May 25th, 1075
Dad moved out.
“Get up.”
Aurora startled awake to a room descending into chaos. Several ponies wearing dull brown uniforms stood around her bed while more crowded through doorway toward Roach. A stubbled gray unicorn stood above her, his expression impatient. She squeezed her eyes shut to get them to focus. When she opened them, the stallion’s frown had cracked into an impatient sneer.
“Get. Up.”
She recognized his voice from outside the wall. The gatekeeper. A sewn patch on his chest read IRONSHOD. She scooted to the other side of the mattress quickly enough to dislodge the IV. She barely noticed the needle’s pinch and risking a glance toward Roach. They were putting something over his horn. A silver ring? He stood perfectly still as they closed iron shackles around his hooves.
Worry touched her voice. “Roach?”
The calm of his voice was betrayed by the fear in his eyes. “It’ll be okay, Aurora. Just do what they say.”
“I don’t underst-” Her words were cut off by a yelp as she felt a familiar, unwanted force drag her across the mattress and onto the floor. Panic leaped into her throat as she was hauled up by Ironshod’s magic and dropped onto her hooves like a puppet suddenly made to walk. She stumbled and was caught by two ponies in uniforms dyed brick red.
Every bit of her screamed to run away. Her hooves scraped at the ground in preparation to do just that when she saw the pleading tension on his face. She stopped. A lump built in her throat but she set her jaw, watching as uniformed ponies moved in to secure identical shackles over her hooves. They jerked her from one side then the other as a thick strap of leather was fitted around her chest, pinning her wings to her sides.
Ironshod’s horn lit with white light and shoved Aurora toward the doorway. “Walk,” he ordered.
She tried to look back at Roach but the gray gatekeeper stood behind her, waiting. She bowed her head and allowed herself to be led out of the room. Chains scraped the floor beneath her with each step.
Knight Latch held open the clinic’s front door, giving her a clear view of the street outside. The diffuse morning light reflected off the curves of his power armor like a dusty mirror. Nurse Redheart watched from behind him, her blue eyes bright with outrage at the sight of her patients being handled so roughly. She looked at Aurora with an expression that tried to project reassurance, but Aurora avoided her gaze and stared at her shackles. The last thing she wanted to do was drag another innocent pony down with her.
“There was a third,” Ironshod said to Latch. The armored stallion visibly straightened. “A unicorn by the name of Ginger Dressage. She isn’t here.”
Aurora forced herself to pay attention despite her body’s lingering protests of being yanked away from bed. Ginger was missing?
The implication was unmistakable. Latch had been responsible for them and one had gotten away.
“She left to use the outhouse several hours ago and didn’t come back, sir.” He carefully left out the possibility that he might have sent her out alone to retrieve the water bucket at the pump. “She must have spooked and run off.”
Ironshod’s voice drew low. “I was under the impression that I told you to watch all three of them, Knight.”
“You did, sir.”
A pause. Latch was an asshole, but he was a smart asshole who knew better than to make excuses.
“Find her. Report back when you do.” Ironshod didn’t wait for a response. He shoved Aurora toward the door until her hooves were moving at a pace that suited him, and he followed close behind. A detachment of Rangers waited for them outside and fell into ranks around her. Their faces were devoid of emotion but their eyes lingered on her with varying degrees of curiosity and hostility.
By her own words, she was their enemy. Her shackles settled uncomfortably against her ankle and she quickly began to regret plying Ironshod with lies to get through his gate.
She could make out the edges of the rooftops against the dark brown underbelly of Equestria’s permanent blanket of clouds. They curved downhill and abruptly ended at a dark line that drew an arc from north to south. The wall. Pinpoints of light moved along its length, some flickering with the instability of the city’s ramshackle electric grid while several others glowed steadily atop unicorn horns.
Beyond the wall lay emptiness. Only a black void that seemed to lurk in the morning shadow of the massive bluff. The sun was rising somewhere behind her. Behind the escarpment of sedimentary rock that gave the city its surname. Here and there a light peeped on inside the hoof-built hovels that crowded around the city’s narrow streets. Early risers getting an early start on an early morning. More than a few faces peered through makeshift windows to watch the little parade making its way downhill.
The Rangers turned her down a wider street with a subtle urgency. Nobody spoke to her or anyone else. Aurora couldn’t help but think about the quiet funeral processions that squeezed through the halls of Stable 10, carrying the deceased to their final resting place in the gardens. Where her father or someone he knew would guide them toward the row where a deep hole waited.
Slowly, the road bent away from the wall and toward the foot of the high bluff. She looked up at the towering mass of shaded stone and felt impossibly small by comparison.
She couldn’t help it. She had to ask.
“What’s going to happen to Roach?”
For a long while, nobody answered her. They passed a mare in the middle of setting up a vendor’s stall complete with a tattered blue awning. Aurora met her eye for only a moment, and then she was behind them.
When Ironshod finally spoke, there was an acidity in his voice. “The ghoul isn’t who you should be worried about. Keep walking and stop talking, or I’ll add a muzzle to your wardrobe.”
Her heart sank into the pit of her stomach. The corners of her eyes stung with tears. She squeezed them shut with renewed anger, wrenching herself back under control. This wasn’t the time.
She set her jaw and stared forward. A Ranger to her right gave her a curious look. She narrowed her eyes at him and enjoyed the little victory when he looked away. It occurred to her that she already knew these types of ponies. Give them a uniform, a rank and a noble purpose and their egos balloon like its somebody’s birthday. She’d had plenty of experience butting heads with bureaucracy back home. In one case, literally.
One of the inevitable moments for a pony who spent the entirety of her day sweating, spitting and bleeding in the bowels of Mechanical was the eventual invitation to share a drink with her crew. Un-breaking a Stable that constantly found new ways to break was thirsty work and Aurora wasn’t immune to the burning pleasure of her neighbors’ many sources of compartment-brewed hooch. While she never developed the creeping dependencies that plagued a few ponies who shared an after-shift night cap, she did develop a reputation for settling grudges over the odd cup of engine-quality ethanol. One such grudge came in the form of a towering red stallion named Sledge.
Aurora suppressed a bittersweet smile at the memory. She couldn’t remember the exact insult he’d thrown her way, but he had done it in front of her peers and walked away without giving her a chance to answer. She’d been humiliated, which was exactly his intention. She hadn’t known it at the time but he’d been chipping away at her so he could build her back up from the foundation. After shift, an invite went out to taste Carbide’s latest alcoholic abortion he generously called rum and Aurora found herself suffering its wrath alongside Sledge. The drink had poured fuel on her smoldering indignation and after her third cup of Carbide’s criminally bad liquor, she picked a fight. Sledge turned her down. She clubbed him over the back of the head with her chair.
She’d been under the impression that Sledge would take it easy on her because she was a mare. She’d been very wrong. She spent the next week in the infirmary with more bruises than she could count and three fractured ribs.
But damned if she hadn’t gotten a few licks in. His muzzle still had a slight bend to the right from where she’d broken it against her hoof. He became the closest thing she had to a best friend ever since.
She was abruptly shoved out of her daydream by one of the Rangers when they diverted off the dirt road onto genuine cobblestones. It was a proper street with a set of prewar train rails sunken between the stones, evidently the Bluff’s version of a main drag similar to the one in Junction City. Carts and wagons lined the curbs, some in disrepair but all of them loaded with goods ranging from reclaimed lumber to disorganized heaps of scrap. She saw several covered wagons bearing F&F Mercantile’s whimsical logo from a bygone age. A few ponies in blue pinstriped armor stood about one of the carts, discussing prices with the first customer of the day. She craned her neck to see their faces but couldn’t tell if any of them had been a part of Cider’s caravan.
Her hoof clicked against one of the rails and nearly twisted into the narrow cavity alongside it. The rail was caked in flakes of rust and drew a straight line toward the bottom of an arch carved into the bluff. She blinked. Not a carving. A tunnel. A familiar tunnel.
Her heart skipped a beat. The tunnel was much shallower than the one in Foal Mountain but the architecture was the same. Pillars stood on either side of the rails with wide flagstones marking the end of the street and the beginning of something built and preserved for hundreds of years.
She saw it well before they entered the tunnel. A great steel gear with a bright yellow number 6 emblazoned across the center.
Another Stable.
Ironshod pushed her into the tunnel without comment, but she didn’t need to be encouraged. The Stable door pulled at her with a force of its own.
It was too surreal. Light streamed down from utility lamps bound to the top of each pillar with a uniformity that suggested someone had put some care into their work. A few ponies milled in and out of the tunnel, some wearing saddlebags while others made do with hoof-made burlap sacks. Even in the barest first hours of the morning, the tunnel felt alive. Several ponies watched her as her escorts aimed her toward the Stable door.
Aurora didn’t notice them. Her attention was on the faded posters that hung on the tunnel walls in yellowed plastic frames, each bearing slogans and reassurances from a failed era. It was clear that great pains had been taken to preserve them. Heavy gauge cable was strung into makeshift fencing to keep ponies from touching them. Rangers patrolled nearby like docents in a museum.
Each poster was a little different than the next, but the overall theme stayed the same. Some were simply there to drum up support for the six ministries. Others warned her to be suspicious of their neighbors. That not all zebras had stripes. One had been torn to confetti by a long burst of gunfire. Aurora could barely make out the blue and yellow logo of the Wonderbolts that clung to the upper margin of its frame. A sign of some animosity she didn’t yet understand.
Aurora’s gaze was pulled away from the mangled poster to the one nearest the Stable door.
The kind eyes of a yellow pegasus gleamed behind a pink curl of mane. Fluttershy. Element of Harmony and later the head of the Ministry of Peace. She stared out from the poster with a melancholy resignation that made Aurora briefly forget her situation. At the bottom of the poster read a simple phrase:
WE CAN DO BETTER.
Aurora noticed more than a few Rangers glance up at the poster as they passed. How many times had they read those words and still felt the urge to read them again? Fluttershy’s eyes seemed to follow her as they passed through the door to Stable 6.
As she ascended the ramp into the antechamber, she had to remind herself that she wasn’t back home. It was strange. Doors she remembered jamming shut stood open for anyone to pass through. A Ranger glanced up from a makeshift guard station at the top of the antechamber ramp, looked at her, then returned to the book in front of him. Her escorts led her through the security office where three cells stood empty. It felt like weeks had gone by since she picked that lock. Pried open that utility panel and cut the hydraulic line behind it. She closed her eyes. This isn’t my home.
The Atrium opened up around her. The first thing she noticed wasn’t the bizarre, rickety shops crammed around the perimeter of the Atrium floor or the startling volume of the ponies below as they shouted cheerily to one another as they organized their wares. The first thing she noticed when she stepped into this strange new Stable was how dim it was.
It reminded her of when she’d built a dimmer switch into her compartment with parts she’d borrowed from the salvage bins in Mechanical. After a few failed attempts at creating her own variable resistor, she’d come up with a functional dimmer that made her infrequent migraines a little less horrible.
Except the Atrium didn’t have a dimmer to play with. A quick look at the dozens of recessed lights above gave her the answer. Barely half of the fixtures had bulbs in them. Those that did weren’t burning at full brightness. She felt the urge to check the work order queue on her Pip-Buck and had to remind herself that there wouldn’t be one. Not for her, at least.
They herded her down the ramp and into the corridors of the Residential wing, indicated by the green stripe on the floor that she’d been trained to follow as a filly. She prepared for the Rangers to rearrange their protective phalanx just to fit into the hallway, but they didn’t. They didn’t have to. A pair of chattering unicorns passed them in the hall, barely noticing them. Aurora balked at the generously wide corridor. There was enough room for two ponies to lay across the floor ass to eyeball and still have room to spare.
The ponies who lived here would have never needed to wear wing guards just to walk from one place to another. The thought burrowed into the back of her head like an angry little tick. Why had her Stable been so… small?
To distract herself she read the nameplates outside each compartment door, half expecting to see one that read A. PINFEATHERS. The names marched by one after another. J. HARVEST, SHINE FAMILY (3), GOLDENSPARK FAMILY (4), O. MELODY. She smiled weakly. Roach hadn’t been too far off when he said ponies had strange naming conventions.
“In here.”
Ironshod stopped them outside a door labeled WORKOUT 1A. He flipped the switch and the corridor lights perceptibly dimmed as the steel door labored its way up into its recess.
Aurora knew ponies who spent more time working out than they did working. Carbide was one of them, though he’d never admit it. She wondered if he knew what was happening to the Stable. Working so close to the generator, he’d know something was wrong. Every pony in Mechanical would. Without Sledge down there to keep everyone in line, she wondered how long it would be until word spread to the other levels of Stable 10 that something was deeply wrong with their insulated world.
The workout room had been cleared out save for a cluster of folding chairs and a metal table bolted into the concrete floor. The exercise equipment had been ferried away somewhere unknown, likely scrapped, leaving behind scuff marks and bolt holes where benches and weight racks had once stood. Fluorescent lights flickered on with the same electric buzz from Redheart’s clinic. Several tubes didn’t bother to light up at all.
Ironshod pulled a chair toward the table and gestured for Aurora to sit in it. It was awkward with chains rattling between her legs, but she managed it just as he pulled up a seat opposite of her. She tried to hide the relief she was feeling. An interrogation, then. Not an execution. Two Rangers stood guard at the door while the rest quietly congregated in the hall. The door sank back down with a prolonged hiss.
They stared at each other across the narrow table for a long while. They were close enough that, if she wanted to, she could grab his face and drive it into the table. It was a tempting thought but she didn’t like her chances in the moments that would follow after. She looked at his hazel eyes and wondered how many times he’d been in this room, sitting across a pony who had something to hide.
He reached into the breast pocket of his uniform and set something down onto the table. A brass pin made to resemble a pair of outstretched wings. A bisected steel circle sat in its center. Two alicorns, one white and one black, hung in mid-flight on opposite halves as if chasing one another around its circumference.
Aurora looked up at Ironshod with a blank expression. “What is it?”
“I thought you could tell me.” He pushed the pin across the table to her. She hesitated before finally picking it up in her hoof. Her chain scraped against the table as she looked it over. It was pretty and had clearly meant a lot to someone. The two princesses were worn almost completely smooth. “I found it on the body of a dead Enclave soldier back when I first conscripted. I didn’t know what I had until I interrogated a live one several years later.”
Aurora turned the pin over, expecting to find a simple press latch. Instead it featured a decorative brass cap with the letters RC engraved in the center.
“Remember Cloudsdale,” he said. He watched her face intently as he spoke. “The Enclave could never let that one go. Even now they wear it like an open wound.”
She set the pin back on the table. The links of her chain stuttered against the edge of the table as she pushed it back toward him. “I’m not with the Enclave.”
Ironshod stared at her for a moment before picking up the pin and returning it to his pocket. He tapped the table with the tip of his hoof, his head tilting slightly as if she were a puzzle he was trying to solve. The silence stretched. Then his eyes dropped to her foreleg and the Pip-Buck attached to it.
He nodded at it. “Explain that.”
Aurora moved her hoof away from him. “It’s my Pip-Buck.”
“Tell me what it does.”
She lifted a confused eyebrow and gestured at the door. “You have an entire Stable of your own.”
He shrugged. “Humor me.”
She felt ridiculous and suspected that this was a test of some kind. Ironshod watched her impassively as she told him what every Stable pony knew since they were yearlings. “It’s a personal information processor, hence the pip. We all get one when we’re young.” She paused, but Ironshod gestured for her to continue. She sighed. “It gives me a live health assessment and lets me keep track of personal stuff like how many bits I have and which tickets I have assigned for my shift in Mechanical. I mostly use mine to keep track of project notes and sent memos when I can’t get to a terminal."
Ironshod leaned back in his chair and chewed the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “So you’re going to stick with the Stable-mare story.”
She rolled the flats of her hooves up in a mock shrug. “It’s the truth.”
His lips curled into a smile. There was no warmth in it.
“Do you know how many pegasi Stable-Tec assigned to the shelter program?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Zero. Out of all the Stables that stand open today, exactly zero percent of their populations have been pegasi. Now, would you like to guess how many pegasi come from the Enclave?”
Aurora looked at the ceiling and shook her head in exasperation. “All of them?”
“Damn near.” Ironshod leaned forward and pointed a hoof at her face. “You came here on the back of a walking corpse and with a unicorn who is wanted for the murder of an operator of this region’s largest and oldest trading company. The ghoul is clearly a historical asset to you or you wouldn’t be travelling with him. The mare is protection from other unicorns. And the three of you were trying to get somewhere but got dosed with enough radiation to force you here. Does that sound about right?”
He had the comfortable smugness of a pony who thought he had his prey cornered. Aurora had to admire him just a little. The story in his head could make for a decent thriller novel. If he had a mustache she fully expected him to be twirling it around the tip of his hoof.
As much as she wanted to slowly poke holes in his story, needle him until he lost his patience, she could tell that there was a side of him that wouldn’t tolerate disobedience. She’d known a few ponies with too much muscle with skin too thin for it. Ironshod seemed like that type. Provoking him to violence was a path she’d rather not explore.
“I told you from the start,” she said flatly. “I’m from a Stable.”
Ironshod scoffed. “The Stable without a number.”
“You don’t get to have that.”
He stared at her with a cool intensity. “Why?”
She met his gaze. “Because I have people to protect.”
Ironshod tapped the table once and took a breath. He sat up a little straighter. Something about his demeanor softened, but it was artificial. Something about it made the mane on her neck stand on end.
“At the wall you said you knew things about the Enclave that my superiors may be interested to hear. Things that could turn our stalemate with them into a victory. Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what I told you I would do if I found out you were lying to me?”
She swallowed, then nodded a second time. “You said you’d put me in crutches.”
A smile creased the corners of his eyes. His voice was gentle like her father’s but the note of violence behind his words were unmistakable. “That’s correct. So what I want to know is which part is the lie: the Stable you claim to come from or the information about the Enclave that you promised me. If you tell me the truth, I’ll let you pick which leg I break. If you lie to me, I’ll break all of them.”
Her heart began to pound. The panic was rising in her chest again, urging her to run. Except there was nowhere to go. Her mouth went dry, making it hard to swallow. Calm down, she thought. You had a plan. Think.
She took a shaky breath and looked up at Ironshod. He sat like an overloaded spring that was waiting for a reason to shoot across the table. She tried not to wince. She nearly succeeded.
She spoke slowly, choosing each word deliberately. It terrified her to know her safety depended entirely on the sturdiness of Ironshod’s ego.
“I didn’t lie. I told you that I might know things about the Enclave that the Rangers might be interested in. I said that those things could turn a stalemate into a victory. I never said that I had information you didn’t already have, or that it was of any particular value to you or the Steel Rangers.”
The room went deathly still.
“We needed medicine,” she added, quietly. “You were going to turn us away because of my wings.”
Aurora’s heart hammered at her ribs as Ironshod leaned back. His chair creaked under his weight. The longer he stared at her, the clearer she could see the anger building behind his eyes. He traced his tongue under his upper lip and look away, shaking his head.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. Then louder. “Son of a bitch, it really was all dragonshit.”
She sat perfectly still, unable to tell whether he was furious or enjoying the fact that he’d been duped.
“I’m hoping that means no crutches,” she said.
Ironshod snorted. “If you were Enclave I would’ve broken your neck.”
Her wings went rigid against their bindings. Ironshod glanced at them, then at her. “But you’re not Enclave,” he said. He produced the brass pin from his pocket and held it up for her. “You proved that when you gave this back. The Enclave treat these things like they’re sacred. They’d remove your hoof if they saw you give it back to a Ranger.”
He dropped the pin back into his pocket. She looked over to the door hopefully. “Does that mean I can go?”
“Not quite. There are still some elements of your story that don’t add up.”
She turned looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “I’m not giving you that number.”
It was his turn to frown. “What was your name again?”
“Aurora.”
He waited.
She pursed her lips. “Pinfeathers.”
He leaned forward and set his hoof over her foreleg, just below her Pip-Buck. She had to force herself not to show her revulsion.
“Aurora Pinfeathers, if I wanted to know where you came from, I would take this Pip-Buck off your leg and let the scribes pick it apart.” He took his hoof away and sat back. Aurora slipped her Pip-Buck under the lip of the table. “I’m not going to do that, though. Not unless you make me.”
There was something he wasn’t saying. Something he wanted her to work out on her own.
“You want proof,” she said.
He shrugged. “You said it yourself at the wall. You have information that my superiors would find interesting. I’m not too proud to admit that you pulled one over on me, and as a result I’ve made some… premature assurances to the Elder that I’m no longer in a position to fulfill. That’s a problem for me, which makes it a problem for you.”
She blinked and looked down at the Pip-Buck in her lap. Her muzzle twisted with worry. “What if I don’t have anything to offer?”
Ironshod chuckled. “Let’s not go down that path.”
That didn’t do much to settle her nerves. She’d promised Ironshod the moon and now that she was coming up empty-hoofed, he wanted something else to keep the axe off his neck. From what she’d seen of the wasteland so far, she wasn’t willing to bet that axe would be the figurative type.
The fluorescent tubes buzzed impatiently above her head. She squinted at the fixture and nearly considered offering to change the bulb for Ironshod. Thinking it might result in many months of crutching around the wasteland, she held off. Still, it was a problem she understood.
She caught Ironshod’s curious expression and gestured up to the fixture. “Do you mind?”
Bemused, he spread his hooves with invitation. Aurora pushed out of the chair and climbed onto the metal table. The chains made standing on her hind legs awkward but she managed to reach high enough to catch the edges of the noisy fixture. She looked back down at Ironshod and saw where his eyes were at.
“Seriously?”
He held up his hooves and turned his gaze up to the fixture, his eyes unrepentant. She grimaced and peered back up at the light.
The fixture creaked as she balanced against it. With her right hoof she pinned down the cable that fed it power, reading the tiny string of text printed in repeating strings along its cracked insulation. She had a hunch and squinted at the last ten digits in the dim light.
Everything fabricated inside a Stable had a shelf life. No pony reminded her of that fact more often than Tally Mane, the former production lead of Stable 10’s Fabrication Wing and current trainee in Sanitation courtesy of a forty-four minute blackout caused by his overzealous production goals. The Fab Lab never failed to print out the date and lifespan of everything they made, embedding them into the last digits of every product code.
Stamped into the black insulation was the serial 0409107725-S006. April 9th, 1077 with a usable lifespan of 25 years, fabricated for Stable 6. She blinked. The bombs fell in 1077. The cable was 160 years overdue to be replaced. These were the original lines from when the Stable was first constructed.
She quickly took her hoof away from the cable and hopped off the table, chains jangling in protest at their sudden mistreatment. Ironshod watched her face with curiosity as she shook her head at the other lights in the room.
“That’s why it’s so dark,” she said, turning toward him. He didn’t seem to be worried that she was standing. “You’re capping the power output.”
Ironshod only shrugged. “If you say so. The senior scribes are charged with keeping the city and Stable functional.”
Aurora stifled a derisive laugh. “This Stable is a bonfire waiting to happen. Your senior scribes are idiots.”
Ironshod’s expression chilled. “Elaborate on that.”
She lifted a hoof toward the ceiling and the chain nearly pulled her other leg out from under her. She bit back a curse and nodded at the light fixture. “That light is getting power through a century and a half old cable. If I was a betting mare, my bits would be on the rest of the Stable being in the same shape.” She paused. “Why haven’t you fabricated new lines?”
The stallion’s face was carefully neutral. He said nothing. To Aurora, it translated to Keep digging.
She did. Her chains jingled as she paced across the workout room. “If your scribes can regulate the generator’s output, they’d have to be smart enough to use the fabricators. Which means there’s something wrong with the fabricators.”
Ironshod steepled his hooves in front of his muzzle. The fact that he wasn’t trying to redirect the conversation gave her the impression he didn’t want to. This was new information for him. Possibly something she could leverage to her advantage.
She pressed on. “There are multiple fabricators for redundancy, though. Nothing should be able to break that another couldn’t make a replacement parts for, within limitations. You haven’t cannibalized the Stable for material, either, so it’s not a production issue. And you’re clearly using the Stable’s generator to power the city even if it means dropping the output to keep the wiring from catching fire. This place isn’t unimportant to you by any stretch, so… why not get the fabricators working and fix the Stable?”
She looked down at the patches of discolored flooring where the ghosts of workout equipment still lingered. A hazy idea began to form in the back of her head. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. She looked at Ironshod with realization.
“The fabricators aren’t here.”
He frowned. “What makes you think that?”
Her eyes lost focus for several seconds as she gathered the foggy edges of her theory. The last pieces of the puzzle clicked into place. “If you had the fabricators, you would have fixed them. Nobody in the city would be living in shacks. With enough time and raw material, a fabricator could rebuild Blinder’s Bluff into a citadel instead of what it is now. The city’s been here long enough for someone to learn how to repair one. Goddesses know I’ve had to tear ours down more times than I can remember. That means you either dismantled the ones that were here for some idiot reason, or they weren’t here in the first place when you arrived.”
She stopped and narrowed her eyes at Ironshod. “How did you get into this Stable, anyway?”
He surprised her by answering. “I wasn’t even thought of when Rangers first set hoof inside, but the official record states that the Stable was already open when we arrived. All signs pointed to a total loss of life triggered by a sudden food shortage.”
“Stable-Tec.” She came back to her chair and sat down.
“Most likely it was one of their experiments, yes. I recall hearing something about crops modified to be sterile, but I won’t pretend to understand how that’s possible. Stable 6 evacuated less than a year after the bombs fell and nobody shut the door behind them.”
She drew a circle on the table with her hoof. Her tone darkened. “They need to be lined up against a wall and shot.”
Ironshod whistled. “You’re definitely not Enclave.”
He reached into another one of his pockets and pulled out a keyring. Aurora eyed the glittering bits of metal as he set them down in front of her. She didn’t reach for them but she didn’t dare take her eyes off them either.
“I think we’re past the point of restraints,” he said. “You want the little one in the middle.”
They sang against the table as she picked them up and sank the tiny key into the shackle locked below her Pip-Buck. It swung open. She wasn’t sure it was safe to be too thankful just yet and settled for a polite nod of acknowledgement instead. “Can I ask why the sudden change of heart?”
He watched the next shackle clatter to the tabletop with a small smile. “Well, I think I might know how you can be valuable to the Steel Rangers, for one.”
She crossed her hind leg over the other and opened another lock. The leather band around her wings made them ache. She winced. The last shackle fell from her leg and she stood up, relieved to have them off of her. “You want me to bring you a fabricator.”
He nodded. “You did say you had more than one.”
“No.”
A pause. His face darkened. “I don’t think you’re in a position…”
“For several reasons,” she continued, ignoring him. “One, they’re huge. You can’t roll one through a corridor without disassembling it, and even then they weigh literal tons which means you’d need to send Rangers to my Stable to move it. And I already told you that’s not happening.
“Two, my Stable doesn’t have that kind of time. The entire reason I’m out here is because Stable-Tec is slowly killing our ignition talisman and I need a new one. So unless you have a spare in one of your pockets, I’m still on that clock.
“And three,” she frowned for a moment, then looked at him with defiance. “I can’t think of a third reason right now but you can be damn sure it would have been a good one. The answer is no.”
She tossed the keys to Ironshod and he caught them in his magic. They fell into his pocket with a jingle. The firm disappointment of a career professional solidified on his face.
“That said,” she continued, bending her neck back until she could get the buckle of the strap between her teeth. Her words slurred as she worked it loose. “I could get you schematics. If the price is right.”
He stared at her, chagrined as the strap clattered to the floor below her. Years of crawling into tight spaces required a level of dexterity she excelled at. It was clear she was also making a point. Her eyebrow lifted a fraction of an inch as if to say, Don’t underestimate me.
Ironshod looked at the belt, nodded, and looked up to her. “I wasn’t aware we were bargaining.”
She let herself smile a little now that she had leverage.
“It’s more of a-”
Three heavy clangs rang against the door, cutting her off.
“-favor.”
Ironshod was already on his way to the door, offering no hint that he’d heard her. He toggled the door and the lights dimmed again as power diverted to the hydraulics. The door rose and a familiar suit of power armor loomed in the corridor.
Latch stood at attention, or as well as he could inside of a weaponized scrap bin. “Sir,” he said.
Ironshod looked behind Latch, then up into his visor. His tone darkened. “Correct me if I’m mistaken, but I thought I ordered you to find and bring back Ginger Dressage.”
“You did, sir. She’s not in the city.”
Aurora sprang to her hooves. “What?”
Latch looked at her. Ironshod closed his eyes and sighed.
“I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realize she-”
“Spit it out, Knight, or she’ll be badgering me about it for the next hour.”
Latch cleared his throat and glanced at Aurora again. Something about the way his armor shifted suggested he was uncomfortable with her listening in.
She stepped toward the door just behind Ironshod. “Where’s Ginger?”
He looked between the two of them, unsure which to address. He settled on the safer bet and regarded Ironshod.
“Somebody claimed her bounty, sir.”
The Rangers never took their eyes off Roach, and he never took his off them.
His chitin itched under the shackles. The outside air had always been too dry for him to be comfortable for long. He preferred the damp air of the tunnel. At least the floor was cool to the touch. Not nearly as chilled as the slate tile back at the cabin, but still soothing against his belly. He lay with his forelegs in front of him, one crossed over the other, and observed the Rangers as they passed in and out of the recovery room.
Nobody spoke to him and he was alright with that. Rangers weren’t as quick to kill sentient ghouls as the Enclave were, but they would if he provoked them. He was good at being quiet. After more than two hundred years in the serene darkness under Foal Mountain, silence had become a dear friend to him. He’d watched the tunnel age and decay with each passing day. The corpses trapped with him dried and settled with time and the colorful posters rotted into nothing until only the narrow frames were left. Even after his tunnel broke through the rubble and he took his first breath of fresh air, he never went more than a few days outside.
Bumping into Ginger on the road west had been a fortunate fluke. Normally he would have avoided her. Ponies had a tendency to assume his strange appearance meant he was feral and he’d been shot more times by panicked travelers than he could remember. Ginger had been unexpected. She couldn’t have been older than thirteen when he found her. Too young to be traveling alone, but there she was fending off a raider ambush and losing. He saved her life and, since it was on the way, escorted her to Junction City. She’d been too traumatized to object and he’d been too polite to ask about the film of mud she’d used to hide her cutie mark. He wished he had.
He sank against the wood planks with a gentle sigh. He’d forgotten how quick ponies could become attached to one another. It was two years later that he found himself wandering back to Junction City and Ginger had almost tackled him. She peppered him with updates until his head swam. One of the locals had hired her as a shelf stocker and she was saving up caps to open her own business someday. When he congratulated her, she had beamed like she’d been waiting to hear it ever since he left. Friendship was strange like that. He smiled at the memory.
The door punted open and a stallion in an older model of power armor pushed into the recovery room. The only other stallion Ranger in the room rolled his eyes and slipped away unseen. By listening to the inevitable gossip between bored soldiers, Roach and learned the armored stallion was named Jester. To say he was unpopular among his fellow Rangers was an understatement. Jester had a reputation for talking for the sake of hearing his own voice. The fact that he included Roach in his one-stallion conversations was rubbing several of his brothers and sisters the wrong way.
Jester tromped over to the corner of the room and cracked open his power armor. The weathered and rusted plates bloomed open like a metal flower. Jester was a strange egg. His mint green coat clashed with the short-shaved pink mohawk that ran the length of his neck. Roach suspected his mane was dyed, but the odd look wasn’t entirely unattractive.
Old music streamed from a tiny speaker inside Jester’s power armor. He left the radio playing as he backed out of the suit, much to the irritation of the mare posted near the door. Jester winked at her and flopped onto the mattress next to Roach’s spot on the floor, his head thumping against the foot of the bed.
He spoke unprompted. “It’s gonna be a barn burner today.”
The mare at the door groaned and pushed through the door. Jester’s smile broadened a little. “Know how I know?”
Roach looked up at him with an eyebrow raised. It was easier to humor him than it was to ignore him. And to be fair, he wasn’t hard to look at. Jester was tall, toned and had a natural smile that could sell magic lessons to a pegasus. His hip was graced with a depiction of the grinning mask of comedy. Roach had to wonder what drew him to join up with an organization like the Steel Rangers.
Jester tucked his forelegs under his head and let a hind leg dangle off the side of the mattress. “I know cause the zebra station is real hard to dial into today.” He gave Roach a knowing wink and his horn glowed green. The radio in his power armor began to sputter static. “I used to be stationed in Appleoosa a few years back and one of the guys in the engineering corp told me about it. Y’see, there’s still zebras living out in Vhanna same as we’re still kicking over here. Bet you didn’t know that!”
Roach didn’t know that. He made a curious face and Jester’s smile widened.
The static gave way to a strange music he had never heard before. It was barely audible over the hiss of interference, but it was there. Several voices sang harmonies in a language he couldn’t understand. They sounded happy.
“So anyway,” Jester continued, “when it gets hot out west, the signals degrade. It’s hard to notice on the local stations but if you tune into something long-range like the stuff coming in from Vhanna, you can really notice it. So yeah, it’s going to be hot today.”
Roach smiled his appreciation and glanced over at the only other Ranger remaining in the room. She stared longingly at the door.
Jester radio twisted back to static and returned to the station he’d been listening to earlier. Roach recognized the prewar crooner’s voice and let his head bob gently to the prancing lyrics of Mister In Between. To his surprise, Jester swung his leg back and forth to the rhythm of the tune for an entire verse before speaking.
“I gotta ask, only because Initiate Rosethorn over there wants to know.” He craned his neck back to see if the mare on the other side of the room reacted. Her eyes didn’t leave the door but her tail whipped irritably behind her. Jester grinned at her and turned back to Roach, gesturing at his legs with his dangling hoof. “What’s with all the holes?”
The question caught him off guard. As he fumbled for an explanation, the song ended. It was replaced by the impassioned voice of a mare.
“Good morning, dear listeners. Flipswitch here, and I have bad news to share. Last night I told you about the death of a monster named Cider. This morning I have to inform you that the bounty placed on the mare who killed him has been claimed. Autumn Song, sister of-”
The Initiate that Jester had needled at made a face. “Turn that crap off, Jester. They don’t want the ghoul hearing it.”
Jester winced apologetically at Roach and lit his horn. Flipswitch’s report cut out with an electric pop. “Sorry,” he said. “Orders and all.”
Roach stared at the two Rangers with disbelief. The only pony he knew with a bounty was Ginger. He suddenly felt dizzy and tried to stand up, forgetting the chain clamped to his hooves. It yanked tight and he stumbled against Jester’s bed hard enough for its feet to peel loudly against the wood floor.
“Woah, take it easy pal!” Jester dropped to his hooves in front of Roach, blocking his path. He stood a good several inches taller than Roach. Stopping him wasn’t difficult but Roach tried to shove him aside anyway, first with his hoof and then with his magic.
A bright pain erupted behind his eyes like a migraine on steroids. His legs went out from under him and his first thought was he’d been attacked. He looked up at Jester who seemed just as surprised as he was. Then he remembered the ring they had put around his horn. A magical suppressor. It felt hot against the base of his horn.
Rosethorn was already making her way toward the door. “I’m getting a Paladin.”
Roach stared imploringly at Jester. If they thought he was out of control they’d kill him. Jester came to the same realization and bit the inside of his lip, his grin gone.
“Get back to your post, Initiate.”
Rosethorn stopped and glared at him. “He’s dangerous.”
“Not as dangerous as I’ll be if you disobey a direct order, Initiate.”
Her face twitched with anger. She set her jaw and turned around. “Yes, sir.”
Roach sat on the floor ignoring them both. His head pounded as the ring cooled around his horn. He wasn’t even sure how much he’d been trying to use, but the fact that he didn’t hear the radiation meter in Jester’s power armor screeching alarms was a relief. He needed to start thinking clearly but it was hard to focus.
“Hey.” Roach felt Jester’s hoof on his shoulder. “Your friend’s not dead. You gotta calm down.”
He looked up at the Ranger. His face was a war of anger and confusion, daring Jester to lie. “How do you know.”
Rosethorn answered for him. “It’s been playing on the radio for hours. She walked through the gate with a group of bounty hunters last night.”
Roach stared at the Initiate with open mistrust.
“Rosie’s telling the truth,” Jester said. Rosethorn shot him a look that he didn’t see. He held out a hoof to Roach who grabbed it after a moment of hesitation, allowing himself to be pulled up. “Flipswitch’s pissed about it. She’s got the same recorded lecture playing on repeat between every other song. It’s kind of annoying.”
Roach looked toward the open suit of power armor and debated his odds of getting into it before Jester could stop him. Then he remembered the chains around his hooves and reconsidered. He didn’t want to think about what might happen to his legs if the suit tried to move in a way his legs couldn’t follow through on.
He looked at Jester with a hard expression. “I want to hear the broadcast.”
“We’re under orders-”
Jester flipped the radio on before she could finish. A new song was playing. Jester looked over his shoulder at Rosethorn and winked. It wasn’t the flippant gesture of an oblivious, care-free stallion. There was an unspoken threat behind it that made the Initiate’s shoulders stiffen. Roach found himself unable to make heads or tails of the stallion.
The song ended and on cue, Flipswitch’s prerecorded voice played over the airwaves. Her voice was sober as she finished breaking the news.
“Autumn Song, sister of Cider and full owner of F&F Mercantile, has offered two thousand caps for the live capture of Ginger Dressage. I can’t say I’m surprised he was found so quickly, but I’m so disappointed that she was captured here in my home city. She was stolen away in the middle of the night by bounty hunters who value quick caps over decency.
“This is a message to Autumn Song down at the JetStream solar plant. Your brother was a monster who was killed by a mare who was only defending herself. Please, don’t-”
The radio clicked and the broadcast went silent.
“She gets sappy toward the end.” Jester doused his horn and hopped back onto the mattress. “But hey, good news right? All things considered, I mean.”
Someone outside broke into laughter. Several voices joined the first. Too many of them. He wasn’t going anywhere.
He felt a tiredness that went beyond the simple aches of a weary traveler. His knees popped as he lay down on the cool wooden boards and he allowed the righteous anger in his chest leech away. Eventually, Jester launched into another animated one-pony discussion that left Rosethorn rolling her eyes and Roach nodding whenever the oddly hued stallion paused for his input. As much as he hated it, there was nothing left to do except wait.
Roach was good at waiting.
“Let me go!”
Making a run for it had been a mistake, but what choice did she have? She needed to save Ginger. Not because it was heroic or romantic, but because it was her fault.
Over the course of the last several days, Aurora had learned that she could handle more than she would have ever imagined and the things that would take more time to process were surprisingly easy to pack away into the back of her mind until later. She’d seen death and she’d delivered it. She’d been chewed on by walking corpses, fought her way out of the cloying hooves of a drunken stallion, been shot, irradiated so badly that her piss glowed and murdered another pony. She knew it would take a while to reconcile the things that had happened to her, but she could handle it in time.
This? Being responsible for destroying the life of an innocent mare? She couldn’t handle this.
Despite losing her home. Despite losing her livelihood, Ginger had encouraged her to learn to fly. Ginger had given her the room she needed in order to talk about what Cider did to her. For all the hardship Aurora had brought to Ginger’s doorstep, she offered nothing but kindness in return.
Aurora refused to repay that kindness by allowing Ginger to suffer the consequences of Cider’s death.
Something that would be easier to accomplish if Latch didn’t have her pinned between his power armor and the corridor wall. As soon as he told her Ginger had been taken, she skirted around him like a startled mouse and broke into a gallop. She knew it had been a bad idea but she hadn’t expected a passer-by to leap in front of her pursuers. The good Samaritan fouled her up just enough for Latch to catch up and press her hard against the wall.
She had the sinking feeling this is what it felt like to fall into a trash compactor.
“Latch, I know we’re not friends but you have to let me go.”
He said nothing, but he subtly moved his armored hoof from her neck down to her shoulder. A crowd was beginning to gather in the corridor and he was perceptive enough to know what that could have looked like.
Angry tears formed a film over her eyes as the futility of her position sank in. Latch’s hooves held her against the wall like a vice. She had plenty of flexibility to kick at him but she doubted he’d even feel it under all that armor. She could feel Ginger slipping away as more ponies came to gawk.
Ironshod appeared in front of her. His mask of careful neutrality was cracking under the heat of boiling rage. She’d pushed him close to the edge. He stared at her, his words dripping with threat. “We weren’t finished.”
His casualness caught her off guard. “My friend is-”
“Your friend,” Ironshod interrupted, “can wait. We. Weren’t. Finished.”
He stood there waiting for her to answer him, but Aurora wasn’t sure what it was he wanted to hear from her. She opened her mouth hoping to string the right words together once she started talking, but she was too fixated on finding Ginger to say much else. Ironshod’s lip curled in frustration as his patience evaporated.
He shook his head incredulously. “You tried to run from me. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and you tried to run. Did you really think I would let you leave without paying your debt?”
Aurora’s muzzle wrinkled with confusion. “No, that isn’t-”
Ironshod’s hoof cracked across her mouth so abruptly that at first Aurora didn’t realize she’d been hit. Her formerly white mane, stained the color of dust from the wasteland, fell across her right eye like a dirty veil. The coppery flavor of blood pooled around her tongue as he mouth bled. She wrinkled her nose and sniffed at the blood that poured from both of her nostrils. She looked up at Ironshod first with shock as the pain began to register, then with rigid defiance. Pain lanced through her jaw in waves but she ignored it, letting the blood patter quietly onto the floor.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Latch look away.
Ironshod was becoming more agitated by the second, like someone itching to get somewhere but didn’t know which hoof to move first. He shot her a sideways glare and pointed a hoof at her. “You’re going to get me those schematics right now.”
Aurora swallowed the blood in her mouth and stared at Ironshod with disdain. Behind him, ponies were looking at her with similar expressions. She pulled her lower lip over her teeth and stifled a chuckle. “The schematics are on your servers, dipshit.”
Ironshod’s shoulder stiffened and she prepared for a second blow, but it never came.
“Which server.”
She looked up at him like he’d asked her how to build a balefire bomb. “How should I know? I didn’t work in I.T.”
“But you know how to find them.”
She could tell where this was going and shook her aching head.
“Show me.”
“No.”
He took a deliberate step toward and she stuck out her chest, daring him to hit her again. She stared up at Ironshod as blood slid over her chin and stained her neck. Let him see what he’d accomplished. He’d already shown her his cards when he struck her. She wasn’t going to let that slide. Not for free.
Her eyes flicked toward the Rangers approaching the back of the crowd of ponies, already beginning the unpopular task of dispersing them.
“This isn’t going to be a one-way transaction,” she said, looking back to Ironshod. His fury was abating now that the key to his fabricators wasn’t in a position to flee again. Watching his face slip from frenetic rage to a placid calm so quickly was disturbing. She tried not to focus on it as she led with her counteroffer. “I want two things from you in exchange for the schematics.”
He stared down at her like a landslide waiting to happen. She took his silence to mean he was willing to listen. She wiped her nose across her shoulder to give her a few seconds to think over what she was about to say.
“First,” she said, “I want Roach released into Nurse Redheart’s care for the time that I’m gone. If your people hurt him in any way, the deal is off.”
Ironshod squinted at her. “You’re not leaving until I have those schematics, so it’s a moot point what happens to your friend.”
Aurora pushed down the heat rising in her chest and continued on as if she hadn’t heard him. “Second, I give you the schematics after I get Ginger back. Not before. And lastly-”
He was shaking his head, his mouth opening to speak.
“Lastly,” she repeated, cutting him off, “I want your word that after this business between us is done, it’s done. The slate’s wiped clean.”
The corridor grew quieter as the last curious ponies were encouraged to find somewhere else to be. As the hall cleared and the prying eyes of civilians were peeled off of his back, Ironshod seemed to relax enough to consider her offer. He stepped back and walked in a slow, plodding circle. His eyes tracked her as he completed the circuit.
He nodded at Latch. “At ease.”
The immense weight of his armor vanished as he relaxed his posture and Aurora could have sworn she felt a few bones realign themselves. Ironshod watched her, apparently to see if she would try to run.
She wasn’t stupid enough to try that a second time. She rolled the shoulder Latch had leaned on and relished the feeling when it popped, twice.
Satisfied she wasn’t about to bolt, Ironshod took a breath and slowly released it. The placid mask of perfect control fell over his face once again. The only difference now was that the taste of blood in the back of Aurora’s throat was there to remind her not to trust it.
He looked at her with a half-lidded expression. “If I let you leave, what assurance do I have that you’ll come back to give me the schematics?”
Aurora sniffed her bloodied nose. “Roach will be here,” she said as if that were obvious.
He shook his head. “Not for long, if he’s in the care of Nurse Redheart like you’re asking. I can’t trust her not to help him leave the city and rendezvous with you. Your ghoul will stay in our custody. To that end, I can assure you he will remain unharmed.”
Aurora frowned. “Alright, deal.”
“I’m not finished.”
A faint white glow around Ironshod’s horn caught her eye and her frown deepened.
“Here’s the way this is going to go.” His horn brightened, casting stark shadows across his ashen face. “I’m willing to let you leave to help your friend, but the reality is that I have no guarantee you won’t get yourself killed in the attempt. If that happens, I don’t get those schematics. If that happens, I will be forced to tell Elder Coldbrook that I allowed a self-proclaimed Enclave pegasus to leave without obtaining a drop of information out of her.”
Aurora felt a familiar click against her foreleg. She looked down, and confusion was quickly shoved aside by horror as she realized what was happening. Ironshod said nothing as he lifted her leg and slid her Pip-Buck down and away from her, its heavy clasp swinging freely in the white haze of his magic.
She opened her wings and lunged into the air after it. Her body jerked painfully to a stop with her Pip-Buck bare inches away from her hoof. Everything seemed brighter and she realized with sickening clarity that she was looking at the world through the fog of Ironshod’s magic. She hung in the air like a sculpture of a bird in mid-flight. Her heart crashed against her ribs as she slid closer and closer to panic. She watched her Pip-Buck come to a stop in front of Ironshod’s face, curiosity capturing his attention for the briefest of moments as he examined the dusty and scuffed screen.
“No! Give it back!”
He looked up at her as if noticing her for the first time. “This,” he said, floating her Pip-Buck next to him, “is how I know you’ll return. This is collateral.”
He set her back onto the ground and the magic around her vanished. Her wings dipped under the return of their weight. She folded them to her sides before she could give into temptation and snatch at her Pip-Buck with one of them. She didn’t doubt she could. She just didn’t want to find out what he’d do to her if she did.
The reality of it sank in like a stain. Her singular decision to lie to Ironshod outside the wall had brought her here. Ginger had known it was a mistake but Aurora had committed them to the lie without giving them a chance to think of something else. She’d acted on impulse with what little she knew about the wasteland and now Roach was sitting in shackles and Ginger was being carted off to suffer for Aurora’s sins.
“I’m glad we have an understanding.” Ironshod turned to Latch. “Knight, escort Miss Pinfeathers out of the Stable. Her time is precious and I wouldn’t want her to get distracted on the way.”
Latch held out an armored hoof in the direction she’d tried to flee, inviting her to follow.
She hesitated. “What about my saddlebags? My rifle?”
Ironshod looked at her as if she were a filly asking for candy before bed. “What about them?”
She stood there for several seconds, uncomprehending. Then she understood.
She looked away from Ironshod, and her Pip-Buck, and stepped toward Latch. The Knight began walking and she fell in next to him. The rhythmic hiss-stomp, hiss-stomp, hiss-stomp of his hooves drowned out everything else.
Unarmed, unfed and stripped of the one tool that gave her a fighting chance, Aurora walked back toward the wasteland unsure of what to do.
For the first time since deciding to leave home, she was afraid.
June 2nd, 1075
Dad came to the house to pick up the last of his boxes. Mom stayed in the back yard until he was gone. I tried to ask him why he’s leaving us but he wouldn’t say anything to me. Why won’t he talk to me? He’s my dad! What did I do wrong??
June 4th, 1075
Mom heard me crying and this time she wouldn’t leave me alone. I yelled at her and said a bunch of stupid things. I told her about dad and how he ignored me when he left. I felt bad for telling her that because she almost cried too. I’ve never seen mom cry before. She’s always so… calm. I wish I knew how to be more like her. I feel like I’ve been crying a lot lately. Mom said I need to be patient with her and that she’s trying. I know she’s trying. I just wish dad cared enough to try at all.
June 9th, 1075
Fluttershy came to our house this morning to talk to mom. THE Fluttershy. I mean I know there’s not a second one but still, oh my gosh, she shook my hoof and offered to make us tea! Mom showed her my whittling sculptures, even the really bad ones from when I was first learning. Fluttershy asked if she could keep the one of the jackrabbit I did. I really liked that one, too, but she looked so sad when she held it. And I can’t say no to her! She’s the only ministry mare that will even talk to zebras anymore. She was super happy when I said she could take it. I can whittle another one, anyway. Rabbits are pretty easy once you learn how not to break the ears off.
Fluttershy said that she needed to talk to mom in private so they could sign a bunch of papers. They wouldn’t say what for, even when I asked. Mom said if everything worked out, I might see her in the papers.