//------------------------------// // Chapter 5: In Which I Learn The Importance Of Cardio // Story: Breaking Bricks // by Aquaman //------------------------------// Chapter 5 – In Which I Discover The Importance of Cardio Despite all the indecision and confusion I’d been suffering through the whole day, this time I didn’t hesitate. In ten seconds flat, I was galloping into the same alleyway I’d seen Stumpy charge into, my heart already on overdrive and my eyes locked onto his wavy maroon tail as it vanished around a corner. I had no idea who this pony was, and I had even less of a clue about where he was going. All I knew was that my apartment was charring into cinders and he was running away from it, and that was reason enough for me to stick to this guy like green on grass until we got to a place where we could discuss the matter like grown stallions. Or barring that, at least a place where I could stand him up against a wall and beat him halfway into next week. To be honest, I kinda liked the sound of option number two at the moment. “Hey!” I shouted after him as he skidded out of the alley into a tiny courtyard in front of a dilapidated hotel, and then turned hard to the right onto a one-lane side street. “Get back here, you little jerkoff!” I guess he wasn’t feeling too cooperative after that, which was probably why he chose right then to kick a trio of overflowing trash cans right into my path as I rounded the bend and caught sight of him again. The first one bounced off to the side and clanged against the back steps of a locksmith’s shop, but there wasn’t enough time to dodge around the other two. By the time I had shaken off the week-old collection of grass clippings and lettuce heads splattered all over my forelegs, the orange-furred pony was thirty feet away and still gaining speed. By the time I actually got clear of the trash and made it over to where the alley curved off to the left, he was nearly out of sight again. That gave me pause for about a second and a half. Once that was over, I threw out a snort that’d turn a prizefighter white and took off again, my goal for what to do after catching him now firmly confined to the “beat the holy hell out of somepony” camp. If I were a cop, this would’ve been right around the time where I would’ve called for backup and waited to watch the scuzzball squirm under an overheated headlamp in a windowless think tank. But I wasn’t a cop. I was a pony who, in a single day, had spent the whole morning trying to look professional while nursing a hangover, been publicly embarrassed by an elite member of his society, and now had his home burned down before he was even done being evicted from it. As far as I was concerned, anything short of tossing this moron off the Statue of Harmony with an anvil tied to his tail was completely justifiable at this point. Little Mister Stumpy Hooves up ahead was still running for all he was worth, and for a couple minutes I was mostly just trying to keep him in sight. But even though he was a good bit faster than me and didn’t seem to be slowing down, he was also panicking, and that meant he was indecisive. So whenever he hit a fork in the road and held up for a split second to figure out which way to go, I gained another few yards on him. It was a slow process and my stamina wasn’t exactly anything to write home about, but for the time being I was still making progress. And for the time being, that was just making Stumpy freak out even more. Sooner or later, one of us had to slip up, and after pounding past six different alleyways and at least a dozen reasonably shocked bums and bag fillies, it ended up being Stumpy who went first. With fifty feet still separating us and my lungs searing as I sobered up from the adrenaline kick the fire had given me, he stopped on a tenth-bit right in front of an sunset-lit offshoot to the alley we were racing through, half his face set alight by the angled beam of light pouring over it. I couldn’t have cared less about the reason why; I just wanted this chase to end. I covered the gap in a few lengthened strides, and lowered my head just as he looked over and saw me closing in. He gasped, I leapt forward, and the next thing I knew I was bouncing shoulder-first off a solid brick wall and he was running again, this time towards a fruit stand sticking halfway out across the entrance to the alley. In two hops, he was up and over it, and a moment later he leapt forward again and landed on top of a two-wheeled wagon packed from end to end with heavy wooden crates. After that, all I could do was watch from afar as the pony I’d been inches from smearing all over the side of a dry goods store effortlessly bounded from carriage to carriage, and crossed four packed lanes of traffic without ever touching the ground. Sometimes, even swearing isn’t quite enough to cover everything. “Well, two can play at that game,” I told myself through gritted teeth. Working around my throbbing foreleg as best I could, I stepped forward and jumped up onto the fruit stand, much to the chagrin of the vendor below still recovering from the last idiot who’d decided to use it as a trampoline. I muttered a half-flanked apology in his general direction, then stared out across the street to where Stumpy was just now touching down on the opposite sidewalk. Now all that stood between me and him was thirty feet of unbroken asphalt, completely covered with oblivious pedestrians and carriages with big, solid-looking wheels that could crush a pony flat before the occupants even felt a bump. And the longer I waited here, the more Stumpy’s lead on me would grow. But no pressure or anything. As the vendor continued to make very impolite assertions about my relationship with my mother, I set my jaw and scoped out the path I was going to take. The first gap I’d need to clear was about eight feet wide, and my target was a cart full of what looked like crates of bananas. And the pony pulling said cart was already staring at me, with thick dark eyebrows already lowered over very unsympathetic eyes. And he also happened to be about a foot taller than me. And about three times as heavy. With a mark on his flank of what I was pretty sure was a sledgehammer. “Oh, who the hell am I kidding?” I muttered under my breath. Two minutes and a severely bruised ego later, I had navigated my way across the street the normal way and trotted into the alley I’d seen Stumpy run into just a short time before. Predictably enough, he was already long gone. A stray cat darted out of sight as I reached the spot where the alley split off into two opposite paths. The path to the left was where I’d seen the cat go, and that was just a dead-end into another cluster of trash cans and four stories of unbroken brick. The path to the right wasn’t much better; it was longer by a good hundred yards or so, but it made up for it by being packed from end to end with ancient metal fire escapes, each one perfectly designed to ferry panicked residents down to the ground and ornery little firebugs up to wherever they wanted to hide. A full battalion of royal guards would be lucky to find him back here. This was pointless. And, more to the point, hopeless. Well, maybe not entirely hopeless. I knew what this guy looked like, at least. It wouldn’t count for much once the day ended and I had to start from scratch tomorrow morning, but it was a start. I’d found plenty of ponies before with less to go on than that. The catch, though, was those ponies also took months to find. And with the first case on my priority list being a foalnapping, the last thing I had at my disposal was free time to go chasing after a single arsonist who most likely didn’t have a single thing to do with it. Still, I wasn’t ready to give up on my little shred of optimism just yet. Whether that was justified or just due to the fact that I was dizzy as a dodo bird from all that running was still up for debate. I was in the middle of turning around and just starting to wonder where exactly the hay I’d just run off to when a shadow shifted in the corner of my eye. I stopped for a second and almost dismissed it as the cat I’d seen a second ago, but then the bricks off to the right twitched again. There wasn’t any cat in the world with a shadow that big. Not unless that cat had hooves and a mane, and a dirty little secret about who had told him to set my apartment on fire. I turned around slowly and faced the bank of trash cans I’d come so close to ignoring entirely. “I know you’re back there,” I said. “And I know it was you in my apartment earlier.” The trash cans were silent. “I’ll make you a deal, all right?” I told him. You come out now, and I won’t strangle you with your own intestines. “I’m not gonna hurt you. I just wanna know who you work for. Whoever it is never has to know. I won’t tell him who told me. Just…just come on out now, and I promise we can talk about this nice and civilly.” Still no response. I figured that meant he was about three seconds from making a break for it. I crouched down low, counted to three, then leapt up and sent the whole row of trash cans flying out in front of me, towards the stray cat I had cornered with nowhere to run. Or I would have, if the trash cans hadn’t burst out towards me at the exact moment I started forward. And if Stumpy hadn’t jumped out over them and me both in the same instant, and taken off down the alley like he’d been warming up for this moment all day. The cans were empty this time, at least, but I had a bigger problem: Stumpy was on the move again, and this time he’d had a few seconds to think about where he was going to go. By the time my head stopped spinning and I figured out what in the holy hell had just happened, he was already charging towards the nearest fire escape. If he made it there and got the staircase down before I could reach him, he’d be gone for good. Time to stop screwing around and end this. At first, luck was on my side: the stairs on the fire escape nearest to us were part of the way down already, but so coated with rust that Stumpy couldn’t budge them even after he took a running leap and threw his whole body weight on the bottom step. While Stumpy wasted his time trying to yank his escape route down to ground level, I flattened my ears against my skull and lowered my head into a charge. I was only twenty feet away when he saw me coming and dropped down again, his hooves scrabbling against the pavement as he tried to get his legs back in gear. If I’d skipped a donut run or two during the past week, I probably would’ve caught him right then and there. Just as I got within hooves’ reach, though, Stumpy turned on the jets and switched over to his backup plan. Thirty feet away, there was another fire escape attached to a building with much cleaner brickwork, and those stairs looked fresh as the day they were forged. A little better, even, considering the little hoof-tied rope somepony had left hanging off them after some late-night adventure. But even though I was huffing and puffing like an asthmatic wolf, I swear I felt my heart jump kick out an extra beat just at the sight of it. He was pulling away from me now, but the second he stopped to pull that staircase down, I’d be all over him. I had him this time. One last screwup, one last dive for that pull rope dangling just a little bit too high for a normal pony to reach, and I’d finally have my answers. It was at the last possible second that Stumpy changed course, and that might’ve been why it took me a split second too long to register that he wasn’t going for the rope at all. In the end, the reason didn’t really matter: what mattered was that instead of heading underneath the staircase and closing his teeth desperately around the thick beige rope that controlled it, the pony in the dumpy gray jacket veered off to the left towards a pile of boxes and crates stacked behind a neck-high partition. I lost a step or two wondering what the hell he was doing, and that gave him all the time he needed to go ahead and show me. He took one last long stride up onto the first row of boxes, then hopped once, skipped twice, and jumped over the debris, onto the partition, and across twelve feet of open air to land safely on the second floor of the fire escape. Of all the things I could’ve imagined failing to account for, the stallion I was trying to catch being a damned Ponympic athlete honestly hadn’t even crossed my mind. I swore under my breath and kept going. If this guy thought he could shake me off that easy after I’d tailed him halfway to Trotton and back, he was gonna have another thought coming real damn quick. I knew colts on the long jump squad in high school. I was charged up, zeroed in, and pissed off beyond belief. I could handle this. I glared at Stumpy long enough to make sure he saw me, then traced his path step for step and aimed for the partition. Step One: Stride. I planted my back hooves down hard and stretched my forelegs out over the first boxes. Stumpy gritted his teeth and whipped his head away from me. Step Two: Hop. The boxes creaked as my forelegs made contact. Stumpy was making his way towards the next flight of stairs. Too slow. Too late. Step Three: Skip. Up over the debris, up onto the partition. The muscles in Stumpy’s neck were bulging beneath his fur. Step Four: Jump. I hit the partition hard, but kept my balance. Stumpy turned around just in time to see me take off, and for a fraction of a moment our eyes locked together again just like they had when we’d first seen each other. Game over, buddy, I thought. I bared my teeth, ducked my head, and stretched my hooves toward his throat. And met air. I’d closed my eyes at some point during the final descent, so it was a second or two before I realized that my head wasn’t heading for a passionate rendezvous with Stumpy’s sternum. And a second or two later after that, I also realized that the space below me that should’ve been full of fire escape was empty, and that my nose was about three feet away from an unscheduled rest stop in Roadburn Heights. Thankfully, I tucked and rolled fast enough to keep the pavement from rearranging my face, but that didn’t do much to dull the blow of tumbling to a stop a few yards away and looking up to see a blurry orange earth stallion getting smaller and smaller as he climbed up the fire escape all the way to the top floor. From five stories above, Stumpy poked his head over the edge of the penthouse platform and looked down at me, then ducked back out of sight. A second later, the whole fire escape creaked, and Stumpy leapt up towards the wall and scaled it as easily as a spider could. I caught one last glimpse of his wavy-tailed behind as he hoisted it up over the lip of the roof, and then Stumpy was gone. I almost got up and went for the rope under the stairs right then, but at the last second I held back and kept my spot on the ground. I could’ve gone on chasing him, but I’d already spent the last ten minutes demonstrating quite clearly how useless that was. There was no two ways about it: the little bastard was faster than me, and judging by how heavy my legs felt right now he probably had me in the endurance department too. Showed what I got for looking at consistent exercise the same way other ponies look at root canals, I guess. The point was, burning off the last dregs of my head of steam to chase this pony across the rooftops of Manehattan was just going to be another waste of time to add to a whole string of them today. And that was assuming I didn’t fall off one of said rooftops and get a one-way ticket to Splat City first. I let my head fall back against the pavement and stared aimlessly up at the fading patches of blue and gold still poking through the clouds overhead. How had this even happened? I’d had him painted into a corner that no other pony I’d ever heard of would be able to slip out of, and he’d just jumped right over it. Right over me. Yeah, that was another thing he had going for him, wasn’t it? A normal pony was lucky if he could clear a chest-high fence; Stumpy, meanwhile, could prance clean over my head in two steps. At every corner, he’d taken me completely by surprise, and that was why he was fiddling away on the roof and I was stuck down here, watching him run off and wondering how the hell he’d done it. Well, I’d already said how he’d done it, hadn’t he? He took me by surprise. He waited back behind those trash cans until I was just about to strike, and then he broke away right when I was too close to do anything about it. Lulled the predator into a false sense of security, then timed the escape perfectly to leave him gasping for air in the distance. Classic move. One I should’ve seen coming. One that I could feel my face going near purple with rage over. Or was that embarrassment? That was another possibility. As was pain. I’d hit the ground kind of hard a minute ago. I think, in a way, that was when my new plan was first spawned: when I rubbed my forehoof over my freshly bruised shoulder and wished more than anything that I could get one last shot at the flankhole indirectly responsible for it. But to get that shot, I’d have to find him first, and I’d have to figure out how many building tops he was planning on bouncing across before deciding to join the rest of us mortals down on Earth. Yeah, that was definitely where my plan came from, because it was right about then that I looked up at the sky again and let my eyes drift along to the right and over to the next building in the row, and then the next after that. And it was right about then that it occurred to me that even street-spanning duplex rows had to end someplace, and that not even Stumpy could clear a gap as big as the city streets that surrounded them. Which meant it was right exactly then that a little inkling of an idea began to form inside my head. I rolled onto my side and looked down to where the alleyway opened up again at the end of the block, then glanced back up at the fire escape again. Five minutes ago, I would’ve said there were only a couple things I could do now: either clamber up onto those catwalks and follow Stumpy across the roof, or quit while I was behind and wake up tomorrow even further back. But that wasn’t completely true, was it? Because there was something else I could do instead. If doors number one and two didn’t look promising, then I’d just have to go out through the window. I’d need a little bit of trickiness and a much larger bit of luck to pull it off, but it was definitely a possibility. And that meant the hunt was still on. It was like the gears inside my brain had just gotten a fresh coat of axle grease. By the time I was all the way up on my hooves, I had everything figured out. Maybe I couldn’t run as fast as Stumpy or jump as high, but I could play the game by his rules. I couldn’t catch him, but I could sure as hell hunt him down. All it’d take was a little creativity, and a little natural instinct. Just like Stumpy would do it. Just like a lion hunting for dinner in the savanna. And guess what, Stumpy? This lion here? He’s starving. • • • The sun had set hours ago, but as far as the residents of Manehattan were concerned, the night was still young and ripe for the taking. While the crowds had thinned a bit since earlier in the evening, the sidewalks were still hardly even visible for all the ponies trotting along on top of them. The streetlights were bright, the breeze was fresh and just slight enough to touch the night with a homely chill, and even the ponies themselves seemed carefree enough. For the briefest of moments, the City That Never Slept was at peace. At the Manehattan Public Library, the spindly black minute hand on the clock embedded in the central pediment ticked forward an inch, and the bell hidden behind it tolled nine times. As the echo of the final chime faded away, the front door of a condominium across the street swung open, and a short, stocky earth pony with orange fur and a wavy maroon tail poked his head out, his ears and mane hidden under a speckled gray hood. After an edgy glance in either direction, he stepped all the way out and hurried down to the end of the block. His shoulders were hunched and his gaze wove back and forth through the ponies crowding around him, almost as if he were searching for one of them in particular. At the corner, a herd of ponies stood clumped loosely together, most of them looking up at the magically enhanced globe that glowed cherry red over the crosswalk and dyed the parallel white lines beneath it a dim shade of pink. Instead of dodging around the cluster of Manehattanites, the stocky pony trotted straight towards them, and squeezed into the middle of the pack just as the otherworldly color inside the orb swirled from red into a bright emerald green. Once the light changed, the whole group moved as one mass, and they would’ve remained that way for another few blocks if the newest addition to the crowd, too short to be seen by anypony more than a few feet away, hadn’t peeled off to the right just before they reached the curb. The herd behind him oblivious to his actions, he jogged off alongside the street he had just crossed with his eyes still sweeping over everything he passed, sticking to the shadows as much as he could and using the bodies of other ponies to shield himself from the view of any carriages rumbling by on the street. Almost as if he expected the pony he was looking for to be searching for him in return. The orange pony kept the same pace for another three blocks, and then with one last impressively unsubtle glance behind him, he slowed to a steady walk and let a heavy sign escape his lips. His relief was written all over his face: he’d spent two hours hiding on the roof of that condo until he was as sure as he could be that the coast was clear, and yet the whole way down the street he’d been absolutely sure that he was only a single errant glance away from having to make another frantic escape. But for whatever reason, the stars had seen fit to give him a reprieve this time, and that suited him just fine. With the spring of freedom in his step, he pushed himself back into a brisk trot and kept it up for another six blocks, until he had left the bustling mercantile quarter behind him and entered a place that felt a little bit closer to home. The southern tip of the Manehattan Peninsula is taken up almost entirely by Rocky Feller Plaza and the surrounding financial district, with the Hostler River forming a natural border to the south and west, and Sugarcube Hill located about half a mile to the north. To the east, however, lies a small neighborhood about twelve hundred yards square called Amity Park City. Centered around a massive textile plant and crowded with shops catering to the Rocky Feller crowd, the borough was once a bustling microcosm of middle-class Equestrian society. When the plant closed down six years before Princess Luna’s return, though, the foundation the community was built on crumbled and dissolved in a matter of weeks. Now, Amity Park was a virtual ghost town, filled with more potholes than ponies and left to rot by a city that couldn’t be bothered to tear it down. It was grimy, dreary, and a detestable eyesore for the ponies who lived and worked in the skyscrapers still visible in the distance, and that meant it was the safest place in Manehattan for anypony who didn’t want to be found. That was where the orange-coated pony was going now, and that was where he would burrow so deep into the cracked streets and deserted tenements that it’d take an entire division of the Canterlot Royal Guards to root him back out again. Maybe even two. West River Street marked the unofficial divide between Amity Park and the rest of the city, and the orange pony slowed to a meandering shuffle once he crossed over it, shrugging off his hood as he did so to reveal an unkempt mane that shared the same color as his tail. The streetlamps in this part of town were still functioning, but every third or fourth lantern was burnt out or broken, and in some cases was missing entirely. This pony didn’t seem to mind too much, though, if his habit of bounding between patches of darkness was any indication. All things considered, it was probably better if no one could see him right now. The fewer ponies who saw scuffed hooves and dirt-streaked face and got a chance to put two and two together, the better. A flash of red in the distance caught the orange pony by surprise, and instinctively he flinched back into the nearest doorway the instant it flitted into his view. With his teeth clenched tight and his breaths coming in short, staccato bursts, he pressed himself as far into the alcove as he could, only daring to peek back around the corner once he’d waited so long that his legs were starting to wobble with how hard he had them locked at the knees. Once he did look, though, his shoulders sagged, and he let out a high, shaky chuckle that reverberated all the way down to where the street ended at a vacant lot stuffed with broken-up carriages and compost heaps. He’d just about blown a gasket seeing his reflection in a store window. He laughed again and turned his head to the side, his lips parting into a grimace as he noticed the grey smudges still lining the back of his neck. He’d need to get cleaned up while he was out here, too. If anypony out there was still chasing him, they’d probably be able to see and smell him coming before too long. Despite the murkiness the pony was wading through, his face still visibly darkened as he turned away from the shop window, and it wouldn’t have been hard for an onlooker to figure out what was on his mind now. He’d cut it way too close sticking around to watch the blaze he’d set, and this was what he was going to get for it: a whole night of jumping at his own freaking shadow, because every single one looked like it belonged to a brick-red earth stallion with a short brown mane and a wicked case of post-traumatic rage. “Stupid,” he muttered under his breath as he started walking again. He was stupid. Setting that fire was stupid. This whole thing was stupid, and it was his own stupid fault for screwing it up so bad. He went ahead and told himself so under his breath: “Stand out in the middle’a the damn road, why don’t you? He’ll never think to look there. Could’ve been back hours ago, but no, you had to go and let him see you. You had to let him chase you all the way across the freakin’-” The pony stopped, then perked his ears and swiveled his head around. The alley to his left was empty, and so was the side street on his right. But he could’ve sworn… He wrinkled his nose, then swore under his breath. “C’mon, Springs,” he growled to himself with a heavy sigh. “Get it toge-” With a lowly whisper, the breeze fell silent, and a piece of paper crinkled somewhere off in the distance. And then the next thing Springs knew, his rump was pressed flat against the wall behind him and his lungs were heaving for breath, and his eyes were locked in on a single green bottle rolling out from the shadows of the alley across the street. The bottle tumbled out onto the sidewalk and fell into the gutter with a soft clink, and after that the night was still. “W-Who’s there?” Springs called out, his jaw continuing to shake even after he ground his teeth together and shut his mouth so tightly that his lips went white around the edges. In the darkness beyond his vision, a second bottle dinged against the pavement, and a moment later a third one shattered completely. “I know you’re back there!” he shouted. “I can see you! I’m comin’ after you, you little…” His threat froze in his throat, and Springs stood stock still and listened. No hoofsteps running. No returning shouts. The other pony wasn’t leaving. The other pony was calling his bluff. “Just go,” Springs hissed through his teeth. “Just go.” He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and stared straight ahead into the shadows of the alley. There was nothing there. He could see where the third bottle had broken, just below a whole row propped up on and around a decrepit wooden crate. There was nothing there. The alley was definitely empty. It might’ve just been a sewer rat. He might still be perfectly safe. It probably wasn’t. He probably wasn’t. “Just go.” With a shuddering sigh that bordered on being desperate, Springs took to his hooves. Somewhere in this district was a place he could hide, where he could sleep and eat and bide his time until the world lost interest in him again, and all he had to do was get there before this other pony did. Except now every time his sole hit the ground, there was an echo behind him. Now he was running, and someone—or something, Celestia forbid—was giving chase. Grunting with either frustration or terror, he shifted up into his maximum speed, the ancient buildings and rusting lightpoles whizzing past as his mane slapped against his face and his jacket billowed out in the wind. Three blocks later, there were still two sets of hoofsteps cutting through the night, and Springs was only a minute or two away from running on fumes. He could outrun just about anypony in a pinch, but he wasn’t built for distance and he knew it all too well after the day he’d had today. This was going to end sooner rather than later, and if he couldn’t get away within the next thirty seconds, that end was probably going to lead to a fight. And in a fair fight, he’d be smeared halfway across the neighborhood before he could so much as duck. Which meant there was only one thing left for him to do now. It was time to start cheating again. Springs waited exactly three seconds, then dug his forehoof into a gap in the cobblestones and made a blind turn into a narrow space between a boarded-up dress boutique and a pawn shop with two sputtering candles on either side of the door. It wasn’t clean by any means, but he squeezed through the crevice with only a couple scrapes and popped out on the other end to find himself sprinting down yet another nearly pitch-black backstreet, with only the gentle glow of the waxing moon overhead keeping him from bouncing off the walls again. His hooves pounded down the inky road, each step producing a powerful crack that sounded for all the world like a bone snapping in two, like a nail being driven into a coffin. The back lane spit him out onto Saffron Street, but Springs couldn’t have cared less what the road’s name was. It was empty and it was going to get him where he needed to go, and for now that was more than enough. He risked a glance behind him, saw nothing, pushed on, looked back again and nearly fell flat on his face tripping over a bump in the road; he was wheezing for breath by now, and most of those breaths were wasted on the frenzied fragments of sentences that dribbled out of his mouth as his exhausted mind narrated his progress. “Come on…come on…two more blocks…come on…one more…keep going…keep going…just leave me alone…just leave me alone.” Just a few yards ahead, a cast-iron fence cordoned off a small smattering of storage units that took up the entire end of the block. With a final groan, Springs took flight off a dumpster and vaulted the fence, then collapsed once he rounded the corner and stopped by way of slamming into the wall and flattening against it for all he was worth. The textile plant loomed up overhead a hundred yards away, two of the now defunct smokestacks blocking off either side of the moon so that only a small sliver of ghostly white light slipped through to illuminate the unit doors and the pony crouching in front of them. That pony, however, didn’t seem to be the type to appreciate the beauty of nature set against the backdrop of urban sprawl; in any case, he wasn’t looking at the moon right now. He was looking straight at the corrugated metal door of the unit on the other side of the entrance into the lot, his mane slick with sweat and his ears twitching and jumping almost as much as he was. He was listening for hoofsteps, for the pony following him. If he heard him coming, he had just backed himself into a corner that he wouldn’t be escaping from. If he heard nothing, he was, for the time being at least, safe. He heard nothing. Springs kept his sigh of relief as quiet as he could manage, and slumped into the wall just before his wobbling knees pitched him onto the ground. For a long while, he just stood there with his forehead pressed against the brick, his chest still heaving and a weak chuckle floating out of his mouth every moment or two. “Holy shit,” he muttered to him, another laugh bubbling out of his throat at the tail end of the curse. Two narrow escapes a day was more than enough for him, it seemed. He was ready to get off the streets, and this storage lot was just the kind of five-star establishment he was looking for. It wasn’t the best hiding place, sure, but in the present situation it would do well enough for one night. The thing about hiding places, though, is that they all hinge on the seeker giving up before he can find you. Skill never plays into it; the whole effort is a simple test of will where the prey gets a step or two ahead and dares the predator to come find him if he can. And you know what the thing about predators is? They don’t give up. They don’t get bored or discouraged, or decide that tomorrow’s just as good a time to eat as today. When a predator is locked onto his prey, there is neither rain nor snow nor meteor strike that’s going to shake him off until he’s good and ready to call it finished. Like when a werewolf in the Everfree corners a rabbit. Like when a lion in the savanna hunts down an impala. Like when a pony in Manehattan wants answers and doesn’t care how far he has to go to get them. So when Springs turned around and found himself nose to nose with a brick-red, brown-maned earth stallion whose eyes were set on “barbeque”, I really don’t think he should’ve been all that surprised. After all, I’d made him a promise that we were going to have a nice, civil conversation with each other before the day was done. And Brick Breaker doesn’t break his promises. “Howdy,” I said, putting on an absolutely winning smile as Springs’ eyes widened and his jaw dropped to his hooves. I caught him by the shoulders just as he started to turn around, and with one gentle push I had him shoved up on his hind legs against one of the storage units with my hooves placed nice and civilly on either side of his throat. “Y’know, I don’t think I ever properly introduced myself before,” I remarked cordially as the metallic clang of Springs’ skull hitting the unit’s door echoed along the deserted street a few yards away. “Hi there. My name’s Brick Breaker. You probably know me pretty well, don’t you?” I paused, and Springs tried to squirm away. Like most other things he had tried in the last few minutes, it didn’t go well. “Or actually, I guess you probably know my apartment a bit better. You remember my apartment, right? Probably sticks out in your mind a little bit, doesn’t it? Y’know, being on fire and all.” “How did you find me?” Springs grunted raspily, as if there was something blocking his throat and keeping him from speaking him clearly. Must’ve been that dry night air. “How did I find you…” I repeated, my laugh sounding more like a cackle. I was probably enjoying this just a bit too much, in retrospect. “You’re a lot of things, Springy, ol’ pal. Slimy, irritating, idiotic, bit on the ugly side too, actually. But if there is one thing, buddy, that you are not…” My good cheer vanished, and even Springs’ pupils seemed to shirk away and try to hide from the daggers my eyes were throwing at him. “It’s subtle,” I whispered, the whole back of my neck tingling with adrenaline. Yeah, I was definitely enjoying this too much. I promised myself I’d apologize for that once I kicked the bastard’s teeth straight through his lungs. “But I never saw…” Springs started to say before his eyes drifted up and his neck went slack. He was looking up at the four-story tenement row behind me. Or more specifically, at the warped, twisted old fire escape that snaked up its back side and was nearly level with the roof of the storage units at the second floor. “Yeah, didn’t think I had it in me, didja?” I remarked, while thinking to myself that it wasn’t technically gloating since the path I’d taken hadn’t really been all my idea. “Who says an old dog can’t learn new tricks?” Springs swallowed hard, and the tiny bulge in his neck kept shivering even after he was done. “L-Look, just lemme expla-” “No, you know what, Springs?” I interrupted, my eyes shut tight with the effort of keeping a lid on what my gut was telling me to say. “I’m sure you’ve got just the most charming little excuse for why you had to set my apartment on fire, but I have had a really, really long day today, and quite frankly I’m not really in the mood to be talked at anymore. So how ‘bout, just for a little bit, you keep your speedy little trap shut and let me do the talking? Sound good?” Springs’ lips went tight, and a little bit of heat seeped back into his eyes. I ignored the implications and took that as a “yes”. “Wonderful,” I said. “And if you don’t mind, let’s go ahead and start with who told you to come after me today.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Springs replied bitterly, though not nearly as steadily as I think he was aiming for. “Oh, you don’t, huh?” I murmured back. “So what, Mom just forgot to tell you not to play with matches, then?” “I didn’t set your apartment on fire,” he growled. This time, his voice was strong and clear. Rotten luck for him I was too busy laughing to care. “Bullshit, you didn’t,” I came back loudly. “What the hell were you doing, then, Springs? You gonna tell me you led me halfway to the friggin’ moon and back ‘cause you had to make a milk run?” “I didn’t do it,” Springs repeated. I looked off towards the sky and felt an almost painful shudder run through my forelegs. “But I know who did,” he added a moment later, still not looking me in the face. For the moment, I decided to let his indelicate behavior slide. The side of my head was itching something fierce. “Is that a fact?” I crooned. “You know who torched my apartment? Well, damn it to the moon, Springs, I would just love to know who did that.” “Yeah, okay, just…it was, uh…” he stuttered. Seemed Springs wasn’t very good at stalling either. “Y’know, that’s just fascinating, Springs,” I said. “But there’s something else I’d love to know too. You want to take a guess at what else I’d love to know, Springs?” “I…” “I’d love to know what it is behind me that’s so damn interesting you just can’t take your eyes off it.” I’ve heard a hundred different names for the look that passed over Springs’ face just then, but my personal favorite—and by far the most accurate—is the “oh shit” face. It was the same look he’d had when our snouts had bumped together a couple minutes ago, and the same look I’d had when I’d walked in on my bachelor pad being turned into charcoal earlier that afternoon. It was the look everypony got when something happened that completely blindsided them, when somepony took their carefully laid plans and tossed a big honkin’ monkey wrench right in the middle of them. And the best part was, I hadn’t really even needed to work all that hard to get this wrench up in the air. Springs’ eyes had been darting over my shoulders every five seconds since we’d started talking. I guess he’d thought I wouldn’t notice from all of six inches away. He really was utterly hopeless at this. “What do you not want me to see back there, Springs? Hmm?” I continued. Hell, he was even looking back there again right now. The guy couldn’t have been more of an amateur if he’d gotten indignant and threatened to call his lawyer. “Is this where you were gonna hide tonight? Is this where the pony who really set that fire is?” Springs wasn’t talking, and he also wasn’t shifting his eyes back over to me. I had a brief notion that now was probably a good time to stop screwing around and actually look behind me, but one look at the way Springs’ chest was heaving was all I needed to dismiss that. I was cold, I was homeless, and I had a stitch in my side that felt like somepony had stabbed me with a pair of fetlock trimmers, and I had the colt responsible for all of it literally with his back against the wall. Constant vigilance could wait at least another five minutes. Right now, I had some karmic rebalancing to do. “What’s over here, you little flankhole?” I asked, in a low, feral snarl that I’d spent years perfecting. “What are you looking at?” Springs blinked, the corners of his mouth twitched, and then he finally looked me in the eyes again. “Nothin’,” he said quietly. I turned around just in time to catch a size nine hoof right in the muzzle. Now, I’m not one of those ponies with titanium ‘nads who thinks their whole bodies are made of the same stuff, but most of the time I can take more than a few hits before I go down for the count. A blind sucker buck to the face, however, tended to skew the average a bit, especially when it came from what seemed to be a full-grown rhinoceros. I shut my eyes just in time to miss the sky filling with stars, but a moment later I could see plenty of them even with my eyes screwed up and my forehooves clamped over my nose. Not that it really hurt that bad or anything. Just basic instinct, that’s all. You knock a guy hard enough in the snout, he’s gonna tense up a little bit. It was a perfectly natural reaction. I was fine. I just needed a little peace and quiet, about five minutes to get my sense of balance back, and enough triple fudge brownies to sink a sea pony. Then I’d be fit as a freaking fiddle. Somewhere far off in the impenetrable distance, a stallion was talking in a voice that made it sound like he was about ready to bite somepony’s head off. As I dizzily got my hooves back under me and got busy with the valiant effort of keeping my breakfast in my stomach where it belonged, my brain eventually unscrambled enough to translate the loud, angry noises into words. “…think you cut that close enough, ya big oaf?” “But you tol’ me to stay hidden.” “Until I came back. Did that part just not make it through customs, Blockhead?” “You tol’ me-” “Stars abo…I know what I told you. It’s called critical thinking, Cinder. Looking at a situation and making your own freaking decision about it. Really not that hard.” “But you tol’ me I’m not supposed t’ make my own decisions.” In the darkness, somepony groaned. “Well, whaddya know…boss hires a pony big as an elephant, and now he’s got the memory of one too. That’s just precious.” “I got what now?” “Just shut up, Cinder Block.” For about half a second, the waves of nausea crashing over my stomach leveled out, and I took the opportunity to stand all the way back up for the express purpose of marching right on over to those two voices and opening up an Ursa-sized can of whoop-ass pronto. I was just over a foot off the ground when the tide came back in, and the throbbing spot on the front of my nose was the first part of me to crash into the pavement again. Okay, so basic motor functions were probably gonna be out of commission for a while. Fine, then. I could work around that. If I couldn’t get up and physically maim anypony, the next best thing was verbal abuse. I just needed one devastating insult, or one insufferably cocky one-liner. A half-decent pun, even. And whatever it was, I needed it fast before the moment was gone, before Springs realized I wasn’t skipping off with the Sandmare just yet and sent Brutus the Wunder Pony after me again. I racked what was left of my brains for a second, then swallowed hard and opened my mouth. “Ow,” I said. There was a long moment where nopony spoke, and during that time I cracked my eyes open for the first time in at least a minute. In the split second I managed to keep them open, I saw Springs standing next to a shadowy, muscle-bound silhouette that would’ve blocked out the moon if it’d been standing a bit farther to the right. The huge pony’s face was too dark to see clearly, and Springs’ brow was creased with equal parts confusion and exasperation. “Stars above, he’s still awake,” the higher of the two voices—Springs, I figured—said. “How hard did you hit him?” “Pretty hard,” answered the deeper voice. That must’ve been…the other pony. Cinder something. “You didn’t knock him out?” “I didn’t wanna hurt ‘im.” “Oh, for…he had me by the throat, Cinder!” “Well, maybe he had a good reason.” “What…the hell is that supposed to mean?” “I dunno. What’d you do to him, anyway?” I still hadn’t worked up the courage to open my eyes again, but I had a pretty good idea of where Springs’ forehoof was even without them. “Cinder, we went ov…I don’t even know how many times we went over this. We’re doing all this because…” Springs paused, and I ended up squinting up at him just to check whether he was looking at me. He was. “You know what, forget it. I’ll explain later. Just hit him again.” “Huh?” Cinder replied slowly. My eyes were open all the way now. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I go over that too fast? Hit. Him. Again.” “W-Whoa, hey, wait a minute, guys,” I sputtered a bit drunkenly as I fumbled my hooves around to find purchase on the road. “’M fine down here, actually, so you really, uh, really don’t have to do tha-” The good news was, Cinder didn’t buck me any harder the second time. The bad news was, that second buck still felt about as good as taking a piledriver from a buffalo. “Okay, yes, good, I surrender,” I groaned. “Can we cease with the kicking now, plea-” The third one was definitely harder, though. “Seriously, is this really necessa-” As was the fourth. “Celestia on a bike, just stop it alrea-” I went ahead and shut up for good after the fifth shot to the braincase. I still didn’t cry, though. Tearing up was different from crying. So was curling into a ball and letting out a little moan that somepony not listening very well might misinterpret as a whimper. Similar, but different. “Luna above, are you even trying?” Springs grumbled loudly, which from my perspective just made him sound like he was trying to sing the National Anthem underwater. “I t’ink that one did it,” Cinder said confidently. Springs and I both begged to differ, my own reasoning being that ponies who were unconscious generally couldn’t feel exactly how fast the earth was rotating through every bone in their body. “He’s still moving, moron,” Springs snipped back, his forehoof pressed between his eyes again. “I told you to hit him.” “Do we really gotta knock him out, Springs?” Cinder asked. An excellent question, in my opinion. And one with a very simple answer. “No, we can go ahead and skip that part, thanks,” I said to Springs. Or at least, I think that was what I’d intended to say. What actually came out of my mouth went more along the lines of, “Nahwashinhaskitapartank.” Turns out, it’s actually pretty tough to enunciate when your lips are numb and your tongue won’t move off the roof of your mouth. “You mean, did the Boss tell us we had to?” Springs clarified as he met his partner’s eyes, his mouth pursing into a contemplative look. “No, he didn’t say that,” the orange pony admitted. Now his thoughtful expression was curling into a smirk. “He also didn’t say we couldn’t.” Hey, legs? This might be a bad time, but any time you wanna, y’know, start working again, that’d be just peachy. “You sure?” Cinder said. “’Cause I don’t know if that’s really what he meant…” “Cinder Block,” Springs said firmly as he rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck. “Shut. Up.” Cinder Block shut up, and then it was just Springs and I staring at each other without saying a word, he standing over me with quickly darkening eyes and me trying to figure how I had started my day broke and hung over and was about to end it beaten to a pulp in a grungy storage complex halfway across town. How the hell does all that happen to one pony in twenty-four hours? And why did it all have to be happening to me right now? “You know,” Springs murmured, raising his voice just loud enough for everypony in attendance to hear him. “I really think I’m enjoying this just a bit too much.” Oh, yeah. Karmic rebalance. That explained it all. Now if only I could remember the box of baby kittens I must’ve eaten at some point to earn it, my life would make sense again. “Sweet dreams, Bricky, ol’ pal,” the orange pony said. I would’ve said something snarky back, but the words were still on their way up from my lungs when Springs’ hoof smashed into the side of my head. The lot went fuzzy, and a bell started ringing somewhere close by. And as much as I’d like to say that I fought off the blackness pulling at the edges of my vision as long as I could, senselessness looked pretty damn heavenly at the moment. A pony can only take so much before he cracks, you know. And after the day he’d had, this pony here was officially split right down the freaking middle. I was out cold before my head hit the ground.