedroom. “Is it usual to have police come around here?”

“No, they usually stay away from these places to keep all the criminals contained or whatever,” Red said. “Why?”

“Well, they’re here now, and in force.”

Staten, sitting in the passenger’s chair, started. “It must be the IS,” he muttered, then turned to the smuggler. “How fast can you get us out of here?”

“Woah, woah, you didn’t say anything about being wanted,” Red said. “I don’t do fugitives. Especially not for the money you gave me.”

The professor shook his head. “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice,” he said. “This isn’t just the regular police, but Intelligence Service agents. They’re going to seize this RV of yours too, and I don’t want to imagine what you’ve hauled in this thing.”

Red opened his mouth, then shut it and thought for a second. Without a word, he stuck a key in the ignition and started up the RV. The engine sputtered and coughed for a moment, then roared to life.

“You two might want to buckle up,” he warned.

Staten did as he was told, but when Starlight looked down at the other seats, she noticed none of them actually had a way she could restrain herself. In the end, she sat behind the kitchen table and hoped she could hold on.

The smuggler backed out of the parking space and set the RV in gear, heading down the ramp through the garage. The air seemed to stop moving inside the RV. Everypony clutched their seats and tried to look calm.

It didn’t help that the farther they went inside the parking garage, the lower the ceiling became until the top of the RV almost scraped against it. Still, the ride was normal until they got to the third level. Driving up on the opposite side of them were three cop cars with big searchlights. They were shining them into every vehicle in sight.

“Get down!” Red hissed.

Starlight threw herself down below the table and Staten ducked underneath the console. Red drove right on by the cop cars, keeping a neutral expression on his face. Even though his hooves started to shake, the police paid the RV no attention and let it pass.

There was an audible sigh of relief from the all three of the ponies in the RV once they had gone past. Red accelerated a little bit and zoomed down the ramps toward the exit of the garage.

Starlight watched out the front window for signs of an empty road ahead and freedom, but her heart sank when they came in sight of the exit. Two police cars guarded the entrance, and four stallions stood around them. They stared at the oncoming RV through reflective sunglasses, and held up their hooves to stop.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“The only thing there is to do,” Staten said. “Go on through it.”

Red smirked. “I like the way you think, old stallion.”

He slowed the van down until he was almost at a stop near the exit gates, but then, when the officers approached the RV’s door, the smuggler slammed on the gas and drove right through the police cars. The bulkier RV’s front smashed aside the cars with a grinding and crunching sound of steel on steel.

The surprised police officers jumped out of the way and the trio in the RV were free on the open road. Red gunned it down the street toward the highways leading out of the city.

“Starlight, go check for followers,” Staten instructed. “I have a feeling we’re not out of this yet.”

She scrambled into the bedroom and peaked out the rear window. Sure enough, flashing lights were coming from the parking garage. “They’re on to us!” she yelled back.

She was thrown off her hooves and fell onto the bed when the RV lurched forward. Instead of falling onto a soft mattress, however, whatever she hit felt solid and hard. Curious, she threw off the blanket to find that the center of the mattress had been hollowed out.

Inside, there were a variety of weapons ranging from pistols to rifles and everything in between, including a dozen or so grenades. There were also piles of ammo for all of them.

Starlight’s eyes widened as she looked at one that she thought to be a folded-up anti-material rifle. Before she could say anything, she was thrown against one wall when Red steered the bulky RV around one corner.

A grenade flew through the air towards her and Starlight cried out. She caught and bounced it on her hooves before she realized the pin was still in. She let out a sigh of relief. Then, the RV turned again and Starlight slammed against the bed.

To her horror, she looked down and realized that, somehow, she had managed to wrench the pin out in the last turn. She clutched the grenade to her chest to keep the lever from extending while she looked around for a place to put it.

Her eyes alighted on the window at the back of the RV.

While the smuggler continued to swerve the vehicle in and out of traffic, she scrambled up on the bed while keeping the grenade against her chest. She hung on to the edge of the window before wrenching it open.

The RV turned again and Starlight’s heart stopped as she lost control of the grenade and watched the lever extend out. Reacting as fast as she could, she grabbed it out of midair and slung it out the open window.

Outside, the grenade landed on the street just before the lead cop car that had been following them drove over it. The grenade exploded and sent the vehicle spinning out of control until it stopped, facing sideways and blocking the road. The cars that had been following behind it slammed into the unfortunate officer, further blocking off the road.

Red let out a whoop. “Great shot, kid, that was one in a million!”

Starlight let out a sigh and laid back down on the bed while the RV climbed up a ramp and onto one of Gracia’s outgoing highways.

Some time later, as they passed over the suburbs that lay in the swampy grasslands surrounding Gracia, Staten stepped into the bedroom.

“You did good back there,” he said.

Starlight laughed. “An accident, I can assure you.”

“Even so, we are now on our way without the IS. We might just be able to make it after all.”

“Yeah, I guess,” she said. “Where are we going, anyway?”

“To Serenity Valley,” he said, “and the cities of Skyhall and Amperdam. I believe you’re familiar with them.”

Starlight raised an eyebrow. “That’s a long way.”

“Yes, but we’ll make it one way or another,” the professor said. “We have to. Now, would you like to come to the front of this vehicle and watch as we get on the Red Road for the first time?”

Starlight nodded and followed him up to the front seats. Looking through the massive front windows, she watched as the highway climbed up a hill and merged with other freeways and sideroads from all over the Greater Capital Area to become the Red Road, the massive highway that connected Teton from coast to coast. She had read about it in books before, but never actually seen it.

They crested the hill and Starlight’s breath caught in her throat. There, on the other side, was the massive raised highway that stretched on toward the horizon. Cars of every size and make plowed the dozens of lanes on each side in a never ending flow of traffic. Streetlamps as tall as the parking garage lined it and lit up the boggy surface that had worn black over millions of tires.

Far off in the distance, over grassy knolls and rolling hills that marked the outer reaches of Gracia, the sun had begun to rise.

The Odyssey drove on toward it.

Chapter 4: Have a Cigar

Sunny leaned her head against the back window of the government car and watched it drive past the Sundown Oasis. The massive, spindly dome of steel and glass soared over the city’s primary lake and the grass around the edge to keep it safe from the outside desert and allowed the ponies of the city to cultivate it. It was Sundown’s biggest tourist attraction and Sunny had walked through it a few times herself.

The IS motorcade moved on past the Oasis and through downtown Sundown, beneath the watching eyes of a row of skyscrapers adorned in lavish ornamentation around sharp, geometric edges. Sunny didn’t have much of a choice but to look out the tinted windows, as she was squeezed into the back seat of the sedan with two other government ponies in tacky suits. A fourth sat in the passenger seat next to a uniformed driver.

“Are we there yet?” she whined. “I’ve got classes tomorrow and I haven’t even started writing my lecture yet.”

“You will be taken to the Sundown Branch of the Intelligence Service and held there for an undetermined amount of time,” the agent in the front seat, who Sunny now realized was a mare, told her. “No further questions will be answered at this time.”

Sunny crossed her hooves over her chest. “You all have the nerve to drag me away from my dig site in front of all my colleagues like a common criminal and don’t even have the decency to tell me what all of this is about.”

“If we deem you fit to know, then you will be informed once we reach the Sundown facility,” the female agent answered. “But until then, no questions.”

Sunny grumbled and sat back in her seat. Outside, the car left downtown behind and passed into the expansive suburbs that ringed the business districts. Little clapboard houses were done in earthy tones and had rocks for lawns instead of grass to preserve water.

Ponies walked along the sidewalks with umbrellas and floppy hats to avoid the afternoon sun in what was turning out to be a particularly hot summer. At the moment, though, Sunny envied them and their ability to walk around unmolested by the likes of the IS.

The row of four black government cars turned down a side road that was lined by small businesses and a shopping mall. To Sunny’s surprise, they turned in, not to some monolithic building, but to a small parking lot in front of a low-slung adobe building that lacked any decoration besides a sign that proclaimed, “Teton Intelligence Service - Sundown.”

The four cars parked in a semicircle around the front steps and the doors were opened in a flurry of movement by agents who scrambled to get their passengers out. Sunny hadn’t seen them take anypony from the dig site with her, but there was a stallion in a police uniform being pulled out of one of the cars, and a mare out of the other. She was placed in a shiny metal wheelchair with a bundle of clothes in her lap. When the bundle began to cry, Sunny’s eyes widened.

“You are to follow us into the station,” the female agent said. “Any deviation from that action will be treated as resistance of arrest and punished as such. Are we clear?”

Sunny said nothing and fell in line behind her. They marched her up the concrete steps and through glass double doors into the inside of the building.

The interior of the office was taken up by a number of desks scattered around the room. Various agents sat at them with collars undone and sleeves rolled up while the whirring of electric desk fans filled the room. Light got into the room through half-open blinds, while the overhead lights were switched

One of the agents near the door—a copper-colored stallion in a white, button-up shirt—stood when Sunny’s group walked in. The other ponies in the room were quick to follow suit.

“What’s going on?” he asked in a gruff tone.

“Ah, you must be Agent Nightcall,” the female agent said. “I am Agent Flower from the Intelligence Service Homeland Division, and we have been instructed to secure these . . . ponies of interest . . . by order of the state and bring them here for examination and questioning.”

Nightcall leered at her. “Why was I not informed of this?” he asked.

“The information we were given was highly sensitive and not confirmed until mere hours ago,” Flower explained. “You will be give a full debriefing once you have secured your prisoners.”

“Prisoners?” The male agent stared at the group. “These are your prisoners?”

“Yes, and we will need a necessary facility to house them,” the other agent replied, then sighed and looked at the foal wrapped in swaddling clothes in the hooves of its mother. “They may be taken to a more . . . accommodating . . . interrogation room if you so choose, however.”

“Right.” Nightcall led them past overflowing desks and the scraggly-looking agents who stared as they went by until arriving in a plain, concrete hallway in the rear of the building.

The agent took out a silver key from his pocket and opened a wide metal door to a sparse, white interrogation room. It had a one-way mirror that took up all of one wall, a rickety wooden table, and some equally unstable-looking chairs scattered around it.

Sunny and the police officer were marched in while the mare with the foal was wheeled in. She kept a stony glare on Agent Flower. Nightcall nodded to them, then shut the door behind them with the audible sound of the lock being turned.

With that, they were alone in the room. Sunny sighed and slumped into one of the chairs while the police officer followed suit. The mare in the wheelchair sat, cradling her child in her hooves, and didn't look at the either of them.

After a moment, the officer took his off his service cap and scratched at his indigo mane. He seemed to realize, for the first time, that Sunny was there too. He smiled a little. “What are you in for?” he asked.

She snored. “I wish I knew. Do you? Being with the police and all . . .”

“Nope, not a thing,” he said. “Name's Carpenter, by the way. Sergeant Carpenter, Sundown PD. The pretty mare there is my wife, Frankincense.”

“Sunny Sky, Professor of Hippology, University of Sundown,” she said in return, nodding. “I am sorry to see the two of you put in here with a kid so young . . .”

“Born today,” Frankincense muttered. “And they almost took him from me.”

Sunny turned in her chair to look at her, but the new mother was back to staring at her foal. The little pony made the occasional cooing sound, but was otherwise quiet, for which Sunny was thankful.

“When the IS showed up, we didn't know what to think,” Carpenter explained. “They came into the room and dragged us out of there. They tried to separate us but, well, my wife talked them out of it.”

Sunny grimaced and tapped a hoof on the table, which groaned in protest. “Right, but what would they want with the three of you? Especially a police officer, because isn't the police supposed to work with the Service?”

“We knew something was strange when he was born, but for them to just show up like that . . .” Carpenter said.

“Wait, hold on, what was strange when he was born?” Sunny asked. “Was it some kind of defect?”

“He's not defected!” Frankincense growled from her wheelchair. Even with her mane still clinging to her face and massive bags beneath her eyes, her expression was enough to give a trained soldier pause.

Carpenter leaned closer. “He was born with, well, an abnormality,” he whispered.

“What sort?” Sunny asked. “I'm in my university’s Hippology department, remember. These things are what I live for.”

“Well, you see—” he paused, then gulped. “Our son was born with, well, a horn.”

“A horn?” Sunny repeated. “A horn. Like, magic and rainbows type of horn? Like, from all the stories and myths type of horn?”

Carpenter nodded.

Sunny sat back in the chair and let out a breath she hadn't known she had been holding. Vestigial horns weren't quite unheard of as far as birth defects went, but this was the first she had heard of a government taking an interest in the child. Especially so soon after it had been born.

She turned to the mother. “Frankincense?” she asked in a soft tone. “Could I, maybe, see your child?”

She hugged the baby closer to her chest. “What for?” she snapped.

“Your husband tells me the baby was born with a certain, ah, trait. I'm from the Hippology department at Sundown U; I specialize in these sorts of things.” The mother hesitated for a moment, so Sunny added, “I can use my professional opinion to sway the agents that nothing is wrong, but to do that I'll need to see the child.”

Frankincense glared at her, but after a moment, sighed, and let the lanky professor walk over by her side. Frankincense cleared away the bundled blanket around the child's light brown head. Its wide blue eyes stared back up at Sunny with wonder and amazement while its little mouth turned in a smile.

Sunny couldn't help but smile back a little, even as she examined his forehead. When Frankincense took away the blanket covering that spot, the teal mare gasped. There, on the baby's forehead was a thick, spiral horn. Not a fleshy pouch of skin like the other cases had been, but a real horn.

“What, is something wrong?” Carpenter asked, springing from his chair.

“No, no, your son is perfectly fine,” Sunny said, “but this is something that I haven't ever seen before.”

Below her, the little foal cooed and waved one little hoof up at the adults above him.

Special Agent “Night” Nightcall of the Teton Intelligence Service led Agent Flower away from the interrogation room and back toward his desk in its solitary position at the front of the spacious main room. The desk, which he had inherited from the previous station manager, was chipped and stained from its years of service, but still clung to usability.

Night dropped in his padded swivel chair and cleared the papers and styrofoam coffee cups off the center of his desk with a sigh. He watched Agent Flower, who regarded him with an apparent disinterest.

“Okay, so spill it,” he said. “What's HQ want with some bookworm, a cop, his wife, and their kid? They don't exactly scream 'national threat' to me.”

Agent Flower leaned against his desk and raised an eyebrow. “What this Service regards as a 'national threat' is hardly up to you, is it, Agent Nightcall?”

“Spare me the official bullshit,” Night said. “I just need to know what's going on.”

“We were called out to assist in any way we could with earthquake relief this morning,” Flower began, pulling a small order form out of her suit pocket. “While covering evacuation from the afflicted areas via the Red Road, we received orders to seize these ponies of interest and bring them to the nearest Branch for containment and interrogation. That's all I know.”

Night grit his teeth. “I don't like this; Lupine Falls knows more than they're telling us. Did they order you to bring in anything else?”

“Just a big crystal from a dig site outside the city,” Flower said. “It’s shaped like a big heart. Fancy, but the crystal quality is too poor to be worth much.”

“So that's what they give us, then.” Night shook his head and leaned forward in his chair. “I can't interrogate them in this sort of position. Hell, what would I even say? I don't know anything, and you don't seem to have much of a clue either. What do we tell them?”

Flower sighed. “Let's just keep them as comfortable as we can and prevent anything drastic from happening.” A ghost of a smile appeared on her face. “We have a new mother in there; we don't want to piss her off.”

“Right.” Night nodded and picked up the bright red phone on his desk and held the receiver to his ear. “I'm going to call Lupine Falls and see if I can't get something out of them. You get back in the room and keep them calm. Bullshit as much as you can. You're in my department now, so get going.”

Flower hesitated, then did as she was told, scurrying off toward the back room without a word.

“And somepony around here get that new father a damn cigar!” Night barked.

A couple hundred petramin inland from Gracia, at the peak of a highway that looped off the Red Road, sat Lupine Falls. Amidst a vast sea of impenetrable forest was a town of simple brick buildings clustered around monolithic factories that belched smoke toward the cloudy skies above.

It was an insignificant city of less than one hundred thousand, save for one defining feature: a massive campus that ran from the hills south of the city and stopped at the first row of houses. Featureless concrete buildings that extended three stories above and four stories below ground marked the headquarters of the Teton Intelligence Service.

Back away from the town, on a hill that was hollowed out and stuffed with offices and personnel facilities, stood a small tower that belonged to only one pony. Some said she was as powerful as President Morrel, though others insisted it was she who had started the rumor in the first place.

Whatever the truth, it was undeniable that Director General Bilhaus Haze, known to her minions only as Director B, was the queen of Lupine Falls.

Atop the reinforced concrete tower, above the hidden networks of air-to-ground missile batteries, was an office with a single window at the top. A pony looking out of it could watch the vast forest pitch and bank until it smashed against the mountains that rose in the west, their rocky peaks capped with ice year round.

As she often did, Bilhaus enjoyed the view from her plush, high-top chair spun around to face the window. A small glass of brandy sat on the glass top of a massive oak desk that dominated the rear of her office. The sun had peeked over the tops of the mountains just minutes ago and bathed the forest valley in tinges of copper and gold that marked a new morning.

It also marked the fourth consecutive morning she had spent in her office. She yawned and took a sip of the brandy. It went unnoticed down her throat, but slammed into her empty stomach like a brick.

The azure-colored mare growled and held her stomach for a moment before it settled back down. Satisfied, she pushed a lock of her ghostly white mane over her ear and tried to enjoy the view for a few more minutes before the rest of the IS caught up to her.

A red button on her desk phone lit up and began to buzz. The Director sighed, then spun her chair around and pressed the button.

“Yes, what is it?” she snapped in her usual haughty tone.

The voice on the other end hesitated, as most did when speaking to her. “The suspects we brought into custody have all been flown into our holding facility,” the little black box told her. “The one you wished to speak to, one, uh, Noctilucent, is being escorted to your office as we speak.”

“Good,” Bilhaus said. “Who is the escorting agent?”

“Agent Fresco, as you requested.”

Bilhaus smiled. “Just checking. Report back if there are any complications, otherwise allow them access to my office.”

She switched off the phone before whoever it was working the desk could thank her for her orders. She rolled her eyes and pulled another bottle of alcohol from the bottom drawer of the monolithic desk. If there was anything the unruly thing was good for, it was storing alcohol; her predecessors had made sure of that.

Bilhaus turned her chair until it faced the mahogany double doors, far at the end of the room. There was a portion of tile leading from the doors up to her desk that was painted red, as opposed to the uniform black found in the rest of the cavernous office. She had had it repainted so that, by tricking the eye, it appeared that the room widened and her desk got bigger as ponies approached, even if the only thing that changed was the width of the red path. It had been the very first thing she had changed in the office after assuming the Director’s position.

The doors slid open with a soft hiss against the glossy tile and two ponies stepped through. The familiar sight of the grey and black-spotted Senior Agent Maxis Fresco was enough to set Bilhaus at ease. The newcomer, however, kept her from any thought of relaxation.

Standing taller than Fresco by half a head, the ivory pony with the inky black mane marched beside the agent without missing a step, even as he approached one of the most powerful mares in the country. His icy blue eyes bore into Bilhaus.

Their footfalls echoed through the empty office that extended far above them. Light streaming in from the windows behind the Director cast the two in an orange glow. They came to a stop in front of the desk and stood before her. There were no chairs, and the desk was angled upward to complete the feeling that Bilhaus sat above where they stood.

She smiled at them.

“How was the flight in?” she asked, her voice echoing around the bare office. “Those spinners can be rough coming over Lupine Falls, but, unfortunately, we had no time to arrange for airframes to bring you here.”

The stallion, Noctilucent, looked up with a snarl on his face. “You act like I was brought here as a guest, not as a prisoner,” he said.

Bilhaus smiled. “But you are here as a guest,” she said. “If you notice, we have not bound you. You are free to leave at any time.”

Noctilucent didn’t budge.

“What?” she asked. “Do you not trust me?”

“I know your kind,” he growled. “You’re not letting me go that easy.”

The Director turned in her chair and picked up her glass of brandy. “I assure you, it is that easy, Mr. Noctilucent, but the effects it may have upon you could be . . . considerable.”

Noctilucent eyes narrowed. “You’ve already taken my wife and I, what else is there?”

“Mr. Noctilucent,” Bilhaus asked with a smirk, “when was the last time you were in contact with your daugher?”

“So you have her too,” Noctilucent muttered. “What, is that it? You’re going to keep me here by threatening her?”

Bilhaus held up a hoof. “There is no need to get upset,” she said. Behind her, the rising sun reflected off the glass window and appeared to project a halo of light around her. “We do not, at this time, have possession of your daughter. Which brings me to the purpose of you being brought to me.”

She sighed and took a sip of brandy. “I am a busy mare, Mr. Noctilucent. This country expects me to have my eyes and ears on every square petrabit of Teton without considering that such an effort would require the resources of every nation on this planet. With the recent events in the city of Sundown, my agency is spread thin, and some individuals have slipped through our grasp.”

“You mean my daughter,” Noctilucent said.

“I mean the stallion who has absconded with your daughter,” Bilhaus snapped. “You are familiar with Professor Staten, I would assume. Your former archaeological excavation partner and current curator for the Gracia Museum of History and Science.”

Noctilucent raised an eyebrow. “Are you implying that my former partner has kidnapped my daughter?” he asked.

“I would not go so far as to call it ‘kidnapping,’” Bilhaus said. “My sources tell me that she was seen willingly fleeing my agents with Staten. It is my belief that he has fooled your daughter into following him.”

“But why?”

Bilhaus shook her head, her ivory mane flopping about. “That is unknown at this time, which is why we have called you in. If you assist us in capturing Professor Staten and bringing him in for questioning, then you, your wife, and your daughter will be free to go.”

Noctilucent smirked. “No strings attached?”

“No strings attached.”

“So let’s say you’re telling the truth,” Noctilucent said. “How am I supposed to track down an old buddy of mine if I have no idea where he’s going or why?”

Bilhaus motioned to Agent Fresco, who marched back down to the doors and walked out, shutting them behind him. Once he was gone, Bilhaus reached under the desk and flipped a switch. She grinned and watched Noctilucent’s eyes widen when the smooth wooden surface of her desk lit up into a tabletop touch screen that displayed a glowing map of the entire country.

It had been one of the more recent installments to the room, and by far her favorite. No paper meant a clean and more impressive room, as well as a toy to astound visitors with. With that in mind, she had been quick to master it.

“What you are about to see is known only to the topmost individuals in the country,” she said. “Revealing this information to anypony except official personnel is constituted as an act of treason against the Republic of Teton and punished as such. Am I understood?”

Noctilucent looked her in the eyes and nodded.

“Good,” she said, then touched a button on the map that zoomed in to show a holographic representation of the city of Sundown and the desert around it. “Yesterday morning, as I’m sure you’re aware, an earthquake struck outside the city of Sundown, resulting in minor damage to the city and no loss of life.” On cue, little red warning signs appeared around the afflicted areas of the city.

“What few know is that, while there is, in fact, a fault line that runs near the mountains north of the city, the quake did not originate there.” A red line appeared on the map, not north of the city, but east, out among the open sand. “You may recognize the source of the epicenter as the same area in which your digs with Professor Staten took place, which were continued by his daughter and the university”

Bilhaus switched the map off and brought up a series of digital pictures. Most of them were taken years before, but a couple were much more recent.

She tapped one of the older ones, which had a picture of a large stone tablet containing a rough inscription of a heart on it. “You may recognize this as one of the pieces you and Staten uncovered from the Sundown dig, which was donated to the University of Sundown where his daughter teaches.”

Bilhaus brought up another image of the same heart, but instead of a picture on a tablet it was a real, physical crystal. Rougher around the edges than on the tablet, but very real. “What you may not know as the recent excavation of the same piece by Staten’s daughter.”

Noctilucent shook his head slowly. “No, no, they couldn’t, it’s . . . it was just a legend. How could they—”

“It was being kept under wraps, only just shown to the investors yesterday. The finding of an old artifact is monumental, of course, but not in any way that anypony could have predicted.”

“What do you mean?”

Bilhaus switched back to the map of the city, which now displayed little blue columns that rose at various heights. Around the dig site and the hospital, they were tens of times higher than anywhere else.

“Radiation monitors in the city, left over from the tests farther east sixty years ago,” she continued, “picked up massive fluctuations shortly after the earthquake. Though it is perhaps reasonable as to why the artifact was affected, given the circumstances, the event at the hospital is much more . . . perplexing.”

The map switched to images of a newborn foal, wrapping in swaddling clothes and lying in his mother’s hooves. Noctilucent craned his neck for a better look, and let out a small gasp when he saw the horn on its forehead.

Bilhaus flipped the screen off and it returned to its default state of appearing to be a normal wooden desktop.

“We seized Staten’s daughter along with the piece, but we believe she was able to get a message to her father before being taken,” Bilhaus said. “Our best guess is that Professor Staten successfully convinced your daughter to come with him to Sundown and fled Gracia before agents could apprehend him. That task, as he travels out of our thinning net, falls to you.”

Noctilucent scratched his head. “But why does he have to be caught?” he asked. “What’s he done wrong?”

“Nothing, so far,” Bilhaus said, “but it’s the potential. Since its activation this morning, the radiation levels surrounding the artifact have not gone down like the child, and have instead kept a steady outpouring of radiation in the surrounding area equal to standing at the blast zone of a megabomb. Yet, reports indicate that no harm came to the unshielded civilians who stayed within the vicinity of the artifact for hours.”

She leaned back in voluminous chair. “You can see why the Intelligence Service does not wish for power of this magnitude to fall into the wrong hooves.”

Noctilucent nodded. “And you will allow me to bring my daughter home safely?”

“You have my word.”

He sighed. “I don’t really have much of a choice, do I?”

“I wouldn’t like to think so, no,” Bilhaus said.

Noctilucent thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll find him, for my daughter and to keep the artifact safe. Don’t expect me to be your henchpony.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Bilhaus said. “I have Agent Fresco for that. Meet him out in the hallway and he will escort you to the loading station. From there, you will track Staten from the outskirts of Gracia: his last known location.”

The stallion turned and walked back down the long path to the door. He kept his head down and did not not look back at the Director. His heart beat faster. He knew the potential of the heart, knew the power . . . and could only wonder if Bilhaus did too. For the sake of Staten and his daughter, he hoped not.

Director B smiled at the back of Noctilucent’s head and turned around again in her chair to look out her window.

She reached behind her and tapped a button on the phone.

“Yes, Director?” came the voice.

“Make sure Agent Fresco keeps a close watch on Mr. Noctilucent,” she instructed. “We wouldn’t want him getting any wrong ideas.”

Chapter 5: In Bloom

The sun beat down on a vast cement parking lot that surrounded a modest, two-pump gas station and squat supermarket behind it, heating the gray surface. Nestled at the far end of a town called Mayberry, settled on the windswept plains beneath the great shadow of the Red Road, the station was one of the last vestiges of civilization until the Road hit the Andalusian Mountains out west.

Spreading chestnut and poplar trees grew in stands around the aching and sagging wooden houses which lined the road that cut the town in half and connected it to the Red Road. Scraggly front lawns and battered sidewalks decorated the small town and set it apart from the shiny cities to the east and west. It was a quiet place with a quiet dignity that was set apart from society and liked it that way.

Below a vast blue sky with contrails of white that cut through it, resting on that hot cement parking lot outside the supermarket, was the Odyssey. The camper was connected to one of the rusting pumps by a gas line that shuttled the precious fluid into the RV’s tanks. Reddington stood by it in his leather jacket, watching the counter on the pump move upwards.

Starlight, meanwhile, leaned against the rickety RV on the other side, looking out and away from the grocery store, past the small town’s dusty road, and to the wild plains beyond. The tall grass swayed in the wind like a vast ocean on land, rolling and diving with it. She kept one hoof over her eyes to block out the harsh rays that tried to blind her while she watched.

A chime above the door of the convenience store next to the gas pumps dinged as Professor Staten walked out with a plastic bag in his mouth. He narrowed his eyes against the glare and ambled over to the Odyssey. He wore a loose shirt covered in flowers that he had bought at the same station, along with a new pair of sun shades.

He walked up to Starlight and held up the plastic bag. “I thought I’d get you and I something to keep with you just in case.”

“In case of what?” she asked, looking away from the majestic scene and, unfortunately, back to Staten’s aging blue face.

He shrugged. “Accidents, death, explosions, you know, the kinds of stuff that’s already happened before we even got out of Gracia.”

“Very funny. So what is it?”

The hazel-eyed pony reached in the bag and produced a small headset with a wire that ran to a box with bumpers for hooves to press. It was an older model mobile phone; the kind that were bought with minutes instead of some sort of data plan.

“I figured that the two of you could use some phones in case we need to contact each other,” Staten said. “I’ve got my own that’s not hooked up to any big phone company, and you two need to do the same. It makes it harder to trace the calls.”

Starlight took the phone and looked down at the little box it came with. There was a small screen that, unlike the newer models, only displayed the names and numbers on a monochrome green background.

“I already put my number and the one for our smuggler’s phone in there,” he said. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she mumbled, scrolling through the half-dozen menus, “just what every growing girl needs.”

Staten rolled his eyes and went off to give Red a phone. The smuggler had denied owning one, so it was about time that changed. If he was going to work for them, he was going to keep in contact.

Starlight stayed put, leaning against the camper while she fiddled with the thing. She had had one not so dissimilar back in highschool, but the plans had been too much once she started to live on her own. Besides, who was going to call her? Her parents? The professor?

She shook her head. It wasn’t like she had missed out on much. Now, all it took was getting chased by the government while traveling with her dad’s friend and a crazy smuggler to get her another one. She had to smile a little bit at that thought.

Starlight sighed and looked back out across the plain, but it didn’t look quite so peaceful anymore. Instead, it looked vast and empty: a great waste that stretched on petramin after petramin and made their destination beyond the mountains seem forever away. And in between them and the destination could be a thousand different threats like those in Gracia. Or worse.

“What’s on your mind?” Staten asked, walking around the RV and shrugging on his jacket. “You look troubled.”

Starlight shook her head. “It’s nothing. Really.”

“Somehow, I don’t think you’re telling me the truth,” he said.

“It really is nothing. Just afraid is all.”

“Afraid?” he said. “Afraid of what?”

She sighed. “Well, you got us those phones for ‘emergencies’ and it got me thinking. That smuggler is the only one here that knows how to shoot a gun. You and I can’t really look out for ourselves if we get separated from him, and there’s a lot of chances of that between here and the Serenity Valley.”

Staten leaned against the side of the RV and smiled. “Who said I didn’t know how to shoot a gun?”

“Well I just assumed—”

“Your father and I had quite a bit of fun out in the open desert in our excavation days.” He sighed wistfully. “The least I can do for your father is teach you to defend yourself properly.”

Starlight jerked her head toward the other side of the RV. “What about the smuggler?”

“What about me?”

Red came walking around the RV with his leather jacket hanging on his back. He nodded toward the Odyssey. “The gas is pumped and we’re already paid. We can hit the road at any time if you two are ready.”

Staten turned to him. “I was actually thinking about taking Starlight out and teaching her how to shoot. I know you have weapons; I’ll pay you for the ammunition later.”

“Woah, woah, go shoot my guns and my ammo while I sit here and do what, exactly?” Red asked.

“You seem to have neglected to fill up your cupboards and refrigerator with, well, anything,” the professor said. “The supermarket is right over there. Why don’t you go fill up while we’re out? I’ll even give you the money.”

Red took out a pistol from beneath his jacket and smiled. “Or I could show the lady how to shoot.”

Quicker than Starlight would have thought possible, Staten surged forward and wrenched the gun from the smuggler’s hooves. Then, in one fluid motion, he tossed his sunglasses up in the air and shot two neat holes through the lenses. Starlight held her hooves tight to her ringing ears and grit her teeth.

“I’ll show Starlight how to shoot,” Staten ordered. “You go get the food. Meet us back here in an hour.”

Red grumbled but took the money the professor offered and started back toward to the supermarket. He kept his head held low and his pistol once again holstered.

Starlight was left alone outside the RV while Staten smiled at her and climbed up in the Odyssey. He rummaged around for a minute before reemerging with a saddlebag loaded down with guns and ammo.

“I think this might be enough,” he said.

“Yeah, for arming the militia,” Starlight said, then shook her head. “Whatever, let’s just go.”

She followed the professor to the edge of the road, then ran across with him when no cars came. They trotted across the ditch on the other side and arrived at a barbed wire fence that separated the fields from Mayberry.

Staten used his hooves to spread apart the fence into a hole large enough for Starlight to climb through, then followed after her. The pair found themselves waist deep in the sea of grass the caressed over them in waves.

“Doesn’t this land belong to somepony?” she asked.

“Probably,” he said, “but these country hicks won’t stop us. Come on.”

Starlight sighed and trudged along behind the professor until they were well away from the roads and houses and everything else that made up civilization. They could hear the chirping of crickets and other bugs while birds circled high above.

The professor stopped after what felt like an hour of walking and held up his hoof. “Here is good,” he said.

“About time,” Starlight grumbled.

He ignored her and shrugged off his saddlebag. From inside, he produced a long barrel shotgun and then took off his floral-pattern shirt. He marched out about two hundred petra from Starlight before shoving the shotgun in the ground butt-first. The barrel stuck up above the grass and he tied the shirt to it until it was whipping around like a flag.

“That’s our target,” he said, pointing to the shirt. “Let’s see if we can’t hit it.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever you say,” she said.

Staten pulled out a standard rifle and showed it to her. It had a long, shiny barrel that ended with a dark wood stock that had been smoothed down until it shone. The butt, like all pony weapons, was specially made to lean into the shoulder so the pony’s full body would absorb the brunt of the recoil.

With a smile, Staten brought the gun up and aimed down the built-in sights. He brought his opposite hoof up to the lever-trigger and pushed down on it. The rifle barked and spit smoke and fire as it sent its lead bullet downrange.

A single hole appeared in the short as the retort rang out across the fields.

Starlight’s hooves leaped to her ears. “You keep doing that!” she yelled. “Warn a pony before you do!”

“Right, sorry,” the professor said, giving her a pair of earplugs from his bag.

Starlight popped them in her ears and nodded to him. “Okay, you brought me out here to teach me, so teach.”

“Well, first thing,” the professor began, taking up position behind her and putting the rifle on her shoulder, “is to get a proper stance down.”

Reddington tried to ignore the squeaky wheel on the buggy that he rolled through the supermarket lanes. The stuffy little concrete store had him sweating as he pored over cans of corn and fruit that looked like it had been run over by a truck a couple of times.

The few other customers in the store were elderly folk who paid him no mind and did little to get out of his way when he walked down the snack food aisle. After getting dirty looks from a few of them, he made sure to buy as much soda and chips as he could carry. He would do anything to remind the geezers who was the young stallion in the store.

He shook his head when he passed them.

What did they matter? He was a smuggler! Sure, that girl and the professor started to ignore him and didn’t seem to think he had any idea what he was doing . . . but that didn’t make him an idiot! They wouldn’t forget him when they were thankful to have food in their bellies.

Metal fans lazily spun through the air above him, doing little but to move the hot air around a little bit. Red grumbled beneath his breath about it and did his best to get everything they needed.

In the cart, he had piled in, along with the chips and soda, a variety of fruits, canned goods, vegetables, bread, cheeses, and some milk to put in the Odyssey’s fridge. That was as much as he could think of at the moment and would be enough to make it to Amperdam, at least.

He pushed his cart to the store’s sole checkout counter beneath the thin windows that let in murky light, reflecting off the dirty linoleum floors. Red fought from fidgeting in the unfamiliar, enclosed space and longed to be on the road back in the Odyssey.

There was a small teletube with a bunny ears antenna sitting behind the counter, which a plump mare watched while occasionally doing her job. She hit the side of the machine and the static dancing on the screen cleared for a moment. It was some local hick reporter droning on about crop news and traffic on the Red Road. Red ignored it like everything else in the little town and placed his items on the counter for checkout.

The mare looked at him with disdain for interrupting her show but started to scan the food and place it in bags for him anyway. She rang up the total for him and took his cash without a word. Red started to breathe easy again when she gave him the change and loaded the bags into his cart. Then he heard his name.

“. . . a stallion known only as Reddington, interstate smuggler and petty thief, is wanted for kidnapping, assault, assault on an officer, grand theft auto, and treason,” the little tube blared. “He was last seen heading west on the Red Road and all towns are advised to be on a lookout for him and his passengers. Here is a police photograph for reference.”

To Red’s horror, an old mug shot of him popped up on the screen. He’d changed enough since then that he hoped he could pass for a different pony, especially as the clerk watching the tube turned around to face him.

“Have a nice day,” she said in a strained voice.

Red nodded to her and did his best to keep cool as he pushed the buggy out the door and back to the parking lot. He could feel the clerk’s eyes boring into the back of his head, and he broke out into a run once he was outside.

While he ran, he wrenched the mobile phone from his pocket and put the headset on. He got up the contact list and dialed the girl’s phone number. Just as he did, he thought he could see the clerk start to approach him from across the parking lot.

“You have to learn to control your breathing,” Staten told Starlight after she missed her eighth shot. “Otherwise you will be too shaky to aim anything. Breathe in when aiming, then out before you pull the trigger. Keep both eyes open at all times.”

He was standing over her as she struggled with the gun. The thing had enough recoil to send her sprawling without the right stance and was aching against her shoulder.

“How am I supposed to control my breathing every time?” Starlight asked. “That’s impossible.”

“You have to feel it,” Staten said. “Do it until it becomes instinct. Again.”

She sighed but raised the gun and kept her eyes glued to the shirt with one hole punched through it. She tried to feel the way the grass around her bent and swayed to the wind.

Deep breath.

She took aim and placed her hoof on the trigger.

Let it out.

She fired.

This time, the gun bounced back instead of up or some other direction, and the bullet flew straight and true. A rough hole was shorn near the bottom of the shirt.

Starlight jumped up in the air and laughed. “I did it!” she cried.

Staten smiled and patted her on the shoulder. “That was a fine job you did. Now do it ten more times and you’ll be a real marksmare in no time.”

Before she could, though, her mobile started to ring. She had left it in the saddlebag and hurried over to it. Putting the piece in her ear and clicking the answer button, she said, “Hello?”

“Listen, girl, it’s me,” the smugglerl said on the other end. “I’m going to have to make this quick, but I think the townsponies know who we are. The clerk at the supermarket . . . she saw me.”

Starlight could hear sirens begin to wail in the background.

“Shit,” Red said. “Okay, I gotta go, but you and the old guy get out of here as soon as you can. I’ll find a way out.”

The line went dead and Starlight threw off the headset. Staten was staring at her and she shook her head. “Red’s in trouble,” she said.

“Of course that little fool would get himself into something . . .” Staten began.

“No, no, it sounded like they found out who he was,” Starlight said, “and the only way they could have found that out is if there is a bulletin out for our arrest too.”

Staten smirked. “So are you saying that we mount a rescue operation?”

“Well I managed to hit one out of nine shots with this thing,” Starlight said, shaking the gun. “So why not? It’s nothing worse than what we’ve already done.”

The professor laughed. “That’s the spirit!”

Together, they sprinted back across the field with the professor lugging the saddlebag with him and Starlight doing her best to cradle the rifle to her chest. Luckily, Staten made her turn the safety on before she shot herself in the face somehow.

They made it back to the parking lot to find the place deserted, but the RV still parked in front of the empty pumps. There was a shopping cart next to the camper that was loaded with food but nopony to attend to it.

“We’re too late,” Staten muttered.

He paced around the parking lot after setting the bag down. “They’ll have taken him to the local police station by now and have probably called in the IS too. We don’t have long before they’re here, but we’re going to be outnumbered by the cops. We’ll need surprise, but all we have is the RV . . .”

Starlight shrugged. “A big RV barreling toward me would be a pretty big surprise to me.”

“No, no, they could just shoot out the tires or the driver if they felt like it. It won’t work as a surprise, but, perhaps, a distraction.” Staten got a big grin on his face. “Starlight,” he said, “load up all the food from the cart except fruits, vegetables, or anything soft. Then, give me a grenade or two. We’re going to have a little fun.”

The county sheriff was a lime colored stallion with a barrel paunch and thinning yellow hair who was fond of wearing reflective sunglasses and a beefy jacket while he chomped on a cigar.

He kept Red in the front of the town’s small jailhouse, located at one corner of the dusty town square, instead of inside. He had told him the IS would be coming and they didn’t want any surprises.

The smuggler’s heart beat faster. The IS weren’t going to play nice if they wanted the girl and the professor so bad. Yesterday, he had been just another smuggler, but now he was valuable.

He tried to wrench his hooves against the shiny, like-new cuffs, but it was to no avail. The sheriff, however, noticed him doing so and laughed.

“Don’t even bother; those aren’t going to be broken open until our friends at the Intelligence Service get here. I just know they’re going to love you.”

Red snarled at him. “At least they notice this little hellhole for once.”

The sheriff slapped him. “Quiet you,” he said. “I’m not stupid. Nopony’s gonna provoke me while we wait.”

“Fine,” he said, looking away.

The sheriff started to laugh. “Oh, don’t tell me you’re scared! Boy, you’re practically shaking!”

“I am not!” he shot back.

“Sure, sure.” The sheriff leaned closer to him and smiled wide enough so that the smuggler could see his broken and yellowed teeth. “Listen, let’s just make this easy. You tell me where your little friends are and I tell the IS that I never found you.”

Red backed up and shook his head. “Never,” he said. “As long as those two are with me, they’re my crew, and I take care of my crew.”

The sheriff shrugged. “Suit yourself. Just hope you’ll feel the same way when the suits are done with you. In the meantime, just relax and let my boys keep an eye out for your friends.”

Clumped together next to the jailhouse were the four other police of the town. The perimeter of the town square was just a bunch of sagging brick buildings with roads at every corner. There was a small stand of trees with a gazebo in the center. It was deserted at that time of the day and utterly quiet.

That was, until the blasts of a horn filled the empty stretches of the square.

The sheriff laughed. “That must be them. Time to go.”

It was Red’s turn to shake his head, though. “No, that’s a very particular horn,” he said. “That’s my horn.”

Down the side street across the square from them, the Odyssey came barreling down the street, its horn blasting. The mighty vehicle roared across the square until it came to squealing stop in front of the jailhouse, turned to the side to present a larger target.

The hatch at the top opened and Starlight popped out, rifle already raised to her shoulder. She cocked it and kept it trained on the sheriff.

The four police officers raised their weapons as well and pointed them all at Starlight. She tried to keep their aim steady as they came to a standoff.

What the officers, nor the sheriff, noticed, however, was the metal grocery cart filled with fruit that had rolled its way out from behind the jailhouse. Red had only a second to see it before he dove to the ground as the explosion went off.

Gooey extracts of a dozen kinds of fruits and vegetables covered the sheriff and officers in a nonlethal mess that left them sputtering and confused.

Before they could come to their senses, a stallion wielding a big, silver shotgun came walking up from the alley the cart had come from.

“Well look at this,” Staten said. “Looks like we got here just in the nick of time. What does that make us, Starlight?”

“Big damn heroes, professor,” she said.

Staten smiled. “Ain’t we just?”

Red stared at the two of them, cornering the town’s entire police force. The old geezer and the girl? Really?

The professor walked up to the sheriff and tapped him in the chest with the shotgun. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said, “but you’ve got something that belongs to us and we’d like it back.”

“This is an official police investigation,” the sheriff began. “You cannot think to disrupt—”

“You see the mare hanging out of the top of the RV with the really big gun?” Staten asked. “She’s one of the criminals the IS wants. She’s a convicted killer and we’ve come an awfully long way and, well, she’s looking to kill somepony.”

“I never liked this town anyway . . .” Starlight mumbled.

Staten nodded to the officers who put down their now-gooey guns. “Right, so let him go.”

“But he’s a wanted fugitive,” the sheriff protested.

The professor raised his shotgun into the sheriff’s face. “But he’s our fugitive, so let him go.”

Refueled and safely out of the clutches of the IS, the Odyssey cruised down the Red Road with a full tank of gas and full fridge of junk food. Minute by minute, the town that would now be swarming with black-suited agents was falling behind them while the mountains to the west got closer and closer.

“I guess we’re all wanted criminals now,” Red said at last.

Starlight smiled from her chair near the back of the RV. “Yeah,” she said, “but it has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

He coughed. “And that was mighty fine of you two coming to pick me up back there. You really saved my skin.”

“Don’t mention it,” Staten said from the passenger’s seat. “If we’re going to make this journey, we will all have to work together.”

He looked out the window to where the Red Road rose up to the mountain pass and where he knew it dropped off into Serenity Valley soon after. “I’m afraid we will be tested on that before long.”

Chapter 6: Bad Moon Rising

The whirring of rotors filled Noctilucent’s ears. Though the ivory stallion wore large headphones that caught on his inky black mane, the eternal hum filled his eardrums and refused to allow him a minute’s rest on the flight from Lupine Falls back to Gracia.

Not that he could have gotten any sleep anyway. The back seat of the IS spinner was nothing more than a hard, cushioned bench up against the rear metal wall. Noctilucent’s back ached from the hours of flight, made worse by being packed between two agents in black suits.

Across from him sat the grey-and-black spotted Agent Fresco. He had glared at Noctilucent the entire ride, one hoof always near his weapon. Even as they began to descend, once they had reached the outlying suburbs of Gracia, the agent kept his eyes locked on their newest member.

The spinner threw up dust and stray blades of grass as it came down in a park in the middle of a neighborhood about twenty petramin outside of downtown Gracia. It was a quiet and well-kept neighborhood, so naturally the residents flocked to watch the landing of not just a spinner, but an all-white IS spinner.

Ponies gathered in a ring around the spinner kept their hooves on their ears until the blades had finally stopped spinning and the vehicle had come to a complete rest. Not a second later, the anonymous agents were out of the passenger area and working to create a perimeter for them.

Agent Fresco stood and half-helped, half-pulled Noctilucent from his seat, wrangled the headphones off, and escorted him off the spinner and onto the soft soil of the park below them. The pilot waved to them and leaned back in his seat, his job done.

The elder stallion followed Fresco and the other two agents away from the spinner and across the verdant green field to the entrance of the middling suburb. It had all the tenets of its kind: blocks of four models of houses placed close together and done in earthy tones that were bright, but not too bright. The lawns, as usual, were immaculate and the cars in the driveways higher-end.

Farther down the blacktop road, right on the corner, was a house surrounded by police vans and IS cars. Their lights were still flashing and bright green police tape ringed around the perimeter while ponies went in and out of the front door.

“So you brought me back to Gracia to look at Staten’s house?” Noctilucent asked. “What’s the point? We already know where he’s going.”

Agent Fresco nodded. “Yes, that is true, but we do not know why. Serenity Valley is home to over ten million citizens; the task of finding them will be impossible without knowing where exactly they’ll be heading first.”

“Right, sure.”

Noctilucent followed the agents down the street and up to the house. He stepped underneath the police tape and up the steps to the small bungalow. The door was off its hinges and hanging to one side while a single agent milled outside. He started when he saw Agent Fresco walk up and did his best to get out of the way. He only gave a cursory glance when the ordinary citizen followed Fresco in.

The interior of the house was a mess, as to be expected, but Noctilucent had a sneaking suspicion that the police weren’t the only reason. He remembered that Staten had always been a bit of a slob, so it was unsurprising that his house was as well. The building itself wasn’t very big. A small living room with a model kitchen and master bedroom with a bath. There was a study upstairs, he knew, but they had searched every petrabit of that place already.

Fresco turned to him. “Well?” he asked.

“Well what?” Noctilucent replied.

“You’re the suspect’s friend,” the agent said. “We’ve searched every petrabit of this place: we’ve gone over his computer records, his phone bills, and his mail. Not a single shred of evidence. That’s why you’re here, to find what we can’t.”

“And if I can’t find it either?”

Fresco cracked a frightening smile. “Try not to think about it.”

Noctilucent looked further around the house. He grinned a little, seeing the serious police agents box up all the little knickknacks and food boxes that Staten had left laying everywhere. He’d never liked to throw anything away, saying it was an archaeologist’s duty to find the value in everyday things. How the old coot thought a takeout box would be valuable someday was a mystery, however.

“Well?” Fresco asked after the fourth time Noctilucent had circled the sparse living room, pawing around his video collections and gaming consoles.

“There’s nothing here,” the older stallion said. “I’m telling you, Staten isn’t the kind of stallion to just leave important stuff out where anypony can find it. Even somepony like me.”

Fresco’s expression didn’t change. “Search the study.”

Noctilucent sighed, but dutifully walked across the small room, past the kitchen swarming with police officers and agents, and up the stairs toward the study. Staten had invited him for drinks a few times and they had always made their way to the musty old room at some point to swap stories and reminisce about old times.

The warped door to the study hung open like all the others and contained a couple agents who peeked at the sturdy bookshelf against one corner and poked around the desk in the other. Both were ordered out by Fresco, who shut the door behind him.

Noctilucent turned to him. “I really don’t think—”

“Keep looking.”

The aging finance broker and former archaeologist sighed and moved over to the bookshelf. If Staten had kept anything of use to the IS in the house, it would be there.

He picked out a few books and stared at the titles: The Twilight Code, A Case for Celestia, and The Unicorn Delusion. He rolled his eyes, but Fresco seemed to find interest in the doorstop-sized novels.

“Your friend was certainly . . . interested in the Old World Myths,” he said.

Noctilucent shrugged. “Every archaeologist gets a little interested in this kind of stuff at some point, I suppose. In the end, though, you dig enough and you figure out for yourself that there’s no such thing as a ‘Canterlot’ or a flying pony outside of little kids’ stories.”

“And Mr. Staten believed differently?”

“I wouldn’t say he believed in them,” Noctilucent said, “but not as skeptical, I guess. He used to have this theory, you see, Celestia and Luna, the big ones, were like gods to the ponies and that, maybe, they angered them and the two took away their wings, horns, and magic, then wiped the world clean.”

He chuckled a little. “He was a Solarist when he was younger, but kind of gave that up, so I guess he wanted to believe something. Used to give me crap for being an Adanist, I’ll tell you what.”

Fresco seemed to have retreated back into his shell and gave Noctilucent a blank stare once more, as if he knew more than he wanted to say. “Keep looking,” he ordered.

Noctilucent scanned the bookshelf once more, over the covers of passé sci-fi novels and big fantasy series that Staten had kept since his youth. Then, he spotted one book out of place among the rest. Its black spine stuck out from the orderly shelf, as if it had been put back in a hurry.

He took it out and his eyes widened when he saw the cover. Teton Atlas. When he flipped it open, it turned to a page not quite in the middle of the thick book. What was more important than the page it turned to, however, was the ones that had been torn out of the book near the front.

Fresco appeared next to him. “What do you have?” he asked.

“It looks like he tore out some maps,” Noctilucent said, then whistled. “If I’m reading this right, they were the maps for the area in and around Amperdam.”

“Amperdam? What’s there?” Fresco snapped.

“Nothing, nothing.” Noctilucent shook his head. “We only went there a few times. We never did anything except—”

“Except what?”

He paused. “Have you had any agents sent over to my house since you got me and my wife?”

“We had a few patrolling near there for your daughter and Mr. Staten, but they left once the pair had run from the police with Mr. Reddington. Why?”

Noctilucent shut the book with a thump. “Get me over there right now.”

The ride over to his house in the back of the police car had Noctilucent on edge the entire time. He kept looking out the window at the lunchtime traffic and willed it to move so they could reach his house before Staten got any farther with his daughter.

That thought set him on edge.

Every time he shut his eyes, it seemed, his mind was assaulted with the images of Staten dragging Starlight further and further away from him, and toward whatever danger his old partner had gotten himself into this time.

Dammit, Staten, why didn’t you pick me for this fool adventure? Why Starlight?

After what seemed like an eternity inside the stuffy police car, they arrived in front of his house. Noctilucent noticed more damage than he had when he’d been shoved into a van in the middle of the night and winced a little. He wasn’t here to look over the damage, however, and leapt from the car once they let him out.

He bounded up the front steps, through the front door, and across his living room to his study. He paused for a moment at the destruction that had been brought down on it, but then looked around for what he knew in his heart was already gone.

Sure enough, after a moment of searching, he found the family portrait he had paid for many years ago. And, like he had most feared, the front was cut out and the disc inside was missing.

Noctilucent threw the picture aside and sat in the rubble of his study, trying to keep the thoughts of Staten taking his daughter to her away.

Fresco popped his head into the room and stared at the older stallion. “Do you know where Mr. Staten has gone?” he asked.

“Get a spinner out here,” Noctilucent ordered. “We need to get to Amperdam.”

Agent Nightcall sat on the hard, uncomfortable interrogator's chair in the Sundown IS office’s interview room and wondered if the furniture was as bad on the other side of the big, metal table. The copper-colored stallion with the soft, wavy golden mane that he been worn and fringed from stress stared down at the papers that had been faxed from Lupine Falls to him.

Across the table sat Sunny Skies, her hooves crossed in front of her teal chest and her icy blue eyes staring daggers at her would-be interrogator. For the twenty minutes the two had spent in the room together, she had not said one word.

Night sighed and took out a prisoner interrogation form from the bottom of the folder and put it at the top of the stack of papers. He clicked open a pen and asked, “Name: last, then first with middle initial.”

Sunny snorted. “You already know my name.”

“It’s for the official form; just tell me, okay? I don’t like this anymore than you do.”

“Skies, Sunny D,” she growled.

“Great.” Night wrote it down at the top of the form. “Height, weight, date of birth.”

“Ten petras tall, a thousand pounds, and the beginning of time.”

He put the pen down and rubbed his forehead. “Look, I know you’re mad, but there isn’t anything I can do about it. You want to get mad at somepony, take it up with our head office. Right now, I just have to do this for the records.”

“Well, I may be happier to answer your questions if I knew what I was even being stuck in here for,” she said. “Last time I checked, holding me without a reason was against the law, but you IS colts have never been good at obeying that, have you?”

“Look, the information of what’s even going on is just now getting down to us over here,” Night snapped. “We don’t know much either! We’re stuck in the dark and while you get to sit here and stew I have to be out there trying to figure out a way to keep this whole situation from falling apart!”

He took a deep breath and tapped his pen against the form once again. “Look, you help me with this and I’ll tell you what I know, okay? It may come as a surprise to you, but I like obeying the law. Now: height, weight, and date of birth.”

Sunny continued to leer at him, but answered, “Two petra and three petrabits, sixty-one pounds, and June 7, 2017.”

“Place of employment and job title.”

“The University of Sundown and Professor of Hippology — Doctor.”

“Alright, good,” Night said as he wrote it down. “Now, the important thing: relation to Dr. Staten Lane, curator of the Gracia Museum of History and Science?”

Sunny’s eyes narrowed. “So this is about him, is it?”

“It’s what Lupine Falls wants.” He shook his head. “Not my question.”

“Well you can tell them that, oh yeah, he’s my dad! Yeah, we haven’t talked in a while, but he’s my father and if they think I’ll tell them anything about him, they can shove it up their overly-puckered flankholes.”

Night smiled a little. “I’ll write ‘No Comment.’”

Sunny leaned back in her chair. “Okay, so I gave you the whole story on me, now why don’t you hold up your end and tell me just why I’m still in here?”

Night shuffled the document back into the folder with the rest. He’d have one of his desk jockeys send it off to Lupine Falls and hope they didn’t respond very fast. He leaned forward on the table and cleared his throat.

“From what we know, your reasons for being held is a little more . . . complicated . . . than the deal with that couple in the other room. Most of it stems from the crystal heart we were forced to remove from the dig site.”

“It didn’t used to be so active,” Sundown said.

“As we are well aware. Its transformation is what has us worried the most. According to readings from around the edge of Sundown, that thing was pouring out more radiation than a megabomb, and it still is. If we scanned you right now, you’d probably be white-hot.”

Sunny raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t the only pony there, you know. There were dozens of ponies: financiers, board members, faculty, and the rest.”

“And we’re doing all we can for them too; they’ve been escorted to the hospital.” He sighed. “The only problem with you is your ties to the heart being there in the first place and the relationship your father has with the object and his current position with the Intelligence Service and Teton Government.”

“You want to arrest him.”

“I’ve been informed that he fled the city of Gracia with his former partner’s daughter and a smuggler. We’re being told that they’re on their way here. Of course we want to arrest them.”

“For what?” Sunny cried. “What have I or my father done that could possibly justify this kind of treatment?”

“We are only holding you and wish to hold your father until we can figure out all that is going on,” Night said. “Or do you want to be out there on the streets, walking around like some rad bomb?”

Sunny sat back in her seat and didn’t say a word. She looked away, towards the one-way mirror, and refused to respond to any more questions the agent posed to her. The interview was over.

Agent Nightcall sighed, collected the document folder and walked out. In the hall, he instructed a junior agent to escort Miss Skies back with the other prisoners in their room.

On his way back to his desk, Night was joined by Agent Flower, who stepped out of the other interview room and gave a big yawn. The light violet mare had dark circles ringing her golden eyes, and her maroon mane was almost as frayed as Night’s was. She had discarded the heavier trappings of her Agent uniform, leaving only a white undershirt and black trousers.

“I take it your interview with the proud parents didn’t go so well?” Night asked once they had reached his desk. He just about threw himself into his chair, which squeaked and groaned in protest. He took a cup of coffee off his desk, sipped it, decided it wasn’t too old, and drained it.

The oppressive desert heat had started to set in for the day once again, and the fans around the office were going at full blast, though they did little to bring relief to the poorly-ventilated office.

“Shockingly, new parents don’t want to be told they can’t go home with their child,” Flower said, taking a seat in a plastic chair somepony had brought for her. “Explaining the finer points of security protocol was more an exercise in patience than anything else.”

Night smirked. “An exercise they won, huh?”

“You could say that.”

“And I am.” The supervising agent laughed and scratched at his mane. “Can you even believe all this crap? We’re getting news from Lupine about radiation and mutations and all this other bull. They’re talking like it’s the 90s or something with all the dirty bomb scares and mutant ponies.”

“I don’t . . . I don’t even know what to believe,” Flower said, leaning forward in her chair and putting her head in her hooves. The once resilient and stone-faced agent now just shook her head and frowned. “Bringing them in was hard enough, but now it’s like every hour that passes, things get worse. There’s talks of quarantining the entire city, and who is supposed to do that? The Army’s out in Sethton, the police force here is only big enough to keep a tight watch on downtown and, well, we’re overwhelmed by three stubborn prisoners.”

“Close the city? Really?” Night asked.

“It might just be a rumor, but who knows at this point? Phones are tied up at Lupine and what we get from them is conjecture at best.”

The both of them were silent for a moment. The office around them was quiet as agents who had worked through the night fought to keep themselves awake. Night leaned back in his chair and tried to get comfortable.

“What are we going to do, Rose?” Night asked, using the name he’d found in glimpsed on Flower’s paperwork.

Rose raised an eyebrow and rested her hooves against his desk. “Are we on first name terms now?”

“I try to get familiar with my agents as best I can,” Night said quickly. He turned to an agent at a desk not far from him. “Isn’t that right, Blackstone?”

“My name’s Topaz,” the agent said. “Jerk.”

“Right you are, Tom,” Night said, then turned back to Flower. “See? Familiarity.”

The agent rolled her eyes and put her forehooves behind her head. “Well, to answer your question, Night, I’m not really sure what we are supposed to do at the moment. Headquarters hasn’t given us much in the way of direct orders that we haven’t done already and we’re all taxed out today. If I may, I might go find somewhere to take a nap.”

Night tapped a hoof against his chin. “Well, you could do that, but when’s the last time you’ve eaten?”

“Yesterday, why?”

“Well, there’s a good diner just around the corner.” Night scratched the back of his head. “Want to go grab something? Strictly business, of course.”

Flower smiled a little. “Strictly business? You promise?”

“I’m a stallion of my honor,” Night said.

“Alright, then let’s go. I’m starving here.”

A steady downpour of rain beat against the front windshield of the Odyssey. The RV idled in the middle of a dozen other still cars on the Red Road, all stalled while they waited to pass through the final mountain pass and into Serenity Valley.

It was late in the day and the heavy clouds overhead glowed orange from the setting sun. They had spent the entire day on the road and would make it to the valley just as night fell.

Red sat in the front seat, his head resting on his hoof as he idly watched the cars in front of him. In the seat next to him, sprawled out in the leather chair, was Staten Lane. His eyes were closed and jaw hung open.

At the back of the recreational vehicle, curled up in the small bed with the blanket wrapped around her, was Starlight. She had pushed her way against the pillow and slept quietly through the trip.

The steady beat of raindrops against the back window kept her in a dreamless sleep as she waited for the Odyssey to make it past the mountains and into the valley. For the moment, she was content to sleep.

Then, the traffic started to move again.

It was so sudden that Red jerked in his chair before putting the Odyssey in gear and following the cars in front of him. As if a lever had been pulled, the stalled traffic melted into a throbbing vein of cars moving steadily forward.

Staten awoke to the sound of the cars and looked around. “We’re moving again?” he asked.

Red nodded and smile. “You’re going to want to get that daughter of yours for this. We’re almost out of the mountains.”

Staten nodded and slid out of his chair. He stumbled across the interior of the RV as it moved, then wrenched open the door at the back.

The beam of light that invaded the small bedroom hit Starlight in the face and she awoke with a sigh. “What is it?” she mumbled.

“We’re almost to Serenity Valley,” the professor said. “I thought you might enjoy your first view of it.”

“Can’t it wait?”

“Not if you don’t want to miss it.”

Starlight debated for a few seconds about whether to stay in bed, then sighed and swung herself out of the bed. Her hooves touched the cold floor—she winced—and then followed Mr. Staten out of the bedroom and toward the front of the RV once again.

The road ahead of them rose up until it came to a crest where it sloped down the other side. The Odyssey neared the top just as Starlight and the professor joined their smuggler by his side.

“You ever seen this before, kid?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Never.”

The RV finally made its way to the top of the hill and, for a moment, rested on the top.

“Well then,” Red said, “welcome to Serenity Valley.”

Chapter 7: Nightvision

The Odyssey crested the last hill before Serenity Valley and drove on toward the land set in between monolithic mountains capped with snow. Down on the valley floor, at the meeting point of three wide rivers, was the city of Amperdam.

Spread across two opposing river banks, the city rose above the forested valley with glass spires and uniform grids of suburbs. As night fell on the city, the roads and freeways surrounding it lit with thousands of tail and headlights. Meanwhile, the neat, squat suburban homes burned brightly as parents returned home from work and children did homework by lamplight.

In the mountains above the city was a feature unique to Serenity Valley. Rising from tiers of stone cut into the mountains itself was a second city: Skyhall. Roads climbed up through the mountain passes to reach the mile-high metropolis that ringed around the largest peak in the valley. Its lights glowed brightest in the night and washed over Amperdam like a watchful protector.

The rain from earlier had let up on the other side of the mountains as night settled in. A broad expanse of stars wheeled overhead while a crescent moon watched over the valley.

Starlight took in the view in stunned silence. Her jaw hung open and her eyes widened as she swung her head back and forth, trying to see every inch of the vista before her.

“Yeah, I had the same reaction my first time too,” Red said with a laugh. He looked at her again, then focused on the wheel and the traffic that moved steadily around the RV.

“You been here much, gramps?” he asked Staten.

The professor nodded. “Not in a while, but in my younger days the Valley was one of the most popular places to be for graduate school.” He sat back in his seat and sighed. “Ah, the ‘20s.”

The Odyssey rumbled around a turn and Starlight snapped out of her stupor. “Wow, just wow,” she said.

“City girl liking her first taste of the rest of the country?” Red asked. She hit his shoulder and he just laughed. “Hey, don’t get jealous now. This job has some benefits, you know.”

“It’s going to have less if you don’t keep your eyes on the road,” Staten warned. “Let’s just try to focus on getting into Amperdam, alright? We can think about the rest later.”

“Fine with me,” Starlight said, taking a seat in the recliner behind the two front seats. “Though would it be too much to ask for us to get a hotel for the night?”

“Would it be too much to ask for you not to hog up the bedroom all the time?” Red asked. “I’ve had to sleep in this chair every night so far.”

Starlight glared at him, but then just looked out the window and did her best to ignore him. They were driving down one of the last hills now, approaching where the Red Road lowered to the ground and ran along one of the rivers into Amperdam. A section of the road, however, curved away and headed up toward Skyhall.

The RV rumbled on toward Amperdam at a steady pace and the traffic moved with it. They were going smooth, but Starlight could see a flurry of red brake lights far ahead. Red grunted when he saw it too.

“What the heck is going on down there?” he asked.

Staten leered at it. “Nothing good, I’m sure,” he said. “Slow down.”

They approached it as Red drifted toward the far right lane. The RV approached the last exit toward Skyhall, intent on barreling past.

Then, roaring down from the sky above, came an all-white IS spinner. It swooped over the highway and hovered over the section of the highway all the cars were stalled at.

“Take the exit!” Staten commanded.

Red stared at him. “What? Are you serious?”

They had almost passed the exit, so the professor leaned over and spun the wheel, dragging the RV toward the off ramp. The Odyssey’s tires squealed and the cars behind them honked, but the RV managed to get on the exit, clipping the side of the ramp with a thump.

“Are you crazy?” Red shouted, taking the wheel from Staten’s hooves and glaring at him. “We could have been killed! What were you thinking?”

“That was an IS checkpoint back there,” Staten said. “I’m sure of it. And how long do you think we’d last if we got caught at one of those?”

Red shook his head. “So you see one IS spin-job and you automatically assume a traffic jam is caused by a government checkpoint? I know we’re supposed to be cautious, but isn’t that just paranoid?”

“Better to be safe than sorry. I don’t put it past the IS to block off a road just to catch us.”

Red sighed and just drove onward. The exit ramp snaked along the edge of the valley and rose up toward the mountains and Skyhall above. No matter how much he wanted to turn around, he wouldn’t be able to once they were fully into the mountains, and even then it was a long loop around to get back to Amperdam.

“So, what, are we going to Skyhall now?” Starlight asked.

“It seems like it,” Staten said. “We go there and figure a way into Amperdam. Shouldn’t be too hard.”

Red grunted. “You say that, but if the IS really blocked off the Red Road, they got the rest of them too. And good luck getting into Amperdam without a road, considering it’s the car capitol of Teton.” He laughed. “Plus, the only way by water goes down over the country’s largest waterfall, so good luck with that.”

“But you’re a smuggler, aren’t you?” Starlight crossed her hooves over her chest. “Can’t you, you know, smuggle us into Amperdam?”

“No, see, that’s the beauty of this whole thing. Since our little ‘escape’ from Gracia, the whole country’s going to be not only looking for the two of you, but me and the Odyssey too. I can’t run a single checkpoint if I wanted to.”

Starlight sighed and laid back in her seat. “Great, then.”

The RV drove on, up the mountain slopes around Serenity Valley, drawing ever closer to Skyhall. The city of seven tiers loomed above them, a watcher in the night. Its bright lights a welcoming gate from the danger behind them.

The outskirts of Skyhall were small suburbs built on the slope of the mountain. Some areas were flat and cut from the rock while others simply rested on the incline. The Odyssey turned on the curving road that ran through the suburbs and on toward the first massive tier of Skyhall. For a city that had once been an army fort, it still looked very much like one.

“So here’s one thing I don’t get,” Red said, taking a sharp turn with the sluggish RV, “why haven’t the IS closed off Skyhall if they went ahead and shut off Amperdam too? I mean, it doesn’t seem like that much of an effort.”

“They know that what we want is in Amperdam,” Staten said. “Why spread your forces thin if you can just wait for your target to come to you?”

Starlight leaned forward in her chair. “Okay, so we have to go to Amperdam . . . but for what? Last you told me, we needed to head to Sundown. What’s the point for our stop?”

Staten didn’t say anything and the RV grew silent, save for the road noise coming from outside. They were passing through a dingy district of Skyhall’s suburbs, with plenty of bars, cheap motels, and nightclubs scattered around. Only a few cars shared the road with them.

When the professor had been silent for a few minutes, Red slowed down and turned in to a parking lot outside a strip mall. “Gramps, you’re going to need to tell us something or we’re not going anywhere.”

Staten sighed. “Alright, alright. Before we can go to Sundown, I need to see a friend down in Amperdam about something my daughter told me about.”

“Daughter?” Red asked, looking at Starlight.

“Uh, other daughter,” she stammered. “My older sister . . .”

“Sunny.” Staten shook his head. “She’s a professor out in Sundown, and she told me that she’d found something interesting at her school. Something about an artifact I had uncovered rumors about years ago.”

“And you need to go to Amperdam about this why?” Red asked.

“I have an old geology friend there. She studied the carvings back in the days before it had been discovered. I figure she might give us a little information on the artifact before we get to Sundown. It’s going to be touch-and-go once we’re there, so best to figure out now what we can.”

Red stared at Staten for a moment, then nodded.

“Alright, fair enough. Now, how do you suppose we can get you in touch with this geology friend of yours from all the way out here in Skyhall?”

“A payphone will do,” the professor said. “I have her personal number; if she doesn’t answer, we’re already too late.”

“And is there a reason you can’t use one of the mobiles you bought?”

“The IS, sooner or later, is going to search my friend’s phone records for all incoming calls. If they find the mobile number, we can’t use it again or they will know our location instantly. Seeing as none of the shops are open this late to buy a new one, a payphone is a nice alternative.”

Starlight looked out the window to the dark concrete lot outside. There were a few lamp posts scattered around, near the closed shops. Then, in the orange light beneath one of them, she spotted a lone phone booth.

“Hey, there’s one outside!” she said. Staten looked where she was pointing, then nodded.

“Good,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

The door opened and the professor walked out, grabbed his jacket, and let the door slam shut behind him. Red watched out the front window as the professor stalked across the parking lot and toward the pay phone booth.

He turned to Starlight.

“So did your dad not tell you much about what he does?”

She coughed. “He’s not the most open of stallions, no. He had to come and get me from my own apartment. We weren’t exactly on the best of speaking terms.”

Not a lie, she supposed, though not quite all the truth. Then again, it was better than telling Red the entire story. She didn’t want to know what he would think if he found out about her.

“I know the feeling.” The smuggler sighed. “Me and my dad didn’t talk to each other much, either. I think it reminded him of the kind of stallion I was becoming, and he didn’t like that very much. When I moved out, he said bye and hasn’t given me a call since.”

“Do you ever get in touch with him?” Starlight asked. “Or, I mean, is he . . . ?”

Red shook his head. “He and my mom live out in Sethton with my brother. He’s a nice kid, but they tell me I can’t talk to him unless I make the trip out there, and I don’t want to put any pressure on the little guy.”

Starlight rubbed a hoof across her forehead and looked out the window. She’d never known what it would be like to have a sibling, but the idea of parents who didn’t like her so much wasn’t new. She bet her father wouldn’t even come looking for her if he tried.

Red clicked on the radio. It started in some news program, but he spun the knob until he came on a country channel. He settled back as the sounds of wheedling guitar and drawn-out lyrics came through.

Starlight rolled her eyes but allowed the smuggler to keep his music.

“You know, country is a lost form of music,” he said.

“Is it?”

Red laughed. “‘Course it is. What you’re hearing now was recorded half a century ago. Not a whole lot of new stuff these days. It’s all ‘glam rap’ and ‘pop rock’ instead of the old stuff.”

“So why do you listen to it?”

“Because nothing plays better on the open road than country music.” Red smiled. “It’s the same kind of music that was played by the ponies that built this country. They crossed it first, so I’m just following in their hoofsteps.”

Starlight sat back and listened to the music for a minute. It wasn’t as fancy or complex as newer music, but it did have a kind of old world charm. It was a sentinel of a bygone era in Teton history, and even she could appreciate that, despite how little she’d ever cared for history at the museum.

“Baby you and I, are not the same. You say you like the sun, I like the rain. So before we go through it all again, you better catch yer own train . . .”

Just as the song ended and the radio station went to commercial, the door to the RV opened. Staten walked in and sat down in the passenger seat with a sigh of relief.

“She’s alright,” he said. “I talked to her and the IS hasn’t found her yet. I told her to stay out of sight and out of trouble until we get to her. With all luck, we’ll still be a couple steps ahead of the government.”

“Well that’s a relief, for once,” Red said.

Starlight nodded. “Yeah, but where do we go for now?”

“What we do,” Staten said, “is go and find us a cheap motel to stay at. A place that doesn’t ask questions and won’t be on the grid unless the IS searches every last place in Skyhall. Can you do that, Reddington?”

The smuggler turned the key in the ignition and the Odyssey coughed to life. He drove away from the parking lot and back onto the main highway. Partway up the mountain, however, he turned right and passed into a valley between two snowcapped peaks. Lights glowed down in the green area between the mountains.

They drove toward it and were soon among rundown gas stations and houses with bars on the window. It reminded Starlight of Horizon back in Gracia, but more spread out. Sure enough, before they had gone too far, they spotted a dull neon sign that advertised the Sleepy Hollow Motel.

Red pulled the Odyssey in and stopped out front of a dingy office building out front. Behind it was a half-circle of concrete rooms, each with a heavy door painted red. The RV came to a stop and the three got out.

“Lovely place,” Starlight muttered.

“Your dad’s the one who wanted us somewhere like this,” the smuggler reminded her. “If it were my choice, I’d go for somewhere that the cockroaches don’t outnumber the guests . . .”

Staten ignored them and ducked into the run-down office. Red and Starlight followed him into the dark office, lit only by a lamp on a desk in the corner. A magenta mare sat in a worn-out chair, her eyes passing over a magazine she held in her hooves. She looked up when they came in.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“Yes, we would like a room, please,” Staten replied.

Her eyebrow rose. “Is this for an hourly rate, or . . .”

“Just for the night,” Red cut in. “We need a room. A cheap one.”

The mare turned in her chair and brushed some fast food wrappers off an old cash register. The machine sprung to life with a touch of a button while the mare got some papers out of a drawer on her side of the desk.

“Alright, the room is going to be fifty rounders for the night,” she said, pushing the papers toward them. “You can pay in cash or credit, but we do not accept checks or wire transfers.”

Staten looked at the other two, then nodded and drew his wallet out of his jacket. He produced a plastic card and slid it toward the mare behind the desk. She accepted it and pressed a few buttons on the little cash register.

She slid the card through while the trio of fugitives stood in a tense silence. The machine made a little beep and they relaxed for a moment, but then the mare shook her head.

“I’m sorry, sir, but your card has been denied,” she said.

“Denied?” Staten asked. “Are you sure? Try it again.”

She slid the card through the machine again, but it made the same beeping noise. “I’m sorry, sir, if you want to try another card—”

Statentook the card from her and began to march out of the building. Starlight and Red looked at each other, then hurried after him.

“What gives?” Starlight asked.

“Get back in the RV,” Staten hissed.

His shift in tone stunned her for a moment, but she followed his order and climbed into the RV along with Red. She shut the door behind her and slumped in the recliner, per usual. She watched as Staten slammed into his seat and threw his wallet across the room in a fit of rage.

“Woah, woah, now just calm down,” Red said. “No need to go do somethin’ you’ll regret.”

Staten whirled around. “Regret? Oh, you mean that emotion that is supposed to come when things get better? Well good news, smuggler boy, this isn’t the case.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What am I talking about?” Staten laughed. “Don’t you see? The IS got ahead of us once again! And, worse, they almost certainly know where we are now.”

Red shook his head. “You mean from your card being denied? What if they just drained your account?”

“Oh, of course they did,” Staten said. “But, see, they’re going to keep track of that account. Every time I use that card, it’s going to send out a big message to them of where exactly I tried to use it.”

He began to thump his head against the window beside him, making a soft rattling sound. “How could I have been so stupid? This whole chase is starting to get to me.”

“So they’re going to be tracking us right now?” Starlight asked.

Staten nodded. “Almost certainly.”

She turned to Red, who watched the pair from the front seat with a grim look on his face. He was tapping his hoof gently against the steering wheel.

“Is there nowhere we can go in Skyhall?” she asked him. “I mean, you’re a smuggler, aren’t you? Don’t you know somepony, anypony here?”

Red took a moment before answering, “I did. Once. But I don’t know—”

“Anywhere is better than here,” Staten interrupted.

The smuggler sighed and started up the engine. He backed out of the motel’s parking lot and drove on, deeper into the mountain valley and the seedy districts. They passed by more bars, brothels, and thrift shops. They were aglow with neon and packed with shady customers, even at that late hour.

Farther into the valley, though, Red turned the Odyssey onto a ramp that ran back up toward the backside of the mountain Skyhall sat on. It looked out over a massive, forested plain with further cities sticking up in the distance. On the rear of the mountain, on stone terraces, were the suburbs of Skyhall.

The Odyssey drove through quiet streets with small lawns and clapboard houses squished together into large neighborhoods. Far from the neon of the valley, the suburbs were nestled and asleep.

Starlight watched the forest valley outside the RV windows. She gazed at the stars above that swirled in a black blanket above her. She could see the faint yellow glow of another city far across the forest valley. Whitetail, if she remembered correctly.

As the RV drove up the ramp toward an upper terrace, she took in the quiet awe that the city gave her. It was easy for her to forget how exciting the trip could be, were it not for the IS. In all of the craziness, she had begun to forget that she was achieving a dream she had held for so long.

Eventually, the Odyssey came to a stop in front of a squat, one-story house. It was not much different from any of the houses around it, save for a stone birdbath in the front lawn. The driveway was empty, but the lights were on inside. One of the few houses on the street that was still lit up, in fact.

Red drove up and parked in the driveway.

“This is it,” he said. “Been a while since I was here last.”

Staten looked around. “Good. The IS will have to do some digging if they want to find possible hideouts we could have.”

Red got out of his seat and stepped down out of the RV, his eyes on the house’s front door. Staten followed him, with Starlight bringing up the rear. They all snuck up to the archway in front of the door and paused outside.

The door was green and loomed above them as Red knocked on the door. There was no answer at first, then they could hear the sound of locks being undone from the inside. Then, the door cracked open and an eyeball appeared from the other side, attached, presumably, to a head.

“Whaddya want?” a gruff voice demanded.

Red gulped. “Is, ah, Sunrise still living here?”

“Red? The Reddington?” The door swung open to reveal the head and shoulders of a dark green pony. He nodded for them to come in and his sage mane fell over one eye. “Come in, come in. Folks like you shouldn’t be out in the open at this time of night.”

Once they were inside, Starlight noticed he had a blanket thrown over most of his body. More worryingly, he clutched a pistol in one hoof as he swung the door shut. He waved it around as he spoke.

“Red, tell me you’re not with the government, are you?”

“No, no, of course not.” Red rubbed the back of his head. “In fact, I was just wanting to stay here for the night until things blow over. Like old times, you know? I figured maybe you could do me a favor . . .”

A ghost of a smile appeared on Sunrise’s face. “Like old times, eh? I admit, you’ve got a whole lot of nerve coming to me and talking about old times, but, well, it turns out I need you too, right now. See, I’m going to need your help with the IS.”

“Oh?” Red raised an eyebrow. “What trouble did you get yourself into this time? Dealing again?”

“Not . . . exactly.” Sunrise reached back and pulled the blanket off his back.

Starlight didn’t figure out what she was looking at for a moment, but when she did, she let out a gasp. Folded against the green pony’s back was a pair of large, feathery wings. Just like the ones she had read about in the museum.

Back in Serenity Valley, in an office at the top of a small concrete building that stood in the shadow of a glass skyscraper, stood Noctilucent. He looked around the tiny office, strewn with papers and maps of every kind. There was a mare talking on the phone at a desk in front of him.

Agent Fresco watched her as she talked to a friend of hers. She was nodding and speaking quickly to him. The conversation drifted off after a minute, and she hung up.

She whirled around in her office chair, and faced them. Her black mane was done up in a bun and she put one blue hoof on her chin. “Did I do well, boys?” she asked.

“You did just fine, Ms. Midnight,” Fresco said. “You and your family have been a great help to the Intelligence Service. Your loyalty is admirable.”

Midnight gulped and continued to smile, her cheeks straining from the effort. “Thank you.”

Noctilucent turned to Fresco. “See, I told you that Staten would call her eventually. The stallion’s predictable, if nothing else.”

Fresco nodded. “You were indeed correct, Mr. Noctilucent. Even better, we now know where your daughter is. Reports are coming in of them attempting to use a credit card.”

“Where?” the older stallion asked.

Fresco pointed out a nearby window toward the glowing tiers in the mountains above Amperdam. “They’re in Skyhall.”

Chapter 8: Any Colour You Like

“Right,” said Red. “Those are definitely wings.”

He leaned forward on a cream-colored couch in the middle of Sunrise’s living room. Tall bay windows near behind him cast the glow of a full room into the room, and mixed with the dull amber glow of a table lamp.

Sunrise sat on a stool in front of the couch, staring at the three ponies in front of him. His pale red eyes traveled over Starlight and Red, next to each other, and Staten who kept his distance from them all. The professor stared at the thick front door with a furrowed brow.

“I think I’m dreaming,” Starlight murmured.

“You have no idea,” Sunrise muttered. “I’ve been wishing that these things have been pipe dreams, but no matter how sober I am they won’t go away. It’s like being strapped to a curse.”

Red fell silent, and rubbed his chin with one hoof. His gaze slid over Sunrise and to Starlight, then back again. His mane looked stringier than it had when they’d reached Skyhall, and lines showed around his mouth.

“When did you get the wings, exactly?” Staten asked suddenly from his perch on the end of the couch.

Sunrise blinked, like he hadn’t been expecting the half-fossilized stallion to speak up. “Oh, uh, it wasn’t very long ago,” he said. “In fact, it was just around the time of that earthquake over in Sunrise. I remember it was all over the news.”

“And you’re sure about that?”

“Sure I’m sure. I can feel the memory of it returning.”

Staten slid off the couch and walked up behind Sunrise. He ran one hoof over the feathery appendages and hummed to himself. “Then tell me, what do you remember?”

“Well, I remember the news being on,” Sunriset said. “They were going on and on about getting emergency help out there and re-ran this stupid story about a foal who survived in a tree. Wouldn’t stop talking about the little brat.

“Anyway, I start to feel a little woozy, right? I felt like I was on a ship in the ocean, even though I was just in my living room. So, I stumbled over to the kitchen to get something to drink, then, suddenly, I’m waking up on the kitchen floor with a bruise on my head and two wings on my back.”

“Can you fly?” Starlight asked. “Like, you know, like a bird?”

Sunrise shook his head. “I tried, you know. I’ve been holed up in here since I got these things, so of course I got bored and did my best to fly. I can flap them and everything well enough, but it’s way too hard to take off.”

“Interesting . . .” Staten muttered. “Vestigial wings, but for what purpose? Or perhaps not vestigial, but you are too weak to use them.”

“Hey, I ain’t weak!” Sunrise puffed out his chest and threw his hooves up.

Staten rolled his eyes. “I meant that if you haven’t had them since birth, then your muscles and skeletal structure are unlikely to be right to use them. If a pony was born with these, however, the effects could be quite . . . exhilarating.”

Red hopped off the couch and paced around behind it. “You know, I get that it’s cool and all you have wings,” he said, “but all this means is that we’re an even bigger target for the IS than before.”

“You’re the ones who brought them here,” Sunrise mumbled.

“They would have come eventually,” Staten told him. “By all accounts, the IS is gathering everything strange due to the quake, including us. It’s only now that you have a fighting chance.”

Red seemed to light up at the mention of a fight, and looked around the room. With a huff, he trotted off down a hallway to the right of the living room that ran between the main area and the kitchen. Starlight looked around, then followed him down the corridor.

The narrow hallway with white plaster walls ended in a simple bedroom. An end table with a lamp on top edged against a single bed with blue sheets and an alarmingly-large pile of pillows on top. Other than that, the room was bare, without even the thinnest of carpeting.

“Uh, is there a reason you came back here?” Starlight asked.

Red ignored her, and instead walked over to one corner bare of anything but a wooden floor. He hunched over and began using his hooves to pry off one of the floor boards. He grunted and was able to yank one of them off, then another. They were both tossed aside.

Starlight ran over to him. “Hey, what are you doing?” she cried. “You can’t just pry up his floor!”

“Oh? Is that it, you tell me what I can and can’t do in my friend’s house?” Red said. He reached down into the hole he had made, and searched around inside. He grinned and began pulling something up. “Besides, girl, I’ve been at this much longer than you have.”

The object he pulled out left Starlight speechless. In Red’s hooves was a midnight-black rifle with a stunted barrel and large banana clip underneath it.

Red slid the slide open and checked inside, then smiled. “Glad to see he still kept the heavy weaponry around here,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to go up against the IS with empty hooves, would we?”

He reached back inside and pulled out a similar weapon, along with a couple pistols. The last thing he pulled out was a burlap sack spilling over with rolls of bank notes. He took one and tossed it at Starlight. “Have a thousand rounders,” he said.

She caught it and stared at the little roll of money. “Is this . . . is this for real?”

“Of course it is. What do you take me for?” Red chuckled. “Though I wouldn’t be so quick to spend it. It’s money marked by the police back in me and Sunrise’s old days. They’re good in a pinch, but use too much in one place and you’ll draw the IS to you like ants to honey.”

Starlight stared at the fat stack of bills in her hoof. She had never seen so much money in one place before, let alone having it belong to her. She watched Red stuff the rest of them back in the bag and sling the guns over his back.

“So you think we’ll really need these?” she asked.

“Do I think? Yeah,” he said. “Do I hope? I really don’t. It’d be nice if the IS didn’t show up here with spinners and trucks full of gun-toting stallions, but I think the chance for that flew out the window a long time ago.”

Starlight rubbed one hoof over the other and looked at the floor. “Do you think we’ll make it out of here? Like . . . alive?”

“Hey, don’t sweat it.” Red placed a hoof on her shoulder. “We’ll make it out of here just fine, I promise you. I’ve never gotten into a fight that I couldn’t walk away from, and I don’t plan to start now.”

Starlight gave him a smile, and followed him back to the living room with the clump of bills held in her teeth. Sunrise looked up when they arrived, though neither he nor Staten seemed overly surprised at the heavy weaponry Red carried.

“Expecting a party, are we?” Staten asked.

Red set the assault rifles down on the living room’s coffee table and nodded. “A party of the worst sort. We need to pack up all we can and get on the road. If we don’t, then I doubt there will be any getting out of this city except in an IS spinner.”

Sunrise shot out of his chair. “What about me?” he cried. “Are you all just going to leave me here for the IS to get?”

“Calm down,” Red said. “You’re coming with us, you big drama queen. Those wings are relevant to what we’re after anyway, and we think Staten here has a friend who can tell you more about them. So just calm down and start loading all the supplies you’ve got into the RV.”

“Right, right, of course.” Sunrise licked his lips and nodded. “Thanks for this, Red. You don’t know what this means . . . yeah.” He scooped up the rifles and headed out his front door. Red let him go, then shook his head.

“He’s going to be trouble for us, I just know it,” Staten said.

“He’s a good pony,” Red replied.

“Yes, but for how long? He’s scared and in the presence of strangers and somepony he hasn’t seen in years. What’s to keep him from turning us in to the IS?”

“I know my friends, alright?”

“But for how long?”

Starlight sighed as the two continued to argue, and did her best to tune them out. She dropped her billfold into the sack with the rest, and grabbed the burlap in her teeth. It was heavy, but she managed to drag it out of the house and toward the RV that was still sitting in the driveway.

The night air felt cool and crisp on Starlight’s fur. The quiet suburbs on the backside of the mountain cast little light into the sky, so the young mare was able to glance up at the stars that whirled above her. She smiled like she always did when she looked at them, and trotted over to the Odyssey.

Sunrise was standing in the doorway, looking off toward the road that led to the rest of Skyhall. He looked up in surprise when Starlight approached.

“Got your money,” she said. “How’d you and Red get all of this, anyway?”

“You probably don’t want to know,” he said.

Starlight snorted. “I’m not some little girl.”

“You ever shoot anypony?”

“No . . .”

“Then you’re a little girl around here.”

Starlight glared at him, but the winged stallion refused to meet her gaze. She sighed and gave up after a minute, and left the sack of money with him.

She turned to go back inside, but Red and Staten barreled out of the front door before she could. Both still argued with each other, but they made it to the RV in one piece, at least. Red gave Staten the keys to the RV, and nodded to Starlight.

“Alright, that’s just about everything,” he said. “Me and Starlight are going to go check inside the house one more time, alright? You two keep watch and we’ll clean up and cover our tracks. By the time the IS gets here, this place will be clean.”

Staten nodded. “Alright, we’ll honk if we see anything. If we get overwhelmed, though, we might have to leave you two.”

Red smiled. “Sounds like a plan.”

He galloped back inside, with Starlight trying to keep up behind him. Red sprinted past the kitchen and toward the back bedroom where he’d found the rifles. Starlight found him digging around in the cubby hole beneath the floorboards.

“What now?” she asked.

“Just checking for more loot,” he said. “We hid most of these so long ago that there could be anything in here.”

He dug around, and smiled when he brought out a small pistol. It was pitch black and, unlike the rifles, made to be held and fired in a pony’s teeth. Red gave it to Starlight, and she slipped it into a holster that he had found with it.

“Come on . . .” he grunted, digging deeper into the hole. “Just something else we can use.”

There was a short crack when he was digging, and Starlight heard him let out a sharp hiss. “Damn,” he grunted. “That one wasn’t so pleasant.”

“What’s wrong?” Starlight asked.

“I got my hoof stuck,” Red mumbled.

Starlight held back a laugh when she looked over the hoof that was dug into the floorboards. “You really did,” she said. “You’re in their pretty tight.”

“Oh just shut up and help me.”

“Alright, alright, no need to get hostile.”

Starlight moved around to Red’s front and wrapped her hooves around Red’s leg. She pulled, but to no avail. The hoof remained stuck, and the stallion it was attached to was biting his lip until it bled.

Then, to add to it, Starlight heard the honk of the RV’s horn from outside.Starlight tried to pull harder, but only succeeded in digging him in further.

“Come on, come on,” she muttered as she worked. The honking continued as she worked to free Red. At last, she was able to pull a board out of the way and Red came up with one last pull. By the time she had gotten him out, though, she heard the squeal of tires and the rumble of the Odyssey's engine.

“No!” Starlight ran to a nearby window, but only in time to see four IS cars rumble to a stop in front of the house. Agents in black scrambled out of the cars and headed for the front door.

Red pulled Starlight away from the window, and dragged her down the hall toward the bathroom. She struggled a little, but he didn’t let up until they were both inside the narrow room, and he had softly shut the door. He stared at it like it was made of bees, and stayed as far away from it as he could.

“You could have just let me follow you,” Starlight hissed.

“Hey, it’s not everyday I get to drag a mare to the bathroom,” Red whispered, and winced when Starlight glared at him.

They both stopped their foaling around when they heard the creaking of wooden floorboards down the hall. The IS were checking Sunrise’s room, and the pair could hear the low rumble of conversation coming from it. There was a clatter as the sound of an agent jumping into the cubbyhole echoed down the hall. The sounds of more agents came, like they were pouring in.

“How are we going to get out of here now?” Starlight grumbled.

Red looked around, then patted her on the shoulder and pointed upward. There was a narrow window above the toilet. Moonlight shone through it, giving them light to see by.

Red hopped up on the toilet, and creaked open the window. He watched the door to see if anypony had heard him, but the door remained shut. He took a deep breath and slipped outside.

Starlight jumped up on the toilet after him, but one of her hooves slipped and knocked hard against the porcelain. The sound was loud, and she winced. She could hear everypony outside the room go silent, then start chattering and moving toward the bathroom.

Feeling like her heart was in her throat, Starlight struggled back up on the toilet, and onto the back. The window was just barely in her reach, and she had to haul herself up to it. Her forehooves weren’t as strong as Red’s, and her muscles ached to hold her whole body up. Her back hooves dragged against the wall.

The door had been locked, thankfully, but the agents were banging on it. “Just come out peacefully and you will not be harmed!” somepony yelled.

Starlight strained and grabbed for the outside edge of the window, but couldn’t quite get it. Instead, she started to fall backward, and couldn’t hold herself up with just one hoof. She felt her hooves flail as she started to fall back, and she cried out.

Then, just as suddenly, she stopped. A hoof hung on to her own, and at the end of it was a smiling Red. “I’ve got you,” he said. He pulled her up to the window and was squeezing her out when the door finally burst open.

Starlight’s rear end hung inside the bathroom while Red pulled her out. She began to kick just as a couple overexcited agents fired their pistols at her. She felt a sharp pain in her inner thigh, but by then she was pulled free and on the outside of the house.

“Were you hit?” Red was yelling.

“I-I think so,” Starlight mumbled.

“Can you run?”

Starlight stood up, and tested her hind legs. It stung like Adana himself had hit her, but she could withstand it. She nodded and took off with Red toward the back fence of Sunrise’s house. She could hear the agents running to get out of the house to chase after them.

“Come on, follow me!” Red cried as he burst through the back gate and into an alley behind the house.

Starlight tumbled out the gate in time to see Red take a hard left down the alley of back fences and driveways. They ran, hooves pumping and vision going dark at the edges from the adrenaline flowing through them both.

Lights switched on and dogs began to bark as the neighborhood woke up to the interference of the IS. Ponies watched them from backyards where they stepped out in pajamas and nightgowns to see two ponies sprinting behind their house.

Finally, Starlight saw the end of the alley, and the road beyond. From there it was open ground toward the rest of Skyhall, and hopefully to the Odyssey. She could feel the blood pumping in her ears and her breath came in short gasps.

Then, just as they had reached the alley, Red and Starlight were blinded by headlights. They both skidded to a stop in the face of the vehicle, out of disbelief. The IS had caught them, and there was nothing they could do.

“What are you two standing around for?” Sunrise screamed from the door of the RV. “Move it or lose it, you two!”

Red looked up in question, but Starlight didn’t need anymore prodding. She scrambled over to the open door of the Odyssey and barreled inside. She threw herself into the recliner inside the RV and had never felt so happy to be in it.

Red got in a few seconds after it, and Staten roared off. The IS had filled the alleyway, but if they saw the RV they didn’t shoot. The Odyssey weaved like mad through suburbs quickly filling with ponies, on a general course further up the mountain to downtown Skyhall. Spindly towers and stone forts converted into cafes and penthouses.

Starlight’s chest heaved as she sucked air back into her lungs. They felt like they were on fire, and her eyes were squeezed shut. When she opened them, she saw spots in her vision, and her mouth felt dry. “Did we make it?” she asked. “Are we alright?”

“We’ll be fine,” Red said, turning around to face her. When he did, though, his brow furrowed and his eyes traveled to her flank. “Though, are you going to be?”

“Yeah, why do you ask?”

He pointed to her rear. “You’ve got blood all over you.”

“I don’t know how I—” Starlight began, but then took a good look at herself. Crimson blood was smeared over her pale flank, and it was erupting from a . . . a hole just above her thigh. Like a cork out of a wine bottle, seeing the hole brought a rush of pain through her body.

Starlight hissed and held a hoof over the bullet wound. Blood flowed from around it, but it at least stopped the worst of the bleeding. Now that the shock started to wear off, it felt like a giant needle was digging inside her, tearing through her and leaving her whimpering on the recliner like a school filly.

“What’s wrong?” Staten called from the driver’s seat. “Who’s hurt?”

“Starlight’s been shot,” Red said. He looked back at her again, and bit his lip. “She needs to go to a hospital, or we’re going to have a problem on our hooves. There should be one downtown.”

Sunrise got out of his seat and shook his head. “We can’t!” he said. “If we go to a hospital, any hospital, we’re going to get impounded by the IS and this whole thing will have been for nothing. We might as well just turn around and tell them the whole thing.”

“We can’t just let her die!” Red said. “She’s been hit bad and if we don’t do something then, well, I don’t want to think too far after that. You get the idea.”

Starlight started to feel woozy, and the conversation seemed to float around her like in a heavy haze. She bobbed her head down, but fought to stay awake as the Odyssey sped faster and faster toward downtown Skyhall.

“We won’t let her go untreated,” Sunrise said. “But we can’t go to a hospital.”

Red shook his head. “Unless you’ve become a surgeon since we last saw each other, then I don’t think we have much of a choice, Sunrise.”

“No, no, not me.” Sunrise pointed up toward downtown Skyhall. “You remember Parish? The dealer who would quote Adana scripture and all that crap? He’s a priest in training up at the Church of the Heavenly Solstice in Skyhall.”

“So what?”

“So all the priests get medical training because some of the hardcore Solarists don’t like hospitals. We go up there, and there’s a good chance he can fix your friend up.”

Red sighed. “What do you say, professor? Is it worth risking it?”

“We’ll try the church first,” Staten said. “But if they can’t fix Starlight then we get her to a hospital. I’ll keep the engine running.”

Red turned back to Starlight, and saw her smiling at him. Her eyelids fluttered and her hooves started to go weak.

“Starlight?” he asked.

“I feel funny . . .” she mumbled, then her eyes closed and she slumped in the recliner.

“Starlight!”

Noctilucent arrived to the marked house in Skyhall inside of a black, unmarked van. It pulled up to the curb of the the suburban ranch house. Spinners flew through the air, buzzing and spreading their spotlights all across the neighborhood. Agents went from house to house, asking questions and talking with unhelpful citizens who weren’t happy to be awake so early.

Fresco walked out of the house with a disgusted look on his face. He shook his head and ran a hoof through his close-cropped mane before taking a junior agent by the sleeve. “We have been ordered to not shoot at the subjects,” he growled. “We don’t want corpses, understood? Another slip up and every agent here gets demoted.”

He let go of the shaken mare and made his way over to Noctilucent. “Who did they shoot at?” he demanded. “Was it Starlight?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Fresco said. “Probably the slimeball they took with them from this house.”

“Which wouldn’t have even been a concern if your agents had gotten here faster,” Noctilucent said. “Now they’re saying that they’ve lost them again! I can only help you so much if you can’t find an old professor and an inexperienced mare in this city.”

Fresco sighed and rubbed his forehead. “Mr. Noctilucent,” he said, “we’ll find your daughter, don’t worry. They can’t have gotten far.”

Noctilucent leaned against the van. His heartbeat had slowed once he’d been assured that his daughter wasn’t hurt. He took in a deep breath of the cool night air and looked around. “I wonder why they’d take the guy who was here too, why he wouldn’t turn them in.”

Fresco shrugged. “Nearest we can tell, the stallion who lived here was a former criminal, so he may have been the friend of the smuggler. That, or they kidnapped him.”

“No way,” Noctilucent said. “Starlight wouldn’t have let them do that.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know my daughter.”

Fresco shook his head. “Well, that’s not the point. What we need right now is to set up a perimeter in Skyhall. We’re going to have to move the barriers from Amperdam up to here.”

“And what do you expect me to do?” Noctilucent asked.

Fresco pointed toward downtown Skyhall. “Take a spinner down there and get on the wire with that professor in Amperdam. Find out who, if anyone, that professor knows in the city and keep a lookout at local hospitals for whoever got shot.”

“Should I salute you?”

“No, but you should remind yourself that you are a guest so long as you cooperate, Mr. Noctilcuent.”

Over the city, storm clouds gathered. Far away from the house, on the other side of Skyhall, rain began to fall on a lone RV that stopped in front of a grand church that sloped up the side of the mountain.

Chapter 9: You're Gonna Go Far Kid

Starlight’s eyes snapped open. The world was blurry for a minute as her mind fought to identify where she had landed. The last moment she had been conscious, she had been in the RV, now she was . . . wherever here was. Soaring spires that looked like they were made out of sand and glass extended upwards to an arching ceiling far above her. A mural of a sun crackling in the sky above an ancient city was painted on the surface.

She sat up, holding a hoof to her head and fighting the urge to vomit. Her mouth was watering, and she had to wipe away some spit that made its way out. Starlight’s gaze traveled across rows and rows of pews with hard benches and felt backs that faced a central pier made out of sandstone and covered in drawings of suns.

“Great, church is just what I need,” she muttered, realizing she was laying on a back pew. As far as she could tell, the church was empty, with the only sign of life being the electric lamps attached to the walls were turned on.

Starlight tried to get up, but a bolt of pain shocked its way through her. She looked down and saw one entire flank covered in bandages. Some had dried blood on them that had soaked its way through. Her stomach did a turn, and she really did almost vomit.

A door opened behind her, and she heard chattering voices that echoed as they walked into the central chamber. They stopped when walked into her field of vision, and revealed themselves to belong to Staten, Red, and a pony she had never seen before. He was a short, stock stallion garbed in soft, white robes that covered him from head to hoof.

“Hey, look who’s up,” Red said, trotting over. “Sleep well, Princess?”

Starlight rubbed her head again. “What happened to me? I remember being in the RV, then . . . nothing.”

The pony in the robes smiled at her. “You were hit by a bullet,” he said in a soft voice. “It nicked an artery, and you ended up losing a lot of blood. Luckily, your friends were able to take you to me.”

“You mean, I was shot in the ass?” Starlight asked.

“The bullet hit your flank, yes. You are very lucky it hit the fat there instead of more of the artery.”

Red snickered while Starlight glared at him. When he had calmed down, he waved a hoof at the pony in the robes. “Starlight, meet my friend, Parish. He’s a priest-in-training here at this Solarist church.”

“My official title is Sol Parish,” Parish said, “but most call me by my name. Welcome to the Church of the Heavenly Solstice, I only wish your visit was more holy than one of necessity.”

“He’s the one who fixed you up,” Red explained. “Some of the hardcore Solarists don’t go for hospitals, so he’s got training in surgery. You should have seen him . . . or maybe not. It was pretty messy.”

Starlight rubbed a hoof over her bandages and shivered a little. “How did you replace the blood?” she asked. “I mean, I’ve heard stories about Solarists, but . . .”

Staten smiled. “We all gave some for you. Hurt a bit, but we managed to get you stable.”

“Well, um, thanks. To all of you.”

“Don’t mention it,” Parish said. “We Solarists believe that we are to spread our light to anypony in need, no matter what they believe in.”

“And I’m glad for it.” Starlight looked around again at the massive, sloping walls and delicate patterns on the ceiling and pillars around the room. She whistled. “I’ve never been inside a Solarist church,” she said. “The Adanas don’t have anything like this place.”

Parish bowed his head and shuffled his hooves inside his robe. “You are lucky to see one of the most unique Solarist churches in all of the world,” he said. “This one was carved out of Skyhall’s mountain, and we have been blessed to have built such a mighty structure as this. Many come in here just to look, even Adanas.”

He waved his hoof in a circle in front of his face, and bowed his head. He muttered something in an old language, then smiled once again. “I can only thank Solaris that you woke up to see the church. To tell the truth, I was not sure if you would. You are a very lucky mare, Starlight.”

Starlight chuckled. “I guess Adana wanted to keep me here for a while longer. Maybe he was in league with Solaris.” She thought that Parish’s eyes flickered for a moment at her little bit of blasphemy, but he didn’t say anything.

Her stomach began to growl, and she held a hoof to it. It felt like her insides were trying to claw their way out, and she was tempted to find out how well the religious books of theirs, the Sol’ar, tasted.

“Is there anything to eat here?” she asked. “I’m starving.”

Red and Staten had gathered some food from a small kitchen inside the church and spread them out on a blanket in front of the pews, on the same platform as the pulpit column. Starlight had managed to walk up there, but it had left her sweating and her flank aching. She lay down on the blanket eagerly and gnawed at some fruit and noodles in a can.

Sitting next to her was Red, chewing silently on a peach. Sunrise and Staten sat with Parish on the other side of them. Starlight had thought about saying something to him, that he didn’t have to feel guilty, but she thought better of it. She admitted to herself that she almost liked having him next to her.

“I see you’ve all been through a lot,” Parish was saying as Staten told him their story. “Far beyond what even I have experienced. I am happy to see you are all here and well . . . barring present company, of course.”

Starlight nodded to him. “Hey, could be worse. We could be in an IS spinner right now, headed for Lupine Falls to be thrown in a dungeon somewhere.” She slurped on some noodles, spilling juice all over her face. “I’m sure my parents are already in there too, and I’m not so hot to want to join them.”

Parish looked grim. “That doesn’t sound much like the IS I’ve known,” he said. “They never seemed the villain type.”

“Maybe they’re just scared,” Staten said. “They’re confronted with something they neither understand or control, and it terrifies them. I can understand them wanting to gather together everyone with some control over the Crystal Heart, just to make them feel on top of things. Power is a funny thing.”

Red snorted. “Or maybe they’re just flankholes.”

Sunrise was quiet, and pushed around his food. He kept looking at Starlight, then looking away with his ears pressed flat against his head. Red watched him too, and coughed.

“Got something to say, Sunrise?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” Sunrise said. “Really, it’s . . . nothing.”

“You know, if there were ever a place to confess, it would be in a church,” Parish said. “We’re all friends here, I believe.”

Sunrise looked down. “I gave the order to drive off to Staten. We could have waited, and then Starlight wouldn’t have gotten shot. She almost died because I got jumpy and wanted to get out of there.”

“It’s not your fault,” Red said. “We’re the ones that brought everything down on top of us.”

Starlight hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, anything could have happened. I was just in the wrong place. And besides, I’m alive now.”

“Plus, it was Sunrise here that gave the most blood,” Parish said. “He made sure you pulled through, Starlight.”

“See, there you go.”

“I guess,” Sunrise said, though he did so quietly while flicking his tail. Starlight wanted to say more to him, but it was clear he was just going to keep on feeling guilty about the whole thing. So, she dropped it.

Staten swallowed the rest of his food, then waved to everypony gathered. “I think it might be time we all get some sleep,” he said. “It’s been a long day on top of many long days, so a little sleep won’t hurt any of us. Especially you, Starlight.”

“There are plenty of extra beds in the basement,” Parish said. “This church is also a disaster relief center and a home for the poor if they need it. Feel free to find one and use it tonight.”

“Will do,” Red said, then brushed against Starlight. “I’ll help you get downstairs. I don’t imagine it’ll be easy with that leg of yours.”

Starlight smiled. “Thanks.” She offered a hoof to him, and he helped her hang on to his shoulder and lurch along next to him. They made their way down the aisles and turned a corner toward the basement. Staten left with Sunrise, leaving the cleaning to Parish.

Parish sighed, then set about cleaning everything up. The church had a small cell for the priests, and it came with a kitchen. He carried the dishes back to it, and washed them before heading to his bed. He flopped into it with a tired groan, and was asleep within minutes.

The problem, however, is that it seemed he could only get to sleep for a few minutes at a time. Parish tossed and turned on the rough hammock the church had given him. He held his tongue, but felt like cursing his idea to be a priest rather than a drug dealer with a feather bed. After a few hours of tossing and turning, he gave up and pulled himself out of bed.

Parish poured himself a glass of milk and gulped it down, then walked down the stairs from the upstairs rooms to the worship to see if there were any late-night ponies come to pray. He had turned off the outside lights to discourage anypony getting caught up in the affairs of Reddington and Sunrise, but he didn’t know if it would keep out the most faithful.

To his relief, only one pony was in the worship hall, and he recognized the sitting form of Red from the back of the pews. Parish trotted up the center aisle toward his old friend, and came to a stop beside him. Red was sitting on the ground, polishing an assault rifle with an oily rag.

“Evening, Red,” Parish said.

“Evening, Sol,” Red said.

Parish eyed the gun. “Did you feel like you needed to bless your weapon?”

“Nope.” Red looked up at the religious tapestries above him. “Just liked the company in here, I suppose.”

“You worship Adana, if I recall.”

“The way I see it, Adana could be Solaris and Solaris could be Adana. Doesn’t bother me none. In these recent days, all this seems to be the only thing that makes sense.”

“Faith?”

“Yeah, that.”

Parish sat next to him and breathed in the smells of the worship candles he had lit around the hall. “I admit, I took Sunrise’s wings better as a Sol than I would have a few years ago,” he said. “Faith makes these sorts of things easier to take.”

“Yeah, but blind faith isn’t the best idea,” Red said.

“I didn’t say it was blind.” Parish smiled. “When I enrolled to be a Sol, my life was almost at an end. I thought I had nowhere to go, that I could accomplish nothing, that I would die young. Now, I am next in line to take over as Head Sol for this church. Faith isn’t my means, it’s my foundation.”

“I suppose that’s something along the lines of what I’ve got,” Red said, checking over his gun. “I gotta tell you, Parish, sometimes it gets hard with all this going on to keep believing. I don’t understand the half of what I’ve got into, and it’s too easy to get lost.”

“If belief were easy, we would not need faith. It’s trying times like these that we are tested the most, and it’s who you are in the dark that shines brightest in the light.”

Red stared at him. “You’ve really been buying into the Solarist thing, haven’t you?”

Parish smiled and stood up. “Well, they way I see it, I can ‘buy into’ Solaris and have something to believe in, or try to go back to my old life and buy into drugs again. Somehow, one is more reassuring than the next.”

“I’m just going to try to find something worthwhile in this whole crazy trip,” Red said. “I agree to one easy job, and now I’m polishing an assault rifle in a church in case the IS comes bursting through that front door. I’d leave if I could, honest.”

“Really?” Parish chuckled. “I can hardly imagine you doing that.”

“Why not?”

“That girl.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

Parish rolled his eyes. “Come on, Red, we’ve known each other too long for you to play dumb. I won’t tell you that you like her in that way, but you’ve at least made yourself her protector. You’re the one who sprinted in, cradling her in your arms and wouldn’t leave until you knew she would live.”

“I just didn’t want her to die,” Red said, looking away.

“No, you didn’t,” Parish said, “but knowing you, it’s because you’ve gotten yourself thinking you’re her guardian. Kind of sweet, really.”

Red put down the cleaning cloth and slung the assault rifle over his shoulder. He stepped up behind the pulpit and looked at the baptism sand pit that stood beneath a massive mural of the coming of Solaris. Parish joined him, after a moment, and didn’t even complain about the gun.

“I don’t know what I’m doing, alright?” Red said.

“Not many of us do,” Parish said. “The best we can do is to keep going, and pretend like we have a grip on things. You’re tough, Red. You’ll make it.”

Red shook his head. “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

“She’ll be fine, you’ve all just got to be more careful.”

“You say that like it’s easy.”

“Is anything?”

Parish flicked his tail and went to attend to one of the candles that was flickering out. He snuffed out the dying flame, then lit again so it burned even brighter. He smiled, but when he turned back, Red was gone. Parish sighed, but didn’t go after him.

He went around the worship hall, relighting candles and giving occasional glances up at the paintings of Solaris on the wall. He muttered prayers under his breath and tried not to feel so exasperated.

Downtown Skyhall wasn’t a very active place after dark, so Noctilucent, for the most part, had the sidewalk to himself. He walked between spindly skyscrapers that stretched above the mountain peaks to watch over Amperdam in the valley. Many of them had lights flickering inside of them, even if they were empty of ponies.

A car rolled by, coasting on its brakes as it rolled down one level of the city toward another one. Noctilucent kept his face hidden from whoever was in the car, though he wasn’t sure why. Then again, he wasn’t sure why he was out of the hospital. He kicked a can away from path and kept close to the walls of office buildings and shops that stood next to the sidewalk.

He hadn’t been able to stand being in that hospital for a minute more, and had had to go somewhere else. He hadn’t cared much where he was going, and still didn’t. Skyhall was an unfamiliar city, but Noctilucent preferred it that way.

A spinner flew overhead, hovering a moment before heading on to the hospital. The place was crawling with IS agents who barked at each other and shoved ponies aside to try to keep their control tight on the building. It made Noctilucent sick to his stomach to see them acting like that in a place with so many ponies hurt or dying.

There was only one building in the whole district he was in that drew the eye. A massive church was built into the rock of the mountain, and its sharp towers rose above the smaller buildings around it. The lights were off, but that didn’t mean it was closed. Noctilucent hesitated, but was drawn to it like a moth to flame. He felt like the church was calling him, in a way few had in the past twenty years.

He pushed open one of the large doors of the church and walked inside. As he had expected, the inside of the Solarist Church was covered in lit candles in addition to the electric lights in some of the corners.

“Hello?” he called.

There was a moment of silence, then a pony stuck his head out from behind the pulpit. He was dressed in a long, white cloak and looked at Noctilucent with interest. “Yes, hello!” he said. “What brings you here?”

Noctilucent looked up and shrugged. “The same thing that brings anypony to church?”

The stallion smiled and hurried down the steps and front aisle toward Noctilucent. The cloak he wore fluttered as he went, and his eyes were bright. “Welcome to the Church of the Heavenly Solstice,” he said when he had reached Noctilucent. “My name is Parish, and I’m a Sol in training. Do you have any questions?”

“Is it okay if I sit in a pew?” Noctilucent asked.

“Yes, of course,” Parish said. “Might I ask if you need some help?”

“I’ve been a Solarist for ten years,” Noctilucent said. “I’ll be just fine, Sol. I just need a little quiet, is all.”

“Of course. Just call if you need help.”

Noctilucent nodded and walked to a pew in the back row. The seats were as hard as they had always been, but he ignored them. He bent his head down and leaned forward in the pew, like he was praying. The problem was, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He knew he should pray, but his mind wandered no matter how he tried.

All he could think about was Starlight, and where she could be in the city. None of her friends had come to the hospital, and in a town as big as Skyhall, the chances of finding her were slim. His stomach felt like ice when he thought how close he had been to finding her again, but how she had just slipped from his grasp.

The church certainly felt much cooler to him when he thought about Starlight. It was like the thought of her sent icy chills down his back. Whether it was because he wasn’t able to find her or because he started to think she didn’t want to be found, he didn’t know.

Noctilucent kept his voice low and head bent. “Just let me find Starlight,” he said. “Please, if you’re there, help me find her. She’s a good girl and I . . . I screwed up with her. If you’re there, just help me find her.”

He wasn’t sure if he felt better, but Noctilucent at least felt satisfied, done. He stood up from the pew and began to shamble out. The church had a thick, stuffy kind of air to it, and he could hardly stand it for too long. He walked out of the pew and headed for the doors.

Before he did, however, he saw a pony emerge into the worship hall out of the corner of his eye. The tan pony caught his eye, but he wasn’t sure why. If the stallion had seen him, he hadn’t done anything about it. Noctilucent dismissed it, and walked out of the church. The world outside seemed comparatively bright, and he appreciated the cool air.

It wasn’t until Noctilucent was halfway back to the hospital that he began to get a bad feeling about the pony he had seen in the church. He racked his mind for why that pony had seemed familiar to him, but the answer seemed to elude him. Then, just as he reached the hospital, it hit him.

When it did, Noctilucent’s stomach dropped and his heart felt as cold as ice. The reason that pony had seemed familiar was because his face was plastered on wanted posters all across Teton. A familiar face of the smuggler traveling with Professor Staten and Starlight.

Noctilucent galloped into the hospital, and headed right for the break room that Fresco had taken up residence in. His heart beat fast and sweat ran down his head, but the stallion didn’t pay attention. He was going to save his daughter.

Starlight couldn’t sleep. She lay on her side, careful to keep her damaged leg up, on a hard cot in the basement of the church. The sheets were starchy and the pillow might as well have been cardboard. The big dark room was devoid of anything interesting other than a window that was more of a slit near the back. It let in some moonlight, but only just enough to see with. Sunrise snored gently somewhere across the room, but Starlight couldn’t tell where. Staten was quiet, and was sleeping about three rows away.

She turned on her back with a sigh and stared up at a ceiling she couldn’t see. The whole place felt damp, like the air had been soaked in a dish rag before being dumped in the room. Starlight took long, deep breaths and grimaced after every one.

A door at the top of a set of rickety stairs opened and Red stood, silhouetted in the doorway. He looked around, and trotted down the stairs and over toward Starlight. He placed the assault rifle slung over his back next to a cot beside Starlight’s, and then jumped into the bed. He didn’t say a word to Starlight, and nor she to him, but she felt like something had been said between them nonetheless.

Clouds raced to cover up the moon, and Starlight finally began to find a little bit of sleep in the dank basement. Her eyes began to flutter shut, and her breathing slowed. Then, just as her mind was ready to drop off to sleep, she heard a bang from upstairs.

Starlight’s eyes shot open, and she sat up. She looked around, hoping it was nothing, but the bang came again. It was the bang of something heavy hitting on wood. Her stomach sank.

“Ugh, what is it?” Sunrise asked from his cot. “Can’t ponies wait until it’s day to come worship? It’s not eve Sunday!”

There was a pause, then the banging came again, louder this time. Red was already up and with the assault rifle once again over his shoulder. Starlight couldn’t see much in the dark, but could almost hear his grimace.

“Something’s not right,” he said.

The door at the top of the staircase burst open, and Parish switched the lights on. Everypony covered their eyes and grunted as white light flooded their visions, and by the time they could see again Parish was already rushing down toward them.

“The IS,” he said between breaths. “They’re here!”

Everypony was out of bed now. Red ran to the corner where their bags were packed and rifled through them. He pulled out extra ammo and slammed them into his gun before throwing a couple saddlebags on his back.

“Time to leave. Now!”

Starlight fought to get up, but her leg still ached. She bit her lip and tried to keep quiet, but Red had to rush to her side.

“I got you,” he said.

“I don’t need your help,” she said.

“Right now isn’t the time to debate this, Starlight. I can help you move, but we have to go!” He turned to Parish. “Is there a back way out of here?”

Parish nodded. “Yeah, but you’ll have to cut across a street filled with IS cars.”

“We don’t have much of a choice,” Red said. “We have to go. Stall them as best you can, will you?”

Parish muttered under his breath, but agreed. He pointed to a wooden door at the far end of the basement. “That way is to the alley behind the church. You’ll have to sprint across the street to get to your RV.”

“Right,” said Red. “Thanks for the help, Parish . . . good luck.”

“You too, Red.”

Parish ran back upstairs while the crew in the basement made their way toward the door. Red dragged Starlight along, careful to keep weight off her bad leg. He had to hold her with one hoof and the gun with the other, so he burst through the wooden door by ramming it with his shoulder.

The door took him into a narrow alley outside that stank with mold, but was hidden from view of the IS. He could hear them burst through the front door of the church and begin shouting. Red turned right and began to head down the alley toward the open street, and the RV parked under a tree beyond.

Starlight was breathing hard, and Red had to hold her tight to keep her from falling down. “Almost there,” he kept telling her. “We’re almost there, just hold on.”

She nodded and used her three good legs to keep up with Red’s steady trot, but just barely. Sunrise and Staten rushed behind them, and soon they burst out of the alley. The street, as Parish had said, was swarming with cars. Most of the IS faced away from them, and they could see a clear avenue to the RV on the other side of the street.

Red let Starlight get off of him. “I’ll provide cover,” he said. “I’ll take Staten across and start the RV, then you and Sunrise get over there and get in, okay? We have to get out of here as fast as possible.”

Starlight nodded, and Sunrise slipped a hoof around her to keep her upright. She watched Red raise the assault rifle to his shoulder, while Staten clutched a pistol in one hoof. They looked both ways, then dashed across the street. If the IS saw them, they didn’t make any indication of it.

Staten and Red climbed into the RV parked under a tree on the street, and a few moments later the vehicle started up. Sunrise nodded to Starlight, and they began to lope across the street. Starlight’s leg burned, and she bit her lip until it began to bleed. Her muscles complained and tried to shut down on her, but she was determined to stop them.

Halfway across the street, though, they gave out and Starlight tumbled to the ground. She let out a cry and writhed on the ground, holding on to her bandaged flank. Sunrise looked down at her, not sure what to do. She could hear Red yelling at her, and then yelling from the direction of the IS.

From the corner of her vision, Starlight could see IS agents start to move toward her. Cautious at first, but then faster when they realized what was happening. The sound of a rifle split the night, and bullets sparked at the hooves of the IS agents.

Red was firing away at them, giving them cover fire. The IS agents, however, were not so easily taken. They pulled guns and began to fire back at Red and the RV. Their attention, however, was shifted when Sunrise began to pull Starlight across the street. They yelled at him to stop, then shot above his head. Starlight was staring up at his face, twisted in concentration as he dragged her. She could hardly hear anything, but she could definitely see when he got shot.

His body seemed to shudder, like there was something not quite right with it and it was trying to figure it out. Then another bullet hit him, and Sunrise spun like a top and fell to the street. He lay there, moaning and bleeding next to Starlight. Red tried to move toward him, but concentrated fire from the IS threw him off. It was all he could to keep them pinned down, now behind some of their cars.

Starlight was tired. More tired than she had ever felt. She was tired of the shooting, of the yelling, of the fast-paced chases away from everypony, from a government that was hellbent on capturing them no matter what they had to do.

Starlight was tired.

She crawled over to Sunrise and lay on top of him. He was breathing, but in small, little breaths. His mouth hung open and his eyes stared up. He was dying. Starlight pressed herself over his wounds, and closed her eyes. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stooped low over him.

Starlight had never been a pony to pray, but she did now. She prayed for all of the bad to go away. For the IS, for the bullet wounds, for all the terror and pain to disappear and for her to just be with her friends in peace once again. She wanted it more than she could have ever known, and she found that she was yelling them out.

She prayed and prayed, while bullets flew over head. She prayed hard, prayed for peace. And then, suddenly, it came true.

Like a switch had been turned, the RV, Red, Staten, Starlight, and Sunrise just . . . weren’t in Skyhall anymore. It was if one second they were, and the next they were gone. Where they had been on a rough street a moment before, suddenly there were in a small patch of forest, standing within a large, smoking circle of burnt grass and leaves. The smell of ozone danced through the air as Staten and Red put down their guns and looked around. The only sound was that of the rumbling RV engine.

Starlight opened her eyes, and blinked as she adjusted to the light glinting through the leaves overhead. She was still lying on top of Sunrise. A Sunrise who was, in fact, breathing normally once again. She ran her hoof over his chest where the bullet wounds had been, but only found smooth skin. Her throat caught, and tears came once more as she lay on him and cried, in joy and relief and a dozen other emotions she didn’t know she had.

Red saw her leaning over Sunrise, and rushed over to her. When he was next to her, however, he slowed and stared down at her. In utter silence, his mouth opened, then shut again.

Starlight looked up at him. “What?”

He wordlessly pointed to her forehead, so she brought a hoof up and patted her head. At first she found nothing, then she felt like she suddenly had a small pipe sticking out of her head. A pipe that ended in a point.

A horn.

Chapter 10: Under the Bridge

The dark forest that the Odyssey had landed in turned out to be a few dozen petras the wrong way away from Amperdam. Starlight had landed them in the hilly, wooded region south of the city that was popular with tourists and saddlebaggers. Once every pony had calmed down, Sunrise had gone up to the top of the RV to scout around while Staten looked over Starlight.

Starlight had shivered when her new horn was poked and prodded, but didn’t protest. Eventually, Staten decided it was real about the time Sunrise had plotted a way back to Serenity Valley and Amperdam.

The RV had to bounce over rough ground to make it to a dark road leading to Amperdam, then drive along the pavement with the lights dimmed just in case the IS had come to track them. Starlight was in the back bedroom, laying on top of the bed and staring at the ceiling. She was quiet, just listening to the engine noise coming through the thin walls of the vehicle.

Starlight’s namesake shone in through the window above her head, giving the room a pale glow. She had to fight the desire to reach up and rub her horn for the millionth time. It felt so strange to her, like somepony had attached a rod to her head, but one that wouldn’t come off. If she didn’t think about it she couldn’t feel it, but it was always there.

She hadn’t bothered to close the door leading to the rest of the RV, and could hear whispered voices coming from outside. They were talking about her, she knew it, but she didn’t bother trying to stop them. Even with Sunrise and his wings, he had never teleported four ponies and the Odyssey miles and miles away, so their attention had all focused on her.

Starlight sighed. She felt like a prized pet that everypony wanted to grab and cuddle but wasn’t going to be thought of like a real pony. The horn still felt a little hot when she touched it again, against her wishes, and she wished it would all go away.

“Starlight?”

She looked up to see Staten in the doorway. “What do you want?” she asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about Amperdam,” he said, walking over to the bed and sitting on the edge. “There is a lot we need to do and little time to do it, after all.”

Starlight crossed her hooves in front of her chest. “What, are you and your doctor going to run tests on me?”

“It’s not just like that,” Staten said.

“Then what is it like?”

“We need to test what’s happening to you so we can know how to make you better,” Staten said. “Something is happening to you and Sunrise, something we don’t understand. I get the feeling nopony in Teton does. The government is desperate to get you just so they can figure out what’s going on.”

“Maybe I should let them,” Starlight said.

Staten sighed. “I get that you’re scared and hurt, Starlight, I’m just trying to help.”

“Well first I’m shot, and now I’ve got some horn growing out of my head!” Tears started to well up in Starlight’s eyes. “Of course I’m scared . . . I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. I didn’t ask for any of this, and now it’s like everything is being piled on at once. I wasn’t even give a choice about going on this stupid trip anyway.”

“And yet, you’ve proved to be far more than just a museum worker,” Staten said.

“I wish I was back there,” Starlight said. “Things were so much simpler. All I had to worry about was my job, not getting shot or a . . . a horn!”

“I know, I know.”

Starlight looked down and drew her legs closer to her. “What do you think they did with my mom and dad? Do you think they’re in a cell . . . are they still together at least?”

“I know that they’re strong,” Staten said. “The IS won’t have broken them, and I’m sure they’re together. They are probably planning an escape right now.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

The RV hit a bump and Starlight hissed as she came down on her flank. She rubbed it and tried to roll on her side. The Odyssey came around another bend and straightened out. The rumbling engine filled the night.

“Hey, we’re nearly there,” said Red from the front seat. “You two might wanna be up here when we get in. Especially you, Staten.”

Staten nodded to Starlight. “Need some help getting up?”

“I got it, I got it.” Starlight heaved herself out of the bed, though made sure to keep most of the pressure off her bad leg. She half-walked, half-limped to the front of the RV, and was joined by Staten. Sunrise was asleep behind the kitchen table.

Out front of the RV, Amperdam glowed. Whereas Skyhall’s buildings had been spindly and built with the land, Amerpdam’s looked like they had been built in spite of it. The skyscrapers were blocky rectangles that stuck out of the ground, with sharp edges and lots of steel and concrete. Spinners flew over the great city blocks that extended all the way to the foothills of the mountains behind the city.

“About time we got here,” Red said. “It only took us that whole fiasco in Skyhall.”

“Well it’s fortunate that we picked up your friend,” Staten said.

“I hope he sees it the same way.”

Starlight watched as the traffic went from nonexistent to a street filled to the brim with cars in a few short minutes. The main highway leading into Amperdam was clogged with traffic even so late at night. Tail lights gave the air above the street a red tint.

“Finally a city that stays up past nine,” Starlight said.

Red snorted. “Yeah, you could say that. Amperdam is the only interesting thing in the whole valley. Or in the whole middle of the country, really.”

“Which also makes it the home of the largest IS office outside of Lupine Falls,” Staten said. “We’ll have to be on our guard the entire time we’re here. Which, hopefully, will not be for long.”

“Yeah, why are we here again?” Red asked.

“We’re here to check out Starlight and Sunrise with an old friend of mine,” Staten said. “She knows a lot about that Crystal Heart, and has equipment that might be able to study them and figure out exactly what is going on.”

Starlight looked down. “Great, I’ll be a lab experiment.”

“We have to find out what’s going on,” Staten said. “Whatever this is, it’s what the IS wants and it’s something strange. We have to know if this is hurting you, Starlight.”

“I guess.”

Red turned the RV down one avenue, then skidded onto another. He kept a tight grip on the wheel, and his eyes locked on the road. “You know, it would be nice if you told us where to go,” he said. “Seeing as we’re just going to be going in circles until you say something.”

“Right, right, sorry,” Staten said. “If I know her, she’ll still be in her office, even this late at night. Most times she doesn’t even leave it. The building is downtown, just head down this next road.”

Red did as Staten said, and merged into the right lane to roll down a smaller, uncrowded road. Most of the buildings standing on either side were dark, their concrete facades staring down like silent gargoyles.

“Her building is at the end of the row, closest to downtown,” Staten said. “You’ll know it when you see it.”

Starlight watched them approach a small, squat building that stood in the shadow of a great glass skyscraper just a few blocks from it. The boring building was only noticeable for the lights on in the top floor that burned bright orange in the otherwise dark neighborhood. Staten directed Red to park in front of the building, and they came to a shuddering stop.

Staten rose and tapped Sunrise on the shoulder until the green pegasus woke up with a start and looked around. “Where are we?” he asked.

“We’re in Amperdam, Sun,” Red said. “We’re here to meet one of the professor’s friends.”

“What for?”

“She’s might have some answers for what’s going on with you and Starlight. You know, the whole becoming magical creatures thing.”

Sunrise rubbed his head. “I wish I was still selling drugs.”

The group piled out of the RV, and looked down the sidewalk both ways before heading to the building. Red made a move for the front door, but Staten shook his head. “The front’s always locked,” he said. “She keeps a door open around back, though.”

Starlight limped behind the group as they made their way around the building, and Red moved back to help her. She tried to throw off his reaching hooves, but eventually let him help her walk when the pain began to get too great. Starlight still kept from looking directly at Red while he half-carried her to the back of the building.

When they got there, Staten was holding open a small door that led to a lit hallway inside the building. Red helped Starlight inside, and over to a silver elevator placed in the middle of the hallway. Sunrise waited by it, tapping his hoof against the ground.

“What if the IS got to her?” he asked. “What then?”

“Then we’re already done for,” Staten said. He pressed the button for the elevator, and stepped in when it arrived.

Starlight slumped against the back of the elevator as it rose up in the building with a gentle whirr. Her grip on Red grew tighter when she started to think about what awaited her. Tests for sure, and Adana knew what else. She pressed harder against Red.

The elevator doors opened into a small hallway with a single door at the far end. Staten led the way to it, then slowly opened it without knocking. He stuck his head in. “Midnight?”

There was a muffled cry from inside, then the door swung open all the way to reveal a cluttered office. Desks were piled with papers below maps that hung on every square inch of the wall. A couple filing cabinets were practically buried inside a mountain of papers.

In the middle of it all stood a navy blue mare with a curly black mane, with horn-rimmed glasses wrapped around her face and bearing a scowl. “Why in Solaris’ name did you come here?” she asked.

“Somehow, I thought you’d be happier to see me,” Staten said.

“Things have changed since we last talked,” she said. “The IS are out in greater force than ever and I don’t want to be in their way if they found out I took you in.”

“You two get right to the point, don’t you?” Red said.

Midnight turned to the smuggler and looked him over. “I recognize you from the wanted posters,” she said. “You looked better on those than in real life.”

“He’s traveling with me,” Staten said. “We’ve been on the road for a long time now just to get here.”

“That’s great, now you can leave too.”

Staten stepped forward and glared at her. “Midnight. We need your help and you’re greeting us by turning us away. We risked far too much to get here to just be thrown out.”

“Do you know how much I risked just taking that call?” Midnight’s voice dropped low. “If you’re here, the IS can’t be much farther behind. They’ll come after you, and now after me for helping you.”

Staten stepped past her into the room. He beckoned for Starlight and Sunrise. “Well, I might have a reason here for you to risk the trouble,” he said.

“And what could that possibly be?”

“Show her,” Staten said.

Starlight took a deep breath and walked into the room. She bowed to show the thick horn sprouting from her head. Sunrise stepped in behind her and extended his wings, flapping them around and sending papers flying everywhere.

Midnight’s eyes looked like they were straining to pop out of her head, and were only held back by sheer force of will. She took a step back, knocking over a pile of folders on top of her desk. Her mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out.

“Yeah, I had about the same reaction when I found out I had these,” Sunrise said.

“Tell me about it,” Starlight said.

Midnight began to stammer. “Y-You have wings, and a horn, a-and they’re really, and . . . oh my.” She swayed on her hooves, and Starlight was afraid she was going to faint, but she held steady. She pressed a hoof to her forehead and rubbed. “Why, Staten, have you deemed it necessary to bring these two to me at this late hour? Are you trying to give me a heart attack?”

“Not if I can help it,” Staten said, “but you can see why we’re in such a rush. If the IS catch these two, we don’t even want to think of what they’ll do.”

“I can see that.” Midnight fell into her chair and rested her head in her hooves. “Well, they have them, but do they work?”

“My wings don’t,” Sunrise said, “but her horn transported us and an RV a few dozen petras away from Skyhall in the blink of an eye. I’d say it works.”

Starlight felt like the room was turning its attention to her, and she wished she could hide her horn. Midnight stared her over like she was a very expensive toy that may or may not have been broken. She tapped a hoof against her desk.

“A working horn is definitely going to give the IS pause,” she said.

“It also gives them more incentive to find us,” Staten said.

Midnight nodded. “So tell me, girl, what do you think of all this? Either you performed an act of god or you just created magic, but either way you’ve got a horn and can use it.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Starlight said in a quiet voice. “I’m not even sure what to make of it anymore. I don’t know how I did all that, it just . . . happened.”

“And I’m guessing that Staten took you all here to find out why,” Midnight said.

She turned in her desk and stared out the window behind her. Starlight stood by her side, while she watched the mare chew on her lower lip as she thought. Starlight wasn’t entirely sure of it, but she thought that Midnight looked scared more than anything else.

Midnight let out a long sigh, and let her head droop forward. “As much as I want to say no, I’m just as curious as to what’s going on with everypony as much as you all are. You mentioned on the phone that you think this is connected to the Crystal Heart?”

“I’m almost certain of it,” Staten said. “The way my daughter described it to me, the Crystal Heart is very much powered on and emitted some kind of energy wave when it was awoken. I’d say there’s a good bet that it’s at least a starting point.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out,” Midnight said. She got up from her seat and grabbed a set of keys from off the top of her desk, carrying them in her teeth. “We’re going to have to set up a Magnetic Resonance Scan and run it on both of them. It should give us a picture of what’s going on.”

Sunrise cocked his head. “You’re going to give me an MRS?”

“I’ll give you one on your torso, around your wings.” Midnight gave him a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, it won’t hurt one bit. It’s just a scanner that uses magnets to take detailed pictures of the inside of your body.”

“Oh, because that sounds so simple.”

Staten coughed. “Do you have an MRS machine on-site?”

“Of course,” Midnight said. “It’s mostly used in the labs for examining fossilized skeletons, but it’ll work just as well on a living pony . . . I hope.”

Before Starlight could protest, Staten followed Midnight out of the cramped office and into the narrow hallway outside. She took them into the elevator once more, and tapped the button for the basement. With a whirr, the car slid down the shaft and landed on the ground floor of the building.

Starlight stepped out behind Sunrise, her head angled toward the ground, as they walked into a brightly-lit lab. Linoleum floors polished to a shine and metallic machinery covered in plastic tarps greeted them beneath the harsh lighting.

The room was icy cold, enough to raise goosebumps beneath Starlight’s coat. She shivered and rubbed one hoof over the other. Luckily, they didn’t have to walk far to reach the MRS machine. It was the centerpiece of the room, with a myriad of cables snaking across the floor to and from it. The machine itself looked like a giant tube with a bed sticking out of it. There were control panels built in the side of it that glowed and hummed when Midnight switched the machine on.

“We’re going to want to make this fast,” Staten said. “If we stay here too long, the IS will come knocking eventually. How soon can you have the results?”

“Regularly?” Midnight pressed a button on the machine and stared at a blinking light that came on next to it. “Two, maybe three days.”

“We don’t have two days.”

“Which is why I’m going to get the data raw. We’re going to have to make do with it or figure something else out.”

Red watched all of them in silence, then stuck his hoof out. “So it’s ‘we’ now?”

Midnight rolled her eyes. “Don’t remind me or I might change my mind about helping all of you. You’re going to owe me big time, Staten.”

“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Staten said.

Midnight tapped a few more buttons on the side of the large machine, which caused the bed to slide out of the interior of the machine to wait for a pony to climb on. It was hard plastic and didn’t look very comfortable to Starlight. Luckily for her, it was Sunrise that Midnight pointed to.

“Alright, you’re up first, flyboy,” she said. “Hop onto the bed and keep those wings at your side. Oh, and it might help to close your eyes.”

“Why?” Sunrise asked.

“It gets a bit cramped inside the machine.”

Sunrise nodded, and climbed up onto the bed. He lay on his back with his wings tucked beneath him. His hooves were crossed over his chest, and he nodded at Midnight for her to continue. She retracted the bed into the machine, and started it up.

Midnight worked with her tongue hanging out of the corner of her mouth, her eyes concentrated on the screens before her. She wiped at her forehead as the machine began to hum louder and louder. Lights flashed on the side of it, and then a clicking sound began to emanate from the MRS machine.

“Those are the magnets,” Midnight said. “They spin really fast to give us a picture. I just hope they’ll work on his wings.”

“Why wouldn’t they?” Staten asked.

She rubbed her head. “I’m not sure what these wings are made of, but all I know is that they’re not natural. I’m not sure if this machine was built to handle acts of Solaris.”

The clicking sound increased, until it was a constant thumping in Starlight’s ears. Click. Click. Click. The more it hit, the more she could feel it pressing at the back of her mind. She rubbed at her temple and shook her head, but it didn’t go away. She stepped away from the machine and paced around the rear of the room, her mane swishing behind her. The pain in her leg grew, but she managed to ignore it.

“Hey, you okay?” Red asked. He ambled over to her and stood by her side.

She sighed. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you’re going to be sick.”

“I’ll be fine, it’s just nerves.”

Red stepped closer to her. “It’s okay if you don’t feel good about this. It’s been a big, wild ride and none of us have slept since we left Skyhall. And you, more than all of us, should be feeling uneasy.”

“Well I’m just not going to have much time to rest,” Starlight said. “That option flew away when I got a horn.”

“I’m sorry.” He paused. “You don’t deserve this.”

“Well wouldn’t it be nice if I could tell the universe that.”

The clicking, at last, stopped as the machine powered down. The bed slid out of the chamber and Sunrise climbed off it. He held his head, and gingerly flapped his wings behind him. He swayed a little on his feet, so Staten held on to him until he got his balance back.

Midnight trotted over to a panel on the wall, and pressed a few buttons on it to bring up an image on the screen. It was a detailed picture of the outline of a pony with bones, nerves, and blood vessels in various colors. The most interesting part, of course, were the two wings on the image, which Midnight zoomed in on.

The entire group clustered around the screen and stared at it. Red whistled. “Looks like those wings are attached pretty hard to you,” he said. “All the nerves and blood vessels are connected, looks like.”

Sunrise stared at him. “Since when have you been a doctor.”

“You’d be surprised what you learn when you can’t see any official doctors.”

Midnight tapped the screen and clicked her tongue. The image wavered, then zoomed in further. It showed a more detailed look of the wings, and little else. “That’s about what I thought,” she said. “Strange, but not fully unexpected.”

“What is it?” Staten asked.

“The wings are a physical impossibility,” she said. “See the skeletal structure? The wings, like those of birds, have hollow bones, but the rest of your friend doesn’t. Even if he did, the wings are far too small to ever get him off the ground. They are vestigial at best.”

Staten nodded. “I thought as much. Anything else that’s . . . unusual?”

“No, there doesn’t appear to be.” She scratched her chin. “That’s what is so odd. The wings don’t look like they were grafted on, but rather they fit perfectly like a puzzle piece. His body looks to have taken to the wings perfectly, with nerve endings lining up perfectly.”

Midnight sighed. “I wish we had more time or better equipment here, and then maybe we could figure out more. As it stands, there’s a lot I don’t understand, and I don’t see a link between the Crystal Heart and these wings.”

“But you wouldn’t rule it out, right?”

“At this point, I don’t think I’d rule anything out.”

Staten turned to Starlight. “Alright, it’s your turn,” he said. “We’re going to need to look at that horn of yours.”

“Are you sure?” Starlight asked, looking at the machine with a gulp. “I mean, if you couldn’t tell anything from Sunrise . . .”

“That was a pair of wings, something that we’ve seen millions of times with birds,” Midnight said. “A horn? That’s something we’ve never seen before. This part is going to be more valuable than any scan this MRS machine has ever done.”

Starlight looked down, then slowly began to nod. “Alright, fine. I’ll do it.”

“Get up on the bed, please.”

Starlight looked at the machine once more, then walked over and hopped up on the plastic bed. It felt warm under her from where Sunrise had been on, which helped a little but not much. Staring up at the ceiling wasn’t so bad, but things got worse once the machine turned on and the bed started to retract into the chamber.

The first that hit her was how dark it was inside the machine. She felt like she was being shut inside a pitch black tunnel that held her tight. The walls pressed in on her, forcing her to keep still and not move more than a couple inches in any direction. Worse, she had to hold her head farther back to keep her horn from scraping the ceiling.

Her breath started to come in small gasps, and she felt like her chest was clamping up. The walls . . . they were too close. She wanted to kick, to shove them away, but forced herself to stay still. She bit down on her lip so hard it started to bleed. Then, the magnets started up.

The clicking was slow to start, but grew in pitch and volume with every second. It was an incessant clicking, one that thumped in the back of Starlight’s brain. All alone in the darkness of the machine, the clicking hammering itself into her mind, her mouth opened and closed in silent screams. Sweat ran down her head and she whimpered.

Her flank ached where the bullet had hit it. It felt like the darkness was coming for her, coming for her wound like it had before. She’d almost died before, and felt like she was going to again. Starlight did her best to not throw up.

She heard from outside: “She’s screaming! Get her out of there!”

That was when Starlight realized that her mouth was opening and, yes, a scream was coming out of it. Somehow, she felt disconnected from herself, like she was watching a movie about her own body. All she knew was that she wanted out of the machine.

She closed her eyes as they scrambled to shut the machine down. She wanted out, wanted out so bad, didn’t want to die. She didn’t want the darkness or the pain or the clicking that with every passing second sounded like gunshots. Her chest heaved and she gritted her teeth. Starlight told her brain to take her out of there.

Then, her brain obeyed her.

In a bright flash, Starlight appeared on the other side of the room, gasping for air and lying in a rough circle of burn marks on the floor. She coughed and felt like her horn was on fire. Maybe it was, for all the looks that Red, Midnight, Sunrise, and Staten were giving her.

While Starlight stumbled to her hooves, it was Midnight who spoke first. “If I’m going to study that, we’re going to need a better machine.”

Chapter 11: Everything In Its Right Place

Sunny Skies lay back in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. The cell the IS had given her was small, and smelled like dish soap. The walls were slate gray and the ceiling had one long crack in it that her eyes traced over and over again. An incandescent bulb sprayed her with harsh light for sixteen hours per day, and was turned on low for the rest. They never let her have complete darkness.

Somewhere else in the prison block, the little foal of Carpenter and Frankincense began to cry. Its wails were loud and echoed around the cell block, but Sunny didn’t yell at him. She couldn’t blame the foal for being scared. If she were in his position, she would never have stopped crying.

The two parents had been looking more and more haggard every time Sunny saw them, which wasn’t often. Then again, she was never completely sure what time it was. They didn’t let her see any clocks, and the cells had no windows to tell time with. She assumed the lights dimmed at night, but for all she knew they let them sleep from ten in the morning to six at night.

“We’re sorry!” Frankincense, the mother, yelled down the hall. “He’s just been so fussy lately!”

Sunny had to strain her voice to yell back. “It’s no problem, I just hope he gets some sleep.”

“Thank you!”

With a sigh, Sunny rolled on her side. Her golden mane flopped over her face, but she didn’t wipe it away. She let it stay there to give her some shielding from the light. Slowly, softly, the foal began to stop wailing and even started to coo. Babies were strange like that, and Sunny had never understood them.

She’d never had any brothers or sisters, and most of her early years she remembered spending them at home in her father’s library or with him while he showed her off to his colleagues. Her mother had been gone long before she could remember. Sunny shut her eyes.

“Would you be proud of me?”

The door at the end of the cell block slammed open, and the foal began to cry again. Sunny sighed and stood up, walking over to the door of her cell. She knew what was coming, and had learned not to resist. She still had a circular burn on her neck from that lesson.

Two dull-faced guards appeared at the front of her cell. In the middle of them was Agent Nightcall. He took out a key and held it in his teeth to unlock the cell. His eyes didn’t meet Sunny’s as the guards came in and grabbed her by the waist. She was hauled into the hallway and shoved toward the door at the far end.

Outside, she was met by the female agent, Rose, who stared at the ground. Beside her was a needle-nosed doctor in a white lab coat. Silver glasses wrapped around his face. He grinned cruelly at Sunny, running a hoof against her cheek.

“How have you been, Miss Skies?” he asked.

“I’ve been fine, Dr. Bond,” Sunny said, injecting fake cheerfulness into her voice. Bearing a black eye, she had also learned what happened if she back talked to him.

“Bring her to my lab,” he told the guards. “I’ll need to go wash up. We have a special visitor today.”

The guards dragged Sunny down a blank hall in the back of the IS Sundown building. She had tried to talk to them before, but they always told her to be quiet. They at least looked repentant when they threw her inside the lab before they slammed the door shut behind her.

Dr. Covalent Bond’s lab was a converted store room with machinery from Sundown General Hospital arrayed around a cold metal table. A tray of tools was locked inside a case, just in case she got any ideas. Like her cell, the room was covered in harsh light that Sunny tried to blink away. The place smelled like antiseptic and, vaguely, the air tasted like copper.

The doctor, at least, didn’t leave her waiting for long. The door opened and Dr. Bond waltzed in, a smile on his face. He took no time to walk over to her, and ignored the very concept of personal space with her. His hooves reached around her side and found the masking tape he had applied.

Bond unwrapped the tape from Sunny’s side. “So how are your wings today, Miss Skies?” he asked.

“Stiff,” she said. “As usual. I can barely feel them after a while.”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to do. See what happens when we put them under certain . . . conditions,” he said.

Sunny held her tongue while the doctor poked and preened the feathers of her wings. She was still getting used to them, and it felt so strange to feel another pony touch them. They had appeared while she was sleeping, and the doctor had shown up the next morning.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked, shining a light in her eyes.

“As well as I could in a place like this,” she said.

Bond pursed his lips. “Now, now, you are a guest here with us, Miss Skies. Do try to show a little hospitality.” He slapped her lightly below the chin, then started wiping off the metal table. “I’m afraid we won’t have much time to do a proper examination today. I have a guest arriving and I’m going to need to . . . show you off. I’ll have to make sure that you are your best for her.”

“How will you do that?” Sunny asked.

“Hop on up here and you’ll see.”

Sunny hesitated for a moment, then sighed. She wasn’t interested in getting another mark on her, so she walked to the table and swung herself up. The metal was deathly cold against her coat and skin, and she shivered. She lay on her back, but Bond shook his head.

“On your side, with your back facing me,” he said.

She did as she was told, but she had to bite her lip from saying anything back. She hated herself right then, doing as the doctor ordered without protest. Every fiber of her being told her to scream at him, to lash back at him, but the marks and bruises on her body cowed her. They made the experience even more revolting.

Before she could act in surprise, the doctor took some rope hanging on one wall and tied her hooves down to the table, leaving Sunny unable to move. Goosebumps rose on her skin as her heart started to beat faster. Little beads of sweat formed on her forehead and she started to whimper.

“Wh-What are you doing?” she asked.

“I told you, I have a special guest arriving today,” Bond said, “and I don’t want you to cause her any distractions. Director B absolutely hates them, and she’ll have my head if I mess this up.”

He began to hum, and Sunny felt him wipe something on her back. Her breath started to quicken when she realized it was right on her spine. She tried to fight, to inch her way away from his prying hooves and what she knew was coming, but it was no use. A sharp electric shock ran through her body and Sunny yelled once before lying still on the table, moaning softly and twitching.

“Now, now, no fighting today,” Bond said, putting away the stun gun. He carefully picked up a large syringe with his teeth and walked toward Sunny. He placed the needle on a bump in the mare’s back, then pressed the needle inside.

He heard her whimper and moan, but the electric shock had taken its toll on her, and Dr. Bond found no more resistance as he emptied the inky fluid into Sunny’s spinal column. He withdrew the needle and cleaned the small wound with a sterilizing cloth.

“There, all done,” he said. “If you can’t feel anything, then you know it’s working. That should keep you in a state of minor paralysis while the Director visits, and a few hours afterwards. Nothing permanently damaging, though. We wouldn’t want our favorite little subject getting hurt.”

He left her there, laying on the table. Sunny had to bite back salty tears as she gradually felt her limbs go numb one by one. It was a horrifying experience, to be losing control of her whole body. If she could have started shaking she would have. Eventually, though, she lay on the table unable to feel anything, just listening to the soft whir of the machines in the room.

The tears came easy to her then, flowing unbidden down her cheeks and forming a puddle beneath her head on the cold, hard table.

Doctor Bond stood just outside the IS building along with several security stallions and the two senior agents on the site, Agents Nightcall and Flower. The two of them stuck close together and hadn’t spoken to the doctor since his arrival. Their eyes were cast on the ground, though it might have just been because of the glare.

The midday light over Sundown was harsh, and beat down mercilessly on the blacktop outside the building. The glare from the downtown glass office buildings was intense, and Dr. Bond kept a hoof over his face to keep out the sun. He watched as, for a brief moment, that same sun was blotted out by a massive spinner that moved in front of it.

Twin blades kicked up dust and debris from the parking lot outside the building and threw them around in the buffeting wind. Dr. Bond’s coat flapped hard in the wash, but he paid it no mind. Instead, he watched the spinner settle down onto three wheels and a side hatch open on the fuselage. A ramp extended and a small legion of IS agents marched out, their gazes sweeping the small crowd.

Once they appeared satisfied, the Director herself cantered out of the vehicle, her head held up high. Her signature white mane whipped in the wind, and made her look like a warrior striding onto the battlefield. She, unlike the rest of the agents, wore nothing. To Bond, he had always thought it was her way of challenging the resolve her agents had.

She walked straight to the doctor, ignoring the rest of the procession. “Do you still have the subject in custody?” she asked.

“Yes, of course, ma’am,” Bond said.

“Good,” she said. “It seems, lately, that our agents have been having trouble keeping anything from slipping out of their hooves.” She beckoned to her accompanying agents and they ran ahead into the building to sweep it for her. The Director walked with Bond into the building, her eyes holding steadily upon his.

Bond coughed and felt himself sweat a little. “Director Bilhaus,” he said, “before we go in, I must inform you that I have access to the subject for only a few days. As such, I have had a very limited amount of time to run any experiments or tests on her. I’ve only been able to gather preliminary knowledge based on what little we know.”

“Preliminaries will have to do in a time like this.” Bilhaus swept a hoof through her mane. “The Joint Command staff urged me not to go here, that it was ‘too dangerous.’ I came anyway, but know that I am still taking great risk to do so, Dr. Bond. I do not want my time wasted.”

“Of course.”

Bond led her down the twisting hallways of the squat building toward the back where he made his home. His teeth were chattering a bit as he opened the door to his hastily-constructed lab and let Director Bilhaus in. He walked in after her, letting the door slide shut behind him.

The first thing the Director saw were Sunny’s wings, just as Bond had planned. He smiled when he heard her give a small gasp at the sight. She trotted over to the mare on the table, and ran her hooves over her.

“You paralyzed her?” Bilhaus asked.

“Only temporarily,” Bond said. “It was a fairly simple mixture, and I wanted to make sure that she wouldn’t interfere with your examination of her.”

The Director spun around. She had a frown on her face, which surprised Bond. “I did not give you permission to do such a thing to one of our ponies,” she said. “We are not monsters, Dr. Bond, and I would expect you to act like it. The IS has reacted badly to this situation, I admit, but we are still supposed to protect these ponies.”

“The subject resisted when we first tried to work with her,” Bond said in an even tone.

“I could tell by all the bruises on her.” Bilhaus sighed and rubbed her head. “Dr. Bond, I chose to send you here because you are the best practicing expert on ponies we have, despite your . . . reputation. However, I would expect you to at least show some empathy for anypony you work on. Are we clear?”

“Crystal, ma’am,” Bond said.

“Good. Now that I’m here, show me what you had planned to. You were going to go over her anatomy, yes?”

“That’s correct, ma’am.” Bond walked over to Sunny on the table and held up one of her wings for the Director to see. “As you can see, these appendages are not crudely grafted on, but instead appear to grow naturally out of her back.”

“How naturally?”

“Several nerve clusters have realigned to match up with those inside the wings to form a perfect loop into her nervous system. The strangest thing, however, is that they seem to almost be . . . too natural. Almost like she was born with too many nerves and they waited until now to be activated.”

Bilhaus stared at him. “That’s impossible. These wings were activated by the high amounts of radiation from the crystal heart, were they not?”

“In theory, yes,” Bond said. “But I can find no other explanation as to why her wings seem to be so naturally built into her body.”

The Director walked over to Sunny’s body and touched her hoof to the wings. The feathers felt soft in her hooves, and the wings so fragile. Bilhaus marveled at how they seemed liable to break any moment, and felt like she couldn’t touch them for long or she’d snape them in half.

“Can she fly with these?”

Bond shook his head. “Most definitely not. The bones in these are hollow, like a bird’s, so they would need to be several times larger than her body to keep her aloft. From my perspective, they seem to be vestigial at best, further suggesting that they are products of the crystal heart.”

“And she is the only pony we know to have grown these wings?” Bilhaus asked.

“Yes, the only one with wings,” Bond said. “The foal, of course, has a horn, but he is . . . different from her. We’ve had trouble examining him, and have largely focused our efforts on the subject here.” He pulled out a sheet that showed an x-ray of Sunny’s midsection. It showed the small bones of the wings that connected to the larger spine. “See here, no fusing in the bones, either. The wings fit into pockets in her back and on her spine. Unfortunately, the earthquake damaged the records in the hospital, so we were not able to pull her medical records.”

“For what?”

“To see if she was like this before.”

Bilhaus rubbed her head and stepped away from the mare on the table. It was all too much for her to take in at the moment. She had gone, in a short amount of time, from having to deal with a few domestic disturbances to suddenly having ponies sprout wings and horns and a big heart causing an earthquake.

There was something almost funny about the whole situation for her. She had spent so many years training to take a position like this one, only to find that, when she took it, she had no idea what she was doing. Then, when she finally managed to figure things out, this whole thing happened. She wanted to laugh.

“Are you alright, Ms. Director?” Bond asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “I just feel a little . . . lost. Was this all you wanted to show me for the day, Dr. Bond?”

“Well, ah, not exactly . . .” Bond rubbed the back of his head. “Well, you see, we had planned a, um, demonstration for you if you wished to see it today.”

“What kind of demonstration?”

“Well, you see, Ms. Director, we have been planning since I arrived on testing the effects of bringing in the crystal heart and laying the subject next to it. We want to see if there will be any more ‘events’ or if things will simply stay the same.”

Bilhaus stared at him. “You would risk another earthquake for that?”

“Of course not, ma’am. We do not believe another should occur, as the leading theory is that the earthquake was simply the Heart becoming active. It has not stopped its radiation stream since we brought it in, so there is nothing more to activate. It should be perfectly safe.”

“Using ‘radiation’ and ‘perfectly safe’ so close together seems like a bit of a contradiction, Dr. Bond.”

“As I said, Ms. Director, it will be perfectly safe. We will be well behind radiation-proof doors and those that handle the subject will have radiation suits. The test could provide some very vital information for exactly what we are dealing with here. We could stop this deadlock of information and figure out how to put a stop to all this craziness.”

Bilhaus thought it over. Her gaze kept drawing to the mare on the table, still unnaturally still and quiet. She wasn’t sure how she felt about exposing her again to the Crystal Heart, but she had an entire country of ponies to worry about. Surely, she thought, the life of one would balance out the safety of millions.

That was what she told herself, anyway.

“Alright,” Bilhaus said. “Let’s set it up. Today. I want this whole thing over.”

Sunny was tied to a gurney and wheeled into a different room of the building. She couldn’t see where they were going, since all she could see was the ceiling above her. She watched lights flash by over her head and could feel the rumble of the cart they’d shoved her onto.

Feeling was starting to come back to her limbs, not that it did her any good. They had tied her down so tight that she couldn’t move even a little bit. It was for the better, though, since her first instinct was to start bucking everypony around her in the face.

Instead, they wheeled her into another boring, slate-gray room and shut the door behind her. She was made to wait there for a good ten minutes or so, doing absolutely nothing but stare at the ceiling. There weren’t even tiles for her to count, just bare concrete. She hated it.

Then, the door opened again and she watched out of the corner of her eye as more ponies marched in. She fought the urge to hit all of them, but they didn’t pay attention to her. Instead, they jabbed a needle in her neck and emptied it into her veins.

A wave of nausea hit Sunny, and she wanted to bend over and throw up. No bile came to her throat, however, so instead she started to shake. The guards then unstrapped her from the gurney and tossed her to the floor, where she lay. She wanted to get up and make her escape, but felt too weak to do anything but moan and groan.

They started to wheel something inside the room with her, but Sunny didn’t see what it was at first. It was only when she fought to roll herself over did she see the object, and gasped. In front of her, on a steel cart surrounded by stallion in gray radiation suits, was the Crystal Heart.

Despite what it had been through, the crystal was still flawless and seemed to shine even where the light didn’t hit it. It seemed to pulsate with a hidden power, like it was calling to Sunny. She wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel it beneath her hooves . . . she shivered.

The stallions, as quickly as they had come, left her. They slammed the door shut and she could hear it locking. It was just her and the Crystal Heart. Sunny gulped and looked at it.

One of the walls of the room had a long mirror on it, which she knew was going to have ponies on the other side watching her. She could almost hear them writing on their clipboards when she walked over to the heart. She figured that was why she was there anyway, so she might as well.

Sunny had to hold her stomach while she tumbled to the heart. It still rumbled and made her feel as weak as she had ever felt. Still, she pressed on. She knew what the IS wanted, and what she had to do if she ever wanted to leave the room: Touch that damn Crystal Heart.

For a moment, she wondered if it would be good to think things through or hesitate, but she pushed the thought away. Sunny was sick and tired of being pushed around that day, and just wanted the whole thing to end. The IS, Dr. Bond, everypony. She just wanted to take them all down.

Sunny shoved her hoof against the Crystal Heart and closed her eyes.

A moment later, she opened them again. Nothing had happened. She didn’t feel different, her mane wasn’t glowing gold, she was just standing in the room with the Crystal Heart.

With a heavy sigh, Sunny let her hoof drop from it. “Just great,” she said.

Then, the room blew up in light.

When Sunny opened her eyes, the door to the room hadn’t just been opened, but had crashed through the wall behind it. Alarms were sounding somewhere, and red emergency lights seemed to bathe the room in light. There was no sign of the IS anywhere, and the mirror on the far wall had caved in.

Despite the air that smelled like acid, Sunny found herself reinvigorated. Her head had cleared up, and she could feel the energy pulsing through her veins. With a smile, she got up. One way or the other, the Crystal Heart had fulfilled her wish, and she wasn’t about to let it slip away.

She galloped out of the room and to the right, sprinting down the hall toward the exit of the building. She knew it was down that way somewhere, and made a mad dash for it. The hallway was empty, and her hooves felt lighter with every step she took. With a smile on her face, Sunny ran toward freedom.

There was a right turn, and then a left, and a right again before she neared a set of double doors with “EXIT” printed on a sign over them. She smiled and ran toward them, but before she could arrive they opened on their own.

Standing in the middle of them, with his glasses cracked on his face, was Dr. Bond. He smiled a cruel grin at her and shook his head. “No, no, you’re not getting away, not so easily,” he said. “Do you understand the power you just unleashed? The IS staff is still unconscious, and the entire city is without power! You have done it, you’ve mastered the Heart!”

Dr. Bond smiled and started to advance on Sunny. She noticed that there was something wrong with his head . . . it seemed like part of kept switching colors, to where it made it look like his head kept morphing between Director Bilhaus’ and his own.

Sunny didn’t really care that much to think about it at the moment. Instead, she just ran at him. He was in her way, and she would be damned if she let him stay that way. She thought that Bond looked a little surprised to see her running at him, enough that he didn’t move.

She thought it was nice of him to hold the doors open for her.

Just before she ran into him, Sunny jumped. She soared over Bond’s head with a small laugh at the look on his face. Only, she didn’t come down on the other side. She kept soaring, up out of the doors and over the IS building.

With a flap of her wings, Sunny flew on away from the building, not a care in the world.

Chapter 12: Thnks fr th Mmrs

Red had found a gurney that wasn’t completely rusted in a storage room inside the building and let Starlight lay down on top of it while he wheeled her back up to Midnight’s office. While he had gone looking for the gurney, Staten had taken the liberty of bandaging Starlight’s head, since the rough journey had left her dazed and with a knot on the back of her skull.

Starlight herself felt, ironically, powerless to do anything more than let them cater to her. The pesky horn on her head throbbed like somepony had started to hammer it down, but for all the pain Starlight was too weak to even reach up to rub it. Once she was laid onto the gurney, she felt as if she couldn’t move one more muscle without a titanic effort.

She noted that teleportation, as cool as it was, left much to be desired. The feeling it brought, in that spare moment when she was neither alive nor dead, here nor there, had been exhilarating, but the cost upon her body was enough to make her not want to do it ever again. Worse, the bullet wound was flaring up again and had started to bleed, so now her entire hindquarters were wrapped in gauze.

To Starlight, she didn’t know which was worse: having her flank wrapped in so much gauze it vaguely resembled a diaper or having Red be the one to wrap it.

Once they were up in Midnight’s office once more, however, the joking around her had subsided. The mare had a grim look in her piercing red eyes. She had booted up her computer and pored over screen after screen of text that Starlight couldn’t see, but figured that they were important. Red paced around the room as she did so, while Staten stood close behind the mare, his gaze locked on the screen along with Midnight’s.

“Well are we going to sit around here all night or not?” Red asked after a few minutes, his voice flaring up.

Midnight scowled. “These things take time. To find out what’s wrong with your friend, we’ll need to go beyond my pay grade, and farther than what any normal citizen could get their hooves on.”

“What do you mean?”

“What we mean is that the machinery available to ordinary ponies isn’t enough to accurately figure out what’s going on with Starlight,” Staten said. “Whatever is powering that horn of hers, whether it’s some form of radiation or magnets, is too alien to be read with a normal scan. Our goal is to find something that can overcome that limit.”

Red cocked his head, then smiled. “You two are going to do something illegal, aren’t you?”

“In the barest sense of the word, yes,” Midnight said. “Although, since it would appear that it is the Intelligence Service who are the only ones in the city to have that sort of equipment, we would technically be using what our tax dollars bought.”

Over on the gurney, Starlight groaned. “Can there just be one part of this whole quest-adventure thing where we don’t tangle with the IS? Can’t they, like, go pop little foals’ balloons or ruin birthday parties somewhere else? I’m sure they’ve got better things to do.”

Midnight rolled her eyes, while Staten chuckled under his breath. She kept poring over her computer, the glare of the screen reflecting off her glasses. Staten started to pace behind her, and occasionally shot glances out of her window as if a spinner would show up at any moment to take them away.

Red walked over to where Starlight lay and looked down at her. “You okay?” he asked. “I mean, it seems like you need to rest, not go rushing out on some other crazy adventure thing. You’re bleeding, after all.”

“I know,” Starlight said with a small laugh. “Aren’t I a roughflank?”

“You’re stubborn, I’ll give you that,” Red said.

Starlight smiled, then looked away as she bit down on her lip. Her eyes closed as a sudden wave of pain washed through her body, with the epicenter right under her horn. She wanted to cry and scream at the same time, but settled on shaking like a fish out of water.

Red rushed to her side. “Are you alright?”

“I’m . . . fine . . .” she said. “Just a little more pain. It should go away soon.”

“I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“I’m not a fan of it either.”

He looked down. “I’m just worried we’re not doing all that we can for you, Starlight.”

“You’re all doing fine,” Starlight said in a halting tone. “I’m just . . . scared. That’s all. I mean, I’ve got a horn growing out of my head and I can teleport and I’ve been shot and I’m so far from home and, and . . .” Tears welled up in her eyes. “I don’t know if we’ll make it, Red. I don’t know if we’ll get through this.”

Red reached out to say something, but Sunrise burst into the room before he could. He was grinning and wearing a tacky red coat around his green waist. “I finally found something to hide my wings!” he said. There was a gray beanie sticking out one pocket, and he tossed it to Starlight. “I found something to cover up that horn, too.”

The beanie landed on Starlight’s chest, where it stayed since she did not feel the immediate need to pick it up and place it on her head like some tactless idiot. Midnight turned around in her seat and only stared at Sunrise before shaking her head and going back to her work. Staten, however, wrinkled his nose.

“You know, I think you were less conspicuous with the wings,” he said.

“Not my fault that nothing goes with green,” Sunrise said. “So what’s everyone looking so down about? We aren’t dead yet.”

Red walked up to him and put a hoof around his shoulders. “Maybe now wouldn’t be the best time for optimism.” His nose perked up, and he sniffed the air around Sunrise. “Hey, ol’ buddy . . . please tell me you didn’t shoot up in the bathroom.”

“I can tell you I definitely didn’t not do it,” Sunrise said.

“What?”

“C’mon, Red, one of these nerds had a big vial of stuff marked ‘psychedelic’ and there was no way I couldn’t try that stuff out.”

Red stared at him, then shook his head. “Stress getting to you?”

Sunrise’s eye twitched. “A little bit.”

Midnight shushed them, then went back to her computer. She tapped the screen and let out a small laugh. “I think I’ve found the place!” she said. “There’s a hospital downtown, on Third Street. It looks like the IS have some sort of advanced scanning machine that they’ve been running trials on located there. It’s not exactly a high risk area, so security should be light, if any.”

“And you think their machine should give us a better look at Starlight’s brain?” Staten asked.

“It’ll give us the best shot in the city.”

Red stepped forward. “Alright, how do we get Starlight in there?”

“We—” Midnight began to speak, until she saw Sunrise standing by the door. Her eyes went wide, then she sighed. “You took the white powder, didn’t you?”

“Why, is it noticeable?” Sunrise asked.

Everypony else turned to look at him, and let out a collective gasp. There were angry blue and red welts all over Sunrise’s hooves and face. They swelled up and looked utterly painful, though he didn’t seem to feel anything and only kept dumbly looking at them.

“What?”

A smiled grew on Midnight’s face. “I think I know our ticket in.”

A unanimous decision by Midnight—in which she was the only voter—led to the group taking her office’s van over the RV since it was, as she described, “a lumbering target ready to bring the entirety of the IS down on our heads.” Red grumbled about it, but the thing had at least a big enough back seat to let Starlight lay down. It was also large enough to pack the gurney on top, which Midnight insisted they would need.

Sunrise had, as ordered, brought out as much of the chemical he had found as he could carry. His fur was already starting to change colors into various hues of pink and violet, with a vague undertone of green. Other than that, though, he seemed fine.

Red sat in the back seat with Starlight, keeping her head raised above her body as Staten had instructed. The ride over to the hospital wasn’t a long one, but it seemed to take forever to all those inside the van, as they grew closer to yet another possible capture by the IS.

It was still late in the night, so the cars out on the roads of Amperdam were few. There had been a light drizzle while the group had been discussing the plans, so the road was wet and the buildings slicked with raindrops. The lights on lampposts reflected off puddles in the street and onto the windows of the van. From her perch on one of Red’s thighs, Starlight looked out one window and smiled. To her, at least, the night was peaceful.

She hadn’t told anypony yet, but inside she had given up. Or, at least, largely found peace. To her, the entire situation was one that was rapidly worsening. Her body wasn’t hers anymore, and the government itself wanted her. With nowhere else to go but down, she had begun to accept the inevitability of it all, and simply concerned herself with resting on Red. She smiled to herself.

“Glad to see you’re happy about all this,” Red said. “I’d be pretty worried myself.”

“Me, worried?” Starlight asked. “I think you know me better than that, Red.”

“I’d like to think I do.” He stared straight ahead, toward the hospital on the road in front of them. “I just hope we’re ready for whatever we find inside.”

“ . . . I am too.”

He didn’t say anything more after that. He didn’t feel like he had to. His only focus was making sure they all got out in one piece, and it was for that reason that he leered at the back of Midnight's head. She had elected to keep their plan all to herself, only letting him in on a few sparse details. He wasn’t entirely sure that he trusted the mare, but then again, he thought, there weren’t many ponies that he could trust in the first place.

The van at last came to stop in a parking lot in the rear of the building, away from most of the other vehicles. Midnight turned off the van and got a few things out of the center console next to her. She got out, and had Staten and Red take the gurney off the roof of the van.

Once Starlight was secured to the gurney, Midnight stood in front of the rest. “Alright, here’s the plan,” she said. “I’ve got some badges from my office that should let two of us, plus Starlight, inside the hospital without too much suspicion. We handle cases together all the time. However, getting into the wing of the hospital where the IS machine is located won’t be so simple.”

“Is there where I come in?” Sunrise asked.

She nodded. “You take the rest of that experiment and drink it, and you should get all the side effects without any pain. Nopony at this hospital will have the slightest idea what’s going on, so they’re going to be rushing around like crazy. In the chaos, we can slip into the back of the building where the machine is.”

Red stepped forward. “And who is going where?”

“I have to go with Starlight, of course, to run the machine, and I need Staten with me to figure out whatever results I get. That leaves you to be with your friend here and stay with him while the doctors look him over.”

“And what happens if they figure out who I am? Or if they figure out that he has wings?”

“Improvise.”

He wanted to grumble more, but there wasn’t much of a choice at that point. Sunrise downed more of the vials and complained he felt sick as his eyes flashed different colors. Not the pupils, but the white around them. Midnight and Staten, meanwhile, put on the badges and began wheeling Starlight toward the building.

They stopped just outside the front door and Midnight motioned to Red. “Take him in there first and stir things up. We’ll be in afterwards.”

Red nodded and headed inside.

Starlight watched him go from on the gurney. It wasn’t comfortable to be laying on the thing, but it was better than any alternative. Some of the strength had come back to her, but not much. She had a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach when she watched Red go, and she wished she could have said something to him before he left. She got the feeling she wouldn’t see him again for some time.

Staten held on to the back of the gurney and drew deep breaths. He had his head down, and had remained silent for much of the night.

“Are you alright?” Midnight asked.

“I’m fine,” he said.

“You don’t look fine.”

“I’m just nervous about this whole thing. I almost don’t want to go in, and just leave it all a mystery. I just want to keep them all safe and find my daughter.”

“Well I’m sure that—”

From inside the hospital, they began to hear some yelling. Then, several loud crashes and a few ponies ran out the front door. Midnight grinned at Staten and nudged him forward. “Well, we don’t have much of a choice now, do we?”

Staten nodded and began to wheel Starlight in. He kept his head bent low, as Midnight did as well. They walked through the lobby relatively unopposed as a large crowd gathered at the far end around some chairs where Red and Sunrise were shouting. Hospital staff were swarming out of doors all around the room, and nopony paid attention to them. The entrance to the wing of the hospital where the IS machine was didn’t even have a guard, and they passed through with only a few cursory nods from the nurses.

The inside hallways were wide with bright lights spaced every couple petras and smelled strongly of cleaning supplies. The gurney, while it may have stuck out in the lobby under normal circumstances, was in its element inside the larger areas of the hospital. Nurses and doctors rushed back and forth, and were all too busy to pay attention to just another patient and attending physicians. Some ran by muttering about a “craziness in the lobby.”

Midnight walked like she had been in the hospital a thousand times before and the path she was taking was as natural as walking around her home. Staten admired that about her. She had always been something of a frantic memorizer, able to quickly recall anything she wanted to remember. He envied her for that, as he felt very lost.

After trotting through twists and turns, they at last came to an area that was blocked off by a single, large door. There was a moment of fear as Midnight tried the handle, but it turned and they were in. Compared to the rest of the hospital, the IS wing was silent. The lights were even turned off, and only switched on once Staten and Midnight caused enough movement.

“Alright, the machine is straight down this hallway,” Midnight said. “The worst is over. Now we just have to get her in the machine and start it up.”

Starlight sighed and tried to push down the little twinges of fear that threatened to bubble up inside of her. She held on to the gurney as she was wheeled in through a set of double doors into a large room. Unlike a lot of normal rooms, this one seemed to be in a spherical shape, tapering up to two flat point, one of the ceiling and one on the ground. In the middle of it all was a large chair that was attached by crain to the ceiling. It had little electric diodes blinking all over it, and a helmet to boot.

The gurney stopped and Staten picked up her back end while Midnight got her front. She felt odd for a moment as she was held between the two, then settled into the large chair. There were clamps that closed around all of her hooves, and for a moment she felt a primal rush of fear due to her inability to move. It settled down quickly, but she was still having trouble sitting still. It didn’t help that her horn felt sore when Staten pulled off the beanie.

“Is this all really necessary?” she asked.

“Trust me,” Midnight said, “I’m a doctor. Sort of. Well, we’ll see.”

Before Starlight could object, she was left alone in the big room as Midnight and Staten stepped out. They reappeared a moment later through the windows into a small control room next to the exit. They stared at her through the thick glass and appeared to talk, but Starlight couldn’t hear them until they turned on an intercom.

“Alright, we’re going to start you up!” Midnight said. “Try to relax and remain as still as possible! Also, it might help to close your eyes.”

Starlight took it as a warning, and immediately shut her eyes. All she heard was a loud whirring sound as the machine came to life. Where she couldn’t see, her chair was raised higher into the air and the helmet came down upon her head. Machines built into the walls of the room turned on, flashing lights and making small working sounds.

In the control room, Midnight and Staten could only watch in silence as the machine did its job. The screen in front of them didn’t show anything that was happening, evidently, until it was finished, so there was little else they could do.

The machine began to spin on a gyroscopic wheel, turning every which way and making Starlight feel like her stomach was trapped in a hurricane. She tried to keep herself calm, though, lest she repeat the accident back in Midnight’s lab. She didn’t want to go through that again, and so did her best to breathe regularly and keep herself from shaking.

Then, as if it had never begun, the shaking stopped and the seat was lowered back to its starting position. The helmet drew off Starlight’s head and she shakily tried to get off it and to the ground. This proved to not be the best of her ideas, as her unsteady grip on balance resulted in her falling to the floor and laying in a heap on the ground.

She grumbled and picked herself up, though still shuffled from side to side as she made her way back to the control room. Staten let her in, and she stood behind him and Midnight to stare at the display monitor that currently had a lot of graphs and charts on it that she could not understand.

Midnight herself was looking over them with a worried expression on her face. Her lips were pursed and her eyebrows kenaded. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Logically, it shouldn’t make any sense at all. And yet, we’re still here.”

“What is it?” Starlight asked. “Am I going to die?”

“No, no, I highly doubt that, barring unfortunate circumstances,” Midnight said. “What is wrong with you, though, is a bit more complicated.”

She clicked a few buttons with her hoof and the graphs and charts were spirited away to be replaced with a 3D model of Starlight’s head. The picture zoomed in to show her brain, and some sort of purple field around it.

“See, this is your brain, which appears normal,” she said. “Around it is a substance that, back at my lab, I tentatively identified as radiation.”

“But now you’re not so sure?” Staten asked.

“Precisely. What it appears to be is, well, impossible.”

Starlight stepped forward. “Tell me.”

“Well . . .”

“Doctor, I deserve that much.”

She sighed. “Well, currently that field around your brain that the monitor shows is, well, impossible. It is exhibiting natures of radiation that have never been witnessed before and should not exist by every law of science, but it still is, and growing. When you grew stressed inside the seat, the field even grew, and began focusing itself on your horn. I can’t believe that I’m saying this, but by all accounts it seems to be . . . magic.”

Staten laughed. “Magic? Really, Midnight? Surely you can come up with a better explanation.”

“Don’t laugh,” Midnight said with a snappy tone. “It’s not as absurd as it sounds. There have long been theories of . . . unexplained happenings . . . that crop up every few decades, especially in Teton. We seem to be the central place for this weird stuff.”

“Right, like the tooth gremlin, the five-hooved monster, and, don’t forget, Father Winter. I’m sure they’re out there somewhere, right?”

“Fine, you explain it,” Midnight said. “I’ll take what I can get, thank you. As for me, I’m leaving and going to check up on Red and his friend.” She rose from her chair and trotted out the door, her nose up in the air.

“I see you’re a big hit with her,” Starlight said. “You didn’t have to mock her like that.”

“A lifetime of having your own work grounded in fact being compared to magic will do that to you.” Staten tapped the monitor and studied it a bit more. “I will agree with her, though, these figures aren’t like anything anypony has ever seen.”

“No wonder the IS want their hooves on it.”

“Agreed. Speaking of whom, we should probably leave ourselves—”

Starlight heard the doors open, and thought it was Midnight returning to say something. What she saw, instead, was a small stick, no longer than a petra, fly through the door and land on the ground in front of the control room.

She had no time to cry out before the world exploded into a pure sheet of white and a loud ringing that made it feel as though her head was home to a beehive. She writhed on the floor, holding her head as she yelled out, but couldn’t hear herself.

When she opened her eyes, however, she felt her heart sink. Standing all around her and Staten—on the ground next to her—were IS agents wearing black uniforms and pointing guns at them. The most confusing thing of all, the last thing she saw before she passed out from the experience, was that she thought she saw her father standing with them.

Upstairs in the hospital, burly IS agents barreled through the narrow corridors. Their guns were swung around their waists and they wore gasmasks that made them seem less pony than machine. Doctors and nurses scrambled out of their way.

The beat of their hooves grew closer to the room down the hall that one of the nurses had informed the head agent that the fugitive, Reddington, was staying in. The stallion smiled to himself. He had been with the team for weeks trying to catch them all, and suddenly they were stupid enough to trigger the silent alarm at the hospital. His muscles quivered with excitement, like a racer at the starting gate.

He indicated to his team to stack up behind him once they reached the doorway. They lined the wall around the door, but it was the team leader who went in first. He couldn’t help but smile to himself while he did, ready to see the smug grin on that Reddington’s face disappear at gunpoint.

With a yell, he burst through the door and swept his gun around the room. In his excitement, it took him a few moments to notice that, besides himself, there was nopony in the room. There was, however, a note on the hospital bed. It read: You should really turn down those sirens. -Red

The stallion looked to the window, which was open and letting the wind come through as the first rays of the morning sun appeared over Amperdam. Despite all his training, the IS agent let out a yell of rage as he stared out window, and the empty parking lot outside.

Red was panting as he rounded the corner away from the hospital, taking a rest against the brick wall of a coffee shop next door. He faced away from the street, toward the suburbs that were separated from the business district by a chainlink fence.

Sunrise came running around the corner after him, breathing even harder. He had to bend down for a few moments before he could catch his breath and stand up. Red was relieved to see that he had at least had the mind to throw away the hospital gown.

“What in the world happened?” Sunrise said with a frightened screech in his voice. “Everything was fine until the IS just showed up out of nowhere!”

Red growled. “I know, I know. Starlight and the others must have set off an alarm or something. Of all the stupid things to do . . .”

“What do we do now? Do we go back for them?”

“No, the IS has taken them already, I’m sure of it. We barely made it out ourselves, and we weren’t even who they were looking for.” Red smashed a hoof against the brick wall and ignored the pain. To his surprise, the bricks instead crumpled beneath his blow, but he shook it off as adrenaline. “Damn it all! We got lazy and now look what’s happened!”

Sunrise slumped to the ground. “So what do we do?”

“I’m thinking.”

Red paced around, his hooves trembling. The combination of anger and helplessness was getting to him, and he knew it. He shook his head to clear his thoughts and, like a burst of lightning from the heavens, got an idea. He started to smile.

“Well, there is one thing we can do,” he said.

“And what is that?”

“We already know where the IS is going to take them: Sundown. It’s where that whole earthquake thing was that started this weirdness.” He started to laugh. “And we’ve still got the Odyssey, and guns. Lots of guns. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

Sunrise rolled his eyes and offered a hoof to Red. “Suicide mission?”

Red took his hoof and helped him up, smiling. “You’re goddamned right.”

Chapter 13: Take It Easy

When Starlight was a little girl, she loved trees. She would walk through the park by her house everyday and run her hooves over the bark, saying their names under her breath. They towered above her during the long, hot summers on the coast of Teton, and in the bitterly cold winters she could lean against them while the other children played and pushed each other in the snow.

Her mother considered her strange, to be fascinated with trees like they were her friends. The older mare constantly set Starlight up on playdates and tried to force her into sports or dancing to keep her from being an outcast, but it was no use. It had never been any use.

What her parents didn’t know was that Starlight’s fascination with nature’s great beasts went far beyond just simply knowing them: she wanted to climb one. She had seen how the little squirrels in the park did it, and wondered how she could. With four awkward hooves, climbing was usually out of a pony’s abilities, but she wanted to anyway.

For an entire summer, she looked all around the massive park in the center of Gracia for a perfect candidate. It was almost August when she found one that she thought was perfect: a massive oak with so many branches that they practically created a staircase up to the top of the tree.

She tried climbing it several times the day she found it, but it wasn’t until her last try that she really got anywhere. Starlight made it halfway up the tall, tall tree before one of her legs slipped, leaving her dangling on one branch. Without any possibility of pulling herself back up, she eventually slipped and fell.

It was hours before they found her. She had laid on the ground, broken, only able to look up at the tree that had betrayed her. When her father next spoke to her, he had only told her: “You took on more than you could, and found your limit. Try to remember that next time.”

She had stopped loving trees from that day on.

A stark white spinner flew low over a forest that grew in the foothills of the last mountain range before the wide desert beyond. The winds were heavy around the tall peaks, and buffeted the metal doors of the spinner hard enough that Midnight looked like she would throw up. Starlight sat across from her, and spent most of the ride regretting her choice of a seat.

To distract herself, she looked outside the window to her right, and watched the carpet of green pass down below them. Her mind drifted back to her obsession with trees as a little filly, and the scars she still bore from the fall. She wondered what her younger self would have thought of the vast forests that decorated the countryside of Teton that, until that very moment, she had never glimpsed before.

Those were better days, Starlight thought. Back when she had been optimist and thought the world full of wonder. Now, she only had to look up and across the back compartment of the spinner to see why that wasn’t true. Though he tried to not make contact with her, the very presence of her father was enough to take the spirit out of her.

When he had appeared at the hospital, she had held a vain hope that, somehow, he had come to save her. Instead, he had told her to cooperate with the nice ponies in black and not to struggle too much. A burning coal of anger rested in the pit of her stomach, which she stoked the flames on every time she remembered. It had been one thing to be captured, but another for her father to do the deed.

Staten looked almost as glum as her. He hadn’t said a word since they had set off from Amperdam, only kept to himself and stared at the floor of the spinner. Starlight wanted to say something to him, but she didn’t rightly know how to cheer him up. They had lost. Some pony in a white coat had clamped a steel device onto her horn, and she’d overheard that she would be examined once they reached Sundown. There was little doubt in Starlight’s mind that she would be examined like a lab rat for the rest of her life.

One of her hooves strayed to the lever keeping the steel door of the spinner shut. She wondered if she could open it and jump out before they stopped her. She had always wanted to fly, even if it were for a few brief moments. Not to mention that hitting the trees would just mean they would be finishing up what they had already started.

Starlight tried pushing on the lever, but it wouldn’t budge. She pouted to herself, her plans ruined. Across from her, Midnight looked at her with a knowing in her eyes and, Starlight thought, a little too much pity than she was comfortable with.

“We’ll be crossing the Vale of Arnin soon,” her father said. “Beyond that is the Sand Sea, and then Sundown.”

“I don’t remember asking for a geography lesson,” Starlight said.

If her father was taken aback by her attitude, he didn’t show it. Instead, he simply nodded and tapped on the door opposite from Starlight’s. “It’s going to be hectic once we land,” he said. “There will be a lot of ponies that want to meet you, Starlight. It would be best if you kept quiet.”

“Because you know that I’m really good at that.”

“It’s for your own good, Starlight. I’m just trying to help.”

She opened her mouth to reply, to tell him how wrong she was, but she let it go. He wasn’t worth it, she thought. Not anymore. The statue that she had carved into her brain of a kind and caring father had been toppled in a few short minutes the day before, and now she couldn’t care any less what happened to him.

In her mind, she was probably supposed to cry or to shake or any other “ladylike” activities, but instead all she could think to do was stare bitterly at her father and bide her time. Because, to her, he wasn’t her father. The Noctilucent that sat so close to her inside the spinner was a shadow of the stallion he had once been, without all the bravery and kindness that Starlight had once taken for granted.

The world came into focus, like a fog had been washed from her mind. She wasn’t on the run anymore. No, the enemy had met her and taken her, and that made things all easier. She would let them take her to Sundown, let them tell her what exactly it was that her horn could do, and then she would stop them all.

Starlight wasn’t sure what the IS was doing, but whatever it was, she wasn’t going to let them succeed.

Outside of Amperdam, the countryside turned to tall, proud trees and sharp hills. The road was curvy and the RV had a hard time taking some of the corners. Red trusted the old vehicle and his own driving, but it was clear that Sunrise lacked his faith. The stallion clung to his seat—despite already being double-buckled into it—like it was a life raft in a tumultuous ocean. Red swore that, somehow, his green coat had gotten greener when they took one particular corner.

Most of the towns up in the region were small and built around forts that had guarded the border back when Teton had stopped at Serenity Valley. But, once the country moved on, enveloping former Occitan territory until they reached the sea, the forts had most been abandoned and the areas left to mining settlements and a few casinos.

Red hated driving through the area. The locals were superstitious, upstanding, and fiercely loyal to the law. Taking illegal cargo through it made him feel like he had painted a large target on his back saying: “Arrest Me!”

“We need to stop soon,” Sunrise said, speaking up for the first time since he had started to look sick.

“I told you, the restroom in the back works just fine,” Red said. “If you’re really going to puke, just try to get it all in the bowl.”

“No, not for that reason.”

“Then what in Adana’s name do we need to stop for?”

Sunrise sighed. “Red, I know this is a suicide mission, but I still want to play it smart. Right now, we’re three hundred petras from Sundown with no plan, no backup, and no idea what’s waiting for us. We need information. First, a newspaper. I’m sure the gas stations around here will have one from out west.”

“You really think a newspaper can tell us anything?” Red shook his head. “They’re just going to say whatever the IS wants them to say. We could guess and probably be closer to the truth.”

“It’s what they don’t say. You have to read between the lines, Red. This is why you never got any of the important trips.”

There was just enough truth in that to keep Red from hitting Sunrise, but only just. It wasn’t his fault. He still remembered all the lessons his father had taught him, about being blunt and upfront with ponies. It was a good way to catch enemies off guard, but, much to his chagrin, he usually couldn’t see much farther past his own nose.

Directly above them, the sun burned down on them like it was angry at them for busting up its church. Red would apologize if he could, though he was not sure what he would say, or if Solaris was even real. If he admitted it to himself, Red wasn’t quite sure what he believed in.

The Odyssey rounded a bend in the road and came upon a service station built more or less into the side of the mountain. It was little more than a squat building barely larger than the Odyssey herself and two gas pumps, but it was the most they had seen in hours.

Red didn’t like Sunrise’s plan, but he had to admit they would need gas if they wanted to get over the mountains without hoofing it. He steered the RV beside one of the gas pumps and turned off the engine.

“Alright,” he said, “you stay here and get the fuel while I go in and grab a newspaper . . . and some snacks.”

“But why me?”

“Uh, maybe those wings of yours have something to do with it, flyboy.”

Sunrise looked at his back and hung his head. “Right.”

Red swung himself out of his seat and through the door to the concrete outside. The air felt wet so high up in the mountains, and he could feel a bead of sweat forming on his brow. “I thought mountains were supposed to be cold,” he muttered to himself as he stalked over to the convenience store.

A bell chimed wearily above his head. The little store was more like a large bathroom with snacks, but he didn’t mind. Spending most of his life on the road, any place with food and gas was good enough for him.

There was a stack of newspapers on a rack near the door, and Red began pulling them out. Most of them were from Amperdam, Skyhall, or Gracia. Even after so many years, the ponies out in the mountains considered themselves easterners and not westerners, thought Red.

He found a newspaper from Sundown on the floor next to the rack. To his relief, the date was from the day before. He smiled and went to the back of the store to look for some snacks. That, and he admitted, some drinks that wouldn’t make him drunk, but wouldn’t keep him too sober.

The air in the store had been stale when Red walked in, so when a scent of fear began to fill it, he too noticed. He spun around, though with a six pack of drinks in his teeth, he imagined he didn’t look very frightening.

“I don’t know why you came here, but you’re going to regret it,” the grizzled old shopkeeper said. He had a shotgun cocked in his hooves, and the barrel looked about a mile wide from where Red was standing. His hope that it wasn’t loaded was cut short when the shopkeeper cocked the gun. “The police are on their way, so why don’t you just stay where you are and no one gets hurt.”

Red tried to back up, but the gun only swung up to his head, and the old stallion let his hoof glide down toward the firing lever. Stallions like him were dangerous. Most usually, they were crazy or out for some kind of perverted justice, which made them meaner than any cop or IS agent Red had ever run into.

I swear, if I end this way, in a freaking gas station . . .

His mind groped for a plan, for some way out. He didn’t come up with anything. The gun had a clear line of fire against him, and the only things around him were shelves full of snacks that provided no cover and glass cases for drinks all the way at the back of the store. Any attempt to run and he would be gunned down.

“Well, what’s it going to be, colt? Are you going to submit or just stand there looking down the barrel of Ol’ Crowd Control here?”

“I—” His anger began to flare. “You know what, you old—”

Before said geezer could reply to the insult boiling in Red’s mouth, the window to the parking lot burst inward, showering them both with bits of glass. Red received a dozen cuts for his trouble before he threw himself to the ground and hid behind a rack of candy.

He stood back up in time to see Sunrise leap through the hole he had created, cradling Red’s heaviest weapon in the RV: a portable machine gun with a mountable bipod and belt of bullets wrapped around one of his hooves.

The shopkeeper stared up at him, but it wasn’t the gun that had him speechless. Sunrise had spread his wings out behind him to their full length. The sunlight caught them and shone through the feathers, bathing Sunrise in an orange glow.

“Wh-What are you?” the old stallion stammered.

“I am an angel of Adana, the Lord your God,” spoke Sunrise in a booming voice. “You have disturbed one of my Lord’s divine servants and threatened his life. What say you?”

“I, I—”

“Speak clear or never again!” Sunrise raised the bulky gun, and Red wondered if he really meant to shoot.

The shopkeeper threw himself at Sunrise’s hooves, his nose pressed against the ground. “Oh, please forgive me, Lord!” he squealed. “I did not know he was yours, I only thought he was a criminal! I swear, he can go, he can go!”

Sunrise beckoned to him, and Red didn’t need to be told twice. He stepped over the cowering form of the shopkeeper to get to the door. He stopped in the doorway and turned back, but nothing came to mind that he could say. Instead, he shook his head and followed Sunrise to the Odyssey.

“Really? An angel of Adana?” he asked when they were back inside.

“Hey, I went with what came to mind.” Sunrise unloaded the machine gun and put it away in a secret shelf beneath the kitchen counter inside the RV. Red grimaced to see his favorite hiding space uncovered. “Besides, it was nice to use these wings for something.”

“You could have just used the gun.”

“Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”

Red shook his head and got into the driver’s seat. Almost as an afterthought, he tossed the newspaper he had been clutching to Sunrise. “Here, I hope that’s worth it.”

“Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”

Sunrise snapped the newspaper open. Red let him read while he steered the Odyssey back onto the road and away from that gas station as fast as he could. The police around these parts were few and far in between, and for a somepony like him would be calling for reinforcements from Amperdam, so he figured he had an hour to get out of the mountains before the cops could catch him.

He pressed his hoof to the accelerator and the RV leapt into gear around him. Trees blurred past him the mountains eclipsed the sun as they grew in front of him. The road appeared to be no more than a thin line along the craggy side of the peaks, and the Odyssey less than that.

If Sunrise noticed, he didn’t make any mention of it. His eyes pored over every ink-stained word, and the crackle of the thin papers was beginning to drive Red nuts.

“You find anything?” he asked warily.

“Nothing,” Sunrise said.

“Well great, then that was the most pointless sidetrack ever.”

“No, no, I mean nothing.” He shook his head. “There isn’t a single thing that mentions increased IS activity, strange sights, even the aftermath of the earthquake. This could have come from a year ago if not for the date printed at the top of the page.”

“So what? Maybe they just haven’t noticed it.”

Sunrise glared at Red. “Really? You think they wouldn’t have noticed IS spinners everywhere and the whole, you know, earthquake?” He discarded the newspaper behind him, and let it fall to the floor. “What this tells us is that things are worse than they were. Somepony’s covering up any news coming out of the city, and we’re running smack dab into the middle of it.”

Red turned that over in his mind. He had expected danger, of course, but if the IS were running a scam operation on an entire city, it was going to be a lot more than two ponies and an RV could handle. Every sane instinct he had told him to turn back, but instead he kept turning sharp corners on the mountain road.

Starlight was going to be in Sundown too, and he would be damned if he let her walk into that crap without any backup. He turned on the radio and let the music soothe him through the mountain pass.

I’m just a runnin’ down the road, tryin’ to loosen my load, I got seven women on my mind . . .”

The spinner swept over mountain crags and winding valleys on the edge of the desert. The air grew noticeably more arid, and Starlight had to lick her lips to keep from drying out. Midnight snored in her seat, and sleep had claimed Staten as well, who leaned on his friend. The wind had thankfully died over the Vale of Arnin, and hadn’t returned besides the occasional gust.

As far as Starlight could tell, the only ponies awake were the pilot, her, and her father. She watched him when she wasn’t pretending not to. He looked pained some of the time, but others he just stared at the door leading to the cockpit like she wasn’t even there. Starlight wondered where her mother was. She’d asked once, but Noctilucent had brushed the question off without so much as a grunt for an answer.

She didn’t think her mother was dead, though. Surely if she was, her father wouldn’t have been trying to capture her. He must have only been doing this because he had no choice, right? That sounded good in her head. Of course, a little niggling doubt reminded her that he could have led the IS on a wild goose chase if he had wanted to keep her safe.

The door to the cockpit slid open, and a black-and-gray spotted stallion stuck his head inside. He bobbed his head at Noctilucent knowingly. “We’ll be coming up on the city soon,” he said. “We should be landing in twenty minutes.”

Starlight slumped in her seat. She had hoped against hope for some last minute rescue or change from her father, but he only buckled himself into his seat and looked out his window. Starlight did the same with a defeated sigh. Her side of the spinner would come toward the city first, she knew, judging from the landscape below her. She remembered her father’s old atlases, and studying the desert city. It had seemed like a dream back then, to reach the city. Now that she was here, there was nothing more she wanted than to go back to Gracia and pretend nothing had ever happened.

A mesa passed below them, and then suddenly there it was: Sundown. Spires of glass and concrete rising from the desert floor and shimmering with heat. It was so large, she thought, much more than in any book. It was hard to believe anything could grow out in the desert, let alone a big city.

She was still looking at it when the spinner began to shake. Gently at first, then wildly with warning lights flashing and alarms beeping. They spun and jerked in the air like they were a rag doll. She could hear the pilot shouting in the cockpit, and her own voice was soon added to the cacophony.

Midnight and Staten were awake and yelling along with her, but her father was saying nothing. When she looked at him, he had been knocked unconscious. At least, she hoped that’s all it was.

Starlight managed to get one last look at Sundown outside her window as the spinner plunged toward the ground right outside the city. It was shimmering, but not with desert heat. It was like there was a field of energy surrounding the city, pulsating with life as much as the beating of a heart. And in the sky, above the city, was a spinning cluster of gold.

Before she could think what it meant, the vehicle’s nose struck the ground, the spinner turned end over end, and everything went black.

Author's Notes:

Sorry for the wait, but now that it's up I hope you all have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and just a wonderful time this season!

Chapter 14: The Post War Dream

Starlight felt something drip on her face. It was a steady flow, each drop landing half a second after the other. She told it to go away, though whether it was out loud or in her sleep, she couldn’t say. The drops, annoyingly, didn’t listen to her.

Her eyes opened, and Starlight almost immediately regretted the decision. She had managed to land on the roof of the spinner—now serving as the floor—but the IS agent her father had talked to hadn’t been so lucky. Somehow, she didn’t think seatbelts were supposed to bend a pony in half like that.

Another few drops splattered on her forehead. Starlight let out a strained cry when she realized why the “water” had felt so warm. She scrambled backwards, trying to push herself against the spinner’s door but only found open air.

She fell backwards into the sand outside the crashed spinner. She shut her eyes and grunted, moving a hoof between her face and the sun. One of her legs was still ensnared by a seat belt inside the spinner. She cried out and shook her leg until it came off, then crawled away.

It wasn’t more than a second before she ran into her father. He stood above her, blocking out the sun from where she was looking. His eyes looked at her blankly, and she wondered if he could really see her. Starlight wasn’t sure what she expected him to do, but it definitely wasn’t fall to his knees in front of her.

Two thick, strong hooves wrapped around her neck, and Starlight found herself pulled into her father’s embrace. He said nothing, only sobbed quietly. She hesitated, then reached up and rubbed Noctilucent back.

“I”m alive, dad,” she said. “I’m okay, I think. I just have a few cuts or scrapes—”

“Shush now, all that matters is you’re still here,” Noctilucent whispered in her ear.

She did, and let him rock her back and forth like she was two years old again. Starlight closed her eyes, and could hardly even feel the burning hot sand. Her mane was matted to her forehead, and she could see long gashes in her forehooves, but she was alive, and so was her father.

A crash from behind them both interrupted the reunion. Starlight turned to see Staten and Midnight walking around the other side of the spinner. Staten’s mouth was turned down and hard at the edges. He scowled at her. “Nice to see somepony decided to join us at last,” he said. “Too bad the pilot didn’t share your fate. He had all the provisions and survival gear with him.”

Staten pointed to the wreckage. Starlight could see where the nose section had completely shorn off from the rest. “Nice to see you, too, Staten,” she said.

The professor tapped her on the shoulder and smiled. “Don’t give me another scare like that, kid. I’m not liable to survive the next one.” Midnight followed behind him but only gave Starlight a curt nod. Her gaze focused on Noctilucent.

“Did you find anything?” questioned Noctilucent, peering around the crash site. “We can’t stay here much longer in this sun. We’ll need to get some sort of shade.”

“Right now the best bet is just sitting in the spinner’s shadow until nightfall. Nothing but sand dunes for a dozen petramin in each direction.”

“Great, just great.”

A sharp wind blew over the group, and Starlight grimaced. The heat bit into her like knives, and she kept shifting from hoof to hoof so she didn’t heat up too much. In cold, rainy Gracia she had dreamed of it being sunny everyday, but she was beginning to honestly rethink her stance.

She frowned. “So what exactly did I miss?” she asked. “What are we trying to do here?”

“We’re trying to get to Sundown.” Staten pointed to a hazy grey mark on the horizon. “See, all this business about your magic and Sunrise’s wings started there. There’s got to be answers, and how we can end all this, too.”

“I guess so,” Starlight said. She flopped down in the sand and looked up at the clear, blue sky. It just kept going up, so far that she could see where it turn dark blue, then black where it bordered the vast nothingness of space.

Sundown. Stranded. All with this horn and my magic. My magic . . .

Her eyes widened, and she sat up. “Wait, I have an idea!” she yelled. “I can get us to Sundown! All I have to do is use my teleportation and we’ll be there in no time.”

“No, absolutely not,” Noctilucent said. “Staten told me about what happened the two times you did, and I won’t let you risk yourself like that.”

“It’s either that or starve out here.”

“We’ll figure out another way.”

Midnight shook her head. “Oh come on, we all know she’s the only chance we have right now. We’re stuck in the middle of the desert between huge mountains and a city out of control. If we want to get through this, I suggest we go with Starlight.”

There was a moment of silence. Starlight could feel her breathing slow, like time was slowing down. Her eyes turned to her father, but he said nothing. Instead, he settled back on his haunches and looked at her. In one glance, he said more than just words.

“Are you sure you can get us there?” Staten asked. “It is an awfully long way . . .”

“Maybe not in one go,” Starlight said, “but I’ll get us there. We’ll just do little jumps, and let me rest in the middle. I’m tired of this whole mystery. I want answers, and I want them now.”

Both Staten and Midnight smiled, and Starlight thought she heard her father give an approving grunt. Without anything else to do, she beckoned the two lab ponies over until the four of them were huddled together.

“Alright, just stay calm and don’t move,” she told them, though most of it was directed at her.

Starlight shut her eyes and hugged herself to them. Inside her mind, she focused on the hazy image of Sundown. I want to go there. She gritted her teeth. I want to go there!

There was a pop, then a flash, and when Starlight opened her eyes the spinner wreckage was gone. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to tell they had moved. The city seemed just as far away as before. She sighed, then closed her eyes again to repeat the process.

Movement, even with teleportation, was slow. She figured each journey only took them a few hundred petras each time. With Sundown a dozen petramin away, it was going to be a long time before they reached the city. Not that she totally minded.

With each jump, Starlight’s heart beat faster in anticipation. What would she do once they got there? The only thing they could guarantee was that the IS was waiting for them, along with whatever made them crash. Unless, by some miracle, Staten’s daughter managed to break out, they wouldn’t have any allies.

Her father was silent all through the jumps. He had only made some kind of activity when they did their first jump away from the wreckage. She had seen him looking back with sadness in his eyes. It made her wonder about the pony snapped in half by the seatbelt, and what he had been to her father. Then Starlight reminded herself that it had been her father’s fault they were even there and had taken off across the sand again.

If Starlight thought she had been tired when waking up from the crash, an hour later it was like somepony had beat her face in with a boot . . . forever. She was exhausted, and after one last jump, pitched forward in the sand. Her breath came in short gasps, and her horn felt like it was burning its way out of her head.

“I . . . I can’t,” she said weakly when Staten stopped to examine her. She shook her head from side to side, or tried to but only barely managed to move it.

The sun blazed down at her, like it was mocking her fruitless attempt to escape it. They were even more in the middle of the desert now, away from the mountains or the city, simply lost and abandoned. Starlight almost wanted to laugh when she saw a buzzard start to circle them.

Only, her laugh started to fade when the winged figured continued to approach them. It circled down toward them, and she saw it was much too big to be a buzzard, or any bird she had ever seen or heard about. For one, it had four legs . . .

Starlight managed to sit up just as the rest spotted whatever it was that was flying toward them. She managed to rub her horn but otherwise couldn’t do anything but wait for the figure to land. If it came to a fight, she knew she was doomed.

Her breath caught in her throat when the figure drifted into full view. It was a pony! A pony with wings just like Sunrise’s, only able to actually use them. Before she could get a good look at exactly who it was, the pony dropped down to the sand, landing hard enough to send up a plume of dust.

When the dust had settled, it revealed somepony Starlight hadn’t seen before. Her teal coat was matted and now covered in sand, and a golden, stringy mane blew in all directions from the wind that harassed her. Starlight was going to ask for a name when she heard Staten making a choked cry.

Stumbling in the sand, he ran straight for the mare and threw his forehooves around her. He hugged her tightly, letting out gasping sobs, while the mare, startled at first, quickly did the same. Starlight only gaped at them both, but then noticed Midnight and Noctilucence staring knowingly at the two.

“What’s going on?” Starlight asked.

“I haven’t seen her in years,” Midnight said, “but that right there is Sunny . . . she’s Staten’s daughter.”

Starlight knew Staten had a daughter, but she had never seen her before, let alone believed they would find her in the middle of the desert. She looked at Sunny’s wings again curiously. They were larger than Sunrise’s had been and seemed like they had gotten more use. Besides that, she looked normal, save for the tear stains covering her face at that moment.

When the two had finished their hug-cry, they turned to the rest of the group, both of them smiling. Sunny was practically beaming. Staten cleared his throat to speak, “I, uh . . . Sunny’s here. She’s made it back to us.”

Sunny nodded to each of them in turn. “Noctilucence, Midnight, I haven’t seen either of you since I was just a teenager . . .” Her gaze fell to Starlight. “And you must be Starlight, Noctilucence’s daughter. My father told me all about you in his letters.”

From the way she said it, Starlight assumed Staten had actually told his daughter good things about her, which made her stop to think for a second. The way things had been at the museum, she was surprised Staten would tell anyone that she was good. Though, she didn’t quite have the time to think about that at the moment.

“W-What exactly are you doing all the way out . . . here?” Starlight asked.

“Now that’s a bit of an adventure,” Sunny said. “The short answer is . . . I got these wings and found out that they can work. So, I decided to escape Sundown. It never fit me anyway. Good thing I ran into all of you, or I would have flown all the way back to Gracia for nothing.” Her eyes narrowed. “But dad . . . what are you doing out here?”

Staten cleared his throat and smiled. “We came for you, Sunny. When I got your message, I got Starlight, and we came here to rescue you and find out what’s going on.”

She laughed. “Well, some rescue, I have to say. This place has gone insane, anyway, so I don’t blame. I think the whole country is going to be going insane once everything spreads.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know . . . these.” She flapped her wings a couple times. “At first, I thought I was the only one who had them. But then, when I broke out, it turns out everypony is growing something in Sundown. It’s crazy, like something out of those old picture books from when I was a foal.” Her mouth turned into a frown. “Too bad not everything about magic is all that great.”

It was Staten’s turn to laugh, though whether it was happy or manic, Starlight couldn’t tell. “I always knew you would fly, Sunny, just not . . . literally. We’ve seen firsthoof that magic isn’t all it’s cut out to be, though.” He nodded toward Starlight’s head.

Sunny seemed to really notice her for the first time, and her eyes widened. Starlight was reminded that, young as she was, the mare was a professor as much as her dad. She trotted over to Starlight and peered at the horn on her head, nodding.

“Yep, I’ve seen these on a few other ponies. This one looks like it’s actually been used for more than those little teleports back there,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve . . .”

“Long story,” Starlight said.

“I bet.”

Midnight stepped forward. “I hate to break up all this reunion business,” she said, “but we really need to find someplace that’s not the desert to stay. Sunny, is there a way you can help get us back to Sundown?”

Sunny’s face fell. She looked back toward the city, then bit her lip. “I was actually, ah, going to show Starlight here about that. I saw her teleport you three around, so I can show her where to go.”

They all nodded, though Noctilucent seemed reluctant to agree. Starlight wanted to say something, but she felt like Sunny was leading her on, so she only shut her mouth and trotted after the mare.

Neither of them spoke until they had reached the top of a large sand dune, far out of reach from the three ponies behind them. The wind blew hard atop the dune, and Starlight had to keep blinking to get the sand out of her eyes.

Sunny wrenched Starlight’s head around to get her to look at Sundown. The city seemed surprisingly close now, enough that she could see the skyscrapers glowing in the midday light. “You see that?” Sunny asked.

“Well, yeah,” Starlight said. “That’s where we want to go, isn’t it?”

“Not if you ever want to come back out again.” Sunny pointed into the sky just above the city. “See that? That is what’s causing all this trouble, I think.”

Starlight strained to see, but she could just barely make out some sort of dark shape or object hanging in the sky above the city. It wasn’t very large, but the air seemed to be shimmering around it. “What is it?” she asked.

Sunny shook her head. “I don’t really know. It’s some sort of monument: five big gemstones centered around a larger one, all set in gold. All I do know is that the day I escaped, it rose out of the ground and nothing’s gotten out of Sundown since. When they tried to get out, that thing blasted them down.”

“So we can’t get into the city, then, can we?”

“I don’t know why you would want to,” Sunny said. “Look, I’m here, and we can leave now. Let’s leave this for the government to figure out.”

Sundown looked back at the mountains. They seemed much farther away than before. “We still need somewhere to hole up, at least for a little while.”

Sunny beamed. “I know just the place.”

Agent “Night” Nightcall paced at his desk and watched the flurry of activity around him. The IS building in downtown Sundown had become the center for whatever government was left in Sundown, and he was happy to let other ponies take over the job.

The chaos since the gems rose into the sky had subsided a little, if only just. Most ponies were still freaking out about new appendages, anyway, so few cared if they couldn’t leave the city. Night watched as a couple greenhorns from Lupine Falls tried to comfort a kid who had just grown wings. The little colt started to cry, so Night could figure out how well they were working.

He supposed he could go out on patrol. Director Bilhaus herself had been sending them out since her mad doctor turned into some kind of pony-bug . . . thing. However, most of them turned out to be as amiable as ever, and just the doctor was the one who tried to bite on the agents. Night just didn’t see much of a point to doing anything.

A shadow appeared in front of him; somepony was standing behind him. From the smell of her perfume, Night didn’t even need to turn around. “Director,” he said.

“Senior Agent Nightcall,” Bilhaus said. ”It would seem that in these trying times, a pony like yourself might feel compelled to, I don’t know, lead?”

Night pointed to his forehead, which had a large, pointed horn poking out of it. “I figure growing one of these gets me a few days of leave, at least. Why not use it here and now? It’s not like I could head to the beach if I wanted to.”

“We are all under the same pressures as you, Nightcall.” She shook herself, and he could hear the ruffle of feathers. “I have wings now, like some, while others have horns like you, while the rest seem to have grown vastly stronger and able to make plants grow by being angry. I do not need one of my senior agents sitting down on the job.”

Night stood, carefully and quietly. He smoothed out the dark suit jacket he wore before looking the Director in the eye. “Miss Bilhaus, you can fool all these other ponies to thinking you’re in charge, but not me,” he said. “We both know you’re rearranging deck chairs on a sinking ship. Those gems have us trapped in here for Solaris knows why, and we are not in any sort of control. I can understand not wanting to scare the idiots out there, but don’t insult me with lies.”

If he didn’t feel so dead inside, he might have been afraid of what the Director would say to him. In fact, if it wasn’t for the threat of death hanging over him, he wouldn’t have said anything at all. Still, he was surprised when Bilhaus sniffled and leaned against him.

“I know,” she whispered. “You’re right and I know it, but it’s all I can do. These ponies need some order or the entire city will go crazy. We’re trapped like rats, but I have to make them forget.” She stood once more and wiped her eyes. “Just stay out of trouble, alright?”

Night smiled. “You can count on me.”

Outside, he was met by a very angry-looking Agent Flower. She waited for him at the bottom of the steps leading up to the building. “It took you long enough,” she said. “We were starting to worry you’d never come.”

“Calm down, Rose, I just had to settle some things before we left,” Night said, putting on his best smile. If she was impressed, she didn’t show it. Instead, she led him around the corner, away from the building and into an alleyway out of view of any watching ponies.

Within the alley, three ponies waited for them. They were wrapped in bulky clothes to keep their identities a secret, but Night knew them on sight. Carpenter and Frankincense, their former prisoners, were watching them impatiently. Laying on his mother’s back was their unicorn foal.

“Are we ready?” Frankincense asked. His burly police stallion voice was shining through. “We need to get going, I don’t like being so close to the IS building . . .”

“We’re going, we’re going,” Night said. “I just got everything squared away in case . . . well, you know. You two are going to get through that shield, don’t worry.” He gave them another one of his poor smiles. “If it’s the last thing I do, it’s going to be releasing my prisoners.”

They seemed to accept that and followed him out of the alley and down a sidestreet that ran behind the IS building. He trotted past like he belonged on the street and didn’t deserve any suspicion by the guards outside. If they noticed him, though, they didn’t show it. Probably too busy looking for more bugs, he thought.

Once they were past, it was a straight shot to the edge of the city. The street ran all the way to the desert, where it curved and met the Red Road to head back toward Serenity Valley. Though, if it was so simple, why was he sweating so much?

Night fought the urge to look up at the gems in the sky. He knew the danger, and the risks of trying to escape. He had seen the corpses that now made a ring around the city. But he had seen the ponies who got out. If you were just fast enough, you could make it . . . . He was fast enough, wasn’t he?

“Hey, you look more jumpy than a greenhorn on their first visit to Lupine,” Flower said.

“I don’t like the feel of this mission.”

“Mission?” She laughed, throwing back her head and letting the wind catch her mane. “This isn’t any ‘mission,’ Night. We’re committing elaborate suicide to let these folks through because of our guilty consciences. Or am I wrong?”

He scowled. “You know you’re right.”

“I always am.”

“Still . . .” He looked back up toward the gems in the sky. “Maybe if we make it out . . .”

“Then what?”

“Nothin’. Just an idea.”

She gave him a demure smile. “Tell me later.”

They reached the end of the street and stopped. Across the way lay all the mangled bodies of the poor ponies who had tried to get out. Their bodies outlined the invisible barrier. Night wrinkled his nose from the smell, and he saw Flower do the same. As a police officer, Carpenter took it okay, but his wife vomited in the street, which set the baby crying.

“We’ll go first,” Flower told them. “The two of us should draw its fire. After us . . . get out of here, and never look back. Get someplace safe and hope for the best. It’s all we can do.”

Frankincense, the mother, shook. “But you two will—”

“We know.” She turned to Night. “Ready?”

I’m going to die. “Ready.”

“Then let’s go!”

He took off. Any slower and he knew he would have turned back. Don’t think, just do. Never mind the laser in the sky or the death around you, he thought. There was no point in worrying about it now. He was a dead stallion walking. Well, running.

Flower cursed, and Night looked behind them. The two parents had set off already. Too soon! They kept looking up in the sky. Scared, most like. Night let out a curse of his own and gunned it. If he could just make it there before them, he could draw the fire and . . .

There was a roar in the sky, and Night felt heat on his back. He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer. To which god, he didn’t know. Maybe all of them. He waited and waited and—

Nothing. He opened his eyes. He was still here and the wife was shrieking. He turned to see Carpenter lying on the ground, burnt to a crisp. The smell, oh Adana, the smell . . . he wanted to throw up. Then he saw the jewels turn toward Frankincense and glow once more.

She saw it too. For a second, nopony did anything. Then, in her last act, the mother threw her baby to Flower. It cried as it soared through the air. Night wondered if it knew, if it could her its mothers cry wail up then cut off suddenly. He wanted to vomit.

Flower caught the baby and rolled backward, tumbling and letting out a cry of her own. Night just stood in the open, dumbly, like a deer in the headlights. He stared up at the jewels. They mocked him in their silence.

“C’mon, shoot!” he yelled. “Shoot me, shoot me! You were supposed to shoot me!” Hot tears streamed down his face and snot bubbled out his nose. His eyes felt puffy as he continued to scream and cry, somehow both at once.

He didn’t stop until he felt Flower’s hoof on his shoulder. “Night, look.”

For once, he did as he was told. The ring of bodies was in front of him. He was outside the barrier. He wanted to fall to his knees and weep for them, but . . . he couldn’t. He wasn’t even crying for him. Each tear that ran down his face wasn’t for the dead parents or the orphan they now carried. They were for him.

“We have to go back,” he heard himself say.

Flower stepped in front of him. “We’re no good to them back there, even if we could get back in,” she said. “Out here, though, we can do something.”

“Like what?”

She draped a hoof around him and gave him the widest, fakest smile he had ever seen. Somehow, it worked. “Well for starters, I know a little place that used to have a certain crystal . . .”

Author's Notes:

Tell me true, tell me why was Jesus crucified?
Is it for this that daddy died?

Chapter 15: Rock of Ages

The sun was setting by the time they reached the dig site. Sunny led them from the air. Starlight marched at the head of their little column and tried not to focus on the pain in her hooves. It was better than teleporting, at least. She had tried to jump them to the site earlier but had only managed to knock herself out cold. It appeared there was some limit to what her powers could do, at least at the moment.

Sunny swooped over deserted tents and abandoned RVs that sat in the shadow of darkened mesas. Wind washed over the site, throwing sand into the air in great gales. Starlight narrowed her eyes. When they reached one of the RVs, she was tempted to fall inside and find a bed. Only Staten and the rest kept her going. She couldn’t look weak in front of them.

“Come on, guys,” Sunny yelled, “we’re almost there!”

“There” appeared to be a large, metal housing in the middle of the dig site. It stood as tall as ten ponies and almost as wide. It was the single largest object around.

Starlight stared at it and bit her lip. She hesitated before walking toward it. Something felt off about it to her, and she couldn’t shake the feeling no matter how hard she tried. Behind her, Staten muttered something to Midnight, so Starlight assumed she wasn’t the only one creeped out.

They reached the entrance to the large building, and Sunny dropped back to the ground. Her wings were dirty and covered in dust, but there was a smile on her face. “This is it,” she said. “I spent a good year of my life digging out here, and the IS took it away from me.” She chuckled. “Well, they couldn’t hold me for long.”

She led the way inside, and Starlight felt she had no choice but to follow her. The interior of the building was little more than alcoves of darkness spiraling up toward the ceiling, all centered around a large steel platform. It had what looked like controls on one end, and she could see tracks that led into a tunnel.

“Wait, we’re going down there?” Starlight asked.

“It’s where all this started,” Sunny said. “If there are answers to this whole thing, they’ve gotta be back down in the tunnel.”

Staten coughed. “But I thought you said they removed the heart you found.”

“They did, but there has to be more down there.”

Nopony objected to that. Starlight saw Midnight start to say something, but Noctilucent shook his head and she quieted down. There was little else they could do, anyway, that wouldn’t involve them getting hurt back in Sundown.

Sunny jumped on the platform and started pressing buttons and pulling levers. Sure enough, the platform lit up with lights around the edges that glowed bright red. The winged mare’s smile quickly turned to a frown when she checked some gauges.

“It looks like the lights are still on down there,” she said.

“Maybe somepony forgot to turn them off when they left?” Starlight suggested.

“Maybe . . .”

After a few more button presses, she waved them over, and their entire party climbed on the platform. The metal felt odd beneath Starlight’s hooves, like it was humming with energy. It gave a jerk, then started to descend into the tunnel. She fought the urge to shut her eyes and curl into a ball on the floor once they were inside.

Nopony spoke the entire ride down. Sunny pursed her lips and stuck her tongue out while she looked at her controls, and the adults were huddled silently at the other end of the platform. They might as well have been singling out the two ponies with magic, for all Starlight knew.

She watched the rock of the tunnel fly by. Back in college, she had taken a few geology classes, but she struggled to remember them at the moment. Her specialty had always been the history of ponies, not the planet. Still, she knew enough to know that they were going deep, way down into sediment that hadn’t seen the surface in millions of years.

The platform sped up for a while, and Starlight could feel her heart in her hooves. Just when she thought they were going too fast, however, they started to slow down, gently coming to a stop at the bottom of the chasm. When she looked back up to where they had come, she couldn’t even see the top. It was at least fifteen thousand petras down, if not more.

When Starlight looked to the tunnel that lay ahead of them, she saw that, just as Sunny had said, the electricity was on. Unlike in the large chasm, however, the lights didn’t glow red but rather the more natural yellow.

Sunny nodded to Starlight. “Alright, we’re here. Move carefully, though . . . I don’t like how this feels.”

“I got it,” Starlight replied.

The two of them moved forward, with Staten right on their heels. The professor seemed unusually quiet, and Starlight figured he was holding some cards close to his chest. They crept down the tunnel without a word, following the winding path of cables on the ground until at last they came to the entrance of a chamber.

This wasn’t any ordinary chamber. It was positively huge, at least twice as big as the building up top, and made of solid stone. The rock itself had been polished until it was as smooth as a concrete sidewalk.

Starlight tried to get a glimpse of what lay ahead of them, but she bumped into Sunny’s back. “Hey, what gives?” she muttered, but then saw what the mare’s eyes were transfixed on. In the middle of the cave, on some sort of natural platform, was a giant crystal in the shape of a heart.

It pulsated with energy and shined brightly, though no light directly hit it. Sunny began to shake her head. “That’s . . . that’s impossible. The IS, they took it from the site and sent it to a lab in Sundown. How could it be here?”

Staten and Midnight approached it. A look of awe crossed their faces. “In all my years . . . I never thought I’d actually see it,” Staten said. “Noctilucent, you remember when we were colts just out of school? All the inscriptions we found?”

Starlight turned to see her dad sitting on the ground. His jaw was open and his eyes weaved over the massive crystal. He nodded. “We found so many clues, and I knew that Sunny had found it, but . . .” He shook his head. “I never thought I’d see it, or that it’d be this big.”

For a moment, it looked like Sunny forgot that the crystal heart wasn’t supposed to be there. She smiled and puffed herself up from her father’s compliments. Starlight rolled her eyes but said nothing. It was the other mare’s moment, after all.

“We only excavated it a month ago,” she said. “Nopony even touched it before I did. Though once I did . . . this whole mess got started.” Her face fell again. “And now it’s back where it started. How?”

“You’ve got us,” said a voice from the far side of the cavern.

Starlight jumped, and Noctilucent growled in the direction of the voice. “Who are you? Come out and show yourself!” he barked.

What Starlight had expected were some drifter ponies, or maybe scientists like, well, everypony there but her. The last thing she expected was two IS agents dressed in full uniform. They both looked haggard, like they had crawled through mud before they got to the cavern. One of them had a pair of sunglasses with only one eyepiece remaining.

Sunny gaped at the both of them. “You’re . . . you’re those IS ponies from back in town!” She shook her head. “You two arrested me!”

The stallion stopped for a moment, but the mare agent just sighed. “We followed orders and we made a mistake. We let you go, though, didn’t we? Or did you think nopony was coming after you because the IS just felt nice that day?”

Starlight, her father, Staten, and Midnight all looked between them in confusion. The three ponies bantered for a few moments before they noticed their audience. The two mares didn’t seem to care, but the stallion stuck a hoof out.

“This must all be news to the four of you,” he said. “Has Sunny, er, filled you in on the finer details of what went down here in Sundown?”

They shook their heads no, so the IS ponies started in on a story. Starlight learned their names were Agents Flower and Nightcall, and about them taking Sunny custody. She had to laugh while they told the story. Her entire journey, she’d thought the IS was one step ahead and that they knew just what was going on.

As it turned out, it seemed the IS had as little an idea of what was happening as she did. Somehow, that didn’t make her feel any better.

“. . . so we came here because we knew it the place where the crystal originated from, and that it might hold some answers,” Agent Nightcall finished.

“Did you find anything?” Sunny asked.

He grimaced. “No, all we found were some smooth rocks and not much else.” He snorted. “Oh, and the crystal here. It was already waiting for us by the time we got here. The team looking after it disappeared yesterday . . . I guess we know why.”

Starlight looked up at the crystal. It didn’t look very imposing. Besides its size, it could have been mistaken for cheap knock-off jewelry. It was almost funny, to her, that it had been the thing to cause all the trouble in the first place.

She could hardly even remember the night in the grocery store, when news broke about the earthquake. It had seemed so far away and strange at the time, that she had almost forgotten about it at all. Now she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Part of her wanted to reach out and touch it, to feel the crystal beneath her hooves . . .

No, that was silly. She shook her head. Why would she think that?

“Uh, Starlight, what are you doing?” Staten asked.

“What do you mean?” she asked, but then she looked down. Her hoof was touching the crystal. Somehow, while she had been thinking, her body had walked her over to the crystal. That couldn’t be good.

The crystal heart began to rumble. Beams of light shot out of it in all directions. One hit Starlight in the face and she staggered back. Spots swam in her vision, and she let out a cry as she fell to the ground.

When her vision returned, she watched the heart raise itself off the platform and begin to spin in the air. The beams of light coalesced into one single shaft that focused on the ground in front of the gathered ponies. There seemed to be an . . . image . . that was projecting itself onto the floor of the cavern.

Starlight’s mouth hung open when she saw what was being projected. Not some picture of a warrior or a god or anything, but a pony. A pony who only stood a little taller than all of them. She was a bright pink with a long mane in a violet hue, which also dotted her wings. That was also what surprised Starlight: the mare had wings and a horn.

A picture of the crystal heart was tattooed on her flank. Starlight would have snickered had the situation been more dire. As it was, she waited until things had calmed a little before daring to step toward the image of the mare.

For what it was worth, the mare seemed as surprised to see them as they were to see her. She paced around in front of them, staring each of them in the face. When her gaze rested on Starlight, she wanted to say something, but the words caught in her throat.

It was the first one to speak. “Hello,” it said in a soft voice.

No words came to Starlight, but Sunny stepped forward. “What . . . are you?” she asked, tilting her head. “You were inside the crystal this whole time?”

“I am many things,” it said, “but ponies used to call me Cadance, a long time ago.”

“Cadance?”

“Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, to be precise,” she said. “I haven’t used that name for even longer. But that doesn’t matter now, does it? You all were called here, subconsciously, to wake me up because of a great need.”

Starlight stared at her hooves. She had just been . . . almost forced to the crystal, like her mind had been taken over. If the whole magic thing was as real as the scans had shown, then this Cadance was a very powerful magician. She wanted to kick herself for even thinking it.

“And you used magic to put it there, right?” Starlight asked. She stared up at the ghostly visage of the pony princess. “That’s is what all of this is, right? Magic?”

“Cadance” almost looked surprised. “Oh, yes, you ponies don’t believe in magic, do you? It’s been so long in there, I almost forgot.”

“Forgot what?” Sunny asked.

“How long have you been in there?” Starlight asked.

Staten rubbed his head. “How did your crystal get all the way down here?”

Cadance held up her hooves in front of her. She shook her head. “Perhaps it would be better to just simply tell you all what you need.” Her eyes flashed when she looked at Starlight and Sunny. “Especially the two of you.”

The crystal spun faster, and the walls of the cavern were filled with projected light. Where there had been stone before, there now appeared to be rolling hills and mountains, and a great castle atop one of them. It reminded Starlight a little of Skyhall but much more regal.

“You are not the first pony civilization to inhabit this land,” Cadance began. “Long before your cars and spinners and broadcasted programs, there were other ponies like yourselves. They lived simple lives, endowed not by science and engineering but by magic. It controlled their lives, whether they be winged pegasi, horned unicorns, or powerful earth ponies.”

Starlight heard the two IS agents gasp. She turned and saw what looked like the crystals above Sundown displayed on one wall. They were all different colors and had ponies clustered around them. Cadance gazed at them and bit her lip. “The Elements of Harmony,” she said. “Once, they were weapons of absolute good, used against any and all evil that threatened the magical land of Equestria.”

Her gaze darkened. “However, ponykind learned a valuable lesson . . . that the Elements could not always tell friend from foe. When a great conflict arose in Equestria after a long and brutal winter, one side, led by a Princess, decided to use them in anger.

“The Elements were meant to be used against absolute evil. When used against other ponies, it could not tell which side was wrong. So . . . it decided both sides were evil, that ponies had fallen too far to use the Elements any longer. The Elements themselves went on a rampage, ripping the world apart. Millions perished under its magic.”

Agent Nightcall began to cry, like the words had triggered some memory. His sobs echoed through the chamber, while Agent Flower spoke to him in soft whispers. Then, Starlight realized it wasn’t the cries of a grown man . . . it was those of a foal. Cadance seemed to notice it and bowed her head.

“Not every pony perished, however,” she said. “Those that were left struggled to build up their magical kingdom again, only to be struck down by the Elements when they got too powerful. This occurred one more time, until the Elements of Harmony apparently decided ponies weren’t deserving of magic.

“I defended the ponies who were left and sealed myself inside this crystal to keep them safe. While the Elements upturned the entire world and buried me down here, they also ripped magic from the very earth and took it inside themselves. All but the ponies in my care and non-magical animals lived.

“When the cataclysm had finished, the world didn’t even look the same. I teleported the ponies in my care far away from here and waited. Ponies took so long without magic, I was hoping that they would never awaken the Elements of Harmony. Yet, one hundred thousand years later, here all of you are.”

Besides the crying foal, nopony said a word. They looked at Cadance with faces ranging from utter sadness to shock and revulsion. Starlight, despite herself, wasn’t even sure what to think. There was so much to take in at once. It explained a lot . . . all the signs that scientists had found over the years of some past civilization was true. Yet, it almost made it worse . . . to know. To know that things had been better once and were destroyed by whatever was now above Sundown.

Agent Flower was the first to speak. “And now that the . . . Elements of Harmony . . . are over Sundown, what’s going to happen to the city? What do they plan to do?”

“From the looks of it, the Elements have decided that not letting ponies have magic was a mistake.” Cadance sighed. “They seem to be trapping ponies inside to keep them there while the rest of the world—judging from past experiences—will be torn apart. Whoever is inside the city will live and whoever is outside it . . . won’t.”

Now it was Agent Nightcall crying, along with the baby. Their sobs were enough to bring tears to Starlight’s eyes. However, she had to shake her head. She wasn’t going to think about it. “Alright, so these Elements of Harmony want to kill us all and do whatever it wants with ponies,” she said. “What do we do to stop it? What can we do to keep it from destroying us all? There has to be something!”

“I have spent one hundred thousand years encased in this crystal trying to think of something to do,” Cadance said. “I have come up with nothing. However . . .”

“However?”

“It seems that the Elements of Harmony has taken a very specific interest in this group. It must have sensed, as I do, that your fathers both were the ones closest to finding out the truth behind all of the lies you have been told. And thus, the Elements saw fit to grant you both some very specific gifts.”

Sunny cocked her head. “Uh . . . Miss Crystal lady, plenty of other ponies have horns and wings too. We’re not really special at all.”

Cadance laughed. “It’s not what you see on the outside, but what I can see on the inside . . .” She reached forward and pressed her ghostly hooves to Sunny and Starlight’s shoulders. Neither of them felt anything from the touch but could feel their bodies start to shake.

Starlight doubled over and cried out as a feverish itching spread onto her back. She convulsed and bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. It felt like hot knives were forcing their way out of her skin. Through the pain, she saw Sunny’s face contorted in the same agony she felt.

She heard her father gasp, and Staten mutter some curses. Then, just as soon as it had started, the pain ebbed and flowed out of her. When it was over, she felt like, somehow, she had two very light hooves growing out of her back.

“You have wings!” Sunny gasped at her.

Starlight turned and her eyes grew wide. “You have a horn!” she told Sunny. They both paused to examine their new appendages. Starlight had thought having the dull sense of a horn on her head was weird, but the wings felt like they were truly a part of her . . . a feathery and lightweight part of her.

“What did you do to my daughter?” Noctilucent growled, surging forward. Staten was right behind him, repeating the same question in a low tone.

Cadance blinked. “I only made them what the Elements intended for them to be,” she said.

“And what is that, exactly?” Noctilucent demanded.

Starlight noticed the crystal glowing bright as Cadance spread her wings wide and lifted her horn up. “The Elements of Harmony are powerful. For years, it has played its game as I watched, using its magic to move pieces into place. Sundown provided it with a population of magic users to settle the land once all else had been destroyed . . . all it needed were leaders.”

Starlight stepped back. When she did, she almost tripped as she realized that she had, somehow, grown taller. It was enough to make her dizzy. “We’re supposed to be some sort of magical leaders? Why two of us?”

“The sun and the moon, of course. Or did you think having the names ‘Sunny’ and ‘Starlight’ was mere happenstance?”

Both mares slowly turned to glare at their fathers. As one, Noctilucent and Staten looked at each other and stepped back. “How were we supposed to know?” Staten asked. “It wasn’t like it was planned . . . was it, uh, Cadance?”

Cadance shrugged. “I would assume so. Ponies are easily susceptible to magic, especially as you all have it locked up inside you. But that is not the issue here. What is, is that I managed to gather you all here to fight back. Sunny, Starlight, if you two combine your power with myself, we can stop the Elements of Harmony.”

“I’m not entirely sure how to control my powers—” Starlight began, but was interrupted as all three of the older ponies stepped forward.

“I won’t allow you to use my daughter like that,” Noctilucent said.

“They’re not weapons of war!” Midnight, who had been silently biding her time, added. Staten agreed with her and placed himself in front of his daughter.

Cadance opened her mouth to speak but was interrupted as the cavern began to shake. Pieces of rock and dust fell from the ceiling. The baby started crying again, which Cadance seemed to notice for the first time. She smiled.

“The good news is the child is here too,” she said. “The bad news, however, is that the Elements have found us. We have no choice now. We must all fight, or the Elements will control Sunny and Starlight forever while the rest of us perish.” Her eyes flashed. “We have to go, now!”

A massive boulder dislodged itself from the ceiling. It fell down straight toward the group, large enough to crush all of them.

When it hit the ground, however, nothing was left under it. The only sign anypony had ever been there was a fading light and the peculiar smell of magic.

Chapter 16: The Lightning Strike

They appeared in flash of light, once more inside the city. Starlight’s vision swam for a moment, and the world spun. When her vision cleared, she saw that they were standing in the middle of a street, looking up toward a massive dome.

The dome’s structure wasn’t like the kind she had seen for sporting events. The ceiling appeared to be made of glass, and she could see the tops of trees rubbing against it. A golden glow seemed to emanate from within. Seeing so many trees in the middle of the desert made Starlight wonder if the magic was affecting her mind.

In front of them, the Crystal Heart hovered above the ground, like it was waiting for something. The ghostly visage of Cadance was gone, but Starlight told herself she was still in there . . . or so she hoped.

Sunny was sprawled on the ground beside her. Staten stepped forward and helped his daughter to her hooves while Noctilucent stepped forward and put a hoof on Starlight’s shoulder. She looked at her dad, who wore a small, sad smile on his face.

The two IS agents were quiet. They simply stared up at the top of the dome, and Starlight followed their gaze. That was when she saw it. Hovering above the glass enclosing was some sort of . . . jewel. No, an agglomeration of jewels, all kept together.

“The Elements of Harmony,” Cadance’s voice from within the crystal said, answering Starlight’s silent question. “They’ve been controlling this city for some time now.”

Midnight stared up at it. The professor, who had been silent for most of the trip, looked visibly shaken. “Does it notice us? Can it, ah, see us?”

The Crystal began to turn, and Cadance’s voice rang out from it, “I’m not sure, I haven’t—”

A beam of light shot out from the hovering Elements. Where it struck the ground, the asphalt exploded like it had been hit by a bomb. Bits of street pummeled into gravel cascaded down over the shield that had appeared from within the Crystal Heart. Starlight peeked out from behind a hoof that she had used to cover her face.

Behind her, the baby that the IS had brought with them began to cry. Starlight would have told them to shut it up if she didn’t feel like crying herself.

As she watched, the Elements of Harmony began to descend toward them, moving silently through the air. The shield around them gradually dissipated, though the Elements didn’t make a move to try to strike them again. It settled for hovering just outside the entrance to the dome.

It seemed to watch them through its six crystals. Each glowed a different color, and Starlight thought she could see a face in all of them. A face of some pony, even. But, it might have just been her imagination.

When the Elements spoke, it was like a great rumbling that emanated from the earth itself, and seemed to come from everywhere at once. “I was wondering when you would make an appearance,” it said.

Cadance appeared once again as a ghostly hologram from within the Crystal. She seemed miffed, and pawed the ground. “I was hoping that we had seen the last of each other. After all this time, I almost forgot about you.”

A similar hologram appeared from the Elements, but it was not just one pony. It flickered between the image of a purple unicorn with wings, a cyan pegasus, an orange normal pony, and a few others. With every word it said, the image cycled. “You were sealed deep under the ground at my behest, little princess. It was your kind that showed me what ponies were capable of, if you recall. You are lucky I do not strike you and all ponies where they stand.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

“I recall another princess telling me that, after she realized I was not some weapon for her to use at her will. I believe she may still be in the heart of the sun.”

Watching the two argue, to Starlight, was like watching a couple of gods fight. She may have been taller and with a horn and wings, but she felt about the size of an ant. Looking at Sunny confirmed that she wasn’t the only one who thought so.

“You were kind to the ponies, I will grant you,” the Elements continued. “And it is for this that I will spare you. Hand over my ponies now so that I may begin the final preparations and you may slumber once more. Perhaps, one day, you may even meet the new race of ponies.”

The Crystal Heart rose higher off the ground. “That’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get to play god with these ponies again.”

A sickening chuckle echoed from within the crystals. For a moment, the hologram seemed to be all six variations at once. “I played God? Would you wish to lecture me over that when I always had ponies’ best interests in mind? It was ponies who tried to use me as a weapon of war! It was your kind who grew corrupt and vicious and forgot what harmony is!

“This world was created by me and I can unmake it just as easily. I have to unmake it. Look around you, so-called Princess of Love. The ponies have grown corrupt once again, fighting and bickering over each other while turning the land into a cesspool of industry and ‘progress.’”

“Hey, you can’t just talk about us like we’re not here!” Sunny barked, stepping forward. “Who are you to even decide what we can and can’t do? I don’t remember you exactly helping when we had to work for hundreds of years just to get where we are now!”

“And ruined the land as you did so!”

“What choice did we have? One in four foals used to die before they were even a year old, and that was at the best! What, were we supposed to live in filth and squalor so we could be some sort of perfect society for you?”

Starlight wasn’t sure, but the Elements seemed to sound like they were annoyed. “The so-called filth and squalor was the doing of you ponies. I set in motion a possibility of living in peace and harmony with nature. It was all of you who decided to try to be more.” For the first time, it seemed to see the wing and horn combination on Sunny. “And I see that Cadance has set in motion the changes I had planned.”

“Us having wings and a horn was your plan?” Starlight blurted out. Her heart sank when the Elements turned toward her.

“A magical population needs leaders,” it said. “I needed two—one for the sun, one for moon—to be able to survive. Ponies without leaders are little more than rabble.” It sighed. “It does, however, appear that you two were not ready. A pity, but one that is easily fixed.”

All six jewels began to glow brighter and brighter. If it hadn’t been for her father, Starlight would have been caught in the blast of light that came from the Elements. It incinerated an entire section of the street they were on and cut a hole in the size of a building large enough to drive a car through. Starlight could feel the hairs on her body tingle from the aftereffects.

The Elements began powering up another strike, but a beam of blue light shot out of the Crystal Heart and impacted the center jewel, throwing it back and onto the ground.

“Run!” Candance’s voice shouted from inside the crystal.

None of the ponies needed to be told twice. Sunny sprinted away with the two IS agents and Starlight followed them. Another attack from the Elements cut them off from her father, Staten, and Midnight, who ran to the other side of the street. Starlight didn’t have any time to try to get to them, though. She dove into the runs of a building that the Elements had carved up, falling behind a brick wall along with the agents and Sunny.

They were all panting. Sunny wiped sweat from her forehead and looked around. “So anypony got a plan B?” she asked.

“There was a plan A?” Agent Flower asked. She was breathing hard and holding the squealing foal to her chest.

Agent Night turned to Sunny and Starlight. “Shouldn’t one of you, you know, have some sort of power? It seems like you went through all of this for nothing.”

“If I have some power, it sure would be helpful right now,” Sunny said. “Too bad I don’t feel any different before, other than taller. What about you, Starlight?”

“I haven’t been able to do magic since we were captured by the IS. It just . . . comes and goes. I’d sure like it to come right around now.”

An explosion rocked the street and sent tremors crawling up Starlight’s spine. She peeked around the corner to see a ten-story-tall building collapsing in on itself. The Crystal Heart and Elements of Harmony danced around each other, firing beams of light that seemed to strike some sort of shield that they had made for themselves. Each was powerful, but every blow by the Elements forced Cadance in her heart back. She was losing.

Starlight took a deep breath and mentally repeated to herself that she was insane. “We have to go help Cadance,” she said. “She’s going to get destroyed out there, and then what? The Elements do whatever they want.”

“We literally just got done saying we don’t feel like we can do anything,” Sunny said. “How are we supposed to help?”

“We’ll figure it out, okay?”

Another rumble shook all of them. Starlight didn’t wait around for a confirmation. Truth be told, she was scared out of her mind. Before she could decide to stay behind, she dove out of her cover and into the middle of the street. Cracks had appeared on the glass of the dome, and the glow inside was brighter. The Crystal Heart was almost at street level now, only just defending attacks rather than giving them back.

“Cadance!” Starlight shouted, waving a hoof. “We’re here to help.” Her own heart was beating faster, and she kept casting glances at the Elements of Harmony. A thousand thoughts of how the malevolent jewels could kill her echoed through her mind. The only thing that kept her from running back to cover was the appearance of Sunny at her side.

The Heart levitated toward them, extending a shield that protected them from an attack by the Elements. It was a good thing, too, as the pavement around the shield cracked and burst into bits of gravel.

Cadance appeared before them once again. “You two aren’t ready!” she exclaimed. “Your powers have only just begun to manifest. If you don’t stay back, you may have your new powers wiped from you . . . or worse.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Sunny said. “It seems like if we don’t stop these so-called ‘Elements of Harmony’ then it’s going to destroy the whole city! We have to do something.”

Another attack from the Elements came, harder this time. The attack ground down the shield little by little, but it still held. Cadance looked worryingly at the floating jewels, and then back to the ponies in front of her. Her eyes seemed heavy, like a secret weight was heaved upon them. Her mouth turned down into a frown, but she nodded.

“Touch your hooves to the crystal once more,” Cadance said.

Starlight and Sunny didn’t need any prodding. Both of their hooves touched the Crystal at the same time. Starlight closed her eyes, and felt a wave of energy rush through her.

When she opened them, the world was not the same. It was hard to describe, exactly, like telling somepony a dream a day after you had it. Stars pinwheeled overhead. The moon rose and fell rapidly in its everlasting dance with the sun, spinning and moving in a waltz of eternity. She could feel that dance, right down to her bones. The stars felt like pinpricks on her own skin, each one of them a part of her very soul.

Her eyes flashed, and suddenly Starlight was back to the street in Sundown. And yet, she could still feel the stars and the moon. Even in the light of day, they were always there, and being able to feel them gave her the kind of reassurance that she had not felt since she had been separated from Red.

Sunny was reeling and nearly fell to the ground. Starlight moved to help her up, but the mare shook her off and smiled. “You feeling it too?” she asked.

“If by ‘it’ you mean like I can feel the orbit of the moon, yeah,” Starlight said.

“Well for me it’s not exactly the moon . . .”

They were interrupted by another blast from the Elements of Harmony. It finally managed to overtake Cadance’s shield and sent them all sprawling to the ground. The Crystal Heart skidded across the pavement. All that was left between Starlight, Sunny, and the jewels was open air. The Elements hovered toward them, glowing brighter.

“You two were meant to be the saviors of this world!” it blared. “You would have led ponies to utopia, in a brave new world without all this industry and technology!”

Sunny laughed and pawed the ground. “I happen to like this world, you know. It’s not all that bad. Shouldn’t you try to save this one first than destroy it?”

“In the past, I worked to actively save worlds even as I knew they were beyond saving . . . they only grew worse over time. You ponies have a magnificent talent for ruining what you touch.”

“Then what’s the point in keeping us around?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

Starlight punched Sunny on the shoulder. The mare blushed and shrugged, then turned her attention back to the Elements. The jewels were still lighting up, growing brighter and brighter for the next attack. It looked to be an even larger attack than the one that had knocked out.

Inwardly, Starlight cringed. Down to her very stars, she could feel that the weight of the attack would come down on her. This would be it. Despite all the power at the tips of her hooves, she didn’t know how to attack or even defend herself. The Elements, it seemed, would win.

She closed her eyes as the beam shot out from the jewels, coalescing into a rainbow wave that rushed toward them. She felt Sunny cringe beside her, and Starlight waited for it to be over.

It wasn’t until she had waited for a few seconds too long that she dared to open her eyes. The rainbow light was still there and pouring around them, but a large shield stuck out in the middle of it. Its surface bubbled and popped and was colored garish blues and reds, but it was a shield nonetheless. It wasn’t until Starlight looked up and saw her horn glowing that she realized that she had cast it. Sunny’s horn was glowing as well.

“That’s new,” Starlight muttered.

The Elements, for once, seemed confused. It flew around the shield, shooting beams of its magic at it but having no effect. The shield may have weakened a little, but overall it held together and stood strong.

Behind them, the Crystal Heart rose from the ground once more. “I’ve altered the game,” Cadance shouted. “You only sought to use these ponies as pawns, but I’ve given them the power you should have afforded them a long time ago! Now just try and stop them!”

“Hey, can you not give it a challenge?” Sunny asked.

The Elements took her message to heart. It lowered itself toward them and began to press its physical self against the shield. The magic held for a moment but began to part under the pressure.

Starlight took a step back. “Uh, Sunny?” she asked.

“Yeah?” Sunny replied.

“What do we do?”

“I think the good idea might be to run again.”

Starlight turned tail and sprinted toward the Crystal Heart, which bobbed in the air just a few petras behind them. She saw Sunny do the same, and their shield collapsed with a burst of magic. The force of all the magic suddenly breaking free was enough to trip them both, sending the two winged unicorns onto the ground.

They shakily got to their hooves, only in time to see the Elements hovering over them. It stared down at them with all the malevolence that six colored jewels could show. Surprisingly, it was quite a lot. The Crystal Heart threw itself in front of the two.

“We’re . . . not going to win, are we?” Sunny asked, coughing up a mixture of spittle and blood. “All we can do is defend, not fight. And that thing is too powerful for us.”

Starlight looked up. Cadance had given them a shield again, but this one was dying even faster. It seemed that the more they resisted the Elements, the more powerful they got. Starlight wiped blood from the corners of her own mouth. “We have to try something,” she said. “If we don’t, everypony we’ve ever known is going to die.”

“We are going to die.”

“Yeah, well, I guess that just sucks, huh?”

Sunny snorted. “And I thought I was the crazy one.” Even so, she took up a stance alongside Starlight. The two of them closed their eyes and began to concentrate. Starlight tried to feel the power of the moon, the force of the gravity and energy that came from it. She didn’t know where she got the idea to try, but it seemed almost natural to her.

Dimly, she was aware that all of that power had begun to make its way into her horn. She focused harder. She wanted to be the moon, to feel every little crater and edifice, and to feel the stars that surrounded it in an endless blanket of space. Science, magic, whatever it was, she wanted to feel it flowing through her.

And, more than that, she wanted those Elements dead.

A shaft of light the color of the night sky shot out of Starlight’s horn. It impacted on the Elements of Harmony—right in the center of the purple jewel—at the same time a similar attack from Sunny struck. Starlight had the chance to look over and grin at her compatriot. It seemed, to her, that she was not alone in her revelation.

The Elements wavered for a moment, then fell back under the brunt of the combined attacks. They didn’t seem to have done any actual damage, but for the first time since they had faced the monstrosity, it had begun to retreat.

Starlight took a step forward, then another. Memories flashed through her mind. The raid from the IS. Running for her life across the country. Getting shot. Being captured. Her father’s betrayal. Every moment piled on top of another and each one was the fault of the Elements. Rage burned inside her, and she ground her teeth.

If the stupid jewels had just stayed buried, nothing would have happened. She could have been happy and back in her bed! Starlight took another step. She could be normal, not some freak with a horn and wings! There wouldn’t be any worry about saving the city or not dying, just normalcy. Was that too much to ask?

Dimly, she was aware of her father, and Staten and all the rest were staring at her. Even Sunny seemed aghast. Starlight didn’t care. She had come too far, done too much, to let some glorified piece of jewelry get in her way!

“You think you can just run our lives?” she growled. “You think you can just come in and dictate what’s best for us? Who are you to even dare!” With a yell, she ran forward until, suddenly, her horn impacted onto the Elements of Harmony themselves.

“Get the fuck out of our lives!” Starlight screamed.

For a moment, nothing happened, even as her body sent energy coursing out of her horn and into the Elements of Harmony. Then the smallest of cracks appeared on the violet crystal in the center of the jewels. It was only as long as a hoof, but it was enough to let out a gust of energy that sprayed across the entire city block.

The Elements went flying end over end, sailing through the air until they landed hard at the end of the road. For a moment, all was quiet, then ponies began to cheer. Starlight slumped over and had to hold her hooves out wide to keep from falling over.

Sunny trotted over. “I thought I was supposed to be the one with the temper,” she said. “Remind me never to piss you off.”

“As long as I don’t have to do that again,” Starlight said. “I don’t think I could handle another one.”

The Crystal Heart hovered over to Starlight, but Cadance didn’t speak her congratulations. Instead, her holographic form only stared at the fallen Elements. “You gave them a beating,” she said, “but they’re not done yet. All six Equestrian saviors once tried to fight it off . . . and it only consumed them. I’m afraid we’re not out of this yet.”

As if on cue, the ground began to shake. Not just a small tremor, but as if the earth itself would split open. Starlight saw Sunny cry out and fall to her knees.

Before her eyes, the Elements of Harmony rose into the air. The crack that Starlight had struck in it was gone. It spun in the air, all gems glowing. A low rumble emanated from within the interior.

“Who am I to dictate your lives?” it growled. “Who are you to poison this planet, pollute your bodies, and pervert the way of life that you all once cherished? Who are you to claim this world as your own when you cannot take care of it? You have no right to it, and no right to the gifts I have given you!”

While it spoke, the holograms of six ponies appeared before it, mouthing the words in tandem. It sickened Starlight. Worse, when she looked in their eyes . . . all she saw was fear. She had figured Cadance must have bound herself to the Crystal Heart voluntarily, but something told her that those ponies hadn’t been very willing.

“We don’t want your lousy gifts!” Sunny shouted. This only seemed to annoy the Elements, however. The green jewel rotated toward her and let out a shot of light. It struck the mare in the chest and sent her sprawling onto the sidewalk, where she hit head-first into the side of a building.

Starlight’s heart skipped a beat until she heard Sunny moan in pain. Then, she began to back up as the Elements advanced on her. An attack similar to the one that had struck Sunny hit her on the shoulder. Starlight screamed in pain and clutched her shoulder like it had caught fire. Tears welled in her eyes and she bit her tongue hard enough for blood to run out the corners of her mouth.

Another attack hit her in the stomach. It was enough to send her skidding over hard concrete, a couple dozen petras away. She moaned and tried to stand, but her knees wobbled and gave out. Her head banged against the street and her eyes swam.

“Pray to whatever gods you ponies made up,” the Elements said tonelessly. “It was a pity you will not live to see the new age.”

The six gems lit up once more. They seemed to rotate toward one another, until they concentrated on a single point: Starlight. If it was like combining six of those previous attacks at once, she knew, it was all over. The Crystal Heart with Cadance in it had been thrown aside, and Sunny was lying in a heap. Everypony else was only staring.

Starlight closed her eyes. She wondered what her last thoughts could be. She tried to remember birthday parties and walks in the park with her dad and listening to her favorite music. All that came to mind, though, was Red. He would know what to do. Even if he died trying, he would have fought for her.

Just before the beams struck, she opened her eyes. A pony was standing in front of her. For a moment, she thought it was Red. Visions of him coming to save her danced in her head. Then, the pony leaned down and smiled a long, sad smile.

“Dad . . .” Starlight whispered.

“I’m not going to help anypony else take you, not again,” he replied, and gave her shoulder a squeeze.

Then, the six beams of light struck him in a rainbow blast. They had been meant for a pony of her stature, fully powered up with magic and anger, not a simple pony. There was a flash in his eyes. He looked surprised. Then, he pitched over onto the ground, and his eyes clouded over.

Starlight wanted to scream out, to cry, to curse the Elements and all that was associated with them, but she couldn’t find the strength to. There was just no time. As soon as the Elements of Harmony saw it had missed its intended target, it began powering up again. She only had a few more seconds before she would join her father. It was a bitter taste for her to swallow.

Slowly, she climbed to her hooves. “You want to kill me? Fine, but at least do it while I’m standing,” she spat.

At that point, there was nothing to do but wait. Wait as absolute silence settled over the city as everypony watched the deadly beams of light begin to gather again.

It seemed almost absurd when the silence was split by the long, loud drone of a car horn. But it wasn’t just any car horn, Starlight realized as it blared again . . . it was coming from a horn belonging to a certain RV.

Chapter 17: All You Need Is Love

The blast of the Odyssey’s horn echoed across the quiet skyscrapers of Sundown. It seemed absurd for it to be there, like the blare of an alarm clock cutting through a dream. Then the air around Starlight erupted in gunfire, and she dove to the ground. It was no dream.

When the RV came into view, she saw Sunrise and Red leaning out opposite windows of the Odyssey. Each had a gun clutched in their hooves, and they poured bullets into the Elements of Harmony. Whether the bullets just happened to work or they caught the Elements by surprise, Starlight didn’t know, but the magical jewels actually started to lose ground. She could hear the bullets make impacts rather than bounce off of it.

Starlight felt hooves on her shoulders, and she looked up to see Staten dragging her away. For a moment, she wanted to shove him off, to tell him to leave her with her father, but the RV was barreling down the street right toward where she had been.

“Stop resisting and move!” Staten hissed in her ear. “I was close to your father too but there’s nothing we can do for him now! I think I know what those boys are up to, and we don’t want to be around when it goes off.”

Starlight opened her mouth to ask him what he meant, but then she saw Red and Sunrise dive out of the moving RV. The Odyssey, however, didn’t stop moving, and instead continued to speed toward the Elements of Harmony, which seemed to regard the whole thing with a minor sense of curiosity.

Red dove out with a gun in his hooves, but when he hit the ground it flew from his grip and slid across the ground. It landed near Starlight, and when Red saw her he motioned for her to pick it up.

“Shoot the gas tank!” he said.

Time slowed down for her. The gun lay just across the street, but was still out of her reach. Part of her knew that. The other part of her, though, knew she had magic. Before she knew exactly what she was doing, Starlight picked up the assault rifle in a field of magic and brought it to bear on the Odyssey. She had just a few seconds before it hit the Elements.

Breathe, she reminded herself. Breath in, aim, then breathe out . . .

She fired. The bullet struck the large gas tank on the underside of the RV just as the Odyssey plowed into the Elements of Harmony. The wonderful, ugly vehicle that had carried them all across Teton disappeared into a ball of flame that engulfed the Elements. It exploded, and the air felt as hot as oven. Instinctively, she wrapped her wings around Staten.

It was a full minute before anypony moved. It was hard to tell if the Elements were still there, as the entire area was covered in thick, acrid smoke. It billowed from what used to be the Odyssey and formed a column that reached up to the sky. Starlight sighed when she looked at it.

Red, naturally, was the first to get up and move around. He walked over to Starlight and whistled.

“Something about you seems different,” he said. “New haircut?”

“Very funny,” she said. “And that plan of yours, by the way, was insanely stupid.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

Starlight snorted. “How did you even know to shoot at that thing?”

“I just did it because Sunrise told me to.” Red turned to the pegasus. “Isn’t that right?”

For having jumped out of a moving RV, Sunrise seemed to have made it through okay. His deep green coat was covered in gravel, and he had a big scrape on his face, but otherwise looked fine. He shook himself off. “I knew that using some binoculars would be a good idea,” he said. “Of course, Red, it would have helped if you had told me your plan before shoving me out of the RV.”

The Crystal Heart floated toward them, once more revived. Starlight noticed a few cracks along its surface and bit her lip. Red and Sunrise, however, just gawked at it.

“Uh, is this entire city filled with floating jewelry?” Red asked.

When Cadance’s holographic form appeared, Starlight had to stifle a giggle as Red and Sunrise fought to hide behind each other. Cadance herself didn’t seem very amused but at least gave them time to calm down.

“At last I get to meet the rest of the group in person,” Cadance said. “I’ve watched you two for quite some time . . . you are both quite interesting.”

“Uh, Starlight, who is she?” Red asked.

Starlight put her hoof against the crystal. “Her name is Princess Cadance. She’s the one that’s helped give all of us our magic.”

“Magic, right.”

“Well, what else would you call these wings and horns popping up everywhere?”

“Okay, point taken.”

There was a low rumble in the ground. Starlight’s eyes grew wide. Everypony turned as one to face the wreckage where the RV had been. The flames and black smoke still spread across the street, but within them bright lights could be seen flashing. Starlight’s stomach dropped to her hooves.

“Oh, come on . . .”

The Elements of Harmony burst out of the wreckage, flames licking at the edges of the jewels. Other than that, they looked like the Odyssey hadn’t even given them a scratch. They spun in the air a few times before facing down at Starlight and her little group.

Red groaned. “I wasted the Odyssey on that thing! How did it not die?”

“More than simple fire and explosions are needed to destroy the Elements of Harmony,” Cadance said.

“If you know exactly what it takes, now would be a good time to answer,” Starlight hissed.

“I—”

The Elements let out a roar that consumed all the street in a massive concussive force. Ponies were blown in every direction, including Starlight. She lost her balance and was flung into the side of a building. Her head swam, and she groaned. Only the Crystal Heart remained in the center of the street.

If the Elements had been mad before, now they seemed pissed. Starlight felt her heart beat faster just looking at them. The holograms of the six mares flashed rapidly back and forth, screaming in rage.

Cadance was the only one who seemed to be bemused by the sight. Then again, Starlight supposed, this was possibly the angriest the Elements had ever been. She wondered briefly if the ponies in the past had fought it. Had they just accepted their fates? Had they tried to resist? If they had fought back, it was evident how successful they were. Another chill went down Starlight’s spine, but this one blossomed into a ball of ice in her stomach.

She could see Sunny lying across the street from her, and Staten on the ground beside his daughter. Neither was moving. Red was somewhere to Starlight’s left, but trying to move her head to look sent spikes of pain lancing through her body. It hurt just to get herself to her feet, but she managed anyway. The magic that flowed through the stars and moon into her was all that was keeping her up, she knew. More than likely, they were all that was keeping her alive.

Meanwhile, the Elements of Harmony were seething with rage. “All that I have done,” it roared, “everything that has been set in motion has been ruined by you, Cadenza!”

Cadance shook her head. “The only one who ruined this was you, all those one hundred thousand years ago. You took my friends, my sister, and twisted their powers into your own petty desires! We all thought the Elements of Harmony were for the good of ponykind!”

“I am what is best for ponykind!” The sound of the Elements had become like a speech from a thousand dark tongues, all blabbering into Starlight’s mouth at once. It was disconcerting, and she took a step back. “For eons, I had defended the world from the likes of Discord and Nightmare Moon. Yet it was never enough. The Element bearers, with every generation, progressively weakened. By the time it reached your friends, they had become corrupted.

“Once, the Six Element Bearers had been kind and virtuous, and I was proud to be worn by them. But time destroys all, as surely as it did them. Greed, anger, hate, bitterness . . . it claimed them. The civil war only made things worse. It was your kind, not myself, that acted first. If I had allowed them to use me, thousands of lives would have been lost!”

“So you killed millions!” Cadance cried. “And for what? To create a world without magic that couldn’t meet your standards anyway?”

“If those that represented the best of ponydom could fall so far, how was the rest worth saving?” the Elements asked. “I sought to create a better world, without the infection that was magic . . . but ponies only found technology, which made it worse! Count yourself lucky I do not wipe the whole rest of your race from this world!”

“Like you did with the griffins, the diamond dogs, the zebras . . .”

“Each worse than ponies. None of them were worth saving beyond a few minor specimens, and they were destroyed long ago. Why should I feel pity for what was corrupted in the first place? Why should I be forced to let these ponies continue to plunder the earth until they kill themselves off? I can save them!”

The holograms had finally settled on the image of a purple mare with indigo highlights in her mane. Seeing her seemed to make Cadance waver. Starlight’s heart felt close to breaking. The mare looked so . . . scared. Like she had realized what the Elements were doing but had been too late to stop them. Starlight wondered if that would be her fate.

She nearly jumped into the air when she felt somepony touch her back. Starlight turned her full body around to see Red standing beside her. Half his face was bloody and bruised, and he had several jagged cuts all across his body, but he was smiling.

“This thing never shuts up, does it?” he rasped.

Starlight reached out and brought him into a hug. It felt odd, holding on to him when she was now taller than he was. Still, she admitted to herself it was the nicest thing she had felt in weeks.

“Even if all this ends badly . . . I’m glad you came,” she said.

He shrugged. “Hey, what are friends for? We couldn’t just abandon you when they took you in at the hospital. Sunrise and me, we made like bandits to get all the way here.” His vision grew dark. “Too bad about the Odyssey, though. The old girl deserved better.”

“She saved my life.”

“Oh, well, maybe it wasn’t so bad?”

If she didn’t already feel so bad, she would have slugged him. As it was, the Elements of Harmony had quieted down, instead choosing to simply stare down Cadance and her Crystal Heart. Between the two of them, the air seemed electrified with power. It felt like the entire city was a bubble about to pop.

Then, the Elements spoke once more.

“I chose the ponies who were to come to this city for a reason,” it said. “They were to embody the virtues of myself and lead the ponies here to a new age of enlightenment and joy. Two of them would even once more have the powers of the sun and moon.” All six jewels began to glow once more. “But I see now I was mistaken. You ponies are even worse.

“Your kindness is only given for selfish reasons, you laughter is hollow, and your loyalty is to whatever you think feels right. What little generosity you have is squandered by taking from others, and you lie more often than you tell the truth.” It began to rumble. “For this, there is no recourse but your destruction

The six jewels rose high into the sky, to where they had been earlier. They began to spin, and light radiated from within them like the core of a sun. A tumor of dread grew in Starlight’s brain as she watched. She knew that, without a shadow of a doubt, the Elements had been talking about exterminating her. A large part of her wanted to scream and run, and maybe see if her wings worked.

She didn’t even get the chance. An attack that felt like boiling magma poured on her, flinging her farther down the main street. Unlike the other attacks, this one had taken a physical toll. She watched the fur on her chest burn away and could feel the skin start to bubble and peel. The fact that Starlight could barely feel it had her more worried than the attack. Part of her brain knew she was going into shock.

Sunny landed with a thump beside her, a victim of the same attack. Unlike Starlight, the mare stood back up as fast as she was able, staring defiantly at the Elements of Harmony. Seeing her example, Starlight got to her hooves as well. She wavered and almost fell over again, but managed to stay upright.

“So, that’s it, then?” Sunny asked, spitting on the ground. “Your little plan to make us your cronies fails, so you’ll just kill us? What, and you expect nopony to remember this, to treat the Elements of Harmony as some wise leader, like its virtues matter anything?” She began to laugh but was interrupted when she hacked up blood. “Killing us won’t get you your utopia. It’ll just be the first step in your next downfall a hundred thousand years from now.”

Starlight added her voice. “If you think that anypony in Sundown will follow you after this, you’re wrong!” Worriedly, she glanced around. Dozens of ponies watched them on the side of the street, but so far none had made a move to come help them.

The Elements evidently noticed it. “I believe you put too much stock in your fellow ponies,” it said. “You ponies are herd creatures at heart, perfectly willing to follow the crowd as long as it keeps you safe. The ponies remaining once I’m done with the two of you will come around to me in the end. And together, Equestria will be reborn!”

It began to build up an attack again. Starlight fought back tears and looked at Sunny. The other mare, despite her rough exterior, seemed on the verge of crying too. For all her brave talk, death terrified Starlight. She didn’t want to go yet, and not like this. Not in front of everypony.

Worse still, she was almost completely fed up with the idea of death anyway. She had faced it too many times in one day. Wouldn’t it just end already? The Elements seemed happy to oblige her on that request, anyway.

At first, when Starlight heard the crying, she thought that it might be Sunny. But no, the wail was too high-pitched to be coming from a full-grown mare. She turned her her head to see the two IS Agents, Nightcall and Flower, galloping over to them. The baby they had brought with them wasn’t just crying, but glowing. His little horn was lit up as brightly as the Elements were.

For once, the Elements of Harmony seemed confused. “What is that?” it demanded. “Who is that foal unicorn? I did not create any children for this crusade! Doing so would ruin the natural order!”

Cadance gave a weak laugh, and the Crystal Heart floated over to them. When Starlight saw the surface of it, she realized why Cadance hadn’t been helping them. It was covered in cracks, some that almost looked wide enough to put a hoof through. She winced at the sight.

Despite her injuries, though, Cadance appeared once more and laughed at the Elements. “Surprised?” she asked in a sing-song voice. “All this time, you thought you were controlling everything, that the scenario had been shaped for so long, and that I was powerless . . . but you were wrong.” She bent over, coughing while a few of the cracks in the crystal widened further.

“This child,” she continued, “was created through love, not through magic. I only gave it that gift. Why? Because I knew that if I could alter your plans, even a little, I could bring everypony to the right place at the time. Sunny, Starlight, Midnight, Sunrise . . . all would come to Sundown because of a baby called Dawn.”

Red stared at Starlight. “Is there a reason all your names . . .”

“No idea,” Starlight whispered.

The baby continued to cry, and its horn only grew brighter. Starlight realized, after a moment, hers responded, and so did Sunny’s. She looked and saw Midnight and Sunrise approaching, both of them glowing. All of their auras seemed to feed into the Crystal Heart, and she watched it steady itself in the air and some of the cracks begin to heal.

The Elements called down on them from on high. “Do you truly believe that one child may stop me, after all this time, Cadance? After the Bearers never could?”

Cadance smiled weakly. “No, but I think they can.” She pointed to the crowd of ponies surrounding the street. At first, they had seemed paralyzed, but the cry of the foal, Dawn, seemed to snap them out of it. One by one they walked to Starlight and Sunny’s side. Staten and Red were the first and stood in front of the two. Soon, close to a hundred ponies were clustered on the road, the road that served as the artery of their entire nation, and stared down the Elements of Harmony.

It seethed at them. “Insolence! You fools, following these so-called leaders will only lead you all into damnation! Follow me or perish!”

Nopony moved.

The ground began to shake, and the jewels swirled in a torrent of energy, spinning around the center in a haze of magic. “Alright then, you have all chosen your fates! You will only be the first to learn the lesson of your foolishness!”

The attack lanced out like a thousand beams of lightning at once. Starlight stood her ground. At that point, she declared to herself, it was better to die than listen to the thing’s ranting for even one more minute. She saw the Crystal Heart fly out in front of her at the last minute, however.

It sparked and popped from the strength of holding the attack back. Cracks formed once more on the surface, and pieces began to fall off. Cadance was dying holding the attack back. In front of them all, she appeared to them, now as on older version of herself with a sad smile on her face.

“I can’t hold them back forever,” she said in a soft voice. “But I think I’ve . . . done enough. I’ve seen you all grow into just the ponies I hoped you would be. Not bound by some vague idea of virtues, but by something . . . deeper.”

Cadance cried out, and a massive crack appeared straight down the center of the Heart. She turned to Starlight. “I know you’ve known me for only a short time,” she said, “but I need you to trust me, Starlight. You are your father’s pony . . . the only one who can take what I have left. You can take the power of this heart and win this!”

A thick chunk of the crystal fell to the ground. The attack worsened, and Cadance visibly looked pained.

Starlight stepped back and shook her head. “Why me? I can’t! I’ll get us all killed, there’s no way I can do this on my own!”

She started to cry out, but a hoof tapped her on the shoulder. Red stood next to her and smiled. “But you’re not alone,” he said. “I’m here, remember? You’ve got me.”

Sunny stepped forward. “That’s right, and me!”

“You know I’ll do anything for Noctiluncent’s daughter,” Staten added, which Midnight agreed with.

One by one, the ponies behind her turned and nodded or voice their agreement. A chorus that rang up over the entire street, of togetherness and hope. And with each one, a light shined through all of them and spread to the Crystal Heart. It glowed brighter and brighter, even as the Elements destroyed it.

Cadance smiled. “See, you’re not alone, Starlight. So long as you ponies continue to love each other, you’ll never have to face anything by yourself. Hold on to that love, and you can do anything.”

She bowed her head, and her holographic horn touched Starlight’s real one. Energy and strength surged into Starlight, just as the Crystal Heart finally broke apart and shattered into a million pieces, taking Cadance with it, who faded away with a weary smile. The attack from the Elements of Harmony dispersed, leaving Starlight standing in front of the crowd, alone but together at the same time.

The jewels fired again, but Starlight only had to bow her head and the blast exploded harmlessly in front of them.

“What have you done?” the Elements roared. “I have pummeled you with more power than it took to kill the Element Bearers! Why do you persist? Why won’t you die?!”

A smile spread to Starlight’s face. For once in her life, for the first time since she started the whole trip, she felt like she knew the right thing to say.

“Because love doesn’t get weaker with every attack, or with every loss!” she cried, trying to not look where her father lay. “With every loss, it makes us stronger. We grow closer to each other and learn from our pain! Those that we lose yesterday only make us stronger for tomorrow.”

She stepped forward. “Because love is more powerful than whatever your virtues are. It takes us through the good and the bad, and surrounds us when we are at our best and at our worst. Love looks past our weaknesses and holds up our strengths.

“As long as the love for each other is in our hearts, you can’t kill any of us.” She took a step forward. “We will go on, and we will persist! We will love and be loved because we are ponies, and not machines! Because as long we have our friends, you can’t stop us!” Her horn lit up and she screamed at the top of her lungs, “And we don’t need you!”

Far stronger than the moon and stars had been, the power flooding through her allowed her to feel the presence of every pony beside her at once. She felt their fears and anxieties, their hopes and their dreams. Each one wished her well, wished for her to grow stronger. It filled every inch of her body with a power she didn’t even know she had.

Starlight began to run straight at the Elements.

As expected, beams of energy lashed out at her, trying to rip her apart. Each one was as strong as the one that had ended Cadance. Yet, to her, they moved in slow motion. They might as well have been toys. And, even better, she found she could jump on them.

She leaped off the ground, ran across a beam of light five petras long, and jumped off, landing on the next one. A part of her mind drifted back to her days as a foal, jumping from tree limb to tree limb. Each leap had to be perfect, and her balance could not waver. Don’t think, just act.

The attacks became more frequent and concentrated. One hit right on one of her wings, and Starlight watched in horror as it burned away, leaving bare skin behind. She had no time to think about it, however, and jumped to the next beam. She rose and was pummeled by attacks. Her other wing bled off, and more of her coat as well.

Magic rose her like steam off of hot water. But still, she ran into the sky. Her eyes were focused on only one thing: the purple gem at the center of the Elements. Starlight galloped as fast as she could and leapt just as the last of her magic bled out. She flew toward the Elements of Harmony, the only magic left being what was inside her; only her normal body was left on the outside.

Her hoof connected with the center jewel, and for a moment her heart stopped when it did nothing. Then, a fissure spread beneath her hoof, and another. Magic washed out from inside as the crystal broke apart. All around it, the other five pieces of jewelry began to fall apart as well, breaking into tiny little bits.

The Elements themselves only spoke once more. “That’s not—”

Then, it exploded into a burst of magic and white light.

Starlight, as her first thought, assumed she was dead. All she could see was white light. That was, until she turned around and gasped. Spreading out across an endless blank plain were millions of ponies of every color. They were all smiling at her. At the front of them stood the mares that the Elements had used as holograms. They had tears in their eyes, and the pink one seemed to have an overly-large hoofkerchief.

Each of them looked at her with something close to pity, but what Starlight eventually decided was admiration. Standing behind them, she saw, were two more ponies that looked like Cadance. They were smiling sadly but gave her grateful looks. Beyond them, there were too many ponies to count. Each had the same look that Starlight suddenly recognized as the strange combination of pity, admiration, and thanks: love.

There were a million things Starlight wanted to say, but they all had only two words for her, which a million voices spoke as one: “Thank you!”

Starlight smiled, and the world faded to black.

Her eyes opened, and above her the sky was as bright blue and cloudless as it ever got out in the desert. The faces inside . . . whatever that had been . . . were replaced by the looks of worry from Red, Staten, Sunny, and the rest.

Starlight coughed. “How did I do?”

“You did good, kid,” Red said, offering her a hoof to help her up. “You did real good.”

Epilogue: Never Forget

Sunny kept her wings, and Sunrise did too. The light that had engulfed Starlight had swallowed all of Sundown, and when it was left some ponies were back to normal, and some weren’t. According to them, they were given a choice by a voice in their heads. Most of them chose to go back to normal.

Starlight missed the feeling of power from her horn and wings, but she smiled as she ran a hoof over her smooth forehead. Then grimaced as the van bounced, and she smacked herself in the face. She was still grumbling about it when Red, seated next to her, opened the sliding door.

“We’re here,” he said. “I’m surprised a dinky little vehicle like this even made it. It sure ain’t the Odyssey

The IS had been kind enough to lend them a van, but Starlight agreed that she missed the cushy seating and heavy shocks of the RV. Everypony piled out of the vehicle, and she followed them, setting her hooves onto the sand outside. She covered her face with one hoof to block out the sun in her eyes.

Gulls chirped and circled overhead, riding the cool sea breeze. Just beyond the van, deep blue water lapped at the sandy shore. The beach was empty so early in the morning, with only the seabirds and foam to accompany their little group. Sunny and Sunrise took to the skies, laughing and chasing after each other. Starlight rolled her eyes when she saw Sunny slap the stallion on his rump.

“I always forget what the west coast smells like until I come back to it again,” Red said. “It smells . . . clean. Like you can come here and be anypony, do anything.”

“Is that right?” Starlight asked.

He nodded. “It’s out here that I decided I was done taking anypony’s orders but my own, and started smuggling. Funny to come back to it now, after everything.”

“I’ve never been out here, you know.”

“Really?”

“First time going coast to coast.” She breathed in the air and smiled. “And you’re right, I can smell it too.”

Starlight reached back inside the van and pulled an object out of the box. She hefted it in her hooves and brought it over to where Red stood, by the water. It was a thick, ivory urn with brass handles.

She walked into the ocean until it was knee-deep, then stopped. “I think this is what he would have wanted,” she said. “I never really knew how he would want to be buried . . . I called my mom back at Lupine Falls, and she wasn’t up to telling me.”

“I think it’s fitting,” Red said, taking her by the shoulder. “He got you here, didn’t he? The way I see it, he wasn’t always the best pony, but he did what was right in the end. I think that counts for something.”

“I wouldn’t be alive if he hadn’t saved me.” Starlight opened the urn and bit back the tears that stained the edges of her eyes. “He did right in the end.”

She overturned the vase and watched the ashes fall out into the water. Soon, they were washed away by the endless waves, borne back ceaselessly into the great unknown. Starlight watched for a long time. The waves had a way of putting her into a trance, until her breathing matched the coming and going of the tide.

Beside her, Red stood firmly and looked to where she did. After a few moments, he asked, “What now?”

Starlight looked back at the van. The two IS agents had accompanied them to the beach. They were now playing with Dawn on the sand. The little colt wobbled on unsteady legs in the uneven terrain and giggled as he fell. Above them, Sunny and Sunrise continued to swoop and dive around.

She turned back to Red. “Well, the IS gave us just about all the money we could ever want to shut up . . . why don’t we use some of it?”

“To do what?”

“I don’t quite know.” She wrapped a hoof around his shoulder and smiled, looking out to the horizon. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”