//------------------------------// // Farmer's Market - Part 5 // Story: Harmony // by Aquaman //------------------------------// “... ain’t nothin’ left down here to find, Lola. They’re all dry.” Instinctively, my hoof goes to my gun, and without letting go of me Link looks down and violently shakes his head. I go ahead and move anyway, but only enough to worm my way out of his grip. My legs are shaking almost too much to even manage that, let alone stand up and fight through the courtyard full of splicers I nearly waltzed right into the middle of. “Well, go back and check ‘em again!” somepony else screeches. The first voice was male, thick and impatient, but this one definitely came from a mare, and an unnervingly angry one at that. “No wonder my motha never liked you. Always lazy, always lookin’ for the easy way out!” “Ah, go soak your head, ya crotchety old bitch. Ain’t like you’ve been lookin’ anyplace either.” The mare makes a noise like she’s about to protest, but eventually just blows her partner off with a dismissive grunt, muttering and cursing to herself about two-bit suits and good-for-nothing drunks. Neither of them make any sort of movement towards us. They didn’t hear us come in. I let myself take my first breath in half a minute and slide a little farther down behind the partition. My heart is buzzing like a forgotten alarm clock, and not just out of fear of getting caught: stupid as it seems even now, it’s really the way those splicers were bickering at each other that’s bringing out the cold sweat on my hooves and legs. In all my life, I’ve never heard anypony speak with such abject hatred in their voice, let alone direct it at another pony they were supposedly friends with. But down here, that seems to be almost the norm for everypony outside the Apple Family’s compound. And all that over what, some supercharged magical energy drink? Even after seeing its effect a dozen times, I still find it hard to believe that SUN alone could so dramatically change who a pony is like that. I turn to ask Link what the splicers are doing now, but he’s crouched just as low as I am behind the partition, bracing his shoulder against it for support as he paws at his radio. “Applejack,” he whispers. “Don’t talk too loud. We’ve got company.” Link lets off the radio, and my heartbeat hitches with a jolt that sends another shiver down my spine. Even the hiss of radio static seems deafening now. “How many?” Applejack asks a moment later, her tone low enough that it doesn’t carry beyond our hiding place. I hope. “Where are you?” “Some kind of terrace or something,” Link replies. “We heard two of ‘em. There might be more, I don’t know.” He must have let off the button again for a moment, because Applejack cuts him off before he can explain further. “Don’t move a muscle till you’re absolutely sure,” she says. “Remember, they always travel in packs. Last thing you want is to get ambushed by some straggler wanderin’ off behind the rest.” I wait for Link to ask Applejack what we’re supposed to do, but when her end of the radio goes quiet again, he just catches my eye and jerks his head up towards the top of the wall. He wants us to check how many splicers are in the room with us. He wants us to take care of them ourselves. I roll onto my hooves and nearly all the way over onto Link before the floor solidifies enough for me to keep my balance. Don’t be afraid, I tell myself. Don’t lose control. I glance at Link again and count down with him from three, then slowly raise myself up into a sitting position and peek over the edge of the partition. The room we’re in is about thirty yards wide, and the deck I thought I saw before is actually a walkway that catty-corners the left and back walls, connected to our level by an angled flight of stairs on the far side of the room. A walk-up bar fills the space beneath it, and a few rusting tables and chairs complete the setup of what was once a cute little restaurant, chips of their once pristine white paint staining the boards of the terrace and the oddly It’s among those chairs that I see the first splicer: a lemon-yellow earth mare hunched near the center of the room, her crossed hooves the only thing keeping her sour face from sagging into the table in front of her. Across the way, another earth pony is poking around behind the bar, and the faint grumbles coming from beneath the register make it a pretty easy guess to identify the relation between the two. Those are the splicers we heard before, then, but two doesn’t seem like much of a pack. Sure enough, a few seconds later a third pony stumbles into view on the walkway overhead, this one a navy blue unicorn wearing a tattered coat with some glowing thing bulging out from its inside pocket. He stops to survey the room with a furtive look, one eye peering out from behind a soiled bandage wrapped around his forehead, and Link and I both duck down out of sight before he gets a chance to spot us. I can hear him clunking down the steps and out onto the patio, but after that the room goes quiet. “Three splicers,” Link murmurs. “And the only way out is through ‘em.” Five seconds pass without Applejack answering, then ten, then fifteen. I don’t realize until I shift my gaze to my left again that Link never even switched his radio on, that instead he’s pulling out his pistol and checking the chamber and wrapping a tendril of his telekinetic aura around the trigger. Several facts hit me at once: Applejack can’t see us. Apple Bloom isn’t here to help us. The only way we’re getting past those splicers is if we take care of them ourselves. Link is about ready to do it with or without me. And if I don’t do something to stop him, it could very well be the end of us both. “Wait!” I whisper as harshly as I can manage without attracting the splicers’ attention. Link only glances at me, then shifts into a crouch and readies his gun besides his head. He’s not listening. He’s going to try to start a firefight anyway. So, trapped between desperation and panic, I do the only thing I can think of doing: I grab at his gun with my forehoof and push it back down before he can manage to lift it—and the rest of his body—out into view. “What do you think you’re gonna do?” I hiss. For a moment, the same cold fury I remember from the zeppelin crackles in Link’s eyes, then he sucks in a deep breath and thaws back out to just looking a little annoyed. “What does it look like?” he says slowly. “It looks like you’re about to get us both killed!” I tell him honestly. “There’s three of them, Link, and only two of us. And we don’t even know how to fight in the first place!” Link shrugs, but the effort is weak. I can see his shoulders rebelling against the action at first, his mind reminding him of what his heart is determined to ignore. “We’ve got guns,” he says. “For all we know, so do they,” I argue back. “And I’m pretty sure they know their way around them a lot better than we do. Shooting at them’s just gonna make things worse.” “What other choice do we have?” Link snaps back, and now a bit of genuine anger is starting to seep back into his voice. Let him be angry, then. Maybe he’s forgotten how he froze up the last time he tried to shoot somepony, but I’m not so short of memory. And more importantly, I’m not all that keen to find out whether putting me in the same situation would get us the same result. “There’s gotta be another way to do this,” I tell him. I’m hoping to get a few seconds to actually come up with another way to do this in the meantime, but Link seems to have already decided he’s going to have none of it. “Yeah, you know, we haven’t tried negotiating yet,” he replies. “Maybe if we just give them our guns and the clothes off our backs, they’ll kill us quickly instead of dragging it out for half the moondamned day.” “I meant we can figure out another way,” I say through clenched teeth. “Just gimme a few seconds and chill out, for pony’s sake.” I can feel another smart comment burning in Link’s throat, but he swallows it back as he slouches back down behind the barricade, rolling onto his rump and ever so slightly away from me. “You’re crazy,” he whispers just loud enough for me to hear, and as I peek back over the wall and catch sight of the earth mare at the table again, I can’t help but wonder whether he was thinking of using another word entirely. I grit my teeth and roll my shoulders to keep from cramping up. Focus. I need to focus. Not on arguing with Link or being friendly with Link, just on piecing together a way out of this room that doesn’t involve turning this place into the OK Corral. But as much as I was hoping that another good look around the room would reveal a big golden arrow pointing towards the solution to all our problems, the reality I end up finding is a lot less convenient. From what I can see, there are only three options about where we could go from here: back the way we came, up the stairs onto the platform and into the hallway the third splicer came out from, or off to the right through a big metal door which I suppose leads out to another one of those glass and metal walkways. Even barring the fact that I trust those things about as much as I trust Miss Sally SUN-For-Brains over here, the door’s well within view of all three splicers in the room with us. We wouldn’t even get close to it before we were spotted, let alone have a chance at reaching the hallway on the upper level. Link was right. To get out of this room, we’ll have to go through those three splicers. And that brings me nicely into our second problem: there really doesn’t seem to be anything left in here at all we could defend ourselves with. There’s a small wooden door behind the bar on my left, but that couldn’t be much more than a storage closet, and there’s no way I could get over to that without being spotted either. A long length of rope is hanging from a pulley next to the stairs, but even if the dumbwaiter it was once attached to wasn’t smashed to pieces, we wouldn’t be able to climb it without that pulley dropping us right back down to the ground again. Little bits of trash and scrap metal are floating about here and there, but unless I want to start chucking them at Link’s head so the splicers have an easier time getting at him and not me, they won’t be any use either. Given the way Link’s glaring at me now, though, I have to admit the idea is kind of alluring anyway. “Just stay here and cover me,” he says, giving up on me before I even so much as duck back down. If I were madly in love with him or just an idiot in some other way, I could imagine that he was trying to be noble. Since I’m not either of those things, it’s pretty obvious that he just wants me out of the way, that he’s tired of humoring me and more than ready to take charge all by himself. And once again, the idea of just sitting back and letting him is sorely, shockingly tempting. If he’s so determined to throw himself into the fray and take on three bloodthirsty maniacs all by himself, who am I to stop him? All I have to offer here is a bunch of scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that I haven’t seen the picture on the box for. I’m never going to figure this out and neither is he, so why bother? Why even try to put all those pieces together? It’s weird, I think, the way my mind works sometimes. No matter how deep a hole I’ve dug myself into, the only thing I need to pull me out again is one idea, one stray thought, one little diagram in my mind that’ll show how all the parts and pieces of a problem can fit together. It’s not even that I actually know what I’m going to do yet. I just need to realize that I’ve got all the right components sitting in front of me, and it’s my job to try every combination I can think of until I find one that somehow miraculously works. On the other side of the partition, the splicer mare cries out and jumps clumsily to her hooves. I can hear the screech of her chair as it slides out from under her, the disgruntled and then panicked response of her target—the unicorn, the one whose voice I hadn’t heard yet up until now. She’s noticed the bulge in his coat pocket. She’s demanding that he give it to her, whining that he always hogs all the goods he finds. My cutie mark is tingling, telling me to trust in the indescribable instinct that’s drawing my eyes up over the wall and past the two splicers tussling near the walkway door, all the way back over to a dusty gray hunk of metal and technomagic wiring propped up against the inside corner of the bar. One more piece in the splicer’s pocket. One more piece at the bar. I think I’d like to solve the puzzle now, Link. “We need to get to that security bot.” At the last second, Link pauses again. “What security bot?” he asks in a voice I can tell he’s straining to keep level. In response, I just nod my head towards the hunk of metal that at first I thought was just worthless junk. He looks at it for a moment, then squeezes his eyes shut and tilts his pistol ever so slightly down. He may not feeling all that cordial with me, but at least he’s listening now. “We can’t take on three splicers with only two of us,” I explain as quickly as I can, “but if I can get that bot running, we won’t have to. With that thing buzzing around, those guys won’t even turn our way. We could get through this without anypony having to get hurt.” “Yeah, uh, quick question, though: you skipped over the part where you actually make it all the way across the room to that thing in the first place,” Link says. “And also the part where you have any idea how that damn thing works.” My answer to Link comes out on instinct; I don’t have time to look him in the eye. The splicer mare has her hooves around the other stallion’s shoulders. Her eyes, same as mine, are locked on his pocket. “I’ve built bigger stuff from scratch out of spare parts and duct tape,” I say. “Trust me, I can get it running. All I need is a distraction, and then...” The distant crackle of radio static intrudes in on my thought process, and I pull my radio back out to tell Applejack that I’ve got things under control. But when I pull the box closer to my ear, something else cuts across my mind much more violently: silence. My radio’s silent. Applejack isn’t talking. The static’s coming from somewhere else, getting louder, filling the room and drawing the attention of everypony still inside it: the two ponies scuffling in front of the bar, the one still digging around behind it, and Link and I crouched behind a flimsy little partition, stuck in plain sight like sitting ducks if anypony felt inclined to point a glance our way. Before I can so much as raise my gun, Onyx Ryder’s voice booms out from some unseen speaker, so loud that even the floorboards vibrate with the force of her words. “Desecrators wander the halls of Harmony,” she says. “As we heal and rebuild, the doubters on the surface send parasprites to spoil our ointment. A hundred vials of SUN to the mare or stallion who pins their wings!” What happens next is almost like déja vu: I see the splicers look at each other a split-second before their heads move, sense their attention shift from the ceiling to the walls to the partition in front of the maintenance tunnel, and yet I’m powerless to do anything but watch it all happen right in front of me. Another burst of static jolts through my ears and down my spine. This one is from my radio. “Y’all might wanna start runnin’ now,” Daybreak says, his voice as cheerful and calm as if he were commenting on a hoofball game. Forty feet away, the gears in the splicers’ heads are starting to turn. I have maybe a few seconds before they realize who Ryder was talking about and attack. Should we go for the door? Try to escape? Run away and lead this pack of bloodthirsty maniacs straight towards the ponies who’ve done everything they could to protect us? No. Link thinks I’m a coward. He thinks he has to do all the dirty work for me. He thinks I’m too fragile, too frail, too wrapped up in my past to even bring it up around him. And what is he doing now? Stepping forward with his gun raised, in front of me, ready to save the day. Just like I knew he would. Just like how he’s going to get us both killed. Daybreak wants me to run, then? That sounds fine to me, so I pick my legs and I run. But not towards the other doors in the rooms. Not back into the tunnel. Not away from the splicers who are already fumbling around for their weapons. Instead, I run straight towards them. For the briefest of seconds, luck is on my side: the splicer mare is telekinetic just like Apple Bloom and Applejack, and she’s not good enough with it to keep a firm grasp on her pistol once she pulls it out. The gun hits the ground with a clattering thunk, and the same instant I slam into her and the unicorn beside her with enough force to make my head spin, my mouth lowered to just the right level to make a grab at the glowing red syringe that comes flying out of the stallion’s pocket. Ryder’s speech only confirmed what I’d been thinking before: any splicer in the city would walk over hot coals to get a grab at a few drops of SUN, and that’s precisely what I knew the stuff these two were fighting over had to be. So once I have their precious syringe safely clasped in my teeth, I know they’d follow me to the ends of the earth to get it back, which is why the first thing I do with it is chuck it over the mare’s head and towards the little door behind the bar. It’s a good toss, fast enough to trigger the magical force field that makes the door slide open on its own, and like clockwork the splicer mare squeals in panic and chases the vial straight into the pitch-black pantry it’s disappeared inside. Once the door closes automatically behind her, I run over and buck at the molding beneath it for all I’m worth. The door tries to open again, grinds and crunches against its torn-up track for a moment, then buzzes angrily and shuts off. One down, two to go. Unfortunately, the rest of my plan isn’t quite so foolproof. Mostly, it involves sprinting over to the security bot and hoping that the other two splicers would remain awestruck by my ferocity and courage long enough for me to fire it up. Admittedly, Link may not have been entirely off on the wisdom of this particular part of the plan. Luckily, that also meant he took it upon himself to handle the unicorn I’d just stolen the vial from, who looked a fair bit peeved that I’d thrown away his prized possession and only got angrier once Link blindsided him and rode him to the ground with his forelegs wrapped around his throat. Crude, but effective. Time to get to the bot. Or it would have been, had we only been dealing with those two splicers. Halfway over to where the bot lies abandoned, the earth splicer vaults the bar and makes a telekinetic swing at me with a jagged lead pipe. I stumble and dive off to the side, and my skin crawls as the pipe whips over my head. Stars above, I completely forgot about him. Why the hay didn’t I ever think about him? When I straighten up again, our positions have reversed. The earth pony is crouched in front of the bot, and I’m pressed up against the bar with no place else to run. The splicer grunts and chucks the pipe at my head again, missing me by inches and sending freshly shattered fragments of liquor bottles showering down onto the floor. For a moment, I wonder whether I could sprint past him like I did his wife, but he learns from experience a second faster than I do. He lowers his head and charges at me like a rampaging bull, and every ounce of courage evaporates from my veins. I dodge away and knock a squeal from my lungs as I hit the ground in front of the stairs, and when I look up again, the splicer is snarling with fury in the little crevice between the stairs and the bar, his legs hopelessly tangled up in what’s left of the ropes from the dumbwaiter. On second thought, that’ll work too. Before the splicer can extricate himself from the ropes, I grab the tail end of one in my mouth and sprint up the stairs, tugging it limply along with me until it suddenly snaps tight and yanks my neck back around. I grit my teeth harder and keep pulling, and finally manage to pull the struggling, shouting splicer all the way up to the second level. He shuts up just long enough to look me in the eye, and opens his mouth again at the same time I do. The rope whips away from me and takes the splicer with it, and when the splintering crash I hear below isn’t followed by another shout, I let out all the breath in my lungs in a single heavy sigh. The coast is clear. We did it. Link’s name is halfway past my lips when the railing next to me explodes. I’m on the ground before I realize my legs have moved, and as I cover my head and shimmy forward on my belly, another deafening report sends another spray of splinters raining down on top of me. A cheery whistle rings out over a constant, droning buzz, and even though it’s more or less pressed up flush against the floor, my heart still manages to sink. That sound can only be coming from the security bot. Somepony must’ve turned it on. And that somepony has decided that I’m their next target. I spring to my hooves and stumble blindly forward, and a third volley from the bot chews up the deck behind me. Down below, I can see Link flat on his back with his hooves over his face and blood smeared all over both of them. And stomping up the steps no more than ten yards away, I can see the unicorn splicer who Link had been fighting with, his horn awash with the same cherry-red aura that surrounds the metal casing of the security bot hovering over the terrace. My back hoof slips back along the boards of the deck, and the bot spins up its turret and peppers the wall behind me with lead, its single red eye trained right on me. The splicer has me trapped between a rock and a hard place, and the sneer curling on his face tells me pretty clearly that he knows it. “Thought he’d keep you all ta himself...” he mutters as he reaches the top. “Oughta show him how a stallion takes what’s his!” I try to take another step back, and the security bot forces me to stay put again. I press my lips together and bite my tongue to keep from screaming, but the pressure welling up in my throat is threatening to burst straight through my chest. With all the theatrics he’s going through, this splicer can’t just want me dead, and the thought of what he does want instead almost makes me too sick to stand. “Come on!” he says. He’s only a few feet away yet, close enough for me to see his tongue flicking out over his lips. “You want me to teach you to dance? I’m real good!” I need to move. I need a way out, but the splicer’s at one end of the deck and the hallway he came in through is at the other, and between both of them is too much space for me to cover before the security bot shreds me like parmesan cheese. But it tried to shoot at me before when I dove onto the ground, and it missed. It shot the deck full of holes, not me. It would be able to track me if I tried to run, but if I didn’t run, if I just made one quick movement again... The splicer lunges forward, and in the same instant, so do I. We pass right by each other and careen to a halt a few steps apart, and at the last second the stallion realizes he’s standing exactly where I was before, where the turret still thinks I’m standing now. With a frantic burst of magic, he shoves the bot away and forces it to miss hitting him, instead directing its fire into the wooden struts and supports shoring up the deck and the alcove where the bar is set up. “You really think you’ll get rid’a me that easy, babycakes?” he spits as the turret warms up again. “Kind of,” I tell him as I raise my left forehoof and aim it at the floor beneath the splicer’s hooves. I was all set to finish with my own gun the job that the bot started, but there turns out to be no need. The deck buckles and shrieks underneath the splicer’s weight, and as the demented fury in his eyes gives way to confusion, the battered and pockmarked support beams finally give way. The splicer vanishes as the deck falls out from under him, and a moment later the angry red haze in the corner of my eye winks out and the deactivated security bot drops to the ground like a rock. By the time the sawdust has settled, the room is finally silent. Now—I think—I can breathe again. My first thought is to run down and check out the bot, but the trip down takes a lot longer than I thought it would. The fight took something out of me I hadn’t really known I could lose: my legs feel hollow like I just run a marathon instead of a few dozen yards, and my lungs don’t seem to be big enough for me to catch my breath anymore. Making it down the stairs without falling on my face turns into an exercise in patience: I take a couple steps, wait for my knees to stop wobbling so badly I’m afraid they’ll break in two, take as big a breath as I can manage, and then start the process over. In this haltering, clumsy way, I eventually make it down to where Link is slowly getting to his hooves. The flow of blood from his nose seems to have stopped, and now that I can see it a little better it doesn’t look like anything was broken. “Nice plan,” he says. “Thanks for sharing it.” The edge in his voice leaves little to the imagination, but behind it I think I can hear a bit of begrudging admiration for how quickly we dealt with all the splicers. Or maybe that part is in my imagination. Either way, he’s up and ready for action, and that’s good. I’ll need him to watch my back while I’m messing around with the bot. “Coast is clear, Applejack. We’re good,” I say into the radio. My next sentence is directed at Link. “Keep an eye on the exit for me. Let’s see if I can’t get this thing fired back up.” Link’s mouth pops open as I turn away. Like a runaway train, I can feel his complaint coming a long time before it hits. “Do we really have time for that right now?” The bot is lying over by the bar, propped up off the ground by the rotor sticking out of its top. The blades are scratched and dinged up a bit, but probably still solid enough to function. “Are you still bleeding?” I ask Link as I walk towards it. “I don’t think so.” Once I reach the bot, I sit down next to it and give it a once-over. As far as I can tell from here, it’s still in working order. “Are any of the splicers in here about to get up?” Link pauses for a few seconds, which I imagine he uses to check out the collapsed deck and dumbwaiter. “No, but–” “Then we have time,” I say as I spin the bot around. Once I find a panel that looks like the one Apple Bloom tore off the turret back at the plaza, I stare at the bracer on my right hoof and concentrate. As soon as I gather my thoughts, the bracer shudders, and a flathead screwdriver to match the screws securing the panel pops out. “Besides, if I can get this to work, we won’t have to fight by ourselves if we run into more trouble. I would’ve thought you’d be happy having some extra firepower.” “That’s not what I’m worried about,” Link mutters as I pry the panel off and set it on the ground next to me. He doesn’t see the need to explain what he means by that, though, and I’m too busy examining the innards of the security bot to bother asking him. Right now, I’ve got a couple larger elephants to usher out of the room. Like how in Celestia’s name I’m supposed to make any sense of the mess of tubes and intake valves snaking above and below and all over each other inside this thing. No, no, I can do this. This is just another puzzle, and like before I’ve already got all the pieces laid out in front of me. What did Marla’s tape in the storeroom say about hacking the door controls? Step one: rearrange the MOON pipes inside the door controls so that the red light turns to green. MOON pipes. That’s what those tubes are. Applejack said everything in the city runs off that MOON stuff Twilight and Foxtail created, so that must be what powers this thing as well. I take a closer look at the intake valves and notice a little red light blinking next to one near the top left corner of the machine, as well as another one near the bottom right. I need those to be green. I need those to be connected. Lesson two: don’t let the MOON spill out or the pressure inside the pipes get too high. So all I need to do is manually switch the tubes around until the flow of MOON goes from one light to the other. If I do it fast enough and don’t let any of it spill out, the bot will reset and I’ll be able to control it. I used to play with logic puzzles like this all the time when I was a filly. This won’t take hardly any time at all. “See anything, Link?” I ask before I start off. He’s facing away from me, his gaze pointed towards the heavy metal door on our level. “No,” comes his lethargic reply. “Hurry up.” But I’m way ahead of him by that point. With a little tugging, the chunk of pipe closest to the first red light, an L-shaped one that would let the MOON flow harmlessly back into an unlit valve, has already come loose in my hooves. Replacing it with a straighter piece creates a new path that points more towards the second light, and not a moment too soon. By the time I fasten the new pipe into place, a thin, luminescent trickle of MOON has already started seeping out into the tube. Must be a security countermeasure to keep the average yokel from sticking their hooves too far into this thing. Unfortunately for this bot’s designers, I don’t think I really fit that description. I didn’t realize it until a few months after I first got it, but my cutie mark doesn’t just mean that I’m handy with a socket wrench. I’m not quite sure how to explain it, but ever since I was old enough to see over the top of a workbench, I’ve had what I can only call a sixth sense when it comes to technology. I’ve never had to read an instruction manual or look up a blueprint before I could figure out how something worked. Even when I put my dad’s watch back together, I barely touched the clockmaker’s guide I’d pulled out from his bookshelf. To me, the secret to how all the parts and pieces of a machine function and work together comes as naturally as flight does to a pegasus, or good friends do to extroverts. I reach the halfway point in seconds, my hooves mechanically moving pipe chunks around while my brain is already three steps ahead. When I’m three-quarters of the way done, I notice the sound of soft, faltering hoofsteps behind me, and soon after I can feel Link peering over my shoulder. Part of me hopes he’s still keeping an eye on the door, but I can’t help but feel proud that he’s taking such a close interest in what I’m working on. In fact, he’s practically breathing down my neck. “Geez, Link, you ever heard of breath mints?” I say as I finish, both red lights flashing green as soon as the last piece is connected. It’s kind of a joke, but also kind of not: the air wafting around my braid is rancid, like an old garbage can filled with rotting garlic. He puts his hoof on my shoulder, then presses down hard and spins me around. I feel the pain before I notice the gaping, filthy cracks in his hoof, and I notice those before my gaze lifts up to meet a pair of scummy, furious, glowing red eyes. Link doesn’t have red eyes. The mouth beneath the eyes cracks open, and a wave of nausea makes my vision go dark. An ear-splitting boom knocks me onto my back and a sudden flash of light pieces through the blackness, and when the spots finally fade from my eyes the floor around me is red and the air smells like it’s burning. Link stands in front of me, pistol raised, barrel smoking, his teeth clenched behind his cheeks and his shadow cresting the twisted, motionless hooves of the mare who I thought I’d locked in the storage closet. Who I never considered would actually use the SUN I sent her sprinting after. Whose luminescent red blood is spreading across the terrace boards, dripping through creases in the pounded-smooth slats and pooling under a hole torn straight through her head. “Don’t say a word,” Link growls, the air in my chest expanding with every syllable out of his mouth. He holsters his gun and starts walking towards the exit he’d been watching, and for a moment I’m sure I’m going to throw up. I clutch at my chest and gasp for air that won’t come, and when the harsh, grinding sound of the door opening punches through me, it finally jars the lump in my throat loose. “Link, what–” “I don’t wanna hear it, Ruby!” I’m halfway up onto my hooves when Link turns around and screams at me, and I stay stuck in that half-crouched position for so long it starts to hurt. On the outside it probably looks like I’m trying to process the sudden bite to Link’s voice and maintain my composure, but it’s really because the buzzing, weightless sensation inside my legs is starting to move up into my chest. It’s a feeling I’m intimately familiar with, partially from the exact moment I solve a tough problem or figure out a new way to look at an invention, but mostly from the appearance it always makes whenever my mother snaps at me like that. “You don’t want to hear what, exactly?” I ask, stretching out into an upright position with my hooves shaking beneath me. Link’s face tightens over his cheekbones, and he purses his lips as if he’s about to spit on me. “Oh, don’t play stupid with me, not now.” “I’m not–” “No, you’re not doing anything wrong, Ruby,” Link says before I can finish. One of his forelegs is off the ground, hanging in midair and tensing up every time he ends a sentence. “In fact, you know what? You’re never doing anything wrong. You are so... convinced that you’re invincible, that nothing in this place is going to hurt you, and I’m sick of putting my own life on the line just so I can protect you from everything that tries!” He’s sick of protecting me, he says. As if I didn’t just take out two bloodthirsty splicers with nothing but my bare hooves. As if the only reason I got ambushed now wasn’t because I had to improvise on the fly to deal with the one splicer he couldn’t handle. “I never asked you to protect me, Link,” I say with a ferocity that doesn’t surprise me at all. Link’s raised hoof twitches again, then darts towards his forehead. The look on his face makes me wonder if I’ve been speaking another language this whole time and didn’t notice. “Oh, Celestia hel... is that actually how you see this? Do you seriously think I’m only looking out for you because I think you’re weak?” “Well, who died and made you my knight in shining armor?” I shout. I want to stalk forward and say that right in his face, but I hold myself to just a single stomp of my forehoof against the terrace. “I’m a grown mare, Link, I don’t need protecting! I can take care of myself!” “You just ran into a three-on-one fight without even knowing how you were gonna get out of it!” he yells right back. “Bullshit, you can!” “Oh yeah, great. Start swearing at me now. That’ll patch things up.” For a moment, it looks like Link’s read my mind and decided to close the gap between us himself, but at the last second he swings his first step around and starts pacing back and forth in front of the door. “All right, lemme just see if I’m hearing this right,” he says, shaking his head and staring off at the ceiling. “We’re half a mile underwater in an abandoned city full of psychopaths, one of whom would’ve just done Celestia knows what to you if I hadn’t shot her in the moondamned head first...” Now he looks back at me. “And your biggest, most pressing concern right now is that I’m swearing?” This would probably be a perfect time for a witty comeback or sharp remark, but by the time I comprehend what Link’s saying, my mouth is hanging open and I’m speechless. There are so many things about this I can’t believe: that he’s actually acting like this. That I haven’t bucked him in the head for it yet. That I’ve even put up with him this long, when ever since I saved him from drowning he’s been nothing but a pain-in-the-flank spoiled-rotten socialite who thinks I’m gonna throw myself at his hooves just because he’s the son of a big steel magnet and I’m a helpless little bookworm who’s too scared of her own shadow to even curse. “You know, this is probably gonna seem a little petty, but I’m genuinely curious now: do you even know any swear words?” Link’s question bites into me like ice water over my head, and a flare of anger shoots a response back before I can so much as grit my teeth. “What does that... yes, I do! For your information!” “Really?” Link’s eyebrows shoot up, and with an exaggerated roll of his shoulders, he tilts his head towards me and gestures towards his ear. “Hit me.” “Are...” I’m shaking so badly I can barely form words, and my vision’s narrowed into a tunnel, a red-tinged pistol barrel with a big ol’ target painted right over Link’s simpering, slimy face. “Are you kidding me right now?” “Nope. Not a bit,” Link says. The hardened look in his eyes doesn’t soften. “If that’s really your problem here, then let’s just get it over with and get the hell out of here, because I’m done trying to figure out what it is I’ve done to piss you off so badly. So, not kidding at all, let’s hear ‘em.” Once again, words spill out of me without warning, without any thought involved save for a searing, all-consuming image of Link sprinting away from me with his tail between his legs. “Well, I... I know ‘hell’,” I say. Link’s eyes flick towards the ceiling, and he replies, “Literally just said that one.” “S-shit...” I say next, half in answer to his question and half from pure reflex. The word feels like sludge surging out of my throat, but I spit it out anyway. I’ll rant and cuss till I’m green in the face before I let Link get the best of me here. “Ditto,” comes Link’s immediate reply. My mouth opens and closes, and nothing comes out. The urge to run away tugs at my stomach, but at the same time weighs me down and anchors me to the floor. I don’t need him to help me. I don’t need anyone to help me. Not with proving I can handle things on my own. Not with something as stupid as this. “Ruby, this is ridiculous,” Link says. “You know and I know this isn’t why you don’t want me around, so just... for once, could you please be honest with me? Could you please just tell me wha–” “I know the F-word.” The way Link’s looking at me, I imagine he’s wondering whether I’m even worth the effort of a response. The way I’m looking back at him, I imagine he’s about to find out. “You know the F-word,” he says, in a voice that makes him sound like an tight-flanked father scolding his daughter for staying out too late. “Yeah, I do,” I snap back. “I’ll even say it. Is that it? Will that make you happy?” I’m closer to him now, a few steps or so that I don’t remember taking. Link bites his lip and shakes his head, and when a chuckle slips out of his throat it’s only the floorboard pressed up against my hoof that keeps the knife in my bracer from popping out. “You know what, Ruby? It totally fucking would,” he says. “In fact, it’d make me so fucking happy I might just keel the fuck over right here and have myself a little fucking heart attack.” “Damn it to the moon, you are such an asshole!” I scream at him. “Pretty sure that one doesn’t start with ‘F’,” he says with his lips curled into a smirk. “No, you know what, Link? You’re right. I don’t want you around. I don’t need you. In fact, I don’t even like you,” I shout over him. Some part of me knows what I’m saying, but it’s a part that’s stabbing at my heart instead of my head, instead of my brain that’s clouded up red and pounding fit to burst. “You got Chestnut killed because you wouldn’t shut up and listen to him, you’re perfectly fine with killing everything you see because you think it’s all high and noble of you to protect me, you keep staring at me every chance you get like we crash-landed into a moondamned peep show, and now you’re standing there yelling at me like I’m the one who should apologize to you!” “Then say it.” Link’s face is hard as stone. His eyes never leave mine, and staring into them feels almost like falling off a cliff. “Say you don’t want me near you. Say you ha–” “I hate you.” I don’t know how I knew that’s what he was waiting to hear. I don’t know why I never thought to say it before. I can’t even see Link anymore, an inch away from me and yet blocked off by a gaping black hole in my vision. All I know is that there’s some titanic beast trying to claw its way out of me, and saying that aloud just made it roar. So I say it again. And again. And again. “I hate you, I hate you, I can’t stand being around you, I hate you. You don’t owe me anything, I’m not some damsel in distress who needs you or anypony else to rescue me, so just drop the selfless martyr routine and leave me the hell alone.” I can’t remember who it is I’m screaming at anymore. My mother, my brother, my father, myself—bodies in a shapeless mass swirl around me, crowd into me, open a million mouths to speak with one voice that echoes with gentle firmness and funeral bells, that says I’m weak and I’m tragic and if I just sit in my room and let the grownups manage all the necessary affairs it’ll be like it never happened and it’ll be like nothing is wrong. And in the middle of it all—blossoming into view as my muscles unclench and the red haze dissolves—stands Link, his face colorless, his jaw quivering from the effort of keeping it closed, his emerald green eyes pooling up with what should be all of those things I hate and instead is none of them. For the briefest of moments, he just looks like my mother. “Fine,” he finally says. “Have it your way.” It takes me a few seconds to realize what’s happening, and by then Link is nearly back to the door again. “Where are you going?” I call after him. “Link, don’t you dare walk away from... Link!” The door screeches against its moorings as it slides open again. Link walks through it, and doesn’t turn around. “Link, get the... get the f... g-get the f-f-fu...” Link thinks I can’t take care of myself. Link thinks he has to protect me, and Link is walking away from me and leaving me behind down here because I told him he doesn’t. Because I told him I didn’t need him. Because I can’t swear. “Get the f-f-fuck back here!” I scream, but he never hears it. The door slams shut, his bushy blue tail vanishes from view, and the echo of my outburst soaks into the walls and dies away. He’s gone. I’m alone. This is what I said I wanted. So I say it again. “Fuck!” Repeating the dirty word does nothing to bring Link back. It does nothing to erase what I what I said to him, what I meant to say to him. Did I mean it? I must have. I wasn’t thinking about hurting him or making him run off when I said it, so that means I must’ve meant to say that I hated him and that I wished I’d never met him. And that means I meant to get myself stranded out here. That means some part of me is happy about this. And cursing does nothing to make that any less true, but it feels so good anyway I can’t help doing it again. And again. And again. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I need to get out of here. I need to keep moving and get back to where we’re supposed to meet Apple Bloom, where Link will surely end up anyway since he’s on the same radio channel as the rest of us. Or then again, maybe he won’t. Maybe he won’t find his way back. Maybe he’ll get lost out here or another pack of splicers will find him or a tunnel will collapse again, and he’ll be trapped and we’ll lose the tubing and he’s going to die and it’ll be all my– Instead of swearing, this time I just kick out at the security bot. The motor whines as my hoof throbs, and then with a belch of smoke and a whistle, the bot turns on. Its rotor whirs to life and chews a ridge in the terrace boards until it’s moving fast enough to lift it into the air, and once its glowing green eye zeroes in on me, it lets out another whistle and propels itself forward to hover right over my head. Its turret is aimed right at the door Link walked through. “Come on,” I growl. As fast as my exhausted legs will allow, I make my way towards the door, the bot following right behind me as happily and obediently as a little lost puppy. I don’t know for sure that this is the way I’m supposed to go, but I know it’s the only way out I can easily reach thanks to the deck collapsing in front of the other exit. I also know it’s the way Link went out. Whatever the reason, my baser instincts seem to be converging on the same path, and since residual adrenaline is the only thing keeping me alert right now, I’m not really in the mood to argue with them. The door opens out onto another glass walkway, but my heart rate’s already so high that stepping out into a veritable deathtrap again hardly does much to change it. The path splits off at a T-junction twenty yards away, and I’ve already walked thirty before I realize that I turned off to the right without even thinking, a fact that only troubles me for a moment or two before the crushing weight in my chest smothers it. I can’t stop moving. I can’t stop to think about where I’m going, because then I’ll think about where I’m coming from and then I’ll think about where I just was, and then I’ll have to start thinking about why getting exactly what I asked for makes me wish I could throw up all over myself. In any case, the route I’ve chosen is a short one, only extending a few more yards before a squat, windowless building swallows it up. The room I step into looks like someone left it out in the sun too long: the garish colors and cartoons painted on the walls have faded into depressing paisley shades, and sagging sculptures of giant candy pieces and stoic tin soldiers form a lazy arc around the entrance, as if someone had started moving them out and gave up on the job halfway through. The air is stuffy and sticks in my throat, and the sugary scent of crystallized sugar hangs over me like a blanket. There’s no sign that Link or anypony else has been through here in years, which can mean only one thing: I’ve been riding solo for a minute and a half, and I’ve already managed to get lost. My first instinct is to call up Applejack on the radio and get some directions, but my second instinct says that doing that would be more trouble than it’s worth. She’ll ask how Link’s doing and I won’t have an answer to give her, and more importantly I’ll probably just be bugging her. I don’t need her to hold my hoof for this. There’s nopony else here, and if what I’m seeing and feeling around me is anything to go by, there hasn’t been in years. Worst case, I’ve got Rover here puttering away by my side to keep me company and viciously rend the life from anyone I come across. It’s not the best circumstances I’ve ever been in, but it’s not like I’m in any real danger either. I just got turned around a bit. I can figure this out on my own. Holding my breath as much as I can—the sickly sweet scent in the air makes me nauseous, and it only gets worse as I get further inside—I navigate my way around the debris in front of the door and enter the building proper. The only other exit out of the room is right in front of me, through a heavyset pair of double doors framed by two giant candy canes and situated under a off-kilter sign with most of its letters missing: SU__EA_ SW_E_ __OP. Just like in the Mercury Mechanics lobby, two flights of stairs on either side of the doors ascend up to an upper-level mezzanine. In the back of that mezzanine, something is glowing. I climb the stairs expecting to see a window into the room behind the unreadable sign, but the only thing I find once I get up there is a huge, boxy machine about twice my height that’s bookended by two grimy plastic statues of curly-maned earth fillies in purple dresses. According to the round neon sign balanced on its top and the cursive script near its base, this thing is called a Pyrus Paradise, and the light I saw from below is coming from a little window in the center of the machine, where a rounded bottle of red liquid about the size of a milk carton sits next to a thick syringe filled with what looks like the same stuff. It’s SUN. It has to be. No other substance would glow like that, or be stored in a syringe already prepped for injection. And yet the longer I try to convince myself that’s what the bottle holds, the more I become sure that it isn’t. Even for the few seconds I held the splicers’ SUN vial back at the terrace, I could feel its raw power it contained, the vibrations in my teeth where it struggled and strained relentlessly to escape its airtight container. Nothing about the liquid in this machine reminds me of that experience. It’s not moving at all inside the bottle or the syringe, and staring into the light it gives off feels like watching the glimmer of a dying fire rather than the glare of a raging inferno. It might be SUN all the same, but it’s a processed kind, distilled and refined until it’s something a normal mare or stallion could control. On second thought, I think I might know what it is after all. “Hey, Applejack?” I say into my radio. “What do plasmids look like?” “What, before they get inside you?” Applejack says after a pause of a few moments. “Little glass jugs’a radioactive fruit punch. Pretty much like SUN, ‘cept with all the fight bucked out of it. If y’all think you found one, g’wan and bring it with you if you can, and we’ll take a look at it once y’all get back here.” I think back to breakfast at the Apples’ table that morning. Apple Bloom grabbing a fork out of midair without touching it. Applejack talking about bending Big Daddies to her will. Lightning shooting from the tips of your hooves. All that power, all those miracles of magic that an earth pony like me could never even imagine, all locked away in that bottle and that syringe. What would Link say if he was with me now? What would he think we should do with it? “Hello? Anypony home out there?” He’d think we should leave it here. He’d think it was too big to bring along with us, too dangerous to test out, too foolish to think about achieving something impossible when we were so busy already getting back to reality. He’d think I was stupid to be curious about trying it. He’d think I couldn’t handle it if I did. He’d think I was a coward. “You’re not usin’ that thing now, right?” Fuck him. There’s a little translucent port in my gun that seems built for a needle to go through it, so once I step forward and grab the plasmid from behind the window, I brace myself against the Pyrus Paradise machine and do my best to balance the syringe over that hole. Pushing it inside my foreleg is surprisingly painless—maybe the magical connection the bracer has with my nervous system did something to numb the area. Either way, the needle’s in, and I’m feeling just fine. “Ruby? Ruby, wait!” Without any hesitation, I lean forward and push the plunger down. In the time it takes the syringe to fall to the floor, every thought and memory in my head has been wiped away, replaced by one all-consuming state of being. Pain. Pain that locks up my muscles and fills them with acid, pain that slices my guts into ribbons and blows a smoking hole in my brain, pain I can’t even scream at for lack of air in my lungs and energy left in my body. I thought it had hurt to break my leg as a filly, to get crushed by a tidal wave, to nearly drown after a zeppelin crash, but this is worse. This is inconceivably worse. This is breaking and crushing and drowning all rolled into one and amplified a hundredfold. This is every part of me dying at once, rising from the ashes only to burn away again a thousand times a second. I’m not aware of my legs moving or my hooves carrying me across the floor, only of the railing as the shock of slamming into it rolls through my body on a wave of razor-sharp needles. Impossible shapes and sounds flash in my eyes and stab into my ears: pale, ghostly blue apparitions of dancing fillies and laughing colts, chasing each other across the room and squealing with glee over candy creations that rotted away years before. The room is full of them, full of ponies who can neither see nor hear me, who have no idea that I’m here and that I’m watching them and that I’m in agony and that I’m melting. Melting. Every drop of blood in my body feels like lava pulsing through my veins, and my skin feels like it’s peeling away from the heat radiating off it. Somewhere below me, Applejack is screaming at me. Somewhere in front of me, something is glowing. My hooves are glowing. My hooves are spitting out angry red sparks. My hooves are burning. As I watch with horror I have no mouth to express, my hooves crack apart and burst into flame. The pressure in my gut intensifies, then without warning vanishes. I’m aware of losing my balance, of air rushing past my ears, of the ground shooting up towards my face, and then stars explode in my eyes and every bone in my body shatters into dust. The light is gone. The fire is going out. I’m dying. I’m alive. I stare up at the railing, and the ghosts are quiet. I close my eyes, and the silence rushes in.