"A dozen roses, please," the dragon rumbled, and I couldn't resist one last con before the big job.
"Certainly, sir!" I said brightly. "That'll be twenty-one fifty."
One purple foreleg, as big around as a tree trunk and considerably more muscular, rummaged in his neckpouch amid the comfortable jingle of coinage. Two claws extracted a five-thousand bit coin like a grain of sand in a pair of tweezers. I leaned forward out of my stall, wings out for balance, and clenched my teeth around the small golden disc.
There is an intricate art to tongue-sleight, so subtle that most ponies think it's impossible. It requires the proper environment — such as a cluttered flower stall with the customer counter on one side, the cashbox on the other, and a profusion of items hung from the center brace to obscure their view for a split-second. It requires extensive personal modification — a frog-tongue thaumic trait for a little extra grabbing power, and a squirrel-cheek trait for the palate pouch that keeps the second coin from coming out covered in spit. And it requires intense practice — both in talking naturally with coins in your mouth, and in performing the motions fluidly enough not to be noticed.
As my head swung behind the center display, I opened my mouth, shooting my tongue forward and back; the five-kay vanished in between my tongue and lower jaw. Then I flicked my tongue up and forward, catching the very tip of the pouched two-kay and shooting it out like a spitwad from a straw, re-clenching my teeth with microsecond timing to catch the very back end of the coin with a soft tick. When my head swung back into view a fraction of a second later, everything looked identical, except that the coin in my teeth was fractionally lighter and embossed with the Two Sisters rather than the First Friends. Continuing the fluid motion, I dropped the coin next to my cashbox with an audible rattle of metal on wood, then did a practiced double-take as my hoof paused on the cashbox's closed lid.
"I'm sorry, sir," I said, turning an intently remorseful stare up … and up … and up into the dragon's emerald eyes. "But money's tight these days, and I can't cut any deals … do you have the other one-fifty?"
The swap, of course, had barely earned me lunch money — an insignificant fraction of the mill I'd paid for the Cloudsdale Square vendor's license. I wasn't there to earn money, though. I was there to keep my skills sharp and my wits sharper. It was that sort of dedication — honing my craft to the point where I could dare to think about cheating a dragon to his face — that kept Jimmy the Grey working cons year after year.
The dragon's eyes shot open. He leaned in, squinting at the two-kay bit on the counter, then hefted his neckpouch in one claw, frowning. My heart danced a cha-cha, but I kept my muzzle carefully earnest.
Then he reached back in, rummaging around slightly longer, and extracted a rectangular strip of colored paper with the precision of a surgeon, threading his claws through my displays to drop it near the coin. The bill fluttered down to rest alongside my cashbox. My own eyes went wide.
"A kaymill? I couldn't possibly make change for this, the entire stall's not worth that much —"
"Keep the change. My flowers, please."
The alarms in my head were screaming. "Sir," I said carefully, "if you'll forgive a moment of stereotyping, dragons aren't in the business of charity, and this is an uncomfortably large investment in a simple flower-seller."
"It's not an investment," he said, "it's a gratuity, for services rendered." He made a sweeping gesture around Cloudsdale Square, at the towering cloudcrete-and-lightglass skyscrapers, at the whizzing airbuses in their flightpaths, at the giant thaumic focusing ring around the perimeter of the city. "If I might stereotype in return, this is an age of tamed miracles, and ponykind has been tamed along with it. The last time anypony robbed me was a generation ago, and the last time anypony got away with it was Inseam herself. It was worth the kaymill just to see you try." A predatory smile crept onto his muzzle, and he stood to all fours, flaring his wings. "The money should just about cover your hospital stay."
Part of my brain was screeching in protest — He's bluffing! I did everything right! — but I forced myself to ignore it and focus; the difference between a bluff and an error was academic when they both ended in a blast of fire to the face. I'd miscalculated his reaction, and now the top priority was a flame-free exit. Out the back of the stall, then into the lobby of Cloud Savings, then … no, dead end, and a quick disguise change in the bank would be useless unless I could also foil a dragon's sense of smell. Through his legs and into the crowd? Audacious, but unless he thought fast enough to sit on me, he wouldn't be able to attack without collateral damage.
First, I'd need a moment of distraction. "Sir, if you'll think calmly for a moment, I believe there may have been some mistake here," I stalled.
He chuckled deep in his throat. "Oh, I'm quite certain there was a mistake. I had one hundred and thirty-seven coins in my pouch when I reached in, weighing 4,247 grams, and my treasure sense is now telling me 4,216. Now, I'm humble enough to admit that I'm still young yet; if I pulled out a two-kay, I might have lost three grams to an accounting error. However … considering that every single one of those coins was a five-kay, it's clear the mistake here wasn't mine."
Oops.
I'd walked right into that, hadn't I? It galled me that I hadn't considered he'd take such an improbable precaution, but that was what happened with spur-of-the-moment thinking: your assumptions did you in. On the bright side, I'd never had to flee from a dragon before, so this would be the finest sort of on-the-job training.
"Be that as it may," he continued, "before you try dashing between my legs and losing yourself in the crowd — which would get as far as several tons of scaly hindquarters — I'm going to make you an offer."
There went Plan A, which meant that keeping him talking was good. "Go ahead."
"A dragon of my considerable assets could always use someone of your intelligence and chutzpah. A pony who can think outside the box, and pull off the impossible. It is a desk job, but if you do it right, I'll make it worth your while. That bill on the counter? It could be pocket change. Imagine what you could do with the resources to back up your wit."
I had no doubt that the offer was sincere, and even less doubt that I would loathe every minute of being legitimately employed. "That's tempting, sir —"
"Spike."
"That's tempting, Spike, and I'd love to hear more, but first, mind if I go deposit this bill in the bank behind me? I've accumulated a few overdrafts this would clear up." Plan B was worth a second shot, never mind the armed guards and the lack of alternate exits. Even if I ended up right back here, waiting in line would buy me more thinking time.
Spike sighed. "Well, it was worth a shot. I'd rather skip all the tedious bluffing and mind games while you flail for a new plan, so here's my final offer: Pocket your kaymill and give me my flowers, and I'll give you a twelve-second head start."
Twelve? Even nine would comfortably put me on the far side of the square and around the corner toward my emergency exit. I almost bargained him down to eight to recover some of my bruised ego, but pride had already gotten me into enough trouble today. "Deal," I said, cramming the kaymill into my saddlebags and hoofing over the most extravagant-looking bouquet in my stock. It wasn't like I was losing anything from the gesture — I'd stolen them that morning from a Harmonicorp delivery truck.
"Thank you," Spike said, and by the time he added "One" I was already off like a shot, vaulting out of the stall and galloping through the park in the center of the square. The afternoon crowds were getting thick, so I took a leaping shortcut over the fountain, bouncing off Commander Hurricane's cloudcrete tail and startling a group of well-dressed unicorn tourists. I resisted the urge to spread my wings — flying would make Spike's line of sight easier, and deny me some of my best tools in a pinch — and landed on the broad lawn past the statue, dodging around picnickers and through a game of disc-toss. At the count of six I was on cloudcrete again, and at eight I was leaning into a sharp turn, upper wing spread to tighten it. Nine saw me galloping past the scattered ground delivery traffic of Sunburst Street — aircarts weren't cost-effective for bulk freight — and I was skidding around the second corner into the alleyway on the count of twelve.
A moment later, there was a flash of purple light from back on Sunburst Street, and the distinctive bang of teleportation. A big one. "Ready or not," Spike called out from just thirty meters away, amid the screams of terrified delivery ponies and a sudden and general stampede, "here I come!"
Oh, come on! What sort of crazy reptile, with built-in dragonfire delivery, learned a teleportation spell — and what kind of crazy unicorn would get close enough to him to teach it?
I set my jaw as I galloped toward the end of the blind alley, suddenly grateful I had shut up about those last four seconds. I clearly was going to need my A game to get out of this mess. Fortunately, I'd planned this part far in advance.
As I reached the brick facade at the rear of the alleyway, I locked my front hooves and threw my body into a spin, hiking my hips and lashing my hinds out at one particular brick whose red was brighter than the others. I was no earth pony, but the momentum of my charge combined with the buck to send my hooves straight through the brick and into my small cache behind. I winced as the dual shocks hit my ankles and flared out into pain — good thing I didn't have more galloping to do — and hauled my hooves back out, one of them dragging a tangle of shiny blue fabric. I lost another precious second kicking my leg free of it, then clenched my jaw around the corner of the blanket and yanked. It billowed out above me, and while gravity was settling it down over my body, I already had both wings spread out in front of my muzzle. I plucked a flashbang feather from one and a thaum-surge from the other, both of which immediately primed into their detonation glows.
Behind me, there was an ear-splitting crash, and then an empty delivery cart tumbled like a desert-weed past the alleyway entrance. "Coming through!" Spike bellowed amid further screams. The last few ponies within sight galloped away as his claws thundered down the street toward the corner.
I snapped my wings back against my sides just in time for the blanket to settle in atop my body, and jerked my head sideways to fling the feathers into the air behind me. Then I reared up — hind ankles painfully protesting — and landed a short, sharp stomp on one corner of the Cloud Maintenance groundplate with the faulty lock. It bounced off its frame, leaping a few centimeters behind my rising hooves, and I wedged a hooftip underneath it and heaved. The door swung open on the hinges I'd recently oiled, revealing a square tunnel descending under the surface of the city, the rungs of a ladder quickly vanishing into the shadows.
I flung myself straight down the shaft, limbs and head tucked in, rolling to plummet back-first into the darkness.
Mere meters above me, there was a brilliant, searing light as the flashbang went off, and every hair in my body stood on end as the thaum detonation sent shockwaves through the aether. The last thing I heard as the door slammed closed was a mighty screech — apparently Spike had rounded the corner just in time to get an eyeful.
Then my falling body hit the floor.
And kept going.
I avoided spells as much as possible in my line of work — setting off the wrong magic detector was a guaranteed visit from the police; not to mention that spells could be countered, and enchantments suppressed, to fail you exactly when you needed them most — but sometimes there was no substitute for magic.
My makeshift cloak, for example, had started life as an earth-pony raincoat, projecting a minor water-repulsion field. A bit of tinkering with a storebought thaumic amplifier — itself modded to remove the limiter field — had supercharged the spell. The cloudcrete of the upper city was light-as-air stone, but Cloudsdale was still built atop clouds; the maintenance tunnels had been built for pegasi like myself, and normally I would have hit the floor with a soggy smack, but a microsecond before my own personal field could interact with the cloud floor, the fabric's field cut through it and shoved it aside like the vapor it was, blazing a self-sealing tunnel straight down through the foundations into open sky.
As soon as I was clear, I rolled out of the blanket and spread my wings, swooping in a lazy circle to retrieve the fabric and stuffing it into one saddlebag. I made sure that there was nopony in sight, then flew over to a small alcove I'd hollowed out of the cloud during my planning, and allowed myself the luxury of a long, deep breath.
First priority: Take a seat and check the hind ankles. They were tender and swollen from the jolt of the sloppy buck — probably light sprains. I dug through my saddlebags for the travel medikit I'd assembled from off-the-shelf drugs and a few homebrewed surprises, painted on some contact anti-inflammatories, and filled a syringe with my small concealed vial of changeling-chitin trait. My ankles stiffened at the injection, growing a hard outer layer without changing appearance. I wiggled my hooves experimentally — I wouldn't trust them for an evening of line dancing, but the trait would get me back on my hooves without the paper trail of a hospital visit or the exorbitant cost of an under-the-table healing spell.
With that fixed, it was time for some changes.
Goodbye Jimsonweed, mildly pudgy botanist with modest dreams of small-business entrepreneurship; hello J.K. Greyson, thin and long-muzzled repairer of corporate automatons. Jimsonweed's paunch came from a pair of kangaroo-pouch traits, their openings concealed in my wingpits, packed with shaped nullfoam to keep my disguise tools in comfortable stasis. J.K.'s muzzle would be a similar application of alchemy from those tools: a tiny touch of elephant trait on the bridge of the nose.
Traiting used magical reagents, but it wasn't magic in the traditional sense. It involved injecting a specific extract of Poison Joke, prepared with a homeopathic solution of animal parts, to splice one of that animal's characteristics into your body — permanently, unless an injection of an equally specific Joke remedy undid the effect. Because Poison Joke merely altered your personal morphic field, its changes didn't scan as active magic and couldn't be suppressed or countered by spells; every alteration did mean your inherent magical trace changed, but that was less a problem than a feature for someone like me.
I double-checked my flight feathers: running low, but I still had at least one of each type. They, too, had been traited, but their special properties were the result of years of careful experimentation — trollskin on the wing-struts to speed feather regrowth; a bizarre mixture of manticore-tail, porcupine-quill and rattlesnake-fang to turn the feathers into detachable reserves of magical toxin; and then various other injections to alter the magical potential of that poison into something useful to me. Some ridiculously expensive black-market essence of windigo had turned those feathers into fog bombs, flash-freezing the water vapor in a large volume of surrounding air; further applications of blood samples liberated from the Everfree Memorial Zoo had given many of those clouds extra punch, with soporific or nauseating qualities. The flash-bang was a simple conversion of a feather's magical potential into noise and light, and the explosive thaumic discharge simpler still — releasing the energy in a way that mimicked the surge of spellcasting, as I'd done escaping from Spike. The obvious conclusion for a spellcaster like him would have been that I'd signaled a unicorn accomplice for teleportation, and for the next several hours he'd be scouring the upper city's hundreds of preset destination pads for my drop point.
As I injected the antidotes for my pouch traits, I couldn't help but replay the whole encounter in my mind. Maybe dragons were just that irrationally scrupulous about their bits, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd been played from the first moment. And what about his job offer? All the history books said that organized crime had been stamped out centuries ago, and my every encounter with the simple and scattered grifters that passed for a criminal underworld was firsthoof evidence of that. Had I finally stumbled across a deep underground organization snapping up all the real talent?
Or … wait a minute. "Spike." The Spike, from the old legends of the First Friends? Was he Rainbow Corps?
A chill ran down my spine at the thought. Equestria's police and Guards were like the rest of the nation — fat, soft and lazy after centuries of harmony. When it came down to it, the few ponies like me who had the smarts for a life of crime were providing a public service, giving the police something to do beyond dreary days of writing traffic tickets. The Rainbow Corps were something else — a small and secretive cabal of heroes who were sent after the worst of the worst. They'd taken down the Chrysalid Cartel, back when changelings were still infiltrators into pony society; they'd broken the back of the Gryphic Raiders, bringing peace to the eastern continent; they'd even captured the great Inseam — the Tailor of Terror, the Celestia of Crime. Had Spike's "desk job" been some sad ploy to rehabilitate me?
I snorted. Whether kingpin or hero, he was crazy if he thought I'd play along. Living outside the law meant not being bound by rules — escaping the soft and gilded trap of society, and carving out a life that was truly your own. That freedom was a rush with no equal, and solitude was the price of admission.
It hadn't always been that way. Crime had flourished when society's rules were looser — for the same reason that ancient granaries, with wooden walls and padlocked doors, had more rats than the modern ones with steel siding and deterrence wards. It was simple to be a rat in the old days, but the modern era required vision and drive. A different breed tough enough to make their own holes and smart enough to foil the magical countermeasures. A cold-iron rat, if you will.
Speaking of which … a smart rat didn't stick around once the exterminators came knocking. It was time to start the job I'd come to Cloudsdale to do. I had unintentionally created a perfect diversion — my little altercation with Spike would tie up half the city's cops — and I could hit my target and be halfway across the continent before the Corps picked my trail back up.
I applied a storebought personal alterant to my mane — it was what had originally given me the idea of traiting — shifting it to a function-over-form buzz cut, and used the color-shifting trait I'd discovered early on to turn my pelt into J.K.'s dull grey. My Cutie Mark was a different matter entirely; traiting it was beyond my skills. I squirted on a few drops of the solvent for the skin-adhesive holding on the image of the bouquet, revealing underneath the crowbar Mark that had first earned me the name "Jimmy." In its place went a screwdriver grip over the curved end of the crowbar, and a mallet crossing over it. A perfectly nondescript Mark for a repairstallion. The old Mark, along with the used syringes and padding, got wadded up in the raincape, and then I triggered a tiny disintegrator-bomb I'd modded out of an office wastepaper-atomizer.
All traces of my past life gone, I pinned on my forged Harmonicorp ID card, flew toward the center of the donut-shaped cloud holding up the city, and spiraled up the central updraft. Sticking scrupulously to the flight lanes, I landed at Central Station. First, I went into the station's Honest Tea franchise and grabbed a caff-cider, paying for it with a two-hundred-kay bill from my saddlebag — which got me some odd looks; it was a little-used denomination. Then I discreetly spit Spike's five-kay out of my mouth-pouch and bought an airbus ticket for the Northedge Express. Finally, I ducked into the bathroom, pulled out the blunt back ends of my lockpicks, and added a few extra punches to the cards — altering it into a ticket into Northeast Industrial.
I'd lost 1500 bits in the bargain. That was the guiding principle of petty misdirection: anything that shorted the system would be flagged and scrutinized, but anything which benefited it would be glossed over as an accounting error. What sort of thief would rob himself?
I settled into a seat near the front of my airbus, directly behind the driver. Except for a few earth ponies in the back, whose conversation suggested they were heading out to an overnight road-maintenance job, the bus was empty — a welcome bonus, since it would give me an extra chance to think back through my heist plans. However, that idea was scotched when a tall, pudgy unicorn galloped up to the bus as the doors were closing, and sat down directly across from me as she caught her breath. She glanced up at me, and our eyes locked for a second. "Oh, my," she said with a smile. "It's not often you see a pegasus in an airbus."
I took in the pristine curls of her indigo mane — perfectly coiffed into the hairstyle of Rarity of the First Five; copying the look of long-dead heroes never seemed to fall out of fashion — and the immaculate curves of her long eyelashes over sparkling azure eyes. Probably colored contacts to go along with the hair, but I had to admit they were an exquisitely tasteful match for her mauve coat and sea-green beret. It was too bad I didn't go in for the heavyset types, because she was certainly easy on the eyes.
What the hay, a little conversation couldn't hurt. "I'm new in town," I said, pushing my costume glasses up the bridge of my nose. "I figured this was the simplest way to navigate to my new job."
"Oh! You're heading to work, too?" She glanced at the clock display above the automaton. "There certainly aren't many ponies who go to work at 5 p.m."
"Not many ponies want their automatons repaired during business hours." I gestured to my Mark, then glanced at hers. "What about you? A geode with a gem inside? I can't imagine there are many after-hours geologists."
She giggled vapidly, breaking the Rarity illusion and making me wince. I admittedly took disguises far more seriously than the average pony, but had she no pride at all in her costume work? "Dear me, no," she said. "I'm a talent scout; my job is to discover diamonds in the rough. There's an audition tonight I don't dare miss."
"Ah," I said, my tolerance for small talk waning. "Well, good luck with that."
The airbus slowed and pulled out of the traffic lanes. A squadron of air police screamed by in the opposite direction, followed by two Guard patrols and an air-wagon with sirens ablare, all on a beeline toward Cloudsdale Square.
The unicorn's eyes widened as the bus accelerated back into traffic. "Oh, my."
"I imagine some criminal is on the loose," I said, then shrugged. "I'm sure the Princess' finest will give him what-for. That's what we pay them for, right?"
"We pay police to keep the peace," she said. "To step into disputes, and to help ponies who make mistakes. But a criminal?" Her muzzle curled. "Somepony who chooses to reject Harmony. Standing against everything the Sisters hold dear. What could drive a pony to such an extreme?"
I sat up a little straighter, and adjusted my glasses again. "It is an interesting question, isn't it? But I don't think they see it that way. I read a book a few years ago —" I didn't mention that I'd written it myself, under a pseudonym — "that dissected the careers of famous criminals. Take Inseam, the greatest thief ever. She only stole from corporations and from the ultra-rich, and he uncovered evidence that she set up a series of philanthropic shell organizations to donate the profits from all of her heists to the poor. Why would a criminal do that if it was about rejecting Harmony? Maybe she was rejecting a false interpretation of Harmony that was holding her back."
"That's rather an intriguing point," she said, leaning forward. "Come to think of it, I believe I recall that book. Wasn't it written by that 'cast-iron rat' fellow?"
"Cold iron."
"Right," she said. "He talked at great length about famous criminals of the past, but he himself was an enigma, wasn't he? He was bluntly disdainful of Inseam's charity, yet his heists all had similar targets to hers, and he never seemed obsessed with personal gain. He talked a great deal about proving himself and about being the best, yet he also described walking away from several heists that would have put his name down in history. He had nothing but scorn for the sort of thug who would hurt innocent ponies — a stance which cannot be reconciled with a desire for domination." The unicorn tapped a hoof to her chin. "A pony like that … driven not by wealth, nor fame, nor power … I dare say there's a yearning in his heart he dare not name, warped and stretched into a je ne sais quoi."
I snorted. Just another soft pony trying to romanticize a subject she could never understand. "You're overthinking it. He's a criminal, and the book was about the criminal mindset. All you have to do is look at the life they all chose. He said it himself, 'a rat is a rat is a rat.'" I glanced out the window, then leapt to my hooves. "Unfortunately, as much as I'd love to continue the conversation, this is my stop."
The unicorn gave me a small smile and inclined her head. "Thank you for such an insightful discussion, darling. I hope you enjoy your new job."
I stepped out of the airbus on the second-tier grid, on a walkway about twelve stories up from the cloud layer, and stared up at the Harmonicorp skyscraper that dominated the northeastern skyline. Below me were layers and layers of warehouses, and above were hundreds of stories of offices; here, nestled unobtrusively in the middle, lay the accounting department of their Honest Tea division.
Every Sunday at closing time, every Honest Tea in Equestria bundled up their cash collections and used a special target-locked teleporter to send the week's profits in. All of those bundles of large bills arrived in a single fully automated room. The bundles went one-by-one into a central bill-scanner, to verify the totals against each store's receipts, and the processed bills were collated into a single giant bundle. Then a targeted exclusion was briefly opened up in their cash vault's magical seals while that mega-bundle was teleported inside. Meanwhile, return shipments of low-value coins were prepared and teleported back to the stores, so that they could make change for the following week. It was elegant and foolproof — the teleportation automatons, being dragonfire-based, wouldn't transmit living matter, and ponies were kept out of the room during the process.
My plan was simplicity itself. I'd done the hardest part weeks ago — getting a fake security clearance and employee keycard for automaton repair contractor J.K. Greyson, and adding myself to the bottom of the on-call list for Sunday repairs. The 200-kay bill I'd slipped the Honest Tea cashier was specially treated with a material that, once primed by the dragonfire, would melt into adhesive under the infrathaum light of the bill scanner. All I had to do was beat the legitimate repairpony to the machine once it jammed — trivial, since I would already be on site — and I was in the controlled-access room with nearly a billion bits. A simple tweak to one of the automatons — which weren't target-locked, as they were reprogrammed for new stores all the time — and I could send that bundle anywhere in the city I wanted. As an extra precaution, I could check the manifests for a change bundle with the same weight as the one destined for the Vault, and reprogram that automaton to make the vault's deposit as usual — as long as the weights matched, the only discrepancy immediately flagged would be that one of the change bundles didn't reach its store, which was a common enough annoyance to have its own writeoff code in their reconciliation database.
I killed a bit of time at a food-stand around the corner, eating a late lunch of fried kelpcake as I kept an eye on my ankle-watch. I wasn't a fan of fast food, but J.K.'s cover story required a strict budget, and there was little point to playing a role if you weren't willing to stick with it. At exactly 5:12 p.m., I threw away my leftovers and walked around the corner. My keycard got me through the outer door, and I walked through the labyrinthine halls toward Cash Processing, against the flow of outbound traffic from the hundreds of employees leaving for the day.
Next came the guard station securing the restricted area around the counting room. The equine element always introduced unknown and unknowable complications into any plan, but there was no reason for this to be anything but routine; all my paperwork was in order. Today's equine element was a bored-looking ex-Guard, if the military service medals on his civilian uniform next to the "P. REST" nametag were any indication. He was flanked by two hulking gryphons with massive goop guns holstered between their wings.
Ex-Sergeant P. Rest stared at me as I approached. "Got a scroll about a machine jam," I said, and he rolled his eyes and waved me forward. I walked through the magic detector — clean, of course — and then stood still for the field scan. Rest raised one eyebrow. "Hell of a signature you've got there, son."
That was the traits' fault, but I'd accounted for that by registering my race as Changeling; their thaumic signatures were typically the same sort of incoherent melange. "Everyone says that, sir. Sorry if it's a hassle."
Rest squinted at my badge, understanding dawning, then leafed through a filing cabinet in the guard station. "It does all seem in order. Can't say I recognize you, though."
I inwardly sighed. Guards who took their duties seriously were always so tedious. "Just transferred to this division, sir. It's all there in the records."
"It is." He scribbled some notes down on the station record, then stood up and walked over to a side door. "In here, please."
I glanced at the hallway beyond the guard station, and the small, glass-windowed door leading to it that Rest wasn't opening. "Uh, but you just said everything was in order."
"So far. One last routine test."
I didn't like the sound of that — we'd been through all the routine tests I knew — but the gryphons' trigger-claws were looking predictably itchy, so when Rest opened the door into a small and totally empty room, I tamped down my panic and followed him in. He closed the door behind us, hoofed a button labeled "PRIVACY" by the door (which obligingly lit up green), and said in a bored tone: "Hatched form, please."
I stared numbly at him for a moment. "What."
"The form," he said, voice strained, "you came out of your egg in."
"That's ridiculous!" I protested. "My thaumic signature matches — even changelings can't forge that!" That was the point of using it for ID validations, after all. "This is — that's ridiculous, that's discrimination, do you even know how many equal-treatment regulations you're breaking right now?"
"Tell it to Equine Resources," Rest snapped. "The rules here are clear. You shift back to hatched form, or you walk out of this room in hoofcuffs."
In my line of work, it's essential to be able to read your adversary. In a situation like that, some ponies are vulnerable to the emotional appeal. Some are willing to look the other way for a large sum of money. Some are amenable to … other favors. But Sergeant Rest was that most aggravating of guards: a scrupulous one. The best I was going to get out of him was the element of surprise.
So I sighed, brought a wing to my face, and bit off one of my sleep-gas feathers.
The instant it started glowing, his eyes widened and he lunged for the door, shouting. I tackled him and we went down in a tangle of limbs. The element of surprise wasn't much help against earth-pony strength — he quickly lifted and slammed me into the wall, and had enough time to land a hard hoof upside my head before the feather went off.
As the room swayed around me, I clamped my jaw shut, desperately forcing myself to breathe through my nose — I'd hydra-traited it long ago so I could use their miasma resistance to escape the effects of my own bombs. Rest's eyes instantly rolled up, and he sagged to the floor, breathing slowly and evenly. Outside, I heard a further shout, the scrambling of claws, and the ominous whine of a goop-gun cycling up. I was still too rattled from the blow to think straight, but I dimly realized that if I gave the guards time to sound a general alert, that meant big trouble. A facility lockdown would ruin most of my escape routes.
I plucked my remaining flashbang, kicked it under the door, then turned around and closed my eyes as the whump of detonation hit. I could barely hear the gryphons screeching above the ringing in my ears, followed by the deep coughing of blind-fired goop and the jarring shudders of random bursts impacting the nearby walls. Walking out into suppressive fire wasn't anyone's idea of a good time, so I fumbled a small ball of clay out of my saddlebags, plucked a nausea-gas feather, and quickly jabbed its quill into the weight. I cracked the door open and flung the makeshift shuttlecock as far out the door as I could. About ten seconds after the soft paf of its detonation, the firing finally stopped, replaced by the twin sounds of retching.
The pause had also given me time to recollect my wits. Not enough to do the smart thing and abort the mission, unfortunately — all my rattled head could focus on was how close I was to those billion bits, and how unfair it was that an illegal anti-changeling corporate policy was about to blow my scheme apart. Maybe my pride was still a little stung by that close encounter with Spike, too. Whatever the reason, I found myself shouldering the door open and dragging Rest's body over to the lockpad in the middle of the hallway. I yanked his keycard from his belt, straining against the retractable chain to swipe it through the lock, and when the light turned yellow I hauled his hoof over to the sensor until it registered his thaumic signature and turned green. I threw a fog bomb toward the retching gryphons as a parting gift, closed the hall door, and hauled back to buck it as hard as I could, right underneath the lock mechanism —
OW sweet motherrutting Luna OW
— and as the quick patch-up job from the traits gave out, pain exploded through my senses.
On the bright side, while I could barely walk any more, the screaming agony had done a fine job of waking me back up.
I fumbled two quick-absorb opiates from my medikit, and crunched them between my molars, burning precious seconds as the gentle numbness kicked in. Pain drugs were like magic — harmful as a crutch, occasionally necessary as a tool — and a dull head was going to get me through the mission much better than lancing pain. I checked my work — thank the Sisters, I'd at least accomplished my goal by jamming the guard station lock, which meant that they weren't going to be sending anypony through the door after me.
… Until the security mages arrived right behind the guards and disabled the teleport suppression. I facehoofed. In exchange for buying myself the 30 seconds that I'd burned on downing my pain-pills, I'd just cost myself an exit. I gritted my teeth, took to the air, and flapped down the hallway toward Cash Processing. Deal with that later. Finish the job first.
Just past a T-junction, I carded open the Cash Processing door. It was a huge two-story room with walls lined with dual levels of automatons, a tangle of conveyor belts funnelling endless bales of bills toward a boxy central unit. The air smelt of burnt machine oil and tasted of copper, and a red light atop the bill-scanner in the center gave the dimly lit room a Tartaric feel. Not for the first time that day, I paused, tallying up another problem in the "stupid Jimmy mistakes" column: since the entire scanning unit had halted at my application of glue, about three-quarters of my billion bits were still scattered throughout half a roomful of smaller bundles. If I'd arrived without attracting suspicion, that wouldn't have been a show-stopper, but the clock was ticking and letting the scanner process and rebundle all the bills was out of the question. Well, there was nothing for it now but to take what I could — with an adversary as dangerous as Spike on my tail, I had a feeling I'd want as much cash as I could get to cloud my trail as I left Cloudsdale behind.
As I limped forward, I must have triggered an automatic sensor, because the room's lights sprang to life. I was startled enough to glance around, and a second-story window up above the door caught my eye. Two surprised ponies in business collars stared down through the glass at me. One turned to the other and mouthed something I couldn't make out, pointing at a panel in front of them. The other pointed at me, said something back, and dashed out of the room. Great — now I was really on a timer.
I hit the manual override on the scanner output tray, disengaged the bale-wrapper holding the loose pile of bills, and heaved it down the conveyor toward the Vault teleporter automaton, my hind ankles protesting severely. Then I jimmied open the automaton's maintenance panel, glancing at the grid of jumper pins that coded the delta to its destination. I'd practiced on these models enough so that I could have reset it in my sleep to hit my drop point. With a number of precise tongue-flicks, I connected the shunts for the X coordinate and pulled the lever to lock it in. I quickly reset the grid for Y and Z, locking them into volatile memory with lever-pulls, then slammed the panel closed, switched the automaton to manual activation, and stabbed the starter. The central flywheel whined to life, gears spun up, and the air began crackling with magical energy. With a flash, a quarter of a billion bits had vanished, replaced with the subtle tang of ozone.
Time to leave.
In the distance, I heard a muffled shout, then the hard crunch of bending metal. I flew back over to the door and peeked down the hallway — what looked like a full squadron of guards was trying to break through the guard-station door I'd jammed, but for the moment my sabotage was holding. I said a silent thank-you to fickle fate for that spot of luck, then glanced around for an exit. In one direction, the hallway had quad and biped restrooms, an elevator with a prominent "OUT OF ORDER" sign, and a row of office doors out to the distance. In the other direction, a few vending machines and then a break room, with plush carpeting, a few sofas, and a window-wall looking out over the city. Bingo. I dashed over to the break room, tapping on the window — from the dull, metallic sound, it was about a centimeter of clearsteel, and given that I was inside a secured area, I wouldn't have expected any less.
That gave me one chance, at least.
I took a deep breath, fished another ball of clay out of my saddlebags, then flexed my wing and plucked my last fog-feather, quickly tilting my head against the window and mashing the clay over the feather with a hoof. I jerked my head back, grabbed a chair with my forehooves, and reared back to lift it, gritting my teeth through the pain. I wasn't going to be bucking anything for a while, but a short, sharp pressure at exactly the right point …
The feather went off, most of its cold confined to the window by the surrounding clay. With the mightiest heave I could manage, I swung the chair forward, the tip of its metal leg aimed squarely at the flash-frozen spot.
There was a sharp crack. A hoof-sized network of cracks spiderwebbed out from the impact.
My heart sank. Not enough. If I'd just had a good buck left in me —
No! There would be time for regrets later, when I was safe. I backed away from the window and spread my wings — though my rapidly decreasing supply of flight feathers was going to hamper my speed, it was that or galloping. I had just reached the T-junction when I airbraked — at the far end of the corridor I was advancing into, a second squadron of guards had just burst from what looked like a stairwell door, and the lead gryphon was raising his goop gun ominously. At the same time, I heard a final sharp crack from my left, and the first guard squadron broke through the jammed door.
I dove back into Processing as the first goop-bursts spattered around me, wings already up to my muzzle as I rolled into cover. Out of smoke and flashbangs — rats. I plucked all three of my remaining nausea-gas feathers and flung them just outside the door — that would at least create a logjam as they tried to enter, and leave me the sleep feathers for when they got through.
I glanced wildly around the room. Ventilation ducts? Not likely, given the concentration of scents in here. Other doors? None; everything that entered or left this room did so through teleportation.
Teleportation …
It came in two flavors, neither of which would help me. Spell-based teleportation, like Spike's stunt earlier, required a caster. Even if I'd had one, any secured building would have blocked it with an inhibitor field as a matter of routine policy, and given the active countermeasures that followed a security breach, nopony short of Princess Twilight would be going anywhere. The machines that surrounded me, though, used dragonfire technology. No caster necessary, and not affected by anything a unicorn response team could do on short notice. Perfect … except for one little catch.
There were giant screaming warnings on every teleportation automaton in existence: DO NOT USE WITH LIVING MATTER. The problem was, dragonfire burned thaumic fields. An object to be transported — with a single, static field — could be caught in the fire all at once, and carried through the ether to the destination before getting hot enough to catch fire. A creature's field, on the other hoof, continuously fluctuated as blood flowed, muscles moved, nerves signaled. Applying dragonfire resulted in a few milligrams of teleported ashes from their outermost layers of skin and fur, and a very toasty creature that went nowhere.
I stared at my wings, and desperation sparked into inspiration. If a shifting thaumic field was the problem, what if an outside effect flattened it for the split-second the dragonfire needed to take hold …?
The first guards reached the door. There was a deep thump, then an ominous splat half a meter to my right, before the retching started.
Right. One way or another, this was going to hurt.
I vaulted the conveyor belt, ducked behind the bill scanner, and dove onto the pad of the automaton I'd reprogrammed, hoofing the activation switch along the way. I yanked the override lever as hard as I could, hoping that it would catch in place long enough to start the fire despite the organics on the platform. Then I bit down on my one remaining thaum-surge feather, tearing it from my wing and swallowing it, feeling my gag reflex fighting the twin wars of the throat-tickling and the nausea gas.
My world became fire.
And somewhere in my neck, something began strangling me from the inside out —
I gradually stirred to consciousness, opening my eyes to the familiar dimness of my hideout and the decidedly less familiar form of a tall, pudgy white unicorn reclining on my sofa, humming to herself and cleaning a hoof-edge with one of my lockpicks.
As I sat up, wincing at the hopefully-metaphorical fire in my joints, she glanced up at me and set my pick down. "Good evening, darling," she said brightly.
Something about her appearance clicked — probably the curly mane. "You're the unicorn from the bus," I rasped accusingly through a throat that sounded less sandpaper than sand. "What are you doing here?"
"Next time, you really should set a thaum-surge feather on the control panel of the automaton, timed to detonate immediately after you leave. Wiping the settings might have delayed me enough for Spike to get here first, even considering his unnecessary stunt to clear the street and keep civilians out of the line of fire." She gave me a lopsided smile. "He's going to owe me dinner now, you know."
I let out a long breath, heart sinking.
"So you're Rainbow Corps," I said quietly. "Is this Harmonization?"
She stared at me for a few moments. "Come now, Jimmy, you're smarter than that," she said, then stood up to her full height. The pudge of her barrel shifted and deflated, and brilliant white wings unfolded from pouches of pelt and skin on her sides. Trait pouches.
It took several seconds to click.
My jaw dropped. "You're Inseam."
"Correct."
"You know, when they called you the 'Alicorn of Avarice' I thought that was just an honorific."
She winced. "I'm no fan of that title. I should hope, from our conversation, you understand why."
The question I'd wanted to ask all my life leapt to my lips. "So, all the charity work …? That's the one thing I never understood. Did you start that after the Rainbow Corps caught you and Harmonized you?"
She shook her head and clucked her tongue. "Jimmy, darling, I was never caught by the Corps. I became the Corps, when larceny no longer served the greater good. All my life, I've served Equestria … or did you somehow miss my face on the money?"
There's a point at which a pony's capacity for surprise simply gets overwhelmed. I'd reached mine. Standing in a room with one of the living, breathing First Five was just another tally on the day's list.
"You're Rarity," I said, then blinked. "Wait. What Spike said … you stole from your childhood friend?"
She chuckled, a hint of a blush on her cheeks. "That's our little in-joke. A century after we drifted apart, when the great thief Inseam sought him out for advice, and he helped me decide to found the Corps … he fell in love with me all over again, but as an adult, and with an adult mature enough to reciprocate. To this day he claims that Inseam's greatest heist was stealing his heart."
I struggled to my hooves and limped to the mirror. Pretty toasty, but any landing you could walk away from was a good one. "So why tell me all this? You know the life I chose. You know I wouldn't have it any other way. Why I turned down Spike's offer."
"That wasn't our job offer, darling," Rarity said. "That was our placement exam. Some ponies, by the time we catch up to them, are ready to grab the gold ring and settle down. You still have the fire for fieldwork. Indeed, I'm confident it's the only work you would be happy doing."
"If that's what you think," I said bitterly, "then Harmonize me now, because I know, like I know my name, that I could never be happy working for other ponies."
"That's nonsense," Rarity said with surprising gentleness. "You and I both know that A.K. Yearling took missions from the Crowns."
I froze. I turned slowly to her, fire in my eyes, a lump in my throat.
She was staring at me, the corners of her eyes downturned, a quiet mixture of sympathy and intent. "It runs in your family, doesn't it? Your father, and your father's mother, and your great-granddam before them, all settled down … but they were never happy, not like Daring was. A spark burns in you, Son of the Great Greymane, and you chose your name to keep that fire alive. Even your Mark is a relic of an age when the world still needed ponies like Daring Do, before all of the frontiers were conquered and the wilds were tamed." Rarity stepped forward and touched my shoulder with a hoof. "You're an adventurer, but you thought the only way to find adventure was to defy society and make your own."
"I'm a rat," I snarled. "And I'll never be anything but."
She smiled. "Then be a rainbow rat. The iridescent iron rat. And let us point you at the problems that only your skills can fix."
I stared at Rarity … at Inseam … and I felt the walls of my cage closing in. The scariest thing was that she wasn't wrong. It was humiliating to think that there was somepony who understood me even better than I did myself … and also strangely exciting.
I said the only thing I could.
"Oh yeah?" I leaned forward, a rakish smirk spreading across my muzzle, charred and plucked wings spreading out. "You really think so, huh? Fine. If you can tell me just one problem only I can fix … I'm in."
I expected Rarity to gloat as the trap sprung shut. She'd won, after all — I was just forcing her to play out the last few moves. But as my challenge sunk in, her expression became oddly subdued.
"Alright," she said quietly. "As you were teleporting here, three billion bits was also stolen from the accounting department of Harmonicorps' Friendshipping Division."
"Not seeing how that makes it my job."
She floated a photograph out of her saddlebags to me. It was of a small clockwork rat, which had been left in the Friendshipping office on an accounting table. "Whoever committed this crime seems to think it is."
I snatched the photo from her field and scrutinized it, then furrowed my brow in thought, pacing away. The timing of the heist, the target, the calling card … there was something she wasn't telling me, but nevertheless, she was right: this was a mystery that screamed my name.
"But it wasn't a copycat crime," I finally countered. "Friendshipping doesn't do automaton processing. It's all hoof-sorted. That's the exact reason I went to Honest Teas."
"Indeed … but Honest Teas was not as lucrative." Rarity's muzzle dropped into a frown. "Our mysterious thief took advantage of your chaos for a premeditated large-scale snatch-and-grab — approximately a thousand kilograms of small bills vanished with no teleport signal. In the process, they made an armed assault on a guard post, crippled three witnesses, and poisoned an entire roomful of accountants."
My jaw dropped. "What?"
Her voice went quiet and icy. "Twenty-seven ponies are in the hospital in critical condition. One, despite our best efforts, may be permanently blind."
I threw the photo to the floor and pointed an accusing hoof. "Then why did you waste your time coming after me, when a … when a thug in such desperate need of Harmonization is on the loose?"
"I wouldn't have, if I'd had any idea our criminal would stoop so low," Rarity said. "This wasn't the mission I'd intended to tempt you with, but it seems fate has other plans." A hint of a smile crept back onto her muzzle. "Though I must say, you certainly are taking to your new duties quickly."
I stared at Rarity for a moment, then threw back my head and laughed. She had me there.
I walked over to her and held out a leg with a lopsided grin. "You've got a point. After all, who better than a rat to catch a rat?"
We bumped hooftips, and the Iridescent Iron Rat was born.
