My big brother Garnet always used to say that every storm cloud has a silver lining. He loved little fortune-cookie morals like that; he picked that one up from a spicy little mare he met in Las Pegasus, and since then it’s been one of his favorites. Look for the silver lining, he’d tell me. Look on the bright side of life.
Well, I’m looking all over the place right now, and so far the rim around this situation still looks pretty well black. Our group is fifteen minutes out from the Apple Family’s compound, weaving between sagging fruit stalls picked bare by looters. Apple Bloom is in front, Link is brining up the rear, and I’m trapped in between them, my head tilted towards the floor as I try to shake off the feeling of Link’s eyes on the back of my neck. I don’t know for sure that he’s staring at me. In fact, I haven’t so much as glanced at him since we left. No matter what he does or doesn’t do behind me, though, some part of me knows he’s just waiting for a chance to give me a piece of his mind, and by now it’s starting to drive me out of my own.
“All right, here we are,” Apple Bloom says with a relieved sigh. “Geez, it’s a maze back here. C’mon, let’s pull over a spell and get our plan together. I don’t wanna be fumblin’ around for too long out here any more than y’all do.”
She gestures over to a group of tables in front of what looks like a walk-up café, and we all crowd around the nearest one. While Apple Bloom digs around in her saddlebag and Link gazes off placidly at Celestia only knows what, I take the opportunity to get my bearings. We’ve moved out from the cramped hallways surrounding the exit from the orchard into a market square about fifty feet across. The design matches the rest of what I’ve seen in this part of the city: stained oak gleams in the floorboards and shops, and bright flags and banners hang under an immense striped canopy that covers the whole area.
Even here, though, the effects of the last six years are plain to see. The stands are broken down and coated in dust, and the banners are faded and ragged, some so much that they’ve almost been torn to bits. Through a hole in the canopy, I can see a web of girders and glass holding back the ocean above us, and more exposed iron beams and panels are visible around and under the mismatched shop fronts they support. It all adds up to an eerie recollection of a one-sided battle of ideologies. Ryder may have designated this section of Harmony for the farmers down here, but she sure as hay didn’t build it for them.
“And there you are,” Apple Bloom mutters, pulling out a tightly rolled scroll of paper and one of the three radios we brought along so we could keep in touch with Applejack and each other. She spreads the scroll out on the table, revealing the map printed on the inside, and switches on the radio. “Ya ready, AJ?” she asks it.
“An’ able ta boot,” the radio crackles back. “What’s the plan?”
Apple Bloom nods to herself and smoothes the map out with her forelegs. “Right now, we’re here,” she tells me and Link, one of her hooves stopping over a scale depiction of the square we’re sitting in. “We came up this hall here—” She traces along a path pointing off towards a misshapen clump of shops. “—so we got two more choices about where to go now. One of ‘em leads to the Mercury Mechanics store and the other leads to the meat grinder, so I figure we’ll just flip a coin or somethin’ an’ hope for the best. Sound good?”
Apple Bloom waits a second to take in the expressions on our faces, then cracks a grin and chucks me on the shoulder. “Aw, c’mon, I’m just kiddin’. The left one goes to Mercury. Other one just goes to Sunbeam Sweet Shop. Worst thing that’ll get ya in there is a stomachache.”
“Ha.” I say through a wide, toothy grin. “Funny.”
Seeming to realize her joke didn’t exactly bring the house down, Apple Bloom clears her throat and slots an awkward pause into her speech before she continues. “Still, I ain’t so familiar with that area an’ ya never know where a few splicers might’a wandered, so let’s just stick to Mercury for the time bein’. We should be able to find everything in there easily enough.”
“Define ‘everything’?” Link asks. By way of answering, Apple Bloom floats three photographs out of her bag and spreads them out before us.
“These are the busted parts from the bathysphere we’re gonna ride outta here,” she explains. She points to the first picture, which shows a lumpy cylindrical mechanism with rust eating into its sides. “That’s the primary rotor for the rear propeller. Without that, we might as well try to swim to the surface for all the good the bathysphere’ll do us. The one we need’s a bigger model than most, since this sphere needs more thrust to get to the surface, so I’ll take care’a huntin’ that down.”
She moves the second photo overtop the first. This one shows two coils of thin, transparent tubing, with a circle drawn in red pen around the gap between the two split ends. “And that’s the tubing that carries MOON from the fuel tank to the injection system in the engine. It wears out pretty quick if there ain’t anypony around ta maintain it, so we’ll need a new coil with about a five-eighths inch diameter. Doesn’t really matter how much of it we get. I can cut it down to size once we get back home. Link, ya think you can handle that?”
Link pulls the photo towards himself and considers it for a moment, then nods. Now Apple Bloom turns to me.
“Third, and last, we need a new ballast pump. Every sub needs ballast to weigh it down enough to travel underwater, and without this little puppy, we won’t be able to release it gradually enough to send us off with any grace an’ dignity. We’d basically just slingshot straight up to the surface.”
“Is that bad?” Link asks.
“Imagine you’ve got a ten-thousand foot bungie cord tied to your ankle, and I just cut the rope holdin’ you to the ground,” Apple Bloom replies. Link’s lips tighten, and he nods again.
“You’re up for trackin’ that down, Ruby,” Apple Bloom continues. “Looks like this.”
The picture she gives me shows a boxy contraption that looks more or less like a fish tank filter on steroids. It’s small, sturdy, completely unremarkable, and it’s my job to sift through an abandoned underwater scrap heap until I stumble onto one of them. Well, as long as there’s nothing living in there with it—or already dead nearby—I’ve survived far more tedious jobs back home.
“I got it,” I tell her.
“Perfect!” she shouts, and for a second I can picture her perfectly as a pint-sized little filly, clapping her hooves and cheering as her friends all agree to try one of her daring schemes. How can she exist like this, making jokes about our bloody demise one moment and squealing like a schoolgirl the next? How can she seem so innocent even as she waves around a fully loaded pistol bracer on her foreleg?
“Now, we’re all gonna go in together and leave together, but just in case anything funny happens while we’re split up searchin’, I want ya both to take a radio.” Finally, she passes out the other two radios she’s been keeping in her bag the whole time. “They’re all on the same channel, and so’s Applejack. So any time ya take a wrong turn or Celestia’s name in vain, she’ll make sure ya know exactly what you gone and did.”
“I heard that,” all three radios squawk. Apple Bloom smirks and mimics a shocked expression, and then her impossibly genuine smile returns.
“Any questions?” she asks.
Link and I are both silent. Just barely, I resist the urge to give him an awkward glance.
“All righty, then. Let’s get our rears in gear ‘fore AJ clunks out here and buckstarts ‘em for us. Celestia knows, she’s got about as much patience as a tree squirrel waitin’ for the peanut vendor.”
“I heard that too.”
Apple Bloom makes another face at her radio, then takes off at a brisk pace towards the hallway on the left. Just like when she rescued us, it seems she just expects us to follow her. Because we don’t have any other choice. My pulse ratchets itself up a notch, and this time I go ahead and turn towards Link just as he turns towards me. As I probably should’ve expected, the end result is plenty awkward.
The way Apple Bloom talked about this place made it sound like the mechanics shop was right down the hall, but by the time we catch up with her, we still haven’t gotten where we need to go. Instead, the hallway just seems to keep twisting and turning farther away from the square, though instead of fruit stalls, this place is bordered by rounded light fixtures faded yellow with age, spaced out between glossy posters advertising every kind of mechanical nut and bolt imaginable. Since Link decides to hang back and I refuse to get stuck in the middle again, I end up at the front next to Apple Bloom, who gives me a couple sideways glances but doesn’t say a word otherwise. Normally, I’d be fine with that, but every step we take without anypony else popping into view makes the silence ring louder in my ears. Starting a conversation with Apple Bloom would probably be like opening the metaphorical floodgates for how much she seemed to love the sound of her own voice, but at the moment, even that seemed better than trudging mutely through this deserted corridor with only the sound of my breathing for company.
“So this is all part of the Farmer’s Market?” I ask.
“Yep,” Apple Bloom answers quickly. Of course. We’re ten miles up the creek and a couple minutes from bucking the paddle to pieces, and now she’s got her tongue tied in knots. I swallow back a growl and push harder.
“Seems like strange stuff for a farmer to buy,” I go on, nodding at a pony-sized flyer showing off Rusty Nail’s Axle Lubricant. Judging by Apple Bloom’s sheepish grin, that seems to have finally grabbed her attention.
“Yeah, I was wonderin’ when you’d ask that,” she admits. “The mechanics were here in this sector first. Back when the city was first bein’ built, this was where they all lived. The Market didn’t open till regular residents started movin’ in. Ryder needed somethin’ to feed ‘em with and, well, once she started hawkin’ the place as a paragon’a equine culture and technomagical advancement, a whole wing set up for rough’n’tumble miner types kinda stuck out like a loose tooth. So she monopolized the fields she planted to feed the workers and consolidated ‘em under one’a her puppet corporations. Couple weeks and some ‘natural enhancements’ later, she had her Farmer’s Market. Saturn Incorporated leased out cropland and retail space, Ryder taxed the raw materials, and the farmers kept whatever profits they made off the fruits and veggies they sold. The quick ones pooled their resources and formed sub-companies. The rest burned their savings on berry wine, and tilled the fields for half-bits an hour and a promise they could claw their way back up the social ladder if they just worked hard enough.”
Apple Bloom dodges around a puddle of water formed by a jagged hole in the ceiling, and slaps a forehoof against the sopping wet poster underneath the gap. A trio of darkened red apples dominates the display. “And to the quickest,” she says, shrugging her shoulders with a wry half-grin, “went the spoils.”
Apple Bloom bounds ahead before I get a chance to consider what she just said, and what I see up in front of her whisks the thought away anyway, and stops me dead in my tracks to boot. Just a few feet away, the hallway is flooded with wavering blue light, and instead of dark iron and wood, the walls are made of crystal-clear glass. It takes me a few seconds to recall something to match the sight in front of me: the web of enclosed walkways connecting each of the buildings that I saw on the bathysphere ride in. By the time that memory makes it to the forefront of my mind, my legs have turned to jelly.
“All right back there?” Apple Bloom shouts back. “Don’t worry ‘bout the walkway now. It might look a little on the flimsy side, but that glass is six inches thick and magically treated to be all but Celestia-proof. It’d take half a building fallin’ on it ‘fore we’d need to start worryin’.”
I step to the edge of the walkway and look over. She’s right. I know she’s right. For Pete’s sake, we already sprinted through half a dozen of these walkways when we were trying to escape the plaza. I’ve done this before. These things are sturdy. There’s nothing to worry about. So why does the seabed I can see pulsing and shimmering in the distance make my heart want to punch its way into my hooves?
“C’mon, y’all, shake a leg!” Apple Bloom shouts back at us. She’s already at the other end of the tube. “Mercury’s just up ahead!”
Because I’m thinking about it. Because all I’ve been doing this whole time is thinking about it, thinking about everything. Thinking, and worrying, and moving one more mechanical step like a dog being pulled on a leash. I can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep dwelling on things I can’t change. Because if something does go wrong and my head’s still swimming with all the things that haven’t yet, the only thing I’ll be good for anymore is telling Link and Apple Bloom what color flowers I want at my funeral.
“You…” Link starts to say, but whatever he wants to say reaches me too late. I’m already a half-dozen steps beyond him, my hooves echoing against the floor and my jaw shut tighter than the lock on a manticore’s pen.
I reach the other side in half the time it took Apple Bloom, due in large part to the fact that my controlled trot kind of evolved into a gallop somewhere along the way. Thankfully, neither Link nor Apple Bloom seems to notice, the former because he’s just about sprinting trying to catch up to me, and the latter because she’s already on the other side of the room I just barreled into: a wide and open space with a pair of staircases curling up to a small mezzanine in the back and all the cheap seating and barebones décor fitting of a corporate lobby. All in all, the place looks absolutely nothing like the underwater mechanics shop I had pictured in my head, and the image isn’t improved at all by the mangled, bloody unicorn corpse lying spread-eagled in the center of the room. More specifically, the mangled, bloody unicorn corpse that Apple Bloom appears to be poking at with all the grace and solemnity of a foraging raccoon.
“Boy, this poor sucker must’ve been turned around somethin’ terrible if he ended up all the way down here,” Apple Bloom comments, her words muffled by some blocky blue thing she’s holding in her mouth. “Unicorns never come this far down into Engineering. Probably got cut up wanderin’ through somepony else’s turf and couldn’t make it to a first aid station in time.”
“So you’re… moving him?” I ask, my voice distorted too by the crinkling of my nose at the tangy scent of blood in the air.
“Searchin’ him,” Apple Bloom replies. “Never know what you might find. He’s fresh too, so he probably ain’t had anypony else pickin’ through his pockets yet. Can’t have been here more than a few hours, I reckon.”
Somewhere between “pickin’ through his pockets” and “more than a few hours”, I suddenly lose my ability to keep my eyes open and my breakfast down at the same time. While I turn my head away and do my best not to wonder whether apple bits taste the same going down as they would coming up, Link graciously takes over the role of “grimly fascinated party member with brass intestines”.
“Did you find anything?” he asks hesitantly. I glance up for just a moment, but it’s long enough to see Apple Bloom toss her head back and spit the little blue package out towards us. It hits the floor with a wet, rattling thump, and my innards blast off for the moon again.
“Energy bar,” I hear her say. “Couple pistol rounds. And, uh… box of cigarettes. Either’a y’all smoke?”
“Can’t say I’ve tried,” I groan towards my hooves.
“Can’t blame ya,” she replies. “Try suckin’ half your first one straight down to your lungs.” Apple Bloom stands up, and one of her hooves splashes in a puddle that I’m absolutely positively one-hundred-percent sure is just water. “Thought I was fixin’ to cough up my…”
At first, I don’t know what to make of the silence that follows. Once Apple Bloom loudly clears her throat and I glance over to see the positively green tinge in Link’s cheeks, a couple things begin to click together.
“Man, I keep forgettin’ what y’all aren’t used to,” Apple Bloom mutters. “Let’s just, uh… keep goin’. Storerooms are downstairs. Just back here a ways.”
Seeming content with leaving her apology unspoken, Apple Bloom motions us forward. After gingerly picking my way around the corpse, I follow her off to the left through a short hallway and down a wide flight of steps. Link lingers back at the body for a few seconds, then jogs to catch up with us. His trademark look of stoicism is back, but I can tell that not all the color has returned to his face yet.
Unlike the surplus shop Apple Bloom got my bracers from, the storage area in this place is organized into six partitioned rooms, each of which looks about a tenth the size of Slinky’s warehouse. Apple Bloom splits us off so we’re each responsible for searching two rooms: she takes the first two, Link takes the middle, and I take the ones in the back. After we promise that we’ll holler if anything goes wrong and Apple Bloom informs us—through a pointed look at Link’s patently colorless lips—of the bathroom back upstairs, we all take our positions. I walk up to the left-hand door in my section open and walk under it as it automatically slides up into the ceiling, and once I hear it touch back down behind me with a whoosh and a gentle thump, I am finally, blissfully alone.
The urge to let my shoulders go slack and slump back against the door is tempting, but ultimately I choose to push on with my job—mostly because the door just snaps back open again when I try to lean back into it. Thankfully, Apple Bloom and Link are already inside their respective rooms, so they both miss the show I end up making when I flail around and smack my head on the ground outside. They also miss the door almost closing on my stomach once the motion-sensing spells around it detects the fact that I’m lying immobile on the floor clutching my skull and moaning. Harmony, two; Ruby, zero. Things can only get even fricking better from here.
Once I’m up and more or less at ‘em, the job before me seems, in a rather polite word, daunting. Turns out, a tenth of Slinky’s inventory still covers a good six long shelves worth of space, and to make matters worse, these ones don’t look organized by any sense that’s even distant cousins with rhyme or reason. For lack of any better ideas, I just hop around the piles of sagging cardboard boxes and unidentifiable metal contraptions over to the first shelf, and start looking for something that might possibly fit into a submarine.
As my newfound mood was keen to predict, the search quickly proves to be futile. I’ve combed through storage rooms for parts before, but in those cases I always knew exactly what I needed and exactly where I’d need to go to get it. Even if the ballast pump is in here—and the more shelves I comb over, the more I’m convinced it’s not—it’s going to take me ages to dig it out, let alone haul it all the way back to the Apple Family compound. Still, though, the thought of getting out of this place and back to one where the doors all have lovely little knobs to keep them closed whenever I darn well want them to be keeps me going, and once my first sweep of the room is done, I trudge right back to the other end and start over again, checking beneath and behind every loose gear and scrap of sheet metal and sifting through every box of half-inch thick screws and propeller blades. The work is monotonous, and the polar opposite of intellectually stimulating. Left with the choice of either finding greener pastures to reside in or going completely numb, my brain eventually turns to Link.
Actually, a better way to phrase that would be “my brain spins circles around the concept of Link”, because everything I see him do just confuses me more and more. A few minutes ago, he was a visibly nauseated tourist here trying to put on a brave face he could show off to the rest of us. This morning, he was a mumbling introvert with a facial tic that made his eyes turn to me every time he spoke. Yesterday, he was a raving lunatic with a radio, then he was a raving lunatic with a crowbar, and before any of this even started he was a well-groomed colt with a wind-ruffled mane who couldn’t read his ticket right and looked like a kicked puppy the second I called him on it. My hoof pauses in the middle of its third sweep through the crate it’s stuck in, and my guts twist together. I never apologized to him for that. And he never apologized to me for setting me off in the first place.
Oh, who the hay am I kidding? None of that was his fault. He was fresh off a shouting match with a fat, ornery marketing executive. If that’d been me standing there, I would’ve been ready to blow a fuse too. If anything, I just escalated the tension in the cabin. We were both in bad moods, and we took it out on each other.
I reach over for the next box in the row, and nearly fall over a second time when my hoof hits empty air. I’m at the end of the last row again. I’ve gone through this entire room front to back and top to bottom twice now, and I’ve got nothing. So now I get to add a whole steaming pile of misery and frustration on top of the load of guilt I just buried myself under. I wonder if that little game this city and I are playing has a mercy rule.
And wouldn’t you know it, the good times just keep on rolling. I look through the next room three times, and still come up dry. The only thing even vaguely interesting I find lost among the discarded and forgotten parts is another voice recorder, with a label on it that reads “Marla Mercury – Regarding Lost ID Cards”. When I first come across it midway through my second circuit, I leave it on the shelf for fear of getting distracted and wasting time. By the time I reach the same spot on my third go-around, I figure having something to break the monotony is the only thing that could possibly motivate me to finish.
“Greetings, loyal Mercury Mechanics employees!” a cheery mare’s voice trills once I push the play button, her voice dripping with enough syrupy sweetness to drown a honeybee. “As co-founder and chief operations officer of Mercury Mechanics, it is my eternal pleasure to provide assistance, advice, and a warm, welcoming smile to anypony who asks! Recently, it has been brought to my attention that several ‘Product Managers’ and ‘Consumer Appropriation Experts’ have misplaced their personal identification cards, and as such, I would be overjoyed to inform you that… is he gone, Sparks?”
A different pony in the background gives an unintelligible reply, and Marla lets out a heavy, distorted sigh. When she speaks again, her voice has dropped a good three registers.
“All right, numbskulls, listen up: I don’t know whether you’re mistaking those cards for potato chips or trading ‘em in the Commons for male enhancement tonics, and quite frankly, I don’t care. Celestia knows, this ‘positive reinforcement’ crap is running this company into the ground, which should come as no surprise considering that’s always what happens when I get a migraine and can’t keep Max from blowing our entire R-and-D budget on some half-cocked scheme to build automatons out of porcelain. Any case, here’s the deal: I don’t want to front the bill for new ID cards, and you don’t want me to kick your pockmarked little asses to the proverbial curb. So as of right now, you boys are officially students in Professor Marla’s Hacking 101 class. Lesson one: rearrange the MOON pipes inside the door controls so that the red light turns to green. Lesson two: don’t let the MOON spill out or the pressure inside the pipes get too high. Lesson three: should you ignore lesson two and allow the system to short-circuit, your employee benefits do not include medical insurance. Lesson four: you didn’t hear this from me. Congratulations, you passed! Use your newfound criminal expertise well, and for Celestia’s sake, keep track of your shit so I don’t have to.”
There’s a pause, and the Marla’s perky voice returns. “Have a wonderful day!” she says. The tape shuts off, and after giving myself a second to bite my lip and get over the urge to snort, I decide to commit Marla’s advice to memory. Never know when something like that might come in handy around here. Worst case, it would at least give me something to talk about with Apple Bloom later.
I’m a little bit surprised when I find I’m the last one to come back out into the hallway, but once I take a closer look at the two other ponies in my group, I’m kind of glad things turned out that way. Apple Bloom has her forehoof propped up on a blocky metal object that looks exactly like the rotor in the picture she showed us, and Link has a long coil of rubber tubing looped over his shoulder and chest. Despite the extra time I took, I’m still the only one who came out empty-hooved. At the very least, nobody can accuse me of not trying. And come to think of it, I bet that counts as a silver lining. See, Garnet? I can be positive sometimes too.
“No luck?” Apple Bloom asks once I join them between the two doors of the rooms Link searched. Her tone is gentle and completely sympathetic, but my face still grows warm the second her eyes settle on me.
“It wasn’t for lack of effort,” I assure her. “I probably could’ve built a whole new bathysphere out of all the other parts in there, but I never did find the one we actually needed. Guess that pony up in the lobby wasn’t the first one to wander back here.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Apple Bloom says with a grimace. “Pretty much everyplace in this area outside our compound’s either been picked clean enough to eat off the shelves, or just gotten all mixed up without any clerks or workers to keep it all in order.” She looks down at her rotor, and a spark of cheerfulness begins to sneak back into her gaze. “Still, though, it ain’t all a wash. Least we got two parts outta the three. To be honest, that’s more than I was hopin’ for on the first day.”
The first day, she says. The first day of wandering through the city hunting down a part that might not even exist anymore. Speaking of positive thoughts, I’m also positive that silver lining’s starting to look more like fool’s gold.
“You have any trouble finding that, Link?” she asks next.
“No, not really,” he answers. “Second room was weird, though.”
“How come?”
“Well, I found this in the first room I checked,” he says, pawing at the coil while nodding towards the door to my left, “and you guys hadn’t come out yet, so I figured I was just done early. And then I thought, why not check out the other room just for the hell of it? So I went over and opened the door and…”
“And what?” I interject.
Link looks at me for a moment and then chuckles and shrugs. “And nothing. The whole place was empty. Not one single part or parcel anywhere.”
“What, in medical?” Apple Bloom asks incredulously. It takes me a second to figure out what she’s talking about; until now, I hadn’t noticed that each room in the hallway had a sign over its door that displayed what kind of parts were stored inside it. Both of my rooms were labeled “Transit”. The one Link was standing in front of now was labeled “Surgery”.
“Yeah, it was crazy,” he confirms. “Whoever it was that got in there, they weren’t screwing around. Even the shelves were gone. Only thing left was one of those audio recorder things, right in the middle of the floor.” Link magically flips open his bag and pulls out the recorder. “I don’t know what’s on it. I was just about to flip it on when you guys came out.”
“Well, ain’t that the darndest thing…” Apple Bloom murmurs, her brow creasing in puzzlement. Like always, though, her face is sour only for the most fleeting of moments. “Well, we can be thankful you at least still got what ya came for. Let’s go on an’ head back for today. We’ll give that tape’a yours a listen once we’re back in friendly territory.”
Link and I both nod in agreement, but even though Apple Bloom sees us do it, she still doesn’t move. “Actually, on that note, Link, you mind goin’ up ahead and makin’ sure the lobby’s still clear? I got somethin’ I wanna check on back here.”
Link nods again—slower this time—and glances in my direction for just a moment before turning around and climbing back up to the front hall. I’m two steps behind him all the way to the foot of the stairs, but once I get there, Apple Bloom sticks a foreleg out in front of me.
“I could use a hoof here, Ruby,” she says. Link stops on the fifth step and glances back at me again. He knows just as well as I do that something’s up, but we also know that neither of us know what it is. So we both fall back on our standard response techniques: he walks away and pretends he didn’t hear anything, and I sit tight and wait for somepony to tell me what they’re expecting me to do.
I stand there for ten seconds, then fifteen, then twenty. The urge to blurt something out hits us both at the same time, but Apple Bloom’s voice is louder and a pretty good deal more fervent.
“I’m sorry!” she half-shouts as my counterargument of “I shouldn’t have come” falls on deaf ears. The open-mouthed stare we share in the silent seconds that follows ends with Apple Bloom snorting with laughter, and me eventually cracking a grin of my own. I’ve heard people describe laughter as infectious before, and Apple Bloom’s the first pony I’ve met in a long time that truly lived up to that cliché.
“What are you sorry about?” I ask once we both bend the cheesy smiles off our faces.
“I’m just sorry about being so…” She pauses, her tongue stuck between her teeth as she tries to think of the right word. “…uncouth about all this. I mean, with the jokes and all the kiddin’ around about that unicorn upstairs, I just… I wasn’t thinkin’. I wasn’t thinkin’ about how you or Link were feelin’, or rememberin’ what it’s like to come straight from Equestria and see things like… things like that. I know it’s scary, an’ I know it’s shockin’. An’ I just wanted to say that I’m sorry I forgot that for a little while.”
I don’t know why my first instinct is to laugh again, but luckily enough, that reaction seems to make both me and Apple Boom feel better. “I just don’t get it,” I confess to her. “How can you be so… uncouth about it, or whatever? How aren’t you scared or shocked or… well, like me?”
Apple Bloom shrugs. Her laugh is a tinge wistful this time. “Built up a callus,” she says. “It’s like apple buckin’: the first time you do it, it stings like all get-out, but give it a couple weeks and you start to bulk up. Your hooves get tougher, your muscles get stronger, your back legs start goin’ numb once ya get into a groove…” The look in her eyes is opaque, like a glass of water that’s been emptied and refilled with something a little less pure. “Lotta things work that way. More than you’d expect.”
“So that’s it? It just doesn’t bother you?”
“Sometimes it does,” she admits. “Most times I just… treat it like it ain’t supposed to.” She chooses her next few words carefully once she sees the look on my face. “It’s hard to explain. I guess the best way of sayin’ it is that the mind’s a right powerful thing if you know what to put it to. You see enough unnatural things, enough friends disappear or die or do things you never would’ve expected ‘em to do… eventually you can’t think about it all at once. You keep it all up in your head, you try to make sense of it all, and before you know it you’re the craziest one outta all of ‘em. So we don’t think about it, I suppose. Applejack just don’t say much to begin with, and I just… try to be practical. If I see something like that poor unicorn sometimes, I figure out what I can do about it, and if the answer’s ‘nothing’, then I don’t beat myself up over somethin’ I can’t change. And if I get scared, I joke about it. Kid around. Act like it ain’t a big deal, because emotions are funny things and if you tell yourself you ain’t feelin’ any, sometimes you believe it.”
Apple Bloom pauses for breath, then bites her lip. I’m almost sure this is the most she’s opened up to anypony in years. And come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I know why she chose me to do it with.
“’F I’m bein’ honest, I don’t know I still do it,” she goes on quietly. “I tell myself it’s for Cider’s sake, and it ain’t like that’s a poor reason at all to keep a smile on, but… I just can’t bear the thought’a her growin’ up somewhere where the sun don’t shine. I want her to grow up in Equestria, where the fields don’t have walls around ‘em and the windows aren’t always dark, and the rain don’t come from a spigot in the ceiling. Used to be I wanted to go home, but I can hardly call it that anymore. I spent more’n half my life down here. Lost my friends, lost half my family, lost ten years of growin’ up after doin’ it all in a few days. And I laugh about it. I laugh about it, because by this point it hurts too much to cry. Because this family’s all any of us has got left, and if either’a them saw me start to sink, they’d hang onto me all the way to the bottom.”
Now her eyes are frothing, not with pity but with resolve. “And so help me, I will not let that happen again. Not with Cider. Not with AJ. And not with you or Link either. You don’t deserve to be stuck down here. Nopony does.”
She lets herself trail off and eyes me expectantly, waiting for something I can’t identify. Ten seconds pass, and then she wipes a hoof across her brow and whistles loud enough probably for Link to hear it in the lobby.
“Damn, you’re good at this listenin’ thing!” she says. “I could swear you were even interested for a bit in the middle there!”
I almost protest, but Apple Bloom’s wink steals the words from my mouth. “Seriously, though, thanks for… thanks for stickin’ around,” she adds. “Means a lot.”
“Don’t mention it,” I tell her, tossing in a wink in return for good measure. “You think Link fell out of a porthole waiting for us?”
“With how long you let me ramble like a steer without a yoke? I reckon we mighta starved him to death up there.”
“I’m not searching his body if we did,” I joke back. Apple Bloom’s grin is the widest one I’ve ever seen split her face.
“Neither am I. I don’t hate him that much,” Apple Bloom jabs back. My half-hearted chuckle only eggs her on further. “Aw, c’mon, he’s really not that bad. Harmless enough, at least. Besides, coming out here with us in the first place has gotta count for somethin’, right?”
This time, I do a little bit better of a job faking amusement. Apple Bloom doesn’t know the whole story between him and me—and personally I don’t know how much credit I can give him for just going along with what Applejack and I had already decided—but that isn’t worth spoiling the moment here over. “If you say so, Apple Bloom,” I tell her.
“What’d I tell ya? You are good at listenin’,” Apple Bloom replies, punctuating the remark with a chuck on the shoulder. “And for the record, just ‘AB’ will do fine. Seems more friendly-like.”
I shrug again and nod my understanding, all the while doing a very good job of holding onto whatever parts of my mind I haven’t lost yet. She told me all those secrets. She wants me to use her nickname. Does that mean we’re friends? Oh, wow, this is what it feels like, isn’t it? I made it through a whole conversation without Apple Bloom thinking I’ve got motor oil for brains, and now we’re friends. I don’t mean for my next step to be more of a bounce, but by then it’s beyond my ability to control. Holy crap. I mean, oh my gosh. I mean… oh my gooooosh!
For the next little bit as we climb the steps, my thoughts stick more or less to that same path. Meanwhile, Apple Bloom fires up her radio and floats it close to her mouth.
“Hey, Link, sorry for keepin’ ya waitin’,” she says. “We, uh…” Her telekinetic aura shimmers, and one tendril of it lifts off the talk button. “What am I supposed to tell him?” she whispers through a giggle.
Oh geez. Don’t be braindead. Say something funny. Help. “I don’t know, make something up,” I whisper back.
Apple Bloom sticks out her tongue and presses the talk button. “Ruby found a room full’a frilly little shoes and saddlebags,” she says, dodging around the awkward/friendly swipe I take at her foreleg. “Couldn’t drag her away. Where you at?”
Apple Bloom lets off the talk button to bicker with me some more. We’re almost to the top of the stairs before we realize Link hasn’t answered yet.
“Liiiiink,” Apple Bloom calls back the radio. “C’mon, sugarcube, say somethin’.” She releases the button again. Nothing but static.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“Probably just doesn’t have it on,” AB replies. She doesn’t sound at all sure, or at all casual. “Let’s go check the lobby. Try to raise him on yours in the meantime.”
Apple Bloom picks up her pace, and I follow close behind, balancing on three hooves as I hold my radio against my chest. “Link, if you can hear me, pick up already,” I order him, but when I pull back and wait for a response, I get nothing more than AB did. “He’s not answering,” I tell her.
“Try it again,” she pants. “We’re almost there.” Our jog has become a run. My heart is thudding like a cheetah’s, and it only beats faster when I dip my chin down towards my radio again.
“Link, this isn’t funny. If you’re out there, if you’re still alive out there, just stop screwing around and answer your-”
“Get back!”
Apple Bloom’s order comes out as a violent hiss, and is accompanied by a powerful hoof smacking my radio away and pressing me back against the wall of the corridor. “Apple Bloom, what-”
“Get down and stay quiet,” she interrupts in the same low growl. With one hoof still on my chest, she stands up on her hind legs and pushes her back flat against the wall. With me still watching from below, she raises the bracer on her other hoof to her mouth and yanks at it with her teeth. I hear her grunt, and then the click of a switch: she just flicked the safety off her gun.
“What’s going on?” I whisper through my teeth. Now my heart’s going like a hummingbird’s. In response, Apple Bloom just jerks her head towards the corner a few feet away. The lobby is right in front of us, but whatever she’s motioning at is hidden behind the curve of the wall. I can hear it, though: a shuffling, clumsy thing, punctuating whatever it’s doing with a constant and unintelligible stream of nonsense words and animalistic growls.
I peer around the corner and make a quick sweep of the room, but some part of me already knows where to look. In the very center of the lobby, a dust-covered black pegasus wearing a torn collared shirt that’s two sizes too small is digging through the pockets of the unicorn we found earlier, his efforts seemingly fruitless if the increasingly erratic twitching of his wings is anything to go by. I hold my breath and try to keep as far out of sight as I can, but the pegasus is so absorbed in what he’s doing that he doesn’t turn around once. Another scan of the room reveals our problem: he’s facing right towards the walkway we came into Mercury through. In order to get to it, we’ll have to get past him first.
“Must’ve been pals with the other one,” Apple Bloom guesses as I slide back behind cover. She peers out around me again, and a look of thinly veiled disgust overtakes her face. “Damn vultures. They act all chummy, prowlin’ around in groups, but that’s only ‘til one of ‘em ain’t useful anymore. Once the SUN starts flowin’, they’re about as noble as foxes in a henhouse.”
“Should we try to distract him?” I ask. “Maybe we could sneak around.”
“Maybe,” Apple Bloom says. “Maybe not. Some of ‘em are smarter than you’d think, ‘specially the pegasi. We call ‘em Buzzards back at the ranch. They can’t really fly anymore—the SUN does their wings in something awful—so they climb all over the ceilings and walls with those hooks they used during the war. Just about all their wings are good for is jumpin’ short distances, and you can always hear ‘em buzzin’ like houseflies when they do. They’re still natural-born hunters, though. Couldn’t tell you why, but when pegasi get too far gone with that stuff, it’s almost like they go feral. He might well smell us comin’ ‘fore long.”
I think back to the thing Link and I saw in the bathysphere dock, and my skin crawls. This one doesn’t look nearly as deformed, but his raspy breathing and jerky movements are all too familiar. “This thing ain’t worth a split pea from this distance,” Apple Bloom grumbles, lowering her bracer and crouching down so that her belly almost touches the floor, “and you don’t ever wanna tussle with a Buzzard in open space. We’re gonna need to draw ‘im over here so I can get him in range and trap him in the hallway. I’ll fire a round over his head, then pull back outta sight. With any luck, he won’t see me till I’m on top of him. I’ll take him out nice and quick, you’ll back me up if he gets away from me, and then we’ll both get the hay outta this building and go find Link. Got it?”
“I-I…”
The gears in my head were spinning fast enough to fly right out my ears a minute ago, and now it feels like somebody shoved a crowbar right in the middle of them. I sit down hard and do my best to nod, fumbling with the safety on my own bracer and praying I’ll even be able to aim the thing with how bad my hooves are shaking.
“Don’t worry. I’ve done this a hundred times. We’ll be fine,” Apple Bloom says without looking at me—or judging by her hollow tone, convincing either of us. “Ready?”
My hoof loses purchase on the opposite leg’s bracer. The safety on my gun is still on.
“On three,” Apple Bloom says. “One…”
Apple Bloom, wait!
“Two…”
I grab desperately at the switch with my teeth. I still can’t get a grip on it. “AB, I can’t get it off!”
“Thr-“
“Pssst!”
In the time it takes me to blink and jump back in shock, Apple Bloom snaps her hoof away from the pegasus and up towards the mezzanine in the back of the foyer. Behind the balustrade bordering the platform, Link’s hoof is frozen in the middle of a frantic gesture to get our attention, his eyes slightly crossed as he looks down the barrel of the pistol trained right between his eyebrows.
“Damn it to the moon,” Apple Bloom spits under her breath before lowering the bracer again, her hoof trembling ever so slightly the whole way to the floor. Link glances down at the pegasus and signals for us to come up the stairs, and once Apple Bloom directs the same motion towards me, I follow her slowly and quietly up to where Link’s hiding.
“Are you outta your friggin’ mind? Where’s your damn radio?” Apple Bloom hisses at Link, her teeth clenched so tightly I can tell she’s doing it so she doesn’t scream at him. She isn’t the only one, either.
“I turned it off,” Link snaps right back.
“Why the he-”
“What was I supposed to do? I walked in here the same time he did,” he says. One hoof is pointed towards the stallion now haphazardly ambling around the lobby, and the other is holding tight to the radio pressed against his flank. “I barely had half a second to think, and then you two wouldn’t shut up on this thing! I’m lucky I even got up here before he figured out where all the noise was coming from!”
Apple Bloom mouths something that looks an awful lot like a curse, then slumps back against the stone railing, peering through a gap between the pillars holding it up at the situation below. “You think you could hit him?”
“With wha-”
Apple Bloom shoots him a look, and Link’s eyes turn away from hers and towards the holster on his hip. It’s about time he did too; my eyes have been glued there this whole time. “Can’t you?” he whispers.
“Not at this range,” she repeats. “Magic-operated guns are always more accurate. Don’t need to compensate for recoil as much.”
Link wets his lips and swallows hard. Now he’s clutching the holster just as hard as the radio. “What if we just wait him out?” I suggest. “He’s gotta wander off sometime, right?”
“That’s the other problem,” Link says weakly, and Apple Bloom and I follow his sideways glance out through the immense window that forms most of the building’s façade and tapers into an arch three stories above our heads. I squint towards the blotchy dark mass that seems to be stuck halfway through the glass tunnel we went through to get in here, and the realization of what I’m really looking at is accompanied by a tingly sensation of dread, and a low, mournful bellow that echoes into the lobby and dissipates without the pegasus below so much as looking up. Apple Bloom groans, and Link goes back to fiddling with his pistol. When a foolish giggle wafts out of the tunnel a few seconds later, AB swears again.
“It’s the Big Daddy,” Link asks. “That’s what you call that thing, right? Big Daddy?”
“And a Little Sister to boot,” Apple Bloom grumbles. “We mighta jumped outta the fryin’ pan, but we’re ‘bout to fall into one helluva of a fire if we don’t do somethin’ fast.”
Link and I share a brief look of mutual panic. For once, he doesn’t even try to feign indifference. “What fire?” I ask.
“That walkway’s too narrow for us to just skirt around that big bastard,” she tells us. “And once he gets in here, that splicer’s gonna gun for that Little Sister like a moth towards a porch lamp. He probably won’t be able to do much ‘cept set her bodyguard off, but by then it won’t matter. He’ll be pissed off, and we’ll be his next targets once he swats that pegasus into a wet spot on the wall. Best case would be that he doesn’t notice us and we just wait for his Sister to finish pokin’ holes in both those poor saps’ corpses, and who know what else’ll wander in while that’s goin’ on.”
“So what are we gonna do?”
Apple Bloom slaps at her pistol bracer and sets its ammo chain spinning, the gentle whirring of the mechanisms inside the device seeming a hundred times louder in the otherwise silent room. From behind Link’s back, she pulls out the rubber tubing with her telekinesis, testing its strength in midair before unfurling it onto the floor and cocking her gun with one twitch of her leg.
“Expedite the process,” she says. As we watch in numb confusion, she loops one end of the tubing around a balcony and begins tying it into a knot, explaining the rest of the plan as she does so.
“If that splicer gets a chance to attack the Sister and start a fight, we all stand liable to get caught in the crossfire. Our advantage is how the Big Daddy’s mind is programmed: he won’t get involved unless he thinks his Little Sister’s life is in danger. So if we kill that splicer before they get in here, we can just walk right out, and that metal monster won’t so much as give us a wave as we pass ‘em by.”
Apple Bloom finishes tying off the tubing and tugs at it again to test her knot. Once she threads the tail end between the balustrade pillars and tosses it over the edge, she has a makeshift rope leading down to the first floor. “There’s a security station right below this balcony,” she continues, turning to face us again but still keeping low enough for the railing to give her cover. “I saw it on the way in. I’ll get down there and hack a security bot to watch our backs. Once I’m done, Link, take the best shot you can right at that splicer’s head. He must be runnin’ pretty dry if he’s in this neck’a the woods, so you don’t have to worry ‘bout him healin’ up. One good round through the skull oughta be enough to do him in.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Link groans. “You gotta be kidding me right now.”
“Look, I…” Apple Bloom shuts her eyes and gnaws on her lip like she’s trying to bite it off. When she looks up at us again, the pain in her eyes is something I know she could never fake. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I got you into this, and I’m sorry I can’t think of any other way to get us all out. I swear, if I thought for even a second I could take this all on by myself, I would, but… that ain’t no ordinary splicer down there. He’s fast, he’s dangerous, and I’ll bet apples to oranges he’s about as crazy as they come down here. I might be able to take him by surprise if I moved quick enough, but I’d be goin’ all in on an inside straight, and I sure as hell ain’t about to risk strandin’ you two alone out here on a piss-poor gamble like that.”
Link gulps ahead and bumps his head back against the railing. If anything, he looks sicker than before. Sicker than I feel, even. “I promise you, this’ll be simple,” AB says. “Even if you miss, I’ll have a bot ready to pick up the slack. All you gotta do is pull the trigger. Just like target practice.” Now she turns to me. “Ruby, you’re on standby again. We’re all a team here. You watch Link’s back, and I’ll watch both’a y’alls. Clear?”
“Wait, just wait a second,” Link pants. “What if I screw it up? How am I supposed to know when to shoot him?”
For better or for worse, I can tell by the half-cocked smirk on AB’s face that her good humor and spirit has started to return. Without breaking eye contact with Link, she reaches over with her telekinesis, plucks his radio out from beneath him, flips it on, and tosses it into his lap. “I’ll keep ya posted,” she says. Before he can object again, she lifts up the tubing and wraps it around her forehoof, then hops up onto the railing and over the side of the balcony. We both duck down and listen for the clattering racket of her impact on the ground, but neither we nor the pegasus hear a single solitary sound.
“I’m in,” she reports a few moments later, her voice coming through Link’s radio in a scratchy whisper. “Remind me to thank the guards for leaving the place less locked than they found it.”
“Will do,” Link croaks back. He slides the radio off his lap and his pistol into it, handling the weapon between his hooves like a hot coal from a furnace.
“And here we… go,” Apple Bloom then mumbles on. “All right, gimme a minute or so to get this sucker up and runnin’, and we’ll be good to go. Ruby, how much time you think we got till our guests arrive?”
I push myself up into a half-crouch and peer over the railing. The pegasus is tearing apart a desk on the far left side of the lobby, and the dark blob in the window is three-quarters of the way through the tunnel outside. “Less than that,” I tell her.
“Heh. Time trial,” she murmurs. “Figures. Start the clock… now.”
“What?” I sputter, but the silence I receive in response to that seems to indicate that she was probably serious about that. Her loss for trusting me to do it, then. I’m a bit preoccupied watching Link slowly lift his gun up to rest against his forehead, with the mouth of the barrel pointed right at the tip of his illuminated horn. To her credit, though, it doesn’t take long after I do start counting before the crackle of Link’s radio announces her success.
“Done!” she triumphantly sighs. “All you, Link. You got one shot. Make it count.”
My heart sinks, and all the sweat and droplets of seawater that’ve accumulated in my coat suddenly turn ice cold. So this is what I came out here for. For history to repeat itself. For Link to have to end another pony’s life. And why? To save Apple Bloom the trouble? To convince him he was in the right all along? To protect us?
To protect me?
Link blows a long, slow breath out between tightly pursed lips, then lurches onto his hooves and lifts his pistol up in front of his face. His eyelids flutter for a moment, then open as wide as they can go.
“Link, we’re runnin’ on borrowed time here. He shouldn’t go anywhere fast, so don’t worry about ‘im bein’ a movin’ target. Just line him up in the sight and squeeze. He won’t feel a thing. All told, you’re probably doin’ him a favor.”
Link readjusts his stance and rolls his shoulders. I’m still crouched out of sight behind him, but I feel as though I’m sharing his body with him. I can see the splicer lined up at the end of my gun, hear my heartbeat pounding in my ears, feel the bead of sweat trickling down my temple towards the corner of my eye.
The splicer has lost interest in the desk now, instead choosing to shamble back towards the center of the room. Far away, I swear I can hear the voice of a little filly calling out for somepony to hurry up. Without me realizing it at first, my lips are moving in tandem with it. Why hasn’t Link fired yet? What is he waiting for?
“Nice and easy…” Apple Bloom says, though her voice is getting quicker and a little less patient. The pegasus stops suddenly, cocks his head and sticks up his ears. He’s heard something. The blob in the walkway is twenty feet from the lobby. Link isn’t looking at the blob, though. In fact, he isn’t even looking at the splicer. He’s looking away from his gun, away from the living, breathing pony it’s still pointed at.
“Link, it’s now and never. Just shoot him!”
He’s looking at me. Hopelessly, desperately, he’s looking at me. And far too late, I finally understand why.
The splicer’s head is turning up. He’s looking towards the balcony, towards the exact spot where we’re hiding. I turn away from Link’s stare just in time to crash into that of his target; for a mind-numbing second, my own wide eyes met a pair of cloudy, livid brown ones. Then the pegasus below lets loose a furious snarl and snaps out the hooks strapped to his ankles, and Apple Bloom’s voice is ringing out through the entire room.
“Hey, featherhead!” she screams from somewhere right beneath us. The splicer twitches and focuses in on the security station, and in the corner of my fire I see Link’s ankles tighten up. In the time it takes me to drop my mouth open and whip back around to face him, he narrows one eye, shuts the other eye tight, levels his pistol dead in line with his nose, and fires.
The round makes an ear-splitting crack that brings tears to my eyes, and tears into the splicer’s left shoulder with enough force to ricochet out the other side in a burst of ruby-red gore. He screams in pain and stumbles back, his body sent into a slow spin by the force of the bullet’s impact. There’s no time for a warning, no time for Link to try again. Apple Bloom can’t even get her security bot out in the open before the splicer’s eyes drift towards the far side of the lobby, before they latch onto a mint green earth filly with a wavy silver mane and a hulking metal monstrosity wearing a bulbous, multi-windowed diving helmet—a Big Daddy—standing behind her. As the splicer dips into a crouch and cackles with greed, the Little Sister screams in terror, but her thin voice is soon drowned out by the furious bellow of her bodyguard. The pegasus launches into the air, the Big Daddy’s foreleg splits in two to reveal a rapidly rotating mining drill, and the battle is on.
I’m too far back from the railing to get a good view of the fight and too scared to get any closer, but the vicious squeals of metal against metal and anger and pain are vivid enough to give me the feeling of being right in the thick of things. After one particularly heavy-sounding blow, the radio coughs out something too garbled for me to pick up, and a moment later the whirring sound of a propeller overtakes the noise below. Apple Bloom’s released her security bot, its cheery, melodic whistle announcing its entrance into the fray. Over the ensuing volleys of gunfire and cries from the splicer trying to dodge them, I hear the radio come to life again.
“We gotta go!” Apple Bloom screams up at us. “Ruby, grab Link and get outta there no-”
The first time I got into a mess like this, there was a point in the fight when everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. That never happens here. In the split second before the balcony explodes, I see Link duck down and try to dive towards me; he barely gets his knees bent before we’re showered with dust and rubble, the force of the splicer’s impact against the railing strong enough to smash through it like it was carved out of hollow glass. The unwilling flight of the pegasus comes to a gruesome halt at the wall behind us, where feathers fly from his back as he bounces off the tile and leaves a round splotch of blood trickling down from his point of impact. Even still, I can see his eyes fluttering, his wings and legs struggling to push him back upright. He’s still alive. He’s going to attack.
“Ruby, jump!”
Jump, the radio says. Who said that? Apple Bloom? Applejack? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I don’t question the order for a second. I push Link off me and onto his hooves, then shove him through the gap in the balcony rail. He lands ten feet from the Big Daddy charging up from the front of the room, and hits the ground running. Now it’s my turn. I take two steps forward, channel all my strength into my back legs, and then something slams into me from behind and sends me careening into empty space.
It’s the splicer, blood streaming down his face, teeth bared in fury, manufactured metal talons clamped around my sides. We fall together, his first blow sending us into a somersault that ends with me landing on top of him in a disorganized heap. He never loses his grip, though, and when our dizzying spin comes to a stop, he’s standing over me with all four of my limbs pinned under his impossibly strong legs. He raises one blade for the kill, his shout of triumph spraying my chest with gore. I don’t even have time to blink.
Which is why my eyes are still wide open when a massive block of steel the size of a football player smacks the pegasus halfway to kingdom come, sending him soaring across the room and into the wall for a second time. The Big Daddy cranks his drill back to life once he sees he’s scored a hit, and for a moment the irrationally deadly weapon is gyrating half a foot from my nose. Then the beast bellows again and lowers its head into a charge, lumbering towards the far wall at top speed. The splicer dodges to the side in the nick of time, and the Big Daddy’s impact against the wall shakes the entire building.
I feel Link beside me before I see him: he’s reaching down towards me, threading his forelegs underneath mine, pulling me up and shouting at me to keep going. I stumble to my hooves and follow him to where Apple Bloom is waiting at the mouth of the walkway, my ears ringing and my vision knocked off-kilter in a way that makes everything seem too blurry and too bright at the same time. Another impact behind me vibrates through the floor, and then we’re outside the building and Apple Bloom is running ahead of us again. Clearing the way, she says. Hurry up, she says.
“Stay here!” Link says. “I’ll be right back!”
His words echo in my skull, and finally penetrate my brain as he sits me up against the wall of the tunnel. I grab his foreleg just as he starts to turn. “Are you crazy?” I shout at him. “We gotta go!”
“Just stay here, it’ll only take a second,” he says. “I gotta get the tubing.”
“Get back here!” I scream at him as he pulls away. “Are you serious?”
“It’s the only reason we’re here in the first place!” he screams back. The Big Daddy roars behind him. Now I can feel the walkway shuddering too. “And I’m the only reason it all went to hell! I’m not leaving it behind!”
I open my mouth to tell him he’s an idiot again, but Apple Bloom beats me to it. “Landsake, forget the moondamn tubing!” she yells from the opposite end of the tunnel. “We’ll get it later! Let’s go!”
Link isn’t listening. He’s already turned around. I’m still scrambling to get to my feet when the biggest crash of all hits me like a tidal wave and stops him dead in his tracks. The floor sways beneath me, tiles and wall fixtures shatter inside the lobby, and when the dust settles, an eerie, haunting silence settles with it. I freeze halfway off the ground to check if the battle’s really over, and that’s when I hear the faint, unmistakable clink of stone against glass.
Link and I both look up towards the same spot, where a chunk of concrete about the size of a baseball is sinking down outside the enclosure surrounding the walkway. It didn’t seem to do any damage to the glass plating it bounced off of, but that’s not what really keeps our attention. About ten stories over our heads, the roof of Mercury Mechanics is barely visible past millions of gallons of foggy seawater. Sticking out from the front of it is a huge, misshapen blotch, its color a different shade than the rest of the building and its shape not nearly uniform enough for it to be part of the roof’s construction. Link steps closer to me and narrows his eyes. At first, the blotch looks like it’s just wavering in the dim light of the city around us, but after a few seconds I’m almost positively that it’s moving. Shifting towards the edge of the building.
Shifting towards us.
I plant my forehooves against the floor. In my mind, I can still feel it shivering from the pounding blows of the Big Daddy. Could he really have been powerful enough to shake the entire building? To dislodge something stuck on the roof? I only have to wait a few moments before my questions answers itself: with a distantly audible crunch, the blotch separates from the building and, pulled by the force of gravity, begins to descend.
“What did Apple Bloom say about these tunnels?” Link asks quietly.
“That it’d take half a building falling on them to break one,” I answer him. And it’s almost funny that now, of all times, the world has finally slowed to a crawl. I see Link’s shoulders go limp, Apple Bloom’s jaw drop open, and the shape overheard slowly morph from an indistinct smudge to a jagged hunk of salmon pink steel, all in the span of a few seconds. My eyes drop towards the opposite end of the hallway and lock together with Apple Bloom’s. A hundred feet end to end. So far. Too far.
“Get back!” she screams. “Get back insi-”
I don’t get a chance to hear her finish. The dislodged piece of the zeppelin’s hull cleaves the walkway in two in a single moment of shattering glass and screeching metal, and a wall of bone-chilling water knocks every inch of air from my lungs. Apple Bloom vanishes, Link is swept away by the wave, and in the instant before I shut my eyes, I see the lights of Harmony go dark.