When Starlight was a little girl, she loved trees. She would walk through the park by her house everyday and run her hooves over the bark, saying their names under her breath. They towered above her during the long, hot summers on the coast of Teton, and in the bitterly cold winters she could lean against them while the other children played and pushed each other in the snow.
Her mother considered her strange, to be fascinated with trees like they were her friends. The older mare constantly set Starlight up on playdates and tried to force her into sports or dancing to keep her from being an outcast, but it was no use. It had never been any use.
What her parents didn’t know was that Starlight’s fascination with nature’s great beasts went far beyond just simply knowing them: she wanted to climb one. She had seen how the little squirrels in the park did it, and wondered how she could. With four awkward hooves, climbing was usually out of a pony’s abilities, but she wanted to anyway.
For an entire summer, she looked all around the massive park in the center of Gracia for a perfect candidate. It was almost August when she found one that she thought was perfect: a massive oak with so many branches that they practically created a staircase up to the top of the tree.
She tried climbing it several times the day she found it, but it wasn’t until her last try that she really got anywhere. Starlight made it halfway up the tall, tall tree before one of her legs slipped, leaving her dangling on one branch. Without any possibility of pulling herself back up, she eventually slipped and fell.
It was hours before they found her. She had laid on the ground, broken, only able to look up at the tree that had betrayed her. When her father next spoke to her, he had only told her: “You took on more than you could, and found your limit. Try to remember that next time.”
She had stopped loving trees from that day on.
A stark white spinner flew low over a forest that grew in the foothills of the last mountain range before the wide desert beyond. The winds were heavy around the tall peaks, and buffeted the metal doors of the spinner hard enough that Midnight looked like she would throw up. Starlight sat across from her, and spent most of the ride regretting her choice of a seat.
To distract herself, she looked outside the window to her right, and watched the carpet of green pass down below them. Her mind drifted back to her obsession with trees as a little filly, and the scars she still bore from the fall. She wondered what her younger self would have thought of the vast forests that decorated the countryside of Teton that, until that very moment, she had never glimpsed before.
Those were better days, Starlight thought. Back when she had been optimist and thought the world full of wonder. Now, she only had to look up and across the back compartment of the spinner to see why that wasn’t true. Though he tried to not make contact with her, the very presence of her father was enough to take the spirit out of her.
When he had appeared at the hospital, she had held a vain hope that, somehow, he had come to save her. Instead, he had told her to cooperate with the nice ponies in black and not to struggle too much. A burning coal of anger rested in the pit of her stomach, which she stoked the flames on every time she remembered. It had been one thing to be captured, but another for her father to do the deed.
Staten looked almost as glum as her. He hadn’t said a word since they had set off from Amperdam, only kept to himself and stared at the floor of the spinner. Starlight wanted to say something to him, but she didn’t rightly know how to cheer him up. They had lost. Some pony in a white coat had clamped a steel device onto her horn, and she’d overheard that she would be examined once they reached Sundown. There was little doubt in Starlight’s mind that she would be examined like a lab rat for the rest of her life.
One of her hooves strayed to the lever keeping the steel door of the spinner shut. She wondered if she could open it and jump out before they stopped her. She had always wanted to fly, even if it were for a few brief moments. Not to mention that hitting the trees would just mean they would be finishing up what they had already started.
Starlight tried pushing on the lever, but it wouldn’t budge. She pouted to herself, her plans ruined. Across from her, Midnight looked at her with a knowing in her eyes and, Starlight thought, a little too much pity than she was comfortable with.
“We’ll be crossing the Vale of Arnin soon,” her father said. “Beyond that is the Sand Sea, and then Sundown.”
“I don’t remember asking for a geography lesson,” Starlight said.
If her father was taken aback by her attitude, he didn’t show it. Instead, he simply nodded and tapped on the door opposite from Starlight’s. “It’s going to be hectic once we land,” he said. “There will be a lot of ponies that want to meet you, Starlight. It would be best if you kept quiet.”
“Because you know that I’m really good at that.”
“It’s for your own good, Starlight. I’m just trying to help.”
She opened her mouth to reply, to tell him how wrong she was, but she let it go. He wasn’t worth it, she thought. Not anymore. The statue that she had carved into her brain of a kind and caring father had been toppled in a few short minutes the day before, and now she couldn’t care any less what happened to him.
In her mind, she was probably supposed to cry or to shake or any other “ladylike” activities, but instead all she could think to do was stare bitterly at her father and bide her time. Because, to her, he wasn’t her father. The Noctilucent that sat so close to her inside the spinner was a shadow of the stallion he had once been, without all the bravery and kindness that Starlight had once taken for granted.
The world came into focus, like a fog had been washed from her mind. She wasn’t on the run anymore. No, the enemy had met her and taken her, and that made things all easier. She would let them take her to Sundown, let them tell her what exactly it was that her horn could do, and then she would stop them all.
Starlight wasn’t sure what the IS was doing, but whatever it was, she wasn’t going to let them succeed.
Outside of Amperdam, the countryside turned to tall, proud trees and sharp hills. The road was curvy and the RV had a hard time taking some of the corners. Red trusted the old vehicle and his own driving, but it was clear that Sunrise lacked his faith. The stallion clung to his seat—despite already being double-buckled into it—like it was a life raft in a tumultuous ocean. Red swore that, somehow, his green coat had gotten greener when they took one particular corner.
Most of the towns up in the region were small and built around forts that had guarded the border back when Teton had stopped at Serenity Valley. But, once the country moved on, enveloping former Occitan territory until they reached the sea, the forts had most been abandoned and the areas left to mining settlements and a few casinos.
Red hated driving through the area. The locals were superstitious, upstanding, and fiercely loyal to the law. Taking illegal cargo through it made him feel like he had painted a large target on his back saying: “Arrest Me!”
“We need to stop soon,” Sunrise said, speaking up for the first time since he had started to look sick.
“I told you, the restroom in the back works just fine,” Red said. “If you’re really going to puke, just try to get it all in the bowl.”
“No, not for that reason.”
“Then what in Adana’s name do we need to stop for?”
Sunrise sighed. “Red, I know this is a suicide mission, but I still want to play it smart. Right now, we’re three hundred petras from Sundown with no plan, no backup, and no idea what’s waiting for us. We need information. First, a newspaper. I’m sure the gas stations around here will have one from out west.”
“You really think a newspaper can tell us anything?” Red shook his head. “They’re just going to say whatever the IS wants them to say. We could guess and probably be closer to the truth.”
“It’s what they don’t say. You have to read between the lines, Red. This is why you never got any of the important trips.”
There was just enough truth in that to keep Red from hitting Sunrise, but only just. It wasn’t his fault. He still remembered all the lessons his father had taught him, about being blunt and upfront with ponies. It was a good way to catch enemies off guard, but, much to his chagrin, he usually couldn’t see much farther past his own nose.
Directly above them, the sun burned down on them like it was angry at them for busting up its church. Red would apologize if he could, though he was not sure what he would say, or if Solaris was even real. If he admitted it to himself, Red wasn’t quite sure what he believed in.
The Odyssey rounded a bend in the road and came upon a service station built more or less into the side of the mountain. It was little more than a squat building barely larger than the Odyssey herself and two gas pumps, but it was the most they had seen in hours.
Red didn’t like Sunrise’s plan, but he had to admit they would need gas if they wanted to get over the mountains without hoofing it. He steered the RV beside one of the gas pumps and turned off the engine.
“Alright,” he said, “you stay here and get the fuel while I go in and grab a newspaper . . . and some snacks.”
“But why me?”
“Uh, maybe those wings of yours have something to do with it, flyboy.”
Sunrise looked at his back and hung his head. “Right.”
Red swung himself out of his seat and through the door to the concrete outside. The air felt wet so high up in the mountains, and he could feel a bead of sweat forming on his brow. “I thought mountains were supposed to be cold,” he muttered to himself as he stalked over to the convenience store.
A bell chimed wearily above his head. The little store was more like a large bathroom with snacks, but he didn’t mind. Spending most of his life on the road, any place with food and gas was good enough for him.
There was a stack of newspapers on a rack near the door, and Red began pulling them out. Most of them were from Amperdam, Skyhall, or Gracia. Even after so many years, the ponies out in the mountains considered themselves easterners and not westerners, thought Red.
He found a newspaper from Sundown on the floor next to the rack. To his relief, the date was from the day before. He smiled and went to the back of the store to look for some snacks. That, and he admitted, some drinks that wouldn’t make him drunk, but wouldn’t keep him too sober.
The air in the store had been stale when Red walked in, so when a scent of fear began to fill it, he too noticed. He spun around, though with a six pack of drinks in his teeth, he imagined he didn’t look very frightening.
“I don’t know why you came here, but you’re going to regret it,” the grizzled old shopkeeper said. He had a shotgun cocked in his hooves, and the barrel looked about a mile wide from where Red was standing. His hope that it wasn’t loaded was cut short when the shopkeeper cocked the gun. “The police are on their way, so why don’t you just stay where you are and no one gets hurt.”
Red tried to back up, but the gun only swung up to his head, and the old stallion let his hoof glide down toward the firing lever. Stallions like him were dangerous. Most usually, they were crazy or out for some kind of perverted justice, which made them meaner than any cop or IS agent Red had ever run into.
I swear, if I end this way, in a freaking gas station . . .
His mind groped for a plan, for some way out. He didn’t come up with anything. The gun had a clear line of fire against him, and the only things around him were shelves full of snacks that provided no cover and glass cases for drinks all the way at the back of the store. Any attempt to run and he would be gunned down.
“Well, what’s it going to be, colt? Are you going to submit or just stand there looking down the barrel of Ol’ Crowd Control here?”
“I—” His anger began to flare. “You know what, you old—”
Before said geezer could reply to the insult boiling in Red’s mouth, the window to the parking lot burst inward, showering them both with bits of glass. Red received a dozen cuts for his trouble before he threw himself to the ground and hid behind a rack of candy.
He stood back up in time to see Sunrise leap through the hole he had created, cradling Red’s heaviest weapon in the RV: a portable machine gun with a mountable bipod and belt of bullets wrapped around one of his hooves.
The shopkeeper stared up at him, but it wasn’t the gun that had him speechless. Sunrise had spread his wings out behind him to their full length. The sunlight caught them and shone through the feathers, bathing Sunrise in an orange glow.
“Wh-What are you?” the old stallion stammered.
“I am an angel of Adana, the Lord your God,” spoke Sunrise in a booming voice. “You have disturbed one of my Lord’s divine servants and threatened his life. What say you?”
“I, I—”
“Speak clear or never again!” Sunrise raised the bulky gun, and Red wondered if he really meant to shoot.
The shopkeeper threw himself at Sunrise’s hooves, his nose pressed against the ground. “Oh, please forgive me, Lord!” he squealed. “I did not know he was yours, I only thought he was a criminal! I swear, he can go, he can go!”
Sunrise beckoned to him, and Red didn’t need to be told twice. He stepped over the cowering form of the shopkeeper to get to the door. He stopped in the doorway and turned back, but nothing came to mind that he could say. Instead, he shook his head and followed Sunrise to the Odyssey.
“Really? An angel of Adana?” he asked when they were back inside.
“Hey, I went with what came to mind.” Sunrise unloaded the machine gun and put it away in a secret shelf beneath the kitchen counter inside the RV. Red grimaced to see his favorite hiding space uncovered. “Besides, it was nice to use these wings for something.”
“You could have just used the gun.”
“Yeah, but where’s the fun in that?”
Red shook his head and got into the driver’s seat. Almost as an afterthought, he tossed the newspaper he had been clutching to Sunrise. “Here, I hope that’s worth it.”
“Well, we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?”
Sunrise snapped the newspaper open. Red let him read while he steered the Odyssey back onto the road and away from that gas station as fast as he could. The police around these parts were few and far in between, and for a somepony like him would be calling for reinforcements from Amperdam, so he figured he had an hour to get out of the mountains before the cops could catch him.
He pressed his hoof to the accelerator and the RV leapt into gear around him. Trees blurred past him the mountains eclipsed the sun as they grew in front of him. The road appeared to be no more than a thin line along the craggy side of the peaks, and the Odyssey less than that.
If Sunrise noticed, he didn’t make any mention of it. His eyes pored over every ink-stained word, and the crackle of the thin papers was beginning to drive Red nuts.
“You find anything?” he asked warily.
“Nothing,” Sunrise said.
“Well great, then that was the most pointless sidetrack ever.”
“No, no, I mean nothing.” He shook his head. “There isn’t a single thing that mentions increased IS activity, strange sights, even the aftermath of the earthquake. This could have come from a year ago if not for the date printed at the top of the page.”
“So what? Maybe they just haven’t noticed it.”
Sunrise glared at Red. “Really? You think they wouldn’t have noticed IS spinners everywhere and the whole, you know, earthquake?” He discarded the newspaper behind him, and let it fall to the floor. “What this tells us is that things are worse than they were. Somepony’s covering up any news coming out of the city, and we’re running smack dab into the middle of it.”
Red turned that over in his mind. He had expected danger, of course, but if the IS were running a scam operation on an entire city, it was going to be a lot more than two ponies and an RV could handle. Every sane instinct he had told him to turn back, but instead he kept turning sharp corners on the mountain road.
Starlight was going to be in Sundown too, and he would be damned if he let her walk into that crap without any backup. He turned on the radio and let the music soothe him through the mountain pass.
I’m just a runnin’ down the road, tryin’ to loosen my load, I got seven women on my mind . . .”
The spinner swept over mountain crags and winding valleys on the edge of the desert. The air grew noticeably more arid, and Starlight had to lick her lips to keep from drying out. Midnight snored in her seat, and sleep had claimed Staten as well, who leaned on his friend. The wind had thankfully died over the Vale of Arnin, and hadn’t returned besides the occasional gust.
As far as Starlight could tell, the only ponies awake were the pilot, her, and her father. She watched him when she wasn’t pretending not to. He looked pained some of the time, but others he just stared at the door leading to the cockpit like she wasn’t even there. Starlight wondered where her mother was. She’d asked once, but Noctilucent had brushed the question off without so much as a grunt for an answer.
She didn’t think her mother was dead, though. Surely if she was, her father wouldn’t have been trying to capture her. He must have only been doing this because he had no choice, right? That sounded good in her head. Of course, a little niggling doubt reminded her that he could have led the IS on a wild goose chase if he had wanted to keep her safe.
The door to the cockpit slid open, and a black-and-gray spotted stallion stuck his head inside. He bobbed his head at Noctilucent knowingly. “We’ll be coming up on the city soon,” he said. “We should be landing in twenty minutes.”
Starlight slumped in her seat. She had hoped against hope for some last minute rescue or change from her father, but he only buckled himself into his seat and looked out his window. Starlight did the same with a defeated sigh. Her side of the spinner would come toward the city first, she knew, judging from the landscape below her. She remembered her father’s old atlases, and studying the desert city. It had seemed like a dream back then, to reach the city. Now that she was here, there was nothing more she wanted than to go back to Gracia and pretend nothing had ever happened.
A mesa passed below them, and then suddenly there it was: Sundown. Spires of glass and concrete rising from the desert floor and shimmering with heat. It was so large, she thought, much more than in any book. It was hard to believe anything could grow out in the desert, let alone a big city.
She was still looking at it when the spinner began to shake. Gently at first, then wildly with warning lights flashing and alarms beeping. They spun and jerked in the air like they were a rag doll. She could hear the pilot shouting in the cockpit, and her own voice was soon added to the cacophony.
Midnight and Staten were awake and yelling along with her, but her father was saying nothing. When she looked at him, he had been knocked unconscious. At least, she hoped that’s all it was.
Starlight managed to get one last look at Sundown outside her window as the spinner plunged toward the ground right outside the city. It was shimmering, but not with desert heat. It was like there was a field of energy surrounding the city, pulsating with life as much as the beating of a heart. And in the sky, above the city, was a spinning cluster of gold.
Before she could think what it meant, the vehicle’s nose struck the ground, the spinner turned end over end, and everything went black.