For a long moment, Fluttershy stared at the metal soldier in front of her. Time seemed to slow as it lifted one hand.
She dropped out of the air to the ground, and its hand flew over her head and through the air. Behind her, she heard the quick clack clack clack of the clockwork ball rushing back down the stairs, and she turned to follow it.
Both of them reached the bottom of the stairs just as the soldier that had been coming down the other entrance stepped into view. Fluttershy glanced over her shoulder; the soldier that had been outside the door was coming down the stairs. A constant stream of crackling hisses and growls burst from the two soldiers as they approached. Fluttershy and the ball ran down the next set of steps to the bottom floor of the station.
Fluttershy reached the ground and kept running. Behind them, the soldiers reached the bottom of the stairs and stood there, blocking them off. The ball ran towards the stairs at the other end of the station, and Fluttershy followed. There must be another exit at that end, maybe if they got there –
Yellow circles of light illuminated the foot of the two stairs at the other end of the station just before another pair of soldiers came down them. Fluttershy and the ball stumbled to a halt in the middle of the station floor.
The four soldiers stood at the foot of each staircase, shining their lamps at Fluttershy and the ball. None of them moved from their position blocking the stairs.
Fluttershy looked up. The mezzanine was maybe twenty feet above her, and she didn’t hear anything coming from up there. She could fly up with the ball and run. Fluttershy reached out her front hooves and picked up the ball.
It screamed.
Fluttershy dropped the ball in shock. Its body had caved in where her hooves had touched it. The legs curled back, bending in ways that would have snapped the joints of any organic creature who tried them. The ball rolled on the ground, clearly in pain. A few gears popped out of it, rolling away across the ground.
She hadn’t expected this! Why was the ball reacting the same way as when she touched a soldier?
Another wave of electricity passed over the ball. Its legs relaxed. Gears pushed out to the surface from somewhere inside the ball, filling in gaps. The ball righted itself and shook itself like a dog shaking itself dry.
“I’m so sorry! Are you all right?” It seemed a terribly inadequate thing to say, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
The ball nodded. It was all right, but it needed Fluttershy to never do that again.
The soldiers hadn’t moved from where they had been standing. All they were doing was making those same mechanical crackling noises. Fluttershy wondered what they were waiting for.
Alight went on inside the tunnel at the far end of the station, and Fluttershy turned to look.
There was a train coming towards them, traveling along the rails in the ground. There was a pair of lamps on the top of the train pointed right at them, and Fluttershy had no doubt it was full of more soldiers.
Fluttershy looked around frantically. Her eyes fell on the wicker basket that had been left with the other random junk next to the tracks. It wasn’t near any of the soldiers and she didn’t think that they would move from where they were, so that they could keep her trapped, so she could easily reach it.
Fluttershy grabbed the basket. “Come on, get in,” she said to the ball. It skittered over and jumped into the basket. Fluttershy gripped it in both forehooves. They could go up, over the soldiers and onto the –
Another lamp suddenly shone down from the mezzanine above her. They couldn’t go up there now.
What now? There had to be a way out, there had to be! It had to be somewhere the soldiers weren’t, and someplace they couldn’t be quickly. If she could only fly up!
The train car pulled completely into the station and out of the tunnel. It was starting to slow to a stop to let the soldiers out; in just a moment Fluttershy and the ball really would be in trouble.
Fluttershy flew up and over the top of the train, dashing past it into the tunnel just as the doors opened.
Fluttershy sped down the tunnel, banking downwards as the tunnel dipped, and she burst out into an empty station. The walls on her left were a simple white, but the walls on her right were green glass. The navy blue of the sky was visible through gaps in the roof. Was she near the surface?
“Can we get out here?” she asked the ball.
It shook its head; if there was an exit here, the ball didn’t know of it. But they couldn’t go back to the other station now.
“Okay, let’s hide somewhere for the night,” Fluttershy said. She flew up the nearest set of stairs and burst out into the ruins.
The skies above were still a dark navy blue. She was underneath a roof over an open space, next to the street. To her right were two more towers, and to the left across the street there was a wide open space that might have once held a fountain. In front of her, the road curved past the buildings and then curved back again, rising up above the ground in a wide-open area.
There was something coming down the road fast, and Fluttershy almost didn’t see it before the lamps on it landed on her. Some kind of wheeled carriage without any ponies pulling it, speeding towards her.
She squeaked, turned, and flew back in between the rest of the buildings, trying to put something between here and the soldiers who had just arrived. She banked hard to her right, throwing herself around a corner, out of sight from the new soldiers. There was a sudden buzzing noise of propellers and something whooshed past just over her head, and she looked over her shoulder to see what looked like two paper-thin metal wings flying away. There was something shifting between them, and Fluttershy realized that they were carrying a net between them.
Fluttershy turned her head back to see what was in front of her just before she slammed into the second net.
She tumbled downwards, spinning through the air before hitting the ground. The impact jarred the wicker basket out of her hooves, and she landed face down. She heard metal crashing into the hard ground just in front of her. Fluttershy looked up to see another metal wing crumbled on the ground before her. She must have flown into the net that this another wing was carrying and then dragged it down with her when she had fallen. Fluttershy began trying to disentangle herself from the net before anything found her.
A lamp shone on her, from very close.
There was a soldier standing right in front of her. It looked down upon her, then reached down.
Fluttershy squeaked and flailed, trying to get the net off. She threw the top part of it off just as the soldier’s cold hand closed around her neck. Fluttershy instinctively reached up to the hands around her, trying to pry them off. The hand tightened around her neck, and she coughed as she tried to get her hooves under it.
Fluttershy remembered what was supposed to happen whenever she touched one of the soldiers. They fell apart, or changed, or –
Nothing was happening.
The thought flashed through her head: the soldiers were protected here, in their home. Touching them wouldn’t work while she was in the ruins.
The soldier began pulling upwards, trying to lift her. Fluttershy dug in her back hooves and strained, trying to get away.
She looked down just as the ball reached the soldier. Its fangs grew out of its body, and it opened wide and bit down on the soldier’s ankle.
A ripple of wave of lightning surged over the soldier’s body, falling down towards the ball. The soldier let go of Fluttershy as power was drained from it. It kicked its leg, trying to shake the ball. The ball held on, and there was a crunch from somewhere inside the soldier’s leg. Small metal shards fell down to the ground. The ball let go of the soldier, dropping to the ground.
The soldier was limping on one broken foot; it was turning slowly to face them. Fluttershy snatched up the basket, and the ball clambered inside. She took off before the soldier could reach for them again, shooting around a corner and not stopping.
Fluttershy flew as fast as she could, cutting a straight line as far away from both stations as she could. She felt a shifting of the weight in the basket and looked down. The ball had hooked its front legs on the edge of the basket so it could keep an eye on the ground beneath it.
They flew for fifteen minutes, staying close to the walls and hiding in broken windows when groups of soldiers went by. Finally, they were out of the district of tall buildings and were back in another area with the same three-story apartment buildings. There hadn’t been any more soldiers or metal wings for the past several minutes, and Fluttershy let out a sigh of relief.
Her thoughts turned towards what to do next. They needed to find a place to stay for the night, away from where the soldiers were congregating. She decided to put just a bit more distance between herself and the stations, and then look for a room with a couch or bed. It felt a lot less cramped now that she could see more of the sky. They flew over the rooftops in silence.
The ball clicked, and Fluttershy looked down. It was jumping up and down a bit excitedly, making the basket sway, and it was pointing at something down in the street. Fluttershy could only see a darker shadow in the street. “What is it?” she asked.
The ball clicked again and kept pointing. Whatever it was, the ball wanted her to see it. Fluttershy flew down to the ground, setting the basket down before landing herself. The ball climbed out of the basket and clattered over to the thing it had seen.
It was another one of the two-legged non-metal creatures she had seen before. He was wearing a long, thick trench coat that went down to his ankles. His body was sprawled on its side in the street, and there was a faint smell of burning meat. He was curled up into a ball, and there was a dried dark stain smeared under his body. The ball had already reached the body and was trying to pull something off of it.
“What are you doing?” Fluttershy asked in alarm. “What is it?”
The ball stopped for a moment to speak to her. According to the ball, the creature was…something. It was trying to tell her some more words that she didn’t know, and again she could only understand the last one: Albino. The creature was an albino. Fluttershy let the information go; she had something more important to talk about.
“Those are his things you’re taking!” she said.
The ball shook its head. The albino was dead; he didn’t need his things anymore. The albinos often carried food or water or equipment with them, and they might need whatever he was carrying more than he did.
Fluttershy’s stomach growled at the mention of food. She was suddenly aware of an empty feeling in the bottom of her stomach, and that the back of her throat was becoming parched. “Well…”
Her first reaction was of shock and dismay. Her natural instinct was to treat the dead with respect, and going through a corpse’s pockets, even if it didn’t fall outright into disturbing the body, was definitely skirting the edge. On the other hand, if she didn’t eat or drink, what would happen to her? She imagined herself lying on the ground somewhere, too weak with hunger and thirst to move, until she died in a dusty corner or the soldiers found her and she couldn’t run.
She walked over to the corpse and took a closer look at it. It was wearing a backpack that was looped around its arms. The ball was trying to pull the loops down the arm, but the loop was trapped between the arm and the torso of the albino. Fluttershy reached out two hooves and grabbed the body’s forearm, where the sleeve covered the skin. She shivered as her hooves felt the cold flesh underneath. Rigor mortis was already starting to set in, but she was able to lift the arm enough to let the ball pull the backpack strap free of the arm. Together they rolled the body onto its stomach so that they could take off the other strap and pull the backpack free. The backpack was closed, and Fluttershy opened it.
Inside was a bounty. She recognized the canned food and water bottles at the top of the backpack immediately, six round cans and two bottles. In the dark night light she couldn’t see what was underneath the food, and she didn’t think she would be able to tell what it was in the dim light anyway.
“Let’s go inside to eat this,” she said. She lifted the backpack and put it in the wicker basket. Fortunately, enough of the backpack fit into the basket so that it wouldn’t fall out when she flew. The ball climbed onto the backpack.
Just before she lifted off, Fluttershy walked back over to the corpse. From this angle, she could see that it was wearing a pair of goggles like the other albinos she had seen. The night light glinted off the glass, and she saw that the lenses had been smashed into splinters. A strand of hair had fallen over his eyes, and she reached down to brush it away.
“I’m really sorry,” she said. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She turned back to the basket and gripped it in her hooves.
Fluttershy flew up into one of the nearby apartment buildings, landing in a second story room. She could see just enough in here to tell that there was only a couch against one wall and a table in the middle of the floor in this room. The ball jumped to the ground when Fluttershy put the basket down, and it sat and watched as she opened the backpack and took a can out.
The cans had a pull tab on top, and she opened the first one easily. She smelled fresh kernel corn, and she realized just how hungry she was. She didn’t know where a spoon might be in the backpack, so she lifted the can to her mouth and carefully tilted it backwards, tipping the corn into her mouth. The corn was stored in water, and she drank that as well, making sure not to spill a drop.
When the can was empty she set it down. There weren’t any trashcans in the room, and she wasn’t sure what to do with the empty can. She put it down next to the backpack. She could figure out what to do with it in the morning. Right now she was tired. A blanket and a warm fire would have been wonderful, but she didn’t have those. Well, if she put the backpack on top of herself that would insulate her body heat; it would have to do.
Fluttershy curled up on the couch and drifted off to sleep.