From her seat in the air conditioned train car, a coltish orange mare with a purple mane watched the desert speed by.
Caramel sat across from her. He leaned over the table between them, whispering his plan. “It’s a real classic job,” he said, his voice low and cool. “You want a plan?--that’s fine. The plan is, shoot the security camera and the teller if you have to, just make sure you get that security camera. I’m gonna barricade the door.”
As he went on, Twilight stared out the window and counted the blanched tree trunks that popped through the cracked earth like chimney vents. One in particular caught her eye, a massive old tree with a cancerous growth on one side, slanted like a jackboot in mid-step. It faced north, marching forward forever towards Canterlot.
“Hey,” Caramel snapped, “listen to me.”
“Sorry," she replied. "Can you repeat the stuff you said after you told me to commit murder?”
He chuckled. “I saw that tree too. Pretty cool, right?”
She put her nose to the glass, but the tree must have marched away. Only the desert remained. Another blast from the overhead vent made her shiver. She pulled at her jacket. Twenty two miles til.
“Is there anything else I should know?” she asked.
“Yeah, don’t do anything suspicious until we’re inside the bank and the doors are closed. Hey, don’t zone out again. That’s important. Everypony in this town owns guns. If we go charging in shooting the place up, they’re gonna mob us when we come out. We can handle--” he grabbed Twilight’s hoof and pulled her away from the window. “We can handle the ponies in the bank. So long as it’s just them we gotta deal with, this is gonna go smoothly.”
Twilight nodded. “Sorry for spacing out.”
“It’s because I’m talking too much, I just know it,” he chuckled.
She smiled through the stress and said, “Not at all,” hoping the ponies sitting around her would take it as romantic. That was their cover this time. Family or lovers or something.
Twilight didn’t feel like a lover. She loved her friends, and she loved her parents, and she loved Celestia and Luna and Cadence and her country. She was supposed to love the other ponies on the train. She looked around at their undersized ties and mismatched suits. They weren’t so different. Their minds were elsewhere. Lingering on the shadows. Conducting business. Providing. Rewinding. Wary of griffons. Always elsewhere.
The dunes outside thinned out, exposing rocky soil. Ancient homesteads and cattle communes popped up, closer and closer to the tracks, until a town took shape. Row by row everyone got up and left the train. Caramel paused at the station door to grab a tourist pamphlet detailing the canyon hiking trails to the south of town, then made straight for the bank. Twilight smiled through the stress and followed.
“You good?” Caramel asked as the bank came into sight. “Right side top corner.”
“I forgot to ask--why do we need to shoot the camera again?”
“If we don’t, the authorities might conclude we’re disguising ourselves some other way. This makes our geddup believable.”
They stepped up a pair of concrete steps to the bank door. The sun was wide and fierce above them, but Twilight still felt the chill of the air conditioning vent. She nodded to Caramel. Family or lovers or something.
Caramel shoved open the door. Twilight took two steps inside and dialed in the camera in the corner. She didn’t need her eyes for this. She felt it. When she heard the door swing shut behind her, she pointed at the camera. The noise it made sounded like an explosion, though Twilight knew better. She made sure to destroy every piece of it, tear apart every atom and let physics do the rest. It was her job to destroy the camera, so she shredded it into oblivion. That just happened to sound kind of like an explosion.
“Holy cow!” Caramel announced as he jammed a screwdriver into the lock. “That was so cool, I’m jealous I didn’t do that myself. And if you don’t want that to happen to your pretty little heads, then you’ll do as we say.”
Twilight kept her horn lit as Caramel sauntered to the counter and tossed a burlap sack to the teller. A unicorn in the corner tried snapping a hoofgun onto his wrist, but Twilight yanked the firing pin into the next dimension before he could get a shot off.
“So,” he said, “pretty crazy thing, right?” He leaned against the table and slicked his mane back. His voice dropped. “I take it this is your first time being robbed?”
“Yes, sir,” the teller replied.
“I like your eyes. They’re nice.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re very welcome. Tell me--do you have any hobbies?”
“Not getting robbed, sir.”
Finally Caramel took notice of the awful, crushing silence in the room. While he was flirting with the teller Twilight had gathered up the customers and herded them into the corner. It wasn’t a normal crowd, all screaming and shouting. It bore down on him like an angry mob. The crowd behind Twilight was watching him. He could feel it. All those eyes. Like they could change him. Him! The nerve! Nerves pinching in his back.
“Cute,” he said, and threw his saddlebag across the counter. “If you would.”
Tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa-tappa. Five bits. Or a hundred. Or a hundred. Who knew? The customers sure did. Caramel sure did. The sound of coins on the counter played behind them. A hundred more, maybe. Not as much as Barcleigh’s.
Fear, the old familiar tune. Nervous dancing. Movement! Twilight locked eyes with an older stallion in the back of the crowd fiddling with something in his jacket pocket. She wondered if he felt the same cold she did, even all the way out here in the desert, a cold like the end of the universe was closing in on her, when he tried to pull something from his pocket. She could have used her magic to subdue him, but instead she walked right up to him and took his hoof in hers. They locked eyes, and she shook her head. There was the power! There was the dance.
Fear, the old familiar tune. Flat seventh. Screaming! Twilight could mold fear, manipulate it into submission, force it into compliance. Fear was a weapon. It struck her heart each time without fail and jolted her veins full of a strange and awful electricity. Now she could see the current in the old stallion’s eyes.
Caramel snatched up the bags and tossed one to Twilight. She caught it without breaking eye contact.
“Hey.” He grabbed her shoulder. “Leave him.”
As he made for the door, Twilight nodded to his saddlebags. “I think your bag is rigged with a rusting agent. Don’t open it until I can make sure.”
“Look at you with the plan.” He smiled.
Fear, the old familiar tune. Applause. Motion! The audience trying to leave! The old stallion barreled through the crowd, his eyes wild and cold. In an instant he was between them, jamming the barrel of a hoofgun right into Caramel’s face and firing over and over again.
Caramel flinched and clocked the geezer in the temple. Twilight had her hoof on the deadbolt, ready to melt it and free the door. So close. The whole mechanism popped and disappeared. Fear took over. An overhead air conditioning vent blasted her square in the face. Using her magic, she picked up the firing pin from where she had thrown it and pinned the stallion’s hoof to the floor. There was the charge. Now she felt alive! This was the dance, the tall terrible partner who had circled for for seven years and just now took her hoof. Something like a chuckle rose from inside. It bent and blued until it hit a good note and fell all the way into the back of her throat. This was every war she had won, every bad decision that didn’t matter in the grand scheme. This was the dance.
Caramel howled in pain, “You freak!” and kicked his outstretched leg.
Out of the corner of her eye, Twilight noticed the bank teller reach below the counter.
Caramel pointed. “Don’t--”
The alarm went off. The victims covered their ears. Twilight snapped up and vaporized one of the decorative mirrors purely on instinct. Caramel snarled at the noise and shouted, "Damn it, we’re leaving."
He unzipped his bag as he walked towards the exit. The rusting agent inside popped and covered his hoof with dust. He shook it off without a care and pointed towards the speaker in the corner. It exploded in a shower of sparks. The wail of the burglar alarm fizzled, drooped, and fell to the floor--dead--along with the rest of the speaker. Twilight recoiled as her ears rang.
He turned back towards the crowd just in time to be struck in the chest by the force of utter and complete silence. The eyes were upon him. A history of conflict in a stare. Twilight’s, charged and cloudy. The old stallion’s, shivering and deep. The teller’s, calculating and metallic. The eyes spoke in place of noise.
Caramel tried to sigh, but he coughed instead. “Would you all just shut up?”
“You shot that thing right next to my ear!” Twilight shouted. Something had happened to Caramel. Rusty powder covered one hoof. Some of it was smeared across his cheek. His eyes looked just like the barrel of his ankle-revolver--a small circle pointed right at her forehead.
“Shut up. All of you shut up.”
Twilight backed away and tripped over herself.
Caramel raised his hoof and pointed at the ceiling again. A chunk of drywall fell on him in a shower.
“Quiet. Would you just shut up? Everyone quiet.” He turned back towards the old stallion. His voice was animal, staccato gunshots. “What did you call me?”
The old stallion tried to yank his hoof free and groaned again.
“Sunrise!” Twilight called to no avail. The dance was over, it had been over for years, but her mind kept spinning and spinning. Sublime spin, like a drunken stupor. Something terrible had to be coming--she was certain of it. There would be an angry mob around the corner coming to lynch them, or some other old hero with a gun she hadn’t already disarmed. If she tried to run she’d just fall over. If she stayed a little while longer--she might just catch another dance.
“Tell me what you said.” Caramel raised his hoof and pointed.
“Freak.” Words pooled in the geezer’s throat. “You just want to scare us with your screwed up face.”
It was loud. Louder than it had ever been before. Caramel could hear it so vividly. Her saccharine laugh. Cardboard. The war clouding the backdrop. Bobbing up and down and up and down and up and down and--
The hoofgun clattered to the floor, louder than a gunshot.
Caramel blinked, then picked it up again. He pointed at the ceiling again. The bank and its occupants reeled, but stayed in place. He took Twilight by the hoof and stumbled out the front door towards the sirens. The next moment they were gone, carried away on the wake of the gunshots, swallowed up by the shivering desert.