The stairs creaked in weak protest as she ascended.
Aurora grit her teeth against the familiar pain of an injury she’d pushed too hard. The hours of navigating wide fissures and miles of uneven pavement had forced her to use muscles she wasn’t accustomed to relying on. Her calves burned with a deep, dull pain that felt like it had soaked into her bones. Compared to the searing heat that stabbed the rear of her hind leg, her road-sore muscles were a footnote.
She allowed herself to be led up to the second floor of Gussets & Garments in spite of her newly minted disdain for stairs. Ginger smiled expectantly over her shoulder at her as she reached the top. Aurora’s mouth sagged open as she found herself climbing into a richly adorned parlor.
Whether by force of will or simply in the spirit of defying the decay of the Equestrian wasteland, Ginger had found a way to blend the aging materials she had at her disposal into a lavish living space. The floors were layered with a hodgepodge of salvaged carmine and wine colored carpets, the solid designs bordering the walls while leaving a core of patterns in the center of the room. Original pecan wainscoting fenced the edges of the room underneath an upper stripe of plaster painted the same shade of red wine of her carpets.
The ceiling had fallen apart over the centuries and had been replaced by an assortment of wooden planks of differing lengths, widths and origin. The mural of lumber had been painted with several shades of whitewash that had cracked and pulled apart where planks shifted over the years. An assortment of crystals hung from gaps in the wood, glowing with an internal light. Sheer swayed on makeshift rods mounted above a row of three windows looking down onto the street below. At the back of the parlor, Ginger’s bedroom door hung open.
“This is beautiful,” Aurora said, marveling at the unusual sensation of tender carpets under her hooves.
Ginger smiled at Aurora with polite acknowledgement and led her to the center of the room where two cream colored divans sat opposite of one another with a wide wooden coffee table propped between them. A column of prewar novels rested on the far end of the coffee table. Across from the books, the handle of an imposingly large knife protruded from a wide leather sheath.
“Sit,” she said, gesturing Aurora to the nearest divan. A spell leaped from her horn and several lavender crystals strung from the ceiling brightened the room with an internal light. “I should have clean bandages for your leg. Excuse me.”
Aurora dropped her saddlebags from her sore hips with a grunt while Ginger trotted through the open door of her bedroom. As Ginger rummaged through her belongings in the other room, Aurora hoisted herself onto the faux leather divan and winkled her lip when the back of her hind leg clipped the edge of the seat.
Lacking anything else to do, she browsed the bent spines of the paperbacks on the table. Full Bodied in the Vineyard, The Heat of the Moment, Night Mares: Vol. 6. At the top of the stack, the paper cover of Ship to Shore curled toward her featuring a dashing young earth pony the deck of a ship, a curved blade gripped in grinning teeth as she leaned over sparkling blue water with a hoof wrapped in the rigging. Aurora didn’t have the vocabulary for half of the things pictured on the book’s faded cover, but the swooning eyes of a unicorn mare in the background made it clear which boxes the novel would check.
“Put your leg up,” Ginger said, her sudden reappearance making Aurora jump.
Ginger sat on a floral patterned rug next to Aurora while a pastel yellow box emblazoned with three pink butterflies, evidently her first aid kit, floated to the edge of the coffee table next to the sheathed knife. A bronze glow slid the blade toward the stack of books whose spines had subtly turned away from Aurora. Ginger cleared her throat and tapped the back of Aurora’s bandaged leg with her hoof. “Your leg, dear.”
Aurora winced as she extended her hind leg to bridge the space between the divan and squat table.
Ginger lifted the lid of the metal box to reveal a thick roll of gauze, several brown glass bottles and a small sewing kit. After inspecting her stock, she turned her attention to removing Aurora’s blood spotted bandages. Behind her, heavy hooves thumped up the stairs announcing Roach’s return.
“Front door’s locked and the lights are off,” he rumbled. Aurora leaned back on her forelegs and offered Roach a she-made-me-do-it smile as he walked to the divan across the table. He considered the seat as he dropped his own saddlebags, essentially a couch without a backrest, and opted to lay on the carpet instead. He watched Ginger work as he adjusted his legs beneath himself.
“Thank you, Roach,” Ginger said. As the last layer of bandages looped away in an aura of her magic, a brown mat of blood-caked hair clung to the fabric strips behind her knee. A ragged wound emerged, red and angry, and a fat drop of blood rolled down the back of her leg.
Ginger swept up the droplet in her magic and let it fall into the wad of bandages on the table. She spooled a length of fresh gauze into a ball and pressed the mouth of an open brown bottle to the clean fabric. Dark yellow liquid soaked through the cloth in a widening stain.
She capped the bottle and floated it back into the metal box with a click. “If you don’t mind me asking, how long have you been outside your Stable?”
Aurora gasped at the sharp burn of antiseptic as Ginger pressed the cloth into the raw wound. Caught off-guard, she tensed her leg and rode through the furious rebellion of raw nerve endings. She shot a glare at Ginger who stared back pleasantly, daring her to lie.
She spoke through grit teeth. “Is it that obvious?”
Roach chuckled, drawing a withering glare from Aurora. He shrugged. “Not many ponies wear a Pip-Buck.”
Ginger dabbed the edges of the wound with the medicated cloth. “Nor do they offer to pay in bits,” she said, looking up from her work with a patient expression that many teachers reserved for their duller students. “That and you’ve been gawking like a tourist since you walked through my door. The doe-eyed look is adorable but it’s bound to attract attention.”
The lump of antiseptic cloth pulled away from her leg, the edges of the yellow stain tinted with bits of clotted blood. The stinging dulled.
Aurora gnawed on the inside of her cheek, considering that last part. The more she thought, the more she realized that she hadn’t planned for there to be anyone outside the Stable let alone what appeared to be a small knot of commerce barely more than ten miles away from her home. Everybody in the Stable assumed that the world had been so thoroughly irradiated that life simply wouldn’t be capable of sustaining itself. They were supposed to be seeds for a dead world but while this one was clearly struggling, it was alive.
It meant that she was two centuries behind the curve, and she had a decent idea of what would happen to Stable 10 if she didn’t catch up.
Aurora watched the soft amber glow around Ginger’s horn as she levitated the sewing kit out of the metal tin. A curved needle lifted into the air along with a dense length of black stitching thread. Magical energy. The idea hit Aurora like a sack of apples.
“Ginger, do you know anything about fixing broken talismans?”
The fine hook of metal stopped in midair.
Ginger’s eyebrow went up as if Aurora had asked whether she wanted her mane shaved off.
“If I could do that, darling, I wouldn’t be scraping together rent every month in the middle of nowhere. The methods to creating talismans were lost generations ago.”
Thread slid through the eye of the needle and neatly tied itself off. She used her hooves to keep Aurora’s leg steady and the curve of metal slid into the healthy skin at the edge of the wound. The pegasus sucked air between her teeth, biting back ungrateful thoughts as the thread slowly pulled the gash together stitch by stitch.
“I assume it has something to do with your Stable?” Ginger asked.
She nodded, wincing as the needle sank into her leg again. “We need an ignition talisman for our generator. Ours is…” she paused, recalling the slow and orderly decline of the generator’s spin. “I think it was designed it to fail.”
The accusation drew a look of sympathy from Ginger, though there was no surprise in it. “I’m sorry to hear that. Stable-Tec certainly has a reputation for falling short of expectations.”
Aurora frowned, ignoring the needle. “I don’t follow.”
Ginger was silent until she finished the last stitch and drew the wound shut. The string snipped apart with a flicker of magic and she ferried the sewing kit back into the yellow box. She looked to Roach for help explaining.
Roach’s smile had faded into a flat line that made it clear Ginger had opened a line of conversation he’d been avoiding.
She pursed her lips and lifted the clean gauze out of the first aid kit, watching it hover in front of her for several moment before looking back to Roach. “She’s from your Stable?”
Roach went rigid. “Ginger.”
The unicorn bit her lip and nodded, chastised. “A conversation for another time.”
She turned her attention back to the roll of fresh bandage and pulled a length around Aurora’s extended hind leg. The roll swept around and around until a suitable layer covered a wide patch above her knee. She tucked away the loose strip of gauze and frowned.
“I’m afraid that will leave a scar once it heals,” Ginger said. Aurora let her hoof slide off the coffee table. The wound throbbed, but not as much as it once had.
Ginger reached out to the first aid kit to close the lid.
A flicker of green light rumbled from the late evening sky, causing Aurora’s Pip-Buck to emit muffled burst of ticks from inside her saddlebag.
Ginger sighed, let go of the lid and plucked a bottle of pills from the container. She popped one in her mouth and swallowed it dry, wrinkling her nose at the bitter flavor. Then she drifted the bottle to Aurora.
“You’ll want one,” she said. “The radstorms can get bad out here.”
The yellowed label on the bottle bore the name RAD-X in block letters. Aurora let her tip a chalky pill into her upturned hoof. She considered it for a moment before tossing it back. Another flash of emerald light seared the clouds and another thick burst of static complained from her saddlebag. Thunder rattled over the city with an unnatural distortion. Ginger rose to her hooves, walked over to the windows and began pulling exterior shutters closed.
“You should be wearing your Pip-Buck, Aurora,” Roach said. She noticed his face was pinched with a discomfort he was trying to ignore.
“The first pony I met out there attacked me because he saw my Pip-Buck,” Aurora argued. “I’m not going to…”
“You’re going to attract attention no matter what you do,” Roach said more firmly. “You’re a pegasus. The only pegasi that come down here are Enclave, Dustwings or dead before they hit the dirt. You’re clearly none of those and it’s only a matter of time before ponies start asking where you came from. Wearing your Pip-Buck will answer that question for them and give you an advantage in a fight.”
Aurora felt the familiar irritation that rode tandem with a losing argument. Cider hadn’t injured her like the feral ghoul had, but he had deeply shaken her confidence. How could she win against ponies who could project their will with a passing thought? There was a reason Luna and Celestia had led Equestria for so long and they had stood atop their heads for centuries.
Ginger latched the last shutter and the Pip-Buck’s chattering lessened to a few faint pops. Aurora slid down to the thick red carpet and grudgingly sank a hoof under the flap of her bag, removing her Pip-Buck.
She slid back onto the divan, careful not to disturb her newly bandaged leg. She laid back with her head against the soft armrest and transferred the little computer from her hoof to her wingtips, examining it. The heavy clasp swung loosely on well oiled hinges.
Aurora let the Pip-Buck thump against her chest. The screen cast green light against her white mane before she turned it face-down against her coat, snuffing it out. She watched Ginger hop up onto the opposite divan and lean against the armrest. The storm continued to build outside, but the lead-lined shutters caught most of the radiation. The Pip-Buck ticked a few times against her chest and went silent.
“What kind of advantage does this give me, exactly?” she asked dubiously.
“You’re listening to one,” Roach answered. “It’s been pretty much impossible to find a working radiation meter after the bombs burned out all the prewar stock. That’s one of the reasons why they’re coveted. Being able to detect radiation and walk the other way before you take a lethal dose isn’t a luxury most ponies have.”
Aurora turned the Pip-Bucks’s screen back up and looked at the tiny gauge embedded in the lower corner of the casing. Something Roach said didn’t make sense. She turned back to him, her expression puzzled.
“Why doesn’t someone make more of them?” she asked.
Roach looked up at Ginger on the divan, handing the question off to her.
Ginger slid the tip of her hoof in circles along the padded arm of the divan, watching the faux leather dimple and crease under the pressure.
“There’s simply no infrastructure for that type of manufacturing,” Ginger said, looking up at Aurora. “Every so often you’ll hear stories of a group of ponies who manage to get a power plant working or somebody who might light the furnaces of an old forge, but it only ever lasts until something breaks that nobody knows how to fix. And that’s just electricity and smelting. Simple things. Precision tools like your Pip-Buck or even a simple radiation meter would require dozens of industries working together that simply don’t exist anymore.”
Aurora frowned. She let her eyes wander the room again. Everything from the nails in the ceiling to the Rad-X in her bloodstream were antiques. Two hundred and twenty years later, nothing was new. Everything was salvage.
She slid her hoof through the cuff of her Pip-Buck and locked the heavy clasp with a thick clack. A notification appeared at the top of the screen letting her know that the sensors built into the padding were detecting trace amounts radiation in her sweat. Nothing harmful, yet, but a number that had been steadily climbing since she left the Stable. She dismissed the notification with a tap of her hoof and stared at the painted ceiling.
“This is ridiculous. Has anyone actually tried to fix anything out here or are they just happy living like this?”
Ginger stiffened in the corner of her eye. Aurora hadn’t intended to sound petulant, but there was nothing to be done about it now. Barely a half hour in the parlor revealed to her what it actually was. Scrap wood. Peeling paint. Pieces of a dead world stitched together into something serviceable but ultimately doomed to fall apart.
“Miss Pinfeathers…” Ginger started.
“Aurora,” she corrected.
Ginger’s polite smile evaporated, revealing a deep impatience. “Fine. Aurora, let me do you the service of being perfectly clear,” she said plainly. “You haven’t seen enough of Equestria yet to know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Aurora opened her mouth to interject and was quickly cut off.
“Shut up. This is the part where you listen,” Ginger said. “If you want to survive in the wastes, you need to stop looking at it like a Stable dweller. Equestria isn’t a stack of blocks that a foal knocked over and crawled away from. You don’t fix this by telling ponies it should be fixed. We’re not blind. We know the world is broken.”
Ginger’s voice grew bitter as she spoke. “Ten generations ago our idiot “Ministry Mares” sank a rotten stick into a beautiful place and churned it into mud. We don’t get to live in that world just because we know what it looked like. You don’t stir the muck the other way and expect everything to go back to normal. The balefire didn’t just knock over buildings and kill ponies. It killed the foundation of what made the old Equestria possible in the first place.”
Distant thunder rattled at the shutters and another radiation warning appeared on the Pip-Buck’s screen. Aurora didn’t tap it away.
“What foundation?” she asked.
Ginger shrugged and sighed. “Unity. Commonality. That sense of trust that keeps our weapons pointed outward instead of inward. Equestria died grasping at the fog of mistrust and suspicion it created. Now its corpse is chewed on by factions, independent cities and opportunists. None of whom are willing to concede so much as a cap to the other without expecting two in return. We have what we have, Aurora. Living here is an exercise in keeping it.”
Having said her piece, Ginger flicked her tail looked away.
Thunder rippled the air outside while Aurora traced the cracks in the whitewashed ceiling. Ginger was right, she decided. Equestria and her Stable were two different worlds. Her focus needed to be on fixing her world before it died the same death as this one. The solution to her problem was somewhere in Fillydelphia. Equestria would have to find a solution to its problems on its own.
“It’s getting late,” Roach said, breaking the silence. He shifted to a more comfortable position on the carpeted floor. “We should get some sleep.”
“I imagine you should,” Ginger agreed, happy to put the discussion behind her.
She dropped from the divan and lit her horn. The crystals hanging from the ceiling dimmed. Aurora blinked, her eyes adjusting to the sudden twilight.
Ginger’s hooves rustled over the carpets toward the stairs. “I have some work to finish in the shop. I’ll wake the two of you at sunrise, if you like.”
“We’d appreciate it,” Roach said.
Aurora nodded. “Thanks.”
Ginger doused the crystals and night wrapped the parlor. Aurora listened to her descend the stairs before stretching out on the divan, her head resting on her foreleg. She turned off her Pip-Buck’s display and looked into the darkness toward the patch of carpet Roach had curled up. A faint jade light glowed between his chitin like a jigsaw puzzle.
Ginger had wanted to ask her questions. Instead, Aurora had hijacked the conversation and asked all the wrong ones.
She felt a twinge of guilt settle in her gut as she closed her eyes and let herself drift.
She jerked awake to a hiss of static in her ear and the hammerfall of thunder over her head. Her heart raced as the Pip-Buck fell quiet. The thunder rolled away and the parlor was filled with the strained whistle of wind between the shutters. Aurora stayed still, halfway sitting and halfway reclined, taking in her bearings.
Roach stirred on the carpet a few feet away. The skin between his chitin glowed brightly enough for her to make out the features of his face in the otherwise darkened room. His mouth hung open. A ratcheting snore rose from his throat as he slept.
Aurora’s head bobbled from exhaustion while she watched Roach sleep. When she was sure he wasn’t in the process of eating his own tongue, she laid back down and waited to drift off.
Or at least she tried.
Thunder exploded outside like a war zone. Her Pip-Buck chattered its warning at the flicker of every lightning bolt. Roach made wet, gargling noises that made her briefly consider wedging his hoof in his mouth. She wasn’t sure how much sleep she’d gotten, but it hadn’t been nearly enough. It was as if the world were conspiring against her.
To top it all off, she had to pee.
“Buck’s sake,” she grumbled.
Aurora dropped to the carpet and went downstairs. From the stairwell she could see light streaming into the office below. Ginger’s voice trickled from the door that led behind the shop’s counter. Guilt still nagged at her for letting the night end on poor terms with her. She crossed the office floor and poked her head out into the shop where she saw the coffee unicorn crimping grommets into a long leather strap.
Ginger muttered to herself as she checked a yellowed diagram laid flat over the countertop. She rubbed her eyes against her leg and squinted at the paper.
Aurora tapped her hoof against the door frame. “Hey,” she said.
Ginger looked over her shoulder and forced a smile. “Mis… Aurora. You’re up late.”
“Nature calls,” she said, but her eyes were on the countertop. Desperate Times lay disassembled on a cloth stretched across the wooden workspace. Two bent lengths of iron had been drilled into its wooden body. She fought down the urge to overreact. “What do you have going on there?”
“Your order, believe it or not,” Ginger said. “I was hoping to have it finished by now, but I found mud in the receiver and… well, everywhere, actually.”
The crawl through the tunnel. Aurora groaned. “That was me.”
Ginger’s eyes went to the stains in Aurora’s coat. “I assumed you weren’t aware. It’s not a problem.”
Aurora knew the hallmarks of a rush job and there was none of that here. Every rod, spring and pin of the rifle lay organized in the rough shape of the weapon she arrived with. A stack of rags lay on the floor next to her, several coated in grime from her crawl beneath Foal Mountain. Aurora scanned the polished and oiled innards of the rifle and couldn’t help but appreciate the attention Ginger had paid them.
“Thank you,” Aurora said. “And sorry about earlier. I crossed a line.”
Ginger regarded her as if she was seeing Aurora for the first time. The leather strap hung in the air, not forgotten but no longer the focus of her attention. The bronze glow that held it aloft faded slightly as Ginger smiled. A genuine smile that, albeit small, creased the corner of her lips enough for Aurora to notice.
“I think it’s fair to say we both did,” Ginger said, and shook her head chuckling. “Poor Roach didn’t know what to do with himself.”
Aurora snorted, shifting in place. “I hate to change the subject, but you wouldn’t have a restroom I could use?”
“Oh!” Ginger’s eyebrows shot up with embarrassment. “Oh, I didn’t even think to show… through my office and out the back. I have a private outhouse behind the shop.”
A crystal sitting atop Ginger’s desk in the office bloomed with light, illuminating the building’s back door. Aurora mouthed a grateful thank you and turned back into the office toward the door. She twisted its brass knob with her wing and the wind nearly tore it from her grip.
The dark sky above writhed with a sickly green glow as she stepped outside. She had to lean against the door to get the latch to click, the wind buffeting her with a force that was as terrifying as it was thrilling. Bits of dust and grit dug up by the gusts stung her nose and ears like sandpaper while thunder and lightning, unfiltered by walls or shutters, rattled her bones.
The storm was dazzling in its fury. Aurora found herself staring at it for several minutes, the call of nature temporarily forgotten.
Flashes of light gave her glimpses of the dilapidated fence that bordered a small square of property behind Ginger’s shop. Several planks were missing or broken but the majority still held to their frame to create a meager amount of privacy. Several yards from the building, butted up against the far corner of the fence, a stubby outhouse withstood the worst of the storm without complaint.
She pinned her wings to her sides and crossed the property. The outhouse faced her and she had to pull the door against the wind. Mercifully, the wind drew the worst of the odor outside before she could smell it but the sight of the outhouse gave her pause. There was nothing inside except a wide hole dug into the dirt and a roll of paper hung from a nail in the wall. She grimaced, stepped inside and latched the door behind her. When she was finished, she pushed through the door and let the wind slap it shut behind her.
Her Pip-Buck crackled and the sky flashed as she walked toward the brick building. In the afterimage that lingered she thought she saw Roach standing at the back door. She squinted through the buffeting wind and followed the jade glow toward the doorway.
“I tried not to wake you up,” she called.
Lightning struck something nearby and the thunderclap was instantaneous. Aurora stopped walking, her eyes widening. She hadn’t been walking toward Roach.
There was no mistaking the pale green glow of Cider’s horn.
She spun on her hooves and ran.
Cider’s magic coiled around her forelegs like a whip and sent her sprawling. Her chin clipped the hard packed dirt and pain rang down her jaw like a bell being struck. She could feel panic clawing its way into her chest as she twisted as far as her pinned front hooves would let her and tried to scream for help. The sound lodged in her throat and for a moment she was confused. Then she realized she couldn’t breathe. Cider was choking her.
She thrashed on the ground, gagging on the sickly green aura that collared her neck. Panic ran wild in her veins as she wrenched back on the magic that bound her forelegs to the dirt. Her hooves slid barely an inch before the green aura brightened, stopping them as if a boulder rested on them. She looked back at Cider, pleading.
His face was devoid of sympathy.
The collar around her neck tightened. Her wings pounded at the ground, her body reacting out of sheer instinct. Ginger wasn’t coming to save her. Roach was still asleep upstairs. She thought of them finding her dead in the dirt. Just another unfortunate bird killed in a storm.
Her right wing struck a rock the size of a walnut and sent a bolt of pain into her shoulder. Without thinking, she wrapped her primary feathers around the the stone and whipped her wing back at his head with as much force as she could muster.
The rock shattered against the brick just over Cider’s left ear, spraying his face with shards of stone and eliciting a stream of profanity. For a few brief seconds his magic evaporated and Aurora gasped down a lungful of metallic tasting air.
Running wasn’t an option.
In desperation, she pivoted and hurled herself head first into Cider’s chest. She was rewarded with a bright pain in her forehead and the satisfying sound of the stallion crying out in shock. The unicorn reared on his back legs against the bricks and Aurora pressed her attack, driving her hoof into the side of Cider’s muzzle with a wet thud. Blood and spittle stained her hoof pink.
Every muscle in her body screamed that she had to stop him before he killed her. She reeled her leg back and speared it toward Cider’s head.
Cider’s horn flared like a living torch and her hoof skittered painfully across the bricks.
Suddenly the world lurched as if a hinge and the building slammed into her back. The impact stole the air from her lungs and for several terrifying seconds she didn’t know what was happening. She could feel her forelegs being pulled up the bricks wall while her rear hooves lay rooted to the dirt. Her wings stretched away from her shoulders hard enough to hurt. She couldn’t turn her head. Slowly, a familiar pressure applied itself to her throat, pressing on her airway.
Her heart crashed against her ribs like an animal trying to escape its cage but there was nowhere to go.
Cider stood in front of her, the facade of the cheery salespony peeled back until all that remained was the promise of a slow death. The left side of his muzzle was already beginning to swell. His lips curled back like a predator preparing for the kill.
“All I wanted,” he snarled, “was to trade.”
She would have laughed if she wasn’t being suffocated. His horn flared again and she felt her Pip-Buck pull free of her leg, hovering into her fixed field of vision next to Cider.
He stood up and dropped his hooves against the brick on either side of her head. His face leered at her close enough for her to smell his sour breath. The Pip-Buck stuttered indifferently as the storm flashed angrily above them.
“You could have avoided all of this if you had been smarter,” he continued, waggling the Pip-Buck in the air. “Tech like this can change lives. And you Enclave shits wonder why we hate you down here.”
Aurora didn’t have a clue what he was talking about but the magical garrote around her neck was making it hard for her to make sense of anything beyond the powerful spasms of her lungs. The edges of her vision began to bleed red. Her eyes watered with fear. She bent her spine away from the wall, trying to get free, and felt his magic nearly slip.
“Quit struggling!” Cider barked. His horn flashed.
She slammed flat against the wall and Cider jabbed a hoof into her chest. His lip twitched as he forced calm into his voice. “Quit struggling. That fashionista friend of yours isn’t coming to save you this time. I’ve already sent a messenger to F&F Headquarters. She’s blacklisted. She’ll be lucky if I don’t have her sewn shut for the stunt she pulled today.”
His hoof lingered on her chest. She watched as his eyes drifted lower. A cry of protest lodged in her throat as his hoof began to trace a similar line down her front. Her Pip-Buck wobbled in the air next to him, the aura around it dimming.
“Don’t,” she choked.
Cider ignored her.
Her lungs burned like they’d been splashed with acid. Her chest jerked and heaved, starving for air. She bent her head against the bricks and was surprised to feel the collar of magic around her neck flex slightly. Cider touched her and Aurora recoiled like a broken spring.
She wrenched her knees up hard enough to feel the joints crack. The magic pinning her hind legs shattered. Cider realized what was happening and stumbled back, his horn thrumming as he refocused his spell. He was too late.
Startled, Cider gave Aurora too much time and too much room. He met her eyes and saw rage. She coiled her midsection and bucked both hind legs into the center of his throat. His larynx collapsed with a wet crunch.
A sharp wheeze rose from Cider’s throat and his magic vanished.
Aurora fell to the ground and heaved, her lungs competing to suck air through the same airway that her stomach sought to empty itself through. She drank down lungfuls of air while her gullet sorted itself out.
Cider wasn’t having as much luck.
Aurora stared at him as he flailed, his eyes bulging. He clawed at his throat but the only sound he made was the scraping of hooves in the dirt. His hind leg struck her Pip-Buck and it skittered across the rocks to her feet. It sputtered static at her in greeting.
She looked down at the stain the yellow stallion had left on her hoof and realized she didn’t have to let him suffocate. She didn’t have to let him live, either. There was no doubt in her mind what he had wanted to do with her. What he had begun doing.
Cider was a problem she knew how to fix.
Aurora slipped the bulky Pip-Buck over her hoof and stepped towards Cider. He saw her approach and his horn sputtered briefly, tugging on her bare foreleg. She yanked free of his dulled magic and stood over him as he choked. She lifted her Pip-Buck, the object he’d been willing to trade her life and dignity over, and drove it hard into his temple. Something like fear gurgled past his destroyed trachea and he tried to roll away. She stopped him with her wing and struck him again.
And again.
Her Pip-Buck came back bloody and she felt tears burning in her eyes. She grit her teeth and hit Cider across the muzzle, her foreleg becoming a hammer that she beat him with until he stopped moving. She kept hitting him until his face and the dirt beneath him were soaked black with blood.
Eventually her leg grew tired. Her shoulders burned. She ran out of tears and stood over him in the dirt, watching the life dribble out of Cider’s broken body. Lightning stabbed at the ground somewhere nearby. Thunder exploded overhead. She didn’t flinch. She didn’t feel anything.
It occurred to her that Ginger might come out to check on her if she stood here much longer. The storm would keep ponies indoors but eventually it would pass and Cider’s body would be discovered. There were no gardens for her to bury him in and no tools to dig up the hard, dry soil he bled into. She looked at the outhouse.
That would do.
Aurora opened the door and let the wind slap it into the outside wall. The hole in the ground was little more than a foot across and stank with layer upon layer of offal. She returned to Cider’s body, looped her foreleg around the strap of his pinstripe armor and dragged him across the property to the outhouse. She dropped him halfway through the door and his head tipped backward. Briefly, she considered taking off his armor. That thought passed as quickly as it arrived. He didn’t have anything on him that she wanted. She dragged him over the pit and let go.
Cider vanished into the ground. The splash below served as his eulogy.
Aurora closed the outhouse door and turned the latch. She brushed dirt over the smears of blood on the ground and turned the screen of her Pip-Buck on, using the light to look herself over. Her legs and hooves were stained with Cider’s blood and her chin felt raw from her fall. There was nothing she could do about that. Ginger and Roach would have questions.
She killed a pony.
Aurora stood outside the shop’s back door and was startled by how clinical it sounded in her head. Cider had tried to kill her. He tried to rape her. She killed him for it. It would have almost been comforting to think about if she could just shake off the part of her that wouldn’t stop telling her she wasn’t alright. That this wasn’t something normal ponies went through. This was traumatic. She should be having some kind of reaction to it.
She tried to let herself cry but the tears didn’t come. Thunder rumbled overhead, disinterested to the violence she’d been subjected to.
I’m fine, she thought as she turned the doorknob and limped across the threshold.
I’m fine.