In another elevator, riding to another part of the fortress, Gerardo stood still, deep in thought. Now that he knew Shinespark had failed to recover his sword, it was time to deeply reconsider his priorities... a list that constantly appeared to be shrinking.
He had three goals, in a best-case scenario. The first, and most important, was the safety of his friends, because actual lives and trust and other creatures besides himself were on the line. The second was to recover his sword; the most useful and potentially irreplaceable tool he possessed. The third was to obtain his writ of entry into the Plains of Harmony, which he had been promised as a reward for completing the Yakyakistani delivery... a task that was progressively becoming more tangled and convoluted by the minute. The ultimate goal underlying all three of those was to escape the city with his life intact and in possession of as many of the three as possible.
Every one of those required him going out and hunting down something he didn't already have; finding something that was lost in the city. For a moment, he imagined what it would be like to have a brand like Maple's that would allow him to guard his possessions from theft at all times... and shook his head. Wishful thinking wouldn't be practical.
Finding Maple and Starlight was the most important of those goals, because they would be helpless and vulnerable without him and would soon come under attack, assuming Selma wasn't lying. But without his sword, he would be powerless to defend them, as Selma had painfully taught him the previous evening. Furthermore, neither of them could fly, and while they weren't pushovers physically they couldn't match him for fitness and endurance. Unless he could establish a guaranteed safehouse to hide them in, finding them before the sword would only weigh him down... and so long as he stuck to his present task of pursuing the crates and the writ, they would be safe from pursuit. Logically, then, they would have to be the last thing he found before leaving the city.
That left his sword and his writ. As much as it pained him to admit it, neither was truly essential: once he left Ironridge, having a weapon would no longer be of as critical import, and Starlight herself could function as a key into the Plains of Harmony, having somehow found a route out. But if he were to get them...
Stalling Selma would have to be his top priority, as that would buy him more time to act later, and that hopefully was moving him closer to the writ. His sword was a mix-up: he could go to the Steel District as requested and hope that Shinespark had managed to obtain it over the course of the night, or go to the Sky District and confront Dior with what he suspected about Braen's identity. A mistake in either direction would be a costly waste of time.
Quickly, he took stock of his tentative alliances; the greatest asset he still had. Sharpie? Motivated by revenge and working with him out of shared mutual interest. Slipstream? He was already indebted to her before considering that she might be mad at him for ditching her at Skyfreeze. Howe? Ironrically, his most trustworthy ally. For all the pegasus's incompetence and bravado, he seemed to have a legitimate interest in helping Gerardo. If only trustworthiness extended to reliability...
Then there were Selma and Herman. He wasn't sure why he was lumping them together when they seemed to be on opposing sides... or, at least, Selma was plotting behind his superior's back. Likely, it was because they were both the most suspicious: Herman had been overly helpful without a clear motive, and Selma had said too much, too quickly. Gerardo wished he could rewind his conversations with the unicorn to analyze what had been said for clues and contradictions. In the heat of the moment, it had seemed reasonable enough, but the mere fact that Selma always chose to discuss important things during moments of extreme tension wasn't a strike in his favor.
None of those ponies, he suddenly realized, he could properly confide in about everything he knew. If Herman assigning him to work against his own underling wasn't enough, Selma had told him, with the barest sliver of consent, information that was both extremely sensitive and extremely useless... making him dangerous to talk to. The only ponies he could fully trust in Ironridge were lost somewhere, being chased by Howe and soon the rest of the Defense Force. He was isolated by his knowledge, unable to trust any minds but his own to aid in parsing it. He was stuck thinking through the things he learned and observed on his own, and that made it extremely easy for his perception and agenda to be manipulated. That was dangerous.
As the elevator slid to a stop, Gerardo quickly resolved to set his plan in stone: get the writ if possible, get the sword if possible, get Maple and Starlight, get out. Any changes to that agenda caused by anything he found that Selma or anyone else could possibly have anything to do with had to be questioned under utmost scrutiny, because he was a sitting duck to misdirection. No matter what he found while stalling, he couldn't make any hasty, influenced decisions.
...And the act of stalling and dragging out the inspection rather than hurrying back to his friends was just such a decision.
"Selma," he immediately probed, "once we are finished here, how am I to proceed?"
"With?" Selma lifted an eyebrow. "You're going to make your report to Herman, unless you decide otherwise. I could care less what you do, myself."
"That's rubbish," Sharpie grumbled, pacing out of the elevator at Gerardo's side. "The way you were talking when we watched those kids open the crate, you both obviously talked about it beforehoof, and I know you're not in this together because I listened to him complain about being mugged earlier." She jabbed a wing at Gerardo. "And don't think I didn't notice how long you were gone for that first teleport. Selma, you've clearly got something on him, so don't pretend to be ignorant for my sake."
Selma's face fell into a frown. "I'm perfectly serious; I could care less what he does when this inspection is over." Huffing, he quickened his pace.
"I imagine you could," Gerardo whispered under his breath, falling into step behind the unicorn. It was blatantly obvious that Selma did care... or, at least, wanted Gerardo to think he cared. But he had only started caring once Gerardo mentioned what the reward was...
The writ, he realized, was likely a lost cause. He had just witnessed a bold-faced lie in some capacity, and Selma had openly conspired with him earlier to attempt to con an unknown representative of Yakyakistan... and a pony like that would hardly consider him a perfectly trustworthy ally, either. If something didn't collapse and trap him in the remains of a scheme, whether through treachery or merely being caught, it was almost inevitable that Selma would just take the writ for his own purposes, whatever they were. And Sharpie was smart and hard to shake, so if there was anything to catch...
It was time to call quits to his fake inspection. He would ditch Selma, not return to Herman, and track down his friends as quickly as possible... and see where he could go from there. All he needed to do to start was find a way out of the tunnels.