March 8th, 1075
I’m getting really good at whittling. Okay, not like good-good but a lot better than three months ago. I can carve really small feathers but I still have trouble with wings. There’s a lot of weird shapes they make all at once when they’re open. They’re easier to do when they’re closed but Mom wants me to keep trying like with the feathers. Dad says I’m turning my room into a birdhouse. I just really like birds.
March 15th, 1075
Who has four hooves and got her ears pierced today? THIS MARE! Mom took me to Carousel Boutique for my 15th birthday and let me pick which ones I wanted! I got gold hoops like hers and two studs with tiny hearts etched on both sides. I have to keep them in for six weeks and keep them really really clean, but I don’t care because I FINALLY GOT PIERCINGS!!!
April 4th, 1075
Everyone’s talking about the Stable-Tec commercial on TV last night even though nobody knows what it’s supposed to be about. It plays every hour and keeps saying the same thing: “Stable-Tec: The Next Revolution in Security” with a big yellow gear spinning behind the words. I don’t see what everyone is so excited about. Dad thinks it’s a teaser for a movie. If it is, it looks like a pretty dumb one.
Everything hurt. Her chest hurt, her guts hurt and most of all her head was killing her. It took several seconds for her to put together where she was. Shadowed pavement sped past at a sickening speed. Black legs flickered past one another. She was on top of Roach or, more accurately, thrown over him like a sack of apples. Vertigo and nausea hit her at the same time and she retched. Streamers of clear bile spun off in the wind and caught against Roach’s leg.
“Sorry,” she groaned.
“Did she say something?” Ginger called.
“She threw up again,” Roach called back. The wind made their voices sound distant. Ginger didn’t sound normal but her hooves clattered against the broken road just outside Aurora’s view. She tried lifting her head to look at Ginger but vertigo spun her world around and her head sagged back to the pavement.
When had they gotten back on the road? More importantly, why did she feel so horrible? Roach hopped a fissure and landed roughly on the other side. Aurora’s skull felt like it was going to burst. She could feel her heartbeat stabbing at her temples. The more she tried to remember, the more she realized she was missing. She could recall leaving the raider camp. Bits and pieces of their walk stuck out. There had been a patch of woods that had been burned to the stumps, and the empty stone foundation of a house that was probably the fire’s source. They’d crossed a dry stream bed and Roach had shared a story about something he called fishing.
She remembered feeling suddenly ill and Roach made her stop to look at her Pip-Buck. There had been a dosimeter she didn’t know about. A little green bar that tallied her radiation exposure in something called rads. She didn’t remember how many she’d taken, but it had been a lot.
Aurora frowned. She wanted to tell Roach they forgot to bring her vest, but she didn’t trust her bobbing stomach enough to speak. She was sick. Really sick. And Ginger wasn’t far behind her.
She let herself doze, or pass out, she wasn’t sure which had happened when she woke up in total darkness of deep night. Roach’s chitinous back still scraped against her belly. How long had they been running? She squeezed one eye shut and lifted her head enough to see where they were going. Roach must have felt her move and looked over his shoulder at her, his eyes wide with worry. Aurora looked past Roach’s face and for a moment she thought she could see the stars.
Yellow diamonds twinkled against the black horizon and Aurora gradually recognized what they were. Light bulbs. Hundreds of them mounded atop one another so high that they looked like a mountain made of incandescent light. Blinder’s Bluff. It was beautiful. She opened her other eye and risked pushing herself up a little to see past the back of Roach’s head. The movement made her immediately dizzy and she swore under her breath. She slid back down and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will away her splitting headache.
She might have succeeded if it weren’t for the spotlight.
Light bloomed behind her eyelids like an explosion and she turned her head away with a wince. Roach’s gait slowed as they approached the source of the light. Aurora lifted a hoof and shielded her eyes, risking a glance in the direction of the electric glare. Roach carried her toward what could be generously described as a wall of garbage. A collage of plywood and rusted sheet metal sewed tight with barbed wire stood several feet above them. Worn carriage wheels secured to two makeshift axles pierced the bottom section of wall that didn’t sit flush with the rest. Shadowed figures peered at them through the gaps, weapons ready.
Atop the wall, a half dozen strangely armored ponies assessed their harried visitors. A speaker crackled to life and a stern, male voice assaulted their ears.
“Stop. That’s close enough.” His flat tone carried a calm confidence of someone used to being obeyed. Aurora wasn’t sure why but she braced herself for a fight. She was pleasantly surprised when Roach slowed to a stop alongside Ginger. “This city is under the protection of the Steel Rangers. Who’s the pegasus?”
The suspicion in the speaker’s amplified voice was palpable. Roach cleared his throat. “Her name is Aurora. She was exposed to extreme radiation today and needs to be seen by a doctor.”
A strange stretched in which nobody said a word. It became clear that the gatekeeper was still waiting for an answer to his question. Aurora squinted through the glare, trying to see which one of the ponies was speaking but they were indistinguishable from one another in the shade of the spotlight. She suspected that was deliberate. The silence became uncomfortable. Then she remembered something Cider had accused her of in Junction City.
“I’m not with the Enclave,” she called. The sound of her voice buzzed in her ears from the effort and she felt woozy.
Another pause. “I find that hard to believe coming from a pegasus carrying a Pip-Buck. Would you like to try again?”
“I was given this Pip-Buck by my overmare.” She couldn’t keep the sharpness out of her tone. She already felt like a fool for being in the literal spotlight while her stomach was trying to crawl its way up her throat. Being called a liar was just salt in the wound.
“Is that so?” Aurora could hear the smirk in his voice. “Which Stable?”
She hesitated, actually feeling Roach stiffen at the question. He looked over his shoulder at her and gave his head a tight shake. Aurora looked up at Ginger and saw the intense focus in her eyes as she counted the guards on the wall. The faintest glow illuminated the inside of her jacket where she kept her knife.
Fuck, she thought, and slid off of Roach and onto unsteady legs. She caught herself before she fell sideways and waited for the world to stop spinning. Whoever the Steel Rangers were, they were confident. They watched patiently as Aurora searched the wall for the nearest silhouette. She wasn’t sure if that was the pony she needed to speak to but it would have to do. If they were already convinced she was a liar, she could work with that.
“Alright,” she said, swaying a little on her hooves. “Hypothetically speaking…”
“Oh, naturally,” the gatekeeper agreed.
Aurora flattened her ears at the voice. “Okay, hypothetically, fuck you in particular.”
A chuckle escaped the wall and quickly snapped shut. Aurora resisted the urge to grin at the little victory. She could feel the gears spinning in her head. Her mind was back home, replaying the cheesy dialogue of her father’s favorite prewar radio play Counter Spy (featuring Buck Barding!). He made Aurora and her mother listen to it every night for weeks until he ran out of episodes. Then he started over to their dismay. Buck Barding’s silver-tongued voice was forever embedded in her brain like a tick.
“Secondly,” she continued, channeling the saucy confidence of her father’s favorite protagonist, “if I were Enclave, I’d assume your superiors would be pretty pissed off if you turned me away.”
The gatekeeper’s voice crackled a cautious response. “And why would that be?”
“Because I know things,” she crooned as much as someone on the edge of radiation-induced retching could croon. “I suspect I know a few things about the Enclave that your bosses might be interested in knowing. Things that could turn a stalemate into a decisive victory.”
“Dragonshit,” he spat.
She smiled to hide her nerves and pressed forward. “Is that how your bosses will see it? What would they say if they found out an Enclave asset walked right up to their doorstep offering information and you turned her away without even hearing what she had to say? You might smell dragonshit, but you’re here and they’re not. How confident are you that you’ll be able to convince them that what I had to offer wasn’t invaluable?”
“Give me an example,” the gatekeeper ordered.
Aurora lifted an eyebrow and shook her head in her best impression of Ginger she could muster. “Darling,” she said, “I don’t put out for free.”
Ginger’s posture turned wooden. With pinched lips, the unicorn turned her head toward Aurora so slowly that she expected to hear a hinge creak.
Hushed voices filtered down from the wall. Aurora desperately avoided eye contact with Ginger as the gatekeeper silently watched her from atop his perch.
“You’ll be kept under guard and will pay for your own treatment. A detachment will be sent to collect you in the morning for your first debriefing.”
Aurora’s stomach twisted. “Deal.”
He kept speaking as if he hadn’t heard her. “You don’t go anywhere without your escort. If you try to go anywhere without your escort, I will personally have you irradiated and thrown out of the city. Your weapons will be confiscated until such time we decide you can be trusted with them, if at all. Is that clear?”
Aurora arched her back and vomited. Roach braced her until the nausea ebbed. She lifted her head with sick clinging to her chin.
“Crystal.”
“Don’t get cocky,” he warned. “If I find out you’re lying, I’ll put you in crutches.”
Aurora swallowed a lump in her throat. After a several seconds the gate jerked and rolled aside. Behind it, a hulking machine resembling a pony glared down at them.
“Welcome to Blinder’s Bluff,” the behemoth rumbled. “Come with me.”
Blinder’s Bluff was the most beautiful fire hazard Aurora had ever seen. Strings of electric lights crisscrossed the narrow dirt alleys that made up the city’s streets. Short buildings made from the same debris that comprised the city walls sprouted haphazardly from the base of the bluff and wrapped around its northern slope like a shawl of light. Most of the windows were dark but a few still glowed, lending a dim glow to the streets below. High above them, the granite face of the bluff was splashed gold with light.
Despite her bravado outside the gate, radiation poisoning had taken her balance and thrown it out the window. She found herself unceremoniously thrown across the back of her metal retinue after falling for the second time. Roach and Ginger walked ahead of their metal escort where he could watch them.
“Turn right,” he said. Roach and Ginger obeyed.
Their escort’s voice was unmistakably male and carried the same built-in security in his own authority as the gatekeeper’s had. Aurora couldn’t help but marvel at the stallion’s power armor. Up until now she had only seen pictures of it in the history books back home. The mechanical suit stood a head taller than Roach, fully enclosing the stallion inside while still moving effortlessly as if it were its own being. Mounted to the suit’s shoulders perched two startlingly large guns.
Aurora felt nausea creeping back up on her at the feeling of being carried sideways. She made a face and swung a foreleg left and a hind leg right, careful to avoid the armor’s pinch points while she pivoted to face forward. The stallion turned its head to look at her with a black mechanical eye. “Stop moving,” he said flatly.
He must have heard her shifting. Ginger and Roach looked back at her with concern but Aurora held up a placating hoof. “Sorry, just feeling a little queazy,” she said.
They passed a curtained window with a light on inside. A yellow unicorn colt no older than five appeared between the worn fabric and clung to the sill to watch them pass.
“Hi!” the colt chirped as Roach drew near. “Your legs got holes.”
Roach smiled. “They do, don’t they?”
“That’s weird,” the colt said and his attention flitted to the approaching suit of power armor. “Hi, Knight Latch!”
Even through the suit’s speaker, Aurora caught the exasperation in his voice. “Go to bed, Sunspark.”
Sunspark pointed a hoof up at Aurora and almost lost his grip on the windowsill. “Is she your marefriend?”
“Go to bed, Sunspark.”
Aurora chuckled. The stoic Steel Ranger was embarrassed.
“Mom’s not home yet so I don’t have to,” the colt declared. Latch ignored him. Sunspark grinned at Aurora at his little triumph. She smiled back as they continued past the window and further up the road.
“Bye, Latch’s marefriend!”
Aurora lifted a wing. “See ya, kid.”
Latch said nothing, save to tell them which way to go. They walked in silence for several minutes. The smile Roach had given Sunspark faded quickly and impatience settled back into his shoulders.
Ginger’s head dipped low as they climbed the ever-rising roads. Exhaustion, radiation sickness or likely both were starting to wear at her. Eventually she fell behind Roach, her eyes straining to focus on his hooves and nothing else. She barely acknowledged Latch when he told them they’d arrived.
They stopped in the middle of an alley in front of what could best be described as a very large shack. A wooden sign hung between the first and second floor that read: REDHEART CLINIC. A faded heart painted inside a medical cross garnished both sides of the sign.
An alabaster mare loitered beneath the sign with a lit cigarette dangling from her lip. Smoke curled up around a starched nurse’s cap. She looked up at them as they approached. Tendrils of smoke seeped out of the holes in her cheek.
Aurora felt a stripe of fear ripple down her back. Excluding Roach, the last ghouls she met had tried very hard to eat her. The nurse standing in front of them was clearly not one of those, but exhaustion and sickness were making it difficult for Aurora to shake her worry. The mare looked too much like the ferals from the tunnel. Strips of flesh were missing from her body as if they’d been torn off one piece at a time. A gash under her chin revealed the ragged musculature of her throat. Aurora watched with nauseating fascination as ligaments twitched under her jaw.
The ghoul stared back at her with the mild irritation of someone who knew their break was going to be cut short yet again. She took a long drag on her cigarette and dropped it to the dirt, crushing it under her cracked hoof. A key ring jangled on a strap tied to her foreleg. She nodded greetings to Roach before turning her faded blue eyes to Latch.
“Knight,” she rattled.
“Nurse Redheart,” Latch answered coldly. He tipped his head back toward Aurora. “You’ve got a patient from outside the wall.”
“I can see that.” Nurse Redheart sighed and walked past Roach, her gaze assessing Ginger as she approached Latch’s side. He kneeled down and Redheart reached up, dragging Aurora off his back and to the ground. Aurora’s knees almost buckled, but Redheart eased her descent with practiced ease. She helped Aurora toward the clinic. Roach and Ginger followed, as did Latch.
As she pushed through the wooden door, Redheart shot a look back at Latch. “You know my rule.”
Latch didn’t flinch. “They’re under my guard. Take it up with Paladin Flint.”
“I do not tolerate Rangers in my clinic. You can guard my patients outside.”
The Knight ignored her and pushed through the door. Redheart glared at him with open hatred. “I don’t take orders from Rots. Not even you. If it were up to me, your kind would be at the bottom of a burn pit where you belong.”
“Huh,” Redheart said. She led them through a small waiting area and through a set of rickety double doors into a medium-sized room filled with six empty beds. The beds were nothing more than bare mattresses on bed frames in varying states of decay. Fluorescent lights buzzed in dented fixtures hung from what appeared to be scavenged bits of wire. Several bulbs were dark.
“A burn pit. That’s a new one, Knight. Why don’t you write that down while I keep these two ponies from dying? That way at least one of us will be doing something meaningful with our lives.”
Redheart didn’t wait for a response from Latch. She helped Aurora onto the nearest bed, taking care with her wings as the pegasus settled in. Then she turned to Ginger and led her to the next one down. She offered Roach a chair, which he predictably declined. Aurora tried not to smile as Roach set himself down on the floor between the two beds. Latch positioned himself next to the double doors like a brick dipped in mortar.
Unfazed, Redheart pushed past him and walked out the door. Aurora could hear keys jingle and a lock turn. Metal clattered and soon wheels were squeaking against floorboards. She shoved a battered metal cart through the double doors hard enough to slap Latch’s power armor with one of them. He didn’t budge and she didn’t turn to see if he’d reacted. The door was incapable of scuffing the Knight’s armor, let alone damage it. She parked the cart at the end of Aurora’s bed.
“When were they exposed?” she asked Roach.
“Today,” he said.
“Impossible,” Latch said tersely. “The Rangers cleared out all the hot spots within a day’s walk of the Bluff.”
“And yet here we are.” Her voice dripped with accusation. Latch’s armor didn’t move but his silence was evidence that he was bristling at being told his kin had made a mistake.
Redheart’s eyes lingered on Roach before she went to Aurora’s side. She lifted her eyelid with a hooftip. The holes in her cheek crimped into a frown and she turned to look at Ginger. “Broken blood vessels, but no yellowing, so that’s a good sign. Your livers aren’t leaking out your pores quite yet. A few more days without treatment and that might change. I’m assuming the Rangers aren’t paying your expenses.”
“Not part of the deal,” Latch said.
“We have caps,” Roach added, his eyes narrowed at the Knight.
Redheart nodded and went to her cart. She slid open a drawer and dipped her nose into it, retrieving two IV bags full of liquid the same color as motor oil. Scrawled over the wrinkled paper label in thick black letters read the word RADAWAY.
Aurora looked to Roach for assurance and he nodded.
They watched as the ghoul hung the bags on hooks above their beds and sank needles into their forelegs. Aurora’s leg burned as the dark fluid slid into her vein.
Redheart returned to the cart and retrieved two battered metal pails that gave off a slightly antiseptic odor. She set one down on the floor next to each mare’s bed. Roach glanced uneasily at the buckets flanking either side of him and decided the safest course of action was to move to the foot of Ginger’s bed. Aurora watched him slink away with a twinge of embarrassment, but she was at least thankful to have something to use instead of puking over the side of another pony.
Ginger promptly snatched up her bucket and noisily filled the first inch.
Near the door, Latch made a noise of disgust.
Redheart rolled her eyes at him. “Really. If you’re going to complain, at least do it while making yourself useful and get some water for them.”
“I’m not leaving them unattended,” he said with a little less surety.
She gestured at the two mares. “You’re afraid they’re going to run?”
As if on cue, Ginger retched again. Aurora and Roach flattened their ears to spare themselves from hearing it a second time.
Latch made a coughing noise within his power armor. “For Luna’s sake.”
“Don’t you even think about opening that suit. If I have to clean up after you, believe me when I say Paladin Flint will hear about your delicate stomach.” She let her words sink in before adding, “The water pump’s out back. If you need to puke, do it out there. If you managed to come back with some water for these mares, I’ll consider keeping my opinion regarding your constitution off your senior officer’s desk.”
The Knight said nothing. He turned and hurried out of the room.
Redheart didn’t speak until she heard the faint squeak of the pump handle outside. She looked at Roach with something like pity. “You’re the first changeling I’ve seen in over fifty years.”
“Living?” he asked, hopefully.
It took her a moment to catch his meaning. “No. Feral.”
“Oh,” he said.
Roach watched Ginger set down her bucket with a thunk and lay back down a little too quickly. She winced when her head bounced against the bare mattress.
“Not many ponies knew about us,” Roach said. He glanced at Redheart. “Prewar?”
She smiled and nodded, not without a little pride. She pushed a thin lock of pink mane behind her tattered ear. “One month away from retirement when the bombs fell. Forty years with the Ponyville Hospital and my pension literally went up in flames.”
They both chuckled at the joke.
Aurora and Ginger swapped wary expressions. Ghoul humor.
Redheart’s smile faded. “I’m sorry for what happened to your hive.”
Roach pursed his lips and looked at the floor. “Changelings were never friends of Equestria. Queen Chrysalis wanted to replace the princesses for decades. She would have tried eventually if the zebras hadn’t started an arms race.”
“Maybe,” Redheart said. “It still doesn’t make what we did right. You deserve an apology from someone.”
Roach’s lip twitched. During the last chaotic minutes of the war, as missiles tipped with balefire megaspells traced lines from east to west, one missile streaked south. With the sky falling down around their ears, few ponies noticed or cared about the single contrail that had gone in the wrong direction. It would take years for word to trickle back, and even longer for anyone to piece together what had happened.
“Thank you,” he said.
Outside, the pump stopped creaking.
Redheart inhaled and sighed. “The metal child returneth.” She looked at Aurora. “May I ask what deal you have with him?”
Aurora opened her mouth to answer but Ginger cleared her throat, cutting her off. The foreleg without a needle hanging out of it lay over her eyes. She bit off each word one by one. “In her infinite wisdom, Aurora has convinced the Steel Rangers that she is an Enclave operative turned rogue. In exchange for medical treatment, she has promised the Rangers valuable information regarding her exploits with said Enclave. Oh, and they took our weapons.” She turned her head slightly, peering at Aurora from under her leg. “Is that about right?”
Ginger’s words cut. Aurora bit her lip and nodded.
Redheart looked at the two mares. Her scarred face creased with confusion. “I’m missing something.”
Roach sighed. “She’s not Enclave.”
Her eyes went wide with understanding. “You swindled the Steel Rangers for RadAway?”
The double doors shoved open and Latch lumbered in with a bucket of water hanging from the barrel of his suit’s gun. He set the bucket on the floor near Redheart’s hooves and backed away from it, returning to his post next to the door.
The four of them stared at Latch. He stared back.
“What?” he asked.
The ghoul mare turned to Aurora. Her faded eyes were pinched with apology.
“I may be needing payment in advance.”
Aurora couldn’t sleep.
She stared at the light fixture above her bed, listening to the single working fluorescent tube’s electric buzzing. She knew the sound by heart. The ballast was going bad. The light would continue to buzz and buzz until it went out with a quiet plink. She’d replaced so many of the little bastards that she could probably fix the one above her bed with her eyes closed, assuming Redheart even had the parts. She doubted it. If someone spent the time to search for, collect and transport the fragile materials to Blinder’s Bluff, it would make sense that they would be valuable enough at that point to store them somewhere safer than a broom closet in a ramshackle clinic.
Not that she could afford one at this point. Redheart had been serious about being paid up front, and the cost had cleared out what little caps they had after leaving Junction City. Nobody had remembered to take the caps Ginger had taken off of Cider when they left. Several hundred caps were currently sitting behind the counter at Gussets & Garments. Redheart’s bill had tallied up to nearly a hundred caps more than what they had. Whether it had been kindness, altruism or just a way to get under Latch’s skin, Redheart chose to forgive the outstanding balance.
It still felt like a raw deal, but there was nothing for it. They would be flat broke but at least they wouldn’t be dead from radiation poisoning.
Her bladder twitched.
Joy.
RadAway, as it turned out, was not a magical miracle drug that whisked away radiation on a cloud of pixie dust. It was a cocktail of compounds that, in the simplest terms, bound to radioactive particles and encouraged her body to purge them. She’d lost track of how many times she and Ginger had gotten up to use the toilet, but at this rate she was surprised the thing hadn’t started glowing.
At the very least, they both had gotten pretty good at removing and reinserting their IVs. Aurora pressed the port down with her free hoof and pulled the needle free with her wing. She hung it on the hook the RadAway dangled from and got out of bed. The blue IV port stayed in her foreleg like a needle in a pincushion.
On her way out the door she picked up the water bucket. Barely a puddle sloshed at the bottom, not even high enough to dip a ladle into without tipping the bucket on its edge.
Latch’s power armor stood in the waiting area like a weaponized statue. She wondered it the armor made sleeping while standing more comfortable. Unfortunately for Latch, he didn’t qualify as the others. She tapped a hoof against his helmet and waited.
He groaned. The speaker in his suit gave his voice a tinny quality. “What?” he grumbled.
“I need to pee.”
He looked down and to his left, a gesture Aurora was beginning to suspect meant he was checking the time. She’d asked whether his suit used some sort of heads-up display, but he refused to tell her. Apparently he wasn’t allowed to tell the Enclave whether or not he used a clock.
“You just went forty-five minutes ago,” he said.
“You’re keeping track?” She glared at the lens behind his helmet’s black-tinted “eyes.”
Inside the armor, he shrugged. Outside, it looked like a servo shorted out in his shoulder. “Operational protocol. Everything you do will be cataloged.”
“That’s… creepy.” She lifted the bucket and hung it on the barrel of Latch’s shoulder rifle. “You can catalog my bladder while you pump water.”
He watched the bucket slosh at the end of his suit’s weaponry but said nothing.
Aurora walked out the front door and the Steel Ranger followed. She was already sick of making this trip and tried to ignore the thump of power armor walking behind her. She navigated the tight alley between the clinic and the neighboring tavern. It opened up into a tiny courtyard surrounded by makeshift buildings. In it stood two outhouses build side-to-side and a water pump built into a cement basin. A bench sat against the rear of the tavern. A blue-haired stallion splayed across it, passed out with a capped bottle held loosely to his chest.
Aurora had been pleasantly surprised at how little the outhouse smelled. The water pump in the middle of the courtyard fed into a pipe that drained beneath the outhouses. The city’s designers had taken advantage of the natural slope of the bluff and constructed a crude sewer that swept the city’s waste downhill toward a quarry north of the bluff. The water pump effectively turned the outhouses into crude flush toilets.
It was an impressive feat of engineering. The only part that left her wondering was where Blinder’s Bluff drew its water from.
Aurora stepped into the outhouse and listened to Latch work the pump handle. She scrolled through her Pip-Buck as she did her business, ignoring the slow ticking it made once she started. She checked her rad saturation and was relieved to see it had dropped into the four hundreds. Not great, but not fatal.
She tapped over to the radio menu. HIGHTOWER RADIO 99.5 still appeared just beneath her Stable’s unavailable network node. She selected the radio station and a mare’s well-worn voice filled the outhouse.
“...to me that they found something worth not killing each other over, at least not yet. My little birdies want you, dear listeners, to be careful out there. We all want a little peace and harmony but when the raiders are skipping down the highway hoof-in-hoof with the Epicureans, you know it ain’t good.
“And now for something… poetic. Some of my listeners may have already heard, but for those just tuning in, listen up. Cider - yes, that Cider - was found dead yesterday evening in Junction City. Now I can hear you asking: But, Flipswitch, what’s so poetic about that? I’ll tell you. Cider, the reknowned co-owner of Flim & Flam Mercantile and notorious brutalizer, got his neck broken and dumped face first into an outhouse and you bet his sister Autumn Song is gunning for the ponies who did it. Now, this is just me thinking out loud here but it seems to me Cider got off easy. A quick death and a free burial? Usually you have to piss a mob boss in Las Pegasus to get that kind of service.”
Flipswitch broke into a self-satisfied laugh.
“That’s all for now, dear listeners. As always, keep your eyes open and your ears low. And if you happen to be the pony Autumn’s looking for… stay safe out there. Now, keep it tuned to Hightower Radio on frequency 99.5 for fresh news and classic tunes. We haven’t heard this one in a while. Let’s get it on deck. Here’s A Good Stallion is Hard to Find…”
A shock of trumpets introduced the track and quickly mellowed as a prewar mare sang alongside a smooth trio of clarinets. Aurora let the music play for a little while before turning it off. She felt off balance.
A battering ram shook the outhouse. She yelped, torn from her thoughts. Latch knocked on the rickety frame again, his tired voice growling from the other side of the door. “Wrap it up.”
She made a face at the back of the door and turned off the radio. The door squeaked on old hinges and slapped shut behind her. Latch gave the pump handle a few presses and hiked his chin back toward the alley. Aurora bit back a clever comment and crossed the courtyard. The blue-haired stallion on the bench was awake now. He winked at her with a close-lipped grin.
Latch put an armored hoof on the bench and tipped it forward, spilling the drunk onto the ground. “Find a different peepshow.”
The stallion laughed, scooping his bottle off the ground. “Yes sir.”
Aurora pursed her lips and walked into the alley. Latch followed close behind her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“We’re not friends.”
Aurora opened her mouth but thought better of it. She said nothing as she pushed through the clinic door, leaving Latch to lock it behind them.
Ginger stood half-asleep in the recovery room doorway. She caught Aurora’s eye as she walked inside. “Did you refill the water?”
“Tin pony left the bucket at the pump.” Aurora hopped onto her bed, satisfied to hear Latch mutter a curse from the other room.
“You could have mentioned that earlier.”
Aurora settled into the mattress and shrugged even though he wasn’t in the room to see it. She could hear his hooves thump against the floor as he debated whether to drag her out of bed to retrieve the bucket. He wouldn't give her a choice if it came to that, but she wasn’t going to go out of her way to help him make that decision when he’d thrown her thanks back in her face. Her wing scooped the needle away from the wall and she carefully navigated it back into the port in her foreleg.
“I need to use the little filly’s room,” Ginger said. She rolled her neck and yawned deeply before nudging off the door frame. “I’ll pick it up on the way back.”
Aurora breathed a sigh and rested her head against her foreleg. It was the closest she would get to an actual pillow. She heard the front door squeak open and click shut and felt a little envy when Latch’s hooves didn’t follow. He parked himself in the waiting area, resuming his watch over the pegasus who claimed to be from the Enclave.
She stared at Ginger’s mattress and listened to the buzz of the lights. Roach stirred somewhere on the floor below her. His breathing settled into a slow, relaxing rhythm. She closed her eyes and listened to him sleep. And then she was falling. Falling. Falling.
April 20th, 1075
I got detention today for being a distraction. All I did was raise my hoof! Mr. Sky said that without the princesses the sun and moon would stop moving, but that’s just stupid. I told him he shouldn’t be telling ponies stuff like that but he said it’s a figure of speech, which is apparently supposed to make lying to your class okay! I told him so and he gave me detention for the rest of the WEEK. Mom says I need to be more patient with ponies, especially the ones who grew up thinking Celestia and Luna could do that kind of stuff. Why should I be the patient one? We’ve got rockets and satellites and pretty soon we’re going to send a pony into orbit on one. How dumb do you have to be to think one pony can move an entire SUN. If Celestia could do that, she wouldn’t have needed the Elements of Harmony to save her butt all the time. I don’t care what Mr. Sky says, he’s wrong.
May 1st, 1075
Mr. and Mrs. Cake are getting a memorial statue put up where Sugarcube Corner used to be and the Ministry of Morale paid for everything. They want it to be really big I guess, because Chipcutter said it’ll take a few months before it’s done. Mom had been hoping they would do something simple and plant a tree for them, but she says Pinkie Pie doesn’t know what simple is.
May 11th, 1075
Mom and Dad are fighting in their bedroom. I’m afraid to tell them to stop but mom is so angry she’s not even rhyming. She keeps screaming about wanting to protect my future and do what’s best for the family and I’m really scared because they’ve never been this mad before. Dad just said… I don’t want to write it. Mom’s crying and Dad’s gone. This is all my fault.