Chapter 1: The Road that Lies Behind

The temperature fell fast as the storm pounced on us.

I could hardly see more than a few tail lengths in front of my face as the skies roared at us. The rain fell almost horizontally, thrown into my eyes by huge gusts of wind that threatened to blow me off of the mountainside. I was exhausted, cold, and soaked to the bone, my orange and yellow mane reduced to little more than ratty, tangled cords of color clinging to my charcoal face.

Lightning flashed above us, and I nearly jumped at my own shadow, a stark black outlined against a white flash on the rock. Thunder boomed, rattling the ancient stone under my hooves and sending a few loose pebbles clattering down the slope to my left. I watched them fall, squinting into the darkness as the little rocks bounced and rattled a few hundred feet toward the canopy of a forest below us. The trees bowed and creaked in the wind, scattering tufts of dull, orange leaves into the air.

A touch on my flank made me turn around. A zebra looked at me with concerned eyes, his short mohawk plastered to one side of his head from all the rain, and the scruff on his chin dripping water. “We have to stop!” he shouted, barely audible over the storm around us. He winced and held up a foreleg to try to block the rain flying into his eyes and shuffled a step forward. “This storm is going to blow us off the mountain!”

He was right. I’d wanted to push through to the next peak of the mountain pass before settling down for the night, but the storm had slowed our progress considerably. What I thought was going to be a quick squall had turned into a nightmare, a watery, windy nightmare. Perhaps my only consolation was that we were in the mountains, not on some fields somewhere. A storm this strong would’ve kicked up a tornado miles high, and we wouldn’t have survived that.

“Do you see anything, Ember?!” the zebra yelled again. He was trying his best to anchor himself against the wind, and I couldn’t tell if the bags on his back were helping or if they were just giving the wind more area to push against. A white figure capped with red and yellow streaks clung to his side, ragged wings held in front of her face to try to block out the rain.

I squinted into the rain and wind, water dripping from my full eyelashes and making it even harder to see. “There’s fucking nothing!” I yelled into the fury of the skies, angling my head off to the side so I didn’t immediately drown whenever I opened my mouth. “Just rocks and rocks and fucking rocks!”

I raised my hoof to stomp in frustration, but a strong gust of wind came roaring through the narrow mountain pass at precisely that moment and struck me square in the chest. Yelping, I flailed my legs as I tottered backwards, the weight of the bags on my back pulling me toward the ground. Only, there wasn’t any ground off to my left. Just the endless expanse of trees hundreds of feet below me.

“Ember!” the zebra screamed, lunging forward and managing to hook a hoof through a strap on my bags before I plummeted to a painful death. I bit on my tongue as I suddenly came to a stop, the straps of my bags holding me by the shoulders while my limbs flailed above open air. Rocks tumbled down around me, and I saw the stony mountainside light up beneath me in another strike of lightning. A tree burst into flames in the forest, and flaming branches flew a good twenty or thirty feet into the air before landing back in the canopy. A few more small fires began to spring up, only to struggle and wither under the smothering rain and wind buffeting them.

Great. I’d get to fall to my death and be burned to a crisp. Just what I always wanted.

Something began to tear in the bag keeping me from becoming an orange and black pancake, and I felt my shoulders slump suddenly. My horn flared with brilliant orange magic, though it was more mana leaving my body in desperation and fear than an actual attempt to cast a spell. “Gauge!” I shrieked, the wind starting to blow me around like a ragdoll. “Pull me up! Pull me up! Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck I don’t want to die, fuck!”

“Hang on!” Gauge yelled back at me, and I could feel him heaving and struggling to try to drag me and my bags back onto the stony ledge. “Nova! Drop your bags! Get ready to catch h—!”

The straps keeping me attached to the bag Gauge held in his grasp suddenly gave way with a gut-wrenching tear of fabric, and my stomach flew into my throat as I began to fall.

I screamed and wailed as the wind began to spin me through the air, and I quickly lost track of what was up and what was down. I was too terrified to do anything meaningful with my horn; it just flared and sputtered sparks of orange as mana flew out of it in desperation. But just before I could enjoy the lovely sensation of belly flopping a slab of stone a few hundred feet down and having my guts expelled through my teeth, I landed on something much softer, something that also grunted when I hit it. After wavering in midair for a few seconds, I felt gravity pull my stomach back into my chest where it belonged, and I began to rise with the frantic beating of a pegasus’ white wings.

“I’ve got you!” Nova panted through clenched teeth, her wings working hard to keep the two of us plus a few spare bags that’d come along for the ride aloft. The wind tore at her wings, knocking a few feathers loose, white lines that quickly disappeared into the veil of gray surrounding us. A good twenty or thirty feet above us, Gauge’s striped face peered down over the edge of the cliff, his hoof outstretched as if that somehow was going to help us not get blown away by the strong headwind Nova flew into.

I felt my sodden mane begin to prickle with static electricity, and I looked above us to see a particularly fat storm cloud flying in low. “Nova…”

She didn’t say anything, but the next thing I knew, Nova had turned her wings vertical, allowing the wind to send us flying backwards, almost completely out of control. The static buildup in my mane disappeared in an instant, and a moment later, I went blind as a searing white light burned my retinas into scorched discs. Thunder exploded around us, and the shockwave was strong enough to forcefully eject the breath from my lungs. A moment later I found myself sucking down air, and one by one my senses returned to me. It took me a solid minute to recognize the feeling of stone beneath my cheek, and another two minutes to even see it.

Dazed and disoriented, I managed to stand on shaky hooves and take a single step forward before I tripped over Nova, who simply groaned and rolled over, clutching her head and flattening her ears against her skull. I saw Gauge galloping toward us from a ways away, leaving our bags in a soaked pile on the cliff. I staggered toward him, but after only hesitating for not even half a second to make sure I was okay, he slid on his knees toward Nova, cradling the pegasus in his forelegs and showering her with kisses.

“H-Hey…” Nova feebly protested, fighting Gauge off with increasingly strong limbs as her senses returned to her. “I’m alright, I’m alright! Stars, you’re such a worrywart!”

“The fuck happened?” I asked from where I stood. Still feeling more than a little dizzy on my hooves, I slumped over and sat against the wall, cradling my aching skull. I felt like a group of Crimson had taken turns beating me over the head with rocks.

“You almost got struck by lightning!” Gauge exclaimed. “If you hadn’t have flown backwards, Nov, the two of you would’ve been fried!”

“I blame Ember for carrying her gun,” Nova said, rubbing her undoubtedly sore head. “Metal and lightning storms don’t mix well…”

I frowned at somepony insulting my baby. “Yeah, well, this gun has gotten us a few dinners since we left the dam, okay?” Another throbbing ache wracked my brain, right behind my eyes, and I pressed my hooves against them to try and blot out the pain. “But thanks for saving me, you two. I thought I was gonna be a fucking abstract paint smear on the side of the mountain.”

“At least you’d be a p-pretty paint s-smear,” Nova teased. Grunting and groaning, she managed to stand up in the face of the wind, her wings held tightly at her sides so she didn’t get blown away. Nova was a small pegasus to begin with, but with her wings little more than waterlogged messes and her mane and coat flattened against her body, she looked like a drowned rat. The spaces between her ribs from her starvation at the Crimson’s hooves hadn’t entirely filled in either, giving her a thin and bony look. A chilly gust blew over us again, and she began to shiver violently. “W-We need to t-turn back,” she said, teeth chattering and wings shaking at her sides. “T-T-There w-was a small hollow we could hide in. W-W-Wait out the s-s-storm!”

“Nova’s right, Em,” Gauge said, wrapping his hooves around Nova and trying to keep the little mare warm. “We’re gonna freeze to death if we stay out here any longer. If the wind doesn’t blow us off the mountain, that is.”

I looked to my right, in the direction we were going. I could faintly see the outline of the next peak through a momentary break in the clouds. I’d wanted to hit that marker before stopping for the night just to keep up our pace. But with this storm and all…

Water dripped from Nova’s eyelashes, and she sniffled a few times as the rain tickled her nose. Streams of runoff poured from her wings, audibly splashing on the ground. And Gauge didn’t look much better; somehow his blue bandana around his neck looked like it weighed twenty pounds with all the water it’d soaked up.

“Okay,” I said. “Gauge, take Nova back and find us some shelter. I’ll grab these bags. We’ll want to get dry before nightfall.”

Gauge nodded, and I could see the silent appreciation in his eyes. He carefully helped Nova turn around on the narrow cliff, and the two of them staggered back through the rain in the direction we had come. I watched them go for a few moments before trotting in the opposite direction, to where we’d dropped our bags when I nearly died. I made sure to stay close to the rocks, though, so the wind couldn’t send me flying away again.

“What have I gotten them into?” I muttered to myself, getting a gulp of water while I was at it by merely opening my mouth. We’d been on the trail for two weeks now, two long and boring weeks of walking. After helping the Sentinels drive the Crimson out of Celestia Dam, me, Gauge, and Nova left them behind to venture deeper into the heart of Auris, chasing a murderer and some scattered bits of code. It didn’t help that he could fly while we were stuck to the ground.

I grabbed the bags in my magic and turned around after making sure everything was here. When we left the dam, I’d been optimistic and eagerly hit the trail, chasing the promise of revenge. Yeoman’s days were numbered, and I was going to be the one to end them. But everything went to shit when we tried to take a shortcut through the mountains instead of following the caravan paths down the river, which would’ve taken another week, maybe more, to loop all the way back around. It was a miracle none of us had caught blue lung or any other nasty disease so far. Getting horribly sick on the trail was about the only thing that could’ve made this journey worse.

It took me almost fifteen minutes of backtracking to find where Gauge and Nova had set up shop. They’d found a crooked ‘L’ shape in the mountain with a bit of an overhang to at least keep the corner dry. More importantly, the walls were between us and the wind, so we didn’t have to worry about being blown away. Just simply getting out of the wind made me feel a little warmer, even if I was still soaked to the bone.

I threw the bags down in a heap at the back of the shelter, behind where Nova and Gauge were trying to make a firepit out of some rocks. “I didn’t think you guys went this far back,” I said, combing water out of my mane and tail with my magic. “I was worried you’d fallen off the mountain.”

“This was the first good place we could find,” Gauge said, rummaging through the bags and pulling out a few sticks of miraculously dry wood. “It’s dry and not windy.”

“The best we could ask for,” I agreed, sitting down next to the fire. I frowned a little bit and lit up the wood with a thought. In a few seconds, we had a nice fire going, and I relaxed as I felt the heat begin to worm its way under my coat.

“Hey, you’re getting good at that!” Nova said, smiling at me. “I thought you said you were bad at pyromancy!”

“Don’t worry, Nov, she was,” Gauge said before I could respond. “She couldn’t even scorch a piece of wood for the longest time.”

“Shut up,” I said, frowning at him. “I just needed practice.”

“And how!”

I responded by summoning a few sparks to dance over the tribal swirl on his flank, making him furiously swat at them until they disappeared. “What was that?”

Nova snickered into a wingtip and nuzzled Gauge’s cheek. “Before you ask, I’m not gonna kiss that and make it better.”

“Good call,” I said. “The last thing Gauge needs is somepony kissing his ass.”

“Now you girls are just ganging up on me,” Gauge said. He dug through the bags for a few moments until he pulled out a cloth bundle, which he unwrapped to reveal a dormant sentry drone. He tapped it a few times and the thing suddenly sprung to life, buzzing and squawking as it hovered around and scanned the area. “I’ll just find new friends, then.”

“Yeah, yeah. Hey, SCaR,” I said, waving to the drone. “Be happy you didn’t have to get your shiny metal ass all wet.”

Nova sneezed and drew some blankets closer around her shivering wet frame. “I wish my coltfriend cared as much about me as he did his pet drone…”

Gauge rolled his eyes and wrapped a foreleg around Nova’s shoulders. “Shush, honey. SCaR’s just more sensitive to the wet weather, is all.”

“What is he, a fucking old stallion with back pain?” I asked, watching the drone buzz around under the dry safety of the overhang. “Do his thrusters act up whenever a storm comes through?”

Apparently satisfied with its scan of the area, the drone deployed four little peg legs and landed near Gauge before going into some kind of sentry mode. “He might as well be an old stallion,” Gauge said, patting the drone’s casing. “He’s older than all of us. He’s got exposed circuitry and shit underneath his cracked casing. Enough water will short him out.”

“Good to know that our watchdog doesn’t function well in the rain,” I said, shaking my head at the drone. Groaning, I quickly tore apart my bags and stretched out a bedroll between two comfy-looking rocks and moved to it. I couldn’t help but sigh as I stretched my aching muscles out on my bedroll, hooves splayed all around me and eyes fluttering with bliss. “Fuck, I feel like I could sleep forever.”

“If you could save that until after we’re done with all this bullshit, that’d be great,” Gauge said, gently stroking Nova’s mane as she leaned against him. “We’ve still got to find this ‘Yeoman’ pony… wherever he is…”

“He’s out there, somewhere,” I said. “He’s looking for the same pieces of code we are. If we’re fast enough, we’ll cross paths with him eventually.”

“But what if we aren’t?” he asked. “He can fly and we can’t. I don’t know where this ‘Ivory City’ he’s from is, but he’s probably been all over Auris in the time it’s taken us to get this far. How do we know we’re not just chasing him for nothing?”

“Are you really gonna bring this shit up now?” I asked him, fixing him with an accusatory glare. “After how much we’ve been through to get this fucking far?”

He raised his hoof like he was going to try to calm me down. “Ember, I’m just saying that… why does this concern us, anyway? We’re miles and miles away from civilization, on our own in the middle of the mountains! If something bad happens to us, there’s nopony who’s going to come save us.”

“And what would you rather us do, huh? Turn back? You know I can’t do that, Gauge. Not after what he did.” Memories of an orange mare, of happier days, threatened to break out of the closet I’d thrown them in, so I growled and shoved more metaphorical junk in front of the door to keep them inside. “I never asked you two to follow me.”

“If we hadn’t have followed you, you’d be dead several times over.”

“So?”

Bitter silence hung in the air between us, Gauge not sure how to respond, me regretting everything I’d just said. I could feel that dark void opening around my hooves, those thousand pound shackles that nearly threw me off of the dam when I learned Zip died. I had a feeling that Gauge and Nova knew I was depressed, maybe even suicidal, after what had happened. But nopony could even bring themselves to say anything about it. Not even now, when I’d all but played my hoof on the table for everypony to see.

Instead, when the silence dragged on for so long I was afraid it was going to kill somepony, I cleared my throat and tried to dismiss the conversation with a wave of my hoof. “How much farther until we’re out of these mountains?”

Thankful for the excuse to talk about anything else, Nova pulled out a soaked map from a bag at her hooves and spread it across the ground, careful not to rip it. “Last I checked, we were a day’s hike away from the end of the mountains. After that, Hole’ll be in sight.” She shivered, though not from the cold. “I heard some of the Crimson talk about Hole while I was there. Do we… do we have to go there?”

“It’s the first settlement we hit after we get out of the valley,” I said. “I’ve heard all about Hole, too, but we need to stop there. We need food and supplies and information. How are we going to find Yeoman if we don’t even know where to look? Besides, if he’s looking for code pieces around here, then he might be in Hole, too.”

“You know who else is going to be in Hole?” Gauge asked. “Slavers. Maybe even some Crimson that haven’t gotten the memo that their boss is dead. And when they see the two of you with your brands…”

I shifted my leg slightly, the flesh where the Crimson had seared a heart over my cutie mark a month ago itching at being mentioned. Across from me, Nova glanced at the pair of brackets burned into her left flank and wilted in embarrassment. I knew exactly how she felt; even though we were free, and even though we’d destroyed the Crimson, those brands marked us as somepony’s property. And no matter where we went, we’d always have to carry those marks and that shame. For the rest of our lives.

“We’ll have to keep them covered,” I said. “It’s the only way.”

“And how long do you think that’s going to work?” Gauge said. He pointed to the map. “We’re going to a pleasure town! If you two can go two steps without somepony grabbing at your flanks then I’ll be amazed!”

“But what if we already have owners?” Nova asked, and both Gauge and I gave her confused looks. She looked up and nuzzled Gauge under the chin. “You don’t have a brand, Gauge. What if you pretended to be our owner?”

“But we don’t even have his swirly ass mark branded on our right flanks,” I said, looking at my natural mark on my right. “That’s where they put the owner’s mark. What if they don’t buy it?”

“I’ll make them buy it,” Gauge said. “Maybe we can make some things out of our supplies. Some simple rope bridles. Anything to look the part.”

I shrugged. It was as good of a plan as we were gonna get. “Yeah, I guess,” I conceded. “Just don’t make me kiss your hooves or any shit like that or I’ll make your life hell.”

Gauge just smirked at me. “Come on, Em, you have to make it look authentic! I’m your master, remember?”

“Dammit, Gauge, I’ve kicked you in the balls before, and I’m not afraid to do it again.”

“Oh, it’s not so bad,” Nova said. “I don’t mind calling him master…” she added in a squeak of a whisper.

I just blinked at her. “Nov, I did not need to hear that.” Her cheeks began to turn red, and even Gauge looked like he was a little uncomfortable. Looks like the two of them were going to have a lot to discuss the next time they wanted to fuck. Just so long as they didn’t do it while I was around. I’d come back from hunting once to find the tent rocking and one of them making the strangest noise I’d ever heard. The less I had to deal with that, the better.

Nova giving us an unwanted sneak peek at one of her fetishes kind of threw our collective train of thought for a loop, so I cleared my throat like a half dozen times to put us back on track. “Right, so… yeah. So the plan is this: we go into Hole, we ask about Yeoman and any old Equestrian installations that might be in the area, and then we get the fuck out of there before some slavers kidnap our asses and fuck Nov and I raw. Sound like a plan?”

“I’m all for it, especially that last part,” Nova said, rubbing at her cheeks to try and force their blush to go away.

Gauge sighed. “It’s as good as any we’re going to get out here. Let’s just hope this pays off.”

“It’ll work,” I said, feeling a fire burning in my chest. “I just know it will. Trust me. I’ve got a feeling.”

“That’s what you said when you made us take this dumb shortcut through the mountains!” Nova protested.

“And it’s working! Kinda!” I winced as a bolt of lightning blasted some rock off of the mountain about a half mile away. “Mostly! We’re alive, that’s all that matters, right?”

Gauge chuckled and shook his head. “Whatever, Em. Not like we’re going anywhere now. Let’s just try to enjoy the rest and not get blown off the mountain again.”

“Hey, sounds like a great plan to me,” I said, digging into my cigarette box and pulling one out. Fuck, only two left. I was going to have to stock up when we got to Hole. Lighting the cig up, I stuck it between my lips and took a long pull. As soon as the nicotine hit my blood, I immediately felt myself relaxing, the stress of trying to hike in the storm suddenly bleeding away. “Yeoman, you fucking half-faced cunt bag, I’ve got a bullet with your name on it.”

Chapter 2: The Good We Do

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Chapter 2: The Good We Do

The same dream, over and over again, without end. A nightmare that wouldn’t leave me be.

I saw Zip again. The love of my life, the lone spark in the darkness that brought me through the tough times following the destruction of Blackwash. The mare who I poured my heart into, and who loved me back, despite my flaws. The mare whom I’d wanted to spend my life with. The mare who had made me happier than I’d ever been.

The mare who was taken from me. The mare who died in my forelegs as I screamed at her, begged her to be okay. The mare who spent her final moments touching a hoof to her own bloody muzzle, then to mine, eyes filled with regret and sadness, afraid of what awaited her beyond the land of the living. The mare who died too good and too pure for this world, a tiny spark of bravery and hope that needed to be snuffed out for Auris to have its way.

I woke up, screaming her name, sweat and tears pouring down my face, like I’d done so many times since that awful day.

“Ember?! You alright?” Hooves shook me as I panted, my vision blurred somewhere between the dream world and the real world, my hooves dry but sticky with imagined blood. After a few seconds of hyperventilating, I locked eyes with Nova, and I finally realized where I was and what I was doing.

Swallowing hard, I shakily nodded and removed her hooves from my shoulders. “Yeah, Nov, I’m f-fine.” I was basically sucking down air at this point, and I closed my eyes for a few moments to try to calm myself down. “Just a bad dream… a bad dream…”

Nova immediately adopted a concerned look. “Ember… you’ve been having nightmares for two weeks now. Are you sure you don’t want to… want to talk about it? Or something?” She hesitated, then added, “I’m worried for you, Em. This isn’t healthy. I don’t even know if you’re really sleeping, you have nightmares so often.”

She was right. I hadn’t been sleeping. Not really. Every single night I woke up one way or another, panting and sweating from my nightmares. Truth be told, I hadn’t gotten a full eight hours since the attack on the dam. Whenever I tried to sleep, I dreamed of Zip. I was slowly becoming more and more scared that I’d never be able to sleep again. Too many nightmares awaited me whenever I closed my eyes.

I hung my head and rubbed my eyes, the last traces of sleep fleeing from them despite my efforts to trap them. I was fully awake now, which sucked, because that meant I was going to be exhausted while the sun was up. Again. Groaning, I peered out from beneath the rocky overhang of the mountain to where the two moons hung overhead. “How long…?”

“Maybe two hours,” Nova said, shaking her head. She looked me over like I was about to break into a million tiny pieces of glass and chewed on her lip. “The worst of the storm passed. You alright? Wanna go back to bed?”

“No, no,” I said, waving a hoof. “I probably can’t. Not now, at least.” I looked to my right to where Gauge was still passed out in a striped ball by Nova’s side, sprawled across their bedroll. Chuckling, I shook my head. “That fucker can sleep through anything.”

“It’s amazing, really,” Nova said, smirking at him. “I once accidentally kneed him in the face trying to get out of bed. He didn’t even stir. It’s like he’s comatose or something.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, shrugging, “better he get all his sleeping done while he’s not on watch. I don’t want to get dragged off the mountain by a shrike because he fell asleep during his turn.”

Nova shook her head. “You know we can count on him.”

“I know. I just can’t help but tease him, even when he’s not awake to appreciate it.” Smiling faintly to myself, I turned around and reached for my bags. I popped open my cigarette box for a moment and looked at the two measly rolled sticks inside. “I’ll save those for later,” I muttered to myself, shaking my head and tossing the box back in my bags. I turned around to find Nova watching me, but she quickly turned away when we made eye contact. Sighing, I just slid forward to the end of my bedroll and sat next to her, staring out into the starry night.

“It reminds you of home, doesn’t it?” Nova asked, her eyes wide and full of wonder as she looked at the familiar constellations above us. “It’s like the quiet nights after curfew when we’d sneak off to the flat rock. Only… well, quieter.”

“As far as I’m aware, we’re the only two ponies and zebra out here for miles,” I said, my eyes dancing between the stars above us. “Nopony really wanders the mountains between the valley and the heartland, right? They all still think the valley is Crimson territory.”

Nova nodded. “And that’s gonna change soon,” she said. “Those traders we passed going the other way have to have made it to the dam by now. They know that the Crimson are gone.”

“And soon the rest of Auris will know too.” Sighing, I crossed my forelegs on the stony ground and laid my chin on them. “It feels weird being a part of the community, you know?”

Nova cocked her head to the side. “Uhhh… no?”

“I mean, like…” I bit my tongue and tried to phrase my thoughts. “Two months ago, we thought we were basically alone, right? We heard radio signals sometimes, but for the most part, we didn’t know of anything outside of Blackwash. And now, look at this.” I gestured with my hoof across the shadowy mountains, silent giants in the dark of the night. “We’re walking right into the heartland of Auris. We’re walking into civilization, or whatever passes for it. We’ve gone farther than anypony from Blackwash has ever gone, ever. And as for the rest of Blackwash, well, they’re at the dam now, and they’re working with the Sentinels. We’re a part of Auris, now. This is our world. Not just a shantytown on a mountain. It’s kind of overwhelming, if you ask me.”

“More like exciting!” Nova said, ruffling her wings at her sides. “I’ve always wanted to see the rest of Auris. There’s an entire world out here that we don’t understand! Equestria never even had time to study it all before the Silence! I can learn things that nopony has ever learned before, and see things nopony has ever seen!” She was practically vibrating with energy, and I shook my head as she exclaimed, “Isn’t that amazing?!”

Gauge snorted in his sleep, making us both jump. But when he rolled over and went back to snoring, we chuckled a bit and returned to staring at the constellations.

“Which one is it, again?” I asked, my head pointed straight up, my eyes darting between the stars above us, looking for one that felt vaguely familiar to something deep inside of me.

Nova bit her lip and studied the skies for a minute before pointing about twenty degrees above the horizon. “It’s over there,” she said. “See those three stars in a line? It’s the second one down from that.”

I followed where she was pointing with my eyes and found the star I was looking for. “How far away is that from here?”

“Seventeen light years,” Nova said, lowering her wing. “The light that star’s giving off was created seventeen winters ago. Well…” she shrugged and shook her head. “More like twelve or thirteen winters ago, with Auris’ longer orbital period. Space and time get confusing when you’re trying to use a system developed on one planet with one set of time standards and adapt it to a different planet with its own rotation and revolution periods. Not to mention time dilation because of gravity—”

I held up a hoof to cut her off. “Nova, you lost me at the part about Auris’ special time of the month. Please don’t get into any freaky gravity science bullshit. I have no idea what any of it means.”

Nova laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Em. Maybe one day I’ll teach you.” Then, smirking, she drew away a little bit like she knew what she was going to say next would make me want to hit her. “Unless you want me to teach you how to fly first. We might have more success with that.”

I groaned and buried my face in my hooves. “Damn it, Nov…”

“Just paying you back for catching you!” Nova said, sticking her tongue out at me. Then, after a breath, she sobered up a bit and shook her head. “But anyway, yeah. That’s them alright. So tiny and far away…”

“It’s hard to imagine that’s where we came from,” I said, my eyes fixated on the star, the star that played host to ponykind’s home world, Equus. “So far away, so tiny and insignificant. I can’t believe we came from that tiny speck in the sky. Like… how amazing is that, just to think about?”

“It’s pretty amazing,” Nova said. “The effort it took to do that, the technology…” She rubbed her hooves together. “Just think how incredibly advanced Equestria must’ve been to put ponies all the way out here. Their legacy is all around us, forgotten and broken. Imagine what Auris could do if it had access to Equestria’s knowledge…”

Grunting, I sat up and shook my head. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said, making Nova tilt her head a little bit in a puzzled look. “This code we’re chasing… well, I don’t know what it’s going to do. Yeoman said that it would ‘wake the Azimuth’, but I don’t know what that means. But if it helps ponies on Auris get their hooves on ancient pre-Silence tech…” Sighing, I looked back to the star ponykind came from. “I’m afraid of what might happen if ponies like Reclaimer get their hooves on Equestria’s legacy. I don’t trust them to use it for the benefit of Auris. Honestly, I think the planet was better off during the Silence than in whatever this is now. At least when ponies killed each other it was for petty shit, not something that could change the world…”

I stopped as a big yawn came over me. Maybe it was time I tried to go back to sleep. Just talking with Nova had certainly helped, even if it was about random shit, not about my nightmares. Smiling at her, I leaned in and wrapped my forelegs around her. “Thanks for the chat, Nova. It… it helped.”

Nova nuzzled my cheek and gently pushed me away when we were done. “I’m always happy to help, Em,” she said. “Just… just say something, okay? No matter what it is, Gauge and I will always try be willing to help. We have to rely on each other out here, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, crawling back into my bedroll and trying to make myself comfortable. “But we’ll make it through fine. We just…” I yawned again and rubbed my eyes. “We just need to stick together. And one way or another, we’ll deal with this stupid code.”

Nova merely nodded in response. “We’ll deal with that in the morning. Just for now, sleep, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I hear you…” I mumbled. It didn’t take long before sleep found me again.

-----

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

I winced with every step of my left hind hoof. We’d made decent progress since we packed up camp this morning, and now we were starting to descend out of the mountains. Unfortunately, I’d cut the frog or cracked the hoof or something trying to navigate the rocky pass this morning, and now it hurt to put weight on it. Not terribly, or else we’d have stopped a while back to get it patched up, but enough to be an inconvenience and an annoyance.

“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fu—Ow! Fuck!”

Gauge put his hoof back on the ground and shook his head. “If I have to listen to any more of that, I might just cut your leg off and be done with it.” Nova giggled at his side, the bags she carried on her back almost dwarfing her tiny frame.

I rubbed the sore spot on the back of my head and scowled at the path in front of us. “Well fuck you too, then…”

I took another step, and it was like I’d stepped on a red hot knife. Yipping in pain, I dropped my bags on the ground and began hopping around on three legs, swearing and cursing and shouting. Nova and Gauge just stared at me while I cursed out everything under the sun until finally the dagger of pain faded into a dull ache.

Nova’s wingtips touched my shoulders and she guided me toward a rock. “Come on, sit down,” she said. “Let’s take a look at your booboo.”

I hobbled over to the rock and flopped down on it. At least I didn’t see any bloody hoof prints in the ground; that was a good thing. While I lifted my hoof for Nova and Gauge to take a look at, I drank a quick splash of water and munched on a stick of jerky I’d made from some rock runner I’d shot the other day. It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. A little bland since we didn’t have any spices to smoke it with, but it worked enough. At least we’d be at Hole soon.

Nova made a face and poked at a sensitive spot with a feather, and I recoiled a bit from the touch. “You should have checked your hoof a while ago instead of toughing it out like a big filly,” she said. “You’ve got a splinter of rock jammed into your hoof. No wonder it hurts.”

“I thought I’d just cut it or something,” I said. “It wasn’t that bad until just now.”

“Not that bad?” Gauge asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Listen, I’ve been shot and almost got hanged at the dam, my idea of painful might be a little messed up right now.”

“Well, it’s not the end of the world,” Nova said, digging through her bags with a wing. “We just have to pry the rock out. Hopefully it won’t hurt too much to remove.” She eventually pulled out a knife and bit down on the handle. “Hold still...”

“Don’t you think amputation’s a little bit of an overreaction, Nov?” Gauge asked her, though the smirk on his face as he looked at me made it clear he was actually teasing me.

“Fuck off, Gauge,” I said. “Or I’ll shove this rock right up your ass.”

“Kinky.”

“Foals...” Nova muttered around the handle of the knife. Gauge stuck his tongue out at me, so I did the same, only Nova chose that moment to dig the knife into my hoof to pop the rock out. I yipped in response and ended up biting my tongue, and Gauge fell to the ground laughing as I unleashed a string of profanities at nopony in particular.

Nova put the knife away and stood up, offering me a helping hoof to get up off the rock. “You’ll be fine, it’ll just be sore for a day or so. Just try not to do too much running, or you could hurt it worse.”

“Not sure I can promise that when ponies start shooting at me,” I muttered, standing up and testing my hoof a bit. Now that the shock had worn off, the pain was more like a prickwing sting whenever I put too much weight on it. Sighing, I shouldered my load and looked down the path in front of us. “Alright, we should get going, then. Thanks, Nov.”

The pegasus grinned and fluttered a foot or two into the air before the weight of the bags on her back brought her back down to earth. “It’s what I do!”

Almost as soon as she touched the ground, I heard the crack of a rifle echo over the mountain pass. I flinched, kind of shocked to hear the noise, and both Gauge and Nova froze as well. After a few seconds, we heard it again, and the return fire of some automatic weapons just out of sight around a corner in the path in front of us.

I dropped my bags again and drew my rifle, making sure it was loaded and ready for action. I gave Nova a curt look and pointed past the corner. “Eyes on.”

Nova swallowed hard and shed her bags, launching into the air and flying for the clouds as fast as she could. It was something we’d rehearsed a few times on our little trip. Since the mare couldn’t tell one end of a gun from another, we’d decided she’d be best used as our scout rather than trying to teach her how to fight in a shootout. While she gained altitude, Gauge and I hurried to the ridge, SCaR at our backs, and threw ourselves into the dirt as soon as we crested it. I set my rifle down in the dirt and cut off my magic so the fiery orange glow wouldn’t give us away and Gauge pulled out a set of binoculars.

I could kind of see what was going on down below us, but it was a little far away, so I couldn’t make out much detail. We were looking at a narrow basin between some tall mountains, where a group of figures were gathered in the middle among a bunch of tents. Above them, a trio of pegasi flew fast and low, strafing the group with their guns and twirling out of the way whenever somepony tried aiming at them. The pegasi seemed like they all wore their own ragtag armor, while the ponies in the camp all wore uniforms.

“Bandits,” Gauge hissed, moving the binoculars back and forth. “Three pegasi armed with some pretty heavy weaponry. One of them has a gun almost as big as he is strapped to his side. The camp guards don’t look they’re anywhere near as well armed.”

“Wonder what they’re doing all the way out here,” I wondered aloud. “It’s the middle of nowhere, and they look like they’re here to stay.”

“Well, they’re pinned down regardless. Those pegasi know what they’re doing. The guards can’t get a shot in edgewise without a swooping bandit taking their heads off.”

“Right.” Grunting, I stood up and shook some of the dirt off of my coat. “Fuck this.”

“What are you—?” Gauge started to ask, but I’d already started tearing down the pass toward the camp, staggering and limping on my hurt hoof as I did so. It was a little difficult to hike down the side of the mountain even without a hurt hoof, so I waited until I got behind some rocks to start shooting, not wanting to draw attention to myself before I had some solid cover. My sexy BR12A rifle roared as it spit out three empty cases in a quick burst, the middle tracer bullet helping me to adjust my aim for the next one. Two more bursts were all it took to drop one of the surprised pegasi out of the sky; she cried out in pain as the bullets ripped through her ribs, and I saw her neck snap backwards as she fell and broke it on a rocky spire.

One down, two to go, and a lot of bullets to finish the job.

I had their attention now, and the campers began shooting back with a renewed frenzy when they realized I was trying to help them out. They pushed out from their defenses, widening into a net of guns and bullets that could cover a larger area. The pegasus bandits drew back a bit from the lead being thrown up at them and tried to strafe from a distance, but only the stallion carrying the heavy machine gun could really do anything from that range. He managed to shoot one or two of the camp guards before his chest exploded in a red cloud of gore and he fell to the ground, dead.

Without the thump-thump-thumping of that heavy machine gun, I heard the sound of a pretty large caliber rifle firing from somewhere across the pass at us. Even as I looked for the source, I saw one of the camp guards’ head explode as a fat bullet tore through it, sending his skull flying into a hundred million different gory pieces. It seemed like each crack of that rifle dropped another guard, even as the sole pegasus flying like a madmare over the camp did her best to avoid getting shredded into pieces.

I peered out from behind my cover, scanning the general direction those shots were coming from. All I saw were rocks, rocks and more rocks, until—there! I saw a figure nestled in the crook of some boulders about two kilometers away with a pretty high tech rifle in its hooves. Beige feathers sticking out from either side were all I had to clue me in to what the shooter’s race was; in retrospect, I should’ve figured it out sooner, given than the other three were pegasi as well.

Then a bullet ripped through my mane, and I fell backwards in shock.

I laid on my back for a few seconds, not quite sure I was still alive, until I remembered to start breathing again. Cursing, I sat up and huddled against the rock, careful not to expose myself to any more fire. Yup, that sniper had definitely seen me, and my huge and fluffy mane must’ve thrown off their aim as to where the center of my skull was. That they could even shoot that accurately from that far away was amazing to me. And I didn’t have anything that could shoot back!

But maybe they’d give up if they knew it was a lost cause. The one pegasus who’d lingered over the campsite banked her wings and rocketed toward the south, trying to outrun the bullets the camp guards fired at her from below. While they couldn’t really connect the shot on her, I had some higher elevation which put that pegasus on eye level with me, and she was flying in a straight line. For an admittedly good marksmare like myself, I only needed two bursts to hit my target. In a cry of pain that echoed over the pass, the pegasus fell to the ground as my bullets ripped her wing off, and she couldn’t save herself from slamming into the earth at full speed. I saw her legs twitching through the scope of my rifle as I aimed a finishing blow, but one of the campers ran up with a shotgun and mulched her guts. I winced at the blood and gore, but turned my attention back to the sniper. They were more important than their dead companions.

And they must’ve realized that their little raid was a lost cause. The pegasus nestled in the mountains quickly broke down their rifle and shortened it down into a compact box before spreading their wings and taking to the sky. The beige shooter lingered only a few moments before flying to the south, easily outrunning a few stray shots fired in their general direction with no real chance of connecting.

With the danger over, I lowered my rifle and reset the safety before slinging it across my shoulders. Hoofsteps and the puttering of little thrusters came up behind me, and Gauge was at my side in a few moments. I smiled and shook some dirt out of the ends of my mane and waved at the camp guards below us. “Feels nice to do something good for a change, eh?”

“Don’t look at me, you’re the one who actually did the shooting,” Gauge said. I followed his eyes to one of the dead bandits on the ground, which a few of the guards began to strip of valuables. “Were they Crimson?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “They don’t have any of that stupid war paint on their faces. Besides, I’d be surprised if there were really any Crimson bandits this far from the dam. They mostly kept their shit to the valley from what I heard. They wouldn’t be terrorizing the middle of nowhere when there are settlements to torch.”

Wings fluttered next to us as Nova descended from the clouds. “I didn’t see anypony else,” she said, her eyes drifting over the aftermath below us. “The one mare with the big gun got away to the southeast. Looks like she was heading back to Hole.”

“And I thought raiding was a stallion’s profession,” Gauge joked. “Why couldn’t Blackwash have been attacked by a bunch of cute mares instead of stallions wearing makeup?”

I ducked as Nova swung her wing over my head to clip Gauge in the side of the face. “I might have gone willingly then,” I added. Standing up tall, I glanced at Nova. “I’m more impressed that you could tell she was a mare from that far away.”

Nova shrugged. “I’m a pegasus, remember? I’ve got great eyesight. Plus, I know what a mare looks like.”

“What, were you staring at her ass?”

“No!”

Gauge shook his head. “Are you telling me my marefriend is bi, too?” he asked nopony in particular.

“Gauge!”

“I could believe it,” I said, smirking at the two of them. “Nov and I used to practice kissing behind the forge when we were teens.”

“E-Ember!” Her face was a blisteringly bright red, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for her as she slowly died of embarrassment. I won’t say whether I was just teasing her or not, though. I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

I reached over and gave her a quick hug, but I couldn’t help kissing her cheek while I was at it just because I could. She roughly shoved me away with a wing, and I fell against Gauge, laughing my head off. Gauge held me up, shaking his head, until we heard a whistle from far below us. I looked down the slope to see a pair of ponies waving up at us, inviting us over. After a quick nod with Gauge and Nova, I started descending the slope, trying my best to not aggravate my hurt hoof on the rocks.

The two ponies who’d come out to welcome us down were an earth pony stallion and a unicorn mare with the most striking patterning on her coat I’d ever seen. While the earth pony was an uninteresting but pretty muscular brown stallion, the unicorn was shapely and surprisingly tall and limber, with white markings on her forehead, ears, hooves, and splotched randomly across her coat. Her horn was streaked with white, contrasting with the milky brown color of the rest of her coat. She was beautiful, and I felt a twang on my heartstrings. But with Zip’s death so fresh in my heart, they hurt more than anything.

“So,” the stallion said, stepping forward once we were finally on the same level, “to who do we owe our lives?”

I tried to play it off with a wave of my hoof. “Don’t worry about it, it’s nothing. I’m Ember,” I said, placing a hoof on my chest, “and the two back there are Gauge and Nova.” The two of them waved when I said their names, and SCaR began to hover around and scan the area.

“Who’s the little guy?” the mare said. “He’s remarkably intact for a Synarchy drone.”

SCaR flew up to her and scanned her like a curious bird or something before flying back to Gauge. “We call him SCaR,” Gauge said, trotting up next to me. “And what can we call you?”

“You can call me Manchado,” the mare said, and then she smiled and nodded to the stallion. “This is my husband, Sawdust.”

Sawdust nodded in the direction of the camp. “Why don’t we go back and share a drink or something? It’s the least we can do. If it weren’t for you, those pegasi would have picked us apart for sure.”

Well, I wasn’t going to turn down hospitality and the chance to maybe trade a bit. “Sure, we’d love to,” I said, looking over my shoulders and catching nods from Gauge and Nova. “Lead the way.”

They happily obliged, and soon the five of us were walking among the tents of the camp. Things had calmed down a bit, but a decidedly heavy and smothering mood hung over the camp. Unsurprising, considering that the bandits had managed to kill quite a few of the campers before we drove them off. We had to wait for a pair of stallions to pass us by at one point, the corpse of one of their friends suspended between their hooves.

Thankfully, Manchado led us to a big tent in the center of the camp so we’d be out of the way of that. It was actually surprisingly roomy, all things considered, and it looked more permanent than it let on. A large bed made out of cloth and a pair of bedrolls sat in the corner, the sheets piled at its foot and two pony-shaped indents lying side by side in its surface. A few sparse decorations hung from one of the ropes running the perimeter of the roof, mostly hoof-carved wooden knickknacks and the like. A folded picture of Manchado and her husband sat in a makeshift frame on a table in the corner, the two of them holding hooves and kissing against the backdrop of the setting sun. This was more than a tent. This was a home.

While Sawdust went digging through some bags for a drink, I turned to his wife, who sat down at the opposite end of a crude table. “Who were those pegasi?”

“Oh, the pawns of desperate scum, that’s all,” Manchado said with a surprising amount of venom in her voice. “We’ve been trying to survey these mountains for weeks now, and it feels like every few days there’s some trouble. Shipments of supplies have been destroyed or simply stolen, sometimes our sentries go missing in the night, it’s—” She sighed and shook her head, her eyes following some crude glass tumblers Sawdust set on the table alongside a bottle of what I could only assume was hard liquor. “Nopony’s openly attacked us until now.”

“But why?” Gauge asked, humbly taking a filled glass when Sawdust passed it to him. “What are you even doing out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Prospecting,” Sawdust said in a scratchy grumble. He and his wife exchanged a quick glance, and Manchado nodded in agreement while he continued. “Rumor has it there’s some good metal in these mountains. We’re trying to find the motherlode and haul it back to Hole. We’ll make some good money while we’re at it, and Auris gets some raw material to work with to further civilization.”

“So long as those bandits to the north don’t stumble across us,” Manchado said, shuddering. “Those pegasi are nothing compared to them. I heard they conquered an entire valley!”

“You three came from that direction,” Sawdust said, concern in his eyes. “Is it true?”

The three of us looked at each other, and we couldn’t stop proud smiles from breaking out across our muzzles. “Actually, funny you should mention that,” I said, smirking and leaning back in my chair. “As of two weeks ago, the Crimson are no more.”

Manchado and Sawdust exchanged surprised looks. “You’re serious?” Sawdust asked, leaning on the table. “We’ve seen their soldiers in Hole before. Are they really gone?”

“Yup. The Sentinels killed their leader and took them out. They own the dam now.” I picked up the glass of booze Sawdust put in front of me, sniffed it, suppressed a disgusted face, and took a tiny sip of the awful liquid for politeness’ sake. “We were there when it happened. All three of us. After everything they did to us, it’s amazing that they’re finally gone.”

“Amazing…” Manchado breathed. “So then… the valley… it’s free?”

“Free and open for business!” Nova chirped, grinning at her and Sawdust. “Spread the news to everypony! The valley’s open to trade, and it’s the dawn of a new day!”

Sawdust shook his head in disbelief. “If what you’re saying is true… then that’s really something.”

“It’s true,” I said, calmly nodding at them. “All of it. If you ever head north, tell the ponies at the dam that Ember sent you. They’d be more than happy to take you in for a while.”

“While that’s well and good and all, I don’t think we’re going to be budging from these mountains for a while yet.” Manchado’s glass began to glow white, and she slammed down half her drink like she was taking a shot. Wiping her lips and shaking her head a few times, her eyes turned to mine. “And what are you three doing down here? If the valley’s safe now, why leave it? Unless…” her eyes drifted to my flank, even though the table kept it out of sight. “Those marks on your flanks… you’re runaways?”

“What? Oh! No!” I said, emphatically shaking my head. “We aren’t runaways. We’re liberated, I guess you’d say. And now we have business with the rest of Auris that we have to take care of. Besides,” I said, sitting back and pointing to the meaty spaces between my ribs, “if we were runaways, do you think we’d be this well-equipped and… well, this well-fed?”

“I guess not…” Manchado said, tapping her chin. “But then why are you going straight into the heartland? Slavery’s legal here, you know.”

“Depending on where you go,” Sawdust said from Manchado’s side. “Hole, for example…”

I looked at Gauge, and he gave a tiny little shake of his head. Nodding to him, I looked back at our two hosts. “Can’t really say, sorry. It’s Sentinel business, though.”

“Sentinel business or not, if you go to Hole you’re going to get nabbed by the RPR,” Manchado said, frowning.

“What’s the RPR?” Nova asked. “We’re not exactly from around these parts, remember.”

“The Runaway Property Repossession.” Manchado’s face turned sour and she slowly shook her head. “If you have a slave that’s escaped, you go to them. The RPR is scarily good at tracking down runaways.”

“And they’re not afraid to do a little freelance work on the side,” Sawdust added. “They’re always looking for ponies with brands, whether they’re paid to do so or not. They auction off unclaimed runaways at the slave houses every month. You do not want them to get their hooves on you.”

The three of us exchanged another round of concerned looks. “Well, the thing is, we have to go to Hole,” I said. “We’re looking for… somepony, and that’s the first place we need to start looking.”

“Then you’re as good as dead,” Manchado bluntly stated. “The RPR will have you in chains by the end of your first night there.”

I bit my lip and tapped my hooves against my mostly full glass. “Is there any way you can help us?” I asked her. “Any way at all?”

“We could give you some old travel cloaks,” Sawdust said. “Sad as it may be, there are a few ponies in the camp who won’t be needing theirs anymore. They’ll at least cover your brands.”

“And that won’t do anything if their cover slips,” Manchado said to her husband. “All it takes is one urchin looking for a few bullets to catch a peek and the RPR will be on them before they know it.”

“I’m not branded, though,” Gauge said. “We actually had this conversation yesterday. Would it be possible for me to pass myself off as their owner?”

“Not without them having an owner’s brand on their right flank,” Manchado said. “Which I’m sure they’d rather avoid if they could help it.”

Nova winced and rubbed her left flank. “Yeah, I didn’t really like that part…”

“But what about something temporary?” I asked. “Like, maybe we can paint his swirly zebra shit over our marks? Or something?”

Sawdust scoffed. “Paint won’t cut it. I guarantee the RPR has seen that before. And on top of that, he’s a zebra.” The stallion shook his head. “You don’t see any zebras owning slaves around here. There are so few of you as there are. No, you’d need something better, like an illusion.”

I glanced up through my long bangs at my horn. “I’m only a pyromancer. I don’t know any illusions.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Manchado said. “I used to be an actress in a theatre troupe at Hole before I met Sawdust. I know my way around a few simple illusions.”

“You’re too kind,” I said, smiling at her. “We’re more than happy to pay whatever you want—”

“Hey, you saved our lives, remember? You don’t owe us a damn thing.” Standing up, she gestured for the rest of us to do the same. “Instead of giving the two of you illusory brands that match your friend’s mark, I can hide your own brands for a few days. After that, well, then you better be long gone from Hole if you don’t want the RPR to nab you.”

I looked to Gauge and Nova for support, and they both nodded in agreement. Sighing, I let some of the tension building up in my shoulders relax. “Thank you so much. I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.”

“Gotten yourselves killed, probably,” Manchado said, gently moving to my side so she could examine my mark more closely. “At least this’ll give you a chance.”

“And if there’s anything else you need, we’ll be happy to trade you for it,” Sawdust said, his eyes drifting over my battle rifle and the ammo pouches affixed to my bags. “Looks like you’ve got the bullets for it.”

“I think I’ll take you up on that offer,” I said, grinning slightly as I remembered my almost-empty cigarette box in my bags. “I could really go for a celebratory smoke right about now.”

Chapter 3: The Jaws of Death

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Chapter 3: The City of Sin

I couldn’t stop staring at my left flank. It was amazing.

Instead of scarred, white flesh cutting through the lines of my cutie mark, there was nothing but colored hair. For the first time in weeks, I was free from what the Crimson did to me. Even though the stupid mark was permanently seared into my flesh, and even though I could still feel it if I ran my hoof over it, Manchado’s illusion hid it from sight, for the time being. It was like she’d let me live for a few days like I wasn’t somepony’s property.

Hooves grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back. I yelped in surprise and kicked out my hooves, only to find them scrabbling against hard stone, kicking some pebbles down a steep hill in front of me. I fell onto my ass, dropping my bags all over the ground, and tottered backwards to see Gauge staring down at me.

“You really need to watch where you’re going,” he said, shaking his head.

“Yeah, Em, you should really stop falling off of things!” Nova squawked, grinning at me. “One of these days I’m not gonna be fast enough to catch you before you go splat!”

Groaning, I sat forward and threw my bags back onto my shoulders. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I’m just so…”

“Emancipated? Free?” she clarified when I gave her a blank look. I nodded, and she glanced at her own illusory flank. “I know what you mean. Even if it’s still there, just pretending that it never happened is…” She shuddered, and Gauge patted her shoulder.

“If only they could just heal the thing and make it go away,” Gauge said.

I stood up with my bags and shook my head. “I went and asked the Sentinels’ doctor, Hacksaw, about it once. In addition to telling me to quit my whining and to stop being such a little bitch about it,” I said with a half-smirk, “he told me that you can’t fix cutie marks.”

“But why?” Gauge asked. “Do you really have to carry those things for the rest of your lives?”

“Because healing magic doesn’t remove scars,” I said, shrugging. “Healing spells don’t fix flesh, they just make it grow faster or something, so it scars. You can’t fix a scar with a scar. That’s why my stomach’s all fucked up,” I said, raising on my hind legs and pointing to the three claw lines of pink skin showing through my black coat, “or why I’m missing half an ear.”

They were quiet for a little bit as that all sunk in, but Nova cleared her throat and made a show of shrugging her shoulders. “But, like, so what, then?” she asked. “It doesn’t change who we are as mares. It’s just a mark, and it comes with a backup, right?”

“But it means we’re property,” I said, bitterly.

“In Hole, maybe, and maybe some other places, but not everywhere!” she said. “Not in the valley, not anymore. Not at the dam, either. And who knows? Maybe not the rest of Auris, if we can find this code thingy and get it back to the Sentinels.”

“We don’t even know what it does,” I said.

“That’s why we need to get to Hole,” Gauge said. “Somepony there might have an idea about what’s going on. And the sooner we can get in and out of there, the sooner we can go someplace safe where you two don’t have to worry about your brands.”

“Right.” Cracking my neck, I looked out in front of me. The mountains had finally begun to fall away at our sides, and there was nothing but tons of open grassland as far as the eye could see, apart from an old and broad mountain range further to the southeast. Behind us lay the small valley that led through a split in the mountains to Sawdust’s and Manchado’s mining camp. They’d given us supplies after casting the illusions and sent us on our way. It’d been several hours since then, but thankfully with Auris’ twenty-eight hour days, we still had another three or four hours of daylight left to make it to Hole.

And rising out of the grasslands like a disgusting wart…

“Is that it?” Nova asked, flying up a bit to get a better look. “It’s…”

“Exactly what I thought it was going to look like,” I said. My eyes darted over the disgusting mound of gutted rock sitting all alone in the grasslands. We’d learned a few more details about Hole from talking with Manchado and Sawdust, including some of its history. Hole was founded in the remains of an ancient Synarchy mine that hollowed out the inside of this lonely mountain sitting in the middle of nowhere, hence the name. Even from here, this far away, I could see a few clearly pony-made watchtowers perched on the mountain’s rocky face, watching the entirety of the land below. Some slums crawled up the mountainside, reaching ever higher; I wondered what they were going to do when they eventually made it to the top of the mountain.

“They sold ponies from Blackwash there,” Gauge commented. “Who knows how many before them.”

“Nothing we can really do about it,” I said, shrugging. “That place might be even more secure than the dam. Just think of how much business they do there. They probably have more bullets than the Sentinels.”

“It’s a city, too,” Nova said, her eyes wide in a weird mixture of awe and disgust. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

She was right; that was the first time any of us had seen a real city before. Blackwash was just a town, and the Bastion and the dam were just forts. Hole was a real city, home to thousands of ponies, each scraping out livings in their own ways. They probably had a real government and local politics, too, things that were almost alien to us in Blackwash. Admittedly, a small part of me was a little excited to get to learn more about Auris. The rest of me was mostly disgusted.

“We should get going,” Gauge said. “The sun will be setting in a few hours, and tolans roam these plains.”

“I’m all for avoiding the giant death lizards,” Nova said. “I don’t want to be turned into pega-bits.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” I said. Adjusting the straps of my bags and making sure my rifle was ready, I began to follow the path down out of the mountains and onto the plains. “Let’s get going.”

It took us a deceptively long time to actually cross those plains and make it to Hole. It felt like every time I looked up, the mountain was in the same spot, never getting closer. That is, whenever I could see it, really. I couldn’t tell from standing on that ledge earlier, but the grasses down here were six or seven feet tall on average. Their spiky orange tufts swayed above my head, and their thick stalks spilled a white sap whenever we broke them. It was why we couldn’t graze on Auris, despite that overwhelming instinct to just bend over and take a bite off the ground whenever we were hungry. A pound of that grass and you’d be sick for a day with horrible stomach cramps and shit. Two pounds and you’re dead, vomiting out bits of your insides.

Nova flew above the grass, and she’d given some of her load to Gauge and I to shoulder so she could do so. Her sharp pegasus eyes scanned the grasslands while we forged our own path through the grass, keeping an eye out for trouble or other ponies. But even she couldn’t see deep into the shadows of the grasses.

If my reflexes had been faster, and the safety on my rifle been turned off, I might’ve gotten all of us killed. Instead, when we were less than half an hour away from Hole, with the mountain looming above us, four ponies camouflaged in the oranges and reds of the grasses burst out from either side of the path, weapons raised.

SCaR let out an alarmed chirp and deployed its electric probe while I fumbled with my rifle, but before I could even get it on target, I had a gun barrel shoved almost up my nose. I blinked at the soot-stained steel in my face and wrinkled my nose at the smell, and after a second, I let my magic die away. I didn’t want to give the stallion a reason to shoot me.

There was a surprised squawk above me followed by a thud, and I quickly glanced to my side to see Nova struggling with a net wrapped around her and two pegasi holding it down on either end. Behind me, Gauge looked like he’d all but stopped breathing as a pair of automatics stared him down from either side. While SCaR whirred angrily above us, it didn’t try to tase anypony.

The grasses around us rustled some more, and a tall brown earth pony in cobbled together armor lazily strode out. She didn’t say anything until she stood almost right in front of me, and all it took was a wave of her hoof to get the other ponies to lower their weapons. Her eyes looked me over—or, I guess, I assume so, since I couldn’t see them behind her chipped aviators—and her nostrils flared after a moment. “Why weren’t you on the caravan path?” she asked after a moment’s hesitation.

You know, I never felt myself really wanting for anything in life. Maybe sometimes I wish I was a little smarter so I could understand the nonsense Nova spouts half the time, but then I’d actually stop and think about my actions before I did them. If there was anything, though, I wished that I was good with words. You know, a real silver tongue that could talk me out of any situation.

Instead, I just answered her with, “This isn’t the caravan path?”

It was stupid, and the second I realized what I said I realized just how stupid it was. Yeah, of course this wasn’t the caravan path, you fucking idiot. The lack of an actual path was a good hint.

Gauge groaned, and I could imagine him rolling his eyes. Nova stopped her struggles with the net to only look at me for a second, probably in awe of my stupidity. At least SCaR didn’t care. I think.

The mare slowly reached a hoof up to her aviators, then slowly pushed them down the top of her muzzle until I found myself looking at orange eyes. “…Excuse me?”

“Uh… like, what I meant was, we weren’t on the caravan path because we didn’t come that way,” I said, feeling a fresh wave of sweat breaking out under the heat of both the summer sun and the mare’s stare. “We came from the mountains, and there aren’t really any roads that go to Hole from there, so…”

I felt the brand on my flank burning, and I suddenly became paranoid about whether Manchado’s illusion was up to snuff. I wasn’t entirely sure because they didn’t have any badges or anything, but I figured that these ponies might be part of the RPR. They certainly looked the part. I mean, why else would they be stalking through the grasses in camouflaged armor?

“And what were the three of you doing in the mountains?” the mare asked, glancing over my head to where the tallest peaks of the distant range were just visible through the tall grasses around us. “That’s Crimson territory.”

Before she could come to a conclusion and ask her guards to feel up our flanks for marks, I decided to cut in with the only thing I could think of: the truth. “Carrion’s dead,” I said, earning surprised looks from the ponies around us. “The Crimson got blown the fuck out. The Sentinels are in charge of the dam now.” I made a show of giving Nova and Gauge a sympathetic glance before turning back to the mare. “We figured that somepony would want to know the details. They might be worth a lot of bullets to the right people. That, and we just wanted to get out of the valley in case things went to shit again.”

The mare thought that over for a bit, and I could see her teeth working the inside of her cheek. “And how do I know any of this is true?” she asked me. “We’ve seen runaways from the north before.”

I puffed out my chest a bit. “Runaways? Us?” I tried to sound indignant, and it took all my willpower to keep my knees from shaking. “Do we look like runaways to you? Stocked with weapons, bullets, supplies, and most importantly, meat on our fucking bones?” I took a bold step forward and stood eye to eye (or at least tried to) with her. “When was the last time you saw a runaway, huh? I thought you guys were supposed to be good at your jobs.”

Okay, so maybe I did have a little bit of a way with words, because I’d certainly caught Aviators here off guard. Most importantly, however, I was right that she was RPR; she wouldn’t have expected any runaway slave to talk so boldly to her if they knew who they were talking to. She frowned and looked me over for a second before backing off a step and spitting into the dirt. I decided to count that as a victory.

“Don’t you think you know my job better than me, bitch,” she said, flinging her aviators back into their natural position with a toss of her head. I bit down on my tongue as she leaned to her right to get a better look at our left flanks, covered by Manchado’s illusion. After a moment’s scrutiny, she frowned and gestured to her troops, who began to rally around her. “You’re wasting my time. There are a pair of runaways loose out here, and they’re probably getting farther away while I sit here talking to your whore face. So how’s about you apologize and compensate me for the trouble and we go our separate ways.”

“And why should we do that?” I asked her. “You’re the one who jumped us and shoved guns in our faces.”

“Because I’ll break your legs over your back like twigs before I haul your pretty little ass back to the auction house and sell you for two bricks of fifties if you don’t.” She smirked at whatever facial expression I made as I tried to imagine that and stuck her hoof out. “Way I see it, I was paid to find two runaways, so I’m either coming home with two runaways and two mags of .308s or three runaways. I don’t give a shit either way.”

I wanted to say something back at her and try to wipe that smug grin off her face, but Gauge put his hoof on my shoulder and pressed hard. “Let’s just give them what they want,” he said, eyes matching the big mare’s. “For the inconvenience.”

I glared at the mare as I undid my ammo bag and dropped the two mags into her outstretched hoof. That was sixty Cs I wasn’t going to see again. She moved her hoof a bit to feel the weight, then just smiled at me as she pocketed them. “You might want to get moving,” she said, and a twist of her hoof caused the barrel of what looked like an anti-tank rifle to appear from the side of her armor. “The grasses get dangerous after sundown. We sometimes see parts of pretty little mares like you strewn all about when we go hunting. Wargs aren’t known for their table manners, and they don’t like to clean up after themselves.”

I quietly let the threat go over my head. Instead, I helped Nova stand as two of the RPR ponies took the net off of her. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

“You’d do well to,” Aviators said. Then, gesturing to her squad, she pointed off to her left. “Alright, come on, the longer we’re out here, the longer you’ll have to wait to get shitfaced! Move it!”

As one, the ponies disappeared into the grasses again, except for the big mare. She just gave me a poisonous grin and winked. “I’ll look for you when I’m back in Hole. Maybe we can sit down and have a few friendly drinks.” And then, with a snort, she galloped into the grasses after her squad.

Gauge, Nova, and I just stood there as we listened to the rustling of the grasses grow fainter and fainter. After what felt like an eternity, I just turned to the two of them with a smile. “I think she likes me.”

-----

I kept looking over my shoulder during the rest of the walk to Hole. It felt like there were dozens of ponies hiding in the grasses around us, all watching us and ready to jump out at a moment’s notice. Gauge had put SCaR on high alert, but it was hard to trust the little sentry robot’s scanners; after all, Miss Aviators and her RPR squad jumped us without it even detecting them.

“Do you think she knew?” Nova asked in a low voice, her eyes shifting left and right through the grasses.

“No,” I said. “If she did know, she would’ve captured us and taken all our shit. The three of us, our gear, and SCaR are worth a lot more than two random runaways, I’d think.”

Of course, that was just what I told Nova. Deep inside, I worried that the RPR mare didn’t let on as much as she knew. I had a sickening feeling in my gut that rather than going through the trouble to drag us back to Hole, she was content to let us walk right into the city ourselves and then arrest us once we were there. Her parting comment about having a few ‘friendly’ drinks only reinforced that in my mind.

Though I’d relieved Nova’s fears a little bit, she still seemed on edge, like her coltfriend. Gauge, ever the one to drop a wry comment here or there, had been all but silent since the encounter. And knowing Gauge, that meant he’d been thinking. Hard. “Speak up, Gauge, I can’t read minds,” I said, smirking a little bit as I jolted him out of his thoughts.

“Hmm? Oh.” He shook his head and quickened his trot a bit to walk by my side. “Maybe we should just pass Hole over. Those illusions are only going to last a few days, and we don’t want to be caught inside when they wear off.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We can get in easy, assuming that security there doesn’t feel like copping a feel off of Nova and I for entering. We’ll be in and out in like a day. We just have to check around, ask if anypony knows where any big Equestrian installations are.”

“I’m not worried about getting in,” Gauge said, frowning. “Getting out is going to be the hard part.”

“We’ll make it work okay? Trust me.”

In truth, I had no idea how I was going to make any of this work. Who was I going to talk to? Who could I even trust in a place like Hole? What was I going to do if the RPR came for me? In the end, I decided to adopt my usual plan of ‘fuck it’ and just improvise on the fly. Because when had that led me wrong since I left Blackwash?

And then, all of a sudden, the grasses of Auris suddenly came to an end. In their place, an enormous titan of stone loomed, covered in shacks and stone cottages.

“That is a fucking big rock,” I said, craning my neck up toward the peak. I could even see pegasi fluttering around it like birds, streaming in and out of an enormous hole bored into the side facing us. It looked like a giant wormhole, like a giant world-eating monster had drilled its way into the planet’s core from that mountain.

“It’s amazing!” Nova exclaimed, fluttering several feet higher like that was going to help her get a closer look inside the hole a few hundred feet up the mountainside. “There are so many houses, and so many ponies! I wonder if there’s any old mining equipment inside there. Just think of what it took to do that to a mountain!” Turning to me and Gauge, she clopped her hooves together. “You could fit like twenty Blackwashes inside that mountain alone!”

“Is it really hollow?” Gauge asked, staring up at it. “Like, the whole thing?”

“We’ll find out when we get there,” I said. “Knowing the kind of ponies that run this shithole, that’s probably where the real happenings are. These houses here just look like slums.”

And it was true. As we trotted into the outskirts of Hole, I was amazed at just how much poverty there was. While the settlements in the valley were little farming communities of only a hoofful of buildings, here there were nothing but clusters of stone shacks made from excavated material strewn at random across the low slopes of the mountain. Many of them looked even shittier than the little aluminum shack I grew up in, with mud and dirt serving as cement to try to keep the rocks that didn’t fit together (which were all of them) in place. Thatched roofs made from the grasses surrounding the mountain kept the worst of the wind out, but I bet they leaked like nothing else when it rained. And on top of that, the ponies looked miserable. They were all covered in dirt and assorted bodily injuries. Homeless ponies with crippled limbs and mangled faces sat in the dirt roads, begging for a few bullets. I noticed that quite a few of them had slave brands on both their flanks, though unlike mine and Nova’s, they’d been burnt through with a big ‘X’ on top of the old brand. Were they rejects? Trash? The thought made me sick.

“Travelers!” It was a filly’s voice, and it was filled with excitement. The three of us stopped as an olive green filly galloped up to us, carrying a basket full of fruits I’d never seen before. Her voice and hoofbeats were like a beacon, because soon a swarm of colts and fillies were converging on the three of us, pressing in close with their goods or just to check us out in excitement.

My head split open and I flattened my half-ear at Nova’s high-pitched squeal of excitement. She immediately stooped down and held out her forelegs, wrapping a few of the children up in hugs. Gauge gave her a concerned look, and I understood exactly what it meant. If Nova had her way, the two of them would probably have like five kids in a few years. I pitied the poor stallion.

And then a basket of fruit shoved into my face took my attention off of the two of them. The olive filly stood on her hind legs, holding the basket over her head and basically jamming it into my muzzle. “Fresh fruit, fresh fruit! Four bullets a manem! Best fruit in Hole!”

Frowning, I took a strange fruit that was mostly orange with a soft green strip of flesh running from top to bottom. It certainly looked juicy, but it was hardly bigger than my hoof. “Uh… these are ‘manems’?”

The filly set the basket down and vigorously nodded. That let me get a good look at her knotted and torn mane, her dirty coat, and the slight hint of gauntness to her face and thinness of her ribs. She must’ve been a street urchin peddling what she could to survive. “Yeah! Manems are delicious! I eat them every day!”

They certainly looked tempting, and I could’ve really gone for some food that wasn’t trail rations and meat I hunted along our hike. Plus, I was sure that Gauge and Nova would appreciate it. I looked over my shoulder to see Gauge trying to pry a few dirty children from Nova’s forelegs, saying something about how she didn’t know where they’d been. My mind made up, I turned back to the kid in front of me. “I’ll take six for six.”

The filly frowned at me and took the basket away. “Four bullets a manem!” she shouted back at me, glaring daggers at the bag she suspected was where I kept all my ammo.

“For those tiny little things? Come on,” I said, taking a step back. “I bet I can find another homeless kid selling bigger manems for less.”

After a moment of some serious battle between the filly’s greed, pride, and simple necessity, she offered the basket to me again. “Three bullets a manem! Special deal! Just for you!”

“Tell you what, I’ll give you two bullets a manem because you’re adorable,” I said, pulling out a magazine of ammo from my ammo bag and counting out the twelve rounds. I dropped them in a pile at the filly’s hooves and tucked the rest of the mag back in the bag. She immediately scrapped them together and tipped the basket so a bunch of manem fruit fell out, and I gathered up my six. “Pleasure doing business with you.”

The filly slowly scooped the rest of the manem back into her basket and stood up. Then she gave me a really big smile. “You too!” And without any warning, she turned around and galloped back up the street, followed by a bunch of the other kids.

“Aww, why’d they run off?” Nova asked, pouting. Gauge had finally removed the last of the children from her forelegs, but they’d left plenty of dirt stained into her white coat. Gauge was looking at her like he was going to have to scrub her down for parasites or something. “They were so cute!”

“Beats me,” I said, tossing a pair of manem fruit at each of them. “But I got something tasty to snack on… I hope.”

Nova wasted absolutely no time biting into the fruit. The orange part didn’t really seem like it wanted to give under her teeth, but the green part readily burst open in a juicy mess. The thing split in two from there, and she held the halves up to the corners of her muzzle to try to work the flesh out of the hard orange exterior with her teeth. “It’s good!” she exclaimed, wiping her chin. “Try it!”

I gave the fruit a suspicious sniff, but it didn’t really smell like anything. A bit of dirt, perhaps, considering it was dumped on the ground. I rubbed it against my coat to try to get any shit (literal and metaphorical) off of it before taking a bite. All at once, an almost overwhelming sensation of sweet and tart assaulted my mouth, almost shriveling my tongue with how powerful it was. It was almost like too much of a good thing, so I carefully worked my way through the rest of the fruit to not die from taste overload or some shit.

“Pretty good,” I said, chucking the two mostly-empty shell halves away. “Definitely beats the stale shit we’ve had to eat these past few weeks.”

Gauge discarded the shells of his first manem fruit as well and nodded. “We might have to get more of those before we leave. They’d be good for the road.”

“Mmhmm.” I pocketed the last manem fruit and grunted as I stood up. “Alright, we should probably get go—!”

The abrupt sound of a bunch of metal objects hitting the ground at my side cut me off, and I looked over my shoulder to see several magazines for my battle rifle spilling into the dirt. Somepony had undone the leather latch holding the thing shut, and I could see several empty pockets inside the bag. I just stared at it for a moment before glaring back in the direction the children ran off to. “Welcome to Hole, Ember, you fucking dumbass.”

Chapter 4: The City of Sin

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Chapter 4: The Jaws of Death

“I hate kids.”

Nova, Gauge, and I had found a place to sit a little further into the slums of Hole and a little bit up the side of the mountain. It was a shitty restaurant with food that I couldn’t entirely rule out as pony meat (not through any evidence but simply because I couldn’t put it past a shitty place like this), but at least it was someplace to sit and eat and drink. I’d taken the time between ordering our food and waiting for it to be served to search through all our bags to see just what those fucking kids had stolen from us. They hadn’t really bothered Nova and Gauge apart from stealing a few bags of food, but they’d done a number on my ammo bags.

“What’s the damage?” Gauge asked, holding a glass of water between his hooves.

“Well, we left the dam with six hundred rounds,” I said. “I used two full mags between there and here, including what I shot at those bandits. Plus another fifty from bartering with Manchado and Sawdust, sixty to that RPR pony, twelve for those manem fruits, and another ninety that those damn kids stole. So that’s two hundred and seventy-two out of six hundred gone so far.”

“At least we still have more than half what we started with.”

“For what that’s worth,” I grumbled. I spared a glance at Nova, who was uncharacteristically quiet. I think more than being angry or anything, she’d had her feelings hurt when she learned that those kids were just mobbing us to try to steal our bullets. The poor mare loved kids.

Pulling a cigarette out of my bags, I stuck it between my lips and lit the end. “Ready to go?” I spoke around the end, glancing at the two of them. “We still need to get to Hole proper.”

“Might as well,” Gauge said, sliding his chair back. “Let’s find somewhere to hunker down when we get there. We’ll need someplace to hide if those ponies come looking for us.”

I nodded, knowing full well that he meant the RPR. The less we talked about them in public, the better. Who knows who could be eavesdropping, waiting for anything that they could tip off to the RPR for a nice reward?

I stood up, shouldered my bags, and dumped a bunch of bullets on our table to pay for our meal. “Alright, let’s move,” I said, navigating our way between the tables filled with patrons getting their dinner. Long shadows were already beginning to fall, and half of the slums were shrouded in darkness as the mountain blocked out the setting sun. “How much you want to bet that ponies can’t get inside the mountain after dark?”

We set off, following the main road up the mountain to the giant hole bored into it. We kept a wary eye on any more dirty children running around, not wanting a repeat of what happened at the outskirts. Once or twice, a few kids looked like they were thinking about it, but I leered at them and stomped my hoof to get them to scram. We passed a few beggars as well, and Nova, bless that poor mare’s soul, looked like she was about to break in two. Sighing, I pulled a mag of ammo out of my bag and tossed it to her. “Knock yourself out.”

“Thanks, Em,” she said, smiling at me and quickly trotting up to a few stallions sitting against a building. They also had those burned cross marks on their flanks; it felt like we were seeing more of them the closer we got to the heart of the mountain. And they almost all had crippling injuries that made it difficult for them to even move. I guess that was life and death in a fucking slave city shithole. When a slave can’t work anymore, they just toss them onto the streets.

Gauge must’ve read my face while we watched Nova mete out a few bullets each for the stallions. “At least they’re free this way,” he said. “Their masters could’ve just worked them to death. I’d take being free and homeless over slavery any day.”

“I’d rather they not be enslaved in the first place,” I said. “This place is disgusting.”

“Any place that openly does business with bandits and slavers is disgusting, yeah. Not like there’s much we can do about it.”

I sighed and hung my head. Much as I hated to admit it, Gauge was right. We were only three, and only I really knew how to use guns. And I doubted that shooting up random RPR ponies would solve anything. Though if I saw that mare with the aviators again, I wouldn’t mind cutting her down if I could get away with it.

When it looked like Nova was going to chat those ponies up for their life story and shit, I turned around and looked up at the mountain. It loomed over us, and we’d be at the bottom lip of the hole in a few hundred yards. I could see inside of it from here, and it was actually amazing. Glowing lights lit up the windows of buildings carved into the interior wall of the mountain, with rickety walkways attached by rope and chain to the support pillars holding the cap of the mountain up. There were hundreds of those buildings, all carved into different shapes and sizes, and going who knows how deep into the shell of the mountain itself. Rope bridges joined opposite points of circles together, and pegasi fluttered from one house to the next while their ground bound cousins used a never-ending series of stairs and platforms. It went up for almost as high as I could see, and I could only assume it went down as far, if not further.

“Why does the coolest shit have to belong to the shittiest ponies?” I asked Gauge. “The Fort, the dam, now this…”

“The Sentinels have the Bastion. And Sig’s family has that quarry,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, but like, that shit’s nothing compared to this. Just look at it! They hollowed an entire mountain! It doesn’t get much cooler than that!” I made a quick estimate of the number of houses and came to the conclusion that there were approximately a fuckload. “Thousands of ponies have to live here! Tens of thousands, even! There are so many that they live in slums outside of the mountain because there’s not enough room inside!”

Gauge slowly nodded. “You know, it always amazes me how stubborn you ponies can be, sometimes,” he said, to which I only gave him a confused look. “You all came from a planet light years away and made this planet another home. Even the end of the world wasn’t enough to wipe you all out. And here we are, standing in front of a mountain home to one of the biggest cities on the planet. That’s nothing short of amazing.”

“It’s not just ‘us ponies’,” I said, touching his shoulder. “There were plenty of zebras in Blackwash too, and then there’s Sig’s griffons as well. It’s not all ponies.”

“No, but it is mostly ponies.” Sitting down, he absentmindedly pawed at the dirt under his hooves. “I learned a lot of things working at the dishes and then going through old data when we were at the Bastion. Equestria didn’t like my kind. They didn’t like griffons either.” Chuckling, he added, “Actually, I think the list of people they liked is shorter than the ones they didn’t like. They were always ‘Ponies First.’ And my grandpa always used to say—”

“That the zebras were brought to Blackwash as prisoners to do cheap and dangerous labor, yeah,” I said. “Expendable labor to do all the shit jobs for the installation so the ponies could focus on doing the important ones. You’ve told me this a ton of times, Gauge.”

“And after learning about the quarry that the griffons are from and just… well, seeing what Equestria’s legacy is being used for, that only drives the point home for me.” He shifted to a more comfortable position to sit and grunted. “Sig’s family at the quarry? They’re probably descended from griffon workers forced to cut stone for the settlements of Auris. How else does a flock of griffons end up someplace like that and thrive if they weren’t there to begin with?”

I cocked my head at him. “So is there a point to all this?”

“I just… I don’t know.” He hung his head and sighed. “This code that we’re chasing is Equestria’s legacy. It’s something the Synarchy wants us to have. But is a world like that really something we want to bring back? Do we want to let the Synarchy be reborn on Auris?”

I frowned and tried to think about it for a bit. It was a new angle to the code I hadn’t really considered. I mean, yeah, we were trying to find the pieces so that Reclaimer couldn’t awaken the ‘Azimuth’, whatever that was. But what would happen if we got the whole thing and turned it over to the Sentinels? Did we really want to unearth the Synarchy’s darkest secrets? Did we really want to bring that to Auris?

“The Sentinels aren’t like them,” I said. “Fusillade wouldn’t try to bring Equestria back. They’re good ponies. They only want to help people.”

“I suppose. But supposing that we don’t get the code back to them…” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “Something tells me that Reclaimer isn’t as altruistic.”

“Hard to say without having met the fucker, but if what they say is true?” I shrugged. “That’s why we’re out here. As far as we know, we’re the only ones apart from the Ivory City that knows what this code is, more or less. If we don’t try to stop them from getting it, then who will? And besides, all it takes is one piece. If we can get it before them, then they won’t have the full thing they need to break it.”

Nova came trotting back over to us, several bullets lighter. Grunting, I stood up and caught the empty mag she tossed at me. “Thirty bullets? Really? You can buy a nice meal for three!”

“And now they’ll have a lot of nice meals to look forward to,” Nova said, carrying herself proudly.

I sighed and tucked the empty magazine into my bag. “Yeah, whatever. I’m not giving you any more. I hope it was worth it.”

“It was,” Nova said, walking right up next to me and smiling, “because they told me a lot of interesting things about where we’re going.”

Gauge smiled at his marefriend and rubbed against her side. “Look at you, gathering the intel.”

“At least somepony’s doing it,” I said. “Don’t ask the stupid forge mare to do anything with ‘intel’ in it. I just shoot things.” I gestured for them to follow me, and we set off toward the hole in the mountain. “So, what’d you find out?”

“For starters?” She shook her head. “Nopony’s heard anything about a code around here.”

“That’s not very useful,” I said. “If the code came here, I doubt that the RPR would be telling everypony about it, especially not random homeless ponies.”

“No, but they have seen a pegasus missing half his face poking around here since a week or two ago.”

I abruptly stopped and turned to her, my breath catching in my throat. “Yeoman was here?”

“Is here,” Nova clarified. “He’s been seen at the mountain a bunch since he got here. He and the RPR are working together on something, but nopony knows what. But he has been leaving with a team of ponies every few days at dawn and returning two or three nights later.”

“They’re looking for something,” Gauge concluded. “They don’t know where the pieces are either.”

“No, but I’m sure they have a good guess,” I said. “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “If Yeoman and the RPR are working together, it’s only a matter of time before they find something. How long you bet it’s gonna take a bunch of ponies that are experts in tracking runaways to find an Equestrian installation?”

“It’s taken them two weeks so far without any luck,” Gauge said. “There’s hope.”

“However slim it may be,” I muttered. Sighing, I shook my head. “Alright, new plan. Once we get inside the mountain, we’re going to find someplace to lie low, and we’ll see what we can find out. If we can find Yeoman or listen to some RPR ponies, we might be able to get an idea of where to look. Once we do, we’ll have to try to book it to where they’re looking and somehow find it before them.”

“And if they’re wrong?” Gauge bit his lip. “It’d be putting all our eggs in one basket if we follow them somewhere and it turns out it wasn’t the right place to look.”

“We only have one egg; no matter what we do we’re putting all of them in one basket,” I said. I paused a moment. “Did that even make sense?”

“I get it!” Nova exclaimed.

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Gauge said. “And what do we do if Yeoman spots us first? I don’t think he’ll be fine with letting any of us live long if he knows we’re after him and the code.”

“We’ll wing it, okay? One thing at a time.”

Nova and Gauge looked at each other. “I don’t like this plan…” Nova muttered.

But we didn’t talk about that anymore, because we made it to the lip of the hole into the mountain. A small crowd milled outside of a chain fence protected by a lot of ponies with guns, and pegasi hovered at various points in the air, using meagre clouds to rest their wings when they got tired. Guards wandered among the crowd, chasing the destitute and discarded slaves away with harsh words and quick batons. The three of us just stood off to the side for a moment, trying to take it all in and work up the courage to go further.

“Right into the belly of the beast,” Gauge murmured.

“That’s for sure.” Spotting an opening in the crowd, I began to trot forward and gestured for them to follow with a shake of my head. “Well, if we’re gonna get fucked, might as well get it over with now.”

I made my way through the crowd, Nova and Gauge following me and trying to act natural. After a bit of nervous waiting in line, we found ourselves in front of a bored pony in a worn-out set of armor made from scrap mining gear. Next to him, however, was a very shiny pistol, and I could smell the oil coming from it. Despite outward appearances, I wasn’t keen on fucking with him or any of his friends standing nearby.

“How many?” the stallion asked, holding a tally counter in his magic.

“Three,” I said, clearing my throat to try to flush any phlegm (and terror) out of it. “Me, the zebra, and the pegasus.”

The guard looked the three of us over with a profoundly bored stare. How many ponies had he checked into the mountain today? “Business?”

“Oh, uh… business?” I said. When he frowned at me, I managed a smile. “I mean, business is my business. I’m with, uh…” I stood up straighter as an idea hit me. “Manchado and Sawdust from the mining excavation to the north. They needed me to come back and get some more supplies.”

The unicorn pulled out a holographic tablet and poked around in it with his hoof. “Supplies to the contracted party were sent out two days ago. You’re not due for another supply shipment for two weeks.”

“We were attacked by bandits,” I said. I mean, it was half-true, right? “We fought them off, but they did a number on the supplies. So we’re here for more.” At his skeptical look, I sighed and shook my ammo bag a bit. “I have the bullets to buy them here, okay? I’d think that Hole would be happy to do a little more business.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure.” He tapped a few things into a calculator at his side, which spat out a number on a growing roll of paper. “Taxes are going to be seventeen bullets for each of you.”

If I’d been drinking something at that moment, I might have spit it out. “Seventeen bullets? Each? What is this, an extortion racket?”

“Entry tax is ten rifle bullets per person. Business is another four bullets. Arms is three.” He finished by pointing to the rifle on my back and the drone buzzing around Gauge’s head, then shrugged. “Somepony’s gotta pay the RPR.”

Sighing, I opened my ammo bag for what felt like the millionth time today and dropped the bullets in front of the stallion. “Fifty-one bullets. There.” At the rate this was going, I was gonna be out of bullets in two days!

The stallion counted them and then added them to a box. “If you leave, you have to pay the tax again. Any stays longer than three days have to be registered with the RPR. And remember, we have laws here, unlike the rest of this planet. Don’t break them and you won’t get shot.” He pressed a button under his desk, and an electric latch on the fence behind him slid open. “Don’t cause trouble.”

Even though I had a ton of questions, I hurried through the gate with my friends. Once we were on the other side, I sighed in relief and took a moment to recollect my nerves. “That was easier than I thought it would be. I thought I’d have to bribe him or something.”

“I bet that’s what some of those taxes were,” Gauge said, looking back in that direction. “They probably skim some off the top for themselves if ponies look like they can afford it.”

“We must look like a fucking walking bank or something because everypony is trying to steal from us,” I grumbled. I looked around us, trying to gain my bearings, and instead only felt more disoriented. There were a few crooked streets that seemed to weave around buildings haphazardly plopped in the middle of the stone floor, and they were clogged with ponies doing business out of little carts. The buildings themselves stretched upwards where they couldn’t expand outwards, eating up as much space above them as their rickety constructions could support. Directly above us, a crisscrossing series of bridges connected the different sides of the outer ring together, and the voices of thousands of ponies echoed off the hollow mountain interior to form a roar like a waterfall. It was as confusing as it was mind-blowing.

Nova took wing and hovered above us, trying to pick out signs on the buildings in the streets. When she didn’t see anything satisfactory on the ground, she pursed her lips and flew higher and higher. Only after she passed the first of many bridges did she come back down to us and tuck her wings back against her side. “I think there’s an inn on the first ring and a bit to the left. Like, eleven or twelve o’clock if we were standing at the bottom.”

For those of you with twenty-four hour clocks instead of twenty-eight, she meant at roughly nine or ten. It’s confusing, I know, but we make do.

“Might as well go for it, then,” I said, forcing myself to stifle a yawn. “I could use a good night’s sleep.”

Gauge looked behind us and nodded. “The sun’s already gone down, and it’ll be pretty dark soon, especially inside the mountain. Plus,” he added, turning to me with concern in his eyes, “if what Nova’s homeless friends said is true, then Yeoman is may be back here pretty soon with the RPR. We don’t want them to corner us.”

As much as I wanted to use that opportunity to avenge Zip, Gauge had a point. It was going to get not only me killed, but him and Nova, too. And as much as I wanted to gun the fucker down, I had to look out for my friends first. They were counting on me to keep them safe, and damn it, that was what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to fail again.

I slowly bowed my head and turned to Nova. “Alright, Nov, lead the way. I just hope they have decent beds.”

“Any bed is gonna feel great after sleeping on rocks for so long,” Nova chirped. “Is anypony else’s back messed up? Because mine’s pretty messed up.”

With Nova’s vantage point, we navigated the streets of Hole proper, taking extra care to stay out of the way of the RPR ponies we saw loitering about. And fuck were there a lot of them. At least they didn’t seem interested in seeing if there were any hidden slaves among the crowds; for one thing, they knew that slaves would be trying to get out of the mountain and all its guards, not in, and for another, there were slaves everywhere. Everywhere I looked, I could see them following their masters like dogs, the brands on their flanks obscuring dozens of different and unique marks. But as much as I wanted to help them, I couldn’t; that’d only get us caught, and I didn’t want to think about what would happen next. So I tried not to, and we managed to make it to the perimeter of the mountain, where a staircase anchored to the stone walls by steel cables rose to the first ring of buildings.

I put my hoof on the edge and pressed a few times. The wood underneath it wobbled a bit as the cables swayed back and forth. “Well that’s just fucking awesome,” I said. “Gotta love fucking shitty post-apocalyptic engineering.”

“Don’t worry, Em, if you fall I’ll catch you again,” Nova said, smirking at me.

“And what about your coltfriend?” Gauge asked, indignant.

Nova waved her hoof. “SCaR will catch you! Won’t you, little guy?”

The sentry drone trilled and beeped once before flying up the stairs without us.

I snickered and patted Gauge’s shoulder. “That’s cold, dude. Cold.”

“Whatever.” Shaking his head, he took the first few steps up the stairs, then promptly shuffled to the side as a pair of ponies carelessly trotted down from the other direction. “Let’s go, alright? Solid ground would be pretty nice.”

“Foals,” Nova teased, hovering next to us as we climbed the stairs. “You two act like you didn’t grow up on a mountain!”

“We grew up on a mountain, not inside one!” I shouted at her, feeling the planks shifting under my hooves. I stared ahead at Gauge’s ass and gave him a telekinetic shove. “Can you hurry it up, fat ass?”

“Fuck off,” Gauge retorted, “or I’ll take this fucking thing down with me!”

It took us a while of bickering and shouting, but we all made it safely to a relatively stable platform. We could get a good look at the buildings around us now. They’d all been carved from the stone of the mountain, at least to an extent. Many of them had add-ons of corrugated steel and wooden planks jutting out from their stone walls, and quite a few had small balconies for ponies to sit and admire Hole below them. Two or three large platforms big enough for a hundred or two hundred ponies to gather jutted out from the ring, and these platforms were connected to each other by bridges and to the other rings by staircases. But it turned out that the real Hole was hidden beneath the stone, because we found an archway cut into the mountain from the platform we were standing on that opened into a narrow road following the perimeter of the ring.

“How the fuck did they do all this?” I asked, jaw hanging slack as I just tried to comprehend the sheer hugeness of it all. “There’s rooms on either side of this tunnel! Does it go the whole way around? Just how deep into the mountainside are we?”

“I have no idea,” Gauge said, his eyes tracing the supports holding the tunnel up. “But it is amazing.”

“Amazing doesn’t even begin to describe it!” Nova sung. “I bet there’s nothing else like it in the world!”

“If only it could’ve been attached to a prettier face,” I said, beckoning for them to follow me as I set off into the tunnel. “Imagine if this place was run by the Sentinels instead of the RPR.”

“To be fair, it hasn’t seemed like it’s that bad,” Gauge said, watching the mostly contented and relaxed ponies around us.

“Did you forget all the slaves we passed on the way over here?”

“Well... no,” Gauge said. “But I was expecting it to be worse, I suppose. Most of the slaves we passed at least looked like they were fed and cared for, for the most part.”

“They probably don’t want to let an investment go to waste,” Nova said.

“Give it time,” I said. “I bet we’ll find a guard kicking a puppy somewhere around here.”

But we didn’t, and we made it to an inn after a bit of searching and asking around. It wasn’t all that big, given that it didn’t have a lot of space to work with in the first place, but they’d somehow crammed ten or fifteen rooms into this thing. I gave the innkeep, a mare in her forties by the looks of it, some bullets, and she showed us to a room. There were only two beds, but I wasn’t going to complain about that; I had a bed all to myself, and Gauge and Nova were going to share.

The innkeep left the key on a wobbly nightstand before leaving, and when she did, I dropped my bags on the wooden floor and flopped onto the bed. Springs creaked and the bedframe groaned, but it was still the softest thing I’d slept on in weeks. “This is fucking awesome,” I said, almost moaning in ecstasy. “Once I throw my bedroll on this thing, it’s gonna be amazing. I don’t think I’ll ever wake up.”

“If only we didn’t have to,” Gauge said, looking out the window at the far end of the room, which gave a nice view of the city below (and above) us. “Too bad we’ve got work to do.”

“Yeah, yeah, we’ll do it,” I said, making some last adjustments to my bed and closing my eyes. The bedroll could wait. “We’ll do it in the morning. Whenever that comes…”

Gauge said something else, but I didn’t hear it. I was out like a light.

Chapter 5: Where the Outlaws Live

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Chapter 5: Where the Outlaws Live

It took a lot of willpower to get out of bed the next morning, but I somehow managed to do so. I felt like my spine had rearranged itself while I was sleeping; my muscles were soft mush, and any attempts I made to sit upright ended in failure. Groaning, I rubbed my eyes and rolled over, landing on my hooves and trying to stretch my limbs out to work the soreness out of them. I even arched my back like a cat, something that I felt like I’d been unable to do ever since I started sleeping on rocks two weeks ago.

My eyes drifted around the room in sluggish little motions, and I blinked a few times to shake away some of the crustiness. After a few confused thoughts rolled through my head, I finally remembered where I was and how I’d gotten there. I also noticed that Nova and Gauge weren’t in the room with me, but their bed was made. I guess they’d gone to get some breakfast.

Staggering forward, I made my way to the window and looked out over the city spread around me. There was already a line forming at the checkpoint, and judging by the angles of the shadows, it was still really early in the morning. That, and the stone of the mountain scattered the sun’s blue light everywhere in an almost blinding display of… blueness. It hurt to look at and messed up my depth perception a bit, since everything looked the same.

I also spotted a circle of ponies standing just behind the checkpoint, armed and decently equipped. I had to squint into the glaring light to make anything out, and at this distance, I could really only see coat colors. But as I scanned through the ponies in the group, my eyes widened. Standing in the middle of that group, giving orders to everypony present, was a pony missing half of their face.

Yeoman.

So he was here. After what he’d done at the dam, when he killed Zip and hanged me, it was so surreal to see him again. That dirty coat, that scarred half-face of his… and I even saw my old family heirloom, my BR11 marksmare rifle, Fortitude, on his back. The thought of him using that gun to do evil shit made me feel like I was going to boil over.

But before I could do anything stupid, like break open the window and try to shoot him with a burst-fire battle rifle from well outside its effective range, he spread his wings and took off with a team of ten, disappearing through the hole in the mountain and into the sunlight. I watched him go, teeth sliding against each other, just trying to process what I saw. Hopefully he was still looking for a code piece around here. Maybe we still had a chance.

At least I could feel safe knowing that Yeoman wasn’t in the mountain to identify us. And while I didn’t trust that RPR mare we met to not bridle and sell us if we ran into her again, I wasn’t worried about the rest of the guards. The illusion on my flank was still holding, and it’d hopefully last a few more days. Manchado had promised as much, at least. In the meanwhile, we needed to learn all we could and get what supplies we needed.

Surprisingly, our tiny little room had a tiny little bathroom inside of what was basically a closet. Did this city have indoor plumbing, too? After taking care of my morning business, I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my reflection. I was surprised by just how gaunt these two weeks of hiking through the mountains had made me look; my cheeks were thin, there were bags under my eyes, and my mane was ratty and tangled around my horn. My lips, once full and pretty, were chapped and split, and I had an assortment of tiny cuts and bruises all over my body. Half of my left ear was missing, a souvenir from the quarry, though hair was finally beginning to grow around the scarred end. I was only twenty winters old, but I looked like I was at least thirty. I’d aged so much since Blackwash was attacked only a bit more than a month ago.

I grabbed one of Nova’s combs and tried to run it through my mane. Standing there in front of the mirror, I found myself longing for the young mare of two months ago, who thought the whole world was limited to a single mountaintop, who hadn’t been branded, beaten, shot, and hanged. The mare who hadn’t watched friends and family die in front of her. The young and pretty mare who didn’t carry the fate of the planet on her shoulders, aging another year with every bullet fired and pony killed. I wanted to go back to being a forgemare, not a wandering gun in the wilderness, chasing pieces of an ancient message that could end the world as I knew it.

But that was never going to happen. I’d been changed, even as much as I wished I could go back to how things were when this was all over. That was already impossible, anyway, with Blackwash now living at the dam instead of in the mountains. Not only that, but I was a sergeant in the Sentinels. I had responsibilities to them too, and unless I quit, I’d probably be responsible for fighting off threats to the valley for years to come.

After splashing my face with some water and cleaning my teeth with a bit of telekinesis, I trotted out of our room and into the inn’s common room. Several ponies sat at tables, engrossed in their own conversations while a ten or eleven winters filly trotted around, bringing them food and drink at their summons. I found Nova and Gauge sitting at a table in the corner, next to the window looking out over the city and coincidentally as far away from the windows into the tunnel, where hoof traffic was beginning to pick up. Grabbing a chair in my magic, I slid it back and sat down in front of them. “Fuck, that was a good sleep.”

“So you did wake up,” Gauge said, smirking at me. “Nov and I were taking bets on how long it’d take you.”

“I thought it was gonna take you another hour,” Nova said. Sighing, she nudged a pastry off a plate between them and put it on Gauge’s. “Here, the last one.”

“Wow, Nova,” I said, shaking my head. “I would’ve thought Gauge would be the one to bet on me sleeping until noon, not you. I’m hurt.”

“Sorry!” Nova exclaimed, leaning out of her seat just to hug me. “You were really tired! I thought you’d sleep longer!”

I chuckled and patted her on the head. “It’s okay, Nov. I don’t blame you.” I looked at their plates, and I felt my stomach rumble. “What’s for breakfast?”

“Hotcakes and fresh fruit,” Gauge said. “Plus a few sweetrolls. Not bad at all.”

“I’ll say. It definitely beats trail rations.” I flagged down the filly and pointed to Gauge’s plate. “I’ll have two of whatever he got.”

She nodded and left, letting me catch a glimpse of the pair of brands on her flanks, and I closed my eyes and leaned back in my chair. As much as it disgusted me, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, and it pissed me off. So I tried to push it out of my mind as best as I could, which was much easier said than done. “Before you two say anything, yeah, I’m fucking hungry. And I want to eat all the good food I can before we have to leave civilization again.”

“I don’t blame you,” Gauge said. He smirked at Nova and added, “I mean, Nov does her best with what you bring her, but you start to get sick of that charcoal taste after a while.”

“Hey! At least I try!” Nova crossed her forelegs and pouted, the crests of her wings pointing inwards as they wrapped around her body like a shield. “It’s not my fault everything I try to cook burns!”

“Well, when you put it that way…” I chuckled and shook my head. “Hey, you’re better than me. Probably, I mean. I was never into the whole cooking thing…”

The filly returned with my food amazingly quickly, and my stomach began to purr as I sat there looking at it. As soon as she left, I tore into the meal in a frenzy, nearly choking a few times as I tried to inhale my food. Only after I’d taken the curb off my hunger did I slow down a bit. “So… I saw Yeoman outside the window today.”

Both Gauge’s and Nova’s ears perked, and their eyes shifted around the inn, as if Yeoman might’ve been sitting here spying on us. “You did?” Gauge asked. “When?”

“Right before I came out here,” I said. “He was down at the checkpoint with a bunch of other pegasi. They flew out of the mountain after standing around for a few minutes, though. I don’t think they’ve found what they’re looking for.”

Nova visibly sighed in relief. “If he’s not here, then that’s good for us.”

“And we better take advantage of it,” Gauge said. “We need to scour the city for any information that could help us. Plus, we need to buy supplies, too. We won’t have much time.”

“Right. Who knows how long Manchado’s gift is going to last,” I said. “So we’ll have to cover more ground than we would together.”

Nova looked between the two of us. “Are you sure? I don’t like the idea of splitting up…”

“We’ll be fine,” I said. “The illusions work and Yeoman isn’t here. Nopony’s looking for us. And I can handle myself. I’ve got my rifle if I really need it.” I popped another bite of hotcake into my mouth and chewed on it for a moment. “You two take care of our supplies for the next leg. Two weeks sound good? Three?” I shrugged. “I’ll flip you a few mags to barter with. You can figure it out. I’m bad at planning ahead.”

Gauge nodded and placed his hoof over Nova’s when she opened her mouth to say something. “We can take care of that. What about you?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” I said, taking a sip from a glass of water. “I’m gonna stick my nose anywhere and everywhere I shouldn’t.”

-----

You know, for a while there, I thought things were gonna turn out alright.

After breakfast, I split up with Nova and Gauge, and we made plans to check in with each other at the inn for lunch and dinner. Lunch had come and gone just fine, and the two of them had already gotten the bulk of our supplies squared away while they were out. Nova had dropped a few bullets where she could to try to gather any information on where Yeoman and the RPR were flying to, but so far hadn’t turned up much luck other than that they were going somewhere to the south. But she did learn that they hadn’t changed cardinal directions in their last two trips, so they had to be onto something.

I, on the other hoof, hadn’t come up with fucking anything. I’d spent all day scouting around Hole and tailing RPR patrols, just trying to listen in on their conversations. I’d learned a few tidbits of information, but nothing too helpful: the RPR headquarters (and the seat of government for the city) was housed in a complex of buildings on the fifth ring, near the top of the mountain, and that Yeoman was here with fourteen ponies from the Ivory City, six of whom were among the pegasi that I saw with him this morning. The other eight I gathered were a sort of diplomatic envoy or something from the City, like an embassy or some shit. I didn’t know how long they’d been here, but Reclaimer was definitely trying to build new alliances in the north now that the Crimson were gone.

Between finding guards to tail, I took the time to get myself acquainted with the city. It seemed like most of the big businesses like taverns and merchant houses owned buildings on the floor of the hollow. They also seemed to be the more expensive places, as if their position on the limited space of the floor as opposed to a small carving in the mountain walls was a status symbol or some shit. They also had the ability to grow and expand upwards as needed, something that the carved rooms sorely lacked. I hung around these places for a bit, lighting a cigarette and just listening, trying to pick out any interesting tidbits of conversation.

And the thing I found strange about this was just how normal everything seemed. It felt like I was back in Blackwash or at the Bastion. Ponies went about their lives, talking about family, friends, what they did for fun (apparently exploring old mineshafts and caves underneath the mountain was a favorite). They talked about the food that they ate and new recipes to try. Stallions talked about business, and mares talked about their families. Colts played tag in the streets, tripping up ponies just trying to get somewhere else. There was a sense of calm and happiness in Hole, despite everything I’d heard, and I felt myself relaxing and lowering my guard the longer I was exposed to it.

But even despite that, there was something wrong beneath the surface, and it wasn’t too hard to find if you just looked around. There were slaves everywhere, following their owners like dogs. Many of them were gaunt and bruised, scared and submissive, but there were many who dressed in formal attire and carried themselves with a confident air. It was strange to look at those slaves in particular and realize that their owners apparently cared for their property, and perhaps even more frightening, the slaves were content to serve them. But nopony else in Hole seemed to be making the same observations I was. Slavery here was just a way of life, and it seemed like everypony, from the richest master to the thinnest slave, accepted it.

A bell rang at like three in the afternoon, and I noticed a marked shift in the direction of hoof traffic. Curious, I snuffed out the butt of my cigarette and followed the crowd, trying to get a sense of where we were going. It seemed like we were wandering toward the center of the city, toward the market district. And there was a buzz of interest in the crowd, too. Whatever was going to happen, they wanted to be there to see it.

We entered a big courtyard, a plaza a few hundred feet across. Ponies crammed all around a large wooden structure erected in the middle, fighting for standing room. It looked like a pagoda or something, with eight long beams poking out of the corners of its octagonal shape. Only when I saw the nooses on the ends, and the ponies gathered inside, did I understand just what I was looking at.

Public executions.

I wanted to turn around and leave, but the crowd had me packed in pretty tight, so I could hardly move. I managed to fight for a little room, but by that point, a familiar brown mare had taken the stage. Even if I hadn’t been looking in her direction before, the glint of her aviators was hard to miss.

“Fillies and gentlecolts!” the mare’s voice boomed across the plaza. “The RPR brings you its offering, the fruits of our hard work!”

At the shove of a few guards, several beaten, bloodied, and lame ponies staggered out from under the roof of the pagoda, each in the direction of one of the nooses. The crowd cheered at the sight, and the roaring continued as the guards fitted nooses around the ponies’ necks. On the stage, the RPR captain gestured at them with an outstretched hoof. “Today we bring you four runaways, caught and broken, whose masters were unwilling to pay for repossession. We bring you three bandits who attacked a slave caravan and were taken alive by our soldiers, and one pony whose treason against Hole and the RPR will be repaid with their blood! Judge them, and remember what it means to forsake your duty and betray your home!”

The crowd hissed and jeered at the visibly terrified ponies, some still with blood from fresh wounds dripping off of their muzzles. As one, the guards kicked the ponies off of their stands, sending them falling a foot or so only to hang from the ropes around their necks. The condemned kicked and flailed as they struggled to breathe before one by one they went limp. After only a minute or two, all eight ponies had been reduced to lifeless corpses swinging on ropes, eyes and features bulged out from their strangulation.

I touched the nearly-healed bruises around the top of my neck and shuddered. I understood what they went through far more than I should’ve had any reason to.

As the crowd began to calm down, the mare with the aviators started to speak again. “The auction house is now open for business. We have stock from Notched Whip, seventeen specimens, six mares and three foals; Flaxen Reed, fourteen specimens, two mares and six foals; Moonlit Chains, twenty-nine specimens, eleven mares and five foals. We also have final stock from Carrion, twenty specimens, ten mares. We have severed business ties with the Crimson due to unsatisfactory and unfulfilled trade agreements, so this will be the last chance to purchase stock from the valley.”

She hadn’t told them the truth: that the Crimson were no more, and the Sentinels were in charge of the valley now. For some reason, that stuck out to me as odd.

I spotted a procession of chained ponies march up to the wooden structure accompanied by a ton of guards, and promptly turned away. The crowd was beginning to disperse, save for those wealthy enough to buy and trade ponies like tools, and I wanted to leave now. I felt sick to my stomach after watching the execution, and I didn’t want to have to watch ponies being bought and sold like livestock. Now I could feel the rot underneath the surface of Hole finally showing its face. Beneath the happiness and normality I’d seen just a few minutes ago, there was something horribly wrong with this city, where public executions were a big event everypony wanted to see, and enslaving your fellow equine was just a way of life.

A shiver ran down my spine, and I swore I could feel eyes burning into the back of my skull as I retreated. I could perfectly imagine my reflection in each lens of a pair of shiny silver aviators. I didn’t stick around long enough to find out if that was true.

-----

I soon found the Pit, as ponies called it. It was kind of strange to think about there being a pit inside of a mountain that was almost filled to the brim with ponies, but there it was, an open cavern in the back out of the mountain, only accessible through a few mineshafts that went down into the bedrock. As far as I could tell, the cavern was natural, and the ponies of Hole themselves had broken into it when looking to expand or something. If Equestria had done it, I’m sure they would’ve just kept boring through the mountain to get to here.

But I could see why the Pit had a reputation for nastiness. Unlike the clean and happy (well, mostly) surface of Hole, it was dirty and shifty down here. Squat buildings rose from floor to ceiling, and piles of rubble blocked off abandoned tunnels and mineshafts. The only light came from cracked lanterns hanging on doorposts, creating an eerie mirage of flickering shadows to accompany the distorted echoes of laughter and conversation in the tunnels. The ponies here seemed tired, and many simply sat in small groups next to buildings or in alleyways. Even the very ground was slick with moisture, and the air was suffocatingly humid. There was also a faint smell of something in the air. If I had to describe it, it’d probably be… an overwhelming sense of despair.

But it seemed to be popular with RPR guards off-shift. I figured that out when a trio of them stumbled out of a tavern, obviously drunk out of their minds, and collapsed in the street. I gave them a wide berth, not wanting to get any projectile vomit or some shit on my coat, and not wanting to be the first pretty mare these drunkards saw. But there were other guards in some of the nearby bars, so I decided to use another smoke break as an excuse to eavesdrop by one of the windows.

I don’t really know what I jumped into, but apparently it was something good. A stallion’s voice, worn ragged from years of shouting and yelling, drowned out that of his friends. At least he was easy to listen to from the other side of the window.

“…you know, right? Why the fuck do they get to set the terms? We’re the ones helping his sorry ass find this fucking shit. We’ve got teams digging everywhere! And they want to walk away with the spoils?”

“They’re hardly walking away with fuck all, dickhead,” a mare’s raspy voice countered. “From what I heard, they promised everything we can get our hooves on inside the place. All they want are the computers or some shit. Fuck ‘em, they can have it. If it’s another military base, we’ll be drowning in brass!”

I was about to put the cigarette in my lips again after blowing a cloud of smoke, but I stopped when I heard that. They had to be talking about Yeoman and the search for the next code piece. Maybe they’d say something more specific. I stuck the cigarette back in my mouth and slid a little closer to the window frame, pressing my good ear against it to catch every word.

“Now that’s the kind of shit I like to hear,” a different stallion’s voice said. “You know anypony on the teams they’re sending out? Got an idea where they’re searching?”

“Eggshell said that they were searching for an installation underneath a waterfall or something like that. But there’s a fucking million waterfalls in the gorges to the south.”

“Eggshell’s a fucking dickwing. You know that.”

“So? Even retards get things right every so often.”

I frowned and thought for a bit. How the shit were we going to find this thing if it was supposedly under one of a million waterfalls in some place to the south? And that was assuming they were even right in the first place. Still, it was something to work with, I suppose, and their conversation broke up as somepony brought them more to drink. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to get anything more out of that.

Tossing my cigarette away, I sighed and rolled my shoulders. It was getting close to dinnertime, but at least I had something to share with Nova and Gauge now. Hooray for not being totally useless! Feeling a little bit better about myself, I began to move down the stairs, trying to part a crowd of ponies and get back to the mineshaft that led out of the Pit.

And then I bumped into a wall. A solid brick wall of muscle and brown hair, topped with a white mane and the silver glint of aviators.

I staggered backwards and froze as I found that mare staring down at me. She seemed surprised, too, but that quickly evaporated into a predatory smile. “Well, look at that. Wasn’t expecting to meet you down here. You having fun in the Pit?”

I tried to swallow my fear, but I only choked on it. In the ensuing silence, the earth pony shook her head and put a big hoof on my shoulder. That thing could crack my skull in one solid hit. “I hope you weren’t just leaving. Happy Hour’s just starting, don’t you know? And last we talked, I’d promised you a few friendly drinks.” I felt her hoof clamping down on my shoulder like a vise, and I had to bite my cheek to not cry out at the sudden pain. “I at least owe you a little taste of Hole’s hospitality.”

“I have dinner plans,” I said, carefully sliding out from under her hoof and trying to skirt around her. “I really should get going—!”

I ran into an outstretched steel pole. Or maybe that was just her foreleg. “I’m sure they can wait,” she said, and a not-so-gentle shove sent me stumbling toward the door of the bar. “Better yet, maybe I can have one of my ponies find them, and we can all have some drinks together.”

“They’ll be fine,” I hissed, reluctantly opening the door to the bar and trudging inside. I felt trapped, and the more I looked around, the more I began to panic. There were more RPR ponies in here than there were other patrons, and about half of the windows were barred to prevent break-ins. And when the mare led us to the bar, she sat down on my right, between me and the door. I really doubted that I could run past her without getting laid the fuck out with a solid cross right under the horn.

The bartender, a horribly balding middle-aged stallion, looked up from his rack of chipped and cracked glasses to see us sitting down at the bar. He flashed us a smile that was half the teeth it should have been and pulled out two glasses. “Hunter! Good to see you, as usual.” He placed the glasses in front of us, and his eyes drifted to me. “Who’s the friend?”

“A business partner,” the mare, Hunter, said in a way that did not bode well for my prospects of a shackle-free future. “Pour her a glass of the usual shit.”

Even before she finished saying the words, the bartender already had our glasses filled with a frothy liquid which I could only assume was beer. Considering what the rest of the Pit looked like, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was made from cave fungus scraped off of the walls. Hunter took her glass between both hooves, lifted it to her lips, drained half of it in a gulp, and slammed it onto the bar so hard that a glass chip came flying off of what remained of the base. I saw the bartender wince, but he maintained the smile on his face all the same. After licking her lips, Hunter turned to me and poked my glass. “You wouldn’t want to offend Hops over there, would you? He makes this shit himself.”

Swallowing hard, I took the glass in my magic and raised it to my lips, taking a little sip. I immediately had to suppress a gag; it was bitter as all hell, even worse than the moonshine that made me swear off drinking years ago. It tasted like an ashtray, sweaty tail hair, and the crust scraped off of a pony’s frog, with something pretending to be a wheaty taste underneath but was almost certainly a poison of some kind. Maybe bearing grease? There were a lot of machines lying around the Pit, abandoned where they broke down and stripped for parts.

And then Hunter slapped me on the back nearly hard enough to break my spine. I doubled over, choking and coughing, while she just grinned at me like some kind of predator. “Not bad at all, right?” she said, hitting me on the back again and bumping my nose into the bar. It was slick with moisture, and I doubted that all of it was merely water. Grunting, I managed to sit up and glare at her, but all I could see was two nervous mares staring back at me from circles of silver.

“It’s wonderful,” I grumbled, rubbing my nose. “You guys just have all the greatest shit here, don’t you?”

“Don’t humor me,” Hunter growled. “I wouldn’t live in this fuckhole if I didn’t love my job. It’s dirty and filled with spineless shits. Only upside to that is that I’m paid to kick their teeth in.”

I pushed the mug away from me and folded my forelegs on the table. “What a noble job. You make necklaces out of their teeth? Saw off any horns, clip wings, that sort of shit? You look like the kind of mare who has a severed head collection in her basement.”

Hunter laughed, too loudly to be natural. “No, but now that you mention it…”

I sighed while she chuckled. “What do you want?” I asked her through bared teeth. I already knew I wasn’t going to like the answer.

“I’m just going to ask you one question,” Hunter said, the menacing smile falling off her muzzle only to be replaced by a businesslike frown. “Who gave you that illusion on your flank?”

I flinched, and I knew for a fact that she saw it; she was watching me like a shrike, after all. “Don’t lie to me,” she said, touching a big knife strapped to her chest. “I won’t make it quick if you do.”

My heart began to pound as I stared at the nearly ten-inch long sheath fastened to her armor. I wasn’t confident that I could disarm her fast enough if she tried to use it on me. I also didn’t know just how much she knew. What gave away Manchado’s illusion? I glanced at it, and it was still there, covering my flank. How could she have known? Did those urchins that robbed us yesterday feel up my or Nova’s flank and tip her off?

Her hoof moved to the fastener on the sheath and undid the button. She pulled it out by half an inch, revealing glistening, spotless, oiled steel. This mare knew how to take care of her weapons. Weapons that were becoming more and more likely to be used on me. I glanced out of the corner of my eye to see the bartender with his back turned to us, trying very hard to ignore what was happening at his bar.

“Warped Glass,” I said, thinking of the first unicorn that came to mind that wasn’t Manchado. And unlike Manchado, a veteran Sentinel wasn’t likely to get murdered in his sleep by an RPR hit squad. “He said that the illusions would be foolproof. Nopony would know.”

“Illusions can’t hide fear,” Hunter said, and I could see exactly what she meant in my frightened reflections in her aviators. “I don’t even need to see your flank to know you’re branded. I’ve been doing this for years. The only reason I let you go in the grasses outside of Hole is because I knew you were coming here. Why would I bother wasting time and effort dragging you back to Hole when you’d come here on your own? You’ve already done all the hard work for me.”

My ears flattened against my head and I looked down at my shaking hooves. My mind was racing. How the fuck was I going to get out of this? I had my rifle, but Hunter would stab me before I even managed to draw it. I could try to swipe her knife and take her out with it, but if I wasn’t fast, the other RPR ponies would pry me off of her before I could escape. And who knows how many of them had their own weapons, though I hoped they wouldn’t risk shooting their boss…

“So… what happens next?” I whispered in a slow voice, trying to stall for time. My eyes scanned the bar and the rack of glasses behind it. Maybe I could cause a distraction? Smash a glass or several over her head? Though the last time I tried to club an earth pony in the skull with something it didn’t work well for me at all...

“That’s simple,” Hunter said. “I’m going to arrest you as runaway property, have that illusion removed, and then sell you at the auction house to the highest bidder. You’re going to spend the rest of your life sucking on a stallion’s dick and giving him lap dances and doing all the disgusting kinky shit he wants you to do because he owns you. If you’re lucky, you’ll bear his foals when you’re no longer the prettiest thing he can afford, and he’ll keep you around to raise his children. If you’re not, he’ll probably try to sell you again, and if nopony buys you, then he’ll maim you and throw you out into the streets as unwanted property. Then somepony stabs you over a few spare cartridges and you die face down in a ditch, and we use your body for fertilizer.” She leaned back a bit. “That’s what’s going to happen.”

“And my friends?” I asked, still staring at my hooves. “What about them?”

Hunter thought things over for a moment and then leaned in close to me. “I’ll make you a deal,” she said in a low voice, almost next to my ear. “You come with me willingly and don’t make too much of a fuss, and I’ll just kick them out of Hole instead of selling them too. Beating your face in is going to hurt your auction price, and I’d rather avoid the hassle. How does that sound?”

I stopped as I tried to process what she was offering me. It seemed too good of a deal—for my friends, at least. I was still fucked, and if I accepted I’d be literally fucked almost nonstop in like a month. And there was a chance Hunter would go back on her word; she didn’t have any reason to stay true to it. Maybe Gauge and Nova would be able to escape on their own when they realized I wasn’t ever going to be coming to dinner. There was always the chance I could escape too, later. I wasn’t ever going to stop trying, no matter how many times I was raped.

But if they put that mindfuckery spell on me, though…

“And what if I tell you to fuck off?” I said, managing to lift my head enough to glare directly at Hunter. “I’m a Sentinel, you know. I’ve fought my fair share of slaving shits like you.”

Hunter raised an eyebrow. “Sentinel, huh? Well, that certainly changes things a bit.”

I blinked at her. “It… wait, it does?” As stupid as it was, I felt a glimmer of hope that just maybe they respected the authority of the Sentinels enough to not fuck with me.

“Oh, definitely.”

I saw her muscles tense, and I immediately acted. She went for her knife, but I shoved her muzzle away with my telekinesis. Off-balance, Hunter nearly fell off of her bar stool, and I spun around to kick her in the chest before she could recover. She clambered to the floor but rolled onto her hooves in a split second, instinctually lashing out with her hind hooves as I tried to run past her and out the door. The blow caught me in the side, and sent me flying across the bar into a table full of RPR ponies at the other end. Groaning, I managed to pull myself back to my hooves, but one of the guards struck me in the back of the head with a glass, breaking it against my skull and digging shards of glass into my skin. I stumbled forward and nearly lost my balance, but Hunter was there to catch me by wrapping her legs around my neck and slamming me into the ground.

My horn hit the floor, dazing me just as I tried to unholster my rifle and try shooting my way out. But while my head swam, Hunter rolled me onto my back and drew her knife. She tried to plunge it into my throat, but I managed to cross my forelegs under her chin and keep the knife at bay. Unfortunately for me, she was an earth pony, and I was a unicorn; my limbs shook as I tried to hold back a fucking mountain from crushing me. Coiling my hind legs, I managed to kick her in the cunt, and she wheezed and backed off a bit, wincing in pain, but it wasn’t enough. Whether it was her earth pony toughness or I’d just gotten a bad hit off, she didn’t recoil enough for me to slip away. Instead, she just lunged at me again, and when I tried to protect my throat like before, she instead drove the knife deep into my right shoulder.

It felt like my mind reset at that moment. A few seconds of thoughtless pain gripped me as I realized I couldn’t move my right leg. When the red haze finally cleared, I could see Hunter standing over me, and the moment I tried to move, she twisted the knife, ripping flesh and muscle inside of my shoulder. That was when the pain decided to hit me again, and I screamed in agony.

Hunter let go of the knife but left it embedded in my shoulder. She’d stabbed it in so deep I was afraid that it’d pinned me to the floor. I could only hope against hope she hadn’t just permanently maimed me. “If you’re a Sentinel, then maybe I should just kill you here,” Hunter said. “Chaining wild dogs is never a good idea. The moment they break loose, they’ll rip you to pieces. And I doubt any stallions so weak and disgusting that they have to buy mares instead of wooing them will want a Sentinel sucking on their dick.”

I was in too much pain to respond to her. My mind was too preoccupied with ‘fucking shit there’s a big metal thing jammed into my shoulder holy fuck’ to really do anything. Hunter frowned at me, then bit down on the knife and tore it out of my shoulder in a bloody, painful motion. For some reason, the knife leaving my body hurt almost more than it did entering, and on top of that, my coat was soaked with blood in a few seconds.

Hunter reached down and grabbed me by the mane, hauling me off of the floor. Then, holding me up with her hooves, she brought me almost nose to nose with her. “Let’s do this outside,” she hissed. “I wouldn’t want to make a mess on Hops’ floor.”

I spat into her face—but her aviators stopped it from getting into her eyes. She just flinched, but didn’t let go of me. I stared at her for a moment before grimacing. “That… worked better in my head.”

She responded by putting my face through the bar. Figuratively, thank the stars. I’m pretty sure she actually could’ve had she tried.

By this point, the bar had gone completely quiet as everypony watched Hunter obliterate me. Nopony dared to move or even say anything as Hunter threw me onto the ground again. Nopony looked away as she pummeled me into the floor with savage blows of her hooves I couldn’t protect myself against. I tried to shield my face and my horn with my forelegs, but one wouldn’t even move, and she decided to beat my gut instead. In fact, I’m pretty sure she would’ve taken her time to break every bone in my body if a visibly drunk mare hadn’t stumbled into her as she tried to stagger out the door.

Hunter stopped her onslaught for a moment, letting me get some breath and try to figure out which parts of my body were still attached to me. “Watch yourself, cunt!” Hunter exclaimed, raising a bloody hoof and striking the drunk mare. The mare staggered and fell to the ground right next to me, collapsing in a pile of limbs and feathers and gear. She’d taken Hunter’s fury for the moment, and I knew what was going to happen next.

But then the haze of drunkenness vanished from the mare’s face as Hunter reared up to smash her skull into pieces, and she winked at me.

I… I can’t even describe what happened next. Hunter stomped toward the ground with the force of a fucking meteor. But the mare’s head wasn’t even there by the time her hoof hit the floor. In a flurry of wings, the definitely-not-drunk mare was on her hooves and shoving Hunter backwards. The big earth pony slammed into the bar, and the pegasus used her wings to whip a pistol out of one of her bags and press it against Hunter’s chest. I heard three reports from the gun as she fired into the big mare’s armor, and Hunter collapsed, clutching her chest. A twirl of the pistol holstered it across her chest, and the pegasus hauled me off of the floor.

My head swam at the sudden shift in gravity, which certainly wasn’t helped by all the blood I was losing. “W-What?” was all I could wheeze before I felt myself being moved to the door.

“Don’t ask questions, just move your fucking flank!” the mare yelled back at me, and kicked me right in the ass. I fell out of the doorway and rolled down the stairs, ending with my face on dirt and rock at the bottom. Groaning, I tried to push my way back to my hooves, but immediately lost my balance and rolled over.

But it gave me a view of the absolute carnage this mare was wreaking on the bar and the RPR ponies inside. Her pistols hammered rounds through the doorway she flew backwards out of, and I could hear cries of pain and death inside. Spreading her wings, she rolled around and picked me up off of the ground in one swoop, though I could feel her straining to move the two of us. “What are you made of, fucking lead or something?!” she squawked at me, grunting as she tried to get us higher off the ground.

My hooves skimmed over the dirt, but my brain was slowly catching up to me. I looked over my shoulder to see a ton of ponies pouring out of the buildings behind us, definitely very pissed off. “Who are you?! Why are you helping me?!”

“Ace, and fuck the RPR,” she said. Bullets began to whizz past us, and Ace darted down an alleyway where the cavern widened. “Fuck, they’re pissed. If Hunter didn’t have enough reason to want my ass dead, then phewee, she definitely got it now.”

She set me down behind a corner, then darted back the way that she came. She pried a compact box off her back, which suddenly expanded into a pretty fucking hi-tech sniper rifle at the push of a button. Bracing it on some garbage, she turned it to the side so the scope wouldn’t be in her way and waited. The faint glow of a holographic display added a little white light to the beige color of her face as she focused.

A group of five RPR ponies darted into the alleyway, only to be greeted by Ace’s sniper rifle. The rifle roared as she fired five bullets in quick succession, dropping our pursuers with five shots to their chests. She didn’t waste any time before compacting her rifle, tossing it onto her back, and darting over to me. “Come on, we have to move, now!”

There was a black haze creeping into the corners of my vision, and I was starting to feel really cold. But that didn’t stop me from putting two and two together. “Wait… you’re… y-you’re that pony that attacked those miners! With those other three pegasi!”

“Yeah, and I’m also the dumb bitch saving your fucking stupid ass.” She basically flung me through an open window, hopped in after me, then picked me up again and ran up a flight of stairs. “So don’t complain!”

We burst onto the roof of this building, almost right against the ceiling of the cavern. I could hear the shouting in the streets, but it was getting harder to make things out in detail. Ace’s face was just a beige blob topped with black and surrounding two blue spots.

But I did notice that she’d taken us right to the edge of the rooftop. “Hold on, don’t let go,” Ace told me, and I grunted as she suddenly hauled me onto her back. “Maybe you won’t fucking die before we get there.”

I could hear ponies stomping up the stairs behind us, so I wrapped my forelegs around Ace’s neck and just tried to keep my eyes open. My hooves were like rocks strapped to the end of my legs, and I couldn’t feel them in the slightest.

But when Ace leapt off the building, picking up speed as she fell, my eyes rolled back into my skull, and I blacked out.

Chapter 6: The Plan

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Chapter 6: The Plan

I woke up on my back, legs tied down with ropes, and something under my neck keeping my head tilted back. It was hard to see around the room without really moving my head, but I could see a few things. A desk that was on the verge of falling apart, a table with legs made out of different random shit, and several plastic bags lying on the floor, printed with some numbers and the letters “U-Art” on them. They were empty, though it looked like the insides were stained with blood.

That was when the pain hit me, though it was dulled and muted. Groaning, I tried to move, but my restraints held me down. As the memories of what’d happened to me started coming back, I began to panic, worrying if somehow Hunter had managed to catch me and Ace, and I was currently trapped in her slave fuck dungeon or something. And she was not a mare I wanted to have anywhere near my cunt. I don’t think I would’ve survived her fucking me.

“Calm down, calm down. I’ll get them off of you.” It was Ace’s voice, and I saw a shadow move in the corner of my vision. Hooves fumbled with the restraint around my neck, and soon I was free. I gasped and shook my head, feeling much better not having something pressing around my neck, and saw Ace move onto the rest of my restraints. One by one, she freed me from the ragged bed I was lying on, and I was finally able to sit up and stretch my limbs.

My head also started swimming, and Ace steadied me before I could fall off of the bed. “Careful,” she said, patting me on the back. “You were thrashing something fierce when I brought you here. Hunter’s knife was poisoned, and I needed to keep you still while I gave you some antidote. I also gave you some pretty strong painkillers while I worked on your shoulder. I ain’t the best surgeon, and I sure as shit ain’t a unicorn, but I’ve patched up worse than a knife wound before. Dumped a lot of blood into you so you wouldn’t bleed out and shit. Couldn’t really do much for your eye or your nose, though, but at least those aren’t life-threatening.”

I touched my swollen left eye and looked down my muzzle at my crooked nose. Looks like Hunter had given me a black eye and a broken nose on top of the stab wound. I looked at my shoulder to see a big red line oozing the smallest bit of blood through my coat. It was held together with thread; I guess she’d made some makeshift stitches. “Uhm… thanks,” I managed, wincing as I tried to move my right foreleg. “Still hurts like fuck, though.”

Ace just shrugged. “I dumped a bunch of Stabil-Ice and whatever other shit I could get my hooves on into the wound before I stitched it shut. Hopefully that should fix the worst of the muscle damage. It’ll probably be sore for a few days, but we’ll have to make do.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ll tough it out, I guess. Somehow.” I knew walking was going to hurt like all fuck unless I bound this thing up in a sling so I didn’t have to move it. I just hoped that whatever Ace dumped into the wound would be enough to get me going again before too long. I looked around me again at the small room now that I could actually see things clearly. “This your place?”

“I guess you could call it that,” Ace said, looking around. Apart from the bed I was sitting on, the desk, the table, and a chair in the corner, there wasn’t really much in this stone room. In fact, the room didn’t look so much like a room but a cave that somepony had decided would be good enough to live in. There weren’t any personal items or shit in here apart from a small arsenal of firearms and magazines sitting in an unzipped duffle bag in the corner of the room. “It ain’t permanent. More like a hideout, really.”

I frowned at her. “Yeah, hideout. Because you’re a bandit.”

She just shrugged and sat down in the chair, crossing her forelegs and letting her beige wings hang loose. She was kind of dirty-looking, but then again, it seemed like merely stepping hoof into the Pit made you dirty. Her black mane was wild and sort of rose up out of her skull before swooping down halfway over the right half of her face, while it was nearly shaved down along her neck. Her tail was really short for a mare, barely peeking out between her legs as she slouched in the chair. She was thin but roughly the same size as me, and covered in old scars and wounds from bullets, knives, and the horrifying monsters of Auris. Her mark was an ace of spades inside of a reticule; fitting, considering her name and profession.

“I ain’t no bandit,” she said. “I’m an outlaw. There’s a difference.”

“Oh yeah?” I crossed my legs and glowered at her. “What’s that?”

“One shoots ponies ‘cuz they’re greedy. I shoot ponies ‘cuz I don’t like them. One’s a piece of shit, the other just pisses off the ponies with the bullets and authority to put her face on a bounty poster.”

“Yeah, I bet your face is on a lot of bounties. I bet those miners north of here know all about you.”

Her blue eyes flicked to me. “That’s where I recognized you from,” she said. “I knew you were familiar.”

I threw my good hoof into the air. “You almost took my fucking head off!”

“Almost,” she said. “It still looks firmly attached to your shoulders to me. Unlike the other ponies on my team that you helped rip apart.”

“What, you want me to feel sorry for them?” I asked her. “That’s not gonna happen.”

She waved her hoof. “No way. Fuck them. They were just bullet-hungry shitbags who’d help me do what I needed to do. They—hold on. Do you actually know what those ponies in the mountains were doing? Because I didn’t attack them for no reason.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “Does it matter?”

“Yes, it fucking matters you dense fuck,” she said. I wondered if she was getting impatient with me.

“Well, they were miners. They were looking for ore seams in the mountains, just minding their own business until you attacked them.”

Ace snorted and leaned back in her chair again. “That’s bullshit.”

“Why is that bullshit?” I asked her. “Why should I believe you over them? They helped me get into Hole, after all. They’re nice enough!”

“Listen…” she stopped and frowned at me. “What was your name again?”

“Ember.”

“Ember. Nice name. But listen, just because they’re nice ponies, don’t mean that they ain’t doing shit work. Did you even see any mining equipment up there? Any big machines, that sort of thing?”

I opened my mouth to respond, but I couldn’t think of anything. Where were the machines? I’d just assumed that they’d been in one of the tents or somewhere far away from the campsite, but now that I actually thought about it, those miners or prospectors or whatever didn’t really seem to have a lot of gear on them. “No, not really. But what does that have to do with you attacking them?”

“Because they ain’t miners, they’re surveyors on a contract from Hole,” Ace said. “They’re out there combing the mountains, looking for old Equestrian installations. And when they find them, they’re gonna turn them over to Hole, and the RPR is gonna get whatever’s inside. So I’m trying to disrupt their operations by poking out their eyes in the field.”

“But just because they’re doing work for Hole doesn’t mean that they’re bad!” I exclaimed. “You’re just attacking innocent ponies instead of the ones who deserve it! That’s no better than being a fucking bandit!”

Ace frowned and looked away, shrugging her wings. “It ain’t always that easy. Sometimes you can’t hit the big wigs yourself, so you prune their branches. Cut enough off, and eventually the damn thing’ll wither and die. And I didn’t get my bounty just from attacking their surveyors, caravans, whatever,” she added, glaring at me. “Sometimes I save ungrateful bitches like yourself from their slaving patrols and kill a few officers while I’m at it.”

I threw my hooves into the air, frustrated and too tired to have this moral argument right now. “Alright, alright, fine. I’ll drop it. That doesn’t mean I don’t think you’re scum.”

She just shrugged like she didn’t give a shit. “I’m used to that. I can count the ponies who like me on a wing, and it don’t bother me none.”

Silence stepped between us, long and overbearing. Eventually I shook my head and rubbed my shoulder some. “So now what? Is that bitch Hunter dead?”

“Fuck no,” Ace said. “She got carbon fiber weave under that armor of hers. Even if my dinky nine-mils poked through her armor, they wouldn’t get through the weave. It just winded her, that’s all.”

“So why didn’t you just shoot her in the neck?” I asked her. “You had plenty of time.”

“Because killing one of the RPR’s top bitches ain’t gonna make my life easier,” she said. “I have a ten-k bounty on me right now. Killing Hunter would double or triple that. Then the bounty hunter companies will really start sniffing me out. I’d be surprised if I lasted a year after that.”

“I thought you were supposed to be this tough, badass outlaw,” I said.

“I didn’t get that way by getting myself killed,” she shot back. “Dumb glory hounds get their head on somepony’s bounty board and then die in a week. The smart ones like me just try to keep low and not show our faces anymore than we have to.” She smirked at me and wiggled her eyebrows. “Makes it harder for the artists to draw them on their posters.”

Groaning, I swung off of the bed and winced as I moved my right foreleg. I could hardly even put weight on it without a piercing pain tearing through my shoulder. “You got a sling or something?” I asked Ace. “I’m not gonna be moving very fast if I have to drag my leg everywhere.”

A length of cloth landed on the table in front of me, and I picked it up in my magic. “Make do with that,” Ace said while I tied it off into a sling. “We’ll need to get moving soon.”

“You never told me what the plan is,” I grumbled, looping the sling around my neck and tucking my hurt leg against my chest. It was uncomfortable and only a little less painful than before, but at least I could move freely now. Well, as freely as a three-legged unicorn could move.

“Getting you out of Hole,” Ace said, standing up and fluttering to the corner of her cave where she’d piled all her gear. “And me too. I ain’t gonna stick around any longer than I have to now that I’ve pissed Hunter off even more than before.”

“We can’t leave until we find my friends,” I said. “They’re waiting for me, and—how long was I out?”

Ace stopped shuffling things around for a moment to think. “Dunno… three hours? Four?” She shrugged. “Long enough for me to go and scout out the RPR patrols for the evening. The moons are pretty low in the sky right now, so there won’t be a lot of light for them to track us.”

My heart skipped a beat. I’d been gone for that long? Who knew what could have happened to them in the meantime! Hunter could’ve had them in chains by now! And even if she didn’t, what were they thinking? Did they assume I’d gotten captured? Were they looking for me right now? Were they hiding in our room at the inn, waiting out the storm?

Ace must’ve seen the panicked look on my face, because she stopped what she was doing and turned to me. “You alright?”

I just stared into space, trying to process the million different ways I could’ve just gotten my best friends killed. In the meanwhile, my mouth decided to go on without me. “I… I missed dinner…”

Ace looked around her little hole in the wall and pulled out some smoked meat and dried fruit from a bag. “…here?”

“No, I don’t mean that!” I exclaimed, at the same time snatching the food from her and stuffing it down my throat. It’d been a long time since lunch and I was starving, okay? I began to pace in circles in front of her bed. “I was supposed to meet Gauge and Nova at dinnertime and we’d all discuss what we found. But I was too busy being poisoned and passed out to make it!” I turned to her and swallowed hard. “If they’d been waiting for me, Hunter could’ve found them easily. She knows what they look like. She stopped us outside of Hole and nearly arrested us there.”

“If Hunter’s found them, then she’ll have taken them to their headquarters,” Ace said. “That’s where they keep all their slaves until they finish processing them for auction.”

I remembered that one conversation I’d overheard earlier today that’d mentioned that the RPR headquarters was on the fifth ring in the mountain. “They didn’t just take them to jail or something?” I asked, hopeful.

Ace snickered and shook her head. “Jail? There ain’t no jail in Hole. Everypony’s already a criminal here. Just that sometimes if you piss the RPR off enough they make you a slave so they don’t have to deal with you none.”

Add that to the list of reasons why Hole was such a lovely place. “So what are we gonna do?”

“Well, let’s not rule anything out just yet,” Ace said. “They could still be wherever it is that you all are holing up. If they’re smart, they would’ve realized something was up when you didn’t show and booked it somewhere safe.”

“And if they aren’t?”

Ace stuck her wing under my rifle, which she’d apparently nabbed during that chaos back at the bar, and flipped it to me. I caught it in my magic and checked the bolt, seeing a fresh set of brass inside. “We’ll get creative,” she said with a smirk.

I collected the rest of my shit from where Ace had put it and checked everything over. At least she hadn’t rifled through my ammo bag, so that was a plus. It seemed like everything was how I left it, more or less, just shaken up during our frantic escape. As for Ace, she took her time donning all her holsters and slings for her weapons. She had a brace of wing grip pistols, one under each wing, two knives strapped across her chest, and a magnetic rail on her back to drop her compacted sniper rifle in. A few magazines of ammo covered her chest, almost like makeshift armor. If I hadn’t lived among the Sentinels for a few weeks, I’d have been amazed at the amount of firepower she had on her. My own battle rifle felt small in comparison.

“Nopony will ever notice us,” I quipped, looking at this mare ready for war. “Completely natural.”

“Good,” she said, brushing past me toward the exit. “Ain’t nopony gonna stop us then.”

I followed her into the tunnel leading away from her hideout, stopping only when she did. She dug into her bags and pulled out a bottle with a rag stuffed in the top. I could smell oil of some kind and wrinkled my nose. She just held it up to me. “You know how to light?”

“‘Do I know how to light?’” I echoed her, rolling my eyes. A single flare of my horn was all it took to set the end ablaze. “My ass mark isn’t a flaming coal for nothing, you know.” Of course, that wasn’t exactly the reason why I had a burning coal as my cutie mark, but I didn’t think she needed to know that I’d only learned how to cast pyromancy a few weeks ago.

Ace wasted no time taking the bottle and hurling it back the way we came. It smashed against the bed before erupting into flames, and I flinched backwards at the sudden heat. “Umm… why?” I asked her.

“Because I’m done with this place,” Ace said, turning away and walking back along the tunnel. “And fuck if I leave anything behind for the RPR.”

She trudged onwards like a resolute mare of steel, while I lingered in the tunnel. I watched the dirty blankets on the bed burn and curl, and the table near it let out a groaning whoosh of sparks as the flame got to it and burnt it in two.

For some reason, I shivered as I followed this lawless mare out of the tunnel, a mare who, it seemed, had nothing to lose.

-----

“What’s the plan?”

I’m pretty sure Ace had grown tired of hearing that over the past half hour, if her ears flattening against her skull was any indication. But to be fair, I wouldn’t have kept asking it if she’d just tell me things for once.

“This is why I like working alone,” she grumbled, peering around the corner of a building. Farther down the street, there were at least a dozen guards standing between us and the mineshaft that gets us out of the Pit. Only problem was, as best I could tell, there wasn’t any way to get past them, save shooting them to pieces. And supposing we even did manage to kill all those ponies, we’d lose the element of surprise, and reinforcements would be on our ass almost immediately.

I rolled my eyes and cuffed her over one of her ears. She flinched and shot me a piercing glare, but I was too annoyed to care. “I’m not a fucking amateur, you know,” I spat at her. “I’m a sergeant in the Sentinels. I fought at Celestia Dam and killed Carrion. I can handle myself, even in a sling. Just tell me what you need me to do and I’ll fucking do it, okay?”

Ace frowned at me for a second, looked back around the corner at the guards, then shoved me away from the street so we could talk in the alley. “Fine, I’ve got a plan.”

“Fucking finally,” I muttered.

“I could just fly past them and leave you here, you know,” Ace shot back. “But I’m trying to be a nice bandit and save your hide. So listen. I’m gonna go and make a distraction a few blocks away. Hopefully it should get those guards away from the shaft. While they’re gone, do whatever it takes to get out of the Pit. I’ll meet you behind the fifth building on the left as soon as you exit. Just try to do it quiet-like so we don’t get caught, alright?”

I nodded. “Easy enough.” Of course, I had no idea just how I was going to do any of this, and we were betting a lot on Ace’s distraction working in the first place. Still, we didn’t have any other options, so it was all or nothing. And fuck it, that’s how I liked to live anyway.

“Fifth building on the left,” Ace said again. Then, spreading her wings, she darted down the alleyway, disappearing behind a few of the buildings, leaving me alone.

I had no idea what kind of distraction Ace had in mind, but I figured it’d be a bad idea to sit on my ass and just wait for it. I was going to have to figure something out on my own to deal with any stragglers without just shooting them. I sighed and began to slink along the buildings, my rifle holstered but with the safety off. I didn’t want my super-glowy fiery magic to give me away.

There wasn’t a whole lot of room behind these buildings; they were mostly stone and wood just jammed against the natural walls of the cavern, and since space wasn’t a concern down here, they didn’t need to dig into the stone to make rooms. But even though I had to try to scramble over rock with only three hooves, it meant that light didn’t get back here. Couple that with my black coat and I was like a shadow, moving around unseen as I stalked my prey. Or… something like that. Point being that I was able to get really close to the guards without them noticing me.

Now to see what I had to work with. Well, for starters, there were rocks. A lot of them. Not sure what I could do with those other than chucking them someplace to try to lure guards away, but if these ponies had the slightest bit of brainpower, they wouldn’t all go wandering over to investigate the noise. But maybe I could make something work. I was a unicorn, and telekinesis is a very versatile spell.

And then of course the tunnel fucking blew up somewhere in the direction Ace went. Seriously, she wanted me to be quiet?! I’m pretty sure all of Hole heard that one!

But it was time to act, not bitch, so after recovering from my surprise, I peered back around the corner of the building at the guards. After some worried conversation, eight of the guards galloped off toward the noise, leaving four behind to guard the mineshaft. Even though I knew they weren’t all going to go investigate, I was still disappointed that I’d have to work some.

I unslung my rifle and leaned it against the corner of the building just in case I needed to grab it quickly. I could probably kill all four of those guards with some accurate bursts, but the noise might draw back some of the guards who went to go investigate the explosion. With that in mind, I started collecting as many rocks as I could possibly find, just adding them to a growing stockpile I levitated in front of my face. This plan was stupid, but it might just be stupid enough to work.

With something like a hundred rocks in my magic, I peered around the corner, lined up my shots, and flared my horn to life. The rocks flew toward the guards, pelting them before they could even get the chance to react. My vision briefly faltered for a moment as I burned so much magic at once, but the effect was something like a giant shotgun that shoots rocks. When the blackness faded away, the four guards were lying in bloody heaps on the ground, some twitching as they bled out.

I waited for the tingling in my hooves to go away before I collected my rifle and galloped over to the mineshaft. I didn’t even bother with trying to hide the bodies somewhere; it’s not like it really would’ve done anything, since the RPR already knew I was somewhere inside Hole. Instead, I sprinted past those four, trying to climb the stairs as fast as I could before somepony happened to see the dead guards sitting at the base.

Fuck, you would think being a machinist all your life and running around Auris for a few weeks would get you in shape, but I was winded by the time I finished climbing the million steps between the Pit and Hole. Then again, I’d lost a lot of blood earlier, been poisoned, and had to do it all on three legs after I’d just nearly blacked out casting. I could at least blame my panting on that.

Almost immediately upon surfacing I had to force myself to gallop to the side at the sound of thrumming hooves. I barely managed to slip behind some old mining machines before a battalion of RPR ponies began to gallop down the stairs to the Pit, definitely investigating the explosion down there. I held my breath as they passed, worried that even the slightest noise or movement was going to give me away, and my heart and muscles screamed in protest after all the stairs I just ran up. But as soon as the last pony disappeared into the mineshaft, I gasped and spent the next minute sucking wind before I managed to limp away from my cover and head off to the left.

There were a lot of ponies milling in the street and standing in front of buildings, talking to each other in worried voices about the noise they’d heard down below. But nopony was moving. They were all standing still, too curious to go home but too afraid to investigate any closer. All they did was force me to have to shoulder past and around them, and I could hear whispers around me wherever I went. I was attracting attention, and that was definitely a bad thing.

But I made it behind the building Ace told me to meet her at without incident. Groaning, I collapsed onto the rock and leaned against the siding, just trying to rest a bit and recover my stamina for any more sprinting I was probably going to have to do today. My shoulder was also acting up, and I could hardly move it at all; the muscles were so tight that I was worried they were going to snap in two, and no amount of massaging made them loosen up. I could only hope that Ace cleaned the wound out well; though we didn’t have to worry too much about disease on Auris, since its microbiology and shit isn’t compatible with our bodies (at least, that’s what Nova tells me), we’d still brought plenty of diseases over from Equus when Equestria colonized the planet. To put it another way, I really didn’t want to get tetanus, because I’d probably die from it.

Wings fluttered above me, and I flinched and grabbed my rifle, but it was only Ace flying over the building. She touched down in front of me, her face streaked with soot and a few small cuts, and the end of her mane smoldering a bit. She looked me over, saw that I was still in one piece, and nodded. “Glad to see you’re still in one piece.”

“What the fuck was that?!” I hissed at her. “An explosion?! Right after you told me to be quiet?! Now you’ve got the whole fucking prickwing nest stirred up!”

“Yeah, stirred up in the Pit, not up here,” she said, crossing her forelegs. “I got a little closer to the blast than I really wanted to, but it did its job. We have to move now before they come back up; those bodies you left at the bottom of the stairs really didn’t help us none.”

“How was I supposed to know you were gonna—” I decided to stop before we wasted even more time arguing. “I’ll bitch at you later about this. What next?”

“Where were y’all staying?” she asked in that rough, almost-country accent of hers. “We gotta check there first before the distraction wears off. We can still hope they’re safe and sound.”

I looked around, trying to gain my bearings, but gave up after a few seconds. “We were at an inn on the first ring. It was… to the left when you enter?” I tried to piece my mental map of Hole together to try to figure out where we were, and I ended up pointing over my shoulder. “That way, I think. We had a room on the outside.”

“Then that makes things easier.” Ace stooped down and spread her wings out. “Come on, hop on up. Hunter probably has ponies watching the inn, so we’ll have to take a look through the window.”

Grunting, I stood up and slowly climbed onto her back. I spent a little bit trying to find a comfortable position because of all the gear and weapons she had, but eventually settled into crossing my forelegs over her chest and pressing my neck against hers, just trying to slot our bodies together like puzzle pieces. She grunted and stood up to her full height, then began to flap her wings. “Ugh… I’m glad I exercise,” she said through clenched teeth, and a few moments later, she began to fly us up.

She flew in the direction I’d pointed her in, flying just high enough to not be noticed by ponies on the street but low enough so we wouldn’t be visible from the higher rings. I bit my lip and kept watch around us, just waiting for somepony to shout in alarm and send a hail of bullets at us. But I didn’t see any RPR ponies, and nobody noticed or did anything about us, and we were able to cross Hole in a few minutes and hover in front of the inn.

“Which room were you?” Ace asked, her eyes drifting between the ten windows lining this part of the ring.

“We made a right from the common area and were the fourth door,” I said. I counted four windows over from the rightmost and pointed to it. “That one.”

Ace brought us over with a few more flaps of her wings and pressed her nose against the glass. I pressed my cheek right against hers so I could look into the room at the same time. “That’s… not how we left it,” was all I said.

It was empty, clean. The beds were made and the door was open, and none of our shit was anywhere. And with the obvious lack of my two best friends, there was nothing to even remotely tell that I’d slept here last night.

“You sure it’s your room?” Ace said, floating back a bit and looking at the nearby windows. “Maybe you’re remembering wrong?”

I shook my head. “No, I can see the little graffiti on the wall over the bed I slept in. This is the same room. It’s just… like we were never here…”

And then I saw it. A tiny, white feather stuck in the corner of the window. It looked like it came from the crest of a wing, like a pegasus had tried to push the window open with their wing but it’d closed on them before opening all the way. I plucked it out with my magic and held it up to our faces, slowly spinning it around to get a better look at it.

I had a sinking feeling in my gut as I figured out the implications. Ace, meanwhile, just slowly nodded once. “And as far as the RPR’s concerned, you ain’t ever were there.” She turned and looked me in the eye. “Property doesn’t rent rooms and leave a record of itself. Property never, ever, escapes them. And when they finally catch that property, they make sure that nopony knows it escaped to begin with. Don’t want other slaves getting ideas.”

She flew away from the outside of the inn and landed on a nearby bridge. I slid off of her back, still kind of in shock, with the feather clutched in my magic. Ace, meanwhile, simply looked further up the mountain, to a big series of rooms protruding from the fifth ring. “Hunter’s probably signing paperwork right now authorizing two new slaves to go on stock at the auction house tomorrow. Within a week, they’ll be bought and have their owner’s brand applied to their flanks. After that…” she shook her head and shrugged. “Well… let’s not talk about that.”

She turned to me and nudged me with a wing. “I’m sorry. I really am. But unless you want to end up like them, we gotta get out of here. I ain’t fixing to become a decoration at the auction house myself. And neither are you, I don’t think.”

But my eyes were locked on that building. “I’m not leaving them.”

“And just what can you do, really?” Ace asked, her wingtips twitching in irritation. “You’re just gonna get yourself caught and killed. If you’re lucky, that is.” She shook her head. “Forget it. They’re gone. It sucks, but they are. You ain’t gonna be able to free them. So let’s move while we still can.”

I turned to her and narrowed my eyes. “Then I’ll get myself caught,” I said, and she just raised an eyebrow at me. “We got out of the Pit with your plan. Now I’ve got one of my own. So are you gonna help me or not?”

Ace chewed on her lip for a few seconds, and I could tell she was weighing the options in her head. But eventually, she sighed and shrugged her wings. “Fine. Fuck it. I’ll help. But this shit better not get me killed.” She jabbed her hoof into my chest. “You owe me. Twice over. And you can bet I’m gonna call that in when we’re done here.”

“So long as you don’t ask me to kill innocents and do bandit shit then I’m fine,” I said. Then, looking back up to the RPR headquarters, I tapped my hoof against my chin. “Now, where can we find a uniform and some hoofcuffs?”

Chapter 7: The Idiots and the Fools

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Chapter 7: The Idiots and the Fools

As I stood in front of the doors to the RPR headquarters, my rear hooves bound in chains, my right foreleg tied up in a sling, and a steel bit between my teeth, I had to wonder just how exactly I got here. How in the world could some mare’s life get so fucking turned around that she willingly walked into the jaws of death and slavery in chains?

Behind me, Ace finished tucking the rest of her curtain-like forelock into a hat and grumbled. “This ain’t gonna fucking work,” she spat, glaring at me. “And if you’re gonna get me killed, I’d at least like to die with some dignity.”

She was more than a little upset at her disguise, to say the least. In addition to the hat and some armor we’d picked off of a guard, I’d had Ace cover herself in dirt and grease so she looked like she was a dark brown instead of the beige I’m sure was on her posters, wherever they were. No matter how much I tried, though, I couldn’t convince her to hide her wings just to make her disguise a little bit better. But it worked. I hadn’t known her for more than a few hours and I had a hard time recognizing her. A bunch of tired guards who’d probably seen so many wanted posters they all blended together would likely pass her over without a second thought.

“An RPR guard’s uniform doesn’t count as dignity?” I teased her. As she continued to fuss with her disguise, I leaned over and slapped her shoulder. “Relax, we’ll be fine. We just gotta get in, find Nova and Gauge, and get out. Easy.”

“This shit’ll never work,” she continued to grumble. “This ain’t one of them adventure stories. Shit like this never works in the real world. If you’re so set on hoofing yourself over then I have a mind to just leave you to it and save my own hide.”

“So why don’t you?” I flatly asked her. “You keep bitching about me putting you in danger. There’s nothing stopping you from just leaving. I’ll figure something out without your sorry flank if I have to.”

Ace growled in irritation but merely held her wingtips to her temples and shook her head. “Fuck it, let’s just get this over with. You ready?”

Shrugging, I made sure the key to the hoofcuffs was safely tied into my tail and began to walk forward. “Let’s do this.”

It was pretty awkward and difficult to stumble up the hill in hoofcuffs, and occasionally the rifle Ace had leveled at my back jabbed into my shoulders. I spared a quick glance off to my right and shivered; it was nothing but a several hundred foot drop to the ground below, and the only thing between me and the open air was a rope railing. But I could see basically all of Hole from here, and I understood why it was the RPR’s headquarters.

Then we were in front of the door, which had a pair of guards on either side. They raised their weapons some and squinted at me and Ace before one stepped forward. “What’s your business? I never seen you around here before.”

Ace cracked the butt of the rifle across my back—like, really cracked it. My cry of pain was pretty stars-damned genuine, along with how quickly I fell to my knees and slammed my face into the floor. “You know who this bitch is?” she shouted back at them, and by the way that they took a step back I could tell she’d caught them off guard. “This here’s the cunt who shot Hunter. Rounded her sorry plot up in the Pit and brought her up here. Hunter’s in, right?”

The two guards looked at each other, unsure of what to do. “Yeah, she’s in,” the one who spoke earlier said. “Getting her ribs looked at. Her armor’s tough shit, but it ain’t gonna stop everything.”

“Good, then I’m gonna fucking talk to her.” Ace bit down on my mane and hauled me back to my hooves. “I’m sure she’ll want some payback.”

One of the guards nodded and began opening the big door while the other stepped up closer to us. Squinting, he took a close look at Ace’s coat and sniffed. “You been rolling in shit down there?” he asked her. “Just who the fuck are you, anyway?”

Ace met his stare for a few seconds, but then her ears flicked to the opening door. “The game show host,” she said, smirking, and the stallion just blinked and stared at her with a dumb look on his face. “You just won a free lesson in skydiving!”

And then she threw me back closer to the wall and bucked the stallion in the chest. He staggered backwards, surprised, and tripped over the rope railing behind him. All I saw were his limbs flailing as he fell, disappearing over the edge of the ring, his scream lasting for like five seconds before it abruptly stopped.

In that same moment, Ace rolled out of the buck and launched herself at the other guard, knocking her to the ground and sending her gun flying. It was kind of hard to see what was happening from where I was lying, but I think Ace held the mare’s legs down with her own and stuffed her wing in her mouth to silence her while she dug a knife out of her disguise. I saw steel flash in the light before it plunged into the guard’s chest, and each time it did, I saw her legs spasm and twitch, but weaker and weaker each time until she stopped moving.

Ace pried her wing out of the dead mare’s mouth and cussed, shaking it out some. “I hate it when they take care of their teeth,” she muttered, gingerly folding it back against her side. Then, dragging the mare along by her tail, she tossed the dead guard off of the side of the ring, too.

“The fuck are you doing?!” I just hissed at her. “The whole point of the plan was to not have to shoot our way through everything!”

“And it was fucking stupid,” Ace shot back, helping me stand and pulling the key out of my tail. “That one guard already had a hunch I wasn’t RPR. Must’ve taken one look at me and the mare standing next to him and realized I was too pretty to be a slaver. I wasn’t gonna sit around and wait for him to call out the alarm.”

Then, sticking her tongue out at me, she flung her hat over the side while I undid my hoofcuffs. “Ah! So much fucking better!” she sighed, shaking her curtain-like mane out so it hung over half of the right side of her face like she liked it. She ripped open the top few buttons on the uniform as well and flexed her shoulders. I had no doubt that if she thought she could spare the time, she would’ve tossed the thing too and washed the grime out of her coat. Then she peered around the half-open door. “I always wanted to shoot this place up. The RPR’s too cocky; I would’ve put at least another four guards behind the big door if I was worried two madmares with guns were gonna storm on in and shoot everypony.”

I lightly tossed the hoofcuffs back at her and plucked my rifle off of her back. “Because two of us versus an army is gonna work so fucking well.”

“Most of them are currently running around the Pit trying to find out who set off the explosions. We won’t have to fight them if we move quickly and quietly.”

“Wait, explosions? As in, more than one?”

“Yup,” Ace said, smirking at me. “Second one should be going off right about...”

A muffled boom shook the mountain, and dirt and tiny pebbles from the ceiling landed on our backs. Down toward the Pit, I saw a huge plume of fire roar out of the mineshaft, casting an eerie orange glow on the inside of the mountain. Distant screams began to echo around the mountain, the stone walls only seeming to make them louder and louder.

I whipped my head toward her in disbelief. “Holy fuck, how? Stars, you’re not a bandit, you’re a fucking terrorist!”

“Are you really going to criticize every damn thing I do to try and make this easier for us?” Ace spat back. “Hole’s a fucking dump. Ain’t nopony live here but slavers, slaves, and thugs. I figure the more of their shit I trash, the more good I’m doing.”

Then she waved a wing at me. “Come on, we’re wasting time,” she said, darting inside. I followed her into the compound, rifle raised and safety off, and let her lead the way. I figured she probably had a better idea of where to go than I did.

She slunk down a hallway, left wing brushing the wall and half-crouching. Everything was quiet, as far as I could tell at least, since there was a lot of noise outside. It seemed like most of the RPR was scouring the Pit and Hole itself or trying to deal with Ace’s bombs. Their base of operations was the last place anypony would think to look for us. So we were able to make it a good ways in without hearing or seeing anypony.

But there was a lot to look at. The RPR was kind of vain, because they had all this artwork on the walls to try and liven up the stone, stone, and more stone that it was made of, carved into the mountain like it was. The ceiling was high and unnecessarily vaulted, and if she could’ve, I imagine Ace would’ve taken flight for a better vantage point. She couldn’t really do that while staying glued to the wall, but I could see her right wing twitching whenever she glanced up.

It was kind of funny, really; unicorns and earth ponies tend to really only look at eye level, but pegasi are always looking up and down

Then we went down a hallway that had a whole bunch of stone busts. I stopped to read the name and inscription on the first one, and I realized that these were all famous slavers and RPR captains. The first one went over a hundred winters back! I couldn’t even imagine just how many slaves had passed through Hole over the decades, and how many more would continue to be bought and sold at that auction house down below.

I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on in front of me, and I ended up bumping into Ace’s ass. She glared at me as I staggered backwards, and when I opened my mouth to apologize, she held a hoof to her lips and flicked her ear toward a door ahead of us on the right. I grasped the meaning quickly enough and nodded to her, and we slowly inched around the door. As we passed it, I hesitated and turned my ear to it for a second, trying to make out what exactly Ace had heard.

“You’ll be fine,” I heard a stallion’s voice say. “Just some bruising and a cracked rib, but you’ll heal that off in a few days. Just don’t put any more stress on it.”

“It’s not gonna stop me from doing my job,” a mare grunted back, and I flinched as I recognized Hunter’s voice. I heard big hooves hit the stone floor and begin to stride to the door. “I’m going to get some payback. Those cunts are somewhere in Hole, wreaking havoc by the sound of it, and I’ll find them even if I have to turn the whole place over.”

Ace was a few paces in front of me, so I hurriedly danced on the tips of my hooves over to her and tugged on her tail. When she looked back at me, I frantically slipped back into the space between two of the pedestals holding the busts and tucked my tail under me. The door opened not even two tail lengths away, and as soon as it started, Ace had disappeared between two pedestals as well.

I saw Hunter’s shadow fall across my hiding place as she stomped out of the infirmary, and I held my breath. She rolled her shoulders, looked this way and that, and then set off down the hallway in the direction that we’d come from. The other stallion, who I guess was a doctor or medic of some kind, emerged a few seconds later and went in our direction. I held as still as I possibly could as he walked in front of me, and when he passed by both me and Ace without noticing, I saw Ace slowly stalk out of her hiding spot and follow him down the hall, matching careful hoofsteps with his as she crept forward.

Once again she used her wing as a makeshift gag as she tackled the doctor. When he tried to use magic, she cracked him over the horn with a baton she had concealed in her disguise. He cried out in pain, but his cries were muffled by Ace’s wing. With her free wing, she grabbed one of her wing-grip pistols and held it under the stallion’s jaw, spitting out the baton in the process.

“Where are the new slaves held for processing?” she asked him in a quiet voice while I approached the two of them. “If you try to shout for help or do any funny stuff, I’ll paint the floor with your brains. I recommend playing nice.”

Then she removed her wing from his mouth and used it to pull the hammer back on the pistol to prove her point. I could see the terror in the stallion’s eyes, and it took him a few stuttering tries to tell us what she wanted. “N-N-Not too far from here! J-Just around the corner and, and to the right! Please, please don’t shoot!”

“I ain’t gonna shoot if you tell me what I want,” Ace hissed at him. “And keep your voice quiet! Now, how many guards? Don’t try to tell me there ain’t any, because that’s shit and we both know it.”

“Four!” the stallion hissed, his hooves shaking, pinned at his sides. “Please, I told you everything you wanted, please let me go!”

“I promised you I wasn’t gonna shoot you if you told me what I wanted,” Ace said, smiling faintly. She holstered the pistol again and stood up some. Then, to my horror, she raised her hoof and drove it into the stallion’s neck so hard I swore his eyes almost popped out of his skull. He struggled and made a few gasping and wheezing noises before his eyes rolled back and he went limp.

“Is… is he alright?” I whispered to her. He didn’t look like he was breathing at all.

She shook her head. “Fuck no. He’s dead. Crushed his windpipe. I couldn’t risk him running off and getting Hunter, or waking up after I wasted the time to choke him out and hide his body somewhere.” Then she drew her rifle, expanded it, and took wing. “And I don’t think I have to remind you that time is precious here. The longer we’re inside, the more likely we’re gonna get caught.”

I looked between her and the dead doctor, and after a few tries my face just settled on disgust. I mean, sure, her argument made sense, and I couldn’t really justify letting the doctor loose in case he did squeal to somepony. But I would’ve spent the time to choke him out and hide him somewhere instead of just killing him outright! Even if he was with the RPR, that didn’t mean that we needed to kill him in cold blood.

But Ace was definitely not the gleaming knight in shining armor that Zip and the Sentinels were. She was a toughened, weary, and efficient mare who’d spent so much time fighting to survive that killing ponies probably didn’t even take a second thought. If that was what Auris did to ponies, then I hoped it’d kill me before I ended up like her.

I used my magic to position the doctor between two of the pedestals for the time being and hoped that would be enough to hide him until we were done here, then hurried after Ace. After checking her corners, she drifted off to the right, ears swiveling back and forth as she tried to pick out sounds. After passing by a few doors, she stopped in front of one reinforced with iron bars and looked it over. “Seems like a good guess,” she muttered, half to me and half to herself. Glancing at me, she nodded to the door. “You know any silence spells?”

I shook my head. “Pyromancy’s all I got. I never really learned utility spells like that.”

She frowned, and my ears wilted a bit; I was starting to feel bad that I kept disappointing her, even though I really shouldn’t have felt anything when it came to this mare. “Right. Well, burning them to death ain’t gonna keep them quiet. If we go in there and start shooting the place up, we’re gonna bring reinforcements.”

Hmmm… I thought for a moment before an idea struck me. “How many knives you got?” I asked her.

“Two,” she said, pulling at the stolen RPR uniform to show the hilts protruding near her shoulders. “You got a plan?”

“Something like that.” I pulled the knives out of their sheaths and held them in the air between us. “Let’s hope there’s only four.”

Ace nodded and pulled one of the heavy bars out of the door. It swung open on creaky hinges, giving us a good look at what was inside. There were three cells, one of which was a big communal cell, a table, and a desk. Frightened ponies and even a few griffons huddled together in the big cell, signs of their time spent in captivity pretty easily picked out with all the bruises and injuries on their bodies and faces. But my attention immediately shifted to the four RPR ponies in the room, who all turned to me and Ace as soon as they heard the door open.

“Knock knock!” I immediately flung the two knives at the guards closest to me before they could even move. One knife buried itself in a stallion’s neck, and the other one caught a mare in the side of her muzzle. The moment my telekinesis was free, though, I immediately wrenched the guards’ guns away from their owners and cracked the two still standing over their heads with them.

It wasn’t enough to put them down and out, but Ace flew through the door like a missile and caught one of the guards in the chest, slamming him into the bars of the big cell behind him. She spun around before he could recover and used his face as a springboard to smash the other guard to the floor. As they struggled, she managed to get on his back and snap his neck with a quick jerk of her forelegs, then pried the knife out of the stallion I’d killed and throw it into the other’s heart. He spat blood and wheezed as he slowly slid down the bars until he came to a rest on the floor.

Unfortunately, things weren’t as quiet as either of us would’ve wanted, because the mare I only wounded was screaming in agony the whole time as she pawed in vain at the bloody knife handle sticking out of the side of her face, unable to get a grip on it with her hooves. Galloping up to her, I held her head down with a hoof and pried the knife out of her muzzle before cutting her throat open with it, ending her screaming and suffering in one blow.

Ace stood still, panting for a few seconds, before she went and collected her knives. “That could’ve gone better,” she grumbled, looking over my shoulder toward the door. “We need to get this done and over with fast. She probably could’ve woken the dead with all that screaming.”

I opened my mouth to say something back to her, but hooves slammed against the steel bars of the big cell. “Ember!” I whipped my head in that direction as soon as I heard my name, and I saw Nova standing on her hind hooves at the bars, smiling at me. She was a little bruised and dried blood stained her white coat, but she was still in one piece. At her side, Gauge rushed up to the bars to see me, and I galloped over to the two of them and nuzzled them through the bars.

“We’re getting you out,” I said, “and we’re gonna leave this fucking hellhole behind.”

Behind me, Ace rifled through the nearby desk and plucked out a key ring. “Keys!” she said right before tossing them to me, and I caught them in midair and began trying the lock. While I fumbled with the keys to figure out which one opened the cell, Ace’s ears pivoted toward the door and she galloped up to the corner, peering around and keeping a close eye on the hallway.

“Who’s she?” Gauge asked in a low voice while I cussed at a key and moved onto the next one.

“Remember those bandits that attacked Manchado?” I asked him. “She’s the one that got away.”

He blinked in confusion once or twice. “So why are you working with her?”

“Does it really matter? We’re getting your asses out of here, aren’t we?” My ears flattened against my head and I shook it slowly. “I had a run-in with that RPR mare, Hunter, in the Pit. Ace saved my life, but I was out of commission for a while.That’s why I never came back, and why they went after you guys shortly afterwards. I’m really, really sorry.”

“Can you fucking hurry it up in there?” Ace shouted back at me. “I think they know we’re here!” As soon as she said that, I heard more shouting outside, and then bullets peppered the doorframe as Ace ducked back inside. Cursing, she snatched one of her wing grip pistols and began firing blindly around the doorframe.

I finally managed the lock and pulled the door open wide. Gauge and Nova immediately came rushing out to hug me, and soon the rest of the slaves inside the cell were trying to get out too. “Anypony here know how to use guns?” I shouted at them, holding up the four compact PAW-5 bullpups the RPR guards dropped. “We could really use some more firepower.”

A few ponies (and one griffon) stepped forward, and I tossed the weapons to them. “Scavenge mags from the guards; we’re gonna have to shoot our way out.” Then I turned back to Gauge and Nova while everypony got organized and I touched one of the bruises on Nova’s muzzle. “Stars, those fuckers…”

She shook her head and pushed me back a little bit. “I’m fine, Ember. The Crimson were worse. Much worse.” Then, sighing, she added, “And can we talk about this later? We’ve got a lot of angry ponies out there trying to kill us.”

At the door, Ace ducked back behind cover and waved to me. “Ember! I could use your help here! Clear this hallway and we can get out of here!”

I shouldered my way past a bunch of the slaves and made it to her side. “What are we looking at?” I shouted into her ear just to be heard over all the gunfire.

“A whole lotta fuckers out there with big guns!” she shouted back at me. Just then, a big metal ball ricocheted off of the door and landed in front of us, and I immediately picked it up in my magic and flung it back down the hall. Not a second too soon; the grenade exploded almost as soon as I tossed it. When our ears stopped ringing, Ace frowned and fired a few more shots around the corner with her pistol. “And they’ve got fucking grenades, too. My fucking favorite.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said to her, quickly forming a plan. “Think you can keep their heads down?”

Ace shrugged and held out her wings like she didn’t really know. “Fuck it, I’ll see what I can do. Better than cowering in this tiny little room just waiting for a grenade to get lucky.” Gritting her teeth, she nodded to me and grabbed both her pistols before darting halfway into the open and firing lead downrange.

I didn’t waste a second. As soon as she started shooting, I began concentrating mana on my horn. I could feel the scalding heat building around my forehead until I finally stepped around the corner. “Get back!” I screamed at her, and that was all the warning I could give her before I let the spell loose.

I am really good with fire.

It was like a raging inferno in there, and the stone walls of the hallway glowed as my fireball roared past them. The mana drained from my body so fast I thought for a second my heart had stopped, and I wasn’t entirely sure that it hadn’t at least skipped a few beats as my vision wavered and my knees wobbled. But when I opened my eyes again, Ace had my shoulder, and a lot of extra crispy corpses were lying on the floor in front of me.

I tried to shake some of the dizziness out of my head and stand on my own. Sometimes I wondered why Warped Glass had really felt the need to give me that whole speech on burnout. I didn’t think I had to worry about killing myself through magical burnout when I felt like I was already dead after burning as much mana as I did on one spell. But at least I had a few moments to recover before we pushed onwards, what with all the ponies that had been shooting at us burnt beyond all recognition.

At least they died fast, right?

Ace sort of poked my cheek with her nose (I’d call it a nuzzle but it wasn’t quite there) and only took her wing off of my back once I proved I could stand on my own. Then she smirked at me and patted me on the back. “So, you do know fire. Well I’ll be.”

“It’s about the only damn thing I actually do know,” I said once I’d finally caught my breath. “And it takes a lot out of me. I almost blacked out from that one and that was just one spell.”

“A big ass spell, mind you,” Ace said. Then, looking at the slaves huddling in the doorway, she waved her wing at them. “Well, what’re you all standing around for like scared sheep? Don’t you want your freedom?”

There was a lot of murmuring and nodding heads, and finally the four slaves that I’d armed came out of the group and moved to the front, checking down the hallway with all the busts before hurriedly moving along. A few more slaves grabbed some of the guns off of the guards I’d fried and joined them. I gave those guns a wary glance; if the fireball I’d used was hot enough to make the stone walls glow, then it probably warped those guns a fair bit. I’m not sure how much use we’d get out of them, but if they helped, then they helped.

Nova and Gauge trotted up to us, and I saw that Gauge had found SCaR somewhere along with the supplies the RPR had stolen from them. Nova must’ve seen that I was a little unsteady on my hooves, because she trotted to my other side and rested a hoof on my shoulder. “Oh my gosh, Ember, are you alright? You don’t look so good…”

“Burnout,” Ace said before I could say anything. “Unicorns that really push their magic get it. She’ll be fine; she didn’t use anywhere near enough mana to kill herself.” Her ears flicked to the left at the sounds of gunfire further down the hall, and she gestured with her head in that direction. “Come on, we need to get going. It’s only a matter of time before Hunter figures out what’s going on and rallies all the guards in Hole to come stomp us out.”

I nodded and checked my rifle. “Stay behind me,” I said to Gauge and Nova, “and keep your heads down. I’ll keep you safe, alright?”

Nova bit her lip and nodded, and Gauge just dipped his head once in understanding. I smirked back at them and winked. They knew the drill, and I knew they wouldn’t get themselves in harm’s way if they could help it.

By the time I made it to the front of the RPR headquarters, Ace and the slaves had gotten into a pretty intense firefight with a group of soldiers trying to retake the building. We had a good defensive position, but we needed to get out. Unfortunately, this was the only way out of the building, at least as far as I’d seen. I didn’t consider the windows overlooking a hundred or so foot drop to be a real option, honestly.

And the RPR was dug in pretty hard at the entrance. Bullets flew back and forth, and occasionally a pony would catch some with their face and fall to the ground, skull blown to pieces. It was a fucked situation, and I started hearing voices shouting from within the building.

Ace spun around the corner to fire but ended up flaring her wings and stumbling back behind cover as bullets ricocheted off the ground around her hooves. Grunting, she fell against the wall and checked herself for injuries. “Well this is fucking great, ain’t it?” she asked me, peering around the corner. “They’ve got like ten of them out there but we can’t even push forward enough to sweep them.”

“Is Hunter out there?” I asked her, shouting to be heard over the noise of the gunfire.

“Not yet, she’s probably rallying the rest of Hole,” Ace said. A bullet ripped through the end of her mane, and she flinched back. “Fucking shit! Alright, that’s it, I’m fucking taking care of the situation myself!”

Growling, she stood up, flexed her wings, and propelled herself straight for the window on the other side of the hallway. I could nearly see the air distorting around her as the bullets flew by in the split second before she tucked her wings in at her side to fit through the window. I saw her tail flick briefly past the corner of the next window, and then I heard her pistols at work.

The bullets flying down the hallway momentarily lessened, and I seized the opportunity to push forward. “Now!” I screamed, running out into the middle of the slaves, “Push now or we’re going right back into those fucking cages!”

Lowering my rifle, I spearheaded the charge out of the headquarters, picking up an army behind me. As soon as I reached the doorway, a few bullets went past me, but I quickly took aim with my battle rifle and put a few bursts downrange. I saw a whole bunch of ponies looking either up at me or off to the side, where Ace was strafing them as best as she could and just trying to break up their fire. But it was the distraction we needed, and I picked off a few of the RPR soldiers before they could either hit Ace or redirect their attention to all of us, standing in the open and pushing out from the headquarters.

With their defensive position broken, the RPR tried to retreat and regroup, but I don’t think I could’ve stopped our momentum even if we wanted to. What started as a push out of the headquarters turned into a charge down the side of the ring, and it felt like I blinked once and suddenly I was in the thick of a brutal brawl. The slaves quickly overwhelmed the hoofful of surviving RPR ponies, beating them into bloody messes or throwing them off the side of the ring to their deaths below. I caught one RPR pony running a bayonet through a slave on my left, so I spun around and shattered his jaw with the butt of my rifle before hurling the howling pony away with my telekinesis.

Ace landed at my side, the side of her muzzle streaked with gunpowder from shooting one of the pistols with her mouth. Blood dribbled down her shoulder from a deep trench carved through it, and it was obvious she was favoring the opposite side, though it didn’t seem like it hurt her mobility all that much. “Good push! We need to keep going!” She instinctively ducked as gunfire broke out behind us, and we both turned around to see a contingent of RPR storming out of the headquarters after us. We both raised our weapons and fired back at them, trying to keep them suppressed while the rest of the slaves ran further away. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much cover out here for us to hide behind; the fifth ring was open almost all the way around, except for the stairway on the far side that went down to the fourth ring. The only things up here were the RPR headquarters and one or two buildings that I couldn’t see an entrance to, along with a rope bridge that cut the ring in half.

Then ponies started shooting at us from below, and I could see an entire army making their way up to the upper levels. A few pegasi flew directly at us, but Ace and I shot them down before they could get a good shot on us. “We need a plan!” I screamed at Ace, firing a few more shots at the headquarters before my rifle spat out its empty magazine. I quickly slotted a new one in and tried to shield myself with a rough rock face that provided at least a little cover for me to reload and get my bearings. I could see Gauge, Nova, and SCaR in the middle of the slaves; at least they were alright. But that was going to change soon if we didn’t get out of here.

Then RPR ponies started coming up the stairwell from the fourth ring. I cursed as we got caught in the crossfire, and ponies started falling—how many were just ducking for cover and how many were cut down, I couldn’t tell. But we were pinned down, and we were either all going to get killed or have to surrender.

“It’s no use!” I shouted at Ace as she tried to gain some altitude and suppress the RPR coming out of the stairwell. “We can’t win this!”

“We ain’t gonna have to!” Ace screamed back. “The bridge! Get everypony on the bridge!”

I had no idea what her plan was, but I didn’t like it; the bridge had even less cover than the sides of the ring, and ponies below us could just shoot through the floorboards and kill us. At least we had the stone floor protecting us on the fifth ring. But if we stayed here, there wasn’t any winning. Might as well gamble on some crazy plan.

“The bridge!” I screamed at the slaves, trying to relay Ace’s plan. “Get on the fucking bridge!” I limped toward the bridge, moving as fast as I could despite my sling, trying to spur them to action. When I looked over my corner, I had a few of the slaves plus Nova and Gauge following me. The rest were too confused or panicky to realize what was happening, and I watched them fall one after another to the onslaught.

Ace landed next to me and my friends. “You!” she shouted, grabbing Nova by the shoulders and dragging her closer. She pressed a knife against Nova’s chest and pointed to the ropes holding the bridge to the top of the mountain. “Cut the middle ropes! All of them!”

“What the fuck are you doing?!” I shouted at Ace. “We’re all gonna fall!”

“That’s the fucking plan!” Ace shouted. “Hold onto the planks! Hang on for your life!” Then she flew off and began slicing through ropes with a knife of her own. Nova swallowed hard, opened her mouth to say something, but instead frantically flapped her wings and took off after Ace.

I looked at Gauge, and I could see the mixture of fear and confusion in his eyes that had to be reflected in my own. “Fuck it, if we’re gonna die, at least it won’t be boring!”

Then I hit the deck, wrapped my good hoof around a plank in front of me, and prayed.

Every rope that Nova and Ace cut made the bridge sag a little more. I started feeling like I was leaning forward, and when I opened my eyes, I caught a glimpse of the ground below through two planks. But at least the RPR had stopped shooting at those of us lying down on the bridge; I think they thought we were surrendering, so their attention was entirely focused on Ace and Nova. I could hear some of them stepping onto the bridge behind us, shouting orders, trying to get us to move.

Then I heard Ace scream “Hang on!” and I suddenly felt weightless.

It was a good thing I was holding onto the bridge with all my might; she’d cut all of the ropes except for the two holding the bridge to the far end of the ring, so it began to fall and pivot, slowly at first, but picking up speed. The ponies who’d stepped onto the bridge after us screamed as they plummeted and the bridge fell away from them, leaving them with nothing to hang onto. I’m pretty sure I was screaming, and one of the surviving slaves in front of me lost his grip and went flying, nearly knocking me off of the bridge as he flailed. But then the bridge hit its low point, and it began to swing upwards again.

I was pretty surprised when I felt a gentle breeze and saw moonlight on my coat during the upswing.

Suddenly, the whole bridge went slack, and I heard the ropes tearing and planks breaking apart. I flew off of the bridge, screaming, before hitting the ground and tumbling across the dirt and stone. I must’ve only fallen like fifteen or twenty feet, because I was able to stand and move my limbs again after a few seconds to recover. My everything hurt like all fuck, but I could move, and I could fight. And somehow, we were outside of Hole.

I spotted Gauge lying and groaning just a little bit away, so I hobbled over to him and helped him stand. “Come on, Gauge, you’re alright, right?” I asked him. I could taste blood pouring into my mouth, and the left side of my face really hurt. I felt around with my tongue and realized I was missing a tooth; who knew where that went, but that wasn’t all that important right now. With a little bit of effort, I finally got Gauge to his hooves, and we began to hobble away.

Nova and Ace fluttered down next to us, and Ace quickly gunned down a lone RPR pony running toward us from the checkpoint between Hole and the slums. “Fuck, that worked. I didn’t think it would actually work.”

I blinked in astonishment. “So why the fuck did you try it?!”

“Quit your bitching! You’re fine now, ain’t ya?” she snapped back. Around us, the few slaves who survived the escape took off through the checkpoint, quickly dispersing through the town. I didn’t see any more RPR; they must’ve all been back in Hole, and it’d take them a little while to catch up if they were on the rings. Still, we had to watch out for pegasi following us, so we didn’t waste any more time talking as we hurried away from Hole.

When we were on the outskirts of the city, we finally stopped to catch our breath and assess our wounds. Nova immediately flew over to Gauge, and the two of them hugged and kissed while I just took out a wad of gauze from my saddlebags and stuffed it into my mouth. Ace sat down near a boulder and wiped her brow; I could see all the sweat on her body glistening in the moonlight, along with the blood still running down her forelegs. I tossed her the roll of gauze, and she nodded to me before tearing a strip off and bandaging the bullet wound on her shoulder.

“We need to keep moving,” I said, speaking a little funny because of the gauze in my mouth. “It’s only a matter of time before the RPR starts doing what they do best. And I’ll fucking kill myself if Hunter finds us again rather than let that bitch take me back to Hole.” Sighing, I turned to Ace. “Got any tips?”

But Ace wasn’t paying attention to me. Instead she had her eyes on SCaR, a thoughtful look on her face. I sighed and flicked a pebble at her, which got her attention. Clearing her throat, she nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got something.” Standing up, she checked her pistols and expanded her rifle, holding it in her hooves while she fluttered up a foot or two. “I’m gonna try to harass any hunting parties they send out after you. Go due south for two days. There’s an old steel foundry that ain’t too far from Hole that we’ll meet up at. It’s a big complex that’s seen better days; you can’t possibly miss it.”

“And from there?” I prompted her.

She just shrugged. “We’ll figure it out then. Though if my hunch is right, I think I know a way you lot can pay me back.” She fiddled with her rifle a little bit more and looked right at me. “The foundry in two days. If you ain’t there I can’t promise I’ll stick around. Got it?”

I nodded. “Got it.”

“Good. Best of luck to you.”

“And good hunting to you,” I said. She smirked at me, winked once, and flew back off in the direction of Hole.

Grunting, I stood up and turned to my friends. “Well, we got this far. Let’s not waste any more time. Let’s put some distance between us and this hellhole and never think about this ever again.”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Gauge said. Nova just trotted up to me, nuzzled my cheek, and wrapped me in a big, feathery wing hug for a few seconds. Smiling, I nuzzled her back, and then the three of us set off at a hobbling pace toward the south.

We had survived Hole, and that was a hell of a lot more than I’d thought we’d be able to say when all was said and through.

Chapter 8: The Hole Matter

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Chapter 8: The Hole Matter

We didn’t get any sleep that night; we were too concerned with just moving and trying to get as far away from Hole as we could while it was still dark out. Come morning, we knew that any pegasi in the skies would be able to see us once they had the sun at their backs. We planned on resting and hiding during the daylight hours, then moving again when it got closer to dusk.

The grassy plains outside of Hole were great for keeping us hidden from the sky, so what little light the moons cast on the ground didn’t give us away in the immediate aftermath of the jailbreak. But the further from the mountain we got, the more the grass thinned out. By the time we crossed a stream, the grasses were only shoulder height. But we were getting closer to the mountains on our eastern flank, and the rough terrain was filled with little caves and hidey-holes to bunker down in. We decided that one of those would be a good place to rest, and we soon found one big enough for the three of us. Once I’d dragged a bush over it, it was almost impossible to see, even up close.

But it was still a little cramped, and the three of us (plus SCaR) were almost wedged in together. If I laid on my back, I had a little bit of room between the rocks on my left and Nova on my right, but I couldn’t sit up all the way or I’d smack my head on the ceiling. Although I grumbled about it once or twice, we weren’t really in a position to complain; running for your life doesn’t leave you a lot of freedom to be picky.

I was just happy to lie down, and I took the time to massage my shoulder a bit. It felt like it was made of rock, and moving it was painful. I’d powered through the last few miles on willpower alone before we found this hollow. I was afraid it was just going to be worse when I woke up.

While Gauge worked on getting SCaR set into sentry configuration so it could warn us if anypony was approaching, Nova saw me massaging my shoulder. Tutting like a worried mother hen, she brushed my hoof aside to get a look at the wound. “What happened?” she asked, worry in her voice. “Are you alright? Was that cleaned properly?”

“I certainly hope so,” I said, shrugging my good shoulder. “That outlaw I was with, Ace, she patched me up. Hunter—head RPR bitch with the aviators—stabbed me in a fight down in the Pit. Ace said the knife was poisoned and she gave me an antidote, so since I’m here, she must have done a decent job treating it.” Grunting, I poked at the rock-hard muscle and winced. “I can hardly move it, though, and that’s not the sling’s fault. Feels like my shoulder’s a solid steel ingot.”

Nova rolled onto her side and began massaging my shoulder with both of her hooves. I flinched whenever she pressed hard, trying to soften my muscles any way possible. It hurt, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t deal with. I just hoped that it’d help in the morning.

“What about your mouth?” Nova asked, and I instinctively rubbed at the side of my jaw. “You were spitting out a lot of blood for a while, there.”

“Lost a tooth in the fall from the bridge,” I said. “Don’t know what happened to it. I might have swallowed it for all I know. But it’s gone and now my mouth hurts like shit.” Sighing, I closed my eyes and shifted my bags to make a makeshift pillow. “Just for once, I’d like to go somewhere new and not get fucking beat up. First the fort, then Sig’s quarry, the dam, now Hole… I’m starting to feel like Auris doesn’t love me anymore.”

Gauge snickered on the other side of Nova. “What, you think she ever loved any of us to begin with?”

“Are you telling me our relationship isn’t real?” I grinned a bit. “Well fuck. What am I supposed to do now?”

My answer came in a big yawn, and I shook my head to try to shake it off. Gauge chuckled, and I could hear him shifting around while Nova worked on my shoulder. “Get some rest. SCaR’s set to wake me if a pony comes within a mile of us. We’ll need to be well-rested and ready for more walking tonight. We have a lot of ground to cover before we make it to this foundry place your outlaw friend mentioned.”

“Yeah, that’s for damn sure.” I tried to find a comfortable position but gave up after a minute. At least I was used to sleeping on rocks, though I really wish we could’ve used those beds in Hole a little while longer. They were so much nicer than a literal hole in the ground. “Goodnight… morning… whatever. Fuck the sun.”

And with those moving words, I quickly fell asleep, Nova’s massage pushing me into blissful unconsciousness.

-----

I must’ve slept like I was dead, because it was so much brighter outside when I woke up. I figured that I had to have been asleep for eight or nine hours. But when the days on Auris are as long as they are, it was only an hour or two past noon when I finally woke up.

Gauge and Nova were already awake; I could hear them talking quietly to each other, trying to let me rest. I was about to sit up, but the moment I heard them whisper my name, I decided to pretend I was still sleeping a bit longer. I carefully pointed one ear at them and listened.

“But I told her, ‘Ember, just say something, okay? We’ll always be willing to listen.’” It was Nova, and she sounded kind of sad. “But I just… what do we do? I’m worried for her, Gauge. I’m afraid she’s going to hurt herself, accidentally or otherwise.”

“She’ll be fine, Nov,” Gauge said. “She just… needs time to grieve.”

“But she’s not grieving!” Nova hissed back. “She’s bottling it up and won’t talk to anypony about it! I know that mare meant a lot to her, but she’s gotta talk to us, not just pretend like it isn’t bothering her!” A sigh. “Do you know that she cries in her sleep?”

“Yes, yes I do.”

“And I feel so bad for her! Like, I want to wake her up and just hold her, but she doesn’t get much sleep as it is, and… and I don’t know, Gauge. I don’t know what I should do. I want to help her, but she doesn’t want to let us. And if she keeps all that misery bottled up, she’s gonna get herself hurt.”

“Listen…” There was a moment of silence, and then Gauge’s already quiet voice became almost impossible to hear. “We can’t force her to talk to us. She has to decide to do that on her own. And I’m worried for her too, yeah, but I know that she won’t hurt herself. I’m not worried about that. She has us to look after, and I know that she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to us or herself. She can’t keep us safe if she gets herself killed; hopefully she’ll realize someday soon that she doesn’t have to stay alive just for us.”

I was almost certain that last bit was directed at me, but I didn’t move. Even if he suspected I was awake, I wasn’t going to let them know for sure. After a few seconds, Nova sighed, and I heard her feathers ruffle. “I suppose you’re right. I just… just wish there was something we can do.”

“We’re doing everything we can just by being with her. Right now, that’s all that should matter—to us, and to her.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right…” Her wing brushed my side as she groaned and stretched. “It’s getting into the afternoon, right? Should I wake her up? When should we get moving?”

“It’s been eight hours at least. Go ahead and wake her. We’ll plan things out from there.”

A second later, Nova nudged my side and gently shook me. I had to pretend that I was just waking up, so instead of groggily rolling over, I flinched and bolted upright. I immediately slammed my horn into the rocks above me, and that was pretty painful, but I’d completely forgotten about them, so at least it looked authentic. Groaning and hissing, I eventually sat as upright as I could. “What is it?” I asked them, forcing some concern into my voice. “Did SCaR see anything?”

Nova placed her hoof on my shoulders to try and calm me down. “No, no, Ember, it’s alright. You’ve been asleep for about eight hours now. We figured that we should get you up.” She smiled at me and nosed the sling. “Feeling any better?”

Grimacing, I tried to move my foreleg. It actually moved a bit more than it was before I fell asleep. “It feels a bit better,” I said. “Still really stiff, but I can move it a bit. I guess that massage helped.”

Nova laughed and shook her head. “It’s probably all that stuff that that bandit put in there, honestly. I’m not a very good masseuse.”

I blinked. “What?”

Nova chuckled and shook her head. “Massager.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say that?”

“Because Nova likes to use the Equiish language like a scalpel, not a club,” Gauge teased me.

“Yeah, why don’t you go fuck yourself, how about that?” I smirked back.

Nova shook her head and rubbed her crests against her temples. “You two, I swear on the stars…”

“Yeah, yeah, we love you too, Nov.” I patted her on the back (which required me to twist my body to get my good hoof over to her) and tried to peer through the brambles I’d dragged in front of our cave. “Fuck, there’s still a lot of light outside.”

“The sun won’t go down for at least another six hours. If we move now, any pegasus in the air might see us.”

Groaning, I put my forehead in my hoof. “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of. And we don’t know how far this foundry is.”

“It can’t be too far, otherwise she would’ve given us better directions. Besides,” Nova said, “I don’t think she’s gonna just leave us there. Did you see how she was looking at SCaR?”

The zebra nodded. “Yeah. We’ve got something she wants. Not sure why or what for, but a pony like her will stick around for something she thinks is worth her time.”

“And that’s why I can’t bring myself to trust her,” I said. “For starters, she nearly killed me, so that’s a shitty first impression. But she’s also a bandit—oh, sorry, ‘outlaw’—and I doubt that everypony she’s shot at or stolen from really deserved it. What’s to stop her from just killing us and taking SCaR if we won’t give her what she wants?”

“You, I would hope,” Gauge said, a coy smile pulling at his lips.

I shook my head. “You haven’t seen that mare fight. She’s better than I am. Really fucking fast, too. If she decided she wanted me dead, I wouldn’t be able to react before she cut me down.”

“Sounds like a lovely mare.”

“Psh. You’re telling me.”

“She seemed like a decent mare,” Nova said, surprising me. “I mean, she helped us escape, right? And as far as I know, you didn’t pay her. Did you tell her about SCaR beforehand?”

“No,” I said. “Doesn’t mean she’s not gonna shoot us in the back for him later, though.”

“In that case, we might just be better off ignoring the foundry altogether,” Gauge said. “Did you hear anything about where Yeoman might be looking?”

I shrugged. “A little bit. They’re flying off to the south and searching around some waterfalls there. They think that there’s an installation hidden under one, but there’s apparently like a fucking million waterfalls to look under. It’ll take us forever to find it, supposing that they’re even right in the first place.”

Gauge nodded. “I suppose you’re right. If only that signal could’ve been a little more clear about where these places were.”

“That’s the whole point, though,” Nova said. “Whatever the signal was, it was supposed to be received and authorized by the seven different installations at the same time. It’s like a failsafe to make sure that it doesn’t fall into the wrong hooves. To actually know what it says, you have to put the message together from all seven installations, otherwise it’s useless.”

“Well that’s great and all, but it doesn’t really work if there’s nopony around to actually read the message, right?” I shook my head. “And it doesn’t help us, either. Now we have to find where these places are before we can even put the pieces together.”

Nova pursed her lips in thought and Gauge just bowed his head once and went back to staring through the brush. In the lack of conversation that followed, I rolled over so I could dig some rations out of my bags and quickly stuffed my face. With all that’d happened last night, and then with how long I slept, I was absolutely starving. I hadn’t eaten anything decent for almost a day.

As we sat there in silence, I could feel the conversation I’d overheard eating at me. I felt sick and betrayed, and I did my best not to show it. They were worrying about me like I was about to hang myself, and after having nearly been hanged and tasting that fear and desperation to cling onto life, that was the last place I wanted to go back to. I wanted to live, but it wasn’t easy. Besides, I had too many things on my shoulders, too many people relying on me, to fall now. I couldn’t let myself be weak, but I could feel the tears on my muzzle when I woke up, just as I’m sure Nova and Gauge could see them. The little corner of Tartarus where my nightmares took place was the only place I could afford to be weak.

And how dare they talk about Zip that way? They weren’t feeling what I was feeling. I watched her die in front of me in terrible agony. In my dreams, I could still feel her blood on my coat. The happy nights we’d had together were all tarnished by her death. I couldn’t think about one without thinking about the other. I couldn’t make that misery just go away. It took everything I had just to keep my head above the water, so to speak.

White hooves nudged my shoulder. “Ember? What’s wrong?” Nova asked. “Something on your mind?”

“Thinking,” was all I said. I didn’t even look at her; I just wanted to be left alone, and I was feeling pretty vile. I didn’t want to explode on them like I did back at the dam after Zip died. I still regretted everything I said to them; I’d probably regret it for the rest of my life. That they’d forgiven me didn’t make it any better. In fact, I’m pretty sure that made it worse. I didn’t deserve to have them as my friends. They didn’t deserve all the suffering I’d put them through.

Sometimes I wished that they’d just stayed behind at the dam. It felt like the road ahead would’ve been so much easier by myself.

But they were here now, and the only thing I could do was keep them safe. I’d almost failed at that in Hole, but thanks to Ace, I’d gotten them out. I rolled onto my back and started picking out the different splotches of color in the rocks with my eyes. “How’d they find you two?” I asked them. “What happened while I was gone?”

“We waited for you at dinner like we planned on,” Gauge said, “but when you didn’t show up, we knew something had to have gone wrong.”

“I wanted to find you,” Nova said. “If you were in danger, I thought you’d need our help.”

“But we didn’t,” Gauge said, and Nova frowned. “I convinced Nova that you could handle yourself and it wouldn’t do you any favors to just end up getting captured or killed looking for you. I figured you’d stop by the inn looking for us if you were okay, so we went back there and just tried to wait it out. But the innkeep sold us out; she gave the RPR ponies a key, because the next thing we knew, they unlocked the door and stormed in. I tried to hold them off so Nova could run…”

“But they dragged me back from the window before I could jump out of it,” Nova said. She held up her left wing and pouted at a gap in her feathers. “They slammed the window shut on my feathers and I lost a few when they dragged me away.”

“It’s a good thing they did, I guess,” I said. “Ace and I flew up to the window to go looking for you once I was awake again, and I saw some of your feathers in the window. That’s how I knew the RPR had you. Otherwise…” I shrugged. “I might have spent a lot longer looking around Hole to see if you two were hiding somewhere before trying my luck with the RPR headquarters. Who knows what would’ve happened then?”

“Let’s not think about that,” Gauge said. “We’re here, we’re together, and that’s all that matters.”

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“You got it!” Nova exclaimed. Her forelegs wrapped around mine and Gauge’s shoulders and she brought us all in for a group hug. “So long as we stick together, we’ll be fine! There’s nothing we can’t do!”

Gauge chuckled. “Auris better watch out.”

“We’ll have that code put together in no time at all!”

As I sat there nuzzling her side, I realized that maybe she was right. Where the fuck would I be without these two? I’d probably be dead several times over. And even if we didn’t always see eye to eye, at least we’d always be there for each other.

That mattered more than all the bullets on this shitty planet.

Chapter 9: The King of the Hills

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Chapter 9: The King of the Hills

Nopony found us, so either our hiding spot was pretty good, or nopony was looking in this direction. SCaR beeped once, and after I spent a good fifteen minutes keeping my rifle trained on the entrance to our hole in the ground, I finally poked my head out of the shrubbery and saw a bunch of rock runners grazing on the grasses nearby. I considered shooting one for its meat to supplement our rations, but decided against it. In addition to the noise that a gunshot would make on a quiet and calm day like this, we didn’t really have the space to clean the kill, and hauling the carcass around would just slow us down. I did glare at one that was thinking about eating some of the leaves off of our camouflage, though.

Once the sun finally started setting, I gathered up my shit and burst out of the undergrowth. I couldn’t stand waiting in that cramped little hole any longer. If I did, I was afraid I was going to explode. So as soon as I could stand up straight again, I galloped (or hobbled, really) in frantic circles around the entrance on three hooves, just burning off all the excess energy I’d accumulated from spending so long lying down.

I made like five or six laps before finally slowing down. My heart thumped in my chest, healthy and strong. It felt good to feel it beating and not have that sensation tied to fear for once. It felt like I spent too much time running for my life and not enough time running just because I could. The pure joy I felt, even on three legs, was something I hadn’t felt in ages.

When Nova and Gauge finally came out, I was smiling and rolling in the grasses. The two of them just looked at each other and burst out laughing. Finally, it was Nova who, wiping a tear from her eye, came trotting over to me. “Ember, what are you doing?”

I came to a stop with my mane spread out in the grasses, little seed pods stuck in my hair, and just smiled up at her. “I’m fucking living, Nov! We’re out of that fucking shithole, we’re alright, and nopony’s trying to kill us! It feels like it’s been years since we’ve been this free!”

I could tell by the look on Gauge’s face that he was thinking about reminding me that we weren’t home free yet, but at least he decided to keep those thoughts to himself.

Grunting, I rolled back onto my hooves and tried to shake all the seed pods and grass blades out of my mane and coat. I cracked my neck a few times and sighed, smiling at my friends. The setting sun casted its strange display of yellows and blues on the western horizon, and our shadows shot away from us across the pink grass, shining faintly in the dying moments of the day. If I could’ve captured Gauge’s smirk and Nova sitting on her hindquarters, preening her right wing, and just held onto this moment forever, I would have.

But slowly, the giddiness of just being out of the cave and running around in circles began to wear off, and pretty soon, the reality of our situation once more settled itself across my shoulders. We still had a long ways to go to get to the foundry, and we were still (most likely) being hunted by the RPR. If we didn’t get moving soon, we’d either miss Ace entirely, or the RPR would catch up to us again. And I don’t think I need to say just how bad either of those outcomes would be.

So, after one last look at my friends, we shouldered our loads and continued to the south.

-----

The sun had long since fallen, and now all we had for company were the two moons overhead. They provided enough light to see by, which was nice, but they also provided enough light for us to be seen. I kept an eye trained for any pegasi, and Nova flew up a few thousand feet to scout every once in awhile, but we never saw anypony. It didn’t mean I felt any better, though.

But at least that paranoia was good for something, though. Gauge and I kept up a good pace while Nova watched us from the sky. I knew that every mile we put between us and Hole was another mile that the RPR would have to search if they wanted to find us. And even though I was hampered by my leg, I’d figured out a good way to walk so that I didn’t have to lean on Gauge’s shoulder just to move quickly. It wasn’t exactly the most comfortable thing in the world, but comfort was a luxury I couldn’t afford to let myself have at the moment.

And then we crested a hill and I actually jumped and shrieked a little at what was on the other side.

Nova must’ve heard my scream, because she came flying down in a second. “What is it?” she asked, eyes whipping back and forth. “What did you—oh my stars!”

Gauge grimaced and stared at the mess the two of us were looking at. “Shit…”

That ‘mess’ may have once been a pony. I think. Maybe several, though it was hard to tell them apart with all the blood and only moonlight to see by. Sitting on top of the hill was a mess of broken and crushed limbs and other pony bits, and everything was covered in blood. The whole thing reeked of death, and the only reason we hadn’t smelled it earlier was because we were upwind. The grass was also dotted with spent shell casings, though I couldn’t smell the gunpowder in the air or on the grass. As far as I could tell, whatever had happened here happened a few days ago.

Nova spun around and covered her face with her wings. “I think I’m gonna be sick…”

I swallowed my own nausea and moved a little bit closer. The blood was dry, and the flies and prickwings were feasting on the rot. It looked like these ponies had been ripped into pieces and then crushed beneath something large. Just what had happened here?

“Was it RPR? Bandits?” Gauge asked, looking like he was trying very hard to keep his dinner down.

“There’s no way it was ponies who did this,” I said, shuffling the remains a little bit with my telekinesis. “I mean, first off, I wouldn’t even know why, and second, these ponies got ripped and torn apart. Bandits don’t do that, and the RPR would’ve just taken them back home to be sold later.”

“Maybe it’s to make an example?” Nova asked, though she had her back turned on the mess and was just sitting down with a hoof over her lips.

I frowned at that. “No, it can’t be that. This is the middle of nowhere, and there’s nothing to tell that ponies even did do this. It’d be a bad way to try and make an example.”

“How about those wolf things? Wargs?” Gauge gave the remains a sideways glance. “They’re almost as big as us, and I’m sure that they’d love to rip ponies apart.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I just hope it’s something like that and not something worse. At least I can shoot a warg...” I turned back to Nova and trotted up to her side; she was still facing away from the mess a few paces away. “Hey, you alright, Nov?”

She squeezed her eyes shut and took a deep breath. “Yeah. Fine. I’ll… I’ll live, at least.”

I nuzzled her cheek and patted her shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s nasty, I know.” My eyes drifted to the sky, and I nudged her wing. “Think you can be our eye in the sky for us? There’s a lot of hills and trees here, and we don’t want to run into whatever did this. I figure you’ll be able to see it before we do so we can steer clear of it.”

Nova nodded and spread her wings a little. “Yeah, I can do that. I’ll keep my eyes open.” She flapped her wings a bit and hovered a few inches off of the ground before putting an uneasy smirk on her muzzle. “It shouldn’t be too hard to see anything on a clear night like this.”

I gave her an encouraging smile. “That’s the hope.”

She dipped her head once and then flew over to Gauge, and the two of them kissed briefly before Nova shot up into the night sky. Pretty soon I saw her level out and begin to make broad circles above us. I immediately felt a lot safer knowing that she was up there, the moonlight reflecting off of her white coat like a mirror.

Gauge looked at me, and I looked at him. Shrugging, I just continued to the south, giving the pile of pony remains a wide berth. I didn’t hold my rifle per se, because the orange glow of my magic would’ve been a beacon to anypony (or anything) within miles, but I did have the safety off and kept it slung loosely on my back just in case I needed it.

I really hoped I wouldn’t need it.

-----

We stopped after like three or four hours to eat something before continuing onwards. I don’t know how many miles we covered, but it was enough; when Nova flew down to meet us, she said that the foundry was actually within sight. It’d be another hour on hoof, and I would’ve insisted on pushing on if my shoulder wasn’t super stiff again. I had to stop and nurse it for a bit, and I was at least thankful for the rest. Besides, I didn’t know what we’d find at the foundry, and if it was bad news, then I wanted to be at my sharpest. I couldn’t keep Gauge and Nova safe if I could hardly move or focus.

I’d decided to forgo a fire; the night was already warm enough, and the light and smoke were too risky in case somepony was tracking us. Still, I eyed the shadows around us constantly, imagining that at any second Hunter or a warg was going to burst forth and kill us all. Between the two, I honestly didn’t know which was worse. I mean, what would you pick: being sold into slavery for the rest of your life, or being ripped limb from limb by a bunch of big wolf things and eaten alive? They’re both fucking shitty ways to go. One’s just a lot more protracted than the other.

Once we had something to eat and drink, we packed up our things and continued along to the foundry. Nova flew up to keep her watch, and the closer we got to our destination, the more relaxed Gauge and I got. After such a harrowing few days, our nightmare was basically over.

Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.

As Gauge and I walked past some trees and boulders, the smokestacks of the decaying foundry in sight, I heard this weird clicking noise. I can’t really describe it more than that. It was… I don’t know. But it sounded like it was coming from something big. And something close.

Gauge heard it too, because he stopped and began swiveling his ears, trying to locate the source of the noise. After a second, he looked at me, and I could see his concern. “Did you hear that?” he whispered.

I silently nodded and drew my rifle. I looked ahead at the foundry, trying to imagine just how far it was from here to there. It wasn’t more than a quarter mile away. So close to safety. Swallowing hard, I gestured with my head and began to creep up the hill.

That’s when the side of the hill opened its eyes and began to stand up.

I was too shocked and terrified to scream. Instead, I could only watch as this thing stood up taller, taller, taller. Scales faintly tinted pink and brown flexed over muscles bigger than my body as the monstrosity rose onto three pairs of legs. Claws two feet long glistened off of shorter arms it held crossed against its chest. An arsenal of razor sharp spines popped erect on its back, and a head bigger than two or three of me turned in our direction. In it, four eyes glinted in the light of the moon, and scaly lips pulled back to reveal jaws set with dozens of teeth, each one nearly a foot long. A long, bony tail swayed behind it, almost like a counterweight to support its massive head and neck. That tail could probably break trees in one swing.

Gauge and I stood dead still, like we were statues, as it stared down at us. I could see the hunger in its eyes, so primal yet so clear. And the terror that gripped me held me like a vice. I couldn’t make myself move at all. I could only stare at it in horror, my brain completely refusing to work.

Then it started clicking at us, and the claws on its feet gouged the earth as its weight shifted. Its short, clawed arms unfolded from its chest, twitching like coiled serpents ready to strike at a moment’s notice.

We were standing face to face with a tolan. I hope you never have to see one up close. I still have fucking nightmares about it to this day.

The thunderous roar it made as it lunged for us broke me out of whatever stupor I was in. Shrieking and screaming I immediately bolted to my right, while Gauge galloped in the opposite direction. Claws flew through the air and tore the ground where I’d been standing into ribbons, throwing huge clumps of dirt and grass into the air. For a moment I forgot I only had three legs to walk on, and when I tried to put weight on my front right leg I ate dirt instead. I hurriedly scrambled to my hooves, afraid the tolan’s maw of infinite pointy pain and death was about to scoop me up, but I felt the ground shake less as it charged in the opposite direction. Looking over my shoulder, I saw it lumbering after Gauge, who was simply high tailing it in the opposite direction as fast as he could. I don’t know why it went after Gauge instead of me when I was obviously weaker; maybe it saw Gauge was bigger, and therefore better to eat. But whatever the explanation, that’s the only reason why I didn’t fucking die immediately.

The gears in my mind whirred extremely fast. We had to get someplace where the tolan couldn’t get to us. Out here in the open, it’d run us down or tire us out, and it’d be over. For the moment, Gauge was fast enough to outrun it, using the trees to his advantage, but that wasn’t going to last forever. He was galloping as fast as he could, and the tolan didn’t look like it was at top speed. It was spending too much time navigating the woods (and knocking over a few trees in the process) to pick up much speed. And I remembered Zip saying that these things can easily outrun a pony on open ground.

I saw the smokestacks of the foundry further up the hill, and I knew that was our only chance. Stumbling and tripping my way up, I tried to get as much distance as I could while Gauge led it on a chase through the woods. After I picked up maybe thirty or forty yards, I turned around and fired several bursts from my rifle at the tolan’s rear. I actually saw the bullets spark off of its armor like tiny fireworks in the night—what the fuck was it with Auris and all its wildlife using iron in their bodies?!

But at the very least I achieved my intended effect; it stopped chasing Gauge and turned toward me. Even though I hadn’t hurt the damn thing, I could tell I’d pissed it off, and the only warning I had was a violent shriek that rattled the teeth in my jaw before the tolan kicked up plumes of dirt and grass and began barreling towards me. There weren’t many trees between it and me—it’d been waiting at the edge of the woods when we stumbled across it, and I’d run the complete opposite way—and it began to pick up speed frighteningly fast. Suddenly those extra thirty yards I’d picked up didn’t seem like all that much.

I backpedaled as fast as I could (which wasn’t fast at all) and tried to shoot at its eyes. They were probably the only unarmored part of its body apart from its mouth, and I really didn’t want to be given the opportunity to shoot into there. But the thing lumbered and swayed so violently with its strange six-legged gait that I couldn’t put the bullets where I wanted. I saw a few spark off of its nose and brow, but none hit its eyes. Behind it, at least, I could see Gauge galloping for his life toward the foundry, so I wasn’t going to become tolan food for nothing.

Once more it lunged at me, but before it did, I summoned a fireball to my horn and launched it at the monster’s face. I don’t think I hurt it at all, because it didn’t stop its charge or anything, but I momentarily blinded it. Once more I threw myself as far to the side as I could as it blindly lunged for me, claws swinging through the air. I wasn’t fast enough, because one of its claws ripped through my saddlebags and got stuck in it. Next thing I knew, I was violently thrown through the air as it roared and thrashed, and when I finally stopped spinning, I was at least a good fifty feet off the ground, probably more. And I’d lost my fucking gun, though I wasn’t exactly too concerned about that at the moment.

Right at the top of my arc, I heard Nova shout “Ember!” and the next thing I knew, she’d barreled right into my side. It knocked the breath from my lungs and painfully reminded me about my injured foreleg, but Nova was able to carry me back down to the ground instead of letting gravity do it for me. She angled for the foundry and set me down against a wall, then turned back to the roaring tolan down the hill. “Oh no! Gauge! It’s gonna eat him!”

“I lost my gun!” I wheezed, still recovering from being tossed into the air like a fucking ragdoll. “I can’t distract it from here, and I can’t see it to throw fireballs at it!”

“What do we do?!” Nova wailed. I could see her hyperventilating and her shoulders shaking; this was by far the worst shit we’d ever been in. Even I couldn’t help them, and they were so reliant on me to keep them safe. I felt fucking awful about it.

I tried to haul myself back to my hooves, but in the time it took to do that, Nova already snapped open her wings and streaked back towards Gauge and the tolan. I tried to gallop after her, and got to the edge of the compound just in time to see Nova launch herself at the tolan’s face. Her hooves connected with its armored brow, though nowhere near hard enough to hurt it. But it noticed her, because it snarled and spun around, trying to snap her up in its jaws. Nova was too quick, though, and darted back into the sky and started flying circles above it, just out of its reach.

I saw Gauge momentarily hesitate as his marefriend started distracting the tolan. “Gauge! Come on!” I yelled, getting his attention. “This way, before you’re fucking lizard food!”

Thankfully, Gauge lowered his head and began galloping up the hill toward the foundry while the tolan was too distracted to notice. In a few seconds he was at my side, covered in sweat and panting really hard. I gave him a quick slap on the shoulder and pointed to the foundry. “Find a way in! Quickly!”

“But Nova—!”

“Will be fine! Now go!” I gave him a little shove with my telekinesis, and I went down the hill a little bit to get a better line of sight with the tolan. Then, letting mana build up on my horn, I lowered myself into casting stance. “Nova! Fly!” I shouted, right as I loosed a massive fireball at the tolan.

Nova quickly twisted and spun in the air to reorient herself with the foundry and swooped over the tolan’s back right as my fireball hit the ground, throwing up a ton of smoke and ash. I heard the tolan roar in frustration and felt the thundering of its feet as it began to charge out of the fire, searching for Nova. Thankfully, my distraction bought her some breathing room, and she was able to streak back to me long before the tolan could get to her.

But it was still picking up speed; there wasn’t anything between it and the foundry to slow it down, and it could move deceptively fast. As soon as Nova got close to me, I turned around and did that hobbled-gallop thing back to the closest building, where Gauge was trying to force a huge warehouse door open. “Ember! Help!” he shouted, his hooves slipping on the ground as he tried to gain traction. Letting my horn flare up a bit, I wrapped it around the top corner of the door and began straining. The thing was locked from the inside, but if the hinges on the outside were horribly rusted, then the lock inside had to be as well. Even Nova flew up to the corner of the door I was pulling on and wedged her hoof in the gap I’d made to try and widen it some.

Then SCaR began blaring an alarm, and I looked over my shoulder to see the Tolan getting really fucking close. I puffed out my cheeks as I strained one last time, and then I heard the shrieking of metal and the lock shattered into tiny rusty bits. The door flew open and nearly hit Gauge in the face, and then the three of us darted inside and immediately grabbed the door to close it again. With my magic and both Nova and Gauge struggling to pull it closed, we managed to shut it right before the tolan reached us.

Then the doors almost flew off of their hinges when the tolan rammed its armored skull against them. “Hold the door!” I screamed, and we all threw our backs against the bulging doors to try and hold them shut. They were big doors and they weren’t meant to open inwards, so we had that going for us, but I didn’t know how long they’d hold. Instead, my mind started racing as I searched for anything to barricade the door with in the immediate vicinity. My eyes settled on a massive pile of billets sitting near some old machinery not too far from us, and I picked up a couple and floated them over to the door.

Then the tolan’s claws started ripping through the door, and Nova screamed in agony. My blood turned to ice, and I turned my head only to see the tolan’s claws wrapped tightly around one of her wings. “Nova!” I screamed, immediately dropping a bunch of billets on the floor and dashing to her side. Gauge almost shouldered me out of the way as he grabbed a piece of scrap metal lying around and began clubbing the tolan’s claws in desperation, screaming Nova’s name and trying to free his marefriend. But neither his makeshift weapon or Nova’s screeching and flailing made the tolan let go, and even my fire didn’t do anything. Fucking tolans and their armored everything!

The tolan began to pull back, taking Nova’s wing along with it through the deep gouge it carved out of the door. Nova cried out in pain again, tears streaming down her face as she fought and thrashed. Gauge continued to struggle and try to get it to let go, but I stopped as a cold horror settled deep in my gut. There was only one way this could possibly go.

I pulled a rag out of my sliced-up saddlebags and stuffed it in Nova’s mouth. She fought against me, confused and afraid, until I held her head between my hooves. “Nova, bite down, okay? It’s gonna be okay, Nov, I promise, you’ll be fine! You’ll be fine! We’re gonna get you out of here!” Then I turned to Gauge and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Gauge, we need to cut her loose!”

Gauge blinked and looked at me in disbelief. “But her wing—!”

The tolan clenched its claws and I heard bones snap like little splinters. Nova screamed again, muffled as she was with the rag in her mouth. The only reason the tolan hadn’t ripped her wing clean off yet was because of the heavy steel door its claws were wrapped around, but if it took that door off of its hinges, it’d take Nova with it. And I didn’t trust the door to hold much longer. “Gauge,” I said, pleading with him, “it’s her wing or her life.”

The poor zebra stared at me, completely torn on what I was asking him to do. I didn’t blame him; could I have brought myself to do the same had it been Zip stuck in a tolan’s claws instead? But the tolan tugged again at the door, and one of the bolts holding the hinge to the door came flying off. Cursing, he gently pushed me aside. “You cut.” I nodded and stepped aside, and he put his hooves on Nova’s cheeks. “Nova, look at me. Look at me. I love you. No matter what, I love you, okay?”

Nova’s teary and frightened eyes were locked with Gauge’s, and he nodded almost imperceptibly to me. Then, pulling out my hunting knife from my bags, I grimly wrapped my magic around Nova’s wing and began to cut. Nova started to scream and thrash some more, and Gauge wrapped his forelegs around her shoulders to calm her. Her screaming only got worse and worse as I sawed my way through her wing: skin, muscle, sinew, and finally the white shards of broken, hollow bones.

And then, with a sickening tearing noise and a river of blood, I chopped Nova’s wing from her shoulder.

She fell forward with one last muffled cry into Gauge’s embrace, and he carried her away from the door, leaving a trail of blood behind. “We need to get her someplace safe,” I said, glancing at the door and the gruesome sight of a white wing dripping blood onto the floor. “That tolan’s gonna get inside any fucking moment.”

I finally had a chance to look around the room we were in. There were a ton of billets lying around next to some pretty old machinery. I couldn’t make sense of what most of it was for, but I guess it had something to do with refining the steel billets into more useful forms. I will admit that I felt a touch of jealousy in my forgemare heart that there was all this good quality steel just lying in piles on Auris when I’d spent most of my life recycling shitty aluminum satellite dish panels.

In the back of the building, behind all the machinery, was a large foremare’s office that looked down on the production line. “Up there!” I said, pointing to the catwalk that led up to it. Gauge took his attention away from Nova just long enough to nod, and then he went back to kissing her cheek as he carried her on his back across the floor. I felt awful just looking at her, at how a wingtip nearly touched the ground on Gauge’s left and blood just poured down his right. I flung some more billets at the door and then used my telekinesis to put pressure on the wound and stop her from bleeding as badly until we got her someplace safe; there wasn’t even enough of a stump left on her shoulder to put a tourniquet around, so I’d have to stop her bleeding in a much more unpleasant way. I felt worse than the fucking tolan outside for having to do all this to her.

We hurriedly made our way across the building and up the catwalk to the office before the tolan smashed its way through the door. I’d just managed to force the locked door open when the tolan finally broke through, clawing and ripping up the concrete floor as it tried to squeeze through the opening. The wall above it and around it started to cave, and I started to panic again. If this thing was this desperate to get its meal, then simply hiding in this building wasn’t going to be good enough, especially with the smell of Nova’s blood in the air. We had to find some way out of here.

Thankfully, there was another door in the back of the foremare’s office, and when I opened it, I saw it led to a walkway between this building and the adjacent one. “Come on!” I shouted to Gauge, dashing across the walkway and forcing the next door open. “It won’t find us in here!”

I stuck my head through the doorway to make sure that it was safe to enter. I saw a short hallway with a few rooms on either side; it looked like it was a bunch of administrator’s offices or something. At least this would be safe enough. I immediately went for the first door on the right and opened it to find a conference room inside with a big metal table in the middle. Using my magic to sweep away the dust and debris, I cleared a space and pointed to it when Gauge followed me inside. “Put her down there,” I said, “and hold her down.”

Gauge nodded to me, but he looked pretty frightened. Nova was drifting in and out of consciousness, but I knew that what I did next was going to snap her awake pretty fast. Once Gauge was in position and was murmuring things in Nova’s ear to calm her, I grabbed a piece of scrap metal that’d fallen from the ceiling and began to heat it until it was glowing.

“Get that rag in her mouth again,” I said to Gauge, and he carefully put it between Nova’s teeth. He watched me lower the piece of metal, obviously worried but at least knowing what I was about to do, and he went back to petting Nova’s mane. “Nova, bite down hard,” I said. “Please forgive me.”

Then I pressed the glowing piece of steel to the stump of her severed wing, and she immediately cried out and started thrashing again. But Gauge held her down, and I was able to take the metal off after a second or two and toss it away, leaving a charred, cauterized stump on Nova’s right shoulder. Then I pulled out my first aid kid and immediately bandaged it up, tucking lots of gauze and some Stabil-Ice against the wound to try and make it more comfortable for her. Or, as comfortable as having one of your limbs ripped off and burned could possibly be.

Nova passed out at some point during all that, but she wasn’t bleeding anymore, so I hoped that she’d be fine. Once I had everything taken care of, I finally snapped and started jumping around, cursing, and kicking shit everywhere. “Fuck!” I screamed in fury. “Stars-fucking-damn it! Fuck!” I wanted to rip that tolan to pieces, limb by limb. The pain and agony it dealt to Nova I’d deal back ten times over. But underneath all of that, I was afraid. Afraid of how Nova would react when she finally woke up and realized that she’d never fly again. I couldn’t possibly imagine life without my magic. I couldn’t possibly imagine what life without the sky would be like for a pegasus.

By Nova’s side, Gauge laid next to her, forelegs wrapped around her but careful not to touch the bandages. And unlike me, he simply cried in silent sorrow. He nuzzled her over and over again, as much for his own comfort as for hers. SCaR awkwardly hovered behind him, silently looking on apart from the noise of its thrusters.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I dug through my saddlebags, grabbed my box of cigarettes and stormed out of the room.

I only started to cry when I found a quiet corner to myself further down the hallway.

Chapter 10: The Things That Go Bump in the Night

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Chapter 10: The Things that Go Bump in the Night

I don’t know how long I sat in that office down the hall, sitting in the remains of an old and tattered chair. I do know that I was chain smoking like there was no tomorrow, and the moment I smoked a cigarette down to the butt, I tossed it aside and lit a new one. I’d gotten a whole ton of cigarettes while I was at Hole, and I already had a small pile of four sitting on the table next to me.

How had things gone so wrong? We were so close to the foundry, practically right on top of it, and then a tolan attacked us and Nova lost her wing. I still had some of her blood on my hooves, dried onto my coat. I’d left the bloody knife that I used to slice her wing off in the table, buried up to the hilt in the rotted wood. When I closed my eyes, I could see that awful, terrible mix of agony, fear, and betrayal in her eyes as I started cutting off a piece of her soul.

I dreaded having to face her when she woke up. I didn’t think I could look her in the eyes and tell her what I’d done.

Cigarette number five finally burnt out, and I tossed it onto the pile. I considered going for number six, but my throat was really fucking dry, and I’d left my canteen back in the room with Gauge and Nova. Plus, I had a little bit of a coughing fit, and when I finally finished with that, I wasn’t really in the mood for any more smokes. And my breath smelled really bad, bad enough that I noticed it. It was probably time to stop, even though one more hit of nicotine would be really great with how fucking stressed out I was.

But I put the box away, even though I wasn’t ready to go back to Gauge and Nova yet. I decided that maybe I could kill time and put off the inevitable by just exploring a bit. Maybe I’d find something useful in here, like another gun. There were a few small pistols in one of the bags that Gauge carried if need be, but I really wanted another rifle of some kind. If I happened to run into bandits with any kind of armor, I’d need something powerful enough to punch through it.

I really wish I had Sentinel armor right now. Those deflectors, laser blades, and six machine guns would be so fucking useful.

I pulled apart the desk in this little office, searching for anything of value. There were a lot of rotted papers and just general moldy trash, but I did find a sealed bottle of wildfire whiskey. I wasn’t interested in drinking any of that myself, but it’d probably be worth a lot of bullets to somepony, so I figured I’d hang onto it. Though I did have to imagine just how good whiskey that’s been aging for nearly two hundred winters would taste. It’s supposed to get better with age, right? Stars if I know, I hate alcohol.

I did find the remains of a manifest and a letter etched into some kind of flexible glass. I’d seen glass like that a few times before at the Bastion; usually important or sensitive messages were printed out onto it, and you could simply shatter the glass to destroy the message. I wondered why ponies didn’t just use paper though if any unicorn could burn it with a thought. I mean, Warped Glass had told me that almost all unicorns before the Silence knew how to make a basic flame, so wouldn’t that be more convenient?

But I wasn’t going to complain all that much, though. At least it meant that little slices of the past survived for me to read. Setting the manifest down and wiping some dust off of the glass, I started to read:

Mr. Billet,
I am writing to inform you that as per the orders of Her High Majesty Twilight Sparkle, your request for additional funding for the core mining of Mountain 831 has been approved. We will be moving fifty million bits into your company’s account for use on this project. In addition, Her High Majesty has insisted that you accept a further fifteen million bits to aid her generals in a matter of high importance to the Synarchy. You will be receiving a discreet shipment from the EOF Fluttershy in four days. We expect you to have a warehouse cleared for this shipment.
As a last reminder, the Synarchy is at war, and we need as much high quality steel as you can provide for us. The construction of warships is no small matter, and our navy is taxed enough as it is defending our country. Though your Auris foundry is small, it is incredibly important to us, as it is beyond the attacks and sabotages of the Enemy. As such, Her High Majesty has demanded that you increase the production of your foundry by 35% over the next month. The Fluttershy will be delivering griffons captured at the front to help boost production. As per standard protocol, they have already been declawed, blunted, and clipped, and should pose little threat in your foundry so long as a watchful eye is kept over them.
Remember, the Enemy is everywhere, and even though the location of Auris is a closely guarded state secret, there may be those who sympathize with the Enemy and may turn their treasonous thoughts into action. Ensure that all messages are approved by the appointed censor before they are cleared to leave the planet, and keep any news and discussion of the situation back on Equus only to your board. In fact, you and your company would be better off ignoring the situation entirely and focusing only on your duties.
We Survive Together,
Straight Margins
Secretary of Wartime Production

I put the glass down and frowned. It at least confirmed a few of my suspicions—Equestria was at war when the Silence happened, and they apparently had no qualms about using slave labor—but the rest was new to me. Auris’ location was a state secret? If nobody else knew that there was a colony on this planet and something bad happened to the Synarchy, it would at least explain in part why nopony (or nobody) had ever come and found us. And now I really wanted to know what that code had to say and why we were getting a probe now after so long. Maybe somepony was trying to find us again?

I pulled over the manifest and started to skim through it, though I doubted that I’d find any information about the special delivery the other letter mentioned. And I was right: the manifest was pretty boring stuff. Most of it had to deal with shipment numbers and how many thousands of tons of steel the foundry produced each day, week, month, and year. It looked like they were turning ore from Hole into steel as fast as they were mining it, and there was an obvious uptick in numbers between two months. I guess that was when they got their funding and griffon slaves to boost production numbers. I even did a little math and figured out that they’d increased their production by about forty percent, so they were pushing themselves even harder than what Equestria asked of them. I just wished that there was more to tell me about the situation back on Equus. Whatever was going on, Straight Margins made it sound like they were already straining their industry. Too bad that there weren’t any newspapers or anything here to read and get a glimpse into what life was like way back when.

And then I heard Nova wailing from the conference room. The cries of heart-rending sadness and despair made me slouch further into my chair. I really didn’t want to go over there… but she was my best friend. What kind of monster would I be if I wasn’t there for her? I’d be worse than the fucking tolan that did this to her in the first place.

I picked up my cigarette box and my knife and slowly hobbled back to the conference room. Nova’s anguished cries had stopped, but I could still hear her sobbing and sniffling. I lingered at the door for a few moments before I finally managed to muster up the courage to go inside.

She’d gotten off of the table and was instead curled up on the floor, her remaining wing wrapped tightly around her chest as she cried and rocked back and forth. Gauge was practically lying on her like a blanket, trying to hold his marefriend as close as he possibly could. There were even tears in his eyes, and he wiped them away a bit when he saw me enter. Nova didn’t react; she was too lost in her own little hell to notice me, at least at first.

I had no idea what to say. I didn’t even know what I could say. ‘Hey, I’m sorry I cut your wing off?’ I’m sure that would’ve gone over perfectly. Instead, I just walked to her side and sat down next to her, trying to nuzzle her and comfort her. But to my surprise, she flinched away from my touch, and she shot me this awful look of betrayal. “Why did you cut off my wing?!” she screamed at me, and I could feel the pain in every single one of her words. “How could you?! How could you?!”

I felt tears forming in my eyes. “Nova, I-I’m sorry, I’m so fucking sorry!” I pleaded. “But the tolan had your wing and if we didn’t do something fast it would’ve dragged you off with the door and it would’ve killed you and I didn’t have any other choice and I’m sorry!” I sniffled a bit and rubbed my hooves together, just completely unsure of what to do with them if Nova wouldn’t let me touch her. “I can’t imagine what it’s like but it was the only way to save your life.”

“Then you should have let me die!” she cried back. “Anything is better than being a one-winged freak! Anything!” She held the feathers of her wing up to her face and started rubbing them across her muzzle, I guess to try and comfort herself with the feeling. I saw the stump on her right shoulder twitch a bit beneath the bandaging and I immediately looked away in shame. “Why did you have to ruin my life?!”

I opened my mouth to reply, but I didn’t have any words. There simply wasn’t anything I could say to that. Thankfully, Gauge caught my eye, and he just slowly shook his head. I nodded in understanding. Maybe once Nova had some time to accept it, then I could properly forgive her for what I’d done.

But I didn’t keep thinking about that, though, because I heard something fall over outside, along with the staggering of hooves. Stepping away from Nova and Gauge, I stood up and slowly moved towards the door. “Who’s there?” I asked, carefully watching the doorway. “We’re armed, and I will shoot!” Even as I said it, I was rifling through Gauge’s bags for those spare pistols.

Then I heard some kind of hissing, choking noise, and the hoofsteps outside accelerated. In a split second, some… thing darted around the doorway. It looked like a pony, or at least enough that I’d probably mistake it for one at a distance. But it looked more like a corpse than anything. Its skin and coat had mostly fallen off, revealing rotting muscle that twitched and spasmed with each step. Its face was covered in this sort of crusty, puffy brown stuff, so much so that I couldn’t even see its eyes. A lot of teeth were missing from its bloody jaws, holding a tongue pockmarked with rot. And it let out some kind of wailing moan, like it was in agony as it lunged toward me.

I had no idea what the fuck this thing was apart from nauseatingly disturbing, but I wasn’t going to let it get close to me if I could help it. I hadn’t managed to dig out one of the pistols (where the fuck did Gauge keep these things?!) so I just grabbed both of his bags in my magic and swung them at the pony-thing’s head. I put as much force into the blow as I could muster, but I didn’t think I’d hit it that hard; a big chunk of its head came flying off, revealing bone and rotting meat on the pony’s cheek. But apart from throwing the thing off balance, I didn’t manage to hurt it, as best as I could tell. It only continued to wail, and then it threw itself at me.

It hit me in the chest, and we both fell over backwards onto the conference table. By now, Nova was screaming in fear and Gauge was standing up to come over and help me. Meanwhile, I just tried to keep the thing from biting me with its furiously snapping jaws. Sticky black drool dripped onto my chest from its lips, and its limbs continued to spasm and twitch as it tried to hold me down. Summoning my magic, I grabbed onto its muzzle and tried to push it away, further and harder each passing second, until suddenly there was a crack somewhere in its neck and its body went limp. Apart from its head, that is, which continued to try and bite me.

I shoved it back some more, and Gauge started dragging its body off of me. “SCaR! Torch it!” he shouted, and the little sentry drone beeped and angrily whirred as it flew over to us. I managed to slide out from underneath it, and Gauge stepped away as it laid limp on the table, save for its snapping jaws. A second later, the drone flew over its head, lowered its thrusters, and suddenly propelled upward in a small plume of fire that seared off most of the flesh on the thing’s skull. Only then did it finally stop biting and snapping, even though I swore I could still see the corner of its jaw twitching with what little muscle it had left.

“What the fuck was that thing?!” I shouted, finally finding the pistols in Gauge’s bags and drawing both of them. “Some kind of fucking zombie fucking thing?!”

“It looks like it may have once been a pony,” Gauge said. He warily moved around the table, keeping an eye on it in case it suddenly sprung to life again. “Its flesh is all rotting off and there’s this crusty brown stuff in the open sores. It kind of looks like some sort of mold or fungus.”

I remembered that it’d drooled on me, and I quickly wiped that off of my chest; I didn’t want anything to do with this sort of spooky nasty shit. I certainly didn’t want to end up like the thing lying on the table. “Great,” I said, sitting down against the wall. “Not only is there a tolan somewhere outside trying to eat us all, now there’s a mushroom that turns corpses into zombies. How much you want to bet there are more of them in this place?”

“I’d imagine there’s more, yeah,” Gauge said. “Whoever that was, he must’ve died sometime recently, I’d imagine. His body was still in good shape, all things considered.”

“If he even died in the first place,” I muttered. “Didn’t you hear him wailing? He sounded like he was in pain.”

Gauge closed his eyes and shuddered. “I’d like to imagine that they’re just walking corpses, not living ponies controlled by a fungus.”

“You and me both,” I agreed. “At any rate, at least he can rest now. I hope. Actually, you might want to look away.” As soon as I said that, I put one of the pistols next to the zombie thing’s head and fired, spraying the opposite wall with all sorts of brown and red shit. It looked like somepony vomited on the table and wall, and I quickly looked away, otherwise I’d be puking too.

Both Gauge and Nova flattened their ears at the sudden sound, though Nova was still in a daze, hugging her remaining wing and rocking back and forth.. After checking to make sure his marefriend was alright (or at least as alright as she could be, all things considered), Gauge walked over to me. “We should barricade this room and just wait for Ace in the morning. We can use the catwalk outside to watch for her when it’s finally daytime out.”

That’d certainly be the smart thing to do, and after all the shit we’d been through tonight, I wasn’t opposed to it. Though if there was a horde of zombies in the foundry, the last place I’d want to be is trapped in a corner with no way out. Besides, after spending all day in a hole in the ground, I was going to go stir crazy if I had to pass the night in another small room.

Eventually, I sighed and dug out all the spare mags I could find for the pistols. “You two stay here and barricade the door after I leave. I’m going to take a look around. Maybe take SCaR with me just for another set of eyes.”

Gauge groaned and put a hoof to his forehead. “Come on, Em. Are you really gonna do this now? We need you here in case something happens, not wandering this deathtrap by yourself!”

“I think it’d be better if I gave Nova a little space,” I said, dropping my voice a little bit lower as I did so. “And I can’t possibly bear sitting around all day again. You’ll be fine.”

Then my ears twitched at a familiar sound further down the hall. It wasn’t another fungus zombie, thank the stars, but gunshots. And where there were gunshots, there were other ponies. Both Gauge and I flinched, and we shot each other nervous glances. Other ponies? Here of all places? Who the fuck would be in an abandoned foundry in the middle of the night?

I looked at Gauge and nodded. “I have to check it out,” I said. “If those are bad ponies, RPR even, then we need to know now, not when they stumble across us.” Turning to SCaR, I tweaked his antenna with a little magic. “Come on, little guy, let’s take a look.”

SCaR warbled and buzzed as he puttered over to me. I stepped out of the doorway and put my hoof on the handle. “Barricade the door as best you can and sit tight. I’ll probably be gone for a while, at least until I know that everything’s safe. I’ll knock twice when I’m back.”

“Right,” Gauge said, though I could pretty easily tell he was a little ticked off with me. “And if you don’t come back?”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not gonna happen. I’ll be back by daylight at the latest, I swear.” And with one final nod, I started to swing the door shut. “Keep her safe.”

Then I closed it and drew my two pistols. SCaR followed along, the lens on its camera adjusting as it took a good look around. “Well, how about it?” I asked him. “Let’s go take a look. Just beep and squawk a bunch if you see any more of those spooky zombie things.”

SCaR made some kind of mechanical chatter and began to drift down the hall. Shrugging, I started to follow him since he seemed to know where he was going. We were at least going in the direction of the gunshots, which was a start. I just hoped that the ponies shooting the guns were friendly.

The whole thing was an eerie experience. I’d never wandered around a completely deserted and abandoned pre-Silence building before. We’d used all the buildings left behind in Blackwash, and the Bastion, the valley fort, and Celestia Dam were all inhabited. But here, there was nothing. The ceiling was collapsing in places, leaving piles of rubble on the floor, upon which grew tufts of pink grass and other plants. Spider rats, dirt crawlers, and all sorts of vermin scurried around on a disturbing number of legs, and occasionally there’d be gaps in the floor leading down to the lower levels. But I didn’t see any zombies, though I could hear them inside of closed rooms I walked by. I doubted they knew how to work doors, so I just left them shut and tried to quietly scurry on by.

I finally made it to another one of those big foremare’s offices that looked over the foundry floor below. Though the roof of this building was mostly intact, making it difficult to see much in the darkness, I could see some torches thrown in the far corner. They cast flickering shadows of equine figures on the nearby walls, illuminating a group of four as they tried to fend off several of those zombie pony things galloping at them out of the darkness. The flashes of their weapons occasionally lit up the surrounding area a little more, and the gunshots echoed off of several large melting pots still hooked up to their ancient machinery, scattered around the foundry floor.

I tossed a few mags on the table right by the big window overlooking the floor and readied myself. “SCaR, I need a light,” I said to the drone, and after a quick whistle, it flew out through the broken glass and began to shine a spotlight down on the floor. All of a sudden, I could see ten, maybe fifteen of those things in various states of decay galloping, stumbling, even crawling toward the party of four in the corner. The ponies in the back hesitated for a second at the sudden bright light in the foundry, but with the zombies pressing them, they rapidly picked the pace back up.

I pointed my two pistols down and began shooting at the things on the floor. The pistols were nowhere near as accurate as my battle rifle was and definitely lacked its stopping power, though I don’t think the latter would have mattered too much for these things. Still, damaging their bodies slowed them down, and it looked like two of the survivors down there had rifles that let them fire accurate bursts at range. Maybe with my help, they’d stand a better chance.

Then SCaR started blaring an alarm, and I looked to my left at the door leading downstairs to hear a few sets of hooves shambling up it. I pointed my pistols at the doorway only a few seconds before three zombies suddenly burst into the room. I aimed for their heads as best as I could, though they were awfully hard to hit with their weird lunging gait, but I blew one’s skull to pieces after a few shots. Gritting my teeth, I dropped my pistols and readied a fireball, then launched it at the two still standing. The flames engulfed them, and the fungus protruding from their skulls began to smoke and pop in the heat.

Of course, I hadn’t considered that they’d still keep charging me despite that. My eyes went wide as the first flaming pony torch thing continued its approach, hissing and snapping as its body burnt all around it. I just had enough time to squeeze off my fireproof spell from my days back in the forge before it collided with me and sent me backwards into a desk. I heard the vertebrae in my spine crack, though it slammed me into it so hard that it was nowhere near as pleasant as it might otherwise have been, and I gasped from the sudden shot to my lower back. I held my hooves against its chest even as it burned apart around me, just keeping its snapping jaws away from my face. For a second, I felt like I was having déjà vu to just a few minutes ago, except with a lot more fire.

Eventually, the fire burnt out whatever corrupted part of its brain made it into a zombie, and I dropped the corpse on the ground. The other one wasn’t too far away, lying in the middle of the room. At least that one burned to death quickly enough; I don’t know what I would’ve been able to do if I had two of them trying to rip me to pieces. Grabbing my pistols again, I ran back to the broken window, but the gunfire had slowed down considerably. Now there were only three survivors in the corner, while one lay in a pool of its own blood, the shredded corpse of one of those zombies lying on top of it. And in front of the three still standing, a sizable pile of rotting corpses were stacked, most of them with their heads blown to pieces, and a few still twitching.

One of the survivors with a rifle gunned down the last charging zombie, and then all was quiet again. SCaR buzzed and swept its spotlight all across the floor, trying to look behind the machinery and in the corners of the building, but none of us saw anything. Finally, sighing, I swapped mags, dropping the used ones back in my bags for reloading later, and began to go down the steps.

I kept my pistols ready until I got to the bottom, just in case, and even then I only lowered them so I wasn’t pointing them at the other three as I approached. I had to step over a few bodies on the floor before I made it over to them, and when I got close, I realized that they weren’t even ponies. They were zebras, and basically the first I’d seen outside of Blackwash and maybe a couple in Hole. I got as close as the edge of the brightest part of their torchlight and waved at them. “Hey, you guys alright?”

The one closest to me quickly looked me up and down. “Alive,” she said, though in a slight accent that gave her voice a sort of flowing melody. “Thank you for the help, stranger. That light your little robot gave off was incredibly helpful to see what we were shooting at.”

“Just trying to help,” I said, smiling a little bit to try to mask my initial apprehension. The zebra mare and her two companions were looking me over, sizing me up, probably trying to figure out if I was trustworthy or not. I did the same, looking first at the mare and then at her two friends. She and a shorter stallion looked almost identical in their facial markings and striping, so I figured they were brother and sister, while the last zebra was bigger than Gauge, with broader shoulders, a stronger jawline, and a small but noticeable twist to his muzzle, like somepony had clamped it in a vice and given it a spin. Two more dead zebras were lying on the ground around them, both with throats ripped open; I guess they hadn’t been able to hold off the zombies without some casualties.

They were also very well equipped, though none of their gear matched. The mare had a bullpup rifle that I didn’t even know how she could use without shoulder mounts or magic, several magazines for it hanging off of her shoulders like pauldrons, and what looked like eighth-inch steel plates wrapped around a half-inch of wood as some sort of makeshift armor, cut and shaped to closely fit her frame. She’d even painted beautiful designs on her armor, and I could tell that it was all made with a craftsmareship that only a true smith could appreciate. As for her companions, her brother didn’t wear any armor at all but had what looked like an AS-4 automatic shotgun resting in the crook of a foreleg and two bandoliers of shotgun shells (one of which was mostly empty) across his chest, while the big zebra had two BR12As in shoulder mounts and old Equestrian assault armor covering his body. I think he even had some grenades tucked just over his left shoulder.

After what felt like an endless few seconds, the mare smiled and held her hoof out to me. “Mawari.”

I took her hoof and shook it. “Ember. The little drone’s SCaR.” I chuckled a bit as SCaR warbled and flew forward a bit to get a closer look (or maybe a better reading or some shit) of Mawari and her companions.

“Cute,” Mawari said. Then she looked over her shoulder at her companions. “This is my baby brother, Denawa, and our cousin, Rankan. We’re from the Ruin Runners, though I guess today we’re wailer hunters.”

“Is that what these things are?” I asked, poking the nearby corpse of one with my magic. “Just what the fuck are they, even?”

“Walking corpses.” She walked forward a bit and rolled one onto its back and pointed to its open wounds. “There’s a fungus that does this. If the spores get in your bloodstream, they go to your brain, where they begin to grow. You enter a coma within a week, and a day later the fungus makes you walk again. It controls your body until you’re no longer able to move, at which point it finds a nice corner to tuck you away in and finish its meal.” She shook her head. “It’s a very unfortunate way to go, but you can only become infected if one bites you. The spores are harmless if inhaled or ingested; thank the ancestors for that.”

I shivered and tried to shake the sensation out of me. “Well that’s… pleasant. Are you… still alive like that? Does it at least kill you first?”

Mawari grimaced and shook her head. “Why else do you think they wail like that? Nozebra knows for certain, but there are always stories claiming that the wailers have spoken before, though it’s impossible to make sense of. Your body and brain may not be your own anymore, but there might be a piece of you trapped inside.”

“That’s fucking horrifying,” I said, staring at the corpse at our hooves. “And I thought getting eaten alive by a tolan would be about the worst way to go.”

“Maybe not, but I’d still take these things over a tolan any day,” Denawa said from behind us. Then, narrowing his eyes, he took a few steps over to me. “Say, were you the one who pissed that thing off outside? We were going through one of the warehouses when we heard it come stomping onto the compound. It woke up all the wailers, and now they’re all looking for another meal, trying to spread their spores. We’ve been running for our lives ever since. Lost a number of good zebras.” His eyes drifted over to the two dead zebras nearby, and he slowly shook his head.

“I’m really sorry about that,” I said, hanging my head a little. “We were trying to get to the foundry and we stumbled across a tolan on the way. I didn’t even notice it until I was right on top of it. Thank the stars we were able to get inside before it ate us.”

“Us?” Mawari asked. “You have friends here?”

I hesitated, not entirely sure that I could trust them; Auris was a shitty place and there were ponies (or zebras) who’d stab you in the back if they thought they could get away with it. “SCaR and me,” I said, nodding to the drone. “He’s like a dog, except he can fly and has a taser probe and really isn’t like a dog at all.”

SCaR buzzed at me and floated back a little bit. I don’t think he liked the dog comment.

Mawari thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Alright. More important question is, what are you doing out here?” She eyed my sling and the bandaged wound on my shoulder. “You look like you’ve had your fair share of trouble.”

“I was supposed to meet somepony here,” I responded. “She wasn’t supposed to be here until tomorrow. You guys haven’t seen a beige pegasus with a black mane hanging over half her face like a curtain, right?”

“Not here. Then again, we have been running for our lives for the past half hour.” Marawi sighed and shook her head. “Thanks again for your help.”

“Pssh, don’t worry about it. I’m a trigger happy nutjob who just likes to shoot at things,” I said, grinning. Marawi chuckled and Denawa rolled his eyes, while Rankan might as well have been a statue. I fussed with my mane with some magic, then realized I was still holding my pistols. Using my saddlebags as makeshift holsters, I sat down (on a spot that wasn’t drenched in blood) and let out a deep breath. “So, what were you all doing here? Before the tolan and the wailers and all that shit.”

I noticed Denawa clear his throat and shoot his sister a look right as she opened her mouth to say something. Mawari frowned at him and turned back to me. “We’re Ruin Runners, remember? Exploring the remains of the old world is what we do. An old place like this has lots of steel and machine parts that people will pay a lot of bullets for… but that’s not why we’re here.”

My ears perked a little and I looked up at her. “Oh? Then why’s that? I don’t feel like you guys went wailer hunting for fun.”

Denawa groaned and shook his head, turning away from the two of us—I guess he didn’t trust me, or just didn’t want his sister talking about why they were here. But she was definitely the leader of their little group, and she apparently trusted me enough to talk. It made me feel a little bit bad about keeping my friends a secret from them. “Rumor has it that this place wasn’t just a foundry,” she said. “The warehouses out here don’t just hold steel. Equestria was really paranoid, so they hid weapons and supply caches everywhere in case they needed to repel an attack at a moment’s notice, or their depots were destroyed, or whatever. A lot of times, they used other buildings and companies to hide their weapons for them.”

“And you think one’s here?” I remembered the message I’d read on the glass tablet back in one of the offices upstairs. Looks like they did get their delivery after all. “What do you think’s inside?”

Mawari shrugged. “Don’t know, but we think we found it. Warehouse 4F, at the far end of the compound. There’s another secure room inside of it that we couldn’t get to. It’s locked up really tight; none of our blast charges could get through the door, and the walls are reinforced. We need to find some way to open the door if we want to get at what’s inside.” Smirking, she added, “Whatever’s inside, though, is going to make us very rich.”

“Tell the whole fucking planet about it, why don’t you?” Denawa grumbled.

Mawari rolled her eyes and gave her brother a shove on the shoulder. “What, you really think this mare’s going to stab us in the back after helping us out? Even if she tried, she’s no match for Rankan.”

Me and the big zebra made eye contact. I sheepishly smiled and backed down a bit, and the most he responded was flaring his nostrils a bit. Yeah, that was something I hoped I could avoid fighting, in all honesty.

“So why tell her about it in the first place?” Denawa asked. “Now she’ll want a share.”

“And she can have a share, because we need her,” Mawari said, and my ears perked a bit.

I put my good hoof over my chest. “Me? What do you need me for?”

“Your drone,” Mawari said. That caught SCaR’s attention, and he kinda buzzed as he floated back over to us from where he’d been scanning some machinery. “There’s an old interface on the warehouse that might fit a drone’s probe. It might be able to get us through the door.”

I looked at SCaR and frowned. “I don’t know. SCaR’s a sentry bot, not a hacker. His name literally means ‘Surveillance, Combat, and Reconnaissance,’ not ‘door opener’.”

Mawari thought for a moment. “Actually, I have an idea. There’s lots of old bots lying around the foundry. Maybe if we can find one in working condition, your drone can download its memory and get the codes to get through the door.”

“Assuming those old drones even have the codes,” Denawa muttered.

“It’s worth a shot. We don’t really have any other options unless we want to tear this whole place apart for an access code. And with a tolan out there, we don’t have the time to go searching all the buildings before it corners us in one.”

“Won’t it just… I don’t know, get bored and go away?” I asked her.

Mawari shook her head. “No. Once a tolan sniffs out a meal, it doesn’t give up until it gets it. They’re incredibly single-minded, and if it chased you here, then it won’t stop until it snaps you up—and us along with you.” Sighing, she shook her head. “It’s probably smelled our scent by now, so it knows we’re here too. If only it would kill some of the wailers for us, but I guess they smell too much like death for it to be interested.”

Denawa grunted and checked the magazine for his shotgun. “Doesn’t mean it won’t step on them if they get in its way. Think we can kite them all behind us and just let the tolan do its thing?”

“We’d be better off just dealing with the few wailers we find and not attracting the tolan’s attention,” Mawari said.

“But what about the tolan?” I looked between the three of them and frowned. “You don’t look like you have anything that can hurt it. Suppose that we do open this warehouse, how are you even going to get away with all your loot without the tolan catching you? Those things are fast.”

“Maybe we’ll find something in the warehouse that’ll help us kill it,” Mawari said. “Like a railgun. They might have thick armor, but even they can’t survive a railgun.” After casting a quick glance at her companions, she stepped forward to me and held out a hoof. “So, are you in?”

I took it and used it to stand up. “We’re trapped in a foundry full of horrible mind-controlled zombies, and there’s the literal incarnation of sharp and pointy death outside stalking us.” After a moment, I grinned at her. “Fuck yeah, I’m in.”

Chapter 11: The Foundry

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Chapter 11: The Foundry

I was starting to understand why generations of scavengers hadn’t picked this place clean in nearly two hundred winters. The foundry was huge.

I hadn’t had the chance earlier to just get a sense of how big the compound was, since I was a little too busy running for my life from the tolan. But as soon as I followed Mawari and her family out of the one building into the interior of the compound, I was amazed. In the light of the moons, I could see building after building lined up and down the roads, some of them collapsing from age and decay, while others remained defiant and strong. While most of the buildings around me were very large and topped with a few smokestacks that had remained standing despite the passage of time, I could see a pair of warehouses down the road to my right, still in perfectly pristine condition. Somewhere in that general vicinity was the shipment the Synarchy had sent the foundry a long, long time ago. I only hoped it’d help us get out of here alive.

After checking the surrounding area for any more wailers, Mawari began to sneak off to the corner of the building on our left, with Denawa following her. I started to follow them, but Rankan put a hoof on my shoulder, stopping me dead in my tracks. When I looked back (and up) at him, he simply shook his head, then took his hoof off my shoulder and pressed it to his lips.

I grasped the meaning easily enough. “I can be quiet too, you know,” I grumbled, sitting down against the wall and crossing my forelegs. “I’ve had to do my fair share of sneaking around and not getting caught by ponies who want to kill me before. Two days ago, I had to hide from the high bitch supreme, Hunter, back in Hole! And she walked right by me without even noticing me.” I proudly stood up and puffed out my chest. “How’s th—!”

He didn’t let me finish the rest of that before he more or less shoved his hoof in my mouth and glared at me. I pulled his hoof out with my magic and spat a few times on the ground. “Jeez, you could have just said something, you know,” I muttered.

SCaR trilled a few times and Rankan raised his eyebrow at me. I just dumbly stared at the both of them. “What?”

Then Mawari hissed at us from the corner of the building. I snapped my head over to her and saw her waving us over with a hoof. Rankan immediately began lumbering after her, his assault armor clicking and clacking as the old plates rattled around, and I followed him over. When we got close, Denawa galloped across the road to the next building on silent hooves, and Mawari pointed to where he was running. “Denawa’s going to take a look at the rebar plant,” she whispered, and I noticed she kept pointing her ears in different directions at the slightest noise. “If he finds a way in, he’ll come back and tell us. We don’t want to break any windows or force open any big doors, or else we’ll be buried to our necks in wailers. And with all the noise the wailers make, the tolan won’t be far behind.”

“Speaking of which, where the fuck is it?” I asked her, looking around us, but everything was still and silent. “It’s the size of a fucking house, it shouldn’t be that hard to find.”

“You’d be surprised,” Mawari said. “Tolans can be very quiet when they’re hunting. All those legs it has dissipate its body weight so you can’t feel the ground shake when it starts stalking toward you. Plus, they’re good diggers, and there’s a lot of rubble here for them to hide in and wait. Keep looking over your shoulder, don’t go too close to anything vaguely tolan shaped, and if you hear a clicking noise, just run. It’s about the only warning you’ll get.”

“Terrific,” I muttered, and glanced over my shoulder. Thankfully, I didn’t see any tolans sneaking up on us. “Can they slice through twenty feet of solid concrete with their claws and shoot lasers from their eyes, too? And just what are we supposed to be doing, anyway? Shouldn’t we have gone with your brother?”

Rankan gestured with his hooves a few times and shook his head. I just looked between him and Mawari and held out a hoof. “Well? What did he say?”

“He says you ask too many questions,” Mawari said, rolling her eyes. “And in case you hadn’t noticed, me and Rankan are wearing armor, so we make a fair bit of noise when we move. But Denawa isn’t, so he can go get a look at things before we go charging blindly into a wailer nest and get bitten.”

Well, they had a fair point, but I couldn’t help that I was impatient. I just wanted to find the access codes, open up the warehouse, and hopefully blow the tolan to pieces. Every minute I spent out here, searching the foundry with these zebras, was another minute I had to worry about Nova and Gauge. I just hoped that they’d barred the door and were staying quiet; I didn’t want any more wailers to find them, because I doubted they could defend themselves as well as I could. Hopefully that one that we’d encountered earlier was the only one upstairs in that building, apart from the ones trapped in rooms, and me and the scavengers had killed the rest on the floor.

Stripes moved across the street, and Denawa came creeping out of the undergrowth toward us. He hissed once to catch our attention, then waved his hoof for us to come over before disappearing back into the grasses and shrubs. Mawari stood up straight again, looked down the streets for any trouble, and then nodded to me and Rankan. “He’s found a way in. Let’s move.”

Mawari galloped across the street on surprisingly light hooves despite her armor and gear, though Rankan was hardly better than her; the heavy bulletproof plates of his assault armor rattled with every step, and he crossed the street more like a force of nature than a zebra. As for me, I followed close behind him, hobbling in my sling, my two pistols held by my side in fiery orange magic.

When we crossed the street and pushed through the brush, I saw Denawa standing next to a smashed in window. Flicking his ear toward it, he put one hoof on the sill. “It’s a mess in here. Lots of rubble and toppled machinery. Probably wailers hiding in the corners too. But they had a lot of drones to handle hot rebar here, so it’s worth a look.”

Mawari nodded and turned to the rest of us. “Keep quiet and calm. Don’t fire unless a wailer starts charging you; a single gunshot will wake them all up, and they’re usually fairly docile unless they hear noise.” She nodded toward SCaR. “Can you get him up in the air? That spotlight was useful last time, and wailers don’t respond to light, so we should be safe.”

“Just tell him where you want him to go and he’ll listen,” I said, smirking at SCaR. The drone hummed at me and then drifted over to Mawari’s head, slowly circling around her once as he scanned her or something. Fuck if I knew what that drone was doing half the time, but at least he was smart enough to understand what we wanted him to do. “What about me? I don’t have a whole lot of ammo for these pistols, but I have pyromancies, so that shouldn’t be too much of an issue.”

“How’s your stamina?” Denawa asked me. “I’ve seen unicorns blow their mana in three or four spells and then they’re out.”

“I’ve had plenty of practice,” I insisted. “I can conjure ten, fifteen fireballs a day.”

“And how many have you used today?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know, maybe five? I’m not feeling tired if that’s what you’re asking. I spent all day sleeping. I’m, uh… well, I’m sure you’ve seen it.” In case they hadn’t, somehow, I turned my flank a bit so they could see the heart burned over my left mark.

“I was wondering about that,” Mawari said. “You’re lucky. Not many slaves get away from the RPR.”

“I’m not actually a slave myself, but I may have kinda done a lot of shooting in Hole and helped a bunch of slaves escape,” I said, grinning. “They’ve got their hooves full right now. Still, the sooner that we can kill this tolan and get the fuck out of here, the happier I’ll be. Don’t want to be staying in one place too long in case they catch up to me again.”

“Hopefully we can help with that.” Mawari checked her rifle and nodded to the window. “Denawa, scout the threshold. We’ll follow you and move right toward the stairs so we can get on the catwalks. If the wailers sniff us out, we’ll have a better chance fighting them up there.”

Denawa nodded and unslung his shotgun, balancing it between his hooves. “Right. Follow in fifteen.” And then, like a shadow, he slipped through the broken window and melded into the shadows inside.

Mawari must’ve been counting down in her head, because she didn’t say anything or move at all for about fifteen seconds. Then, all of a sudden, she crawled through the window, the loose plates of her armor rattling a bit as she entered. I glanced at Rankan, and he just stared back at me, so I swallowed hard and swung my legs over after her, being careful not to get my sling caught on anything.

The rebar plant was dead silent, save for the clop my hooves made when they landed on the concrete inside. Some glass also crunched underneath them, and I quickly scooted away from the window so Rankan could enter. I could hardly see anything inside except for the faint glow of old metal piled high in front of me, so I tugged on one of SCaR’s thrusters with my magic to get his attention, then pointed up toward the ceiling. Trilling quietly, SCaR puttered up higher, then activated its spotlight.

The drone slowly swept the spotlight across the plant so we could see what was around us. Half of the ceiling had collapsed, letting some moonlight in, and there was a lot of heavy machinery that was crushed underneath it. Near us, a huge cobble of rebar had roared out of a jam and formed seven or eight loops in the air before it finally stopped, leaving only a twisted and rusted set of hoops and turns jutting out of the machine two centuries later. And there were a few skeletons lying near that machine with cracked and bleached bones, just to complete the picture.

Mawari saw the skeletons and shook her head. “Poor bastards,” she whispered. Then, moving slowly so her armor wouldn’t rattle, she began to move to the right, her eyes set on the flickering shadows SCaR’s spotlight cast on the catwalks.

As I followed her, I got a little distracted trying to reconstruct what had happened here. I sure as shit don’t know the first thing about forensics, but I could put together a rough idea of what’d happened solely from the rebar cobble and the skeletons near the machinery. The plant had been running when everything went to shit, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a cobble still sticking out of the machines. Maybe the plant had been attacked while the workers were still using it? And if that was true, I had to wonder if those skeletons next to the machinery belonged to the workers. It was one thing to grow up surrounded by centuries-old technology, but it was quite another to find the remains of somepony who’d actually used it.

I was starting to get the feeling that all of the buildings in the foundry were laid out the same. They had all of their machinery on the floor, a whole bunch of catwalks around the perimeter, and a room that overlooked the whole thing at the top, which was usually connected to some more offices for administration and shit like that. And, true enough, once we made it on the catwalk, we began to go up and toward the foremare’s office so that we could see the whole thing from above.

And then the rusted stairs shrieked and collapsed under us when we were about halfway up.

I felt my stomach start moving into my throat as the catwalk fell out from under me, and I lunged forward and managed to hook my one and only good foreleg around the bars on the stair railing a little further up. I grunted and smashed my teeth together as my hind legs kicked at nothing and I tried to hold myself up with only one leg, but thankfully Mawari was in front of me, because she quickly turned around and hooked her hooves under my shoulders, dragging me onto the stairs with her. They groaned a little bit more under our weight, and she quickly skipped up a few more steps to try and distribute the weight better.

I took a second to catch my breath before I looked behind me. A good fifteen or so steps had completely fallen out of the staircase, right in the middle of it, and Rankan and Denawa were picking themselves up at the end of it. I guess they’d jumped back before the falling stairs took them down too, but now they were on the other side, and there wasn’t really a good way for them to get up to us. But that was about to become the least of our problems.

A chorus of howling moans and wails began to echo through the plant, and SCaR squawked in alarm and quickly shifted its spotlight toward the far corner of the room. I felt my throat tighten up as a whole swarm of wailers began shambling, tripping, and falling over the equipment and rubble toward the staircase, wailing in agony as they did so. Seeing that many victims in such bad decay, many of them carrying twisted and rotting limbs and exposed brown bone, made me feel like I was going to puke.

“Shit! Denawa! Rankan!” Mawari screeched, quickly turning her bullpup rifle on the wailers below and firing several puttering sprays into the crowd using only her hooves to hold and brace the gun. One fell to the ground, its brain blown to pieces, but the others just staggered onwards despite the bullets ripping into their backs. I wished I had my rifle, because that was a lot more accurate than whatever gun she was using, but I only had a pair of pistols, and I doubted I could score any headshots from this far away.

Denawa and Rankan quickly took up defensive positions on the staircase, with Denawa crouching in front of and to the left of Rankan and his dual battle rifles. They waited until the first wailers funneled onto the staircase before Rankan opened fire, his rifles alternating bursts to rip the first few wailers to pieces. Denawa just tensed his grip on his shotgun and looked back at us. “Unicorn! Can’t you make a fucking bridge or something?!”

I quickly holstered my pistols and tried to look around, but it was really hard to focus on anything with all the flashing lights and loud thundering of gunfire all around me. I first tried to grab onto the collapsed portion of the stairs and lift that back up, but it was way too heavy for me. I managed to heave it maybe a foot off of the ground, but I had to let go before my head blew up. It felt like somepony was driving an axe through my skull. I had to think of something else.

Mawari suddenly cried out in alarm, and I immediately spun around to see her grappling with a wailer that must’ve come down the stairs toward us. She’d jammed the barrel of her rifle into its snapping jaws so it couldn’t bite her, but it was thrashing and flailing so violently that she was having trouble keeping her balance. Suddenly, it twisted its head to the side with frightening strength, enough to wrench Mawari’s hooves off of the ground and slam her into the railing of the stairs. Her hooves slipped off of her rifle, and suddenly she was going over, right toward a mass of wailers stupidly standing below us.

“Hang on!” I shouted, rushing to the edge and quickly flaring my horn to life. I managed to grab her tail with my telekinesis and stop her fall just a foot or so from the snapping jaws of the wailers. Gritting my teeth, I pulled her back up toward the stairs, sweat beginning to bead on my horn as I strained to lift her. She probably wouldn’t have been too bad by herself, but all the armor and gear she was wearing really weighed her down.

But while I’d been doing this, the wailer on the staircase wasn’t content to just sit and watch. Almost as soon as it’d thrown Mawari, her rifle fell out of its mouth and it started snapping again. Then it set its sights on me, and before I knew it, it was all but on top of me. With me holding Mawari and the fucking zombie about to tear into me, I had to make a choice. Did I haul her up and let the wailer possibly bite me, or drop her so that I could blast it with a fireball or fling it off the staircase?

I grunted and basically tossed Mawari back up to the staircase; I just hoped that she’d be able to grab onto it and that my aim wasn’t too shit. Then I tried to draw my pistols before the wailer set on me, but it slammed into my shoulder and sent me onto my back. I felt my head and shoulders over open air, and I managed to kick a hind leg between two stairs to try and anchor myself to them. It was painful as fuck, but trying to keep the wailer from biting me had my attention for the moment.

It was almost as if it knew that it had its prey cornered, because it just laid on top of me so its weight could hold me down while it tried to find something to bite onto. I got yet another close-up look at its disgusting, rotting teeth, and this close to my face I could see some sort of yellow and red bile in its mouth. I fought as best as I could with one good foreleg, and I tried to hold its face away from me with my magic, but it was really struggling and trying to break free. It even managed to bite onto the sling holding my foreleg in place, and I struck it on the cheek with my good hoof to get it away from my helpless limb.

After what felt like an eternity of wrestling and fighting with this thing, Mawari suddenly cracked its head to the side, breaking its neck and immobilizing its limbs, though its jaws continued to bite furiously where its head lay. I quickly picked it up in my telekinetic field and dumped it off the stairs, where its rotting skull broke open on the collapsed staircase below. Mawari held out a hoof and helped me stand, and then she pointed to her family. “Can you pick them up? Like you did me?”

I nodded and moved up the stairs a little bit. “Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, too,” I said. “Denawa! I’m bringing you over first!” I shouted across the gap and over their gunfire. The two of them were making good use of the chokepoint, but the second they were out of bullets and shells the wailers would be on them in an instant. I’m not sure if Denawa heard me or not, because he kept his ears flat against his skull and blew the mushy brains out of one of the wailers, but I wasn’t going to wait for a response. Closing my eyes and putting all of my focus into my magic, I wrapped a field around Denawa and lifted him off his hooves.

He jerked in my grasp, startled, but then he stopped moving, so I guess he realized that I wasn’t a wailer suddenly pouncing on him from behind. Only when I brought the field close to me did I open my eyes, and I safely deposited him on the bottom of our part of the stairs. “Get up the staircase, I don’t want all of us standing on this thing,” I told him. He nodded and slid past me, and he and Mawari moved toward the foremare’s office above us.

Rankan stood his ground by himself now that he didn’t have Denawa’s shotgun supporting him, and I cursed at myself as I realized I should have brought him over first; his rifles were accurate enough to shoot across the gap, but Denawa’s shotgun couldn’t cover that distance. I took a second to catch my breath and recover my strength, and then I readied myself for the larger of the two. “Rankan! You’re next!”

Just like before, I closed my eyes and focused on bringing him across. Once I had him firmly in my field, I lifted him up and started pulling him toward me. He must’ve stopped firing once he was clear of the wailers, because he wasn’t shaking in my grip, and besides, they couldn’t get to us.

But then a loud roar, crumbling concrete, and twisting metal almost broke my concentration. I heard Mawari scream in terror, and when I opened my eyes, the tolan had all but smashed through one of the decaying walls near the stairs and was forcing its way through. Rankan started shooting at it, but he only got a few bursts off before his rifles automatically ejected their empty magazines. Gritting my teeth, I simply flung Rankan over my shoulder in the general direction of the foremare’s office, just to get him out of reach of the tolan, and the sudden exertion made me stagger on my hooves. The dark haze of burnout crept in on my vision, and it took me a second to get my sight back again.

That was a second I didn’t have.

When I could see again, I saw the tolan lunging for me, massive mouth open and hundreds of crooked, glistening teeth ready to tear me to shreds. I kicked off of the stairs as much as I could, and I somehow managed to get out of the way of its bite. Its jaws snapped shut on the bottom of the staircase where I’d been standing just a moment ago, and the entire structure shrieked and groaned. But before I could climb any more steps, the tolan thrashed its head back and forth, tearing the entire staircase off of the foremare’s office and sending me flying across the plant.

I heard Mawari shout my name, and SCaR blared and squawked in alarm, but I ended up hitting my head on the ground, and that disoriented me for a few seconds. It hurt like a bitch to stand, but I forced myself to, because I could hear the tolan climbing over the rubble and around the broken machinery of the plant to get to me. Not only that, but I was in the middle of at least four wailers, who’d just noticed that a fresh meal had landed between them. Thankfully I’d holstered my pistols earlier, otherwise I would’ve lost them when the tolan threw me, and I immediately drew them and quickly dumped their clips to make sure that I dropped those wailers before they could get to me.

And then the tolan roared again, and I didn’t even bother looking over my shoulder; I just started running. There was too much rubble to climb over and I could never escape the tolan and its six legs that way, and not only were the windows next to me shut, but they were also barred. The wall was still pretty intact, and I couldn’t find any holes to slip out of. The only thing I had to look forward to was a dead end corner right in front of me, but I took it nonetheless.

I could feel the tolan’s hot and rancid breath on my neck, and I figured that it was just waiting for me to corner myself before it came in for its meal. I heard gunfire from the scavengers and heard a few bullets spark off of its armor, but they weren’t distracting it, and really, that was the best they could do. But as I got closer to the corner, I saw a big metal hatch in the wall that was about as big as me. I didn’t know what it was for, but as soon as I got close enough I pulled on it with my magic. It was a little rusty and didn’t want to open, but I forced it open anyways, and I saw a chute leading down into darkness. I wasn’t going to question my good fortune, though; I holstered my pistols again and galloped right toward it, and I didn’t waste any time jumping inside.

I heard the tolan’s jaws snap shut behind me and the entire building shook as its skull rammed into the wall, but I was safely out of its reach. As I slid down the rusty chute head first, I lit up my horn a little bit to see what was at the end. The moment I did that, I felt the chute drop away beneath me, and suddenly I was falling. The orange light on my horn glinted off of twisted and jagged metal below me, and as soon as I realized what it was, I hardly had time to cross my forelegs against my body and try to make myself as small as possible before I landed right in the scrap pile of rust.

An intense, fiery sensation shot through my left side, right around my midsection, and sparks of pain went shooting up and down my horn as I struck my head against something. A rolling wave of agony slowly engulfed my limbs one by one as my brain tallied up my injuries, and only when it finished with all of those did I suddenly feel the lance of lightning in my side. I managed to open my eyes and keep my horn weakly lit, and when I looked at my left, I saw a long piece of rebar running through my side, impaling me from below and with a good foot sticking out of the top.

Blood ran down my face and got into my gaping mouth as I just stared at the piece of metal running through my body. I felt myself begin to convulse around the foreign object spearing me, and I could hardly breathe from the shock alone. Little by little, the light on my horn dimmed and dimmed, and it wasn’t even thirty seconds before I was shrouded in complete darkness.

And then the shock and the pain took me away from the world, and I blacked out.

Chapter 12: Where the Synarchy Hides its Toys

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Chapter 12: Where the Synarchy Hides Its Toys

I don’t know how long I was out cold for, but I didn’t even dream or hallucinate. All that surrounded me was black nothingness, and I blissfully drifted through unconsciousness for an eternity. But it wouldn’t last forever.

I came crashing back down to the world of the living with a gasp, panting and shaking. My face and coat was matted with dried blood, and my limbs twitched and shook. I could feel cuts and scrapes covering basically every inch of my body, and the sharp corners of scrap metal were digging into my flesh from all angles. And it wasn’t until I tried to stand that I remembered the piece of rebar impaling me, and the pain from that suddenly came crashing back down on me.

The cry of pain I made echoed a surprising number of times in the total darkness. Wherever the scrap chute went to, it was a big, empty room. Gritting my teeth, I tried to keep myself as still as possible so the rebar wouldn’t hurt me anymore, and I let my horn glow to get a look around.

The orange light on my head weakly sparkled and fizzled once or twice before I finally had enough light to see with. The room I was in must’ve been about fifteen feet high, with several chutes protruding from the walls about ten feet off of the ground. I was lying on top of a big pile of scrap metal in the middle of the room, almost all of it, including the rebar spear I was impaled on, covered in rust and grime. I saw what looked like a door a little ways away, so at least I wasn’t trapped in here. Or so I hoped.

And then I heard a low wail echo in the chamber that made my blood run cold. I whipped my head back and forth, but I couldn’t see where it was coming from; it echoed so much that I couldn’t pinpoint the source. I knew that if I was pinned to the scrap pile for much longer, I was about to become dinner, and I had no intention on letting that happen. But first, I had to pry myself off of this spike, and I was not looking forward to that at all.

I heard the metal behind me shift a little bit, and I looked over my shoulder and saw an almost skeletal wailer slowly shambling up toward me. I reached for my pistols, but when I pulled them out, I saw that their slides were both back, ready to receive fresh magazines. My saddlebag holding all my ammo was on my left side, but the rebar spear running through my side was between me and it, and it’d somehow impaled the bag as well, so I couldn’t open it. I doubted that I had the strength to summon a fireball, so my only hope was to get off of the damn thing before the wailer managed to climb up to me.

I considered just ripping the rebar through my flesh and escaping that way, but it was a good inch or two into my side, and I’d probably be crippled for life if I did that with all the muscle it would tear, not to mention that it’d be almost impossible to close the wound and I’d die of blood loss. So that meant the only way I was getting out was going up and over, and to do that, I’d have to stand. Squeezing my eyes shut, I turned my head to the side and bit onto my sling as tight as I could, then tried to stand. The pain was excruciating, and I screamed into my sling as I felt the metal ribs on the rebar sliding into and out of my flesh. But I didn’t stop, because if I stopped, I was going to die.

And then, just like that, I did it. I gasped as I felt the end of the rebar slide out of my lower side, and my weak legs collapsed back onto the scrap pile. I immediately felt my side begin to drench itself in blood, and the rebar spear was covered in a gory red, but I was free. Free and about to get eaten.

The wailer bit down on my tail and dragged me backwards a bit. I twisted away and kicked at its face, despite how much my side hurt, and I smashed its muzzle to pieces. It gurgled and snarled at me, but I screamed in exertion and dug my telekinesis into its gaping muzzle and pulled until I tore its rotten head in two. It moaned once and then collapsed on the scrap pile, thick and coagulated blood plopping out of its destroyed head.

I took a second to rest, and when I put a hoof to my side, it came away covered in blood. Grunting, I sat up and threw my saddlebags onto the metal in front of me, looking for something to patch the wound with. I had bandages and gauze, but that wasn’t really going to stop a puncture wound from bleeding. I needed Stabil-Ice and staples to hold the wound shut, but I didn’t have either of those in my bag. And at the rate it was bleeding, along with all the dried blood I’d lost on the rest of my body, I probably only had ten, maybe fifteen minutes before I died from blood loss. And I was way too weak to make enough fire to cauterize the wound, especially one that deep.

While I was at it, I reloaded both of my pistols, then threw them back in their holsters; I was worried that if I tried to carry them in my magic, I’d just weaken myself faster, and I might not even notice if I dropped one. With all of that taken care of, I forced myself to stand, and I slowly stumbled down the scrap metal pile, my right foreleg still bound in a sling, and my left side crippled and painful to even move. But I managed to avoid falling on my face, despite how dead my hooves were, and I made it to the bottom without too much trouble.

I staggered over to the door I saw earlier and tested it with my magic, but a little tug from my horn was all it took to break the rusted hinges off it. I had to step back a bit so the falling door didn’t crush me, though I cringed when it slammed on the ground and the noise echoed throughout the room and down the hallway on the other side. I guess if there were any more wailers around here, then they knew I was here now.

There were four doors in the hallway and a staircase going up at the end of it, next to some big cargo doors that must’ve been how they got the scrap out of here and sent it to where it needed to go. Maybe one of the smaller doors had some medical supplies inside, but there weren’t any labels on the doors. I considered opening each one and rummaging through them, but the dripping of my blood on the floor reminded me I didn’t have all that much time to waste. Plus, I tried two of the doors closest to me, and they were both locked. I couldn’t afford to waste energy breaking old locks when I was bleeding to death. I was already starting to shiver a little bit.

I figured that there had to be a first aid kit in a bathroom, and hopefully there’d be some Stabil-Ice in it, assuming that it hadn’t already been found by scavengers before me. And I doubted that there were any bathrooms down here, so my best bet was to go upstairs. Maybe I’d find what I needed up there.

My blood dripped, dripped, dripped on the stairs with each step I took. I had to use the railing to hold myself upright, my legs were so weak. When the staircase doubled back on itself, I could see the splotchy red trail going all the way back to the open scrap room. Gritting my teeth, I shivered and pushed further up the stairs, leaving a red smear on the left wall as I staggered against it.

The doors at the top of the stairs were already open, which I thought was a little odd. One of them looked badly damaged, like something big had forced it open, and there were bullet holes all over the pair. There were also a few skeletons lying around, two of which were wearing old combat armor that’d been shot to shit. I don’t know what’d happened here, but I had a feeling it was related to the plants just suddenly stopping mid-production and spewing all those rebar cobbles everywhere. Of course, I had more worrying matters to deal with than finding out who killed these soldiers and why.

The doors opened up into a big central hub, and it took me a few seconds to realize that this was like the living quarters or something for the ponies who worked at the foundry. It made sense; Auris wasn’t developed enough to have towns and cities nearby, so they would have had to house the workers on site. That was good for me, at least. If they had to house their own community here, then they should have had something like a hospital to treat any injured workers. I just had to find it.

The first floor of this building was a big communal area. There were lots of old chairs and tables on my left near some huge windows looking out on the Auris countryside, although the fences and wires and all that other industrial shit kind of ruined what little of the view I could see in the moonlight. At the far end of the floor was a big desk that a receptionist or somepony probably sat at, and beyond that were a set of big double doors that probably led back out into the foundry. At least I knew the way out, and maybe once I was done here, I could go looking for Mawari and SCaR. I only hoped that they were taking good care of the drone. And that SCaR was playing nice with them, too. I honestly didn’t know what he would try to do when I got separated from the rest of them.

I didn’t see any staircases leading up; they were probably behind doors somewhere in the corners of the building. But if I was going to build a big communal building and put an infirmary or something in it, I’d want it on the ground floor so that injured ponies could be quickly taken in and out. And there were plenty of doors to choose from on the ground floor alone; I saw eight, so I staggered and limped over closer so I could read the labels. At least these ones had labels.

The fifth door I looked at had ‘INFIRMARY’ printed on it in big, blocky letters under the dust and rust coating the metal placard. I sighed in relief and took a moment to lean against the wall and recoup my strength for breaking open the door. The dripping of my blood on the floor just sounded weird to my ears in the dead stillness of the foundry, and I shook my head back and forth a few times to try and push a little blood into my brain. I was really shivering and starting to become disoriented; I didn’t have much time to fuck around.

I took a few deep breaths to get oxygen into my body, and then I grabbed onto the door and began to pull and pry. But the door must’ve been reinforced, because I couldn’t get it to flex or bend at all, and when I shook it back and forth, the hinges didn’t rattle. I cursed and tried again, knowing that this door was the last thing between me and salvation, and if I could just open it, maybe I wouldn’t die here. But the fucking thing refused to budge in the slightest.

“Open, you stupid fuck!” I weakly grunted at it. My throat felt dry as sandpaper and I could hardly move my tongue. In desperation, I started pounding on the door with my good forehoof, and I slammed my shoulder into it once or twice. I winced from the pain, and as the dizziness took hold, I closed my eyes and slid down the door. So close! So fucking close!

Then my sling got caught on the handle, and it turned to open the door.

I kind of stared at it for a moment as the door swung open, unimpeded. I felt like such a fucking idiot for not checking the stupid handle first. But seeing the inside of the infirmary open to me put a little bit of energy back in my hooves, and I managed to stand up. My head swam and my vision blurred and blacked for a few seconds, but a few deep breaths let me see and walk again, and I limped into the infirmary, immediately heading for a big red box bolted to the back wall.

I opened it with my magic before I was even halfway across the floor and feebly cheered in joy when I saw it stuffed with medical supplies. I nearly tripped and fell in my excitement, but I used a gurney lying askew in the middle of the room to support me as I hauled everything over. Spreading everything out on the gurney, I immediately picked out two packs of Stabil-Ice, a roll of gauze, and what looked like a miniature staple gun. The bottle of disinfectant was some kind of black sludge, so I threw it aside. Stabil-Ice kind of disinfected things, so I hoped that’d be good enough; besides, I’d already spent so long impaled on that rebar spear that I doubted whatever might be on two-hundred-year-old staples was any worse.

But those thoughts could wait. I primed the two pouches of Stabil-Ice, then tore one open and shoved the end right in the upper of the two holes running through my side. As I squeezed it, I sighed in relief as a cold, icy numbness swept over the whole area. By the time I finished the whole pouch, I wasn’t losing blood anywhere near as fast as I was before. So I grabbed the second and used about half of it to fill up the wound, then set it aside and made sure that the staple gun was loaded. Pinching my flesh together with my magic, I grit my teeth and stapled my wound shut. It hurt a fair bit, but the area was already numb from the Stabil-Ice, and besides, after having a rebar spear run me through, tiny staples were hardly anything in comparison. Once that was done, I stapled the top hole shut as well, and then I slathered both wounds with the remaining Stabil-Ice in the second pouch. I only hoped that the excessive number of staples I used would be enough to keep my wounds held shut when I inevitably had to start running again. But, just to be safe, I dumped the rest of the contents of the first aid box into my saddlebags and sealed them up good. I had a feeling they’d be very useful later.

While I was here, I figured I should take stock of my injuries and collect whatever else the infirmary had to offer. I didn’t know just how long I was going to be away from the next settlement, or if that settlement was even going to be friendly to me, so I’d need to be able to tend to myself and Gauge and Nova once we left this deathtrap. I shoved the gurney away and sat in the middle of the floor, looking over my impressively large collection of cuts and scrapes, most of which were on my legs and stomach from flopping onto the scrap metal pile. None of them looked too deep at least, which was astounding, but I did bandage up some of the deeper ones and used a third pouch of Stabil-Ice on the few still bleeding. But I stopped when I looked at my right foreleg, and the collection of odd scrapes arranged in a semicircle just above the fetlock. I stared at them for a few seconds, then swallowed hard and wrapped a bandage around them as well.

“It’s nothing,” I whispered to myself. “I’ll be fine. Just fine.”

Though maybe I should have a conversation with Ace when she showed up. I didn’t know how Gauge would react if I told him I’d been bit. But maybe I’d be fine. The cuts hadn’t looked too deep at least. Maybe the spores weren’t in my blood. Maybe it wasn’t even a wailer’s bite.

Maybe.

I tried to calm myself down with a few deep breaths before I stood up again. There wasn’t anything I could do about it now, except try to not get bit anymore. I figured that if those were bite marks, then I must’ve gotten them when that wailer tackled me when I was trying to save Mawari. I couldn’t remember any other times I got that close. Unless that one wailer in the scrap room gnawed on me a bit while I was passed out and impaled, but if that was the case, then I would’ve been covered with a lot more and a lot deeper bite marks.

I realized that I was feeling horribly light headed from all the blood I lost. My hooves were numb and tingly, and I felt like I was going to be sick. But as much as I just wanted to lie down and take a nap, I knew I had to keep moving. Mawari and her family might be looking for me, so I had to try to link back up with them as soon as I could.

I started scavenging the infirmary until I came across some artificial blood packs inside a locker. I frowned and pulled them out to get a closer look at them. Each pack held about a liter of dark red blood, and each was labeled with ‘U-Art’ and a bunch of numbers and code I couldn’t make sense of. About the only other useful thing I could see on it was the word ‘pony’ printed at the bottom of the label, so at least I knew this wasn’t griffon or zebra blood. That was good, because I could really use some to make up for all I lost today. I just hoped that since it was artificial blood it’d be okay to use. About the last thing I needed was to get fucked up because I was using the wrong blood type. But the U on it had to mean ‘universal’, right? I remembered seeing blood packs with the same markings on them back in Ace’s place in Hole, and seeing how I wasn’t dead yet, they should be fine.

The blood packs already had a tube and needle on them, so I found an IV bag stand to hang the first one up and sat down on a bed next to it. I held out my left foreleg and looked over it until I was able to find a vein bulging out of my thinning coat. At least not eating much since leaving the dam was making this easier than it otherwise should have been. But once I found a vein, I wrapped a tourniquet around the crook of my foreleg below it, then jabbed the needle under the skin and into the vein. The blood began to flow out of the bag and into my body, and I idly kicked my hind legs as they dangled off the edge of the bed while I waited.

It only took me like two minutes before I got bored. I was still kind of on edge, because I half expected a wailer to jump me while I was getting blood, but nothing moved and nothing made a sound. The beds in the back of the infirmary were all covered in dust and grime, the blankets rotting away over the years. Now that I had a chance to look around, actually, I noticed a few skeletons scattered throughout the room. There was one in a bed next to me, and another that looked like a griffon’s skeleton in a small bed at the far end of the infirmary. And at the other end, there were five or six skeletons lying in a pile, their bones bleached with age and limbs sticking off in random directions. They definitely didn’t die there, otherwise they wouldn’t be positioned like that, so somebody had thrown their corpses in the corner after they died. But who, and why?

That wasn’t really something that I could find an answer to while I was just sitting here, so I put my mind on other things instead. I took out both of my pistols and counted the rounds I had left, and I came up with a very disappointing thirty-two. I only had one reload for each of my eight-shot pistols, so I’d have to be careful with my fire. Though if I got only headshots, I could kill thirty-two wailers, so that was something. And I still had my spells, and I was already feeling a bit more awake and aware by the time I finished the first blood pack.

I looked at the second one and thought about it for a few seconds. I honestly didn’t know if one was enough or if two would be too much or what. But I mean, I couldn’t have too much blood, right? I’m sure in that case, the bag would just stop emptying once I had enough. Detaching the first bag from the needle still embedded in my foreleg, I set up the second one and got it all hooked up. Then all I had to do was sit back and relax for a few minutes before that one emptied as well.

When it was finally done, I pulled out the needle and put a little bandage on my foreleg. It honestly looked a little silly to see a tiny normal bandage next to a bunch of big bandages and gauze wraps, but it was definitely enough. Sliding off of the bed, I pranced around on my hooves for a little bit and even worked my wounded shoulder just a tad to get some of the stiffness out of it. I already felt like a new mare, though I still hurt like shit all over, especially on my left, because the Stabil-Ice was already starting to wear off. But so long as I stayed in one piece, then I wasn’t out of the fight yet. Not by a long shot.

Collecting my things again, I left the infirmary behind after scavenging a few more metal boxes of medical supplies and stuffing them all in my saddlebags. As much as I would’ve liked to go searching through the living quarters some more, I needed to find Mawari and SCaR, wherever they were. I could try going back to the rebar plant, but if the tolan was still around there, I didn’t stand a very good chance of escaping it again on flat ground. My best bet was to try and find the building the rebar plant connected through if it was anything like the first building I’d run into where Nova lost her wing. Maybe the zebras were still around there.

As I walked past the big reception desk in the front of the building, my curiosity got the better of me, and I went around behind it. There was a skeleton lying on the floor with its skull cracked and caving in around a hole in the center; must’ve been a gunshot to the top of the head, which was interesting, but I couldn’t really make sense of it. Pushing away some of the mulchy papers and shit on the desk, I found another one of those glass panels. Blowing away the dust, I held it up to my face and read.

09/01/1589 10:17:32 — Message from Blue Dew
Don’t say anything, okay? This comes down from the top. The workers don’t need to know. We’ll have an explanation soon. Let them use the NetStat if they want, but if they complain that they can’t get any letters through, tell them that the system is down. It might even be true, for all we know.
But you want to know what I think? I think this is it. Something really bad happened back home, Tare. Nopony’s been able to contact Equestria for over a week now. Mr. Billet won’t talk to any of us about what’s going on. I think he might know what’s happening. Ever since that message came through, he’s been all but locked in his office. I ran into him down near the smelting plant yesterday and he smelled like booze and smoke. I don’t think he’s slept in days. I even poked around his office a bit while he was out, but I couldn’t find the message. I think he’s keeping it with him; I noticed he has a piece of etch glass inside his suit. Good luck trying to get it away from him.
Oh, and another thing. Have you noticed the soldiers acting weird? They’ve been all over the place since the new year, sticking their noses in things they otherwise wouldn’t care about. A bunch of them tried to get some of the manifests from me the other day, and they wouldn’t take no for an answer. I had to give those to them because we’re at war and the military has the last say, you know? I don’t know what they’re going to do with them, but I don’t feel safe here anymore.
Can we talk at lunch? Bring anything you don’t want to leave behind.
Blue

I bit my lip as I put the glass thing (etch glass?) back down. I guess the secretaries here hadn’t known what was happening, but they could tell something bad was going on. Maybe I could find that etch glass that Mr. Billet had on him that Blue Dew mentioned. There might be answers in that.

I was about to leave the desk when I noticed something tucked in the corner. Curious, I pulled it out with my magic and set it on top of the desk. It was pretty horribly rusted, but I could tell at a glance that this was a drone of some kind. It didn’t look like SCaR—it was sleeker and smaller, so it must’ve been some kind of civilian model instead of the rugged military frame SCaR had. I spun it around until I found what looked like the storage ports, and I pried them open with my magic. Inside were a few chipboards that weren’t too badly damaged, so I pulled them all out and stuck them safely in my bags. I’d let SCaR figure out which one was the memory board when I found him again; I hardly knew how computers worked in the first place.

My ears perked at some muffled gunshots coming from somewhere outside, so I immediately secured my bags and bolted out the door. I looked up as soon as I got outside and saw the zebras and SCaR crossing one of the walkways between buildings with a horde of wailers right behind them. I couldn’t help them from here, because my inaccurate pistols would be just about as likely to hit them as the wailers, and I definitely didn’t want to shout in case there were any more near me, so I just took off in the direction of the building they were going to. Hopefully I’d be able to meet up with them inside.

I made it about halfway across the street before a big loading bay door at the rebar plant flew off of its tracks and the tolan started crawling out of the gap. Before it could see me, I immediately flung myself face down in a drainage ditch alongside the road and covered my head with my hooves. I didn’t know if tolans used their eyes or their noses more to hunt, but I just prayed that my orange and yellow mane wasn’t standing out like a beacon.

The tolan roared once, and I heard its claws stomp across the ground as it started moving toward the building where Mawari and them had run off to. I carefully, carefully poked my head out of the ditch in case I needed to run, and I watched it growl and sniff as it crossed the yard. When it was halfway across, though, it slowed down, and I saw its throat vibrate several times as it began to make a clicking sound. Its six legs moved much more slowly and smoothly, and it almost glided across the ground as it stalked up to the building.

Well, fuck. That was where I needed to go. And unless the tolan left any time soon, I wasn’t going to get inside without it noticing me.

I tried to look through my bags without making too much noise; I didn’t want to attract that monster’s attention to myself. I didn’t really have anything that would be good at distracting it, but then I looked at the pair of pistols I was carrying. After thinking it over for a minute, I sighed and slid the magazine out of one, leaving only the bullet in the chamber. Then, cocking the hammer back, I flung it as far as I could in the opposite direction of where I needed to go and took cover.

It took almost six seconds before I heard the gun fire off in the distance, and I heard the tolan growl. When I peeked over the edge of the ditch again, I saw the monster stalking in the direction I’d thrown the gun, clicking as it did so. I waited until it was almost at the corner of the rebar plant before I crawled out of the ditch and started trotting as quietly as I could toward the building it’d just left behind. By some stroke of luck, the tolan was too distracted by the gunshot to notice me, and I was able to slip in through the first door I found without having to scream and run for my life.

At least that went better than expected. I’d take whatever I could get.

The door I’d slipped through opened into a small room that had a lot of old computers in them. All their lights were dead and the faceplates were covered in rust and ash, but the whole place reminded me of the listening outpost back in Blackwash. I guess this is what it would have looked like if we hadn’t taken good care of it over the years. I had no idea what all these computers were for, but I figured they had to be involved in running the foundry in some way. Maybe they automated the machines or something like that. Couldn’t really say now.

There was a door at the other end of the room, so I snuck over to it, trying to keep my hooves as quiet as possible on the concrete floor. When I got there, I forced it open and stuck my muzzle through the gap, looking around for any wailers, but the room was too dark to see inside. I let some magic slowly build on my horn until I had enough of a glow to see with, and once I was sure there weren’t any wailers hiding inside, I pushed the door open the rest of the way and stepped inside.

There were a lot of rebar bundles in this plant, and some heavy duty machinery on wheels and tracks. If I’d had the time, and I wasn’t desperately trying to outrun and outsmart tolans and wailers, I would’ve loved to study this place and get a good look at the machines. But at the moment, I simply couldn’t. As I quietly trotted past a few decrepit machines, the rust coating their nuts and bolts like a fuzzy layer of paint, I promised myself that I’d come back here when all this bullshit with the code pieces was over. This was where the future of Auris lay; not in the messages and relics of the past, but in its machines and technology. One day, my descendants would need this stuff to build a new world. I just didn’t know how long that’d be from now.

I idly scratched my foreleg while I paused between two silent behemoths. This was all assuming that I was even alive a week from now and not some corpse mind-controlled by a mushroom.

Suddenly I heard a squawk and a trilling sound above me, and I tilted my head all the way up to see SCaR fly down from the rooms at the top of the plant. The drone excitedly chirped and circled around my head a few times, and I let out a sigh of relief and smiled at him. “Good to see you too, little guy,” I said, tapping my hoof against his top panel like I was petting him or something.

I looked back in the direction that he came from to see Mawari and Denawa looking down at me, both with relieved looks on their faces, though Denawa was kinda trying to hide his. They didn’t say anything, I guess because they didn’t want to wake any wailers if they were hiding around here, but Mawari gestured for me to come upstairs. I nodded back to them, and when they disappeared from the window, I carefully picked my way over to the nearest staircase and climbed up the catwalk. And for once, nothing tried to kill me.

When I finally made it up to them, I saw the three zebras sitting in a circle, busily reloading their weapons. “I don’t know how, but I’m alive,” I said, smiling and leaning against the wall. “I miss anything?”

Mawari chuckled and stood up. I didn’t know what she was doing until she stopped in front of me and hugged me. “Your ancestors must’ve been keeping a close eye on you. We all thought you were tolan food; we didn’t see you escape.” She stepped back and started looking me over. “How did you escape? And—oh my, just what happened to you?”

“What, do I look that fucked up?” I asked her. “I didn’t find any mirrors where I went.” I sat down and poked at my face with a hoof, wincing from all the bruises and cuts and all the dried blood plastered to my coat. “I found a hatch in the rebar plant that went to a scrap pile under the whole foundry. Got kinda run through by a piece of rebar sticking out of it.” I pointed to the stapled wounds on my stomach and back. “Passed out for a bit, woke up and had to fight off a wailer, then went looking around for a while. I guess I ended up at the living quarters or something, but I found some medical supplies to get myself patched up. Oh, and I also found these.”

I dug through my bags and pulled out the chipboards I’d stripped from the drone behind the desk. Mawari and Denawa looked at them in thought, while Rankan just kept his attention focused on spotting any creeping wailers. “Let me take a look,” Denawa said, and I slid the boards over to him. After a moment to look them over, he set two of them aside and held up the third. “This should be its memory. I just hope that your drone can read it.”

“I’m sure he can,” I said, and I tugged SCaR down with my magic. The drone squawked at me but was otherwise cooperative. I looked him over a few times and turned back to Denawa. “So do we just like shove it up his ass or…?”

The scavenger rolled his eyes. “Assuming it still has all of its hardware, there should be two wires in a compartment on its bottom that allow it to interface with boards like this one. All we have to do is connect them to the plugs on this board and it can read off what’s kept in the memory banks.”

I flipped SCaR over (much to his annoyance) and found a small rectangular panel on the bottom. I was able to pry it open using my magic, revealing an orange and a black wire neatly coiled inside. I pulled the two out and showed them to Denawa. “These?”

He nodded and passed me the board back. “Good. Connect them to their matching ports on the board, then give it a few seconds to transfer the data. Hopefully it has what we need.”

I did as he told me to, and SCaR squawked once and then made some kind of loud, low tone that just droned on and on. I looked at Mawari and Denawa, but they both just shrugged, and I noticed Rankan wearily checking the doors and hallway that led deeper into the offices. Then the noise stopped, and I looked at SCaR for a few moments before I unplugged the wires and flipped the drone back over.

SCaR didn’t do anything for a few seconds, but suddenly there was a spark and his thrusters ignited, propelling him a few feet off of the ground. He chattered and beeped a whole lot, and his thrusters flickered a few times, but then he started behaving like his usual self, slowly wandering around the room and occasionally beeping or trilling.

“Did it work?” I asked, cocking my head at the drone.

“It’s not my drone. I don’t know how to communicate with it,” Denawa said. “Can’t you just ask it?”

Now I really wished I had Gauge with me. He could understand SCaR’s beeping and babbling, or at least he acted like he did. I actually didn’t know. I’d just assumed…

Well, fuck it. “SCaR, you find any codes on there? Anything that will help us get into the warehouse?” I asked it. At least SCaR could understand Equiish, so I didn’t have to worry about that. The drone stopped puttering around the room and faced me, then began enthusiastically chirping and whirring.

Mawari looked at it, then looked at me. “Well? Are we good to go?” she asked, running a hoof through her sweaty mohawk.

“Uh… I’ll be completely honest with you, I have no idea what he says half the time,” I said, blushing a little bit.

“And the other half?” Denawa asked.

“Kind of? I mean I can tell when he’s happy or pissed…” Denawa rolled his eyes, and I turned back to SCaR. “Just… beep once or something if you found what we need.”

SCaR just kind of hovered in place and stared at me for a few seconds before he chirped. Great, now even the robots were giving me sass and thinking I was stupid.

Denawa didn’t look too impressed, and even Mawari frowned at me. “Right,” she said. “Maybe we should—?”

She abruptly stopped and her ears started twitching. The rest of us froze, and I started pointing my ear and a half around too. I didn’t hear anything at first, but then I recognized an odd clicking noise coming from below us.

Before I could even react, razor sharp claws tore through the thin metal floor of the observation office, shredding it to pieces and causing it to buckle. I scrambled back to the wall and drew my pistol, for all the good it would do, but the tolan kept slicing as we all tried to get away from the floor. Then it suddenly tore a huge chunk of the floor out, and Rankan’s eyes widened as he began to fall. Mawari screamed in terror and alarm, and I tried to grab the big zebra in my magic, but I was too exhausted from everything I’d been through today. My horn flared up but began to spark, and I cried out in pain as it felt like somepony hammered a chisel into my skull. I heard the tolan’s jaws snap shut, and when I could see again, I saw it mashing something that vaguely looked like a zebra to red paste between its teeth.

I pressed my hooves against my stomach and dry heaved. I’d seen ponies heads explode and shit before, but nothing as brutal and horrible as that.

“Rankan!” Mawari screamed, and I was afraid I was going to have to hold her back or something with my magic. Denawa’s face was stricken with horror, and we all slid closer to the walls and further away from the hole in the floor. My heart began to thunder in my chest, and I looked across the room and spotted another catwalk running along the wall of the plant before ending at a door in the corner. If we wanted to live, we had to get there before the tolan finished its meal.

“Come on!” I shouted, stumbling past the two of them and getting onto the catwalk. “We have to go now or we’re next!”

I looked over my shoulder to make sure they were coming when I was about halfway over the catwalk. Denawa dragged Mawari away from the hole in the ground, and after one last tear-stained shudder, she turned her head away and came galloping up behind me. I made it to the door first by virtue of my head start, and I quickly spun the shrieking rusty latch and started shouldering it open.

Or trying to, at least. The metal door was so swollen with rust that I couldn’t get it to open. Once he saw that I was struggling with it, Denawa rammed his shoulder into the door and immediately winced when it failed to open. Gritting his teeth, he pushed me out of the way and gestured to his sister. “Buck it open! Unicorn, just push with your horn!”

I nodded and gave the two zebras space to work, and they began hammering on the door with their rear hooves. I tried to help them with my telekinesis, but I was so burnt out and exhausted that I could only manage a few spurts at a time. When the door refused to open after ten seconds of frantic pounding and shoving, I felt my stomach drop when I heard the tolan begin clicking again.

“Together!” I screamed at them, and they looked at each other and nodded. While they quickly got situated, I prepared whatever last mana reserves I had and concentrated on the door. “On three! One! Two! Three!”

The two zebras bucked the door at the same time that I slammed it with a blast of my telekinesis, and I heard the ancient hinges shriek. But the door still wasn’t open enough, so I swallowed and spread my stance. “Again! One! Two! Three!”

We all struck it again, and this time, there was a decent space between the door and the frame, but it still wasn’t enough to squeeze through. I looked down at the ground to see the armored hide of the tolan stalking out from under the office, its four eyes practically shining with its hunger, and blood dribbling down its lips. I whipped my head back to them and stepped a little closer. “One more time! One! Two! Three!”

This time, when we all hit the door, it flew open, revealing a fire escape that went down to the road outside. We didn’t waste any time charging out of the door and down the stairs, and I heard the catwalk behind me shriek and tear as the tolan ripped it off of the wall with a roar. I didn’t want to look over my shoulder to see how close it was, so I instead focused on not falling on my face as I tried to gallop down the stairs on three hooves. Every second counted, because it was only a matter of time before the tolan got back out of the building and started chasing us across open ground.

“Across the street! The warehouse!” Mawari shouted, and I wasted no time following her toward one of the long buildings at the edge of the compound. As we ran, I saw a few wailers emerge from their hiding spots and begin shambling over toward us, so I drew my pistol and fired a few shots at the closest ones, trying to slow them down. Mawari and Denawa couldn’t aim while running like I could, so they just pressed on toward the warehouse. I noticed a dead zebra or two covered in bitemarks, and a few had their brains blown out from weird angles. I could only assume those were mercy killings after they were bit; better to die from a bullet to the brain rather than be turned into a walking corpse until you rot to pieces.

The warehouse door was already open, so the three of us galloped inside and immediately ran straight to the back. I didn’t know where the two of them were going until they went behind a stack of some old crates to reveal a terminal next to a blast door of some kind. “This is it,” Denawa said, pointing to the computer. “I hope that your drone found what it needed on those drives, otherwise we’re all going to die in here.”

“Then let’s save us some anticipation,” I said, and I pulled SCaR lower with my magic. He started to squawk at me, but I just pointed to the terminal. “Can you get it open? Please tell me you can get it open!”

SCaR warbled and set to work on the terminal, extending a plug or connector of some kind I didn’t know that he had and sticking it into a port on the wall. Mawari and Denawa immediately took positions behind him and readied their weapons, then began firing at the first wailers that came in range. Rotting, mushroom-y limbs and chunks of flesh came flying off of their bodies with every hit, and a few fell down and tripped some of the ones behind them. I fired off my pistol a ton of times, then slid a fresh magazine in it and continued shooting. I really hoped there was something useful behind that door, because I was basically out of spells and almost out of bullets.

Then I felt the ground shake and the tolan came charging around the corner, sending a few wailers flying with its big feet as it did so. It spotted us huddled against the back of the warehouse and let out a loud roar, then began charging right at us, shattering crates or simply knocking them aside. I fired at it in a panic, for all the good that would do, and my bullets either ricocheted off of its armor or shattered against its scales.

Luckily, SCaR chirped and warbled behind me, and I heard ancient pistons decompressing. The door behind us made a chime, and then it slid open. We didn’t waste any time turning tail and diving through it, immediately running as far into the darkness on the other side as we could.

We formed a little half-circle about fifteen feet in and started shooting at the wailers that’d followed us. “SCaR! Shut the door and hit the lights!” I shouted at the glowing light and two flames hovering overhead in the darkness. SCaR whistled and flew back up to the door, completely ignored by the flesh-hungry wailers, and fiddled with a dimly lit panel for a few seconds. There was another hiss of air, and the door slammed shut, actually crushing a wailer in half. The sudden darkness was jarring, especially since I could still hear a wailer or two moaning, but I was able to provide enough light to see by and we were able to mop up the last few threats.

Then ancient lights began to turn on, one by one, and I could see all the dust that we’d kicked up swirling in the air. I could also see just how reinforced the walls and roof of this part of the warehouse were, and even when the tolan slammed against the wall leading back into the main part, nothing bent or buckled. We were safe for the moment.

And then I turned around, and my jaw hit the floor.

There were tons of old crates stacked up high, each one with the same symbol printed on them that I’d seen at the dam: a unicorn horn going through the middle of a winged horseshoe, with a sun, heart, moon, and star arranged clockwise around them. On the right was an entire set of gun cases and ammo crates covered in dust, and on the left were heavy munitions of all shapes and sizes. And further in the back…

“What are those?” I asked, pointing to them. “They look like giant tank shells!”

“Orbital munitions,” Mawari said, her voice almost reverent in this treasure trove of the past. “The Synarchy used to have ships that fired thirty inch shells for orbital bombardment. They’d level everything in a city block when they hit. And those next to them are for ship to ship combat.” She pointed to a bunch of long and thin metal rods that were about four times as long as I was tall from hoof to horn. “They’d shoot them at ships and they’d use their momentum to overwhelm shields, pierce through compartments, and rupture the ship’s hull. A direct hit to an enemy ship’s bridge would completely disable it, because the crew would be sucked out into space.”

“And why is all this here?” I murmured, still kind of amazed by what I was seeing. “This is a steel foundry for fuck’s sake, not a military base.”

Mawari shrugged. “I can’t say, but the Synarchy was very secretive. They hated everyone who wasn’t a pony, zebras included. And we all hated your kind back,” she said, turning to me, but there wasn’t any hostility in her eyes. “Or, so that’s what the elders say. But your pony nation had enemies everywhere, and I think that they were always afraid that one day they’d be attacked and need to defend themselves, so they hid weapons stockpiles like this one everywhere.”

“Well, they were at war at the time the Silence started, but I don’t know if they were attacked or they started it,” I said. “I’ve found a few logs and journals in my travels, but nothing that really explains what was happening on Equus and why everything went to shit. Even the foundry workers here had no idea what was going on.”

The tolan rammed against the wall again, and I noticed a few flakes of paint come off of the bulwarks. Gesturing to the weapons cache on the far wall, I started trotting that way. “Come on. Let’s see what we can find.”

They followed me over, and together, we started digging. We dragged a few of the weapons cases over and opened them, and I had to stop myself from squealing as we opened case after case of pristine weapons, the finest shit money could buy. And speaking of money, there were probably a million bullets in here, maybe more. Even after splitting it evenly, I’d have more brass than I knew what to do with.

But small arms weren’t going to help us now, so we set those aside and started going through some of the heavy munitions crates. There were some anti-vehicle rifles and rocket launchers, and even some kind of laser gun that hardly looked finished with all the wires sticking out of it at random, but then we dragged out a heavy steel case and set it on the ground. And inside was a long steel frame that looked almost like a rectangular tube with a saddle mount and pop-out firing computer. Wires ran between bulky blocks of metal running along its length, and one end was painted yellow and had ‘warning’ printed in black. The presence of a set of replacement steel rails inside the case told me that this was exactly what we were looking for.

I pulled the railgun out of its case and looked it over, using my magic to lift the heavy thing up. Out of curiosity, I flipped the switch on the side, and I heard a hum as ancient circuitry powered up and the pop-out screen flashed to life.

“This,” I said, “is a sexy piece of equipment.”

I set it down so Mawari and Denawa could look at it, and I pulled out a few heavy discs that were set inside the case as well. The case came with five of them, and when I picked one up, I was surprised at how heavy they were. It was hardly bigger than my hoof but I’m pretty sure it weighed close to twenty-five pounds. No wonder that case had been so hard to move around; the five slugs in here probably weighed more than the railgun itself!

Denawa nodded in approval. “If this thing doesn’t kill the tolan, then I don’t know what will,” he said.

“Do we know how to use it?” Mawari asked. “Looks complicated.”

“I dunno,” I said, hefting it up again. “I put it on my back, point, and shoot? How hard could it be?”

Just then, claws tore through the metal wall between two of the reinforced bulkheads. The tolan roared at us as it tried to force its way through, and in a few minutes, it might’ve been able to. Growling, I stomped around to face it and picked up the railgun in my magic. “Won’t you just fucking take a hint?!” I screamed at it, and I took one of the slugs out and slotted it into a circular port at the base of the gun. The firing computer displayed a few messages, then proudly told me that the slug was loaded and that it was priming the magnets. Mawari and Denawa took a few steps back as the gun began to whirr to life, and by the time the tolan had made enough space to stick its head through the wall, the computer displayed a green exclamation mark and the word ‘PRIMED’ began flashing in big letters at the top.

“This is for Nova, you piece of shit!”

I pulled the trigger, and the computer chimed at me. The magnets hummed and the whole thing buzzed with electricity, and I actually saw the air deform around the barrel rails as it fired the slug faster than a bullet. Amazingly, there wasn’t any recoil because the slug was pushed along with magnets, but I felt the air slam back together as the twenty-five pound hunk of metal tore through it at supersonic speeds.

And the tolan… well, it had armor, and it was huge and vicious, true. But when the slug hit it in the chest, it passed right through its hide like there wasn’t anything there. I heard the lump of metal shatter bone and pop scaly armor before shearing straight through the roof of the warehouse. Blood and gore flew out through the exit wound like it’d been sucked out, making a red tidal wave behind the monster.

Then it went limp and slumped over, the last of the railgun slug’s momentum knocking it away from the wall. A second later, the warehouse shook with a loud thwump as the tolan hit the ground, dead.

And I couldn’t help myself but cheer.

Chapter 13: The Last Secrets of a Steel Mill

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Chapter 13: The Last Secrets of a Steel Mill

I’d killed a fucking tolan.

Ponies might have done it before me—Zip herself had done it before me—and I knew I wasn’t going to be the last. But to just stand in front of its corpse, an enormous pile of meat and bones and scales, and to realize that I’d just killed a monster that could rip steel apart like it was paper was absolutely amazing. I honestly felt a little lightheaded just trying to understand how the fuck I could’ve killed something like that.

But the ‘how’ part was pretty easy. The tolan had twisted when it fell, and I was staring through a hole in its chest about as wide as my head. I could actually see the wall of the warehouse on the other side. Its armored scales were all cracked and shattered, and I could see a few organs that’d been ripped into pieces from the slug punching through its chest. It wasn’t the slug that’d done that, though. All that damage came from the air sucking the tolan’s guts out the other side when the slug ripped clean through it.

I tried to imagine what would happen to a pony if you hit one with the railgun. She probably would just explode and evaporate if you hit center of mass.

Mawari and Denawa stepped out of the arsenal behind me and got a closer look at the monster. I’d told SCaR to keep an eye out for any more wailers, but so far I hadn’t heard anything from him, and there were a lot of dead wailers that’d been smooshed into paste by the tolan’s feet scattered around the door. Finally, the three of us could just relax after a night that went so horribly wrong.

“I can’t believe that monster is dead,” Mawari murmured, carefully walking around the tolan like it was going to come back to life any second. “How these things never wiped out the first colonists all those centuries ago is beyond me.”

“The military probably brought a lot of railguns with them,” I said. I’d left the railgun in the arsenal because it was really heavy to carry around, and I got close enough to the beast to actually touch it. My hoof clacked off of its scales, and I hit them a few more times just out of curiosity. It sounded like I was banging on a chunk of stone; no wonder that thing was so fucking hard to kill.

“We could make a lot of bullets off of its hide,” Denawa said. “Most smiths will buy them at fifteen Cs a plate. They’re great for making bulletproof armor with, if a bit heavy.”

“Denawa, we have an entire stockpile of weapons to go through!” Mawari exclaimed. “There’s probably millions of bullets in there! More than anything we can scavenge off of a tolan!”

Denawa just shrugged and pulled out a knife. “Yeah, but what will the other Runners think if we just head home with thousands of bullets? We’ll be on the wrong end of a gun or a knife in a week.” He hopped onto the tolan’s corpse and started moving toward where the railgun had fucked it up. “If we take back the scales and just stash the bullets somewhere so other scavengers won’t find them, then we’ll be much safer.”

He jammed the knife under the edge of one of the tolan’s shattered armor plates, and Mawari sighed next to me. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, shaking her head. Then, turning to me, she stuck out her hoof. “I feel it’s only fair that you get a share at least. You and your drone helped us out so much; we wouldn’t have been able to get into the warehouse without you.”

“Or kill the tolan,” I said, smirking a little bit. “I guess I helped with that as well.”

Denawa coughed and rolled his eyes. “We wouldn’t have had to fight a tolan or as many angry wailers if you hadn’t have brought it to the foundry in the first place.”

“True, but what’s done is done,” Mawari said. “So, how about it? I don’t know where you’re going, if you’re a scavenger or whatever, but you at least deserve some of the spoils.”

“Well, I could use a new gun,” I said. “I lost mine fighting the tolan in the first place.” Smiling, I shook her hoof. “I’ll take a quick look through what’s back there and pick out a few nice things for myself. I can’t be travelling too heavily; I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“So you’re a wanderer then?” Mawari asked me. She nodded to the brand on my flank. “Or a runaway who really knows what she’s doing?”

“It’s… a long story,” I said, glancing at my brand. “The short version is that I got away before the Crimson could make me a slave, but not fast enough to leave with both my marks intact. Now I’m on a mission for the Sentinels while they focus on rebuilding the valley to the north.” I paused, unsure if I should ask them, but I decided to anyway. “Say… if you guys are scavengers, have you run across any old Synarchy installations to the south of here? Some place where there’s a lot of waterfalls or something?”

Mawari and Denawa looked at each other. Denawa frowned, but his sister shook her head at him. Then turning back to me, she nodded. “There are… rumors of an old facility hidden in the mountains, under the waterfalls. The Ruin Runners tried to find it a few years back.”

“Ruin Runners?” I asked her. “You’ve mentioned them a few times now. What are you guys? Just scavengers with a fancy name?”

Mewari chuckled. “At its barest, yes. We’re organized and can distribute resources better than little scavenging bands or families can. We try to both find forgotten installations on Auris and plunder them bare. It takes every last bullet and bit of technology to survive this world, and everything we can find helps.”

“It doesn’t help if we let others in on promising secrets,” Denawa growled from the tolan’s carcass. “I’m glad you’re not in charge of the gang, Mewari, or we’d be out of business in a week.”

Mewari rolled her eyes. “Maybe if she actually had anything to go off of. She’d have as much luck as we have had trying to find this place.”

My ears perked a little bit. “Well? Did you find anything?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Not the installation, no. But we found some old Equestrian tech scattered around Bluewater Gorge. We weren’t able to go searching for too long, though. A lot of shrikes make their nests in those mountains, and the weather turned bad. But if there’s anywhere in the mountains where the Synarchy might have hid a base of some kind, then it’d have to be in the Gorge.”

I smiled and stepped forward to give her a hug. “You’ve just made these next few days so much easier for me,” I said. Then I nodded over her shoulder. “I’m gonna take a quick look around the arsenal and pick some things out that I might need. I want to be armed before I go check up on my friends.”

Denawa stopped what he was doing and spat out the knife. “I thought you said you were alone?”

“Just because I said it, doesn’t mean that I meant it,” I said, winking at him. “I didn’t know whether I could trust you guys or not earlier. But, well, I think you’re all pretty good.”

He sighed and shook his head. “They better not want cuts, too.”

“Relax, Denawa,” Mawari said, shooting a quick glare at him. “We’re already splitting the cut fewer ways than we were before.”

Denawa tore a big armored plate off of the tolan’s hide and tossed it onto the ground. “I guess we should work on laying them to rest, shouldn’t we?”

I felt a little remorse in my gut and flattened my ears. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know they were friends and family… I-I just was too weak and startled to catch Rankan before the tolan got him.”

Mawari put her hoof on my shoulder. “What’s done is done. All of us knew the risks going on. No Runner ever goes picking through ruins without knowing that they could die at any moment.” She sadly chuckled and glanced at her brother. “Denawa and I have been through many places much worse than this.”

Her brother slid off of the tolan’s body and slowly walked over to me. “Yeah, like Equestrian installations. If you do find one in Bluewater Gorge, be very careful. Its defenses could still be active after all these years. That means turrets, robots, and all other sorts of countermeasures you probably can’t even think of. At least it means other scavengers tend to leave them alone. They just want scrap and salvage, they’re not interested in running a gauntlet of traps for a few secrets.”

“Sounds like I’ll need to talk with you guys later,” I said. “You Runners have probably seen and heard a lot of useful things I’d like to know about. Maybe you can help me.”

“Maybe,” Mewari said. “But we’re not supposed to talk about any of our finds. That’ll be up to the boss. If you ever come to Three Rivers, look for us there. That’s where we’ll be going after this, and it’s where we keep our base of operations.”

“Three Rivers. Got it. One of my companions probably knows where that is.” I turned back to the door and trotted inside. “Now to see what toys the Synarchy left us!”

I spent the next half hour just searching through the crates of weapons and ammo inside the warehouse, trying to find the perfect weapon. It had basically everything: pistols and assault rifles, shotguns and sniper rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and some purpose-built weapons that I couldn’t really make sense of. I kind of wanted to take the railgun with me in case I ran into any more tolans, but it would’ve been way too heavy to carry. Maybe if I was an earth pony I could’ve shouldered that load and not been bothered by it, but I just didn’t have that kind of strength or stamina.

Finally, I made my choice: a very modern BR14M that still smelled like fresh oil. It was the last firearm Equestria had ever made before the Silence; the Sentinels only had a small cache of them at the Bastion, and I’d gotten to try one out at the firing range, but they wouldn’t let me trade my BR12A for it. It had more stopping power than my old battle rifle, could be configured between semi auto, burst fire, and full auto, and had a special set of variable optics with a rangefinder and night vision. Though moonless nights weren’t all that common on Auris, it’d definitely help if I ever had to fight in a cave or something.

Oh, and it also had a grenade launcher on its bottom attachment rail. I knew that’d be useful in the future.

I stockpiled bullets and grenades for it and refilled my saddlebags. It was tempting to just stuff them with as much brass as I could carry, but all the bullets in the world weren’t going to mean anything if I was carrying too much shit to move properly. I laid my collection out neatly, though, in case I wanted to stop by one more time on the way out. Ace might appreciate taking a look through the stockpile here, and maybe I could get something for Gauge or Nova. Adding more firepower to our little group certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Though if only there was some way for me to give Nova her wing back…

I didn’t want to go back and face Gauge and Nova just yet, though. Gauge had probably calmed Nova down some, but I still felt really guilty about just running off and leaving them alone. They were probably terrified that something nasty was going to find them, and I hadn’t left them all that much to defend themselves with.

Well I’m just the shittiest friend, aren’t I?

I decided that if I was going to stall until it was closer to sunrise and Ace showing up, I might as well take a closer look around the warehouse. Maybe I’d find some neat piece of technology or something that might help on the road ahead. I could already see a big crate labeled ‘RATIONS’ a little bit farther back, and my stomach decided that it’d be a good time to remind me to eat something now that the excitement and danger was finally over. So, picking my way around the crates and shifting a few off to the side with my magic, I started making my way deeper into the warehouse.

I stopped once I got a little bit further in. There were some open crates of rations here, with plastic wrappers tossed everywhere. I frowned and sifted through the garbage some. Somepony had been back here, but the wrappers were very old and dirty. Whoever it was, they’d been back here a long time ago.

And then I found a skeleton curled up between some of the rations crates.

I may have jumped back a little bit in surprise, and part of me expected it to suddenly rise up and come snapping at me like a wailer. But it didn’t move, and it was covered in webs and dust, and the tatters of ancient clothing covering its bones had almost wasted away into nothing. And next to it was a piece of etch glass, and I remembered the message I’d found back at the living quarters. Was this Mr. Billet? What was he doing back here?

There were actually a few pieces of etch glass around him, so I picked one up at random. I wondered why ponies before the Silence loved this stuff, though. Wouldn’t paper be easier? Maybe I was missing something. I mean, it preserved notes remarkably well, because paper would’ve just rotted and computer tablets would just break or run out of power and then nopony could read what was on them. Who knows?

The first note was a short message, but it wasn’t really all that clear:

EQUUS IS LOST.
AURIS WILL CONTINUE OUR LEGACY.
WITH THE PASSING OF THE DUSK, WE WILL RISE AGAIN.
WE SURVIVE TOGETHER.

Talk about cryptic messages at the end of the world, right? For some reason, I shivered after reading those four lines. They were so vague, but so terrifying. Whatever ‘end’ had come to Equestria, they’d seen it coming long enough to shoot a message out to Auris. I wondered if there were more copies of this message lying around at various installations and such. There certainly weren’t any at Blackwash, but if a random foundry owner got a message like this, then surely others would have as well. But more importantly, I had to wonder just what exactly happened. If only they could’ve sent us a clearer final message, then maybe we would’ve been able to make sense out of the Silence.

I set that piece of etch glass aside and pulled out the next one:

It’s over. The unthinkable has happened.
Nopony here knows what’s going on—I don’t even know enough to tell them. I put the foundry on lockdown until we could figure out what happened, but the military here isn’t cooperating. They want the plants running at maximum capacity, saying that we need to have the next shipments ready on schedule. But I don’t think there’s going to be a next shipment. The message I got on the emergency comms makes it sound like the apocalypse came to Equus. I know we were losing the war, and losing badly. I have to wonder if the Coalition finally did us in.
Lieutenant Rider is going to the Ivory City to meet with the rest of the Synarchy brass here on Auris to figure out what we should do. If Equestria really is gone, then we’ll need to prepare for the worst. It’ll be up to us to carry on and continue the fight from afar.
I just pray to Celestia that my family is still safe. If only I could’ve brought them to Auris before the blockade formed. If only the Lieutenant hadn’t waited three months to tell me that it was too late to get my family off of Equus.
But for now, I’ll do my part, and hopefully one day I’ll see them again. Assuming that the military can do their part, too.
We Survive Together.

I frowned and immediately skimmed through the next few glass tablets. They were a lot more mundane than the first two, but I could tell that Billet was slowly growing exhausted and on edge. I decided to skip right to the last one he had:

Fuck the Synarchy. Fuck the High Queen. They’ve killed us all.
It’s been almost a month since we last heard anything. Where we used to get messages two or three times a day, there’s been absolutely nothing, and our attempts at getting an answer all failed. And Rider never returned. Not fast enough to stop this all.
The garrison here mutinied. Killed the sergeants and started looting the place. They claimed that since we hadn’t heard from the military back home for so long, the Synarchy must be dead. That means we’re all stranded here. Auris doesn’t have the infrastructure to support as many ponies as Equestria stuffed onto it. We were still maybe thirty years away from becoming self-sufficient. And with the Synarchy gone, and all us left out here all by ourselves, that means only two possible outcomes. Either the Coalition finds us and kills us all, or we descend into madness. The latter has already begun.
I’ve heard the gunshots all day. My workers have been screaming and dying, powerless to do anything. The soldiers who once protected and watched over us are now gunning us down and taking whatever they can. I can only imagine it’s the same elsewhere. Desperation and damnation brings out the ugliest in us, and both are in abundance, it seems.
Some of the soldiers are trying to get in right now; I can hear them banging on the doors, demanding that I open up. But I won’t let them in; they’ll just kill me. I shudder to imagine what those marauders would do to the mining complex at the mountain not too far from here with all this firepower. Thank Celestia that the Lieutenant and I were the only ones who knew the code to open this door.
As far as I’m concerned, this is it for me. I don’t plan on living in a world where I have to fight for survival, killing my fellow pony. It’s just a slow death, and I’d prefer to die with my dignity intact. There’s a lot in here that can at least grant me that.
If anypony finds this years, decades, centuries from now, I’m sorry. Take this as an apology from somepony who stood on the threshold of the end of the world and fueled the madness that finished off civilization. I can’t imagine what you’ll have to do to survive. I can’t imagine what life on Auris will be like a hundred years from now. I hope it’ll be better than how I leave it. I know it won’t be.
Steel Billet

I read and reread that last one a few times. It was… melodramatic, sure, but then I glanced at his skeleton and the hole in the top of his skull. A loaded handgun and a spent casing were nearby. I guess he wanted to die in peace or something, that’s why he wrote this whole thing out.

I set the pieces of etch glass back down next to his bones; they weren’t going to be of any use to me, so I might as well just leave them. Besides, I knew all I needed to know. Okay, not in the slightest, but I was getting a clearer picture of what the last days of the foundry were like, and more importantly, what the last days of Equestria and the beginning of the Silence were like. And it did not paint a pretty picture. What’s worse was that all these messages and things were just throwing more paint onto the canvas, not making the whole thing clearer. Just what happened?

“I wish I could just ask you what went wrong,” I muttered to the corpse. “I wish I could ask any of you fucking pre-Silence idiots that fucked everything up for us. But I guess I’ll never know.” After snatching a half-dozen rations from an open box, I shook my head and trotted away, leaving the bones behind, undisturbed. As much as he tried to sound apologetic in his final message before he killed himself, he was a part of everything that went wrong. Why should I waste the time and effort to bury somepony who destroyed the world?

Mawari and Denawa weren’t by the tolan anymore when I emerged from the arsenal; I guess they were finding the bodies of their comrades so they could bury them or whatever it is that zebras do to their dead. But it was about time that I went back to Gauge and Nova anyway, so I set off from the warehouse and into the faint blue glow of the early morning. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, but its light was chasing the night away. It’d be up in half an hour or so, and then I could look for Ace. I kept my new BR14M at the ready, though, just in case I needed it.

It was a little confusing to find my way back to the building Gauge and Nova were hiding in; all the running for my life tonight had gotten me pretty disoriented. I just tried to head in the general direction of north until I made it to the edge of the compound, and then retraced my steps from there. It didn’t take me too long to find a building with the doors torn off their hinges and the wall buckling inward. And there, lying in the debris, was a twisted and broken white wing, with bones sticking out of feathers that’d been stained red with blood.

I stopped and just stared at it for a second. There was even a small pool of blood around where I’d sawed through it. It didn’t feel right to just leave out here, but I didn’t know what to do. Bury it? Burn it? Give it back to Nova?

Okay, no, that last one would be an absolutely horrible idea. The less she had to think about it, the better. Though I knew that she wasn’t going to stop thinking about it for the rest of her life. If only I knew healing magic like Dr. Hacksaw. I would’ve spent weeks working on Nova’s wing and either reattaching the old one or making an entirely new one from scratch. It’s the only way I would’ve forgiven myself, the only way to make things right. But all I knew was fire magic.

Sighing, I carefully moved the wing to a dirt clearing then set it on fire. I watched as the feathers curled before evaporating into soot, smelling the awful smell of cooking pony flesh. But I kept the fire fueled, even forcing more magic into it, until all that remained was a few shattered and broken bones sitting in a pile of ash. Then, scooping up the ash in my magic, I tossed it into the sky, where the wind took care of the rest. It was only fitting that I returned a part of her to the sky. With luck, a piece of her wing would never stop flying, carried on air currents across the world. It would be small consolation to the mare herself, but it just felt like the right thing to do.

It was a huge relief to me to see that the door to the conference room was still securely shut when I got back to it. Trotting up to the door, I knocked twice. “Gauge? It’s me. Open up if you’re still alive in there.”

I heard movement behind the door and then the sound of something heavy being dragged away from it. A moment later, the door unlatched and I saw Gauge on the other side. He sighed with relief upon seeing me, and he opened the door a little wider. “Thank the stars you’re still alive!” he said. “We were getting worried about you, you’d been gone for so long!”

“I’m glad I’m alive too,” I said, shaking my head and stepping inside. “For a second there—ow!” I winced and staggered back, rubbing the stinging spot on my cheek where Gauge slapped me. “The fuck was—okay, yeah, I probably really deserved that.”

“Yeah, you did,” Gauge said, frowning at me. Then this time he actually smiled a little bit and hugged me. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”

I returned the hug and nuzzled his neck. “Almost wasn’t,” I said, and when I moved a little bit to the left, I winced. The Stabil-Ice was mostly worn off by now, and I knew in an hour that my side would be hurting like a motherfucker. “But I’m in one piece. That’s all that matters.”

I stepped inside and let SCaR float in before I shut the door behind me, just in case. Gauge and his drone had a little happy reunion, while Nova was asleep on the floor, a blanket draped over her, and the hair around her eyes matted with dried tears. She looked so normal just lying there, resting peacefully. With the blanket covering her back, it wasn’t hard to imagine she still had both her wings.

“How is she?” I whispered, feeling the guilt well up in my gut just from looking at her.

Gauge sat down on the edge of the table and bit his lip. “Tired,” was the first thing he said, his eyes drifting over to his marefriend. “Upset. Scared, mostly.” He shook his head. “I don’t blame her. It’s less the physical pain and more what it means for her. She’ll never fly again. She’ll be ground bound for the rest of her life. I can’t possibly imagine what that feels like for her.”

“I can,” I said, hanging my head. “I don’t know what I’d do without my horn, without my magic. It’s so much more than just a bone sticking out of my skull. It’s who I am. Now Nova’s afraid that she’s not Nova anymore. She’s afraid she’s some mare stuck between being an earth pony and a pegasus and not really being either.”

Gauge nodded. “I see what you mean. I just… just wish there was some way to help her.”

“You and me both.” Digging through my saddlebags, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. It was exactly what I needed after all the shit I’d been through tonight, and all the shit I still had left before we could leave this hellhole behind. “It’s just gonna take a while. We’ll just have to be there for her.”

“Mmhmm…” He hummed in agreement and just watched me for a bit as I blew smoke toward the ceiling so it wouldn’t get in his face.

I sat down against the wall and shook the box at him. “What? You want one? I’ll share.”

He just shook his head and held up a hoof. “Not my thing. Nova always complains about how bad your breath smells. I don’t think she’d like it if I took up the habit too.”

“My breath doesn’t smell that bad…” I insisted.

Gauge chuckled at me. “If you say so, Em. If you say so.”

Silence passed between us for a few seconds while I worked on the cigarette, but eventually Gauge broke it again. “Well, tell me about your little trip. Did you find anypony else? You were gone for a while. And what about the tolan? I heard it roaring a few times, even from here, and every time it did, I worried that you’d just become dinner.”

“Oh, yeah, the tolan’s fucking dead,” I said, smirking a little when Gauge’s eyes widened in surprise. “And those other ponies we heard weren’t actually ponies, they were zebras. And together we found an entire arsenal of stashed weapons the Synarchy hid here and we used a railgun to blow a hole right through the tolan. Then I got this,” I said, showing off my rifle a bit, “and we came back here.”

“So where are they now?” Gauge said. “Are they alright?”

“Mawari and Denawa are taking care of their dead,” I said. “A lot of them died to wailers—those zombie things,” I said, pointing to the corpse of the one we killed earlier, “while they were running around. They’re very nice and trustworthy. Though Denawa, he’s a little bit suspicious of me, but I don’t blame him.”

“Ah. Well, hopefully I’ll get a chance to meet them before we leave. I haven’t seen any zebras since we left Blackwash, apart from a few slaves in Hole.”

I nodded in agreement. “They should be hanging around for a bit. There’s a ton of shit in that arsenal we found, and they want to move a bunch of it someplace safe and hidden in case other scavengers find it, I guess. We can go talk to them when Ace gets here, and then it’s off to Bluewater Gorge. From what they said, it sounds like that’s where the next piece of the code is.” Looking at Nova, I swallowed hard. “I just hope that we don’t have to lose any more limbs to get to it.”

-----

It didn’t take too long after that for morning to come. I could tell by the light coming in through the holes in the ceiling that the sun was beginning to rise, so I took my bags and my new rifle and went to the door. Nova was still passed out and Gauge was on the verge of falling asleep, and he looked up from Nova’s side when I opened the door. I nodded at him, he nodded back, and then he closed his eyes and laid his head down next to Nova’s.

I decided to sit on the bridge that connected the two buildings together. It had a good view of the north and was wide open, so hopefully Ace would be able to find me without too much trouble. Plus, I could also keep track of the movement of any wailers or anything around here. I didn’t need us to get jumped when we were so close to the end.

Speaking of wailers, I looked at my bandaged foreleg again. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or not, but I felt like I had a little bit of a headache, and my stomach was feeling pretty upset. But I didn’t know if that was because I was slowly turning into a fucking zombie, or if it was simple exhaustion and exertion. I’d used a lot of magic tonight, lost a lot of blood, and hadn’t eaten anything good for a while now, apart from those rations I’d snatched from the warehouse. I supplemented those with some of the fresh greens that we’d gotten back in Hole for the road. The greens were kind of small, but green-leafed plants don’t grow all that well on Auris. I guess that’s why the natural plant life is all purple and pink and orange instead. Still, the Equus grasses and flowers were tasty enough, especially after a night as taxing as this one had been.

I don’t know how long I sat on that catwalk, just staring off to the north, when the door to the conference room opened. I glanced over and was surprised to see Nova standing in the doorway. For all the sleep that she’d gotten (however much that was, really), she didn’t look any less tired. Her left wingtip dragged on the ground, though when she saw me looking at her, she tucked it in a little bit. I saw the stub on her shoulder twitch, and I could imagine her trying to move a limb that wasn’t there.

She slowly made her way over to me, and I stood up, though I didn’t move, unsure of what to do. Do I say something? Hug her? Cry with her? Instead, she surprised me by walking right into my chest and pressing her neck against mine. Her left wing wrapped around my back as she pulled me into a limp but heartfelt hug. “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered, shivering slightly as she did so. “I’m sorry for screaming at you earlier.”

I didn’t really know how to react at first, but after a second, I pressed back against her and placed my foreleg on her back. “I’m so sorry, Nov,” I whispered into her ear. “I wish there had been another way…”

Nova sniffled, and the feathers on my back shifted some. “Yeah…”

We broke off the hug, then sat down on the catwalk together. I just held her close, and she kept her wing loosely around my shoulders. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, and I didn’t blame Nova for not having anything to say, either. For now, the silence was enough, and I was just happy to be there for her. She needed this as much as I needed it.

Pretty soon, I spotted a dark speck on the northern horizon, slowly growing a little bit larger each passing minute. It took another twenty minutes or so, but soon I could make out Ace’s features from the catwalk. She circled over the foundry once or twice, I guess looking for us, before she suddenly broke off and glided down. She came in for a rough landing, stumbling before she caught herself using the railing, and took a few breaths. “Good,” she panted. “You made it… just give me a second…”

She looked like she’d been through Tartarus and back. The half-curtain of her black mane was frayed and clumped with sweat, mud, and dried blood, and there were a few streaks of dried brown blood on her neck and her chest. She’d wrapped a bandage around the upper part of her right foreleg, and a few of her feathers were sticking out at odd angles. I noticed that her wingtips were stained black with gunpowder, and there was some soot on her chest and legs. I guess her two days since we’d all escaped from Hole were just as nightmarish for her as they were for us.

“Holy fuck, Ember, you look like shit,” she grunted once she finally caught her breath. “Good to see you ain’t dead yet. I worried for a bit after I flew off that y’all were gonna blow it.”

“We’re in one—” I immediately bit down on my tongue to stop myself. “We’re alive. Barely. Had to fight off a ton of wailers and a tolan. It’s been an awful night.”

Ace nodded. “That tolan still around, or you manage to shake it?”

“Killed it,” I said to her surprise and my smug satisfaction. “Turns out there was an arsenal that the Synarchy hid here. Me and some zebras from the Ruin Runners found it, and then took it down with a railgun.” After a second, I added, “We can go there in a bit if you want to take a look at the guns and shit. Just please don’t shoot at any zebras, okay? They’re nice and they helped me out a ton.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I ain’t gonna bother them none. I think.”

“You got something against the Ruin Runners?” I asked her, noting the hesitation. “Or just zebras in general?”

“I used to run with the Runners as a filly,” Ace said. “Our parting weren’t exactly agreeable. I’ll leave it at that.” Her eyes slid between me and Nova and she cocked her head. “Where’s your zebra? He with his kind?”

I nodded back toward the building. “Sleeping. We’ve had a fucking shitty night.”

Ace nodded. “And the drone?” I think she sounded a little bit more worried about SCaR than she did Gauge.

“With him.”

“Good.” She stood up and stretched her wings, though I noticed that she suddenly stopped and carefully tucked them in at her sides when she saw Nova. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and her lips twitched for a few seconds, but she roughly shook her head. “We should… I mean, are you lot good to go? I put the RPR in a loop, cut down a lot of their soldiers, but we ain’t gonna wanna hang around here for all that long. Hunter’s got a vendetta against y’all, and I already spent the past two days pissing her off something fierce.”

I nodded and started to stand. I intended on helping Nova stand, but the damage to my side and just my general exhaustion meant that she had to help me instead. I gave Nova a quick nuzzle as a ‘thank you’, and I turned around and staggered back toward the conference room. “Come on. Let’s get Gauge, and then we can check out the arsenal before we go.” I yawned and shook my head a few times to try to get some blood back into my brain. “And maybe take a quick nap while we’re at it, too.”

-----

Ace whistled as she looked through some of the guns I’d left out on the floor. “These gals sure are pretty. You ain’t gonna find freshly oiled guns like these no more.”

The four of us (and SCaR) had gone back to the arsenal after collecting all our things, and now Ace was looking through all the weaponry. Gauge had gone off to dig through some crates off to the side, and Nova simply sat against the wall, her eyes blankly staring away as she thought. What those thoughts were, I didn’t know, but I assumed that they weren’t pleasant thoughts. How I wished I could help her.

Our accompanying bandit put down the BR14 she was looking at and moved on to a set of bulky pistols lying in their case. “SP-9s? No way!” she exclaimed, giddily digging them out. I moved over to her side as she adjusted the configuration for wing grip and slid them between her feathers. She moved her wings a bit like she was aiming, and I saw her grin get wider and wider the more she played with them. “Been a long time since I’ve seen one of these puppies. Longer still since I’ve seen a working one, let alone two.”

“But they’re bulky as shit,” I told her. “I don’t even think they’ll fit in your holsters.”

“Psshh. Holsters are easy enough to replace. The firepower these things have? Not so much.” She spun one around her wingtip a whole bunch (I don’t even know how she did it with only her feathers) and pointed it forward again. “They don’t use bullets either. They pull their ammo straight from ambient magic in the air.”

She trotted back over to the doorway and aimed at the tolan’s corpse, and then I saw a blue glow where the slides should have been. After a second of charging, Ace squeezed the triggers several times, shooting a volley of blue beams at the tolan. They shot more than even a submachine gun could manage in a few seconds, but they only left tiny scorch marks on its armor. Those would only sting at the most; I didn’t see them killing a pony.

“What, they just tickle ponies to death?” I asked her. “I got worse burns working in my family’s forge.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Ace said, and then she charged the pistols again. This time, she kept the triggers pulled longer before releasing them, and larger blasts of blue energy hit the tolan’s armor. These ones actually made the scales melt some, and a little bit of sustained fire was enough to work through the armor and get to the skin underneath. Then, she charged one for almost ten seconds before firing it, and the recoil viciously yanked her wing back as a blast of energy larger than my head hit the tolan in the back of the neck. It burned through its armor and several inches of its flesh, leaving charred muscle and bone behind by the time it finally dissipated.

I kind of gawked at the damage for a minute and rubbed my eyes. “Okay, I take it back. Those things are fucking great.”

“Ain’t they, though?” Ace said, grinning at me. She tossed her old pistols out of their holsters and attempted to put the SP-9s in them, but they didn’t really fit all that well. Her ear flicked in annoyance and she trotted back to the weapon case. “Ah, figures. Better do some digging so I can carry the damn things.”

“Ember?” I looked over my shoulder to see Mawari poking her head into the arsenal. Upon seeing me, she relaxed some and set down the rifle she’d had between her hooves. “Oh, good, it is you. I heard voices that I didn’t recognize, and I just hoped they were your friends.”

“The shit did they do to the tolan?” I heard Denawa shout from the other room. “Those were valuable scales! The spines alone were twenty Cs each!”

In front of me, Ace just rolled her eyes and went back to looking for holsters.

I trotted over to Mawari. “Yeah, these are my friends,” I said, flicking my ear in their direction. “The two pegasi are Nova and Ace. Ace is the one with all the guns.” Mawari waved to the two, though Ace only spared her a quick look over her shoulder before going back to her work, and Nova waved a little but self-consciously wrapped her wing around herself. She was sitting with her left side to Mawari, and I could tell she was trying to keep her right side out of sight.

“A pleasure,” Mawari said.

“And this greasy motherfucker is Gauge,” I said, pointing to him as he came trotting over, SCaR puttering along behind. “I’m not sure if zebras are any different from where I come from, but you two look the same, at least.”

“I don’t think you could’ve made a more racist comment if you tried,” Gauge said, lightly brushing me out of the way. He and Mawari sized each other up for a moment before they touched hooves. “Good to meet you. Haven’t seen a free zebra for almost a month now.”

“You should come to Three Rivers sometime,” Mawari said. “There are a lot of us there. The city isn’t anything like Hole or Thatch or the Ivory City. We’re neutral, and that’s how we like to keep it. Stop by whenever you’re done with looking around Bluewater,” she added, nodding to me.

“We just might,” I said. “Unless we find exactly what we’re looking for there, I imagine we’ll have to swing by and get reoriented.”

“And just what are you looking for?” Mawari asked me. “You mentioned that it was a mission for the Sentinels, yet you don’t have their armor or anything. What do they want with the rest of Auris?”

I hesitated for a second, squirming in place. “I… well, I don’t think I can tell you,” I said after some time. “We’re looking for some very old and probably hidden Equestrian installations. They have something that we’re after.” I didn’t say anything more than that, because even though I trusted Mawari, the fewer people who knew about the code and just what it could possibly mean, the better. After all, she might not be interested, but what if she or Denawa mentioned it to somepony who was? The last thing we needed was more people trying to snatch up code pieces.

“Well, uh, good luck with that, then, whatever it is,” Mawari said, flashing a small smile at me. Then, sighing, she looked around the warehouse. “While Denawa’s working on the tolan carcass, I guess I should start getting things organized for when we leave. It’s going to be a lot of back and forth trips over the next week or two, I think. You guys take whatever you need, while you’re at it.”

I stepped forward and gave her a quick hug. “You’re too kind.”

Mawari patted me on the back. “Yes, so I’m told.” When we separated, she looked me in the eyes and rested a hoof on my shoulder. “You stay safe, wherever you go. I hope your mission goes smoothly.”

“Fat chance of that happening, but thanks,” I said, smiling a little. “And I hope you and Denawa get super fucking rich from all this shit.”

She flashed her teeth at me. “I certainly hope so, too.”

Then, nodding, we set off to put some last things in order, with the blue sunlight shining through the hole in the roof and bathing everything in an electric glow.

Chapter 14: The Heart of an Outlaw

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Chapter 14: The Heart of an Outlaw

The blue sun was directly overhead by the time we finally started moving again, but we weren’t too concerned about that now. We had new weapons and Ace was with us, so we’d be able to take down any RPR ponies that managed to catch up to us. And after the hell that we went through at the foundry, I think we were all looking forward to leaving it behind for good.

I really don’t know how I was even awake at this point, but I knew I’d need to sleep eventually. I needed the rest before we continued on through rougher terrain. The mountains rose out of the hills to the south like jagged and shattered teeth, imposing titans that we’d have to climb on hoof. I wasn’t looking forward to that at all. Couldn’t Equestria decide to build their installations someplace other than in mountain ranges?

After some goodbyes (mostly between me and the two Ruin Runners) we set off to the south. Ace flew regular circles above us, just keeping an eye on our surroundings, and SCaR confidently whirred near every bush or copse of trees that Ace couldn’t see into from up above. I could tell why the little drone was so excited at least; Gauge had found the modules to upgrade SCaR to a true combat model, and now he was armed with a pair of submachine guns for close range engagements. Which I was thrilled about, really. If we happened to get into a firefight, Gauge could have SCaR deliver precise gunfire from unexpected angles. After all, who would even notice a tiny little drone buzzing around in the chaos of bullets flying everywhere?

It must’ve been about an hour into our hike to the south when I heard a loud boom behind us, and a shockwave nearly knocked us all over. Spinning around, my jaw suddenly dropped when I saw a huge plume of fire erupting over the foundry. Gauge, Nova, and I just stared at it in mute shock, even as Ace calmly circled down to us.

She landed next to me, and after a second to look over the explosion, she nudged my side. “We ain’t got time to waste looking at the pretty lights. We should keep moving.”

“What the fuck is that?!” I asked, completely at a loss to explain just why the foundry blew up. I hoped that Mawari and Denawa were clear of the blast.

Ace just shrugged. “An explosion?”

I knew right away that she was involved in whatever had just happened. Spinning to face her, I jammed a hoof into her chest. “What did you do?”

She frowned at me and smacked my foreleg away with a wing. “Damage control.”

“You call blowing up a huge foundry and shit damage control?!”

“You really want ponies running around Auris with all the shit in there?” She sat down and crossed her forelegs. “You could equip a small army with everything we found. Plus, there was orbital bombardment shells. It’d only take one of those in the right place to blow up Hole or destroy Celestia Dam or whatever. If bad ponies got their hooves on them, hundreds of innocents could die. And I ain’t fixing to have that on my mind when the Ivory City buys them or steals them and blows up Thatch with them.”

I would’ve said something back, but I was completely at a loss for what to say. How could I argue with that logic? Maybe she was right. But even if she was right, and even if she wanted to do the right thing, all I could see this as was another example of how this mare didn’t care about collateral damage. If this was how she thought she was helping Auris, then I didn’t want to know how many dead ponies were left in her wake.

Flicking her tail, Ace stood up again and spread her wings. “Let’s get moving. That’s gonna be a big shining beacon to any RPR scouts nearby. It ain’t gonna be long before they track us here.”

And just like that, she flapped her wings and took off again, climbing higher and higher until she was just a silhouette in the sky.

-----

“That mare’s a psychopath.”

I looked at Gauge as he frowned at the ground. “That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose,” I said. I raised my eyes to Ace way up above us, still flying circles, just like she had been since we started moving again. “I can’t figure out what her deal is. Does she want to be an outlaw or a hero? She spent a lot of time trying to convince me that it’s the latter, but she certainly acts a lot more like a bandit than anything.”

“Actions speak louder than words…”

A cool breeze brushed over my coat, and I tried to shake what sweat I could off of it. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky, and the bright blue sun was going to roast me alive at this rate. Plus, I was starting to feel really exhausted; a nap would be awesome. There was a cluster of trees up ahead that’d make a good place to stop and rest before we started the first leg of our trek through the mountains, and I knew that the rest would do all of us good before we worked on that.

“Hey, SCaR, go tell Ace that we’re going to stop under those trees,” I said to the drone. It chirped at me and set off, puttering higher into the air, and I angled away from the caravan path we’d been following and toward the trees. I didn’t know how SCaR was going to tell Ace that, but I figured that she’d see what we were up to once the drone started beeping at her.

I sighed as soon as I was under the shade of the leaves, and I flopped onto the grass. Finally, I didn’t feel like I was being cooked alive in an oven. I simply lay on my side, panting, as Gauge and Nova trotted over as well. They both sat down under the tree, side by side, and visibly relaxed now that they were out of the sun. Gauge pulled out a water skin from his bags, and after letting Nova take the first drink, he tossed it to me. I took two big gulps before floating it back to him, and he finished it off and stuffed it back inside.

Fluttering wings heralded Ace’s arrival, and she landed a few feet away from the rest of us. She looked us over for a second and her expression turned sour. “We should really keep pushing on,” she said. “The longer we stay here, the more time the RPR will have to catch up to us.”

“They really won’t have a hard time catching up to our fucking corpses if we die of heat stroke and exhaustion,” I grumbled back at her. “Besides, don’t we have to go over those mountains to get to Bluewater Gorge? There’s no way we’re going to survive that hike without at least a little rest.”

Ace’s eyes momentarily widened in surprise. “Bluewater Gorge? How did you know that’s where I was going? I didn’t say nothing about that.”

I blinked, and I realized that I’d never told her that I wanted to go to the gorge next after what I’d heard from Mawari and Denawa. “Wait, so…” I stopped and sat up. “Okay, maybe we should just let each other know what we’re all after, here. If we’re gonna travel together any longer, then we should be honest with each other.”

“Agreed,” Ace said, suddenly looking at the three of us with a lot more suspicion than before.

Gauge looked at me. “Are you sure that’s a good idea, Em?”

“It’s better than blindly stumbling after each other without even knowing why,” I retorted. Then, turning to Ace, I raised an eyebrow. “Well? What about it, outlaw?”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You first.”

“Alright, fine, be that way.” Shaking my head, I sighed. “I’m a sergeant with the Sentinels from the north. After we took Celestia Dam from the Crimson and killed Carrion they sent me south to go looking for pieces of a code.”

Ace’s ears perked. “What kind of code?”

“We don’t know,” I said. “Our hometown heard it first, and then it sent pieces to hidden installations on the rest of the planet. Our home got one. Celestia Dam got one. We don’t know where the other five went. But all we do know is that this Reclaimer pony must’ve gotten a piece too, because suddenly he had the Crimson destroy our home for our piece, and now his right hoof fuckwit is searching Auris for the others. We’re trying to find the pieces before Reclaimer gets all of them, because apparently he’s really bad news, and if he gets them all, then Auris is probably fucked.”

“Auris is certainly fucked if he gets them,” Ace said, and I cocked my head a little bit. Sighing, she sat down under the shade of the tree with us. “I grew up in Thatch. It’s a big city near the Ivory City. Reclaimer hates us, and we hate him. We refuse to kneel to him, and we’ve been fighting him for years. We’re the biggest roadblock between him and the rest of this shitty planet. If that monster gets this code, whatever it is, I’m afraid of what it’ll mean for all of us.”

“Apparently it’ll ‘awaken the Azimuth’ or something,” I said, shrugging. “But anyways, we think there’s a piece in Bluewater Gorge. Those zebras, Denawa and Mawari, said that there’s a hidden installation there that nopony’s ever found. I also know that Yeoman and ponies from Hole are searching that area for something, so they’re likely looking for the installation, too. We just have to find it before they do so we can get the code piece and get out of there as fast as possible.”

Ace started smiling, and at first, I didn’t know why. “That ain’t gonna be hard,” she said. “The whole reason I was planning on taking you three to the gorge is because I happen to know where an installation is.”

I blinked. “Wait, really? You do?”

“Mmhmm.” She nodded. “Stumbled across it five or six months ago while I was in the area running from a bounty team. Big huge door in the rock underneath the base of a waterfall, halfway submerged in the water. I thought I’d be able to use it to escape the bounty hunters, but there weren’t no way in, best I could tell. I went looking all over the damn thing but I didn’t find a way to open it.” She shook her head. “Had to fight my way out of that one. Took two bullets to the stomach and jumped into the river out of desperation. Woke up later that night draped over some rocks and spent the next four days crawling back to civilization.”

Stars, I couldn’t even imagine what that must’ve been like, assuming it was true. I guess it was a good thing for all of us that she survived that whole ordeal. “But if you couldn’t find a way inside, then what are we supposed to do when we get there?” I asked, sharing a concerned look with Nova and Gauge.

“There was a panel behind a rock a little bit away from the door,” she said. “It didn’t have no buttons or nothing on it, just a standard B/O port.” Her eyes flitted over to SCaR, and I saw Gauge gasp with realization out of the corner of my eye. “The same kind of port that your little drone there can access.”

SCaR buzzed and chirped twice, hovering a little bit closer to Gauge. The zebra glanced at his drone, then back at Ace. “But what makes you think that SCaR will even be able to get that door opened? It probably has a password or something that it needs to be opened.”

“Your drone’s military, though, ain’t it?” Ace asked.

Gauge nodded. “Yeah, cobbled together from a few drones we had lying around at Blackwash, but yeah.”

“Then it can open the door.” Crossing her forelegs, she looked over her shoulder at the mountains to the south. “All military drones have a common database full of emergency codes for operating equipment in case shit goes bad and they’re needed to perform tasks. Installations have their own set of codes, but if your home and this place were chatting each other up, then they’re part of the same system. That means that they likely have the same emergency codes. If that installation is in emergency lock down, and I’m willing to bet that it is, then that door should be opened by an emergency override passcode that your drone probably has on it.”

“Huh.” I looked at SCaR, then at the mountains behind Ace. “Well, I mean, even if that doesn’t work, there has to be a way in, right? There’s always some work around.”

“If it’s inside of a mountain, there would have to be some sort of ventilation,” Nova said. “Probably big units, too, to move air in and out. We can always look for those.”

“Hopefully it ain’t gonna come to that,” Ace said, raising a hoof. “I know with your drone, we’ll be able to get in the front way. I’d stake my life on it.”

“We may have to,” Gauge said. “Remember, Yeoman and the RPR were looking out in the mountains too. If we don’t find a way inside fast, they might catch us, and then we’ll just have led them to the installation.”

“If they haven’t found it already,” I grumbled. “It always feels like that fucker’s one step ahead of us. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve got a camp right in front of the fucking door, just trying to get inside.”

Ace chewed on her lip; I guess that wasn’t something she’d considered before. “We’ll just have to be careful. Though with four of us, we can probably either slip in unnoticed or clean the place out in the middle of the night.”

Well, more like three of us, I supposed. I still didn’t really trust Nova with a gun, though she might have to learn fast. Given that she was grounded, as awful as it was to think about, she’d need to learn how to fight or do something to help us out. Gauge at least had SCaR, and SCaR could now help in a firefight, but I didn’t want to have to distract myself with keeping Nova safe now that she couldn’t just fly to safety whenever fighting started.

Ace and I broke out of our thoughts when we heard Nova make a squeaky yawn. Our attention turned to her as she rubbed her muzzle with the crest of her wing, and blinking, she cocked her head at us. “What? I’m tired. It’s… been a really long night.”

I nodded, feeling the leaden weights hanging off of my eyelashes too. Just keeping my eyes open was becoming an almost impossible task. “Yeah, sleep sounds really great about now. Should we draw for first watch?”

“I’ll handle it,” Ace said. “I was able to get some sleep last night. Weren’t much, but some. Besides,” she said, pulling a tin out of her bags and shaking it some, rattling whatever was inside, “I’ve got caffeine pills for this. One of these and I’ll be alert for four hours. Don’t worry yourselves none.”

Well, if that meant I could get to sleep faster, I was all for it. “Cool,” I said, pulling out my bedroll and laying it flat on the grass next to the tree. It was way too warm outside to get under my blankets anyway, but I could definitely use the padding on my back. It was pretty sore from getting slammed into the desk by that one wailer. “Wake me if you need anything; I know how to handle a gun the best out of these three.”

Ace nodded and took her bags off, setting them on the ground and making a backrest to lean against while she watched the sky from the cover of the tree. “We should be good. I ain’t expecting to see anything here other than some rock runners or maybe an adventurous shrike. Y’all should go get your rest.”

I yawned and laid my head down on my crossed forelegs. “Sounds like a plan to me,” I muttered. And with the smell of the grasses in my nose, I slowly drifted off to sleep.

-----

I don’t know what it is about sleeping after a horrible ordeal, but it’s great. I only got a few hours of sleep under that tree, but I felt so much better when I woke up. Well, mostly. My head felt like it was going to split in two, and my neck itched all along my spinal column. I tried scratching it a few times, but it wasn’t any use. It felt like the itch was coming from inside of my spine.

The stars only knew what that meant. I just hoped they were wrong.

Groaning, I raised my head and looked around. The sun was just starting to go to the west, so it was still the early afternoon, and the birds were chattering away above me. Gauge was still passed out at my left, but surprisingly Nova wasn’t with him. When I looked to my right, however, I saw her and Ace sitting side by side, away from the tree.

I rubbed some of the bleariness out of my eyes and squinted into the sunlight. Yeah, they were just sitting there, just… talking. They were too far away for me to hear what they were saying, but there they were. Nova was on the left and Ace on the right, and they were sitting close enough together that Ace’s feathers rubbed against the naked spot on Nova’s side that used to be covered by her wing.

For the longest time, I just watched the two of them talk. Occasionally I’d hear Nova laugh, so sweet and happy after all the shit she’d been through. Ace would smile at her, too, and one time she acted like she was going to lick Nova’s cheek, and Nova playfully fended her off, giggling all the while. Then they were quiet for a while, and I laid my head back down on my hooves, still a little too tired and too warm to be bothered to move.

After a few moments, they both stood up. I thought they were going to come back to the tree, but instead, Ace crouched down and spread her wings. Nova carefully climbed onto her back, looking a bit unsure, but once she was fully on, she wrapped her hooves around Ace’s neck and hung on. Fluttering her wings a few times, Ace took off, slowly gaining altitude with the added weight of her passenger on her back. I watched them for as long as I could through the leaves of the tree before they disappeared somewhere out of sight.

Smiling, I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep again.

-----

I woke up when they landed again, maybe half an hour later. I hadn’t been napping all that heavily anyways; I didn’t want something to jump Gauge and me while Ace and Nova were off flying, even if we had SCaR to keep watch down here. When I heard hooves trampling grass and making their way towards us, I perked up my ears and opened my eyes.

Ace was pretty damn sweaty; her wings hung a little from her sides like they were too heavy to tuck away, and she sat down on the grass and started preening them. Nova was right next to her, a little dazed smile on her face, and she sat down next to Gauge. Seeing me awake, she nodded. “How was your nap?”

I yawned and rolled onto my side, stretching my three free legs as best as I could. “Fucking amazing,” I said. I cracked my neck a few times and started to stand up. At least I was getting good at doing that on only three legs.

Then Ace just kind of looked at me and tilted her head to the side. “You’re still in that thing? You should’ve been done with that by now.”

“Wait, seriously?” I looked down at the tattered sling, somehow still holding together after everything I’d been through. “It’s only been a few days!”

“I threw all the best shit I had on hoof into that wound when I patched you up,” Ace said. “I don’t want you being dead wait for too long, you know?”

I frowned and looked at the stained sling again, and slowly undid it. My leg initially screamed in protest when I tried to move it, but after gritting my teeth and pushing through the pain, I was able to get it straightened out and everything. It was sore as all fuck, but I could put weight on it and move it around. “Huh. Well I feel stupid now.”

“From what I’ve been gathering, that’s the usual for you, ain’t it?” Ace said, smirking at me.

“Shut up.” I looked over to Nova, who was settling in by Gauge’s side and getting ready for another nap. “I saw the two of you talking out there. Have a good flight?”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” She sheepishly smiled. “It was… good. I mean, it’s not like I can really fly on my own now…”

I gave her a sympathetic smile and stretched my leg some more. “That’s good. You just catch a quick nap, alright? We’re probably going to want to get moving before too long.” Yawning, I shook my head. “I’ve already gotten enough sleep. I can take watch.”

“I’ll stay with you,” Ace said. When I turned to her, she just shrugged. “Caffeine pills. I got a bit left in me before I crash. Ain’t gonna sleep in the meanwhile.”

“Cool.” I had some things I wanted to talk to her about anyway. Walking away from the tree, I looked over my shoulder at her as I passed. “I’m gonna sit in the sun some. I can see things better from out there.” Nodding to Nova, I added, “Sleep well, Nov.”

Nova nodded back at me and laid her head down on Gauge’s side. Ace looked at me, frowned, and then stood up again, reluctantly following me away from the shade. I didn’t blame her—I didn’t even want to be out in the sun, not really—but I didn’t want to talk to her close to Nova and Gauge. I didn’t want them overhearing that I might be turning into a wailer. If I was gonna die soon, I didn’t want to spend my last days about it feeling bad because they were afraid and upset.

I sat down once I was far enough away from the tree and pulled out a cigarette. I was surprised the heat in the air alone didn’t light the thing, but I lit it with a spark regardless. Sticking it in my lips, I waited until Ace sat down next to me. She stuck her water skin to her lips and drained half of it before tucking it back in her bags. “I’m assuming that you ain’t actually interested in no sunlight,” she said, lying on her stomach and letting her wings hang loose on the ground.

“I wanted to talk where they couldn’t hear us,” I said, looking down at the bandage on my foreleg. It was spotted brown, and when I undid the bandage, the wound was still oozing blood even though it was half a day old. Sighing, I showed it to Ace and didn’t say anything.

Her eyes flitted over the bite marks in my leg. After a moment, her nostrils flared and she nudged my leg away with her wing. “Too much to assume that one of them zebras did that?”

“I wish,” I said, slowly wrapping the wound again with some fresh gauze. “I don’t know when I picked it up, but I was wrestling with wailers all night. One of them might’ve gotten lucky.”

“How’re you feeling?” she asked me, her voice suddenly a lot more tender. I turned to her, and I saw concern in her eyes. “Burning, itching, headaches?”

I took a deep breath and nodded. It felt like I was signing my own death sentence with that little motion. “Leg’s burning a little bit, my head feels like it’s about to explode, and my neck itches really bad. I’d say that I’d hope it’s nothing, but…”

Ace grimly nodded and looked away. Her eyes drifted over her shoulder and back to the tree, where Nova and Gauge laid side by side. “You tell them yet?”

I shook my head. “No, I haven’t.”

A tiny gust of wind provided a momentary respite from the heat. My eyes fell, staring at the swaying stalks of pink grass in front of my hooves, watching the little bugs crawl up and down. Another sore pang in my skull reminded me that I wasn’t alone in there anymore; I had a roommate now, one who was going to kill me in a few days. It was probably chewing up my brain right now. I shuddered and held myself in my forelegs, suddenly feeling cold despite the heat.

“You realize there ain’t a cure, right?”

“I didn’t think there was,” I murmured.

Moments drifted by like a few feathery seed pods caught in the wind. It felt so strange to be staring at the twilight of my life. It felt so wrong for it to be coming so soon. I either thought I’d never see it coming, losing my head to a bullet or something like that, or that it wouldn’t come for me for another few decades. Twenty winters felt like such a short time to be alive.

“What you want me to do for you?” Ace asked me, poking my shoulder with her nose. It was such a strange little action—I don’t know why I noticed it. It was like she wanted to nuzzle me but she couldn’t bring herself to. I appreciated it regardless.

“Well, first, we make it to the gorge,” I said, glancing at her. “I… I-I’m not going to give up just yet. This was something that the Synarchy had to have dealt with when they were still settling the planet, right? Maybe there’s something there that can help me.”

It was really my best shot; the rest of Auris didn’t have a cure, and the installation was the only place I knew about that we were close to that might have something that could save me. Sighing, I looked at my leg again and moved my hoof a bit. Funny how my limbs would no longer be my own in a week. “If not…”

I swallowed hard and managed to make eye contact with Ace. “When I go into the coma, just… just please put a bullet in my brain. Burn my body. I d-don’t want to become one of them…”

Feathers ruffled the hair on my coat as Ace draped her wing over my back. “I can do that,” she said, her voice soft and sensitive. “But you’re gonna have to tell your friends. They ain’t gonna understand if the outlaw shoots you while you’re down.”

“I know, it’s just… I don’t want to get them worked up and worrying about me,” I said. “They already worry enough about me. I’d feel so awful just to have them panicking about my impending zombification for a whole week before I go. Besides, maybe there’s a chance I can fix this before it’s too late?” Blinking, I sniffled away a tear. “I don’t want to die with them worrying about me. I just want to die happy with them. Is… i-i-is that so much?”

It felt like that one sniffle set off the gunpowder. My sniffles turned into sobs, and soon I was heaving and tearing at the grass with my hooves. Salty tears stung my eyes, and my whole body shuddered with each breath. “I don’t want to die!” I hissed, tears streaming down my face and along my muzzle. “It’s not fair! Not after all this! Not after all this shit!”

Ace tried to calm me down with her wing and her voice, but I blotted it all out. Instead, burying my face in her chest, I sobbed, “Why me?”

It was a question I couldn’t answer. I could only cry away the pain. I’m only glad that somepony was there to be with me as the reality of my death all but smacked me in the face.

And then, once the tears dried up and the hours passed, we once more set off like nothing had happened. It was all I could do to keep up a brave face and pretend nothing was wrong.

But the guilt ate me alive more than the fungus in my brain.

Chapter 15: The Bluewater Gorge

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Chapter 15: The Bluewater Gorge

It took us two more days to reach Bluewater Gorge on hoof. There were so many mountains and passes that we had to navigate, and I was really wishing that I was a pegasus. That Yeoman and his team could make this flight from here to Hole on a somewhat regular basis wasn’t fair at all.

And speaking of Yeoman and the others, we actually saw them once. They started out as a faint dark line to the north, but as the minutes passed, it slowly became larger and more distinct. Within an hour, ten pegasi passed overhead in a wedge formation, just high enough that I couldn’t really make out who was who. But I knew that Yeoman was at the head; where else would Reclaimer’s top asshole be?

Thankfully, they weren’t able to see us through all the trees, and once they were out of sight, we pressed on again. I was getting exhausted from all the hiking, but knowing that Yeoman was in the mountains again put some energy back into my legs. We were in a race against time, and even though Ace knew exactly where we needed to go, I knew it was only a matter of time before Yeoman’s party found what they were looking for.

We stopped briefly on the shoulder of a mountain to recoup our strength. Nova took out some rations and passed them around, and Ace flew off to a waterfall to refill our canteens. While Gauge made sure everything was taken care of and talked with Nova, I sat a little bit away on a cliffside and just admired the scenery.

It was a hell of a view. These mountains must’ve been older than the range that I grew up in, because they were a lot less rugged and a lot more rounded. Many of them had tree coverage all the way to their blunt peaks, and it looked like the range just stretched on forever to the east and west. If I traced the range along to the east and north, I could see where it began to decline and flatten out before suddenly spiking again into the jagged Dragonsteeth mountains that made up the south wall of the valley. The north wall was lost in a haze of clouds, otherwise I would’ve looked to see if Blackwash was visible from here. How neat would that be to think that we could’ve seen this much of Auris from our mountaintop and not known about all the ponies on the surface?

I turned back to the constant roar of the waterfalls. There were so many of them in the Spines. I counted eight that I could see from where I was sitting, and I knew that there were more. Sure, most of them were pretty small, but they all added together to provide a soothing background noise. I could only imagine that the one hiding the installation had to be bigger than these, and that there had to be more of them as well if Yeoman was having trouble finding the installation after two weeks.

I stood up to go back to Nova and Gauge, but suddenly a sharp pain tore through my skull, and I fell to my knees. Red haze filled my vision and my legs twitched and spasmed on their own; it was like I was fighting with myself for control of my body. No, I realized, not with myself. I guess the first roots were being planted and the disease was figuring out how to pilot its new host.

“Ember?” It was Gauge’s voice, but strangely muffled. I saw striped limbs gallop over to me and sit me down again so I wouldn’t accidentally fall off the cliff. My head snapped up of its own accord, and when I looked at Gauge’s worried face, I felt an overwhelming sense of hunger and hollowness in my stomach. I started salivating really badly, and I had to swallow a few times to stop myself from drooling on my coat.

But, little by little, the haze cleared away, and my senses returned to me. I realized that my heart was pounding and my whole body was shaking. I felt horribly sick, and I actually spun away from Gauge and Nova and hurled off the side of the mountain. I’m glad that they couldn’t really see it, because there was a little bit of red and black in there that was definitely not normal. But once I finally got my stomach under control, I gradually stopped shivering, and I felt almost back to normal.

Trembling, I sat up again and scratched at the perpetual itch inside of my neck. Gauge and Nova watched me, shocked and concerned. Eventually, it was Nova who swallowed hard and placed a hoof on my shoulder. “Ember? Are… are you alright?” Stars, she looked so scared, and I didn’t even know why.

“I… I-I’m f-fine,” I said, grimacing at the taste of blood and bile in my mouth. “I’ll make it to the gorge. Don’t worry.”

“You sounded like one of them,” Gauge said. He bit his lip and sat down in front of me. “You made this noise… this wailing noise for a second.” When I continued to stare at him, he slightly angled his head. “Don’t you remember?”

I didn’t, and it’d just happened. I swallowed again, and then, holding my right foreleg out, I unwrapped the bandage.

Nova gasped and Gauge cursed when they saw the bite marks, now swollen and red. What looked like scabs were a little too brown and crusty to be natural, and they flaked off if rubbed. After a few seconds, I put my leg back down and wrapped it up again. “I’m not giving up,” I told them, trying to harden my voice as much as I could.

Gauge swallowed hard. “Is there…?”

I shook my head. “Not that anypony knows about. But maybe this installation will have something. It has to have something.” I carefully stood up, but my legs didn’t feel like they were going to fail me, at least. “I’m not going to die to this stupid mushroom.”

Nova sniffled, and Gauge put a leg around her shoulders. “How long do you have?” she whispered.

“Three or four days. Then I go into a coma. When I wake up…” I shuddered and closed my eyes. “I’m one of them. I asked Ace to end it before then.”

Silence, but I felt more irritated than anything. I’d cried over my impending demise with Ace two days ago. I didn’t want to do it again. And I was determined that I’d find a cure in the installation. There just had to be something there. I wasn’t going to give up until I’d searched everything.

And then Nova burst. “D-Damn it, Ember, why didn’t you tell us?!” she screeched, her voice swiftly climbing into hysteria. “Why didn’t you tell us that you’re dying?!”

I looked away, unable to meet her eyes. “If I am gonna die, I didn’t want my last days to be like… like this.”

After a long moment, Gauge spoke up. “You’re not going to die,” he said, and when I looked at him, he nodded at me. “That installation has to have something to save you. It has to. And we’ll find it, and you’ll use it, and you’ll be cured.” Then an uneasy smirk crept onto his muzzle. “Just don’t gnaw on my legs until we find it, okay?”

I bitterly chuckled. “You want a kiss?” I asked him. He smiled and shook his head, holding up a hoof like he was going to try to keep me away.

Wings fluttered overhead, and Ace landed behind us. Dumping a bunch of water skins on the ground, she looked over at us. When she saw Nova’s tears, her eyes snapped to me. “You tell ‘em?”

I sighed and nodded.

Ace dipped her head once, then pointed to the water skins. “Then we ain’t got time to waste. We need to get there before it’s too late. I think y’all can appreciate the pace I been setting these past few days now.”

She quickly trotted back to where she’d set her bags and slung them across her back in one smooth motion, checking that everything was secure and loaded. I started after her, but before I did, I helped Nova stand up, then wrapped her in a hug. She stiffened at first, but then she relaxed as I nuzzled her neck.

“I’m gonna be fine,” I told her. “I’m not gonna become one of them.”

“I-I know,” she said, sniffling. “I’m just so scared for you, Em.” She leaned back and looked me in the eyes, almost nose to nose with me. “I just feel so helpless, so… so useless!”

“You’re doing more than enough just being here with me,” I told her, patting her shoulder. “You and Gauge both are the reason I’m determined to beat this thing.” I looked over to where Ace was (not-so) patiently waiting and smiled at Nova. “Now let’s get moving before I lose any more of my brain to this thing, okay?”

She shakily nodded, and when I stepped away from her, Gauge moved in to fill my place. I walked away from the two of them and grabbed my gear, and once I had everything strapped down, I turned to Ace. “How much farther?”

“I give it no more than five miles from here,” she said. “All we gotta do is crest this here mountain ridge and the gorge is on the other side.”

“So an easy hike, right?”

I should’ve known what I was asking for as soon as I said it. Ace just shook her head. “RPR has a camp in the gorge as well. I think they’ve winnowed everything down to this area. Ain’t sure if they found the door yet, but they’re looking in the right spot.”

“So what are we gonna do?” I asked her. I was trying to think of some ideas myself, but I’m pretty fucking awful at planning.

“Wait for nightfall and slip into the camp. We should be able to get to the door without much problem. Then we just gotta pop the door open, scoot on inside, and seal her up again.” She winked at me. “Easy as pie.”

I just frowned at her. “You know it sure as shit isn’t gonna be that easy.”

She just shrugged. “Don’t mean I can’t be optimistic. Now if you don’t mind me…” Her wingtip slipped into a bag at her side and she pulled out a half-empty bottle of whiskey. Popping the cork off, she raised the thing to her lips and took a few gulps before tucking it away again. “I’m gonna do some recon. Just follow the ridge and you’ll be at the top of the gorge in no time at all. Just don’t go down towards the camp, and I’ll come find you when I’m done.”

And with that, she spread her powerful wings and launched into the sky, quickly gaining altitude and nearly disappearing from sight.

I watched her go, then, shaking my head, popped a cigarette out of my bags and stuck it between my lips. I really didn’t understand that mare. I was starting to get the feeling there was a lot more to this ‘outlaw’ than she really let on. What I’d seen between her and Nova, and then my own conversation with her afterwards, led me to believe that she had a soft spot… and a pretty big one, too.

It was kind of cute in a way. I thought about telling her that next time I saw her. I’m sure that’d ruffle her feathers a bit.

Nova and Gauge came over and grabbed their things, and once they were ready, I turned to them and flicked my good ear over my shoulder in the direction of the ridge. “Well? Ready?”

“Yeah, let’s get moving,” Nova said, though I noticed that she wrinkled her nose some at the smell of my cigarette. Gauge’s comment on what she thought about my breath came back to me, and I slid the cigarette to the far side of my mouth and started walking. I mean, with all the shit I’d been through at this point, could she really blame me that I’d picked up a nasty habit? At this point, it was looking a lot more likely that I’d die from the wailer parasite instead of lung cancer.

But that didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was getting over this ridge and making it to the gorge. And only once we got there could I really start worrying about the installation and averting my impending demise.

So we set off once again, though much more somber and quiet than the previous two days of hiking had been.

-----

“Didn’t you say there was only a small team of them?”

I frowned down my muzzle at the camp far below us. “That’s only what I heard, Gauge. I didn’t think that they had a more fucking permanent crew here.”

We’d found a sheltered spot on the ridgeline to wait for Ace to come back, and our curiosity had gotten the better of us. Now me, Nova, and Gauge were all lying on our stomachs, side by side, peering over the rocks. Down below us was Yeoman’s camp, and it was a fuckload bigger than I thought it was going to be. They’d used up almost every available inch of space on the riverbank and the shoreline of a large lake at the bottom of the gorge. Everything was covered with tents and supply crates, and there was some sort of machinery that I couldn’t make sense of. It looked old, though, so it had to be some Synarchy tech that they were repurposing for their hunt. What it did, though, I couldn’t figure out.

“How many ponies are down there?” Gauge asked me.

“No fucking clue.” I looked over his shoulders at Nova, who was lying on his other side. “You’ve got sharp pegasus eyes, Nov. What do you see?”

“Not as much as I would if I had binoculars,” she grumbled. Squinting, she leaned forward to get a better view of the camp. “Ten tents big enough to hold four ponies each, lots of sensor equipment, and a whole lot of guns. The camp’s really empty though. Wonder where they are?”

“Where else?” I asked her. “Probably out looking for the installation.” I pointed to a team of three that was wandering around some rocks near the lake. “There’s a few. The rest must be taking a look elsewhere.”

“There’s certainly a lot of ‘elsewhere’ to look,” Gauge said. He was right; Bluewater Gorge had a fuckload of waterfalls. The gorge itself was probably ten miles long with an oblong lake that ran its length, connected to a river that went somewhere to the south. And all up and down the gorge, dozens of waterfalls, some tiny and some huge, spewed water into the lake below. There were so many snow-capped mountains around and huge stormfronts building up to the west that it wasn’t difficult to figure out where all the water came from to even keep all these waterfalls going.

“I’m really fucking glad Ace is with us,” I said. “Otherwise we’d be as lost as Yeoman’s crew down there. There’s simply too much shit to check and go digging through.”

I looked up to see a beige figure slowly circling down to us, and I nudged Gauge to alert him so Ace’s arrival wouldn’t spook him or Nova. We drew back from the ledge and went back to where we’d set our shit down and simply waited for Ace to get to us. Finally, flaring her wings, the outlaw came to a cantering stop and immediately took several large gulps of water. Wiping her lips, she sat down across from us. “It’s too fucking hot to be flying today. Mountain air ain’t even helping none.”

I saw Nova look on at Ace’s wings with a sense of longing, and the stump by her shoulder twitched. I don’t think the heat would’ve bothered her any if it meant she could return to the sky.

I was having my own problems with the heat, what with having a black coat and everything, so I took a long drink as well. When I was finished, and when Ace had finally stopped panting, I sat up a little. “So? News?”

“RPR scouts are all over the damn gorge,” she grumbled. “Got a couple of pegasi searching from above, too. Good thing I was higher than them; their eyes were too glued to the ground to notice me flying around.”

“And the installation?”

She tossed her head back, getting the sweaty curtain to rest comfortably around the right side of her face. “They ain’t found it yet, but they’re getting close. Saw a patrol snooping around the waterfall next to it. Another day and we’d have been too late. Just gotta hope they don’t stumble across it between now and night.”

“And if they do?” Gauge asked.

“We ain’t gonna worry about that none,” Ace said, waving her hoof. “We’ll just have to think of something at worst.”

Groaning, I stretched my sore leg out some more. It almost felt like it was back to normal. “So what now?”

“We wait,” Ace said. “It’s too dangerous to move while there’s still daylight out. We use nightfall to sneak up on the door and get her open real quick before we’re noticed. From there it’s just dealing with whatever security’s inside.”

“Any idea on what we should expect?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Anything, really. Probably drones and turrets. I ain’t expecting much else out here. Supposing I had a better idea of what this installation did in the first place, I’d be able to figure out a thing or two about what we’re up against.”

“It was a critical installation in the Synarchy’s eyes,” Nova said. “Otherwise the code piece wouldn’t have been sent here. Whatever they did, it was important enough to be one of six Blackwash contacted.”

I glanced at Ace, who seemed to be thinking that over. “Foreboding, isn’t it?”

“It’s something,” she muttered. “Usually, there’s lists of installations lying around at comms outposts. That’s what the Ruin Runners use to coordinate; you just gotta find them first. But this installation ain’t been on any chart I’ve seen, and I ran with them for a long while. Only found it myself by accident.”

I wonder what happened to Blackwash, then, because we didn’t have a list of neighboring installations, as far as I was aware. And you’d think that the outpost that handles interstellar communication with the homeworld would know where shit is. That seems like the kind of thing you’d leave on a piece of that etch glass I kept finding everywhere. Though I’ll be damned if somepony didn’t think a big pane of that would make a great window.

Groaning, I lied back down and looked up at the sun. “Well, it’s midday right now, so we’ve got a long time to wait. Stars, I hate fucking doing everything at night. That’s when all the bad shit’s out and about.”

“Better bad shit than bullets,” Gauge said. “One’s easier to dodge than the other.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I laid my head down on my forelegs. “I’m just sick of being fucking bored. It’s like all the bad shit happens at once, and then there’s days and days of boring nothing.”

Ace chuckled and pulled out her booze again. “Believe you me, when you been wandering Auris as long as I have, you really appreciate the boring days like this.”

I raised an eyebrow at her. “As long as you have? Girl, you look like you’re around my age.”

“How old are you?” she asked me. “Twenty winters? Nineteen?”

“Twenty,” I said, picking my head up again now that there was an actual conversation happening. “You?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “Been wandering Auris most of it, too. The Runners adopted me when my ma died. I was only five winters at the time. Stuck with them until fifteen, and then we... parted ways. Been on my own since then.” I spotted her wince, and she looked aside, rubbing her foreleg. “Well, not from the start. Weren’t quite so alone for the first three or four years.”

Nova reached across the open rock to touch Ace’s hoof. “I’m so sorry.”

The outlaw swallowed hard and pulled her hoof away from Nova’s. “That’s an old wound. Scarred over and shit. Ponies die, and Auris is good as shit at killing them.” I saw her eyes drift longingly to her bottle, and sighing, she put her lips around the mouth and tilted her head back. She eventually pulled the bottle away with a grunt and grimaced, then corked it and returned it to her stash. “S-So, y’all know how to play cards? Appleloosa hold’em? Gotta find some way to pass the time.”

Gauge and I glanced at each other, Ace’s obviously desperate attempt to change the subject only making things more awkward. “Yeah, sure, I guess,” I said. “I learned how to play growing up.”

“To be fair, it was either play cards or be really, really bored,” Gauge said, chuckling. “There wasn’t much to do when you live on a mountain.”

“That I can imagine,” Ace said, digging into her bags and pulling out a worn and bent deck of cards. She put the deck between her wingtips and shuffled them together blindingly fast—I had to kind of wonder just how much cards this mare had played in her life to shuffle a deck that quickly. It didn’t take her all of ten seconds before she had everything shuffled and put the deck in front of me to cut. “Y’all ready to lose?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah. Whatever.” Setting the deck back in front of her, I sat up. “Just deal, card shark.”

-----

I glared at the small pile of bullets sitting across from me. That glare only deepened when a beige hoof swept them all up.

“I’m not playing cards with you ever again,” I grumbled, watching about fifty rounds disappear into Ace’s bullet purse. I flicked my cards at her in disgust, sticking my tongue out at the three of a kind that’d failed me.

“You ain’t gotta be a sore loser,” Ace said, smirking at me as she collected the cards back into the deck. “Just patient.”

“Yeah, well, fuck being patient,” I said, standing up. I grunted and cracked my neck; we’d gotten so carried away playing cards that I hadn’t moved in a while. Gauge and Nova were sitting off to the side, overlooking the gorge, having lost all their bullets some time ago. I’d clung onto mine for as long as I could, but I couldn’t figure out Ace’s play style. She liked to play really conservatively, but then all of a sudden she’d become very aggressive, and I couldn’t tell if she had junk or was hoping I’d call a bluff. In the end, I simply called too many, and there wasn’t much I could do as my bullets started dwindling.

It wasn’t quite nighttime yet, but the sun had set a few minutes ago, so the western horizon was drowned in yellow and golden light while the deep purples and blues and greens of night slowly inched across the sky. It was just about time to move, and after sitting on top of this cliff and getting my ass handed to me by Ace and her card shark ways, I was itching to go. Plus, I was secretly hoping for a chance to try out my new BR14M. At least that’d be a silver lining if we got caught, right?

Ace stood up, and I noticed her swaying a little bit. But before I could say anything, she shook her head, took a deep breath, and took four or five seconds to just stare at the opposite stone wall of the gorge. When she started walking again, she kept her eyes sharp and her hooves mostly in a straight line, though I could tell by the way her wings twitched that she was making a conscious effort to keep them looking as natural as possible.

Fucking great. Our fucking guide was drunk, and we had a bunch of RPR ponies to sneak by. And she’d been bitching at me back in Hole that I was gonna get her killed!

Groaning, I smacked a hoof against my forehead. “You ready to go, Miss Whiskey?”

She glared at me and shuffled her wings. “I fight better after a drink,” she growled at me, flicking her feathers along her tail in what I’d learned from Nova was an insulting pegasus gesture. She took her rifle off of her back and checked it, then slung it back over her shoulders but left it expanded. “Now c’mon. We should get a move on if we wanna get down there while they’re eating dinner.”

She started off down a rocky trail, pointedly trotting ahead of us so I couldn’t argue with her. Groaning in frustration, I picked my shit up and slung it across my back, then waited for Gauge and Nova to make their way over to me. They stopped by my side, and we just watched Ace’s tail flick and disappear behind the rocks.

“She’s drunk…” Nova murmured.

“She’s an idiot,” Gauge said.

“She’s gonna get us fucking killed!” I exclaimed. “Even if her drunken shit doesn’t catch the RPR’s attention, what good is she going to be against turrets and drones?”

Gauge just shrugged. “I mean, we only need her to find the door…”

Nova slapped him with her wing. “Gauge!”

The zebra took a step back and held up a hoof. “Hey, I didn’t mean it like that! I’m just saying that so long as she gets us to the door, then who cares if she’s drunk. We can all handle ourselves, right?”

“Yeah, but can we handle her as well?” I asked him.

“Hopefully we won’t have to,” he said. “I’m not sure if you noticed, but I’m pretty sure she’s an alcoholic. She was sneaking drinks constantly during trip up here.”

I’d definitely noticed that. Whenever we sat around the campfire, it seemed like Ace had a bottle of whiskey between her feathers. She usually didn’t drink as much or for as long as she did while we were playing cards, though. I could only hope that she’d built up enough of a tolerance over the years to at least keep her aim steady and her wits about her while we were down there. I didn’t want to have to pull her ass out of the fire in case she fucked something up.

Nova just shook her head. “The poor thing…”

“Let’s just hope that ‘poor thing’ doesn’t fuck everything up,” I said, setting off after Ace. Gauge and Nova followed at my heels, and soon enough, we caught up to the outlaw as she worked her way down the side of the overlook.

“Took y’all long enough,” she grumbled as we caught up to her. Frowning, she opened her wings and fluttered around some boulders in the path. “Just pick your way across, they ain’t too dense.”

I led my friends as we carefully worked our way down the trail and between the boulders. On our left, the mountain towered up above us, while on the right, it just fell away in a steep drop to the lake below, maybe two hundred feet down. Thankfully, the path wasn’t too hard to navigate, just a bit rough, and the sharp and thorny bushes growing out of the rocks weren’t all that pleasant to deal with. After getting more than enough scratches in my coat for my liking, I just started incinerating the bushes one after another. Sure, it was a waste of mana, but it took only a trivial amount of energy to get the dry and scratchy things to blow away into ash.

We crossed over a tiny waterfall, the stream running off the cliffs just barely deep enough and wide enough to get my fetlocks wet. On the other side, an outcropping of rocks overlooked the lake about twenty feet down, and gave us a pretty good view of the waterfalls. I trotted up to Ace, who was resting in the crook of a few rocks, and tried to peer over her shoulder to see what she was looking at. “Well? Which one of those fucking hundred waterfalls is it?”

Ace jolted like I’d startled her, and after blinking a few times, she vigorously shook her head. “What? Oh, yeah. Sorry… thinking.” She pursed her lips, then pointed a shaky hoof at three waterfalls all joining together maybe a hundred yards away, creating a huge curtain of falling water. “There,” she said. “That’s the one.”

I nodded, taking note of the rocks and waterfalls that we’d have for cover on our approach. The sun wasn’t visible any longer in the gorge, and much of it was shrouded in shadow, but there was still plenty of light to see us by. We’d have to move quickly and quietly if we wanted to get to those waterfalls unnoticed.

Just then, we saw a pegasus fly out from behind the waterfall and begin to make his way through the gorge to the other side. Ace stomped her hooves in frustration on the rocks and stood up, her wings snapping open and hitting me in the face. “Fucking cock shit!” she shouted, a little louder than I would’ve liked, but not loud enough to be noticed over the constant roar of waterfalls. “They found it! Them fuckers found it!” She pulled out her rifle and slammed it down into a crack between the two rocks.

Before she could do anything stupid, I grabbed the end of the rifle with my magic and pulled it away from the pegasus. “Stop it, you fucking idiot! The whole gorge is gonna hear that shot!”

“And that fucker’s flying back to tell them about the door!” she shouted back at me. “I ain’t gonna let them find it!” She tried to tug the rifle out of my magic, but I fought back. Growling, she spat at me. “Let go, you fucking bitch!”

I gritted my teeth and pulled back. “If you’d just stop and think about a solution that doesn’t involve fucking shooting everypony you don’t like, you’d see that you’re being a complete fucking shithead!”

She growled and leapt at me, but the moment her hooves left solid ground I shoved back on the rifle, sending her flying in the opposite direction. Her drunken wings weren’t good enough to stabilize her, and she went tumbling over the rocks, dropping her rifle as she did so. My heart jumped into my throat for a second as she disappeared over the edge toward the lake below, but a second later I barely heard a comforting splash over the roar of the waterfalls. At least it wasn’t a crack or a splat.

“Hold onto this,” I said, pressing Ace’s rifle against Nova’s chest, and then went galloping over to the rocks. I looked down to see Ace emerging from the shallow water, coughing and sputtering, and she stood up and stopped for a second to shake the water out of her mane and feathers. When she was done, she glared up at me, and I saw her wingtips fidget in unison; she still had her wing grip pistols, and I thought for a second she was going to use them on me. Instead, growling, she angrily stomped her hooves in the water and watched the pegasus fly away.

Chewing on my lip, I picked my way down the rocks and stopped on the shoreline, a safe distance away from the outlaw. “Look, I didn’t mean to send you flying and shit, but—”

She snapped her head toward me and bared her teeth. “Shut your shithole. Now we gotta move quick before they come back.” Her eyes looked me over, and she started stomping out of the water toward me. “Where the shit’s my gun?”

“Oh, uh, it’s up here!” Nova said from above, peering down at us from on top of the rocks. She looked at me. “Should I give it back to her now, or…?”

“Gimme my fucking gun,” Ace spat, her wings popping open and quickly getting her airborne. Nova flinched and held out the rifle, and Ace snatched it out of her hooves. Angling her wings downwards, she glided until she landed back on the shoreline, and she started looking over the weapon like it was a foal or something. Given her reaction just then, I’d say that she certainly treated it like one.

Satisfied that her rifle was still in one piece, she glanced aside at me. “We gotta go. Now. You remember which waterfalls it is, right?” When I nodded, she flapped her wings and hovered a few inches off of the ground. “Good. Gallop and don’t stop. Them pegasi will be back in a few minutes. Don’t get caught out in the open.”

I blinked. “Wait, what the fuck are you gonna—?!” But it was too late. With a few flaps of her wings, she was already streaking through the sky, racing for the waterfalls hiding the installation behind them. I swallowed hard and looked over my shoulder at Gauge and Nova, who were just starting to make their way down. “Uh, guys…”

The two of them stopped and looked up at Ace’s figure flying away from us. “Damn it,” Gauge cursed, and he stepped to the side to let Nova get past him so he could hurry her along down the slope. “I swear on the stars, this mare…”

Nova jumped the last five feet off of the rocks to the sand, wincing when she landed harder on her hooves than she thought she was going to. Gauge followed her down but didn’t jump from so high up, and after I made sure that the two of them were ready, we all set off at a gallop down the shoreline. Ahead of us, I saw Ace swoop down behind the waterfalls, and I immediately heard her rifle go to work from behind the cover of the water. I knew that Yeoman and his crew would be able to hear it as well, so I leaned into my run and tried to pour on a little more speed.

My hooves kicked up wet silt and sand as I galloped along the shoreline, and it made it a little hard to keep my balance, but soon the roar of the three waterfalls drowned out almost everything else. They didn’t look too big from far away, but as I got closer, I realized that they seemed taller and taller. They poured off of three sides of a cleft in the canyon wall, creating an almost solid wall of water that obscured the rock behind it. In fact, I had to hold my breath and lower my head as I galloped right at the edge of the waterfall closest to the wall, and I emerged on the other side almost completely drenched.

Ace spun around and raised her gun at me, but quickly pulled it up and to the side when she recognized me and Nova and Gauge. Three dead bodies lay on the rocks around her, each one with a few bullet holes in their chests and backs. And behind her, down at the water level, was half of an enormous metal door. I could see the lower half through the shimmering waterline around it, frothy and foaming because of the waterfalls. The next piece of the code was just inside; we were so close.

“Took y’all long enough,” Ace grumbled, swaying as she trotted up to us. Turning to Gauge, she pointed to the door. “Just to the left, almost at the waterline. That there’s the panel behind a big, flat rock. We need it open before they get here in force.”

Gauge nodded and galloped up to the door, SCaR following along behind. He pried a fake stone open with his hooves, revealing a rusted metal panel, but amazingly, its lights flickered on as it opened. While he and SCaR started figuring out what they needed to do, Ace looked at me and Nova. “They’ll be gunning for that door—literally. We’ll have to fend them off.” She looked at Nova, who was chewing on her hooves. “You got a gun? Know how to fight?”

Nova rapidly shook her head. “N-No! I’ve tried shooting them before, I’m awful at it! I don’t know the first thing about how they work!”

My ear perked at shouting outside, and Ace glanced at the waterfall preventing us from seeing outside. I felt like we were trapped in a cage, just waiting for the shrikes to dive on us. Ace quickly pulled one of her SP-9s and tossed it to Nova, who barely managed to catch it in her hooves. “It’s wing grip, just stick it in your feathers and shoot. I don’t care if you don’t hit nothing, just keep shooting and keep them from getting comfortable!”

Nova slid the pistol between her primaries and pointed it at the waterfall. “Oh, stars, oh, stars, oh stars…” she muttered to herself, shaking as we waited for the attack. I wanted to hug her so badly, but there wasn’t any time. I picked up my BR14M and waded into the water to at least make myself look like a smaller target. There really wasn’t any cover to hide behind back here.

And then the first pegasi dove through the waterfall, hooves over their eyes to shield them from the water pouring off of the mountain. They were equipped with shoulder mounts and automatic rifles, and they had ballistic plating covering their chests. If they had a chance to line up shots and fire, we’d all be dead. But we didn’t give them that chance. As soon as they burst through the waterfall, the three of us started laying down fire. My new rifle chattered in my aura as I unleashed full-auto hell on them, and though a few of my bullets squashed on the ballistic plating, I managed to hit the fucker in the neck. He fell into the water with a limp splash of feathers, and the foamy white water began to turn red.

On my right, Ace dropped her target with a quick double tap to his chest and head, but on my left, Nova was only firing wildly at the remaining pegasus. The RPR pony swooped down to line her guns up with Nova, but a quick burst of fire from Ace and I cut her to ribbons before she could. She shrieked in pain as she slammed into the rocks, coming to a stop just in front of Nova, who yelped in surprise and jumped backwards. All it took was a quick shot from Ace’s rifle to kill the RPR mare, and I quickly checked the glowing number on the back of my rifle for my ammo count.

Just then, automatic weapons chattered and fired through the waterfall, and we all hit the ground, or in my case, the water. Bullets flew around us and slammed into rocks and water, and I saw a few slow as they entered the water before clunking against the rocks at the bottom. The barrage lasted all of three seconds, and when it was over, I realized that I needed to be shooting. I stood up, raising my rifle, but I was nearly too late.

Five pegasi burst through the waterfall, and they immediately began shooting without even checking to see what they were aiming at. I tried to use the split second they were blinded to my advantage, but I was so thrown off by their suppressing fire that I could only wildly fire my rifle in a spray up at them. I got one, and she flipped over backwards before hitting the water, but the rest quickly scattered and picked us out. Their automatics fired and I instinctively squatted down, but I stopped myself from going prone in the water. If I laid down, I’d be an even easier target, so I forced myself to stand and keep shooting despite the burst of bullets heading my way.

Ace’s powerful rifle cracked three times in rapid succession, almost completely destroying my ears as the report echoed in this tiny little cleft, but two pegasi fell immediately. I put my sights on another and fired, forcing him to dive away, but I managed to catch him in the side of the jaw and take him out with a scream. Spinning to my left, I sighted the last of the five, but before I could fire, his feathers just burst into flame. Panicking and with his wings on fire, the last pony didn’t even try shooting as he flailed, falling into the water below. Ace’s rifle thundered again as he disappeared beneath the water, and a plume of red rose to the surface before the waterfall quickly diluted it.

Nova stared at the gun in her wingtip in shock. “Did I do that?” she said, looking at the weapon like it was going to bite her.

“Yes you did!” Ace exclaimed, laughing. “Feels good, don’t it?”

“No!” Nova exclaimed, turning to Ace with an incredulous look on her face. “It really doesn’t! I just burned his feathers off! That’s horrible!”

“It’s better than losing your fucking pretty head,” Ace muttered to herself. Snarling over her shoulder, she looked at Gauge and SCaR. “Well? You two done yet? It ain’t no fucking picnic out here!”

“The bullets flying at us aren’t really helping, thanks!” Gauge shouted back. “We just need a few more minutes, SCaR’s trying to navigate old—!” There was an electronic ping, and ancient hydraulics began to hiss as ancient metal squealed in its frame. “…Or not! We got it!”

“Good!” Ace turned to me and quickly changed mags, compacting her rifle from a high powered marksmare rifle to something more snub-nosed and automatic at the press of a button. “Suppressing fire! Get that door time to open!”

I nodded and began firing blindly through the waterfall, just trying to cover a wide enough area to discourage any more pegasi from flying through it. I was really glad that this thing had a magazine size of forty-five instead of the thirty that my old BR12A had; I could keep firing for a lot longer before having to reload. At my left, Nova just sent frantic bursts of her SP-9 into the waterfall, but I wasn’t sure if they were even going through or if they were just fizzling against the surface.

“Out!” Ace shouted after several seconds of firing, and it was almost like that was the magic word. Two more pegasi flew in, and I managed to bring my rifle to bear on one, but suddenly Ace fired four more shots from her weapon and dropped the two immediately. Grinning, she raised her rifle as it automatically ejected an empty mag, then slammed it over the protruding end of one of the magazines at her shoulders. “Or not! Hah! Get fucked!”

“Ember!” Nova shouted at me, and I turned to her only to see her pointing behind us. “The door!”

I spun around in time to see the door open wide enough for us to go down. It led to a short hallway that ended with another door, and the water from the waterfalls began pouring down ancient and dry metal before smashing up against the far door. Lights flickered on in the hallway, and another panel at the end lit up, ready to receive commands.

“Come on!” Ace shouted, moving away from the wall and toward the door. “Now or never!”

I fired a few more bullets into the waterfall before my rifle automatically spat out the empty mag, then turned tail and ran toward the door. Ace darted in first, and I followed her, while Gauge and SCaR waited for Nova to hurry inside before they followed us. Some pegasi took the opportunity to dive through the waterfall, but Ace fired at them with her rifle, unimaginably loud in the small hallway. “The door!” she screamed between shots, and I lifted my rifle above her with my magic to help her keep the pegasi away from the door.

“SCaR!” Gauge shouted, pointing to the control panel in the hallway, and the drone immediately warbled and whirred off in that direction. Within seconds, the lights in the hallway flickered, and the door slowly began to close in front of us. Ace and I just fired and fired and fired until our magazines were empty, and in that little moment of calm, I saw a familiar face fly through the waterfall.

Half of a familiar face.

Yeoman looked right at me, and his eyes widened. He hovered in place for a moment, still as a statue as the doors slowly closed between me and him. Then he smiled, a sickening, disgusting thing where only half his face moved, and the bare muscle and skin on the other half didn’t even twitch.

I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding when the door finally, finally shut. A few bullets shattered uselessly against the heavy door from the other side, but they stopped after a few seconds. The four of us just stood silently in the knee deep water, catching our breath, before Ace just started laughing. Me and my friends stared at her like she was insane, and it took her a while before she finally calmed down.

“What’s so funny?” I asked her, holstering my rifle. Though it was fun to shoot, getting shot at wasn’t so much fun, and I was just glad that it was over.

Wiping a tear from her eye, Ace simply waved a wing at the door leading deeper into the base. “After all this time, all this fucking time, I finally done it. I’m finally inside. And to think that it ain’t been more than a week since I was shooting at surveyor camps and RPR caravans to scrape the bullets together to survive.”

Grinning, she trotted past us and put her hoof on the door, so perfectly preserved after all this time abandoned. “Whatever’s in here, it’s gonna make us rich. Fuck, it might even change the whole damn balance of power in the war against the City. And anything I can bring home to Thatch to help us go kick Reclaimer in the dick, I’m all for. Especially if this code thing you mentioned really is all that damn important like you make it out to be.”

Checking her rifle, she swapped a magazine of hollow points for a box of armor piercing rounds. Then, nodding to the door, she simply smiled and waited. “Let’s get this shit open before those RPR fuckers blast their way inside, how’s that sound?”

Chapter 16: The Voice of a Ghost

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Chapter 16: The Voice of a Ghost

I felt like I was staring at a time capsule.

The door leading deeper into the installation stood before me, spotless and free of rust. Dust covered the surface, or at least what hadn’t been splashed when the water came pouring down the hallway. The panel next to it hummed with energy, covered in flashing lights, clear and perfect. This place hadn’t been touched since the Silence began nearly two hundred winters ago.

“So, what?” I said, turning to Ace, who was impatiently waiting for Gauge and SCaR to get the door open. “There’s like turrets and drones and shit defending these places?”

She nodded back at me. “That’s the usual layout. Automated defenses programmed to fire on anything not carrying an identification badge. Since the door’s still got power, I’d reckon they still got power, too. Check every corner, high and low, before you start down a hallway. Otherwise, you’ll be shot up damn good.” Then, looking at my rifle, she pointed a wingtip to a switch at the base. “That’s one of them BR14s, ain’t it? It’s got an AP setting on it. Some tiny enchantments that make anti-armor rounds unnecessary. Shitty rate of fire’s the tradeoff, but killing turrets and drones is more important. Ain’t like we gonna find any security forces down here.”

“You never know,” I said, finding the switch and setting it to ‘AP.’ “I wouldn’t put anything past a place like this. Maybe there’s a whole bunch of ponies living inside, waiting out the apocalypse. Like a bunker or a vault or something.”

Nova snorted. “That’s stupid. You can’t get something like that to work for that long. Even if you recycled all the waste produced, you’d still run a deficit unless you kept your population under incredibly strict control, and even then it might not be enough. Food stockpiles and hydroponics farms will carry you for a while, but eventually you’ll be consuming your food and water and energy faster than you can produce it.” She paused, and then her wingtip twitched as she raised her hoof. “Like, if you think of this as a closed system—”

I held up my hoof. “Yes, uh, thanks, Nova, but I’m gonna stop you there before you start getting into that fancy math shit that I don’t understand at all.”

Ace sighed in relief behind me. “I hate math. All I need’s basic stuff, like counting.”

I grinned at her. “Finally, somepony who hates math as much as I do! Where have you been all my life?”

Nova pouted and stomped a hoof. “So mean!”

Chuckling, I patted her on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Nov, at least Gauge appreciates it… I think.” I looked at him expectantly. “Well?”

Gauge pretended like he was trying to avoid the conversation. Clearing his throat, he pushed a button on the panel as SCaR unplugged itself from it. “Hey, look, door’s open.”

Nova frowned at her coltfriend. “Gauge!”

“What?” he asked, smiling at her. “I was just a greaser, I didn’t do all that much math.”

Ace coughed into her hoof and pushed past us toward the door as it slowly hissed open. “Right, let’s just save all the friendly talk for after we clean this place out, okay? In case you forgot, we ain’t got much time.” She pointed back over her shoulder at the exit door. “They’re gonna be blasting or cutting through that in a few minutes. I ain’t fixing to be cut down when they do.”

“Right.” I trained my rifle on the door, and Ace did the same at my side. “Nova, Gauge, just stay behind us. If you see anything, call it out. I don’t wanna get shot in the ass today.”

They nodded and fell in behind us, and we all went quiet as we waited for the door to open. It parted lengthwise down the middle, and the two halves slowly retracted into the walls on ancient hydraulics. Lights flickered on inside, one after another, and soon the entire room was lit up. When nothing moved or shot at us, Ace flicked her ear and slowly walked inside, her rifle braced between her wings. At least I was happy to see that her drunken swagger was fading away now that we were finally inside the facility.

Swallowing, I moved with her, peeking to the left as she went to the right. Our hooves made little splashes in the water draining out of the hallway and into the big room, and once I checked my corner, I slowly scanned the rest of the room, my rifle following my eyes. It looked like a big reception area, with a huge counter that ran along the left wall of the room, making an L shape when it hit the far corner before ending abruptly next to a door. Several old computer frames lined the counter, covered in dust, all dark and dead. There were a few benches for sitting along the right wall, but everything else was bare, from the grated metal floors to the solid steel walls and the concrete and steel roof supported by exposed trusses. But one thing stood out to me, painted in flaking black letters at the far end of the room:

BLUEWATER GORGE INSTALLATION X-37

MANATRONICS, ROBOTICS, CYBERNETICS RESEARCH

“Manatronics?” I thought aloud. “What does that even mean?”

“Advanced mana batteries research, probably,” Nova said, stepping further into the room, her eyes trained on the painted words like they were holy text. “There’s two kinds of mana in the world: that which our bodies make, and what’s just ambiently floating in the air. Since the great wizards of old discovered it, ponies have been trying to harness the latter into basically infinite energy. It looks like the Synarchy was no different.”

Ace set the butt of her rifle down at her hoof and hummed to herself. “Infinite energy? Think they ever got it to work?”

“Power’s on,” Gauge said with a shrug. “Either they have really good generators to keep this place operational for two hundred years with no staff, or they figured it out.”

“Maybe we’ll find out,” I said, slowly walking over toward the door. “I just hope the code’s in here.”

“It should be,” Gauge said, and SCaR whirred its agreement. “Remember that list of installations we saw when we first got the code? One of them was ‘BGX37’. This has to be it.”

I just blinked at him. “You remembered that?”

“I had slave drivers slamming my face into their computers for days before you and the Sentinels took me out of there,” Gauge said. Wincing, he rubbed his forehead. “I think they literally beat it into my brain.”

Rubbing a hoof behind my neck, I swallowed and started walking toward the door. “Yeah, well, that’s over now,” I said, looking up at it. “Don’t have to worry about that anymore.” I raised my hoof to the switch next to the door, but before I pressed it, I readied my rifle and made sure that Ace did the same. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Ace said, nodding back at me. She reared up on her hind legs and balanced her rifle with her forelegs and wings, aiming right at the center of the door, and only swaying slightly. Nova and Gauge moved off to the side, behind the counter where they couldn’t be shot at, and with a deep breath, I pressed the button.

The door hissed and slid open, and an alarm immediately began to blare. It sounded like the entire mountain was screaming at us. Ace pressed her ears flat against her head, and as I looked through the door, I saw a pair of turrets pop out of the ceiling of a long hallway about halfway down. Ace and I immediately began shooting before they could train their sights on us, and I noticed that my rifle shook a lot more and fired a lot slower on its AP setting. But it spat out glowing rounds that streaked right through the armored casing of the turret on the left, and four or five shots was enough to make it spark and jam. Meanwhile, Ace shot hers in a weak spot or something, because the armored casing around it shattered and the entire gun and ammo belt popped out of its mount in the ceiling.

When nothing else moved down the hallway, Ace lowered her rifle. “Old trick I learned back with the Runners,” she said, pointing to the turret she’d shot down. “Ain’t the strongest welding at their roots, provided you can punch through the armor. Good for scraps and bullets.” She pointed with her rifle down the hall. “Let’s get moving, ain’t no time to waste.”

She led the way and I followed her, gesturing for Nova and Gauge to hang a safe distance back. The hallway felt like it was unnecessarily long, but it was putting us more and more under the center of the mountain. It also had a slight decline to it, and I could imagine the millions of tons of stone and water sitting above us as we descended into the dark secrets of Equestria’s past. I was just glad I wasn’t claustrophobic, though I heard Gauge whispering soothing things to Nova behind me. Most pegasi don’t really like caves and that sort of thing, and even Ace, experienced as she was, looked pretty twitchy as the air grew heavier and heavier.

There were a lot of doors along the hallway, but we walked past all of them. Our sights were firmly set on the massive door at the end, labeled with a dimly-lit sign that read ‘CENTRAL LABS / REACTOR’. If there was anywhere that this code piece would have gone to, it had to be there, right? But before we could get to it, a forcefield materialized in the middle of the hallway and several heavy turrets emerged on the other side.

I raised my rifle to shoot, but Ace quickly swatted it aside and shook her head. “Ain’t nothing gonna get through that shield,” she said, frowning at the shimmering light in front of us. “We’re gonna have to shut down the security systems.”

“Easier said than done, I imagine,” I said, and the outlaw nodded. Sighing, I spun around and looked at the eight doors that we’d walked past just to get here. “So, which one is it? Think there’s a map somewhere?”

Ace opened her mouth, but a synthetic mare’s voice began to shout at us. “Alarm!” It blared, “Critical Reactor Malfunction! This facility is on lockdown until further notice! All personnel, report to your labs and await further instructions! This lockdown will remain in effect until your commanding officer reestablishes communication with the Ivory City! Alarm!...”

While it droned on and on, I just looked at Ace. “So, uh, how the fuck are we gonna get past this?”

“We need to find the control room,” she said. “From there, we should be able to shut the system down. Maybe even get rid of these damn turrets and shit while we’re at it, though I ain’t never been one all that good with computers.”

Nova’s ears perked up. “I can do that!” she exclaimed. “If these computers are running the same system as the ones back in Blackwash, then it’ll be a piece of cake!”

“That’s a relief,” Ace said, flickering a smile at Nova. Then, pursing her lips, she looked at the doors around us. “Now then, we just gotta figure out where the fuck to go…”

“Well, uh, where’s a command center more likely to be held?” I asked her. “You’ve run through installations like this before, right? Maybe it’s got a similar layout?”

Just then, we heard a distant boom, and the installation shook. Dirt and dust fell from the ceiling, dusting us all. Nova and Gauge looked to me, and I in turn looked to Ace. Chewing on her lip, the outlaw motioned for me to stay put. Spreading her wings, she flew up the hallway, pausing at the door before turning around and gliding back down.

“They’re trying to blast through the door,” she said. “Equestrian steel’s stronger than that, but it ain’t gonna hold forever. They’ll have that door open sooner or later.”

“So we need to get moving,” I said, and Ace nodded. Frowning, I just walked to the nearest door and opened it with the press of a button. It hissed on its hydraulics and retracted, and the lights inside the next room flickered on. It looked like a series of labs connected to each other with glass walls dividing them. Ancient equipment I couldn’t make any sense of lay dormant and still, untouched for two hundred years. And above all this, there was a curious lack of skeletons or remains or anything, really. It was like everypony had just up and left two centuries ago, never to return.

Ace peered in over my shoulder and shook her head. “Non-critical labs,” she said. “That’s probably what most of these rooms are. Stuff that ain’t too dangerous or secret, they’d do out here. They’d save the important stuff for that.” She pointed to the forcefield with a wing, with the two heavy turrets still just staring at us from the other side. They were even ticking by on little motors, swiveling to watch Gauge pace back and forth in front of the forcefield.

“What about this one?” Nova asked, pointing to one of the two doors closest to the forcefield. “It’s got a keypad in the wall next to it.”

Ace and I trotted over, and sure enough, there was a little keypad set inside of the wall, right next to the doorframe. Nova’d pried open the panel that had once covered it, and I saw why we missed it the first time; it looked exactly like the wall, and it fit flush with it, too. But now that we had a good idea which door we needed to open, we had a new problem to solve.

“What the fuck’s the passcode?” I asked, staring at it. I didn’t even know how many numbers it would be, or what would happen if we just put something in randomly. But that didn’t seem like something I’d want to fuck with.

“I bet an office around here has it,” Ace said, looking over the doors. She trotted over to the first and one by one opened them, peeking inside before shutting them. She uncovered a few labs and a janitor’s closet, and I could tell she was starting to get impatient as she flicked through them. Finally, she opened one that led down a short hallway with a few doors on either side. “This has to be it. Let’s go.”

She set off down the hall, me following her and keeping my rifle trained on everything. She slowly advanced, opening one door after another, but when she got halfway down the hall, another alarm blared and the door we entered slammed shut behind us, almost crushing Gauge in two. But luckily he managed to jump through, and that left the four of us in this short hallway as the synthetic voice started talking again.

“Non-Authorized personnel detected in the administrative wing. Please lay down your weapons and surrender to the authorities. Lethal countermeasures are on standby. You have thirty seconds to comply.”

Then I heard this buzzing noise coming from the walls, or more specifically, small hatches built into the walls. The voice began counting down, slowly and ominously, and my heart started to pick up. “Ace, what the fuck do we do?” I asked her, bouncing my rifle from hatch to hatch but unsure of where to put it.

“We need to get a door open and get out of here,” she said, looking around. She immediately rushed over to one of the doors and tried to open it, but it refused to budge.

“Twenty seconds…”

“The vents!” Gauge shouted, pointing to a large grate built into the wall above his head. “Maybe one of us can go through and open a door on the other side! They need to circulate air throughout this entire place, they have to connect.”

“I’ll do it!” Nova exclaimed, placing her hooves on the wall. “I’m just small enough to fit!”

“Ten seconds…”

“Do it,” I said, swallowing hard. I didn’t know what was going to come out of those hatches but I didn’t want to know. “Give her a boost!”

“SCaR! The bolts!” he shouted as he crouched down under the vent. The drone buzzed and flew up to the corners of the vent, and with quick and accurate bursts from its probe, it turned the bolts holding the corners into molten slag. I quickly reached out with my magic and tore the thing off of the wall, and with a boost from Gauge, Nova squeezed into the vent, her remaining wing fluttering uselessly at her side for a moment before she started crawling around, SCaR following her into the cramped space.

And then at that moment, the hatches on the wall flew open and at least a dozen drones poured into the room. They looked like combat models, smaller and more agile than SCaR, each one equipped with a single barrel and probably no more than twenty shots. But they immediately swarmed on us. And while Ace tried firing at them, I immediately closed my eyes and put a shield around the three of us.

The drones started firing, hammering the shield from all sides as they angrily buzzed around it. Each one would fire off its burst and then quickly disappear into the walls again, only to be replaced by a fresh drone to add to the swarm. My skull pounded with every bullet strike against my shield, and I started gasping as I tried and tried to keep it up. I didn’t know how much longer I could do this; shields were never my strong suit, and I could feel blackout creeping in on me. It’d only be a matter of time before I dropped the shield and the drones killed me, or the shield ate my life force and killed me. Either way, I would end up dead, and Ace and Gauge would go down with me.

I heard hydraulics hiss through my dimming senses, and hooves on my shoulder and chest pulled me backwards. I staggered along with them, just trying to keep my shield up, until finally the immense drain on my magic stopped. I hesitated a second, but eventually I couldn’t keep the spell going any longer, and I dropped it. Gasping and wheezing, my eyes fluttered open to see my friends standing over me, concerned looks on their faces as a bright manalight shined down on them from above.

“Take your time,” Ace said, patting my forehead. “Let your mana get back to you. Ain’t no good trying to run around on empty.”

I couldn’t even respond to her, so I just closed my eyes and kept panting. Eventually, my heart slowed down and I finally felt like I was getting some air in my lungs, so I sat up and rubbed my head. Only then could I feel the blood dribbling down my muzzle from my nostrils, and I wiped it away with a sniffle.

“We’re all in one piece?” I asked, looking around. None of my friends looked hurt, though Nova’s white coat and feathers were stained black with grease and grime from her crawl through the vent. In front of me, the door was shut, though I could still hear a lot of angry buzzing on the other side, and just above it to the left was an open vent with the grate lying on the floor. Grunting, I slowly managed to stand, and looked around to see a lot of tables and desks with dividers between them. Old computers covered in dust and rotting paper mulch that might once have been books decorated most of the shelves, and the chairs here were either overturned or set away from their desks. I guess the ponies who worked here had left in a hurry a long time ago.

There were more doors at the back of the room, though they weren’t hydraulics at all; they were just plain metal doors. Ace was already snooping around one of them, and after poking her head through, she waved us over. “They just connect the offices together. Won’t have to go out in the swarms again.”

“Good,” I said, cracking my neck. “I don’t think I’ve got another shield like that in me.”

“I didn’t know you even had a shield like that in you to begin with,” Gauge said, lightly hitting my shoulder. “You saved us all from getting shot up out there.”

I just shrugged. “I certainly wasn’t going to try shooting all of them. There were too many.” Then, swallowing, I started off after Ace. “But we should probably find what we’re looking for fast. We’ve got Yeoman trying to get in and drones looking to gun us to pieces. I don’t want to stay here any longer than I have to.”

I half expected to hear another explosion shake the facility as soon as I said that; it’d certainly fit with how things seemed to be going for now. But all was quiet and still, save for the buzzing of the drones on the other side. I was surprised that they didn’t go through the open vent between the hallway and this room, but maybe their programming didn’t allow for it. Still, I wasn’t going to take any chances. “Gauge, can you and Nova get that vent closed up? I don’t want to risk the security system suddenly getting smart and sending those buzzy fuckers in after us.”

“On it.” The two of them made for the open vent and picked up the grate lying on the ground, the corners still glowing faintly from SCaR’s little welding probe thing. Meanwhile, I followed Ace through the doors, and we carefully moved into the next room.

“Now if I were a code to an Equestrian installation’s security center…” I muttered, snooping around the desks in the room. “Where would I be?”

Ace just looked at me funny and shook her head. “It’d probably be written down somewhere important,” she said, poking through the cubicles in the room. Once again I noticed that everything was just… empty. A far cry from the foundry where there were bodies and remains everywhere. What had happened to the ponies that worked here? Did they get out? I was half expecting wailers to come charging out of the woodwork, but there wasn’t so much as a bloodstain anywhere.

“Here,” Ace said, taking my attention away from some broken etch glass on one of the desks. She stood in front of what must’ve been a supervisor’s office, since it was sort of set into the wall and separated from the general office space by big glass windows. Even the glass was still intact, and when she tried the handle, it refused to budge.

I shrugged and raised my rifle. “Guess we go around,” I said, smashing the butt of the gun through the glass. Ace winced as it shattered onto the floor, and we both jumped as an alarm blasted.

“Intruder alert! Unauthorized entrance at Dr. Electric Surge’s office! Security personnel, respond immediately!” Ace and I immediately whipped our rifles to the corners of the room as turrets burst out of the ceiling tiles and began firing. There were four turrets, too many for us to take standing, so Ace tackled me backwards into the office where we at least had some cover.

Bullets pinged off of the metal half-wall as we huddled up against it. “You just had to,” Ace spat at me. She tried peeking over the wall to get a shot at the turrets, but several bullets ripped through the fringe of her mane, shaving black hair off of her head. Cursing, she pointed at me. “You’re a unicorn! Blind fire or something!”

I tried to do just that, picking up my rifle and shooting into the corners of the room. I heard one turret pop and crack after several shots, but I couldn’t see where the others were. I ejected my mag without any more luck and slotted a new one in.

Then I heard more gunfire coming back from the way we came. My blood turned to ice; did turrets pop up in that room, too? Nova and Gauge were practically defenseless! I tensed my legs, ready to whip up a meagre shield and run over to check on them, but then I noticed that there were only two turrets shooting at me. The other gun kept firing, and I saw SCaR putter past my line of sight toward the turrets that were practically above and alongside us, keeping us pinned down. His probe flashed several times, and one by one, the turrets stopped firing.

Ace and I poked our heads out of cover and SCaR flew down to us. The drone chirped and warbled before retracting its probe, and I saw that the gun attachments Gauge had put on it were stained with soot. Gauge came trotting in a moment later, and he let out a sigh of relief when he saw we were both okay. “I heard the turrets, and when they kept shooting I worried.” He patted SCaR on the top of its frame, and the drone whistled at him. “SCaR shot at one of the turrets from the doorway, but they didn’t react to him at all, so I had him go in and take apart the other two without wasting bullets. He can’t punch through them easily.”

“Huh. That’s useful,” I said, wincing as I plucked some glass shards out of my coat. Then I yelped as Ace slapped me across the back of the head.

“Dumb bitch,” she growled, brushing herself off. “Don’t go breaking shit in places like this. You ain’t been with the Ruin Runners like me, so just let me lead the way, alright? These places are full of nasty surprises, and I don’t need you setting them off all willy nilly.”

“Well, we’re alive,” I said with a shrug. I turned back to Gauge and SCaR, and even Nova, who had her head poking through the doorway. “Is that grate covered up?”

“Kind of,” Nova said with a shrug. “The drones can’t get in, though they’re still buzzing like mad out there.”

Shrugging, I stepped over the shattered glass into this ‘Dr. Electric Surge’s’ office. “That’ll have to do. Keep an eye on it while we poke around here.” I walked over to the computer on the desk, and to my surprise, its screen lit up when I sat in front of it. After a second, I chuckled. “Actually, think you could take a look at this? It’s computer shit, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“Coming!” Nova sang from the other room, and a moment later, she gracefully hopped the divide into the office, carefully avoiding the shattered glass jutting out of the frame. I slid out of the seat, letting her take it, while Ace and Gauge wandered around the desk.

“Maybe I should help,” Ace insisted, peering over Nova’s shoulder at the holographic screen. “I been around these kinds of computers before, I know—”

“Wow! This thing still works perfectly!” Nova exclaimed, pushing things around on the screen with her hoof. “All of their mail is still on here, too!” A few quick taps of her hooves and a flick of her feathers made the screen change into who knew what. “There’s even design files, a few communiques, spreadsheets and a ton of raw data…”

Ace kind of threw her wings up in surrender. “Okay, yeah, you seem like you got it. I’ll just… go salvage some of the turrets.” She fluttered through the shattered window and trotted off to the corner, momentarily disappearing from sight.

“Yeah, Ace is right, I think I’ll just let you do that,” I said, stepping away from the desk. I mean, I was barely literate, much less computer literate; me trying to navigate a computer would be a disaster. At least Nova knew what she was doing. In the meanwhile, I started snooping around the doctor’s possessions.

The first thing I grabbed was a photo, remarkably well preserved in some kind of crystal frame. In it, an older pair of unicorns stood by a younger mare’s shoulders, each with a foreleg resting across her back. The older stallion was a faded blue with a random white shock at the front of this mane, and the mare who I assumed was his wife was white with an electric yellow mane, though that mane was quickly adopting the color of her coat. The younger mare between them, who looked maybe a few winters older than me, was a brilliant electric blue that reminded me of my mother, and her mane was split into zigzagging blue and white patterns layered one atop the other, with the hair at her scalp a deep blue, and the hair at its ends pure white. Sapphire blue eyes completed the beaming mare’s face, and she held a diploma against her chest. I assumed she was Dr. Surge, though how old she’d been when she got this office, I couldn’t tell.

But I was more interested in the background, anyway. Tall buildings of steel rose behind the family, almost entirely at odds with the vibrant grasses and stone building they stood near. Other ponies walked down a sidewalk on the right, heads down and moving with meaning, and in the very back of the picture I saw the barrel and front end of an Equestrian tank sitting on the street corner. Overhead, four ringbirds flew in formation away from the photographer, and above them, the ghostly shape of some enormous ship loomed. I didn’t know what it was, only that it was huge. I could only assume that it was a warship of some kind.

“Find anything, Nov?” I asked, setting the picture back down. I doubted Surge’s personal life was going to help us out all that much.

“Not yet,” she said, her eyes skimming through messages as she flicked them to the corner of the screen. “But there is a whole bunch of interesting stuff.”

Me and Gauge glanced at each other. “Such as?”

“Well, first off, it looks like I was right,” Nova said. “They were trying to make a fuelless reactor that gets its energy from ambient mana. It looks like they had some success on smaller prototypes, and this facility was primarily built to house the full-scale version.” She frowned and tossed aside another message. “Dr. Surge was the head researcher for the project, but there’s no mention on whether it worked or not.”

“I wonder if the reactor is still intact,” Gauge said. It wasn’t difficult to recognize the excitement in his eyes—he was a born mechanic, after all. “This place could be a huge boon to Auris if it works. Just the ability to provide power to the planet would be amazing for civilization.”

“What little of it isn’t already a twisted, slaving mockery,” I bitterly remarked.

Nova shrugged. “They were going to turn it on at the beginning of January, but there’s nothing past that point. I guess the Silence finally hit them on the ninth.”

I blinked. “The ninth? That’s the exact same date that I found on a message between somepony and a secretary back at the foundry.”

“I guess we know the day that the world ended,” Gauge said. “For all the good that really does us.”

Nova nodded her agreement. “It’s a neat anecdote, but not one that’ll help us.” Her remaining wingtip pulled a message to the front. “But—here! This is what we’re looking for!” She enlarged the message, and I saw Ace stick her head around the corner. “Another one of the researchers asked her for the codes to the security station. They seemed like they were worried about what was happening back on Equus, and they didn’t trust the soldiers here. I… I think they were trying to turn the security systems on the garrison!”

Again, I could only blink at her. “They were—what?”

Ace chuckled at us—or at least, at me. “Welcome to the end of the fucking world, Ember. It ain’t pretty, and it sure as shit ain’t fair.” She stepped back into the office and walked up to us. “I seen my fair share of betrayal and backstabbing, and I stumbled across a lot of logs of the last days of Equestria.” Shaking her head, she pointed to the computer. “Everything went to shit around the beginning of January of that year, whenever it was. Ponies turning on each other, all sorts of nastiness. And this here? This is just a bunch of eggheads trying to pull the rug out from under the ponies with guns. Not a bad idea, given what was happening all across Auris at the time, but we ain’t got time to go into that.”

Nova nodded. “In any case, the number we’re looking for is ‘024114’. That’ll get us into the security wing.”

“But what about those drones?” Gauge asked. “Unless Em’s got another shield in her, and we find some way to open the door back out, they’ll just chew us to pieces.”

“Funny you should mention that.” Nova’s hooves and wingtip poked a few things on the screen, and I heard the clattering of a lot of metal things back the way we came. “This Surge pony had control over security in this wing of the installation, apparently. Given that she was the one in charge, that’s not all that surprising.” She thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Or maybe she set it up shortly before the Synarchy said bye-bye. They were planning on killing the garrison, going into lockdown.” Shuddering, she added, “Why were ponies from the past so lovely?”

“Not like the ponies of today are any better,” I muttered. Still, I checked my rifle and hopped out of the office. “But we should get going. They’ve been awfully fucking quiet at that door…”

“Agreed,” Ace said, following me out. She stopped and picked up a chain gun she’d stripped from one of the turrets and momentarily leaned it against the wall. “Figure this’ll be useful once they manage to get through. Can’t really shoot it without bracing it on some shit, but it’s better than nothing.”

I just looked at all the guns we had between all of us. “I think we’ve got a lot more than ‘nothing.’”

She shrugged. “Ain’t gonna hurt us none. Now c’mon, let’s go.”

We hurriedly retraced our steps, and when I pressed my good ear against the door out, I didn’t hear any more buzzing. I bit my lip and prepared a shield in case I’d need it, and at my nod, Ace opened the door. I flinched and nearly threw up a shield prematurely, but there wasn’t anything hovering on the other side. In fact, all the drones were lying lifeless on the floor, and the little ports they’d come from in the walls were all closed.

“Oh, thank the stars,” I muttered, stepping into the hallway. “I was afraid I was gonna get turned into fucking cheese. Good work, Nova.” The locked door at the end even opened at the touch of my magic; at least we weren’t trapped in this wing.

Nova beamed at my comment and trotted into the hallway after me. “See? I don’t need to know how to use a gun to be useful.” Then she must’ve glimpsed her naked side out of the corner of her eye, and she wilted like a flower in the scorching Auris sun. “Or have both my wings…”

Ace trotted up alongside her and wrapped her wing across Nova’s barrel. “You don’t need no stinking wings to be a pegasus. We got good eyes, good ears, we’re fast and nimble—and in your case, pretty darn small to squeeze into places them fatties can’t fit into.”

I rolled my eyes but let it slide—Ace was trying to help Nova, and I wasn’t going to make some comment about how big my ass was. Not now, at least.

Still… I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder and down at my tail. I certainly was a lot leaner than when I left Blackwash.

Gauge brushed against my shoulder as he made for the door. “Don’t worry, there’s still a lot down there left to love,” he whispered in my half-ear, then darted out of the way before I could hit him. He stuck his tongue out at me while I fumed, then slipped out the door back into the main hall. Ace and Nova went by as well, leaving me standing in the doorway while they went to the keypad at the security wing door. After a few seconds, it hissed as it slid open, and Gauge turned around to taunt me from the other side of the hall. “You coming, Em?”

I didn’t really say anything as I stomped over to him. He probably thought I was going to shove my rifle right up his ass, because he scampered away. That was probably a smart move for him, though to be honest, I didn’t know if I should’ve been pissed with him or not. I mean… nopony wanted to date a skeleton, right?

Ugh, okay, that’s enough about me and my body image. And even if those were the thoughts that crossed my mind at the time, I didn’t dwell on them. After all, though it’d been healing over the past few weeks, I was still raw over Zip’s death, and on top of that, it wasn’t like I’d seen anypony that caught my eye lately. And on top of that, the only pony in our little troop that wasn’t already taken was Ace, and I still didn’t know how I felt about her. Of course, there was always SCaR, but… well, that sort of speaks for itself.

I know what you’re thinking from that one time way back in the valley, and I’d like to reiterate that was one time. No. It never happened again.

I followed the three of them into the security wing, then realized that I should probably be in front with Ace. After slipping past Nova and Gauge, I got a good look around. There were several doors inset on the one wall, all of them open wide, their mechanisms broken. Ace and I peered into them first, and Nova and Gauge would each take a look as we passed. There was an armory (unfortunately stripped bare), a barracks of sorts (almost completely untouched; the beds were still made!), showers, and other stuff you’d find in living quarters. But this wing wasn’t as clean as the others; at the end of the hall, two turrets hung from the roof, and both had been severely damaged by gunfire.

“I guess they tried it, then,” I said, observing the bullet fragments and marks in the hallway, and even more around the wall near the turrets. “Surge and her group. They must’ve tried to take down the garrison.”

“Must’ve,” Gauge said, looking at the floor. “There’s ancient bloodstains on the grating, though it’s almost impossible to see. Either the ponies those turrets shot survived, or something took away the bodies afterwards.”

“There certainly ain’t no scientists around here,” Ace grumbled, stopping in front of a big door at the end of the hall. “Maybe it backfired on them.” She tried to open the door, but something had destroyed the switch next to it. I couldn’t figure out what made that damage, but whatever it was, it’d turned the whole thing into slag. “Fuck, we ain’t gonna get through this shit from the front.”

“I’m gonna assume that shooting it a bunch isn’t going to help,” I said, looking the thing over alongside her.

Ace rolled her eyes. “I ain’t even gonna bother commenting on that.”

The four of us stared at the door and the walls around it, searching for answers. We found them in a metal panel slightly protruding from the wall. The edge farthest from the door blended in perfectly with the surrounding wall, but the edge closest jutted out by about an inch and a half. Grating covered the gap, and when I held my hoof up to it, I could feel air limply moving along. I looked at Nova and shrugged. “Feel like climbing through more vents?”

Nova frowned. “If I have to,” she said, shaking out her wing. I just nodded to Gauge, and Gauge in turn whistled to SCaR and pointed to the bolts holding the panel in place. Between SCaR’s torch and my horn, we got the panel off of the wall in no time at all. Soon, a dark and dusty square tube yawned at us, barely big enough for Nova to squeeze through.

She placed her forehooves on the edge of the vent, but before she could hop in, Ace touched her shoulder. “If you can get the door open from that side, that’d be mighty fine. If not, see if you can shut down security. We need them turrets and that force field turned off if we’re gonna get to the labs.”

“Okay, I’ll see what I can do.” She bit her lip, then looked at Gauge. The two quickly kissed, and then Gauge pointed to the vent. “SCaR, get in there and pop open the bolts. Help Nova out.” The drone whistled and disappeared into the vent, and I saw a flash of light reflected in the aluminum as it set its torch to work. A second later, Nova hopped in after it, and began wriggling her way through the vent. She barely had any room to move her legs; there was no way any of us could squeeze through. I was glad to have her.

It was a long time before we heard anything; the vent must’ve been longer than I thought. But finally, we heard the grate fall on the other side, and a second later, Nova’s hooves clopped on the grated floor. “Okay, I’m through!” she shouted back through the vents. “Stars, I think these vents run through the whole installation! There were a ton of other passages and stuff!”

“Hopefully we won’t have to have you go crawling all the way to the code,” I said.

Ace wasn’t feeling quite as cheery. “The computer in there work?” she shouted back, straight to business. I couldn’t blame her; we were wasting a lot of time as it was.

All was quiet for a few moments; I guess Nova was taking a look around. “What do you see?” I shouted back to her when she didn’t say anything fast enough for my attention span.

“A lot of big screens,” she said. “No bodies, though. Where is everypony?”

“A mystery for another time,” I said. “Can you find the controls?”

More silence, and then, “Yeah! Yeah, I think these are them!” Me, Ace, and Gauge just waited at the vent to see if there was anything more for her to say, and we all jumped when the lights suddenly shut off. Emergency lighting flickered on a second later, bathing us all in a red glow.

“What did you do?” I shouted into the vent.

“I shut off power to this wing,” Nova said. “It should shut off security, too. Are the turrets outside still ready to blast us to pieces?”

Ace flew back down the length of the hall and carefully poked her head around the corner. I saw her wings relax, and she turned around and waved to us. “Force field’s gone, and the turrets are dead.”

“They’re good, Nov!” I shouted into the vent, just in case she couldn’t hear Ace from in there.

“Awesome! Okay, I’m coming back!”

Gauge breathed a sigh of relief; I guess just being separated from his marefriend was worrying him, but I didn’t blame him. This place was a fucking deathtrap and a half waiting to happen. In the meanwhile, I heard a few deliberate gunshots from the main hallway. “What’re you doing out there?” I shouted to Ace, frowning at the doorway she’d disappeared through.

“Disabling security. Just in case,” she said. “Don’t trust these damn things to stay dead. I ain’t gonna get shot in the ass because this place got a backup backup generator.”

“Fair enough,” I said, and my ears perked as I heard Nova clambering through the vents. But Ace must’ve been prophetic or something, because a moment later, the lights came back on—and with them, a mare’s voice. Only, this voice didn’t sound like the synthetic alarm that we’d heard earlier.

“Who are you?!”

I blinked, Gauge flinched, and even Nova momentarily stopped crawling through the vent. Only SCaR acted like nothing had happened, buzzing out of the vent and hovering around Gauge’s head like usual. Swallowing, I raised my voice, unsure if the mare—whoever or whatever she was—could actually hear me. “Wait, are there ponies here? Where are you? Or am I just talking to a wall?”

Seconds ticked by, but no response. I felt a tingly chill crawl down my spine. Something was definitely not right about this place.

Then I heard an alarm blare, and the synthetic voice returned. “Alert! Contaminant detected in Security Wing Ventilation System! Initiating Purge!”

My blood ran cold. “Nova!” I screamed, sticking my head into the vent. I could see her wriggling her way through, so far down. “Get out of there!”

Gauge practically shoved me aside. “Nov!” he screamed in turn. “Nov, come on! Come on!”

“I’m trying!” Nova said, and I could see the panic in her eyes. But despite how much she thrashed and clambered, she hardly sped up her progress.

Then I felt it. The air began roaring through the vents, almost like a vacuum. And at the far end, I saw Nova jolt and slide backwards several inches as the wind tugged on her mane.

“Ember!” she screamed in desperation, and I managed to grab her with my telekinesis. I could feel the strain on my magic as the vacuum tried to suck her away. Putting my hooves on the frame of the vent, I tried to leverage my body into pulling her back, but that only goes so far with an intangible grip.

She kept sliding. Back, back, back into the darkness, and then her hindquarters violently twisted to the right. She cried out in pain, the tears on her cheeks sucked down the vent past her tail. Her hooves fought for purchase on the corner of the vent as it dragged her around it, and she looked at me with pleading, desperate eyes. “Ember, please, I don’t want to die!” she screamed at me—

My horn flared, already exhausted from the shield today that’d barely saved our lives. My concentration broke. The spell disappeared.

Nova disappeared around the corner before I could focus again. I heard her screaming, screaming, screaming… and then nothing.

The vacuum stopped. All was still, silent—dead.

Dead save for the synthetic voice on the speakers.

“Purge successful. Contaminants removed. Returning to normal operations.”

Chapter 17: Where a Dead Mare Sleeps

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Chapter 17: Where a Dead Mare Sleeps

I stared into the vent. I couldn’t bring myself to move. My mind was broken.

I failed her. I fucking failed her again. She begged me to save her, to not let her die. And I failed her.

She was dead. She was dead, and it was all my fault.

Gauge collapsed, still in shock, tears streaming down his face. “No,” he muttered to himself, as if by just saying that, Nova would come back to us. “She can’t be, she can’t…”

Swallowing, he stood up and put his hooves on my shoulders. “We have to find her. Wherever those vents go, we have to find her. I won’t believe she’s gone until I see the body.”

I sucked in a shuddering breath and nodded. This was just like when I jumped down the scrap chute in the foundry, right? Nova was just… somewhere else in the facility. She had to be. “We’ll find her,” I said, meeting Gauge’s eyes. “We’ll find her, and she’ll be alright. I just…”

I felt another hoof on my shoulder, and I tilted my head to see Ace standing next to us through my teary eyes. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “There weren’t nothing you could do.”

“If only I was stronger,” I whispered, trying to swallow the lump in my throat. “I could’ve pulled her out…”

Gauge straightened up and looked at his drone. “SCaR, go follow the vents. Find her, figure out where she’s gone.”

Ace managed to hook the drone with her fetlock before it could buzz into the vents. “Think for a second. We might need this drone to get through anything else we come across. It ain’t gonna do us no good to send it down the vents if we need it to open a door.”

My zebra friend just shot Ace a cold, determined glare. “If anything, Nova needs SCaR more than we do. I won’t let her sit all alone, wherever she is. I can get through doors fine on my own.” He slapped Ace’s hoof off of the drone, and SCaR warbled once before slipping into the vents.

The outlaw rubbed her hoof and frowned at Gauge, but that confrontation didn’t last long at all. Another explosion rocked the installation, this one much bigger, and I could hear metal ricocheting down a hallway somewhere way back toward the entrance. A moment later, distant and muffled shouts began to echo through the installation.

Ace and I looked at each other. “Ain’t got no more time to waste,” Ace muttered, and spreading her wings, she immediately flew back to the main hallway. “Come on! We gotta get moving!”

I reluctantly drew my rifle and nodded to Gauge. “We’ll find her,” I said to him, and I wiped the tears from my cheeks. “I promise you. We’re gonna fucking find her.”

Gauge bobbed his head, and together, we galloped down the hall after Ace.

We rounded the corner, and I was glad that Ace had taken care of the turrets and the force field while they didn’t have power. The emitters for the field flashed and sparked, and the turrets twitched and tried to track us as we ran up to them, but Ace had detached their ammo belts so they were harmless. I cursed as I saw Ace struggling with the big door at the end of the hallway; apparently that was locked, too, and I immediately regretted Gauge sending SCaR down into the vents after Nova.

At the sound of a troop of ponies clambering down the ramp, I moved behind one of the turrets and leveled my rifle at the far end of the hallway. “Ace, we got bigger shit to worry about. Gauge, get that fucking door open!”

Ace grabbed the chain gun she’d stolen from earlier and mounted it on the back of one of these turrets, even as it poked its empty barrel into her ribs. Seriously, I could hear the firing pins clicking as they tried to shoot us to pieces, but I couldn’t focus on that. I saw the first hooves appear at the far end of the hall, and after switching my rifle back to regular semi-auto mode, I began shooting. I didn’t want to give them a chance to fire at us; the turrets weren’t exactly the best cover. Of course, none of them tried to push their luck when Ace’s chain gun started firing, spewing lead downrange at an amazing volume.

“How’s that door coming?!” I shouted over the death machine in Ace’s grasp. I really had to struggle to be heard, and I had to turn away just to hear Gauge’s response.

The zebra was basically in the guts of the panel next to the door, trying to tie two wires together; I don’t know how he was managing it with only his hooves, but even I knew that you didn’t want to stick a live wire in your mouth. “Another minute!” he shouted, cursing when one of the wires slipped out of his grasp. “It should—!”

To both of our surprises, the door suddenly split open, revealing a massive cargo elevator. I blinked, then looked at the wires in Gauge’s hooves, which weren’t attached or connected or anything. “Did you do that?” I shouted.

“No, I didn’t!” Shrugging, he dropped the wires, letting them hang from the panel. “I’m not going to question it! Come on!”

I slapped Ace on the shoulder to get her attention, then dashed over to the elevator. The barrels on the turret Ace had salvaged were glowing red hot from her continuous suppressive barrage, and I don’t know how many shots she’d fired, but a second later it clicked on empty. Ace wasted no time in throwing the weapon aside and drawing her own rifle as she backpedaled into the elevator, but a unicorn at the far end of the hall threw up a magical shield to shelter their comrades as they stormed in after us.

“Hit it!” I shouted to Gauge when we were all inside, and he immediately slapped the button to trigger the lift. The thing shook and groaned, and the heavy metal door began to slide shut, even as bullets started to ping and ricochet around us. We huddled out of sight by the corners so we wouldn’t get shot, but before the door closed all the way, I got an idea. All it took was a quick burst of my telekinesis, and I reconnected the belts on one of the turrets. The door shut a moment later, but we could all hear the turret wind up and begin firing a devastating, thumping barrage at Yeoman’s crew that’d followed us.

I panted with sweet relief as the elevator continued its journey unimpeded. “That should slow them down, at least for a while,” I said. I chuckled and added, “I guess it was too much to hope that they wouldn’t get through, right?”

“It was only ever a matter of time,” Ace said. Then she popped a rare smile at Gauge. “Good job on that door.”

But Gauge just shook his head in confusion. “It wasn’t me, though,” he said, and Ace lowered her eyebrows. “I didn’t do anything. It just opened on its own.”

I cleared my throat. “Do you think it had anything to do with… you know, that mare or whatever that was on the speakers?”

Ace glanced at me. “Glad I ain’t the only one who heard that.”

“Do you know what that was?”

She sighed. “Just because I ran with the Runners don’t mean I know everything about these places. Each one’s unique, I can tell you that much.”

“This place is fucking haunted,” Gauge muttered, and I could see him shivering. “Feels like there’s ghosts crawling along my spine, it’s so cold and creepy.”

I shivered as well, and that’s when I realized that it actually was getting colder. When I opened my jaw and slowly exhaled, my breath clouded in front of my face. “Why the fuck is it getting colder? Shouldn’t it be warmer?”

“Warmer?” Ace asked me.

“Yeah! Warmer! We’re getting closer to the center of the planet, right?”

Gauge blinked. “Ember, I don’t think that’s how that works.” Another blink. “At least, I think...”

“Even if it ain’t, it shouldn’t get this cold, this quickly,” Ace said. She started rubbing her forelegs together. “It must be because of the labs. Maybe they needed it cold down here for something.”

The elevator came to a shaking stop, and the door at the opposite end from where we entered opened. I could see the frost that’d gathered on the walls of the small room in front of us, and a pair of deployed turrets pointed in the general direction of the elevator were covered in icicles. Me and Ace immediately raised our rifles, but when the turrets didn’t react, we held our fire. Only then could I see that they were completely encased in ice, and I realized that their firing mechanisms were probably frozen solid.

“Can’t you keep us warm with some of your fire magic?” Gauge asked me. His teeth were starting to chatter and he kept rubbing his forelegs together to try to keep them warm. “I could really use some fire!”

“I can’t manipulate the fucking temperature in anything short of five hundred degree swings,” I muttered.

“Can’t you just make a fireball and keep it near us? Keep away the chill?”

“We don’t need her wasting her magic,” Ace interrupted, pushing past us. “She already tired herself out good with that shield earlier.”

I nodded in agreement. “That’d take a lot of energy to just maintain a fireball like that. Maybe we should just try to get through here quickly.” Then I looked at the door in front of us, and how it and its panel were covered in ice. “Though maybe I can help, at least a little bit.”

And then I summoned a wall of fire in front of the door. It wasn’t very big, and it didn’t last long, (and I realized I just accidentally made an innuendo,) but it got the job done. It only took a minute to melt the ice covering the door, but we all used that minute to try and get ourselves warm and ready. None of us knew what was in store for us on the other side.

Then two things happened at once. The door in front of us opened all on its own, and the door to the elevator slammed shut. My ear and a half twitched as the elevator began to ascend again, but Ace didn’t leave me much time to think on that as she dragged me into the next room. I still voiced my concerns about it, however. “They’re going to be down in a minute.”

“Then let’s get a move on.” She turned to Gauge. “Can you fuck with this door?”

“I can try,” Gauge said, and he immediately went over to the panel and shut the door.

While he fiddled with the panel, Ace and I stepped forward. We weren’t in a room anymore so much as we were in a cavern. I wasn’t sure if the mountain was naturally hollow or if this was something that the Synarchy had done, but it reminded me a lot of Hole, just much, much smaller. There were some maintenance and support structures lining the walls of the cavern, though they were all covered in ice, and at the far end I could see the walls of several buildings built into the rock. They too were covered in ice, which told me that either the ponies who lived here had to deal with it constantly, or something else was going on. Given all that’d happened in the past few minutes, I was pretty sure that last one was more likely.

More pressing than that, though, was the huge icy moat between where we stood and the buildings on the other side. It was probably fifty feet across, far beyond my ability to jump or even levitate myself and Gauge across with my magic. Of course, Ace could fly the gap easily, but I doubted that it would just be as simple as that. After all, there was a bridge that connected the two sides—or, at least, I assumed what I was looking at was one. There were two big metal structures built into the ground and covered in ice, one on each side, and they protruded slightly over the gap. They must’ve made a bridge somehow, but it was currently retracted.

Ace must’ve come to the same conclusion as I did, because she pointed to the gap with her wing. “We need to get that bridge extended. Only way to cross.”

“Can’t you fly us over?” I asked her. “It’s not that far of a flight.”

The outlaw chewed on her lip. “I could, but I doubt it’s gonna be as simple as that.” She pointed out several rectangular structures just sitting on both sides of the moat, their tops covered in an inch or two of ice. “Bet there’s turrets in them things there. I try to fly, I’m likely to get blasted to smithereens. I could probably dodge them and cross on my own, but weighed down…”

She shook her head and instead pointed to a large tower on the right—one that was mirrored by a twin on the other side. “I bet those towers control the bridges. We extend the bridge, you two can cross.”

I nodded. “Good. Gauge and I will take care of this one. You want to clear the other?”

Ace sighed and shook out her wings. “Might as well. Cold’s gonna ice my wings over if I wait any longer.” She shivered and hugged herself with her wings. “Good thing I’m a pegasus. We like the cold.”

And with that, she spread her wings and took off. I moved in the direction of the tower, but stopped and waited for Gauge after a few steps. While I waited, I watched Ace cross the moat as fast as she possibly could. She made it about halfway across before the ice-topped boxes shattered the ice covering them and deployed turrets. They took a second to wind up, and my heart jumped into my throat when they started firing, but Ace was already diving low to get behind the tower for cover. A moment later, she disappeared from sight, and the turrets stopped firing.

Gauge stopped beside me. “I crossed a bunch of wires, but I really don’t know if that’s going to keep them out,” he said. He gave the door behind us a worried look for good measure and shrugged. “I don’t really know how these doors work; they seem simple enough at a glance, but I don’t trust them to not open on their own.”

We trotted up to the tower; I could already see the frosted glass on the windows glowing from some computer lights within. “It had to have been that mare we heard, right? That was just… too fucking spooky.”

The ice-coated door suddenly opened in front of us, shattering the thin wall of ice and allowing entrance to a dark room. Within a moment, the lights began to flicker on, and ancient machinery hummed with life. But behind that noise, I heard what sounded like the pained wails of a mare over a speaker. They died within a second.

I just turned to Gauge. “See?”

He nodded. “Whoever that is, she must’ve been the one who activated the vent purge that caught Nova. We have to find her and get her away from whoever—or whatever—is doing this!”

“We will, Gauge, but first we have to cross the fucking moat.” Rifle raised, I walked into the tower, taking aim at the various shadowy corners. I didn’t know where a turret might pop out from, but to my surprise, everything was quiet and still. Nothing moved, and more importantly, nothing shot at us.

“There aren’t any turrets?” Gauge asked, double-checking all the corners I’d glanced over. “I would’ve expected a place like this to be defended.”

“If there are, maybe that mare is keeping them down,” I said. “I have a feeling we’re being led somewhere. We’re supposed to cross this bridge.”

“If it is that mare doing this, then I wonder why she can’t deploy the bridge herself, or why those turrets shot at Ace.” Gauge walked over to a big computer instrument thingy and poked it, then frowned. “These machines are all powered on.”

I found a staircase in the corner and began to climb it, though I wasn’t about to lower my guard just yet. “And?”

“They shouldn’t be.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that they’re not all supposed to be on at the same time. There’s a ton of different instruments here, and not all of them work together.” He pointed to a big machine in front of him with several slots on it. “There’s an etch glass machine here. It can read, etch, and send messages, but they’re not programmed to do all of that at the same time. But all of them are on, and if my ear isn’t lying to me, they’re all running right now, even though there’s no glass inside.”

“I don’t see what a broken machine has to do with anything,” I said, finally making my way all the way up the stairs and into the control room of the tower. After a brief glance around, my eyes settled on the bright red lever on a desk panel, currently pulled toward me. That had to be what we were looking for.

“I don’t know either. It’s just… weird.” He joined me in the control room a second later, just as I walked over to the lever. “Is that it?”

I put my hoof on the lever. “Only one way to find out…”

I pushed the lever forward, and after a second of delay, I heard something ancient and enormous shriek and groan back the way we came. A little fire brought to my horn was all it took to warm the glass enough to melt off the frost covering it, and as soon as I did that, I saw half of the bridge extend across the moat.

“Well, that’s our part done,” Gauge said, turning his head toward the other tower where Ace hopefully was at this point. “Now we just have to wait on the other half. Want to go wait outside, Em?” A worried look flew onto his face as he turned back to me. “Em? What’s wrong?”

I must’ve looked pale or something (a challenge with a black coat), because I certainly felt awful. I stumbled forward and placed my hooves on the panel to steady myself as my head exploded with a violent, burning pain. Once again, I felt my limbs twitch and spasm on their own, and I vaguely heard my own voice moaning and wailing through the red haze clouding my vision. Hooves touched my shoulders, and I snapped my jaws at them in retaliation before I even knew what I was doing. Then I crumpled onto the floor until the molten agony began to recede.

I panted, panted, panted as I slowly recovered from the latest episode. I’d nearly forgotten that I was turning into a fucking fungus zombie with all the madness and terror this installation held. I still had another few days left before I was gone, if what Mawari had said was true, but I couldn’t possibly imagine what those last few days of my life would be like. This was horrible enough.

Then I heard two things: a distant thud, and Gauge’s voice. I focused on the latter first, and I managed to sit up with Gauge’s help. It took me entirely too long to remember what the words he was saying even meant, or that ‘Ember’ was my name. I just closed my eyes and waited for the dizziness and nausea to pass, and I squeezed his hoof with my own when he offered it to me.

“I’m fucking dying,” I murmured when I could finally speak again. “I’m fucking dying and it sucks dick.”

“Ember, just… j-just hang in there, okay?” Gauge asked, and at once, I could feel a number of things in his voice. Fear. Sorrow. Frustration. “I’m not gonna lose you. I-I’m not going to lose Nov and you today.”

I swallowed, tasting bile, but I forced myself to chuckle through a grimace—not for anything Gauge said, but just for his sake, and maybe my own, too. “You still got me for a few days yet,” I remarked, somewhat bitterly. “It’s taking the spores a bit to find my brain. I don’t have much of one to begin with, hah!”

Gauge didn’t find it funny. That much I could tell at a glance. “Ember…”

“Listen, Gauge, I can spend the last few days of my life moping about and feeling sorry for myself, or I can make fun of it until it has the last laugh.” I closed my eyes and inhaled, and a shiver ran down my spine; I could feel the itching at the base of my skull again, worse than before. “I hope that ‘manatronics, robotics, and cybernetics’ can help me out. Think I can get a computer for a brain?”

“It might help,” Gauge said, though the strained smile on his face told me he was just trying to play along. Then he pointed out the window. “Ace extended the other bridge while you were… yeah. We should cross now before—shit!”

I groaned and rubbed at my eyes as I turned to the window. “What’re you—fuck!”

The reason for both of our outbursts was probably what you’d expect. Down below, I saw something like ten or twelve ponies go galloping across the bridge that we’d so helpfully constructed for them. I guess my only saving grace is that the bridge was connected when they came across, otherwise all twelve of them probably would’ve run to my tower instead of going straight over the gap. And I might be a good marksmare, but I can’t go twelve to one and even hope to survive.

That didn’t stop me from smashing out the window and taking a few potshots at them while they were exposed on the bridge. They jumped at the sudden rifle fire behind them, and a pair of pegasi broke off to fly back to me. I dared to hope for a moment that the turrets guarding the moat were still active, but it seems that they powered off when the bridge halves connected.

“Gauge, get down!” I shouted moments before the two pegasi began strafing the tower. Bullets flew through the windows, scattering glass and pelting us with shards. Lead ricocheted off of the metal floor or bored right through the grating, and sparks flew all around the little command center. I huddled myself under the control panel and pointed my rifle at the opposite window and just waited. The moment that I saw a feathery figure fly in front of the window, I unleashed full-auto hell on it. A spray of blood and a burst of feathers was the end of that pegasus.

A line of bullets cut through the tower from left to right, and as soon as they hit the far right corner, I clambered out of hiding and ran to the window. I saw the pegasus turn around for another run, but I started firing first. Yeoman’s lackey began diving and weaving to avoid my bullets, but after a second of frustration, I dropped my rifle and reached out with my telekinesis instead. I tell you one thing, the bastard didn’t see that coming at all. Neither did he see the icy wall I sent him into with a tug on his wing. There was a solid crack, and both the pegasus and a sheet of ice fell to the ground. I put two shots into his body just to be sure, but I’m pretty sure the huge icicle sticking out of his chest made that unnecessary.

“We need to fucking get across that bridge, now,” I shouted, and before Gauge could get off the floor, I was already galloping down the stairs. I burst through the door and began galloping to the bridge, sparing only a single glance back toward the elevator. Sure enough, that door was wide open, without any sign of damage. It didn’t look like that mare cared who she helped get deeper into the installation. All I wanted to know was why?

Gauge managed to catch up by the time I put my hooves on the bridge. More pegasi circled the other tower, so I could only assume that Ace was still inside. In front of me, the door leading directly into the labs was wide open, most likely courtesy of the mysterious voice. I could see down a long hallway, but I was too focused on helping Ace out to pay too much attention to it.

I slid to a stop at the end of the bridge and raised my rifle. Several bursts of my BR14M chattered through the air, and I sent one of the pegasi down in a bloody heap. The second turned in surprise at the sudden attack, but the moment she hesitated, her guts exploded out of her right side as a high caliber round went right through her ribs. She just had enough time to clutch the exit wound with her hooves before she fell to the ground, definitely dead.

Recounting this all after the fact, I’m amazed at how desensitized I was to death by that point. I didn’t even flinch at that gory and brutal death. I barely registered it as I ran over to the tower and shouted up at the control center. “Ace! Come on, we have to move! They’re ahead of us!”

Ace burst out of the tower with a flourish of her wings, knocking loose any glass that still clung to its frame after she’d shot it. She landed hard on her hooves next to me, and she and I galloped straight into the belly of the installation’s labs. “How many left?” Ace asked me between breaths.

“I got two, you got two. Should be eight,” I said. They had to be all that was left of Yeoman’s team, what with the few we’d shot outside of the installation and however many the turret took down before they were able to get to the elevator. But the cold truth of the matter was that only Yeoman himself had to escape with the code for us to be too late. I’m sure that as far as he was concerned, everypony else on his team was expendable.

That didn’t mean they were going to make our lives easier. This long hallway we galloped down split maybe a hundred feet in from the door, but the only thing we cared about was the open door in the middle with the sign ‘Manatronics & Central Processing’ above it. The left and right branches I could only assume went to the robotics and cybernetics parts of the installation, but they didn’t have what we all were after. I figured that out for sure when the moment we entered the door, bullets pelted the floors and walls around me. Only a shield I threw up on reflex saved me from getting shot to pieces, and me and Ace immediately retreated to the safety of the doorframe before my shield collapsed, weak as it was.

I rubbed at my smoking horn and winced when my hoof ran over a crack in the enamel. I already knew I was going to have a pounding headache in the morning—supposing that Yeoman’s lackeys and the wailer spores left me with enough of a brain to even feel it. But I had much more pressing concerns to worry about. As Gauge slammed into the wall next to me, safely out of the line of fire, I had to wonder—just how the fuck was I going to get past this?

Ace seemed to be looking to me for an answer even as she blind fired around the corner with the one SP-9 pistol in her wing. “You got a spell in you or not?” she shouted over the noise of the gunfire. “How’s your horn?”

“Cracking!” I shouted back at her. “But I’ve been through worse!” Though that was technically true, it didn’t mean I’d be all that helpful. The last time I pushed burnout worse than this was when I chased Yeoman at the dam, and I’m sure you remember how well that went for me.

“Got any fire?” she shouted. “You blast them, I’ll follow up with the guns!”

I nodded, then slapped Gauge on the shoulder. “Catch me when I collapse,” I told him, and I began building mana on my horn. I let the spell grow and swell, and when I started to feel faint, I braced myself on the doorframe and whirled around the corner. The fireball flew from my horn into the room beyond in a bright light, and I heard the ponies inside scream as the fire spread. Ace blurred past my face, and Gauge pulled me back from the doorframe as I started to fall over.

The outlaw’s rifle rumbled in the next room, but I was too dizzy and faint to give it much thought. I spent the next minute or so just recovering my strength, because that took a lot out of me. I was vaguely aware of Gauge patting my cheek as I probably just laid next to him, panting, but it took a bit before my eyesight came back to me. When it did, I forced myself to stand, because I couldn’t afford to waste any more time.

Gauge was there when I inevitably staggered and needed to catch myself on something. I took a second to catch my breath, using his shoulder, then stood up straight again. “That’s never not going to worry me,” he said when I found my hooves and planted them under me.

“Try being the one who has to do it,” I groaned, and I plucked my rifle off the ground. I was rewarded with a spike of pain in my skull for my efforts, but I soldiered through it. Every second counted.

The gunfire abruptly stopped, and I staggered through the doorway to find Ace standing at the top of a small set of stairs, absolutely covered in blood. She panted and sheathed a dripping red knife, then swallowed and used her powder-stained wingtip to wipe some of the blood off her muzzle. Lying all around her were the shot up (and in one case, sliced open) bodies of four ponies. All she did was spare me a nod as I staggered up the stairs to her. “Can you walk?”

“I’ll live,” I grunted. “For the time being, anyway.” Swallowing, I pointed to the door ahead of us. “I swear, if that door doesn’t take us to a big computer room…”

“We ain’t gonna find out just from standing around,” Ace muttered. She drew her rifle and flew to the open door, stopping just long enough to gesture to Gauge. “Keep her standing. I’ll clear everything else.”

Then she darted off down the hall, wingtips scraping the walls with each flap. I grimaced and started after her, and Gauge stuck to my side for support. “How much you want to bet there’s another trap up ahead?” I asked him. He just shook his head and kept on walking.

We passed by a lot of doors in this hallway, each one providing entry to a different lab. Or at least, that’s what they would’ve done if they weren’t all locked. I had a feeling that they weren’t just locked on accident; I felt like we were being guided deeper into the facility, toward something important. What that something was, I didn’t know… but it turned out all we had to do was round the corner and look to our right.

I didn’t even know what I was looking at at first. It looked like an enormous version of a ringbird’s rotor assembly, to be honest. It was this big metal ring, probably twenty feet tall and a hundred feet in diameter. It was held off of the ground on massive supports, and heavy copper pipes protruded from one side and disappeared into the ground. Catwalks surrounded the top of the structure, upon which I saw a trio of ponies trying to shoot at a figure flying as fast as she could along the ground.

But even as I worried about Ace trying to dodge three (and suspiciously only three) ponies shooting at her, I found myself more enthralled with just what exactly the ring thing was doing. This crazy glow hovered above it, shifting all the colors of the rainbow and then some, before the ring sucked it down. Some sort of paneling in the center of the ring glowed and absorbed the glow, and little wisps of this whatever it was flickered at the bottom of the ring before vanishing almost immediately. Whatever this thing was, it was still running!

I tried to fire a burst at a pegasus perched on the catwalk above the ring thing, but my bullets just bounced off of the glass looking into the room without putting more than a few cracks in it. “Bulletproof, fuck!” I hissed, and I pointed at the open door a little further down the hallway. “There! Let’s go!”

I staggered to the doorway, but at least by this point I didn’t need Gauge’s help to stand anymore. I pushed off of him and flicked my ear at the frame. “Stay back here. Don’t get shot.”

“Don’t push yourself,” he cautioned me. “Just… be safe, okay?”

“Heh. ‘Safe.’ Gauge, I haven’t been safe since the Crimson attacked Blackwash.”

One of these days, I’m sure my friends are going to strangle me for saying shit like that.

I cantered through the door and immediately took cover behind a huge crate full of some sort of pieces or parts for the big ring thing. In the back corner of the room, up some stairs and behind the ring, I saw the faint glow of a computer screen. Lines of text blurred across it, but I was too far away to make them out. All I knew was that Yeoman had to be up there, and I needed to get there fast.

Sucking down a deep breath, I galloped across the open ground toward the stairs. A few stray bullets bit the ground around me, and I ended up diving behind a forklift for cover. I managed to poke my head around the corner just long enough to get a glimpse of the pony shooting at me; he was on top of the catwalk, laying down on his stomach to minimize his profile. He responded by shooting at my exposed head, but thankfully he missed. One bullet still managed to shave a lock of my mane off, and the others slammed into the body of the forklift. That was when I heard a hissing noise, and I spun around to see a red glow coming from the engine of the forklift.

Fuck me, right?

With the pegasus shooting at me and keeping me suppressed behind a bomb, I did the only thing I could do; I let my horn surge with power and ripped the fusion plant out of the forklift, chucking the whole thing at him. Once more I felt the tendrils of burnout and exhaustion slip into my vision, but at least I wasn’t getting shot at for the moment. The reactor smashing into the catwalk and violently exploding as its miniature fusion core detonated took care of that problem for me. When I could see again, I found the catwalk as little more than twisted shrapnel, but the ring itself didn’t seem damaged at all apart from a black scorch mark on its superstructure. Whatever this thing was made out of, it was tough.

Ace was in a shootout with the other two ponies somewhere above me; I didn’t really waste time taking a look. As soon as I could stand again, I hit the stairs and galloped up them as fast as I could. Somepony took some potshots at me, but I saw Ace’s beige feathers blur by along with the snapping of her rifle, and that shooting stopped abruptly. While Ace dueled with the lone survivor out by the ring, I burst into the room with the computers—and promptly got shot in the leg.

I’ll admit, that came as a complete surprise. I don’t think my brain even registered that I’d been shot until my right foreleg collapsed underneath me mid-stride and I rolled and tumbled into a desk. The heavy steel thing shook with a loud bang as my skull slammed right into the drawers, and I laid there groaning for a second. But I remembered that if I was shot at once, I’d be shot at again, so I picked my rifle back up and propped it on the back of the desk.

It was the closest I’d been to Yeoman since the dam. There he was, maybe fifteen feet away, pulling a sheet of etch glass out of a terminal underneath an enormous monitor. Whatever text it’d been displaying disappeared as soon as he slipped the glass into his bag, and he ducked down before I could put the sights on his brain. I fired all the same, growling in frustration, until I heard a series of reports as he fired back. Only, he shot under the desk, at my hooves, and I jumped into the air in surprise and landed on my back, scrambling like mad to get away from the line of fire.

He took that moment to fly from the computer to a door at the back, which he promptly opened and jumped inside. The image of him standing there, etch glass protruding from the corner of his saddlebags, and Fortitude, my fucking family rifle, in his grasp, is burned into my mind. And then he galloped up the stairs before I could shoot, disappearing from my line of sight.

“Get back here!” I screamed at him, and I hobbled over to the stairs as fast as I could, which wasn’t fast at all. Before I could make it to the stairs, however, the door slammed shut, much faster than I thought possible. I flinched in surprise, but I immediately mashed the release button with my magic. Despite all that, it refused to open, and I couldn’t think of anything else to try other than screaming in frustration.

I noticed that the shooting had all stopped; in fact, the place was eerily quiet except for my own screams and the humming of the ring in the main room. Eventually, I gave up (mostly because I was starting to feel really dizzy) and fell to my haunches, simply staring at the door.

He got away! All this for what?! All the pain I suffered, the danger I faced, for nothing! Nova might have even died and we didn’t have anything to show for ourselves!

“Ember?” Gauge’s voice. “What are you—?”

“He got away,” I croaked, and only then I realized just how hoarse I was. I looked over my shoulder at him and Ace, and I pointed at the blank computer screen on the wall. “It was there… and he took it! He took the code piece with him and he got away!” I growled in frustration and fired my rifle at the door in front of me, which obviously didn’t do shit. But it made me feel a tiny bit better, for all the good that was going to do. “Stupid door shut on me! I was gonna chase him, and the stupid thing just slammed shut!”

I felt Gauge wrap his foreleg around me as he sat down at my side. “Breathe, Ember,” he said. “This isn’t over. We’ll catch up to him yet, I’m sure of it.”

“Nova fucking died for nothing…” I murmured, still unable to look away from the damn door that’d let the bastard escape.

Gauge didn’t have anything to say to that, but apparently Ace did. “We ain’t found a body yet, Ember,” she said. “Don’t say anything until we know for—what the hell?”

The surprise in her voice snapped me out of my rage, at least for a little bit. My curiosity got the better of me, and I turned to her. “What is it?” I asked with a shaky voice.

“Weren’t that computer screen blank just a second ago?”

“Computer…?” I stood up, wincing as I accidentally put pressure on my wounded leg. At least it didn’t feel like I’d gotten shot in the bone, which was good; a little Stabil-Ice and it’d be good as new. But for the moment, all I was concerned about with the computer screen and the message that’d suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

>UNICORN
>USE YOUR MAGIC
>FREE ME
>LET ME LIVE!!!

“What even is this?” Gauge asked. “That voice upstairs, and now this? Who is this? This has to be a pony, there’s no way this is just a security program!”

“Maybe we should ask it,” I said, and I stepped forward to get at the keyboard. “If it’s in the computer, maybe it knows what the code piece is!” I let slip a tiny, hopeful smile; maybe shit wasn’t as fucked as I thought it was!

My horn sparked to life, and the orange glow of my magic washed over the keyboard as I prepared to type a response. “What should I—?”

A bolt of blue lightning jumped from the keyboard to my horn. My vision exploded in pure white, and I fell away from the keyboard with a scream. It felt like somepony drove a length of glowing steel fresh from the forge through my horn and into my skull, impaling every single vertebra in my spine on the way down.

The last thing I remember was a mare’s joyous laughter before I passed out.

Chapter 18: The Memories of Yesterday

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Chapter 18: The Memories of Yesterday

I was awake five minutes before my alarm went off. I always was, but if I didn’t set the thing, then I’d oversleep. And today was a day I couldn’t afford to sleep through, so I ended up just staring at the digital clock face as it blinked along.

It didn’t have a chance to buzz once before I flicked it off with a burst of blue magic. I groaned and sat up in my bed, wincing as I tried to work out all the kinks in my spine. I must’ve slept wrong again. The faintest glow of the sun knifed its way through the blinds in my hotel window, so I flicked them open with some more telekinesis. Hopefully the light would help me wake up.

It took a lot of effort, but I rolled out of bed. I arched my back and waddled over to the window on my tip-hooves and ended up resting my forehead against the glass. All around, a huge city with harsh steel skyscrapers rising up to touch the heavens stood in the morning mists. Resolute. Defiant. I saw a wing of ringbirds fly between a few of the skyscrapers some blocks away. Manehattan was the heart of the Synarchy’s military, and every day, it shuttled thousands of soldiers—thousands of heroes, as the state-run news insisted on calling them—off to the Front. It was only a matter of time before the Coalition collapsed.

A shame I wouldn’t be here to see it. The last tickertape Triumph was twenty years ago. I was just a little filly then. I didn’t want to miss this one when we finally laid low the bastards who attacked us. Even as it seemed increasingly unlikely with each passing day.

I heard the coffee machine flick on in the kitchen, so I left the window behind. A turn to the right and a pair of steps took me right to the vanity in the cramped bedroom, and I got out my brush and comb and went to work. When I was done, my blue coat glistened like sapphires, and the sharp zigzag between the blue base and white fringes of my mane and tail were perfect, not a single hair out of order. I tilted my head this way and that, keeping my eyes locked on the yellow discs of the mare in the mirror. I might as well look presentable on my last day on Equus.

The coffee machine beeped at me, and I moved from the bedroom to the kitchen, stopping to use the bathroom along the way. I didn’t even look at the machine as I floated the cup of coffee directly to my lips. As soon as I took a sip, I hummed and pranced in place a bit. I was already feeling more alive.

I sat down at the table and flicked on the portable radio. I would’ve turned the telescreen on to catch the news that way, but power rationing meant that the electricity wouldn’t come back on for another two hours. Everything I needed to run in the morning could be charged by horn, so I made do. We all did. We had to. But if my research went anywhere, maybe we wouldn’t have to.

I caught the tail end of a weather report, but I didn’t pay it any attention; why would I have to? Equus’ weather wasn’t going to be my problem much longer. But I did turn the volume up a bit when Junebug launched into the after-action report of yesterday’s fighting at the front.

“Morale among our soldiers at the front remains high as ever! Yesterday saw another substantial push from Coalition forces in Bramble Ridge. An estimated fifty thousand enemy soldiers, supported by artillery and heavy tanks, attempted to force the ridge, but once again they were repelled by our brave heroes. General Beachhead has informed us that this should mark a turning point in the battles in the east, as the enemy simply cannot maintain this level of offensives for much longer. Our reporters in the field have told us that action in the other fronts has been contained to skirmishing as we bolster our numbers to defend our country. Remember: we must all do our part to support our heroes in the field. Only through pony unity will we defeat the forces of darkness that threaten our way of life.”

It was interesting what you could read out of the radio by what wasn’t said. Though ingrained patriotism made me believe that we would one day triumph over the enemy, recent reversals on the field had at least delayed our victory. It was obvious to anypony who listened closely that we wouldn’t see victory this year. A month ago we were on the doorstep of the caribou capital, and just last week the radio mentioned reports of fighting nearly fifty miles outside of it. And the lack of any mention of fighting on the other fronts more likely than not meant that we were still withdrawing. The radios were the first to announce our victories and praise our defenses, but they always remained silent when it came to our losses.

Of course, the average Equestrian wouldn’t know that. It wasn’t their place to know that. They fought and struggled for our High Council and our High Queen, as was expected of them. I only knew because I had enough gray matter in my skull to make a thought or two of my own instead of letting the propaganda do all the thinking for me.

Junebug continued to chirp along on the radio; I didn’t know if she was always this cheery or if the Synarchy paid her to be. “Back at home, High Queen Twilight Sparkle will be attending Harmony Day services tomorrow outside of the ruins of Ponyville, in honor of those who died in the centaur Tirek’s attacks on the nation two hundred and twenty-one years ago. As is custom, she will lay down wreaths on the graves of each of the former Element Bearers, and will conclude her services with a private visit to the sarcophagi of the princesses. May they watch over us in our darkest hours, and give ponykind the strength we need to stand against the Coalition.”

I flicked the radio off and set my empty coffee cup aside. I’d heard all this a million times already; they just phrased it differently each year. But so long as the soldiers did their job, I did mine, and the High Queen did hers, then Equestria would survive. The Synarchy would weather the toughest the other species could throw at us.

Of that, I was certain.

\/\/\/\/\/

“Ember, put the gun down!”

I tell you what, that was not the first thing I expected to hear after snapping back from… whatever that was. I was still shaken up from what I’d seen, what I’d felt. It all seemed so real. Was I hallucinating? Did that shock off the keyboard fuck me up more than I thought?

I was back in the big room with the computers and that ring thing, only I wasn’t anywhere near the keyboard. I was maybe a dozen strides away at this point, but what frightened me most was that I had my rifle leveled at Ace’s head, and she in turn had hers pointed at mine.

What the fuck was happening?!

I tried to lower the gun, but my body wouldn’t respond to me. It felt like I was trapped inside of my skull, looking out at the world like my eyes were windows. My leg shifted without me making it. I swallowed against my will. My breathing was quick and ragged, and I felt like I was suffocating because I didn’t have any control over it. And my orange magic was blue. The same blue I’d had in… whatever that just was.

Was this the wailer fungus? Had I finally lost control? But my body was acting like it was intelligent, not some mindless zombie…

I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t make myself.

“Who you?” my body said, and the way it pronounced the words was… odd. It was garbled, to say the least, and my tongue didn’t feel like it was moving right. My face grimaced in response to the sensation, and I couldn’t stop tonguing my teeth like I didn’t know what they were. Gauge must’ve seen it too, because he took a step out from behind Ace’s shoulder.

“Ember, we’re your friends,” he said, almost like he was speaking to a frightened child. “That keyboard must’ve given you a good jolt. I’m Gauge, remember? This is Ace. Just… put the gun down. It’s okay.”

My body stepped back; whoever or whatever was in control didn’t trust him. I tried once again to take control of my limbs, and my body jolted in response.

She’s awake. Are you awake?

I stopped. I’d clearly heard a mare’s voice, but it sounded like it came from within my skull, like a thought. Not only that, but it was familiar.

Well, if she was in my head… that would honestly explain a few things. Give me my body back! I thought-screamed at her, and I started wrestling for control of my limbs. The blue magic holding my rifle aloft changed to orange, and before it could flicker back, I ejected the mag and fired the bullet in the chamber into the floor. Seeing that I was disarmed, Ace dropped her rifle as well, only to tackle me. I grunted as I slammed into the ground beneath her, and she ended up straddling me with a pistol pressed under my jaw.

“Don’t move,” she warned, and I felt the other presence in my skull stop struggling with me, which let me take control of my body again. “What in the blazes is going on?!”

“Ace!” I gasped. Then I just tried to force words out for as long as I had control over my mouth. “I don’t know what’s happening, it’s like there’s somepony else in my head with me, I don’t—!”

“Get off of me!” the other me insisted, again speaking in a slightly off accent from how I normally spoke. “What year is it? Has there been any news from the Synarchy?”

“Synarchy?” Ace asked with a blink. Frowning, she just jammed the pistol harder into the soft part under my jaw. “Who the fuck are you?”

Gauge’s tugged on her shoulder with a hoof. “Get that gun away from her! Don’t hurt Ember!”

I tried to take control of my mouth again, but the presence in my brain just forced me out; it was like by surrendering her control of my limbs, she’d made her hold on my mouth unbreakable. “My name is Dr. Electric Surge. I ran this facility before the mutiny. When the soldiers attacked, I fell through the torus in this room and died.”

Ace just had a dumbstruck look on her face. “Wait, you’re Dr. Surge? You died? What?”

“The torus ring was my work. We were testing to see if we could harvest energy from the ambient mana that surrounds us. To summarize a long story, you can, and we did. But that’s not the only thing it can harvest.

“Souls are made of mana, and they’re bound to our bodies in some way we don’t understand. But that bond can be severed by a strong enough force, one which I had the misfortune of determining can be applied by the torus. My soul has been trapped in this installation, in the very copper and wiring that powers it, ever since I died. Do you understand what kind of Tartarus that is? To be dead for years and years, to watch from the cameras as your body decomposes into a skeleton?” Apparently, her control over my mouth included the ability to spit, because she spat into Ace’s face. “I don’t care if you threaten me with a gun to my head, I’m more than happy to die and move on! But your friend is still in here, and I’m not sure she’d agree with me.”

Since I couldn’t use my mouth at the moment, I vigorously shook my head from side to side. I really wanted to keep my head.

Ace sighed and slowly stood up, then gestured for me to do the same. “Let us speak with her. I ain’t gonna do anything just yet, I promise.”

I stood up as well, and I felt Surge let go of my mouth. “Yeah, I’d really like to keep my head, thanks,” I said with a chuckle.

Both Gauge and Ace just eyed me warily, though. “So, what are we going to do about this?” Gauge asked us. “Dr. Surge, can you… I don’t know, get out of my friend’s head?”

I felt Surge step in to grab control of my voice again. “I need her body to stay alive. The mana her horn produces can sustain me. I could leave to jump into a circuit, for example, but without a steady source of mana, I’d fade away.”

“How’s about we just start from the beginning,” Ace said, still eying me like I was going to lash out at her. I didn’t think I’d be able to stop Surge if she took control of my horn before she did something nasty. “Ace, Gauge, and the mare you’re possessing is Ember.” She pointed her wingtips to each of us in succession. “Were you the voice from earlier?”

Surge pulled my lips into a frown. “Yes, that was me. I’d been in a thoughtless torpor, a coma, if you could call it that, for decades. It was the closest to death I could come.” She sighed with my lungs, and I think she would’ve made me shake my head if I’d let her. “But then you restarted the security system, disrupted the flow of power from the torus to the rest of the installation. I felt that. It woke me up. And then I knew that I had a chance of either escaping from this cursed place or finally ending my suffering.”

Gauge immediately stepped forward and pressed his nose against mine, a hateful glare in his eyes. “You’re the one who triggered the purge, aren’t you? Where’s Nova?! Where’s my marefriend?!”

“If you’re worried about her safety, Stripy, then don’t be,” Surge retorted, sneering at him. I guess that was her old Synarchy racism showing. If she stayed in my head long… well, I wondered how long it’d take before Gauge beat me up just trying to shut her up. “And that was an accident. I needed to restart security to see what was happening up there. The system triggered the purge on its own, not me.”

“Where can we find her?” Ace asked.

“Before I jumped to Ember’s skull, I noted doors being opened and shut in the cybernetics wing. I’d imagine she’s there, and she’s mobile. She was near the surgery rooms last I knew.”

I sort of pushed her out of my mouth for the sake of actually being able to speak with my friends. “We should go there quick. We don’t know if that’s dangerous or not.”

“It’s not,” Surge flatly insisted. It was kind of weird to be answering myself like this; this was going to take some getting used to. “I was in charge of this installation for four years, I know it inside and out. There’s nothing dangerous in the cybernetics wing.”

I feel like we all breathed a sigh of relief at that. “Good. We should still go see her anyways,” Gauge insisted.

I nodded. “We can talk and walk,” I said. As we turned down toward the stairs, I asked aloud, “So did you read the message that was sent to the computer there? The shit that the other bastard stole?”

“I wasn’t aware that the installation had received any outside communications until you woke me,” Surge said. “But yes, I remember it clearly.”

As she said that, I felt something flit across my mind. It was like Surge took what she remembered and pushed it against my consciousness. Suddenly I ‘remembered’ the message on the computer terminal as if I’d seen it maybe an hour ago:

>>>SECURE SIGNAL INCOMING FROM INSTALLATION BIC01
>>>PREPARING SECURITY PROTOCOLS
>>>INITIATING HANDSHAKE…………100%
>>>DATA TRANSMISSION RECEIVED
>>>WARNING!!! ATTEMPTING TO ACCESS ENCRYPTED FILES!!!
>>>ENCRYPTION LEVEL: ONYX STAR
>>>OVERRIDE: EOH PROTOCOL DUSK
>>>EMERGENCY OVERRIDE INITIATED
>>>ACTIVATING WISPR COORDINATE TAG…………100%
>>>BROADCASTING DISTRESS FREQUENCY 27.065MHZ
>>>ADGGA | I | 36-J

I stumbled on the stairs as that all flashed against my mind’s eye, but Surge took control of my legs and stabilized me before I—or I guess we—could fall down the steps. “Woah…” I groaned, rubbing at my skull. “That was… trippy.”

Gauge touched my shoulder. “You alright, Em?”

“She’ll be fine, zebra,” Surge informed him. “I showed her what I saw instead of saying it aloud. It’s much faster that way.”

“Also disorienting,” I muttered, shaking my head. “The next code piece is ADGGA and an I. Usual 36-J and all that.”

“EOH Protocol: Dusk,” Surge murmured aloud. She turned my features into a frown, and I could tell she was thinking about what exactly she had seen.

But then she forced me to turn around on the stairs and glare up at my friends. “I’ve answered your questions, so now it’s my turn. What happened to the Synarchy? What happened to Auris? Who exactly are you three, and why are you after these code pieces?”

“Talk and walk,” I insisted, turning around again and forcing us down the stairs. “Answer number one: we don’t fucking know. It’s been two hundred winters or some shit like that since Auris last heard shit from them. We called it ‘the Silence’, though I guess with these code pieces, the Silence is over now. In that time, the planet basically blew up and now there’s all sorts of fun things running around the countryside, like rape and slavery and all that nasty shit. There’s answer number two for you.”

I made it to the bottom of the stairs and started toward the door, Ace and Gauge right behind me. “As for the third and fourth answers, you already know our names, and Gauge and me are with the remains of the Synarchy’s special forces or some shit, or at least that’s what they used to be before they became paladin protectors of the valley to the north. The Sentinels, they call themselves now. And Ace is…” I kind of stumbled on words to say.

Ace apparently had no qualms about admitting her ‘profession’; I’m pretty sure she took pride in it, honestly. “Outlaw,” she said, with a little smirk on her muzzle. “Though I ain’t the common kind.”

Surge looked at her with annoyance and disbelief; I knew because she twisted my expression to match hers. “An outlaw is an outlaw, whether they’re common or not. Now I have concerns that apparently a lawless mare is plundering the secrets of the greatest nation to have ever existed.”

Ace jabbed her hoof into my chest. “Greatest nation or not, Equestria’s fucking dead, Surge. And now us poor shits on this fuckin planet gotta scavenge and plunder what you fuckers left us if we’re gonna have any chance at surviving. You fuckers done killed yourselves, and you dragged a whole ‘nother planet down with you.”

My horn flared with blue magic as Surge pushed Ace back. “You will not disrespect Equestria and our High Queen.”

“Who’s gonna stop me? Sure as shit ain’t gonna be your army. Sure as shit ain’t gonna be your ‘High Queen.’” She sneered at me (or I guess at Surge) and walked past us. “Y’all fuckers destroyed yourselves. Now we gotta deal with the aftermath. Get over it.”

Surge was silent, and I could feel her thinking in my skull. It was a weird sensation; I got wisps and hints of words and ideas that weren’t my own, almost like I was talking in a room but I could overhear bits of conversation in the far corner. I used the opportunity to take control of my mouth back and try to sort things out before this mare from the past started yanking my limbs around at will. “Okay, Surge, before we go any further, I want to at least lay down some ground rules. I’ll let you use my mouth as you want, but don’t fuck with the rest of my body, okay?”

Gauge shot me a concerned look. “You sure that’s okay, Em?” he asked me. “We should try to find something to get her into and keep her out of you. I don’t want you to have to keep another pony in your head.”

“You regard me like a parasite, don’t you, Stripy?” Surge spat at him. “An evil spirit, perhaps? Your kind was always so fascinated with your ancestry and your strange voodoo magic that you refused to let us bring you into the modern age. You were always so afraid of what you didn’t understand, too afraid to actually try to understand in the first place. That is why we colonized Zebrica, and you threw our gift of enlightenment back in our faces and spat at our hooves.”

“And that’s part of the reason,” Gauge grumbled, rolling his eyes. “I’d like you to stop making my friend spout racial slurs.”

“Implying that you share our genes! You are a different species, though a closely related one. It is obvious simply by looking in our genetic code which of the two of us the Sisters decided to raise from the filth—!”

I basically mentally slapped Surge out of control of my mouth. “That’s enough, you crazy racist scientist,” I growled. “I swear, I don’t know how the fuck I’m going to do anything if I have to spend all day literally arguing with myself. Just… try not to fuck with my body and I’ll let you speak at will, alright?”

She thought hard about that for a few moments, trying to decide if it was worth it to call me out for being disrespectful to her and her obviously superior Synarchic ways. “Alright. That is… agreeable,” she finally said. “In return, I can offer you my help in spellcasting. I can combine my soul energy with yours to create more powerful spells.”

“But, like, don’t you need your soul energy to stay alive?”

“That’s why I must stay in your body, Ember. I need your body to produce mana to sustain me, and in turn, I can use that to help you. I have effectively doubled the size of your mana pool, and added my own knowledge of spells to you. Speaking of which…”

I shivered as I felt an icy blue hoof go poking through my memories. I felt her reviewing the basic cantrips I knew that I used to cast spells, and in what ways I knew how to use them. It was weird to suddenly be thinking about fire protection, shields, and fireballs against my will.

Then I felt her disapproval. “I expected more from a unicorn like you. You have an incredibly limited repertoire at your disposal. It explains why I find your brain so… cozy.”

I blinked. “Did you just fucking call me an idiot?”

“Did I?”

I growled and smacked my head against the wall; I knew from the surprised jolt in my mind that Surge felt the crack of pain too, though maybe more sharply than me since she hadn’t known pain for so long. “I’m surprised it’s not more cramped with a fucking zombie fungus in there, too.”

“Oh, is that what that is? I was wondering. I thought it was just cancerous and I could deal with it later when you were resting.” She poked around my brain some more, and I felt a sickening wave of nausea overcome me. “Yes, Cortexus equus. A particularly nasty fungus, or so I heard; I was a mana engineer first and foremost, not a biologist. Usually preys on wargs and spider rats, but adapts to equine physiology surprisingly easily.” I felt her preparing something in my skull, and Gauge and Ace warily watched me. “I can take care of this, but it will hurt.”

“Hurt?” I asked, nervously shuffling my hooves. “How much is—!!!”

I broke down into uncontrollable screaming as Surge did something to my brain. It felt like she’d taken a white-hot bar of iron straight from the forge and driven it through my skull from horn to neck. I’m pretty sure I fell to the ground and started convulsing, and I’m pretty sure that Ace and Gauge hovered over me, worriedly asking me what was happening and insisting that I’d be okay, but I was in too much fucking pain to comprehend any of that. After what felt like an eternity, the pain finally ebbed away, and instead I was left with a pounding headache that felt like nothing but gentle head pats in comparison.

Even though I could hardly move from where I lay on the ground, Surge used my mouth and voice like I wasn’t in agony at all. “I told you it would be painful.”

“What did you do to her?” Gauge asked. “She was screaming…”

“Better than wailing, wouldn’t you agree, Stripy?” she asked him. “I fried the tumorous mass that the fungus was building on her brainstem. I also had to track down spores and mycelium bodies elsewhere in her brain and burn those, too. I think even you could understand just how painful such a procedure would be… though I do admit that the level of control I have in this form is astounding. I can navigate her brain down to the cellular level. I wouldn’t have anywhere near such control as a flesh and blood surgeon.”

“If you could avoid fucking with my brain and my mind, that’d be awesome,” I groaned, finally finding the strength to stand up again. “Please?”

“I make no promises,” Surge said, but I could feel her acting all sardonic in my head. Wait, fuck, I didn’t even know what ‘sardonic’ meant. Was she putting words in my brain too, now?

Then she urged me forward, since I guess I was standing too still for her liking. “You’re welcome, by the way,” she said. “Now there’s only two of us in here. And not to push the envelope, but we should find your friend and leave this place behind. It’s been my tomb for two centuries now. I want to see something else. Anything else.”

“Agreed,” Ace said, taking point back down the hall. “We can all sit ‘round the campfire and trade stories later, because Surge, I promise you, we all got a lot of questions.”

“As do I,” the pony in my brain said. “Can I at least trust that you uncivilized killers of the far future are literate? Can you at least read the directions to the cybernetics wing, or do I have to guide you?”

“We had books and simple schools in Ember’s and my settlement,” Gauge said. Then he whipped his head over his shoulder and glared back at me and Surge. “And before you say anything, yes, I know how to read, and I probably know my way around the guts of a machine better than you do. So, can it.”

“I’m surprised you even would be taught how if you work menial, filthy labor,” Surge muttered. Thankfully, Gauge knew better than to respond to that barb. I really didn’t want to get sidetracked into yet another racist argument, and thankfully for your enjoyment, we managed to get our shit together and fucking focus from there on out.

We made it to the entrance to the cybernetics wing, but before we could enter, Surge brought us to a stop. “I’m no longer in the circuits of this installation, so I can’t stop the turrets and defenses from firing on you like I did earlier,” she warned us. “And I will not jump back into the grid just to keep them off of you. I won’t risk you leaving me here. If you want to leave the installation, I am coming with you.”

I wasn’t sure if she was just being overly cautious with us or she’d actually sensed a few ideas I had, but I nodded regardless. “Can you at least give us a heads-up to what we’ll have to fight through?”

“There are two turrets in the room immediately ahead. Beyond that, there are a pair in the administrative offices, and another four in the secure labs. I hope your friend didn’t wander into any of those since I stopped controlling them, though I do recall her using a modified SCaR unit to disable some of them anyway. Clever. I can appreciate a pony with enough skill to control one of those and keep it functioning centuries after it was built.”

“She didn’t do it, I did,” Gauge said with a pleased smirk. “Built SCaR back up from scratch using several other sentry units. Even tweaked its response parameters some, gave him a little bit of a personality.”

Surge scowled at him, but I focused my will on keeping her out of my mouth. I felt a pang of irritation and anger bounce off my mind, but simply the satisfaction of denying her another racist remark was enough for me. Instead, while I was distracted focusing on my mouth, she kicked me out of my limbs long enough to open the door with a wash of blue magic and march inside.

She didn’t draw my gun as she entered the room, despite Ace’s surprised protests. Instead, my horn glowed with her blue magic, and I felt an unfamiliar spell building along its grooves. She manifested two small shields on either side of my head to block the barrage of bullets that the turrets fired at us, and while doing that, she managed to cast another spell directly at the turrets. They sparked, and then just like that, they fizzled and died.

I reasserted myself over my body and pushed her back to the little space in the back of my mind; it was already getting much easier for me to push her influence around now that I knew how to deal with it, and I guess my will was stronger than hers because this was my body or something like that. “What spell was that?” I asked, warily watching the turrets. They didn’t seem physically damaged in any way, just… off.

“Electromagnetic pulse,” she said. “Just as you have an affinity for fire, I have an affinity for electricity. I disrupted their electronics with a single spell and severely crippled their circuitry. They will be inoperable until they get repairs.”

“Which’ll be never,” Ace said, brushing past us. “I hate to admit it, but maybe we should let Ember and racist grandma take point. I ain’t got nothing that can deal with turrets as simple or as quickly as that.” She nudged Gauge and added, “Why waste bullets when we got these two to deal with everything this place throws at us?”

“Good a point as any,” I said, walking further into the room, at least until I felt Surge trying to take control of my legs. Sighing, I yielded control to her and just started looking around. “You know where you’re going, you do the walking.”

“That’s still so weird to hear…” Gauge muttered behind me.

“Try being the one living it. It’s fucking weird.”

“Try not having a body for two centuries,” Surge countered, “And suddenly finding yourself in control of flesh and blood again. It’s funny how you forget how everything works, and how quickly it all comes back to you.” She chuckled and added, “I’m just glad I’m not in a stallion’s body. That would feel strange.”

I couldn’t imagine that, but I’m not going to go into my own thoughts on that matter. “I’m with you on that, sister,” I said as she walked past a desk and toward a big door. “That’d be all sorts of fucked up.”

“Even more than this already is?” Ace grumbled.

Surge chose to ignore her and her blue magic pressed a control panel. She twisted my muzzle into a frown when nothing happened, and a wispy jolt of blue energy hit the control panel. In that moment, it felt like my head was a little less cramped, and the panel suddenly lit up. This time the door opened on its own, and the blue wisps jumped back to my horn.

“What was that?” I asked her.

“Being incorporeal has its advantages,” she said. “Like I mentioned before, I can jump to electronics and back, making them work how I want, within the limitations of their design. I bypassed a broken diode in the door panel to open this door, for instance.”

I just nodded, and Surge walked us through the door into a long hallway. All the doors on our left and right were sealed shut and dark, but Surge just went by all of them without stopping. Her eyes (and mine) were set on a big door at the end of the hall labeled ‘SURGERY WING’. This door, however, immediately opened when Surge pressed the button.

She came to a stop just inside the door and sighed. “I spent so much time in these wings. It’s… melancholic to be walking through them again. I feel like I’m out of my time, out of place.” She hung her head. “Everypony I knew when I fell through that torus is dead. I’m the last mare of a dead world.”

We were all quiet as she sorted her thoughts, but she shook her head and kept walking. “The surgery wings are this way. Come along.”

The four of us walked through the room. Like the main entrance, it had a reception area, though it was much smaller and pushed out to the side so it wouldn’t interfere with ponies entering and exiting the wing. Like the other rooms, this one was devoid of bodies. I had a feeling I really needed to ask Surge about just what happened here, but now wasn’t the time.

“Hold,” Surge said, and she stopped me next to some exposed wiring. “I’m going to try to find your friend. Do not try to go anywhere until I say so, or I will not let you leave. Okay?”

Gauge shrugged. “Not like we have much choice in the matter.”

Surge smiled at him. “Thought so, Stripy.” Then my horn flared a wispy blue, and suddenly Surge was gone from my skull.

I rubbed my face and groaned; now it felt weird to not have another pony in my brain fighting for control of my limbs. “Fuck, I really don’t want to let her back into my brain…”

“But you have to,” Ace finished for me, and I sighed and dipped my head. “Otherwise that mare ain’t gonna let us leave.”

“I know…” I groaned. “It’s just… you try having somepony living in your head with you. I want to do something and it feels like I need her permission to do it easily. Sure, I can force her to let me do what I want, but if she doesn’t agree with me, it’s a fucking pain in the ass.” I flipped open my bags and stuck a cigarette between my teeth; I really fucking needed it after all this bullshit. “And you know what the scary part is? I can hear her thinking, feel her emotions. It’s not right. And after that keyboard zapped me—or I guess, she zapped me—I think I relived one of her memories.”

Gauge’s ear perked up. “Really?” he asked. “From before the Silence?”

I nodded. “Yeah. She was back on Equestria.” I shuddered as I remembered this something I shouldn’t have been able to. “It wasn’t like watching a vid, though. I was her. I had her thoughts and emotions and her knowledge on the war and everything. I wasn’t Ember. I was Surge.” A cold shiver ran down my spine and I shut my eyes. “It… I-It’s scary, now that I think about it. I want to be Ember, not Surge or some combination of the two of us. And the longer she’s inside of my head…”

Gauge gave me a hug, while Ace stepped forward and patted my shoulder. “You’ll be alright,” she said. “You ain’t gonna let her change who you are. I ain’t been traveling with you long, but I know you’re strong. Stronger than you look. And, well,” her eyes looked around the room we were in. “I might not’ve found any treasure or weapons like I hoped, but this code thing y’all are pursuing? It’s important, whatever it is. And if you’re doing something about it, trying to stop Reclaimer from getting his dirty hooves on it, then I’m with you, all the way.”

I was a little taken aback; some part of me figured that Ace would just leave after we went through this installation. It was the first I’d really heard about her staying with us. But she was a great fighter, and she seemed to know her way around Auris like nopony else. She’d make this so much easier for all of us.

“Well, we’re happy to have you, then,” I said. I was just relieved to have her expertise and know-how with us, but I will admit that once I got past her walls, she reminded me of myself. She truly wanted to help ponies, even if she often took the simplest or most practical route without much care for who got caught in the crossfire. Which sounds kind of weird at first, but it’s who she was. She’d kill a dozen minions without a thought if it meant stopping their higher-ups from hurting more.

Of course, that was a dangerous morality to walk, and I certainly didn’t always approve, but maybe I’d be able to iron that out of her.

“It’s just because you’re a pegasus,” Gauge teased her. “Ember has a thing for them.”

I blushed. “So what if I do?”

Gauge blinked. “Snrkktt!” he snorted. “I was just teasing you, Em, but that’s nice to know, too. Must run in your blood.”

Ace rubbed the back of her neck with the crest of a wing. “ Didn’t know you felt that way about me. Should’ve just said something, it’s been too long since I had a roll in the hay.”

I hung my head, though now it was more from darker thoughts than embarrassment. “I’m… n-not looking for love, right now.”

Ace clammed up immediately, and when she dipped her head, it was slow and understanding. “If it’s any consolation… I know how you feel.”

The door in front of us opened with a sharp hiss, revealing a short hallway that branched left and right. Once more, Surge’s voice crackled over the speakers, though she definitely sounded less insane than the first time she’d spoken to us that way. “Your friend is in the fitting and calibration room to the right. I have to help her with the last bits of the procedure. She’s remarkably intelligent to have gotten it that far on her own, though these last few steps do require some assistance.”

“Procedure?” Gauges asked, pushing past me so he could go down the hall first. “What do you mean?”

“Something that’d go over your head, Stripy,” Surge hissed back. “But let’s just say that we’re putting her back together.”

Putting her back together? Considering we were in the guts of one of the Synarchy’s most top-secret installations, that could’ve meant anything. And Gauge was likely just as worried about what that meant as I was, probably even more so. He was all but cantering down the path Surge had told us to go, and as soon as a door near him opened on its own, he went into it.

I followed a little ways behind and stood off to the side of the room. An assortment of mechanical arms glided along from where they hung in the ceiling, obviously working on something (or somepony) in a chair with its back turned to us. Gauge approached the chair warily, and Ace rested a wingtip on my shoulder when I went to follow him. Within seconds, the arms all abruptly stopped, and then they retracted in unison to lie flat against the ceiling.

“Nov?” Gauge asked, finally reaching the chair. “Nov, is that—?”

A flash of metal cut him off, and me and Ace both flinched. A series of pleated metal panels extended from the right side of the chair, ending in the rough shape of a wing. White feathers stuck out from the other, and when they began to move in unison, I recognized the happy laughter coming from the chair.

The chair spun around, and I felt all my worry suddenly go away when I saw Nova grinning at us. She was a little bruised and nearly gray from dust, but she was alive and in one piece. “Gauge! Ember! Ace!” she exclaimed, jumping out of the seat as the belts holding her torso down popped free on their own. “You’re okay! Oh, I was so worried!”

Gauge rushed forward and wrapped Nova in a tight hug, one which she returned with her wings, one feathery and one metal. “We thought you were dead!” Gauge exclaimed, nuzzling his marefriend. “How did you—but where—?”

Nova booped his nose. “It’s… it’s a really long story. But SCaR helped a ton, didn’t you, little guy?” She looked over her shoulder as SCaR came flying in from another room, and the drone flew in close enough for Gauge to pet it before it began idly floating around the room like it usually did.

By now, I’d finally managed to join my two friends now that they’d had their moment, and the first thing that drew my eyes was Nova’s shiny new wing. It was sleek and thin, and it folded and flexed and twitched like a real wing would. But I could tell just from looking at it that it was some kind of stainless steel alloy, or maybe titanium, though it had a very slight blue tint to it that I couldn’t explain. Each ‘feather’ was individually shaped, and even though they slid against each other as Nova subconsciously fidgeted with her prosthetic, they glided along on well-oiled joints. Just from the way that the feathers caught the light, I could tell that they were razor-edged and probably incredibly sharp. Honestly, it looked like a combat prosthetic, and given the kind of ponies that’d made it, I didn’t find that hard to believe at all.

“Nice wing,” I said, tapping it. I noticed that Nova moved the wing in response, almost like I’d touched the real flesh and blood thing. “You look like such a fucking badass now.”

“Ember!” Nova squealed, turning her excitement from Gauge to me and burying her nose in the hair along the side of my neck. Then she held out her wing and looked at it. “Isn’t it amazing?! I can feel it and move it like it’s the real thing! It’s not even that heavy despite being made out of metal; it probably weighs as much as my other wing!”

“It was designed to be as integrated and unobtrusive as possible,” Surge said from the speakers. Nova jumped at the dead mare’s voice, but Surge didn’t notice or didn’t care. “We lost fliers constantly, especially when fighting the dragons and harpies. Pegasi aren’t tough enough to be hoof soldiers; their real value is in the sky. The Experimental Wartime Injury Neural Gateway prosthetic—X-WING—was simply the latest effort. It performed so well in trials that we submitted a proposal to the Department of War to replace and augment the wings of our fliers currently in active service with this prosthetic. We calculated it would have increased lethality by 17% and survivability by 9%. Sadly, this so-called ‘Silence’ happened before we could actually implement our work.”

Nova swallowed hard, but when none of us reacted with any concern, she calmed down a bit. “Who are you?” she asked. “You’re the mare from before, right?”

“That’s an explanation I’m sure your friends can deliver to you; I don’t wish to repeat myself again. Now, Ember, we’re going to leave. The easiest way out is through the emergency escape stairs the other pegasus took after downloading the contents of the computer. Head there immediately, and I’ll open everything up for you. But you aren’t leaving without me or my skeleton. I won’t leave my bones to rot here any longer.”

I nodded and turned around, certain that Surge was watching us through cameras. “Right… come on, guys, let’s get the fuck out of this shithole.”

“We’re leaving already?” Nova asked. “Can’t we stay a little longer?”

“I have locked every door in this facility save the way out. The Synarchy’s secrets were not meant for your eyes. We will be leaving immediately. There is no discussion.”

“If we can’t see those secrets, then who will?” Nova muttered under her breath as we began to backtrack. “Who is she, by the way?” she asked me.

“The soul of the doctor who used to run this place,” I said. “It’s… a long story.”

“She’s Ember’s new imaginary friend,” Ace more or less summed up. “She won’t let us leave unless we take her with us, and the only way for her to do that is for Ember to let her into her head.”

“Trust me, I’m not that happy about it,” I grumbled. “At least maybe we’ll learn something about what life was like before the Silence. That kind of knowledge has to be worth it, right?”

I could certainly kid myself about that, at least.

We made it back to the room with the big donut thingy, and I could just tell that if we weren’t in a hurry, Nova would’ve wanted to spend days here just analyzing the thing. But I could also tell when the door sealed behind us and powered off that Surge was serious about us leaving. If there were any turrets in this room, I was afraid that she was going to force us out at gunpoint.

I walked closer to the ring thing, still whirring and humming along. The frigid air felt so much colder next to this thing; I think it was the reason everything was coated in ice under the mountain. It was just sucking all the warmth out of the air. But as I walked closer, I could feel it pulling on something inside of me. Strange colors I don’t have names for flickered at the edges of my vision, and I felt like I was holding my head underwater. Rather than fuck about next to this thing that literally rips souls from their bodies, I grabbed the pale unicorn skeleton under the ring with my magic and quickly backpedaled away from the whooshing, pulsing, glowing air being drawn through the ring of the generator.

“Good,” Surge said as I walked up the stairs to where my friends were waiting by the way out. “Maybe my bones can get some rest, even if I cannot. I’ve spent too long studying my own corpse, watching it decay, noting all the tiny insignificant irregularities in the shape of my bones.”

Have I mentioned that the sentences ponies were saying today were really weird? I never expected to hear this shit in my life!

Ace, Gauge, Nova, and SCaR all waited by the door out of here; even though I felt like there was so much more we could learn from this place, we were all really antsy to get back above ground and away from the turret-filled murder base. “This is how it will work,” Surge said. “You three go first. Take my body with you. I will open the door at the top of the stairs, and then you will keep it open. It’s designed to close automatically in case of a system failure, and that pegasus from earlier damaged its circuits on his way out. I can bypass it myself, but as soon as I jump from the circuit board to Ember’s skull, it will attempt to close. Ember will wait here until you leave and do that before she is allowed to go. I will not be tricked into being left behind.”

Gauge and Nova gave me worried looks, but I waved them off and sat down on the floor. “I’ll be fine,” I assured them. “Surge needs me to leave this place. Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

“If you say so,” Nova said. The door to the stairs opened and she reluctantly set off down them, followed by Gauge and Ace. The outlaw spared me a glance and a nod before she followed the other two up the stairs, and I sighed as I waited for them to disappear. The door slammed shut after them; I guess Surge wanted to make sure I didn’t get any ideas.

It took a few minutes before the door slid open again. “They’re at the top, Ember,” Surge informed me. “Your friend is making good use of her new wing. The results are impressive given her small frame, but I wouldn’t keep her waiting.”

I stood up and immediately went to the door. “Alright. Let’s get going then.” I lowered my horn toward the panel at the door, and again, another disorienting jolt ran down the length of my horn and through my spine. At least it was nowhere near as bad as the first time, but I immediately felt Surge’s presence at the edges of my thoughts, and some of my muscles twitched as she felt them out. “Are you settled in?” I asked aloud.

As much as I can be, her consciousness thought at me, foregoing the need to use my mouth at all. The presence of nicotine in your blood disgusts me, but your body is already addicted and I don’t feel it’s worth it to undo on my end.

“Good,” I muttered back, starting to climb the stairs. “I like my body just the way it is.”

You wouldn’t want a bluer coat? I raised an eyebrow; it felt like the sour mare was actually teasing me. I’m not good at parsing through cellular DNA, but I can recognize some phenotypes by feel alone. You inherited genes for a blue coat from one of your parents; a lovely shade of sapphire, if I’m interpreting them right. And—oh, you have pegasus blood in you? Interesting. As for the rest of your genes... oh my.

“I was born in a town that’d been isolated for two centuries,” I grumbled. “I get it, I’m a little inbred. It’s not like we had much choice in the matter. Though yeah, my dad was a pegasus and he wasn’t from Blackwash, so I at least have it better than pretty much every other pony or zebra in our settlement.”

How unfortunate. Your town likely would have been assigned menial labor with this much genetic damage, were the Synarchy still around. We certainly would not have wanted you to pass on your genes. the doctor thought, returning to her usual biting remarks.

“Yeah, whatever. Fuck you too.”

And then I came across a sight I wasn’t expecting to see. At the top of the staircase, the door… simply wasn’t there anymore. The edges of the frame glowed orange, and I could tell at a glance that something extremely hot like a blowtorch had sliced through them like a hot knife through butter. But standing in front of me was just Nova, and the normally blue edges of her new prosthetic still glowed faintly, and the feathers were all arranged perpendicular to the crest so that they looked like a heat sink. A few beads of cooled steel dotted the grass around her, and Gauge and Ace just stared in awe at the two halves of the door lying on the ground.

“What the fuck…” I muttered, stepping through the hole in the door and being careful not to burn myself on the edges. “Did you do that, Nov?”

She beamed at me. “This wing is amazing!” she shouted, though it didn’t look like she could move it that well while it was cooling. “That computer mare, Surge, told me I could use it to cut apart the door. I can’t even imagine how hot the edge had to be to do that!”

“I can,” I said, admiring her work. “Metal’s my thing. You’re looking at at least 1400 degrees to do it. That’s fourteen times hotter than water’s boiling point.”

Ace whistled. “Wish I got me one of them,” she said, pointing to the wing. Then she turned to me and smiled. “Hey Surge, think we can go back in and hook me up with a pair?”

“I shudder to think of what a lawless mare such as yourself would do with prosthetics that strong,” she hissed. And I was just starting to enjoy not having her use my mouth as she wanted.

Ace shot me a sympathetic look, though I didn’t get to look at it long. Surge seized control of my eyes and my legs, and she walked me farther out into the open. Around us, the pink and gray mountains rose up from the earth like teeth, and far below, I could see a snaking blue river fed by innumerous waterfalls. A breeze rippled through my mane, and a wave of pleasure from Surge settled over me. I guess feeling wind and being outdoors for the first time in centuries could be an exhilarating experience.

“I’m alive,” Surge breathed. “I’ve been dead for two hundred orbital cycles of this damn planet… and now I’m alive.”

She turned around and made me smirk at my friends. “Let’s put my own private Tartarus as far behind me as we can, alright?”

Chapter 19: The Dead Mare in My Head

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Chapter 19: The Dead Mare in My Head

We didn’t see Yeoman as we left the installation behind, even though I expected to find him behind every tree. Occasionally my eyes would shift and focus on something I didn’t want them to, and I’d remind Surge about our agreement for her to stop messing with my body. In return, I let her freely use my mouth to talk about whatever she wanted. Which, when she wasn’t being extremely racist to Gauge or insulting our general intelligence, was incredibly interesting. Screw reading logs and letters to find out what the past was like; there was a mare who grew up in it, lived it, right in my head.

“Military service was mandatory, of course,” she was saying, in the middle of explaining what life was like growing up. “The Synarchy was surrounded on all sides by brutes and beasts who hated it, and hated us. We needed soldiers to defend it, because something was always attacking us.”

“Always?” Ace asked.

“I left Equus when I was thirty solar years old—roughly twenty-two solar cycles here on Auris, for comparison. Equestria had been fighting the Coalition all thirty years of my life, and the war had started before I was born. We needed everypony we could get.”

We threaded our way through some trees and found a clearing on a hilltop surrounded by a river on three sides and the rising mountain behind us. “Good place as any to make camp,” Ace said. “Sun’s going down, too. Might as well rest here for the night; ain’t gonna get very far in the dark.”

The rest of us nodded and started setting things up, but the conversation continued while we worked. “The war had been going on for more than thirty years?” Nova sounded incredulous. “The toll on Equestria’s population must’ve been catastrophic!”

“Mares were encouraged to have children if they weren’t actively fighting or contributing to the war effort; the Census Bureau was always busy filling out Maternity Licenses for mothers. Mares were eligible once they completed their five years of mandatory military service and turned twenty. They were expected to have two children in five years as part of the license or face steep penalties. I did my part; I had two foals of my own.”

“Twenty?” I raised my eyebrow and turned to Nova. “How long’s that in Auris years?”

“Fourteen winters,” Nova said. “Stars, that’s such a short time…”

“You’re telling me, I’m twenty winters and getting laid is enough of a challenge.” I started shoving the stakes of our tent into the ground with my magic; thankfully it was damp, so it was pliable enough to not be too much of a hassle. “And you served? What was that like?”

“Military service began at fifteen, regardless of who you were. Rich filly, poor colt, everypony served. You were released from compulsory service at twenty. If you wanted to serve longer, you could easily re-enlist, and they’d give you better training and specializations instead of making you a front line grunt or an expendable deckhoof on a starship.” Her chuckle was lost on the rest of us, who just found that horrifying. “I was with the artillery corps when I was fifteen, then got transferred to engineering when I was sixteen. Spent a lot of time on the EOF Horizon, a home world cruiser. I thought the heat of the engine core was bad enough when we were on patrol, but the Horizon was in combat a few times while I was on it. The core gets hot enough to ignite paper at a five foot distance; we had to wear special suits to service and maintain it then.”

Gauge whistled and sat back against a splintered tree stump. “I would’ve loved to have been on one of those. It sounds amazing: working in the guts of the greatest technological achievements ever made.” He sighed. “It’s everything I dreamed of as a greaser.”

“A technological achievement designed and perfected by ponies first, then copied by the other races,” Surge felt the need to elaborate. “But I digress. When I returned from the Horizon, I applied for secondary schooling and was accepted. After five years of intense study, I earned my doctorate and married a marine I met on the Horizon during my mandatory service. We had two beautiful children.” I felt a feeling of sorrow and incredible loneliness brush against my subconscious; I couldn’t imagine how horrible it must be for Surge to be trapped here, centuries later, while her family was dead and waiting for her in the afterlife.

Nova must’ve been thinking the same thing, because she wrapped her flesh and blood wing around my shoulders and nuzzled my cheek, trying to get through to Surge and comfort her. Words weren’t necessary, and I doubt they would’ve helped, anyway. From what I was gathering about her, Surge was too much of a no-nonsense and logical mare for those words to really mean anything to her.

In any event, she steeled herself and pushed away those emotions. “I worked in the best facilities the Synarchy had on Equus while I raised my children. I devoted myself to manatronics and cybernetics with a wild passion. I wanted to help the Synarchy win, and I felt like it would be my work that would turn back the Coalition and give us an edge. I climbed through the ranks of scientists so fast I was in charge of my own lab in four years. But two years later, the High Council pulled my number and decided I needed to take my team to work on Auris. That’s how we ended up here.”

The rest of my friends nodded, but I had a few questions from what I’d seen when she’d jumped into my brain. “I think I saw one of your memories, earlier,” I said, and I could feel Surge’s surprise. “When you first jumped into my head. It was weird, but I think it was your last day on Equus, or at least the morning of it. Where was your family? It just looked like you were living by yourself.”

The sensation I received from Surge’s consciousness told me that I’d asked a bad question. “They... the High Council needed me on Auris to head this project more than they needed me on Equus,” she said, and I could feel the heartache not just in her words, but emanating from the mare’s consciousness in my brain. “My husband was recalled to active duty as well, so he couldn’t look after our children. So the Synarchy took them, raised them, gave them everything they needed.”

“…Oh…”

I kind of envied my friends at that moment. They could at least shuffle their hooves and look away and shit. Me? My mind was locked in my skull with this mare. It was just another reminder that I’d never have any privacy so long as she was in my head.

“I’m… sorry?” Hey, it was the best I could do.

“Don’t be. They received better care from the state than I could’ve given them, as busy as I was.” Her words were bitter, but I could feel that she believed them—or at the very least, was willing herself to believe them. “I’m sure they served the Synarchy well, but… well, I wish I knew what happened to them. I wish I could’ve seen their faces one more time. I left Equus without speaking to them, and for all I know, they died in whatever calamity brought about this ‘Silence.’”

I saw Nova fidgeting, torn between her sympathy and respect for Surge’s boundaries and her desire to learn more. In the end, it was the latter that won out, after a few seconds of silence. “I know it’s hard… but do you know anything about what happened?” she asked. “These code fragments we’re chasing… we don’t know anything about that, what they’re for or anything, or why we got them in the first place. One was sent to your installation, and if you were in charge, then surely you knew what that means?”

I watched Ace start laying the foundation for a fire while Surge formed her answer; I couldn’t even imagine how many times Ace must’ve done this, her hooves moved so mechanically and effortlessly. “The Dusk Protocol was an apocalypse scenario,” she said, getting a few surprised looks from my friends. “The Synarchy had been stashing weapons and everything we’d need to function and continue the fight without our home world if Equestria were to fall. The protocol would’ve been sent to the most important centers on Auris, and each of us would have to send our parts to the Ivory City, where the code would be put together and solved. But that’s all I know. Even though I was the head of the facility that got one, I’m certain the High Council felt I was still too young to be trusted with information as to its exact purpose. That, and I wasn’t a part of the inner party. I’m surprised my facility was even entrusted with participating in the Protocol in the first place.”

Ace finished arranging rocks for a fire and crossed her forelegs. “Well, whatever it was, that signal didn’t make its way here until it was too damn late. Auris fell apart without her momma, however many light-years away y’all were.”

“So you’re saying that if that signal had shown up when it was supposed to, Auris wouldn’t be the shithole it is today?” I asked Surge. “We’ve had bandits and slavers and all sorts of horrible shit for two hundred winters because we didn’t get what we were supposed to, when we were supposed to?”

“Why didn’t we get it?” Gauge asked. “What happened?”

Surge shrugged my shoulders; I at least allowed her that motion. “If I knew the answer, I don’t think we’d be where we are right now. Something must’ve happened to the signal; I couldn’t possibly imagine what. If I had more information, I’d be able to construct a hypothesis, but all I can do is guess right now.”

“Alright, so we ain’t gonna find out more about that, then.” Ace dumped a bunch of fuel into the firepit and gestured to me. I nodded and lit it all up with a thought, and just like that, we had a fire as the dark fingers of night started clawing through the mountains. “Why this code, though? Why not just send a signal to the Ivory City to wake everything up directly? Don’t seem like it’d be that hard; this sure as shit ain’t the easiest solution.”

“Auris was a secret,” Surge said. “And the High Council wanted it to stay that way. The other species didn’t know about it. Sure, they knew we had a colony somewhere, but they didn’t know where. There are a lot of stars in the galaxy, after all, and you wouldn’t expect a blue star world to be the one we settled on. And the Council was loading this planet with weapons and munitions. Splitting up the code would ensure that it would only be activated as a unified last resort from all the important center on the planet, not prematurely by somepony with other plans in mind.”

Gauge snorted and turned away, focusing on his supplies and fetching some food for us all to eat. “I assume it worked better than this on paper, right?”

“I was not a part of the plan’s formulation, merely a custodian of one of the installations that would play a part in the Synarchy’s resurgence,” Surge spat at him, absolutely bristling. I think she just hated the fact that a zebra was calling something thought up by pony minds ‘stupid’.

“Can we please stop fighting about every little thing?” Nova pleaded with them. She nibbled on her dinner, using her strange new metal wing like a tray to hold her food. “What about now? Auris is in pieces, and we haven’t heard from Equus in two centuries. What’s the point of the code now?”

“If you’re asking why it arrived now, again, I can’t answer that.” I kept her out of my mouth just long enough to take a bite of my own meal and swallow it before I surrendered control again. She immediately used my lips to grimace. “I was never a big fan of meat… disgusting,” she muttered, but I just shrugged and rolled my eyes while I couldn’t talk. “Regardless, the point is that many of these installations were sealed and locked, designed to stand the test of time.”

My mind went back to the Bastion and the huge metal door that remained closed no matter how much the Sentinels tried to open it. Could this protocol open that door and give them access to whatever was inside?

Surge must’ve read my thoughts, because she nodded my head. “Assembling the code and using it would unlock all of the installations around Auris and make their locations known to the Ivory City—assuming it’s still standing, that is.”

“Oh, it is,” Ace said with a scowl on her face.

“Oh?” Surge seemed genuinely surprised. “That’s good, then. Maybe reason, sanity, and moral decency are still alive and well somewhere on Auris.”

This time, Ace burst out laughing. “Reason? Sanity? Moral decency? I hate to disappoint you, but that ain’t what you’re gonna find in the Ivory City. It’s run by a madstallion with a lust for power and the technology to wage war on the rest of Auris. I’m from a town called Thatch, which ain’t too far from it. We’ve been fighting him since before I was born.” She leaned in, and her laughter turned to a frown. “There ain’t nothing good about the City. Auris would be better off if the damn thing was razed to the ground.”

Surge thought for a few moments; it was like listening to somepony mutter through the walls in another room of the same building. “I’m curious, outlaw…”

“Ace,” said outlaw harshly corrected.

“If I thought you worth the courtesy, I would’ve used your name.” Ace scowled at me, but I could only shrug while Surge used my voice. “But regardless of how little respect we have for each other, I think we all deserve to know, or at least Ember and I; I certainly don’t feel any recollection of it in her memories. Explain where you’re from, this Thatch, and why I should feel sympathetic towards their side of the struggle against the final bastion of the Synarchy still on Auris?”

Ace sighed. “I ain’t no historian; I don’t know how the town started or all that. But we’re in the Crystal mountain range, near Lake Luna. At least, that’s what we’ve always called them; I assume they’re the same as they used to be when you were still… uh, alive. Not sure if you’re familiar with the place, but—”

“I am familiar,” Surge interrupted. “Apart from the mining town in the north between my installation and Celestia Dam, the settlement at Lake Luna was the closest population center to me. Never saw much of it while I was working, though; it was simply a logging camp at the time, providing raw lumber for Auris’ growth.”

“Right, well I’m sure the town elders would love to have you tell us about it sometime.” She inhaled and shut her eyes. “Ever since the Ivory City started conquering little settlements around its borders, Thatch has held its gates open for the refugees. Reclaimer, the monster who rules that city, must’ve turned on all the old factories, because his troops are better armed and better trained than anything I’ve ever seen before, and they’re brutal. They burn down farms and slaughter the farmers to make way for their own settlers. They choke the life out of distant settlements and force them to surrender by severing caravan ties. He’s a land-hungry bastard, simple as that.

“Whereas, in Thatch, we try to unite the settlements, not scorch them and plant our own ponies in the remains,” she continued; it was somewhat surprising how animated she could get when she was talking about something that interested her. “We’re building a trust of settlements between us and the Ivory City, trying to strengthen ourselves to stand up and fight Reclaimer’s forces. And for the most part, it’s working; he ain’t going nowhere to the west thanks to us, even if he still pushes in the other cardinal directions.” She sighed and shook her head. “But the best we can do is raid his caravans, ambush patrols, just hold him off. Eventually, he’ll gobble up enough resources and claim enough land to push us aside with ease. And he’s trying to get his hooves on this code as well. If he does, it’ll be the end of Thatch and any last chance there is for hope and harmony on Auris. What you’ve told us about it makes it pretty plain and clear that whoever gets ahold of it is gonna run the show.”

“I see. And why should I support upstarts standing in the way of progress, of rebuilding the Synarchy, instead of throwing my weight behind Reclaimer? It seems to me that your town is the menace to society, not the City.”

Ace opened her mouth, but no words came out. I don’t think she even knew what to say. It was Nova, however, who filled the silence. “Dr. Surge… how many of your inventions helped people?”

I could sense Surge’s confusion even before she spoke. “What do you mean? I developed more efficient batteries, portable cores for war machines, even refined the latest generation of mana artillery! I was one of the Synarchy’s greatest minds; I did so much to help ponykind!”

“Not just ponies,” Nova insisted. “Everyone. What did you do for the zebras? The griffons? All those other species?”

“Nothing,” Surge hissed. “I helped them die. They were monsters that wanted to kill us!”

“Does Gauge look like he wants to kill us?” Nova asked, pointing her metal wingtip toward her coltfriend. “What about the griffons on Auris? You’re in Ember’s head, so you can see her memories or something like that, right? Look at her time with the Sentinels. Look at the fighting at Celestia Dam. All those griffons fought with her for something better. Do you see what they all accomplished when they fought together against the Crimson, a band of ponies who hated their neighbors and all the other races?”

Memories from the assault on the dam suddenly flew to the forefront of my mind, and I could feel Surge watching them with me as they replayed behind my eyes. Across from us, Nova stood up and nodded at me and Surge. “We aren’t like the Synarchy. None of us are. And we’re better for it.” Flicking her tail, she turned around and walked away from the fire. “We should build a better future instead of dragging this planet into the same mistakes you made.”

We all watched Nova walk off into the darkness. Soon, the only thing we could see was her silhouette moving towards the cliff overlooking the river. I noticed that her metal wing had several glowing red lights on it; at least it meant she was easy to keep track of in the dark. Eventually, those lights stopped moving, presumably as she sat down to look at the stars. Nova always loved to watch the stars at night.

Gauge stood up and nodded to Ace shortly after, then he too disappeared into the night, making his way to Nova’s side. That left just me and Ace (and Surge) sitting around the campfire, watching the fire I’d created consume the logs around it.

Ace flung another log onto the fire. The sparks roared up into the night, and the sap in the wood began to pop and sizzle as the heat got to it. Seconds faded into minutes before she finally spoke. “You’re a fucking cunt, you realize that, Surge?”

Surge had been focused on her own thoughts up until then, leaving me some peace in my skull. Unfortunately, Ace broke that. “Trading foolish insults, now?”

The outlaw just shrugged. “Ain’t interested. I’m just saying what I’m seeing.” She sighed and looked us in my eyes. “I just… I don’t understand none of how ponies from back then acted and thought. My ma used to read me stories of what Equestria was like a long time ago—before the Synarchy.”

“Oh?” I asked, interested. My mom certainly never read me any stories like that. “What was it like?”

“A land of peace, friendship, harmony,” Ace said. I didn’t miss the wistful twinkle in her eye, and I didn’t blame her; that sounded amazing compared to the hell of Auris. “Two regal sisters raised the sun and the moon. Six friends using the magic of friendship to stop monsters—”

I burst out laughing at that. “The magic of friendship? Really? That’s fucking great.”

“It was true,” Surge murmured, dragging my voice back from cackling and sarcastic to somber and thoughtful.

Ace blinked. “Wait… honestly? You ain’t bullshitting?”

Surge shook my head. “From what you just said, it sounds like everything your mother told you was true. We were ruled by two great alicorns, once. Four, actually, but Celestia and Luna held the power. And the six friends? Those were Twilight Sparkle and her friends.”

“They were real?” I asked, incredulous. “Celestia and Luna? The four alicorns? I always thought they were just fairy tale stuff. Nopony at Blackwash believed in them.”

“They were real,” Surge insisted. “And Equestria was happy and peaceful. Harmonious. And then, straight from Tartarus, a centaur by the name of Tirek came. He drained all of Equestria’s magic, sucked it out of every last pony; stallions, mares, foals, all of them. Except for the four princesses, that is.

“They knew Tirek was coming. They knew he was powerful, too powerful for them to stop. So three of them gave their magic to the fourth—to Twilight.” Surge hesitated in her story, giving me a chance to take a bite of food. It’s hard to eat popcorn and listen to the campfire story when your mouth is being used to tell it, so to speak. “Twilight fled with their magic. When Tirek made it to the palace and found the three others there, exhausted and magic-less, he… well, he killed them. Slaughtered them. Then he found Twilight, and when he tried to get her to surrender by offering to trade her magic for her friends, whom he’d captured, they told her to run instead of surrender. So she did. And he killed them, too.”

Surge sighed, and I didn’t blame her. I didn’t expect this story to get this depressing. “She ultimately came back and fought again. This time, she didn’t hold back. She defeated him. Destroyed him and avenged her friends and the other alicorns. But now she was the only one left. Ponykind looked to her for a leader, and she did her best.”

When her silence dragged on for a few seconds, Ace shifted some and cleared her throat. “I’m guessing it didn’t go so well.”

“Twilight had been groomed to be a diplomat, an ambassador. A leader one day, maybe, but she never had the chance to finish that training,” Surge said. “She… wanted to be peaceful, at first. She wasn’t ready to make the hard choices that face a princess or a queen every day. The other races took advantage of us while we were weak.”

“Through war?” I asked.

“Not through war; Equestria was still the largest and most populous nation on Equus, and we were guaranteed to win any war. But our High Queen wasn’t a fighter, not then. So they would threaten and refer to old treaties to back their claims, and she’d cave.” She pointed my eyes in the direction Gauge and Nova had gone. “The zebras were the first to push their demands. They made Equestria vacate our holdings and colonies in Zebrica. That emboldened the griffons, who demanded the secession of the northern territory around Griffonstone, land that Equestria annexed from them centuries before. Then the deer demanded the end of logging and milling around the Whitetail forest and for us to recognize their sovereignty, followed by the harpies in the southern skies…”

“Sounds like she was a terrible leader,” Ace said through the feathers she was preening. “Weak-willed and just giving land away to whoever wanted a slice.”

“We were watching our borders shrink by the day,” Surge agreed. “This went on for years. Decades. I think it may nearly have been a full century of the other races whittling away at our borders. There was unrest, dissent, ponies were talking about removing her, evening assassinating her… so finally she stepped up to the plate. She demanded that the zebras renegotiate their treaties with Equestria, and when they refused, she sent in the army. The griffons denounced us for what they called unprovoked aggression and tried to intervene militarily, so we fought them too. Then the caribou jumped in, followed by the Empire of the Claw, a land filled with tigers and other big cats. It seemed like the longer we fought, the more people we were fighting. Soon it wasn’t a war about old treaties, it was a war for our very survival. Had we lost, the other nations of the world would’ve torn Equestria to pieces. We couldn’t afford to lose. So we didn’t.

“When the smoke cleared ten years later, we came out on top,” she continued. “The zebra homelands were decimated, the griffons were bankrupt and in ruin, and the caribou forests had nearly been razed to ashes. Equestria signed peace treaties with the different nations, and we returned our borders to how they were before Twilight came to power, and even expanded beyond that. But now the rest of the world wanted to kill us, so Equestria reorganized into a synarchy, a nation jointly ruled by its new High Queen, her trusted councilors who had helped guide her through the wars, and the will of the ponies of Equestria. And that’s how we stayed for a hundred and twenty years before what you call the Silence began.”

That was something to marvel at. It seemed like a tragedy paired with weakness and mistakes had ultimately transformed Equestria from a peaceful and harmonious state to a militant, isolationist, and xenophobic synarchy that saw enemies in every shadow. A bit more than a century later, it all blew up in some way that I still didn’t understand. But now it seemed much less mysterious to me, especially given what I’d heard in Surge’s memory early. “Do you think that ‘Coalition’ won?” I asked her.

“It’s possible,” Surge admitted. “Even though it’s the outcome that everypony feared, it’s probably preferable to other apocalypse alternatives. Though it doesn’t explain why they didn’t find Auris afterwards when they started combing through the Synarchy’s rubble.” She shook my head. “There has to be an alternate explanation.”

“Nuclear weapons?” Ace offered. “If y’all were advanced enough to build a colony lightyears away, y’all must’ve been advanced enough to wipe each other out at the press of a button.”

“Unlikely. Our High Queen used her unbelievable power she inherited from the other alicorns to protect the Synarchy from nuclear weapons. The other species all had their own defense programs, some rooted in ancient magic, others in technology pilfered from us. All our wars were fought in the conventional style, because anything else simply didn’t work.”

“So you’re saying that y’all got so powerful that your big bad toys didn’t work on each other no more?”

“We were always searching for an edge. We had the best scientists and the brightest minds, but any edge we brought to the battlefield would be lost within a year when the enemy got their claws, hooves, whatever on it, too. So we were always searching for an answer.” She waved my hoof back in the direction we came. “Auris was a colony, yes, but it was also a testbed for sensitive weapons. We needed to experiment with our arsenal somewhere secret, somewhere safe. In addition to my manatronics work, for example, we were trying to manufacture advanced prosthetics, cybernetics, even drone soldiers to enhance our hoof soldiers.”

“Doesn’t sound all that smart to be leaving it behind with the door wide open, though,” I said. “That kind of stuff falling into the wrong hooves would be bad.”

“We should blow the whole damn thing up,” Ace said.

I frowned at her. “Like what you did at the foundry?”

Ace rolled her eyes. “We done had this argument already. I ain’t gonna retread old ground.”

“The defenses—however few are still intact—will keep the place mostly secure,” Surge assured us. “As for the knowledge, well, I spent years analyzing every file in our closed database to stave off the boredom of immortality. I memorized everything.” It was true, too; as she said that, I saw blueprints and schematics and complicated formulae I couldn’t even possibly fucking understand go whizzing around the edges of my mind. Honestly, with a pony much, much smarter than me in my brain, I didn’t know how long it was going to take before I just went completely fucking insane.

Ace took a few moments to nibble and straighten a crooked feather on her wing. “If you’re so confident in its safety, then I don’t see no harm in letting it be. The technology inside will be useful when we ain’t chasing this doomsday code protocol thinger all across Auris.” She sighed. “Hopefully we’re gonna be the ones picking through the remains, not Reclaimer.”

“Speaking of which, you said you were one of the ponies trusted to respond to the code, right, Surge?” I asked, kind of crossing my eyes down my muzzle instead of having a physical pony to look toward.

“I was, yes.”

“So, like, do you know where the other installations that held the code pieces are?” Once again, I could see bits of data from the message go flitting through my subconscious as Surge remembered them. “We got an installation list a long time ago, but I hardly remember any of it. But if you were around at the time, then maybe you—?”

“Dr. Hozho,” Surge said. “She was the lead researcher on linguistics, ethics, and sociology. Her father was also on the Council that advised our High Queen. She would have been trusted in the party. Her facility in the Spines would have received a code piece.”

“Linguistics? Ethics? Sociology? That don’t seem like the most important thing you could be studying while at war,” Ace said. “You sure she was important enough to get a piece?”

“She was a cryptanalyst by job title, but she was… something more.” I saw brief flashes of a mare through Surge’s memories: tall, slender, faded green, sharp eyes and a small but angular muzzle. A melodic accent that carried the inflections in her words along like a leaf riding a river’s current. The occasional furious outburst in a language I didn’t understand, and Surge didn’t either. “She sought to try to understand the Coalition’s codes organically, but her real value was in learning how they thought and acted. Her experiments were often strange or controversial, but she provided us with incredible insight on how the different species planned and behaved. The last I heard from her, she was still running an experiment in the Spines.”

“What kind of experiment?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Surge admitted. “I don’t know what any of the other installations on Auris were researching. We weren’t allowed to directly communicate with each other. But I do know she got her pick of the litter of all the political prisoners the Synarchy had acquired over the years. And I know she churned through them at a frightening pace.”

“And all that means…?”

“Nopony working on linguistics research would need so many subjects for her experiments,” Surge said. “Whatever she was researching in that installation, it went beyond simple sociology.”

I scowled. “That’s all kinds of fucked up,” I said. “So much for that whole ‘ethics’ research.”

“I bet she was more focused on figuring out which ethics she could bend and which ones she could kick into the dirt than actually applying them,” Ace said with a bitter chuckle. “Y’all pre-Silence ponies were messed up, you really were.”

“And you post-Silence ponies are backwards and barbaric.”

I flipped my cigarette box open with a sigh. “Yeah, yeah, the whole insults thing is already old. Can we try to be more productive? Like, can you show us the way to this mad doctor’s installation so we can get the next piece? We need to stay ahead of Yeoman if we want to stop the Ivory City from getting all the pieces of the code.”

“I don’t know where exactly the installation is, only that it’s in the petrified forest to the southwest we called the Spines. I’m afraid you’ll have to go looking around yourselves.”

“The Spines is a damn big place,” Ace commented. “Been there a few times. Enormous trees packed so close together you can’t hardly see a hundred meters ahead of you. Thick canopy means the sun never touches the ground. And these huge, petrified trees stretching up for a thousand meters... I ain’t ever seen anything like it anywhere else on this world. And folks go disappearing there all the time, and nopony knows why.”

“Sounds like the fucking perfect place to go looking for a piece of this code.” I lit the cigarette and stuck it in my mouth, sighing as the chemicals hit my blood. I could feel Surge’s revulsion, but I didn’t care. I needed this fucking cig after all the bullshit I’d been through today. “Guess that’s where we’re going next.”

“We’ll stop at Three Rivers on the way there,” Ace said. “It’s a neutral settlement, biggest one west of the continental divide. It’ll be a welcome change of pace after Hole.”

“Good. We need to stock up on supplies and shit. Also, Mawari and Denawa are there. Maybe we can meet up with them.”

“I might pass up on that offer,” Ace said, rubbing her neck. “They’re likely gonna be right sore with me after I blew up the foundry.”

“Right... good point.” I stood up and arched my back, listening to the vertebrae in my spine crack. I wasn’t thin enough yet to actually see them, but if I ran a hoof along my back, I could feel them more than usual. All this running and fighting and nearly dying was really doing a number on me. I can’t believe that a town on the peak of a volcanic mountain could scrape together enough food to keep me better fed than this.

Ace watched me stand, then her eyes flicked to the red lights of Nova’s wing in the distance. “You gonna talk to them?”

I shook my head. “Gauge has it covered. I’m just gonna finish this cigarette and pack it in for the night.” Yawning, I added, “I have to sleep for two now, you know.”

“You better make Surge promise not to take your body for a joyride while you’re passed out.”

“I’m unsure of what state of mind I’ll be in when Ember’s body falls unconscious,” Surge said. “I may be my own consciousness, but I may not even be able to influence her brain in a REM state. It might even put me to sleep too; I don’t know.” When I frowned, she added, “Fine, I promise not to use your body while you’re asleep.”

“Thank you,” I said, trotting away from the fire. “I’m gonna take a piss. Surge, just… try not to be creepy about it, okay?”

I sensed a bit of amusement coming from her. “I make no promises.”

Ace snickered and waved at me as I left. “You girls have fun!”

“I’ll piss on you, how about that?”

“Find somepony else who’s into it, Ember. That ain’t me.”

“Ugh,” Surge grunted. “I’m surrounded by foals.”

“Get used to it, missy,” I teased, making my way through the bushes. “We’re all like, ten on the inside.”

“That much, I have certainly gathered.”

Chapter 20: The Light of the Stars

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Chapter 20: The Light of the Stars

“Zip, no!”

I cradled the body of the mare I loved as the life slowly left her. The blood pouring from the gaping hole in her chest was like a river, and within seconds, I was soaked to the bone. Her blood was thick like sludge and sticky as glue; I felt like I was being buried alive in cement. The interior of the dam twisted around me, turning into a cage of pipes and concrete, isolating me from the world outside.

Zip coughed and covered her chest; it sounded like she was choking on stones. “Why?” she wheezed out, gurgling as blood filled her throat. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I didn’t know!” I screamed at her. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Please, don’t go! I can make it better! I can! I know I can!”

Her face disappeared beneath the blood, and I felt like I was in a grotesque swimming pool. I started flailing as the blood continued to rise and rise, and soon I found myself treading in it just to stay afloat. More and more blood poured into the tiny cell, and I looked up at a grate covering the opening. Even in my panicked state, it didn’t take much to piece it all together. “Help!” I screamed, clinging onto the bars above my cell as the blood rose past my shoulders. “Help! Help! Help me!”

My next screams were drowned out by Zip’s blood pouring down my throat. I spasmed, convulsed, choked, gagged…

-----

…and woke up.

It took me a few seconds to figure out where I was. Rubbing my eyes, I picked out the coats of my friends all lying around me. Gauge and Nova held each other tight, though I noticed that Nova was sleeping on the side with her flesh and blood wing as opposed to the metal one. Ace was off to the side, snoring loudly; I doubted anything short of me kicking her in the crotch would wake her up. But most surprisingly of all, I could barely sense Surge in my mind. I mean, sure, I could feel her sitting in the back of my skull, for lack of better terminology, but she seemed a lot less active than she had been. I guess even she had to sleep some, though with my mind more active now, I didn’t know how long she’d be asleep for. I felt like if I thought too much or too loudly I’d wake her up, like she was sleeping in the same room with me and I was making too much noise or something.

Yeah, I know it’s weird. Try to avoid sharing your brain with somepony else. It gets annoying real fast.

But I knew with the usual dream that I wasn’t going to be sleeping again any time soon. Lacking anything better to do, I slid out of my bedroll and snuck outside, taking a cigarette with me. I could still feel the tiniest hint of nicotine in my blood from the last one I took before I went to sleep, but the usual nightmare had shaken me up enough that I needed another hit if I was going to have any chance at calming down. What I’d seen in my mind’s eye was making my jittering so much worse.

I decided to go sit where I’d seen Nova and Gauge go earlier that night before I’d passed the fuck out; it had to be a good spot, right? It certainly had a great view of the river below, though I was a little uncomfortable in the shifting wind and the misting rain. It was probably going to get a lot worse by morning, that much I knew for certain.

A trivial thought was all it took to light up the cigarette, and I stuck it between my lips, angling the end out to my left. I fought a small cough back down as the smoke and tar hit my lungs, then felt myself loosen up as that blissful drug hit my blood. The jitters and shaking immediately went away, and I hummed a random melody to myself as I worked on the cancer stick. Yeah, I knew by then that I was heavily addicted, but I just didn’t care anymore. There were worse things to get hooked on, and by comparison, cigarettes weren’t all that bad. I honestly didn’t know how I survived without them… but then again, I didn’t have to deal with this much insane world-ending bullshit on a daily basis when I lived in Blackwash.

My eyes turned toward the moons… or I guess, moon. Argenta was out there, sitting low on the horizon, but the smaller one, Platina, was nowhere to be seen. I thought I saw the faintest glow on the horizon, but I couldn’t really be sure. Still, Argenta was full enough that I could easily see the land around me, and I found myself looking inwards as I sat up there, alone.

I fucking hate it when I do that. Life’s so much easier when you just go and don’t take the time to think.

As they always did whenever I was alone for too long, my thoughts drifted to Zip. Though the wound would never go away, the knife in my heart had just turned into a throbbing heartache that gripped me in the quietest hours of the night. And whenever that happened, I always found myself torn. One part of me wanted to break down and cry about this mare I loved, this mare whom I’d had a lot of sex with and close moments together. The other part wanted me to push it all away. I hadn’t even known Zip for a month before she died and I was treating her like we’d been married and in love for years. And while yeah, I thought we were in love, I just… I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. What we had was real, I knew that much, but the cynical part of my mind wanted to argue with me that we hadn’t been together long enough for it to really be ‘real’. Why should I care about some mare who I fucked a few times before she died?

And then there was Ace. As I sat there on that hill, I realized that yeah, she was attractive, and yeah, I wouldn’t mind letting her stick her tongue under my tail. Somehow I’d even gotten past her abrasive, hardcore, badass ‘outlaw’ personality. She could be really sweet and friendly when she wanted to, and hearing her say that she wanted to be a part of my team really made me happy for some reason. But I couldn’t bring myself to like her. I’d loved a mare, and our love was like a firework. It was brilliant, bright, and beautiful, but then it was over in a bang and a flash. Now, Zip was feeding the worms, and I was left behind to carry the scars. After feeling that heart wrenching pain at watching her die, in my forelegs no less, trying to bring myself to love and care for another pony just seemed like a short road to misery. Auris was dangerous, and Ace could die any second; could I bring myself to deal with that sort of agony again, knowing full well that I could have prevented it if I’d only stayed detached?

I shivered as I felt the blood pouring down my throat once more. I didn’t think I could take twice as many nightmares. I’d never be able to sleep again. I was better off just staying single, at least until this all was over.

Yeah, it’s nuts thinking about romance at a time like this, especially after all I’d been through and what I’d just woken up from. But then again, almost every single waking moment since the Crimson razed Blackwash to the ground had been pure insanity. If I could hardly make any sense of the world around me even when I wasn’t getting shot at, then my own thoughts stood no chance.

I heard hoofsteps and oiled metal approaching from the camp. I didn’t even have to look to know who it was. “How come everytime I wake up in terror, you’re the one who’s there for me?”

Nova sat down next to me and fidgeted with her metal wing. “Ember, we’ve known each other since we were infants. What kind of best friend would I be if I wasn’t here for you?” She offered me a comforting smile, which I did my best to return. Then, sighing, she slid a little closer and put her shoulder against mine while her flesh and blood wing enveloped my back. “I don’t even have to ask, do I?”

“No.”

Her wing tightened a little more around my shoulders. “I wish I could help you,” she said. “That Synarchy bitch can’t help make the nightmares go away?”

I blinked in shock; Nova never swore like that. “Where’d you learn pretty words like that?” I teased her.

“Just this foul-mouthed forgemare that I travel the world with,” she said, flashing her teeth. Her expression turned sour. “Well? Is she there or what?”

“She’s asleep… or something,” I said, shaking my head. “I can feel her there, but she’s in her own little world. It’s weird.” Sighing, I added, “And I don’t know. I don’t want her messing with my mind any more than she already has been.”

Nova nodded along. Her hoof tore at a tuft of grass in front of us. “I wish we could get rid of her.”

I raised my eyebrow at that. “Any particular reason why?”

“I don’t know, she’s just so… so…” she shrugged in frustration.

“Bitchy? Racist? Like, super racist?”

“Xenophobic would be the correct term, but… technicalities.” She waved that away. “She’s a jerk, and I don’t trust her. You heard her earlier when Ace explained Thatch and the Ivory City to her, right? She’d sooner turn over the code pieces to Reclaimer than keep them for us and the Sentinels. She wants to bring back the Synarchy, in all of its dystopian, hate-mongering, fascist and fearful ways. She wants to turn Auris into a place ruled by right of might instead of a better world. Given the chance, I think she’d turn on us if it meant bringing her world back.” Teal eyes warily watched my horn. “We all know that she can control you, Ember. Maybe only for short bursts, but that might be all it takes to derail everything.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “When I first came to after she jumped into my brain, I couldn’t control myself at all. She had complete control over my body. It felt like I was watching the world through a window, stuck inside my own skull. It’s… really hard to explain what that feels like, because it’s like your body isn’t your body anymore. It’s just some machine that your mind is trapped in and somepony else is behind the wheel.” I rubbed at my eyes and hung my head. “It doesn’t quite feel like she’s got a gun to my head, but she’s certainly got it visible. I mean, she fried the wailer growth right out of my brain. It wouldn’t be too much effort on her part to turn what tiny brain I have into mush.”

“But didn’t you say that she needs you to survive?” Nova asked, to which I nodded. “So she won’t do that at least. Still, I can’t say that I envy you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“Which is why we should get rid of her.” When I looked to her with an eyebrow raised, I saw determination born from lots of planning and thinking—you know, the kind of shit I’m fucking awful at. “If she can jump into circuits and stuff, then she can be trapped there, right?”

I pursed my lips. “Where are you going with this?”

“Whenever we get to the next installation, we dump her off into a simple circuit or something so she can’t really force us to take her back. Then we just get you as far away from her as possible and leave her there.” She swallowed and added, “We could destroy the circuit, too. She might be… well, a not nice pony, but she doesn’t deserve to spend any more time suffering in some horrible limbo between life and death like she has been for the past two centuries. Then we go on our way and forget this happened.”

“That’s… surprisingly dark, coming from you, Nov,” I said. She bit her lip and looked away, so I left that remark hanging. “She saved my life, you know. She killed that wailer fungus eating my brain.”

She hung her head. “I know, and I’m really happy that she did, but...”

“And even still, she knows a lot of things about what life was like before the Silence. She lived it. Wouldn’t killing her and losing all that knowledge be awful?”

Nova seemed to deflate a bit. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate the useful bits from the hateful, xenophobic diatribe, but I just think it’s too risky to keep her around, especially as we get closer to the Ivory City.” She swallowed hard. “Just because she saved your life now doesn’t mean she’s going to have any loyalty to you. She might jump ship if she gets the chance when we’re in the City. You know that we’ll have to go there at some point to get the last piece, right?”

“Something I’m really not looking forward to…” I shook my head. Who knew what that was going to be like? Somehow we’d have to sneak into the heart of the bad guy’s power and shit and snag a closely guarded and secret code fragment out from under his nose. But seeing as how I basically didn’t know shit about the Ivory City other than that it was bad news, I used that as an excuse to not think about it. We’d get there in time. The time simply wasn’t right now.

We sat together, watching silvery clouds come rolling in, outlined in moonlight. “What do you think of all this shit?” I asked her. “You think we can do it?”

Nova giggled. “Em, a couple days ago, this giant lizard thing mangled my wing so bad that you had to cut it off to save my life. I never thought I’d fly again.” She extended her metal wing, and I saw the edged blades of the ‘feathers’ glint like diamond knives. “Now I can fly again, and I can do incredible things with this wing. As far as I’m concerned, we can do anything.” She sighed and added, “So long as we’re not tripped up from within.”

I leisurely nodded along. “Your thoughts on our lovable outlaw companion?”

Nova pursed her lips. “I like her,” she said after a moment. “I really didn’t trust her at first, but… well, she has a nice heart. Soft, even, but I’d like to see you tell her that and keep your head.” We both laughed, and Nova shrugged her shoulders. “After I lost my wing, she talked to me. She was the only other pegasus there; she was the only one who understood what our race has, how tightly the sky is entwined with the fibers of our souls, and what it meant to me to lose that. And I mean, she didn’t have to—she didn’t owe me anything—but she did it anyway. That’s when I realized that she cared, she actually cared.”

“Even if she doesn’t want ponies to know it,” I finished for her, smiling.

White teeth responded in kind. “She’s a softy. I bet she’d look the cutest in a dress.”

“Maybe if we got her to trim back the edgy emo manecut,” I said with a bemused snort. “Seriously, she’s got the shaved-down super short crest and that curtain that swoops in front of her eyes. She keeps her tail short, too, just barely long enough so that you can’t actually see her cunt if you’re standing behind her.”

“You been looking?” Nova snickered.

“No… I just happened to be looking at something else but her ass was between me and it.” We giggled like naughty fillies, but my ears fell with my laughter. “Am I a bad pony for thinking about this shit?” I asked Nova. I thought I’d settled that internal argument once tonight, but I felt like I could confide in my best friend about it. Maybe she’d help stop this thing from eating me alive. “Is it okay to be thinking about another pony’s ass and having all these thoughts when the pony you thought you loved hasn’t been in the ground for much longer than a month?”

“I mean, you’ve always been one to fling yourself head first into something and only worry about it later,” Nova said, trying to lighten the atmosphere with a joke. I smiled and shook my head, but it was half-hearted. She could sense that, because her ears drooped alongside mine and she shuffled a little closer. “I can’t speak for you, Em. You know that. I think you first need to make peace with yourself if you’re gonna start thinking about a new crop of flank to harvest.”

That got a surprised (and amazed) snort out of me. “Stars, Nov, if I knew I was this bad of an influence on you, I would’ve tried harder!”

“I’m just trying to put it in terms that you’ll understand,” she teased, gently tapping my skull.

I giggled and brushed her hoof away. “Careful, you’ll wake the roommate.”

“Right, right.” Her expression gradually became more serious. “If you’re worried about what Zip would think, Em, don’t be. If she really loved you, then she’d want you to move on. Find another pony to love. Somepony who makes you feel like you did when you were with her.” She opened her mouth, stopped herself, then laughed. “Please don’t make me speak in any more Ember-isms.”

“Why not? You’re good at them!” I protested, but Nova just shook her head and crossed her forelegs. I let her be and softly sighed. “What if I don’t want to make it awkward in the afterlife? It wouldn’t do to show up and have multiple ponies fighting over me.”

“The afterlife lasts forever; I’m sure you’d work something out.”

“Yeah, like an angelic threesome,” I said. Even though I couldn’t see it in the dim light, Nova ducked her head like she was hiding a blush. I nudged her ribs and leaned up against her. “You’re imagining me and Zip and Ace all fucking each other on a big, puffy white cloud with little halos over our heads, aren’t you?”

“N-No!” Nova protested. “But now I am! Eww! Ember!”

“Oh come on, Nov, it’s not that bad! I bet I look super pretty and shit with a little halo and a set of fluffy white wings on my back!” Of course, that thought led down a random tangent that I’d always wondered about. “But, like, if angels are ponies with wings, what do pegasi get? Double wings? Please don’t tell me you get four wings like a fucking shrike or something.”

“By the stars, Ember, you are insufferable sometimes!” Though she sounded irritated, I knew she was just playing around. “Your cutie mark should’ve been a pain in the flank!”

“It is; why do you think it’s a flaming coal?” I bumped my mark against hers a few times. “I’ve got a fire literally stamped on my butt. I swear and make lewd jokes all the time to cover up the fact that my ass is in constant pain.”

Nova slammed her forehead into the grass and covered her head with her hooves. “Stars, spare me…”

I chuckled a few more times, but that ultimately ended in a yawn. Icy fingers ran down my spine, and I could feel Surge’s consciousness starting to get restless in my brain. If I stayed up much later shooting the shit with Nova, I was probably going to wake her up. And besides, I needed the sleep, too. “Thanks for the talk, Nov,” I said, nuzzling her behind the ear. “You’re like my own therapist, except I don’t have to pay you shit.”

“I’m starting to wonder if I should start charging.” She hummed and nuzzled me back. “Think about what I said. Don’t let your guilt drag you down and keep you from being happy. I can’t bear to see you suffering like this.”

Her wing brushed my shoulders one last time as she stood up and started walking back to the camp. “Maybe I’ll get some sleep by some miracle or something. I keep rolling onto my side and poking myself with the feathers of this thing. I feel like I need a sheath for it when I’m not using it.” Yawning, she waved her natural wing at me. “Sleep well when you go to bed, Em. Long day ahead of us tomorrow.”

I waved back to her, but lingered at the cliff a little longer. I really wanted to sleep… but at the same time, I didn’t want to. Now that Nova had once again put my thoughts at ease, I just wanted to look at the sky.

Auris is a lot of things, most of them bad. I know I’ve complained about them. But one thing I don’t really give it that much credit for is its beauty.

After listening to tales of a homeworld torn apart by war and hate, the quiet buzzing of cello bugs under an alien moon on a foreign planet was the most peaceful thing I could imagine.

-----

I woke up again to find myself already sitting in front of a fire in the early hours of the morning. A canteen and a bundle of dried fruit floated in my magic, though I immediately dropped both as I came to. I was confused and disoriented, to say the least, and for a moment, I wondered if everything I’d been through last night was merely a dream.

Then I felt Surge’s presence in my skull as she moved my mouth. “She’s awake.”

“I guess that settles that question,” I mumbled to myself, picking up the food and water Surge had me snacking on before I came to. Now I really felt like my body was just a vehicle or something either of us could control while the other was asleep or absent. Surge hadn’t woken up when I talked to Nova last night, and I hadn’t woken up when she moved me from my bedroll and started eating by the fire.

“Good of you to join us,” Gauge said. He sat next to me, and when I looked over at him, he passed me a stick of stone hare jerky. I greedily took it and all but shoved the thing down my muzzle; I needed some real protein to deal with all this bullshit. “I knew right away when your body got up and started calling me ‘Stripy’ that Surge was in charge, not you.”

Surge wanted me to roll my eyes, but I didn’t let her. “Maybe we should call her ‘Sparky’,” I countered, earning an amused snort from Gauge. I could feel Surge glowering at me from within my skull as I added, “She says she likes it!”

“I have said no such thing,” Surge spat.

Gauge shrugged and went back to his meal. “Whatever, Sparky.”

I actually had to stop Surge from grabbing hold of my horn and tearing him in two. The river of racism runs deep, it seems, and I really didn’t need it killing my friends.

Gauge wisely shut up and fell back to his own meal while I waited for Surge’s temper to cool off. “Where did Nova and Ace go?” I asked him, noting the absences of our two winged friends.

“Off to scout,” he said. “Getting into the mountains is one thing. Going through them is another. And Surge said she didn’t have any maps of the area in her photographic memory, so they’re getting a feel for the land before we set off.”

I nodded and went back to my meal, but I flinched when a raindrop struck the tip of my right ear. Tilting my head back, I stared up at the blanket of clouds descending on us, promising much more to come. Gauge did the same, and his ears folded back even as he climbed to his hooves. “Looks like we’re gonna be hiking in the rain. Think between the two of you, you can put together a rain shield?”

“Can I leave a hole in it for you?” Surge asked.

“My horn, my rules,” I insisted. “Between Surge’s magic and my own, it shouldn’t be a sweat to keep up a rain shield for four.”

“Five,” Surge insisted. “Don’t count me out just because I share your body.”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” More rain began to fall on me, so I followed Gauge’s example and tried to finish my breakfast as fast as I could. As soon as that was done, I started collapsing our tents and supplies and getting them ready for travel. I didn’t want to have to pack and keep a rain shield up at the same time.

Within minutes, the rain began to fall, steady and even. It wasn’t a hard rain, but it was enough to get us soaked to the bone in a matter of minutes. Thankfully, I didn’t let that happen; with mana freely flowing from my horn, I engulfed the campsite in a rain shield that swirled a mixture of orange and blue. It was like when I helped Warped Glass make the airtight shield that let us sneak into the dam, only this time, both sources of magic were flowing through my horn. The only downside is that my horn began buzzing so hard that it was rattling my teeth.

Gauge noticed me working my jaw from side to side as we sat together, our things long since packed. “You okay?”

“Really bad horn buzz,” I said. “When a unicorn moves a fuckload of mana for an extended time, it can get our horns all buzzy and shaky. It’s like taping a vibrator to your forehead. A strong one. I’m sure Surge could explain why that is, but I know that neither of us care.”

“You may not care, but this is an important field in manatronics,” Surge protested.

“I’m actually interested,” Gauge said. “It’d help pass the time.”

Though I knew Surge wanted to talk more about manatronics and shit, Gauge simply saying that he was interested shut her up. She apparently didn’t want to entertain him if she could help it. And I’m sure Gauge noticed that while most of the shield was an even distribution of blue and orange, the part immediately over his head was mostly orange.

I wondered if we were ever going to teach Surge the magic of friendship and all that shit. How do you take apart ingrained racism in a mare more than two hundred years old?

Nova and Ace returned after a few minutes, both little more than soggy bodies attached to a pair of wings. They immediately ducked within my rain shield and began shaking themselves off, accidentally splashing me and Gauge a little. “How was the flight?” Gauge asked, nuzzling Nova’s dripping cheek.

“Wet,” Ace grumbled, answering first. “It ain’t storming, but it’s certainly hitting hard all round us. Clouds are wide, too; storm’ll probably last the rest of the day, maybe tomorrow as well.”

“We can keep this shield up for a while with the two of us, but I’ll have to stop eventually,” I warned them. “I don’t think I could take this much horn buzz for more than a few hours.”

“The good news is that we found a good way out of the mountains,” Nova said, standing up tall. I lit a patch of grass on fire to make some heat for the two of them, and both pegasi gratefully huddled around it and began warming themselves up. “Maybe a day’s hike to the south and we’ll be at a large river. Ace says that it’s about a two days’ walk from there to Three Rivers. If we just follow that river downstream, we’ll be in the town in no time.”

“Hopefully it won’t be swollen by then,” Surge said. “This area was known for its persistent rainfall. The rivers often breached their banks in the spring and well into the early summer.”

“We’re in the early autumn now, or right around it,” Gauge said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about meltwater runoff, but it’ll still be good to start moving in case the rain just keeps coming.”

I nodded in agreement and shouldered my load of the supplies. “Yeah. I want to get to Three Rivers as fast as possible so we can find this next piece before Yeoman gets there. Speaking of which, you guys didn’t see him, did you?”

Ace shook her head. “The bastard’s probably long gone by now. Probably flew south as fast as he could when we chased him out of that installation. He weren’t gonna stick around and try to take on four of us by himself.”

“Damn. If only he was stupider.” I waited for Ace and Nova to pick up their stuff as well, and then I started moving, taking my rain shield with me. The other three fell in around me, not wanting to leave the safety of my magical umbrella. “Nothing at his camp?”

“We didn’t check his camp, Em,” Nova said. “That’s in the opposite direction of where we want to go. And only Ace would’ve been able to put up a fight if he still had ponies there. I’m a lousy fighter.”

Ace slapped Nova’s shoulder. “Lousy fighter, eh? You did okay during that stand behind the waterfall.”

“I didn’t like it…”

“Ain’t gotta like it. You just gotta do it.” Nostrils flaring, Ace’s wings sagged a bit as she added, “I’ve done tons of things I weren’t proud of myself for. I did them anyway because if I didn’t, I’d die.”

Nova hung her head slightly. “I hate this planet.”

“Because Equestria sounded so much better,” I said, sticking a barb at Surge. The doctor (scientist? Engineer?) remained silent, though I got the feeling it was more because she felt like a teacher that couldn’t take anymore stupidity from her retarded students and had just given up more than anything else.

“We’ll make Auris better,” Gauge insisted. The zebra stuck so close to Nova’s side that the two of them often bumped shoulders together. I did notice that he’d chosen the side with her flesh and blood wing to stay near as opposed to the shiny slice-y death wing. I wondered how that’d interfere with their sex, much to Surge’s disgust.

“Hopefully,” Ace said. “It’s what this code thing’s supposed to be for. I just hope that you’re right.”

“At the very least, it can make things a fuck of a lot worse,” I said. “Whether or not it’s the key to a doomsday weapon or the planet’s supply of food, medicine, and textbooks, all I know is that we want to end up with it, not Reclaimer.”

“Maybe she knows,” Gauge said, pointing at me, or probably more realistically, Surge. “Didn’t Yeoman say something about what it was supposed to do?”

“He said it would ‘awaken the Azimuth’,” I said. “What the Azimuth is, I don’t know, but I don’t like the sound of it. What do you think, Sparky?”

I felt her anger, but she answered anyway. “It’s not manatronics, and I wasn’t on the war board, so it’s not familiar to me,” she said, much to our collective disappointment. “It could be a code name for a secret project of some kind or the name of a ship. Either is just as likely.” Then a hole appeared above my head, dousing me with water before I patched it up. “And don’t call me Sparky.”

Gauge snickered, and Ace openly laughed at me. Only Nova seemed more interested in Surge’s words than my dripping mane. “A ship?” she asked. “You mean, like a starship?”

“A traditional ship would be a rather poor superweapon for a signal sent from our homeworld to unlock, don’t you think?” Surge shook my head. “The Synarchy stockpiled weapons on this planet for years. I think they’d include a few spacefaring vessels here to be activated into an emergency reserve navy if ours was ever destroyed back home.”

Ace and I just looked at each other. We’d seen the orbital munitions stockpiled in secret at the foundry. That explosion Ace had set off probably flattened the entire hillside. If Reclaimer got his hooves on a starship capable of attacking from orbit, then there wouldn’t be anything any of us could do. The Sentinels had the means to resist orbital bombardment from the Bastion, but as far as I knew, they didn’t have anything that could kill a starship in orbit. We’d all be fucked, and Reclaimer would win.

“What kind of ship?” I asked. “Is this like a little frigate or a fucking battleship?”

“Again, I wasn’t in the navy at the time, so I wouldn’t know,” Surge said, an irritated edge in her (my?) voice. “I only served in it during my mandatory service, but I never grew too attached. But the Synarchy sent ships of all kinds here, and they weren’t going to let just anyone know what they deployed.”

“Even so, anything that can blast us to pieces from orbit ain’t good for us,” Ace said. “Even if it’s just a rinky-dink corvette, he could level Thatch unchallenged from that high up. Auris would be his.”

Gauge cleared his throat. “Assuming it even is a starship,” he said once he had our attention. “Like Surge said, it could be something else. ‘Waking’ certainly could have a lot more connotations than simply powering something up.”

“Whatever it is, we won’t find out from here,” I said, picking a path that led down the mountains and around a craggy peak. A small tributary gushed out of a crack in some rocks ahead; hopefully it’d lead us to the river that we wanted to follow. “Let’s worry about Yeoman and the code for now. If we can get one of these code pieces before he does, this whole conversation means nothing. It won’t matter anymore.”

Ace pointedly nodded and fell in alongside me. “That, I can agree on.”

Chapter 21: The Three Rivers

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Chapter 21: The Three Rivers

I’ll skip through the boring part, I guess. We ended up walking along tributaries and rivers for something like three or four days. Screwbugs made a mess of my hide; I was half tempted to start shooting the little bloodsuckers with my rifle after the second day. Other than that, and Surge being her usual racist and bitchy self, I don’t remember much from those days of hiking. I guess that means nothing interesting happened.

I did manage to sort some things out with Surge over control of my body, though. She wanted free use of my head so she could express herself easier in conversations, and I insisted that she doesn't bother the rest of my body in return. After we’d both saved each other’s lives, we were both willing to compromise a bit to make this work. We also agreed that we could both use my horn to cast spells if we needed to. I mean, I wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to double my magic output and have Surge cast a few spells with my horn that I didn’t know. While I was better with fire than she was, and she told me that was because I was naturally ‘attuned’ to fire or some shit, she knew things I couldn’t for the life of me figure out, like ice and lightning and teleportation.

When I randomly appeared on the other side of the river without warning during our hike, I was not a happy camper.

She made me swim back to the other side, too, even though it meant we both got wet. I couldn’t tell if she was just being mean, or if she thought it was a funny prank. Still, I did momentarily freak her out when I cast my flame-retardant spell on myself and then lit my mane on fire to dry off. I think I scared Nova, too, because she was about ready to push me back into the river to put out the fire.

But soon, we were there. I didn’t really appreciate what I was looking at at first; since we were following the river downstream, we were at the lowest point between the mountains. All I saw were a few low buildings along the river with hardworking ponies laboring outside them, but Ace insisted that we spend the extra hour to climb onto a bluff and get a good look at the city. I really didn’t want to, because that was an hour we’d be wasting, but it was worth it.

When I got to the top of that bluff and looked down, I felt my breath slip away. Here was a city. A real city. Hole had been impressive in the feats of engineering and architecture that had gone into supporting a vertical city inside of a mountain, but the whole thing was rotten with the RPR and everything else. Three Rivers was less dense than Hole, I thought, but it sprawled everywhere. The valley was shaped more like a bowl than a valley, with pink mountains all sloping inwards and supporting orange tufty trees around their upper limits. The river we’d been following flowed through this bowl and joined another river coming somewhere from the northeast, and together they formed a third, massive river that flowed south and out of the bowl. Nestled between and around all these rivers were log buildings supported on pylons that kept them ten feet off the ground. Those buildings were connected by rope bridges and walkways, and so many hundreds, thousands of ponies moved to and fro. And unlike in Hole, I didn’t get a feeling of poverty and desperation from the ponies moving around down there. They seemed happy and well-fed. For me and Nova and Gauge, who’d seen only war and bad shit since leaving Blackwash, it looked like a utopia, a model for how Auris should be like.

“It’s been too long since I’ve been here,” Ace said, drinking it all in. “Ain’t had nothing but good memories of this place. Three Rivers is like Thatch, except they don’t have the Ivory City breathing down their necks. Plus, they’re a hub of transportation, so they’re rich. They’re at the crossroads of the northern settlements and the interior of the continent, and merchants can ship goods along the rivers. Little wonder the Brass Bank sets up shop here.”

“Brass Bank?” I asked.

“The name’s pretty straightforward,” Ace said, shrugging. “They trade in bullets. They’ve got the biggest stockpile of ammo in the entire world, probably. Technically they’re a merchant organization, but they’ve been known to play favorites. Ain’t much to wonder about who done it when your enemies suddenly have thousands of bullets and shiny new weapons at their disposal; the Bank’s put out a loan on something they have an interest in.”

“I guess that means that they’ve got one hell of a mercenary army.”

Ace chuckled. “They’ve probably got the strongest army short of Reclaimer’s. It’s how they stay neutral; ain’t nopony wants to fuck with that and have the might of the Brass Bank wipe them from the face of the planet.”

“Impressive,” Surge said, taking over my mouth and voice. “I’d nearly written off all of you Auran ponies, but it seems that you’re still capable of the greatness the Synarchy birthed within our species.”

“And the bloodlust,” Gauge grumbled. “Don’t forget that part.”

“This is how it should be,” I said, smiling. “If we could make all of Auris as peaceful as this, then living here wouldn’t be so fucking awful.”

Nova strode up next to me and brushed my side with her feathers. “Kinda makes you hopeful, right?”

“Yeah, it does.” The pink grass beneath my hooves crunched and bent as I contentedly shifted my weight from leg to leg. “Come on, let’s go get a closer look at this beauty. No sense in just admiring it from all the way out here, right?”

We set off again, making our way back down the hill. For the first time in a long time, I felt some spring in my step; I was genuinely eager to be someplace instead of forcing myself to push through a wall of dread and anxiety. Three Rivers wasn’t some deadly installation that I had to go to; it was a city that offered a chance to rest and recover. I was already trying to make excuses in my head to stay at least for a day or two. We knew where we had to go, but Yeoman likely didn’t. He’d have to go searching around and asking ponies about what they knew, but Surge could just guide us there herself.

We could at least stay one day. I really needed the peace and rest, and I didn’t think I was the only one. Ace would tough it out, I knew that much, but Nova and Gauge were probably just as worn out as I was. Plus they hadn’t gotten a good chance to fuck in a few weeks, what with me sharing a tent with them and all. I could tell just by looking at Nova that she had a need she needed satisfied as soon as possible. I couldn’t think of a better way to be her best friend than to let her and Gauge get set up in a room and fuck all night long.

As we got closer to the heart of Three Rivers, I bumped into Ace. “Got any pointers so we don’t fuck everything up forever?”

“I think she means so she doesn’t fuck everything up forever,” Gauge said, making Nova giggle. I shot a dirty glare at the two of them before bringing my head back around to Ace for an answer.

“Only one, really,” she said, her eyes rising upwards to a low-flying cloud that a platoon of ponies in sleek armor and carrying shiny guns sat on. “If you draw a gun, you’re gonna get shot dead. Boom, dead, no questions asked. Three Rivers is violently neutral. They enforce it by killing anypony who threatens their neutrality through fighting and shit. They ain’t gonna care that you were shooting back in self-defense, they’ll gun you down too. Best thing to do is to run and get the mercs; the Brass Bank pays them well to keep the peace, but it’s a boring job, so they’re always happy to get in on a little action.”

“What about beating other ponies’ faces in with your bare hooves?” I asked, only semi-serious. “Can I still get in a good barfight if I want to?”

Surge rolled my eyes. “Barbaric.”

“Shut up.”

Ace chuckled a bit; I didn’t really blame her. I bet I sounded like a fucking crazy pony when Surge and I started talking aloud to each other. “Then you’ll just get kicked out,” she said. “They can afford to be a little more lenient if nopony dies.”

“That’s good to know.” I turned my head nearly backwards to kiss the butt of my rifle, sticking out over my shoulder. “Looks like you get a break from killing ponies and shit.”

Nova held a wing over her muzzle as she giggled, and Gauge waggled an eyebrow. “Why don’t you and your gun take a roll in the hay?”

“Pfff. Like I’d ever do that.”

“You say that,” Surge said, “but right now you’re remembering that time when you masturbated using the barrel of a submachine gun and then a colt walked in on you. Chaff, was it?”

We all froze for a second. My cheeks burned with fire as Surge let that little secret slip to my friends. Nova had a disgusted look on her face, Gauge was shocked, and Ace fell to the ground in howling laughter. “You fucked a gun?!” she yelled, hooting and hollering as she rolled on the ground. “Oh, Celestia! That’s fucking amazing!”

I flopped to the ground and buried my burning face under my hooves. Even though I had a dark coat, I was pretty sure they could all see my blush through it. “I fucking hate you, Surge,” I moaned, my voice muffled some by the grass and my legs. “I fucking hate you so much. That was private!”

“It’s hard to not notice when you remember it so vividly—!” I cut her off by burying my own muzzle in the grass; at least it worked. Then she just started teasing me inside my skull. Hit a nerve?

I liked it better when you were angry and racist, not mean and racist, I mentally muttered back at her. Somepony’s hoof started patting my shoulders, and I tried to claw my way into the center of the earth. “Just let me die, okay? I just wanna curl up and die.”

“Oh, come on, Em,” Gauge said, apparently recovered from his shock. “Get up. We’ll only tease you about it for the rest of your life.”

Him and Ace helped me stand, and then Ace wrapped her foreleg around my shoulders and wiped a few tears from her eyes with her other hoof. “Whoo-ee that’s something! Did you at least unload the thing?”

“I did,” I muttered, glaring at the ground. “I’m not that stupid.”

Nova approached a little more cautiously; I could see her judging my life choices in the face that she was making. “You’re lucky you didn’t get an infection,” was all she said. “I can’t believe you! That’s disgusting!”

“Aw, don’t be lying to yourself, Nova,” Ace said, coming to my defense. “Listen, we’re all mares here—”

Gauge roughly cleared his throat.

“—and we’ve all shoved shit that don’t belong in our cunts in there at least once,” she finished, ignoring him. “Come on, let’s hear it. I’ve used the handlebars of a hoverbike before. Don’t even have to lie down for that one, just lean it against the wall and go to town. Perfect height.”

“Oh my stars,” Nova said, blushing at that. “You girls—”

“Water supply shutoff lever to the fusion plant of a Rainbow-class homeworld cruiser,” Surge abruptly said, cutting Nova off. All of my friends looked at us; I don’t think any of them, myself included, thought Surge would get in on this too. “I feel sorry for the next engineer who actually turned that thing with their mouth.”

Nova’s mouth hung open, and Ace openly laughed again. “Look at you! Sparky knows how to have fun, too!”

“A shutoff lever?” Gauge asked. Now it was his turn to look horrified. “That’s like, what, an inch or two thickness of hard, steel girth? That had to hurt!”

I could feel Surge picking her next words before she even said them. “…I like it rough.”

“Sweet fucking Celestia, you’ve got a tougher cunt than mine,” Ace said, looking impressed. “At least the hoverbike’s bars are padded!”

“I can’t believe you three!” Nova exclaimed, sitting down on the grass.

“Come on, Nov, it’s your turn,” I said. Stars bless Ace; now I didn’t feel like I wanted to curl up in a hole and die of embarrassment anymore. “I know you’ve done it.”

“Can we just go to the city?” Nova pleaded. “We really shouldn’t be wasting time out here!”

“We ain’t moving ‘til we hear it,” Ace insisted, sitting down right next to her. She wrapped a wing around Nova and pulled her in close until their cheeks pressed together. “C’mon! Don’t lie to us, filly, we’ve all been there.”

“Uhhhh…”

“Even I’m interested,” Gauge said, smirking and sitting on Nova’s other side. “Maybe I can take something from this into the bedroom.”

Poor Nova looked like she was gonna fucking die. Even Surge had a little bit of sympathy for her, but I could tell that she was just as eager as we all were to hear the truth from her. And judging by the look of her face, it was pretty obvious she had something she was hiding.

“I, uhm…” She hid her muzzle between her forelegs. “I’ve used… Gauge’s tools…”

I snickered and clapped my hooves together. “See? That wasn’t so hard!” Ace rubbed Nova’s back, and I turned my attention to Gauge. “You ever noticed that any of your tools tasted like your mare?”

Gauge just looked at her with one eyebrow raised. “You really liked the ratchet with the rubber grip, didn’t you?”

“Oh my stars,” Nova whined, hiding her face from us. “I hate all of you…”

“Awww, I feel like we had a good family bonding moment, there,” I said. “What about you, Gauge? Ever stick anything up your butt?”

Gauge shook his head, stood up, and backed away a few steps. “I need to be about a million times drunker than I am right now for this conversation to go on any longer. Let’s just go to the city, get settled down, and take stock, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” I said, standing up. I flipped a cigarette out of my box, lit it, and stuck it between my teeth, inhaling that sweet, sweet poison. The tingling in my hooves went away almost at the first hit, and I started humming as we approached the city proper. I did notice that Nova kept her head hung low and was shooting the rest of us dirty looks, but that whole thing had been so funny that I didn’t give a shit. I was definitely making it up to her by getting her and Gauge their own room when we got into town.

A few minutes removed from that little shitshow of a conversation, we drifted back toward more normal topics, like the unique architecture of Three Rivers. We climbed up a stout wooden staircase near the edge of the town and began working our way inwards, walking through the thick of the colorful ponies and zebras and even a few griffons around us. “Why’s everything raised up like this?” I asked, leaning over a railing and looking at the dry ground below.

“The rivers likely breach their banks during the rainy season,” Nova said. “This whole valley’s just a big bowl. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns into a lake during the middle of spring.”

“They get a few feet of flooding every spring, yeah,” Ace confirmed for us. “They put all the buildings on stilts so they ain’t gonna get wet. Also makes loading goods onto boats easier,” she added, pointing a wingtip to a simple crane lowering crates down to a wide skiff sitting at the edge of the nearby river.

“A real city. How about that,” I mused, staring with wonder at the buildings we passed. Most of them were little houses that had their storefronts on the first floor and living quarters on the second, though not many of the buildings were higher than two or three stories. Further into the center of the town, however, things started getting a little taller and denser, and the walkways grew more narrow. Even despite all that, there weren’t really big buildings; I guess they were limited in what the pylons could support. They weren’t really gonna get much higher than that.

The city was filled with the idle chatter and drumming of hooves from thousands of ponies, creating this sort of background hum to everything. It wasn’t nearly as loud as Hole had been, since the mountain just made everything echo, but I could see actual happiness here, free of that disgusting scar called slavery. Children ran along the streets and dashed over the bridges, mares and stallions ate together at restaurants, and a few street musicians popped up here and there on street corners. Nova’s generosity started getting the better of her, and she ran off with a mag of bullets so she could mete out some change into the musicians’ hats.

As I suspected, the center of the town was centered around the fork that joined the two smaller rivers together into the third river that flowed southeast out of the valley. Impressively large bridges spanned the largest river here, their walkways wide enough for thirty ponies to cross standing shoulder to shoulder. All sorts of stalls lined the edges of these bridges, and a number of them had buckets hung from pulleys so they could lower goods to the crews of the river skiffs as they passed beneath them. Further downstream, a massive town square made from probably hundreds of felled trees spanned the entire width of the river, uniting both shores while allowing room for the boats to pass underneath. But even that wasn’t the most impressive sight.

At the fork of the two rivers, its dominating façade staring down the length of the third, an impressive building that must’ve been ten stories tall stood proud. Like the buildings around it, it was made of wood, but the craftsmareship was leagues ahead of everything else. I could hardly see the seams between the smooth planks, and it was obvious that careful thought had gone into the architecture and design of the structure. Tall windows seemed to hang from the rounded dome on top of the building, each one a different length, like icicles; the longest must’ve been six stories from top to bottom. The whole thing was fenced off with delicately worked wrought iron, and two huge doors that must’ve been plated in brass or copper or something marked the entrance into the building. Just in front of it, a cartridge easily twice as big as I was stood upright on a pedestal, but instead of being carved from stone or something, it was forged from the twisted remains of melted and shaped guns. Everything from pistols to marksmare rifles had been incorporated in that statue. It had to have taken thousands of guns to create.

My jaw hung slack as I stared at this whole thing, astonished. Nova excitedly fluttered a few feet off of the ground, clopping her hooves together. “This is incredible! Beyond amazing! It almost puts the engineering inside of Hole to shame!”

“That’s what millions and millions of C’s can buy you,” Ace said. “That there’s the headquarters of the Brass Bank. You’re looking at the most powerful institution on Auris. Wars have been won and lost because the council that runs it decided to intervene on one side or the other. Wherever the bullets flow, the Bank’s not too far behind.”

“And what are all those ponies doing?” Gauge asked, pointing to a line of colorful mares and stallions all waiting to get inside.

Ace shrugged. “Ain’t it obvious? It’s a bank. They all want loans or gotta do other shit involving money. Cashing checks and that sort of thing. Ain’t nopony gonna lug around thousands of bullets when they need to buy something like a skiff or a house.”

“Astonishing,” Surge said, even while I was too awestruck to have many thoughts of my own right now. “They certainly have flair, but it’s too gaudy for my tastes. Synarchy architecture was much more… efficient than this. Equestrian Brutalism might not have the most lavishing looks, but it’s simple and you can feel the power coming off of the buildings.”

“I grew up looking at some old barracks built in that style,” Gauge said. “They’re ugly as shit.”

Surge made me shrug. “They were. Ugly or not, they still had a weight to them that was impressive.”

I finally recovered enough of my wits to get over this awesome sight I was seeing. “Alright, how’s about we go find an inn or someplace to stay at so we can leave our shit there and go sightseeing later? I don’t want to be carrying around all our supplies all day if I can help it.”

“I wonder if the old place I used to stay at’s still around,” Ace said, walking toward a bridge that’d take us to the north shore of the big river. “I used to do a lot of business around Three Rivers. Haven’t been back in a few years, though, so I don’t know if that place is still kicking.”

We followed her along more raised streets and little bridges between platforms. She eventually took us to a long two-story building that owned a good portion of the ‘block’ it was on. A cracking sign with peeling paint advertised it as the Spent Casing Inn. Not exactly the best name, I thought, but there were certainly worse names to call an inn. She nosed open the door, and we piled in after her into a large communal room that already had ten or fifteen ponies sitting in small groups or on their own at the various tables and chairs scattered around it.

Ace walked over to the counter set just a bit inside the door, and I followed her. Nova and Gauge hung back, surveying the interior. When we made it to the counter, Ace tapped her hooves on the wood, startling the stallion sitting behind it. “Hey, Lines! Thought you’d never see me again, didn’t you?”

The stallion behind the desk, Lines, almost did a double take. “Ace?” he asked, rubbing his eyes. “You’re alive? Why, it’s been years! Where have you been?”

“Wandering,” she said. “Guess that’s one way I take after my Pa. Spending too much time in one place gives me the itch something fierce.” Her eyes drifted around the inn and she chuckled. “This place hasn’t changed one bit.”

“Neither have you,” Lines said, smiling. He glanced at me out of curiosity, and then over my shoulder at my friends by the door. “Where’s Zephyr?” he asked Ace. “She outside or something?”

Ace’s eyes fell to the counter and her wings trembled a bit. “Z’s dead,” she murmured. “She’s been plant food for a couple of years, now.”

I saw Lines’ breath catch in his throat. “Zeph’s... dead?” A moment later, he put his hoof on Ace’s. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I know how much she meant to you.”

“She was my world,” Ace whispered. Grimacing, she coughed once and shook Lines’ hoof off. “Don’t matter none, now. Been traveling with some new ponies. This here’s Ember, and her friends back there are Nova and Gauge,” she said, pointing to each of us in turn. She left out Surge for obvious reasons, and thankfully, Surge felt no inclination to correct her. I think even she knew how awkward things could get if she made it look like I had really bad schizophrenia.

I could tell Lines was still really concerned about Ace, but he wasn’t going to bring it up again for her sake. Instead, he nodded to me and smiled. “Nice to meet you. You have to be tough to keep up with Ace here—unless she’s gone soft since I last saw her.”

“She knows what she’s doing,” I said, shaking his hoof. “She’s been really helpful for me and my friends back there. We’re from the valley way to the north, past the Celestia Dam, so we hardly know how anything works this far south.”

“I heard about that whole thing!” he exclaimed. “Those Sentinels finally delivered the knockout punch to Carrion and the Crimson. The whole town’s been buzzing about it for weeks! The merchants were all fighting with each other over who’d be the first to open up trade to the north. Those caravan routes had been closed for years because of the Crimson, so the farthest north they ever went was Hole.”

I’m still amazed at how quickly news spreads, even on a planet as sparsely populated as Auris.

“Guess that’s gonna be good for business then, ain’t it?” Ace asked.

“For Three Rivers as a whole, and definitely for my little inn,” Lines said. “We’ll get a lot more through traffic with a brand-new market opened up in the north. I’ll probably start making a killing in a few months when the traffic really picks up. I wish I could thank the Sentinels for getting rid of that menace once and for all.”

“You can thank me,” I said, smirking. “I may not have the armor, but I’m a sergeant in their ranks. I was at the Dam when it all went down. It was a hell of a fight.”

“The merchants tell stories, but I’m sure it’s nothing compared to somepony who lived it.” Lines grinned at me; I was starting to like him, though I was surprised that an earth pony as good natured as him got along so well with a rough and tumble outlaw like Ace. “I don’t envy you, but you still have my thanks for what you all did up there. Auris is a better place because of it.”

I nodded my gratitude. “Thanks. Does that mean that you’ll give us a discount on rooms, since we’re big heroes and all that?”

Lines rolled his eyes. “Ten C’s a room.”

“Is that before or after discount?”

“I’ll let you decide,” he said, smirking. “How many do you want? There’s only a single bed in each room, mind you.”

“Two’s fine,” I said, shrugging. Nova and Gauge certainly wouldn’t mind sharing, and I don’t think Ace cared that much. “I just wanna dump this shit off of my back so I don’t have to carry it around all day. We need a day or two to rest before we get moving again.”

“Sure thing.” Lines ducked behind the counter for a moment and came back up with two keys in his mouth. He put them on the table and pushed them towards us while I counted out the bullets from my ammo bag. “Rooms 309 and 310. You two can take your pick, though I think I know where you’ll be, Ace.”

Ace smirked as she snatched the key to 309. “Glad to see you remember my old room,” she said with it dangling off a feather.

“Kind of hard to forget it; it still smells like your tail all these years later. I don’t know how many bullets I’ve dumped into trying to get rid of the stink.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you, too.” She started walking away from the counter, twirling the key about on her feather. Turning back to Lines, she winked at him. “Good to see you, buddy. I’ll be back down in a bit and we can share a few drinks.”

Lines smiled back at her. “You know I’d like nothing more.” Then, turning to me, he added, “You enjoy your stay. Be careful around that one, though; you never know what she’s gonna do.”

“I’ve certainly gotten a good taste of it, up close and personal,” I said. “How’d you even meet her? She’s, like, a borderline psycho outlaw, and you seem like an honest stallion.”

“We’ve known each other since we were dumb kids,” Lines said. “It was a long time ago. We were both getting caught up in all this nonsense with the Ruin Runners. It’s a story and a half, but when you have go through the things you do as a young Runner, you make a few fast friends that’ll last you for life. And if there’s any one thing I like about her, she’s reliable. If she says she’ll do something, she’ll do it, even if she has to move mountains.”

“She certainly hasn’t let us down yet,” I said. I saw Nova and Gauge getting antsy by the door, so I dropped twenty bullets on the counter and picked up the key for their room. “We’ve been wandering the middle of fucking nowhere for the past forever, so after we drop our shit off and maybe take a nap or something, I wanna just do touristy shit with nopony trying to kill us. Any good places for that?”

Lines collected the bullets and dropped them in a box under the counter. “The Brass Bank’s the obvious one, and it’s usually open all day. You can skip the line if you’re not actually trying to do some banking. Also, check out Southside. That’s where the bars and restaurants are. Other than that?” He shrugged. “We’re living in post-apocalyptia. I doubt there’s going to be any historical landmarks for another couple hundred years, not until civilization gets back on its hooves.”

I chuckled. “True that, I suppose.” I tossed the key over my shoulder, right into Gauge’s outstretched hoof. “Good talking with you. Thanks for the rooms.”

“It’s an inn; what kind of establishment would I be running if I didn’t give you rooms?” Lines shook his head and leaned across the counter. “Enjoy your vacation. I can’t wait to hear from Ace later tonight what she’s been up to since we last talked.”

I nodded and stepped away, heading in the direction Ace had gone. We spotted a staircase through an open doorway, and two flights of steps took us to the third floor. About halfway down the hall, I saw an open door with a big ‘309’ painted on it, and immediately across the hall was the other room.

“Let’s get our shit settled and sorted, then we’ll get food or something and plan what we’re gonna do next,” I said, drifting over to the open door. I stopped right at the bannister and winked at them. “Try to save it until tonight, okay?”

Gauge laughed and shook his head, and Nova’s wings twitched at her sides. “Sure thing, Em,” Gauge said, and in a few motions, he’d opened the door to his room.

My attention went back to the room I was sharing with Ace. It really wasn’t all that big, and the bed didn’t leave much floor space unused. Still, there was a crude dresser and a table to put our shit on, and the bed wasn’t that small. It was certainly bigger than the lumpy thing I grew up on in Blackwash, and it’d fit me and Ace without much problem. We’d certainly be a little bit cozy, though.

Not that you mind that, Surge thought at me, bemused.

Shut up, I thought back at her. She’s hot.

I’m not going to complain if you two fuck, even though I’m straight. I’ve gone two centuries without sex, and I’ll take what I can get, even if it’s just piggybacking off you.

Ewww… I shivered and blinked a few times. Stars, I’d just started getting used to her hanging around my consciousness while I was taking a shit, but having her more or less look over my shoulder while I got laid was going to be something else entirely.

Ace turned around and saw me staring off into space. “Uh, Ember, you alright?” she asked, waving a hoof in front of my face.

I blinked and vigorously shook my head. “Sorry, Surge and I were talking about… things.”

“Huh.” She shrugged and flopped down on the bed now that she’d shed all her weapons and gear. “I’m glad that Surge kept her trap shut while we talked with Lines. That level of craziness wouldn’t have been good for anypony.”

“I know it’s to my detriment if I make Ember look like a schizophrenic,” Surge retorted. “Even if I don’t agree with what she’s saying or how she’s acting, I will voice my concerns more discreetly with her first before deciding whether to act or not.”

I shrugged. “That’s about as much as I can really hope for, I guess.”

“Quite.”

Ace rolled around on the bed a bit, sort of messing up the pattern of her mane. She came to a stop with her head on one of the pillows and sighed. “I’d stop here every time that I happened to be in the area, and this was always my room. Ain’t never had to go somewhere else. It was like Lines kept the damn thing open for me, just in case I’d show up, even if he’d filled every other room.” She winked at me. “He may not be blood, but that’s family. I just feel like shit for not seeing him for so long, but after Z died, I—”

She abruptly cut herself off and looked away. “Don’t matter none. Forget it.” Clearing her throat, she popped her head up and pointed past me to the other door before I could even say anything. “Nova and Gauge done with their shit? We should get out of here, get lunch somewhere. Enjoy this time we got before we gotta get moving again.”

It doesn’t take a genius to know that Ace was hurting. I think that much should’ve been obvious by now, since it’d come up a couple of times. But as much as I wanted to sit her down and talk about it, now wasn’t the time. That, Surge and I could both agree on.

“Yeah, they should be ready,” I said, shedding my bags and floating them over to the corner of the room. I thought about keeping my rifle, but I decided against it. Three Rivers was neutral, right? And if what Ace had said was true, then drawing my rifle was just gonna get me killed. Besides, I had my pyromancies, and Surge could add her spells to my list, too. We’d be fine.

At least, so I hoped.

Chapter 22: Where Old Wounds Heal

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Chapter 22: Where Old Wounds Heal

“Is this what it feels like to not have anypony trying to kill us?” I asked the group once we sat down for lunch. “I can’t remember the last time I felt this way.”

“It’s certainly been a while,” Gauge agreed, placing his hoof over Nova’s. “And even then, shrikes were always trying to kill us back in Blackwash.”

“It wasn’t so bad!” Nova exclaimed, her wings flaring a little with excitement. “They never came to the town, anyway! They only went after you if you were dumb enough to go down the mountainside by yourself or fly too high into the sky!”

Ace chuckled. “They’re big, but they’re dumb. I’ve shot a few because they don’t know when to fuck off. Their skulls have trouble stopping slugs from my rifle.” I noticed that unlike me, Ace had kept her weapons on her person. I wasn’t sure if I should be worried about that or not. I certainly didn’t know what we could expect in this city.

Surge took over for a moment. “I assume by shrike, you mean Aquila montis?”

“Fuck if I know, we just call them shrikes,” I said.

Thankfully, Nova was more helpful. “Yeah, that’s right. They were all over the place where we grew up, to the north.”

I felt Surge poke through my memories a bit to confirm that we were talking about the same thing, so I helpfully remembered the time that one almost killed me after leaving Blackwash. She recoiled a bit from that; I guess I’d managed to capture my terror pretty good in my memory. After a moment to collect herself, she made me nod. “Ah, I see. Thank you for showing me your close brush with death, Ember.”

“Yeah, no problem,” I said. I worked my jaw from side to side and looked around our table. “But like, where the fuck did the waiter go?”

We were seated at a busy restaurant that looked over the big river—creatively named the Main—a bit into the east part of the town. We’d gone there on Ace’s recommendation, as we knew basically fuck all about this city, and it was obvious that she knew where all the good shit was. Of course, it would certainly help if we’d get served, because we were all starving and it didn’t seem like food was coming anytime soon.

At least it offered a good view. Watching the river skiffs paddle upstream on ancient fusion engines that scores of skilled mechanics had probably bashed their heads against to keep running was oddly relaxing. Numerous little docks jutted out from the banks of the river below us, and ponies were constantly loading and unloading crates and goods. The skiffs that returned nearly empty almost always had a couple of strong earth ponies carrying an enormous ammo crate between them, probably filled to the brim with bullets from a trader’s successful haul. I had to wonder just how many bullets were lying around Auris that society could make an economy off of them.

Surge seemed to be wondering the same thing. “Fixing your system of currency around a limited and expendable resource seems like a good way to inflate it to the point of collapse after a few years.”

“It’ll hold for now,” Ace said. “Good thing you fuckers stuffed this planet with billions and billions of bullets. Groups like the Ruin Runners unearth depots all the time and pour cartridges into the economy, usually through the Brass Bank. At least until we finish rebuilding society, we ain’t gonna find a better currency stand-in. Everypony knows the value of a bullet: it’s the price we pay to keep ourselves safe.”

“And the more you have, the better you can theoretically do that,” I finished for her.

“Hypothetically,” Nova grumbled from the other side of the table.

I blinked. “What?”

She waved her wing. “Semantics. What you meant to say was ‘hypothetically’. ‘Theoretically’ relates to something proven through repeated trial and error and backed by data, not a guess.” At my blank stare, she huffed and crossed her forelegs. “At least one pony in your skull understands that.”

“Good to see that the scientific method hasn’t entirely been lost from this planet,” Surge said. “There may be hope for ponykind yet.”

“Unless this code blows us all up or something,” I muttered. I looked to my left and saw the waiter trotting around, so I waved my hoof at him. “Hey! We’re ready to order!”

“You better come fast; she starts getting bitchy when she’s hungry,” Gauge said once I got the waiter’s attention. I yanked on his ear with my magic in response and crossed my forelegs while the waiter made his way over to us.

“I do apologize for the wait, we’re exceedingly busy right now,” the waiter said. His horn lit up and he pulled a pen and a notepad out of some pocket behind his apron. “Welcome to the Main Course. What can I get for you?”

“River craws and something from whatever barrel the house’s got open this month,” Ace said, sliding over her menu without even looking at it. I guess I knew now what she considered the best the place had to offer.

“What’s a river craw?” Nova asked. “That some kind of fish?”

“Soft-shelled crustaceans that live on the bottom of the Main,” the waiter informed us. “A local delicacy. I heartily recommend them.”

“They’re really good,” Ace agreed. “I get them all the time. They just ain’t the same though if they ain’t fresh from Three Rivers.”

I thought that sounded really good, but Nova made a face when she heard that they were crustaceans. “I think I’ll stick with the red salad with stone hare meat,” she said. “And a glass of water, please?”

“Of course,” the waiter said. He turned to me next, being the last mare at the table. “And for you?”

I scanned over the menu to make sure that I knew what I wanted. “A bowl of the sand clam chowder and those river craw things,” I said. I was really hungry, and I hadn’t had a properly cooked meal in forever. Damn if I wasn’t going to stuff my face.

Gauge slid his menu over as the waiter collected mine. “Rock runner ribs and water squash,” he said. “And water.”

The waiter picked up all our menus and bowed. “Your food will be out shortly. Thank you for your patience.” Then he was gone again, and I didn’t know how long it would be until I could feast like a queen.

Ace fixed Nova with a funny look. “You ain’t never heard of river craws before?” she asked. I could tell she was astounded.

“I don’t think any of us have,” I said. “In fact, we’ve never had seafood before. Unless I’m missing something and the Crimson actually gave you two quality rations while they had you captive or something,” I said to my lovebird friends.

“Any rations would’ve been quality rations,” Gauge said, and Nova nodded alongside him. Turning to Ace, he shrugged. “Don’t know what to tell you. We grew up on a mountain, so we never had seafood. There weren’t even any lakes within an easy hike of where we lived. We had to harvest rainwater just to have something to drink and keep our crops growing when things got dry.

“Thankfully it rained at least twice a week,” Nova said. “We were lucky in that respect.”

“Until it got to winter and that meant it was fucking snowing constantly,” I grumbled. I mean, I even liked winter because it meant the sun wasn’t roasting me and my black coat all day, but it got so fucking cold on that mountain, and it snowed so fucking much that we wouldn’t be able to leave the house if we didn’t clear it out every day. “Do you know how much snow I had to shovel just so that Mom and me could get to the forge?”

“At least you had a toasty forge to go to,” Gauge countered. “The rest of us just froze our asses off inside, trying to keep our drafty huts warm.”

“I seem to recall the two of you spending a lot of days sitting in the forge with me when I was working,” I said. “You were lucky you knew me.”

I got a sudden sensation of lying on a bed wrapped in blankets, staring at a glowing tablet I supported on my pillow with blue hooves. “I spent several winters through fuel shortages in the war against the Coalition,” Surge said. “Manehattan hardly had any coal to run its power plants, and the military gobbled up all the nuclear fuel it could get its hooves on to keep the war machine running. During blizzards, my apartment tower would drop below freezing, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.” She thought for a moment before adding, “One or two tenants died from the cold every winter. It was just something I got used to.”

Ace shook her head. “Hard to imagine that you still believe in the Synarchy,” she said.

“You weren’t there,” Surge countered. “You don’t understand.”

“All I’m understanding is that I’m glad I weren’t there,” Ace said. She pointed around us, at the busy streets, the strong buildings, the ponies happily eating their lunches at the tables around us. “Three Rivers is everything your damn Synarchy ain’t. It’s peaceful, it’s prosperous, and it’s fucking happy. Ponies ain’t got no fuel shortages here. Ponies don’t freeze to death inside their own homes because the city won’t even provide the power and fuel they need to stay warm. Ponies ain’t getting drafted and shoved into the military when they’re fifteen winters old to go fight and die someplace far from home.” She spat to her right, watching the spittle fall into the river below. “If you honestly believe the Synarchy is better than this right here, even in spite of us having to deal with all your fuckups and all the misery you left for us to struggle through, then I don’t know what to say other than I’m sorry that they brainwashed you so good you can’t see a good thing even if somepony’s gouging your eyeballs out with it.”

I felt Surge sift through a dozen different responses, but she dropped them one by one until she chose smoldering silence as her answer. Ace glanced at me and shook her head, putting an awkward smile on her muzzle. “Shoot, I hate having to yell at you to yell at her, Ember. This shit’s all kinds of fucky.”

“I’ll live,” I insisted. “I’ve had ponies yell at me for worse. I’m a pain in the ass like that.”

“True enough,” Gauge teased me. Nova giggled at his side and leaned closer against him.

“Yeah, yeah, shut up.”

We talked for a bit more until our food finally came out. I swear, I smelled it before I even saw it approaching. The waiter returned with our dishes held in his magic, and one by one, he placed them in front of us. “Enjoy,” he said, bowing his head before he retreated to talk to another table.

I licked my lips and got a good look at my bounty. The chowder was creamy and chunky, and the other plate had ten river craws on it. I felt like they were staring back at me with their six eyes across their red faceplate. Each one curled up was probably the size of my hoof; honestly, I wasn’t expecting them to still look so alive.

Ace licked her lips and popped one of the craws in her mouth. I heard its shell crunch between her teeth and some clear juices dribbled down her chin. After a few seconds to chew, she swallowed it and slouched back in her chair, humming in ecstasy. “It’s been so long since I had a good craw,” she said. “Had a few in other places, but they ain’t like how they make them here.” She poked my side and grinned. “Try one! They’re great!”

I picked one up in my magic and stared at it. Nova and Gauge watched me with curiosity, mouths slowly working on their bites. “Fuck it,” I said, and I just shoved the whole thing in my mouth. Before I could think about it too much, I just bit down hard.

The shell split open, spilling meat and juice into my mouth. It had a salty, chunky taste to it, but that was blended almost perfectly with a little bit of spice and whatever else they cooked it in. When I finally swallowed it, I grinned. “That’s really good!”

“Told you so,” Ace said. “Best damn seafood there is.”

“I hate your body for making it taste good,” Surge grumbled. “It feels wrong.”

“Yeah, well, shut up,” I said, popping another one in my mouth. I already knew these were going to fill me up pretty good. I levitated a spoonful of the chowder to my lips and took a sip of that. “Fuck, this place is so good! What about you guys, how are your meals?”

“It’s good!” Nova exclaimed between mouthfuls of her salad. “I forgot what eating real food tastes like! Can we just retire here and eat good food and not have to worry about ponies trying to kill us all the time?”

Gauge chuckled and brushed her cheek. “If only, Nov. You know I’d love that.”

“Maybe after we kick Reclaimer in the dick,” I said. “For now, we just gotta push on with this code shit.”

“Not right now, I hope,” Gauge said. “I’d like a chance to enjoy our vacation before we have to go back into the wilderness.”

“Yeah, me too.” I shoveled the rest of the chowder down my throat and ate a few more of the craws. “So,” I said, turning to Ace, “what are we doing after this?”

-----

I thought the Brass Bank was big before, but fuck, nothing really gives you an appreciation for something that huge like standing under it in its shadow. I felt like I was going to break my neck just by craning my head back to stare up at this thing.

“Sweet fuck that’s neat,” I said. “How long did it take them to make this thing?”

“Ten years, I believe,” Ace said. “Ten years and hundreds of workers.”

Gauge whistled. “That must’ve been one hell of a construction project.”

“Impressive for a bunch of backwards barbarians,” Surge muttered.

“And they did this all without modern technology or engineering techniques,” Nova said, awestruck. “Amazing.”

“What’s with the statue?” I asked Ace, pointing to the big bullet made out of guns behind us.

She turned around and looked it over. “They built that shortly after opening this building. It’s supposed to be symbolic and shit. Wars are fought with guns, but you ain’t gonna win the war without the bullets. Sure, you shoot them from your guns, but they’re more than that, too. You can buy mercs, supply your troops, pay off towns for support, that sort of thing. If you control the guns, you’re a warlord. If you control the bullets, you’re a winner.” She turned around again and nodded to the huge building towering over us. “The Brass Bank controls the bullets. They’re the winners of this planet.”

Then she gestured to the big doors. “Why we standing out here like idiots? There’s more to see inside, you know.”

I let her lead the way while I stayed kind of by her side. The huge doors must’ve been forty feet tall and they were held open by massive chains protruding from the outside walls. Four incredibly well-armed ponies stood by each door, each looking more than a little bored. A constant stream of ponies went in and out, many of them lugging large ammo crates with them. I kind of really wanted to see the vault where the Bank kept all their bullets. That must’ve been an amazing sight.

Perhaps not as amazing as the interior, though. Whatever I thought about the outside, the interior just blew that away. The floor was tiled and largely open, interrupted here and there by massive columns that supported an impressive vaulted ceiling. The large windows let in a ton of light, keeping the whole place almost as bright as the day outside, and stone statues lined the walls as tasteful decorations. Several long counters had been placed around the edges of the room where tellers worked with the lines of ponies all trying to manage their finances. Up above, ponies with powerful rifles sat on the second and third floor balconies, idly watching the crowd below them with passing interest.

Honestly, the whole place felt like it was a cathedral. This place was built in honor of money, and the ponies who came here did so to worship money. I guess it just proved that after the end of the world, the bullet was king.

“I think we found civilization,” I murmured in awe. “We should just let the Brass Bank rebuild Auris when all this shit is said and done.”

“Something I can agree on,” Surge said. “These ponies have strength and power. They’re organized and orderly. They could rebuild Equestria here if they weren’t so complacent.”

“I don’t get that,” Gauge said. “They’re so well equipped and they seem so strong and powerful. Why aren’t they doing more?”

Ace shrugged. “Something I can’t answer. I ain’t on their council. Probably ‘cause war is bad for business if you’re the one fighting it. They prefer to be the ones fueling it; much more profitable that way.”

I sort of vacantly walked deeper into the building, my eyes flitting from one thing to the next. There was so much to take in, so much noise and movement and color. It felt like I was in Blackwash’s town square, and this was only one building. I had to wonder if the ponies of Three Rivers really knew the struggles that the rest of us faced in merely surviving from day to day when they were this wealthy and this strong.

As my eyes bounced from pony to pony, I did a double take. There, chatting with one of the tellers, was the fucker himself. I recognized that mangy yellow hide anywhere, especially with my family rifle slung across his back. Four ponies wearing white combat armor with gold designs edging the pieces stood around him, their eyes slowly moving across the crowd. They passed over me without any sort of recognition; I almost felt insulted that Yeoman didn’t consider me enough of a threat to tell his guards to be on the lookout for the black mare with the fiery mane.

“You guys should stop Ember,” Surge warned with my own voice. “She’s going to get herself killed.” Even as she said it, I felt her trying to steal control of my limbs to prevent me from just galloping across the place and pummeling him to a pulp.

Ace and Gauge both quickly moved to my sides and put their hooves on my shoulders before I could even start walking. “We should go,” Gauge said, trying to push me back toward the door. “The last thing we need is his attention.”

“We’ll fight another day,” Ace said, tugging on my left. “Ain’t gonna solve nothing here.”

If you know me at all, I think you shouldn’t be surprised when I did exactly the opposite of that. “Yeoman!” I screamed at him, lunging forward a step only to be roughly shoved back by Ace and Gauge. “Yeoman, you fuck! Come over here! Get your ass over here!”

My voice echoed a few times, and the whole atmosphere of the bank changed. The civilians flinched and looked my way, slowly backing into the shadows. The mercenary guards stationed around the building tensed, and I saw a few reaching for their weapons out of the corner of my eye. Yeoman’s guards all formed a protective line between him and me, though they were disciplined enough to keep their weapons holstered. And lastly, Yeoman himself slowly turned in place until we were staring each other down from across the room.

A smile formed on the half of his face that could still move. “If it isn’t my number one fan!” he purred, parting the wall of his guards to walk closer to me. The other ponies on the floor quickly stepped aside, leaving the two of us an open path. Gauge and Ace loosened their grip on my shoulders, but only when they were reasonable sure that I wasn’t going to try to charge across the room and stick my horn in his heart or something. “I do have to thank you for helping me get to the installation in the gorge. You saved me a lot of time and effort trying to open it and trying to get in. I assume since you’re here that you take payment in standard C’s like everypony else?”

I stepped forward but felt resistance at each shoulder. “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” I growled at him. “I’m gonna burn the flesh from your bones. You’re gonna regret ever fucking with me.” I let my horn light up to try to intimidate him, but he didn’t seem all that fazed. Especially when red dots began hovering on all our skulls.

He just leaned back on his hind legs a bit and shrugged his wings. “Am I? Do you think you can burn me before the guards fill you with lead? I’d darken your horn if I were you; I don’t know how long the Brass Bank’s mercs are going to tolerate that threatening display of magic.”

I sneered at him, but with more gentle urging from my friends, I let my mana fizzle out. One by one, the laser dots started to disappear as the mercs lowered their weapons. Yeoman scoffed at me and walked even closer, so close that we were almost muzzle to grotesquely-deformed muzzle. “You’re lucky that the same rules apply to both of us,” he said, smiling. “I’d cut you down right here and put you out of my mane. You’re starting to create a lot of problems for the City.”

“You think you’re so good?” I spat back. “Why don’t we take this outside the city? My team against yours. It doesn’t matter when or where, but I’d be happy to gut you face to face.”

“I prefer to fight at a distance,” he said, leaning in a bit closer. “You saw what I did to your marefriend.”

That finally crossed the line for me. I drove my head forward without warning, crashing my skull against his. The only difference was that mine had a horn and his didn’t. He staggered back and clutched his forehead, while my friends hauled me back and his guards stepped between us with drawn weapons. Once more, the laser sights danced across all of us, and one of the mercenaries shouted at us to freeze. But simply seeing the blood trickling down Yeoman’s face from the gash my horn tore through his skin was worth it.

He growled at me and wiped some of the blood off of his face. “You’ll pay for that,” he threatened. A moment later, he signaled with a wing, and his four guards holstered their weapons. They walked past me and my friends without another word, save one when Yeoman put himself between me and the door. “Enjoy your stay in Three Rivers. The hospitality is nice… while it lasts.”

Then he was gone. I watched the five of them leave the bank while I panted in rage, and only after they were out of sight did my friends finally let go of me. Things slowly went back to normal, and the mercenaries holstered their weapons and went back to watching over everything. But they still kept a close eye on me and my friends, and I couldn’t blame them for that.

And then Ace slapped me across the face, though since she was already with me, I guess the mercs didn’t care that much. While I reeled from the blow (I didn’t think she could really hit that hard), she leered over me. “You trying to get us all killed?!” she shouted, pressing her nose against mine. “You dumb bitch, you almost got us gunned down in the bank! And worse than that, you let that cocksucker know that we’re following him! Now he knows that we’re right on his ass, and he can set the terms of battle, not us!”

“She wasn’t thinking straight,” Surge said, forcing me to sit down in a burst of willpower. “Then again, I’m not sure that she ever does.”

“Fuck you,” I muttered back when she let me speak again. “Fuck all of you. You don’t know what was going through my mind. You don’t know what it’s like to see that fuck that close but not be able to do anything to him.”

“I felt it,” Surge said. “Pure rage. You were blinded by it, and it made you even stupider than normal. Maybe I should paralyze your tongue whenever you start getting furious; it would certainly help in situations like this.”

“I should just cut it out and save us all the trouble,” Ace growled. Even Nova and Gauge looked frustrated with me. But, sighing, Ace sat down across from me and shook her head. “Was it worth it?”

“Not until I kill him,” I whispered back. “He killed my marefriend. Things won’t be even until I tear him to pieces.”

Ace’s features softened and she looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you still shouldn’t have done that. Now we’re fucked.”

“He can’t hurt us inside the city, right?” I asked her. “They’ll kill him, too.”

“Not if they don’t catch him. You know how easy it is to shoot or stab somepony in an alley and get away without the mercs knowing? And that fucker seems like the kind to have one of his henchponies do it. He ain’t risking shit to kill us here, now that he knows we’re behind him.”

“Oh.” I stared down at my hooves. “I fucked up.”

“And grass is pink,” Gauge muttered.

“It was green on Equus,” Surge countered.

“This isn’t Equus, Sparky. We’ve got pink grass and a blue sun.”

Nova stepped between all of us. “Can we please stop? This isn’t going to accomplish anything.” Looking down at me, she offered me her hoof to help me stand. “Em, that was a really stupid idea, but we just gotta live with it now. There’s nothing we can do except keep an eye over our shoulders.”

Ace grunted and stood up across from me. “And here I was looking forward to a relaxing day or two off. Guess that ain’t happening now…”

I bowed my head. “I fuck up so much that I’m not sure if my apologies mean anything anymore. But I’m sorry.”

“Sorry’s just words,” Ace grumbled. “Actions speak louder. Try to think before you fuck it up.”

“I’ll try.” I looked around us; guess there wasn’t really any point in hanging out here much longer now that I’d caused such a commotion. “Let’s just get go—”

“Ember?” a familiar voice called out of the crowd. My ears perked and I turned in place to see a silvery stallion trotting towards me. It took me a moment to recognize his mustache and fine clothes, but only because I wasn’t expecting to see him here. When I did, though, I beamed and trotted over to him.

“Denarius!” I called back, stopping to shake his hoof. “Fuck, how have you been?”

“Busy,” he said. “Though not as busy as you, I take it. I heard about everything that went down at the Dam. The Brass Bank should give you a medal. You opened a trade line everypony else thought was closed forever. Working with the Sentinels is going to be insanely profitable for the Bank.”

“If only we had the Bank’s help from the beginning,” I said. “It would’ve made that whole thing a cakewalk.”

Denarius shrugged. “The Bank wasn’t going to dump bullets into falling stock. But I’m glad you proved them otherwise.” He shifted the ammo crates strapped across his back, and I heard the jingling of lots of bullets. “I was just off to requisition supplies for the next caravan up there. I came back with a few thousand in profits after we talked last, but most of that’s going right into getting more supplies. The valley is going to need them, and the Sentinels have the funds to buy.”

“Good to hear. The ponies from my old settlement occupy the dam now, so try to be fair with them. You know, as a favor to me.”

The stallion chuckled and gave me a firm nod. “You know I’m charitable when the cause is good. Consider it a discount in the interest of establishing new business ventures with the far north.”

“Who’s that, Em?” Gauge asked, walking up alongside me with Nova not far behind. “You know him?”

“His name’s Denarius,” I said, stepping a bit to the side to introduce him to my friends. “He helped me out when I was trying to find you guys. He was also at the quarry before shit went down.”

Gauge smiled and shook Denarius’ hoof. “Gauge. Glad to see that Ember was making friends out there instead of shooting everypony she saw.”

“Probably for the best that’s how things went down,” Denarius said with a quick laugh. “I had eight mercenaries with me, and they were bored. They would’ve loved the excitement.”

“These are the friends I told you about,” I said. “At least, Gauge and Nova are. I’m just happy I got them out in one piece.”

“I’m happy for that as well.” He shook Nova’s hoof, then looked over her shoulder at Ace, who was sort of hovering in the background. “And you? You look far too experienced to be one of Ember’s friends—no offense,” he added to me.

Ace shook her head. “No, sir. Just along for the ride. Ember needs somepony capable handling a gun right alongside her. Makes it easier to keep her friends safe.”

“Ah,” he said. “Hired mercenary, then?”

“Only thing she’s paying me with is respect and a promise to help stop the Ivory City,” she said, shrugging. “That’s more than enough for me.”

“I can respect that,” Denarius said, nodding his head. Then he looked at SCaR, which was idly hovering around us. “And you have a pet, too. There aren’t many combat drones in working condition these days.”

“SCaR’s helped us out a ton,” Gauge said. He whistled at the drone, and it changed its course to buzz over to him. “He’s more than just a drone. The little guy’s been hanging around with us for six or seven winters now.”

“It’s probably the closest I’m gonna get to a foal out of him,” Nova pouted. I had to try really hard not to laugh at the look on Gauge’s face when she said that.

Denarius gave Gauge a comforting pat on the shoulder. “Sooner or later, that mare’s going to get what she wants,” he said, smiling at him.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Gauge muttered, rubbing his brow.

The merchant chuckled and nodded to me. “Well, it was nice to see you again, Ember. I need to go requisition my supplies before the shops close. I’ll be in town for a few days more before I have everything together to go north. Maybe we can catch a meal sometime.”

“Hopefully,” I said, shaking his hoof once more. “Take care!”

“You too.”

Then he continued on his way. I watched him go for a bit, but eventually the giant doors swallowed him up as he vanished into the vastness of Three Rivers. Soon it was just the four (five) of us inside the Bank, watching the ponies come and go.

Ace brushed shoulders with me and smirked. “Small world, ain’t it?”

-----

After all the bullshit at the Bank, Three Rivers just didn’t feel the same. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting a bullet in the back of the head or a knife in my spine. Every shadowed alley and group of ponies set me on edge, because I was convinced that Yeoman or his goons were waiting to take me down. I just didn’t know where or when an attempt would come from, but I wasn’t about to be caught flat-hoofed. Even if I did end up dying in the street, I’d go down kicking and screaming.

As the hours went on, I felt my edge dulling, and even Ace, usually so attentive and hawk-eyed, was growing more relaxed. Nova and Gauge had gotten over it quickly; I guess being in each other’s company helped with that. Surge largely kept to herself, but I did feel a bit better having another pony processing what my eyes were seeing. Maybe she’d catch something I missed, if there was anything to miss at all.

In the meanwhile, I saw a ton of shit. I could probably go on for a long time talking about everything I saw, but honestly, most of it is probably pretty boring to you. I’d just been excited to see all this awesome, new shit, finally being in a real city and shit for the first time. It certainly didn’t feel like that long had passed, but ultimately, it was Surge who told me that my body was hungry. Almost as soon as she said it, I started to feel the hunger pains, and since it was getting late, we decided to get food.

I was all for going back to the place we had lunch at, but Ace wanted to take us somewhere different and a little classier. We ended up eating at this Bitalian place that Nova and Gauge loved, even though I had no idea what the fuck a ‘Bitalian’ was. I think it was more the atmosphere than the food, really; while I thought the food was good, my mouth was still watering at the thought of getting more seafood from the Main Course. But we ended up eating outside, and there were ponies playing music and singing out there with us, and once the sun started going down, they lit candles at the table to provide us with some light. By the time we had to pay, the two of them were practically all over each other, while me and Ace and SCaR looked on.

Nova must’ve had too much wine, because she was giggling and using her wing to support herself, draping it across Gauge’s back. Gauge was much more sure-hoofed; I guess he didn’t like the wine as much as his marefriend did. I hated it, of course, but I thought all booze tasted like shit. And I couldn’t really tell if Ace was drunk or not; with the amount she drank on an almost daily basis, I figured it’d take a lot more than a couple of glasses to get her over the edge.

We collected ourselves outside of the restaurant, and Gauge and Nova turned to look at me and Ace. “We’re going to go back to our room,” Gauge said, nuzzling his marefriend at the end of the sentence. “It’s been a busy day.”

“Busy…” Nova giggled. “It’s not too late for fun!”

Ace shook her head and held a wingtip to her brow. “Yeah… you two go do that,” she said. “We’ll be back in a bit.”

I winked at Gauge and waved them off. “Be gentle,” I warned them. “Gotta make sure everything works, right?”

“Thank you for the wise words of advice,” Gauge said, shaking his head. Then he turned around, guiding Nova back along the road. “See you in the morning.”

Ace and I watched them go. The outlaw snorted and turned the other way. “He better be careful with her.”

“He will be,” I said. “He’s always treated her right.”

“No, for his sake,” Ace clarified. “That girl’s got a cybernetic death wing attached to one shoulder and she’s sloshed outta her mind. If he ain’t careful, that thing could fuck him up.”

“It takes active thought to activate the wing’s razor feathers and other abilities,” Surge said. “Something that I imagine is difficult enough for her already, and will become increasingly difficult as the zebra pleasures her.” I could feel her practically shuddering in the back of my skull. “If it’s size she’s after, she’d be better off with an earth pony than a stripe’s member.”

“Aren’t you just a lovely little ball of sunshine,” I muttered, turning after Ace. “I don’t know what it’ll take you to understand that they’re genuinely in love, but that’s the truth of it. So you can fuck right off and just let them be.”

“It’s degenerate,” Surge protested. “It weakens our blood.”

“Ain’t you a scientist?” Ace asked over her shoulder. “Hard to imagine you think you’re so smart and you believe in dumb shit like that.”

“Mutts and other half-bloods were euthanized in the Synarchy. Blood breeds loyalty, and an enemy’s blood breeds treason.”

Ace hung her wings and groaned. “Talking with you ain’t no fucking picnic, that’s for sure,” she muttered. “I’d beat some sense into you but I don’t want to smash Ember’s pretty face.”

“Thanks for that,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Can we talk about anything else? Like, literally anything else? I don’t want to listen to more of racist grandma’s life lessons if I can help it.”

“That makes two of us,” Ace said. She raised her head and surveyed our surroundings. “I’ve got an idea. Come this way.”

She started walking down one of the streets without much more explanation than that, so I started following her. “Where we going?” I asked, flipping a cigarette out of my box and sticking it in the corner of my mouth. I’d need to get some more before we left Three Rivers. “Hopefully not to a bar. I don’t drink.”

“Nah, ain’t that,” Ace said, slowing her pace a little so I could pull up alongside her. “An old haunt I used to go to all the time. It’ll let you see the whole city at night. Ain’t something to miss.”

“It’s certainly really pretty down here,” I said, my eyes drifting over the different buildings, weakly lit by torches in streetlights. With the whole town lit up like this, it felt like it might as well have still been the middle of the day. The ponies wandering across the streets this late at night certainly made it feel like the city was still alive and awake. “I can’t imagine what it looks like from afar.”

“It’s the closest thing I’ve seen so far to the Manehattan skyline at night,” Surge said. “Before the wars, they used to call it the city that never sleeps. The lights were always on and there were always ponies on its streets. You could find somepony to talk to or somepony selling something at any time of the day—or night.”

“Before the wars?” Ace asked. “Let me guess. That changed for the worse, too.”

“During the last war with the Coalition, we had mandatory blackouts after sundown. Power rationing meant there wasn’t really much to do after dark, anyway. The city was bombed on occasion, either from atmosphere or orbit, and turning the lights on would’ve made it easier to hit during the night.”

“Thankfully we don’t have to worry about that here,” I said, slipping my tongue and my voice back into my natural accent instead of Surge’s slightly-off pronunciation. “Nopony has any spaceships or bombers… yet.”

“And hopefully it’ll stay that way,” Ace said. We paused at a busy intersection, and Ace thought for a moment and decided on going left. “This way. It’s a bit of a walk, though.”

I shrugged. “Used to it,” I said, falling in behind her. “I don’t remember what it’s like to stay in one place for more than a day.”

“I know exactly how you feel,” Ace said. “I ain’t ever been in the same town for more than a month since I turned fifteen. Got a case of the wanderlust real bad from my Pa; hell, one of the first things I did after I left the Ruin Runners was track that bastard down, figure out where he went to.”

“Track him down?” I asked. “What for?”

Ace shrugged. “So I could look my Pa in the eye and he could meet his little girl? The bastard flew the coop on my Ma before I was even born. Didn’t even know what he looked like until a few ponies pointed me in the right direction, eighteen damn winters later.”

“Sounds like my father,” I said. “Mine hung around until I was two. I barely remember his voice. But he left my mom broken-hearted, so I’m more angry with him than anything.” Sighing, I added, “Is that just a pegasus thing or…?”

“You’re asking the wrong gal, Ember,” Ace said. “I guess it’s just easier to leave everything behind and not look back when you got wings.”

“Statistical data from records collected in the early days of the Synarchy showed that pegasus stallions were more likely to leave their spouses and families than any other group,” Surge said. “There’s probably some truth in what you say, Ace. They were also the worst offenders of our marriage and reproduction laws up to the Synarchy’s prolonged silence.”

Ace snorted. “Stallions,” she said, winking at me. “They knock us up and then leave us to deal with the aftermath. How about that?”

I chuckled. “Ain’t that the truth. At least you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant with another mare.”

“Unless there’s some kind of magic bullshit going on.” Her eyes drifted to my horn. “They have any spells for that back in the day, Sparky?”

I think Surge had just resigned herself to the nickname at this point; after a few days of it, she wasn’t really fighting us anymore. “There were some, but none of them were perfect. They often resulted in miscarriage or other deformities.” She sighed and added, “As advanced as we liked to think we were, there are some things that biology does much better than magic, perfected through millions of years of evolution.”

“Well, that settles that, I suppose,” I said.

“Yeah, guess it does.”

Ace took me out to the north of the city, and we stepped off of the platforms once they finally ended. The ground was a bit higher here, and also a little drier. Long, pink grass blades swayed in a light night breeze, making little shadows on the ground under the light of the moon. Rock frogs whistled around us, and both Ace and Surge made sure I was careful where I stepped; apparently, they were super poisonous, and their backs were covered in spines to deliver the toxins. But they mostly liked to stay down closer to the river, and I didn’t even see anything by the time Ace brought me within the shadow of our destination.

It was a windmill—once. I could tell it was in a bad state of disrepair just by looking at the loose planks of wood covering its frame. Many of them were barely hanging on by a nail; many more had fallen off completely. The actual wheel and blades of the windmill had fallen off of it some time ago, and now they just leaned against it, the tower of the mill resting in the crook of two blade arms. But it was the tallest point within easy walking distance of the city, and when I saw the darkened window in the top, I knew exactly where Ace wanted to go.

“What happened here?” I asked her. “Looks all fucked up.”

“It was struck by lightning some years ago,” Ace said. “Ain’t nopony bothered to fix it up or tear it down. So it’s just standing here. It’s a great place to go when you want to do some thinking.”

“You? Think?” Surge said. “I don’t believe it.”

Ace paused for a moment; I think she was trying to figure out if it was me or Surge who’d said that. “Yeah. I do some thinking sometimes,” she said, choosing a more neutral answer. “You got a lot of time to think when you’re trying to lie low, hiding from mercs who want your hide or waiting for ponies you’ve got a hit contract on to walk by.”

She walked through the door and I followed her. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness inside, and then Surge reminded me I was a unicorn by using my horn to illuminate the interior. A few spider rats scurried to their holes at the sudden light, and Ace fluttered up to the next level instead of taking the stairs. I followed her along the stairs, which wound around the perimeter of the building, out of the way of the gears and machinery the windmill once powered. I could still see enormous, rotting gears sitting in the ceiling overhead.

When we finally made it to the top floor, I carefully tested the floorboards with my hoof before I dared to walk on them. A lot of them were bent and moldy, so I didn’t trust them to hold my weight, but the crossbeams underneath were secure and sturdy. Ace was waiting for me by the window, and when I made it to her side, she sat down with her forelegs dangling off the edge. “Take a look,” she said. “It’s damn pretty.”

And it was. It almost looked like glowing gold was pooled in the bowl between the mountains. The lights of the city danced and dazzled on the rivers, occasionally outlining a boat making its way across the water. And of course there was the Brass Bank, brilliantly lit up in all its glory. I noticed that the lights lining it and illuminating its faces weren’t flickering and wavy, putting it at a sharp contrast with the shiftier lights of the other buildings.

Surge noticed it too. “The Bank has generators and its own power supply?” she asked.

“Don’t know where the hell they got it from, but they do,” Ace said. “You can bring electricity back from the dead with enough bullets, by the looks of it.”

“So it would seem.” Surge seemed impressed by that. “I can only imagine what the Ivory City is like if a backwaters transportation and fishing settlement can grow into such splendor across two centuries.”

“I ain’t never seen the city up close,” Ace said. “You can’t get within a mile of the thing before some marksmare blows your head off. There’s only bad shit there.”

“And we’ll have to go there eventually,” I said. “There’s a code piece there. If we want to get the whole thing, then we’ll have to find some way inside.”

Ace frowned. “That’d be where I draw the line.”

“I thought you wanted to hurt the City?” Surge asked her. “Or do you not care as much as you claimed, outlaw?”

“I want to see the City burn,” Ace said. “Going there by our lonesomes ain’t gonna make it happen. We’d be better just trying to beat Yeoman to this next piece of the code and ensuring them bastards can’t ever finish it.”

I frowned as I stared over the city. It was a reasonable plan—if we wanted to call it a draw. But would a draw help Auris? At best, things would just stay the same. At worst, it’d only prolong the inevitable. I didn’t know much about the Ivory City and how they worked or what their plans were, but I knew that Reclaimer was an evil bastard, and evil bastards are rarely content with what they have. It’d only be a matter of time before he found some other way to brush aside Ace’s hometown and assert his will over the rest of Auris. If he solved the code, then it’d only happen faster.

But if I really wanted to help Auris, there was only one way I knew how to do it. If we could piece the code together and put it in the hooves of the Sentinels, then Fusillade and Sig and the rest of them could put an end to the Ivory City. And given that they’d nearly lost to Carrion and the Crimson despite the advanced tech they owned, I didn’t believe that they could take on an entire city filled with ponies armed and organized much better than bandits. I needed to solve that code, because Auris was just gonna remain a fucking shitty place to live otherwise.

My thoughts momentarily froze as I felt Surge grow interested in them. It was like I had a book in front of me that I wrote my thoughts in and Surge was trying to casually catch a glimpse over my shoulder. But she didn’t press me to know what I was thinking about; whether that was from her respect for my boundaries, or more likely that I’d noticed her peering into my mind, I couldn’t tell.

Ace nudged my shoulder, bringing both of our attentions back to our surroundings. “Thinking?” she asked. “Or are you having a conversation with your imaginary friend?”

Surge didn’t jump down Ace’s throat at that, which was good. The scientist was finally becoming numb to our attempts to annoy and tease her.

“Just thinking about shit,” I said. Sighing, I hung my head and stared out at the peaceful city below me. “Why can’t I just forget about the fate of the world literally resting on my shoulders and just… enjoy my free time without worrying about this shit? This is the first time I get to slow down and take a break in forever, and I can’t stop thinking about what we need to do.”

Ace patted my back. “Just think about anything else. Think about ponies and happier times.” She sighed, and the sound was streaked thick with loneliness. “It’s what I do.”

I bit my lip. “Is that really helping you, though?”

Stark, hollow silence.

I could see Ace’s face outlined in the moonlight. Her eyes stared dead ahead, but I doubted she could really see anything. The corners of her muzzle were turned down, and her ears pointed at the floor. By the way her nose twitched and trembled, she was having difficulty measuring her breathing.

Sliding over a bit, I put my coat against hers for comfort. Then, swallowing, I asked a question I didn’t know how she’d react to. “Do you… want to tell me about her?”

Surge started bracing herself just in case this turned nasty. Ace stopped breathing for a moment, glanced at me, glanced away again, swallowed hard, and tried to sit up straight. She ended with her nose almost resting on her forelegs. “Zephyr,” she said. “We called her Zeph or Z. She really liked that last one. I… She…”

Grain-colored wings shuffled at her sides, one rubbing against my coat. A gentle toss of her head swept her curtain-like mane out of her eye. “We were Runners. Me and her and Lines. We were kids then, so the adults had us get to places they was too big to get to. Me and Lines and Z spent a lot of time away from the rest of the group, trying to figure our way through these old installations all by ourselves. We had a pistol between us, if that; usually we had less. The gaps in vents and shit in some of those places ain’t much bigger than a filly, so we couldn’t take much gear with us. But us three survived. Somehow.”

She breathed, and Surge took the opportunity to answer her own curiosities. “I take it that you would’ve needed more than a gun anyway, many of those times,” she asked. I was surprised at the quiet respect in her voice; maybe our grumpy racist grandma was learning something.

Ace swallowed hard and turned her hooves up like there was blood on them. “You seen a five winters old colt sliced in two by a laser before?” she asked. “Or a little filly who can’t be more than seven scream as acid melts her face off her skull? Even if everything else broke, your Synarchy left security systems and shit lying around that killed children centuries later. Runners didn’t really care much. They’d all done it when they were kids; they were the survivors, grown too big to wander through the maze of hell. When we turned ten, when we were too old to go crawling through vents and shit, me and Z and Lines all got shitfaced to celebrate.” She bitterly chuckled. “First time I ever got blitzed. Guess I started young.”

I tried to share a smile with her, but it didn’t stick. She was finally opening herself up to me, and I was getting a look at this outlaw mare that I hadn’t ever seen before. Her shoulders lazily moved as she attempted a shrug, and I saw her eyes flicker shut as she breathed in and held it for a few seconds. “After going through all that, guess it weren’t much of a surprise to nopony when we started touching and squeezing later on. Maybe Lines; I think he always thought he had a shot with Z before that.” The corners of her muzzle briefly poked upwards. “Poor bastard. Thought he could have one or the other. We ended up fucking each other and left him out to dry.

“Decided we had enough of that shit when we were fifteen,” Ace continued. “Lines went and opened himself an inn with the bullets he’d put aside from running. We gave him shit about it, teased him that he was going soft. He offered us jobs, but that weren’t us. I wanted to wander, and Z wanted to follow me.” Her eyes fell, and her next words cracked in the middle. “Bitch should’ve just stayed with him,” she muttered. “I wouldn’t have gotten her killed.”

She retreated inwards a bit, and I could feel her trembling. My teeth worked on my lip while I put my hoof over hers, and then I squeezed it to let her know I was here with her. “What happened?” I asked, mentally preparing myself.

Her shivers went away, and I could see her looking out over the city and into the distant past. “We were soldiers for hire for a long while. Mercs. Got a contract to go hit a caravan taking arms and bullets to a warlord south of Thatch. It all went sideways so fast.” Her throat bobbed as she swallowed her emotions. “I was on overwatch with my rifle. I was always the better shot. Z liked to get messy and personal. She had autoloader shotguns mounted to a harness under her wings. Crazy bitch, but beautiful on the field. So fucking beautiful…

“I saw a glint on a cloud above the caravan while Z was tearing them new ones,” she said, and her eyes moved skyward like she could still see it all replaying in front of her. I didn’t have any doubts that it was probably burned into her mind. “Pegasus with a rifle, and it was sighted on her. I panicked when I shouldn’t have. I shot too soon. I… I missed,” she admitted, closing her eyes. Her short tail swished back and forth. “He took the shot not even a split second later. Bullet must’ve been whizzing past his face as he fired. It was clean, accurate. Hit Z between the shoulders. I killed him on the second shot, but there weren’t nothing I could do. Bullet had already gone through her back and out her throat. She was dead by the time I flew to her.”

She looked me in the eyes, and I could see the tears starting to streak her coat. “My marefriend died because I fucked up a simple shot,” she said, her voice wavering and teetering on the verge of collapse. “If I’d been better, I would’ve saved her. Z wouldn’t be dead. Celestia, she… she trusted me to watch her back. She trusted me!” Her voice started crumbling as she rapidly slid into hysterics. “I let her die, you understand? All because I weren’t good enough. All because I couldn’t hit my mark! Three years, I’ve had that hanging over my head. Three years. I still see her face when I sleep. Them eyes wide in surprise, mouth hanging open, eyebrows pulled back like she couldn’t believe that just happened to her!” She sniffled and wiped her nose. “I killed her! She’s dead because of me!”

She buried her head in her hooves, and her shoulders heaved and shuddered. With no better option or idea, I threw my hooves around her shoulders and just tried to hold her tight. “I’m sorry,” I choked out, feeling my own emotions starting to get the better of me. Stars, her story reminded me so much of me and Zip. “I’m so sorry.”

And then I saw a sight I never thought I’d see: Ace crying. It wasn’t even dignified, either. It was violent and raw. I don’t know how long she’d bottled all this up, but I’d finally popped the cork off it. This mare, this outlaw I once saw as an unshakeable badass of the wilderness, fell apart into a broken, shivering wreck in front of me with just a few words. I honestly didn’t know what to say. Not even Surge had any ideas.

But I did the only thing I could: hold on. I tried to calm her and whisper to her that it’d be alright, but I didn’t even know if she heard my words or not. Probably best if she didn’t; I was really bad at this shit. Despite my poor attempts at calming her, though, she slowly began to calm down. Little by little, the hysterics faded away and the tears slowed. She’d cried herself empty, and now she just seemed… exhausted. Melancholy, but exhausted.

Sniffling, she wiped her nose and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. She held it between her hooves as she spoke to me without looking at me. “I know you think I’m an alcoholic,” she said, staring at the amber liquid between her hooves. “And you’re probably right. I ain’t no paragon of sobriety. But if I don’t drink, the pain comes back. It hurts me. You don’t think a memory could hurt you like a knife, but I feel like a stuck pig when I’m dry. The booze is the only thing that makes the pain go away.”

She popped the cork off with her teeth and tilted the bottle back. It bubbled once or twice as she swallowed several mouthfuls, and then I felt her shudder against my side as she swallowed the poison. “Fuck me,” she muttered when she’d finally had her fill. “I sound like a fucking baby. Fucking bitching and shit about how my life sucks. I probably sound like a hopeless fuck who can’t let go.”

Though I could tell Surge was inclined to agree, I didn’t let her near my mouth. “No, you’re wrong about that,” I said. “I understand.”

Ace piqued an eyebrow but said nothing. She only sniffled a few times and wiped at her nose, staring longingly at her bottle of whiskey.

“There was this girl I knew,” I began, feeling my wounds scar open as I started along the path. “Her name was Zip. She was a Sentinel. She saved my life. And I loved her. And she died.”

Ace swallowed hard. “I’m sorry…” she said.

I shook my head. “Funny how we both loved pegasus mares whose names started with a Z. But I didn’t know her nearly as long as you did. Maybe three weeks, I knew her. Maybe not even that. But we fought together, and she was beautiful. And I thought I loved her.

“Together, we killed Carrion when the Sentinels attacked Celestia Dam. We destroyed the Crimson. We should’ve lived happily ever after, but…”

Tears began to well up in my eyes, so I closed them and focused on my breathing. “That half-faced bastard, Yeoman… he killed her. Right when we were kissing to celebrate our victory. Shot her through her armor with a bullet designed to kill Sentinels. It turned her lungs to mulch and filled her heart with needles. She… she died in agony, but she couldn’t even scream.”

This time it was Ace’s turn to comfort me. I felt her wing around my shoulders, a strong wing that slid me against her side. I dabbed at my watering eyes and sniffled a few times. “When I saw Yeoman today, when he was just right there, I… I lost control of myself. I wanted to kill him and avenge Zip. I wanted to do so many fucking terrible things to him, but I couldn’t. Hell, if it were only me and I didn’t have Gauge and Nova to look out for, I might have killed him anyway.”

“They would’ve killed you, too,” Ace reminded me.

“And I didn’t care,” I said. “I’ve lost so much in the past two months. So fucking much. I lost my town, I lost my marefriend, I lost my mom, I even lost one of my fucking cutie marks!” I slapped the brand over my left flank. “Stars, I’ve lost so fucking much I’m barely even a pony anymore! Just a… just a bunch of depressed bits and pieces trying to act like one because there are ponies counting on me and I can’t let them down!”

Ace pressed her nose against my cheek to try and calm me down. It was a lot more tender of a nuzzle than the one she’d given me way back in Hole. I don’t know why I noticed that. “You’re far from broken… Em,” she said, using my nickname my friends always used. “You’re strong. Something tells me you ain’t gonna cave. You’re too stubborn for it.”

I squeezed a few tears out of my eyes and wiped them away. “Not if I get myself killed.”

“I ain’t about to let that happen,” Ace said. “You can count on that.”

I managed to smile… kind of. It was an attempt at least. “Thank you,” I said. “We’ll get those code pieces and save your home, too.”

Ace nodded, and the two of us went back to looking out over Three Rivers. It really was beautiful at night. After a minute, Ace chuckled. “I’m happy I didn’t blow your brains out back at that mining camp.”

“That makes two of us,” I said with a light laugh.

Surge was confused. “You two nearly killed each other?” she asked. “When was this?”

“Some time ago,” I said.

“She weren’t really in all that good a position to kill me,” Ace said. “It was a bit one-sided.”

“Shut up,” I said. “I saw you before you shot, at least.”

“For all the good that did you. Bullet was already on its way when you saw me. Missed your right cheek by about two inches.”

“Some marksmare you are,” I teased her, sticking out my tongue.

“You try hitting a target from two kilometers out,” Ace grumbled. “I bet you couldn’t get close.”

“Maybe we should try it sometime,” I said. “I’m no slouch with a rifle myself, you know.”

“Yeah-huh. We’ll see about that.”

I felt her wing shift on my back; I’d somehow forgotten about it being there, keeping me warm and safe at her side. It was comforting, and for a moment, I was worried she’d take it away. But she left it there, and I fought for another inch against her side. “It really is pretty, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Yeah. Brings back happier memories.”

I hummed, wishing I could’ve been a part of those happier memories. But then I realized I already was. We were making them here, now, and doing it together.

I felt like I could see Zip smiling as I curled up against this tender outlaw and listened to her breathe.

Chapter 23: The Welcoming Committee

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Chapter 23: The Welcoming Committee

The farther I walked from the hotel room, my one-time cheap stay while I prepared to embark on my sudden journey to the stars, the more I swore I’d forgotten something. Once again, I assured myself that I hadn’t. I’d checked everything in my two suitcases at least five times before leaving, yet that still wasn’t enough to settle the part of me that worried about these things. Considering that I was about to leave Equus for years, I suppose I couldn’t blame it for overreacting.

The Manehattan streets were filled with the same grim faces I saw every day in Baltimare, and nearly in the same patterns. Everypony left their housing at the same time every day to get to work at the same time every day. We were all parts of the machine, and even one slow cog or slipping belt could kill dozens of our soldiers on the front. Every day, the High Queen asked us to perform our best, and then double it. Every day, we gave the Synarchy what it asked for. Every day, we returned home exhausted, ready to do it all over again after six hours of fitful sleep.

So it was strange to me to break the routine. Yesterday was my last day at the Equus lab. Today, my staff and I were boarding a navy corvette that would take us to Auris. There, I’d settle us all in and continue our work, safe from the bombing of Coalition ships or the eyes of their spies. The military wanted energy, and lots of it. I planned on delivering for them and saving Equestria from the Enemy.

Even though that task grew more and more impossible by the day.

The rumbling of heavy machinery brought all of us to stop at the corner of a sidewalk. To my right, a convoy of armored transports rolled down the streets, weapons covered with canvas and tarps. One by one, the transports passed, each one carrying the grim faces of three dozen soldiers simply watching us as we stood by the side of the road. Following them was a detachment of tanks, their powerful turbine engines whining and whistling as they hovered along. More ponies sat on the roofs of the tanks; a couple of them waved to us as they passed. A few transports full of ammunition followed them, escorted along by police vehicles. The whole procession took maybe a minute from start to end, but when you have to stand and salute for that long, it could feel like a lifetime.

I crossed the street immediately after. They were likely on their way to the Griffonstone front, and military command had decided to divert them through Manehattan itself to remind us all of who and what we labored for. The message was clear enough: do your jobs, and the soldiers will do theirs. They will die if you don’t.

I always found the rhetoric of the past year or so to be such an interesting change from when I was a filly. Nopony praised our armies as invincible. We were fighting a struggle for survival, and our soldiers needed to look equine to the populace, not like invincible killing machines. Sometimes, the best way to convince civilians to do their part was to guilt them into it. With mandatory military service, all of us had served a tour before, anyways. We knew what those soldiers rode off to face. And if we could do our part to make their hell a little less painful, then we’d do it thrice over.

Getting glimpses at the inside of the propaganda machine is confusing. On the one hoof, I knew more about how it works than the ignorant masses, so I could parse some of the truth from the lies. On the other, I wasn’t involved in it at all, so I didn’t know how much it influenced how I thought. As a scientist in search of empirical and objective data, I worried about bias like that a lot.

An hour’s walk took me to the naval spaceport. I had to show three different IDs and a ream of paperwork just for clearance, and then the soldiers put me on a shuttle and sent me off to the main launch wing. I recognized several of my coworkers in the shuttle, and I talked with them briefly. Most of it was strictly research related. A few comforting words were said to those who had to leave family behind. And there were those like myself who didn’t have any family to leave behind.

That wasn’t strictly true. My foals were somewhere on Equus, in the government’s care. My husband was probably already on a shuttle to a frontline somewhere. But they wouldn’t ever know that their mother was being sent lightyears away to work on research that could win the war. They just knew I would be gone for a long time. And if my research meant that my children would live, then it was worth it.

My ears perked at the sound of roaring engines. I looked out the window and saw a great ship dip into the lower atmosphere, far above the base. Static electricity discharged from its hull, striking the clouds around it like it was the eye of a steel storm. That was the corvette we’d be taking to Auris, the EOF Stardust. Having served on the much larger Horizon cruiser during my term of service, the Stardust looked small by comparison. Still, from down here on the ground, it looked massive. It wasn’t often that we saw our ships in atmosphere; we needed them in orbit to fight the Coalition ships and keep them from bombing our country.

I fiddled with my suitcases as the shuttle came to a stop. Once that corvette dropped us off on Auris, I didn’t think I’d see another ship for years. There I’d stay, until either the war was over or the Synarchy called me back. It was humbling to think about.

Then the door opened, and I stepped into the High Queen’s sunlight one last time.

\/\/\/\/\/

An explosion woke me up from my dreams. Or Surge’s dreams. Fuck, even sleeping was getting disorienting. Still, both Ace and I were awake and alert in a matter of seconds, and any exhaustion I might have had from my sleep being so rudely interrupted just vanished into thin air.

I guess sleeping light because you’re always worrying about somepony blowing your head off at any given second has its benefits, sometimes.

“What the fuck?” I asked. I wiped some of the crustiness out of my eyes and peered into the darkness surrounding us. “Are we under attack? What’s happening?”

Surge, her military service more than two centuries behind her, was a lot more shocked and on edge than I was, having been shot at continuously for the last month or so. Still, I guess her torturous years of basic training stuck with her, because she started pointing my eyes in different places. “Are they in the bushes? We should check the door, that might have been a breaching charge!”

Ace used the wing I’d claimed as a blanket to cuff us in the back of the head. “Calm down, you babbling Equestrian fool. We ain’t the ones under attack. That came from the city.”

“The city?” I asked, scanning the lights in the valley below. The Brass Bank stood out first and foremost, just as imposing and impressive as ever, but it looked perfectly fine. Which was odd, because the first place I’d imagine an explosion to come from in a city like Three Rivers would be from the huge building that probably had millions of pounds of ordinance locked away deep down inside. So when the obvious target disappointed me, I had to search for the next one.

“There,” Ace said, pointing to the east end of the city. “You can see that bit of smoke, right? Ain’t all that much light to go by, but it’s there.”

I squinted into the darkness and saw a little reflection off of the angry cloud drifting out from between some of the buildings. “Yeah, I see it,” I said. “Any idea what it is?”

“Beats me,” Ace said. She stood up and collected her things, stretching each of her joints in the meanwhile. “But we should find out. Ten bullets says it’s that fucker you know.”

“Wouldn’t Three Rivers kill him?” I asked as I stood up next to her.

“That threat ain’t enough to make Reclaimer and his lackeys think twice. The Ivory City don’t give a shit about their neutrality,” she said. “They’d gobble this place up and steal all the Bank’s bullets if they could. Reclaimer would love to have that arsenal and get Thatch sandwiched between here and there. And besides, how hard you think it’s gonna be to point hooves when you dump a bomb and run?”

“What would they even blow up?” Surge asked. “Why would they risk getting caught and killed by the mercenaries to plant a bomb?”

My face paled. I knew exactly what Yeoman would try to obliterate in the middle of the night. Or rather, who.

“We need to go find Gauge and Nova,” I said, already galloping down the stairs to the door. “That bomb was meant for us!”

I heard Ace barreling down the stairs after me. “Shit,” she cursed under her breath. “Fuck! If those bastards hurt Lines, I swear to Celestia, there ain’t gonna be much left of them when I’m through.”

We burst out of the old windmill and galloped down the slope towards town, careful not to step on any of those poisonous frogs along the way. By the time we made it back to the raised streets, some pegasi in mercenary armor had dragged a few clouds down to put out some fires, and a thickening crowd of bystanders started to assemble around ground zero. I shoved through them all before the crowd got much worse, and we came to a stop just at the edge of a semicircle cordoned off by the city’s mercenary guards. It took me a few seconds to recognize what we were looking at, but Ace didn’t need any such time.

“Fuck!” she screamed, trying to shove her way past a guard. “Fuck off, you cunt, my friend was in there!” She threw her shoulder against the guard, knocking her to the ground, and galloped over to the edge of the smoldering building. I slipped through the hole as well, even though it probably wasn’t the smartest idea now that Ace had pissed off the guards.

I got a clean look at the building from out here. Most of the first floor and parts of the second were scattered in smoking heaps around the clearing, and a few pegasi were flying up into the shattered levels of the building to pull ponies out of their rooms. A few fires still danced in corners, but the rainclouds the mercs had brought down had taken care of most of the blaze. The injured had been laid out for medical attention, while it seemed like most of the inn’s inhabitants were watching from a distance as the guards thoroughly vetted each one. Given Three River’s armed neutrality, I could only assume they were trying to find any aggressors or targets of the bombing.

Ace’s wings carried herself over to a group of ponies I recognized with a fluttering hop. Lines, Nova, and Gauge stood in a small circle, chatting in low voices and watching the guards fight the last of the fires. Lines had several cuts across his dull red coat; I could only tell he was bleeding because random patches of his coat would reflect the light of the fires. Ace surprised him when she wrapped her wings around his shoulders from behind and nuzzled his cheek, though that turned into a happier smile when he saw just who was attacking him like that. Nova and Gauge turned to them, and then to me as I came up behind them. Both let out sighs of relief and gave me hugs.

“What happened?” I asked as soon as we all broke away.

“There was a bomb,” Lines said. He glanced at the ruins of his inn behind him. “I think that much should be obvious.”

“Ain’t take much brainpower to figure that out,” Ace said. “Why though? You see it?”

“He told us that some stallions dropped a package off shortly after Gauge and I got back from dinner,” Nova said.

“They were asking for you,” he said, pointing a hoof at me. “When I said you weren’t in, they wanted to take it to your room because it was full of valuable supplies you’d ordered for the next leg of wherever you’re going. I told them I’d take care of it and give it to you as soon as you got back, but they wanted to just take it to your room. Had to threaten to call the guards before they left.” He sighed and hung his head. “Thank Celestia I was making rounds on the third floor when it went off. It was behind my desk waiting for you; I would’ve been incinerated had I been down there.”

I made a face, pulling back my lips in a sneer. “Yeoman did that,” I said. “The bastard doesn’t even have the balls to fight me face to face.”

“The box was probably rigged to blow up as soon as it was opened as well as sitting on a timer circuit,” Gauge said. “That would explain why they’d want to leave it in your room while you were gone.”

“They just dumped the bomb and ran,” Ace said. She spat at the ground. “Pussies.”

“We should be safe now,” Surge said for me, trying to match my way of speaking in front of Lines. “Lines can give the authorities a description, and we already know what Yeoman looks like. They likely fled town as soon as they dropped the bomb.”

Lines and my friends nodded, and I took over and turned to my friends. “Are you two okay?” I asked Gauge and Nova. I took a sniff of the air, and even beneath the ashy smell, I could smell something musky coming from the two of them. I practically grinned from ear to ear and winked at Nova. “Have a good time?”

“Before we were rudely interrupted…” she said. She looked away and her tail flicked a bit. Stars I hoped that poor mare had at least managed to finish once before that bomb went off. I’d have to add ‘cockblocking my best friend by trying to kill her’ to the list of reasons why Yeoman needed to die.

Gauge shot Nova a sympathetic look; I bet he was feeling the same way she was. “We’re both fine,” he said, redirecting his attention back to me. “A little shaken up, but fine. If Lines hadn’t left the bomb downstairs, I don’t think we’d be around right now.” Our eyes darted along the destruction on the first and second floors. “That thing destroyed half of the building, and we were only right next door. It must’ve been antimatter or a fusion core or something. You’d need a lot of conventional explosive to do this much damage.”

“I bet that fucker has antimatter on him,” Ace said. “The Ivory City has a refinery. They ain’t in no short supply.”

If I was drinking something, I’m sure Surge would’ve made me choke on it. As it was, her shock nearly made me drop the cigarette I was trying to put to my lips. “There’s still a working antimatter refinery on Auris?” she asked. “You could cause this much damage with hardly more than a pinhead of it!”

“Rumor has it that most of the machines are broken from disuse, but Reclaimer cobbled together the parts to get one working.” Ace shook her head. “I ain’t got a clue how the whole shit works, only that it does. How much can you make with one of those machines, anyway?”

Surge thought for a moment. “Assuming the rest of the facility is at least in passable condition, you can probably put together a gram a year.”

“That’s not so bad, right?” I asked. I didn’t like the look I got from Nova’s face. “…Right?”

“This was a pinhead’s worth of antimatter, Em,” Nova said, pointing her metal wing at Lines’ destroyed inn. “A gram of that stuff could vaporize a good portion of the city.”

I swallowed hard. That did not bode well. “…How much is a ‘good portion’?”

“Easily three-quarters of it,” Surge said. “A gram of antimatter reacting with a gram of matter releases a tremendous amount of energy. A single gram will produce as much energy as a low-yield nuclear weapon. It will vaporize everything in the immediate vicinity, no questions asked.”

I blinked and thought about that for a moment. The Sentinels must have had miniscule amounts of antimatter in their antimatter rockets; it would explain why they could be so destructive despite being so tiny. And Reclaimer was possibly making a gram of this stuff a year. A couple grams of it could probably flatten a mountain, or at least shear a big chunk off of it. He could destroy Ace’s hometown with an explosive the size of a grenade.

I think even Surge was starting to realize how dangerous this stallion and his city could be.

Nova looked over my shoulder, and I knew something was wrong when her face paled (an impressive feat for somepony with a white coat). I didn’t waste any time spinning about, ready to protect my friends even without my guns and gear.

I was not ready to find myself face to face with at least a dozen incredibly armed mercenaries training their weapons at us.

Ace’s wings instinctively twitched toward her guns, but when a few shotguns were raised up to her chin, she flared her wings out and sat down. The rest of us followed her example, and that left me looking up at a pair of mercenaries walking out of the crowd toward us. One of the two I recognized as the mare Ace had bowled over to get to Lines and my friends. The other looked like a captain of sorts; I guess he was the one in charge here. They both stopped when the mare pointed at the five of us.

“That’s them,” she said. “They were involved in an altercation at the Brass Bank earlier today.”

I blinked, realized what was happening, and indignantly stood up. “Hold on a second!” I protested, managing to close the gap by one step before I had more guns aimed at my head. “Are you going to arrest us? Over this? We’re the victims here!”

“Ember, you’re not helping!” Ace hissed at me.

The leader of the two frowned and stepped closer to me. We were close enough that the two of us could’ve crossed horns if we wanted to. “The only victim from all of this is the city,” he said. “You and that other stallion should’ve handled your business outside of Three Rivers. The Bank works very hard to stay neutral, and they don’t tolerate wandering shitbags like you bringing your petty wars into the valley. So yes, you are under arrest until the Council decides what to do with you.”

He stepped back and gestured with his hoof, and several of the mercs emerged from the crowd and started drawing manacles and nightsticks. I took a few steps back, already trying to think of a way out, but then my vision exploded in bright lights and swirling colors as it felt like somepony kicked me in the brain. The next thing I knew, I was already shackled up and being forced down the street by several guards, my legs moving on a will of their own.

I nearly stumbled as I slipped back into control of my body. I could see my friends behind me and Ace at my side at the head of the column. Ace simply stared dead ahead, refusing to acknowledge me, while the other three walked in sullen silence right over my shoulders.

Did you do that? I asked Surge.

Yes, came her reply.

Why? That hurt!

Because if you kept struggling and making a fuss, then you’d just be making this worse for all of us. I heard her mentally sigh. Especially for me, since I’m unfortunate enough to have to share your body for survival.

Woe is you, I thought back. Don’t ever do that again.

I will promise no such thing, Surge spat back. Sometimes you have to know when to keep your head down. You didn’t last long in the Synarchy if you didn’t learn how to do that. And something tells me you’re the kind of mare who’d bash her head against a wall in protest simply because somepony told you not to.

I grumbled inwardly. Somehow I knew she was right.

-----

Honestly, that night wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night in a cell. Technically. I was a stupid teenager once just like everypony else, and I’d gotten in trouble for doing dumb shit back in Blackwash. I used to steal ponies’ doors and bolt them onto other buildings for shits and giggles simply because I could (yes, really). I’d also ended up spending a few nights in a tiny room in the old barracks at the listening outpost with nothing but four walls, a ceiling, and a floor made of rusting steel. Even though I wasn’t really in any big trouble then, that was torturous enough that the cells in Three River’s jail were nearly heavenly because they had beds and furnishings. Ace didn’t seem to mind them all that much, either. I had a feeling that this was one of the more cushy lockups she’d spent her time in. Lines also looked pretty relaxed, though he didn’t seem as comfortable about it all as Ace did.

Nova and Gauge, on the other hoof, looked like they expected to die here. Gauge did a better job at hiding it than Nova did, but he started pacing and kept pacing for a couple hours. Nova cycled between clinging to the bars, trying to lie down on the ‘bed’ that was really just a blanket on a wooden floor, and sitting in the corner, counting bricks. It wasn’t hard to guess that she thought we were doomed, especially because she said as much every few minutes.

“What if it’s the firing squad?” she asked me. “It shouldn’t hurt to get shot in the head, right? Pony reaction times are about a fifth of a second, a bullet would scramble your brain before it could register the pain—”

“Will you shut up?” Ace hissed at her, covering her ears with her hooves. Nova flinched and drew back, especially when Ace flopped down on the floor. “Celestia fuck! You been at it for hours now, girl! If they ain’t gonna shoot us, I might do it myself for a bit of peace and quiet!”

“Watch it,” I warned her, interceding on behalf of my best friend. I tried to hug Nova and get her to calm down a bit. “They’re not gonna do anything, Nov. They already would’ve if they were.”

“Or they like to pretend that they still have a legal system and due process,” Surge muttered. “At least they can put on a show before they kill us.”

I clamped my muzzle shut to get her to shut up. You are the fucking worst help I could’ve possibly asked for, I thought at her.

Gauge hugged Nova from the other side. “We can only hope that we get a chance to explain ourselves,” he said. “Maybe if they listen to our story, they’ll let us walk.”

“Certainly better than nothing,” Lines grumbled. He groaned and glared at Ace. “Figures, after so many years of being gone, the first night you come back, some thugs blow up half my inn and I get arrested for it.”

Ace flicked a smile at him. “I ain’t never said life weren’t boring when I’m around.”

“For better or for worse. This time, I’m thinking worse.”

“Aww, c’mon, Lines, where’s the stallion I used to know? That inn eat your balls and your sense of humor?”

Lines frowned at her. “If this is what passes as ‘humor’ for you, I’m glad I got out of wandering the wilderness with you two.” His shoulders deflated. “What happened to her, Ace? What happened to Z?”

Any last tidbits of mirth that might have clung onto Ace’s muzzle melted in a second. She hung her head, using her curtain-like mane to hide her eyes. “I’ll… tell you about it later,” she said, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a sad eye pointed in my direction through her mane. “In private. Just… I’m so sorry, Lines. It was all my fault.”

Lines’ features softened, and he slid over to give Ace a supportive hug. “Whatever you think, I know that last part isn’t true,” he said, stroking her neck. “Z would never blame you for it either.”

“You don’t know that…”

A heavy iron door banged open somewhere out of sight, and we all froze. Horseshoes clacked against wooden steps as a pony—several ponies—descended them. The five of us stood up and moved toward the bars, almost on some instinct, and tried to peer through the metal to get a good look at the ponies coming down. We all wanted to know the same question: where they our saviors, or our executioners?

We couldn’t figure that bit out immediately, because it was just a group of armed mercs. One of them, the commander from last night, stuck a key in the latch and pulled the door open wide. “You’re going to the Bank to stand trial,” he said. “The Council wants to know why Reclaimer’s agents are trying to kill you, and why they’d blow up an inn to do so.”

I felt a little bit more relieved by that choice of words. At least the hour we’d spent being interrogated last night was good for something. If this Council knew that we weren’t the aggressors here, then hopefully they’d let us go.

I really hoped for that last bit. I didn’t have enough pyromancies to fight my way out of what was probably the most secure place on Auris. Not like I could remove the ring around my horn preventing me from doing magic anyway.

We fell into a line behind the first group of guards, the chains around our legs clinking and clattering as we climbed the steps. When we climbed back into the light, it felt like everypony in the city had dropped what they were doing to get a glimpse of us. The streets were crowded with curious onlookers, and a few mercs had to shoo them away from us before they could get too close. I felt my skin crawl as these ponies regarded us like simple show animals brought out for their entertainment. At least there wasn’t any jeering or fruit-throwing. They were just curious ponies who wanted to see what all the fuss was about since they had nothing better to do.

Thankfully, the walk to the Brass Bank wasn’t a very long one. The jailhouse was only a block or two away, but we got a good, long look at that dominating building as we walked up to it. It was funny; yesterday, that building seemed so magical and mighty, an inspiring pinnacle of what we could achieve if we just stopped fighting with each other for a few years. Today, however, it frightened me. It was like we were walking into a tomb, and I felt like once we stepped inside, we’d never step out again. I didn’t know what to expect inside… but I doubted it’d be pleasant.

Several more mercenaries opened the doors to the Bank and escorted us inside. An audience had already formed around the perimeter of the room, several ponies deep, but the main floorspace was open and empty. The mercenaries walked the five of us into the center of the room, between all the teller desks, and then took several steps back. All was quiet except for the quiet murmurs of a few hundred ponies—at least, until the far doors opened and several more ponies emerged, one after the other, until seven of them made their way to the far end of the room, where the tellers’ desks had been converted into judge benches or whatever they’re called. I nearly did a double-take when I saw Denarius among their number. He was a member of the Council? I didn’t know that I’d been talking to one of Three Rivers’ leaders this entire time!

Denarius and the other merchants took their seats and shuffled a few papers around. I got a wink from the silver unicorn, and I immediately started breathing a little easier. I could at least count on him to have my back. As for the others, I had no idea where they stood; I just hoped Denarius had pleaded my case with them a little bit beforehand. One of those merchants, an aged unicorn sitting in the center of the group, hammered a gavel three times, and then all was silent.

Honestly, I was just impressed that the Bank was wealthy enough to afford to waste money on symbolic shit like little wooden hammers and teller desks that could be converted into judiciary benches at a moment’s notice.

I was worried that this whole thing was going to be long and boring; if I was going to die, I’d have very much appreciated it if they’d just get on with it and tell me. But when the old unicorn in the middle rolled his eyes and began to speak, I knew that at least some of my fears were unfounded. “I won’t waste your time any more than I expect you to waste mine,” he said, staring right down at me. “My name is Aureus, and I’m the supreme merchant of the Council. Would a representative of the accused step forward so I have somepony specific to talk to?”

Lines looked at Ace, expecting her to step forward, but Ace and my friends all turned to me. I swallowed a groan and reluctantly stepped forward. On the one hoof, I was pretty much the unofficial leader of the group, even if I hardly knew what I was doing half the time. On the other hoof, I couldn’t believe they were trusting their fates with the mare whose favorite word is ‘fuck’.

The old stallion squinted at me through shining spectacles (they even had glassworkers skilled enough to make lenses? Holy shit!). “Can I get a name so I don’t have to talk to you like I’m talking to a wall?”

“Ember,” I said, trying to keep my shaking voice under control. “My name’s Ember.”

Aureus nodded with mild approval, his glossy yellow coat catching the light like gold foil. “Pretty name. I can see why you have it.” He shuffled a few papers but ultimately shoved them to the side of his desk. “I’d like to get to the bottom of this as soon as I can, and I’m sure you’d like to walk away with your head. So, answer our questions, and we’ll let you know if you can keep it or not.”

His blue-gray eyes slid over to Denarius, who respectfully bowed his head and slid his chair back some. “I understand it that you and merchant Denarius are already acquainted?”

I proudly nodded my head. “Yes, sir. We met before me and the Sentinels drove the Crimson out of the northern valley—”

“A simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed,” he said, frowning at me. “Word of advice, filly; only answer what I’m asking you. The more reason you give me to distrust what you have to say, the more likely your blood will be painting the firing wall red in an hour. Let’s keep it simple and only elaborate if asked, okay?”

I was a little taken aback, but I swallowed my emotions and stiffly nodded. “Okay.”

“Sir,” Surge quickly added. Be respectful, you dumb cunt, or we’re all dead.

“Good.” Aureus waved a hoof. “Merchant Denarius spent quite some time pleading your case for us before we took our seats. While I get the feeling that you’re generally a likeable sort, I also get the idea that you’re a dangerous one.” He narrowed his eyes at me, and I swallowed hard and tried to meet his gaze. After a second or two, he nodded to Denarius. “Given your past history, however, Merchant Denarius has recused himself from judgment. You will be answering to us and only us. Am I understood?”

Denarius recusing himself from the trial was almost like a blow to the chest. I’d lost an ally I was hoping I could count on, but I doubted the matter was entirely his choice. At any rate, he’d apparently been trying to convince them of my innocence, which I appreciated enough. Now I just had to hold my own here.

I bowed my head. “Understood, sir.”

“Good. Now, for the actual meat of the matter.” He leaned forward a bit, squinting through bleary eyes at me. “You said you were a Sentinel?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Concerned murmuring broke out around me, and a few of the Merchants exchanged looks. Aureus seemed surprised, if only slightly so; his eyebrow hardly moved, but it did move. “We heard your organization drove Carrion and the Crimson from Celestia Dam and reopened the trade network between Three Rivers and the northern valley. Until recently, only Merchant Denarius and Merchant Floren were brave enough to make the journey.” He glanced briefly at Denarius and a pink mare sitting beside him, and they both flickered smiles back. “What is your rank? How long have you been with the Sentinels? I’d like to know if I’m talking to an officer or a grunt.”

“I’m a sergeant, sir,” I said, even earning a little inward surprise from Surge; I don’t think we’d talked much about my time in the Sentinels since she jumped into my head. “I was promoted after the battle at the dam. Truth be told, I was only with the Sentinels for a couple of weeks beforehand, but they needed replacements following the battle.”

“I see.” His horn flared blue as he scratched some notes down on a piece of paper I couldn’t see. “And are you still a member of their organization?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I would like to know what an active-duty sergeant from the Sentinels is doing this far south. You’re well outside of your territory, that’s for sure.”

I debated what to say next. Did I tell him about the code and my mission? I had to tell him something, because I hadn’t left much wiggle room for me to lie. If I claimed I wasn’t here on some mission, then he’d claim that I was lying to him about my position in the Sentinels. And I had a feeling that if the Council smelled the slightest bit of deceit on my part, they wouldn’t feel so bad about blowing my brains out later. Not to mention the brains of all my friends.

But a lie of omission couldn’t hurt, right? “Commander Fusillade sent me on a mission that would take me outside of the valley,” I said. “I’m afraid I can’t say any more than that. It’s classified.”

Aureus didn’t seem to like that very much. “Everypony has their secrets,” he admitted, “but the secrets of ponies like the Sentinels are always concerning to the common folk like us. You never know what a group of ponies with access to much more technology than they should own will decide to do with it at any given moment.” He shook his head and glanced at his notes. “What about the rest of your friends? Are they Sentinels too?”

I shook my head. “No, sir.”

“Then where are they from and why are they traveling with you?” He nodded to Lines. “I understand that this stallion here owns the inn that was bombed, but I don’t know very much about the other three.”

“These two are simply my friends,” I said, pointing to Nova and Gauge. “They’re traveling with me to simply help me out. We’ve been best friends since we were foals.”

“And the other?”

Ace glanced at me, though I couldn’t really read what she was trying to say. Neither could Surge, because she didn’t offer me any helpful hints. “She’s… from Thatch,” I said, deciding to leave out the ‘outlaw’ part. That was just common sense not to include that. “Mercenary and former Ruin Runner. We ran into each other up near Hole and we’ve stuck together since.”

Aureus wrote some more things down and the other Merchants murmured to one another. You’re talking too much, Surge hissed at me. Everything you say gives them another angle to try and kill us!

I wanted to retort, but she was right. I could see it in the way Aureus looked at me, and I knew exactly what he was going to ask next. “What were you doing in Hole?”

“We had to stop there for supplies,” I said. “It took us two weeks to navigate the mountain pass that separates the valley from the interior of the continent.”

“Is that so?” Aureus said, steepling his hooves. “I can’t fathom why two mares with property branding on their flanks would stop at the center of Auris’ slave trade for supplies. If I were you, I would’ve passed by, consequences be damned.”

“We were desperate,” I said. It was truth enough; we were nearly out of supplies and we needed information. And, amazingly enough, it’d all worked out for the best. We all escaped in one piece, met Ace, and got a hint as to where the next installation was. “We didn’t have much of a choice.”

One of the Merchants whispered something into Aureus’ ear, and the old stallion simply nodded. “We’ve heard reports from merchants heading that way that there were many disturbances at Hole some time ago. There was a slave revolt at the RPR headquarters and a good number of the city’s guards were killed in cold blood. Would you happen to know anything about that?”

Lie, Surge insisted. If you tell him the truth, we’re dead.

I shook my head. “That happened before we arrived.”

“Is that so?” Aureus narrowed his eyes at me, but when I unwaveringly met his gaze, he shrugged and began idly spinning the gavel in his magic. “If you insist. We have other matters I’d like to discuss anyway. Like the incident that happened in this very building yesterday.” He glanced down the line at a purple mare with silver-streaked green hair. “Merchant Drachma has the records from yesterday as the Bank’s Merchant of the floor.”

I swallowed hard. This was going to be fun.

Drachma cleared her throat and fixed me with a deadly stare through sharp eyes; I realized that she was the youngest and seemingly most energetic of the Merchants, maybe only a few winters older than I was. It certainly carried through her voice when she spoke. “Yesterday, just past lunch, you interrupted the closing deals of a business transaction with a stallion by the name of Yeoman, independent representative of the Ivory City. Your confrontation nearly came to blows, and were it not for our guards, it likely would have.” She raised an eyebrow. “Is this accurate? Or am I mistaken?”

Fuck that bitch; she knew it was accurate, she was simply daring me to try and correct her. I bit back my pride and simply nodded. “It is.”

I could at least deny her the ‘ma’am’.

“I see.” She pulled out another piece of paper. “You claimed during your interrogations last night that Yeoman was responsible for planting the bomb in the inn in the hopes of killing you and your friends. Is this accurate?”

There was an opening there, and I knew I had to take it. “Yes, that’s right. Yeoman had his lackeys leave a package at the inn that was intended for us. Thankfully, since we weren’t there, Lines left it at the front desk, where it blew up some time later. Otherwise, he’d have killed us, and a lot more ponies might have died if it’d been taken to the higher floors where we were staying.” I took a step forward, at least as far as I could without the guards frowning at me too much. “I’d like to reiterate that never did I draw a weapon on Yeoman, and I didn’t blow up the inn. I confronted him with words, and he confronted us with a bomb.”

“A bomb that would not have been planted in the first place had you two kept your squabbling outside of our city,” Aureus said, taking over once more. “We are fiercely defensive of our neutrality, Ember. You must understand. The only ones who profit from war are those who don’t participate in the fighting themselves, and as you can see, Three Rivers is very wealthy. There has been a war raging far to the east between Thatch and Ivory City, and whoever wins it will become the most powerful faction on the planet. It has been exceedingly profitable for the Bank, but I do worry about how it will resolve.”

“So you should throw your support in behind Thatch,” I said, quickly glancing at Ace. “You probably know a lot more about Reclaimer and the Ivory City than I do, since I’ve lived in an isolated corner of the north valley all my life. I didn’t even know the rest of this planet existed until the Crimson burned down my village in the middle of the night. But do you really want to let the Ivory City win? They’ll conquer the rest of the world if they do!”

“As will Thatch,” Aureus said, frowning. “They may champion democracy and liberty, but their leader is just as much of a despot as Reclaimer is. She will take the Ivory City’s arsenal and demand that the rest of the settlements of Auris fall under Thatch’s rule. Either way, Auris ends up under the hoof of a king or a queen. The only difference is in how they carry themselves.” He dismissively waved his hoof. “Let them fight, and let them destroy each other. It’s what’s best for the planet.”

“What about the Sentinels?” I asked him.

He raised his eyebrow. “What about them?”

“If you lent aid and support to the Sentinels, helped them consolidate the valley, they could use their tech to help end the war and make sure that nopony gets too greedy in the aftermath.” I was really grasping at straws here; I needed to prove to him that I was worth keeping alive, not executing and getting rid of.

“I don’t think your trial is the proper time and place to discuss trade deals,” Aureus scoffed. “There will come a time when we are in more proper contact, not discussing deals with an estranged sergeant far from her home and her authority. At any rate, your presence threatens the neutrality we have worked hard to build. Not just between Thatch and the Ivory City, but with Hole as well. The way that I see it, executing you or enslaving you would please the Ivory City and Hole, while Thatch has never heard of you and the Sentinels are too far away to respond in any capacity.”

My breath caught in my throat. “Killing us isn’t going to make the problem go away. There will come a time when Three Rivers is going to have to choose who to support. If you kill me, you’re going to piss off the Sentinels, and you might need them later.”

Aureus thought for a moment. “Yes, it’s true that there may come a time when our neutrality can no longer shield us,” he said. “And we have discussed it many times. Right now, there is a storm gathering. I can sense it, as can anypony connected to the happenings between the settlements. Pieces are being moved by hooves we can’t see, and I have a feeling that you’re one of them.”

I blinked, utterly lost. Where did this come from? Suddenly, I had a feeling that Aureus knew a lot more about what was going on than he let on. Just how much can you learn when you have merchants going to every corner of civilization left on the planet?

He leaned forward, becoming a bit more imposing from his new position. “I don’t feel like I like you very much, truth be told. I’m not sure whether executing you and your friends would be nipping a problem in the bud or letting it spiral out of control. All I do know is that for some reason you’ve tangled with Reclaimer’s right hoof and he saw it necessary to violate this city’s laws of neutrality to kill you. That is an injustice that I find more problematic and dangerous than the tenuous position you hold between all the different factions of this planet.

“But it is not my position alone to judge whether or not to pull the trigger,” he continued. “This is why we have a council. We’ve all formed our opinions over the course of this discussion, and I think it’s time we decided.” He glanced around the room, and the other Merchants save Denarius nodded at him. “Good. Those in favor of sparing the Sentinel, Ember, and her companions, stand up.”

I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I looked over that line of ponies. My life and the lives of my friends all hung in the balance. I was trying very hard not to move or even breathe in case one of the Merchants used that as an excuse to condemn us to death.

The first pony to stand was the brown stallion sitting to Denarius’ right. “Apart from the incident on the bank floor yesterday, this mare has done nothing wrong,” he said. “While her presence is a danger to our city’s neutrality, the greater offender is Yeoman. I will note that he and his guards could not be found in the city today for testimony, and witnesses claim that they left yesterday within the timeframe that the innkeep claims the bomb was delivered and it detonated. These five ponies are innocent victims with targets on their backs that Yeoman was willing to violate our neutrality to destroy.”

Denarius remained seated, recused from the trial as he was, and the mare to his left crossed her legs and simply watched me with disapproval. I saw Aureus swing his gaze from his right to his left, waiting to see what the other three Merchants decided. I had a feeling he wanted to wait to see what everypony else decided before he picked up the burden of being the final vote.

The stallion to his left remained stoic and impassive, and Drachma openly sneered at me. I swallowed hard and tried to keep my knees from shaking too much. If either Aureus or the last mare voted no, all of us were dead.

After a moment’s thought, the mare stood up. “The Sentinels are a growing force in the north, and Thatch separates us from the Ivory City. Slavery is outlawed in Three Rivers, and the only thing Hole exports are slaves and guards to extort our merchants as they pass to the northern settlements. I feel it’s in our best interests to let them walk for now. Cultivate closer business ties with those who can pay, rather than trying to appease a minority share of our revenue.”

Her standing removed some of the crushing weight from my shoulders. Now it came down to Aureus, and if he stood, it’d be three against three. I didn’t know what they’d do in a tie, but hopefully it wouldn’t end with us dead or locked up in prison.

Aureus looked over his notes, frowned, glanced at us, frowned some more, and went back to his notes. Eventually, though, I saw his shoulders tense, and to all of our collective relief, he began to stand. When he’d stretched his aging limbs to their limits, he slowly dipped his head toward us. “It would be easy to remain quiet and condemn you to death,” he said. “But the easiest solution usually is not the right solution, in business or in life.” His eyes wandered to Denarius, who looked relieved to see me not getting sentenced to death. “Were Denarius allowed, I know he would stand. I may not know you like he does, but he is a good stallion, and I trust his judgment. That is why I stand for him.”

I felt the need to say something, so I bowed my head. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re not out of the woods yet,” he reminded me in a tone of voice that could be described as snappy. “The Council is split, three and three. We will need to deliberate further and come to a consensus as to what to do with you.”

Surge preemptively clenched my jaw shut before I could say anything stupid. I hated her for it, but she probably had the right idea. We didn’t have the time to wait for the Council to decide what to do with us, and there wasn’t any guarantee that we’d be walking free. Drachma and the others could just as easily convince Aureus and those in favor of sparing us over to their side. But we needed to leave the city today; the more of a head start Yeoman got on us, the worse off we’d be, even if Surge supposedly knew where the next installation was located.

“In the interest of time, however,” Aureus began, interrupting my thoughts, “we should consult with those who have gathered here. The people of Three Rivers are the final jury, and in a decision such as this, it is only fair that they play a part.” He sat back down, and the other two ponies standing followed suit. “If there is anypony in the crowd who knows those on trial and wishes to speak on their behalf, please do so, now.”

I stepped back toward my friends and nervously chewed on my lips. Who did we even know here? The waiters from the restaurants we ate at yesterday? Ace probably knew a few more influential voices, and Lines lived here. Surely somepony would have something positive to say.

To my surprise, not a single pony stepped forward. But that didn’t mean nobody stepped forward. I saw movement to my left, and I saw two familiar striped faces walk out of the crowd and onto the open floor. “We shall testify for them,” Mawari said. “They saved my life and the life of my brother as well.”

Aureus raised an eyebrow. “You’re with the Runners, aren’t you? Very well, explain.”

“We were at the abandoned foundry north of Bluewater Gorge not too long ago,” Mawari said, stepping forward into the spotlight. “A tolan attacked and the noise angered a wailer nest inside the compound. They happened to arrive at the foundry at the same time, and together we managed to fight off the wailers and kill the tolan.” She looked at me and nodded. “I would trust her with my life. She can only be a good thing for Auris if left alive. And profitable to the Runners and the rest of us with her invaluable assistance.”

Denawa simply bowed his head, though I caught a quick dirty look from the corner of his eye. Doubtless he was pissed about what Ace had done to the foundry, but thankfully didn’t say anything about it. “I agree.”

“Interesting,” Aureus said. Then he looked at me. “I don’t believe I have to really ask you if this shining testimony is true or not.”

I smiled a little bit. “It is.”

“So it would seem.” He looked out over the crowd. “Are there any other voices that wish to make themselves heard?” When nopony moved or stepped forward, he smiled softly to the other ponies at the front of the room. “I do believe that settles it, then. When the Council is hung, our noble jury decides, and its voice has spoken.”

He picked up the gavel with his magic and twirled it once in the air. “At the conclusion of these proceedings, the Council finds you innocent on charges to disrupt and damage the neutrality of our city. You will be allowed to walk free and take your belongings with you. However, given your part in the events that led up to the bombing last night, you shall receive no reparations from the Bank for your time spent in custody, nor will you be welcome in this city for longer than twenty-four hours. Your presence is still a threat to our neutrality, and I don’t want to see another inn bombed.” He struck the hammer with resounding finality. “This case is adjourned.”

I’m pretty sure you could’ve heard my sigh of relief all the way from Blackwash. Nova and Gauge hugged each other, Nova practically squeaking and cheering with joy. Lines wiped some sweat off his brow, and Ace smiled at me. It was a little thing, but I loved the quick flash I got of it. I could tell that some of the crowd around us were disappointed that they weren’t gonna see heads roll, but I didn’t care. I got to keep my head and that was all that mattered.

Fuck, as soon as I got my shit back, I was gonna dip into my cigarette box. I needed a celebratory smoke after all this bullshit.

My eyes found Mawari and I offered her a grateful nod. I would’ve gone over to her and thanked her personally, but the guards were already moving in on us to undo our bindings and probably escort us back to the jailhouse where all our shit was. I did know that I needed to say hello to her before we left here. I at least owed her that much—and possibly an explanation for what Ace did to the foundry.

Still, when I stepped outside into the fresh air, I couldn’t help but smile and relax. We were alive for another day. Even if we died tomorrow, we still had a day I wasn’t sure we’d have when I woke up this morning.

It was up to us to make the most of it.

Chapter 24: The Ruin Runners

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Chapter 24: The Ruin Runners

Thankfully it didn’t take too long for us to get our stuff back. Really, I didn’t care that we had to wait, I was just happy that everything was fine. I still had my rifle and all our bullets, and our supplies were in one piece. And yes, I did have that celebratory smoke. I finally stopped jittering after going half a day without a smoke.

Auris-grown tobacco is strong. Seriously, kids, don’t try it. You’ll end up like me, and I guarantee you that’s a bad thing. I don’t even want to be me sometimes.

But seeing as how we weren’t ready to leave Three Rivers just yet, the five of us ended up sitting at a table on the ground floor of Lines’ inn. For now, guards kept watch over the front of the shattered building, at least to prevent looters from raiding the place. And despite the damage, Lines still had travelers to house, so he tried to keep things running as best as he could. Really, all he had to do was get the bodies out of some of the shattered rooms. Gruesome as it sounds, the mercenaries took care of it quickly, so at least there wasn’t much in the way of that death smell. Just the smell of burnt timbers.

Lines and Ace had a bottle of whiskey they passed between them that Lines had opened up shortly after we were released. I wasn’t sure if they were drinking to celebrate or to forget what had happened. I’m pretty sure it was the latter for Lines, and probably Ace as well. She didn’t need much of an excuse to try and get blackout drunk, and as of last night, I finally understood why. For once, I didn’t look on her drinking habit with disgust, only sadness.

Nova and Gauge sat side by side, each with a cup of coffee between their hooves. After letting the silence linger on for some time, Nova was the first to break it. “I’m really sorry about your inn.”

Lines scoffed and took the bottle back from Ace. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “I’m just glad that those bastards didn’t accomplish what they were hoping for.”

“It’s still our fault that they planted the bomb in the first place,” I insisted. “They wouldn’t have blown up half your inn if we weren’t here or I didn’t make an ass of myself yesterday.”

“What are you going to do?” Gauge asked. “Do you need bullets to repair the damage?”

Lines waved his hoof. “If it’s charity you’re offering me, I’ll pass,” he said. “I don’t need it from you. I have enough stored away to last, and the Bank’s always willing to put down a loan on an enterprising business. Plus, anything left behind from the travelers who died in the blast, I get to auction off and keep the profits. That’ll pad expenses some.” He took a swig from the bottle and slid it back to Ace. “The bitch of the matter’s gonna come from just fixing the damn place up. That’ll take time and the hit on my reputation will affect the bottom line, but I’ll get over it.”

“Or you could dump this place and come with us,” Ace said. “We’re doing important shit out there. Ain’t like you to just sit in a place like this with your hoof up your ass, pretending you’re a pretty businesspony.”

“Ace…” Lines tapped his hooves on the table. “I told you I’m done with that shit. We all had our adventures when we were younger, but now we’re grown up.”

“Supposedly,” Ace quipped, smirking the tiniest amount.

“I know you still think you’re a stupid teenager who’s gonna live forever,” Lines said, flickering a tired smile for the briefest of seconds. Then that expression fell away and he was just… tired. “I swore I wasn’t going to do any of that stuff anymore. I had enough of it when we were Runners. I wanted to settle down and live a peaceful life with the bullets I put away. Maybe start a family and run a business. I’m not going to give up on that now.”

Ace frowned. “How’s that going for you?” she said, gesturing to the damage all around us. “I ain’t seeing no wife or pretty children. I ain’t seeing any profits in your immediate future.”

“And who’s fault is that?” he bit back. “Ace, trouble follows you like your own damn shadow. It’s practically nailed to you like a shoe. It’s the first time I see you in years and it isn’t even a full day before ponies are trying to kill us again.” He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Z was stupid and she followed you when you convinced her you two could be big badass mercs and heroes of the wilderness. And look where that got her.”

I saw Ace pinch her wings inward and place a trembling hoof against the table to steady it. “That mare was a braver bitch than both of us put together,” she managed through her shaking voice. “And you don’t have to try to sleep knowing it’s your fault she died.”

“I already struggle to sleep because I know whose fault it was. I know that she left to follow you and I can’t help but wonder if I could’ve stopped her if I tried harder.”

Ace’s wings began to tremble. “You don’t know nothing…”

“No. I don’t. Because apparently one of my best friends died years ago and I only just now hear about it because you happened to be passing through.” He sneered at Ace, but I could tell just from looking at him that it was hollow anger to hide his own agony. “I’m not following you out there just to die like Z did. I don’t owe you anything.”

Ace stared at the grain in the table, but she kept her lips sealed. After a few seconds of looming behind her, Lines scowled and turned around without a word. Me and Nova and Gauge all watched him walk back to the staircase and disappear to the higher floors, leaving just the three of us down here with an outlaw who was struggling to maintain her composure.

Say something to her, Surge insisted.

I slid around the table and took Lines’ seat, placing one hoof on Ace’s back. Carefully setting my lit cigarette on the edge of the table so I wouldn’t get the smoke in her face, I leaned in to comfort her. “He’s just upset, Ace,” I said. “He didn’t mean that shit.”

“Yeah,” Nova chimed in. “I’m sure he’s just stressed out by all this. Give him some time to calm down.” She shot me a confused look; I’d nearly forgotten that only I really knew what happened to Ace’s marefriend all that time ago. I nodded to let her know she was at least along the right track and being helpful, but nothing more. Now definitely wasn’t the time to explain all that to her and Gauge, and besides, it wasn’t my place to anyway. Ace could do that later if she wanted.

Clumsy hooves fiddled with the bottle of booze. It seemed like it took her some effort to get the opening to her lips, and even then, enough of it dribbled down her chin to make it glisten. I noticed that I was starting to use my hoof more and more to support Ace, not just comfort her; she was starting to sway pretty badly, and it seemed like the several gulps she took from the bottle were only making it worse. I debated whether to pry it away from her or not, and ultimately decided to do so. She could get blackout drunk later if she wanted to. That wasn’t something we needed to deal with now.

She glared at me as the bottle floated to the other end of the table. “Give it back,” she demanded, trying to stretch across the table for it. “I need that.”

“You don’t need any more right now,” I insisted. Sighing, I helped Ace sit upright and wrapped my leg around her shoulders. “Listen, we’ve gotta be out of this town by nightfall. Let’s just focus on getting our shit in order, alright? You can get fucking trashed sometime when we aren’t on a schedule.”

“What do we need to do?” Gauge asked me. “We already stocked up on supplies and everything yesterday. We’re pretty set for the road, I think.”

“And I have an idea where the installation is,” Surge said, shifting my voice into her accent. “Whenever we’re ready to leave, I can guide us there.”

“I don’t want to leave without stopping by the Ruin Runners first,” I said, catching a flicker of surprise from Ace. “Mawari and Denawa pulled through for us there. They’re the reason we’re free now. We at least have to stop in and talk to them.”

Ace shuddered. “I ain’t want nothing to do with them bastards again,” she said. “I was done with them years ago. I ain’t going back.”

Nova blinked. “Didn’t you grow up with them? Were they not kind to you?”

“I got used like every other colt and filly: helping them get into small places that they couldn’t reach. I saw too many ponies younger than ten winters get killed in those places.” She shook her head. “They taught me a lot, but I survived thanks to Lines and Z and myself. Not them. I don’t owe them nothing and that’s why I spat in their faces when they tried to make us regulars when we turned fifteen.”

I touched her hoof to try and comfort her some. “If you don’t want to go, that’s fine. Just point us in the right direction and we’ll take care of it ourselves.”

Ace seemed surprisingly torn. Her eyes shifted between me, the bottle of whiskey, my friends, and the staircase that Lines disappeared up. Eventually, she sighed and slid her chair back. “It’s on the other side of town. You ain’t gonna find it without my help.” Standing up, she snatched the bottle of whiskey with her wing and took several gulps straight from the source. She grimaced, corked it, and set it inside her bags. “Let’s just get this shit over with.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Fuck it. Let’s just get moving before I change my mind.”

I glanced at Nova and Gauge, who simply shrugged back at me. “Alrighty then,” I said, standing up and collecting my things. My friends did the same, and Gauge sharply whistled at SCaR, which ceased its patrolling around the room to go fly back to his head. When we had all our shit together, I nodded to Ace. “Lead the way.”

“Right.” Ace nodded and turned around, managing to cross the floor with only a little bit of swaying. I was glad that I cut her off where I did; I don’t think she would’ve been in much condition to go anywhere had she any more to drink. And seriously, it was hardly past lunch. We may have twenty-eight hour days, but most ponies still wait until four or five in the afternoon to start drinking like that. Ace didn’t really have that restraint. I wondered how much she spent on whiskey.

…Then again, I was up to five cigarettes a day. I spent a lot of money on cigarette cartons, because who knew when the next time I’d manage to limp my way back to a town or someplace to trade for them would be? I had to stock up to feed my habit, because holy shit did I start to get the jitters if I’d gone four or five hours since my last smoke.

Which reminded me to grab the still-burning cigarette I’d put on the table earlier and stick it between my lips. There was good tobacco left in it, and I wasn’t going to waste it if I could help it.

The four of us stepped out into the sunlight, past the mercs standing in front of the fucked up inn. I couldn’t help but look around myself at the sights and sounds of Three Rivers. The Brass Bank still loomed overhead, now less wondrous and more imposing than it had been when we first arrived. It was merely a building, but it felt like it was the face and voice of the city, its heart and its pulse. The Brass Bank was Three Rivers. And the Bank didn’t want me here anymore.

“I’m glad we got to enjoy it for at least a day,” Nova said, trying to remain positive. “Even if they are kicking us out, it was awesome. Maybe we’ll be able to come back one day.”

“There’s good in this city like we haven’t seen since leaving the Sentinels,” Gauge said. “This town could be a model for the future. Minus some of the ridiculous bits, like killing anybody who starts trouble with no questions asked.”

“Yeah, that’d be good to scrap, I think,” I agreed. “It certainly almost got us executed.”

“I’m simply impressed that ponykind has been able to rebuild this quickly,” Surge said, voicing her thoughts. “Even if it did take nearly two hundred revolutions for the survivors to pick up the pieces and start putting them back together. I can’t possibly imagine the carnage being cut off from Equus could have caused.”

“Well you saw a glimpse of it when we were all trying to break into your installation and shit,” I said. I glanced at Ace, who was simply waiting for us a bit further down the stilted street, and flicked my cigarette butt into the water. “Come on, let’s get going.”

We rejoined Ace, and she started leading us toward the far east edge of town. At some point, we shifted districts or something. I’d seen a few zebras wandering around closer to the Brass Bank, but now there were a lot more of them. There were more lower bunkhouses at this end of Three Rivers than there were closer to the center of town, and the zebras seemed to populate most of them. I’d hesitate to call this the poor district of Three Rivers, but only because their poor was roughly the same as what I’d known growing up in Blackwash. Most of the ponies and zebras were vaguely dirty and spotted with grime, but they’d at least bathed themselves within the past week. They seemed like blue collar workers, for as much as blue collar and white collar really exist past the fall of civilization. I recognized the outfits of dockhooves and mechanics and peddlers, which was markedly different from the innkeeps and waiters and bankers closer to the Bank. It was just kind of amazing that the poor of Three Rivers were the same as the wealthy in Blackwash, for as much as we really had classes or anything.

“I’m not used to seeing this many zebras,” Gauge said as we walked past yet another group of striped equines talking near the edge of the platform. “Have they all just been hiding here?”

“Thatch’s got a decent population of zebras,” Ace said over her shoulder. “Mostly poor souls we can get away from Reclaimer. He and the Ivory City want to enslave or exterminate them all. ‘Ponies first’ and that bullshit.”

“Reminds me of the rhetoric at home,” Surge said through my voice. “The Synarchy rounded up most of the zebras over the course of our wars and either sent them into camps and servitude or shipped them to Auris for menial labor.”

“That’s horrible!” Nova exclaimed. “You can’t just do that!”

“I’d love to hear how you justified that, Sparky,” Gauge said.

“The Zebra Tribes were our enemies,” Surge said. “Equestria’s zebra population posed a direct threat from within. So we quarantined it and treated it before it could hurt us.”

Gauge rolled his eyes. “When I said that, I didn’t actually want you to tell me.”

“It must pain you to see all these zebras walking free,” I muttered to Surge.

“The Bank could improve its profits by several percentage points if it enslaved the zebras,” Surge said. “Then they wouldn’t have to be paid and they could be driven to work harder.”

I noticed I was starting to get some funny looks from a few of the zebras we passed. And by funny, I mean angry. Ace noticed too, even as inebriated as she was, and she cleared her throat. “I think you should keep your trap shut there, Sparky. We don’t need no trouble from the good citizens here.”

“Yeah, really,” Gauge grumbled.

Surge harrumphed but let go of my vocal chords, so I didn’t have to keep looking like a blathering racist idiot in front of all these zebras. Which is always a good thing. At the very least, she kept quiet until we found ourselves standing in front of a modest building dominating the end of a dead end street.

“That’s the Ruin Runners’ headquarters?” Surge asked in disbelief. “It looks squalid.”

After seeing the clean glory of the Brass Bank, I had to agree with Surge. Sheet metal and salvaged materials kept the two story structure together, and there weren’t any windows, only open air. The building wasn’t even symmetrical, and the whole thing looked cobbled together. Honestly, it was a lot less than I was expecting.

“Proud of their heritage to the very last,” Ace spat. “They’re scavengers and they want everypony to know it. Not like it does them any favors, looking like that when the Bank’s still in eyesight.” She angled her head toward the side, where the Brass Bank loomed over the rest of the city, plainly visible even this far away.

“Aren’t they wealthy, though?” Gauge asked. “These people make a living off of crawling around old Equestrian installations. Surely they find a lot of tech and bullets when they do so.”

“Like I said, all part of the charm.” Rolling her shoulders, Ace started advancing on the building. “Never thought I’d be back here,” she muttered to herself.

The doors to the Ruin Runners’ headquarters were open wide, so we could just walk in. The main entrance only had a single desk at the far end, placed in front of a doorway that went to the rest of the building. A few ponies and zebras idly talked in this lobby, their eyes briefly wandering over the four of us before they returned to their conversations. I couldn’t tell if they were Runners or just ponies here on business or whatever, because as far as I could tell, there weren’t any uniforms or anything to identify Runners with.

A unicorn mare at the desk set aside some papers as we approached. “Ruin Runners. Are you here on an appointment or do you have information you’d like to sell?”

“We’re just here to talk to some zebras,” Ace said, frowning at the receptionist. “Ain’t planning on being here long.”

The receptionist’s gray ears raised before her eyes followed. It took her a second to look Ace over before she blinked once in disbelief. “Ace?” she asked, squinting at the outlaw. “That you?”

“Surprised, Shady?” Ace responded. “I told you lot I didn’t need you to make it out there. I ain’t dead yet.”

The mare Ace called Shady sighed. “You know I wasn’t a part of your spat with Wayward,” she said. “I just never thought I’d see you again.” Ruby eyes quickly scanned the rest of us. “What about Zephyr? Is she still with you?”

Ace closed her eyes for a few brief moments. “No,” was all she said.

“Oh…” Shady looked genuinely hurt; it was hard to imagine her as some uncaring scavenger like Ace wanted us to believe. “I’m sorry, Ace.”

The outlaw at least had the courtesy to nod instead of throwing the apology back at Shady. “We just want to talk to two zebras going by Mawari and Denawa,” she said. “We won’t be bothering y’all none more than that.”

“Of course. They should be in.” Shady offered a brief smile. “I’m sure you know the way around.”

“Unfortunately.” Ace looked around and noted the ponies waiting off to the sides. “Wayward ain’t in?”

“He’s off doing business with the Bank,” Shady said. “He should be back soon. You want to see him? Make amends?”

“No.” It was a single word, but the venom behind it coupled with the angry glare she cast at Shady told me just what Ace thought of who I assumed was the pony in charge of the Ruin Runners. Poor Shady wilted under that baleful glare, and her eyes dropped back to the papers on her desk. Ace didn’t say anything else as she skirted past the desk and toward the door, short tail angrily flicking from side to side as she walked.

I shot Shady a sympathetic look as we walked past as well, though I don’t know if she saw it or not, focused on her work as she was. I would’ve stopped to say something, maybe ask a little bit more about what Ace’s deal with the Runners was, but I figured keeping Ace waiting was a bad idea. It was abundantly clear that she didn’t want to spend any more time in this place than she had to and wanted to leave before Wayward came back from his business at the Bank.

There was surprisingly little through the door beyond Shady’s desk. When we stepped through, we were presented with three choices: a big door on the right that looked locked, a staircase going up, and a big, open communal room on the left. Furniture, a stove, and a fireplace decorated the communal room, and a bunch of ponies and zebras sat around on the numerous couches or at the few tables in the room. There were even groups of dirty fillies and colts whose eyes had seen way too much for ponies their ages. One colt of about ten winters was missing an eye, and a filly hobbled around on three legs, her left foreleg just missing entirely. I guess Ace wasn’t exaggerating about that part. I still didn’t really know what to think of this place and these people.

Ace shuddered in the doorway. “They’re over there,” she said, pointing to the far end of the communal room where a group of zebras talked around a table. “You can go talk to them if you want. I ain’t gonna hang around here no more.”

“Are you alright, Ace?” Nova asked. “You’re really on edge.”

“I don’t wanna be here,” Ace insisted. “Have your talk and get out of here before Wayward gets back. If I see the fucker, I might blow his brains out, and we don’t need to fetch us a one-way ticket to the wall.”

“Especially not after all we went through to be standing here in the first place…” Surge muttered.

I seized control of my mouth and shook my head. “Thanks, Ace,” I said, patting her on the back. “Just go chill for a bit. We’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Y’all better be,” she grumbled. Abruptly turning in place, Ace stormed out of the door, shouldering the main doors to the building open and moving somewhere out of sight. Me and Nova and Gauge looked at each other and shrugged. Honestly, this was probably just the best we could do for her right now. Hopefully she’d have some time to cool down later and maybe talk about what was up. I suddenly found myself really interested in her real reason for hating the Ruin Runners for some reason.

And it looked like our little commotion had caught the attention of a bunch of ponies and zebras in the room. I saw Mawari and Denawa watching us from the far corner of the room, their expressions equal parts surprise and bemusement. Waving to them, I decided to cut away all that arguing with Ace and everything by trotting right across the room and joining their table. “Hey Mawari, Denawa,” I said to them each in turn. “It feels like it’s been forever since I saw you two, right?”

My joke earned a little chuckle from Mawari and an eye roll from Denawa. “I could’ve sworn it was only a few hours ago,” Mawari said. Standing up, she left her brother and friends at the table to give me a hug. “It is good to see you again. After what happened at the foundry, I felt like we owed you one for helping deal with the tolan.”

Denawa didn’t seem so pleased. Baring his teeth, he hopped off of his seat and put himself almost nose to nose with me. “I didn’t want to, you know,” he said. “Not after what you did to the warehouse!”

I blinked, remembering what Ace had done to it. “That wasn’t—!”

“All of that fortune, gone!” he spat. “We could’ve lived like kings! The Ruin Runners could’ve had some solid credit to pay off the Bank with! And then you blew it up! All of it! There’s hardly anything left of the foundry other than a carbonized crater!” He hooked his foreleg around my shoulders and pulled me in close until I could feel his breath on my cheek. “Eight of us died trying to get that warehouse open, and you blew it to smithereens after you helped yourself to its armory! Fuck you!”

He shoved me back, and Nova and Gauge had to catch me before I hit the ground. Then Nova left my side, leaving Gauge to help me stand, and stood between me and Denawa. Though she was shorter than him, she puffed up her chest and held her wings out at her sides, making herself seem larger than she was. And given the metal death wing attached to her shoulder, she was definitely successful in that. “That wasn’t us!” she argued. “We didn’t even know that was going to happen until we left! Ace did that, not us!”

“She was with you!” Denawa shot back, growling and baring his teeth. “This is your fault!”

“Hey!” Mawari exclaimed, stepping between the two of them. “Cut it out! I don’t think Ember and her friends came here to start a fight.” Her eyes swiveled to me. “Right?”

I shook my head. “I just wanted to say thanks,” I said. “If you two hadn’t intervened at the trial, we’d probably be sitting in a cell right now with no certainty we’d ever walk free. I feel like I at least owed you two a visit. And you did invite me to stop by when I was in Three Rivers,” I added with a wink.

Mawari smiled and stepped forward. “Like I said, it was the least we could do to repay the favor. Though the Bank is the face of the city, the Ruin Runners carry our fair share of influence as well.” Then her smile fell into a moderate frown, like a softer, kinder version of the glare her brother was giving me. “Though you did cost us a fortune. Denawa’s right to be upset about that. There were untold thousands and thousands of bullets in that warehouse, and now they’re all gone.”

“Like Nova said, that wasn’t our fault,” I said, pointing my hoof at the three of us. “That was our friend Ace’s idea. She did it without telling us. Said that she didn’t trust anypony with the kind of firepower and ordinance that was inside of that warehouse.”

“Then it sounds like she at least has good morals, if not the best way of implementing them,” Mawari said.

I chuckled. “You’re preaching to the choir.” Then after a second, I added, “But I’ve got some good news for you.”

“Oh?” Mawari asked, raising an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“We found that place at Bluewater Gorge.”

That got their attention, as well as the attention of a few other Ruin Runners in the building. Mawari blinked and shook her head in disbelief. “You did?” she asked. “Do you mind me asking what it was and where?”

“Forget them minding,” Denawa interjected. “They owe us a replacement for the foundry.”

“Which is why I’m bringing it up, jackass,” I said, my irritation starting to wear through the thin veil of politeness I tried to wear. “Yeah, we found it. It’s—!”

Surge seized control of my mouth, stopping me from saying any more. That installation is Synarchy property, she thought at me. I can’t let you say any more. Especially not to zebras.

Better them than some random bandits, I thought back at her. Do you want civilized ponies finding your installation, or random warlords? Because I can guarantee you it isn’t going to stay hidden for long.

After a moment to think, Surge finally relented. I moved my mouth from side to side as I felt my muscles fall back under my control. Unfortunately, the pause had been long enough that Mawari and Denawa were both giving me weird works. “It’s… where?” Mawari prompted.

“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “I didn’t really pick out landmarks, so I was trying to remember. It’s like, a two or three day’s hike along the river into the gorges and shit. There should be an open door on a mountain along the north bank of the river.” I shot a look at Nova, whose metal wing twitched under my attention. “We found Nova a replacement wing there, and she used that thing to really fuck up the door. Trust me, you’ll know you’re at the right place as soon as you see it.”

Denawa’s eyes pointed toward Nova’s wing. “I was wondering where she found that,” he said. “That looks incredibly advanced!”

Nova blushed a bit and shifted her wings, the oiled metal feathers hissing as they slid past each other on her artificial limb. “It lets me fly just fine,” she said. “it’s a bit heavier than I’m used to, but it’s amazing. Sometimes it itches and I can’t really scratch it because it’s metal.”

Mawari offered her a heartfelt smile. “I imagine that you’re just happy to be able to fly again.”

“Yeah,” Nova said with a nod. “I don’t care if it’s metal, it lets me fly, and that’s what makes me a pegasus.”

“It’s a little bit uncomfortable when you’re trying to sleep, though,” Gauge said. Winking at Nova, he added, “And I try to keep it as far away from my junk as possible.”

Mawari rolled her eyes and Nova bopped Gauge on the nose. “Quiet, you,” she said. “Give me some credit! I figured out how this thing works!”

“Not when you’re asleep…”

I shook my head. If I let them, these two would go on and on about this all day. Clearing my throat, I moved a step closer to Mawari. “Listen, Mawari, you heard what they said during the trial. We’ve got to be gone by the end of the day. And I don’t want to seem like a shitbag, but we’ll have to get going pretty soon. We’re in a bit of a race against time. I just wanted to say thanks for everything, and I hope our paths cross again sometime soon.”

Mawari smiled and surprised me with a hug. “We may not know each other that well, Ember, but I would like to think of us as friends,” she said. “Maybe the next time we meet we can relax for a bit and actually get to know one another better.”

I returned the embrace. “I’d like that a lot.” I turned to Denawa and winked. “You too, you grumpy zebra.”

Denawa rolled his eyes and looked away.

When we separated, Mawari nodded to Gauge and Nova, then turned back to me. “Where are you going to now? To chase more pieces of that code?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The next piece is supposedly somewhere in the Spines. I’ve never been there, so I don’t know what to expect.” I flashed her a hopeful smile. “You got any pointers for us? You were really helpful when it came to the Bluewater Gorge.”

Mawari shrugged. “I’ve never been to the Spines myself. The Ruin Runners don’t usually go that far to the southwest. Most of the Synarchy’s facilities were closer to the heartland of the continent, near the mountains and such. But I can tell you what I’ve heard.”

“And?” I prompted. “What have you heard?”

“Only that there’s a group of natives that live there.” She chuckled. “It’s funny to think that there are natives on Auris, after only two centuries of lawlessness. But there are. They call themselves Feati, and they’re covered in all these weird magical tattoos. And they don’t speak our language, so good luck communicating with them.”

“Wait, natives who don’t speak our language?” Nova blinked in surprise. “That’s… fascinating!”

“Dr. Hozho’s work must’ve been more successful than I thought,” Surge thought aloud. Only too late did she realize that she’d actually made me say that.

Mawari and Denawa looked at me. “Uh… what?” Mawari asked.

I coughed and shook my head from side to side. “Nothing,” I said. “Just… things I learned at that base in the Bluewater Gorge. Apparently it’s the Synarchy’s fault that there’s a bunch of ponies gone native in the Spines with their own language.”

“Everything here is the Synarchy’s fault,” Gauge said, and when he looked right at me, I knew his antagonizing smile was meant for Surge. “You can trace every fuck up back to them.”

Just to piss Surge off, I didn’t let her retort when she wanted to, and instead nodded along.

“At least we’re better off without them,” Mawari said with a sigh. “It’s taken some time, but we’re finally putting things back together. Groups like the Ruin Runners, the Bank, hell, even the Sentinels up north from what I’ve heard are building a better future. I think by the end of the century, Auris will be back on its hooves and ready to rebuild.”

“One way or another,” Denawa grumbled. “Depends on if that Ivory City fucker has his way or not.”

“And I’m hoping that by chasing this code, I can stop him from getting what he wants,” I said. “I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Reclaimer. If even half of them are true, that stallion needs a bullet in his head as soon as possible.”

“At least Thatch is keeping him contained,” Mawari said. “If they weren’t—?”

Furious screeching cut Mawari off. Startled and confused, all of us turned back in the direction of the main lobby. After a second, I realized that Ace was the one screaming in rage. That was fucking terrifying to me; I’d never heard her that angry before. Pissed, yes, but she sounded like she was going to kill somepony.

“Do you think that Wayward fellow came back?” Gauge asked. I nodded along when I realized that was pretty much the only thing that could’ve possibly pissed Ace off that much.

“Come on, let’s see what’s happening,” I said, moving back toward the lobby. Nova and Gauge followed me, along with Mawari and Denawa and half the Ruin Runners in the room out of simple curiosity.

When I stood back in the doorway, I found myself staring at quite the sight. Ace was practically foaming at the mouth, and she’d drawn her rifle. She was balancing on her hind legs just to hold onto it, her wings out and stabilizing her, but I didn’t know if she could even see straight. I was sure she was just a second away from literally shooting fire out of her eyes. I thought she was going to turn into a blazing inferno right there, like the pegasi of ancient times, who were said to control the elements. The last thing any of us needed was Ace suddenly figuring out how to set everything on fire.

Standing across from her wasn’t a pony, but a griffon. I honestly was shocked to see another griffon so far from the quarry all the way back north. I hadn’t seen many at Hole, and I hadn’t seen any since leaving the city, so some part of me just assumed that they didn’t exist anywhere else. But here one was, dressed in something resembling formal attire, and he matched Ace’s explosive anger with an icy frown that could probably freeze the sun. He simply glared at her, but made no move to draw a weapon of his own or defend himself—even though I was certain he had a gun tucked away somewhere inside of his jacket.

I decided to take this situation apart before it got any worse. A quick burst of telekinesis popped the magazine out of Ace’s rifle and emptied the chamber before she even knew what was happening. She looked at her rifle, then at me, and I shrunk back as some of that fury fell on my shoulders. “Stay out of this!” she spat at me, even moving the unloaded rifle in my general direction.

“No, I think your friend is right to intervene,” Wayward said, and just the sound of his voice made my skin crawl. He sounded slimy, cocky, and just all around the kind of person I didn’t want to associate with. “Now’s no time to get upset. I know we haven’t seen each other in years, but I expected our reunion to happen a bit differently.”

“I should fucking kill you,” Ace said, lowering her rifle and marching up dangerously close to the griffon’s sharp beak. “I swore I’d fucking kill your shit self if I ever saw you again, and I ain’t a mare to break my word. So many people would be better off if your ass was grass.”

Wayward seemed disinterested. “I don’t see what’s stopping you,” he said, raising a feathery eyebrow. “Are you afraid of lining up against the wall if you do? Or maybe you still have a little loyalty for the griffon who raised you and cared for you and your friends for so many years. If anything, I would’ve expected an apology after you threw my charity back into my face and abandoned your brothers and sisters here in the Runners.”

I could see Ace starting to boil over, so I went to her side and wrapped my forelegs around her shoulders. “Ace, seriously, chill out,” I whispered into her ear. I gave Wayward a pointed look and shook my head. “He’s not worth it. Let’s just get our shit and go.”

Wayward dismissively waved his hand. “Yes, go, I wouldn’t want to keep you any longer than I already have.” He winked at her and slid his beak from side to side. “You always have a home here with us, if you’re ever in town again. I heard that there was an incident with Lines’ inn, so it’s probably the closest you’ll get to home until it’s fixed.”

Ace lunged forward in my grip, but I kept her steady until she stopped fighting me. “Don’t listen to him,” I said, nodding toward the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

I shot Mawari and Denawa an apologetic smile and started to move to the door, hoping to encourage Ace to leave. While I would’ve loved to properly say our goodbyes, I just needed to get the outlaw out of here before she did something stupid. When I stopped in the doorway, I rolled my eyes and tugged on Ace’s shoulder. Ace glared at Wayward for a few more seconds, and then she swung like lightning. Her forehoof cracked Wayward across the beak, and the griffon grunted and shouted in pain, clutching his face. Ace cantered after me while Wayward was still reeling from the blow, and Nova and Gauge slipped out after her before he could recover. Thankfully, nopony pursued us.

When we made it to the end of the block, I stopped and spun around. “Ace, what the fuck is between you and him?” I asked her.

“Ain’t none of your fucking business,” she swore back at me.

“If I hadn’t have stepped in, I’m pretty sure we’d all be back in the fucking Bank and on the short track to the firing squad! Of course it’s my fucking business!”

She shot me a harsh glare that made me flinch. “You don’t know nothing about what that fucker did to me,” she growled. Her wingtips twitched and she pointedly pivoted on her hooves, starting along the path to the edge of town. “Let’s go. I ain’t gonna stay here any longer than I have to.”

Me, Gauge, and Nova watched Ace stalk off ahead of us, with SCaR buzzing around and keeping a camera pointed back the way we came. Sighing, I let my shoulders fall a little bit and shook my head. “This mare is one mystery after another,” I said.

“Her and Wayward have a history,” Surge chimed in.

Gauge rolled his eyes. “Gee, thanks, Sparky. I don’t think we’d ever have figured that out ourselves.”

Surge contorted my face into a frown. “More than what she’s showing on the surface, you striped imbecile. She’s apparently known him throughout most of her childhood and teenage years. Something severe must’ve happened to turn her against him like that.”

“Whatever happened, she doesn’t want to talk about it,” Nova said. “I think we should just let her be. She’ll tell us later if she wants.”

“I don’t know about that one,” I said, watching her walk further away. “Trying to get anything out of her is a pain in the ass.”

Nova smiled and rested her feathery wing on my back. “If there’s anypony who can get it out of her, it’s you,” she said with a wink.

I felt my cheeks grow warm. “Yeah, well, we both hate talking. I doubt I’ll get more than a word about it.”

“She’ll talk about it when she’s ready.” Her eyes briefly flicked over to Ace’s retreating form… and then they went elsewhere. “Trust me…” she said after a moment’s thought.

I didn’t really know what she meant by that, so I shrugged and adjusted some of the straps holding my gear to my body. “Well, in the meanwhile, we’re kinda pressed for time. We don’t really have all that long before Yeoman finds what he’s looking for.” Smirking, I started walking after Ace. “You know where we gotta go, Sparky?”

Surge sighed. “Close enough,” she said. “I can get you to the Spines and help you find what you’re looking for. If anything, finding one of these ‘Feati’ ponies will likely lead us to the exact location of Dr. Hozho’s facility.”

“And then we find the piece of the code,” Gauge finished. “If we get there before Yeoman, then we can delete it and he’ll never be able to finish it.”

“Right,” I said, retaking control of my mouth. I cast one look back over my shoulder, where the Brass Bank towered above the rest of Three Rivers. “It’s been fun, but I guess we gotta keep moving. Maybe one day we can come back when ponies aren’t trying to kill us.”

“I’d certainly enjoy that,” Nova said. She pressed against Gauge’s side and hummed. “Maybe we won’t be interrupted next time.”

“Maybe,” Gauge said, nuzzling his marefriend’s head.

I shook my head. “I’d say get a room, but we all know how well that worked last time.” Turning my eyes forward again, I set off after Ace. “How long do you think it’ll be before ponies start trying to kill us again?”

Gauge chuckled. “I don’t think they ever stopped.”

“Yeah. Fuck us, right?”

Chapter 25: The Grind

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Chapter 25: The Grind

I’ll admit it: it sucked being back on the road. We may not have been in Three Rivers for little more than a day, but I found myself already missing civilization. It felt so liberating to be able to walk up and down streets full of ponies and not have to worry about getting caught by slavers or shot in the back. Though Yeoman had ruined that experience for us, leaving Three Rivers behind was like a slap in the face. Out here, there weren’t any rules or laws keeping us safe. The only things we could count on were our guns and each other, and death could come from anywhere, at any time.

Which is why I feel awful about how casually I can look back on those days now. Running from and cheating death had become so commonplace for me by then that I hardly thought any differently about it. Ponies trying to kill me was ‘normal’. But I was trying to find the pieces to this damn code so nopony else had to consider fighting tooth and nail for their life as normal. I wanted to make a better world.

But to be completely honest, making a better world can be boring as all fuck. And what I mean by that is just how long it takes to walk anywhere. These pieces of this code were spread across an entire continent. The Synarchy had hidden installations hundreds of miles apart, and the five of us didn’t have any means of transportation other than our hooves. Surge and I practiced teleporting some more, but we made slow progress on that spell. It just didn’t really stick as well as pyromancy did, and I could only manage four or five teleports a day before I felt burnt out and exhausted. Trying to slide the fabric of reality around underneath your hooves and end up somewhere else without moving is really fucking hard.

By the time night rolled around on the second day since leaving Three Rivers, I had a crippling headache from my exercises with Surge. My headmate could feel it as well; considering the only serious pain I’d felt since she started sharing a room in my skull was usually her doing, this wasn’t exactly a happy surprise for her. Though she’d explained she could manipulate nerve endings in my brain to block out pain (which Ace was too excited to demonstrate by punching me in the gut without even warning us), the bundle of nerves underneath my horn was too sensitive for her to fuck with and block out the migraines. Hence, we both felt like shit as we lay on my side, staring at the fire in the dark of the night.

Nova and Gauge both sat near me, and Nova would occasionally brush her natural wingtip along my side and up and down my back to try and comfort me. Ace sat on the other side of the fire, separated from the rest of us as she usually liked to be, and sometimes shot me a look and a smirk. When I groaned for the millionth time, she chuckled and shook her head. “Maybe you and Sparky should lay off the training for a short bit. Last thing we need is you burning out your horn when we need some actual magic.”

“She won’t learn if she doesn’t practice,” Surge answered. “And the sooner she can learn to reposition herself in a fight, the better.”

“Did they really teach that to every unicorn in the army?” Nova asked.

“And the navy. And the marines. Air force too.” Surge shrugged, sliding the shoulder we leaned on through the grass. “Basic training took two months, followed by specialist training. During the later years of the War for Survival, it was shortened to six weeks. Every unicorn needed to learn how to teleport, cast primitive fireballs and ice spikes, create shields, and perform simple structural mending. Magi would get advanced training to learn better spells. Though earth ponies and pegasi made up the significant bulk of our armed forces, unicorn specialists could fight above our weight class with our spells.”

“Great,” I said. “You’re making me feel like an idiot.”

“I thought you’d already accepted that by now.”

My other friends shared a laugh at my expense. Grumbling, I just focused on watching SCaR slowly fly around the campsite on patrol, the fire glinting off of his metallic body. “The War for Survival…” I began. “That’s that war against the Coalition, right?”

“Correct,” Surge said. “The war was still in progress when the Silence began.”

“There’s some bitter irony in the name,” Gauge mused. “Were all your wars named like that?”

Surge hummed an affirmative. “Their names were chosen to be patriotic. ‘The War of Expansion.’ ‘The War of Honor.’ ‘The War of Vengeance.’ The Synarchy had a different excuse and a different label for every war it fought. It kept the population in support of the government.”

“I just don’t understand how ponies could support a government like that,” Nova said. “The loss of life from all of these wars must’ve been astounding! Wouldn’t internal unrest have toppled the regime after so much bloodshed?”

“Propaganda is a dangerous tool,” Surge said. “As one of the Synarchy’s best scientists, some of the layers of the veil were peeled away for me. I got a closer look at how the inside ran, much closer than the average pony. The propaganda departments fed them stories and showed them that we were alone against the entire world, and if they didn’t do their part, everypony would die. Fear and patriotism are a great way to hold a regime together.” Sighing, Surge added, “Of course, when the propaganda is true, then it’s easier to feed to the people.”

Nova blinked. “That can’t all have been true, though. All that stuff about death coming for the Synarchy if they didn’t fight. It couldn’t have been true. Right?”

“It was,” Surge insisted. “By the time I was born, Equestria had been at war with every other nation on the planet at least once. We had no allies left, and the other nations had started to bond together to counter us. The War of Survival was truly that. If the Coalition had won, Equestria would have been destroyed.” I could feel Surge digging up memories from her time on Equus, especially in those final few years before she left for Auris. “I did my part. I had a family I had to protect. I did everything the Synarchy asked of me because I knew if I didn’t, we’d all die.”

“Sounds like it was the Synarchy’s fault for getting ponykind into that mess in the first place,” I said. “Maybe if it had stopped attacking everyone around it…”

“The Synarchy’s place in the world was decided a long time before I was born,” Surge said. “There was no going back. We stood alone.”

“And yet here you are, wanting to bring that bit of nastiness to Auris.” Ace crossed her forelegs and shook her head from the other side of the fire. “We can use this here code thing to build a better world than the one you left, and yet you want to bring it right back to the way things were. Why?”

Surge bristled… but I felt like it was more out of habit than anything. “The Synarchy was the greatest nation on Equus,” she said. “Nobody could stand up to us. It was our technology that made Auris possible. Imagine what we could accomplish if there wasn’t anyone to oppose us!”

“Imagine how much more we could accomplish if we worked together and stopped trying to kill each other or step on other ponies’ necks!” Nova fluffed her wings out and made herself look a little bigger. “Blackwash did amazing things with just scrap and teamwork. We fixed the communications dish that sent the code throughout Auris in the first place. The Sentinels in the north unified the valley and drove out the slavers and rapists! Look at what the ponies in Three Rivers were able to accomplish without slaves or anything like that!”

“The Ivory City wants to destroy all that,” Ace said. “Thatch is holding them back, but it ain’t gonna be for long.” Then her eyes twinkled. “But with that code, though…”

I grunted and sat up, pulling a cigarette from my carton as I did so. Since my horn hurt too much to light it, I floated it over to the fire quickly and held it there until a tongue of flame lit the end, then jammed it between my lips. It rested there and I inhaled a hit, dumping the chemicals into my blood. It already started making my head feel better.

“Hey, Ace,” I started, shifting the cigarette to the corner of my mouth so I could talk. “That Merchant during the trial, Aureus… he didn’t have a really high opinion of Thatch.” I looked her in the eyes, trying to glean anything from her expression. “He called its ruler a despot like Reclaimer. What’s up with that?”

Ace fidgeted and stared at the fire. “Final Hour is… she’s a touchy bitch,” she said. “I don’t like her very much. But she’s done so much with so little. We don’t have none of the big factories or refineries like the City does. But we’re organized and Hour takes in refugees from across the continent. She keeps Thatch and the heartland safe from Reclaimer.”

“So why wouldn’t the Merchants like her?”

“Because she’s convinced that unless everypony does what she says, Reclaimer will win.” She shrugged her beige wings. “She may be right for all I know. It ain’t my place to judge her. But you either follow her and oppose the City, or you’re casting your lot in with Reclaimer.”

“And the Bank, being neutral, doesn’t please her in the slightest,” Surge surmised.

Ace nodded. “She detains any caravans trying to go further east to the City. Claims that they need to pass inspections and she has to check for contraband. Usually that ends up with them confiscating most of the guns, bullets, and other valuables them merchants are carrying.” Shrugging, she pulled over her rifle and started cleaning it for want of something to do. “She’s costing the Bank business. Of course they hate her.”

“I imagine we’ll be meeting her before too long,” Gauge said. “We know Reclaimer has a piece in the Ivory City, so we’ll be passing through Thatch at some point.”

That seemed to brighten Ace a bit. “It’ll be good to be home,” she said. “I may have been raised in Three Rivers, but Thatch has been my home since I left the Ruin Runners. I ain’t around there all that much, but it’s a place I can hang my hat.” Her ears flicked against nothing, and she chuckled a bit. “Well, if I had one, I suppose.”

I groaned and stretched my legs a bit. With my head feeling like it was going to pop, I figured a chance to walk around and maybe clear it a bit away from the smoke of the fire would be nice. Rolling onto my hooves, I started walking away from the fire and between the trees. “I’m gonna take a walk. Try not to burn the forest down before I get back.”

“What about after?” Gauge asked.

“Yeah, then it’s fine.” I shook my head. “If you hear me screaming, it’s probably because I’m dying.”

And I left the fire with that, slipping between two twisting trees and disappearing into the shadows on the other side. I honestly didn’t know where I planned on going, but it was better than hanging out around the bright fire and choking on smoke while I still had a migraine... even though I was purposefully inhaling smoke with every draw of my cigarette. I took my rifle with me, though. I wasn’t stupid enough to wander around unarmed and with my pyromancies unavailable, and the weight of the killing tool on my back was comforting in its own way.

Auris is a whole ‘nother world at night. At least in the day, you can see what’s trying to kill you, but at night, there are so many strange noises and shadowy things darting around the trees and undergrowth that it feels… alien. Which is weird considering Auris already is an alien world, but during the night it’s doubly so. Weird vining plants clinging to auranoaks glowed blue, green, and yellow, attracting little bugs with ten or twelve legs sprouting off of their bodies. I didn’t know what was poisonous and what wasn’t, considering none of this stuff grew anywhere near Blackwash, so I just did my best to not touch anything.

I found a little creek splashing through the darkness, tiny bits of moonlight dancing on its surface. Given the strange trilling calls of Auris’ nocturnal life, it was something a little familiar and comforting to focus on. Plus, it was peaceful. I could really do some thinking out here, away from the chatter of my friends.

Of course, there was one pony I couldn’t get away from. I could feel Surge trying to get a good look around me, occasionally nudging my eyes in different directions to focus on something else. Sighing, I sat down beside the water and let my rear hooves dangle in the creek. “What was it like coming here for the first time?” I asked aloud. “Leaving everything behind and going somewhere that didn’t officially exist?”

Memories that weren’t mine started to flash in my mind’s eye as Surge dug through them. I saw flashes of steel, aluminum, and titanium as she walked along the hallway of a spaceship. Sitting next to a reinforced window, watching the stars slide by as the corvette picked up speed. Auris suddenly appearing from the bridge, first as a blue dot, then growing into an enormous ball of blue, orange, pink, and white. The feeling of alien air on my face as I stood in an opening airlock. Watching the shrikes wheel around the mountains in the distance, so fascinating and unknown.

“I don’t think I can describe it,” Surge admitted. “You think you’re prepared for it, but you can’t ever be. That first step on the surface of an entirely new world is beyond words. You’ve crossed a divide life was never supposed to cross, and everything you once knew about the biology of your homeworld is different. Everywhere you look, you see something new, something fascinating, something magical.”

Her nostalgia was infectious; I found myself smiling just from imagining that feeling. After all, didn’t I too feel that way when I left Blackwash behind for the first time? Everything was so different and fascinating. I felt like I’d never run out of new things to see and understand. And here I was, still learning new things every day. I could understand exactly what she meant, despite not crossing lightyears like she once did.

“You were proud of what you did?” I prompted her. “I know it was in defense of the Synarchy and everything, but do you ever regret how things turned out?”

“If by that you mean do I regret coming here, getting my soul trapped in a managenerator for nearly two hundred planetary revolutions, and now being forced to live through you, then yes.” Her bitter chuckle felt weird coming from my throat when I wasn’t the one who felt bitter. “I wished to die for years. Or… well, as much as a soul can die. I wanted to move on. Dying wasn’t bad. Being forced to suffer for centuries with no afterlife was worse than Tartarus itself. The burning would have been pleasant compared to the nothingness I experienced, trapped in that reactor and watching my body decay.”

She sighed. “But now I’m happy to be alive, I suppose. Living through you is making the torment I suffered bearable. It’s worth something now. After getting a second lease on life, I’m not keen on dying again.”

“Yeesh. I still can’t imagine what that was like,” I said. “I’m surprised you’re still sane.”

“I spent nearly a hundred and fifty of those Auran years in a restful torpor,” Surge said. “I didn’t have a thought in that entire span. I only snapped out of it when that signal arrived at my installation after so long. The rest protected my mind from falling apart through that torture. Otherwise I think I would be insane.”

After a few moments, she asked me a question instead. “Is this really what you all think of the Synarchy? That we were evil, vile ponies? Despite everything we helped build, despite accomplishing the impossible task of putting your ancestors on this planet, we deserved to die?”

It was a surprising question to say the least. I hadn’t expected her to ask anything like that. “I…” How did I answer that? “I didn’t know much about the Synarchy growing up, other than it was another name for Equestria and you guys were responsible for putting all of us on this backwater, failed colony of a planet. I used to dream about what my life could’ve been like if I’d been born on Equus instead of a planet where everything tries to kill us and we struggled to provide enough food and water for our town every year. We all blamed you for making us live like we did instead of living in tall, shiny towers with plenty of food and medicine and entertainment.” I shook my head. “We didn’t know what happened to the Synarchy, but many of us were happy that you were probably dead. You put us on this planet and then disappeared. We lived like we did and suffer like we do because of you. There’s no love lost between the ponies of Auris and the ponies of Equus.”

“War makes us do bad things,” Surge said in a quiet voice. “Desperation makes us ignore them. We were losing, Ember. A successful defense on any front was good news. We were digging in where we could and waging a fighting retreat where we couldn’t. We’d nearly broken the Coalition’s back, but we were exhausted, both in marepower and resources. By then, the weight of the rest of the planet was too much for us, and we were looking for something to turn the tide. And judging by this so-called Silence, we never found it.”

“How bad was it?” I asked her. “Did you know what was going to happen near the end?”

“I only knew things because I was entrusted with some classified information. Communications with Equus were strictly forbidden; we could only receive, not send apart from the annual check-in. But I was privileged to have an idea of the situation back home as the mare in charge of an installation relating to EOH Protocol Dusk.” I saw flashes of her sitting in her office, reading confidential reports printed on etch glass. “By the end of the war, just before the Silence, we were in hard retreat through our satellite states. The Coalition was consolidating a navy that outnumbered ours two to one, even though we’d been bombing and harassing their drydocks with everything we had to stop them from putting up new ships. A decisive fight was going to happen sooner or later. This was in late November, and everything went dark at the beginning of the new year. I don’t know what happened after that. Nopony did.”

“Why didn’t you surrender?” I asked. “There wasn’t anything to gain from fighting.”

Surge laughed. “Surrender? Do you think the Coalition would’ve let us surrender after everything we’d done to them? We would’ve fought to the last anyway. The Synarchy and all of Equestria probably burned to the ground on the New Year. There wasn’t anypony left who could help all of us on Auris way out here.

“No, Equestria is dead forever,” she concluded with grim finality. “If the Coalition is still around, I’m surprised they haven’t found Auris yet. If they do, we need to be ready to fight them off. And if they’re dead… well, I guess it doesn’t matter much anymore, does it?”

I thought for a moment. “It’s been... what, a hundred and ninety-five winters since the Silence? What is that in Equus years?”

“Two hundred and seventy-ish,” Surge said. “One revolution of Auris around the Meadowbrook star is roughly 1.4 Equus revolutions around its sun.”

“Yeah, so it’s been a fucking long time. Who’s to say that everything’s still the same?” I shrugged. “If the Coalition’s still around, maybe they’ll want peace. That war’s literally ancient history.”

“Peace is impossible,” Surge growled. “Those monsters burned my home. I’ll never work with them.”

“Even if it means they’d kill us all? For a scientist, you can be really fucking stupid sometimes.”

I sighed. “Listen, Surge. I know that you’re from that time. But we’ve got more important things to focus on here. Whoever puts this code together is going to decide the fate of Auris. If Reclaimer does it, he’ll rebuild your fascist Synarchy in his image, kill all of us, and then spend the next forever enslaving everypony who’s not from the Ivory City. If we can get it, maybe we can build something better. A world where we don’t have to send our kids off to fight when they’re fifteen. A world where the government won’t take your children from you if they decide you’d be better without the distraction.”

I felt kind of bad for driving the knife in that deep, but I knew Surge wouldn’t understand unless I preyed upon things that actually mattered to her. I knew she’d loved her kids and missed them still—I could feel what it was like to be a mother through her and I’d gained an understanding of the pain she felt when the Synarchy took her children away. Wouldn’t a world where mothers didn’t have to give up their children to the state because it thought it knew best be better than returning to the old system?

When she was silent, I flicked the butt of my cigarette into the stream. “It’s something to think about,” I said aloud. “We have a chance to do something different. I sure as fuck don’t like the old system. And I don’t know why you would either.”

I watched the butt float down the stream, spinning a few times in the eddies of the current. Who could’ve imagined two months ago that I’d be where I was today, trying to rewrite history? From a simple forgemare to an estranged Sentinel wrestling with mysteries from the past that could change Auris forever, I’d come a long way. And not just me. My friends as well. We’d come so far and suffered so much since we first heard that signal all that time ago.

Was it for the better? Would we have been better off staying at the dam with the rest of the ponies from Blackwash? It would’ve been easy. I could’ve stayed with the Sentinels and helped rebuild the dam, and we wouldn’t have had to worry about anything other than the remnants of the Crimson trying to strike back at us or raid shit in the valley. I probably could’ve lived my life in peace apart from the occasional gunfight or something to defend our turf. I could’ve had kids and grown old, and maybe it’d take forever for Reclaimer and the Ivory City to find their way to the valley.

But I couldn’t do that. Once I knew the stakes, some stupid idealistic part of me refused to just sit by and not give a shit. I had a chance to save the world, and I was the only one who could. And call me an idiot if you want, but I wanted to play the part of the hero. I wanted to be the one that made a difference. And because of that, here I was.

I was an idiot and I was going to get myself killed. But at least it’d be for the right reasons. At least it gave me a fucking purpose.

A distant scream shook me out of my admittedly angsty thoughts. My ears followed the noise and pointed through the trees and darkness to someplace I couldn’t see. There was a hill in that direction, though where exactly the scream came from, I couldn’t tell. My horn lit up and grabbed my rifle, and I crossed the stream and started moving in the direction of the noise.

At least until Surge froze my legs. “What are you doing?” she asked me. “Are you stupid enough to go in there alone?”

“Yes,” I said, forcing myself to start moving again. “Somepony’s in trouble up there. I need to find out why.”

“You’re not even going to go back and grab Ace for backup?”

It was a tempting thought, but I’m an impulsive bitch and I was already trotting through the woods. “That’ll take too long. A lot can happen in ten minutes.” I checked my rifle and turned the safety off. Who knew what I’d need to shoot to death at a moment’s notice. Anything could come through those woods. “Just help me make sure I don’t get lost, okay?”

Surge resigned herself to that, knowing that she’d have to fight me the whole way back to camp otherwise. “Your idiocy better not get us killed.”

“It won’t so long as we’re quick.”

“Not careful?”

“Careful takes too long.” I scrambled over a fallen log and held my breath. Sure enough, after a few seconds, I heard a mare’s cries echoing through the trees. It gave me a direction to go in, so I hurried along as best as I could. If only it wasn’t the middle of the night; I couldn’t see shit further than twenty feet around me at pretty much all times. All I knew was that she was somewhere uphill, and soon I found myself laboring for breath as I jogged up the slope.

Fuck, I was a lot more tired and spent than I thought I was. Walking all day and teleporting around like an idiot takes a lot out of you. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to use any of my pyromancies. I didn’t have the energy left to cast any.

I saw flickering light reflecting off the trees up ahead. “A fire,” I murmured to myself, slowing my advance and exchanging speed for silence. Whoever was up here, they’d decided to set up camp right on top of this hill. Using the twisting Auris trees to shield my advance, I crept through the shadows until I had eyes on what was happening in front of me. Peering through the undergrowth, I took in the scene.

There were three tents pitched around a fire, and supplies had been strung on ropes looped over trees to keep them off the ground. I counted eight grizzled mares and stallions circled around the fire, watching some spectacle unfold. There, another mare with an eyepatch made from a cloth headwrap laughed at and taunted a figure huddling on the ground. And while those first nine ponies looked like your average slaver or bandit scum, the pony on the ground looked like something I’d never seen before.

She was an earth pony and still pretty young, a teenager most likely, but what struck me most were the tattoos covering her body. Swirling tribal patterns ran up and down her forelegs and across her face in mesmerizing designs. They were incredibly intricate and detailed; I couldn’t imagine how long it’d taken for her to get them all done. But instead of worrying about that for now, I decided to concern myself with the fact that she was curled up in a screaming, terrified ball while the mare standing over her whipped and beat her with some kind of prod.

She must be a native, Surge thought at me. Fascinating…

Yeah and she’s getting the shit beaten out of her. I adjusted my rifle and poked it through the undergrowth, taking aim as best I could. I’m not gonna let these fuckers get away with that.

As soon as I had a clear shot on the mare beating the filly, I took it. My rifle cracked through the darkness of the night and the mare’s head exploded into blood chunks a moment later. The other slavers flinched at the surprise shot, giving me time to line up another headshot on a stallion. By the time I took him down, however, they were scrambling for their guns and screaming orders to each other, their heads spinning wildly as they looked for my position.

Think they know where I’m at? I thought at Surge as I used my hooves to manually aim my rifle through the brush. I didn’t need my orange magic giving my position away. I sighted down another with her back turned to me and put one in her neck. She clutched at the wound spewing blood and spasmed as she fell to the ground, dying a few seconds later.

Then bullets began wildly flying through my cover, and I ended up falling flat on my back as I reeled from the return fire. I spent maybe a second to check that I was still in one piece before I rolled back onto my hooves and grabbed my rifle again. I needed to change positions.

And of course, Surge took the opportunity to chastise me. I think they do, yes, she thought at me.

Shut up.

I pressed myself against another tree a bit further to the left and caught my breath. All the while, I heard the bandits shouting orders to each other.

“The asshole’s shooting from the northeast side!”

“Fuck! Keep an eye out for movement! There might be more!”

“Come on out, you little bastard! We’re gonna find you and chop you up into little tiny pieces!”

I took a breath to ready myself and steady my aim, and then I spun to my left around the tree. Two ponies happened to be looking my way, and both rushed to aim their weapons as soon as they saw me. I didn’t give them the chance, toggling my rifle to automatic fire mode and dousing them with bullets. One of them dove to the side, rolling across the ground as she slid behind a tree for cover. The other didn’t, falling to the dirt like a sack of meat.

“There!” one of them shouted, and I immediately galloped to the next bit of cover as bullets began flying around me. I tripped and fell, but that ended up saving me from a pegasus who ducked out of the treetops to try and strafe me. They disappeared back into the air a moment later, but I knew they’d be back. I had to move. Shit, this could’ve been going much better.

I came to a stop against a different tree and checked the number printed out on my scope. Nineteen bullets—more than enough. “One against five,” I muttered, watching the skies and trying to keep my ears trained for the sounds of movement around me. “Could be going better.”

The tree bark next to my head exploded as a heavy round went flying through it, sending splinters flying and cutting my cheek. I immediately fell flat to the ground as three more followed it, chewing right through the center of the tree and eviscerating where I’d been standing moments ago. Bullets struck the ground around me, and I fired blinding up into the canopy where I thought I saw muzzle flashes. That fucking pegasus wasn’t even coming down to fight me face to face!

“She’s pinned!” One of them screamed. “Move!”

“You’re dead, whore!”

Rolling back onto my hooves, I quickly sighted another pony bursting out of cover and put two in the chest and one in the head before she could fire. Four left. A second one started shooting down on me from the right, and I scrambled behind a rock, yelping when I felt something bite me in the flank. I ended up coming to a rough stop and crawled behind the rocks before I could get shot again. But I could still move my leg, which meant I was still mobile. It just hurt like all fuck.

I prematurely dumped the mag since it only had like two shots left in it and loaded a fresh one. Popping around cover, I spotted two figures converging on me from the front. My rifle fire scattered them, but again I had to roll to the side when that pegasus tried to strafe me from above. I fired a few shots at them as they disappeared, but to no effect. And where was the fourth?

Surge drew mana through my horn and manifested a blue shield around me moments before bullets would’ve ripped me to pieces. I spun around to find the fourth pony behind me, obviously surprised that my horn was maintaining two spells of different aura colors. He paid dearly for it; the moment Surge lowered her shield, I shot him to pieces, sending him crumpling to the ground as I blew holes in his body.

“She’s just one damn whore!” The pegasus somewhere above me shouted. “Why can’t you fuckers kill one stupid wh—!”

I heard the distinctive sound of beam weapons cut him off, and moments later, he fell out of the sky, skin charred and blistered from laser wounds. Suddenly Ace was at my side, SP-9s trailing smoke as she held them with her wingtips. “There you are,” she said, holstering her pistols and drawing her rifle. “I figured this was your fault.”

“Shut up,” I said. “There’s two of them left, that way.”

“Good.” Ace put the scope to her eye, sighting down the direction I pointed. “I’m insulted you didn’t invite me to the fun.”

“You’re here, aren’t you?” I rolled to my hooves and found I could stand without too much pain from my bullet wound. “I’ll draw their fire. Crack some domes like you’re supposed to.”

She waved her wing at me, so I waited for a break in their fire before darting to the next tree. It was sort of a hobbling run, but I managed to avoid being shot again as I moved. A rifle and a submachine gun chattered at me, but then Ace’s powerful rifle cracked and I heard a strangled scream from across the way. As soon as I stopped at my tree, I checked in the direction of the fire and saw the last bandit turn tail and start to run. Without thinking, I put three into him as he fled, sending his body tumbling down the hill. And then, finally, everything was quiet once more.

After a moment to run through my kills and tally them up, I stepped out of cover, satisfied there wasn’t anypony else left to shoot at us. I found my nearly-spent magazine lying on the ground and brought it back to my bags for reloading later, then limped over to Ace. “Nova and Gauge are still back at the camp?”

Ace nodded. “Had them put that little robot of theirs on high alert while I figured out where in the blazes you’d run off to. Glad I showed up when I did.” Her eyes drifted to my wound, which was still dripping blood. “And you got yourself shot, you dumb bitch. You ain’t trying to get yourself shot every day, right?”

“I’ll be fine,” I grumbled, flexing my leg. I’d have to get the bullet out later, but for the moment it was just embedded in firm muscle instead of possibly biting into bone. For once, having a nice ass actually helped out in combat.

Yes, that was entirely relevant.

It still hurt like shit, though, so I wasn’t going to let the bullet sit in my flank forever. “There was a filly up here they were beating,” I said, nodding back towards the campgrounds. “Maybe twelve or thirteen winters. I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.”

“Right,” Ace said, holstering her weapons and trotting up to me. “Surge, how stupid was Ember’s plan?”

“About what you would expect,” Surge said. “There were nine of them and one of her. She managed to kill three from the cover of some brush before being spotted. Then she spent most of the time running from cover to cover while the remaining six shot at her.”

“Which I killed three of before Ace showed up,” I grumbled.

“I had to help her with a shield.”

“Shut up, Sparky. But thanks.”

“Somepony has to look out for the two of us.”

I saw Ace covering her muzzle with her wing. “What?” I asked and stopped trudging up the hill.

“Listening to you two bicker is some mighty entertaining shit,” Ace said. “You sound like a nutjob, Ember.”

I groaned and continued stomping back to the campsite. “Be lucky your head isn’t big enough for two.”

“She’s right,” Surge said. “Her brain is very vacant.”

“I swear on the stars I’m going to fucking blow my own brains out so I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore!” I put a little too much weight on my injured leg and sucked in air through my teeth. “…Ouch.”

“We’ll get you patched up in a bit,” Surge said, and now that we didn’t have to focus on fighting, she made my leg go numb. “This should help for the time being.”

I actually smiled and found a little more spring for my step. “Okay, maybe this fucked up situation isn’t terrible if you can just make me numb whenever I get shot.”

“Wish I had that,” Ace said. “I been shot many a time. It’s never fun.”

We finally made it back to the campsite, still and quiet save for the crackling fire—and the struggling young mare. Her body was covered in welts and bruises, but those slavers had bound her legs together so she couldn’t move. Holstering my rifle, I limped over to her and quickly undid her bindings. “It’s alright, you’re gonna be fine,” I said, trying to soothe her. “They’re all dead now. You’re safe.”

Ace stood by my side while the mare clumsily climbed to her hooves. “She one of them Feati mares?” she asked. “I ain’t never seen one before.”

“She’s fascinating,” Surge said, making me lean forward for a better look. It wasn’t hard to imagine her as a scientist observing a new specimen in her lab for the first time. “Her intricate tattoos suggest ritualistic or ceremonial purposes, so there’s obviously some kind of organized society with their own religious beliefs and traditions. Well toned muscles from years of living in the wild, mostly developed through adolescence. She’s probably about seventeen or eighteen years old, biologically. Thirteen Auris winters old, if that helps. If she’s truly from Dr. Hozho’s experiments, then I wonder what her language sounds like.”

“That’s right, these ponies don’t speak like we do, don’t they?” Ace hunched down in front of the mare, who’d drawn back a bit and defensively held a hoof over her chest. Tapping a hoof against her breast, she smiled at the young mare. “Ace,” she said, extending the single syllable word in her half-country drawl. Then she pointed at me. “Ember.” Lastly, she shifted her hoof toward the mare and waited.

After a moment, the mare swallowed. “Tekawenye Kakehote.”

Both Ace and I kind of just stared at her as we tried to process her name. “Tek-ah-wen-ye Kak-eh-hoot-e?” I attempted. Holy fuck was that a name. And by the stars I’m pretty sure I butchered it horribly judging by the look the mare gave me. “Can we just call you Teka for short?”

“I like that one a lot better,” Ace said. “It’s a lot shorter.”

The mare’s eyes shifted to me, and she saw the open wound on my flank. Even though I didn’t know how to communicate with her, and even though she seemed wary of us, she scooted to my side and brushed Ace away to look at my wound. Shrugging, I opened my bags and started pulling out bandages and gauze for patching up the wound. “Yeah, I got shot rescuing you. You’re welcome, by the way.”

Teka frowned at the wound and put her hooves over it, my trickling blood staining her spring green coat red. I couldn’t feel anything because of Surge, but then I noticed the tattoos on her forelegs beginning to glow. Suddenly, the silvery tattoos covering her coat glowed white, and the flesh on my flank started to twist and knit itself back together. There was even a tiny thunk as my repairing tissue expelled the bullet lodged inside. After a few seconds, it was like you couldn’t even tell I’d been shot apart from the blood matted into my coat and a tiny white scar around the wound.

This strange Feati mare took her hooves off my flank and panted lightly, and her tattoos went back from white to silver. Ace and I just exchanged surprised looks with each other. “She can do that?” I asked.

“Tattoo and ritual magic were once the two most powerful and common forms of higher spellcrafting long before the mages came and unraveled its secrets,” Surge said. “That these tribal ponies have rediscovered this art is nothing short of amazing!” I could almost feel her prancing around in my skull like a giddy schoolfilly. “We need to meet more of them. Maybe she can do something else with those tattoos!”

Teka smiled faintly at me. “Agaleplo unta’sat bele,” she said in a language I couldn’t even begin to make sense of. “Hatot bele U’a waksoa A.”

“Well, that’s gonna take some time to figure out, ain’t it,” Ace said, scratching the back of her head with a wing crest.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we’ll just have to point and play charades until we can teach her some Equiish.”

“Wo stum kolwil twoh’un?” Teka asked, clutching at her belly. “A stomm hatot’un.”

“That one’s easy enough to figure out,” Surge said. “She’s hungry.”

“We’ll take her back to our camp, then,” I said, standing up. I couldn’t believe she just fixed my leg like that! “Let’s go strip this place of anything good and then get back to Gauge and Nova. I don’t want to keep them waiting alone any longer than I have already.” Then, turning to Teka, I motioned for her to stay put. “Don’t go anywhere. We’ll take you back soon.”

“I’m gonna get a fucking headache…” Ace grumbled. “The last thing I needed was to fashion myself as a foalsitter…”

Chapter 26: The Native

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Chapter 26: The Native

SCaR was the first one to notice that Ace and I had returned to our camp. The drone, which I’m assuming Gauge had set on high alert, flew up to us and squawked a few times before flying back to the camp with a happy trilling sound. Moments later, Gauge and Nova emerged from the tent they’d huddled down in, Gauge holding a pistol awkwardly between his teeth. Upon seeing us, he spat it out (which made me flinch, because I didn’t know if the safety was set or not) and trotted over to us. “Oh, thank the stars you’re safe, Em,” he said, hugging me and nuzzling my shoulder. “When the three of us heard the gunfire, we were afraid you were in the middle of it.”

“I mean, you ain’t wrong about that,” Ace said. “Found the dumb bitch in the middle of a shootout with three other ponies. Apparently there were nine when she started, but she’d dropped six of them by the time I got there.” She winked at me and added, “She can punch above her weight class, that’s for sure.”

“She simply got the drop on a group of slavers and rogues,” Surge said, ruining whatever thunder or pride I could’ve reaped from that. “She needed Ace to bail her out when they actually started fighting back.”

I sighed. “You couldn’t let me have just one thing, could you, Sparky?”

“What use would I be to this party of traveling misfits if I didn’t provide some common sense and perspective every now and then?”

Nova’s eyes narrowed, then widened in surprise. I already knew what she was about to say before she said it. “Who’s she?” she asked, pointing to Teka, who had just emerged from the shadows behind me and Ace. “And those tattoos! They’re amazing!”

Teka saw Nova pointing at her and pretty much squealing in excitement and frowned. “A wywe pohna’ae’un,” she grumbled. “A pohna’ae.”

“And that language!” Nova bounded past me and Ace to sit in front of the young mare. “This was really made from scratch? It sounds beautiful!”

“Dr. Hozho’s experiments stripped all knowledge of language from the subjects’ memories,” Surge explained. “They had to build a language from scratch. After nearly two hundred Auris years, this is what they came up with.”

Teka looked between all of us and frowned. “U’a tokto mnoet,” she said. “Allae ho’hn konkow lalalu.”

“Maybe we can teach her some Equiish,” Nova said. She sat down in front of the Feati mare like an over-enthusiastic teacher ready to sink her fangs of learning into a new student. “My name is Nova. Nova. This is Gauge. Gauge.” She pointed to herself and her coltfriend in turn, and then pointed to Teka. “Your name is…?”

Teka looked at me and Ace, then back at Nova. “…Teka,” she said, adopting the shorter version of her name that we’d been using. “Tekawenye Kakehote, ia Teka feh.” Then she pointed to Ace. “Ace?” she said, earning a nod from the bounty hunter. When she pointed at me, her brow furrowed in confusion. “…Embaw?”

“Ember,” I corrected. “It’s Ember.”

“Embaw,” she said again, frowning down the length of her muzzle. “Em… bow?”

“They don’t have an ‘R’ analogue in their language,” Surge said. “Fascinating…”

“Of course they don’t have the fucking letter ‘R’ in their language,” I grumbled, crossing my forelegs. “Does this mean I’m gonna have to listen to this bullshit all the time?”

As if on cue, Teka repeated her butchering of my name. “Embuh.”

“That one was closer,” Gauge said, slapping me on the shoulder. “She’s trying, at least.”

“Fuck off.”

“At least it’s better than you trying to pronounce her full name.” When I glared at him, he broke out a shit eating grin. “Go ahead, try and pronounce the full thing.”

After a moment to glare at him, I crossed my forelegs and looked the other way. “There’s a reason Ace and I decided to just call her Teka. The full thing is way too fucking complicated for us.”

“Right.” He shook his head. “So you found her with those slavers or whatever?”

“They were beating her senseless for no reason other than they could,” I said. “That’s why I lit their asses up. I wasn't going to stand by and do nothing.”

“Also, she’s a Feati mare,” Ace said. “Sparky may know generally where we’ve gotta go, but if anypony would know exactly where this thing is, it’s the Feati.”

Teka’s ears perked up when she recognized the name of her tribe. “Wuh wippa M’a Feati?” she asked, looking between all of us. “Ho’hn sahln’an saksi e immapohna’hn’un imma’un.”

“I really wish we could understand her,” I grumbled, finally deciding to drop a bag of supplies and food I’d scavenged from the slavers’ camp. “This would be so much easier if we could just ask her where the Feati are.”

“Maybe we can,” Nova said, and she moved to sit down in front of Teka. “Maybe not directly, but maybe I can make her understand.”

Ace scoffed and trotted away, shifting her attention to securing our new supplies for the night. “Good luck with that, filly. She don’t speak a lick of Equiish.”

“If anypony can figure out how to talk to her, it’s Nova,” I said. “She’s great with that kind of shit.”

I sat down on a rock and started taking apart my rifle now that I’d used it a bunch. I hadn’t really oiled it since I’d left the installation on account of not needing to use it, so I figured now was a good time for basic maintenance. And while I worked on my rifle, Nova worked on trying to communicate with Teka.

I’m not going to lie; Nova made agonizingly little progress. The two mares had no common ground to build off of other than a single word, ‘Feati’. Still, it was interesting to watch her work, watch her try to use that single word in different ways to get a message across. It reminded me of why Nova was a scientist and I was just an idiotic forgemare. I didn’t have the patience or the ability to think outside of the box like her when it came to shit like this.

But the point at which Nova was walking in place and saying “Feati, Feati” over and over again was about where I decided to draw the line with a loud and obnoxious yawn. “I’m fucking toasted,” I said, walking over to the tent Ace and I had been sharing. “Let’s continue this shit in the morning.”

“What should we do about Teka?” Nova asked me. The mare in question cautiously looked back and forth between the two of us, wondering just what we had in store for her.

I shrugged. “Let her eat and drink and then lay out a bedroll or something for her.” I pointed to the supplies Ace and I had liberated from the bandit camp. “We’ve got a spare now.”

“Aren’t you worried she’ll run off?” Nova asked.

“Or steal our shit while we’re sleeping?” Gauge chimed in. “We don’t know that we can trust her yet.”

“Guys, this mare was getting beaten senseless when I found her,” I said. I pointed to the bruises and welts covering her tattooed body. “I saved her from that. I’m pretty sure I saved her from being raped, too. I really don’t think that she’s gonna cut my throat while I sleep.”

“She could still run off,” Surge said, adding her two bullets to the conversation. “We should at least keep an eye on her.”

I turned to Gauge. “Just have SCaR do it. Have him let us know if she tries slipping away or something. I really hope we don’t have to drag her back and force her to take us to her tribe, kicking and screaming.”

“Or we could let her go and follow her,” Gauge said. “I bet she knows the layout of the land. She could probably find her way back home from here if she wanted. We could just follow her to it.”

I looked at the skinny young mare and saw how she started treating her bruises with that weird healing magic. “Something tells me that’s gonna be a lot harder than we think it is,” I said. “She can probably glide across the forest floor without making a sound. As far as we know, they don’t have any guns, and somehow they’ve survived for this long in the middle of the Spines without any modern technology. They’ve gotta be good at moving through the forest and shit.”

Yawning, I tweaked Teka’s ear with my magic, making the young mare jump. Rubbing her ear, she looked around the campsite before turning to face me. “Teka,” I said, then pointed to a bedroll off to the side. “Sleep.” To try and get the point across, I closed my eyes, hung my head, and made exaggerated snoring noises for a second or two.

I saw Teka blink and slowly rise to her hooves. She walked across our camp like she was on air, her hooves barely disturbing the ground under them or even making a noise. She hesitated in front of the pile of liberated supplies, but grabbed a bedroll between her teeth and quickly withdrew to the edge of the camp. Once there, I saw her drop the bedroll to the ground and start fumbling with the latch, trying to figure out how to get it open.

“She’s quiet, that’s for sure,” Gauge said.

“I told you it’d be hard to track her,” I said. “Let’s just hope that she doesn’t run on us.” After a second to look around, I spotted a feathery silhouette moving through the trees, humming a tune to herself. “I guess Ace is volunteering for first watch. Who knows what sort of bad news we might have attracted with that firefight earlier.” Yawning, I started to stand up and reached for my rifle. “I should help her.”

“Ember, it’s fine,” Nova said, standing up even faster. “You look like you could sleep for a hundred years. Get some rest; I’ll keep Ace company.”

I frowned, rifle still held in my magical grasp. “But—”

“Ember,” Nova said again, using a scolding, motherly tone. “You and Ace always take watch all the time. Gauge and I hardly have the chance to help. Just because I’m bad at using a gun doesn’t mean I can’t help the ponies who can use one keep a lookout.”

After a moment of thought, I sighed and sat back down. “Fine,” I said. “I should probably be here at camp anyway. Our new guest will probably feel a lot better if the one who rescued her isn’t too far away.”

“Good.” Nova flashed a smile at me, then turned and kissed Gauge. “I’ll be back in a bit, sweetie. Make sure Ember doesn’t do anything else stupid.”

“I hardly have to do any work, then,” Gauge said. “Sparky will keep Ember in line for me.”

“It’s a lot more difficult of a task than you realize,” Surge said. “Especially when her every instinct is to do something stupid.”

“It’s not my every instinct,” I protested. “Only like ninety percent of them.”

Gauge chuckled and waved me off. “Go to sleep, Em. Me and SCaR will keep things under control here. Besides…” He pointed off to his right and my left. “Somepony’s already got the right idea.”

I blinked and looked in that direction to see Teka curled up in a ball on her bedroll. She hadn’t actually made it inside of the bedroll, but she looked comfortable enough on top of it. Maybe that was just how her tribe slept. Either that, or she didn’t know the thing could open after unrolling it.

“That’s a good sign, I guess,” I said, shuffling back towards my tent. “She’d only sleep if she wasn’t afraid of us. Or just really fucking tired.”

“Probably a combination of both.” Gauge waved once as I lifted the flap of my tent. “Get some sleep, Em. You deserve it.”

“Fuck yeah I do,” I mumbled, and then slipped inside. After a few minutes to settle down and kick my bedroll into a more comfortable position, I finally drifted off to a restful sleep.

\/\/\/\/\/

I sat at a table in the Stardust, my attention focused on the outside. Space was weird here, different. The ships used some sort of teleportation spell to cross the great distances between the stars, but I wasn’t completely sure of how it worked. The physics and magic involved were leagues above anything I ever studied. They were created by our High Queen herself during my lifetime; it was amazing to think that interstellar travel didn’t exist when I was a foal. So many of the things we had now were thought up by our High Queen’s mind, and the war had given us the drive to perfect the technology we needed to use the theories she created.

The reflection of another mare darted across the porthole, a splash of white and yellow against the shifting purple fibers of the universe our corvette was slipping through. Without even turning to look at her, I gave voice to the concerns I’d had since we’d left Equus two days ago.

“Do you think Auris is going to be everything they said it would be?”

The other mare’s reflection stopped in the window. “You know better than I do that the Synarchy never tells us the truth, Surge. I don’t get to know all the secrets like you.”

I turned around and shot her a warning glare. “Flask, keep it down! You know you can’t say things like that.”

Flask scoffed and sauntered closer to my table. She was a pretty mare once, though years of stress and our mandatory military service had taken their toll on her, just like everypony else. “What are they going to do, doctor? Shoot me now? Throw me out an airlock? We’re two hours from entering the system. We’ll be on the planet in another day.”

“Yes, Flask, they would. I’ve seen enough of the inside to know how things run. The only reason I’ve let you and my team run… looser is because the Synarchy needs us and they know it.”

“Sounds like even more reason for them to not give a damn about what I say.”

“Flask…” I hesitated. What I was about to say was nothing short of treason. “You know the war isn’t going as well as they say.”

Flask wasn’t concerned. She shook her head and chuckled once, giving me a look. “Doctor, everypony knows the war isn’t going as well as they say. We’d have won by now if it was.”

“No, Flask. We’re losing.”

The mirth evaporated from her face almost immediately. “…Losing?”

“Yes. Losing.”

“But that’s not what the vids say,” she protested. “They showed a tour of the battlefield at Antler Ridge after the fighting and—!”

“Flask, that footage is ten years old.” My breath caught in my throat as unpleasant memories resurfaced. “I know because it was my husband who took it after the battle. The Synarchy got it from him.”

“But… do you know how bad it is?”

I didn’t have anything to say. I was afraid that if I said anything, I’d send her into a panic.

“Doctor Surge, please! You had the ears of some of the High Queen’s advisors! What’s happening on Equus? I… I left my husband and my three kids behind because I thought we’d help win this war!”

Tears started to well in her eyes. I could see her doubting nearly every decision she’d made for the past few years, wondering if she made the right choice to sign her life away on my stupid project and leave her family behind. “Flask…”

The metal grating actually bent when she stomped her hoof. I was at least glad she took her earth pony strength out on the floor and not my face. “Tell me!”

I steeled myself for what I said next. “…There’s a reason why the military is shoring up defenses around major metropolises. It’s only a matter of time.”

Once more I saw my words leave her speechless. “Celestia! How… no, that can’t be right! You must’ve heard wrong!”

“We’re splitting at the seams, Flask. It’s only a matter of time now.” I fidgeted with the cup of coffee between my hooves. “The Coalition just has too many soldiers and too much industry. We can’t carry the weight of the world on our backs.”

Flask hung her head and walked over to my table. Sighing, she sat down across from me and rested her head in her hooves. “How did we get into this mess? How did we get here?”

I said something I’d never thought I’d say in my lifetime. Perhaps leaving Equus and crawling out from under the hoof of Equestria’s government had freed those words. Still my voice was barely more than a whisper. “Through the same blind fanaticism to our government that ponykind has had for generations. We needed a change, but we never got one. Now it’s all crashing down.”

“Then why are we even out here?” Flask cried. “Why are we even going to Auris? If the war’s already lost, why bother? I should be home with my family, not traveling lightyears away!”

“I don’t know, Flask,” I said. “The High Queen and her council must simply be getting desperate. They’re grasping for anything that’ll give them a miracle to end this war.”

“Why doesn’t our High Queen actually do something?!” she shouted. “She has the magic of four alicorns in her. She could win the war in a single blow, and she’s done nothing!”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “Have you ever seen the High Queen up close?”

Flask shook her head. “No,” she said. “Only at parades and marches.”

“I have. She uses illusions in public to maintain her appearance. But… she looks like a skeleton.”

Flask narrowed her eyes at me. “How would you know? How’d you get close enough?”

“It was an accident. I saw something I wasn’t supposed to see.” I shook my head. “During the first test of our prototype mana reactor. It was just me, her, and her retinue in an observation room when we powered it up. It sucked the illusion off her body. She looks so frail.”

I took a deep gulp of my coffee like it was something stiff. “I had to swear under penalty of death not to tell anypony about what I saw. If you so much as say a word of this to anypony… if word gets out…” I swallowed hard.

Thankfully, Flask put her hoof on mine. “It’s safe with me,” she said in a shaky voice. “But if our High Queen’s too weak to save us… what do we do? What can we do?”

“Our job,” I said, putting my cup aside. “We carry on like normal. But if this whole thing’s going bottom up… we might have to fend for ourselves.”

“What do you mean?”

“When we move into our new facility, I want to have a private meeting with all our crew,” I said. “If Equestria surrenders, the soldiers we’re with might mutiny. I don’t trust them to keep the peace when they’re light years away from anypony who can punish them. Besides,” I added, “most of the soldiers assigned to Auris are there because of behavioral misconduct and demotions. These aren’t model Synarchy soldiers. These are the ponies they don’t want on the front lines. And in a war this desperate, that’s saying something.”

“Celestia have mercy,” Flask said, shaking her head. “Celestia save us all…”

\/\/\/\/\/

I woke up the next morning nearly out of breath. What was that dream? Did… did Surge just admit to that other mare that the Synarchy was a sham? A fucking lie? That didn’t seem to make sense at all. Almost every moment I’d had interacting with her, she’d seemed all pro-Synarchy. What was going on?

That confusion eventually washed away and I gathered my bearings. I was still inside the tent, so Surge hadn’t moved me or something while my mind was sleeping, though I couldn’t tell if she was also awake or not. My skull was quiet for the time being. But even if she had wanted to move me, she might have had trouble doing so, because Ace was basically using me as a body pillow. Her breath tickled the back of my neck, and she had her forehooves wrapped around my midsection, my branded flank tucked underneath one of her hind legs.

I tell you one thing, I wasn’t expecting to wake up that morning as the little spoon. What was even more strange was that I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to move at all or go anywhere while still held in Ace’s embrace. It was comforting and warm… and reminded me of good times that seemed so far away.

Honestly, I have to wonder at this point whether I just have a thing for cuddly pegasus mare badasses or what. Because I was two for two since leaving Blackwash.

My ears twitched at the sound of Nova’s voice outside. I guess she was already up, and by the sound of it, she was trying to communicate with our native guest again. That was good; it meant Teka hadn’t tried to run off in the middle of the night. If she trusted us enough to sleep at our camp, then maybe she’d trust us enough to take us where we needed to go.

I reluctantly used my magic to get myself out of Ace’s grip without waking her up. For a moment, I thought about trying to teleport, but then I remembered that my horn was still taxed and sore from all the teleportation I’d done the day before. Instead, I settled with just lifting her legs with telekinesis and shimmying out of our tent. She stirred and lifted her head for a moment, but when she saw it was only me, she sighed and went back to sleep. She may have been a light sleeper, but she knew how to catch what she could, when she could. Years of wandering Auris will do that to you.

There wasn’t any direct sunlight outside of the tent, and I could smell rain in the air. It’d probably be hitting us within a few hours, so I needed to make sure my horn was ready to hold a rain shield for five bodies. At least I had Surge to help with that. Playing host to two souls was great for my mana reserves. But in the meantime, I needed breakfast. We had a long day ahead of us.

I saw my two best friends sitting around our campfire, which I guess Gauge had restocked with wood for this morning. Nova was continuing to try to pantomime things to Teka, who mostly gave her confused looks, while Gauge was kindling a small fire he’d started with SCaR’s thrusters. While he struggled with that, I simply lit my horn and made the wood erupt into a healthy blaze. When he looked up at me, I winked at him. “Leave the fire to the expert.”

“Well, the ‘expert’ was sleeping, so I tried to make do myself.” He reached into one of his saddlebags and pulled out some slabs of what was basically hardtack, threw them in a pan, and poured some water in it. “Breakfast will be ready in a few. Maybe you can help Nov with her hopeless cause.”

I glanced at Nova, who shot Gauge a look. “I’m making progress!” she protested, pouting. “I’m learning a bunch of things! Like, pegasus is ‘pohna flaga’ and unicorn is ‘pohna magis’. And from that, I can tell that ‘pony’ is probably ‘pohna’ and they describe our race by what makes us special!” She extended her wing and pointed to it. “My wing is a ‘flaga’ and your horn is a ‘magis’! Isn’t this so exciting?!”

“Uhhh… yeah, sure,” I said, sitting down at her side. Teka gave me a look of exasperation and frustration, and her silvery tattoos briefly flickered red and yellow. Smirking, I bumped Nova’s shoulder. “I think she just wants food. Maybe save being a language-ologist for after breakfast.”

Nova groaned and put a hoof to her forehead. “They’re called linguists, Em.”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I said.”

Apparently Nova’s frustration with me being an idiot amused Teka. The young mare allowed herself to smile for a brief moment and she nodded to me. “A U’a hatot,” she said. Then she pointed at Nova and frowned. “S’a takka allae. Takka takka takka.”

Even I could figure out that one. “I think she says you talk too much,” I said, struggling to try and keep something resembling a straight face. “I think I agree with her.”

“I do not talk too much!” Nova protested. “I’m just trying to learn her language! It’ll help us out later!”

“Takka takka takka,” Teka repeated.

Nova spun in place and crossed her forelegs. “Gauge, I don’t talk too much, do I?”

“Whatever you say, Nov,” he said without looking up from the fire.

I snickered and patted Nova on the back. “Don’t worry about it too much, Nov. Somepony’s gotta do all the talking for us.”

A loud yawn broke the peace of the morning, and a tent flap rustled open. Ace stepped into the dreary morning light and rubbed her eyes with her wings. “Fehhh… morning already?” she mumbled, glancing between the three of us. She sniffed the air and saw the hardtack thing Gauge was preparing over the fire and grimaced. “We use up all our fresh food? I hate ReadyTack. Ain’t nopony can make a blander thing if they tried.”

“You’d be surprised,” I said. “The Sentinels have been living off of military rations stocked away in the Bastion since before the Silence. It’s like eating chunky cardboard soup. It’s got about the same consistency, too.”

Gauge made a face and shuddered. “Honestly, eating next to nothing while I was in captivity was almost better than that crap they ate. How did they keep morale up when that’s all they had to eat every day?”

“Beats me.” I shrugged and took a sip of water, then offered it to Teka. “You want some? You look thirsty.”

After a moment, Teka nodded her head. “Hatot bele U’a,” she muttered, taking the thing between her hooves. She took several long gulps, sighed, and the tattoos covering her body flickered and pulsed a few times. When she passed it back to me, I saw a lining of frost coating the outside of the waterskin, and the water inside was chilled and nearly freezing.

Nova saw the ice on it, slowly beginning to melt under the heat of the day. “Teka did that?” she asked in surprise. She whipped her head to the mare, dumbstruck. “How did you do that?”

Teka, of course, didn’t understand any of that, and turned her nose up at Nova. “La takka,” she grumbled. “U’a yut.”

“Yeah, what she said.” I saw Gauge taking the food off of the fire and started rubbing my hooves together. “Let’s get some of that, I’m starving, and Sparky’s still sleeping or something so I can at least enjoy the quiet in my brain during a meal for once.”

“Right.” Gauge cut up the food and put it onto little tin plates, and I passed them around the fire. Teka gave hers a suspicious look and poked it once or twice with her hoof, but when she saw the rest of us eating, she picked the plate up and took a nibble of a corner. Almost immediately, her face screwed up and she gagged, spitting the little bite she’d taken out and pushing the ReadyTack aside. Honestly, I couldn’t blame her. It was like eating tree pulp or something.

Then, almost without warning, the young mare stood up and trotted off into the woods. The four of us all stopped chewing and watched her slip between some bushes, wondering what that was all about.

I swallowed what was in my mouth and looked around at my friends. “So… bets on if she’s gonna come back?”

Nova pouted and hunched over some. “Aww… I feel like we were starting to make progress, too!”

“Your cooking scared the poor filly off,” Ace said, winking at Gauge. “ReadyTack ain’t luxury dining, that’s for sure.”

Gauge sighed and took another bite. “I can’t control that,” he said around his mouthful. “I’m just using this since we have plenty of it and you only need a couple of bites to fill up.”

“Thank the stars,” I muttered, forcing myself to swallow another mouthful. I only had like two left, but this shit was awful to eat. “I don’t think I’d be able to deal with this stuff otherwise.”

“It sure as shit ain’t carrots,” Ace agreed, forcing the last of her morsel down her throat. Grimacing, she wiped her muzzle and set the tin aside. “Y’all sleep good?”

Nova and Gauge nodded. “I always sleep well when it’s just us two,” Nova said, shooting a flirty look across the fire at Gauge.

“She snores,” Gauge said, smirking. He leaned out of the way when Nova flung a pebble at him, chuckling. “You’ve gotta be quicker than th—!”

He fell backwards as another pebble struck him square in the chest like a bullet. Blinking, I stared at Nova, who was seemingly frozen in place with worry, her prosthetic wing extended and pointing in Gauge’s direction. When the zebra coughed and sat up, an apologetic smile wormed its way onto her muzzle. “Sorry… I’m still not used to this thing.”

“It’s… alright,” Gauge said between coughs. He rubbed a sore spot on his chest and shook his head. “Just be careful with that thing. I don’t want it to shoot lasers at me or something.”

“You need to give that thing a big shakedown,” Ace said, pointing to the prosthetic. “Figure out what it can do and all. Better yet, get Sparky to tell you how it works. I betcha she knows.”

I yawned and gulped down the last of my disgusting breakfast. At least I wouldn’t need to eat for another six hours. “You know I sometimes share dreams with her, right?”

“You’ve mentioned it,” Nova said, her ears perking up. “I’d love to be able to do some testing on it someday. That sort of interaction between soul memories is something never studied before! Or… well, at least not on Auris. Maybe on Equus, but who knows?”

“Right.” I shook my head. “Anyway, she had this dream last night, and I saw it through her eyes. It was a conversation with a coworker or something while she was still traveling to Auris.”

“What was it about?” Gauge asked. “How much she hates us striped folk?”

“I bet it had something to do with the Synarchy,” Ace grumbled. “That mare’s got a thing for fascism.”

“Maybe…” I said. “Or maybe not.”

Nova furrowed her brow. “What do you mean, Em?”

“She seemed disillusioned with the whole thing,” I said. “She was saying things to her friend that she made it sound like would probably get her executed for treason. Bad things about how the Synarchy was losing the war and it probably wouldn’t be long before they surrendered. And then she said that their High Queen couldn’t save them even though she was supposed to be super powerful because she was actually frail as shit and just hiding it with illusions.” Shrugging, I added, “I’d love to know more about what happened in those last days, months, years or whatever that got us into this fucking mess of a planet, but Surge doesn’t know anything about what happened, just like us.”

“Their High Queen was Twilight Sparkle, right?” Ace asked. When I nodded, she crossed her forelegs. “Didn’t she have the magic of the other alicorns that died? How could she be weak and frail?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Surge doesn’t know either. But Equestria’s immortal goddess ruler was apparently knocking on Death’s door and nopony knew it. She probably was too weak to save herself from a fly, the way she made it sound.”

“Stars,” Nova murmured. Her wings fidgeted at her sides as she thought, but ultimately she kicked her rear hoof in frustration. “Darn it, now I want to know what happened to her, too!” she exclaimed. “We’re trying to piece together forgotten history more than two centuries after it happened with nothing more than hearsay and little notes left here and there. It’s frustrating!”

“I just want to know how it relates to the code,” I said. “Why was it sent, and what was Auris supposed to do with it? Why did it arrive now instead of earlier? What the fuck was the Dusk Protocol supposed to do?” I rubbed my hooves against my temples and chewed on my lower lip. “Fuck, I hate thinking.”

Apparently, my overheating brain was enough to wake Surge up. I felt the fuzzy edges of her consciousness fumble around mine, and my limbs twitched and horn sparked a few times as she sort of kicked at the controls some. When she slipped back into her co-pilot seat in my brain, my body yawned in response, even though I wasn’t tired. My posture straightened some, and Surge darted my eyes around. “I see we’re already eating breakfast,” she said.

“Yeah,” I responded. “Be glad that you were asleep for it.”

“Oh, I am. ReadyTack is horrid, if nutritious.” She contorted my face into a frown and looked at the blank spot around the fire. “What happened to our little savage? Did she run off in the middle of the night?”

“Weren’t the middle of the night,” Ace grumbled.

I shook my head at her. “She’ll be back. She just… went for a walk.”

Gauge rolled his eyes. “I don’t think she’s coming back, Em,” he said. “She’s probably going to slip back to her tribe so us outsiders don’t follow her.”

“But I tried communicating with her that we wanted to take her back,” Nova whined. “We could’ve all gone there together!”

“Which is probably why she left, truth be told.”

“Assuming she could even understand you in the first place,” Surge said. “Did you make any progress on that front?”

“A little,” Nova said. “We can pick out a few words here and there. Mostly nouns that we can point to and other stuff I can kind of figure out from context. Her language is strange. It sounds like something completely alien yet familiar at the same time. Pony is ‘pohna’, and talk is ‘takka’, and both of those kind of sound the same in Equiish.”

Surge nodded my head. “Given that Dr. Hozho’s test subjects knew language before it was magically stripped from them, it makes sense that some things would have similar analogues, likely construed from memory of what the words were supposed to sound like.”

Nova frowned at the fire. “I don’t even know what to say when you mention things the Synarchy did. Your lack of ethics is horrifying.”

“We were fighting a war,” Surge said, as if that would somehow make everything better. “We tried everything to win it. Ethics were standing in the way of our very survival as a species.”

I sighed. “Look, girls, can we not get into this argument again? I at least need a cigarette first.” As I said that, I pulled one out of my box and lit it. After a long draw on it, I started really feeling like myself again, like I was ready to conquer anything.

A twig snapped in the undergrowth, and both Ace and I instinctively reached for our guns and pointed it in that direction. Instead of some bandits seeking revenge or a horrifying monster native to this forest, we saw Teka wandering out of the purple bushes. She held a bundle of roots and berries in a makeshift basket she’d made from some long blades of grass and dropped them on the ground in front of her. When she saw our guns pointed at her, she shrank back a bit, at least until Ace and I realized who we were pointing them at and set them aside again.

“A sotto bele stomm hatot,” she said. “Allae saffowy” To show us what she meant, she sat down in front of her pile of berries and popped a few in her mouth.

I found myself licking my lips at the sight of actual food. Suddenly the five of us were silent, watching Teka work on her breakfast. I hesitantly lit my horn and put a field of telekinesis over one of the berries, holding it there for a few seconds and raising my eyebrows in a questioning manner when Teka looked at me. “You mind?”

Though she didn’t understand what I said, she at least knew what I meant. Dipping her head, she nosed the pile a little closer. “Timm.”

I assumed that meant it was okay, so I floated the berry over and popped it in my mouth. At first I worried it was actually poisonous, because it had a really strong bitter taste, but after about five seconds, it became tart and sweet, bordering on sour. By the time I swallowed it, my stomach was starting to remind me that I’d only eaten a couple of bites of incredibly nutrient-dense hardtack and didn’t actually fill it with food. “Holy crap, those things are good.”

“I’m just excited that she’s back,” Nova said. Grinning at Teka, she waved her natural wing. “Hello, Teka!”

Teka blinked and looked at her for a few moments. Eventually, she replied with “Teol, Nofa.”

“I guess they don’t have ‘V’ in their alphabet, either,” Surge remarked. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a true challenge to stretch my mind around. It feels refreshing.”

“Yeah, well, that’s something we can take care of later,” I said. Turning to Ace, I nodded to our tent. “We should start getting this stuff packed up. It’s gonna be raining soon and I don’t want to have to hold a shield over the whole campsite while we’re packing up.”

“Can’t we just wait for it to pass?” Nova asked. “We can just hunker down in our tents and wait until it’s dry to move.”

But I didn’t want to do that. “Yeoman has a head start on us, and his team can fly and scout the area while we’re stuck on the ground. Besides, we’re not even at the Spines yet. The trees aren’t petrified.”

“It’s about another day’s walk to the southwest,” Ace said. “If we move soon, we can reach it by nightfall.”

“And we’ve got a guide to take us right to her tribe,” I said, looking at Teka, who had a smattering of berry juices and root bark on her muzzle. “We don’t have to go searching for her home if she’ll take us there.”

“I don’t know if she’ll do that,” Gauge said. “I still don’t trust her to actually cooperate with us. We’re outsiders, and tribal ponies usually tend to be protective of their homelands.”

“And how many tribal ponies have you met?” I asked him, raising an eyebrow.

He shook his head and stood up, collecting his things. “Whatever,” he said. “Just be ready for us to find our own way when she ditches us.”

“She’s not gonna ditch us,” I insisted. Then, turning to Teka, I smiled at her. “Teka,” I said, catching her attention. Then I moved my hoof in a circle to gesture to all of us and pointed through the trees. “Feati?” I asked, cocking my head to the side.

She frowned at me, a particularly juicy berry still perched between her teeth. Then her tongue moved and the berry disappeared into her jaw. After a moment to chew and swallow, she looked at the trees around her, glanced at the sky, and pointed to the southwest. “Feati,” she said, keeping her foreleg outstretched. “Feati stumm.”

I shot a smirk at Nova, who shook her head. “See, Nov? That wasn’t so hard! You don’t have to learn the language to talk to her, you just gotta do a little charades!”

“Charades will only get us so far,” she grumbled. “I just want to know how to talk with her when we actually need to.”

“We’ll worry about that as we get to it,” I said. “That’ll take some time anyway.” Then, stretching my legs, I plucked another berry and crushed it between my teeth. “I’m gonna help Ace pack. I want to get moving as soon as possible. We’ve got a long and wet day ahead of us.”

Chapter 27: The Storm

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Chapter 27: The Storm

As I predicted, it started raining before noon. And as I expected, it was pretty miserable. Even though my rain shield kept us all dry, it didn’t keep the ground dry, and it’d turned into a squishy, muddy mess before too long. At one point, the stream burst its banks, and we had to flee the inch deep water swirling around our fetlocks for higher ground. I don’t know what it is about this planet, but when it rains, it pours. And of course, it always seems to pour at the worst possible time.

But with Surge’s help, the rain shield didn’t bother me that much. I could almost fire and forget the spell, and that was awesome. Normally, I’d have to maintain at least a little focus on what I was doing, otherwise holes would appear in my shield and somepony would get wet. But with Surge’s help, I didn’t have to pay much attention to it other than keeping a steady trickle of mana flowing up my horn, and we sort of split maintenance of the spell between us.

We didn’t talk all that much for the first few hours of the hike. It seemed like the dreary, rainy day had sucked any liveliness out of us, and we just trudged on. Crooked, splitting trees passed by on either side, and the bushes and leaves bounced and waved as the raindrops slapped them about. A persistent breeze came in from the northwest, occasionally gusting and reminding me to keep the sides of my rain shield well reinforced. All was quiet and seemed almost hauntingly dead, and the thick mist from the rain limited our visibility to hardly further than the next tree along our path.

Despite all that, though, Teka never wavered in her path. Once I’d figured she knew what we wanted, I’d just let her take the lead, and the young mare definitely knew her way through the terrain. Oftentimes, she’d leave us trailing behind as we struggled to navigate some hazard she simply glided across like it wasn’t there, like a muddy slope or a treacherous climb up a rocky hill. But even though Gauge insisted that she was going to leave us behind, we always found her waiting at the next hill over, the next tree in line, and wouldn’t start moving again until we were close enough to get the rain shield back over her. Her constant trips in and out of the shield left her dripping with water, but I’d like to think that she wasn’t waiting for us only because of the rain shield.

Then all of a sudden, the geography changed. We crested a hill and it was like we were looking at an entirely different world. A riverbed ran from north to south, obviously ancient and not really used today, even if the heavy rainfall was beginning to accumulate water inside of it. At one point, this dried-up river must’ve been half a mile wide and had eaten a deep trench into the earth. But even more striking than that was the stark difference in vegetation. On our side, the trees were healthy and covered in leaves. On the other, they were nearly barren, with nothing but a dense collection of gray, petrified trunks jutting out of the ground like bones or teeth. A sparse smattering of live trees gave the thing a canopy, but those trees only reached maybe half as high as the petrified giants towering above them. The stone trees reached so high up that the tops of some of them disappeared into the low-hanging rainclouds currently trying to soak us.

“That’s the Spines?” I asked, staring in disbelief at the frankly alien landscape in front of us. I’d seen a lot of things since leaving Blackwash, but nothing really seemed weird or impossible until now. I couldn’t even begin to figure out how those trees had grown so tall and gotten petrified like they were now. Judging by the incredulous look on Nova’s face, she couldn’t either.

“That’s them,” Ace affirmed. “You can see why it has the name.”

“But that’s… how did they…” Nova blinked and rubbed her eyes with her feathers. “How did that happen? Surge, was it always like that?”

“It was,” Surge confirmed for her. “It’s been like that since we first discovered Auris. Isotope dating put the trees at at least fourteen thousand years old.”

“Fourteen thousand?” Gauge echoed, stunned. “They’re that old?”

“What the fuck happened to them?” I asked, repeating Nova’s earlier question.

But all I got was Surge shrugging my shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nopony knew. It wasn’t deemed that important to figure out why the Spines are the way they are. We had more pressing matters to focus our attention and resources on. Like winning the war.”

Teka looked over her shoulder and frowned at us, but especially me. I think she was starting to figure out that I talked to myself all the time, courtesy of sharing a body with Surge. But honestly, I really wasn’t in the mood for explaining how that worked to her. I seriously doubted she’d be able to understand something like that.

Then the sky did something I didn’t think was possible: it started raining harder. A fresh wave of rain hit my rain shield like a hammer on an anvil, and I winced as it started taking noticeably more mana to repulse the water trying to get inside. There was a brilliant flash of light, and a second later a booming crack of thunder echoed through the valley and shook the ground underneath my hooves.

“We should find shelter!” Ace said, suddenly having to shout to be heard over the wind and the rain. “It’s only going to get worse from here!”

“I fucking noticed!” I growled back at her. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of shelter on our side of the riverbank, unless we wanted to backtrack half an hour to an outcropping of rock we’d passed by on the way up here. I squinted and tried to peer through the mist toward the Spines to see if there was any cover there, but couldn’t make much out. “Do you see anything?”

Ace pulled out her rifle and started using it like a makeshift telescope. She scanned back and forth for a minute before she lowered it and pointed ahead. “There! There’s a cave under the far riverbank. I reckon it’ll be a tad bit soggy, but ain’t worse than getting rained on!”

“Cool, that’s all I needed to hear!” Shouldering my load of supplies once more, I started moving toward the riverbed, which had already developed a stream about three inches deep. “Let’s fucking go! I don’t want to stand out here any longer than I have to!”

Teka blinked in surprise as I trudged past her, taking the lead of our group. “Embaw?” she asked, frowning and trotting up at my side. “Wo leol’set U’a? M’a Feati ka stum, ka’un ite!”

“We’re gonna get out of the rain, Teka,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t understand me. “Very wet. Very bad. And a wet Ember is a sad Ember.”

The tribal mare stopped in place as she tried to process that, but the encroaching rain got her moving again before I carried my rain shield too far away. Gauge shook his head, sending a few droplets of water that’d managed to stick there simply from walking through the rain out of his mane. “You know she doesn’t understand that.”

“Maybe one day she will,” I said.

“One day?” I could hear the suspicion in Ace’s voice. “As soon as we get this filly back to her people, she’s gonna end up staying there. She ain’t following us where we’re going.”

“I know,” I said, but that didn’t change what I was thinking. This young mare was a natural tracker and had crazy tattoos that could do all sorts of weird shit without her even having a horn. They could heal wounds, and that’s pretty crazy magic even for a unicorn. Not even Surge could do it that well, and she told me my horn wasn’t naturally attuned to it so there wasn’t any way in fuck that I’d be able to use it that well. Having a companion who could heal me whenever I got shot in the ass would be so much better than lugging around Stabil-Ice, bandages, and all those other medical supplies.

Thankfully, apart from a sharp sniffle, Ace didn’t press me on that. Instead, she spread her wings and started to hover, and a moment later I knew why. When I stuck my hoof into the ground, it sank about four inches into the mud before finally coming to a stop. The ground squelched as it absorbed my weight, and I sighed as I stepped back and leveraged my hoof out of the sucking mud. It felt like five pounds clung to the end, slowly sliding off of my fetlock and plopping on the ground. I shot Ace a look and she just shook her head. “Great. Lucky you, with the wings.”

Ace winked at me. “Use what your mama gave you.”

“She can’t,” Surge said for me. “Her magic is fire attuned. I couldn’t get her to make ice and freeze the mud without a lot of hassle.”

“Well fuck me right in the ass,” I grumbled, once more stepping out into the mud. “Stars, sometimes it really fucking sucks to be a unicorn.”

“Try being a zebra,” Gauge said, stepping into the mud next to me. “We don’t have any magic.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got weird shaman voodoo martial arts moves and stuff.”

“Uhh… No I don’t, Em.”

I shook my head. “Not even living up to your own stereotype. Good job, Gauge.”

“Yeah, whatever,” he grumbled back.

Of course, Surge felt the need to add her two Cs. “Zebra commandos were one of our most feared opponents on the field,” she said. “They were stealthy, silent, and could kill without weapons. There was an irrational fear among the grunts that they could show up anywhere at any time and kill everypony in a compound without taking a casualty. In reality, they were limited in number, and every casualty they took was one they couldn’t afford to replace. They weren’t a threat to us after a few decades of losses.”

“Couldn’t they just train more?” Gauge asked, grimacing as he pried his hooves out of the thick mud and continued to stomp across the riverbed. “If I were them, I’d have schools dedicated for training commandos like that.”

“They couldn’t,” Surge said. “We’d razed most of their homelands to the ground fifteen years prior and turned it to glass. They were a dying race on Equus without anywhere to call their own.”

“No wonder everybody wanted to kill the Synarchy,” Nova grumbled, taking wing with a hiss and hum of her metal prosthetic. “Nopony ever thought that would backfire?”

Surge was quiet for a moment before saying, “The hope was that a show of force would cow the rest of the species into submission. It… backfired.”

“You don’t fucking say,” I grumbled.

“I can’t offer commentary on why Equestria’s leaders acted the way they acted,” Surge retorted. “At least, not back then. I was still a filly when it happened.”

I grunted and forced myself forward a few more steps. By now, I’d accumulated enough mud on my hooves that they had the surface area to prevent me from sinking too far into the riverbed with each step. “Yeah. Still think the Synarchy didn’t deserve to be fucked up like it was?”

“The Synarchy was strength for ponykind,” Surge insisted. “It allowed us to prosper in a world where the other species wanted nothing more than to bring us down.”

What about what you said to Flask? I mentally prodded her. I figured I’d get a better answer if I didn’t force her to sound like a hypocrite in front of everypony.

I saw memories of the dream flicker in my mind’s eye as Surge sifted through them. Eventually, she settled with a mental growl. My memories are none of your business.

And mine don’t get the same treatment? I know you look through mine all the time. It’s not exactly subtle.

That brought her into a fuming silence. We will talk about this later, she growled at me, and I could imagine the scowl on her face as she thought it.

Of course, me suddenly falling silent and making a bunch of different facial expressions at nopony caught Nova’s attention. “You alright, Em?”

“Fine,” I said. “Just… having a private discussion with Sparky.”

“There wasn’t much to discuss,” Surge spat. “It’s nopony’s business.”

Nova blinked and drifted a little closer to Gauge. “Riiiiiight…” she said, eyeing me warily. “You two have fun with that.”

“It’s not fun being the crazy mare,” I grumbled. “Eventually you realize that you’re the last person you ever want to talk to, especially when you’re shouting racist bullshit all the time.”

“Or imagine being forced to ride around in the brain of a primitive and you can’t do much about it,” Surge said. “You can only watch the world through her eyes without any agency of your own.”

“You’re pretty fucking insistent on taking the wheel whenever you want…”

A strong gust of wind roaring down the riverbed nearly bowled me over, but in this case, the mud anchoring me to the ground was actually good for something. Nova and Ace, however, tumbled and struggled to right themselves before they hit the mud. When the wind finally passed, a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder boomed across the landscape, and the leaves of the trees flailed wildly in the wind around us.

“Fuck, it just keeps getting worse!” I shouted into the storm, just struggling to be heard over the noise.

“That cave sounds really awesome right about now!” Gauge shouted back. “Come on, let’s move!”

Gritting my teeth together, I started cantering across the riverbed as fast as my weighted limbs would let me. The rainfall had already accumulated an inch of water on top of the mud, and it was starting to develop a current pulling toward the south. But while me and Gauge struggled to cross, I saw Teka practically prancing across the surface on hooves that seemed to be light as feathers. She’d apparently grown tired of waiting behind us, and with the cave entrance just a short ways ahead, she galloped off on her own, her silver tattoos flickering and glimmering in the misty haze of the rain. When she finally reached the cave entrance, she shook her coat off and turned back to watch us, her body glowing like a beacon in the dark.

“That filly’s something else,” Ace said. “I’d heard tales about the Feati ponies before, but seeing one in person is so much different.”

“Now imagine an entire village of them,” I said. “Because that’s where we’re headed.”

“I can’t wait!” Nova exclaimed fluttering her wings. “Do you think any of them know how to speak Equiish? If they’re known by the ponies of Three Rivers, then surely they’ve had enough contact for some cultural exchange to take place.”

“That’d be really helpful,” Gauge said. “If they can talk with us, then we can find what we’re looking for that much easier.”

“And hopefully before Yeoman does as well,” I said. “I’m afraid of what he’d do to them if he stumbled across them.”

“You know full well how that bastard’ll greet them,” Ace muttered. “With lead and death.”

“Then we just need to get there first and give them a warning. Maybe we can even get the jump on Yeoman and deal with him once and for all.” I can’t even begin to describe how much I wanted to do that. I was still craving revenge after what he did to Zip at the dam. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to settle down and go back to Blackwash until I avenged her, one way or another.

But we finally reached the cave, and the four of us darted inside as I let the rain shield fizzle away. My horn ached and was a little warm to the touch, which was to be expected given that I’d been using it almost all day. Thankfully I could split some of the load with Surge, otherwise I never would’ve gotten us this far. I would’ve burnt out long ago. The relief at not drawing mana through my horn anymore hit me so hard that I almost got dizzy.

Teka sniffed at us and wiped some mud off of her almost perfectly clean hooves on the stone wall of the cave. “U’a pohna’hn spili’un,” she said, a smug look settling on her face. “U’a nabb’un A oe A wippa leol.”

I just nodded at her for wont of a better way to respond. “Yeah, sure, Teka,” I said, flashing a smile at her. “We won’t be leaving for a bit.”

Teka frowned at me, I guess because I didn’t understand what she said to me and I’d responded wrong or something. But frankly, I didn’t care all that much. I had more important things to worry about than solving her language, like scouting the cave and getting a fire set up so we could all warm up and dry off. Throwing my saddlebags against a far wall, I pulled out some of the fuel I’d collected earlier and threw it in a pile a ways back from the cave entrance so the wind and rain wouldn’t get to it. While I rummaged for some kindling to get the fire built up slow, considering the wood was damp, Teka just walked over to the pile and stuck her hoof in it. Her tattoos flared red, and there was a few sharp pops of crackling sap before the blaze engulfed the wood, leaving a flickering, healthy flame on it.

“She can make fires with those tattoos, too?” Nova asked. “That’s amazing!”

I frowned at the young mare, who’d curled herself up in front of the fire and shut her eyes as the heat started working on her damp coat. “I can make fire too, you know…” I grumbled.

Gauge shook his head and smirked at me. “Poor Ember, feeling jealous of the new mare’s crazy tattoos.” He patted my back and winked at me. “Don’t worry, we won’t be replacing you with her. Yet.”

“You better hope she knows how to use a gun,” I muttered. Ultimately, though, I decided I was too tired to bother getting egged on by him and I’d rather just sit by the fire for the time being. “I’m gonna dry off and try to get some of this fucking mud out of my fetlocks.”

“I’m gonna explore the cave some,” Ace said, her hooves echoing on the stony ground as she walked past us. “This thing goes back for a bit. Reckon I might as well figure out how far.”

“Please don’t find a cave monster or something bad like that!” Nova pleaded after her.

“But if you do, just shoot your rifle a bunch if it starts mauling you to death,” I quipped. “Or scream a lot. Just make sure we can hear you so we know to leg it.”

Ace rolled her eyes. “Tsch. Yeah, right. Be back in a bit.”

And then she was gone, her tail swaying back and forth and her head moving all around as she observed the dim walls of the cave. A flashlight on her rifle left a glowing white circle on the walls in front of her, and pretty soon that disappeared around a bend in the stone.

Gauged moved closer to the fire, sitting down at Nova’s side. “Wandering a spooky cave on a planet where everything wants to kill us. What could possibly go wrong?”

“She’s a big girl, she’ll be fine,” I muttered, moving to the fire as well. The fingers of heat working into my coat felt absolutely fantastic, and I was tempted to just use my fireproof spell and walk into the fire to dry off. But I wasn’t in a hurry, and my horn hurt from keeping a rain shield for five up all day, so I didn’t want to bother with it. Instead, I figured Teka had the better idea. The tribal mare was already asleep by the fire, her hind leg kicking slightly in her dreams, her tattoos occasionally flickering or glimmering through different colors before returning to silver.

But of course, I couldn’t bring myself to lower my guard. I was on edge like I’d pretty much been since leaving Three Rivers. Some paranoid part of me worried that if I closed my eyes without Ace around to pick up the slack, my friends would get jumped by a monster or bandits and they’d all die. So I stayed awake, staring at the fire for who knows how long, while my friends dozed around me.

The rain lessened a bit outside, so I moved to the entrance of the cave and simply took in the dreary sight. The trees swayed on the opposite riverbank, and a slope of leaves rose and fell with the low mountains and hills we’d just hiked through. The riverbed finally resembled a river once more, and a speedy current of water a couple of inches deep rushed to the south. I was glad we’d crossed it when we did. Otherwise we’d have had to deal with sinking mud and water rushing past our knees. At the very least, the cave entrance was a bit off the ground, so the water from the riverbed didn’t flow down it.

I felt Surge watching the outside world with me, so I frowned and mentally prodded her. You wanna tell me what that dream was about now?

There was a moment of irritation and disgust coming from somewhere in the back of my mind before Surge replied. It shouldn’t mean anything to you.

I just want to know what’s your deal. Why did a mare who had nothing but praise and reverence for the strength of the Synarchy talk with a friend behind closed doors about how bad it was?

Surge was quick to correct my terminology. I never said the Synarchy was bad, she thought. I respected the Synarchy. I respected the strength it had given ponykind, the land it had won for us, the foes it had vanquished. The Synarchy saved Equestria when it was on the verge of collapse, long before I was born. And in my lifetime, I saw it rise to its peak. But then…

When she didn’t finish the thought, I ended up finishing it for her. Then you lost, I thought. The Synarchy started losing and you saw the ugly face underneath the mask of unity and strength for ponykind. Sucked off it like the illusion from your High Queen.

We became weak and desperate, Surge replied in a low tone, Once upon a time, the Synarchy did mean strength and unity for ponykind. There was a time when we were unchallenged by the world. Our technology advanced at an astronomical rate. Our economy boomed. We did so many wonderful things… but then a rot began to fester in the trunk of the tree. I couldn’t tell you when it started, and I doubt anypony could, dead or alive today. But the Synarchy failed us during the War of Survival, and all the cancers in the government and military revealed just how weak and frail we were—just like the skeleton I called my High Queen.

Her words brought a memory to the surface of her mind, and I think she willingly shared it with me, considering how crystal clear the image was. In one moment, a tall, proud, regal alicorn of lavender coat and indigo mane stood next to me, mane streaked with pinks and reds and yellows while stars glistened inside like the endless expanse of space. Strong muscles held her slender frame together, belying amazing strength beneath such a fragile form. Her face was full and young, even if her eyes shone with wisdom and knowledge of countless years. A proud horn rose from her skull, larger than anything I’d ever seen. Strong wings hung folded at her sides, almost too large for her body. Her cutie mark, a large magenta star surrounded by five smaller white ones, twinkled and shimmered like the stars in the night sky. Beautiful platinum regalia decorated her body, at once elegant, royal, and final.

And then I saw a completely different mare, yet I knew she was still the same. Her ribs showed through her chest, the vertebrae of her spine jutting out of her back like little blunt spikes. Knobby knees complemented shriveled legs that left me amazed to realize she could even stand on them. Her wings were almost featherless, having shriveled up into ugly, naked things, and her horn carried cracked and pronounced grooves all the way up its length. Her cheeks were gaunt and hollow, her muzzle streaked with white hairs, and her mane and tail little more than limp rags clinging to her body. Her sunken eyes widened in shock, and even Surge-in-the-memory drew back in fear, alarm, and surprise.

And then the memory was gone, and when Surge spoke to me again, there was a shakiness in her voice after reliving something so vividly after centuries. She was our High Queen, Surge thought in a quiet voice. Her royal majesty, the High Queen Twilight Sparkle. She was the face of our nation for generations. She was the Synarchy’s strength and its resolve. But, like the Synarchy, she was dying on the inside, beneath the mask. We all believed our High Queen would keep us safe, no matter what befell Equestria. But I don’t think she could’ve saved herself from a drunken stallion with a knife.

I swallowed, a million questions flying into my mind all at once but no good way to go about asking them. Instead, I went with the most topical one. What did she do? Did she really control the heavens?

That and so much more, Surge replied. The Equus system is unlike every other star system in the universe. It’s geocentric with a tiny sun, comparatively speaking to most stars. The entire thing is held together by ancient magic nopony ever understood, but the alicorns could control that magic. And so could Twilight. After Celestia, Luna, and Cadance died, she had all their magic. She was responsible for moving the sun and the moon. She kept the whole thing together.

And that led into my next question. …What would happen to Equus if the High Queen died?

Surge was quiet, but I could feel her thinking. I don’t know, she said. Tradition holds it that her powers would find new bearers to keep the sun and moon moving and maintain the balance. But it’s never happened before—at least, not in recorded history.

And if they don’t?

Then the sun and moon stop moving, Surge thought. It would destroy the planet. One side would boil and the other would freeze. Life could maybe survive in a temperate band of twilight in between, but the rest of the planet would die. Equus would die.

Do you think… maybe that’s what happened? That’s why the Silence started?

Surge solemnly shook my head. It’s a possibility. But a probe carrying a message entered the Meadowbrook system not too long ago. You heard it before anypony else did. How could an FTL probe arrive in this system centuries after the Silence began if there wasn’t anypony to launch it within the past few years?

I nodded along, engrossed in thought. Honestly, I didn’t know which was better and which was worse: that Equus might be a destroyed ruin of a tomb world, or that somebody there was still alive and shooting off probes into space using the Synarchy’s codes and encryptions. If the Synarchy was still alive and they came here to reclaim their colony…

Two feathers jabbed me in the sides, and I immediately jumped about three feet into the air and started yelling and squawking in surprise. I grabbed my gun in my magic and spun around, heart pounding, only for a beige hoof to knock my rifle away and blue eyes to roll in their sockets. “Jumpy, ain’t we?” Ace asked, standing almost nose to nose with me, a stupid and amused grin on her face.

I shoved her back a bit, frowning and more than a little pissed. “Fuck off,” I growled. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot the shit out of you.”

“You’re lucky I weren’t some monster ready to gobble you up like a tasty treat.” Ace winked and nonchalantly slid over to my side so she could look out the cave entrance as well. “Whatchu been up to?”

“Having conversations with Sparky while the rest of the gang sleeps,” I said. I looked over my shoulder and confirmed that they actually were still sleeping. Sheer exhaustion, it seemed, kept Nova and Gauge down, but I noticed that Teka’s ears were pointed in our direction, even if she kept her chin on the ground and her eyes shut. I nudged Ace’s side and pointed, and Ace shook her head with a chuckle.

“Can’t say I blame her,” she said. “She don’t know none of us well. I’d be suspicious as hell that my would-be rescuers might not have my best interests in mind after coming from a bunch of slaving miscreants who abused me and the like.”

“I just wish we could talk to her,” I said. “It’d make this so much easier.”

“I’ve been trying to puzzle out her language,” Surge said, stepping in to make use of my mouth, “but it’s hard to make any headway without notes to keep track of what she says and how she acts.”

Ace shrugged. “Maybe Nova’ll be right. Maybe one of them knows how to speak Equiish and can translate for us. Celestia knows we ain’t doing it ourselves.”

“Just count me out if it comes to that,” I said with a shake of my head. My eyes slid over to the tunnel in the back of the cave. “Find anything neat in there? You’re not dead, so that’s a good thing.”

“Tunnels,” she answered me. “Lots and lots of tunnels. Shit goes on forever. Ups and downs and everything. Big caverns. You could get lost in there.”

“Nothing living?” I prodded.

“Cave slugs, spider rats, not anything out of the ordinary.” She scoffed as she added, “Cave slugs are weird, though. They’re shaped like triangles. Ain’t ever seen anything like that. They’re weird, even by Auris’ standards.”

I stretched myself out and slowly shook my head. “Now that’s impressive. No big monsters, though?”

“Maybe once. There’s some big bones back there. Exoskeleton bits from huge bugs, too. Almost pony-sized, I reckon. Spooky stuff.” She shivered. “Didn’t see any living or freshly dead things they might’ve come from, though. It’s almost as quiet as the grave.”

“Don’t say things like that,” I muttered. “I really don’t need that stress in my life.”

Ace frowned at me. “What, dead stuff? Filly, you and I kill so much shit. Between the two of us, I reckon we could fill a cemetery.”

“Well, the tolan would certainly fill a big chunk of it.”

The outlaw snickered and winked at me, fluffing her wings at her sides. “That’s for sure. Ain’t many ponies who can say they’ve killed one of those monsters. I certainly haven’t.”

“Really?” I asked. “I figured you’ve done everything. You certainly know what’s what out here in the wilderness.”

“Ah, that’s just paying attention. They say failure’s the best teacher, but there ain’t no room for failure out here in Auris. Watch somepony else do the failing so you don’t have to. You learn better when you ain’t dead.”

“I’m sure,” I said. My ears twitched at another boom of thunder, then twitched again and again as it echoed through the caves. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw Teka sitting upright, eyes wide as she hyperventilated for a few seconds. But after realizing it was only thunder, she swallowed hard, looked around the cave, and barely made eye contact with me before she lowered her head and looked away in embarrassment. Nova and Gauge just shifted positions some and muttered to each other when the noise finally stopped echoing.

Ace had a little amused smirk on her face. “Ain’t gonna get much sleep during this storm,” she said. “Thunder’s right on top of us.”

My ears were still ringing a little bit from the boom, and I pressed my half-ear flat against my head with my hoof. “Gee, I didn’t fucking notice.”

“Don’t bitch at me about it, just because I’m a pegasus don’t mean I can clear those clouds.”

“That certainly would’ve been nice. My coat is still pretty damp.” To emphasize my point, I used my magic to pull some water off of my charcoal body and let it splash onto the floor.

Ace just rolled her eyes. “Should’ve kept up a better rain shield.”

“You should have stayed closer to us,” Surge countered. “Ember kept expanding it to cover you when you drifted too far ahead or back while flying. I would’ve just let you get wet.”

I blushed a little bit, feeling a little tingly inside. “I was just trying to look out for you,” I said, defending myself. “I didn’t want you to get wet.”

“Good thing I can count on you to watch out for little old me,” Ace said.

I smirked back. “Somepony has to.”

I could feel Surge rolling her eyes inside my skull. Just fuck already…

Ace fluttered her wings a little in the ensuing silence, and I was too embarrassed to say anything after Surge called me out on it. But I honestly didn’t know what to say at the moment and was too nervous about pressing the obvious issue between us, so I started down probably the least romantic thing I possibly could. “Back there in Three Rivers… what happened between you and Wayward?”

The outlaw scowled and looked away. “Ain’t none of your business.”

“You were seconds away from murdering that griffon in cold blood,” I countered. “If somepony on my team is gonna go berserk and turn into a psycho killer on a moment’s notice, I want to know why. Fuck it, I need to know why. That’s what I’m supposed to do as a leader, right?”

“You ain’t my leader,” Ace grumbled. “I could fly off anytime I like.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “Yeah, well for now, you’ve been traveling with us and following my lead, so I’m your leader, reluctant or not.” Sighing, I ultimately yielded and abandoned the topic, not wanting to get in a shouting match with a valuable teammate and surprisingly close friend. “Fine, whatever. I’ll drop it. Sorry.”

I lowered my head onto my crossed forelegs and decided to just watch the rain instead. But after a few moments, I saw Ace’s wings begin to tremble in my peripheral vision. Raising my head once more, I looked aside at Ace and saw her sniffling and trembling. Without a second thought, I slid up against her side and tried to use my warmth and presence to steady her. “Ace? What’s wrong?”

“I would’ve liked to stay a Ruin Runner,” Ace said in a fragile voice. “It weren’t them that made me leave. It was him. Him and him alone.”

I closed my eyes and crossed my neck over hers in a comforting half-embrace. “What happened?”

Ace squeaked out three tiny words. “He raped me.”

That was like a hammer blow to my chest. It took me a second to process it, but when I did, I could only think about how much that horribly made sense. “Stars, Ace, I’m so sorry. I… well, I didn’t know.”

“Nopony does,” Ace whimpered. “I only ever told Z and Lines. That was the night we quit. I was thirteen, almost fourteen, and he got me during a run when nopony else were around. Stuffed a gag in my mouth and told me he’d kill me and Z and Lines if I ever told anypony. So I never said a peep for the longest time. It was almost a year before I finally worked up the courage to leave the Runners. Realized that being on my own scared the shit outta me, but staying there with Wayward scared me even more.”

She sniffled and wiped at her eyes with a wingtip. “I didn’t tell Z and Lines until the day we left. They got me outta there. They were such great friends to me. I didn’t hang around Three Rivers long before me and Z decided to explore the world. I feared I’d lose my shit if I saw Wayward again. Guess years later, I proved myself right.”

And now I totally understood why Ace was so furious back in Three Rivers that she was going to paint the walls with Wayward’s guts, consequences be damned. Would I have acted differently had I been in her position? I couldn’t imagine what that must’ve been like for her. I mean, I’d nearly been raped at Blackwash, but I’d fought off my attacker and killed him before he could do anything to me. Even through the emotional burnout that night had been, I’d still been terrified and panicked. Actually having to suffer through the whole ordeal like Ace did…

So I wrapped my forelegs around her and held her close, whispering soothing words into her ear as she started to cry. “It’s okay,” I whispered, even though I knew it wasn’t. “You’ll be alright,” I told her, even though I knew she’d never be. What else could I do, really? Not even Surge was being all that helpful, instead just watching events unfold from a distant, if horrified, position in the back of my brain.

What do you do for a badass of the wilderness who’s fundamentally broken at her core?

Only one thing. Sit with her. Hold her. Let her know she’s not alone. I can never fucking find anything to say in situations like that… but I could definitely be there for her. And so I was. I don’t know if it helped or not, but in that bleak, lonely cave, that tiny safe port in the storm, I think it did.

That was all I could do.

Chapter 28: The Stalker

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Chapter 28: The Stalker

I don’t really know when I fell asleep, mostly because I wasn’t expecting to. Between the constantly booming thunder and my paranoia that something bad would kill us all if I dozed off, I was sure I was gonna be wide awake. So I was more than a little surprised and disoriented when I woke up and the storm had almost passed.

At first I thought I was just super exhausted from everything and the constant magical exertion that day, and my body had simply shut down once it had a quiet moment. Then I started wondering if maybe Surge kicked me off to dreamland or something. I already knew the mare could play with my brain more or less at will, and doing something like that to make me fall asleep didn’t seem too farfetched. Especially since she was awake and actively keeping watch with my body when my mind finally came to.

Of course, she knew the question I was going to ask before I even asked it. Probably because she was reading my thoughts again or something. “You needed your rest.”

“Yeah, I did,” I reluctantly admitted, taking in my surroundings. The rain had slowed to a drizzle outside, and the riverbed had turned into an actual river, with water lapping at the entrance to our cave. I was just glad it hadn’t risen high enough to flood us out or anything. At my side, Ace was merely a feathery ball of warmth I held onto, and she’d pinned my left foreleg under her body so I had no hope of escaping without waking her up. Defeated, I rolled onto my back and stared at the cave ceiling, blowing a few strands of orange and yellow out of my face with a huff. “How the fuck does this work?”

My eyebrow rose as Surge expressed her own confusion. “How does what work?”

“How can I be asleep and you be awake when we’re in the same body?” I idly looked over my hoof, at all the mud and grime covering it from frog to halfway to my knee. “Like, I’ve only got one brain, and my brain is me, so… yeah. I’m confused.”

“The brain and soul are two different things,” Surge said. “Animals have brains, but they have feeble, weak souls. That’s what separates us from them. Thoughts and consciousness are generated by the soul. The brain is just the hardware they run on. Your body has two souls, Ember: mine and yours. It’s not just you in here.”

“That doesn’t answer my question,” I grumbled.

Surge rolled my eyes. “I’m trying to keep it simple for you. When you sleep, your soul and your brain disconnect in a sense. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but that’s the general gist of it. So while your spirit is resting, I can still use your brain to pilot your body. To an extent, of course. It naturally prefers your soul to mine, and even then, your body needs to rest physically. And even I need to rest, despite just being an incorporeal soul using your body and your magic to survive.”

“Huh. Spooky.”

“Ember, are you talking to yourself again?” Gauge’s voice echoed lightly around the cave, and shortly after I heard his hooves clopping against the stone. “We should really get that checked out.”

I raised my head as he approached us. “Yeah, my split personality’s kind of a bitch. She’s really fucking smart, though, so I guess that evens it out.”

“Still not smart enough to figure out why I’ve been cursed with such a fate as this,” Surge groaned. “If this is Tartarus, then the gods did a really good job of personalizing it for me.”

“It could be worse,” I offered. “You’re only trapped in a stupid mare’s body and have to deal with her shit all the time.”

“You’re right. I could be trapped in a stupid zebra’s body instead. I would actually prefer the embrace of dispersion and oblivion instead of the afterlife over that.”

Gauge shook his head and sat down on the opposite side of me from Ace. “Love you too, Sparky,” he said with a wink. “But actually though, how does that work for you? If Ember just spit you out through her horn or something, would you go to the Summer Lands?”

“At this point, who’s to say?” Surge asked. “My research was on manatronics and robotics, not the afterlife. But usually just releasing a soul with no guiding strings to send it off to the afterlife doesn’t work all that well. That’s what the light you see when you’re dying is, or at least, that’s what I’m told. I wouldn’t get that if Ember just released me because my body is long rotted away and it couldn’t send me on. I’d just fade away until my soul energy is returned to the ambient mana of Auris.”

“Doesn’t sound fun,” I said. “But I mean, at least dying isn’t so bad when you know there’s an afterlife, right? That’s pretty cool, I guess.”

“It’s a lot easier to die for something you believe in when you know there’s a reward waiting for you on the other side.”

After a moment, I decided to ask Surge something I hadn’t really thought much of as of late. “Surge, what happened at your installation? What happened when you died?”

Ghostly images flickered past my mind’s eye too quickly for me to make sense of. I felt a crushing weight of panic and stress settle in my ribs before I realized it was coming from Surge. She made me swallow, and when she spoke, my voice shook and wavered. “We were trying to survive.”

“Survive what?” Gauge asked. “You were in probably the safest place you could’ve been, deep underground with lots of food and water and your own power source. You even had soldiers for your own protection.”

“That was the problem,” Surge said. “I talked to Ember about this before. The soldiers sent to guard the installations on Auris and garrison the planet were the dregs and rejects from the Synarchy’s military. The Synarchy didn’t want them fighting on Equus, so they shipped them off here. Half of them were criminals and murderers who took several years of military service out here in place of execution. They were all scum simply given weapons and kept in line by officers and automated defenses. They were as much prisoners here as anything.”

“Did they turn on you?” Gauge asked. “Is that why there was nobody in your installation?”

“No. We turned on them.” Memories of secret meetings, stealing weapons, and more drifted past my mind. “Almost as soon as we landed on Auris, I had my team prepare for this. We drew up plans, collected weapons, had a master key and passwords for all our security measures. I didn’t pull the trigger for years, though.”

“So why’d you pull it when you did?” I asked. “The Silence?”

“It was the root of the reason, sure,” Surge admitted. “When we lost comms with Equus, the military brass from all across the planet convened in the Ivory City to plan what to do next and how to keep the rest of us calm. Then we heard there was a riot in the City and most of them were killed. As soon as we knew the scum guarding us wouldn’t have officers to keep them in line, I knew they’d start shooting the place up within a day. It happened at so many other places. I activated the security systems and we killed them before they could kill us.”

“But the place was on lockdown when we got there and you were dead,” Gauge stated. “I’m guessing not everything went according to plan.”

Surge shook my head. “Far from it. Though every pony in that installation had military training at some point in their lives, we were still no match for soldiers in a stand up fight. Our bodies had decayed from the peak of our youth after years studying and working in labs, and our training was rusty. After we got the drop on them, they rallied and fought back. They tried to storm the reactor core because that would shut off all the automated defenses chewing them to shreds. I stopped them… but not before one of them threw me through the core. That’s how my soul was separated from my body. That’s how I died.

“But my colleagues were successful,” she continued. “They killed the rest of the soldiers. Afterwards, they cleaned the place up and locked it down. They thought I was dead, and I didn’t know how to manipulate circuitry in my pure mana form then, so I couldn’t communicate with them.”

I felt my throat temporarily seize and my body shuddered. A memory seared into Surge’s mind latched onto mine. I could see the reactor room, the walls peppered with bullet holes, and automated robots dragging away bodies and cleaning up blood. I saw a small knot of eight or nine scientists standing at the base of the reactor ring, staring at Surge’s body below it, unwilling to go any closer for fear of what the torus might do to them. Surge tried to wail at them for help, but she didn’t have a mouth. She tried to make noise, but she didn’t have hooves. She tried to channel her magic, to do something, but she didn’t have a horn. And I felt the fear and dismay settle over my body like poison when they walked away, leaving her to a fate literally worse than death.

“They left me there,” Surge said. “They didn’t know. But they left me to rot in that reactor for one hundred and ninety-five long revolutions of this horrible planet around its pitiful sun. You can never understand what that was like. Every day, I wished that I hadn’t attacked the soldiers if only so they’d kill me and send my spirit on later. I would’ve sacrificed everypony in that installation just to die once and for all.” She swallowed hard, and then her voice took on a softer note. “But now I have you all, primitive and misguided as you may be. So I guess life’s worth living once again.”

I offered her a smile, genuinely surprised by the tender moment she’d allowed herself to admit in front of us. “I’m glad you’re with us, too,” I said, “though maybe not in the current arrangement. That could be improved. But still.” With a burst of magic, I lit a cigarette and continued to nurse my addiction. “It’s good to have you with us. You’re super helpful when it comes to getting any sort of idea what all this ancient madness was caused by.”

“And I’d be lost without somepony to explain the state of the world to me today,” she admitted. “So much has changed over the two hundred years I was dead. It was disorienting when we first left my installation, to say the least.”

“Yeah, I can bet.” Blowing smoke out of my nose, I watched it dissipate as it drifted up to the ceiling of the cave. “And now we’re here, and we’re hopefully close to Teka’s tribe. Once this rain clears, we won’t have much farther to go. I hope.”

“Me too,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “I’m just amazed that she trusts us enough to lead us back to her tribe. She could’ve run off so many times today, but she didn’t.”

“I guess she likes me or something,” I said with a little chuckle. “I did save her life, after all.”

“With plans like that, I’m amazed you’ve lived this long,” Surge said. “And I’m more than a little concerned for my own fate since I have to share your body.”

I waved my hoof that wasn’t pinned under Ace’s side. “Get used to it, sister, because it’s a nonstop fucking mess on the Ember Express.”

“I want to get off,” she grumbled.

As Gauge and I laughed, Ace snorted at my side and raised her head. She blinked her bleary eyes one at a time and yawned, her whole body shaking and stretching as she did so. When she finally had her wits back about her, she craned her head back to look at me, almost bumping our noses together. “So,” she said, her words still slurred so shortly after waking up, “Anypony else hungry, or is it just me?”

I slapped Ace on the shoulder and giggled. “Of course that’s all you care about.”

A corner of Ace’s mouth inched upwards. “The best things in life are those you can eat.”

“What about sex?”

“My point still stands.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me for emphasis. “Am I wrong, Gauge?”

Gauge shook his head and stood up. “I’m gonna ignore that question and wake Nova instead,” he said. “And get some fuel on the fire too so we can start getting food ready.”

“You didn’t answer my question!” Ace shook her head while he walked away, grunted, and shut her eyes again. “Maybe I’ll just doze another five minutes.”

“Can I have my foreleg back?” I put my free hoof against her back and pushed, rolling her back just enough to wiggle my pinned limb out from under her. The sensation of pins and needles covered the whole thing, and I massaged it with my other hoof while I waited for feeling to return to it. “I don’t know how you thought that was comfortable. I could feel your ribs jammed against it.”

Instead of a snappy comeback or something, Ace blushed and fidgeted her wings. “I can sleep on anything,” she said, looking away so I couldn’t see her face. “Ain’t no beds or mattresses out in the wild. You learn to make do.”

I didn’t push her on that, mostly because I started to feel a similar heat building in my cheeks. I could feel Surge watching me from the other side of my brain, and I let a frown settle on my muzzle to let her know that I didn’t want to hear it. Especially because she was right. Her and Nova both. But I couldn’t bring myself to admit that yet, still wary of taking that step after the pain I’d felt at Zip’s death.

After a moment to clear her throat, Ace sat up and used her wings to help stand up. “So, uh, I reckon you should help start the fire or something so we can eat. Our backup’s still asleep.”

I glanced across the room and saw Teka still curled up on her side next to Nova, who was beginning to stir at Gauge’s gentle prodding. Unlike before, her ears were still and relaxed, instead of upright and discreetly poking around for noise. That made me feel good. The poor native mare really needed her rest, I could tell. And though it seemed like she trusted us, I just wished she could be more comfortable around us. For all the effort Nova was investing in this mare and her language, I knew the only way we’d really learn it would be if she felt comfortable enough to open up and talk at us long enough for us to start picking up bits of her language. I really wished there was some device that could automatically translate her language into something we could understand, but as far as I knew, Equestria hadn’t managed to make anything like that before the Silence.

In short time, me and Ace moved to a pit Gauge was constructing in the middle of the cave, I lit a fire, and the zebra started preparing meals for us. I guess it was dinner, but I wasn’t really sure. The constant rain all day, coupled with my already fucked up sleep schedule and midday nap, really had me all out of sorts. I even tried to count my meals for the day and realized I’d only eaten breakfast and had continually been munching on berries or other small morsels as snacks to keep my energy up while I maintained the rain shield. To top it all off, I had the sneaking suspicion I was gonna end up awake all night again. On the one hoof, that meant that keeping watch would be easier, but on the other, fuck me I just wanted to get a good night’s sleep and feel like a normal pony for once and not a wailer.

Though maybe I shouldn’t joke about that. If it wasn’t for Surge, I would have been a wailer. Sometimes I still felt random hot flashes, and I had to wonder just how much damage the wailer spores had done to my brain before Surge killed them all. I’m sure she would tell me if I asked, but I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to know that.

Nova yawned and fluttered her wings as she slowly roused herself from her nap. Her eyes went cross and she blinked several times before their bright teal mirth fell on me. “Heya, Em. Did you manage to get some sleep too?”

“Yeah, I got some sleep,” I said. “Not by choice.”

“She needed it,” Surge finished. “I helped.”

Nova shrugged. “Whatever works, I guess. I’m glad we have you to keep an eye on her, Sparky. Stars know she needs an adult.”

“I am an adult,” I grumbled, lowering my head.

“And I’ve got two centuries on you,” Surge countered, raising it back up. “I could be your grandmother with several ‘greats’ affixed to it.”

“Does that mean I get to call you granny?”

“Only if you want me calling you filly.”

I noticed Teka had opened her eyes and was staring at me with a confused frown on her face. “Ete U’a takka U’a ho’hn ifite?”

“I bet she’s asking why you talk to yourself so much,” Gauge said. “If I didn’t know the story behind you and Surge, that’s the question I’d be asking, too.”

“I don’t know how the fuck I can explain that to her,” I said. “She only understands my name and nothing else.”

Nova shrugged. “She might understand a few more things, but we don’t really have a way to tell. I mean, apart from pointing at things and saying their name. We’ve done that a bunch since we met!”

“Yeah, and that’s why she thinks you talk too much,” I said, smiling when Nova pouted. “It’s okay, Nova, I know you’re just trying to help.”

“I thought it was another one of her selfish desires to learn more,” Gauge said, gently elbowing his marefriend. “She puts everything else on hold when she’s trying to learn something new. Even me.”

“Do not!” Nova protested, slapping Gauge’s shoulder. “I have time for everything, okay? I work this stuff out!”

“Where do I fit in on this schedule?” Gauge asked, sticking his tongue out at Nova.

Nova blushed and quickly focused her attention on her meal. “Whenever we’re alone,” she muttered. “Which hasn’t been that often as of late…”

“Hey, girl, don’t let us bother you none,” Ace said. “Just say the word and Ember and I will skedaddle.”

Gauge started passing out food to the five of us and ultimately ended up leaning back to back with Nova, each using the other as a backrest. “We’ll keep that in mind for later, then,” he said, shooting a sly look at Nova. “Not right now, though. I bet the acoustics in this cave are something else.”

“It’d probably sound like a pair of rock runners fucking. Those fat bastards are loud.”

Once more, Nova started blushing and she dipped her head and tried to appear small behind Gauge’s back. “We’re not like that…”

“Nov, don’t try and defend yourself against everything,” I said, winking at her. “It just makes the rest of us think we’re right and you’re embarrassed.”

Nova wisely decided to shut her mouth and pout after that. At least she had Gauge to give her nuzzles in between bites of his dinner. I was just content to watch them cuddle and be cute together while I ate. I gotta have some kind of entertainment during dinner, right?

When we were most of the way through dinner, joking and laughing about all sorts of dumb shit, I noticed that Teka looked stiff and on edge, even more so than she had been all day. Frowning, I set what little morsels of my dinner I had left aside and nudged Ace’s shoulder to get her attention. “Does Teka seem tense to you?” I asked the outlaw. “Like, more than usual?”

Ace continued to noisily work on her dinner (she was one of those horrible ponies who chewed with their mouths open) but gave Teka a curious sidelong glance. The tattooed mare sat stock still and rigid except for her ears, which slowly swept across the cave. The muscles in her shoulders and forelegs would twitch like they were coiled springs about ready to let loose at any second. As far as I could tell, she had every appearance of a mare deciding whether it was time to fight or flee.

“Yeah…” Ace said when she finally swallowed what was in her mouth. “That’s pretty odd.” Clearing her throat, she opened and closed a wing to catch Teka’s eyes. “Hey, Teka, what’s worrying you?” She cocked her head to the side, trying to communicate with the tribal mare as much through body language as through the spoken word.

Even Nova and Gauge fell silent as they realized what me and Ace had realized. All eyes turned to Teka with a mixture of confusion and worry. Teka looked between all of us and swallowed hard, then rose to her hooves. Her tattoos flickered a few different colors, and she turned toward the entrance leading deeper into the cavern. “Himnm,” she said. “Sotto noal mofmi’set”

We all turned in the direction Teka was looking, but we couldn’t see or hear anything. I wasn’t really gonna risk it, though; if she’d heard something bad back there, then I didn’t want to stick around and figure out what it was. “Nov, Gauge, start packing shit up,” I said. “I think we might have woken something bad. We better get going before it finds tasty ponies in its house.”

Ace and I both readied our weapons and carefully moved closer to that tunnel in the back of the cave while Nova and Gauge started putting everything away as quickly as they could. If I strained my ears, I thought I could hear something shifting across the stones and breathing down the corridor. Whatever it was, it sounded big and nasty. Because of course it was going to be big and nasty. Big and nasty is pretty much all Auris does.

Either way, I set the mode for my rifle to ‘AP’, figuring I was gonna need it. I also made sure the grenade launcher mounted on the underbarrel rail was loaded. That might also save my fucking life today.

“How’s it going?” I asked my friends. “You guys almost done?”

“Almost,” Gauge hissed between something clenched in his teeth. I didn’t dare take my eyes off the tunnel entrance to see what he was working on, worried that the moment I did, this nasty thing was gonna come flying around the corner and tear me in half immediately. “It’s a lot harder without unicorn magic!”

“I’m watching the fucking tunnel!” I hissed back at him. “You wanna fucking shoot?” I glanced at Ace. “Any idea what the fuck could be inside one of these tunnels?”

Ace shook her head. “I ain’t never been out to the Spines before. Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Shhhh!” Teka glared at the two of us and put a hoof to her lips. “Shwikskit uss’set bowib Tm’a poppo lifte! T’a soe’set’un, twee! Kepsep Um’a soew’an lopo...” She said the last part under her breath in a fairly ominous tone, but I had no idea what she was trying to say other than that we needed to be quiet.

I glanced at Ace and shared a nod with her. “Quiet’s good,” I whispered. “I can do quiet.”

“Can you?” she whispered back. “You’re usually pretty awful at it.”

“Shut up, Ace, this isn’t the fucking time!”

Something made a noise in front of us, just down the tunnel. I immediately tensed, and my magic flared as a result. I still couldn’t see anything, but whatever it was, I knew it had to be close. “Hey, Sparky? You don’t happen to know what wildlife lives where on Auris off the top of your head, do you?”

I could feel Surge wracking her brain (figuratively, of course) for anything that could help us. “We didn’t get a chance to come anywhere near even performing basic taxonomy of the planet,” Surge said. “We never even explored the other continents. We—!”

“Stum!” Teka suddenly screamed. As soon as she shouted that, a number of different things happened all at once. Her tattoos flared red, and tongues of flame began to peel off her body. I noticed the air in front of me shimmer slightly, sort of like the distortion that happens to it on a hot day. Ace’s rifle boomed next to my ear, and something let out an ear-splitting shriek as lead and fire sailed toward the tunnel leading deeper underground.

Blood splattered across the ground, and what looked like an enormous snake shimmered into view. Its body was long and flat, and its upper body raised up until its head nearly brushed the thirty foot ceiling of the cave. Spindly clawed spider-like legs stuck out of its oval-like torso, the hooked ends clutching at rocks and the walls, and its back was arched almost like an inchworm mid-stride. Its tail ended with two long, gnarled, bony spines that curled up over its back, and each spine was about ten feet long. Gray and blue scales covered the length of its body, and it had six eyes on its flat head; four on top, and two on the bottom. When it opened its mouth, I saw dozens of sharp and hooked fangs pop out of its gums, and green acid dripped from its lips, hissing when it hit the ground. If I had to take a guess, I figured it was probably somewhere close to fifty feet long from head to tail.

I’ve seen a lot of terrifying things in my life. I thought shrikes were awful, but they’re tame compared to the stuff that’s out there on the rest of Auris. And while the tolan had been terrifying, it just looked like big, hungry, raw power. This thing—whatever it was—was like evil personified, like something straight out of a nightmare.

And then its edges shimmered and blurred and the damn thing turned invisible right in front of us.

“Run!” I screamed, immediately backpedaling and desperately firing my rifle where the monster had been just moments before. I saw blood spray a few times out of thin air, so I at least knew my bullets were hitting it and doing something, but it remained invisible. It screeched and the cave shook, and I heard the sound of claws tearing across rock and rubble as it started to move into the cave. A fireball left my horn and briefly outlined the monstrosity as it struck off its scales, but that didn’t even seem to slow it down. I didn’t know how fast that thing could move, but I had the distinct feeling that it could move faster than us.

Ace flapped her wings and flew backwards, firing a few random shots from her rifle into the cave, hoping to score some hits on the invisible monster. Teka merely turned tail and fled, bolting right out of the cave and past Nova and Gauge, who were trying to haul what they could of our gear out of the cave. Deciding they had the right idea, I grabbed my own bags in my magic and galloped for the exit, practically feeling the thing skittering across the ground after me. My horn flared at Surge’s beckoning, and a shield manifested behind me right before acid splattered against it. Had she not have done that, I probably would’ve been turned into a pile of pony goo on the floor of the cave.

And then we were outside, the five of us sprinting for our lives across the rough and muddy ground. Gauge and Nova led the way, and Nova used her wings to gain some height and distance on the thing, followed not too far behind by Ace. The outlaw would occasionally twirl about in midair and fire her laser pistols in a wide arc, simply trying to hit this thing wherever it might have gone. That left me to take up the rear and try to get away from the centipede-like thing. I wished my hooves were as light as Teka’s as the thing breathed down my neck; Teka had quickly left all of us behind with her light hooves and took the lead of our column, the mud not slowing her down in the slightest.

“What the fuck is that thing?!” I screamed, practically crying as I heard it skitter out of the cave and into the mud behind me. “I hate it! I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it so much!”

Trust me, if you’ve ever seen one of these things before, you’d understand while I was wailing like a little filly.

My horn flared again on account of Surge using it to cast more spells while I simply focused on running and not tripping. My stomach did backflips as the world flashed around me, and then suddenly I was on the other side of the river and maybe a quarter mile in front of my friends. The disorienting teleport ended with me falling on my face into the mud and muck, nearly dropping my rifle and definitely succeeding in dropping my bag of supplies. I pulled my head out of the mud and sputtered, then grabbed my rifle and tried to orient myself again. “Why’d you do that?!” I shouted at Surge, eying my friends with worry from afar.

“It was going to fucking eat us!” Surge shouted back. She seized control of my foreleg and pointed my hoof across the river to where the mud seemingly tore itself up and went flying. “There! You can see it now! Shoot it!”

I did my best to shoot at where its invisible legs churned up the mud and splashed through the water. I tried to remember what exactly it looked like and how it was proportioned to make sure I was actually aiming for its body even though I couldn’t see it. I fired several heavy duty shots from my rifle, the AP setting doing wonders as it punched through the monster’s hide and sent splatters of blood into the air. After about the fourth hit on its body, however, the mud shifted again, and this time it came charging across the river at me.

Well, on the bright side, I’d bought my friends some time and some space. On the other hoof, fuck me, why did I have to piss it off?!

“Get another one of those teleports ready,” I told Surge, firing several more times at where I thought the thing’s head was in the meanwhile.

“I can’t!” Surge shouted back. “Your horn’s exhausted from the rain shield today! You’re running on empty as is!”

Of course, now that she mentioned it, I suddenly started feeling it. I was shaky and woozy, even after getting some time to sleep and rest. I knew I needed a long vacation after we got the next code piece if I was ever going to recover my magic and strength, but that wasn’t really something I had the fortune of asking for right now. Besides, if I couldn’t shoot this thing, I had a feeling I was about to take a vacation inside of its stomach.

I wondered if it would swallow me whole or if it’d chew first. I didn’t know which prospect was worse.

All of a sudden, SCaR zoomed over from my friends and began shooting his little guns at a space in midair. At first I didn’t know what the drone was doing, because I didn’t really see anything happen, but then I heard the monster roar and SCaR quickly juke backwards and off to the side. Was SCaR trying to distract it so I could get away?

“That sentry drone has infrared,” Surge said. “It can see the creature’s body heat!”

“It can?” I took another look at SCaR’s movements and where the drone kept firing its weapons. Sure enough, he was moving with too much purpose and caution to be just flying blindly over the river. And judging by the way the drone pointed his weapons about, he had to be trying to shoot the thing in the face. With that in mind, I adjusted my aim accordingly, trying to shoot a few feet off to the side of SCaR in whatever direction the drone was oriented.

I was rewarded with several more roars and chittering screeches of pain, accompanied by a huge splash in the river as the monster fell over. For a brief moment, I dared to hope that I’d actually shot the thing in the brain and killed it, but Auris’ wildlife is much too tough to go down that easily. Once more, the water splashed about, and this time the monster shimmered back into view, allowing me to see the damage I’d done to it. I’d managed to hit several spots along its neck and head, but it didn’t seem too impaired by its wounds. If anything, I might have disabled its invisibility for a little while… and really pissed it off.

It spat more acid at me, and I didn’t waste any time to turn tail and gallop away. I heard the mud and rock sizzle into sludge where I’d been standing moments before, and I even watched my bag of supplies hiss into useless slag as it took a hit before I could move it out of the way. But I couldn’t spend any time to dwell on the fact that I’d lost my tent and sleeping roll now; I’d lose a lot more than some random shit if I hung around any longer. Once more running for my life, I just tried to focus on keeping my hooves from slipping while I galloped along the riverbank, hopelessly trying to outrun this centipede-scorpion-monster-thing.

Of course, I wasn’t alone. I had my friends to look after me, and thankfully that’s exactly what they did. Ace soon started harassing the thing from above and behind, distracting it while I made my getaway, while Nova put her super fucking bionic death wing to good use in chewing its hide up with precise cuts and slashes. The monster’s bony tails jabbed at the air with frightening speed and accuracy, nearly turning Ace into a cloud of beige feathers and blood, but the outlaw managed to twirl away when she realized just how fast those spines could move. Both she and Nova immediately backed up, giving the creature some more space as they tried to gauge its reactions, but that just let it have more freedom to decide what to do. Before I’d even gone a sufficient enough distance to feel comfortable setting up and taking shots at it again, it roared, reared its head back, and flung its body into the soft earth, its numerous legs dragging its serpentine body deep into the muddy soil around it.

Great. Add burrowing to the list of things this monster could fucking do. That was exactly what I wanted to see from it. Now we couldn’t even attack it!

The ground rumbled as the thing burrowed its way through the earth, but with the ferocity and intensity of the burrowing, I had no idea who it was going for. Instead, I opted for caution and decided to start moving again, not wanting to get caught by its jaws when it inevitably erupted from the ground and tried to swallow me whole.

Which for some reason, pissed off Surge. “Don’t run!” she shouted, and she asserted herself to make me stop.

“What the fuck?!” I shouted at her. “We’re going to die!”

“No! It’s burrowing! How do you think it’s going to figure out where we are?”

“I don’t know, it’ll fucking smell me or something!”

“It uses vibrations! If you move, it can find you!”

I was about to protest, but amazingly, we hadn’t died in the entire ten seconds we’d been standing utterly still. The thing still burrowed its way through the ground, but I felt like it had given up on me in pursuit of Gauge and Teka, who continued to gallop across their riverbank as fast as they could. If Surge was right, then we had a way to avoid getting eaten—but only while it was underground. And that still didn’t really help us get away.

Ace flew down to me while Nova flew over to her coltfriend. “Why’d you stop?” Ace asked me, panting slightly and her coat covered in spotty dribblings of the monster’s blood. “What’s going on?”

“It can sense tremors,” I said. “If I walk, it’ll know where I am! We just gotta stay still!”

Ace raised an eyebrow in surprise but didn’t question me. She did, however, point across the riverbank to my friends. “I don’t think they got the memo,” she said. “They’re gonna be worm food in a few minutes at this rate.”

“Warn them!” Surge shouted, pointing desperately across the river. “If you care so much for the zebra, now’s your only chance!”

Ace grunted and flung herself airborne, wings frantically flapping as she tried to gain lift. I, meanwhile, readied my gun while I couldn’t move. If that thing burst out of the ground, I was ready to unload hell into its brain and hopefully drop it for good.

But I could only watch, wait, and worry while my two pegasus friends tried to rescue Gauge and Teka before the beast could get to them. I saw the ground begin to bulge upwards as it closed in on Gauge, but before it could snap him up in one vicious bite, Nova swooped down and pulled him skyward, her bionic wing compensating for his surprised flailing and weight. No sooner had she pulled him into the air did the monster burst out of the ground in a shower of mud, teeth and fangs snapping at the air while acid sprayed from its gums. It twisted and clawed at the retreating pair in frustration, but ultimately its weight dragged its upper body back down to the earth and it set its sights on its next target.

Before Ace could even get to Teka, however, the tribal mare abruptly turned away from her and started running deeper into the spines. Her tattoos shimmered with a light even I could see from the other side of the river, and moments later sent several colorful flares flying off of her back. They whizzed and curled through the sky before fizzling out, but they definitely seemed to get the big creepy-crawly’s attention locked on her. With big chitinous legs churning through the mud, the beast skittered in pursuit, inadvertently putting itself between Ace and Teka.

Ace tried to capitalize on approaching the monster from its blind spot by stopping her charge and coming to a hover so she could use her rifle. She let the powerful high caliber weapon fire off three shots in rapid succession, keeping a tight grouping on the back of the creature’s neck even with its erratic and exaggerated movements during its charge. But even Ace’s amazing skills with a rifle didn’t drop the thing, and it continued to close the distance on Teka.

I wasn’t standing around being useless this whole time, though. I fired several times with my own rifle, though I had to be careful not to hit Ace when she stopped between me and it. But at the distance it had moved, and the angle its armor made as I tried to shoot through it, my bullets didn’t have the same punching power as Ace’s rifle did, even with my rifle set to its AP mode. Growling in frustration, I lowered my rifle and cursed, trying to think of what else I could do to help out. If bullets didn’t work, and my magic was fried, what could I do?

Apparently nothing, and it turned out I didn’t need to. I heard a yell somehow slice its way through the rain and the noise of the creature, and my eyes widened in surprise when I saw four more tattooed ponies emerge from the foliage around the enormous trees of the Spines. They immediately moved to intercept the monster, fanning out into a formation as they did so. I saw their tattoos glow in different colors, and two of the ponies stopped to launch barrages of ice and fire at it. Though they failed in bringing it down, I had a feeling that wasn’t their intention. It hissed in pain and surprise, and a wave of mud flew into the air as it abruptly changed its direction and started to charge at them.

But the moment it tried to pivot in place, the other two tribal ponies hurled themselves at it. While one spread his wings and buzzed its head, another began to climb its legs, swinging around onto its back before it could react. With the monster disoriented and focusing on the pegasus around its head, the pony on its back started to climb up the jagged chitin scales lining its upper body. Me and Surge watched in disbelief as the pony managed to climb all the way to the thing’s head, take a spear off his back, and jam it into the base of one of its antennae.

A sickening howl seemed to shake the entire river basin, and the monster fell onto its side and began to flail, disoriented. The resulting thrashing flung the one tribal pony on its head into the air, where the pegasus smoothly caught him and carried him back to the ground a safe distance away. The other two who had been just casting magic likewise backed up, and they watched with their tattoos flashing while the monster writhed in agony.

And to my shock, whatever they did seemed to work. They didn’t kill it, not even close, but it reared back and began to slink away, hissing and spitting acid. I watched it scuttle backwards until it figured it was a safe distance away from all of us, at which point it turned around and scurried back into its cave. With one last hiss and a flexing of its bony spines, it slipped through the entrance and disappeared from sight.

I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. “…It’s gone?” I wondered aloud. “Just like that?”

“Instead of killing it, they disoriented and dazed it,” Surge observed. “They struck it right in the antennae, made it sick and dizzy, and that was enough to scare it away.”

I eyed the new arrivals and watched how Teka fearlessly trotted over to them. If I hadn’t already pegged them as Feati ponies from the tattoos earlier, her friendly and relieved expression upon seeing them would’ve done the trick for me anyway. They seemed surprised to see her, at least from what I could tell this far away, and they immediately circled around her and started checking her for signs of injury.

Ace drifted back towards me and raised an eyebrow. “Guess we were right on their front porch this whole time,” she said. “Think they’re gonna be nice to us outsiders?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said. Shouldering what was left of my supplies, I nodded to my outlaw friend. “Mind carrying me across the river?”

“Can’t you teleport?” Ace asked, raising an eyebrow.

“If I teleport her, her horn’s likely to shatter from extreme burnout,” Surge said, switching my diction and accent back into her natural speaking patterns. “That won’t be very useful to anypony.”

“Wait, my horn can do that?” I asked, now kind of worried about how much magic I’d been using as of late. “I know you can kill yourself if you cast too much, but that sounds really unpleasant!”

Ace just blinked at me. “You’re… more worried about your horn blowing up from overuse than you are dying from it?”

“Shut up,” I growled. “I like my horn. A mare’s allowed some vanities, right?”

Ace shook her head. “Whatever. I ain’t gonna ask.” Lowering her stance, she spread her wings so I could climb onto her back. “Come on. Let’s see what the locals think of us.”

Chapter 29: Where Wild Ponies Walk

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Chapter 29: Where Wild Ponies Walk

The Spines loomed all around us, towering sentinels that disappeared high into the clouds. I wondered what they would look like on a cloudless day, or if they were visible from space. They’d looked absolutely enormous from afar, but now that I walked among their petrified trunks, they felt like they were on a whole other level of huge. It took a long time to just walk past one of their massive trunks, and by my best estimates, they averaged a hundred and fifty to two hundred feet in diameter. They might as well have been mountains in their own right.

But to the ponies leading us deeper into the Spines, they were just an everyday sight, something they’d grown used to that held no meaning for them. The Feati ponies that had helped fight off that monster—something they called a shwikskit, or at least that’s what Surge thought after listening to them talk for a bit—had watched us approach them warily, and their shimmering tattoos had made it look like they were ready for a fight. But Teka said something to them, and somewhere in the flurry of musical conversation, she’d gotten them to agree to take us with them to wherever they were going. Where that was, I had no idea, but I could only hope it was their tribe. I mean, they said ‘Feati’ a few times, so that had to be where we were going, right?

They certainly didn’t want us really wandering off or doing anything without them knowing about it, though. The four ponies had split into two groups, with two in front and two in the back. Teka walked with the front group, and now that she was back among her own kind, she’d turned awfully chatty. A beautiful fountain of the Feati’s interesting and kinda cool-sounding words just constantly streamed forth from her muzzle, and I could tell the two stallions walking with her were quickly growing tired of her chattering. The irony wasn’t lost on Nova, who seemed to remember a specific phrase Teka had used on her not too long ago.

“S’a takka allae,” Nova said, trying to do her best to mimic Teka’s pronunciation of those same words. When the three ponies in front of us all looked at her in surprise, she smirked. “Takka, takka, takka.”

The two stallions both smiled first at her, then at each other, before turning their amused expressions to Teka, who hung her head and pouted. “A soe’set U’a bele tunkto T’a’hn mak,” one said.

“To, U’a lenwen’sat saso Mum’a tokto? ” said the other. “E’un tu’set S’a T’a takka’set floff?”

Teka scowled straight ahead. “S’a agga takka’set wuh A takka’sat S’a. S’a takka’set allae gwa S’a takka’set.”

“Maybe they have a pony who speaks Equiish,” I said. “That’d be nice instead of just playing guessing games.”

“I bet they do,” Ace said. “I reckon they encounter other ponies from Auris often enough. We ain’t the first ponies, that’s for sure.”

“Yeah,” Gauge said, trotting along at Nova’s side across the damp and muddy ground. “If it wasn’t for Teka, I’m pretty sure they were going to attack us. They probably have a problem with slavers raiding their land, if she’s any indication. What else are they supposed to think when they see a bunch of armed ponies with lots of high tech equipment on them wandering near their territory? Especially if it’s a problem they’ve had to deal with before?”

“I’m just glad that we’re actually making progress with this,” I said.

“We at least know Yeoman hasn’t gotten to them yet,” Surge said.

I frowned. “How do you know?”

“Do you really think there would be any of these tribal ponies left alive if he did?”

“That’s… a good point,” I admitted. She was right; if Yeoman found the Feati tribe before we did, then he’d tear the place apart and slaughter them all with his high tech weaponry from the Ivory City. I hoped somepony at their place spoke Equiish, because we had to warn them somehow that a monster was coming and he’d kill them all just for the hell of it.

I at least decided to try and make progress on the first step now. “Hey,” I said, raising my voice enough to catch their attention. “Do any of you speak Equiish? You know, the common tongue? Anypony?”

They frowned at me in confusion, and shortly after they began whispering things to each other in their tongue. “Wuh takka’set S’a?” one asked his companion. “A to tunkto’set’un.”

“A tunkto’set S’a takka’set ete oe pohna’hn S’a takka.” Teka said, shrugging.

“S’a unta’set’un tenten A U’a Feati lewal, thenne,” the other said. “Lentowenye E’un Santy S’a hilf.”

“I’ll… take that as a ‘no’, then.” I sighed and rolled my eyes. It looked like the confusion was only going to continue for the time being.

“On the bright side, if they have contact with the outside world, however small it is, then they have to have somepony who can speak our language,” Nova said. She fluttered over a puddle to avoid getting her hooves dirty, and I saw the tribals watching her metal wing warily. “They can’t have gotten along this long without somepony becoming fluent in it.”

“There better be somepony there,” I grumbled. “I don’t intend to learn their entire language from scratch just to translate things for a few days.”

“Why not?” Nova asked. “It’d be fun! Learning a new language is good for cognitive development and stimulation!”

“Will it make me not be retarded?” I asked her. “I can barely do fucking simple math.”

“At least she hasn’t tried fucking complex math,” Surge said, forcing my lips into a smirk. “You have to buy it dinner first.”

Ace snorted and shook her head. “Nah, she wouldn’t want to fuck math. It’d bend her over the railing and ream her plot.”

“Fuck off, all of you,” I grumbled, hanging my head. “Fucking assholes…”

“I didn’t know you liked it in the butt,” Gauge quipped.

“I’ll shove my rifle up your butt, how about that?”

Nova blinked. “Didn’t you once shove a rifle up your—?”

“Don’t say another fucking word,” I growled. And great, because Nova had brought that up, I felt Surge start digging through my memories for it for her own amusement. “Surge, get out of my fucking memory filing cabinet shit, or I’ll blow my brains out and take you with me.”

My friends all shot each other looks and snickered, and I just grumbled and hung my head. Ever since Surge let that secret of mine out of the bag, I knew I’d never be free from it.

As we continued to walk through the Spines, I started growing restless. For some reason, I’d imagined that the Feati tribe must’ve been just like, on the other side of a couple of these big trees or something, but apparently we were a long ways away from it. We passed by enormous tree after enormous fucking tree and I still hadn’t seen any signs of civilization. At least, not until Surge noticed I was looking for it and then adjusted my eyes to look higher up the trees.

“Do you see those?” she asked, making sure my eyes were pointed at exactly what she wanted me to see. “Up in the trees?”

I blinked and furrowed my brow. They looked like smears of color decorating the gray of the petrified bark, though there was a sort of uniformity or purpose behind their shape. They seemed to be placed every few trees, and when they were placed on a tree, it’d be repeated two more times, one for each third of the monstrous thing’s circumference. Not only that, but the color composition changed. The first one I saw was an even mix of blue, yellow, and orange, but the further we went, the less blue there was painted on the bark, and an ever increasing amount of yellow and orange. Much further along, I saw that the yellow even began to be overtaken by the orange, which had been joined by a little red smear.

“They’re like… signposts or something,” I said. “But what’s with the colors?”

Me and Surge talking to each other caught the attention of the rest of my friends, and they likewise turned their eyes to the paints in the trees. “They’re measuring something,” Nova said. “The color turnover makes that pretty clear.”

“It’s likely distance back to their main camp,” Surge said. “The closer we get, the warmer the colors get.”

“Warmer?” Gauge asked. “Like telling somepony they’re hot or they’re cold depending on how close to something they are?”

“Seems to me like the basic gist of the thing,” Ace drawled. “And I mean, these are simple folk we’re dealing with. Smearing colors on a tree probably works better as a guide to clue you in on how close you are to home than chiseling numbers into the bark.”

“Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one,” Nova said.

“Huh.” I returned my attention to the path ahead of us, my curiosity sated. “Guess I know how to find my way to their camp then if I ever get lost.”

“I don’t see why we would end up getting lost,” Nova said, her oiled metal feathers hissing against each other as she idly flexed and relaxed her wing. “It’s not like we’re going to go anywhere while we’re there, right?”

“Who knows exactly where this facility housing the code piece is,” I said. “It could be a bit away from the Feati home.”

Ace nodded. “These Synarchy facilities can be pretty spread out. I mean, we’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere to find this one. It ain’t gonna be sitting right there, I don’t think.”

“Dr. Hozho’s facility was an observation complex,” Surge said. “It would likely be located in close proximity to her subjects, but hidden enough to allow them to develop naturally without Equestrian interference.”

“I guess we’ll just have to go looking for it when we get there,” I said. “Or maybe somepony there speaks Equiish and they can tell us where it is.”

“Fat chance of that,” Gauge said. “If they don’t like outsiders too much, I don’t think they’ll bother to learn how we speak.”

“You’d be surprised,” Surge countered. “If they don’t like us much, assuming they’ve had contact with us before, then somepony there has likely learned Equiish. How else would they know if they’re being cheated, or what their enemies might be planning?”

“Don’t know which is worse,” Ace said, “Them not knowing our language, or them knowing our language but thinking we’re gonna cheat them before we can even say boo.”

“I’d rather take the latter,” I said. “At least it’s something to work with.”

We didn’t have a whole lot more to say as we wandered through the Spines, but the further we went, the more I felt like we were being watched. It was a strange sensation, because the undergrowth at the base of the Spines was only clustered in the dead zones between the trees, as there wasn’t exactly a lot of sunlight that could get down to the forest floor for shit to grow, yet I still couldn’t see anypony. No matter where I looked, no matter where I thought eyes were staring at me from, I couldn’t tell if there were actually ponies watching us, or if it was just our imagination.

“You guys feel that too, right?” I asked my friends after my skin had been crawling for like, five minutes.

“What?” Nova asked, looking around. “I don’t feel anything.”

“We’re being watched,” Ace muttered. “Got lots of curious eyes on us right now.”

“But where, though?” I asked. “I haven’t seen anypony else except for Teka and her friends.”

Teka’s ears twitched at her name, and she looked back at me, but when she saw I wasn’t actually talking to her, she went back to ignoring me. Ace, meanwhile, took her wingtip and twitched it upwards over her flank. “Watch the trees,” she said. “You might see some movement here and there.”

“In the trees?” Gauge asked. “You think they’ve got a whole network of bridges and platforms above the leaves where we can’t see them?”

“Either that, or they’re just wandering around from branch to branch,” I said. “That seems exactly like something these ponies would do.”

“Can’t SCaR go check it out?” Nova asked. “He could fly up into the trees and take a look.”

I glanced at the drone and frowned. “You think these guys down here would really let us start sending a drone around?”

“Yeah,” Gauge said, shaking his head. “If I sent SCaR up into those trees, they’d chop him up or something. That’d be the last we’d see of him.”

“Plus, we don’t wanna piss off the locals none,” Ace said. “That ain’t gonna win us any favors.”

“Best to just keep him down here, then,” I said, to which everypony else agreed. “He’d probably be more useful with us in case shit goes sideways.”

“When shit goes sideways,” Ace corrected.

“Don’t tempt fate,” Surge muttered. “Just don’t do it.”

“Are you kidding? That’s my specialty.” I smirked at Surge’s inward dismay, but kept on walking. “C’mon, I think I can see something up ahead. We’re almost there.”

I wasn’t exactly sure if ‘almost there’ was the right way of putting it, but I could at least see something past the enormous petrified trees towering around us. Or, well, mostly the lights of something. The Spines were already so thick and dense that they let hardly any light fall to the ground, and the clouds from the storm certainly didn’t help either, but somewhere in the distance, I could see flickering torchlight, a sure sign of civilization—or what passed for it out here. Honestly, just any signs of a settlement were good for me. It meant we were closer to our destination, closer to another piece of the code, and Yeoman hadn’t burned the place to the ground and butchered its population.

I also noted that the activity around us started to pick up. The closer we got to those lights, the more I saw obvious signs of ponies, from artificial, wooden structures like fences and ladders, to other things as simple as churned dirt and tilled earth. The paint smears on the trees had shifted toward red, and it wasn’t long before I noticed other ponies watching us from the shadows or from behind the trunks of these enormous trees.

Soon, we were right in the thick of Feati civilization. The further we went, the more ponies I saw. They were all tattooed, and many of them wore decorative garb with feathers and furs and painted tree bark. Many carried primitive weapons like spears and slings, and they watched us with wary distrust, even despite our escort. But then there were fillies and colts, elderly mares and stallions, and other ponies simply occupied with their day to day lives and giving us more curious looks. I noticed that many of the younger ponies weren’t as heavily tattooed as the adults, or even adolescents like Teka. They had some paint and tribal designs around their faces, especially their ears and eyes, but a lot of the rest of their bodies were blank, clean slates for future art.

And they were really curious about us, too. They watched us pass with equal parts wonder and fear. We were something new to them, something they’d never seen before, which led me to believe that despite their primitive technology, the members of the Feati tribe were strong enough to defend their territory from slavers and the like. After watching them fuck up that horrible monster that’d almost eaten us all earlier, I started wondering if maybe I wasn’t giving them enough credit. Teka must’ve been surprised and caught unawares if a bunch of slavers had taken her captive and then managed to get out of Feati territory without having to deal with all their freaky tattoo magic and shit.

By the time we made it to the Feati’s settlement proper, we’d attracted a small crowd of curious tribesponies who wanted to see what all the fuss was about. But now, in front of us stood a massive wooden wall, illuminated by weird glowing stones embedded in the surface of the wood. I couldn’t even imagine how many tree trunks had been chopped down to make up the twenty foot tall wall, but I knew that it stretched around the entire settlement, however large it was. The tribal ponies had even built watchtowers at regular points around the walls, and on top of that, they’d attached a platform that went over the walls to one of the giant petrified trees, and ended in a staircase that went up and above the canopy of the smaller forest trees. I’d never seen anything like it, and it was incredibly impressive to see from a bunch of ponies that were basically just primitives with sticks and stones. It rivaled even the architecture and engineering of Three Rivers simply by how impossible it should’ve been that these ponies could create something like it.

The gate, a colossal structure that was taller than even the walls around it, was already open and waiting for us. By the looks of it, I doubted that the tribal ponies shut it all that often. I couldn’t imagine how many tons that oversized door must have weighed, and I imagined it would have taken the entire village to even start to close it if they needed to. But even then, the gate wasn’t just wide open. It was opened enough for three ponies to enter side by side, and no more. I had a feeling it was specifically left that wide to prevent some of the nastier creatures that might prowl the Spines from getting into the camp, while allowing the Feati themselves easy access both in and out. Given what I knew about how Auris’ wildlife tended to be like, these ponies had to be tough as nails and pretty fucking resilient to survive out here since the Silence began.

But who knew how much longer they could stick around if Reclaimer got his hooves on the pieces of the signal? Somehow, I doubted very much that he’d tolerate their mere existence, from what I knew of the stallion.

Teka and the two tribesponies in front went through the gate first, followed by the rest of us, and then the pair of guards behind us. Once we got through the gate, however, Surge and I let our shared jaw drop in wonder. This wasn’t just a tiny settlement in the middle of the woods; this was basically a village, a town, a small city… something! It was a lot larger than I thought it would be, could possibly be. There weren’t just longhouses and a few huts scattered here and there; there were multiple-story wooden buildings, a market district (or as close to one as a bunch of tribal ponies would have), living quarters, an armory… just all sorts of things I would’ve expected to see in Three Rivers, not here. I could only see so much of the interior of the camp from the entryway, but what I saw left me impressed beyond words.

Thankfully, words have always been something Nova was good at, even if the ones that came out of her mouth were just a simple, awed observation. “There’s so many buildings here,” she said. “And the engineering… they know how to build things better than many ponies can these days.”

“I’m amazed,” Surge said. “These ponies’ ancestors had their ability to understand language completely wiped clean, but they were a very diverse set of subjects. They somehow must have preserved some of their knowledge in engineering and construction to their descendants without the ability to read, write, or even effectively understand each other.”

“Kinda makes you wonder what they could have done if they weren’t subjects of some psychotic mare’s experiments,” Gauge said. “Out here, they were perfectly isolated and didn’t have to retreat to tiny havens of safety like our ancestors did.”

“Don’t know how long that’s gonna last,” Ace said. “Ain’t gonna be too long before Reclaimer’s got his rat bastards all over the Spines.”

I nodded, but there wasn’t much we could do about that at the moment. Right now, the important thing was figuring out what was going to happen to us next. It seemed that word of our arrival had reached the Feati settlement before we ourselves did, because there was already a large crowd of ponies waiting for us not too far from the gates. Teka seemed surprised by this, and I saw a look of excitement and relief flash across her face, before it quickly melted away into dread. She almost seem to cow before the ponies standing around her, and her escorts quickly abandoned her to stand closer by us.

One pony stepped out of the group of colorful and tattooed individuals looking us over, and I immediately knew he had to be the tribe’s leader or something. There was hardly any space left on his coat to cram more ink into, and he wore what looked like a set of haphazardly patched together combat armor, painted with swirls and other colorful details. Enormous feathers that had been tied into bundles of color sprouted from the armor, and the feathered headpiece he wore reminded me of an exaggerated griffon’s head crest. Even his tail had braids, colorful cords, and more feathers woven into it. But underneath all that, two things struck me about the pony himself. For one thing, he seemed awfully young for a chief, maybe around my age or so, and as for the other, his green coat reminded me a lot of Teka’s lighter green coat.

The chief briefly glanced over us, but soon his attention fell on Teka, and his eyes seemed to pierce through her. “Tekawenye,” he said, using her full name. “A U’a tunkto’sat U’a tol”

Teka swallowed hard and briefly lifted her eyes to the other pony. “Lentowenye… A hatot hommo ba’set.”

From the way she said that sentence, I wondered if ‘Lentowenye’ was the name of the stallion. The ‘wenye’ part fit with Teka’s name, so I assumed they shared the same root word for their name. In that case, they had to be related somehow. Brother and sister, maybe? I looked again at Teka. Did I accidentally save the sister of the Feati’s chief?

Even if that was true, Lentowenye did not seem happy to see Teka back. “A hatot’sot U’a la.” he said, and even the ponies around him murmured slightly and glanced at the two ponies. “U’a bepbo wyklo noppo, e U’a tol’sat T’a’hn. Unta U’a wetwa ite T’a’hn awwe mahaha wiwiw U’a kolwil. To la U’a galep lewal imma salhn’an li onotni pohnaa’ae.”

Teka’s gaze hardened, and she seemed to find some steel to retort to whatever her brother accused her of. “A galep’sat’un kampno’un. Immapohna’hn’un fumpo’sat A U’a. U’a soe’sat owow oal T’a’hn kolwil’an. Ka’hn immapohna’hn’un nitkli’hn! T’a’hn timm’sat A loklok e mnib’sot A stafiwi!”

Lentowenye’s eyes turned toward us. “A soe. E U’a bwonm’sat T’a’hn lewal ite owow’sot T’a’hn of fumpo’set A U’a?”

Teka glanced over her shoulder and shook her head. I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. “T’a’hn’un immapohna’hn’un A mak loklok. T’a’hn A mak’un loklok. T’a’hn lifte’set Mum’a hommo.”

I’d had about enough of listening to this and wondering what the actual shit was going on. “Can we have somepony who speaks Equiish translate for us?” I asked, looking around. “I hate being caught out of the loop.”

Nova roughly slapped me behind the head with her wing. Unfortunately for me, it was her metal one, so it actually hurt quite a bit. “Be quiet, Ember,” she hissed at me. “You’re making a bad first impression in front of the chief!”

“He can’t understand me,” I said, my eyes wandering over the crowd, looking for somepony a little more advanced in years who probably actually knew basic Equiish. “And I’m tired of listening to this stupid, made-up language.”

Lentowenye’s eyes fell on me, and I should have realized I’d fucked up by the way he glared at me. Wordlessly, the stallion advanced down the slight hill between my party and his, brushing aside Teka with a forehoof as he passed her. He stopped right in front of me, and though he was just a little shorter than me, he certainly knew how to make his presence felt when he wanted to. “My language does not agree with you, outsider?”

Immediately, every last one of my friends glared at me. Even SCaR turned in my direction, squawking and buzzing a few times. As for myself, I could only swallow hard and put a nervous smile on my face. “Oh… you can speak Equiish?”

“I learned how to speak your language before I was named chief,” Lentowenye said. “I would need it to protect my people from the cunning ways of outsiders like yourself. Understanding your violent thoughts can save the Feati from your aggression.”

“Well… great!” I rubbed the back of my neck. “Then we can understand each other and shit. Cool! That’ll… that’ll make this a lot easier.”

Lentowenye squinted at me. “I am not interested in negotiating with you, outsider. My sister, Tekawenye, tells me that you rescued her from slavers, and that you were looking for us. Tradition dictates that I welcome and entertain you briefly as a symbol of gratitude from the tribe, but I do not want you here. So tell me what it is you want with us, and then I can be rid of you as soon as I am able.”

Well, there wasn’t any point beating around the bush any longer, I guessed. Might as well just try to get this over with and move on quickly. Maybe Lentowenye would be able to just point us on our way and we could be off. “I’m looking for an old installation,” I said. “You know, like, something from before the Silence. It’s got a thing I’m looking for.”

Lentowenye just gave me a blank and confused look. “I do not know what you are talking about.”

“Like… is there a bunker or something around here? Something Equestrian?” I quirked my eyebrows, hoping that maybe I’d get a response, but I just got more blank looks. “Ummm… You guys know what Equestria is, right? The Synarchy?”

“Ember, none of those words mean anything to them,” Nova said, shaking her head at me. Clearing her throat, she stepped forward and waved her metal wing—a motion which immediately caught everypony’s attention. The mare kind of froze in place, not really anticipating such a reaction to her prosthetic, but nervously laughed it off and smiled at the tribe’s leader. “Are there any places of metal around in these woods? It would probably be… underground? Partially in the ground?” She looked at me for confirmation, but it wasn’t until Surge forced my head to nod did I realize she was asking the Equestrian, not the Aurissian. Aurelian? I don’t even know what we call ourselves, honestly.

Lentowenye nodded once at her, and I was once again immediately thankful that I had Nova with me. There was probably no way I’d ever figure out the right combination of words to use to get my point across with these ponies. “You are looking for the gods’ den beneath the Walsahn?”

“Yes, I believe so,” Nova said, even though I had no fucking idea what this ‘walsahn’ was supposed to be. “We need to get inside of it.”

“You cannot,” Lentowenye said, his features setting into a hard frown. “The holy tree is not for outsiders. None may enter it.”

“But it’ll only take us, like, ten minutes!” I exclaimed. “We’ll be in and out before you know it! We just have to find a computer in there, and then we can get what we need and leave!”

Lentowenye stomped his hoof, and his tattoos momentarily flickered and glowed silver. “You will not enter the roots of the Walsahn,” he growled at me. “I will not allow it. If you try, we will kill you, and not even your horrible weapons of death will save you.”

I already felt my temper beginning to boil over, and I probably would’ve gone nose to nose with this kid and tried shouting my way into their holy tree had Surge not paralyzed me with her force of will. But while I tried to fight her off, Nova filled in for me and nodded her head in understanding. “Of course. This is your tribe, so we will follow your rules. Perhaps we can come to an agreement later.”

“There will be no agreement,” Lentowenye said, turning back to her. “My word is final.”

“Right, right.” Nova dipped her head and smiled at him. “In that case, we’ve traveled a long way from home. Some food and rest would be wonderful, if you can afford to spare it.”

Though I was pretty sure Lentowenye would have liked nothing more than to turn her down and spurn us away, I guess honor or tradition meant he had to act otherwise. “Of course,” he said, narrowing his eyes at Nova all the while. “We will provide food and shelter for three nights. No longer. You are welcome to come and go as you please during those three days, but we will be watching. Remember that.”

He didn’t really wait for us to nod or agree to his terms, even, before he turned around and walked away from us, back toward the crowd of his fellow tribesponies. As he passed Teka, though, he slipped back into his native tongue and said something to her in a stern voice. “Unta’un of A imma Mum’a hommo. A U’a ho’hn takka’set, thenne.”

Teka bobbed her head in reluctant acknowledgement, and Lentowenye continued on past her. The ponies in front of him parted as he approached, reforming their solid mass when he moved by, and began to follow him deeper into the settlement. Around us, with the spectacle apparently over, the tattooed ponies of the Feati began to disperse, returning to whatever other tasks they had to still take care of today.

That included our guards; they just sort of left to go do other things, I guessed. Soon, it was just us standing there, with Teka a little bit farther away, ears drooped and eyes turned toward the ground.

Ace looked around us, even spinning in place a few times as she tried to figure out what happened. “That’s it?” she wondered aloud. “They just up and left us to our own shit? Ain’t they worried we’re gonna do something dumb?”

“They said they were watching us,” Gauge said. “Don’t doubt that. These ponies can be sneaky when they want to.”

“Or just fucking confusing assholes,” I grumbled. I raised my eyebrow at Teka and nudged Nova in the side. “What do you think’s going on with her? Their leader didn’t seem happy to see her back.”

“I don’t know,” Nova said, shaking her head. “But I wish I could help.”

Sighing, Teka looked over her shoulder at us for a few seconds before she began to trudge deeper into the camp. The young mare looked like she was marching off to her death or something. I wanted to help her… but I had no idea how.

By my other side, Ace shrugged and looked around. “Ah, whatever. We’ve got three days here before they boot us out the door. Reckon that’s plenty of time to take a gander about and see what we can find. In the meanwhile…” She raised her nose to the air and started sniffing, before triumphantly pointing her wing somewhere deeper into the camp. “I smell food coming from there. I don’t know about y’all, but I’m famished!”

“Didn’t we eat not too long ago?” Gauge asked her.

“That was before we got chased by a horrible abomination.” Ace pointedly shrugged her rifle between her wings and started walking off without us. “It’s been a long day!”

“That it has,” Nova said, setting off after her, Gauge not far behind.

That just left me standing in place, alone with Surge in my head. Sighing, I reluctantly set off after my friends, my eyes wandering about the area. We were close to our destination—that much I knew for certain. But if the Feati ponies wouldn’t let us into it… what was I going to do?

Chapter 30: The Outsiders

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Chapter 30: The Outsiders

So my first impression with the Feati and their leader had gotten off to an awful start. I’d already insulted him and made a fool of myself, and only my friends managed to bail my ass out of the fire before I sunk the whole thing entirely. Now, we were just kinda hanging on to their hospitality, hoping that we didn’t do anything that would get us kicked out faster than we already were. And by we, I mostly meant me, because I’d be the only one fucking stupid enough to blow this in some way.

At the very least, the food was good, and it really, honestly made me forget about all the awful shit I’d gotten us into over the past several days. This wasn’t trail rations or stuff we killed and cooked up plain over a fire; this was true home cooking. Word must’ve gotten ahead of us that we were looking for food, because shortly after we sat down around an empty fire pit, several mares trotted out seemingly from the woodwork and dropped wooden bowls filled with piping hot stew in front of all of us. After the misery I’d been suffering through, hot food on its own was a godsend, but hot food that tasted awesome was practically a miracle. I think I had three or four bowls of the stuff before I finally decided I couldn’t eat anymore—and that was mostly because I didn’t want to overdo it and cramp my lean stomach, so used to surviving on barely more than starvation rations after wandering the wilderness for so long.

Ace didn’t really seem to have that problem. I was becoming increasingly convinced the longer I traveled with her that she was basically a bottomless pit of hunger with wings. She ate all the time like each and every meal would be her last, and given her history in Auris’ wildlands, that honestly made a lot of sense. Death could come from anywhere out there, without even a moment’s notice.

At any rate, she’d gone through her fifth or sixth bowl—I’d honestly lost count, but whenever she put a bowl away and waved a wing, it’d barely take a minute before a fresh one was delivered to her. Despite the cold reception we’d gotten from Lentowenye, it seemed like many other tribesponies were fascinated with us and were practically doting on whatever we wanted. We were outsiders, we were amazing to them, and they wanted to see us and our strange ways, even if they didn’t know how to communicate with us.

“You need to slow down, girl,” I said to her, shaking my head as she contemplated getting yet another bowl of stew. “I know it’s really fucking good, but you’re gonna have a food baby when this is over.”

“I ain’t planning on having kids anyway, might as well make it a food baby,” Ace quipped, winking at me. “I haven’t eaten like this in months. I ain’t letting this opportunity slip me by.”

“What about those meals we had in Three Rivers?” Gauge asked. He and Nova had eaten far more reasonable portions: only two bowls each. They wouldn’t be passed out in a food coma for the next few hours, at least. “Don’t those count?”

“Eh, sure, but then it don’t sound as impressive.” Finally, though, Ace decided she’d reached her limit, and dropped her bowl into the little tower the rest of us had built in the center of the fire pit. “Whew! That hit the spot. Good way to finish off a day spent running from a freaky scorpion centipede monster thing!”

“It is getting late,” Nova noted, her eyes drifting up to the sky. “It’s getting hard to see my hoof in front of my face. The clouds combined with the trees and thick canopy… nighttime comes early around here.”

She was right; I didn’t really know how late it actually was, but the Feati’s home was already thickly swathed in shadow and growing darker by the second. Everywhere I looked, I saw ponies trotting up to torches and touching them with their hooves. Their tattoos would flash red for a second, and when they took their hoof away, they’d leave a tongue of fire on the torch wick, healthy and strong. They even moved through bridges and hidden pathways in the leaves above the camp, lowering lighted fire bowls to hang above the camp and illuminate the buildings below. Again, the mastery these ponies had over the elements was amazing to me, and it was all done through the strange designs inked onto their bodies. I’d seen their pegasi fly and their unicorns use basic spells, but they didn’t seem like they knew any advanced magic apart from what their tattoos could give them. I’d noticed that last part mostly because Surge’s academic interest kept drawing my eyes to them as they went about their business while I was thinking or spacing out.

Just how had these ponies survived out here for so long? Everything they did was so primitive but so practiced and oiled that I knew they’d been doing it successfully for generations. What might have started as a twisted sociology and linguistics experiment two centuries ago had given rise to an entirely new civilization in the isolated forests of the Spines, and now, these ponies were unawares custodians of a piece of the old world that could forever change the present and the future. If only they knew what they were sitting on, if they knew just what that code meant for Auris, and why it was so important that we got it…

But they weren’t capable of understanding it. There was no way. Forget the fact that hardly any of them seemed to know how to speak our language; the mere concepts of what this shit meant were so far beyond them there was no way they’d ever come close to understanding. And my hope of saving Auris, of saving them from the storm coming straight to their doorstep, hinged on me getting access to this thing they called the ‘Walsalhn’. I knew, just knew that that was where the code piece was held. But if I couldn’t get access to it… what could I do?

I heard a snicker from off to my side. “Em’s thinking again,” Gauge said with a laugh. “You can see the smoke.”

I glared at him. “Somepony’s gotta do the thinking. If it isn’t gonna be you guys, then I guess it’ll have to be me.”

“At least you’ve got Sparky in there to do most of the work,” he teased. “What’s it like sharing a head with her?”

“I think it’s kinda neat, now that I’m used to it,” I said.

Gauge chuckled again. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

Surge made my ears twitch as she started paying attention again. “I was given a Class D dwelling back on Equestria before I came here,” she said. “Ember’s skull is a Class B at least.”

“I think she just insulted me,” I grumbled, mostly to Ace, since I knew she was particularly fond of being on my side as of late.

“At least it’s a pretty noggin,” Ace said, winking at me. “Honestly, I bet it’s an improvement over Sparky’s old mug.”

Surge blinked my eyes. “Excuse me?”

“Just sayin’.” Ace laughed a bit at the frown suddenly appearing on my face. “I mean, no offense, girl, but you were in your forties or something when you died. Ember’s a nice pretty mare in the prime of youth. A lot fewer wrinkles, right?”

“Her face is very attractive, I will give her that,” Surge said. “She ruins the look with her enormous mane, however, and the battle damage detracts from it quite a bit.”

Nova giggled. “You just had to insult her mane, didn’t you, Surge…”

I crossed my forelegs and huffed. “I like my mane,” I grumbled. “It’s like, the one thing I actually care about in how I look. You don’t know how upset I was when a shrike ripped a big chunk of it off, or when I lost half my tail in a teleportation circle.”

“At least they’ve grown back a bit since then,” Gauge said. “They’re not as short as they used to be.”

I fluffed the end of my mane with a hoof. “Yeah, that’s true. What I wouldn’t give for a comb, though. Or some conditioner.”

Nova laughed at that. “Em, Blackwash didn’t have any conditioner. We’d been out of conditioner for a hundred and eighty years!”

“Then those mares way back when should’ve learned to ration better. Our makeshift shit never did the job right.”

We all had a little giggle at that, but Nova brought it back down to earth soon enough. “So, what were you thinking about, Ember? I know we tease you about it, but whenever you do get thoughtful like that, it’s usually about something important.”

“Like when she’s gonna find some quiet time with her rifle,” Gauge said, accompanied by a few guffaws from Ace.

“Shut up, Stripy,” I said, borrowing Surge’s (racist) nickname for him for a moment. Focusing my attention back on Nova, I shrugged. “I’m just… thinking about how we’re going to get that piece of code. We’re not leaving here until we do.”

“We certainly came far enough,” Ace said. “Would be a real shame to turn back now. Whatever it is, I’m in.”

“Yeah, but I don’t even have a fucking plan.” I frowned at the ground between my hooves. “It sounds like there’s something important about this ‘Walsalhn’ of theirs, and I’m willing to bet that there might be an installation hidden under it. But if that tree is super important to them, then I just know they’ll fight tooth and nail to keep us from getting into it without their permission.”

“They probably couldn’t stop us if we tried,” Ace said, and her right wingtip stroked the body of her compacted rifle on her back. “Surgical strike, get in and out before anypony even knows it.”

“We are not murderers!” I realized I was leering at her, and I took a deep breath to calm myself down. “Just because we could slaughter these ponies with our guns and magic doesn’t mean we should or will. I’m not going to be a murderer like Yeoman. That’s exactly what he would do if he found these ponies.”

“Then what option do we have?” Gauge asked. “We already know that their leader doesn’t want us to go anywhere near the tree. We’re not welcome. And something tells me it’s going to take a lot to change his mind. More than we can possibly manage in only three days.”

“Maybe we can make a trade?” Nova asked.

I lowered my brow at her. “What could we give them that they could possibly want?”

She fidgeted in place. “Maybe some of our guns? We have a lot…”

“We have enough for the fighters in our group,” Ace said. “Meaning me and Ember. Ain’t got a whole lot to spare. Got plenty of ammo, but without a gun, it don’t mean shit. And I doubt these primitives trade in Cs.”

“Information, maybe?” Gauge asked. “Surely they’d like to know more about the outside world.”

“Do these ponies look like they care about the outside world?” I asked, gesturing around us. “They know that there are other ponies out there, but they aren’t interested in connecting with them. I don’t blame them, really; it sounds like they have to fight off slavers trying to pick up some exotic products more than anything else.”

“Then… fuck, I ain’t got no ideas,” Ace drawled. “Maybe you let their leader rut you senseless and then you can get in?”

I immediately slapped her across the cheek, though she was already drawing back by the time I leaned over so it was much less effective than I’d hoped. “I’m not whoring myself out to a tribal pony to get inside this tree,” I said. “I don’t want to catch like, super turbo Auris AIDS or something.”

“That’s racist,” Gauge said.

“Your face is racist,” I grumbled back at him. “But that is absolutely off the table. You go let him fuck you if you think it’s a good idea, Ace.”

Ace chuckled and fluffed her wings. “He could be into dudes, too. They don’t look like they got no zebras around here; maybe something spicy will loosen him up a bit.”

Nova wrapped her forelegs and wings around Gauge. “Nopony touches him,” she said, nuzzling into his shoulder. “He’s mine!”

Gauge chuckled and patted Nova’s back. “Don’t worry about it, Nov, it’ll never happen.”

“Just like anything happening in this discussion,” I grumbled. “So we’re back to square one.”

Surge surprised me by offering a suggestion of her own. “If Lentowenye can speak fluent Equiish, then he’s likely not the only one here. Somepony had to teach it to him. Maybe we can find them and speak with them about it.”

“Maybe they’ll have a sunnier disposition,” Ace drawled. “The chief ain’t exactly somepony I’d want to be stuck in a small room with for very long.”

“Define very long,” Gauge said, his eyes following SCaR as the little drone did its usual thing of idly patrolling around us.

“Like… more than three seconds.”

“At the very least, it’s something for us to do,” I said, standing up. I grimaced from forcing myself to move; I’d definitely eaten too much, and now my gut felt like it was bloated. Four bowls was, in hindsight, probably way too much. “Come on. We’ve basically got free roam of most of this place, right? Let’s go do a little asking around.”

“Asking what, exactly?” Gauge asked. “If they speak Equiish?”

“If we get a response, then it worked,” Ace said, quirking her brow. It took her even more effort to stand up than it’d taken me, especially considering how she’d stuffed herself, but soon all of us had left the campfire behind and started wandering off in a random direction.

We passed by… well, in a word, life. On my left, a mother watched her foals chase each other in circles in front of their hut, the kids squealing as they played, and on my right, a trio of stallions talked and laughed in their own language. Ponies went this way and that, minding their own business and acting real friendly to their neighbors as dinner in the Feati stronghold wound down. But apart from it all, I couldn’t help but notice how much we stuck out like sore hooves. Everywhere we went, even from just a brief walk from the campfire to the streets of the tribe, we attracted the attention of curious onlookers. Old and young, mares and stallions, we were outsiders that they watched with curiosity. And everywhere I looked, every single place I looked, colorful coats made a lively background for silver tattoos covering hooves, legs, faces, and barrels. It left me with little doubt that every adult the Feati had knew how to use their magic to some extent, and made Ace’s foolhardy idea seem even more pointless and hopeless. We couldn’t fight our way through an army of ponies who could command fire and ice and the other elements at will, even with superior technology.

But even if they all knew how to use their magic tattoos and shit, that didn’t mean like, any of them knew how to speak Equiish. Nova, always excited about shit like this, had taken it upon herself to ask everypony we met if they spoke Equiish. Without fail, every single one of them just stared at us in confusion or muttered something in their own language. But we knew there had to be somepony who could communicate with us who wasn’t the tribe’s chief, because Surge was right: somepony would have had to teach him. The problem was, finding that one somepony in a settlement as big as this was proving pretty fucking challenging. It was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, or to use an analogy probably more relevant to my life, a single cartridge in a fucking mountain of shells.

“Equiish? Equiish? Anypony speak Equiish?” Even Nova’s enthusiasm was beginning to run its course, and she growled and fluttered her wings in frustration, her metal prosthetic slicing through the air at a frightening speed. “Grr! Why is this so difficult! You’d think at least a few of these ponies would know a couple of Equiish words and be able to show us what we want!”

“Wishful thinking at its finest,” Ace said with a chuckle.

“Wishful thinking is about all we have to go on,” I said. I flicked a cigarette out of my little box and got it between my lips as fast as I could, lighting it with a spark from my horn. I needed the nicotine after all this shit, but I noted that the box of fifty I’d left Three Rivers with had become worryingly light over the past few days. “We’re certainly not getting very far on our own.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Gauge said. He frowned at a crowd of tattooed ponies and suddenly froze in place. “So, all of these ponies have tattoos, right?”

“Yeah?” I blew out a stream of stinky smoke and walked up next to him because I knew he was going down some logical train of thought. Or at least, that’s what I hoped. “That isn’t exactly new.”

“Right. And they seem to get more of them the older they get?”

I glanced at a couple of nearby foals and noted the significantly fewer tattoos decorating their bodies—again, only clustered around their ears and eyes. “Yeah. It’s probably a coming of age thing or something. Fuck if I know.”

He pursed his lips for a few moments, then pointed across the way to an older stallion sitting inside of a hut, talking with several colts and fillies. “Then how come he doesn’t have anywhere near as many tattoos as the other ponies his age?”

“He… doesn’t?” I frowned and squinted across the way, my cigarette momentarily forgotten as it dangled from my lips. The stallion was obviously middle-aged, and his body was thin and wiry beneath a thin and wiry sandy coat. He had a horn, gnarled from use and probably a fair bit of trauma and healing, and his deep blue eyes almost looked as dark as some of the beautiful sapphire waters of the Bluewater Gorge. He had a mark on his flanks that seemed to be a pile of woodworking tools, which I thought was fairly odd; as far as I could tell the Feati ponies didn’t use tools like that. But, as Gauge had pointed out, his lack of tattoos was the most striking thing. He had a few around his eyes and ears, like the foals did, and a few on his shoulders and chest, but other than that, his body seemed like a blank canvas to the more filled-in coats of the ponies we’d seen so far.

Ace hummed and frowned. “He’s certainly different,” she concluded, saying the obvious thought on all our minds.

“No shit,” I said, already striking off to go talk to him, and somewhat surprising my friends as I did so. “He’s the most different pony we’ve seen since we got here, which means I wanna talk to him.”

“How do you know he’ll even speak Equiish?” Nova asked, scurrying to my side.

“I don’t, but that’s why I’m going to talk to him,” I said. “I think we’ll learn pretty fucking quick whether he does or doesn’t that way.”

We hesitantly gathered outside of the hut, unsure if now would be a good time to intrude or not. I obviously wanted to just barge right on in and talk to him, but Surge forced me to do the courteous thing and wait to be acknowledged. So while we did that, I took the time to get a good look around this place. The hut was pretty sturdily built, and it was very spacious, with open holes in the walls to serve as windows and let whatever meager light there was down here into the interior. Numerous little totems and knickknacks decorated the walls, and about ten young ponies sat on a woven mat on the floor while the stallion spoke to them. He gestured to something on the wall, and my eyes widened in shock and surprise when I recognized the Equiish alphabet, scrawled there in large letters so it was easy to see.

“It’s a schoolhouse,” Surge murmured.

“And that’s the Equiish alphabet,” Gauge said.

The stallion flashed us a smile that said he at least acknowledged us and would be happy to talk in a few moments. Then, turning his attention back to the kids around him, he began to wave with his hoof. “Ahso, ahso, lenbab tunn. A U’a tunn agga le’hn unta’hn. Unta, A takka’sot immapohna’hn’un. Galep’set, galep’set.” The colts and fillies glanced at us, and then they stood up and began to stream out of the hut, dispersing once they made it past our legs. “Goodbye!” The stallion called after them in perfect Equiish. “See you tomorrow!”

We all stood there, dumbstruck, until the stallion chuckled and leaned against the wall, looking us over. “What’s the matter?” he asked us. “Never heard anypony speak Equiish before?”

“You… can actually speak it?” I asked. Surge immediately pulled on some nerves in my temple, making me wince and rub the side of my head like somepony had kicked it. Of course the stallion could speak Equiish. But sometimes, I didn’t listen to myself before I spoke.

The stallion nodded. “It’s kind of a rare thing out here, isn’t it?” he asked. He gestured after a few of the kids still trotting along the street. “But I’m trying to teach it to these ponies. It’s important that they learn it while they’re young, because it’s a lot harder to pick up later in life.” He shook his head. “It took Summer Light some time to learn, and he’s a hotheaded young colt. But he’s chief of the tribe, and so like it or not, he had to put up with me trying to teach him our language until he was fluent.”

“Summer Light?” I asked, cocking my head to the side. “You mean Lento… whatever?”

The stallion nodded. “His full name is ‘Lentowenye Ilum’. ‘Lentowenye’ means ‘Summer’, roughly speaking, and ‘Ilum’ is ‘Light’. Now, his sister’s named ‘Tekawenye Kakehote’, which means ‘Spring Breeze’.” He chuckled at my confused and probably pretty stupid expression. “I could explain the finer points of the language further, but for that you’d have to attend my daily classes, and for some reason I don’t think you’ll enjoy being surrounded by foals less than half your age.”

“Oh, I’d love to attend!” Nova exclaimed, fluttering forward. “We traveled with Teka for a bit after Ember saved her from slavers! I’ve been trying to figure out her language, but I don’t have any common ground to base it off of.”

The stallion eyed her mechanical wing and took a nervous step back. “I guess I should have expected a group of heavily armed and augmented ponies like you lot would be the ones to bring the chief’s sister back. That must be why Lento’s letting you all stay. Normally he chases off outsiders before they can get close.”

“And what about you?” Ace asked, striding closer. “You sure as shit ain’t one of them.”

The stallion raised a curious eyebrow at her. “Was I really that obvious?”

“You ain’t got as many tattoos and you speak Equiish like it’s your first,” she said, her wing pointing to the large, blank spaces on his coat. “No way you were raised here.”

He chuckled and smiled at us. “Good eye and good ear,” he said. Then he stuck his hoof out at her. “Name’s Sandy Banks. I was a mechanic for a caravan company, but through a wild series of events, I ended up as the Feati’s schoolteacher about eleven years ago. Plenty of time for me to learn the language and pass on my own to them. Lento’s and Teka’s father wanted me to teach them when they were young.”

“Wait…” Nova frowned at the dirt between her hooves. “Teka knows how to speak Equiish?”

Sandy snorted in amusement. “If she does, that’d surprise me. I tried tutoring her for a year, but she absolutely didn’t want to be there. Eventually, I realized it was a fruitless endeavor. No doubt she still knows the bare basics, but she hates the language. Her brother, though, he didn’t get a choice as the chief’s son. He took to my lessons better than she did, anyway.” The stallion shook his head and sighed. “Probably to one-up his sister again. The two hardly ever see eye to eye, and there’s some real bad blood between the two of them, at least from brother to sister. Lento wasn’t happy to see you all bring his sister back, if the stories I’ve heard from earlier today are true.”

I remembered the harsh words Lentowenye had given Teka and the way she tried to make herself seem so small and nonexistent. “Was he really? What kind of sick fuck would want to see his little sister dead?”

“Teka’s always been trouble for the tribe,” Sandy said. “She’s reckless and fearless. Those two things don’t combine very well. She’s endangered a lot of ponies with her antics, and I think it’s fair to say a few ponies have died because of them. This isn’t some kind of family power feud for control of the tribe; Lento, I believe, genuinely doesn’t want her around because he sees her as a danger to the tribe, but she’s still family, so the poor stallion’s caught in a difficult position. You don’t just send a thirteen-winters old kid out on her own into the wilderness, especially not in a place like the Spines.”

“So I’m guessing he hoped that her disappearance to the slavers and everything would just solve the problem for him.” I groaned, already exasperated at the stupid fucking family drama in the Feati power structure, and sat down so I could suck on my cigarette in peace. “Really nice guy. Really. Fucking dick wouldn’t even let us go check out his stupid tree for what we’re looking for.”

“Oh? You’re looking to get into the Wahlsalhn? The World Tree?” Sandy shook his head. “You probably stood a better chance of getting in when Lento’s father ruled the tribe, but he’s been dead four years now.”

“Lento made it pretty fucking clear he wasn’t going to let us in,” I said. My cigarette had all but ran out at about that point, much to my annoyance, and I snuffed the butt into the ground. “But we need to get inside. We have to.”

“It wouldn’t be no exaggeration to say that the fate of this whole damn planet hinges on it,” Ace said.

“Can you help us?” Gauge asked. “We really just need to get something that’s inside. That’s all we need.”

To my frustration, Sandy shook his head. “I’m still an outsider by blood. I’m not allowed in there, even if I’m integrated into the tribe. The only time any ponies go inside is when they complete their adulthood rituals, at which point they are allowed to enter and pray for one hour. Since I wasn’t born here, I don’t get to participate in it. I got some of the tattoos: Listen, Watch, and Learn—” He pointed to the tattoos around his ears, eyes, and forehead, respectively. “—but none of the adulthood tattoos. Strength, Bravery, Honor, Loyalty, such and such. I’ll never get them because I’m not one of them.”

“Well, so much for that fucking idea,” I grumbled, really desperately trying to resist the urge to pluck another cigarette out of my box and start smoking it to curb some of my tense frustration. “We really, really need to fucking get into that tree,” I insisted. “There’s an old Equestrian installation under it, and it has something we absolutely need. So if you can help us get inside one way or another, that would be really fucking fantastic.”

Sandy sort of looked up and down the street before gesturing for us to come further inside. “Why don’t we talk about this inside,” he said. “It’ll be a little more private.”

“Why?” Nova asked, even while Ace and me just slipped right on in. “Are we not allowed to talk about this?”

“Can anypony even understand us?” Ace asked.

“They’ll recognize what we’re talking about the moment they hear the word ‘Walsalhn’. It’s a touchy thing for these people,” Sandy said, gesturing for her and Gauge to enter. “It’s the one big religious symbol these ponies have, and they’ll get very uncomfortable and suspicious about outsiders trying to get inside. But, nevertheless, I think I can help you.”

“If you’ve got an idea, I’m all ears,” I said, hastily following him inside. Sandy went behind his crude, makeshift desk and sat down on a stool, and seeing as how there weren’t seats for the rest of us, I walked right up to it and put my hooves on the edge. “We need to do whatever it takes to get inside there. I really don’t want to force the issue with my guns.”

“I really don’t want to see you try,” Sandy said. Then, sighing, he raised an eyebrow at all of us, now that we’d filed into the privacy of his schoolhouse. “Before I even begin, I feel like I should ask exactly why you all want to get under the tree. This is my home now too, and I don’t want to do anything that will endanger it.”

I glanced at the rest of my friends to see if they had any reservations on talking about this kind of thing to Sandy, but the most I got were a few shrugs. Apparently, that decision was up to me. “Since you’re not from here, I assume you know what the Silence is.”

“Of course I do,” Sandy said, waving his hoof. “Every pony who claims to be civilized knows what the Silence is.”

“Then you’ll be surprised to know it’s over,” I said, trying to make and hold a level gaze with him. “For the first time since it began, we’ve heard something. It’s over.”

He blinked in surprise, and I could tell he was searching my face for some kind of clue that I was joking or lying to him. “No, that’s… what? Really?” One of his eyebrows crawled up his forehead. “You’re not joking around, are you?”

“She isn’t,” Nova said, moving to stand by my side. “We were originally from an old Synarchy communications outpost. Our settlement used to be the link between Auris and Equus. We still had the satellite dishes, and we went through a lot of effort to get them working again. And when we did, we heard something. A message. A code.”

I nodded, thankful for Nova’s help. “We got some kind of coded message sent from a probe traveling to Auris. It broke the code into parts and sent them across the world. One of those parts ended up here, in the installation underneath your big tree. We need to get access to it.”

I decided to neglect mentioning that another piece had gone to the Ivory City. The last thing I needed was him to get fearful or suspicious that us being here would bring Reclaimer’s wrath down on this place… even if it was true. If Yeoman found the Feati’s home, I knew he would do terrible, terrible things to these ponies in search of that code piece.

“And… what will it do?” he asked, suddenly looking very concerned.

“We don’t really know,” Gauge said. The zebra had taken a seat on one of the mats on the ground and was currently fiddling with one of SCaR’s little thrusters. “But I think we can both agree that there are a lot of hidden Equestrian military and science facilities scattered across Auris. That code could go to any one of them, or it could wake up all of them. We don’t know. But what we do know is that we need to get it before other ponies get it—other, terrible ponies who could use it for evil ends.”

“How do I know that you all will do anything good for Auris with it?” Sandy asked. “How do I know that helping you find this code piece will leave the world a safer place?”

“Ever hear of the Sentinels?” I asked him. When he nodded, I put a hoof over my chest. “I helped them fight off the Crimson. We took the fight right to the dam and blew them apart. We even killed Carrion. They made me a sergeant and sent me off on this mission to get the code pieces. If nothing else, you can at least trust them to do good with it.”

“That’s almost as hard to believe as what you’re saying about this code.” He held a hoof to his chin and thought for a moment. “Alright, you’ve convinced me.”

I smiled and relaxed a bit, letting out some of the tension in my shoulders. “Awesome. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me just yet,” Sandy said, looking me in the eye. I should have immediately known this wasn’t over yet judging by the look he gave me. “You’ve still got to convince the chief. He’s the only one who can give you access to the tree.”

“I’m going to go out on a limb and assume you have some kind of idea that can help me?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. I did not go all this way and basically spill the beans on everything to some random stallion just to get stonewalled and told to go away.

“I do,” he said, nodding. “But you’re probably not going to like it.”

“Why’s that?” Ace asked, her ears perking in our direction. Apparently, when Gauge had decided to do some maintenance on SCaR, she’d decided to do the same with her rifle. She had the entire thing broken down into parts in front of her and used her feathers to fiddle with little screws while she cleaned it out. “It ain’t gonna be bad, right?”

Sandy steepled his hooves together and pursed his lips. “There’s a rite that ponies must perform when they wish to pray at the Wahlsahn,” he said. “They call it Alaenin Kallengen–we’d call it the Grass Trial.”

Nova shrunk back from the desk. “A trial? That sounds… foreboding.”

“It sounds confusing,” was all I said. “What do I have to do?”

“I don’t know,” Sandy said, much to my frustration. “It could be anything, really. You have to complete something that the village chief and the shaman agree to test you with. Usually it involves going out into the Spines to do something, but they could ask you to do anything.”

“Alright,” I slowly said, already trying to think of what kind of impossible shit Lento would try to get me to do so I’d automatically fail. “Is that it?”

“No, in all likelihood, it’s gonna be the easy part.”

“The easy part?” Ace blinked and raised her head. “What’s gonna be harder than doing who knows what out there in the wilderness?”

“Getting tribe members to vouch for you,” Sandy said. “You need two ponies to agree to let you attempt the trial. Two ponies who know you, respect you, and see value in letting you participate. Good luck finding total strangers to help you. No bribe is going to convince any random pony who doesn’t know you to say you should be allowed into the holy tree.”

“Fuck.” I scowled at the ground and turned to look at my friends “We have three days to try to figure out how to get ponies to vouch for us. Two, more likely, because I bet if we try to start the trial when our time’s almost up, Lento’s gonna tell us to fuck off.”

“And we’ve already burned away most of today,” Ace said. “Ain’t gonna get much done tonight.”

“Shit.” Who was I going to get to help me? How was I going to get strangers to vouch for me? “Can you vouch for us?” I asked Sandy, hoping that he could be at least one of my two supporters.

Unfortunately, he shook his head. “No. I’m not a full tribe member. Just a welcomed outsider. My vote means nothing because you’re outsiders like me. They’d see it as favoritism.”

“As if this whole stupid fucking thing isn’t favoritism enough,” I grumbled.

“What about Teka?” Gauge asked. “Think she’ll vouch for us?”

Well, it was a better idea than I’d come up with so far. “I don’t know. Maybe. We did save her hide, after all.”

“And brought her right back here to get chewed out by her brother,” Nova glumly observed.

That might complicate things a bit. “She’s still worth a shot,” I said. “She’s probably our best bet. Maybe she can help point us to where we can get somepony else on our side.”

“Ain’t gonna be easy if we don’t speak her language,” Ace said.

I shook my head. “We don’t have to. Sandy here does.” I turned to him and wiggled my eyebrows. “You’ll help us out with this, right? We’d be super thankful.”

Sandy sighed and reluctantly nodded. “Only because the fate of the world is at stake… or something to that effect.” He turned to the window and looked outside, where the glow of fire bowls hanging from the canopy cast dim, flickering light across the camp. “I’ll meet up with you again in the morning. It’s nearly high time I went to bed anyway. Daylight is precious here in the Spines, and we can’t afford to sleep in when the sun actually does come out.”

“Yeah. That kinda sucks. I’m used to living on a mountain where there’s always daylight. The sun stays out longer when you’re higher up than the horizons all around you.”

“Where are we going to stay?” Nova asked. “We didn’t get a whole lot of direction when we got here.”

“Head up the road to the top of the settlement,” Sandy said, vaguely gesturing with his hoof to something outside. “There’s a longhouse up there that’s communal. Just pick some unclaimed mats and sleep. I’d have somepony be mindful of your stuff, though.”

“Why?” Ace cocked an eyebrow. “Somepony gonna steal our things?”

Sandy laughed and shook his head. “Curious little hooves might,” he said. “Outsiders that are welcome inside the settlement are always something new and exciting for the foals to see. Some are more adventurous than others when it comes to finding out more about you all.”

“We’ll keep that in mind,” I said, turning to Gauge. “We’ve got a little drone that can watch our stuff while we sleep.”

“He’ll beep and let us know if somepony tries touching our stuff, don’t worry,” Gauge said. Then he bowed his head to Sandy. “Thanks for all of your help.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at the stallion. “I think we would’ve spent another three hours asking ponies if they spoke Equiish before crashing under a rock or something otherwise.”

“It’s no problem,” Sandy said, waving his hoof in front of us. The corners of his lips pulled back in a smile as my friends began to file out the door. “Take care, and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Chapter 31: The Struggle to Find Friends

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Chapter 31: The Struggle to Find Friends

The sharp beeping of my alarm clock woke me up the next day, which was kinda weird, considering I didn’t have one.

Now, I’ve become somewhat of a light sleeper ever since Blackwash was plundered and razed in the middle of the night however the fuck long ago it’s been, but I was so tired from hiking through the rain yesterday and then fighting that monster that my eyelids felt practically caked together when I opened them. Like, full on nasty, crusty stuff trying to glue them shut. I could only imagine how bloodshot they were as I stared at the wooden beams over my head and tried to make sense of where I was.

It took a lot of effort to sit up and rub the sleep out of my eyes, and my magic bumbled around SCaR’s chassis as I tried to find a snooze button that wasn’t there. It wasn’t until I saw several sets of little, startled eyes staring back at me that my mind finally clicked into place what was actually happening.

“Mmrrrfff… Damn kids,” I growled at the children standing in front of me, and I snapped my travel bags closed before they could start digging into them. The foals squealed in delight and mischief as they scampered away from my things to the far end of the room, where they watched me from the doorway. That was fine; I didn’t care if they stared all they wanted. The last thing I needed, though, was them going through my bags, finding a gun, and accidentally shooting themselves or one of us. That would be a great start to the second day in Feati lands.

As much as I wanted to go back to sleep, I was already awake, so I rolled onto my side and looked around. We’d found a quiet area in the back of the longhouse to sleep in the night before, and the bedding was all fresh. Which was fucking amazing, by the way. I’d grown used to sleeping on a bedroll since we left the Dam, and though it’s better than sleeping on bare ground, it’s hardly the most comfortable thing. But here in the longhouse, where the Feati had carved little hollows into the earth and then filled them with moss and grass and thrown a blanket over it… oh by the stars I was tempted to just lie back down and go right back to sleep.

But I could see through the cracks in the ceiling and the walls that the sun was beginning to come up—as much as it did in the Spines—and that it was probably time to start finding ponies who would help me do the Grass Trial or whatever Sandy had called it. I looked at the other beds for my friends and saw Gauge and Nova sleeping comfortably in theirs, but Ace must’ve gotten up already. That was about as good a reason as any to get out of bed and actually do something. I noticed that my skull was quiet, too; Surge must’ve been conked out as well, which meant I had some time to myself before I was back to sharing my body with another mare. I was getting used to the lack of privacy that came with it, but that just made me all the more greedy for the moments I could have it.

I just had to remember not to think too loudly or anything. Now there’s a situation I’d never have imagined myself in a couple of months ago. Oh, how I yearned for the simpler days before all this code bullshit…

I think every one of my joints snapped and cracked as I rolled to my hooves and stretched them out. I must’ve slept so soundly that I didn’t even move an inch from when I’d closed my eyes until now. Even my tail felt sore, but at least the achiness that bathed my body was the good kind of ache, not the bad kind. The kind that you get when your muscles finally have a chance to loosen up after a long time of keeping them tense and exerting them. Definitely not the best kind of ache—the kind I’d experienced a few times after some wild nights with Zip—but definitely not horrible, either.

Some curled strands from my mane ended up in front of my eyes, and I tried to comb it all back into place with my magic. It really needed a washing and a trimming, now that I thought about it. Maybe I’d be able to find time to take care of that while I was here. But in any event, I could only roughly shake my head from side to side to try and get some life into my brain and look forward to the rest of the day. With that in mind, I looked at my bags, but decided against taking them for now. Even though the foals still watched me from the doorway, my stuff would be safe enough in here with SCaR to watch over them.

“If they try to get to our things, beep at them and maybe chase them around a little,” I said to the drone, moving our stuff closer to Nova and Gauge and checking it to see if I’d need anything for the day. After all, I was someplace safe, so I really didn’t need to carry all my crap around. At the very least, however, I unloaded all the guns just to be safe, and slung my rifle across my back. Shit would be bad if I needed it at all, but I felt a lot safer and a lot more secure just having it with me—not like thirty bullets and a grenade would really do all that much if the entire town went cannibal on me or something, but it never hurt to at least be a little bit prepared.

Is that a racist thought? I’m not sure if that’s racist. Maybe Surge was getting to me.

SCaR whistled his acknowledgment and flashed some of the lights on his chassis as he briefly puttered over to stop in front of our supplies. Once I was sure our shit was as safe as could be, I started moving toward the door, my hooves lightly crunching through the dry and dusty dirt floor. The foals cried out in excitement again as I approached, disappearing from the doorframe, and by the time I emerged a few seconds later, they’d already galloped to the far end of the longhouse and watched me with curious eyes, wondering if I’d play tag with them or something like that.

A thick fog hung over the Feati camp, limiting visibility beyond a hundred feet. Compared to the warm and dry interior of the longhouse, the morning fog felt cool and wet against my coat. I figured it was maybe two hours after sunrise, if that, if only judging by how long it felt like I’d slept for. It wasn’t like there were a lot of shadows on the forest floor to tell time by. But all around me, the ponies of the Feati Tribe were already well into their morning rituals. The adults all seemed lively and awake, and I could smell food being prepared across the settlement. That only got my stomach kicking and flipping. Sure, I’d eaten a lot last night, but damn if I wasn’t already hungry for more. I’d have to see if I could get the recipe from Sandy. If I could make something like this while traveling through the wilderness, I’d be in heaven.

The longhouse had been built on a hill in the settlement, and a deck jutted out from the side of it to provide some solid flat ground before a set of steps led down the earth path into town. The wood was slick with morning dew and the tables and chairs the Feati had left around it were too wet to sit on, so I instead walked over to the beige pegasus leaning against a railing overlooking the settlement. I tugged on her opposite shoulder with my magic as I approached, but Ace was definitely too good for that, because she didn’t even hesitate to look away from it and spot me before I even set my weight against the wooden post. “You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pull that one over on me,” she said, a twinkle in her eyes.

“I don’t even know what’s ‘early’ anymore,” I said, shrugging. “I haven’t had a normal sleep schedule in weeks.”

Ace scoffed. “Try years,” she said, shaking out her feathers. They must’ve been to her dissatisfaction, because she grumbled and held them in front of her face so she could study them. “If you’re going to live out there in that mess, you can’t afford to be sleeping when the sun’s out. Late to bed, early to rise. Ain’t had a good night’s sleep in… well, since Z left.” She sighed and vigorously shook her feathers again, knocking a few loose ones out and tucking her wings against her sides. “I could trust somepony to watch my back when I snoozed, then. Not so much no more.”

“Not now?” I asked her, cocking my head to the side. “I think by now I can trust you with my life, Ace. We’ve done a lot of shit together.”

Ace opened her mouth, froze, then looked away from me and hunched over. “It… It ain’t that, Ember,” she said. “I don’t mean nothing by it. Just that… well, I’ve been alone for years now. It’s hard to trust ponies again after all that, you know? Especially those who don’t understand it none.”

I lit my horn and surprised her by pulling a crooked feather out of her wing. She looked at me, blinked, and I lightly smiled in return. “I know I’m new to this whole ‘surviving in the wild, wild Auris wilderness’ thing,” I said, tossing the broken feather aside, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t understand you.”

I thought I saw a little bit of fluster in Ace’s face before she once again looked away to hide it. “Yes, well… maybe.”

In place of anything more to say, Ace immediately held her left wing to her face and started chewing through the feathers as she preened it back into top form. I shook my head as she worked and redirected my attention to the settlement below us. “So, uh, anyway… what do you think Lento’s gonna have us do on this Grass Trial thing?”

Ace frowned into her wing and pulled her muzzle back, a few feathers sticking out of her lips. Spitting them onto the ground, she shrugged and shifted her weight onto the railing. “Beats me. He ain’t gonna make it easy, assuming we even get two ponies to vouch for us.”

“Yeah. That’s gonna be a real pain in the ass.” Groaning, I watched a couple slowly walk down the street, as if I could just ask them to support us and validate our right to participate in this tribal rite. “Teka we can probably get to support us. We saved her life, and from what Sandy told us, if her brother doesn’t want us to do this, she’ll be more than happy to support us just because. But that’s one pony. How are we gonna convince strangers to support us when we don’t even speak the language?”

“I don’t know, but there ain’t nopony who don’t have a price,” Ace said with a shrug. “We only gotta get one other to support us, right? He didn’t say nothing whether they gotta be noble or not.”

“It’d really surprise me if just anypony could support us,” I said, frowning. “Even then, it’s not going to be that simple. I don’t know what the fuck we could do to get some stranger to support us. They love their holy fucking tree for whatever reason, and Sandy made it pretty clear that they’d consider the safety of their tree first before helping a bunch of random outsiders.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Fuck if I know.” The outlaw sighed and sagged against the railing. “I’m gonna try and catch a look at this holy tree of theirs,” she finally said. “Certainly won’t hurt none to know where it is and how well protected it’ll be. You know… just in case. Worst comes to worst, and all that.”

I wanted to say no, but only because I really, really wanted to hope it wasn’t going to come to that. But I didn’t; I only nodded slightly instead. “Just try not to get caught, okay?” I asked her, making sure she acknowledged my pleading look. “We really don’t need this to get fucked up for us.”

“Believe it or not, I can be quiet when I need to,” Ace said with a scoff. “You learn pretty quickly that you ain’t gonna get far if you try shooting at everything that crosses your path. Half the things that live on Auris are armored, and the other half tends to shoot back.”

I nodded to the rifle resting on her back between her wings. “That’s a hell of a gun to carry around if you don’t use it,” I teased her.

She chuckled and stroked the barrel with a wing. “That’s the beauty of range; I ain’t gotta get close to kill like you do.”

“You gotta let me try it sometime,” I said, smirking back at her. “It looks fun as shit.”

“Yeah, well, she probably got too much buck for you,” Ace said, winking at me. “She’s tuned for four limbs, not two, and definitely not a horn. She’d fly right out of your magic.”

“You saying I can’t handle a mare?” I asked her, and I’m willing to bet I had a stupid look on my face as I said that.

“You’ve handled neat and military,” Ace said, her wing snapping out to tap the BR14M on my back. “All the finest toys, lethal and complicated and tuned so anypony could wrangle them. You ain’t handled a real wild girl yet. She’d be too much for you.”

“Yeah? Well… maybe we’ll put it to the test soon,” I said. “I think I’ll surprise you.”

Ace snickered. “We’ll see about that, forgemare. We’ll see.” Then, spreading her wings, she lifted into the air with a few strokes and turned to face me. “I’ll try to find you later. If not, see you at nightfall.”

“I won’t be too hard to find,” I said, rolling my shoulders. “Just follow the cursing.”

“The cursing. Hmph. Yeah, I ain’t never met nopony who cusses like you do. Not even Z.” She winked at me and even tousled my mane with a hoof, much to my displeasure. “I’ll stay out of sight. I figure the best way to figure out where this tree is is to fly up onto the top of one of them Spines. If I can’t see it from there, I ain’t finding it anywhere.”

“Let me know what the view is like,” I told her as she backed away. “I bet it’s great.”

“I bet it’s wet,” Ace said. “Gotta fly up through the clouds to get to it.”

“You’ll be fine,” I told her. “You’re a big girl.”

“True enough.” Then, winking at me, she turned her attention skyward and the powerful muscles wrapped around her shoulders bulged as she rocketed straight up. “Take care!”

“You too,” I called after her, even as she quickly disappeared into the fog. I stared at the space she’d vanished through for a few seconds before I sighed and turned around. I heard a beeping and a squawk from inside the longhouse, along with the pitter-patter of little hooves, and I just knew that the foals must’ve tried getting into our things again. Nostrils flaring, I shook my head and trotted back inside.

“Hey, lovebirds, wake up!” I shouted as soon as I crossed the threshold. “It’s Election Day and we got votes to win!”

-----

By the time Nova and Gauge finally woke up (with a little bit of poking and prodding help of my own), I was really starting to get hungry. Thankfully, just before I decided to leave them be and wander off in search of food on my own, my nose caught a whiff of something tasty. I trotted outside the longhouse in search of the source and practically ran into Sandy, who had set bowls of some piping hot porridge or something down on the tables and was using a rag to wipe the dew off the seats. He flinched in surprise when my orange magic immediately snagged one of the bowls, and he turned around just in time to see me practically pouring the contents down my throat.

“Bele funnen ata,” Sandy said in what I could only assume was ‘good morning’ or something to that effect. “I take it you slept well, Ember?”

“Better than I have in a long time,” I said, but only after I’d nearly drowned on an entire bowl of delicious porridge. I wiped my lips and dropped the empty bowl back on the table, then sat down on the bench across from Sandy. “Not worrying about wargs or tolans killing you in your sleep is really something.”

“Or slavers,” Sandy said, nodding to the obvious brand on one of my marks. “I take it you’ve been through a lot.”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I said with a shrug. I knew I was safe talking about it with Sandy, and the rest of the Feati wouldn’t even understand the brand, so for once it wasn’t too uncomfortable to mention. “I got the brand but I escaped before the Crimson could take me. It’s sorta the reason I ended up with the Sentinels in the first place, and why I’m out here now.”

Sandy slowly nodded. “And your friend? I saw her brand as well…”

I briefly flared my nostrils as I tried to push painful thoughts away. I hurt more for Nova than I did for myself; she was the one who actually suffered through enslavement with the Crimson, however brief it may have been. “She wasn’t as lucky. But we’re here now, and we’re free. That’s the important part.”

“Yeah. You’re right about that.” Sandy closed his eyes and cracked his neck, and his gaze wandered across the settlement where the fog was beginning to lift. “I mentioned I was a mechanic for a caravan company, right?”

I nodded. “Yeah, you said that yesterday. How did you go from caravan mechanic to tribal schoolteacher?”

“My caravan company used to be the only ones that would make the trip from Three Rivers to the Spines,” he said. “We had supplies and goods they wanted, and they could trade us little enchanted runestones and other trade goods, like blankets and rare crops that don’t grow outside of the Spines. But there were plenty of ponies who wanted something else the Feati could offer.”

“Slaves,” I said, filling in the obvious blank.

He nodded. “Slavery is still the only trade on Auris that will make you insanely rich. Exotic slaves are worth double that of poor farmers. And my company was the only one that really knew how to get into the Spines…”

It wasn’t too hard to piece together what he was getting at. “What exactly happened?”

He hung his head and his ears fell flat. “A lot of fighting. A lot of death. Slavers would try and tail us, figure out where exactly the Feati lands were. Usually, if we spotted them, we exchanged bullets instead of words. The company couldn’t afford to make the runs out into the Spines because of all the protection we needed. For all I know, they collapsed or tried searching for better prospects elsewhere. But the damage had already been done. The slavers knew roughly where the Feati lived. That’s why they’ve become so… reclusive and hostile ever since Lentowenye took charge.”

“But how did you get here?”

Sandy shrugged. “By nearly dying,” he said. “I was part of the last caravan to go to the Spines. Slavers ambushed us on the way back to try and get us to tell them where the settlement was. It was a bloodbath; everypony died but me. Just when I thought it was my time, the Feati drove away the rest.”

He scratched at a trio of puckered scars in his chest, obvious old bullet wounds. “They took me back and healed me with their magic. My company had been kind to them, after all. When they said I was free to go, however, I decided to stay on and help them.” He shook his head. “Guess that was my way of trying to repay them for all the misfortune we’d accidentally given them. Besides, there was nothing to go back to in Three Rivers. I didn’t have a family, and considering they never sent another caravan to the Spines after mine, I bet the company fell apart and went under. But the Feati gave me a new life and a new purpose. That’s why I’m proud to wear the tattoos and help the foals learn our language. If they can speak and understand us… well, maybe it will help them survive when the only outsiders they meet anymore will be slavers.”

“I’m glad you’re trying to protect them,” I said. “They’re going to need protection now more than ever. That thing we’re after in their tree? We’re not the only ones. There are going to be others who will come looking for it. If we can get it out of here, then nopony will bother braving the Spines for it. That’s why we need to do this Grass Trial thing and get out of here as soon as possible.” I leaned across the table. “Please tell me you’ve got a plan that can help us.”

“I’ve got a few things I can try,” Sandy said after a moment to think. “I’m going to try asking around later and maybe talk to Lento and the shaman. Right now, your best bet is to talk to Teka. I can help play interpreter for you two. Once the rest of your friends get up and have breakfast, we can go and talk to her.”

Almost as if on cue, Nova and Gauge emerged from the longhouse, sleepily bumbling about like wailers. “Took you guys long enough to get up,” I said, shifting my attention to the couple. “Your breakfast is getting cold!”

“I know,” Nova moaned, sitting down next to me and greedily snatching up breakfast between her hooves. “But it’s just… beds, Ember. Real, honest to the stars beds!”

“They’re not exactly real beds,” Gauge said, feeling a need to correct her, “but I will agree, it’s better than sleeping on a thin mat over the bare ground.”

“So? That doesn’t mean I’m not going to celebrate having something nice to sleep on!” Anything more she might have had to say was immediately put aside in favor of digging into her meal with a barely restrained frenzy. Sometimes it was easy to forget given how shitty our meals had been for the past two weeks, but Nova was still trying to recover after the starvation the Crimson inflicted on her. She needed to eat more than any of us here, and I felt guilty about immediately devouring my entire breakfast. I should have saved a little something for her for when she finished her own.

Thankfully, Gauge is a great coltfriend, because he only ate about half of his breakfast before putting the rest in front of Nova without even any prompting or hesitation. While she happily took what he offered her, he leaned forward on the table and nodded to Sandy. “So, you and Ember discuss what the plan is?”

“There isn’t much of a plan so much as there are a few options we can try,” Sandy said. He looked at me and cocked his eyebrow. “Everypony’s awake now, right? Where’s the other pegasus?”

“She went off to get her exercise,” I said, covering up for Ace with a half-lie. Flying up to the top of the Spines to find the Walsahn was exercise, right? “She’ll catch up to us later.” In the meanwhile, I gave my mind a little kick, and my limbs immediately twitched as I roused Surge back to the realm of the living. If we were going to get started on this shit, then I needed her to be awake and here for it, too.

I did clamp down on my mouth as she came to, though. I didn’t need her spouting gibberish and weirding Sandy out. We’re discussing the Grass Trial, I thought at her to catch her up. You didn’t miss much.

Well, that’s a relief, she replied, and I felt her begin to sift through my memories to see what exactly she had missed. I was afraid this place would be burnt to the ground by the time I came to.

You don’t give me enough credit.

Sometimes I think I give you too much.

I did get a strange look from Sandy, so I could only assume I was making strange faces while Surge and I had our little dialogue. Clearing my throat, I grinned at the stallion and tapped my hooves together. “Right, so… Grass Trial. Where do we begin?”

Sandy turned to the side and pointed a hoof out over the settlement, where a tall structure barely poked out through the fog. “We’re going to start at the grand lodge,” he said. “That’s where we’re most likely to find Teka. You were right about one thing, Ember,” he said, winking at me. “Teka’s going to be your best bet to get into the Grass Trial. Even if she didn’t have any reason to support you, she might still do it just to spite her brother. And she has sway in the tribe as the current next in line for the chiefdom, since Lento doesn’t have a kid yet.”

Gauge sighed and rolled his eyes. “Of course, it has to be politics. I hate politics.”

“And yet you still dated the daughter of Blackwash’s leader,” I teased him.

“He knows how to play the game better than he lets on,” Nova quipped. The two lovers proceeded to make silly faces at each other, and Sandy and me could only shake our heads and smile.

But it was back to business soon enough, and since we’d all finished our breakfast, I stood up to get things moving. “Well, we’ve only got another two days before we get booted out of here,” I said, stacking everypony’s plates up nicely. “The sooner we get on this, the better.”

“Agreed.” Sandy nodded and stood up, and my friends did the same. “Come, follow,” he said, moving past me and beginning to descend the stairs into the settlement itself.

“Should we do something with our stuff?” I asked him, looking back towards the longhouse. “Those foals are crafty…”

Sandy smiled and paused on a little landing between sets of stairs. “Hey! Momtom stum imma’un, U’a’hn wywe nokoko” he shouted back at the lodge in the Feati language. “Lifte’set Um’a mema’hn e leol m’immapohna’hn’un sotto’hn!”

A few moments later, five sets of hooves clopped toward the door, and five foals galloped out of the building, giggling and laughing. They spared us more curious looks as they skirted down the stairs, and Sandy gave one a tousle of his mane as he scampered past. Winking at me, he beckoned toward the stairs with a shake of his head. “They’ll leave it alone, so long as you leave that drone to watch your things.”

“That’s what I was planning on,” Gauge said, filing in after me with Nova at his side. “Not much need for another set of eyes and guns down here, I don’t think.”

“I certainly hope not,” I said.

“But you never know,” Surge added, ever the skeptic.

I fought back the urge to retort her; again, I really wouldn’t do us any favors if I started arguing with myself in front of Sandy. Thankfully, he took my unwilling comment in stride. “Lento may not like outsiders, but he is a staunch proponent of tribal law,” he said. “If he promised you safety for three days, he will not go back on that promise without good reason. For now, you are welcomed guests of the tribe.” He shot me a sly smile. “Try to stay that way.”

“If there’s one thing Ember’s good at, it’s shooting her mouth off when she really shouldn’t,” Gauge teased.

“I already did that yesterday,” I huffed. “I’m not dumb enough to do it twice.”

“One can only hope.”

“Oh, she’ll be fine!” Nova said, sticking up for me. “She’s not that dense!”

I chuckled and flicked my tail. “At least somepony believes in me,” I said, grinning at my best friend. “It’s a nice change of pace for once.”

Sandy only chuckled and kept walking when he reached the bottom of the stairs, leaving the rest of us to follow him. “I’m so used to dealing with foals that sometimes I forget what outsider Aurans your age are like,” he said.

“Uh…” I blinked. “Thank you? I think?”

“You’re welcome. Now come, come, and try not to get lost in the fog.”

So we did as we were told, and the three of us plus Surge fell in behind Sandy as he led us to the big structure in the heart of the tribe. With the breakfast hour over and the day well underway, there weren’t as many ponies on the streets as there had been yesterday. Mares congregated inside huts where they stitched fabrics or prepared food, and stallions would occasionally bring them materials to work with. But for the most part, the camp was empty of its stallions; they had presumably all gone off after breakfast to begin hunting food and gathering resources for the tribe. Even the older foals seemed to mostly be gone, something I found curious.

“This place gets empty during the day, doesn’t it?” I asked Sandy.

He nodded. “The stallions go off to hunt, the mares to gather and scout, and they take their able children with them. They have to learn somehow, and the Feati don’t have textbooks or a written language. They learn by watching the adults and getting a hoof into the action as they can.”

“That sounds dangerous,” Nova said, her wings fidgeting at her sides. “They actually have to pull their own weight out there?”

“Everything is dangerous when you live in the Spines,” Sandy said. “Doubly so when you don’t have guns. But they keep their kids safe. Foals are the future of the tribe, so they can’t afford to lose them. But they can’t afford for them to be weak and coddled, either, otherwise the tribe will grow weak.” He shook his head and looked over his shoulder back at us. “I’m sure you lot understand that Auris punishes the weak.”

“Oh, you don’t even know the half of it,” I said. “We’ve had our fair share of shit to deal with between Blackwash and here.”

Sandy hummed his acknowledgement, and then he came to a stop in front of the chief’s hut. Or, well, I guess ‘hut’ is kind of a disservice to this thing. To put it simply, it was fucking huge, maybe even bigger than the longhouse we’d slept in. Entire trunks of smaller trees had been split from the ground and leaned against each other, creating a sharply angled roof that must have been fifty feet tall. While only half the height of the Brass Bank in Three Rivers, it seemed to have a resolve and sturdiness to it that the Bank’s delicate façade of painstakingly crafted wooden panels and glass lacked. There was no doubt about it: everything from the dozens of fire dishes lighting up the corners and walls of the structure, to the colorful paints splashed across the logs, to the game skulls hung above the entrance, cried that this building was the seat of Feati power, and the one who lived in it was the greatest of their tribe.

“Lento lives here?” Gauge asked. “That’s quite the house.”

“He doesn’t live here by himself,” Sandy clarified. “Teka lives here too, along with their mother. Lento’s blood brothers—his personal guard—also stay here so that they can always be close by their chief… just in case.” He pointed to a pair of stallions standing by an open set of doors leading into the structure. “Those two are some of his blood brothers. You can tell by the red feathers they wear, tucked behind each ear.”

I glanced at the two warriors, noting the spears resting on each shoulder and the bows draped across their backs. One was a unicorn and the other an earth pony, and they had all sorts of wild tattoos that faintly glowed in the dim light of the morning haze. They had armor made from some kind of wood or plant fiber, and while I had no doubt that they were fierce, I knew they still wouldn’t be able to stand up to modern weapons and armor. If Yeoman ever found the place and laid siege to it, Lento’s blood brothers wouldn’t do much to protect him against the kind of firepower he brought with him.

“So they’re all friends of Lento’s, then?” Nova asked.

“Yeah, all some of his closest friends or cousins growing up,” Sandy said. “They won’t help us, but they at least won’t stand in our way.” Then, swishing his tail, he led us up to the doors of the building, while the blood brothers watched us the entire time.

I felt the air change as we stepped inside, the humidity of the morning replaced by a smoky dryness due to the large fire burning in a pit in the center of the structure. More blood brothers milled about in here, along with what looked like servants for the royal family and a few other ponies. At the far end of the room, a large chair of carved wood stood, with crossed spears mounted on the wall behind it, and some huge skull with six sets of antlers as long as my body branching off of it. I’d never seen anything like it, but Surge apparently had.

“Is that a tree cutter’s skull?” she asked. “Looks like a mature male.”

“I’ve never heard anypony call it a tree cutter before, but the Feati call it a ‘Ho’hn Salhn’an Nokoko’, or ‘Forest Devil’.” Sandy gestured to its jaws, which in typical Auris fashion, had several rows of lethally sharp teeth. “They don’t usually come near the Feati’s settlement, but they do prowl the Spines. And they’ll eat anything they can fit their jaws around.”

“Stars!” Nova exclaimed, her whole frame leaning back on her hind legs as she shrank away from the colossal skull. “Is the rest of the thing as scary as that?”

“Shrikes seem like little chickens compared to it,” Gauge said.

“Good thing we’re not leaving the Feati settlement any time soon,” I said. I idly wondered how thick the skull of that thing was, and if my rifle could even pierce it. If it was anything like the tolan, I doubted it very much. “Unless we have to for this Grass Trial.”

“Now there’s a scary thought,” Surge interjected, and I couldn’t help but agree with her.

Sandy looked around the interior of the structure, and his ears perked when he spotted a middle-aged mare sitting at a table, weaving grassy fronds together with her hooves to make little baskets. Smiling, he trotted over to her and bowed his head, leaving the rest of us to follow him in confusion. “Ah! Feati Mema Iklimna pohnaa’ae! Ful U’a?” he asked in a cheery tone.

The mare, her face speckled with tattoos that looked almost like tears permanently falling from her eyes, offered Sandy a delighted smile in return. “Santy pohnaa’al! Bele soe’set M’a m’tikwi’hn lenwen pohnaa’al. A bunto’set hewe’hn U’a gunt kepsep’set?”

Whatever she asked him, Sandy nodded his head in reply. “T’a’hn tu’set, Feati Mema. E U’a twee, A bunto’set.”

“To, T’a’hn tu’set.” Her eyes fell on us and she raised an eyebrow. “Hwim T’a’hn immapohna’hn’un, Santy pohnaa’al? Bwonm T’a’hn M’a tikwi kampno A?”

Sandy smiled and gestured to us. “To, Feati Mema.” Then, turning to me, he beckoned for me to come closer. “She wants to know if you were the one who brought Teka back to the tribe,” he said, switching back to Equiish. “She’s very grateful to you.”

“She is?” I asked, but I stepped forward nonetheless. “Who is she? Is she going to help us?”

“She’s Teka’s mother, Iklimna,” Sandy explained, and suddenly everything clicked into place. “And I imagine she’ll want to do everything in her power to repay you for bringing her daughter back safe and sound.”

I stopped and gave Iklimna another look over now that I understood who I was dealing with. Her coat was beginning to thin and patch, and she wore colorful robes over her body as if to hide it. Her hooves were cracked and split from use, and her teeth were browning and crooked. But beneath the shell of a decaying mare, I could feel genuine emotion. Her eyes were bright and attentive, and her ears were perked and held high. Her tattoos were beautiful and ornate, helping to mask some of the wrinkles digging into the flesh around her muzzle and forehead. But even they failed to mask the sadness that seemed to hide underneath it all. When she smiled, it seemed like the emotion was clouded by regret, and her brow had adopted an almost permanent droop, as if the weight of the world perched upon it and slowly beat it down over the years. She was a hurting mare, and given what Sandy had told me about her family, I didn’t really have to stretch to imagine why.

“Uh… Hey,” I lamely said, realizing that I had no way to speak directly to this mare even though I stepped forward. “Nice to… meet you and stuff. My name is Ember,” I said, tapping my own chest to try and get the point across, “and those are my friends.”

She only gave me a patient look in return, and after a second of awkward silence, I roughly cleared my throat and turned to Sandy. “A little help? Please?”

Sandy laughed into his hoof. “Tribe Mother, you’re making her uncomfortable,” he said—in Equiish. I blinked in surprise and turned back to Iklimna, who began to softly laugh her own sad laugh in return.

“Wait,” I said, frowning at the matron of the tribe, “you speak Equiish?”

She shook her head. “Speak… strong word,” she said in clipped and stunted words, and her Feati accent made her R’s seem more like W’s and her D’s sharpened to T’s. “Know enough… yes. Speak well?” Another laugh from the mare. “No. Understand? Yes.”

“She’s speaking on Ember’s level,” I heard Gauge quip to Nova, earning a tittering laugh from the pegasus. I flicked my tail in annoyance but didn’t bother giving a bigger response than that.

“Oh, well, that’s a relief,” I said, relaxing some. If I could just talk directly to Iklimna, that would make things so much easier. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Teka’s Mom. I hope she’s doing alright and all. She’s a really good pony, and she helped save our lives on the way back from a spooky invisible scorpion-like monster. That was—!”

Surge abruptly seized control of my lungs and made me roughly clear my throat to get me to stop talking. When she did, she pointed my eyes towards Iklimna’s face, which was screwed up in concentration and confusion. “Oh, um, sorry, Tribe Mother,” she said through me, forcing me to speak slowly and clearly. “I did not mean to confuse you with my fast talking.”

Iklimna held up a hoof and shook her head. “No need for sorry,” she said. “I do okay.”

Judging by the sympathetic look on Sandy’s face, that was a lie, but at least Surge had gotten her point across to me. “Ember and her friends want to speak to Teka,” Sandy said, again bowing his head out of respect to the tribe mother. “Is she around?”

Iklimna’s ears drooped, and she gestured to a room branching off of the main hall. “Tekawenye pohnaa’ae,” she called, albeit without hardly raising her voice. “Key U’a imma’un momtom le’hn unta’hn, M’a awwm?”

I waited with bated breath for what felt like forever, but finally, I heard some movement. Hoofsteps dully echoed across the wooden floorboards, and soon the young mare in question appeared—with her head hung low. I was surprised to see such a lively and energetic young mare walking around as if the fight had been throttled out of her, but perhaps even more so to see some of the welts around her face. She’d been beaten and scarred when we rescued her, but these were fresh and still healing.

Teka shuffled out and came to a stop in front of us. Her eyes dared to wander up to mine, but when she saw me, she grimaced and looked away, almost as if in shame, or regret. When Iklimna reached out to touch her shoulder, she shrank away and mumbled some sort of question beneath her breath.

“Immapohnaa’ae’hn takka’sot U’a,” Iklimna said to her daughter. By the way she angled her gaze to me, I could assume she was letting Teka know we wanted to talk to her. Then, clearing her throat, she nodded to Sandy. “You will… speak her, yes?”

Sandy nodded and turned to me. “Whenever you’re ready, Ember.”

With a deep breath, I tried to make eye contact with Teka, which was very hard considering how small she was trying to make herself. “Hey, Teka, I uh… I hope you’re doing alright,” I said, and Sandy began to translate my words to her, even as he shot me a look that I shouldn’t waste time just having him translate pleasantries with her. “Anyway, uh…” My nostrils flared, and I decided to get right down to it. “Look. Teka, I want to get to your holy tree, because I need to see something there. Your brother won’t let me, but Sandy here told me of a way to do it. I need you to support us in entering the Grass Trial so we can go inside.”

I waited for Sandy to translate all of that into the Feati language… and then for Teka to respond. I could see from her mother at least that what I had asked was plenty surprising. I doubted that very many outsiders had ever requested to participate in the rite to get inside their huge fucking tree.

Teka began to speak, and Sandy translated it for me. “‘You want me to support you and defy my brother?’” he said, exchanging the musical words of the Feati language for Equiish.

“Your brother’s a jackass,” I said, frowning at her. “He doesn’t want us to go see the tree. From what I’ve heard, I was thinking you’d like to help us ruin those plans.”

Once again, Sandy translated my words to Teka, and when she replied, he spoke them back. “‘I can’t help you with that,’” she said through Sandy. “‘Lentowenye is my brother and the chief of the tribe. I must stand by his decisions.’”

I blinked. “Seriously?” I took a step closer to Teka, who retreated half a step in response. “What is with you, girl? Me and my friends busted our flanks to get you back home, and sure, I get it, it’s not exactly been the best for you since you got back, but come on! Don’t you just want to stick it to your brother, just once?”

Sandy rushed to translate what I said for Teka, but he didn’t have to go the other way. Teka seemed to lock up and angle her head away, gritting her teeth and growling. When she didn’t respond, and just as I was about to let out an exasperated sigh, Surge stepped in and stopped me. “Why did he hit you?” she asked, narrowing my eyes at the bruises on her face. When Sandy didn’t translate, she whipped my head towards him and raised my eyebrow. “Well? Ask her!”

Our impromptu translator swallowed hard but nevertheless began to speak. I know that he said exactly what Surge had asked because Iklimna and Teka both acted like they’d been slapped. Mother shot daughter a worried look, and daughter rubbed one of the welts on her cheek. She drew in a breath that seemed to prop up her crumbling frame, and she fixed me with a glare. “‘You don’t know anything about this!’” she exclaimed through Sandy, and the silvery tattoos across her face flickered and flashed red. “‘This doesn’t concern you!’”

“You can keep telling yourself that,” Surge said, and she frowned at the young mare and her flickering tattoos. “When you’re done pretending that’s okay, find us.”

Then, to my shock, she abruptly turned around and walked past Sandy, past Nova and Gauge, and toward the door—of course, taking me with her. “Ember?” Nova asked, blinking as we passed. “What are you…?”

Surge didn’t stop us to answer. Instead, she continued to the door while Sandy fumbled over the last words Surge had spat before we left. By the time I regained control of my limbs, we were already outside the lodge, waiting for my friends to catch up.

What was that?! I shouted at her inside my skull.

Our ticket in, was all she had to say in reply. You’ll see.

I didn’t quite believe her, but there was nothing I could do about it now. Instead, growling in frustration, I lit one of my few remaining cigarettes and angrily stomped off into the settlement, trying to get as far away from that disaster as I could.

Chapter 32: The Ticket In

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Chapter 32: The Ticket In

To say that we were all pissed with Surge was an understatement. Instead of picking up Teka’s support in the Grass Trial, we’d alienated her—and likely our only chance at actually getting into the thing. I don’t know how Surge thought that was going to work, but she seemed very confident in her decision. I don’t know if she actually wanted to ruin this for us or was too stupidly ingrained in Synarchy superiority to interact with tribal ponies in a more friendly way, but if I could have strangled her without choking myself out, I absolutely would have.

Gauge and Nova caught up to me at a campfire, but not Sandy. Our translator and now only remaining friend in the Feati tribe had stayed behind to try and smooth things over with Teka and her mother. Of course, I already knew that he blamed me for being so rude, even though I had nothing to do with it, but I didn’t think explaining to him that I had another pony living in my head who sometimes said things would do us any favors. And with Ace still missing, that left just the four of us around the campfire while I smoked my cigarette down to a few flakes of cancerous ash sticking to my lips.

It was only a matter of time before somebody broached the topic, and once Gauge had finally had enough, he looked Surge and I right in our eyes and raised a brow. “So? What in the stars’ light was that?”

“Don’t ask me,” I said, immediately separating myself from this mess. “Somepony else kept me away from the controls to go and insult tribal royalty.”

“I just want to know why,” Nova moaned, her usually perky features downcast. “We could have had a friend helping us!”

“She wasn’t going to help us,” Surge said, shaking my head. “Not until she got a kick in the flank.”

“And how the fuck would you know?” I growled at her. “You’ve been dead for two hundred years, Miss Synarchy. Your people skills aren’t exactly the best.”

“I was a leader of a team with a lot of alpha personalities,” Surge said, and she glared at Nova and Gauge to make sure they wouldn’t interrupt her. “I had to get the Synarchy’s best and brightest minds to work together to save our struggling nation. I had to get ponies with very little in common to come together and do our part, and I had to keep them from turning mutinous when we found ourselves separated from our families while on our only colony world light years away from Equus. I know a thing or two about getting ponies to do what I want, and trying to plead and bargain with Teka wasn’t going to solve anything.”

“And insulting her to her face was?” I retorted.

“Forgive me if that seems a little odd,” Gauge said.

“I know what I’m doing, Stripy,” Surge snapped. “You heard what Sandy told us, and you saw it clear as day when we were talking to her. Her jackass brother is beating her down both with and without his hooves, and trying to tell her everything is going to be better if she helps us isn’t going to help. She needs to make that change on her own, and a slap on the cheek will get her moving again.”

“Sounds reasonable… if it wasn’t stupid.” I sighed and pawed at the ground. “What’s done is done, though, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

My friends nodded in agreement, and Surge seemed happy enough to drop the topic for the time being. We sat in silence for a few minutes, just staring into the fire as the heat helped burn away the morning fog, until eventually I saw Sandy approaching us through the haze. Still ashamed and embarrassed about Surge’s outburst, I averted my gaze and let my friends do the talking for me.

The tattooed stallion sat down somewhere at my left, and I could feel his eyes needling me for a moment before he shifted his attention to Nova and Gauge. “I… well, I tried to apologize to Teka and the Tribe Mother for Ember’s outburst, but I don’t know how much good it did. Teka stormed off on her own, and I could tell Iklimna didn’t want to talk about it.”

“So where does that leave us?” Gauge asked him.

“Friendless and without much time. Once Lentowenye hears about what happened, he’ll find us and demand an explanation. If we can’t get you the support you need to participate in the Grass Trial by then, he’ll never let you do it.”

“You’ll probably be better off looking without me,” I grumbled. “Who knows when I’ll open my big fucking mouth again and say something stupid?”

I could tell Surge resented that indirect accusation, but she at least chose not to say anything. Nova, meanwhile, reluctantly nodded her head and stood up. “We should get a move on, then,” she said. “We don’t have a lot of time to make friends before Lentowenye comes for our heads.”

“We’ll meet you back at the longhouse, I guess,” Gauge said, joining his marefriend and moving to Sandy’s side. “Just… try not to get into any more trouble, okay, Em?”

I nodded, even though I doubted it would be that easy; trouble always seemed to find me, one way or another. “See you guys there, then.”

My friends reluctantly set off without me, leaving me alone at the fire. Not only was I by myself, but I felt crushed and isolated. It wasn’t my fault, but I had to deal with it because it was my body, even if they were Surge’s words. But I guess I should have seen this coming. The ponies of the Synarchy never bowed to any rule save that of their own High Queen, so why had I hoped Surge would be respectful of the Feati’s?

“Why can’t this shit be easier?” I muttered aloud, supposedly to myself, but I knew I at least had Surge to listen to me. “Why is doing the right thing so hard?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Surge said, shaking my head. “I was born and raised thinking I was doing the right thing. But after two hundred years being stuck in my own personal Tartarus…”

We sighed together, our shared eyes falling on the fire. “How did things get like this?” I asked her. “How did Equestria go from a mythical land of harmony to a bunch of ponies trying to put the pieces back together on a completely different world?”

“We started putting our country above ourselves,” Surge said. “We blindly followed a High Queen who had turned her back on friendship and harmony long before I was born. We ponies replaced it with duty and blind faith instead. It was that wrong sense of loyalty to the wrong pony that put the Synarchy against the Coalition—the entire world—and doomed it.” She pulled my eyes toward the royal longhouse in the background, and I felt my lips pull into a frown. “Even out here, that misplaced loyalty threatens pony lives.”

I at least understood what she meant, and it kind of made more sense now. “I wouldn’t say Teka’s loyal to her brother, though. She’s more afraid of him than anything.”

“Fear buys loyalty so long as the afraid don’t realize they’re stronger than they think,” she said. “Teka is afraid. She’s afraid of her brother and her place in the tribe. She needs somepony to show her she doesn’t have to be afraid anymore.”

“That why you told her off?” I asked. “Cut right to the personal bits?”

“I guarantee you that none of these Feati savages would dare question her behavior and her brother’s treatment of her,” Surge said. “They’re loyal to their chief, no matter what he does. But we aren’t. We aren’t afraid of him, and we only respect his authority as guests, not members of his tribe.” By that point, I could feel my lips forming a small smile. “We’re the only ones who would dare stand up for her and question her brother. If that doesn’t buy her support, I don’t know what will.”

It was a funny feeling; minutes ago, I was pissed at Surge for saying what she said and doing what she did. Now, it started to make sense, in a way. “You know, I feel like I’m underestimating you,” I said to her. Chuckling, I added, “In fact, I think I’m even starting to like you.”

“Do you want me to say something racist?” she suggested, and it took me a second to register the joke.

Snorting, I stood up and collected my things. “You wouldn’t be the same if you stopped,” I said to her. Suddenly feeling a bit more energetic, I hopped in place a few times and looked up and down the haphazard streets of the settlement. “Tobacco came from native ponies a long time ago back on Equus, right? I bet we can find some more here; I’m running pretty low.”

“Now that’s stereotyping.”

“What can I say? Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.” Humming to myself, I struck off in a random direction, one of my last cigarettes spinning in my magic in case I needed to use it to charade my way to the pony with all the tobacco. “Come on, let’s go get into some trouble. I bet Nova would just love that.”

-----

Nova would be proud to hear that we did not get into trouble, despite how much I assumed we accidentally would. Surge and I spent some time trying to use my single cigarette to find a pony with tobacco with a little success; we at least got some points and directions in a language we didn’t understand. Our wandering took us all over the Feati settlement, but somehow we didn’t cross paths with Sandy and my friends… or Ace, for that matter. Our party’s mischievous outlaw was still nowhere to be found, and I certainly hadn’t heard any commotion in the settlement that would indicate she’d been caught and they were about to skin her alive or something to that effect. As far as I knew, she was still out there in the Spines, undetected, and I was still probably more likely to get into trouble than she was. She knew how to take care of herself out there. I could only pretend I did.

Still, our wandering took us around the settlement and back up the hill, where we found ourselves in front of a simple shack decorated in animal trophies and totems. Compared to the towering longhouse behind us, this thing looked like a shed to keep the garden tools in or something like that. But I could tell somepony lived in it, because not only was there smoke coming out of the hole in the roof, but I could hear cheery chanting and humming coming from inside. What exactly the pony who directed us here expected us to find, I don’t know, but I had my doubts about it, to be sure.

“Nothing shady about this at all,” I muttered aloud. “We’re just getting sent up to the little shack on the hill to get murdered by a cannibal, that’s all.”

“I am not dying for your drug addiction,” Surge said. “Perhaps now is a good time to quit while you’re ahead.”

“Fuck no. Wandering around Auris is gonna kill me sooner or later, so I might as well enjoy the vices I can take. Besides, it’s not like I’m practicing… I don’t know, blood magic or something.”

“Even in the Synarchy and its desire to win no matter the cost, blood magic was punishable by death.”

“See?” I smirked in triumph. “Tobacco’s not nearly as bad! Besides, I’ll die from a tolan or something before lung cancer gets me.”

Surge sighed. “I wonder if there’s another unicorn who will let me live in their head so I don’t go down with you…”

“I’m the only one who will put up with you, Sparky.” Rolling my shoulders and cracking my neck, I started toward the dark red ferns hanging off the frame as a sort of makeshift door. “Come on, let’s see if there’s any tobacco here. I’m going to go into severe withdrawal if I smoke my last cigarette.”

“You already are,” Surge said, and my magic pulled a lit cigarette from between my lips.

“Oh yeah.” Shrugging, I shouldered my way inside. “All the more reason to get a move on, then.”

When we entered the room, the stench of burning plants smacked me across the nose. I didn’t know what exactly was burning in the fire in the middle of the room, but it released a lot of smoke and made the air stifling and hazy. There was just enough room to walk around the fire, and a figure pranced about on the other side of the crackling flames. The smoke made it difficult to see it in detail, but it looked vaguely equine, with a wheezy stallion’s voice coming out of its throat. He didn’t seem to notice me enter—at least, not until he came further around the fire and stopped almost face to face with me.

We both froze and looked each other over in that moment. He was unlike anything I’d seen so far in the settlement, in so far as that he took everything about the Feati and took it to the extreme. I didn’t know what color his coat was supposed to be, because almost every single inch of his body had been decorated with silvery tattoos that flickered between several different colors. They masked his wrinkles, but not entirely; I could tell that he was maybe fifty or sixty winters old just by how the skin on his face seemed to droop and sag, like the peel of a bagfruit after it’s been left in the sun too long. He was a unicorn, but his horn was gnarled, crooked, and split down the middle from point to base. Both Surge and I winced at that; a split horn is about as painful as anything can get for a unicorn. But even something as striking as that was hard to see beneath the ornate headdress he wore. Leaves from ferns, trees, and flowering plants had been harvested and woven together into an elaborate crown of sorts that he wore atop his thinning mane. One of his eyes was clouded; the other was bright and shining, filled with a spark of liveliness that betrayed his age, but not his voice.

“Outlander, hmm?” he creaked, surprising us by not speaking in Feati. “You’re the ones I heard about yesterday, yes? Yes! Ha!” He cackled and stepped forward, while I took a nervous step back. Noticing my unease, the stallion laughed to himself and backed off, holding a chipped and weathered hoof over his chest. “Ah, ah, I mean you no harm! Do not worry about me! I think I’m forty winters too far gone for a beautiful and… curvy mare like yourself.”

To be honest, hearing that come out of his mouth left me with my jaw hanging open. I mean, how do you respond to an old stallion telling you you’re curvy? Laughing to himself again, the stallion turned around, grabbed a bowl of dried leaves off a shelf with his teeth, and dumped them into the fire. Vibrant, purple sparks flew out of the fire, and the shocking color snapped me out of my stupor. “You… what?”

“What, was I not clear? You are an attractive young mare. Blessed by the spirits of our foster planet, indeed!” He dropped the bowl back on the shelf and pranced to the other side of the fire. “If I was your age, I would perhaps try my luck, haha!”

“Alright, uh… look, I’m just gonna… go away,” I said, already backing for the door. I didn’t really want anything to do with this weird and creepy stallion. I figured at that point that I’d be better off trying to find tobacco growing in the wild instead of going through him for it. Surge seemed to agree; I could feel the relief inside my skull.

But the strange stallion was at my side again; worse, he wrapped his foreleg across my shoulders and pulled me close in a surprisingly strong grip. “I kid! Ha! You have nothing to worry from me.” He let go of my shoulders, and I immediately reestablished a little bit of personal space between us. “You will forgive me if I act a bit… silly, yes? Not very often outsiders come to the sacred lands. Almost never they come talk to me. Almost never get to use your gravel-tongue.”

“Gravel-tongue?” Surge asked, cocking my eyebrow.

“Yes, yes! Gravel-tongue! Your words not musical like the Feati. Your words sound like you chew on gravel first, yes? Ha!” The old stallion snickered and plucked a few sticks of some kind of incense off the wall… and then flung them all into the fire. I almost gagged on the pungent smell, but he didn’t. I wondered if maybe his sense of smell was so far gone he hardly noticed unless he burned a lot.

I had to cough my way to my next words. “Who… are you exactly? Achk!” I made a fan out of my magic and tried to wave the smoke away, but that was only mildly successful.

“Ah, who am I? So you are here by accident!” The pony grinned and grabbed a spear off the walls that I hadn’t noticed before and shook it, letting the animal skulls tied to it clatter and rattle in response. “I have no name, for I gave it up when I became Shaman.”

“You’re the Feati shaman?” I asked, looking around the hut. I mean, I didn’t want to think about it too stereotypically, but on second glance, this looked exactly like a shaman’s hut. Who else would be running around a wooden hut with a roaring fire inside of it, throwing weird things into the blaze seemingly without rhyme or reason?

“Last I checked I was! Ha!” Spinning the spear around in his hooves, he slammed the head into the fire, seemingly cleaving the flames in two. The flames hissed and roared in response—and that’s not a metaphor or anything. The fire actually twisted into the shape of some kind of demonic reptile, coals burning in its eyes, a tongue of flame spewing forth from its tongue of flame. Drawing out the spear, the shaman planted the head in the ground and put a clay jar in front of the fire. “Tawti aoukka, saksi aoukka, Feati aoukka! A U’a wiwiw’set wola, ka U’a sasno’sot Wal bele sonal!”

I had no idea what he said, but the effect was profound. The lizard-thing squealed and hissed, and the flames seemed drawn to the pot. It fought and flailed, but it was all in vain, and the fire was sucked out of the pit and into the jar. The creature cried and moaned, but the shaman put the lid on the pot, and all was quiet.

The shaman tapped it twice with the butt of the spear then, smiling, tossed the spear against the wall. “Fiery, that one was, hmm? Ha!”

“What…” I swallowed hard, and I wasn’t sure if the sweat on my brow was from the heat or just fear over what terrifying thing I’d seen. “What the fuck was that?”

“The spirit of dragon fire!” The shaman proudly picked up the jug and set it aside with several other similar jugs by the wall. “Captured and turned to paint! How else do you cast fire?”

“Uhhh… with magic?” I blinked. “And… what’s a dragon?”

Surge seemed incredulous. You don’t know what a dragon is?

There aren’t dragons here! I thought back at her. At least… I don’t think so.

“A dragon is a beast that used to live on dirt mother a long time ago,” the shaman said. “They were flying lizards that breathed fire, and they were enormous. As big as the Spines themselves!”

“Really?” I blinked and tried to imagine something that large. A tolan would have looked tiny compared to it! Was there actually something on Equus that was scarier than the wildlife on Auris?

They didn’t usually get that big, Surge said. …Usually.

“Ha! How would I know? Dragons never live on this rock! Old Ones never brought them here!” Chuckling to himself, the shaman threw a heavy blanket on the coals in the pit, smothering what was left of the fire. After jumping up and down on the mat a few times and peeling it back with his teeth, he let out a satisfied hum when there weren’t any more tongues of flame remaining. Then, sitting on the dirt, he smiled up at me. “Well? What bring you here? Or you are lost?”

“Well, honestly, I was just here for tobacco,” I said, passing him the smoldering butt of my cigarette to show him what I meant. “Somepony pointed me up here. I, uh, hope it’s not too much to hope that you have any.”

The shaman took the cigarette and sniffed it, even sticking the butt in his mouth for a moment. Spitting it out, he nodded and pulled a wicker basket off a shelf by his side. “Smoke leaves you want, eh? Well, I have! Ha!”

“You do? Awesome!” I’m not gonna lie, that was probably the widest I smiled in at least a few days. Knowing I wouldn’t have to wander through the middle of the wilderness without something to smoke was the best news I’d heard in a while. “How much can you spare? And what do I owe you?”

The shaman shook his head and held the basket out to me. “Take what you want, only if you answer question.”

“What question do you want to ask?” I asked him, giddily pulling dried leaves out of the basket. Sure, I’d have to roll the stuff myself, but it’d be worth it just to have cigarettes again.

“What bring you here?”

I momentarily stopped and blinked. “Uh… I thought I just answered that?”

“No, no.” The shaman shook his head. “What bring you to Feati, outsider? Not smoke leaves, I hope. Ha!”

“Oh.” I took the opportunity of tucking leaves into my wooden box to think over my response. “Well, uh… truth be told… I want to see your big tree.”

The shaman slowly raised an eyebrow. “The Walsahn, hmm?” He crossed his legs, and I’m not really sure how he did that without dislocating his hips—it did not look comfortable. “Why would an outsider want to see the holy tree?”

“It’s… important,” Surge said, stepping in for me. “What we find there will shape the future of Auris. If we aren’t able to get inside, bad things could happen.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Very interesting!” The shaman rolled his neck from side to side. “And how do you suppose to do this? Lentowenye will not let you inside. He will not let any outsiders inside. Might have come long way for nothing, ha!”

“The Grass Trial,” I said, frowning at him. “We plan on doing it.”

That seemed to get the shaman’s attention. His silly, carefree attitude hardened, and he slowly focused his sharp attention on me. “The Grass Trial,” he said, echoing me. “How does an outsider learn of the Grass Trial?”

“From asking around,” I said, shrugging. I didn’t want to say Sandy’s name, at least not yet. If this shit went bad, I didn’t really want to implicate him in it. But then again, how many other ponies around here knew both Equiish and Feati?

The shaman thought for a moment. “I wish you best of luck with that, then,” he said. “Finding influential supporters… not easy.”

“That’s what my friends are trying to do.” I sighed and looked over the supplies in my wooden box. Good enough, I suppose; the thing was almost filled to the brim with dried tobacco. “I’ve already had my share of adventure today fucking that up.”

“Ah.” The shaman nodded and closed his eyes. “You seem capable, though. I think you will run in the Trial.”

I blinked in surprise. “Wait… really? I mean, Lentowenye fucking hates me, and we—I insulted Tekawenye to her face earlier!”

One eye cracked open. “You insulted Tekawenye?”

I huffed and tried to glare inwardly at the Synarchist sitting inside my brain. “Yeah.”

“Hmmm. Mmmm.” The shaman closed his eye again and smiled faintly. “That will be… interesting.”

“What?” I blinked. “What’ll be interesting?” When he didn’t respond, I growled and stood up in frustration. “You are being beyond not helpful, dude.”

“Was I supposed to be?”

I decided I’d had enough. Sighing, I gathered my stuff and turned around. “Great. Whatever. At least I got what I came here for. Thank you for the… uh, smoke leaves and stuff.” Glaring at the ferns hanging in front of the door, I pushed them aside with my magic and marched on out of there. “So much for being a helpful shaman…”

I squinted as I stepped outside into the light, if only for a moment. Once the shaman had squashed the flames inside his hut, it had gotten really dark in there, or at least dark enough that the dim light hanging over the Feati settlement as it shed the last of its foggy blanket seemed bright to my eyes. I rubbed at my eyes with my magic, pressing down on my shut eyelids to try and squeeze away a little bit of drowsiness still clinging to them, and so didn’t even see the meaty wall I walked straight into.

“Son of a fuck—!” I growled at the surprise obstacle, expecting some tribespony to be standing in front of me that wasn’t smart enough to move away from the door while waiting to go inside. Instead, I saw the green face of Lentowenye staring back at me, flanked by four of his blood brothers, two at each side.

He did not seem happy. Not at all.

Swallowing my rage (or was it Surge swallowing it for me?), I took a step back and awkwardly bowed my head. “Oh, uh… hey, your chiefliness. I didn’t see you there.”

Instead of words, Lentowenye spoke with his hoof. It was one of those ‘blink and you miss it’ kind of hits; I didn’t even see him take his hoof off the ground, I just saw his shoulder tense, and the next thing I knew, I was doubled over and clutching my cheek while he calmly put his hoof back on the dirt. “You outsiders are all so alike,” he growled at me while I struggled to stand. Even Surge seemed to be reeling a bit from the blow; she must not have seen it coming fast enough to get the fuck out of my nerve endings before she felt the pain too. “You all want something from us, and you don’t care what you have to do to get it.”

Hissing, I managed to stand up straight, though I still cradled the welt I felt forming on my cheek. “What… the fuck… are you on about? I haven’t done anything wrong, you prick!”

Lento sneered at me and lunged forward, making me flinch back even though he didn’t do anything. That little jock-y display of dominance accomplished, he turned to his soldiers and nodded. “Bwonm’set S’a imma,” he said to them, and he started to walk toward the royal longhouse in the center of the hill.

I didn’t know what he told his buddies until they grabbed hold of me and dragged me after him, indifferent to how much I struggled.

I guess Nova was right to worry about me after all…

-----

I was all but certain that the Feati were going to drop me off in whatever they used for a jail or a dungeon or whatnot—assuming they even did stuff like that. I figured it was equally as likely that I’d end up tied upside down to a tree by my hind legs, my horn broken off and dripping blood, dangling like a worm on a hook for any hungry animals that wanted to come along and take a bite. So it was a huge relief when they instead dragged me over to the longhouse after Lento and threw me onto the floor, where the blood dripping from the gash in my cheek and from a spot where I’d bit my lip stained the wood.

It was not a huge relief when I saw another figure squirming under a net a few feet away. Another beige figure.

“Ace?” I sat upright despite the throbbing in my jaw and slid closer to her. The mare looked pretty awful; leaves and twigs stuck to her coat, her feathers were a mess, she had scrapes across her legs and face, and she was so hopelessly tangled in the net she could hardly move. I was about to touch the net and try to get it off from her when I noticed the glistening of sap coating the ropes. Judging by how the net clung to Ace’s body, even through her mouth where it held her lips open and kept her tongue stuck against it, I knew that the sap was probably as sticky as glue. I felt sorry for the outlaw; the ropes holding her mouth open and glued to her tongue probably had to be an awful experience. I managed to muster the strength to growl at Lento and turned my attention toward him. “What did you do to her?!”

“She was getting nosy,” Lento said, matching my glare with one of his own. “She was caught snooping around the holy tree. Usually the punishment for outsiders is death by bloodworms, but I wanted to hear what you had to say about it first.”

Ace’s eyes widened and she thrashed a bit more at hearing that sentence. Whatever a bloodworm was, I had a feeling it was horrific, just like the rest of the animal life on Auris. I mean, for it to scare an outlaw who was used to danger and death…

I shrugged as Lento’s eyes bored into me. “Can you really blame a mare for wanting to fly around? Besides, it’s not like you said we couldn’t go near the tree. Just that it was… off limits?”

It was a bullshit excuse, I know, but it was about the best I could come up with. It’s not like I could really hope to fight off all these guys if they decided to just kill Ace and I on the spot. Sure, I had my rifle, but those blood brothers had spears a lot closer to my neck than my rifle was to my face. Surge was already trying to figure out if my horn was good enough to get us all out of there if we really needed, but I could tell she wasn’t liking the odds. We’d have to leave Ace behind, and I was not going to do anything like that.

I heard a commotion behind us, and I looked over my shoulder to see more blood brothers leading my friends into the main room. They didn’t seem like they’d been roughed up too much—I guess I was special in Lento’s eyes or something—but they definitely weren’t there by choice. I saw concern light up Nova’s face when she saw Ace and me lying on the ground, and she broke ranks with the rest of the group to flutter to my side.

“Ember!” she shouted, hugging me with her forelegs and her wings. “Oh, you’re alright! And Ace—!” Her eyes widened and I could tell she wanted to help her fellow pegasus, but I held her back before she could get entangled in the net, too. “What did they do to her?” she asked me. “What are we doing here?”

“I guess it was too much to ask for you two to stay out of trouble?” Gauge asked as Lento’s guards led him and Sandy towards us. Soon, we were all seated on the floor in front of the tribe’s chief, and shit was not looking good for us.

Lento sat down on a stool and glared at us all. “I knew letting you stay was a mistake,” he growled, his lips pulled back to reveal gritted teeth. “Outsiders have brought us more pain and misery than anything else. Now your kind would gut the holy tree for the relics inside?”

“That’s not what we want!” I protested, finding the strength to stand up (or, well, sit up) to Lento. “All we wanted was to go inside your stupid fucking tree. If we could do that, we’d leave! But since that’s such a big deal, can you really blame us for looking around on our own?”

“Yes, I can.” The Feati chief fixed me with a dagger-like glare. “You have no business here. You are not Feati. This is not your home, and I do not like outsiders. We do not like outsiders.” He leaned back on the stool and crossed his forelegs. “As far as I am concerned, you are nothing but a threat, and I take the safety of my people above everything else. I will drown you in the tar bogs if I think it will protect my tribe. So why shouldn’t I?”

“Because we brought your sister back,” Nova exclaimed. “We saved your family! Why would we do that if we wanted to hurt you ponies?!”

“My tribe would be better off without my sister,” Lento hissed at us, making Nova pale in shock and recoil at the blatant admission. I guess he felt he could speak freely since his blood brothers probably didn’t speak Equiish. “She is weak, she is foolish, and she endangers us all by bringing outsiders back to the sacred lands!”

Surge flicked my eyes to a pair of figures emerging from one of the rooms behind Lento, and she promptly took control of my voice. “Is that why you beat her?” Surge asked through me, even raising one of my eyebrows. “As a punishment? Or because it makes you feel better?”

Lento’s face twisted into a scowl. “That is none of your concern,” he said in a low and angry voice. “I can do much worse to you if you tempt me.”

“Oh yeah?” Surge looked over my shoulder at Sandy, who until now had been quiet at the back of the group. “Tell them,” she said, nodding my head. “Tell them all we want to participate in the Grass Trial.” When Sandy blinked, Surge frowned at him. “Do it!”

While Sandy fumbled over the Feati so everypony else could understand, Lentowenye blinked in surprise. “You… you want to participate in the Grass Trial? Is this some kind of joke? Did Sandy tell you this?”

“We would have found out one way or another,” I said. “There are a few ponies around here who speak our language. You’re not the only one.”

Lento’s blood brothers looked to him, and the stallion hesitated. I didn’t know what he was going to do next. Shoot down that option before we even had a chance? Just kill us on the spot? Instead, he snorted in irate, sarcastic amusement, and he perked his ears toward us. “I could just deny you the Trial, but that would not stop anything. So I’ll humor you. Who will support you for it?” He held his hooves out to the sides. “You know nopony who matters. And I will ensure that nopony will support you.”

“I don’t know about that,” Surge said, and she looked past Lento to where Teka and her mother stood at the far end of the room. “Teka!” she shouted, making the younger mare flinch at her name. Surge beckoned with my hoof, and Teka swallowed hard and started to walk closer, her mother not far behind.

Lento actually laughed at us. “You believe she will support you? My sister? Against me?” He snorted and shook his head. “She knows her place. Isn’t that right, dear sister?” He hopped off his stool and stood in front of her, forcing the young mare to stop dead in her tracks. “Isn’t that right?”

Teka drew back like she was about to cower and flee before her brother, but she hesitated. In that hesitation, Surge made sure that we made eye contact with her. All the Synarchist mare did was slightly nod my head once, and then she leaned back on my haunches expectantly.

“This isn’t going to work,” Gauge muttered under his breath. Even Ace had given up her struggling, perhaps realizing the futility of the situation. I was starting to have my doubts, too. I doubted that this was how Surge had figured her master plan to get Teka on our side would work.

But to my surprise, Teka didn’t back away or yield. Instead, she raised her head to Lento’s and met his glare with one of her own. Nostrils flaring and tattoos flickering red, she shouldered past him and soon stood by my side. “A beleten’set Embaw pohnaa’ae,” she finally proclaimed in her own language, and the only thing I could pick out of it was her awful pronunciation of my name. “A S’a namno timm’sot kallengen.”

“What did she say?” I heard Nova whisper to Sandy behind me.

“She supports Ember,” Sandy replied, and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Surge, of course, was sitting all smug inside my head, but even still, what did it matter? Teka was one pony, and we needed two to support us. And if Lento had his way, he’d intimidate the rest of the tribe into backing down.

And I could tell just from looking at him that that exact thought was going through his head. Sure, he looked pissed that Teka would stand up to him like that, but that was about it. “U’a wunkwi mak’set koaw A,” he growled to her, sending some kind of threat in their language. “U’a Le’un pohna bwomtuT’a’hn beleten’set, e A mak’sot U’a T’a nowow.”

Teka flinched, but she held her ground. “Embaw,” she said, nodding to me. She held out a hoof to help me stand, and then it was the two of us facing down Lento. “Embaw… Embaw help A,” she said, trying her hardest to say words in Equiish. “A… I help Embaw.”

Lento sneered at her. “Cute,” he said. “But that doesn’t get you anywhere.” He marched forward until he was way within the bounds of my personal space. “You’d be better off withdrawing that intention,” he said. “For yours and my sister’s sake.”

“How about you make me?” I growled back at him.

“I don’t have to make you,” he retorted. “You will not get anypony else to support you. As soon as I spread the word, it’s over.”

My eyes flicked to the side, where I saw Iklimna slowly making her way to Lento. “Oh yeah?” I asked him, grinning when I saw the look on her face. “And what if mommy tells you to play nice?”

Lento blinked and turned around. “Mema, wuh U’a tu’set?” he asked her, quickly closing the gap to her side and giving the aging mare a little support to lean on. “U’a ite’hn. Immapohna’hn’un allae noal.”

“Outland pony? Unsafe?” Iklimna gently shook her head and patted her son’s shoulder. “I think no. I meet earlier. They nice.” Her eyes fell on me and she lightly smiled.

“Now’s not the time for this,” Lento impatiently growled, trying to shepherd his mother away. But the willful mare refused to be escorted away by her son, and instead she forcefully shook her head and walked past him. Stopping in front of me, she turned around.

“I support Ember,” she proclaimed in a steady voice. “She bring Tekawenye back. She bring family home.” She put a foreleg around Teka and nuzzled her daughter. “I support her.”

I grinned from ear to ear. “Thank you, Iklimna,” I said, moving in close to the older mare and, after a second’s pause, giving her a friendly nuzzle. “You don’t know what this means.”

“You don’t know what bring Teka home mean,” she said in return. “Husband dead. Children all have left.” She sadly shook her head. “Do not like to see fight.”

Unfortunately for her, I don’t think siding with Teka over her brother was going to solve the issue anytime soon. Lento stood with his mouth agape, nostrils flaring as he tried to process his family siding with us. Ultimately, however, his face screwed up in suppressed rage. “Fine,” he spat, and he removed his feathery headdress and threw it on the ground in front of us. “Have your trial. I will make sure it kills you.”

With that ominous threat, he turned around and stormed away, his blood brothers following swiftly after him, leaving us alone with our new allies—and me with a lot of dread beginning to surface as I wondered just what the fuck I’d gotten us into.

Chapter 33: The Outsider and the Shaman

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Chapter 33: The Outsider and the Shaman

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just made a terrible mistake.

Around me, my friends were celebrating in muted excitement. Nova used her metal wing to cut Ace loose, and the outlaw now tackled the arduous task of preening all the sap and gunk out of her feathers. Gauge talked to Teka and Iklimna, with Sandy to translate and smooth things over in conversation. But me? I could only stare in the direction Lento had gone, wondering just how true his parting threat could be:

I will make sure it kills you.

Should I have been worried by that? Should I really have been putting so much worry into it? Of course the fucker didn’t like me. I’d probably say something like that too to somepony who turned my family against me to get what they wanted. But was it an empty threat or a loaded gun? Lentowenye was the absolute chief of the Feati. He could do almost whatever he wanted. And since I still had no idea what was expected of me in this trial, no idea what I would have to face or have to do, I worried about whether he could actually get me killed and if there was anything I could do to stop him.

It was Surge, of course, who interrupted my thoughts and helped snap me out of my worrying. Are you really going to waste time fretting over this?

I looked back at my friends for a moment to see if they were still engrossed in their own conversations, then stood up and briskly trotted out the door to some privacy. “What, you think I shouldn’t?” I asked her aloud. “You think I shouldn’t take the threats of the tribe chieftain seriously? That just sounds like a good way to get killed.”

It wasn’t too hard to imagine the ghostly blue mare scoffing inside my skull. He’s a savage who hates having his authority questioned. You’re a mare born from the Synarchy, raised in Synarchy property and using Synarchy weapons. You’re better than him.

“I am not a part of the Synarchy,” I growled at her. “I am not one of the ponies that thought waging war on the world was a good idea.”

Whatever you think you are, you came from us, Surge stated, and I hated the fact that she was right. But even barring that, you are capable and strong. There is nothing this savage can throw at you that you can’t overcome.

“Well… thanks for the vote of confidence.” I shrugged and sat down on a tree stump outside of the longhouse put there for exactly that purpose. “I get the feeling that whatever I’m going to have to do is not going to be easy, though.”

You just now figure that out? Despite the sarcastic slap in the face, Surge sighed and mentally assumed the same slouched posture I had. Well, if all goes well, I guess I’ll finally get to know what Dr. Hozho was involved with.

I blinked. “Wait, what? I thought you knew what she was doing. That stuff with language and the like.”

Do you really think the Synarchy would send an eccentric linguist to Auris just to play goddess with a batch of war criminals and undesirables? Surge shook my head. She was involved in Protocol Dusk just like I was. Only, she was older and more senior, so she had more clearance than me. She might have actually known what the Synarchy was trying to accomplish out here, because I can tell you for certain that neither my project nor hers would win the war.

At first, I thought she had to be crazy… but the more I looked at it, the more I realized she had to be onto something. I knew the Synarchy liked to do weird things and mess with all sorts of secret projects. Protocol Dusk was a name I was just beginning to put significance to, but it had been attached to all the pieces of the code we’d recovered so far. And Surge was right; a generator that could pull mana from the environment would be incredibly useful as a form of easily generating power, but I didn’t think that would help them win the war. What they needed was more troops and more weapons. Bulky power generators and a camp devoted to watching a society build a language from the ground up did not seem like the kind of wonder weapon the Synarchy desperately sought for to stave off the Coalition.

“Okay… you might be right,” I admitted. “All I know about the code right now is what Yeoman said about the Azimuth. You… you think there might be more to this?”

Like I told you before, Protocol Dusk was supposed to be a worst-case contingency for the Synarchy. I don’t know what it means or what it does, only that I helped it in some way with my work here on Auris. After a second’s hesitation, she more firmly added, In fact, I’m pretty sure that everything that happened here on Auris… everything you’ve seen in your travels…is related to the Dusk Protocol in some way. Sure, Auris was the Synarchy’s first colony among the stars, but it had to be something more than that. They—we—were always thinking ahead to some greater scheme, some plan years down the line. We wouldn’t just make a colony world and not have a plan for it. Not when we were fighting for our life back home.

“Great, another mystery,” I grumbled.

That mystery could have huge repercussions for the future of this planet, Surge cautioned me. It’s important that we figure out what it is.

“Yeah, good luck to us with that.”

“Good luck to us with what?”

I looked over my shoulder and saw Nova emerging from the longhouse. The oiled metal feathers of her wing silently hissed as she tucked it back against her side, and soon she was standing at my shoulder. “Are you and Surge discussing something?”

“A thing or two,” I said, sliding over a bit so she could sit down next to me. When she did, I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Nov, when we were back in Blackwash, did you ever hear of anything called Protocol Dusk?”

Nova pursed her lips in thought. “That name that keeps popping up on the code fragments?” When I nodded, she rubbed her chin with a wingtip. “I… don’t think so… why?”

“Dr. Hozho was involved in it, too,” Surge said. “Whatever it was that we worked on, it was something big. And there is going to be more information on it available in her notes. I just know it.”

I nodded. “But there wasn’t anything in Blackwash about it?” I asked her. “If our home was the main hub for talking with Equus…”

But Nova only shook her head. “There were very few logs that actually survived from then, Ember,” she said. “The ponies a hundred winters ago let the listening outpost fall into terrible disrepair. Our parents were the ones who started repairing it, and we were the ones who finished it. Maybe if we had more time…”

Her words trailed away, and I didn’t blame her. The night the Crimson attacked us was the worst night any of us had ever seen by far, but losing all that information just a day after we got the outpost working again was just another kick in the cunt. Who knows what we could have discovered if we’d only had a chance to study the databanks there?

“Well, there’s nothing we can do about that now,” I said. “Like Surge said, I bet we’ll find more stuff inside this fucking tree. All that stands between us and it is an angry tribal chief and a trial that he said was going to kill me.”

“We’ll be fine,” Nova assured me. “There’s nothing that we can’t do if we work together!”

The silly naivety of that statement left me chuckling. “You sound like your mom.”

Nova fluffed her wing and pouted a bit. “I’m just trying to remain optimistic…”

“Optimism is all we’ve got,” Surge said. “Unfortunately, if the Synarchy taught me anything, it’s that it won’t get you very far.”

“It’s better than nothing,” I grumbled. Fixing my attention back on Nova, I cocked an ear. “So, even though it’s a moot point and all, you guys have any luck finding help or just… well, learning cool shit about this place?”

Nova shook her head. “I think word had already started going around that Chief Lentowenye didn’t like us,” she said. “Nopony was willing to stick their neck out for us if it would pit them against their chieftain.”

“We did get to see the Walsalhn from afar,” Gauge said, emerging from the longhouse to join us, Ace right behind him. “It’s on the other end of the settlement from here, maybe a couple miles away. It’s the only colossal tree in the Spines that still has leaves on it.”

I craned my neck back as if I could hope to see it through the canopy of the smaller trees rooted around the petrified giants. As you might expect, I saw nothing. “Maybe I’ll get to see it sometime,” I said, my eyes wandering to Ace. I lightly smirked at her as I added, “Everypony else has got to see it except me and Surge.”

Ace grimaced and spat a sticky blob of saliva into the dirt. “Weren’t worth it none if you ask me,” she grumbled. “Them Feati pegasi can be sneaky when they wanna be.”

“I can imagine,” I said. “This is their home, and we’re trespassing in it.”

“Still,” Surge continued for me. “Did you see anything interesting?”

The outlaw shrugged. “There’s a hollow at the roots of the tree,” she said. “Can’t say none about how deep it goes. Lots of torches and shit like that round it, though. Lots of ponies with funny hats kneeling around it. Probably priests of sorts.” She turned her eyes to Gauge and finished with a toss of her mane. “But yeah, Gauge is right about one thing. Sure ain’t no other trees as tall as it with their leaves. Flew all the way up to the top of one and there were nothing red like it for as far as the eye could see.”

“Easy to see why it became their sacred tree,” Nova said. “I wonder if the facility underneath it had anything to do with it?”

“Fuck if I know,” I said. “This shit is too complicated for me.” I blinked and looked around. “Where’s Sandy?”

“Inside with Iklimna and Teka,” Gauge said. “They’re starting to get things together for us so we can do this trial.”

“Really? Do we need to do anything?”

“They’ll come get us when they’re ready,” Gauge said. “Sandy said that Lentowenye has to talk to the tribe’s shaman first. He’s the one who oversees the trial.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle at that. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing that while you guys were wandering around the settlement, Surge and I happened to find the shaman. I think he likes me, so that’s a good start.”

Ace smirked and slapped my shoulder. “Leave it to Em to bumble her way into some sorta success.”

“Even an idiot can be useful with a little luck on her side,” I said. “He was a pretty neat stallion, though. A little weird, but we seemed to get along just fine. If he’s overseeing the trial, then we’ll be in great shape.”

“I certainly hope so,” Nova said. “Maybe it won’t be too difficult. But if we have to fight one of those invisible cave monsters again…”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I said, though to be honest, I didn’t think any alternative would be better. After all, this was Auris we were talking about. Everything on the planet wanted to kill us in some way.

“So,” Gauge began, looking out at us with a slight smirk, “while we’re waiting… who wants to get food?”

“Count me in,” Ace said, already trotting down the path away from the longhouse. “Anything to get that sap taste out of my trap…”

-----

As we continued to live off of the rest of the Feati tribe’s hospitality, the forces that be continued to plan our Grass Trial—and, as I was all but certain, our demise. The fact that we didn’t know what we had gone through all this effort for only made it worse. We were all feeling pretty uneasy, and the lack of conversation at the table certainly showed it. So to be honest, I don’t know if it was with relief or dread that I looked up from the table at the sound of approaching hoofsteps and saw Sandy trotting towards us.

“So?” I asked, pushing aside an empty bowl. “How did it go? We good to rumble?”

“Lentowenye and the shaman have worked out what they will ask of you in the Grass Trial,” he said. “As far as that is concerned, everything is good.”

“Well, that’s fucking great, right?” I asked him. The look on his face, however, told me there was something else up. “Right?”

“Lentowenye has made it clear that he will only allow one outsider to participate in the Trial,” he said. Then, looking me in the eye, he gave me a nod. “Since Tekawenye used your name specifically when she gave you her support, Ember, it has to be you.”

I blinked. “Wait… me? Just me?” I looked at my friends, then back at Sandy. “I can’t at least take like… I don’t know, Ace along with me?”

“They will only consider it valid if you perform the task, and you do it on your own. To that end…” He sighed and gave my friends an apologetic look. “I have been asked to make sure the rest of you stay in the royal longhouse with all your gear. Interfering with the trial is strictly forbidden, and if you were to help, Lentowenye would declare it forfeit on the spot. You cannot help Ember in this. She has to do it alone, and they want to make sure of that.”

“We can’t even watch her do what she has to do?” Nova asked. “Cheer her on? Give her support?”

“None of that. I will explain the details later, once the trial is underway. But you will not see her again until she completes the trial.” Hesitantly, he swallowed hard and looked the other way. “… If she completes the trial.”

Way to slap a mood right down to zero in a hurry. We all sort of sat there in shock at what we were hearing. Finally, it was Ace who spoke up. “Is she going to be in danger?” she asked, and I thought I could hear a little waver in her words.

“The Grass Trial is a shortened version of the coming of age ritual for Feati children,” Sandy said. “To be considered an adult, they have to go into the wilderness and complete some task given to them by the chieftain. These tasks are usually difficult, but not impossible. Even still… foals die out there,” he finally concluded. “The Spines are not a friendly place. I’ve been here for years, and I can’t remember a single one without at least one pony dying or disappearing.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Nostrils flaring, I stood up anyway. “But fuck it. We didn’t go through all this trouble just to bitch out. I’ll do it, and Lento can suck my dick when I do. He’s not gonna scare me, and I won’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me dead.”

“Then it’s settled, then.” Stepping closer to me, Sandy put his hoof on my shoulder. “Best of luck to you, Ember. Make sure you have whatever you think you’ll need, and then go to the shaman’s hut when you’re ready. I heard that you supposedly already know where it is.”

I nodded and put my hoof over top of Sandy’s. “Yeah, I’ve been there. And Sandy… thanks for all this shit,” I said, managing a smile. “I don’t know where we would be without you.”

The corners of his lips twitched and he bowed his head. “I’ll be waiting for your return at the longhouse with your friends. I’ll make sure they’re taken care of.”

He backed away and off to the side, giving me some space to embrace my friends. Nova was the first to her hooves and she practically launched herself at me, enveloping me in a full-bodied hug. “Be safe, Em!” she squeaked into my shoulder, and her wings tightened around my body as she gave me a squeeze. I tried not to wince too hard at the sharp metal of her prosthetic slicing into my back. I didn’t dare breathe lest I impale myself on it until she loosened her embrace and leaned back to look me in the face. “You can do anything Lentowenye puts up against you, I know it. Just come back in one piece, okay? The last time we got separated you came back with a zombie fungus growing in your brain.”

“I’ve got a new parasite in there that should help keep it clean,” I said, and Surge sent me an image of her crossing her forelegs in response. Still, I squeezed her once and then let my hooves fall away. “I’ll be fine, Nov. Don’t worry about me.”

Nova shook her head. “I don’t worry about you, Ember. I worry for you, since you’re too busy to do it yourself.” Her lips twitched through a few different emotions as she tried to figure out what to say next, but she ultimately just dipped her head and backed away. “I’ll be rooting for you, Em, one hundred percent!”

Of that, I had no doubt. If nothing else, I knew I could always count on Nova for support. She was my first friend, my closest friend, and she’d be at my side until the day I died.

I just hoped that day wouldn’t be today or tomorrow.

Gauge was next. I turned to him, and he looked me up and down… and then he started chuckling. When I raised my eyebrow, he shook his head. “I’m laughing at Lentowenye,” he clarified. “He doesn’t know what you’ve been through. He thinks you’re just another outsider. But the truth is, you’ve done things he couldn’t possibly imagine. Whatever his little mind can think of is nothing compared to what you’ve already accomplished.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I bet you’ll come back in record time.”

I reached forward and drew him into a hug, and even though he stiffened at the contact—Gauge wasn’t all that fond of physical contact from ponies other than Nova—he at least returned the embrace. “I’ll do so well that the Feati decide to make me their chieftain,” I said with a confident smirk on my face. “Once we get these ponies some guns, Yeoman won’t stand a chance.”

Gauge nodded, then lowered his voice and put his muzzle next to my ear. “If you want, I can see if I can get SCaR—?”

I cut him off with a gentle push. “I don’t want SCaR’s help,” I told him. “You heard Sandy, either we do this fairly, or not at all. And if Lentowenye even suspects foul play…”

He sighed and reluctantly nodded. “Yeah, yeah. Still, SCaR or not, you’ll be fine. Of that, I’m more than certain.”

We exchanged one last look, and then he stepped to the side to support Nova, who was beginning to let her anxiety show through her trembling wings. I smiled to the both of them, trying my best not to let my own worry get the better of me. I was their friend and their leader. They looked to me for support and strength. And I was not about to fail them today.

Lastly, I turned to Ace, who had lingered aside from the rest of us. When she didn’t come forward on her own, I went to her and planted my forehooves right in front of hers. That little motion was enough to draw her head up, and I met it with a goofy little smile on my muzzle. “You’re just upset it wasn’t you, right?”

She chuckled and fluffed her wings. “Well, if I wanted it done right…”

“I promise I won’t disappoint you.”

“Heh.” She looked away, and her smile faded bit by bit. “These ponies are crafty, Ember,” she finally said. “I didn’t hear them sneak up on me, and I been out in these wilds longer than you. I know when somepony’s trying to get the drop on me.” Her eyes met mine—or at least, her one eye that wasn’t always shrouded by that jet black curtain of hair she kept over the right side of her face. “You watch out for everything, now. Don’t let anything slip your eye.” She leaned in and added, quiet enough for Gauge and Nova to not hear her, “It’d be awful easy for Lentowenye to make a pony he didn’t like none disappear out there… you understand?”

“Yeah… yeah, I get it.” I nodded once just as an additional assurance, and when she still looked uneasy, I pulled away that curtain covering her face with my magic. That got her attention, and then we kind of just stared at each other for a few seconds. Finally, swallowing a growing lump in my throat, I smiled at her. “I’ll be back soon enough. You might have experience on me, but I’m nothing if not a fast learner.”

I let go of her mane and she moved to brush it back into place with a hoof… only she didn’t. She let it hang to the side of her cheek, exposing her whole face to the light, to my eyes. Finally, she breathily chuckled and shook her head. “Right. Maybe I should stake a wager on you. I could stand to make a lotta Cs if I did.”

“That, I’m sure.” I wanted to say something more, and I got the feeling she did as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so. It felt like if I did, it wouldn’t be right, and not only that, I’d be betraying somepony else. So I didn’t, and what could have been a good chance to say something, to finally air something out… it was gone. Gone and faded, just like the awkward cough Ace made as she stepped away.

And then it was just me and Surge, stuck inside my own skull as Sandy led my waving friends away. Soon, they were fading colors on the climb back up to the royal longhouse, and I was all alone.

So alone… save for the voice in my head.

“I guess it’s a good thing I have you with me, at least,” I said aloud.

I’ll do my best to keep us alive, Surge said. As much as Lentowenye wanted to make you suffer this alone, he failed before he even tried.

“Yeah. Joke’s on him, the shrike fucker.” Sighing, I grabbed my rifle and started back towards the communal longhouse. “Well, we better get armed up and shit before we have to do whatever it is Lento wants us to do. It’s not going to be easy.”

Whatever gave you that idea? Was it Sandy’s vague concern, or Lento’s explicit threats?

“You can shut up now,” I growled at her as I walked away from the fire. “One way or another, we’re punching through this trial and shooting Lento’s balls off.”

Literally or figuratively?

“Whatever works best.” I let a smirk onto my face as I added, “Though personally, I’d prefer the first one.”

-----

I was happy to see that SCaR had kept our stuff safe when I returned to the communal house to grab some extra supplies. The kids must have gotten bored of him at some point, though it looked like they’d thrown a few rocks in his direction to try and get a response. Still, I was glad to know that our little sentry was doing his job and nopony had tried to make off with all our gear.

I didn’t take much with me when I went to the shaman’s hut. I had my rifle, five spare magazines for it, and four extra grenades for the launcher under the barrel. I kept all of that in the smallest and lightest saddlebag I had, along with some food and water, just in case this trial would involve a wilderness excursion. Apart from a few other basics like bandages, I didn’t take much else. After all, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of space for shit, and I didn’t want to load myself down with all my gear. Chances were I was going to have to run for my life at some point, and that would be a lot easier to do if I wasn’t carrying a hundred pounds of shit with me.

When I made it to the top of the hill where the shaman’s hut and the royal longhouse proudly stood, I lingered in the open between the two. Somewhere inside that massive structure of felled trees and carved wood, my friends waited for me to return from a trial which we had no idea what it would entail. I wanted to go in there and see them one more time, but there was already a crowd beginning to form on the hill. Apparently, word had gotten out that the outsiders were up to something interesting, and now all the ponies of the Feati wanted to see what it was.

They at least parted easily enough as I made my way to the shaman’s hut. They all watched me with curious eyes, curious eyes and bated breath. I was about to do something they hadn’t seen in a long time. I honestly don’t think they knew what I was getting into any more than I did myself. Hopefully I could give them something to talk about… and come back in one piece to hear it, too.

I saw Lentowenye standing in front of the shaman’s hut, along with Teka and Iklimna. Though the two mares seemed pleased to see me here, Lento was obviously anything but. His eyes narrowed when he saw me, and he took a few steps forward to head me off before I got to the hut. “I was beginning to hope you wouldn’t come,” he said.

“Why? For my sake? Or yours?” I tried to keep my scowling and frowning to a minimum. We were, after all, in full view of his people, and a fight between the two of us right before this trial would probably not be in my best interests.

Lento’s nostrils flared but he said nothing in response. Instead, he only turned to the side and pulled back the ferns covering the door. “Inside. Then we can finally get this over with.”

I nodded and set my hooves in a line, walking right past him into the hut. Once again, I found my eyes straining to adjust to the harsh light inside. The shaman had set up another fire, but this one wasn’t violent and feral like the dragonfire he had tamed earlier. Instead, it seemed muted and sluggish, if you could even describe a fire like that. I’d spent a lot of my life around fire in a forge, but I’d never seen it behave so oddly as it did in the shaman’s hut. It almost looked like it moved in slow motion, with tongues of flame gently rolling and lapping at the air above it.

The shaman himself sat behind the fire, somehow dislocating his fucking hips or something to sit with his hind legs crossed. He held his forehooves together in front of his face, and his eyes opened when he heard me enter. “Ah, you,” he said, a grin breaking out on his face. “Should have known you would be back. And adventurous, too! Ha! Find yourself in the trial so soon, yes?”

“I, uh… I guess.” I fidgeted at the edge of the fire, scooting over a bit when Lentowenye entered the room after me, leaving Teka and Iklimna outside. “I still have no idea what I’m supposed to do, but I’ll do it if it gets me into your Walsalhn.”

“The Shaman and I have discussed your trial,” Lento said, circling around the fire to stand by the shaman’s side. He fixed me with his eyes as he continued, almost rooting me in place. “I do not like you, Ember, and I do not want you here. But the Grass Trial is sacred. I cannot interfere in your participation, but I can ensure it is difficult. So, before we continue… Will you revoke your claim to participate in it?”

“Will you let me go inside the tree otherwise?” I asked him in return.

He shook his head. “I absolutely will not allow it.”

“Then I absolutely will not take anything I’ve said back.” I took a deep breath and squared up my shoulders. “I will participate in this trial, and I will win. Then you’ll have to let me into the tree, and I can be out of your mane for good.”

Obviously, my insistence was not what he wanted to hear, but he kept his fury in check. Instead, he turned to the shaman and waved a hoof. “Begin the ritual,” he said, moving to my side. “I will translate for her.”

The shaman nodded and, standing up as if the odd positioning of his legs didn’t bother him at all, reached for a bowl of silvery pigments near the fire. Lifting it in his hoof instead of his magic—I was all but certain at this point that his split horn didn’t actually work—he slowly began to pace around the fire. “‘At the birth of the world, there was nothing but rock and stone,’” he said, which I understood through Lentowenye’s quick translation. “‘Dirt Mother was bare. Nothing moved upon her rocks. She was barren, her womb hardened and desolate. She was imperfect.

“‘But then the foals of the stars came to her,’” he continued, and he streaked some kind of powder into the fire which made it sparkle and flicker like the stars above on a clear night’s sky. “‘They set hoof upon her barren womb, and with them, came a gift. That gift was the gift of life. The gift of grass.’”

I raised my eyebrow at the tale but didn’t say anything—now wasn’t the time to really go and interrupt with a history lesson about how Auris was colonized by the Synarchy long ago. “‘Grass is the simplest of life,’” the shaman continued. “‘Without grass, there is no life. From grass, life springs in abundance. The mighty canopy of our forest protects us, and its roots are hidden beneath the grass. Even the towering world-trees are rooted in the grass of the earth. Without the grass, there is no life, and without the grass, there are no Feati.

“‘For we were born from the grass like the trees around us.’” At that, he threw more powder into the fire, and it began to crackle orange and maroon like the grass that called Auris home. “‘Like it, we grew and thrived. Like it, we brought life to Dirt Mother’s desolate womb. But though we trample grass underhoof, we must remember that it is to the grass which we owe everything.’”

He approached me and placed the bowl at my hooves. Then, dipping the tip of his into the silvery paint, he brushed my mane out of my face and began to draw lines and patterns on it with the paint. “‘Today, an outsider has ventured to the sacred lands to commune with her roots. In doing so, she seeks to understand her origins, to understand the beginnings of life. While not a member of the sacred peoples, I ask that she receive the strength she needs to survive the ordeals placed ahead of her.’”

My face felt a little sticky and matted once the shaman had finished applying the paint. I didn’t know what the designs looked like, but unlike the rest of the Feati, he’d kept it all to my face and not to any other part of my body. For all I knew, he could have painted a big dick on my face and I wouldn’t know any better. But, pushing the bowl away, the shaman helped me stand. “It time to present yourself to the crowd,” he said, letting the grandiose tone of his voice fade away for normal conversation. “Your support must be observed by ponies of Feati.”

I nodded and turned around, stepping past both him and Lento and making for the door. Stepping into the light, I momentarily winced as my eyes adjusted, then recoiled at the sight before me. It looked like almost the entire village had silently materialized in a few minutes. I stared at hundreds of faces seated on the dirt, and they all watched me intently.

Lentowenye and the shaman both moved past me and stood just to my front on either side. “Feati,” Lentowenye began, “Immapohnaa’ae’un A U’a mofmi’sat Alaenin Kallengen pabtow’set. S’a wippa’set Feati hupf takka’set imma Walsalhn, anta noal etib salhn.” He looked back at me and his lips momentarily twisted into a sneer. “S’a beleten’sat wiwiw wola Mum’a unta’sat awwe, ia S’a Mum’a tuat lenwen’set. Oe T’a’hn S’a bunto’sot, T’a’hn S’a A U’a wetwa’sot. Oe T’a’hn S’a bunto’sot’un, S’a tol’sot noal.”

I learned later that he was basically telling them that I wanted to do this Grass Trial thing and get inside their tree, and whether I lived or died was based on the favor of their ancestors. At the time, however, I could only stare stupidly ahead as he spoke in a language I didn’t understand.

“S’a hilf’set, S’a bwonm swos sonal.” Lento turned toward Teka and Iklimna, and both moved forward to stand at his side. “Swos Feati pohnaa’ae’hn bunto’sat S’a e Alaenin Kallengen hilf’set. To hilf’set, A takka ete’sot T’a’hn takka’set.”

Both Teka and Iklimna raised their heads high. “A hilf’set Embaw,” they said in unison, and I recognized the horrible butchering of my name again. Seriously, was it really so hard for these ponies to say the letter ‘R’?

Lento watched them in silence for a moment, and he and his sister made eye contact. Instead of backing down, however, Teka merely kept her eyes locked on his, weathering his glare of disappointment and controlled anger until he looked away to continue his speech. “Wiwiw sonal’an hilf , immapohnaa’e’hn kallengen pabtow’sot. S’a bwonm imma saksi ho’hn sahln’an e leol S’a waksoa’sot. Oe S’a hommo wetwa’set, thenne S’a wiwiw bele Walsalhn imma’sot. Oe la, wiwiw S’a kolwil hatot’sot imma alaenin saksi ho’hn sahln’an.”

He turned to the shaman and nodded, and the shaman stepped back into his hut. He returned a moment later with a bowl of something, which he immediately passed to my hooves. It had a foul smell to it, but when I looked back at the shaman, he made a show of lifting his hooves to his face and smiling. The message was clear, and fuck did that make my stomach churn.

But Lentowenye had stopped his speech and was instead watching me closely, waiting for my next move. Swallowing hard and bracing myself for what was probably going to be a horrendous assault on my tongue, I lifted the bowl to my lips and tried not to think about whatever it was that I was drinking. Surge fled for the distant corner of my brain away from my sense of taste as soon as it hit my tongue, and it took all my effort not to spit up the awful soup, if you could even call it that. It tasted like somepony had left rancid meat sitting in a pot for days under the sun and then pissed in it for good measure. But Lento began speaking again as I drank the awful shit, so that must have meant I was doing what I was supposed to.

I tried to focus on what he was saying… but I simply couldn’t. I almost dropped the empty bowl as I tried to put it back down on the ground. The world sounded like it was underwater, and my hooves began to shake and tremble. I wondered if I’d been poisoned, but the thought didn’t come with any alarm or fear like I would have expected, only a dazed observation. I smashed my teeth together as a frigid icicle suddenly formed in my body from the base of my throat all the way into my gut, and the world began to spin. Up was down and left was right, and as I tried to blink my way back into figuring out what was going on, every tree in the Spines suddenly fell on their sides, their pink and red leaves pointing in front of me, toward the clouds and sky beyond just in front of my muzzle.

My body fought and struggled against the brew, twitching and heaving, and I was pretty sure I was frothing at the mouth. Surge cried something inside my head, and I think she might have been trying to fix whatever the fuck was happening to me, but I only became more dizzy and disoriented. Fire replaced the ice inside me, and I might have screamed had I been able to. Instead, I was reduced to a twitching and convulsing mess on the ground, unable to do anything except stare up at the sky.

And then a crack of thunder split the sky, fire rained from the stars, and the dead titans of the Spines began to bend over me, one by one by one.

Chapter 34: The Grass Trial

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Chapter 34: The Grass Trial

\/\/\/\/\/

The ERN Stardust finally set us down in the Ivory City’s spaceport after two weeks of travel. Even though mana-charged warp drives allowed ships to ‘teleport’ across the vast reaches of space, the journey was hardly instantaneous, and the drives were far too weak to move the corvette more than a lightyear a day. But now the long voyage across the ether was finally over, and after spending two weeks with its artificial gravity field turned on, the Stardust finally switched it off and gave us our first welcome to Auris’ gravity.

I felt like somepony put heavy saddlebags across my shoulders and pushed down on them. I felt slow and sluggish, and for a second, my heart began to flutter as I suddenly found it more difficult to breathe. Around me, the rest of my team had similar reactions, and Petunia, heavyset mare as she was, looked like she was practically crushed into her seat.

But the sensation passed in the few minutes it took to securely dock the corvette to the spaceport. We had been cruising across the cosmos at a little more than seven-tenths of Equus’ gravity. Auris, as I very quickly remembered, was around double that. Though not quite one and a half times stronger than Equus’ gravity, I certainly felt like I’d just put on fifty pounds in the blink of an eye. Ever the scientist, I noted that within a few generations, the ponies born and raised on this planet would likely be stockier than they would be on Equus just to account for the additional gravity.

I left my seat and blundered over to the observation deck, my hooves practically stomping on the ground as I still tried to get used to moving in this gravity. When I finally reached the window, I flicked the switch to pull away the blast shielding and let some natural light onto the deck. My first observation was how everything seemed slightly blue-tinted, and my blue coat seemed to stand out in a more vibrant sapphire display. Far away and high in the sky, the blue giant Meadowbrook star bathed the planet in high energy blue light. It was a miracle that the Synarchy had even found this world. Right on the far edge of the star’s habitable range, its distance and thick atmosphere gave it just enough protection from the deadly radiation and scorching heat of the monstrous star to support life. And if what I’d heard from some of the reports I pulled with my clearance back on Equus is true, then life on Auris was exotic and monstrous. As ready as I was to see my new installation and get to work on my role in the Dusk Protocol, I hoped to find time to go and see some of the planet before I secluded myself away in my work.

It had only been two decades, but the Ivory City actually looked like a city, and that was beyond impressive. In two decades, the Synarchy had set up enough industry to start erecting towers and prefab housing in the plains of the planet’s capital. While the city had none of the height or density of Fillydelphia, and certainly couldn’t even be considered a matchstick next to the megatropolis of Manehattan, it was the only sure sign of development across an almost pristine world. Still, it was gilded in a way the brutal buildings back on Equus weren’t. The towers seemed to reach for the sky in curving and sloped shapes, and the swooping edges were trimmed in gold and alabaster white—or at least, were either painted or enchanted to look that way. Just the mere difference in architecture alone made the city feel more inviting, more promising, than the world I had left behind.

If this was what the ‘non-conformal architects’ the Synarchy had shipped out here had come up with, I found myself wishing they’d been allowed to stay on Equus and work their magic on the buildings there. It would have been a shot of joy and grandeur into a bleak and almost hopeless world.

“Is it what you expected, doctor?”

I looked over my shoulder to see Flask stumbling over to me. She seemed like she’d recovered well enough from the news I’d given her earlier… or maybe the awe at joining an exclusive hoofful of ponies to set foot on another world had merely driven everything else away. She stopped by my side and regarded the world beyond the glass with wide eyes, almost as if she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” I admitted to her. “But first impressions are positive.”

“Is this where we’re going to be staying?” she asked me. “It’ll remind me of Baltimare, at least.”

I shook my head. “We’re not nearly that lucky. We have a remote installation a day’s flight by ringbird from here. Don’t expect to see this place too often.”

Flask’s face fell. “And here I was hoping for something a little more relaxing than another lab in the middle of nowhere. Does it at least have good views of the outside? These pink trees and orange grass… it’s so exotic!”

“It’s in the middle of a gorge filled with waterfalls,” I told her, neglecting to mention the part where our facility would be buried in the ground there. “I think we’ll get a lot of picnics outside. It’s sure to be beautiful.”

That got her excited, and she started to tap from hooftip to hooftip—at least until the prancing proved too exhausting in Auris’ gravity. “That does sound amazing! This place is so wonderful! It’s like the war is lightyears away!”

“That’s because it is,” I reminded her. “But don’t think we’re getting off easy. We still have a job to do for the Synarchy, and we have to do it well. Otherwise, there may not be an Equestria to go back to.”

The reminder of the war—and what the Synarchy had forced her to leave behind to come out here for Protocol Dusk—dampened her spirits. I put my hoof on her shoulder and gave it a supportive squeeze. “Come on. The ship should almost be done pressurizing. Our ringbird doesn’t leave for the installation until this evening, so we have time to kill around the city. And in case you forgot, Auris has long days. We’ll get a lot of use out of these four extra hours a day.”

That snapped her out of her momentary melancholy, and with a smile back on her muzzle, the mare followed me away from the observation deck and toward the airlock, ready to take her first breath of life on a new world.

\/\/\/\/\/

The noises of the forest were the first thing to tell me that I was awake. I lay on something cool and firm, unable or unwilling to move for the longest time. But I was breathing and I could hear the blood rushing through my ears, so I knew whatever I had drank wasn’t poison. Or, if it was, it wasn’t strong enough to kill me.

And then I realized that I was alive. My heart began to race, and I sat bolt upright, cracking open bleary eyes and rubbing them with the backs of my fetlocks to try and get them to focus on what was around me. My body ached from horn to hoof, and my throat felt as dry as the ashy crags of the mountain back in Blackwash. Even though I was alive, I felt like death. And when I finally began to take in my surroundings, I had a feeling that death wouldn’t be too hard to find here.

The tall, petrified titans of the Spines loomed around me, gargantuan trunks reaching through the ceiling of dull orange leaves like pillars supporting the canopy above. The dense tangle of leaves from the smaller trees didn’t let much light hit the ground, shrouding everything in shadow. I was sitting on a damp stretch of dirt, covered in fallen leaves and bits of moss. But no matter where I looked, there was no sign of the Feati settlement. I was all alone in the middle of nowhere with no idea where to go or what to do next.

“Surge?” I croaked, my tongue still feeling sluggish and uncooperative. I could taste bile on top of the sandpaper in my mouth, and I wondered how much fluid I’d puked up while unconscious. “Surge, you there? Fuck, my head…”

I felt another presence in my head begin to stir, and soon my body staggered and lurched as Surge inadvertently poked at the controls. My eyes went cross and I dry heaved as my stomach did flips, but apparently I’d already vomited my brains out and didn’t have anything left to give.

“E-Ember?” Surge croaked and winced. She tilted my head left and right as she looked around. “Where… where are we?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I groaned. “I was hoping you could tell me.”

“Whatever poison was in that brew sent me out cold just like you. I don’t even know how long it’s been since that ritual.”

I groaned again. “I bet this is our fucking trial,” I said. “If we can make it back to the Feati lands, then we win. If we don’t, then we’re fucked.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Surge muttered. “But how are we going to get there?”

I looked around again, hoping for some hoofprints or tracks in the dirt and mud. But there was nothing, or at least, nothing I could see. I had no doubt that a pony raised in the wilderness and taught to hunt and track would have seen something I didn’t, but I didn’t have any of that training. I was a forgemare way out of her element, and I was hopelessly lost in the Spines.

“Forget that,” I croaked, and I felt like the inside of my throat was going to start cracking and flaking. “We need water and food. We’re not going to get very far without them.”

For once, I was the expert when it came to this shit, and it brought me a tiny bit of joy in this grim situation we found ourselves in. Surge had some military training, sure, but she was a spaceship engineer, not a soldier on the ground, and that was a long time ago. She was a better scientist than anything else, and advanced energy manatronics and shit wasn’t going to get us home. Meanwhile, I’d been spending the past few months wandering around the wilderness on my own, fighting for survival. I at least knew what I had to do to stay alive. And the first step on that front was to make sure I didn’t die of dehydration and starvation. Unfortunately, that second step was going to be a lot harder than I thought. When I looked around, all my supplies were gone. My canteen, my box of ReadyTack, and my rifle and ammunition were all gone. The Feati had stripped me of everything, then dumped me out here in the middle of nowhere.

If this was Lento’s way of ensuring I died during the trial, he was already off to a great start. I was so weak I could hardly use my magic, otherwise I would have had Surge help me make just a little bit of frost to slake my thirst.

With nothing in sight to drink and no food to follow it with, I hauled myself to my hooves and began to stagger through the thick undergrowth of the Spines. Bugs whizzed around my head and little animals skittered off through the leaves as I struggled to even move. And I didn’t know where the fuck I was going. I just hoped that I’d find a river before I passed out, because if I passed out now, I probably wouldn’t wake up again.

And as the minutes dragged on, it certainly looked like I was staring option two in the face. I didn’t hear anything indicating water, only the noises of the wildlife around me. They seemed like they were taunting me, laughing at my failure. I was an outsider and an alien on their world, in their turf, and I was going to die there. Auris was always their world, not a pony’s world. I felt like my skin was shriveling up and my teeth were going to start falling out. Spots began to dance in front of my eyes as the humidity sucked the energy out of me. I began to stumble left and right as my sense of balance slowly failed. Moving was tough, and I only grew more tired the more I moved.

“Surge,” I mumbled through my dry mouth. “How did you always think you were going to die?”

The question was a strange one, but my mind wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe it was thinking too straight about my likely impending demise. I’m not sure if it caught Surge off guard or not; I wasn’t really in any capacity to try and read her right now. Regardless, it didn’t take her long to give me an answer. “The war was going to kill me,” she said. “I never doubted that for a minute.”

“But didn’t you hope you’d win the war?” I asked her. “Wasn’t that what this was all about?

“I would die before it ended. When the cruiser I served on was lanced by anti-orbital defences, it nearly broke apart in low orbit. I would have died if the bulkheads failed. After that…” She shrugged. “Either a bombing or an assassination would get me. One way or another, the war would kill me before it was over. Considering I died on a project involved in the war, I guess I was right.”

“Huh. I always thought I’d die by falling off the mountain,” I said. “Because I’m a stupid idiot.”

Almost as if to prove my point, I stepped through some undergrowth—and promptly tumbled down a sharp slope. I cried out in surprise as I rolled toward the bottom, banging my head and shoulders on the damp and dense ground. By some luck, I didn’t bash my head open on a protruding rock or something as I fell, and by some miracle, when I finally came to a stop, my entire chest and underside ended up slick with cool, wet mud. It took a full ten seconds from coming to a stop for my eyes to stop rolling in their sockets and my black-spotted vision to settle on what was in front of me—and the rippling lifesaver I had been searching for.

The sight of water popped open energy reserves I didn’t know I had. I managed to get just enough lift from my legs to fling myself out of the mud and into the pool of water, and I stuck my parched muzzle beneath the surface and practically chugged down as much as I could. But after two deep gulps, Surge craned my neck back and out of the water, leaving me sputtering and coughing.

Slow! she shouted at me from within. You’ll cramp if you aren’t careful!

It sounded like such a stupid warning—what the fuck was a cramp compared to slaking my thirst?—but she was right. If I cramped myself, I wouldn’t be moving for a while. And I needed to be in top shape to get out of here alive. The longer it took me to find the tribe, the more danger I was in. Light was already fading, and I knew I didn’t want to be out here after dark. Any number of horrible monsters could appear in the darkness of the Spines once the sun disappeared, and I bet half of them would snap me up without a second thought, especially since I didn’t have a rifle to defend myself with.

So I forced myself to measure my gulps, however painful that was. Soon, I finally felt the desperate need clawing at my throat subside, and I propped myself up on my knees. I’d stumbled down into a little bowl-shaped hollow in the earth, where the rain that had battered the Spines a few days prior had collected into a stagnant pool. Trees and undergrowth protected and shrouded the bowl from its rims, hiding the topography inside. I didn’t want to think about just how contaminated the stagnant water might be, or what kind of parasites may have been lurking in it, but it was either die of thirst now or maybe catch some nasty bug later. Besides, if there was one good thing about life on Auris, it was that its diseases hadn’t really adapted to pony biology yet. I’m sure one day that would change, but for now, I didn’t have much to worry about on that front.

When I’d finally sated my thirst for the time being, I stopped and let the water in the pool fall still again. There, I finally got the chance to look at myself for the first time in a while. And when I saw the mare staring back at me, I nearly froze, because not only was she unfamiliar, but she was exotic and—dare I say it—beautiful, even. Sure, I looked like shit given my haggard expression, but the silver paint covering my face and dried to my coat… I’m not even sure how to describe it. Delicate swirls of silver coiled around my eyes, and gently curving zigzags moved in a step-like pattern down the length of my muzzle. Dots of silver paint ringed the edges of my ear and a half, and broad strokes of silver colored in my cheeks, my jawline, and spotted down my neck. For a moment, I felt like I was looking at an alternate reality, one where I’d been born down in the Spines instead of high on a mountain, one where I had never had this code and this responsibility forced upon me.

What a life that would have been.

“You’ve spent your whole life stuck on a mountain until now,” Surge said, reading my thoughts. “Have you ever wished you were somepony else?”

I guess we’d gone full circle from the death question earlier. “I always wanted to live in Equestria,” I told her. “I didn’t know what the Synarchy was like back then. I always figured it was better than the hard life I had to scratch out on top of a mountain. The Synarchy had put ponies on another planet, and then they’d disappeared.” I sighed. “I prayed that one day they would reappear and I wouldn’t have to live this life anymore. When the code showed up and the Crimson destroyed Blackwash… I guess I got my wish.”

“You should be thankful for it.”

I blinked and frowned. “Thankful? Why the fuck should I be thankful? My mom died, so many of my friends died, my home got burnt to the fucking ground! My flank got branded and I was nearly raped! Why the fuck should I be thankful?!”

“It gave your life purpose.” When I stopped, my anger slipping to confusion, Surge pressed on. “You were a forgemare on a mountain, and you were going nowhere with your life. You were born in that village, you were raised there, and you’d fuck a stallion with a little too much shared DNA, raise a family, and die there. That was all that your life was leading up to.

“But out here?” She gestured around us. “You have a purpose. You have a reason for doing what you’re doing. You’re changing the world, Ember, whether you realize it or not. You’ve met people and done things you never would have done on top of your little mountain hideaway. Be thankful for that; instead of going nowhere, you’re going somewhere in a hurry. Wherever that trip takes you, it’ll be better than not moving at all.”

When she stopped, I found I didn’t have anything to say—at least, not at first. Finally, though, a thought formed. “You sound like you’ve had experience with that.”

“I didn’t have a choice in who I would be,” she said, looking away. Her mind’s eye wandered, and I caught glimpses of her childhood, her service in the navy, her long nights spent staring at mountains of textbooks and lecture notes. I saw through the eyes of a little filly staring up at a cruiser flying low over her hometown, patriotic music blaring from enormous speakers, while her father stayed her with a hoof on her shoulder as soldiers marched down in parade formation. I felt the heat of an overheating fusion reactor as it scalded the hair of my coat, my flame-retardant jumpsuit curling and smoking as the fabric began to melt while I tried desperately to repair a leaking coolant valve with sweat stinging my eyes. I tasted the lips of a stallion as we watched our foals run in circles in the living room, playing tag while the bombardment shields over the city flickered and boomed. And I felt my heart break in two as a government official rejected my maternity license and told me the Synarchy needed my brains, not my womb, and since my husband was a marine and I had no family left to look after them, they were going to take away my children so I could focus on my work.

I heard my wails echo in the bathroom of my lab as the life I’d wanted was taken away by a High Queen who didn’t care about me, who I couldn’t say anything bad about lest I disappear forever, and nopony would dare question what had happened to me.

When my world finally flashed back to the present, and the emotional ride Surge had accidentally dragged me on ended, I almost collapsed. I nearly couldn’t breathe. I’d caught glimpses of her life in dreams before… but nothing like that. That was a visceral experience, not some hazy, half-remembered dream. And suddenly, Surge seemed to make a lot more sense.

“I spent my whole life doing what my country wanted,” she finally said in a vulnerable, hitching voice. “Just when I thought I’d finally earned something for myself, they took it away because they wanted more. You never had that… that prison around you your entire life. And I was so indoctrinated by the system that I didn’t realize it until I died… and a mare out of her element gave me a second chance.”

I smiled, and if she had been a flesh and blood pony sitting next to me, I would have hugged her. Instead, I could only wrap a foreleg around my barrel as if I was trying to hug myself. “Yeah, well, what can I say, Sparky? You’re electrifying.”

She sent me an image of herself smiling, though that quickly faded away to focus on the task at hoof. “I appreciate the compliment. But I think we’ve dallied long enough, don’t you agree?”

Nodding my head, I groaned and stood up. “Yeah, you’re right about that. We’ve got water taken care of, but we’re still not out of the woods yet.”

“I don’t think we’re getting out of these woods anytime soon.”

“You know what I mean.” Bending over, I took one or two last drinks, then looked around at my total lack of basic supplies. “I guess we don’t have any fucking canteens or shit to keep some of this water in.”

Sure shook my head. “We’ll have to go nice and easy,” she said. “We can’t risk dehydrating ourselves.”

“I just hope we’ll find our way back home,” I said. “They must have had pegasi put us here, because I didn’t see any hoofprints when we woke up.”

“I don’t think we were out cold for a whole day, only a few hours,” Surge said. “So a few hours flight by pegasus… we’re probably a half day’s walk from the settlement. If we keep at it, we’ll be back by tomorrow morning, sparing time for sleep.”

“Think we’ll even be able to sleep out here?”

“We’ll have to,” Surge said. “We’re tired and hungry. That poison stew they gave us sapped our energy. We’re not going to make it home in one go.”

“Great.” Spying the most shallow path out of the bowl, I set about getting out of here, pretty face paint and all. “Well, we got water. Now we need food. Know anything that’s good eating out here?”

“I didn’t spend much time outside once I got to Auris,” Surge said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

“Great.” I shook my head and grimaced as I began the climb and stressed my aching legs. “I wish we had Ace out here with us. Stupid Lentowenye chieftain bitch…”

Surge chuckled along. “I couldn’t agree more.”

-----

The sun was getting real low—or at least, so I thought. I really couldn’t tell through the canopy of the Spines, but it was getting harder and harder to see. And as the light in the forest dwindled, so too did my time to find food and shelter for the night. I was so used to having eighteen hours of daylight and ten of darkness during the summer months, but here in the Spines, it was more of an even fourteen hour split.

Now that I’d rehydrated myself, I found I could use my magic again for simple spells. Teleporting would probably take too much energy, but telekinesis and making sparks with my horn wouldn’t be too difficult. Unfortunately, neither of those were going to help me get back to the Feati, at least not directly. But they would help me find food and defend myself, and I knew I’d have to do both before I got out of this.

I’d left my pond of stagnant water behind and struck out in a random direction, with no way to tell where I’d been dropped, and no way to tell which way was north, since I couldn’t see the sun. In any event, I tried to go in a northern direction, since that meant if I was going the complete wrong way, I’d end up back in Three Rivers eventually. But of course, like I said, I had no idea which way was north, and Surge and I would stop and argue about it almost every fifteen minutes. Things got particularly bad when she accused me of going in circles, and when I followed her lead as a compromise, I nearly blew up when I found the tree I’d shat under two hours earlier. We were going nowhere in a hurry, and eventually we just decided to stop and try and get some food. After all, our body was hungry, and it was making both of us cranky and irritated.

Getting the food was something else, though. So far, I’d supplied almost all of our food in our expedition across the continent with the aid of my rifle. But now, I didn’t even have a knife to work with. I only had what I could find lying around, and that wasn’t much. The sticks that were on the ground were soaked through with water and beginning to rot, meaning they were more likely to splinter and break before they killed something, so that left me looking for rocks. Thankfully, I found one about the size of my hoof with a jagged edge to it near the roots of one of the towering, petrified behemoths, so I wasn’t totally helpless. With a sharp rock and my ability to swing things in my magic like a sledgehammer, I could probably kill a pony in one or two good shots.

Unfortunately, the game I was trying to hunt happened to be stone hares.

I’d caught a pack of them while wandering through the forest, and after managing to sneak up on them and close the distance, I found myself at a loss for how to go about killing them. Stone hares were heavy, and if I tried to pick one up, it’d probably break free of my weak magic before I could haul it back to me. And I doubted I’d be able to break through their armor with my rock. Stone hares didn’t get their name because they just looked like rocks (which they did), but because they basically were rocks. Little rabbit-like things with six legs and heavily armored backs. They lived around Blackwash too, and when threatened, they’d roll up into armored balls and fling themselves down the side of the mountain. If they could survive that seemingly suicidal escape tactic, how the fuck was I going to kill one without a gun?

You know anything that can get through their armor? I asked Surge. This rock isn’t going to make a fucking dent.

I might have been able to help if you had any excess mana to use, she said. Our little agreement is great when you’re not starving and tired and you have mana to spare, but not when you’re too exhausted to replenish it for me.

No wonder I felt like I was going to die after half a day of dehydration and starvation, I mentally grumbled at her. You’re eating my life energy shit!

And it’ll kill both of us if we don’t get some food to help you replenish it.

Yeah. Right. Whatever. Frowning and chewing on my lip, I idly rolled the rock in my hoof as I watched the hares chew through the sprigs of grass popping up from the forest floor. It was hard to keep my mouth from watering as I watched them. I would have gladly followed their example, but grass on Auris was mildly poisonous, and after puking up my lunch before the trial, I didn’t need to get sick a second time. If I killed one, I could cook its meat with my magic… but of course, killing one was the hard part.

My eyes narrowed on one that wandered farther from its pack and closer to my hiding place. As it chewed on tufts of orange grass, I got a good look at it. Its little head seemed almost entirely too small for the four eyes sticking out from it, and it crawled about on six legs. The legs were too short and stiff for it to run away quickly, I knew that much. That was why the ones on the mountain let gravity do the work for them. If I attacked it, it would likely curl into its armored ball, and then…

A plan came together, and I licked my lips. We were going to eat well tonight.

I waited for the hare to get a little bit closer, and then I pounced. I whipped my head downwards as I lunged at the hare, the stone sailing right for its skull. It cried out in alarm and began to tuck itself into its armored ball, but my stone was faster. It crashed onto the hare’s bony head with a booming crack and split in two, but I had accomplished my goal. Though not dead, the hare was dazed, and it fell onto its side and flailed helplessly as I picked up the two pieces of my stone and flipped it onto its back. Without any further hesitation, I took the two pieces of rock and jammed them into its soft underbelly, one in its gut and the other in its neck to at least try and kill it mercifully. It squealed and wheezed, but after a few final twitches, it fell still.

Pulling my stone shards out of its body to save for later, I picked up the fresh kill in my telekinesis. “Hard part, fucking done,” I proudly proclaimed, already eyeing up its armor. I’d cleaned stone hare kills in Blackwash before, so the process wasn’t exactly new to me. Unfortunately, I usually had a knife when I did so, but my newly split stone shards would have to do. Humming to myself, I gathered everything in my magic and set off for a clearing to build a fire and clean the kill. Thank the stars I wouldn’t be going hungry tonight!

Of course, while stone hares are pretty big, a lot of their size goes to their stout bones and armored hides. By the time I’d finally gotten its bony plates peeled back and started gutting the thing, I realized that I was famished enough to eat two. But it’d taken me this long to get the first hare ready for cooking and I didn’t really have enough time to go hunting for a second, especially since I’d chased the pack away. One would have to do, and if I didn’t find my way back to the settlement soon tomorrow morning, I would have to hunt a few more to keep my energy up.

Wood for fuel was pretty easy to find on the forest floor, so I had myself a fire going in no time. I didn’t bother making a spit to roast the hare with, however. I just held it in my telekinesis and slowly rolled it through the flames. I suddenly missed my forge again, because I used to take raw meat and slap it on top of the furnace to get it seared nicely through, medium rare. And if you think that sounds unsanitary… well, maybe. They did sometimes taste a little ashy, but a little seasoning took care of that problem. And I’d be surprised if any germs or disease could survive on the surface of a furnace regularly brought to hundreds of degrees.

But I had some cooked meat in short order, and I tore through it with a ravenous frenzy. Surge didn’t even complain about it; I think the hunger was getting to her enough that she put aside reminding me about how Equestria was largely vegetarian in favor of getting something into our belly. I cleaned the hare to its bones and tossed them into the fire, then relaxed with my back against a tree as my hunger pains slowly faded away. I was right in that I probably could have gone for two, but I wasn’t about to go back out there and start hunting again. Especially not when I looked around our little camp and saw that the rest of the forest was shrouded in shadow and that it would very shortly be pitch black.

“I don’t think we’re going to make much progress tonight,” I said. “It’s getting harder to see.”

“We’ll need to find someplace to shelter,” Surge said. “If the sounds of the forest are anything to go by, we don’t want to be caught out in the open.”

I perked my ears and listened to the woods around us. As the singing of the birds began to thin out with the encroaching darkness, new sounds began to replace them. Distant branches cracked and creaked, piles of leaves on the floor shuffled and hissed, and the occasional bark or yip of some distant creature would make its way to my camp. I thought I recognized the howls of wargs, and I began to shiver. As far as I knew, wargs were everywhere on Auris, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they called the Spines home too. Larger than a pony and roughly twice as fast, their teeth would rip me to shreds in an instant if they caught me. And exposed as I was in the open, I would be absolutely out of luck if a pack happened to stumble across my camp. With a little worry, I wondered how long it would take before they found my scent or the smell of blood and followed it back here.

I didn’t really want to wait around and find out. Standing up, I grabbed my shards of rock and a bundle of wood I hadn’t dumped into the fire with my magic. I pulled one of the lightly-burnt logs out to serve as a torch and held it in front of me where it could illuminate my path. “Yeah, let’s not be caught out here,” I said, and I paused just long enough to kick dirt over the remains of the fire. “I think getting eaten alive would really put a damper on this whole Grass Trial thing.”

So we ventured off into the forest, straining harder and harder to see as the trees grew darker and darker. Soon, the only light under the thick canopy of the giants was my single torch I carried with me. The night had become alive with the calls and cries of nocturnal animals, and enormous insects and grubs began to emerge from the damp soil in search of food. I screamed aloud and bolted off blindly through the forest when something crawled onto my hind leg, dozens of tiny feet gripping at the hair of my coat. I never found out what it was, only that it must have fallen loose in my panicked sprint. I didn’t really like bugs (I loathed the spider rats that skittered around the old prefab buildings in Blackwash), and I really didn’t like ones that crawled on me in the middle of the night that I couldn’t see. Surge had to take over for a few minutes while I shivered and cried inside of my head as I imagined what sort of horror had tried to latch onto me.

By the time I finally stepped back into control of my limbs, Surge seemed to have miraculously guided us to a passable shelter for the night. Before us stood the colossal trunk of one of the Spines’ petrified giants, only the roots had been exposed by a frothing river tearing between us and it. The whitewater rapids had dropped the earth out from under the tree, creating a dense network of enormous roots that formed almost a protective shell over what looked like a dry interior space. Not only would it provide shelter for the night, but it was another water source, and those were very important to cling to. My panicked retreat across the forest earlier coupled with the charred flesh of the stone hare I’d eaten had left me parched, and so I was glad to see water again. It was everything we were looking for, and I suddenly felt a lot better about surviving the night.

After stopping for another drink, I carefully built mana into my horn to teleport to the other side without stressing it out. I’d only had one stone hare to eat since waking up out here, and so my magic was still pretty spent, but I could afford to spend a little to get to the safety of the other side without having to look for a way to cross the river where I wouldn’t get swept away. Once there, I quickly scuttled to the underside of the tree and threw the meager supplies I’d scavenged onto a plot of dry land away from the river and flopped down onto my side. It wasn’t as cramped as the literal hole in the ground I’d hid with Nova and Gauge when we fled Hole, but the gnarled and petrified roots of the behemoth above me left the hollow feeling claustrophobic and tight.

“Home sweet home,” I muttered as I looked around. The shelter was secure and almost unassailable; I doubted that any wargs could claw their way inside and get to me, which was nice. The thick mass of roots and brush created a curtain against the outside world, and the only places that could see into the hollow clearly were along the banks of the river. Sighing, I closed my eyes and let my muscles relax. I should be safe inside for the night, and I was eager to get some rest and try to recover my energy for the next day.

“Are we just gonna crash?” I asked Surge. “I don’t think my body can stay awake much longer.”

“It would be wise just to recoup our strength,” Surge said. “We’ll need it for tomorrow. Wasting any energy trying to remain alert tonight would doom us tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I get that.” I rolled my neck and listened to the stiff vertebrae pop; I started to wish I had collected some plant material to use as a makeshift pillow or something. “I just hope nothing sneaks up on us. Say, do you know if there are any poisonous bugs or stuff around these parts?”

“Venomous?” Surge asked.

“What’s the fucking difference?”

Surge dropped that with an inward sigh; even she was too tired to argue the finer points of Equiish with me. “I’m sure there are, but I never encountered any. Most of the life on Auris tends to be more directly violent and lethal than that. We should be fine sleeping out here.”

“Good.” I let out a huge yawn and rolled over, turning my head away from the roaring rapids behind me. Hopefully I was tired enough that I’d fall right asleep and they wouldn’t keep me up. “Fucking… see you in the morning or something, Sparky.”

“Goodnight to you as well, Ember.”

And then I was gone, too tired to dream for the night.

But that didn’t mean Surge wasn’t.

\/\/\/\/\/

I sat on a metal bench in a domineering room made of brutal concrete. Across from me, a door with a frosted glass pane loomed, flanked on the left by a secretary tapping her way through a computer screen, and a soldier on the right. I tried for the eighth or ninth time to focus my eyes on the name written on the glass, but I simply couldn’t. My mind was still reeling from the day’s events, and I knew my makeup was ruined by the tears I hadn’t quite been able to suppress. Professionalism dictated that I should have gone home and cleaned myself up before coming here. I was here at the Synarchy’s request—no. No, it wasn’t a request. The Synarchy never requested anything of us. It only commanded, and like a good soldier, I obeyed my orders without question and without hesitation.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t wear my misery into this office so the monster who blocked my maternity license renewal could see what she had done to me.

I heard the click of door’s magnetic locks releasing before the secretary turned her attention to me. “The Councilor will see you now,” she announced, and her eyes flicked back to her screen as soon as she decided she’d given the wreck of a mare on the bench enough attention. I was slow to get up, but when I did, I found my hooves plodding toward the door, knowing that there was nothing I could do but let fate drag me onwards.

I didn’t bother to knock on the door before entering. I merely opened it, stepped inside, and moved right for the closest chair, firmly shutting the door behind me.

The pane rattled in its frame.

My eyes stayed glued to the desk in front of me; I couldn’t bring myself to look at the gray mare sitting behind it. I only wanted her to spit out my orders and send me away so I could go back to my husband and wallow in my misery with him. That would have been the kindest thing… but the Synarchy was never big on kindness. Only efficiency and order. And I was just another part that had gotten out of line and needed to be brought back to where it could be most useful. The machine never stopped turning, even when it chipped the corners of the gears that turned it in its merciless grind forward.

I did not get my wish. Instead, the mare gently put her hooves on the edge of her desk, just inside the upper reach of my vision. “For what it’s worth… I’m sorry, Dr. Surge. As a fellow mare and a mother of my own, I know your pain.”

No you don’t, I wanted to scream at her. She was a member of the Synarchy’s High Council, second only to the High Queen herself—on paper. But I knew as well as she did that the High Queen was little more than a demented shell of a mare the Council paraded around to let them do what they want. I’d seen as much during the test run of our mana torus. And I knew for a fact that she never had her maternity license revoked or was asked to sacrifice something for the nation. She could do what she wanted, and there were no repercussions. And even though I was one of the best scientists—no, the best scientist the Synarchy had in the field of manatronics, I had no such freedoms.

So instead, I only bobbed my head. “We all do our part,” I said, flatly recycling a line I’d used so many times throughout my life. Then, steeling myself, I raised my head to look her in the eye. “But if the Synarchy is going to cut my foalbearing days short, may I at least know why?”

That was just the polite way of asking why she had done this to me. I’d always wanted to have a large family when I left my military service, and I’d been allowed to bear two foals. But that wasn’t why I was so hurt by the rejection of my renewal; my pain lay in the fear of what would happen to my family if the Synarchy needed me this desperately that they would deny me from taking time to raise more children.

The Councilor sighed and stood up, and that made me raise an eyebrow. She was usually such a calm and collected mare, but something was obviously bothering her. She held her tongue until she walked to the window of her office, overlooking the towering skyscrapers of Canterlot below us. Far beyond them, a flight of two cruisers and an escort of corvettes slowly lifted into the sky, ready to do battle against Coalition ships somewhere else above the planet. As a former naval engineer myself, my heart went out to the souls on those ships. Gone were the days of unquestioned orbital superiority the Synarchy had enjoyed years ago. The Coalition could finally field ships capable of squaring off against our own—and in ever-increasing numbers.

“The Synarchy is in desperate need of your skill and knowledge,” the Councilor said, finally turning away from the window. “I think you’re a smart enough mare to realize that the war has gone nothing like the propaganda and drivel we spew out across the radio on a daily basis suggests.”

I nodded. “I realized that when Whinnypeg’s suburbs were flattened by orbital bombardment two months ago,” I said. “That wouldn’t happen if we were winning.”

The Councilor’s shoulders sagged. “We need your help if we’re going to turn the tide,” she said. Walking back to her desk, she opened a drawer and pulled out a folder. Setting it in front of me, she gingerly pushed it forward with an almost grim finality. “I’ve taken the liberty of getting everything in order for you. You can read this folder so long as you’re in this office, but the moment you leave, I will break the etch glass. This is Onyx Star clearance, do you understand?”

Blinking in surprise, I pulled the folder closer and lifted it in my magic. Printed across the front in stenciled lettering were the words ‘PROTOCOL: DUSK’. Opening it up, I pulled out the sheets of etch glass and scanned through them, my eyes growing progressively wider.

When I was finally finished, I felt my chest tighten up. Putting the folder down, I looked at the Councilor with wide eyes. “Auris… it’s real?”

She only nodded. “It is.”

“But… but that’s impossible!” I stood up in shock. “The navy doesn’t have drives that are good enough for interstellar travel. I know because I worked on them for my service! Any attempts to reach another star system would take centuries, let alone one that has a habitable world!”

“You’d be surprised.” The Councilor took the folder back and waved a hoof. “The details need not concern you, but the technology exists, courtesy of our High Queen’s labors. The brightest minds of the Synarchy will never be her equal when she’s lucid and devoted to the diversions the Council gives her. But this colony has been kept a secret for years now, and it will continue to be so.” Then, hesitating, she put the folder out of sight. “It is easy to do so when ponies only go one way. Ships are lost in combat all the time; it’s easy to make a ship disappear to bring ponies to Auris and nobody will be the wiser.”

My mind came to a screeching halt when I heard her say ‘one way’. I looked up, horrified, and she gave me only a grim nod in return. “You… you aren’t… b-but my family!”

“The Synarchy needs everypony who can help to give their all,” the Councilor said. “We must all be prepared to sacrifice for Equestria, or there will not be an Equestria left to sacrifice for.”

“But my children are still young!” I shouted at her in dismay. “Circuit is only five, and Solder—Celestia, Solder is two! You can’t take me away from them! You can’t take away their mommy!”

“There are a million foals younger without either of their parents, each suffering because of the war,” the Councilor grimly noted. “A million more will grow up orphans if this war is not brought to an end, and soon.”

“So my children are the price to pay for Equestria?”

“When your husband is deployed to the front, they will be taken care of by the state,” the Councilor told me, as if that would help me feel any better. “They will not know want. They will be raised well, and they will become effective members of our great nation. Perhaps one day, when the war is over, you will be allowed to see them again.”

I was caught between rage and desperate sorrow. Tears streamed down my face as I clenched my teeth and had to restrain from tearing the Councilor’s head from her body. But I couldn’t; I knew that my family and everypony I knew would be tortured beyond imagination in reprisal, and I knew that I would be forced to watch. That was if the soldier standing outside her office didn’t merely gun me down as soon as he heard the screams.

As I struggled and raged in my seat, the Councilor stood up and had the gall to put her hoof on my shoulder. “Go back and be with your family,” she told me, “but you will not say a word about what was discussed here to anypony—not even your husband. You will have until the end of the week to prepare your team for transfer to Auris and say goodbye to friends and family. Celestia willing, you’ll see them again when the war finally ends… however long that may be.”

I managed to choke some words out of my constricting throat. “But… the weekend is in three days.”

The Councilor merely nodded. “I know,” she said. “So use them wisely.”

\/\/\/\/\/

I woke up with tears staining my cheeks the next morning, and it took me a minute to remember why.

Surge had come to before me, and she’d moved our shared body down to the river, peering intently at the churning water before us. A small pile of four-eyed fish had been laid on a rock next to us, their necks snapped with a telekinetic twist. Even as Surge felt my presence appear in our head, she snatched a fish out of the river with my magic and broke its neck with a thought before adding it to the pile.

“I took the liberty of catching breakfast,” she said, picking up the five fish she’d collected. “It seemed like a better solution than bashing stone hares with rocks.”

“Can’t say you’re wrong about that.” As I switched back into full control of my body, I turned away from the river and stared at the fish, trying to push Surge’s private memories out of my mind. “I’ve never cooked fish before. I’ve never fucking cleaned one. There really aren’t a lot of fish on top of a fucking mountain.”

“You have to scrape the scales off and gut it like any other animal,” Surge said. “Be careful of the little bones inside. They’re almost as bad as fish back on Equus.”

Taking the sharp edge of the stone, I began to run it against the grain of the fish’s scales and started to knock them loose. “You cleaned Auris fish before?”

“Never personally, but my installation was in Bluewater Gorge, remember? Some of the ponies on my team liked to fish to pass the time. Sometimes they’d dissect fish for fun when there was a lull between testing phases.” When I snorted, she shrugged. “Scientists get bored too, especially when they’re isolated light years away from everything they’ve ever known.”

“Yeah, that probably sucks. Probably about as much as this does when I don’t have a fucking knife or anything!” I growled in growing frustration as I tried to cut open the fish’s flesh to clean it out, but the rocks I had to work with were not nearly fine enough or sharp enough to cut cleanly through its skin. Groaning, I flopped the descaled fish onto the ground and picked up the next one. “Fuck it, I’ll just cook these things whole and pry the meat off with my magic. Otherwise, this is going to be way more effort than it’s worth.”

And even then, it still kind of was, but after a lot of effort cooking the stupid fish with my magic and burning a good bunch of it in the process, I at least had something to eat. And when I finally began to stuff my face with food, it didn’t matter how much effort it had taken to open them up. I could finally stop feeling like shit and actually focus on making it out of this forest in one piece. But I noticed I still trembled from time to time, and my throat felt tight, like I'd spent the whole night sobbing. Perhaps I had.

When I noticed Surge wasn't going to say anything about it, I decided to clear my throat and broach the topic. "Surge, that dream, is... is that when you stopped believing?"

I felt Surge freeze inside my brain, and after a moment, sorrow began to soak over me like a tidal wave. "Yes," was all she managed.

"Only three days, I... I didn't know it was that bad. I couldn't imagine what that was like."

"I couldn't, either," Surge weakly admitted. My whole body trembled again as her inner turmoil swept through me. "When you're growing up, you don't think about the sacrifices you have to make. Not in explicit terms, anyway. When I married my husband, I promised him we'd have five children together. We'd be a strong and healthy family, loyal to the Synarchy, and we'd help win the war. But..."

The pain came at me again. The rejection at the Citizen's Office bit deep, even though it wasn't my pain and wasn't my memory. "How could you possibly say goodbye to everything you knew in three days?"

"I couldn't," Surge admitted. "I had to leave a lot of messages to ponies I wouldn't be able to see. I never got to see the responses before I departed. And even then, I had to spend the third day in a hotel, far from my family, before I left Equus for good. How do you say goodbye to your husband and children in two days, not knowing whether you'll ever see them again?"

It was a question I couldn't answer, and I doubted Surge intended for me to do so anyway. I could only stare helplessly at the river rushing past the shore as she drowned herself in sorrow. "I... don't know," I said. "I really don't."

Surge mirthlessly chuckled. "Well, neither do I. I thought dying would solve those worries for me. I could see my family again, but..." She sighed. "That's not how things worked out. It seems I'll have to wait." She used my throat to whimper and tremble one last time. "I want to know if my foals grew up and lead good lives. I want to know if they remembered their mommy. If they didn't..."

Stars, I wished I could hug her. She needed it so badly. It was like through that one memory and conversation, everything about Surge made sense. She'd been betrayed by the country she'd been raised to believe since she was a filly, and even now, two centuries later, she was trying to reconcile what happened to her with what she believed in. But I knew I had to say something, I just didn't know what, so I took a bite of fish to stall for a response.

Before I could say anything, I heard a twig snap behind me.

My ears perked straight upright. Swallowing the piece of fish I had in my mouth, I turned toward the noise. Almost immediately, I froze as still as a statue, my eyes widening as some instinctive fear gripped at my gut. There, standing not even twenty yards away, was a warg. Its four eyes were locked on me, watching every tremble that ran through my body, and the hooked teeth of its lower jaw meshed with the razors poking out from beneath its upper lips. Two tails swished back and forth, and the claws on its six paws dug into the earth as its muscles tensed.

And it wasn’t alone. I saw movement out of my peripheral vision as more began to circle around me, though I didn’t dare break eye contact with the first one. I didn’t know how many there were, but I knew there were more than me, and that was a problem. I was about to become a very bloody chew toy for a pack of monstrous wolves, and that was absolutely not okay. I didn’t even have a gun to fight back with. All I had were two rocks and a pile of fish bones, and somehow I didn’t think I would get the wargs to choke on the bones no matter how much I asked.

Ember, Surge warned me, worry creeping into her voice. She'd pushed away her inner turmoil and sorrow to focus on the danger at hoof, and I was at least grateful to have her mind working alongside mine. Don’t back down. Don’t make a move. If we stand our ground, maybe we’ll be fine.

I swallowed hard. I think that’s wishful thinking, I replied. We’re gonna have to fight.

Rather than let the pack get the first move, I suddenly widened my stance and let magic flare up on my horn. The wargs immediately barked and began to charge, but my magic was at least faster. I immediately erected a semicircle of fire around me, crackling flames taller than my head bursting forth from the ground. Animals, whether they were from Equus or Auris, feared fire, and I hoped that would work to my advantage. And astonishingly, it did. I saw the warg in front of me dig its paws into the dirt and slide to a stop as the wall of fire lashed out at it, forcing it back. I quickly spun around to make sure I was safe from the other end of the semicircle, and I saw one of the wargs running away as fire latched onto its tails. A third prowled around the edge of the fire, lunging forward only to retreat when the flames crackled in its direction. I was safe for now, but I hadn’t exactly had any time to digest my breakfast. Maintaining the wall of fire was taking its toll on me, and I didn’t know how long I’d be able to keep it up.

Something Surge was sharply critical of. We should have teleported to safety while we had the energy, she said. Once that wall goes down, we’ll die here.

“Fuck off,” I growled at her through gritted teeth. “Get us out of here, then.”

You don’t have the mana. If I teleported us someplace far away enough to be safe from the wargs, we’ll pass out cold. And even then, I can’t guarantee they won’t find us while we’re uncon—wait. There were only three…

I blinked and counted the two remaining wargs. “So? What the fuck does that have to do with anything?!”

Wargs hunt in packs of four or five!

Almost as soon as she said it, searing pain raced through my left hindleg. I cried out in pain and my magic failed as something heavy dragged me backwards. Casting a terrified look over my shoulder, I saw the fourth warg sinking its claws into the riverbed, its fur soaking wet. Did the fucking thing jump through the rapids to get me?! Fuck!

My legs instinctively bucked and kicked before I could even react, trying to shake the monster loose, but I couldn’t just slip out of its bite, not with teeth like that. To make matters worse, the other two who remained jumped through the dying flames to rush me as my magic failed. It felt like I was watching my own impending doom in slow motion. So many teeth lunging for me, ready to tear the flesh from my bones and drag my intestines out of my still-screaming body. It was, all things considered, an absolutely terrible way to die.

It was a good thing, then, that Surge and I were both fighters. We wouldn’t go down quietly.

My horn flared blue as Surge caught the two lunging for us in her magic. That blue shifted to orange when I turned her telekinetic grip into fire, engulfing them in an inferno that clung to their furry coats. We turned my horn to the last one still clinging onto my leg, but that was where our luck ran out. Seeing its friends flee, it jumped backwards, its six muscular legs easily kicking it off the ground—and dragging me with it. It fell over backwards into the rapids, and I could only scream helplessly as its weight whipped me through the air. My shoulders and hind quarters hit the frothy surface of the water square on, and I coughed just before my head could go under.

And to make matters worse, the warg still hadn’t let go. As its six legs secured its footing against the rocks in the rapids, it twisted and began to whip its head back and forth. It took all my effort and then some on Surge’s part to keep my mouth closed and not scream as I felt its teeth rip through my flesh. Surge mercifully began to dampen the painful sensations coming from my leg, but that didn’t stop the whiplash from tearing at my neck as the monster tried to throttle the life out of me and drown me in the water. I was choking on the white water around me, and my forelegs flailed in front of my head to keep the warg from bashing it against any of the rocks.

Then my desperately kicking hind leg scored a hit. I don’t know what part of the warg I bucked, but it recoiled and let go of my leg. Freed from its grip, I struggled to get my head above the water, barely managing to suck down another breath before the strong current dragged me back under again.

Sunken rocks whizzed by as I spun around and around in the water. Surge pulled my limbs together and covered my head with my hooves, but as my mangled hind leg struck rock after rock, I realized I could hardly move it, much less tuck it against my body. Dull aches made their way to my brain, and I knew that if it wasn’t for Surge, I’d be screaming in pain right now. But even if I wasn’t screaming in pain, I certainly had to fight to keep myself from screaming in terror as the riverbed blurred past.

A drop in the rapids sent me spinning out of the foamy froth for a brief second, and I took another breath while I had the momentary opportunity. Then I was down again, the knee of my foreleg taking a sharp crack on a rock poking out from the ground. The water around me began to take on a crimson tinge as my profusely-bleeding hind leg dumped my lifeblood into the river, and I knew I had to get free of the rapids now or I would die, either from rocks I barely avoided through luck and desperate flailing, or from simple blood loss from the massive gash in my leg. I was already feeling woozy, and I didn’t know if that was the blood loss, the adrenaline kicking my exhausted body into overdrive, sheer terror, or all three. Even inside my brain, Surge’s shouts had become muddled and distant. Black spots began to dance around my vision, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before they coalesced into a total blackout.

Then, above all the chaos, I heard Surge scream one word clearly through my brain:

Rock!

I reached my forelegs out on instinct, and instead of bashing my brains against a sunken stone, I coughed as the rapids threw me onto the rock, crushing the wind from my lungs just as sure as the stone bruised my ribs. But it wasn’t until I began coughing that I realized my head was above the water and I was clinging onto salvation. This single boulder, overgrown with moss and slime, was all that stood between me and the rest of the raging rapids surging over my flanks. Driven on by strength fueled by desperation, I dragged myself out of the water and onto the rock, ignoring the disgusting feeling of the slime beneath my chest. Survival was the only thing that mattered; everything else was secondary.

Panting, I looked back at my leg, and nearly lost the breakfast I’d eaten. The warg’s teeth had ripped so much flesh off of my leg, severing muscle and tearing tendons free from the bone that now glistened in the muted light of the forest. Those severed strands of muscle twitched and tugged at nothing when I tried to move my leg, and the blood profusely pouring out of it had already painted the rock red. I doubted I had even a minute left to live at the rate it was going, and it was already getting exceptionally hard to focus on my injury.

I had no other options. I needed to stop the bleeding now, and there was only one thing I could do.

Not even Surge’s pain dampening was enough to stop my screams as I set fire to my destroyed leg.

I heard Surge crying out to me, but I was already too faint to even hear what she was saying. Her words, too, had turned to garbled mutterings and fruitless warnings. As my body started to shut down and I began to pass out, it dragged her along with me, despite her desperate efforts to remain coherent.

It was a fruitless struggle; my limbs fell slack, and soon we were both gone, our shared body helplessly clinging to a slippery rock with only three working limbs.

Chapter 35: Where Survivors Thrive

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Chapter 35: Where Survivors Thrive

It was many hours before I finally came to.

I awoke to find myself shivering on the same rock I’d clutched to when I passed out. The light had shifted, but it hadn’t yet dimmed, so I’d only been out for most of the day. It was probably four in the afternoon by my best estimates of the light, and even though I was in the middle of a river, I couldn’t see the sun through the gap in the canopy above. Heavy clouds had started to move in, and it seemed like the heavens would begin to rain soon, if only to spite my survival.

My survival… I almost didn’t want to look at my leg. I don’t know how many times I’d seriously hurt my legs in my life (I was a stupid filly who got hurt a lot in Blackwash) but this easily took the cake. What had once been flesh and blood was now little more than charred flesh and cracking bone. My desperate burn of my wound had saved my life, but it had likely cost me my leg. I knew that the flesh would never heal from that wound, and if I didn’t have it amputated, infection would set in soon, and then I’d die that way. What kind of a mare would I be with only three legs? How could I hope to fight and serve the Sentinels when I had to pogo around everywhere on three hooves? I tried to pretend that I could still save my leg, but that argument fell apart as soon as I breathed. As soon as I got the tools for it, I’d have to have it amputated, at least from the knee down. There was very little I could save thanks to the warg’s teeth and my magic.

Thankfully, and with no small note of irony… it didn’t hurt. I guess my fire had burned away all my nerve endings in the leg, so I couldn’t actually feel it anymore. It still itched and ached around where the fire had stopped singeing my flesh, but that was it. I might as well have already lost the leg; I certainly couldn’t sense it, and I definitely couldn’t move it. It was just dead weight affixed to my hip, and there was nothing I could do about that until I could get it removed.

This fucking code better have been worth it.

Surge started to come to momentarily after me. “Em… ber?” she moaned, twisting my face into a wince and craning my head back. “We’re… still alive?”

“Alive, yeah,” I told her, looking away from the mess of my leg. “In one piece… no.”

We shivered, a combination of passing out so close to the cold water and of the blood loss through our leg. All our efforts the previous night and this morning to try and recover to make our way back to the settlement had been for nothing. We were even worse off than when we’d woken up the day before, dehydrated and starving. Not only was I dehydrated and starving again, but I felt like my head was swimming as dizzy delirium washed my vision from side to side, my eyeballs feeling like they were floating in my skull.

“We’re gonna die out here, aren’t we?” I asked her.

“I died once,” Surge muttered, and even then she started to try and get us off of the rock. “I’m not going to do it again.”

She took charge, leading my body away from the rock and crawling across the stones to the far bank of the river. I merely let her work, not wanting to get involved and risk sending us tumbling back into the water. If the rapids swept us away again, there was very little chance we’d be able to repeat our miraculous feat. Even still, wave after wave of dull, aching pain shot its way through my thigh as my heart beat and tried to send blood to a limb that didn’t work anymore. I knew I was lucky to be alive after a warg had managed to sink its fangs into my flesh, but the sensation made me start to wish it had finished the job.

But for better or for worse, we were alive now, and if we didn’t do our damnedest to keep it that way, we’d be fucked in short order. Surge was at least determined to survive, even if I was starting to have second thoughts about the whole ‘life on three legs’ thing. She pushed me onwards, and when we finally made it back to the riverbed, it was through her persistence that we began to stagger through the trees. Our gait was hardly quick, nor was it comfortable, since we had to compensate for our useless leg, but it was better than nothing. Bit by bit, we shambled deeper into the forest. Bit by bit, we continued our desperate search for the Feati tribe.

Bit by bit, I started to regain some of the confidence the warg had throttled out of me this morning. If I died, that monster would win, and I was not going to die because of a six-legged wolf. I’d wander around the forest until I couldn’t wander any more, and maybe by the end of it all I’d find the settlement again.

“How long do you think they’ll wait for us?” I asked Surge. “Before they assume we’re dead?”

“Not too much longer, I don’t think,” she replied. “We were a day’s walk away from the settlement when we woke up yesterday. We should have found a way to make it back by now, I think.”

“Yeah, well, we’re not part of the tribe,” I said. “I’m sure there’s some easy way they’d use to find their way back home.”

Surge shrugged my shoulders mid-step. “Growing up in the Spines, Feati foals probably know most of the surrounding area,” she said. “It would be a test to see if they could survive and get home in one piece once they figure out where they are. We don’t have any of that.” She swallowed hard, and I felt her attention turn to the leg we had dragging on the ground behind us. “Ember…”

“We’ll get it chopped off when we get back to the tribe,” I said through gritted teeth. “Otherwise infection will kill us.”

“We may not have to.” When I raised an eyebrow in surprise, she elaborated. “Teka healed a gunshot on you, remember? Her tattoos let her magically repair your flesh. Maybe the Feati can do the same for your leg.”

I didn’t even want to look at the mangled mess dragging through the dirt after me. “I… don’t know,” I said, worry creeping into my voice. “That’s a little more serious than a gunshot.”

“It’s worth a try, at least.”

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do about that until we get back to them,” I said. Setting my eyes on the tree directly in front of me, I tried to focus on limping to it without swaying or staggering too much. I wondered how long it would be until the delirium set in. Once I lost my marbles from blood loss and exhaustion, it would be up to Surge to get us back home safely—assuming my malfunctioning brain didn’t take her down with me like it did when we passed out on the rocks.

When I made it to the tree, I paused for a second to rest, and then I set my sights on the next tree in front of me. Hopefully by just going from tree to tree in short bursts, I could make steady progress without getting lost and turning in circles. The last thing we needed was to double back on ourselves and waste any more time. It was slow and agonizing work, and I kept my head on a swivel to spot any predators sneaking up on me, but apart from the background noise of the wildlife and birds flitting from branch to branch above me, I didn’t encounter anything. The closest I got was when some bird shit hit me on the shoulder from somewhere high above, so I grabbed a cluster of fallen leaves and wiped it out of my coat, cursing at the bird the entire time.

Just as I began to lose hope that we’d ever make any progress in finding our way back to the settlement, Surge stopped me in my tracks. “Wait,” she said, flicking my eyes up the length of a tree. “Do you see that?”

I squinted and managed to focus my bleary eyes on what she had pointed out, but as soon as I could, I gasped in surprise. Smeared onto the bark of the tree far above my head was a blue stain of paint, with two smaller splotches of yellow and orange to the right of it. I immediately surveyed the rest of the trees in the area and spotted another petrified titan with paint staining its surface. Memories of my march to the Feati settlement came back to me, and I realized that we’d accidentally stumbled into some of their waypoint markers. Using these, we could find our way back.

“We’re fucking saved!” I exclaimed, hobbling up to the tree and putting my hoof on its base. “We’re not gonna die out here after all! We’re gonna live!”

“If we can follow the signs all the way back to the settlement,” Surge cautioned me. “And if we’re going to do that, we can’t afford to waste any time. The longer we take to get back home, the less likely we’ll even make it there.”

Pushing off of the tree, I set my sights on the next smear of paint and began to trundle towards it. “Yeah, I know. We’ll make it, though. We didn’t come this far just to die, right?”

“I hope not. Like I said, I don’t want to die a second time.” She set my features into a determined frown. “Let’s just focus on making it from one tree to the next. Talk will tire us out.”

I nodded and set my hooves—or three of them, at least—in a line. If we could just follow the paint in short spurts, we could make it back easily. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how exactly the Feati measured the distance between the marks and how much of the spectrum we’d have to go through before we got back to the settlement. All I knew was that red was the end, so I made sure that we moved towards the marks that had warmer colors on them. With every tree we passed, a little bit of blue disappeared, with yellow taking its place. All the while I kept on the lookout for more wargs or other wildlife that wanted to end me, but the forest seemed curiously bare. Orange leaves swayed above maroon grass, but the forest was still, quiet, dead. There was hardly any noise save for the whooshing of the wind through the leaves and the crunch of my hooves on the ground. Though I heard songbirds singing in the distance, their songs were very faint and far away.

“Something’s not right about this,” I said, frowning up at the trees. Yellow had entirely superseded the blue on the trees, and even that was beginning to fade to orange. We were much closer to safety now, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Not when something was up and I had no idea what it could be.

“Wildlife always grows quiet when predators are about,” Surge said, and she turned my attention back toward the ground. My eyes swept through trees and undergrowth, but we couldn’t see anything. “We need to be careful.”

“I hope it’s not another one of those invisible giant centipede things,” I said in a low voice. “We definitely will not survive an encounter with it.”

“It would have a hard time burrowing in a forest with this many roots and obstructions,” Surge said. “So we should be safe from those creatures. But we don’t know what else might be living here…”

It was then that my eyes settled on something we’d missed the first time. A red-brown shape lied underneath some ferns and growth maybe fifty yards ahead of me. Frowning, I trudged over to it, using my magic to pull away the plants so I could get a better look at what it was.

A warg’s face glared back at me, tongue lolling out of the side of its mouth. I screamed and jumped back, but the monster didn’t react. In fact, it didn’t move at all. Swallowing hard, I approached it again, and then I saw the blood that had pooled around its body, staining the dirt beneath it and spattering the leaves of the shrubs concealing it. It was stone dead, but when I put my hoof on its chest, it was still warm. It had died recently, maybe within the past few hours; it definitely hadn’t been dead overnight, otherwise the cool night air would have taken care of its body heat easily. I tried to roll it over with my magic to see what had killed it, but it was too heavy and my horn was too weak. Still, I couldn’t see any cuts or slashes to its face or neck, which is what I would have expected had another animal killed it. The wounds that had snuffed out its life were somewhere on its left side, sandwiched between the cooling meat of the monster and the spongy ground where it rested.

“I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” I said, stepping away from the body.

“Perhaps the Feati killed it,” Surge suggested. “They would likely have to fend off wargs all the time while roaming the forest.”

“But why wouldn’t they take it back to their homes for the meat and fur?”

Surge shrugged. “Perhaps they simply couldn’t if they were out here to do something else. Or maybe they’ll have other ponies from the settlement drag it back.”

“I’m not going to count on that,” I said, and I started walking onwards. “I don’t get that lucky.”

But now I felt like I was balancing on a razor’s edge. Something had killed a warg out here, and though Surge thought it was more Feati, I wasn’t so sure. Regardless of what it was, it was more dangerous than the thing that had nearly killed me this morning, so I wasn’t going to take it lightly. And even as we left the corpse of the monster behind, the sounds of the wildlife still hadn’t returned. Surge and I were alone in the middle of the Spines, and I was growing more tired by the minute as I struggled onwards. When I got back to the settlement, the first thing I would do was chow down on a couple bowls of that really delicious stew they made, followed shortly after by a long nap. It was the least I deserved, right?

A creek cut across our path, and I stumbled down to the water to get a drink and keep myself hydrated. Though I was weak from starving for two days, and the blood loss had certainly taken a lot of my energy away, I knew I was suffering the most from dehydration. You lose that much blood and you need fluids, especially when you’re hiking your way through the forest. But when I took a few gulps of water from the creek, I frowned and stared down at it. Was it just me, or did the water taste a little… coppery?

And then I saw why. Just a little ways upstream, three bodies were face down in the water, their coats speckled with blood and their corpses slowly draining into the creek. I grimaced and stuck my tongue out on instinct, but then my face froze when I saw the tribal tattoos decorating their bodies. I immediately lumbered over as fast as I could, even though I knew I was too late for these ponies. They had been dead for a little while now, and I had the feeling that the culprit was the same one who had killed the warg.

But I could examine these bodies.

I grabbed the smallest of the bunch, a mare who couldn’t have been more than fourteen winters old, and dragged her out of the water with my magic. The water had kept her blood from staining her coat, which made it a little hard to find her cause of death under her waterlogged deep blue hair, but after feeling around with my hooves, I found the wounds on her chest—six of them in total, and all neatly grouped together. Surge and I just stared at them when we realized what they were.

Bullet holes.

I swallowed hard and took a step back, my gaze falling on the other two ponies. I didn’t even need to go over and inspect them to see if they also had died from gunshots; I already knew that they had. And I knew that the dead warg we’d passed had also died from gunshots, but its hide had been too thick for the bullets to exit the other side.

“Slavers?” Surge asked. “The Feati have a problem with them.”

“They wouldn’t have killed them,” I said, shaking my head. “At least, not the young mare. She would have been worth her weight in C’s.” I ran my eyes over the gunshots again. “Something automatic did this to her. Two bursts of three. That’s why they’re grouped so cleanly. And burst-fire weapons are usually military grade… right?”

Surge nodded. “All the army’s rifles when I was around were either single-fire or burst-fire. You wouldn’t find something like this in a colonist’s house. These guns would’ve been kept in an armory.”

“Or made,” I quietly said as a grim realization suddenly dawned on me. Gritting my teeth, I turned away from the dead and splashed my way across the creek, struggling very hard to move quickly with my lame leg. “We need to get back to the settlement as fast as we can!”

“Why?” Surge asked, and she forced me to slow down to avoid injuring my leg any further. “If whoever did this is still around here, we have to be careful!”

“It’s not a ‘whoever’ that did this,” I said, forcing myself to speed up and blunder forwards again. “It’s Yeoman.”

Surge froze in thought, the resistance she’d applied to my muscles slipping away. “You really think so?”

“I know for a fucking fact,” I growled. “He was looking for this place too, and I knew he couldn’t have been far behind us. We only got here first because we had Teka to follow. And if he’s this close to the settlement—!”

Gunshots in this distance cut me off. They were faint and the leaves of the trees distorted the sound, but I could recognize them regardless. The rapid fire staccato of burst-fire and automatic weapons began to crack through the air, paired by muffled screams. That told me everything I needed to know. They had reached the settlement, and they would carve a bloody swath through it until they found what they wanted.

And not only would they slaughter every innocent who crossed their path, but my friends were there, too. They knew Yeoman, and Yeoman knew them. If he got his opportunity he’d kill them all. They were in danger, and I had to help. But I could only move so fast on a lame leg.

The closer I came, the louder the screams and gunshots grew. A haze hung in the air, and I could smell burning wood. Casualties began to appear along the path, Feati ponies either dead or dying, the fallen moaning for help or crying as they left slick trails of crimson behind them. I couldn’t stop to help them, though; there were too many for me to help each one. My best course of action was to cut Yeoman off and stop his rampage as quickly as I could, otherwise nothing would be left of the Feati. And if I could stop him here… if I could kill him here… not only would I have finally avenged Zip, but I would put a stop to Reclaimer’s plans to get all the pieces of the code. After coming up just short at the Bluewater Gorge, this was my chance to finally come out on top.

That chance almost ended before it began. The forest opened up in front of me into the clearing around the Feati settlement. A flickering orange haze filled the area, but my eyes fell on two ponies standing in front of me. They weren’t Feati, that much I could tell at a glance. They wore armor and they carried rifles, and the moment they saw me stagger my way into the open, they pointed their rifles at me.

My horn simultaneously lit up in blue and orange glows as Surge and I cast spells at the same time. I reached out with my telekinesis to disarm the unicorn raising his weapon at me, and blue fire flew out of my horn at the pegasus standing next to him, swallowing her up in flames as she shrieked and screamed. Casting two spells at once made me dizzy and falter, and my grip on the unicorn’s weapon failed as I stumbled to the ground. Before he could shoot me, however, a pair of small caliber automatics cracked to life behind him, and his neck erupted into spurts of blood as he fell. As my swirling vision finally centered itself again, my eyes focused on SCaR hovering over the unicorn’s corpse, his barrels smoking faintly.

“Boy am I glad to see you!” I exclaimed, dragging myself back to my hooves. SCaR whistled and flew over, and I could hear him making some kind of concerned chattering when its camera fell on my maimed leg. Still, I didn’t waste any time snatching up the rifle the unicorn had dropped when SCaR surprised him, sparing only a quick glance at the feebly twitching, burning body of the mare Surge had lit on fire as the flames consumed her. “Where’s everypony else?”

SCaR whistled and chattered and flew off ahead of me. I definitely didn’t know how to interpret his language like Gauge did, but it was pretty obvious he wanted me to follow him. So follow him I did, at least as quick as I could manage, and I set my hooves in motion toward the settlement.

Which was nothing short of a hellscape. The gates to the settlement had been blown to pieces by some kind of explosive charge, and the thick tree trunks that had provided a sturdy defense against the creatures of the Spines were now little more than splinters and fuel for the growing fires. Bullet holes pockmarked the settlement walls, and the bodies of Feati warriors lay slumped over against the walls or crumpled on the ground. I only spotted one other body from Yeoman’s group, a stallion with a spear run through his neck. But the Ivory City had outfitted their soldiers too well to be challenged by the primitives with their simple weapons and tattoo magic, and even if Yeoman only had a few dozen ponies with him, he could easily kill his way through the entire village.

Shooting echoed from all around the settlement, along with the screams of the terrified natives trying to flee from the carnage. Ponies streamed past me, simply trying to escape the settlement and the fires raging within, and I had to quickly get to the side so that the panicked stampede wouldn’t flatten me into the ground. The shooting seemed to be coming from everywhere, but I couldn’t search everywhere at once.

Up to the longhouse, Surge thought at me, the only way she could be certain I’d hear her over the roar of terror pounding on my ears. That’s where our friends were, and that’s likely where they left your rifle and ammunition. We’ll need it to punch through to Yeoman.

And that’s likely where he’s headed anyway, I thought back at her. Sure enough, SCaR also started moving in that direction, flying well above the rush of ponies below him. He pivoted back to make sure I was following, and when I started limping after him, he resumed his flight through the settlement, leading me onwards. As I moved away from the gate, the fleeing masses of civilians thinned out, and I began to enter the thick of the fight.

All around me, Feati warriors clashed with Ivory City soldiers in a one-sided slaughter. Though they fought bravely, and they somehow stood their ground amidst the hail of bullets and magic chewing through their ranks, it made little difference to the disciplined ponies they squared off against. Shoulder-mounted automatics ripped those in the open to pieces while unicorn marksmares fired with magic-held rifles from a safer range. And though the fire and ice the Feati mustered was a terrifying force in its own right, it simply wasn’t a match for the professional corps of ponies they had to square off against.

But I was here, and now I could help turn the tide. I wasn’t familiar with the rifle I’d scavenged off of the unicorn SCaR had killed, but it had a barrel, it had sights, and it had a trigger. That was all I needed to work it. I sighted down the first unicorn’s head from behind and pulled the trigger, and a burst of three bullets blew his skull to pieces and sent his helmet flying off his head. I immediately switched targets to the next pony and dropped her with another burst, and only then did the squad of Ivory City soldiers realize that they were under attack from behind.

When they responded, it was with such a decisive swiftness I wasn’t used to that I was almost stunned. The two ponies in front of me split in opposite directions to scramble to cover, and as soon as they were out of my line of sight they quickly brought their guns to bear on the Feati warriors that had attempted to seize the advantage I’d given them and cut them down in the streets. They shouted to each other, probably through radio devices to be heard over the noise, and suddenly I had ponies shooting at me from my flank. I backpedaled and managed to press myself flat against a hut before the flanking fire could rip me to pieces, and even as I did so, a shockwave of telekinesis sent the sacks of foodstuffs between me and the first two ponies flying, removing the one thing obscuring me from their line of sight.

I forced myself to my hooves and lunged for the next piece of cover as bullets came flying in around me. Somehow I barely managed to avoid being hit, clumsy as I was with my dead weight leg dragging through the turf behind me. An explosive of some kind tore apart the roof and the walls of the hut I’d moved to, however, and again I found myself cowering behind cover as bullets bit into the earth all around me. Fuck, these ponies were relentless! Why couldn’t I fight stupid Crimson raiders or slavers who could only shoot about as well as they could fuck?!

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone. SCaR triumphantly whirred in from the side, gunning down the ponies that had started to flank me before they could react. I immediately poked out of cover as I heard the cries of alarm from the other two ponies who had been pinning me down and put a burst into one’s neck as he tried to swivel his guns to SCaR. The last one, an earth pony mare, swore and ducked down behind cover, and before I could press my advantage on her, a red flare shot up from her position, spiraling into the air above the settlement before igniting the leaves of the trees far above us.

Shadowy figures moved through the smoke and ash filling the clearing, and I swore over and over as I realized she’d just summoned backup. Pegasi appeared from above, their shoulder mounted guns blazing as they flew at me in a line, each strafing me as they passed. I scrambled for new cover, raising a shield to protect me with Surge’s help, and it ultimately ate a few dozen bullets as I found yet another hut to hide behind. “Fuck!” I shouted again as I checked the ammunition in my rifle. Unlike my BR14M, which had to be somewhere up in the middle of the settlement, this rifle didn’t have an ammunition counter in the optics, and for all the impressive stopping power it had, it was very barebones. Perhaps it was a rifle I was unfamiliar with, or maybe even something the Ivory City produced itself, but I didn’t know how to find any of the information I’d come to rely on while trying to survive in the wilderness.

I saw the pegasi begin to wheel about in the sky, and even as I turned my attention toward them, I heard something strike the ground next to me. I whipped my head to the left and spotted the grenade rolling across the sand, the little light on its crown flashing. Surge reacted faster than I did, and blue telekinesis plucked the grenade off the ground and whipped it into the air. Why didn’t you—? I began to think back at her, until I saw where she’d thrown the grenade: right into the trio of rounding pegasi about to dive at me again. The grenade blew up between the first and the second pegasi, filling the air with lethal shrapnel, and they immediately began to fall out of the sky, blood trailing behind them.

But there was still one pegasus who hadn’t been struck, and though he watched his two comrades fall in front of him, that didn’t stop him from launching into another strafing run on me. Before he could start, and before I could bring my rifle to bear, a single crack! split the noise of the settlement, and a single well-placed shot ripped the pegasus’ head from his spine. I felt a smile breaking out on my muzzle as the lifeless body fell to the ground. There was only one mare with a rifle like that and accuracy like that, and I immediately felt better knowing she was around.

I popped out of my cover right as the last remaining Ivory City soldier ducked down behind hers. “I need backup!” she screamed into her radio, and I could hear the fear and panic in her voice. “Give me more troops! The north entrance, by the north entrance, help me! It’s her!”

Another crack of a rifle, and I saw something rip through the mare’s cover and bury itself in the ground between me and her. She slumped to the side of her cover, convulsing as blood drained from a hole in her neck, so I at least did the merciful thing and finished her off with a shot to the head before emerging from my own cover. I kept my rifle raised and cautiously looked around, expecting more troops to arrive at her cry for alarm, and so I nearly put a burst into Ace in surprise when she fluttered down from the trees next to me.

Thankfully I didn’t actually squeeze the trigger when I recognized her, and even if I had, it wouldn’t have hit her, since she already deftly nudged the barrel away from her as she landed. She pushed me back into cover, putting my back against a hut. “Ember! You’re back! You just got the damnedest timing, ain’t ya?”

“The party couldn’t start without me,” I said, managing a smile back at her. But I knew it was filled with pain, because Ace’s own smile fell to concern. Her eyes looked me over, stopping when they settled on my leg to the accompaniment of a horrified gasp.

“What the fuck happened to your leg?!” she exclaimed, pointing at it with a trembling wing.

“A warg tried to rip it off,” I told her as calmly as I could. “I had to stop the bleeding somehow when I got away.”

“Holy shit, Ember, you’re gonna have to have that taken off! And a warg? What kind of hell did these bastards put you through?”

“It’s a long story and we don’t have the time.” I glanced out from behind cover. “These are Ivory City soldiers, right?”

Ace nodded. “They showed up just a little while back. I been looking for Yeoman, but I ain’t seen none of him. Been up in the trees thinning them out and looking to put a bullet in the bastard’s head if I spy him.”

“Are Nova and Gauge safe?”

She nodded and pointed up to the longhouse. “They’re still in there, with Lento and his blood brothers. Safest place to be right now, I reckon.”

“Or the most dangerous. I bet that’s where Yeoman’s headed.” Ace pursed her lips, and I put my hoof on her shoulder. “I need to get up there. I’ve got SCaR here to help me on the ground, but I could really use your eyes in the sky.”

Ace nodded. “I’ll take my perch again,” she said. “I’ll be watching you. You get pinned down, just sit tight and I’ll flush them out.”

“Keep yourself safe,” I told her. “Don’t take any risks for me.”

“My whole life is one risky move after another.” She spread her wings and stepped back, but hesitated at the last second. “…Speaking of which, before I go…”

I opened my mouth to respond, and that was when she rushed me. A half-step lunge, wings around my back pulling me close, smashing my lips against hers. My eyes widened in surprise, but Ace didn’t hold back, her tongue invading my mouth and pulling against the space in my gums where I’d lost a tooth in Hole. She held the kiss for five seconds before she broke off with a wink. “Figured I’d do that just in case,” she said. “Don’t want to miss the chance later.”

I blinked in stunned silence as Ace backed away, a proud smirk on her face. “Try not to let that distract you. You got places to be, remember?”

And then she was off, wings blurring as she spiraled into the shroud of the forest canopy. It took me a few more moments for my brain to catch up with my surroundings—I was too lost in the taste of her tongue and the feeling of her breath on my muzzle. It wasn’t until Surge started snickering inside my skull that I finally paid attention again. It was about time, I’ll say.

I… shut up, I thought back at her. I could feel my cheeks beginning to burn red. We need to get to the longhouse. Let’s just ignore that for now.

Sure. I will say, though, I’ve never kissed a mare before. What an… interesting experience.

I raised my rifle and tried to put that comment out of my mind. I had a job to do, after all, and I couldn’t afford to get distracted. The longer I waited here, the more of Yeoman’s troops that would close in on me. I needed to get a move on toward the longhouse.

SCaR led the way, taking me through the streets in a sidewinding fashion towards the huge structure perched on the hill. As I followed him between huts and around obstacles, I realized he wasn’t taking me the most direct way to the structure, he was taking the one with the best cover. I smiled a bit at that; the drone was trying to keep me out of harm’s way as best as he could and wasn’t leading me into the main body of Yeoman’s troops.

Tactical drones shouldn’t show this much intelligence, Surge noted as SCaR led me past two buildings that were beginning to catch fire. The drone paused to make sure I navigated the obstacles okay, then moved on ahead.

Being dead for two hundred years and suddenly brought back to life can be a life-changing experience, I thought back at her. I’m sure you have experience with that.

Gunshots clattered close by, and SCaR squawked in alarm as two bullets sparked off of his metal casing. The drone zipped for cover, and I whirled around the corner to spray three bursts in the direction the shots came from. Two sailed wide, but the third carved apart an armored mare’s face, crumpling her body to the ground as her two companions cursed and darted away from her. A unicorn carrying a machine gun of some sort sprayed bullets in my direction as he ran, and I had to drop back behind cover as they chewed into the wood around me. They looked like they were small caliber, but that didn’t matter much. Oh, I would have loved to be wearing some Sentinel armor right now!

The other pony’s weapon chugged out three shots in a deep and throaty sound, and three holes as large as my hoof appeared near the corner of the structure I’d been hiding behind. I didn’t know what kind of gun he had, but it seemed like it fired slugs with a lot of punch behind them.

BRS-08, Surge thought at me. Automatic shotgun with an 8 shot magazine. It has an enchanted firing pin that can shoot steel slugs through a foot of concrete from a hundred yards away.

Two more holes ripped through the structure near me, and I ducked my head as wooden splinters rained down on us. Fuck me, I growled, gritting my teeth. Why does Yeoman get the best toys?

If he’s from the Ivory City, he can probably find anything he wants there.

Thankfully, a crack from a rifle high above me rang out over the settlement, and I heard the two ponies curse again and fall back. Ace was in position—good to know. Before they could focus me down again, however, I stood up and hobbled as fast as I could from my current cover to a building on the other side of the street, where SCaR hid from the two soldiers and their weapons. I didn’t blame him; either could rip him to pieces with an accurate shot, and I didn’t know how much ammunition he had left in those guns mounted to his frame. Once I got to cover, however, I had to duck again as another two slugs punctured holes clean through this hut. I was just thankful they didn’t like, I don’t know, explode or something after they made it through!

Biting my lip, I managed to stand up on my hind legs (though I had to use my forehooves to balance against the wall given one of my legs didn’t work at all) and jammed the barrel of my scavenged rifle through a hole in the hut. Placing my eyes to the other, I caught a glimpse of movement on the other side and fired several bursts. One bullet pinged off the earth pony’s helmet, and then my rifle ejected its spent clip into the ground. I instinctively reached for a magazine at my flank, but realized I didn’t have any extras. Why didn’t I take some spares when I stole the gun in the first place?!

Do we have enough juice to teleport? I asked Surge.

We can only perform a few more spells right now, Surge warned me. We’re running on empty. The only thing keeping us up is your adrenaline.

Fuck. Growling, I looked the now-useless rifle over in my hooves. It was made out of several angled pieces and good quality metal, but that wouldn’t help me. Unless…

My magic settled over some of the screws and pins holding it together and pulled them out. It was a good thing I knew my way around guns; it didn’t take me more than five seconds to strip it to pieces. I twirled the barrel in my telekinetic grip, feeling its weight. It was made of heavy stuff, an attempt to balance the weapon and counter its recoil when it fired. And it would do nicely.

Ember, what are you doing? Surge asked me. I could feel the worry in her voice. I would be worried too if I was stuck in the body of a madmare who thought stupid bullshit could count as good ideas.

I peeked around the corner first just to keep track of the unicorn with the machine gun, and I let out a sigh of relief when I realized he was lying in a pool of blood not too far from where I’d last seen him, a clean hole shot through his eye. I saw the earth pony take aim at me with the shotgun mounted to his shoulder and scrambled backwards as he put another slug through the wall… and then nothing. That was eight slugs from him. Time to make my move.

Whirling around the corner as fast as I could on three legs, I flung a cloud of rifle parts at the earth pony while he was reloading. The stallion raised a leg to shield himself as they pelted his body, and in doing so, didn’t realize that I hadn’t let go of the rifle’s barrel. I whipped my head from one side to the other, imparting a little momentum on the barrel and striking him across the nose with it. He sputtered and recoiled, crying out in pain, but I wasn’t finished. The moment he opened his mouth to shout, I stood over him and jammed the barrel into it, gritting my teeth as I fought and struggled with him to jam it down his throat.

I don’t know if that would have actually killed him or if he still would have been okay since there was a hole in the barrel. What I do know, however, was that it gave Ace plenty of time to line up the shot. Her rifle cracked, and I got to see up close and personal what that monster of a weapon she carried on her back could really do to a pony. The stallion’s helmet split in two from the force of the bullet, and I saw bloodstained lead flash for the briefest of moments as it came straight out of the bottom of his jaw. It’d gone clean through his head and I don’t think it slowed down much at all. It was probably buried at least ten feet into the ground now.

SCaR triumphantly chirped, and I stumbled over to the bodies of the soldiers I’d killed. I swiftly decided against taking the shotgun, since having only eight slugs didn’t seem like a good idea, and I passed on the largely unremarkable rifle. But then my eyes settled on the machine gun. Hefting it into the air, I felt the weight, felt the power behind this monster. Three box magazines hung from its underside, all mounted to a rail that could slide forward and backwards to allow the next box to be loaded as soon as one was empty. I didn’t really know how many rounds were in each box, but the first one was basically empty, so I disengaged the scraps of the belt still fed into the gun and slid it over to the middle box. The rail latched in place and the feeding mechanism from the gun automatically bumped down and pulled the first bullet of the belt into the chamber. A little readout on the dot sight mounted to the top printed the number ‘200’, along with an icon of three bullets that I assumed meant it was automatic.

It wouldn’t have the control or stopping power of the rifles I liked to use, but I was salivating nonetheless. I was going to light Yeoman’s ass up with this, and I probably wouldn’t stop shooting the body until I ran out of bullets.

Try to keep it for shooting only, Surge cautioned me. I think it’s a little too much for your vagina to handle.

My vagina’s tougher than you think, I retorted. My eyes settled on SCaR, and I nodded when it beeped at me. “Lead the way, little dude.”

SCaR led me up a street parallel to the main road, and I’d occasionally catch glimpses of Yeoman’s soldiers between the huts. Most of them were moving back down toward the gates, likely looking for me and trying to stop me before I got close to the longhouse. But I was already past them, and everywhere I looked, I started seeing the Feati rally. Now that the initial surprise of the attack had worn off, the Feati warriors began to attack isolated groups of soldiers in overwhelming numbers with relentless onslaughts of tattoo magic backing them up. Fire and ice were their primary weapons, with the fire zoning off enemies and ice preventing them from mounting an effective defense as the warriors closed in with spears and slings. Still, it didn’t completely turn the tide; modern guns ripped the warriors to pieces, and Feati casualties were mounting dramatically.

I wanted to stop and help, but Surge pressed me onwards. We can’t afford to waste any time, she said. If Yeoman finds what he’s looking for, it’s all over.

I reluctantly nodded and continued onwards, following SCaR. I didn’t want to think about how many dead Yeoman would leave behind in the wake of the attack. I already knew it’d be an unfathomable massacre.

And then I was at the top of the hill. Here, the fight raged on in the clearing before the longhouse, with Lentowenye’s blood brothers fighting a brutal and desperate melee with the soldiers of the Ivory City. In such close quarters, they had the advantage, their powerful and muscular bodies forcing back the soldiers and rendering their firepower useless. But these soldiers, disciplined as they were, had split into two lines to control the flow of combat, with a marksmare firing line dropping Feati soldiers with precise shots into the brawl. A group had even separated and made it toward the door of the structure, repulsing counterattacks to dislodge their position.

I pulled the bolt back on the machine gun and squeezed the trigger, and the weapon immediately began to buck around in my grip. I had to hold onto it more tightly with my magic to keep it on target, but the sensation sent tingles running through my legs. It chattered with a fierce and sharp bite, and when I kept a tighter grip on it, its accuracy was excellent as well. It reminded me of the machine guns in Sentinel armor, but minus the eerie shriek those six guns made when they fired off in unison. But oh could it fling lead downrange. The marksmares I opened up on began to drop before they even realized what was happening, and though the bullets weren’t strong enough to pierce through the armor around their vitals, there were simply so many rounds that most found their mark one way or another.

As I turned the weapon toward the scattering survivors of the firing line, a thunderous explosion hammered through my skull, followed by a shockwave and a rain of debris and shrapnel that sent me stumbling for balance on my three legs. When I looked back toward the longhouse, I saw a huge hole torn through the front of the structure, the massive wooden doors ripped to splinters by whatever explosive charge the soldiers had placed on it. The shockwave had also knocked many of the blood brothers off their hooves, and they scrambled back to their hooves even as rifle fire cut them down where they stood. Hefting my machine gun again, I tried to suppress the soldiers and allow the Feati time to recover, but it was too little, too late. Even as I began to clear the soldiers with the crack of Ace’s sniper accompanying the chatter of my gun, the rest of the soldiers around the longhouse overwhelmed the few Feati left to protect it and stormed inside.

“Fuck!” I screamed in frustration, hobbling after them as fast as I could. I could already hear the gunfire echoing from inside, and every shot left me worrying that a bullet had found a friend. Bullets flew past me and Surge propped up a shield to keep us safe from the worst of it, but they slowed my progress nonetheless. I unloaded on them with my machine gun, my suppressing fire keeping their heads down long enough for Ace to find their skulls with well-placed shots. And then, just as the machine gun alerted me that it had emptied the loaded box and automatically swapped to the next one, I stumbled inside the longhouse.

SCaR flew in after me, immediately spraying bullets at the backs of the Ivory City soldiers trying to move into the structure, and downing one. Some of the soldiers closest to the door turned to fire on me, but my machine gun chewed right through them in a hail of lead. One managed to duck behind cover, but a blue flare on my horn sent a fireball flying towards him, and I soon heard screaming as the flames lapped around the pillar of wood and engulfed the pony hiding on the other side.

My heart leapt into my throat when I saw my friends at the far end of the room, cowering in the corner. Gauge and Nova huddled side by side, their coats stained with ash from the fires beginning to rage through the structure, their hooves pressed together. Two soldiers aimed rifles at them, and even though I screamed and tried to bring my gun to bear, it was too late. The two rifles chattered as they fired their bursts, and it felt like I was watching the casings fall in slow motion.

But they didn’t die.

I froze in shock as Nova’s metallic wing shot forth on reflex, the metal feathers fanning out to shelter her and Gauge. Sparks scattered through the air as the bullets shattered against the metal, the lead hardly leaving a scratch against the super strength alloy that formed the body of the prosthetic. Even Nova seemed surprised, but she didn’t let that paralyze her. Whether she realized that she needed to press now or her body merely acted on instinct alone, she lunged at the pony closest to her, razor wing extended the whole way. Though the pony did his best to ward her off, the sharp edges of Nova’s prosthetic feathers sliced right through his armor like it wasn’t even there. The two of them fell to the ground as Nova’s clumsy attack left her off balance, and before the other soldier could aid his companion, I cut him down with a well-aimed burst from my machine gun.

“Nova!” I shouted as I shambled into the longhouse. The mare looked up in surprise, her white coat stained with blood, and her prosthetic wing a glistening fan of blood and metal. I threw myself at her, forelegs wrapping around her shoulders in a hug, and she jerked in response. “You’re alive! Oh thank fuck, I thought I’d be too late!”

“Ember?” Nova asked, still seemingly in a daze. She blinked and looked at me. “You’re… back?”

“What happened to your leg?” Gauge asked, hurrying over to us. He looked me up and down and his muzzle twisted in shock. “Stars, Ember, what did they do to you?”

“Tried to kill me,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

I could feel Nova shaking in my hug, so I gave her a squeeze before turning her over to Gauge. “Breathe, Nov,” I said, knowing exactly what she was freaking out about. Not only had she been staring death down the barrel of a gun moments before, but she’d also just taken a life—her first and what I hoped would be her last, even though I knew that was wishful thinking at best. But the little consolation was all I could spare her. I turned to Gauge and set my jaw. “Have you seen Yeoman? Lento? Teka?”

Gauge only shook his head. “Lento and Teka went out to fight. I haven’t seen Yeoman either. They must all be going for the tree.”

“But how would they know where the tree is?” Surge asked. “They certainly didn’t have as much time to get familiar with the area as we have.”

“They took Sandy,” Nova said in a shaky voice. She blinked once, twice, and then turned wide eyes to me. “They found him, dragged him away. He could speak Equiish. They’d force him to take them to the tree.”

“Shit.” I grimaced and bared my teeth. “You don’t know where it is?” I asked them, but they both shook their heads.

“Ace knows,” Surge said. “Assuming she actually managed to find the tree before she was caught yesterday…”

I nodded. “I need to meet up with her,” I said. Then, lifting a rifle from the ground, I passed it to Gauge. “You two stay safe here, okay? I don’t think there were very many soldiers left around the center of the settlement. The rest are probably with Yeoman himself.”

To my surprise, both Gauge and Nova stood up. “No, Em,” Gauge said, shouldering the offered rifle and moving to my side. “We’re not going to sit by while you go and risk your life on your own again. We’re coming with you.”

I blinked. “What? No! It’s too dangerous for you two!”

“And not for you?” Nova asked, her shock slowly bleeding away. A look at her metal wing seemed to steel her, and her features hardened with determination. “Ember, you’ve done so much on your own. Why do you have to do everything on your own?”

“Because… b-because…” I growled and turned away. “Damn it, I don’t want anything bad to happen to you guys, okay? Just stay here!”

“And we don’t want anything bad to happen to you,” Gauge insisted. He put a hoof on my shoulder and lightly shook me. “We’re a team, Ember. You don’t have to look out for us all the time. You don’t have to carry us around like dead weight. You’re always putting us on your back and trying to fight three times as hard so we don’t have to. But you’re not going to make it to Yeoman alone.”

“Yeah, Em,” Nova said. She leaned in and hugged me, nuzzling my dirty and sweaty cheek. “This time, we’re going to carry you. No matter what it takes.”

I started to sniffle, and I fought my hardest to keep my tears down. “You… you guys…”

It was Surge who stepped in when words failed me. “Personally, I’m glad you two are coming along,” she said. “We need all the help we can get, and maybe having two sane ponies around to temper Ember’s impulsiveness will save our lives.”

We chuckled, a brief moment of levity in the midst of the carnage and chaos. But when it ended, the slight grin on my face didn’t go away. “You guys are the best friends I could ask for,” I told them, and we lightly embraced one more time.

“It’s good to have friends when we’re marching into Tartarus,” Surge added.

“Especially when we’re taking on the Ivory City’s finest…”

“These ponies are from the Ivory City?” Gauge asked, his eyes flitting to the bodies by our hooves.

“I’d bet my life on it,” I said. “They’re better than mercs and bandits. They’re trained and organized. I’d rather fight a dozen Crimson than just a couple of them any day.”

Then, turning toward our things, which had been piled up against the wall, I tossed aside the stolen machine gun and reclaimed my rifle and a few extra magazines for it. The added accuracy would help me a lot since I doubted I’d get close enough to really make good use of the machine gun with my bum leg. “At the very least, you guys should stay behind me, okay? I know how to handle myself in a fight, and you two don’t. So just hang back a bit and make sure nopony shoots me in the ass.”

“I’ll do my best,” Gauge said, and he quickly pulled a pair of small ammo belts out of his bags and loaded them into SCaR’s guns. “Thankfully I’ve got SCaR to do the shooting for me.”

“I’ll try to get behind them,” Nova said, looking at her lethal cybernetic wing. “I think I’ll be more useful there than hiding in the back.”

I saw Gauge and Nova exchange looks, and if Gauge wasn’t going to object to his marefriend leaving our side in an attempt to be helpful, I wasn’t going to either. “Just be careful,” I said, pulling a cigarette out of my bags and settling it between my lips. “Don’t take any risks and we’ll get through this in one piece.”

This was it. As we geared up and prepared to chase down Yeoman, I couldn’t help but think one thing:

That half-faced bastard was fucked.

Chapter 36: Where the Old and New Struggle

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Chapter 36: Where the Old and New Struggle

Within minutes, we’d gathered all we’d need to drive Yeoman away from the Walsalhn. I had my rifle and a few spare magazines for it, Gauge had SCaR freshly loaded with bullets, and Nova had spent the time bandaging my mauled leg so I could at least move it easier. I’d suggested that she just slice it off with her wing and be done with it, since I’d need to get it removed anyway with how badly it was mangled, but she’d refused and had instead patched it up as best she could. She’d tried to justify it by saying that the pain and shock would almost certainly take me out of the fight entirely, even when Surge protested that she could just block the sensations streaming down my nervous system. In the end, however, Nova just wrapped up my leg as tightly as she could, implanting a couple sticks in the wrappings to give it a little support.

And then we were off, venturing once more back out into the fiery haze that clung to the city. The trees overhead seemed like they collected the smoke and pushed it back downwards, making the air thick and hot and difficult to breathe. Distant gunshots still cracked throughout the settlement, but it seemed like most of the fighting had died down. The Ivory City soldiers were pulling out, and they’d left a mountain of corpses in their wake.

“By the stars… this is horrible!” Nova gasped as we passed by a few of Lento’s surviving blood brothers lining up the bodies of their fallen comrades, grim looks chiseled into their faces. They’d amassed nearly thirty or forty tattooed bodies on the flat ground, and a short ways away was a haphazard pile of half a dozen City soldiers. Most of those soldiers were ponies I’d killed with my machine gun; very few had any spear wounds or scorch marks from the Feati’s futile attempt to fight back. The attack had been a massacre, a horrible massacre, all for a single string of six or seven letters hidden away on a computer somewhere nearby.

“Is it bad to say it’s a good thing they found Sandy as quickly as they did, then?” Gauge asked, shivering at the carnage surrounding us.

“They would have continued to tear this settlement to pieces had they not,” Surge said. “A lot more would have died.”

“At least they’re not interested in slaughtering these ponies for the sport of it,” I said. “That’s the one reason why I’m happy they’re not bandits. They’re professional, as horrible as they are.”

We made our way down the hill, away from the misery at the longhouse, and I did my best to avoid looking at all the death around us. Mothers wailed in the streets as they cradled the bodies of their dead children, and tattooed ponies tried desperately to use their ice magic to put out some of the fires consuming their homes. Glassy eyes stared skyward, forever unblinking, and the suffocating, choking ash and smoke hung heavy over the settlement like some abominable hell.

The clouds in front of us swirled as a pegasus descended, and I lowered Gauge’s rifle with my magic before the zebra could jump and start shooting at her. Ace appeared through the smoke and dust like an angel from on high, and her hooves struck solidly into the soot coating the ground as she landed. “Ember, guys, thank Celestia you’re alright,” she said, worriedly trotting closer to us. I saw her eyes dart over all of us as she looked for any obvious injuries, and her wings relaxed when she saw none of us were fucked up that badly. “I missed the party, didn’t I?”

“Not yet,” I said, rolling my shoulders. I offered Ace a cigarette, which she happily took. While she got it started with a helpful spark from my horn, I gestured vaguely toward the outskirts of the settlement. “Yeoman was looking for somepony who could take him to the big fucking tree, and he nabbed Sandy. We need to go there now. You know the way, right?”

“I didn’t spend a whole day preening sap outta my feathers for nothing,” Ace said. “I can get us to it.”

“Good.” I looked over my shoulder and nodded to Nova and Gauge. “Nov, when we run into trouble, just fly out of sight as quickly as you can. If you’re gonna hit them with that wing of yours, they can’t see you coming.” When she nodded, I turned to Gauge. “Just stick with me, buddy, and have SCaR support us when we try to move or get pinned down. He saved my ass just trying to get up to you two, so he can be really useful.”

“I’ll do my best,” Gauge said.

“Me too,” Nova added.

Satisfied, I turned back to Ace. “I don’t suppose I need to tell you what to do,” I stated.

Ace just rolled her pretty blue eyes. “I can’t be up in the trees none if I have to lead y’all to the big one,” she said. “But if the shooting starts, I’ll find a nice vantage to start plucking away from.”

“Good. Let’s just be careful, then,” I said, and I felt my cheeks beginning to turn rosy as I looked over Ace’s muzzle. “I, uh… we need to have a talk when this is all done…”

To her credit, Ace just smirked and winked at me rather than descending into an awkward mess like me. “You just want another peck on the lips, don’t you?”

“I’d hardly call that a peck,” Surge commented. “That was anything but chaste.”

Nova blinked in confusion. “Wait… what happened?”

“Nothing!” I insisted, trotting forward. “Just… stuff! Stuff that’s not important right now!” Coming upon a fork in the road, I struck off at random to the right, my hooves stomping through ground.

“Uh… Em?” Ace chuckled. I turned around to see her pointing her wing in the complete opposite direction. “The tree’s this way.”

“I knew that!” I abruptly turned around and set myself on that path instead. “Come on, we don’t have time to waste!”

As Nova and Gauge giggled, I heard Ace chuckling to them over my shoulder. “I gave her teeth a good cleaning, if you know what I mean…”

-----

The embarrassing levity of the moment didn’t last all that long. All we had to do was walk past a few more burned-out husks of buildings and skirt around a dozen bloodstained piles of ash and dirt for the lightheartedness to all disappear. There was only the grim feeling of failure and doom hanging over us, the worry that we might be too late, and all our efforts would be for nothing.

And despite all that, we made agonizingly slow progress. Now that the adrenaline of combat had gone away, my body began to show its weariness, and I started to struggle to walk. I could only move so fast on my mangled leg; even though Nova’s bandages had helped keep the mess a little more contained, I couldn’t put any weight on it. Gauge tried to give me some support so we could move a little bit faster, but I could still barely manage more than a trot. It was clear I was slowing everyone else down, but the stubborn part of me refused to admit it. I had to find Yeoman, and I had to kill him. If I wasn’t out there to protect my friends from him, he’d take them from me.

Just like how he’d taken Zip from me.

But for better or for worse, the rational part of me could talk on her own these days. “Stop,” Surge finally said aloud, surprising my friends. “Ember and I need to stop. We can’t do this.”

“What do you mean?” Gauge asked, helping Surge guide me to a wall despite my protests.

“Don’t listen to her,” I insisted, trying to hobble away from the wall, though Surge and I fighting over my legs mostly left me fidgeting uselessly in place. “I can do it. I can make the walk.”

“We can’t,” Surge said, shaking my head. “We’re slowing you down, and time is of the essence. We’re hurt, weak, tired, and Ember’s finding it hard to see straight.” That was true enough; the world was roiling around me, and I felt sick to my stomach. “We’re going to be useless in a fight. Given everything we suffered through during the Trial, it’s a miracle she even fought her way up to the longhouse to get you.”

“I can go faster!” Once again, I tried to get back on the path, but this time Surge slapped me down with a pinch of nerves that made me too dizzy to stand up right. “Fuck you, you Synarchist cunt,” I growled, even as my vision swam and my mostly-empty stomach felt like it was doing flips.

It was at that point that Ace took charge. “Surge is right,” she said, much to my dismay. “They can’t go on like this. We’ll move faster and safer if we make sure she’s tucked away safe and set off on our own. Time is of the essence.”

Nova and Gauge hesitated, looking toward me almost as if they were asking for permission, and I finally reluctantly waved my hoof. “Fuck it… fine. But you better be careful, okay?” I tried to sit up a little straighter and lock Ace with my eyes. “Don’t let anything bad happen to them, you hear me? They’re not as experienced in a fight as we are.”

“I’ll keep them safe,” Ace said, solemnly nodding. “You can count on that.”

“And let me ride along with your drone,” Surge said.

Gauge lifted an eyebrow, and SCaR pivoted about to face me. “Why?”

“I’m pure energy, remember?” Surge said. “I can zip along any circuit and override any doors, terminals, et cetera. You’re going to need me if you’re going to get to that code.”

“Do it,” Ace said. “We’re gonna need every bit of help we can get.”

“You’re not going to mess with SCaR’s programming, are you?” Gauge asked, still wary. I couldn’t blame him; SCaR was basically his pet, or his son. I didn’t really know where exactly he drew that line with the drone.

“I might dig through its memory to see if it has anything stored from before the Silence, but I’m not going to touch the code if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Gauge still wasn’t happy about the whole thing, but he eventually relented. “Alright, fine. SCaR, go fly over to Ember.”

The little drone did as it was told, and Surge touched my horn to its frame. My legs twitched and jolted as a blue spark of mana connected the two, and then it felt like my mind went silent. I’d grown so used to having Surge present in my mind, even when she was quietly resting, that having my head all back to myself felt eerie and odd, like there was a void in my skull. And strange as it sounds… I sort of missed that intrusive companionship the moment she left.

SCaR shifted and puttered wildly for a few seconds before it stabilized. “This is certainly much different than playing with a unicorn’s body,” Surge said through the drone’s speakers in a tinny voice. She spun the metal frame around and turned the camera on the rest of the group. “Let’s get moving, then. I’d much rather be back in Ember’s body as soon as I can be.”

“You’re not going to die if you spend too much time in there, are you?” Nova asked.

“I’ll be fine for a few days before the mana holding my soul together dissipates,” Surge replied. “Though if I’m in this frame for more than a day, something’s gone terribly wrong.”

“And the longer we stand around here yapping, the worse it’s gonna get.” Ace impatiently fluffed the feathers on her wings. “Let’s get moving, or there ain’t gonna be a tree to save!”

They began to form up around Ace, and I finally slumped back against the wall. Disappointment hung heavy in my heart, but I tried to wave off Nova’s concerned look. “Go,” I told them, propping my rifle up against the wall. “I’ll be here when you’re done. If you can, try to bring Yeoman back alive, alright? I’d love to have a few words with him before I skullfuck him with my rifle.”

“We’ll do our best,” Gauge assured me. The corners of his lips twitched up as he tilted his head down a few degrees. “Just rest and take it easy. Maybe you can find somepony who will help you with your leg.”

“I’ll just wait for Nova to take care of it with her wing,” I said. “It’s likely gonna be sharper than anything the Feati have here.”

“Eat and rest,” Nova insisted, and she gave me a quick hug. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

“Keep your body in one piece for me,” Surge simply said. “I’d like to not go down with your ship too.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and then my eyes locked with Ace’s. She didn’t say anything, but I saw the flare of her nostrils, how she parted some of the long strands of her sweaty mane away from her hidden eye with a wingtip. She flashed her teeth in a tiny approximation of a smile, and then, winking, she turned back to the rest of the group.

“We good?” she asked, and when she got nods from everybody else, she spread her wings open. “Good. Come on!”

I weakly waved as they galloped off after Ace, moving much, much faster than we were before when they were all waiting on me. As much as I hated missing a fight, I knew it was for the best. I was too hurt and too weak to do anything other than get in the way and drag everyone else down. And on top of that, a haunting thought began to creep into my skull. Even if we did all leave this place with our lives, how useful would I be to my friends with only three legs? If they had to wait for me to limp everywhere after them, if they had to carry me whenever we needed to go over rough terrain or mountains, was I really still an important member of the team anymore? Or was I just a burden?

I closed my eyes and tried not to dwell on those thoughts. They had Ace with them, and Ace seemed committed to the group, and to me. If it came down to it, she’d be a fantastic leader for them. She’d know how to keep them alive, and they’d thrive under her command. They’d probably do a lot better than I would.

Keeping that in mind, I was at least able to close my eyes and doze as the past twenty-eight hours finally caught up to me.

Or at least, I’d started to before I heard a surprised gasp coming from right in front of me.

My eyes popped open to see a familiar tattooed stallion looking me over. His coat was roughed up with scratches and soot, but he looked lively and unharmed. His headdress was askew, but everything about him was so unique that it would be hard to mistake him for anypony else. When I looked up at him, he came closer and dropped the basket of salves and wrappings he’d been carrying and trotted closer to me. “You are alive? Ha! I should not be surprised! Lentowenye had tried to make the Trial as hard as he could, but he could not keep you down!”

I found myself smiling up at the delighted face of the Shaman. “I’m just glad to get back here in one piece,” I said, though my eyes wandered down to my bandaged leg. “Or, well, mostly in one piece.”

The Shaman shifted his attention to my leg. “Yes?” he asked, hooves resting on the bandages. I assumed he was asking if he could take a look at the wound, so I nodded. As he began to unwrap the bandages, he whistled as more and more scorched flesh began to emerge. “What happen?”

“Wargs,” I told him, not really sure if he knew the common name for them or not. “Big wolf things. One mangled my leg and nearly ripped it off. I had to burn it to get it to stop bleeding. It’s… really fucked. I’m gonna have my friend cut it off when she gets back. You know, the mare with the cool metal wing…”

As the Shaman slowly undid my dressings, I let my eyes wander around the settlement. “What happened while I was gone?” I asked him. “I mean, I know outsiders attacked this place and all, because I fought and killed a bunch, but how did it start?”

“Attacked at the height of day,” the Shaman said. “Boom-shots out in the middle of the forest. Must have killed hunting party. Set us on edge. Then they came and blew down the gates. No warning, no demands, no willingness to talk. Just attack. Attack and kill. Burned down everything they touched to make chaos.”

“They’re looking for the tree,” I told him. “You know… the big tree.”

“The Walsalhn?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. They’re trying to get something from it. The same thing I was after,” I said, dropping my voice a bit.

The Shaman didn’t react to that at all, instead only continuing to tend to my mangled leg. So it was something of a surprise when he finally quipped, “If they were upset about missing Grass Trial, could have asked nicely.”

“Really?” My brows knitted together. “After all this shit… you can still joke about it?”

“Horrible, yes,” the Shaman said. “Sad, yes. Disgusting, very yes.” His withered nostrils flared nonetheless. “Misery is trap. Embrace it, grieve, but never let paralyze. For me… laughter helps keep moving.”

It was certainly an interesting thought, considering how miserable my life had become. “I’ll… try to keep that in mind,” I said. “It’s wise, in a way.”

“Not much point to old shaman if not for wisdom!” the stallion said with another breathy chuckle, and I had to admit, it got me to smile a little bit as well.

His expression soured, however, when he finally peeled away all my bandages and saw the mess I’d made of my leg. “I told you it’s pretty fucked,” I said as he looked it over. “You’d be better off taking care of the rest of your people.”

But he only shook his head and placed both his gnarled and cracked forehooves on my mangled leg. His tattoos began to glow soft white, and I gasped when I felt the burned and mangled flesh around my wound begin to itch. As I watched in awe, the black char and ash that made up my roasted flesh began to flake away, replaced with rapidly growing—and healthy—pink skin and muscle. Bit by bit, my wound began to close, my leg repairing itself as if the terrible wound that would have otherwise required an amputation was nothing more than a mere scratch.

Eventually, I had to let out the guilt gnawing away at me. “You don’t blame me and my friends for this?” I finally asked him.

“Why?” He momentarily took his eyes off my legs and raised an eyebrow. “Did you bring? They with you?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I’m trying to stop them. We’re trying to stop them. But they’re after the same thing we are. I just… I-I can’t help but feel like we led them to you, somehow. Like, if we could have gotten what we wanted and left, we could have led them away…”

My hoof on my mangled leg twitched for the first time since the warg had ripped the muscle to shreds, and my eyes widened. “Holy fuck, that’s amazing,” I murmured aloud as I watched the Shaman finish sealing my horrid wound back up. “You… I…”

The Shaman panted lightly as he finished closing the wound and took his hooves off my leg. “Like new,” he proclaimed, and I immediately began kicking the leg around. It felt like it was so full of energy… come to think about it, it wasn’t the only part of me that felt completely re-energized. I felt awake, alert, and ready to take on the world. Sure, I was still hungry and a bit thirsty, but I still felt like I could sprint a mile at full gallop without pausing for breath.

“How?” was all I could ultimately ask. “How do your tattoos do that?”

“Nature,” the Shaman said. “Our ink is nature. Fire, its anger. Ice, its sadness. Healing, its life.” He pointed to my leg. “The world is life. Can be moved as needed… if you know how!”

“But why would you do that for me?” I asked him. “I’m an outsider, and I’m sure Lentowenye would have loved to see me crippled, if not just outright dead.”

“Lentowenye cannot stop this,” the Shaman said with a wink of his cloudy eye. “We cannot. Can only slow down. But you, outsider… You can.”

His split horn sparked and fizzed to life, and he picked my rifle up from the ground and pressed it against my chest with great difficulty. “Go. Lentowenye cannot save the Feati. But you will.”

I took the rifle from his grip and swallowed hard. “Jeez… no pressure, right?”

The Shaman grinned at me. “Pressure where you thrive! Ha! Nopony better, no?”

Smiling, I slung the rifle across my back. “I guess you’re right about that.” Then, because I felt like I was going to explode if I didn’t start moving, I began to bounce back and forth on my newly rejuvenated hooves. “Thank you, dude. Like, so much. I would have lost my leg if you hadn’t done that.”

The Shaman merely nodded. “Is nothing,” he said. “Now go. Bad outsiders need you to stop them. Hopefully I don’t have to fix other leg when you come back, ha!”

“I hope so, too.” I rolled my shoulders and began to side-trot in the direction my friends had galloped off toward. “I’ll be back with the head of the stallion that did this. I guarantee it.”

And then I spun around and began to sprint after my friends’ tracks, leaving the Shaman behind. Hopefully I’d be able to catch up to them, but they’d left several minutes before the Shaman had found me, and I didn’t know exactly where the big tree was. But I would get back to them, and together we’d take Yeoman down.

He was so close now. The next time I saw him, it’d be through the sights of a gun. Finally, after so long, I could put an end to that monster and avenge everypony he’d killed.

The thought of an orange face resting easy after all this time spurred me to gallop faster, and I practically tore apart the Feati’s dirt streets as I raced off toward destiny.

-----

My heart pounded, my lungs burned, and my hooves thrummed against the soft dirt of the earth. I was running, I was alive, and most importantly, I wasn’t out of the fight yet.

I galloped out of the shattered settlement gate and hooked a left, following the churned up earth leading around the village’s walls. Lots of ponies had passed through here recently, all carrying enough gear to leave deep ruts in the dirt and mud. They had left with purpose and left as a unit, and there was only one place they could have been moving with such focus.

I passed dozens of distraught Feati huddled in groups and caring to their young and wounded outside of the settlement. Their eyes, shot through with red from tears and soot, watched the fires still crackling and roaring through their home with distraught pain carved deep into their features. Their entire way of life had been uprooted and tossed into the fire on a moment’s notice, and now many of them were left to wonder if things would ever be the same for them again.

The things these ponies would do to Yeoman if I could drag him back to them… the thought of it made me consider letting them have their vengeance instead of keeping it all to myself just to see him suffer.

Then, distant gunshots. They started with the loud report of Ace’s rifle, followed by a few rapid three-shot bursts of an Ivory City rifle—maybe one I’d given to Gauge. But then a cacophony of shots answered them, drowning out the repeated crack and boom of Ace’s sniper. A full on firefight had broken out, and whatever ambush Ace must have been planning descended into a messy shootout.

I swallowed hard and tried to redouble my pace. They needed me in there to help them. Ace was a crack shot and Surge could do tricky things while in SCaR’s frame, but Nova and Gauge were hardly combat experts.

I saw the Walsalhn before I even saw the fighting. It was impossible to miss once I got into line of sight of it, and the only reason we couldn’t see it from the Feati settlement was because of the sheer density of the forest around it. But here, through a parting in the tree canopy, I saw an absolutely monstrous tree rising out of the ground. It put all the other petrified giants around it to shame, not only because it was the biggest, but because it was still alive. Pink and red leaves grew aplenty on the branches radiating out from its colossal trunk, and the wood still had a healthy dark brown color to it, unlike the paling gray of the other petrified spines.

It was easy to see why the Feati worshipped it or whatever. If you saw a tree like that and didn’t know any better, you’d think it was holding the sky aloft. It was the last surviving member of a dead breed, and maybe there’s something mystical in that notion alone.

But it was still so far away. I knew it would take me another few minutes to reach it on hoof, and who knew what shape my friends were in. They were still fighting, true, but the gunshots didn’t tell me what exactly they were up against. If I took too long, I might end up arriving too late. And I couldn’t let that happen.

Surge had repeatedly warned me that I needed to save my mana and conserve my strength, so we hadn’t teleported around a whole bunch today. But after the Shaman worked his voodoo tattoo magic on me, I suddenly felt full of life and energy. And if there was ever a time to push myself in the name of haste, now was the time.

I just hoped I wouldn’t teleport right into the center of one of those petrified monoliths. That’d be a messy way to go, and nopony would ever find my body. What a horrifying thought.

Still, that didn’t stop me from mustering the mana for the spell and focusing on a target. I didn’t have Surge’s expertise to guide my horn, true, but I at least had done it enough to feel my way through the spell. I tried to aim between the trees maybe three or four hundred yards away, trusting that my marksmare insticts were good enough to judge the range accurately, and let the spell fly in a sloppy burst of orange light.

There was a loud pop, a dizzying flip of vertigo, and then weightlessness. When I opened my eyes, I had just enough time to realize that I’d teleported myself maybe thirty feet into the air, roughly right where I was looking when I was trying to see over the undergrowth and brush back on the ground. I yelped in alarm and flailed my legs as gravity took hold, my horn sparking in confused and startled bursts of mana.

It was to my surprise, then, when I fell not on the hard ground, but something rushing underneath me, something I sent sprawling to the ground with a grunt and a surprised scramble of hooves.

I rolled three times away from the pony I’d landed on, my rifle bouncing barrel-over-butt past me. Before it could roll out of sight, however, I snatched it with my magic and swung it around. I sighted a pair of figures scrambling to pivot about, their bodies covered in makeshift armor, their faces torn up with cruel and sinister-looking scars. As soon as I saw they weren’t my friends or Feati ponies, and the moment I saw the weapons on their armor, I opened fire, cutting the two of them down with two quick bursts to their necks. The spent cartridges tumbled over my face as I fired from my back, and I cursed when one hot casing struck me on the nose.

That gave the pony I’d landed on enough time to get back to their hooves. I heard something metallic slide and lock into place, and I immediately rolled to the left, practically throwing myself into the brush. Just in time, too; as soon as I rolled away, a deafening boom nearly knocked the leaves off the trees around me, and the ground where I’d been lying moments before exploded in a shower of dirt.

I popped back onto my hooves, already bringing my rifle to bear, and a second shot blew up the tree next to me. Wooden splinters exploded outwards, peppering my hide and biting into my skin, and the sudden spikes of pain down my right side made me accidentally squeeze the trigger. A trio of bullets cracked forth from the gun, flying who knows where, but the burst sent my assailant slipping away instead of shooting me while I staggered from the blow. When I’d finally found my hoofing, I narrowed my eyes at the shock of white mane and brown body hurtling toward me.

The blow from the pony’s shoulder struck me square in the chest, and the force behind it swept me off my hooves. I cried out and helplessly waved my legs around as I flew through the air, only coming to a stop when I slammed into a tree trunk and slid down to the ground. Momentarily dazed and stunned, I could only look up as the pony I was fighting rushed over to me only to stop in place with a rise of her eyebrows.

“Well, look who it is!” a familiar mare’s voice said, and when my eyes finally realigned, I saw my face reflected in the chipped silver aviators perched on a mare’s face maybe fifteen feet away. Her cobbled-together armor was scratched up and stained with mud, and the protruding barrel of the high caliber weapon built into the side still smoked faintly from the pair of shots she’d flung at me. But even though I’d met the mare only a few times before, it was impossible to forget that face or confuse her for somepony else.

“Hunter?!” I nearly did a double-take. “What… The fuck are you doing out here?!”

“A job,” the slaver said, calmly striding closer to me. “Yeoman wanted backup to comb the Spines after the great job we’d done for him helping him find that neat little installation in the Bluewater. And when he told me that he’d run into you while there, I just had to see for myself.” Her grin was sickening, full of poison. “Sooner or later I’d run into you, I knew. And here you are. I think it’s time we settle the score, hm?”

She knelt down across from me and chuckled as she casually aligned the barrel of her weapon with my heaving, panting chest. “Nopony gets away from the RPR, bitch,” she growled at me. “It’s our fucking job and we’re fucking good at it.”

I didn’t bother wasting my breath with a reply. Instead, I spat right in Hunter’s face, and the slaver flinched back. Of course, she had her aviators over her eyes, so I didn’t exactly blind her, and she growled in irritation. “Whore!” she shouted, and the hammer on the rifle built into her armor struck down.

Of course, by that point, I’d already yanked open the rifle’s receiver, and the slide slammed shut on a shell halfway sticking out of the side of gun.

I immediately seized the advantage even as the glow on my horn faded. My left hoof flew up from the ground, striking Hunter in the face and smashing her aviators against her eye. The chipped silver glass shattered, and she howled as the shards dug into her face. She lunged forward on instinct, trying to pin me against the tree, but I used the momentum from my punch to fall to the left, barely twisting away. I didn’t see my gun, and I wasn’t about to waste time looking for it, so I instead turned my horn towards Hunter herself. I tried to break her neck with some well-applied telekinesis, but the mare twisted her body in the direction of the force, so all I succeeded in doing was spinning her about.

And here’s the thing about earth ponies: they’re freaky good at finding their balance, no matter what you do to them. Hunter must have spun twice, but when she came to a stop, it was with all four hooves slamming into the dirt, one after the other. She charged at me, even when I pushed back at her face with my telekinesis. She bowled me over, and the two of us went tumbling across the ground, fighting and scratching and biting like animals, not ponies. But even as we wrestled in the dirt, I knew this wasn’t going to be a fight I could win. Hunter was bigger than me and way stronger, and to top it all off, some of the adrenaline and extra energy I’d gotten when the Shaman fixed my leg was beginning to wear off. Soon, I found myself on my back, trying to push Hunter off of me and protect my face as she smashed her hooves into it, one after the other.

Each shot put stars in my eyes, and my ears started to ring and clatter like a million bells falling off a cliff and pummeling the ground below. I knew from the pain that Hunter had broken my nose again, not that it’d had much time to heal since our fight in Hole, and it wouldn’t be long before the rest of my face followed it. Though I tried as hard as I could to push her away, she seemed to somehow anchor herself in place with her hooves, so instead I reversed my magic between punches and brought her head down to mine even as I lunged forward. She screamed as my horn stuck something soft, and I was able to punch her in the throat and throw her weight off of me before she could recover.

When she took her hoof off of her face, blood poured out of the mangled mess I’d made of her eye. “You fucking bitch!” she howled, her single remaining eye fixing me with all its fury. “Stop fucking around and let me kill you!”

She charged again, but this time there was a little more distance between us, giving me enough time to fling fire at her. She weaved around my magic on agile hooves, and when I threw a wall of fire down in front of her, she instead jumped clear over it. I backpedaled as fast as I could when she landed in front of me and ripped her knife out of its sheath, her sweaty white mane whipping back and forth as she sliced the blade through the air at me. I tried to dance backwards as best as I could with my head turned to the side, one eye trying to watch out for things that could trip me up and the other tracking the knife, and both failing to do either thing very well. When I inevitably tripped, Hunter pounced on me like a warg diving for the kill… but I’d had enough experience with wargs today that I wasn’t going to take anymore of this shit. Even as I fell on my back again, my magic plucked a rock off the ground and drove it right into Hunter’s face.

The colossus of a mare snapped her head back as the stone met bone, and she lost her balance when her front hooves hit the ground, sending her for a rough topple into the muck. This time it was my turn to seize the upper hoof, and I rolled back onto my hooves as I drove the rock down toward her skull again. It shook in my grip as it made solid contact with her forehead, but I was trying to fight an earth pony in close quarters through brute force here. That’s a fight that’s pretty hard to win on its own, and when fighting a determined and veteran slaver like Hunter…

She managed to twist her head to the side before I could strike it again, and the rock only bit dirt. When I tried to pull it out to hit her again, she caught it with her hoof, punching it clear across our makeshift arena, her ruined depth perception apparently not bothering her at all. When my attempts to pluck it out of the air fumbled and failed, I shifted my mana to burning the bitch alive, but Hunter clearly knew how to fight dirty. Her hoof dug into the dirt as she pulled herself off the ground and whipped muck at my face like a brown snowball of mud and shit. The muck stung my eyes and blinded me, and I responded by throwing up a shield around myself just in time to feel the point of the knife stress my defenses.

As soon as Hunter hit the shield again, I reversed the magic, blasting mana outwards in a cone of force. I felt her stagger backwards, which gave me enough time to clear the muck and shit out of my eyes and orient myself before she attacked again. By this point, we were both panting heavily, and I didn’t know who would break first. I had an advantage with my magic, but Hunter was relentless. If cracking her in the skull with a heavy rock twice was hardly enough to faze her, then I really needed to figure out what would fast before she simply overwhelmed me.

There wasn’t any banter or threats or cursing. We were way far past that by now. All we had left was a furious rage and the will to kill each other. One of us was going to end up in the dirt, and I was damn certain that it wasn’t going to be me. And I knew that Hunter was thinking the same thing.

Her leg twitched, my horn flared to life, and our momentary stalemate ended as quickly as it began. Once more, the mare came barreling at me, and once more I tried to stop her with a whirlwind of fire and telekinesis. But again, the slaver was too fast and nimble, skirting around fireballs and either jumping over or barging through walls of fire, her armor absorbing most of the heat anyway. I began to retreat as her brown body grew closer and closer to me, and then in a flash, she pounced, knife glinting in the light of the fire crackling through the undergrowth and along the trees.

I fell back, hooves raised and horn already spitting out fire, and I felt her knife dig into my foreleg as I sacrificed it to keep the blade away from my neck. But with my other leg, I managed to push Hunter off toward the side so we awkwardly fell on our shoulders instead of with her atop me. She dropped the knife as she hit the ground, and before I could snatch it in my magic, she twisted to strike the tip of my horn with her hoof. The shot of pain running down into my skull severed my ties to my magic, and this time she rolled on top of me and began crushing my throat underneath her powerful hooves.

“Die!” she screamed at me, her single orange eye glaring down at me as blood poured out of the socket where her right one used to be. “I’ll fucking bury you! Nopony fucks with the RPR! Nopony fucks with me!”

I gasped and choked and wheezed as I desperately tried to inhale and couldn’t manage it beneath the crushing force of Hunter’s hooves. I tried to push her away, my hooves clawing at her face and her bulky neck, but I couldn’t throat punch her again because of the angle of the armored collar she wore. Not only that, but she expertly used her body and her weight to keep my hind legs pinned to the ground, unable to do anything except thrash and flail uselessly. She’d managed to collapse my windpipe, and I didn’t know how much longer it’d take for her to break it entirely. The edges of my vision were already going black…

A glint of metal flashed at the edges of my hazy vision. It was her knife, buried halfway up the length of the blade in the ground, just outside of my reach. I could already feel my magic returning, rallying to my horn just before I could black out, and I knew that the moment Hunter knew what I was trying to do, she’d punch out my magic again, and then I’d be dead.

So instead of grabbing the knife, I feebly pushed against her face. She snorted and pulled her head back, but she didn’t take her hooves off my throat to snuff out the spell. And in that single decision, it was over. All I’d intended on doing there was showing her my magic was too weak to fight back. So she didn’t even realize that I’d picked up the knife in the same flare until I drove it into her neck.

Her body went rigid, her hooves suddenly losing their choking force as her muscles locked stiff. Even as I coughed and started desperately sucking down air, I tore the knife out of her neck and stabbed it in again. A tidal wave of blood drenched my face as Hunter’s severed arteries drained her life all over me, but I didn’t stop. I stabbed her again, and again, and again, cutting and thrusting as the slaver choked and gagged and collapsed, too weak to stand, too weak to do anything. After the sixth stab, I left the knife buried in her neck and pushed her away, standing up and coughing as my windpipe propped itself back open again. I grimaced as I tried to catch my breath, doubled-over and covered in another mare’s blood, while Hunter convulsed and trembled on the ground. Eventually, I found the strength to stand up. The same, thankfully, could not be said about Hunter.

I turned around and looked the dying mare over. Her chest still heaved and shook, caught between coughing on her own blood and a primal thirst for air. The river of red running out of her neck bubbled and gurgled, and she only looked up at me with a hateful glare, somehow, somehow remaining conscious and coherent enough to hate me one last time. I knew she was cursing me out as furiously as she could inside her head, devoting the last few moments of her existence to despise the mare who got the better of her.

Just to stick it to her, I laughed and shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me like that, Hunter,” I told her, my voice raspy and raw after nearly having the life choked out of me. “We couldn’t keep dancing around the point forever.”

Hunter’s dying glare hardened into something more… and then eventually something much less as her chest finally stopped struggling.

I left her body where it lay, instead limping along in the direction of the Walsalhn. In the end, that dirty slaving bitch had gotten exactly what she deserved, and I didn’t feel the least bit sorry for her. In fact, I was actually quite pleased with myself. All I’d expected to get out of today was Yeoman’s head. Taking down Hunter, the RPR’s lead whore, was just a bonus on top of that. And even though I’d almost died, and my gun was lost somewhere in the dense undergrowth of the Spines, I was feeling confident. Hunter was just the latest thing to try and kill me and fail. Yeoman would be the next.

Or so I thought, but then a zebra began firing wildly through the brush around me. I immediately hit the dirt and covered my head (for all the good that would do) and waited for the barrage to stop. When it did, it was accompanied by a horrified gasp and the dull clatter of a rifle hitting the dirt. “Ember?!” Gauge shouted as he galloped toward me. He tried to slide to a stop at my side, but instead slipped, stumbled, fell, and then picked himself up again. “Holy shit! I didn’t think you’d be… I didn’t… you aren’t hurt, are you?”

“For fuck’s sake, Gauge, look at what you’re shooting before you shoot it!” I sat up, thankfully unharmed by Gauge’s wild shooting, and almost immediately did a double-take when I saw he was hurt. “What the fuck happened?” I asked him, my eyes honing in on the shoddily bandaged gunshot wound near his right shoulder. “Where’s Nova and Ace? Surge? SCaR?”

“We couldn’t stop Yeoman from getting into the tree,” Gauge said in a hurried breath. “He got the door open and went inside with a pair of his lackeys, while the rest stayed outside to keep us away. Ace tried to force her way in, but they hurt her bad. Nova had to get her out of there, and Surge rushed ahead with SCaR to get inside the installation’s circuits before it was too late. We’re scattered, Em. It’s bad.”

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath. “Then I need to get there. Somepony has to rip Yeoman in half. I’m not letting him get away from me again.”

“But how—?” Gauge began to ask, until he saw me stand upright on my four perfectly fine legs. “What happened to your leg?” he instead asked, eyes wide in surprise. “Wasn’t it—?”

“The Shaman,” I told him. “He used that freaky healing magic the Feati have. And if Ace is hurt bad, then she needs to see him.” I snatched the rifle Gauge had dropped from the ground and turned back to him. “How… how bad is it?”

“I don’t know, Ember,” Gauge admitted. “I’m not a doctor. I only saw her go down. But Nova was worried. She ran out there in the hail of bullets using her wing as a shield and dragged Ace back. When she flew off with Ace, that was when I fled too. I’m just… not a good enough fighter for this shit.”

“I don’t give a fuck about that,” I told him. “You’re alive. That’s the only thing that matters.”

“But what about the code?” Gauge asked me. “Yeoman probably already has his hooves on it.”

“Not if Surge did her job,” I told him. “And regardless, I’m going to find out. If I can’t stop Yeoman from going inside and getting the code, I can at least kill him on the way out.”

The zebra nodded. “SCaR should still be over there,” he said. “After Surge jumped circuits, I told him to hang around and make sure Yeoman doesn’t go anywhere. He was a little pissed we let Surge possess him, but I know he isn’t gonna let us down.”

“Good.” I checked the ammo in the rifle and pulled the spare magazines out of Gauge’s bags. “Go back to the settlement and help there. They really need it.”

“You’re going to go in there alone?”

Nostrils flaring, I finally bobbed my head. “Yeoman’s not going to get away from us,” I told him. “I just killed Hunter on my own. All Yeoman has is a pair of wings. Once I catch him, he’s dead.”

Though I could tell Gauge wanted to argue with me, he at least seemed to know better. “Alright,” he finally said. “Just be careful. You and Ace… you have a lot of things to discuss and…”

“Yeoman’s not going to take another pony I care about away from me,” I told him, and it wasn’t a promise, it was a fact. “I’ll see you when this shit’s all done.”

“Good luck, Em,” Gauge said. “Stay safe.”

I nodded and wordlessly turned away, once more stalking through the undergrowth of the Spines. Behind me, Gauge limped off in the opposite direction, back toward the settlement, back toward the smoke. I could only hope that my friends had done a number on Yeoman’s party before they were driven away. If I had to fight Yeoman and an entire squad of the Ivory City’s finest at the same time, I probably was not going to win that clash. But if I could catch Yeoman on his own…

As I approached the Walsalhn, I slowed down and moved with a little more caution. Yeoman was in total control of this area, based on what I’d heard from Gauge, and I didn’t need to stumble right into an ambush. My best bet was to try to move quickly but quietly and not get caught in the process. But as I slowly began to circle the enormous tree, working my way closer and closer to its trunk and to the clearing that separated it from my cover, a thunderous boom that shook the ground roared from the other side of the tree. I crouched low as the earth shook like an earthquake was ripping through the Spines, and some of the trees began shedding leaves and branches as the vibrations caused them to start whipping back and forth. For a moment, I feared it was another one of those huge invisible burrowing centipede things, but the ground hadn’t shaken nearly as much when we fought it as it was now. And it wasn’t until I saw a few trees begin to topple ahead of me that I knew whatever was causing the ground to shake was emerging.

But when I finally wound my way around the base of the huge fucking tree, I saw a sight I absolutely was not prepared to see: a steel tower jutting out of the ground, waves of dry dirt and detritus cascading off of its sloped roof. A few birds screamed in alarm at the sudden appearance of something so foreign and alien to this undisturbed patch of woods, and the light of the sun silhouetted the tower’s sleek form and tall antenna against the smoke and ash still filtering through the forest. It was only then did I realize that the tower had appeared near the edge of Spines, for the trees suddenly thinned out behind it, opening this dark and shadowy forest up to the light of Auris’ blue sun.

I watched it for several long seconds, rooted in place with shock and awe. The tower was part of the installation hidden underneath the big fucking tree; that much was obvious. But why had it suddenly arisen? Was it Yeoman’s doing, or Surge’s? She was in the systems, after all, and if she wanted to fuck with Yeoman, she definitely had the means to do it.

Perhaps she was raising the tower so I could sneak in the back way?

I mean, I sure as shit wasn’t going to call it the stealthy route, considering all the noise it’d made coming up, but if it was an entrance to the installation where I didn’t have to shoot my way past a half dozen soldiers without backup, I was all for it. And it was that notion that sent me galloping toward the raised tower, determined to reach it before any of Yeoman’s posse did. Besides, I hadn’t gotten close enough to the tree to be out in the open yet. I still had plenty of brush to use as cover.

When I finally made it to the front of the tower—or rather, what I assumed was the front—I finally slowed down and began to circle it much more cautiously. There weren’t any other signs of activity around it, save for a few freakishly large insects scurrying away from the uprooted ground as their buried burrows were suddenly exposed to the air. I was the first one here, if any of Yeoman’s soldiers were coming to investigate, and I knew I couldn’t squander this opportunity. After I spied what looked like a door leading deeper into the tower, I popped out of the brush and galloped over to it, immediately trying to force it open with my magic. “Come on… come the fuck on…” I growled under my breath. I didn’t see any sort of latch or button or terminal to get it open; it must have only been operable from the other side. Finally, I cursed and stomped my hoof on the ground. “Surge, if you can hear me, open this fucking door!” I shouted at it. “I can get in this way and we can stop Yeoman before he—!”

There was a hiss of hydraulic fluid, and a seam suddenly appeared in the middle of the door. I backed away as the rust-speckled door began to groan open, shedding dirt from its joints like rain. Thank the stars, Surge must have heard me! I never would have thought having a dead mare in our little team would be so useful a month ago, but now…

The door dropped open with a heavy thud, revealing a staircase going down into darkness. I didn’t need any more of an invitation to go charging on in; with my rifle held closely in my magic, I rushed right at the entrance, hoof making solid contact with the metal step, the first time a pony had touched it in almost two hundred winters. I could hardly see down the shadowy corridor, but the lights began to flicker on, one after the other. And when the one above me finally flashed to life as I hurtled myself toward the next step, I found myself face to face with a shocked yellow pegasus flying up the other way.

We slammed into each other, and the momentum he’d had on his side overpowered my unicorn weight and sent me toppling backwards and out of the stairwell. I clutched tightly to my rifle as we tumbled through the dirt, but I didn’t get the first kick in. The pegasus stomped on my gut as he worked his way out of my tangle of limbs, and I coughed and rolled away, using the trunk of a tree to pull myself up.

It was then that we locked eyes, and there was no mistaking that terrible, terrible scar covering half of Yeoman’s skull.

Red filled my vision, the red haze of anger, the crimson of my marefriend’s blood as it drained on the ground around her body. I screamed with rekindled rage and sorrow and began firing wildly with my stolen rifle, the bullets chasing the bastard off to my right. But I checked my anger with focus; as much as I wanted to rip him limb from limb, blind rage had nearly killed me at the dam. This time, I wouldn’t burn away all my anger on furious, angry shooting, but neither would I give him a chance to recover.

“Get back here!” I screamed at him, taking off after him through the undergrowth. I ripped branches and leaves out of the way with my magic and held my gun just out in front of my face, firing quick bursts whenever I thought I had an opportunity. Ahead of me, Yeoman bounced from tree branch to tree branch, using the towering trunks for cover, but not stopping to return fire. Not like I gave him much of a chance, anyway; the moment he even began to slow down in the slightest, I fired at him, forcing him to keep moving. Bark and wooden splinters erupted from trees as my bullets chased him through the forest, and more than a few yellow feathers ripped free from his wings as he frantically changed direction to avoid getting shot.

But then he burst out into an opening through the trees, and I had to slide to a stop as I suddenly realized the clearing was actually the overlook of a cliff. Rocks clattered down the side of the cliff as my hooves sent them toppling over the edge, down into a river maybe one or two hundred feet below. For once, I could see above the canopy of the Spines, the red and pink leaves of the forest swaying beneath me as the mammoth trunks of the Spines’ petrified giants rose up to reach unfathomable heights in the sky. And just ahead of me, Yeoman flew for the open space away from the cliff, to where I wouldn’t be able to follow him.

I brought my rifle to bear and braced it with my forelegs as best as I could, trying to sight down the erratically flying pegasus. I fired one burst, the middle tracer round flying wide left. I adjusted and fired to the right, but Yeoman climbed above the bullets on some instinct. I parted my lips and gritted my teeth as I fired a third time to no avail. But the fourth time, I saw feathers fly out into the air, and the pegasus began to fall…

But he recovered and adjusted, once more gaining altitude. When I tried to shoot again, the rifle squawked that it was empty, and I threw it aside in frustration. I had more bullets, but Yeoman was heading for the trees, and the moment he got beneath the canopy, I’d lose him for good. And this rifle just wasn’t accurate enough to hit him from that far away. Not like Fortitude, which the bastard still had on his back, or Ace’s rifle, which was with the mare back at the settlement.

So I came up with another plan. And I flung myself off the cliff before stopping to think about whether it would work or not. I didn’t even ask myself if it would just end up getting me killed because I already knew what the answer was going to be.

My stomach jumped into my throat and I felt my whole body clench up in terror as I began to free fall off the side of the cliff. Beneath me, the waters of the river churned, still white and frothy from the heavy rain that’d fallen in the past few days. But even as I started picking up speed, I built magic onto my horn and took careful aim at the figure fluttering away from me. I’d likely only have the one shot; I didn’t think I’d have the recovery to adjust if I missed.

With a flash of magic, I shunted myself through space, reappearing far in front of the cliff. But this time, I reoriented myself and pulled my momentum through the teleport to keep going. Using the speed I’d gained, I propelled myself right at Yeoman, who whipped his head toward his right at the sudden flash and pop. Screaming, I flailed my hooves as I slammed into him before he could dive out of the way, and I hung on as tight as I could as we tumbled out of the air, doing my best to drag him to the earth and not let him shake me off.

Ideally, we would have hit one of the trees and fell to the ground there, and even more ideally, he would have taken the brunt of the impact, not me. But I misjudged my teleport in one way, and our combined momentum didn’t take us to the trees. Instead, it sent us hurtling toward the river. I only figured this out when suddenly the cold fingers of the water knifed their way into my coat and the world suddenly began to spin as I tumbled through the rapids. I managed to get my head above the water and coughed, my legs instinctively kicking at the current to keep myself afloat. This was the second time I’d ended up in rapids fighting for my life, and I wasn’t about to lose the rematch.

A little ways away, Yeoman also emerged from the water, and before he could drag himself to safety, I lunged at him and hooked my forelegs around his neck. I dragged us both back beneath the current, and soon we were wrestling for control as the river sent us tumbling about. Rocks and roots blurred by, but all I focused on was Yeoman’s furious half-face. I at least had one advantage over him when fighting in the water: I could actually keep the water from flooding into my mouth since I still had both my cheeks.

But even under the water, Yeoman was strong and used his wings like another set of forelegs. It wasn’t enough that I had to try and fight his hooves off; I also had to keep his wings from jabbing my eyes or punching at my throat in an effort to get me to inhale the water around us. Thankfully, I could still use my magic underwater, albeit fairly poorly considering I was more focused with trying not to get throat punched and trying not to lose my horn on a rock. Still, it helped to negate Yeoman’s extra limbs, and I soon found myself on top of him, trying to force his head down to the riverbed where a rock would hopefully cave his skull in.

Instead, Yeoman snapped his wings open to his sides and fanned his feathers out as wide as they could go. The sudden drag sent us spinning again, and this time I lost my grip on him completely. We separated, and I saw him go up for air, so I immediately did the same. My nostrils blew a spray of steam into the air as I exhaled and sharply drew in a few more breaths, and I saw Yeoman trying to use his wings to help him paddle off toward the side of the river. “No, you fucking don’t!” I screamed at him, and I yanked back on one wing with my magic, dragging him back into the center of the river and closer to me. Yeoman shouted something at me in return, but I couldn’t hear him over the growing roar of the water around us—and it was then that I noticed the current was getting stronger.

I looked over my shoulder and realized I couldn’t see much more of the riverbank ahead of us. It looked like the trees suddenly ended in a frothy white line of water, and it didn’t take me too long to realize what I was headed for. “Fuck!” I shouted, trying to muster up the energy to teleport out of the water, but Yeoman latched onto me and started trying to dunk my head back under the water.

“No!” I heard him shout as I struggled to keep my muzzle out of the river. “You’re going to drown, bitch! Drown! You’re not cheating death again!”

The river roared so loud I feared it was going to burst my eardrums. I felt it tug on my mane and tail like a strong hand, and before I knew it, gravity began to take over. I cried out in fear and alarm as I went over the edge of the waterfall, Yeoman pushing away from me to try and glide to safety now that he had some altitude to work with. It felt like I was watching him spread his wings in slow motion as I fell backwards who knew how many feet to the water below, the water rolling off of his feathers as they began to fan to their full glory. They began to catch the air and we started to separate, me chained by gravity, him cheating it and death with an extra pair of limbs. I didn’t know what lay beneath me or if I would even survive it, but in that moment, only one thought crossed my mind.

“You’re coming with me!”

My magic took hold of his wing, and he jerked his body to try and shake it free. But a single second was all I needed to work with, and that one motion did half the work for me. Summoning all the telekinetic strength I’d built up over the years as a forgemare, I twisted his wing as far back as it would go, and then some. His mouth parted in pain when the bones popped out of their joints, and suddenly he wasn’t flying anymore, he was falling just like me.

That look of fear, that pained shock carved deep into his features… that was an image I knew I’d never forget. Reclaimer’s right hoof pony brought low by a simple forgemare. And now he was going to die. We were both going to die. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to pull off another teleport, not unless the bottom of this waterfall was a lot farther down than I thought it was.

I’m pretty sure I grinned at him as our eyes locked. Payback. That’s what it was. Payback for taking Zip from me. Payback for destroying Blackwash. Payback for all the misery he’d caused in his life. And to top it all off, he was taking a piece of the code to the grave with him instead of back to Reclaimer. We’d won. All it would cost us was my life.

An even trade, I’d say.

I slammed into the water like a bag of bricks hitting concrete and knew nothing more.

Chapter 37: The Last Mare Standing

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Chapter 37: The Last Mare Standing

I honestly didn’t expect death to hurt this much.

That was all I had for what felt like an eternity: pain, pain, and more pain. All of my senses had been stripped away save the pain. My body felt like it’d been crumpled together, all my bones broken and snapped and packed into one big useless pile of meat. If I wasn’t already dead, I would have gladly welcomed death again.

But corpses don’t feel pain. So was I still alive?

Something kicked me in the ribs, and I realized it was my diaphragm, greedily sucking in air and coughing out water. Bit by bit, my senses came back to me, first my sense of touch, then hearing, then sight. I cracked open bleary eyes and saw a waterfall roaring above me, sending millions of gallons of water out into open air every minute. The dull roar had faded into the background of the world, hidden behind the shaky beating of my heart thumping in my ears. But that was my heart that was beating, and that was the waterfall I’d gone over to end up down here. I was alive—somehow—and boy did I wish I wasn’t.

“Embaw?” Green hooves moved out of my periphery, and it took all my strength just to tilt my head back a few degrees. Teka stood over me, her tattoos aglow in silvery light, and she put one of her hooves on my forehead. Blissfully cool warmth seemed to flow out of it and into my skull, and soon my pounding headache began to fade. I saw her pick up something black and conical off the ground and press it to my forehead, and soon my horn began to sparkle with mana and energy, casting little orange sparks all around us.

Was that my fucking horn she just reattached to my head?

“T-Teka?” I breathed and slowly fought to sit upright, only for the Feati mare to put her hoof on my chest and force me back down.

“La,” she said, shaking her head. “La, la, Embaw.” She scrunched her muzzle and chewed on her lip as she sought for the right Equiish words. “U’a… you… huwt. Noal huwt. Noal, noal.”

“Yeah, you’re… you’re right about that,” I wheezed as she turned her healing magic towards the rest of my broken body. “I hurt like a motherfucker… ow…”

The more Teka worked with her magic, the more alive I began to feel. The pain slowly subsided as her tattoos healed broken bones and slowly put me back together, though I noticed that the young mare began to slouch more and more the longer she worked on me. The magic was tiring her out, but she still worked relentlessly to make sure I didn’t die.

Eventually, I had enough strength to sit up. Digging my hooves into the soft ground of the riverbank, I propped myself up and looked around. I must have drifted fifty, maybe a hundred yards away from the base of the waterfall, and the ground was all churned up by the water’s edge. That must have been where Teka found me and dragged me inland so she could work her magic. There was also a worrying amount of blood coating the ground, and not only that, but the sun was low in the sky, over the eastern horizon. It was morning now, and when I’d gone over the waterfall, it had been late in the afternoon.

How long had I been out here?

Teka sat down on the ground, panting lightly, and her eyes slightly sunken in their sockets like she’d spent the past week without sleep—I didn’t know how much of that was actually because she’d been missing sleep and how much of it was a result of the magic she’d just poured into healing me. The Shaman’s words came back to me, and I also wondered if the Feati tattoos could drain a pony of their life essence like overcasting could do to me.

“Teka,” I asked her, and she lifted her eyes at her name. I swallowed hard as I tried to force myself to ask the question I’m not sure I wanted to know the answer to. “Did I… Did I actually die?”

The Feati mare frowned and cocked her head to the side. “A to tunkto’set’un,” she said in her language, and I could only sigh. I really wish she knew how to speak Equiish apart from a few random words. Maybe I could ask the Shaman later about how exactly that magic worked, and if it could really bring a pony back from death. Judging by the mess I’d made on the riverbank, I was finding it harder and harder to believe that I had actually survived the fall.

I stood up, my legs trembling slightly as I used them for the first time in who knew how long. All the supplies I’d had with me when I went over the edge were gone. I had nothing, naked and alone out in the wilderness apart from Teka, who looked like she was trying her hardest not to pass out. But I didn’t see the body of a yellow pegasus anywhere nearby. Swallowing hard, I began to slowly trot along the river, keeping my eyes peeled for any signs of a pony scrambling out of the water. If I’d been so badly mangled that I might have actually died and come back, I was hopeful that Yeoman would have had it much worse.

And what did that mean for me if I had died? That was a worrying thought. I didn’t remember anything after that crushing pain that overwhelmed me when I hit the water. Maybe I couldn’t remember anything because brains make memories, not souls? Or maybe I hadn’t died in the first place, only barely clinging onto life? Either way, it left me shivering and frightened, and unless Teka suddenly learned how to speak Equiish, I wasn’t going to get an answer. But I resolved not to burden my friends with those worries; I didn’t need them worrying about me more than they already did.

And I had other things to worry about myself as well, so I tried to push them away and focus on the world around me to get a bit of my sanity back. The birds sang their morning songs overhead as the blue light struck its way between the red leaves, and I just closed my eyes and took it all in. The Spines seemed like they’d returned to their usual self; no gunshots broke the calm stillness of the day, and the only sounds I could hear in any direction were the noises of the wildlife. It was like the madness of before had never happened. Even on an alien world like this, there was a peaceful simplicity to nature. The Feati had been in tune with it for who knows how long, and then the outside world had nearly destroyed them.

It didn’t take me all that long to find what I was looking for. Wedged between a pair of rocks on the opposite side of the river was a yellow body, wings tattered and waterlogged, tail swept off to the side as the current trickled past. I lit my horn and lifted Yeoman’s body out of the water, wincing once or twice at the aches running along my horn from tip to base. At least the damn thing still worked after Teka had reattached it. No wonder I’d had a pounding headache when I first came to, though that could have been from any number of other possibilities, including a rock caving my skull in before Teka fixed it.

Once I moved Yeoman’s body to my side of the river, I let it flop on the ground. The first thing I noticed was the mangled mess of his wings, likely destroyed after hitting the water. Little bones pierced through the skin and half of the feathers were gone; even if he was still alive, they’d be of no use to him for a long time. The next thing I noticed was the awkward bend in his neck. He must have broken it when he hit the water, which was a shame. That kind of a death was too quick for a fucker like him. He should have drowned as his broken and mangled limbs proved too useless to swim. That was the least he deserved.

But he was dead now. He was dead and I’d killed him. Gravity may have struck the final blow, but I was standing, and he wasn’t. And I began to smile to myself, genuinely smile. Hunter and Yeoman were both dead. In one day, I’d taken down two monsters who had been making life miserable for me and my friends for so long. There wasn’t much I could really complain about with that.

And then I spied something sticking out of the water not too far away. Frowning, I picked it up in my magic, only to gasp in shock at what I’d found. It was Fortitude, a little waterlogged and definitely in dire need of a cleaning and oiling, but it was my family’s rifle, alright. After all this time, after all these miles between here and Blackwash, I’d finally reclaimed my lost heirloom.

I cradled it against my chest like I was holding a newborn. I was holding one of the last pieces of Blackwash I had left, apart from Nova and Gauge and my family picture I kept safely tucked away in my bags back at the settlement. The last time I’d fired this weapon, it was to kill the slaver who’d murdered my mom. Perhaps there was some poetic justice I’d missed out on by not ending Yeoman with it too, but that didn’t matter to me. Fortitude was back in my hooves, and though it wasn’t anywhere near as good as the modern rifles I’d used since losing it, I knew this gun inside and out. She was reliable, accurate, and deadly, and I knew I could always count on her. So long as my knack for losing weapons in the chaos of combat didn’t continue, of course.

I didn’t bother to look Yeoman over any more; whatever gear he’d had on him had been lost to the water, and I was content to just let him rot. So after spitting on his corpse one last time, I left it for the birds and trudged my way back to Teka. I found her still sitting by the water’s edge, but at least she’d stopped panting and seemed to be recuperating her strength.

Sitting down across from her, I tried to give her a friendly smile. “Thanks for saving me,” I said, hoping the gratitude in my voice could carry across, if not the meaning of the words themselves. “And thanks for helping me get into the Grass Trial. Lot of fucking good it did me in the end, but it’s the thought that counts, right?”

Teka cocked her head in confusion, but she at least attempted to return my smile, as exhausted as she was. I held my hoof out for her to shake or bump or whatever, but she just kind of stared at it awkwardly for the longest time. “I’m glad you’re okay, Teka,” I told her, feeling guilty that I’d only just said it now. I’d been so caught up with other shit and worrying about myself that I hadn’t stopped to wonder if this poor mare I’d rescued had survived Yeoman’s attack on her home or not.

The young mare hesitantly touched my hoof, and after a second or two of uncomfortable contact, I finally just rolled my eyes. “Fuck it,” I said, and I leaned in to give her a hug. She stiffened a little bit at the surprise contact, but I eventually felt her return it. I could feel the shakes and tremors running through her body, and I realized that she was scared and frightened but doing her best to try and cover it up and be strong.

Once we separated and I managed to get Teka back up to her hooves, I looked around for any paint markers or anything that would tell me where I needed to go next. “How do we get back to your home, Teka?” I asked her, before sighing and slapping myself in the face when I saw her only frown in confusion. “Right, right. Fuck. Uh… Feati? Feati home?” I asked her, trying to push my meaning through one common word we understood. When that failed to elicit a response, I tried something else. “How about… Walsalhn?” I charaded walking in place and pointed roughly in the direction of the waterfall’s source to try and tell her that I wanted to go back, and this seemed like it finally got through to her. She nodded her head once and walked in front of me, starting down a barely visible trail flattened into the woods of the Spines by countless generations of pony hooves. She looked over her shoulder to make sure I was following her, and when I trotted up behind her, she once more set off, her nimble hooves traversing the undergrowth and bushes with ease.

It took us probably the better part of two hours to just get back to the tree, and that’s because we had to go way out of the way to find a path back up the river and past all the harsh terrain. It didn’t feel like I’d covered this much ground when fighting Yeoman, but I guess a life or death struggle will do that to your perception of distance. I worried about Teka almost the whole way since she hadn’t exactly fully recovered from healing me, but she soldiered on regardless, always managing to keep the pace somewhere between a canter and a trot. I didn’t know how many winters younger than me she was—maybe six or seven—but she took it all in stride and pushed on more than I could ever hope to do myself. If nothing else, Feati ponies were tough as nails, tougher than the petrified giants they lived under.

At last, we made it back to the Walsalhn. Some small smoldering fires still guttered in the surroundings (some of them no doubt lit by my own horn) but the tree itself looked fine. I mean, I doubted anything could actually hurt a monster that big, but it was good to know that Yeoman hadn’t torn it down just because he could or something like that. I was still wary for any of the soldiers he supposedly had left with him that I’d never seen when we fought, but Teka moved through the forest without worry or fear, so I had a feeling they either left a while ago or the Feati had managed to clean the rest of them up.

I wanted to go investigate the tower, or at least the opening to the hidden facility, and get Surge back inside of my skull so she could clue me in on what had gone down, but it wasn’t meant to be. Almost as soon as Teka and I approached the tower, a couple of Lentowenye’s blood brothers appeared from the brush and approached us, sour expressions on their faces. Teka froze and I hesitated as they drew nearer, until one of them began talking to the young mare. I gathered from the tone of his voice that he was giving her a command, and when Teka shakily bobbed her head, he shifted his tattooed focus to me. He didn’t say anything, only bobbing his head back in the direction of the Feati settlement, and the rest of his companions all moved a step closer to us.

The message was clear: follow, or else. And I was really in no mood to start fighting off Feati after I’d tried my hardest to prevent Yeoman from slaughtering them all. I could always swing by and pick up Surge later, assuming that I wasn’t being led back to an execution. After all, I had the distinct feeling that the coming reunion with Lento wasn’t going to be pleasant. Nothing with that stallion had proved to be so far.

As we were escorted back to the settlement, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of déjà vu. When we’d first entered the settlement, it was through armed escort. Now, in what I assumed would be the final time I ever set hoof in this place, I once again found myself guarded by ponies with spears. In some small way, it frustrated me to no end. I’d done everything I could to jump through the hoops Lento placed in front of me, to abide by the traditions of his people to get what I want. And at every turn, I’d had to bash my head against a concrete wall just to make any progress. And for what? None of it mattered in the end. Dozens and dozens of ponies had died in a surprise attack by the Ivory City, and I wasn’t in the settlement to help protect it when the attack started. And now, to top it all off, I had a feeling Lento was going to find some way to place the blame at my hooves. The fucker hated me, and after all this shit I’d had to go through because of him, it was easy to say that the feeling was mutual. I couldn’t help but think that the Feati would be much better off if Teka was the one leading them instead of her brother.

Those thoughts soon subsided to disgust and shock as we approached the settlement. Bodies were strewn all about the town’s stout wooden walls, and mothers cried over the fallen bodies of their sons and daughters, husbands and fathers. There was blood everywhere, from crimson pools seeped into the ground, to dried drops speckling the foliage. Though the Feati had cleaned up considerably in the day following the attack, the settlement was still raw and broken. I didn’t know how many ponies had lived here before the attack; I could only count the bodies. I just prayed that there were enough still left alive to keep this last bastion of peace and innocence to the sufferings of the outside world in one piece.

And watching all that suffering… It was very easy to believe that I’d somehow been responsible for it.

Eyes watched me as I was escorted through the settlement doors. In every pair, I saw something different. There was relief in some, disgust in others. Joy and hatred. Sorrow and apathy. Everypony had their own thoughts about the outsider with the fiery mane, the one who had led death to their tribe, the one who had stood tall and fought her hardest to protect them against those very same ponies. What was I to them? A curse? A blessing?

It didn’t fucking matter, I knew. The only opinions that mattered were those of Lento, the Shaman, and Iklimna, and of those three, Lento had the final say.

The interior of the Feati settlement looked like something out of my nightmares. Which was fitting, because it looked almost exactly like Blackwash did months ago. Buildings had been burnt out and collapsed in on themselves, bullet holes riddled every exposed surface, and smoke billowed from the dying embers of fires nestled in the heart of the rubble. The bodies had been cleaned up at least, save for the invaders; they were left to rot where they lay, at least for the time being. Ponies cried in muted wails as they huddled together, the survivors of broken families. Many were loosely bandaged with leaves and grasses, and some still had dried blood caked into their coats. There weren’t many wounded, likely thanks to their penchant for healing magic, but not all wounds could be healed so easily.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to go all the way up to the longhouse, scarred as it was from the fighting. The ponies escorting me broke away and vanished into the settlement after motioning in pretty clear terms that Teka and I were to stay there and wait for them to return, leaving us to stand alone in an open space. Ponies turned their eyes towards us and murmuring began to spread through the crowd, but when somepony approached us, it wasn’t Lento or any of his lackeys. It was Nova, barreling out of the crowd on white and metal wings, knocking me flat on my back as she literally tackled me in a hug.

“Ember!” she cried, and I could practically feel her as much as I could hear her squealing in delight and relief. “Oh, stars, Ember, we thought you were dead! Gauge told us what happened and that you went off to fight Yeoman by yourself but then you didn’t come back and—!”

“Hey, take it easy, Nov,” I interrupted, trying to gently shush her by giving her a firm hug back. “I decided to take a river cruise in the middle of it,” I joked, grinning at my best friend’s bright face. “Teka found me and brought me back when I dicked around too long.”

Two more sets of hooves joined us, and I craned my neck from the ground and grinned at Gauge and Ace. “I heard you guys missed me,” I said, finally sitting upright and making Nova do the same.

“I coulda sworn you were gonna turn up dead,” Ace drawled, though her usual outlaw smirk was betrayed by the shining happiness in her eyes at seeing me not fucking dead.

“I could’ve sworn the same thing,” I told her. She wasn’t wearing any of her usual gear, and she looked odd without it, honestly. “Gauge told me you got hurt really bad,” I said, lowering my voice.

“Hurt, but I ain’t dead yet,” she proudly proclaimed. Her wingtips drooped a bit as she added, “It were real close, though. Not gonna lie. Almost started losing my guts through my bellybutton. But that shaman, though…”

“He’s something else,” I agreed. “That’s why my leg is in one piece. He’s a miracle worker.”

“Good thing, too.” The outlaw winked. “You look better with four of ‘em.”

Gauge sat down by Nova’s side and draped a foreleg across her back. “You must be the luckiest pony who ever lived,” he finally said with a shake of his head.

“I’ll agree on that, I guess, but it’s not all good luck,” I told him. “But eventually you have to have a little good luck to balance out the bad, right?”

“I suppose so.” Then his eyes narrowed, and he seemed almost afraid to ask his next question. “Yeoman… is he…?”

“Dead,” I said with a firm finality. “I took him over a waterfall with me. I made it. He didn’t.” It felt like my head was filling with air; I was getting dizzy just thinking about it. “It’s over, guys,” I managed to croak. “He’s… he’s dead. Blackwash… our friends and family…”

Nova put her hooves to her muzzle, and I saw tears begin to well up in her eyes. They weren’t sad, but they weren’t happy, either. I think they were just… relieved. The pony who had ruined our lives had gotten what he deserved. Now, we could finally put our demons to rest… or at least most of them.

“We still have to do something about Reclaimer,” Gauge said. “He was the one who ordered the attack in the first place. He’s the one behind all this shit.”

“We’ll get to him in time,” I said. “Once I get Surge back from the tree, we can make our way to the Ivory City and pay him a visit.” My gaze swiveled to Ace, who’d set a dour frown on her face. “What? Something wrong?”

“You wanna go toward the City?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “Ain’t nopony I ever known who actually wants to go there.”

“If that’s where Reclaimer is, then that’s where we have to go,” I insisted. When her expression didn’t change, I shrugged my shoulders. “Look, Ace, I know you don’t really want to go there and shit, but if you know the way—”

“I’ll go,” she said, sharply interrupting me. “But I ain’t gonna be happy about it.” She cursed under her breath and stood up, tail lashing back and forth. “Fuck… can’t even celebrate being alive for two minutes before you go right back into the grinder,” she muttered to herself as she turned around and began to walk away.

I blinked in confusion. “Hey, where are you going?”

“To find somewhere to drink in peace,” she called back over her shoulder. “If we’re going to the City, then I wanna savor my booze as long as I can before my head ends up on a pike.”

I tried to go after her, but Gauge caught me with a hoof on my shoulder. “Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. “Let her be. She was worrying herself ragged about you last night. She thought you were dead.”

“We all did,” Nova said with a nod.

“Give her a few minutes to cool down, and maybe we can all talk about it later,” Gauge said. “After all, you did just practically say you want to go and get yourself killed moments after coming back to us.”

“I just… We’re not done with it yet,” I said. “Yeoman was just a lackey, but Reclaimer…”

“We’ll worry about it later,” the zebra insisted. Then he looked to the side and pointed with his ears. “And besides, it looks like Lentowenye wants to have a few words with us.”

I shifted my attention to the heart of the settlement, where I saw the chieftain approaching us. He moved with an escort of a few blood brothers, maybe the only ones he had left, and it was obvious he’d been hurt in the fighting. The way he carried himself had all the signs of a hurt pony, even if I couldn’t see anything that was wrong with him at a glance. I had no doubt that he’d probably been shot at least once but had gotten some healing along the way, though I had to wonder how good the Feati’s magic could heal internal injuries. Limbs and flesh seemed easy enough, but guts and organs…

When he stopped in front of us, I saw Teka wilt back behind me. That didn’t save her from her brother’s harsh words, however. “U’a S’a lifte’sat?” he asked her, his voice steeped with venom.

Teka bobbed her head. “S’a A U’a hilf’sat noal immapohna’hn’un e tol’sat Tm’a’hn almaha, A—!”

“Yut’un!” Lento bared his teeth, and I saw a shudder run through Teka’s frame. Once he’d pinned his sister to the ground with a glare, he turned his attention to me. “Did you know they would come?” he asked me, the hair on the back of his neck practically standing on end.

“If you would have let us into your stupid fucking tree in the first place then they would have chased us, not you!” I shouted back at him.

His silvery tattoos shifted to red for a few seconds before returning to their usual shimmer. “So you did lead them here,” he stated, coldly.

“That’s not what I fucking said!” I protested. “They were after the same thing we were looking for, and if we’d gotten to it first, they would have gone after us, not you! But you wouldn’t let us just get what we needed and go, so we couldn’t do that!”

“Outsiders have brought us nothing but pain!” Lento shouted back at me. “You attack my people, enslave them, and burn our homes! You kill us by the score with your weapons of death and your black magic! Why would I ever trust you to visit our sacred tree?”

“Because not all of us are fucking evil! I stood up for your people! Me and my friends, we fought those other outsiders off! I killed their leaders!” I snarled at him as I added, “I killed more of them than any of your blood brothers did. Without us, you all would have died!”

“Without you, the invaders may have never come, and my people wouldn’t be grieving for their friends and family.”

“You can’t honestly fucking believe that!” I felt somepony tug on my shoulder to get me to stop, but I pushed them away. “If you do, you’re so hopelessly naïve that it’s a fucking wonder anypony ever thought you’d be good chieftain material!”

Again, Lento’s tattoos flickered red, and the Feati around us grew tenser as they watched their leader’s temper flare up. “Your three days of hospitality in my tribe are over. Take your things and go.”

“Not without going into the Walsalhn.”

Lento sneered at me. “You will never be welcomed into the tree for as long as you live.”

“I survived your stupid fucking Grass Trial,” I retorted. “By your tribe’s rules, I’m allowed to visit it. Unless you want to go back on that and break those too.”

Lentowenye gnashed his teeth together in frustration, and I swore for a moment he was going to tell me to fuck off anyway. But instead, he stomped the ground, a tiny fire bursting out around his hoof. “Fine,” he spat. “So be it. It’s already been desecrated by outsiders once. What more could you possibly do to it?” But then he lunged into my face, pressing his nose against mine. “But if you hurt it in any way, defile it further… I don’t care how many of my people I have to send to kill you, I will do it.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” I flatly told him. “As soon as I’m done with the tree, I’m gone.”

“Good.” Lento took a step back, though his shoulders remained tense. “Then I think it’s better for all of us if you got moving.”

We leered at each other for a few seconds, but ultimately I was the one who yielded first with a snort. “Fine.”

Lento watched me with hard eyes as I turned back to my friends and immediately walked between them. “Let’s grab our shit and go,” I told them. “I’m sick of this place.”

“But what about Teka?” Nova asked, and the question was just enough to make me stop and look back at the young mare as her brother cuffed her over her ear and began to lead her away from the rest of us.

I could only give her a sigh. “There’s nothing we can do for her,” I finally told her. “She’s the only pony who can help herself.”

Of course, I didn’t know how exactly she could do that, but I just hoped things would work out for the poor mare one way or another.

Nova’s wings drooped. “I wish I could’ve said bye to her,” she pouted. Gauge gave her a pat on the back and a hug, and I at least sympathetically nodded along.

“She deserves to lead these ponies,” I said. “Not her brother.”

But even I knew that wasn’t going to happen any time soon.

-----

We found Ace back at the longhouse where all our shit was, back propped against the wall, a half-empty bottle of whiskey between her feathers. She was looking at something she held in the fanned feathers of her other wing, but when she noticed us approach her, she deftly tucked it away. “What do you want?” she asked us, her usual drawl just the slightest bit slurred from her drinking.

“We’re moving out,” I said, grabbing my things and putting my bags around my body. I’d lost one of my smaller bags and a few magazines chasing Yeoman, but at least the rest of my gear was still here. “Lento doesn’t want us here any longer than we have to be.”

“Great,” Ace muttered under her breath. She put the bottle of whiskey to her lips and took three big gulps before she grimaced and corked it back up. “Can’t even have a few minutes to drink alone ‘fore we gotta throw our asses right back into it.”

“After all the shit we’ve been through, I just want to get out of here,” I said. “This is not a vacation I’m going to look back fondly at.”

“I wish we could go back to Three Rivers,” Nova said with a sigh. “At least the ponies there were nice and didn’t want to kill us.”

“And they had restaurants,” Gauge said, licking his lips.

I felt my stomach rumble in agreement. How long had it been since I last ate? I pushed those thoughts out of my mind regardless. “We’re going to make one last stop at the tree to get Surge and then we’re out of here,” I told Ace. “Then… I guess off to the Ivory City?”

Ace shook her head. “We ain’t gonna make it to the Ivory City in one hop,” she said. “Might as well stop somewhere friendlier first.”

“You know a place?” Gauge asked her.

The outlaw nodded. “Yeah, and it’s about as far from the City as you can get. I mean ideologically speaking. Mileage-wise, it’s pretty close.”

“Well, if they’re the opposite of the Ivory City, then I’m all down for stopping there first,” I said. Really, the thought of having someplace friendly to visit after all the shit I’d just endured was really appealing. “Where is it?”

“My home,” Ace said, and she stood up on wobbly hooves so she could get her things together. “A little place called Thatch. They’re the ones doing their best to keep them bastards in the City contained.”

“That’s good to hear,” Nova said. “I’m glad that we’re not the only ponies trying to stop Reclaimer.”

“They’ve been trying longer than anypony else out there… for all the good it’s done ‘em.” She shrugged and slung her compacted rifle across her back, then lifted her bags onto her midsection with her wings. “Still, better to rest a little bit somewhere nice than run off to our deaths for no reason.”

We gathered everything we owned within a few minutes and were ready to move out. As we made our way out of the longhouse and down the hill, I looked back over my shoulder at my friends. “Hey, Gauge and Nov, can you guys go get some food from here before we leave?” I asked them. “I don’t want to be in this shithole any longer than I have to, and if Lento sees me again, I bet he’s gonna stop me from going to the tree.”

“You gonna just go right to the tree, then?” Gauge asked me.

I nodded. “Might as well. The sooner we get that taken care of, the sooner we can get the fuck out of here.” Then I turned my attention to Ace, who seemed more focused on making sure she could walk without falling over than she was on our conversation. “Ace, you can come with me. They don’t like you only a little less than they don’t like me after you went looking for their tree the other day.”

“Yeah, sure.” Ace blinked several times and briefly made eye contact with me. “Iffin’ you say it…”

“Are you sure you don’t want us to look after her?” Nova asked me.

“I’ll be fine,” I told them, waving a hoof. “Besides, uh… well…”

Thankfully, Gauge understood and nodded in agreement. “Yeah, might as well get that cleared up,” he said. Then he winked at me as he added, “You’ll have a better chance when she’s drunk anyway.”

“Oh, you shut up.” I groaned and rolled my eyes. “Just get some fucking food, I’m starving.”

Gauge snickered and Nova looked between the two of us in confusion before I led Ace away. As we walked out of the settlement, almost ignored by the mourning community, I tried to think about what I was going to say. I mean, I hadn’t exactly had a whole lot of time to think about this moment. There had been too much of ponies trying to kill me to really devote any thought to it. But now that I had my time alone with Ace, I couldn’t figure out how to put my thoughts into words. I couldn’t even make sense of my thoughts to begin with. It didn’t help that Ace was slowly getting worse and worse as the alcohol she’d had finally started to get to her.

When we were halfway between the settlement and the tree, I stopped and turned around. Ace blinked in surprise, and her brow slowly dropped. “What?” she asked me. “Why’d we stop?”

“I…” Fuck, how was I even gonna broach this topic? It just felt wrong, like if I said what was on my mind, I was hurting or betraying somepony. And for the first time since I felt this shit coming to a head, I had to choose. In front of me was a drunken outlaw, a mare who’d been beat around her whole life until she decided she’d beat life around to get even, a mare who would kill ponies simply because she didn’t agree with them or who they supported. She was lawless, dangerous, crude, but underneath that, she had a good heart. It was lost and confused and drowned in sorrow, but it was there regardless. And after traveling with her for a while, I’d seen enough of it to know that who she was now was not who she wanted to be.

And then in my mind were memories of an angel. A mare who’d given everything to try and make the world better. A mare who had risen above her humble beginnings just to be another humble part in a more important ideal. She hadn’t flinched from her duty, and she truly believed that everything she’d done had been to leave Auris a better place than how she had entered it. And she had loved me. A perfect angel. That was the only way to describe her.

But she was dead now. And I wasn’t.

Ace continued to stare at me, oblivious to the turmoil tearing me apart inside. But finally, I found the words I was looking for. “Why did you kiss me?”

The outlaw raised an eyebrow, and I could see her attention sharpen through the alcohol at the question. Some part of me felt relieved when I saw I wasn’t the only one wrestling with their feelings. “I… dunno,” she finally said, and it wasn’t quite the answer I was expecting or hoping for. “I just… seize the moment… you know?”

“So that’s all it was?” I asked her. “Just because?”

She looked away and muttered something under her breath. “I like you, you know,” she suddenly blurted. I saw her throat bob as she swallowed, and she turned her head to the left to put that curtain of a mane between the two of us. “I just… it ain’t something I can… I can easily explain.”

I looked on at her in silence, my cheeks feeling rosy while cold sweat ran down my neck. She turned her whole body around and away from me, her hooves clumsily moving one after the other. “I been… I-I been so alone,” she finally said, but the words came out almost like a whisper—a squeak. Her wings trembled, the feathers shaking as she tried to keep them still. “Ever since Z died I…”

I didn’t know what I’d expected to hear from her, but a sniffle wasn’t it. I took two steps forward, my hooves quietly crunching the grass. “Ace…” I cooed softly, suddenly feeling terrible about bringing up bad memories for her. “I… I’m sorry…”

Ace turned to me, and tears glistened down the sides of her muzzle. “It’s… it ain’t worth it, Ember,” she finally said. “I loved Z so much, and when she died, I swore I’d never find another girl like her. I didn’t… d-didn’t want to betray her. Hurt her memory. But it… it just makes you miserable. I want to love again, Ember, I really do.” She sniffled and wiped her nose with her wing. “But how do you do that without feeling guilty?”

Thoughts of Zip flew through my mind. I’d loved her, and I still did. But did that mean she would want me to suffer in memory of her? Ace was the prime example of that. The poor mare hadn’t let herself become close with anypony because she didn’t want to betray her own lost love, and now I could see how much damage that had done to her. Would this have been what Z wanted?

Would Zip want me to end up like this?

I put my hoof on Ace’s shoulder and slowly turned her body towards me. I tried to think of something to say, but when I saw the hurt and worry in her eyes, I realized there wasn’t anything I could say. Words wouldn’t console her; who knew how many years she’d had to practice feeding herself words to hide that pain? So instead of that, I hugged her as tightly as I could. She hiccupped once, and then I felt her return the hug with her forelegs and wings. We fell to our rumps, sitting and hugging it out in the middle of the forest, and I slowly started to feel my worries melt away.

I had mourned for Zip. I had loved her, really, in the short period of time we’d gotten to know each other. But now I knew she didn’t expect me to mourn for her forever. She was an angel, after all. And an angel like her wouldn’t want me to be miserable for her. She would want to see me happy again. Not only that, but she would love to see me make somepony else happy by loving them. Zip had loved the world and the good ponies in it. Now I felt for the first time that I could really make a pony happy in her memory.

I took my hooves off of Ace’s back and put them on her cheeks. She blinked at me, eyes puffy and red, confused and worried about what I might do next. My horn lit up and I pulled back that curtain over her right eye, once more letting the world shine down on it, and tucked it back behind her ear.

Then I leaned in and kissed her.

There wasn’t much to that first kiss. Our lips locked as I pushed them together, but nothing more. I sucked on her lower lip for a second as we separated, and then we were staring at each other, breath halting, the world forgotten save for each other’s face. Ace’s mouth still hung open, her lips still parted, her body still motionless. I couldn’t help myself; I giggled once at that dumbstruck look on her face, and my breath touching her nose broke the spell.

She closed her eyes and pressed her muzzle against mine, her lips against mine, her tongue against mine. I let my lashes drop and did the same. My hooves wrapped around her shoulders and held her tight, and she embraced me with her wings while her own hooves rubbed over my chest. There we were, two warm bodies held together in the emptiness of the forest, finding solace in each other. We were both hurt, we were both grieving, and we had both been trying to heal on our own. But heartache isn’t the kind of wound you fix by yourself. Only another pony can do that.

The whiskey on her lips tasted like heaven.

Chapter 38: The Silence

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Chapter 38: The Silence

Before you ask, no, we did not have sex right then and there. I mean, we’d only just admitted that we liked each other. What the fuck do you think this is? The real world is a lot messier than that. Case in point, instead of sex or anything like that, there was a lot of hugging and crying and kissing. But sex was the furthest thing from my mind. The only thing I could focus on was this: I’d finally found somepony who could help fill that Zip-shaped hole in my heart, and she needed me as much as I needed her. We didn’t really complete each other—I was definitely not her Z, and she was definitely not my Zip—but it was a start. And a start was all that mattered.

Neither did the moment last that long, either. That was practically a given considering how much Ace had drank before we both confessed our feelings for each other. Instead, after a few minutes of kissing, I found myself stroking Ace’s mane as she laid her head on my shoulder. We’d been together for only a few minutes and already I was comforting her as the alcohol slowly wreaked havoc on her body and her senses. But, unfortunately, that wasn’t really something we could wait for. Surge was still trapped inside the installation, and I wanted to see what was going on down there before we started moving out again.

“Can you walk?” I finally asked her, looking at her closed eyes set inside the angular features of her face.

“I can walk,” she insisted. “I didn’t have that much.”

“What I meant was, ‘can you walk straight?’”

She snorted and opened her eyes. “I promise I’ll try my damnedest.”

I rolled my eyes and helped her stand. “What are Gauge and Nova gonna think when we meet back up with them as a couple and you’re still shitfaced?”

“I ain’t shitfaced,” Ace protested. “I gotta drink a lot more for that.”

“Please don’t,” I told her when I saw her glance at the bag that had her whiskey in it. “The last thing we need is you drunkenly bumbling about a possibly really dangerous installation.”

Ace blinked and furrowed her brow. “We going in? I thought we was just gonna grab Surge and go.”

“I want to take a look around,” I told her. “We come across so few of these places while we’re wandering around that we can’t waste this opportunity.”

“I guess,” Ace said with a shrug.

“Come on…” I bounded ahead a few steps and then turned back to face her. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what happened to the Synarchy and why the world is such a shithole?”

“I been disappointed too many times in my life to get my hopes up,” she said, but she nevertheless began to bumble after me. “Just… don’t move too fast. I… ugh… forgot I hadn’t eaten much lately.”

“The whiskey hitting you harder than you thought it would?”

“You shut the fuck your face.”

I chuckled and waited until Ace was at my side before setting off together. It felt nice to have somepony to walk with through the Spines; I’d certainly done so much of it by myself in the past two days, just fighting for survival. We rubbed our coats together as we walked, and the bubbling joy of new love almost kept our necks glued together (even if I was using mine to help Ace walk steady and straight apart from the simple pleasure of a comforting touch). I occasionally gave my new marefriend a kiss on the cheek, and she would giggle happily and try to do the same. It was odd seeing Ace’s tender self beneath that toughened shell of an outlaw, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t like it. Seeing her happy and smiling like that was a thrill in itself. She hadn’t even pulled her mane back down over her eye, instead leaving it tucked behind her ear where I’d left it. It was like she was a whole new pony, and I didn’t mind that that mare was a happier one.

Our little happy moment sort of shriveled up and died when we made it to the base of the Walsalhn, however. Some bodies still lay around the tree, left there to rot from my friends’ failed assault on the tree the day before. They were starting to smell, and I scrunched up my muzzle as I moved past them on my way to the door. “What happened here?” I asked Ace, who held a wing over her nose to try and filter out the smell.

“I tried to move Gauge and Nova around a bit to get a kill zone set up,” she said. “We got spotted before I was done. Shit went downhill fast from there.”

“I’m just glad you’re all in one piece,” I said. “Gauge told me that Surge made it to the door with SCaR before you guys had to retreat. I’m surprised she wasn’t able to keep Yeoman out of the place; I ran into him when a tower rose up out of the ground not too far from here and he came barreling out of it.”

After we picked our way past the bodies, we came face to face with the trunk of the enormous tree. It took a little bit of looking around, but I finally found the hidden entrance to the installation at its base. It’d been camouflaged into a groove running along the exposed part of one of the tree’s massive roots, but when I stooped down and peered into the darkness, I could see exposed metal reflecting dim lights from somewhere further inside. The walls of the little tunnel that ran down to the metal were covered in tribal paint and art, and if I squinted, I thought I could see another body down there. “Come on!” I called out to Ace, and then I slid down the dirt ramp leading to the door.

I had to stoop down to move around the claustrophobic little hollow hidden underneath the tree, and when Ace slid down after me, she shivered and shuddered. “I fucking hate caves,” she groaned. “Pegasi ain’t meant to be in ‘em.”

I ignored her muttering and pressed forward, letting my horn glow for a little light. With a little illumination, I could finally see the body lying in the dirt, and though I wasn’t surprised to see who it was, my heart still dropped regardless. “Shit,” I muttered, flipping the tattooed stallion over with my magic. Sandy’s face stared up at the low roof above us, eyes rolled back and almost looking right at the bullet hole in his forehead.

“That Sandy?” Ace asked, craning her neck over my shoulder to get a better view. “Fuck. I’d been hoping… well, maybe…”

“Another innocent bystander caught up in all this signal shit,” I said, closing the stallion’s eyes with my magic. “He deserved better than this.”

“They all did,” Ace agreed. “But we can’t do nothing for them now.”

I nodded and gingerly moved the body out of the way. “We’ll get him on the way out,” I said. Then, turning my attention to what lay ahead of us, I moved towards the entryway to the installation itself. I was surprised at what I saw, though. Instead of an intact door like what we’d seen at Bluewater, or something blown apart from high explosives, the door was already parted wide enough for a pony to slip through, and it and the entryway behind it were heavily rusted and corroded. I could tell just from the amount of rust built up around the joints that it hadn’t moved from that position in a very long time.

These doors had been forced open at least a hundred winters ago… and maybe more. What had happened here?

…Had these doors been open since the beginning of the Silence?

Ace took one look at the doors and frowned hard. “I, uh… thinkin’ I’m gonna wait here,” she said, leaning against the wall. “Gonna wait for the booze to wear off… yeah…”

“What’s the matter?” I asked her. “You didn’t seem this nervous when we went under a mountain for the last one.”

“That one didn’t have a living tree growing atop it.” She shook her head. “It was all sealed up tight, too. Not compromised none. I ain’t looking to get buried alive today.”

I rolled my eyes and turned around to face her. “Fine, I’ll pick up Surge and she’ll keep me company.” Though I was disappointed and nervous about going in here alone, I at least understood Ace’s anxiety. That she was inebriated probably didn’t help her state of mind either. So instead of guilting her to come along, I stepped forward and pecked her lips. “Go sit out in the open some,” I told her. “Wait until the world stops spinning. Okay?”

The corners of her mouth twitched up. “Yeah, sure. Just try not to get yourself buried alive down there, ‘kay?”

“I can teleport, I’ll be fine.” I pressed my nose against hers once more and then stepped back. “I’ll be back out as fast as I can.”

She nodded in acknowledgement and I turned back to the installation. I took one breath to ready myself before squeezing through the door, my hooves practically crunching on piles of rust on the other side. A staircase leading down immediately greeted me, and there were more torches and tribal paints decorating the stairwell. I guess the Feati went inside the doors, too, though I had to wonder how deep inside they went. I was going to be really upset if they’d somehow destroyed all the shit inside of this installation through countless years of exploring and worshipping at it. What if the signal was lost and we’d be leaving here empty-hoofed? But all the installations Blackwash had pinged when it first got the signal had responded, so this place was in working condition as recently as two months ago…

Had it really been about two months since we heard the signal? Fucking stars…

Though the torches were all extinguished, some of the lights inside the decaying base still worked, giving plenty of light to see by, even if it was flickering in places. The door at the bottom of the stairs had also been open for some time, though it wasn’t as badly rusted as the entryway I’d just come through. My eyes settled on an access panel next to it as I cautiously walked down the stairs, and as I drew closer, a light on it began to blink an erratic, electric blue.

“Hello, Sparky,” I said, stopping in front of the panel and lowering my horn to it. A jolt of mana rushed through my body from horn to hoof, and my legs twitched and my tongue felt fuzzy as I felt a familiar presence settle herself back inside my brain. I involuntarily coughed once and my lungs fluttered for air for a few moments before the shock had passed and I finally had control of the reins to my body again.

“Celestia, that took you long enough,” Surge said, though she finished her sentence by working my jaw from side to side. “Ugh, moving from machines and wires back to a living body is disorienting.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I responded, smiling lightly. “It’s good to have you back, girl.”

“It’s good to be back,” she admitted. “Electricity is like diet mana. My soul can survive on it for a while, but it’s not very filling. Speaking of which, when was the last time you ate something?”

“Nothing since before the wargs,” I told her. “It’s a long story.”

“Spare me the details,” she responded, and I felt her quickly sifting through my memories to get caught up on everything she missed. “So, you killed Yeoman? Put your mind at ease?”

“For now,” I said with a nod. “Did you get the piece of the code?”

“Not yet,” Surge said, shaking my head. “It’s on a separate circuit than the door controls and basic installation functions. I jumped from SCaR to the door panel only to realize I couldn’t get to the database from there, and by that point the drone had already flown off.”

“Fuck. Do you think Yeoman—?”

“He didn’t,” Surge cut in, almost as if she was reading my thoughts (and she probably was). “I could watch what he was doing through the cameras. He damaged the computer after he got what he needed from it, but I should still be able to access its memory. And before you ask, no, I could not see the holographic screen from where the cameras were placed.”

“Alright,” I said, squeezing my way through the next door. “Where to?”

“Let me do the walking,” she said, and she swiftly took control of my legs. I was just along for the ride at that point as Surge walked me through the installation, and I let my gaze wander over the interior. I noticed that unlike the installation in Bluewater Gorge, which had been spick and span and cleaned by automated robots for who knew how long, this one hardly had the same level of maintenance to it. It was dirty, it was in a bad state of disrepair, and I’m pretty sure I saw one of the robotic cleaners impaled on a shaft of metal and hanging from the ceiling. I guess the Feati didn’t like the little robots that much.

Speaking of the Feati, this place was covered in their art and decorations. Offerings covered what was once a secretary’s desk, and the metal walls had all been painted over with a depiction of what I could only assume was their history. Surge didn’t offer me much of a chance to look at it all (not that I really would have been able to make sense of it without another Feati nearby to explain it to me), instead moving me briskly towards a door that’d been forced open at the other end of the reception area. As we approached it, however, I was able to make out some letters painted underneath the smear of tribal art on a nearby wall.

“Hold up,” I said, forcing Surge to stop. I trotted over to the wall and squinted at the letters, trying to make sense of them without ruining the Feati art. Though it wasn’t exactly easy, I was able to piece together what it said:

STONE FOREST RESEARCH INSTALLATION 04-TWILIGHT

CIVILIZATION RECONSTRUCTION OBSERVATION

“What the fuck does that mean?” I asked Surge. “Civilization reconstruction? Why would the Synarchy be studying something like that?”

“I don’t know,” Surge admitted. “But it explains why the Feati are here. They were stripped of all their language and knowledge and left to build a civilization together from the ground up.”

“But why?” I asked her. “That just seems… dumb.”

“The Synarchy was inefficient in a lot of ways, but all these installations were placed here with a purpose,” she said. “And this one was part of the Dusk Protocol. Whatever they were doing here, it was deemed vitally important to the survival of our species.”

She started moving me back along the path, but I was too caught up in my thoughts to really notice. Civilization reconstruction? What kind of government would come up with a study for that… or consider it so important that it was integrally tied to this supposed worst-case backup protocol?

…Did the Synarchy worry that civilization as they knew it was about to be wiped out forever?

We passed through the door and continued deeper into the installation. Here, however, the walls were free of Feati paint, and though the place wasn’t in the cleanest of states, it was definitely better beyond the reception area. “The Feati never forced those doors open,” Surge explained. “Yeoman took care of that. They were the first ponies to enter this part of the installation likely since the Silence began.”

“They’re going to have access to it now,” I said. “It doesn’t look like we’d have an easy time resetting those doors.”

“Would we even want to?”

“I mean, maybe?” I cocked a brow. “I’m just… I guess, thinking about the Feati and how they’ll adapt after all this. Are they gonna keep being primitive and stick to their way of life, or are they going to try to be like the rest of us? I’m just worried about what stumbling into all this technology like this would do to them.”

“It’s not our place to decide,” Surge said. “They’ve been exposed enough to the outside world to know what it’s like, for better or for worse. How they decide to go on from here is entirely up to them.”

We walked past a few more rooms, places I gathered were sleeping and crew quarters. The ponies who worked in this installation likely didn’t have the chance to go outside much, lest their subjects discover them. We walked past another room that had some of its walls made out of glass, and inside were several mounts for hologram screens on one of the walls. “They would have monitored camera feeds from here,” Surge said. “All of the cameras are long gone, now. Not sure if the Feati found them or time simply did its number on them, but we’re not going to get anything from there.”

“It’s sick to think about,” I said. “Forcing a colony of ponies to survive on their own in the wilderness while you observe them from underground. What if they just… I don’t know, all died or migrated somewhere else?”

“Who’s to say that that never happened?” Surge asked me. “The Synarchy had no shortage of political prisoners to send here.”

As horrible as that thought was, I knew that it was likely true. Lost study populations could be easily replaced. The Synarchy didn’t value the lives of the ponies they forced into this experiment. It only cared about the results… for all the good they did them in the long run.

Again, just like in the Bluewater, I noted that there weren’t any bodies or bones lying around, apart from those coming from vermin like spider rats. Yet again, we were wandering through another installation that had just been abandoned. It was as if all the ponies inside had gotten up and left everything where it was. What had happened here? Why were there no bodies?

“I checked through all the cameras I could access,” Surge said, reading my mind. “No bodies, no weapons, no battle damage. I don’t think this place had an armory or an armed garrison like my installation. It was just Dr. Hozho and her staff, isolated from their subjects and the rest of the world around them.”

“Maybe they just left when the Silence began,” I suggested. “How long would you have kept up your operations when you stopped hearing from Equus?”

“Admittedly, not more than a few months,” Surge said. When I blinked in surprise, she shrugged my shoulders. “A few months is hardly a long time when you worked for the Synarchy. We were all loyal—well, mostly loyal—intellectuals, and we had dedicated our lives to helping the Synarchy thrive. I would have maintained discipline over my team for a few months, but after that, even I would want to put that aside in order to find out what was going on. But Dr. Hozho…”

“She wouldn’t?” I asked.

Surge shook my head. “Hozho was nothing if not dedicated to her work. To a fault, even. She put the interests of her studies above all else, and she was fanatically loyal to the Synarchy.” I saw memories of a short, pale mare with equally pale green hair giving a presentation beneath a thick pair of glasses and through a heavy accent while I—or Surge, rather—looked on with wavering attention. “She never would have let her team waver in their mission. Communications or silence, she had her assignment and would see it through to the end.”

“Whatever way that would come,” I said. “I doubt everypony on her team shared her deep convictions.”

“I can’t say.” Surge used our magic to open a door in front of us and we strolled through to the other side. “I never interacted much with her team, but she hoof-picked all of them. Even I wasn’t trusted enough to assemble a team on my own. Half of my team was assigned to me by the government, and they forced us to support a garrison as well. Her father may have been on the High Council. I honestly can’t remember.”

The room beyond looked like a central communications hub, and I knew immediately that this is what we had come for. Surge walked me over to the computer terminal built into the wall next to a set of damaged laser display bars and touched my horn to it. I felt a rush and my head filled with air as she zipped into the circuit, leaving me to frown and shake my head to get rid of the sensation in her absence. After a few seconds, the lights on the terminal flickered to life, and I heard Surge’s voice crackle over the speakers.

“Ah… well, the speakers are in working order. That much is good at least. The display is damaged beyond repair, though. Let me see what I can find.”

“Take your time,” I told her, pulling over a chair with my magic. “Yeoman’s dead and the Ivory City won’t be getting this piece of the code. No hurry.”

Surge went silent and I could hear the computer whirr as she poked through it. “Found it,” she declared after a few seconds. “Let’s see here… the code fragment is ‘GFXAX, V, 36-J’. Got that?”

I did my best to commit it to memory. “I think so,” I said. Then, frowning, I slouched back in the chair. “What the fuck does this shit mean, though?” I asked her. “All these fragments are just gibberish.”

“They’re part of a cipher,” Surge reminded me. “And we won’t be able to figure out what it means until we know all the code fragments. That’s how an ADFGX cipher works. Splitting the code up across seven installations ensured that nopony would be able to crack it without all the pieces.”

“But how would we crack it?” I asked her. “You were part of this whole Dusk Protocol thing, surely you should know how to do it?”

“It involves manipulating the letters of each piece of the code and translating it back into the standard alphabet once we know how to arrange them all and what the code table in 36-J is,” she said. “You’ve found four code pieces, and each of those had a tag with them that spells out a code word. E, F, I, and V, if I’m recalling correctly. We’d have to rearrange all the parts so the tags form a word, and then we could start decoding the message.”

I frowned for a moment. “You can spell ‘five’ with those,” I said, grinning at my revelation.

“And what about the other three missing pieces?” Surge asked.

Well, there went my one shot at feeling smart. “Alright, ruin my hopes and dreams, why don’t you?” I muttered, dropping my attention to the floor. It was then that I noticed something lurking beneath the shadowy overhang of the control terminal that a pony would have normally sat at and worked with the computer Surge was now interfaced with. I raised an eyebrow as I grabbed ahold of the white thing with my magic, then promptly dropped it in shock and disgust when I saw it was a unicorn skeleton.

“What the fucking fuck?!” I shouted, sliding my chair back. What the fuck was a skeleton doing here? It was intact, too, and wearing tatters of clothing—tatters that practically disintegrated as soon as I touched them. Lying next to the skull was a pair of glasses with the left lens completely missing, and it didn’t take me too long to find the little shards littering the area. Some were stained with a sort of brown or black crust—long dried blood—and now that I looked around the floor, I saw specks of it in the tiles, too.

“What is it?” Surge asked, and I saw the camera in the corner of the room pivot. “What did you find—oh. Well, I think we can reasonably conclude that Dr. Hozho did not abandon her work willingly.”

Once I got over the fact that I’d just unwittingly handled the skeleton of a long dead mare, I got out of my chair and looked down at her body. Her bones were still relatively intact, or at least, as intact as one would expect them to be given the passage of time. I didn’t see any damage to her skull, and her ribs were still connected firmly together. But when I looked over her head, it was pretty easy to figure out what had killed her. A pen stuck out of her left eye socket, the point buried somewhere deep in her skull, probably deep enough to stab her brain.

“She didn’t, but I think her team did,” I said, pulling the pen out. Surprisingly, I was able to get the ink flowing again, but I wasn’t about to keep it. Why the fuck would I want to keep a murder weapon around with me? When the fuck would I have to write something down? Paper was hard enough to come by as it was. I just did it because it felt… right to do so. Even if she was a fanatical Synarchist and responsible for the horrible experiments performed here in the Spines, her body at least deserved a little respect.

“Hey, can you look through that computer for anything interesting?” I asked Surge. “Maybe she left some reports before she died. And if she was better connected with the Synarchy than you were, maybe she might have had some insight as to why the Silence happened?”

“I suppose it’s worth a shot,” Surge admitted. The terminal whirred and clicked again as she began to look through its memory. “A lot of the files are badly corrupted—no surprise there, considering how long this thing had been left without maintenance. But I think there are a few things I can pick out here. Let’s pull up the first one.”

A set of lenses built into the wall underneath the damaged display lit up, and I stepped back a few paces when a hologram of a mare materialized almost right where I’d been standing. Thanks to the glimpse of Surge’s memory earlier, I recognized Hozho, even if her colors were skewed towards the blue and purple side by the holograph. She slowly paced back and forth, short tail swishing from side to side, her magic holding a few sheets of etch glass in front of her. I couldn’t tell how much of her thick accent was a product of the poor quality of the file and how much it was that she just couldn’t pronounce the letter ‘L’, but it made her very difficult to understand.

“…test group 3-C fled their territory under the cover of darkness,” she said, lifting one of the etch glass sheets closer to her nose. I guess we had jumped into the middle of a recording? At any rate, the middle-aged mare only continued to mutter to herself and pace, discarding the sheet when she was done with it. “That makes four control populations lost in nineteen months. We need to invest in a settlement for future groups. Without something permanent to tie them down, they will eventually attempt to flee the observation grounds, and our perimeter can only catch and return so many before the group must be decommissioned.”

I frowned down the length of my muzzle at the hologram of a long-dead mare. Decommissioned? I was pretty sure I knew exactly what she meant by that.

The mare sighed and tossed all the sheets out of frame of the hologram, where they disappeared from sight. “I need to meet with my team tomorrow morning,” Hozho muttered aloud. “We need to change our approach. The Synarchy is counting on us, and we won’t let them down…”

The hologram warped and flickered back and forth, and anything more she may have said was lost to static. Surge powered it down, and I found my gaze settled on the long-shattered remains of some etch glass in the corner of the room. “Are there more?” I finally asked her.

“Two more that I think I can recover,” she said. “The others would take some time and effort.”

“Might as well see them,” I said. “I want to know what the fuck was up with this place.”

“This one is stamped almost four Auris years later,” Surge said. “There’s not much surviving in between, but here we go…”

Once again, the hologram of Dr. Hozho flickered into existence. But even though I knew she was only four years older than the last one, she looked like it was closer to ten. Her features were growing increasingly haggard from stress, and I could tell from the coloration that her mane was beginning to gray. Her glasses had thickened a few lens sizes, too, probably from way too much time staring at tiny print. This time, instead of pacing, she was seated in a swivel chair, hooves pushing aside reports arrayed on a desk in front of her.

“Group 17-A seems to have developed a robust social hierarchy,” she droned, and it was pretty obvious she’d had a few sleepless nights lately. “They’re outcompeting groups 17-B and 17-D. Only 17-C can amass the same amount of resources as their stronger peer, and that’s likely due to their focus on building a protective settlement above all else. It hurt their numbers in the short term, but they should be poised to eclipse the other groups in the region before too long. That is, if 17-A doesn’t raid and crush them while they’re still exhausted from building up their defenses.”

“Were they making the groups compete against each other?” I wondered aloud.

“It would make sense,” Surge said, her voice momentarily drowning out Hozho’s over the speakers. “If she was trying to simulate the reconstruction of civilization after some apocalyptic event, there would be competition between survivor groups. I think they were trying to see which approaches worked best for longevity and prosperity.”

When she stopped speaking, Hozho’s voice once more took over the speakers. “…incidents. I had her whipped and placed in the holding cell. Two days with no food, water, or light. She cried like a griffon pup when we let her out, but afterwards, she swore she’d learned from her mistake. That’s good. I need my team focused on our project, not gossiping about the war situation back home. But I can’t help but feel like I’m losing them. The Synarchy needs us, every last one of us. What we’re doing is too important. The future of our species is in our hooves, and if we fail, ponykind fails with us…”

The hologram flickered out of sync once more, and Surge shut it off. “I guess not even her hoof-picked team had the same fanaticism that she did,” she finally said.

“I don’t think there’s many ponies who would be like that,” I said, shrugging. “Being trapped down here for years, watching ponies fight each other like rats in a cage… That’s a bit much even for a bunch of fanatic racists like the ponies back then. Err… no offense, I guess.”

I’m sure Surge was rolling her eyes, but she didn’t exactly have any right now for me to see. “Whatever. Last one, then we should probably get moving.” I nodded in agreement, and once more, a projection of Dr. Hozho appeared in front of me.

But this Hozho was different. She had her head in her hooves, and her body was trembling. A bottle of something—liquor, presumably—stood off to the side. I couldn’t tell if it was empty or not through the hologram, but I had a feeling she had been drinking when she recorded this.

“I… I heard the news from my father,” she said, her words slow, quiet, afraid. “They… they were some of the last words to arrive. The last words I’ll ever hear from him…”

Her throat bobbed, and she looked up at the camera. I trotted around her and caught a glimpse of tears on her face. “It’s the beginning of the end,” she whispered. “Everything we’ve done, everything we’ve fought for… it’s all coming apart at the seams.

“I knew this day would come,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “That’s why I’m working on this project. That’s why the High Council implemented the Dusk Protocol. The Coalition War… this ‘War for Survival’… we were never going to win it. All we did was send our children off to die, die by the thousands, in a fight we couldn’t win.”

She looked at the bottle next to her, picked it up in flickering magic, and took a few gulps before setting it back down. “I read the dispatch sent out from the comms outpost. It all came down to one decisive battle over Baltimare. Our navy against the Coalition’s. Everything we had, mustered for one last stand.

“And they broke it. They broke it like plywood.”

Her lip trembled again, and she began to massage her temples. “How many thousands of sailors died defending our home skies? How many stood their ground as salvo after salvo of Coalition cannons ripped through the hulls of our warfleet? Ponies blown out into the vacuum of space without any environmental protection, turned to plasma as kinetic rounds ripped through airtight compartments…

“I don’t have the numbers. I don’t think we ever will. But the entire fleet is destroyed. Stragglers that fled were caught and shot down, or bombed as they crash landed on the surface. Who knows how many Coalition ships we took down with us? It doesn’t matter. Their industry is five times greater than ours. The entire world, united against us… it was only a matter of time. For every cruiser we make, they can make five. And now that we have no more navy, they can bomb our land as much as they want. Shields will protect our population centers, but our farmland? Our factories? What will protect those?

“And the shields won’t even keep our cities safe forever.” Her face took on a haunted look as she stared into the distance. “I moved to Baltimare when I was eleven,” she said. “I practically grew up there. It was the longest I’d ever stayed in one place. And then our ships started falling out of the sky. The reports that came in… it’s gone. The entire city is gone. Millions dead as our cruisers’ hulls began flattening buildings. And then their fleet stuck around to glass whatever was left. Civilians just trying to flee for their lives, reduced to ash from orbital strikes…”

She hiccupped and squeezed her eyes shut as more tears tried to escape. “We have no navy left. Nopony is going to come to Auris anymore. And our entire communications relay was destroyed. We can’t send anything back to Equus, and Equus can’t send anything back to us.

“We’re trapped,” she said, baring her teeth in pain. “We’re cut off. We’re alone. And when they’re finished with Equus, the Coalition will come for us. What chance will we stand then?”

Hozho looked around like she was lost, bewildered and lost, but struck herself in the face and stopped. “I can’t let my team see me like this,” she said, trying her hardest to calm back down. “If they know something has happened… it could be the end of us. Of all of us. We must stick to our objective and see it through. The Dusk Protocol demands it. It was designed to be implemented in case something like this happened. And when it’s activated, the Synarchy will need my research to rise again.

“We Survive Together,” she said, repeating some mantra she must have heard throughout her entire life. “After every dusk is a new dawn. And so long as we work through the night, tomorrow will be so much brighter.”

Her eyes looked into her camera, and since I was standing in front of her, it almost looked like she was looking directly at me. “One day we will be reborn. The Dusk Protocol will make sure of that. And it starts with us.”

The hologram abruptly disappeared after that, and I could only stare into the space where Hozho had been in shock. What I’d heard, I… I didn’t know how to process it. Finally, after so long, I finally understood Auris’ oldest mystery. I was the first pony in almost two centuries to know what caused the Silence. The Synarchy had been fighting for its life, and it had lost. The Coalition destroyed the relays that let it speak to Auris and scrapped its entire navy, severing all ties we had to our mother planet. We had been cast into the dark while our mother died alone, light years away.

But the Coalition had never come after us. Did they not know where we were? Or did something else happen to stop them?

I slowly turned back to the computer terminal, noting that Surge had been quiet for a long time now. “There’s… there’s nothing else?” I asked her, prodding for something more, anything more that would give me some more answers. “That’s it?”

“She didn’t leave any recordings after that,” Surge finally answered. “I think she didn’t see the point in them… or she simply wasn’t able to.”

I looked at the skeleton lying on the floor and pulled the chair over. Flopping down on it, I held my hooves to my temple and slowly massaged them. “The Silence… that’s how it all began…”

“If Dr. Hozho knew this much from the Synarchy’s final messages, she likely wasn’t the only pony to understand what had happened,” Surge said. “No wonder that chaos followed so soon. It’s hard to keep a secret like that. It would get out eventually, and then…”

“Anarchy,” I concluded. “Do you think that’s why the garrison at your installation…?”

“How they heard it before me, I have no idea,” Surge said. “But I had heard rumors to the effect right before the mutiny. It’s just… to think that…”

The speakers crackled with static; I think Surge was choking up. And I couldn’t exactly blame her, either. She’d died because of the Silence. She’d died and then spent the next two centuries trapped in some kind of horrible purgatory, left to wonder why it had happened. And now, to get some closure on all that after so long…

I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she was feeling right then and there.

“We should go,” she stated. “We have what we came for, and we… I don’t want to be here any longer than I have to.”

I dumbly nodded in shock. Yes, it was time to go. Lingering here any longer wouldn’t accomplish much. I would need time to think about what I’d heard. The Silence, the Dusk Protocol… what did the Protocol mean, even? ‘One day we will be reborn?’ Was Hozho simply spouting the words of a fanatic… or was there something more to it?

Yeoman had told me a long time ago that the code would ‘awaken the Azimuth’. Surge had thought it was a cruiser or something to that effect. But what if the code was going to awaken more than one ship? After all, a code this important wouldn’t just be used to activate one dormant orbital cruiser. It would be for something more important.

Was it really a way to bring back the Synarchy, as Hozho had seemed to imply?

I lowered my horn to the terminal for Surge to jump back, but before I got close enough, I stopped. “Wait,” I said, stepping back. “One more thing before we go.”

“Yes?” Surge asked, though there was some impatience in her voice. “What is it?”

“Is this installation’s communications shit still working?”

“For the most part,” Surge said after a moment’s hesitation, likely to check all its systems. “Why?”

The shock lingering on my muzzle after hearing all this shit gave way to a small and eager smile. “Because I have somebody I want to talk to…”

Epilogue

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Epilogue

It took us a few minutes to figure out how to establish a connection, but once Surge managed it, I almost couldn’t hold back my tears. “Ember?” A voice asked, so familiar but so, so far away.

I wiped my eyes with a fetlock, almost glad he couldn’t see me. “Sig… you great, feathery bastard…”

“By the spirits, it is you!” Sig exclaimed, somewhere on the other side of a radio set and so many miles away. “It’s just… it’s been so long, I was starting to wonder if…”

I beamed, even though I knew he couldn’t see it. “I’m not dead yet,” I told him. “Still alive and kicking.”

“Been shot a few more times?”

“How’d you know?” I asked, and we both chuckled. “Yeah, yeah, but nothing too bad.”

“And Nova and Gauge?” he asked me. “Are they still…?”

“They’re getting food and stuff right now,” I told him. “But they’re alive, too. Nova got a badass metal wing at the last installation we were at. She’s scary.”

“Scary?” Sig asked. “From what little I got to know of her, I doubt even a metal wing could make her look scary. She’s too happy and cuddly.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “You ever try to get a hug from a pegasus with knives for feathers?”

Sig laughed again. “No, I can’t say I ever have.”

“That’s what I thought.” My eyes slowly began to fall, the excited smile on my face starting to give way to something else. “So, uh, how are things going back at the Bastion? Recruitment drive going full swing?”

“We renewed our efforts to pick up more Sentinels a week or two ago,” he said. “Up until then, we were mostly focused on cleaning out the remains of the Crimson in the valley. Most have gone into hiding now that Carrion’s dead, but a few local warlords held strong positions for some time. We eventually overwhelmed them, but it was slow going. We couldn’t exactly afford to take any more losses.”

“Is Fusillade doing good?” I asked him. “I bet losing her eye didn’t even faze her in the slightest.”

“She was ordering us around within hours of getting it removed,” Sig said with another chuckle. “Glass hadn’t even gotten the seat warm before she chased him out of his temporary position.”

“That sounds like her. Is she around?”

Sig’s feathers rustled—I assume he shook his head. “No, she’s out inspecting the Dam. She’s taken a personal interest in making sure your fellow survivors from Blackwash are whipped up into top fighting shape. They’ve been doing well, I have to say. Brass Casing makes a damn fine captain.”

I rolled my eyes. “Of course, I’m with the Sentinels for a few weeks and I only hit sergeant, but Brass gets to go all the way to captain?”

“It’s largely a formality,” Sigur said. “He’s your people’s leader, so he needed a rank befitting that status. But thank the spirits for them. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to hold the dam, the outpost, and the Bastion all at the same time. Your neighbors are helping to make the Valley a better place, Ember. I can’t stress enough how proud of them we all are.”

Tears again pricked at my eyes. “That means so much to hear that,” I said. “Things have been so hard lately I… I’m glad to hear a bit of good news.”

“What’s been going on, Ember?” Sig asked, his voice dropping to a concerned note. “I can’t imagine being out there without support has been easy for you.”

“It hasn’t,” I admitted. “There’ve been points where I’ve wanted to give up and I almost died several times. It’s just… just…”

“Tell me all about it,” Sigur said. “Consider it your official report.”

So I did. It was a little hard to start at first—the journey was pretty boring until the storm that nearly blew us off the mountain pass—but once I got through that part, the words just began to tumble out. The shit that went down at Hole. The lost foundry and the tolan, and how I’d almost ended up as a wailer. Bluewater Gorge and the Three Rivers, and everything that had happened to us since entering the Spines. I don’t know how long I blathered at him for. I didn’t hold anything back, detail after detail piling up as I felt the stress begin to melt off of my shoulders. It was therapeutic, just getting to talk about everything I’d been through with somebody willing to listen. It was something I had needed for a while now.

And then I came full circle. “There’s more to this code than we ever thought,” I concluded. “This thing isn’t about awakening some spaceship or opening a vault full of weapons and tech. I mean, maybe it is, but there’s a lot more going on that I don’t understand. This whole ‘Dusk Protocol’… these installations… they’re all part of something huge the Synarchy had planned. Some sort of worst-case contingency plan. And we’re out here chasing the pieces of the code like a bunch of idiots, not knowing what we might be doing in the process.”

Sig was quiet for a while, but when he finally did respond, it was with that same calming, authoritative voice I’d known from him. “Whatever we’re doing cannot be anywhere near as bad as what Reclaimer is trying to do,” he said. “He might know what this code is about. That’s why he’s so adamant on getting it. But right now we’re even with him. We each know what four of the seven fragments say. But with a cipher like this, it wouldn’t be too hard to break the code if you’re only missing one piece. He could easily get the remaining two pieces and then he’d have enough to figure out what it is. So we have to stop him.”

“Right,” I said, nodding even though he couldn’t see me. “Which is why we’re going to the Ivory City.”

“Are you sure?” Sig asked me. “If you wait a bit, we might be able to get you at least a little backup…”

“We can’t wait,” I said. “You know that as well as I do. The longer we wait, the longer Reclaimer has to find what he’s looking for. And he has a lot more resources than we do. If we don’t move fast enough… we could lose everything.”

“Mmmm.” A moment of silence stretched between us, and then Sig roughly cleared his throat. “Then I guess that’s your next objective, sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, giving a salute for my own amusement. “We’re going to be moving to Thatch first and then onto the City. Hopefully it will be a friendly place to resupply before we go into the prickwings’ nest.”

“Hopefully. And if they’ve opposed the Ivory City for this long, they may be willing to work with you. It’s worth a shot.”

“I’ll give it my best. I leaned back in my chair and a feeling of dread settled in my gut as I realized I wouldn’t be able to speak to Sig again for a long time. “It… I-It was good talking to you again, Sig.”

“You as well,” he said. “You don’t know how much it means to hear your voice again.”

“Yours too.” I swallowed the lump in my throat and reluctantly stood up. “I… I guess I shouldn’t keep you busy any longer.”

I heard him breathe out, and I took it as a reluctant agreement even if he didn’t actually say anything. “Find a way to contact us again when you’re in Thatch,” he said. “And next time, I want to hear all of your voices. Understood? That’s an order.”

“Sir, yes sir,” I said. Then, lingering by the ruined laser projectors a little longer, I added, “Please let everybody know I’m alive and well.”

“You can count on it,” Sig said.

I felt my throat seizing up, and it took all my effort to force the next bit through. “Well… goodbye, then.”

“Goodbye, Ember,” Sig said. “Stay safe out there. It’s only going to get harder from here on out.”

“I know.” I swallowed hard. “I miss you, Sig.”

“I miss you too, Ember. But we will meet again, right? It’s going to happen.”

“It will,” I said. “You can count on that.”

“I will, Ember,” he said, softly, mourning that our time was coming to an end. Finally, he said the words I hoped would somehow never come. “Bastion, out.”

The line went dead, and I hung my head. Surge was quiet for a few moments before the speakers crackled to life again. “You’ll meet him again, Ember,” she said. “If there’s one thing I’ve gotten to know about you in our short time together, it’s that nothing can stop you when you go after something.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I finally lowered my horn to the terminal. The familiar rush of vertigo shook my limbs and made my head spin for a moment, but then it went away as Surge settled once more into my brain. I gave one last look at the place, at Hozho’s skeleton left lying on the floor, and let my eyes commit it to memory. “Well… let’s get going.”

We made our way back out of the installation without any detours. I had to hunch down to scramble back out of the hollow leading down to it, and my eyes hardly had to adjust to the dim light beneath the Spines’ canopy. In front of me were my friends, bundles of supplies at their hooves, and Ace sitting off to the side, looking considerably less wobbly.

Nova trotted up to me and looked me up and down. “You find what we were looking for?” she asked me.

I nodded. “I did… and then some.” At her peaked eyebrow, I waved it off with my hoof. “I’ll tell you all about it on the road. Stars know we’ll have plenty of time to talk.” I looked around for Sandy’s body but noted it wasn’t here. “What happened to Sandy?” I asked Gauge.

“Some of the Feati came and took it,” he said. Then he angled his head to the side. “They… they also brought her with them.”

I blinked and craned my head in that direction. Her? Who did he mean by her?

My heart did a flip when I saw Teka sitting at the base of a tree, the hair over her cheeks matted with drying tears. She looked crushed, defeated, broken. “What happened to her?” I whispered to Gauge, dumbstruck. “They didn’t…”

“They did,” Gauge said. “Lento’s an animal, casting away his own sister like this.”

I felt a fire burning inside my gut… but there wasn’t any fuel to feed it. Instead, my shoulders merely sagged as I nodded. “I wouldn’t expect anything less,” I said. “But we’ll be better.”

Nova nodded in agreement. “She deserves more than what her people have given her.”

I walked over to Teka and sat down in front of her. She sniffled and looked away, unwilling to meet my gaze, at least until I lifted her chin and made her look at me. “Tekawenye,” I said, trying to give her a friendly, comforting smile. I considered trying to say something, but what would be the point? The language barrier was too thick, and no matter what I did, words wouldn’t get my meaning across.

So instead I drew her close and hugged her. I gave her as tight and as loving an embrace as I could, because I knew she needed it. She needed it more than anything else in the world right now. And as I felt her legs slowly tighten against my body, I also felt her begin to sob. I didn’t say anything or do anything else as she broke down in tears. I just held her until they stopped, and then held her a little longer.

Finally, we parted, and I helped her stand. She didn’t look that good, what with her eyes all red and puffy, but she could at least stand and walk. In time, she’d get better. But right now, she wasn’t okay… and that was okay. “Come with us,” I told her, even if the words were lost. “We’ll look after you.”

I patted her once more on the shoulder, then made way for Nova to comfort her. Nova would be better at that than I would, anyway. Instead, I walked past Gauge and SCaR and set my sights on my outlaw marefriend, who was currently using her mane as sort of a visor to block the light.

I smiled and pulled it back with my magic, and she cracked open a pale blue eye to look at me. “Fuckin’… what do you want?” she grumbled, though I could tell from the rosy color in her cheeks that she didn’t actually mind.

“Get up, gorgeous,” I told her, and I helped her stand as well. “It’s time we hit the trail.”

“Already?” She rolled her neck and arched her back, eliciting a few cracks from her spine. “I was just getting comfortable.”

“No rest for the weary,” I told her, bumping my shoulder against hers.

“We sure as fuck ain’t nothing if not weary,” she said, returning the contact.

I giggled a bit and rubbed my cheek against hers. “Come on,” I said, leading her back to the rest of my friends. When we approached, I picked up all our things in my magic and helpfully distributed them to my friends. As they did the straps on their bags, I snatched some of the food they’d brought with them and crammed a bit into my gullet. Humming in satisfaction, I pocketed the rest of the bread and looked them all over.

“Well,” I finally said, pulling a cigarette from my supplies and lighting it. I stuck it between my lips, took a long drag, and blew a jet of smoke from my nostrils. I let the rush of nicotine flood my veins, and it was enough to pull a smile to my face. “Looks like it’s time we get back on the path, don’t you think so?”