Collaborators

Chapters

One
Two
Three
Four
Five

One

"So." Ahuizotl's grin split his face like a machete slash across a watermelon. "Once again, Daring Do, it comes down to you, and it comes down to me." He patted the papers on the table between us. "And my cease and desist order, of course."

I stared out through A. K. Yearling's glasses, and even though I was in my publisher's office—bigger than my whole house but still somehow cozy, the floors carpeted, the walls book-lined, the view of the Manehattan skyline breathtaking—the air suddenly seemed hotter and stickier than any jungle I'd ever slogged through as Daring Do. Wearing the bonnet and shawl I always donned for these trips into the civilized parts of the world didn't help, either.

"No games, Ahuizotl," I said, well aware of the two earth pony stallions shifting nervously beside me: Red Pencil, the editor I'd worked with since the beginning of my writing career, and Dust Jacket, president and publisher of Random Horse Books. At the end of the table sat a frowning unicorn stallion in a suit and tie, a briefcase open in front of him, but I'd never seen him before. I'd only been expecting to meet Jacket and Red for our annual luncheon celebrating the success of the series, but to find two strange unicorns and Daring's arch-nemesis here as well?

Focusing completely on Ahuizotl again, I managed to squeeze the words past my gritted teeth: "What's this all about?"

Ahuizotl leaned back in his chair and waved his tail hand at the pony sharing his side of the table. "I shall allow my lawyer to explain."

"Codicil's the name, Ms. Yearling," the unicorn said. "With the firm of Render, Trocar, and Wheedle." Yellowish light wavered from his horn and pushed a manila folder toward me. "This is a copy of all the relevant paperwork. You might want to have your legal representative look it over, but I'll be happy to summarize." The flash of his thin smile made me think of a dagger unsheathing. "You are to cease and desist immediately from all activity related to the Daring Do series until such time as my client's suit against you has been settled."

Daring's first impulse would've been to buck the folder back into his smug little face, but I was being A. K. Yearling right now. So instead, I turned to my publisher and asked, "Jacket? What's this all about?"

His gray eyes not meeting mine, Dust Jacket cleared his throat. "I'm sorry, Kay," he started.

But a louder clearing of throat interrupted him. "Forgive me, Ms. Yearling," the unicorn at the end of the table said. "I'm First Part, head of the legal affairs department here at Random Horse. I've advised Mr. Jacket to have no communications with you at all until such time as we've considered whether we'll be bringing a suit of our own against you."

"What?" I cried out, leaping to my hooves.

"For breach of contract." First Part took a folder from his briefcase and opened it as calmly as if he hadn't just figuratively stabbed me in the back. "Specifically article three, section one of your publishing agreement with us." He adjusted his glasses along his muzzle and read the clause aloud: "'To the best of the Author's knowledge, said Work contains no material which is libelous and infringes no right of privacy.'" Looking up, he wrinkled his brow. "Imagine our shock, Ms. Yearling, when we learned that the Ahuizotl you write about so frequently is in fact a real person and not a product of your imagination."

A chill rattled me this time, and my ears folded at Ahuizotl's snicker. "I am quite real, I assure you, Mr. Part." I looked over at the monster, smiling broadly from his perch on the cushion of a chair several sizes too small for him. "And imagine my own shock when a chance trip to a book store yesterday during my first visit to your fair city led me to discover the horrible and libelous things 'Ms. Yearling'—" I could hear the quotes he put around the name. "—has been writing about me for all these years."

"Horrible? Libelous?" As much as the Kay part of me wanted to remain professional, I couldn't keep from yelling. "If anything, I downplayed your crimes! I had to, or the stories never would've passed muster for a young adult readership!"

"Crimes?" His smile vanished. "Show me a single Equestrian court of law where I've been convicted of anything! Detail for me what charges have ever even been brought against me!"

I picked the first thing that sprang from Daring's memories. "Three years ago last August!" I pointed a shaking hoof at Dust Jacket's picture window. "Not two blocks north of here! You and your minions broke into the Manehattan Natural History Museum and stole—!"

"Lies!" Ahuizotl barked. "The police never found enough evidence to make any arrests in that case! It's still listed as unsolved unless I'm greatly mistaken!"

"Phillydelphia, then! The home of the wealthy industrialist Countertops was robbed of—!"

"Again, 'Ms. Yearling,' insufficient evidence led to no charges being filed against anypony in that particular instance."

About to rattle off another, I stopped. For the first time, it occurred to me that no official action had ever resulted from any of Ahuizotl's various capers. "Well, then, what about the destruction of the Hippodrome in—?"

"I can hardly be blamed for the collapse of a three thousand year old ruin when an earthquake strikes!"

"You caused the earthquake!"

"I?" He pressed the fingers of his right hand to his chest. "Do I look like a unicorn? Or are you claiming now that I possess some sort of magical powers?"

It was all I could do to restrain the Daring Do in me from leaping across the table and smacking him. "You had the Amulet of Enceladus! You could've made every rock in that valley start dancing if you'd wanted to!"

He spread his arms. "And where is this amulet now? Produce it as evidence, 'Ms. A. K. Yearling,' and bring the full power of the law against me!"

I just glared at him. He knew as well as I did that Daring had shattered the amulet before kicking its pieces into Titans' Gorge.

"No?" His smile was back. "Of course not. For there was no Amulet of Enceladus, no Griffon's Goblet, no Rings of Scorchero. Nor am I the villain you paint me to be in your series of potboiler novels." He folded his arms. "After all, if I were truly as much of a threat to Equestria as you seem to think me, surely one or another of your four princesses would step in as they did against Discord or Tirek. Surely they would deal with me once and for all rather than allow the same insignificant little pony to continue failing and flailing against me. Would they not?"

Had I been facing him out in the wild, I would've happily let Daring answer him the way he deserved. But in Kay's domain, all I could do was glare at him some more.

"No." He said it more quietly this time, but I could hear the malice in his voice. "For I am but a private citizen of foreign birth upon whom some hack novelist has focused her irrational fears and hatreds for what has apparently been more than a decade. And I will not continue being libeled for the sake of this company's bottom line."

First Part cleared his throat again. "As I was explaining to your counsel, Mr. Ahuizotl, the representations clause of Ms. Yearling's contract clearly indemnifies Random Horse from any liability in this case."

"And yet?" Ahuizotl pointed his toothy snout at the lawyer. "I will sue you for damages: every last bit you've made despoiling my good name to line your pockets."

I sat forward. There was the Ahuizotl Daring knew, laying out his threats before getting to the point. "Or what, Ahuizotl?" I asked. "What is it you really want out of all this?"

His grin got even toothier. "I want A. K. Yearling to disappear. Forever."

That made me blink. The Kay part of me had been expecting him to spit out a number with six or seven zeroes attached to the end of it. "Disappear?" I managed not to stammer.

"Completely." He was getting that glint in his eye, the glint I recognized from all the times Daring had seen him perched atop some ancient plinth or other in an attempt to summon whatever fiendish power he was after. "I want her every title dropped from Random Horse's catalog. I want all the library copies gathered up and burned. I want the printing plates melted to slag and dumped into the sea!" He leaped onto his hind legs, all three of his hands bunching into fists, the tips of his ears nearly brushing the ceiling. "I want her name erased, her typewriter smashed, and legally-binding contracts formulated that will forbid this foul pony—" He crooked a finger out to point directly at me. "—from ever besmirching my reputation again!"

Red, Jacket, First Part, and Codicil were quivering, their eyes rimmed with white, but I didn't spare them more than a glance. A tingle had started at the base of my spine, the same tingle I got every time Ahuizotl tried to kill Daring. "Wow," I said with a grin. "I'm flattered."

Ahuizotl's face twitched. "You're finished!" he shouted. "That's what you are!"

Shaking my head slowly, I made a clicking noise with my tongue. "You've finally realized that you'll never beat Daring Do. So you're trying to beat A. K. Yearling instead."

"Trying?" He flung an arm out. "Look around! Your ostensible allies have turned upon you! This false veneer you have wrapped yourself in has shattered irreparably! Your livelihood, the source of the wherewithal you need to support your adventuresome meddling, is draining away around you never to return!" His chest heaved, and his snout curled into an absolute ripsaw of a smile. "This is the end, Daring Do. You've interfered with my plans for the last time."

"Okay." I crossed my front legs over the table. After more than a decade, the Daring Do in me knew pretty well what made Ahuizotl tick. This sort of revenge thing was one of his big buttons, sure, but he had plenty of others. I just needed to bring out Kay's negotiating skills and start pressing those buttons. "Here's my counter-offer."

Two

Even with all the times Daring had been ambushed there, beaten and robbed and left for dead, my cabin in the woods was the only place that could really make the tightness in my stomach relax. Here, I didn't have to worry about being Daring Do or A. K. Yearling. Here, I could just be quiet little me.

"That?" Ahuizotl sputtered. "That's a hovel, not a home!"

"It's where the magic happens." I kept my voice light, but the sight of the cabin this time wasn't relaxing my stomach at all. "Come on in, and we can get started." Grateful for the chance to finally stretch my wings, I flapped over to the front porch, pushed the door open, and gestured with a hoof for him to precede me.

Sniffing the air, he did, and I frowned at his back. Not my best idea, offering to let him co-write the next book.

In my defense, the Kay in me had never expected him to accept. I'd purposefully started with that absurd proposition and had expected to haggle with him till we reached something that appealed to the trifecta of his vanity, his greed, and his lust for power: a cut of all future earnings from the series, for instance, and a public apology where A. K. Yearling admitted her wrongdoing and announced how sorry she was for tarnishing his sterling character. Give him a little speech and some money, I'd thought, all very simple and meaningless, and I could head back home to write without having to worry about his ugly mug till the next time Daring foiled one of his stupid schemes.

But the look that had come over that ugly mug when I'd suggested that he drop his legal claims in exchange for collaborating with me on the upcoming Daring Do novel, the way his long, tooth-filled jaw had dropped and his little, beady eyes had lit up, I'd suddenly felt too cold and too warm at the same time. "Yes," he'd said, his voice deep and rumbling. "My name and likeness beside yours on the cover." He'd slapped the table, Red and Jacket and the other ponies jumping as the crack echoed around the room. "We have a deal!"

The two lawyers had clearly been unhappy, but they'd still drawn up the contract there and then. I'd set the Kay part of my brain to glancing through the usual boilerplate but had slowed down to read the new language for divvying up the profits and the credit and all. My insistence on a 'no pets' clause had come close to sinking the deal, but the Daring Do in me had been adamant: this whole situation stank enough without adding Ahuizotl's herd of cats to the mix.

With a phony smile, then, I'd signed the copy I'd been examining and had passed it over to him. Always the supercilious egomaniac, he'd signed all three copies without bothering to read them, but the way his smile hadn't seemed phony at all had rustled the fine hairs along the base of my mane. Traveling north by train over the next three days with the big lummox in the compartment next door, I'd found more and more doubts cropping up. He'd agreed to this so readily, I couldn't help but wonder what he was up to.

As with most of Ahuizotl's schemes, though, I was pretty sure the easiest way to get to the center was to fall in and then let Daring find a way out. That was how it always worked, after all. So we'd gotten off the train at Lone Pine and had walked from there to the cabin: almost two hours on hoof without a word passing between us.

"Do you ever dust?" Ahuizotl was asking when I followed him inside, one finger of his tail hand clearing a track along the top of my desk.

"I've got better things to do." A quick glance around the room showed that none of the tripwires had gotten sprung while I'd been away, so nothing had likely been stolen.

Of course, the creature responsible for most of the thefts I'd experienced over the years was currently sitting and blinking at my writing desk. "I have never understood," he announced, that overly-theatrical voice of his filling the air like molten wax oozing into a candle mold, "how these typewriting mechanisms you ponies employ can possibly function."

"They're magic." A shake of my head dislodged Kay's bonnet; I caught it in my teeth and tossed it across the room to its hook beside the door. "You think of the letter you want, push down the proper lever, and it gets printed onto the paper. The left lever does the first half of the alphabet, the right lever does the second half, and for a capital letter, you push and hold down the opposite lever first. For punctuation, you—"

"Cease!" His ears had folded practically flat against his long, narrow head. "I shall allow you the honor of recording my immortal words for posterity, then."

I couldn't help laughing at that. "The way most pony magic ends up exploding in your face, yeah, that's probably a good idea."

He scowled, and I did the same sort of flip and fling with Kay's shawl to snag it on the coat rack. "Besides," I went on, "we've got a lot of work to do before we start any typing." I set Kay's glasses on the desk and trotted toward the kitchen door. "You want anything to drink? I've got water, cider, iced tea, or I can put the kettle on if you like."

"Drink?" His shout bounced around the walls. "We stand upon the precipice of a literary masterpiece, and you prattle on about beverages?"

With a sigh, I kept trotting. Amateurs... "Fine, then." I pulled the icebox open, grabbed the jug of iced tea, and set it on the counter. "You got a plot in mind?"

"Of course!" He squeezed through the doorway, a giant smile on his face. "This shall be the book in which—!"

"Ahuizotl beats Daring Do, right?" I shook my head and let the Kay part of me rise to the fore. "Dust Jacket'll never go for it no matter how many lawyers you throw at him."

He stood frozen in place for a moment, his mouth open and one finger raised. Then his jaw snapped shut, and his scowl came back. "Your publisher seemed quite spineless to me. I'm certain Codicil can frighten him into doing my bidding once again."

Flapping up to the high cupboards, I took out a flower vase, one big enough to fit around that snout of his. "You'd be surprised how cut-throat Jacket can be when profits come into the picture. And a book where Daring Do gets beaten? That won't just lose him money; that'll lose the series some fans." I filled the vase with iced tea and pointed a hoof at it. "This stuff's pretty strong, so let me know if you need more sugar or anything."

His snort puffed against the back of my neck, but the gentle airflow over my wings told me he wasn't leaping for me. "Your readers fear being challenged, do they?"

"It's a fine line." Grabbing a normal-sized glass, I glanced along the counter to see his tail hand wrapping around the vase. "In a series like mine, you want to push things just a little with each book, show the audience something that's new enough to fit in with their own ideas about the characters but not so shattering that they feel like you've blown all the stuff they love to smithereens."

He grunted this time, squatting on a stool at the table, an oily but thoughtful look sliding across his face. "As in book four, for instance," he said, tapping a finger against the vase. "Introducing Compass Rose allowed you to shift perspectives ever so slightly, giving new readers a way into the story while shaking the series dynamic up a bit for the old readers."

I almost dropped my glass. "You said in Jacket's office that you only found out about the books last week."

His ears folded again, his cheeks darkening with an unmistakable blush. "Well, now!" I gave a toothy smile of my own, all kinds of things coming clear. Gliding over to the table with my glass, I settled onto a stool across from him. "You're a fan, aren't you, Ahuizotl?"

Swigging a gulp of his iced tea, Ahuizotl grimaced and reached for the sugar bowl. "That fool Caballeron brought me the first book ten years ago while I was recovering from the burns I suffered during our encounter at Mount Salamander. I think he expected that I would tear it to shreds in rage, so to spite him, I read the whole thing from cover to cover. Although I found the characterizations laughable and the writing pedestrian, my featured role in the proceedings made the experience not entirely unpleasant." He dumped about half the bowl into his drink and began stirring it with a finger. "You treated me with more fairness than I would have expected, all things considered, but still, having finished the book, I became even more determined to destroy you and everything you stood for."

Wariness tensed my muscles, but I was sure it didn't show. I've had plenty of practice hiding my true reactions, after all. "You always know how to make a girl feel special, Ahuizotl."

He dabbed his finger against a napkin. "As you continued ruining my plans, I continued going over your novels as sort of 'after action reports.'" Sipping from his glass, he smacked his lips and drained it dry. "Finally, it occurred to me that I could strike at you using this art of yours as a weapon, upending your life, then finishing you off while you reeled in confusion." He set the glass down. "But when you offered this collaboration, I felt that it would prove much more satisfying to force you into plotting your own demise, as it were." His mouth went sideways. "Failing that, however, perhaps I can console myself with the cartload of money I'll be making from this partnership."

Slowly and carefully, I took a mouthful of my own tea, cold and bitter and just the way I liked it. "And there's our plot."

His brow wrinkled. "A cartload of money?"

"A partnership." Pushing both the action-oriented Daring Do and the business-focused A. K. Yearling completely aside, I rolled the idea around in my mind and liked the way it fit. "Daring and Ahuizotl are forced to team up against a bigger enemy that's threatening them both. That way, you get a notch in the win column, and I still don't get any notches in the lose column."

He arched an eyebrow. "A bit of a cliché, isn't it?"

I shrugged. "That's how things get to be clichés, pal: they work."

Three

III

"It'll never work," I told him.

"Ha!" Ahuizotl was clinging to one of the two-story tall pyramids he'd put together behind the house using nothing but firewood and rope from the shed. "Detail for me how many death traps you have ever built!"

"A valid point." I had to smile. "But I've still managed to dismantle every one I've ever come across."

He scowled. "You will see, Daring Do! This will be the perfect scene with which to end the third of our novel's five acts!" His tail hand began lashing more rope to one side of the thing.

Standing on the back porch, I shook my head. The past month and a half had been, well, fun for want of a better word. The most fun I'd had as myself in decades. Because yes, I loved venturing forth into the wild as Daring Do and living the civilized life as A. K. Yearling, but holing up in this cabin alone with my typewriter, that was what made me who I really was.

And yet? Having Ahuizotl curled up under the nest of blankets he'd made for himself in the spare room downstairs kept my nerves humming the way they only did when I was trying to untangle some ancient cipher or evading fiendish cultists bent on Daring Do's destruction. A. K. Yearling got to sleep in a familiar bed every night, got to eat three meals a day at the kitchen table, and got to engage in hours of conversation with a bombastic yet erudite houseguest. And working on a completely fictional adventure with one of the few other creatures in the world who knew what a true adventure was like?

It was scratching all my various itches at the same time and in ways that they'd never been scratched before.

We'd made good progress, too: hashing out plot points; arguing over the outline; scrawling thoughts and ideas and bits of dialogue on pieces of scrap paper that we then arranged and rearranged by pinning them to a section of the living room carpet. I did the actual typing—the machine wouldn't respond to Ahuizotl's touch at all, it turned out—but I recited the lines aloud from our notes as I typed them so he could shout his corrections from where he paced back and forth in the room behind me.

Was he annoying? Undoubtedly: the Daring Do in me had come close to exchanging haymakers with him on more than one occasion. But as I'd learned from Rainbow Dash and her friends last year, working alone wasn't the only way to work. And Ahuizotl had a gift for language that kept me grinning while I typed. A couple of times, I'd even almost asked him to call me 'Cricket,' the name I'd grown up with and hadn't heard spoken aloud since the horrible events that had sent me running off to reinvent myself as a pony who wasn't always cringing and weeping and—

"Behold!" the trombone blare of his voice announced, and I shook myself back to the present; he'd added what looked like octopus arms of rope to the tops of his two firewood pyramids. "This is the trap Ahuizotl will set for Daring Do amidst the bones of the ancient Land Leviathan!"

"Really." I stepped down from the porch. "Flick a match at it, and the whole thing'll go up like a torch, I'd say."

He gave a snort. "Exercise your paltry imagination if you can, Daring Do! The complex itself would be four times this size and built of solid granite!" He gestured to the ropes. "The trap would be fashioned from steel cables as thick as your leg and twice as supple! But once they have wrapped themselves around our hapless heroine, there will be no escape for her!"

I pursed my lips and thought back to the scene that had started this argument just before we'd taken our lunch break. "So, this would all be desert, right?" I waved a hoof at the patchy backyard, the forest pressing in along one side. "Land Leviathan's fossilized bones are scattered for an acre in every direction, and from what Daring Do understands of the prophecy at this point in the story, all she needs to do is find the one part of the monster that hasn't turned to stone." Nodding to his structure, I settled back to sit in the grass. "Why would she bother with something as obviously suspicious-looking as a double pyramid complex if she's got all this other ground she can search?"

"For one thing, she's not an idiot!" Hanging onto the top of the left pyramid with his tail hand, he folded his arms across his chest. "One would expect Daring Do to have picked up a bit of elementary knowledge during her career as a pseudo-scientist! She would therefore know that nothing of the Leviathan's physical being could've survived all these millennia without undergoing the process of fossilization!"

"Then what—?" An answer came to me, and I cocked my head. "Wait. In the legends Daring hears back in chapter two, you made sure I put in that line about Leviathan leaving its name and thoughts written across the landscape." I couldn't help surging to my hooves as if I really were standing out in a deserted field of bones. "You're gonna tell me these pyramids are built right over Leviathan's front paws or something like that. Right where the monster would've written its last words before the curse killed it."

Ahuizotl's teeth seemed to gleam in the early afternoon sunlight. "The one part of the monster that hasn't turned to stone." He tapped the side of his head. "Its final thoughts scrawled on the spot where it breathed its last!"

Almost tasting the dry desert wind, I half-closed my eyes. "The sun would be setting behind her, and Daring would be standing on the thing's spine, these mounds of stone jutting up from the silent sands. She would turn slowly, squinting into the sunset, and look up along the spine to where the skull lies." I stomped the ground. "We'll have its arms folded under its snout so its chin is resting on its front paws! And the pyramid complex will be sitting right there at the end of its nose! She'll have no choice but to investigate!"

"Excellent!" he shouted. "And then she will fall into the trap Ahuizotl has strung for her!"

"Ha!" I started forward, my senses sharper, I was sure, than they'd ever been. "The triggers are obvious: there, there, there, and there." I pointed a hoof at what had to be pressure points on the surface of the pyramids and the wooden plaza he'd laid out between them. "The doors are suspicious, too, so she'll head for the—"

Something clicked under my hoof; I leaped to the side, but not fast enough. Ropes sprang from among the lashed-together logs and coiled themselves around my legs and barrel. They tripped me, spun me sideways, and sent me skidding across the spintery flooring to bump my nose against the base of the pyramid on the right. "Ow," I said.

"Eloquent as always." Ahuizotl's voice came from above and behind, and I managed to roll enough so I could see him climbing down and settling into a squat beside me.

My throat wanted to tighten, but I wouldn't let it. "Huh." I blew out a breath like I wasn't lying bound and helpless in my own backyard before Daring Do's arch-nemesis. "I guess maybe that would work."

"Yes," he said, and just that one word made shivers crackle down my spine. "But now, you see, we come to the crux of our act three, the mid-point of the story, if you will, the climax toward which all the action so far has been rising." He reached down and stroked a finger, warm and gentle, along the side of my head. "For Ahuizotl has had Daring Do caught in his death traps before, but he has never done the one thing he really should've done the very first time." His finger moved to rest under my chin. "He has never simply wrapped his hands around her neck and strangled her, or grabbed her firmly below the ears and snapped her skull from her spine." The pressure of his finger forced my head up till I was looking into his narrowed eyes. "This has always seemed odd to me."

I made myself give as much of a shrug as I could while surreptitiously setting the Daring Do part of me to work stretching and relaxing my hind legs to loosen the ropes. "Art imitates life, I guess. I mean, I can't very well write that Ahuizotl kills Daring Do when, like you say, he never has."

He nodded. "Then why shouldn't he do it now? Yes, I know that in our plot outline, we have him and Daring Do reach an agreement to cooperate lest the Land Leviathan return to life and in its madness destroy everything they both deem worthwhile. And yes, the resurrectionists have thwarted Ahuizotl quite thoroughly throughout the early chapters of the book. But that doesn't mean he's incapable of stopping them on his own. He might get lucky." A second finger folded down to join the first crooked under my chin. "Luck is going his way at the moment, after all. Should he not take advantage of the situation in which he suddenly finds himself?"

Breathing in and breathing out, I kept Daring Do focused on stretching, relaxing, stretching, relaxing and wouldn't let even the idea of breaking eye contact with Ahuizotl cross any part of my mind. "Well, for one thing, he's not an idiot," I said. "He knows he's gonna need a very specific sort of pony magic to see this thing through, and we've already seen in the second act of the story how that sort of magic doesn't work for him. Besides, he wouldn't trust in luck. There's so much at stake here: why would he take the chance? Neither of them can do this alone, and while the rewards if he and Daring Do pull it off will be more than substantial, well, so will the penalties if they fail." The Kay in me started recalling the punitive sections of the contract we'd signed, but no way was I going to push this little discussion out of the realm of fiction.

For a moment, he stayed as still as a stone idol half-covered with undergrowth. "All valid points," he rumbled. "But you do see his dilemma, do you not? He has her right here." The pressure increased under my chin. "Right here."

The smile I gave him then was one of Daring's best: slow and sardonic and quite thoroughly practiced. "And he'll have her there again. They both know it. It's just that right now, they've got a bigger problem to deal with. And they can only deal with it together."

Another moment quivered in the air between us. "Yes," he finally sighed, and he pulled away just as the ropes around my hind legs loosened enough to let me spring into a sitting position. But by then, he had already loped halfway across the yard. "Perhaps we could take the rest of the day off!" he called without looking back, his voice tight and growling. "I fear I'm feeling somewhat uninspired at the moment!" And he vanished into the trees.

"Okay!" A few shimmies got the rest of the ropes to slide down my upper torso and midsection. "Bright and early tomorrow morning, though! I'll do a rough draft of the scene with the pyramid tonight now that we know how it goes!"

Only the chirping of the birds and the wind in the branches answered me.

Trotting onto the porch, I pushed into the kitchen, closed the door behind me, and collapsed into a twitching pile on the floor. For two seconds—two seconds!—I'd dropped my guard, had stopped being both Daring Do and A. K. Yearling, had truly revealed myself to someone I'd imagined might be a kindred spirit. And I'd come that close to literally getting my head torn off because of it! The fear and the hatred and the anger that had fueled the creation of my two alter egos all those years ago flooded through my mind—

And just like then, I clung to the emotions, breathed them in, breathed them out, and breathed them in again. I could draw strength from them, I knew, not just to keep myself safe from the world, but also in the book. In the scene where the resurrectionists finally realize that the Land Leviathan is going to make them its first victims, for instance...

Climbing to my hooves, I wrenched open the ice box and grabbed the pitcher of tea steeping there. I needed to get writing while it was all still fresh in my mind.

Four

The next morning, Ahuizotl came creeping in the back door just as day was breaking. I was right there at the kitchen table: every time I'd closed my eyes all night, the imagined stroke of his finger along my jaw had sent me leaping to my hooves with a cry. So I'd spent the hours before dawn sucking down bad coffee and refining my notes on the pyramid scene.

I nodded to the pot on the stove, he poured half of it into his vase, and we got right back to work.

As the weeks slipped by, we kept making good progress, and when I typed the last word of the last scene one mid-morning about a month and a half after we'd performed our little scene behind the house, he slapped the carpet and shouted, "We must celebrate!"

I shook my head. "We've got a lot of revising to do yet."

"Ha! Today, I shall not be bothered by such paltry details, and neither, my dear Daring, will you!" Looking from side to side, he suddenly grabbed the table lamp from beside the sofa and started unscrewing the shade. "We have performed a nearly miraculous deed, after all!" The lampshade came loose, and he trotted over to the desk with it held aloft in his tail hand. "We have survived three months in each other's company!" Carefully he lowered the shade over the stack of pages beside the typewriter. "Tomorrow, we shall release this beast from its confinement and attempt to tame it, but today, you will fly into town and procure these items!" Seizing a blank sheet and a pencil, he did some quick scrawling and slammed the paper onto the desk. "I trust you will not find the task too daunting?"

Narrowing my eyes, I looked from his smirking face to the piece of paper. He'd written two words there: Rice and Beans. "Pinto beans, of course," he continued, "while the rice may be whatever sort they have available. Of the most vital importance is that you obtain this much of each!" He cupped his hands to indicate a vaguely pint-sized amount. "And when you return, I shall treat you to a dish the likes of which you have never tasted!"

"Uh-huh." I folded my front legs across my chest. "You come across a patch of nightshade out in the forest you want to introduce me to?"

His smirk wavered for the briefest of instants. If I hadn't gotten so used to that long, weird face of his, I doubt I would've noticed. But—

Had he looked hurt?

Like I said, though, his smirk was back almost immediately. "In my part of the world, we call that brand of nightshade a tomato. I assume you've heard of it considering you've a veritable garden of it and other such edible vegetation growing wild within the nearby woods."

I stood from the desk and made a show of stretching. "Y'know, after three months of wild grass and iced tea, I'll be happy to let you cook something." I raised a hoof. "As long as we're both eating from the same pot."

He snorted. "You should feel fortunate that I am allowing you a share of my arroz con frijoles." He started into the kitchen, his tail hand shooing me away. "Now be off with you, and let me create my salsa!"

I couldn't help smiling, and I was out the front door and spreading my wings for the half-hour flight into Lone Pine before I realized that I wasn't wearing Kay's bonnet, shawl, and glasses.

The thought froze me in place for a second, and then I scrambled back into the house. I almost even ran upstairs to slip my safari jacket and pith helmet on underneath the shawl and bonnet—I'd had both ensembles specially made to fit together that way—but I stopped at the desk, my mouth open and reaching for the glasses.

What was it Ahuizotl had said a minute ago? That we'd just survived three months together?

And the thing was: it hadn't been Daring Do who'd done that, and it hadn't been A. K. Yearling, either. Yes, I'd called upon the skills I'd learned as both of them, but for the most part—

For the most part, it had just been me.

So did I need to go all A. K. Yearling just to fly into town and visit Vendor's grocery store?

The reaction in my gut was immediate. I mean, I was going out! Of course I needed to put on my disguise! Look what had happened when I'd been myself with Ahuizotl! He'd nearly killed me!

Except it had been Daring Do he'd wanted to kill, hadn't it? Me, he'd just spent a whole quarter of a year writing a book with...

Shaking my head, I bit down on my glasses, flipped them into place, and flapped out the door.

The flight there and back passed uneventfully, the packages of rice and pinto beans balancing nicely in the pockets on either side of my shawl. Any other time, I would've welcomed the calm, but with nothing else to focus on, my mind kept going places I didn't want it to go: that little house on the outskirts of Phillydelphia, so tidy outside but festering inside; big, brooding Dad and cutting-as-a-whip Mom; the fights escalating slowly over a decade as quiet little Cricket learned the bargaining and survival skills she needed to avoid the traps the two set for each other.

Then came that final night—the cursing, the smashing furniture, the shattering glass, the fire roaring through the house from an end table bucked into the mantelpiece to scatter kindling all over the living room floor—Cricket only making it out by becoming her imaginary friend Daring Do. Her life dissolved into running after that, hiding and lying, Kay springing into being around her whenever she needed to smile and talk and deal with adults both well-meaning and possibly not so well-meaning. With those two as my shields—

I mean, as her shields. I mean—

Crushing every thought in my head, I forced my attention to skim over the forest below in the hopes of finding a stray timberwolf or cragodile I could fight.

The stupid things never show up when you need them, though, and I arrived home just about an hour after I'd left. Pushing my way through the front door, I opened my senses to detect any trap Ahuizotl might've set up while I was gone—

And stepped into a cloud of absolute ambrosia, the scents of chilies and spices wrapping around me as warm and perfect as blankets on a cold winter night. I more drifted than flew back into the kitchen, the aromas beckoning me onward like the glinting of gold at the end of some shadowy corridor. Floating through the doorway, I had to gawk at the sight: my big carving knife flashing in Ahuizotl's right hand; his tail hand darting my cheese grater in, out, up, and down; buckets and pans of herbs and vegetables spread across every inch of the counter; his left hand grabbing tomatoes, garlic cloves, peppers, leaves and twigs and tubers I didn't recognize and flinging them into the path of the knife and the grater.

I breathed in, breathed out, and breathed in again. "Incredible," I said, my eyes curling closed to focus more of my brain on my sense of smell.

"Of course," came the rich smoke of his voice. "Now, your attention, please, Daring Do, for you have two duties you must perform lest this entire endeavor collapse into ash and ruin!" I snapped my eyes open to see him gesturing to two of my saucepans, bubbling away on top of the stove. "The rice goes into the pot on the left, the beans into the pot on the right! And while the beans must boil uncovered for an hour, the rice must be covered, the heat below it must be turned down to the merest trickle, and the pot must be allowed to simmer for no more than forty minutes!"

Smiling, I shook my hat and glasses off onto the kitchen table and moved to the stove. "I never knew cooking was so dramatic."

"Life is drama," he said, "or it is nothing." The shunk, shunk, shunk of his knife didn't even slow down, and his chuckle stroked my ears as I pulled the two packages from my shawl. "I have a feeling you might disagree with that statement, however."

I shrugged, tore the bean bag open with my teeth, and dumped the things into the water boiling in the pot on the right. "Drama's got its place: leaping free from the jaws of death at the last minute and like that." I couldn't help giving him a sideways glance. "I imagine your minions must be getting bored after three months without you injecting your particular brand of drama into their lives."

"Minions?" He set my giant iron frying pan onto the third of the stove's four burners and poured olive oil into it. "I haven't a permanent staff, if that's what you're implying. When I need them, I simply hire whatever mercenaries I may find available."

Chewing carefully, I made a hole in the rice bag and emptied it into the other pot. "Even the cats?"

"Especially the cats." With a hind foot, he pulled open the bottom panel on the oven and shoved in a log from the hamper. "Little Fluffy Pookums is quite the hard-nosed negotiator."

"What?" I glared at him. "Then why did you fight so hard back in Dust Jacket's office when I insisted on that 'no pets' clause in the contract?"

He puffed a loud breath through his nostrils. "Image, of course. And knowing how much the felines annoy you, I would have paid any price they'd asked to have them here at my side." Swiveling his head, he nodded to the pot in front of me. "Perhaps you recall the word 'simmer' in the instructions I gave you earlier?"

"Image, huh?" I dialed the heat down on the burner below the rice and tucked the lid into place. "And here I thought you ran a vast criminal empire that stretched across the whole of the Tenochticlan Basin."

He grunted, his attention focused on slowly tipping the cutting board full of chopped-up vegetables into the frying pan. "I feel it would be safe to say that we each had any number of mistaken ideas about the other before this collaboration began." Sizzling burst from the pan, and the scent in the kitchen ratcheted up from 'delicious' to 'mouth-watering.' "I for instance constantly imagined Daring Do boasting of her prowess before her fellow adventurers in some capacious club founded hundreds of years ago by your Princess Celestia as a way of celebrating pony dominance over all the world. Or I would imagine A. K. Yearling surrounded by sycophantic, upper-crust pseudo-intellectuals toasting her literary success at an unending string of well-attended salons and black-tie-only functions."

I had turned to breathe in the full effect of the salsa cooking, so when he glanced up, I found my eyes meeting his not a hoof's breadth from the end of my snout. "But never," he went on, his words suddenly quiet, "in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the truth about you, whoever you are. And never have I been so pleased to be proven incorrect."

The glint in those eyes made my heart hammer harder than when I'd been wrapped in his ropes, and it took all Daring Do's strength and A. K. Yearling's resolve not to leap away. "Glad to be of service," I said, my voice somehow not cracking at all. I crooked a hoof over my shoulder at the refrigerator. "I'm getting some tea. You want any?"

"I do." He straightened quickly, his tail hand appearing from around his left side with a spatula gripped in its fingers. "And I thank you."

Walking away from him was about as hard a thing as I'd done in years. Not because I thought he might grab the knife and leap at me—that I could've dealt with. But because my every instinct was telling me to run. I mean, the way he'd suddenly become a person I could live and talk and work with?

No way could I deal with that.

Still, I was good at pretending, so I got us our iced teas and sat chatting with him while he mixed up the stuff. And while I can't remember a single thing either of us said, no way will I ever forget that first taste of his arroz con frijoles: the sweetness of the rice, the saltiness of the beans, the fire of the peppers, the whole rich combination of flavors.

And the next day, we got to work revising the book.

Five

"So without any further ado," Dust Jacket said with a smile I recognized: instead of seeing the ponies crowding into the Barns & Kobold bookstore, he was seeing the bits in their saddlebags, "let me introduce the best-selling authors you've all come here to see this evening! Fillies and gentlecolts, A. K. Yearling and Ozzie Yodel!"

We'd been putting the final touches on Daring Do and Ahuizotl's Quest when I'd first suggested the pseudonym to him. Ahuizotl had stormed around the front room in outrage until I'd pointed out that if he laid claim to the identity of the character in the books, he would also lay claim to the crimes the character had committed. He'd settled down pretty quickly after that.

I glanced over at him now as the crowd began whistling and stomping. In his tweed coat and horn-rimmed glasses, he certainly didn't look like the megalomaniac who'd nearly killed me a dozen times in the past decade, and padding out onto the stage beside me, he almost seemed embarrassed, ducking his head and smiling shyly. The glint behind those glasses, though, told the Daring Do in me exactly how much he was eating this all up.

The whole party went off without a hitch, too. We unveiled the over-sized lithograph of the book cover that Random Horse was auctioning off for charity—my regular artist, Bristol Board, had done a terrific job on the Land Leviathan looming above the figures of Daring Do and Ahuizotl—and when the bookstore staff wheeled out the carts filled with special editions, the crowd practically stampeded to get their hooves on them.

After the auction, the signing went on for hours, but Ahuizotl didn't threaten to disembowel anypony at all. In fact, the big jerk was obviously basking in the admiration of the fans who lined up to get our signatures. He repeated the story that we'd come up with—Ozzie and Kay had known each other since their university days, but he'd never considered collaborating with her on a project until she'd asked him during one of their frequent get-togethers over lunch—and it flowed out of him with such sincerity that I once again found myself wondering just how much of what he said I could ever really trust. A written contract, of course, was a different matter, and the sales figures from the book so far made the Kay part of my brain allow that another collaboration might not be entirely out of the question under the right circumstances...

It wasn't until it was all over, the books sold and signed and the two of us strolling down the sidewalks of Manehattan toward the hotel, that he let his persona slip. His shoulders hunched forward under his coat, and that familiar aura of cold menace shimmered up around him. "Dust Jacket asked if I might be interested in writing a spin-off series focusing on Ahuizotl's attempts to take over the world. Something for the pre-adult market, he said, and he used the nonsensical phrase, 'Dark but light.'" He puffed a breath through his nostrils. "Nonetheless, I find it to be quite the tempting offer."

I nodded. "You'll need to hire a pony to work the typewriter for you. Another of your mercenaries, I guess."

He glared at me, but I wasn't worried. He'd come close to breaching my walls, closer even than Rainbow Dash and her friends had, but Daring and Kay were each more than tough enough to deal with him. I gave him a grin and went on: "Deadlines are tricky, though. Might be you'll find you won't have time for much else but working on stories."

His eyebrows bristled. "I will remind you, Daring Do, that I still mean to destroy you and everything you stand for."

The Daring Do part of me wanted to say something snappy like The feeling's more than mutual, pal. But the words dissolved before they could get even halfway up my throat, and I found myself murmuring instead, "Not one of your better lies, Ozzie."

Everything about his face went blank. Then his left eye twitched, and something that was either a laugh or a cough rattled from his mouth. "You know me so well. Although I imagine you're quite the expert in psychology with your three identities and all."

It took some effort not to leap away, but I managed to sound breezy and dismissive as I said, "Two identities are plenty for me, thank you very much."

Ahuizotl stopped, his gaze peering through those glasses and transfixing me like a spear to the chest. "We're exchanging lies, then?" he asked.

Four quiet little words, but they blew my shields away like the blast of a monsoon; I just stood there staring at him for what felt like five minutes before I barely squeaked, "I don't know what you mean."

He looked down at me, and the sweat that sprang up all over me made me feel like a piece of the deep and ancient Tenochticlan rain forest had suddenly sprung up in the middle of this Manehattan sidewalk. "I am quite familiar with the eyes of Daring Do glaring at me from that face," he said softly. "And over our contract negotiations and our discussions around your kitchen table, I've come to know the different shadings of A. K. Yearling's eyes." His tail hand snaked around to gently touch the end of my nose. "But these eyes that look out at me now, these eyes whose owner has changed my life over the last four months in ways I have yet to fully understand, these eyes are the eyes of a very different pony. A very different pony indeed."

My insides were shivering so violently, I almost thought it might show on my outsides. Still, I forced the same words out again: "I don't know what you mean."

"Ah." He shrugged. "Then I will say that I find you much more interesting than that busybody Daring Do or that status-seeking A. K. Yearling, and having said it, I will let the matter drop." Spinning away, he waved a big hand at the buildings all around us. "For the night is young, and I feel certain that with some concerted effort on our parts, we can find an establishment in this city that knows how to prepare a proper molé!" He looked back at me. "Are you up for an adventure, Daring Do?"

I couldn't move, afraid that the cyclone whirling through my brain would knock me sideways onto the sidewalk. There was no way he could know about me: no way, no way, no way!

Part of me as always wanted to run, but if I did, he'd catch me and kill me. Another part wanted to stay, but if I did, he'd look at me and kill me. And the vast majority of me screamed that he'd figured me out, that he would expose me to the world, that he was just toying with me now like those damnable cats of his!

Except they weren't his cats, he'd said. He had to hire them each time he had a job he wanted to pull, he'd said. To preserve his image, he'd said.

Could it possibly be true? Was he maybe not what I'd always known he was? Was the Ozzie Yodel I saw standing in front of me someone who really existed inside Ahuizotl the same way I existed inside Daring Do and A. K. Yearling?

Was I up for an adventure?

"Cricket." I pushed the word out before any other part of my brain could stop me. "My name's Cricket."

Everything froze, the quiet sounds of the late night city settling over me heavier than Kay's bonnet or Daring's pith helmet ever could.

He blinked. Then he smiled and bowed his head slightly. "A pleasure to meet you."