Lyra looked up at the dilapidated warehouse and bit her lower lip. “Is this it?”
“This is it,” Bon Bon confirmed.
“Looks… inviting,” Lyra said. “You know, if I were a rat.”
Bon Bon cracked a smile. “Follow me and stay close.”
They walked through the warehouse. It was old and abandoned, and crates and shipping containers were stacked haphazardly around. Some had been opened roughly, their contents raided. Others were open, broken, or decaying from water damage, courtesy of the broken skylights. Sunlight peeked in through holes in the walls and ceiling, and dust covered all of the ground that wasn’t already a puddle, along with broken pallets and discarded packing materials.
Lyra glanced around as they walked. It was a time of reckoning. This felt like it had been going on for weeks, though it really hadn’t even been one. Finally, they’d find out who was behind this whole thing. And maybe it could all end, and they could go back to Ponyville, but as better-than-best-friends.
“I don’t like how deep we’re going,” Bon Bon muttered, jerking Lyra back into the present. She cast a nervous glance up at the ceiling. She was clearly planning out escape routes in her head, but the deeper they went, the more nervous she became.
And then, as they reached the heart of the warehouse, a mare’s voice rang out from the rafters. “Fillies and gentlecolts!”
Lyra jumped. Bon Bon quickly dropped into a defensive stance, eyes flicking upwards.
“Finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for!” the voice continued. “Truths uncovered, secrets revealed! Who could it be? Who could possibly hate SEMHA so much that they’d be willing to pick off the star team, one by one? Who in Equestria could it be?”
“Show yourself,” Bon Bon ordered.
“Gladly.” A shadow swooped over the nearest skylight and landed on a nearby crate with a crunch. It was a goldenrod pegasus wearing an open vest and a bandanna tied tightly over one eye. “Surprise,” she whispered.
Bon Bon’s eyes narrowed, and then widened, and she took a tiny step back. She knew this mare! “S- Sparky?” she stammered, squinting as she tried to disprove what she already knew.
“Oh, you do remember me!” Sparky said, her smile too wide and obviously not real. She clapped her hooves together. “Special Agent Sweetie Drops remembers me! Oh, how special I feel! Do you remember my real name, too?”
Bon Bon shook her head in disbelief. “G- Golden Thunder, of course; b- but how…?”
Golden jumped off the crate and started pacing. She shook her head slightly, as if expecting her to catch on to a joke only she knew. “Oh, yes. You didn’t expect to see me again. You abandoned me, remember?” Her smile turned furious, her voice turned harsh and angry, and her wings flared. “Left me to die out in the desert? Any of that ringing any bells?”
“You were bitten by a basilisk!” Bon Bon protested. “There’s no cure for that venom, not even-!”
“No, but I survived!” Golden jabbed a hoof into her chest. “I survived! Me! I did! But nopony even cared! Nopony even came back to look for me!”
“There is a one in twelve thousand chance of surviving a basilisk bite, and we had no choice! We had to kill that snake before it reached Los Pegasus and then dispose of the corpse before the Benchmark could steal the blood!”
“You always have a choice!” Sparky spat. “That was when I realized that SEMHA didn’t care about us, about their agents! We were expendable!”
“We were doing our duty to protect the ponies of Equestria!” Bon Bon spat right back. “Being willing to sacrifice our lives for other ponies was kindof a big requirement to join! You knew that when you enlisted!”
“I never realized that meant being on a team that threw away each other's lives! Even the Wonderbolts treated me better! And the worst part? Nopony in Equestria knew! I would have died a nopony! Forgotten!”
Bon Bon sputtered. “What part of ‘sec-’?! We were doing our-! You know what? Never mind! You're insane!”
She took a small step back and giggled. “Good thing I am, too,” she said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing this.” She held up a small detonator. With a manic grin, she pushed the button.
An explosion shook the edges of the warehouse. It was quickly followed by another one, this one closer, and another, this one even closer. Thick smoke started swirling as the fires they caused spread, finding plenty of fuel among the abandoned warehouse. Lyra’s ears pinned.
Golden Thunder let out a maniacal laugh and flew out, crashing through the skylight and sending glass shards raining down on top of them. Lyra instinctively raised a hoof to shield herself.
Bon Bon was already moving. “Come on! Stay low!” she shouted, grabbing Lyra’s hoof and dragging her away.
Lyra had no idea where she was going, but Bon Bon seemingly remembered the way. She pulled her around crates and through puddles in their rush to escape.
Part of the ceiling crashed down, on fire and burning brightly, and Lyra let out a shriek as embers flew into the air. Bon Bon adjusted her direction and kept running, pulling Lyra along beside her. The smoke grew thicker, and Lyra choked.
But Bon Bon was implacable. She charged through debris and clouds of dust and smoke, and after what felt like an eternity of darkness, burst outside. Lyra gasped and slowed, relieved to be outside and blinded by the sun.
Bon Bon, however, wasn’t having that. “We’ve got to keep moving!” she urged, dragging Lyra onward.
They continued running across the yard until finally, Bon Bon pulled Lyra behind another warehouse, this one with a long overhang to shield the delivery carts from the sun that would also shield them from above. Just in time, too; they heard the sound of fire bells ringing, and pegasus ponies flying through the air, pushing clouds over.
But try as they might, the flames were just too big and too spread out, and so they quickly switched their tactics to containing the flames from spreading further, using the clouds to wet down the surrounding warehouses.
Bon Bon hesitated, then wrapped a foreleg tightly around Lyra. Lyra leaned against her, and together, the two watched the warehouse burn.
As the flames burned, Bon Bon chuckled, a dissonant sound compared to the destruction happening nearby. “We did good,” she said, sounding oddly relieved. “That was sloppy.”
“Really? It looked pretty well-done to me,” Lyra squeaked as one of the walls collapsed, sending a burst of flames erupting into the air.
“You don’t know Sparky like I do. This was fast and makeshift. Nothing like her best work.” She held out her hoof for a restrained but satisfied bump. “We did it. We surprised her. She was not expecting this.”
Lyra gave her a weak smile. “Yay, us,” she said, returning it. “But now what?”
“Now, we stop her. She’s been trying to kill us,” Bon Bon said wryly. “There’s no way she’s stopping now, not after we know who she is.”
“She’s just so… angry,” Lyra said. Something Golden Thunder had said made her pause. “Did you really not go back for her?”
“She wasn’t the only one on our team who got bitten by a basilisk,” Bon Bon said quietly. “Every single time, it was fatal. And the one that bit her was old, and huge. They never stop growing, you know. We did go back afterwards, but we never found her body.” She snorted. “Guess we now know why.”
“So she waited all this time just for revenge?”
“I mean, I guess?” Bon Bon said hesitantly. “She’s crazy. She said so herself. Which is a problem, because I’m not, so I don’t know what she’s going to do next, or even why she decided she needed to cross off her old teammates.”
Lyra paused as another thought occurred to her. “You don’t think she’s going to try and get revenge on all of Equestria, too, do you?” she asked. “Like, she started with her team, and then she’s moving on to everypony else?”
“By what? Unleashing another basilisk on the world?” Bon Bon chuckled darkly. “No. She wouldn’t be that crazy.” She paused, and horror dawned in her eyes. “Actually, she just might be.”