She didn’t think the mare’s “talk” with Puck had been all that amicable or peaceful, but it wasn’t until she saw the bastard hobbling down the street, his forelegs covered in blood-soaked bandages and what looked like dozens of spidery stitches that made her cringe in uncomfortable places, that she realized that the mystery stable mare’s subtle rage had a very violent breaking point. It was one reason why she hadn’t mentioned the little fact that Puck was making her out to be his next—and youngest—call girl, but somehow or another she’d found out anyway.

She wanted to take pleasure in his suffering, the small, almost unnoticeable shift in his eyes of a defeated ego having met up with a soul who was not the least bit afraid of him. She wanted to squeal at every painful step he took even if it made her tense up thinking about how all those stitches felt when he so much as twitched a leg. She wanted to memorize every unstable shake of his tail as he drew closer to his bar, his one sanctuary in an uncaring wasteland, every minor quiver of his hindquarters as he seemingly fought the urge to relieve himself in public.

The moment he stopped his forward progress to turn into the alley with a hurried, pained gasp, all she could feel for her former “boss” was a sad, unexplainable pity that his day had turned out so very different than what he had expected. And as a cry of sharp anguish rang out from the alley and through the walls of Miss Glossy Shine’s bathhouse, she swore she would say she almost felt bad for him.

Almost…but not quite. Not after what he’d planned to put her through. But she still couldn’t shake off that….that look of mortal terror, as he tried to return to what had once been his sole castle, and now seemed to do nothing but remind him of a certain teal blue unicorn with an extremely violent side to her when pushed the wrong way. She didn’t feel the least bit sorry for him….

….but she couldn’t bring herself to laugh at his misfortune, either.

She turned away from the window and wandered back into the depths of the bathhouse’s rear corridors before she could get to thinking too much longer about that kind of thing. She had other things to take care of, now that the place was closed for the night. Like getting her stuff back, permanently, and getting paid. Last night, Shine had told her trusting that mare was a mistake, and she’d expected to be able to say “Guess it wasn’t!” the next time they met.

She never got to.

Miss Shine’s first question when the teen filly poked her head through the office door should have clued her in on it, but she paid it no mind. “….was that Puck I just heard a minute ago?”

“….yeah,” Rally replied, squeezing through the doorway and shutting it behind her. “Think he’s pissing himself all over your outside wall.”

Miss Shine’s face scrunched up slightly in distaste. “….don’t tell me you enjoy seeing him reduced to such a state.”

“….it’s hard to feel bad for him, considering he was about to lock me into a room to “service” adults,” she spat back. “What was it you said about that mare? Couldn’t trust her?”

“And I haven’t changed my mind one damned bit,” Miss Shine hushed her with a hard glare and a snappy tone. “I know you want your things back, that you think you’re safe with her, but you’re not.”

Oh god, again?! “We’ve been through this already—”

“Then we’ll do it again because things have changed,” she cut her off. “You can’t trust her.”

“Because she’s “using” me? She got both of our guns back and she got me out of a tight spot when everypony else was telling me to suck it up and take it, and I can’t trust her? Explain that one to me, please.”

“I was at Doc Bones’ place today. I saw what that ‘Sling Shot’ did to him, if that’s even her real name—”

It took Rally a couple of seconds to figure out who she was referring to, and then mentally slapped herself for forgetting the mare’s name so easily. Then again, she’d barely paid any attention to her when she’d introduced herself and her kid to Miss Shine….

“I don’t care what name she goes by, I care what she does, and she’s already done a lot more in one day than most folk have in the three weeks I’ve been stuck here.”

“That crazy….bitch hacked his legs up!” Miss Shine spat with a barely restrained fervor. “Shot Twister’s knees out, Bones doesn’t think either of them will ever get full use of their legs again!! She’s dangerous!”

“Then it sounds like Puck finally went and pissed off the wrong person. He was bound to someday.”

“And has it occurred to you that this “wrong person” is the last soul you should be making friends with!? By the sun, open your damned eyes for a second and look at this whole situation! Normal people don’t slice other people up like celery sticks on a whim, they don’t shoot out the legs of folks ten seconds after seeing them for the first time, and they don’t just switch from calm to fucking murderous in less than an eye blink!! There’s something wrong with her and you need to stay away from her!!”

Rally’s words died in her throat as she tried to process what Miss Shine had just screamed at her. She had never been this….this forceful, about anything to her before, but this time….by the gods, she was even crying a little, if those tears really were genuine. And she never quite swore like that unless…

…well, to be honest, she’d never heard her curse before. It kinda scared her a little. Either Miss Shine was just a tad bit possessive….or she really was worried about her….

…but either way, Miss Shine was not the kind of pony she needed help from right now. If anything, staying with her would just get her killed, and she wouldn’t forgive herself if that happened.

“….normal people don’t break a little girl’s nose and try to force her into a whore’s life after screwing them over into a debt trap,” she sniped back bitterly. “Whatever issues that mare’s got right now, she was the only one who gave enough of a shit to get me away from that backstabbing snake when everypony else just let him do what he wanted to me. I am not asking you for approval, I am asking for my stuff back. You can keep the caps you were going to pay me for today’s work as my thanks for holding onto it for me.”

She saw Miss Shine’s lips begin to quiver slightly, and she wished right then that she’d caved in and let her win. But the mare stopped fighting with her and retrieved her bag from the locked safe, though she did so with such sloppy hooves that Rally began to believe that she was on the verge of breaking into tears…..

….and she didn’t want to be anywhere near here when that happened.

She swiped her bag off of the desk and showed herself out of the bathhouse in silence for the second time in twenty-four hours, half-wondering if she’d just ruined any chance she had of getting back into Miss Shine’s good graces if this thing with Sling Shot didn’t work out. And it stood no chance of working out at all if she didn’t come right out and tell her what was going on with her life. She didn’t want to hang around the mare for a couple of days and have the bastards drop down on them out of the blue, no warning or nothing. If she’d messed Puck up like that over a girl she’d just met, what would she do to people that went after her kid?

…..shit, maybe Miss Shine’s onto something….

…so, the best way to avoid getting caught in her wrath was to just be up-front with her from the start, before things could get out of hand. If the mare didn’t want to risk her life or her kid’s afterward….well, she was screwed. Royally. By Luna and Celestia, and maybe the moon and sun while they were at it. Only other option she could see was to cross the valley and risk getting swept up by the slavers, and then she’d be back where she’d been with Puck—trapped, capless, weaponless, and almost completely powerless to do anything about it…or the things that might be done to her.

Shit let this work let this work, became a repeating mantra of prayer and hope all the way back to Sling’s rent-free room (she didn’t ask how she managed to do that)—

“Something on your mind?” the mare’s voice crept into her panicked thoughts, just as her nose bumped into the adult pony’s barrel without even realizing it, and the sudden contact of both body and voice jolted her into a slight leap of terror that ended with a less-than-graceful landing on three hooves.

“L-lotta things on my mind!” she chittered back, hearing the door squeak shut behind her as she set her bag on the floor. “Lots of…things, and….stuff….”

“Something specific to your jumping bean act just now?” the mare smiled back, slightly, rolling out what looked to be an adult-sized sleeping bag across the middle of the room.

Well, she’s quick to sniff out trouble, Rally bemoaned silently, watching as the mare began setting out a pair of wool blankets by the sleeping bag, presumably to serve as pillows. …not that she’s wrong….

Despite it being her plan the whole time, now that the opportunity had essentially been hoof-delivered to her, she found it a lot harder to actually say anything about it. Where to start, or how much to tell her, especially since she seemed to be putting an effort into making sleeping space for a third soul instead of forcing her to share a bed with one of them.

Then again, it could have also been because the husky pups seemed to be taking up enough space on the filly’s bed that putting a teenaged filly over there would have left all four of them cramped and uncomfortable. “….lots of…specific somethings,” she whispered softly. “…mostly Miss Shine, just now…”

“Something go wrong?” Sling replied quietly, further surprising Rally when she began to slide herself into the sleeping bag, seemingly leaving the more comfortable bed free for her to take as she wished.

“….have you ever said something you wished you hadn’t?”

Sling’s head stopped lowering towards her wool blanket pillows. “….too often.”

“….it…it didn’t go like I thought,” she started as she slowly trotted around the sleeping bag to the empty bed in the corner of the room. “I was just gonna ask for my stuff back…”

“…what’d you do?” was the mare’s polite question. Non-accusing, but non-committal. Like she was simply fishing for information until she could decide if she cared or not.

“It’s not…it’s not that. It’s…she thinks you’re dangerous to me, or something. Scared of you. Lotta folk are, actually, after seeing what you did to Puck. Some even think there’s something really out of whack with you.”

“….they wouldn’t be wrong,” the mare sighed, settling into her sleeping bag and “pillows”, though for the moment her body was still facing towards the bed. “You’ve thought the same thing.”

“…some,” she admitted under Sling’s neutral glare as she pulled herself up onto the bed and slid underneath the patchy blanket. Not really the warmest thing, but a lot better than the rock-hard mattress she’d been sleeping in for the last three weeks, and she didn’t really care to sleep on floors, even in a sleeping bag. “I mean….I can just see it. The look in your eyes, the way you carry yourself…you and your kid, actually. You both just came out of something really nasty, lost somebody very important to you….who wouldn’t be messed up after that?”

Sling’s gaze forced itself away from her, though for a brief moment Rally could see a stunning flash of grief settling into her features, as if those words hit a much deeper nerve than she’d intended. Light Tail all but burst into tears talking about it earlier in the afternoon, but Sling Shot was nowhere near as willing to deal with it, and she didn’t want to see how she’d react if she found out she’d bugged her kid to get all the gory, harsh details behind her back. “….I was messed up before I ever came out here….”

Shit, back off, getting too close….

“...speaking of messed up things…there’s one you should know, if you’re gonna stick around me for long…”

Sling’s voice, despite its soft, sullen tone, surprised her with its unnerving accuracy. “…we’re all running from something,” she sighed, her words softening as she drew herself into a light sleep. “Whatever, or whoever it is you’re running from….will find very poor company if they find you.”

By the time Rally could find something to say, the mare had drifted away into a slumber, her breathing dying down to a slow, steady crawl and leaving the teen filly to try and silently ponder how she had already managed to figure it out on her own. She’d thought she’d been pretty tight-lipped about everything, honestly….

…but then again, how many fourteen-year olds were wandering across the wastes on their own, scraping by on whatever work they could get instead of settling down in the first decent place they could find? Life was harsh enough that a kid would have to be either an idiot or desperately outracing folk they’d pissed off to want to leave anything resembling safety behind. And given that Miss Glossy Shine was about as decent a pony as she could find to stay with….

….shit, she probably figured it out this morning, when I said I was just looking to get enough caps to get me back on the road…

…figured it out….

…and did nothing to encourage her to move on her way, or kick her out, and apparently still very willing to keep sticking her neck out, if what she’d just muttered in her sleepy state of mind was any clue….

She wasn’t sure how to take it. Nobody had ever gone out on a limb for her before, not like this, and now an exceptionally angry stable mare with a hair trigger hold on her rage was including her in her personal sphere of protection. For how long she did that, appeared to be solely up to little Rally.

It was enough to make her eyes slightly moisty as she hunkered down in bed and dozed off, though from her perspective it only seemed like moments when her eyes opened again. A moderate, persistent pressure in her bladder immediately revealed itself as the catalyst for her rude awakening, and her sleep-addled brain cursed at herself for forgetting to take care of business before bed. With careful, slow movements, she slid out from underneath the blanket and quietly snuck out of the room, going straight for the fire escape door at the end of the hall.

With her mind so singularly focused on one task, she didn’t realize she’d opted to use the wall on the back side of the inn until the pressure had passed and her eyes had finally figured out why she was seeing the brick-and-mortar broadside of the old law office that sat beside Puck’s inn, and by then she had already cleaned herself up with some of the contents of a small canvas pouch labeled “HYGEINE KIT MKI”, apparently lifted from the stable mare’s stuff subconsciously.

She swore at herself in disbelief as she trotted out of the back alley, and into the side alley and the bottom of the fire escape stairway, her eyes locked on the pilfered pouch and its luxurious contents. Gods alive, twenty-four hours in her company and I’m already stealing stuff from her, and I can’t even be awake enough to do my business properly in the outhouse to boot! Keep this up and you’ll be back on your own in no time, idiot!

….then again, she’d told Puck a couple of times that his shitty little inn in the wasteland was just good enough to piss on, and now she could say that she’d literally done that. It was a lot funnier the first time she thought of it.

Now when she thought about it, she kept thinking back to earlier in the evening, when Puck was so mortified at the sight of his own inn that he almost wet himself in the middle of the road….

…maybe that bothers you more than you want to admit…

With a shake of her head to clear her vision and thoughts, her forelegs began climbing up the fire escape stairs….

….and stopped mid-step when her eyes noticed the dim yellow glow of a lit lantern’s light coating the side window in the wall….

….after closing hours. Puck normally kept Willow and Ginger around after closing only long enough to clean the place up for the next day’s business, but that had been….two hours ago, maybe longer. She hadn’t really checked the time when she woke up. And given the state he was in, she doubted that he was up to making rounds around his bar to tidy up a little himself….

Her insane and perpetual curiosity—the part of her that had learned how to repair MEWs or build one from scratch with working spare parts—directed her legs to back off of the fire escape and trot around the side of the building to check the front door, which she curiously found unlocked and slightly ajar. Had she been more awake she might have judged it suspicious enough to avoid it and just retreat back to the safest place she knew of, but right then, she was simply too tired to feel little more than curiosity at how out of place things were, and why they were that way.

The answers, it turned out, were waiting for her in the back, past the kitchen. The main bar floor had been lit up by a sole lantern, and through the open kitchen behind the counter she saw another lantern aglow as well and followed the light to the back hallway, where she found that several of the overhanging lanterns had been lit in turn to illuminate the hall. The trail of light led her to the end of the hall, just outside of Puck’s office, the door slightly open and allowing her to hear every bit of what was going on inside—

“Took you long enough,” Puck’s voice complained bitterly, his words accented by a sharp gasp of pain. “I sent you word two weeks ago.”

The voice that answered was not the least bit perturbed by Puck’s mood. “I don’t work for you, I work for me,” the gruff male voice replied. “Where’s the package?”

“…upstairs,” Puck surrendered quickly. “Room five—”

It took a sharp bite of her inner lip to muffle her gasp into silence, though her heart was suddenly a lot louder in her ears.

They’d finally found her.

“She alone?”

Puck’s voice groaned slightly, probably from his legs. “….eff no. Some…some crazy mare took a fancy to her, took her in or some shit. Did this to me!”

“’Some crazy mare’ could apply to half my ex-girlfriends. Try a little harder. What does she look like, what kind of guns does she have, equipment, shit that like—”

“…she ain’t a lightweight for sure. Saw about three pistols and a shotgun on her, her brat’s got three guns herself, and they got a pair of mutts that might be trouble, they’ve stuck by the filly the whole time they’ve been here.”

“….pair of mutts…huskies?”

Her tail began shaking slightly, in accordance with the increasingly rapid beating of her heart. To even guess that correctly, he would have had to have heard something about them out there….

And even Puck wasn’t that stupid. “….you’ve heard of them?”

“Our contact in Life Tap’s guild got word to us this morning, said the Union was looking for a mare with a kid and two husky pups. Supposedly she wiped out a slaver hit squad in Trotpeka a few days back, and did it in a way they can’t figure out. She look kinda dreamy? Dark bluish coat, darker mane, wicked set of scars on the left half of her face? Kid’s got a sick streak of bright blue in her tail?”

A chorus of f-bombs and slanderous insults of the Princess Sisters’ true relationship began silently passing through her lips as she began to inch away from the door on her four slightly trembling legs. She’d heard all she needed to know.

“….that’s the bitch,” Puck seethed angrily. “….you takin’ her alive?”

“If they’re all asleep like you said, it’ll be a cinch.”

“….bring Rally and the mare down to me before you go, so I can say….“goodbye”, and you can keep the caps you were gonna pay me for the troublesome brat.”

“No go on the kid, boss wants her back unhurt, but you can ravage the mare until sunrise for all I care. What about the other one?”

“Keep her, sell her, kill her, whatever you wanna do—”

Oh fu—

She’d barely made it to the other end of the hall, around the corner, when her ears picked the last bit of bad news she could stand to hear—

“Hold onto her a bit, might have a buyer across the valley for her. Fifty-fifty cut in it for you if it comes through. If not you keep her, do whatever you want with her.”

“Deal,” Puck’s voice agreed coldly.

It was all she could do to sneak through the kitchen without breaking into a hard gallop, or to calmly trot up the stairs to the second floor instead of screaming in terror. Or to avoid bumping into the sleepy-eyed zebra mare that apparently had the same urge she’d been awakened by minutes ago, stumbling out of the room right next to number five.

The second she crashed her way back inside, though, she finally decided to panic. Just a little.

“S-Sling, get up get up!!” she tried to say quietly, though it came out as a slight shriek that managed to stir the slumbering mare regardless. It might have also helped that she was using her right leg to vigorously shake her awake, with the result being a full-grown mare being more or less pushed around by a fourteen-year old kid as though she were a mere wooden log. “Get up get up—”

“Ghhh shhhiiiiiiii quit it quit it quit it I’m up I’m up I’m up,” Sling cried out, her words coming out in an alternating crescendo of highs and lows as she was violently shaken out of whatever dream she’d just entered. “Oooohh fuuuuuuI’mgonna be sick….”

Across the room, little Light Tail’s body began to stir awake, disturbed by the sudden burst of noise and clearly not liking it. “….shuuuduuup,” the little filly begged, still half-asleep as she turned her back to the room at large.

“They’re coming!” Rally shrieked next, now that she’d gotten Sling more or less awake, and without getting punched or kicked or anything to boot. She hurriedly ran over to her stuff nestled in the corner of the room, her right hoof shifting into a griffon’s talon as it brushed over the grip of her gun. “They’re coming right now—”

Hearing the panic and dread in her voice seemed to help shake off any lingering frustration Sling might have had at being so rudely awakened, and the mare’s body began to free itself from the sleeping bag at a hurried pace. “Who’s coming?”

She’d barely grasped her gun and pulled it free from the holster when soft thumps began to creep through the hallway, filtering into the room through the crack in the door that she’d failed to shut completely—

“—shit that’s her, she knows we’re coming—”

A silent scream threatened to leap forth from her throat, her gun coming up into her view—

—Sling’s body slinked out of her sleeping bag like a gushing water current, her horn lighting up in an indigo flash, and a similar light enveloped her shotgun and her travelling saddle and dragged both towards her. In what seemed like an instant she had her saddle strapped onto her body, minus the saddlebags, and every sound in the world was washed out into a muffled tap, like somepony had just plugged her ears up—

—Light Tail’s motions and voice became much more animated and lively, her little body now scrambling to escape her bed and slam herself into the floor, dragging her pups down with her in a crash of surprisingly subdued yips. And it didn’t look like a complete knee-jerk reaction…but more like a partially learned reflex, as if she’d seen this kind of thing before and knew instinctively to get out of the way.

She had just enough time to follow the squirt’s lead and dive into the floor herself before the room lit up with a blinding flash, and the compact nature of the room made the shotgun blast sound much deeper and heavier than it might have outside. But even within the window-rattling noise, she could still hear the sound of wood cracking apart and the sharp, metallic clack of a slide-action being worked over an—

—a second blast, maybe just under a second after the first one, filled the room with more chest-thumping noise and splintering wood—

“—ck me, get her—“

The panicked, terrified stallion’s voice barely spoke when a rapid spattering of gunshots from the hall began popping off, sending bullets back at Sling through the wall and ripping into the mattress of the bed behind her. She chanced a look up into the room, her pistol held out in her cyber-talon as she tried to pick out which growing set of bullet holes to shoot back into when she heard Sling’s hooves beating into the door and smashing it open—

—just before the mare dashed through the doorway and into the hall, she saw that she had her 10mm out in front of her alongside her shotgun, and the darkened hallway began to lit up in quick, orange-yellow flashes in tune with the shotgun’s booms and her pistol’s sharp, loud barks—

—she counted three more shotgun blasts and about eleven or twelve 10mm shots in about three seconds, along with a couple more bursts of automatic fire from the hall, but the silence that filled the air afterward was almost as loud as the brief spat of gunfire itself—

—she whipped her eyes about the room, hoping to the Sisters that she wouldn’t spot the squirt or the dogs lying in a growing pool of blood, and felt a strange sense of body-lightening relief at the sight of the three roughly an inch apart from each, pressing themselves against the floor as they waited out the spat of violence, with no immediately obvious wounds amongst them—

—a harsh thumping of running hooves rippled through the bullet-riddle wall, rapidly fading down the hall and accompanied by a short string of silence that was followed by a heavy thud at least twice before the pony in question began disappearing down the stairs to the ground floor…and where a new chorus of gunfire began to pick up and quickly grew in intensity.

She didn’t think too terribly much of the situation beyond “get out!”—despite her hyperventilating breathing and the heart that wanted to spear itself against her ribcage, her biggest concern was helping the stable mare before she wound up dead on the floor and leaving a broken ten-year old filly an orphan. She thought she screamed something to the effect of “stay put” to Light Tail, rushing to the door and slinging herself through it—

—her breath was sucked out more by the presence of three brown-and-green armored bodies in the hall, than by the impact of her body against the hallway corridor. Just past the door, and directly beneath two hoof-sized tears in the wall where Sling had fired her first shots, was the fresh bleeding corpse of a light green-coated unicorn stallion, with the left half of his face covered in blood and unrecognizable and a short-barreled 10mm SMG lying on the floor next to him, its bolt locked mid-cycle on an empty casing jammed inside the ejection port. Crumpled up a few feet behind him was the body of an earth pony mare, her upper torso contorted and slumped against the wall instead of following the rest of her body to the ground, and the three bloody holes in her face and neck was a strangely gross contrast to her blue coat…not that the wood camo armor was any better. Five holes at the end of the hallway signified close to five misses from Sling’s 10mm, though she spotted a bit of blood splatter just to the left of the cluster of holes, and the mare’s saddle-mounted rifle was partially detached from its mount and dangling by its ammo belt.

The third body, she only saw the back half of as she gingerly leapt down the hall and around the previous two corpses, and initially identified it as a beet red mare with a yellow tail, only to find the mangled remains of a stallion’s head when she made it to the stairs and saw the rest of the body. An impact of what looked like a tight cluster of shotgun pellets was clearly visible on the left side of his armor, like a hoof-sized clump of the outer fabric had been physically torn out, and further down the stairs was what appeared to be a six-shot revolver with a rare mouth-bit grip on it. Blood dribbled down the stairs in slim lines, staining the wood into a darker shade of brown.

And through it all, as she neared the lower half of the staircase, was still a raging gun battle between a fourth soul and Sling Shot, who was conspicuously absent from the floor itself. The fourth—and possibly last—member of the party that had come for her was crouched behind a table turned over on its side for use as cover, though the ragged chunks of plywood jutting out at him from several bullet holes suggested his impromptu plan wasn’t all that well thought out. The black-feathered griffon, who was quite small for his species, was in the process of reloading his magazine-fed rifle when she spotted him, and didn’t seem to realize she was even there….

She reacted almost instinctively, raising her pistol up until the glowing red rod of crystal imbedded in the front sight ramp obscured his face, and rolled the trigger back with a miniscule thought from her brain into her cybernetic limb—

—the cyber leg was barely moved by the recoil push; the revolver itself merely floated up a tad in the firing process despite the heavy boom that batted her face and the massive muzzle flash and five-inch flames that shot out of the cylinder gap, and she had the front sight settled on him again almost instantly. But it proved to be an unnecessary gesture, as she thought she saw a bit of blood spurt out from his position before she heard him slumping over on his side—

—a final shotgun blast tore a chunk of the table’s surface off of the edge as the griffon’s body fell out into the open, possibly a split-second shot Sling had taken without realizing that her target had already been felled.

Or maybe she did, and just wanted to take a shot at him anyway. They had just filled the hotel room with bullets with her kid less than ten feet away from her. Given what she’d done to Puck just for what he tried to do to her, Rally did not think she would have any mercy at all for those that put Light Tail’s life in danger in any way.

So she walked, slowly, down the remainder of the stairs, sweeping the room with her eyes as she holstered her gun an—

—Sling’s body hefted up and over the bullet-riddle bar, her shotgun flinging an empty hull out and slapping a fresh shell into the chamber as if she intended to put another one into the griffon’s body, but after a couple of seconds she stopped walking and simply began loading it back up.

“….good shot,” the mare’s voice mumbled, and mid-way through her words became crystal-clear once again, along with just about every other sound around her. “....done it before?”

Have I killed a pony before….gods, yes, don’t make me remember.

“….like I said, you don’t stay young in the wastes very long on your own,” she sighed sadly, stopping at the bottom of the stairs to get her thoughts back in order as she began to come down off her adrenaline high. Her lungs were already slacking off, and her heart wasn’t quite as interested in self-mutilation anymore…and she prayed that would be the worst of it. “Most orphans lucky enough to live as long as I have got help or found an adult that wouldn’t take advantage of them. Then there’s the few like me, who don’t get that luck and got to watch out for ourselves…and that means having to kill people looking to hurt us for their own pleasure. Those that don’t find a good soul, or have the strength to make it on their own…don’t make it to puberty….”

The stream of red-colored hulls feeding themselves into her shotgun began to slow considerably, and Sling’s face lost its hard-edged fury. “….is Light Tail okay?”

“…everybody’s fine,” she replied softly, ignoring a slight tick in her left foreleg. It’d start shaking in a bit regardless of what she did. “…well, except these guys, obviously.”

“You woke me up saying, ‘they’re coming’,” Sling said next, shocking her with her uncanny perception. “Not ‘somebody’. Where in town did you stumble into them, and how did you find out that they knew where to find you?”

There must have been a “deer in flashlight” look to her eyes, because when she failed to work up an answer Sling merely laughed quietly as she finished loading her weapon and slung it back inside a long gun scabbard along her left side. “Surprised?”

Rally’s left hoof came up to her temple, rubbing at it absently as though it might help jump-start some critical thinking. “…I…I know you kinda figured out I wasn’t running by choice,” she muttered helplessly. “Bu…but I never told you how I found them here….how….”

A mild grin spread over Sling’s face as her magic floated out that little “MKII” pouch in front of her, open flap and everything, and Rally’s face began to burn a little. “…well, the fact that you took my little outhouse kit here tells me you had to…take care of business, earlier,” the mare snickered. “I gather that you found these guys at some point between here and there. I just want to know the particulars of that moment in time. I’m not gonna kill you for wanting to make use of this stuff, I got plenty of it for the time being.”

She was glad her face was too bewildered to betray her true thoughts, because she was suddenly acutely aware that another pony’s life—albeit one she didn’t like—would depend on whether or not she was cruel enough to tell her everything like she asked. Shit, I should just be glad my having to take a leak might have just saved our lives, but if I tell her everything there’s no telling what she’ll do to Puck. Much as I hate the asshole, I don’t want him murdered on something I said….

“….I…wasn’t really all that awake when I went out,” she started, running her mind through the lie as she spoke to make sure she could tell it right, and consistently. Going over Sling’s words had just given her an idea on how to get out of this jam, tell her about these guys and who they really were, and without getting Puck killed in the proce—

….wait, something’s wrong, she thought suddenly, turning her eyes towards the bar and the kitchen behind it. …shouldn’t he have come out by now?

“….hey, wait a sec,” Rally’s voice spoke of its own accord. “….Puck does live here….why isn’t he coming out here screaming about the gun fight that just tore up his bar?”

Sling’s eyes widened slightly as she jerked her gaze backward as well, though unlike Rally she had a much clearer reason to be fearful. She had that fancy PipBuck that could tell where nearby folk were, after all. “….oh, hell,” she cursed lightly, breaking into a quick gallop towards the back, and Rally found herself drawn to follow—

—Sling’s run came to an abrupt halt in the kitchen, where Rally crashed into her backside and nearly toppled the mare over—

—and in the process of righting herself back onto her four legs, came to spy the presence of a growing pool of blood behind the kitchen’s island in the center, and cautiously wormed her way around the mare’s legs to follow the blood to its source—

—Puck’s body was splayed across the tiled floor, his right side pocked with at two bullets, plus another to the side of his head. Mercifully, he was facing away from them and thus sparing them the empty, lifeless stare of his dead eyes, though she wasn’t sure his ass end was any better to look at. She promptly turned around and showed herself out of the kitchen, barely taking note of the fresh bullet holes peppering the kitchen wall and the backside of the bar.

Much as she hated him….it kinda hurt to see him just…die, like that….even if he had been the one to send those damn mercs upstairs in the first place….

And whatever personal issues she had, Sling seemed to still have a decent grasp on reading others’ emotions….or maybe just that of a kid’s, as she followed her all the way back out until she’d stepped out in front of the teen and stopped her in her tracks with an outstretched leg. “Whoa, wait stop, stop,” the mare commanded gently. “Stop a minute, take a breath—“

A canteen, engulfed in indigo light, floated its way into the space between them, its cap twisting open, and Rally simply swiped it with a burst of her own magic and took a gulp of its wat—

….no, not water, she realized upon sampling the foreign taste upon her tongue. Water doesn’t taste so….strong….so….something else, I’ve never tasted this before.

“…what is this stuff?”

“….tea, unsweet,” Sling replied, though she couldn’t help but notice a tinge of sadness when she said it. “It…it’s something other than water, for the road. Just for a slight change of pace…”

She didn’t totally buy it, but she didn’t care enough to ask any more questions about it right then. Not when there were more important things to be bitching over….

“….I didn’t know he was back there,” Sling muttered over the sloshing canteen. “…not in that exact place, I…my PipBuck doesn’t tell distance, just direction. That was just…bad luck.”

Her hold on the canteen faltered slightly, shaking it a tad as she fought off the urge to just drop it and start screaming. It wasn’t bad luck, he made a deal with them….

….hell with it. Tell her. It wasn’t like she could kill Puck for it now anyways, right?

“…like I said, he lives here,” she gulped through a swish of this “tea”, her left leg pressing down into the floorboard when she felt a light tremble begin to manifest in the limb. “…and when I was coming back, I saw the lantern on in his office, and the front door to the bar was open, when it’s usually locked at night…so I snuck back there, and these guys were in there….”

“And who are these guys, exactly?” Sling’s voice prodded gently. Whether she was forcing herself to be gentle, or genuinely doing so, she couldn’t tell. “If not for the forest camo pattern and the sloppy approach they made just now, I’d have mistaken them for Runners.”

A sharp snort escaped her nose as she pulled the relevant data from the vast collection of information in her head. “According to them, they’re the Runners’ biggest rivals,” she sneered lightly. “Not that the Runners even pay attention to that kind of shit. They call themselves the Pythons, mostly because they’re based out of an old zoo in the Withercha area that used to have a forest python exhibit, before the megaspells. Most of their armor and weaponry were taken out of a local military garrison they found mostly intact. The armor’s a woodland camo variety of what the Runners use, but other than that, they’re nothing alike. Runners are actually pretty decent mercs, won’t run chems, and they kill slavers, raiders, and highway gangs on sight without being paid to do it if they run across them. Pythons are…well, they’re basically well-equipped raiders. No job’s too foul, no murder too gruesome or cruel. They do run chems…and booze…and just about every vice a soul can lose themselves in. They even have a lab in the big city where they make some of it.”

“…so how the hell did you end up getting chased by people like this?”

“….I took a job, some months ago,” she answered, her voice growing somber and regretful. “Somepony came up to me, said he had a stash of MEWs he’d found but needed somepony to fix ‘em up. He told me he was gonna sell ‘em to either the Runners or the Union, coulda made a fortune for both of us, and a fortune of caps can do a lot for a fourteen-year kid on her own. Everything was fine up until about three months ago, when he found a different set of buyers….”

“The Pythons.”

“…it was a last-minute deal,” she confirmed sadly. “Runners didn’t have the caps, Union was too far away for the shipment to make the journey safely and they wouldn’t send troopers to make sure it got to them, not that deep into the west. By then he was getting tired of the whole mess, just wanted his caps, didn’t care who got the weapons. Pythons were gonna use the MEWs to make a hard push on the Runners, and I didn’t want all my work being put to use wiping out the most decent souls on this side of the valley…”

“So you made sure it wouldn’t…and they aren’t the type to forgive.”

She would count that night as the most haunting of her short life. All those beautiful, meticulously crafted MEW rifles and pistols…and she had to break them after all the blood and sweat she’d put into making them functional again. It was almost as criminal as what Puck had tried to do to her. “….anybody would be pissed if they spent twelve thousand caps for a stockpile of MEWs that got broken by a smart-ass little girl with a cyber leg before they could get their hooves and claws on it. They’ve been searching hard for me, and Puck must have recognized me or got word later, to keep screwing me over as often as he did just to keep me in one place long enough to send a message to the Pythons telling them where I was….”

Sling’s head turned back briefly, looking out through the bar’s front windows as a flash of her magic enveloped her 10mm pistol. “…then I doubt these four are the only ones that came out here. Could be another group or three in town, or camped outside it along the roads. And if these four were smart they left one or two of their own outside to watch the place and report back to the group if they failed.”

A nervous, terrified sigh escaped her lips as he set the canteen down, having had her fill of the “tea” for the moment. “….you wouldn’t be wrong….”

Sling was quiet for a moment before speaking again, and when she looked up to stare the mare in the eyes she found a…sympathetic face staring back at her, rather than a fearful one. “….you have a choice to make, among several,” Sling said. “Most of them aren’t all that appealing.”

“No shit,” she blurted derisively. “Most of them end up with me dead or in servitude to people who would do things to me that’d make Puck look charitable. Best choices that I can see is to either try and get over the valley, land work with the Union trooper corps or a trade guild, or try and hook up with the Runners, who aren’t known to take in runaways and strays at the drop of a hat…”

“We might want to work on getting out of town first,” Sling offered quietly and freely, which didn’t surprise Rally as much as it might have yesterday. “Then we can start weighing your options.”

I am so going to hate this…

“….your options, as they are, aren’t much better than mine,” she sighed heavily. “When I found them in Puck’s office, they were making deals with him….mostly over you and Light Tail…”

Sling’s gentle, quiet mood evaporated almost immediately, replaced by a loin-cringing, contained rage that nonetheless scared her a bit. “….what?”

Rally felt herself flinch slightly at her harsh tone, though it was directed more at the air around her than at the stupid fourteen-year old…though she had no bets on that lasting for much longer once she spilled the truth out. “….they…they said they had a contact in one of the slave guilds…Life Tap’s, I think. That you’d apparently wasted a slaver hit squad in some way that’s got them confused as to how you actually did it, and that the Union was looking for you because of it. They specifically mentioned you, Light Tail, and those two pups of yours, and…and the Pythons might try to sell your kid if they catch her, they told Puck to hold her for a bit while they search out a buyer….”

Sling’s head snapped up, staring into the back kitchen so fiercely she feared the mare might actually rush back in there and pump some more bullets into him. But after a few tense moments she merely hissed a string of silent f-bombs at the corpse bleeding out thirty yards away from there and smacked at the floor beneath. “….well, shit. That…complicates things.”

Massive understatement. Still…at least she wasn’t blowing up at her, so…there was that. But waiting for these two Runner friends of hers was quickly becoming a dangerous prospect. If there were more Pythons out there, they’d be on their way into town at first light in the morning. “…yeah, can’t really stay put like you want. Plays right into their hooves.”

“So does trying to move about in the dark on only ninety minutes of sleep. Go on back up, try and sleep a bit. I’ll take care of the bodies. I’ll wake you in four hours, so you can take watch while I get some rest. We’ll play it out by ear come first light.”

Five minutes.

She could not get over it. Five minutes.

Five minutes was all it took to lose them. To go from lunch, laughing and playing….

….to never hearing their voices again, or seeing them, or….or anything. As quickly as she could blink they were simply gone. And it was….

….horrible….the screams….oh gods, the screams, they were so terrible. So….

…scared….

Kite died, scared…and alone….and in such a violent manner that she couldn’t fathom it without barfing…..

…so she just stopped fathoming anything at all. For what seemed like an eternity, she would wake up, see that they were gone, and cry herself to sleep, hoping that the next time she woke up, the nightmare would be over, and they would be right there.

Of course it never worked.

And after that eternity, she found herself walking, somehow, following her mom along a hoof-paved dirt path until she found herself stepping into a run-down bar that happened to have a few rooms, and the prospect of crying her grief out on something besides a cold concrete floor was enough to wake her up long enough for her to toss her stuff on one of the old beds and hop up, and only then did she notice that her world had another pony in it.

An older filly, her pink coat and mixed blue and purple mane and tail oddly distracting her from her dark thoughts, with a kinda cool cyber-leg. That bit about turning that broken MEW into a “puppy that’ll bark armor-piercing lasers” was kinda funny, in a morbid way. Not quite something that Aunt C would say, but it was still sorta like her. And it did something else.

It took her mind off the pain that she couldn’t explain.

So…sorta like Mom, Rally had become something to focus on. If for no other reason than to simply try and forget how much it hurt inside when there was nothing physically wrong with her.

And it worked, somewhat. At least, it worked when Mom wasn’t there. When she was there, she would start to remember...things. Hateful things, that she must have done to Mom, because she was seeing it through her eyes. Her little hooves, lashing out in blind, furious strikes at the sole parent in her life, drawing blood, making bruises, and probably adding injury to the harsh insults being screamed out of her mouth—that she’d just left them, that she was no friend to them to leave them like that….

….that she’d intentionally dropped Kite just to save herself….

And when she started remembering those things, she’d shut down again, curl up, and sleep it off. Rally never bothered to ask her why she just shut up and went to sleep when Mom came back, and Mom never had the heart—or courage—to wake her up or bother her otherwise. For a brief time, that was as close to peace as she could get, and even Max and Mona were starting to get a little fed up with her, if their huddling around the floor was any serious clue.

And then Death came back to remind her that it still lurked in the shadows, always ready to claim the next soul on its endless, eternal list.

She’d barely dozed off when Rally burst back in, panicking and shrieking that “they” were coming, and the moment she saw Mom change into that…that other pony, that killed in the blink of an eye right after she cast that hearing spell, she found herself diving onto the floor out of learned reflex, and only in the midst of the muffled gunfire immediately afterward did she realize how badly she wanted to go back home.

Wanted…and couldn’t. In the sickest of ironies, she knew that if she tried to strike out on her own and go back across the wasteland, she would be quickly swallowed up by the horrors that dwelled in the wastes surrounding the ruined towns and cities….or by the savage ponies that scavenged for their existence within them, because she didn’t have Mom’s willingness to kill them. Even now, with…with Blue and Kite gone, because those evil slavers just wouldn’t leave them alone….she couldn’t bring herself to contemplate killing another pony or griffon. Not even to save the ones that mattered most to her.

She was a coward, in every sense of the word, and she couldn’t stand to look at herself anymore. She just wanted to go home, to Emmy and Jam and Aunt C and Spiner and everypony else in the stable. She was sick of watching people die. She was sick of Death in general, to be honest. The journey had promised to be dangerous and eye-opening, and in that regard all of her assumptions had borne out. Just not in the way she wanted.

And now she wanted to leave….and knew that it also impossible. There was no way in Tartarus (or the wasteland) that Mom would just give up, turn around, and limp back home into a land of slaving murderers after what had happened at that stupid bridge. Or in this stupid bar-slash-inn last night, when more bad ponies going after Rally showed up, and in the aftermath learned that she and Mom were also targets.

No. When bad ponies went after Mom, she didn’t let them do it for very long. They would all die, violently and horribly, and she and Mom and Rally would be safer for it.

After suffering a little for it, first. Naturally. The wasteland did not like good deeds going unnoticed.

The pitch-black darkness outside had barely begun to brighten into a tolerably visible overcast gray when their “reward” for backing Rally up showed up in the form of one of mister Puck’s employees, a maroon-colored mare that deftly swished her way through the door to their rented room as they were packing the last of their bags and guns for the road trip ahead.

“….you gotta go,” the blood-like coated mare warned in that raspy voice of hers. It wasn’t really blood…but maroon lately was reminding her too much of dried blood, and she felt sorry for the mare, but that was the truth. She couldn’t stand to look at her for more than a couple of seconds before she started seeing bodies in her eyes.

Bodies that Mom had shot….

“As you can clearly see, we’re well on our way to doing just that,” Mom said back, not even looking back at the other mare as she secured the last buckle of her travelling saddle into place. “…and for what little it’s worth to you, I’m sorry about the mess I left you with.”

“No, you really have to go,” the mare insisted, very strongly and very impatiently. "Pythons have long memories when it comes to vendettas and you definitely made their shit list for killing four of them last night. If they aren’t on their way yet they will be very shortly and I do not want you here when they arrive.”

Mom’s shotgun racked a shell into the chamber, the sound amplified to an uncomfortable sting in the compacted room. “….that confident about it?”

“Confident enough that I’m not risking my life any further than this. Just…just go. Please.”

“….you girls ready?” Mom asked, her eyes scouring her shotgun one last time.

She meant to say “No, not now, not ever”. What she squeaked out was, “...sorta.”

Rally couldn’t help but be a smart-aleck, even knowing they were probably gonna get into another gunfight. “….who’s ever ready to get shot at?”

Mom’s patience with smart-alecks usually wasn’t very high when it came to serious stuff like this, so the lack of that patented “Mom” attitude only startled her even more. “Stay close, watch the windows and alleys.”

A dull nausea began to creep up her throat as she followed Mom out of the room, her 9mm conspicuously heavy in her spell field. Her legs seemed to be taking her forward of their own will, when all she wanted to do was stay put and hide in the corner….or it could have been the pups pushing into her hindquarters with their skulls to urge her to move.

Or it could have been an instinctive desire to not be very far from Mom, because anytime she got more than a few feet from her, she felt exceptionally exposed and vulnerable, more so than if she were right next to her. Even if being right next to her meant possibly getting shot at. Mom was a shell of safety.

A vicious, life-stealing shell of safety….that couldn’t even keep Kite or BJ alive….

She must have done something to catch Rally’s attention, because a moment later the bigger filly was slowing down to walk beside her at her pace, and her presence was….oddly comforting. More than Mom’s, even….

And it took her mind off all this hurt.

“….we’ll be fine,” Rally’s voice whispered softly after chancing a look at Mom to see if their conversation would be noticed or not. For the moment, it looked like Mom was more worried about bad ponies and griffons lying in wait for them than on two fillies quietly chatting away behind her. “Might even be able to leave before they find us.”

“….not counting on it, with our luck.”

“…this have anything to do with what we talked about yesterday?”

Of course she’d bring that up now, of all times….

“….I don’t wanna talk about that right now.”

“….right, sorry,” Rally relented after a moment’s peace. “…and…sorry, for getting you and your mom dragged into my mess.”

That wasn’t quite how she remembered their paths crossing—she remembered it as Mom deciding on her own to take care of Rally’s problems with her meanie of a boss, albeit quite violently in the end. “….I think Mom’s just tryin’ to make up for….for things she wished she’d done earlier. Just wish we coulda waited a bit longer.”

“For your Runner friends?”

“….I wouldn’t call them friends,” she said, her head turning about to her right to scan over the windows and alleys when the thought struck her. “….not quite, anyway. Ada, she’s…she’s kinda cool. A lot like Aunt C. She and Leon keep showin’ up when Mom needs ‘em….most of the time….funny coincidences and stuff. Hopin’ they show up today, too….”

….now that she thought about it, she wished they could have showed up at that bridge, too….when they really needed them….

“….better not to count on it,” Rally sighed. “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

“….the worst being we run outta bullets and die, or get caught….”

“…okay, maybe not that bad,” the older filly backtracked quickly. “….your mom found some battery cells for that Lightbringer at the market yesterday, right?”

Her magic unconsciously tapped at the now-fully functional—and totally cool-looking—laser pistol holstered on her left side. “….you mean this “puppy that barks armor-piercing lasers”? Yeah, it’s charged. Got like, three spare cells for it, even. Not sure how she managed to afford ‘em when we was flat broke, but….she got ‘em.”

“….it comes to it, use it,” Rally suggested with a grim tone. “Best option we got for cutting through their armor.”

“….if that’s the case, it’s better off with Mom,” she countered, quickly taking the laser pistol’s holster off of her travelling saddle, along with the three spare power cells. “She’s much better at shooting than me….and somethin’ tells me shootin’ somepony in the leg with this is just gonna slice it off, and…and I don’t wanna do that to anypony.”

Despite the fact that Mom’s attention was focused on looking for threats and killing them, she was still quite capable of hearing everything the two of them were saying. “Keep it,” she said over her withers with a brief glance backward. “Let Rally use it. If we get separated I’d rather have the firepower spread out than have it all on me.”

“….or we could do that,” she whispered meekly in defeat, quietly re-attaching the holster to her saddle.

“….I got enough spare parts to mod a couple more Lightbringers, if we find ‘em,” Rally offered, a slight squeak slipping out of her throat as she spoke.

“Why not a rifle?”

“Because a laser rifle is operating on a much higher output,” came the unsurprisingly “no DUH” answer. “…well, most of them. There’s this last war-era variant that got out into the field that was based on an AER frame, and the thing is crazy modular. I mean, I can make it a short-range pistol or a rapid-firing rifle, or even an overcharged sniper rifle and anything in-between. It’s like, a MEW nut’s nocturnal dream and I want one!”

The slight, giddy adoration with which Rally spoke of this gun was hard not to laugh at a little. It was almost like watching Mom find a few gun that she really, really liked. “So get one,” she snickered back.

Rally’s ears wilted slightly in despair. “…well, that’s the thing,” she mewed sadly. “….the biggest collection of ‘em I ever found....I….broke, most of them….so these psycho mercenaries couldn’t use it on the Runners….”

“….most?” Mom’s voice creeped back into the conversation, her body slowing down as she turned about to face them. “…that’s not what you told me last night.”

Rally’s body froze up, her eyes widening into little beads. Even her front legs stopped mi-step. It would’ve been funny if things hadn’t turned so serious right then. “…..no, it’s not….”

…uh oh….

El-Tee unconsciously began to back away from Rally as Mom began channeling that “impatient parent” glare through her eyes and into Rally’s soul. “Because now that I think about it, it’s a little difficult to believe that you’re being actively hunted down, at a potentially heavy cost in caps, materials, time, and lives, as vengeance for a pile of broken weapons. I could see them making it a standing order to catch or kill you on sight if they came across you, but there’s too much work involved in hunting down even a single person across the prairie to make it worthwhile. Not unless there’s something else involved….”

She put it all together before either of them could spell it out. “….like where you might have stashed some of the weapons after you broke all the others,” she sputtered. “…I mean, you did just get all girly and stuff just talking about them….there’s no way ya coulda resisted stealing one or two for yourself….or any rare spare parts they had. Like the parts you fixed our gun with.”

Rally’s body began to shake slightly as she promptly plopped herself down into a sitting sphinx position, no longer willing to look either of them in the eye. “….damn my mouth and the smarts of precocious fillies—”

“Rally,” Mom’s voice growled angrily, “if you want me to keep helping you I need you to level with me, right now. What did you mean by “most”?”

Seeing herself cornered into an inescapable predicament, the teenaged filly offered very little resistance to Mom’s quiet wrath. “….b-by most….I mean that….I might have swiped…a few of them…before I broke the rest….”

“How many—”

“T-twelve!” Rally surrendered, now clearly seeing that Mom wasn’t going to back off of her “parent mode” until she was thoroughly satisfied. “I….I got twelve out of the warehouse….broke the rest, a hundred in all—”

Mom’s eyes bulged slightly in place, but she remained quiet as Rally continued spilling her guts (figuratively)—

“I….I took everything I could load in two bags and a brahmin,” she went on, lowering her head into her forelegs in fear, and El-Tee slowly began to wonder if Mom was pushing her too hard. “I had just enough time to stash them somewhere safe before they found out what I’d done to the stockpile. I…I found out they had a bounty on me the first time somebody tried to collect on it. That was…three months ago. I never went back to my stash, I just tried to get away…I tried to get away and nothing’s working and I keep getting screwed over—”

Rally’s voice began to break down into a soft cry, and El-Tee couldn’t stomach it any longer. It was starting to sound too much like….like….

…..herself….

Up until now, the pups were content to just watch the ponies bicker and fight, but now that one of them was starting to get hurt by it, they were quick to change their minds and start squeezing into Rally’s personal space, as if trying to nuzzle and rub her fears away. “….m-mom, stoppit, it’s hurting her—”

“It’s our lives!” Mom snapped back harshly, and El-Tee swore she could feel her ears being batted down by the sheer volume of her voice. “If there is even the slightest chance that we can get these mercs off our backs without having to kill them we need to take it, I can not take them all on in a stand-up fight—”

Light Tail could think of at least three ways to accomplish that right off, and two of them were not in Rally’s best interests. She seemed to realize it too, because the teen filly began to shake uncontrollably and even tried to scoot away from them, and now she was sure Mom had gone overboard. “N-no, wait, don’t please—“

It was getting disgustingly familiar. The terror, the tears, the shaky, scared voice….it was like Mom giving Kite the third degree over something she didn’t feel comfortable talking about. And in Rally’s case, she was probably thinking her very life was at stake in the mess….

….and in a sickening moment of clarity, she realized that it was.

She acted before she could even think of how to act—she lurched forward, latching onto Rally’s barrel with a clumsy hug, and then clinging to her tightly in some vain hope that she could keep her still and not run away. “No!! Mom stop, that’s not helping!!”

“Neither are the secrets!!” Mom’s voice bellowed deeply. “This is serious—”

“We know that” she shrieked back, snapping her head back at Mom and even feeling part of her lips curve up in a strange, dog-like snarl. “Kite hid all sorts of stuff from us and you never bit her head off over it!!”

A tiny hoof popped into her mouth the moment she heard those words peel free from her tongue, but it was too late to take them back. Seeing Mom’s face go from angry to almost….heartbroken….it took a lot of the fight out of her, among other things.

….but it took the fight out of Mom, too….

…and feeling Rally’s body shiver in fright within her hug brought her focus back to the most important problem at hoof, for the moment. There’d be time to mess with the other stuff later. “…look, if these snake guys are really as mean as you and Rally say, then nothing we could offer them would make them go away. They want Rally, and the guns she stole, and they won’t leave us alone until they get both. They’re not gonna take her stash and let it go at that. Or us, for that matter, now that you’ve gone and killed some of them.”

Mom’s eyes slid downward, almost in shame. “….I…I wasn’t suggesting her as a sacrifice….”

El-Tee was a little confused as to why she would even think such a thought crossed her tiny brain…at least until she thought back several days….when she practically beat Mom up and all but accused her of doing exactly that to Kite….

….useless bucking idiot, she spat at herself hatefully, tears rolling out of her eyes and down her face as she barely avoided cussing herself out in her head. Why not just scream “murderer” at her face while you’re at it?! Why not just ruin everything else…..

“….we can figure out the how later. But we gotta get outta here first….could try getting a ride with a caravan, like we did the last time we had to get out of a town in a hurry without being shot up…”

“....yeah,” Mom said quietly, turning away from them and starting back on the path to the market. “...not like I have any better ideas....”

The fortunes of the wastes tended to be fickle little bitches.

For instance, the matter of Saurus, and the ill-advised and ill-fated request for assistance in tracking a hated nemesis. While she had never actually sided with him on it, she did say that she would keep the request in mind and keep an eye out if she had the time, and she quickly found that she didn’t really care to bother with it and went back to her own business. It seemed that even that minor a lie was enough to draw his ire. She wished now that her saviors had left at least one of the mercs alive so that she could have learned when or how he had managed to subvert her entire hired crew out from underneath her. She’d gotten a little carried away with a couple of them herself, yes, but…well, what was a girl to do when she was cornered like that? Let them have their vile way with her? She was still retching from the fact that she had let Lucky Strike touch her, much less…other things, but it had saved her some caps in the end. Doubly so when the crazy stable pony and her party ran into his “checkpoint” and slew him and his entire crew.

Still, it was quite a tale of rapidly-switching fortunes, one way to the other and back again, and at the end of it all she was back home in the west, alive and somewhat well….and almost completely broke. That wasn’t how the plan was supposed to end. But it did make for a good story to tell others she trusted enough to tell it to. And despite the pitfalls and hardships that had fallen on her in the last few weeks, she found herself wondering whether the crazy stable pony’s plan had worked, and if her runaway slave friends were well.

The wasteland being what it as (and likely seeing a chance for amusement in humoring her), she was given a chance to obtain her answers rather abruptly and without warning. It came to her in the market row of Rough Port, a sad little speck of a town in the western prairie roughly a dozen miles or so from Trotpeka’s valley crossing. Despite her appearance she was able to semi-mingle into a small crowd without drawing too much attention, as long as she kept her mouth shut when a pretty thing drew near her. She had not thought that would require as much mental effort as it did, and she found it increasingly difficult to scour the small, two-block stretch of travelling merchants and traders in search of both Sling Shot and a suitable replacement for her lost blade with so many nice looking mares and stallions (and a couple of griffons, she wasn’t picky) to be found amongst the throng of scarred wastelanders. Yet as she entered her third day into her dive through the market row’s visiting merchants, she began to entertain the very serious thought that she might have made a mistake in how to approach the stable pony. She’d missed her entrance into Puck’s bar the other day by roughly an hour, having gone out to slake her thirst for fun with another willing soul, and after the violent events of last night she’d thought better of trying to meet up with her face to face and elected to try and catch her in the morning, after she’d had a chance to calm down and put the fight behind her.

But when the blackness of night gave way to the gloomy, dark gray overcast sky that passed as morning in the wasteland, she’d found that the stable pony and her entourage had already left, and even as she charged into the market row in search of them she’d thought she’d lost them for good. And then she spotted a potential sign of her quarry amongst the throng of early risers in the market, and her brief look at the unicorn pony in question derailed her brain’s thought processes with the information she gleaned from that two-second look.

Teal blue coat. Darker colored mane, like the Night Princess’s coat, a travelling saddle adorned with weapons….which, by a stroke of luck from gods above or below, included a black katana scabbard capped with a red tip and a red ring at its open end, through which protruded the tell-tale extended grip of a full-length katana, adorned in alternating black and red cording. The grip itself was modified with a specially sized and fitted hoof cuff through which a magic-less pony could fit a foreleg and use the weapon.

She knew this, because she’d made it that way. How or why this crazy stable pony mare had come to keep possession of her most prized weapon, she couldn’t fathom…but then, that’s what questions were for.

To be answered.

She began to chase after the pony in seemingly weightless leaps and bounds, her excitement overtaking her to the point where it seemed that she was leaping forward far faster than she would have if she’d decided to run, and caught up to her prey in about eleven and a half jumps—

“Hey!” she shouted at the seventh jump, roughly thirty feet behind the pony with her sword, causing her to snap her head back over her withers—

“The hell is th—”

Oh yes, it is her! She squealed to herself in delight. Lengthy, ragged scars running down one side of her face, eye color matched her mane and tail. Yes, this was crazy stable pony Sling Shot!

“Hey!” she shouted again at the zenith of her ninth jump, bringing her ever closer now that Sling Shot had come to a complete stop. “Crazy pony!”

Sling’s face was rapidly growing confused, her brow furrowing deeply into her forehead, and now she could see signs of what looked like two children following closely behind her as the crowd around the mare began to pull away. One was a teenaged filly, her head coming up to Sling’s neck, and with what looked like a patched-up blue leg warmer around her right foreleg. The other filly was smaller, maybe just small enough to duck under the mare for protection if she felt like it, and while her coat was a lighter shade of Sling’s, her mane and tail matched save for this streak of electric blue in the tail that dazzled her eyes briefly whenever it swished about. “Wh—”

Her eleventh leap was not quite as profitable as the last ten, only taking her three feet forward, but her next half-jump brought her within four feet of the stable pony’s presence, and she chose to stop here and immediately prostrate herself before her, splaying her legs out across the ground as she dipped her head down in mock prayer. “Crazy pony Sling Shot, I humbly beg for the return of my sword which rests upon your back,” she commenced to speak in a quiet, reverent tone. “….you know, if you do not mind….”

A brief moment of silence only made Sling’s reply even funnier amidst the children’s quiet giggling. “….what the ever living fu….”

She had to bite her tongue hard to keep from laughing. “….um, yes…my sword. Which I gave you, to aid in your ploy. Which I kind of want back. Soon. Please. If…if you do not mind…”

To complete the joke, she let herself lie there in silence while Sling supposedly tried to make sense of what had just happened to her right then, and in a few seconds she could hear the unicorn groaning in defeat over the sound of a leather strap rubbing across coat and flesh…and the cool, hard touch of the scabbard upon her outstretched forelegs made the payoff worth it. “….take it and get away from me, you lunatic.”

With a delighted giggle, she snapped up to her hooves in a single bound, sweeping up the katana into a tight, but quick hug against her chest before slinging it over her neck and across her barrel, until the pommel of the katana was hanging over her withers and the sword itself resting on its side, positioning the hoof cuff just so, so that her right foreleg could slip into it with a thought and begin cutting her enemies to pieces when the mood struck her. “Aaaaahh,” she sighed contently as the sword’s weight finally resolved that lingering feeling of unease and…nakedness, that had bothered her for weeks. “I feel whole again.”

“Glad to hear it,” Sling mumbled darkly, already attempting to slip away deeper into the market and pulling the two children and mutts with her with a flash of magic. “Good-bye, Julaya.”

“Wait wait wait!!” she called out loudly, leaping back into Sling’s personal space and landing immediately to the mare’s right—not that it really mattered, when she had her guns spread out on both sides to keep the weight balance even, but she seemed to keep her shotgun on her right side along with one of her revolvers, and Sling seemed to be a….right-hoofed person, even when using her magic, so at the very least she wouldn’t get a shotgun to the face if she irritated her too much. “Please wait, I have questions!”

“My answers may come in the form of a ten millimeter slug if you keep this up.”

“….then I will ask the questions most important to me so that I may die with knowledge I sought,” she chuckled back. “Your plan to save your friends…did it work?”

She did not expect the reaction that followed—Sling’s ears began to seemingly melt until they’d almost folded against her head, and her tail drooped low until it was practically dragging across the ground. Even the little Sling look-alike wilted where she stood. “….they’re dead,” she whispered with a choked sob. “….slaver hit squad ambushed us….shot up the bridge, and they…they fell off, into a riverbed infested with ghouls….”

Her rush of elation and joy at being reunited with her sword died almost as violently a death as the poor stable pony’s aforementioned friends, and all pretense of humor and levity left her.

This was no time to act like a child.

“….I….I’m sorry,” she whispered, a touch of shame creeping into her voice and face as she felt her own ears flattening out. “….how does the little tail of light fare in all this?”

Mini-Sling’s voice was barely audible, but the pain of despair in her voice spoke more than enough on its own. “….was doin’ okay, ‘till you said somethin’….”

She felt her eyes close for a brief moment, her mouth utter a silent prayer to departed spirits in the hopes that they might hear her plea and act on it. Children always seemed to suffer the most in this cruel wasteland. “….that was rather uncouth of me,” she said when the prayer upon her lips had ended.

Sling’s face turned to her with moist, but wary eyes. “…surprised you care, given your previous occupation.”

…okay, I can see the oddity in that. Going from robbing and killing caravans to “I’m sorry your friends died horribly in a pit of murderous, hungry ghouls” would seem somewhat….unbelievable, to a stable pony. But the truth was too simple to ignore…and fortunately for her, simple to give, unlike others who might not find it comfortable to speak of their own feelings. Like this stable pony, apparently. “I care because the grief of losing loved ones should not be carried alone. Especially not by a child.”

The stark honesty seemed to catch the stable mare off-guard—her faced hardened slightly, but her eyes began to grow uneasy and turned away from her, as if uncomfortable with her. “….I guess it would be hypocritical of me to say otherwise, given the last few days….”

“….you would be called “careful” in the eyes of most,” she offered back. “Children fall prey to strangers, often with terrible results. Do not forget that you now inhabit a land where the depraved and sick-minded have little to fear except those who know how to fight back.”

Sling’s face began to wipe away its grief and confusion, reforming into a stoic, unreadable form that reminded her partly of a griffon’s glare. “Don’t remind me.”

Perhaps it is best to find another subject, she surmised silently. Before she gets too depressed to suffer my company any longer.

“….are you looking for anything in particular in this collection of sometimes-thieves?” she finally asked, after several tense, uncomfortable seconds of silence of trying to find something to ask about other than that boring old question about the weather (the answer was usually a sarcastic-ass “Sunny”).

“….a way out. We need to leave town. Now. And without attracting the attention of mercenaries who want to find us. They’ve already tried their luck once last night and got the bar owner killed in the process.”

“…I know. I was hardly out the door when the shooting started. I….took my time returning, and when I did you had removed the bodies and retreated to your room once more. I held off on bothering you until later. Which would be….now, I guess….”

“Then let me return the ‘favor’,” Sling shot back. “She only mentioned it in passing, but Major Colada was of the opinion that you could vanish into the wastes for a good stretch of time whenever it pleased you. Otherwise she wouldn’t have found it so hard to find and kill you for all the grief you caused her over the years.”

Ah, I was wondering when you would ask. “’Tis a natural skill I seem to have nurtured since I was capable of walking. The roads can be just as dangerous as the wastes, crawling with slavers, troopers, and bandits of varying degrees of depravity, and I found it no less or more dangerous to simply walk across the open wasteland to my destination instead. When the Runners crossed over to take the fight to the Union in the war, I was one of many volunteers who accompanied their squads to learn the lay of the east and map alternate paths of travel. I eventually used several such routes to lead runaways over the valley, by paths no slaver or trooper would dare tread without company. It would not be an exaggeration to say that I could walk into or out of any settlement in the prairie without ever touching the decaying highway system that connects the towns.”

“Then you could conceivably tell me the quickest way westward? The major roads here seem to lead either north, south, or east, but not westward.”

“If you wish to live off the land, then yes, you can simply stroll into the west, but water is rather scarce around this particular spot of earth. But it would not be a chore to turn northward to the next town on the highway. Not as close to the old riverbed as here, but if you want to leave quickly, then that would be your best option.”

Sling’s head began swinging around in a slow sweep, her eyes suddenly regarding every shadowed alley with suspicion and mistrust. “….how quickly? How close?”

“…you can be there by tomorrow, if you must….”

The stable pony studied her environment with caution and wary as she began to pick up her pace. “...is it a friendly place?”

“’Friendliness’ is a tad…subjective,” she said cautiously. “….it would be no worse than here, if that is what bothers you. But I would ask something of you first.”

Sling’s voice took on a slight hint of disdain. “I’m not swimming in caps at the moment.”

“That is actually quite painful,” she laughed, instantly recalling a recent memory, when she still had that vast fortune of caps spilled across the floor of that old brewery and decided to see if she could play in it. That little childish venture lasted for about twenty seconds. “But no, caps are not what I desire. These last few weeks I’ve spent alone have been…well, lonely. I…I am not used to travelling alone, and I do not like it. Much of my life since the war has been spent robbing and killing slavers and the Union troopers who support them, and I obviously cannot return to that life now.”

The stable pony was not that dumb, though in hindsight she was probably a little too obvious with what she wanted. “….alone? What happened to your….friend?”

She had expected this question, and for the sake of getting along with the crazy stable pony later, she did not bother to try to dodge it. “We…did not part on good terms,” she replied, a tinge of sadness coloring her tone. “The caps I gave you….I…I had promised her a new eye, someday. I had forgotten about it until we crossed over, out of Ada and Leon’s feathers, and…she exploded. It was…necessary, to part ways. I do not blame her for her anger….even if it hurt…”

“….so you want to wander the roads with a stable pony you barely know, after all that?”

“Even the company of casual acquaintances is far preferable to me than silence. And I promise to only make your life difficult some of the time.”

The crazy pony was surprisingly silent for a few moments, and when she finally spoke it was with a strangely sad resignation. “….she did the same thing,” she said quietly. “….and I can’t decide if I miss it or not.”

Try as she might, she could not conjure up any words of consolation or sagely advice, and decided she was best off just allowing them to follow her out of the market in silence, but she could not help but dryly note the eerie accuracy of her theory on wasteland fortunes.

Fickle bitches, indeed.