“Three hundred.”

“Bullshit,” she snarled back instantly, her ears flattening as irritation began to set into her bloodstream. “Hammer and sear are tight, no cracks to speak of in the receiver either. The bore’s worn down some, but the barrel’s clean and the rifling’s intact. At least another five to six thousand rounds in it.”

“Except that most idiots with a full-automatic like to do entire mag dumps in a fight,” the gray-maned, charcoal-coated stallion returned with an even, unperturbed tone. “If you know enough about guns to guess at how long their barrels will last, then you also know what that kind of constant heat abuse does to them. I’ve seen machine gun barrels cooked and warped all to shit because their owners wouldn’t let off the trigger for longer than it took to load a fresh two hundred round belt.”

Sling felt her jaw come loose from her head, gaping in shock at the thought of how such a thing could even happen. Or that some folk would be so willing to waste all that ammo in a world that barely knew how the technology worked.

“So you see the dilemma,” he went on when she couldn’t offer anything meaningful to say at that moment. “Yeah, the gun might be worth two to three thousand caps as is, but to the bucking fool I’ll probably end up selling it to, it won’t be worth much more than a junk 9mm pistol, because that’s about how long it’ll last in their hooves, or claws, or whatever the hell else they grab things with. So I’m buying it for half of what I’d sell it for, unless you know enough about gunsmithing to modify it to a semi-automatic only gun.”

“What’s the point of such a big-ass gun in 10mm if it’s only gonna shoot once per trigger pull?” she shot back, already finding at least two things wrong with that statement. “If you were selling this thing at...what? Two thousand caps? For a five-pound gun with a thirty round mag and semi-automatic only? And over here you’ve got what looks like two old C-series 10mm pistols for six to seven hundred? Why would I want that modified SMG over those? Even the N-series would be a better choice, and those things are fragile as hell. Smaller, lighter, fires the same round, faster to get on target, and 10mm was a pistol round to start with so the barrel length’s already perfect. Might as well leave the SMG intact and get your caps’ worth out of it.”

“And I’m going to take advice from a half-blind unicorn, why?”

Temporarily! she roared at him mentally. “Why do you care what the buyer does to the thing once you’ve sold it? If they want to throw away two thousand caps for a gun they’re going to ruin in a couple hundred rounds of careless shooting and neglect, let them. But make them pay for what the gun’s worth to you, not what it’ll be worth to them. Hell, the high price might scare off those idiots to start with. You get somebody that actually knows how to keep their firearm running and not abuse it, then maybe you can work something out to both your benefit.”

The stallion’s eyes tore away from her bandaged face, back down to the 10mm SMG that had been sitting on his table for the last two minutes…and a three-shell magazine tube extension for her shotgun, with matching spring and follower lying next to it. “...even at a thousand caps in trade worth, you’re still short seven hundred for the extension.”

Her brain nearly mouthed off a foul curse, but staved it off at the last moment before she could utter it. It wasn’t quite what she’d been aiming for, but it was still better than the price she’d been looking at a minute earlier. Take it and be glad he’s not stiffing you for over seventeen hundred like he’d wanted…

It took her nearly three minutes to count off the required caps (and the increasingly lighter weight of the caps purse scared her with every passing moment), but in the end he took the “money” without further complaint and scooped up the SMG and its three functional magazines off the table, while she slipped the magazine tube extension and parts into her saddlebag. “…does the lady require anything else? Besides the rare and mysterious bullet called .44 Mag that I’ve not seen in high quantities for four years now?”

Her heart floated down a bit lower in her chest at that remark, but she took special note of his phrasing. “…but you’ve still seen at least a few, somewhere?”

“…yeah, that’s the word. A few. Seriously, not near as much of those around now as there used to be, most of the old Ironshod revolvers that survived the end of the world are all shot out and ruined. Anybody with a working model, they don’t fire it much. Only .44 magnum guns I see in working order these days are lever-action rifles or a Phoenix Rising model of some sort. Like yours. You sure you won’t sell it? That thing’s worth two-thirds of my inventory.”

Sling unconsciously shifted her body weight about until she felt Grayhawk’s weight tapping into her side as its holster bobbed in place slightly. “You even think to reach for it and I’ll cut your leg off at the joint.”

Surprisingly, the stallion merely laughed at her threat, apparently not realizing that she meant every word of it. “Okay, okay, fine, I’ll stop asking. As for .44s, sometime after the megaspells, they had a hell of a rep. Supposedly could kill any living being that walked, crawled, or slithered on the earth, or at least that’s how my grandfather remembered things. I still remember twenty years back when the demand got so bad that some wise guys set up shops pushing out reloaded .44 Mag rounds at a fraction of what a war-era round would cost. Apparently they never bothered to learn that the casings can only be re-used so much before they get stretched out and overstressed from all that pressure, and the rounds explode the next time they’re re-charged and fired off. Lots of guns and their owners got blown to bits before folk caught on, but by then the damage was done. Not much of ammo or gun to go around now. So if you find any war-era .44 mag rounds, expect to pay a lot more than two or three caps per bullet.”

There may be a reason he’s single, she thought bitterly, her eyes scanning over the rest of his small collection of ammunition behind him. He’s depressing the hell out of me and I just met him. “What about 5.56? Or civvy .223s?”

“Biggest stockpile’s in Union control,” he spat with disdain. “But the army left enough caches lying around that you can usually find a can or two if you go out looking for salvage. Except the armor-piercing rounds. Union snatches up every batch of those they find, and they got patrols and salvage teams that do nothing but search them out.”

She did indeed fail to spot any manner of AP munitions in his stock in any caliber in which such a round would actually be useful. Plenty of simple FMJ rounds and a scattered count of jacketed-hollow points, even some .357 flat-nosed soft point rounds….but absolutely no armor-piercing rounds. “You’d think they’d have enough for themselves, sitting on top of that military arms cache of theirs.”

“Doesn’t mean they want the rest of us to have any. Runners gave ‘em hell years ago, so they want every advantage they can get if they ever have to tangle with ‘em again. Nine-mil, .38s, even .357 Mag, got plenty of those. .44 Special too, but only a couple of boxes. As for 12-guage, I don’t have much of any particular type, but I got slugs, buckshot, three-inch magnum shells, a couple of bolo shot shells, bean bag rounds, flare rounds—”

She’d already begun to sort out the quantities of pistol ammunition she’d need to get the next round of target practice going when he got to listing off his shotgun shell stock, and had a sudden urge to bug him over the bolo shells. “Whoa, wait a minute, bolo shot? I thought that was just an experimental round.”

“Which might be why nobody finds that many,” the stallion replied, even going so far as to pull one of the shells out for her inspection. “Supposed to be able to cut a head off at close range if the wire is pulled taut, but the damn things rarely work right. Most of the time they just nick you pretty good, or the bolos just tumble over each other in flight, or the target gets smacked by the ball rather than the wire. Better off with flechette rounds, but I don’t have any. Another one of those ammo types that the Union likes to suck up on sight.”

She promptly set the bolo round back onto the table. Such an exotic and unpredictable round was not worth the risk in a firefight. “I need around seven to eight hundred caps’ worth of ammo, mostly 9mm and .38s. Thinking around two hundred of each of those to start, plus those .44 Specials, then we’ll work in some other calibers.”

“Well, my gods, the lady is on a spending spree today!” he laughed as he began to pull out boxes of variously-labeled ammunition onto his counter. “You keep this up and you’ll have enough ammo to fight Runners for half a day.”

Sling spent the next ten minutes working out her ammo order. Four hundred caps were already allocated to two hundred 9mms and two hundred .38s, and another hundred for fifty rounds of .357. Another eighty caps netted her the forty rounds of .44 Special, just so she’d have something else to shoot through Grayhawk. Afterwards she was torn between adding to either her stock of 10mm or 12-gauge, given that ten-mil went for three caps a round and the 12-gauge shells varied widely in cost depending on the type. She eventually settled for roughly two magazines’ worth of 10mm, at 60 caps, and splurged the rest of her ammo budget on 12-gauge. She eventually wound up with a small helping of roughly nine 3-inch magnum shells, four flare rounds, three slugs, and five 00 buckshot rounds. The nine caps left over at the end went back into her caps bag, leaving her with roughly six hundred and twelve for future dealings.

The walk back to the hotel at the northwest quarter of town went largely unnoticed to her, with much of her attention focused on memorizing the takedown procedure for her shotgun. She barely even registered that she’d made it back to her rented room until she was slinging her traveling saddle off and onto the floor beside the bed, and chills of terror slid through her bones at the thought of her missing potential threats eyeballing her and trailing her all the way back here. She’d have thought a near-death run-in with a hedonistic merc would’ve taught her to look out for herself a lot better…

“He have much of anything you wanted?” Kite’s voice crept up from behind, growing closer with every passing second.

“Plenty,” she replied with a grunt as the left side of her face briefly attacked her nervous system with a flash of searing pain. “After lunch we’ll hike back out to the north end of town, take some more target practice.”

Kite’s presence began to intrude into her personal space as the other mare crept to a stop beside her, her magic tugging at the bandages over her face and eye. “Is that still bothering you?”

“It’s my bucking eye, of course it’s bothering me!” she hissed back softly when Kite’s pulling began to get uncomfortably close to the scabbed-over cuts on her eyelid. “Shit, watch what you’re doing you’re making it worse.”

Instead of taking the hint and leaving things be, Kite’s response was to simply shove her up and over the foot of the bed until she’d landed on top of its ragged, patched-up blankets, and then quickly hopped up after her as she began to snip away at the bandaging. “Oh you poor, big baby, shut up and sit still so I can pull these off. It’s time to be rid of them.”

Sling’s blood began to grow hot with anger, her forelegs trying to push her up into a standing position so she could better resist the ex-slave’s efforts to take away the one thing that kept the dust and wind out of her healing wounds. “The hell you will! Get offa me—”

Kite’s body sat down on her back before she could get up, and she was surprisingly heavy considering the food quality of the wasteland—she found it very difficult to get her legs back under her now that she had this pony-sized tick on her back. And when Kite’s forehooves grabbed hold of her head to hold it still, she suddenly decided that she might have been better off simply staying put instead of risking re-opening her cuts in a struggle to get free.

“Sit,” Kite spat back sharply, as if she were giving one of the pups a command. “Stay.”

“…just get it over with.”

“Good girl,” the scarred mare purred, her voice practically dripping with satisfaction. Her magic began to unravel the maze of gauze and bandage wrapped around her head, and as the layers began to grow thinner Sling could feel a slight, pleasurable release of pressure and relief seep into her skull…

“…oooooh, that actually does feel better,” she sighed, allowing her body to relax itself and quit trying to find out a way from underneath her “tormentor”.

“I told you it would,” Kite mused with a quiet laugh. “But did you ever listen, nooooo, you just squirmed and squealed like a foal until I got tired of it and let you keep the damn thing on another coupla days.”

The wrappings began to tickle her coat as they were peeled off of her skull, and the gauze pad that had been pressed against her eye began to loosen up. “…kinda scared of what the mirror’s gonna show me….”

Kite’s amusement died almost immediately, and she began to take greater care with her work now that the pad was no longer held against the eye. “…I…didn’t think of that…or Elly….”

The last of the bandaging lifted away from her skull, and Kite’s magic started tugging gently at the pad over the eye to pry it off without disturbing the scabs too much. “…where are they now?”

“On their way,” Kite replied, though most of her attention was now focused on the gauze pad as it resisted her efforts to remove it. It seemed to have gotten stuck on a couple of scabs, she could feel the crusted wound sites screaming fiery rage with every movement. “They took the pups out for some air and play time out back, that was right after you left. The moment I heard you come back I told them to come up. Should be here any minute now—”

Kite had barely spoken of the increasingly rambunctious children when they began to hear their voices curling around the top of the staircase, eighty feet down the hall to the right—

“—ieve you taught them to fetch that quick!” El-Tee’s voice squealed happily. “Come to think of it, I didn’t think you could teach much of anything!”

“…Mom and I wound up with a brahmin herder for a few months once. What was it…two years back? Had to work the fields, and he used dogs to help keep watch. Learned a bit about teachin’ tricks there.”

Kite’s body finally got off of her back, coming around to sit in front of her and allowing Sling to bare at least one eye onto the scarred slave’s face. “…brahmin herder?” she asked.

Kite’s ministrations to her eye became subdued and half-hearted, and her eyes grew downcast and withdrawn. “….we’ve gotten bounced around masters a lot the last few years, after Bark Skin sold us off…that was actually one of the better ones….”

The sullen, low tone of her voice convinced her not to ask any more questions.

“—at else could ya teach ‘em?!” El-Tee’s voice cried next, now louder and far closer to the door. Probably just a couple seconds away…

“What’d ya have in mind? They already stay put when they’re told to, most of the time. They keep watch, they sniff out stuff we might need—”

The door creaked open without warning, a faint electric blue glow popping over the doorknob as the door swung inward and revealed the indigo-maned filly’s body, her head looking over her withers towards the colt trailing in behind her—

“…roll over? Stand up? Or maybe train ‘em so they can track any of us down if we get separated?”

“Think that was covered when your mom got all those guns and ammo off those dead Union troops two weeks back,” the light blue colt muttered as he slipped through the doorway, though his path was momentarily interrupted by a pair of black/white blurs zipping in between his legs—

Awww, shit, Sling growled silently as Max and Mona began to chase each other all over the hotel room, and while Light Tail seemed amused by their antics, she dreaded the next quarter hour ahead. They seemed to get bigger every week…

“Stop! Heel!!” she barked out sharply before the pups could get the idea to try leaping onto the bed in their energetic zeal to amuse themselves—

Both pups came to a halt within two seconds, their heads and pointy ears cocked in the direction of the large pony that had just yelled at them. But instead of ignoring her and going back to their play, they reluctantly sat down on all fours with a whimper and contented themselves with examining their surroundings.

“…yup, pretty much trained already,” BJ decided a moment later, his hind leg kicking the door shut behind him. “Intelligent little buggers, swear they’re smarter than you are.”

“Oh yeah?” Light Tail laughed. “What’s the square root of twenty-five? When did Princess Luna become head regent of Equestria—“

That, apparently, was all it took to scramble BJ’s brains like a cooked egg. “…the…, wait, what now? What’s a square root? Is it like…a square-looking plant root, or…”

“Ha!!” Light Tail laughed back triumphantly. “Smarter than you, then! Don’t think those fuzz balls even know what math is!”

“…heeeeeeey…”

Kite chose that moment to butt into the children’s playful bickering, seemingly miffed that neither of them had even taken notice of their mothers. “Nice to see you too, Beige,” she grumbled, turning her attention back to the stubborn gauze pad and the increasingly painful gasps coming out of Sling’s throat. “Be a dear and fetch the med kit for your poor mother.”

Instead of obeying her instantly, the smart-ass colt simply relayed the message to one of the pups. “Max, fetch the med kit.”

She heard a pair of husky feet begin to patter across the floor as the pup immediately darted across the floor, likely for the saddlebags stacked together in the corner, and when she looked up to gauge Kite’s reaction she saw an unamused mare flatly staring back at her stubborn-headed son.

“…what? You said fetch the med kit. Didn’t say how,” BJ sassed back at the silent glare of his mother. “Had the dog do it. I don’t do fetch.”

“Your lunch is a military MRE,” Kite snarled testily. “Talk to me like that again, and you’ll be eating them until we’re out.”

Sling heard what sounded like BJ’s voice trying in vain to come up with something that would either get out of trouble, or at least not get him into any more trouble, but after a couple of seconds he just gave up and dragged himself to a far corner of the room, where he plopped himself down and stayed put.

And quiet.

With BJ more or less punished for displeasing his mother, Light Tail was left with little else to do but bug her own mother for amusement. “…whatcha doin’?”

She felt a scab over the lower half of her eyelid began to peel off, sending a sharp pain through her eye, and she reflexively grabbed at the sheets beneath her with a forehoof. “Ooooh, y’know,” she half-squealed through the pain. “Just sittin’ here, being tortured by this heartless so-called nursemai—”

Kite stopped being gentle with her tugging, and in one swift motion simply ripped the gauze pad off of her eye, taking with it the scabs that had gotten stuck to it. Now instead of one small pain, she had an entire eyeful of it assaulting her face, and she shrieked with a mixture of shock and anger. “—aaaaaaaeeEEOOOOOWWW OW OW OW OW OW—”

“Do you want some ice for that, oh poor tortured girl?” Kite muttered back, her tone completely neutral and detached as she tossed the pad into what looked like a trash can held together with decades-old fuzzy duct tape. “Maybe a kiss to make it better?”

She almost snarled off a hateful curse, but bit her tongue at the last moment when she remembered her daughter’s presence only a few feet away. Instead she simply lay out onto the bed, rubbing at her eye with her left foreleg in some vain effort to scrub away the pain and hissing her pain out through her teeth.

“…better that way anyway, Mom,” Light Tail dared to say in Kite’s defense. “Ain’t that what you told me the last time I asked for help getting a band-aid off? You just tore the thing off without a care in the world as to how much it stung.”

I hate the wasteland! she howled to the depths of her mind. There is no punishment I can give that is worse than the horrors of living out here!

“When you’re done screaming and crying like a little foal, sit up so I can get some eye solution in that eye, clear your vision up,” Kite went on in, just as Max’s body leapt up onto the bed with a small, red-cross marked bag in his jaws. “By the time we eat and get out there, it should be good as new and you can actually hit the target today.”

She heard BJ’s mouth open and close in disgust, as though he could still taste that horrible military ration half an hour later, almost retching in horror at the taste of it.

“Oh…dear…Luna,” he mumbled in his misery. “I hope it comes out easier than it went in.”

Groooooosss!! “…gross, Beige. Just…no.”

BJ, however, ignored her, and continued to try and huff out the taste and, occasionally, spit it out as they followed their moms through the sparsely-populated streets and ruined, crumbling buildings and houses. “And to think the army fought on stomachs full of that shit…”

Light Tail had, by now, figured out what that particular cuss word meant, and she really disliked it. “Stop cussin’. Especially that word, that’s gross.”

“No, seriously, how could anypony fight for freedom and all that when they had that to look forward to back at camp?” he went on. “If I was a soldier in the war, I’d desert and tell the zebras to hurry up and win so the rest of us wouldn’t have to eat that stuff anymore.”

“…from what I’ve read, those rations weren’t meant to be eaten for long,” she answered back, momentarily setting aside her distaste for his constant swearing as she made a quick scan behind them to make sure there were no bad ponies or bugs sneaking up on them. “Supposedly they were purposely made to focus on calorie count ‘cause they were going to soldiers in combat zones, and they burned through a lot of energy fighting and wouldn’t be able to set up a kitchen or anything like that. The rations had to have a really high shelf life so they could just pluck them off a store room rack and ship ‘em to a front line when they needed to. That meant making it taste really, really bad, or it wouldn’t last near as long.”

“I can believe that,” BJ gagged back, still fighting with the aftertaste in his mouth. “…was it considered a war crime to feed them to zebra?”

“…maaaaaybe?”

“…no wonder they were mad at us for so long.”

The next four minutes were spent in solemn silence as they trotted through the dusty streets, broken up only by the occasional gag of BJ’s throat or Max and Mona barking at either each other, as they’d taken to play fighting while following them. Only when she saw Mom stop at the end of a dead end street facing a crumbling, half-smashed house with a short stretch of fence in its front yard did she sense an end to their brief journey.

“…good spot,” Mom said, mostly to herself as she surveyed the surroundings. “House makes for a decent backstop, fence is mostly intact. Don’t see anything on my EFS other than us, too. Rest a bit while I set up some targets. Lotta junk lying around…”

Finally glad to be rid of her traveling saddle for a bit, Light Tail unceremoniously pulled its straps open and slid it off to the ground, then began pulling her guns and a share of ammo out from their pouches and holsters. “Which one ya want this time, Beige?”

“Neither,” he answered, digging into her saddlebags as well. Probably hunting down that honey oat granola bar she’d snuck out of the stable ration at lunch for him. “You and mom need the practice more, I think.”

“If you’re decent enough at it, then you should keep at it when you get a chance.”

“Had plenty of practice the other day. Your turn. Somebody’s gotta keep the pups still anyway, might as well be me.”

…well, if that was what he wanted, she wouldn’t push it. She didn’t waste any more time trying to convince him otherwise, and simply collected the guns and ammo together in a single spell field before carrying it with her as she trotted onward towards the end of the street, where Kite was laying out a couple of rifles and several boxes of ammo herself. In a way, she was kinda glad that BJ wasn’t going to join them now.

It gave her a chance to try and subtly pry some information out of his mom. Gently, of course. She wasn’t gonna be rude about it.

“BJ don’t wanna shoot today,” she heard herself say as she stopped beside her, setting her stuff down in front of her and beginning the task of sorting it out. The lightweight revolver went off to the right side, along with its speedloaders, which she’d emptied out earlier in the morning in preparation for the afternoon’s target practice…

“He’s good enough at it when it suits him,” Kite murmured back, one of the rifles coming up from the ground, surrounded in Kite’s magic. “Me, I barely know what I’m doing with this thing. Need all the practice I can get.”

“And how’d he get decent at it if the Union don’t want slaves to learn how to work a gun?” she asked next, popping the magazine release on the 9mm pistol and catching the mag as it fell out, setting it down gently, and then quickly racked the slide to clear the chamber. A glint of movement sailed out from the gun’s slide, and her eyes followed the bullet until she could catch it in a spell field and bring it back to her.

“…some of our masters, now and then, would let BJ shoot a little when they were sure they could get away with it with nopony else watching or knowing about it. Something about boys and their guns...all I ever learned about ‘em was what I saw others doing. I can hit something if it’s in front of me, up close, but for that I’d rather have a knife. Much easier and quieter, and enough tasks and jobs had me using a knife for something or another that it wasn’t hard to get the practice in on those with no one the wiser for it.”

With both of her pistols unloaded, she set to emptying a couple of magazines of their bullets, setting the rounds aside inside a small belt pouch she kept tied around her torso. Lately she’d taken a liking to having a pocket or two to stuff things in, and didn’t want to be wearing that traveling saddle all the time to do it. And it turned out that a few of the pouches could be taken off and fixed to a belt to wear on their own, so that’s what she wound up doing a few days ago. “You learned how to shoot by watching others do it?”

“…well…maybe BJ showed me a thing or two, when nopony else was looking. Used one of these rifles to do it, was surprised by how he managed to load, unload, and actually fire the thing without help. I needed him to hold my hoof for a half hour until I got it.”

“You did well enough two weeks back, when those ants were trying to eat us,” she forced herself to say, and tried hard not to remember anything specific about that day. The ants (especially ones that burped fire), the terror, the half-starving ponies in the stable that Mom almost shot to pieces…

…the image of Mom peeing herself all over the floor when they’d finally gotten inside the stable, away from the bugs that that terrified her to such a humiliating degree…

“…I did, didn’t I,” Kite said dismissively as the T-shaped handle embedded inside the rifle’s carrying handle was pulled out until she heard a click! from inside the gun, at which point the handle slid freely in and out of the receiver as the magazine fell free from the weapon.

“You did.” Now she had everything set—empty magazines for the 9mm, speedloaders for the revolver to load up and practice using, at least fifty rounds per gun to shoot with…

…and Kite, slowly backed into a corner, figuratively speaking. She’d thought about it for weeks, continued to dwell on it now and then, but only now did she have the guts to try and see if she was right…

“…lucky me, eh?” Kite said, but a noticeable pause in her words, the hesitation in her voice…

She knows what’s coming...

“…yeah, lucky. Lotta that. Thinkin’ it’s more than luck, though—”

Mom nearly ruined it all by coming back a lot sooner than she’d expected, and apparently having heard enough to figure out what she was trying to do. “Honey, stop that,” Mom rebuked her sharply, her body seemingly appearing out of nowhere right before them. “She’s not a bad pony, she’s just…not comfortable talking about that part of her life. Don’t pry it out of her—”

Crap, gotta speed this along or I won’t get anything out of her… “I don’t wanna hear about all the bad things others did to her. But there’s some stuff that ain’t makin’ sense.”

“Like what?” Mom challenged back sharply, just as El-Tee had satisfied herself with her target practice preparations and dared to look u—

Her haunches quivered slightly, her face cringing at the sight of Mom’s face without her head wrapped up in bandages and gauze pads. Two large, ragged strips of bare flesh streaked down across her face from above the right eye and into her cheek, and a third, smaller scar now creased her forehead and curved around the edge of the eye itself. Probably one of Saurus’s claws that hadn’t gotten as deep or as good a hook on her face as the other two…

…and El-Tee couldn’t keep from thinking that she half-preferred seeing the bleeding wounds instead of these scars, when all that blood had covered her mom’s face and kept her from seeing how bad it really was…

She saw Mom’s face lighten up a little out of pity, probably seeing just how much it hurt to see her like that, and the slight pause of silence between them gave the filly enough time to re-organize her thoughts. “…it’s just…Kite knew where to find somebody to get those exploding collars off, all those weeks ago. His name, where he lived…that ain’t common knowledge or the Union would’ve taken him out a long time ago. She can shoot a little, and knew how to use that rifle a bit when you found it out in that field of ants two weeks ago. Didn’t need to ask you anything about it.”

Mom’s face began to grow conflicted as she started to look back and forth between her and Kite, and she already knew why. It could be really hard to judge somepony that had saved your life, or ask them questions that seemed to sound like you didn’t trust them…

“…ffffuuu…dammit, do we have to do this now?” Mom whined softly, her ears beginning to lay flat against her skull.

“Better here than back at that hotel where ponies might overhear it. Ain’t sayin’ we’re in trouble, just…Kite, c’mon, if there’s something we need to know about what ya did years back, tell us…”

Shifting the focus onto the scarred mare seemed to spread her mom’s dismay around, as now Kite’s ears were flattening out of despair, her body lumbering down into a prostrate position with her legs tucked in…

…and with a heavy, mournful sigh, she simply stopped resisting and spilled her guts out without any further prodding. “….hell with it. The Union didn’t always have solid control of this half of the prairie, and the slave trade wasn’t as…strong, as it is now. Back then, there weren’t any rules or such backing up the slaver guilds, they just took whoever they could grab on the highways. But the Union was getting some groundwork done on that, in their core territories…”

El-Tee heard what sounded like soft hoofsteps coming up from behind her, along with the curious strange noises of the pups as they sniffed out their surroundings. Something between a growl and a whine…

“I’d been over here a while, when the first Union caravans tried to cross the valley. BJ was only…a year old, I think. The war they touched off with the Runners threw this side of the prairie into near chaos. Only safe place was a town with a good set of guards and guns, and even then highway gangs and raiders would take their chances. The Union and the Runners would shoot them to pieces on sight out in the wastes, and caravans only traveled with heavy guards so they wouldn’t get hit. Slave trade was a mess. Runners even thought to try and starve the Union of slaves by building up an underground of sorts, places where slaves and runaways could be funneled along ‘till they crossed the valley.”

Sparks of information came together in her tiny head, drawing to a conclusion that her mother had already figured out before Kite could finish. “That’s how you knew about Fixer,” Mom murmured softly.

“…yeah. At the time I was with my second master Breaker, a general goods merchant in Syrup Mound. His basement was a “pit stop” of sorts for runaways, and Fixer worked for him fixing up any high tech junk he found in salvage or trade. He also knew enough about the collars to get them off. None of the guilds marked their slaves or kept any kind of records back then, so it was a lot easier to sneak off unnoticed once the collar was gone. A cloak, or some robes and pants, and a runaway could brave the rest of the road on their own after Syrup Mound if they wanted, or stick with the underground.”

Now that Kite was talking, Mom seemed to have no problem with poking her head for information, so she let her do all the questioning. “So how is it that anyone involved with this…underground railroad, is still alive after the war?”

“…most of them aren’t,” Kite answered sadly, dampening spirits and thoughts all around her with her words as BJ came to a stop beside her. “A month after the Unification War ended, the Union and the slaver guilds started hitting the pit stops, starting with Stifla, killing everyone they caught along with their families once they’d gotten all the information they could out of ‘em. When they wiped out the stop in a town called Laura, a bit northeast of Mound and Lome, we got word of it through a courier that had slipped through their perimeter. Laura’s stop led to Lome, and from Lome the route led to us in Syrup Mound, and then on to Trotpeka. From the sound of things, it looked like the Union and slavers were just following the main central route, piece by piece, because only a few souls outside the Runners actually knew the entire network, and Breaker was the last one left alive with that information. Rest of us only knew the stops before and after our own. We decided to break up what was left of the underground starting at Lome, and scattered out as far apart from each other as we could. BJ and I were sold to Bark Skin before Breaker packed up his shop and went south. Fixer stayed put, and Bark Skin never knew I was part of the underground. Union scoured Lome and Syrup Mound for weeks, but never found any further trace of the route, so they called off the search and focused on solidifying control over their half of the prairie. That’s about when they figured out they needed to keep track of all the slaves in the trade.”

…so that’s why the slavers get free reign to kill anybody they want, Light Tail half-cried silently. ‘Cause folk dared to stand up to ‘em and make things better…

“How were slaves moved from one place to the next? Caravan?”

“…yeah, actually. Most of the runaways that came to us did so disguised as guards for caravans, sometimes with Runners along for the ride on their way to their next target. Occasionally Breaker would organize a caravan of his own when he needed to make a run to Trotpeka, he’d take any slaves he had waiting in his basement and arm them up. I went along mostly as an extra gun, learned my way around a rifle and a few pistols, but never well enough to take on anything at a distance. Only reason I didn’t get across the valley myself was ‘cause Breaker was pretty well known in Syrup Mound, and folk knew I belonged to him. Best cover he could think of was to keep me so no one would suspect he was leading slaves out of Union territory. I mean, a slave owner secretly sneaking slaves off to freedom? Who’d believe that?”

“I would,” Mom answered immediately. “But I’m kind of distrusting like that.”

“…I noticed….” Was all that Kite was willing to say to her face.

“And I get why you didn’t say anything,” Mom went on, her voice oddly calming and…polite. Usually, when Kite said something she’d been holding back, Mom kinda got a bit angry…. “…beginning to wish you’d stayed quiet, but at least we know how things with the slavers got the way they are…and how Ada knew who you were talking about when we first asked around about Fixer. Do you know of anypony else in this underground that might have survived beyond Fixer and Breaker?”

“Just the five that ran the stop at Trotpeka…provided the wasteland hasn’t killed them in the last seven years. Always thought this one stallion in Lome was in on it, went by the name Blue Star. But the underground only went one way, never backward. Breaker was real particular about what I was allowed to know, so I never knew who ran the stop there.”

“…that’d make a bit of sense, actually,” Light Tail quipped after a moment’s thought. “When Mom and I first walked into Lome the day after we left the stable, we ran into him, and…he seemed kind of angry when he got to telling us ‘bout the slavers. The kind of anger that folk say comes with losin’ someone close to ya…”

Kite’s gaze finally dared to pull away from the pavement and take in the faces around her…..faces that, to her surprise, seemed to be pitying her rather than hating her for hiding things about herself.

So Mom took that as a cue to get off the topic before anybody got any more depressed. “So how well do you know that rifle?”

“….I can manage when I have to,” Kite answered softly, seemingly grateful to have the conversation back where it had started. “Don’t expect any miracles though.”

“What about pistols?”

Kite’s breath came in grunts and groans as she stood back up, shaking off what seemed like decades of dust and bits of asphalt off of her legs. “Only one I ever cared for was a .45 Auto a Runner leant to me for a caravan run, back in the war. Hated it at first with that safety in the grip, but once I got the hang of it I hit better with it than I did anything else, even a revolver. Runner said it didn’t seem to break down as much either.”

“It wouldn’t,” Mom said. “.45 doesn’t work at near the pressures a nine or a ten-mill does. Eighteen to twenty-thousand pee-es-eye, max. I’ll keep an eye out for ‘em. Wasn’t looking at .45 ammo these last few weeks so I have no idea how often it can be found. Load up those mags and speedloaders, we’ll just focus on sight alignment and trigger pull today. Last chance to change your mind, BJ.”

“…I’m fine,” the colt muttered, his voice distant and almost entirely removed from whatever it was that was bugging him on the inside as he turned tail and trotted away from them at an unusually brisk pace. For him, anyway.

Mom didn’t seem to catch on and simply began pulling her own guns out of their holsters, but all El-Tee needed was a quick look at Kite’s face to confirm what she suspected.

She’d never told him any of that before today. She looked almost....stung. Like his tone had hurt her.

Light Tail’s mind had been made up before she even knew she’d decided anything. She’d had her 9mm wrapped in a spell field, but quickly put it back down and took off after him. “…go ahead, I’ll be back in a minute. Wanna make sure he can keep the pups corralled on his own.”

“They don’t seem gun shy to me,” Mom’s voice countered in confusion.

“They were real strung up and hyper earlier, took the both of us to keep track of ‘em. I just wanna make sure they ain’t gonna take off on him.”

Mom thankfully chose not to bug her any further over it, and let her go, simply putting her attention back to her own concerns. “All right, Kite, I got sixty rounds of ball ammo I can spare. Load up three mags—”

She heard Kite say something back, but by then she’d stopped paying attention and stayed on BJ’s tail—literally, her eyes were focused on it as it disappeared around the edge of a house maybe sixty yards away from where the shooting was going to be. She picked up her pace and zipped into the alley roughly five seconds later—

BJ’s body had just plopped into the ground, his magic absently pulling the pups back to him from the far end of the alley, and while his body seemed listless and tired, the hard, stoic glint in his eyes gave away the turmoil he was likely feeling right then.

“…Beige, you know why your mom never told you any of that,” she said after giving it a moment’s thought. No point in dancing around the subject. No “hey, you okay”, or anything like that. It was pretty obvious to her that he was anything but okay.

“Beginning to wonder about that,” he spat darkly to the wall of the house in front of him. “She trusts you guys more than she does me…”

“You heard her, they killed everybody they caught who was involved in it, even killed thei…even their families,” she choked back. “That’ve meant you if they’d found out she was in it. She didn’t want that.”

“There’s days when I think she don’t want me,” he croaked, his anger turning his voice into a deep, hollow roar. “Half the time she looks at me, she gets this look in her, like I remind her of something she don’t wanna remember. And sometimes she just…bites my damn head off at the slightest thing and I don’t know why.”

Light Tail felt her resolve and determination fading by the second. She’d gotten the same vibe off of Kite at times, as though she wasn’t entirely sure what to do with BJ sometimes. But hearing him say it himself, knowing it himself….what was she supposed to say to that?

“…m-maybe she’s just…stressed,” she spoke meekly, her legs tensing up in preparation for a quick walk back to where she’d come from, just in case he did blow up at her. “Life out here…it’s hard. I won’t pretend to know anything about it, but…by the moon, just the few things I’ve seen have been giving me nightmares and this stupid wasteland almost killed my mom….I can’t begin to imagine having to grow up and live in this place. That’s got to wear on a pony’s soul.”

“Seems to have weathered it well enough to have me,” he bit back bitterly. With Max and Mona now firmly under his control (much to their disappointment), he could finally start to put a bit more focus on his conversation rather than his magic. “Won’t even say a damn word ‘bout who my dad is. Wonder if she even cares.”

Oh, come on, now what am I gonna say?! I don’t even know how moms and dads have foals!

“…y’know, I kinda wonder the same thing,” she murmured softly. “It’s…it’s not something we’ve ever talked about. I wanna, but…but when I get enough guts to ask, I get this ugly feeling in my stomach that tells me I’d better not. If my dad was somepony special to my mom, I’d think I’d have heard something about him by now. But then sometimes I think he was, and that she doesn’t talk about it ‘cause it hurts. And she’s never once told me anything about how the whole parents and foals thing works…”

BJ didn’t look away from the wall, but a hard, exhausted sigh left his lungs that betrayed his waning patience with that particular subject. And maybe she had been bugging him about it a bit much these last two weeks. “…gods, look, your mom ain’t told you for a reason, and I ain’t about to do it for her,” he said. “Yeah, I know how it all works, and no, I ain’t gonna tell you. Your mom ought to. Not my fault she’s scared to.”

“…wh…what makes you think she’s scared to explain it?”

“’Cause my mom was when she told me. I’ll tell you this much for free, though….don’t wander off alone and out of our sight. Stay close.”

El-Tee felt a tinge of frustration flare to life within her. “I ain’t stupid, Beige, these last two months have shown me everything I need to know to stay close to you guys—”

“You ain’t seen shit,” he snapped back harshly, finally turning to look at her with an angry glare. “Worst you’ve seen is your mom bleeding out from gettin’ shot, and yeah, that’s pretty bad. But to be honest with you, that’s probably one of the better ways to die out here. You don’t wanna even know a third of the things Saurus did to girls when he felt like it. Things he did to my mom…things he’d do to you…and he ain’t the only guy out there who’d do it. There’s a lot of bad people out there who wouldn’t think twice to hurt you, in ways you shouldn’t be hurt, just ‘cause they’d get a kick out of it. So when I tell you not to go looking around on your own, I mean it. Wouldn’t take but two minutes and they’d…..they’d make you wish you were dead. Don’t trust anypony you see, ever. Stay close.”

It felt like Mom talking down to her, laying down the law of the living quarters. It shocked her how fast he seemed to change on her—harder, meaner, angrier…but it seemed as though some of that anger was coming from something else. Maybe from some of the things he was talking about, that he’d seen…and also maybe because she’d been bugging him about these kinds of things for too long…

And it hurt, hearing him talk to her like that. Like she was some little baby stepping out of line and needed to be corralled, like Max and Mona.

Maybe she was.

The weight was off.

Sure, the extra three shells that the extension gave her were welcome, and she wasn’t about to pull it off. Three rounds could have made a big difference in that scrapyard two weeks ago, and she wasn’t about to be caught with an empty gun again if she could help it. But the weight of the extension, plus the added ammunition, made the shotgun more forward heavy than it’d been when it just had the standard magazine tube. Not that much heavier, but enough to make a difference. She could feel it in the feedback loop of her telekinesis as she hefted the weapon about to test the weight balance, how it swung from one target to another, how much more mana she needed to put into her spell to keep it steady. The barrel clamp that slid over the barrel and tube extension now seemed less superfluous than it’d looked when she’d bought it. Part of her was afraid the added weight would cause the extension to slightly bend out of place over time—with the clamp in place, it was firmly secured in perfect alignment with the barrel and wasn’t going anywhere, ever.

The trade-off, in her opinion, was worth it. She could work with the added weight, eventually get to where she could get it on target just as quick as before, and it wasn’t as though the gun was any longer now than it was before.

The 5.56mm revolver, on the other hand…she had no idea what to make of it. She’d never fired one, never worked on one ‘till she found the spare pistol on that dead sergeant, and it’d taken about three days of reading up on the repair manual before she’d been able to replace the damaged cylinder on the one she’d found in the stable. Five shot motorized cylinder, with a fresh spark battery to power it…she could easily see the cylinder being bored out for eight rounds, considering the size of the cartridges themselves, but the five-shot cylinder made sense considering the pressure levels a rifle round put out. More metal to contain the pressures, without overstressing the chamber walls. She couldn’t see this cylinder wearing out, provided it didn’t get hit hard enough to crack it.

She just hoped the five-inch barrel didn’t rob the bullet of its velocity. The round was meant for a much longer barrel and rifling length. Then again, the designers had to have thought of that when they built the things in the first place. And she had felt a tinge of magic enchantments in the gun whenever she handled it…

The clink and jingle of loose rounds brought her attention back to the world around her, and she briefly turned her gaze off of the 5.56mm pistol to see who was playing around with their ammo—

—she spotted El-Tee sullenly gathering a small collection of .38 Special rounds from a box she’d laid out beside her pistols, soullessly floating them into her five speedloaders in a manner that resembled an automated manufacturing line—the rounds were held in a straight line and simply fed into the loaders as they were rotated around to present empty holes to the first cartridge in line. Once filled, they were locked in place and the loader set down on the ground. It took her maybe twelve seconds to load all five loaders.

A month ago, it would’ve taken her a minute…

With Kite having gone off out of sight for a moment to answer the call of nature, she had just enough time to find out for sure if BJ had said something to kill her good spirits. She knew the filly hadn’t gone off just to make sure he could handle two rambunctious puppies….and Kite probably did too, but she hadn’t wanted to say anything about it out loud.

“…he didn’t take all that too well, did he?”

El-Tee didn’t even look up at her. She just set the loaders down on the ground and started streaming rounds into the two 9mm pistol magazines she’d emptied earlier. “…not really, no. Can’t really blame him.”

“Let Kite and BJ sort that out. Don’t get in the way.”

El-Tee stopped loading momentarily when she’d topped off the first magazine, a disappointed sigh escaping her lips. “I…I know that’s probably a better idea, but I still wanna help. BJ has a hard time trusting anybody. It took you gettin’ shot up and sliced and my freaking out over it to open him up, and he don’t get why his mom gets angry at him at times. There’s something else she ain’t told him that’s eatin’ at her, and it has to do with him…”

Sling felt a tight knot begin to form in her stomach. If El-Tee had already figured that much out, how much longer before she inadvertently stumbled onto the truth? “…I’ll see what I can do. I ain’t promising anything, that’s something that seriously freaks her out if it’s mentioned. The one time I asked, it seemed to trigger some really bad memories that got her shaking and trembling like she was reliving it. Don’t push it, just let her be. I’ll deal with it.”

Light Tail’s mouth sputtered in disappointment, but she kept her dispositions to herself and simply resumed loading the other magazine, just as a light green triangle began to morph into being at the edge of her vision. Sling followed the EFS mark towards the approaching life form—

—Kite’s body sauntered back into the street from the darkened shadows of an alley between two half-demolished houses, her eyes settling on the service rifle she’d left lying on the ground unloaded. “...not so sure I’m up for this now…”

“We’re doing it anyway,” Sling shot back gently, turning back towards the fence at the end of the street, roughly twenty yards away. “If anything, blowing the crap out of ancient milk bottles will be rather cathartic. Take up a weapon and load up.”

To her left, she heard the familiar slap of a magazine finding its way home inside its pistol, followed by the sharp clack! of a slide snapping forward a half second later. Kite was far less enthused about it, but managed to have the service rifle up and loaded in about six seconds.

Firstly, demonstrate…

“Sight alignment is easy when there’s no one shooting at you,” she began, taking hold of her 5.56mm pistol and pressing down on the cylinder release—and holding it in place as the motorized cylinder swung free from the frame, to keep the ejectors from pushing the five loaded rounds out automatically, a feature she’d figured out the hard way. “When you’re panicked and terrified it gets a lot harder, you’re lucky if all you get is a group size larger than from when you’re practicing. You want to focus on the front sight, and not necessarily on the front and rear together. You should still see enough of the rear sight to get it aligned with the front sight. It’s normal for the rear sight and your target to be on the blurry side, but keep your focus on the front sight.”

“Says the mare with the eagle-like eyesight,” Kite muttered bitterly. “I swear that solution OD gave us actually improved your vision…”

“Quiet you,” she shot back, though she was not nearly as irritated with the comment as she pretended to be. All she had left over from that gunfight was a set of scars on her face and left side—and a slightly different outlook on life. “Where you settle the sights on the target matters too, and this is where it gets tricky. Depending on the model of the gun, you either set the sights directly over the target, or just under it at what’s called a 6 o’clock hold. For the handguns that we have, centering the sights on the target seems to get the best results—”

She followed her instruction with a quick check of the front sight blade on the 5.56mm revolver, and was satisfied to see a slightly blurred image of the rear sight that crept up under the front sight blade in her vision. “Everybody’s eyes are different, too. Some folk can’t focus on the front sight with both eyes open, they blur together, or they get double vision trying to focus on the front sight. For those types of problems, just sight in with your dominant eye, close the other one—”

Even as she spoke, she followed suit, putting her focus on the front sight with both eyes open…and was inwardly elated to see no change in her vision, as usual. Front sight was clear, rear sight stayed slightly blurry but didn’t split into two distinct ghostly images, and she could still see a clear target—a weathered, sunbaked milk bottle stuck onto the remains of a mailbox pole—

“Never had that problem,” Kite mumbled, and out of the corner of her left eye Sling could see her aiming down the street at the various targets scattered about on the fence in front of them. “…good to know for when my eyes start getting older, though.”

“El-Tee’s eyes are actually better than mine, too,” Sling added. “Almost 20/10, like I had before that accident I had in the infirmary three years back. Probably how she spotted that yao guai so quick the first day we were out of the stable.”

“I still think it was really mad from its bad mange,” Light Tail said, also playing around with the sights on her 9mm pistol. “And I also think we’re getting sidetracked. We can talk and play later.”

The child admonishes the adult…now I know she’s growing up too fast…

With a slightly heavier heart Sling unleashed her ingrained hearing protection spell over their ears—she’d been teaching it to the others the last two weeks, but for this particular practice session she wanted their focus on their shooting, rather than the new magic spell they’d been trying to get the hang of. “…right, anyways, once you get the sights aligned and on your target, then comes the shot. Squeeze the trigger straight back, don’t jerk it—”

And with those words, she deftly swung the front sight over the center of the milk bottle, smoothly rolled the trigger back in a near-unconscious squeeze of her spell field—

—the report, even with the hearing protection, was sharper than she’d thought it would be, though the rather large, star-like muzzle flash that accompanied the gunshot was just about what she expected to get out of a such a short barrel for a 5.56mm round. Velocity, however, seemed to still be in “rifle” range, as the muzzle flash had barely appeared before she heard the milk bottle shatter into hundreds of pieces and fly in just about every direction imaginable. Recoil wasn’t that bad, probably a little less than a 9mm given that the pistol weighed about five pounds. As a quick test of its shooting speed, she went ahead and sighted in on a rather large fragment of the milk bottle that had begun to sail upward, tracking its path upward for a half second while she zeroed in on it—

—a second squeeze turned this flying piece of debris into dozens of even smaller shards, with the same trigger pull pressure as the first shot, just like she’d have expected on a semi-automatic. Two shots, just under a second…

…okay, yes, she already loved this gun. Cylinder rotated by the motor automatically after every shot, internal hammer cocked at the same time as the cylinder rotation, rounds ejected automatically upon opening the cylinder so she could get the fresh rounds in a little faster, accurate at the ranges she intended to be shooting it, and velocity was still high…yes, she could work around the five-shot cylinder in a pinch with some practice…

“Show-off,” Kite spat with slight disgust.

“I don’t think I could do that in an actual gunfight,” she shot back darkly, unlatching the cylinder and catching the rounds as they were cleared from their chambers—even the three unfired rounds. One drawback to the automatic ejection, she supposed. “Once your target starts moving and shooting back at you, the stress and adrenaline hits you like a train, which is why mastering the basics is so important. And they take time to get right. Every day you keep at it, you get better. So start popping bottles.”

It was probably just as well that they only got sixty rounds of ammo to practice with. Barely a second after Elly’s last shot, the skies had darkened considerably to the point that it was almost mistaken for nightfall, and the constant, randomly located flashes of white light and streaks of lightning crackling through the clouds compelled them to seek shelter back indoors before the rain hit.

Still, Sling was right about one thing—watching those bottles explode into hundreds of pieces every time she hit it was kinda fun. Even….what was that word she used? Cathartic? She imagined a couple of bottles to be the faces of former, more abusive masters, and though the elation was only brief when they shattered, it was definitely uplifting. Took her mind off things, and made her want to focus on shooting better so she could do it again. All told, she got about twenty hits. A one out of three hit ratio. Sling said that was pretty good, but coming from a mare that had shot a bottle, and then popped one of the flying shards barely a half second later just for fun, with a gun she’d never fired before, that sounded more like the kind of half-hearted praise that a disappointed teacher would give their student for at least trying to learn the lesson.

Sling, apparently, didn’t believe that.

“I’m serious, you didn’t do that bad,” she said over her withers, though most of her attention was focused on the pile of firearms on the coffee table at the edge of their hotel room. “One out of three is a lot better than one out of five or six.”

“On targets that didn’t move,” Kite bit back, lying listlessly on the bed in the center of the room. The kids were, thankfully, preoccupied with giving the pups a bath in the adjoining bathroom, giving them a little semblance of personal space. “You’re right, though, I’d never hit anything in a real fight.”

“....I didn’t, either,” Sling sighed in dismay. “Out of all that shooting in that scrapyard, I only actually killed one of Saurus’s mercs with gunfire. I killed the other one with that knife I found in the stable. The ants were easy, they had no sense of self-preservation. They literally walked up into our sights. But a pony or griffon? Whole different story. If you can get the drop on your target you’ve got them, but once they know you’re there and they can get to cover, it comes down to who can get the hits that count first. There are a lot of things about that fight I should’ve done differently, now that I look at it harder….but it’s given me an idea, too.”

Kite bolted upright almost instantly. She’d thought the stable pony had only said those things to get her and her boy to moving along with them as they snuck out of Maize. She didn’t think she’d actually be stupid enough to try it. “….you’re kidding.”

“Dead serious,” Sling half-snarled, her magic re-assembling the 9mm into a working firearm once more. Once she’d played with the slide and trigger enough to be satisfied that it was working, she set it aside and pulled up Elly’s small revolver from the pile. “Been thinking about it for days, cooped up in here like a pet. I can’t take him on in a stand-out fight, he’s far more experienced and trained. I’m not even sure this plan is going to work, but it’ll make the odds better.”

“You don’t have to do anything,” she blurted suddenly, trotting from the bed to the coffee table in about three seconds. “He doesn’t even know we’re here, we can sneak off again, find a way across the valley—”

“That’s the only way this is going to have a chance at working. If he finds out where we are he can set up another ambush or just come right after us. I have one shot at doing this. And he will find us if we get back on the road long enough. You know how he works better than I do, you know that much.”

“Whatever you’re planning is suicide, just drop it,” she hissed sharply into the stupid stable pony’s ears. “We’ve got a straight shot to the valley from here, a week’s travel at best and we’ll be there—”

“Through a canyon infested with mutant cannibals? Hell no, I’d rather take my chances going through Trotpeka. It’ll be easier with Saurus dead.”

“Drop. It. Please,” she insisted again, far more strongly, and maybe with more tears than she’d intended to show as she planted a forehoof on the revolver, pinning it to the table to ensure she had Sling’s full attention. “Those damned Runners can’t even find him and they’ve been looking for him for months. And even when they did find him, they did nothing but watch him rut me every other night hoping he’d lead them to more slavers. I don’t know what those bastards promised you when I wasn’t looking but it’s not worth it.”

Oddly enough, Sling did not respond with a huff or an angry voice, or even forcefully push her off of the gun as she’d expected. She just looked at her with this strange gaze of…pity? Empathy?

“…..she’ll kill me for telling you this,” Sling muttered at last, releasing her hold on the revolver and simply picking another gun from the pile to clean. “….but Ada’s hunting him for personal reasons. They’re siblings.”

Kite’s brain, sharp as it was, began to fuddle and misfire as it tried to process how two wildly different griffons could possibly be related in any way. “….y-you mean….like….blood-related?”

“He was a Runner himself,” Sling answered calmly. “Which is how he knows how they operate, and how he’s able to avoid those two so well. He…didn’t take the Runner’s stalemate agreement with the Union all that well. Or at least that’s what Ada says. Before long he was drowning his rage in every female he could pin to the ground. When their father finally had his fill of it, he took her with him to deal with him, one way or another. It didn’t turn out well for either of them….he had back-up, and they were too shocked with what they saw to fight better than they did. He killed his own father….and…”

Sling’s mouth paused a moment, as if stumbling over how to press on with her grisly tale…

“….and, after that, he vanished. For a while. He showed up a few years later, made a mess of things on their side of the prairie, and she asked to be the one to track him and kill him. But I imagine she’s finding it harder to actually do it once she finds him, despite what he did. Family is still family, I guess….even the crazy, rape-inclined members of one’s flock.”

Now it was Kite’s turn to stumble over her words. If Sling was making all of this up on the spot, it was a hell of a tale. But something in her gut told her otherwise—that Sling was holding something back. Saurus supposedly killed his own father in a gunfight and….and then what? Just left? Saurus wasn’t one to run off from a fight he won unless he was alone and wounded…

“…..you’re not telling me everything.”

“I’ve told you enough. Leave it at that, trust me.”

Oh, buck you, you start showing signs that you actually trust me and you still hold out on me?! I already know what that sick bastard is capable of, he did it to me often enough I can tak—

Her thoughts screeched to a halt, a sudden dawning beginning to rise to conscious thought as she recalled the weeks of carnal abuse she’d suffered at his talons…

…and…

…her tail began to shake at the implications.

“…o-oh my gods…he…h-his own sister…”

Sling’s breath came out in a heavy sigh, and set her 10mm pistol down onto the table with its slide locked open. “…I told you to leave it…”

But Kite’s body couldn’t stop shaking now. Not now. As much as she wanted to hate those Runners for failing to do anything to stop him…if it was true…and….and she just watched, instead of acting…

“….oh, Luna, how could she watch all that…”

“She watched because she wanted to find out exactly how many others he was selling those poor souls to, and how big an operation he ran, probably to track down the unguilded slavers and kill them. And it must have killed her inside to watch from a distance, knowing what you were suffering, and having to put that aside for the sake of trying to save as many other enslaved souls as she could get to, not just you and the few he kept in tow. I think, if she could have popped him right there and still accomplished that goal later on, she would’ve done it the moment she found him.”

“….a-and you still want to find this sick bastard?!” Kite hissed back.

“No,” Sling answered coolly. “I want him to find me. ”

Her eyes widened, nearly encompassing her entire face (at least, she thought so). “….w-what?”

“I want him to find me. And I want him to walk right into what I’ve got planned for him. BJ was telling me a few stories about the war the other day, including one where the Runners rigged an abandoned town with so many improvised munitions that they wiped out nearly sixty Union troops with just the traps alone. Grenades, shotguns, pipe rifles, spike pits…if we can find something similar, find enough junk parts to make some one-shot pipe guns….we can do the same thing. If not kill him, at least give me a good shot at an even fight so I can take him out. It’s the only chance we have save for finding Ada and Leon and teaming up with them, and I have no idea where or how to find those two.”

“….a-are you insane? Listen to yourself—”

“How far do you think we’ll get with him out there?” Sling shot back, throwing a hard, angry glare back at her. “To the next town? Trotpeka? Across the valley itself? He will find us, you know that. Right now, he doesn’t know where we are, and we have this once chance to take advantage of it. I do not want to try this later once he’s picked up our trail. I want him thinking he’s tracked me down without me knowing about it. If he thinks for even a minute that I’m anticipating him he’ll vanish and the next time we see him is when he’s filling me with holes and taking you and El-Tee as playthings. Don’t fight me on this, please, I want to know that he will never lay a claw on any of us again…”

O-o-oh gods, she’s playing that card…I…I can’t let her do this, I can’t—

Her heart stopped cold, her own ears and eyes beginning to play tricks on her as she tried to think of some way to dissuade this crazy mare from her path to oblivion. She couldn’t allow this.

Can’t let her do this, not again—

“—IIIIIITE!!! HELP MEEEEEE—”

A flick of her tail chased the terrified screams away, but the memory still lingered. Luna help me I don’t wanna hear her scream like that again, I don’t wanna see her breaking, c’mon you stupid bitch think of something—

—a buried, long-dormant urge spurred her forward, encompassing the mare’s neck in a tight hold as she lashed out with a deep kiss—

—a blink of her eyes, and she was back in the room, still sitting next to Sling and her begging eyes…and awfully close to her, close enough that she could reach out with her forelimbs, draw the stable pony closer for that kiss…

…and at the last second, lowered her forelegs onto the ground, pressing them down into the floorboards to suppress the urges and desires that the other mare did not share.

“…don’t, please,” she croaked, the words barely escaping her lips in a whisper. “He nearly killed you. You said it yourself, he’s far more experienced and trained. Who’s to say he won’t see your traps, you’ve never built these things before, all you have is that book to show you how and you got lucky with those fire bottles. And you want to try building junk guns out of scrap now? What we find in the wastes is in pretty sorry shape to start with and these are the properly built guns, these…these “pipe guns”? You want to make them out of nails, screws, and water pipes lying in the open for centuries? If he doesn’t kill you for this stupid stunt, your own traps will. Drop it. Flee. Don’t…don’t do this…”

Surprisingly, Sling didn’t have anything to say right off, though she seemed to take great notice of how her front legs were seemingly struggling to stay put. “...why are you fighting me so hard on this? I’d have thought killing him would be a dream come true for you.”

“I don’t care anymore,” she blubbered (blubbered, with actual tears). “I just want as far away from this place as I can get. I don’t want to hear Elly screaming and crying ‘cause you got yourself killed going after that bastard, I don’t want your blood all over me, I…”

…o-oh shit, I didn’t mean to say that out loud…

Having put herself in an exceptionally awkward corner, she had suddenly found it next to impossible to speak any further, no matter how hard she tried to. Even Sling seemed stunned by what she’d just cried out, perhaps sensing the unspoken, subtle meaning behind those words.

Unspoken meanings that she’d never meant to let get out.

With a choked gasp she turned away, retreating back to the bed and burying herself into its patched, fraying blankets in a vain attempt to hide from the world.

She felt like a complete and utterly insensitive ass. She’d not once thought of how that ordeal might’ve affected Kite, only that it had happened and that she would’ve died without her help. Light Tail’s scars were easily seen and tended to, but…

…but until last night, Kite had done a stellar job of hiding hers. If not for that buried infatuation she still harbored, she probably could have done it for months on end.

Or had she grown to see her and Light Tail as something more than just mere traveling companions? Dare she say it…friends?

Something she’d been sorely lacking in since El-Tee’s birth?

Breakfast offered no answers or solace from these thoughts. Nor did the preparing of their weapons and traveling equipment for the next leg of their journey west. Wrestling control of their kids and two rapidly growing husky pups disrupted her inner musings for about as long as it took to get El-Tee and BJ to stop playing with each other’s heads and get their stuff together. They were starting to get worse and worse since that caravan ride, now they seemed to playfully bicker and argue almost daily, seeing how long they could keep it going. The other day it seemed as if they’d never shut up…

It was only now, briefly, that Sling could bring her thoughts together and try to mend things with her…

…no, not a guide. They had learned too much about each other, gone through too much, to still just be two mares with a mutual goal of escape. She was still hesitant to call Kite a friend…but she was now clearly much more than just an organic guidebook to this wasteland. So “friend” would have to do.

And because she wanted to try and do this right, she changed her mind and allowed the moment of clarity to pass in silence. There were far more important things to put her mental energy into today than trying to figure out what to say to an extensively abused ex-slave without sounding like the insensitive ass she perceived herself to be…

“Which way we goin’, Mom?” El-Tee’s voice prodded gently into her thoughts, just as she’d finished strapping her traveling saddle on.

“…highway heading west will get us back on track,” Kite’s subdued tone mumbled from the corner of the hotel room, still fiddling with her own saddlebags. “…exit forty-nine will take us south, three hours out…”

El-Tee, ever the perceptive little bugger that she was, took note of Kite’s somber and unenthusiastic mood almost immediately. “…Kite, you okay?”

“Let’s just…go, okay?”

Ahhh, shit…

“…Beige, you were right,” El-Tee announced somewhat casually. “Our moms were fighting while the pups were drowning us in the bath tub last night.”

“Dammit,” the colt blurted angrily almost immediately. “Seriously, yesterday wasn’t enough? We gotta do it again now?”

This was not how she’d expected the stroll into the wastes to go. The children were ganging up on the adults, and they’d heard more of their discussion last night than either of them were comfortable with. “Let’s not—”

But Sling’s words went unheeded, as her daughter merely picked up where BJ left off. “I mean really, you two are worse than us, and we’re just playing half the time. You gotta admit it, Mom, your plan depends too much on things goin’ accordin’ to plan…or something.”

“And how much of my ‘plan’ did you catch eavesdropping on us?” she challenged back, in vain.

“Enough to know you need more than an afternoon to pull it off. Saurus has lived out here his entire life. He’s seen more and done more than you have, his guns are a lot bigger, and he knows how to use ‘em. He was shootin’ through my freakin’ cover two weeks ago, how do you fight somethin’ like that?!”

Sling’s ears and eyes briefly flashed back to that afternoon, to that hollowed-out sky wagon and the harsh clang of high-velocity rifle rounds shearing through the aged metal…

“Plus there’s the fact that he’s like, y’know, super crafty and shit,” BJ added, as nonchalantly as ever, though it was quite surreal to hear him saying anything in support of El-Tee at all. “In the few weeks that Mom and I were in his clutches we never, ever saw him just walk into a place without scoping it out real close first. He could spot two-thirds of the traps I told you about the other day, because he knows how to set them up himself. If you’re really serious about killing him, you’re gonna have to do it head-on. Try to outthink him and you’ll end up dead. Trust me on that one….you’re not the first to think to come after him like that, and it didn’t work out for those guys. Won’t work out for you either. You’d have to know him like family to get the drop on him, and I bet they’re all dead. Let’s just run.”

“Yes, run,” Light Tail agreed, with an almost playful flair, even going so far as to point a forehoof out in front of her. “To the west!”

“You’re pointing to the south.”

“You know what I meant! Anyways, look, if Saurus really wants to go to all the trouble to track you down no matter where you go, at least out west he can’t get as many hired guns. And those Runners probably want him dead badly enough that they’ll help us out. We’re on our own out here, but if we can get over the valley, we can get help. And get Kite and BJ away from these stupid Union jerks.”

Sling’s mouth had barely opened to protest when the plain obliviousness of her child’s words smacked her senses awake as if she’d been blind half her life. She was so worked up, so pissed off at the idea of Saurus doing anything foul to her only child, that she’d squirreled it away and used it as a silent fuel for every half-decent plan she could throw together within the next week to kill the bastard. Using herself as bait, setting up a town full of death traps, even outright hunting him down like a bounty…and here said child was, using far more common sense than any child had any right to have, telling her own mother she was better off just swallowing that pride and anger and getting help. It was dangerous to be on the road for long, yes…but in hindsight now, all of her own plans required some degree of travel and risk themselves. Saurus would eventually find them, either way…

…and Light Tail was right. She’d rather he find her in a place where she could get help and not worry about the Union getting in the way. Hell, going west into Runner territory might even make him back off rather than risk tangling with his former merc band…

“…she’s quiet,” BJ spat with a blunt edge. “Starting to look like she’s been slapped in the face. I think you got through to her. Again.”

“Nah, wait a tic, she’ll swoop me up in some big hug, then we’ll know it worked—”

“It worked,” Sling blurted softly, a small sigh escaping in the process. “…you had me at “get Kite and BJ away from these stupid Union jerks’.”

Light Tail’s face began to scrunch up in confusion, as if she’d expected a much more dramatic conclusion to the whole mess. “…re…really? …just like that?”

“Just like that,” she confirmed, with as little flair and drama as possible. El-Tee was right, to a point, she could get overly emotional at times. Even so, she couldn’t help but raise a forehoof, pointing towards the west (at least according to her EFS compass overlay)… “…to the west. That way.”

El-Tee’s face began to break into a mad, gleeful grin as her body perked up, and she began to hop and canter out of the hotel room and into the hallway. “Hey Beige, last one down forfeits the granola bar at lunch today!”

BJ’s growing fondness for the various-flavored oat/grain/nut bars that served as treats in their Stable-made rations caused the colt to forget to be angry at being called that pet name she’d come up with on a whim, and he hurriedly chased after the filly and her rambunctious husky pups in a mad fit to catch up. “Like hell I’m giving that up, get back here—”

The kids and pups quickly vanished beyond the door, their hooves and paws thumping through the wooden floor and creaking, paint-stripped walls, leaving Sling alone with what appeared to a visibly-shaken and shocked m—

…o-oh, shit, she managed not to say aloud the moment she took a closer look at Kite’s body language. She seemed to be on the verge of crying, or….or something, but the way she kept trying to squeeze her forehooves into the floor, like she was forcing herself to stay put and not do whatever it was she wanted to do right then…

Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit have I just gotten onto her permanent good side—

“…K-Kite…look, you were right,” she breathed uneasily, her body taking a short step backward. “…you made me promise to take you home in exchange for your help getting over the valley…I should’ve been trying to do that the moment I agreed to it.”

Surprisingly, Kite managed to keep a level voice when she answered. “…yes, you should have…but at least your detours got us
enough weapons to do it with…just…no more sidetracking. No more stupid plans to try and outsmart a griffon that knows better than you do how those plans work. Let’s just…get away from here. Make those stupid Runners clean up their own mess. They’re good enough at fixing everyone else’s troubles, they can handle their own.”

Sling saw an opportunity to get away from this increasingly uncomfortable situation on a good note, and decided to simply do just that instead of screwing it up. “…soo…still the same route, then? West for a bit, then south?”

“Y-yeah. Should be an old granary between here and that southern highway if we need emergency shelter, we’ll just…ignore the old farm town at the junction…”

…right…the town I was looking for to turn into a death trap…

“Yeah. Ignore it. We can hoof it all the way to the next town, if we have to. That’d be…what, thirty-two miles?”

“More or less. The…the actual distance, if you drew a straight line from here to there, would be more like twenty, but we’d have to cross the wastes, and I don’t know what all’s in that particular part of the world to our southwest. There’s an old dry lake bed just north of the highway we’re taking, might have an ant nest or three. Once we hit the junction we’ll be out of their foraging range….”

S-shit, bugs, she shivered, her hindquarters already quivering slightly at the thought of having to face mutant ants again. But at least this time, it would be in the open, and they wouldn’t be heading into a cramped tunnel at her insistence…

“…I’ll keep the PipBuck on,” she assured her with a slight nervous tinge. “…w-we should get going. Long day ahead of us.”

Kite’s pained words came out in a long, desperate gasp. “…no shit…y-you go on down, I need a minute…”

Her initial instinct was to do exactly the opposite, but something in Kite’s voice re-wired that response into a more cautious approach, and she found herself wordlessly trotting out the door before she could think to do otherwise. Kite wanted some space, for some reason…and it suddenly felt very wise to give her that space.

Even wiser to make sure the kids weren’t wandering off from being left on their own for more than ten seconds.

Thankfully, they promised to be at least a little controllable today—they’d parked themselves on the sidewalk, passing the time with more of their mind games, and barely even registered her presence at first.

“—ith my not-so-little eyes, something that starts with ‘R’,” Light Tail’s voice droned almost soullessly, to which BJ immediately responded in kind.

“Road.”

“Strike one, try again slugger.”

“Rubble.”

“Oh for two. One last swing, make it a good one.”

“Ruined house.”

“And you. Are. Out! It was ‘Reed Avenue’ on that little sign post by the corner, right over there.”

“Damn, I can’t even read that from here. What kind of spell did you use to see that?”

“It’s called superior eyesight,” Sling butted in, now that she was certain they wouldn’t so much as even acknowledge her presence until she made it known. “She gets that from me.”

She found herself surprised by the kids for the second time in less than five minutes. “Thought you’d be up there longer,” BJ muttered over his shoulders, not even bothering to look behind him, though she couldn’t overlook the subtle insinuation in his voice. “…my mom okay?”

“She’ll be down in a minute, then we’ll get going,” she answered swiftly, just as Max’s cold nose began sniffing at her left foreleg, and she gently shooed the pup away from her with a soft nudge. “She also mentioned the potential for ant nests along the first half of the day’s journey, so we won’t be stopping until we hit the highway junction southward. Go easy on the water.”

“Might get lucky and find a working soda machine somewhere along the road,” the colt suggested dryly. “Better than nothing.”

“Ech, no,” Light Tail spat with disgust, which surprised her since she seemed to like her first taste of the stuff weeks ago. “Stuff goes through me in like, an hour. Got better things to do than constantly trying to find someplace to go in peace.”

“New rule, no soda for the baby, got it.”

“And don’t let Max or Mona have a sip either, they’re hyper enough without all that sugar.”

“Think they’re getting that from you.”

“At least they’re getting something useful. Who’d wanna be a boring, dead-faced blank flank?”

“This boring, dead-faced blank flank will be all the rage with the ladies when he grows up.”

“Oh, they’ll be raging all right—”

“By the Sisters’ eternal souls, stop that,” Kite’s irritated voice growled suddenly from behind, her voice almost overpowering the sounds of her hooves as they passed onto the concrete sidewalk through the doorway. “I could hear you two halfway down the stairs.”

Kite’s warning did not seem to have the effect that she’d intended—the kids merely stopped bantering back and forth long enough to stare at each other for a few moments, as if silently conferring with each other how best to respond to that particular comment.

And Sling decided to let them. It wasn’t as though they’d get to have any fun all that often, now that they were more or less back to traveling along the slaver and raider-infested wastes…

“…if she can hear us with all those walls and junk between us and her, how does she not know we’re eavesdropping on her?” BJ asked aloud after a few moments.

“Attention span, maybe?” El-Tee pondered in return. “They really weren’t paying any attention to what was going on around ‘em, they just argued with each other about what to do about Saurus. They didn’t even seem to wanna know why Max and Mona were constantly whining and crying about their bath—”

Sling’s mind allowed itself a small, momentary thought of darkness, of how easily somepony could sneak by her to harm either of the children when her attention was focused on something else entirely, and decided that she’d allowed them to play with everyone’s heads long enough. “I promise you that will not happen twice,” she bellowed into their world, jolting them both back to the reality of having to deal with their mothers once more. “From now on neither of you will be left alone for very long, dogs or not.”

The kids’ response almost made her laugh, despite how serious she’d meant to be right then. Both foals began glancing back and forth between each other and their moms, their forelegs pointing at them, or at their moms, or both at once, as they tried to wordlessly work out what to do about that particular commandment—

…and then, after roughly three seconds, they just promptly gave up with a large, exaggerated sigh (at the same time, even), and sullenly turned to face the streets in front of them.

They’re not done, a cautious voice warned in the back of her head. They will hound you for another quarter-hour, at the least, and you cannot stop it.

“…just…put that endless energy into keeping an eye out on the highway,” Kite whined quietly as she trotted past them, apparently intent on taking the lead for the moment. “We got a long walk today…”

The voice in her head continued to whisper warnings of seemingly endless hours filled with the sound of playfully bickering children, yipping puppies, and the hostile growls of a mare at her wit’s end with these merciless antics of the young. The voice assured her that her own patience would be tested by mid-day as she fell into step behind Kite, ushering the kids along with a soft click of her tongue. The voice all but promised her an evening of literary antics as El-Tee and BJ continually tried to best the other in long-running back-and-forth conversations or, failing that, to see which of them could get their moms to snap first (it was increasingly looking likely that Kite’s patience would fail first).

It never warned her of the hardships that loomed ahead.